So, when I'm drunk, things just seem so overtly beautiful. I'm not
trashed, mind you -- just sorta floaty, so to speak. But, yeah. When I'm drunk, I feel like I just sense beauty so deeply, you know?
Up until I was 24, I was going to be a poet. I was going to change the world with poetry. I went to grad school, I spent two years reading and writing (I didn't read everything, but I read enough to know I hate Rita Dove and love
Lee Ann Brown, I hate Billy Collins and love
Charles Reznikoff). I wrote a book (it was terrible). I have since written a second, slightly more terrible book. Then I finished grad school and moved in with the woman. I supported
her through grad school. Since poetry didn't pay the bills, I started teaching. I ITed part time to help pay the bills. And do you know what the management jerks said to me the other day at work? "25% of the students who graduate from our school -- that's 25% of the students you teach -- will be incarcerated." It broke my heart. I work so hard for these kids. I mean, they're bright, their family situations are real, you know? I decided long ago that teaching is about feeling your failures, not feeling the "rewards" of your successes (I hate people who say teaching is rewarding), but god. What am I doing if I'm working this hard and these kids are still winding up in jail, you know?
But on the up side (I'm not being dismissive, I'm being repressive), after I got home tonight (the JTE (pseudonymous) and I perhaps had a few too many during the Patriots game) there was this
Alleve ad on TV. All these elderly people kept falling up the stairs or suffering crippling pain while playing poker or wearing sweaters around their necks in pain and all I could do was laugh
so hard because it was all so staged and yes, so beautiful that there was this real gray hair and real, staged pain. This theater of
the body in pain.
I read
this post from
mymemory and almost cried because it's real -- it's heartfelt and it's beautiful.
There's coffee, there's alcohol, there's cigarettes, there's love -- I started painting and realized Mark Rothko really's done everything I want to do, though I almost cry everytime I look at something by
Michael Brodeur ...
"Oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much."
-->
Frank O'Hara
Thanks, anyway, to the MR regulars for being so real, so honest, so moody, so angry, so insistent and so funny. You maintain me at least as much as
Ella in Rome does, and that's saying
something more than a Thank You thread could.
I wonder if I've said too much or absolutely nothing at all?
[/melodrama]