I watched Faces again tonight. It’s been at least a decade, maybe longer, since I last watched it. Cassavetes crushes me every time, maybe more the older I get and the more I’ve seen and felt. When I think about the movies I like, the art I am drawn to, the music I connect with, the books I fall in love with, I see that they all share a common thread: their creators do not shy away from an honest portrayal of life as a human being. They do not judge; they simply show life for what it is. We humans are messy, we screw up a lot, we’re vulnerable, we’re fallible, and sometimes we never learn from our mistakes. There is a beautiful ugliness that hangs about us…it could go either way what you see, depending on our moods, depending on so much beyond our control. And when you talk about things like trust and expectations…well, then that is where it really gets complicated. People don’t bargain so easy with those, and with good reason. We can build and destroy these over and over, throughout a life of trying not to be alone for a little too long, carrying resilience with us, the one weapon we hope to always hold close to our hearts.
All posts in category human behavior
when you don’t leave the house
Posted by sean on October 22, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/10/22/when-you-dont-leave-the-house/
see you when your troubles get like mine
Small tragedies and minor victories twist around your idle fingers like woody vines. You trade witticisms like barbed wire slipped underneath your tongue. A single scent scatters a part of the brain already always a bit on edge. But at arm’s length, you don’t ever find the visceral. You won’t ever find it there. So push away the veil of ions, then, and you will see the rush of blood. Warm air on skin, brushing off a touch that never came. Color in cheeks, déjà vu and try to ignore imagination prone to wanton escapades. Think and wish, then, and think again. Fall into the ordinary, fall into it open and true, with wild grit in your gut.
Posted by sean on September 3, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/09/03/see-you-when-your-troubles-get-like-mine/
institutionalized
Due to cat needing vet visits, I spent two days working from home, driving Em El down south for work and picking her up in the evening. I haven’t commuted by car in years, so it was quite a shock to my system. Blood pressure rises, teeth gritted, eyes glaze over as you follow the same route over and over. I’m used to seeing the stupid things drivers pull as I ride my bike, but it’s totally different when you’re driving. It actually bothers me more, probably because I’m already extremely agitated just from the mere fact of being behind the wheel. Anyway, it got me thinking about people who commute the same route for years on end. Every day, a vacant thousand-yard stare fixed on the traffic lights ahead. The rote of it all would kill me in a matter of months.
So after the storms pass, and the dishes are drying in the rack, I step out into the cool air. That old cottonwood out back sings its timeless song with nothing more than leaves in the wind and I am so thirsty to hear it. I want to go to sleep listening to nothing but that. It takes me back to, of all places, Lucy Park and the hidden trails I found that one day, winding alongside the chocolate brown river. After a deep and full night of cottonwood sleep I want to wake up to the high fluted serenades of the thrushes. I want to turn my head to the window and breathe in the meadow breeze as it fills the room. I am so hungry for what feeds me. So desperate in this urban confusion. I keep fitting one leghold trap after another onto these withered limbs.
I can’t stop hearing Bill Callahan sing, “My ideals have got me on the run…towards my connection with everyone. My ideals have got me on the run…it’s my connection to everyone.”
I don’t even know anymore what my ideals are, if I even ever had a clear idea. I’m so shifty and drifty, I’m barely able to pin myself down most days. And I’m certainly not running anymore. Treading murky water, perhaps. As for my connections, they are few and far between. Far in miles and farther yet in states of mind.
I don’t want to become institutionalized. I really don’t. I know that much. Maybe that’s an ideal? It’s something I’ll keep fighting against as long as I have the strength, even if it’s with my last few ounces.
Posted by sean on June 4, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/06/04/institutionalized/
furthest
I’ve made it to the end of another of my work weeks. There’s something that seems not quite right about this drive to “make it through another week.” Shouldn’t we be treating every day as an amazing gift, not something to slog our way to the end of? People say, oh, if I can just make it to Friday. Yeah, well, you made it…so what are you going to do now? Get drunk for the next two days? Try to forget your crappy job and live your “real” life for a brief moment? What a sick system we’ve built for ourselves here. I generally try to spend Fridays in the woods, away from people, but the blizzards and general crappy weather have hampered that often in recent weeks. I guess you could say I’m ready for Spring.
Back when we had our work retreat, during one meal I was eating at the same table as our facilitator. Someone commented on how this one guy had hardly been seen at all outside of the work sessions. Well, the facilitator said, some people are introverts and it’s hard for them…they need to be by themselves and recharge. She said that actually she herself was an introvert, and, in fact, that she would probably opt out of the scheduled “social time” after dinner that night (so she could recharge, I suppose). [I wrote more about this night in an earlier entry]. Anyone who knows me is, I’m sure, well aware of my introverted status. Sometimes I feel like I never recharge, though. I often can’t spend enough time by myself. But other times it feels unhealthy, and I get to the point of craving companionship. I spend so much time alone that I can drive myself to the breaking point, where I just generally feel crazy and by then it’s too late to be around people because I would just feel and act too weird. I often find it much easier to connect to sounds, smells, and textures, than to carry on a conversation with a person. Music is an important interface for me to explore emotions and just generally function in the world. And clearly nature is integral to my life. Even though technology surrounds me and I use it every day, I would always choose the natural world over the manufactured world. Every single time. So…that’s where I’m at right now, here nearing the end of this week. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow. I’m supposed to go look at the stars tomorrow night. Peering out into the night sky at those celestial bodies so far away. It sounds pretty perfect, actually, and the forecast looks mostly clear.
Posted by sean on March 5, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/03/05/furthest/
something was missing
At the end of the day on Friday, I felt irritable. Typically, a Friday spent engrossed in the woods restores sharpness to eyes dulled by a week in front of a computer in the office. However, this Friday was slightly different in that more time was spent in the car, driving around from place to place, than was spent actually walking in the woods. I know myself pretty well at this point in my life, and every time I get behind the wheel of a car my soul takes a beating. To mix the joy of watching birds in the field with battling moronic drivers on the road, therefore, is a bastardization of everything I hold sacred. This was actually the first time I tried this method of visiting various places across a sprawling geographic area in order to maximize the number and diversity of birds seen. Many people on this birding discussion list I follow use this method at least every weekend, and sometimes most of the entire week. They are not necessarily all twitchers (birders who travel great distances to view rare birds in order to build their lists), but I think many of them are and certainly they exhibit the tendency. I think it’s fair to say that people who travel all over the state to fill out their “county lists” may as well be called twitchers, even if the birds they are chasing are not rare, per se.
I always suspected I couldn’t be one of these people, but after Friday I now know for sure. I can’t stand driving; everything about it is abhorrent to me. Impatient drivers who crawl up your car’s ass particularly drive me insane. Just being on a road in a box made of steel kills me. I much prefer to bike to my birding locales. What this means in practical terms is that my list(s) will grow at a much slower rate than if I were a gas-guzzling twitcher. I’ll also end up birding most of the time in the same place (my local patch, as it’s known in birding parlance). And that’s fine with me. Sometimes I get impatient with seeing the same birds over and over, particularly in the winter, but when that happens I need to just stop and remind myself of why I like birding and, more importantly, why I love birds. It’s not a competition for me; I just want to observe. It’s fun to keep track of what I see, but it’s not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to reach that plane of existence, however tenuous and short-lived it must be, where I can untether my soul and let it roam free, as I immerse myself in the natural world around me.
Occasionally I will continue to travel farther, by car, to go birding, but I think I will restrict myself to going to just one place and staying there, instead of driving around to multiple places in one day. And I found on Friday that birding from a car just feels wrong to me, sort of unnatural. Walking down a country road looking for birds is one thing, but driving down it is different. The birds are more easily frightened, for one thing, and so I see less of them (not to mention more significantly disturb their activities), but it’s also the principle behind it. I don’t use a car to commute to work, so why should I use one for my recreational activities? I felt like a big hypocrite on Friday driving all over creation, when I could’ve just stayed in one place. Sure, I would’ve seen less birds, but at least my soul would’ve remained intact, and I would’ve ended the day with a more peaceful inner state. I also don’t like myself behind the wheel of a car, because I get too easily worked up by other people’s asinine behavior on the roads. I’d rather completely remove myself from that equation whenever possible, but especially when I am engaged in an activity that is as free and pure to me as observing nature has become.
Posted by sean on February 22, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/02/22/something-was-missing/
random
Nicest day we’ve had in weeks and I’m stuck inside waiting for a tardy contractor. As I wait, someone intermittently uses a loud drill next door. Sometimes homeownership sucks. Muggings and robberies are up, in both the neighborhood and the city at large. This depresses me on an epic scale. Drilling next door probably indicates installation of new deadbolts. Bars on windows, steel doors, quadruple locks, where does it end? How safe can you be? Muggers lie in wait looking for opportunities. We really have no control over it. The problem is systemic: the haves and the have nots forever divided. No reconciliation possible. Only solution is to take to the woods. The cities are doomed.
In 1960, John Steinbeck traveled the United States with his dog and wrote a book about his trip. At one point he notes, “I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.” Since then, we have happily continued to destroy all the natural places, with the exception of a select few that are so overrun they project a carnivalesque atmosphere. We have built a society so spread apart that most people see the automobile as the only way to traverse the uncomfortable distances between point A and point B. To not own a car is anathema. You are branded a freak and possibly un-American; at the very least, you are suspect. Similarly, to eschew the consumerist lifestyle that is so red-bloodedly American is also viewed with suspicion. Why wouldn’t you want to buy all the latest greatest stuff? You saw it on TV, after all, and it looked totally awesome. And everyone who had that stuff looked really happy. So why wouldn’t you want to be happy? Get out there and shop, sucker.
Often I think I was born in the wrong century, perhaps in the wrong country, possibly of the wrong race, and maybe even on the wrong planet altogether.
I just got back from a work retreat that I had been dreading for quite some time. During said retreat, I spent some late night hours carousing with a few coworkers who I hadn’t really gotten to know beforehand. I found them to be decent and fun to hang out with, at least in my inebriated state. I’m sure they were surprised by my sudden bout of gregariousness. I’m not a mean drunk, but I can be a saucy one. During the work sessions, I was surprised to sense a tiny flame of enthusiasm ignite somewhere deep below the layers of cynicism within me. But I know better. We can talk grand and eloquent away from the office, but reality is grim. Knowing how long it’s taken to get this far (still a sad state of affairs) makes it impossible to expect that even a quarter of our lofty ideas will ever come to fruition within the next three and a half years. And that is not cynicism talking; that’s just pragmatism.
The place where we stayed was a Bavarian-styled inn that was the type of place where the Griswold family would’ve roomed during one of their epically disastrous vacations. My bathroom had a disused-looking bidet in it and a space heater mounted in the wall that smelled like burning dust when turned on. Still, the king-sized four-poster bed was comfortable and the vaguely shabby past-its-heyday look to the entire place was preferable to the sterility of modern hotels. Not a good place to be a vegan, but I got by (barely). I wish I had photos to share, but the camera was left behind.
Posted by sean on January 15, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/15/random/
why, yes, i should’ve finished painting that wall by now
When we bought this house I made a list of things to do/fix soon after moving in. I think my idea was to get it all done and then kick back and relax. There were certain things, like painting, that I just knew if we didn’t finish before moving in, they might not get done for some time. Well, I was sure right about that. As I sit here at my desk, my eyes wander to the pile of switch face-plates that have yet to screw themselves back into the wall, probably because they are patiently waiting for me to first slap on that final coat of paint. After so many months of living with half-finished projects, you become dangerously ambivalent to their incomplete status. In all fairness, I did complete some things. But there’s still a list and I still look at it regularly and sigh. I am quite adept at avoidance, wasting colossal amounts of time daydreaming and mindlessly surfing the Internet. I could blame this on the cold winter, and my desire to hibernate. Really, I could blame it on a lot of external factors. But mostly it’s because I just don’t feel like doing it. I guess I am a slacker at heart.
Posted by sean on January 10, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/10/why-yes-i-shouldve-finished-painting-that-wall-by-now/
from the bottom of the roiling pond
As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, the previous name of this blog had nothing to do with the content. It was just a nod to a type of wordplay that I enjoy. I think that many disappointed web searchers arrived at the site as a result. The new name is actually an old one, the title of an essay I wrote many years ago. It’s about a common thing that happens between people: you bond through shared experience, but as the vaporous passion and overstimulation of youth burn away over the slow dull coals of maturity, you perceive the true tenuous nature of that bond. Either what we need from other people changes as we grow older, or it just takes us awhile to figure out what we needed in the first place. Then again, with human beings it is rarely a matter of one option or another. Sometimes other people simply stop giving us what we need, either consciously or unconsciously. Or we tire of seeking it out from them, realizing we’d sooner squeeze blood from a stone. I suppose that, in the end, it’s usually a blurry blend of all of the above. Often when I look around and try to figure out what’s going on in the world, it’s like I’m peering through a jar of cloudy pond water. I see signs of life and movement, but what it all points toward is beyond me.
Posted by sean on November 30, 2009
https://sd-stewart.com/2009/11/30/from-the-bottom-of-the-roiling-pond/
abandoned umbrellas
A common rainy day sight in the city is the abandoned umbrella. I find this practice of flagrantly abandoning umbrellas at their point of failure to be extraordinarily odd. Countless times have I seen these cast-offs downtown, their broken metal frames splayed obscenely on the sidewalk, or folded and perched forlornly on some faceless building’s window ledge. Their bright hopeful colors belie the tragic loss of function in their mechanisms. Certainly I sympathize with the frustration that suddenly vulnerable pedestrians feel when they are faced with the prospect of getting wet. I have been there myself. But a broken umbrella is a large piece of waste to simply toss aside in the street. Fast food wrappers I can sort of (painfully) understand. However, the step up to throwing an umbrella on the ground is one that my brain can’t seem to navigate. If I were to follow this logic, it seems like the sky would be the limit as to what is deemed “acceptable” as litter. However, I might just not be properly connecting the lines between umbrellas and what else I have found abandoned on the street. For example, during one recent 6-mile bike ride back from an early morning birding expedition, I counted no less than 5 pairs of women’s underwear lying in the road, quite evenly spaced between the park and my house. I felt like I was traveling along some sordid trail at the end of which I had no idea what I might find. I have also seen plenty of shoes, pairs or singles, littering the streets, as well as a surprisingly diverse collection of other clothing items. I always imagine the scenarios that might lead to a particular item ending up there. But maybe I’m over-thinking it and the answer is simple. Perhaps there is a certain fraction of the population for whom disposing of used and unneeded accessories in the street is a commonplace activity. I guess that after giving it some focused thought, it really wouldn’t surprise me.
Posted by sean on May 26, 2009
https://sd-stewart.com/2009/05/26/abandoned-umbrellas/
escape
Flew out of the city like bandit bears with a swarm of angry bees on our tails. At the top of a mountain, pitched the tent only to return an hour later to find another tent pitched next to it, despite the many other available sites nearby. It gets harder and harder to escape humanity. But, alas, this was not a backpack-into-the-middle-of-nowhere situation and, after all, on the first truly nice warm weekend of the spring after an unpleasantly cold winter, what can one actually expect. Surely not solitude with nature when still so relatively close to representations of civilization. Surely not the absence of every last vestige of human life. Surely not that. What one can expect, however, is depraved college-age youth yelling and carousing until the wee hours of the morning. Yes, one can count on one’s expectations in that regard to indeed be met. Even in the midst of such pure and innocent natural beauty, the horror of humanity awaits us.
I shoved all that to the back of my head, though, and we made the best of it. For example, I saw a Brown Creeper! I was excited about that. Chipping Sparrows engaged in esoteric mating rituals. Northern Flickers abounded. And on an isolated Sunday morning hike at Catoctin we met a couple of spry older men in training for their hike of Mount Kilimanjaro next month! It was a pleasure to engage in dialogue with such good folks, and it wove back together a few tattered shreds of our hope in humanity, which had been subjected to such vicious thrashing of late.
Bike parking at Catoctin:
Posted by sean on April 20, 2009
https://sd-stewart.com/2009/04/20/escape/
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