Wednesday, February 13, 2019

ITC Conf 2019

People I met
Elizabeth Johnson
Frank Crocco
Don, from Prince Ed Island
Waleed Ma'arouf, who told me about demitri martin
Ted Ward, whose favorite music is early hiphop

A worker dragging a cart full of projectors asked me if I was alright. I worry about seeming like a quiet psycho. Maybe he cared. I am copping an air of neediness. It takes work for me to keep my spirits from slumping and the dinner group pressed my social anxiety buttons to overload until I was pretty much in a state of paralysis. At those moments it's hard, and easy to look back only minutes later wishing I was truly authentic, but my authenticity is full of trembling fears that tend to freak people out and shut them out. I have to keep the mask on. The mask of being just fine. Just tired. Unable to laugh.
A light and airy sense of the real - what's really going on with my emotions, but in a light and airy fashion that isn't soft - might work to express the fears authentically, so my companions would see and connect, as opposed to shuddering and thinking I'm on the spectrum, as I sometimes do, but it's just that I think too much, too much up here (points to head). Fuck the frontal lobe!
In the early morning at the conference hall in planet hollywood, a few of the folks show up as early as me. I'm not alone.
It's the feminine side, all the watery wishy washy wannabies in me.
My joke fell flat, the quip about Las Vegas being the hub of all the world's magicians and clowns. I think the thing's changed because clowns are pariahs now, not happy-silly beings of childhood.
Stay in the masculine and stay in the center. Grounded even in heavy emotion. That would work. That could be the way. But a fish swims not on to the land.
The Ethiopian restaurant, makumba(?) was pretty amaze', even if I did have a paranoid jealous freakout. I get close to crying lately. I need a good watershed moment. The music and the dancing on the screen, and the beautiful woman serving and making us coffee by roasting the beans right in front of us in a little pan, then it brews in an elegant tall black pot. She forgot to serve me mine and maybe that would have been just as well, a sign. I felt terribly passive. A sign that the ship is taking on water.
The talk here is dire: of everything going online and art schools closing and the young generation being so damn worried about the worrisome state of the world they want nothing but security, so they give up every dream of... dreams like mine, that don't cling to security. It is entirely fascinating to know that things fall apart.
Chinue Achebe
Now the worker pushes the cart by me again and "Sweet Dreams" is playing from the phone in his pocket and I take a chance and sing it out and he smiles and paints at me and says "I like good music". And we're connected again. And I want to cry.

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