turtles all the way down

OK R U REDY 4 THS?

2007-04-27T18:47:00.000-07:00

it's straight (no, forward) back to the old ways.

i just went to meet a girl for a date but she is late so while waiting i texted another girl (denise's ex) to ask her out for tomorrow. then called denise to ask her advice on this girl i am seeing tonight, she is going to come bail me out at 8. when i hung up with denise i got a text from chris who apparently wants phone sex* later.

gilbert is mad at me because i still won't go out with him on a date no matter how many times he hints at it.

me? oh fine, i went to the bank and finagled a $20 bill out of them so i could buy beer, and my friend is coming to visit me on sunday and i think i might not be quite as broke 6 months from now but then you never know.

ho.

there's a little man with a cat head sitting under the little tree next to me and sometimes i wish i could be a homemade clay figurine, always smiling, sitting in the shade with a cat for a head and a coyote sitting next to me telling stories from the road.

today i did yoga and for the first time ever i aligned my spine all by myself. it was like a burst of sunlight in my frontal lobe. I GET IT that was rad.

happy friday fuckers

*ps i don't do phone sex but usually the other person doesn't notice that i'm not doing anything

today I read
the laist roster, hello how is it that i know half the people on there? i live in fucking san francisco.

2007-04-25T16:55:00.000-07:00

oh man, shit dude, blogger just forced me to switch over to the new blogger. whatevs.

i just got in from walking all over san francisco because i had a job meeting at 11 and an interview at 3, and i had 17 dollars in nickels, dimes, and quarters (yes that is all i have to my name right now) so i spent a lot of time doing things that are free. like, walking. and sitting in the library. and taking pictures of the triangle building which, if you stand under it at the right angle, looks like it is a mile high:

anyway i just got home, had a snort of tequila and a slim-fast shake with added coffee, and got 3 hours to do some work before jen comes over to watch Lost.

oh yeah and i hooked up with my ex-gf's ex-gf at a party the other night, that was rad. my bf wanted to get on her too, but she only likes girls. HA

today I read
the onion

2007-04-12T21:06:00.000-07:00

eddi eddi eddi

for reals. hi, sunshine. thanks for being the one to actually read this. i have missed you.

it's so funny

2007-04-12T12:11:00.000-07:00

You know, neuroses.

I was so high when I wrote that last post, completely bonkers. Now I see there are comments, and I'm not going to read them, not right now. I'm not going to re-read the post, either. I have a little voice inside that is saying hey, guess what, you are getting all infatuated with someone again and you should not do that.

Of course I should do whatever the hell I want to do, I should get infatuated eight times a day if that is what I do naturally. Love makes me happy, and so does infatuation. But still I am insecure about it. Having a big open bloody heart, god it is so frightening sometimes to post about these things.

On the door of my apartment there is a heart, and it has a lion and a lamb and stars and a moon. Beneath it there's a deep scratch in the wood from the time that Evren got mad and tried to rip it off the door.

To the heart's credit, it stayed hung where I had put it. But it is not big enough to hide the scratch, and that damn scratch is never going to go away.

today I watched
shortbus

i was mistaken

2007-04-10T21:09:00.000-07:00

yes, because actually he is amazing. he puts little sunshines in my eyes, and i mean that in the totally cheesiest of ways. chris, i mean. is awesome. we hung out for days. then we went out on sunday night, drinking tequila and organic lemonade ("because that's how i roll"), went to an underground club and tried to dance together and got so turned on that we had to go and fuck in the backseat of his rental car, parked right on the well-lit street in the tenderloin, with crackheads trying to peer in.

the funny thing, though, is that he says his libido fluctuates a lot. which is great because mine does too. and he is the first guy i've ever met who doesn't have to bust a nut every time he gets a stiffy. he is totally capable of fucking for a while and then rolling over and talking about something else, and then getting up and going to work.

also: does a dead-on impersonation of kip (from napoleon dynamite). knows lots of monty python songs by heart. makes bad puns, constantly, with a dumb grin. has been in the rave scene since we were in high school, and openly bisexual even longer. has gone to burning man 14 times. sports a butt-rock combover mohawk.

wants to build an earthship. EARTHSHIP!!! i went nuts over those a couple years ago.

we know the same songs and the same parties and the same people but never crossed paths... except, of course, as small children, when we were at the alternative preschool together.

i think this is going to be a big one, folks.

today I listened to hella
tvotr. watch this video, because it's good.

not so random.

2007-04-03T22:51:00.000-07:00

a party full of ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, and I mean full. Denise was there and so was her current girlfriend and two of her other exes. Alex was there, and the Turk. Jen said to me, "you should try hooking up with someone from outside our scene, so you don't run into them at every party."

Nonetheless I found myself cruising the coastal highway in a dusty Justy yesterday, high on drugs and alpenglow and Spanish wine. And brought Chris home with me, an enigmatic fellow from the semi-distant past and the subject of that recent piece I wrote on bisexuality. Also, a DJ and producer and promoter and burner. Not to mention he's from my hometown.

So much for expanding my horizons.

It was not even that good, to be honest: I was coming down from drugs and mostly wanted to sleep. But he wrote me a poem already, via text message of course because he was transporting pot across the state and didn't have time to email. Something about moonlight and something or other.

I am like this close to calling it off for good. Fuck the mating game.

Le sigh.

the king of clubs

2007-03-31T12:18:00.000-07:00

It was like there were two of me. Two little mes, sitting in a tree, throwing star fruits at each other. At first the fruits were big and ripe and luscious and they burst covering us with little bits of juicy flesh and minor galaxies and the leaves all quivered in the breeze. But the big fruits were the ones close at hand and then they were gone, and we were too lazy to move and so we reached for smaller fruit. And these ones mushed a little and split, drops of sweet juice and rosy planets dripping out of them and glazing the tree's bark with moonshine but the juice on our skin grew cold and dried and then we were sticky, and it began to be irritating. And then what was left were the small fruits, the closed ones, hard and wrinkled and we threw them harder and harder until we knocked each other out of the tree.

today i read indexed

hi sierra

2006-05-28T20:43:00.000-07:00

The man upstairs is a dancer.

I didn't want to tell you until I was sure, but it's true. He is dancing right now! It started as a sort of rhythmic thumping, you know, and then late last night when I was sighing and wheezing at the ceiling like some sort of old lady on a sitcom -

WHAT IS ALL THAT NOISE YOU KIDS -

I realized, oh hey, that is dance.

And then it shattered into syncopated syllables and slides, and I laughed out loud at myself, tucked the covers under my chin, and went to bed.

Today he is dancing again, and I shake my head at the ceiling in joy. It's like having an angel upstairs, a dancing man for me, a little present to let me know I haven't been forgotten yet. There is still beauty in the world, the man upstairs is a dancer.

last night I finished guns germs & steel finally

sardonic

2006-05-20T12:41:00.000-07:00

I hadn't done anything self-destructive enough in a while. I mean, usually during a breakup period I create my own trauma very effectively, but this time, things were just going so well. There had been the thing where I poured boiling tea on my wrist and gave myself a second-degree burn, but somehow that wasn't bad enough.

I needed more.

So last night I had several Sparks and watched a bitchload of lesbian soap opera antics, and made the decision: time to go out and pick up a girl. So I got all kinds of dolled up, lipstick and all mind you (and we are entering a new era here: Ogma is finally getting the hang of lipstick), and went out to the gay bar down the street.

It's a Berkeley gay bar, so it is always packed. The front room has a pool table and slot machines and is full of roving lesbians in vests and cowboy hats; the back is a mirror-walled dance club featuring flashing lights and chubby fags. I made my way into the smoking lounge, and invited myself to sit down next to a couple of girls who instantly engaged me in a conversation about theology.

The pickings were slim: all the girls there appeared to be either 55 and overweight, or taken. So I decided just to enjoy myself, and ordered another drink.

Long story short? I ended up with the only straight guy in the bar (hot, yes, very, thank you), we went back to his place, he couldn't keep it up and kept asking if we could do it without a condom "just for a second". So I left and went home, kicking myself the whole way.

But at least I did something properly self-destructive. Now I can be comfortable being angry with myself...

Okay, anyway I have to go now, my lizard brain keeps saying "eggs".

today I read
cantplay and
a gay history of berkeley

the legs, the legs

2006-05-17T22:22:00.000-07:00

AND so it is that I became a Serious Published blogger-type person, and that was O-K. Soon, in fact, I was to find myself surrounded by gorgeous horny men with halitosis and drinking problems, smoking endless cigarettes and fucking quite often -

and that was Ok too.

It was when I returned to the bay area that everything got all fucked up, like I mean I got coopted and bossed around and suddenly I realized that I had been awful all this time I had been living for my own self and of course that is wrong. Dug helped me to see that, in fact, I should live for his own self. So I tried that for a while because, really, he is so gorgeous to me (although I suspect I am the only person who sees it) and so funny and wonderful, until all of a sudden it is not wonderful, not wonderful at all, and by then it is too late.

We broke up for good this time, because I told him I wouldn't speak to him until he came up with something nice to say, and he refused. Well then.

His roommate is about to move out, he has no friends left, he has even abused his sister into a defensive spitting corner. He is fucked. It is sad. I picture him alone in his four-bedroom apartment with no roommates, a bag of sex toys and no girlfriend, having a horrible tantrum and burning everything. I think he probably will. I just hope he is not the suicidal type.

Anyway, back to the legs: I am quite happy with my new site, but it is on Dug's server and I'm scared he'll sabotage all my lovely work. My fingers are crossed. I would ask you to cross yours, but at the moment there is no "you". It's for the best.

paxie

2006-05-17T21:19:00.000-07:00

Oh my god, I love this blog! I know exactly why I left, and it was because my crazy boyfriend turned out to be crazier than I was, and I was constantly afraid he was reading this. But you know what, now he's gone gone gone, at least I think he is, and I can return to my fretful disjointed unfocused cat-lady headspace, and? I think I am going to finally call that girl Disaster and see if she is in town, and ask her on a date.

Strange, this time I am happy about breaking up with Dug. I feel free. Free to grow back into myself. I feel like I just barely saved myself from being totally uprooted and transplanted again.

I'm home, hello bloggie.

jamie is seriously the best of photographers, and also a very awesome writer.

christmas was a train.

2005-12-30T20:38:00.000-08:00

over the rivers, you know? and bridges.

I was a very tired soul, and am still, and 27 shines in its mediocrity (for I am now, faithful readers all two, twenty-seven years of age): terribleness, even. The financial situation is despicable. The outlook is less than resplendent. My boyfriend loves to fight. My mother is tired of me. The rain is interminable.

And still the slogging, stepping forth, at once an illumination and a curse: finally, independence, adulthood. Degrees, I suppose it comes in waves, but this wave is very strong, yes -

Meanwhile my ass gets fatter and I learn things everday.

-

Christmas was a train berryling straight into my birthday which was spent crying, mostly, in fits of shattering insecurity and loneliness and ineptitude. I have wants and desires and don't know how to reach them, primary among them being: I would like to be able to afford an apartment to live in, and to not lose my car. But possessions are fleeting and they flit and flicker, you know, like a fucking smoke signal in the wind, made of nothing et cetera.

The work, the money, the income is pushing at the edges of the membrane, threatening to pop the unemployment bubble and gush me out into that vast field of self-employedness. I wish it were here, I miss it before it arrives. The employers are leaving voice messages, requesting conference calls on national holidays, ready to take my work and pay me grandly. I say, yea. Can I get an advance on that?

It is almost 2007, or 2006 at least! the clock strikes downward this year, heavily: we will all lose something we love by the time midnight strikes. The carnage will be significant. The renewal will be awesome in that god-fearing way, too bright to look at: this year we all love and lose and learn and burn and shine and become gods and never look down again at the dirty gum on the sidewalk: this is a year of tidings.

2007. Or 2006, at least. This year is a train.

al-tryptophan

2005-11-25T14:13:00.000-08:00

well, i start this new job tonight. really, really don't want to go. i mean, i deeply don't want to go. i already hate it. i don't even own any makeup, you know? like, i have to go buy some.

everyone else in my house is grumpy too. my new pseudo-roommates just got in a fight and both left.

NARF

picture this!

2005-11-23T00:29:00.000-08:00

i am sitting in a noisy living room with some kind of clash rock screaming dramatically melodically on the walls.

no: i am sitting in the corner of a living room, with a speaker directly behind me playing some kind of clash rock.
there are four other people talking at top volume, gesturing at each other excitedly, lighting cigarettes and waving cheap beer in cans.
one of them is my boyfriend, two of them are my roommates, and two of them are visiting internet pornographers.

this is so boring.

the boys are talking about web commerce and the girls are talking about gash.

i think i will go to bed.

whaaaaaaaaaaaaatrewarlskjfa;skldjfaiwer

2005-11-22T15:42:00.000-08:00

I quit posting the novel here, because then I started to think about who would be reading it, and even though - even though, or maybe because - each post was tagged "unedited", I was still assuming that people would read it like a final draft.

If I do keep re-writing this thing, it's going to come out VERY different. But I'm on a schedule here, can't afford to rewrite, and the agonizing over instant perfection was really gettin' me down. So, I quit posting it, and am focusing on short bursts of 500 to 1,000 words at a time, whenever I get a moment.

day ten

2005-11-10T12:59:00.000-08:00

There are about twenty people living in the Clown House, give or take a stray dog. Some of them have jobs and some of them raise cash on the sidewalk, but most of them can’t afford to go out to eat and drink. Meals come at all times of day, whenever someone arrives with food. Whiskey-drinking starts midafternoon and goes until sunrise.

DamNear happens to have arrived in the middle of a birthday party for Shackles the Clown, a sixty-five-year-old boozer with yellowish eyes and an endless supply of bad jokes. He is sitting with DamNear right now, telling a joke that involves a blonde and a donkey. DamNear is giggling, stamping her feet on the lawn.

Shackles throws the punchline like a paper grenade. He grunts and turns suddenly to face DamNear, who is still grinning. “So,” he says, “you gonna stick around?”

DamNear shakes her head slowly, shrugging. “Dunno.”

“Well, we’d love to have you around, little girl. You gonna give fighting lessons or somethin?”

“Fighting?”

“HasBen says you’re a fighter. Could be a cool thing to do, you know these kids would be real into it.”

“Hey, are you fucking with her?” Miriam drops suddenly to her knees between Shackles and DamNear, a big smile on her face. “DamNear, c’mere!” and she grabs DamNear’s hand and helps her stand up. “Fuck off, Shackles,” she calls over her shoulder as she leads DamNear to the house.

“Fuck off, Miriam,” he chuckles with a wave of his creased hand.

The house creaks even when it’s empty, but walking through the front door releases a cacophony of clunks and squeaks like DamNear has never heard before. They enter a wide, cluttered living room with a few ripped couches and carved-up walls. Someone has practiced their wood etching skills in here, probably drunkenly and with a bowie knife; nonetheless, some of the pictures are pretty cool.

Miriam takes a left, down a narrow hallway. “I got you food,” she says. “But I’m serious about this shower, we gotta get in there before anyone else does. I fuckin hate cold showers.”

“Me too, yeah,” echoes Fran. She’s not sure if she’s dizzy because she’s hungry, or dizzy because of this whole crazy house, or dizzy because Miriam is holding her hand. Any way you slice it, she feels dangerously out of control. She hasn’t been this confused since high school.

They pass four closed doors, all damaged in some way and decorated with dead Barbie heads or “Pornography Is Fucking Awesome” posters or upside-down American flags. If I have to stay in this shithole, thinks DamNear, at least the people are artistic. She expects to see a cockroach or a fucking rat at any second, but that kind of thing never hurt anyone. Anyway it’s better than the street or a homeless shelter or a whorehouse. She may be broke, but DamNear ain’t desperate – and the Clown House may be dirty, but it’s got a shitload of culture.

DamNear wonders idly where Miriam is leading her.

“Where are we going?” she tells Miriam.

“Here, dumbass,” Miriam answers. She takes another left through a doorway, pulling DamNear in behind her.

They are in a largish bathroom with small octagon tiles covering the floor. Atop the tiles are set a toilet, a free-standing sink, and a clawfoot tub. The lid of the toilet is closed, and a plate sits atop it, covered with a grease-stained paper towel. Miriam picks up the plate and hands it to DamNear.

“I’m like, you gotta eat and we both gotta get clean, so let’s hog the bathroom,” she says. Her upper arms jiggle slightly as she emphasizes her words. “There’s another one upstairs anyway but it only has a shower. I actually like baths, you know?” She turns to the tub and starts running hot water.

“Yeah,” replies DamNear. She sits on the toilet, not sure what else to do. “Hey, thanks for the food.”

“Girl, you like almost fainted out there,” Miriam says, stepping out of her platform Mary Janes. She sits on the edge of the tub and grabs the toe of one green sock, pulling it off. “You shoulda just said you were hungry.”

DamNear is torn at this moment between thanking God she can get this turned on and not have an erection to hide, and thanking God for the veggie burger with ketchup she is currently plowing into. She doesn’t say anything, just smirks around a mouthful of burger as Miriam pulls her slip dress over her head. Miriam’s body is small and brown and round in all the right places – small tits, a smooth little pot belly and a bubble butt. Her feet and hands are tiny and her hair is fine and loose, falling across her face as she bends to drop the dress.

DamNear suddenly needs a shot of whiskey and a cigarette.

Luckily, she managed to palm the whiskey bottle that Shackles carelessly set on the grass earlier, and she pulls it out now.

nonowrimo day ten, unedited

day nine

2005-11-09T10:21:00.000-08:00

Chapter Seven

We all live in a yellow submarine, dear reader, and the windows are too small for us to see what really exists outside the comfort and bright warmth of our daily lives. For every one of us that sleeps in a bed, there is one who does not; for every meal served with bread, there are seven of rice; for every six billion human beings, there is one Clown House.

It’s a two-story victorian monstrosity with a big yard and a tall wooden fence. Every corner and crack in the yellow siding is grimy; the second-floor balcony sags; wild vines and insects roam freely along the walls and windows. There is an oversized flag attached to one of the cracked white posts of the front porch. If the wind was blowing, it would reveal itself as a faded clown face, but the wind isn’t blowing.

Next to the house, on the overgrown lawn, a long and narrow table is set up with a real banquet: sausages, potatoes, veggie burgers, corn on the cob, chocolate pudding… However, much of the pudding and potatoes are currently flying through the air: the Clown House is having a food fight.

DamNear and HasBen can hear the yelling from halfway down the hill. Ben’s step quickens. He shoots her a smile over his shoulder as he pulls ahead of her, almost jogging up the warped, broken sidewalk in the late-morning sun. As soon as he steps inside the gate, he pauses to shrug off the turtle pack (which he has been carrying for the last hour as per their agreement). DamNear stands just outside the tall wrought-iron gate and watches as he charges, yelling, into the middle of the fracas.

It’s just a bunch of gutter punks and war vets, really. Some of them have green hair and top hats, most of them are pierced here and there, but it’s nothing DamNear hasn’t seen before. There are twelve people around the table, most of them in their twenties. All of them are wearing their food. As she watches, Ben tackles a pretty girl in a black slip dress, grabs some of the glob of pudding that has already landed on his head, and starts rubbing it into her shoulder. She struggles and gasps. He lets up. She turns over and socks him in the balls. DamNear lights a cigarette.

Sidestepping around the table to lean against the trunk of a nearby cottonwood, DamNear considers her situation. It could be worse, put it that way. Ben briefed her a little on the Clown House during their journey: it’s been around for five or ten years, and actually started out as the home base for a touring clown troupe. But the members, especially Ben, have a habit of bringing home strays, travelers, and artists; now it’s some kind of hostel. “We never lock the doors,” he explained, picking a shred of tobacco from his lip. “None of us have anything worth stealing, and anyway we don’t really trust each other. Plus, we could fight off any intruders if we wanted to. Hey, but especially if you’re around. Can I see your machete again?”

DamNear thinks she might sleep with that machete in her hand, at least the first few nights. She doesn’t know how long she’ll be staying here, you can never tell that kind of shit. But yeah, she’ll stay a while.

No fucking food fights, though.

Anyway, this one seems to be breaking up: the lawn is now littered with groaning, giggling, discolored bodies. A cracking voice cries out: “Oh God can anyone get me a cigarette!” This only makes everyone giggle more. Bunch of fuckin idiots. DamNear is not about to share one of her smokes with these fools. She tucks her pack into her sweatshirt pocket.

Ben is walking toward her, flushed. Half of his hair is matted with chocolate pudding; there are smears of it all over his face and sweater. There is a potato stain on his ass, too, but DamNear can’t see that. In fact, she’s mostly looking at the girl in the slip dress, who is holding HasBen’s hand.

“Hey,” he says between heavy breaths. “You wanna go get set up inside? The shower’s gonna be busy in a few minutes, maybe you can get in there first.”

“Fuck yeah, me too,” the girl chimes in. Her voice is low and round-sounding. “I don’t want no cold fucking shower.” She’s too short for him, DamNear thinks.

“DamNear, this is Miriam,” Ben grins. “Can she shower with you, save some water?”

Miriam steps forward, offering her hand. Her hair is black, cut straight across her neck. She looks up at DamNear from beneath her bangs, revealing a pair of huge, round eyes the color of amber. She murmurs, “Just ignore him.”

DamNear is not having any trouble ignoring him: DamNear is smitten.

She shakes Miriam’s hand in a daze, spellbound. She flushes, looks down, steps backward. Her hand feels warm, wet, squishy somehow.

HasBen and Miriam are having a laugh attack. DamNear looks down to see that she has just been given a potato handshake. Her heart is pounding. She feels dizzy. She sits down on the grass.

“Hey, y’all got any food that isn’t for throwing?” she mumbles, staring at her knees. Looking up, she sees that Miriam is already at the table with a plate. Miriam glances over. Orange sparks shoot into DamNear’s brain. A pudding-smudged Betty Page tattoo smirks at her from beneath the strap of Miriam’s dress.

Ben is talking, possibly to himself. No, no, he’s talking to DamNear. She tunes in Tokyo. “…Dr. Bronner’s, but you know that shit cuts everything so we should be okay. What’s on there anyway, engine oil? …DamNear? Your backpack?”

She shrugs. “Train grease, you know?” That poor turtle.

nonowrimo day nine, unedited

day seven slash eight is when it finally starts to get good

2005-11-08T11:56:00.000-08:00

Chapter Four

Sacramento is one of those towns where culture has sowed its seeds, germinated, sent down deep roots into the sandy loam – and failed miserably. Drive through this valley in summer, and the air is brown and hazy; the streets shimmer ominously in the 110-degree heat. Drive through in autumn, and the air is full of black smoke: the rice fields in the Delta are burning.

Folks in Sacramento are overfed and air conditioned government employees, for the most part. They prefer not to have to walk more than a block or two from the parking garage to the sandwich shop. They go out of a Friday night in brightly colored, tasteless clothing, get embarrassingly drunk, and dance to horrible jam bands (or just watch the game on TV). They like to listen to light rock and classic rock, maybe some country. Their kids are generally into top-40 hip-hop, the kind that mostly consists of the words “shake that” and “girl”. Kids around here think it could be fun to try being in a gang. Their parents just don’t know what to do with them, so they send ‘em to the mall.

Sacramento is a land of endless mediocrity, a bastion of inadequacy in the middle of the Golden State.

DamNear can’t believe she left the grandeur of the desert for a place like this.

She is sitting in a bar that is vaguely redolent of stale vomit, probably because the floor is carpeted. The bars are funny in this town: most of them are crammed into strip malls, set up all jackjob with particleboard and glue in some generic commercial spot. Cover the windows with posters, turn the lights down low, start up a jukebox, and put a pretty girl behind the bar: you got yourself a watering hole.

This particular bar sits between a chinese food restaurant and a Big-O, and purports to be a sports bar. Since there is nobody else inside but DamNear and the bartender, the TV is off. They are rolling dice on the bar while DamNear spends the $18 she hustled today.

The bartender’s name is Leticia and she has black lipliner all around her lips. Her hair is jet-black and heat straightened, and her eyeliner is heavy. She looks like a Dallas Cowgirl with ten years and twenty pounds added on. That is to say, she’s very beautiful.

DamNear is trying hard not to lose herself in Leticia’s eyes – or in her cleavage – but the whiskey and the beer are starting to have their way with her, and she keeps catching herself staring like an idiot. It doesn’t help that Leticia is asking all kinds of questions about DamNear’s past, present and future. It feels like she actually cares about DamNear, and that makes her want to just jump across the bar, bury her head in those pillows, and cry for hours.

In fact, Leticia is starting to care about this little girl with the big attitude and the turtle backpack (which is currently nestled, all soiled, beside the broken pinball machine). She’s the kind of girl who – body odor aside – you just want to take care of. Leticia wants to take her home and give her a bath and put her to bed right next to her two-year-old son. And okay, maybe DamNear is about twenty-five years too old for that, but there is so much sadness in her eyes, in her situation…

“Where does your mother live?” she asks.

DamNear shrugs her shoulders vaguely and continues to stare fixedly at Leticia’s breasts.

Leticia sighs a little and turns to pour another two shots of whiskey.

“You know,” she continues with her back turned, “I could prolly find you a place to stay here, get you some work. My husband works construction, you know? Tough girl like you, I bet you like that kinda stuff.”

She turns back and sets the shot glasses on the bar.

DamNear giggles. “I like this kinda stuff.”

“To whiskey,” Leticia smiles, raising her glass.

The door opens, and instantly the door chime sounds: one of those horrible electronic bell noises, it announces every person that passes through the doorway. Leticia hates that awful noise, never wants to hear it again. She glances at the person in the doorway, but the light is behind him and she doesn’t know who it is. With a shrug, she tosses back her shot, shakes her head quickly, sets her shoulders back, and bangs the shot glass onto the counter.

“Cute,” says the incomer. “Hey, gimme one of those.”

He’s a scruffy-looking fellow, skinny as hell, in a big gray knit sweater and tight black jeans. His hair is ear-length and tousled, and conceals most of his face excepting a small, strangely ladylike mouth and an oversized proboscis.

He points at the backpack. “Turtle. I like it.”

DamNear ignores him. DamNear is currently ignoring everything except the bowl of honey-roasted peanuts in front of her. She picks at them idly. Her lips appear to be moving.

Leticia slaps the bar in front of DamNear, who looks up distractedly. “Hey girlie, your new friend here, he said something to you.” She picks up the empty shot glasses and starts to pour a fresh round.

DamNear is standing before she even knows it, legs planted, fists up. “What the fuck did he say?” she asks slowly, looking directly at the incomer.

Leticia hands a shot to the guy. He looks at DamNear, shakes his head. He speaks from the corner of his mouth: “I said I like the turtle.” And then he takes a slow sip from his shot glass.

DamNear’s fists are still up. Her head is cocked, the nuts and bolts tied to her dreds all hanging down the left side of her skull. She is swaying a little. Her shoulders barely clear the top of the bar.

Leticia smiles and removes one of the shot glasses from the bar with a deft hand motion. She slides the other one to her right and leans over the counter. The new guy, whose name is Benjamin Royce Parker the Second but who is known far and wide as HasBen, can’t help admiring her cleavage.

“Honey,” she says to DamNear with a slight smile, “he don’t mean nothing. He just likes turtles, okay?”

DamNear snorts, but her fists come down. She leers at the skinny dude on the barstool. He is slouched and dirty-looking. His eyes are a clear hazel-ish color, with long lashes. One of his wrists sports a leather arm band with metal studs. Looks like some kind of gutter punk. DamNear likes gutter punks, so she climbs back onto her barstool.

“Yeah,” she says, “it’s my backpack.”

Chapter Five

HasBen turns out to be a clown.

He and DamNear have a good laugh about the similarity between their nicknames, and then he tells her his real name. “What’s yours?” he asks. She avoids the question.

Eventually Leticia starts serving DamNear whiskey again, and by the time the electronic doorbell starts announcing her happy-hour regulars, they are all happily sloshed. Ben starts doing clown tricks and mime acts, and DamNear shows off her machete. Ben is dancing with the machete in his teeth when the bar’s owner walks in.

Leticia is too beautiful to get fired from this job, but DamNear and HasBen are not so lucky. They end up in the parking lot of the strip mall with no cash and a big turtle backpack, and no phone to call a cab. Ben doesn’t have a car.

“How did you get here?” DamNear slurs.

“Followed you,” he answers simply.

She stops and cocks her head at him. “Huh?”

“I was downtown today and I saw you on the street and I thought you might need a place to stay, so I followed you here. But then I didn’t have any cash to buy drinks, so I went and sold my bike.” He shakes the hair out of his eyes and beams at her.

DamNear shakes her nuts and bolts slowly, giggling. “You fucking idiot.”

“Yeah, I know. Whatever, I can –“

“Let’s go steal some bikes.”

But they never do steal the bikes, because Ben doesn’t believe in stealing. Instead, they climb on the roof of the bar and smoke some of DamNear’s speed, and try to spit on every person that walks in or out of the door.

After a while, this grows tiresome and they head off on foot. Picture them if you will, as their silhouettes stretch beneath the sodium light: skinny shuffler and shortround, turtle and licorice whip, nothing more than a clown and a punk, two cartoon characters off on a grand adventure. Night folds itself around them, a Sacramento night full of fiberglass and carbon monoxide gathers them into its embrace as they march one-two one-two down the glittering streets of broken glass

and turning right is when we finally lose them, when they leave the pools of orange radiation and hop a low fence and disappear into the freedom and safety of the darkness; when their feet pad over cool green grass and the moon shines on sprinkler heads, and the world spins softly and everything is quiet.

DamNear and HasBen spend the night in a playground, lying on their backs in the wood chips and counting the stars.

They rarely get more than seventy before they get confused and have to start over. They never give up, not until the black sky gives way to midnight blue, then periwinkle. Idealists on speed: they count the stars all the way back to zero.

In the morning light, they sit up and make a plan. Watching the first jogger streak across the dewy grass, eyeing the mothers with strollers and Starbucks, they decide to walk back to the Clown House – which is, of course, where Ben lives – and wash DamNear’s backpack, and then go hustle enough money to buy a real turtle. Ben tells DamNear she can stay at the Clown House as long as she wants (“assuming, of course, you can handle living with a bunch of fuckin’ punks and not fighting ‘em.”) DamNear laughs at that, and tells Ben she guarantees nothing. He stands then, brushing wood chips from his sweater, and helps her up.

“Let’s go.” And they do.

nonowrimo day seven slash eight, unedited

day five

2005-11-05T13:47:00.000-08:00

Ginger does not have red hair, and she is not young and cute, but she’s nice. She left a box of tapes on DamNear’s bed yesterday, with a note:

Found these when I was cleaning #3. Most of them are crap, but you might be able to find something you like.

Most of the tapes are crap, but DamNear is bored and she’s listening to all the unmarked ones. One of them turned out to be a Turtles album, and she is painting it green while she listens to the rest. Turtle. Awww. Next time, next town, she is going to get herself a pet turtle.

Mama Lola’s story, her ghost story, is not really anything new to DamNear. She heard it first from Tom, who washes dishes at Sammy’s Restaurant. He turned to her with wide eyes and wisps of steel escaping from his hairnet, and he whispered the whole thing from under his bristly mustache. At that time, DamNear had thought he was afraid of the ghosts hearing him mention their names or some idiot thing like that; she later found out he was just scared of Sammy.

The ghosts of the Molitars, it turned out, were pretty well-known in town. Nobody seemed to care much about them, except the little kids (of which there were three, all related). Mama had explained it to DamNear while they sat at the kitchen table that first day: “I don’t worry about the Molitars because they ain’t worried about me. They’re just here to torture each other, and that work keeps them plenty busy.”

“Yeah, but can you even see them?”

“Sweetie, I see them clear as if they were still alive and sitting on the couch with me. They’re not always here, but they’re here a lot of the time, and their spirits are strong –“

“So if you can see them, why can’t everybody?”

Mama laughed wheezily. “DamNear, you are a funny girl. You’ll see ‘em.”

DamNear grinned ear to ear at that, and started giggling. Mama smiled broadly and wheezed some more. And that is how DamNear got stuck in this crazy house.

Ginger, on the other hand, has always been here. She comes in the late morning and leaves in the early evening, going off to her doublewide to live what appears to be a very happy life with her short, bald husband and a rambunctious little kid. Funnily enough, her son has red hair.

“Shoulda named him Ginger,” she always laughs, with a laundry basket on her hip and a massive, fluorescent water gun dangling from her free hand. “He bites, too.”

Ginger takes care of Mama, and is trying to clean out the junk from some of the empty rooms. They have the same conversation almost daily, those two:

“You know Mama, you could make a lot of money on this place. Fix it up, rent it out, sell it –“

“I am not selling this house, missy. You know that.”

“So let out the rooms then, get some life in here.”

“Ginger Petunia! You think anyone is gonna want to stay in a haunted motel?”

“Oh come on, how about some of them biker clubs that ride through here? Sammy never has enough rooms, it would only be for a night.”

“Yes, and they’d come asking for refunds in the morning.”

“No, they’ll sleep fine. You know they all just come home drunk and pass out snoring till morning –“

“Bill used to pass out drunk, too. He’s liable to get jealous and throw fits in all their rooms to wake ‘em up.”

“Mama. Really? Don’t you want a little more money so you can take better care of yourself?”

“I’m fine, Ginger, now why don’t you put supper on and leave me be.”

But Mama is not fine, Mama is getting old and she is starting to think a lot about dying. DamNear knows this, and Ginger does too. DamNear decides it’s time for them to have a talk. She walks out to the front porch, where Ginger is having a cup of coffee and a smoke before she heads home. The porch door creaks as she swings it open, and Ginger turns her head. For the first time, DamNear thinks she looks a little tired.

“Hey D.”

“Hey Ginger.”

“Want one?” Ginger holds out the cigarette pack.

“Thanks.”

There is silence for a moment, the sound of a lighter. Outside the porch, the town’s one willow tree lets its branches caress each other, a sound sweet as violins. Cicadas cry tirelessly, the desert flute. In the distance, a train whistles.

DamNear sits in one of the deep wicker chairs. She tries to figure out, to remember what she needs to say.

“You’re leaving,” Ginger says suddenly. She doesn’t look at DamNear, but cranes her head to watch the moon through the porch screen.

DamNear thinks for a minute.

“Yes.”

“It’s okay.”

“You think? I don’t want to leave -”

“D, Mama was fine before you got here and she’ll be fine when you’re gone. Ralph used to do the repairs for her, he can do ‘em again.”

“Oh.”

“D, you and Mama have something special, she really likes you. Plus she’s always had a soft spot for people that need her. You needed her when you got here. But you don’t any more, right?”

DamNear breathes in slowly. “No, I guess not. I guess I thought she needed me.”

“Yeah, we all think that.”

DamNear’s eyes suddenly feel prickly.

Ginger turns now, finally, to look at her. “DamNear, or whatever your real name is, you’re a sweet girl. You go find yourself a real life. Mama and I will both be thinking about you.”

DamNear can’t talk any more. She gets up clumsily, stubs her cigarette butt in an empty pot, and turns to go back inside.

“And D?”

DamNear stops, one foot through the door. “Yeah?”

“Get off the speed.”

Speed is DamNear’s main problem, anyone will tell you that. It’s not that she does all that much of it, not as much as some of the people around here. She only smokes, never shoots. She hasn’t lost any weight, never had a loose tooth. Shit, she hardly even has bags under her eyes. She is never awake more than three days at a time, and she usually goes a few days sober after a binge like that. If you can call it a binge.

But Tina is a girl who’s always ready to party, the kind of girl that always comes through. DamNear first met her back in New York when she was fifteen or so. It was a party, she was smoking weed in the living room and some big burly guy had his arm around her and was trying to get down her pants. Later on it would be this same guy (Rico) who would influence DamNear to study martial arts and sharpshooting. But this was before the broken collarbone and the restraining order, and Rico was just another horny asshole.

“You sure are a sexy little girl,” he was telling her.

“Thank you,” she giggled. Truth was, she wanted to fuck him, but she was teasing a little.

His hand shifted, moving down from her shoulder. Her arm was pinned against her as he clumsily tried to reach her breast. She laughed and squirmed out of his grasp.

He dropped his hands to his knees, looked at her with a sly glint in his eye. “Girl, I know what you need. You wanna party all night with me?”

DamNear giggled again. “With you?”

“How about with me and Tina?”

DamNear thought Rico was talking about a real girl. She smiled broadly, and when he stood up and reached for her hand, she gave it. She followed him into the back room, where Tina was waiting.

…And just look at me now, she thinks as she surveys her room. Drug paraphernalia everywhere. The thing about DamNear is, once she finds something she likes, she takes it all the way. Not just a karate student, but a black belt. Not just a slut, but a porn star.

Not just a user, but a dealer.

Maybe it isn’t a good idea, maybe it’s dangerous to surround herself with something so addictive, but DamNear has always liked to be in control.

Sarah would have said it was “small-person syndrome.” Fuck Sarah. Fuck that prissy white bitch. That girl had no fucking clue what it was like to be small.

“Shit, I’m not a midget,” DamNear grumbled to herself. She picked up the Jim Beam and took a long slug from the bottle. And then she started packing.

It was the middle of the night by the time DamNear was done. At some point she’d given in and smoked some speed despite Ginger's warning. She just wanted to get the fuck out of this town, pronto. She’d think about the meth thing later. Anyway she was leaving, so all the ranch-hand junkies (and the junkie preacher from the next town over, which always made her giggle) would have to find themselves a new source, and that was a good start. Getting out of the business. Go find something more productive to do. Contribute to society, or whatever.

She didn’t really know or care where she was going, but she figured California might turn out okay. It all depended, she told herself, on the first train she caught. Things usually did.

So there she was with her backpack all packed up again, sitting by the tracks in the dark and trying not to freeze. She had left Mama a nice note, told her she would write when she got set up in the new place. Told her to let Ginger decide what to do with the turtle car, since she couldn’t drive it on the highway. Left the crossbow and some extra bolts right there on the kitchen table – mostly since it was the only clean surface in the house, but also because she wanted Mama to be sure they were still there. Not that Mama could see well enough to shoot any intruders, but it might make her feel safer.

A stupid thought, really. Mama wasn’t afraid of much.

nonowrimo day five, unedited

day three

2005-11-03T11:12:00.000-08:00

(today's installment is gonna need a lot of reworking to drum the fantra out of it. patience please, i beg)

Lola says all the princes in Persia couldn’t match my Lou.

“We were never in love, there wasn’t room for that sort of thing,” says Lola, “but he was a good man, a good man, and we run deep.”

Mama Lola’s eyes always look dreamy, watery and unfocused, and the spent youth of her face has long fallen to puddle around her neck, but if you look at anyone the right way you can see them every way they ever were and there is no hiding Mama’s strong chin –

“We never fought, didn’t need to. I used to flash my eyes at him and he would flash right back, and we would sit there at the dinner table with his mama and grip our spoons and tell each other off without a single word. And then you know I would look up the table and Mrs. Molitar would be sitting there with her eyes laughing at us two fools. She still laughs at me sometimes, would never say it out loud of course, but I know she thinks I’m a silly woman.

“Lou used to say to me, ‘Lola, there never was a livin thing you couldn’t read like a book,’ but you know I guess he never figured about the ghosts. Guess I didn’t expect it either, and back then I was too busy making biscuits and raising chickens and trying to keep miss Mary out of Bill’s way, and I just reckon I never paid attention to all the souls wandering the desert.

“Well and I had a one-track mind back then, all I could think about was getting out of this town. I was pretty enough, me and Lou figured we could clean ourselves up and fit in pretty good in Reno, maybe even get all the way to San Francisco and be proper city folk. The way we saw it, him being the older brother, he would inherit all the cattle when his mama died, and we could sell ‘em off and buy ourselves a nice house in a new town and raise a couple children. Bill would get the house, you know, and that could work out just right. I felt a little sorry about the thought of leaving Mary here with that drunk husband of hers, but you know that woman needed to learn to stand up for herself and I was tired of watching over her. Besides, I had these dreams of a handsome son, a lawyer maybe, pullin up to the curb in a shiny new car with presents for his mama, a pretty daughter-in-law with city ways, clean-scrubbed grandchildren...

“But you know everyone will tell you that nothing in life is gonna turn out the way you planned it, and I am no exception to that rule. Things happened real fast, once they started happening, and I just wasn’t ready for it. Lou’s mama died in the winter, she got pneumonia and her old bones couldn’t stand for it and she only lasted a few days, and the last thing she said to me was, ‘I am praying for my boys, you tell them I will always watch over them.’ Those weren’t her last words or anything, but they turned out to be truer than I ever thought. Me and Lou, we were gonna stick out the winter and sell the cattle in springtime, but Bill wanted those cattle and sure enough he got real drunk one night and shot Lou right in front of the house.

“That night, me and Lou and Mary were playing poker at the kitchen table, and it was pretty late. Then all of a sudden Bill came back from the bar with a bottle of whiskey still in his hand, and he stomped in the front door bellowing Lou’s name. Lou shot me a look and he got up from the table quick and walked Bill out to the front yard.

“Now Bill wasn’t a bad man, he wasn’t. There was something wrong with him, no doubt about that, and I know if we’d lived in a bigger town he would’ve been in a hospital somewhere, or else jail. But we were here, and he’d gotten this far in life and was trying real hard to do the right thing, and his mama had always been there to talk him down when he got mad. Me and Lou always figured Bill would be angry forever, but we never thought he do worse than throw a few punches here and there, you know?

“But, well, I guess we were wrong. I never saw what happened. Me and Mary were walking hand in hand up the hallway toward the front porch, scared as mice, and we heard a shot and a scream like something not human, like a mountain lion. We ran up to the porch and hid ourselves under the big oak table, and right after we got under there, the porch door swung open and Bill stomped through. There was a gun in his hand, and he used it to smash out a picture frame on his way into the house. He wasn’t saying anything, but he was screaming something terrible.

“Me and Mary didn’t know what to do but hide under that table in the freezing cold all night. Mary was hugging me tight, hiding her face as Bill crashed around the house, but I had my cheek against the screen and I was watching my husband die. You ever see anyone die? In the end, you just pray for it to be quick. Lou died slow, groaning and bleeding, and I prayed and prayed. I was never even religious, nobody ever taught me how to do it right, so I prayed to Lou’s mama

Oh please Mama if you’re up there you said you would be watching oh Mama look down here, look at Lou oh please can you help him

And I guess it worked, didn’t it.

“I must have seen a ghost or two before out of the corner of my eye. I remember as a girl I was always more in tune, more on edge, always could guess why the dogs had their hackles up. But I’d never known anything like this, never. I sat there in the porch, shaking from the cold, and I pinched myself over and over…

“Bill’s screams seemed to fade suddenly, not really quieter, but less important. Mary, well, I knew she was there but I couldn’t feel her a bit. And I was warm, and somehow I felt like I was standing up, like I was right there in front of my Lou. And I felt a surge of love, deep true warm joyful love, all through every part of me when I looked in his face, and then he looked up at me and the way his eyes widened, I knew he was looking at his mama. He stretched out the fingers of his hand, the hand that wasn’t holding his stomach, and I saw my own hand reaching out to his, and my other hand went to stroke his poor sweet face, and suddenly I saw him - remembered him - as a little baby with colic and I knew I’d seen him dying once before, and I had no fear.

“Then I heard a rushing noise in my ears and it was like a thousand million voices all babbling and laughing and talking at once, flowing past me and around me, like swimming in a river of ghosts. And just like a flash of lightning in my brain, all of a sudden I knew something I had never known before and haven’t been able to fully understand since. I saw the world all full of life and beauty, and I saw plain as day that there is no such thing as death, and I fell backwards and I floated through the air, like being carried on the backs of a thousand happy souls.

“Next thing I knew I was cold and awake and it was like nothing had happened. I thought it was all a dream, until I tried to stand and I banged my head on the table. Mary was next to me crying without making a sound, and Bill was passed out drunk, right there on the floor of the porch, and Mrs. Molitar was standing above him looking stern as a schoolteacher. That morning, her eyes weren’t laughing.”

Mama Lola sighs.

“I guess when someone finds this tape, they’ll just think I’m a crazy old lady making up stories,” she says. “But it’s all true, I will swear it on my life, and if you don’t believe me then you just stay around here a few days and you’ll see soon enough. You’d have to be deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid to miss all the Molitars roaming around my house. Why do you think I’m still here? I can’t leave my family, I won’t leave the memory of my husband, and I’m not letting this house fall into the wrong hands. If it was up to me, I would’ve hopped a train to San Francisco twenty years ago.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen when I die. I guess maybe I’ll end up hanging around here with Bill and Mary and Mrs. Molitar, just us chickens. It won’t be long now, I don’t have many more winters left in me and anyway I’ve seen what I need to see in life. Guess I’m ready to find out what happens next.

“Well.”

There is a fumbling noise, a muffled click, and suddenly Mama’s voice is gone from the tape and Donny Osmond is singing joyfully:

…silver girl, sail on by
Your time has come to shine, all your dreams are on their way
See how they shine, oh
If you need a friend…

DamNear shuts it off.

nonowrimo day three, unedited

day two

2005-11-02T11:30:00.000-08:00

Mama doesn’t mind ghosts, she’s a little nuts anyway. She is seventy-two years old and a self-proclaimed “collector”, which means she hasn’t thrown anything away in thirty years. Shit, longer than that. She has an eighteen-room motel, and none of the rooms were usable until DamNear got here: all of them were packed to the eyes with junk. She’s got everything from dartboards to headboards to board games to sweatshirts with embroidered cats on them. Mama is a big-time dial-up shopper, shut-in like she is; you name it, she’s bought it on QVC and it is probably still in the original packaging.

DamNear’s favorite thing that she found at Mama’s motel is the jar of doll heads. Nobody knows where that thing came from, least of all Mama.

The fact is, Mama is losing her edge, and DamNear does a lot of the work that needs to be done around the motel: repairs, cleaning, like that. The other girl that lives here spends most of her time keeping Mama company. The other girl, Ginger, doesn’t believe in ghosts; Mama, on the other hand, talks to them when nobody else is around.

DamNear is scared shitless of ghosts. She hasn’t seen them yet, but she knows they’re there. She wouldn’t be living in this shithole if Mama hadn’t hired her as caretaker. When she rolled into town two years ago, hunkered under a blanket in the back of a pickup truck, you could say she was pretty flat broke. The town had seemed a little more promising then: it wasn’t much, but it could be worse. She should have figured out a thing or two, looking at the signs on the businesses. There was an “AUTO SHOP PARTS & SERVICE,” a “Miners Club MEMBER’S ONLY,” a “Sammy’s Country Club Restaurant Bar Casino,” and a “Sammy’s Motel.” And that was it. Main Street USA.

That first night, seeing as she had no money, DamNear decided to check out this Sammy character and try to negotiate some kind of room rate.

Four hours later, after getting kicked out of the kitchen with fifty cents and a “don’t come back you speak to my daughter like that,” DamNear realized it wasn’t likely she’d get a room at Sammy’s Motel. Probably, ever. In fact, all she’d discovered from her efforts was that (a) Sammy had a daughter that was ripe for plucking; (b) Sammy’s daughter didn’t want to get plucked; (c) Sammy owned everything in town – from the motel, to the restaurant, to the trailer park, to thousands of acres of ranch surrounding the area; and (d) Sammy didn’t like her one bit.

DamNear went next door to the Miner’s Club to find out what her fifty cents could buy her. They wouldn’t even let her in the door. It was dark by then, late September and the wind was blustering and she was starting to get cold –

Late September! DamNear thinks. That means it’s been two years since she got here, like, any day now. Two fucking years in this shithole town? Now that’s just wrong.

DamNear is sitting on her bed in her room by now, with her glass pipe and her bottle of Jim Beam and some comics, all wrapped in her blankets and engrossed in her thoughts. She takes a hit and puts the pipe aside, then sinks back onto the bed with her arms folded behind her head.

It’s time for her to get out of here. She really doesn’t belong in this shitty town. The locals here either hate her for being a black lesbian punk with a big mouth, or they love her because she runs speed, but it’s not like she has any friends. She’s afraid to leave (or come back to) her motel room after sunset, because the hallways at Mama’s are dark and full of junk and ghosts. She has no CDs, no money to buy CDs, and all the radio stations out here are country or Mexican. What the fuck is she even doing here in the first place?

It was good, for a while. Really, it was.

The first night, however, was scary and bitterly cold. DamNear found herself on the street – not for the first time in her life, but definitely the first time in a town with no sidewalk – with no chance of finding shelter. She was walking along in front of the buildings when she noticed curls of blue-white steam, glowing in the moonlight, at knee-level. They appeared to be coming from the ground in front of a big, dilapidated wooden building. She smelled sulfur and cat piss (the latter, it would later become apparent, was coming from the house; the former, of course, came from beneath the ground). She walked closer.

There in front of what she would later discover to be Mama’s defunct motel, DamNear discovered a little puddle bubbling up from the ground. It smelled like sulphur, and it smelled hot. She stuck her finger in it, and right away pulled it back out! Shit that was hot! And that was when she decided to sleep right there in the front yard of this weird house. She didn’t really have a choice, it was the only place around that was any kind of warm, and she would get up at sunrise and leave before anyone knew she’d been there.

So DamNear pulled out her sleeping bag and huddled up there, curled around the hot puddle with her backpack for a pillow and for a while she let the headlights from the highway lull her to sleep, and later she thought she heard a woman singing a sad song and she felt soft arms raise her up and rock her like a baby, poor little baby so far from home.

The next morning, DamNear woke up in the back yard. Shit you not, it’s true. She woke up in the back yard and she was being poked with a broom, the bristles cutting into her cheek and neck and her first reaction was to grab the broom with one strong forearm and swing it away from whoever was holding it and CRACK! it hit an olive tree and the handle broke.

“Well that wasn’t a nice thing to do,” said Mama in a raspy old voice. She was standing still at the top of the back stoop, and her voice sounded calm but her callused hands were clutching her skirt tight. Mama couldn’t see much, and she’d thought the black shape in the yard was some kind of dead animal. It sure smelled enough like one. The Molitars (for that was the name of the ghost family who shared Mama’s house) had been up late last night, so Mama knew there was some sort of disturbance. To be perfectly honest, she was glad it wasn’t a dead animal, because it would be all kinds of trouble to have it carted away. But what, exactly, was it? With strength like that, it must be human. Mama hoped it was a human of the alive type and not the dead type. She decided to ask.

“Who are you?”

“Fuck,” DamNear groaned.

Mama shut her mouth even tighter, her thin lips folding almost over themselves. Her knuckles were turning white where her hands clasped her skirts. Please, please, not another angry ghost! She had enough trouble with Bill and his tantrums.

Then the black shape turned, rustling as it did, and Mama heard a zipper. A new wave of stink came off the shape – but it was an alive stink, the smell of someone who hadn’t washed in a long while.

DamNear had just unzipped her sleeping bag and was rubbing her swollen eyes. She was very, very thirsty and her lids were swollen almost closed, but she knew something was wrong. Aside, of course, from the ol’ lady poking her with a broom. She was somewhere different.

She decided to ask.

“Where am I?”

Anyway, long story short, that’s how DamNear got to Mama’s house, and later on over a tall glass of water Mama told her all about the ghosts of the Molitar family and DamNear ended up moving in to that haunted motel in the middle of the desert and setting up a little speed-running business out of a dark and creepy little room. She didn’t see the ghosts ever with her own eyes, but Mama said the ladies must have brought DamNear to the back yard to keep her safe.

DamNear kind of found that heartwarming.

Sarah was just an episode, really, in DamNear’s crazy life. Her life is full of episodes, and most of those episodes have to do with some girl or another. She’s always been into sex, ever since she was a little girl and she used to let the neighbor boys feel her titties. She lost her virginity at thirteen and started going with girls at fourteen: Mini, everyone called her, that blond girl with the limp bangs and bags under her eyes, she and DamNear used to go to the bathrooms at the public pool and smoke cigarettes and make out. DamNear was hot shit back then, because she was little and she had this high scratchy voice and she was badass and she would do anything. She’s still little, short of stature anyway, but her tits got big and her ass did too. Her voice is still scratchy and she’ll still do anything, but it’s not the same when you don’t have a tight little package to work with.

DamNear is thinking about the first time Mini made her come, by mistake really, in the bathroom stall with two fingers jamming DamNear’s g-spot and her smooth white chin rubbing DamNear’s clit (because, like most people, she had her tongue about an inch too high), and DamNear was so excited she just quivered and her knees gave way and that was the first orgasm she hadn’t given herself.

After that there were lots of girls, girls and boys, and DamNear worked in the biz for a while mixing sound and they even cast her in some bondage flicks when she was sixteen. Oh yes, somewhere out there is a video of DamNear, and someone has jacked off to it a million times. Now there’s a thought to make ya smile.

Actually, right now that thought is making DamNear come.

When she finishes, she pulls her pants back up and smokes a little more, takes a hit off the bottle. Then she reaches into her nightstand and pulls out her weed and papers, starts to roll a joint.

DamNear hates Sundays. There is never anything to do.

nonowrimo day two, unedited

day one

2005-11-01T11:20:00.000-08:00

DamNear raises the crossbow to her shoulder, sights. Around her, wild grasses writhe with the fragrant sage, clinging to the rocky soil and swaying under the torturous pressure of the wind. Behind her, a thousand dead and dried bushes are submitting to the wind’s influence and flying away, tumbling and bouncing across the high desert. Above her, buzzards and ravens swing in wide arcs through the deep blue skies. This is a land of death and starvation: repressing heat and strangling cold, winds to lift you off your feet and rains to sink your car into the soil, lions and coyotes and bears, oh my.

DamNear is aiming at a PBR can she’s stuck onto a sage branch, a hundred paces away. The wind is high and warm from the southeast. DamNear cocks the bow, squints her little eye, and lets the bolt fly.

She misses, but it was damn near a hit.

That was the last of the five bolts she bought last time she was in Reno. Five for $19.95, what a fuckin ripoff. That, plus she has to get a ride out there and back every time she wants to buy some, and her paycheck doesn’t do gas money. Those bolts are barely worth it: the fuckers are made of fiberglass or something, and they break when they hit a rock hard enough. Bullshit.

DamNear sits down on a rock, hitching up her cut-off Carharts, crossing her scarred brown legs. She reaches for the tube of her Camelbak and takes a long sip of beer, then pulls the flask from her pocket. She holds it in both hands for a minute, thinking.

Four feet away or so, someone else is thinking too. He is thinking, okay okay just hold still, it’s not coming over here I’m safe just hold still and just in case, he is coiled and springloaded with his rattle held stiffly in the air, ready to sound the alarm. A drop of venom falls from his left fang and lands on a tiny black beetle, which dies instantly.

DamNear doesn’t see the rattlesnake, because she is tipsy and she is obsessing, and because it is hiding from her. She also doesn’t see the bobcat, the little brown bunnies, and most of the birds. This is normal. They are always hiding from us and from each other, stupid animals. What a lame existence.

But then again, so is living in a haunted motel in the middle of a desert, with winter coming. This is what DamNear is thinking. It’s not the first time she’s thought about it, but she spends more and more time on this particular topic lately. She scratches her cheek, scratches her head. The hardware in her hair (nuts and bolts, you know, but also an ancient bead and an obsidian arrowhead and a buzzard feather, all twisted into her little dredhawk and it’s a good thing she never sleeps) clinks against itself contentedly.

The rattlesnake, thinking she is making some sort of warning noise herself, decides to make a break for it. It slithers away at top speed, rustling through the dry grass as it goes. DamNear notices the sound but doesn’t turn her head. She doesn’t even, fucking, want to know. She unscrews the cap and draws deep from the flask, and then she stands up, brushes the burrs off her ass, rares back and kicks a rock as hard as she can. The rock doesn’t move. Now DamNear’s toe hurts, and she is almost out of beer, and there are five bolts somewhere on the ground that she has to find. She hopes none of them are cracked, those pieces of shit.

DamNear’s car is little and white and she bought it for $200 a couple years ago and it has “TURTLE XING” spraypainted on the front with a picture of a turtle. DamNear looooooooves turtles. She even has a turtle backpack that her friend Heather made out of felt for her. Turtle! She pets the little turtle on her car and giggles widely. Turtle. Her car is her turtle too, she loves it that much. She doesn’t have a driver’s license, but who gives a shit out here. The car isn’t registered or anything, it’s not really that roadworthy, there’s no back seat and you need a screwdriver to start it – but it’s the best car she’s ever driven. One time she was hauling ass across the desert and she hit a bump and all four wheels caught air and she just had time to think “oh SHIT” before it came CRASH!in back down and she swore to god she thought the whole underneath was going to come disconnected. But it didn’t, it was okay and now it just drives a little wobbly.

DamNear’s car is bouncing along a gravel road that leads from here to Winnemucca. She is not going to Winnemucca. First of all, Winnemucca sucks ass. Second of all, she is out of beer and she doesn’t have any money. No, she is going back to the motel, dammit, and she is going to smoke some speed and think about things like she does every night, and she will probably cut herself again.

…Sarah was not a turtle, she was a snake and she slithered away without saying goodbye and she took DamNear’s fucking CD book with her, which is so fucking not okay. Those CDs are all DamNear has to keep her busy, that bitch didn’t understand. Of course she didn’t, she could just get in her little gay boyfriend’s car and drive back to the city and work at a gas station or a restaurant or an accountant’s office or whatever the fuck she does, and go out dancing every night if she wants and buy ammunition at the fucking corner if she wants. And okay, she probably doesn’t buy ammunition because she doesn’t shoot, but she is in the city and she is dancing, and she has DamNear’s CDs and this situation leaves a major hole in DamNear’s head. Just as if that bitch had shot her.

“Why don’t you just aim for my heart next time,” DamNear murmurs.

…Sarah was not a turtle, she was a girl and when she danced she undulated her long limbs and swayed like a charmed snake, and her long neck held up a head of straight blond hair that floated like rainclouds whenever she turned quickly. DamNear used to love to brush that hair, and she used to love to watch Sarah sleep and stroke her clear, white, freckled forehead, and she loved to watch Sarah wake up and then she loved to kiss her everywhere all over. The sex was never very good though, which is how she always sort of knew that Sarah was straight. So maybe it hurt, maybe it hurt like a knife to the ribs when Sarah left, but DamNear had been ready for it. Sarah had only been here to visit anyway, here for a month, just here to party, and DamNear understood the concept.

What really hurt was how alone she felt when she realized Sarah had her tunes. She’d emailed her, you know, to let Sarah know. A week later, there was no response. No, fucking, response. That was low. DamNear had almost slit her wrists that night.

Once, long ago in this history of this town, a man shot his brother outside a house on Main Street. The brother fell into the street and his blood pooled in the dusty crescents of hoofprints and bootprints, and it soaked into the ground all night while he died, and as he died he thought of his wife and he thought of the girl he’d loved as a boy and he thought of his mother and he dreamed she came down from Heaven to carry him up into the sky. His blood sank into the ground and the beetles drank it, and it sank farther and clung to the wizened roots of crab grasses, and it sank and when it hit the sulphur rocks deep below, they began to steam with anger for the injustice of his killing, and the earth split open where his life had spilled into it, and to this day it steams and smells of death.

The man’s mother, after sacrificing her place in the afterlife to carry her son home, came to live in the house on Main Street, a specter: a ghost. She was a calm ghost, at peace with her decision. Her activities were fairly mundane: she had been seen attempting to dust the mantel in the parlor, or hovering in front of the hall mirror fixing her hair. She never set foot in the kitchen or the bedrooms: apparently, that part of her life no longer interested her.

Her son, the man who had killed his own brother, was very much alive and very troubled to see his mother in the hallway in the mornings. It also bothered his wife: in fact, it bothered her enough that she began to go mad and the local doctor was no help. There was no local preacher because there was no church in this town (and never would be, never in the town’s long life), and the man’s wife begged him to please take her away from the scent of hot sulphur and the ghost of his mother.

The man took his wife out in back of the house and shot her in the head to shut her up, and where he shot her there grew up an olive tree, and the ghost of his wife became caught in the branches. There, on windy nights, she sings a song of misery and loneliness, passion and loss.

The man was at the end of his rope, and he hitched up his horse to a wagon he’d stolen from a neighbor, and he turned it onto the road to drive it to Winnemucca. But two days’ ride out, the wagon betrayed him and he became stranded in the desert; his only choice was to ride the horse back to his house.

As he drew in sight of the town, the man’s horse collapsed beneath him and he had to shoot it in the ear, and it died peacefully and it left no ghost. But the man, the man staggered all the way back to town and died of thirst in his own back yard in the middle of the night, with his dead wife’s song ringing in his ears. And when the ground cracked open and his ghost was pulled downward into the netherworld, two lady ghosts pulled back, and held him there at the house where he was destined to throw fits of anger, over and over, for ever.

This place on Main Street, with the lurking hot spring splitting the grass and the sad wailing in the branches of the olive tree, is where DamNear lives. It’s a motel now, with one woman running the place, two permanent residents, and the rest of the rooms filled with junk. And the whole thing is haunted, scary haunted.

nonowrimo day one, unedited

from the under-tablecloth point of view:

2005-10-21T23:15:00.000-07:00

I worry about my mother, sitting there with her arm around that guy with the bad smile and the watery eyes. I think of her at my age, married to the wrong man and with my little brother already on the way while I grabfisted at her curls -

when did her smile stop being a happy smile and change into a plea for help? And what is this guy going to do for it.

Now don't get me wrong, I want her to be happy, have rarely wanted something as much. But it scares me, after a string of guys that were sore sore losers, the first guy that isn't half bad

she is sighing all day long and forgetting where things are
talking about him endlessly and saying everything but the words "I love him" -

At my age she was a baby with babies; at my age she threw the romance out the window to keep her hands free for diapers and an inattentive husband; at my age she stopped learning about the outside world, and hid inside a dream house full of skeletons.

Who is this person that she is letting in? Does she know what to do with him? Does she really love him after three weeks, or is he just the first guy in twenty years that has paid her any attention?

...so I worry.

At least he seems nice.

999 lovely

2005-10-18T17:16:00.000-07:00

They call her Lobster Girl and it breaks my heart a little, because when she is walking around a party she wears her jacket over her shoulder to cover that hand. I never even noticed for the first couple of weeks, until she made a strange motion to grab a paper plate. But every time the band goes on stage they like to bring her up front and display how she can play a washboard with it.

I want to ask her what it is like to be in the circus.

Anyway I am attracted to her with or without a fucked-up hand, and one night I was daring enough to leave E's side, saying "bye I am putting Disaster to sleep" and I tucked her in on a hammock and left her to sleep it off.

Innocent little girl in a striped shirt and bad haircut and leather jacket, touring the country with a jug band, sometimes you need someone to tuck you in.

She found me again, that was the wonderful part, and she had that jacket over her arm and was drinking wine from the bottle, and had discovered my real name. We made a date for "sometime in a couple of months" and did not exchange numbers because neither of us know where we'll be in a couple of months.

But I think we should be friends, and make circus dolls together and write our names on things, and never sleep together no matter how much we want to. But maybe I will kiss her.

today I read
foxie

2005-10-18T10:39:00.000-07:00

well, it looks like we've lost another cat to the coyotes.

spectacles

2005-10-17T14:24:00.000-07:00

mamta

The Conductor's eyes looked like needles in a haystack. I realized just how handsome he is, cleanshaven and washed. His girlfriend looked mashed-together, harried, makeup with a spackle knife; she went onstage and the room echoed as she yelled out the words to her circus songs.

With my acid eyes I could see the Conductor's valiant efforts to Do The Right Thing, and I decided to do the same. I ignored him as much as possible, avoided him politely. I looked my boyfriend deep in the eyes and told him with my gaze, "you only you". The Conductor was drunk; the Conductor has the prettiest eyes; the Conductor walked away. I looked my boyfriend in the eyes.

And he said, "forever." Again and again, forever and forever. Pledged his forever to me. His eyes bulged and drooped and he said, "forever." He said, "will you at least consider it."

I said, "yes."

today I surfed
buzznet

bite into the APPLE!

2005-10-14T10:14:00.000-07:00

kirsten johnson

Apples for breakfast, apples that have lost a little crunch but no flavor, a zillion rubbery cells bursting under the pressure of my teeth against the peel, bleeding sweetly all down my throat and sticky across my lips!

Murder a living thing for breakfast! I like to eat things that were very recently alive, they taste better that way. This apple has known for a long time that it was sick and it is preparing itself for a peaceful frost-limned entombment ah alas i never spread my seed but such is life thinking back to imagine that damn drone, that dusty-legged bee who deflowered the blossom -

in spring, it seems like such a good idea - and now I am carving a half-dead fruit with my canines, plundering its sad resigned life and judging it:

TOO SWEET

and not even eating the entire flesh before depositing it in a white plastic bag with all the other remainders, detritus and rejecteds of my ravenous lifestyle, a purgatory it can never escape.

you know i think i'll throw this apple core out the window instead
i wonder if it's painful for them to be eaten
or if
severing the stem
is like severing consciousness
and i am eating terri schiavo.

4:00 today will be great! and then I go away for the weekend and do drugs on a beach in San Francisco and have lots of sex, see you monday

ps today i read papamamba

conductor

2005-10-12T15:43:00.000-07:00

The Other Man (who is really just a boy) says he misses me. The Other Man writes, "I had grown found of you." The Other Man can't spell. He has body odor and mouth odor and his mustache gets in my nose when I kiss him, and he smokes too much and is in love with someone else anyway. This is what happens when you decide to fill the cold spot in your bed with the least harmless of suitors.

Still, the sight of him dancing in the passenger seat, wearing overalls with a tiny train safety-pinned to the bib, grinning at me: "shake your ass! you never shake your ass" - or the way the water clings to his eyelashes and he opens his eyes bright green with a surprised look, the look of surprise he gets sometimes to see me. Or that last night, not a date, but the first night together with no interruptions -

Well, it was pleasant. I was growing found of it too.

today I saw
tif's lovely face

re-up

2005-10-11T12:40:00.000-07:00

he pressed me for hours, tears leaking from his swollen eyelids, unshaven cheeks haggard in the half-light. I held him tight, the only thing I knew to do, and I tried over and over to say the right thing.

Everything I said was the wrong thing. actions speak louder than words, I whispered to myself and I cupped his face in my hand and with the other hand I squeezed his waist.

On a bench in the park I had finally found him, pretending to sleep, waiting for me so that he could hurt me like I'd hurt him. I hadn't even known I was hurting him, off on a glamorous crusade as I was, traipsing through my last days in heavenly exile, never taking the time to pay quite enough attention

he had been sending me messages, I had tossed off replies like torn butterfly wings, fish scales, autumn leaves.

So we came to the park and I tried to sit but he wouldn't make space for me; I knelt on the ground and he whispered in my ear I read everything you wrote, you're a writer for christ's sake, you didn't write any more than a shit stain to me

I had a gift I'd been saving for weeks, in the pocket of my boot. He took it without a word. I cried, and laughed to find myself crying, and he held me silently. And when our friends came to gather us, he stole my cell phone: insurance, I suppose.

Soon enough I found myself parked outside his house, half-asleep with the seat reclined, and he walked up with hands in pockets and too-big backpack - face slumped onto his chin like a little boy with hurt feelings - and I followed him inside.

I don't know if I'll be able to talk much.
That's okay, I just want to be here.

but of course we did talk, and he pressed me for hours while tears slimed his haggard cheeks, and eventually I sat up and I said,

we can play word games forever, and nothing I say will ever be the right thing. I never had any bad intentions toward you, but I see now how I can have hurt you. I get it. I'm sorry.

the next morning I kissed him and touched him and his embrace turned rougher, more forceful, and I kissed him gently and he thrust his cock down my throat five, six times before he came

we went to lunch

slept again

and this morning he sighed and called me "baby" and kissed me like a lover, and I drove him to work, and I left town again.

today I read
radiohumper

thank god for you

2005-07-29T22:45:00.000-07:00

And you know, in four months of working there, I didn't meet a single person that I liked.

In fact, most of these women scraped my nerves like knuckles on a cheese grater. Bitch, moan, whine, all day. They grumbled to themselves while they made copies, rolled their eyes between customers, made false friendships and insulted each other in the hallways. Between their elaborately frumpy hairdos and worn-shapeless pink smocks, their pasty white faces were filled with wrinkles and always, always making puppy-dog eyes. Or weasel eyes, which is - while not quite as awful - still bad.

I had thought it was grinding to work in an office full of successful, well-dressed, put-together women. "These women complain too much," I thought. "They have nothing to complain about, I don't see why they have to be like that." But lord, o lord, I had never worked in an office with senile women and women with bad credit and women with health issues and small children and giant bags under their eyes. Most of them were fairly intelligent, but not a one among them, not one, would ever take responsibility for her choices in life. No, they just came to work in their barely-acceptable shirts with pictures of puppies on them, and their haircuts from 1985... and bitched and whined, all day long.

I couldn't believe how many of them there were. They seemed to bleed from the walls. Never a moment of silence in that place, and rarely a topic of conversation other than how much they all disliked their workplace.

Anyway, today was my last day and I snuck out without really saying goodbye to anyone. It's for the best. I wouldn't have known what to say.

updates:general

2005-07-28T22:53:00.000-07:00

1. I am havin a party this weekend, we are goin campin. Some friends are driving up from the bay area (tho isabella has refused to attend)(with a valid reason so iss okay) and some are driving across town, and we are goin to the river like i do every day anyway. I hope they all have a good time. I also hope we don't get kicked out by the state ranger, for camping illegally.

2. Tomorrow is my last day of my job which I mostly hate but also sort of love, a lot.

3. S. told me to STFU (tho she said it much nicer than that) and enjoy the fact that I have lots of hot boyfriends, instead of stressing over them. It is working out very well, thanks S. Because, really, they are fucking HOT.

4. I got a paycheck today from my new job. The new blog is sposed to be activated later tonight. I have been conducting some sly networking-oriented email activity in preparation for this.

5. And on Monday, I move to my tent in the desert.

6. I hope H lets me shack up with him in his trailer so I don't have to stay in that damn tent every night!

Also: it's like, when it's Led Zeppelin I just automatically give it at least 3 stars. Why didn't I start listening to this earlier? What a late bloomer.

today I surfed
49media

2005-07-27T13:47:00.000-07:00

I should have picked up on it a lot earlier, really. But, you know, I am not always a very good judge of character.

It's not that there was anything wrong with Chandler (aside from her name). In fact, she was beautiful, intelligent, and down-to-earth. She and I had friends in common, and we liked a lot of the same things. She was good company, most of the time. Except for that smile.

When Chandler smiled, it was wide, and curled at the edges like The Joker's. Her lips, naturally red, would stretch to thin purple strips of flesh in order to accommodate a full display of her teeth - and what teeth they were! Absolutely even, flawlessly white, long and straight like pickets on a fence, and framed by an adorable pink gumline. I remember her teeth perfectly - because I spent most of my time staring at them.

It was her line of defense, I know now. She grinned when she felt uncomfortable, when she was bored, when she was angry, and of course when she was happy. Her face must have ached from smiling all the time, and particularly when in my company. With me, she was especially prone to bobbing her head up and down while making a strange, rough noise in the back of her throat - laughing, I assumed, like Ernie of Sesame Street.

Of course, later I figured out that there really wasn't any laughter about it, that she was hissing at me like an enraged goose behind that soulless grin. But back then, I didn't understand. Back then, I never looked people in the eye.

We were all alone in a foreign country, a couple of 20-year-olds doing a year abroad in France. We took an apartment together, Chandler and I, a little two-bedroom on the ground floor of a rich couple's walkup. They had marble steps and stained-glass windows; we had tiny rooms, metal cots, and windows that let out onto the sidewalk. We were in heaven.

Chandler took the big room, because she'd found the apartment. I took to inviting boys over for dinner, and wine, and more wine... We formed a tribe with a couple of guys from the exchange program, and the four of us used to sit and talk until early morning. As the conversations became more and more intimate, I started keeping track of our funnier and more ribald comments. As I recall, most of them had to do with ass-fucking. I thought this was hilarious, and wrote the prize pieces down on a whiteboard in the hallway.

This was only one of a long string of incidents involving my writing things down that other people didn't want to have recorded.

I think the whiteboard was the first straw for Chandler, but it eventually became an emblem of my uncouthness. Every time I would write a new quote on it, she would stand nearby, looking at me sideways and hissing through that great wall of teeth. She never complained about that or any of my other annoying habits (of which, I'm sure, there were plenty)...

Oh I just ran out of steam. Maybe I'll finish this another time.

the romanians and the baby talk

2005-07-26T12:51:00.000-07:00

It's 100 degrees and there are Romanians in the kitchen. They got here at 7:30 this morning and commenced cutting tile and arguing with each other in gibberish (or, perhaps, Romanian). I got up and left the house... but eventually I had to come back home, and they are still here but have switched from just yelling at each other, to yelling in absurdly high tones of voice. One of them sounds like he's trying to imitate a hysterical woman, and I would laugh but he NEVER STOPS

aargh

Somebody fucking shoot me.

2005-07-24T17:08:00.000-07:00

When I was a child, my hair was both more beautiful and passionate than I was. Picture it, if you will, through the lens of the 1980s: A light ash blonde, fine and curly and backlit. Accented with colored barrettes, combed into soft waves, it cascaded about me like an intricately-woven halo. Growing up, it was a constant topic of conversation: this angelic weave that framed my pale cheeks with a gentle glow.

My hair was commonly acknowledged to be my strongest feature, and if you look at a picture of me in those days, it's easy to see why. For, perched amid this gorgeous waft of curls, clutching desperately at the camera, is one of the ugliest faces you will ever have the displeasure to see. A pile of jumbled features, frozen into an expression of absolute terror. The lips, too thin and red, stretch in a grimace over raggedy teeth (so crowded in that infantile jaw that some of them grew in sideways). The nose is short and wide, nostrils flared. Eyebrows, invisible. Ears like doorhandles. And the eyes! My poor childish eyes alone are enough to frighten away all but the most stalwart viewer. Large and round and blue, they seem to recede from the camera even as they hold it fast in their gaze. They are couched in a nest of fine wrinkles and bags, signs of too many nights spent awake. Their terror of the photographer is obvious, and strong enough to give the distinct impression that I am not all there, that I might be better off in one of those nice homes for wacky children, that, lacking proper supervision, I might very well end up on a murderous rampage a la Children of the Corn...

Not surprisingly, I think not even my mother found me beautiful in those days. I do not blame her one bit.

crossing the double yellow

2005-07-24T15:18:00.000-07:00

How it would feel to lie in your death bed, to know that you would die there.

Alternately hot and cold, perhaps, or maybe just cold. Delirious or just bored witless, the sheets at times comforting and at times rough and painful, wrapped around ankle and wrist like restraints. The sheets which begin the day clean but, by midnight's restless watch, have adopted your stench: The stench of you, but gone bad. The smell of your self rotting away - dusty and dry, or medicinal with the tang of urine, or musky and rich like fresh earthworms -

and the time, all the time in the world to think these thoughts, as your body fails.

How it must feel to wait through the night, moonlit, cold and barren. Afternoon visits by sullen, frightened children and falsely cheerful youngadults with no knowledge, no concept of death at all. How you grow to resent them, as much as you need them. How their eyes glance sharply off your glazed stare, not wanting to see your muddy, blurred searching of their physiognomy.

Searching the faces of your loved ones, of those progeny in whom you have placed all your trust and all your doubt for the future. Searching for a sign, a marker, a glint of something solid. Knowing that you have no choice in the matter: suddenly this is the future, this gaggle of people you love frantically but have barely connected with.

The utter helplessness of being ill, the regret. The thought of all those days when the spring boughs were waving and the ice cream trucks tinkling and you, you were wrapped up in your self
(whom you are now unable to escape, ever, for ever)

Perhaps the thought of all the time that is gone away, what could have happened.
Perhaps a name that sticks like popcorn in the back of your throat, and you spend the better part of a day trying to remember

before giving up
(the ghost) of someone, long gone now and anyway it doesn't matter.

The realization that it really doesn't, doesn't matter. That you have done what you will do in your life, there is no more need to worry. For better or for worse, that things are finally out of your hands

and you can relax
and die in this bed with a needle in your arm, a nurse who knows all the embarrassing secrets, the television blaring
and the sheets wrapped all around

2005-07-23T14:10:00.000-07:00

my ear is plugged today, and it thrums - no, thumps, but distantly and irregularly. My eardrum today is like an old amputation: maroon-colored and cotton-wrapped and loosely persistent.

And speaking of drumbeats, they are beginning to make their way to me through the jungle. Here and there, more and more, the occasional and still unreliable beat in the distance. I know what it will become, as more and more drums join in, and it is in expectation of this joyous cacophony that my heart begins to bang its own jittery drum.

Also, I've had too much coffee.

today I witnessed
ms. piggy's nip slip

2005-07-23T10:18:00.000-07:00

My brother has met the girl of his dreams, and he's bringing her home today. My mother thinks it's funny that B's girlfriend is Persian and my boyfriend is Turkish, since my family has been 100% honky for at least the past five centuries. But, you know, my brother's always had a thing for girls with dark coloring - and I just try to be as trendy as possible all the time.

Heh.

And my mom went on a date yesterday. Her second one, as far as I know, since my dad left in 1991. She brought the guy here first so I could meet him. They spent the day together, hiking and things; when I left for work, they were in the kitchen snacking on canteloupe. This is so awesome. I hope she gets laid.

You know, I moved in here because I had a few things I needed to accomplish; four months later, I really feel like I've accomplished every single one of them. Maybe not perfectly - and maybe not without assistance - but dammit, I tied up the loose ends with a quickness.

I love my little life.

today I read
simpleton was an outlaw
and
about the bugbear and the squirrels

s-e-x

2005-07-21T13:34:00.000-07:00

but the funny part is that we snuck out of the party as soon as the speeches commenced, and walked back to the car where E promptly stuck his hand up my skirt and next thing I knew we were fucking on the hood and I had one foot braced against a truck and one against a street sign. All in all I think we had sex five or six times in less than 12 hours, interspersed with bouts of schmoozing and sleeping. Also, definitely some "I love you"s and genuine affection; these are all good things.

Still, it's an open relationship, right? And I've got a fuck-buddy waiting list again. I love that. There's the river guide, who emailed me today - that one's in my pocket for later, if we ever cross paths; the Marine sniper, whom I continue to think about a little more than is maybe necessary; the rock star who suddenly looked me up and wants to see me when he gets back from Hollywood -

and I sense the distinct possibility of a threesome this weekend, if we go to the desert, with E's roommate who has big ta-ta's and whom he's been fucking for years.

But I dunno, I don't really like big titties, and besides she is obviously in love with him. I might sneak off and go find the sniper instead. He's fun.

schmoozie floozy

2005-07-21T13:26:00.000-07:00

I'm glad I went to the thingie. It went real good. Immediately upon climbing the staircase I dropped a melon and it went boom-boom-boom all the way to the bottom with E running after it. But everything else about the evening was smooth sailing and actually I felt a bit honored by the attentions I was given. So.

E asked if I have a new blog, and I said yes but don't go looking for it, and he said what if I find it by accident, and I looked deep into his eyes and I made him promise not to look for it or find it. It was sort of the first time we've ever had an open power struggle. Usually we avoid that sort of thing.

I think it went okay.

magic sprinkles: the art of networking in the counterculture

2005-07-20T08:18:00.000-07:00

I am in a great mood today, because it's the day of the schmoozy thing, and although I really don't want to go to that... it means I get to see E. How pathetic am I? Shut up.

So today I'm mostly going to spend primping, shaving, things like that. Because we all know that 90% of success is showing up, and another easy 8% is looking really fucking fabulous when you get there.

The schmoozy thing is chez my new boss (with whom I am still hashing out terms) and E's ex-girlfriend (who hates me). Conveniently, they are roommates. Even more conveniently, E is escorting me to the party. It's a big potluck where the web team celebrates themselves, and I need to go make a good first impression on absolutely everyone there.

I'm thinking a black miniskirt and tall black boots should do the trick... maybe some fishnets and/or stripes... perhaps a little pink hair dye... and you know what, I should seriously think about bringing some food for the potluck.

Anyway, we are on a strict cameo-only timeline: get there after everyone is drunk, and leave before they start the speeches. I may not get any ear time with boss, but I can get her attention (yet another reason for the short skirt). That's usually half the battle.

today I read
the singin butler

2005-07-19T19:48:00.000-07:00

I can not motivate myself to do anything lately. I don't need to. I sleep in, take naps, lie around, do a chore here and there, work four hours a day. Everything is being taken care of, my bases are covered.

I feel like a lazy slob. I really do. But then at the same time, I'm doing enough, my bills (for now) are paid - and that's more than I could say when I lived in the city.

It's the calm before the storm you know, I am gathering up all the lazy summer days and afternoon naps and trying to store them somehow, perhaps in my thighs or the arches of my feet, so I can pull them out later and say: remember, you had comfort.

today I read
trueboy

2005-07-18T22:41:00.000-07:00

The air hangs still and stagnant, redolent of summer-elbows. The odor of two-showers-and-two-swims-and-i'm-still-drenched-in-sweat

my onliest allthetime friend is going away for a little while and I will be left to fend for myself against the rampaging psychic miasmas (iss okay i have a broom)

and in other news, i am attempting to play hard-to-get. for what, i don't know. also will have an interesting social challenge on Wednesday night, getting ready to schmoo-

oh, would you look at that, a fresh breeze just blew in like a cool stick of gum beneath my nose.

if i want to look good on Wednesday i better wash my face today. Bye

today I read
jamie boud jamie boud

i miss you already

2005-07-18T00:37:00.000-07:00

Jasmine and I figured it all out tonight*. It goes like this:

1. The unavailable (emotionally)
2. The codependent
3. The stable and openminded
4. The alien from outerspace

#1 is the one we are in love with.
#2 is the one(s) in love with us, who we hate.
#3 is the ideal we haven't met yet (except, in her case, as someone else's husband - and possibly, in my case, as something i'm trying not to think about)
#4 is known to both of us, and runs the gamut from stalker to heartbreaker (with no happy equilibrium, poor chap)

...and furthermore, we now know why neither one of us can imagine having a coherent relationship; this is because we have both spent our lives surrounded by horribly incoherent relationships, and we don't understand how they are supposed to work**.

I am waiting for a phone call from a recently-returned adventurer who is not calling me, possibly because I possibly don't want him to. I am waiting for a call from a #1 who wants to be a #3. I am wishing I had never had my cards read, because if the cards hadn't told me it was hopeless, then maybe I would have some hope for this relationship***.

I am looking for the exit. I am wondering about this quest for love in all the places, and exactly how far I am prepared to travel in the name of a romantic ideal which may or may not be attainable.

It's all very dramatic****.

I'm going to bed (alone and with my dreams).

*this is a lie
**this is an excuse
***this is a defense mechanism
****although i secretly suspect it's quite simple in the end

anyhoo

2005-07-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

and in the middle of doing the dishes I have made a decision to live more passionately. You know? More life, more feeling. Less acceptance of things that are almost-right. Not refusing to cry, refusing to love, refusing to get angry.

No more personal conservatism, apprehension, stability-over-freedom.

For a long time now, I've talked a great game, and I've lived the life I wanted in fact - but I haven't risked opening my heart, not for a long time. And so, no matter what I do, I end up here, in mediocrity. Unfulfilled.

So this morning - and maybe it had something to do with that documentary on Louise Brooks, or winning at poker - I decided, just out of the blue like that. To be unstable again, volatile, intricate.

Perhaps this is just my ego blossoming beyond restraint. But I think restraint has served its purpose, for me, for now.

The last time I made a decision, it was to let myself be more free and creative - and look where that got me (hint: it's good).

I think this sort of decision, welling up from inside of me with no warning and no pretense and no rationale, is the sort of decision I can't not make.

anyway, I think it means that I might have to learn how to dance.

2005-07-16T10:31:00.000-07:00

I tied my hair up in knots this morning and went to the grower's market where it is hot and unrelenting

my mother is in her post-birthday passive-agressive depression and I am ready to leave this house, get out and go and do something, paint a new picture of a new person living somewhere far away

the cycle of escapism
surrealism and fantasy are my avoidance tactics

Frantic phone calls from good friends gone ga-ga
a duty neglected, another five expected:
Having committed myself to nothing, I find still that things have been committed to me, simply because these women want me to do them.

I have always said that I understand boys more than girls, and maybe this is it: the desire to be in control, strong, unfettered; while my mother sits downstairs and plays solitaire with lips pursed, or in response to accusations made by people who call me too frequently and frantically, all I want is to be gone away and in charge again

or maybe it's just my own weakness that lets me feel so put-upon. if I could find the strength I would ignore the wanting wives, or else treat them better, and not need to run away

but either way
I am disgusted by the past and fearful of the future
my scope is very limited, one month or two
and still i don't know where to go or what to do.

So there's that.

scruffy had a baby

2005-07-14T16:56:00.000-07:00

Her real name isn't Scruffy. Her real name is much better than that, and her sister's name is Buffy Jo (that part is real) and they used to get kicked off the school bus more often than they were allowed to ride it.

The bus driver was named Alana and she had feathered hair and big sunglasses, which in the 90s were two major socioeconomic indicators and she used to YELL at BUFFY JO and say STOP LIGHTING MATCHES BACK THERE and one time she stopped the bus middle of nowhere and let Buffy Jo and Scruffy out.

When I was in 7th grade Scruffy sat with me sometimes, and she told me about eyeshadow and weed. In 1993 in rural America, she knew all about ecstasy and designer drugs. By 8th grade she had run away to San Francisco for a few months, and come back.

She was smart as a whip, and cool besides. I wonder if she'll ever know how much I looked up to her, how many times I've told people about her (and the time she introduced me to Queensryche, or the time the skaters fought the stoners and she was ringleader, or the time she got our Accelerated Algebra teacher in trouble for throwing books and erasers at her)

anyway she has a baby now, and she lives about ten minutes' drive away from me, and that's all I know. I can't even remember what she looks like; she was one of those kids who never sat for school pictures, you know?

In truth, I thought I'd never see her again - thought for sure she would run far far away and do something glamorous and horrible with her life. I always saw her as one of those people who, barely tethered to begin with, just go bobbing away on the first breeze, never to return -

But she landed. Scruffy has touched down, in my neighborhood. And she has a baby now, six days old. I wonder if I could look her up.

today I read
anti at the 7

2005-07-13T21:14:00.000-07:00

Fingers thru hair, make it vertical. Too horizontal lately. In 2 weeks it all gets cut off and bleached, start anew.

I almost died today. I was in a bikini, which I consider very fitting, and I didn't want to go down the waterslide again because last time I got water in my nose. So I attempted to climb around the long way, and then I reached a point that I couldn't pass, and there I was clinging to slippery rocks and below me were sharp rocks and swift current
and then my knee dislocated itself and my leg buckled and I screamed and clasped the rockface with my whole body
(and didn't die)
and laid there panting while my friends yelled are you ok but they couldn't reach me, remember, it was impassable.

Half hour later I was back to where they were, and we all agreed I was fine, and then we sat and ate baby carrots and talked about sex and yoga and people we knew from high school and mojitos, and later when I got home my mother said

oh you must have been having lots of FUN to stay OUT so long
and I almost smacked her.

Almost almost almost. I didn't die, didn't die, didn't fight with my mom. I hurt my knee and then came home and took a shower and went to work. That is the truth of it.

today I read
anda who secretly.

2005-07-12T21:24:00.000-07:00

I can tell that I have a crush on someone, because I suddenly find myself wanting to write them a letter. Not a love letter or anything, just some sort of rambling narration of my mental processes...

So I've got a couple of crushes going right now.

The other thing is: this weekend I was talking to J and she asked if I miss my friends. I said I've never missed anyone a day in my life, which at the time seemed to be true. But, now that I think about it, it's not

I miss E right now. It's silly and I wish I didn't feel this way, but I do. It's a long-term thing, too. I think what I miss is the potential more than anything else. I mean, we finally got together three days before I moved away; since then we've spent a few days here and there, but it's always an Outing, a Trek.

I want to spend time with him, casually. Like, just hanging out doing nothing. I want to get to know what he's like on a normal day, when he's not particularly happy to see me, not tired from too much sex, not drunk-n-high.

That's not going to happen any time soon, though. We won't be living in the same town again for months, probably not until next year. Hopefully he'll come out and visit me in the desert on weekends, but still...

It's a challenge, you know?
But things are rarely perfect

i just wasted an entire day on the internet

2005-07-12T14:46:00.000-07:00

My skin, all over my body, has turned to scab. Dry, thick, solid, raspy skin everywhere. Not flakes! Just scales. CLASSY. Note to self: no more hot sex in hot springs. The water'll kill ya.

I have just spent the entire day online, and you know I miss being able to do that. I convinced myself that it was necessary for my new blogger job, to get things in order. And for the most part, I was doing useful stuff. Still.

I just don't like to work, kids. I don't like to do it. I don't want to clean the house, do chores, return phone calls. I just want to make stupid webpages about myself.

Do you think there's something wrong with that?

I pretty much just read
Antie and
Radio

my face is chafed in the shape of your whiskers

2005-07-12T11:39:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'm working on the new blog now. Things are beginning to get exciting. I have a login to the Official Website, I'm testing things out, it's rad.

They are using Quills, which I would just like to let you know is HOT HOT HOT SHIT already and I haven't even tried working with it yet.

Big blog, ho!

quills works only with
plone

2005-07-11T12:32:00.000-07:00

I went to the desert for the weekend. For the last time until August, which - if you didn't already know - is when I'm packin' up the tent and cooler and moving to the desert FOR 2 MONTHS. woot, right. If I don't die of exhaustion, it'll be one of the more exciting episodes in this lil blogger's life.

I'm going to have a sign outside my tent. One side will say FUCK OFF I'M SLEEPING (this side will show when I'm not home) and the other side will say FUCK OFF I'M NOT HOME (for when I'm sleeping). If a windstorm comes up and blows the sign around, I'll just let it tell me where I am.

Anyway, it was an exciting weekend. I got romanced and a half by a proclaimed 33-year-old (I call it more like 40) ex-Marine sniper with dreds and a big black truck and skull tattoos and bright blue eyes. He treated me better than just about any guy I've ever hooked up with, and not just physically. Sunday morning when I woke up with dehydration sickness, he made me eat Clif Bars and drink water with electrolyte powder, and then he drove me around to all the hot springs and secret spots while I recovered, and told me I was gorgeous (which, coming from someone as good-looking as him, is definitely surprising to hear). And of course there was all the sex, which, you know, what's to tell? Heh.

You Are 39% American

America: You don't love it or want to leave it.
But you wouldn't mind giving it an extreme make over.
On the 4th of July, you'll fly a freak flag instead...
And give Uncle Sam a sucker punch!

How American Are You?

(and it's funny because I did fly my freak flag this year)

paxgitmo says
I don't give a shit that you're not what you appear to be.

2005-07-08T10:29:00.000-07:00

I should learn to count cards.
I should clean my room and my workroom.
I should call my grandmother.
I should call my aunt.
I should go to work early.
I should stop fucking around.
I should lose five pounds.
I should try harder.

I should repaint my toenails.
I should shave my armpits.
I should sort out my finances.
I should make a plan.
I should make a plan and stick to it.
I should stick to my plans.

I need to stop talking to myself like this.
I need to shut up and do.

today I read
tif and the lemmings

vai vai vai vai vai

2005-07-08T00:47:00.000-07:00

There are coyotes outside my window, their voices high and frantic. They're hungry. We are keeping the cats inside the house tonight...

Isabella says I got the strangest feeling about you today, like you were in trouble, and I almost called

Radio had the same feeling, and she did call. And she and I don't call each other much.

Something amiss? I don't know, I woke up depressed today and I can't tell why. On the way to work I repeated to myself out loud: something is wrong something is wrong and i don't know what and you know, I think it's true.

But then again, usually when I get this feeling, it's because I am bloated from PMS and it makes me feel fat.

Anyway I went to someplace online and got my insta-cards read and my question was "what is wrong with me?" and here is the answer.

(PS I do love him, isa, I do. I can't help it. I talk a tough game in the sunlight when things are solid, but it falls to pieces every night.)

today I got my cards read at
facade

the details

2005-07-07T12:35:00.000-07:00

i am still going to talk about what i did this weekend, because nothing good has happened since then (save that one IM conversation, below).

1. MOISTURIZING SUCCUBUS (SUCCUBA)

I was just sitting there drinking a beer, when they came by dressed all in black and speaking through a megaphone. They made me take off my shirt and then they giggled and rubbed lotion all over me. So I joined them and spent the next hour running around camp moisturizing shirtless men and women. They said we are the moisturizing succubus (and then one of them yelled "succuba!") and you look very dry.

2. (later) REDNECK SOCCER

You take a roll of toilet paper and stick a firework inside it, wrap the whole thing in wire. Then you soak it in kerosene and light it on fire and kick it around. DA burned his hand on one. I was too afraid to pick them up and throw them, but I did kick several of them into the crowd, screaming burn the spectators. Meanwhile a man with a leather hat was lighting Roman candles and shooting them at the heads of the soccer players.

3. (later yet) FIREWORKS SHOW

I was tired and dehydrated so I sat down with Ginger and suddenly! Fireworks! went off ten feet away. Well maybe twenty feet away. The point is, the guy left them in the box and lit them all at once, and Ginger and I had screaming convulsions while ash and cinder rained down on us.

4. oh shit that just reminds me of the London bombings, now I am depressed. And you know why? Because nobody cares when it is the Iraqis getting bombed every single day.

today I got my London news at wikipedia
and used wordnet to check my latin plurals

one more drunken IM with you before I die

2005-07-05T21:28:00.000-07:00

Maggiorata1: NO!

ogma: yes.

Maggiorata1: you done kilt a bunny?

ogma: yep.

Maggiorata1: you mean like....pregnancy?

ogma: nope. bunny.

Maggiorata1: ELABORATE

ogma: My cat, the small one, the one named Mouse (not the one from the photo shoot, but the one who weighs 2.5 pounds)
ogma: was growling and making her i-just-caught-something noise
ogma: so i went to take it from her, like i do
ogma: and it was a baby bunny.

Maggiorata1: how?????

ogma: i pinched her throat until she let go

Maggiorata1: awww

ogma: it was so little it fit in one hand

Maggiorata1: you poor thing

ogma: and my mom got a box and we put a towel in the bottom, but when we put it in there we saw it had a broken leg
ogma: and it was too small, it probably wasn't weaned yet

Maggiorata1: this just gets better and better
Maggiorata1: omg
Maggiorata1: cats are assholes

ogma: I thought about nursing it back to health but I can't take it to the desert with me
ogma: so i took it out in the driveway and smashed its head with the blunt end of an axe
ogma: and fed it to the dogs.

Maggiorata1: JESUS TITTY FUCKING CHRIST
Maggiorata1: that is so morbid and violent

ogma: no, it was a mercy killing.

Maggiorata1: I'm sorry
Maggiorata1: but that wasn't the ending it sounded like you were leading up to

ogma: my mom wanted me to give it back to the cats, but i didn't want it to die slowly.

Maggiorata1: no, no , you were right

ogma: i know. it was the best thing to do.

Maggiorata1: but....you told it with such panache

ogma: urg.

Maggiorata1: I'm sorry...I laughed a little
Maggiorata1: Dude,
Maggiorata1: I did the same thing last year
Maggiorata1: with a kitten

ogma: you did? oh lord. i cried a little.
ogma: did you?

Maggiorata1: I still get shivers
Maggiorata1: yes
Maggiorata1: I blogged about it

ogma: that's funny, i thought i remembered you SAVING a kitten

Maggiorata1: I cried too

ogma: maybe it's my mind trying to avoid the truth

Maggiorata1: no, two different stories

ogma: i'll probably forget all about this one.
ogma: oh, ok

Maggiorata1: bunnies are so.....
Maggiorata1: helpless
Maggiorata1: but, Mother Nature makes so many of them

ogma: i know. quivery and fluffy and scared
ogma: it's true.

Maggiorata1: they must be kind of disposable

...today I read
wrapped up like a summer's eve

2005-07-05T12:52:00.000-07:00

I did not sleep with G, nor did I marry him.

I had good reason, too. You know, he's said some things - throughout our friendship - that have bothered me. Graphic comments on my blog about how, for example, I'm going to scream his name again and again as he pounds my hole with his huge cock.

Huh.

But, you know, he was a nice guy and I thought oh, he's just clueless, this might be forgiveable.

Anyway we get there and it's the desert so I ask him - just to make sure - if he knows what the signs of dehydration are.

He grins and says, "Well if you don't know that, then you're not gonna get fucked tonight."

So needless to say, he didn't get fucked the entire weekend, and will continue to not get fucked (by me, anyway) for the rest of eternity. Furthermore, I think I'm secretly calling off the wedding.

Other than that, we got along great. I filed that little thorn away and didn't let it break my skin until the end of the trip. On the way home, though, I had lots of time to fester and bubble...

What an asshole. You know? To say something like that and then call me "sweetie" for the rest of the trip, and slap my ass without my permission, and patronize me and assume I don't know how to do things like set up my own fucking tent?

Okay, I'm over it. I promise.

today I read
casual friday

turtles all the way down

2005-07-04T16:21:00.000-07:00

I'm back, tired... the to-do list looms. I am irritable to say the least.

It was an excellent trip. More comments of that ilk, plus a redneck-soccer recap, will be forthcoming. Right now I have to wash my poor sunburned scalp.

Oh yeah, happy Independence Day.

today I read nothing because I was in the desert.

i'm the kind of girl who keeps a pocketknife in her makeup bag

2005-07-01T13:43:00.000-07:00

I'm leaving again. Going to the desert with G. Slight possibility we will get married along the way (although we had originally planned for Vegas, Reno could work too), so I've packed my cubic zirconia.

I am also the kind of girl who provides her own gigantic imitation diamond ring for her three-day Vegas wedding to a guy she met on the Internet.

Bye! Back Tuesday... assuming I don't blow my fingers off with fireworks.

PS is it just me or is my new blog some kind of sex-in-the-city pseudo pillow book with all the drama and not nearly enough gory detail.

today I read
mister whitey

okay, fuck it, let's talk right now.

2005-06-30T16:52:00.000-07:00

Because the truth is, I had some experiences while I was out there.

1. in which the narrator finds herself beset by two tanned and muscular river guides

2. and of course there is one of them who looks at me piercingly with eyes that EXACTLY match the eyes of the San Francisco photographer (not matched by shape or by color, but by their desperate and flagrant display of their owner's desire to have his heart trampled upon by my self)

3. (and later I was to find a daisy chain in my pocket)

4. The other one wanted simply to fuck me in the sauna, and I agreed wholeheartedly that this would be an excellent course of action.

5. Cock blocked by Mr. Desperation 3000, who singlehandedly and deftly maneuvered all parties back into their respective corners.

Back against the wall, Ogma found herself with time to consider, vaguely:

Why is it that I choose so very badly? Of these two (boys? men?), only one was blessed with extreme good looks, and one with extreme intelligence; one with a slacker's grin and one with a riverfront property; one whose attempts to attract me were halfhearted, while the other pursued me actively. You can guess which one of these two has my phone number and standing invitation -

and not once during the entire experience did I feel the need to mention E, who waits or doesn't wait for me, but who certainly is shackin' up in my absence. Who is unable to bring himself to commit to anyone, myself included, and whose comments to others - when I overhear them - often tell me more about our relationship than he would ever tell me himself.

So,

How come?

And I think what it is, is that I know I haven't found the right person for me, not yet.

I think my inner reasoning (mainly, and you may feel free to factor in any other pertinent reasons [such as the twisted power one feels when manipulating the well-meaning heart of another, and the powerlessness one feels when being thusly manipulated] to this equation) is:

If you're gonna be wrong, at least have fun while you're doing it.

What would I want with a nice guy who is obviously smitten with me, if I know right out of the gate he's not someone I can truly, passionately love? A girl could end up married that way.

I'd much rather just go get fucked in the sauna.

today I read
isabella's sad sad demise

2005-06-30T16:50:00.000-07:00

the sign of a good vacation is that, upon returning, you can't remember what's on your to-do list.

more details later. right now, I have so many things TO DO!!!!!!!

!!!

hello! goodbye

2005-06-26T07:57:00.000-07:00

a la Paul McCartney, that fop.

I am going river rafting, I'll be back briefly on Thursday. I wonder if anyone other than Susanna will notice that Ogma is away!

2005-06-25T17:08:00.000-07:00

5:00 and I find myself swooning. Maybe it's just Elliot Smith in my ears, and yes that is probably it, delicate tinkling melody and whining crooning vocal, the way he do -

and other than that, you know, I have decided that I have a psychic connection to certain people and can tell when they are thinking about me, and this being 5:00, well, the fact that my concentration just broke into fractions?

Tom Waits says she thought she had the moon in her pocket and I think also I have a psychic connection to my iPod and it will play the songs I need to hear, at just the time I need to hear them.

I seem to have been commandeered by the law of synchronicity, and I don't know how to put two steps together but I am expert at blowing in the wind -

true love is
ebitchu

okayyyyy!

2005-06-25T00:29:00.000-07:00

Funny story. You know how I work in this medical office? And, like, I'm there after hours so I have the whole building to myself? WHAT WOULD YOU DO. So far I haven't found any decent meds, but I definitely found some pregnancy tests.

And I'm not pregnant, again. Last time, me and E gave each other a big We're-Infertile Hi 5. If he wasn't in the desert right now, I'd text message him the good news. Is that weird?

And speaking of the desert, geez is G excited. He's all, thanks for inviting me, it's like prom! No, actually, it's like dirty camping at a party. He's just really excited to sleep with me, as far as I can tell. Urg.

I'm going to bed so I can get up plenty early tomorrow and hit the retirement home yard sale before I go to work. AWESOME

2005-06-24T17:58:00.000-07:00

Well would ya look at that, I'm blogging from work. Fuggit. I don't care, I'm leaving this job in a month and besides! They pay shit!

Suddenly find myself very turned on, which I take as a sign that E is thinking about me. He is currently on his way to the desert with some good friends, one of whom he's fucking. eeenteresting. I wonder how much he'll tell her about his lil agreement with me...

Think he's mad at me too, probably because I didn't call him yesterday re: dream job. I would have, but it goes against my policy of only calling him when I really need to. Never just to chat.

The ancient art of man-catching requires both great resolve and great delicacy, you know?

I have decided to take advantage of the current situation, and experiment with the open-relationship concept myself. Invited G (my Vegas fiance, as it happens) to join me at the 4th of July party weekend, during which time I imagine he'll ply me with libations until I agree to consummate the engagement*. Also, I got some french-horn-player's number while I was in Oakland last week, and he left me a message the other day which I have not returned. So rude. I'll call him.

This could actually work out well, this whole free love thing. I would never have guessed.

*All I really want from this guy is a cheap ring, a flashy photo shoot, and a quickie divorce, but I'll do what I have to. Apparently he's both experienced and skilled in the sack, and we're good friends, so where's the risk?

2005-06-24T00:55:00.000-07:00

oh my god, funny funny blog. funny shit. or maybe it's just me? maybe it's just because i've been a receptionist? you figure it out, k.

post-its from irene

today i am swathed in rose pink light

2005-06-23T20:59:00.000-07:00

Ah, yes. It feels good to be glowing again, childrens. I had forgotten about all the nervous energy, though. I can't remember if I'm happy or irritated or horny or what. Oh, whatever.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that transition is very... bumpy. These ups and downs will kill you (me). I am constantly busy doing NOTHING, with no real life prospects (despite rapidly snowballing career and love affair). I wake up feeling guilty about the things I didn't do yesterday, and go to bed guilty about the things I didn't do today, and in between I work a LOT and get paid approximately nothing.

+ possibly pregnant again. I know, I know. This is the last time. I am opposed to fucking around with hormone levels, but if I can't trust myself to remain barren, then I'm going to have to put it in the Pill's hands. If you-all were able to grok the sheer amount of sex I am having with this guy, then it wouldn't seem so outrageous. Still. That's easy to say when you don't have a half-Turkish blastocyte busily dividing cells in your uterus.

I can't tell you how many times I've considered just having a hysterectomy.

Anyway it's good, I got my dream job and now all I have to do is put together a workable plan of action for August and September; I suspect things will unfold from there, career-wise.

Now I'm going to go drink a beer and attempt to put my head through a wall or something.

today I read
notevenenglish! (star star)
synchron in yer whatsit
and
onelove king anti

haha

2005-06-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

You know, I really can't keep a secret to save my life! it's true. watch:

I have B.O. and I have not shaved my armpits in DAYS! so gross. Also, I am a huge slacker.

I just got my dream job, though. So there's that. Yes, I got the blog. I'm going to be famous. I'm gonna blog this really big event, you know, like this huge festival? and have thousands of readers? and they are paying me to do it and then I get to move back and try to get them to hire me for an office job too.

mm-hmm. FUCK YES, ebay.

i am always reading
skankyho

love n marriage

2005-06-21T22:45:00.000-07:00

It was a good weekend, just what I needed really. You know: long eyelashes, strong arms. Beer and weed and pills and sunshine and art and good food and free clothes and lots of sex and laughter.

E and I went hot tub hopping on Friday, willy-nilly like around Berkeley until we found a hippie co-op with no gates, where we immediately co-opted the tub and spent all night in various states of unclothed affectionality (to the tune of "oh my god!" from the mouths of passing babes).

Saturday we picked up Lucy in a room full of politicians and cake and typewriters, and headed for the David Best temple on Hayes Green:

(I've seen bigger, you know)

...and drinks. Ended up in a fancy restaurant where we proceeded to not pay for our dinner. Go to a nice place with a Turk, a Mexican, and a Scot, and if the service is bad? Honey, feel our wrath. We ran a few blocks just in case the waiters might come carumphing after us (they did not, because we had cleverly distracted them with a final round of porto and tiramisu), and ducked into a gay bar where we semi-enthusiastically viewed a drag show - and very enthusiastically fagged out, all three of us, like we do.

Sunday I saw H, lovely baby, she looked very young and fresh and different somehow. I think maybe I have grown up a lil bit in the past few months, and that one-year difference in our age is stretched out right now. I think she's about to enter the growth spurt, I'll catch her on the other side.

Anyway it was good.

today i read
silentwalk and
summer m. (turn off speaks tho)

ignore this post i'm feeling abusive and can't find the whip

2005-06-21T21:37:00.000-07:00

OOOH!!! (snap)
reasons why i hate your blog, in case you were wondering.

1) y kant u talk like normal ppl or sumfin... yucka yucka

2) no, wait, tell me again about your dog! is it cute? post a picture of it ok? i know, post a picture of your dog next to your baby! next to the dinner you cooked last night!

3) "i don't really have anything new to say right now, life is pretty boring i guess"

4) hatemongering. the serious, ignorant, intolerant, ill-informed kind.

5) how you just started blogging, and you posted two times, and that is all that you are ever going to post.

6) aka 5b: the obligatory "i started this blog because yada yada" post.

7) um, i have to install plugins to view this shit?

...Obviously, I've been surfing tonight. Using the New Blog button, which is pretty rare for me since half the blogs out there are ad jockeys now anyway. Blogger, I sense, prances nearer and nearer to its inevitable demise. Anyone out there remember Angelfire? Hmm.

What I'm trying to say is, where are the good blogs? I commented on some of them tonight. Anyone have suggestions? FYI, I only read top-shelf shit.

2005-06-17T11:39:00.000-07:00

I think I am going to start an advice-column blog. How rad will that be? But under my old pseudonym.

Tonight I'm going to the bay area to see E and H. I can't fucking wait to get out of town. Go get all dressed up in boots n short skirt, go to a good party, get wasted, get some laid... mmmm. It's been too long.

Just when I was all worried about things with E, I called him yesterday and he totally geeked out on the phone, reporting all the tech news he'd found online and narrating to me as he surfed the web. Note to self: don't stress this one too much.

2005-06-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

So anyhoo, whilst waiting for replies from these people who are brushing me off etc., I have been doing a really good job of staying on top of my shit. Like, excellent. I hope I can keep this up. I'm using to-do lists, and doing the things on them. And, you know, just generally gettin' er done. It does feel good to not have anything hanging over you... All my life I've been the type to procrastinate and miss deadlines, and hey, I'm still doing it. But gradually, one thing at a time, I've been picking up. I figure in another year or two I'll have my shit in order, and not be missing deadlines any more. I know I can do it, just have to teach myself how.

2005-06-15T22:53:00.000-07:00

It's a downswing. I am in a downswing, a big one. This is rough, kids.

I am getting a big cold shoulder from the Powers That Be, re: new blog. If I don't hear from them, there is no blog and no prospect for me and I look like a dumb fuck in front of E.

I'm just trying to keep going, at this point. Take care of the details, hope that the rest will come. More than anything, I am afraid of losing E, really afraid. I can't tell him that, though, or show him, because that's an even quicker way to fuck everything up.

I don't really know what I'm doing here. I am so tired of crying. What happened to the girl who never cried? Who is this person that gets up and works all day and doesn't eat, and doesn't see anyone, and cries all night, and earns no money and gets no breaks?

You know, all I need is just one friend that I can call and cry to. Just one person to call right now, someone that would listen to me weep for a few minutes. I would feel so much better.

Fuck.

so this is that "rejection" thing

2005-06-15T14:02:00.000-07:00

Good thing I was forewarned. No, really, it's a good thing. Everyone told me writing is rejection all the time to start with, and I'm glad I listened. Because it's a lot of rejection right now, and although I'm spending a fair amount of time on the edge of my seat, I'm also starting to recognize it for what it is, and relax about it. Okay, so it's rejection. I don't know these people, never met 'em, wouldn't recognize 'em on the street, will probably never have any kind of deep relationship with them. So... it's okay. Thank god there are so many other people in the world.

Learning to move on. I think it's a good thing for my personality too. Last night H reminded me not to dwell, did I already mention this? Anyway, it was one of those pieces of advice that come at just the right time for you to really hear them and take them in, and I've been chewing on it since then and hope to file it away (like that leaving-your-comfort-zone thing) to be used when necessary until it becomes second nature for me.

Don't dwell. This time is not like last time, or maybe it is but how can you know? Just deal with things as they actually are, don't try to think around walls. Don't get stuck in some past thing that didn't work. Do your best for right now. S'okay.

Anyway I got invited to a bbq today, and I don't want to go. I know that's not right, and I have to go because otherwise I'm a rude fuck. So I guess I'm out for the night, then. No big deal, I always have fun at these things... it's just that they eat up so much time.

I'm working on getting things done as efficiently as possible, so I can afford the time to go to a FUCKING BARBECUE WITH MY FRIENDS every once in a while. I think I'll get there. it's a mission.

when you have a fancy blog you are not supposed to put up your quizilla results but guess what.

2005-06-15T00:03:00.000-07:00

Your soul is bound to the First Totem, Ares:
The Dove.

Ares appears as a pearl dove. She embodies
love, peace, balance, and devotion. She
is associated with the color pearl, the season
of transition, and the element of love. Her
downfall is idolization.

You are most compatible with Wolves and White
Stags.

Which Animal Spirit Totem Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

the ways in which i am unkind

2005-06-14T23:15:00.000-07:00

I lost perspective tonight. I was driving and I started to notice it like the first twinges of psychedelia: blurriness and shaky edges, things that looked more realistic than usual... and then turning my head I found a green motel sign floating among green branches, and then all third-dimension spatial relativity was gone. I started up a long hill and you know there was no hill at all. The streetlights were not far away, just very small, and one perched above the other.

So I closed one eye and enjoyed it. A spray of rocks, littered clumsily across the road this afternoon, now jumped out beside me and grew heavy with sodium light. The manhole cover sped toward me at knee level, and the yellow moon swooped down talonlike and barely missed me as I turned left.

I let myself surreptitiously into the building, dressed in green sweatpants, an oversized white sweater, argyle socks and cheap sandals. I wandered and snook a little, committed a minor act of illicit thievery (which, sorry to say, may benefit me greatly in the long run while causing no inconvenience to anyone else) - and then I returned an item which had previously been mishandled. Not on purpose, that one.

Driving home, I made a mental list of admirable and non-admirable qualities, just in case a certain person needs any compliments this weekend.

2005-06-14T23:10:00.000-07:00

but what did you actually do?

well, today i woke up and freaked out for a while, made some phone calls, sent several business-related emails, checked things off my to-do list, chatted briefly with the cat and then locked him in my room because he is stubborn and lazy. Then I went to the gym, then work, then I came home and started to watch TV but H called and she is about a gazillion times better than TV so I talked to her instead.

Then I went to work and returned the keys which I had taken by mistake, and I took something useful which nobody will miss and which has no monetary value - except to me.

fweekin out!

2005-06-14T12:40:00.000-07:00

I stress myself out too much. It's counterproductive.

That's all I have to say about that.

I'm going to go sit on the porch for a minute and drink a smoothie, you know? Hello, it's beautiful out and I just spent two hours gettin 'er done. The wind is all rustly in the pine needles and there are yellow roses cascading from the rooftops and the sky is solid porcelain and the grass is finally turning to golden threads, summer is swooping in with a vengeance and I want to be there for the victorious battle of the seasons. Somehow the victorious battle of my impending career is something that frightens me, and I can't spend too much time staring at it. Must go relax before I have a coronary.

Cheers.

2005-06-14T00:12:00.000-07:00

Ha. It's so strange, writing this blog that nobody's reading. I keep checking for comments, as if there would be any. I keep fighting the temptation to install an INVISIBLE hit counter, as if it would catch anything.

Just spent an hour on the phone with E, discussing logistics for a mutual pet project that (ideally) will be a mutual enterprise and mutually beneficial. Hint: it's a blog with the potential to have HUGE traffic.

I'm sure there will be updates on that front. For now, all I'll say is that I'm contacting some people tomorrow, and researching project management, and going to try and write up a viable plan to submit to the Powers That Be. It's simple, really: how can I make sure that everyone will benefit? Why, by making sure the blog is correctly publicized and correctly written. It gets in the papers :: the Organization gets positive attention :: my name (my other name, though) gets known :: I direct traffic as specified by E. Trickle down. Like I said, it could be a lot of traffic.

Fuck, this shit has potential to get into Newsweek. Maybe not this year, but next year for sure. If I'm careful.

So I have to learn how to present it.

antie, you may not know this but your advice about "stepping out of your comfort zone" is constantly with me. You're right. It's the one thing I've always been afraid to do, and now I'm doing it, and mostly because you dared me to.

already already

2005-06-13T22:32:00.000-07:00

already I'm having doubts about full disclosure. You know, I think I'll never be able to tell the butt truth ever again and post it on the Internet. It's probably not right to do that, anyway. I mean, I don't know why that wouldn't be right. Why is it not ok to tell the full truth? Because truth hurts, that's why, and if you can't say it to someone's face then you really shouldn't post it on the Internet, especially if you are saying things about the person you are in love with,
that you only half-mean,
and you really wouldn't want them to read,
and you suspect that they are web-stalking you
for that exact reason.

HUH. Guess I should edit some of last week's posts. Gotcha.

feed your brain, bitch

2005-06-13T22:15:00.000-07:00

sociolinguistics.blogspot.com

2005-06-13T13:39:00.000-07:00

Visit with S was awesome. Just the way to finish up the weekend and get my head back together again. Lounging in the pool, eating fresh salmon, climbing trees, weird drinks, drunken blogging. I couldn't have had a more perfect day. Shit.

It's kind of cute, I think it was an Event over at my old blog, when I quit. Like, people seem to be genuinely bummed, and not just by the loss of traffic. That's really flattering. I wonder if this new one will get big like that one did? I think I'm going to set it up without permalinks, just for privacy's sake... but I should probably put links in the individual posts, try to draw in some people. It'll be an experiment. Blogitics. Love it.

self-medication worked fer me

2005-06-13T12:30:00.000-07:00

No, really. Conscious drug use. It's the way to go when you need to blow off steam. Works like a fuckin miracle.

It was serendipitous, really. My mom was gone, she wasn't coming back, it was Saturday night and I didn't got nobody to love. But those drugs, they did good by me. Maybe I didn't get much sleep before I headed to S' house, but I was happy again. Amazing.

I think it's safe for me to say: I been doing drugs long enough, I know what I'm doing, and I know their benefits. And yes, I do benefit from doing them.

2005-06-11T20:18:00.000-07:00

Just got back from saying goodbye to my grandmother, for the last time certainly this time. Dad was barely holding together. His wife cried. Gramma, of course, was mostly clueless about the whole operation, but sweeter than ever and with a certain glint in her eye. I think she's happy to go live with my aunt. I would be too, it's okay.

Anyways I'm still horribly emotional and feeling very grown up. Not pregnant, no job, family issues, money issues, nobody to turn to. This is what it means to be an adult, then. Make decisions. Shoulder burdens. Drive away dry-eyed, cry in the car, arrive dry-eyed at the other end. How very like my father - except I suspect he skips the crying part altogether.

My mother, meanwhile, up and went to Reno with no warning, leaving me alone in the house with 2 cats 2 dogs and 3 fishes on Saturday night. I don't want to call anyone, don't really know if I can hang right now. I have some yay and old E powder; I'm tempted to get splendidly mind-numbingly drunk, snort it all, and attempt to spiral blindly into a state of catharsis.

Will probably do just that.

I'm really looking forward to seeing S tomorrow (hi S!). It's funny, but all those truths I have to hide from everyone else, I can tell to her with no problem.

Which brings me back around to the role of the blog.
and the King of Pentacles, or was it Diamonds? and the need to have secrets
and the lack of a partnership in my life.

wellllllll well

2005-06-10T21:25:00.000-07:00

the filter in the aquarium goes:

ploot
hhhhhh-clik!

I should know I spent about forty minutes already today staring at it.

The aquarium wandered in this afternoon while I was in the shower, and started plooting and hhclik-ing shortly thereafter. Inside of it there are corals, and crabs, and snails and baby snails and a giant shell and three fishes, none of whom match each other. I keep telling my mom she needs to get an anemonem and another clown fishie so her one clown fish will have friends.

Someday I will have an aquarium and it will have sections so I can have dangerous fishes. I am only going to have really strange-looking fishes like:

dog-faced puffer

cowfish

spider crab

blue starfish

...et cetera. Also jellyfishes of various sizes and anemonems and eelies and all of that.

2005-06-10T14:09:00.000-07:00

nonsense, today. I am hibernating. The job wants me in August, not next week, and the pay is still un-negotiated. I'm glad I don't have to move this weekend, but procuring a paycheck between now and August will be a challenge.

So, I'm hibernating and I feel like all my limbs are stuffed with pork, but tomorrow I think I'll hike. Ask J what she's doing. Visit Gramma. Things like that.

2005-06-10T00:07:00.000-07:00

oh lord, you know. I have a breakdown. It came tonight, which is a horrible night for it to have come, but it happened anyway.

So many things, and so many things I can't admit to anyone, cause of my stupid pride. Pride pride pride.

Number one: (edited).

Number two: I have no direction in my life, and I don't want one. I want to wander. I want this to be acceptable. I don't want to have to excuse myself all the time, act like I have some great ambition. There is no ambition, there is only me, wandering and learning and observing and that is the way I want it to be. Why do I have to Do Something with my life? My life is insignificant, just a speck on the film reel. I find great comfort in this, especially when I'm wrapped up in a crisis like I am tonight.

Number three: I have to stop taking care of other people. I have to stop giving myself away. I need to shut down, and I don't know how. I don't know how. I don't know how. I don't know how to live a life that doesn't involve at least ten hangers-on who are sucking up my energy. I don't want to be a hermit, not an island, but I don't want leeches. I want friends and family who are able to take care of themselves, who don't depend on my strength. I need to change all my relationships, every single one, from the ground up.

I can't stop crying. I am so lonely that I turned to the dog for company, but she was asleep and she blinked at me blearily from her position on the couch, and I, kneeling on the floor, shaded her eyes from the light and told her to go back to sleep.

All my life I've been the pillar. It's usually fine, I prefer it to the codependency and emotional manipulation which seems to be the nature of human relationships... but sometimes, just sometimes I find myself yearning for someone who will reach in. In, not out. I just wish someone would find me, discover me like some kind of rare treasure, want to examine and admire me.

But you know, that happens sometimes and I always get freaked out.

Just a fleck on the screen. this too shall pass. Sometimes it's just a good idea to go to bed.

2005-06-09T16:35:00.001-07:00

in the dining room, Mouse is killing a mouse.

Mouse is the cat. The mouse is a mouse, and it's squeaking, and Mouse is growling and making strangely maternal-sounding noises. This is how she kills. It takes a long time. She likes to drag it out. Surfing the emotional rush, riding the chemical wave, you know? don't we all do it one way or another?

and I am strung out on stress. I'm inhaling sugar and carbohydrates like my life depends on it. Knee-jerking. Drinking coffee. Yes, to enhance the feeling. If you're gonna stress out, why not go whole hog?

I just want to know if I got this job. It's 4:37 pm. They work late. I have no idea if they'll call me today. But, if they don't call until tomorrow, that means I didn't get it, right?

Aargh. Pass the tortilla chips. Make a fresh mocha. This could be a long night.

the waiting is the hardest part

2005-06-09T11:48:00.001-07:00

Oh, you know, it's starting to get to me a little, waiting to hear about this here job. I know it's still Thursday morning and they told me Thursday OR Friday, but, you know. I am not made of patience, are you?

And it would be great to have the job but I'll definitely live if I don't get it, it's not something I'm pinning my hopes n dreams on after all. I just want to know, because if I have the job then I have to move to SF this weekend? So, you know? Would be nice to find out if that's in the cards.

Anyways. I'm home for a few hours and am going to spend them writing, not here but in my travel-writing course. Also watch some TV. Then more work later today.

I miss having a bunch of googly fans. But I hope none of them finds this blog and figures out it's me writing.

secretsecret

barren!

2005-06-09T08:06:00.001-07:00

dear lord, I got my period this morning.

am seriously considering becoming religious, so I have someone to thank for this sort of thing.

NOT PREGNANT. THANK YOU JEEBUS.

shield bug

2005-06-09T00:37:00.001-07:00

the way it will work is, i will not have a site meter or a stat counter or a anything. so if you read it, i don't have to know about it.

in which the author discovers that the only way to avoid the nasty truth is to hide it from her self.

so kids

2005-06-08T23:53:00.001-07:00

it's been a tough day. I am retreating, I will myself to retreat, I find myself a niche a nest and I can't tell you how much I want to know for sure that this place is safe. If I could build it all of thorns I would, you know.

This place is safe. I am safe here. I have to believe it.

So here's the deal: it's

-Tensiontensiontension aargh. Tomorrow I may or may not hear about the job, but I am definitely buying a few pregnancy tests. Was going to pick some up today, but had no time. Friday is my mom's last day at her job, and I just spent an hour being a total jerk to her, trying to make her feel better while she cried and cried. Before that I spent the whole day at my dad's office, working my ass off and getting nowhere, and trying to make dad feel better. They're so understaffed for this whole thing (transition to new electronic records system) and it's his pet project, and he's bearing the brunt of it and he's just worn down. But I have to say, he is SO MUCH STRONGER UNDER PRESSURE than my mom is. It's his whole emotional-detachment thing, which i definitely inherited. Double-edged sword, anyone?

Anyways, on Friday night it's the goodbye dinner for my grandmother who is being shipped off to Virginia to live under my aunt's care until such time as she chooses to kick the bucket. So I'll probably never see her again. She taught me to paint.

Did I mention I might be pregnant? And moving to San Francisco on Monday?

and: did I ever have any doubts about moving back to my hometown? Because I really should have thought it through. Every day here is a family crisis. And they're going to tear me a new asshole for moving away again. They prey on psychic power, these people...

(edited)

Fucking webs we weave. I don't know, you know, it's these edges, they cut sometimes. So here I am, retreating. Seems easier than trying to explain myself publicly. It's an outlet. Clearly I need one. Don't we all?

ogma says

2005-06-08T23:52:00.001-07:00

explains it