#i mean its also sort of poetic in a way i cant quite put my finger on but im not one of poetry so

[muchmossymess]

It's been weeks of this

[luckynumbersevenseven]

Last night i was writing a poem on the 580 east coming back from point reyes. Driving fast to give off an air of confidence. And not an air of “i am actually writing a sort of sad really sad poem behind the wheel of a car going at least 20 mph over the speed limit on the freeway at night”. Its not like i havent learned enough lessons. I know the risks. I have been in car accidents, like more by the age of 24 than most people have in their entire life. And still i am risking my life to write a poem. Is that poetic?ughhhh Maybe but also corny and just self destructive. I have stopped romanticising self distruction mostly. I take care of myself now and find reality quite enough to keep me…entertained? Occupied? Satisfied???? I enjoy making my bed every day. I am disgusted by the vacancy in the darkness that once seemed to promise so much to me.

I think about cars a lot. The potential and power they hold. These big metal dogs. And we can hold their leash for a time and pretend we have control. All day! Every day! As a means to an end! We do this forgetting that the dog isnt really a dog but is a machine and was not programmed for empathy. Because you cant program empathy. Machines areimpartial. Like the ocean or a forrest fire in some ways. Undiscerning. Unforgiving. A carless power…but there is no beauty in cars the way there is in the careless power of nature. Because the earth cares in a very differnt way. It does care. And because behind the invention or creation of the bloodless metal car beast is someone who did care and that is where it starts to unravel.

Whatever.

I find i do my best thinking while driving. I cant stop my mind from making poems. And then there is the desperation to not forget! The words that first fit that feeling! Is it worth dying over? The answer is sooooo obvious when i am judging from here in my bed. What the fuck.

I met two 5 day old goats last night. Behind a tarp in a hutch on a property in santa rosa. I was there to see the art of someone i met once and there was a cheesboard and everyone was middle aged and there were no lights by which to see anyones faces. The tiny goats seemed a cold and were shockingly passive to my touch. It was unsettling that something so young and new and small should trust me. I might have bad intentions. I dont even know my own intentions half the time. I have the power to kiss them or to kill them. The capacity or potential or whatever. Like a coiled spring, like how sometimes you think about saying the worst possible thing but you dont. But you could! But it seemed like maybe it wasnt about trust for the little goats? Like they just dont even know enough to trust or distrust. Like they didnt care. Their hair was soft and white still softer than grown goats but maybe not as soft as a lambs. And they were vaguely oily the way any farm animal is. But not smelly. And they did not shy from my touch. Nor did they really seem to welcome it. I dont think either one would have put up a fight if i had picked it up and left with it under my arm. I think it might have gladly slept in my warm bed with me. Impartial. Undiscerning.

When I saw the goats I played out some sort of fairy tale trade in my head. I lost my baby…so i earned this baby. ? Or something? But i forfeited? my baby. I do not get to take another one. A goat baby to replace the baby i know i could not have. Because because i am not ready? I would not love it the way i want to? The way a mother should? The way it would want? It? My baby. My baby.

Oh what do i know…i am living within a hypothetical. Not that the choice wasnt obvious. But the what ifs are soooo tempting.

The things that i wrote in the notes app on my phone while i was driving last night were mostly about the relief in giving up hope. Hope is so exhausting. My friend told me that they read somewhere that hope is similar to fear in its detriment to the mind and body. And i can attest. Like…the way you let out your breath when a door finally closes. Or when you try on something and it doesnt fit. The decision was made for you. Shows over. The relief in saying goodbye and meaning it.

I was thinking about how there is tissue/matter coming out of me following the abortion. It is somehow more clinical than blood. Less romantic. Grosser. I was thinking about how i had the weird urge to eat it. Maybe because in some way it wouldnt feel like a loss. Like in this way im capable of holding on or something. But whatever that metaphor doesnt even work cause id have to shit one day. But also the urge didnt feel metaphorical…just sudden and disgusting.

In my notes I wrote:

I hold onto the rag i used to clean up the spill of you

I live with it under my pillow

Weeping over whats unsung

Or what is sung and never heard because that is sadder

Repeating the lyrics under my breath

So i wont forget

And i got home and i did forget entirely until I read my note. I forgot all about how i would never sing a song to this particular baby. Or maybe any baby of my own. And how that made me want to break for a moment. A moment. Because longer than a moment might be self indulgent. And i am not broken. I just want to be able to break. For a moment. Like i am asking permission. A moment? Is it ok if i just break? I swear just for a moment i will be broken? And then i promise to put myself back together again just like before as quick as i can as good as i can. I promise. But there was nobody there to ask for permission. So i didnt.

The nurse (the one that wasnt my hinge match) asked if i wanted to know if it was twins.

I whispered “i want a hug” to the dark house. And then i cried for the person who said something so sad.

Like a child.

I am doing better though! I make my bed. I make my bed and and i think i am mostly doing better.

I hold myself up to an old picture for size. I use new language to describe my pain. Or whatever. And share the blame. I take the pill. I forgo the rest. I dont even have sex anymore.

Yea yea but here i am. And the blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere.

I didnt write it all down though. In my head i was turning over a line about waking up in the night and confusing the crescent of the face on the pillow next to me –– momentarily illuminated by the passing light from a car––for the moon

Thinking a lot about the moon. About confusing things for the moon. Man made things or earthly things for that big glowing moon. I dont have a good word for the power of the moon though. It is again an undiscerning sort. Is that power? Freedom from the sway of emotion? Freedom FROM choice? Freedom TO choose is one kind of power but its a human kind of power and it only gets you …to like a certain level of power…And dont get me wrong I am not trying to say that a prisoner is more free than the man that takes the train past the prison….

On my drive I was listening to fulsom prison blues (obviously) and also fast car. And those songs are about chosing. And disappointment. And consequence. The consequences of being human and having choices and how lonely and how insatiable. And freedom also. (A beautiless and boring oversimplification of these bangers)And i was thinking about how free I feel driving a car with a full tank on the open road at night with the windows down and the music up (and i am alone and choose the soundtrack without fear of judgement…) and a cigarette and even if that is some synthetic version or trope of freedom it still feels good when it hits the blood stream and ill take that over nothing.

Because i am girl and not a god or the moon.

[liquidstar]

ok. ξέρετε κάποιες λέξεις που υπάρχουν στα ελληνικά, αλλά δεν υπάρχουν στα αγγλικά, που νομίζετε ότι θα έπρεπε να υπάρχουν στα αγγλικά; (χρησιμοποίησα deepl και ελπίζω η πρόταση να βγάζει νόημα)

μην ανησυχείς! η πρόταση βγήκε μια χαρά! αλλά θα αλλάξω στα αγγλικά για την υπολπή την απανδάση ^_^

okay so anyway i actually dont have a suuuper wide vocabulary in greek- my mom super does so i have no idea what shes talking about half the time so maybe i should ask her tho lol

but here's my sort of non-comprehensive list of some language shit that exists in greek but not really in english

first of all, i always found it funny that greek has different words for "died" depending on what it is that died. if a human died, its "πέθανε" (pethane) and if an animal died its "ψόφησε" (psophise) but theyre not always used literally- you would use the more respectful "πέθανε" if a pet passed away, but if some bastard you didnt like died you would use "ψόφησε" just to be an asshole (itd be considered super disrespectful but people still do it)

i love the word "παρέα" (parea) because it literally means "together" but can be used to describe a group of friends who always hang out with each other. its like saying "these people are my together" which makes no sense in english but isnt it a sweet sentiment?

"μαλάκα" (malaka) technically translates to "wanker" but wanker will never capture the same energy as malaka. not to me. not ever. not even close. the way its used is closer to how irish people use "cunt"

the word "πνεύμα" (pnevma) which basically means "spirit" but literally means "air" or "breath"- i cant quite describe it but the concept of air and the concept of souls are inherently linked bc of this in my minds eye. like the air in your lungs is your soul. that might not make sense i dont know!

i like the word "φιλοξενία" (philoxenia) which you can kind of translate as "hospitality" but that doesnt quite capture it- the first part of the word means "friend" and the second means "stranger" and it basically means showing the same kindness you show to friends to strangers

the word "βρε" (vre) or "ρε" (re) which ive talked at length abt bc its so. hard to describe in a language where it doesnt exist. its like. im going to copypaste from my other post: a word you put before a persons name (or even replace their name all together with) to sort of put more emphasis on it, but in a negative way. like, almost as if youre disappointed at how dumb the other person is being. obviously it can be used in an affectionate or lighthearted way too. like, its just a diminutive term i guess. you could also just literally say the word on its own in the same way you might say “dude.” to someone, or even just as a way to show surprise. it just sort of depends on the context and tone of voice. like its such a common exclamation w a lot of uses but theres not really a single word in english that it can directly translate to, especially to prefix a persons name in the same way.

"μάγκας" (mangas) literally means "tough guy" but i think i could more accurately compare it to the word "macho" which isnt english itself. it actually comes from a sort of old counterculture movement

"καψούρα" (kapsoura) is a word that describes a burn, but is more-so used metaphorically to describe an intense desire- one so bad that it burns. it sounds poetic but most of the time i hear people use it to describe food cravings lol

"κέφι" (kefi) is a word that describes an uncontainable joy that simply HAS to be released in one way or another- this is why greek people break plates when partying. we're letting out our kefi!

this isnt really untranslatable per say but its more like, a different way of wording things than we would in english- the word for the universe, for the world, and for mankind is all one word: "κόσμος" (cosmos).

"μεράκι" (meraki) is most commonly translated as "passion" but it more literally describes a passion so intense you put your soul into it, with absolute devotion, especially in reference to art or cooking

"γεια σου" (yia sou) is how you greet and say goodbye to people in greek, so usually it just gets translated as "hello" or "goodbye" but thats not actually accurate! what the term actually means is akin to "i wish you good health" which you start and end every interaction with. you also say "to our health!" when toasting.

this one is kind of morbid but "kοψοφλεβικα" (kopsoflevika) is a word (and genre of music) that means wrist-slicing. it hyperbolically refers to something so sad that it makes you want to slit your wrists. not all of them are sweet and lofty lol

[prolapsarian]

Conversation with David Panos about The Searchers

The Searchers by David Panos is at Hollybush Gardens, 1-2 Warner Yard London EC1R 5EY, 12 January – 9 February 2019

There is something chattering. Alongside a triptych a small screen displays the rhythmic loop of hands typing, contorting, touching, holding. A movement in which the artifice strains between shuddering and juddering. Machinic GIFs seem to frame an event which may or may not have taken place. Their motions appear to combine an endless neurotic repetition and a totally adrenal pumped and pumping tension, anticipating confrontation. 

JBR: How do the heavily stylised triptych of screens in ‘The Searchers’ relate to the GIF-like loops created out of conventionally-shot street footage? DP: I think of the three screens as something like the ‘unconscious’ of these nervous gestures. I’m interested in how video compositing can conjure up impossible or interior spaces, perhaps in a way similar to painting. Perhaps these semi-abstract images can somehow evoke how bodies are shot through with subterranean currents—the strange world of exchange and desire that lies under the surface of reality or physical experience. Of course abstractions don't really ‘inhabit’ bodies and you can’t depict metaphysics, but Paul Klee had this idea about an aesthetic ‘interworld’, that painting could somehow reveal invisible aspects of reality through poetic distortion. Digital video and especially 3D graphics tend to be the opposite of painting—highly regimented and sat within a very preset Euclidean space. I guess I’ve been trying to wrestle with how these programs can be misused to produce interesting images—how images of figures can be abstracted by them but retain some of their twitchy aliveness. JBR: This raises a question about the difference between the control of your media and the situation of total control in contemporary cinematic image making. DP: Under the new regimes of video making, the software often feels like it controls you. Early analogue video art was a sensuous space of flows and currents, and artists like the Vasulkas were able to build their own video cameras and mixers to allow them to create whole new images—in effect new ways of seeing. Today that kind of utopian or avant-garde idea that video can make surprising new orders of images is dead—it’s almost impossible for artists to open up a complex program like Cinema 4D and make it do something else. Those softwares were produced through huge capital investment funding hundreds of developers. But I’m still interested in engaging with digital and 3D video, trying to wrestle with it to try and get it to do something interesting—I guess because the way that it pictures the world says something about the world at the moment—and somehow it feels that one needs to work in relation to the heightened state of commodification and abstraction these programs represent. So I try and misuse the software or do things by hand as much as possible, and rather than programming and rendering I manipulate things in real time. JBR: So in some way the collective and divided labour that goes into producing the latest cinematic commodities also has a doubled effect: firstly technique is revealed as the opposite of some kind of freedom, and at the same time this has an effect both on how the cinematic object is treated and how it appears. To be represented objects have to be surrounded by the new 3D capture technology, and at the same time it laminates the images in a reflected glossiness that bespeaks both the technology and the disappearance of the labour that has gone into creating it. DP: I’m definitely interested in the images produced by the newest image technologies—especially as they go beyond lens-based capture. One of the screens in the triptych uses volumetric capturing— basically 3D scanning for moving image. The ‘camera’ perspective we experience as the viewer is non-existent, and as we travel into these virtual, impossible perspectives it creates the effect of these hollowed out, corroded bodies. This connects to a recurring motif of ‘hollowing out’ that appears in the video and sculpture I’ve been making recently. And I have a recurring obsession with the hollowing out of reality caused by the new regime of commodities whose production has become cut to the bone, so emptied of their material integrity that they’re almost just symbols of themselves. So in my show ‘The Dark Pool’ (Hollybush Gardens, 2014) I made sculptural assemblages with Ikea tables and shelves, which when you cut them open are hollow and papery. Or in ‘Time Crystals’ (Pumphouse Gallery, 2017) I worked with clothes made in the image of the past from Primark and H&M that are so low-grade that they can barely stand washing. We are increasingly surrounded by objects, all of which have—through contemporary processes of hyper-rationalisation and production—been slowly emptied of material quality. Yet they have the resemblance of luxury or historical goods. This is a real kind of spectral reality we inhabit.  I wonder to myself about how the unconscious might haunt us in these days when commodities have become hollow. Might it be like Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious, in which through the photographic still the everyday is brought into a new focus, not in order to see what is behind the veil of semblance, but to see—and reclaim for art—the veiling in a newly-won clarity. DP: Yes, I see these new technologies as similar, but am interested in how they don't just change impact perception but also movement. The veiled moving figures in ‘The Searchers' are a strange byproduct of digital video compositing. I was looking to produce highly abstract linear depictions of bodies reduced to fleshy lines, similar to those in the show and I discovered that the best way to create these abstract images was to cover the face and hands of performers when you film them to hide the obvious silhouettes of hands and faces. But asking performers to do this inadvertently produced a very peculiar movement—the strange veiled choreography that you see in the show. I found this footage of the covered performers (which was supposed to be a stepping stone to a more digitally mediated image, and never actually seen) really suggestive— the dancers seem to be seeking out different temporary forms and they have a curious classical or religious quality or sometimes evoke a contemporary state of emergency. Or they just look like absurd ghosts. JBR: In the last hundred years, when people have talked about ghosts the one thing they don’t want to think about is how children consider ghosts, as figures covered in a white sheet, in a stupid tangible way. Ghosts—as traumatic memories—have become more serious and less playful. Ghosts mean dwelling on the unfinished business of the past, or apprehending some shard of history left unredeemed that now revisits us. Not only has no one been allowed to be a child with regard to ghosts, but also ghosts are not for materialists either. All the white sheets are banished. One of the things about Marx when he talks about phantoms—or at least phantasmagorias—is much closer to thinking about, well, pieces of linen and how you clothe someone, and what happens with a coat worked up out of once living, now dead labour that seems more animate than the human who wears it.  DP: Yes, I’ve been very interested in Marx’s phantasmagorias. I reprinted Keston Sutherland’s brilliant essay on how Marx uses the term ‘Gallerte’ or ‘gelatine’ to describe abstract labour for a recent show. Sutherland highlights a vitalism in Marx’s metaphysics that I’m very drawn to. For the last few years I’ve been working primarily with dancers and physical performers and trying to somehow make work about the weird fleshy world of objects and how they’re shot through with frozen labour. I love how he describes the ‘wooden brain’ of the table as commodity and how he describes it ‘dancing’—I always wanted to make an animatronic dancing table.  JBR: There is also a sort of joyfulness about that. The phantasmagoria isn’t just scary but childish. Of course you are haunted by commodities, of course they are terrifying, of course they are worked up out of the suffering and collective labour of a billion bodies working both in concert and yet alienated from each other. People’s worked up death is made into value, and they all have unfinished business. But commodities are also funny and they bumble around; you find them in your house and play with them.  DP: Well my last body of work was all about dancing and how fashion commodities are bound up with joy and memory, but this show has come out much bleaker. It’s about how bodies are searching out something else in a time of crisis. It’s ended up reflecting a sense of lack and longing and general feeling of anxiety in the air. That said I am always drawn to images that are quite bright, colourful and ‘pop’ and maybe a bit banal—everyday moments of dead time and secret gestures.  JBR: Yes, but they are not so banal. In dealing with tangible everyday things we are close to time and motion studies, but not just in terms of the stupid questions they ask of how people work efficiently. Rather this raises questions of what sort of material should be used so that something slips or doesn’t slip—or how things move with each other or against each other—what we end up doing with our bodies or what we end up putting on our bodies. Your view into this is very sympathetic: much art dealing in cut-up bodies appears more violent, whereas the ruins of your abstractions in the stylised triptych seem almost caring.  DP: Well I’m glad you say that. Although this show is quite dark I also have a bit of a problem with a strain of nihilist melancholy that pervades a lot of art at the moment. It gives off a sense of being subsumed by capitalism and modern technology and seeing no way out. I hope my work always has a certain tension or energy that points to another possible world. But I’m not interested in making academic statements with the work about theory or politics. I want it to gesture in a much more intuitive, rhythmic, formal way like music. I had always made music and a few years back started to realise that I needed to make video with the same sense of formal freedom. The big change in my practice was to move from making images using cinematic language to working with simultaneous registers of images on multiple screens that produce rhythmic or affective structures and can propose without text or language.  JBR: The presentation of these works relies on an intervention into the time of the video. If there is a haunting here its power appears in the doubled domain of repetition, which points both backwards towards a past that must be compulsively revisited, and forwards in convulsive anticipatory energy. The presentation of the show troubles cinematic time, in which not only is linear time replaced by cycles, but also new types of simultaneity within the cinematic reality can be established between loops of different velocities.  DP: Film theorists talk about the way ‘post-cinematic’ contemporary blockbusters are made from images knitted together out of a mixture of live action, green-screen work, and 3D animation. I’ve been thinking how my recent work tries to explode that—keep each element separate but simultaneous. So I use ‘live’ images, green-screened compositing and CGI across a show but never brought together into a naturalised image—sort of like a Brechtian approach to post-cinema. The show is somehow an exploded frame of a contemporary film with each layer somehow indicating different levels of lived abstractions, each abstraction peeling back the surface further.  JBR: This raises crucial questions of order, and the notion that abstraction is something that ‘comes after’ reality, or is applied to reality, rather than being primary to its production.  DP: Yes good point. I think that’s why I’m interested in multiple screens visible simultaneously. The linear time of conventional editing is always about unveiling whereas in the show everything is available at the same time on the same level to some extent. This kind of multi-screen, multi-layered approach to me is an attempt at contemporary ‘realism’ in our times of high abstraction. That said it’s strange to me that so many artworks and games using CGI these days end up echoing a kind of ‘naturalist’ realist pictorialism from the early 19th Century—because that’s what is given in the software engines and in the gaming-post-cinema complex they’re trying to reference. Everything is perfectly in perspective and figures and landscapes are designed to be at least pseudo ‘realistic’. I guess that’s why you hear people talking about the digital sublime or see art that explores the Romanticism of these ‘gaming’ images.  JBR: But the effort to make a naturalistic picture is—as it was in the 19th century—already not the same as realism. Realism should never just mean realistic representation, but instead the incursion of reality into the work. For the realists of the mid-19th century that meant a preoccupation with motivations and material forces. But today it is even more clear that any type of naturalism in the work can only serve to mask similar preoccupations, allowing work to screen itself off from reality.  DP: In terms of an anti-naturalism I’m also interested in the pictorial space of medieval painting that breaks the laws of perspective or post-war painting that hovered between figuration and abstraction. I recently returned to Francis Bacon who I was the first artist I was into when I was a teenage goth and who I’d written off as an adolescent obsession. But revisiting Bacon I realised that my work is highly influenced by him, and reflects the same desire to capture human energy in a concentrated, abstracted way. I want to use ‘cold’ digital abstraction to create a heightened sense of the physical but not in the same way as motion capture which always seems to smooth off and denature movement. So the graph-like image in the centre of the triptych (Les Fantômes) in this show twitches with the physicality of a human body in a very subtle but palpable way. It looks like CGI but isn’t and has this concentrated human life force rippling through it. 

If in this space and time of loops of the exploded unstill still, we find ourselves again stuck in this shuddering and juddering, I can’t help but ask what its gesture really is. How does the past it holds gesture towards the future? And what does this mean for our reality and interventions into it. JBR: The green-screen video is very cold. The ruined 3D version is very tender. DP: That's funny you say that. People always associate ‘dirty’ or ‘poor’ images with warmth and find my green-screen images very cold. But in the green-screened video these bodies are performing a very tender dance—searching out each other, trying to connect, but also trying to become objects, or having to constantly reconfigure themselves and never settling. JBR: And yet with this you have a certain conceit built into the drapes you use: one that is in a totally reflective drape, and one in a drape that is slightly too close to the colour of the greenscreen background. Even within these thin props there seems to be something like a psychological description or diagnosis. And as much as there is an attempt to conjoin two bodies in a mutual darkness, each seems thrown back by its own especially modern stigma. The two figures seem to portray the incompatibility of the two poles established by veiled forms of the world of commodities: one is hidden by a veil that only reflects back to the viewer, disappearing behind what can only be the viewer’s own narcissism and their gratification in themselves, which they have mistaken for interest in an object or a person, while the other clumsily shows itself at the very moment that it might want to seem camouflaged against a background that is already designed to disappear. It forces you to recognise the object or person that seems to want to become inconspicuous. And stashed in that incompatibility of how we find ourselves cloaked or clothed is a certain unhappiness. This is not a happy show. Or at least it is a gesturally unsettled and unsettling one. DP: I was consciously thinking of the theories of gesture that emerged during the crisis years of the early 20th century. The impact of the economic and political on bodies. And I wanted the work to reflect this sense of crisis. But a lot of the melancholy in the show is personal. It's been a hard year. But to be honest I’m not that aligned to those who feel that the current moment is the worst of all possible times. There’s a left/liberal hysteria about the current moment (perhaps the same hysteria that is fuelling the rise of right-wing populist ideas) that somehow nothing could be worse than now, that everything is simply terrible. But I feel that this moment is a moment of contestation, which is tough but at least means having arguments about the way the world should be, which seems better than the strange technocratic slumber of the past 25 years. Austerity has been horrifying and I realise that I’ve been relatively shielded from its effects, but the sight of the post-political elites being ejected from the stage of history is hopeful to me, and people seem to forget that the feeling of the rise of the right has been also met with a much broader audience for the left or more left-wing ideas than have been previously allowed to impact public discussion. That said, I do think we’re experiencing the dog-end of a long-term economic decline and this sense of emptying out is producing phantasms and horrors and creating a sense of palpable dread. I started to feel that the images I was making for ‘The Searchers’ engaged with this. David Panos (b. 1971 in Athens, Greece) lives and works in London, UK. A selection of solo and group exhibitions include Pumphouse Gallery, Wandsworth, London, 2017 (solo); Sculpture on Screen. The Very Impress of the Object, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal [Kirschner & Panos], 2017; Nemocentric, Charim Galerie, Vienna, 2016; Atlas [De Las Ruinas] De Europa, Centro Centro, Madrid, 2016; The Dark Pool, Albert Baronian, Brussels, (solo), 2015; The Dark Pool, Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid, 2015; Whose Subject Am I?, Kunstverein Fur Die Rheinlande Und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2015; The Dark Pool, Hollybush Gardens, London, (solo), 2014; A Machine Needs Instructions as a Garden Needs Discipline, MARCO Vigo, 2014; Ultimate Substance, B3 Biennale des bewegten Blides, Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; Ultimate Substance, CentrePasquArt, Biel, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; Ultimate Substance, Extra City, Antwerp, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; The Magic of the State, Lisson Gallery, London, 2013; HELL AS, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013.

[arsnovac12]

Blog Post 1

I go on runs from time to time when I’m back in Burbank, I enjoy keeping active, but it’s mostly an excuse to get out of the house. When I come home on holiday, I become confined to my parents house without any means of viable transportation. I have my drivers license, sure, but no car. My parents can’t afford to buy me one, and I can’t afford to get one myself. In fact, even if I could afford a car, I certainly couldn’t afford the insurance to go with it. Anyway, all this is to say I go on runs so I don’t feel too confined to my house.

That’s not very interesting, is it? Some things just tend to be that way. The life of a poor twenty-one year old white kid is never all that interesting in the first place. My life, my story, whatever it is, is not irregular. In fact, it’s one most people in America know very well, because it gets championed whenever one of us poor white kids gets rich and famous. Surprise, surprise, it happens pretty frequently.

So why write about it? I don’t know. Does it really matter if no one sees it in the first place? Maybe not. I guess I backed myself into a corner. If you’re reading this (if anyone is reading this) you’re probably expecting me to dive further in. Ultimately, you might say, there’s no point in agonizing over whether or not you’re going to talk about your life, because you already started writing a blog post about it, and it has to go somewhere. It does, doesn’t it? So why start with a lengthy preamble full of rhetorical questions? Besides being a clear literary crutch I’m struggling with, I think I feel indebted to having a conversation or dialogue about these things, as if to hide from some private guilt I have in telling any personal story. Writing has clearly become some sort of therapy to me, where I play both doctor and patient. The results are always inconclusive.

Anyway I should get back to the bullshit lede about running. Look, I like running, and it’s when my head is its most clear, so forgive me for using it as a starting point. Most of my ideas come to me when I run, so it was only fitting that it become the brief anecdote that starts a blog post that holds the kernel of what I’m going for. Which, now that I’m thinking about it, I didn’t really get to. Look at me, whining before I even finished my “insignificant thing is contorted into something profound” anecdote. Okay, I’ll finish the story:

I like to go on runs. I feel trapped at my house, and I like to get out. Anyway, whenever I run, I take the same path. It leads away from my house towards the park in the hills where people would take their prom photos back in high school. The path mostly runs parallel to the major streets and hits several large intersections on its way. In all, the run from the house to the park and back is about five miles. Yesterday, I reached the park and stopped for some water. This wasn’t irregular or anything, but I took my time and drank more that I usually would. Then, something compelled me to keep running. The hills in Burbank are filled with expensive homes, and near the top of the street, sort of tucked away, there’s a pretty large mansion that’s almost gothic in its design. Anyway, I guess it was my curiosity that drove me to keep going. To get a look at that mansion, and the others around it.

So, I kept running for another half mile or so to see this mansion. On the way up, the houses got larger and more impressive looking, and I was filled with a mounting sense of dread. Eventually I reached the cul-de-sac with the house on its end. Naturally the street, called Viewcrest if you can believe it, was the most decadent one yet. Their driveways were filled with expensive cars I don’t know the names of, carefully manicured lawns, and about ten security cameras lining every porch. I got closer to the end of the street where the imposing mansion was, but it was tucked away from the front and hardly visible. I didn’t get much closer than fifty or sixty feet. The drive way had a large black Hummer sitting in it; another, more psychological warning sign for someone like me to keep away.

I left pretty quickly after I got there. No one was out, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of being unwelcome. Before I turned the corner and left the street completely, I had the strange desire for someone to come out of their house and scold me for even coming there. In this fantasy, would I stand my ground, or run away as is fitting for my station? My brain firing it’s typically small amount of synapses couldn’t quite make it that far. Instead, I was caught up in the swell of what righteous injustice such a thing should muster.

This story isn’t very interesting, I know. Nothing really happens in it and there isn’t much imagery to it, but it caught me off guard as I thought about it again today. I had the idea to write about the experience soon after it happened while I was still running, but I, ever the proactive one, put it off. In sitting down with it today, I realize how full of shit I am.

Before I go on, I’ll give a little more context for my life. As mentioned briefly before, I’m a poor white kid. My parents are loving if occasionally abusive, or maybe abusive if occasionally loving. We live in my (deceased) grandmothers house and can’t afford any necessary repairs on it to make the place livable. My dad lost his job about a year and a half ago that was going to take him to retirement, now he works at target. My mother is a hoarder, not to the extreme you may have seen on television, but certainly well beyond what the general society might deem as healthy. She works just enough hours at the Disney Corporation’s day care so that they don’t have to give her full time benefits.

Two of my adult brothers still live at home, crowding the house further. They could, should they allot their funds correctly, afford to have their own place, but my parents discourage that sort of thing. Coming from lower middle class families, both of them have really only known economic uncertainty their whole lives. To have their children live lives separated from themselves means certain uncertainty. Plus, when you don’t have the kids at home, there’s no one left to accuse of being a burden.

I, more than any of my brothers, struggled against my parents to have a normal life. For a while I was pretty damaged; my parents fundamental conservatism really did a number on me. I was a hateful kid, saying cruel things to people that didn’t deserve it. When I got to high school, it took a little while, but I became a better person. Still prone to bouts of selfishness, I began to try a little harder for things. I quit running competitively in high school to join the theater, much to my parents chagrin, and also started dating. Naturally my parents tried putting a stop to both.

By the time I finished high school, I had cut ties with most everyone that knew me there. By its end, I had partially realized that I hadn’t progressed all that much as a person and was still rather selfish. My assumptions that people did not like me were eventually proven correct when I had finally done something that had made me worth disliking. I receded further into myself, even more aware of my deepest flaws.

Eventually I made it to college where I became more depressed than I had ever been before. Towards the end of the semester, my mom ordered me to call after weeks of ignoring her. During that phone call, I told her that I wanted to kill myself. Horrified, she said that they could afford to send me to therapy, I said no, it would be too much of a hassle and it would get to be too expensive. She was relieved and thus the matter was settled and never spoken of again.

So today, I sit in my crowded bedroom in my decaying house (yes, there are rats now) and try and write a story, a true story, about how running in the rich part of town made me sad. So often I am desperately seeking a new lede, some way to ease into the story of my life, so I come up with the flimsiest ones imaginable as opposed to just starting from the beginning. I’m no one I tell myself, so why bother in the first place? No one will read it anyway. But so often, I’m met with the same dull idea that I have a story worth telling. The cynic in me is so embarrassed to want to explain away my life that it has to invent a dialogue with no one to justify wanting to tell an over told story. The poet in me wants to make something beautiful out of my life, and will find any excuse to do so in the most meaningless of events. The realist is here with you trying to make sense of these two voices.

I am obsessed with artifice. Look anywhere in my life and you’ll see it. I’m a theater performance major. I sit at home alone and watch movies that very few people like to gage some sensationalist position on. I go running by major streets hoping that someone, anyone from my past will see me and say hello. I run to the park I took my prom pictures at for the hope that some ounce of high school happiness will be absorbed back into myself, so that I can pretend I didn’t lose all my friends from those years by being selfish. I run further into the hills because deep down I know it might lead to something worth writing about. Only to now finally realize there wasn’t much of a story there to begin with. There, or anywhere.

Self pitying is probably what most people would call this. I’ll probably call it that too. Maybe it’s a cry for help. Maybe. Or maybe it’s a desperate plea for attention from an empty audience, because the author thinks that’s most poetic of all.