the baby has been doing trapeze artist tricks in there, and it creates the god-weirdest ache in my cervix. 'ow, my cervix' is a curious thing to be saying a few times a day. i cannot quite tell which body part is causing the sharp one-two jabs. all of them, i think.

here is a tiny rhyme about it:

my baby floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee
it's my cervix vs. muhammed ali
punch and jab and kick and spar
out of myself is beaten the tar.



also, i'm so sentimental these days. over the weekend i almost started crying because of takeo spikes's achilles tendon thing. i don't even know what the man looks like, that's how much i follow football. but man, that's a tough row to hoe.

it would be my fortune that just as i finally procure a library card, the library closest to me is closing, permanently. the flourescent paper that declares so is quite sad. though i accept that some libraries *have* to close, and that the 'system' is doing its best to keep all areas of the city well served. we have been lucky so far in that (previously) we were in the top five cities for libraries per capita, or something like that. also, most other libraries charge you to request items and to rent movies, buffalo's didn't (but will starting october 1st, blech).

also there was a fairly entertaining dylan doc on pbs last night, which continues tonight. some of the footage was quite astounding, it provided a nice pictorial/video supplement to the 'story,' which was basically dylan's own 'chronicles: vol 1' with some interviews of contemporaries thrown in. that's why i say 'fairly entertaining' since if you read the book, the film (at least this first part) isn't telling you anything you don't already know. plus if you are a big dylan fan you will most likely already know a ton of this stuff. but dylan's own commentary is a great deal less miserable and vague than seen previously and he actually gets a light in his eyes during a few reminisces. it occured to me, both reading the book and seeing the film, that fame like his is not in the least enviable. you have three, maybe four generations putting all this meaning on songs, words, feelings, and attitudes you can never recreate. deifying you. you yourself may have never known the meaning, and after a certain time, your life changes and you probably don't care like you once may have. you tour, you keep performing since that is your line of work, but (most of) the crowd is expecting those old washed out now threadbare anthems you've done thousands of times, in countless versions, endless cities, in front of hundreds of thousands of old timers and kid hippies, for decades. i'd be pretty miserable as well. but, at what price fame. and i'm making him sound all played out and used up, as if he relies on all those old tunes to get him through, when really 'love and theft' kicks ass. judging from a show i saw a few years back in columbus, he has himself an excellent time playing from that. he's writing his memoirs and appearing in films by martin scorsese, about him. i guess life can't be too bad.

last night i dreamed of two massive eagles with especially large claws, flying just a few feet from the surface of some pristine lake who knows where, hopefully somewhere on this earth, a secret place on mama nature's body as yet undefiled by man's repugnant touch...

anyhow, one of the eagles spotted its catch and swooped down, scooping with its claws but missing, so very quickly it plunged itself into the water in a shallow arc and emerged victorious in the air with a monstrous, delectable salmon. it was awesome. i felt that.

yesterday i witnessed a very happy, very large man riding an old fashioned aqua blue bicycle.

a few days before that, i got to see my baby's face in 4D.

the world is fucking amazing, in't it?

sparrow (finally) caught a bird and left it for us for a present. unfortunately, it was not discovered until it set to stinkin in the 'junk' room we don't use that much. so paul swept it up and dumped it in the trash. i feel bad because i had always kept it in mind that when cats do that it is truly giving a gift, and he should be praised and thanked appropriately. well, who knows when he actually dropped it off, and since the reaction was less than stellar, he may not ever do this again. aw. sorry, little hunter. carry on, do.

matthew's zoo pics reminded me that sometimes at night from our room (which opens up to a backyard porch), we can hear some kind of zoo animal warbling? yowling? lowing? bellowing? moaning? singing? crying? yodeling? ....some combo. the first few times i heard it i thought it was a far off dog, perhaps ill, whose howl got distorted over the distance. then for some reason i thought someone had a llama in their backyard (hey, i have pregnancy brain, ok??? and the pseudo-mansions around here have some big (and of course, fenced and bushed) backyards). i did not even think about the fact that we live near the zoo until our landlord, who came over to fix something, asked if we've heard the zoo animals yet. duh! anyway, it's quite impressive, since it is quite a few blocks away, but also very sad. a plaintive, displaced sound. i will not go to zoos because i get too blue about the whole state of affairs. there's a lot of arguments and counterarguments and reasons and pros and cons and the like, but what it all boils down to is it just makes me *sad* that they're in there. as for what i am going to do when the baby is four or five and wants to go, i do not know......

also in the hood some moneyed folks were having quite the backyard karaoke party last saturday night. yikes! four reps of dancin' queen, each sung by equally hideous though surely different generational females is quite enough for me. i will not enjoy that song evermore. it was fabulous free entertainment though. abruptly, it stopped, which led us to believe that some other moneyed folks may have called the police for disturbing the peace of our perpetually quiet area. p and i were saying how a party in our house would be unenjoyable b/c the neighbors and hood are so still, and music/noise would surely be frowned upon at least. a shame. i miss you, north pearl!! do i feel an ode coming on?? i do, i do!!

ode to north pearl

dearest railroad style apt
i miss that funky brick wall in the kitchen
what became of the courtyard sludge bucket, (surprise!! (ha))
and now no jaunty sparrow climbs that rickety escape to the roof.

we have flowers here too
though much less crack cocaine
i used to walk in antique daydreams
streets leaking slowly histories.

you will be restored to some former glory
huge and barely lived in by two busy people
maybe some echo of a good time will resound in the closet they'll preserve,
i sure hope so, the baby was conceived there.






i won the lottery! my uncle gave me a scratcher called "fat cat" and laughed because i'm 'fat', then i went and won a benjamin. ha ha and hell's yeah! *someone* i know says unfortunately it's not yahoo money this week, but i say screw that, mama's buying herself......hm. what? it is funny how when you're not working you don't need and want things the same way. or maybe i am in the detached from material items cycle. before i might have blown it going out, eating, drinking, carousing. i think i am finally learning how to be quieter.

maybe i could go to some pub at say, three in the pm, play a bunch of jukebox songs and have a pepsi (which sometimes causes my eyes to roll back in my head it's so goddam good: allowable but slightly naughty...) there's something so awful about going to a bar when you're pregnant tho. i can't remember the last time i was in one. am i missing anything? nah.....

it's baffling when two people who have been married quite a long time suddenly hate each other, and have so many vicious things to say, and messy proceedings begin. it only makes sense for communicating well to be the base of one's friendship, love, relationship, commitment, marriage, what have you, yet still pathways of talking and emotion get unusable if they ever were to begin with, and shows like jerry and maury rack in the moolah......and divorce lawyers get rich, and people continue on with the ridiculousness of all these diversions from truth.

hate is still passion. passion is a kind of love. so when people really go at it, they're just distracting themselves from some kind of powerful feeling they don't want to admit is there. where there are feelings, something ought to be salvedgeable, yes/no?

this is just one piece of the baffle box pie that has been placed in front of me as of late. do i eat or just sit there with my thumb in it?

the beautiful (but still baffling) hunk of the pie: the human knitting up in my belly is almost complete. he or she does a lot of rolling around and a fair amount of kicking and punching. i am hoping she or he will be a dancer, or an acrobat, or maybe start a fight club. all in all it has been a lightning fast pregnancy so far and holy shit, i am soon to be someone's mother. milk is going to come out of my breasts. that is some insane business right there.

dr. cl, i very much appreciate your concern and reply. it helped. also, your tour pics are grand. we have a good friend who teaches architecture at fayetteville and moved there from up here. and *i* was an english major as well....which i never knew about you, so it seems we have something in common.

springf, i hope you are ok....screaming in the car helps a lot too.

for a cd that is perfect for walking around in this shifting weather, i highly recommend "a ghost is born" by wilco......beautiful and bittersweet, just like summer's end.

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?