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.