Well, I kinda want to tell you a funny story since I'm here at work and trying to waste time, but every time I try to start writing it I can't finish. I think my typing muscles have atrophied now that it's summer.

OK, so the story. It might be funnier if you know them, but My mom and my sister Cintra were in town yesterday for my niece's graduation. After a long day, they came over to see my new apartment and weren't ready to leave until it was almost 11pm. My mom has years of driving experience since I've always gone away to school and she drove me, so it was decided that she would drive the 2 hours home to Pennsylvania. She opened the driver's side door to the truck with the keys, then she said "Open your door Cinny" and whipped the keys right at my sister's head. Cintra, without even turning her head or blinking, flung her hand up and caught the keys in mid air just before they gouged out her eye. I was like "Whoa, Mom, you're gonna hurt someone" and we were all laughing. So then my Mom says, "Oh that's our new game." See, my sister had said that women never throw things, they always hand them. So to prove a point (and then some) my Mom has started to throw everything she can, as fast as she can, and without warning. And Cintra never misses. Apparently this is great fun for them. Or an outlet for their pent up aggression! See, this is why I didn't want to write this story. It's hard to understand the side-splitting, tearing-up hilarity of these little Johnson family scenarios unless you really know us.

But, for those of you who know us, we're dying for a camping trip to the Mines... Why not even the weekend after next? June 17th?

Well, for the first time since I moved to Buffalo, I'm moving to a new apartment. It will be sad to leave the little closet I've lived in for 3 years, but it will be an improvement. The new place is on the corner of Parkside and Hertel. Hertel is my favorite street in Buffalo, no offence to Elmwood intended. But Hertel is more diverse and less commercial. You get as many people out walking the streets and sitting at sidewalk cafes, but not all of them are yuppie moms in birkenstock clogs, or student hippies, also in birkenstock clogs, come to think of it. You know, middleclass types who think they're environmentalist just because they wear fleece and forego those cardboard coffecup insulators. Hertel is more like a real urban neighborhood, with the old established Italian retaurants shouldering up with Halaal butchers. It encapsulates my little hopeful vision for Buffalo: a city that preserves its everyday gems (the Northpark theater) along with the bustling changes of a cosmopolitan community. It will be nice to look out on the corner from my 2nd floor porch and watch the neighborhood ebb and flow, come and go.

I'm also going to be moving in with my boyfriend, which is scary, but at this point it just seems practical. I mean, why keep paying for two places when we are only ever in one at a time, together. I really care about Matt in like a romantic way, obviously, but the more level-headed part of me just thinks its so much more practical to be in a dedicated relatinship than it is to be alone. There's no poem about how much money it saves you, or how someday you'll get to be on his health insurance, but hey, when you get to be my age, nothing is more thrilling than saving a ton of money. Not even sex maybe. Unless you have some kind of hooker coupon that gets you a reduced rate or something. Then you'd be both sexy AND frugal.

Of course, we have to move on May 1st, and I have major school projects due April 28th and May 2. But I have like the worst senioritis ever. Fuck school. I've like cut like every class I could for like the past month. I just can't sit through anymore of it, even if it is good for me. Forget it! I just want to do my own projects and read what I want and just go to work and shit. But then again I did spend a couple of hours today googling current Berkeley Rhetoric PhD students to see how I hold up against their stellar CVs, but apparently they're too busy being geniuses to learn some HTML, since I can't find anything good on any of them... Me, on the other hand, I've already had an illustrious career as a pop star. Just go to www.hollyjohnson.com and see.

So for my first effort in my new life of independent work, I'm off to a conference at the University at Iowa, called the "Collage as Cultural Practice Conference" . I'm pretty excited about it, but I'm still trying to whittle my 28 page paper down to a 20 minute presentation. That means I have to cut so much! By Thursday night! Plus I still have to get a new pair of pants, and a new brassiere so that I don't look like the floppy-booby frayed-kneed hippy grad student that I really am. But the University of Iowa is a mecca for writers and poets, so I'm psyched to go to a famous bookstore there, Prarie Lights, and maybe see their poetry collection, although it prolly isn't as cool as the one at UB! Luckily too my Matt is coming with me so I don't have to be all alone during the social hours, when I find it hard to be social. And we can have hotel sex! Yeah!

So, should be a feather in my cap, right, (going to a big conference, not the hotel part) but of course I got another talking to for missing this first year MFA review thang that I didn't even think I had to do since I'm a transfer, not really a first year. A proffessor told me I was a "fuck up", and I quote, for missing it. That's such a laugh. Why oh why do I have to fight all the time? I know I'm a very proud and haughty person, and I'll be the first to admit that I barrel into my fair share of head butts. But honestly now I don't try to bring it on. I'm just sick of being talked to like a snot-nosed undergrad. I can't get no respect. I'm so very close to just dropping out of society and gnawing on branches for the rest of my life. Not really. Instead I'm making a video in which I do. I wrapped myself in deer skin and ran through the waist-deep snow. Gnawed some branches. Very satisfying... life imitates art imitates life imitates art imitates wing-nut drop-outs who can't manage to get along with anyone!! :(

The Swan is Dead!



Long Live The Swan!



Well, after nearly 3 years of being used, abused, degraded and confused by a boss who shall remain nameless, except for those who know who I'm talking about, yesterday I finally had the semi-satisfaction of resigning for good. I say semi-satisfaction because when I walked into the room she looked and me and said "you're resigning." She denied me even the pleasure of getting to say it myself! Always has to have the upper hand. What an ugly duckling, eh? But I don't even care at this point. No skin off my nose, as they say. Sure she gets away with my idea, and she'll get a book out of it, and her hardscrabble climb to the top of her hallucinatory ladder will once again be boosted by the lift she got from my shoulders, but what do I care. The one thing I wish I had gotten to say to her is "I hope I'm never anything like you." She couldn't seem to grasp the fact that someone who is smart and talented is not also plagued by unbridled ambition. I just want to live, man, and I don't need to be dragged into my overseer's office every week for a dressing down, especially when I was 90% of the project. The saddest thing is that she is still convinced somehow that I'm lazy and insolent, that I don't manage my time well, and deserved to be fired. She almost even mananged to convince me of it. If I didn't believe so wholeheartedly in the wheel of karma, I'd be so pissed off right now. Well, okay, I am pretty pissed off right now. I'm no guru, alright!?

So now that I have time to live and breathe, I'll stop having nightmares and anxiety attacks, start sleeping, start eating, start, you know, doing it, again. I might even start keeping this journal again! Ha ha! At the very least I can start hanging out with my old firends again. Now if they'd only get over themselves and call me (hint hint...)

I never thought I'd say it, but jeez I wish it would snow more. Today is okay, but it doesn't seem like it will last. My friend Sebastian is coming tonight from Philadelphia for a visit, and the least we could do is have a blizzard in his honor. Last year, or was it two years ago, when he was here there was a lot of snow and he wanted to take my picture atop a parking lot mountain of plowed gritty snow, and I said, nah, next time you're here. But now there are no parking lot mountains! Only slushy white stuff.

On Sunday I went cross country skiing in Delaware park: around Hoyt lake, up by the David and the expressway, down the hill and back around to the dog park. It was icy, muddy, and blades of grass were showing through. But it was still fun, and I didn't die the next day from painful thighitis. But the next morning all the snow was gone again. Since skiing is about the only excercise I get all year, it's becoming an (in)convenient excuse that you can't ski without snow.

I was in Ellicottville on New Years and I wanted to go to Allegheny to ski with my boy Matt. I called the park to see if they were renting skis on New Years day and the lady said "There's no snow on the mountain" and I said, well can you rent snow shoes at least and she was all like, "There's no snow" as if to say, what part of that didn't you understand? So instead of skiing on dirt, and due to the nervousness from Matt meet the fam, I got ripping drunk in a house full of twelve-steppers and puked in my sister's guest room. Fun! See, if there had just been snow we could have avoided a very embarrassing situtation. Luckily twelve-steppers are the best people for nursing a hang-over-- plenty of experience.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be screening my short movie at Squeaky Wheel. That's part of why Sebastian is coming up. That and because at Christmas time he sent me a 144-page letter! He spent a month filling a blank book with his adventures, observations, and memories of our friendship-- journal entries just for me. So we have a lot to talk about. Plus he wants to support my forays into movie making. Anyone is welcome to come too to see the final results of my Keys Train Brain, I mean, Brian, movie, called "Duplicates". It should start around 8 pm.

I've been working with my friend Brian on this trains project. We made a cool video that partly involved trains for the Mole People cabaret show. And I edited some train sounds into a strange TrainScape song. Now we're back down there again. This time for a couple of projects, my Lost Keys video and Brian is working on some installation stuff. Basically we're getting entranced by the sounds and glows and slow high pitched flute music the rails make. We go down in around 10 to midnight, when it's practically deserted. It's like a whole other world down there then.

Here are some still shots from the video we made. I would put up a Quicktime movie, but alas, no Quicktime. And I can't get the mp3 of the sounds small enough right now. 100K!?

I have the plague. Or maybe it's SARS. Tuberculosis? Alright, how 'bout plain old bronchitis. At the very least, walking pneumonia. Whatever it is, I've had it about a week, and after the near-101 degree fever, its main symptom seems to be body-wracking whopping coughs that sound kind of like the death thralls of a goose trapped at the bottom of a well. Oh well.

So the way I've been coping with it is of course to chug bottles of cough syrup. Active ingredients, dextromethorphan (robotripping, anyone?), guaifenesin (an "expectorant" (what a beautiful word for spitting)), and good old pseudoephedrine. Ah, pseudo-ephedrine. Drink enough of it, and there's very little "pseudo" about it. It's speed, people, pure go-juice, and it's making me twitchy, itchy, and tingly. Not to mention kinda spastic. But maybe those are all the same ways of saying I can't hold still or concentrate.

And I can't hardly sleep at all, even though sleep would probably help me recover from this illness. But if I don't take the cough syrup, I cough all night long, and if I do, I lay in bed wound up for about an hour before I slip into a shallow sleep broken by erratic and unsettling dreams.

Then this morning, about 6 am, my phone rang, and I came to just as my machine was picking up. The caller didn't leave a message. I was wide awake in an instant. Ever since Maria disappeared, I fear calamity's around every corner, so a phone call at dawn was a little unsettling, in and of itself. I got out of bed and star 69'ed. The number was blocked.

Back to bed. Laying there I kind of felt like Maria was close and watching me, and I asked her to go away till morning. I wondered what her body looked like when they found her in the lake. I shivered. My throat felt raw and scratchy. My eyes were dry.

The phone rang again. This time I threw the covers back and walked blindly but deliberately as possible to the phone in the living room.

"Hello," I said kind of anxiously. What was I expecting? The police? A distraught friend caught at dawn in some kind of horrible cycle?

A man's voice I didn't recognize said "Holly?" in a low tone.

"Yes. Who is this?"

And then, like he was asking to borrow a cup of sugar, "I was wondering if I could cum inside you."

I hung up the phone. I was standing naked in the dark in the living room and suddenly I felt very vulnerable, cold, and painfully alone. I walked back to my bedroom, avoiding the windows, and put a nightgown on. Then I went over to the window, pulled the curtain back and peered out like some old suspicious woman. There was no one out there, but I still felt watched.

I turned on the light and sat down on the couch, lighting a cigarette and quivering. My nasal passages were dried out from the cough syrup abuse, so I could hear my breath whistling in and out of my sinuses.

The phone rang again in about 15 minutes. I let the machine pick up. Nothing. Then the same thing again, immediately after. Nothing again. I smoked some more and watched infomercials till the sun came up, then crawled back under my now-cold covers. I lay there curled in a ball, listening to the little shifts and tics of the building, imagining footsteps, trying to unclench my muscles.

Today I looked myself up in the phone book, running my twitching finger down then rows of first names under Johnson until I landed on my own first name, and address. I tried to imagine myself as a stranger would. What about those five black letters would make you want to call me in the middle of the night, sex crazed and persistent? Is it because my name seems young? Or pretty? Or maybe there isn't any reason at all, and phone stalkers are as arbitrary as everything else in the universe seems to be. How's that for a grand theory?

I wish I wasn't so twitchy and distracted by this. I wish I wasn't sick and could sleep as l
ong as I want in utter safety in clean flannel sheets with everyone I love beside me. I wish there was a way, some guaranteed way, to keep the outside out, and the inside in.

There is this great Carter family song from the Depression that pretty much sums it up:

No Depression In Heaven

For fear the hearts of men are failing,
For these are latter days we know
The Great Depression now is spreading,
God's word declared it would be so

   I'm going where there's no depression,
   To the lovely land that's free from care
   I'll leave this world of toil and trouble,
   My home's in Heaven, I'm going there

In that bright land, there'll be no hunger,
No orphan children crying for bread,
No weeping widows, toil or struggle,
No shrouds, no coffins, and no death

This dark hour of midnight nearing
And tribulation time will come
The storms will hurl in midnight fear
And sweep lost millions to their doom

I searched for a free mp3 of it, but no luck. There are some samples online that you should hear, it's such a beautiful song. I would love to spend some time doing research on Depression era music. To us the puns seem labored maybe, depression/Depression, but back then they really meant it. For example, we think "Pennies from Heaven" is a cute song today, but during the Dust Bowl Depression days, who knows... Rain and pennies were luxuries worth singing about then.

I guess we're all in a bit of a depression now. (e:soyeon), I'm gonna call you on the phone and find out what's going on with you! You sound so sad! [inlink]soyeon,141[/inlink]

So I'm off for the weekend to where there's no depression... and no I don't mean heaven. In fact, it is pretty depressed in my rural home town, the landscape dotted by tiny run down houses and dwindling farms, no jobs to be had, too many bars and even more churches. But it's where my momma is, so I'm running home to her for some country style momma love, to recover from my own depression. I'm bringing a video camera with me to document her and my back yard forest. Hopefully I'll catch up with everyone again when I get back, reinvigorated for the rest of the year. Hopefully.

Here is some important information following the election that concerned citizens may want to learn:

Official Lyrics of O Canada!

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.

With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!

From far and wide,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

Or you could read this editorial on Commondreams.org by Sarah Anderson called "Ten Reasons Not to Move to Canada"

On Tuesday night while watching the electoral results come in I got a phone call informing me that Maria is dead. They found her body in Lake Erie on Sunday and weren't able to identify it definitively until Tuesday. She drowned the same night she disappeared. We'll never know if it was an accident or a choice she made on her own. She was manic depressive, and I don't blame anyone, myself, her family, even Maria, I blame the disease that drove her from her home in the middle of the night.

I can't really say what I'm feeling about the whole thing. When I found out I sobbed in this really surprised gasping way, just fighting against the reality of it. From now on, for the rest of our lives, Maria will always be gone. I can picture her in my living room watching old movies, I still have messages from her jotted down on the notepad by my phone, and my travel mug is probably still in her car. The last time we talked she said she would drop it off at my place.

You know, as someone who is very melodramatic and prone to some pretty self-pitying fits of depression, I've often talked and thought about suicide. My friend last night was saying how mourning is the most selfish act, beacuse it's all about the loss of the living, and not the suffering of the dead. But now I see how selfish suicide is. Maria stole herself from us, stole herself from herself. I'm reading a book she gave me, Bergson's Time and Free Will, but it is a poor substitute for her conversations, her mind, the intonations of her voice. She may have been found, but I'll always keep asking, "Maria, where are you?"