I Don't Deal Well with Joy

Or at least what's supposed to make me happy. It just gets to be too much and I can't deal. Maybe it's the frenetic 21st-century pace with multitasking hyperthreaded intertextualizing, but when there's stuff that I know I'm going to REALLY want to take notice of, I keep putting it off with a hint of guilty hesitation.


It might be the newest album by the Really Important Band I Am Hardcore Crushing On, or The Book by a Hip Author That Seems Like Exactly What I'm Looking For, or even just A Website I Should Take Closer Notice Of.


It's almost like the whole world is a checklist of things I'm supposed to see, hear, feel, experience, watch, embrace, critique, and the big things are just slowing me down. Better to do a whole bunch of little things, the satisfaction of the red pen crossing items out so that even if I'm no closer to the goal at least I can point to something I did. 


Case in point: poetry and the contemporary world. I'm way more comfortable with dead people. I don't think they're any better than us, they just tend to talk back less, have more accepted interpretations, and most importantly, I can come to them with my own biases, approaches and decisions and they don't get to tell me what to do.


I know that on the Internet every single vice, subculture, interest, hobby and permutation has its own usergroup, flagship site, splinter cells and memes. Same with poetry. But I hesitate to dive into that pond: it's big, I'm unsure of the temperature and especially what animals or organisms might have gotten there before me. Even this blog was something of a leap of faith, meager as such a hop is.


I found an interesting discussion tonight on enjambment and line breaks. Well thought out, civil, some good points and some very personal ones. The kind of thing you might imagine I'd leap to wade into. Instead I have to hang back. 


A friend of mine posted this link to a "weird corner of the internet" which seems to be an alley of Craigslist where users post and respond to haiku like the traditional haiku contests in feudal Japan. Cool, right? I want in, right? Nuh-uh. 


I'm happy to lurk, browse, muse, respond in private. But setting up an account I've got to keep track of, monitoring responses and new topics, keeping abreast of the developments and feuds and politics...


Or maybe I'm avoiding what the real issue is: I've been burned. Whether the topic is Maya Angelou, Pedro the Lion, Battlestar Galactica, health care reform, Creative Commons Licenses... It always seems to devolve into the bullies, the cowards and the cops, where beatdowns, shakedowns and crackdowns rule the day. I've got enough drama with the people I know. I don't want to get into a pissing contest slash arm wrestle (I believe that's the indigenous Alaskan pastime) with people I'll never meet on subjects that aren't life or death.


Maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps my refusal to become a member, "be a joiner," sign up for groups or activities is just more of my misanthropic introversion. It's easier to feel good when you pity yourself, unconstrained by other people's thoughts or feelings, assured of the rightness of your own cause and the universal dirtiness and infamy of the rest of the world.


Or maybe I just don't want to have to keep up with one more username and password.


Regardless, here are a few of my favorites from Haiku Hotel, the aforementioned Craigslist poets' corner.

fire safe cigarettes 

mistymoon

april angst 
smoking 2 cigarettes 
at the same time 

baby baby baby

pukindog

It's nothing fancy 
just God's honest truth from a 
slightly askew postulation 

m 

rytis

slapping mosquitoes - 
their blood trickles 
with mine