Conflicting Messages

She stood motionless staring at his gravesite from across the small river. Although she was dressed in black, you could not tell if she was mourning because she did not shed a single tear. Besides, she always dressed in black.

A dusty cowboy appeared out of nowhere, startling her. “Did you know him?”, he asked.

“No.” she replied quietly, not taking her eyes off of the aging headstone.

A tumbleweed blew by, as did several awkwardly silent minutes. The cowboy cleared his throat.

“I, uh…my ranch is nearby.”

“Uh huh.” She continued to stare.

“Ma’am, look, I’m not tryin’ tah intrude on your business, but uh…well, I see you here every day.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you live close?”

She turned her head for the first time, facing him, with unblinking ebony eyes penetrating his of steel blue.

“Actually, I live a few hours away.”

A 5 Minute Study on Pretentiousness Followed by a 30 Second Observation on Corresponding Linguistics

It occurred to her, one lazy August afternoon, while sitting in Mariah Carey’s luxury penthouse apartment, that she was incredibly pretentious.

The pretentious one being herself, and not Mariah Carey, of course.

Careful not to be nosy or intrude on any personal space or belongings, she quickly scanned the room for spelling errors, of which she found none. Unsatisfied, she began to think of her bookshelf at home as a competitor against the one beside her, which she had not bothered to peruse for fear of being let down again.

Dostoevsky, Newton, Nabokov, Slim, Vian, Strauss, Kerouac, Zedd, Kraus, Lunch, Acker, Cooper, Rand, Miller, Nin, Vollmann, Baudrillard, Robbins, Plath, Virilio, Almond, Marx, Hitler, Guevara, Crowley, Bukowski, LaVey, Freud, Orwell, Capote, Vonnegut, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Foucault, Burgess, Kesey, Salinger, Levitt, Bataille, Sotos…suddenly, she began to feel very aware of how cliche she was…

She thought of all the pretentious movies she would watch with her friends, noting that they (the films) were pretentious and pointing out the parts that were the most. How would they know if they were not pretentious themselves? Surely Mariah Carey would not think the same things about the same things. For Miss Carey, things are probably in her head, or over it, not some strange place in between.

Her mind replayed a moment in which she watched Sasha Grey say, “I often wonder how many 18-year old pornstars are existentialists…”, while reliving that same feeling of disgust, only this time while facing a mirror instead of the VICE Magazine website on a computer monitor.

Ritual in Transfigured Time, Maya Deren, 1946

On Love and Empirical Romance

(How attitudes toward sex, love, and marriage in the Summer of 6th grade differ from those in the Summer at age 26)

She was 12, tan, thin, and flat-chested with long black hair and all the innocence of youth. He was 17, pale, tattooed, rode bmx, and was horny like most boys his age. He wasn’t her first boyfriend, but he was the first person with that title that she actually had a relationship with.

She was a virgin and probably didn’t even know the technical mechanics of sex. It was also a subject that she never thought about. It never even occurred to her to wonder what his penis looked like. She was just content to ride on his handlebars around their respective neighborhoods, talk on the phone about nothing, make-out for hours on end in front of all their friends, and hold hands at Pacific Beach. He, on the other hand, had invested months into trying to plants seeds of interest in that pre-pubescent little brain of hers.

He started by telling her “I love you.” every night on the telephone. Even at 12, she was already scared of love, or maybe didn’t quite believe in it’s existence and never said it back.

Brigitte Bardot in Godard’s ‘Contempt’ 1963

She Believed in Thoughts Like Trees

As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.

— Shunryu Suzuki

While she was traveling through time at a different rate than the rest of the Universe, her world was interpenetrated by a being who seemed to be of similar classification. Which was odd for her because, she had not seen, or would not see one of her own kind since/until the far future. Her response was to give him a modicum of sloppy drunken kisses on the dance floor of a sweaty nightclub while sliding her hand down his pants when she thought no-one was around. This was the first time, in a very long time, that she had felt a heart beat. This was the first time, in a very long time that she knew she was alive.

A carefully curated collection of thoughts were displayed in her recesses while she pretended not to notice his daydreams projected onto the wall. Could he see her intellectualizing her perversions, she wondered? In an attempt to create tangibility out of the shortness of breath he had inspired, she whispered softly in his ear, “I want it in my mouth…”.

How profound.

It was then that the tesseract folded onto itself before expanding and she found it, inside of her mouth indeed. Inside of her mouth and all the way into the back of her gagging wet throat, where she was thrilled to give him kisses much sloppier than those she had given him on the dance floor. He lovingly destroyed her face with violence and saliva until she no longer had thoughts of her own. Her body, desperate for his sex, acted on its own accord, and her brain became a silent retrospective of teachings by Soto Zen Priest, Shunryu Suzuki.

The Films of Guy Bourdin

Wunderkind Burnout

Know thyself? If I knew myself I’d run away.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

She often spent too much time telling people all the parts of herself that she probably shouldn’t. Night after night, she logged long hours in front of fireplaces or atop bar-stools the world over, confessing her startling memories of sex, drugs, and anorexia to strangers while clutching white-knuckled-tightly to stems of wineglasses-Always empty, always full. Upon making new acquaintances, this was her mysterious tradition, her frightening routine.

Every terrible thing she had ever done, she would gladly pour into the soul of another. How could she not know that these dark secrets should be locked away? Why did she never tell people the interesting things about herself that actually mattered? The real puzzle pieces that created the picture of who she was? Somehow she always found it easier to self-deprecate than aggrandize.

The things she kept for herself, like the extent of her academic achievement, were tucked away in dusty bins in the complex compartments of her mind. Treated as painful recollections, whispered quietly only while rocking in corners of closets with hands held to ears…these would be the things that some might consider accomplishment, and yet, she was oddly ashamed.

To hear her tell it, one would think that her honest belief was that she had never done anything (of a positive nature) of interest in her entire existence.

She claimed that she was searching to one day create the things that mattered…but what we all knew as truth, was this:

A brain does not matter to a girl whose only desire is to be beautiful.