fallen verses

(This post has nothing really to do with anything. If I had the least sense of decorum or shame, it would be password protected. For fans of schadenfreude, you can be glad that I have neither of those things. I anticipate this coming back to punch me in the future)

NaNoWriMo starts in a little over an hour. I have only the vaguest idea what I’m going to write about. This doesn’t worry me as much as it should. Rambling for a hundred, hundred-fifty pages should be no big deal. Right…

However, that is only tangentially related to this post.

Several fine bloggers rate confession as an integral part of their creative process. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’ve never really tried “confession.” However, I don’t want to spend NaNoWriMo writing about me, and that’s what I mostly think about (narcissism? obsession? dunno).

Maybe confession can be cathartic. I hope so. I hope that writing about what I’m thinking about can be the end of all of it. A grand letting it go.

I was on the younger side when my parents separated, reconciled, separated, reconciled, separated and divorced. Honestly, this has never bothered me. But that was a factor in how I felt about marriage. For a very long time I thought it was a waste. It was a religious ceremony I don’t believe in. It’s just tradition; it’ a social construct I had no respect for, blah blah etc.

Even when I met Andrea, my view on marriage didn’t change. Dating Andrea was wonderful. Living with her was… complicated. Sometimes, it was better than I imagined life could be. Sometimes it was frustrating. It was sharing a life with someone: messy.

She was, is, the first person I’ve loved more than just superficially. I think the concept of ai is the closest way to describe something that is rather difficult to pin down and is, to some extent, inexpressible. One day I was rather startled to find that I wanted to marry her. It made sense from the legal standpoint. Socially it was the only way to give greater recognition to our relationship. But more than that, I wanted her to be more than my girlfriend. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her and for that to be the end of the discussion. So we got married.

It didn’t last long after that. We had been together for six years, living together for most of it, and less than a year after taking vows that included the word forever, she left.

I wish that I could paint a better picture, but the failures of communication that I believe were a large part of of relationship ending did not go away with her leaving and I never got much of an explanation. This was not so pleasant an event from my perspective. Here was a person that was the reason I overturned so many views on life, the reason for so many choices I made (things that could be called sacrifices if I had not simply been choosing the more important outcome), as clichéd and pathetic as it is, she was the light of my world. With Andrea gone, it felt like nothing could ever be right.

I’ve suffered from had insomnia for as long as I can remember. Strangely, sleeping in a bed where I was able to keep the sheets all night and not be scrunched up the edge made sleeping worse and even more tenuous. (And I still can’t sleep) There was one day I didn’t want to survive to the end of it. I realized that was silly. Later I came to realize that hope is a cruel bitch.

I know, I know, that there isn’t anything I could have done. Not by the time there was a problem. Our ways of relating were just different enough to make it need work from both sides and, really, neither one of us knew it. Until she did, I guess, at the end. I can’t even fault her decision. Ethically, the greatest responsibility I believe we have in terms of happiness is for ourselves. I want her to be happy and have the life she wants. I just think it really sucks that it excluded me.

The movie Swingers has a short scene

How did you get over it?
Every day you wake up and it hurts a little bit less. And then one day, you wake up and it doesn’ t hurt anymore. And then you realize you miss the pain.
You miss the pain?
Yeah. For the same reason you miss her—because you lived with it for so long.

Except I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t feel it’s true. I don’t think it’s true. It would be nice…. I think the past haunts us like something unburied. We can, however, use the good things in our lives as a covering, as dirt, grasses, flowers, maybe even castles, to cover them up. The pain is always there, but we can put it in a controlled and forgettable spot unless we need it. Sad trick to that is it requires sufficient “good” to obscure the bad.

So now I find myself in my late twenties, the jeering, mocking specter of happiness haunting every memory. I’ve always had a small social group and that has scattered over the years. Socially, politically, artistically, etc. I do not at all fit in with the area I live in, but I have something of a life here. Not a great one, but enough that giving it up is a fairly high cost that would require a high benefit to outweigh.

Balanced against that is my complete lack of understanding about what I should do. I have a job that could be a career if I wanted it to be (though I do not). My interests are so varied and so variable that no goal worth pursuing remains a goal for long. I try so hard to live a rational life and I cannot find the answers in all of this. We all have our own blind spots.

Every job interview I’ve had has asked that ridiculous question: where do you see yourself in five years. I’ve always made something up. What it so clear, is that every answer I’ve ever given, has been completely wrong. Let me pretend for a moment, that I am being asked that question.

In five years, I see myself where I am now, but mid-30s. Just older. And I hope—this time, I’m wrong too.

(And NaNoWriMo starts in but a few moments. I just need this blog post to hold these thoughts, these obsessions, these feelings, for thirty days. Forever would be okay, but I only need thirty days…)

I’ve been writing at fallen verses for a while now. I don’t plan to stop so you can stop worrying / start worrying depending on your perspective.

However, there are some things I don’t blog about, because I kinda figure they’re separate from what fallen verses is about. Decided I wanted to. If anyone cares, that’ll be ineffably tom (ineffably.net).

Really, seriously, I mean it. It’s just, well, sometimes you meet someone and it feels great and then in a couple of weeks you realize, yeah, this just isn’t my thing.

Well, maybe other people think that, I have trouble at the “meet someone” point. But this is going increasingly irrelevant.

Fallen Verses has yet another theme. Usual rules apply. Let me know if you have any problems or comments.

Presented as an unordered list. Containing nothing of consequence.*

• Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. (I wish we used rhetorical marks. And while we’re at it: tree, forest, sound? Is the sound the vibration of air or the perception of it? I know, the point of koan is not to answer them, as such.) It depends on the person. While I suspect most people who love or have loved would say it is the most glorious thing, it’s really the capacity to handle the loss that is the question. Some people don’t do loss well.
• Feeling is like exposing a piece of photographic paper, or a digital sensor (but like all symbolic expression, only to a point). If you want to capture the really good, you won’t be able to discern much of the bad. On the other end, to define the bad means you can’t see the good.
• Unlike photographic stops, I think there is no need for more than five “levels” of, I guess, happiness: really, somewhat, not, un and very un. People can live in two neighboring, and experience a third from time to time. Trying to live in more than that is like trying to see in an all black room when the lights have been turned out. Can’t do it. (Or the other way, like walking out of a movie theater into a sunny afternoon.)
• Trying to write about spooky poetry while sitting in soft lighting, listening to Journey, and drinking wine produces cognitive dissonance.
• Aside from holding contradictory ideas, the previous should be enjoyable. It isn’t. I wonder if I can enjoy anything.
• Sometimes, thought move so quickly and so unpredictably, that it’s like bad carnival ride in my head.

*Isn’t it great that we have the capacity to be inconsequential at times? And have a public forum to do it? The troubling thing: our public figures are inconsequential most of the time, and they get to define the fora for everyone.

…is that you get “rewarded” for it with more things to do. So, doing a good job leads to having to do more job. How in the world is this considered a good thing?! Is business completely unaware of punishment by contingent stimulation (i.e. positive punishment)? Must remember: you don’t need to be good, just good enough to not get fired.

This isn’t the first time I’ve used wordle on fallenverses, but this is the first time I’m posting it. For a theoretically poetry-themed site, I don’t think these are the words I want to see. I will work on that.

On an unrelated note: my analytic tools are showing no traffic since I’ve added the new theme and I’m worried that something got screwed up. I can see everything, but no traffic even for the quotes that usually get a lot of traffic. Perhaps if you are reading this you can either click-through from your feed-reader or leave a comment so I at least know other people can see this? Pretty please?

Okay. Last theme was seriously pissing me off in IE7 and since half my readers seem to use IE (courtesy of Woopra analytics), having things not work right in IE was a problem, which, unfortunately, I couldn’t fix. Add to that Christine’s very valid point about background color and reading… well, I scrapped the last theme. got a new one. I think it works. Now I just need to put a header image. Usual caveats apply: let me know if anything is broken and if you care to share your thoughts I always listen. Might not do anything, but I listen.

Making some changes to the theme, namely, scrapping the old, pink one, and putting in a new, grey one. But things are going to be a little broken while I recode some of it. And I’m at work, so it may be sporadically addressed.

UPDATE: I think I’m basically done, and everything should work. The “need to do” list includes putting up a better header image (well, putting up a header image) but to do that I need to install photoshop. If anyone encounters any problems, let me know tom (at) fallenverses (dot) org or leave a comment. You can also leave a comment to just say the new look is ugly and you don’t like it, if that’s how you really feel.

UPDATE2: Still no header image, but that is next on the list. Being mindful of Christine’s comment, I tried out a “white” look and I don’t care for it. However, I did write up a second version of the stylesheet with a white look. Firfox users can go to View -> Page Style -> white if they would prefer to use it. Internet Explorer users should download Firefox appear to be unable to switch rendered stylesheets. Or, if IE can, I have no idea how. I’ll look into a method on the page to switch views, but that won’t be right away.

I adjusted the colors in the normal style to have greater contrast between the text and the background- previously the text was only about 80% white, so that may help in reading as well. As far as black being scary… well, ’tis the season, I guess.

UPDATE3: Everything seems to be completely broken in IE7. le sigh.

UPDATE4: Less broken in IE7. everything loads and all that, but some of the margins are not being respected. On single-post pages, the previous and next post linsk should be above the title of the post by a fair bit and IE7 doesn’t like that idea. On pages with multiple posts, there should be more psace between posts than IE7 is displaying. IE7 knows web design better than anyone and thinks standards are for the weak. I hate IE7. And I don’t know how to fix this.

I’d wager that as long as there has been lyrics, there have been people misunderstanding them. “Excuse me while I kiss this guy,” right?

Usually, I don’t misunderstand lyrics. Sometimes I may not know what the hell they’re saying, but getting it wrong… well that’s rare.

I picked up Rock Band 2 over the weekend and the song “Aqualung” by Jethro Tull is one of the tracks in the game. The line in the song is: “Sitting on a park bench / eyeing little girls with bad intent.” I thought the line went: “Sitting on a park bench / five little girls bad intent.”

The first one makes more sense and is, you know, right, but the second one seems cooler. It’s not a song about a creepy old guy, but there are wicked children!. Maybe it’s just me, but that seems like a more interesting story.

I just spent the last couple of hours re-reading every poem I’ve posted here.

(point at self) Masochist.

For almost a year and a half of creative efforts, it’s an expected mix of some stuff that’s not bad, and some that’s pretty terrible. Considering these are not really edited or revised, for the most part, and are raw and fresh when hung on the meathooks, I think that’s okay.

The better ones, seems to me, tend to be the ones that really make no sense. Because they do make sense, but in a way that doesn’t make sense. They don’t explain, they just are. Like life.

In a sestina I wrote a while back, I wrote these lines:

An elegant script,
serifs feel personal,
classic choice
and no burden
for printing.

What The Hell? “serifs feel personal?” Where in the world did that come from… It almost cannot possibly be something I came up with: my knowledge of the psychological effect of typography is rather lacking.

Oh well. Some time in the future I bet I’ll read this post and think to myself: “man, I was a raving lunatic!”