Piotr Sikora at Meet Factory did a little interview with me a few weeks ago. I think he's the cat's pyjamas and I feel lucky to have been able to sit down and talk with him.
Or if you want to hear what I would sound like if I was Czech.
.... it's still shit eating grins.
I think the world is mostly made of fiction. People talk a lot about how they only like REAL things, but what are these real things? Atoms flying around the sun? Leaves green in springtime? These things are all rooted in theories of the world that started as a fiction of sorts.
Pure, fantastical fiction is the solution that the real world of a crystal grows in. On the edge of this growth is where we all live. We conjure and place narrative like legos hidden on identical colored carpet. We wince in pain at our missteps in these fabrications: reorder and reassess. But it’s a play between these supposed real things and fiction that create our story. To believe in one side alone is to isolate oneself from failure, but also hide from a certain truth.
I’ve caught myself thinking a lot about this divide recently. Between Real and Fiction or what could probably be more easily categorized in this day and age as what we argue about and what we discuss. My head has felt so swarmed with what is the supposed Real — the constant influx of news and statements from others — that the wonder of the world has become less visible in the surfaces of the environment around me.
The problem is that at this boundary an unknown is felt as very present. Since moving to LA my car, Nemo, has been the brunt of a lot of violence: catalytic converter stolen, window smashes, both locks broken, antenna ripped off (this was my own fault during a backup involving an unseen tree limb). Nemo was given to me by my father and at times when life isn’t feeling like it’s going the most optimal direction it’s hard not to see the failure of a son in the misgivings that the passed on car has endured. Failures in this context usually mean a sensation of wishing I have achieved more in some way; it’s a moment when I can see myself about 10 years ago and having my dad tell me that he’s worried that I want something very big in the world and what will happen if I don’t achieve it.
This moment with Nemo becomes a weird stick balanced on a word that exists in a story told of something real and something that is fiction.
I’ve tried to be more thoughtful in my approach to the world in order not to let strong flash floods pull these words down dark storm drains. During a period of time when we seem to always be in constant conversation with each other, it feels a bit like we are skimming the cream off our experience before the fat content can really reach a good percentage. I’ve been trying to bask in a moment a bit longer and absorb it before being seen.
I guess I’ve just been trying to get back to seeing more fiction in the world
When I was young, I’d walk home from school some days on the aptly named High School Road, heading straight down the center of the road stepping on all the worn yellow ceramic pavement markers; parts of their circular shape worn away like slot canyons in Utah, feeling my sneakers slip off their contours like the details of so many memories.
I can remember walking with my friend, David, who’d walk the whole way home on his toes to make his calves stronger: he had huge calves. Later on in life he’d end up managing a bar that occupied that unusual ground between a strip club and airport bar: lots of brightly colored shots and too many teeth in everyone’s mouth.
I’ve been feeling a lot recently that my memories have begun to crystalize in a way that I find a bit unsettling. The ability for a memory to mean lots of things has disappeared and I find myself looking back into a field of statutes. Each memory has suddenly become a monument to a single idea of a single moment, but somehow removed a bit from my own experience of it. It maybe feels a bit like that last scene of No Country for Old Men (or last page depending on how you consumed it) where our memories become dreams, and our dreams become strangers to exactly who we are; just dust sprinkled on tracks of a car long past.
Maybe it’s a bit the feeling of the world becoming very factual in a way. I’ve talked with people who believe fiction is not needed as a genre as there is plenty in reality to look at in wonder. I would argue that the parts of reality we take wonder in, are parts that still have an unknown to them and therefore are fictions in our mind. We converse around these ideas of this “real” thing and in fact are telling stories of the same memory of the present in a different way.
One person tells the story of a road dotted in yellow ceramic disks, while another tells the story of a road that rose and fell with waves of emotion for future ex-girlfriends.
I’ve been having a funny relationship with forgetting these days; the sensation of being on the cusp of suddenly seeing a past self as an Other instead of Me. Which, I guess, is something that happens throughout life, although we hardly see this progress as it is usually the carving of slot canyons of the soul; long nights and days over desert outlooks.
I catch myself looking at people in my life and wondering “who did I once know you as?” and there’s a lot of trajectories that suddenly become apparent, like fireworks shot out of one of those tubes I can hold on 4th of July.
I’ve been thinking a lot of a friend I had long ago, who I fell out of touch with. Back then, word was that he had just gotten in a car and disappeared and maybe had become a chemist, or a professor, or started a company.
Now new words have trickled in of sad posts on Facebook about being a single Dad and the heaviness of a certain type of life. Part of me heard this and hoped instead that he was trolling people in a way that he found funny. I remember long ago when I was in high school I had gotten an email from my doctor (or it appeared to be so) that they had found some unusual things in my blood work that had just been done; this had just been that friend spoofing emails, which back then was as easy as cut and pasting sentences from Wikipedia.
If the medium is the message and we are the collection of thoughts and interactions of a world around us — a medium in flux — we become messages for a period of time that we have coalesced around; a jellyfish caught on the mind’s paddle.
I think at moments it becomes startling to realize this message and to wonder if this is really who we are.
Today everyone was shouting from cars that were fishbowls on wheels; voices were muffled and eyes wide as the panoramic view of the future extended in front of us all.
We glanced with cartoon eyes at each other and hoped that we would never see each other again.
