My Spatial Epiphany

I was sitting around the new digs the other day (ok, I admit, i've been bad and haven't updated the blog in months...ok, I've been really bad, like Michael Jackson at summer camp bad - I'M SORRY ALREADY...for those of you who don't know, I moved across town to a neat little apartment in La Jolla, leaving behind the familiar embrace of the Blue House - I'll miss you, Bluey!), contemplating on the fact that after three months of living, eating, and sleeping, after three months of coming home here, this place, this space, still doesn't feel like home.

I don't get a tingle when I enter, that crooked little smile doesn't find its way to my face every time I walk through the door; it feels neither like my power place nor like my resting place. What I mean is, this place is still things, it is still walls and chairs and electronics, food and dishes and appliances; it is still carpet and paint and plaster and photographs. It is things, both my things and its own things, yes - but it is not me, this space, it is not mine to wrap myself up in, to keep me warm, to parry stones.

So I thought about it. And I thought, and hummed, and thought. This went on for some time. And then it hit me; the spaces I've lived in which have become truly mine have shared one thing in common. The fondest and most vivid, the clearest and most singularly comfortable memories that I can recall from each of my past dwellings, from each of my spaces of my life, have revolved around music.

I replay Radiohead's The Bends in my apartment sophomore year, the Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletein in the blue house, built to spill and grandaddy everywhere but especially in my freshman dorm - my space has always been a space of sound, a space where I can turn it up, tune it in, lapse into aurality, and forget that a world does, in fact, exist outside of the walls and chairs and electronics, food and dishes and appliances, carpet, paint, plaster and photographs. With music, a space becomes infused with life, space adopts a soul, space inherits a heart.

With music, a space and I become each other's, once and forever.

-tn

The Thoughts We Think

This wasn't supposed to happen. I was just chillin', flipping between the NBA playoffs and Law & Order, hoping against hope that somehow, someway, somewhere, the Lakers would lose and the bad guy would outsmart those crafty cops and DA's. When all of a sudden, a thought popped unbidden into my head.

Listen, I'm telling (the truth with) my slant -

I thought of my cat Bruce, and how I control his life; when he eats, when he drinks, when he sleeps, and of how Bruce controls me. I thought of my baseball fantasy league, and how I'm losing because I don't drop feelgood players like my name starts Stein and ends brenner. I thought of my home, and of Mum and Dad and Sis and Bro and Grandma and my niece Amanda, and of the lives I'm missing and we talk and write often but just - why wasn't I home for Amanda's 4th birthday or for Mother's Day, anyway?

Then I flipped and thought about beheading in Iraq and about people there, what they're doing, how their lives have changed or not changed. I thought about what they think and why they think that. I thought about China and Mongolia and Tibet and Somalia and Uganda and and Indonesia and Kendra (wait, Kendra, that's not a country or a place, that's a girl that I love...c'mon, back to selfless proselytizing) and about raw hunger and calculated fear. I thought about a crackpot idea to start a clothing company printing "Valley Pride" t-shirts and hats. I thought about morning lethargy and why some people say leth-AR-gee and other say LETH-ar-gee, and about which way sounds cooler and which way sounds correcter - dammit, that's not a word. I thought about how my standard of living, how my life, was and is borne upon the backs of laborers, of factory workers, of children and of billionaires. I thought about how hot it was last week and how nice it would be to have a pool. Or air conditioning.

I thought about bills and credit, about the Joneses and the Gateses. I thought about Oscar Wilde and Denzel Washington (The Siege was on USA) and Kobe Bryant and the fine handcrafted beer I was drinking alone. I thought about life as a schoolteacher, a clerk, a cop, a soldier, a priest, a derelict. I thought about things that I'm supposed to think about and about things I think I'm not supposed to think about and why I think about the things I think about and why I think I'm not supposed to think them. I thought about Thailand. I thought about the smiles you see at McDonald's and Starbucks and the local grocery store and are those folks really that happy to give me my Big Mac, my americano, my vegetables?

I thought about amazing artists making prints for hotel room walls and singers singing songs about bubblegum and lost love. I thought about my hatred for pop culture and Friends and my unique facelessness (psst - it's not really unique) and about how if you wanted that part in quotations that I'm a bad writer and you're a complacent reader.

I thought about that guy at the corner market that tries to bum cigarettes or change from people, and about how I feel when I tell him "no change, man, sorry," and why I tell him that when I have change in my pockets and how can I tell him that while I'm muffling the sound of the change with my hand as I walk by? I thought about my grandmother's stories of Religion in the 30's, 40's and 50's, and about how she had to sign official Catholic Church documents denouncing her Lutheranism and swearing by Grandpa's Catholicism, when their faiths really weren't that far apart. And I thought about all the thought that went into the importances of her era, and the thought that goes into the importances of ours.

So, really, I thought about you (me). What do you (no, me) think about? Why do you (ME, you idiot) think you think about the things you (HELLO, I'm talking about myself [ed: they get it already, you heavyhanded hack]) think about? Are you (no really, me) supposed to think those things or are you thinking those things because you're you (umm, me?)?

Let me repeat, sans distracting parentheses and faux editorial comment - So, really, I thought about you. What do you think about? Why do you think you think about the things you think about? Are you supposed to think those things or are you thinking those things because you're you?

And just who are you (me) anyway?

-tn

[ed: this is, in some strange, distorted, convoluted, adjective-bombed way, a call for ideas - all of these words are just trying to ask the question "what occupies your mind?". Really. Email me at teddynutmeg@hotmail.com. Please?]

yuk yuk yuk

Funniest flash cartoon in the universe, or until I find one funnier, that is:

http://members.cox.net/impunity/endofworld.swf


Check it out.

-tn

Where to begin?

Not that anyone will actually read this, or anything, since you've all stopped checking my humble blog for updates long ago, but why not, eh? A percieved audience is the only audience I need, I'm sure somebody famous said that or a variation of that, and if not, they have now!

Disclaimer - a startlingly large part of this entry comes from emails to various friends and family over the last week or year. so deal with it.

Asleep again I dreamwalk through my past and enjoy the shadows of memory.

But I'm doing ok. I find that, on little sleep (5-6 hours every night for a week is just fine with me), I'm more awake than if I've slept for a long time. Though on these days I'm somewhat in zombieland, and typically much quieter (not that I don't say anything, but my volume is automatically and drastically decreased), it nonetheless creates an interesting dynamic for my day.

I blame it all on the business travel - imagine: a typical Friday finishing off a trip, waking up in a hotel on the east coast at 6 am EST (after a few hours of restless sleep on an unfamiliar bed in a hotel room that is too bright on sheets that smell too much of bleach), working that entire day, face jammed in a computer or financial statements, or banging my head against the wall of a pentagenarian's fear of computers until 4 or 5 pm EST, then jamming to the airport to catch a flight that puts me, barring delays, in San Diego at 3 am EST, then hanging with the roommates/homies, in a zombie-like mode, until 6-7 am EST...and the upshot of all this being that when you try to wrest yourself back into a normal schedule, you find that you've conformed to the fucked up schedule, "broken chairs your body conforms to," to quote the inimitable Doug Martch. Insomnia isn't an affliction, it's an acquired taste (that's all me).

I used to travel for my company, all over the USA, coming back to San Diego on the weekends, but I don't anymore. I miss it. Chicago, NYC, Miami, Dallas, Houston, the Atlantic, the Great Lakes, the Great Cornfields, America is large and and I have seen its largeness. I have driven across Texas in the summer nights with the windows down, letting the sticky air pervade my spirit. I have slid gleefully across icy roads in Wisconsin, spinning the tires of my rental car like a 16-year old on the frozen, deserted roadway. I have danced all night in the nightclubs of Boston, walking from bar to bar and realizing in a smiling flash that it's a small big city. I have cried, alone and tired in a Holiday Inn by the highway in Tennessee, feverish with the flu and missing Her fussiness over me. I have jumped for joy in the green spring air of Kentucky, breathing in life itself.

I could go on forever, I love to write, but who knows if anyone is ever listening?

Besides, I'm about to go home where the light of the computer shines no more. I'm about to get German.

-tn

Sunday laundry

Holy crazy days, Batman!

Amazingly long hours at work!

Great concerts!

Wacky hijinx!

Friends and fun, fog and sun, October has come to San Diego again!

I've finally uploaded some pictures to a free picture album website, so all two of you avid readers can see what's going on! Whoooo hooo!

Click here to view: http://teddy4life.instantlogic.com

Then email me to tell me how wonderful my photos are: teddynutmeg@hotmail.com

Yeah, baby!

-tn

friday again

Yup, its friday again, and I'm staring at the monitor, wondering where my week went again, smiling tiredly again and getting ready to climb into my honda civic and drive home again.

there's a song by blur called "ernold same" that hits me in the right spot today - about a guy who wakes up in the same mood every morning, on the same side of the bed, takes the same shower, dresses in the same clothes, has the same breakfast, takes the same train to work, sits in the same seat with the same ugly stain, next to same old what's his name, and he does the same thing again and again and again.

Well, it doesn't rhyme for us Americans, but if you say again like a Brit, then it works pretty well.

Grandaddy played here just last Saturday - god that seems so long ago - I had a weekend to remember last weekend, or a weekend to forget, or whatever. i scared the shit out of myself on saturday night, well, i wasn't scared until i woke up sunday morning and remembered what i did - it wasn't anything bad, or wrong, more a little joke that could've turned out horribly. but the grandaddy show was bad-ass, as usual. can't say the 5 dollar beers were too welcome, but they went down easier than the five bucks came up.

this sunday is RADIOHEAD at coors amphitheatre. i somehow weaseled my way into a pit ticket, which means that i'll be right down front by the stage with 100 other lucky ducks, and the other 10,000 people at the sold out show can't leave their sections.

boo yah, grandma. boo yah.

-ts

a veil over my happy

Was trying to explain this to someone the other day, and it ocurred to me that I'm just not equipped to express my own feelings of happiness.

I'm usually a happy person, a very happy person. really. Even when I'm sad, I enjoy it, like you enjoy the blues. When I'm happy, its like my baseline feeling, my normal mode - I'm always happy and so it doesn't merit description or expression or even acknowlegement. So, when I write stuff, when I'm motivated to write stuff, its only when I'm sad or mildly depressed.

But then you blogreaders read all these depressing posts and think "Wow, Teddy's a really dark, disturbed guy" and then you email me "Wow, Teddy, you're really dark and disturbed!" And its just not true.

I think of it like this - you don't notice or comment on ordinary things when you're walking down the street; you don't notice the elderly couple out for a stroll, the businessman power-walking to a meeting, briefcase in hand, the mom with her baby in a stroller.

But you do notice things out of the ordinary; you do notice the punk rockers with pink spiked hair holding hands with the Japanese schoolgirls, you do notice the mormon guys in ties having a foursome with the two nuns, you do notice Gray Davis and Arnold Schwartzenegger shoving eachother around and you do notice when Arnold crumples Davis up into a ball, puts him into a Magnum brand condom and shoves him up a midget's butt, saying "Davis screws the little guy - Vote Yes on Total Recall!!"

see what I mean?

-tn

happiness

Feeling more like this today, like I've returned to The Happiness as described by Jack Hirschman. (Hint - click on the underlined phrase "The Happiness" and you'll be taken to a website with information about the poem and author.)


The Happiness
Jack Hirschman
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There's a happiness, a joy
in one soul, that's been
buried alive in everyone
and forgotten.

It isn't your barroom joke
or tender, intimate humor
or affections of friendliness
or big, bright pun.

They're the surviving survivors
of what happened when happiness
was buried alive, when
it no longer looked out

of today's eyes, and doesn't
even manifest when one
of us dies, we just walk away
from everything, alone

with what's left of us,
going on being human beings
without being human,
without that happiness.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For those of you who don't deal well with poetry, AHEM, I feel like the past few days I've done what the poet describes, I've walked away and gone on being human without being human, I've buried real joy and contented myself with the barroom jokes and gawdy puns of crude salfivic humor; and this is a scary thing, that I (or anybody) can ignore the hollow place left behind when happiness/love take their leave, even for a few days.

And its ironic that when two people who love eachother are in an ongoing argument and aren't speaking to eachother, our language tends to label the first person to restore contact as "giving in," as somehow weaker than the other - and this locks both in misery, in apathy, in the false stoicism of supposed strength.

-tn

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