May 31, 2009
Amanda, A-Kon (unedited)
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- Casey Cichowicz: And health, wealth, and happiness to those that eat them.
- Sheila Ryan: Eggs.
- Erica: Perhaps we can pick up John Waters.
- Josh Weichhand: Ugh… Yes, to all of the above. Miss you guys. Miss the time I was able to spend here. I miss...
- Sheila Ryan: In the back of my Honda Element, the moveable roadside attraction.
- Sheila Ryan: You are very good. Pray continue in this vein.
- Cooper: You are both very kind. Thank you.
- Erica Braverman: Where’s the world’s largest fork and stack of bacon?
- Casey Cichowicz: Also, I think the new Here We Go Magic album is quite good.
- Sheila Ryan: Also, it is a wonderful story, and I really want to believe it was not a contrived stunt. Damn. I want...
- Joel Bernstein: It was mostly for you.
- Sheila Ryan: Well, you just know I love that, Joel.
- Michael Grant Smith: Cooper’s entire collection of short-short stories in JMWW is a lesson of how to write...
- Sheila Ryan: It’s all in the attitude you take toward non-anecdotes — such as my not having seen the...
- Dave Vogt: I gotta work on developing stories. Sometimes I feel like I’ll never catch up.
Holy toledo, she’s charming! I love that you asked her to describe the relationship she has with her character.
And Patrick— was that your train?
When she talks about how much she feels like she belongs to ‘a group’, I think of clusterflock.
I did too, Michael.
I think I may be on to something. I went down there again this afternoon to take some pictures (was drawn to it again, I think) and when I got there the atmosphere was completely different. whereas yesterday was buoyant and filled with jubilation, today was somber, slightly melancholy, introspective: it was like someone was packing up after a play.
anyway, I started taking pictures of some people and found out something about two of them that made me want to interview them (I won’t give it away just yet, I’ll let it unfold as I post the video). the thing is, it is becoming really clear from this interview, and from our experience at clusterflockstock last weekend, and the interviews I did today, that the common thread for this is a desire for community, to both build and mask identity, to create a sense of self by imagining a character for oneself.
oddly, I ran into two people from the Dallas historical reenactment society at the grocery store last night and in talking with Amy this afternoon (the two were in full 19th century costume (sorry Cindy)) we realized the common thread through these things is like I said, community, a sense of self, exploration, identity. which reminded me of the drag show we went to a few weeks ago, which reminded me of Amy’s belly dancing experiences.
anyway, this feels like the hub of something. I’m still processing it. if anyone wants to be involved, let me know.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Danny and I have been so excited since our encounter with y’all over last weekend. At the root of it, the community we’ve established together. It is a hub. It will be interesting to see it evolve.
I’m excited to see how it focuses us, our creativity. Whether it’s just me who’s suddenly more motivated to produce and share the iterations with y’all — my muses.
It’s me too who’s more motivated to produce and share with all of my fellow flockers!
Deron, I’d love to be involved.
I feel the same way. Our experience motivated me to produce, to revisit art projects I put away long ago. To show y’all what I’m doing.
And Deron, yes, I think you’re on to something.
I’m curious–did anyone among us expect clusterflockstock to be the transcendent experience it turned out to be? I’m thinking maybe Rick did. I know I did not.
incidentally, it is spelled “psionicist.” I think I just admitted something here.
thank you, Andrew. I was thinking scionicist in my mind.
Michael, how would you like to be involved?
and no, Cindy, I didn’t imagine it, although I felt a great sense of happiness the week before.
This weekend, I did the strangest thing. Instead of calling someone — anyone — in my family, I twittered about an anxiety I was experiencing.* Several flockers responded to my concerns, which supported me enough to finally email my father, mother, and two sisters. I didn’t write to them for help; it was more of an exchange of information. This morning, after I was examined and my fears tranquilized, it occurred to me why it felt more natural to turn to a public forum over my own blood relations: mutual respect.
A theme emerged toward the end of clusterflockstock, and it had to do with the way we, as adults, reconcile our childhoods. The axiom goes, “You can’t pick your family.” I think we flockers ‘picked’ each other out of a piecemeal mutual respect — by the time one of us becomes official around here, we’re already a part of this. In person, we discover a satisfaction that comes from opening up to people who have no agenda for you. I don’t love you in an involuntary way, or because I have to. I don’t know any of you well enough for that …yet. I think I transcended (as Cindy said) because I was given the chance to witness how you see me — in all your curiosity and receptivity.
I’m not saying families are incapable of providing this kind of sincerity. I’m just saying that whole histories of interaction can weigh relationships down. So perhaps humans dig out communities of their choosing to taste the kind of unconditional love that only folks who have no agenda for you can give.
* I discovered a lump in my breast and my imagination ran with it. I was picturing myself alone, after a double mastectomy, with no more hair. I’m not usually a hypochondriac, so I had no idea how to calm myself down.
Oh, Kelsey. Be well!
there is more in your comment dear Kelsey than I can adequately respond to except to say it makes a lot of sense to me and we are glad your anxiety has been relieved!
It’s odd – I wasn’t there, but, it has had an effect on me also – I feel more focussed as a result of you all having a great time. By reading your affirmations, looking at the photos. There is an infectious buzz.
Post clusterflockstock, seeing those first photos and reading those initial accounts dragged me down. I really felt I had missed out – I was doing that curly bottom lip thing a lot – but as the day progressed and as the days have passed I feel energised by it.
Fucking brilliant – did I ought to be thanking you for having a good time? I dunno, all I do know is my head has been buzzing.
Thanks guys! All I can tell you — without nauseating our readers — is that I probably won’t want to swim in the awesomeness that is Lynn’s manmade lake ever again.
Hee.
Kelsey, so good to hear that your examination went well. What a frightening thing.
really? there was a correlation?
Whoa! Did you get an amoeba in your booby??
Kelsey, I was confident, after talking to you on Saturday, that it was nothing, but I’m so glad to hear it went well. Something I meant to say on Saturday but got distracted was that I admired how open you were to tweet that on Friday night and how wise you were to box up your fears/concerns until “business hours.” Some may not have felt like making the trip across the bay to meet some guy from the internet the morning after making such a discovery.
Deron, to be honest, I’m not sure how I’d like to be involved. Like Phil, I feel impacted by clusterflockstock even though I didn’t attend (more so since meeting Kelsey and hearing her confirm some of my impressions of what it was like) and I’m facinated by us. By that I mean I’m facinated by my feelings toward the members of this community. I’m surprised by the sense of friendship I feel with this group of people I’ve never met (with how easy it was for me to sit and talk with Kelsey when we did meet). So, I think you’re right, you are on to something and I’d like to be involved anyway I can be.
I wouldn’t have made the correlation ‘cept that my dad just told me he once got a big, bad …bump from swimming in the Russian River when he was eight. As he put it, “Untreated sewage from Santa Rosa flowed into the river back in the day. You been swimming in a dirty pool or something? Texas?”
Apparently this is only the beginning, guys. If it gets this bad, there may need to be an intervention.
I’m glad you’re ok. XO
So sorry, Kelsey – I didn’t see your last paragraph – by far the most important. I’m embarrassed, but am happy that you are well.
Oh Phil, no worries! Seriously, I’m still reeling from the news that there will be no need for breast and hair loss. In fact, y’all might need to restrain me from using too many exclamation points here today.
Oh, and Kelsey, I’m so glad you’re okay–my delight at the possible booby amoeba notwithstanding. There’s nothing like the sense of happiness and relief that come when we’re prepared for bad news find good news instead.
Kelsey, that sucks, whatever it is!
But I feel slightly vindicated in my avoidance of the lake, which sure looks pretty in those photos.
I certainly didn’t go to CFstock expecting it to be transcendent—I mean, no offense intended to everybody else, but learning that Sheila wasn’t going to be there lowered my anticipation considerably—but I did set out without any anxiety whatsoever, which is unusual. Partly that was because I’d just come home from traveling to places that were more difficult in some ways (big language & cultural difference, presence of children), and I knew that, as much as Texas seems like another country (or another planet) sometimes, it is, still, more like home than a lot of places are. But also, I just trusted that everyone was going to be nice to each other, and that I wouldn’t feel obliged to act like a neurotic freak.
It’s interesting to contrast CFstock with another lovely, long weekend in the country that I took almost a year before. Last July I went to a wedding in Vermont, at a place configured somewhat like Lynn and Jackie’s place, and I’d known almost everybody there (“there” being in the group that came up for the weekend, not among the wedding guests as a whole) for at least eight years. Most of us have worked together, some of us closely, some of us at more than one place, and though we all have our obvious favorites, we tend to socialize in flock formation—if you invite more than two people from the group, you kind of have to invite everybody.
The place was beautiful, the weather was beautiful, there was a jar of cookies on the counter at all times, there was a pond, there was alcohol, there were bonfires, there were bugs. Cozy and familiar, right?
It was a truly nice wedding, and a super-plush place, and it was a treat to see all those friends, but I spent a lot of the weekend feeling like an oddball, like I was trying to look like I was having a good time, when really what I wanted to do was go back to my room. Because it feels far less lonely to be alone when you’re by yourself than it does to feel alone in a group of people you know.
That didn’t happen in Texas. There was no time at which I was like, “Okay, I need to get away from all these people for an hour or so. Now.” I did spend an afternoon in the living room with my laptop, but I didn’t feel weird for doing it.
Obviously, the circumstances are different. A wedding weekend has a certain trajectory, a predictable schedule. Now we will hang out; now we will drink; now we will dress up and sit in folding chairs on the lawn; now we will have cocktails; now we will sit at dinner with people we don’t know; etc. Clusterflock had no schedule, besides the regular appearance of Lynn’s love-filled cooking. Oh, god, is it really time to eat again already? There was one day when we sat so long in the dining room talking after breakfast that it became lunchtime. But aside from that, I think most of the difference was in the kind of relationships I have with y’all, versus the kinds of relationships I have with my friends in meatspace.
I said this last week but in another way, so I’ll say it again: I think it will take me at least another ten years to become as close to any of the friends who were with me in Vermont as I feel that I am to the friends who were with me in Texas.
The Web not only allows us to become friends with more people, more widely distributed geographically, but it also, I think, has created a new kind of friendship. More is different.
What will that do to us? Something good, I hope.
Soon as I have attended to some immediate problems, I hope to post about my feelings over not having attended, as I had expected and hoped to do.
(India, I am really sorry I ducked out at the eleventh hour. I was really really really looking forward to being with you. I have kinda special feelings for you. We go back a ways. Aw. Shucks.)
And Kelsey, I am relieved that you are well.
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