innerviews_raze PeeT do you think red is like a secret salon? 130130 ... raze i think that's a good way to put it. either a salon, or a literal internet café, where we congregate, and either keep to ourselves or bounce off of each other, depending on mood, what we're drinking, and who else is around. i look at blather as strangely sacred internet ground. as you said elsewhere, we rely entirely on imagination. all we have here is our words and the words of others. there's something comforting about that, at least for me, especially now when there seems to be more meaningless noise on the net than ever before. here it feels like everything has meaning. even random silliness that tries to resist meaning anything. part of me misses the days before facebook, when i had to form images of what everyone looked like based on what they said. in the very beginning, i somehow got it in my head that mikey was a beautiful blonde woman using a nickname. that still cracks me up a little. in my mind, birdmad looked like a bounty hunter out of "blade runner" as it might have been written by hunter s. thompson. misstree was a dark and mysterious goddess. kerry was a wise-beyond-her-years ingénue who looked like the female heroine out of a david gordon green film. their words painted the pictures of who they were, and i felt like those were the only pictures i needed to see. sometimes i wish red was just a little bit busier...i wish some of the old faces would pay us another visit. i wish a few new faces would find their way here and share the full range of their expression with us. but even if it's a little quieter than it used to be, it still generally feels more alive here than it does over on blue, where some days i feel like i'm almost carrying the whole place on my shoulders. i never thought i would live to see that happen. and i'm not sure i'm the best person for that job. but i'm doing my best to keep it going while making up for lost time. lucky for me, they're pretty broad shoulders. but yes. to return to the original thought...i think red is our shared secret place. and i'm really glad it's still open for business. i regret not being a more active customer at certain times in the past, but i plan to stop in everyday from now on, at least for a cup of coffee and to read the paper, tearing out the articles i want to return to later, while scribbling my own thoughts in the margins and smearing ink all over the sides of my hands. 130130 ... the evil angel on my shoulder you know, you could have just said "heroine", since that implies femininity. but no. you had to slip up and be redundant. now go rob a bank! do it! 130130 ... PeeT i liked what you said. you know this place well and how it works. you give yourself to it. 130131 ... raze if i'm honest, there have been times i haven't given as much as i now feel i should have. as personal as something like "slightly_rehearsed" is, for most of the writing of that blathe i was still trying to hold onto some of the anonymity blather allows you to have if you want it. so instead of getting across that i was in love with a gay friend who enjoyed toying with me, i think it came off like i was just a bit of a sad sack, and it staggered me that what i was saying resonated with people at the time. i felt like i was wearing a mask and trying not to reveal too much of who i really was. but now i make no bones about the fact that i'm a sack of potatoes, and i feel no need to censor anything, now that the_mask_no_longer_fits. i find it funny that it took me basically a decade just to get around to being myself again. now where's my peeling mechanism? 130131 ... raze fails at the linkage the_costume_no_longer_fits, even. 130131 ... PeeT what does it mean to be cool? 130201 ... raze my somewhat biased, narrow definition of cool would be "someone who is completely his or herself without apology, while also being the kind of person i'd want for a friend". if we all decide for ourselves who and what is cool, that's what it is for me, more or less. and by that measure, one of the coolest people i ever knew was a high school substitute teacher. my grade twelve english teacher was a woman named mrs. broad. she seemed like a nice enough person, but she was one of the worst teachers i ever had. i took to calling her class "assembly line english", because she had no interest in exploring or nurturing anyone's individual creative voice. there wasn't a shred of character or soul in her class or the way she taught it. she felt everyone's writing should read like something out of a textbook. cold. clinical. utilitarian. she punished anything in our work that resembled personality. but it wasn't just that. she would explain to us how she wanted an assignment or an essay written. i would write it just the way she wanted it, having quickly given up on ever getting her to appreciate my writing for what it was. then she would tell me i hadn't followed her instructions, and i would get a middling mark. every time i gave her what she said she wanted, she turned around and told me it wasn't what she wanted. there was no pleasing her. she looked a little like a short-haired brunette version of natasha henstridge. most of the male students were happy about that. they could think dirty thoughts about her in the middle of class while turning off their brains. i just couldn't do it. given how she'd managed to make me dread one of my favourite subjects, it was kind of difficult to find her useful as teenage masturbation fodder. i stopped trying to please her after a while and started looking for ways to have fun and send subtle little "fuck you" gestures her way. in response to test questions about shakespeare's "macbeth", i wrote about the "care bears" cartoon that came on in the morning before i left for school, and how the theme song was weirdly infectious. i went out of my way to fail some assignments, and didn't bother turning others in. i didn't care. the joke is, i still got something like an 84% in her class. my latent writing ability (what there was of it, at least) was enough to get me through, even with someone like her at the cockpit. but i never hated a single class in my life more than i hated hers. it was demoralizing beyond all reason. in my estimation, the best thing she ever did was break her leg in a skiing accident. she had to take two weeks off, and our substitute teacher was mr. klein, a middle-aged jewish man with bifocals. he was almost violent in his contempt for the lesson plan mrs. broad had outlined for us. he threw it out immediately. he told us point blank that our teacher was an idiot. he used yiddish slang like "tuchus" in casual conversation. most of the students thought he was insane. i thought he was the most brilliant person ever to set foot in our school. he made shakespeare interesting, when i had always found the stuff pretty ponderous. he attacked things from odd, unexpected angles. he got us involved in discussions, whether we wanted to participate or not. if someone was being a disrespectful ass in class, he kicked them out. he didn't just ask you to leave; he barked, "get the fuck out of here!" i hung around as long as i could after class everyday to talk to him. i wanted to soak up everything he had to say. he seemed to like me, but he wasn't the kind of person who would come out and tell you a thing like that. he had a sort of controlled aggression about him that's difficult to describe. he would act like he didn't give a shit, but then he would say or do something that was the equivalent of a raised eyebrow, telling you in a subversive way not to take everything at face value. the classroom was alive when he was in it, charged with unpredictable kinetic energy. he called me by my last name. "read tom robbins, west," he said. "get 'still life with woodpecker'. you'll like him. now get the hell out of here." then his face softened a little and he said, "be careful. there are a lot of assholes floating around this place." i wrote something for an assignment before mr. klein showed up, and it was one of those things where i didn't put any effort into writing about the actual subject at hand. i just threw up some random brain spill onto a piece of paper and called it "charlie brown sings frère jacques". mr. klein sat down at my desk, read it, and talked to me and a female student for what seemed like half an hour, ignoring the rest of the class. "the title is apropos of nothing," he told me, but he said it in a way that conveyed approval. he told us in detail about a recent phone conversation with his grown daughter. he analyzed something i'd written with my brain mostly dormant, and treated it like it had meaning and worth. he was interested in it. he was interested in us. he taught me more in ten days than the sum total of what almost every other teacher taught me in four years of high school, and it had nothing to do with literature. it was about existing. he was fearlessly himself. he said what he thought. he did what he said. he expected you to use your brain and break away from "safe" and familiar modes of thinking. he didn't go out of his way to piss you off, but he didn't care if he did. that was your problem. mrs. broad returned, with her leg still in a cast, and sucked the life right back out of the classroom. she regarded the residue of what mr. klein had done to her lesson plan with something approaching horror. the horny male students were happy to have her back, content to nurse their semi-hard dicks through the pockets of their jeans. i felt empty. a little bit of mr. klein stuck around, though. after her leg had healed, mrs. assembly line english had us come up with thesis statements off the top of our heads as part of a class discussion. i volunteered one. she proceeded to pick it apart like it was a potential suitor she felt pity for. a classmate named richard, without putting up his hand, said, "i think it's an excellent thesis statement." he argued with her. he got angry. he was eloquent and compelling. i felt like he was passionately defending me in a courtroom. every lame throwaway excuse she came up with for shitting on my thesis statement, richard tore shreds. he told her she was missing the point. he was the teacher, and she was the uncomprehending student. i sat there without saying a word, in awe. in the end, mrs. broad lost her patience for a debate she wasn't even intellectually awake for and said, "i'm not going to keep arguing with you, richard." after class i thanked him for sticking up for me. i didn't even know the guy that well, and he was still upset about it. he had been slamming a baseball bat against a brick wall, but he felt if he'd just been able to get in a few more swings, he might have made a dent. i didn't think there was any getting through to her, even with a jackhammer. i was moved by the effort anyway. mr. klein would be retired by now. i hope he's still around and doing well. i wish i knew his full name and his address so i could write him a letter telling him some of these things, but i doubt he would remember me. then again, maybe he would. i can just about hear him saying, "so, west, how have you been navigating this fucked up adventure we call life? i would think you burned the map they gave you a long time ago when you figured out for yourself how useless it was..." 130202 ... log burning fire i passed out the paper cookies at ski school. one of the kids read theirs. "what do you think is cool?" we discussed various responses, finally reaching a consensus; to be cool is to be yourself. 130202 ... log burning fire i passed out the paper cookies at ski school. one of the kids read theirs. "what do you think is cool?" we discussed various responses, finally reaching a consensus; to be cool is to be yourself. 130202 ... raze kids are the smartest people. 130202 ... raze i have been thinking a bit more about what this place is and has been to me, and i think i have a little more to add to that first answer. blather is my morning coffee, and my glass of wine before bed. my cigarette after sex (or it would be if i was...you know). a scattered diary for someone who could never keep a paper journal with any consistency unless i was writing to someone other than myself. a place where those who are lost come to find themselves. a place where those who don't want to be found come to lose themselves. a place to be alone together. a friend. a confidante. a river of friends and confidantes. a shared secret. and so multifaceted, i doubt i'll ever see every side of it. but i'll keep turning it over and exploring new crevices as long as my hands respond to the signals my brain is sending. 130207 ... the evil angel on my shoulder you like saying "shared secret", don't you? 130207 ... raze everyday. 130207 ... cocoon why do you feel the need to carry blue on your shoulders? 130208 ... raze i think part of it is feeling like i need to atone for past blather sins. when i first found blue nearly twelve years ago, i was a messed up teenager, and i kind of treated blather as my playground. i was lucky enough not to get raked over the coals for it like some other 'skites were, but i feel like i didn't treat the place with the respect it deserved initially, and i didn't understand my head or my heart well enough to say much of worth even when i did try to pull something meaningful from inside of myself and toss it up there on the screen. a lot of my old blathes embarrass me now. to be completely frank, it was that embarrassment that kept me from doing much more than lurking on blue for more than a decade after the way i melted down in front of everyone in a mess of suicidal self-hatred. i kind of ran away, started fresh here, and it took years before i was comfortable writing without trying to keep certain personal things hidden. i didn't want what i wrote here to be associated with the dreck i'd written in the past using different names. it wasn't until just last month before i was able to break through that psychological block and finally start blathing on blue again, with a new name that i've stuck with (it didn't feel right carrying this one over). it was kind of sad to see it so dead over there, with three or four day periods where the today/yesterday columns wouldn't change because nothing at all was said. i don't mind blather being quiet, but it feels wrong that it should just go completely dark. i thought i might stimulate a little more activity over there. it seems to have worked, at least on some level. i hold myself back from saying too much, because i don't want to ever come near spamming or polluting the place, but i'm trying to say things that mean something to me there now, while making up for lost time and hopefully encouraging a few old or new faces to write a little more, whether or not anything i say resonates with anyone else. the funny thing is, i think blue used to be more of an "everything goes" kind of place (at least once it got really busy over there and the old "rules" flew out the window), while here it was always a little more serious and thoughtful. that's part of the reason i was so skittish about what i said here for so long, and would go months or even years at a time without saying anything at all. now i feel looser over here, more comfortable sharing random thoughts, while the darker thoughts seem to be making a beeline for blue. it does get pretty lonely over there some days, though. so i spend a lot more time here, where it's generally felt more like home for the past ten years, and where i feel like there's more of a communal energy to swim around in. that was a very long-winded answer...hopefully some of it made sense. (it's good to see you back here again, by the way) 130208 ... PeeT it is very good to see cocoon back. please stick around. become a butterfly. 130208 ... PeeT each day is a lifetime. think so? 130209 ... raze that's an interesting thought for someone who feels as much of a sensation of time having sped up as i do. some days seem to be gone before i can even decide what kind of days they've been at all. i think this is more an issue of perspective than time actually moving faster (a friend once explained it as the perceived movement of time being relative to how long we've been alive, and how much time we've experienced the passage of), but whatever it is, it's definitely felt. i do think it's possible to have days that feel like entire lifetimes in microcosm, because of the range of emotions felt and the experiences had. i can't remember the last time i had a day that felt like it would never end (there used to be so many of these), but there have been days that ended with a feeling of being completely exhausted and scraped out, as if years had curled up inside of hours when i wasn't looking. sometimes it's been a feeling of having accomplished some worthwhile things and earned my rest. other times i've dreaded having to wake up the next day. each new day is a blank slate, really. every day we wake up different from who we were the day before. the changes are just too subtle most of the time to register. so maybe it's not that each day is a lifetime, but more a case of each day being a new life. i feel like a snake eating its own tail. stop me before i swallow too much of myself! 130209 ... PeeT if the grim reaper came to your door, what would you say in an effort to dissuade? 130214 ... raze "hey...if you let me live a while longer, i'll write a song cycle for you to sing, and i'll play all the instruments for you, and record the whole thing, all free of charge. i'll even tour with you if you feel like going out on the road. haven't you always wanted a venue to express yourself? you've just been so busy taking souls all this time, you've lost sight of what's really important. you've neglected your own emotional needs. you know, you've got a beautiful voice. it would be a terrible thing to waste. come on in and sit by the piano, and i'll play you something i've been working on that i think would be perfect for your vocal range..." appealing to the grim reaper's sense of vanity and all, and trying to turn what skills i have to my advantage while bartering. to that end, i once had a horrible drug experience during which i was sure i was dying, which is kind of where this idea comes from; i found myself singing to satan (unseen, but very tangibly sensed), who i was convinced was about to take my soul, asking him to allow me to use my songs to spread his message, thinking he might leave me with some amount of freedom if he thought i might be of use to him, and even if i really was going to hell, at least i'd still be able to make music. that's a long story. but it makes me laugh now, in a twisted way...not least because i'm not really a religious person, and yet when i thought i was a goner, things split into very pronounced "god" and "satan" camps. maybe in times of great drug-induced distress, whatever we believe is stripped away, and what we're left with are those things we were taught as children, warped by fear and whatever chemicals are running around in our brains. needless to say, there would be no more smoking questionable pot out of a bong for me after that. 130214 what's it to you? who go blather from