the training of the horse does not depend on force but on habituation
I don’t want my personal blog to die because I don’t want to be a cliché. Instead of writing for myself or making art or doing anything that abates obsessive thoughts, I’ve been sending lots of words and other nonsense to people. I’ll give myself credit and acknowledge that I’ve been excelling at sentimentality and human connection, but I am afraid of what happens when that’s not available to me. Inevitably there are times when I’m alone, and being alone is a practice. When you’re not okay being alone, your motivations for socializing can paradoxically become this distorted self-absorbed thing. Does this make sense? It makes sense to me, and this is my blog, so I can say whatever I want. Bazinga.
Friends friends friends. I’m thinking of a friend I was convinced was my soul mate 10 years ago. I urged him to write because he was funny and smart and talented. He responded that he was only good at bits and one-liners; that our conversations were the perfect set up for these things. We lost touch for reasons I can’t write about publicly. I deleted any reminders of him: chat logs, emails, text messages, and photos. He reached out a couple years ago to say that he reviewed our old chats and wanted to acknowledge that I was a good friend. I wonder if this delayed appreciation had anything to do with him practicing his comedy more than wanting to connect with me. I feel that he’s still my friend on some phantom, spiritual level and that I’ll have a part of him with me, always, and I think of that scene in Adaptation (2002) where Charlie’s optimistic twin brother Donald talks about a crush he had on someone and that it didn’t matter if it was reciprocated because that love was his own. That was a really long run-on sentence that I wrote about how I seem to be in a constant state of yearning.
American Cinematheque is hosting a Charlie Kaufman retrospective with Kaufman in person for Q&As, but those events are members-only. I think I should probably avoid retrospectives anyway.