Late Fall, Old Orchard 2011

Keeping thoughts in shoes because that would be more truthful because they’re closer to the ground than if they’re floating around in your cloak like a “cloak of lies.” If they’re near your feet. Beverly’s art show had to do with a phrase “cloak.”

Before sleeping last night I wanted to get a bunch of old stuffed animals, drain them of their stuffing then sew them all together like composite animals.

Folding my clothes to get ready to go a camp. I’m an adult but I’m very excited to go. I’ve also made a documentary about an artist making masks. It was an African-American guy who was using white plaster on his face to make the mask bases. I was editing the movie and worried that this would seem racist? Like blackface in reverse?

Hiking with Kevin up a mountain after someone from work had taken me on a trip to Cuba because I was upset about something. It was snowy. We found two skeletons that were slowly being worn and washed away. There was a shrine area with some broken dishes, a blue glass cup. Kevin explained to me that it was just a shrine of decomposing things, things that were lost and gone, “we should take a moment to honor them,” pour some tea or water out of this kettle. He did that, performed this sad ceremony while I watched. I didn’t want to leave.

Somebody told me that I should be focusing on making sound art.

An extra pumpkin showed up on the porch for me. I did a stand-up comedy routine. Someone complimented me on being outgoing. I went to an art residency. One of my students from KCC was there. She was nice. Everybody else wasn’t working enough. There was a guy there that looked like Scott, the adjunct from KCC. He was a clean-freak with a feather duster. He was showing us all these feather dusters he crocheted. He dusted all of his belongings before he put them away.

I was living in house that was famously abandoned. Of course there was a time before when I lived there and it wasn’t abandoned. I was living there with Bradley. He died but I didn’t know, or didn’t believe anyone. I saw it in the newspaper. Distant members of my family came over to bring me meatballs and lay on the couch. They didn’t think I should be alone. It was a motorcycle accident or something. But in my head, I knew it was maybe because of drugs that I knew he’d bought. It was confusing about whether or not he was alive because I also kept hearing his voice.

In some woman’s bathroom. I’d gone to visit with the new girl from work. I was trying to put some sanitary supplies in the toilet but it would flush. The sink was tiny. It was strange. I realized the woman had built everything in the house herself and it was smaller because it was less expensive, sort of like when I would buy children’s clothes cause they wear cheaper. Also, went on a tour of a big old barn and the minute I walked in I was like “I want one of these to have an art studio in.” I think K was there, it may have belonged to his family.

Bradley had a compost heap with a petrified watermelon that also was a fountain. There was a cat outside the house. I talked to it. I tried to get it to move inside but it wouldn’t move.

In a studio recording sound art projects but everybody kept forgetting they’re lines, there were these little kids who were supposed to be jumping up and down in slippers but the slippers kept sticking together and they had shoes on inside of the slippers so they couldn’t jump quickly. There was another group that pretended they were famous people from a band who had met themselves in the past. I don’t remember my project, but I think it went okay.

Something awful stuck in my head but I don’t remember what it was.

My dad was making something. I was cutting something out with scissors.

I was given some sort of ultimatum.

…with people in a foreign country. There’s a lot of water, an ocean maybe.

My music stopped my dream clock ship. There are owls. I’m counting my steps for something. Trail/railroad jumping on the cars.

House-sitting for my parents. My mom had a wipe board in her room that said “How do you talk to Emily Dickinson? (The Yellow Rose of Texas).” Bert was with me. My parents got home early. My mom told me a story about how her and my grandma Shirley found a stray cat and bought it Chinese food, Chinese soup. How it or I really liked that.

With my cousins Jake and Molly and Bert and some girl, we broke into an insane asylum that still had most of the things inside. It looked like pictures from National Geographic. There were plants inside and it was humid like the rain forest room at the Nature Center. We walked through, looking at things and then the police showed up. I kept telling the policeman about how I could feel the feeling inside the building and how it was overwhelming. I made a statement about things dying.

A girl I went to elementary school with and I are sitting in a coffee shop, both reading. We’re unemployed because the economy is terrible but we’re looking for work. Our gym teacher walks by and doesn’t remember the other girl. There are some faculty/staff members that are telling me I’ve done something great for a patriotic/revolutionary cause but not in a bad way, like for unions. They get me a cake shaped like a feather- like “a feather in my cap.” There are people from Sawall there. They let me have a tomato because they want me to have enough food. I’m some sort of hero but I feel like I’ve fucked up and I don’t know why. In the morning I know I have to wake up in the morning and call somebody about a job in the morning, in real life.

In a grocery store some people found out that if you just text “Brrrrr Cold” to a certain number, everyone will know that you’re just talking to yourself.

My dad was supposed to pick up Anne and I somewhere. She wanted to be dropped off in Columbus, not Dayton. We got to my parent’s house and my grandma Vickie was there. She kept complaining about how sick she was and then she disappeared into the backyard and came back with a giant bottle of wine. My mom was hiding in her room for a while. Everyone seemed to get more merry. I explained to my mom that I only saw Bert a little bit before we slept. She was empathetic.

Watching a documentary about art with Nick. It started off as a TV show about how the weather looked like a Van Gogh painting. Cloud patterns slowly turned to brushstrokes. We looked at a painting on the wall far away that I had done. It looked good but as soon as I felt not-confident about it, these parts with arms and faces showed up. I hadn’t had a small enough paintbrush and it was outside the lines and all funny and peely and pink. Retrospectively, from “awake,” it looked okay.

Some trip. Airplane tickets. Other people. Doing a project about tall, tall grass. Outside a car getting out of waiting for me.

With Anne in an airport, went to go find something. Wandered through a department store/mall, picking up jewelry and almost stealing it but not having the nerve.

Apparently I got bit by a coyote, but you just put this sandy clay-like salve on there and you’ll be fine!

Making a pulp of blended up cucumbers for paper making. Live in the same house situation with Brad, but there are more windows and it’s sunnier. The neighborhood’s still the same.

Airport testing. A crappy house in that neighborhood off 9th street where my boss lives. Snow day. Snowing at school and my mom said she felt like she didn’t have to go.

Walking around a city at night, trying to find booze or something. Tom was there and he found a van but it wasn’t his van so he left a note on it in other people’s handwriting, small and cursive. I was teaching a poetry workshop in the summer. I worried about school, walking all night.

Shopping with Kate. She was going to buy me these clothes. I found these boots I really liked but they were expensive and I didn’t want her to have to pay for them so I hid them somewhere.

I got drafted to be in the army and went to basic training. Jen was there with me. She was so slow that they were gonna kick her out. I tried my best to be slow, to get dressed slow. The bras were really uncomfortable and they kept flopping off of me. My shirts were the wrong color. I went outside where everyone lined up after they blew a whistle. I interrupted when they asked who I voted for. I said “no contest,” but I meant “not going to war.” I saw Kevin in a line but I had to stay with my group. I couldn’t recognize anyone because they’d changed their shirts.

Went a poetry reading with Alicia and went to her house where she was starting a fire inside. I was afraid she was going to burn her bicycle. Brian Diamond and Brian Lee were there. Brian Diamond’s wife called him on the phone and he began speaking in non-word noises, and I guess that’s how they communicated. I asked someone else on the couch “he does that too?” Nic had given me a ride home from a reading in Portland even though he doesn’t drive. I felt awkward. I was just trying to get him to borrow a book because I knew I’d see him somewhere eventually. I got out at the library where I conveniently lived and I had this book with me, it was about keys. It had pictures in me. I didn’t even know the book was with me. I put it back.

Playground equipment, a rickety boardwalk in the sky, painted the color of the cabins. I was there as an adult, hanging out during a lightning storm. Ariel and chris from Kazoo school were there, getting high or something, we were talking about when we thought it would fall. Most of the people who went to school there wanted to do something bad with it. The librarian was my mom’s friend Steve and he was disheveled to say the least.

Went to my interview really early, it was at the hospital. It looked like the retirement home kitchen I’d worked in before. The woman who rang me up was gossiping about the people there and all the animals she still had- a tiger and a lion on a farm somewhere. I was trying to put on my name tag with a safety pin and talk to her at the same time.

Hiking with these things leftover from an Ostrich farm. A rock and a feather. A “blue feather” was a kind of ostrich. Collecting them, putting them in a desk drawer. They were leftover and unimportant for whatever I was trying to accomplish.

Wall decorations for a show at a bar but it’s always the same old show. See Kevin, ask him if he wants to go with us somewhere afterwards. Bowling or something. I don’t want to drive everyone around town, there’s already so many people. He has on these funny white shoes. His ex-girlfriend Kate from high school is at the back door of the place where we are. It is the only time they’ve talked in years. It doesn’t seem intimate so I walk up to them.

( ) came to visit and brought like forty condoms and some attachment thing for his penis because he didn’t think it was big enough and then he got mad because I didn’t want to have sex with him and told me I was always leading boys on. I told him there was someone I was with. He told me he thought I was a really great artist but that I’d never amount to anything, messing around with all these boys. I told him that I wasn’t doing that anymore.


I was getting ready to go to Prague. The only clothes I had were embarrassing, but I didn’t seem to care. I had on a swimsuit top that was very, very revealing; droopy yellow socks that were very dirty. I just cared more about where I was going.

Worked at the hospital and my friend Joe was working there too. I propelled myself down the hallway in an office chair towards the punch clock. I was late but it didn’t seem to matter. It was someone’s birthday. There was cake everywhere and way more people than usual. I felt disoriented. There were pieces of paper and cards with names on them. My manager came up and we got in an argument. I ended up yelling at her; but, then as some defense mechanism, I started singing because I’m so bad at it. It kind of worked but then she started singing back at me and I spit on her. Then I realized that she was Sheryl Crow. We had a long discussion about the crappiness of her lyrics. I was telling her about how I could only listen to songs where the words and the music were both really well done, because I was a writer. She said “give me an example.” I told her I didn’t want to say “Dylan” because everybody’s always talking about Dylan. “Hank Williams?” I was saying that the best thing about songs is that they’re simple, that they repeat emotions/sentiments throughout the songs.