life can be going along just fine, nothing too terrible or too good, endless cycles of work money bills (getting and spending, we lay waste our powers....) and the pleasantness of sun, flowers, walks, friends, entertainment of course to interrupt, and while some may call this boring (such as myself), what we (i) may not realize is that it is idyl in a pure form. hazy days, no particular place to go, future goals just that (future) and all seeming possible or impossible, day into night and a minimum of human drama equals a muddy utopia, swimming in waters made thicker by absorbing so much quiet.

BOOM!something happens. worry, revenge, regret, penitence suddenly stab at you, in the night of course to make it worse. tears threaten, time tears, you wonder just what have you been doing with yourself all this while. no book is going to tell you, it's only all inside the one you're not writing, you're not reading yourself, the words are there but you do everything in your power to cover them up, to do what you think you should.

you tell your family, your friends of a tragedy. you cannot express how right now you hate the beauty of configurations of cells, correlations of systems, the perfect or haywire machinations and secret stealth of these electrified sacks we all carry around. you realize we are all destined to fail one day. things go wrong. the cliches: numerous: life is precious. why, then, are we here? an awful, no-answer question.

friends, family say the things they think they should, that anyone would. it's ok, but just once i would rather have someone say something utterly ridiculous, proving the faulty-ness of us all, the random misfirings that go on within: "mynah birds cry at midnight," or "please pass the fruit compote." but who am i and what am i to refuse what i know to be gestures of comfort. black-hearted, bitter, like tea, i fear.

i sometimes wonder if intelligence is a detriment, does anyone else wonder that?

scrawling a pie crust recipe from a decades old cookbook (lined with notes, hole punched index cards inserted, pages half falling out-- something like a spellbook), receiving dictation, advice to practice. "once you start making pies, dear, no one will let you stop." she tells us she made the crust, then set out for fresh berries, daunted by a stand that wasn't there.

i listen and feel warm, that a whole sunday could be spent this way. that at the end of the day you have something no one in their right mind would refuse, and it was whipped out of its separated, lonely parts into a thing of magic, something that makes people happy. blue stained teeth and large grain sugar melting on the tongue.

here i am poised, fingers on the asdf. past training, right hand of course on the jkl;, i wonder as always if my talents go beyond the conditioned and re-conditioned. goddamn it, i want to say no but i correct always my mistakes, a "born proofreader"..... it's wrong to spell anything wrong, even in the throes of unrelenting thought...

here are some of the eve:

my best friend:

• sophomoric perhaps, to say *my best friend*, i have had a few, each is so dear and yet lost, each and every me and so not me: what does it mean to have this best friend: is it someone who will understand you no matter what? i feel; that is impossible. and so: what is , who is, a best friend? what is the definition?

• the one i would like to say so, she recently called me out: "you only call me when you're in the car." my response, "I'm never home...." an implicit sense of guilt, a feeling that my life is focused on the wrong, a love that is hindered by everyday life. as much as i wish is was not so....it is so.

my life, whatever that may mean:

• i have aspirations to act. though i am ridiculous at forms of playacting, theoretically i long for the real faking in front of a camera. paul has made me a subject for various film projects, albeit in what i think of as an "academia" format. nonetheless, i am so shy in front of a "crowd", but i know my own spurts of extraversion, and it screams for a forum. motivation for this forum should be a top priority, why isn't it? why i don't tend to the things * i* need is the same reason my houseplants suffer so.

on everyday life:

• i am so blue. call it winter, whatever, this hibernate yields nothing, perhaps tears only, which are prayers in and of themselves. but yonder my love sleeps, unresolved, and tonight we fought, as the night before and the night before, and any previous life i may have had seems only nostaligia, and where might i go from here?.....both of us happy at the same time seems like the days of dating (impossible to recreate), not necessarily a goal to aspire to. him happy only breeds resentment, myself happy only feels selfish, 18. and is happiness the penultimate anyway, and if so, why?

i long for any answer(s), yet scoff at anything anyone else has to tell. it has to come from me, yet my heart has a closed brain, a closed mouth.... while my brain has a closed heart, so little room for idealism, for poeticism.....all is rooted in the practical, and i despise myself while making excuses...

mayhap, can anyone tell me, ought i to give up the search for any true meaning of life? my nails are once again bitten to the quick, i can't ever seem to resist the nervous hope that there's just *more*, more to life than this......

yet when (or how) can that hope ever be assuaged?

it bothers me like crazy that this hip loft type look is all over tv and catalog and magazine pages. chic baskets, clear acrylic end tables, pendulum lights, metal, glass, those new looking kinds of hardwood floors and swedish lines in all the furniture. super functional, throw in that tad of retro or futuristic "to soften the look", everything coordinating in some perfect color wheel smear. that look is all over the place, all up in your target. it's like "look at me-i live in a loft. i love my loft. wanna come hang out in my loft? if you do anything to fuck up my loft, i'll kill you."

but i know the reason it bothers me so, which is even more bothersome, and that is that design is everywhere, everywhere! and i love it, i love all of it and i don't have the slightest how to sort out the line from the form from the texture from the color and how to put it all together but how i WANT to know and how if i had taken the leap years ago when i thought i was "getting a little too old to go to school for four more years" (ha) this would have been my last semester i think and through all my flavors of the month design has really stayed way there on the backburner, my heart barely giving it enough flame.

and why is that, i ask myself. you've been trying so long to figure it out what you really want to do, maybe you've known for a long time and are just wasting time so if it's design (and you think it is) -why not just jump now?

well that's easy. and it really is the easier thing, i guess, to just be so afraid that you do nothing. i have 42,651 reasons for not doing it (#1? i can't even DRAW), but only 1 or 2 little ones for doing it <i think it would be super fun?> i am just too scared.

but then i looked in the sunday classies today. and its offerings might just be scarier. no one ever says 'i want to be an account manager when i grow up'. hi little girl me: here i am. i want something lush, juicy, something that makes my heart sing. i want to work not with yellow or green but with 'marigold' or 'verdelicious'. how do you get to be the person who names colors anyway. i want *that* job.
how's "pancreas" or "psychosomatic".

i get mad sometimes at paul for not having the "secure", benefits generating, "regular gig" type thing that i do, and for doing things that he gets to create. of course part of the anger is jealousy, and of course underneath it all i admire him for throwing all the aforementioned "steady job" bullsheeit away and pursuing and finding. it's cool, but what happens if i don't make it? then we're forever on this wobbly ground, with a heap of degrees and debt. but what happens when i'm fifty and the kids i've finally decided to have are raised, and i'm always saying to myself "maybe i could have been a great designer? or even just, a designer."
yikes, i guess i'm saying that now......

oh, i love love love those goddamned clear acrylic end tables.

sometimes i get to feeling about how i feel things so much differently from others, then i see how silly that is because you just can't know how someone else ever feels things. it's like you think you're so different but because everyone is so different it makes you realize that everyone started somewhere with the same blank canvas. paul asked me on a lovely citytraipse, haven't you ever wondered if happiness feels different to someone else? well yes, but i haven't in so long that i said no. i forgot that i used to. wonder about those things and others, even. it is tough to get a little caught up in yourself, and in the humdrum. it makes you think that living inside someone else would be viral, instead of magical. i need some warm glowing oil into my wide open throat.


avocado, you fatty veggie
some texture that the gods have whipped
an oblong eighth
like the thorax of some delectable soft bug
like devouring those perfect juicy rooms
you only see on design magazine pages.


went to washington market today. cute, and not too pricy atall, for neither ready made foods nor groshmeries. my sangwich (california chicken) was super good and had avocadoes on it, prompting my props. i was delighted by the place, it was very "market"-y and downtown, which is just great. however, being a connoisseur of lazy pierogi salad, don't get theirs. that's all the smack I'm gonna talk.

every day
and in every way
i am getting
better and better.

can you believe that?
that's crazy talk.

i dreamed i was in a roomful of pregnant pious women who were having a christian arm waving and singing ceremony while seated in a big pregnant circle. i remember i lazed about on the floor, lolled from time to time in postures of boredom, and rolled my eyes a fair bit. i remember thinking with a small bit of fear, when the arms really started waving, that it was all very cultish.

the night before i dreamed i found a baby in a gutter. it was gray and so tiny and i thought it was dead but when i touched it it was warm. in that second i wanted it and something strange happened in my dreamheart like i would do anything for it, even find its real mother. there was a supermodern tech convention going on in a glass and metal building behind us. a woman who was tailgating in a desperate way with another woman and a sleeping child decided to help me. she walked down an empty street straight north. somehow i knew she was in search of some collective mother, some abstract "good". i didn't really want her to find it. i wanted the baby: half dead, beautiful.

what the heck is going on with these dreams?

goddamn it, that post just made me mad at myself. it felt like putting on an old glove. i went and put on a sweater and realized it's warming an old lady's heart. startover.


Song for an Unused Piano

i swear to god, you won't be
lonely for too much more long
there are so many gloves in the world
but i will come to you with these bare hands
freezing
i will play you like a virtuoso of goofiness
make you feel like you're full of chemicals
make you wish you were in tune
you and i will roll around on that unlived in living room floor
your strings struggling with letters, dying to scream.
i'd make it happen, if i knew how,
and your keys would tremble with my name
everytime i passed you
on the way to the teevee.

evry'1!

my house is a perpetual mess. i have so little capacity for joy. i found out i am really no one (a quote, so true).

would yu like to have a party?


i feel full of a defective gene, a propensity for unrealized realization, a renewed relazyation. something pink, black, and aqua blu. the mobile of the future, wondering when above my bed it will be born to catch my dreams.

iwe have a piano, we never use it. it is the lonesomest piece of percussion, so out of tune. there is no day that a bunch of chemicals will be poured over it, and so it has nothing to look forward to. i am hoping to develop it. it is a resolution, that word that means nothing will happen.

bzzaz.

the time is near: perpetual night
for ungrowing in flourescent fright
for gloom and dim and scrounge for light
for winds and massive frozen might

to sleep, to eat, to knit perchance
to struggle with the limp houseplants
this is the waltz of winter's stance
a rhythm yet a ghastly dance

for now let color fill the eyes,
and sunshine be a sweet surprise,
let leaves be carried with the sighs
of autumn's final lullabies

oftentimes throughout my life, i have felt like god might not care that much, might be languishing for all eternity (which to us might be a katydid's walk to the next eucalyptus tree, or a chicken's peck to the next corn kernel) ha-ha'ing at its creation, amused by the follies and foibles of man.

not so over the last few days, for which i feel truly and unconditionally blessed, for which i feel there is no such thing as this funny thing we call "luck," only what you choose to make yourself a circumstance of. and those things are by name: to be a willing and humble servant of the fates, to be a hopeful apprentice of artemis, to hold a worshipful reverence of autumnal mysteries, to have an open heart always to meeting jesus in the middle, a devotion to the unknown, and a song and praise for that which belongs to others, to yourself, to no one, and to everyone: the right to boundless love, as much as you ask for! it shall be there, somehow or another, and in the smallest of things god tells us that.



thank you matthew, for your paper collage and your photograghs. don't ever doubt your eyes, for inherent in them is a hope and understanding that only love can lend. and that you have in abundance.

otherwise ain't you, or me, or ain't none of our friends n famblys'd be here. and i like bein here....

i am reading Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. in some ways it is a bit sophomoric at times, and a platform for one man's beliefs (other novels by same author? this is a one hit wonder i believe...) but essentially it is a beautiful story, and very much requires your "rational self" to just shut up for a while.

the premise: a gorilla, kept in captivity in the mid 1900s and through a series of fortunate events, becomes educated and learns to communicate via telepathy to humans. being an objective outsider, and a scholar from the time of "identity" *(a name, and an understanding of that name as individuality) he seeks a student. he gains such (our narrator), and the instruction that follows is the "plot."

his teachings, through a series of rather mind blowing "steps" lead to the uncloaking of "Taker Mythology," basically how Takers, or "modern thinkers" (ie western ideology) have created a history in which evolution has led to basically (of course), to us. evolution did not "mean" for mollusks or playtypi or killer bees to be the pinnacle of creation. that is man. and so, we have invented for ourselves an undeniable right to power, because why on earth would we be the height of creation yet made to live like common "beasts". while we can admit that we are royally fucking things up, part of our mythology (to make ourselves feel better? to blame it on the gods?) is that there is something inherently wicked in human nature, that something in us "can't help it." we were evolved for power, and power we must take or perish. also inherent in our mythology is a need for a prophet, a divine yet fleshly hero (because as conscious thinking feeling beings we were given the right to conceive of such figures) who will tell us how to live and interact, in the "human community."

this is contradicted, though not so overtly so as to make you ill, by Leavers. i have not gotten to leaver culture or leaver mythology yet in the book but there's enough there to know that the leavers are what we (takers) would call indiginous tribes. those who we call "left behind" by history. and that the leavers don't need to believe themselves full of inherent sin, or to have a prophet, because they are living by the laws of nature, in accordance with the earth and with animal societies, and learn that way how best to carry on.

this gets me to thinking in a way i haven't in a long time: is it possible to truly live in harmony with nature, raised as we were in this culture? no, no, and no, but what if you want that, truly want it knowing all the things we call comforts, infact our very way of life, would be obliterated completely? you can't just go to south america or something and be like "here i am, i want to live like you, can i be in your tribe?" and neither does it seem you can just create your own, it's too late for that no matter how we might try to idealize it, that's just it: it's idealizing. and any children raised in that manner, i truly believe, as soon as there was an inkling of what the "real world" (ha) was about, would be off like a shot, and hating the parents and extended family of that tribe for everything since birth, since they were kept from a culture that valued so highly the individual potential for gain and more of the same.
how did it all come to be this way? this is a central premise of the book, and comes fairly close to an inkling, which is further than i've gotten in a while.

from the book:

The most fundamental difference was that in Africa I was a member of a family-of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their fa
mi
ly is like a hand, of which they are fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas-but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.
I considered the matter of our feeding. Human children dream of a land where the mountains are ice cream and the trees are gingerbread and the stones are bonbons. For a gorilla, Africa is just such a land. Wherever one turns, there is something wonderful to eat. One never thinks "Oh, I'd better look for some food." Food is everywhere, and one picks it up almost absentmindedly, as one takes a breath of air. In fact. one does not think of feeding as a distinct activity at all. Rather, it's like a delicious music that plays in the background of all activities throughout the day."

if it's like this for gorillas in Africa, why not for humans there or in the Americas as well?