January/February 2013

 * I’d been working on a little spot of land where you can do anything. The size of half of a veggie burger, that’s the way I think about. I work with Bert. Maybe we stay there, maybe we live there. I have my sleeping bag. We have a tent to put up somewhere. My dress gets wet. We’re in the shower and my grandmother is also getting out of the shower, commenting about how cold it is, brushing her teeth. It’s lunchtime and the guys from the shop are in the kitchen, eating. I’m scared to do anything because there’s sausage on the grill and I don’t want to put an egg in it. I tell myself to pretend I’m with people like my family but I know I’m not.

 * I wanted to change my name to Contessa but I don’t remember why. I went to go visit Katie and Kent in Ohio and we went to the the gym. They both mooned me at the same time and I told them their butts were cute. They told me about the first time they saw each other’s butts. At the gym we were going to work out but I got this big sweater stuck over my head. It was like a video game and I couldn’t figure out the controllers. They were just sitting on top of the treadmills, looking at the internet.

 * How many things can you eat in a row with ketchup on them? Four? Or, a series of photos of things with ketchup on them, things decorated, all kinds of things. Tree houses there, or a band. Bradley had bought the tree house series. We were visiting. There was a house across the street that Bert and I were going to live in but the stairs made it so difficult to get inside. They were nearly circular and over water.

 * I run into I.N., walking somewhere on some campus. He as some protective bubble over his eye because he’s been injured. We make small talk about Italy. I guess that’s a place we’ve both been. I go with…texting T to get his address to go visit him. In my head it looks like a place I’ve never been. It’s like a cartoon- that empty. We go to this cabin that’s part of a state park. Everything’s mossy. There’s a house that looks like my grandma’s house, a pavilion and tents. I’m with Bradley and Bert. We were hanging out for the day. I fall asleep in the middle. It seems like we all should have left, but we’re still there. I wake up with memories of sex. Strangers and that C show up for dinner. T is wearing overalls that look like my old overalls except black and sort of acid washed. I know there is something small and import in the left breast pocket. * Things I found on the side of the road as I was leaving China. Maybe here. Two pairs of red boots, maybe from the 1800s, surprised they were big enough. The whole shoe thing, a pair of ice skates. I was also drinking a mix drink. The old ladies were trying to sell me items. There’s a really great ash tray, but it was a tiny ceramic hole in a brass holder. I knew I was going to get it and bring it to Bert. I had two shirts, a candle holder, and the boots but then the old ladies found the stuff and put it away. It was cash only so I had to go the ATM and back to my house and I lived in some weird apartment. I went to a party with Justin and Brittany. There was a mosh-off/dance-off, really ugly dancing. You had to keep dancing so you could keep drinking from some nozzled contraption.

 * Riding a bus with Bert and Justin. The bus driver was driving super fast cause the bus was running late. The back was like a slide covered in cloth. We fell off somewhere near downtown. There was a Friends of the Library truck and they were giving away free books. I went inside a house, this little house right there. There was an older woman inside who had other things, not just books. She seemed to take a liking to me, she was giving me some of the objects in the house. Her slippers looked like they were made of diapers. An old table cloth, some sort of containers, some vials and droppers, a hammock or a hammock chair cover with a dancing parrot on it…a parrot with hair on it’s head or a beard, sunglasses—I’d seen the parrot before. It took me a long time to leave her house. I heard Bert and Justin say they were going back on the bus, riding somewhere. They had broke in. I thought I’d just catch up. I put everything in my backpack which was like a sewing bag, the way it swiveled shut. We were in some high up place, there was a man with a gun, joking about something but the gun was real. He was waving it around pretending he was going to shoot people.

 * Planning a trip and a shadow puppet movie at the same time with a group of other people. Like usual, I had all the ideas. We had this weird sensor thing that was like a magnetic roll-out placemat that would record actions and sounds on it, maybe project it, but it didn’t work too well. I thought we could just use candles. We were inside of a cabin. There were so many people. We just made them gather around the table. We never made another performance. We went somewhere, another country maybe, dumpster-diving for materials. I was back in China and stuck in an underground maze, a horrible factory. Someone was with me, we were trying to get out, they were trying to help me. Driving me around on the back of a forklift. My father was there too, for a minute. Out in an alley, at the end of it, standing in the street talking to C, she said she’s really shy but sometimes she’ll walk down the street and says hello to every single person and it makes them really happen. K was with her and he tried to give her some advice about what to say to people, but she ignored him. They embraced. There was another couple on the other side, but I don’t remember what they said.

 * My family lives nearby. My friends and them are all real close. My mom and them always wanting to get drunk and play scrabble.

 * My car was gone. I needed to go somewhere. I took Bert’s moped, rode it into the country. There was a snowstorm. I was out on West Main, trying to find someone’s house and then alternately to leave it. Confusing errands that I didn’t understand. I got stuck or run out of gas or something so I left it there. I ended up at the carey-webb’s house where my brother had stayed the night before. Nate wouldn’t even let me use his phone. I eventually tried to find his dad to ask for help. I wandered through their house into a semi-haunted attic. It had a room full of things that looked like oars and mirror that when you looked inside it, someone else would appear. I looked like a midget person. There was a room with art projects in it. I asked his father for help and he made me carry a lot of tools and gave me a lot of confusing directions. All I wanted was to get out of the door. I finally got back to where I’d been and it was spring. Everything was spring. The children, maybe I was one of them for a while, walking. I just couldn’t get my head back to this particular part of land I was looking for. This hill like the West Main hill, but more woods and rivers and trees. It had been snowing and then the power lines froze and fell. There were children everywhere, trying to help people get out from under them. I just wanted to find the moped so I could put gas in it and bring it back home.

 * The ER report for my father says he arrived electric blue and naked. My mother says it took a very long time for him to die. It wasn’t sudden. She says he was sleeping at the hospital but he could have followed her home. It was like ghoul-sleep. I feel in shock and it doesn’t seem real. Though I had an intense feeling the night before it happened. I’m with someone and they’re driving me to see my family. Before this, I was laying in a big, cold street. Then my mother dies too. My brother and I are both raising one-year old daughters. But then my mother is back alive, telling me about my father. It is very confusing.

 * I was watching and helping film a remake of Hamlet that involved busty, blonde characters that were avatars of a people on a cruise ships. There were these special cookies all over the set that said “Thank God!” on the back. The cookies were being served by monkeys that were all dressed up like old-fashioned butlers.

 * It was early and we were moving out of somewhere. A couple weeks ago, me and Bert and Bradley. I was the last one out. I had three cats instead of two. One was big and dark like it was the one with all the bad thoughts in it; all these weird blow-up things and toys. We lived in a space that looked like an old art gallery. I don’t know why we were leaving. There were rolling hills outside. The cats were laying down. I came back late for something. I said I’d be back by two. It was after two. I didn’t tell Bert I was home. He didn’t know. It wasn’t good.

 * We live on some farm. I had a job teaching kids to do some art things. We needed a blender so maybe we’re making paper or cooking something too. Teaching job. My grandma was there, two little cats or dogs. One of them was the littlest dog in the world. It was the size of a penny. She was in the parking lot, taking it on a walk. I got stuck in this glass elevator with these women who didn’t want to let me off at my stop so I pushed the stop button and gave them a dollar and ran away.

 * Went on a family trip, all of us in a rowboat. It was like the back of a pick-up truck. A thrift store where I’d been years before and left some of my photographs. I was with Chris Hefner and he was doing some sort of project about historical importance. I went with one of my cats to visit Kevin.

 * There was this weird street performance thing, someone small like a midget miming. It’s funny because it’s not something he’d normally do. We’re playing pool in the basement or getting ready to play some other game. I go across the street to this fancy hotel to get …more carrots or playing cards. I’m able to jump across the holes in the cracked sidewalk. I steal a bunch of candy from the hotel although it’s complementary. I run into KP who remarks upon how agile I am. When I get back, Bert is there. He tells me that I forgot to tell him that I made him macaroni and cheese and a waffle and left it on the stove. So it’s all weird now. My cousins there. We’re supposed to go downstairs and play this game. Bert doesn’t want to play it. My family’s just playing pool and having a good time. I feel bad.

 * At an art res. place. My mother was there too. We’re in some group in charge of planning some bear? I thought I’d signed up for writing but I’d signed up for some vocal intonation thing and then I remembered that when I signed up I thought I would have learned to sing by the time I got there but I hadn’t. I went home and rode my bike to my parent’s house and then I was late late late to get back. My brother was going to give me a ride back. We got in the car and my brother turned into Mark and we were driving through the country, backwards. I asked him why were driving backwards and he started laughing and said “this is what I always do.” I was like, oh yeah. We were facing the wrong way, looking back. It was supposedly Texas, but everything looked like a jungle besides a mcdonald’s sign sticking out from behind the trees.

 * Broke into our old house with Bert and Bradley, we were going to have a party and burn a million candles. We had the cats with us and it was fun but I was worried that the landlord would show up so we left. Then Bradley wanted to stop at a million places on the way home. My parent’s cats were with us and I was so worried. It was nervewracking.

 * Thrift stores dead clothes I just steal the things I was going to buy, some giant pair of Nike boots, some shoes that look like shoes I already have, a backpack that’s almost to small. Back at this cabin where I’m staying with a bunch of other people. Josh has gotten me this backpack that looks like Joe’s bag, like a big leather football…I don’t know what he expects, he’s just over there in the corner, watching me. I think I’m there with k, but I’m not sure. I’m supposed to go hiking. I’m putting on a lot of layers of clothing.

 * I’m trying to sneak into Mexico, pretending to be some sort of home health aid. At some high school. Paula, my piano teacher, was also some substitute teacher. Asia, from ASU, was there. At the end of the day I was creeping through the hallways, tiptoeing over the students while a classical music concert played.

 * There’s a special orange blanket with tools on it. You can put them back there and they’ll find their place. There was a store and a guy who installed furniture or worked in the factory where he made it. He got to go to a birthday party in the basement of a house that he’d worked on before. He was walking by and thought he saw something but it was just the noise of the people. The chimney. Something about aging. Traditions of aging in different countries. Computer speed number family’s money.

 * I’m in high school or college. I have to pay some huge fine for leaving China. I walk into a classroom where everyone’s working on drawings of women or something feminine vs. masculine. The teacher is a cross between Jane Eyre and Ms. Pankop, she’s showing me a drawing of my friend’s cat when I was a child, the cat named “Omy.” After school gets out I end up on a road trip in a big van, like a 15 passenger one. Fernando is driving. He’s got a tiny bottle of booze to drink. Everyone’s drinking. We’re going, I’m not sure where. There was an understanding between the teacher and I, something about turning.

 * Teaching somewhere. I haven’t planned my class. I make my students wear sparkly blue fake mustaches and tell themselves about each other. IT’s somewhere summer and I’m in a vacation area, I’m trying to escape the place and escape a man who’s hitting on me. He takes me somewhere to get coffee and I leave without saying goodbye. But I feel bad and I come back and he promises me another one. There’s a swimming pool near or inside the school. My mother must teach there also. There’s a bridge that connects the town. You can take a ferry, a highway bridge, or gondola. I get so angry at a man in the coffee shop, a teenager really, that I leap up onto his back and start beating him.

 * Group photographs of men wearing matching wedding dresses. Something to alay nervousness. I’m somewhere again and I need to escape.

 * The house would change colors like an apple flickering but we were trying to sell the house. I’m teaching in a high school but I get lost because it’s huge. I have to pee before my class. I go in a bathroom that’s unisex. I’m peeing in a sink standing up and my eighth grade crush walks by and says something to me like “nice.” Sonte is there teaching too.

 * I was walking home with James the social outcast from middle school. I had been hanging out with Britanny, Justin, and Justine. Everyone was sleepy. He made me some orange juice. We were at Justin’s parents’ house and they had one room with three refrigerators and another closet with three more refrigerators. It was a lot, a lot a fridge. Anyway, when I was walking with James he told me that when he was a child his parents would give him candy to eat and they’d bribe him with candy because they were too busy having sex to make him dinner and I felt really bad for what a horrible life he had.

 * I was packing all my stuff to leave some country. I had more stuff than what would fit in my bags. I was in a hurry and I was being careless. Other people were also leaving the country, packing, but they were neat and precise.

 * I felt like people were watching me. The leavers and the people who were in the country I was going to. There was nothing to explain because I was acting like my usual self.

 * I decided I was only home for a visit was going back to China to work more. My parents were not happy about this. No one was. I don’t think I was happy about this. The only people that could give me a ride to the airport were mark and Cameron from Arizona. They had a big black and yellow van they picked me up in. I had a student who reminded me a lot of myself with a big funny hat. They were really upset because they thought they lost something. The hat was full of miniature pine cones, it made them very happy.

 * My mom decided to buy me groceries. We go to a store sort of like Sawall after hopping through some floating maze elevator thing which we admit scares us both because it has no railings. The produce is not so good-looking. I accidentally drop a couple things and the packages break open. There’s cookie mix and flower on the ground. My mom’s friend G is working at the store. I tell her that I’ve broken these things and she tells me I have to pay for them. This seems totally unfair and unlike anything that happens in any other grocery store. We tell her we will not be paying and things get kind of harsh. As my mother and I are walking out of the store after not paying for anything, my mother turns to G and yells “you cunt!” Outside it looks like San Franciso. There are middle-aged men wearing headphones and sunning themselves on the pavement. Everyone looks undeniably hip.

 * Talking about the neighborhood. Bert tells me when he was a child there was a loop he’d ride his bike around with a money jump out into the woods behind the church. You were well-known if you remembered to wave and say “hola, los ninos” as you went over the jump. A conversation with Joe about something serious. Some twitching, an argument with Bert. But that’s not how I remember our neighborhood even though I grew up here too. Like when you’re a child and you’re thinking of something with a sign and lights and a plan: a big deal! I’m gonna be an adult. My brother’s in charge of planning an activity. I’m not sure what it is.

 * My cousin Clara falls for my eighth grade crush. And strange becomes. I’m sitting inside KCC. Some old woman with lots of makeup is looking at facebook and showing me these stories about them. I tell her I know them, but she doesn’t. We start talking about pianos and she asks me a question about keys not working. I tell her, it happens sometimes. I hopped on a train after getting coffee at water st. There were soldiers on the train. I made my way around them into the back of the car. There was one woman dressed up in a red sequin dress, walking slowly with her eyes down looking sad. I walked by her. There were young men hitting each other with weapons just to ingest/impress. Finally I went toward the front into this little gondola crow’s nest thing. I got to watch as the train went over the kalamazoo river which was way wider in the dream than in real life. Downtown I jumped out and went to work. I’m not sure what my work was, but I had to run through a building where all the people I don’t work for anymore were. That was fun.

 * Gerry LF is a doctor and a teacher at the writing retreat center. It’s more rustic than I remember. Rain or something and nowhere to sleep. Trying to iron clothes. Something is always socially awkward. Skateboarding in the lobby, sneaking in too late.

 * Chelsea with red hair from Friendship Village is sitting on an overturned bucket singing a song. The chorus: “place a bit of clay on your fireman’s finger.” Your fireman’s finger is your fourth finger. We were playing capture the flag in a big field. Or something where the person who went the farthest away and then came back won. Out in the country, Elizabeth and Douglas from ASU were having us over for dinner. They had an enlarger just like mine. A giant sprawling group of friends. They were so nice and we were all so raggeldy.

 * Sara Bijani and my brother work in a record store. My mom tells me she worries that my brother could be making more money somewhere else, but I tell her it’s everyone’s dream to work in a record store. She says it doesn’t make sense that Sara works there. There was a song playing in the store that was stuck in my head, the chorus: “I have always been a better dancer than you.”

 * I’m in charge of training these dogs and I give them all yoga mats that are different colors that correspond with the colors of their fur. I’m not sure why I’m training them. There’s a movie I’m watching or I’m in. A man lives out on the frontier with his second wife/lover, the other one lives in town. He takes a picnic cart up a mountain. Someone else was supposed to bring it down for him, but they let it go. It arrives in the town before him. His wife is pissed. My family’s at the cabins and he’s there too, we’re doing some remodeling. My grandpa doesn’t like the idea of it, some of the windows being switched. He hears a hammer or a saw and starts running outside. I’m all worried because he’s running.

 * Bert and I lived in a house like this one. It was above a house made to look like a castle. Old video footage from a movie: me and Sara and Cameron, people walking like an acid trip but not. We enter a grocery store…

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.

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.

Summer Dreams, A Late Report

sleeping on james st., june 10-august 12

really old / mystery building where I was a server but they only had clam chowder even though there was tomato soup but they told us to mix it because the clam chowder was too thick.

ghetto art baseball team and callyn from Prague/aca was on my team and everyone was worried we wouldn’t be able to smoke cigarettes while were playing or there would be a thunderstorm. some girl wearing these really crazy tights. some boy trying to hit on me who kept saying “moth” instead of mentos. he was telling a story that didn’t make any sense. he was really self-conscious about it. I wanted to do cartwheels on the way to the field in the grass because I was so excited but I was worried that no one else was that into it.

something thing about trading clothes with people. everyone being really nice.

it was important to remember purple flowers or blue flowers. something running through a basement. the way the light is violet or violent during a storm.

newspaper article with holga pictures in color. there was one of bert selling kale.
his last name in the caption is “will”or “w(h)ile”

there’s a house that I live in, it’s next to a restaurant. a lot of people I don’t come over and have a potluck or something. there’s a flaming lips album on that I’ve never heard. it’s a mixture of some other album, too.

in a downtown that looked like our downtown, I was there for some workshop about kale or something, jen was there. there was this building in the middle surrounded by forest even though it was like in the middle of town like the strut. whoever was doing the workshop said something like they referred to bert like he was a piece of bacon and were doing something about kale. everybody had to write down the time or place that they fell in love with the natural world with this piece of plastic. I think mine was about Michigan. somebody wrote something about a forest I don’t remember. we all put them in the middle. the room that I really liked was being used as a bathroom, but it wasn’t, it was painted pale blue and barn red on the inside. I remember going in and locking the doors. there were windows on both sides. it pretty much looked like the middle cabin up north and I thought I could stay there forever.

something about tom, moving something like he was a bulldozer, his arms strong like that.

moving bales of nutritional yeast. I was trying to make somewhere to sleep. on the floor but josh n. was there and I didn’t want him to sleep next to me. somewhere maybe in my parent’s house.

boat trip in italy. there was a gymnasium on the boat and this weird hose that was neon orange that was made of silk that was used to blow up… I don’t know what it was used for. every night we had to clean the gym up and different people did it. I just kept putting my stuff closer and closer to the stereo.

you could go exploring on the island we were on, but I don’t think I knew that until afterward so I just stayed around where there were cities. later on the map I looked and there was apart that was blue or pink or green and I could have gone there, but it was just with all the people and their lawn chairs.

Franz came to teach some workshop. Some people in it were annoying maybe some girl who couldn’t find the stuff we were supposed to be working on. workshop wasn’t good. I saw him later though. Got to talk to him.

there was something important about mice this morning. four different room. like meidival shit, like bile, the four different tempers. one of them was sand. something in glass jars.

supposed to go on a ski trip with some school. I rode my bike there and there was a special container packed with a piece of ///// wish I was there.

a thrift store full of items there was there that was a full of table of

drinking discount wine, buying a lot of bath towels, helping my parents with some sort of project.

Lesley sarry east hall art studios, that kind of thing, climbing up and down the stairs.

Camping in a square tent. The word would flash.

Bert? had gotten some instrument, very excited to play, had to wear this neon army poncho blanket. Spinning wanting to play it out by the highway. Needed tuning. The diagrams were drawn, looked like garden plots. Gonna go out by the highway and play it. Weren’t wearing anything under it.

A piece of paper all filled out for school. Name in the top left corner. Names all smooshed together. I am trying to write. It says ‘mom’ and a bunch of other names at the same time. Maybe a picture of Beverly? a movie?

Out on some farm, near a ski resort. Lots of little roads connected. Maybe we’re all signing/sawing something we’re making there. Like dairy separates.

So wonderful brown dog. Brown curly hair. We were staying there with a crazy old hippie guy who would pick you up wherever you were and give you a ride to the airport. Always seemed like there were people staying with him, maybe bert and brad and sara were there. We stayed there. I knew him before they knew him. I gave him a hug and his body was three or four times wider than a body should be. A big cast on one of his arms. We kept forgetting things inside and whoever was driving, I think it was Brad, everyone thought maybe I was going to stay there, but that was more like a joke than a real thing. Bradley was driving Tom’s big blue van, but it kept changing from what it was going to be. I was also involved in a cooking project at the same time. There was a box cutter.

Looking through an owl shaped wind chime, I mean pillow, I mean pillow with a wind chime inside. I was with my mom in a store and we were looking for a pillow that was also a windchime with a bell inside. They had some shaped like owls but they weren’t perfect so I didn’t get one.

Bradley was here moving milk crates around the kitchen. Asked it was okay if he invite people over. Earlier he’d won something, I’d said. We were on a road trip with other people. There was a question. We were at my house. He got some piece of paper with a squirell drawn on it, maybe a magnet. I wanted him to take something better from the box of things to give away but I’m not sure what.

In Portland Nina makes us get these sandwiches from some place under the bridge that look like really not good sub sandwiches, I think eric sabatino might be there. Kevin is there with his girlfriend that hate’s me or doesn’t hate me but she has wispy blonde hair and bright orange finger nails. She keeps running around putting her head inside of his shirt and she’s not very tall.

Earlier making some baked goods in the forest by the lake or maybe an ocean. I stick my head in a mail box/tube, find these vitamin/candies that bert was telling me about. They’re probiotic and they have some silly name. There’s two bottles of them, so we get to take them. We go up in this machine, flying. I’m not sure how it works. Swooping out over the lake/ocean. Either my boss Rick or Joe from the writing workshop is there and he’s sort of driving it, saying that nobody else likes it when he drives it out over the lake but we tell him to go ahead and do it anyway even though there’s someone in the back of the nonexistent vehicle who had perhaps gotten sick earlier, so he does and it’s really great, swooping out there and everything and I’m not even scared of falling in the water. We’re staying out somewhere for an extended period, a week. Bert and I have a discussion in the kitchen in the morning about how the whole week is somehow like…ironing out some difficulties or something, I think he’s referring to something with sex and Brad walks in while we’re talking about it, but things seem…good, fine, all of us being there together.

Dream about making many many many different flavors of granola. Shelves arranged like cubby holes, the bulk section of Sawall. It might be raining out. There might have been some oracle inside of it, something about quitting making it but we didn’t.

Me and Alicia where she lives. A weird bathroom where the toilet doesn’t work and she’s collecting piece after piece of paper. Her bed was hidden under a big pile of other things, it seemed typical and undisturbing.

Not the actual thing happening, but the phrase of it. The thought of getting tied down while sleeping.

Cooperative, everybody working on a farm or on little projects, making…things.

I was wearing my ramones t-shirt part of last night.

Driving a car maybe raining, a windy road up a hill. Had a job interview. They called all four of us back even though they only needed two.
Giant pile of cooked spaghetti in the room where the interview was being conducted. It needed to be washed.

House-sitting for my mom, wearing her clothes, at least a slip of hers. My dad coming home with some cauliflower that was like cauliflower that she made but it was cauliflower that she made. Living with a lot of others, I had this giant barrel full of wine that I’d bought in San Francisco, trying to get people to drink with me. Felt like a very stereotypical depressed artist because I wasn’t smiling very much. I kept saying things about “art school!” and trying to give people wine. We did a project where everyone was given a category and a size and everyone was supposed to pick up items from a store to resell, like a goodwill and we were going to resell them somewhere else. I went in the men’s shoe aisle. Spencer from work was there and his butt was all in the air. I found these really cool lace-up green keen shoes with toes and they fit me and not a man with size 12 feet and I was gonna keep them, but then I woke up. Before this we were in a supermarket and we were choosing the best pictures to advertise food. I kept thinking how they should have chosen all fruits and vegetables but they were obsessed with these mac and cheese things that looked pretty stupid. I wasn’t smiling in those pictures either.

For a second I thought I got to drive the jeep but it was some crazy contraption gypsy wagon thing, it was bright orange. I guess it belonged to my family. I was in it with Bert and Brad, maybesomebodyelse was there. All our stuff was rattling around. We were driving up the side of a mountain. My brother and dad showed up at the bottom. We were glad they were going to help with something. We were gonna drive it to Portland, stay the night, and then keep moving. Hard to remember where we were going. Inside was beautiful. Wood carving on the outside, pasta and kitchen stuff hanging on the inside. I remember wondering where I would sleep with bert in it. Him turning younger in a grocery store, asking for oreos for some recipe but he didn’t even know what she was making. He didn’t want to buy them because they were unhealthy. I understand that. Something about going to Portland I can’t remember. We didn’t get there, just this mountain. So steep, so steep.

Maybe the machine was shrinking and growing. It was squat like a gelato container. Had a life of it’s own like a copper beetle. Glass jars that once held gelato sleep in or something. An old woman with big leather feet/teeth, stains on them.

Prow of a ship. Positive octave. The front of it like a ferry. RJ.

Working in a kitchen that looked like Friendship Village. Specific tasks for specific days. I was in charge of pushing carts full of dishes. Feeling of Big Sur. Built to Spill and M ward played a show together two nights in a row. California. I get to sneak in and see it, it was great.

Got a ride home on a thing like a motorized rickshaw. Hottest day ever. Everyone had sweat inside it and their sweat was still there. I tried to make them watch the movie on the way in the driveway. I just wanted to see the opening. There had been some festival with lots of drinking. I’d been with friends trying to cross a demolished bridge. They had to trespass through a yard. I think we made it. Backpacks and wading through swamps though.

Sitting next to grandma or someone like her at a big banquet table. Fucked up vegetarian restaurant but it’s not vegetarian because they have chicken, but they claim the chicken is “dirt-free,” they claim the things they’re selling never even grew in the ground. She keeps stirring some red powdered fizzy stuff in my drink. I’m holding my hand above the top. Before that in the basement of my parent’s house. My mom gives everyone pro-biodiesel bumper stickers. There’s a boat inside that we’re all hanging out in playing cards. You can lower it up and down but I don’t know why we were down there. There’s something inside there. The boat is also a chest. Just before waking I was cranking it so it would open. But I got nervous because my mom was coming. I stopped opening it.

Spend some time in a skate park. The concrete was made of my parent’s basement. Greasy and shiny with little tar spots on it. Bicycles that resembled row boats with lever machines oars that we’re three times longer than normal bicycles. Levers on the tops. Parked by my parent’s house. Tom and Kevin were visiting at the same time.

I remember us as jokes. Maybe talking about who we had crushes on. I remember us as jokes. Taking a marker or colored pencil to check or not check who we liked on a notebook paper. This was Tom’s joke. I closed my eyes and drew a lot of circles and said “everyone.”

In the garage somebody told me that your hair looks okay before that in the freezer.

Carrying knives and gardening equipment. Really heavy in the back of my parent’s house. Trying to explain to them that as much as I hated it when I was younger I’d make fun of people for not going out and leaving their houses most of the time, that’s what I like to do. I was trying to think of a specific example of a hermit I’d known but couldn’t do it. Also overgrown tall stalks it was late fall, thinking about Colorado.

About the writing of poetry, about how that was/is the one thing. Also that rejection letter, hot in my head still.

I was a child at something that looked like the flea market in Prague. I could have anything I wanted from a pile. Running around through the rubbish. The edges of chalkboards broken, the corners of them.
Went to Chicago to see my friend Angela…somebody and me stuck in the worst play in the world. Kevin/Cabin. In the basement of somewhere lost talked to Chris Morgan for a long time. Looking at homemade candles that came with something free if you got one. We talked about rice paper?

My dad was ocd or something had thirty or forty pairs of the same socks. My mom and I were doing something trying out in the field like an old golf course. Neither of us had clothes on. There were people around getting ready for a game or movie. Trying toget omething back that we’d lost out there. Some maintenance men or delivery drivers. It was pretty audacious. Spent some time wandering in an abandoned factory, maybe the abandoned factory, maybe.

Something on the lens, out on a limb, going out with the lightbulbs. I was hopping over a chain link fence. There were people everywhere. People like hanging out in the neighborhood here like usual. There was someone that was supposed to be Nic, fallen over passed out in the lawn but it didn’t look like him. There was a dog that was trying to get in. I was moving. It was stuck by its leash in the tree, it was hanging but not hanging. It was definitely stuck up there.

Bunch of mattresses in the back of my car. They got crushed or smashed somehow. A person from the salvation army in south haven did it. I got to get a free bed from them. I’m not sure why. It worked out that way. Somebody saying it’s not something you can do alone.

Giving away granola. Watching Bradley talk to two women walking away outside some gathering. I’m with Alicia and sara. They both have seen the way he can talk to girls and charm them. He’s telling them a story that involves witchcraft. We’re walking down egelston, the street I grew up on. Maybe there’s blueberries somewhere. I don’t like the girls he’s talking to. It’s not that I don’t like them but that I know they’re not… they like him but he’s just impressing them to impress them and I’m annoyed about it.

Trying to catch a taxi on a dirt road but cars… standing with a bunch of other people but I kept getting scared because I hardly ever get in taxis but besides we were on a dirt road anyway. I felt like everybody was watching. I walked along til we got to a loop where everybody had to get in, so I got in.

Hanging out with Rachel (howard) that used to live with Kevin. We built this raft thing in my grandparent’s backyard after we spent one night camping out there sleeping on just the grass without any shelter. We built this thing out of pvc pipe. These dudes had been hitting on us before…we used the raft to zoom away from them. There were some people watching, laughing… Drew, not Kevin, maybe Tom.

I looked in the bedroom where kevin’s girlfriend used to live. The paint was all patchy pink purple spray paint on the walls. Looked like ten times abandoned for ten years. Holes in the floor. Felt really weird looking in there. Very curious. I shut the door and the rest of the house looked normal.


At a residency place somewhere in "Saratoga Springs, FL" but also in Europe at the same time. Went on a walk with sara bijani, bert … an old abandoned building. Really sunny. Kombucha babies everywhere inside there was a water slide thing. Somewhere along there it turned into the desert almost. Bert took his clothes off and started walking up this dune. I of course followed him, leaving Sara there all alone with our clothes. She got them and took them back to the place. When I got there I had lost my schedule and there was a gymnastic dancing show being put on by people from wmu. they were all smoking cigarettes at the same time too.

Dog Herding, Driving the Fifteen, Found Jewelry, Melted LP & Tahini Dressing

March 25-April 25

I go camping by myself. I hike out across a bridge. There are school children singing gospel songs. I hike on the edge of the water. When I turn back, I cannot remember where I put my stuff and all the backyards where I pitched my tent look the same. I find a ranger station to go ask for help, but they’re busy on the phone. Some note about how there’s a tiger that’s gotten loose and is chasing its way around the park, though I shouldn’t be worried about it. “Compared to other parks, this park is just like Europe,” the ranger said in a nice way.

Brad’s doing some trick with some cards. Moving his hands around and spinning them a little. He’s just been at the border with these wolf-dog things that belong to us. He has some super-scammer plot about herding them. I end up driving them back and forth between two points. One in America, one in Canada. I don’t quite understand the plan.
Maybe my father is also involved? We speak about how much he wants to leave wherever we are and move to Canada. I keep thinking that I never want to go, I don’t want to move at all. He said a border guard offered him a cigarette. When he decline he said the guy said “I never seen a dog herder who doesn’t smoke.” Now he lights a cigarette. What a trickster.

Nick and Evan Barr are wrestling outside of some cottage that my friends have bought in the woods somewhere. Trent and Eana and Katie and some other couple are living there. My parents own it though, but they’re only there off and on. Everyone’s joking around, throwing leaves. Evan picks up my brother and pretends to slam-dunk him on top of this little shed and I give him shit for it. My brother picks me up then and does the same thing. We go way up in the sky, but he makes sure I don’t land on the shed, but on the ground where it’s softer. Isn’t he a nice guy.

Katie and Trent are talking about marriage. About how when you get married, you have to have your own system, not like other people’s systems. Trent has been wearing roller skates throughout the whole dream.

Making small talk with some man. I had to ask twice, “where did you go to school?” “UC Irvine.” “Oh. You told me that already, sorry.” I think Bradley’s there, in the place where Evan and Nick were throwing. He gave me a pair of shoes and I really wanted to like them. They almost looked like the black shoes I have from Target. But then I looked at them again and they transformed into meshy-Nike looking basketball shoes and I didn’t really like them. But I wanted to. That’s maybe what’s important.

In the CESTA kitchen, eavesdropping on Chris and George, talking about the Rolling Stones. But really it’s not the CESTA kitchen, it’s some school cafeteria store where I’m microwaving some pizza and a muffin. Maybe on ASU campus. I hear Chris and George talking. Just the inflection of their voices talking about rock and roll is so nice. I want to tell them I miss them. But part of me knows that it’s like some kind of mirage and if I interrupt them it won’t be true.

My mom and grandma are here to watch other people’s defenses…or maybe mine. Cynthia and Beckian are outside and we get in a discussion about why people are so bent on getting into Ph.d programs when they’ve just gotten MFAs. I get the feeling that Cynthia and Beckian know that I’ve just applied to all these programs but I’ve been rejected but they know whether or not I’ve gotten in and they aren’t telling me.

Yesterday I had a very strange memory of a sunburn/suntan. Tan lines. Tan lines from a tan I got while sleeping.

I have a multi-tiered, multi-layered belt which has synonyms for “razzzladazzin’” or “honky tonkin’” sewed or printed on it. Maybe it’s for sale on the internet. People are impressed. They like to take time to read it.

I had an interview to be a kindergarten teacher. I went to the school and hung out during nap/free time. Had to be in a play about a pirate ship. Realized it wasn’t the job for me. Went to some party/reunion thing. Rachel Malis was there she was in really good shape. Fernando was there but I didn’t want to talk to him. No one did. Almost didn’t see Rachel and Ari at first. It was good to see them. Worried at home about finding a job. Maybe at another elementary school. Even though I wasn’t qualified.

Josh Johnson lent me his car. Went driving around the student ghetto with Tess. It was like a holiday, the fourth of July or not. She wanted to stay at this party with these dumb redneck guys. She was in her swimsuit. I left her with the car and walked up the hill. I don’t know where, back to my parent’s house. I didn’t drink anything, either.

Kept trying to get myself to pee outside of the university. Some unknown architecture building in broad daylight. People were going by. I couldn’t do it. I kept saying “vent your frustration at the university with pee. Just let it go.”

Watching some art installation that Kelly from Portland made. It’s all these projections, like a birthday party? No. Projections of people inside the building. She was explaining it while wearing 14th-15th century Flemish painting style clothing. There was a soundtrack that went along with it. I didn’t quite understand it, but it looked really good. Drew was there too, talking about planning things. Kelly said how strange it was that we all look at things in a certain space, and that’s how we perceive art. Drew said “well, that’s what we’re good at naturally, looking at things in a space.”

Before this, I’d been hanging out with Allyson Boggess until the wee hours of the morning. Was hanging out also with my mom late at night. A merge. My mom had been trying to convince me to go drink with her at Asylum Lake in the middle of the night. It didn’t seem like a good idea. We smoked though, even though I told her I hadn’t been. I caved. Then I ended up spending hours opening and shutting the refrigerator making a sandwich for myself. It took forever. What annoying bullshit. Then I went to Allyson’s. She was giving me one of her cats. It had poop in its hair and I didn’t really want it, but I didn’t want to be rude. I put it in my coat and it made my coat smell shitty. I had to chase it around the house to get it in my car. Don’t ever get a cat, dude.

Another project that Kelly made, starring Jerome from CESTA. He’s sort of like almost Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. Less gimmicky. Not more serious, but calm. About having only eight hours left to hoist the world back up after it fell down. There’s all these blow-up cloth things and felt scenery suspended in the air on strings. There’s a massive effort of people in the wings to tie it back up. Its done very well, very intricate. It actual raises up on strings a few feet at the end after they get this baloony world. World of balloons and rain drops fluttering the space up. Jerome was also in a project previous to this one. I was in it also.

Some summer institute. Anna H. was my roommate. Every morning we’d get up and make a meat juice smoothie. Whenever Robin starts talking we go and hyperventilate and stick our faces in the same corner and laugh about it. One morning she doesn’t show up. She sends a text message saying that was her last day but doesn’t explain why. I pee in my bed (in the dream, not in real life).

Getting dressed up in the basement with mom and Kate. Everything I try on is icky. It’s all old stuff that we’re throwing away. But there’s stuff I’ve gotten and never worn that doesn’t fit me like this weird old wedding dress that we put Beth Staples in. My mom wears a bunch of my old skirts and Kate laughs at how two of me can fit in most of them.

Trying to find Tabor. I’m driving but the road gets so bumpy that I decide to leave my car. I think I’m almost there. I walk and walk, I end up walking into a ski resort in New Zealand…in Germany or Austria. It’s snowing. It gets dark. I can’t find it.

I work at some summer program where every afternoon at five you get to swim with the baby seals. My dad shows up to pick me up and take me home. We find out that I didn’t get into the ph.d program.

My brother and I staying in some weird mansion. There’s pianos in it. Maybe it’s not a mansion, but a suburban house, which at this point, seems like a mansion. It’s snowy outside. Somebody rings the doorbell. I don’t recognize them so I hide behind the piano. My brother is like “whatever, I’ll answer it.” I say “what if they know we’re skipping school?” They bring by this contraption that looks like a swing set. You lay down in it. There’s two seats/swings. No one can really see you but then you press this button and it swings back up so you’re upright. You can kick or scare someone. We decided it would be good if we were hiding out in the backyard and someone/the sherrif was coming to get us. Cameron Lockwood’s around. He shows up.

My mother suggests that we make a video of my grandma and my dad eating chocolate cake that we bought for grandma’s birthday. The video will allow her to “re-eat” it over and over throughout the year at no cost.

A school tradition? Or not. Before the defense question section, the person is blindfolded and spun around.

My Dad and one of the cats can trade physical attributes/characteristics.

Some website where a woman had written stories based on people’s real family stories. Would show you the locations of where things happened. A series of “old west tales” about people living in cabins and long shoremen and crazy affairs and shit. They were like romance novels but you could look and see what inspiration came from what place. You could look at the mildewy beds! She was like a middle-aged, like a cat lady… She kept saying how uncomfortable the bed she slept on was. It was tiny and there were all these pillows on it. Then she said “then the long shoreman came by and time just flew in bed.” I was like “eeewww don’t tell me that!”

Watched a documentary about these crazy obese people who had giant stomachs. They would make their own bread and all this food and then eat it and throw it up. Waffles and butter. It was total disgusting but they were totally open about talking about it. It was mind boggling that they would make all this food and waste it.

Kate told me this story where she’d figured out some scam in Portland where she’d figured out years ago if you were stealing stuff and reselling it but making less than ten dollars an hour it wasn’t a crime. One time she found an ipod underneath a lamp in an army-navy surplus store. But it turned out it had belonged to the lady who ran the store, or her dead wife. Kate got caught. The dead wife had been a super-huge Great Gatsby fan, so Kate felt really bad and gave her a CD by band who had been influenced by that book. The woman listened to it and now they were kind of friends. Half way through this story, Kate morphed into her male equivalent who is someone unrelated to me. Sort of like Jack Black.

Some dress up show/play where everybody had (Berkeley was there). I had all these little kid clothes that I could barely squish into. Ladybug print pants and a neon sweatshirt, a life jacket, and a helmet. Super-neon ‘90s break dancer. Berk. was trying to put on these really girly clothes…nylons. Mark was there trying to help us. We were having trouble putting on these girl clothes. Some belonged to Lyndsay Reese. They were designed so weird and didn’t make sense. We were rolling around on the ground laughing. It was fun but I was embarrassed that I was having fun. MY part in the play went really well. Brittany was there. IT was outside a fountain. It was kind of improv. Everybody’s costumes were homemade beautiful ramshackly werid. Brittany was a chicken that turned into an alien part way through. It was really good.

My car died. So I had to get something so I could get back to Michigan. I just went to this gas station where I had a second job. It was next door to a car dealership where I bought the first thing I saw that was on sale because I just wanted to get the hell out. It was a motorcycle with a big wing-hoop on top. It had a special chute that it would take off from. It pretty much drove itself, just press a button. I didn’t understand how it worked, it was horribly ugly: a bright red new motorcycle with a sun bonnet deal on top. It was so bad. I couldn’t believe that I bought it.

Killing cockroaches. Getting really crazy into it. In the bathroom mirror staring in it my skin turns green and my eyes are flickery. Can’t help but feeling that they are crawling on me in my sleep.

Forced-awkward “get-casual” feeling party. Like Mark H.’s last night. Get drunk in my dream is worse than real life. Feeling so awkward.

Thrown in a semi-truck. Took a shit in a bathroom somewhere as –a walked in and –ar was leaving. They caught each other there. Mostly awkward for them, but maybe me a little bit too.

Baby doll collectibles. Phantom of the Opera water bottle and cheese grater all for dolls. What else? Supposedly vintage clothes that were so small it was inconceivable that they could have belonged to my father. My brother and I deciding we couldn’t sell any of it. My mom’s there practicing for some piano recital. I’m climbing back in the window. We’re all the ages we are now or older so it’s all just for a novelty effect. My dad’s planted these great plants outside. It’s really pretty. Nice old books with funny old covers from the ‘70s. Very ‘70s. I was practicing the piano for something too. We all started to promise at the end of the dream “no, we’ll never throw away anything ever again.”

april 5th

Dreaming of -ea-el again, again, again. Drunk and beautiful. We have sex and then he disappears.


Walking around a campus at night. Holding on to a book that is John Steinbeck, except trashier. It has some appeal. Maybe using it to impress people. I’m in the photo processing lab and there’s this new process for processing color that involves throwing these strips of film like their paint and Bill from Western is there and some of my other friends are in this class. I tell them I know how to do this! We can break in over spring break and make a bunch of prints. It’s really exciting. I see my mother and she’s mad that I haven’t put the book in my book bag, but all I can think is “at least I’m not smoking! At least I’m not smoking!” The girl I’m with is a mixture of Amanda and Tess.

In the morning before I hear all the noises right, it’s soft like an abstract painting.

Assorted strangers: Kalamazooians, people in a lobby waiting for something to start. Everyone has the look of “rescue me” on their faces. A lecture? Something about going up north. Cannot remember. Waiting for lectures. Awkward small talk spaces. Forgetting my sunglasses.

My family is up north. Ryan is supposed to be there with me. There is someone who has a silhouette vaguely like his but it is of a developmentally disabled adult. In the middle cabin, sleeping the first night, waiting for Ryan to show up. He drove up with us, and then went somewhere to get something. Maybe my grandparents are making him sleep in a separate cabin or something? It’s not like I wanted to sleep with him, sleep with him. I just wanted to hang out in the same place. In the morning I think that I see him, looking really cute from far away but then it turns into this lurching adult-child who just barges into my stuff and is not Ryan, not at all.
Having two dreams at once. Helping with Karrie Pollens’ wedding. Thinking about several abstract paintings I’d like to make. The best parts of the paintings are the names of the colors of the paint. I can’t remember them though.

Went to some photography conference/nature’s classroom something or other in Vegas. Brit was there. I overslept for the class we were going to be in together. It was confusing and terrible. No one was attractive. I just felt lonely in crowds.

Combination of melted vinyl from an LP and tahini sauce: tasted damn good. I’ve dreamt about it before.

Some store, a hardware/grocery store, like a little WalMart in the middle of nowhere. I was coming home from a dance class where I was sweaty and wearing tights. There was this man I didn’t know in a jacket and dark-rimmed eyeglasses. He did not have good hair. He had hair gel in his hair. On several occasions he would walk by me in the store and tap me on the shoulder. We would run into some back room and without speaking or having any eye contact, we would have sex. Then I would leave. He would always chase me until one time I saw him in the store and I tried to chase him. But then he wasn’t in the meeting place. Somehow it didn’t work like that.

Mini-museum of action figure cut-up world. Nick and Dylan circa 1994. Some other kind of dance with music collaged songs about apples/geniuses…all at this practice museum for something. Alone. But I’m not as I’m practicing.

from a gas station. From walgreens. Home, home with my family, working on something. Going to see Kate on a road trip when she lives in Canada.

Kalamazoo people who’ve never been out west, take them to Portland, go to K’s work…it was really busy with other crowds of people visiting. It was just like I’d never known him. For a long time. Some job somewhere making a haunted house outside in a backyard. I kept needing something from a chimney vent above an oven. I kept having to take my clothes off and climb into the vent. Kept worrying that Robin Pollens, or whoever’s kitchen it was, would get home and I’d be in trouble.

Went to the doctor. The office was outside, overlooking the street. Doctor was a woman who just started feeling me up all the time.

My mom could play guitar, and harmonica, and saw through a tree trunk at the same time.

I was walking around with Tom in a city that looked like Tucson, but a city we’d never been to before. He decided that it would be a good idea to throw a shoe through a very small window, prefaced by the phrase “I’m going to something stupid.” Then we went inside this place that was a shoe store/used something or other store. I only went in the entrance and was looking at the shoes, but he went all the way in. Seconds later came out yelling “go! go! the light came on!” Ran down the street and hid in a café where my friend Angela was working. Then in some dormitory. Having trouble with the soda machine. Somebody told me that it would work if you put Czech money in it. Luckily, I had a leftover Czech coin in my pocket. Put it in the machine and all the jewelry I’d ever lost started coming out the coin return.

A road called “The Fifteen.” Driving it one way at sun set can bring up certain memories and the other way, not. It was the end of a movie or poem or something, a driving scene, just figurines in the sun. Something secular, but the way it was described, religious.

The figurine from Paddle to the Sea. Floating in the lakes up north.

My parent’s basement: Pat Mahana’s explaininrg to my brother how way back in the day all those kids saw me as some second mother figure, doing embroidery and listening to records. Art projects and punk rock. Meanwhile, someone who maybe represents God or something is shuffling around trying to give me some cd that I’m not going to listen to and don’t really want. I think we’re wearing snowboarding boots ‘cause its cold out.

Birthday party for Karrie Pollens. Everybody’s super-normal. Having a fire, reminiscing. I decide to be socially anxious, go hide in her bedroom. I can’t get the toilet to flush. I go outside. Part of it looks like the Green Top and my old friends from Kalamazoo are there, drinking whiskey sours. Someone looks in the fireplace, picks up a dead cat. I feel guilty. Robin asks me where I’ve been and I can’t explain.

How to stop doing something that you’re doing. Something about bravery.

In Chicago, working. It feels comfortable, even though I don’t know anyone. Before that, at a ski area that’s turned to mud. As usual, I’m walking below the chair lift and I don’t have skis. There are people with skis riding above me. My grandfather had pushed me through some parking lot or something. He was pushing it, even though I was supposed to be taking care of him.

I lived somewhere with my brother. We had this chanty/tent in the middle of this big room we lived in. One of us had built it for ice fishing or some other purpose. We rebuilt it so that there were separate rooms. We had to take measurements so they could build more. It was nice, convenient. The one we had was covered in floral print fabric. Of course. There was some other scene where there was a family and I was in the family but its not the family I have now. The mom and dad were fighting about something and the mother had set out this elaborate feast of hamburgers, take-out from somewhere. One of the little girls had gotten their period for the first time so there was a party. There was an ex-somebody who showed up with a child who was in a tizzy because it was so expensive. And no one was eating it. She was giving this little girl all this rich people food. I might have been the little girl. No, I wasn’t, I don’t know what I was.

Watching girls sunbathe out of the top of this ugly brick building with no windows. They were on wire mattress frames. It looked like a more industrial detroitish version of phoenix. Had a job interview for some outdoor ed place but abruptly forgot about it while I was out walking around.

Had a harmonica. It wasn’t my harmonica. It was covered in some icky dust but I didn’t notice until my mouth was on it and my mouth was cleaning it off.

Raining in a park. Like the park on College before the whole foods. Trying to solve a mystery.

Bob Dylan comes to visit Kevin’s house. When he’s sleeping they decide to dress up like him to see him off. I get all embarrassed and tell them it’s a stupid idea. Drew says its not about how it makes HIM feel, it’s about how it makes US feel. Then I felt embarrassed for never thinking that way.

Started in texas only ten years ago. Displayed in a novel or short story about a couple. He’s looking for a house for them to live in, but realizes she’s not real or something.

Airport with mom and Kate, picking Nick up from somewhere. In a stairwell full of glass baubles. Having trouble getting something to eat. Hungry, but at the airport. I just get hot chocolate mix and eat it dry. Nick gets...? Mom wanted a gatorade but they didn’t have any, but it’s all ridiculous cause we’re eating these non-food foods. Somebody that Kate knew had died that morning and she’s all sad and we’re telling Grandma Shirley this later, but by then it’s funny.

Visitng JLowe, her friend ? They’re doing “secret” things together in the other room. I try to pack stuff up. I find a notebook bound together but only a centimeter wide. There’s writing in it. I ask JLowe what it is and she says it’s a diary. It just seems that someone’s diary would be so cramped and hard to write in.

Dreamt we had some soldier friend who died. Made some video for/about him for the funeral. It was narrated by -ana and it was incredibly, incredibly long because the editing was so bad. Three hours instead of five minutes. But since somebody died there’s nothing you can say about that. The best part is that as a tribute, cause the guy was good with kids, we had this big water balloon soccer fight with kids from the town. IT was really muddy, there were good scenes of playing in the mud.

British woman telling a story about how when she was younger, living somewhere in/on the water, her husband would rent a cabin for a day and then at night they would pretend that they’re friend had gotten in some sort of accident and they didn’t have enough money to make it home because it was storming, and then they’d get a free night without having to pay.

Christmas display…animals all electrocuted and fried before the show. I was in a play that involved remembering lines. We were from Kazoo School. Everyone would have to run across this field and then up this really slippery thing that was like the outside of a tube slide. I was having so much trouble climbing up the outside that I couldn’t remember my lines.

Exhibition hall in Phoenix with irrationally high ceilings: half of the floor is made of spinning escalators/people movers. There are horses and school children on trampolines and an audience and it’s a mess. I keep trying to go by the booth where the photographers are to steal film. They have blocks of hundreds of rolls of Ilford HP5 400 but I can’t get them. There are posters that don’t make sense: very large women with Burger King logos on them. Anna and I are there, and some school friends. She says “let’s play!” We start messing with all these strangers, making up new social norms/rules of interaction. Brian Diamond is there and he wins the game: he waxes his forehead by rubbing it on some sculpture and then rubs his forehead on somebody else’s forehead. This becomes a recurring custom. Soon everyone is rubbing foreheads.

Small problem including not feeling invincible all the time. Is there a time when you felt invincible? Do you still feel that? Where did it go?

How to make/ how to light yourself /on fire/ how to start a fire/ how to light a match. Hot cup of coffee in one hand, pick up the matchbook, hold the matches in your three fingers out arm back around coffee, hold the matches between your thumb and three fingers, open up the matchbook, light up, burn, drink your coffee somewhere else.

A couple got a divorce very early in their marriage. Their daughter gives a monologue about learning how to pee in some receptacle that she keeps inside of her pants. She’s been doing this ever since somebody stole her pants and she started using pants she found somewhere with a receptacle already inside of them. Somebody recognized them later and stole them back as she was wandering the countryside. In some clinic line or something. She talks about how she’s a female she has to go out of her way not to be considered a “dandy.” But she couldn’t be a dandy because she’s a girl. But she doesn’t think she looks like a girl anymore.