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.