OF A GOLDEN AGE

going to museums makes my brain explode with aesthetic joy and intellectual stimulus. something in my brain feels sated after staring into the eyes of a painting i’ve never seen before, knowing how beautiful and full of talent some people are. milwaukee has a large collection from one particularly hip elderly woman benefactor: a picasso, a kandinsky, clashy fauves, even a mildly-ugly chagall, and hundreds of others. the picasso is called “the cock of liberation,” something we giggled over without embarrassment until we reached the georgia o’keeffes, which gave us something dark, soft, warm-colored and cavernous to giggle about anew.

sifting through mounds of disposable nonsense at my grandfather’s house, all the while searching for the few things not only worth keeping but necessary to keep, made my mind reel over the nature of our lives’ collections. my parents talk now of throwing things away that they never use or want, a category often including everything but books and family-memory-type items. the thought of leaving behind a houseful of bullshit and garbage, inspiring in me the same feelings we felt toward my grandfather’s house, makes them crazy and embarrassed. i turn my intentions this way too. my family travel light.

recently a close friend was rude to me without reason, or at least, no reason that i can glean. was it sartre who said hell is other people? i don’t agree, but perhaps hell is trying to decipher other people. it is callous to tromp around our lives, knowingly flattening the intentions and emotions of others, but what of doing it accidentally? for every instance when i know what an asshole i’m being, there are ten more when someone misinterprets me, takes a meaning i didn’t intend, reels at what i thought was an innocuous remark, takes away hurt feelings.

my friend schwartz on deliverance:

when my friend first gave me the synopsis in the third grade i thought he had just imagined the most revolting, frightening, perverted thing he possibly could and pretended it was a movie.

eye color is a dodgy game. some people’s eyes bear down with mystery: sometimes blue, sometimes green, always something different and compelling. my eyes can play no game, unless sometimes looking altogether-black works. their color is dark, flat and nearly textureless, once described by my middle-school nemesis as “poop brown.” something about them suits me exactly, though . . . maybe their straightforward quality, their directness. when i was first learning to talk, i woke with nightmares and told my parents there were monsters behind my eyes. perhaps, then, they are the dark glasses between the world and my mind, preventing unwanted entrants.

drawers have no appeal to me; i pile things on open shelves or in simple heaps on the floor. cleaning my room means shuffling all of those things around, making neater stacks or hiding some stacks in the closet, both of which are an acquired taste. my throat still aches and i wonder, like i always do when i feel scantily well, if the way i pile my room causes dust allergies or secret mold cities where i can’t see them. if so, live on, mold: eventually i will find and crush you with the force of an ill-feeling woman.

the thing about **** is that **** is actually a crazy person, medicated to regulate ****’s biorhythms and attention span. sometimes the fact that our personalities so closely resemble each other in critical ways makes me self-conscious and crazy-feeling by proxy. two weeks ago ****’s diagnosis formally changed from depression to manic depression, explaining the stay-up-all-night impetus and bizarroworld mood swings. i’ve never met someone so capricious but in that way we are just the same. i change my mind without the drop of the hat even taking place and usually don’t bother making excuses. just because i want to.

in the car these days i listen to the kind of music that would soundtrack a movie scene of me while i am driving my car. low, the album leaf, explosions in the sky: humming, deep, powerful music. generally, though, people really driving in their real cars listen to the radio or something they can sing with. the same way movie conversations never feel real, movie drivers never seem comfortable. the false purple of a grape soda is more authentic and natural. i want a movie with a prominent radio flipper, talking to himself in the driver’s seat, concentrating hard.

strange to feel the rush of physical attraction without the normal accompanying flights of nervous system, without the cluttery urge to impress. instead there is calm and humor and an utter lack of seriousness: exactly what i want, a situation that can make fun of its own absurdity. in a way this dynamic settles well into the tone of my life in the summer of my twentieth year. after a couple of years it has grown and matured; mellowed like a soda seconds after the initial twisting of the cap. cleaner, brighter, more direct – less harsh fluorescent but still alight.

i always thought growing pains would ease out of my life at some point but i seem to be wrong. now i have lived in the same-sized body for seven or eight years and every motion to stand up or sit down, any twist of a joint or settling of weight, rouses a series of pops and cracks from the core of my person. people i am close to are always surprised by my body’s percussive musicality but it’s second nature. not even. regular nature. maybe my clunky digestive system is just contributing its own percussion to the bodily rhythm.