Alarm

Thursday 2/6/25

The fire alarm went off in the building last night. I was lying in the darkness thinking through a new story. Had to get up and leave. Fire engines came. Sat in an empty Starbucks where I did nothing save sort of stare off into the distance that wasn't there. This is a very hard time. Things get harder, darker. I looked back up the street and saw that the engines were gone and I went back after a few more minutes.

Finished one of these film pieces for Valentine's Day. What will be the longest of the lot. Came in at 2900 words. I'll be expanding the prose off concept soon to include works of nonfiction. This is a bit more from it for now, though:

Then there is the old bugaboo of unrequited love of which the poets speak. William Butler Yeats and his Maud Gonne weren’t meant to be—or maybe one should say, never were, exculpating the fates—and so it went with the beast and his beauty in one of our most poetic works of terror cinema, 1933’s King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and screamed, let us say, by Fay Wray, the definitive horror queen in this arena.

We read fairy tales as children—which the wisest adults among us revisit from time to time—and we learn of love in a goodly number of them. That is, we think we do. We are exposed to the concept. King Kong is akin to a fairy tale for anyone first getting into movies. You watch it early—like The Wizard of Oz—and—again, if you’re wise—you watch it often enough. Each time that you do, the experience changes. We see love and love that could never be, through changing eyes. The same as we look back on that period in our lives when we thought we could care about nothing more than a given person. We’re like Kong atop the Empire State Building, with a clear view in all directions. Ah, but those planes. Those thoughts. Those realizations. They won’t leave us alone for a single second. May we not end up like Kong, though, falling, and falling, and falling until we hit the ground below, but instead climb down at our own pace, and then make the best determination about what to do next, and try again.

Instagram makes it difficult--if not impossible--to deactivate your account. There's nothing I wish to see there. What I share on my page usually pertains to art. One would find many films, books, records, that they likely don't know about, or are especially familiar with, to check out. But no one does. No one is interested in anything interesting. No one sees it. There are also photos from the various places I go, the things I do, and stairs, as well cards and the likes that I sent my nieces and nephew. Nothing is vapid and everything is substantive in its way. That's not what anyone wants to see. People don't want anything, save that which is lesser, easier, without substance and individuality.

I don't want to play this game, and no one has anything for me, either. I don't want recommendations to check out of people I used to know, who tend to be broken, bad people, which is why I don't know them any longer. But try as I did to follow the instructions provided from a Google search--after I couldn't figure it out, as I had in the past, from Instagram itself--I couldn't manage to deactivate the account. I did another search, "Why is it so hard to deactivate Instagram," and there were many people with the same problem. Someone provided a direct link, but Instagram thwarts these kinds of things, and what had worked before in clicking this link doesn't work now. You can't deactivate. I find these things alarming. And telling. Tech-rape. Technology's constant, non-consensual intrusion. Leave me be. Let me go. You can't even work the washer and drier in the basement of my building without an app.

There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, has gotten a lot of the book-related attention in my thoughts of late. It's been the book I've been looking to the most. I'm open to a lot at this stage. All that is certain--set in beautiful stone--is that the first three stories are "Fitty," "Dot," "Dead Thomas," in that order, and the last two are "Thank You, Human," and "Girls of the Nimbus," not necessarily in that order. I'll be getting back to the middle portion of the book as it has stood, going into those stories, making changes in them, and I'm open to whatever works best, whether that means out something comes and ends up somewhere else, and in terms of what becomes a part of the book. This is a special work, and I feel duty-bound to get it right.

I must admit that things with my family this week--some of which I touched on here, others which I did not, pertaining to that theme of disloyalty and betrayal--moved me closer to drinking than anything in years. That, and the toll of all of this. Living like this. It's not so much a drink thing as a "Let go of the rope, this can be over" thing. I feel like I must protect myself, and that is not how one wishes to feel about family and the few people one does know, when one knows as few people as I do.

I am also exhausted from being made the villain for people's shortcomings. I do not do anything to anyone. I don't hurt people. I seek to help. I give of myself. I work. I work so hard. I try to keep going. I go up and down an obelisk. I work more. I work constantly. I go to sleep. I arise earlier than a farmer. I do it all again.

I mention this in part because someone told me--they were blaming me--that someone else didn't ask about me. "They don't even ask about you" and "They didn't ask about you the whole time." This is someone I haven't done anything to, whom I ask after, just of out politeness, not interest. But I play some of those little social games, and I play them well, actually. This person thought I didn't make anything up, because that would be too hard. I mean...I can hardly conceive of a more asinine thing to think, let alone attribute to me.

This person has to be with someone. They're like that. And that person they're with is always unintelligent. I became Facebook friends with one of the people they've been with, because that's how that works, which is another reason why I'm not aggrieved to have had my Facebook accounts--personal and author page--shuttered, again, sans consent.

Well, this person they were with wouldn't, of course, hit the like button for anything of mine, but one day she decided to start lecturing me about how there was no excuse for me not to find delight in the wonders of food. Seriously. What the hell goes through people's heads and makes them think, "This is the thing, of all the things, for me to do"?

I have made dietary choices and am disciplined in those choices because of my health--specifically, my heart. I am not a foodie. I don't care to be. I am here to do what I am trying to do. I was not rude about this, but I wasn't going to play that game. My point is, this is typical. I don't do things like this. You won't find me jumping into your day and lecturing you out of the blue in public.

So on a recent visit to this person's home--the person now with the foodie person--I was informed by the person closer to me that this person we have in common didn't say my name once and then my ex-wife was brought up in the next breath to me by the person closer to me. For some ungodly reason. A shot. That's not what I want to be dealing with as I try to deal with all else. And of course I'm thinking, "I ask about this person we have in common, I play along, and I'm the bad guy because that person didn't bring me up and that speaks to what, how bad I am? I'm the asshole here?"

People also sense that if they're upset about something having nothing to do with me, they can take it out on me, because I am strong and I am kind. And it's also how it goes--throw it all against this guy, he's the guy for that, when you're feeling low or you want to try and hurt someone other than yourself. Eh, he'll be fine. That's second nature for people when it comes to me. I don't act out, I don't punish, I don't do what others would do; those others would have an immediate family, and they'd sever the relationship, hunker down on their island with the immediate family (spouse, kids). I'm not saying I would do that. But I do also have no one right now. And people take horrible advantage of that.

It is exponentially, if not infinitely easier, to be stupid in this world.

I'm having a conversation the other day with someone who is about as smart as anyone one realistically encounters, which means nothing and is in actuality very depressing, and I said something about syntax, and went on a bit, and finally I said, "You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?" They said no. "What did that mean?" I asked. "Do you not know the word 'syntax'?" They said no.

They didn't. Where do I go from there? I have to do definitions? Where does that stop? Am I supposed to do them with every sentence? What do people know anymore? What can they even know?

It's like people are only able to understand the most stupid things. And you have to listen to these remarks you've heard a million times, that you could hear from billions of other people, and you don't care, save that you're being nice and it matters, you figure, to this person, so you're motivated by wanting to be good to them, and patient with them, and they're repeating things they've told you so many times before, probably told you yesterday.

And I think, I just don't belong anywhere in this world. There is nothing for me, no one for me. I cannot stand all of the stupidity; stupidity without end.

I also don't want to be thinking about my ex-wife. I don't want to think how this was the only person I've been involved with romantically for whom I felt as I did. There's no getting over what was done and how it was done. That still, in all of these years, has not lost its mind-fuck horror quality. I don't want to be thinking to other times before that, and having to attempt to reconcile someone's words, their looks, with what they were capable of doing, because there is no way to reconcile those things.

If I'm going to think about those things, so be it. But no one should be coming along and introducing this subject into my life, especially now, when I'm fighting so hard to just remain alive and keep going, because there is nothing at the end of any of my days; there is no reward, nothing coming back my way. I'm just giving and making and trying and fighting and not sleeping and for what? How do you keep doing that? Alone. Can you imagine how hard that is? I can't have people technically on my side making it harder.

Worked more on a story called "Still Good." The story is told by a guy--or that's what we think--who is talking about a kind of web subscription he signed up for with certain expectations. He doesn't say specifically, but we know the kind of page he's talking about. And instead of seeing what he expected to see from the woman providing the content, there were all of these videos of her fully clothed in her car, in some sort of remote parking lot. A parking lot by a forest instead of at the mall with the Target.

She sits in her car in these videos and dishes out a familiar, hackneyed form of life advice. Around the same time every day. But there's more happening here than just that; the guy keeps watching, and a story about this woman begins to emerge. There are holes in that story as such, but we can fill in some gaps. Then in one of the videos, the man who is watching sees this other man come up from behind the woman's car, where she's doing her monologue. This man isn't someone who's with her, and he doesn't know her, know her, if you will, but knows of her, at the very least, and a situation. Again, very different. You don't see stories like this. So that needs to be finished. I don't know what I'm going to do with it when it is done. And it's not like I can do anything with it right now anyway. It'll just sit here until it has somewhere to go.

Need to crank some film pieces, a flurry of music pieces, and a couple op-eds.