Tag Archives: loves it

Man on Extremely Small Island

17 Dec

Well, this is a special day.  Jason Koo’s first book, which won the 2008 De Novo Prize, came out this week and you can buy it through Amazon.

Since he has a reputation for being something of a rockstar at his readings, my guess is that this book is going to do pretty well in both popular and critical regard.  It’s pretty exciting to hold a bound collection of his poems in your hand, and the Trent-Thibodeux-designed cover is just absolutely sick.

This book really has everything in it.  No, I mean literally:  there’s a hippo, there’s baseball, there’s limousines, there’s baking cookies, there’s sex, there’s text messaging, there are gorgeous lines about “the trees / tossing their heads in the wind like conductors” and “take on the pain of sunlight in your eyes”, there’s highly skilled use of profanity, and everything else.

I’m not alone when I say that this is the poetry you’ve been waiting for.

How I Really Feel

22 Mar

Every person’s life is  animated by one of two desires.  We either live to avoid discomfort, or we live to have as much intercourse with the world as possible.

By intercourse, I don’t mean merely sexual intercourse.  I mean a “give and take” with life:  taking in all the myriad things the world offers, and as a result having something meaningful and unique to give back with confidence.  This kind of intercourse almost always involves stepping out of your hiding places.  It’s often emotionally raw and you feel awkward doing it at first.  The reward for doing this, though, is that you feel new pleasures and understandings inthings that you didn’t even know you lacked before.  These pleasures and understandings are impossible without walking through that discomfort.

I suspect that everybody’s life, at times, traffics in both realms:  avoiding discomfort and having as much intercourse as possible.  Clearly, everyone is capable of both.  But make no mistake:  when you look at the lives of others, and when you look at the results of your own life, it’s not difficult to tell which of these desires animates your daily existence.

It’s really that simple.  The two are, over any length of time, absolutely, unconditionally, mutually exclusive.

Which desire animates you?  Which one, when you look back at your life so far, has produced your favorite moments — the give & take or the drive to remain comfortable?  Which, ultimately, has produced deeper comfort in your life?

When your sleepy eyes open tomorrow morning and no one else can hear, ask yourself how you really feel.

We Bonded Over Broken Bones

27 Jan

The concept of this song by Owen is simple enough:  a guy and a girl, strangers, sharing a hospital room for broken bones, start to fall in love.   What the song means, though, and how it’s really helped me to understand my relationships, is after the “keep reading” link below.

Enjoy the song first — it’s short, and light, beautiful, and acoustic.  The lyrics are right below the video.

We bonded over broken bones.
Who’s broke skin, who’s fractured in two places, and whose hurt the most.

We bonded over broken bones.
How many Vicodin we took before bed, how many we sold
to the band sleeping on our floor;
Week one of a two week tour.
God knows, they’ll need it more than us.

You and me; an x-ray machine.
I swear that day you saw straight through me.

We’re two bags of bones, broken and talking
of people we both know in common.
Amongst other things that I shouldn’t mention.

You and me: a hospital love scene.
If only these broken bodies were ours forever.

For the relationship of this song to, well, my relationships, click the “keep reading”.

(more…)

This Changed Everything

12 Jan

So the following from Alice Miller is what started the ground-shaking revolution a few weeks ago:

Quite often I have been faced with people who were praised and admired for their talents and their achievements.  They do well in everything they undertake; they are admired and envied; they are successful whenever they care to be — but behind all this lurks depression, and a sense that their life has no meaning.  These dark feelings will come to the fore as soon as the drug of grandiosity fails, as soon as they are not on top, not definitely the superstar, or whenever they suddenly get the feeling they have failed to live up to some standard.  What are the reasons for these disturbances in these competent, accomplished people? Typically, this child had an amazing ability to perceive and respond unconsciously to this need of his parents to take on the role that had been unconsciously assigned to him by them.

This accomodation to parental needs often leads to the “as-if” personality.  The person develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected of him and fuses so completely with what he reveals that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to him behind this false self.

As an adult, this “grandiose” person is admired everywhere and needs this admiration; indeed, he cannot live without it.  He must excel brilliantly in everything he undertakes, which he is surely capable of doing (otherwise he just does not attempt it).  He, too, admires himself, for his qualities and success and achievements.  Beware if one of these fails him, for then the catastrophe of a severe depression is imminent.

Click on the  “Keep Reading” link, and after the jump she further dresses me down and talks about my choice of marriage partner, my contempt for others, my struggle for authenticity, and how all this craziness gets resolved.

(more…)

2008: The Year in Review

2 Jan

As usual, this was quite a year.

365 days ago, I was living with spartan furniture in a different city, deeply in love and joined in a life with a woman I no longer even speak to.  It was before Bon Iver, before The American Dollar, before my last birthday night, before the old apartment got new furniture, before Terry Richardson, before The Wire, before Facebook, before David Foster Wallace, before Gossip Girl, before AG, before the real estate project, before the apothecary, before Taleb, before creating the Legacy Strategy movement, before starting to make it work, before EB White, before the trips to Jersey City, before de Botton, before the summer, before love walked away with little explanation, before the aftermath, before the healing, before the new spots, before the new people, before the midnight swims and the new apartment, before Bammers and a whole new generation of change, before the new clothes, before the new deals, before the  marriage proposal videos, before feeling the whole world rush through me again, before the new friends, and — most of all  — before being completely changed by Alice Miller’s work on the origins of grandiosity & depression in the lives of adults.

The great lesson is that I have no idea — none whatsoever — what life will look like in a year.

And there’s something beautiful about that.

We.  Shall.  See.

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