a small truth: desperation, cracking up, going under, dissolving, this is what hides inches below the surface. no amount of love, kindness, satisfaction, or comfort seems able obliterate it. it’s there, just below the skin, stubborn and malignant. i think anyone who knows me suspects this or at least intuits an unseen shadow. much to my embarrassment it seems to be a defining quality. unshakeable; part of my clumsily cobbled together identity.

another unsettling part of which is an odd lack of memory. that is not to say i am an amnesiac obviously. i have memories of a sort. but by and large the details of my life, which ought to provide comfort and a certain stability in the form of a connecting thread, are not recorded. i can’t tell you how many times a friend has tried to reminisce about an event only to find they are not reminiscing at all, but more accurately relaying a story. sometimes such stories do spark memory, other times nothing at all. that i require such prompting, that random memories do not pop into my mind more often worries me whenever i stop to think of it. in any case, today i made a mistake which i make periodically, perhaps every 6 months or so, i opened the hall closet and began picking through the various journals, piles, and clippings i’ve amassed in this forgetful lifetime.

the effect of leafing through the smallest sampling of these few thousand pages is incredibly unsettling. a shock to the system almost. the endless variety of drawings, paintings, doodles, stickers, magazine clippings, poems, letters, and writings, which directly and indirectly record my path through life, never fail to rudely manhandle my perception. these crazy poems full of sickening romanticism… who wrote them? me? these journal entries, these pained and evocative scribbles… who the hell was this person!? i find it disconcerting and sad somehow to read even snatches of this stuff, to see the array of printed matter i took the time to trim and save, the crazy raw drawings, the half incubated ideas. i feel so impossibly removed from the person who created and collected all this. my memory being what it is i find in most cases i can not reconstruct the context, can’t really remember the circumstances, though the confusion and earnestness of it all is plain enough. it’s an uncomfortably intimate look at over 10 years of growing pains, insecurities, epiphanies, loves, and losses. a detailed look at what feels like the life of a stranger.

why do i look? well, it’s there, it’s mine, and i can’t help it. why do i save it all? well, obviously as strange and off putting as it can be, i can’t part with it. they are the remains of a youth, the physical evidence which props up a faulty memory. it’s stuff which i must have hoped to find a use for later. though what use i really can’t imagine at this point. weakness i suppose. or perhaps the same overly self-reflective mechanism which i suspect keeps the details of daily life from making any imprint was at work here as well. the isolation of a consciousness, put down and saved like a time capsule, for better or worse.

i remember that years ago when i was at s.v.a. a friend named mike defeo decided after portfolio review to destroy everything he’d done in those years. he shot a video of himself gathering all his work into a pile, then setting it on fire. i remember watching it in disbelief. how can he do that? how can he just let it all go? now, all these years later, i suspect he had the right idea. the video of the destruction is proof enough that something had existed before today, without the potentially dangerous particulars surviving to cause any anguish. my father on the other hand mourns the fact that all of the works from his youth and his time in the army, when he painted, are gone; that not even a photo remains. even as i write this pointless post i know i’ll never get rid of all that stuff. on the contrary, maybe i’ll make a page here, and put it all up on public display, allowing it break from it’s dusty closet and forgotten origins. giving it a chance to become somehow relevant to the present again, thus demystifying it, and lessening it’s weird potency.

good question i guess. posed at the time to the world outside of myself. now, years on, removed from the mind that asked it, it applies to me as well. it’s a stranger, a time traveller, a historical figure asking and i’m an outsider who no longer knows the answer. i realize this post is bombastic, and means nothing to the rest of you, but i feel much better having taken a little time to address it. more composed. less apt to lock myself in some dark room or crawl into bed and force myself to sleep. less apt to go out and buy a bottle of cheap liquor as i once might have done. less apt to aimlessly wander the freezing january streets. less apt to pour forth with flailing sentences that never manage to connect or carry any message. whoever that person is, whose heirlooms and history i hold in my hall closet, whose ramblings and creative outbursts i hold in safe keeping, does not seem to be me. for good or for ill, now, today, i’ll just blow off a little steam here on the nonist, then go to the couch and snuggle up to my love, have a nice home cooked meal, then watch a little t.v… i know the malignancy is still there, strong and unstoppable, but fuck it, there’s more to life than reflection and sadness. right?