NOTES OF AN INTERIORIST

The hearings don’t matter.
–Emily Bazelon 

Another garbage story in a tabloid full of garbage.
–Alice Stewart

The false, even, belief that you have agency is what keeps us alive and keeps us actually surviving and going beyond trauma.
–Jennifer Fox

Maybe you’re a baby who can write.
–Maroline Martin

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.
–President Gerald Ford

I still got one of his hickeys. It won’t go away. It’s a scar.
–Kids In The Dark

Quantitative scientific measures are almost always more accurate than personal perceptions and experiences but our inclination is to believe that which is tangible to us, and/or the word of someone we trust, over a more “abstract” statistical reality.
–Gabriel Weinberg

I got an hour here before I have to take a call.  It’s been a rough day writing-wise and that’s because I’m not prepared.  I’m never prepared and that’s because I loathe doing this–well, I hate drudging it up and “coming to a conclusion” and talking myself into continuing the charade.  It’s as hopeless as it sounds but, maybe it’s not.  The price I pay for sensitivity, I could tell myself.  What I mean is I woke up knowing I’m not Hunter Thompson and that, it being Thursday, I’d solve the crisis of either writing or hating myself by coming through with 600 words neat and fine or otherwise.  But I gave up on that before noon and started looking around for something to post that wasn’t personal or current and wouldn’t remind me that I’m a fraud.

I came across my filmed performance, at Metaphorically Challenged last January, and started singing a different tune.  Sometimes I need my friends to tell me I’m a writer but sometimes I can figure it out all by myself on a day off as a luggage handler in a small garage apartment in the Pearl of the South.  I couldn’t download the video to my desktop though.  My Mac tells me I’m out of space on the cloud.  I don’t know why that should matter but it seems like a brilliant business move to have some of the machine’s functionality out of sight and as invisible as a cloud so that you only notice it when it’s gone and that’s when you’ll need it the most.  These are the shakes and breaks, the little pin pricks that can pop your balloons, not to mention the device and ease that’ve trained us to be consumers and send us out into the hordes on a perfect day of solitude to get what we need–Christ.  Tangential fits of filigree and rage like that are exactly why we tune in here ain’t it though.  Why you’re here reading and why I sit here writing it down.  It’s also exactly the kind of thing I’d much rather avoid but the video is still loading and my MacBook’s only heating up tallying my bill for storage for its master.

You gotta serve somebody and life here is inuring and mad.  It don’t feel right to complain but it don’t feel right besides.  Over there they’d kill for what we have and over here we kill ourselves.  I spent too much money this summer but I’m changed now and I can’t go back.  There are over a thousand shots in my Dropbox and I’m playing in town some, getting back into the groove.  It feels good but none of it is a cure for the malaise that comes from building your own cage.  I know I’ve got to get free.  I can see the way out and it’s what I’ll be working towards for the rest of my days.  There’s a tally I know I’ll need to settle.  There are universes of misunderstanding between me and Them but it’s nice to know I won’t have to fight against a dull idea of living anymore.  Being alone has made me strange and being independent’s made me queerer still.  I wasn’t understood in the hometown so I left.  I’m not understood in Austin but I live behind a tall wooden fence off the highway and people leave me alone.  I’m still trapped by my own comfort and the Machine has got me coming and going too.  I wake up most days a failure but sometimes I can convince myself otherwise.  I can still hump luggage for $14/hr even if I have to shit my brains out the whole time.  I suffer tension headaches, hardons, fear and lusts great and small.  The sun is always setting and the moon is always giving rise.

I’ll take it, too–another breath, diminishing returns, this uncanny strength in ease.  I’ll always be glad for another day, one I’d rather have than not, no matter it’s outcome, despite its reward or travail and whether or not it’s Thursday and I have to write another fucking blog.

what a time to be inside

— Karen Kilgariff (@KarenKilgariff) August 28, 2018