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The Interpreter.

2010-12-20T15:03:00.000-08:00

In the unfathomable epicenter of some giant structure, I lay in wait, in wonder. I watch from out of new eyes at the world building up around me; it's ancient motivations still making their way out from the depths, from the heights. My thirst is for many things which I cannot explain, which start at my foundations and work their way up. There is a light, a light from so long ago, and it burns within me- wishing me alive, wishing me awake. Some of those who pass stop and stare; they absorb my aspirations, my meanings and then they continue on their way, a glance back every once in a while.

In the sunken ships at the bottom of the ocean, I swim through coral built up after years and years of abandonment. My eyes are accustomed to the lack of light, to the things that usually go unseen. There is a whole world beneath me still, and a whole world above me. I am pushing through this life, an interpreter of all the world's woes, of all the world's wonders.

And yet, no one sees me but those who set out searching; no one finds me but those who dedicate their lives to what I am, to the energy which flows out from all things. I can feel my importance in the world of humanity, in the world of animals, bacteria, in the way the ocean's waves slap against the shore, in the patterns that birds make as they fly the skies in flocks. But, sometimes, in the rushing hush of people shuffling through each other, past each other, I wonder what I'm doing here in this life. What role do I have? What am I but some long lost idea, some antiquated notion that all things have a center- all things reach their goals?

I suppose, I am everything. I am the blood that drips from the teeth of the alligator; I am the lion that lies down with the lambs. I am the etches on the walls of caves and the paint that forms the picture of what it means to make. Consumption and disillusion, excitement and desire; I am all of these things and more. I am only sitting and waiting in the wings; I am everywhere- wishing to be used up- to be made into something more.

Going Into Gehinnom. (Some Days it Shines Just Like A Diamond; Other Days It's Black as Coal.)

2010-12-19T14:24:00.000-08:00

"Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone." - Rudyard Kipling

I raced to the edge of oblivion, looked down into it and saw that it was nothing. I pace along the edges, glancing every few moments into the blackness, somehow expecting something to rise up from the nothingness. Perhaps it is a memory I wish to see floating up from those dense depths- an old love, a new one, a realization, an epiphany. But, no matter how often I peer into that inconsolable hollow, I cannot help but see the reflection of my own lack staring back at me with a silence I cannot quell.

I push my glasses up my nose; I squint my eyes, open and close them again and again. I brush the hair from my face, wipe the sweat from my brow. Patrolling the perimeter of the pit, I wait for something which I know will not emerge from the emptiness. There is a vague memory of how I arrived here, of walking up cobblestone steps which shattered into shards beneath my shuffling feet. There used to be something which surrounded me but, just now, I cannot remember what it is. Everything grows dimmer, fading into the corners, taking backward steps away from the quaking cliff. I can no longer hear the birds caw but I remember I once could; that memory, at least, stays with me- those yellow-hooded blackbirds bending their eager necks and craning them up toward the sky.

The edges where I am standing crumble a bit and pieces of mud and sand slip and slide into the darkness but I do not hear anything but the echo of a song I once knew; it feels like forever ago. I'm sure that it is just some kind of delirium, but I could swear it was rising up- climbing slowly over the crag, dusty fingers clutching the edge- calling me, beckoning me back with it. It whispers, "You are weary, weary from travel. We will scale all the way to the top of the tower of Babel."

The song's singer, its writer, calls to me from somewhere out of reach and I push my face further and further into the nothingness, trying to make out the next verse, which I've forgotten. The ground crumbles beneath my palms but I am only focused on the soft, rustling sough which sings quietly- murmuring almost, "We are weary, clearly we are." My knees shake on the loose soil; I can feel my body propelling itself forward but all I hear are the sheltering words sounding out from the depths of the dusky drop.

I am falling into the fissure and all around me is silence. I can feel the shaking, the howls of his lost tribe's lament, which rings in my ears and turns the darkness into day, even as I weightlessly plummet forward, patiently awaiting a landing that never arrives. I hear the singer, "All the rails have unraveled. Babel is gone. To dust and to gravel. And the saddest of songs."

I Used To Be Such A Good Swimmer.

2010-12-14T22:44:00.000-08:00

I am floundering on the shores of my own bad decicions, stranded on this island alone and forsaken (by fate and by man). Regret and loss swim in the shallows waiting for me to wade in so that they may wallop me with their great mass. There is an undercurrent of blistering cold watching for the tops of my two knobby knees to appear before pulling me beneath the surface. Just now, I can see all these things and I watch them from the shore; the waves break mistily against the sand and in their foamy beauty I see an echo of who I once was, of the giddy, love-struck girl who swallowed your music in gulping mouthfuls and sprayed it back out at everyone she could. The strange thing is I set off for these shores of my own volition. I hoisted my sails and raised my flag and departed for this far off land full of strangers and sunshine. And I left you- to live as a ghost in my heart- naively expecting that you would be my Penelope and fend off all potential suitors until my dramatic return. But, I cannot provide a dramatic return, as much as my heart pulls me to you- I know that you have found another to lose yourself in-to find yourself in.

Fueled by some ancient manifest destiny, I took off across the country, guileless in my expectations, that everything would come together where it needed and we would spend our hours productive and resourceful. But, no matter how productive anyone is- he will never live up, in my eyes, to the promise that you have, to the deep and intense beauty of your songs that strikes me deeper and harder than anything I've heard or seen before. I hid from myself those last days before leaving, I cowered in the darkness of corners, pretending that all would be well and that there would not be the great unraveling that my mind kept whispering to me about. And now I am here, still unsettled still staring longingly at the past and wishing things were done differently on both sides. Pangs of jealousy seize me and the tears come crashing down. It is funny that I am now suffering at the mistake of my own hands, my own heart. I live out my life here in this sunny state living side by side with a sadness so great it spills out over everything. Sometimes I wonder if anger is no better than complacency but they both weave a wicked path which leads to nothing but despair.

I am drowning in wild, emotional abandon, heaving heavy breaths that choke out at their ends. There is an emptiness which lingers, longing, and it feels like the pit of my stomach hollowed out. It has been years since I have cried so much, since I have choked on the sobs that spilled from my lips and ignored the snot that dripped from my nose in a steady, sticky, stream. It has been years since I have felt an emotional release so strongly, so steadily and for so long. Yesterday was the 6th day in a row and today marks the first day without crying. I need to get a hold of myself. I need to figure out what I want in the world.

Regret and fears chase each other around my swollen and tear-addled brain. I have done the wrong thing. I have hurt someone who may be the only person who can give me the things I need, who I can give the things he needs. I made a choice fueled by alcohol and fear; I chose the one who hurt me because he was willing to leave. I knew he was like this- the Jekyll and Hyde- the drinking, and I thought, for some reason, that it was okay. I hid myself behind the delicate clanking of a drink and told myself there was nothing left for me in Baltimore. And, it's true- for the most part. I needed to leave, to find myself somewhere else- but I also needed to get myself there on my own and not rely on someone else to do all the legwork.

And in my haste to leave the barren city that held little for me but memories of the past, I made the most important person in my life a memory. I abandoned everything I had worked to build for so many years and no one, not even him, asked twice. I wonder now, surrounded by the marks I have made, facing the mess I have made of the most honest and productive relationship I have ever had, if things really were as bad as I thought. I had backed myself into a corner, screaming to be heard and he sat there stone-faced, trying to understand but failing. And I flailed my arms and jumped up and down and he said, "Stop jumping. It's noisy." He fell into a darkness that I could not contain, that I could not alight. And I stayed there with him, trying, but often failing, to be a support system.

I, repeatedly, ran to others to satisfy my need for emotion, for words, for fiction. And I was wrong on so many counts that I have failed to realize until now. I want to shout apologies across the barren mid-land plains. I want to say, "Don't forget me. Please don't forget me. Make it easy on me just for a little while. I know you think about me. Let me know you think about me too." I want to say, "I'm sorry, so sorry, that I was such a fool. I didn't know love could be so cruel. You tell me mistakes are part of being young. But, that don't right the wrong that's been done. Love is blind and I was too blind to see. "

There is an all consuming sadness and it grips me often, more so now than ever before. And now I am fading into fog, mired in the muck, fighting to breath beneath regret and fear and sadness. I miss having your hand to hold. I want to light the path, yours and my own- to be what we once were, to work toward the dreams of our youths and the dreams of now. I want to not be afraid anymore. I want to fill the hole inside me that was torn so long ago when I was such a small, fragile thing. It's been a long life of denial that I have lived beneath the lie that I am not affected by the large number of family members that disregarded me as a babe but I am finally forced to come to terms with it and I can only hope that I can find some way to plug this constant outpouring of emotion, to stop from becoming a walking embodiment of my own fears. I can only hope that when I have figured out how to be someone by myself that I can figure out how to be someone by your side.

I am drowning in my own lack. I am reaching up for someone who isn't there. I am slowly sinking but struggling. I always used to be such a good swimmer.

Rediscovering the Deluge

2010-04-15T16:27:00.000-07:00

I have been lost beneath a cloud of expectations. I have dwindled away days and days hiding in dreams and waiting for something to shake me from my slumber, to make me make something of the days. I have wandered through an unknown city, searching for something I didn’t understand. It is only just now that I have understood (again) that it is not in another that I will find any sort of salvation but it is in my own ability to make something of myself. The dreams I have trapped myself in are loose fitting and ill conceived. They are vague and silly dreams and yet I always struggle to return to them- a sanctuary from the constant calling to create. But, why should I dismiss the need to make things into words? Is it because I have made so much and seen so little come from it? I ask too much, perhaps? For someone to feel the way I do about words. I have known people who embrace words, who keep them close in form and function, who delve deeply into all ways of expressing. I have let myself go; I have lost- if momentarily- the passion for creating. I have let it lay dormant while I ache for what once was. And it is only now that I am finally finding myself again amidst this unknown land, beneath the weight of everyone else’s successes and failures.

I spent the day on a snowy mountaintop, remembering how the words used to flow through me, enrapturing and encapsulating everything in the world that I wanted, that I imagined I could keep in the palm of my hand. And I stood there with the wet, stinging wind smacking my face, careening down the mountain on a wooden board, feeling the tug of muscles I had never used in such a way. And I found myself tired but fulfilled, for the first time in ages. I recalled the memories of snowy days of my past and the envy that I left my home town right before the deluge. I would have loved to have watched the snow build, layer after layer, and then melt slowly. I would have loved to have fallen backwards into the fluffy white depths. I did just that on the mountain. I stood elevated thousands of feet and felt the mountain beneath me, traversed it’s hills as an amateur snowboarder- scared to go careening off the edge and down hundreds and hundreds of feet into the trees. It was that fear that finally pushed me to begin again the daunting task of attempting to always make something, to try to make every day into words, into palpable memories even if it seems that nothing terribly of interest occurred.

There is a sudden resurgence of desire, of passion, of need. At another time I might have attributed it to the weather but hardly changes around here so it must be me who has changed. Perhaps it is I who have picked myself up by my bootstraps and demanded that something be done, that writing be made, that things be created and recreated. I have let down my writing friends for too long- left them lingering without a real beautiful word from me. It has been such a while and I have been so behind, suffocating in a world of nothingness, of neediness. It is time to shrug off the shroud of who I once was, who I was last week, yesterday, and today and make tomorrow into something worthy, make myself into something worthy.

More RAM.

2009-06-16T23:07:00.000-07:00

I walked through this day filled with the rhythms of James Joyce's words. I sat in a pub with a slightly chilly Spring breeze at my back. Everything was slightly surreal and it all glowed a golden hue beneath the slowly setting sun. It's hard to focus on putting inner thoughts into writing when everything around you is in the midst of a shift. The ground beneath your feet is not solid and the words come shakily as well.

The future is unknown but I suppose no more than normal. There is always the unknown, the unknown is just getting a little bit bigger. And we are traveling across a great expanse of it. I always think about what stories you will tell when the thing you are looking forward to actually happens. What will happen and how it will be articulated.

I think that once I feel slightly more settled there will be a torrent of words which will pour from my lips and fingers and bleed on pages and pages of paper and take up bytes and bytes of space on computers. I might need to get more ram.

Tsunami Wave Trains.

2009-06-06T22:43:00.000-07:00

I have been dreaming about tidal waves and bridges crashing down, falling to bits into the ocean. Last night I dreamed that I was pleasantly sitting and reading a book, leaning against a tree when I realized that there were ants all over my head and I shook it out and tried to get them all out. There were trees and buses strewn around the sky by tidal waves; there was running and hiding and fighting some weird monsters.

I don't know what any of it means, really. Perhaps a paranoia of the unknown, of not being good enough, of not changing enough. But, I don't feel scared, really. Only sometimes. And mostly I feel scared for the people I am leaving behind. Also nervous that I will not change enough, not change the way that I would like to. I have a very clear vision of the ways in which I wish to change and I feel silly writing it all out because I have before and then I didn't do it. But, I suppose in that situation there were extenuating circumstances.

I think that working to grow fruits and vegetables and having the chance to begin anew, a new city, a new house, new people to meet and know. I would like to be less judgmental or at least less forward about my opinions. I will read far far more and exercise on my trampoline. I will dig in the dirt and pull out radishes and I will reach into the trees and pluck out figs. I will miss people.

A Peach Tree.

2009-06-06T00:24:00.000-07:00

There is some difficulty to beginning again. But at the same time it has an exciting presence about it. With something like a personal blog it's hard to get back into the rhythm of writing especially when the audience is so vague. It has been a bit of time since I have really written and much much longer since I have written on this blog. Everything lately is divided up into small parts. I have to put everything into boxes and yet again shuffle through the bog of what I own to divide it between what I need and what is trash. There are many things that I don't need but they remind me of something or they make me smile to look at them. I am going to have to downsize my plastic animal collection and retire the majority of my little friends. With the exception of my goats, ibyx, ram, and meerkats. Oh, and my sperm whale. They shall be decorative pieces; the rest shall rest.

It's interesting to move and I am glad and nervous at the same time. There are, obviously, many people who I regret to leave behind. Many people with whom I would like to spend more time and get to know better. But, I believe at the same time there are people, people I don't know, waiting to be met. People who will change many things. Although, I guess that is always true if you let it be.

I am both coming and going. I am leaving a long known comfort for something new and foreign and a bit frightening. And I will trek the country with cats in tow to do so. I will drive a large truck and drag all my things behind me. My fear of wrecking and killing my cats is palpable. My fear of driving off an embankment somewhere in Utah is chilling and constant. At the same time I cannot wait to fill the back of the truck with boxes of my things and set off into the distance toward some undiscovered future which will likely resemble the past in many ways but also will be new and different and I will be able to bounce on a trampoline all of the day long. I will get a trampoline as soon as I arrive. And I will bounce on it and it will be most lovely. How I have longed for a trampoline. Since I was a wee lass.

The night grows old and I must wake early for to make the market despite the rain which I fear will cause much trouble with the produce. Soon, I will venture to my own back yard for radishes and tomatoes and peaches and oh how I would love a peach tree.

The Wounded Flowers Were Dangling From the Vine.

2008-09-29T22:18:00.000-07:00

I am hanging, dangling between one place and another, between almost there and almost gone. There is a slowly building fear that something unimaginable will occur, that some crazy thing will occur but I suppose that is true of life in general and is not necessarily specific to leaving home. But, it is also true that chances of all sorts of things are higher in a third world country. I have, once again, gone too long without writing. It is harder now for me to pull the things I need from my head and harder to put together thoughts and line them up next to each other in a cohesive fashion. It requires more patience and consideration than I have lately been granting to writing. All caught up in leaving and moving, I have neglected to closely analyze my thoughts in writing and instead I have tried to enjoy the here and now because it will be somewhere else soon. Perhaps there should be a more balanced idea of the two things.

It's A Wonder We Can Even Feed Ourselves

2008-08-06T01:23:00.000-07:00

There is a blank page and it is staring at me expectantly. It is rather difficult to find words when there is no one to look at them and respond to them and tell you how they feel about them. There was a time once when someone did that, when someone stared back with knowledge of words and writers and I suppose at the time he never really did say anything that brilliant. I suppose, if I really think about it objectively and not forgivingly and with pity and regret, that he rarely was able to say anything very distinctly, very definitively. And I made him purposefully into a hollow shell, a hidden ghost but then, suddenly, unexpectantly, he became a mocking, vibrant reality and he was there infront of me and I ran, afraid of crying, into the darkness. I returned and there was an empty chair to look back at me and instantly I regretted running. Instantly, I regretted pretending to smile, trying to smile despite such fear of a flood of feverish sobs. Perhaps it was my own lack from the beginning. Perhaps I expect so much of people and then they are afraid because they don't think they can live up to my expectations. But, maybe I set the same expectations for myself and that is why I think it is simple for other people to achieve them. I try so hard to write and to grow in writing that it was so foreign to me that someone who was as talented as he was could just be so lazy about it and never really finish anything. And I thought that I might help him, that I might give him feedback which was engaging and real and it would inspire him to write and to finish things. But, I painted myself into a corner and I lost the only person who ever understood how I feel about words. Though, I say that I lost him, it seems almost that I never really had him and I poured myself into the situation so openly and so honestly and so beautifully (until the end, when I got drunk and ugly) and that he never did once react the way that I wished he would. And I never did understand what he wanted from me.

The Storms Of Time's Swords. Letter 4.

2008-08-03T11:42:00.000-07:00

These letters are responses to letters published on The Exquisite Thread (the link can be found to the right). In case you were wondering.

Dear______,

It is rare to find a heart filled with want, insular and hollow and yet still beating so steadily, so passionately. You make such grave and solemn claims, to forsake that with which you feel, touch and see, and yet there is a deep irony which lives within the weight of your emotions and which betrays the very words with which you claim this darkness. Perhaps you fade into the muddy depths of dumb dreams but those are not the dreams of an unborn child; they are the dreams of someone lost in life, afraid to accept the burden of the gift he has been given but which is so hard to give back.

The proof that we are alive lies in everything around us and in our ability to perceive it and to make it something new, something with our own reflection glancing back at us, hidden just beneath the surface of the universal. My heart beats irradiatively, flecks of lambent light aflame inside my chest. I try to fill the swelling space which you so definitively describe with the beauty of words and sounds and sights. When I stare into a sky alight with the summer sun and awash with the billowing clouds, I find that there is little need to peer over into the space within a space at the center of all things. And even when I am overcome with the immeasurable depravity of the human condition, I never find other people arbitrary. It is when I am mired most deep in disgust for the sins of the individual that I look to others for solace. I look to others but I also look inside myself.

I live in the hope that our words will one day sustain someone the same way that Shelley's and Shakespeare's words have sustained me and you too, my dear. Your words also sustain me and each time we finish fleshing out these thoughts and making them words, I breath a heavy sigh of relief that something was expressed and understood and will be remembered. I am happy to be a bastion, a citadel to hold strong against the storms of time's swords. What better use of these words than to cushion the beams in the walls of one's heart. For that is surely what your words do for me; it is what the best words achieve. I will use your words to remind me that I am not the only one who seeks to say things long since left unheard, that you too absorb and reform the world's words and make them your own.

These letters, though beautiful, do conceal a certain simplicity. The ease with which we've been able to leap into these letters after such a long silence is, I think, not quite clear. There is so much detailed inward focus and so little of the drab and daily. Tell me what you do when you are not writing me lenghty, lovely letters. Tell me how you came to write me again after so many voiceless years. Disclose some lost, hidden secret and I will as well.

Unveiled,
_________________

Spider's Silk. Letter 2.

2008-07-20T20:26:00.000-07:00

Yes,________,

The silence between us has always glowed in the fiery furnaces of my recent recollections. I spend my days in memories, often lost amidst a frenzied sea of faces, weaving in and out of the pulse of normal life. I struggle to maintain the same self-assured attitude which you so easily spout but I am not so quick to compare my escapades to those of an immortalized Ithacan king. Your name frequently finds itself a fertile home in the folds of my thoughts. Memories crown themselves rulers of my mind and long nights are spent chasing the past in circles down roads I never thought I'd find again.

Together we frolicked through the pathways of our past and time and again we've discussed all the things we did and all the things we did wrong. There will always be things which could have changed and we always want to be given the chance to do it again. But, we continue to absorb into each other and it seems like no matter how hard you try to build an inner life, there will be someone with whom you have to live an outward life. Sometimes my outward life is a lie and the life which reveals itself through brief and simple daydreams is more honest and true than anything said to another person.

I, too, remember when we dove directly into that deep, blue beyond. We didn't stop to look over the edge together, simply nodded and ran: our faith fraught with a faint horror but still smiling. We soared down the plateau, towards some unknown undiscovered future. You said it perfectly when you described the window pane quivering as it spasmed beneath the strength of the wind. We understood it then, even above the knowledge that we were shifting apart, that the world beneath us was wavering on the brink of a sudden shift.

Our lives interweave like layered webs and we struggle through different degrees of entanglement. Sometimes it seems we are wrapped up and waiting to lay victim to some unseen but hoovering Shelob who hangs eagerly in the shadows for the right time to strike. Other times we are falling through many stretched out cotton webs, slipping farther and farther into the depths. When you write to me I feel as though I am at the bottom of that dark well, staring up into a brightly lit sky obscured by the gossamer membranes woven, back and forth between the walls. I see your face at a distance but I know that you are only going to stay long enough to make me wonder what could have been.

We will always meet again, friend, within the weightless wanderings of ancient Ithacans or entwined in the spiders' silk of the skies. I will always find you peeking out at me from the edges of deep woods or from the shimmering surface of the sea and I will know that you think of me when your heart folds in your chest and you need to find a reason for things. Our lives and all of the other lives have all faded into the constant song of the past, as do all things but the persistent sea and the lands laden with history. So much has made it through the fire and ash of the centuries and even things long buried eventually find their way to the surface, to tell their stories or to inspire a new ones. You can follow mistrals or The Tramontane, you can roam the Rhone and beyond but you will always find the same thing when you look out into a clear sky or threatneing clouds. You will always find your self, seeking out something in the great beyond, a small thing, staring out at a steadily shifting world and trying to keep up with it's stirring.

Don't let the ash settle where it falls.
Frequently,
_________

Morning Call.

2008-07-02T09:26:00.000-07:00

I awake to the rattling hum of a saw buzz outside my window. I fade in and out of dreams and lay in half-consciousness trying to pull from my mind the images of my dreams in order, try to make some kind of sense out of them. I was trying to teach Walker to fly last night. I was also trying to convince Rob that we needed a gigantic dog like Samson. Last night I dreamed that I put two 100 dollar bills into a soda machine and had to walk around everywhere with huge pockets full of change. I think that dream is about moving and about putting too much of myself into things, about offering up too much and getting back too little. I was trying to put the change somewhere safe while I went down a waterslide in an amusement park I had broken into with my Mom. I'm not sure what that means.

Sometimes dreams are simply replaying your days in an abstract way and sometimes they are subtle premonitions. I have a lot of adventures in my dreams. I wonder if that's because I don't have so many in real life or because everything I do in real life is an adventure.

I've sat here tonight and tried to write the second half of En Route Thereto. I'm listening to Beethoven's Symphony Number 4 in B Flat, Op. 60. It's nice to write to classical music, especially when it moves so nicely as this symphony. I really enjoy the pace and the build. It's not too flashy or jumpy. It doesn't move too quickly between high and low volumes. I think all the instruments are at a really nice level on the recording that I have. It makes my writing kind of move in a way that is slightly easier and more fluid.

I suppose I use this blog as more of a relaxation tool, a way to get basic thoughts written down so that I can move past them to more interesting and focused ideas. Also, it's partially a winding down after a time of trying to get things written and if I haven't succeeded at least I'll succeed in writing something down, even if it is dribble that nobody cares about and that needs not be published.

Fernando should come alive again. That would be more productive than a bunch of pointless chatter.

June 28th 08 A Dream

2008-06-29T22:48:00.000-07:00

There was a company which manufactured a way to turn people into weird mutant fighting machines. It happened naturally when this toxin they released into the air interacted with eggs on the beach. The eggs grew into scary demonic things that ate little kids. I was trying to get away from where this was happening. There was a university on the beach and they had decided to let the creatures take over and they were going to invent some way to turn people into robot demons. Each person took on a different form that they could use to their advantage. I was trying to sneak in to talk to the people in charge by pretending that I had invented some kind of special pill. All the guards were watching me but they were also wearing matching outfits and playing speed poker. I was running away again and they were trying to get Kody. I was running into other people's houses to try to distract them from knowing where he was. They had turned my Dad into a weird tornado that swallowed up whatever they asked.

Goats and Eh.

2008-06-23T22:38:00.000-07:00

The wind outside is howling and the sky is waiting to crack. The pressure is building in my head and the humidity is stifling. I've been living inside myself, waiting for something to break me free from my inner dialogue. I've been promising to write and not doing it; I've been promising myself several things which have all been left undone. I read and speak and eat in order to maintain a life and I create in order to somehow keep a record of this life. Each day that passes without words pressed to the paper is a day that falls into the masses of un-recalled, half-lived moments. I want to make something real out of the days so that I can look back on them and know that I spent them well. So that when I am old and tired and finished I can look back on my life and know that I have made something that is important to someone, that I have succeeded in at least capturing something about life with words and images.

Some days all the things I see I see in words. I see a tree and I spell it out in my head: T-R-E-E. And I think sentences about the tree. "The tree stood by the side of the road, beckoning with it's massive branches as it swayed in the summer wind." I make associations with other trees of my life, experiences involving trees and climbing them and picking their fruits. And other days all the things I see I see in images. I see the tree and I photograph it from different angles and I photograph the different parts. My eyes will constantly search for a balanced image and I see things as lines and within a frame. And on the days inbetween I just look at things and see them and I don't think about them in words or try to force them into images. Those days make me anxious because I want to always be in the midst of making something and I fear I am always in the midst of explaining why nothing is being made.

Happiness is often like a brief respite between other emotions. It carries with it a sense of intoxication and it is often the littlest things that make me the happiest. Yesterday, while driving down a rather windy road, we turned a corner and I saw, so briefly, several goats munching away on green, lush grass. We passed them so quickly that I barely had time to think before a squeal escaped my lips and I was awfully pleased. How I love goats. The knowledge of their existence is one thing that makes me extraordinarily happy. Ah, goats.

I digress.

I want to go to the ocean. I want to swim out as far as I can and float on the surface of the water and look up at the sky. But, everytime I do so I am afraid of sharks. Especially after last time I went to the beach and was quite close to a shark before I realized that people had fled the water and everyone was standing out on the beach looking in my direction. I only saw the shark after I swam back to shore but it was right where I had been. There are a lot of things like that in life, it seems. Things you don't understand are dangerous because they are too close and it is not until you see them from a distance that you realize your mistakes.

I was reading through my notebook of dreams recently and I realized that all of my dreams involve people who have been in my life in the past or the present but mostly the past. I cannot let go of people no matter how hard I try. But, I suppose I don't try very hard, do I? I am terribly sorry that this post is so stupidly personal and it doesn't have all the grandiose statements about living and dying, about creating and not doing so. There are just so many things in my head all at once and I hate being in the middle of something and waiting for it to happen.

There are about to be many changes happening. Already they have begun. My writing partner and roommate and closest friend of six years has ceased to live with me for the first time. I am still getting used to it. It was all rather sudden and I am still unsure as to when I will see her again. I fear that I did not do the things I should have done to help her in the ways that I could. But, I believe in her and I know that we will once again write together like we did before and that we will both learn a great deal by forging for ourselves and doing what is necessary.

Ah. Well, at least something was written, eh?

Sharks.

2008-05-21T22:56:00.000-07:00

There is a bit of a struggle on the brink of a new beginning. There is always that little voice that tells you that it is easier to simply stay the same. I am making an attempt to do things for more than just myself but part of me feels that I ought to do things just for myself for a change. Regardless, I am making this brief and painless leap into another place, into living for at least another year in Baltimore but at the same time I am spending three months in Honduras and I suppose all things considered, having a nice place to come home to after three months abroad is worth the four months that I will have to spend in this country when I return. Three and a half months in the new house, three months in Honduras (maybe four) and four and a half more months in the new house and then we shall see where we stand.

I miss when I used to have the time to sit and write and think. There is too much stress involved with moving and finding a house. I hate packing and cleaning and searching and considering what it would be like to live somewhere. Maybe if I had a zillion dollars I would like to go around and look at all the houses with lovely pools and several decks and a house that would be mine. But, I hate looking at places to rent.

I am a Pisces. All I want to do is swim in the ocean. But, not just swimming: lounging and laying and reading. In the ocean. God. I miss the ocean. But, also. I'm rather scared of sharks.

A Blog for the Sake of Blogging.

2008-03-25T00:10:00.000-07:00

There's been yet another cloudy day with only a brief and sudden peeking of the sun through the clouds. I spent the majority of the morning and well into the afternoon in bed, dreaming strange dreams influenced by His Dark Materials. The blinds in my bedroom were not glowing with the sun screaming through them and so I felt no need to get out of bed. This is how I determine whether I should rise from the sheets: if the sun is warm and bright I am inspired and excited to face the day, if not I'd rather live in dreams. For, they are so vivid and colorful. I dreamed last night that I was trying to save a young boy and I had to slip through several worlds which was only achieved by leaping through a mirror and when I did this it made a very loud swooshing, suction sound. I was in several different houses which I had arrived in by way of the mirrors. I was trying to find as many mirrors to move through as fast as possible and I felt that I could save the boy if I got away from the group of younger people chasing me.

It's strange because I read a lot more of His Dark Materials than I had read last night and there are many parallels which I was unaware of until I read it. I read most of The Subtle Knife today and when I had the dream I knew that in the book there were windows into another world but there were long scenes of a murderous group of children chasing the protagonists and they had to move through several worlds back and forth to escape. I remembered my dreams more vividly as a result of reading the book and there were some parallels which were unexplained. Perhaps there was some subconscious foreshadowing which I picked up on. Anyway, His Dark Materials is no Harry Potter but it is at least slightly entertaining if a bit boring and one dimensional (no pun intended).

The sun is warm and bright today and I rose rather early and wandered about the roof, soaking in the sudden sun, dodging bees and wondering when all those flowers on the tree that hangs over onto my roof ever did start to bloom so brilliantly. I've been trying to set things up to go to Honduras to volunteer in November and things are coming together pretty solidly. I am sure to have excellent learning and finally travel from this godforsaken country.

I am so tired of it here. I just want to explore new things, think in a new language, interact with people who are not Americans, who are deeper and more cultured and who actually enjoy the act of thinking and learning and living.

I love to feel the light wind on the back of my neck, to sigh softly beneath the sun, to read wonderful and wistful words while the breeze blows by. I miss the sun and long days beneath the shade of a nice tree. I want to travel through foreign lands and do whatever I wish for as long as I intend. And I have saved up the money to do so which is something rather impressive for me because I was never good with saving or with patience or with limitations on things. When I have money I want to spend it. But, now I have the ability to do whatever I want to do and while it's rather freeing it is also a bit frightening. But, I don't really have the ability to do whatever I want because now I have to go to work.

Darling, What Can I Do?

2008-03-06T00:06:00.001-08:00

I've got no real excuses for the 7 months that have passed since the last time I posted here. Perhaps it has to do with some unnamed gentleman who I began to associate with this whole online world and who I wished to and have (relatively) succeeded to forget. Time enough has passed, I think, that I can begin to make some attempt to write personally without having to associate it with someone from my past. I would like to say I was distracted by the new novella (En Route Thereto) which is still a work in progress. It is partly true. I would like to say that Fernando is living and breathing and making attempts at relationships but this is also only a half-truth. Really, it's all been so slightly hidden beneath the surface and if I had any guts at all I would resign myself to spending the whole day tomorrow writing and then going to the gym at night. I could also say that instead of writing I have been attempting to do something physical but that is not turning out the way I'd like. I've been mostly working and cleaning and cooking and trying to figure out how to get out of this country and where I shall go.

The mice are squealing in the walls and I can hear the babies cry for their mothers. They are loud and shrieking and when I try to rid the house of their filth and nuisance it just smells all over the place or causes me to have to be responsible for the killing and ridding of things. I do not want to kill things and I certainly do not want to have to pull their smushed skulls from the inside of a "humane" mousetrap. And so their squealing and crying and peeing and stinking persists.

It is hard to write in this form because it is hard to ascertain to whom I am addressing this blog-thing. I want to write free-style but I know how annoying it is to read people's blogs when they talk about things you have no connection to whatsoever and it all seems so personal that it lacks in a great deal of objectivity.

I'm trying to relearn to balance between personal and worldly, between what I want to say in this silly little thing and what people want to hear. I might need a few more days to get caught up. And I guess it will give me an excuse to take more photographs too- which I've been slack on. God, look at me: living in a filthy mouse den, not writing the way I want, not taking photographs the way I want, working out well and much more than usual but still not as much as I want. Geez, I guess that's Winter for ya. Funny how the first day it seems like Spring I write again. I suppose the whole world will open up again once I get a little sun.

Let's just hope.

Reaching.

2007-07-08T01:24:00.000-07:00

There is something lost, some silence which I have been seeking for some time. I sit and stare into the darkness and I see a vision of something I wish I was. I see the echo of what once was an effort. I am lost in everything I want and everything I cannot find. There is a tiny sliver that I only see when I am looking very closely, a small fragment of a circumstance which is a never-ending circle. I walk back and forth through my days searching for something which I very rarely find. I am below the things I expect to be; I am looking for the surface of the water, staring into the blinding light, holding my breath, reaching… reaching.

Needlessly So.

2007-06-29T11:18:00.000-07:00

I have had a rather unproductive day off and it makes me fear for four days in a row I will have off next week. I walked through the sticky heat of the city and thought about many things which I cannot change and many things which I can. The things I can't change bother me the most and I spend too much time trying to ascertain how I might be able to change them. I wandered through downtown Baltimore and up into Federal Hill. I swung for several hours on a swing at the top of Federal Hill and I was reminded of a swing in San Francisco which when you got to the highest point in the sky you could see the whole city.

I remembered the trip to San Francisco and how it was bright and glowing but still there were undercurrents of sadness and frustration. A bike ride across the Bay Bridge where I sat on the back of a tandem and did more staring out across the bay than peddling. A walk through the Redwood Forest where I saw someone I knew from high school and was so stunned that I can't even remember who it was right now. I remembered all sorts of little things from my past and I let them all well up inside me and spill out slowly and carefully. I might have cried if I wasn't listening to music the whole time and therefore distracted.

Sometimes, it's the little things which cause me the most pain. Sometimes, it's the mere hint of sad memories which send me into a spiral of uncontrolled emotion. And, right now in particular I am having a hard time not taking everything too seriously and not letting everything get lost beneath the weight of my silly emotions. Mercury is retrograde in Cancer and so people take things emotionally and seriously with little regard for reality.

Ah. Too much, too little.

You Know I'm One To Hold A Grudge.

2007-06-24T09:50:00.000-07:00

It has been quite some time since I have sat here to post on this blog. Partially because I have gotten out of the habit of regularly writing due to the motherboard in the computer having been fried. Previously I had gotten out of the habit of regular writing due to getting into the habit of regular speaking but that is all a memory now and once again I spend my days with no one to talk to about literature. But, I guess it keeps me out of bars.

I suppose it is mostly my fault. I suppose I said several things I shouldn't have said. But, they were not unforgivable things, just things said out of pain and sadness. I gave myself too much credit. I should have known that I could not take it all so easily. I should have simply stayed home until I could piece together how I felt about it. But, I thought I was fine and then I had too much wine and acted like a snide, cocky bitch. And I did it on purpose because I was mad and menstruating and drunk. But, it was hard to do and for some reason I forced myself to do it. Now, the regret runs deep because while I knew it was wrong and it would be upsetting, I did not think that it was the be all-end all to everything we had.

But, perhaps that's exactly what led me down the wrong path from the beginning. Perhaps it is so easy for him to toss me aside because he didn't really care that much to begin with. Perhaps I overestimated his sensitivity, overestimated what I had meant to him. I've done it before but not in a long time. I had genuinely expected that because he is an adult he would realize that people (especially drunk ones) react to being hurt in exaggerated ways and that I obviously didn't really mean what I said, whatever it was. I had genuinely expected that he would be mad for a few days and we would talk about it and it would be alright. If our positions were reversed I would completely understand.

Yesterday, someone wrote me this: There is a certain type of person you draw to you, Rebecca: cold and yet sensitive, cocky and yet insecure, passionate and yet easily discouraged, articulate and yet inexpressive. I could go on. You have somehow, through some complex strength, transcended those weaknesses which often warp the minds of the creative and hyper-sensitive. I can't think of another creative person (including famous people) who is not warped in this fashion. And people look to you to try and understand how you can be so blithely whole.

I don't know how much of that, if any, is true. I don't know how much of that has to do with the situation at hand. There are many people who fit that description whom I have been close to. I don't really know why. I am always trying to change people, to help them, to learn from them and to teach them. I forget sometimes that most people do not want that.

I am soaked in these stupid memories, not even whole memories, just snipets of conversation, his glowing eyes beneath the bar lights- lit up and full of words, just small fractions of feelings felt- my chest exploding with things I wanted to say, with excitement that there was someone there to listen, a brief image of his hand scribbling out the pattern of Swann's Way on my notebook. All these little images, all these little memories each jump out at me and I try to take them individually, as if with tweezers, and pluck them out of my mind. I try to push them back to some foreign corner of my thoughts, somewhere they won't be seen at all, but they all come rushing back like tiny fireflies glowing briefly, fading, then glowing again.

I am trying not to let my regret eat me. I am trying to lose the memories but perhaps he will lend me a modicum of understanding. But, then again, Virgo's hold a grudge.

Another Way.

2007-05-30T20:51:00.001-07:00

I am inclined to melodrama, this I know. But, I also cannot hide the echo of the thoughts that haunt me. I cannot force myself to forget those few nights that lay out before me like a dream. I sit inside the short-lived silences inside me and I wallow unnecessarily in all the things I should have said. But, really, I have said everything; I have said more than enough. And now things unfold slowly, layer by layer until I am left with the withered remnants of what I thought might have been. I analyze and over-analyze each word, each breath, each light and telling touch for signs that things were felt, that things mattered. It is in each over-analysis that I drown beneath the weight of all I thought was there.

I cannot let go of things. I try to forget, to brush it off, but I am lit up by long talks and by a literary understanding. Nights where I raced home fueled by words which pounded through my mind and which spilled off the edges of my lips and out into the deserted, humid evenings. And I felt something full and yearning- whole yet reaching.

The days are long now and the sun is high and bright. I look out into the light blue distance and all the colors crisply coat one another. I sit for many long hours beneath the shade of a tree and read and write and absorb the dense heat and the thick flavored smoke I inhale.

But, I am also a mess in my head, selfish and stupid though I fight against it. I am a foreigner to myself, these days because my computer is broken and I cannot type comfortably and quickly and all my thoughts are long drawn out sentences written in long-hand. I sat at a bar this evening and tried to write an Anna letter. I stretched out all the things Fernando feels and examined them beneath the dim light of the Tavern. I found very little and only articulated things that I myself feel, and nothing that he feels or understands really. I suppose we are quite enough the same, he and I. But, also I do not want to shove my feelings onto him and make him react to someone he has already had an intense relationship with in ways that are my own ways. I suppose that is why I want so much to keep writing Catherine because I feel like it is only in that relationship that I can connect my own feelings to Fernando's without feeling like I am cheating him out of a personality.

I have been supremely distant from myself, from all the things I believe and all the things I understand. I have pushed my emotions aside to make room for someone else's interactions; I have sullied my own relationship with myself quite by accident but mostly because I have distanced myself from the things that I feel. I had to hold so many things back, to stand at an uncomfortable distance and look in on myself and all the things that I said and all the things that I did. And now it is all dust and I am trying to look at my life in another way, in another light.

Soft Whisps Floating Slowly.

2007-05-19T11:06:00.000-07:00

If I could envision all the things I need to be, if I could put them together in a cohesive manner, perhaps I could fashion myself a life- or at least the sembalance of one. If I could step back from my Piscean sun and moon, if I was not so disinclined to make ordinary attachments, perhaps then I could find some equillibrium, some sense of balance. But, I am spinning myself a web of confusion; I am trying to twist myself around a great concern and equally a dissolving responsibility.

Everything swims, a blurry haze in my vision. Everything swirls in and out of itself like light clouds wafting, their soft whisps floating slowly and pressing against each other. I have trapped myself beneath the shiny skin of things past and the icy air of the inevitable future. I may just fall forward into the easiest solution; I may just run from it all and into the open arms of good book. Really, it's not all that dramatic. I am only dramatizing the things I am unsure of. I am only trying to stay above the surface of my emotions, to paddle through them, to wade assuredly no matter what.

Even Great Goliath Grows His Giants Underground.

2007-05-07T14:49:00.000-07:00

I am in mid-air, my legs flying high behind me, eyes closed. I am on the brink of an exploration, a sudden knowing of myself in different ways, in subtle ways. There is a newly formed, recently underappreciated dedication that I have suddenly succummed to undertaking. Fernando is more alive than ever; he breathes in slow and quiet breaths. He is walking on his own sooner than I expected; he is coming to realizations about his own interactions, his own inabilities and equally: his abilities. He has ceased to throw himself into things and has stood aside and watched, waited. He and Catherine are building something solid, something weighty, worldly. She is a young girl but she is sure of the things she knows and she will only continue to know.

I am thinking again, in words. I am speaking words which hoover at the edge of my mind and which race forth and turn to new ones. Perhaps it is the change of season, the long days of sunlit skies and the hours of laying in the grass, with words lazily lapping at the edge of my mornings. Perhaps it is a sudden knowledge of something new, the way that the words creep out of the corners of everything and find themselves again at the tip of my tongue.

I can already feel the water splashing about on the sides of me. I have descended into the depths of the deep, dark lake. I cannot see to the bottom; it gets colder as I dive down. I do not bother to open my eyes; I am in murky waters. And then, I sit beneath the sun and the crisp air sends chills down my spine. And I bask in all the days left with the sun on my head and the water all around me, those days which have barely begun and which lay out before me undiscovered and filled with possibility.

Into the Depths.

2007-05-03T07:11:00.000-07:00

Once again I am lost in the depths of words, in the tiny intricacies of someone else's thoughts, someone elses's sentences. And it is strange for me but I am staring down, at the edge of a precipice, carefully calculating the distance to the bottom. I won't jump; this much has already been proven. I will only stand there, gazing out into the beauty beneath me and comparing it to everything that lives inside.

Once again I am lost in the depths of a pale blue haze which emanates throughout my thoughts from two glowing eyes into which I always briefly glance. And it is strange for me but I am staring ahead, keeping a calm precision: acting. And with each sudden knowledge, with each precariously laid out sentence I am caught leaning further and further in, gazing out into the beauty beneath me and half-expecting that I might slip and fall down into it's depths.

No Place To Fall.

2007-04-24T23:24:00.000-07:00

This day had passed by gently and I was lost, scattered inside a silent, shapeless reverie. The shocking suddenness of the season, a sharp shift into a summery spring. I had been searching for some patron saint, some living literary figure whom I could look up to. It was only so recently that I was told that was what I needed. I was told, "You deserve someone to whom you can look up, someone who cares about literature." And I laughed because I thought it impossible. But, perhaps that is not true.

The heat had suddenly descended upon the city. I woke up this morning in a thin sheath of sweat. I rolled around sleeplessly in my damp sheets. The fan blew brazenly at my body. And all the while I had been writhing beneath some unknown thing, beneath many unsaid things, beneath the sounds of my own silence. I am always wondering if all of this is scribble and nothing else, if I can find some breadth of meaning inside this waning youth of mine.

I am always sinking into some selfish dissatisfaction and I wonder if I had some goal in mind- if perhaps then I would feel useful or even moderately moving toward something. I remember all those years I spent training myself to think in words, training myself to see what I was looking at and to immediately, inherently spell it out in words, in articulate words inside my head. And I have found myself now, seated alone in a smoky bar scribbling things only to see them as they appear in black ink before my eyes. And I am watching the door and waiting for some uncertainty which I already view as a brightly glowing possibility. Is it because I have so rarely, perhaps never, met someone so full of words, so calm and quiet and full of knowledge of literature and what it means and what it is?

And I spent the day trying to press something literary out onto the page only to sit and scoff at myself, only to chew thoughtlessly at my fingers and produce nothing. Even after a whole day of trying, of bouncing back and forth between attempts and the lack thereof, I still ended up only speaking of myself. But, perhaps that is better than nothing. Perhaps, that at least articulates my own thoughts to myself. I am too mutable. I am too liquidy. I am caught up in all the things that I feel and I follow them off into distances and beyond the farthest limits of my own understanding.

I fell asleep this afternoon beneath billowy, beautiful clouds. I felt the wind blow breezily on my bare back. I felt the grass soft on my face and I heard the dogs barking and playing right beyond my half-asleep consciousness. I dreamed of the sky, of the birds which flew through it. I dreamed of light, spring-time dreams: the trees budding, the pollen flying, people peeking out open windows and laughing.

And then I sat in a dark, smoky bar and I listened and spoke. It was strange to speak to someone who knows more than I do about literature. It was very strange indeed. And I was my normal self, opinionated and absurd but I understood an inherent point in things I used to scoff at. I listened long enough to understand because the person speaking was not emotional and ridiculous and I saw someone else's point, a point which I don't wholly agree with but I was able to understand several things all at once. And, usually, I do not do that. I can only see one perspective or another. So it was strange but pleasant to understand something shades of grey. Even if I didn't admit to it at the time.

I am caught between too many understandings. I am drawn to too many things at once. I really don't care to do much about it but behave as I naturally would. I am only fearing feeling some whole, full-on guilt. But, I suppose that doesn't really happen. I will very soon write another Fernando letter. And it will be full of many things that I have been meaning to say but have only been wavering on the brink of everything I don't know. Ah, to know. It is a life-long effort. One I will never grow tired of.

Scattered Showers and Streaming Sunlight.

2007-04-12T17:07:00.000-07:00

My dreams drifted lightly by as I dozed off into a soft sleep. The sky had just finished darkening and I awoke a few minutes later to the suddenly set sun. The day built bright around me and the rain fell erratically onto my head. Through scattered showers I walked, the sun streaming down in blinding little lines between big buildings. The wind was harsh and fierce and it blew the light rain against my face with a sting. All day I have been silent, mostly so, standing back and watching myself as I moved forward, through something and toward very little.

My nap was short and I was awoken rather harshly by an improperly formatted version of 'I Offered It Up To The Stars and the Night Sky'. Warren's violin shrieked in my ear and I jolted up from my spot on the sofa, searching frantically for the laptop. I fell asleep mid-sentence halfway through The Artificial Nigger by Flannery O'Connor and I think I half-dreamt the ending, the grandson's frightened eyes, the repeated buildings, the lawn-jockey. I think I remember it right but it's vague. I haven't read it in some time.

The night has now fully descended on the city. I know that most of what I will do today I have already done and I wonder if that is enough. I've updated afrailandslenderlie.blogspot.com and added photographs to the posts. I've walked around a bit and read the city paper, had an espresso and some lamb. I've stood on my roof and photographed the sun setting through the trees, bright behind the clouds. I've walked in the rain and stood in the sunshine and sat in a small cafe. I've written rather little but it feels like a lot.

The warmth is imminent now. I know it will come and I hope it will come soon. It is much easier to be fit and healthy when the weather is warm. I want to eat steak tartar all summer long. And sushi and salads. I want to sit outside of Grand Cru and sip Rose and eat smoked salmon. I remember those short summer breaks between shifts. They were always so nicely illuminated by a sparkling wine and a matching smoked salmon. But, I dreaded work more than ever because the sun shone through the windows and I wanted nothing more than to be outside. In the winter the fire is raging in the fireplace and there are few places I'd rather be than darting in and out of marble tables, listening to the bubbling din of the bistro buzz.

Tomorrow is Friday the Thirteenth. I wonder if anything strange will happen.

A Fernando Letter- Babbling Blurs.

2007-04-01T11:45:00.000-07:00

Catherine,

I think of all the people that I've been; I think of the child that I once was. And I cringe to consider all the things that went unrecorded because of insecurities and hang-ups. Perhaps if I had written some of the things down that I felt as a child I would be able to read them now and know myself better.

I was always afraid to write, afraid to see so plainly infront of my own eyes what I was, what I thought. So, I buried myself in books and wrote about the characters I knew. I understood them because I could empathize.

The distant past sits in my memory as something I only pull out in parts and I twist it to highlight whatever point I seem to be making at the time. I let it simmer; I let it boil away, unused and barely touched. Only the recent past lives in my full view and all the rest is history. I try to attach it to recent experience. But, I fear that the older I get the less I remember being young. Things that were once full-blown, life-changing, emotonal episodes are now only distant, dimly-lit stories and what was once real life is now left, lost to anecdote, to the simple telling of a tale.

It is the people, though. It is the people who live inside me, who peer out from behind my eyes, people whom I haven't seen in years materialize in my daily visions and I cannot let them go. I cannot help but wonder and I cannot stop wondering. I often become so caught up in the people who peer out at me from the corners of my peripheral vision that I am distracted and the people infront of me become babbling blurs.

I wonder if this is a common thing, if many people face these same heartaches, these same problems with memory. I imagine they do and yet it makes me feel no better. I already understand that I am human. It changes nothing.

Unchanged and Unwilling,
Fernando

Someone Almost, But Not Entirely, Another.

2007-03-29T22:46:00.000-07:00

I set out through the streets in search of an answer. I wandered through the bitter cold; my gloved hands still shivering, shoved in the pockets of my coat. The buildings rose tall and gray around me, looming above like a displeased surgeon looking on a patient. Their square windows were like a thousand gaping eyes, reaching out a far and wide gaze, the patios outstretched palms- waiting to pull me toward something. My pace quickened. I longed to escape the confines of this city and I knew that if I kept walking I would eventually reach the bridge. I longed to glance at the water, imagining my limbs reaching out beside me, pushing through it, beyond it, away from everything I knew and into the arms of mystery.

I felt my legs brush up against each other as I settled into a jog. "At this rate I'll reach the bridge in no time," I said to myself. My thoughts were quick like arrows and my eyes squinted to block out the people in my periphery. There was always someone watching, a lone eye positioned at the top of a tower. Only a myth- I know. But, I couldn't help feeling caught between myself and my fantasies. I had to be back at the office the next morning. The stacks of paper would surely be built up on my desk, a cluttered cave of the beaurocractic dundgeon. And I knew that come morning, I would look that lovely lady in the eye. And she would bow and her smooth skin would brush against the sides of her skirt. I could hear the sound echoing in my ears, the fabric sliding carefully against her, her heels clanking on the hard-tile floor, my eyes searing into the back of her, my lips quivering with unspoken promises. She barely even knew me but still I shivered.

The buildings became fewer- they were now only small houses peeking out from the sides of the street. An old man left his home. He had shut the door tightly, it closed quickly clattering behind him. He clammered down the front steps and I stopped to stare. Rude, I know. He looked familiar- his age-worn and washed out eyes which glimmered only faintly, heavily set into a gaunt face- just two tiny green twinkles. Barely noticible if it hadn't been for the streetlamps which lined his walkway. He looked at me, blinked, checked his watch. "Somewhere to be?" I wondered. He continued on his way, head down as he headed ahead of me. I'd shout a warning but I doubt he'd heed it.

I continued on my walk, my feet shuffling slightly, my eyes trained forward and my arms dangling uselessly beside me. I wished there was something to be done with them. I fumbled through my jacket pocket and pulled out a few crumbled notes, recipets. I fiddled with a small flask and took a sip. The whiskey warmed me but I was wary not to drink too much. The houses soon seemed more scattered. Only one every few blocks. Things were quiet and I saw no people on the street which had changed to a gravel road. I knew that just over the hill the bridge poked out; I could see the very tip of it along the horizon. I knew I would get there soon. It was so close I could taste it.

The Epitaph for My Heart.

2007-03-25T16:42:00.000-07:00

The pages build up behind me. There are two notebooks now, nearly full. Today I rode through the city, no destination necessary, snapping photographs of buildings standing still, some half-built- the sun leaping off of their raw interiors. I looked up through cherry blossoms and took a few shots of the birds landing on the newly budding branches. I sat on a rather muddy hill in Robert E. Lee park and watched two dogs attack each other rather viciously. The water ran steadily over the concrete and flowed past, by my feet. I have watched that water move from many different places in the park. Unfortunately, it is not terribly interesting, only a bit of frothy whiteness flowing freely. I wished that I had gone to the mountains or to the beach. I wished that I was not looking at the same streets, the same sky, the same buildings that I've been looking at since I was a very young girl.

My fingers are gnawed raw; they hurt a bit. I am silly to chew them so neurotically. I am silly to chew them because I am thinking things which aren't being written, because the time is passing and I am making nothing of it. This happens almost half of my days off from work and usually, eventually, at some point I get something accomplished. I spent the morning reading a girl's long and ridiculous blog about a specific interaction she had with her ex-boyfriends new wife. It was an obsessive, absurd, violent, manipulative internet relationship they had but her blog (written after all of it happened) was so serious and so emotional that it was hard to stop reading, even if only to find out the end. It was like a soap opera but it was mostly strange because I ended up there from someone else's blog who had nothing to do with the situation. I don't understand why someone would make an entire blog dedicated to proving oneself in a certain situation or to hurting another person. It got me thinking about the internet and about the way that people communicate through these glowing machines, how they have totally alternate lives, often anonymous ones, through blogging. And I thought of all the people whose blogs make me feel good about humanity, people who I don't know but who have fascinating things to say and who say them in an intelligent manner.

It is hard to find bloggers who you relate to, as it is hard to find friends who you relate to. Sometimes they write something inane, something annoying. But, they always make up for it in the next post. I think about Wide Lawns often, about Forksplit, about Lagal and The Great Hall. They are all a part of my life just like Kafka was when I read his diaries for months, like Camus was when I was absorbed in his notebooks. I suppose that is what makes words so beautiful to me, that they let me know people in the most intense and personal ways. And I think that everyone has it in them to write an interesting blog which is what makes it a much more universal medium than literature. You can know an author by what he writes, by what he says about himself but an author has to have a universal medium. He has to write a story, a poem, a novel. Bloggers have only to describe vividly, entertainingly and frequently of the motions of their lives and the way they fit within those motions, the way they make them. Perhaps this is why I don't do it so frequently. My life is not full, though I'd like it to be, with interesting quips, with entertaining snippets, with things I would rather write than literature. So, I spend my time trying to make real lives out of made up people instead of writing out each interaction of my own day.

I keep meaning to start fictional blogs but it somehow feels lazy. I suppose it would just have to be brief outlines of things which would eventually become something lengthier. But, already, I feel as if Fernando is a never ending character, a constantly communicating but often stagnant individual, stuck inside himself and perhaps this is because I see no veritable end and I don't wish for their to be one. A very close friend of mine who is also a brilliant writer began to correspond with Fernando via a character he invented named Catherine. Catherine only wrote one letter but hopefully there are more to come. I had come to believe, rather whole-heartedly, that she would be the one to change Fernando. He may not write her anymore; most likely it would be out of unfounded feelings of inadequacy. But, I suppose she can exist without him to write her, though I don't want him to. "The half-moon sat on a field of bright pinholes; the milky-way like queen anne's lace strewn carelessly across the sky. All of it reflected in the deep darkness of the Atlantic, the churning mirror that stretched the entire horizon. I walked out to where the waves were lapping at the shore, a strong breeze whipping my hair around my face. It was bright and the sound of the waves breaking in rhythm stirred the blood in my cheeks. And I wished you had walked out with me, to behold the perfect night in our world which was like a dream for that short time."

The spring is slowly approaching. Today I smelled it strongly and clearly in the air. There are many important decisions sitting on my doorstep and I am hearing the buzzer but paying it no regard. I am stalling an offer of increased responsibility. I am going to have to answer the door soon and sit down to speak with the offerer of said responsibility. Too bad he is such a chesire cat. Grinning and disappearing but always aware of all the goings-on in Wonderland. And it is such a tempting (though as yet unspecified) offer- a challenge almost. A challenge to mold my behavior, my personality to a specific type of professionalism, a specific type of classiness, a diplomacy that I am not quite sure I am capable of. And it is also a question of how much I would be giving up, how many hours of my life I would be worried about the thousand and one responsibilites of a new restaurant. And how many words would I lose to a year without time to experience enough to have anything to say. There is much speak of my "resume" and I don't know how much I really care about any "resume".

Still, there are a thousand and one things to filter through, to analyze. I suppose I ought to get started. But, I think I'll go eat Thai food and watch The Host instead.

The Sooty Sponge of the Sky.

2007-03-03T12:08:00.000-08:00

Four or more times I woke this morning and rushed to the screen of this glowing machine, searching for the glistening letters I knew would be stacked next to each other, word by word. My dreams followed my steps across the room, hazy and startled by such sudden movement. Usually, they have time to settle, to set themselves to the pace of my mind. But, this morning, full of energy and excitement I let them ride the tail of my desires and they were shaken. It was not until the fourth time I checked that I found the words, full of breath and perfectly moving through my muddled morning mind. I read them over and over again; I inadvertently whispered them aloud- so beautiful were they built. They rolled off the edge of my slightly moving lips and I felt the form of them and their measure.

My dreams are just now popping up in small and flatly colored bits. I was chased through a large building full of doors. I knew each person who slept behind each door; I could see the layout of each one of their rooms, but I could think of no where to hide. I almost jumped out the window but I wasn't entirely sure that I was who they were after. I had an accomplice and he had vanished somewhere into the whitewashed walls.

I am awake now and listening to Mozart's Requiem. It tastes like Death, an odd thing to have for breakfast. I am also inhaling the rhythm of written words; they echo inside me and jostle the memories of so many mornings past when I woke to know the depth of someone else's words, when they shook inside me and I breathed my own words back where there used to be only empty air. There is a whole world of words, and they are stacked atop each other, to be continually built and never to fall. Yet, it is so different to stand here, to speak the words that usually take so much care to make. They spill, carelessly, half-thought, from my lips and they fill the room around me with hurried sound. And yet they are happy sounds that break the silence.

The front door just blew open from the wind and when I rose to close it I knocked over a bottle of wine. It spilled and shone red and bloody against the wooden floor, a sudden flash of color quickly mopped up and absorbed into the perfect whiteness of a paper towel. Across the street a bag is caught in a tree and is shivering in the wind, caught just by it's edge. And despite yesterday's perfect weather the trees are still bare but spring is just beyond the horizon, a mere 19 days away. Already, I have felt the great relief of prolonged sun, of arriving to work with the sun still blazing through the windows. And, also, I have felt the great relief that these words lend. Already, I am teeming with aplomb, lost in the comforting sound of the clicking of keys and awestruck by the ease with which these words can flow. But, also, I am grieving for all of the days I have lost to long sleep and too much drink, days where words were intimidations, where they stood to scare me, to show me all the things I couldn't do, I hadn't done.

And perhaps it was the winter. Perhaps it was the lack of sun, that things sat in darkness and covered by layers of dirty ice and slush. I feel as though I am rising out of that slush and into the arms of the trees, thick with leaves and life. I long to swim in lakes and let my limbs carry me across the many miles. In A Happy Death Patrice Mersault is always swimming and I have been reading these intense descriptions of his lengthy limbs outstretched and lapping away beneath the laborious sun. He swims beyond himself, his body only a machine, moving in perfect rhythm, a rhythm which encompasses him, which is entirely himself. And Mersault feels all the world around him with a melancholy depth that I too often feel. Yet, Camus' existentialist leanings separate me from fully believing in the morals of his story. Mersault feels great emotion but does not attribute it to anything but to a vague, general idea of life. Still, Mersault lives inside me like so many other people made of words and I shall once again gather the strength to make myself of words. And this strength lives alongside others.

"As far as the eye could see and at regular intervals, huge black birds with glistening wings flew in flocks a few yards above the ground, incapable of flying any higher under a rainswollen sky heavy as a tombstone. They circled in a slow, ponderous flight, and sometimes one of them would leave the flock, skim the ground, almost inseparable from it, and flap in the same lethargic flight , until it was far enough away to be silhouetted on the horizon, a black dot. Mersault wiped the steam off the glass and stared greedily through the long streaks his fingers left on the pane. Between the desolate earth and the colorless sky appeared an image of the ungrateful world in which, for the first time, he came to himself at last. On this earth, restored to the despair of innocence, a traveler lost in a primitive world, he regained contact, and with his fist pressed to his chest, his face flattened against the glass, he calculated his hunger for himself and for the certainty of the splendors dormant within him. He wanted to crush himself into that mud, to re-enter the earth by immersing himself into that clay, to stand on the limitless plain covered with dirt, stretching his arms to the sooty sponge of the sky, as though confronting the superb and despairing symbol of life itself, to affirm his solidarity to the world at its worst, to declare himself life's accomplice even in its thanklessness and its filth. Then the great impulse that had sustained him collapsed for the first time since he had left Prague. Mersault pressed his tears and his lips against the cold pane. Again the glass blurred; the landscape disappeared."

She Speaks Good English.

2007-01-16T13:19:00.000-08:00

I have started a wine blog because I feel it is a waste to drink wine and not write about it. I have been highly influenced by the likes of Asimov and Koeppel who are excellent wine writers. It is called I Started Out On Burgundy, which, if you are cool, you will know is a reference to a one Mr. Dylan. http://butsoonhittheharderstuff.blogspot.com

I started out on Burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff. Everybody said they'd stand behind me when the game got rough. But the joke was on me there was nobody even there to call my bluff. I'm going back to New York City. I do believe I've had enough.

Oh, one thing I've been meaning to do for some time now is to direct a question to a certain person living in Lewiston, Maine who seems to read this blog rather regularly. If you are interested, Lewiston, I'd like to know who you are.

As Whispers On The Wind.

2007-01-03T21:43:00.000-08:00

The days are getting a little longer and I can actually taste the sun setting in the back of my throat. I get so lost in these short, silent days. I sit and watch the day waste away before me, the sun slowly creeping up onto the roofs of the houses across the street. The bare, leafless trees reach for the sky with their spindly fingers spread wide. A little bird lands on the thin branch and it wobbles beneath its weight. People pass by on the street below me and I don't really care where they're going. A bird swoops up from the street and glides up into the blue sky, breaching the shroud of the buildings' shadow and glowing in what little light is left. And then it disappears in a flash of flapping feathers and I am staring again at the empty sky.

It seems I am always sitting still, simply staring at things which happen outside of me, despite me. I soak myself in all the things that might have happened and I imagine them more vividly than I would have even experienced them if they had happened. It seems I am stuck inside of something and I cannot see a way out. I wrap myself up in each silly situation; I imagine a hundred possible things that will change my life. None of them ever do, though. I am always the same simple, sullen ghost of a person I was before.

I am rash. I am quick to judge. I cannot see myself in others and I cannot see others in myself. But, I know that all people are the same in their flaws as they are the same in their functions. I open myself up to be dissected but by whom but myself. I want to feel the close breath of someone who breaths in words, someone who can speak my own words to me so that I can hear them as distant phrases. Perhaps that is where my selfishness lies, in the overwhelming need to hear my words as whispers on the wind, so that I can barely recognize them as they pass my ears.

I am trying to say things I think but in vague terms because I cannot catch their subtleties; I cannot grab my feelings by the throat and hold them down so I can tell what they are. It is, perhaps, that I am overwhelmed by all the things I cannot say. I am floating on the surface of a thousand unthought thoughts. I can only feel them vaguely. They are pushing on the bottom of my raft, threatening to flip me out onto the empty ocean.

What I Wish I'd Written.

2006-12-16T00:27:00.000-08:00

This morning the many lovely words I'd read rode through the hours. They held me together; they stood solid and deep in my head and took up space which might have otherwise been occupied by less interesting ideas. I giggled giddily over and over again. I floated through the morning serving lots of alcohol to very few people.

A group of 50 something women came in and drank a bunch of Grey Goose cosmopolitians and then wine and then sambucca and baileys and frangelico. They were a merry bunch, exchanging gifts and breaking glasses left and right. I liked them enough; they spent money and were pleasant, apologetic and thankful. Their gifts were rather frightening though. They made me cringe and look away. They traded different unnecessary house items. Raindeer shaped candle holders. Raindeer patterened hand towels- meant for show not for use. Different, ugly Christmas ceramic statuettes- not even ornaments- just things which sit on tables. The degree of unnecessary items was rather appalling.

Luckily, I also waited on a fellow whom I like a great deal. His name is George Lewis and I only recently realized that "George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew". He is a lover of Burgundy, like myself, and we had long and lovely talks about the hit or miss quality of Burgundy in general. We spoke of wine laws in MD and elsewhere and the fact that Burgundy is so full of independent vingerons as opposed to big company owners in Bordeaux. I love Burgundy. He gave me a beautiful glass of Gevery-Chamberin Serafin. It was a bit tart for noon but it was terribly fruity. I'm drinking a rather pleasant Burgundy now.

On the ride home from work I watched the trash on the street swirl around in circles, the leaves blew by and some of them got caught up in the whirlwind. I thought of the way things move in circles; I thought of all the many things swishing around chasing each others' tails. I got a letter this evening from someone I used to call "friend", someone I used to call "love". He sends me bitter, spiteful lashes through lazy, quick words. And they tear through me, with what little truth they hold.

He tells me I am scared to be alone. And I know I haven't been alone in some time. But, I also know it is not because I am scared but it is because I care for people so intensely and so deeply. He does not realize that it takes much more courage to open yourself up to people, to love people with everything you are than it does to simply be alone, to just suffocate in your own stillness. I would like to be alone. I think it everytime I spend more than three hours in my own company. I think I would be a very different person if I spent any significant time alone. But, I also am so bound to other people, so bound to other peoples' words. I am bound to so many dead people; I am bound to them by the words that they left, by the words that I love. They live inside me- as real as the people I make. They live alongside me- as real as the people who grow as I grow.

If only I didn't lose Fernando inside so many attempts at discovering myself. He seems to be hiding; I am trying to find him. But I am always writing about my own days and so his days stay in the shadows of what I wish I'd written.

Silent Piddling.

2006-12-11T10:42:00.000-08:00

I have spent this day piddling about in silence. I cleaned up a bit and threw away piles and piles of things which I would be better off just donating but I'm too lazy to do it. I read Kafka's diaries in the bathtub and then sat down in the middle of my clean living room and stared at the floor. I am now listening to Art Blakey and chewing my nails. I have been letting things live through me instead of living them lately. It is a silly thing to do, simply watch yourself live out the days of your life. I feel that I am barely a backseat driver.

Perhaps it is partially due to a high consumption of alcohol but I still feel that my brain is smushed up inside my head and soaked with slime. I am looking for things to say but there is nothing to say. I let the days slip through my fingers. I drink myself into oblivion. I need to pull myself up by my bootstraps , give myself a swift kick in the ass. All of these diary like writings add up to very little. They are just small waves in a sea of emotion. I seem to have lost subjectivity. I am drowning in a sea of "I"'s. And I can see you on a small island, waving at me to swim back to you. But, I can't keep my head above water. Every time I have any significant amount of time to myself I become very depressed at how infrequently it happens. In order to know yourself you must spend time alone and I spend so little time alone that I cannot see myself reflected in my own actions, in my own words. I scramble around in a shell of myself, smiling and I forget about the part of me that used to read all the time and write all the time.

I used to be more people than I am now. I used to make them; I used to live inside them. I am still perpetually stuck inside Catherine and Gabriel and their last interaction. I would love to finish Gabriel, look it over, make it new. But, it is so dense with error and ridden with repetition. I am afraid to look at it. There are only a few sentences here and there, a few paragraphs left and write which give it any weight at all. But, perhaps I am being too hard on it. It was to be a novel. It had a beginning and an end. It was supposed to be A Happy Death but it went on for too long and became A Drawn Out Life. We pieced Fernando's fragments and tried to attach them to a human face, to a real person. But, I think we failed in many places. I do not write enough to fail. I must write and write and write and when I look back from some old age onto my youth I will be able to look back at pages and pages, at books, perhaps. I piled all my old notebooks in one place beneath the window of the living room. I flip through them and I can see myself become someone I meant to be. I can see all the deliberate changes which I talked myself into making. And they are the same as now. I am still telling myself to let my emotions take a back seat. I am still telling myself to write and write and write.

I am always losing written moments. I am always stranded between writing and living. I am convinced that the only thing to do is change, to move, to leave this land behind and find some inspiration in a different lifestyle. I am constantly stymied by all the ugly things I see, by having to see the same ugly things over and over. I walk down the street and there is a barrage of unpleasantness, of broken people and dirty places. I want to see something new. Even if it is different dirty, broken people and places.

The Past Rides Behind Me.

2006-11-18T22:46:00.000-08:00

I know little to nothing about my ancestry. My birth father's father was in WWII. He has a lot of stories which all end with him doing something crazy and dangerous- just for kicks. My father's grandfather was a map-maker and a wood carver. I used to visit him when I was a kid and he would give me ducks and deer and elephants that he had carved, as well as a few dollars so that I could buy books. It was a weekly ritual. My mother and I would drive over to visit them and then we would go to the bookstore on the way back.

My mother's family is quite a bit more upsetting but I believe I told you about it when you were here. She had an incredibly rough childhood. Her father died in prison. He was murdered by someone who disapproved of his crimes or at least I believe that was the assumption. He was a child molester, as was his father whom my mother had to visit on a regular occasion. An offering by her mother, if you will. An exchange for money, food none of which she ever gave to my mother or her 7 siblings.

Most of her siblings are dead. Died in prison from drug overdoses. One of her brothers was let out of prison pretty much accidentally. He was a very bad person in many ways and somehow they had confused him for someone else. On his way out of the prison he was walking across the street and was run over by a truck. Killed instantly. This was something like 10 years ago, perhaps 15. The only sister who she speaks to has several retarded children and is currently involved in a severe law suit as a result of the fact that her dog bit off the face of someone whom she had met on the internet. She told my mother, "He wasn't all that to begin with." The dog ripped off his lip and when she was sent back to the house by the hospital to retrieve it she returned to the hospital with the brilliant discovery that, "He musta ate it." She called my mother the day after it happened to see if he could sue her.

She tried to commit suicide at 7 and then again at 13. She ran away from home at 14 and lived in Mt. Washington with a family she knew. She married my father when she was 17. He had shouted to her from his car when she was walking to work. He was addicted to heroin and various other recreational drugs. He was small but violent and he beat her with regularity. She beat him back often but he was a dirty fighter. She got pregnant at 18 but got an abortion. She was 22 when she gave birth to me and I was 4 when she finally left him. That wasn't until he knocked all her teeth out with a baseball bat one day when she was sitting with her friend watching TV. She didn't even know that he had come home.

Sufficed to say, I grew up a rather angry child. I spent the first 9 years of my life involved in a rather violent legal dispute. My father didn't even want me. It didn't make much sense. His stepmother, Ava, wanted me more than he did, surely. I would have to go visit him every other weekend. We met in the parking lot of Bob's Big Boy. They would drive me back to Pennsylvania and we would always stop to get beer on the way there. I don't remember very much of it really. Only a set of ceramic animal shaped bells. Little chipmunks dressed as old maids and farmers. And a set of audio tapes of readings of Mother Goose stories and such. They gave me a lot of gifts. My father told me, much later, that I said to him when I was about 3 that I didn't think that my birth father loved me because he never made me go to bed when I was supposed to and he always gave me presents. I was a smart kid. I was in therapy, discussing my feelings and eating M&M's and playing with carved wooden jungle animals for a few years. I remember feeling comfortable there.

I read constantly beginning at a rather young age. I was always super smart in school up until 5th grade when we moved and I had to be with a bunch of people I didn't know or like. I lived in Georgia in the second grade which is how the court trials finally ended. My birth father owed something like 10,000 dollars in back child support and my father agreed to let him off if he signed the papers giving up custody. He sent him the corner of a newspaper in an envelope and on it was scrawled, "You can keep her." We moved back to the house my father owned, his father's house. (His father was a chemist who worked on the Manhattan project. He was cold and empty and died a terribly sad death recently.) We moved back only to be greeted by the fact that the people who had sublet were some crazy devil worshippers. This is going to sound very crazy but it's true. The house was covered in blood from weird rituals, circles on the carpet and the walls. They had a bunch of praying mantis' as pets and they were running wild about the house. I remember standing outside and waiting while my parents went in and then I had to stay at my grandfather's house for a week. It was awful. He was married to a terrible terrible balding bitch. Florence. I hated that woman. She made the worst oatmeal.

We moved out soon after for many reasons all of which are long and involved stories, regarded as simply unbelievable by most normal individuals. I'll spare you the long and grisly details. The house wasn't the same after those people lived there, though. My uncle wouldn't go in it and he didn't even see what happened and that was the house he grew up in. He lives in New Mexico now. He does healing with crystals an channeling and things of the sort. I believe in many things that few people believe in or understand but it is simply because I have seen and experienced them. My father has a number of very long and complicated "other realm" stories which I know he wouldn't make up and which are simply insane. One day, perhaps, I will tell you some of them. They are good stories. One of them involves Captain Beefheart and a thunderstorm.

I was a rather angry child. When my sister was born I was very jealous because she belonged to my father, who I had come to know as my father, and I was a product of a terrible thing, something my mother was still struggling with. Her health was always bad. She grew up severely malnutritioned and therefore struggled with many debilitating illnesses. She was in therapy most of my young life. She was not terribly stable and I hated going on errands with her, to the grocery store, etc. I hated my sister and tortured her endlessly. I was a vindictive and terrible child. I was always getting in trouble for lying and for beating up on my sister. I watched far too much television and played with Barbie's only when I had friends who wanted to. I had an undying love for the New Kids on the Block. Fifth grade was my worst year. I had been with my friends whom I had gone to preschool and even nursery school with except for that one year in Georgia. And suddenly we had to move. I went to fifth grade in a school which was full of supremely wealthy jews. I was terrified. There were girls who wore blazers and brooches in fifth grade. It was terrifying, really. And I decided to wear all black, all the time. I was disliked by my teachers and picked on. I was borderline suicidal.

It got better in 6th grade, though I was an awkward child at best. Braces at 14, didn't begin developing physically till about 17. I was often made fun of for being flat chested and was as relieved as I was confused when I finally grew breasts. I remember thinking, "Where the hell did these come from?" My mother never thought it was important to be in advanced classes. They were going to put me in GT but she thought it would be the same, just more homework. I didn't try to get in on my own. I figured she was right. In high school I was rather confused. I wrote all the time and read too. I always knew that writing was the only thing that ever let me understand myself. I wrote all the time but never really liked any of it. My parents encouraged me and they liked my writing. I struggled very much in Math though. I hated it. I spent my time editing the school literary magazine and yearbook. I realized that most of the people around me were idiots. I drank too much sometimes and ended up in the hospital more than once. I had refused to deal with many things until after I was out of high school. I wished that my parents had the money to send me to college and I knew they didn't. I didn't know what I wanted to do but write and I didn't want to write a bunch of garbage.

This is probably a lot more than you intended to hear. This evening the bistro buzzed with giggling, giddy guests. Everyone was glowing; the fire crackled and snapped and the flames flew. I raced around, smiled, spoke. I took what came to me and did what I could. I don't know what I long for but there is some sinking emptiness which I can't seem to get a grasp of. Perhaps it is the imminence of age, the knowledge that the future will come and go just like the present does and I am still here doing what I have been doing for years. Perhaps it is the cold weather sinking in, the frost covering the trees and streets shines and it reminds me that I am living through yet another east coast winter, still waiting tables and still a just barely finished book of short stories beneath me. I know that if I wrote more often, if I made real literary progress that the emptiness which wavers, haunting- would somehow subside or at least temporarily quiet itself. I am too often asking other people what they want and too rarely asking myself. I am less than I should be. I am exactly what I let myself become. I am always using the same words. I am living in the shadow of how I'd like to live. I am billowing beneath the weight of my own expectations. I am being too hard on myself.

And A Sleepy Little Dreamer (With Just Miles To Go).

2006-11-13T23:30:00.000-08:00

I have had a long day full of quiet. The only real things which left my lips were the breaths which I slowly exhaled. I woke up early and walked around the apartment, wrote a letter, looked at some things online. I have been thinking of sending a secret to Post Secret. I might make a bunch of them and see how it goes.

My astro-horoscope told me something highly untrue. My day has been one solid block of ice and my attempts to chip away at it were pitiful, at best. I tried to melt it, to push it out of place. And I just sat there, covering my face and tried not to look at it. Things added up and weighed down on me, they held more space than they usually do, watching me from the corners of my house. I am caught between Scylla and Charybdis, losing my footing and falling forward into the storm.

Also, I am overly emotional, excessive. I feel things briefly and they echo inside me and I feel them again wholly, all the way through me, and then again as a memory. When the days shorten, when they darken so early, it seems as though they never even began. I loom through them confused as to how the sun could so soon be gone.

Tomorrow bounces on the horizon, beaming before my eyes. I will wake up early and spend all day working, hopefully finding time on break for a glass of rose and a tarte flambee. That brief time spent at the square between shifts always saves me. I am rejuvenated by Kombucha and lardons, by rustic pear tarts and Gruet Rose. And then it is back across the crowded roads and into the bistro where a bustling, crackling fire and a wine varietal quiz awaits me. I enjoy the quick hustling before the shift, the round table family meals where we laugh and recite the plat du jour.

And yet it is all these comforts which scare me the most. I want to leave everything behind and travel, let the weight of my words rest on my lips and let another language envelop my mind. I want to have something new to see and touch and know. And the more things I find to love, the harder it is to let them go.

And I speak of these things as they happen to figure out what they mean and what they are. I do not get ahead of myself and to be aware of each moment. I see things so clearly, always. And when I am around people who see me see things, when I can speak to them of what I see and when I can see in their eyes that they understand me, I am humbled and happy and what I see means more because they've seen it too.

I have come to love so many people so much. People who have made me realize that it is not useless to try to change people, as I am always told. People have shown me that I have the ability to teach people things I never really realized I could. I'm not bragging, no sir. I am just very glad to have been given the chance to know them. I change too, knowing them. Knowing that we will always know each other. That we will never let anything get in the way of the words we make, the words which are the only things that really live.

I am floundering now, gasping for breath. I simply need to write more. I just need to think in words, about words.

Weightless, but for the Heavy Heart Which Waits.

2006-11-04T22:22:00.000-08:00

The leaves outside are bustling in the wind. They are caught up in air traps and left to swirl endlessly around themselves. I am lying in bed; it's late. I am listening to the sounds of a mostly silent city. I am stretching inside my skin, wishing that I was in some other circumstance, that the night was not so close to dawn, that work was not imminent on the horizon.

This month has moved past me, motionless. I have been a specter, a silent witness to my own life. I have been staring, barely expressing a life which I am letting live itself. The leaves have almost fallen; the winter is steadily approaching. I wish I was in the mountains, the smoke of a freshly lit fire flowing above my head, the little flames popping and snapping at my feet. I wish I was walking through a beautiful vineyard, sipping wine and smiling.

I've barely begun to live a life which stretches out before me. I feel that things just move through me, sometimes. That they roll by weightless but for the heavy heart which waits. I remember many things which mostly go forgotten.

I think of specific people, of many people, and I wonder if they think of me. I compose letters to the ghosts of people I haven't seen in years, to the ancient image of them which I've fastened to myself. I know that this is read by at least one of those ethereal apparitions and I wonder if he knows me, if this blog is enough of who I am to let him know me. I suppose that the answer is yes and no. I don't talk much about Cahors or Gigondas or the deep, dark earth of France that I am knowing so intimately. I don't talk about Abbaye de Bellocq or Epoisses or any of the other cheeses which taste just like the sheep and cows and goats which eat the earth of France which I have come to know so well. I don't speak in facts or in faces. I don't speak of Confits or Cassoulets. I don't speak of the sunny Burgundian hillsides or the meaty foie gras from Bordeaux and I suppose it's just because I've never seen them. I only know them in theory and in representations. I love the Loire Valley, the stony minerality that echoes sharp and clean. I can practically imagine myself leaping across a bubbling brook.

I suppose I don't even speak of what I've learned, only what I feel. But, I have learned so much about poise and character and an actual fact rooted understanding of something most people consider so subjective.

Ah, how I love food and wine. I say as I sip my Gigondas.

I can't wait till Thursday.

All I Got Inside Is Vacancy.

2006-10-25T20:37:00.000-07:00

This day blew by a slow blur, things flopped past me and I clumsily shuffled around them. I dreamed of empty houses with broken floors and dusty ceilings. The mildew was suffocating me; I kept breaking floorboards. I was scared I would fall through and I didn't want to take a step in any direction. Perhaps this is a symbol. Perhaps not.

I am looking forward into the future and counting down the days until fun things happen. I will take many pictures on Halloween and at shows which are approaching. The Bistro will soon be bustling with business. I shall see someone whom I have not seen in quite some time. My horoscope tells me to free myself from ballast. I am wondering if this is something I am capable of doing.

I am searching aimlessly through my skull, trying to find something worthy of saying. And it seems that there is nothing there.

More Than I Do.

2006-10-21T11:55:00.000-07:00

All manner of things have come and gone. I have been intently focused on some certain things which mostly have gone but perhaps have not entirely gone. I have been falling into the past, headfirst, as if into a freshly raked pile of freshly fallen leaves. I have been soaking in all the things I used to feel before I knew why I was feeling them. Those feelings used to seem so real; they used to seem so honest. I used to be someone I never knew I was.

All manner of things have come and will come. The leaves will leave. The frost will follow. And then the winter will melt into yet another spring. I have been someone I did not know I would be. I have found things I never would have wished to be true. I still feel like I know someone and he still acts as though I never knew him. I was someone to him, once. I was someone real. And now he pushes me away; he pulls me apart. I can never understand those people, the people who can throw others away as though it never mattered. I guess I can't understand the idea of deluding yourself. I can't understand lying to yourself and behaving as though nothing was ever any different than it is now, at this second.

Youth is a fleeting thing. It is something that, if you are observant, you understand at the time that it will not last. I remember being so very young, being in elementary school and thinking of how quickly the time passed. And when I thought about how quickly the time passed I always thought about how that had always been true to me, how I always had thought the time passed quickly. And I understood that I would not feel the same way in a few years. I knew that soon, all this time I had tossed aside and wished would be through with, would mean something very different to me. I remember sitting, in wait, for a spelling test that I had not studied one bit for
and I remember wishing that the day was over and done with. But, I also remember knowing that maybe today I want this day done for, over with, but in the future I knew I would look back on this time and I would remember it clearly. I guess that's part of what is so hard about being so young. You are so aware and so yourself. You are so full inside yourself, so immensely embodied in who you actually are as opposed to who you think you ought to be. You have so few experiences behind you that the only person you are is entirely you. And I suppose that is equally upsetting as nerve-wracking.

I wish that I knew someone more than I do. I wish I could see someone else more than I do. I wish I could know myself more than I do. I wish I could see these words more often than I do.

The Darkest Blues

2006-10-13T20:39:00.000-07:00

The days are so short now, they end so suddenly and the sun just sinks in the sky. The slow, sparkling summer sunsets are soon to be only a memory. The cold is already creeping in, callous and crisp. I am already dreading waking up and stepping out onto a frozen floor, my feet cringing. My only consolation lies in the snow, the perfect white sheets of frost which cover the ground, the windows. And in the fall leaves which are still shifting, still clinging to skinny branches, still holding onto the last bits of green.

Today the sky was crystal blue with little scattered specks of clouds. I woke up cold from terrible nightmares. They were vivid and graphic and violent. It is hard for me to think of them. I am trying to forget them. People are out in the streets tonight; I can hear them, drunkenly spewing undirected obscenities. They are often there, beneath me, making a ruckus, running amok and screaming threats at one another. I try to ignore them but I often must hear their shouting matches and their words shake the air.

I am home alone, something that happens rarely with roommates. And I often yearn to be alone with my thoughts, to let them simmer and shatter and slide around without any outside influences. But, each time I find myself alone I stare blankly into the darkness and I fill with a vague fear, an undefined sadness. I look out into the emptiness and into the artifically lit street and I feel the weight of all that needs to be done, of all that needs to be written. I stare out from eyes which do not feel like mine. And there is a silence somewhere that should be filled with words.

Life sometimes passes over me like a shadow, unfelt, barely seen. I sit here, soaking myself in the words I speak, in the words I cannot speak. I attempt to articulate something serious, something worthy of even my own re-reading. The ghosts of my past gather around me. They stare in silence; they wait for me. And I am always grasping for air, struggling to see what lies before me. I am always caught between the layers of the years I have lived. I am always calculating the worth of each day. I weigh out the words I have written and I judge them; I am them. Even now, I am looking at the paragraphs before this one, wondering if once tomorrow arrives, if I will feel like today was a day well-lived.

I have squirmed inside a sickness which is only just now subsiding. This week has been merely a mirage. I have watched things happen and I have not felt that I was the one they were happening to. But, I have also been overwhelmed by the same feelings I have always felt, the same feelings which never leave but which fester and glow inside me. I hold them there and I could not let go if I tried. Everything that happens to me happens to me so wholly that I can only stand back and watch it. I hide inside myself, inside my memories, inside the reflected images of the things I think of doing.

I want to move through a foreign landscape; I want to speak in another tongue. I want to build a thousand new memories to quiet the things I see everyday. All of the places here are coated in all the things that happened before. The old associations haunt my present. I can never figure how what to let go of and what to keep tight against my chest. I am always searching for a change in the people I know. I am always searching for a change in myself, a change I constantly try to encourage. I am losing the things I am trying to say.

Some Vague But Vibrant Visions.

2006-10-01T20:22:00.000-07:00

I am sitting, sinking, soaked in the definitions of distances, those dire miles measured out in tense timetables. There is a shaky silence echoing, evasive, in my head and I cannot catch it, cannot make it something of substance. I saw a city today, a city I rarely see, and I wandered through it, inch by inch, inhaling it's pace. I swam through the movement of all the motionless things. I had no real destination- only a vague idea of one, a loose list of numbered, lettered streets, littered with things I couldn't afford to care to look at. I wished you were there. I thought of your pace, of the way you hold your shoulders when you walk. The city rose up around me- the buildings broad and bright- bustling with business in the afternoon light. I thought in words rarely- in motions and movement, in fast-moving footsteps. I thought in the sounds my feet made on the ground, in the reflection of the sun on the stylish glasses of the people walking past.
The sun shone starkly, stretching out far beyond the clouds which covered it, breaking brightly through those bubbly bunches. The air was cool and the breeze brushed the back of my neck. I moved briskly, beaming beneath the busy sky, the busy streets. People hustled past me, their destinations decisively designated, delegated. They are so deliberate, their demeanor poised and perfect, precocious. And I am slumped forward fading into the far away sound of my footsteps. I am observing the city sky, the sidewalks, strangers.

I fell asleep on the train and I dreamed of a distant landscape layered with all types of terrain. A vast ocean sunk straight out into a dense desert which shifted swiftly into an Antarctic ice patch. And I walked through each one, alone, unafraid. I expected something, some manner of movement, some striking season to overtake the land. They sky suddenly broke and a hard but scattered rain soaked the landscape only in spots. I saw someone standing far off in the distance. He was looking out toward the horizon, hands on hips, searching. And he looked down in front of him in disbelief and I moved toward him but never got any closer.

My thoughts were vibrant and I could taste them in the back of my throat. I was suddenly standing by him and his eyes glowed a golden green, like moss, and I reached out to touch him. He blinked and his eyes changed color. I thought of all the distance I had traveled. I didn't know how I had traversed such tumultuous terrain. An then the sky dimmed and I was on a boat. It was a steamliner and I could stare out into the shining sea. I saw a storm ahead but wasn't scared. I clutched an anonymous letter in my fist. I searched through oddly lit rooms for evidence of it's author. Sometimes the sun shone through the windows and sometimes I thought I could see the moon and stars.

This is all a story.

"We all play at existing without thinking about it- the most advanced of us thinking only about thinking- under the vast stillness of the stars." So says Pessoa. I wish I wrote more about living and less about thinking about living. The people we write live; they see their lives, they feel them. But, in order to see things you must see them through someone's eyes. I suppose it is just more difficult to see things from someone else's eyes and therefore more challenging.

The train is shaking my seat; I am thinking about thinking, thinking about writing, thinking about all the things bobbing about on the brink of my written thoughts. I am hiding something from myself. Some wealth of words, some wordless wisdom only felt in feelings and only escaping on the edges of these vague but vibrant visions.

All I Ask Is Four White Horses Follow.

2006-09-29T11:29:00.000-07:00

I'd like to spend the day laying out beneath the sun, falling in and out of sleep, lightly lingering in dreams. I'd like to watch the clouds from atop Federal Hill, seeing them through the shaking trees. I'd like to breath and inhale the wind, crisp and brisk and steady. I'd like to read Rimbaud, with the newly fallen leaves blowing around me. I'd like to kick through piles of crackling leaves, feel the sun on my back. Instead, I must go to the Bistro and I must care entirely too much about things I don't really care about at all.

I am watching from my window, the sun strike the bright white windows on the building across the street. Neko Case is singing in my ears. I am preparing myself for all the hours I will waste working, wishing I wasn't. I am counting down the final hour, looking nervously each minute.

I dreamed of weird things last night. They bumped awkwardly around my head and then fell out instantly upon waking. I can't seem to stretch them out from anywhere in my memory. The vague recollection of something mundane is slighty scattered across my efforts to remember. And I briefly recall finding them unworthy of recollection; perhaps that's why they've faded so.

Smudged Moments and Skipped Stones.

2006-09-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

I am walking through a landscape rife with rocks. I come home and slip into the words I've spent the day lacking. I moved around dedicatedly, carefully, meticulously. I lost myself in the bustle of the bistro, in the deafening, dizzying din, in all the things that happened around me and all the things that I did without thinking. I've worked from ten am to eleven pm for the last two days and now I finally feel like I have some breathing room before I must be at work in the late afternoon tomorrow.

I am stripping myself of all the things I've done this evening, yesterday evening. I am trying to pull all these fragmented, frenzied thoughts from my frantic head. I am leaning back, inside myself, breathing slowly, exhaling in studied breaths, watching each one fall, roll, off my lips. I open my mouth wide into yawns and try to hold my shaky eyelids still.

The night is wet and dark but the streets are shining, twinkling beneath the bright buzz of the streetlamps. This morning was bustling with a breeze, a cool autumn breeze which blew my hair across my face. I put it back up and looked up at the clouds, trying to ignore the building beside me, the building from where I had come. I saw a few birds flap their wings lightly and land in the little flower boxes which hang from the windows. I squinted into the noonday sun and sighed; I knew I had to spend the rest of the day and night indoors. By the time 3 o'clock came rain clouds had gathered and the sun had sunk behind them. I sat outside only briefly, my pen hoovering above a piece of paper, the words just out of reach. Before I knew it I was back at work, lost again and still my thoughts peered out shyly from the shadow of that lonely second in the sun.

I don't know what I thought, then, or the rest of the night. I let the words lose footing; I let them linger, unformulated and then I come home and try to etch them out of the events of the day. I vaguely mention things here and there. Every sentence I write starts with "I". But, is that not how a diary is supposed to be? Only, it seems there is no real evolution. That I describe the same things the same way. I am trying to capture the tone of the moment but the moments all smudge together.

Will You Know? Or Must I Tell You?

2006-09-24T23:00:00.000-07:00

I woke up early, drowning in the muggy mist of morning, groggily groaning my way to work. The air was heavy with the threat of rain; you could smell it everywhere quivering, waiting. It bunched up and caused pressure in my head. It felt like forever before the sky finally cracked and the pressure subsided. It felt like weeks. The sky darkened dramatically but I couldn't see the clouds from inside the bistro. I imagine they swarmed overhead ominously. The day let out slowly and I walked out of the bistro relieved, exhausted, right as the sky broke and the rain crashed down. It was a warm rain, a damp rain (like the kind you find in songs) and I walked slowly to the car, letting it slide down my sticky, sweaty face.

I drove slowly through the rain, the puddles flying up in streams and coming in through the open window. The windshield wipers ran furiously, scraping across the widow, spitting the water off the sides of the car. I came home and took a brief nap. I woke up just at sunset. The clouds had broken beautifully, layers of light clouds sitting right beneath deep, thick layers of dark rain clouds. The sun screamed out from behind them, glowing red and orange. It slowly sank, and Sunday waned.

There is something solid beneath me these days. I feel I am gaining footing. Each day of words I build, on this blog or elsewhere, is a feather in my cap. Each sentence spoken simply, slipping suddenly from my lips, is an articulation of something solid. I feel, sometimes, that this blog is too vague. That a reader might not have anything to take a hold of. That it is too personal, too emotional. If anyone reads this perhaps you can give me some advice.

A Specter of Something

2006-09-21T23:39:00.000-07:00

I am trying to remember my dreams but they are sinking fast into all of this days disasters. I ran around- crazy. A chicken. And I've come home to try to find the remnants of yesterday, only to scramble back to bed to find the morning. I am always looking for things. There is someone hinting on the edge of my memory and I am pushing him back, far from me, but I can still see him in so many sideglances, dangling around in my peripheral vision, a specter of something I can't remember in words, only brief images and dreams, only in a floating feeling. I see the little statcounter map and I wonder if it is just someone else in Montreal. It could be. Last night I dreamed I was there. I dreamed I saw you standing in the middle of the mall, bundled up in snow gear, mittens. There was a line of light coming in from the glass ceiling above you and you were still as young as you were then. I want to brush it off. I want to let it slide off my shoulders but those words which once rang so true inside me still vibrate in my memory every once in a while. I suppose, though, that this is not rare. That I am a pisces and everything reverberates inside me always, people I can never give up. And they all stare at me from photographs which capture so much of who they are. And sometimes I wish I could forget. But, mostly I just wish I could write them more real than they ever were and therefore know them. That's what must be done.

The Shadow of The Person I Only Vaguely Remember Being.

2006-09-18T22:07:00.000-07:00

I've been lost, lingering on the edge of an almost understanding. Wavering, wandering on the brink of a battlefield I can't remember ever stepping onto. Each day I face with a shaking fist and a hidden agenda. Each day I sit and stare at the next, expectantly. I am waiting for something which only I have the will to wish into action. I wonder, like Pessoa, like Mr. Cobain, "Who needs actions when you've got words?" And then I wonder, how can I make actions into words so that they live as actions, wholly and truly and so that the words move just the same as the actions do.

I walk outside, lost in the vague and visually unpleasant tapestry that shrouds the streets of Baltimore. I try to find beauty in all the unfinished things, which we all know will never be realized the way they were intended. I find the most beauty in the broken buildings on the brink of reconstruction because they aren't yet a failure; they are still fighting valiently, hanging wires like vines, pieces of metal- shrapnel- sticking out from beneath the dug up earth. They haven't yet become what people want them to be. They stand, unstructured, gradually becoming more and more shiny, becoming more and more human.

I am struck silent by the city streets. By the uncanny way that everyone is exactly who they are and how we can know them so suddenly. I see someone walk and I know him. I see someone hold her eyes to her brow to sheild her face from the sun, and I know her, her small denim skirt clutching onto small feminine thighs. And she alters her walk to suit her skirt; and she alters her walk to suit her shoes. I see a student stomping steadily down the campus steps, heading to the food court, plugging his laptop into the wall and staring intently at graphs and charts. And I know him because I can write the exact way which he moved along those stairs. I know what he thought as he moved toward the counter at the checkout. He studied his watch; he studied the zippers on his backpack. He fiddled with something, jingling, in his pocket. This is the movement of life, this ethereal, glowing, commonality that is everything we are- whether or not we are aware of who we are.

I am frustrataed by the instinct to settle, the way people sink beneath the briefest hint of frustration. I wish I knew less of the rich, of how rich the rich are and how they feed on each other, worms. I wish I didn't work for them, moving briskly to make them money. Learning facts just to show I know and then coming home and caring about the facts, making them mine, only be be quizzed on them later. As if they're required. As if that's a possible expectation. Some people are so themselves in the midst of so much that is not them. I wish I was not so mutable. I wish I could hold my ground.

I wish I could write more but I must wake up and make myself someone I wish I never had to be, only the shadow of the person I vaguely remember being. All the things I used to do bubble to the surface in the brief intervals between work and I can almost see my own shadow; I can almost step into it, become it. But just as I find it, just as I shift myself into position, it moves. The daylight peeks in through the curtains and throws my shadow far behind me. And I wander, lost, practically motionless beneath the weight of my memory. And I wander through work, a shadow.

Not So Steady.

2006-09-15T01:05:00.000-07:00

Today was yet another day littered with light misty drizzle, exploding with unending stillness- where the rain wouldn't let up nor actually become something. It would only suggest the idea of rain, casually coating people's hair and clothing, listlessly littering the edges of everything. And I stood at work, wandering, wavering, gazing out the window, wishing I was anywhere else. I stared at women with faces which were cut, pulled, placed. I stared at them disgustedly, glaring. Those foul creatures. And I claimed, more than once, and seriously so, "If everyone who ever had surgery for purely cosmetic reasons would just fall over and die now, I would volunteer to go around and clean up the bodies."

How is it that people can be so shallow? That who they are is so defined by how they look that they would sooner give up their bodies to plastics and scalpels than actually be a person or learn anything about themselves. I think of this and I think of the life you live isolated, mostly, from these people. And I wonder if I would rather see them, broad as the gloomy day, or hide from them beneath papers and the past. I suppose it's rather the same thing, that the past is just like now, that people have always been frightened, meekly peeking out from behind their own eyelids as if from behind a curtain, on a stage.

I sometimes peer out into the darkness and wonder what it is I'm doing, mascarading as someone who lives a life outside of words. As if I am capable of understanding anything without promptly putting it properly in paragraphs, in phrases. The more I force myself to sit here, staring, at the blank, buzzing screen infront of me, the more I articulate the things I would often rather forget. I feel so responsible for people, I find it ridiculous. Everyone I've ever actually known I feel somehow responsible for. Because the second I know someone I feel like I have some objective insight into their personalities and I can better help them to understand themselves. Unfortunately, I often forget that most people would much rather meander motionless through a life they don't understand than take the time or effort to change, or even understand. I give so much weight to the few who do; they carry me through.

I can hear the mice run amok through my apartment. The sink is dripping steadily, every few moments. I am trying to ride on all the words which came before these. I am not so steady myself.

I dreamed about some strange sort of heaven and hell. There was a concubine of some kind sucking me down but at the same time I didn't know if this fellow, with whom I was in love, wanted to go back to heaven or to hell. I couldn't even tell which was more pleasant. Except this creepy concubine was in the lower level of this Alice in Wonderland-esque world and I figured that was hell. Now that I write it down I realize that I've had a dream which took place here before. I remember the long winding road with the yellow hills to each side. In the other dream, which I must have had 5 years ago or more, I was trying to get somewhere which I thought would be the finale of the dream but I was in a wooden wagon and nobody was pulling it. These dreams are all so symbolic. I wish I remembered more.

Things Alive Only in Whispered Words.

2006-09-13T22:21:00.000-07:00

All day the sky has been grey and dull, a damp blanket coating the sky, covering the sun. I spent the day in awkward transition, dreading the coming cold and the trees- empty of their leaves. I think about these last few years and wonder where they've gone. They live for me inside of letters, words piled a top one another and sent forth through the vast network of space to the minds and eyes of others. I hear the words I've read echoed in my head and I wonder how long they'll live there, waiting for me to make use of them.

Today, the sky cracked it's poems in naked thunder. I stood at the window at work looking out into the glossy parking lot, at the grimy puddles, thinking of all the things I've left unthought and unwritten, unrealized, for so long now. I am bobbing around a sea of confusion, in a raft which is too small for me and blistering beneath the burning sun. I am afloat, riding the light waves which weave me across the sea, waiting for the inevitable storm which I see so far out in the distance. I can feel the weight of all things I do not know as it pulls down on me; I can imagine all the possibilities but I cannot reach them.

There is something new. Some small light shining where it wasn't shining before. And all at once, I feel like I am losing something. The ground beneath my feet, perhaps. I am wrapped up in a world of unsaid things and slowly they are leaking out, finding the way to their rightful places. And all at once, I am keeping things in- hiding them in dark corners where they live only in whispered words.

The ground outside is still damp and obsidian, the black street iridescent and opaque. I look to it as into a crystal ball and I see myself reflected, my eyes wide with wonder. I wish I was staring out into the bright, blue pacific- my feet digging in the whiteish sand, someone beside me pressing his mouth against my neck, tasting my shoulders.

Why must we only have one life?

Fading Freckles and Frantic Fumbling.

2006-09-11T23:17:00.000-07:00

A dog is barking outside in the distance; I can hear his shouts echo through the alleyway in front of my house. These have been many days full of waiting, listening, hearing the faint reverberations of what once was ringing in my ears. The winter is imminent and each fallen leaf, brown and broken beneath my feet, is a warning. And yet, I am looking forward to that brief period between the seasons when the air is just crisp enough and the breeze is blowing the leaves around your knees. I look forward to shuffling my feet through piles and piles of leaves and the sound they make when the swoosh up into the air. This last summer is now just a distant memory and I've been looking in the mirror everyday to study how quickly my freckles are fading. I don't want them to fade.

I am trying to lose myself in something but, perhaps, I don't know what it is. I miss all the days I used to spend alone, on rooftops and running through back alleys. I don't know myself as well as I should because I don't spend enough time trying to get to know myself. I'm lost in the constant rushing swirl of clattering dishes and the busy din of the bistro. Every movement is so fluid and steady and yet everything is so calculated and cold. I am thinking about the past and how it is a constant present. Everything builds beneath me, it bubbles and billows and often breaks. I'm lost in the different people and I am trying to refine all the things I have been and all the things I want to be.

I dreamed something dark and awkward, something different and I dreamed it in stuttered movements. I have many things hidden in the folds of the sheets. I am lost in a landscape which towers over me and I can barely see behind me. I am caught in memories of things so long finished they may as well have never happened. Yet, I am haunted by all the people I used to know and perhaps I must write them in order to forget, in order to make them something outside themselves. And I am haunted by a feeling which lies deep within my chest and which I cannot break free from. I am looking up from the bottom of a rocky cliff and I cannot see what waits above me, far out of reach.

When You're Caught Betwixt Charibdis and the Krill

2006-09-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

I drove down the highway today; the midnight moon was bright in the sky. The sky was a much lighter blue than I expected and the streetlights shone along the rim of the road. It was an empty road and I traveled toward the lights. I wondered what I was coming home to and what I would write when I got there.

The highway was an extension of myself; it stretched out far in each direction. I could have gone any way I wanted. But, instead, I headed home. I blinked, perhaps more then a few times, at the brightness of the road, the brightness of my dashboard. I knew this car was taking me from one place to the next. And I wondered, “Where am I taking myself?”

Am I walking down a long road headed to the highway? Am I destined, by the stars, to do something I barely understand but that can be explained quite clearly? Am I free to choose who I want to be and be that? And I laugh, also, because I think it’s funny.

I’ve thought too much about Ayn Rand today. Her horrifying empty cliché’s she calls people, just empty symbols for “righteousness” and “arrival”. The pain I felt upon reading that conjecture was magnified so much by her complete and utter lack of understanding of what a human is. God, what a foul creature. And I had to think all day of the sort of denial it takes to be able to read that and claim that it is based on even the vaguest understanding of humanity. Am I free to puke all over myself? Why yes, yes I am.

Fiction is as little known a thing as how to actually live a life. People don’t realize that fiction is a means of expressing what life actually is and, therefore, in order to understand something about fiction you have to, in turn, understand something about how a person lives a life. It is rather difficult to make a person and prove he lives a life, a real life, and make his life real to others. It is perhaps one of the most difficult things. But it is amazing because those people you make, they live. Sometimes, they live more than the author does. And all the people we haven’t made, they live inside me so soundly, so simply, sitting so still and waiting so patiently to be made into someone. George Barnes just wants to go home and we will not let him, to spite ourselves. James will always live with the shadow of his foot crunching a cigarette and then, walking away. Edeline will, forever, wipe her nostril on her mothers’ coat, unless we choose to make her grow. And I suppose that’s what’s best about fiction, you can make people grow at the rate that you, yourself, are capable of understanding how it is people do grow. Fiction is not molding a bunch of plastic people to fit your ideals and your philosophies. Fiction is about making people come to life through words. Making real people come to life through words.

Or Beast of Man Left Wantin'

2006-09-05T21:38:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about posting something for some time now without actually doing it. I've been listening to Rob's new songs and I've been wishing I was able to just make something and have it whole so quickly. George Barnes has been alive for so long without being finished that it makes me think I don't even know who he is. We trudged through so few sentences but they were such full sentences. I sit here, still, with my fingers on the letters, hoovering, waiting. The words simmer beneath my consciousness and I wonder if I've been thinking them all day or if they just found their way to the tip of my tongue, the tip of my fingers.

I dreamed of running last night, that I ran from some unknown source, from some scary someone who I didn't understand. They knew me, the both of them, and they cornered me. I sunk into the seat of the car I had stolen and I waited for them to get me. I had tried to hotwire the car but I realized, once I had the flap open, that I didn't have any idea how. And I woke up confused.

And I dreamed I swam frantically from an angry Orca through the flooded hospital halls. And the Orca saw me but didn't seem to mind my presence. I sat in my bed and wrote pages and pages of my dreams this morning, my fingers feeling that they had long ago been finished. My head was full of the deep, colorful things I had witnessed in the night and I pushed the words onto the page in illegible early morning scrawls. And I felt beside me the warmth of someone I believe so much in. And I heard beneath me the sounds of someone I believe so much in. And today I looked up from a fancy dinner into the eyes of someone I wish I could help but she can help herself. And I'm so glad she can.

I spoke to a friend last night who was so sad and so silly. I wished I could whack him once or twice in his head. He spoke of the selfish nature of art and his desire to engage in humanitarian deeds and I laughed because he would never do such a thing. He would only wish he could. I haven't seen him in so long and we just started talking out of nowhere. He's not as different as I think I am. I feel like he knows me now just as much as he ever did, which is not so much at all.

And I felt, beneath the surface of my skin, the person waiting to emerge, winking. She looked up from the place I always knew she would wait, and she showed me that the person I wish to be has always been there, waiting. I think of how I work so much that I don't get to sit through these times, these smooth surfaces and soft transitions from one moment to the next. I've been pushing the moments past for so long now, just hoping for their end, just begging for the time to pass so that new time could begin. I've spent so long asking people what they want and not thinking, seriously, what it is that I want. Can I bring you anything else, I ask. And really, can I bring myself anything to start with?

This is, likely, just a bunch of nonsense. Just a bunch of babble, but I bet some of it lives outside things. And I bet I sit and hear the best songwriting I've ever heard and I grin giddily because he made it. And now he makes absurd noises.

I won't be a while.

We All Live Alone.

2006-08-28T20:24:00.000-07:00

The sun is hidden somewhere beneath the thick layer of clouds. One is not easily distinguishable from the next, they are one big blanket laid across the sky. The trees outside my window are shaking. I am looking forward to this shift in seasons. I will be glad to see the leaves change color once again, crisp and crinkle and then litter the ground and gutters. Time is always passing. It is always creeping up behind me and blowing softly onto the back of my neck.

I've been so many people these two days. I've been witness to beauties so sincere, talents so natural. And somewhere in the silence of all the days which have sped past, I've thought things and learned things and I've stood back, slowly taking small steps, and I've seen these things and wondered in what way they will serve me. I've wondered if I will wake up in another country, speaking another language and live for the things I believe in instead of trying to find room for those things in between all this work.

I was lost last night between the brilliant collaboration of my first love and my current love. They know each other so separately, so individually. They are so whole outside of what they know. It always serves to remind me of who I was and I wonder if I am really any different. How deeply am I mired in the past and how aware am I of the future?

Each one of us lives inside ourselves, peering out from behind open eyes. We all live alone.

So Few People Understand.

2006-08-26T02:22:00.000-07:00

I would also like to leave everyone but my art, and that one who makes my art with me, behind. I would also like to be who I was before, when all that mattered was what was written. When all that mattered was who he was, was who Fernando was. When all that mattered was who those people whom we made were. It is a different thing to make people. So few people understand. If only I could know someone who had made someone, who had made someone who knew something, who had made someone who intended to know someone even if it was supremely hard for them to understand someone.

To make someone is to be responsible for someone, is to be able to excuse this person, to
be able to know what motivates this person, what makes him/her who he/she is. I would like to know who George Barnes is; I would like to know that George Barnes is someone specific, is someone who has been somewhere. But, he is so difficult, he is so complicated. I want to write about other people who are more there, who are more forward.

I would like to write about a certain Slipster. I would like to write about many people. But, I get lost in all the subjectivity. I wish I could be more distant. I wish I could be more like he who gives not a shit. I wish, sometimes, I could give nothing and get just that back. But, also, I am clearly a liar. I want nothing more than to know people, than to know that people know me. But, mostly, I care about words and about people living the words they make. And that is why the Subservient Worker, the Waiter Rant, Fernando Pessoa and all the rest are so important, because they are words. How I live to be words.

Circumstance Lives Alongside Fate.

2006-08-24T23:29:00.000-07:00

This blog has gone untended for over a week. Perhaps because I believed that no one was concerned and no one was checking or perhaps because I was caught up in other people's blogs and didn't dictate the time I needed for my own.

This day was spent psychoanalyzing different people's responses to a "personality test" given to me by my Dad quite some time ago. The taker of the test is essentially on a "journey". This journey is his/her own journey in which anything they believe is possible is the case. This is the basic premise. So, you inform the subject of this fact and then you take them on a journey. They must decide, first, at a fork in the road, between a sunny meadow and a wooded field. This decision, based on the way they come to their conclusion, is symbolic of the choice between the known and the unknown, the mysterious and the apparant. Many people I've given the test to have chosen the woods. I did. Everyone I've known to chose the meadow has been someone generally afraid of what they do not understand or someone who just wants the warm, clear things. They don't mind that all they can see is right there in front of them. They prefer it that way.

Next, the subject comes across a key. This key and their reaction to it is a symbol of the subject's general attitude toward knowledge. People either immediately take it, (it's obviously theirs if it's in their woods) or they think it's the key to someone else's house and want to leave it for the owner to find it. The people who take it generally have ornate, old, skeleton keys. I knew a Gemini who drew a picture of his key. He was very concerned that I understand what his key looked like, exactly.

So, the subject with or without his key continues on his/her way. He or she comes across a vase. This vase is suppose to be symbolic of the person's sexuality. People always have severe reactions to the vase even if they don't react severely to anything else in the whole test. People who are unsure of their sexual orientation or who are keeping it a secret almost always break the vase. I knew another Gemini who found his vase broken and he didn't know who had broken it but he knew it wasn't him. This was rather distressing. He wanted to know what this said about him and I didn't want to talk about it because it was rather obvious that he had something serious he was hiding, even from himself. Me? I didn't know what a vase was doing in my forest. To some people the vase is extremely important. It dictates the whole rest of their journey. To some people the vase is kind of nice but they don't want to be burdened by it. To others the vase is something they might consider coming back for but since they don't know where they're headed they don't pick it up, they hide it and intend to come back later to unearth their vase. A particularly chilly fellow for whom I work said that his vase was an urn. This caused me great distress. An URN!

The subject moves on, with a vase or without, with a key or without, and comes across a body of water. The subject is asked to describe this body of water. This body of water is supposed to symbolize their experience dealing with relationships and what relationships mean to them in general. Many people have a small but vibrant stream that they either walk across, jump over, or walk through. Many people also have a large lake which they either walk around, jump into, or perhaps boat across. More rarely someone will have a murky marsh, a puddle, a pond, or an ocean. The puddle and the ocean being the most extreme examples. Both of whom I have given this test to. The subject who had an ocean also had, and I swear to God, dead horseshoe crabs along her beach. They stank the place up, she said. When asked how she would go about traversing this ocean she said, "I would build a raft out of sticks. I don't know how to do that but I would do it." A RAFT to traverse the OCEAN. She could have chosen ANYTHING. A boat, a fucking dolphin, anything. A raft made of sticks. Christ. Most people who have no idea what to do or how to behave in a relationship just walk around their body of water, whatever it may be. These people will NEVER jump in. It won't even strike them momentarily. One fellow I heard of, through a reliable resource, said that he walked across his lake because it was frozen. He is fellow who will not have a girlfriend, scared to death of committment. Another fellow whom I work with said that he walked around his lake because the trees were too thick around it to get through. He is a rather distant person, very hard to know. Shocking.

Lastly, the subject is brought to a wall. This wall is very high; the subject cannot see over it and as far as they can see on both sides it continues. They know only this: that if they choose to go over the wall they may never return to the other side. This wall is a symbol for death and the occult. The unknown in general but mostly death. Some people are unwilling to believe that once they have gone over they can never come back. Some people peek over to see if they want to. Some people do not even CONSIDER for one solitary second the thought of going over the wall. Some people would rather return the way they came. The distressing fellow for whom I work used his urn/vase to peek over the wall, climbed over and then said he didn't care about the urn/vase or whether he could get it back because, of course, he had the key. Another beautiful girl who is a very close friend mine did not go over the wall, she instantly turned around and went back to her body of water in order to "catch frogs". This is a girl who very much wants babies. Shocking.

But, it's all in the way they take it. It's all in how much they're willing to give up, in how willing they are to conform to this world and to believe that anything they want can be. And that's why the test is so accurate. Because, just the act of taking it says enough about you and when it is layered with these Freudian symbols it makes it all the more multi-dimensional. Some people just won't believe that whatever they want is true, they want to ask you all the time because they perceive you to be in the "know" since you're the one "giving" the test. And some people just pick up that it's their world. In the exact same way that some people are willing to take complete and utter responsibility for their own lives and others want to be told what to do and think that circumstance is the only dictator. They don't understand that THEY themselves are RESPONSIBLE for the circumstances. They say, Oh I just did this because that's what it looked like. If it looked like something else I would have done it differently. They don't understand that it looks like that because they made it that way.

What does your body of water look like?

Wanting for Words.

2006-08-16T16:42:00.000-07:00

This life moves in fragments, in rhythms, in the sounds of footsteps in sand, in the buzz of streetlamps and insects. I try to follow it down that crooked pathway but I cannot look up, only at my own two feet. I inhale words in heavy breaths, in gulps. I swallow them voraciously, letting them coat my insides with their calming cadences. I lose myself to watching lips as they let words loose, as they dance off them and at the eyes that react inside skulls.

I find, in the way the clouds move across the sky-changing- the image of what I wish I was, moving shifting, scattering, leaving the place I once was forever behind me. In footsteps I search for history, for evidence. I ride the tail of yesterday trying to catch a hold of tomorrow but it's always too fast for me. There are so many things to happen yet and they all live on the edge of everything which has already happened, hinting. What if we aren't what we live but what we dream?

I'm often someone else in dreams, wondering whose head I'm in and what I'm doing there. I'm writing, "Eyes of a Blue Dog" on the floors of dream houses in lipstick- waiting for myself to understand what it means. I'm spending a Season in Hell, illuminated. I'm living inside a disquietude which I cannot quell. I'm asking myself, "Who are you?" I'm asking someone else, "Who is he?" I'm asking no one, "Who am I?"

I'm waiting, wandering through these moments wanting for the words to wrap themselves around me. Sometimes, I can find them hiding beneath the layer of hours lost to work, waiting to see the ends of their own sentences.

Slow Down, Fast Train. Take Me With You.

2006-08-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

I try to balance on this thin line between the personal and the impersonal, the general and the specific. I try to write sentences which mean something more to someone than, "Oh, she felt this and that way these days," Because, really, who cares how I feel? I try to make this into literature because I am having such a hard time making much else into literature. Each day that passes, unwritten, into the long and growing line of days behind me, is a day lost to all the things that could have been but never were. I am constantly writing about how terrible it is to not write. I am constantly pouring over all the time I spend not writing, even while I'm in the process of trying to make something memorable, or at least something that I am proud of. But, it seems possible that it is just as useless to spend words on what it means to not spend words on anything. It seems possible that I am wasting just as much time as if I wasn't writing at all.

Rimbaud raced and rambled through my head today. His soft face stared at me from behind my eyes and I closed them over and over again to see those deep, dark eyes looking out at me.

"Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.

One evening I took Beauty in my arms - and I thought her bitter - and I insulted her.

I steeled myself against justice."

In the Great Hall it is said that one can live only in thoughts, but why would one want to? Fernando Pessoa says that he can live a million lives in thought so why would he want to do anything else? I, whoever this "I" is, try to dig a life out of the ashes of moments which constantly rush by me. I try to catch the seconds as they speed across each minute and hold them steady for just long enough to know them. But, I also push them forward, let them fall, wish they were passed and done with. I'd like to hold them in my palms, press them out from the tips of my fingers and make them mean something solid. And, sometimes, even when I do, I finish what I'd made and I forget I ever made anything. Sometimes I feel that the only time I am doing what ought to be done is when I am furiously fingering a keyboard, fleshing out a story, making something come alive from nothing. We all want to make something come alive, don't we? We are just so often afraid to see what it is that comes from inside us. We must leap into ourselves with wide open eyes but we can't see what we've done with anyone's eyes but our own.

And I want to follow myself into each moment, into each vibrant sunset, and push myself along with words. I want to add something significant to all the things which have been said before and I wonder if these brief vignettes are anything more than late night boredom manifested in far too many words.

The Coals Went So Wild As They Swallowed The Rest.

2006-08-12T21:38:00.000-07:00

This evening sped by in a clumsy dance of door banging, plates crashing and screached Spanish insults. I stumbled my way through it, pretending it was happening to someone else. I thought about letters written and letters not written. I had intended to write back to someone but I woke up too late. I had so many dreams spinning about in my skull and wasn't finished with any one of them so I kept going back to sleep, over and over again. The next thing I knew it was three o'clock and I barely had time to write them down before having to jump up and leave.

It's hard to write about a day during which nothing really happened. I am currently digging through the scattered remnants of a tired mind, trying to find a solid thought to pull across the page. I am having difficulty discerning what should be said and what should be left to silence.

I see people as they pass me. They are the vague representations of what I spend everyday trying to attain in words. They are very quickly doing all the things it takes them pages and pages, hours and hours to do when I write them down in words. Often, I think of people in words, in the brief but bright recognization that always takes place somewhere in our stories. I think of that moment when they might realize who they are and react accordingly. I would like to write myself in fiction one day but I believe that takes far more practice than my few years have had.

A friend recently asked, "Why must everything be born out of so much pain?" And I feel like somewhere, deep down in the darkness of my belly, I know the answer. But, just now I can't find it. Maybe tomorrow.

I do know that we all struggle to find the things that pull us out of the pain of knowing that your life is limited. I suppose the fact of the infinite possibilities capable of unfolding is just as limiting though. But, it depends on who you are. There are those of us who skip through life, unknowing and not wanting to know, because they are afraid that knowing will cause them heartache. I prefer to know and to try to deal with the pain that living sometimes causes. Part of what is so beautiful about humanity is the depth of people's ability to feel emotions. I want to stand out on the deck of a boat, the wind blowing through my hair, the fish jumping up around me. I want to stand on the beach and look out onto the sea and think of all the places, perhaps, where a young man could be. I want to jump back out on the rooftops, look out over the town. Think about the strange things circulating 'round. It ain't easy.

A Bad Dream Is Like The Past, Just Like A Bad Dream.

2006-08-10T23:41:00.000-07:00

This is all a dream but it is also just the remnants of the dream I wish I might have had. I dreamed many a deep and intricate thing last night and I said it all to myself, quietly. Letting it seep out in serious sentences. There were so many things falling from the sky. Those things were things we all knew but couldn't explain. They were parts of museums, things I'd assumed to be dinosaurs. There were dinosaurs, dangers. There were things which fell from the sky and scared me, things which I didn't understand, which I couldn't explain. And I was going to fix things; I was going to make them what they ought to have been.

There is a dialect; the city has a language. The city speaks it's language and those who listen write about the language that the city speaks. They write what the city would have written if it were something else, something more real than a place. I know that places waver, they shrug themselves off sometimes, as if they aren't really as real as they are. It's just the same with people, always pretending to be things more solid, more structured, then they actually have the ability to be.

Carnivale is over and it is absurd. People are left to dangle and dance around and you, you know that they will never be anyone, that their lives are finished just because someone has finished writing them. But, I suppose that insane degree of incompleteness makes you want to finish what's been started even more. It doesn't make you want to say, "Oh, he is who he is." And we spent all night being asked who he is. And really, I suppose, the question is, do we know? Do we know who he is just because we know what he does?

Do we seek to find something that is lost to the intricacies of storytelling? Must we just fill in the middle and not think about the end? The end is so much what it's meant to be. How do we know that people will understand that their ends are often predictable? Megan predicted it. She said just so much was so. And Slippy has been reading it; does that make it real? Perhaps I ought to be someone I'm not? Perhaps I ought to be a character. If only I had a huge hall to strut about in. If only I could be someone, someone not myself. But I suppose I have been just that. I suppose I have been playing the game.

If only I could live all the things I know are being lived by others. I suppose it might be enough to know that I have made something, that I have also helped someone make something, that all I do is worth something. I suppose it is true that the words quiver in my eyesight, they sink into my belly and become the most beautiful of breaths. I do think the things that I think I ought to think when I wake up and see the things I have seen.

I hear about psychic dreams and I wonder if my dreams directly dictate what my day will be. These dreams of last night have fallen gracefully into another's arms and have become something I didn't even know they would be. Only because of the fact that I am aware of them. I suppose I am terribly dictated by the way someone else creates who they are based vaguely, and only slightly so, on who I am. But, can I? I suppose I don't know, yet. I must wait for what echoes through the Great Hall; I must wait for what falls from the fingers of he who speaks, he who says what is true. Or, perhaps, I will just wait for anything.

Everything's Impossible, Till It Ain't. (Perhaps I've Made It So)

2006-08-08T20:51:00.000-07:00

Today was a day on the roof. I ran around, danced, stretched, did gymnastics, took some photographs. The beatnick barber bought us champagne. The sky changed and shifted. The day dimmed and darkened. We've watched Carnivale and it too darkened, unfolded. I sat and wondered. I sat and watched. She's the omega. She's the end. It must be Lodes. Appalonia threw the record. How long has she known? They all know the pieces. We don't know what he knows.

I'm covered in roof dirt, my knees and elbows and the soles of my feet. I have to wake up early tomorrow, to wander about and dance and hand things off to others, things they barely want but pretend to. Geoff wondered if I'd been reading his blog, The Great Hall. I laughed. Of course, I have. Endlessly. Searching. Wondering how mine is different. If I am who I am or if I am someone else. Wondering if, perhaps, I ought to be someone else. Or if I should be who I am. But, why would I be someone else, when the point of this whole endeavor is to understand, based on my own words, who I am. It's strange when Copper Top tells me what to say and what not to say. As if his song is not saying something. As if the fact of it being written is not saying directly that it is for knowing. As if there's such a large difference if I make a vague reference.
He says I've said his name before. Like anyone knows what this is. Like anyone pays attention.

Carnivale is so entirely Twin Peaks. Or what Twin Peaks could have been. Or Carnivale is almost what Twin Peaks just nearly was. Management is a prophet. Scutter is a prophet. They're all avitars. He and Ben are the same thing. Ben's the prince and he's the Usher. It's from a made up Apocrapha.

There used to be a slew of secrets I'd hold inside me. I keep them there still. Wondering who might wish for the answers. Wondering when they might fall from their roofs, when they might plummet from their unthinkable heights. Is this a journal I keep or is it a joke? Am I myself or I am another? Am I another version of myself or do I just make up all the versions of myself to suit the sky in the show I'm watching. The sky is the same I saw this evening through the lens of my camera, my face is the same I saw through the lens of my camera.

My roof, the sky, the trees. I shall wander the words which ring through the Great Hall. I shall let them ring in my ears. Ricardo Reis. Fernando Pessoa. One and the same. I shall separate them in my dreams. They are such distinct people.

The past is the past. Just like a bad dream.

Perhaps I Will Make It So.

2006-08-07T21:04:00.000-07:00

I walked in circles 'round this city today. Up and down hills and sidewalks. Everything always looks the same. The same buildings, the same streetsigns, the same sorts of people scattered about the streets. It felt like rain all day. The humidity bubbled and boiled and the air was so still, waiting to be shaken. It was one of those days that just lulls on and then lands flat on its back. It felt momentarily uplifting when the sky finally broke and the rain poured down in storms. I breathed a heavy sigh of relief the first time I heard the thunder crack.

I've been waiting for something to write about but not much has really happened. I am only writing now so as not to chew my nails, as I have finally decided, once and for all, that this is the end of neurotic nail gnawing. We drank Bandol Rose and watched Carnivale. I fear that it will end with far too many unanswered questions. I had previously thought that Rose didn't match Carnivale but was proven wrong this evening. It suits it rather well. Rose would be really good with Amelie too. I wish I knew how to put an accent on the 'e' so that it was clear I'm not talking about a person.

There have been many sudden and strongly felt changes at work. There will be a new manager when I go in tomorrow and I wonder what she will be like. It will be interesting at least, momentarily, to know someone new. But they are always sucked into that scary world of pseudo-authority. Either that or they refuse to be empty and nasty and so instead they leave. It's so odd to be expected to treat people as though they aren't human beings, as though they don't matter at all.

While I was out walking around Juan Copper Top, my lovely boyfriend, wrote a rather humorous but still sad song about my former friend Jack Benny. It was a good song based on a poem written about me by this Benny. They are both about laundry for some reason. I'm not sure why. I love it when I come home to see that something productive has been created. And with Juan I am always immensely pleased with what he produces. I am lucky to be involved with such a brilliant and silly songwriter. What a beautiful Copper Top he is.

But, alas, this day should have been more than it was. It should have built and peaked and lived so long and far outside of itself. I meant for it to be that way. Perhaps tomorrow something will spill out, some important breakthrough will occur. Perhaps I will make it so.

The Forced Smile I Bear

2006-08-05T01:11:00.000-07:00

I know that what I want lurks between sentences. I know that it lurks there when the sentences don't and it begs me to pull the sentences from between my teeth so that I can know what I want and feel that I am attaining it. I am in constant fear of the youth that drives me and of how quickly it seems to be slipping away, dragging me along with it and I don't understand where these thoughts are coming from. How can I be so young and feel so stifled, so stiff? My bones crack and creak when I stretch and my hips shift when I sway. I see people and speak to them but the distance is an ever glowing orb between us and I'm always saying something that is so frequently misunderstood.

I feel that perhaps I don't understand things with such giddy excitement any longer and I miss those days when everything happened in unison with another. I know that I wake up now and all the things I might have thought, all the things I might have been forced to articulate, if I was alone, are lost to the feeling of flesh against my skin. I'm always slipping into the ever comforting embrace of skin on skin and I wish I could write my dreams down with someone holding me against his chest. I fear that the comfort of another with whom no art is made is an escapist sort of comfort.

I am not comfortable these days and I feel my life sliding around beneath me, around the forced smile I must always bear. This will not do. This distance. What will do is words. Words are the only thing that will do and they must be made really and entirely. I've lost so much time to this din beneath all the words I didn't say. It's time to make what's been said heard and to make what hasn't been said, art.

"I Try To Wear A Wicked Grin."

2006-08-03T13:04:00.000-07:00

A Letter to a Friend. The above friend, specifically.

I remember the last time you were here the three of us walked down Key Highway on the wrong side of the road. The stone sidewalk was small and not even really a sidewalk. One of us always had to step out into the street and I tried to stay on that skinny stretch of stones, slipping every once in a while. We moved swiftly and you spoke eagerly. I like that memory. It's much like a movie. It reminds me of Jules and Jim in a way. Or perhaps Band of Outsiders. Sometimes things are so distinct in my recollection of them that they exists with the same weight as something I saw expressed in a film. I guess that makes perfect sense though. The best movies make you feel like they aren't movies. But, I find it intriguing that the majority of my memories of you fit in this category in my subconscious where brief but lovely things linger and repeat. When I was driving into Death Valley with Julian so many summers ago, the road twisted in sharp circles. The car got hotter and hotter and at one point we were overlooking this deep gorge. It was a bit frightening because there were no barriers and it was just barely a road. But, as we turned the corner to overlook the gorge I looked out the window and the most beautiful bird flew up out of the depths beneath me. It was framed so perfectly within the confines of the window from which I viewed it. It was the most perfectly photographic I've ever seen. And I remember it like a moving photograph much like I remember interactions with you. They live in the same place. I guess that's how a lot of people remember their youth. As brief, bright passing images.

Each day I arise from sleep searching my brain for all the dreams I lost overnight. I am left with vague feelings and inside my groggy skull there lives someone so different than the person I know I will inevitably wake up to become. All the moments of my day add up and linger behind me and now, as a result of this blog-keeping, I remain in constant search of things to say. I see people in the same way I used to, as characters, as bubbling, bobbing presences whom I may grab ahold of and make them words. People are far more real once they're words. Once they can be described steadily and distinctly and put down on the page. I've been reading people's blogs, my friend Andre's and WaiterRant, to be specific and they exist so fully there, on the glowing screen. People are what they do to such a degree that I try not to think about what I spend the majority of my time doing, which is serving rich people dinner.

You speak of the things that you cultivate, the reflections and shadows you push yourself through and I know your search is honest and genuine. You speak of justifying your life to yourself and I understand you so wholly and so completely that I feel your sentences reverberate in my chest. I often think about these words which pass between us and I think of other letters between people which have been studied and published. Your words shine so brightly through the monotony of employment. They're always new and telling. I can't wait until Rob's songs will reflect again, anew. I've only heard them too much. I am waiting for a new one.

I've been involved in an endlessly absurd argument about subjectivity, yet again, as I always
am. This argument hurled at me through clenched teeth, "Art is whatever you think it is." Yes, well life is whatever you think it is too but that doesn't mean that there isn't an objective reality happening around you. Your ability to perceive that reality and your ability to understand that art, like everything, functions within a specific structure, that structure having been created by history, context, society and personal subjectivity. You can dream that you have a completely unique experience, that whatever you want to believe is true, but art is making your subjective experience visible to others through a medium and that medium exists within certain frames of reference. And there are only so many possible experiences any one person can have.

Yes, my dear Geoff, all of what you say is true. Men's minds fool them often but it is completely possible to be aware of the way in which your mind is fooling you. If you write what you think and think about what you feel, you won't have anything to hide from. It is only the days during which you don't express something honest to yourself that your mind can fool you. That's why I've been writing these long days into short experiences. I can only know that I've lived if I make words out of the things I've seen.

Happiness cools my sweat.

2006-08-01T17:08:00.000-07:00

Today was hot and muggy and perspiration dripped between my breasts all day. I casually wandered around the dining room bringing people their lunches at a leisurely pace, not really terribly concerned about much. The SmellyOld's came in again, like always, twenty minutes before we close and sat there for 40 minutes after we close. They are quite scary indeed. Mr. SmellyOld is a therapist or a psychiatrist; I try not to listen when he talks. He has the most condescening tone of anyone I've ever met in all my life. He's always lecturing his wife who must have had 30 face lifts in the last 2 years. And she sits there, her bright pink lips stretched tightly across her face, smiling and asking questions in her high, forced voice. She's a nice lady. I like her far more than I like him. But only because she talks less. I've seen him come in with a pile of poetry and read her poems out loud and then quiz her on them, I swear. There's a rumor around the Bistro that you know they've been screwing when they share the same water glass. I believe it's true but I try not to think about it.

The Moldy's came in too. She's rather frightening. They MUST sit in the window so that they can see the beautiful view of the parking lot. And if they don't get their window seat you're sure to get chewed out no matter who you are. Although, she's calmed down quite a bit lately there are some rather funny notes about her on Open Table. I love those notes. It's so funny to read some long rant about someone while they're on the phone with you. Especially when they specify the exact absurdly entitled desires that it tells you they will in their customer notes.

I had a fine morning, I guess. Things moved quickly and I left promptly when my shift was over. I saw Mr. Heuman going to the bank and spoke to him for a bit. I've been looking forward to Megan's birthday party which is tonight. I bought her a book of Russian Prison Tattoos and some weird little fuzzy rabbits smoking cigarettes. I wrapped it in wrapping paper with bacon printed on it. I think I'm a good gift giver. Megan is downstairs waiting for me.

2006-08-01T15:35:00.000-07:00

That Day.

2006-07-31T22:36:00.000-07:00

I sit here often in front of this blank screen waiting for the words to come. I'm sitting here now, chewing my nails instead of typing, wondering what happened today that I might want to write about. It seems to be that nothing happened today. I stood around and sat around waiting for someone to sit down so that I could bring them something but nobody who sat down wanted anything. I stood around and moved around picking small things up from people's small tables, bringing them small checks and muttering small obscenities beneath my breath when they left me small tips.

I've begun something, a sentence, a fragement, something I ought to finish. I've been losing myself beneath the heavy breath of work, the days and days piled atop each other where I give up my time for a little bit of cash in my pocket. I know there must be some better way to live and it all begins with writing. I returned home this evening full of the desire to hear Rob play a song but he was sleeping and tired and he's upstairs; I've yet to see him.

There's a car alarm outside beeping incessantly. My friend the bartender from The Tavern promised me an etymological reference. He has six of them. So he says.

I feel like perhaps there needs to be some interweaving theme to this blog but I'm not going to write another waitress blog. I don't care to speak exclusively about my work nor do I want to come home and relive all the annoying things I witnessed during the day. Although, I'm sure they'll sneak in here and there, every once in a while. Maybe I'll think of a theme. Perhaps I'll transcribe my dreams from the notebook by my bed. I love dreaming.

Days in the Dust

2006-07-29T20:37:00.000-07:00

I begin this blog in an effort to chew my nails far less and type far more. I've been thinking about blogging for a while now. I sometimes try to forget about the world inside this machine but it glows ever brightly beneath the hum of the outside world. I sat today in the City Cafe, drinking a watered down Iced Latte, arguing about whether or not there is a maximum terminal length for hair (there is) and behind me a few people sat, alone, looking into their computer screens. Somewhere, beneath the deep contemplation about the genetic differences between people's hair, I thought about moving through places with a portable machine and having a totally different life inside that machine. I'd been reading the Beatbots message board and thinking about possible responses but never posting any. I'd been reading Andre Fluette's blog about living in Antarctica (http://mcpenguin.livejournal.com/) and was so stricken by how much you can know about someone by reading their thoughts and also by how important it is to write down your thoughts. I've been thinking about Geoff scribbling a letter to me beneath the tall, antiquated ceilings of The Library of Congress and of all the gorgeous letters he's sent me lately. I've been thinking about a letter to write back and a letter to write to Rob, a letter to Megan for her birthday and finishing George Barnes with Sulima. It seems just on the tip of my tongue.

And I haven't simply written, without thinking, written long lines of things, scattered them across the page in sequence, slipping in and out of rhythm but always maintaining a theme. And I figured, what better place to come and simply put down in writing what is in your mind. And of knowing myself by seeing my words the same way I know others by reading theirs. I need to find words everywhere instead of hiding beneath the shadow of them.

I suppose I've known for some time the importance of what is now called a "blog" but what used to be simply a diary, a small book hidden beneath a mattress. I had a blog in college where I posted lots of my dreams, brief absurd babble and more Bob Dylan references than anything else. I never described my days but in quick silly sentences or short snippets of sadness, all full of quotes. And then, later, I composed letter after letter to someone specific: Sulima, Julian, Geoff, Rob. We wrote letters from Fernando, Anna, Miguel. We shall return to them soon.

I'm drinking Cahors and watching Carnivale. There are many secrets being uncovered. The wine changes with each small glassfull. I swirl it lightly and it opens up floats off and then the glass is refilled and I am deep beneath the earth again, tasting the speed at which the vines broke through the soil . I can almost taste the underbrush; I imagine the ground, damp and muddy and I feel that viscosity and the tartness on my tongue. I wonder how Geoff liked his Chateauneuf-du-Pape and whether it was any good or not.

Oh, yes, I'd also been reading waiterrant.net and knowing that fellow in such a vague but deeply personalized way, knowing him as just this character who moves through things and sighs afterwards. Everyone in life is a character to someone else, I suppose.