The questions I wish you would ask me

On NPR tonight Night Rhythms was playing haunted ghost music
and I was driving on the thruway which was pretty empty after eleven
and I was imagining the host of Night Rhythms alone in a dim studio and shivering slightly at the thought that he was currently haunting so many cars at once with his choice to play 'ghosts among us' by the two man band of synthesized cello and guitar. And i was wondering about the specific statists that someone gathered somehow that let them know how many people listen to NPR after eleven on a friday night...

I was speeding. And its unfair that they build cars that are able to speed and then also build alcoves into highways so that cops can hide and get you when you speed.
Why, is it possible for cars to go fast and also possible for drivers to become distracted? Why is possible for bodies to break?

And because I was speeding and alone in my car on the mostly empty highway-
And because the highway was like a tunnel made of streetlights-
And because at certain hours and in certain states of mind
streetlights are like the figureheads of ships with long necks leaning over canals-
because of all this
I was thinking about how my car and the other cars were all like sad lonely whales-
And because of all of this
I decided to and then did, say out loud "Bodies are breakable"
Because I wanted to say it out loud
Because its easier for me to remember something that I've heard with my ears rather than something that I've thought
And I wanted to make sure I retain enough of it- the whales and figure heads of ships ect- to write it down when I got home-

Whales and the radio host sending out blue ghostly signals to a certain statistic of people listening to NPR after 11-
And all this is similar to a bus driver driving through the suburbs in his off duty bus.
And all the empty seats sit in the dark behind him and hold the potencial for people and are symbols of people
and at night in the dark symbols and potential can easily become ghosts.
and the bus driver is alone with all this person symbolism behind him in the dark
And he stares straight ahead behind his flat windshield under the neon banner that says "No passengers" which now sounds like a bad joke.

Anyway I spoke out loud but couldn't even hear myself
because the radio was turned up so loud because my car is so noisy that i cant hear over the sound of the car
so I have to turn the radio very loud to hear it.
And so I couldnt hear myself say "bodies are breakable"
and I was alone in my haunted whale car on the highway.
And I realized how much I really wanted someone to ask me about the whales on the highway
So I could tell them about the car that was parked on the entrance ramp coming off the palisades.
The car didnt have its blinkers on, just headlights, brights, shining at a dramatic angle out across the highway
and I interpreted it as sort of passive aggressive... Like the car was a quietly pathetic whale
saying "help" really softly and with wide staring eyes but then not explaining what was wrong.

and all of this is because they were playing haunted music on NPR and lately I feel trapped and paralyzed inside my own inability to explain the poetry inside my head.
And anyway the image of car-as-whale is actually stolen from my mother who said it first in San Francisco last summer about the busses. She said "they're like friendly whales. Like baby whales following mother whales" when she was too tired to drive and i made her let me drive. and i drove over the golden gate bridge for, maybe, the third time that day and i tried to be impressed with the bridge because i love the bridge even though i had been in San Francisco for almost a month at that point which was long enough to feel like the bridge was just for crossing the water and not for admiring.

Lots of Words

David Gray sings a beautiful cinematic song called “Please Forgive Me.” I’m not sure why I call the song cinematic. In high school I used the word Cinematic interchangeably with the words ‘beautiful’ ‘cool’ ‘fly’ ‘has swag.‘ Lately I’ve been trying to use the word only as it applies to something’s apparent inclination to be made into cinema.

The song doesnt have a narrative and the poetry isn’t full of imagery. I call it cinematic because of the way the percussion is layered onto the melody and the way the melody has moments of seriousness that make me think of someone all alone wrapped in his own arms rocking back and forth and then simultaneously a lightheartedness that sounds like spinning around in a field then theres an aching almost childishly genuine candor to the lyrics that almost sounds like the poet has never written a poem before. The layers of the music are cinematic to me because the ability to evoke so many moods at once is what cinema does more often than any other art.
He says, “Help me out here all my words are falling short and theres so much I want to say. Want to tell you just how good it feels when you look at me that way.”

I’ve always liked love songs that discuss not being able to speak truth to love. I have a collection of them- this is how i feel about the songs and movies and poems and books that I like... I collect them and I organize my collection into categories and I start to notice patterns. I large catagory of songs that i like are love songs and a subcategory of the love songs are songs specifically about the mind’s inability to find words.
I like how in order for the song to have been written the singer must be singing everything now that he was, presumably, unable to speak before. The ‘let me make a list of everything that I couldn't say before” songs- they’re like mind reading or time travel. They’re not about not knowing what to say, they’re about knowing exactly what you want to say but no one has invented the words yet and words are not what you want to say anyway.
The Beatles have one: When i get near you words begin to drag me down, I don’t mind I can wait forever I’ve got time.

It’s possible that I am boring you. I feel formal. Can you tell? I’m writing this like a voice over in a british period piece. In Atonement the letter that Robbie writes Cecila, the one he meant to send, not the one about a cunt, that letter is: Dear Cecila, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad. The truth is I feel rather lightheaded and foolish in your presence and I don’t think I can blame the heat. Will you forgive me? -Robbie

Anyway, I had this collection of these songs long before I ever experienced that romantic muteness for myself, but now that I have, I’ve written this blogpost in which I say approximately nothing because the words I need in order to say what I want to say have no yet been invented.

What I Have to Say About the House that They Bulldozed Today

It was a three story farm house and there was nothing overly ornate or offensive about the architecture. The siding was plaster not plastic and the trim around the windows was the appropriate amount of trim not too bare or frilly or contrived. The color was the only thing in bad taste- a murky mud brown with lighter yellow-brown accents so that it looked the way mud looks on a boot when some but not all of it has dried. Even with the problem of the color I always thought it was a good looking structure. I liked the way it was placed on it's gravelly dead-grass lawn with its first rate view of the four lane service road, gas station and construction site. It nestled nicely into the commercial landscape the way architects like to place cottages neatly amongst rolling hills.

If the house had been inhabitable I would have liked to live there. I think I would enjoy and not be at all annoyed by the way the rooms surely throb red, green and yellow even at night when the service road is empty of cars and living there is like living on the edge of a wide waterway and the traffic light outside like a drawbridge going up and down servicing boats that aren't there. During the day though-
I imagine one could sit for hours, cross legged on the moldy carpet looking up through the window attempting to write poetry about the stuttering and oddly weak-looking gestures of the bulldozers and cranes doing their long-necked jobs in the construction site next door.

This morning they were spraying the house with a fire hose. I'm not sure how I understood that that meant that it was going to be knocked down but I did understand that right away. Like the phone ringing in the night and the dread you feel even before you answer it.
I don't think anyone ever explained to me that when a house is going to be bulldozed you must first spray down the surrounding area with a lot of water. I find that I am often making these far fetched and yet correct leaps of logic. I mean... the house was uninhabited and was -most people would say- ugly, completely in the way, and also rotten so I guess you don't need to be someone as brilliantly observant as myself to make this particular leap of logic and assume that any attention that the house was receiving had to be in regard to its impending end. I did think briefly that maybe they were going to burn it, though that seemed more unlikely it would have more satisfyingly explained the fire hose. But if they were going to burn it I probably would have received some letter from the town explaining that there would be a fire today and that this fire was intentional. Maybe they would have be required to shut down the road.
Anyway I watched them spray the house with water and then I ate breakfast at the healthfood store and then I left on my way to school. At the corner I passed a bulldozer who was bent over and sniffing a pile of mud colored rubble in a confused kind of lonely looking denial. I felt satisfied that something large and significant had taken place. The house used to be there and while it was I had had many thoughts about it, including but not limited to how interesting it would have been to live in it.

A Midsummer Nights Dream

this is a Monologue to be spoken by a boy to the girl who he loves who doesn't love him back:

Do you want to know the problem with this play?
When the story ends and everyone is supposedly with the person they are meant to be with-
The problem is Demetrius! Demetrius is the problem.
Do you know the story?
The story is: Demetrius loves Hermia and Hermia loves Lysander and Lysander also loves Hermia, no one loves Helena and Helena loves Demetrius.
But Demetrius loves Hermia!!!
So the fairies but a spell on everyone and mess everything up and then they fix it. They fix it all... but not Demetrius!
Demetrius gets fucked! They just put him with Helena. But he doesnt love Helena!
The Fairies put a spell on him and then leave it on him to leave him in love with Helena. But its a spell- he just continues to be under a spell and love her.
And I guess it's fine cuz I mean, it works out. Cuz Hermia would never have loved him right? I mean- unless they put a spell on her right? They could just as easily have put a spell on Hermia and made her okay with loving two boys or something. And then put a spell on Helena to make her OKAY with loving someone who didnt love her back! Whats the problem with that? As long as there is magic happening- its magic right?- POOF! 'Helena you enjoy this, i will magically make you fine, make you ENJOY loving someone who doesnt love you back. Magic.

Jake and I discuss our personal genius.

Jake tells me that he played a show with a band that he had never played with before. The front man of the band tells a short anecdote- something like 'this is Jake, we don't know where he came from. He's never played with us before.'
After the show some people from the audience come up to Jake and ask 'is this true? have you never played with them before?' he tells them that this is indeed true. The people are so impressed, they are blown away, they are astonished by his amazing skills.
"And it dawned on me," he says, "that I mean, I better be able to do this. I've been practicing the cello every day for ten years. I better be able to do this."

And I share with him similar compliments that I received after screening my film. Compliments mostly from women who call it 'truly observed' or 'delicately articulated' or 'honestly and simply stated.' And I mean, I better be able to make an observation about the experience of a young woman. I've only been studying this 'Young Woman' creature and it's relationship to the world for, lets say, ten (conscious) years. I better be able to express my thoughts about the 'Young Woman' in a cinematic way. I've been practicing the ability to organize the world in cinematic terms every day, every moment since before I understood what I was doing.

I would venture to say that there is no such thing as 'naturally gifted' instead there is 'naturally inclined to practice.' There is also 'incessant compulsion to practice.'
And Jake and I sat in a small Greek restaurant in the East Village.
We licked hummus off our fingers and expressed to each other the joy of becoming expertly gifted by being 'incessantly compelled' to practice.

...I think Malcolm Gladwell also has some thoughts about this...

I feel that need to confess things into the Internet

"No One has Secrets Anymore."

"Some people are just gracefully happy and it doesn't seem like they're rubbing it in your face."

"...That's why ppl like to laugh together, it means they're all on the same page."

"Modesty. People like that."

It requires a certain level of skill to talk to you. It's a skill that everyone around you has to work hard to master for fear of failing with disastrous consequences. This wouldn't be so bad if you didn't exert so little effort when speaking to others. You don't go out of your way even an inch to make other people comfortable, while they are walking on eggshells scattered over thin ice under shaking icicles for you... Thats why its exhausting to be your friend.

"The problem with busy people is that they they only hang out with the ppl who they like the MOST so why would they hang out with me? They dont have the time for people who they like a little bit." He says.

The character of you when I write it will be slightly deaf the way you are slightly deaf. In the picture of our relationship, your deafness will illustrate how frustrating it is when you talk and talk and then when I respond you say "what?"
You tell no objective stories. Every anecdote is so concretely inside your pov, for the whole car ride its as though your voice is narrating my mind.

...They were an itchy class. They might have just slipped through unnoticed like for instance a quiet insecure class might have done. But part of their itchiness was that they all had huge egos so they talked about themselves constantly. They talked about their itchiness.

When I spend time with him I feel how huge and delicate my life is. Probably because, weather it's true or not, I feel that he doesn't value his own life and so if he is leading, or even simply present, we wont necessarily fall into situations that are necessarily safe.

I cant help but think about myself as I appear in his story. I don't want to be another part of people who leave and abuse and misunderstand him, almost as an impulse to avoid a cliche.
I want to save him so that he can't have the satisfaction of being right about his predictable situation. But he is right. In his story I am just another relationship which he tried to maintain and only pushed away.

The kid sitting outside the door smoking a cigarette at the top of the stairs has sharpie all over on his arms.

"Who has secrets anymore?"

Godfather: try to think as people around you think and on that basis anythings possible

Sort of between people right now

"Sometimes is a percentage!"

"I kissed my person last night."
"Fuck you!"
"She kissed me."
"Fuck you."
"It's not a contest."
"Yes it is."
"Well then I won the contest."