One Day Everything You Love Will Die

"Why do people have to die?"
"To make life important."

I forgot how much I love Six Feet Under. I've been watching a lot of it lately on bootleg DVDs, considering I'm stuck on my friends' couch and they don't have cable and I've got lots of my time on my hands before my NYC departure in two weeks. I remember my parents didn't get HBO until I was in high school, so the first night we had it I decided to curl up on the couch by myself and watch nothing but hours of it so I could see if its programing was all the life-changing, creative masterpiece bullshit it was always advertised to be. Luckily, I found myself at the very begining of a SFU mini-marathon, and the tale of disfunctionality that was the Fisher & Sons Funeral Home became the cornerstone of my television investment for the next five years. SFU has this unexplainable, quirky addictiveness that hooks you in from the first episode and doesn't let go until you've seen the whole fucking Fisher family die, quite literally, and somehow that same invigorating lightening has struck again. The brilliance is still there, the acting impeccable and the writing layered with an offbeat imagination that somehow hides a firm, brutal honesty on the importance of life and the meaning of death behind layers of dead bodies and musical numbers and explicit sexuality. As a result, I'm only more hungry for the creativity that awaits in the world of brave, professional New York theatre. Well, there's that, and also the fact that I'm dreaming constantly about death and my parents' divorce and my teeth falling out. Death not so much in the morbid sense, but in the dream within a dream type way where a space ship falls on my house or Matthew Fox from Lost sets out on a mission of mass extermination across the UNC campus. The divorce is, well, divorce. But the teeth, that's the weird part. I've always had dreams where my teeth fall out, but in these, I pull my own teeth out. And my father is usually watching, or my cousin is drowning in a pool, or I'm smoking goo with aliens and I punch my teeth out to impress their extraterrestrial ways. When I tried to Google the meaning the only thing that came up was the idea that Freud describes dreams about teeth falling out as unconscious manifestations of guilt about masturbation. On the "fuck no" flip side of the equation, I'm sure it just has something to do with anxiety or stress or a big change or something clinical like that.

I blame this all on you, Claire Fisher. Damn you and your pretty face and your fucked up family.

The No Talent Show

Take a step back and ask, what is your lived experience?

"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

-Theodore Roosevelt,
via Wilderness Wisdom

This is Carolina United, this will always be Carolina United, and this is the hope for a Carolina United. This experience will remain one of passion, grace, sacrifice, knowledge, depth, inspiration, and unabashed honesty for as long as I hope to keep fighting the good fight. Goodnight United, goodnight.

Grassy Creek

it sang to them
to these fawns of the whistling machines
spoke in tongues of knots
of callouses and caves
they perked their ears to the sound
so silent and stunning
a melody of mammoth
a groove of gargantuan
not wanting, not needing
yet still they danced
heaving in the overgrowth of the disco
a rural regime
the moonshine militia
marching and carving into the boom boom beckoning
of the bang bang beat
they climbed up to it, onto it, into it
so desperate to be part
this swallowing sound, the sweetly suffocating
they burrowed past mothers
past fathers, past martyrs
to the thundering thumps of the heart
and they only lived to listen
and they sang the song of the hills