2001:November:14
2001
"After a certain age you have to stop behaving like a teenager, but that doesn't mean you have to have a joyless life that's boring and tired."
- Mick Jagger
WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR POLITICAL BELIEFS? SB: Well, I'm very much a humanist. I'm very much pro-choice. I'm very much, I think, politically correct, I mean - not because I want to be, just because I am. And I just believe in people living their lives and having privacy. I think that's, to me, the most important thing in this age, is just to let people be. I think if people don't have their freedom and their basic needs met, there's nothing much to really address until those things are taken care of.
MS: IS AMERICA LOOSENING UP? SB: Well, certainly part of it is. The part that always has - the young, the people who've always been in touch with their emotions, the kind of hip people. But the rest of it? No. They're running scared. Why do you think the right wing is so fucking powerful? Because people want to feel safe. They don't want to deal with their emotions. They don't want to hear about homosexuality, they don't want to hear about the ghetto, they don't want to hear about people suffering, they just want to have their dream. But there's no room left for that particular dream. It's gone, it's over. People have to adjust to what is happening now. And they have to become compassionate. That's something people don't want to deal with
You gotta look at your self-hatred first. You have to look at where
you come from in terms of your family and the kind of pains and fears you
have from your past before you can just walk into the world and say, I'm
ready to love unconditionally. You have to be an extremely evolved and
smart and forgiving person.
Well, here is me writing. I made myself stop my mad internet research of sandra bernhard and try to pinpoint a little speck about me. I had the most intense, bizarre dream last night. It wasn't uncomfortable or upsetting. It was just strange. I went to this place that I can now picture in my head that I realize has become one of the "non-real places I go in dreams". This place is a more tree-lined but similar in its forties lushness to Forest Hills or Bo and Jill's neighborhood. It's sort of like a more tree-lined mixture of downtown and Georgetown and forest hills/bonjill neighborhood - except this neighborhood is adjacent to downtown in my dream. Anyhoo, I'm just getting off my lazy arse to write about it (I'm coming down from the anxiety of a shitty biology test and unexpected lab manual turn-ins and boss just leaving for convention). It involved my ex-boyfriend Chuck as being someone real and important in my life. The crux of the dream was all of these memories (which I didn't even know were real or not)getting validated and bathed in this syrupy nostalgic pointless yearning. Honestly, I don't remember the specifics (except that we were in a house he was staying in in the aforementioned neighborhood), but he needed me to be his friend, and I was a bit shocked and had plenty of baggage to get out of my closet and unpack before that was going to happen. For some reason, I dropped all this and let myself become real with him. He then allowed himself to be real. It was very nostaligic, but like a movie, not really anything I could get inside and live. We just remembered and figuratively wept. I'm sure I'm not portraying this correctly, but it was so strong and woozy that I quite enjoyed it. I'm not someone who shies away from emotion, but rather I greatly enjoy it when I'm completely comfortable and have no secrets (i.e. I love emotion that is either brought up by characters or by people I trust).
