0
i want wings.
0
**
after losing my ID last week (presumably) to an ill-fated decision to run through a drive-thru at 3am for 4th meal (no dice, apparently taco bell is a somewhat strict literalist/not eco-friendly/walk-thru ready…who knew?) and a still missing wallet, decided the best life choice was to catch a ride home to colorado and take the week to do things a little more slowly.
what is it about home that suddenly makes going to bed at 10:30 a necessity, wearing jeans from high school compelling and old journal entries fascinating (by fascinating i mean re-reading how embarrassing you are suddenly the makes of a well-spent evening!?) ?
whatever the case, time at home always seems doing this activity: revisiting.
pictures, postcards, clothing…whatever it is, suddenly the idea of psychoanalyzing myself through remnants of times past seems appealing, even though every time i preform the masochistic dance of remembering i am always struck with the sense of how weird i am. how weird strange bits of shit that look as if fished from the garbage can (and did) mean the world to me, and contain a memory that somehow has shaped some part my current identity.
and then there are the diaries…
stumbled on my first college journal that compared college to an unending summer camp. “when will this feel real??” (sorry to tell you 18 year old self..it never really did)
i remember getting a journal before college thinking really maturely that i would only journal feelings. not situations, or “where i went today,” but that journaling feelings was obviously the college way to do things…BORING.
yet
revisiting always reminds me that seasons change but sentiments don’t really fade, and patterns are a hard one to break.
so maybe i did do myself a favor, in a small way, by writing less about situations, and more about perceptions, because page after page, the story remains the same.
interactions & intentions that are opaque, friends that act fake, and tiny moments that at the time seem equivalent to a civilization ruining earthquake. it’s not to say that it’s a cycle that dosen’t break and fragment along the way, as new names come in and old names fade but somewhere along the way, for page after page, every situation that seemingly felt like the end of the world comes back into its rightful place as just an ordinary day….
thinking of the future, for whatever reason journaling seems like a really bad idea. adult life seems lived always in motion, and retrospect itself seems passe. there are no markers that indicate this period of life as anything more than a chapter that will be defined by lines that are my own….in an invisible page somewhere along the way.
when in school, measurement is everything. years, weeks, grades, height, age? all classify you in some way. post-grad life works the same way, but with interactions & intentions that too, are opaque, but maybe in a different way.
i hate reading old journals because they seem so naive, because flipping open to one line can tell me how transitory this or that person would be, simply given the timing and sphere of life in which i was writing at 17. but telling your younger self how little things will come to mean nothing won’t do anything, little things are everything always, maybe being an adult just means having the smarts to call it reality.
4
Seven years since inception, Weatherbox is still going strong in the music scene. An experimental project begun by lead-member Brian Warren, the San Diego based band, though evolutionary in sound and structure (the band has had at least 20 different members throughout its course)…
0
stalk this column weekly & have had such a fat crush on this book finally had to cave & have it all for my own….personal goal to complete all of em in no particular order with no particular persons only particular rule is that it must be complete by 2015….just read a book today on age etc. that cited that 86% of your life transforming moments go down before your 35th birthday so happy living, rarely is the unlived life worth examining.
1
i’ve been confused trying to decide whether posts are “personal” or Fox & Sound…and everything’s all of a sudden interconnected (instagram, soundcloud, twitter, facebook, etcetc) so sorry for the mass posts of god knows what.
lately been re-evaluating/realizing the schism between “What I want,” F&S to be (collaborative etsy, multi-integrated platform for creativity etc.) , and what, for the time being, it has to be (a what’s what of things), given personal projects & pursuits and time & all of that.
Life after grad has offered opportunities to go full-time with creative consulting, so technically Fox & Sound is now a consulting company of sorts (oops I completely wrote shorts) , with “collective,” as a collection of projects currently underway (FP visual instillation, curating a series of interviews, shirt making, managing two different clients, teaching art in Ocean Beach) so most of the posts are probably lately are related to work things more than future forward material of where i’d like the site to be.
That being said, here’s what i’ve been doing in the in between.
Doing a lot of event press work & upcoming music events for Metrowize where I write about misc. culturally enlightened recreational activities occurring through SD like Sidebar FIVE/TEN parties, street fairs, and where to get your drink on post-Padre game.
I’m not sure I’m doing the job particularly excellently right now, as Sidebars and Padres aren’t really my steeze and street fairs mean crowds which means overwhelming, but I will say I LOVE the job because working from home has been my post-grad dream (i have big dreams, that’s why it’s important my workspace is conducive to my nap schedule).
As one of the perks of the job is working from home and wearing your sweats all day, i’ve been working at home, and wearing my sweats all day. So, to be honest, taking a speculative perspective on the events i’m covering and will save the hands-on journalism for summer. Or, whenever the weather decides to warm, or my ass gets tired of canoodling with my couch. Whatev.
Soon enough, thinking one of these events will inspire me to run across the street to my neighbor, the Lafayette Hotel for a dip, or to use the internet as on the list of fun things about moving, ordering the internet hasn’t been up there, oops!
May 12 participating in PERFECT 10 a group show at The Spot in Barrio Logan which was my personal goal for the year (one of them, that is.. some more delusional than others) so come out & say hey and view the work of over 100 local artists!
What was the point of this post again? Oh yeah, to clarify things (maybe this really is a personal blog post in that this post will be interesting to no one except for myself because really this is just a sneaky tactic to remind myself i’m doing with my life as that shits easy to forget….)
k this post is rambling sooo let’s go with it..here are some other things i’ve been thinking about:
**
life is crazy (^ ‘damn life you’re crazy face,’ ( outtake from something shot earlier this month..but facially fitting for the sentiment i think?)
Batshit bananas, “I feel like i’m watching a movie crazy.” There are many examples of this (insert your own example here) but lately just been thinking how odd it is that the people that are your friends/significant others at this period in time very rarely haven known you at every other time of your life (or will continue to know you long after this moment takes leaves)
Specifically, this came about on a very whimsical trip that ended up with me, back in the kitchen of my childhood best friend’s apartment in Los Angeles eating homemade pizza at 3am while her college boyfriend slept in her room, across the hall. Okay, all of those details sound unnecessary/creepy, but those are the details that hit me. That here, we had grown up together, had countless sleepovers in shared beds but now our lives were different. We were the 2.0 versions of our childhood selves.
We were still ourselves, laughing over nothing, but we now had odd facts attached to our lives . We have kitchens. She’s in a long-term relationship. I’m graduating in a week. Cars, lives, jobs, graduate school, etcetcetc and all of these accessories that now define our meaning.
But our meaning? Hers and mine? Ours together? Hadn’t changed.
We were doing exactly what for years we had always done, (snacking in kitchens together since kindergarten baby) all of the strange tangents strung across our respective lives had hinged for one moment on this intersection, in her kitchen.
Maybe because the backstory of how got there (me to LA and why) makes this interaction so poignant/ little bit more crazy (leaving that detail out for now..) but that brief intersection was the catalyst for thinking of how beautiful relationships that have the ability to age truly are. That this person, has seen you in 390483904 capacities and knows exactly how odd you can be, and still is interested in you, your story.
So that leads me to last night. Back in San Diego. Back at Soda Bar.
Sitting in Soda Bar, watching Inspired & the Sleep whom i’ve blogged about endlessly though before last night I hadn’t gotten a chance to see them live (i just telepathically knew they were darling, and they were/are!) Unforeseen freaky freak shit when down when Max brought out flutes and these two (what I thought was a lesbian couple + straight lady friend) got down on the center pole (which is super skinny if you’ve ever been and also concrete and not made for upside down aerials but do your thing..) and started pole dancing.
To flute music (roy orbison i’ve been told to be exact). Yes, I judged them. It was instinctive. In my 22 years hadn’t seen somewhat dwarfish butch ladies work the pole to flute music….until then. And let me first say THAT IT WAS AWESOME and completely surreal in the sense they were wholly in touch with translating the experience of music & the beats into something that meant something real to them.
Obviously their form of expression was totally different than my blogging excitedly over the band, but we both shared a certain experience over the same medium, a joy. Later, sitting at the bar one of the pole dancers came over and was in fact a man, who had just met Max (the lead singer) but the energy between the two was as if they had known each other forever. That level of comfortable. Anyway, the man and I started talking and here’s his story (it connects back I promise)
“Carlos,” (we will call him) used to be a massage therapist but lately had to quit to due carpal tunnel. Growing up, his Mom always said as he loved music, he needed to do something with it. Now heading towards the mid-point of his career, which he can no longer preform massage, Carlos wondered “what am I going to do with myself?”
Carlos moved in with his brother and wakes up early to clean house for every morning as payment for rent. Across the street from Carlos is Lestats Coffee & the venue where they hold shows. One day Carlos, thinking of his mother’s words, walked across the street to where the sound engineer was working and said, “Hey, I really want to be a sound engineer can you teach me?” The guy said sure, I can teach you one day a week, “as an intern,” (aka learn the trade, sure, but don’t you dare expect pay)
So Carlos came back the next day. As soon as Carlos began to learn about the sound he knew that he needed to be there everyday, not one day a week.
So everyday, after Carlos cleans his brother’s house early in the morning he goes across the street where he spends all day learning to be a sound engineer, for free. It has been NINE months and still Carlos returns daily, to learn.
Now he says he even gets to do the sound for a few shows a month when the engineer isn’t there. It is still his dream and he imagines it will be another year (or two) before he can actually do it completely on his own. But nonetheless, he says he’s incredibly happy. “I used to hustle and make like $9,000 a month….now I make about $60 a week…but I’m happy…the other? Dirty money. It didn’t feel right inside.”
Of course, later Carlos and I got into matters of love & all of that, but the principal of what I think we both were sharing was that whatever your vocation is or whomever you spend time, how you pass your time, all of these things become real, and take on unexplainable meaning when you know there is a lasting quality.
Whatever your passion is has probably been there for a long time, because it has known you through various stages through life, and gives you life and makes everything else make sense.
There are so many people that are amazing for the transitory influence they infuse life with, but that can get exhausting and incredibly tiring trying to figure out, who actually is dependable, “who actually knows and likes me?”.
Similarly, we approach the concept of “understanding,” like it’s from a vending machine, like it’s something that should come easily and packaged neatly.
But true understanding is a mystery, a conversation, and an accumulation of story that happens slowly, and when it does, it’s wholly real and fluent.
Yes, I think some people understand each other immediatley, but that in itself is a rare phenomenon.
Mostly meaning occurs in situations where we have a choice. To delve deep into each other’s humanity (and story) or to ignore it. A lot of times it takes a situation unfolding organically (i.e actually getting the opportunity to talk with Carlos not just watching him dance from afar & judging how I thought he would be).
Everyone carries such a beautiful story but I think too often we see people as simply apart of our own story, and concentrate on the person only in relation to us, how they fit into the story we are crafting, or if they fit at all.
But true relationship should go beyond this.
True dedication sees capacity. And places value on all dimensions of time surrounding what something is, and what something can become. To me, understanding is a sincere exercise in grace that embraces potential.
