Poltergeist

Poltergeist means nothing. It is a red herring of a title. It is a word in a song I like.

This is a worthless post. I am giving myself license to just release words. Lots of them are recycled words.

Today, I've done nothing but knit, watch movies, and eat icecream. My teeth hurt. What if they all fall out like Aunt Carolyn? I should brush them more. I am sort of happy to have spent the day wasted. And doing something worthwhile besides reading: knitting. But I do feel sort of worthless. I think everything would be fine if my teeth didn't hurt.

I am a fuckhead. I can't believe I just bought 19 more songs, forgetting that I'd finally secured for myself, last night, Yves Blues by The Great Book of John. The year long search is over, simple as that. I buy music all the time, and I almost never listen to it. I don't obsess over music anymore, but I still buy it as though I did.

So much of the new music I'm getting is so cold. Cold and crisp, like snow. like Bon Iver. like Ane Brun and Joshua Radin and Ray LaMontagne (the black album). It makes my heart melt, I want to drink it down like hot tea, down into my insides, and it will drip down and down, past the looking glass, into a puddle in the depths of me where it can nourish me. I eat music like chocolate bars. or like spinach. It makes my bones come alive. I think maybe I have a special condition wherein music touches my pleasure centers the way sex does for other people.

I want you but you're a poltergeist. That is the line.

This is why I need to spend this whole break listening to winter and knitting. I discovered it today. Knitting is one of the only things I can do that allows me to just listen to music, the way I did when I was 11. I would stand by the window, standing guard, while I treasured songs like secret joys, singing along with Ace of Base and Queen and Mariah Carey at the top of my lungs. Why is it so hard now? Why do I have to be multi-tasking?

The problem is that I never stop to listen, that is the problem. What has become of us? America? Why can't we just sit and waste time? Why is this something I long for, wasted time? It seems like the antidote to American busyness, but do other people in other times waste time the way that we do? Aren't I wasting time now? Always? It's just, I want to soak up pleasures. I believe in pleasures, they are a part of the life I want. When I sit and listen to music, there is a hole in my heart, I feel like my life is flittering away, flittering away through the hole in my heart. What is strange is that if someone else is there, it doesn't feel like a waste. But I have never known someone, or at least not in years, someone that I could sit in silence with and soak up music. The silence is buzzing with awkwardness, with ticking clocks timing, and what would we listen to? Music is such a singular thing for me. I don't know of anyone I could share all of my music with. I would love to one day be able to lay down my music, without fear or apology, just say "here is what I love, when you know this you are knowing me." the day when I know there will be no judgment, and I don't feel like the least of an imposition.

How is it that just recording your thoughts as they come makes you sound crazy? Are crazy people really crazy, or just excellent transcribers?

The best is the world inside myself, she thought. the freest, the greenest pastures.

If you listen to some of the words Feist says, and I'm not listening to her now, but if you listen to them - I could never say things like that. I mean, I would be humiliated. I think I feel that way about most songs I love. They would sound dumb coming from my mouth, or. Or, I just can't imagine that level of vulnerability, and I'm not even talking about emotional vulnerability, or depression or relationships or something like that. I mean, I couldn't say

Sea lion woman
Dressed in black
Wink at the man
Then stab him in the back

I would write those words, and I would say "What? No. No no no, that is stupid, are you serious? Erase it, don't let the world see." I would feel unbelievably vulnerable putting words that silly and useless out into the world as "art," as something to be taken seriously. But I get the sense that if I would feel embarrassed saying the things I love to hear said, then something is amiss. Either I am accepting crap, or I am unreasonably self-critical. Every word I say, I want to take it back. And then I go back, and I admire it.

Two words that I hate to hear as metaphors:

1) masturbation
2) diarrhea

Both very effective, both revolting. too evocative. This is what keeps me from calling this post diarrhea, my distaste for the word.

Cody Case has collected some truly stellar quotes for his facebook profile. Allow me to quote them here:

"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself — so like a brother, really — I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again." -Camus

"It requires a very unusual mind to undertake an analysis of the obvious." -A.N. Whitehead

"If a human being put his ear to the heart chamber of the world and heard the roar of existence, the innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe, he would surely break into pieces." -Nietzsche

These quotes are why I am a philosopher and not a theologian. Why do I keep faking?