This Week's Laughter #27
An archive in laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing
The year is 2016, or maybe very early 2017. My writer cohort starts to meet together in the home of one of us to watch through all of Twin Peaks. Sometimes we grab a pizza for the event. Sometimes we just have some drinks and snacks. All times we get fairly stoned, or unfairly even. I hadn’t learned behaviors or etiquette or anything, really, about life at that point and so while I might have brought the weed a handful of times, I largely mooched off of others’ brought weed. Nobody seemed to mind or complain. And if they asked for money I gave what I could happily. We were all living off that graduate student budget - some eighteen-thousand a year - and so in that way of knowing everybody’s shared availabilities creates a form of unity in mission and mind, offerings were rarely made with the expectation of return.
We watched two or three episodes of Twin Peaks an evening starting from episode one. We watched Fire Walk With Me after the end of season two as we waited for the beginning of season three to begin, long awaited as it was, twenty-five years after the cliffhanger of a finale of season two. Most of the others had already watched all of it previously though it was my first time seeing it. And so while they were rewatching in the anticipation of their decade(s) long wait for this next season, I really only waited two months until season three. The Summer of 2017 many of us would graduate, move from our apartments, find some means of sustaining life outside of school for creative writing and poetry and fucking around. As a group, we made it through all of season three except the finale.
I remember distinctly, I flew out to New York the day of the season three finale, and promptly hopped onto a — I believe Google meets call — pre-zoom era Google meets so to emphasize that shit was trash — to watch the finale with the group of us, across time zones, camera off and muted through the duration and, at the end, coming together with our collected emotions. We discussed and processed for only a few minutes before hopping off the call together, grateful that we were able to do this even as far apart as we were. Of course, I wasn’t stoned this time, which I do think takes away from some of Lynch’s magic as he so famously wished to pursue the unknown and inaccessible, and otherwise especially my brain soberly wants to create a logic for most things I find or interpret.
Today marks the first Twin Peaks Day since Lynch’s passing on January 16th. In the way of all good-natured brats, I haven’t really watched anything else of Lynch’s. Not because I disliked Twin Peaks by any means but because so many others have told me I must watch this or that and that it would be life-changing or that you would enjoy it greatly. I don’t think they’re wrong and I wish to rebel against their conviction. Perhaps the secret being that it feels like one recommendation is a statement, while twice recommended becomes something more like an authority.
The other parallel to those times, of course, is of governance. 2016 and 2017 marked the same descent into madness of Trumpism as each day uncovered some new schizoparanoiac terror. Or I shouldn’t say the same, as it feels like this time there’s some unfounded urgency to it all, whereas last time there was something of a chaos to it — pressing buttons to see what effects it would cause versus unplugging and destroying everything as quickly as possible. I remember pretty distinctly the number of times we’d all walk into the apartment with some heaviness to our souls as though the burden of uplifting ourselves from the horrors of the day became too much. This is what community is for, though. Not the literal: we should all get very stoned on a couch and watch Twin Peaks and rotate each other’s monthly free Domino’s pizza. But the insistence that sometimes neighborhood is bringing dinners over because you can’t cook and sometimes neighborhood is talking and listening really listening to someone when they’re on the verge of collapse and sometimes neighborhood is letting them use your couch for a while because their couch has saturated with grief and will absorb no more for the time being.
I think a lot about my time in graduate school as mentorship. But while most writers would profess to the available mentorship of professors toward their writerly careers and artistic drives, I largely sought mentorship in the form of how to be. I drank more than I ever had and ever would and somehow still managed to not be the drunk of the program. I was within a hundred feet of a murder on two separate occasions (one: a stabbing in a thai-restaurant-turned-nightclub I’m positive I’ve written about before but can’t see any evidence of; two: a domestic violence response which resulted in a fatal stabbing in my neighbor’s apartment). I had all sorts of sordid affairs and found models for how to accept my queerness and gender fluidity which I would reconcile with years later in therapy, discussing these figures as what they were — icons, paramount in symbolism for my burgeoning mind. Even my thesis committee for my collection of poems — the capstone of my poetic education — was comprised in two-thirds by male figures who I desperately wanted to understand and in that way of understanding come to plant more foundation attaching chains to the aspects of my selfhood.
And in this way, Twin Peaks evenings were also a type of mentorship for me. Learning how to show up for others and extend gratitude to others. Learning that gratitude and support sometimes doesn’t have to be anything at all other than sharing a room together. I mean I don’t think I did a particularly good job of this at the time, and perhaps that’s okay or perhaps it isn’t, but that group of four could still largely call on me for about anything and I would do my best to be there for them how they need.
I spin this yarn for you to enter into this week’s documentation of laughter to say: I remain and continue to be exhausted. Profoundly exhausted. Recently I have seen a score of new social media professing things like: now isn’t the time for art — your art isn’t going to rally the masses to revolt; or is it just me or does it seem like we’re heading towards some massive systemic collapse.
The first tires me because of course art is necessary. There’s a tremendous amount of historical and cultural knowledge of the oppressed and the revolutionary found only in literature. There’s a tremendous amount of literature on first-hand accounts of how a rallying poem or speech were capable of getting a defeated and exhausted band of rebels into continuing their struggle. I think what Art has failed in in recent years is convincing the masses that there is possibility for a better future. There’s been all score of dystopic representations in film, art, literature; and all sorts of escapist and fantastic envisioning of alternative realities, but very few that have taken on the effort of convincing that you we us can create something better, soon, with enough action and energy. And it feels impossible, especially in the U.S., because it is all so spread out and there is this blitzing catastrophic deluge of information and to properly combat a system of oppression one needs to commit so many hours to this: to education, to mobilization, to communication, to care. And it isn’t like you have to tomorrow transition your life into being entirely disruptive, but rather that one small step each day can add up to a more supportive community and a healthier society.
My laughs this week were less notable and uproarious than I would have otherwise wanted to document to you kind individuals. Strangers and kin.
I’ve had a disastrous stomach all week. Heather suspects an ulcer. She’s probably right. She’s also had her bodily ailments come and go through the days. To make us feel better I got us smoothies as a treat. Here is what made me laugh: Marco.
I went to my bank, Bank of America, to get advice on filing for a business and they were just so categorically unhelpful. I mean, not that I expect every banker to know everything but surely they’ve gotten enough requests about starting a business to discuss it in more meaningful terms than “go talk to a lawyer.” They spent half my appointment time opening my banking app on my phone and asking me to update my life goals in the app to include getting married and starting a business. Demographic information isn’t going to help them when they have no trust or rapport in their customer, no? Anyway, I left that meeting and just went ahead regardless. What a funny thing, though, banks are. So ridiculously useless.
I went to new friend Cass’ for something of a departure-art-party-celebration-archive. Within, they graciously allowed me to doodle and dawdle on discarded canvases or abandoned paintings they’d started. I liked the blocky colors of this one. It reminded me of newspaper pages flying in the wind. I imagined what if the newspapers were full of poems and what if the people reading them were all types of creatures. I was not stoned for this. You’re welcome to name a creature. I laughed afterwards realizing that I’d gone to a person’s home who I’d spent several months trying actively to befriend enough to actually spend time together, and then spent the some two or three hours I was there splayed on the floor doodling and composing without speaking more than maybe fifty words.
As always, please share, like, comment, or support me monetarily if you have the wallet for it. Fuck the fascist technoligarchical coup happening.
What are your experiences with Twin Peaks?