correspondence 4.23.24

From: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
To: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
Date: Tuesday, April 23 at 21:10
Subject: Cervantes

Hey Babe. That guy was the one my son didn’t care for when he was an infant. I read him Candide first, and he liked that. I always remember how he cried when I started Don Quixote and he just never took to it. He was fine with Robert Frost. When he was one, we would sit in bed drinking beer and reading On the Road. Years later, I read my daughter Hamlet for about twenty-two seconds before she smacked that shit outta my hands.

From: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
To: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
Date: Friday, April 19 at 10:20
Subject: writing

ah, but writing is such a terrible thing. Didn’t you say that once? Give it up, if you can. I tried, Flanders, because writing I was a person at sea who never found her sea legs. I suppose I could have written a travelogue or self-help but the steel, they winked. I was a saner person not writing. Still… Maybe at fifty, I am less worried about survival.

Let’s give it a shot, shall we? Like that guy who ran at windmills.

B.

correspondence 4.11.24

From: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
To: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
Date: Thursday, April 11, 2024 at 11:23 PM
Subject: Pop. Pop Pop Pop Pop.

Did you really write nothing? Nothing at all? A grocery list doesn’t count. But a clever post-it, perhaps.

Honestly, I don’t know if I can write any more. I feel like some things I wrote were good, and now I’m covering them with bad writing. I guess it doesn’t matter since they’re buried already. No one is worried about the archives around here. I said that once; it’s in the archives somewhere.

Writing this letter / blog post, I feel as if I’ve got to actually put effort into sounding halfway not like an asshole. And for all the effort, I feel like I am failing anyway.

Do I feel like I am failing, or do I think that I am failing, or do I think that I feel like I am failing.

Ah fuck it.

From: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
To: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
Date: Thursday, April 4 at 16:16
Subject: smells of piss and a home to snakes

G–

I remember we used to write about the books we were carrying around with us (and hopefully reading). I thought I ought to start there: I’m reading a memoir by an Irish musician, Sinéad O’Connor. In bed in a rented villa down south. The view outside my window is obstructed by the shell of a hotel, cement-grey with mascara running down its face. Construction began before covid and was abandoned over the lockdown. I escaped here in 2020 when the world was a shut-in. I’m back in 2024 because the north, where I live, is on fire. Literally. Google it. Chiang Mai. Smog.

But Sinéad, that’s what I wanted to write to you about. Are you familiar? Brilliant and mad. She tore up a photo of the pope on the telly when she was 26 to protest child abuse. This was before the Church admitted that such a thing happened. She reminds me of my mother who died at 33 from cancer. Sinéad died last year at 56. I shaved my head for her. In her memoir she writes about the death of her mum. Her mum who starved her and punched her in the gut.

I have not written anything in the years since I last wrote you. I abandoned the writing and it is a hovel where stray dogs take refuge. It smells of piss and a home to snakes… I feel rusty. This might take a while, for the writing to feel like my own again. Be patient with me.

PS– Better three years late than never?

Write back,

B.

Good Morning

Went for a walk this morning. I haven’t made much progress in The Lost Language of Plants because I don’t know work got busy or some shit. My brother came to visit and I stayed up late to clean the garage. Him and my other brother were working on the car so I figured I would work, too. Now the garage looks better. I got a big desk but my chair is too low so my hands are too high and my back hurts. I went yesterday to get free chairs thinking they would be good for the desk but they were cheap office chairs with pleather and sank all the way to the wood when I sit on them and they smell like cigarettes and probably have bed bugs. So that wasn’t worth the hour and gas to go get them. But at least I can fit my desk in the office. But now I’m behind on shit because I well I don’t know why I guess because I put a lot of time into cleaning the garage and also energy and now I don’t have that for other things and on top of the fact that work has been more busy. Any time the kids are away there is more and more work today. It expands whatever time you have available. That’s why I do things like go get chairs for an hour because even though it seems like I would get a lot done in that hour I would probably only make more work for myself.

The Lost Language of Plants, Part 1 of Some

I did not think I would care much for Stephen Harrod Buhner’s The Lost Language of Plants. I don’t really like plants. I mean they’re fine. I do like drugs. I like vegetables and shit. I like going for walks outside. My favorite color is green because I like looking at trees and shit. But when I say plants I’m thinking of houseplants. Like plants in terra cotta buckets that you have to water until you have to go on vacation and they die or the cat eats them and you chase away the cat and shit and for what. Fucking plant in your house. With dirt and shit and sometime the bugs get in there.

But this book is pretty awesome. My reaction to it reminds me of my reactions to Jonathan Nossiter’s Liquid Memory and Beryl Markham’s West With the Night. Not that the books have anything in common I guess. And I read a review that said Nossiter’s book was pompous and shit. But whatever fuck all that the reason that it reminded me of my reaction to those books is that I didn’t think I would care for them either. In the way of not that I thought they would be bad I just didn’t think I would be particularly drawn to them.

But those books are awesome. You should read them. I read them. So you should read them. Everything I do is right. So just do yourself a favor and follow along. Saves time.

First thing to notice about The Lost Language of Plants is this guy is constantly talking about smells. If I remember right, Liquid Memory is also always talking about smells and shit. It’s funny because my brother had Covid recently and lost the ability to smell. He told me he was depressed about it. I was like what for. I could give a shit I don’t hardly smell shit anyways. Besides shit maybe. And cinnamon. But here’s my brother walking around smelling the forest and the beach and shit. And apparently people do that and experience shit through their noses. Well this guy Stephen Harrod Buhner definitely experiences most things with his nose.

Another thing is he writes in a poetic way. Everything is a metaphor and is always sloshing around and shit. Like he puts his shoes on and as he bends down the shoes melt into the ground along with a sinking feeling of sinking into feelings and his world is imbued with the…I can’t even do it.

He starts right off with a note to the reader saying the book is supposed to be a book of feelings as well as thoughts, so I guess the metaphorical language checks off in that way. I’m like a little ways through it and he’s talking about how we over value thinking and not feeling. But I guess it is funny to write a book of thoughts when you have that premise. Or ironic. Or it’s not really because you’re not saying all thoughts are bad just that feelings are good, too. He seems to be mad at Descartes for rendering the universe lifeless for everyone in the West.

He says the way he arranges the text might evoke some feelings. I guess he’s referring to the way he inserts these half pages of quotes and shit in between his own writing. I was wondering why he was doing that. I guess he’s trying to evoke a mood or some shit.

The feelings that emerge as you read the book are important. I do not believe we can solve the environmental problems facing us unless we develop our capacity for feeling and our empathy for other life-forms to the same degree that we have developed our facility for thought.

Stephen Harrod Buhner

He talks about the “aesthetic unity that underlies the ecosystems of Earth.” That reminded me of Paul Graham’s essay How to Do Great Work where he talks about if there is beauty in a theory that’s a good sign. It also reminds me of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV series where Johannes Kepler is trying to get the orbits of the planets in the solar system to align beautifully, but is frustrated because he doesn’t realize the orbits are elliptical. And I’ve been thinking a lot about beauty anyway. Beauty in anything draws us, but also judges us. Beauty as a pursuit seems almost frivolous when spoken aloud and yet always feels worthwhile once the pursuit has begun. Et cetera.

…this book delves into the meaning embedded within plant chemistry, the language of plants- a language human beings in the Western world lost knowledge of when we began to think so insistently with the analytical portions of our brains and quit thinking with other, more holistic parts of ourselves

Same dude as last time

So side note because this is Anyone’s Ghost mother fucker this is some dumb ass blog where I can talk about whatever the fuck I want in some dumb ass stream of consciousness ass way and 20 people a month will still click on this shit. You can take a picture with your phone, send it to your laptop, then copy and paste the text from the photo. What the fuck. Holy shit man I am going to be so productive now. That is going to solve the remainder of my problems that ChatGPT didn’t solve.

Anyways moving on I actually fucking hate when mother fuckers start talking about holistic shit and homeopathy and fucking astrology and shit what can I say man I don’t understand how twins can have different lives and shit. And I grew up an evangelical shopping center ass Christian so you know how we all hate that we got duped into believing Jesus was our friend once we realized the whole thing was a reaction to Satanistic daycare sex rituals that never happened and the economy. And probably Fauci I think he was in office at that time.

So yeah I got a whole reaction to the word holistic even though of course the meaning of holistic is like the whole-ist…what does holistic even mean? The whole thing right? Of or pertaining to.

“Holistic” is an adjective that describes an approach or perspective that considers something as a whole rather than as a collection of individual parts. It emphasizes the interconnectedness and interdependence of various elements within a system or entity. In a holistic approach, the focus is on understanding the entire picture and how different components or aspects relate to and influence each other, rather than analyzing or addressing them in isolation.

ChatGPT

So what the fuck even ChatGPT is going to use ‘whole’ when describing ‘holistic’? What kind of cheap trick homophone is this. And didn’t there used to be a different word for homophone? Homonym. But now homonym is a larger category for homophones (sounds same) and homographs (same spelling). Shit son my cat is having epilepsy over here.

Anyways when people say that shit I’m already ready to zone out. But here he’s talking about how we started relying too much on the analytical part of our brain. And just this morning I was telling my Covid brother that we analyze shit way too much and so whenever we try to do something to improve our situation we immediately realize that there is some simpler and more effective project we could do to improve shit than the one we’re about to do so we know we need to embark on a cataloguing of all the possible projects and then we need to evaluate them for level of effort and level of impact and then we need to choose the one that offers the most bang for the buck and of course we conduct that analysis for five or six years and eventually give up the enterprise since the heat death of the universe is sometime right after Christmas and everyone is busy around the holidays. So fuck analyzing shit man let’s be more holistic. Fuck it, I’m saying it.

In the book he also talks about this list of things that pre-industrial societies seem to believe and one of them is that plants proceeded humans and in fact gave life to humans and so we are children of the plants and furthermore as such if we ever need help plants will help us. I guess plants don’t have individual lives in the same way that we do? Or does crushing the yarrow plant to rub on a wound mean that we’re taking some yarrow’s kid and sacrificing it to ourselves and the yarrow plant is ok with that? Anyways the point is we’re children of the corn. Prehistoric corn. And other plants. Well and even Darwin says that I guess, that plant life preceded animal life and Carl Sagan said that the first fishy like organism was like a detached polyp or some shit. Like a coral grew out and then severed itself with mutations and shit and then went swimming around. Or I guess floating around more likely. Then developed some fins eventually. I just remember the animation from Cosmos, you know. But yeah so science says in that way that we are the children of the plants. So my potted plants in the bedroom are into incest porn I guess. Who isn’t into incest porn these days.

Well shit y’all I got to stop now I’m out of time. Maybe I will talk more about the book later. Or I’ll just die. Or other things. Also could happen.

Disagreeing With Roger Ebert

So I’m on a kick of thinking that movie reviewers are incompetent. Or I just don’t understand movie reviewing.

I know one thing that I think, and that is Roger Ebert’s review of Rampart is not good.

In this review of the movie Rampart, Roger Ebert says that Dave Brown reminds him of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. I had to look up whether Blood Meridian became a movie already and he was perhaps talking about Judge Holden in the movie version, but no. He’s talking about Judge Holden in the book version of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. He calls Judge Holden “one of the most evil characters in American fiction.” I feel like Judge Holden wasn’t an evil character he was the embodiment of evil itself. He was omniscient like the devil if the devil was omniscient. He was a pedophile. How can you compare Dave Brown in Rampart to Judge Holden?

You can only do that if you are thinking of evil characters. Hm, list of evil characters, Judge Holden, Captain Hook, Humbert Humbert, Dave Brown, Hamburglar, Alonzo Harris. Ok fine those are all evil characters. Where’s the fucking nuance though man what the fuck is happening to this world. You’re going to mention one character in your review of a movie and you review movies for a living and have done for so long that I actually heard your name. And it’s going to be Judge fucking Holden?

Dave Brown is a bad person but I think the movie showed enough complexity in his character so that Roger Ebert would compare him to someone else. Who? I don’t know who because I’m not a movie reviewer. That’s not my responsibility right now. Even the Grandpa in Chinatown isn’t as evil as Judge Holden and he had sex with his daughter. Least Dave Brown feels sad that his daughters hate him.

I guess it’s dumb to think the popular movie reviewer would be any good. I don’t know maybe he had an off day.

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Lol this is what it looks like if you don’t pay for your blog. A dude pointing to some giant ass lips. Goddam.

Work on What Interests You

I am interested in so many things, almost everything, but not interested enough to put time into it. I have the sense constantly that my time is slipping away and so I must find out the most effective way to use whatever time is right in front of me. It’s not worthwhile to do some task for ten minutes today when it won’t get completed until two years from now, because clearly I’ll be dead in two years. And then two years goes by and I am staring at a wall thinking how to best use my time that day. And wouldn’t it have been nice if I had done that thing two years ago. And that other thing twenty years ago.

So how to fix? Do the thing that you would be happy you had done two years from now? But I can’t. Why not? Because I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in other things. Like what. Like whatever will be the most effective use of my time right now. So you’re interested in the effective use of time, so you should make an app for helping people to keep track of what would be the most effective use of their time at any moment. Yes that would be good. First I have to learn to code. But I won’t learn for like I don’t know a few months right? And I’ll be dead in a few months.

So how to fix?

Movie Reviews Part 2

I was thinking more about The Banshees of Inishiren.

Does this need a spoiler alert? When I wrote my term paper in high school and read criticism of John Updike’s Rabbit Run, did the critics say spoiler alert? I guess that was before the internet.

Anyway there’s a scene where Colm is confessing to the priest. The priest sails in every Sunday. And Colm is clearly an atheist but still a Catholic. So he goes to confession every week. I think there are three confession scenes. Maybe two. Two of the scenes are pretty funny because in one him and the priest start yelling at each other and telling each other to get fucked and stuff like that. But the other one is the one I’m talking about.

Colm stops talking to Padraic which is the inciting event for the whole movie. Well I guess I don’t have to tell you how the plot goes if this is literary criticsim, right? I guess I have to read some literary criticism and stop just going off my memory about it.

Anyway Colm finds out Padraic’s donkey chokes to death and Padraic now wants to murder Colm because it was Colm’s fault to a degree and next thing you know the asshole policeman comes into the bar and starts to insult Padraic and his donkey and Colm punches him in the face. It’s a great scene but that’s also not the scene I was thinking about.

I was thinking about the scene with the confession and the priest says doesn’t Colm have anything else to confess about? And Colm says no and the priest says, “punching a police officer isn’t a sin?” And Colm says, “If punching a policeman is a sin, we might as well pack up and go home.”

I was going to say some more about what I thought about the movie or whatever but it has taken too much time and effort to get to this point. I guess I rather watch the movie with someone and then be like, “Did you see when he was saying punching a policeman is…that part? Ha that shit was awesome. So true.” And pretend we both understand what it means.

Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall

I don’t know what the fuck to do. Have a vision. Don’t have a vision. Plan for shit don’t plan for shit. Follow your interests. Don’t have any interests.

That’s why I’m working on these paving stones.

I swear to God that is my life right now. Paving stones.

I decided on paving stones because sometime in August, four months after I began attempting to ‘open’ the above ground pool that came with this house, my wife said, ‘for my birthday, it would be cool to have a pool party.’ So for two weeks I fully committed to getting this damn pool open which had hitherto been a struggle for reasons I don’t want to get into right now but at some point I might.

So I fully committed to getting the pool open and in two weeks I did get it open. I thought I was the shit. Then it got fucked up again and I really had to learn all about pools and shit.

But two or three weeks later I knew damn near everything about pools. Like the ten percent of things about pools that you need to know in order to make the water clear. That’s what I know.

So then I swam in the pool and it was awesome. And then I sat in a chair in the sun after the three minutes I was in the pool, since, as Mitch Hedberg pointed out, that’s exactly the amount of time you can have fun in an above ground pool. And I realized it didn’t matter that you can only have three minutes of fun. And I realized I didn’t figure shit out by realizing that, it’s just that three minutes is some amount of time and having fun is some amount of good so it turned out to be some amount of worthwhile.

And I said fuck man I’ve never been able to do shit in my life but I got this goddam pool open. How did I do that?

And I literally spent weeks thinking about that damn pool ahead of everything else.

Now it’s silly as shit. Because I got kids and a job and all of that to think about so who gives a fuck about a pool. No point in really focusing all my energy on a pool.

But then again the pool was beautiful. I had made something beautiful. Just the water. The outside of the pool looked and looks like shit.

Maybe if I focused on something similarly complex (that is to say simple as fuck), I could make that beautiful. Maybe that would be a worthwhile thing to do.

So I decided to get the weeds out of the front walk. I thought it would take five days or so. I’m still working on it 9 days later and probably have 3 to 4 days of working on it left.

And I keep forgetting that nothing matters but that goddam front walk. As long as I make progress on that shit every day I am allowed to go to sleep at night. Fuck it all. All except the pool and the front walk. And my kids. Maybe my wife. But definitely the paving stones.

Movie Reviews

Last night I watched The Banshees of Inishiren for the first time. It was a great movie. I love Martin McDonaugh. If you like this blog you probably like or would like Martin McDonaugh, too. He is always having some outlandish shit happening in his stories. His work is sad and funny and true.

I went online afer the movie was over to get some idea of how people reacted to it, as I often do. I found that I couldn’t really find a movie review that made sense to me. I probably just don’t understand the idiom of film reviews.

I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly. Something like a literary criticism essay.

Anyone know where to find that?