Do I so worry you,
You need to hurry to...
My side?
It's very kind.
But it's to no avail,
I don't want the bail,
I promise you --
Everything will be just fine.
-- Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine
I'm fine, Kittens. You're all very sweet to be concerned; your sympathies and empathy are welcome, but furrowed brows are banned.
At the risk of sounding like a sixteen year old (there are worse things to sound like, aren't there?), I'm kind of in love with that Fiona Apple song right now. It's the first track on my running mix and it's a handy summation of a theme I haven't been able to shake for the last few months - being okay with being uncomfortable. (This is going to get a little crunchy for some of you but I swear my interest in crystals is only piqued when they're under Waterford or Swarovski labels.)
It crept into my mind again a week or so ago with Courtney at Ed Hamell's show in Chicago. I snuck off to the bar to make two quick notes. One reads, "Blood of the Wolf -- nostalgia, good-old-bad-old days, heady on the margins," the other, "being uncomfortable because something's wrong vs. because something's different and/or outside your control; it's no good trying to steer the ocean."
The 'Blood of the Wolf' thing we'll ignore for the moment as it screams of me disappearing up my own ass even more than usual, but the second one...
The good stuff, the marrow, the jewel lives in that place where I'm not cool, where my hands are too big and my corduroys are making noises and my hair is fuzzy and I'm panicked because I can't control what you think of me.
There's a thing that happens sometimes when I'm working, a kind of sickness that oozes up into my throat, a panic, a flush... a discomfort that I can only equate to the awkward horror of adolescence. I'm learning to sit through it, and if I'm feeling brave, to find it, pin it down and open it up like a fetal pig on the last day of seventh grade. It almost always turns out to be one of two things - I'm either trying to force the story in a direction it does not want to go or, more often, it or he or she wants to go someplace that scares me. I'm a deceptively fragile little Vulcan, you see. Sad things stick to me. Someone else's "wouldn't it be awful if..." hypothetical no sooner leaves his lips than it's off his mind, but I'll carry his imaginary consequences with me for years. I don't know why. It's as if I think I'll need them. Like that half sandwich I always saved, wrapped in a napkin in the tiny patent leather purse I carried as a child. I've had to cover my eyes and ears in movies to avoid hysteria and so you see it only follows that I'm quick to tremble when the people I've made up or found or cobbled together from popsicle sticks and glue wander off my pretty path and into the dark where God-knows-what might await them.
But popsicle people don't think like me. They're not concerned for their safety or my imagined reputation, they offer no allegiance to the outline it took me three days to lay down and they know that the story lives in the in-between places, on planes, in subway cars, in claustrophobic rooms filled with Golf magazines, in the minute right before the audition, in the unbearable anxiety of waiting for the phone to ring, on the Cyclone, when there's nothing to do but throw your hands up and scream, the story lives within your ability to guide it but definitively outside your control and the popsicle people know that to find it they must be deaf to your shrieking. They steel themselves, step off the path and set out into the dark.
I certainly haven't been shopping for any new shoes, and
I certainly haven't been spreading myself around
I still only travel by foot and by foot, it's a slow climb
But I'm good at being uncomfortable so I can't stop changing all the time...
If there was a better way to go then it would find me
I can't help it, the road just rolls out behind me
Be kind to me or treat me mean
I'll make the most of it, I'm an extraordinary machine
Posted by kellysue at
03:22 PM |
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