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| 03:59pm 07/05/2006 |
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The reason you no longer like chicken noodle soup is because it's what your mother gave you when you were seven and sick. The reason you liked being sick is because she brought you carbonated drinks and saltines, too.
Am I right? |
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| The Owl Shop |
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| 09:20pm 23/03/2006 |
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I have been having reoccurring dreams about this shop that only sells wooden owls. The women who owns the shop looks exactly like the owls: she has hair like soy sauce and darkish skin, and huge, violently yellow eyes alarming in their keenness. I suppose that doesn't sound much like an owl, a real one, at least. But when I'm asleep the resemblance is unmistakable.
When you enter the shop, you have a currency owl. It looks very much like all the other owls in the shop. It is small and wooden, the color of milk chocolate. It has thin black cylinders for legs, and gaudy yellow eyes glued above a small, hooked beak which is also painted black.
This is how you buy an owl at the Owl Shop:
First, you find an owl you are considering purchasing. There are many owls to choose from. They are displayed neatly on tables and shelves. Some are gathering a fine, gray film of dust. Some look completely, mint-condition* new. They are all identical at first glance, but if you study them closely you can see that some of them are old owls, wrinkled and wise, some of them are fledglings, some of them are mean as empty-stomached dogs, some of them are sweet as violets, some of them are dense as custard. Some of them are pretty. Some of them are not. When you have chosen an owl at last, you produce your currency from wherever you have stowed it-your pocket, perhaps; your fist or your elbow.
Next, you place the currency owl directly in front of your potential purchase owl. At this point they should look like they are getting ready for a western-type showdown. You slowly turn the potential owl around, then move so that you can see both owls as you slowly turn the potential owl back to face the currency owl.
You can feel the shop owner watching you. Her yellow eyes are hopeful and greedy.
You look back and forth between the two owls, currency and potential for as long as you please, though the shop owner is making you anxious. If you decide you like the potential owl better, you take it, and then it becomes your currency owl instead. You can then compare your new currency owl to all the other owls in the shop,and so on. The last currency owl you have when you leave the shop is your final purchase.
This is a little odd. The Owl Shop is haunting me. I can still feel the pressure to just hurry up and choose a fucking owl. But, no. This is an important decision. I will take my time.
*mint-condition. This always makes me think of mint-scented conditioner. What does it even mean? I've only ever really heard pokemon card traders use that expression... |
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| 07:40pm 15/03/2006 |
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A little while ago, there was moonlight between my teeth, as slippery and sweet as raspberry seeds, sliding like beads on an abacus as you push them back and forth with your tapered tongue. I spat moon rock at my feet and felt moonlight between my toes, instead.
The dipping streetlight reflections looked like finger-paint. I would have sworn the river was snakeskin dry, but I saw the beaver's tail vanish last.
Absolutely everything makes me quizzical. |
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| Once Upon a Hideous Car Show in Michigan |
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| 02:41pm 03/03/2006 |
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Sometimes I think about Jordon Orlando and his book I haven't read and how much I miss him and how I amazed him when I wrote in my spring green notebook while we were in that restaurant where wine glasses clicked and wind chime forks danced when happy old misers made gestures to indicate the tires and steering wheel of an Auburn. All I wanted was to be home, away from gleaming red paint and gas fumes and cicada-fearing old men in suits. Oh, Jordan, I hope I never disappoint you. I hope you think of me sometimes, too.
My dreams are small but endlessly unreasonable. Sometimes I think that all I want, in the whole, round, orbiting world is to meet one of my favorite authors, not as the paper-and-ink fan girl (it's a little harder to spot because I don't have glasses, but there are still the thousand other tells I have this far away from a deck of cards-frizzy hair and fast fingers), but as peers. I will recognize them by the way their clothes smell like they were ironed in a printing press and their eyes hold the Seven Wonders of the World. They will recognize me because I wear letters like a cloud and the Seven seas are always crashing down over me.
We will ask each other what we are working on now. |
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| 02:48am 03/03/2006 |
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She draws a note in place of the incorrect one; I blink and it swirls into a peacock plume comma, and then my delusions vanish and what is there is simply there. Simple as can be.
I mix too-sticky-sweet mango-yellow Tangerine Simple Syrup into cold sparkling water with a teatree chewing stick or a cinnamon stick or a straw. I drink it and think that everyone looks beautiful when they are only reflections in the window-glass of a car speeding through the endless night. I am beautiful only when you can see the City in my eyes. I am translucent. |
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| I'm in love with no one in particular. |
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| 10:31pm 02/03/2006 |
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mood:  calm
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Yesterday I was so nervous that it hurt breathe. Oxygen had been scraped into a sharp sword and it cut my throat. I bled blue blood and I knew it because I tasted metallic from fingers to toes. But that is a lie, and you know it,too.
Now the inside of my mouth tastes like root beer gone flat, instead. This preternatural clam is saving me. I am passive and alert and retrospective and now would be a very good time to make an unexpected observation that will convince the doctor there is something wrong with me. I will tell you how neon-bold the cruel nike slash on your stark white tennis shoe is. Or I will tell you that her voice sounds like cranberry juice, or I will agree that Limestone Dasani fixes everything.
And you will not argue or admit you are worried about me.
Yesterday when the air had been blacksmithed and my heart was an anvil, I ran everywhere my feet could find. Nearly. I wanted to run by the river. I wanted to see the moonlight on the tide, and the stripes of street light-fingers reaching across the warped black waves. But the traffic was daunting and the thought of all those people on all those seats made me want to go anywhere else. It made me want to get as far into the woods as I could, or it made me want to dig myself a hole that would take me all the way to China. So I went home,finally. And I wasn't short of breath and even strain and sweat felt nicer than normal. I lingered on the porch until the anvil calmed down and then I went inside and back to work.
And so on.
And so forth.
This Preternatural Calm is saving me.
76,241 words. Crisp clear ink and Times New Roman. Bright white ink jet paper that has edges which turn ultraviolet purple when you flip through them in the right light. Seventy-six-thousand-two-hundred-forty-one words. And I could sit here and write a thousand more, until the affliction of glassy dry eyes drove me to the swimming pool.
And then I would simply taste chlorine.
Flat root beer and blue metallic and swimming pool aftertaste and preternatural calm. Right now, I think those four things could be my autobiography.
I put myself in a big, padded yellow envelope and taped myself in. They weighed me and placed the appropriate postage on the outside of the envelope. I felt their fingers press briefly against me through the thin paper wall. I felt their forefinger and thumb smooth the stamps out and check the edges to make sure they were stuck down,too.
It was cozy and dark in there. It hurt a little when they threw me into the mail truck.
I'm on my way to Alaska or New York.
This Preternatural Calm is saving me. |
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| That was an excursion. |
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| 05:56pm 26/02/2006 |
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What a delicacy; what a pleasant comedy of errors:
Anna and I, wind swept and laughing and intent on making complete fools of ourselves, marveling at periwinkle paint and small square windows and near-empty fish tanks. Avoiding a precarious picnic table, walking into the first building we see, and:
"Where are we?" We ask two bewildered boys in a small weight room. (We are looking for the gym.)
"The boy's dormitory."
We spare a moment to be mildly embarrassed, feel mildly defeated. We get new directions; but they are faulty as well. Eventually, we leave a note and stand in the cold, calling every number our fingers remember, and watching a steady stream of tennis-shoe traffic coming across the road from the graveyard. They are coming from a prairie burning. They all have shovels. They all stare. There are forty six students. They all know we don't belong there.
Eventually, a name that I have known so long on the lips of a stranger makes me think it's a small world after all. And then we are in a car with that same stranger, nervous and wondering. We only stop wondering when we recognize the landscape; but there is a moment of doubt when we pass a nondescript gas station.
Home again, home again.
Later, Sally Risk's hair is a chaos of strawberry red curls. And the auditorium is splendid with smooth arched architecture and sometimes music, sometimes not. Neutral Milk Hotel.
I see similarities and changes in people I never thought I'd see at all. In the end, it is dark and I am home in a room that isn't periwinkle; and I have not eaten anything all day. All I want is cranberry juice.
I wake up and am cynical. I regret not being avaricious. I am a brief mess. Then I look out the window. It isn't small and it isn't square and I don't see pine needles; I see cold sterilized late-winter sunlight, and suddenly, everything is perfect and always will be. |
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| Okay. |
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| 07:19pm 24/02/2006 |
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mood:  sick
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The dull red telephone rings, and I answer it, because there isn't anyone else but shadow puppets to do this, and anyway, I am their puppeteer.
"Hello?" I say, waiting for recognition or propaganda.
Neither.
There is a moment of stillness. I ask again, "Hello?"
And then a single note, piercing and steady and high. Brief; then it's over. A pause. Again. Broken, searing beeps, steady as footfall now.
"Hello?" I say desperately, a few more times. A thousand things flash through my mind. The last is the least reasonable. It's the one that for a moment, is the only one that make any sense.
I hang up the phone. I am scared because I know what it feels like to be right.
And this wasn't logical to anyone, remember.
* * *
I have spring fever as potent as wine. I want to hack all my hair off with a rose thorn. I want to jump off a cliff just to feel the free fall. A few birds return prematurely; their calls clutter the sky. They must have so much to talk about after so long apart.
I figured something out today.
* * *
I reread letters from pen pals in Sweden and Iceland and the Netherlands, and wonder how I came by all of them in the first place. I marvel at beautiful their words are. I remember hearing that there are weavers-maybe Navajo-who intentionally leave one mistake in everything they make. It's so the soul isn't trapped, they say. I look over their letters at the small errors that prove their dubious insistence that english isn't their first language. And it's just like those weavers, I think.
It feels so inaccurate when they tell me I'm poetic. I am in awe.
* * *
Right now, I like absolutely everything. |
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| 05:16pm 16/02/2006 |
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I smell like smoke and licorish.
My head hurts, and I have cold.
I could be in math class right now, but I'm not. |
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| I love my depth perception! =) |
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| 01:35am 16/02/2006 |
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I grow exasperated with newscasters. With those smooth-skinned old men with clean gray hair and clean blue eyes. They read their cues with professional indifference. Never a flicker of emotion crosses those sterilized eyes.
I am tired of learning new ways the world has mangled itself.
I am tired of melodrama, too. I am tired of constantly trying to fix things when the headway I can make is no more perceptible than the shifting of liquid window glass.
I wish I could fix everything.
I wish I had three wishes.
I wish someone would grant them.
I think I am gradually discovering that I am very good at frequently saying the wrong thing all together,at embarrassing myself, at not noticing a potentially problematic way something I say could be interpreted until it is already too late. I wish I could get into the habit of being excruciatingly reticent; it seems like that would be simpler. I tend to end up on the outskirts of things by habit, you see. It is so hopeless to feel like all I can do is watch and mouth advice that is both futile and annoying--it is like talking to people on television screens.
I want to be alone for a while, I think, with shadows and wisps of dreams. Isolation, dear Elliot, pushes past everything, I suppose.
But it's all right. I wake up in the morning with crescents of night time under my eyes, because I never do really fall asleep. And just then I am too tired to think properly and care about things. Gradually, I wake up and become more emphatically involved in the world, until by the evening I am experiencing this sensation that is like being thrown unexpectedly into free fall-I feel like I am about to reach a breaking point or simply the ground; I am overcome and nothing makes sense. It is so overwhelming, in fact, that just before I try to fall asleep, I force myself to become completely apathetic. I give up on being productive and go to sleep and wander through surreal dream sequences which are arranged like Slaughterhouse Five.
Then I wake up and do it all over again.
The poetry makes the repetition worthwhile; even if it is the only thing that does. I decided, some indistinct time ago, that in the end I will not really care if my life was tragic or wonderful, so long as it was poetic.
That is why it is going to be all right.
So I wrote this. There is proof, solid proof; exhibit A in the court room. But I probably won't look at this ever again. If I do, it will probably disgust me. I will probably realize that I have, once again, been much less articulate, precise, and coherent than I wanted to. I am already certain that by now I sound thoroughly, aimlessly self pitying and such; but for the record, I'm happy, now. Sitting here on this uncomfortable wooden chair, the satisfaction of incompletely articulating nebulous nonsense has cheered me up completely.
And also, it is snowing outside. So I might not even need the apathy tonight; might not even be a no good junkie of giving up every night at eleven o'clock. Happily ever after until tomorrow morning, and that's it, I guess. |
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