Tomorrow's the last day of the NBA season, and the league, in its quest to become Futbol, has scheduled all 30 teams, with games at 12 and 2:30 CT. There's a three-way tie for first in the West, a three-way tie for fifth in the East (which matters a lot for playoff seeding and avoiding a play-in tournament) and I'm going to go League Pass bananas.
Right now I'm writing in a $13 Midori pocket notebook I picked from from Kinokuniya, a local Japanese bookstore, and using a Rhodia mechanical pencil I dropped more on than I’m willing to admit, since it uses the same lead as any other mechanical pencil with the same words within. I spent $7 with tip on my cold brew, and just got a notification on my modest-sized-but-still-expensive iPhone over a nationwide data networks that the two tacos from Veracruz I ordered have been prepared for me. I’m a goddamn Fancy Prince.
I live it every day
I know I'm digging hard for my daily AA gratitude list, but I'm simultaneously in the best mood, yet distressed about how much of my life is spent coveting, assessing, self-assessing, judging, keeping it to myself.
Like: it’s insane to me how my neural pathways have barely shifted over the past 33 years. If I (50) meet someone who's 48, I think, "They were a sophomore when I was a senior" then grow resentful that they make more money than I do. It makes me think that the human brain was never meant to live more than 50 years, because the narrative seems all wrong.
Like, what's the point in living past growth and into extreme decay? Particularly when "decay" means "Mistaking your deteriorating mind for the deterioration of society, so I better vote in the Republican primary."
Marvin Bell, from “Book of the Dead Man”
So I’m struggling with entitlement. While the U.S. gears up for an absolutely miserable mental-health summer, on account of the Presidential election and all the noise that brings, I keep salving myself with random-ass purchases. I must have 200 blank pocket notebooks that will never be filled by the 100 pens and pencils I’ll never write with. I can donate the paper, but school supply donation centers are more interested in crayons than titanium refillable EDC gel pens.
I wrote a book of poems inspired by Bell’s Books of the Dead Man (there are three), focused on The Artist, modeled after my painter ex. I always wanted to be a painter because you get to buy so much stuff.
Bianca Stone, from “The Möbius Strop Club of Grief”
The Artist, who had the most saturated red hair, was pragmatic and lacked the pretensions you’d expect from an abstract expressionist. My favorite works of hers from our time together were done with pencil and a circle stencil on gesso board. She’d draw ethereal spirals till they resembled nature, be it alive or stone. I remember the scrape of pencil and pile of shavings, and how some of her friends treated her like a mascot - their “artist friend” - while growing annoyed when she couldn’t go out for drinks because she was making art.
Mary Hughes, “Ghost Spiral #2”
I grew up middle class, with a computer programmer father (upper middle class job) with four kids (lots of financial obligations), and one of my greatest wishes is to be free to buy anything I want without worry. Yet everything came easy to me scholastically, so I never learned to work. I still don’t know the value of money.
Michelle Taransky, “Barn Burned, Then”
I make a decent salary in my corporate life, but I have the good sense to hate myself for it. Why am I so corporate when art is so important to me? And if I’m going to be corporate, shouldn’t I have sold out for more? I spend my workdays surrounded by the sort of people who freely trade tax cuts in exchange for holding their noses at the polls, but aren’t I doing exactly the same thing in my career?
I’m reading “My Three Dads” by Jessa Crispin, who writes “The Culture We Deserve”. When the Chicago witch she consults for a love spell asks if she hopes to meet a wealthy man, Crispin writes “I told her that I had yet to meet a rich man I wanted to talk to for longer than ten minutes.” I mentally nodded as I remembered corporate retreats trapped in conversations with executives talking about their new boats and how their older manservants weren’t properly sanitizing their monocles or whatever, then realized Crispin was talking about people like me. Or me specifically.
Jackie Wang, from “The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void”
Anyway, I bought Wang’s book because Elisa Gabbert compared her to James Tate. But, much like alcoholism, I can always find an excuse to buy something.
This poem (and whole book, really) lit me up because it reflects the way my own mind moves. Ellipses, italics, multiple voices, memories that trail off. I’m forever choosing between a rice cooker and a LaserJet printer.
Something nourishing and something I can buy that will make me an Artist.
P.S. While digging for poems today, I found the download code for Trans Am's first record nestled as a bookmark in “Poems of Akhmatova". There's your essay.