emmkeh

just birdly scratches in the dirt

[marmarlad]

#nasturtiumcanyon #nasturtiums #theseathesea #lightflare #sunset #ORANGE #alotofrabbitbuttsareinthere

[marmarlad]

Sneaky feelings — am I allowed to write this??? Heheh I’ll just write it and no one will ever know

#whyimnotpublished

[marmarlad]

I don’t really know how to use my voice in connection anymore. With two exceptions who’ve known me forever, the more I love someone’s brain and soul the more I struggle to communicate with them. I realized this morning while trying to tell someone I haven’t texted back in months how brilliant they are: I just don’t think my words are good enough. Why? WHY? I teach words and I peddle my words to some minor success, so why do I feel like every text message I try to write is mannered and hollow and why does it seem like the actual things I feel have never been farther from my sentences?

I would rather hear from the people I love than not; I would rather get a string of emoji than nothing at all; I’ve never read a text and thought “that’s bad writing” or “oh guess this friend isn’t so great after all.” None of the people I care about would be so ungenerous either, or I wouldn’t care as hard for them.

Writer’s block for the heart — how do I crack the calcified plasticated barrier how how how how how

[marmarlad]

Every time I pick up my phone recently I think of my barber telling me they’ve been monitoring their three year old’s mood after screen time — and the kid is the most dissociated and grouchy after watching their favorite show.

It sounds about right that this thing I think gives me a break or is a “fun” moment just makes me crankier.

[marmarlad]

The kind of fragile I’m feeling is like old gum that was stretched out and stuck on the back of a bus seat and has dried out completely. I used to be flexible and in my worst form gooey. Now I’m brittle. If you flicked me with a finger I would break apart into dry unnaturally colored flecks and you would be grossed out.

[marmarlad]

It feels right that my egg this morning was wrinkled.

[marmarlad]

Things I wonder about:

Why I always only eat 3/4 of a banana

Why an art school bothers to paint over bathroom graffiti

Attraction

Death

The inner life of Anne Carson

Why I tweeze my chin hairs when I wish I could grow a mustache

Whether I’m gullible, in the grand scheme of people

The impossibility of understanding the movement of time

[marmarlad]

My grandfather died a week ago today. He loved taking pictures of clouds. In 2015, when my grandmother died and we moved my grandfather to assisted living, my mom and my aunt cleaned out his house in Phoenix and found boxes and boxes of cloud photos.

I’ve been taking a cloud photo every day since he died. But this morning there are no clouds. The heavens are just blue, blue, blue.

My grandpa wanted to be a pilot when he was young, like his brother the favorite. He never had a chance because he shot a bottle rocket into his eye when he was seventeen, and people in Crab Orchard, Tennessee didn’t trust doctors so he didn’t go to one. He lost sight in the eye, which meant he’d never be a pilot or a surgeon. His right eye became milky cumulonimbus over clear sky.

Poor Southern farm boy Starling Kessler went on to get a PhD in chemistry and travel the world as an employee of Unocal. He married my grandmother, who was one of the great loves of my life. He didn’t really know how to love her, but on her deathbed she forgave him.

“It must be terrible to be locked in love like that.”

I’ll never forget her saying that as she watched him shamble out of the room. I hope wherever S Kess is, he’s among so many clouds that he at last feels free to express his love.

[marmarlad]

[marmarlad]

[marmarlad]

When I was a child, I thought you could decide not to die. This might say more about what a privileged kid I was than anything, but it also reflects the foolish language we use around serious illness: he’s a fighter! she beat cancer! they’re holding on!

In my five or six year old mind, this translated to the idea that if you simply refused to relinquish your consciousness, if you only clung to your bodily shell hard enough, you wouldn’t die. It was a test of wills between you and death.

I conceded that instant death didn’t leave time for willpower, so if a building fell on top of you or the guillotine was at work, the decision was moot.

But otherwise — yeah. I really believed my family and I would only die if we gave in. I was totally ignorant of how an entire body and all its organs can shut down. I’m very not ignorant of that now.

I’m horrified at my younger self for imagining that people who died must have let it happen. And yet, what a world child me dreamed of, where simply wanting to live could be enough.

[oo111111]

[marmarlad]

Found this in an older notebook and it is correct

[marmarlad]

I should say no to

What’s gonna happen to

Being left

To

Creature thinking

[marmarlad]

(This won’t be interesting to anyone but me)

I have an accidental deep love for Damian Lillard, the star of the Portland Trail Blazers. Never lived in Portland and I got plenty to root for in the Sixers and the Warriors but — when we moved to the west coast, we started watching western conference basketball and happened to catch the Blazers a lot.

I could talk for a long time about why I love Dame, including his ridiculous and amazing wedding outfit when he married his COLLEGE SWEETHEART, but the thing that really cemented it for me was this interview he gave after a game in early 2021. He's unusually talkative in it and even though he's speaking about ball, everything he says inspired the shit out of me & my creative practice:

"I think it's just putting a lot of time into it. [...] You do it with focus, you do it while you holding yourself to a certain standard ... when you tired and probably don't wanna do it."

"...I take a step forward and then another step forward to try to impose myself, instead of playing it safe and wondering what could go wrong. ...If it goes wrong, I'm willing to take that blame. I'm willing to shoulder whatever somebody gotta say about it."

"I had to do my work behind the scenes. [...] I know what it's like to be unknown and not have the lights on you and wanna be seen [...] I don't forget the thing that makes [my fame] possible which is the work, the discipline, the humility, the compassion, you know, all of those things that I know I bring as a person. I know that's a part of why I've been able to get a lot of the things I've gotten. [...] So I've gotten stronger in those things, I've gotten more disciplined, I work harder, I work smarter, you know, I love on my people harder."

But the real reason for this post is the fact that today is the NBA trade deadline. Last night, minutes before a game, the Blazers found out their teammate Josh Hart had been traded. Someone got a picture of Dame reacting to the news and I've never seen him look so surprised, so shook, so vulnerable. I dunno y'all. It's extremely moving for me to see this from a dude who is my epitome of professional poise and badassery.

[marmarlad]

[marmarlad]

I don’t think this is good for me.

I think in attempting to be less performative via public personal writing I’m actually becoming more performative in my evocation of self. Uh — curation of self? Both.

If you aren’t one of five people, it’s pretty hard to bloody my feelings about my fiction. Like maybe if you said you’d rather read a turd smeared on a fascist newspaper then yeah. (Please don’t say that.) Generally though my crooked love for my process in writing fiction is deep enough that I’m not particularly raw about what that process makes. I’m raw about the things my work touches on I suppose, but I’m always a puffy pink baby with an abraded ass about those.

So the probably obvious turn is: unlike my fiction, public life writing is a font of nerves and resentment for me! In putting it out there I feel like I’m demanding a response, which feels shitty, and then when a response (I couldn’t even describe what response I’m looking for) never comes, I feel spreading-bruise resentful. Of who? The only definite answer is myself.

A confusion is: I love life writing to only myself. I depend on it to stay functional and regulated. I have four different journaling practices — like they all get their own notebook or app — AND a physical planner in which I occasionally leave rude and affectionate notes to Wednesday’s or Saturday’s or whatever’s future me.

What if I were to just take old writing I never intended to share and postpublish that, instead of writing new stuff for this space? Would my amorphous craving for attention show up then? I don’t have the bad feelings as much with the redacted morning pages thing so maybe —

but then what does it mean if I can’t write from myself for an audience? If I am commandeering my private texts — writing of a beloved and irritating past self — for current public consumption, how will that change my interior practice moving forward?

I’m afraid of the dark.

That is currently true. Yesterday it was and tomorrow it will be quite false.