Woops

Someone asked me what I could share about the art and science of marketing and being in a sad mood / birthday tipsy I ranted that:

– the process of creating a marketing strategy begins with the segmentation of the population (putting people into boxes) and selection of the target market (judging the worth of people based on their buying power)

– which I thought was a bit dehumanizing and also essentially made you worthless if you don’t fit into any of the right demos

– that ethics wasn’t part of the curriculum

– that marketing can be much more useful to society it is now, if the right people would get into it, with the right training, for the right reasons and the right products

– and that in its current form marketing is poison for society and a major contributor to the isolation of individuals, waste of resources, and devaluation of relationships.

* * * * *

After sobering up, I reviewed the conversation in my head and realized that he might have been sizing me up for a job offer (I had mentioned I was close to graduating).

Ahhhhhh. Ahhh. Aaaaaaaaaahhh.

Doubt

Creep past the hours, like the shorter hand on a clock hanging on a wall of a schoolhouse somewhere. We wait for the bell, and we dream of somewhere else. – Daydreaming, Paramore

This isn’t so much a prison of the body as of the mind and heart. Something about this place fills its inhabitants with dull despair and irrationality. It’s like Kansas – everything is gray.

This is the place where my ____ was stripped of his dignity and worth. Where I made up my mind to die, not so very long ago. Where my ___ ‘s narcissism reigns supreme.

I try to send my mind on journeys from this place, like a tower prisoner sailing paper airplanes out of a barred window. But I never get very far.

 

 

I can’t seem to find the conviction that I blew up the internet with, still less long ago. (My small patch of the internet, anyway.) Or even the rage. After weeks of forced worship at the altar of the holy trinity of Lamictal, Seroquel and Solian, I’m as dull, desperate and irrational as every last miserable inhabitant of this place.

I have news that an ex-lover of mine is now with another ex-lover of mine. I don’t know how this news is supposed to make me feel. I suppose it’s only natural to feel uneasy. Perhaps at this very moment they are exchanging the sordid details of exactly how awful I am in bed. Perhaps they’re so in love that they’ve completely forgotten I existed. It’s hard to say which makes me feel more uneasy.

This is like a sort of purgatory, where I’m being purged of everything that makes me alive. My hopes, my plans, my self-esteem.

About three years ago I decided here that I had lost my mind and I was better off dead. Not having managed that, I decided then that I was good for nothing but menial labor and the most simple tasks for the rest of my life. So I left the University.

The other day, almost all the people I’d known there graduated.

They’re all done and ready to move on with their lives. They managed the pressure without cracking up. Perhaps I’ve been wrong about the pressure that I so angrily wrote about. Perhaps there’s just ever a handful of us unlucky ones.

I’m doubting things I was so sure of just one, two months ago –

That I’m a good writer –

That my life’s heading somewhere –

That I’m in control of where it goes –

There are so many things I could write about, pieces I could submit – about the lake – somewhere nice to eat – about what I went through to get a prescription for Nordette in 2013; what it was like to grow up bipolar and gay; what it was like to have a relationship with an older woman.. oh, so many things… but… I don’t know where to start and how to structure them –

It’s like setting out to a different room, and always forgetting what you were there for the minute you step foot inside.

Always.

Here, anyway. In this place of doubt.

Persona Identity Shift

“Where do we draw the line between who we are and the stories we tell ourselves? What if this character does not know who she is? Can she make the story true by telling it?” – autowin

“They all struggle to reconcile who they are with the quasi-real persona they construct.” – Chuck Klosterman

I wrote this last night:

It’s been a while since I’ve been naked here – or let my blood, whatever metaphor you like for showing overt and unapologetic emotionality. This is a problem, I think, because the truth can only be revealed so much outlining the facts (which I’ve already done). 

It’s late at night and I’m writing for my blog, but I’m doing it in a notebook while lying next to my girlfriend. That’s what’s happening. And I’m hoping some truth will emerge. 

That last time that I thought she and I would not work out, I was also becoming afraid of the fact that I was almost completely alone in my life. So I sat in bed and cried. In the midst of my crying, my kitten started meowing, so I went to see what she wanted. What she wanted was to lie on my chest. Accuse me of anthropomorphising, but in the short time we had been together, she’d decided that I was her mother and that all protection and food would come from me – so it’s not such a long shot to say that she realized I was in distress and was seeking to comfort me…

TLP says that story is the only way we all make sense of our own lives. The story I’ve been using for a while now is Kill Bill. I don’t want to go on an aside about how it’s a misunderstood literary masterpiece, so I’ll get right into it. Beatrix Kiddo is an orphan, and like most orphans in literature, is an exceptional person of extraordinary abilities and an overwhelming emotional isolation. Like Superman. (There was an actual deconstruction and comparison within the movie.) Those two qualities combined result in a life of loneliness. “Otherness,” some people call it – whatever it is, she’s different from everyone else. 

The crux of her character and her motivations are revealed in the final conversation with Bill at the end of the movie. In that, he asks her: “Did you really think that your life as a normal wife and mother was going to work?” And she replies, almost sobbing: “No! But I would have had my baby.” 

I was going to finish with some point about how Kill Bill is the story I use to explain my life because I also feel like I’m an orphan and that motherhood would be the sublimation of all my life’s suffering and that my kitten is practice for a baby, but at that point my girlfriend stirred and I put my writing aside to talk with her.

Which is exactly as it was supposed to happen, I think.

And it’s all very different from what I’m used to, where art trumps reality in terms of importance and passion (drama) is more valuable than loyalty and devotion.

It’s strange and wonderful.

Now that I’m not an artist anymore, it’s time to try and find something else to be. Today I found a blog by a man, so matter-of-fact about his life of creation and excitement that his formatting was fantastically bad (so I won’t link to it) but his blogs contained such sentences as: “We found out that playing with a dummy knife in the parking lot of an airport earns you a free trip in a police car,” and “The peacocks were a spur-of-the-moment Mother’s Day gift, so we didn’t have a house for them yet.” And then he’d tell you all about how beautiful the day was when they got the dummy knives, and how they built a house for the peacocks. I would love to have that life – just an endless process of creation, taking joy in every project and in every step of every project.

Where to start?