Tuesday, May 31, 2011

notes from underground

"I stood in the falling snow, gazing into the hazy darkness, and thought about it."

once again i try to work from home but fail. i do a couple of small jobs, clear a few emails, eat a couple of breakfasts, and then i see that he's online. brazos delgados. i say hello.

more than two hours later i'm saying that i should go. i'll return to my breakfast and my feeble attempts to work. he will return to his x-box race.

for the first time we heard each others voices and we marveled at the strangeness. of course we sound different. he has a drawl, rounded vowels, and a higher pitch than i imagined. he sounds warm. at times he's sarcastic. he's still everything i want.

it rains all day, and all my plans to leave the house don't eventuate. the cat is restless and so am i.

tonight i finish dostoyevsky's notes from underground, and wedged into my thoughts is this sentence: "Without power and tyranny over somebody I can't live".

Sunday, May 29, 2011

brazos delgados

scenes from a weekend.

friday night: i'm at a pub for D's birthday. i went alone. at one point D (somewhat drunk) says 'come and meet my sister' while attempting to take my hand. my fingers stiffen and do not accept his hand. during the evening his friends suss me out and ask me to define my relationship with D. i can't tell them that we fucked a few times and then he went cold on me, yet he sometimes flirts with me and makes me want to kiss him.

saturday morning: i'm sitting outside, amongst plants, speaking to J on the phone. the cat sits on me and i tell J that this is unusual. he says she often sat on him. i suggest that she feels his presence and is attempting to get close. i stroke her fur while we talk about ways that our paths might cross.

saturday afternoon: upstairs at the café he waves his arms around. two skinny men who speak a similar language. we talk academia, teaching, our politics and struggles. it's a nice moment in my day. we are knitting a bond with our words and gestures. we part on glebe point road, my hands in pockets.

saturday early evening: we meet at zanzibar, but i'm not sure why he suggested here. C is visiting from melbourne. i want to hug and kiss hello, but there's too many straight men watching too much football on the tv. we move to another table and here we embrace. we talk about men. in discussing my pseudo boyfriend i ask for advice.

saturday night: my pseudo bf meets us at the pub and he's awkward. we're awkward. we leave C and make our way to his friend's party. we eat pies, we buy wine in erskinville, we piss through the wire fence by the train line. the party is small and i'm surprised to know someone - a young man whom i spent most of the night with, chatting about pop music. on the way home, pseudo bf says he was a bit jealous. i'm drunk and so is he. it's cold but i don't feel it. we hold hands but i don't feel it. he says he's not sure how much i like him. i can't remember my response. perhaps i just closed my eyes and dreamed of reno, nevada.

friday night, saturday, and sunday: i chat to a young man from reno (via mexico). we talk about his skinny arms. he wants to fix them at the gym, but i like his arms. i also like his humour, which is like mine. we give ourselves to one another in written words. we pour each other into gaps that we carve into our lives. he tells me about the empty space in his bed where i'm welcome to sleep. words flow, and i want him more and more. he's too young, too far away, and too beautiful, but i can't stop wanting him.

in today's spanish lesson he teaches me 'pon tus brazos delgados alrededor de mí'.

Monday, May 9, 2011

lost words

i've been quiet. i'm trying to break the flow of a self-focused contemplation that is at the core of this blog. i'm seeking to move away from self. i can't divorce my self from my words, but i can try to project my contemplations further than me. solipsism is rampant. i wonder if an alternative approach is possible.

or maybe i'm just bored with my self to the point that i seek drama elsewhere.

i'm not going to write about my day, my men, or the conversations that i make, because these don't matter today.

i've developed an addiction for reading and watching news footage from the "The Arab Spring", and in particular, the conflict in Syria.

facebook is different now. Each morning I find dozens of videos taken from handheld cameras in unknown Syrian cities; of protests, or buses passing below someone's window, or close-up footage of men bleeding and dying. these videos are not yet edited or spliced into 'news footage'. they're in arabic so i can't understand the context or the voices speaking. but i can understand screams, songs, chanting. i can hear tones of anger or hope.

this morning there was a man with blood on his chest and face, and other men screaming, holding him, praying for him. another person films him, with a shaky camera hovering above, flinching and stumbling around the scene of blood and screams, inserting another body (my body) into that space. soon, the camera is spinning around the scene, capturing every direction and all shapes and colours, and i grow dizzy. i'm unable to comprehend what i see. but i hear the cries, and i sense that my incomprehension is shared among those at the scene. i don't know what's happening, and nor do they. how can this be comprehensible?

i fall into this footage and i'm dizzy from the action that whirls around me. some decades ago, i could not be part of this dazed experience of war and loss. this reminds me that yes, this is painful and immense, and yes, this is happening. and perhaps the clean edit of a news story, or a feature film depiction, is part of the problem in how we come to narrativise war and loss, because these are constructions that do not resemble the moments found here. why should we make sense of these things? why feel like we can understand what's happening? what happens if we agree that we cannot?