Writing up an incline.

This paper should be (I want this paper to be)-
: well written. (I want this paper to be what I want to write. I want to take this seriously and I want to produce something people would want to read.)
: comprehensible. (For all. To be read and to be understood. To understand why I write what I write. To understand how it is written. To make sense. To be common.)
: not a rehash of Kamau Brathwaite's Ancestors. (Already I feel as if I am doing this, but this is almost unfair, I have been fascinated with the "paratextual" dimension for such a long time ((how good it feels to finally put a word to what I want to accomplish)) and now I feel if I experiment I am just copying. Such frustration!)
: honest. (Tying into the previous thought. This is not Kamau speaking. This is me.)
: my own.

You know what, I don't care if anybody reads this, fuck it. Grief. Let's go. Will I ever feel like I fit? Will I ever feel like people enjoy being around me? Will I ever feel important to other people? I have never felt any of these. This is my grief. Other anxieties can take a backseat. Whose fault is this? This is my grief. Children played in the fields while I played on the television. Fuck my fat childhood self. I am so angry that I messed up such a perfect opportunity to be a normal person with close friends and now I feel like I can never connect and will never connect with anybody. Nobody misses me back home. Nobody misses me here. I smile a lot, I try to be friendly, but i think i'm just the same asshole selfish kid. And i'm not interesting. Or i am not funny. or i am nothing. maybe just the fact that i typed all of this out affirms my status as an uncaring, selfish, prick. maybe i don't deserve to be close to anyone. maybe I shouldn't. Now people can read this and judge me. That's unfortunate.. Sometimes these moments get to me. I've had to stop myself from deleting this whole paragraph three times.


Maybe my grief is I'm secretly crazy.


Channahon is a place of green and houses. And yet few houses look the same. This was before prefabricated neighborhoods, or...that is probably false. Definitely false. But I look at these neighborhoods and I don't see the same house. I couldn't walk into my neighbor's home and know where the bedrooms are. Very few businesses. a lovely small town with no trailer parks and very few hillbillys.
Not quite rustic. Not quite sophisticated. Not quite quaint. Subrural.



I wasn't quite the child of privelege. But I wasn't poor and my parents could afford the things I thought I needed. I was surrounded by middle-class decadence. Yearly trips to Florida; eating out once a week; all normal.




I remember when I was younger travelling the trail next to the I&M canal. In the summer time, this was our idea of perfection. Nothing but the nature and the few good friends there were. This was the beauty of our little town. It was still small and it felt like houses were being built around the forests and parks. I could walk five minutes and find myself in the middle of trees. In the winter the wandering nature of our young teenage bodies wouldn't cease. We would traverse the local golf course unimpeded. Just us and the white white snow, the dead trees, the sand traps, the trails that would have to be shoveled for the next season's golfers. Every now and then, we would see a coyote in the distance. This was the feeling of this town. It certainly wasn't backwards, but the pace at which it was moving forward was heavenly.


My dad has always teetered on either extreme kindness or extreme anger. This is not to say or imply he had any disorders. He was in perfect mental health; This was just the way my father was. At once giving and accepting and stubborn and furious. He wouldn't be angry often, but when he was: terror. The way he could swear and create new ways to shout his words was the worst experience in my life. Thankfully, these bouts of anger were few and far between with me. I cannot say the same for my mother. Once again, though, his rows with her would come infrequently. They just occurred more with father/me.
The day he almost died, I couldn't stop my crying. I'm not going to pretend I'm tough. One can just look at me and realize I'm probably not the strongest person inside and out. This hurt.
He had heart problems. Real ones. Surgery-needing heart problems. That one man can be the cause of so much pain and sorrow is astounding. His aeorta rupturing during surgery almost tore us all apart into something wicked.

What am I even trying to say?

"If the first imperalist world war more or less put paid to Sir Walter Raleigh, providing him with an heroic indentiy more comofrtingly in line with that of his Elizabethan namesake, it also signaled the final victory of English studies at Oxford and Cambridge. One of the most strenous antagonists of English - philology - was closely bound up with Germanic influence; and since England happened to be passing through a major war with Germany, it was possible to smear classical philology as a form of ponderous Teutonic nonsense with which no self-respecting Englishman should be caught associating. England's victory over Germany meant a renewal of national prdie, an upsurge of patriotism which could only aid English's cause; but at the same time the deep trauma of the war, its almost intolerable questioning of every previously held cultrual assumption, gave rise to a "spiritual hungering," as one contemporary commentator described it, for which poetry seemed to provide and answer. It is a chastening thought that we owe the university study of English, in part at least, to a meaningless massacre..."
-Terry Eagleton.

Slint, Swan Lake, Lawrence Arms, Teenage Bottlerocket, Sonic Youth, Malkmus, Sparklehorse, Titus Andronicus, Velvet Underground, Dntel, Deerhunter, Bouncing Souls, Sunset Rubdown, Wolf Parade, Frog Eyes, Minor Threat, Fugazi, Guided By Voices,

"In one of our culture circles in Chile, the group was discussing...the anthropological concept of culture. In the midst of the discussion, a peasant who by banking standards was completely ignorant said: "Now I see that without man there is no world." When the educator responed: "Let's say, for the sake of argument, that all men on earth were to die, but that the earth itself remained, together with trees, birds, animals, rivers, seas, the stars...wouldn't all this be a world?"
"Oh, no," the peasant replied empathatically. "There would be no one to say: 'This is a world'""
-Paulo Freire.

,Operation Ivy, Leftover Crack, Choking Victim, Morning Glory, Rites of Spring, Blood Brothers, Orchid, Fela Kuti, Afrobeat, Elliott Smith,

"A vital if subtle connection exists between a discourse in which those who are to be educated are represented as morally and intellectually deficent and the attribution of moral and intellectual values to the literary works they are assigned to read."
-Gauri Viswanathan

"I'm going nowhere, but I'm guaranteed to be late."