You're traveling along across your day
and—ideally—nothing bumps into the elaborate, fragile self-concept you don't even realize you're riding around in
You don't realize you're riding around in it because you've been designing it your whole life and you have worked to make it sleek and feel like absolutely nothing AS LONG AS NOTHING BUMPS IT and so your other job is to carry yourself across your days in such a way that NOTHING WILL BUMP IT That's a good goal That'll work and then when something does bump it
because you are alive among reality You're like
WTF
Okay, me, I, I am like WTF but I feel confident-ish that you, too, are like that.
OKAY FINE I was going to write about something else today but then I saw a bad picture of myself.
this isn't it
I didn't want to make like I was just musing on all of this out of nowhere, oh, hmmm, humans and their fragile self-concepts. But here we are, and maybe you've recently seen a bad photo or otherwise caught yourself seeming another way than you think you seem
Mark Bartkiw, Highway
Ego Bump Itinerary 1. the trigger (bad photo in this case) (or, more objectively: photo) 2. self-concept and reality collide <SHOCK> 3. assessment: how far outside the bounds I've found myself I.E. HOW AWFUL DO I LOOK 4. proportional freakout 5. how far outside the bounds does this freakout fall? I.E. BESIDES BEING AWFUL TO LOOK AT, AM I ALSO A HUGE BABY 6. agggh, we're outside the bounds on two fronts 7. bundled self-concept [I am a reasonably attractive, chill person]
wobbles here,
implodes there,
flammable bits light on fire
8. stomping, drooping, weeping 9. brief, aggressive meditating 10. small passage of time 11. realization slides in: no kind of love has appeared yet on this itinerary
Aw, man.
Here's the thing: When I'm talking about our fragile self-concepts, I'm not trying to rag on us about this. I'm not trying to belittle us for constructing whatever we can to get around down here with the least possible amount of suffering. We're trying to work this whole deal out and it's weird, damn it. A little love, is all. Love for the freaked-out cage builder Love for the scared person who fell out for a second Love for the hard angle that banged into the cage
and did some structural damage if we're lucky
Mark Bartkiw, Sanctuary
SUPERSIZED P.S. The irony is that I read this piece at a reading here in Seattle last night (thanks for having me, Loud Mouth Lit!) "Beauty, Mate"
Fifteen years ago I was living in the Blue Mountains of Australia with my now-husband, then-fiancé Dave. I flew out to be with him a couple of months after we met, and the first time he took me to see The Three Sisters—the ancient rock formation, not the Chekhov play—near the town of Katoomba, in the middle of a national park the size of Belgium—we got out of the car and walked over to the viewing platform, and my mouth was immediately sewn shut in the face of a stupefying beauty the likes of which I had never experienced. It wasn't comment-able upon because I could not talk. The Three Sisters sprouted up from the side of this giant, silent basin that hummed...see, I'm screwed because I need a new verb. Hummed isn't bass enough to describe the depth and force of that place and how it seeped into me, leaving me wordless, unable to praise. We lived in Katoomba for a while, as well as a couple of other towns in the Blue Mountains, but Katoomba was where it was at. It may be the grooviest mountain town in all the world. We lived right on the main drag, which is almost unfairly lined with excellent restaurants and cafés. Bam, bam, bam, crammed next door to each other, and all amid these amazing natural surroundings. We were in heaven. But the greatest thing about Katoomba for me was its style ethos, or its amazing lack of one. It's the most liberating place I've ever lived, sartorially. People dressed however they wanted. And I don't mean that they were artsy, creative dressers, or even just casual dressers. Like, if you think that Seattle is lax...NO. I mean that people dressed like they had just emerged from burning houses in the middle of the night just that second before you saw them. Colors all doing any fuckin’ thing. Tee shirts and floppy pants—and I can't express how much I don't mean cool ones. (Have you heard of Garanimals? If you were a kid in the seventies, you probably ran across Garanimals. They were animal-coded tops and bottoms so kids could dress themselves and have things go. "Giraffe-tag top, giraffe-tag bottom, check. This'll work." Katoomba was an anti-Garanimal nuclear bomb going off on the hour.) Every day appears to be laundry day in Katoomba. Getting dressed when I lived there was the easiest thing conceivable. "Does this go?" was not a question. "Is this cool?"—not even close to a question. You didn't even have to sweat "is this flattering". You were good once you'd covered "is this on". I think fondly about Katoomba because, as with many a human who inhabits femaleness, an obscene amount of real estate in my brain is devoted to cultural beauty standards. I have massive, grotesque developments in this brain that haven’t been deconstructed despite my best efforts, and they’re populated with judge-y phantoms of all kinds, walking around all day, making noise. If I had a nickel for every time my focus wanders to how I look, instead of how I feel or what I think, I could take myself out for a swish dinner at least once a month. It's tiring. From when I was twelve to when I was twenty I wore makeup every day. Eye makeup in particular. No exceptions. Fuck no, are you kidding? It was unthinkable. The sun rose and I traced a cat eye with eyeliner, ringed my lids with dark eyeshadow, blotted my mascara wand, made my Abominable Snow Monster application face, and lo, it was good, amen. A friend in high school offered that I might look prettier without so much eye makeup but ten other friends asked me to do their eye makeup so I ignored the first friend and blessed the ten friends with cat eyes of their own. And then one winter break morning when I was home from my senior year of college, I looked at my bare face in the mirror, my untraced eyes, and—inexplicably—I looked okay. I stared at myself for a few minutes, and then I ran downstairs. "Mom! Mom! Look. I'm not wearing any eye makeup. I think I'm going to go out Christmas shopping like this. Don't you think I look okay? Like, this is a gentle beauty or something?" She laughed, bemused, and said I looked fine. Her nonchalance bummed me out because I felt like I'd discovered electricity. Conversely, right before I went to Australia to be with Dave, I got a bad haircut. The stylist and I had a miscommunication—I didn’t know what "high and tight" meant—and so instead of walking out looking like a 1920s starlet, like I had planned, I looked like the president of the Howard Jones fan club. I was mortified, raging, inconsolable for a few hours. Here I was, about to embark on the biggest romantic adventure of my life, and I felt like I'd been vandalized. A couple of days later I went out to dinner with some friends and bitched. My friend Robert, who was older and wiser, told me that my hair didn't make any difference. I had that glow from being in love, and nothing imparted more beauty than that. I thanked him but I didn't hear him. I still felt ruined. This is the problem. Here it is. If a genie were to appear in front of me right now and offer me two choices: 1. I would look beautiful as long as I live or 2. I would never care any more, and I would be eternally free of the question I would hesitate. I don't like it, but I would hesitate. And that's not who I want to be. I want something larger and more raw for myself out of this life. I want freedom, I do. And if I'm talking about beauty, I want to let actual beauty be what I mean, the thing that rings out from inside an experience—like the sight of a massive, ancient, blue-green basin full of eucalyptus trees, a basin that had beings in it before people lived to have eyes. I want to strip the word from all industry that would make us feel small and ugly, and keep it to aim where it's so true, so there, it stops my mouth.
