epiphany.

what i just witnessed will never be repeated. never in my life have i ever felt so inspired, and nothing i can say will ever be able to describe the incredibility of what just happened. today, lauren picked me up from the barnes and noble here in eagan to take me down to northfield and see this guy- kristoff krane perform. what i didn't know was that before the show we were going to see him do a writer's workshop. the workshop was truly inspiring and i feel so moved by what he taught us. while i'm totally not comfortable posting the random incoherent thoughts i ended up with on my sheet of paper, i will give you my last thoughts and reflections on the excerise and the writing i did. i decided to write about my struggles with coming out, and ended up with some garbage that sort of rambled and stole a bunch of lyrics from merman and riot poof. whatever. these were my final thoughts though:

sometimes i wonder if it's just better that i either come out now or not at all. if my car lands in an ocean, likewise, i have to make the decision whether or not to try and escape the car before i drown. hence, every day i have to make the decision of whether or not i want to come out of that car. the longer i wait, the harder it is and the more likely i'll drown. however, if i rush things i could likely find myself w/out a plan and die foolishly. therein lies the problem.

so you can see from this that from using my resources and a recent conflict that i took my struggle with sexual identity and coming out and used drowning as a metaphor. i drew this conclusion from an exercise he had us do. we were asked to write down "what's on my mind lately? / conflict" and explore those concepts. so i wrote down this list during that time:

heterosexism
fear
what defines a real person?
silence
homophobia
cannibalization of identity
security
identity -> uniformity crisis
self-acceptance
identity crisis
sexuality
sin
sensuality
self-loathing
ego

so from these concepts and ideas i noticed a lot of links and similiarities. all of these are related and essentially boil down to the way i've approached myself growing up gay in a very heterosexist society. we were then asked to make four boxes, and list things. since i can't draw boxes on this, i suppose i'll just write them down as lists in the order of what we did:

objects / images / associations:
parking ticket
tea
riot poof
car - escape
school - sta
cracker

reference / quote:
real men
riot poof
"go to bed the priests are dead so no one can call you bad"

memories:
morality class
8th grade - coming out
denial - freshman year
catholicism
travis

shape / colour / season / condition:
grey / green / blue
cold summer / winter

so as you can see from the lists/boxes that i sorta rambled and didn't have any real sense of direction with my thought process other than that i wanted to write about my sexuality. when i remembered the problems with coming out in 8th grade, i started to think more about my current situation. connecting that with the cold water/ocean, the parking ticket i had gotten and with that my car, which i use a lot of the time to escape (hence have to drive being so dear [err, deer] to me), and especially tori amos's song "merman," i began to draw the idea of myself drowning, trapped in my car. while i didn't get anything really written, i feel like i learned a lot from this writing exercise and hope to try it again on my own time.

the show though, words cannot describe it. i can say that kristoff krane is a wonderful guy and that his music really inspired me today though. i can say that i sat down on a couch and ate pizza with eyedea and totally connected to them and the other people around me. and i can say that i have never before seen such admiration and powerful looks from a crowd like that, as well as kristoff himself. please look the guy up, because had i had $10 there, I would have bought that cd twice over. and i will be buying that shit the instant i have money again. i am completely inspired and in awe of what happened and i wish that i was able to explain what just happened in more detail. thank you lauren for inviting me and experiencing this with me, and thank you kristoff for giving me something i will never experience again.