A Real-Life Anthropologie Catalogue

Originally appeared on Fergie & Fife

I often say that I'd like to live in an Anthropologie catalogue. That sounds sort of silly, since I’m not particularly up with capitalism, and disagree with the owners politics full stop. Nevertheless, the store (the way it smells, the colors) and/or the catalogue (it's always somewhere dreamy like Rome; it's always, ya know, sunset) is a happy place for me. I love the way the pieces make both more and less sense for the average consumer based on how they are expertly contextualized. I love that, as a writer, the Anthropologie catalogue is one of the last places in the modern world where a poet might be paid for poetry, and have it printed en masse; distributed en masse.

My friend Corinne called me yesterday pretty upset. She’s in nursing school and it’s been a dream of hers to get there. To be in the hospital. But now that she’s there, the reality of the dream— the excruciating reality of what happens in a hospital— is weighing on her. We talked about how hard it is to sustain any kind of peaceful — let alone hopeful— mood about life sometimes. How hard it is to look at what you’ve accomplished with any kind of realistic perspective. (Both of us tend to dismiss our achievements pretty easily.) How easy it is to start weighing the merits of others against our own. And how hard it is to remain hopeful when so many things do not live up to our expectations.

In a way, this blog is how I do that— collecting dreamy things, mood building, mood-sustaining.

So, a kind of mission statement.

Mission Statement?

Yeah, there is one for this. Because it’s too easy for whatever online presence one might maintain to become just a collage of likes or rants or a half-assed version of diary. That would probably fine for a lot of people—productive even— but if I’m going to get a bunch of shit from people I really respect for keeping blog, it’s important to me (and to you, if you’re reading this) for me to be accountable for what I put here.

A lot of it (and why it’s daily) is about a diligent effort to sustain (choose to sustain) that certain mood. Selective mood-building. The idea is that If I can fill my day (and yours) with the kind of thoughts that create the moods I do want, then there will be less room for the moods I don’t want. And then maybe we can chip away and the both low-grade modern malaise and also existentially threatening juggernaut that is being alive today.

This song, that book, this idea, that poem. Maybe you don’t know of this entry already, and we can open a door together. Or maybe you do already know, and then we can experience some kind of fellowship about that. We can stop, at least for a few minutes each day and dream.

The dreamy, truth place. That’s where I want to live. This piece of internet real estate is where I build that. All other dreamy people are welcome here. This is how I get to live in my own Anthropologie catalogue.

Well... and the whole moving to Scotland thing.