Pep talk.

This is it. Graduation day.

That seems so puny to say. But it is – graduation day. Everything is going to be okay. Writing that cuts like fire across thought and time but still is reactive to the moment? That’s graduation day. Time the revelator, revelating that this graduation day – hey-hey. Been a lonnnnnnnggggg three years. Pleasure. Pain. Rage. Insecurity. Pride. Fulfillment. Grace. Forgiveness. Pettiness. It all came out at this college, this bourgeoise institution of gatekeeping, this receptacle of higher learning (and shit), this complicit institution, this training ground, this jungle gym, this very expensive resume stuffer. This school.

Columbia University. Friend to Israel. Proponent of the world market. Rich person’s play pool. And, quite legitimate, receptacle of learning (and shit.) But I hope you hear that there’s some good stuff mixed in there. Because I love some of my teachers. I’m grateful for what I’ve learned. I’m not going to try to write it down, that seems tedious. But at least I was exposed to many, many, many more modes of directing.

Wondering what my teachers think of me. Anxiety, because I may well want them to say something amazing, holding this graduation up to the standards of the last two, there’s no need for that. I’m going to have to have some kind of…flexibility today. Some openness to whatever may come, however it goes, however it feels. No emotion unwelcome (even if unpleasant) or denied, no experience wrong.

What am I talking about here? What am I writing? Is this some kind of pep talk for me? Perhaps. How will I get through the long day. I’ll get through it with my family. My fiancée. Her family. My friends. And my colleagues.

Is this cynical? Yes, probably. I’m allowing the thoughts to bubble. Consider me the coffee maker of my thoughts – I don’t need to do much, they’re already warm. I just let them percolate and drop out the bottom of the basket into the carafe.

No stories today. Nothing in me. (Well, a girl in a cape – for a second – a split second. And where was it going? Why do I think that means she was going to jump out of a fourth story window? And was she meant to survive? I don’t know. My brain is a strange place…)

Katie. And Frankie. And Matthew. And Ruthie. And Sammy. Five.

Mom and Dad. Here today to see me graduate from Columbia.

I wish I was someone else. Or I should say, thinking, unpleasant, self-doubt. Worry. But I sit here (this always comes…) in the sun-streaming room even though the sky is grey the sun is shining through, with my art on the wall trailing…along.

Why am I writing today? I might learn something. It feels good? It kind of does. I’m thinking of grey skies, green fields, horses. A knight who’s not a knight. A squire in a kinght’s armor and colors, riding fiercely across a green field under a grey sky. A stone with a circular hole in the middle, the shape in the hole of two half rings, almost together. When we put our rings together.

We make Captain Planet.

It’s not that I’m not a storyteller, it’s that I don’t seem to give myself permission to be one. Constantly trying to do it right, or not do it until I can, but that will never work. Nor is it an exclusive club I’m trying to get into. It’s an exercise, an experience, a way of living

Life.

The mother tree, branches spread out in all directions. Up near the top, her bald crown, the stripped branches. Someone is climbing. Me? Am I climbing that mother tree?

I’m gonna make it. There were times I said, don’t think too much, don’t worry, don’t do anything rash, just put your head down and make it to graduation.

I did. I am here. Here I am. And I could have not been I could have graduated next year but I didn’t .

I’m graduating now. And it’s just an … event. A demarcation of time. Apparently for my pride and pleasure. Can I make that number 1 today?

No extra smiles, less I feel like smiling.

No people pleasing talk, less I feel like talking.

No proving, no self-flagellating, no appeasing, less I feel like those things. A chance for me to appreciate my accomplishments.

Accomplishments I’m scared of, because they were hard, some of them, and what if I have no more?

Accomplishments I’m afraid to be proud of, less someone takes them away from me.

Hope not.

Nay, thinking, unpleasant, fear. That’s okay too. Unpleasant. But it’s allowed to be there. There’s something deeper. There’s a reason I’m doing what I’m doing. By doing it, perhaps I’ll find out.

Time ticks into the last minute here. Soon out into the living room to have lunch with Rebecca. Softness reigns, entering my center, my chest, smoothing what’s hard there. Breath, the liquidator.

Breathing. That’s all I’m doing. That’s all I have to do today. Breathe.

I smile.

Ferdinand Knab – A Fountain by a Lake in the Foreground – 1899

The Magic

Progress!

Climbing that mountain (never mind there’s an ocean of mountains on the other side…)

Crossing that river (never mind it pulls me downstream…)

I’m – becoming – shifting – growing – and soon to – to what?! To…To what? To ascend? To rise up to heaven, pulling against my own bootstraps?

Nahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

A release of gas.

I’m overthinking it. Here’s the truth: thinking, pleasant, pleasure. Indulging.

Vladimir Ashkenazy – Chopin: Nocturne No. 2 in E-Flat Major, Op. 9 No. 2 – 1983

Listening to some of my favorite ever calm music, thinking of Proust, thinking of San Francisco in the summertime, thinking of Midsummer, thinking of oceans of writing, thinking of my shoulder, thinking of my ring, thinking of Chopin, and remembering…

The carpet in Matt’s room was…not clean. It had things ground into it, yeah, but it also had the smell. It was the smell of old pit bull, the smell of wet dog, the smell of mildew, and the smell of long-cooked food, smells that had baked into the walls, and the…carpet. Still that little room became paradise for us, my girl and me, when we moved downstairs from the Witkin residence to the apartment they rented us on the floor below.

Jeanie Witkin with all her wild, dark, blown out hair, and her lesbian erotica.

But for Megan and myself it was that perfect kind of paradise. It was put your mattress on the floor paradise. It was lie naked on the mattress, butt up, paradise. It was…paradise.

What did Megan do with her time all day because I remember some of my own time waiting in that apartment for her to come home. As if she was taking a class at UC Berkeley or something, or maybe back working at my parents’ clinic again, a brief month of paid work before we both went back to UCLA for our last years.

Big mistake. The big break was coming down the pipeline – like a huge dump, just waiting to fall on my face.

She would go out, and I would linger in the feeling of accomplishment I had at that time. Lying on the mattress. Going into the tiny kitchen to cook…what? What did I eat at that time, when I was home, and by myself, with my pants off? Tofu maybe. Avocadoes. Megan taught me how to make sandwiches, not just put in that old meat in cheese, how about a slice of teriyaki tofu? How about a thin spread of hummus or cream cheese? How about, just for kicks, a big hank of sprouts? Megan taught me how to make sandwiches.

I was feeling that accomplishment then. Listening to Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, walking around in the kitchen, while Megan made pasta and I did the sauce, or maybe just put on the music. Listening to a podcast from Pitchfork about the shortcomings of The Suburbs, which they said were few, and Megan saying, “I don’t want to listen to any podcast that has that garbage opinion.” We loved that fucking album.

Arcade Fire – The Suburbs – 2010

It has come to epitomize a time for me, that Jeannie Witkin time, that living below the old Midsummer house time, and the image that stuck with me: all the ghosts of our friends, the busy activity from the months before, now gone, but still faintly audible from upstairs. We ended that fulfilling experience, threw ourselves over the finish line, and then lived below the empty house full of old ghosts. As if those were the only ghosts that mattered or that had ever lived in that house. As if our beautiful, irresponsible summer was some sort of apocalypse, after which? Only dearth and destruction and death. The pitter-patter of little ghost feet running…

As if we were epochal.

I am about to graduate Columbia University, and am tempted to think of it as equally epochal. I did it! I’m proud of my work! I learned so much! The world is my oyster – open and quivering – waiting for me. To slurp.

It’s an illusion, of course. Better to listen to seductive, intimate music from Chopin, and to write about these feelings, than to eat them and to run out into the world, naked, waiting for some great bird to just pick me up and carry me into the future. It doesn’t happen. It is an illusion. But that is NOT to say that I have not accomplished anything.

I have.

At times because of colitis or exhaustion or shame or embarrassment I thought I would die. Dramatic, I know. But I thought I would stop. I didn’t. I kept going. And the future is waiting. And while the just-touch-it-and-it-falls-open oyster image is completely fabricated, and is not how the world works, I am excited, as Tobias Fúnke says, for the magic.

Arrested Development – The Magic – 2003

Meanwhile, dismay at the brutal-horrible-genocidal-unfair-bourgeoise reality of it all. But I am not biting the hand that feeds me. I’m looking at and eating my food.

Knowledge – excitement – growth – change – and the future.

I’m here for the magic. Has anyone seen the magic, please? One admission ticket to the magic, as Doctor Tobias Fúnke says, one magic.

I’m hungry for it. My hands are open. I’m ready for the magic.

And though it is an illusion, and it won’t feel the way I think it will feel, and will come all mixed in with heartbreak, disillusionment, exhaustion, struggle, death, and destruction…I am ready for the magic. That’s all part of the magic.

And I want my turn. I want to eat the magic. Just like we did in that little apartment.

One magic please. Order’s up.

I’m ready.

Let’s go.

Let’s go.

Let’s go.

The magic.

Laurent Grasso – Studies into the Past – 2009