Monday, December 5, 2011

22

I.
i send him flowers in the dream and i go into the woods to pass away,
the winter laying me down to sleep.

i awake from the dream only partially and hallucinate that i am in the middle of a customer service interaction, but my body is paralyzed so my mind experiences extreme anxiety as i struggle to tell my invisible bedside customer “THERE IS NOTHING I CAN DO FOR YOU, I CAN’T EVEN LIFT THAT BANANA. OH GOD I’M GOING TO GET FIRED”

II.
i weave pale hands beneath the empty thrill of indirect sunlight,
i take the leaves into my hands and render from them
a memorial for every tree.
a tree is never thoroughly dead.
the leaves come and go but everything else looks and stays the same
provided there is no freak storm or a movie couple carving some freak shit
in the side of the tree.
imagine if humans were never thoroughly dead.
imagine if the bodies of humans remained intact and our hair just fell in and out,
in and out, threading through the follicles “like woah” and “for eternity”

III.
a graveyard could be a place where our feet are cemented into the ground
and we are like sturdy scarecrows forever, our hair collecting in piles across the land,
blowing across the street.
we could choose to donate our bodies to farmers to cut down on scarecrow costs.
people would come to mistake our hair blowing across the road for something else,
as they do with leaves.

for instance i often think a leaf blowing across the road is a large spider or small animal.

more importantly, people would come to see the piles of hair as beautiful, as indicative of something great and heavy with meaning.
they would rake the clumps of hair into ambitious piles and encourage children to play among the piles.
they would take pictures of children playing in the piles of hair,
and then their children would show their children and say “i too was once young”

IV.
i drive home from work and eat chocolate covered pretzels,
my thoughts heavy with delicious and
i am addicted to this reflex.
it is almost impossible to have a meaningful interaction at work because my being is so thoroughly steeped in

screaming children / repetitive tasks / every type of chef and non-chef shithead you can imagine,

that it is hard to shed the customer service skin in a timely manner.
for instance i said to a man “how are you” and then immediately after i said “good thanks” before he even said anything, answering my own question and feeling uniquely horrified. it is like that moment in every movie where the protagonist catches himself saying or doing something that is diametrically opposed to some value/idea of self, and he goes “OH GOD not this, what have i become, i am becoming {my emotionally distant capitalist dad, etc.}”

not that i am subverting some value or idea of self {always in flux}, but i am being compensated for pouring my mind into the mind-mold of the highly efficient and therefore not entirely present customer service rep, whilst becoming immune to comments about my name and how it’s spelled and how it’s the name of a famous politician lady and did i know that.

K comes through my line with wet hair, with an eight dollar bar of chocolate.
i know he doesn’t like chocolate and i know that the chocolate is for me.
i slide it across the counter to him anyway and then he slides it back, smiles
and leaves my place of work

V.
when i was a kid there was a game where we would close our eyes and imagine we wandered through a large house, encountering religious imagery and creepy things on the way
and the point was that the scenery would actually begin to unfold vividly behind your eyes.
my mother thought this was witchcraft but we were just entertaining ourselves
with elaborate phosphenes on the porch

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Friday, October 21, 2011

20

a couple times a year i have this dream, although it seems like my subconscious should have outgrown it by now.

you were in my dream and we were all “THIS ISN’T DONE YET.” then i realized it was a dream. you said: "why did you do that (thing that I don’t remember now) (in the dream) (it was a thing that hurt you)?”

and i said: “i wasn’t there in that part of the dream. it was a dream lady masquerading as me, but i hadn't arrived yet. i've just arrived now. we’re both dreaming right now, but the thing that you think i did was in your dream before we synched up. i would never do that thing. but we’re synching right now. and you’re right, this isn’t over. you should call me when you wake up, if you remember to.”

“i’ll call you when i wake up.”

i am woken up at this point by the vibration of my phone on my night stand.

i think: “oh wow, he’s fast!” and for five seconds i contemplate how magical this is, and then as the chemicals that constitute my logic slowly fall back into place (i picture a lazy movement similar to the little rings in one of those handheld water games from the 90s*), i feel all that old sadness crowding around me.

then i see that it is a text, an invitation to see Human Centipede 2 at midnight. it is not from you. that is not one of the ways in which we are not done (although it is true that we will never see this movie together). i wonder if the subconscious brain can ever know "done," and i'm glad that consciousness evolved to split itself in two, and i'm glad that i spend most of my time wearing the version that knows "done," or at least knows "done" to the extent that it's functional and not steeped in the old sadness, which can, in dreams, feel acute.

thankfully only a third of my life (ideally) is spent wearing the version that doesn't know "done." although sometimes i wish it were more, strangely enough. sometimes it is nice to feel that something isn't done, though i am not necessarily referring to our thing in particular. always feeling like everything is done sometimes makes me feel a freedom from my own history that can make everything feel "unfamiliar" and not steeped in anything, and after a while that leaves me feeling desperate to be steeped in anything (even gargantuan familiar sadness will do).

the task of life is to feel appropriately steeped in a familiar system that doesn't reek of an old sadness.

sometimes it is more simple than that; sometimes it is just nice to sleep.


i eat a banana for breakfast and i don’t think about you for the next six months.

*http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080602143211AANXphn

Monday, October 3, 2011

18

-I’m No Nihilist-

Didn’t feel the earthquake but saw a bunch of birds that felt the earthquake,
fleeing from our permanent planet and from the smells of cars that need repair

I am eager for a different weather, for a storm to keep me company

I am disturbed by the photoshopped cats on the bags of cat food
I like my cats how I like my humans: real looking, with a disconcerting amount of facial hair

I am eager to forget how absurd a set of traffic lights looks beneath such a big sky,
and that there is no such deliberate cooperation in space

Things smash into each other with an embarrassing amount of disregard,
And this is the same spirit in which aphorisms are formed:

We have coached ourselves to say “live in the moment” when a moment is obedient,
and we say “this too shall pass” when a moment misbehaves.

Really these both hint at the same thing: life is happening while it moves closer to not happening

So really these phrases are interchangeable.

I’m no nihilist, but I’m certainly spearheading the movement to make people aware of this.

Can you imagine if we reversed the occasions for these phrases?
How much more interesting and creepy they would become?

Imagine someone telling you, “this too shall pass,” while you’re throwing back drinks and having a great time with friends,
And that same person rubbing your back while you vomit into the toilet later that night, advising you to “live in the moment.”

Monday, June 6, 2011

13

with each passing year the new cars look more and more like insects.
insects are efficient I guess.
and now I hear the stars are for sale.
anyone who owns a star is on my shit list.
with each passing year big things become more confrontational if you let them.
like fields.
an empty field at 2am can peel away at the onion of my faith like nothing else can.
I try to nominate myself away from all such onions.
is the onion god? I don’t know. whatever it is, it oscillates.
it’s an oscillating onion.
too big to love, too absent to be big.
and sometimes: too absent
to love, too big to be absent.
I turn from the field and dwell on the goodness of no onion.

one never stops wanting to find oneself, even if one knows there is no base self to be found.
I.E. FALL 2006 / SPRING 2007:
I took some time off from school to ‘find’ myself.
I found myself all right.
found myself stoned in the mcdonald’s parking lot in my dunkin donuts visor.

it’s the old man at the coffee shop who has the answers/has the onion in his pocket.
it is impossible for me to look at him: first of all, it is necessary
to gaze at him if one is to observe him at all, and it’s like gazing at the sun.

gold watch.
white skullet.

he stares straight ahead, deep into his own wisdom, silent and still with his cup of coffee.
the only thing that can shake him from his zen is his own 2am field:
the radio playing “menha menha” by the muppets.
he twists his head around as if to contemplate: what the fuck is this,

surrendering to the mystery before it reduces him to admiration

12

oh to be the nurse who kisses your burn. it is a moot point. it is all a basket of moot points, parading in my mind. the basket of moot points laughs at my attempts to make sense. ha! it says. look at this precious (i.e. pitiful) creature, trying to make sense from feelings! I reach for a rice cake and try not to look back. it is hard not to look back when the thing you are trying not to look back at has the audacity to walk in front of you (thoughts of the object, not the object itself), although I am the first to admit one must first approve of the audacity and therefore consent to the confrontation, rice cake in hand. it is hard to conduct the day. it is hard to scramble an egg. it is hard to pursue the ideal of the breakfast before noon. the times and frequencies of meals indicate how close I am to attaining functional personhood, as established by the world around me, a world I increasingly trust with an ease that gives me permission to feel peace via the utilitarian truth of the meal routine. it is hard to determine if personhood really is at odds with the basket of moot points. at some point I hope it is not: one should not have to choose between the basket and full-time personhood. one can perform the personhood in the basket, ideally. one can kiss the burn and achieve the egg before noon. one can truly have it all. before one can have it all, one must first have oneself, though. one must learn to inhabit the body that performs the personhood in another’s basket, before one can feel the happiness of being in such a sexy place. one must first feel that their own basket is not weaved from barbed wire.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Monday, March 14, 2011

10

Remember fend-for-yourself nights? Yeah, like four nights a week. Rememeber shit-on-a-shingle? What? It was something mom used to make for dinner. It was steak cooked with mushrooms and peppers and thrown on toast.
Shit on a shingle. And pancakes. She made the best pancakes. But she would use the instant mix. But she would use the instant mix that required mixing, at least. Like, she added the egg and the water and stirred it and poured it into the pan. Crispy-edged pancakes. Syrup. For dinner.

Dreams about my professor being a disagreeable lover. He looks like the sister of my first ex boyfriend, but with a y chromosome and an eternal nineties grunge essence.

Some college in the country is establishing a men’s studies department to examine the ways feminism has created a culture of misandry. It’s sad that when I type misandry into Microsoft word it tells me it ain’t a word, and am I thinking of masonry? No!