i am often found to be having a go at:

- having nothing to say to telephones
- quick goodbyes
- hurting my eyes
- wearing tights with safari shorts
- appreciating good bone structure
- karaoke
- off-color humor
- impersonations
- sheep sounds
- sleeping
- not moving
- walking long distances
- biking through traffic, cursing
- maintaining an unhealthy fear of musicmaking
- poor circulation
- large format self-portraits without near completion
- self-reflective postmodern banter
- eating
- not getting hit on
- not realizing if i am in fact being hit on
- kicking ass at pool, until i get overconfident, sloppy, and lose
- air hockey
- not being addicted to smoking
- procrastination
- indecision
- sleeping from caffeine
- not showering
- using inappropriate language
- personifying infinity
- thinking about sex
- considering isolation
- recovering
- saying grievously untrue things
- mostly, furrowing my brow.

collapsable acting

the position of the fulcrum: pull it just a little closer.

hold your breath. sputter, but hold it. choke and pass out. come to. have euphoria.

i've seen you come around the corner, lapels flat and tissue discreet. i've hung a finger on my lower lip. the night before in my bath i took account of our encounters and the hollows i'm developing for you to fill. three glasses of port and five cigarettes later, i can't tell the difference between the steam and the smoke. i think about drowning (as all bathers do) and how this might possibly affect you. i imagine at the moment my lungs fill up, you, miles away, drop a fork and pause. my bath is laced with enough scents to cover up any pungent human death, but i worry about my sphincter loosening. i want annie leibovitz to sanctify my dull life and romanticize my silly corpse. i should book the shot in advance...she's a busy woman. make my last hurrah serene, obvious - yet, why oh why. when the water and me are the same temperature so i can't feel it anymore, i pour in more water from the kettle resting on the floor.

your hands are always so busy. what are they scurrying for? could they scurry to pick up a phone of yours that i've made ring? i haven't seen you fidget, but i imagine you fingering keys as you walk to your door. playing with the rim of your cup, or tearing the edges of your newspaper. i could put out my forearm for you to drum on. i'll say it's good for my poor circulation.

but today you're lapels were slightly cockeyed and this gave me great pause. you're such a perfectionist, right? what could have taken your attention away from your polished exterior? little takes mine from yours, so i'm distraught. are you ill? what happened at home? what, god forbid, happened moments ago in the elevator? i feel sick. there was some young thing that exited in front of you, not that interesting from what i could tell. maybe it's what she told you. that fabricating wench is nothing but a calculating hussy with shoes that are made to distract. she doesn't emote. she doesn't analyze. she's a known Unitarian (come on) and has acrylic nails.

but you can't see any of this. those stumpy fingers just twitch without regard, i suppose. flinch at the slightest boring bit of flesh, eh? your corners are looking quite frumpy today. i suggest you take your daily walk quickly from now on, and maybe keep awares.

the rest have fled or are dead

though the lawn was mowed one month past, the cold kept it freezer-fresh. i knew that it wasn't true about walt disney being cryogenically frozen, but it was my first thought, what with the dead grass still green. then i thought heads in jars, then the fetuses in jars they had found in the catacombs of my college's science building while doing construction. then the word catacomb and how i had no reference for its origin, save perhaps some connection to honeycomb. ADHD isn't a plague; it's the human thought process. some synapses are just faster than others.

something about autumn that makes hearing acute and important. the air isn't a hum, laughter isn't filling it. there isn't any air except for wind, and it's cold and dry. it takes away my sense of smell. instead i think i smell the actual electricity of all that stuff of summer dying off. i taste the void, the vacuum, the cold departure. i should be preparing...frost is here. somewhere i still have the facilities to do this alone. winterize, hoard, hibernate. i look at my hands and see i haven't been honing any burrowing skills. perhaps a lean-to would do. i could allow myself canned sardines instead of ice fishing for lake trout.

there is no one to meet. tundra will choke on too many characters. two is one too many. and what horrible opera would ensue. vulgar the dialogue, distracting the glance. no exit. no one can concentrate under those conditions. all efforts on all fronts, having your wits without wit. unsweetened teas, native spices, boiling water. ludicrous to see a doeppleform halt and stare back over the crest of the seaside hill. seaside - right. that's salt i feel buffing my exposed cheeks, cleaning my working lungs. curing me like meat. and to think if it were boy. if i were a boy alone. it could never be, out here, gloryless. but me, i am built for this. low center of gravity, low heart rate, and larded. i'm not sensible at all. senseless instinct serves better than analytical proration. opportunity. darwin feast on the flesh of dickensian foppery. no hand from the sky carves a moral fiber. frostbite teaches greater lessons. hunger casts stones. the sun heals and glares and warms and burns. tell me it's not a cold star. tell me nothing. i've grown autistic, saying nothing to everything, but still i sing myself to tears and laughter. communication has faded like an inefficient gasoline motor. given up like neck ties or rouge. remembered like record players and holidays. words, that strange game i used to play with everyone. stringing them together comfortably, thinking they were mine. barking at one another we were! now just one, even numbers seem silly. nothing is counted when you sleep when you can sleep, eat when you can eat. some days are night more than not, or many without rest. these things i see and realize cannot be delirium, for when you start classifying what is merely mirage, you lose it all to thought. i'm alone. what i see is there. what i see is all there is, at any given time. my blurred vision is not impaired. gave up on edges and lines, the bleed is much more telling. halos of spatial relations. i am never safe or threatened.

the monochromatic is setting in. the fire from the trees spread to the ground and snuffed itself out. i crawled to a stop and lay flat, cheek to ground and watching. the flakey embers are louder now than in their prime. it is the noise of resistance - "this is not death."

grey is the new black

there is a common, colloquial usefulness to words like good and bad, right and wrong. "you were so right to deck that kid." "that cologne just smells bad." these are very handy black and white-isms to quickly describe the positive from the negative.

so, let's go back to atomic, particulate problems. they keep on finding smaller and smaller things. we had atoms. then pro- and neutrons, with electrons to boot. we've got ourselves quarks now, too, and their gluons. and now soon these quarks will show to have substructure? good grief, where does it end?

ah, but lullaby my poor human head and tell me no, it never ends. where my hopeless lack of faith in gods leaves a void, it's overflowing with the infinite. tell me size doesn't matter - we can always just cut it in half again. tell me i don't know from big. bigger than a breadbox? bigger than a baby's arm? tell me things can't even be big or small, because scales can't exist on continuous relativity. tell me things just keep keepin on and on, and that i may never understand what that can possibly mean.

right and wrong. good and bad. how can these things really exist in the same place as infinity? where does the buck stop? how can something be completely right or completely wrong in a world that extends forever in every direction? this all lead to a wonderful grey scale. a fog that thickens and dissipates, but never lifts dry. never saturates. and is not linear! look up and a dark cloud circles, heavy with fogbits. to the right, a patch of space almost arid. and changing! look again and reference points disappear at a nauseating pace. how to classify in a nebula: ridiculous!

was it good to leave oregon? was it wrong to steal office supplies? right politics? bad religion? killing, conceiving? we've got circumstance, perspective, chance. this choose-your-own-adventure is less of a choice and more the inevitability of possibility. i sleep better knowing i know less and less.

kinda i want to

because it was exactly ten years ago, i wanted to do it again.
so, i got these very nice tickets to see an old love, nine inch nails.

now, granted, i've only heard one song from the new supply, and it's extremely terrible. trent never was very good with lyrics, clinging to personal issues with high school authority and pretty girls who didn't look twice, i have a feeling. and when you take away the gritty pop-industrial churning, you're left with something less than a dry hump - more a dry thump, like an old air duct.

but it would not be about that, anyhow. it couldnt' be - Broken was still fresh in my ears and Closer was a new born babe mouthing animal intercourse on Mtv. i was fourteen and fishnetted, sweating with the black clad throngs, loving every crushing minute of it. experience Wish like that, it's cathartic perfection.

but, look, here. lots of me being nostalgic won't come to fruition this time around. i have no car, 'cause i don't want to pay for it. but taking me and mine down to boston and back on a tuesday night by train costs too much money and organization and risk. so, i'm selling the tickets and exclusive members-entrance access to friends. friends with cars. ce la vie.

trent, i will be thinking of you and your strange nasal voice this tuesday night as i touch my once adolescent solar plexus.

now doesn't it make you feel better?

note: ended up HAVING to go to the show. "must present photo id with ticket pick-up. no ticket transferals or refunds". show was terrible. TERRIBLE. long live my old memories.

tisk tisk

it's a good thing i don't have a subscription.

it's a total bad scene to be looking at porn sites during work.
no matter how tame.
no matter if you do have a friend on the site.
no matter if you aren't even getting to the good stuff.

it's a good thing i don't have a subscription.



...i'll need to get a computer for when i leave this place...

never ever daily

tell me about overpopulation. tell me about disease and armageddon. taxes, death, and trouble.

atoms, photons, electro-magnetic forces. quarks. strings? holes?

so, buddhists can lower their heartrates low low low. they can heat their bodies, while under wet sheets, in below-freezing temperatures, meditating until the sheets are dry.

and somehow i feel badly; the number was 877, not 887 - a whole group of CFSR and CFSP consultants had a teleconference on engaging providers in systems reform and that dyslexic fumble stunted that. i have no idea what all that is. how can i care to feel badly?

the fact that, while there is legitimate space between the atoms of all things, i can't put my finger through my water bottle because of the negative electomagnetic repulsion. i can't even make my atoms touch it's atoms. somehow i don't slide right off my chair onto a floor i never really collapse on.

all the while, i'm only aware of my facilities to the extent that i've been instructed to use them. i didn't know i could dry sheets with my body heat under freezing conditions. what else can i do? could i, i don't know, bend steel or leap buildings? hibernate? live or die on thought alone?

the power of the mind - or the powers out there i haven't met yet. now they're talking how there's 11 dimensions. the human experience is limited, true. but maybe not quite so limited. maybe we could conceive of more than four dimensions. maybe there is something to understanding the very very small to further our consciousness. thousands of years ago, could they even conceive of electricity? could they even see the moving pictures on a television, or would it be beyond their scope - like how the synapse bundles aren't developed for the chinese to hear the difference between our L's and R's? i know i'm not hearing and seeing what's there. what am i missing? could i introduce ulta violet to my spectum gracefully? and what else after that?

here's a conspiracy theory: the heightening of information, the increasing speed of movie editing, the decreasing of attention spans - it's all preparation for the Great Enlightenment, sponsered by NASA, Microsoft, McDonadl's, and Jockey. we won't be ancient fuddyduddies when the information throw-down occures. we'll be fully prepared to witness the new glory. we won't be afraid of the unknown - our lives are too luxurious and boring to waste a new chance to be shocked. we'll see microwaves. we'll feel the atoms as we walk through walls. we'll hear those mice singing to each other. when will the cat be let out of the bag? there is more to life than this.

my stomach types this, blandly

so people are very much alike. and people are very much unlike, too.

there are these people that forget to eat. food is boring or something. i also have noticed that a lot of these people don't have very exotic tastes, either. ethnic food scares them. spicy is always mild. everything is covered in run-of-the-mill cheese. lots of fry. lots of salt.

i think food is the best thing ever. i could eat all day long. all kinds of food. everything. there is little i do not like (strangely, cheesecake is not that great to me). i eat socially, alone, out of boredom, while watching movies, while reading, walking, driving, all the goddamn time. the simple act of chewing is just so fucking satisfying. i eat until i'm full, overfull, sick to my stomach. keep eating. everything taste so, so Good.

part oral fixation. part nervous tick. part gluttony. part habit. i have a very difficult time no doing it. i make a terrible anorexic.

but the real shitty end of this stick is that i have virtually no metabolism. i'm pretty much never hungry. part of this is because i eat so often. but even when there's some situation that arises where i haven't eaten all day, i'm not actually hungry.

is it the amount of coffee i consume? alcohol? smoking? all these things debilitate hunger and screw up energy levels. yes. ok.
is it that i have an extreme sugar craving? one that spands from simple to complex sugars? candy, sweet lattes, ice cream, potatoes, and above all Bread. i could eat loaves of bread every day. nothing tastes better. nothing.
oh yeah, and i don't really exercise. that's true, too. i have to get around on foot or bike, which keeps me from being comepletely imobile, but that's hardly enough.
and i surround myself with genetic wonders of food processing. regular dumpsters for food, my friends are, and not much to show for it. my boyfriend EATS NO FRUIT OR VEGETABLES. at all. none. not even potatoes. not even berries. no nuts or beans. it all makes him ill. so, macaroni and cheese with hot dogs. pizza. ramen. ravioli. while watching movies or playing video games. yet, physique-wise, he's a veritable vegan athlete. fuck.

everyone's been bringing their homeless trick-or-treat candy into work. tootsie rolls abound. i have a can of black bean soup. health. green tea. am i hungry? no. i almost got to be hungry two nights ago, but i went to the store, and realized i wasn't anymore.

faxsmash

so, it's in the works. my job won't be. for me. what?

it's the six-month check-up for my position. i had a chat with one of my bosses. he was concerned. about the work. i tried to ease his concern by explaining that he should not worry, i'm not worried. i just don't want to do it anymore. just find someone else.

it's true. i've been slipping. i find it easiest to let the ball drop when playing the simplest of games. i have to keep myself entertained somehow. why not give myself a challenge...like, a late payment? or a lost invoice? it's not good, though, i know. i'm messing with other people's money. but, in the anti-visceral world this cubicle is, it's really hard for me to give a care. push a paper here, throw a folder there, reply and forward with my clickyclick fingers. such crazy motions for a person to make over an eight hour period. lots of swiveling. scrolling. the buddhist meditation for slowing down one's pulse is in full effect. vital signs are there, but lackadaisically slow. submerged in the lake of middle management and white white noise. and this lake is full of leeches!

the papers around me now...i could set them on fire and then they'd be ash in the filtered air. should i be bold and set the cube ablaze, i should save my vitamins and cereal. my nalgene bottle (though, maybe that would survive), cell phone, and the very nice pens i ordered from the catalog. six months and i'm still pressed to give a good answer to what it is they do around here. non-profit. child welfare. training assistance. curriculum. policy. but they don't really DO any of those things. they organize other people to tell them how to organize, i think. and they discuss the issues of how other organizations should discuss issues. i think. nothing is concrete. and nothing is interesting.

i can hear a video teleconference happening in the conference room. i can hear the vents above the tiled ceiling. this place is like a snow storm, though; it muffles out everything around. the airplanes out circling the harbor to land are nothing more than a pressure you recognize only if you're looking out the window at them. windows i can't see unless you end up feeling sounds more the actually hearing them. those funny frequencies of appliances - you can tell the tv's on even if it's muted. thick with 'em here.

but now there is a horizon! hoorah! my horse and i finally know where to head towards as the sun sets. and to where, brave nomad, will you find yourself next? i just can't say, darling, but it won't be like this.