october in chile

I’m not terribly sure what this will be. Perhaps a confession first and foremost regarding my sad internet connection, or rather addiction — for when the power goes out I come alive and start to glow. Daily paterpatinas fill inspirational remarks that could be éxitos on social media… until the plastic and conflict minerals come closer and I shirk. A daily monster. Imagining novels, charlas, letters, messages, impassioned moments lately shallowed into petty quips, where once I dreamed of flying, where once I dreamed. I would escape and cause an eruption. I didn’t want to give up my friends but I was willing to for a greater gain, or so I thought. But when the time to let go of them came, and it was certainly greater to salvage the wreck of depression I was quickly decomposing into, I raged and clawed just like my notorious 8 year old epoch, refusing to let go and shocking my mother and most other onlookers at my obstinacy.

That Jinx touch, the savior of the surreal who melts technologies at the approach, it haunted my writing on emails, staying up late at night pouring on the intensity and believing, little by little, in a power to formalize my dreams into energy. And then a blackout, and no the draft wasn’t saved, and it almost seemed perfect because everything was indicating there was a universal conspiracy, some Cosa Nostra committed to transience, calling me chanting to join the sick and freeing dance of atoms at play in the aurora morning. Wacky and wild, serious and intimate, sometimes the best friend I had ended up hanging from a tree and it seemed both light and freeing, affirming my most private instincts and rendering me some sort of seer who might blow them away – but also seemed incredibly pesado, how would I stand up to my own pressures on myself, not believing deep down that Erik really loved me, that I had to make the fantastic triumph over the petty humiliations of those nights he hated me.

So this blog was supposed to be some coming out, congealing together all the moist dreams that soften my steps and transfigure the plants at reojo into vines and orchids of the netherworld, a comic book adventure. But I don’t know what came before with those tears for Monika. I don’t know what’s public or private. I don’t know what might be the blocks for a letter I can keep writing and what might be another repressed thought, shamefully messy, the funk of the road trampled beneath, abject and defeated. “Social stupidity is the scar tissue of revolutionary defeat”. Kluge and Negt. Let’s forget momentarily the higher levels of stress and dissertations, the speeches planned, the actions, and just come cuddle in bed with this lad so fair, touch his smooth shoulders, round like golden peaches, like greek ramas on the Silver Surfer’s trunk, like a memory so active it collects everything in reach, spitting and spewing new poems like a hungry Chevrolet. Those were my shoulders, my brother’s and cousins’, my sisters’ and lady-friends, my grade school teachers and lucky mistresses in every port and call. My hero Cat-Man and his bronze, ancient nose, his sister beneath the sheets, his silent majesty, his need somewhere deep down for my insecurity and willingness to commit speech acts, my love that acknowledged admiration he was so much more capable of, so much smarter, so less trained in suffering beneath whatever it was he needed from me. A master at blending in, and when I recognized it I did something he couldn’t. There was always a great deal of jealousy. There were men I wanted to be like, wanted to be intimate with, wanted yet had to refuse, except when I didn’t and amazed myself, but only showed them why they already appreciated my company; but then lost that appreciation in the haze and hated the impulse to refuse and the labyrinth that kept me from the repressive process.

Will this disappear too like Jenn did? I thought she was recording it somehow and selfishly treated storage as stuff. I’ve been wanting to slow it down and go back, retrace the process of repression, calmly place myself in the places I did this and that, acknowledge the mistakes, prove myself capable of failing because I’ve backed myself into a corner by not writing, or what was it. There were always those little pauses with her where I got lost and struggle back to the surface, and the Promise Star ironically shines again when I admit the loss. And it has shone so rarely. I get a little sad and accept this will go out, posted. Someone like her might see it. It’s not just stuck in my head. My weird hermit reputation, man-with-a-past Muneeza snorted I think, I couldn’t open up, but good god to walk again like Lazarus or the barefoot easter bunny. Woah, buck, gotta keep on the lamb, out there it’s burning up, and my fever can come back terribly and end me. But to just be me, without the secrets and burden of clearing my name. To go back to Mars and Caspian, swallow my pride again and say hey, I always liked being unassuming, watching others struggle for the limelight, I was good at it, I didn’t like saying, ‘You’re conceited bro, you need to listen to yourself and tone down your ego’ – no, I don’t think I could or will ever really say that. I’d rather say, go, go, go, it’s still not great enough but if you swallow and look at me, well, there’s a lot out there, not like I’m going to make something that big, sheesh, though, ya’ know, I’ve got some ideas. I remember saying Good Night to Jenn. Last time I did. Peaceful, it was. Things just were between us, they aren’t anymore, not in any real sense. Yet literature is for the side I haven’t seen, where the answers are. Like, why did I cheat on her? Boring, horrible question hardly worth the time of day. There was something under the porcelain toilet in that Palo Alto bar, had I smashed my skull against it perhaps the blood would absorb, some lessons absent from Franco’s stories would get thick. Is surrealism just how I can’t physically get to the truth?

Right. I don’t really know what to do with the blog. But when addicted and wanting to play Go and Chess, and here is the pool of my future, can I write? And write, because the fever about facebook, oh. The Fever! The softness of those emails to Jenn, it isn’t worth trying to replace, they were too perfect. Better to remember a gorgeous shadow that suffer painting the clouds of forgetting. So in the asombroso space, it didn’t spit. It was cooly cruising into port beside the little dock in the sun. The cloudy morning my father took me to see the jellyfish. The dream where she greeted me in the shallows, sexy and motherly, my honey just so there, loving me like OH lord, like what I broke and screamed and ran against the screen like Truman at its horror. To face that risks the heart attack, do I dare? Oh Jenn I dare a thousand times, despite your committees for my ostracism. I know they’re right, not because they’re a regime, we didn’t want islands or utopias of any sort, but because of what you needed, for your name now to cease falling from my lips, or at least not like this or…

 

(Postscript: Here in Chile, early october, I wrote again on this blog. It has been over a year and the last posts — I believe they’re visible though I’m not sure — are from the previous summer when I hoped Monika would read what I said online after she ostensibly stated I couldn’t write her directly. Those posts are embarrassing to think about being on the public but it is just that embarrassment that marks them as digging into my demons differently than usual; that marks them as nonetheless showing some spunk as someone who wants to heal, wants to face his fuck-ups. Caspo might slap me on the back.

There’s very little here I imagine will impress the reader, and a fair heap of hubris. It rather calls for persistence, for coming back to see all the holes and omissions given redemption. Perhaps some Comment about the things I don’t, can’t admit. Mainly I wanted to acknowledge that this is a space for me to write, that I have a desire for putting together feelings and past experiences, and putting Pat back into existence, for the shadow his lovers have kept, those who cared remembering me, as I disappointed them they dared to remember, like Clarice. I’ve an intention to make this legible. I have time here, I have access, I have ideas, and I have the heart, I do.)