Tag Archives: knowing nothing

The Less You Know, The More You Aren’t

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I’ve never understood how people know exactly who they are – not only the presentation of themselves but lying in bed with that awareness. I realize it is mostly a farce created to help us through birth to death, but I remain dumbfounded by their remarkable certainity in all of it.

My heads remains much the same as it was at Mia Frumhartz’s birthday party – I think it was her eighth – at the bowling alley where I decided to help her off with her coat. I didn’t know why I did that, aside from the fact that I like to be in the good graces of the fairer sex. I thought I would begin to know more about who I was as life went on. I was wrong.

My only consistent behavior has been to seek solitutude. The results are pending as is the impetus. In other words, I’m still just a kid trying to get away with stuff. My immediate desire when I have free time is to do things I’m not supposed to – smoke, drink, read trashy books – and get away with that as long as possible.

I do other things too, read stuff like Sartre, re-watch Tarkovsky films and have fine thoughts about important things. And I write too, my latest book focuses on an identity crisis, a person who revels in not only not knowing who he is but condemns those who pretend otherwise. And he blogs about that.

The Thing of Expression

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You go down the pipeline thinking you know something you don’t and it isn’t a bad thing but it’s an obvious thing and that’s still okay but then you remember it really isn’t because that’s sliding to nowhere, not knowing who you are and thinking that’s okay when it isn’t.

Then you’re left asking who are all these people are and how did they get into your living room.

Tarkovsky’s “Nostalgia” Half Asleep

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Why are Andrei Tarkovsky’s films even a thing? They’re a meandering mess with endlessly long shot after long shot, slow tracks in and slow tracks sideways, sophomoric monologues about coping with existence dribbling on. Pretentious artsy crap. But I’m obsessed.

I was over tired when I went to see the recently restored version of Nostalgia. As much as I was enraptured by the opening shot, I was already falling asleep. It seemed a volatile thing because that’s where Tarkovsky lives, on that line between consciousness.

On the verge of madness? Was that it? Or clarity? A distant voice called out. A following tracking shot across a drained pond. I was almost scared. Or maybe I was and couldn’t admit that. I was understanding something, or forgetting what I thought I knew.

I Have An Expiration Date Too

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I’ve been hearing the rabbits screaming at night. Have you been hearing that? I was told that it’s just the dogs killing them.

As soon as the veil goes down, that’s when I thought I would know something. But then it wasn’t that. I was just pretending, and that was it.

I’m here. I think I know that. I mean, I look back and remember most things. But I remember who I thought I would be. And I’m good. Almost.

Who I say I think I am

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I try to think about who I am and what I know, but I don’t know what any of that means. It’s a thing off in the distance, someplace that I thought I might have been, even convinced myself of that, and have now lost.

I know what I want to be. No, that’s a lie too. Even if I said that I knew what I want, or that I thought that I knew that, I wouldn’t. The more I think that I know the who and what, the more I’m further from it because I think that. It’s a façade.

Confidence is the thing, believing in those lies is what makes you that you in you. The deeper you get, the further you are from the same. A gosh-darned paradox!

And so…something else. Drugs and whores! No confusion there. Or all confusion. Signs of it all gone awry. At least it’s not a façade. Or the façade of facades. Good copy anyway.

Writing Process: Knowing Something Clearly

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I feel like I know something now, something with clarity. Or just not so lost. Might have even got somewhere. Probably not. But I feel like that.

I’ve never known who the hell I am, and now I’m thinking that I just might. I am a white male, and an older one at that. But that’s not it. I’m not even an asshole, like so many people have said. I know that’s just them being lost and new.

I have come to somewhere and I know something about that. It’s not much but it feels like it might be something. I just hope that I can sell and then get that Malibu estate, be surrounded by beautiful people and complain about the masses.

And how great it was getting to where I got.

Writing Process: Finding My Self

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Reviewing my notes for the Young Chronicles section of this blog reminds me of how little I had a sense of who I was as a young man. More to the point, it makes me realize how much I remain the same person. My sense of self lost in mist.

I am a writer. I know that. I’ve been writing for 37 years – novel after screenplay after novel – but remain unpublished. I’ve also taught for 22 years and enjoyed that. But I feel more the actor on that stage. I do not belong there, as administrations remind me again and again.

It is not that I need praise for my work. That isn’t it at all. Writing is definitively the most comfortable place in this world, a refuge from the blur and nonsense, where I truly know who I am. But it is fleeting. I come back to here, this blog, and think that maybe I’m not.