live on coffee and flowers

These days there are no more deep thoughts.


I think about school, and how if I get a second chance I would do things differently. I think about the situational difference between 正好 and 原来. I focus on the patterns in the curtains and the smell of calcium in the shower head that reminds me of garden hoses and summer.


Sylvia sits at my desk at night. She reminds me of evolution as she tells me to just bite down until "the darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard."


I am Lady Lazarus.
"Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air."


I'm going to get better.

The Sylvia Plath Effect

You know that they call this "The Sylvia Plath Effect".


I suppose laying in bed, thinking about elbows and our mothers or our terrifying, unknowable fathers, and being more creative than an eggshell makes us Lady Lazarus.


The answer might be different if it were London, or anywhere in California, or more likely Paris. Someplace with more trees and less rain. Award-winning, urbane, we contemplate candles and the pattern in the tablecloth, childhood homes and porcelain bathtubs. The answer will never be different.


They tell me this is the Sylvia Plath Effect. I'd leave a thousand pages unwritten if I never had to feel this again.

Dear Sylvia

"...Delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately, cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell — if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door on your face, numbly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors."        — Sylvia Plath

Beginning when I was four, my family used to take annual trips to Eastern Washington to look at the tulip fields. Large plots of land, stretched out along the highway; red, red, yellow, red, yellow, purple. Walking through acres of flowers chosen for the hidden virus in their gene.


We walked side by side, pretending our arms were made of wax. I'd shape your arm and you'd hold your position like a faithful mannequin. You walked ahead of us, his arm wrapped around your waist, stealing the bulb of a tulip that caught your eye.


It's spring soon, and I know we're not going back. The polaroids are gone, tucked away from the sun, tucked away from our eyes. I know you don't remember the gel in his hair, his toothpaste commercial smile; the sunglasses are off, he hasn't shaved in weeks and all you see is the disappointment you've buried for the last ten years. I know you don't look at the bright lipstick, her dainty clothing so carefully picked out, her hair meticulously styled so that not a strand will be out of place; instead there stands a woman whose constant demands you never seem to meet, whose disappointment in you has gotten so tiresome you can't even care anymore.


In my dreams, everything exists on parallel planes. As you sit in that dark, stifled room, straining your eyes to read those stupid numbers, in my mind you're still walking hand in hand. But I know that you're also in your truck on Christmas Day, racing towards Minnesota. I know you're standing at the doorway, watching the cops escort him from our house. The suitcases are being packed twelve different times, on twelve different nights. He's sleeping in four different motels. She's sitting in her too-big armchair, crying until she's nearly blind, too many times to count.


We're trapped in our ways. As a family our love has aged, fermented. The smell of the dirt, the abrasive wind, the slowly dragging hours are all costs too high for the old skeleton of our love to hold up. In my mind the fields are frozen, the bulbs are sleeping. I'll pretend the tulips aren't in bloom, waiting for us to return.

Lately

Lately I've been extremely dissatisfied with everything that I write. And for no particular reason either; the words just seem wrong. One sentence sounds just about right but the punctuation hits me like a hammer and I know it's wrong, or the next sentence is so devastatingly flat that it knocks the wind out of me. And then I delete it and find myself with the same empty box, no matter how many times I try to word it.


I finished reading The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan yesterday, and immediately upon going to bed I opened up The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and began reading. I was so enraptured I stayed up until 4AM, surprisingly, before realizing how late it was and deciding to go to bed. What scares me is the levels of parallelism I find in its pages and my life. I'm almost scared that I feel as if I could relate to Esther Greenwood, though as I wake up five hours later and have a clear mind, I can noticeably count the differences in my head and feel relieved.


This morning I was greeted with a sight I haven't seen in years: birds in my backyard. I counted seven different types, ranging from just tiny to the size of a crow. It felt right to unplug my headphones and listen the pulse and thunder of a group of birds flying together.


I'm still surprisingly burnt out by the last album, Multiply, but today I think that the clear gray light filtering through the window and the abundant number of hours I have will suffice in curing me and allowing me to write about the next album on my list.


But right now...time for breakfast!

Your Sword's Grown Old and Rusty

Today had some minor successes. I went into the Magus Books store and bought myself three books (believe it or not, only coming to $25!). I chose Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. About a month ago I bought Milan Kundera's Laughable Love. I am probably going to become Magus Books' regular customer, as I seem to have decided to begin to build the book collection of my dreams.


There is something to say about hardcover books. And not just the dime-a-dozen hardcover books you can buy anywhere, but the really beautiful hardcover books you'd find decades ago, with imprints and designs. Anna Karenina came in a wonderful green hard cover, with a protective sleeve whose inside is filled with a list of 365 other classic title. The other two books I found were, unfortunately, not hard cover, but they are beautiful nonetheless.


It's amazing how wonderful it is to be surrounded by books; I've always had a fondness for libraries, but the excitement of possible ownership of any book on any shelf is an entirely different experience (which is probably why I couldn't just stop at one book today).


And I have to say, the self-inflicted isolation is a marvelous break from reality; there is an immense burden that I've alleviated, and it actually allows me to reach out to people I run into much easier than before. I found that my choice to not talk to any friends or force contact with people has only led me to embrace the serendipitous occasions in which I run into someone -- today I found myself gushing to a girl I hadn't talked to since 10th grade. Without constantly checking my cell phone or keeping track of time or people, it's a wonderful release and an opportunity to just be out and about. I'm seriously considering deleting my Facebook and leaving my cell phone at home, and just to get rid of these socially intrusive tools that people use to excuse themselves from really caring about other people (while narcissistically forcing themselves on others with their frivolous status updates).


But at the same time I know that this type of social isolation isn't really a feasible reality. It's impossible to escape interacting with people; after all, I'm in this rat-race-of-a-world too.


Anyways, I am debating whether or not I want to use up another one of my 116 free breaks from this project. This Jamie Lidell album, Multiply, for all its merits, is hard for me to write about, and I don't feel like forcing myself to write something. I am pretty happy about the last two albums I reviewed, but I feel like my project is lacking in a more personal feel; if people were looking for music reviews, it would be more beneficial for them to look at Pitchfork or Popmatters.