Fall 2011

The thing that holds my front two teeth in falls out while I’m on this boat trip in Ontario Sasketchewan Pashmina Canada Somewhere in the west. There is a dentist on the boat who is a radical awesome lesbian lady who puts my teeth back in for me for free. It’s just awesome. I had my head in her lap and was just feeling really safeWhen I was there before I can’t remember too well Tess and I stole some tapes that were like the ones I found in the natural health center dumpster. I saw her later at Britanny’s parent’s house but I was drunk and she didn’t seem like she wanted to talk to me.


I come back from the boat trip with someone who is like Justin but younger, someone like Bert maybe…less resourceful. We needed somewhere to live and we were broke. We were somewhere and there was a freezer full of jello pudding, it was messy and Sally and Britanny like her parent’s house, they were all getting ready to go on this camping trip/bachelorette party. I wasn’t invited and it was all sketchy but I said “I need a place to stay.” Even though it was obvious the Justin Bert person needed a place to stay too. “No of course not.” There was a sitcom on that Brittany used to be in, it was kind of nice to see, but she looked older in the television screen than she does now. Hard times in dream land.

The dentist also asked me at one point after I confessed to stealing her tapes the last time I was on the boat, she said “are you straight or gay or gay for straight?” I didn’t know what it meant and I couldn’t answer because my mouth was full of her fingers.

Beach somewhere, bottoms of Bradley’s feet. All I remember.

Some sort of summer camp/school/sleepaway for adults. There’s field trips. I want to be perfect. Maybe we’re roommates, there’s a lot of vitamins we take. We were supposed to go canoeing but then the canoes disappeared. People were swimming and holding on to things in life jackets. I’m way in the back and Raj from Kazoo school is there as so is Kevin from writing class in highschool. We stop somewhere and I start talking about dumpster diving. I’m talking and standing in between two dumpsters and my voice is echoing and I think for a second I see the boys’ faces it’s unnerving, I realize about the dumpsters and am kind of embarrassed about it. There are these townspeople everywhere we go, it was sort of like working in Massachusetts. We go to KCC after this and my mom gives me a ride. There’s some paper she forgot in the car. We are going to smoke cigarettes in the car but once I light mine, hers disappears and it’s just me doing it. Driving my car and having the brakes completely not work.

Bradley working at some library where I didn’t know he was working. I was in there doing something, teaching… I remember being at the desk and thinking “oh no! I didn’t know you worked here! I can’t do whatever I was doing…”

My mom is upset at my dad because he has a stand-up bass that is all connected and ready for when she’s out of town. My brother and I want to see him play it since he secretly can and I asked what the tablecloth or placemat smelled like. My father came up with the answer, he said “salty” because he really likes salty food. There is no segway here except it all takes place in the same room. But my mom DOES NOT want to hear the noise of the bass being played.

On some road trip out at the cabins. Many delicious snacks. A tofu thing. Justin was there, my mom was there. Driving to get there for a long time.

Tried to make a domicile in a garage. Put my mattress and pillow in a dumpster thinking about how it smelled like…ham berries? Strawberries, but also old hamburgers.

I get in trouble for going topless during some art event. Sawall is a coffee shop on top of that hill in Portland where it’s kind of seedy, where the Roxy is. I park my car behind there because I think I have to work but I forget about it. I realize I’m supposed to be at the other location down the hill. I spent the majority of the day in this beat up looking apartment that I was moving out of. I had the windows closed, going in the shower and jerking off. I get myself to ejaculate like a man and it’s very interesting. – and – from the bar downtown are talking about times they’ve slept with me in dreams and – says to --- that “ejaculation was kind of scary, especially coming from a pussy,” but then he changed his mind and decided that it was okay. Once I realize that I’m at the wrong place of work I use my arms like they are crutches, they’re extra long and pull me through the streets. I remember my car might get towed but the parking attendant is like “it’s okay” but his fellow parking attendant is like “hey man she owes us $25” and he looks like that Batso guy from the David Lynch interviews I saw earlier. I give him two dollars and some change and speed off down the hill to the grocery store.

I was working at a bank. I was working at a Chase bank in a big downtown. I remember that the sweater I wore to work was very comfortable. I think it was cashmere. The bank across town got robbed and they announced that my bank was getting robbed and that all of the employees were to stand in a line in front of the bank. I ran away, very, very far into the country and climbed over a porch-veranda with a chicken coop loft thing. I was just trying to get away from…maybe there was a flood going on and the land ended in a cement chicken coop madness peninsula property of someone’s. I climb over the chicken coop and who’s laying there sunbathing but Paige from CESTA. I explain to her that the bank’s been robbed and she’s like “I was sunbathing, it’s fine, don’t worry about it.” I tell her I was just trying to cut through your yard, I work at the bank and I was running because I was scared I have a backpack and a plastic bag and who knows what else.

I’m parked outside, it’s snowy. I’m at the little theater or something and I realize I don’t have a sticker but my dad does. He even offered me his. There’s some announcement outside.

I’m supposed to meet my mom somewhere and Bradley somewhere for a drink at the same time but they’re sitting in different areas. I keep going back and forth because I can’t smoke in front of my mom and bradley’s in the smoking section, maybe he needs ride home and maybe he doesn’t. It all seems really difficult. I feel my mom rolling her eyes at me and I’m rolling my eyes at me. It’s a fucking mess.

There’s a short David Lynch film that had five people in it. There was a line in it about marinating flowers. People’s faces were painted and things were growing…little plants on stage. Each person had a sort of rotating monologue. The Lynch version was pretty good, weird. There was another version that Eana’s sister had supposedly made. I couldn’t tell if she made it bad on purpose and that was part of it or what. The flowers were marinating on this cookie sheet and they were dirty and gross and the actors weren’t very good. Somewhere Katie Berta appeared and she had long dreadlocks and I think she was dating Bert. It was a mix between Katie Berta and Alex M. My mother was there for the second Marinating Flowers performance, which I guess I was in. I guess there was incense so she was outside and I was inside. She was in a wheelbarrow-taxi on the front steps, watching, looking in.

Teaching a writing workshop in Grand Rapids but it was two adults and my mother was there. We ran out of time at the end. I talked to Tom or saw him or just was thinking about him, somewhere.

Story about one girl who was the only purveyor of the town cemetery. There’s some big tragedy, lots of dead people. She was very busy. Everybody gave her a little jar with a name on it for donations toward that person’s funeral. She resembled me. I was her for part of it. Morgan was her name.

Farming, a big house. A rake scraping the ground. Some sort of performance or organization of other people going to …flower basement blue grey sweater was pants like a mailman would wear.

Writing down a list of chores for this house.

Sitting at a table grading papers but I’m arguing with somebody about something. I don’t think I like this person. It might be. I’m teaching. Nic is in my class. [long pause]. He’s talking while I’m talking and I tell him to cut it out. He puts his hand up and says “are you serious?” I can’t understand why he did it.

Riding big big big wooden boat, almost so big that it’s the inverse of the world in a boat. A boat on the ocean but an ocean in the boat. That sort of thing. Pans and lots of books of sheet music. Funny, but I don’t acare if I ever leave or not.
Stuck in some wedding of Nina/Alicia’s. It was nice at first but Nic was there and he kept trying to go sneak off and kiss me. Eventually I just told him I didn’t want to. Kevin was there. I was so nervous. It was like when I was helping Bert clean my house and all I could do was cry. I could barely talk to him. I just wanted to be alone with him but there were so many people everywhere. I was so sleepy. I just wanted to go sleep next to him at my grandfather’s cabin because it was close by. We walked out by the fire there for a minute and looked at the sky, it was nice. We weren’t going back (to thirty?).

…girlfriend for an undisclosed length of time until I ran into my student Courtney with the hair that she’d never cut before and she told me she’d slept with him before. There were laundry baskets lingering around all of these dreams. My hair was shorter.

I was in a play I was in a scene with Brittany but I forgot all of my lines because I’d been doing drugs the entire time that I was supposed to be practicing. The night of the play I was out walking somewhere and I took some psychadelic thing that made my skin turn orangeish red whenever I ate anything. It was fuckin’ weird. Found out a woman I work with has cancer. My parent’s were helping me sweep out the inside of what was supposed to be our house after all this shit happened, after after after the play was okay, kind of. I really wanted to see Bert and I hadn’t seen him and I told him that but I told Patrick Carrol the same exact thing. There was some duel about it and everyone told me I was crazy so I went to my parent’s house and my parent’s walked in. My father had on a very fancy tuxedo and my mother was dressed up too and I said “you look like my tv parents” and they just smiled and Bert made some terrible off-color comment about how they looked way nicer than the quilt that got stained when Rose got her period. And I thought oh jeez oh jeez. And I miss him. That wasn’t in the dream. What helps.

Josh Johnson comes to town with the same intent as last time. Watching a movie with him and maybe his brother or Louie or…not Bert. Somebody. It’s confusing. I’m trying to get to it but I check my email and see that zw from a million years ago in boyfriend land is coming to visit the same day.

Train car, dining car. I found a bunch of brown/round and white dresses in the mail box where I live. Something about writing in the morning.

Remember the Halloween party when the stripper got kicked out? A large waxy bottle of shampoo with the sun and moon on it? A tattoo full of mornings or a morning full of tattoos? I’m trashed and wasting away.

Me and my mom and Brad are going on a trip somewhere like to Florida. They were gonna share a room and I was gonna get my own. Had another room in our house and it was full of posters of Ryan. There was one of him with his head in a space-man helmet. I was looking at them with somebody like Dan Foley and laughing…saying “this is my room…ha ha” The morning before I left I was also touching myself and my brother was outside the door. He didn’t notice what I was doing but he had some question. I had to help him find something. It was weird. My room looked like it did in high school with paint running down the walls and shit taped everywhere. I think Ryan even came over and stayed the night in the room with all his things on the wall but didn’t say anything about that. He was acting quite homoerotic with another fellow.

The feeling of being anxious, waiting for something. Pages of text I haven’t written…some sort of release there. Just a little. About powder. Dry dirt unwatered plants.

Supposed to meet Kevin in a treehouse somewhere to go camping. … ? doesn’t know how to do it. It’s my parent’s treehouse. There is electricity. We are listening to tapes. It’s raining. Of course it’s raining. I have to work at the gas station. I spend my whole time in the back room talking to Tess. My boss comes by and I can’t explain where I’ve been or what I’ve been doing. I go to a poetry reading by Di Seuss maybe. Some guy who seems smarmy but I don’t know who he is. I’ve heard of all the presses, but they’ve never heard of me. Waa waa.

Hung out with Franz. He was staying in a cabin that belonged to my family? Or some downtowny place. We were by these rr tracks. He had this metal case that was like a transistor radio but it looked like a pocket watch with an antennae on it. Three books and a very strange green and blue socks. He left them there. Went across the street to get a blueprint/Styrofoam model for a house printed at kinkos or something. Then Franz disappeared. I was with Tiffany from work. We were trying to get it printed. She wanted me to pay for it but I thought we should split it since we were both doing it. We had a disagreement and she went back and slept with him. I went up north to the cabins and there was a huge mud pit where the lake was.

I played a show naked or at least topless. I was drunk somewhere in a bar. Someone posted it on facebook. I don’t remember it of course, but looking at the post it seemed like everyone who would have been at Christmas Whiskey eight years ago was there. I remember thinking that at least my tits looked alright. Somebody on the floor jerking off while I was playing. I look at a street view on Google of the place. It says it’s a strip club in Phoenix, or it looks like phoenix because there are vacant lots everywhere. I see this video made of all these things exploding. Supposedly I’m working at a health food store but it looks very different. I keep running into Dave and we keep talking about playing the piano, a piano with heavy metal keys that are rusted, it looks like an old trunk. I’m trying to figure out how to play the song that churchbells play as if there is just one. I ask my father and he says maybe it’s A, a scale with A. I try it but it’s wrong. I have a piano that’s made out of sticks and string woven together like a loom. Dave has one made out of something else. We sit in the break room, trying to play. Talking.

Talked to Kevin on the phone about how they were building something new on the site where the old factory used to be. Went to a house that maybe we lived in together. We had a bedtime snack of pizza and Gushers. I hid under the blankets and pretended not to be alive because I wanted him to be worried about me. I went on a walk and I saw his mom walking two dogs. She didn’t recognize me. She was talking to the dogs, but she could have been talking to me. She said “it’s funny how you do that.” I was worried that I might look unhealthy because I thought I didn’t weigh enough in my dream. Before that the new girl at work and Alexis were rifling through all my stuff looking for a tampon. My room was just a giant closet full of clothes, nothing else. It was annoying and dirty.

Flew to NYC. Big big bridge over the airport like a highway onramp. I remember taking pictures of it very close range. Taking a wrong turn, but getting there anyway. It was in the west. It was huge though, there were stony monoliths and voices saying what all the traffic was doing. I had the first seat on the airplane so I sort of just landed face up. Like in Cobra yoga position. I didn’t have to wait for anyone I just stood up after I landed on my chest. I walked down into the airport. It was quite gratifying. The drive from the city had been beautiful. All the old apartment buildings shining lemon lime green, soda machines on porches. All the neighborhoods looking differents. I remember seeing a store that sold “fuses for the five boroughs.” I’ve never felt this way about New York City before. Before that I saw Hugh and somebody else. My brother was drunk on whiskey. Somebody had found a book that Nick and me and friends, maybe Pat and Jeff, had made out of construction paper cut outs.Glued them in a long time ago. At a show. Hugh told me “the only reason I don’t care that you’re brother reeks of whiskey is that we all made this book together long ago.” (even though we didn’t).

Was gonna move to Chicago to go to school again. Was gonna see if Ryan wanted to be my roommate. Even though it was like 45 min. from where he lived to my school but I didn’t want to live in dorms.

I was somewhere where I had to participate in a Scrabble tournament. Leaning against a ? An old house that looked like Tess’s bedroom from when were kids. I kept taking breaks to go pack things up because I was leaving the next day. Big open field with grass almost greener than normal. It starts to sweat a bit in the sun. A hill. That’s the zoom out view of everything but it’s like that there now. There’s a voice, I can’t tell if it’s Bert’s or mine, saying “this is the time that I miss.” I was doing pretty well in the Scrabble tournament but Id given myself a hair cut during it and accidentally cut a bunch of places shorter than they were supposed to be.

Curly haired skinny Jamie who worked at Friendship Village. I was helping her with something. There was a pregnant girl in a class that I was taking. She was really calm about the whole thing “I’m having contractions, yeah, but they’re not that close together, I’ll just come to class…”

Thrift store. Classic factory seen. The one that used to be the Chicken factory. The one that’s set up like my family’s treehouse. Something was happening in there for sure.

My brother is trying to play the song “She Belongs To Me” on the piano at my parent’s. I realize that I know how to play it and I can actually play the song better than him. Without thinking, I just leap over the piano and start playing it an octave higher than he is. I realize what I’m doing and stop.

Art class that Kirk Lois was teaching. My brother and I decided to retake the class to make him feel good or something. It ended up being a swimming class and my brother wasn’t even there. There were two other girls. Somebody forgot their swimsuit. They had to trade with him so the top part would cover their breasts. When we got in the pool it was like a weird meditation workshop or something. We had to close our eyes and pick up these three objects. One of them was a miniature bottle of milk, a carton. One of them was cat food and a miniature bottle of milk and the other I can’t remember. Popcorn. That was being distributed into the pool by astronauts that when they touched each other—
when I noticed this I pointed to the figurines and said something and Kirk became upset that I interrupted the class to speak. The water was very cold. It did not smell like chlorine. There were some symbols I do not remember. Days in October that the lesson was happening. It was the third weekend.

Balancing (beam) next to a pool outside an apartment buildings. Equals signs. The sides of trains. Parallel lines. Symbols. Allens were equals. Construction symbols.

The phrase “cultivating students” still stuck in my head. Some residue all around of beach grass there I was thinking somewhere there might have been another flood. People outrunning water or having to do with water.

I was on the beach with children.

There were wave-shaped scans of each. The mold form of the water.

Church basement weather report and there’s a poetry forecast. Two friends slept on cards with pictures.

Hanging out with Brittany at another old fashioned Kalamazoo wedding. I wasn’t invited and ended up going to the party at the end. That same beach. It’s blank almost. Yellowish brown sand. Gray blue water. Usually some sculpture on the beach. Its changing. I’ve been there every night this week.

The last beach we go to. With sara b and brit and my brother. IT’s like Lake MI but there’s a big cliff to get down to the water and it’s hard to get back up. The ailwives are in the process of dying while flopping on the beach. Little and red like baby fetuses with tails. It’s kind of scary.

I went back to cESTA and there was a bunch of stuff that Lucy and I left behind in a big metal dumpster thing. Women’s clothes and I don’t even know how there was so much that we left. It was covered by a piece of plywood shoved on top. People were living in this warehouse space that was kept. Somebody asked me if I was moving in.

Maybe some propoganda about dropping milk and publicizing it. Pictures of pastels. Dinosaur outlines on them. Eternal thrift store shopping. I was working on a radio show. Went back to a place like ACA. Near the ocen. Walked by myself on the shore. It got dark. There was a gazebo, a fire. A woman showed up and I asked for directions. She gave me them and then started singing her way away. She stopped to show me something floating in this pond it looked like a big Styrofoam buoy. Soemthing on the ceiling towards my boot. A piece of trash, maybe. Meanwhile on the beach there’s a piece of seller of scones. Anne is there. Many projects. So much fun.

Kevin and his friend lived in an RV park or somewhere they’d driven one. Supposedly it was in Texas, but was only four hours away. I’d gone down to visit him. We were gonna have a race underneath these swings while there were kids on them. We were racing to an end point, I don’t remember. He said that Tom was thinking about driving up to visit as well. He told me a sad story about moving away from the house he used to live in. His ex girlfriends. They used to have a bird and he said he decorated the cage after she left. He put it outside to move it to his new place but she came by and took it.

Going on a tour of part of town there is a guy that is like Dave from Sawall. Dave had been a mailman in a previous life and he was showing us where he’d walked when he delivered mail. There was another older man who used to flood his front yard, he told us about how it would divert and make something else happen. We looked and there was a record album in the puddle in the front yard and it had old leaves printed on it. It also had real old leaves printed on it at the same time. At my grandpas cabin and also somewhere with my sister. WE were sharing an apartment where Bradley and I both lived. It was confusing because I kept forgetting which room was mine. Kate was going to give me the apartment that was hers because she didn’t want it anymore. I tried to walk home sometime there was an artist residency place at the cabins. I walked into the cabin I used to share with my friend Anne. She was asleep and seemed upset so I walked out to the spring. There was a part where there was a rock that you could jump from to not get wet. But I had to slide into the water anyway. Someone was behind me and someone was in front of me. I don’t remember who.