Arthur Hovinc's Port Manteau

There’s a humming coming from somewhere in the room. Doesn’t seem like it’s the one lamp on. What could it be?

Sometimes I scroll through my text message logs with individual persons (redundant? seems clear), especially when no new messages come in. Is there a way to link back to old messages and say, “Ha, remember when we said these dumb things?” I suppose a screenshot attached to a new message would work. Would people be interested in that besides me? If the log spans years with few large gaps, you probably have a friendship with someone. Or at least plausible evidence of one. I think these blogs posts are mostly long chat logs with myself.

I haven’t written here in a while, and this was the most likely type of entry to be posted first. I’ve had plenty on my mind to keep me awake, not least of which current events. Some feeling in me feels like it’s waking up (again). It’s shaky and too unclear to name. I’m seeing evidence of it here and there. I wept when driving across a long bridge today, at water with large white and gold (or was it blue and black?) spots on it below tumbling purple clouds. Further weeping at a crashing beach below a yellow ring of sky below those same clouds. My most common exhale lately is a sigh. Puzzles seem fine when there are only a few moving parts, and then you learn the full scope and it’s daunting. Example: making a 10 x 10 x 10 Buckyball cube; mess up the alignment of one row and the whole thing could be ruined! Similar feeling for sorting through and getting rid of my various junk: one box seems to open another, and eventually it’s a good idea to put things away and nothing really happened with the box contents. If only eBay could teleport your items away.

Listening to Courtney Barnett’s The Double LP: A Sea of Split Peas has me wanting to play guitar again. Incidentally, yesterday I found a cassette tape of my recordings that I label “Late Night Radio Hour”, because in between “songs” I pretend to be a radio DJ with a soothing voice. This is normally a secret I save for the third or greater time of meeting someone, so shhhhhhh. I covered Courtney Barnett’s Boxing Day Blues (my favorite song of hers) on that tape, but my guitar Stella is very out of absolute tune (but in relative tune), so I sung, like, three or four half steps down, sheesh.

I want to find more random blog posts of people declaring their favorites of things. I often search for things like “favorite Radiohead Amnesiac song” or “favorite Magic expansion”, but those rarely yield anything. Often I get forums, which I find noisy and unhelpful. I really want to see people with enough courage to just lay down their favorites publicly, and not give a damn about what a “poll” or “top ten list” or “forum discussion” says. I’ll answer my own questions for other searchers with the same questions above: 1) Like Spinning Plates, especially the live version in I Might Be Wrong, and 2) Lorwyn. Bandcamp has a nice feature of marking which song on an album in your collection is your favorite.

While we’re at it, I want to find more random blogs that aren’t about anything really, or ones that take huge tangents to get at what they are trying to say, but it’s such a scenic detour that you don’t mind. An example of the latter is The Pokémon Sprite Guy, whose blog I found two years after it ended, but whose delivery in writing I really enjoy. That’s another criterion: the blog needs to keep being updated! (Hence a stab at writing this very post.) My old friend S and I have scenic detour conversations, and the nonlinear form makes time irrelevant. S had a blog of no-topic musings, but I can’t find it anymore. I think I want more “content” out there that is written by people who just like something, not because they want followers, “highlights”, or money , or something bogus like that. I’m talking something like Geocities, where if you wanted a page about your favorite thing, you wrote it, in your own voice. Now we just click our interests and are served “content”. I’m tired of that. Maybe with enough musings here I’ll have covered all my interests in some detail. I like to read about others’ interests in their own voices, so I’ll pay that forward. For the three of you who know who I am, you might even learn something new.

Mostly I don’t like signing into Facebook, and I don’t want to deal with Messenger. Snapchat makes me feel like I have no life. Twitter is so noisy. I want to asynchronously catch up on my friends by reading stuff like what I’m writing here, but I know that the platforms above are easier to use. They just don’t give me the same sense of knowing someone like you’d get out of reading their writing or having a real conversation with them. I guess they’re not really for that purpose, but it seems shallow to say they are exclusively status-promoting tools. Oh well, I’ll relish the longer form stuff as it comes.

Some more favorite things I have searched for, and my answers to them:

• Album of the 1990s: The Real Ramona by Throwing Muses, followed closely by King by Belly
• Radiohead Album: Amnesiac
• T-shirt brand: So far, AS Colour’s 5002 Paper Tee
• Painting: The Nostalgia of the Infinite by Giorgio de Chirico
• Book: If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland. I have brought this book to a beer festival for re-reading while in line.
• Pokémon game: Silver
• Pokémon: Diglett Cubone (but Diglett’s in the top 15)
• Color on a guitar: Surf green
• Candy bar: Zzang Ca$hew Cow, Butterfinger does the job for the most part

Infinitely Yours,
Art

Readers,

I owe you some more blog posts about my spring road trip but you aren’t going to get them right away. Soon enough. I’ve at least been thinking about writing them recently as opposed to not thinking about them recently. Patience.

I wish I had patience. I think at my core is rage that I try to prevent from feeling. I nod and say, “Mm,” when I really want to say, “No, that’s not correct,” or, “That’s terrible.” My good friend P and I talked on the phone last night and agreed we need to stop more pointless conversation in its tracks. Simply halt the speaker and say, “OK. We can talk more about that after you change your shirt. Why are you wearing that shirt? Why did you think that was a good idea?” Flip something pointless on its head with something equally irrelevant. If they actually change their shirt they care enough to deserve your attention.

I haven’t felt so angry in probably months, which might be what is causing this sleeplessness and stream of unedited words. Dawna Markova says, “Rage is passion without choice.” It feels like a spit of gasoline into the engine. If Color Theory (more on this another time) is to be trusted, and I think it is, rage is composed of the colors black and red, where black represents one’s own ambition and power and red represents one’s emotions. We use words like “ardent” to describe someone’s passion, and the feel is fiery, which is also very red. Red is about creativity and emotion; I just worry about its pairing with my own ego and power, manifesting in anger. It’s a potent fuel, no doubt.

I’ve continued with my mostly daily haiku on my Twitter. I missed up to five days at a time, but I keep coming back to it. I like the challenge. For my grandpa, for whom we just this weekend held a memorial service, I dedicate every day of the remaining half of the year that I will write a haiku, a poetic (thus red, but controlled, with choice) expression to help channel the anger I have that he’s gone. I felt that this weekend. I clutched my magic egg (a lucky charm, more on this another time) as “Taps” played, my throat tight with strained tracheal cartilage and my face a frown canyon. I looked at some of the treasure maps my grandpa and I made year after year for a forest that no longer stands where now rest pole barns and snowmobiles. I miss him so much. I want to live a life as great as his and often worry I won’t. I want to walk in the woods again with him, him pointing out the morning dew beading on old spider webs below ferns, white light and long shadows abundant. It can’t happen. I remember collapsing in front of an angel statue the last time I saw him, fingernails piercing palms, so angry that anything could take someone so great away. I want to keep channeling this rage in a creative way.

There’s another reason I started writing these haiku. One that I’m now ashamed to admit but think I must admit at this point. Most longer term projects of mine kick off because I’m upset that someone doesn’t reciprocate my feelings for them. I created Behold The Cheese as a way to cope with longing for someone. I learned Graph Theory and developed Color Theory from it as a way to take my mind off someone else. And I took on the poetic challenge as a way to deal with rage about my grandpa and rage about someone who left me with feelings of withdrawal. I directed so much of the latter anger toward myself for months after I stopped seeing her, after conversation previously held everyday abruptly stopped. I believed that there were things wrong with me that were keeping me all alone, that I wasn’t funny enough or strong enough or that I was too obsessive. I compulsively ate and drank without realizing I was over my limit. I sighed, so much. I created such a narrative about this person in my head that thoughts continued on far longer than I expected them to. I felt haunted. I kept thinking of reasons why this person was justified and I needed fixing.

I don’t need fixing. I’m not broken. (I sense my own power in writing that.) I don’t want to diminish myself anymore. I don’t want one person’s rejection of me to bring down my esteem and affect relationships that matter far more. I deserve love.

P asked me if this person liked me for the reasons he likes me (that is, for my real self). I didn’t have a good answer back then. The answer is probably no. The people who really like me say, “Never change.” They tell me they miss me and wish I were there.

I am also angry about some comments I’ve received on my appearance and beliefs. I received both from a teenager who probably doesn’t know any better, but that doesn’t defuse my immediate emotional response. I don’t like being called “Jesus” mockingly, especially because Jesus probably didn’t look anything like my mostly Nordic self. I don’t like being called “Sasquatch” while I’m staring at my grandfather’s urn about to be buried, the last time I would ever see his physical form, though dust. He said, “Whoa, it’s Saquatch! Let me get your picture!” pulling out his phone while I was sobbing and sullen about my fallen hero. I’m sorry, that’s disgusting. That’s asocial. I don’t ever like hearing gay jokes, but especially not from a punk teenager as I’m celebrating marriage equality with my Facebook profile picture. I hope this person reads this when he grows up and realizes what a shit he was.

I have a tendency to get carried away. I can be vocal and loud about things. Some people like it, some people cover their ears. I think it’s one of my greatest strengths and a simultaneous weakness (but I believe strengths and weaknesses are intricately tied). It sometimes leads me to think more about another person than can be reasonably reciprocated, which leads to me being alone. But it sometimes also leads to one hundred something haiku produced so far this year, or over 5,000 miles traveled across these United States in two weeks. Sometimes it leads to twenty mile walks which result in deep insights to my brain and brewing of lavish life philosophies. Sometimes it leads me to inexplicable sobbing, or at least looking out windows for hours wistfully. Sometimes it leads to lengthy rants like this one.

The more I use up this anger rocket fuel in creative projects, the better.

Black and red all over,

Art