Once Upon a Time In No Man's Land...

Sun, 07 May 2006 16:00:52 GMT

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?

The Owl Shop

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 21:42:39 GMT

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...

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 19:45:28 GMT

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.

Once Upon a Hideous Car Show in Michigan

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 20:51:58 GMT

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.

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 03:05:42 GMT

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.

I'm in love with no one in particular.

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 23:11:16 GMT

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.

That was an excursion.

Sun, 26 Feb 2006 18:09:52 GMT

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.

Okay.

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 19:35:38 GMT

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.

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 17:18:02 GMT

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.

I love my depth perception! =)

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 01:56:13 GMT

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.

Feb 15=pirate day

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 00:38:35 GMT

Today at lunch I unfolded the crinkly red foil wrapping of a dove chocolate. As always, a tasty treat and an inspirational message awaited me: DO SOMETHING SPONTANEOUS, it said.

Well, okay, I thought.

And in english I decided tomorrow would be pirate day. So, you should probably dress like a pirate. I am going to even if I am doing so alone; the difference is I will feel marginally less ridiculous (though also more original) if no one else does. This could be either a reason to or a reason not to dress like a pirate tomorrow. The question you've got to ask yourself is:

hmm...how much pleasure would it give me to see Eva make a marginal fool of herself?

Whatever. I make a pretty sweet pirate, as it turns out.

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 23:18:13 GMT

Yesterday I was accidentally listening to the radio. The program I was inadvertently listening too was more than a little bit bizarre. It was about a women and her boyfriend. The women wanted to 'take their relationship to the next level' -she wanted to get a dog. The boyfriend however, claimed he was allergic and did not want a dog. So one day, when he came home from work, she introduced him to their new invisible dog Tigor, and so on. Sometimes when when guests were over, he would break off in the middle of a sentence and yell - "TIGOR, STOP THAT!"

I couldn't decide weather or not to laugh hysterically, the end.

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 22:30:12 GMT

Brokeback was overwhelmingly beautiful and sad.

And it's a little sad that I don't have any more too say, too.

:)

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 21:45:16 GMT

I haven't felt this nostalgic in a long time. I miss the circle of pine trees at Shimek. Jade needles above, russet needles below, sky somewhere in between. And innocence and happiness I never knew I had but know i've lost. I miss how the world looked from a lower line of vision, I miss short horizons and aimless emerald grass. Still, though, its comforting to see things look younger and smaller, less intimidating. Its weird how exhilarating that was, how much it made me think.
You can tell what time of year it is by the color of the sky at dusk. In the winter, it is dim magenta, in the summer, it is twilight colors, blue fading to green fading to yellow, mirky as lake water. I don't know what color it is in the fall or the spring. I wonder....

All I want out of life right now is sunlight and sky and brittle, wilted dandelion wishes. Immaculate white or immaculate emerald, but nothing in between.

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 23:52:28 GMT

Yeah, so the world keeps spinning.

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 20:36:41 GMT

I miss the river.
I miss the sunshine and the strangers and the bridge and the soft trampled grass. And the river. The lethargic river with the lazy watercolors dancing on slow waves, and the fiercer current buried underneath, so strong and unexpected.
And the ducks.
And the ice in the winter and the sailboat leaves in the fall.
Picnics in the spring and sunken skipping stones in the summer.

I haven’t been there in a while, what feels like too long. There is one tall,twisted tree near the art buildings that I love, it’s so comfortingly familiar. If this misplaced weather persists, I really want to picnic near their again, or just....well, anything, I suppose.
Yeah, this weather feels like anachronism to winter. i want snow. I want snow racing to the ground, glittering and blurred, and chalky ice that won’t even yield a reflection. The weather we are actually having is nice as can be, but I suppose there’s just a time and place for everything.
Still.

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 23:35:38 GMT

So, The Scribe. Of the three peices I submitted-
( Begrudging the Pigeon, Dandilion Wishes, An Excess of Syllables ....in case you were wondering, which you weren't)

-my least favorite got in. But whatever.

Also, this is because I find it soothing to pretend to be other people.

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 03:19:26 GMT

There are some people who moths flock to, mistaking them for light in the dead of inky night.
I don't need to be one of those people. I don't even think I want to be.
But I know I am afraid of being a were-person who vanishes as soon as the sun comes up, who is there and then gone, like forgotten dreams and other things elusive as twilight.
I miss last year, I think, when things were newer, with a brighter sheen, like snow that has only fallen yesterday, instead of snow which has fallen last week and begun to melt. And frail inspiration simply will not suffice.

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 17:30:01 GMT

I've built myself a house of cloudy glass, and I can watch blurred silhouettes dance past brittle walls polished and blinding as ski-slope glare. Out there, the real world, they call it- but i don't believe them. Those foggy conjugations, those improbable demons, they can be anything but real. They are shadow puppets, perhaps. They will dissolve when the sun turns its back; if I ignore them, they will go away.
They will not disrupt my cloudy house of glass.
Glass...this glass is cold to touch,colder than calloused hearts, colder than idle deception. Cold enough for my blood to remember that it's blue.
And somewhere, somewhere on the other side of the glass, I can taste the end of winter. Premonitions of sunlight and warmth, the anticipation of melt water-these things keep me up nights. Nights like these.
I'm beginning to suspect my glass house is made of ice.
And when it melts, nothing will keep the real world or its improbable demons at bay.

((So this is one of those things I write when I am upset at three in the morning. And they never seem melodramtic until the next morning. I suppose..simple by the moonlight in the morning never is. And such.))

Mon, 26 Dec 2005 18:00:43 GMT

Ow, sometimes I want to be a more interesting person than I am so much that it hurts.

And I wish it would snow.

So what's the difference between a raindeer and a caribou anyway?

Mon, 26 Dec 2005 17:44:13 GMT

So, remember when Kaitlin gave me a link to that international penpal website? No, of course you don't. But I do.

Actually, I'd forgotten. Except that for some reason I had the odd and rare inclination to check my email this morning, and to my astonishment, instead of discovering only spam, live journal replies,and nonsense from writing websites, I found an email from someone from the said penpal website. Oh, it doesn't sound like much, but it was definitely the most exciting moment of the morning.

Anyway, this kid is fascinating. He lives in Saltspring, Canada. His middle name is Joe. I'm assuming his first initial is 'R.' as he signed it 'R. Joe' and gave me a lengthy explanation of how Joe was his middle name. No,it wasn't lengthy; i'm just being inaccurate for fun. It was a short though sufficient explanation, but whatever. His parents are Caribou Biologists. Suspicious? Not even. That's kind of cool. I was going to ask him the question I've been wondering every Christmas for years: what is the difference between a reindeer and a caribou? But I didn't want to look dim, so I didn't. Is it that reindeers are domestic? Maybe? (Oh wait, I remember now, It's that they fly) Seriously, though....

He gave me some irrelevant list of authors he liked, which I googled. David Suzuki was by the far most confusing member of this list. My immediate reaction was: why would you read Suzuki method music books for fun? Of course I noticed the first name a second after. So I googled him. Do you know who he is? I do. He's a genetics nerd. I don't even know if he's a real author. And he was the narrator for this one movie we watched in science about a week ago. He has Einstienesque grey hair and ugly glasses, and he looks kind of asian-y.

Crazy kid, huh

Sun, 25 Dec 2005 16:25:42 GMT

For Christmas I was given innumerable books, several CDs, and an infinate supply of cloth and ribbon samples. I don't know what I'm going to do with them, but they sure are awsome.

The Girl in the Cafe is an amazingly good movie. The title is a little bit misleading. Anyway, you should watch it. Like,now. It will make you hate the world a lot more and a little less at exactly the same time. Like magic.

I hurt. And I hate taking pain killer; it hurts my ego. Actually that's not true, I'm just suspicious of medicine in general. And I'm too tired to be poetic or informitive, so I think I'm going to go eat peppermint and chocolate and drink coffee until I can see straight again.

Yay, medicinal drugs, yay!

Sat, 24 Dec 2005 22:57:31 GMT

It's amazing the things that go through you're head when you are lying alone in the snow at the bottom of a sledding hill, staring up at the sky and breathing cold air scented with melt water and bark for the better part of an hour. There was no breeze, absolutely none, but the black,gossamer, skeletal trees were still moving, almost imperseptively, as though they were breathing. And as the world descends into dusk, it doesn't just get darker. The blank gray skies are suddenly duo color, pale blue near the hill and pale pink near the trees; the faintest of cotton-candy hues. And then they darken, somehow mingle, become a solid,dim red that belongs only to winter.
And I didn't think reasonable things, of course, not a one. I thought about how If I wanted to call Kamil and tell him the irony of the situation, and divulge the latest episode of my remarkably poor luck. I didn't,however. It was Emily's phone, anyway.

And later, when there were flashlights and dim cacophony, and looming figures no more than silhouettes against the dark, I was completely and utterly fixated on charming the paramedics. I was more concerned with making them laugh than being constructive when they asked me what the hell I'd done, though in softer terms, you'll understand.

Firemen have this fascinating thing. It is like a toboggan, but a horrendous shade of glaring safty yellow. Just this side of chartreuse, it almost glows in the dark. And there is a railing. And buckles and buckles and buckles. It makes you feel like you're in a straight jacket. Then, all I could think of was coffins, and how everyone hates walking up the hill after sledding down,and that this time, I didn't have to.

The ambulance was unnecessary and surreal. Run Lola Run, I thought; Run, Lola, run.....I kept seeing the scene where she sits next to the man who is having a heart attack, doing nothing, just being there and breathing hard, her eyes inappropriately calm under a mass of crimson hair. Sirens. They never mean anything precise. Just chaos.

Pain killer injections make you dizzy. Waiting makes you nervous. Hospital rooms have the same aesthetics as the new wing at City High. The only entertainment to be found is a diagram of the skeletal system, but I can't read the size six font, and I certainly can't move. Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten. I can't. I don't have anything to compare it to, I'm careful. It's not that bad. It's bad. No basis for comparison, and this isn't mathematical anyway.

Eventually, they tell me it's just deep,deep bruising. Muscle. Bone. Purple-black like hit eyes.
Buy some drugs, they say, go home. Call us if it gets worse.

Well, on the plus side, these let's-not-have-you-fall-over-when-we're-testing-your-okayness socks they gave me are actually kind of cool. If they didn't come from a hospital, I'd love them. And, unnecasarry or not, and humiliating besides, having 911 called on your behalf sure does make you feel important, in a weird sort of way.

(and I really did charm the paramedics.)

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 18:59:05 GMT

If the snow melts and I haven't gone properly sledding,well.....

Anyway, I spent all morning being irritated and making ornaments for my mother's assorted relatives as she is to lazy to go out and buy them presents. Yesterday was weird. I really want to go sledding and/or go to sleep. Everyone in this house seems to have had their tempers pruned,so that they are now unusually short.

Whatever, I'm better now, maybe. I hate being in bad moods, it just isn't worth it, and besides--it's break!
Which of course leaves me with the delema of what to do what to do what to do so as not waste it.

And now, an anecdote:

On Friday I bought eight black wooden buttons with white birds on them, fully intending to replace the atrocious plastic faux-marble ones on my coat. As soon as I got home, I eagerly snipped off those buttons,bid them farewell,stuck them in a whine bottle and tossed them to sea. Well, anyway, I did cut them off.
Then, yesterday, I was heading off to go downtown, so inevitably I fetched my coat. I tugged my arms through the sleaves and adjusted it until hung normally and all that jazz,and then,of course, I went to do up the buttons.
Only to discover they were not there.
You see, in my admirable haste to rid the poor coat of its former buttons, I severed their umbilical cords,or er,threads,whatever, then got distracted and did NOT replace them.
Fuck, thought I.
So then I had to franticly sew them on in the car on the way to the pedmall, and the only thread I could locate was robins egg blue. Anyway, it looks rediculous; but you can't tell unless the coat is inside out. Oh, and only one of them has fallen off so far. Not bad for a five minute coat-improvement session, if you ask me. Which you didn't.

Au revoire!

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 18:25:12 GMT

The evergreen in our frount hall is a little sparcer than normal, but pretty and pleasently shaped. Also, since it isn't as rotound as some trees we've had in the past, it is possible for me to crawl under it's branches and sit in the corner by the staircase. This is very nice as It is difficult to feel motivated to go sit under a tree in the middle of white december. Anyway, I've begune to habitually stay up until two or so, writing and pricking myself with pine needles. No one ever even notices me except the cats; it's so tranquil. I love it. It reminds of my childhood days when I crawled into the shelf in my closet or some other such place.
I really need to go to Prarie Lights today or preferably sooner. Unfortunately, if i go to Prarie Lights, Paul will accost me by being friendly and enthusastic and loud. Seriously, talking to him terrifys me. But if I go in and just conviently stay away from his desk, he will very likely notice I am avoiding him and that would be bad. Arg, Luan's uncle, how dare you work at Prarie Lights. What to do, what to do, what to do....