the more i sink into the ground...

I was angry last night. I didn't want to keep it internal but I wanted to keep it pointed inward so no one else would have to care. It is painful when everything hurts and there is no understanding from within so how could I presume that any could possibly come from without, and not from lacking trying, bless her poor, unsatisfied need to save me from myself.

I hadn't written a poem in over a year or perhaps longer. Unless there is one I wrote on here that I have forgotten about. But the intent is always so different for me when I use pencil and my yellow legal pad as opposed to a laptop. I think I had forgotten about catharsis and even truth or honesty. I have just been mostly depressed this past week and I don't know how to pray so my mutterings when I am alone have been requests for instruction on how to request instruction. And I need it to be okay that I barely know the one I'm asking because I am so afraid all the time.

Peacebone

I am going soon. Going to Ohio and going to Canada and just plain going places. Lot's to see and do. I have proven to myself that a lot can be done with a little bit of money and a willingness to just "be." It is most certainly a deeply spiritual experience to just sit, think, and understand. The brain is powerful and can communicate and perceive in dimensions other senses are too limited to penetrate. I bet God interacts in that firmament more than outside of it. Not because He can't but because when He does anything in time and space is ultimately categorized and digested into something far too understandable to be anything God-like.

Man, Animal Collective is so good. And I love the word gnaw. Gnaw gnaw gnaw. grrrr.

A couple days ago I dissed Pearl Jam and had my bowels handed to me by Melissa. Not that she is an avid defender of all things Pearl Jam but I was ignorant of the premise of their mega-super-hit "Jeremy." Being the smash single that it was in the early nineties I saw many clips of the music video on several VH-1 "this is what happened when you were growing up" shows. But all I ever connected the video with was a very creepy, shadowy and slightly silly Eddie Vedder and quick shots of a boy at school. I had no clue it was about a true story of a young boy who was picked on so much at school that he was driven to commit suicide at his school. Melissa was right, it is a very important social issue and it was very apt and responsible of Pearl Jam to expose it to the MTV watching youth who would someday be able to be in a position to put a stop to such abuse firsthand. I mocked the song and the video. I felt so foolish. I spouted off rash judgements and I really appreciate Melissa for calling me out for lack of a better phrase. I really want to not be cruel to anything. I hate feeling regret over things I say. When I say mean things, even about things I really have no reason to care about, I usually end up feelings remorseful. What a terrible feeling.

brandonpiercegeary

but not like those poets

I am writing a story about a deformed man and a little girl spending a day together in a sculpture park. She shows him a poem she wrote about water and the world. Naturally it is simple and child-like. Not childish but certainly innocent and trustingly naive, in the best way. I can't get the story off my mind.

too comfortable for closeness

A writing community would be nice. Last night Honey Bee played at a local store called Pulp which specializes in art/paper products. Mostly it has quite beautiful greeting cards and gift wrap. The event was a slightly haphazard gathering of some essayists, musicians, and a poet, I think. If there was a poet, which I believe I heard there was supposed to be, he or she must have read while Melissa and I were getting pizza. But still, poet or no poet, it was a special evening. It certainly fomented a discontentment in my belly. I have a tiny reserve of unfinished stories I am trying to complete. All fiction, all short, and all with endings that are terribly elusive to me. I sketch and outline and jot and write but feel despondent for want of a community of critics and peers.

I feel envious of Melissa at times. She has a group of young writers built-in to her creative writing program at school. I too had this once. I was in writing classes in college and I squandered so many opportunities for focused composition and critique. I was never fully prepared for the workshops. I pounded out half-conceived stories or poems that only survived because they were so convoluted they were barely evaluable. Oddball twists or indecipherable meaning are my most useful crutches. Luckily for me, I can usually slide by disguising it as postmodern writing.

And I promise, there is supposed to be meaning in what I write. I just have the darndest time conveying it. That is why I want people to help me exhume the purpose I know is...just...right...there...if I...could only...ugh...reach it

can't be bested

It was a journey and a half getting to and from Chicago. The journey was the understood one involving the car, the trailer, the five people in the car with the snacks and the music. Developing with my friends and my wife into a musical entity that we are more and more proud of and confident in is the half.

I make the distinction because the physical movement had its beginning and its end. The band certainly had its beginning, even if it was when Melissa was born it had a definite starting point. But it has an evolution that defies an absolute ending. It is that faux/possibly actual immortality brought upon a group of people by playing music. Not to downplay other creative efforts but there is something undeniably enduring about music and its ability to engender or inhibit growth in people and culture.

When we were playing last Friday night I think we all felt that. We felt different for sure. There was progress from the beginning of the show to the end of it. It is somewhat sad that we only played one show that weekend. I think the progress leaked over into the next day or two but it seemed to slow as there became more hours between the present time and the end of the show.

Cody's girlfriend, Lindsey, came with us and did a bit of filming of things along the way. She teaches film and different aspects therein at a local community college here in Omaha. Having her around and my older brother's fascination with movies has caused me to consider the finer points of film making. I don't know much about film but I know what I like. I guess that is the case for most people, or all people, rather.

So there.

real life screams

It's my last day at Kinko's and I am eating a classic twinkie snack cake with a heavy helping of sugared berries swimming in a sugary goo slathered over top. I am celebrating. I know I said in a previous post that I didn't feel a public blog was an appropriate space to air grievances against your employer. I know I said that and I still agree with myself. I however, well, once nine o'clock arrives, am no longer under that heavy lade that is a job at FedEx Kinko's. Jesus once said all you heavy laden, I will give you rest. I cupped my hands and had naught but a Kinko's job and Jesus put a hanky up to his nose and mouth at keep the stench at bay. He pinched that job but the scruff of its neck and placed it in a fish bowl full of baking soda and peroxide. He then reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a yellow bicycle and Urban Outfitters. Well, how about that.

I want to see if I can pull this off and make it worth reading. I want to write a pithy dirge to my soon to be former job. I want to write it on the spot and without any planning or preparation. Let's see what happens.

a reprimand

what comes of a position of internal
rearing
and a nature not tended to
initially
and quite nearly eternally?
what comes is a disrespect for the self-
ish things that always engenders the tension of living
for others and with yourself.
a disrespect from all
sides
and withering from the same
and whispering and hoots and calls
because you're distracted
not interested
in purposelessness



That was stream of conscious. And I think it was quite sad. But I feel freedom. Kinko's makes me sad. And eulogies aren't supposed to be cheerful. Sure they usually embue a sense of hope in some way. But for me, Kinko's stole that little spark. Or perhaps it just buried it in place well marked that I couldn't see until I had an escape route planned. I am onward and I am upward.

Honeybee plays in Chicago this weekend. It will be epic. I assure you.
brandon pierce geary

I am on a roll. I am butter. Seeping into the crannies. Smooth. I feel very good about most things at this precise moment in time. Sure I fret about money, health (mental and otherwise), dreams deferred, societal ills and conspiracies. Yet I feel peaceful. At peace, even. Probably the sun. It's always the sun, isn't it.

I have been reading anthologies lately. The anthology is quite possibly my favorite literary invention. I love reading a single writer's collection but an anthology brimming with all manner of voices and perspectives is intoxicating. I have been reading from the "Best American" Series. This series is very appealing with its wide-ranging focuses from collection to collection. The Best American Nonrequired Reading is captivating my attention right now but I would love to read the Best American Sports Writing, Best American Spiritual Writing, and Best American Essays. Oh, I love good essays. Creative nonfiction is delicious. I just finished an article in the Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology by Jonathon Ames, a writer for Spin, about a goth festival in Illinois. I gotta tell you, that guy had me in stitches. Stitches!

He was so matter of fact. I think that is going to be a very recognizable defining quality of quality writing of this era we live in. This decade. The best, or most widely acclaimed and watched, writing on television is usually quite dry. Droll is funny and interesting and endlessly amusing. That is why I am so hyped on nonfiction. It is just facts but it can be so entertaining or even just not boring. Not boring is very good. Uninteresting is very bad.

Another thing that is very is good is this:
"Not all of us Americans appreciate the fact that we have about 150 very good quarterlies in this country. Every state seems to have a very good quarterly, and about a hundred colleges have very good quarterlies — from the Kenyon Review to the University of Illinois’s Ninth Letter. So by our estimate there are about 150 very good quarterlies in this country. Maybe more. Now, the thing we don’t always appreciate here in America is that elsewhere in the world there are few to no quarterlies." Dave Eggers from the "Q and A" section of the Best American Nonrequired Reading collection.

THIS IS GOOD NEWS. God bless American writers. I usually am not the most ardent fan of things American. But perhaps the winds are changing if this country values its writers as much as it seems to. Hmmm.

brandon

klondike bar for breakfast

My brother was supposed to get married but that was a week ago and he is currently single and battling a psycotic ex-fiance who may/may not be carrying his child within her womb. She verbally assualts him and textually annihilates his self-esteem. She says vile things to his face about everything you could possibly imagine someone berating another person for and then she sends seething text messages in order to stick her grimy fingernail just a little deeper into my brother's gaping wounds. He is a shattered person. Melissa and I went to Ohio last weekend because we had the plane tickets already purchased from when the wedding was still happening. We went for consolation and, unbeknownsted to us, manual labor. We spent most of the time lugging furniture from my parents' garage into a storage unit. It was hard to be callous though, since we were attempting to help right a life gone terrible awkward and stupid. My family is close but we have a lot of secrets we keep from each other. Not a healthy situation but honesty is becoming more and more of a priority amongst my brothers the older we get. One of my younger brothers finally stop trying to hide his smoking habit. Another brother finally moved out of the house he wouldn't tell my parents he was living in. And I, well, I don't know what my parents don't know about me right now. Melissa and I share it all, and perhaps those are the things my parents need not know.

So in like manner as my siblings' truthfulness problem, I had a klondike bar for breakfast. I will surely die. "You will not surely die!" OH, YES I WILL. Melissa and I are obsessive. I can hide mine better. In fact until this week I didn't even know I had these tendencies. I am obsessed with MSG. What a horrid obsession. It is so entirely inescapable. So much so that I am beginning to be just a tad wary of just how dangerous it is. I have been reading about the myriad of adverse health affects MSG causes or exacerbates. I am terrified. The world is fucked. Not just because of MSG but who is truly honest anymore? Who truly does things without selfish gain as even a slight motivation?

when looking for new

I know that to speak harshly of one's current employer on such a public platform as a blog is a veritible shot in the eyeball. So in observance of this fact I will not do that. But goodness it is going to take a great deal of willpower.

My parents are mostly likely in Australia by now. I talked them last night while they were in LA awaiting their 3:00 A.M. take off. They had a 14 hour flight looming and they sounded tired yet excitedly impatient. I burdened them with my job woes so there is no need to unload here. I got it all out.

Speaking of my parents' trip to Australia, I feel quite envious of them. Of course I can be jealous of anyone traveling abroad without even thinking about it, but my parents have been world traversing several times a year for a few years now. Many trips to Hawaii, Honduras, Ireland, France, Belgium, and now Australia. I am proud of my parents and how hard they have worked to be able to enjoy parts of our world that many Americans are not able to, but I am also a bit miffed that this is not myself and my wife. One of the reasons we decided to marry so young was that we both wanted to travel widely and far-ly and we figured it makes so much more sense to do just that together in wedded bliss. So far we have made it to Canada. We are on our way to being true jet-setters. We are actually going back to Canada this summer to lounge at her family's cottage and so I can finally meet an Aunt and Uncle and "crew" of cousins I have yet to. We are also heading East next month to play music for some people are various venues. My parents are in their fifties and have been married over a quarter century. Melissa and I are in our early twenties and have been married about three-quarters of a year. Perhaps all is as it should be.

I've got arms growing out of my vines

'Perfect.'

'Yep, pretty dismal. Het het!'

The FedEx Ground driver just came to pick up the last load of the evening and his heh's sounded more like het's. His name is Steve.

I decided to just play the bass guitar. I can build with it. My fingers feel so much more comfortable stretching across its strings and frets and wood and such than on an acoustic guitar that makes me want to cry more than it makes me want to sing. I reworked a song I wrote about being sad and alone for the bass guitar. It sounds more cheerful now and thus more bearable and perhaps a touch ironic.

'I can build songs with the bass guitar' is what I keep thinking because I think I can create something I would find full and bold and compelling.

I just want to evoke I suppoke. Ahem, excuse me, suppose. I stumbled upon this project of someone I know nothing about. He seems ambitious and has spurred some fascinating music from some artists I admire and aspire to be like. He wrote/is writing a children's book about a mythical land his great grandfather discovered called Murkville. A group of great bands wrote songs inspired by Murkville and put it on a soundtrack. It is quite lovely.

I drew some goofy pictures today on some extra pieces of paper that I had.

facts, huh

I was listening to a bit of NPR this morning and heard of another revealed memorist hoax. The half-white, half-native American gang member, drug dealer from South LA, Margaret B. Jones, is actually the all-white Margaret Seltzer from a flourishing suburb in northern Los Angeles. Her 'autobiography' chronicled her foster situation and eventual gang affiliation and thug shenanigans. All false. All complete fiction. Reportedly, a very well-written piece (many ravenous critics praised the newest unique, young memorist) and yet there is the rub because of her deceit and the rub of our culture's reaction.

I had originally been preoccupied with the hoax and hadn't even considered the fact that it probably doesn't matter a wit that she lied. The reasons for her fabrication is simple. To sell a large amount of novels there are certain culturally common interests the author must appeal to. Voyeurism is the tie that binds the population of Americans who are increasingly interested in documentary film, blogs, reality television, and autobiography. As Tim Rutten of the LA Times puts it, "We love tell-alls and publishers love money." He says that our insatiable desire for vicarious living has caused us to demand the most savage and urbane stories as long as it's the dirty little nuggets of truth.

A couple years ago James Frey was at the top of the memorist-fakers most-wanted list. He wildly embellished his run-in with the law in his book A Million Little Pieces. Oprah's book club adored him; he was practically celebrity. Then it came out that he was not quite the overcomer of a life of hard drugs and crime that he said he was. I recently read an essay written by a fellow who had interviewed James Frey before the facts were revealed. He didn't really discuss why Frey would lie or how it could or could not be tolerated, but he wondered more about what autobiography even is.

Some of the most interesting points are made in the essay when he examines how people who write about what "actually" happened in their lives always seem to have the super human ability to remember. Conversations from decades and decades ago are relayed verbatim. Vivid details of memories occuring while the author was not of an age where memories are usually not captured.

That is all very fascinating to me. As of late I have been engrossed by creative nonfiction. I love the notion that facts and events can be written about in an enjoyable and creative manner. The art of essay. I want it.

adaptation

A great discouragement caught me off guard yesterday. I was having a terribly difficult time playing a song I have been writing for a couple weeks now. A truly terrible time. Well, it was fine at the outset but within a shockingly short amount of time my fingers became overwhelmed and I could scarcely play a chord. Acoustic guitar playing wears out my fingers and my mind because I am so used to playing bass without doing much thinking and I have to concentrate so intently on the guitar when I play. My fingers became forlorn and exhausted. They huffed and puffed their way through the song and then crawled into my palms to make comfortable little fists. Then they proceeded to bash my unsuspecting face in. My body parts tend to revolt against me when I push them to their limits. Tis' sad that my fingers limits are so slight when it comes to guitar plucking.

This is a challenge and I won't shy away.

Also, my wife is quite ill. She has a bad case of strep throat. I have been able to look at her swollen tonsils twice already. They look quite interesting. A bit like tiny brains or the top of a human baby's head as it is crowning when being birthed. But Melissa's tonsils are endlessly cute. hmmmm. I love caring for her in this way.

peace
brandon
pierce
geary

to speak of

No songs yet. But that's not what this is all about. Well, I mean, it is but it's all supposed to be an inspiration to achieve and achieve. Not merely aurally and melodically. I'm writing a story about a young man who loses his wife to death, a very sad way to go. I feel that completing this piece of short fiction will be a crowning achievement for myself. I have "finished" stories before. But upon a recent revisit to these I realized I was quite careless with my satisfaction with my work. Quite careless. I wish not the same fate for any songs I might compose. Oh, compose! I probably didn't mean to use that word. My stuff is more castles in the air and composure for my scoliotic posturing.

Here's an off-the-cuff poem:

and the ropes



always understated the ropes
hold the trapeze artist
hold the man with the muscles dragging the bus
and the lady to the tracks
always understated and always under pressure

such tension
in the twines and strands
who am i to think i am so threadbare

letting the boat from its mooring is the most polite thing to do



peace
brandon pierce geary

a minima

The pressure's off. I cannot tell you how achingly I have wanted to be a musician. I have written about three songs in toto. I have assisted in writing songs. I have collaborated in a song writing experience. And I have bystanded while others write songs. Some friends of mine started a 'label' of mostly 'solo' music released on only cassette tapes. I thought 'Gee, my time has come. A goal to acheive to exhilarate the old song writing machine. I'm in!' I have had a rare communion with cassette tapes of late as the cd player in my car is no longer playing discs. So with that I have started playing Melissa's guitar and singing along to the fumbling. Good Grief. I left my guitar in Ohio because we couldn't fit it in my car when I cut and run from most everything I knew but loved less than being with Melissa.

I want to be good. Everyone wants to be good. I want to do it right.

this is comforting



grace and peace
brandon pierce geary