Yearning

I had every intention of having this be like a meandering, conclusionless diary entry, but i ended up making it about revolution again.

The other day, i was thinking about the phenomenon of sending little thank you texts after a hookup so i decided to write a poem about it, and at first it was like cute and fun and flirtatious but then i decided to get all pretentious about it cuz i’d tentatively titled it Ode to the Post-Hookup Text (and subtitled it Or Mom, I Finally Remembered to Send a Thank You Letter) so i was like well if i’m gonna call it that, then i should structure it like an actual ode, at least loosely, so i started to do that, and i was like ok wait this should just be like a back and forth of texts cuz that kinda fits the structure, so basically what ensued after that was me getting pulled into to the soul-sucking perfectionism of trying to craft a text message, which is like a bad enough experience in real life so why the hell would i make myself do that unnecessarily for literal made up texts that i had no real reason to respond to because they’re made up, and then to top it all off the poem ended up being trash so what was the point of all that torment even, fucking masochist. Writing poetry sucks.

An old¹ friend and i went on a hike a few months back to catch up for the first time in a while. We talked about love, about relationships, about breakups. We talked about looking for peace in solitude, about how no amount of Self Acceptance could override the pain of isolation and heartache thrust upon us by the nuclear social structure of cisheteropatriarchy. She asked me about non-monogamy, saying that it seemed all good and well on paper but that she just didn’t see herself getting caught up in the wave, and i told her she didn’t have to, that non-monogamy isn’t for everyone and that it certainly isn’t the cure-all that some people want it to be or claim that it is, and though i did wryly point out that all of the hangups she’d expressed to me about non-monogamy (like jealousy and all that) were things that also happened in monogamous relationships (sometimes happened there even more), i ultimately proposed that a more pertinent change of outlook in the face of disillusionment with monogamous relationships might simply be accepting and embracing that feelings, relationships, life, everything doesn’t need to last forever to be “good,” to be meaningful. I mentioned Wong Kar-Wai then, weakly parroting what i’d heard others say about how beautifully he captures fleeting love, the poignancy he bestows upon passions that last only a moment—fiery and intense . . . and now gone.

Things don’t need to last forever to be honored, respected, cherished. In fact, nothing lasts forever, so for anything at all to matter means that brief things must matter, too, that endless cycles of endings and beginnings and beginnings and endings must be good. (The world is in a constant state of change and all that good stuff that Mao Zedong and Octavia Butler and other great thinkers have said better than i’m saying it now.) I watched Fallen Angels not long after this hike (on a rainy day when i had no energy but needed to feel Productive (because then i’d have Worth)), and it got me thinking that maybe his films aren’t actually the best argument for short-lived love after all. Cuz isn’t it just us as the audience reaping the benefits of the films’ aesthetic, cathartic, artful beauty? Don’t the characters themselves often just end up with aching, yearning hearts? What does it matter that pain can be represented beautifully? Pain being beautiful doesn’t make it not pain. Maybe i’m just being cynical, his movies are certainly damn compelling meditations on loving, connecting, relating, yearning. Beyond that, who cares, i’m over it, next subject.

That poem i wrote? It wasn’t actually perfectionism that made the process so painful. It was subjecting myself to that god-awful feeling of trying desperately to be Normal, to be nonchalant, to avoid the embarrassment of being caught wanting. With texts like these, there’s this immediate self-censorship, this need to be blasé (which inherently contradicts the premise of Putting Yourself Out There), and of course, my autism is at play here, too, any hint of misinterpretation or negation tugging menacingly at the threads of my wellbeing, saying make sure if you are being hated and criticized for something that it is for something true otherwise you will DIE and also don’t ever step into uncertainty(that is, do not ever cede ground to an imbalance of power) or you will face being-contradicted-or-derailed-or-condescended-to and then you will DOUBLE DIE. It's embarrassing—passé—to fall for someone you hook up with or someone you’re seeing casually, thus a fear that the moment it is revealed that you have needs or wants or desires or hopes or dreams (and that you are therefore necessarily dissatisfied to some degree with your current state of being (meaning that you are sad and a loner and a loser and pathetic)), the validity of your conviction that casual sex is a sustainable, worthwhile practice seems to be undermined, your efforts at connection now mangled into some immature desperation that pegs you Outcast.² All this to say, i begin questioning myself every time i feel compelled to initiate friendliness with someone i’m hooking up with, like are They right (whoever They are)? Am i falling for this person? The thing is, i’m really not. The bated breath when you send a post-hookup text and the heartbeat skipped when you get one are not indicative of having fallen in love or even of having developed a crush. It’s excitement born from something seeping through the cracks of broken infrastructure into the crevices of your bruised heart. It’s the longing deep down³ for friendship, for belonging, for community.

On the bus one morning, i wrote another poem, this one about LA. A love letter of sorts. Except i don’t know if it’s really about LA. I think i wanted it to be, i think i tried for it to be, but i think it’s yet again about yearning. Or i guess it’s not about yearning but is itself yearning. Yearning for some kind of collective identity i can cling to in an attempt to fill the void of not having a community. And it’s not like this collective identity is entirely nonexistent, i absolutely do feel a kinship and a camaraderie with other people from here, but that’s beside the point, the point is i wrote a poem and honestly it’s pure fluff held together by aesthetics, making connections that aren’t particularly significant . . . and yet, in a way, all of this irrelevance becomes relevant in that it reveals this underlying desperation for some source of connection, of identity, of unity, something that says that even when i am exhausted on the bus on my own on my way to work knowing that when work is done i will get back on the bus more exhausted and come home and get in bed and wake up still exhausted and still alone, at least i can console myself with the knowledge that i am part of something that is bigger than myself, kept company by disparate connections whose formation as “community” has, in reality, less structural integrity than the first two piggies’ ill-fated homes but which is made real by my words, decidedly casual and unassuming and oh fine this time i’ll just share the damn poem:

sun peeking but u cant see it yet. dawn light a thick gray film enshrouding lifelessconcretelandscape. U will kill the next person who says there is no winter here

- The older woman wearing scrubs on the bus nearly misses her stop in front of the hospital again. She gets up from her seat in the back after no less than half a dozen others have already gotten off, and scrambles toward the door while other passengers indifferently yell “back door” on her behalf.

remember when u were 12 and u went to the tar pits and did a british accent (well, an english accent) and ur mom was so annoyed and kept telling u to knockitoff

- Plastic surgery office window papered with stock image model, black marker teardrop under her eye and shaded-in tooth decorating her vapid smile

u need to schedule ur goddamn electrolysis consultation already u fucking procrastinator

- Lamppost banner depicts Dudamel in action, his curls bouncing high but still intact, not yet sweated out—it must be early in the symphony still.

when u were a BOY and any time u slicked back ur hair ,and as it reCurled : ur Mom would say uhavehairjustlikedudamel

- 2Pac poster leans awkwardly against window of some commercial high-rise on Wilshire, plastic venetian blinds closed behind it

u compliment someones pants at the hollywood farmers market and he says thank u and if ur into microdosing… and hands u a business card with a qr code that takes u to a website with some pun in the name, not «fun guy» but something like that

- Gray jansport hangs low on shoulders of teenager with teal hair and tapered gauges. He’s late to school

(u know this because you yourself are late to work.)

- Highlights of a (purple) past life peek through the brown mush littering the sidewalk beneath the jacaranda tree in July

sun setting U CAN SEE THE OCEAN BCUZ U R ON A MOUNTAIN AND THE SMOG IS BEING NICE 2DAY u remembered to bring a blanket this time (but decide to bring a chair next time instead). Sun sets. Ur back hurts. lets get out of here before the mountain lions eat us

George Jackson writes the following in Blood In My Eye:

During the nationalist period of the collective oppressed mentality promoted by the establishment, the movement is frozen, static. This is the level of development favored by the oppressor, the artless empty ideals of the pseudo-nation, love and respect for a flag, a nationalistic song or beat, the fervent belief in a bond or organization which arises out of a thwarted longing for real community. The establishment does everything in its power to ensure that revolutionary rage is redirected into empty outlets which provide pressure releases for desires that could become dangerous if allowed to progress. At this stage in the development of monopoly capitalism, there are two alternatives: aggressive revolutionary activity or calcification. (emphasis added)

Loving this city and loving other people from here isn’t inherently pseudo-nationalistic, especially cuz i’m not trying to flatten the depth and vastness of a metropolis so massive and so varied—in fact that’s something i’ve always harped on about: it’s dishonest to try and assert some singular, definitive experience of “LA,” and i love that about this place. But the reason i wrote that poem wasn’t love. It was loneliness. Like if i have nothing else, at least i have the familiarity of the jacarandas, whose blossoms make me feel at home. But i can’t resign myself to mere symbolism. I don’t want to fetishize the sexy existentialism of pain and solitude; i don’t want to just aestheticize my yearning and then call it a day.⁴

On the subject of yearning, i often pine for the internet i grew up with, when Flash games were everywhere and the cyberspace of the day allowed freedom and imagination to persist as it dwindled elsewhere, suffocated by the ever-tightening leash of a 2000s childhood in a car-dependent suburb. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the agency there is in social media like MySpace or even Tumblr, as opposed to the more uniform and constricting Instagram or TikTok. Bring back knowing basic HTML! I want pages or profiles or blogs or sites whose structures we tailor to our various unique purposes, I want a cyberzine renaissance, i want to play—i want a rubber ball of a brain, bouncing off the walls and stretching into every corner and crevice of the world, i want to be a sponge soaking up information and squeezing it back out again.

I’ve been watching a lot of old movies lately, stuff from the 1910s and even ’00s. When i was a kid, i loved making movies. On my own, i’d usually just play make-believe, but with friends, i’d make movies. We’d use a camcorder or one of our moms’ phones or something like that, and off we went. On one playdate i remember making a faux commercial for “Scream Cheese.” The commercial consisted of me pitching the product ramblingly and impatiently and then, well, screaming.

My mom had one of those plastic white MacBooks and this was back before Apple started really shoving Final Cut down everyone’s throats, so iMovie still actually had a ton of functionality, and i would spend forever figuring out how to clone myself or mess around with green screen. One of the things i really like about watching early film is that the people making them were often just fucking playing around, they were making this shit up as they went, and i say that not to undervalue the labor or technique or care or thought that went into what they did but just to say that there wasn’t this bullshit of having to Study all these Films to learn the Right Way to make a movie. If they were starting from scratch, so can i. (So can we.) I want to learn how to play again.

Most of us have little to no community—like real, actual community, and i hear everyone talking about wanting it all the time, but i hear us talking about self-consciousness and trepidation, too. Will we accept this world bullying us into a fear of vulnerability so great that we deny ourselves the power of truly feeling our desires because we cannot sit in the discomfort that precedes it? We need to yearn. Yearning, i think, is the foundation for dreaming. And oh how we need to dream, to imagine, to feel, to think—and to do so with breadth, with elasticity. If we can’t look at a cloud and see an elephant, how will we ever be able to look at imperialism and see a paper tiger?

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1 “Old” here being a reference to the length of our relationship and not the fact that she’s Gen X. . . ;) I usually love making fun of older friends for being older than me, but i’m realizing now that i've never done that with her. She feels ageless to me in a way. Or maybe ageful is a more apt way to put it . . . above age—full of youthful spirit, grounded in age-earned wisdom; and intentionally transcending age, respecting children and elders alike, not as equals per se but as people. I love her very dearly.

2 Like that one Black Mirror episode, Nosedive

3 Listen to this Esperanza Spalding song

4 Like maybe Fleabag (confession scene, etc) is counterrevolutionary lol (read my post about revolutionary art if you haven’t already)