x-mas two K ten

i started xmas morning with a dream in which i was a contestant on america's next top model. for some reason i had no recollection of having participated in the show but as each episode aired, there i was, lithe, with a long shiny ponytail, standing before the judging panel.
i was utterly shocked, and tried to post a facebook status about how i'd had no idea i was even in the show until i saw myself on tv, just like them. in one episode a blonde girl accused me of being pregnant, which i was not.
i thought (with a private pleasure) that my friends might be impressed and awed at my new fame. i went to a friend's house and the reception was luke-warm; i looked at an open computer to see an email chain between a guy i had an awkward thing with awhile ago and a friend who moved away: harsh criticism of my top model photo shoot from that week. then around me all of my friends were saying i squinted my eyes too much when i smiled, was fatter than the other girls, thought i was so special and cool but was just a joke, etc. i hadn't even wanted to be/known i was on the show.

later (this is not about the dream) i ate a trad. english fry-up, then saw black swan (aw yeah), it has been a nice nice day

time telescoping vignettes

need to video

interpretations of capture, levels of it
speeds of frame
shots, motions, nuances
angles
comic book vs. film

i want to see myself i want to see myself i want to see myself i want to see myself i want to see myself i want to see myself i want to see myself i want to see myself i want to see myself i want to see myself i want to see myself i want to see myself i want to see myself i want to see myself

10-minute dream

I dream I'm in a dark-wood, mossy frank lloyd wright house, fallingwater. These black cats keep having sex on the couch and am like hey, hey stop it, quit it guys. I gather the babies they make, which are small brown papery moths with delicate human skulls for heads. I am holding them in a square clear plastic bowl and it is filling with light amber honey, when the honey touches them they dissolve.

quivers and quills

(source: ffffound)

thanatopical-slooth

Last night the dumpster across the alley was full overflowing, like a tiny apartment had regurgitated itself into the trash. Each item was old and thrift-rickety but not in a way that suggested distant abandonment. A narrow gas oven, folding plaid-woven lawn chairs, jousting lamp poles and various other tinny furnishings leaning furtively. Home objects left outside seem more alive, perhaps perversely feral.
When i crept in like a carrion-feeder, eying lit windows around me for movement, i found the completeness of the dumpster-side collection disturbing. these items so clearly were a whole Something and not discarded parts; my hands reached for the three worn coffee mugs in turn, a sinking chord crescendo-ing inside,
There is a pile of faded photographs in a dish neatly stacked on the rack, pulled down from a fridge i imagine. i snatch them, and two gritty shallow bowls with yellow flowers. The pictures are nondescript; two brown-haired little boys, a flash-bleached family portrait in front of wood paneling.
By morning light the choice items from the pile are gone, picked to detritus, neatly filtered by the vigilant neighborhood. This soothes me. i wash the little bowls like praying

a good dream

I dreamed of being in a big antique house with piles of happy thin girls laying on the couches. They reach out to me with gibbony arms and smile.

Then in the distance I hear music and in comes a parade of people and their dogs, walking like the north koreans:

and the people, men and women, are singing in in a handel-esque choir in four parts, and their dogs are singing along with them, each dog matching its owner's pitch and volume in a howl.

I look next to me and there is a light brindle brown dog, who is mine. He is almost like a person in the face though it is a dog face. We lean chummily on each other and watch the parade, I look over into his green-yellow eyes and laugh and say "Arf!", not onomatopoeia but just the word, and he grins and says "Arf! Arf!" back and we laugh because he is a dog pretending to make the noise we say dogs make.

mote aviation

if you are sick of how things are

fukkin change em

DO IT
COME ON

it is sometimes a hardest thing to stop excusing your self

change vs. fear vs. laziness

i'm still here. i tell myself excuses about all of my failings pretty much constantly; it is sometimes exhausting to live your life in this way.
excuses are not necessarily untruths, i.e. "sometimes the keyboard keys on this laptop stick and it makes writing anything suck"; "nobody but some close friends and random non-friends (who could be friends if you tried) and potentially stalking coworkers and family members even look over here at this public typing space"

an aside: hello audience, i need you, even if you are just the you out there alone right now and skimming and curious and kind of apathetic. my whole life the (non-family) relationships i've had have been characterized by something that i always felt was a "perverse closeness." i do not know how to connect in any other, more superficial, more easy-breezy way.
throughout childhood and adolescence my friendships were a string of intense female partnerships i entered into -- kate, meghan, courtney, andrea, anna, jess, charlotte, erin. each of these girls in turn would show interest and attention toward me and i would respond with cultish devotion, absorbing whatever parts of them that i could define and offering them my magic in return.

i wrote this song about the girl you hate whom i now also hate.
i also hacked her email account.
i will give you the best hand massage.
i made up this secret written language for us to pass notes in.

i don't know what these girls/friendships have to do with anything but i remembered and am discussing. i should like to return to a free-streaming daily mundane wordytime.
the girls would eventually tire or feel smothered upon realizing that they were my only friend or i don't know. in high school they were replaced by a string of equally intense boyfriends;
i regret that i am rarely able to experience humans for real in any other way (that is not shaded by my faux-but-adept social grace and anxiety). no matter how many people i am around, if i can't get this undefinable and rare soul-probe sunk into a kindred i am lost. i don't know how i am so fucking strong but require a one to hold my hand in order to accomplish basic things without monumental effort. i feel cursedly skilled like a fable.

oh, except on here, that is what i was getting to. i can get at you folks on here, from inside of me, and it is Important.

These Dark Times since the fall-back have made me shine onyx-like, glassy; i feel ready to be braver
my yoga instructor said "be open to change, let this breath change you" but i am not so good at letting

PRAGMATISM
this concept i am lately obsessed with
and consider myself defined by
(but it might be a cop-out)

it turns out i do have a lot to say (however narcissistic), i did not anticipate this but welcome it

dem bonze

to be a less a frayed

the BBbb, t and '' keys on ttthe keybbboard of tttthis old lapttop stttick

i'm ttired of editing everytthing so intttensely so i''m' leaving it for now y''all can deal.

i have been dreaming again, almostt always ttthte plot is ttthatt i have moved ttto a new aparttmentt or my apartttmenttt is somehow differentt and wrong, in ttthis dream i watttched paralyzed as my cattt dandy fell off tthe roof and when i gott tto her her littttlte leg was broken attt wrong angles. tthen someone cutttt off thtte heads of bothtt my cattts, butt like tthtat tscene in princess mononoke tthe deer god's head survives and reunittes and i knew if i could save thte heads i could have them sewn back on, i kept tasking my mottther tto help me butt was ignored, i put jauffre''s head in a bowl of icy water and saw thte wide yellow eyes frozen, ttthe other i finally gott sewed and she seemed tto recover though slightly damaged and not fully connectted
then i learned in thte dream tthatt upon completttion of college the next sttep for me was somehow to go back tto freshman year of high school, like, that''s just how it's' done, didn''t you know, and i was sitting in the classroom panicking that i'd have to do it all over again and oh god the vauge cloud of misery that represents high school in my memories, i could pass all these classes in my sleep i did it once already plus, plus now i got trainin' (the t key stopped sticking cool)
sarah palin was in my class and laughed broadly at my surliness. she had a giant piece of something on her teeth and i did not tell her, smug cunt.

i am just today obsessed with the notion that my life is made extremely difficult by the imposition of my own self-hatred.
it is like how we insist on peeling bananas from the bottom when the nubby bottom end is really the top you should peel. can you flip your mental image; i cannot

negligence

things seem to keep going wrong; last night i thought to myself "oh be careful don't spill the soup on your computer" just one second before the rim slipped my fingers and i spilled soup on my macbook pro. i want to blame the moon or a wandering curse rather than my ineptitude. the macbook is drying much less quickly than my hope, which is a desert indeed. i am on the old powerbook g4 now and she is like revisiting an old friend, the metal casing more silken and comfortable, the weight and warmth on my lap and a screen big and matte that i want to fall into like another world's sky.

something i think that is true about myself is the closeness with which i clutch my emotional deck. i have done a whole lot of moping on the internet, though, so this is where i come. surrogate realities aren't supposed to be healthy but i have been here for awhile and the rest of the world only journeys further in; enter one of my life's major dichotomies: a religious reverence and passion for nature with the other foot firmly planted in pixels.

it feels good to write on this keyboard, the keys are softer on the edges though they require more robust fingers; i imagine this is how another generation found typewriters

i don't know how long it has to be this way; my vision is blurry i am so tired and my tongue is tethered to secretary-speak. i don't know if i'll ever be strong enough to go back to school (financially), the more i feel like i am failing myself on all of my potential futures out of rabbit-fear the more i feel like a big old cliche
i find it difficult to stand up for myself because it's less painful to shut it away; disengage. i bought jeans on ebay and when they arrived they were clearly counterfeit, didn't fit, and had a broken zipper. the seller charged me $12 to ship it in a $4.75 flat rate envelope (i know these things because i ship a lot of legal documents in flat rate envelopes). i wrote a very polite and frank refund request to send back with the jeans and it's sitting next to me just making me ill, confronting someone who is clearly a random asshole trying to play me for a rube. it makes me feel so darkly bruised; deeply embarrassed, to think i may make someone feel ashamed or resentful toward me. i recognize that i "should not"' feel this way.
i don't know how to be more brave in the ways that matter

yellow times & home love

got to get back on this pony

gonna do it

also i took down that last post because i guess even with a disclaimer sometimes people don't like when you write "whore" on your own face and then you can't decide if everyone's laughing at you for being a fat retard or not
it's cool though

Last night I dreamed that I moved to a new apartment on a whim, because it seemed kind of cool, but then the sudden loss of my old home crumpled me to the floor and i woke up in an emotional pain, relieved not to have displaced myself.

Soon I'll be going to my job, which is about all I do lately. I feel that I work hard, but it and a combination of other things have given me a recent fear of putting myself out in the world. This kind of sucks and I'd like to get over it.

i am sad

my dog died is dead

well maybe it is just that time of year

or maybe it's the time of man

i don't know who i am

but you know life is for learning

we are star dust

we are golden

24

so bored of my self

love to a mews

please know

that i am sometimes just
fucked-up &funny but
i still love you &i am the best girl

getting busy

i can not even think of a damn single reason why not

late summer palette

check-in

life is mostly fine,
though too often it is being an npc;
some days consist of broken english
and me, feeble chessmaster of nouns -

there unfurl small joys which
butterfly as the rorschach
on the broad fore-head of the tiger;
the a/c purrs currently near the kingdom
of my mattress; when bourbon touches
the mouth, the anemone skin therein swells,
releasing enamored acids

searches which resulted in visits to this page

or: alternate website titles

Sleep Walk

i heard a snippet of this song on the radio and it was so perfect i became obsessed with finding out what it was

many frantic googled variations of "hawaiian steel guitar popular song"

i am glad to report others find the steel guitar "wistful" (though the successful search involved the phrase "prom song" [took under 10 minutes so proud])

fritz you are being witholding again

beatrice daily sun .com

making headlines

oh boy hi

welcome back to the fucked generation

when we last left our protagonist

the tomatoes were yet un-ripe

the locust tree out the bedroom window stood still waving

no-body had swam in the warm salt sea waving

or been stuck in germany twice

to come back and fall in love in perpetuity with the prairie

a sweetness in cider

the storms stay

dreaming of being in a childhood neighbors' house; brady and dani from middle school show choir are here looking at old video stills of us and laughing,

downstairs a real estate woman guides

a sophisticated gay couple on a tour

everywhere there is exquisite blown glass, vases, sculptures, fixtures

crowding in a mismatched liquid candy flock, a table is a giant white shallow bowl on a claw pedestal, swirled in carnival colors

transparent and opaque

the couple hems and haws

did you ever see a sky quite like

on the roof just now i saw someone watching me open my arms to the golden rain and animal clouds, in the old folks' building across the street, i saw them as i turned they darted to a more secluded window, that is the first rule of watching, no sudden shameful movements

anyway this storm says she'll scour you with science,

hots and colds and friction,

electric chrysanthemum blooms

vivo el mundo

someday when i am wealthy and have free time i will host lavish parties for world cup games and i will have a buffet of foods and boozes from each country playing. in the mean-time i will eat chips and salsa and cashews.

a man just strolled by my building singing a bizarre growling free-style jazz country tune, interspersed with angry grunts and full-body pauses to puff a smoke. i watched him for two blocks.

sometimes i realize that i look forward to some theoretical day where i will feel okay about how i feel in my body forever more, why do i feel like this day exists in the future, can it even, what am i doing so wrong

tuesday

some days this job thing from a place of pure social anxiety can make me feel

like firing a round in the ceiling and yelling hey, hey,

this terrible bitter game of other men's money you call a career,

i did never sign on to witness your quavery posturing, nor you mine

i wanted to write about how yoga lends to my ever-present sensation of being unnatural; i flex and bend in the proper ways and wonder how on earth a body could do this to me for so long and get away with it

mostly it's cool though i just got to vent shit like this once in awhile or the likelihood increases that i will accidentally call someone a "cunt" via telephone, fax, or email.

low back

both of these swim-suits are mine:

summer is going to be such a thing

someday i will go back to school and study film theory or ecology and evolutionary biology or

both

presently: work · play

then it all

hi, you,

the change-wind is at

our thighs and necks again

knocked down window-cat's house

in the small closed-off alley between the building's sections,

a humid patch of detritus:

old cat food and bird seed and bird shit,

trickling with tiny insect industry;

it seems i have formed a crude ecosystem

in this narrow column of space

i am tired to imploding but

i am growing things and stroking animals and

my life can be full of beauty and contentment

&: why shouldn't it be

it comes on like a sneeze

60w

CINCO TECHNOLOGY

Today front tire fell off my bike in the middle of an intersection.

immediate thoughts:

fuck! concrete!

god how embarrassing.

are my sunglasses okay? my sunglasses seem bent.

I am banged-the-fuck-up. It is okay, I like noble pain.

I somehow landed on: right temple, right shoulder/elbow/hand, knees (left worse than right; no skin left). My arm hurts like fuck and wouldn't work when I first went to pick up my bike tire, but seems to be okay, just like hitting-your-funny-bone-with-a-hammer neuropathic pain.

My bike: :(

it is funny how i can still feel the rude impact in my sinuses

like i can smell it

it is a word that is harder than hard

it is dry and laconic like lead cracking rock but

imagine it harder

need more sleep

I dream about exploring old buildings in new cities, about stumbling into ancient blown-glass washrooms with damp fossil-studded marble and tubes of fluted glass in all colors mimicking the bubbling flow of fountains. Each commode is a blue-green-gold glass lily.

I dream about big white dogs, some curly-coated some smooth, fawning over my attention in dark porch parties of strangers.
I dream that they find out I killed my (stranger) roommate because I found her too annoying; "it just happened." I sprint to the cathedral for sanctuary and almost trip over women in long maroon robes wailing and dragging themselves across the threshold of the chapel.

the blueberi mule

· "one" "shot" stoli blueberi (measure based on whim)

· juice of 1/2 lime, + slice for garnish

· top with natural cane ginger ale

· over so much ice

It is my new favorite summer-time drink; now I just need a copper cup. That will be a happy day. It is my invention after enjoying an attempt at a moscow mule last night, now there are a trio of excellent flavors (merry, mellow blueberry with lime and ginger jousting on top) paired with the sweetness of replacing ginger beer with ale.

Also my camera is on the fast route to brick-town as its focus (when the lens doesn't see only a psychadelic hot-pink wavy universe) is stuck on macro mode. I achieved the above shot by faking my camera out by offering it the lime a few inches away with the other principal players huddled close behind. I do not know that I could achieve this again. It troubles me, as I will be in Malta in July and if I can't document what is probably the coolest thing to happen to me ever I will just die.

There is now a small dent in the wall where I threw the camera at it. Jauffre just chirp-mewed and tried to paw at it like he thought he saw a bug.

All I want to do is be outside and plant things or maybe just lay

inter-net child

you cannot make me ashamed

of anonymous narcissism

dreaming again

the white tiger palace full of white tigerrs

the dark underground zoo portion has the librarian from your childhood

encased in glass and reading aloud with the lights on herr

she says every girl has a story it is about

slowly getting crushed

we escaped on bear-back through the arctic sea where the

whales are impossibly large, dorsal daggerrs

back in the shire it is time to run a race, you used to

win all the races but maybe not because you were

faster just because you were betterr at winning,

in any case today the feet won't fly and the skinny golden ones

make laps around the heavy bruise of you

my former classics professor is invited to my theoretical wedding

Action shot (click):

neuroses

i think when everything in life is generally going okay my brain is wired to shift the load of ridiculous thinking and anxiety to other areas, which is why i've been having panics almost every morning about how "fat" i "am"

but i mean really everything's pretty great

and green and the flowers

what sucks though is how when i'm pulling myself from this shit-winter and this season and my life are starting to become me very much it seems like so many of my friends are getting real down,

maybe i have just never really had friends like this and

this is how things are, riding varying and irrepressible little waves

next to each other, those at their crests always reaching down to support

i was much less angry

when my primary transportation was my feets

i wish everybody would understand how hard i work not to annoy or harm them

and treat me with similar gentleness

cause see, i, like many of my fellow citizens, have a license to

pilot a powerful machine the size of a young rhino

if the spam mailers or scam callers or tea partiers and selfish cocks don't shut the fuck up, someday,

this mild road rage might boil,

misdirected and inappropriate, like taking a hammer to an origami bird

because its tail-lights don't work, or it didn't turn when it had plenty of time

i do not care to be out and exposed where others can affect me

nine hours

is a long time to be in a place that's not home

this work thing feels like a boot camp of paper but then, ha, i remember it's every day now

it's good that my co-workers i am enjoying and being challenged by

and the work is interesting,

it is surprisingly hard to remember time zones

that they exist, i mean. be careful

when you are scheduling those exotic conference calls

to london and california

this document exists to explain how important a mother is to a son

and these photos prove that these two people are in love

a face ages throughout its lifetime on a series of gritty passport copies

i hope that my phone voice does not become my real voice

it surprises me how often a stranger across the country

trapped in some office just like me and using her phone voice

will complain, just a little, in a confiding way

i am proud of being extra comforting in those moments

spring effort

I was attentive to the tentative bristles of green and now all at once the leaves are too many to count; too thick and loud and gagging on the torrent of chlorophyll for me to be careful and observant.

I sat so long in emptiness and anticipation, whispering to the sap deep in the circling wood-folds and listening hard the way a child listens for the answer of a prayer to god: the child presented with a deity doesn't know not to expect magic.

(I may have been, tritely, ruined by religion and fiction in this way: awaiting what I believed to be a sure and inevitable climactic fork wherein the "ordinary" life I was living would be pulled away as a curtain. I would be presented with a vital challenge or quest that involved being somehow chosen or special and not just a respectable citizen who finishes school and gets a productive job. You know where this is going, it is the plot of most fantasy young adult books.

[Contrarily, the twentieth century brought about a great literary love of the salaryman/failure, with whom I also identify strongly.]

[I am now feeling the urge to watch and be inspired by some Kurosawa for some reason {Ikiru}.]

BUT there is magic, intoxicating. This invites fear. Retrospectively, the most magical times of my life were experienced just as any other present, and to think that hindsight is the only place where the larger waves of contentment can be recognized and plotted makes me afraid. Especially of getting old. Especially of not experiencing enough. Especially of being too overcome by my own small rabbit anxieties and existing in this state of visceral discomfort, masking the palpable peace that is within my reach, for no reason I can articulate. Especially of becoming boring.

[A thing I'm trying to say: There is so much joy now I am afraid I will not be able to gather it all up and hold it well enough before future-me is looking wistfully backwards.])

Now I touch the leaves with urgency in passing on my way to work; on my way home; on my way here and there. At work my tattoo lies under my sleeve and pulses in secrecy. My shiny gray new office and car make me feel so uncomfortably posh, sitting always on leather. Today I bought a small abalone shell, like an iridescent ear, to house my paperclips; it makes me think of the sea and love. After work I shed my sleeves. I pause on my bicycle to nuzzle the waxy magnolia petals.

more more more

I started really dreaming again yesterday, this morning I could remember. The town was just a big RPG-land to explore and I found my neighbor's ridiculous tall golden bicycle. It was scary to ride at first but I got the hang of it; the fear in the dismount can be relieved by timing the jump and easing oneself confidently to the ground using the bicycle frame as leverage. My mother showed up and wanted to show me photos my father had taken. They were all just walk-through tours of gas stations; the individual photos could be pieced together into a shifty movie.

I often feel stupid.

a big deal thing that happened for me

tonight i met who i tell people is my favorite author, because he is. It was pretty cool, except in that way where it's painful to go to a public event starring a famous person you admire because everyone in the audience fawns and makes fools of themselves trying to be the one stunningly intelligent individual to whom the famous person they also admire will pay attention and/or invite to become best friends.

It reeks of shame and is uncomfortable because you share these urges to be noticed. To say "You are my favorite" and hear it back is one of the biggest human deals I guess.

I should say that these days lately have all been days of note for their newness and the novelty of relative contentment. [There is always restlessness; the various urges to put things into myself or release things from myself.] My only guilt comes from keeping all of this beauty locked in my head, probably out of laziness, or fear. Both are familiar in spite of evidence to the benefits of quelling them. I am often lazy and afraid. I do not write enough or as well as I could/should because I am lazy, and afraid I and/or it will never be enough, what with apparently the answer to almost everything in the world being steeped in ambiguity, so f it.

I want my friends to see how important they are to me despite the laziness and fearfulness which extends deeply into my social abilities. I am good at the one-on-one romance when I choose to be; it is secretly the thing I am best at in the world.
I know a fact of myself is that I am ideal in harmony. Friendsss will always be novel and odd; with almost singular exception I don't know what it is to have a long friend. My friendships throughout childhood were, in retrospect, eerily like relationships, and I was pretty fucking bad at them, because kids don't ever know what the fuck. I'd always have one female "best friend" whom I kind of idolized and yearned to be like/around, and I would really just soak myself in this girl and and it felt like I was absorbing her magic, learning secrets of how to be a female/human, with the swelling joy of loyalty and the cultist quality young girls have. Then, we'd crumble, and it always felt like my fault, though I didn't mourn or regret the loss terribly. Childhood moved swiftly and these losses were easy to shrug.
What I'm trying to say is, I literally never knew that when you're a grown-up having friends can be like having a sleepover every single night you see them. Haha, I meant something else but I'm really so tired now guys. You guys, my friends who read this, I'm writing to myself but also to you always, and for some reason the sharing makes me able to write more and better than I ever could inside on my own.

anyway, what i did tonight (then bed, then new job i am actually enjoying):

I wish I'd brought something to sign, so I could have a few of his words, but I didn't. I just shook Tom Robbins's be-ringed hand he looked up into my eyes curiously and I said, "Hello it's nice to meet you," and he grinned and said "It's nice to meet you too, who are you?" and I said "I'm Sarah."

i am alive, it's pretty great

Dandy found (mint) gum in the trash and was carrying it around, playing with it and chewing on it.

It interests me to have been in this place for a year. The starlings were not here last spring, or maybe I don't remember well enough, or wasn't paying enough attention. This year a pair of starlings are building a nest in a crevice of the locust tree out front. Yesterday I leaned out my window and whistled with one; I could not presume we were holding any sort of conversation but I thought he might remember the noises I made and incorporate them. I just read somewhere that a study showed starlings need to sleep before they remember and repeat a sound they've heard earlier. To be honest if someone would give me an intelligent parrot I would be entertained forever. The cats and neighbors would be less entertained. Today I was hanging out my bedroom window watching the minor starling drama and an injured squirrel came out of his nest and down, his right front leg had something wrong with it and was all raw and torn open. It broke my heart but the squirrel seemed to get around okay, and could climb. It helped to know that it lives in a neighborhood where squirrels are honored; the cat-lady neighbor always puts corn and bread outside for the animals in the pine grove and every day at noon an elderly man from the old-folks' building across the street comes outside in his walker to throw treats to the squirrels. Every day the squirrels and crows anticipate him and gather. The man then scoots his way slowly back inside, looking fondly over his shoulder. I spread birdseed on the roof. Somehow, the squirrels always seem to know when I do it, because they will come and gorge on the sunflower seeds in the mix. Squirrels and I both enjoy the seeds of the sunflower, and shell them with similar efficiency. Yesterday I biked down through campus (the exotic trees gave such thrill and pleasure and I had missed them; local-born ash or cottonwood are nice but just so similar with their branches like veins thrusting upward as opposed to say a the posture of a cypress). Anyway so I was going down the bike lane and at N street a turkey ran across the road. I have no idea where that fucking turkey came from.

notes on april

April 8 - Tom Robbins At Doane

April 11 - Tatsuya Nakatani at Clawfoot House

April 18 - Seester's 21st B-day. I might see my sister drink on this day, but probably not as she is all Lyla Garrity Season 2.

this list to be added to but i'm late to my second-to-last day at current job. Ooooh boy life feels good now.

would i wear these shoes somewhere fancy

... Yes.

it's friday how 'bout that

I CANNOT BE AFRAID

Having music or radio in the car. I find it weird and distracting. I find myself turning it down to a barely audible level. I find myself hearing things in it, a soft voice talking for a few seconds over the music or other talking, I do not know if the radio does this sometimes or. Having a speedometer is strange after 2 years. I find myself looking down at it like a novelty, testing my instincts when I see a cop and get nervous.

So I got this new car, a Gray Ghost; it smells like my sister, and has her sorority and jesus stickers in the back window. The steering wheel feels greasy and it is so responsive it is like I am riding a freshly broken colt. Gelding. I don't think you ride colts, too twiggy. "Coltish" is an adjective I like to hear describing a woman. I do not believe it is self-applicable, I am something less thin and more calculating.

(How many animal characteristics, though, do we anthropomorphize fourth-hand from Disney, who got it third-hand from Ysengrin and Reynard, who got it second-hand from Aesop. Horses are honest but when feral become possessed by an evil spirit. The dog-kin are so clever, the cats are hedonists (except the lion, who is respected). Birds are nature's quirky retards.)

"Calculating" is often a negative term that implies scheming or dishonesty. This is not necessarily so. Sometimes I feel like such a calculated being who is never fully present but always adjusting, endlessly, for the anticipated moment to come. One of the worst feelings to me is realizing retrospectively that I have misjudged a situation and what someone of importance wanted from me, out of inattentiveness or selfishness. I try to avoid this.

Everything is new, lately. New non-studentness, job (april 1st), new love, new non-smokingness, new hair, new car. This new self is not yet calculated enough to function in the world without the salt and lemon of minor confrontations stinging raw new skin. My ankles are getting caught in the vines of unexplored jungle growth; I will make it through and emerge as the subtle and lovely amazoness, but be patient please, and kind.

Understand that I just mean to be good, and have a good life, and be okay.

branch: I want my family and I to have a relationship that is respectful; reasonable. Pleasant. Sometimes days this feels achieved for a few moments and other days my dad is a total dick to me again which, god. Something about how my dad can be a dick gives me two unbearable feelings number 1) In that way where you don't really even see your dad much and he frankly doesn't really have the smallest inkling of who you really are inside and what goes on in your daily life yet he speaks to you with a great amount of familiarity which is just viscerally shocking like a hobo on the street suddenly screaming at you for your sins. 2) In that way where it suddenly reverts you to your 14-year-old self with knee-high pleather black platform boots and (more) blemishes and more heartbreak and hormones than a scifi convention (which is basically where I wanted to be more than anything as a teenager; I would have been a queen). But something snaps and you just become this literally-kind-of psychotic 14-year-old you who wants to get violent. And then you cry at work, which, jesus, that place is full of enough drama... somehow.

And then you don't get home until after 8 because you were wandering around running various some-more-unnecessary-than-other errands, buying too many groceries because it is nice to be in the store and select products for yourself that you may enjoy. A new bra. A good bra is damn hard to find. Do not even get me talking about my breasts in this stupid blog because that is something I am not prepared to do tonight. Ten dollars worth of gummy candy. A small terra-cotta pot and saucer to turn into a garlic roasting device.

In the car between the errands the radio talks and talks and talks

hahaha

I was unaware that until recently my college diploma was being ruthlessly hostage-situationed by a "'financial hold."

this probably isn't that funny to you

citizen

i completed my u.s. census

report

one, yes

one slightly frayed white girl

at 1111 H

streets scarred like a battle-field

as ghosts of snow hovered

sulking on horizions;

so, i made it my duty

to memorize the braille of us

down to

the sweet seams

where the soul splits;

i stumbled upon the

big-time

in the jungle

love,

driving me mad,

making me

crazy

ways to live dangerously without cigarettes

1) Reckless driving.

2) Nude/pantsless cooking.

3) Falling in love.

4) Reckless biking.

... I need ideas here people.

_____________________

Other news: The squirrels and birds are so happy today!!!

Day 3

The past two were hard, I kept prefacing all social interactions with an explanation that felt warranted. "I'm a little [hand gestures]... crazy." It was difficult to navigate temporarily losing my mind with trying not to annoy everyone; much of this was magnified paranoia/guilt. The world was a mosaic of pulsating psychedelic patterns with odd flashes of light in the periphery. The withdrawal gets you feeling feral, like an animal in a cage with a thorn in its paw; a rabid, squinting jaw-ache.

Today I am feeling like a soap-bubble. There is a lightness I have not felt, in retrospect, for about five years. I realized that I should correct my terminology, because as of yesterday I am not trying to quit, I am quit, it was always that simple, I was just afraid before. I have often found myself irrationally fearful of "change;" of "losing" things and selves. I have always been fearful of adjusting character descriptions, like I might jump my own proverbial shark by evolving too far off-center. If I change too many things I might lose track of the tenuous grasp I have upon my self-hood. This resulted in what could be described as festering. "Sarah can't fall asleep without drinking because she hurts. Sarah smokes cigarettes because she does not give a fuck." I don't hurt anymore, and I do give a fuck.

Unexpected things: My voice sounds deeper to me. I like breakfast. I like a little raw sugar in my coffee.

withdrawal

At least everyone's really nice to you when you tell them you're trying.
My little death-wishes that meant maybe merrily merrily merrily merrily life was but a
rebellion.

• Feelings of being an infant: temper tantrums, intense needs, feelings of dependency, a state of near paralysis.
• Insomnia
• Mental confusion
• Vagueness
• Irritability
• Anxiety
• Depression is common in the short and long term. In the short term it may mimic the feelings of grief felt when a loved one is lost. As foolish as it sounds, a smoker should plan on a period of actual mourning in order to get through the early withdrawal depression.

According to the American Heart Association, the "nicotine addiction has historically been one of the hardest addictions to break." The pharmacological and behavioral characteristics that determine tobacco addiction are similar to those that determine addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine.

Nicotine is named after the tobacco plant Nicotiana tabacum which in turn is named after Jean Nicot de Villemain, French ambassador in Portugal, who sent tobacco and seeds from Brazil to Paris in 1560 and promoted their medicinal use.

By binding to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, nicotine increases the levels of several neurotransmitters - acting as a sort of "volume control". It is thought that increased levels of dopamine in the reward circuits of the brain are responsible for the euphoria and relaxation and eventual addiction caused by nicotine consumption.

When a cigarette is smoked, nicotine-rich blood passes from the lungs to the brain within seven seconds and immediately stimulates the release of many chemical messengers including acetylcholine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, vasopressin, arginine, dopamine, autocrine agents, and beta-endorphin.^[30] This release of neurotransmitters and hormones is responsible for most of nicotine's effects. Nicotine appears to enhance concentration^[31] and memory due to the increase of acetylcholine. It also appears to enhance alertness due to the increases of acetylcholine and norepinephrine. Arousal is increased by the increase of norepinephrine. Pain is reduced by the increases of acetylcholine and beta-endorphin. Anxiety is reduced by the increase of beta-endorphin. Nicotine also extends the duration of positive effects of dopamine^[32] and increases sensitivity in brain reward systems.^[33] Most cigarettes (in the smoke inhaled) contain 1 to 3 milligrams of nicotine.^[34]

Research suggests that, when smokers wish to achieve a stimulating effect, they take short quick puffs, which produce a low level of blood nicotine.^[35] This stimulates nerve transmission. When they wish to relax, they take deep puffs, which produce a high level of blood nicotine, which depresses the passage of nerve impulses, producing a mild sedative effect. At low doses, nicotine potently enhances the actions of norepinephrine and dopamine in the brain, causing a drug effect typical of those of psychostimulants. At higher doses, nicotine enhances the effect of serotonin and opiate activity, producing a calming, pain-killing effect. Nicotine is unique in comparison to most drugs, as its profile changes from stimulant to sedative/pain killer in increasing dosages and use. (Another drug that behaves similarly is ethanol.)

The immediate effects of smoking cessation include:

• Within 20 minutes blood pressure returns to its normal level
• After 8 hours oxygen levels return to normal
• After 24 hours carbon monoxide levels in the lungs return to those of a non-smoker and the mucus begins to clear
• After 48 hours nicotine leaves the body and taste buds are improved
• After 72 hours breathing becomes easier
• After 2–12 weeks, circulation improves

Longer-term effects include:

• After 5 years, the risk of heart attack falls to about half that of a smoker
• After 10 years, the risk of lung cancer is almost the same as a non-smoker.

seasons soon changing

In the little farm house I grew up in there was a free-standing wood stove in the kitchen, a hulking black thing with a squat maw of flame and embers. Once there was a rustling in the chimney pipe. This is when there wasn't a fire burning. The bird that came flapping out in a cloud of ash and soot seemed huge when confined to the room, it was a starling or a lark. When it stunned itself bashing against the windows we cradled it in a towel and took it outside where it sat for a moment then seemed to disappear, there and then gone, leaving a smudge of black.

I remembered this when thinking of how to describe how I've been feeling for the past few months, like wandering in a china shop where the fellow patrons kept insisting I was a bull. Unnatural. Ill-suited; troublesome. Then there was the sensation of looking in the mirror and seeing the horns and the ring in my nose, and walking out the door of the fucking china shop.

This is all to try and say: I am letting go and I am feeling good. I am feeling like the icy trickle of meltwater at the peaks of the mountains, and that this coy and nourishing new ecstasy will only build within me.

you can't scare me off

LET IT GROW

ano

chip chip

Today though it is just a mess of wet grayness out, my chippies (the gang of house finches who live in the brick of my building) started singing a spring-time song that I haven't heard in months. They may have just been confused.

building

I don't tend to remember much of my dreams lately, except atmospheric moods, if they frightened me, if they featured my first high-school boyfriend all lithe and acne-faced instead of marine-bulked and dead-eyed like now, not representing himself at all but some kind of reset button, a tender erasure of damages to hulls.

I never sold the space in my head like a fine and proper realtor. Instead I let it be conquered by seething waves of whatever, whenever. I found the medications (television, alcohol, etc.) that would turn it off, but I could never stop the typhoon. I probably do not appear on the surface to be too at odds, who knows.

I cannot trust others' assessments of myself. You seem _______. I noticed that ______.

I began the year with the wrong head on. So full of terror and longing. Dire words for dire times. Regression. Stagnation. Embarrassment. Boredom. Self-loathing.

The concept of loving myself is so foreign and silly, like "deciding" to believe in a deity. I am working on it though, night and day. I am getting my tiger teeth on. As all the 6ft. drag queens say, "How'n the hellll you gonna love somebody else?"

curses

In the tiny alley-way that juts into the back of my building, the snow hovers on exhalations of heat and starts to float back upwards. Moving particles influenced by large invisible waves always remind me of time.

I can't let the usual helplessness seep in, though. It is no comfort to imagine myself destined to have woken up today and to have been disgusted that I am still myself.

There is no comfort in destiny. I recognize that it is so built into my perception of the world, to presume oneself an element of the "fairy-tale;" to presume the narrative has structure and you have a role. The princess has no agency. The wizard is clumsy and drunk. The knight is self-absorbed. Secretly, you have always been the monster, immanently deformed, sad and dangerous.

getting real with dad

Sitting over greasy eggs and hash-browns at the hi-way diner (pro tip: the meal comes with two eggs but you get a third free if you ask). Dad in our post-tension-overload "effort toward being real lunch" described his racing unwanted thoughts, and how he'll be laying in bed and think of embarrassing things he did in college and get that physical recoil of -- it's not just shame and guilt alone, it's like being punched in the solar plexus with shame and self-loathing (In describing it he did the exact same body motion I do when it happens, the sudden jerk, tense with eyes squinted shut and turned away). And then the thought happens again, and again, and you wake up in the morning and it might not be that thought but another one, a stranger yelled something rude at you on the street last week, you behaved stupidly in front of friends. When things that cause the thoughts happen, you feel like you're in shock, and need to repeat the "story" of the "incident" in your head, rehearse it obsessively until it makes some kind of sense, until it's a complete narrative, then tell the story to a friend, tell it to every friend you encounter until the pain lessens. I knew what he was talking about, I know.

It was good to ease a few of the layers of facade from the parent-child game. There's a lot more to say on the topic, but for right now it feels real good to me to know that there is another person in the world who will go home, obsess kind of delusionally about the amount of calories they are eating, consume nicotine, take profound comfort in animal company, sequester themselves for necessary peace from the noise of everything and the smells of everyone but still need and rely on people they love, and be anxious as hell under a mask of savviness.

fide

I had a "restlessness errand day" which as they usually do involved wandering to some far end of town to a store I would never normally go to and walking the aisles in a state of calm. The best aisles to do this in are rows of light fixtures in the home depot. It is a magical place. WalMart is less magical and generally terrifying; when you walk in there's produce and a vertigo-inducing row of checkouts and everything seems on the up-and-up but the further back you venture into the store, the more it feels like descending* into a warehouse of mothers tiredly barking for their children to come on and endlessly shuffling employees. I got the impression that if I got a job at that WalMart I could just shuffle around the store for hours and hours with a product in my hand until my shift was over. When I buy the 40lb. bag of birdseed I like to carry it on my shoulder like a lumber-jack instead of using a cart so that people will think I am quite brave and strong.

*It is actually more like the the fugue-state atmosphere at the back of the store is a mold steadily creeping toward the front.

These trips are fun because when I make a foolish driving mistake like missing a turn, or turning too soon into the lot of a strip mall, it doesn't matter.

The north side of town has bizarre bill-boards everywhere. "Pet Waste Pollutes Our Water" (said by cartoon fish); "Addicted to Opiates?". There are diners and ethnic restaurants I want to visit but not alone.

I am gathering the pieces for a project of some kind, but so far no medium feels right. Words, yeah, but just words? So inappropriate. I can craft beyond words with colors and shapes, with feathers and hair and string and jewels, but the effort would feel like "not enough." I want something that makes noise and flies.

BUT I have become aware with increasing lucidity that the reason I am often reluctant to undertake and embark and endeavor is a persistent attitude of self-defeatism.

Hello, I am qualified for this position. Or I mean, I will be. No, I mean, I am.

plan:

We're going to pretend January never happened. It was a false-start, on the offense, 31 day penalty.

First down.

more of a "solve your own problems" kinda girl

"Were my friends right? Had I crossed the line from pleasantly neurotic into annoyingly troubled?" -- Carrie Bradshaw

It's time to solve this. I mean, really, what the hell.

pay dirt

do you see how

we are

the fucked

can't you feel

the press of words

great walls of words like eyes

like walls of dream-eyes

un-blinking

how can you expect

how could you have expected

the minute you spoke, girl

you was un-natural

who else's brain kills they body

gnawed us to a sausage

let us all think of the most clever ways to solicit reassurance

the wolves say "i worship you and it feels good"
the primates say "touch me, touch me, touch me"

control

the waiting woman keeps her hands busy

vertigo

I had one of the dreams where I was driving through a big city trying to find my exit. The highway system was like a level of sonic the hedgehog, with signs everywhere pointing to vastly different cities, Denver, San Francisco, Baltimore, like I was at the center of everything. The hills became steeper and steeper though my speed never lessened and soon on the way down the hills the car became weightless and me weightless in it and my organs weightless in me like a lava lamp. I couldn't deal with the vertical hills anymore so I pulled off on an exit and got on my bicycle, which promptly flew off the raised highway and got stuck in some scaffolding. I froze with fear and vertigo and reached for it, crying. An old fat man with a beard came and yelled at me to get it and I just clung (clinged) to the pole like luke skywalker screaming, "I'm too scared, I'm afraid of heights, I'm too scared."

star rats

the sun came back

fuck yeah

i accidently made the margin go over here but i'm kind of diggin it

update: it went away again

it doesn't does it

At 8 a.m. she gets out of bed for the third and final time since getting in late last night. She walks around the untidy apartment. Grit underfoot. Dirty apartment. She sorts the laundry and washes half of the dishes, making a mental list of errands. In the shower, halfway between shampoo and leg-razoring, she screams once, then again, and a third time. Then her throat hurts, and she wonders what it sounded like, the closest she can think of is when they show women in labor on television, the low woman-howl of anguish. She thinks, gross. She sits for a half-hour in the tub with the warm water drumming weakly on her head. When it rivulets down her face and around her open mouth, being drawn in to wet the tip of her tongue and back out again in rhythm, it feels like breathing under water in a dream. She hugs her knees and water pools in the soft white cup formed by her body.

i am painfully aware of how boring i am

I don't know how to describe my dreams lately, they are different. They changed about a week ago, maybe. I am changing too, I am not yet sure how, but I think it is in a way that will suit me. For the past few weeks it felt like my life was dying around me, leaving this boring, empty, miserable person.

One can always retrospectively observe their actions or feelings from the past and recognize that, yes, that was fucking crazy. What troubles me is being able to see the crazy in the present, and not being able to mend or soothe it.

My brain is functioning in new ways, never-before-seen. My dreams have changed. They are horrible and vivid but I can only feel vaguely numb in/about them; it is kind of how I'm feeling about life right now -- I've hit my anxiety breaking point again and tripped the circuit breaker, I love when this happens. I thank my body for what I assume is an act of desperate self-preservation, like puking when too drunk.

This last dream I watched out my window while these guys rioted, grabbing all kinds of garbage and mattresses and a wrecked truck into one giant pile and barricading themselves in the fort just as dusk came. The police came after the sun set and then the shooting started, sparks of gun-muzzle light everywhere and yelling. The trash-fort was lit on fire and burned. In the morning there was blood coating the ground and bodies piled everywhere, all mangled with purple, red and golden organs hanging out like fruit.

Things to think about:

Control -- how I am always strictly, strictly under it. But how I like when it's taken away in good situations; i.e. plans with friends.

Not hating myself.

Thank you for attending my personal therapy session.

i will come around

time moves like amputees

an arm without a fore-arm is too swift

and immediate

thus, i crawl

unnatural connections are made

between bone and snow

a bird hammers seeds from the locust pod

my love lies fierce and subtle