when will the snow go away

If it weren't a breach of lawyer confidentiality law I'd start recording conversations I have with my boss. Not because they're particularly hilarious, just odd and funny to me.

"I'm gonna run off into the treacherous snow, Steve. I'll be here tomorrow."
"Well tomorrow is, as Scarlett O'Hara said, another day... another day in which there is four days' worth of work to do. But we persevere."
"At least the city isn't on fire."
"Indeed. And if it were, we could throw snowballs at it."

It is definitely time for me to find a new job. God, change.
____________________________

Last night I dreamed I had to babysit my friend's baby, except in the dream it was this bald newborn infant. It was all floppy and I tried so hard to take care of it but kept accidentally knocking its head against things and slamming its fingers in doors and hurting it while carrying it around. It didn't cry or anything, but I could tell it was disappointed with me. Then I remembered that babies need to have their diapers changed, which I'd forgotten to do. The baby's clothing began to fill up with liquid shit, which oozed out the neck hole while I tried to find a clean place to change it.

This is much like the dream of bizarre responsibility I had a couple nights ago, where I had to get married, to a guy I knew in 6th grade but haven't seen since. It was an "arranged marriage" where the guy had to get married to inherit his father's business in Beatrice or something, and I agreed to for some reason. Throughout the dream I was trying to get ready for this wedding I was not at all excited for; it felt like some duty I agreed to commit to in apathetic martyrdom, because it was something to do. With a half hour to go before the wedding, I realized it was inappropriate to wear a short black dress.

Do not try to marry me or leave me near your children.

It's the last day of 2009, that's weird.

days coming

I was up half the night worrying. My mom always used to say that, "I was up half the night worrying," and I wonder if this is what it felt like, heart beating so fast you can feel it thud deep into the bedsprings. I'd ask her what she was worrying about, and she'd say "You know, you guys and... everything."

I started falling asleep again after my alarm had gone off a couple times. I had what can only be described as a lucid dream; it started with me sky-diving without a parachute and landing softly on dry hard earth like the scrub of an elementary playground.

Then there was a bird in the tangled roots of a tree, with the head of a cardinal but a bright blue body like a jay. My non-dreaming self was suddenly very aware that this bird was a dream, which was an amusing and hard-to-describe sensation. The bird was now a lark, blue and tan and freckled. Non-dream me reached forward in the dream, slurring out forced non-dream words: "Hoowwww arrrrrrreeee youuuuuu birrrrrd?" Then I woke fully.

bluster

I keep trying to graft some kind of "oh what a special day" feelings onto today but it's not working. The most special holiday feeling I am having right now is smelling the bacon my downstairs neighbor is cooking, and knowing that I have thick-sliced bacon in the fridge. I feel the same way when I walk into my building after a long day and the same neighbor has made the hallway smell like a sweetly acrid pine tree. I like this neighbor; he has a cough and I hope he feels better soon.

None of this lack of xmas joy is meant to imply negativity. N(eg)ativity. I am potentially having the best X-mas of my adult life thanks to no familial responsibilities. Thanks to being able to sit around all day and feel my bicycle-legs atrophy some more, and not having to talk to anyone I don't wish to. Thanks to the bacon in the fridge, the rendered fat of which will make my leeks and onions tender for soup. I am going to make coffee soon; god, this pleases me. The snow feels isolating and right; I am feeling decadent in my warm and wind-blown tower. The everything of things still looms but for the past few days I've tripped the breaker back to a baseline of calm, thank you body, thank you mind, I needed.

dec-

For all the presumptions I make about the episodic nature of identity and events, I never presumed my life could feel so neatly divided into decades: the pastoral late '80s bled into the '90s, which tasted humid, like candy and sweat. At the turn of the millennium things grew sharper and more brittle, I plated myself with chrysalis-armor and withdrew though it cracked still.

I am making generalizations; they are inappropriate. What I mean to say is now I find myself at a cusp, in the same positions, but different, and in different positions, but the same. This body feels tough and unfulfilled. There isn't a child here anymore, though; there cannot be. When there is not a girl or a woman or a mother or a lover, can I cease for a moment.

I need to find a way to de-justify my various internal karmic jihads. That is to say, I am aware that only pain is invited when I go about in a state of deserving, even with concurrent awareness of the eternally troubling imbalance of everything.

What does one do with oneself.

What does one do with oneself. When youth feels like winter. Is this a consequence of having already lived though the greatest fear; life becomes an anticipation of pain, regeneration is slow and the story loses elements each time you tell it, becoming fanciful, this is being passive, perhaps. Aggression, too, does no favors.

I am growing less indignant with all of this, you know, just working it through.

well

(pukes on floor)

i graduated!

ugh god

I am just... I'm sorry, I'll be okay in a minute, this shit's really throwing me around.

Everything is cool.

hello again

the process is becoming more rapid-fire

soon it will be streamlined

and the voice in my head that never really goes away, i will come to regard it more fondly, and it will comfort instead of taunt me, it will keep saying "stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore" and i will be, i will be

melatonin dreamin

My apartment was a half-rooftop affair and I was having a party. People came, among them a tall, stunning man with long dark hair and a necklace strung with fragments of human skull. He leered devilishly at me and said, "I have one question: Why didn't I take you to bed with me last night?" To which I responded with shy confusion, as I'd never met him before. He drew me in and tried to kiss me but I demurred and he pecked my unresponsive lips and held me tightly while I passively tried to show disinterest. Then I noticed his ears, which were stretched down to his shoulders but not just one hole, many in a row, like a flesh honeycomb full of beautiful inch-or-bigger plugs in ebony, bone, horn, and metal.

I went down the stairs of my apartment building, the walls were crumbling and everything was coated with dust. At the front door was the boy I really wanted to see, who kissed me once, then again and said, "Since I didn't kiss you last night." I went back to the party and he didn't, I guess, dreams are weird.

The next rooftop over was just an odd mess of scaffolding and platforms. An old bearded man in a wheelchair was precariously teetering around on it, artfully dribbling a basketball. We watched and gasped as he wobbled and cheered as he avoided falling; long-haired hippy girls danced and cackled.

A very short woman approached me with her even shorter child, like a doll, and demanded that I let her child take a shower. I crouched awkwardly to talk to her, then stood, feeling like I was being demeaning. "I don't know who you are!" I said, and she became indignant. "I didn't say she couldn't use my shower, I've just never met you and I don't know who you are," I said, plaintive. After her child presumably showered, the woman had turned into the woman from church who my mom basically forced me to babysit for once when I was young, the only time I've ever babysat, and it was horrible. She was mousy and extremely pious. The dream-woman felt bad for yelling at me and gave me DVDs of all of my favorite shows from adolescence to apologize.

That is all I remember enough to write. i know dreams are esoteric and not very interesting but f u it's my blooooogggggg~

pen alt

I'm not sure how I ended up in an empty classroom in Andrews, drinking coffee and crying, but it feels right.

There's a lot to say; too much.

This morning in the snow-sharpened sun there was a long white hair on my windowsill. As I got dressed I found another hair, clinging to the lace edge of my bra, short and brown and the softest I've ever felt, like a rabbit, like a puppy in a dream.

I begin to feel parts of me freeze and burst and rupture, like a cellulose plant structure, leaking and wilted. My apartment fills with a cloud of dust that doesn't dance and coil in the sun-beam like my cigarette smoke but hangs and lingers and makes me almost scream. All over the ground is abrasive with salt and grit.

I never scream; You've never seen me scream. I mean heard.

If you were to go back through everything I've written here tabulating the most used words or phrases, I bet dollars to donuts it would be

I feel

I feel

"I feel"

this is not intentional; i wish i could turn it off

just give me a damn minute

College was a child in the arranged marriage between myself and my life.

I don't know why it always felt like such an end-game. Now there are six pages, a study session, a test, and some grammar trees between me and the abyss.

I don't want to be like you.

end times

the time-line has become quietly apocalyptic

it is good to be drunk

initiate

I dreamed that my sister was getting married and I was talking to my dad right before the wedding, trying to convince him that spending tens of thousands on this wedding was stupid because she'd only met her boyfriend a month before. My dad was in high spirits and wouldn't listen; the boyfriend was a good Christian and that was all that mattered. The wedding procession continued down the street, my sister and the groom riding a big bay horse and my dad leading the way, me at his side begging, "Don't do it!"

I remembered last night the time my sister and I almost got lost in the rocky mountains in winter. In retrospect our situation was never precisely dire, but we (probably around age 9 and 7) wandered away from my mom while hiking a familiar path. Our mood was exploratory until attempts to get back down the mountain led us further from our originating point. It was getting dark and my sister and I were wading through snow up to our waists and it felt like we were so, so alone on that mountain, and abstract concepts such as "freezing to death" which don't generally trouble middle-class little american girls started solidifying. I told her not to cry and helped her, we made it down a steep embankment to a path that led us back.

I was surprisingly not loathe to walk to class through the snow this morning. I was still steaming with residual shower heat and swaddled tightly, if unstylishly. There is something calming about this drastic morphing of the world, it is so extreme that prosaic acceptance of it precludes other worries and restlessness. My body says to my self, we are walking through the snow, feel your feet lengthen and arch, becoming lycanthropic to assist you. Everything pushes forward; we bound on our toes and the snow doesn't care.

in the jungle

your screams are mistaken for amorous bird-calls

december

a damp powder-keg

is brought in from the snow.

it dries as a new-born foal

and tests its gritty lungs.

in celebration,

the townspeople agree

to replace the word "please"

with "if you love me."