my how we've grown

Pre-nostalgia

In a renewed effort to seek employment (albeit not necessarily 'gainful' in the singular, Career-ish sense) my mom sent me a few links this a.m., including a job posted on Springboard For the Arts for a string installation artist.

Like all jobs that really sort of seem like they might be most in keeping with my interests, the job triggered an onslaught of stories and memories--ones that seem to occupy my time in a way that is disproportionate to the amount of energy that I am able to delegate to trying to live in the present.

Recently, I ran across this term "pre-nostalgia." It was used in an art show on some internet site from...Portland?

With little more than the suggestion of a new word, I want to find a way to reverse my long-term and recently soured relationship with nostaliga and 'nostomania,' as introduced by the 'off-modern' east-European author Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia.

Don't know quite where to go these days, haunted by an uncomfortable conflation of memories that feature failed personal relationships with failed academic/art relationships--including many people that are no longer living.

My grandma, at ninety-eight, recently fell and broke her hip.

It is hard to try to explain to certain family, and to her especially, why I can't be there for her more completely. There is no way to be fair about feeling exhausted by the grief of having already felt the very unfair betrayal that goes along with having people leave this life--something that most people reserve for intimate relationships--family, partners, friends.

How do I deal with the kind of exhaustion that I feel from having already had too many people that I spent too much energy caring about that don't fit into the categories that are more easily accepted. All of the people that occupy more peripheral spaces in our lives.

Has anyone walked past David Ireland's house lately? Who is there now to hold vigil now that I can't? For all those years that I walked past, on schedule with religious regularity--without question or explanation. The bust in the upstairs window, lights changing, 'we're-gone, back at so-and-so-hour' laminated clock in the front door window--along with a wooden elephant. What is a sculpture is a memory or is the number fifty-three eventually again just that.