(no subject)
commercialism is so translucent. i suppose, working in the mall, it's really gotten to me. try this NEW crap, which glows in the dark!
i'm a terrible family member, friend, and lover for this reason alone: if we don't directly cross paths, i may not speak to you for weeks, and it wouldn't have anything to do with anything you did or that i'm feeling. i'll think to myself, "gantt called! i wonder what he wanted. i'll call him back in a minute." and the minute just SNOWBALLS into WEEKS. i come home from work, i take a shower, i do some laundry, slave through another page, rewrite the page (i've actually been tumbling in a landslide of inspiration lately, and have added more than 20 pages to my second novel), maybe go out to a bar or a show on some good nights, or catch up on so-you-think-you-can-dance, and then boom, it's 2 am and i should get to sleep because i have work in the morning. of course, things directly interact with me and distract me. it must be my perception of time. a few days ago (probably weeks ago), a friend of mine reminded me that they missed me and wanted to hang out, and i said that i'd been meaning to get in touch with them. they said they'd left me a message two weeks ago, and i thought no, it was a few days ago, i was just about to get back to you, and i checked my log, and it had been TWO WEEKS. my voicemail gets so backed up the messages delete themselves before i hear them. i hope this is an "artist" thing, and not a "crazy" thing. there's a short story i wrote based around this theme, which i included below. it's called "disappearing." it's still a little rough, imperfect, but appreciable bones are there.
i'm single now, but it feels good. i feel strong in it. if i didn't have katy, i probably wouldn't feel so strong. that's my roommate.
there's a girl who is pretty perfect for the cover of Vanity who's interested in doing it, and wants to see an excerpt. exciting. hopefully she likes it.
The purpose of life is all around us all the time. A storm converges in the East and I light a candle and lay down, enjoying the ensuing serenade. It may be the only chance I get and in that space of time, someone dies. I know they do. They vibrate and dissipate across the ether and the final lit compartment of the opposing apartment is extinguished. I go to do the dishes and find the romantic ketchup spattering of meals long gone. They are now enmeshed with the corpses of fruit flies. I hesitate-Arthur ate from this plate-before running the water over the sponge. Recall what a wise man once said: we can improve upon our memory by building thought mansions, storing entire days in one room, flashbacks in drawers. So I seal up that dirty plate forever, placing it next to the orange starburst of a thrashed cigarette ember. (It'd sprayed across my lap and I had breathed “It's beautiful,” to which Arthur replied, “You ascribe the word 'beauty' to too many things and dilute its meaning.”)
I wonder what brought the fruit flies in. Perhaps the rotting grapefruit. I've always loved the enigmatic aroma of a softly rotting grapefruit.
I continue to mop at a cup and someone nudges me from behind; I jolt. “Your mother called while you were out,” my boss is informing me. He always startles me. He's too clean, he comes out of nowhere, scrubbing the colors out of my periphery. “I told her you'd call her back on your break.” Mother says goodbye and we hang up the phone. I don't call her enough and can never think of anything to say when I do. Life is fine and she floats away. Everything is so weightless lately. The next time we talk, she says it's been almost a month and she's worried about me. I'm standing utterly still. Have I entertained the company of the moon so many nights and can still think of nothing to say? I'm riding a conveyor belt through work, touching things, saying things, registering nothing. Where do the days go? I fully grasp minutes, I know I do, and yet the days evaporate behind me, both the days and the money. I stand in the shade of a tree, watch the sunlight filter through the canopy, and have to be reminded of the date. Rent's due soon. I stand on the balcony, contemplate the wind and how it dismembers smoke, oh wind, walk inside, and bam, I'm shaking hands with some guy I'm told is named Nick and it's Friday night. A grinning old friend has convinced me to leave the house in a borrowed dress and I'm at some bar and incredibly uncomfortable while sports and fashion and crime and celebrity buzz about me. But it doesn't matter too much; I know that if I sit down, finger the ledge of my glass, and just occasionally dissolve, the night will be over in one flip of the page. It's a dangerous game. I am pure inertia when there is no significance at play. I'm surrounded by plastic and bells, plastic and bells, the laughter and color of an ironic parade.
Nick is going blah, blah, blah when there is some pivotal performance on the television mounted above the bar, and as the floor goes up in cheers, I step quietly into my thought mansion. I try not to linger too long inside. My mother is visible from any window, standing with her back to me, enjoying a strip of beach at dusk. She never turns to face me. I head up the stairs, the banister maintaining an eerie wobble. There are quarters reserved for Arthur up here. He stays and stands and waits. There are love letters strewn across the table like unopened mail. I love the letters I wrote to Arthur almost more than I loved Arthur. I tear one open and it erupts into the orange starburst of a thrashed cigarette ember. I hiss and throw the envelope and Nick says, “I love this song!” We aren't at the bar anymore. We're in the belly of some throbbing, iridescent beast. It must be another night entirely; I'm wearing a different dress. I descend into the crowd grasping his sweaty hand. Two things I've learned about Nick: he loves techno music and cocaine. I find myself carried along by the extravagance of the others, too passive to fight the undertow. The next time I resurface in the tactile world, I am staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. The faucet is running. My dress is drenched. What a vulgar courtship.
I would fit in a lot better if I were dying of tuberculosis in France a hundred years ago. They knew how to profess love: bouquets of flowers, each with a different meaning, discreetly delivered to the secret object of their affection (a spider flower meaning “Elope with me,” the horned yellow blossom of a Bird's Foot Trefoile signifying revenge). There was no beer, bong, bed cha-cha-cha then. There has always been pretense, though. Hasn't there? If humanity has excelled at anything, it is creating its own cage. The women sutured into the fine bones of whales. The men and their private rooms, their private plans. Blah blah blah.
Will another hundred years erode another layer of pretense? Or will televisions adapt to play louder and louder? A television is always on somewhere.
I'm wandering through the pharmacy, I feel like a robot with water in its circuits, looking at the shelves and seeing nothing. The products aren't real, only the price tags. But the money with which you pay is also not real, so the price tag is really nothing but more pretense. I'm walking past a towering display and a screen jumps to life, some beautiful old woman accosting me. She's selling eye cream. It has guaranteed results within six weeks. She looks lonely underneath her smile and I pause. What does she look like when she confronts a chill landscape through her window? Has she ever mounted a passion in the swirling leaves of the public eye, the sun behind her crafting a halo? And were their kisses connections or projections? Do we all ultimately die alone? A phone rings and I answer it. I say, “Lately, Mom, I just feel like I'm not touching anything. Or like I am touching everything. Or that I want to be inside of everything and I almost am.” My boss is on the other end of the line. “You're late,” he says, and I grab my keys and disappear into the vortex at the center of the hour glass.
Sometime later I'm having sex, pinned and then catapulting, face-down and then yodeling. The moon is wild and pale in the corner of the window. I'm not thinking about Arthur. I'm not really thinking about anything but this hopeful gesticulation toward magic and I'm peeling back even my aura now, praying this sacred rite will enmesh me like a fruit fly to the plate. Nick has his hand planted firmly on my sternum, and it is not a heartbeat he feels but the roar of the ocean. I gather like waves beneath his palm and the bedroom spills around us, the sheets rushing and receding, rushing and receding. This transmission is an artifact. I called Christ into the room and, tangled in my own underwear, promised him I could be a better person. I must have left though, because I'm stretched out on my bed in total darkness now, smoking a cigarette. I don't normally smoke cigarettes.
A monk, once asked if one should smoke, replied, “What else is life for?”
“And what vegetables would you like on that?” the man at the deli asks. I blink. I have no conversations of consequence anymore. I barely hear anything but the occasional car horn, jarring me from its path. “Oh, extra lettuce,” I say, and dissolve again. I'm like Lot's wife after a good rain: no more looking back. There is this nagging sensation that I am shedding. That I am leaving pieces of myself behind everywhere I go. You may not expect this to feel good, but it does. I am, however, concerned that I am steadily absorbing into the background. I'm concerned that I only materialize now when a physical object interacts with me, though concern is too strong a word. I walk with the sandwich in my hand through sliding glass doors. The parking lot is a hot, pleasant river down which I float. The asphalt turns to dark, wet sand and I'm on the shore of a lake and I'm alone. The birds, sensing my presence, rip across the surface of the water and into the sky. I place the entire airborne flock into my thought mansion, up on some drafty pedestal, encapsulated as if I think I'll live forever and thereby so shall they.
There is a constant layer of separation between me and everything else, a film on which the present beads. I want to taste deeper and deeper. I sink my teeth into a strawberry and then I sink into the strawberry and close my eyes and start to sink and moan like this is a warm, salty bath. I sit at the breakfast table and pour myself some cereal. The milk pouring from the spout is an alabaster waterfall and my saliva glands secrete. Not even out of hunger but because I'm so here. I can't even remember the last time I left my apartment and I have this funny feeling like I'm dying. I am slowly dying. But it does not feel bad. Colors are brighter and I'm touching everything.
I try to recapture the last beach I saw, to conjure the words that evoke that which has passed away: a dark gray swath against a darker gray, tied off at the tip with a white ribbon. And to ascend its dunes was to sacrifice yourself to the enormity of a sliver of sky! The wind would rip and pull at me like a starved lover, fingers in my hair, celebratory of my epic return to the center of the hour-glass. I had wanted nothing more than that moment of breathlessness. Underneath the same moon, we are all granules of sand. But how can a grain of sand feel alone on the beach? It is the beach. But I can't really remember. Strawberry this and strawberry that but you can never taste through words. It is a snow globe in my thought mansion, meticulously constructed to reassure me that this is all real and matters.
It's after midnight and the last thing I can remember doing is looking at the clock and seeing that it is after midnight and then I begin to melt. I am no stranger to melting, although the heat seems to be heightened just now, as if some warm yellow light is trained directly on me. I don't close my eyes anymore. I just let them go unfocused. I cannot remember the last time I slept, or if I never sleep anymore. There is a shifting in the elements around me, a palette that has gotten sloppy with every color. They drip into each other, writhing in a loping circle. The desk becoming the wall becoming the floor becoming me. Fibers of the carpet drip onto my arm and claim it as my veins are moving across the carpet, taking the wall, becoming vines. My face shudders and falls open, spilling with pleasure, running, intertwining. The thought mansion trembles and implodes like a column of ash collapsing under its own weight. Rent and work and death and sex and golden tentacles thrumming, connecting the moment to my veins. I vibrate and dissipate into the ether and I realize I am not dying. I'm singing.
i'm a terrible family member, friend, and lover for this reason alone: if we don't directly cross paths, i may not speak to you for weeks, and it wouldn't have anything to do with anything you did or that i'm feeling. i'll think to myself, "gantt called! i wonder what he wanted. i'll call him back in a minute." and the minute just SNOWBALLS into WEEKS. i come home from work, i take a shower, i do some laundry, slave through another page, rewrite the page (i've actually been tumbling in a landslide of inspiration lately, and have added more than 20 pages to my second novel), maybe go out to a bar or a show on some good nights, or catch up on so-you-think-you-can-dance, and then boom, it's 2 am and i should get to sleep because i have work in the morning. of course, things directly interact with me and distract me. it must be my perception of time. a few days ago (probably weeks ago), a friend of mine reminded me that they missed me and wanted to hang out, and i said that i'd been meaning to get in touch with them. they said they'd left me a message two weeks ago, and i thought no, it was a few days ago, i was just about to get back to you, and i checked my log, and it had been TWO WEEKS. my voicemail gets so backed up the messages delete themselves before i hear them. i hope this is an "artist" thing, and not a "crazy" thing. there's a short story i wrote based around this theme, which i included below. it's called "disappearing." it's still a little rough, imperfect, but appreciable bones are there.
i'm single now, but it feels good. i feel strong in it. if i didn't have katy, i probably wouldn't feel so strong. that's my roommate.
there's a girl who is pretty perfect for the cover of Vanity who's interested in doing it, and wants to see an excerpt. exciting. hopefully she likes it.
The purpose of life is all around us all the time. A storm converges in the East and I light a candle and lay down, enjoying the ensuing serenade. It may be the only chance I get and in that space of time, someone dies. I know they do. They vibrate and dissipate across the ether and the final lit compartment of the opposing apartment is extinguished. I go to do the dishes and find the romantic ketchup spattering of meals long gone. They are now enmeshed with the corpses of fruit flies. I hesitate-Arthur ate from this plate-before running the water over the sponge. Recall what a wise man once said: we can improve upon our memory by building thought mansions, storing entire days in one room, flashbacks in drawers. So I seal up that dirty plate forever, placing it next to the orange starburst of a thrashed cigarette ember. (It'd sprayed across my lap and I had breathed “It's beautiful,” to which Arthur replied, “You ascribe the word 'beauty' to too many things and dilute its meaning.”)
I wonder what brought the fruit flies in. Perhaps the rotting grapefruit. I've always loved the enigmatic aroma of a softly rotting grapefruit.
I continue to mop at a cup and someone nudges me from behind; I jolt. “Your mother called while you were out,” my boss is informing me. He always startles me. He's too clean, he comes out of nowhere, scrubbing the colors out of my periphery. “I told her you'd call her back on your break.” Mother says goodbye and we hang up the phone. I don't call her enough and can never think of anything to say when I do. Life is fine and she floats away. Everything is so weightless lately. The next time we talk, she says it's been almost a month and she's worried about me. I'm standing utterly still. Have I entertained the company of the moon so many nights and can still think of nothing to say? I'm riding a conveyor belt through work, touching things, saying things, registering nothing. Where do the days go? I fully grasp minutes, I know I do, and yet the days evaporate behind me, both the days and the money. I stand in the shade of a tree, watch the sunlight filter through the canopy, and have to be reminded of the date. Rent's due soon. I stand on the balcony, contemplate the wind and how it dismembers smoke, oh wind, walk inside, and bam, I'm shaking hands with some guy I'm told is named Nick and it's Friday night. A grinning old friend has convinced me to leave the house in a borrowed dress and I'm at some bar and incredibly uncomfortable while sports and fashion and crime and celebrity buzz about me. But it doesn't matter too much; I know that if I sit down, finger the ledge of my glass, and just occasionally dissolve, the night will be over in one flip of the page. It's a dangerous game. I am pure inertia when there is no significance at play. I'm surrounded by plastic and bells, plastic and bells, the laughter and color of an ironic parade.
Nick is going blah, blah, blah when there is some pivotal performance on the television mounted above the bar, and as the floor goes up in cheers, I step quietly into my thought mansion. I try not to linger too long inside. My mother is visible from any window, standing with her back to me, enjoying a strip of beach at dusk. She never turns to face me. I head up the stairs, the banister maintaining an eerie wobble. There are quarters reserved for Arthur up here. He stays and stands and waits. There are love letters strewn across the table like unopened mail. I love the letters I wrote to Arthur almost more than I loved Arthur. I tear one open and it erupts into the orange starburst of a thrashed cigarette ember. I hiss and throw the envelope and Nick says, “I love this song!” We aren't at the bar anymore. We're in the belly of some throbbing, iridescent beast. It must be another night entirely; I'm wearing a different dress. I descend into the crowd grasping his sweaty hand. Two things I've learned about Nick: he loves techno music and cocaine. I find myself carried along by the extravagance of the others, too passive to fight the undertow. The next time I resurface in the tactile world, I am staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. The faucet is running. My dress is drenched. What a vulgar courtship.
I would fit in a lot better if I were dying of tuberculosis in France a hundred years ago. They knew how to profess love: bouquets of flowers, each with a different meaning, discreetly delivered to the secret object of their affection (a spider flower meaning “Elope with me,” the horned yellow blossom of a Bird's Foot Trefoile signifying revenge). There was no beer, bong, bed cha-cha-cha then. There has always been pretense, though. Hasn't there? If humanity has excelled at anything, it is creating its own cage. The women sutured into the fine bones of whales. The men and their private rooms, their private plans. Blah blah blah.
Will another hundred years erode another layer of pretense? Or will televisions adapt to play louder and louder? A television is always on somewhere.
I'm wandering through the pharmacy, I feel like a robot with water in its circuits, looking at the shelves and seeing nothing. The products aren't real, only the price tags. But the money with which you pay is also not real, so the price tag is really nothing but more pretense. I'm walking past a towering display and a screen jumps to life, some beautiful old woman accosting me. She's selling eye cream. It has guaranteed results within six weeks. She looks lonely underneath her smile and I pause. What does she look like when she confronts a chill landscape through her window? Has she ever mounted a passion in the swirling leaves of the public eye, the sun behind her crafting a halo? And were their kisses connections or projections? Do we all ultimately die alone? A phone rings and I answer it. I say, “Lately, Mom, I just feel like I'm not touching anything. Or like I am touching everything. Or that I want to be inside of everything and I almost am.” My boss is on the other end of the line. “You're late,” he says, and I grab my keys and disappear into the vortex at the center of the hour glass.
Sometime later I'm having sex, pinned and then catapulting, face-down and then yodeling. The moon is wild and pale in the corner of the window. I'm not thinking about Arthur. I'm not really thinking about anything but this hopeful gesticulation toward magic and I'm peeling back even my aura now, praying this sacred rite will enmesh me like a fruit fly to the plate. Nick has his hand planted firmly on my sternum, and it is not a heartbeat he feels but the roar of the ocean. I gather like waves beneath his palm and the bedroom spills around us, the sheets rushing and receding, rushing and receding. This transmission is an artifact. I called Christ into the room and, tangled in my own underwear, promised him I could be a better person. I must have left though, because I'm stretched out on my bed in total darkness now, smoking a cigarette. I don't normally smoke cigarettes.
A monk, once asked if one should smoke, replied, “What else is life for?”
“And what vegetables would you like on that?” the man at the deli asks. I blink. I have no conversations of consequence anymore. I barely hear anything but the occasional car horn, jarring me from its path. “Oh, extra lettuce,” I say, and dissolve again. I'm like Lot's wife after a good rain: no more looking back. There is this nagging sensation that I am shedding. That I am leaving pieces of myself behind everywhere I go. You may not expect this to feel good, but it does. I am, however, concerned that I am steadily absorbing into the background. I'm concerned that I only materialize now when a physical object interacts with me, though concern is too strong a word. I walk with the sandwich in my hand through sliding glass doors. The parking lot is a hot, pleasant river down which I float. The asphalt turns to dark, wet sand and I'm on the shore of a lake and I'm alone. The birds, sensing my presence, rip across the surface of the water and into the sky. I place the entire airborne flock into my thought mansion, up on some drafty pedestal, encapsulated as if I think I'll live forever and thereby so shall they.
There is a constant layer of separation between me and everything else, a film on which the present beads. I want to taste deeper and deeper. I sink my teeth into a strawberry and then I sink into the strawberry and close my eyes and start to sink and moan like this is a warm, salty bath. I sit at the breakfast table and pour myself some cereal. The milk pouring from the spout is an alabaster waterfall and my saliva glands secrete. Not even out of hunger but because I'm so here. I can't even remember the last time I left my apartment and I have this funny feeling like I'm dying. I am slowly dying. But it does not feel bad. Colors are brighter and I'm touching everything.
I try to recapture the last beach I saw, to conjure the words that evoke that which has passed away: a dark gray swath against a darker gray, tied off at the tip with a white ribbon. And to ascend its dunes was to sacrifice yourself to the enormity of a sliver of sky! The wind would rip and pull at me like a starved lover, fingers in my hair, celebratory of my epic return to the center of the hour-glass. I had wanted nothing more than that moment of breathlessness. Underneath the same moon, we are all granules of sand. But how can a grain of sand feel alone on the beach? It is the beach. But I can't really remember. Strawberry this and strawberry that but you can never taste through words. It is a snow globe in my thought mansion, meticulously constructed to reassure me that this is all real and matters.
It's after midnight and the last thing I can remember doing is looking at the clock and seeing that it is after midnight and then I begin to melt. I am no stranger to melting, although the heat seems to be heightened just now, as if some warm yellow light is trained directly on me. I don't close my eyes anymore. I just let them go unfocused. I cannot remember the last time I slept, or if I never sleep anymore. There is a shifting in the elements around me, a palette that has gotten sloppy with every color. They drip into each other, writhing in a loping circle. The desk becoming the wall becoming the floor becoming me. Fibers of the carpet drip onto my arm and claim it as my veins are moving across the carpet, taking the wall, becoming vines. My face shudders and falls open, spilling with pleasure, running, intertwining. The thought mansion trembles and implodes like a column of ash collapsing under its own weight. Rent and work and death and sex and golden tentacles thrumming, connecting the moment to my veins. I vibrate and dissipate into the ether and I realize I am not dying. I'm singing.