i have two painted wooden ducks. together, they’re one of my favorite things. they’re shaped like humans, just with duck heads. both of them are in the same pose: standing, sort of hunched, facing forward with their hands in their pockets. they’re dressed similarly smartly. one of them, a fellow with feathers the color of a deck that’s just been stained, wears a red blazer with an aqua shirt underneath and a forest green polka-dot ascot (!), which matches his forest green pants. his friend, whose feathers are a sort of slate green, wears a pale blue jacket with a white button-up and a red tie with black stripes to go with his brown pants. both appear to have black boots on, for some reason.

one of my very closest friends gave me these ducks, so they’re important to me for that reason, but i also just enjoy looking at them. they make me happy, with the way they’re dressed, their slouchy posture. it makes me think of two shitty husbands in the fifties, making awkward conversation and hating their wives and children. i named them both Allan. i keep them together on my bookshelf, with Allan slightly turned toward Allan, while Allan stares out across the room. occasionally, i’ll take another figure that i have (an Animal Crossing amiibo or Milhouse from The Simpsons) and arrange them so that the Allans— who are quite large —are towering over the other figure expectantly, menacingly. that set-up was a little uncomfortable with this tiny Malcolm X figurine that someone gave me, tbh. i received a set of Mexican luchador figures from yet another friend, all in the same bizarre pose with one hand out to the side and the other held up as though acknowledging someone, every finger splayed out, and it amused me to arrange them in front of the Allans like a little army, the two of them thoroughly unimpressed.

american professional wrestler Owen Hart (who died almost twenty years ago when he fell from the rafters of an arena, during a live pay-per-view show, due to a stunt gone wrong), though, is almost as tall as the Allans, so he can simply be placed between them. Hart is wearing a black wrestling singlet (from his brief ‘Black Hart’ period) and it’s not possible to position him in a way that doesn’t suggest, at the very least, intensity, if not full-on aggression. his muscles are carefully articulated, and his fists are clenched tightly (though both hands do have the thumbs extended upward, apparently in a nod to his habit of pointing to himself while boasting, which is strange because that habit is connected to a previous version of the character). who will be the first to speak? what could they possibly have to talk about? Dustin Rhodes (another american wrestler), however, is also dwarfed by the Allans, and his pose, which can’t be adjusted, as he is just a piece of molded and painted plastic (making him beyond useless for a wrestling toy) could not possibly be taken as threatening: while his legs, which are bent and separated in what could be an attack stance, might potentially suggest aggression, his arms, which are held out in front of him, palms up, look, more than anything else, as though he’s expecting someone to dump a bunch of coats into them. he’s wearing a title belt, but he’s also looking up and to the right in a weird way, like he’s watching a fly buzzing around but also doesn’t want you to think he’s not paying attention when you talk. he’s so goofy looking, i can’t imagine anyone, including the grumpy, racist-ass Allans, could stay mad at him for long. he’s wearing a vest and big loud cowboy boots, to go with his wrestling tights and gold title belt.

while the Allans do have episodes where they interact with other figures, they mostly stay on a high-up shelf by themselves. sharing their space is a scented candle decorated with artwork by Jean-Michel Basquiat (Untitled (Return of the Central Figure)).

how do you feel about that experience now, today? what does it feel like physically, when you remember it?

it was a long time ago, and i’ve thought about it a lot, so it’s not upsetting when i think about it. i mean, i can remember the intense distress, it still has that significance. and i think about it regularly still, and i’ve written about it. it has the meaning, but if i think about it then it’s just what it is; a thing that happened.

is it a numb feeling?

i don’t think- i still think about it entirely in the sense of how it made me feel.

when you told the story to me, did you have anxiety or discomfort?

yes.

i felt that listening to you. what was that like?

it’s like, even if i feel ‘okay’ about it- i don’t think i’m a bad person about it; i was a little kid, it was what i’d been taught -the content of it always makes me a little uncomfortable when i tell it to other people, worried that they’ll think i’m a racist. i mean, i think it’s okay, but what if they see it differently? or if they understand it as a big dumb show, like idiots making a spectacle of not being racist and not realizing how poorly it reads to everyone else.

and they think badly of you now?

yeah. in my mind, it seems unlikely, but maybe it’s not. maybe it’s nothing like i think it is.

yes, that’s what it always comes back to for you: what if you don’t know what everyone else knows. like in the story itself.

lol

i’ll tell you my experience of listening to you tell that story. i felt like you were being very open, and i only felt empathy for you as a child. and let’s be honest about the situation here: you’re telling this story, and the person who’s sitting across from you is an African-American woman.

yeah, yeah.

my experience was nothing like what you’re describing being afraid of.

of course, i was considering that aspect of it, but listening to you say that just now, it just occurred to me; if i think about it from that perspective, it almost feels really gross.

i’m not sure what you mean.

well, not like i’m claiming that this episode has importance that it doesn’t, because it really is a big deal to me. i’ve always thought about it a lot, and if i’m thinking of an example of a time when i was young and felt really ashamed or humiliated or whatever, then that’s probably always the first one i’ll go to in my mind. but thinking about it in this way, it kind of feels tacky to present it to you, like i’m asking for you to tell me it’s okay. especially in this context, where it’s literally your job to help me, and i’m like ‘you’re a black person, tell me that i’m not a racist.’ it’s not cool.

oh, i see. that wasn’t my experience of what you said. do you feel like that’s what you were doing?

i don’t think so. well, consciously, i feel like no, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t part of it.

well, as another human being, i can say that it never occurred to me. my experience was that you were being entirely genuine, and my interpretation of what you were saying followed from that.

it is kind of your job to tell me that though, right?

do you think i’m not being honest?

i don’t think you’re lying, like in a malicious way.

but you don’t trust that what i’m saying is genuine.

it’s not about being less than genuine. i think you genuinely want to help.

but you don’t believe that i could have a genuinely good reaction to what you say?

i mean, i can’t know that for sure. it’s safer not to assume that you don’t think i’m terrible.

hearing you say that, it’s not a great feeling, to be honest. it doesn’t feel great to be told that you just won’t believe it when i tell you my thoughts.

yeah.

it’s a real feeling of powerlessness.

well. that’s your problem, isn’t it?

occasionally, my therapist gives me these printouts of, like, workbooks to read. they’re always talking about feelings and how to feel them or how to think about them or how to feel about thinking about them (or think about feeling about them). i don’t take them as seriously as i should.

in this latest packet she gave me, the last page is an exercise titled Recognize My Feelings. it provides a big list of feelings, in alphabetical order, saying:

“Which of the following emotional states do you personally know, and which have you felt in the past two weeks? Please circle those you have felt in the last two weeks.”

i’m a little confused by the first question, because i’m not sure if they’re asking if i ‘know’ them in the sense that i’m aware of their existence (which seems like there’s no point in even asking such a question) or if they mean do i ‘know’ them in the sense that i’ve experienced them personally. it has to be the second one, but it’s a strange way to word the question, especially considering that they’re actually only interested in the last two weeks. anyway, i highlighted these emotions as ones (i think) i’ve experienced in the last two weeks:

• abandoned
• accepted
• affectionate
• alone
• amused
• annoyed
• anxious
• apologetic
• betrayed
• bored
• calm
• caring
• cautious
• conflicted
• connected
• cranky
• curious
• defeated
• dejected
• deserted
• different
• disappointed
• discouraged
• distressed
• doomed
• easygoing
• embarrassed
• excited
• exposed
• foolish
• friendly
• full
• grateful
• helpless
• hopeless
• hurt
• inadequate
• incompetent
• insecure
• interested
• irked
• irritated
• isolated
• jealous
• loyal
• lucky
• miserable
• patient
• powerless
• preoccupied
• regretful
• rejected
• remorseful
• responsible
• safe
• serene
• shamed
• shy
• sorry
• stimulated
• stupid
• sympathetic
• tired
• trusted
• ugly
• unaware
• unhappy
• useless
• vulnerable
• warm
• weary
• withdrawn

so i have had these feelings. there’s some contradictory stuff there, but i don’t think that’s weird. i can pick out some patterns, but those don’t tell me anything i don’t already know. when i focus on the negative feelings that are identified, i notice that a lot of those, while they are connected to stuff in the present, are also very strongly connected to things in the past, so maybe that means something.

unfortunately, it’s the last page of the packet, and there’s nothing after the list, so i’m not sure what the purpose is supposed to be of identifying all these emotions. it’s possible i would discount whatever they would want me to do with this information, but i don’t know. all i know is that i have feelings, which i already knew.

i also now know that my highlighter (from the University of Oklahoma Office of the Bursar) seems to be dried up, and that i don’t know how to make a bulleted list on WordPress that has columns. these two things make me feel disappointed/easygoing and incompetent, respectively.

this is the third or fourth attempt i’ve made at keeping a blog. i’ve got an alternate blog that i used for a class last semester, but this is the third or fourth iteration of a personal, ongoing blog. after i thought of the name shook notes, they’ve all been called that, but there’s been multiple starts under that name. these attempts have been thwarted in a couple different ways, primarily because it’s really hard to figure out the purpose of the blog.

the first attempt was doomed from the beginning, because i tried to address that question explicitly, and it dominated every post. every post was wondering, to one degree or another, what the effect of that post was, what it said about me. i’m very preoccupied with the idea that, when we create something like a blog (or a facebook/instagram/twitter/etc. account) we’re creating a really specific version of ourselves, whether we mean to or not. we’re choosing what to put out there, what to focus on, and what to leave out. it’s the curation of an identity, basically. it’s an interesting idea, and it makes an interesting blog post to consider it. it doesn’t, however, make a terribly compelling subject for repeated, extended blog posts. every single piece was variations on a single idea: “what kind of identity am i creating with this blog? how does the fact that i’m asking that question affect the identity being created?” these questions are interesting to ask once, but not over and over. the whole thing was just me slowly disappearing up my own ass. i deleted all of it.

the second attempt was more straightforward, and i determined to not make any posts that wondered about the persona i was projecting. i just wrote about things that occurred to me and interested me. i wrote about my so-called life. i wrote about our newest cat. i wrote about Gene Belcher. i was surprised to find, one day, that someone had posted a comment responding to one of my posts (about the white nationalist internet forum stormfront.org). the person asked me to reconsider my perspective, positing that white men are singularly blamed and persecuted by contemporary culture. i responded to their response, saying “hey, anything is possible.”

it was fine, i suppose, but while i wasn’t posting concerns about the persona the blog was creating for me, i was still obsessing over it. i mostly worried that the posts were too frivolous or that they were too transparently worried that they might come across as frivolous. i decided to erase all the posts, but instead of deleting them i edited them, crossing out every word of each one, so that they all looked like this. eventually, i just deleted everything.

then i started with this version. i decided i would do my best to not worry about what persona i’m creating with each post. i can’t control it, anyway. i’ma just do me. i started attaching pictures of dark, starry skies to some of the posts, for a reason. i made a handful of posts before again buckling under the weight of worrying about what kind of person i might appear to be to someone who reads my posts and stopped posting again. i didn’t delete the old posts this time, at least.

when i decided to return to school, i also decided i should go back to the blog. i need to just write, and the blog is sitting here, so i can use it for that. just to write anything that i think of. it doesn’t matter, because i’m just getting words out. it’s nothing, and occasionally it might be something. the point is just to do something, even though it’s terrifying and almost paralyzing to worry about the persona i’m performing, the character i’m assembling with each new post. simultaneously, i have all the control over who i am (because i’m the one deciding what i share, curating a really narrow gallery of me) and none at all (because i can’t control how anyone reading my carefully curated gallery understands anything i’ve shared). i don’t know how people do it. probably they don’t worry about it so much.

i shouldn’t worry about it so much. there’s only like four people who even know this blog exists, and i think only of them even reads it. still. what if they think i’m lame?

it’s the first week of the new semester. yesterday was the first day. the instructor of my ‘prose forms’ class used the phrase the life of the mind a couple times in the course of our first meeting.

the first time (or second), she praised us, claiming that we (students in an MFA creative writing program- and i’m assuming this would include her, as well) are ‘brave,’ because we’ve chosen to embrace the life of the mind, rather than the petty practical concerns of, you know, getting a good job and making money and blah blah blah. of course, this is debatable.

beyond that, though, i’ve never understood the phrase the life of the mind. isn’t that just, like, life? who’s living outside their mind? we can try to push beyond ourselves, and at our best we might achieve fleeting moments where we come close to understanding the perspective of others, but it’s the tragedy of us all that we can never escape our own  narrow, stupid selves.

• i have social phobia
• i am bored, sometimes
• i don’t like using silverware because of the way it bangs against my teeth
• i see the world in a particular way
• i share my thoughts, sometimes
• i perform. for others, but mostly for myself.
• i hope i’m interesting, but i’m afraid that i’m not
• i usually wish i was anyone other than the person i am
• i can count on one hand the number of times i have felt like an adult in my life. usually when i’m telling one of my students to ‘act like an adult’). i’m 42 years old.
• i wonder if i mistake depression for boredom
• sometimes

there are two things i remember about the Nicolas Cage film Kiss of Death:

1. the weird way that David Caruso holds his gun and waves it around at the start of the final confrontation between him and Nicolas Cage. i don’t actually know if that’s actually a strange way to hold a gun, but it seemed different, to me, from how people in other movies hold their guns, so it stood out to me, and i wondered if David Caruso had made a point to find out the ‘real’ way to hold a gun in people’s faces for his performance. if the internet had been easily within reach, i probably would have followed up and found out quickly, but as it was i just let it go. whenever this piece of whatever has popped back into my head in the years since then, i’ve made a conscious choice not to solve the mystery. it could be legit, or it could just be an example of how everyone in that movie was overacting their ass off. i choose to believe.
2. Nicolas Cage’s character, at one point, mentions that he doesn’t use silverware, because he “doesn’t like the taste of metal in [his] mouth.” it becomes a mild plot point in the film.

the second one is the more important one for me, because i try not to use silverware, myself. i’m not concerned with the taste of metal in my mouth, but i do hate the feeling of silverware (which is hard and often heavy) scraping or (even worse) banging against my teeth. i just don’t like it, and i prefer to avoid it.

this doesn’t mean that i never use silverware. when i’m at a restaurant or someone’s house, i use what i’m given, because i don’t want to be weird and difficult, but if i’m at home i always use plasticware. i hold onto plastic spoons or forks that i like from places, and i’ll grab extras or ask my partner to save hers. when i was growing up and we went to holiday gatherings with close family, it was just known that there needed to be a plastic fork and spoon for me. real knives are fine, because they rarely need to go in  your mouth. (also because you can’t cut nothing with a plastic knife.)

i try to stock up on them any chance i get. you know, because they break. right now, i’m actually out of forks, so i’ve been using chopsticks.

Nicolas Cage’s character in that movie has always stuck with me, because from the moment i heard that line, i became really worried how everyone interpreted my preference for plasticware. would they think it was an affectation? what if they saw Kiss of Death and thought i was copying the villain from this forgotten noir remake? that question actually really bothered me, actually; i worried it would seem really plausible, because the film was a flop and not seen by most people, making it, in theory, a great movie to jack some steez from. i thought maybe i was thinking about this more than anyone else ever would, but i really worried about it. years later, i was having an honest-to-god extended conversation with someone about David Caruso, and i purposely avoided addressing his work in Kiss of Death because i was still so uncomfortable with the metal in the mouth thing. now that i’m thinking about it, it actually still kind of makes me uncomfortable.

i’m not embarrassed that i am a grown man that will only use plastic spoons and forks. i’m not embarrassed that i have a philosophy about which ones are better than others or that i prefer different styles, depending on what i’m eating. but i’m terrified that people might think i stole this characteristic from a movie that most people aren’t even aware exists. i also worry that this distinction says something really unpleasant about me.

one of my partner’s best friends likes to say that i’m just so quirky, “like a character in a novel!” i try to just not worry about it, but it honestly bothers me a lot. i’m probably thinking too much about it and/or taking it in the wrong way, but it feels reductive. like i’m not a real person, you know? like i’m just a collection of offbeat character traits.

i’m not sure exactly how that last paragraph fits with what comes before. obviously, there’s a connection in the fact that the plasticware thing is absolutely the kind of thing that would be defined as a quirk, and there’s some tension between the idea that i want to push against the idea that i’m ‘quirky’ and my concern that people might think that i got it from an outside influence. i guess the thread that connects them is this idea that i seem to be determined to control how others understand me, that what i really don’t like is that someone might think something about me that isn’t whatever my version of ‘accurate’ is. but that’s not something i want to leave off this post with.

when hard, heavy silverware bangs against my teeth, i can’t help imagining them shattering, just breaking apart from the impact like a coffee cup being hit with a hammer. i also hate marbles, because when i see them i can’t stop myself from thinking about how they would similarly destroy my teeth if i put a couple in my mouth and tried to eat them. i guess i would try to chew the marbles, rather than simply swallowing them whole. it’s awful.