Spider Prophet

It is too bright here. I am sitting in what used to be the cafe section of a food court on my college campus. Visiting the boyfriend as I wait for my new job to start, I figured I’d steal away to a place that used to be one of my favorite spots when I was attending school here. However, after a summer of redesigning the space, trying to find ways of opening it up, streamlining so that processing customers is faster as making selections is easier and the now claustrophobic space in which one picks one’s food makes the dominant desire not satisfying hunger, but getting away from all the other bodies.

Originally, the layout separated the cafe area from the eatery, giving the feeling that they were two distinct places–with different names, hours of operation and a small flight of stairs separating the two areas, this was not hard to believe. Hidden from direct sunlight and with lights that seemed to dim as the day went one, the cafe area usually carried a more muted tone than the eatery. The quiet subdued conversations being a wall that fought against the noise from the other side of the wall.

However, the dimness that I had welcomed as a writer is now gone. I’d always considered writing to be something that was done from dusk and onward. Almost like scrying into a bowl of water, it was about about trying to get clarity out of the murkiness. And submerging myself in it seemed like the best way to do this. I’ve never met anyone who felt that writing was something that was bright, or done without have to discern a concept, idea or sentence. Writing as enlightenment, often becomes the light with which darkness is banished, but that is only because it knows the nature of it so intimately.

However, though I may find the bright light attacking my right eye debilitating to the task I came here to do while he catches a few extra hours of sleep (battling is own light demons), I’m trying this new thing: not coming up for excuses to not write and read. I seem to have made a habit out of it, and hopefully I’ll be getting rid of the need to do that.

- Spider

The publishing industry is like an ex-boyfriend.

He’s treated me badly, beaten me up, left me without a notice and more or less in the worst shape of my life. But somehow, I can never really leave him behind. After days left waking up with nowhere to go, all of sudden he’s on the phone promising me things, and I can’t deafen my ears to his silver tongue. The promises of late nights, skipping lunch to go to a last minute “meeting” and being showered with free gifts makes a fool of me every time. After an hour of teasing (and maybe a bit of oral foreplay), I end up in the same place I was before. Nervous, waiting for a phone that never arrives, until finally, went my withdrawal is almost through, I get a letter from you saying that you’ve left all over again.

Though this description may be a little bit of too much verbal masturbation, it is the best way I have of describing the experience of trying to enter the publishing world. Despite all the mistreatment, I can still feel my blood race when I get that literary world gets close to me. Perhaps enough is never enough?

It seems like I’ve been on a whirlwind of interviews. It makes it hard for me to keep track of where I’ve been, what jobs I was actually interested in, or where else there is to go from here. Mostly because, I’m not even sure where it is that I am now. I feel like a kid trying to find the pinata. After all the spinning around, I’ve been dropped back on the ground and may very well  be walking in the opposite direction of all the goods. However, there aren’t many, if any, guideposts to show me otherwise. (The lack of guideposts is something that shall be discussed in a different entry.)

And yet, at this moment, I still hold out faith in it. In him.

- Spider

The first time I ever heard the phrase “wanderlust”, I immediately thought that it was a sickness. Some disease that people contracted through exposure to some element and was incredibly gruesome. It was life-ending, in the same way that masturbating in-between meetings and getting caught is. Exhilarating, filled with titillating fear, possibly euphoric, and if you get caught by your boss, career ruining. I also knew that I had it.

Now, I don’t mean this in the same way that my minor hypochondria makes me think that I’ve contracted the non-existant Ploxodisium syndrome. I mean that when I heard the word, there was an almost prescient knowledge of it’s meaning and my deep understanding that I knew what it was. And while hearing the phrase made me better understand myself, I needed to hear it before I knew that I could identify myself (or that I could use it to identify a part of myself) underneath it. I need that connection again to explain my hunger for the entire planet.

In talking with my friend Stefanie, we came to understand that we both “want everything, no?” That is to say, we have an unquenchable desire to make goals and plans and strive for just about anything that we can imagine. Whether it’s our first-generation upbringing, our Latino heritage or whatever it may be, we both have it and are at its whim. However, having it’s definition doesn’t help without having it’s name. What would the name of the desire to be everything, or I suppose, the desire to dream of everything come from? It feels at times as though we would simply devour the world if we could. As if take in all the dirt, salty water and air would create the realization we’ve been going after.

However, if I have learned anything from philosophy, it is this: the problem with desire is that it only exists in the action of wanting. A person does not, cannot, desire what they already want. What could possibly satiate us after devouring an entire planet? Perhaps we’d simply move on to more heavenly bodies. Dibs on Jupiter.

- Spider

I suppose that my largest concern right now is that I do not want my writing to simply become a diarrhea of any thought that comes into my mind. I want it that all the effort I am about to put into the career (which I continuously reaffirm as my goal) produces some writing of actual substance. Alright, perhaps not simply some, but a whole lot of it. Unfortunately, despite how much it is that I may desire, I cannot be certain of what it is that I am about to embark upon. Perhaps that should be the thrilling part about this journey; or, simply the most frightening aspect of it all; or, maybe they’re really just the same thing (as cliche as that overly simplified comment may be).

In the years before college (as it is the event in my life that for now everything exists in relation to) I spent almost all of my time reading novels and carrying a notebook in which I could write. Described as an avid reader at one point, but never really being able to describe myself as such (for f-ck’s sake, I don’t even think I knew what the word meant then), all I knew was that I enjoyed playing with words and the power that I believed they possessed.

 At times when I try to create a narrative of myself as a reader and storyteller, I find that I can trace it all the way back to when I was about four. I had seen the “Wizard of Oz” and wrote a illustrated story based around a tornado coming to town. I don’t remember much of it anymore, only that there was a lot of black circular movement from drawing that tornado.

The stories and writing provided a means of escape, and as Titania so aptly states in “Books of Magic”: “They do not exist; and thus they are all that matter.” (For an incredibly long time, even after entering college, I carried this quotation as a sort of mantra, constantly reflecting back on it because I felt that it captured so well the importance of make believe, which I felt held more value than gold. I’m not sure if that has necessarily changed.) Perhaps instead of narrative, a better word choice would be “explanation”, since that is what attempts seem to be aimed for. Dorothy does find the answer to her wishes over the rainbow, doesn’t she?

Anyway: When I arrived at college everything as it was was put to a stop. My reading lists became that provided by my professors, and to an extent I just stopped really reading. Reading for myself seemed incorrect when I had too many social gatherings to attend and materials to read for my classes. Alright, the second may have been a hollow concern, but the first certainly was on my mind. After my first couple of classes, I decided that my college education would be about laying down the foundation of what was to come. I would learn how to read so that I could read and write for myself. I’m thankful to be able to report that I learned much in doing both, and have landed myself in this current state: where I was before I went to college, with just a touch of insight.

Let’s hope that I’ve sowed the ground enough.

- Spider