Posts tagged with "inspiration"

The Honeymoon Is Over

Angel I can see myself in your eyes
Angel won’t you feel for me from your heart
Do return my heart to me
No don’t insist I’m already hurt

— Blonde Redhead, Elephant Woman

Yep. It’s over. Although she still does­n’t know.

Maybe it was just a phase. Maybe I’ve accept­ed the fact that she’s tak­en. Maybe we’re too sim­i­lar. Maybe I’ve real­ized it would nev­er work. Maybe I just love her less, the more I know her.

Or maybe it was just a phase. One of the many things cured by time.

It makes me won­der if I cling to such feel­ings sim­ply because I love being in love, unre­quit­ed or oth­er­wise. It’s like when you’re in a pure­ly phys­i­cal rela­tion­ship with some­one, and you start get­ting feel­ings for them. You won­der if you’re real­ly in love with the per­son, or in love with the idea that you have some­one with whom to go to bed, some­one to kiss and kiss you back. It’s a blur­ry line, some­thing you don’t fig­ure out until you remove your­self from the sit­u­a­tion.

Not that it mat­ters. I’m over her.

And I’ve lost my inspi­ra­tion.

Fighting Oneself, Revisited

This is one of the strangest times of my life. I remem­ber feel­ing some­thing sim­i­lar to this over four years ago, but I haven’t had it since.

I’m fight­ing my old self again. Fighting against these feel­ings and past habits.

I wish I could define and explain it. Vincent Gallo has a song he titled “Glad To Be Unhappy”, filled his dis­tinct­ly min­i­mal­is­tic piano and acoustic gui­tar sounds, so sparse you don’t know where the down­beat falls. But there are no lyrics, and I think I’m start­ing to under­stand why.

Everything is so sim­ple when you’re set in your heart. But when you’re filled with such para­dox­i­cal, con­tra­dic­to­ry feel­ings, noth­ing makes any sense. The world is turned upside down.

It’s frus­trat­ing1 and beau­ti­ful all at once.

I think a part of me wants to think about it. I want to keep this feel­ing, where every song sounds as good as the first time you heard it, and the lead­en sky is urg­ing you for­ward with every step you take. To be so inspired.

And while part of me knows that to fight against ones inner nature is fool­ish2, anoth­er part of me knows how destruc­tive it can be.

  1. The orig­i­nal title of that post was actu­al­ly just a 5x5 pix­el square, meant to con­fuse the read­er into not know­ing what to think. Trolley tried to cor­rect me once and told me the title was bro­ken, and I had to let him know it was done on pur­pose. With my new head­line images plu­g­in, the graph­ic title does­n’t quite work so I had to change it. [↩]
  2. To add anoth­er lev­el to this, I’m fight­ing against fight­ing myself [↩]

Life Is Full Of Possibilities

How sim­ple a thing is hap­pi­ness: a glass of wine, a roast chest­nut, a wretched lit­tle bra­zier, the sound of the sea. All that is required to feel that here and now is hap­pi­ness and a sim­ple, fru­gal heart.

—Zorba the Greek

I feel like writ­ing.

Saturdays are usu­al­ly reserved for relax­ation, but I mixed it with a few errands through­out the day. Bought extra auburn foliage for one of my pots, and a fun­nel to get fresh-ground pep­per into my new pep­per shak­er. Picked up my week­ly gro­ceries. Sat down at the piz­za par­lor to start Beautiful Losers while my Hawaiian was being baked.

I watched Zorba The Greek tonight, about the adven­tures of an aim­less Englishman who goes to Crete, and the lessons he learns from a man he meets named Zorba.

Thumbnail: Zorba the Greek dances

Thumbnail: The Crete widow from Zorba the Greek

Though gen­er­al­ly jovial and light­heart­ed, it was heavy and heavy at times. There’s a scene where a beau­ti­ful wid­ow (the love inter­est of the movie) is rit­u­al­is­ti­cal­ly stoned and killed out of jeal­ousy by the men of the vil­lage, sim­ply because she would­n’t let any of them have her. The direc­tion is a lit­tle incon­sis­tent, but Anthony Quinn’s por­tray­al of the Grecian spir­it keeps the movie in tact. Many believe the movie to be an analy­sis of Apollonian vs Dionysian thought, but I saw it as a nod to Taoism as well.

Zorba’s a Taoist, whether he knows it or not. He shuns intel­lec­tu­al thought and analy­sis, and loves life with bub­bling spon­tane­ity. In the end, the Englishman learns from Zorba, not about life, but how to live it.

And it inspired me. Not just the dia­logue or the play­ful­ness, but the loca­tions too. It made me want to trav­el, to see new places, to meet more peo­ple, and explore oth­er cul­tures.

One day. For now, I’ll enjoy the com­fort of my house.

So here I am, stay­ing up late with my back next to the open win­dow, eat­ing but­ter pecan tarts, drink­ing Dragon Well tea, and writ­ing as much as I can.

I think I’ll go prac­tice the form now.

Tomorrow, I have noth­ing to do but live.

Guest Entry: Inspiration is Everywhere

This is a guest entry by fel­low 9rules mem­ber, Dave Seah. We start­ed this entry swap­ping ven­ture as an exer­cise in writ­ing out­side of our nor­mal styles. It also let us see how dif­fer­ent­ly we would explore a top­ic that was defined by a sin­gle sen­tence, which was “Inspiration is every­where”.

I approached Dave because he writes with a deep insight in his words while pre­sent­ing it with a light can­dor that draws the read­er in. Not only do I admire his writ­ing style and con­tent, I’m envi­ous of his abil­i­ty to come up with cre­ative, phe­nom­e­nal ideas. I’m glad that he agreed to par­tic­i­pate in this exer­cise, and leave his words and ideas as part of my per­son­al jour­ney.

You can read my take on the sub­ject at Dave’s site here.

If I were in your shoes and got hit with an hap­py-sound­ing phrase like INSPIRATION IS EVERYWHERE, I’d men­tal­ly spring into one of three mind­sets: 1. Skepticism 2. “Amen, Brother!” or 3. Apathy. I’d also make a few assump­tions: that the inten­tion behind such a procla­ma­tion was to be inspi­ra­tional in itself. Furthermore, the meta-assump­tion is that we’re all look­ing for it, or need it real bad.

Continue read­ing “Guest Entry: Inspiration is Everywhere”…

The Many Faces of Bronwen

Bronwen is my orig­i­nal muse. We hap­pened to meet short­ly after I got my SLR cam­era, and ever since, she’s my pri­ma­ry mod­el when doing pho­to­graph­ic tests and exper­i­ments.

These were tak­en over the course of about a year. From before we start­ed dat­ing to passed the break-up.

Every angle cap­tures a dif­fer­ent side of some­one.

Thumbnail: Dark and brooding
Thumbnail: The hoodie attitude.
Thumbnail: Against the wall
Thumbnail: Classy cleavage
Thumbnail: Cute mode
Thumbnail: Emo.
Thumbnail: The trustworthy companion look.
Thumbnail: The innocent look
Thumbnail: Bronwen revolution.
Thumbnail: The porcelain doll look.
Thumbnail: The cozy look.
Thumbnail: Trusting

Looking back on these reminds me of how much I miss it when she had red hair, which she dyed for me (but did­n’t like to admit it). Too bad I can’t con­vince her now to do it again.