shredding the emotional gnar
“Can't remember that much about it, don't ask anyone else about it”
Hello:
I'm trying to send these out every couple of days, but there was a longer lag on this one because yesterday I clonked my head on the basement doorframe and spent the rest of the day paralyzed with fear that I had given myself a concussion again. (I didn't.) I haven't been able to stop thinking about the parallels between that period of my life and now (constant hypervigilance re: body, indoor tedium, having zero money and not being able to make any, meticulous cleaning, tiptoeing around a yawning black hole of fear re: not knowing what the future held and no one being able to tell me), but I am also an embarrassingly superstitious person and so in the back of my mind I am always worried that I'm jinxing myself by talking about that period of my life in the past tense. But there's no such thing as jinxing. There is such a thing as boring people by talking about your injury, so I will just say one last thing about it before I stop for a while.
When I went to the brain clinic for the first time, a lot of the instructions they gave me were about managing my fear, my expectations, and the story I had in my own mind about what was happening to me. Every time I came in they would be like healing is not a linear process and I'd be all yeah, yeah, I get it, rolling my eyes, but I actually didn't at all. They encouraged me to keep a diary, but to only write in it at the beginning and the end of every day; aside from that, they said, try to forget about how you feel as much as possible. (They were always giving impossible instructions like this: try not to get anxious or use your memory too much, this one guy told me during my first appointment. Sure!) You might wake up in the morning feeling worse than you did last night, but if you went back and read your entries from a week or a month ago, you'd be able to see a broader story about the trajectory of your life emerging that might not have otherwise been visible to you. People, they told me, are notoriously unreliable when it comes to understanding these kinds of long-term patterns about ourselves; we have a tendency to think the way we feel right now is how we've always felt.
I have been thinking a lot about this strategy. It feels like somewhere in there is the key to riding the bizarre time-dilation effect of this period where every day feels like it is 200 hours long and also over in a flash, where every day you feel each emotion you are capable of feeling plus two extra. Some balance of surfing the moment, committed one hundred percent to knowing that right now is all there really is, while still keeping one eye steadily fixed on the longer line - which is somehow also real, and crucial, and present in its own way. And then forgetting about all of it. No problem.
Something longer:
Rachel Zucker: "The Poetics of Wrongness"
There is something about the presence of time in a poem that pleases the poetics of wrongness, and something about the slight-of-hand, refined, sublimed, edited nature of short poems that often makes the poetics of wrongness cringe. The very long or book-length poems that I've mentioned take time, and are about time, and in the time that it takes to write these poems, the poet punches a time card in the time clock of the poem and begins to become real - to the reader and to herself - in a different way. There is space created by time for the poet to inhabit, and for the reader too. ...The poetics of wrongness says that art is these moments of repetition and recurrence and realness, and that in the time it takes to read the long poem - in the experiential recognition of how long it took to write such a poem - the poet becomes real. With frustration and boredom and anger, with familiarity, adoration and gratitude, the writer and reader get to spend time together. The poem, violating the laws of time and space, is their meeting place, the place where they become visible to one another, and begin to have a relationship that is both imaginary and real, full of faults and failure and desire. It is like sex, and it is what all art, short or long, aspires to.
Pets, Interiors:
Visit @apartment_poem on instagram for more, or to submit your own.
Roommates:
(submit petty gripes about the people you share space with anonymously to apartmentpoem@gmail.com)
They keep breaking my stuff and then not saying anything about it until I ask if they know what happened to the thing they broke. Then they'll be like oh yeah sorry I meant to tell you about that but it totally slipped my mind! The dog knocked it over! Being in the house all the time just really accentuates how silly this is because e.g. yesterday they broke a glass and I FULLY HEARD it happening but they still didn't tell me anything until a few hours later when I specifically asked. WE ARE BOTH HERE! STOP PRETENDING!
Dreams:
(submit dreams anonymously to apartmentpoem@gmail.com)
a friend of mine ditched me to hang out with some folks i didn't like. i had a backpack full of groceries and a long, long walk ahead of me. the bag was extremely, profoundly heavy and i couldn't stop thinking about how foolish it was to walk, but i didn't want to get into a car or a bus either, i didn't want to be around any people. i tripped and fell into mud and i couldn't get up for what felt like an hour. some girls walked by and offered to help me but i said i was alright. finally it occurred to me to take the backpack off and i got up fine. it started to rain and i put the backpack back on and walked into the street. i glided along the wet pavement like my shoes had wheels, faster and faster, taking sharp turns, eventually speeding past cars slowing down for red lights. it was exhilarating but i couldn't stop thinking about my friend. eventually i realized i didn't know how to get home.
Gentle reminder:
You don’t have to go on Twitter. It's not bad if you do, but you don't have to.
&&&:
Glad Day emergency survival fund for LGBTQ2S tip-based workers and artists
List of mutual aid networks in North America (mostly USA but a few Canadian cities too)
List of resources and advocacy groups for artists and freelancers in Canada
Carlo's basketball corner:
Nikola Jokic's Best Assist From Every Game Of The 2018-19 Season