YouTube - Commitment Ceremony - Julie Goldman Kate McKinnon

YouTube - Commitment Ceremony - Julie Goldman Kate McKinnon

2 Short Poems

Cash, grass or ass…

In line at 7-11

Surfer dude,

proudly and with conspiratorial glee announces

“I’m getting margarine! And this time it’s not for rent…”

Head-drop

It all makes sense now

I actually was dropped on my head.

After I sit with this new information for a while,

I ask my mother:

“From how far up?”

She shrugs and reassures me:

“Not far…really, not far.”

False Hope is dead. Long live False Hope!

Finally got my letter from Juilliard.

The wait is over.


Memorial service for False Hope to be held tonight. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to The Foundation for Real Hope, c/o The Commission To Figure Out Just How The Hell I Can Get From Here To There * When It Feels Like The Momentum From Columbia Was My Last Best Hope And I Piddled It Away On Ill-Conceived, Poorly Executed And Grandiose Plans To Apply For Admission Only To The Most Prestigious Playwriting Programs In The World, Somehow Hoping That My Admission To Any (Or All) Of These Impossibly Exclusive Programs Would Be A Message From God And The Message Would Be: "I Love You, Kid" And There Would Be A Postscript, Handwritten, That Said: "You're In. Now You Can Stop Wasting Your Time Being Afraid That I Gave You Keys To Unlock Doors That Are Within Castles To Which You Will Never, Ever Gain Entrance, No Matter How Much Wishing You Do. I'm Not That Cruel. Your Crippling Weakness, Your Mind, Is About To Become Your Greatest Asset. Keep Dreaming. I insist."

* ("There" representing a place where I can have the opportunity to use my actual talents in an atmosphere where they are artistically and financially encouraged, even the slightest bit, in a real and concrete way that involves more than words, but actually, really only money would be the sign that I have arrived, am appreciated, because, sadly, the only way I can judge my worth and the worth of my work is by how much money I make and what I really mean is not the Opportunity To Show My Work And Have It Appreciated, but Not Having To Do Any Work And Being Appreciated For My Essence, For My Potential, For The Brilliance That IS Within Me, Yet Hasn't Yet Found Its Way Into The World In Any Form That Can Be Exchanged Or Displayed Or Submitted For Money.)

My Life As A Blog

My Life As A Blog.

Like my father before me

(before life, with its meds and its wives and children and jobs and chronic medical conditions and jagged remains of shattered dreams dammed his stream of consciousness, or made it go underground),

I am a monologist.

I have always loved to talk and the people who have become my long-term friends are those wonderful folks who (often) enjoy listening to me, sometimes find me funny, and always accept me for the babbling brook that I am. Are these people saints? Perhaps. Do they never tire of the endless flow from my mouth? Of course they do. Sometimes they even have to step away from the banks of my swelling river of words for a while, if only because the sound of the water makes them feel like they have to pee. But, they come back. And sometimes I get to lollygag on their shores or play in their rapids and sometimes our streams cross and we all get wet and a fun time is had by all.

(Even though it sounds like it, I am not into watersports. At least, not yet.)

But, I don’t love these rare and special people only because they listen to me and laugh at my observations and love me. They also speak, though not in monologues

(although I do encourage them, fond of the form as I am),

and I love to listen to them even when they aren't speaking about me or something directly related to me

(and yet, let’s face it, almost everything is directly related to me in some way, being, as I am, the Piece Of Shit At The Center Of The Universe, or POSATCOTU for short).

I find them almost as fascinating as I find myself, and far more consistently delightful. And when I am low, and blue, and feeling mostly useless…when I am out of patience with myself and all I can see when I look back at the (almost) 37 years since I was carved out of my mother's body is:

1. the consistently unrealized potential


2. the overdependence on others


3. the learned helplessness


4. the victim mentality


5. and the countless examples of brilliantly planned and executed self-sabotage…

I can think of these people and understand that we do not see the same things when we look at me.

These friends are kind and encouraging and generous with their time and laughter and gentle (sometimes) acknowledgment of my many broken places and unwillingness to see me in the harsh light in which I see myself and they actively encourage me to replace the bulb (is it just one bulb? I thought it was an arena concert's worth of lighting trusses.) with one less likely to be used as a skin-singeing torture device due to its high wattage, perhaps one of those bluish ones that simulates sunlight or those new fluorescent ones that are good for the environment and last forever and don't really flicker like the old ones, making everything look like washed-out despair.)

When I am worthless to myself,
I know I have value to these people.*

* except when I convince myself that they're just too polite to tell me to go away, leave them alone, grow up, stop being such a lazy-ass whiner, etc… (tape #37, "I am a complete waste of space and time and the only organisms on earth that are happy that I exist are the plants and trees for whom I convert oxygen into carbon dioxide, and the bugs and bacteria and fungi that will consume my body when I die, unless I'm cremated or something, and it looks like the fungi can't wait, I've got that yellow toenail thing and I should get medication for it before my insurance from school runs out, but I won't and it will progressively worsen until it covers my entire body and who cares anyway because I'm such a fat, disgusting pig that no one will ever want to see me naked again so the only person it will gross out is me and I find it hard to imagine that I could ever find myself more naueseating than I do right now.") At these times, it is usually best to sleep it off, or if that's not possible, masturbate or watch television or play video games to deaden the mind, drown out the monologue.

But, I digress.
Back to me. And my history as a blogger.
I'm just sad that so many of my best posts have vanished because I wrote them on the air with my voice.
Well, not just the air. I'm sure there are archival remnants of them in the brains of at least some of the people who were reading my blog with their ears.

So.
The plan is:
Blog every day (yeah, that always works out)
And post things from archives and notebooks and crap so maybe I can get some sort of outside feedback on who the hell I really am and tips and tricks on how someone like me (which is like what, exactly? Aha! We'll find out!) can find a way to live in a system which doesn't seem to value the things I have in abundance.

Hoping that I can compile the evidence and do some detective work to discover my purpose, how I can best be of use, where I belong.

That, or I'll just post so many pieces of brilliant writing, and my blog will become so popular (with hardly any efforts on my part) that I will be offered a writing job at The Simpsons or Late Night with Conan O'Brien, or Saturday Night Live, or a videogame company or even ____________ (insert name of astonishingly bad show here, the television equivalent of Battlefield Earth), or I will be given lots of money to sell my blog to the makers of Welbutrin or Ritalin or some yet to be discovered miracle drug as proof of it efficacy, or maybe I'll just get laid.

or maybe, just maybe, this blog will get me writing.

Plain and Simple, that's really the whole point.

So, now I'm back...from outer space. (and by "outer space", I mean school.)

So. I come crawling back. Slouching toward Bloglehem…Bethleblog…Bloggerham.
(Can’t make an almost clever reworking of a phrase actually work? Just leave it the way it is. You'll get an "A" for effort. You'll get partial credit for showing your work. You will become, in the minds of the people who see the "potential" in what you have written, a horseshoe or a hand grenade and "almost" will, in fact, count.)

A year. It's been a year since I started this blog. Since I took the bull by the horns and then released it almost immediately. But, here’s the thing, I've had a date with Blogville, Blogtopia, The Blogosphere, Blogton for a long time. I've been blogging for decades. Since the 70's. Since I learned to speak.

I just didn't know it.