For a while, I had mostly decided that I would want the power to make people happy; if that seems like too broad, I would like to be able to know exactly what would make a person happy. Of course, I now think this power would end up being pretty problematic, and there’s a big gap between the two versions.

In the stronger instance, how would my power deal with contradictory happiness conditions? Would there be a set level of happiness that I was able to help people achieve, or could I make some happier than others? Would I be able to set things in motion, or do I have to continually focus to keep the happiness going — i.e. is there going to be a bottleneck on happiness-creation based on my mental stamina? How could I possibly decide who deserved my time and attention? Would it be fairest to go by lottery? By acquaintance? I feel like I would need a really complex system for determining need.

And in the second case, where all I can do is tell what would make a person happy, I now feel like I’d end up forever angry at myself for not being able to do more to make such happiness come about. I feel like I would so much more fully realize just how many people out there weren’t happy, and that this would always be weighing at me, even as I tried to do little things to stem the tide.

But maybe I’m thinking too hard about such powers. Maybe there are people out there who could use them better than I could. Honestly, I’m pretty sure I know a few people who already have pretty similar powers.

Then for a while I thought it would be cool to be able to lend things out, to take a bit of my strength, or my hope, or my very small reserve of courage, and let someone else have it for a little while, when they needed it more than I did. It wouldn’t be a very grand super power, but I think I like that. I don’t think I’m really meant for the big cape or the underwear over the pants (sorry, Quailman). Maybe it’s too low a thing to shoot for when you can have any super power though. I’m not sure.

So I still kind of like that idea, that concept. Maybe I’d still answer with it, if someone asked me. But the more I think about it, I’m not sure I’d really want a power per se. I don’t think the “super” part of “super hero” really grabs me. I think, if I have a chance to look back before the end of things, I’d be satisfied with something more quotidian, more simple. To look back and know that there were people to whom I had been a staunch ally, a listening ear, a good friend.

Even if it is more a small, fleeting thing…somehow, it seems it would suffice.

And so, until the end…I try.

When I was 8 I asked my father why the sun goes out at night, and he told me
       “It gets dark because the sun stops looking at us when it goes to shine on other people.”

When I was 4 I asked my toy stuffed elephant why the sun goes out at night, and he/she/it told me
      ”Because otherwise we’d forget how beautiful it was when it shone down on a gentle summer afternoon. Because it’s hard work, being the light of the world. Because there needs to a time for mystery, for the monsters under our bed, for scary shadows and sore shins. Because we need nights to dream in. Because after its beautiful aria, there needs to be some time for the stars to sparkle and sing. Because otherwise wolves couldn’t howl at the moon, and fireflies couldn’t make the world look like it was smoldering, and roosters couldn’t crow in jubilation at the first rays of morning.
      ”The sun goes out so that we can hug each other good night.”

It’s off to a pretty good start though. After all, I wheeled two couches across campus yesterday, and only got honked at by one angry driver. I figured out that my roommate is not good at distributing weight among his boxes. I ate chinese food outside in the dark on top of a suitcase and a mini-fridge. I had a one dollar Jamba Juice today. I’m feeling more relaxed, less uptight, and equally redundant.

So, yea. Hey, Summer. Wassup? Watcha want to do?

——————————————————————————————

I do not often remember dreams, and when I do they are often too jumbled to make sense of them. But I remember one dream quite clearly. It was about my grandfather, and it began with me standing in front of his hospital bed. It was not a memory – I was not a six year old who didn’t understand my grandfather was dying of stomach cancer, I was a teenager, running to the bed to speak to him before he was again lost to me forever. Before I got there, the dream shifted, and it was me in the bed, staring out at a horrifyingly clean hospital room, feeling someone hold my hand and hearing people whisper as my vision faded into darkness, and with it the sound and the feeling until there was absolutely nothing. I ceased to exist.
I have never been more afraid than when I woke up from that dream. The universe had crawled into my skull and whispered “You are going to die!” and it was not a request. I could not say no.
This is one of the best things that has ever happened to me.
When I ran to the shower and had its warm waters rushing over my face as I tried to forget that horrible sensation of not being, my thoughts were drawn, unwillingly, to a line from Blade Runner: “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” No matter how much I may have wished it, I would never be eternal. My body is mortal, and so is the mind it houses. But those moments do not have to be lost. They will be lost to me of course, when I end, but they do not have to be contained to me. Experiences can be shared, ideas disseminated.
I believe the greatest good I can do before I go into the dark is to share, to reach out and touch the lives of others. This does not mean I seek no time for myself. Even if it will be lost, to memory or to time, the moment where I sit on the steps, contemplating the cars whizzing by, the pedestrians strolling past, the wind teaching the trees to dance, has a merit all its own. But to reach out to other lives, and help them over an obstacle, prod them toward a goal, or simply share that bond of mutual existence, and to be pulled, prodded, and acknowledged in turn is wondrous to me. Perhaps this is why I love to write, as it creates half of a connection that will last long after I shuffle off this mortal coil.
When I close my eyes, I can remember that dream about my grandfather. I can remember his intense eyes, and how he taught me to look people in the eye, and to color inside the lines. And I hope that one day, someone will remember me.

Right now I’m supposedly pretty far along this road to recovery: my medication is stable, and I’ll be heading back to school for Spring Quarter. So that’s good. Right now my life is mostly about waiting. Maybe I’m too satisfied with just waiting too often. But for now, that’s the plan.

See you all soon!

It is not a perfect film, but it has moments that capture an exuberant, kinetic and pure joy of a kind I’ve very rarely experienced since childhood. There are moments in the film that reach inside to your own wild thing, that make you want to move along to the wild rumpus on screen. Moments that capture an essence of youth on film both boisterously and delicately, leaving it intact so that energy can leap back out into the audience. I spent most of the film with Max where the wild things were, and the tiniest bits of it with old friends during recess at the Crow Island Woods. Even as I write this, I am remembering in first grade when we tunneled under the fence to escape the playground, how we managed to keep the project secret for what seemed like years but was really days (I would have said that it seemed like millennia, but we barely had conception of months).

But Wild Things is not content with that vivacity. It also explores the casual but harsh cruelty of childhood, the breed of fractiousness and fear that comprise an all too real aspect of early life. It’s easy to build a great fort, but it’s hard to get everyone to be inside it together; as the wild rumpus starts the sun is dying and the world is slowly grinding from rock to sand to dust. Smiles and tears are both integral to the movie, but neither overpowers the other. Wild Things is neither schmaltzy nor sad. It is beautiful, a movie about childhood that was, in the end, not really made for real children, but for inner ones.

Here is the trailer:

Junebug – Robert Francis
This song has a lot of energy and life in it, and can really pick me up on a slow day.

Lua – Conor Oberst and Gillian Welch version
Hauntingly beautiful. Love what Gillian’s vocals add to the song. The line about dying from medication after killing the all the pain sticks with me.

Tiger Mountain Peasant Song
I adore Fleet Foxes’ sound. So full and rich it reminds me of a tapestry, full of archaic heroes and long-forgotten monsters.

But what really intrigues me are the truly vivid memories of non-momentous moments. It’s one thing to have a vivid memory of your first kiss, or of meeting someone who would be your best friend for many years. I enjoy thinking about those moments that get burned into your mind even though they weren’t a milestone, a meltdown, or a miracle.

I have a memory of the time my first-grade friend cheated me out of a win the first time I played Life, getting me to go to Countryside Acres while he scooped up the Life tiles at Millionaire Estates. I have a memory of sitting on the kitchen floor in my old house, banging on old, unusable pots and pans when my Grandmother came in and yelled at little four year old me. I have a memory of being very young and giving an ungrateful non-thank-you at my birthday party when I received a book that I already owned. I still feel terrible every time that I see myself rip away the wrapping paper and declare “Oh, I already have this one. Well, at least I’ll have an extra.” I don’t think I’m as ashamed of any other moment in my life, but I know that no one else has a memory of that moment. I have a memory of getting in a fight with two girls in second grade, teasing back and forth until I got mad and pushed Abby into the mud (actually, that’s the only part I don’t remember, the push, but I have clear memories of how I didn’t even remember it at the time), and how I walked by her about five times later in the day, each time only to whisper, “Sorry.” I have a memory of when I was nine, playing Backyard Baseball in my basement, and yelled “FUCK!” when I gave up a run, yelled it so loud that my mom heard it upstairs. I have a memory of how after that, I walked by the boiler room where the repair man was working, and awkwardly said, “Sorry.” I have a memory of seeing my best friend cry when he thought we had left him behind, and my guilt at realizing we essentially had.

I have a memory of standing on the side of my bathtub, looking at the loop I’d wound around over the shower curtain rod. Well, yea, maybe that one was a bigger moment.

But I guess one thing that stands out to me now is that none of these memories are of times when I was happy. They are all composed of pain, or guilt, or shame. That seems to be what sticks with me. I remember times when I was happy, periods when I was happy, but in that vague way where the memory isn’t immersive, or when it is a blending of different events or moments. But then again, maybe the memories are solely related to intensity, and maybe, unless it is one of those milestone moments, I have not had the intensity of happiness to really make those memories. A few times, perhaps, the memories that come close to being truly vivid. And maybe more so recently, but I won’t know until enough time has passed for those memories to either fade or show their strength.

But I think that’s hard to do, to measure the relative intensity of happiness verses sadness. I feel like despair, shame, pain…it starts on a higher level, gets an edge. It makes the jump quickly from discomfort, whereas happiness seems to like to linger in the area we think of as contentment. Maybe I’m being tired and silly. Or maybe it’s just me.

Or maybe it’s a silly question, and you don’t need to measure happiness, because you feel it. Maybe that’s enough.

I’m going to try and remember that.

The Twist – Frightened Rabbit

The video isn’t much, but the song has a kind of yearning intensity that really caught me. And the line “lift your dress enough to show me those shins, let your hair stick to your forehead” … it just seemed very sweet to me.

Waterloo Sunset – The Kinks

This song has a sort of haunting beauty to it. When I listen to it, sometimes it just sounds… delicate.

Ain’t No Sunshine – Bill Withers

I think this sort of speaks for itself. Even more than “The Twist,” this makes me think of a certain someone.

Murder In The City – The Avett Brothers

Come back to this recently. Even though this song touches on a rather dark subject, I find it very tender and relaxing.

Role Play Tournament – Baby Cakes

I got linked this as a joke, but the song, I think, is genuinely catchy. It will get stuck in your head. Although it is irreverent and funny, I think that it also ends up being a bit touching.

Also if you have the time, I recommend going to the website of I Come To Shanghai, an independent, start-up band from California. You can get there initial release for free, or pay if you want (they kind of have a Radiohead set up going on). I stole the title of this post from Robert Ashley, one of the band’s two members. I’ve included a link to the rather strange/trippy video of one of their songs, ‘Your Lazy Eye,” below.

I Come To Shanghai: Your Lazy eye from Adventureface TV on Vimeo.

Hopefully you enjoyed all, or at least some, of these songs. Let me know what you thought in the comments!

I’ve always found that construction, as common and banal as it may be, to be fascinatingly profound. It’s one of the very few times that we use the verb ‘go’ when the destination is not a place, event, or time, but a state. Of course one can ‘go hungry’ or ‘go without’ but those phrases, and others like them, are both far less common, and far more closely tied to human, physical reality, that I think that ‘go to sleep’ still stands alone. The mere fact of grammatically treating sleep as a destination, or at the least a departure of some sort, carries a suggestion of the mystery and otherness that still cling to this necessary, quotidian ebb of consciousness. The other popular expression, the equally fascinating ‘fall asleep’ still leaves me with this slight, tantalizing feeling of…well, more than departure, but perhaps a little less than…loss.

I have never liked going to sleep, departing the world of the everyday, the known, and sending my mind/soul/whatever little spark of Something off into the deluded domain of dreams, or, even worse, into the horrifying blank oblivion of unadulterated rest. I have struggled for many years with that act of surrendering the power to act, the supplicatory welcoming of night’s embrace. To different extents to be sure, and in no constant or orderly progression, but this years long contention with speech has been…recurrent, as is so often the case with certain dreams.

One of my clearest memories from childhood if of my weary, squinting, A.M.-stubbled father frustratedly asserting that “You don’t go to sleep because you fight it! You fight it and you won’t let it happen.”

You won’t let it happen. Aye, there’s the rub. Perfectly encapsulated in five simple words, a protagonist (‘You’), an action (‘won’t let’), an antagonist (‘it’, though not in the Stephen King sense), and a thwarted action (‘happen’). Put simply, I fought sleep because I could. As I staved off slumber to remain alive and in the night, I was existing, acting, being real. I did not, and cannot, feel comfortable with the deactivation at the end of the day.

C.P. Cavafy once wrote:

IN THE MONTH OF ATHYR

I can just read the inscription on this ancient stone.
“Lo[r]d Jesus Christ.” I make out a “So[u]l.”
“In the mon[th] of Athyr’ ‘Lefkio[s] went to sleep.”
Where his age is mentioned—“lived to the age of”—
the Kappa Zeta shows that he went to sleep a young man.
In the corroded part I see “Hi[m]…Alexandrian.”
Then there are three badly mutilated lines—
though I can pick out a few words, like “our tea[r]s,”
“grief,”
then “tears” again, and “sorrow to [us] his [f]riends.”
I think Lefkios must have been greatly loved.
In the month of Athyr Lefkios went to sleep.

I think that for me the association between sleep and death, between rest nightly and eternal, has been stronger than for most. In that radio show, when they discuss the fear of sleep, they use an approach that does not, and I might argue cannot, successfully wrestle with sleep. They are fated to be the Jacob to slumber’s angel, to struggle unceasingly until the dawn. And the dawn is so important to this struggle with sleep, it is the prize, the reward, the signal that once again you have made it through those hours of something-like-death and emerged again on the other side.

For me at least, the fear of sleep is not of falling asleep, or at least not entirely. As with that other Rest, the issue is one of trust. The convincing of myself that the universe, as large and scary and arbitrary as it is, does have a few rules, and that I will be there to open my eyes tomorrow, that I won’t vanish like the chipmunk pirate or the talking fish or any other figment of imagination do with dawn, that this exit stage left of my Self is only for a little while, and that I get to come back on stage for the next scene, the convincing required to make myself fall backwards, trusting, into Dream’s waiting arms, is the hard part.

I don’t want to not wake up, but I need to sleep.

So, given no alternative, I trust. It is an odd kind of faith, the belief in Tomorrow, but it lets me close my eyes to shadows, and come back from the stars again. So it is faith enough for me. For now.

As I write this, it is close to one in the morning, my computer screen is glowing, bright and warm, and an empty can of Pepsi sits by my mouse. Old habits die hard. But another lesson my sallies against sleep are teaching me is this: that faith is not (or at least, should never be) easy.

So I go to lay me down to sleep
And hope Something my soul to keep
And if I die before I wake
I hope I get another take.

For those interested, the This American Life podcast is available at their website, or via iTunes.