If you don't click on THIS, I will find you and throw up on you.

i have decided to view my time here as an artistic retreat.  it's kind of like a sensory deprivation chamber.

i've always wanted to try one of those out.  see how long it takes to see snakes again.  i used to see snakes everywhere in illinois.  i would try to fall asleep but after closing my eyes i would see snakes of light in my eyelids.  when i opened my eyes, the snakes flew out of my eyelids and grew into space.

last night was fantastic.  i made friends and influenced people.  we were under the influence.  i told tom he was taller than i thought he should be.  just that when i pictured this person in my mind, he was not as tall.  he had only been in my mind for five minutes, but it was a very strong impression.

***

my pal sent me a speech by david foster wallace.  this is water. it is a great thing to remember.  that this is water.  or maybe this is air.  possibly toilet paper.  you can't have egyptian cotton for your ass at all times.

for work, i have to somehow code a lot of free responses to a survey. i did a find and replace for key words, changing, for instance "achievement gap" to a 1. next, i'll extract the numeric info from the variable in a stat program.

in the meantime, these are the goals of our schools:

reducing 8
closing the 1
improving 3s scores
preserving 5
stay 8ly solvent
provide quality 11 development
improving the success of 3
modernize 10
maintain a balanced 8
exceed 7
purchasing new textbooks and 13
be accountable for 2
create a 6 going culture

i had not lived in my own world for 387 days.  it is a strange thing to live in someone else's brain.

for instance, i forgot all about ambulatory.  and was able to rediscover logjam.  jesus that word is satisfying.  i imagine the impact, the resulting crashing sounds as log rams up against the jam.  that word could punch a bitch out.  

B B
U B U
I U B I
L I U L
D L i D
I D L I I d
N I d N L L R g
G N i G I S And B e m
S G N SH a
s g y
S b
e

B                 B                                                             

U    B          U                  b

I     U   B      I          b       u

L     I    U     L          u        i

D    L    i      D         I        l    

I     D   L      I           l         d     u            I   d

N    I    d     N        L    L     i      i     R               g

G    N   i      G    I             S And  B                        e  m

S     G   N     SH                                                       a

-     s   g                                                              y

-     -    S                                                         b 

-                                                                e

we have been burdened by impossible dreams of effectiveness for too long. our grandmothers can no longer carry the lumber. we should excoriate the wind and fill our cups with gravity. the universe cannot hold out for infinity.

it is useless to be angry with the sidewalk.

the rain is starting to erode my sense of well-being. i imagine gullies and craters in rock made by nothing other than drops of water. it has been raining for 48 years now. the neanderthals were the last to see the sun. we saw cave drawings and wondered what it was all about. i am not yet sure where my gullies will be, but i know i will give the cat no more catnip.

my boss told me about her nightmare caused by the rain. we were on our way to a briefing at the capital. the sea came up out of itself, overfilled and gushing forth. there was a family with a small boy. she said she somehow could feel some sympathy for the boy, even though she was clearly not in danger. there were sea monsters and vultures waiting for the dead bodies of the family. normal animals of the sea had become engorged and swelled to terrifying proportions. she noted that even in her REM state of terror, the yellow sea monsters with polka dots were only half-assed, and probably not really monsters. questionable monsters. disney sea monsters that were laughably un-terrifying.

i cannot tell if i am becoming more crazy or more sane. i have no evidence that this is a unidimensional spectrum. i feel expansive. if i were walking through a village, i would have a jolly laugh.

i don't think you understand. I get sad when I visit gas stations on highways with no real towns or cities in sight. when i see old men with hybrid mullet-rattail hairdos working in the post office. there are three of them here. one wears those tacky circular glasses that darken in the sunlight. i can barely bare to visit suburbs anymore. i want to weep. that's dramatic: "weep." i mean, i never shed a tear, but i always feel like the atmospheric pressure has risen. things constrict. i can't help but to imagine living that life. handing people packages or cigarettes. driving home through the fields of traffic and scorn to your trailer or edward scissorhands house. turning on your television while you microwave a pasty burrito with chemical names in the ingredients. the horrible television people must be watching. there's scientific evidence. are you imagining this now? i remember the sickness of going to pizza hut and walmart and driving around and around to try to get lost but you know every fucking stalk of corn like a good neighbor's house. i remember how sad my ankles were in that town.

being human really just means seeking out confirmation of your view of the world. we want our thought machines to be similar enough to others. otherwise, we feel incredibly alone.

Favorite Sentences

If you're a super-attentive reader, hanging on all of my words (what a precipitous thought), then you'll know that I have found particularly pleasing sentences of late. I decided this should be an on-going collection. Each day, I will gather up my favorite sentence and splay it here. It cannot be something I have said, but something I have read, heard out of context, or found on the street.

You are welcome to play along in the comment section if you are so inspired.

1/19: Where it is introduced into a family I need not say how sad the consequences are, both to the furniture and the morals.

1/20: Send me a bill for your failures.

1/21: I was in the kitchen; the year was fall.

1/22:Her husband, Kurt, an engineer and federal employee, sometimes seems to be baiting her by placing plastic yogurt cups in the garbage.

1/23: Just sitting still will earn you these points because you are receiving Spanish passively.

1/24: You should never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs

strenuous selection period of a
german graduate
capable of disdain and distance
awkwardness to glimpse
inefficiency machine giving materials
will need weeks for jars of jam
memory produced proper dinner
motivate lady-like demeanor
overcome resentment and go home.

OR

strenuous selection period of
awkwardness visiting inefficiency
week four's challenge
jar of jam and difficulty color-coordinating
the catchphrase
unable to maintain lady-like demeanor
Grand prize of $3.00

To the sensitive wedding on
central triumph
life
which must experience
terrible pay of sex

this point, actually anticipate beware
advantage forgotten
give little give otherwise
orgy of the other hand

painful beginning home
cases forgeo sexual initiation
ideal offspring
average man

men permit months of frequency
feigned arguments late seduction
clever denying reduced methods
end of the fifth

what you need is
a nordic man-bride.
it's clearer than ever
what is the heart of this matter

i used to have a recurring dream. it recurred.
i would pass out and wake up on the subway as
an older black woman
always wearing polyester and a downturned expression, an afro with blurred edges
what happened was
we had switched bodies while i passed out.
i still had my education in my head, but she had my diplomas
i had clothes and friends but she had my closet and their phone numbers
i think there were three or four kids waiting for me back at my new rundown apartment
i was trapped and i knew i couldn't ever have my life again.
i think i was a grocery worker. something that would numb your mind like arctic saltwater
it was terrifying
i feel like i'm using a lot of 'i's here and also that i'm waking up in someone's body
there is very little polyester involved, and there's no public transportation here

this is how my intestines fell out: i found a hole in my stomach. i could see in that small misshapen and sticky oval an off-white and pink rubber bulge. this does not happen everyday, an off-white and pink rubber bulge poking out of one's stomach.
i immediately began looking for answers on the internet. Search terms I used included:

rubber stomach hole worms
oval with things poking out stomach
why does my stomach hurt hole what pink bulge oval explanation
history abdominal holes feminist
michael jackson cause of death

i thought maybe if i opened the hole a little wider, i would have better search terms. michael jackson died of an apparent homicide. acute propofol intoxication, aka magic milk.

i began to finger the bulge. i could press it back in. it felt foreign, like adulthood. my nails were long. i did not want to puncture this bulge in case it was not actually rubber. or worms. i also do not own a brush with which to wash my nails. to have rubber bits under my nails, this would have disturbed me. a propensity to swear.

anyway. you know what happened next. i met a boy. it was awkward, but on our second date, i asked him to gnaw away the hole so we could get a better look. this was preferable to watching anything on the television. we had already discussed our childhoods.

he took this as an indication that he was going to get lucky. he tried to lick my mouth. look, i said, i just want to have better search terms for this hole in my stomach. do you have intimacy problems? if you were interested in me, you would gnaw away the skin surrounding my hole. i mean, i am ready to gnaw on you. this is what people do when they like each other.

i meant it. i looked at his skin and knew that if he ever asked me to, i would eat his wounds.

he was reluctant. he had never gnawed on anyone before, and he wasn't sure he was ready. couldn't we just take things slow and poke at your stomach for a while?

what an idiot.

after i made it clear that this wasn't going to work out unless he was willing to put 110% into eating my stomach for me, he made an earnest attempt. i lifted up my shirt so that the hole was exposed, we nodded at each other, and he moved to his knees. he began lapping at my hole like a kitten, tonguing the off-white and pink bulge.

of course it wasn't enough. i had made it very clear that he needed to use his teeth. we were gonna make this work, we just needed help. so, we went to therapy to get help for his inadequacies. i thought it might have to do with an ex-girlfriend or maybe a repressed childhood event.

while we went to therapy to address his fear of hole-gnawing, my hole grew bigger. it began to look like sausage casing squeezing out of a glistening red round hole. it was somewhat yellow around the edges. it was clear this had nothing to do with my mother's aloofness or the incident at the pier.

what an idiot.

my intestines were coming out, that's all.

it feels like something has been unlocked in my brain. i have all sorts of projects and stories and worlds swimming in my brain. i want to write more, construct more, paint more, imagine more. my arms are unstuck from my sides. i am no longer bound by the rules of grammar or the clicks of the san bushmen.

Poetry Spam

I find these in my mailbox at work often. I actually read it today, and I will no longer be quickly deleting these.

Enjoy (my favorite line is in bold):

Cophagus'--and, partly to make their acquaintance, partly from a natural aptitude for crime, Sackville Maine followed them, and became an adept in the odious custom. Where it is introduced into a family I need not say how sad the consequences are, both to the furniture and the morals.
Sackville smoked in his dining-room at home, and caused an agony to his wife and mother-in-law which I do not venture to describe. He then became a professed BILLIARD-PLAYER, wasting hours upon hours at that amusement; betting freely, playin

**
I also enjoy that this Sackville became a professed BILLIARD-PLAYER. Are the caps to express disbelief that Sackville could stoop to such an occupation? Who is professing this change? Oh, thank you spam.

it is strange to think about someone who does not think about you. i mean, it's like wondering about Tom Cruise. No one really knows Tom Cruise. Who are we to think about him and his life. This is what we've become, voyeurs in participation, there's no i in teamwork. but there are two in television. there are no real rules for i. it sometimes comes after 'e', even with no 'c' involved.

weird.

at the new years party, people were giving hints about who they were. we were guessing. One guy started yelling, "She's a ho! She's a ho!" He was pointing at her and he struck me as very compelling.

i want to sell my furniture. i've been selling books. it is a relief when i can take something to the post office and send it away. someone else has to put that book in a box now and carry it up to their new apartment.
i've had most of my stuff for at least 7 years. i'm literally a new person now. science tells me so.
i'm going to move again in a few months. i don't want to bring everything with me. it doesn't seem like it fits me anymore. a nesting phase is what my dad called it. that was forever ago. now i envy those sleeping in hammocks with no shelves for their books. there's so much possibility when things are empty.

i liked it better when we had secrets.

also, i told a pal who wanted to read something i wrote about this blog. i told her i don't post here very often anymore. it's okay things are allowed to change.

someone submitted a secret to postsecret saying "venice beach is where my brother buys his heroine." someone else commented that they knew it was a typo, but they loved the idea of buying a heroine on venice beach.

"yeah, she's going to have kill a few ninjas. but don't worry, they're the bad kind. So, uh, can I get a free Lifeguard t-shirt with this?"

I like mistakes. That seems to be where anything interesting ever happens.

i wish my brain was made of only one type of cotton
then i could move to the center of space and become

dominant

there would be no need for water
or
conversations about how things should be going
we could effect normalcy in dance clubs by wearing big hair and lots of makeup.

i have to be incredibly reasonable. it's the only way really. i have no magic. my hands are just made of hand materials. not even high-quality hand materials. they had a sale, i took what i could. i had no hands at the time so it made things slow.

it turns out, i am not a cat person. it's okay, the shelter has a return policy. in the meantime, we've constructed nets of wire and hung pictures of chicken intestines. i think we can safely assume things are going to shape up round here.

another joke is gonna die in this world. it's okay, i was having difficulty laughing with you anymore anyway.

at the end of the day, the golden rule is the best we can do. it used to upset me. flawed logic. really, you should treat others how they want to be treated, not how you want to be treated. but that determination still filters through your brain. you do the best you can. are we done being horrible to each other yet? probably not. it's probably for the best.

thinky post

phew. busy week for my brain. i found this article in the NYT: The Americanization of Mental Illness. It gave me a lot to chew on. My favorite line was about Americans' peculiar habit of psychologizing every day events. We do it to each other, we do it to ourselves, we isolate the individual and attempt to break him or her apart into blocks, some which should be fixed, viewing these blocks like dry skin that needs lotion; a cough that needs some syrup.

I am so unbelievably guilty of this. For the first time maybe ever in my life, I feel completely normal. I am America!

But I think this article was fascinating because it points out the harm in doing this, in isolating individuals, in isolating certain behaviors or neuroses. But damn if I feel like I'm solving a really fun puzzle. I have been doing this incessantly with the writer, with whom I finally had a huge blow-out. It went horribly. I sent an email to him, brimming with my analyses of his behavior, in case he wanted to think about these things in the future. Of course, while sending it I couldn't entirely convince myself that it wasn't entirely presumptuous and, well, a not-good thing to do. but all the conversations in my head had to go somewhere, didn't they?

Nope. And now I feel kind of icky about it. People are whole. Perhaps they should not be nitpicked and analyzed to death. He likes hostile and reluctant women and he can't sexually perform; these are a few traits, and i of course immediately link his inability to have sex to his preferences for hostile women. But why would I assume these are things to fix? First, I love quirky, strange, not-normal people. I have never dated a normal. Second, it is obvious that we're just not going to match given these traits. But I no longer know how I have thought it was perfectly acceptable to break apart his person and identify certain aspects of his abnormal-ness that should be changed to appease me.

Anyway, now I wonder just how badly this habit is interfering with my life. I spent an embarrassing amount of time "figuring out" the writer. Aside from the futility of figuring out a historical figure (as he now is), it deceived me into feeling I understood him better than I probably did. Rather than just having a reaction to the whole situation and behaving accordingly, I spent months trying to pick it apart and assess the probability of X benefit and Y cost and total net enjoyment in a world parametered this way and then the other. I wasted a year going through a time loop no less than three times. THREE TIMES! We had the same reactions, the same behaviors, the same emails in the same order three times in a row. And each time, I picked the situation apart, analyzed it, offered my analysis, and was told to go to hell. And then a few months later, we would wash, rinse and repeat. I was no less than horrified to read through old emails and discover that almost nothing was new. no new words. no new feelings. same ol', same ol'.

God, I wonder if i can ever successfully re-direct my mental energy away from this type of analysis. It seems as bred into me as my eye color. It's also just feeling increasingly un-human of me. to interact with people by breaking them apart like radios and trying to put them back together again. human-looking, but no more than a collection of important experiences, insecurities, and desires i feel competent in disassembling and re-assembling at my whim.

It is time to date a robot. Clearly that is my conclusion.

huh

I rebounded surprisingly quick from this one. I was starting to think it was all due to my happy pills. Getting scared that my brain could no longer do anything for itself.

turns out, i had been taking allergy pills instead of happy pills the whole time.

clear sinuses=happiness.

i really hate feeling depressed. that is the most logically true and obvious statement ever written. maybe.

i hate feeling desperate and naked and small. i tire of reminding myself this is temporary. i wonder if this is going to follow me forever. there's always something horribly wrong. not always. only in months ending in "er" and "y". there's something wrong and i tell myself that when that something wrong is over, when i don't live here anymore, when i'm not doing that anymore, i'll be perky again. i'll say witty things and people will crowd my facebook page with wall posts and send me handmade things and my metabolism will work again and i'll be able to sleep before 3 in the morning and i won't have reasons to dry heave myself to sleep after my body's too exhausted to cry.

but then another month ending in 'er' arrives, and despite the very reputable chinese astrologists who assure me this will be a great year for me, i am fighting through another day. i feel like i am clawing through sand to be able to get to the dessert. i am using awful analogies. my brain isn't working like i want it to. i have bursts of okay-ness, where i don't mind that his world didn't need me in it to keep spinning. it is a good thing i do not date often; every time it doesn't work out it feels like i'm spilt out onto the floor of the state fair.

Edit: It turns out that spilling things out onto the floor was a huge relief. Freedom is very un-depressing.