jan 25 2011
there was a textbook full of weather pictures they did the same thing my phone does
how it shook and moved
it was important for driving
it might’ve been stormy
I cannot drink fast enough, running out of wine. At my family’s home, getting ready to go see bud for the last time or what my mother says will be the last time. For some reason she thinks that I don’t care to go and that my brother and I both don’t care. And this is not true. Kate, and Nick, and Mom are all going together, leaving me with my dad, which is fine but they’ve been picking on me. I hear Kate say to my mother that I said—I never said this— “I hated the smell of condoms so much that I had to wash them before I used them.” But that’s not true! That was some thing she was bringing up about how I was going to get pregnant.
Some holiday hangout with my family. We have this crazy dance circle in my grandma’s house and me and Allison, Billy and Clara, and we’re all really young. There’s some soul cover of a Michael Jackson song. My grandma started shopping at the food co-op.
In somewhere that looks like Euguene for a conference. Walking by myself by what looks like a lake. I see people who are in love. A black woman who looks like she is pregnant and her husband go into a house. They look happy, wrestling on a bed.
But then I am not there for a conference,
maybe for a friend’s wedding…Brittany is there and Anna is there, well, pretty much everybody is there, it’s one of those deals. We’re all in some big old building and it’s kinda leaky and rainy and everybody’s gonna read poems and dance it’s gonna be a goooood time. Britanny talks about photographing this girl she used to be friends with, until the girl got some weird disease that made her age really fast and Brittany didn’t want to take pictures of her because she didn’t look like the same person anymore.
Some time at Beth Staples’ house talking about bartending and she has this great old big that’s a family heirloom filled with handwritten recipes for drinks. She has really big eyebrows and looks like she’s in fourth grade.
Everybody at this wedding or wherever I was, they had on old pins, not on purpose but they just all did, kind of like the penguin one that Justin gave me that I’m wearing and they all had some story behind their’s.
Sometime when I was wandering in the pacific northwest I stopped by Kevin’s to get something and could just hear him and his girlfriend talking, not the girlfriend he has now, but some other one. I could just hear them making fun of someone about office supplies. I still didn’t want to hear it but I guess it was okay.
(not asleep yet. 1/26 no 27…
(Let’s Go To A Death Metal Concert)
The building is burning, I am in my pickup truck.
The fire and smoke make everything look like a movie from the seventies.
In the movie, I am the woman. This is a problem—
sitting in the sink applying lipstick, clamoring for something.
You are tan and unconcerned. This makes you beautiful.
I don’t know where the plot is going. It’s that long part
during the first six hours before we say anything.)
I went in a church because I wanted some… I thought I get some wax that was melting. I thought I could use it for some project I was working on. When I went inside I got scared about stealing inside of a church so I grabbed a candy cane and sat down in one of the pews. It was really, really dark in there except for some candles. They were playing 104.3, some terrible, new song about cowboys where they say “giddyup wah ha ha ha ha” you know, I mean I don’t know. There was a confessional booth in the back and I was sure there were priests in there that were gonna see me stealing the wax. I can’t remember what I even needed it for. Then I fell asleep in the church, woke up, ohhhheuuehheee! Scary.
I tried to get m to move back east. He kept doing the dishes and didn’t move.
Fernando had this plan we were gonna have to murder someone and I don’t remember why. We were testing the gun out outside my apartment and some test-blood got on the ground. We tried to wipe it up with some hydrogen peroxide but it started bleaching the sidewalk. Someone across the courtyard was watching me.
Wandering through a town that didn’t used to exist but exists now it’s somewhere near my hometown. I was with maybe Allyson Boggess and Anna Herdeck. We were gonna go out to lunch somewhere, it was all adult-like. We’d been wandering around the town for so long that I’d ended up seeing names or signs or references to ex-boyfriends of mine and I felt like a skeezy little person.
Talking with Alex or Ryan maybe but I was mailing it in the mail and trying to describe everything like he was here like on the phone last night and there was a green room. It had carped like the color of my sweater, like the color of lichen. This room was where we had once manufactured tornadoes in Kalamazoo. We being my friends and I, somehow.
Jan 29
I’d been trying to tell a story about making out with somebody to my brother but I didn’t want someone else to find out so I confused the story so much that I don’t even know what I was talking about. I really didn’t know. And my brother said “was he a truck driver?” And I said “yeah,” but that’s not what I meant. And there’s a piano. Hmmm.
Something about it was textural like the inside skin was good and the outside skin was…good. Maybe I was talking about zucchini, maybe I was talking about books, tuxedos. I don’t know.
It sounds much better than it looks. And It feels much better than it sounds.
Some story about Hibachi suits, which were some suits for Japanese…fighting?
I went to get ice cream with my family somewhere maybe near Yellowstone park. It was talking forever, like an hour. Of course I was last and I didn’t know what I want because I don’t like ingesting things like that. I ended up flirting with someone who worked there and they took me in the back to show me how the ice cream was made but really we just smoked some pot and then somebody brought me an old-looking bottle of Corona. It was very pretty and had a navy blue label then I remembered my family was waiting outside and I got all paranoid. The kids had some deal worked out where they didn’t have to pay rent and were working for very little money. They seemed alright, for (?) hippies.
Tom had been sending me these scripts as text message things. About how he was or where he was but there were so many theres and wheres and hows of them I had to take a break and go walking out in that snow forest. This is he was from Vietnam war and I was a woman on the sidelines of the Spanish civil war but I lost my phone so I didn’t know my lines. I had this beautiful dress and in a tent in the middle of some grassy set of a battlefield. He walked in through a door and put something in a laundry basket.
Out walking in the woods after I was watching a weather report that said it was going to get cold and snow here. I was walking somewhere that looked like Asylum Lake but it was in Arizona. All the leaves that were still left on the trees were incredibly orange and the path was soggy and flooded but also snowing, I almost went into the lake. I realized that there were so many animals and things I was stepping on…little deer and these little coyoteish things but they were tiny, the size of a chihauha, but a little bit bigger. I realized in the water there was this big wolf-thing swimming so I held really still and then it stood up and turned into this lonesome old man. It was kind of scary.
I lived with Brittany somewhere near Portland but in Oregon, a few hours away. There was mail delivered to our apartment. It was not for us. It was the wrong address. I told the postman I would keep it no matter what but before I even saw it but Brittany told him he should take it and deliver it. I saw it in his hand it was from ?. There was some note about pictures, a tape. Jealousy? How do I deal with it in my dreams?
I was listening to and watching the weather report about snow they did this thing where they showed what it would look like if the colors were all enhanced and the leaves were all oranger. Before I was actually walking in it. They said “wonder what it’ll look like when we get all that snow.” And the other newscaster was like “wonder what it’d be like to get married out here.”
My grandmother or my great-grandmother was staying with me, or next door or something, and she was laying down to go to sleep. She was talking about how much her body hurt, how painful it was and I could feel it for a second. I was telling her about something about thinking how good it would feel for the pain to be gone, how dying would be some kind of release. I could feel her thinking that as if it was some release as she went to sleep.
What is a mating can? They keep them over there by the dirty dishes. This is funny to people who have been doing dishes together. When they’ve known each other for a long time, when they’ve been hidden under blankets together when someone’s mother is in the next room.
This was away from the town where I’d been living in and collecting mail. This was near or in some lonely mountain range. I’ve been there before climbing rocks when it’s almost really windy like that time on dmt on the beach in san Francisco, that windy that sound. But it was a different season and this was a really lonely western mountain range. Something that makes you think of pioneers.
Tom asks me if I am happy when I seem him very rarely in the dreams of late. Maybe I went to visit him. I went to visit him. I don’t know if I’d said I was coming. It was confusing as high school.
I had to take a trailer full of firewood or kindling to the coast. Outside the window was a blue and white fishing pole that wasn’t used for fishing it was used for opening the window if you can’t reach or there’s only some special way to it.
I went to go see my father. He was re-planting a garden. He helped me fix a moped/bbq grill that one could drive around town. I was getting ready to drive it but we didn’t have a helmet so I wore two winter hats instead.
Listened to a special segment on the radio about people who were vaguely related to other people who did something that made them famous but not necessarily. Oh, it was the interview with the nephew of some guy who wrote some songs that were really popular but they weren’t any good.
I was gonna go sledding if I could just get one more word…collecting them from strangers, not the words but the definitions…in empty olive jars and kombucha tea bottles and twigs outside.
I was on some tour where I was collecting the definitions of things from strangers: just talking to them about what different words meant. It was really good, really good, I wanna do it.
The words would collect inside the jars, looked vapor-y almost. My mom understood and also we went to the thrift store and we had dreams about The floor looked like the floor of the church where there were girl scout meetings and everything was stacked in no particular order but it fit nice, concentrically. It just matched up, the edges matched up. All the vaccum cleaners I saw earlier were there. Can’t remember what we bought but we got something…
Went to a conference with J-Lo and I kept seeing her in the morning folding her underwear with my landlord. It was disgusting.
I made muffins but I kept them in the bathroom and they got really really big and moldy like right over night. Somebody showed me a picture of Drew and Ben from Portland changing the sign from Umpqua bank to Wachovia bank. There was a caption like “An Old Haunt” or something.
Rabbits would grow wings but they were just decorative. The couldn’t use them to fly with, they looked like couch cushions or saddles.
Phantom singing, fake book covers, something about antelope, a pair of pants, I was taking a test that I didn’t know the answer I didn’t know about a person who was technically dead, they were having a “brain surge” something that happened that made them still able to survive the thing…what was it? One of four answers and I got it wrong on the practice test the year before and I didn’t know what to do and somebody said it was aspirin and somebody said it was codeine but I didn’t know what the answer was. It was like I was back in high school except all my students that are my students now were my fellow students. There were these women in the hallway they were dressing up for school projects like you’d never believe—there was this girl that was wearing normal clothes but she had her hair done up like an angel, like a greek goddess… she had these weird tufts on the sides and her hair was sticking out, literally, well, no, figuratively, well for like… ahhhhhh three feet. There was another girl with really good hair for a different project but I can’t remember it but they were so into. Dramatic. Excited. Paraclitus? Paracletus? Was one that they were dressed up as. All the people that were taking the test…we were in a house. There was a beautiful attic. IT was almost like a party before it but then there was a test. I think my census boss was giving the test. I think his hair looked like the girls’ hair in the high school hallways. There was something having to do with flying and canoes. We were on teams. But I got there late. Why? I was trying to cook something, I think, in the yard. A different yard. Yes. There was a box of meat that I’d found in my parent’s house that I’d found. We had company and we were running low on whatever you put on the grill. I was walking through the house with…smelt? It was some kind of fish but it looked like a box of air filters and my dad told me what it was. It was still frozen. I was gonna cook it like that but he said “first you have to defrost it.” I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Near the house of young people taking a test I was in a bedroom that looked like my friend Anna’s bedroom from childhood, kind of like an apartment in Traverse City where I’d last seen zw… He was there with his eighteen year old Latina girflfriend? She was just so young and quiet. It was weird. She left with her friends who looked like these girls I saw when I was running through Mesa. They were also very young. All I wanted to ask him in a polite manner was “whoa whoa why is your girlfriend like half your age?” But he started going on about some how I care about you and haven’t seen you for years and years, which was nice and believable but I was annoyed because his shirt was buttoned all the way up to the top button. Not annoyed because I wanted him to take it off, but because it looked like it was too tight. Yeah.
I just wanted to show people how flexible I was.
Driving around with Trent and somebody else who’d moved out west, telling me what the difference… No, I was talking about Trent? The difference between living in the “buried east” and the “lonesome west.” How the lonesome west was scarier, but better, there was more…opportunity? here. We were driving through Seattle. I was helping somebody move. They had a room open to sublease and I wanted to take it but I started thinking I might get into grad school. We were driving around and the sky was many different colors at once blues with gray streaks in it just before sunset, kind of thing in the air where it had rained, but it wasn’t raining. The sun was out and everything was all glisten-y and the air was all… You know…like it is up there… Clean? Maybe.
I was working on a project with Ryan involving video. I was in Kalamazoo home to visit. I asked my mom if we could use the vcr for something. We had a video tape it was wrapped in something pink, this had nothing to do with the project, it was just what I was keeping it in.
Made muffins. There were cranberries in them. I remember when I was in Seattle-ish. It was that road [this is in Portland…] that curves at the bottom by the fruit stand on the hill coming down from Woodstock, 16th or 20th… I used to ride my bike by there when I worked at the sandwich shop. Somewhere in the car, maybe in a barn, somewhere else, maybe somebody’s parent’s talking about working as a janitor during world war two, needing so many rags to clean the blood up… how people are squeamish now.
Sleeping on the/a sun porch during Thanksgiving or some holiday. Stopped by to say hello. Ended up staying out of politeness. It was gum. There was so much gum. Mashed potatoes, seaweed, people moving furniture. Dogs. Dogs. m was there but he looked like someone else. It was like visiting another life. Like that actor from the shining. Or a raggled version of Bob Dylan from the Desire album cover, so confusing. And Trent was there who looked younger than always like always. Stopping by a stranger’s house for some holiday and they expect you to stay. Andy Woodard was there and he was apologizing. We were moving something, trying to do something across the country and the boy who I was with kept changing who they were. I don’t know. Fernando and his brother Carlos were there and they looked the ragglediest of them all but everyone seemed to be sunburnt and unshaven and dirty. Wherever we were… I don’t even know.
A little old Chinese woman who was friends with whoever I was with…we kept having to pretend that my stuff was the other girl who I was with’s stuff. She was friends with this woman who was somehow helping us. I had way too much stuff. I don’t know where I’d been or where I was going. I think I’d been out in the woods. There were light bulbs we were collecting from her house. There were clothes everywhere, these purple tights, some little girl writing messages. I’d been with my family. My cousins were all there. How confusing. At one point my aunt was talking to my grandma and my grandma tried to show her something in her eye and the front of her shirt goes up a little and my aunt says “oh, that’s how you keep looking so young, by getting cold?” …cause her stomach was showing. It was funny in the dream.
Watching footage of me as a child. I had bright orange hair. Then, later, I’m this age of a little younger. My mother says to me “you know, you’re young now, but when you grow up you’re going to be a lesbian.” And it seems to make sense to me how she said it.
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