Drip

“…many men caught in patriarchy’s embrace are living in a wilderness of spirit where they are utterly and always alone.” ~ Bell Hooks

This book is making sense of a lot of things for me, but I only get to read about once a week.  I obviously get to write even less.  So often I formulate a post, and set aside time to write it, only to find I have too much shit to do, or little humans poking at me.  Such is the life of a creative with children.  I remember reading Bradbury's Zen and the Art of Writing, and him describing having a wife and children who separated from him to let him write, even having a desk in the garage, and his kids tapping on the window because they wanted to play.  It doesn't really work like that, and I don't necessarily want it to, but... even now I have a two year old running figure-eights through my legs and pulling at my pants, while I write, standing, at work because our power is out.  It's cute... until it's not...but I love it... until I don't... then I'll miss it... just keep going.

I don't want my kids to ever have to tap on the window of my office because they are so desperate for attention.  There is something very sad about that.  Where is the line drawn, though? So many people have said that you can accomplish something while having everyone pulling at you, but most of the creatives I have read up on only accomplished something significant by alienating their families.  What I was going to write a week ago is gone now.  The only way it could have existed in my endless train of thought is if I would've sat down and written it then.  Even if I were to remember the premise of what I was going to write, it's going to be different a week later, because everything is different a week later.  In order to be genuine, you have to write it now... you have to shoot it now... it will never be what it is right now.  On the other hand, when I go through my writing, as far back as high school, I am basically making the same argument, slightly altered to account for experience and understanding, so maybe just waiting until the kids are old enough and my wife is bored enough to leave me alone is fine... if I'm still alive...

...pick up the oldest from school and drop her off at art class... what was I talking about?

Yesterday I started a post with the proceeding quote and went into my often joking, in the past, about having never been more alone than when I was married.  That elaborated into expectation that people put on relationships, and inability to accept people for who they genuinely are, which I thought was poignant and necessary... but I can't post that.  Who the hell am I, anyway?  What do I know about human relationships, other than the observation that they perpetually fail and no one can really seem to understand why?  Regardless, that argument was ranting on only the last word of the quote about patriarchy, which I hoped to tie in later, but what was I going to write?...because I didn't write it and have no idea where I was going or why.  I highlighted the quote because I have always felt that way... living in a wilderness of spirit where I am utterly and always alone... we're running low on diapers and the two year old just blew out the second one in a couple hours.

Were you to ask my father about how I was as a child, he would tell you that I cried a lot...not that I felt a lot... because I'm a boy.  If I were a girl, like my mother wanted, it would simply be written off as me being an emotional child.  Truth is, we're all just human beings.  We all feel, and the more you coddle girls for feeling and punish boys, the more you are perpetuating this system that is destroying itself.  Feminism is so much more than demanding equal rights and treatment for women; It's about demanding equal heart for men.  When the heart equalizes, everything equalizes.

Another basic observation to ponder: aside from the "locker-room" jobs I have worked in, and being unable to escape this sexualizing of the human body in the fine art world, it has been the women in my life, often "feminists", who have perpetuated the patriarchy in my story; they fell in love with the character I was playing to fit in, not with who I really was.