4:07 p.m. - 2004-06-30
of solitude and seaworthiness
Nothing really is new, my general isolation from the actual world continues. I started One Hundred Years of Solitude a few days ago. I don't know if it's my personal epoch of solitude, or just the subsequent emotional tidal waves I'm precariously surfing...it might even be that this is such a splendid, nuanced book...but it has me tied up in knots like you wouldn't believe. I feel like when the book ends, I will release the tears that have gone unshed for my adult life (I don't cry, remember?).
It's great. I feel like I am marooned on an island and this is the object that has become my companion, the object that injects me with a fever of life that I would otherwise lack.
I think that instead of having a minor breakdown when I finish this book, I will instead surround myself with the works of Marquez until I have finished them or until my weird depression has abated.
I am tempted to write my creative writing prof, in the spirit of finding equally vibrant and heartwrenchingly human works, to follow up my Marquez mania (for it is mania, be certain of that).
Today, I am starting work on a zine that will double as a love letter for the man I saw on Sunday. In addition to being one of the most handsome, hip men I have seen in Seattle, he was wearing a eyepatch. I was as smitten as I was tormented. In a town like Seattle, where everything seems to become a hipster fashion gimick (I too have been guilty of co-opting weird things into my look, mostly at the influence of others) dare I believe that this eye patch is real?
Now, to deal with the obvious question of why I want it to be real. Because I think beauty should be tempered by something less beautiful, and I would much rather it be a missing eye than heartlessness or absence of personality. Also, my slight obsession with the idea of piracy (make your jokes about 'arse piracy' here and leave them here, thankyouverymuch). I love the idea of being at sea, where the world is not yet bought and sold and ruined. I know terrible things happen at sea (poaching, pollution, tacky people in tripped out speed boats), but I have always been in love with the sea. I want to leave this earthy ground and go into a world that defies ownership because of its savage, impossible beauty.
How I run on...anyway, I'm making a zine about searching for him, instead of actually doing so. Like all things, I fear my love for this mystery man will a better story than reality.
