Duly Noted

BOGO Blog

2011-09-30T22:54:00.000-07:00

"Insta-kink," I think. I think? No, I know. White lights, red lights, L.E.D. I would gladly throw open the curtains and pull of my shirt to press my breasts up against the window and pull my pants down below my ass and beg for it. But that is also because I am an exhibitionist. Which is an able foil to your voyeurism. Backstop? Baby, I got your backstop and I don't give a two-penny fuck about the neighbors or their forty year old teenaged friends. The need to write comes on like a red tide; suddenly hard to breathe, waters is murky, fish is dying! I love those sounds that escape you. Up above me thinking how badly I need that tongue that is half sticking out of your mouth. And now, for my second act: a goodbye reunion, a squeaky voice hollering, smouldering me and my butt, a call to reality. See you in bed, Daddy. I'll be on my belly, naked with legs akimbo.

Blimey

2011-09-30T18:14:00.000-07:00

Cock, alright, just no knee. Unless? Nah. I mean, we can use knees, but let's stick with yours. We have before and we will again. It is always fun for a little while, spread open and wet and bouncing slightly, ears pricked (pun intended) for that sound you release when the nerve endings in your thigh finally convey the message to your brain who then sends a message to your lungs; the tiniest bit of a whimper, when I come for you, facing you, reminding your leg of what your whole self needs, kissing and caressing your face. Daddy, I need you, strung out real long and desperate-like. Whiny, even, but not too. And don't you need me, Daddy? Cue fake doe-eyes, affect an innocent bat of the eyelashes? Oh, please? For the length of cigarette or longer? "Suck Me While I ..." gets more comical each time and hotter, too; a true sit-com. Suck you while you check the tire pressure? You got it. Suck you while you balance the checkbook? Sure thing. Suck you while you configure the TiVo? Practically a cliche.

Soon we will set sail for our twelve day party and I will fucking wreck you. In a good way. Command your attention. Gently help you to prioritize. Walk around mostly naked. But mostly just walk around naked. Make porn. Watch the porn we just made during rounds II-IV. Catch some fish. Masturbate each other in the car. Re-learn the in's and out's. Make less puns. Cook for you. Go down that rabbit hole. Turn you on. Remind you of your masculinity. Remind you of my femininity. Switch roles. Switch positions. Find new venues. Savor old ones. Good old Tahoe. Best tent ever. Ejaculate flying everywhere. The sound of the ocean. Watch the boats line up in the ocean. Get fingered while leaning over the railing of the deck overlooking the ocean. Get videotaped doing that. Sit on your face. Be a rockstar. Get tied up. Get burned. Get bruised. Get tanked. Get more. Remember the cast net. Gaze at the stars. Get you so worked up. Get myself worked up. Sleep together. Shower together. Find your favorite candy. Treat friction burns. Feel the breeze. Breathe salty. Fuck at low tide and at high. Scout the birds and the slicks. Back the truck up. Visit. Catch up. Remember me? The fun one? The funny one? The one that loves to fuck in all ways? That loves your voice? Adores your face? The one who sees your every kindness? Can't set up her own rig? That will show you any part on demand? That is down for anything, any time at all? That needs you in a way that is fundamental? I am still her. I will be her again soon. I will always be her.

Knockout Mouse

2011-07-08T18:51:00.000-07:00

I sit to write. Something debauched. Something really fucking hot. It's been some time since I've written like that. All I write anymore is love. Love, love, love. And latent abandonment and fear and insecurity and humanity. Bo-ring. I admit, it is difficult for me to divorce feelings of love and sexual desire. I'm just old-fashioned, I suppose.

Let's talk about anal sex and my love of it.

This is that for which they read, you know. Gotta give them what they want.

So it starts like this:

Let's talk about inherent things. Each day, I am older than I have ever been. And needier, too. Each day, I get a churning in my belly, like a hunger, but inherently pleasant. And then I think about you. I think about the ocean. I think about music and I think about the future. About your face. About the musculature that makes your shoulders cast inimitable shadows when you are on top of me and my knees are in your chest, fighting you off, in a way that is inherently ... not a struggle. And the way your hands are, like a schoolboy's hands. Vaguely cautious followed immediately by patently rapacious. And then deeper, still. Until we are both no place but that place. I am not sure if my eyes are closed but they aren't seeing. Brain is too busy preparing to parcel out plasma oxytocin; can't remember to pay the bills and the eyes get cut off. I think about fucking to raw. Nine day parties. No need for eyes. Anatomical. Astronomical. Anal.

So you're whispering to me and your cheek pressed to my head brushes my sweaty hair into my ear and; it tickles. But I barely notice, for hanging on your every word. You want me to do it? To be a good girl? My eyes are big. I am so completely focused on your words. To do exactly as you say. To move my hips just so. Just so you slip against and in me; just so. And they oblige. Never been more in touch with my own musculature. It is a beautiful machine. At no other time can I make my body do exactly what I want it to. To make my hips move slowly, in a figure out, in a free-fall of a free range of motion. Fluidly. Deliberately. Lo, you moan low. I know it is working. That you are feeling so good. Thank you, Anatomy. I love you, Muscles. Let's go.

And then I close my eyes. And I relax. And you take a deep breath, although I'm sure you don't realize it. There is a moment, a few moments, maybe three seconds. And we are nowhere and everywhere and time warp, worm hole, sleight of hand, magic wand, abracadabra, presto chango, goodbye space, time, and space-time. And I realize at some point shortly following those few seconds, that my ass is, effectively, on your lap. I can feel the bones of your pelvis poking into me. There we go. All the way in. Then, somewhere, the shot of a starting gun rings out and we are disco lights and techno music and athletes and gods and cocaine and digital and animals. We are Carnal Incarnate. And then we're switching between because we are so dirty and, at a time like this, we have such little regard for good hygiene. And because we are hedonists. Because we are lucky and young and violent and virile.

I hear my breasts before I feel them. And after I hear them, I remember that I feel them. Eraser nipples dragging against the sheet and/or towel and the undersides of my breasts drumming my rib cage, keeping the most lovely time. And I remember that I want you to, no need you to ... pay attention to them. And then I say this or that or something to that effect and then you are (ab)using them; like reins.

And this is now the point at which I can come on command. Just say the word and I will be moving and flexing internal parts that I never knew I could control and I am sure I am making sounds now, guttural sounds, like a porn star but genuine. And so you say the word. Not that I haven't already come many, many times. But now I can do it whenever you tell me to. When you tell me that you need me to. At your service. And you can fill me with whatever bodily fluid you feel needs to be released. I really do love it all.

And I don't know, maybe you've switched back to my ass now. Who can say? I feel sheepish in saying so, but there comes a point when I am coming so hard and so frequently and my parts are so numb and starting to get swollen and hot with friction that I can hardly tell which depths you are currently plumbing. It is another state of being altogether. There is sweat in eyes and fingers in mouths and mouths on shoulders and arms twisted up together and hands grasping at sheets and pushing off of walls and nails scratching on backs and we are completely entangled. Stuck like dogs. Say hello to the event horizon!

Welcome to Pleasure Inherent. Licking your semen off my lips and my own breasts in T minus 10.

Inherently Sincere,

Old-Fashioned and Cock-Struck

pink-eyed porcupine pool rat

2011-06-10T22:30:00.001-07:00

What happened, to all my posts, about beachbliss, happiness, warmth, nearness, dearness, closeness. "The Human Experience" godmotherfuckdamn I hate that phrase. So presumptuous. I am unique! Alone! Ubiquitous. I am thoroughly modern, en vogue phone and car and shades and conditioned air and job and kids and life, look, smell, curl of a lip, flip on the hair, sick on the inside but happy on the out; a real human experience. Scorn, shame, opportunity knocking. Souring, sleepy, slurpy, slick. Like selling ice to eskimos? No, like ice on the beach. Aww, shut up, you big baby, you big orgasm-needing baby!

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2011-05-03T19:28:00.001-07:00

Why do I write? It is all I have. He stonewalls, I falter, doubled over in disbelief, sharp grief like you wouldn't believe, acute, like an anvil in the sternum but worse somehow and angry in equal measure, understanding is my only medicine and he will not fill it. He shuts the door. He leaves questions, legitimate fucking questions, heavy hanging in the air, like smoke, like a pall, like something Poe would write, and much better than I, because his mind was clearer, but not less morbid. How long can we agree to just let crazy dissipate? And does it really ever? Or does it just settle, like dust, spiders under a rug, swept with a willow cob broom. He thinks so little of me. And then I think so little of myself. And at what point do we intervene? Do we say, you know, this is really getting out of hand, this is damaging and a waste of energy, let's be civilized, figure this out, because we are two people clearly made for each other, imminently compatible in every conceivable way, this is just silly, immature fears, come on, let's be grown-ups? How many quicks do we have to bite down to? Even our crazies complement, I just fear to our detriment. But he don't fear, I don't think, can't tell if he cares even, that he fucks me up so, that I only respect myself only to the degree that I am honest and just and kind, and that when he, he of all people, can't see it, doesn't love it, won't value it or trust it ... what then? Then I am looking at the world downside up, can't hear anything from anyone, like being under water or hearing a soothing female radio voice from speakers filtered through a screened door, that all becomes trivial. That I can't do even the simplest things, because the only thing is in jeopardy. You suck, man, because I love you and only you. Fuck you for not seeing it and fuck me for not holding your eyes open. Still, though. We are quite the couple.

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?

2011-04-29T20:36:00.001-07:00

The guilt of being broken is breaking, all mental, stupid, wasteful, an endless negative feedback loop, ourobouro for real. Catherine Zeta Jones Douglas is crazy bitch but rich, and I'm neither, everyone has a thing, right? Sutures, supplant, supplicant, and I'm using that word right, right? Look at all these rights, right?, left with an aching need for validation of some sort, what we're all looking for, yes? Yes. Compulsive thinking, my psychiatrist said it is actually good for me, helps me be the guilt-ridden, hyperachiever that I am; but I have to admit: I'm not too sure about those types, people who delve into the psyche, now medicate! Wish mine would, but no, I don't need a mood stabilizer, because I'm not manic or depressive, no uppers or downers for me, I'm certifiably fine, just in touch with my existential side, and maybe a hair too smart but whaddaygonndo. Pay another co-pay to learn that I'm well-adjusted, just everyone around me is mad?? Ha ha, you fell for it, insurance don't come with no meaningful mental health benefits! I once had a boyfriend who said I was ultra-sane and hyper-rational, which sounds like a fair characterization, but fuck 'im, you know, because I cannot love someone who cannot love my crazy, let alone not see it. And I can't pay a shrink on the same basis. And if being a little bent is what has kept me so straight all these years? Fuck that ideology, too, because, let's face it: this world has enough ideology. My man is good and he takes care of me when I'm crazy, and if I'm crazy, he is probably doing double duty. But I'm duty-free, like a commodity. Silliness, all of it.

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2011-04-17T17:16:00.001-07:00

I don't like: pens that are too thin, keyboards that are virtual, fevers, the high cost of modern beauty, work, semantics, pressure and more things, too. Oh yeah ... rice cakes, either. I hear their cries like a phantom limb and I am never not a mother. But I am the child now, who needs taking care of, looked after, attended to. It isn't hard for me to switch roles; I am due. To suffer so bad you don't even remember that you're suffering softens the blackened hole where the heart should be of even the most hardened surgeon. I'm sure there's a diagnosis for it, consult your pocket DSM. Or whatever. I'm tired. I miss my mom. I wish I could have things my way. I wish I didn't have to grow up. Some day, I will have all of the art hanged and pictures framed, but for now, we make due. Funny pair we make, us two, accelerated and arrested. But I never minded or even thought about it much, because we fucking catalyze when we're together, equation successfully balanced. Crazy friends are good and crazy husbands are bad, and I wonder if I can call in sick? I never liked easter too much anyway, except for the weather and the lighter-later nights and its proximity to summer. Be glad when this is all over. See you on the other side, Digitalia.

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My, some gall you have! (and which I won't)

2011-04-15T11:41:00.001-07:00

Content? Blogger, you play fast and loose with that word. Oh, maybe you meant "content." Fast(ing) all the same, but thanks for asking, yes, content just hungry. Gravid men, can you imagine? Judgemental fuckers, and I have a good one, man and imagination. Shakey shakey now, sit up straight Brain, don't slouch, because Depeche Mode starting to sound like an endlessly goosebumped rump romp, like a fucking prayer, like christ can we get to summer already, or whatever season it will be when I'm normal and you're neutered? Sure, Uncle Sam, help yourself! Shrinking, maybe, but not a violet, because I am not shy about what I need. What I need: him, to live for a long time, their kisses and messes, sand, a baritone filtered through an old screened door, to make indelible to my mind those fucking perfect imperfections in his skin that make him him, each vampirish tooth, each soft breath, each cut finger, every single last orgasm. Spiral down, regress, pathetic puppy, but I stand ready to defend because this is me: a woman in love with a man, completely, and I could be worse things, remember, like broken for real and ever.Yours in Happy Bondage,Girl who shines right through

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2011-04-05T18:49:00.001-07:00

Flashing eyes and dimples, sprout from some hidden, places we will probably only dream about, surgeries, elective and life-prolonging, because what does it really mean to save a life, doctors are all adrenaline junkies of the worst, stripes, splatters, drips, strips, the kind you grill, the kind where the girl, lift my shirt, release the hounds, cough, wonder, what's that word, that chemical word, it's like subvert, who cares, it's all one run on, you can count on that, on me, with only commas to breathe on, like how I, how you, how she, tastes paint, life, dirt, air, sand, salt, how Dallas becomes a small town, and how we have friends with ironic honorifics, like that defense attorney, like a master of anything, all humans, more or less, measure, observe, track, coerce, lie honestly, honorably, funny man, silly boy, blue screens, cracked doors, light floods, then spills, trickles, like moonlight, midnight, pre-dawn, like a digital rooster, like never ever fucking stopping, like: oh, this again??, like a woman of independent means ... nothing, too many books about princesses and their dresses, and how can that be dangerous, sheesh, and what about those people that say sheesh, is she for real, no, chimera, the only living girl, the most egocentric girl, the little girl, the sad girl, the rained-on girl, heartbroken and (life) full of sobs, acronym it if you like and read between the ellipses, if you're in the know, if you know, how it feels, how to grow plants and do karate, how to assimilate, because I never learned, too late for me, save yourself, yourselves, humans with cat eyes, but not like mine, with Cheshire grins, and grands, how do those women do it, what class did they take, how to be not crazy or stupid, how to be with your hair and clothes just so, and your mind right, if you have one, and we are just swimming, from island to island, except they are mirages, and we are in the desert, and the snake crosses the road in front of us, cue tumbleweed, cracking asphalt, heat waves, we wave back because now it has gotten to our brains, bone makes a mediocre cooler, insured and insulated against, not the worst crimes or acts of our gods, cringe, because I cringe to think that it is wasted, not too happy with my measurements, hips to the moon, balanced by breasts which are scarred for life and peeling with sun, nose like a I don't know, cancer this way comes, and my teeth will never fossilize, no part of me will, and will I ever get over myself before I become dust in a vase? Hard to say, but at this rate, turn to the next page for the happy ending.

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2011-03-16T20:09:00.001-07:00

Blogger Droid, sounds so funny, like a future human-imagined planetary conglomerate clusterfuck. Free my mind, indeed. It's the eve of the eve, like eye for an eye, but even more enduring. Why does it have to be so distasteful to me? Why am I so rarefied and fatalistic and artistic. An aesthetic. A hedonist. A masochist. A sadist. In a world that just wants to see those types pay heavily, over and over again. Earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown, oh my! Not the first to crack that coconut, I'm sure, many classless before and a good wicked lot this way will come. Before, during, and after; fun with prepositions, reckless disregard for punctuation!! Alienated everyone; blister in the sun. Goddamn, she ocd just like us. My crazy child, italicize where you see fir. I will always have an affinity for and a solidarity with those who have gray matter blackholes. And disco. And tramp(oline)s. Is this poetry? I'm just trying to escape the event horizon and here is no iambic pentameter or syllabic tedium, just careless, strategic ellipses and other intellectual mental tics. And confessions. Jamaica, why are you so far away? And why do we yell at the injured out of anger at them for making us feel weak and impotent and vulnerable. "You are listening to dance." I love it! An imagination as big as the ocean in yours, seems so much and we so mighty tiny. In love: we come in peace, leave in pieces, limping into that bathroom, leaving that euphoria; so that we may collect ourself. Scores and updates; losses and misprints. Why is it that we can't be bothered with truth? Like some kind of innate collective subconscious fear, like we have of snakes. So long, last call for meta, ladies and gentleman may I have your attention please? In T -10 we are colliding with reality and we suspect this may be a turbulent re-entry.

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2011-03-04T19:23:00.001-08:00

Oh lordy, take me take me, ocean and husband, and writing, too, because I think if I crunch one more number or do one meaningless, utterly useless, bullshit discounted cash flow, I might die. I need freedom, I can taste it, from the cell(ular) block of my brain, and just need the haptic happenstance, with you, with the breeze, with warmth and with salty air. I get so fucking crazy, you know, compartmentalizing, throwing every good bit of me away, for what? Corporate waste? I need something else. This job is my undoing. I was built for another era. I send a postscript on every paper I write, my desperation accelerating, but she just says, "well-written" or "nice work". I don't need a smiley face sticker, or the stamps before them; I need advice Lady, on how to do it, won't you champion me? Take my message down the right channels and take pity on me? I need to be a fussy writer with multiple residences. I need him in another life, in all lives, but I'm grateful he's at least in the one. I can't even look directly at him sometimes like fear of the sun, that blinding burn, total annihilation, in my love, My Love. We never hate each other ever, not even a little, and every fight or sleight is made magnitudes more manageable with the fact known by every fiber and ligament and humor in my body that we will get over it, that I can't hate someone with a face like that, that a fleeting gulf is not a sign of impending undoing because we are still standing together, on the same side, just like we always are; and that he is mine. Whoa. Wow. I love you.

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What People Won't Suffer

2011-01-02T14:56:00.000-08:00

It was the nicest grocery store I had ever shopped in. It was a working class grocery store, and I appreciated that. I didn't feel judged for buying regular McCormick paprika instead of free-range, organic, pesticide-free, hand-gathered saffron. Shit, I think I even bought the store's private label garlic powder. So much less pressure than the fancy store. Measurably less soy products the organic/vegan store. Less shaming than the kosher grocery. Orders of magnitude less “I could give a fuck about your shopping experience” than the grocery around the corner from me, which is run mostly by teenaged Mexicans and funded mostly by upper middle class moms.

I was overwhelmed by the neatness of everything. Neat, neat, neat.

It was late. People were tired. It was dark outside. Cold, too. It was well-lit and clean. But it was the tidiness that got my attention.

All of the products were pulled forward on the shelf.

All of the products were arranged in equally-spaced, mind-pleasing symmetrical rows.

All of the products were clearly marked and priced.

It could've been better laid out, to more efficiently direct the flow of the consumers, but given the particulars of my circumstance, my lack of navigational skills was not especially surprising.

I was spending some time in the produce section, feeling up tomatoes. Somehow, I knew it was coming, but I was a little startled by the cold rush of air from the double doors swinging open, out towards me.

There!

Now, there is a man who is walking with purpose!

There was a Quasimodo following him and he had that sort of face that you couldn't tell if he was pissed or if he was suffering from some sort of retardation and was not completely aware of what was going on. Kind of like the gorillas at the zoo. They always look brooding, even when they are sitting in the shade, picking at the thick skin around their fingernails.

So Man With A Purpose says to our hero, “Are you sure you waxed all of them?” I've never worked in a grocery store and I don't know much about science, so I'm just making inferences here, but I think he was talking about the mirrors that slant downward towards the produce. He wanted to know did the Gorilla wax them. I think the humidity and the water that is used to preserve the prettiness of the vegetables must necessitate the mirrors being treated with some sort of a wax. Maybe there's an issue with fingerprints. I really couldn't say.

The Gorilla grunted something like a yes. Yes, he did wax them. All of them? Yes, all of them, if I correctly interpreted the grunt. Naturally, I looked at the mirrors to see if he was lying. I couldn't tell if they had, in fact, all been waxed. I did see a few smeared fingerprints. All of the sudden, I felt very embarrassed to be witnessing this. I could tell the big, burly black man who, only moments before, had been also looking at tomatoes and who had been making me a tiny bit nervous and made me clutch my purse a little tighter, was also feeling a little embarrassed by it. Maybe it goes back to our youth, this embarrassment of seeing someone else get punished. Some people like that sort of a thing, get a kick out of it, out of seeing other people get in trouble. I suspect it goes back to their youths, too.

I walked away, to look at the Hostess cakes or the clearance bread at the bakery or the end cap with the tortillas. Fuck! I'd look at anything to not have to see Quasimodo take a verbal beating that I wasn't even sure he was aware of receiving. I think some time must have passed because I really needed to get those tomatoes, so I walked back over. I was lost in thought when the manager or assistant manager or night manager or whoever he was came striding back with the Gorilla-Donkey following behind him. He was making big gestures with his arms, in a way that seemed kind of silly, like he was talking about the produce section as a kingdom, or maybe as just as a nation-state or something. He was talking about the importance of waxing and cleanliness. I'm not even sure I heard distinct words from him, but then again, there were the particulars of my circumstance. And I'm sure the Gorilla-Donkey only heard his tone, too. I picked a fucking tomato already! and immediately left to find something else on my list. I don't remember what it was.

Then, there came the time where I needed to find tortillas. I looked everywhere. The store was mocking me with its neatness: “What do you mean you can't find tortillas? Look how well-kept I am! Look how organized my shelves are! How is it even possible that you can't find them? It is so bright in here!” I walked every aisle. Every aisle. Other people were finding their things. I saw them. Looking quietly on a shelf. Plucking something. Carelessly or carefully putting it in their buggy, depending on the product. There was a black man and a black woman. They were interesting to look at. They were shopping in a way that I can only describe as erotic. They were both attractive, for hoodrats. He stood behind her, with his arms around her waist. Who shops like that? That is what men do when they stand in line for a concert or movie tickets. They were not teenagers but they weren't old, either. They were somewhere in the middle. They did not look like they were under the influence but I won't claim to know the particulars of their circumstance. I stopped to look at the shelves about six or seven feet from them. Trying to eavesdrop. I knew the tortillas were not here. They didn't move or stop talking. They continued carrying on as if I wasn't there. I grew braver. I stepped in front of them to pull something off a shelf. I said, “Excuse me. Sorry!” They laughed the way lovers do and said, “No problem.” I made like I had found my product, put something in my basket and started to move away. But I still stayed kind of close. I stayed on that aisle. I acted engrossed in the shelves in front of me. My patience paid off. They started to push their buggy past me. She said to him, “Well, yeah, but what did I tell you?” And he said, “That I have to be a good boy.” I beamed with a little kink solidarity and felt that I really must find those fucking tortillas.

I went back to the only place where I knew an employee was working. He appeared to be changing out the white onions, but I couldn't tell if he was putting out fresh ones or pulling out bad ones. Maybe both. It just looked like he was making even trades to me. I hated to bug him. I knew he had already had a bad night. It went like this:

“Hey, sorry to bug you, but can you tell me where tortillas are?”

“Aisle three. I'll show you.”

“Oh, that's okay, I can find it. Is it thatta way?”

“Yes. Aisle three. I'll show you.”

“Oh, okay. Is it on an endcap? I looked down there.”

“Aisle three. I'll show you.”

He started walking and I followed. He walked slowly. He did not walk like his boss.

He walked me about halfway down to the frozen section and then pointed:

“mumble mumble lady there. There's tortillas.”

“The tortillas are by that lady there?”

“mumble mumble lady there. There's tortillas.”

“Okay, so right by where that lady is standing?”

“mumble mumble lady there. There's tortillas.”

“Okay. Thanks so much for your help. I really appreciate it.”

“Okay then.”

I had to muster the only restraint I had to keep from asking him if he wanted to talk about what had happened. I at least wanted to make some crack about how his boss was a dick. But I didn't. Maybe he really didn't wax all of the mirrors. I'd hate to root for the wrong team.

I save the meat for last. That is because the butcher is my favorite person in a grocery store and I think butchers like me, too. And I like the meat to stay cold for as long as possible. Something about those silken, white packages. They feel like offerings to some kind of Depression-era ghost in my machine. I prefer brown or white butcher paper. I'm a purist. I hate when they used branded paper. The meat department at any given grocery store is my ideogram of a basic marketplace. We have to negotiate; we have to make concessions. Out of boneless short ribs? Can you cut the bone-in ribs longer? How about pork shoulder? Do you have a three and a half pound chuck roast? And can you trim it? I don't remember how long this went on, but eventually, I had all the meat I needed.

I made my way back to the checkout lanes. I made my way to the shortest one. I don't remember the name of the lady who checked me out, but her name tag said Assistant Service Supervisor. She looked like she had led a difficult life. But, like the store, she was clean and well-kept. The glasses she wore told me she was mostly poor and had been that way for some time. This was not a temporary job for her. Assistant Service Supervisor was her career. She asked me if I found everything that I needed and it was in that moment, in that question, that the dam busted.

“Yes, I did. This is … this is probably the nicest grocery store I have ever been in. It is so clean and tidy. I can't imagine shopping anywhere else.”

She raised an eyebrow at me as I plopped my purse that cost as much as her week's salary on the counter.

“Well, thank you. Do you have a reward card?”

“You bet I do! How else are your corporate people going to leverage my shopping proclivities?"

She looked stunned.

“I think if you buy one more 12 pack of Dr. Pepper, you will get a better deal.”

“No, it was $3/each for four or MORE.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I'm pretty sure.”

“Let me double check...

Yeah, you're right. Four or more.”

“Thanks, I appreciate you checking anyway.”

“Sure, no problem. Would you like help out to your car?”

I should stop right now to tell you that I have this game I like to play in this scenario. I do it every time, at every grocery store that offers help out to the car. I always say to the designated grocery-helper, “Well, do you want to help me out? It's okay if you don't; don't feel obliged. But if you want to get outside, you're welcome to help me out. Whichever is fine with me.” I always say that to them and they always decide to come outside. Then I always say to them, privately on our way out the door, “I'm sorry about that, I just never know whether people in your position want to come outside to get break or if it is just a pain in the ass.” Up to this point, they have all indicated a strong preference for coming outside. Even if the weather is shit. Incredible to me.

I glanced longways at the helper-out-to-the-car who had been, heretofore, bagging my stuff. By the way, they did not ask me if I wanted paper or plastic. They just gave me plastic. I can't tell you what a relief that was, not to have to make that call. I'm being sincere.

“Nah, I can get them.”

He let out a sigh that thirteen year old children let out when they don't get their way, but he was probably in his early twenties. Actually, he looked like an overgrown thirteen year old. He was kind of goofy looking, like he probably played a lot of video games and was still a virgin. He looked kind of scared of me. So the social experiment began again. “Unless you want to help me to my car? It's okay if you don't. Don't feel obliged.” “It is up to you,” he said. But I could tell he really, really wanted to help me out. Or he really wanted to go outside. So I said sure.

On the way out I said, “Sorry about that, I never know whether people in your position want to come outside to get a break or if it is just a pain in the ass.” He said, in perfectly-practiced Corporatese,

“It is always the customer's call. If they want help, we are happy to do it. If they don't need or want help, they can just carry it themselves.”

I don't think he understood what I was saying. I am not at all interested in what the customer wants in that situation. I am interested to know which choice the bagger would make of his own accord. I already know what the customer wants.

So, I said, “Yeah, but I never know, you know, from your perspective. I think if I worked in a grocery store, I would want to get out a get from under the lights and away from the sounds of cash registers once in awhile.”

He said, “Indeed.” I thought he was well-spoken for a bagger.

Then he said what they all always say, “If I come outside to help you, I get to do the carts.”

Maybe it is because of my significant lack of experience working in a grocery store, but I do not see the benefits of rounding up the carts, except for the getting to be outside part. I imagine it would be lousy in the cold or rain.

He said, “Morning is the best time for doing carts.”

I was silent for a moment while I tried to figure out why morning was the cart-getting sweet spot. Less traffic? Less people? Less carts?

“There is no coffee in the world that wakes you up like morning air.”

I said, “Indeed.”

I cringed at my use of his word.

I smiled.

I didn't tip him.

I drove away.

2010-12-15T15:11:00.001-08:00

Can someone tell me how much is too much lube? Because the accordian squirt bottle tells only truths.

Let's discombobulate!

I used to be so good at finding a spot to park and write, and, yes, usually a park because reality knows how to keep it real, yo. Goddamn getting stuck behind the short bus stop sign, captive rapt audience to a homecoming parade in honor of hydraulic lift hiss happiness with the main float featuring a daughter, whose cripple is on the outside and a dad, who looked like a coach. From what I remember.

I always find it a sad thing that success gets rewarded, more and before, suffering gets noticed. Something about priorities, something about shame, something about humanity, ending on something about getting over it.

But seriously, is this what life is like for everyone else? Useless as a spare part.

Idling. Stalling. A face like yours. Thinking an awful lot about things. My imaginary internal bleeding and your real internal bleeding. An open letter, a plea, a missive, a valentine, on clearance. Maybe I've too delicate a constitution. Lots more hookers and old people 'round here. From what I remember.
I think there's too much earwax in my ears, or something, because I can't understand people too good lately. Because I believe there must be a physiological basis for our emotions, like having a heart. From what I remember.

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Defender/Destroyer

2010-12-11T14:56:00.000-08:00

I've spent a good deal of my life living in my head and now I spend nearly all of my time outside of it, and I can't say which way is best, except that real life tastes much better and imaginary life, more sanitized. I wonder if "lucked out" is the same or different from "crapped out", like in cards not like in cars. I hope it's not the same, because if so I've been using it wrong this whole time, and when I say it, what I mean to say is:

"
I don't care
if I never have
even one more
stroke
of good luck
ever again
because, after this,
well, this is....
this that's
between us
is the part
that is left over
after all of the other parts
have been taken away.
This
is the
remainder.
"

That's what I mean when I say I've lucked out. And believe me, I know lucky, because my mother is one of the kindest people I know and my father is one of the wisest and my brother, one of the nicest and my children, two of the smartest, and my husband ... the loveliest. I won't have much to complain about on my deathbed and did you know that my great-grandmother, on her deathbed, asked us to find a little tiny silver teddy bear ring that she had worn as a child in the early 1900's. How crazy is that? You have to understand, she was like a hundred years old, well, less than that, but at least in her 90's and well over 100 in dog years, and, is it just me but are we getting more industrious, faster? And do you ever have an available moment in your ironic, intellectual, hipster douche bag, iCal life to sit back in awe of this place instead of giving it a cavalier flip of your hair whilst you trot out your usual sneered-lip contempt? I mean, really, how lucky to be a spark, to be the fastest swimmer, the survivor of the fittest? Sure, there was a time in my life where I was immature and nihilistic, but now I feel that:

this is a ride
only a ride
and if there had been an actual purpose for
the ride,
following the Attention Signals
you would've been instructed to stay where you are
and await further official
information
news
or instructions.

I just hope it holds out long enough for me to taste saltwater and sand and breeze and my husband all at the same time. Not that I haven't already. I mean again.

I need more tasks in my life, like doing dishes and writing and cooking and taking drives and music, oh my god, music. I am being squeezed right out of my little brain. I often wonder what makes him work. He still has that wayward boy appeal that drew me to him ala moth/flame or cat/hamster or marionette/strings or ace/hole.

I stared at the ring finger on my hand thinking, "This prom dress is the closest thing I have to a wedding dress." Yes, the holidays must be approaching because I'm pitiful and self-indulgent and I think in seasonal, dirty double entendres, like egg my nog and log my yule, and

I know it has been a long time
a long, long time
since last October
but
I'm coming to you now
Baby, I'm coming
to your bed
to await further instruction.

A skull can't save face but I am not ashamed to be a hedonist.

Can You Draw Me?

2010-12-10T22:09:00.001-08:00

"Oh, a million things come thrusting forth like fireworks and then, oh ouchie, sucked right back in, like a house devastated by a tornado, but in instant "let's see that again!" replay," replied my mind to your mind's command to "prove it." So, instead I make you sugar cookies and balmex myself with benzocaine and await your glorious reminder, of my womanhood, of my muscles, of my place. I'm more in love with you than ever, and holy god, is this what 30 feels like? Because in my twenties, I believed that those soundbytes about thirties and their Y/Y improvements were lies to keep me from hari kari-ing myself upon their approach. I never thought I'd live long, at least not this long, to really be happy and right as rain. No, no one else, not ever, not never ever, as ever, only you, only for you, because you are so beautifully real. "Too fancy," she says and I wholesale agree. "Now, can I put one on your face? You don't have one. You need one." Can't we ever disagree? It (comes and) goes with a quickness, and not just the days; all of it, everything. And just like I don't know how people decide what is right for their own lives, I don't know how to describe feeling ass-hungry, just that I am. Vroom vroom, you're here and I'm back, and I fucking long for the day, said in a whimpering decrescendo, with 'fuuuuckkkking' long and histrionically drawn out, for effect,

etc.

Here you come now, smiling.

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And Now, To Write

2010-11-14T09:18:00.000-08:00

To ... whatever, like a toast, like we make, like we care, like we mean it. I read somewheres that work has been described as running on a never-ending treadmill, and boy, do I ever feel stress-testy and unoriginal. And how come I never saw the option to monetize my blog before? No matter, I'll just be over here, obsessively checking the countdown calendar calculator, trying to ALLITERATE, just to get myself heard over the deafening sound of the afternoon acorn assault ... Nature, will you ever not win? The answer is no, if the question is, "Are you authentic all the time?" and I don't even know what that means any more; I miss back when I was well-adjusted and precious and thought I ruled my world. Because the more cryptic and purple my writing is, the more accurately it reflects my thoughts. People can't relate because people can't go there; you have to mind that gap, spit that game, push that production, hang on, hang out, hold on, hold out. For the one that sees right through you in a way that isn't alienating. I believe there must be a better system than ours, and in that place, logic is just rules and we can choose the ones we want to follow and break the ones we don't, and I'm sure the me in that parallel universe is very happy, because even in a parallel universe, I still pick the parallel you. Water shortage? We have convinced ourselves that this is not a lack, just an unfair distribution, sound fucking familiar yet? Because you can blank out water and insert anything, because, yo: Consumerism is just a juvenile demonstration of our predictive modeler adaptation, stretching it, arching it, forming new muscle memories by using it. More, faster. Better, later. See ya. Bye.

As easy as that, on the macro level, on the color-corrected galaxy level, and it's so cute how we sit around the dinner table of an upper-scale Italian restaurant talking about the coincidence of intelligent design. We can't be a blip! Son, we are a blip, you egomaniacal fucking human. Just finish your puttanesca and hurry back to your adorable little particle accelerator, before my husband's eyes stick that way, k?

Once we talked of knowing a thing, or even a slice of a thing. This (is?) all lies in a belief of blood, which we are bound not to give up. I'm not saying you're not real, I'm just saying: if gaming the system is the only way to win? Well, I'm just a predictive modeler, too, you know.

But on a cellular level, I'm not the Velveteen Rabbit at the end of the story. And I cannot escape the gravitational tugs at my humanity no matter how much I try. Same goes for you.

I only feel better at the water's edge and feel worse at my brain's edge, so what do you make of a person who lives inland and stupid most of the time? We call this "offsetting" which sounds a lot like, "off-putting" and while they aren't mutually exclusive...

At the office, I was asked to dumb one of my presentations down. My friend said, "Boy, they asked the wrong person!" But if I'm so fucking smart, how have I not managed to manipulate this world in a way that is favorable to me and mine? Or maybe I have. There's no accounting for that, I suppose. Turn over two cigarettes of your fresh pack. One for good luck, one for a good ...

Yes, there will be a lottery some day, and we have all already bought our tickets, even those that are temporally lost. Its like a Day of Reckoning, but with 100% less god and 100% more bare-knuckle boxing, with a candy cane to the breadbasket, kidney punch, kiss the canvas, hope you brought your caffeine kids, its gonna be a long Night, because there is no majority decision, just split decisions and lots of memorial tens and dementia pugilistica zombies, fighting for the same last fucking crumb-drop, as our predictive analytics wash back out to sea with the tides of the moon, and we cast our gaze to beyond, to see if we're going to root for who's on deck. Nobody is going to pay for this.

Yes, honey, we need some kind of a ....

tripod.

House of Buckets

2010-11-03T16:22:00.001-07:00

Where we go from here is anybody's guess. I don't know how to make up for all imagined sleights, pastfuturepresent. But I seen a guy in my dreams, with a face like yours, and he smiled her name and she smiled his too and she shared his struggles, and shined right through. It was a hatchet love. He says he don't know what I mean but he know what I mean. Buckees be's so mean to the back end and when are we gonna catch a fuckin break around here? Sometimes we need reminded of the basics, like yessir nossir, and be grateful for the small things, and remember the virtuous value of frugality, and beware the friendly stranger, and to savor every last millibreath of an allerative, literal life-long love. From this (ad)vantage pass and point, I can see the cuts and the breaks are only just; because hold to your arm and waste away the day is where my blushing ambitions lie. Sometimes seems like I'm laying back on bed looking at the world downside up. But I never fail or foresake and just want to be your little godsend, thank whatever that you'll take any and blindly. Because your ligneous parts lick my wounds in ways words won't, not to slander their source. Its just that I'm quite literate and charming and I know a human when I see one. Time to buy monsters on behalf of fairies and so many other pretty things, gone the way of the dododo, like the punchline drumroll, but nobody is laughing and everyone is crying. And I have always operated at my best when things are the worst, not that they couldn't be worser, 'cause they could. That I remember, anyway, but its been a long time since October and I'm counting the blinks til next we cast our gaze to the motherland that isn't really land at all and again we feel mighty

tiny.

Like a slave but with no coercion. Unless you'd like me to be coerced.

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He Do Miss Me (One Half of An Eclipsing Binary)

2010-09-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

He said: Sometimes, you say sweet things sometimes and I think: I don't know what she's talking about.

S'okay. I tell you in another life, when I come back as the hollow in your collarbone and you come back as the snakebite on my left breast, whispered to you, upon our brushing up against one another, warm in our grey and white parallel universed bed, that sits on the floor, on a foundation of two twins, still in plastic.

I'm just another twanger, waitin' for my man to come home, so sad, so lonesome. I could make millions, or more, but I'm on the downward side of a caffeine buzz I chased all day and I have to go to sleep 'for I get rubiconned into stayin' up all night, watchin' watchdog style, keepin' one eye on the windows, checkin' out sounds, droppin' every g I meet, except the one that stitched my heart together, like a thread in a frustrated friendship bracelet wheel, but knottier.

We lament the space, bemoan the distance, and really, truly fucking mind the gap, but it only seems large relative to the space we normally keep, breaths away. Away! To the last bonzo! The end of the line is lonely, the last flickering light and sound of a tween-com, and they still make shows that have those? I thought that text-in (and quickly opt out) surveys were the new laugh tracks. Too much Bravo, not enough bravura, in my life, but today or tomorrow, around the time I got it down, I will be astounded by how unfair, holiday weekend an' all, but many hours spent in generosity can't be wrong.

Most religions have the same visions but mine is so stupid and childish, like magic. I believe in magic. Magic houses where no one gets hurt or sick and magic husbands who never cheat or leave and magic avalanches of love. Have I done enough to be brave? Like a star without a galaxy, I am, to you.

Love,

Your cuil, cuil stellar wife

Memory Leak: (Cheesebreads)

2010-08-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

or, "A Colon Nightmare"

This is my 187th post on the 36th anniversary of the marriage my parents ended 22 years ago and 1,000,000,000 (more) things to say: I'll begin with where I begin: clinging to the thread that hangs from your sleeve: I, your bombed-out lover, your eager seeker. And I know you want to cut it off or weave it in because the prickly, little thorns and sharp, tiny teeth of this place but it ties me to you and leads you to me. Devils want: souls and zombies want: brains and spiders want: corners and my primitive words: match my primitive heart. Some words are just so hard to say. The word of the day: Predilection.

Fall's coming, I can feel it in my bones and how many roasts should I make? I never had a religious thought in my life until that night, that Fall, in that passenger seat, genuflecting on the floorboard: taking it. I warned you that if you did that, that would happen. And I'm not some modern, Western Vala: I just know my limits. That if a person like you were to stick your hands down the pants of a person like me: well, we are fucking. And passing notes, out on a boat, beating back against the waves, borne back ceaselessly into the past. X will mark the spot where you left me at the shore but no one will ever know: that place inside me where you and my memories of you reside. I might as well have been a virgin. Whatever you're doing at whichever moment IS: doing it for me. And I will tangle you and wrestle you and fight you because you are a lonely neutrino, uncharged and passing, through that infinitesimally tinny, tiny place between us and you can see why I, necessarily, am so rapacious.

You can look forward to: Less than eight weeks until nine days of not driving around the bays and bayous looking for a place to fuck wet and moany me. But really, was it so terrible? Luxuriating around, watching me in nothing but your white tee shirt and my black bikini bottoms giving you a show in the lighted vanity mirror? Yes, I agree, Jade Beach and the Santa Lucias and the colder Pacific call. Now, to get off underneath a canopy of old growth. But I'll be waxed. And I'm always devoted.

And yes, sometimes I am tired, you terrorist-brained Criminal.

But my dying words will still be: it was only ever only you.

My Reliquary

2010-06-25T19:55:00.000-07:00

FUCK!

I hate you and your destructive, immature fears, except I love you and I want to kiss it all better. Why are you punishing me so much? Don't you know that being away from you is punishment enough? I had something eloquent all pent up about the feelings it stirred in me to watch rain roll in off the Smokies, silhouetted in the skyline of a generic city that I don't recognize, from the 17th floor of a generic hotel, in a generic room, from my perch on a bed that has about the warmth of a hospital bed, and people will fuck this place over yet! Or fuck themselves over. Or both. They can never be satisfied with just fucking over a little. It has to be a lot. It has to be everything. Annihilation or bust. I'd like to bust those fucking walls in your mind. But I am, as ever, a people, too. But I'm good people. I am loyal people. Honorable. I love these things about myself. And I wish you loved them, too. But you're there and I'm here and I dropped my goddamn fucking phone in the toilet, which is better than a gravy boat, but only marginally. And you're the one that is stuck?

Oh, and I only have one cigarette left and I'm going to go smoke it now, before I reach for my revolver.

I look at the moon and it makes your name ring and I look at the sun and it lilts the same thing and I don't know how to make it all right, alright? I can't help it that we come together so hard it breaks both our hearts but I know that you leave me spitting my teeth and that when you said you would call me later, and you promised, that it was only a weak maybe, just like everything with you: is just my pretty black inner ache of a possibility that you *just might* want to do something with me, or say something nice to me, or maybe even speak to me sincerely and not snidely or, just whatever because when I sleep, I hear you breathe, coming from all directions in my dreams and the rumble of jake brakes on the interstate outside my window sounds like our song.

I know: what part of broken don't I understand? The old love letters you saved that made me want to tell that ghost of a dog that is still chasing its car to go back home with what heart it has left. But I've lived for thousands of years with that, like people did before cell phones. But I just always set those things aside and let it get skinned shut, until its ripped open again, because I know that it has all been worth it, even just that one first night, that made me weep when the morning caught up with us. And to think I thought I'd never see you again.

See, I've seen the wires and I still think it's magic.

Thanks, Cadaver!

2010-05-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

But he is my favorite of the living, and I don't know what is sweeter, a thing or the remembering of it, or if the remembering makes it so. Minds and times, and their wasting. He knows of the mental checklist and he must be stopped! Except he is so so, and not like comme-ci comme-ca, but like so every unfit word that is meant to represent a single golden drop of the milk of his human kindness. I am: that young, swooning girl in any movie, that is swept off her feet and falls in love forever, or whatever part of forever is ours to call forever, that believes in his smile, in his eyes, in my eyes as they are as he is before me (go back and read it carefully), in sexual nirvana, in jigsaw rightness, in the follies of a narrowly-parametered adulthood. Because he springs up for me, like for a mayfly, and I'm just trying to be good bait; an important part of his food chain. And I will never forget our cloudy afternoons or our cold evenings up against the backs of cars, so long as I live, hardwired, now, like breathing, but helps me survive like breathing never could; to know I was loved; that I was that for you. So take me to our places, and order up good food, and enjoy this one shot, after you take a hit and a drink, and I will sing for you, on film, for posterity, for you to remember me by: our soft film reel quilt of blinking, flashing, wrapped in your smell, stitched in our taste, pieced in your silhouette, battened in my warmth, in your profile, in our shadow, in the reverberations of our laughter: the worn satin corner of our eternal, mutual comfort. Me: remembering that you were more human to me than anyone I have ever known and now, what would I do?

I would absolutely swim in the Gulf with you.

My Real Eulogy (cat-colored and almond-shaped loves hazel and knowing)

2010-05-19T15:30:00.000-07:00

How do you thank someone for their time? Brains, and their wracking; hands wringing, parts, squinching. Here, look, a video game. Come, come now: hold it down, press it on, work it out. That's what you do, Baby. Como se dice: lidocaine + sea spray + silicone + sand + some quanta value of flesh/faith/love/chemicals/trust = public perverts.

I don't mean to write cryptically, but I need a release from the analytical grind, from the Power Pointlessness and the endless Excel-eration and the whoreporate Priorities and ... the faustian People? They wear me out. Fuck every last one of them. Except the two I made and the few I like. And the one I do literally fuck: my sweetness and light, like honey, but much stickier.

And I like to think of him all sticky, sticking around, sticking it out with me, hanging out with me, speaking to me: in his halting Spanish or French, or fluidly, in Cracker, or the way he looks when he's bouncing on his toes, completely naked, when we're on break or just looking for something, like he's about to run a race. He has no idea.

Do you? You have no fucking idea. You silly thing! How my physical heart glows for you? I love Blogger! I love email! I love simplicity! And I loathe anyone who would so much as look at you askance. I get homesick for you on my commute, for christsakes. One time, I walked on an empty beach/former subdivision and watched you exploring in the setting sun and I traced your initial in the sand with a seashell and I prayed, the way people who don't pray pray, that you would fuck me on the beach until high tide washed us out.

Let's get really, really fucking stupid rich and go down the rabbit hole and never come back. I will find a way. Just keep sticking around, longer.

Ouroboros

2010-02-28T08:54:00.000-08:00

I have walked around this dirtball planet with three tiny shards of glass stuck in my right foot for ten years(ten years?)(ten years.) And I would rather walk around with them in there another ten than continue to delude myself that love is anything more than being sometimes sex partners with the enemy's enemy; is all a bloodless blood-curdling ritualistic bloodletting backlit by a strenuous exercise in self-loathing; when you're a girl like me, anyway. I wish I was dumb and a better liar but I did not even cry this time and the no sound of teardrops falling is unmistakeably a sign of progress. Only rage like a reticule, which is like ridicule but with two different letters and one hundred percent more crosshairs.

I couldn't sleep facing him but I couldn't turn my back on him, either, so I slept on my stomach and had dreams about the surprisingly good marriages of girls from the Midwest with names like Melanie, whose ambitious husbands took care of them when they had the morning sickness and the unusual, imaginary kitchen tools she used to feed a shit-ton of kids of all difference races and ages. He was a doter. The oldest white girl had that irritating not cute, freckled, redheaded stepchild look about her but had an impressive knowledge of mobile devices and an enviable shoe collection and eventually won me over. And the dad, he did what I do for a living, and he was a little misogynistic for my taste, even in my dreams, but he was a well-intentioned man, which later surprised me to learn. And the wife was smarter than she seemed and knew he was well-intentioned and excused his foibles and took her vows and closed the door on so many men who might have loved her more. And their dining table was like a picnic table you'd find at the park but it was inside the house, in their small, low-ceilinged breakfast nook with sautillo tile floors and hanging, indoor plants and an ugly, crooked Tiffany knock-off ceiling pendant. I helped set the table and took one bite of spaghetti to be polite and then excused myself, because I really must be getting back home, my husband needs me, is waiting for me, to relieve him.

Speaking of him, he doesn't listen to my dreams and he will never do more than skim this tripe for the liquefied fat accumulated at the top, and that's only if its easy to get at, because there is no secret in my garden and there are so many hundreds of people out there, all who just can't wait to undress, actually or metaphorically, or show off their command of English slang or just keep his smart mind company, which a donkey like me could never successfully do. Gluing my eyes together might be the rightest way.

What IS that thing called? The snake terminally eating itself? Getting disjointed. Writing awesome stuff. Dying alone. And he will say to his future her about me, "Aww, isn't it so cute? How she fakes being smart?" And he will be right. It is cute. And then they will go do whatever it is that smart people in love do. Go look at art or intellectually mutually masturbate over the same book or something. They will do a lot of walking in cities and have pretty decent sex and he will think to himself, "She is so cool!" She will be the girl of his dreams because she has transformed him and he doesn't have to be in love with regret anymore. It is a personal tragedy for me that I couldn't be her, but I am not that kind of girl. I was only fake being it. Its just that I was brought up in a family and in a culture where I was led to believe that I could be anything, even the President or a scientist if I wanted, because I was above average smart and not offensive to look at, and this is the Do Anything Age, so you can see how it was not a malicious fake. I really did believe I could be everything to someone.

I am reading your old stuff now, from back when, whenever that was, when I dared to dream the impossible dream, and was so immature and believed everything was about me. It is torture, as I see myself in the prequel, speeding past the stop! fucking stop! signs. Cringing, now crying, the sound of no progress at all, a red-faced snot bubble-nosed baby, with a baby, trying to lift up my shirt. This is after editing; take it heavily.

Exceeding the Recommended Dose

2010-02-26T18:56:00.000-08:00

Oh, I know her
She used to follow me every where I'd go
And its so sweet
Now she's sleeping with a boy I know
The boy I know
Knows a pretty girl in every town
And the way they look
They were made to pin each other down
And everyone in here needs a shove
Or a stomp on the foot
So she'll get the Look Book
He'll get the Cook Book
And they will consummate their marriage
In California
In a car
Parked inside a tree
Its true, I can only relax when his hand is in the small of my back
And this is the sound
Of my resonance
My dissonance
My constance
My consonants
My constant
Erection
.

You're the Fucking Best

2010-01-23T21:15:00.000-08:00

Yeah, some old fires still burn hot; yield to them and when fantasy and reality lie too far apart, I will stretch myself across like a bridge and pull you and push you, in me, to the edge. Stay. There. Waiting. The end of my story. Must I release you? Why don't you release you, that most beloved trajectory, into my waiting, wetting parts?

Ignore the human race.
At your peril.
And if you see an unattended package or bag
Don't touch it
Don't ignore it
Alert a police officer
Or a member of the staff
Because stilettos get stuck in the cracks
When you're running from the starlets
And the harlots
And the gamers and the slave drivers and the red-eyed gay friends of your brothers
But in the future there will be fantasy costumes for your psyches
And he don't drink doubles with me because he's driving

And for my own private Criminal I still feel: sadpuppylovetragicfeardepravedkinkyreverence and I don't know why this is; but it is what I want to know. Were it that I had the productivity of our Millennium Children, but I could still never compete with the sky. Cue triphop, out!

Death by Impressionism (everybody! get down!)

2009-09-27T16:28:00.000-07:00

It goes dark; it goes darker still, pleeeeeease stay; you're just the most gorgeously stupid thing I ever fucked in this world. Because I didn't cut you, like in the song, 'twas you abraded me, kind of the same, and how can I possibly concentrate, with you in me, like this? Cobb County ever calls and I can only think of the place where the Santa Lucias erupt from the colder water of the Pacific and the place inside of me where I safekeep the image of your perfect face and the docile feeling it affects in me. Tit, I'd like to introduce you to Tat: life goes easy on me, most of the time, and the shorter story is: I non-platonically love you and will always and have always. A happy birthday tanka:

Hello One, Two here
I can't take my mind off you
Or our sticky mess
Twenty-nine is the best year
Ask any married woman

It goes deep; it goes deeper still.

How Many Jumps Should I Hoop Through?

2009-08-01T06:16:00.000-07:00

And who stabbed me here? And shot me there? While I wasn't looking, for the trees meeting the forest, because you can't know what you can't see and versa vicea, and I will, with my prayful dog that I bought off tv, ask god to spare me more rejection, because who else is there left to ask? And it doesn't matter how pretty or perfect I am, I will wake up someday and realize that the only people who ever wanted to sleep with me were my children and that its too late for me, because I'm old, now, and I made these choices, and I knew, even back in my twenties, that it was a foregone conclusion, so why even bother? Plus, all of those smart/sad people always say we are always alone and I am just so always afraid I'm always unloveable, in the end, that it will turn out that way, the way it always does in my dreams. But he says its nothing personal. And if I said, "Its not you, I just like how his cock gets hard," would you be okay with that? I just need to turn to his favorite porn star and get some advice, on how to become a shell of myself, and not fucking feel for awhile, but drugs aren't tenable (which is likely her answer) because I have children for whom to care and because I must have a job, for which piss tests I must pass. Not that they would care, really, the lousy cheats, so long as I lose my $3m a day in the most efficient way possible. So, I will affect a casual smile and a flutter of my hand and invite my brother over to dinner: Now Serving: Fatalism, over easy. Suck it, Religiouses, because I am jumped from the hook and this is only, has ever been and will always be, for your pleasure, at your leisure. And I offer you my most resolute assurances: my mother is mortified. But soon I will fly off the map and you will have to cheat gravity to chase me. He writes me, but only one (punch) liners, but I am his spatial girl, taking a menthol hit. Don't worry, girls. He will fight me off with the fists of time.

One Hundred Seventy Seven Tries

2009-06-06T23:55:00.000-07:00

Melissa, I love you, but you're bringing me down. Me? I'm okay. Just mildy hungover and feeling introspective, not that there is anything in there (me) to find anymore. Trying desperately to take myself off my own mailing list, the one for the kids who believe it still exists (or ever did.) I guess this is just my post (about) traumatic stress from hanging out in the places where boring people collect. I mean all disrespect. But they are pretty, I will give you that. God, I'm so fucking weird, grieving the way I do, over the things I do, but I'm good at being uncomfortable so I keep changing all the time and he's no good at being uncomfortable so he keeps staying exactly the same. And its a slow climb, to sit in your general vicinity, doing nothing. And its hard, when you're a native workaholic hedonist. I look at my poor face in the reflection of my glass desk, waiting for the big fat serpent tears to fall, and I wonder how it is even within the realm of possibility that it is pretty enough to keep you around. Yes, you hate that shit, no, I don't care. I was meant for another time; built for another age. Does everyone feel like this? Clinging to the parapets of my mind, clawing for and clinging to every last meaningful thing in my life, wondering what it is, precisely, that I need to do to keep from. Sorry folks can't finish that last one, for my non-existent therapist's ears only. Because I am not the smartest girl in the world but I am certainly not the dumbest. Anyway, I need to write about nice things, to think about nice things. It is so tiring, the trying to be smart enough to outsmart yourself. Simple people belong with other simple people and you are out of my league. Good thing you're too fucked up to notice. Nice things. Yes, Vancouver Island. Storm season. Vodka tonics. Being in the New Love season and swooning over the accompanying tonkas. Knowing you are new enough to still be interesting. No. Buy/sell. No. Chronic cough. Tired eyes. No no no. Maybe Mother told you true. Yes. Maybe she's right and maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong and just maybe she's right. Yes. Yes. I am filthy but fine. Yes. You're still the one pool where I'd happily drown.

Melissa, I love you, but you're freaking me out.

Swine Flu's A Fine Brew.

2009-05-08T21:59:00.001-07:00

Laden, lauded, loaded; for the first time in centuries, but there's no time left over to bite my mind's nails. Not that its a bad thing, but psychotically morose was my shtick and now what? Ambition? Gross. I just want to find a cabin in the chlorophyll-deficient Ozarks and fuck like monkeys and mix prescription drugs and alcohol and just remember myself. Ourself. Because I'm never as tired as when I'm waking up and there are so many places that I want to see because the black-top heat makes me thirsty. My careless, causal bird, you're complicated and violent and flammable. And I have endless concentration. And I will die if you go away. So, the days collide but we will make way for the simple hours when you lie supine and golden and wait for grace. Love to love you, Baby.

The Impulsion of Candor

2009-02-27T22:15:00.000-08:00

You can directly direct me any which way you like; face down in the robe-covered, towel-padded carpet or however. Suits you. Not that beating around the bush has ever been a problem of ours, just a problem of mine, post-coital, "Um, you don't mind that I need .. um .. you know .. for you to be ... like, the boss of me?" I just need to abdicate mine, once in awhile, and objectify myself, even, too. To become: your lovely, sweaty, Eviscerated. Because nothing else trumps the browbeats of the mean quotidian streets of our (multitudinous) lives like that, like that. Hoodwinked and whip-strapped and flash-burned and tequila-drunk and the mind boggles; at the many varieties of sex two people can have, using only each other (and some common household materials.) And it makes me feel unmitigated and unrepentant joy in the absolute center of my dopaminergic system to know that I can pretty much count on fucking you for the rest of your life. No, no, its okay. I would rather go last, anyway. I think.

The Sound Of No Hands Clapping

2009-02-25T21:22:00.000-08:00

Because when I was little, I thought that this was all that there was, but now I think that this is all that. God, I'm so gay; and write in sound bytes, but. Sex makes me sane. Take it lightly? Never. I believe in: murder suicide, driving with my headlights on in the daytime for safety, and that there really is nothing to believe in. One day we're going to live in the south of France, I promise, I'm on it and every night we'll watch the stars because they will be out for us because we will never end this relationship with a simple handshake. No, we'll hold back and kiss slow and then I'll push you out and breathe you in and would you give all back to take you back when? I know its been so long since you felt the same. And I dream a lot and I would do it full time if the position was open and the benefits tenable because you glow and glow and melt and flow and I would do anything to be with you forever. You say dumb shit like "time heals all wounds, baby" and tell it to the ghosts of turn of the last century Galvestonians and I'll only ever bend and never break; when you turn me on and then turn on me. But I'll always take your surly, bratty ways in stride and navigate the labyrinth of the intersecting lines in the palm of my hands into the delicious violence of your lap. Because churning random hearts like ours get off on throwing consequence aside; and we were born to multiply. Now, my Dearest Death Professor Father Confessor, do us both a favor and close this window and power down this machine and, then in the dark, find your way to my bed and then my throat to choke.

You Are The Ever-Living Ghost Of What Once Was

2009-02-14T14:40:00.000-08:00

Anything to make you smile;
'Cause its a better side;
Of you to admire.

You want to know of what I'm made? About to find out because I'm splitting at the seams and there's a bed under this monster. Yeah, I yell, but he says shriek, and its all I can do, never properly trained in the ways of getting.your(my).fucking.point.across't. because of deaf ears, and my everything everything falling; upon them, hard. So he arts and I write and we both smoke and pretty soon I'm going to be rich and I'll never have to write again! Then I can finally sit down at the piano in peace for a piece and write him a song about false imprisonment and how I am so, so sorry for how I done him so, so wrong. And I will dedicate it to the slave drivers and the cage fighters and to the girls who settled down in their early twenties and suck more blood than a dentist. Smile for the digirati! I just want to be loved like Abigail Adams and you can do what you like but you can't do that and you can say what you want but don't say that and you can go anywhere but you can't go there cause you are descended from animals and you are constructed of chemicals and it is not an old wives' tale: everyone you know, some day, will die. Including me; then you can get your architect, so be patient. Today I got a speeding ticket and he asked me if I was wearing my corrective lenses. I told him that I thought I had pulled off to a safe spot but I secretly hoped a car would smash us both, although I am his Valentine all year 'round but I am going to stop this descent into madness now because I am already going to catch enough shit about my poor time-management.

In conclusion, I hated every single lover at la Madeleine today, eating their croissants and linzer cookies and laughing and carrying bouquets and the men pretending to be interested in their woman and the woman trying to be interesting, like one day has ever meant shit in the history of shit. I believe that lovers should be tied together and thrown into the ocean in a fierce squall or chained together and thrown into a fire with their songs and letters and left there to burn because you will spend the greenest summers fucking and water fighting and lovers should drown in their innocence and arrogance before it all dissolves into a single second and you and your over-developed sense of responsibility are left reeling from the force of one G and settling for a few brief moments of wishing that you were the type of girl who made men never want another.

Two Lovers Walk A Lakeside Mile (Big Hands, Strong Hands)

2009-02-01T21:40:00.000-08:00

With an eloquence inspired by no less than the likes of Mssrs. Madden et Michaels, I would like to announce to you that, in probably about 8 months from now, I have designs on quitting to a small Central American island and getting drunk and then staying drunk. Etc.

Baby's up and I'm late for sleeping for work. Out!

PS. I am still non-mad mad!

xoxo

Annihilate Me.

2009-01-04T17:18:00.000-08:00

That's what I need, from you, for you, to do, to me, in my personaldebasementfantasyworld. Because I'll just keep getting back up and coming back stronger than before like a pacman on its third life and I need put in my place, the way my Springer used to do to my Sheltie; always somehow shocked with the way he would stand over her, baring his teeth, growling low on her neck, menacing, while she cowered, not moving. But we are (moving) like plate tectonics, and I just want to be a million miles from here without having to feel bad about feeling sad. That time of the month: to wit, not a good argument. But it is true, I have less a handle on things. Thing things. My mental black holes and haven't I written this a hundred times? I make money by losing it and I'm not supposed to write this way, but I do. And you do, and we do. You would be surprised what women, as a species, can get over, and maybe shocked about what we can't. I need my delusions shattered and my hope obliterated and you can't even oblige? I am trying to make our lives easier. I need told that I am not as good as it. That I will never be enough. That holding out hope any longer is just further evidence of my naivety and loss of touch with anything resembling reality. That I am exactly what I have always feared I was. Confirm them and I can swallow it and silently grieve it and take that part of myself that self-deceives and put it down, like an old dog. I am begging you. And then I will leave you alone.

You Time.

2008-12-21T18:44:00.000-08:00

Hello, One. Two here.

You remind me of baseball and Tonka trucks and scratchy pantyhose and the beauty of mystery and of being thirteen and Starlight, Starbright and a house of cards and of my brother and of my mother and of my father and acts of contrition and great swear words and dramamine and dirty fingernails and sunspots and elegance and of those moustache disgues and the smell of sex and slingshots and.

More like a song and less like its math; curse the shackles of language and measureable time and.

And this is the part where I wish the jews a happy xmas and say how I love nothing more than warming myself by the nice products. But the world's got me dizzy again. You'd think after 28 years I'd be used to it. So I wave my hand and kick my leg, and it is always right with the music. Keeping a careful, sardonic eye on the teleprompter. Trying not to be scared of the nightmare of swirling social cues.

I am busy. But the sight of you makes me remember my needs.

Give Me All Your Pity And Your Money

2008-11-11T21:07:00.000-08:00

All of it!

He has such a magnificent sense of color and composition and he hates everything that is nice that I say and I hate my strange mixture of awe and envy because only three beautiful things have ever come from me, and I'm not minimizing them but I just can hardly believe it, and I wouldn't if I hadn't been there myself, and even when I play an instrument, it is trite and cheap and weak and I am only parroting the parts, beauty come from someone else, from another time, another century, back when things were more beautiful and new. This time is the time, with one day leading to the next, stepping stones on a path to debt, to loss, to shame. Each one bringing us a little closer to our deaths, which is fine with me because my religion's afterlife is the Big Unplug, and I don't expect to feel a thing. Then you can be free play again. The love lottery. Scratch and see what's underneath. And next time maybe you won't get, "Its....! Its...! Sorry. Just one cherry." Something I lack and have spent my whole life trying to make up for. But I can't see you fitting together like a puzzle with anyone else but me. I suppose I lack imagination. Each time the curtain is pulled back, sunlight pours in and each time the faucet is turned on, the water runs away, and I am always reminded that you hold the earth in place for me and so I try to stay in character and respect the unmitigated power that is your bitching.

I will try really hard to get enough to get you to a place on this planet where the nighttime doesn't come so early as to make you suffer and the daylight doesn't shine so bright as to offend you.

Because I love you.

So so much.

Your Face Will Surely Show It.

2008-10-13T18:20:00.000-07:00

I don't like to cry in the light because I don't like to see the splashes because I don't need reminding because I already know what the old man in wal-mart must have known when he asked me if I was okay. And I almost didn't say yes. But we know how to compromise and drink 1% milkfat and this is that gee-whiz time-suck and I have other things that demand my attention, like the switch function and careerbuilder.com and tiger balm and babies and children and blank walls and old hairline fractures that just won't heal and funerals I won't be attending and how I don't be cool by fanning myself with money. Staying busy keeps the deus in the machina. So I try to stay busy. And when I say that I feel like I... like I... I just sound like I feel sorry for myself, so I don't. So I just go back to the things he has written, to remind myself. Because I need reminding. And it all started in 7th grade, my relentless quest for unequivocal evidence, when a boyfriend wrote me the most earnest, romantic, contrived letter telling me how I was the sun in his sky and I had read maybe a paragraph when Ms. Genette, my French teacher, picked it up and threatened to make me read it aloud but before I could speak he spoke, to the class, "I don't care if you read it aloud because I mean it. I mean it." But he broke up with me a few months later, the only boy that ever did, for some girl he met at church and what is stopping you from just walking out right now? Our social contract? Because you are always quick to remind me that it offers only symbolic security. I trust a spit handshake more.

If I ever die in a terrible motorcycle accident, I will always wonder: Did I say that I love you? Did I say that I want to? And you will always wonder: Should I have looked at porn less and fucked my wife more? And then you will remember about the baby and about the schedules and about how your wife looked and you will know you did the right thing and can live with no regrets. And then I will remember how I could never die in a motorcycle accident because I will never ride a motorcycle or take LSD and I will also live with no regrets.

Major Tom to ground control: there is no hero in your sky.

My Lovey Post To Myself

2008-10-08T23:49:00.000-07:00

Finish a paper, finish a crossword, finish a sentence. Something about cramps, something about paints, something about cancer. Work schedules, social calendars, custody arrangements, rashes. Television, radio, mp3 playa. I am not usually this much fun. And I am not young anymore.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to be(come) indelible. To be the water mark. To set that fuckin' bar. So that when he thinks of another woman, he cannot help but to compare her to me, and that I always be the best. A tattoo, even one of my forgettable name or my regrettable face, is ambiguous. Many girls could give him a baby. Lots of people love other people that get cancer. Several girls are smart. Plenty are kind. I don't know how to be more appealing than strangers having sex. I don't know enough words or stories to be more interesting than television. I am severe but I am not radical. I want to be colorfast but all I do is bleed. I want you to take my remains and smoke them.

Women Who Believe They Deserve More Because They Are Special

There is this lady who always tells me stories about her friend.
She tells me about her over beers.
Over the phone.
In emails.
And how her friend's just had such a hard life.
Just been so especially hard on her.
So hard, I really could not have any idea how hard.
Because I have never known personal tragedy.
But this poor chickadee.
So much troubles.
So much worse than most other people's troubles.
Than almost everyone else's troubles.
One bad thing after another.
Poor thing.
Bless her heart.
Poor little lamb.
Poor little depressed lamb.
How does she even keep going with an outlook so bleak?
With odds so bad?
I felt empathetic.
No wait, sympathetic.
No, no.
Not sympathetic, either.
What is it when you are
Neither empathetic nor sympathetic?
I suppose I don't give much of a fuck at all.

Only/Over

2008-10-03T00:12:00.000-07:00

Here I am, going cross-eyed again, beats star-crossed or lazy-eyed so I can't complain, and how do you do? What it is that you do. What is it that you do? I'm caught in a loop with you, and. So I'll just be over here, writing the same things over again writing things only for you that only go over your head. But when he's not watching, he reads; between the lines. In the spaces? And in the punctuation? In the carriage returns and the damnable linefeeds? In that infinitesimal space between lips and in the breath between subatomic particles? I've had that place on my mind for about a thousand years, all imbued with foreign new color and familiar new smells, with flush love coming off of us like heat. But I'm glad for this other place, too, our gentle complacency. If you said you like me better than your past or fantasy girls, I wouldn't believe you, and if you gave me a diamond, I'd only use it to sharpen my teeth. But that is because I love reliability so much that I want to eat it up with a spoon. And you need sharp teeth to eat reliability.

nothing really rocks
nothing really rolls
and everyone
you know
some day
will die

But you will die with a tattoo of a flag with my M in it and it will end up being a bit of a buzzkill for your next wife.

Unless her name also starts with an M.

Then she will probably think its fate or karma.

And you two will be so well-suited because you, too, are a fatalist.

And you believe in karma.

Because you have a bad case of Catholic guilt.

That you got from that evangelical protestant upbranging.

But she will never love you the way I do, my man-child son-husband.

Breaking the Girl

2008-09-27T21:12:00.000-07:00

crying it out writing it out talking it out fucking it out naproxen it out smoking it out
sleeping it all off

Man's Prerogative is man's best friend, don't let anyone tell you differently, because if they do, they are selling something, even if its only their POV, get your mind out of the gutter. And how do you argue against that, exactly? Its like banging your head into a brick wall; eating soup with a fork. Besides, haven't I emasculated him enough, what with the marriage and all, the one institution to which he never wanted committed? The daylight causes all of my naked thoughts to tip stall and my internal engines to die. So, I wait on a moment that will never come while a billion other moments slip away. It is all a mystery.

Don't worry -- I'm not going nowhere. I'll be right over here contemplating the oval bruise on my future thigh, while you whet your appetite.

Fucking Mental

2008-09-27T00:04:00.000-07:00

Yeah, and he won't find better.

So, as I was saying, there's a lot of favors I'm prepared to do. Just tell me what you want and I'll travel and I'll fuck and I'll get fucked up and I'll really fucking live, once the mortgage clears and the grades are posted and the kids graduate and the house is finished because you own the place where all my thoughts go hiding and you are the man I chose and all the other things I deserve for being such a good girl and its so funny that you almost don't believe it, but, really, there is nothing like your smile made of sun. And now watch closely for my next cheap metaphor! We're just two hummingbirds in the middle of a squall floating on a maybe, lifting on a possibility. Beating on hope and stalling on doubt. Now its not my intention, but don't let it all go. Let's not mess up the function, not fuck up the flow. Boost me up my ladder, Kid, and I'll boost you up yours.

Now bite.
Me.
There.
Where I showed you.

Please.

xoxo

Better Living Through Purging

2008-09-22T20:20:00.000-07:00

Cleaning out my garage is like untying a knot, trying to find the best place to start to make a difference. So sad, the many things that go there to die. I mean, go there and die. Like you. Because I have put you off feeling, I think, and I can hardly imagine a worser crime. Got that shaky head feeling, maybe its the adrenaline rush as a biological manifestation from a stark and new understanding of my own humanity or maybe its just the beginning of a nutrition headache. Hard to say at this point, but all will be revealed when I either crash or just simply get crabbier. Its true, I'm an unrepentant elitist with an inadequacy complex that devours me, and he loves me (he thinks) better than he's ever loved anyone (I wish) and I will continue to delude myself like all of those activist idiots who believe that human nature could ever be satisfied with what it has. Because that delusion is all I have (in which to believe.) Because things get dusty and objects break and possessions annoy me and because you will say that I need god and I will say I need it like I need mercury poisoned while getting my back patted and simultaneously getting a hole in my head. What I need is to do is to find a way to politely and grammatically-correctly argue that the biggest issue facing America is the irrelevance of democracy, moreover, the irrelevance of government, and I need to do it in an eight paragraph minimum. And also, to get over myself? Recreating paradise is always a bad idea but if the only bad thing you can say about the girl is that she is in need of a fresh dye job, then I am sincerely fucked. Figuratively speaking. I wish I could quadruply filter my thoughts but they overfill the funnel and pour over the sides and while I have bitterly shared you for all these years, I still don't got no regrets in my life (but the one.) Who am I kidding here, there is just too much that time cannot erase and I am so afraid that this is to my detriment, but you still have all of me. It is a which came first sitchyation: the ends or the means? To waste time thinking about such things is one of the smallest acts of the smallest mind. Like mine.

I need to feel the faustian white hot burn of his devotion. And I have sucked all of it out of him. Figuratively speaking.

Better Living Through Commercials

2008-09-20T22:27:00.000-07:00

Baby come back! You can blame it all on me!

Better Living Through Closed Captioning

2008-09-13T21:06:00.000-07:00

a tree woman fall on the house
don't want the Centerpoint workers to call in suck
we was just praying to cud

Pretty reporters who don't need us to tell them how important they are covering Pick Rerry who is busy pre-positioning the word "pre-positioned" into his (de)press conferences usually in reference to the staged lurch and rescue teams, gotta Rita-iterate that we was learned rill good from the other intense tropical weather system with well-defined surface circulation of 79 mph or higher. Vaya con dios, Crystal Screech.

I just have to remind myself that anything that isn't real is simply a symbol, which can be manipulated by my mind, which means I can take something hurtful and (damage) control it and yeah, I am yelling and bleeding as I argue myself out of being angry, circularing the logical drain. Poisonous and pointed words mindfully morphed to dulcet and downy, self-actualizing my way to The Bright Side®. Lying, you suggest? To myself, you say? We run from the water and hide from the wind and does that make us cowards? No, it is just the pretty window dressing on our own oppressive actions. But we are still cowards. He is lucky and easy and free and I watch him while he sleeps and he watches me while I sleep, he told me so in my sleep.

Counterclockwise Smashing, Scientific BJs, and Half-Staff Flags.

2008-09-11T18:34:00.000-07:00

So much to write about. So little of it worth writing.

If you asked me the top three ways I thought I might die, black hole would not have made the short list. Long list, sure. Not top three. Running from cops was number 2. I'd like to think that death by black hole is just like a gentle floating and Criminal could pat my arm and we'd fall asleep. But he says it would probably be like omg the ripping omg. And I bet you a hundred dollars its more like omg the pressure omg omg I can't breathe omg. More like a hundred euro bet but you know what? Fuck euros. Fuck blue ray. Fuck hurricane (y)ike. Contraflowing motherfucker.

I solved the whole doomsday problem, btw, in a secret formula which I will now reveal to you to be:

e=mc^2^n where n = some quanta value of faith plus medicine plus magic plus a secret constant, which I will also reveal to you now to be 8.

Plz fwd this on to CERN and tell them I get a split of the monetary reward when they find the left testicle of Jesus in their researches.

Also, a mad shout out to 9/11. Keep on reminding us why we went to war with Iraq and why we will never go to war with Pakistan, who stands shoulder to shoulder with us against terrorists.

You Can't Hear Even Though You're So Near

2008-08-30T21:09:00.000-07:00

Pretty plain, that's pretty clear, and I'm the only one to whom it matters but while they're off litigating or being Dutch, I'm here: being cracker, measuring houses; mothering. Stop. Move. Talk isn't cheap, just poorly made, and I needs the sex hotel or some reasonable facsimile; with clean sheets and an unobstructed view of: don't even care. But do bother! Because I always dreamed of a man who would anticipate my needs and feed me chocolates and light my cigarettes; upon sounding off sounds more like I dreamed of a butler but whatcha whichever, some kind of kicky kink thing, like my personal favorite fanfic, his faux-chauv: the clamp on my inner fake-fem's nipple. But I reiterate: I don't care: about religion or politics or playing nice-nice with the woo-woo's who live for either/or. What I do care about is how when acting with a man's initiative, you grab my ass and I can finally exhale and draw the damp curtain 'round my blushing ambition.

To think, I have to write a proper report in a few short weeks.

The Honor of Your Presence

2008-08-21T16:03:00.000-07:00

Q: Why did the poor dog chase his tail?

Please join me for half an hour of bitter whining if you live anywhere in the US or Mexico. From Canada is also not too far to travel (consult your travel agent for more information.) I don't recommend coming from Europe, Antarctica, Asia, etc. You'll be disappointed. South America, say, would be on the fence; depends how much you love half an hour of bitter whining. Mongolia: too far. Greenland: come. Algeria: too far. Cuba: come. Costa Rica, even: come. New Zealand: stay home; do something else.

Just another storied story: about science getting thrown under the bus for sports, smart girls getting pregnant and going stupid, the most beautiful human beings grappling with losspurposemistakeslovebabiesaddiction. Those stories -- their telling never gets old to us. But post-oil society and Malthusian traps? Shut yours and give me the Olympics! We don't wants to hear about it.

Here's some personal short term goals:

1. Continue on steadfastly with plan to live forever. So far, no major obstacles.
2. Invent something that will suppress regret and call it Advanced Tequila 3000
3. Make an A in C++
4. Not be so crazy (this is also a long term goal)

A: Because he was just trying to make ends meet.

He Keeps A Pulpit Straight To My Heart

2008-08-11T23:48:00.000-07:00

A man is trying to reach his lover.
His carriage has broken down in the rain.
The wheels stuck in the mud.
She will only wait so long.
This is the sound of his agitation.

Biochemicalnanomedicalengineer. Dr. Smith to you. Playing against type, just to make a little more scratch and be a little less boring. More than meets the microscopy, though. The Mormons believe that it is a sin to waste the gifts that god has given you, by not exercising them. I am nothing like a Mormon and I don't believe in the existence of a god, vengeful or otherwise, and I pay no nevermind to the concepts of sin or good works. But I do have a moral code. And three house cats to feed. And California to explore. But why do we even do anything? I am suspicious of every motive, maybe my own most of all. I've caught myself in too many lies in the past: its exceedingly rare to be smart enough to outsmart yourself. And I find its real fucking work just to be civil to myself. And then I remember what I am still too smart to mention.

"Aneurysm" used to be my favorite Nirvana song until you touched my arm while we were listening to "Sappy" in the car the other night. Now its "Sappy".

Here's another speech you wish I'd swallow, another cue for you to fold your ears:

However much you love me, I love you more.

Ow! Ow!

2008-08-07T18:25:00.000-07:00

Now come out of your thinking chambers and go straight to the dock of shame! Because I was a teenage bride with a baby inside getting high on information. Now I'm just a grown up twenty-something urbanite party girl in a hurry to get out of this housing Super Bubble, banking on becoming a biochemist or one of its affiliates, got to break the panorama just to save me and mine from its sticky wet slippery credit crunch clutches. But they are so pretty when they pop, you know, like gasoline on the ground; an iridescent desiccant. Descend! Not into madness, ha, don't do enough of anything to go that far (including thinking (but don't make me pull this car over!)) Nay, I just get psychotically melancholy, ask anyone (to whom I'm currently married.) Not enough, way too much, shooting straight from the baby-holding hip, licking my fingers, planning my ink, and sucking rose petals to my face. Fairness is just a measure of the facts, or is that truth, and does it matter, the difference? That the ex gets it, and even the ex's new girl, but me? I wouldn't know a gentle asking voice -- it would roll right over me -- because everything that is good I deem "too good to be true" and what's so impressive about a diamond, except the mining? Because I don't understand, I can't understand, but I'll try to understand because that is all I can do. Is it my fault? Is it my lack? Aye, it was a white (trash) wedding and I wouldn't change a thing, except the whole month leading up to it, because I wanna be someone's prize, pouts the pretty pretty petty princess in me. Says he's glad he did it, didn't have much choice did he, with me looking down the proverbial barrel asking, "Baby, whatcha gonna?"

I sure am ugly (when I'm mad.)

Consider This Dismaying Observation:

2008-07-26T07:29:00.000-07:00

My sweetest bullshit extraordinaire: its called positive assortative mating; takes one to fuck one. Sure, she's billed higher than she should be, nothing but an old, empty diamond mine, but tell that to my imagination, over which I have only sporadic control but especially not when I'm over-tired or sick; "You're such a bitch when you're [sic]..." was his own infirm susurration. Some people in this world, even the lovely people that you love, would love nothing more than the opportunity to take you apart a piece at a time. But I beat on, boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, a la Gatsby, but with a significantly more interesting brain structure. Present? Ask a 7 year old to tell you all about it and have her explain what it means to be consumed while you're at it. I will say only that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future success: the financial advisers in this commercial are penniless actors. Someday, I will grab you by the collar and kiss you all I want but in the meantime we will scratch the script and rework the cast.

I'm The Martyr and I consciously approve this message.

OBO

2008-07-13T16:57:00.000-07:00

There is a method of weaning a child from the breast called, "don't offer, don't refuse" and you do it exactly as it sounds. Of course, most babies will not naturally wean until well after their first birthday, and often times not until after their second. Weaning can be very traumatic and there are other methods but they are much less gentle. But I think to wean the older child -- and I mean the much older child -- the most effective approach is "slash and burn". So, RIP vulnerabilities. You only served to make me cry and break my thoughts beyond repair. And I don't use any drugs, so I remember everything. So I play this little game where I try to make all of the pieces fit and I can get it to work just long enough to make it really hurt. We are letting you get away with it, my blithe naivety and I. But a promise is a promise and you doubt my claim that I can do it. For you, I will. Because you are worth it.

And all of that talk about turning to stone reminds me: TLJ loves BS. Emphasis on the bullshit.

a post
a mean post
a meaningless post

Out In The Street, They Call It Murder

2008-07-12T00:14:00.000-07:00

There are some boo-boos that Neosporin can't heal, like the blisters on my feet from walking around in platform wedges with 25 pounds on my back measuring all those places so I can collect all those the checks to put into the account that pays the satellite that delivers you: strip ping pong. I cry, I cry and I don't know why but don't worry, your acts of contrition aren't lost on me, I appreciate them, and they keep me going, like a complex carbohydrate. And I just want to find a corner or a quieter room, where our conversations don't compete for space with the endless medias and where we can really be alone with the awful sweetness of our escaping sweat. Yes, good luck (with that) and about as likely as dodging a nic from the poisoned dagger of time. So I'll raise my glass to ESP, to the second hand and its accuracy, and to the actual size of everything. Now the world's got me dizzy again and I bathe and I breathe, "Baby, come here, don't go away," but his sirens call and argue "walk this way, no walk that way." Now I've grown tired of holding this pose, so I'll remember to just be grateful for this day, like a good evangelical or whatever. And I'll just get over the things that so violate me that way we don't have to fight about them because it really isn't hard for me and fighting really is. Besides, I have yet to get any genuine happiness from a treasure dug up with a coercive shovel.

I Couldn't Have Maked It A Week.

2008-07-07T20:48:00.001-07:00

Stop me if you've heard this one:

A guy pulls up in a bad ass AMG CL class to the pump catty corner to mine and says, "Man, it sure is expensive these days!" And then I tell him my tale of woe about how I used to drive a Jag but then my old man got laid off from the mill and we couldn't afford premium no more; nor their headlamps. Okay, that last bit was just an afterthought but you can understand my incredulity at the first part. Clean living is just the slowest way to die.

Now I have a healthy vocabulary and a damaging imagination, and, while I would never claim to be an authority on such things, the only way I can describe what I just felt with you is: religious. Just the kind of revival I so very badly needed, sans tent, pulpit and flop sweat.

But I think I did come close to fainting like they do; saying "yes" to that bright light and to the joy in being understood and to wrapping myself up in the transcendent comfort of the flush of your millennial warmth. And I am really fucking thankful to myself for not ever chemically altering the sensitivity of my dopaminergic parts. Were it that I could do those things for you. We could really set sail.

love,

your anal superstar

Ex to the Nth

2008-07-02T21:53:00.000-07:00

Its so much less mathematic than it seems. But its still academic, basic Diophantine zoology where M=the dromedary and everyone else=the bison. And it was while my head was swimming with thoughts of evo-devo and alienation and what I might make for dinner when, from the backseat, I received a linguistic bitch slap from a 7 year old. And I don't mind saying -- it was just as painful as any bitch slap I received from an adult, linguistic or otherwise. And I know it sounds like I've been watching too much Bravo when I say that I just don't know how many more beatings my poor heart can take before it won't. Before it just gives it up. And I'm pretty sure they don't make a prosthesis.

I'd like to pat myself on the back and give myself credit for perseverance or some other word meant to mean, "knowing what you're really made of and still going on living like you aren't the camel" but, really now, what are my options? Face transplant and an eating disorder? Add that to a million bucks and a slurpee machine and I'll tattoo this for our second anniversary: "You can take your scrapbook, my good man, and shove it." Except it will be in tribal or Chinese, so I can properly assimilate into the herd.

And when he throws me that single beatific look that says, "I appreciate and respect you and I still feel like you were the rightest prettiest enabler in the whole wide room," well, I won't bite him, not even a little.

I might kick. But only because some things just make my feet want to go, go, go!

And the other one. MUST BE OBEYED. RIGHT NOW. ON PAIN OF LOUDNESS.

Quittin' For The Mouse (psychic hibernation)

2008-06-23T22:59:00.000-07:00

Or, "An Expensive Way To Experience Heat Stroke"

Sometimes I sit to write and instead I well and, well, I am not so sorry, except for that it doesn't get told and it should, get shouted, my lips pressed hard against his finally yielding ears: the limitless, undying. And he'd believe it.

But still I'm silent. And dreaming! Because there is no supplication strong enough to crack the sifted fear in his half-baked biscuit. His lovely human condition.

We all have our (un)spoken word that should be, and I think we shouldn't use "should" any more, so meet me where "will" intersects with "will not", race ya! But each looking over our respective shoulder, we collided into each other at the intersection of "don't say that" and "out loud".

So, now I speak it, Brother, like in those crazy churches. Witness:

I love him more the longer I know him and this makes me want even more his company which means the more I want to do for him, which is to say: right by him, and when everyone else sells words that makes me feel very alone, I know that I am not, and, I will tell you truly, I never thought this could happen to a girl like me. Not because of fate or guilt or any of the other obstacles to happiness that I don't believe in, or at least subscribe to, but just because I am just a regular girl

cog in the wheel
gear in the machine

you can buy them now As Seen On TV! at Literary Devices-R-Us but you can find them on clearance at Tropes Galore, saw a coupon for a discount on the basest model metaphor in a bulk-mailed booklet entitled "Better Living Through Pornography" and I am not a genius and I do not know everything and I disavow any knowledge of ever saying otherwise. I have been extraordinary lucky in most respects, so I'm not sure why I should walk around in a semi-surprised state that I managed to land him. And in my dark days, I secretly fear that it is because he was just so sad. And maybe stays because maybe still is. But I am not ashamed of nature or my nature and I do not care about efficiency. So, I will take the long way around with you; always. And shout it to you with a tender ruffle of your hair and the raising of your children and, with ridiculous permanence modeled after the steady course of the sun, offer you ten thousand pounds of forgiveness.

And anal.

Chairwoman of the Suicide-by-Assassination Committee

2008-05-30T12:35:00.001-07:00

My delts, my pecs, my lats and my traps, Mi Puerco! They are so sore from carrying around:

the weight
of the burden
of the knowing

that I am holding you back; from the actualization of your sexual self. Because I should really just lighten up and stop caring and give you my blessings to do your biddings.

But the cost!
Bleeding christ on the cross!
The cost!

I am not sure it is worth it. But I am beginning to think it is not my place to decide, because I am only an appraiser and I am only paid for my opinion and I don't broker the deal.

I cry
I cry

and I don't know why, but that's because rich people like me never understand anything, like the value of Fendi shades or how a person can get so broke(n) when they are born with a greasy silver spoon hanging out of their stupid mouths, like a wagging dog tongue. But I've turned it off before and I can do it again, if it is what you really want, and that is not a threat, it is an offer. And when I'm done drawing up all of the detritus in to a dustpan, I'll get my pilot real clean (if you know what I mean) and take a vacation then come back as the automaton-tronic wife of your wet dreams and we'll ride off into the simulated sunset, feeling:

the spitting analogue of happy
in the synthetic warmth
from our virtual
equivalent
of love

I can go back to living and dying in my head. The lies do smother, but not to the point of asphyxiation. My heart gets heavy and my hair gets long, and you'll get high and I'll get low, and we've just got to breathe in, breathe out, and remember that it all boils down to how the serotonin flows in our heads.

Oh, heart, of what is it that you're made?
It's blood, and blood can be remade.
I know because I cut you and looked into your veins.
It's a long ways down from the tallest building.
But its the radon in the basement that eventually kills you.
The average man is 35 years old.
Owns a car but would like a better one.
He's overweight but he's working on losing it.
He'll have sex with 7 people.
And will fall in love at least 2 times in his life.
He will have 3 incidents of infidelity.
His brain weighs about 3 pounds.
He loves his wife but would like a better one.
He will spend 3 hours per day watching television.
And 3,000 hours in front of the mirror shaving.
He has a face but would like a better one.
His penis is 5 inches long when erect.
He works 251 days, gets 6 federal holidays, and 10 vacation days.
The average man is living for the promise of tomorrow's gimmick.

"On WE" Ennui

2008-05-23T22:54:00.000-07:00

Its just another reassuring way to buckle my knees; the realization that truth is the bottom of a bottomless pit. Twice this week I have awoken because I forgot to breathe and I thought that was supposed to be involuntary but something is wrong with me; I need a friend, to whom to tell my tedium. Yes, quite right, less a friend and more an ear, to bend. Because friendship implies some kind of give/take, some kind of camaraderie, but all I want is someone to think that I am worth knowing, that my brain is worth picking, that my company is worth having, that my sneezes are worth blessing. Maybe something bordering on adoration but not like a lover because I have been properly re-acculturated and I know, for a scientific irrefutable fact, that men are biologically incapable of sexual fidelity and its not their fault that novelty is a goddamn sacrament. But back to what I was saying, I don't know if I want someone to worship me or what, but I kind of think I just want someone to think I was really fucking special?? Or, rather, the most special? And I have to tell you, I feel like a favorite fucking workhorse these days, and I don't mean that to sound like I feel unappreciated, because I know I am appreciated, in the strictest sense of the word, in the cool, quiet of the pre-summer night; when I have finally FINALLY gone to bed (away) and the children are sleeping and the luxuries of a modern Western life can be enjoyed without my interruption. And I can cook up all kinds of apology from recipes I've picked up over the years, and I fully admit, I have some really fucking far out ideas about love and the mightiness of. And, yes, I am pretty sure that most of my shit would go away if I could find something about myself to love or someone to convince me that such an animal even exists. I suppose that the devotion and personal sacrifice that people who love me must daily make should be evidence enough, but I'm rill sorry to say that it just isn't, because I (sigh) am just the way that I am. You see, I fish for compliments to validate me(?)(because I didn't win enough blue ribbons as a kid or something?)(or I have daddy issues or mommy issues?)(or a pretty superior inferiority complex?)(or an abandonment neurosis?) but I hate when they take the bait. And I see:

the seams
in their sagging arguments
in favor of Me
through the brick-broken
pane
of my heartsick
brain

Seaven Teares figured in seaven Passionate Pavans together with six songs of teares and Weeping.

2008-05-13T19:30:00.000-07:00

You remember in Tom and Jerry when Tom would somehow get his head stuck in a bell and then Jerry would, invariably, gong it, and then the bell would come off somehow and Tom's head would still be ringing and also it would be in the shape of a bell? Yeah. That.

But today's tears are for the snow that falls on a dead person's birthday. For the outrageous courage to feign guilt. For suffering in solitude. For the burden of being attractive (and for the measures which we will undertake to get that way). For the girls that torment me. For the man that forgives my madness. For the horses hunted by dogs and for the dogs hunted by people. For the build up and the let down and the blow off valves. For showing up and saying hi. For celebrating one year in two hours. For rock hard breasts and soft cocks. For chromatic languages and 18th century ears. For the lack of inspiration that satisfaction brings. For the good men and for the women that complicate them.

This Is Absolutely Not The Time For Heroes.

2008-04-24T17:46:00.000-07:00

Have you ever noticed how each new day requires some more figuring out on how to live? Tears meet cheeks meet kick meet scream. But silent-like, like the song or like films but most like the painting with the hypnotic orange horizon. Big, gaping and speechless, just like I did when I witnessed that accident earlier, and then wondered all day, "Was anyone hurt?" Add that to the kajillion other motherfucking questions I feel compelled to ask but don't really want to know the answers to, like: how much traffic is there going to be after the school finally goes in? and who is the person behind the AOL address with whom you correspond? and why can't I be enough? and what, did she paint you some gushing sunset or you to her and now you're left wondering about all of the homes you could've had? and what is in protein water, really? and what does Tracy have planned for me tomorrow? and, can I survive it? can you truly buy love or are you just renting affection?

I shudder to think, really, about those truths and about what I might have in common with them. But let's play coy now, and again, for the camera, for the lens. Did I marry the one I can live with or the one I can't live with out?? Come now, and don't be ridiculous. I lived for twenty-five years without you and don't you think that saying otherwise would be awfully specious? And being able to live with someone is no small thing; just ask my laundry pile(s). But if you're asking, did I settle? did I settle for you? did I settle for the life that we share? No. I chose it and feel so lucky that, to you, I was the most beautiful girl in the whole, wide room. And if you were to meet me on the street (depending on the street) you might even think I was in the top five. But, I understand where you are coming from because I do sometimes wonder why you agreed to marry me. Because when I look in the mirror, all I see is someone who is sober and irrelevant and very nearly completely barred out. Can you get behind weeping over that? What about if that Izzy were to say it to Denny on his deathbed, with her sweet doe eyes and crooked teeth? I mean, she gave up a baby for adoption when she was just a young girl for chrissakes! Do you know how hard that must have been for her fictional character (a fictional character who is, to wit, fairly smart, maybe gets a little too emotionally involved sometimes, and is a compulsive baker)? Don't answer that.

My darling Criminal, the love I feel for you is the strongest adhesive, the stickiest sticky tape of love, and believe me, I have searched on the roll with my fingernail over and over but I just can't find the end. So let's throw our troubles to the dying embers because I'm just glad to be here.

The Smell of Many Hungry People Breathing

2008-04-11T22:29:00.000-07:00

You know that old "when you're nervous, just imagine 'em naked" thing? I don't do that. When I get nervous, I talk really fast and my palms sweat. But, I do this other thing that is kind of in the same vein but weirder, I guess. I try to imagine what people's guts look like. Does he have a cancer eating his pancreas? Are her fallopian tubes all mangled and twisted up? Is she lactating? Got an IUD in? Is he on any interesting medications? Are his arteries clogged and, if so, to what degree? But my morbid curiosity about people's guts was never strong enough to compel me to become a physician. Hate throw up, yo. Would be an occupational hazard.

I wish I could take away all your guilt and all her worry. But its like punching air. I just try not to add to it. I really do try. But I think I end up sounding like a singing gulagmeister. So, for that, I am sorry.

And I cannot fucking write in two minute increments.

Take This Sinking Boat and Point It Home (New Post, Same Shit)

2008-03-27T20:53:00.000-07:00

Just what this blog needed: tits. Good ones, I mean. I needed something to take the attention off my written. Word. Trying to lighten the mood, so you don't take no notice of this; its just the widow outside my window. A vicious kind of web in my head. I'll write real small so you don't have to read if you don't want to.

What have I become? Got Baby blues, and I'm not talking about PPD or FAS. Someone who entertains the idea of undergoing some of the more unorthodox and curious elective surgical procedures. Elective - ha. Just because a bad hip isn't life-threatening, doesn't mean you aren't gimpy. I wish I had a powerful drug addiction or just a drug addiction, period, so I could destroy myself properly. Because dining on buttered ego noodles and sipping on a pervasive self-loathing is such an embarrassing way to go. No fatal face fracture vis-a-vis trying to kiss a spotted eagle ray at 25 mph, that's for sure.

My thoughts of being someone's way to love are so pathetic and I hate it when my notes turn into cliches. It wears me out and my feelings are flat. And in the light of day, I try to comb my worries and fix my thoughts and I am reminded that I'm not Sundanese and that when I turn on my tap, I can trust that the water that comes out won't kill me. How small of me to disremember this. But somehow, knowing this doesn't solve all of my problems.

Fucked By Leap Year (But Not By My Husband)

2008-03-21T18:34:00.000-07:00

But it's okay, I'll just be over here: masturbating over my ATM slips. Because being an appraiser is good; but being born good is better, which is to say, born well, which is to say well-bred. My old friend, who came from the same stock as me, would say, "If you would be my wife, I would never let you down. If you would give me children, they would run the world." One day I finally said, "But I don't do drugs. And I think that would prove to be prohibitive to you." And then I hung up the telephone and it would be the last time I would speak to him because, several days later, on March 21st:

he couldn't get enough cocaine
he couldn't get enough heroin
he couldn't get enough control
he couldn't get enough
he died from an overdose

Many Happy Returns

2008-03-18T20:37:00.000-07:00

So I quickly fled that place to the farthest far away and I arrived here disenchanted, thinking I had only been irrigating delusions and letting them grow, planting a landscape of sorrow. Then I saw you and the waters that make your eyes shine and now I'm shining, too. And everyone is equal but not as equal as you and I like to look at you when you're looking at me and I'm so glad you were born and what wouldn't I give you, if you only asked. But all I have is that free pretty picture and these fleeting moments and this piece of trash that I cleaned and polished for you, a crumpled paper I unfolded and smoothed out:

You are not alone now. I am here with you now.

always

Look At Turkey Now

2008-03-16T04:28:00.000-07:00

Oh, the words, and how she laments them and how I laugh at them, and their ambiguity.

"Aren't you the one who has the husband who's addicted to Coke?"

"Um, well, I wouldn't say addicted but, I mean, he does get cranky when his gram's cut with too much non-coke, but, I mean, who doesn't, right? LOL."

I hear you sighing as you read my joke. That sigh that says, "Oh, how I suffer you." I know, I know. I never listen. And it makes you mad but all you can do is tell me things. And me not to listen.

So, I was driving today and I learned something from a billboard. Ready? The wages of sin is death. Death. Guess that beats minimum wage these days. Or ... yo, find a better paying job! Or, let's not and say we didn't. I swear to you on a stack of bibles and a side of pancakes that I would rather earn death than minimum wage. After all, it is a recession.

At any rate, Dude: everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. A corollary to this principle holds that: any time spent together that results in us having sex couldn't have been spent better because I really, really love having sex with you. But I must confess, I'm not really sure how corollaries work.

However, I am sure that I pissed someone off whilst driving today when I didn't allow him to cut in front of me after he passed several people behind me on the shoulder (you would have been so proud!) He finally did pass me when it opened up to two lanes and there weren't nothing I could do. And by judging by the number and flavor of bumper stickers he was a member of the NRA, so I'm glad I didn't piss him off too bad. Well, I'm not sure about the NRA thing but his truck certainly was white trash and I certainly did back up off, in case of flying bullets or rifles. And I was rill glad he didn't cause me broken and injure myself because, I must tell you, dying today would have really fucked up my plans of living forever. A plan which, so far, is going really well. But then I got to thinking that maybe he had some kind of emergency, some kind of NRA deer hunting emergency, and I felt kind of bad about being a bitch. And then, I further got to thinking about all of those "safe driving" movies I had to watch in driver's ed. Movies about what good driving should be. Movies from the 50's, when they knew things.

I almost starved to death last night. In a restaurant. I had to wait in line for thirty minutes to pick my protein. But it did force exposure to the world, at large. And, PS -- if you're ever out in the world at large and you see me, please don't make eye contact. I hate that. Here's a little piece I composed in my head:

My Thoughts On You
(After Being An Audience To Your Cell Phone Conversation That I Was Forced To Listen To While I Waited In Line To Pick My Protein)

That's you, with the bad ass Benz.
You gotta go to court.
Got subpoenaed for child support.
You ready to bust one of them niggas' heads!
You ain't scared!!
You know how to play it!!!
I know you ain't just gonna let a nigga come and punk you.
Straight up front you.
Straight up run you.
Some of your partners are dope fiends.
But you come up with them niggas.
So you stuck with them niggas.
You spent $70k on your Benz.
Oh, it ain't yours, its your friend's.
You don't go in the projects when its dark.
You went there on New Year's Eve.
You got stuck in that bitch and couldn't leave.
It was hard for you to breathe.

-----

This got kind of long and I feel (bad about that and...) like you should probably have spent your time doing something else more fun, like enjoying a big bowl of Frosted Monotony. Or having sex with me.

Today, I Genuflect

2008-03-09T21:57:00.000-07:00

Twelve years ago today, I woke from an anesthesia-induced nap lying in St. Paul Hospital in Dallas. I was starving and parched. I remember signing blood transfusion liability waivers because I was bleeding out. People came and went -- doctors, family, grief counselors, a priest? -- I can't really be sure. As I kiss the heads of my tiny salvations I think: does the day go on forever? Will this roast even be eaten? Could I really fuck up a wet dream? Wonders, and their ceasing. Hips, and their denting. Contacts, and their scratching. Heads, and their aching. Hands, and their wringing. Love is a funny thing.

There really are scary shadows and bad guys in closets waiting to snatch you up. Magic does exist in this world, without things happening because they are "supposed to". Prepositions can end sentences. Roasts do get eaten.

I have made heart-breaking decisions. I have been a grown-up. I have done right by at least one person in this place.

And now I would very much like to smoke a cigarette.

Big Nile Crocodile

2008-03-03T19:26:00.000-08:00

I, pork. All roads lead; there. Here, you can follow me to the beautiful faded glitterati of a 19th century port for anal and lobster bisque; for a few days. I've just got to figure out the first, third, and fifth weekend sitchy and the whole suckling pig sitchy and then we can leave, love, get gone. Got more, will get at it later.

Barycenter

2008-02-20T22:42:00.000-08:00

Because I am generally relaxed (37th percentile) and I am relatively open to new experiences (70th percentile) and I am good-natured, sympathetic, courteous, and forgiving (87th percentile) and personality tests are so fun because you already know how they are going to end. You, feeling really fuckin' validated. Or you: lying around feeling drunk for yourself. And we're all doing one or the other; all the time. So take heart, my little wing, because no one hustles harder than me and I've got Armenians assenting allegiance and the State is making a federal case and am I really the only North American that thinks it is positively droll that there is a character on a very popular television show named T-Bag?!? Because I would be astonished if I was the only one who thought of a motherfucking nutsack slapping a forehead. I mean, I'm so debauched when I hear the phrase/name/word "T-bag" I actually think of the balls/forehead thing before even I envision an actual teabag. To the pump! And I don't mean petrol.

Mostly Cloudy/Chance Showers

2008-02-19T05:49:00.000-08:00

Headache? Could've said hangnail and I still wouldn't have gotten laid because, if you think about it, the real appeal of pornography is that it demands nothing -- it doesn't ask you to fuck it when its hair is a mess or when it needs a bath or or when its face is broken out or when it acts miserable or when its baby is in the bed or when it carries around post-partum weight. And when its novelty wears off, you just click on the next link. I understand that a wife is so much more trouble. And I never wanted to cause trouble. So, the intellect battles the heart and so on and so forth and can you think of a more boring story? When you are feeling so alone and the wind is trying to crack you open and the whole world is a mud puddle, you should strap one baby across your chest and fix another one to your hip; nothing makes you feel warmer or more brave. Its called a wheel and its already been invented.

She said: What would it be like if there was no sunshine?

I said: Night. A day without sunshine would be like ... night.

Wah

2008-02-15T20:32:00.000-08:00

I was going to write something mean about my three minute lunches and six minute dinners and low-grade headaches and shitty fucking work and lack of sex and lack of sleep and lack of proper bathing but you know what? I love my life.

You May Cause Chair Broken & Injure Yourself.

2008-02-05T21:03:00.000-08:00

I feels ya, Deb, because I like staying in my dirty pink robe all day long and I am not sorry, except for my husband, and anyone else with eyes. But the years see what the days will never know and today someone called me a "deal junkie" but at least I seem to be cured of my hypergraphia [citation needed], for now. But maybe its because my tits are constantly being summoned and I don't mean that in a cheap way, like Heineken's retrograde trivilization of the essence of femininity in their spot portraying the girl android's uterus as a fucking keg. But this is not a fatwah on behalf of girl androids because, until women's body parts stop selling fine, fine products, we are all guilty. So let's divert from the path marked on our fathers' maps and be good to each other and rejoice on the anniversary of our sealing of a social contract and fuck all the time and huddle close on the beach floor beneath the milky moonlight. But let's not celebrate valentine's day.

The Safest Bet You Ever Made

2008-01-24T19:08:00.001-08:00

god, grant me the strength: to sincerely yell back when my husband tells me to suck someone else's dick. I have a dream, or had one, the other night:

I was getting chased by the cops, had to get my stomach pumped full of a quarter ounce of rocks. Late afternoon, po-po's waiting for me outside of the Kaiser Permanente emergency room, with glocks, ready to Rodney King me to death. Somehow I managed to make my escape through the back of the cafeteria by the vending machine department quickly. Found myself running through the Friendship Apartments complex, over there by the railroad tracks, around the corner from the People's Continuation High School, somewhere back behind Je'Nai's Liquor.

Let's end it here.

Cranky? Doesn't even begin to cover it because all I want is:

Lucille's Stateside lobster bisque
three days of no work
a nut, maybe more

But instead my help is mani'ing/pedi'ing or jerking/toking their ways to happiness and, in all honesty, I could never say no to gainful employment, its a weakness, to a fault, born of a fear of having to go back to the days of illegitimate employment, which I have never known, except in my wildest imaginings. And the duality that exists in me, of eroticism and utility, is only just a motherfucking tease; all because of a little blood. And you want to know the depth of my shallowness, my favorite hostile reader? I didn't get so much as a push thank you note. But all's well that ends well and no harm no foul and such a couple more.

You aren't the only thing that makes me want to live at all. But if you let me crawl inside you, I would never ever leave.

Who feeds me?

The Proven Pelvis

2008-01-12T17:31:00.000-08:00

It’s important to me
That I spend a part
Of the next few hours here
Alone with you in the darkness.

You and I
Will never be this close again.

Again you signal
Your impatience.

Time to get your daddy.

Sexy Sadie

2007-12-03T22:18:00.000-08:00

The world was waiting just for you.

Its not like I have anything to say that couldn't be said better by worse, miles by way of inches, one if by land, two if by sea, ready to ride and spread ... alarm, no more than the papers or the national news syndicates, short and impolite way of saying that I should be bathing, sleeping, working, laundering (not money). I dream of a place with warm sand and ocean and solitude for two and sex, god yes! lots of sex and, and, and, I battle censorship and fight the man, give it the old college try, which, if you know me, you would know not to cash that check; and that I don't complete sentences nor use proper punctuation and I even speak in double negatives just to prove a point, and its not even binary and I don't even care because four AM is a good time to consider ambivalence or worth or meaning or any pursuit of the same. So robotic did I feel today that I think my TiVo might have have developed a small crush on me after years of treating me so bad and vengefully filling itself with Nascar races and Real World XVIILIVXCXXIMIVX episodes. So numb did I feel today that my cranium didn't explode when I read that story about the 13 year old committing suicide over a fake myspace boy. And so bitchy will I be tomorrow that it will require all of my self-control not to quip, "No, you have a nice day, Asshole," when I attempt to procure the card for which I nearly collateralized my soul. Not that I believe in that sort of thing. I'm just a body and a brain, just like my daughters. And since I'm not bound by the silly beliefs of religion or fate, I'll instead start hurdling unchecked through space and time and then some other stuff would happen and then (I'd fast forward at at least a 2 or 3 through this part) it would be life or death and then I would mysteriously become a nebulae bathed in light, "Sexy Sadie" humming in my shell-pink ears, and then ... well, I've kind of lost control of this metaphor.

Sexy Sadie, that is a fine looking Christmas tree.

Her First Fire Dance

2007-11-08T19:37:00.000-08:00

And it won't be the last because she has persistent parents, save the step- for someone who gives a fuck. It's only a matter of pride, my Lion, so take what is rightfully yours and if it involves arson, well, I won't tell no one. This is a bandit's life and it comes and it goes and them's the breaks and if you think you can 4-1-9 B-O'-A without getting tracked down by a real fuckin' dirtbag then you haven't learned a thing. But you don't have to be wound so tight -- you men only pretend to lack self-control. And that Beak's gots no nose for decency and her veins course with envy and I've been called worse by better and despite the ease of the reference I'm not talking about llello (yayo, retard.) I'm talking about a hundred different things, like left-over meatballs and Made Fresh Daily, because the farther away I get from this silly, stupid pastime of mine the less I have to say and the more difficulty I have with saying it. To obey is to resist. To shun is to adore. Maybe I just outgrew that last one or met my quota because I would sacrifice nearly everything for a little kindness (and I did.)

Where I Feel Things (Anatomically Speaking)

Joy -- my cheeks
Pleasure -- my thighs
The pain of forgetting -- my spine
All that's been lost -- my pancreas
Small, daily humiliations -- my liver
The pain of remembering -- my spine
Disappointment in myself -- my right kidney
Disappointment of others in me -- my left kidney
Violence -- the place behind my eyes that tingles before tears

Love Will Get You (down)

2007-09-29T23:52:00.000-07:00

I'm just waiting for that one thing that will propel, wringing my hands, looking for the agent of change. But statistically speaking, I don't see it happening and, its true, I have limitations but being unrealistic isn't one of them. Mediocrity and circumlocution, well, I cannot say the same for those old friends. And don't you ever just want to die? Like when you feel things that you don't have big enough brains to explain and it just seems so much easier and so much more natural that lying there trying not to feel? But death is so silly and not really for me. So he lies awake, supine and golden, and I suspend the rule of law and suck in my thoughts and wait for grace. Sometimes, I just want to be the center of someone's universe but I am pretty sure that is asking too much.

e-stranged

2007-09-22T19:40:00.000-07:00

Tidings, tidings, tidings, go:

This isn't a revival. This isn't a conquest. This isn't a rubber bracelet campaign. This isn't an intervention. Knock knock. Who's there? Teenage hopes alive and at your door.

I should destroy this venue like an old walled city whose purpose has been served but remains as a curiosity, a spectacle; a testament to lawless times where an unlicensed dentist could yank teeth in privacy. But I will not/cannot because ... I am sentimental.

Because I am a wife. And I got everything I wanted. Except, for once, being something that someone doesn't regret.

It is my fault you never learned what I could see: that I am a fatherless mother who bears fatherless daughters; but it is far less exotic than it ever seemed before, so go on and self-fulfill your prophesy and I will even take the long way home to buy you some time. Because, sometimes, you need awhile. With the lights out. The television on. Don't leave me.

Hook me up; because I like to get hooked.

The saddest things are brief and subliminal.

My heaven is never enough.

For you.

You know who you are.

Vehicular multiplicity changes nothing and who are you fucking kidding? Things will remain exactly as they are today and have been for one hundred years, maybe more, because bad girls are always bad girls and Adam was the one who bit the apple first but no one cares (to remember) anymore. There are so many things in this world that I will never be. Two-dimensional, for example. Smart, for another. One in three million, but only in a Wikipedia article. An unofficial grief belies an officially-sponsored face and I tire of taking off my glasses so that I don't have to watch you watch me react. And what is it, really, that occupies the space between a nut and the whisper of intimacy? Upon reflection, I think that there is nothing there and I had the wrong idea all along. But I have never minded, especially, being lied to or tricked. And I always was a fan of music that made me think it was solving my problems. My best friend was a butcher and he had sixteen knives and he always took the time to speak with me and I liked him for that.

One time, I fell through the street. Fell down an open man hole. While I was hitting the sides on the way down, I was having this conversation with myself:

Can I get there this way?
Yeah, I think so.
Can I get there this way?
Yeah, I think so.
Can I get there this way?
Can I get there this way?
Can I get there this way?
Can I get there this way?

You don't write any more because you don't need to. Just like with everything else.

You're Ever My Erotic

2007-09-10T12:07:00.001-07:00

Its 12:34 P.M. and I'm peeing razors again in a McKinney Jack-in-the-Box. I walk out to collect my "food" when I overhear one teen-aged boy say to another teen-aged boy, "I think pregnant women are beautiful." Now I'm back in the rainy day traffic of a funeral procession and not giving a fuck for the living people etiquette for dead people situations, when I'm thinking about this and that and the call of the wild and the nature of the beast. Stop, My Child, and get a listen:

Can you even find some damn peace anymore, Criminal?

A place where people can't touch you, Freestyle?

Have you even noticed at all?

Did you pack and throw even one snowball?

Did you feel the sweltering heat of the summer and take a swim in a pool, an ocean, or other?

No, you live in an air-conditioned nightmare; television will make your eyes lose their resolution unless you were born that way or just growed that way but anyway! turn it off one time before you die because there are greater things, like those first cries that turn back tides. We may not get long and so I think every single moon should bear witness to conjugal congress and co-it-us. So, who's world is this?

This is your world.
This is your world.
This is your world.

And mine. I'm just here to lace they tennis shoes and take away they puppies.

2007-08-17T21:20:00.000-07:00

For all the superlatives, the I Never and the I Always, and its always been so hard for me to take a flattery. I mean a compliment. Just kidding, I really did mean a flattery. Because I am no man's Garance, despite the fact that lots of men want to be the Criminal, well, except the Criminal, that is, but that's because he gets bored of everyone eventually. And I'm so fucking into ironic detachment and the womanly art of speaking only when spoken of and there are some days I wish that I wasn't an actress (with whom no one can identify.) Does there even exist a pet name that hasn't already been used on pets from the past? Because I don't like to think of who was me before I was and I don't mean that in a creepy religious way, either. And even secreter is this: in the escapism of rainy day traffic, I sometimes like to quietly pretend like there is no one else out there like me; or at least that I am not like anyone else out there. Luckily, I am super sane, otherwise the contradiction would kill me. And even though I wear prescription eyes, I see too easily the pockmarks and the seams and the prestidigitation in the commoditization of concepts like love, forever, courage, etc. et al., that is being hawked by the people, for the people. And we are all charlatans. All of us.

Why bother? I find that answering that question it is a task to which I must apply the same earnestness a moron adopts when running repeatedly head first into a brick goddamn wall.

Does it really make me feel better knowing that I tried? And, if so, what does that say about my sense of conviction?

Delete City

2007-08-16T23:00:00.000-07:00

Its not that I, its just that I, I mean, I'm tired, you know? I'm so tired. And its not that there isn't anything to say. There are so many things to so, so many unwarranted opinions to trot out, and not enough angst, not nearly enough, because full is not so heavy as empty, my darling Criminal.

There are things, those things that stick, like those men that speak in slogans, and red Dodge Neons with "Porn Star" stickers on the back commanded by sad nineteen year olds with heavy-handed reddish purple dye jobs; and two occupied child safety seats in the back. And the brilliance and the joy, personified, by a six year old who is trying to figure out her place, and the little men behind big pharma and the quotidian effects of Moody and Fitch junking ResCap and brother bonds, like how am I going to feed and house my family because I only make $130/hr, and nono, is no typo, and what does the Yen surge mean to me, personally? And the burning in my throat from its closing, from its adjuration from my brain, a fear no prescription could heal; one panic attack away from a tracheotomy, from the pressure from an outage that is keeping my childhood memories dim which is keeping from reminding me of the selfishness of my anger over having to tell my child that another two have called it quits because hasn't she faced enough loss and grief and betrayal in her short life and how can I, in good conscience be a sympathizer and ... its just ... some fucking people, you know?

Listen up, boys and girls: do not spend your precious hours scouring the long list of people in your area who are lonely tonight. Not when you have a perfectly capable, albeit sedated, lover in your bed. But I understand, Criminal, I understand; what its like to have things incessantly chirping, ringing, crying, barking, yelling, and kicking: for your attention.

Promise me this: just before you die, insist to yourself that I, your wife, have loved you as completely as one person can love another. And should you outlive me, know that I, who, except for loving you and mothering our children, do not want to be remembered for anything else I have ever done while walking the surface of this abject, despicable, dirtball planet. Not that its the planet, per se.

That Fuckin' Guy (a love letter from my indie pussy)(what does that even mean?)

2007-08-03T22:21:00.000-07:00

Momma, where is Hood? Don't have to look too far, Darlin', but I'll do what I can so you can live and die within the walls of a rural family compound and, failing that, a gated comm w/ common grounds maintenance and hike/bike trails; even if I am deeply saddened by their small-town minds -- for rill, there ain't nothing but crooks in here. Looking through a wandering eye that is sunken in and I just can't stop thinking about how I never learned how to properly do chiaroscuro and so many other things. Too many men are mannish and I think masculinity is overstated -- like a mid-cap's earnings -- and even when it isn't, its overrated -- like mortgage-backed securities -- because I've been used as a shield from both a snake and a wasp and I haven't known what it means to be "supported" since I was a child; or at least much, much younger. My, listen to my words! they are my disguise. Nevertheless, I don't believe in fate but what a happy accident that I was I and you were you; that we save our energies for things much more pleasurable; like braille in the night; feeling you out, so smooth and straight and hard -- and I won't misappropriate my gratitude for your cock to god, so thank you.

Turns Out You Were Only Hungry

2007-07-26T20:43:00.000-07:00

Who are you to judge my block, with your google news muse and yahoo chat consolation? The bicameral mind in the multi-faceted world, and only a 1600 square foot pot to piss in, between us. And he won't read this unless I leave it up and when he does, he won't say anything, because there is nothing to say, because it does not speak to him, like a few hexed ghosts used to, and they will use other words, but I will use common ones, because I am comm...conventional. Lies and flattery are the flies and lottery of the human condition: the platinum cards that get us in everywhere. Except we go no where, because of the traffic, because of the distance, and because of the cost. I am being literal because I am going somewhere, because I'm a hustler, because I'm a scrapper, because I_do_not_have_a_choice. Which is categorically untrue because I do have a choice, because Dad always said that if you thought you didn't have one its because you weren't using your imagination, but its just that all of the other options are not tenable. So long, SAHM. So where do I see myself in five years? On an incentive trip in Niagara Falls. And then there's this wholesale rape of a few sacred things and a hundred inadequacies and a thousand fears, my constant erection. But...the timbre is wrong, all wrong, and I'm just writing myself into oblivion, and he writes in tag lines. And all of my designs are parodies of themselves, like most crimes. But I have no reservations, like the show. So how are things on the East Coast? Because its not so lonely when the bad dreams catapult a warm body into my bed and I hardly understand what it means to regret something. Like I said, I've wanted to die plenty of times, but I don't regret anything because ... because I don't like the mystery.

I Sure Do Love To Be Put To Bed

2007-07-22T22:20:00.000-07:00

He's desperate for an accident (like a million private things) because these are the dull miles -- and all because you're disappointing and they are disappearing and you don't know the words to all those old songs they loved so well and do you see what I just did there? I made it seem like I was talking about someone else but I was really just talking about myself; centrism thy name is my name. Get a new haircut, get a new job, a $452,000 car. Do people simply hate to know anything? Or is it just in the reminding that they don't? Because we didn't really used to push cars with our feet! But we do have little red scaffoldings that hold up our lenses of truth and why can't we trade one metaphor for another? Because I can laugh a musical laugh and effect a casual flutter of the hand and just tolerate. But, in truth, my dudgeon is preemptively high and my scythe is deceptively low and I have genuine difficulty believing people actually watch Big Brother (including you.) Love ya!

I'm a Specialist in Hope and I'm Registered To Vote

2007-07-11T20:30:00.000-07:00

Come into my barrio, we'll see if you can float.

An act in four plays:

She says wives shouldn't suffer for these things for which they suffer; for their diamonds bigger than a cyst. And I admit, party and money keep some girls in check and are you saying "what the fuck" yet? Because anyone with a conscience should be. And all I hear are echoes. Tell me truly: is your own marriage odds-on? Because, for all of your awful entitlement, you are awfully indebted. Como se dice gratis?

There are three kinds of "no" and four kinds of "oh my god" and five kinds of "yes" -- just ask the fiendiest of the fiends if you doubt the claim -- and you'll find him over there, admiring the teethmarks of time; planting seeds of regret that he will forget to harvest. His life is in drugs and rage and he hasn't slept in three days. He is still so young-looking but I remember when he was a boy.

The biggest egg he ever laid. I wonder if my feigned restrain crosses the blood barrier -- a thousand apologies, Pumpkin. I pretend to try to control myself but you're on the inside where my cover is blown. Let me lay it on you: in a passionate break, I begged for you. You are an ounce of trouble. You are three inches of love. You nosedive in me like a peregrine. You are safe and alive. And I can't remember a time when I didn't love you.

And you, Criminal. There is a bitter breed and they watch with bitter hearts but I've grown lengths and lengths and lengths of love since we started this thing out. I can still feel it when you lie but -- how do you say? There is no percentage in it. Briefly, I felt the motion of your skin in those fat blue serpent swells and it made me kind of dizzy and elemental, but in a good way. I felt you so much today.

Mohr Scale of Slickness: A Style Quite Dolby

2007-06-07T19:10:00.000-07:00

Listen up, fear biters and submissive pissers: I ignore. I do as I feel inside. I live with me. I got my back, yannowhatimsayin? Yo, G, I'm not playin'. I'll go alone, I don't care. I make it look easy because it is to me.

Tell me if you've heard this one: a pregnant chick walks into a condom store ... and buys a future dog toy for her future toy dog. Get it? Yeah, real life is not so very sexy, it is just so very. No, no, no -- you know what life is? A walking algebra problem, a riddle. You want a good time; easily solved: I want to give you what you want. So, here's one I bet you haven't heard: All of my spades have been played and now? Now the working hour is upon me. I punch boys but not a clock.

I read the last thing you wrote and I liked it, I liked it. But, I gotta say, it weren't no tanka extolling the grace, wit, and pre-ser-veer-ence of your positively gravid bride. Not that I was looking for idolatry, exactly.

There Goes The Neighborhood ("Adventures In Excess" And Other Fairy Tales To Put You To Sleep)

2007-06-02T20:21:00.000-07:00

Rules set in contrary motion; opposition, the neck of no-man's land, remove the hyphenation and insert a space for a more feministic bend. Spell-checker don't like "feministic" and dictionary dot meant it to be like the gaffe that is activism but I meant it to be like a concatenation of "feminine" and "deterministic" and where in god's name have I been for all these weeks?? The statcounter set wonders. Wandering points at high altitudes but in short increments because submission to the supplication of two bruised lungs is compulsory; and 2.23 miles above the average ocean makes them beg. I remember the title that I thought of while traveling and it involved many bangs and it was about love or survival or both. Or maybe it was part of an advertisement, on some packaging, some red text behind the cellophane, could've been a National Weather Service announcement, or maybe something he read to me out of one of his periodicals. Hard to recall, couldn't really say now, and I mean: do you realize how much less oxygen is in the air up there? Just enough to cause a rock slide that blocks the road in my mind but so very more than enough to force a 16 hour made-for-TV highway trauma complete with tornadoes and "perform service" indicator lights and -- are you sure that shaving and getting high at the same time is really such a good idea? Hey, Criminal, I'm not judging and I'm not much for them myself; good ideas, that is, and I almost always shave in the dark, seeing with my fingers, tactile smooth. Can you spy the existentialism in this photograph?

I Can Grow People.

2007-05-10T22:03:00.000-07:00

Just saying.

Tied by tungsten but bound by blood and there is a magnet in his hand; that pulls me upwards, to beyond. Everything he censors are the feelings that are real: lay down your arms, Sir, and now act upon innocence and push me towards smiles worth remembering because I never staged a bitterness quite like that and I'm embarrassed that you see through me and that my dreams confess: nuance, maneuvers, capital failures and lesser disputes. Still, no apologies are pending.

I love you.

Fault Of The Market: Bad Boys and Good Girls

2007-05-08T08:57:00.000-07:00

I want to be the girl with the most cake so dispense of the lies and rationalizations: ultimately, sexuality is a private enterprise and you do not want me to be privy to yours. Hey, girls: if you are having difficulty getting your man to read, initiate a discussion about the demise of intimacy. 'At ought to do it. But don't you see, boy? Your gifts are like pearls and your faults are like mosquito bites. Everyone has a guilty pleasure but I am a hedonist and none of my pleasures are guilty.

Insults To Last A Lifetime

2007-05-02T19:31:00.000-07:00

Its hard to be a badass when your maternal instinct brings the bile to your throat and blocks the words that were so true in your head but came out sounding like a cross between a gurgle and a sputter. And then he mocks. Shouldn't ever have to be this hard but, like the man said, life is disappointment; and anyone who tries to tell you differently is selling something. In the end I think you're going to want the sunshine, the milk and honey, the land, the matching names, the children, the help fighting the scary days: a person to take care of your feet when you are old. And I would take a hit for you and be very brave for you but you don't give a shit (your words) and I am too neurotic (mine.) Thirty days would positively loom over your day-dreaming head! Do you know how many hours are in thirty days? That's a lot of time to sleep away. How nice it was not to have to hear about it? Nicer still is not having to hope for it. I can make peace with just about anything. I am good at facing facts. I serve a purpose and I cannot complain. I mean, I should not complain. But it is hard when both people believe that they are suffering the most. And, sadly, neither crying nor yelling are empirical. Nor compelling.

So Little Red Riding Hood said to The Wolf, "My, what sharp teeth you have!"

And the wolf answered, "The better to cut my losses with, my dear."

And to think, this is revised. The mind boggles. But this is the last you'll hear from me on the matter. Sure, I will always wonder why I am so uninspiring but I can choke it back. And I enjoy being his baby momma. I really do.

No Smoking, No Drinking, No Sushi

2007-04-29T22:25:00.000-07:00

High on hCG an living on fear. Well, fear with the occasional chicken noodle soup, a flavor-blasted cheddar goldfish palate cleanser, and phenergan, for dessert. Criminal, those knots of terror you asked about? They're called constrictor knots and you are married to them now, if not to me, and your joy will always be tempered by them, by your vulnerability, by the slow or quick burn of mortality, and by the non-existence of immortality. But they are not altogether a bad thing: they are the sacred demarcations between leading a life worth staying alive for and one not; I've done both and I highly suggest the former. I should have volumes more to write but there are so many things in this life which words only serve to desecrate. Suffice it to say, I am nothing less than exultant to be carrying your child even if, at this point, it is sporting a tail.

I Thought I Was Going To Die (The "In Your Face" Edition)

2007-04-23T20:29:00.000-07:00

"Inside of" -- as in, "I've never been come" or "I'm growing a baby" -- is redundant and I'm not sure that the value proposition of my parturient parts is enough to make him want to make me more, anyway. I'll adapt, whether I'm staked or only claimed, just as I always do, shape-shifting to satisfy the specifications of a sadistic scenery. What you want most will always walk behind the god of causality, the rules of this system, serpentine line like, like a switchbacked road, like the Bataan Death March. The universe kowtows to no one, not even to the clumsy supplication of a disharmonic iconoclast, a commitment junkie, a foregone conclusion and a fool's errand. So, that's why my plan never, ever changes: evolve, yo! All the while, I'll continue working hardish to be the best at building the better vanity card and all of the other things one does to get the things one needs: to justify one's existence. Scratch, scrape, stress: sapience. He smiles at me from underneath his arm which is shielding his eyes and I think to myself: what a wonderful world.

Funner Fucking: Exploding The Sunlight

2007-04-21T20:59:00.000-07:00

So very many things to write about, like how I called that shit and ain't that some shit, but I'd rather bespeak the beauty of French bow knots around American wrists. Our tale of triumph on a marquee somewhere in the midwest, attractive actors and actresses who get the accents all wrong, a love story for all times: it all started with a set of genitalia and a dream and quickly transformed into utterly indefensible skin souvenirs from a cat o' nine tails.

I Play Music and I Write and I Also Steal Things

2007-04-19T21:38:00.000-07:00

Dearest Thoughts, I wish you wouldn't leave me at all the wrong times. But its okay, I'm not the boss of you, and I understand you must be so very tired, what with impregnating the universal conciousness hither and tither. But, as an example, I really could've used you today when I was at that very important meeting (because I am very important I frequently have to attend very important meetings.) I was certain you were in attendance when, quite suddenly, I overheard myself saying, "Y'all sign here and them two will sign here," and I knew you had bailed. Next time, please don't disappear when so much money is on the line. You could've cost me my upcoming topless romp in Zihuatanejo. And my writing wouldn't exactly suffer if you'd show up once in awhile for that.

Enough of that gimmick -- onward to love, primal wounds, mortal fear, psychotic morosity. Tell me I don't know what you like. I had planned to purge other demons, vis a vis that old proverb: the dick that meets no resistance is the cow that buys the milk of experience. Or something like that, I forget it now, made sense earlier, you know how I am. But I've found something much juicier upon which to feast my mind's teeth. I give you:

An Abridged Inventory Of Things I Don't Know How To Do

1. Become indelible.
Because I am too realistic to become a stalker and I like my esophagus too much to become bulimic and I'm too sentimental too be promiscuous and I had too good of a childhood to be severely fucked up, so there really isn't anything left for me. I'm the cool girlfriend. The nice one. Reliable. Forgettable.

2. Make a man cry.
Because my tragedies are entirely too real. And I'm too rational to use suicide to make a point.

3. Drive.
Good, I mean. I don't know how to drive good.

4. Have conviction.
Issues are mostly boring to me. Sure, I don't like religion much, but that is because it is dangerous. Not because it offends me.

5. Lie.
Just kidding, that's a lie. I know how to lie. But it feels like I cheat myself when I do, so I decided to stop a few years ago. It was harder to quit than I care to admit.

6. Deepthroat.
At least, anything over six and a half inches and while I'm not under the influence of one or more depressants.

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Here are a few things I do know how to do, in a little piece I like to call:

An Abridged Inventory Of Things I Do Know How To Do

1. Close a deal.
For real, I do.

2. Write emails that are more lurid than something that is very, very lurid.
E.g., "Tonight, I want tied up, ate out, and double penetrated, k? Thx."

3. Use bold and justification functions properly.

4. End things abruptly.

I Win, You Lose, Now You Have A Big Bruise

2007-04-18T21:45:00.000-07:00

Playing with her, it youths me, back when time was my friend and the complicated things were simple. There is more, like the aliveness that surrounds me in their breathing and in the familiarity of their blinking and in the fingerprint-like patterns of their intonation. But there is so much less, like the choke collars and the yelling and the money making and the matters of opinion. I get bored of my feelings, bored of my fears, bored of my needs, but I will never tire of the heart of a man who is never too busy to kiss a girl goodnight; I need not be that girl. The privilege of observing kindness is enough for me. I see a joy in sacrifice. To have loved someone; once.

One You Will Love So Much

2007-04-16T20:32:00.000-07:00

Should've drafted, and I don't mean like the dodge kind. I should be tied up right now but maybe its a date night deal, not really sure how its going to pan out, he's the decider, you know, the dom to my perignon, if perignon is French for sub, and I cross my heart I will write about it; when the lacerations heal. Speaking of which, thanks Tommy, for saving this woman's life for pennies on the co-pay, and to the other two, who remind me why I even bother to get up in the morning -- what I said to Tommy goes double for you, because you make me glad I never killed myself, nor got myself killed with reckless behavior, like not stopping before the tracks, and others. There is not so very much to me, you know. But someday when I am stupid rich from either working my ass off or being born well, I will buy you a sizable tract with a house and a pond and a barn and a pool and a cistern and five bedrooms and an art studio and a special-purpose room for television and certain illicit smokeables. River frontage is contingent upon you continuing to fuck like a god.

Dolly Bankrupt

2007-04-15T17:24:00.000-07:00

As in, gots no cap-i-tal, Cap-i-tan; squirts, too. Choking on what? Wasted years? Yeah, me, too. Some things can't wait forever and the sex is like omg and the sheets are like whoa and the pregnancy tests are like negative, for now. Catch the drift, win a blowjob (not transferable, may not be substituted for or redeemed for cash, participating locations only, odds of winning are 1 in 6,700,000,000.) He plays and I play and he watches and he laughs and I laugh and he saves me from my fill-in-the-blank philosophies; whatever they may be. Sure, I've got a date with a doctor but I don't understand what it means to be deserving nor who decides on it; but I get the concept of comeuppance. And I will be your wife.

See ya next time, frace fans, you neck-braced scapegrace tax base.

Specifically, The Female Condition

2007-04-14T20:42:00.000-07:00

Ultra-classic, but said like a thing trying to sound like a dick. Its not that, its just that I get this thing, I mean I have this thing, this tic, this dog track in my mind, this endless running, chasing that fake bone on a real stick; at worst, trying to get put down before my time, at best, adopted in, rescued, by a charitable soul, not that I believe in such a thing, I mean a soul of any quality, not the charity part, I'm just saying. I'm just saying that my idea of a romantic getaway pour deux is St. Helena Island because its all assholes and elbows in this exile, Son. Well-dressed but such an emotional slob, warring factions of rationality and surreality, a bloodless fight or flight, nature neutering nurture, superlatively evolved; this strange juxtaposition of a thing to a thing: irrelevant, like what we would've done ten years ago but that we do different now, like staying instead of skating, a not-so-subtle way of saying that you're settling for convention, but sputtered with spit, vitriolic as one can muster, feel free to take creative license with the crescendo. What do I want? To be lovable. To be a good mother. To inspire a man. Crazy? Sure, but such a dazzling repartee, plus he likes me this way, and I don't know no better.

My Dishonest Analog of a Dialogue (Beware the Superglue Coup)

2007-04-10T19:26:00.000-07:00

What would you say to the people you've loved who are dying or dead? Or just dead to you? Keep your answers to yourself, Class, because I believe that self-deception is a motherfucking sacrament and I don't want to be a party to anything bearing a passing resemblance to truth. Now pass your goddamn papers forward so I can grade you on your virtue and punctuation; and jade myself further into lonely inner-space oblivion. Affection whore? Some, spelled like sum, and the mind boggles at the things that get you yelled at 'round these parts. Me? I'm the original lampshade; easy, like eggs over, and I go out of my way not to make sense in my spare time, since all my claimed hours are filled with proof of my rationality. I'm lippy, that's a truth, and its ugly, another truth, but not ugly enough, because no amount of make-up can make up for that degree of degeneracy. And just because I don't always cry foul doesn't mean I don't notice. I do. Notice. Its that my tolerance is high; conditioning is a bitch. So you paint your bone and I'll pass that ass and during the many hours that you don't require my attention, I'll devise a way to train myself not to care. Like the old days when I drifted from blue to black to the tune of a sad violin's last refrain, orchestrated by my disappointment which masqueraded as my detachment; principally fucked. I bet you could never throw her picture away and sometimes I think you might be using me, but then I remember that I am not pretty nor rich enough, not nearly, and I have a problem with keeping my goddamn mouth shut and you have a problem with escapism and I am not really sure which stone will kill both birds but I know that I will never get what I want with this kind of attitude. He says he doesn't want someone that is fake but I think he secretly does. Hello, Bullets!

Salmonella for the Soul (a lifetime of perfection)

2007-04-09T18:25:00.000-07:00

Salutations! (said like Charlotte) I hope this finds you high on the hog or on a horse, depending on if you're creating-a-friend or building-a-bear, kids jokes, all. Kids games, too, but played by played-out adults, or those so legally called, pitching conniptions; sooo bullshit, I call. And even as adults, there are some games still that are still fun to play, like swallow the stick or bury the bone or other euphemisms. One of my favorites is that one where you hiss, "Shut up. Shut up! Shut the fuck up!" through that set-steeled jaw look that you adopt when you are supporting your weight with your left hand on the headboard and with your right palm flat against my turned cheek. Much sexier than it sounds, by far. But I'm not here to sell it -- it sells itself; and I'm getting hard just remembering it. I suppose I could've written about the transcendental afterburn but I am one tracked, almost always, and if you can't get what you want, you can significantly soften the crush by changing the way you think of things; or remembering what it felt like before you wanted it. So, tell me, what is your idea of hilarious? And is your heart lined with lead? Because I know that most people don't talk the way that I do but I will not be sorry for it, not ever, for hanging on by a thread or a butt crack.

This Girl Has No Faith In Medicine: the marvel of modern titles (the 'Life Is Just Like' edition)

2007-04-05T20:02:00.000-07:00

Force majeure meet labia minora; now shake on it. You gotta admit: not everyday you find sweet-smelling panties in the glovebox. Lucky, you know, like a penny; and you could wager a dollar, even your bottom one, that I'm going to write about love and heartache, the universal currency. Currently, I'm spending more time in the love camp but I'm fiercely independent and never needed no man (to break my heart, do it on my own dime and without much help, thankyouverymuch.) Speaking of men, did anyone ever figure out a way to make them fucking act right? Without neutering them, I mean? Because someone really should get on that. Me? Oh, no, I'm sososorry, I don't volunteer anymore; bad experience with ARC when I was a kid, you understand, and anyway, I'm just too very busy, trying not to try mine's nerves, by (over)stating the obvious or just driving real bad. Pick an excuse, any excuse: heredity, biology, drug addiction, drug withdrawal, circadian's out of rhythm, overworked, underfucked, what the fuck have you? You have a fuckin' bulletproof plausible deniability, now available in kirkland-size for the responsibility-shirker in all of us. Now feign surprise and cue pretend shame while you wave goodbye to the fancy of your youth, like. It finally occurred today that any man that I love will always have to have a compelling and rational reason to make me his wife because I just lack that requisite x-factor that inspires the kind of adoration that makes a man reckless; should've washed my face more. Don't scowl or suspire, I am not as piteous as I make myself sound; and I've made plenty of boys cry, but I am mostly guileless and play with my cards face up; never learned to bluff. Its just that today I had that crystalline moment of realization, like when you realize that the beauty of your youth has faded and that now you are just weird-looking, but you find some measure of confidence in knowing that there are always weirder. Its realizing that you are that tree: sprouted in a most geographically inconvenient location, right near the breakdown lane, dancing an awkward forced limbo under a live wire; slavishly contorted but still surviving. But everyone loves trees, right?

Gold Metal Phrases (Reactionary Reagent)

2007-04-03T22:12:00.000-07:00

Whatever it takes; to win the day, she says prosaically. Oh, dearest hostile reader, you'll forgive my lack of candor this evening, but my interest in getting laid supersedes my interest in writing what I would otherwise, like wondering what kind of punishment I'm due for punishing him. Of all the me's there are to like, defeatist is probably not the least likable, if you remember maudlin me, who incessantly repeats monotonous expressions of affection, as if somehow I can win your love down like erosion, or even worse, the gestures too late me, the one that appears while I'm driving and trying to draw attention to various points of boring, points of interest being entirely too generous. So should we get married or break up, and is it ever really that straightforward? I've had this persistent headache all day, not like a hangover, but like caffeine withdrawal, but I'm done boiling, not like water, like blood, over the simple acts of character building that are the pollution of this new century.

And now I shout out to my peeps.

Criminal: Everything is poison. Only the dose makes a thing not a poison.

Ray: God bless you!

Mom: God is dead.

God: May you rest in peace and will you stop taking credit for all of my achievements?