In Twilight Regalia

I’m sitting here eating chips, which I never do. Really. I don’t. I’m just in this mental hovering space right now which won’t allow me to eat something normal.

I’ve been told when you are truly hungry, everything seems to look good. Not so with me.
I find virtually nothing is appealing a lot of the time. And yet, I’m really feeling hungry.
So I try to eat what I would normally eat that would be yummy to me, to hit that spot that we all have that says “aH.” when we’re done. It lets us shut off the eating urge and pay attention to other things. But when I eat that thing that I usually find yummy, it doesn’t register as yummy, and then afterward I feel not only just the same, still waiting for the satisfaction feeling to arrive; I also feel like I’ve eaten, and sometimes too much, and so feel worse with regard to not getting satisfied. Full and unsatisfied is this odd place. Others might wain away with lack of eating; I wander around helplessly eating shelf after shelf and saying that’s not IT, that’s not it,….. so now I stop the wandering and put in just one chip, and wait a while. Think about it.

I wondered then, how much of what I do now feels that way — and I notice it sneaks in everywhere in my life.

-Food, for sure. Even cooking it, which I used to love for its chemical processing factor. Now I’m just done with it as soon as I think about it. Nah. Let’s go out.

-Movies (how long has it been since I saw something that inspired?. ).

Music, even. I find my attention and patience growing shorter and shorter, even with music. It all seems so …. derivative.

-Marital life. We’re fine. Really. I mean, you know what I mean when I say Fine, right?. This from a person who, when asked “How are you” on a daily basis at work, generally answers with “Sucky”, “As well as could be expected”, “I’ve been better”, and “Eh.”

-How about interest in the world at large?
Look, I’ve never been that socially involved on a civic sort of scale. But the political bullshit going on in the world has reached such a pitch darkness that I am afraid to look there. I shut it out, because I fear that another serious period of unrest is coming, and I don’t think it will be a cleansingly internal one, such as it was in the 1960s in our country.

I feel, instead, the growing impatience of the world with the United States: with its indefensible war policies, with its sheerly dunderheaded leadership, with our oblivious product-pushing and oil-seeking, with our lack of ethics, with our underhanded power plays and black ops, with our loss of integral societal values where the rest of the community of the world is concerned. And I’m not even hinting at anything remotely as loaded as gay marriage.

I mean, I was watching this sort of infomercial sneak peak of Disney’s new endeavors recently (just bumped into it flipping along on the remote).

All their new plans sounded so awesome, so over the top, so…… fucking corporate head in the sand. Their expansion is digging its fingers into all media, movies, videos, radio, internet, and recordings, but also sneaks into most of general network TV (most targeted is Fox network of course) and large, profitable reality TV shows. Those are the shows where people text in their votes — more votes than our public cares to cast for our presidential elections. Disney is everywhere handing you new “artists” (kid musicians they think will sell) and selling you everything from their faces to their sorry drugged-out later lives on air, and marketing everything they can think of based on them (lamps? jackets? Shoes???).

Then there are the real estate plans: If you don’t know what they are, they begin with new rides in various parks all over the world, but end up with their creation of complete Disney Island getaways with separate beaches for different age groups - supervised play beach for children, teen beach, adult relaxation beach, all of this on some recent purchase in some former island paradise (which means a place with great weather, low taxes and a lot of poor people). It’s all so….So Marie Antoinette. Are they going to have Haiti turned into a nice little theme park? Is it any wonder some people think it’s just …. us? It’s these Americans who are fucking over our planet. They’re the ones responsible for our global warming, our economic stasis, our dependencies, our deaths, and soon, more of our bombings.

IS that what they all think? I mean, I think it even over here looking at it all from the outside. And I’m not there, in a place where I’ve had half my family killed and don’t know where my next meal will come from, and gee, maybe taking tickets in a giant theme park with a huge loss of my personal dignity might be a step up from not having any potable water or electrical infrastructure. I don’t know. Should I kick them out and blow them up and continue with my poverty and pain and hatred and bitterness? Or take tickets for Disney parks and watch my culture vanish irreparably when my kids steal our food money to buy training shoes with a mouse logo on them? Hm. It’s really a toss up. Your belly or your soul? You can’t trade out of this one, see.

But I digress. I was talking about lack of interest. See I’m over here on the Antoinette Island, the BIG Island, and I can’t really feel all that stuff for too long since I’m soon distracted away from it into buying new nailpolish or finding just the right shade of green for the rug in the bathroom, where I have enough running water to save whole towns in Africa, but for a shift in the earth’s plates. Perhaps it’s that I’ve seen so many good intentions get lost in corporate machinations; Perhaps it’s guilt; perhaps it’s that I really don’t like people much and am intrinsically antisocial due to an upbringing of isolation; but I really can’t stay on that channel for very long or I WILL DIE. I will lose further interest right down into the soil in which I will be buried if I shoot myself over it because I can’t fix the guilt because it’s much too big for me. So I guess I show a little interest in myself that way. But otherwise I’m disinterested.

I can’t dress myself up as art anymore. They’ve outmoded my mode. I don’t like this model, and want a total trade-in. There’s no point in starting from here. I take weight off, I put clothes on, I take them off, I don’t like it, I gain more weight, I put clothes on, I take them off, I like it even less, I just want a hejab at this point. Probably a designer hejab, which in fact, they do have.

Making art has been fun, but I fear I’ve out-envisioned my talents. I can’t possibly make the stuff I want to see. Um. Yah. Ok. You can’t see it, but I’m making a You Tube video in my head of it.

I no longer want to duplicate playing others’ music in voice, guitar, or piano. I want a new genre to magically present itself and become my messiah.

Did pretty much what I wanted to do. There isn’t enough psychological buoyancy in me to be an altruistic, energetic youth anymore and go save the entire world, let alone this thing I’ve become.

I cry a lot that I should have had a child. Then I have someone else’s child with me for an hour and feel certain I would have gone through SERIOUS CHANGES trying to endure raising a kid. Would that have been better? Perhaps. But it’s moot.

“What do I care about?”, I ask, as I chomp on a chip, wondering if this is all I should eat today since I won’t become any more certain of its satisfaction….

Strangely, I care about being needed. Being heard. Being here in print. Being at least mentioned. Being noticed. Being recognized. Leaving a piece of my confusion as legacy.

Being something other than certain of my own dissatisfaction.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 11:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.