Grandma Vickie was also at the poetry reading. She was drinking beer that she bought and brewed herself. It was a 22oz bottle of Michigan berry-flavored beer in a brown bottle. She was climbing around on the tables.
Showed a poem I’d written to my mom. It was supposed to be in iambic pentameter. It was 20 lines long and none of the lines, she said, were iambic. She gave me encouragement and told me that I needed to keep reading many things and having outside influences and not getting internally distressed about meter, though I should learn it.
My mom was trying to talk to me over the noise of the faucet while I was in the bathroom. I was saying “I CAnot HEear What YOU-oo ARE say-ING be-CAUSE I’m IN the BATHroom.” I don’t think that was right either. I guess I don’t know it.
School-sanctioned ski trip. My dad is a chaperone. It’s also an SPE conference thing, but all the parents from Kazoo School days are there. People start yelling about something that’s funny but I get upset because I think they’re screaming so loud that they’ll hurt my Dad’s ears. I’m right next to him and it’s not hurting my ears and his are probably less sensitive. Anyway, he stayed really calm even though it was really annoying.
Driving. Turning the dome light on to look at map/directions. It was so faint I could barely see it. A semi-truck went by and shook my car. I got confused looking in all the mirrors because I couldn’t see the road. I pulled out on the road, decided to just “go for it” and not look. I did that thing that I often do in dreams where I lose control of the car and can’t see…I just give up and try and find the brakes.
Back in Kalamazoo I put some blue stuff in my coffee that’s supposed to make me have a psychedelic experience. I don’t think it was working. I called Sara Bijani on the phone, met up with her in some neighborhood, she was just explaining how things between her and her new beau weren’t working out. He looked to be all of 19, wearing a weird puffy white coat. Upset.
I was searching for this thing you can download for your computer, like an interactive clock that you can download, it’s like a wheel that spins with all this news/bullshit that’s going on…you can position these levers to go up and down to draw lines so you just have video/picture representations of little pieces and categories of news that spin as time goes on. “Pretty cool.” This coincides with a conversation I am having with a woman who works for a magazine. She says “we have a tendency to tell models/interns how pretty they are and then show them this clock. We often find them days later, bulgy-eyed and hungry for love, feeding copy to the scanner and printer…”
Went with mom to visit Kate. We drive to some restaurant and my sister tells some anecdote that we supposedly have heard many times before. It is called “The Chimichanga Story.” It involves her being an unruly girl in highschool…she gets drunk and insists on riding the waterslide (like how they have electric trains, except, you know, a waterslide…across the restaurant several times in one night.
A website of beautiful snapshot photos. Some of San Francisco, I think. Can’t remember what they looked like. They weren’t mine but they made me want to take more.
At home, visiting my parents, a holiday. My mom sends Nick, Dad, and I to the store. I go to get ready and end up wearing these strange three-legged pants. I thought maybe it was some fashion response to counteract all the camel toe problems cause by “jeggings” but then I put them on and they just looked no good. I put pants on over these pants and went out to the driveway. There was a big pot of pumpkin ravioli noodle soup that my mom made. We’re all just standing there in the driveway eating it. It’s really good. My dad realizes that we don’t even realize what we’re going to the store for since Stephanie is making the Turkey tomorrow. My brother kindly explains to me after my father goes in to ask her that he thinks it’s just in case I want to get something to eat that isn’t meat. We keep standing in the driveway eating the ravioli. It is very nice.
Ryan sent me something shiny in the mail.
My grandparents are getting married again. They want to get married again before my grandmother dies. My grandfather is (and has been for years now) beyond death, in dream-land. There’s really great brownies and stuff that Stephanie made. My mom laughs at me when I show her all the split-ends in my hair. She’s really on a tear for a while, making fun of them. It’s nice. “What did you do? You just pinned it back for a year and when you un-pinned it, it was long and there were only three strands?” And I say “yes…ha ha ha.” There’s a really good video we make from the wedding. In part of it I am fake-kickboxing with Bud.
Had a dream about re-recording a performance I did on Super 8 while it was projected in an auditorium during an art-walk thing. There were tons of people there. Sara Bijani was there playing something like a flute to get things started. There was someone serving popcorn balls which I didn’t eat because I’d eaten a million doughnuts at a birthday party. People really liked the performance even though it was very hard to understand. It was a recording that I was projecting. Justine and Eric Sabatino were in it with a bunch of other people. The music was very dramatic. I really don’t understand it. Sara said she liked it but she admitted it didn’t make sense. The opening scene was a spastic technology freak-out. It looked like there was a hand making tadpoles. Somebody from the radio station was helping with the sound. (whispering): i think i want to go back to art school.
So then there’s a critique afterwards. Andrea who was one of the wrestler girls is there and Ginger are there. Ginger says we should do some write-up for “Wrestler” magazine. Andrea says “I got really trashed last night so I don’t think we should do anything.” I said “oh…look…we happen to be sitting in a bookstore. I bet they have some copies that we could do impromptu readings from, it would be fun.” Everyone’s like “wah-wahhhh….Rose…we actually have to work?” And I’m like “I looove going to school for art…it’s so much fun, I miiiiissss it.” I wake up.
Had the keys to Tom’s van. Took it driving somewhere… but maybe I wasn’t driving. Was with Sara and Brittany back in the hometown. Spilled frosting from gas station snacks on the interior.
Looking for some celery oil I left in a painting room. Anna H. is practicing softball pitches outside. This is after I’ve embarrassed myself at a reading, asking academic questions about an apple to stop people from shouting and yelling. The frat boys are drunk, they are laughing at the visiting writer. I see Laura P. and she tells me that my old piano teacher says Hi. Also that I might want to perform at the recital this Friday? I say oh no, not this Friday, I forgot to practice and it’s Wednesday! It’s Wednesday! Ahhhhhh!
In the film processing room. Anna nearly cuts my vocal cords because we have them tied to this film reel thing. She cranked it too hard and thought it was really funny but I really didn’t like it. She tried to cut the thing off and we had to call in a congresswoman with rubber gloves to help.
I’m at the grocery store buying snacks. Wondering if people are looking at me.
I’m reading from my/some book. It’s me and some refugee-type. We are somewhere where you are allowed to get three autographs on Christmas, “That Day,” that’s what they call it there, “That Day,” is Christmas. So you’re allowed to do whatever you want on that day to get three autographs.
Another invincible Bud dream. We’re on a walk and he has a ring that lights up with a Christmas tree on it. He’s singing a song about how much he misses Shirley…this is way in the future and I’m explaining this to someone that I don’t know, maybe my kids or some cousin that this is Bud and he is so invincible. But he’s on the way to the mailbox and I get worried that he’s not gonna make it the whole way and he stoops down and gets some snow off the ground and presses it on his middle finger because that’s the ring for her, it numbs himself and the ring for her lights up. I don’t even know how suddenly he’s in the house and I’m across the street. I know he’s my grandpa but I’m watching him or watching people come out of the house across the street, describing them to the people I’m with. He comes out of the house and asks me what’s behind it. What’s behind my house? I think that his beer warehouse is supposed to be back there, but I don’t know if he owns it in this reality. I can’t see it so I just tell him “the highway” and nod or shake my head. I’m sad that there is just a highway there now. I think he can tell that I’m being weird about the warehouse/factory now. “How can I explain / I miss you more than words can say” is the chorus of the song he’s singing. (and then I actually sing this into the tape recorder)
We’re at Brad and Stephanie’s house. Stephanie is shorter than in real life, but adorable. She looks like a version of one of their dogs. It’s not in a bad way, it’s just that her hair’s a little bit longer and her ears are little bit bigger. And maybe she’s grown a tail? And Allison’s there and she’s like an even little version of this cute dog-person too! It’s not in a BAD way. (my uncle) Brad’s like normal though. Immediately before this I’m renting a snowboard somewhere, with Bradley and Christopher Darling, another girl…Brittany or Jen? Anyway, we accidentally had snowboarded to Stevensville?
This must be a real song? Does M. Ward sing it? “If I had the time / go back and make you mine / (humming tune)”
Out walking a dog. Or maybe just walking. I saw a fox and a squirrel-beaver thing. The fox and the other animal, it was scary because they weren’t scared of me so I just screamed until they went away.
Making cupcakes?
Was in Scottsdale when I saw those animals. Wanted to tell Dale about it.
Hung out with Tess in Denver.
Making an art project with Mom and Kate. We’re working on a perfume called “Vanilla Hangover.”
Grandma Vickie dies during some event but we don’t want to disturb anyone so we leave her sitting up against a wall. Luckily after all that we didn’t call an ambulance because she comes back to life during it.
“Let trust do the work / don’t be afraid they might be crying.” This is supposedly a line from an Eleni Sikelianos poem I am reading in the parking lot in my mother’s car as we are getting reading to go into the hospital for some surgery I am getting on my appetite/lungs. F keeps calling on the telephone but I can’t find the time to call him even though the surgery hasn’t quite started. I pick up a ceramic manatee from some charity workers in the hallway to give to my mother but I drop it on the way to see her. “It was ugly anyway,” she said. “Maybe one of my cousins would like it?
I became very angry inside of a Subway restaurant and threw half of a trash can at someone. Don’t remember why. I was in there for a long time, getting really mad. No one reprimanded me besides the people working, to them, I apologized.
My parents have like six cats in the attic of our house. It was ridiculous. It smelled bad. They were nice cats and my mother had really worked hard to make them better (they were adopted/humane society). My mom said that it was good practice because her and my dad wanted to adopt another kid? And I was like Whaaaaaat?! And she said “it was your father’s idea.” Crazy. I told them I was really happy and excited, but really I was just amazed.
At summer camp, got lice. There’s a giant television in the cabin that will play on one angle on the floor a screen with Austin, TX on it and on the other screen Portland is on. They keep playing sports broadcasts. Seems incredulous that we’re watching TV at camp! But besides. I was too busy trying to kill all bugs to pay attention, really.
Watching TV with my family, a movie that was all old video games, really well done with classical music and some video game music set to it. There were full-grown male wrestlers playing all the parts of the female beauty queen superheros…with wrestler-man bodies. There were some other really great looking cartoons. Funny and nice. We found this at a thrift store where I had also gotten many other great, forgotten items. After that we just were watching commercials and I kept saying “this is gonna fuck me up! I’m going to have dreams about them!” And now I am…there was a lot of beef, a lot of cheese, a music video with a woman whose… the music video seemed like a commercial too. I had moved back home and it made me a little claustrophobic.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Dreams from February
About to use some roller skates at Dana’s house with Dana and Bradley. Dana gives me some tea after I tell her my body hurts after not moving around very much yesterday. David SK is there too. Bradley is there and he’s not. But his voice is. We did some yoga in the living room and watched some teen movie that was taking place. It was long. We took a break to play scrabble. Something I had in common with Allyson Boggess- we were commiserating about something. Somebody there is confused that Bradley and I are just friends. I want to explain by hurling/unfurling estate sales at them.
Justin is talking about waking up and hanging out in the snow.
Mark H. and somebody were talking about getting up at 5 to take someone to the airport. They were gonna have a really good party at 5am when they woke up. Fernando was like “Heeyyyy, let me come!” And they said “well you have to bring your own drinks…or your own weed or something.” It was like I was Fernando and they were talking to me? The place that we were looked like some restored/Italian villa version of the insane asylum in Kalamazoo. Doug and Elysabeth were there.
We’ll just take that sentence and see what it means:
judging a shirt or a sticker with the name of that poet on it,
the word is “rusty”
a sticker or a windbreaker or something like that.
Paranoid facebook dream…
when this happens it is spring. - dresses up like - and I end up sleeping with him and it’s really great but then I find out it’s really -.
Even thinking about the pond at the nature center my face feels like there’s flies all over it. I can see his face floating everywhere along the leaves.
Sun and moon that was spectatular! I performed the solar eclipse. How everything loses, surrenders? its engine? and regains it. How the moon sparkles and dripped like the last bit of spray paint in a round round jar. If that was a poem I sounded like a “wintermintablegabull”
Maybe some advice about every lover’s face equaling the same face—but I don’t believe that, I don’t believe that!
My poem kept colored Christina in pink and white another one has a glint of blue in it and don’t ever ask a poet what color the poem is, what color the poem is, or the notebook or the paper is because they shouldn’t be able to see it.
“I’m gonna go see a movie it’s too bad to talk” this is a song lyric.
They found a body at the bottom of the man-made salt resevoir. The accident happened while I was hitching a ride on the back of a scooter. The scooter was being pulled by a car. I didn’t know the driver. I didn’t even have a helmet on. All these police cars and fire trucks went by. The people I was riding with—I was so scared they were gonna crash and my brains was gonna spill everywhere. The person who was gonna dive for the body was a teenage girl, young, young—she didn’t’ seem phased by it. Somehow related to some images/thing of softball game. Other people are playing and it’s gonna be my turn soon. Somebody hit’s a ball way out in the outfield and if I was out there I coulda caught them. I always feel like that.
Series of intense awkwardness around men—strangers, everyone. I just can’t seem to stop thinking about sex and it makes me trip and fall down when I’m walking I feel like if I look people in the eye they can see that sometimes the sentence “you can only carry a sketchbook, you can only look at it.” A sketchbook being about fucking. Something about -. Seems so cliché to have dreams that involve that man. But they happen. He wears that stripey shirt that makes him look like a popcorn seller. It’s…um…an attractive shirt.
Sometimes I like to feel sorry for myself and think other people are eating dinner with their families but I think most people are eating dinner in their cars or televisions or computers.
Candace sold the jewelry drawer for like twenty-thousand four hundred dollars.
Before that, the sentence “it was a set-up: the cashier’s fumbling change around the register.”
Maybe it meant then there was a metaphorical dead body floating in my adolescent emotional past?
Febuary 13 ...am not asleep, just talkin’, talkin’ up a storm ummmm Jeez. I wanna put my brain in your brain. You hear me? I wanna put my brain in your brain. You don’t even know how this would feel or how I feel we never talked about it before but it would be intimate. In it. You want it? I have it. You have it? I want it. I wanna share it. Do you have it? Yeah. Uh-huh. Mmmm.
Somewhere real rural. Lots of sky between the rusted-out farm equipment. Some boarding school with Tess. We find a thing of beer, a keg? We’re in the elevator with an old mattress. She runs into an old friend of hers who is a bum, asks if he can put us up for the night. There’s this German chic with us. I guess we drink it and have a good time. The best part is stealing it though. Being in an elevator we’re not supposed to be in.
Keep seeing people from town who have no idea what bad news we’re getting into. It’s kind of frustrating.
Your buzzword names from the dreaming days?
I think I got to be super-spy police detective woman action hero last night. Helping to tie the ribbon away.
I wanna know about yardstick, I wanna know about movable fort above the floor with wheels and holes that match up. It’s made of wood and there’s books inside. I wanna know about everything.
Just fell on the floor somewhere I thought about where. Kept watching the show, a horse and a buggy. Laura Ingalls Wilder, life on the prairie. And sun some perfect cure who knows those things to…
One: put bird in it. Two: recycle. Three: a long gray dress. Four: a lotta limes and a lie.
I have all the pieces of mango and orange juice coming/covered in.
Making dresses for crazy people. It was a twisted/complicated plot. Pouring some type of mortar in it with clues. There’s this guy driving around chasing me and he says my grandma’s gonna get shot and then people will tell them or tell on me, eventually they would get back to me but they were looking and he would call me and say “Shirley Kerly I know you wore a red cap today and then you decided to do this.”
It’s time to rent a limosine and go to Las Vegas with my friends and…it was probably Bradley’s idea but then he decided it wasn’t a good idea anyway that ended with a bunch
of people giving eachother dress? haircuts in the kitchen and I stabbed someone with scissors but it was comical in the end because we had to try so many times and it hadn’t worked out it was like a play. The dress haircuts were really fun snipping around dresses people were wearing over their clothes, tailoring them, they were all too big. It was really nice.
Changing my clothes in the field behind the factory I told somebody to wait for them while I explored and found some clean ones. I wanted to change into them. Who was I with? It was so brilliantly sunny out and strange there. I think I was with Justin and maybe Bradley. While I was mid-clothing/nude a bunch of worker guys showed up. I fumbled and of course had trouble putting the clothes on. I took Katie, Dale, and Fernando and they had built a sculpture off to one side and I had built something to, by myself, of course, off by myself in the corner. They left a big note on theirs about “don’t wreck this! or we’ll wreck you!” and I tried to explain to them something like “you just have to accept that things fall apart…” You can’t expect it to not get wrecked if you’re building a sculpture in an abandoned factory. I can’t remember what I built or what I made. It’s the same factory always, always is in dreams, different parts…old creeeaaaky. Like my parent’s basement and the scaffolding of an imaginary NYC and of the real factory and that place where the chicken factory by the railroad, factory up north, all those at once.
Something is stuck inside the walls. Pieces of palm trees and bamboo, a commercial. Weird yellow golden. Wandering through empty coffee packages, just empty things and empty rooms. Instructions in thick books on how to fill them.
Cartoon people like from the Sunday paper. Green and white striped shirts. Nothing too perfect. Survey: a dry piece of the rock-bottom. Up from below. Arson is a bath invented by an owl. There’s a nice big empty chair looking at the ocean. You were part of the three/the dream. It was black outside and shiny. I didn’t open it yet, didn’t read it yet. There was something in the sky, no message. Like thin leaves on the surface of water, taking time for things to shiver their way up there.
Just the photographs and buttons are enough. I know from the same place. There is someone from the same place.
Throwing a penny at the sky: even if it falls faster than (up?) it’s okay.
Feb. 18 (above)
Taking to Paige from CESTA about so much work being done in the space. The space became like a communal tent. Talking about the connotations of the world tent. After politics. And oh shit something else. Reading an email invitation from some girls or bands that needed photographers, about time and space, and I hoped it was still there.
Biology/Science class. I was a student with all of my students. The teacher was giving a demonstration where he poured a bunch of soup on the floor. I expected it to start being like some hack job/stain remover guy but he wasn’t, he was proving some theory that at the TIIIIME made sense. Now I’m not so sure because I can’t remember.
Went to a Christmas party at Sally/Mcnally’s house. I was really late. Really confused. There was a huge amount of food and wine, liquor. It was really decadent. I was there with Katie and were trying to leave but we needed to say bye to Sally but she wasn’t around. There was all this drama because she was leaving her husband and it kept being that night and the day before and the morning after all at the same time. In the dream she had a bunch of sons. One of them, named Abraham, ofcourse, was quite cute.
I was babysitting…maybe myself. At Victor (from radiophx?)’s house. He had two houses. He was at work. Before the Radio phx meeting. I worked too late. I was six or seven hours late to the meeting. There was this cold, weird piece of steak on the plate for me and they all thought that I was going to announce that I was going to quit but I just got there and didn’t and oh man.
Idea for a pretend talk show called “Spirit-ish Dang” where they play bad jazz in the background. We talk about pseudo metaphysical religious ideas; a text msg. from Tom; a movie based on a Chekov short story. But the movie was modern and Chekov was "like way back in the day" …but the movie was really good. Space-age possibly.
There was a drink called “sea breeze.” It came in a sunscreen bottle. I had some left over from when I was in the Czech republic. I was looking over this article I’d written when I was at CESTA, it was about some woman named Brittany who was a friend of the art exhibit which was some kind of walk or parade down this mountain. Somebody was pulling a toy airplane behind them. Apparently it had to do with feminism. Or more like (serious voice) “post-feminism…” I was having a birthday party at a cabin I was living in. Trent—why does Trent always show up? He’ responsible, I guess. Helping me clean beforehand, or something. We’re listening to Beat Happening. I had, not only THE whale shark, but a big green shark too! Several other stuffed animals. This is a little disconcerting. Um. That’s where we were drinking the sea breeze drink. Right as I was waking up. People were beginning to arrive for the party. A van pulls up carrying people who are sleeping. Awake and asleep in the back at the same time. My brother and Jacob Newton are lying in a sleeping bag back there. My brother got out. He had an orange hunting sweatshirt on. I was worried that my neighbor’s (but why would I be worried- I lived in a cabin!)… I worried about my neighbors because it would be loud.
Nick had a confused, socially-awkward, worried look on his face. But he hadn’t gotten to the part where he told me what he was worried about yet.
I was showing my mom that I was on a website for the article I’d written for the thing in the Czech Republic. Except the caption they had on there was about goat herding. I had long hair. It was confusing. Kate was home, too.
I go inside the building that’s next to the Freeman’s house, where Rambling Rd. Pediatrics used to be. I was going to ask Diane if I could borrow a camera that I was sure she had, but instead I went inside the building and there were old pianos and arcade games everywhere and the electricity still seemed to be on. I found a nickel that was ten times the normal size lying on a piano bench. I put money in one of the pianos and one of the machines and it turned into this grocery store where everything had fallen off the shelves. Inside the store I ran into my brother, Bojean, and Drew and they all said they were coming to my birthday party and they didn’t know each other.
…recording the noises of something crunching underfoot while walking really good noises of walking, they were yellow-ish, the things. There was a thing that looked like my sound recorder I plugged it into.
You came home with me to visit my family. Taking a shower. Couldn’t find soap, asked me for it. I brought you some grapefruit and the crossword puzzle I stole from my mother’s room. Even though she was about to mail it somewhere. When you came out of the bathroom you were wearing my clothes. They fit you. You seemed smaller than I thought you were. Since they fit you. It wasn’t even a test. Wasn’t a test. My father saw you wearing my clothes. I thought they looked good on you. Kind of.
“You can spend all the money on young one/anyone? you want” this is a guy telling me a story after he didn’t go very well at a poetry slam and booooy I did spend forever. He was telling me about hitch hiking to get there and how he got these really great clothes from a garbage bin and a guy who nearly slit his throat and some lady named Shelley who wouldn’t go to the thing with him, and this kid he met whose cell phone number he had just in case they wanted to call to hang out.
This guy was the guy that Time magazine named “Man of the Year” in some move of super-sentimentality they named some random unemployed construction worker whose daughter was fourteen years old and sent in a ruler for some reason, in order to say “you should choose my dad for man of the year because when I hold this ruler up to his face or his cheek or something…”
Earlier I was crawling around and ran through the secret exit to the factory, the dream factory that only exists in my head. I was there with two other people who hadn’t been there before… we were spending too much time there, just sitting in the sawdust and talking and I heard people coming so I decided I had to get out of there. I went up to the secret escape part where you climb up over all the heating ducts and stuff and I had to walk out by the part where there were people working in the research and development area and there were security guards. I walked briskly out, well, almost out, I was doing really good even though I didn’t have shoes on and my clothes were all baggy/raggedly and I didn’t look like I belonged in this computer part of the factory but then I fell asleepin mid-escape. And it kind of (spoken with corners of mouth splayed out and pulled toward shoulders) meshhhed up mah plans…
some flooded lunchroom at an irish catholic school, all the cups and tables and chairs floating, filled up with water.
Went to the casino with my grandpa and grandma, they gave me change to turn into tokens to play games. I met a little kid and her mom at the coin changer booth. The mom was working and the kid was doing some worksheet for school about ethos, pathos and logos. I started talking to the mom about how tough times were and she said before she had this job her family had had some really good streak of luck or something and they’d driven their camper out somewhere to clear some land these people from Chicago bought and they’d just been backpacking.
Going on a ski trip in the alps with my brother and my dad. While I’m packing I find something from when my girlscout troop meant in the basement of the church. My backpack was handmade, it was a huge cardboard/wooden box that went on your head (it resembled a desk). It was really uncomfortable and unfashionable.
Message relayed: “yes there is love there, but be careful what you…put in it? Make of it?” It’s okay to love but don’t rely on it.
I left a note on my shoes. It was a post-it note. It said “I lied, I’m sorry.” I put it on the garage door so that when my parents got home they would know that we were home and we hadn’t gone back to school like we were supposed to. It was my idea to put the post-it note there. My brother was home- we were somehow adults, but also, maybe eleven at the same time. We were talking about a sociological idea…some kind of response…and night clubs. Earlier in the day we were supposed to be in school but the younger siblings that were us, but not us at the same time- two or three girls and a boy-we came home for lunch. We had like five cats and the garage door was open and one of them had gotten out and stayed out and gotten injured somehow. It looked like a little piece of watermelon, the cat…an eye or just a little sunflower seed. Maybe that was its name, Sunflower. Anyway, the cat got injured and we got sad, and we didn’t want to go back to school. So we didn’t. But the neighbor lady caught us, saw us. We tried to lie to her, said we got immunized and that’s why we didn’t go. But that’s not true.
To-do list that I can’t remember. Doing something for Justin. The whole while walking through the woods, remembering walking through the woods. Remembering walking through the woods populated by roadside trash and the ugly backs of heads. I think this represented my memories of j.nemier and some creepy dude from a football team. Talking to my mom about taking painkillers. We were sitting on a roof somewhere. It was windy. We could almost not fall off. I don’t know what we were doing up there it was awful. She was telling me about a play that she forced herself to write when she was snowed in. It was about somebody in Paris who couldn’t leave their house either but it was in Paris and that element helped her…write it?
Crashed some Jewish wedding with Karrie. I had a 12 hr. layover at JFK. There’s a slideshow that went with music where we saw some pictures of Charles Darwin, or someone named Charles Darkin. Maybe both. Maybe the same guy. Facebook with video intros to people’s pages. Brian Lee’s slogan was “.,..ya busy?”
Justin is talking about waking up and hanging out in the snow.
Mark H. and somebody were talking about getting up at 5 to take someone to the airport. They were gonna have a really good party at 5am when they woke up. Fernando was like “Heeyyyy, let me come!” And they said “well you have to bring your own drinks…or your own weed or something.” It was like I was Fernando and they were talking to me? The place that we were looked like some restored/Italian villa version of the insane asylum in Kalamazoo. Doug and Elysabeth were there.
We’ll just take that sentence and see what it means:
judging a shirt or a sticker with the name of that poet on it,
the word is “rusty”
a sticker or a windbreaker or something like that.
Paranoid facebook dream…
when this happens it is spring. - dresses up like - and I end up sleeping with him and it’s really great but then I find out it’s really -.
Even thinking about the pond at the nature center my face feels like there’s flies all over it. I can see his face floating everywhere along the leaves.
Sun and moon that was spectatular! I performed the solar eclipse. How everything loses, surrenders? its engine? and regains it. How the moon sparkles and dripped like the last bit of spray paint in a round round jar. If that was a poem I sounded like a “wintermintablegabull”
Maybe some advice about every lover’s face equaling the same face—but I don’t believe that, I don’t believe that!
My poem kept colored Christina in pink and white another one has a glint of blue in it and don’t ever ask a poet what color the poem is, what color the poem is, or the notebook or the paper is because they shouldn’t be able to see it.
“I’m gonna go see a movie it’s too bad to talk” this is a song lyric.
They found a body at the bottom of the man-made salt resevoir. The accident happened while I was hitching a ride on the back of a scooter. The scooter was being pulled by a car. I didn’t know the driver. I didn’t even have a helmet on. All these police cars and fire trucks went by. The people I was riding with—I was so scared they were gonna crash and my brains was gonna spill everywhere. The person who was gonna dive for the body was a teenage girl, young, young—she didn’t’ seem phased by it. Somehow related to some images/thing of softball game. Other people are playing and it’s gonna be my turn soon. Somebody hit’s a ball way out in the outfield and if I was out there I coulda caught them. I always feel like that.
Series of intense awkwardness around men—strangers, everyone. I just can’t seem to stop thinking about sex and it makes me trip and fall down when I’m walking I feel like if I look people in the eye they can see that sometimes the sentence “you can only carry a sketchbook, you can only look at it.” A sketchbook being about fucking. Something about -. Seems so cliché to have dreams that involve that man. But they happen. He wears that stripey shirt that makes him look like a popcorn seller. It’s…um…an attractive shirt.
Sometimes I like to feel sorry for myself and think other people are eating dinner with their families but I think most people are eating dinner in their cars or televisions or computers.
Candace sold the jewelry drawer for like twenty-thousand four hundred dollars.
Before that, the sentence “it was a set-up: the cashier’s fumbling change around the register.”
Maybe it meant then there was a metaphorical dead body floating in my adolescent emotional past?
Febuary 13 ...am not asleep, just talkin’, talkin’ up a storm ummmm Jeez. I wanna put my brain in your brain. You hear me? I wanna put my brain in your brain. You don’t even know how this would feel or how I feel we never talked about it before but it would be intimate. In it. You want it? I have it. You have it? I want it. I wanna share it. Do you have it? Yeah. Uh-huh. Mmmm.
Somewhere real rural. Lots of sky between the rusted-out farm equipment. Some boarding school with Tess. We find a thing of beer, a keg? We’re in the elevator with an old mattress. She runs into an old friend of hers who is a bum, asks if he can put us up for the night. There’s this German chic with us. I guess we drink it and have a good time. The best part is stealing it though. Being in an elevator we’re not supposed to be in.
Keep seeing people from town who have no idea what bad news we’re getting into. It’s kind of frustrating.
Your buzzword names from the dreaming days?
I think I got to be super-spy police detective woman action hero last night. Helping to tie the ribbon away.
I wanna know about yardstick, I wanna know about movable fort above the floor with wheels and holes that match up. It’s made of wood and there’s books inside. I wanna know about everything.
Just fell on the floor somewhere I thought about where. Kept watching the show, a horse and a buggy. Laura Ingalls Wilder, life on the prairie. And sun some perfect cure who knows those things to…
One: put bird in it. Two: recycle. Three: a long gray dress. Four: a lotta limes and a lie.
I have all the pieces of mango and orange juice coming/covered in.
Making dresses for crazy people. It was a twisted/complicated plot. Pouring some type of mortar in it with clues. There’s this guy driving around chasing me and he says my grandma’s gonna get shot and then people will tell them or tell on me, eventually they would get back to me but they were looking and he would call me and say “Shirley Kerly I know you wore a red cap today and then you decided to do this.”
It’s time to rent a limosine and go to Las Vegas with my friends and…it was probably Bradley’s idea but then he decided it wasn’t a good idea anyway that ended with a bunch
of people giving eachother dress? haircuts in the kitchen and I stabbed someone with scissors but it was comical in the end because we had to try so many times and it hadn’t worked out it was like a play. The dress haircuts were really fun snipping around dresses people were wearing over their clothes, tailoring them, they were all too big. It was really nice.
Changing my clothes in the field behind the factory I told somebody to wait for them while I explored and found some clean ones. I wanted to change into them. Who was I with? It was so brilliantly sunny out and strange there. I think I was with Justin and maybe Bradley. While I was mid-clothing/nude a bunch of worker guys showed up. I fumbled and of course had trouble putting the clothes on. I took Katie, Dale, and Fernando and they had built a sculpture off to one side and I had built something to, by myself, of course, off by myself in the corner. They left a big note on theirs about “don’t wreck this! or we’ll wreck you!” and I tried to explain to them something like “you just have to accept that things fall apart…” You can’t expect it to not get wrecked if you’re building a sculpture in an abandoned factory. I can’t remember what I built or what I made. It’s the same factory always, always is in dreams, different parts…old creeeaaaky. Like my parent’s basement and the scaffolding of an imaginary NYC and of the real factory and that place where the chicken factory by the railroad, factory up north, all those at once.
Something is stuck inside the walls. Pieces of palm trees and bamboo, a commercial. Weird yellow golden. Wandering through empty coffee packages, just empty things and empty rooms. Instructions in thick books on how to fill them.
Cartoon people like from the Sunday paper. Green and white striped shirts. Nothing too perfect. Survey: a dry piece of the rock-bottom. Up from below. Arson is a bath invented by an owl. There’s a nice big empty chair looking at the ocean. You were part of the three/the dream. It was black outside and shiny. I didn’t open it yet, didn’t read it yet. There was something in the sky, no message. Like thin leaves on the surface of water, taking time for things to shiver their way up there.
Just the photographs and buttons are enough. I know from the same place. There is someone from the same place.
Throwing a penny at the sky: even if it falls faster than (up?) it’s okay.
Feb. 18 (above)
Taking to Paige from CESTA about so much work being done in the space. The space became like a communal tent. Talking about the connotations of the world tent. After politics. And oh shit something else. Reading an email invitation from some girls or bands that needed photographers, about time and space, and I hoped it was still there.
Biology/Science class. I was a student with all of my students. The teacher was giving a demonstration where he poured a bunch of soup on the floor. I expected it to start being like some hack job/stain remover guy but he wasn’t, he was proving some theory that at the TIIIIME made sense. Now I’m not so sure because I can’t remember.
Went to a Christmas party at Sally/Mcnally’s house. I was really late. Really confused. There was a huge amount of food and wine, liquor. It was really decadent. I was there with Katie and were trying to leave but we needed to say bye to Sally but she wasn’t around. There was all this drama because she was leaving her husband and it kept being that night and the day before and the morning after all at the same time. In the dream she had a bunch of sons. One of them, named Abraham, ofcourse, was quite cute.
I was babysitting…maybe myself. At Victor (from radiophx?)’s house. He had two houses. He was at work. Before the Radio phx meeting. I worked too late. I was six or seven hours late to the meeting. There was this cold, weird piece of steak on the plate for me and they all thought that I was going to announce that I was going to quit but I just got there and didn’t and oh man.
Idea for a pretend talk show called “Spirit-ish Dang” where they play bad jazz in the background. We talk about pseudo metaphysical religious ideas; a text msg. from Tom; a movie based on a Chekov short story. But the movie was modern and Chekov was "like way back in the day" …but the movie was really good. Space-age possibly.
There was a drink called “sea breeze.” It came in a sunscreen bottle. I had some left over from when I was in the Czech republic. I was looking over this article I’d written when I was at CESTA, it was about some woman named Brittany who was a friend of the art exhibit which was some kind of walk or parade down this mountain. Somebody was pulling a toy airplane behind them. Apparently it had to do with feminism. Or more like (serious voice) “post-feminism…” I was having a birthday party at a cabin I was living in. Trent—why does Trent always show up? He’ responsible, I guess. Helping me clean beforehand, or something. We’re listening to Beat Happening. I had, not only THE whale shark, but a big green shark too! Several other stuffed animals. This is a little disconcerting. Um. That’s where we were drinking the sea breeze drink. Right as I was waking up. People were beginning to arrive for the party. A van pulls up carrying people who are sleeping. Awake and asleep in the back at the same time. My brother and Jacob Newton are lying in a sleeping bag back there. My brother got out. He had an orange hunting sweatshirt on. I was worried that my neighbor’s (but why would I be worried- I lived in a cabin!)… I worried about my neighbors because it would be loud.
Nick had a confused, socially-awkward, worried look on his face. But he hadn’t gotten to the part where he told me what he was worried about yet.
I was showing my mom that I was on a website for the article I’d written for the thing in the Czech Republic. Except the caption they had on there was about goat herding. I had long hair. It was confusing. Kate was home, too.
I go inside the building that’s next to the Freeman’s house, where Rambling Rd. Pediatrics used to be. I was going to ask Diane if I could borrow a camera that I was sure she had, but instead I went inside the building and there were old pianos and arcade games everywhere and the electricity still seemed to be on. I found a nickel that was ten times the normal size lying on a piano bench. I put money in one of the pianos and one of the machines and it turned into this grocery store where everything had fallen off the shelves. Inside the store I ran into my brother, Bojean, and Drew and they all said they were coming to my birthday party and they didn’t know each other.
…recording the noises of something crunching underfoot while walking really good noises of walking, they were yellow-ish, the things. There was a thing that looked like my sound recorder I plugged it into.
You came home with me to visit my family. Taking a shower. Couldn’t find soap, asked me for it. I brought you some grapefruit and the crossword puzzle I stole from my mother’s room. Even though she was about to mail it somewhere. When you came out of the bathroom you were wearing my clothes. They fit you. You seemed smaller than I thought you were. Since they fit you. It wasn’t even a test. Wasn’t a test. My father saw you wearing my clothes. I thought they looked good on you. Kind of.
“You can spend all the money on young one/anyone? you want” this is a guy telling me a story after he didn’t go very well at a poetry slam and booooy I did spend forever. He was telling me about hitch hiking to get there and how he got these really great clothes from a garbage bin and a guy who nearly slit his throat and some lady named Shelley who wouldn’t go to the thing with him, and this kid he met whose cell phone number he had just in case they wanted to call to hang out.
This guy was the guy that Time magazine named “Man of the Year” in some move of super-sentimentality they named some random unemployed construction worker whose daughter was fourteen years old and sent in a ruler for some reason, in order to say “you should choose my dad for man of the year because when I hold this ruler up to his face or his cheek or something…”
Earlier I was crawling around and ran through the secret exit to the factory, the dream factory that only exists in my head. I was there with two other people who hadn’t been there before… we were spending too much time there, just sitting in the sawdust and talking and I heard people coming so I decided I had to get out of there. I went up to the secret escape part where you climb up over all the heating ducts and stuff and I had to walk out by the part where there were people working in the research and development area and there were security guards. I walked briskly out, well, almost out, I was doing really good even though I didn’t have shoes on and my clothes were all baggy/raggedly and I didn’t look like I belonged in this computer part of the factory but then I fell asleepin mid-escape. And it kind of (spoken with corners of mouth splayed out and pulled toward shoulders) meshhhed up mah plans…
some flooded lunchroom at an irish catholic school, all the cups and tables and chairs floating, filled up with water.
Went to the casino with my grandpa and grandma, they gave me change to turn into tokens to play games. I met a little kid and her mom at the coin changer booth. The mom was working and the kid was doing some worksheet for school about ethos, pathos and logos. I started talking to the mom about how tough times were and she said before she had this job her family had had some really good streak of luck or something and they’d driven their camper out somewhere to clear some land these people from Chicago bought and they’d just been backpacking.
Going on a ski trip in the alps with my brother and my dad. While I’m packing I find something from when my girlscout troop meant in the basement of the church. My backpack was handmade, it was a huge cardboard/wooden box that went on your head (it resembled a desk). It was really uncomfortable and unfashionable.
Message relayed: “yes there is love there, but be careful what you…put in it? Make of it?” It’s okay to love but don’t rely on it.
I left a note on my shoes. It was a post-it note. It said “I lied, I’m sorry.” I put it on the garage door so that when my parents got home they would know that we were home and we hadn’t gone back to school like we were supposed to. It was my idea to put the post-it note there. My brother was home- we were somehow adults, but also, maybe eleven at the same time. We were talking about a sociological idea…some kind of response…and night clubs. Earlier in the day we were supposed to be in school but the younger siblings that were us, but not us at the same time- two or three girls and a boy-we came home for lunch. We had like five cats and the garage door was open and one of them had gotten out and stayed out and gotten injured somehow. It looked like a little piece of watermelon, the cat…an eye or just a little sunflower seed. Maybe that was its name, Sunflower. Anyway, the cat got injured and we got sad, and we didn’t want to go back to school. So we didn’t. But the neighbor lady caught us, saw us. We tried to lie to her, said we got immunized and that’s why we didn’t go. But that’s not true.
To-do list that I can’t remember. Doing something for Justin. The whole while walking through the woods, remembering walking through the woods. Remembering walking through the woods populated by roadside trash and the ugly backs of heads. I think this represented my memories of j.nemier and some creepy dude from a football team. Talking to my mom about taking painkillers. We were sitting on a roof somewhere. It was windy. We could almost not fall off. I don’t know what we were doing up there it was awful. She was telling me about a play that she forced herself to write when she was snowed in. It was about somebody in Paris who couldn’t leave their house either but it was in Paris and that element helped her…write it?
Crashed some Jewish wedding with Karrie. I had a 12 hr. layover at JFK. There’s a slideshow that went with music where we saw some pictures of Charles Darwin, or someone named Charles Darkin. Maybe both. Maybe the same guy. Facebook with video intros to people’s pages. Brian Lee’s slogan was “.,..ya busy?”
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