birdsong radio and grass

i dreamed traveling on a globe that shifted under my feet to deposit my hovering body in the new location; of half a dozen small dogs emerging from the surf of the indoor ocean, pugs and cavaliers each with a small gray egg purse to bury in the protection of the palms. when the tide hits the leathery pouches they explode in a froth of dog-eggs.

dogs feature in almost all my dreams now, most commonly a little black pit bull who smiles at me, her face swimming with iridescence. in real life it is snow-land again, pretty tragic only because it gives me the feeling of being on repeat, like i just tumbled from the sun-kissed lip down into the pit again, a little bit sisyphus. i am not afraid so much of the task as i am of its effect upon my character; the largest thing being that this winter makes me so raw, and in forcing myself to be calm for all the work rush and anxiety it oozes out sideways (the anxiety) and coats every other thing i do. this makes me in the world feel like everyone is talking about me, whispering behind hands, eyes low and looking, speaking "awful awful awful." in seeking reassurance i damn myself.

faux springs

"& all my friends were vampires
didn't know they were vampires
turns out i was a vampire myself
in the devil town"
-- devil town, daniel johnston (in 1st season of friday night lights)

I dreamed another blizzard was coming and there was not enough time. my neighbor's horses were thin and freezing and i had to save them but didn't know how, they nosed foggily at my windows in their fluffy winter coats. i had a list of things to get done, like they were my job, except each task was to drive to a different restaurant and order a different thing. it was like a bulimia mission, i had to gather all this food to force into myself and it made me feel guilty and excited. but the blizzard was starting. shit was getting deadly. when i drove in my car i made it to the beatrice strip-mall where my childhood rental store, silver screen video, the only one in town, was still standing. inside i knew were all the best movies, rare and beautiful ones that would fulfill me.

to my man

h. !. l. c.p. t. j. i. I.

it's been a year, you are so loved

p.s. take my hyperbolic imagery with the practical grn of slt

film-stills: la teta asustada (the milk of sorrow)

literally: the scared tit. i still don't know quite how to absorb this film. it was more bizarre in subject matter than the crafting of it would imply; it had a lot to say; about war, rape, the value of women, virginity, love (familial & romantic), botany, humans using one another, etc.. the peruvian landscape and main actress were stunning - similarly chiseled and full of sadness. i will say: there is definitely a potato up a vagina, a lot.
the camera notably fuels the momentum of the film, keeping the viewer at the same distance one expects the protagonist would for the beginning. ... yet it was quiet; i.e. you see the piano on the ground after it falls, never falling, etc. there is real beauty throughout, drama and contrast between lushness/starkness, but the strengths are in the film's music (a lot of sing-song diegetic poetry dialogue) and the motion of the camera, which subtly propels the main character to the climax of her evolution with several long, captivating motion shots.
written and directed by a lady y'all. i seem to be accidentally picking a lot of woman-directed films and it feels good.

found

"Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles,
follies, costume, crimes,
dissipate away from you.
Your true soul and body appears [sic] before me.
To You, ♥ W.W.2"

Under a tree root walking home today. Tell me more, walt freakin' whitman.

this season's spiritual guide

"if you can't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else."

r.i.p. Brian Jacques

The first favorite author I ever met! He was a major celebrity to me and somewhere there's a photo of me standing next to him blushing so hard I'm red. The Redwall series had a huge impact on the person I became for tangential reasons. Goodbye, kind Mr. Jacques.

year of the rabbit

Every night past midnight I wake up for 2-4 hours. It is a purgatory of my mind and a dully pounding heart that seems to happen regularly in the deep winter. Mostly I spend the time trying to forgive my best friend. This continues to fail. I focus hard on how it felt to sit on the couch with her, and what I loved about her, and our past times with my other beautiful friends. I envision reuniting, and everything goes well and I am so classy until I lean over and, with a sparkling grin, spit in her drink. This is because I still feel emotionally broken. I hope it changes soon.

These thoughts fractal into the increasingly rehashed narrative and prospective future [of being ousted from my favorite people again by the friend-groping emotional cripple who will make things uncomfortable for a year or until he gtfo (though he's actually great fun/likable otherwise [see what I mean about spiraling thoughts])], whose wound-raking is so tired and ineffectual that I then have to focus my efforts on forcing them out. i don't want to feel this way; i don't know yet though that i won't just keep hurting others.

I am finding that whenever I am assertive I scare people. I wish my friends would be critical of me; take the piss out of me; advise me; engage me. I feel I have become a tiger among rabbits. I feel trapped in a room of taffy walls, like Yossarian punching Aarfy in the nose of the bomber.

I try not to think about work. Instead I walk into my earliest memories, seeking that which separates me from the others as though if the plot points align it will explain everything, My Life The Interpreted Text.

On the farm outside of Beatrice, NE my first six years were in the trees and grass. My dad and his friend shirtless and splitting logs. Goldfish that grew to the size of handguns on the algae of the cattle trough. The reverent smell of blood as my dad cut up a deer on our kitchen table, and the purple-gold swirls of it that he wiped and wiped in flowering patterns as the dead deer bled out. The kind of smell you taste, metallic and rank, at the glands of your tongue. Knifing the heads off dead mallards and pheasants and squeezing the corn kernels, still whole, from their gizzards and out their headless neck-holes. Holly the black lab, fast as smoke across the pasture, bringing back delicate fan-shells of rabbit ribcages. Locust trees with thorns bigger than my fingers. Bonfires bigger than my dad's truck. Yellow toad juice. Curling with my face in the sparsely-furred belly of Molly the black lab, feeling the muscles and tendons of her back legs and the rough leather of her paws, pretending I was her baby. Bloated beige ticks on the dogs, and the prickle of nausea upon locating one, the ticks bursting audibly against my dad's loafer.

When I finally sleep and dream again, I am in the zombie apocalypse. I live in my office on a narrow tower of furniture with my little black pit bull/shepherd mix. We are asleep on the tower, having just fought off an encroaching zombie herd. She leans over and kisses me with her dog-face like a person would. Then something is wrong, when I touch her my hand comes back crawling with fleas. I shriek and we descend the furniture-stack where the fleas are now ants, crawling up my arm and on everything. The dream dims out and back in and I'm on my knees sobbing, really crying hard, but I wake up suddenly with no tears to be found and the hot sweet tangle of the crying-relief dissipates like a fog.

film-stills: the princess of nebraska

the title of this obvs. drew me in before i knew anything, but i found this a strikingly implacable film. It has a strange air of being amateurish and ham-handed while presenting artfully rendered shots and captivating tenderness with its subjects. The director, wayne wang, is chinese-american is more known for films such as "maid in manhattan" and "last holiday", but this movie's claustrophobic camera and confrontation of the culturally-displaced east/west native/alien character gives it voice, and heft. It was adapted from a short story; knowing this perhaps endears me more solidly to the drifting, obtuse pace of the narrative. I am also fond of the withheld-orgasm quality of ambiguity in film. Whatever the case, it strikes tones which strike feelings, from stepping out of the airport when you arrive in another country to walking into an abortion clinic (see? exciting. also: bizarre antony & the johnsons ending.).
it was the kind of film that made me put the gwennie foster goggles on; it's not perfect but it says something really interesting about women, etc.

winter seedling

in every picture of me my face has two facets, one soft and sweetly sparkle-eyed and the other
dark with an eye rimmed in aubergine staring straight ahead,
split on a seam like an ancient totem,
i don't know how i seem to constantly exist in dichotomic states;
dreaming and knowing everything

i am often desperate to document myself but cannot ever seem to muster the strength to hold up opposing opinions at once. i want to sing an opus of my division and torsion, how i was born a human and an animal but belong in neither world, i don't want children of my own but my earth says Raison d'être, you know,
each month the moon rips the carpet out from under and re-invents me, boys can you even imagine,
and my nose that angles out handsomely can't smell worth a shit next to another creature's, though scent is so rooted in everything we both experience,
why is my life sometimes consumed by desire to eat ravenously then puke it all out tearful euphoria (dear everyone: don't worry, not practicing); why does my heart sometimes take over a-beating and keep me inside,
it's rough to be a wound-up little bio-robot in a dying world, with first-world problems numbing and hog-tying, with this life of hard training to make you like me no matter what,
i don't mean to be so angsty and fatalistic but i have tiny secret self-truths and one is that I soothe myself by saying I will be dead just before the end of things, alive just long enough to see the dusty whipping coat-tails of industry and elephants before it all tanks, it's been tanking solid so long. every generation feels this way, but don't you have this inkling that we are truly the fucked.
i see weird microcultures of hope. i see our overpopulation regulating itself with sweet gays and folk like me, sensitive but with a maternal desire over-satisfied by small companion mammals and art while pregnancy/human babies have sounded since i can remember to be most gross. i see the planet in a constant state of healing, ms. mama forever.

this might all be stoner bullshit but this is me trying to give voice to what my life has to say, it is a work that needs a form i haven't found yet but my need to start gathering the pieces is grrreat.