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.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
Iambic Pentameter Blues, Drunk Invincible Grandparents, Superhero Ladyman Wrestlers, Dog-People... dreams from March so far
Grandma Vickie was also at the poetry reading. She was drinking beer that she bought and brewed herself. It was a 22oz bottle of Michigan berry-flavored beer in a brown bottle. She was climbing around on the tables.
Showed a poem I’d written to my mom. It was supposed to be in iambic pentameter. It was 20 lines long and none of the lines, she said, were iambic. She gave me encouragement and told me that I needed to keep reading many things and having outside influences and not getting internally distressed about meter, though I should learn it.
My mom was trying to talk to me over the noise of the faucet while I was in the bathroom. I was saying “I CAnot HEear What YOU-oo ARE say-ING be-CAUSE I’m IN the BATHroom.” I don’t think that was right either. I guess I don’t know it.
School-sanctioned ski trip. My dad is a chaperone. It’s also an SPE conference thing, but all the parents from Kazoo School days are there. People start yelling about something that’s funny but I get upset because I think they’re screaming so loud that they’ll hurt my Dad’s ears. I’m right next to him and it’s not hurting my ears and his are probably less sensitive. Anyway, he stayed really calm even though it was really annoying.
Driving. Turning the dome light on to look at map/directions. It was so faint I could barely see it. A semi-truck went by and shook my car. I got confused looking in all the mirrors because I couldn’t see the road. I pulled out on the road, decided to just “go for it” and not look. I did that thing that I often do in dreams where I lose control of the car and can’t see…I just give up and try and find the brakes.
Back in Kalamazoo I put some blue stuff in my coffee that’s supposed to make me have a psychedelic experience. I don’t think it was working. I called Sara Bijani on the phone, met up with her in some neighborhood, she was just explaining how things between her and her new beau weren’t working out. He looked to be all of 19, wearing a weird puffy white coat. Upset.
I was searching for this thing you can download for your computer, like an interactive clock that you can download, it’s like a wheel that spins with all this news/bullshit that’s going on…you can position these levers to go up and down to draw lines so you just have video/picture representations of little pieces and categories of news that spin as time goes on. “Pretty cool.” This coincides with a conversation I am having with a woman who works for a magazine. She says “we have a tendency to tell models/interns how pretty they are and then show them this clock. We often find them days later, bulgy-eyed and hungry for love, feeding copy to the scanner and printer…”
Went with mom to visit Kate. We drive to some restaurant and my sister tells some anecdote that we supposedly have heard many times before. It is called “The Chimichanga Story.” It involves her being an unruly girl in highschool…she gets drunk and insists on riding the waterslide (like how they have electric trains, except, you know, a waterslide…across the restaurant several times in one night.
A website of beautiful snapshot photos. Some of San Francisco, I think. Can’t remember what they looked like. They weren’t mine but they made me want to take more.
At home, visiting my parents, a holiday. My mom sends Nick, Dad, and I to the store. I go to get ready and end up wearing these strange three-legged pants. I thought maybe it was some fashion response to counteract all the camel toe problems cause by “jeggings” but then I put them on and they just looked no good. I put pants on over these pants and went out to the driveway. There was a big pot of pumpkin ravioli noodle soup that my mom made. We’re all just standing there in the driveway eating it. It’s really good. My dad realizes that we don’t even realize what we’re going to the store for since Stephanie is making the Turkey tomorrow. My brother kindly explains to me after my father goes in to ask her that he thinks it’s just in case I want to get something to eat that isn’t meat. We keep standing in the driveway eating the ravioli. It is very nice.
Ryan sent me something shiny in the mail.
My grandparents are getting married again. They want to get married again before my grandmother dies. My grandfather is (and has been for years now) beyond death, in dream-land. There’s really great brownies and stuff that Stephanie made. My mom laughs at me when I show her all the split-ends in my hair. She’s really on a tear for a while, making fun of them. It’s nice. “What did you do? You just pinned it back for a year and when you un-pinned it, it was long and there were only three strands?” And I say “yes…ha ha ha.” There’s a really good video we make from the wedding. In part of it I am fake-kickboxing with Bud.
Had a dream about re-recording a performance I did on Super 8 while it was projected in an auditorium during an art-walk thing. There were tons of people there. Sara Bijani was there playing something like a flute to get things started. There was someone serving popcorn balls which I didn’t eat because I’d eaten a million doughnuts at a birthday party. People really liked the performance even though it was very hard to understand. It was a recording that I was projecting. Justine and Eric Sabatino were in it with a bunch of other people. The music was very dramatic. I really don’t understand it. Sara said she liked it but she admitted it didn’t make sense. The opening scene was a spastic technology freak-out. It looked like there was a hand making tadpoles. Somebody from the radio station was helping with the sound. (whispering): i think i want to go back to art school.
So then there’s a critique afterwards. Andrea who was one of the wrestler girls is there and Ginger are there. Ginger says we should do some write-up for “Wrestler” magazine. Andrea says “I got really trashed last night so I don’t think we should do anything.” I said “oh…look…we happen to be sitting in a bookstore. I bet they have some copies that we could do impromptu readings from, it would be fun.” Everyone’s like “wah-wahhhh….Rose…we actually have to work?” And I’m like “I looove going to school for art…it’s so much fun, I miiiiissss it.” I wake up.
Had the keys to Tom’s van. Took it driving somewhere… but maybe I wasn’t driving. Was with Sara and Brittany back in the hometown. Spilled frosting from gas station snacks on the interior.
Looking for some celery oil I left in a painting room. Anna H. is practicing softball pitches outside. This is after I’ve embarrassed myself at a reading, asking academic questions about an apple to stop people from shouting and yelling. The frat boys are drunk, they are laughing at the visiting writer. I see Laura P. and she tells me that my old piano teacher says Hi. Also that I might want to perform at the recital this Friday? I say oh no, not this Friday, I forgot to practice and it’s Wednesday! It’s Wednesday! Ahhhhhh!
In the film processing room. Anna nearly cuts my vocal cords because we have them tied to this film reel thing. She cranked it too hard and thought it was really funny but I really didn’t like it. She tried to cut the thing off and we had to call in a congresswoman with rubber gloves to help.
I’m at the grocery store buying snacks. Wondering if people are looking at me.
I’m reading from my/some book. It’s me and some refugee-type. We are somewhere where you are allowed to get three autographs on Christmas, “That Day,” that’s what they call it there, “That Day,” is Christmas. So you’re allowed to do whatever you want on that day to get three autographs.
Another invincible Bud dream. We’re on a walk and he has a ring that lights up with a Christmas tree on it. He’s singing a song about how much he misses Shirley…this is way in the future and I’m explaining this to someone that I don’t know, maybe my kids or some cousin that this is Bud and he is so invincible. But he’s on the way to the mailbox and I get worried that he’s not gonna make it the whole way and he stoops down and gets some snow off the ground and presses it on his middle finger because that’s the ring for her, it numbs himself and the ring for her lights up. I don’t even know how suddenly he’s in the house and I’m across the street. I know he’s my grandpa but I’m watching him or watching people come out of the house across the street, describing them to the people I’m with. He comes out of the house and asks me what’s behind it. What’s behind my house? I think that his beer warehouse is supposed to be back there, but I don’t know if he owns it in this reality. I can’t see it so I just tell him “the highway” and nod or shake my head. I’m sad that there is just a highway there now. I think he can tell that I’m being weird about the warehouse/factory now. “How can I explain / I miss you more than words can say” is the chorus of the song he’s singing. (and then I actually sing this into the tape recorder)
We’re at Brad and Stephanie’s house. Stephanie is shorter than in real life, but adorable. She looks like a version of one of their dogs. It’s not in a bad way, it’s just that her hair’s a little bit longer and her ears are little bit bigger. And maybe she’s grown a tail? And Allison’s there and she’s like an even little version of this cute dog-person too! It’s not in a BAD way. (my uncle) Brad’s like normal though. Immediately before this I’m renting a snowboard somewhere, with Bradley and Christopher Darling, another girl…Brittany or Jen? Anyway, we accidentally had snowboarded to Stevensville?
This must be a real song? Does M. Ward sing it? “If I had the time / go back and make you mine / (humming tune)”
Out walking a dog. Or maybe just walking. I saw a fox and a squirrel-beaver thing. The fox and the other animal, it was scary because they weren’t scared of me so I just screamed until they went away.
Making cupcakes?
Was in Scottsdale when I saw those animals. Wanted to tell Dale about it.
Hung out with Tess in Denver.
Making an art project with Mom and Kate. We’re working on a perfume called “Vanilla Hangover.”
Grandma Vickie dies during some event but we don’t want to disturb anyone so we leave her sitting up against a wall. Luckily after all that we didn’t call an ambulance because she comes back to life during it.
“Let trust do the work / don’t be afraid they might be crying.” This is supposedly a line from an Eleni Sikelianos poem I am reading in the parking lot in my mother’s car as we are getting reading to go into the hospital for some surgery I am getting on my appetite/lungs. F keeps calling on the telephone but I can’t find the time to call him even though the surgery hasn’t quite started. I pick up a ceramic manatee from some charity workers in the hallway to give to my mother but I drop it on the way to see her. “It was ugly anyway,” she said. “Maybe one of my cousins would like it?
I became very angry inside of a Subway restaurant and threw half of a trash can at someone. Don’t remember why. I was in there for a long time, getting really mad. No one reprimanded me besides the people working, to them, I apologized.
My parents have like six cats in the attic of our house. It was ridiculous. It smelled bad. They were nice cats and my mother had really worked hard to make them better (they were adopted/humane society). My mom said that it was good practice because her and my dad wanted to adopt another kid? And I was like Whaaaaaat?! And she said “it was your father’s idea.” Crazy. I told them I was really happy and excited, but really I was just amazed.
At summer camp, got lice. There’s a giant television in the cabin that will play on one angle on the floor a screen with Austin, TX on it and on the other screen Portland is on. They keep playing sports broadcasts. Seems incredulous that we’re watching TV at camp! But besides. I was too busy trying to kill all bugs to pay attention, really.
Watching TV with my family, a movie that was all old video games, really well done with classical music and some video game music set to it. There were full-grown male wrestlers playing all the parts of the female beauty queen superheros…with wrestler-man bodies. There were some other really great looking cartoons. Funny and nice. We found this at a thrift store where I had also gotten many other great, forgotten items. After that we just were watching commercials and I kept saying “this is gonna fuck me up! I’m going to have dreams about them!” And now I am…there was a lot of beef, a lot of cheese, a music video with a woman whose… the music video seemed like a commercial too. I had moved back home and it made me a little claustrophobic.
Showed a poem I’d written to my mom. It was supposed to be in iambic pentameter. It was 20 lines long and none of the lines, she said, were iambic. She gave me encouragement and told me that I needed to keep reading many things and having outside influences and not getting internally distressed about meter, though I should learn it.
My mom was trying to talk to me over the noise of the faucet while I was in the bathroom. I was saying “I CAnot HEear What YOU-oo ARE say-ING be-CAUSE I’m IN the BATHroom.” I don’t think that was right either. I guess I don’t know it.
School-sanctioned ski trip. My dad is a chaperone. It’s also an SPE conference thing, but all the parents from Kazoo School days are there. People start yelling about something that’s funny but I get upset because I think they’re screaming so loud that they’ll hurt my Dad’s ears. I’m right next to him and it’s not hurting my ears and his are probably less sensitive. Anyway, he stayed really calm even though it was really annoying.
Driving. Turning the dome light on to look at map/directions. It was so faint I could barely see it. A semi-truck went by and shook my car. I got confused looking in all the mirrors because I couldn’t see the road. I pulled out on the road, decided to just “go for it” and not look. I did that thing that I often do in dreams where I lose control of the car and can’t see…I just give up and try and find the brakes.
Back in Kalamazoo I put some blue stuff in my coffee that’s supposed to make me have a psychedelic experience. I don’t think it was working. I called Sara Bijani on the phone, met up with her in some neighborhood, she was just explaining how things between her and her new beau weren’t working out. He looked to be all of 19, wearing a weird puffy white coat. Upset.
I was searching for this thing you can download for your computer, like an interactive clock that you can download, it’s like a wheel that spins with all this news/bullshit that’s going on…you can position these levers to go up and down to draw lines so you just have video/picture representations of little pieces and categories of news that spin as time goes on. “Pretty cool.” This coincides with a conversation I am having with a woman who works for a magazine. She says “we have a tendency to tell models/interns how pretty they are and then show them this clock. We often find them days later, bulgy-eyed and hungry for love, feeding copy to the scanner and printer…”
Went with mom to visit Kate. We drive to some restaurant and my sister tells some anecdote that we supposedly have heard many times before. It is called “The Chimichanga Story.” It involves her being an unruly girl in highschool…she gets drunk and insists on riding the waterslide (like how they have electric trains, except, you know, a waterslide…across the restaurant several times in one night.
A website of beautiful snapshot photos. Some of San Francisco, I think. Can’t remember what they looked like. They weren’t mine but they made me want to take more.
At home, visiting my parents, a holiday. My mom sends Nick, Dad, and I to the store. I go to get ready and end up wearing these strange three-legged pants. I thought maybe it was some fashion response to counteract all the camel toe problems cause by “jeggings” but then I put them on and they just looked no good. I put pants on over these pants and went out to the driveway. There was a big pot of pumpkin ravioli noodle soup that my mom made. We’re all just standing there in the driveway eating it. It’s really good. My dad realizes that we don’t even realize what we’re going to the store for since Stephanie is making the Turkey tomorrow. My brother kindly explains to me after my father goes in to ask her that he thinks it’s just in case I want to get something to eat that isn’t meat. We keep standing in the driveway eating the ravioli. It is very nice.
Ryan sent me something shiny in the mail.
My grandparents are getting married again. They want to get married again before my grandmother dies. My grandfather is (and has been for years now) beyond death, in dream-land. There’s really great brownies and stuff that Stephanie made. My mom laughs at me when I show her all the split-ends in my hair. She’s really on a tear for a while, making fun of them. It’s nice. “What did you do? You just pinned it back for a year and when you un-pinned it, it was long and there were only three strands?” And I say “yes…ha ha ha.” There’s a really good video we make from the wedding. In part of it I am fake-kickboxing with Bud.
Had a dream about re-recording a performance I did on Super 8 while it was projected in an auditorium during an art-walk thing. There were tons of people there. Sara Bijani was there playing something like a flute to get things started. There was someone serving popcorn balls which I didn’t eat because I’d eaten a million doughnuts at a birthday party. People really liked the performance even though it was very hard to understand. It was a recording that I was projecting. Justine and Eric Sabatino were in it with a bunch of other people. The music was very dramatic. I really don’t understand it. Sara said she liked it but she admitted it didn’t make sense. The opening scene was a spastic technology freak-out. It looked like there was a hand making tadpoles. Somebody from the radio station was helping with the sound. (whispering): i think i want to go back to art school.
So then there’s a critique afterwards. Andrea who was one of the wrestler girls is there and Ginger are there. Ginger says we should do some write-up for “Wrestler” magazine. Andrea says “I got really trashed last night so I don’t think we should do anything.” I said “oh…look…we happen to be sitting in a bookstore. I bet they have some copies that we could do impromptu readings from, it would be fun.” Everyone’s like “wah-wahhhh….Rose…we actually have to work?” And I’m like “I looove going to school for art…it’s so much fun, I miiiiissss it.” I wake up.
Had the keys to Tom’s van. Took it driving somewhere… but maybe I wasn’t driving. Was with Sara and Brittany back in the hometown. Spilled frosting from gas station snacks on the interior.
Looking for some celery oil I left in a painting room. Anna H. is practicing softball pitches outside. This is after I’ve embarrassed myself at a reading, asking academic questions about an apple to stop people from shouting and yelling. The frat boys are drunk, they are laughing at the visiting writer. I see Laura P. and she tells me that my old piano teacher says Hi. Also that I might want to perform at the recital this Friday? I say oh no, not this Friday, I forgot to practice and it’s Wednesday! It’s Wednesday! Ahhhhhh!
In the film processing room. Anna nearly cuts my vocal cords because we have them tied to this film reel thing. She cranked it too hard and thought it was really funny but I really didn’t like it. She tried to cut the thing off and we had to call in a congresswoman with rubber gloves to help.
I’m at the grocery store buying snacks. Wondering if people are looking at me.
I’m reading from my/some book. It’s me and some refugee-type. We are somewhere where you are allowed to get three autographs on Christmas, “That Day,” that’s what they call it there, “That Day,” is Christmas. So you’re allowed to do whatever you want on that day to get three autographs.
Another invincible Bud dream. We’re on a walk and he has a ring that lights up with a Christmas tree on it. He’s singing a song about how much he misses Shirley…this is way in the future and I’m explaining this to someone that I don’t know, maybe my kids or some cousin that this is Bud and he is so invincible. But he’s on the way to the mailbox and I get worried that he’s not gonna make it the whole way and he stoops down and gets some snow off the ground and presses it on his middle finger because that’s the ring for her, it numbs himself and the ring for her lights up. I don’t even know how suddenly he’s in the house and I’m across the street. I know he’s my grandpa but I’m watching him or watching people come out of the house across the street, describing them to the people I’m with. He comes out of the house and asks me what’s behind it. What’s behind my house? I think that his beer warehouse is supposed to be back there, but I don’t know if he owns it in this reality. I can’t see it so I just tell him “the highway” and nod or shake my head. I’m sad that there is just a highway there now. I think he can tell that I’m being weird about the warehouse/factory now. “How can I explain / I miss you more than words can say” is the chorus of the song he’s singing. (and then I actually sing this into the tape recorder)
We’re at Brad and Stephanie’s house. Stephanie is shorter than in real life, but adorable. She looks like a version of one of their dogs. It’s not in a bad way, it’s just that her hair’s a little bit longer and her ears are little bit bigger. And maybe she’s grown a tail? And Allison’s there and she’s like an even little version of this cute dog-person too! It’s not in a BAD way. (my uncle) Brad’s like normal though. Immediately before this I’m renting a snowboard somewhere, with Bradley and Christopher Darling, another girl…Brittany or Jen? Anyway, we accidentally had snowboarded to Stevensville?
This must be a real song? Does M. Ward sing it? “If I had the time / go back and make you mine / (humming tune)”
Out walking a dog. Or maybe just walking. I saw a fox and a squirrel-beaver thing. The fox and the other animal, it was scary because they weren’t scared of me so I just screamed until they went away.
Making cupcakes?
Was in Scottsdale when I saw those animals. Wanted to tell Dale about it.
Hung out with Tess in Denver.
Making an art project with Mom and Kate. We’re working on a perfume called “Vanilla Hangover.”
Grandma Vickie dies during some event but we don’t want to disturb anyone so we leave her sitting up against a wall. Luckily after all that we didn’t call an ambulance because she comes back to life during it.
“Let trust do the work / don’t be afraid they might be crying.” This is supposedly a line from an Eleni Sikelianos poem I am reading in the parking lot in my mother’s car as we are getting reading to go into the hospital for some surgery I am getting on my appetite/lungs. F keeps calling on the telephone but I can’t find the time to call him even though the surgery hasn’t quite started. I pick up a ceramic manatee from some charity workers in the hallway to give to my mother but I drop it on the way to see her. “It was ugly anyway,” she said. “Maybe one of my cousins would like it?
I became very angry inside of a Subway restaurant and threw half of a trash can at someone. Don’t remember why. I was in there for a long time, getting really mad. No one reprimanded me besides the people working, to them, I apologized.
My parents have like six cats in the attic of our house. It was ridiculous. It smelled bad. They were nice cats and my mother had really worked hard to make them better (they were adopted/humane society). My mom said that it was good practice because her and my dad wanted to adopt another kid? And I was like Whaaaaaat?! And she said “it was your father’s idea.” Crazy. I told them I was really happy and excited, but really I was just amazed.
At summer camp, got lice. There’s a giant television in the cabin that will play on one angle on the floor a screen with Austin, TX on it and on the other screen Portland is on. They keep playing sports broadcasts. Seems incredulous that we’re watching TV at camp! But besides. I was too busy trying to kill all bugs to pay attention, really.
Watching TV with my family, a movie that was all old video games, really well done with classical music and some video game music set to it. There were full-grown male wrestlers playing all the parts of the female beauty queen superheros…with wrestler-man bodies. There were some other really great looking cartoons. Funny and nice. We found this at a thrift store where I had also gotten many other great, forgotten items. After that we just were watching commercials and I kept saying “this is gonna fuck me up! I’m going to have dreams about them!” And now I am…there was a lot of beef, a lot of cheese, a music video with a woman whose… the music video seemed like a commercial too. I had moved back home and it made me a little claustrophobic.
Dreams from February
About to use some roller skates at Dana’s house with Dana and Bradley. Dana gives me some tea after I tell her my body hurts after not moving around very much yesterday. David SK is there too. Bradley is there and he’s not. But his voice is. We did some yoga in the living room and watched some teen movie that was taking place. It was long. We took a break to play scrabble. Something I had in common with Allyson Boggess- we were commiserating about something. Somebody there is confused that Bradley and I are just friends. I want to explain by hurling/unfurling estate sales at them.
Justin is talking about waking up and hanging out in the snow.
Mark H. and somebody were talking about getting up at 5 to take someone to the airport. They were gonna have a really good party at 5am when they woke up. Fernando was like “Heeyyyy, let me come!” And they said “well you have to bring your own drinks…or your own weed or something.” It was like I was Fernando and they were talking to me? The place that we were looked like some restored/Italian villa version of the insane asylum in Kalamazoo. Doug and Elysabeth were there.
We’ll just take that sentence and see what it means:
judging a shirt or a sticker with the name of that poet on it,
the word is “rusty”
a sticker or a windbreaker or something like that.
Paranoid facebook dream…
when this happens it is spring. - dresses up like - and I end up sleeping with him and it’s really great but then I find out it’s really -.
Even thinking about the pond at the nature center my face feels like there’s flies all over it. I can see his face floating everywhere along the leaves.
Sun and moon that was spectatular! I performed the solar eclipse. How everything loses, surrenders? its engine? and regains it. How the moon sparkles and dripped like the last bit of spray paint in a round round jar. If that was a poem I sounded like a “wintermintablegabull”
Maybe some advice about every lover’s face equaling the same face—but I don’t believe that, I don’t believe that!
My poem kept colored Christina in pink and white another one has a glint of blue in it and don’t ever ask a poet what color the poem is, what color the poem is, or the notebook or the paper is because they shouldn’t be able to see it.
“I’m gonna go see a movie it’s too bad to talk” this is a song lyric.
They found a body at the bottom of the man-made salt resevoir. The accident happened while I was hitching a ride on the back of a scooter. The scooter was being pulled by a car. I didn’t know the driver. I didn’t even have a helmet on. All these police cars and fire trucks went by. The people I was riding with—I was so scared they were gonna crash and my brains was gonna spill everywhere. The person who was gonna dive for the body was a teenage girl, young, young—she didn’t’ seem phased by it. Somehow related to some images/thing of softball game. Other people are playing and it’s gonna be my turn soon. Somebody hit’s a ball way out in the outfield and if I was out there I coulda caught them. I always feel like that.
Series of intense awkwardness around men—strangers, everyone. I just can’t seem to stop thinking about sex and it makes me trip and fall down when I’m walking I feel like if I look people in the eye they can see that sometimes the sentence “you can only carry a sketchbook, you can only look at it.” A sketchbook being about fucking. Something about -. Seems so cliché to have dreams that involve that man. But they happen. He wears that stripey shirt that makes him look like a popcorn seller. It’s…um…an attractive shirt.
Sometimes I like to feel sorry for myself and think other people are eating dinner with their families but I think most people are eating dinner in their cars or televisions or computers.
Candace sold the jewelry drawer for like twenty-thousand four hundred dollars.
Before that, the sentence “it was a set-up: the cashier’s fumbling change around the register.”
Maybe it meant then there was a metaphorical dead body floating in my adolescent emotional past?
Febuary 13 ...am not asleep, just talkin’, talkin’ up a storm ummmm Jeez. I wanna put my brain in your brain. You hear me? I wanna put my brain in your brain. You don’t even know how this would feel or how I feel we never talked about it before but it would be intimate. In it. You want it? I have it. You have it? I want it. I wanna share it. Do you have it? Yeah. Uh-huh. Mmmm.
Somewhere real rural. Lots of sky between the rusted-out farm equipment. Some boarding school with Tess. We find a thing of beer, a keg? We’re in the elevator with an old mattress. She runs into an old friend of hers who is a bum, asks if he can put us up for the night. There’s this German chic with us. I guess we drink it and have a good time. The best part is stealing it though. Being in an elevator we’re not supposed to be in.
Keep seeing people from town who have no idea what bad news we’re getting into. It’s kind of frustrating.
Your buzzword names from the dreaming days?
I think I got to be super-spy police detective woman action hero last night. Helping to tie the ribbon away.
I wanna know about yardstick, I wanna know about movable fort above the floor with wheels and holes that match up. It’s made of wood and there’s books inside. I wanna know about everything.
Just fell on the floor somewhere I thought about where. Kept watching the show, a horse and a buggy. Laura Ingalls Wilder, life on the prairie. And sun some perfect cure who knows those things to…
One: put bird in it. Two: recycle. Three: a long gray dress. Four: a lotta limes and a lie.
I have all the pieces of mango and orange juice coming/covered in.
Making dresses for crazy people. It was a twisted/complicated plot. Pouring some type of mortar in it with clues. There’s this guy driving around chasing me and he says my grandma’s gonna get shot and then people will tell them or tell on me, eventually they would get back to me but they were looking and he would call me and say “Shirley Kerly I know you wore a red cap today and then you decided to do this.”
It’s time to rent a limosine and go to Las Vegas with my friends and…it was probably Bradley’s idea but then he decided it wasn’t a good idea anyway that ended with a bunch
of people giving eachother dress? haircuts in the kitchen and I stabbed someone with scissors but it was comical in the end because we had to try so many times and it hadn’t worked out it was like a play. The dress haircuts were really fun snipping around dresses people were wearing over their clothes, tailoring them, they were all too big. It was really nice.
Changing my clothes in the field behind the factory I told somebody to wait for them while I explored and found some clean ones. I wanted to change into them. Who was I with? It was so brilliantly sunny out and strange there. I think I was with Justin and maybe Bradley. While I was mid-clothing/nude a bunch of worker guys showed up. I fumbled and of course had trouble putting the clothes on. I took Katie, Dale, and Fernando and they had built a sculpture off to one side and I had built something to, by myself, of course, off by myself in the corner. They left a big note on theirs about “don’t wreck this! or we’ll wreck you!” and I tried to explain to them something like “you just have to accept that things fall apart…” You can’t expect it to not get wrecked if you’re building a sculpture in an abandoned factory. I can’t remember what I built or what I made. It’s the same factory always, always is in dreams, different parts…old creeeaaaky. Like my parent’s basement and the scaffolding of an imaginary NYC and of the real factory and that place where the chicken factory by the railroad, factory up north, all those at once.
Something is stuck inside the walls. Pieces of palm trees and bamboo, a commercial. Weird yellow golden. Wandering through empty coffee packages, just empty things and empty rooms. Instructions in thick books on how to fill them.
Cartoon people like from the Sunday paper. Green and white striped shirts. Nothing too perfect. Survey: a dry piece of the rock-bottom. Up from below. Arson is a bath invented by an owl. There’s a nice big empty chair looking at the ocean. You were part of the three/the dream. It was black outside and shiny. I didn’t open it yet, didn’t read it yet. There was something in the sky, no message. Like thin leaves on the surface of water, taking time for things to shiver their way up there.
Just the photographs and buttons are enough. I know from the same place. There is someone from the same place.
Throwing a penny at the sky: even if it falls faster than (up?) it’s okay.
Feb. 18 (above)
Taking to Paige from CESTA about so much work being done in the space. The space became like a communal tent. Talking about the connotations of the world tent. After politics. And oh shit something else. Reading an email invitation from some girls or bands that needed photographers, about time and space, and I hoped it was still there.
Biology/Science class. I was a student with all of my students. The teacher was giving a demonstration where he poured a bunch of soup on the floor. I expected it to start being like some hack job/stain remover guy but he wasn’t, he was proving some theory that at the TIIIIME made sense. Now I’m not so sure because I can’t remember.
Went to a Christmas party at Sally/Mcnally’s house. I was really late. Really confused. There was a huge amount of food and wine, liquor. It was really decadent. I was there with Katie and were trying to leave but we needed to say bye to Sally but she wasn’t around. There was all this drama because she was leaving her husband and it kept being that night and the day before and the morning after all at the same time. In the dream she had a bunch of sons. One of them, named Abraham, ofcourse, was quite cute.
I was babysitting…maybe myself. At Victor (from radiophx?)’s house. He had two houses. He was at work. Before the Radio phx meeting. I worked too late. I was six or seven hours late to the meeting. There was this cold, weird piece of steak on the plate for me and they all thought that I was going to announce that I was going to quit but I just got there and didn’t and oh man.
Idea for a pretend talk show called “Spirit-ish Dang” where they play bad jazz in the background. We talk about pseudo metaphysical religious ideas; a text msg. from Tom; a movie based on a Chekov short story. But the movie was modern and Chekov was "like way back in the day" …but the movie was really good. Space-age possibly.
There was a drink called “sea breeze.” It came in a sunscreen bottle. I had some left over from when I was in the Czech republic. I was looking over this article I’d written when I was at CESTA, it was about some woman named Brittany who was a friend of the art exhibit which was some kind of walk or parade down this mountain. Somebody was pulling a toy airplane behind them. Apparently it had to do with feminism. Or more like (serious voice) “post-feminism…” I was having a birthday party at a cabin I was living in. Trent—why does Trent always show up? He’ responsible, I guess. Helping me clean beforehand, or something. We’re listening to Beat Happening. I had, not only THE whale shark, but a big green shark too! Several other stuffed animals. This is a little disconcerting. Um. That’s where we were drinking the sea breeze drink. Right as I was waking up. People were beginning to arrive for the party. A van pulls up carrying people who are sleeping. Awake and asleep in the back at the same time. My brother and Jacob Newton are lying in a sleeping bag back there. My brother got out. He had an orange hunting sweatshirt on. I was worried that my neighbor’s (but why would I be worried- I lived in a cabin!)… I worried about my neighbors because it would be loud.
Nick had a confused, socially-awkward, worried look on his face. But he hadn’t gotten to the part where he told me what he was worried about yet.
I was showing my mom that I was on a website for the article I’d written for the thing in the Czech Republic. Except the caption they had on there was about goat herding. I had long hair. It was confusing. Kate was home, too.
I go inside the building that’s next to the Freeman’s house, where Rambling Rd. Pediatrics used to be. I was going to ask Diane if I could borrow a camera that I was sure she had, but instead I went inside the building and there were old pianos and arcade games everywhere and the electricity still seemed to be on. I found a nickel that was ten times the normal size lying on a piano bench. I put money in one of the pianos and one of the machines and it turned into this grocery store where everything had fallen off the shelves. Inside the store I ran into my brother, Bojean, and Drew and they all said they were coming to my birthday party and they didn’t know each other.
…recording the noises of something crunching underfoot while walking really good noises of walking, they were yellow-ish, the things. There was a thing that looked like my sound recorder I plugged it into.
You came home with me to visit my family. Taking a shower. Couldn’t find soap, asked me for it. I brought you some grapefruit and the crossword puzzle I stole from my mother’s room. Even though she was about to mail it somewhere. When you came out of the bathroom you were wearing my clothes. They fit you. You seemed smaller than I thought you were. Since they fit you. It wasn’t even a test. Wasn’t a test. My father saw you wearing my clothes. I thought they looked good on you. Kind of.
“You can spend all the money on young one/anyone? you want” this is a guy telling me a story after he didn’t go very well at a poetry slam and booooy I did spend forever. He was telling me about hitch hiking to get there and how he got these really great clothes from a garbage bin and a guy who nearly slit his throat and some lady named Shelley who wouldn’t go to the thing with him, and this kid he met whose cell phone number he had just in case they wanted to call to hang out.
This guy was the guy that Time magazine named “Man of the Year” in some move of super-sentimentality they named some random unemployed construction worker whose daughter was fourteen years old and sent in a ruler for some reason, in order to say “you should choose my dad for man of the year because when I hold this ruler up to his face or his cheek or something…”
Earlier I was crawling around and ran through the secret exit to the factory, the dream factory that only exists in my head. I was there with two other people who hadn’t been there before… we were spending too much time there, just sitting in the sawdust and talking and I heard people coming so I decided I had to get out of there. I went up to the secret escape part where you climb up over all the heating ducts and stuff and I had to walk out by the part where there were people working in the research and development area and there were security guards. I walked briskly out, well, almost out, I was doing really good even though I didn’t have shoes on and my clothes were all baggy/raggedly and I didn’t look like I belonged in this computer part of the factory but then I fell asleepin mid-escape. And it kind of (spoken with corners of mouth splayed out and pulled toward shoulders) meshhhed up mah plans…
some flooded lunchroom at an irish catholic school, all the cups and tables and chairs floating, filled up with water.
Went to the casino with my grandpa and grandma, they gave me change to turn into tokens to play games. I met a little kid and her mom at the coin changer booth. The mom was working and the kid was doing some worksheet for school about ethos, pathos and logos. I started talking to the mom about how tough times were and she said before she had this job her family had had some really good streak of luck or something and they’d driven their camper out somewhere to clear some land these people from Chicago bought and they’d just been backpacking.
Going on a ski trip in the alps with my brother and my dad. While I’m packing I find something from when my girlscout troop meant in the basement of the church. My backpack was handmade, it was a huge cardboard/wooden box that went on your head (it resembled a desk). It was really uncomfortable and unfashionable.
Message relayed: “yes there is love there, but be careful what you…put in it? Make of it?” It’s okay to love but don’t rely on it.
I left a note on my shoes. It was a post-it note. It said “I lied, I’m sorry.” I put it on the garage door so that when my parents got home they would know that we were home and we hadn’t gone back to school like we were supposed to. It was my idea to put the post-it note there. My brother was home- we were somehow adults, but also, maybe eleven at the same time. We were talking about a sociological idea…some kind of response…and night clubs. Earlier in the day we were supposed to be in school but the younger siblings that were us, but not us at the same time- two or three girls and a boy-we came home for lunch. We had like five cats and the garage door was open and one of them had gotten out and stayed out and gotten injured somehow. It looked like a little piece of watermelon, the cat…an eye or just a little sunflower seed. Maybe that was its name, Sunflower. Anyway, the cat got injured and we got sad, and we didn’t want to go back to school. So we didn’t. But the neighbor lady caught us, saw us. We tried to lie to her, said we got immunized and that’s why we didn’t go. But that’s not true.
To-do list that I can’t remember. Doing something for Justin. The whole while walking through the woods, remembering walking through the woods. Remembering walking through the woods populated by roadside trash and the ugly backs of heads. I think this represented my memories of j.nemier and some creepy dude from a football team. Talking to my mom about taking painkillers. We were sitting on a roof somewhere. It was windy. We could almost not fall off. I don’t know what we were doing up there it was awful. She was telling me about a play that she forced herself to write when she was snowed in. It was about somebody in Paris who couldn’t leave their house either but it was in Paris and that element helped her…write it?
Crashed some Jewish wedding with Karrie. I had a 12 hr. layover at JFK. There’s a slideshow that went with music where we saw some pictures of Charles Darwin, or someone named Charles Darkin. Maybe both. Maybe the same guy. Facebook with video intros to people’s pages. Brian Lee’s slogan was “.,..ya busy?”
Justin is talking about waking up and hanging out in the snow.
Mark H. and somebody were talking about getting up at 5 to take someone to the airport. They were gonna have a really good party at 5am when they woke up. Fernando was like “Heeyyyy, let me come!” And they said “well you have to bring your own drinks…or your own weed or something.” It was like I was Fernando and they were talking to me? The place that we were looked like some restored/Italian villa version of the insane asylum in Kalamazoo. Doug and Elysabeth were there.
We’ll just take that sentence and see what it means:
judging a shirt or a sticker with the name of that poet on it,
the word is “rusty”
a sticker or a windbreaker or something like that.
Paranoid facebook dream…
when this happens it is spring. - dresses up like - and I end up sleeping with him and it’s really great but then I find out it’s really -.
Even thinking about the pond at the nature center my face feels like there’s flies all over it. I can see his face floating everywhere along the leaves.
Sun and moon that was spectatular! I performed the solar eclipse. How everything loses, surrenders? its engine? and regains it. How the moon sparkles and dripped like the last bit of spray paint in a round round jar. If that was a poem I sounded like a “wintermintablegabull”
Maybe some advice about every lover’s face equaling the same face—but I don’t believe that, I don’t believe that!
My poem kept colored Christina in pink and white another one has a glint of blue in it and don’t ever ask a poet what color the poem is, what color the poem is, or the notebook or the paper is because they shouldn’t be able to see it.
“I’m gonna go see a movie it’s too bad to talk” this is a song lyric.
They found a body at the bottom of the man-made salt resevoir. The accident happened while I was hitching a ride on the back of a scooter. The scooter was being pulled by a car. I didn’t know the driver. I didn’t even have a helmet on. All these police cars and fire trucks went by. The people I was riding with—I was so scared they were gonna crash and my brains was gonna spill everywhere. The person who was gonna dive for the body was a teenage girl, young, young—she didn’t’ seem phased by it. Somehow related to some images/thing of softball game. Other people are playing and it’s gonna be my turn soon. Somebody hit’s a ball way out in the outfield and if I was out there I coulda caught them. I always feel like that.
Series of intense awkwardness around men—strangers, everyone. I just can’t seem to stop thinking about sex and it makes me trip and fall down when I’m walking I feel like if I look people in the eye they can see that sometimes the sentence “you can only carry a sketchbook, you can only look at it.” A sketchbook being about fucking. Something about -. Seems so cliché to have dreams that involve that man. But they happen. He wears that stripey shirt that makes him look like a popcorn seller. It’s…um…an attractive shirt.
Sometimes I like to feel sorry for myself and think other people are eating dinner with their families but I think most people are eating dinner in their cars or televisions or computers.
Candace sold the jewelry drawer for like twenty-thousand four hundred dollars.
Before that, the sentence “it was a set-up: the cashier’s fumbling change around the register.”
Maybe it meant then there was a metaphorical dead body floating in my adolescent emotional past?
Febuary 13 ...am not asleep, just talkin’, talkin’ up a storm ummmm Jeez. I wanna put my brain in your brain. You hear me? I wanna put my brain in your brain. You don’t even know how this would feel or how I feel we never talked about it before but it would be intimate. In it. You want it? I have it. You have it? I want it. I wanna share it. Do you have it? Yeah. Uh-huh. Mmmm.
Somewhere real rural. Lots of sky between the rusted-out farm equipment. Some boarding school with Tess. We find a thing of beer, a keg? We’re in the elevator with an old mattress. She runs into an old friend of hers who is a bum, asks if he can put us up for the night. There’s this German chic with us. I guess we drink it and have a good time. The best part is stealing it though. Being in an elevator we’re not supposed to be in.
Keep seeing people from town who have no idea what bad news we’re getting into. It’s kind of frustrating.
Your buzzword names from the dreaming days?
I think I got to be super-spy police detective woman action hero last night. Helping to tie the ribbon away.
I wanna know about yardstick, I wanna know about movable fort above the floor with wheels and holes that match up. It’s made of wood and there’s books inside. I wanna know about everything.
Just fell on the floor somewhere I thought about where. Kept watching the show, a horse and a buggy. Laura Ingalls Wilder, life on the prairie. And sun some perfect cure who knows those things to…
One: put bird in it. Two: recycle. Three: a long gray dress. Four: a lotta limes and a lie.
I have all the pieces of mango and orange juice coming/covered in.
Making dresses for crazy people. It was a twisted/complicated plot. Pouring some type of mortar in it with clues. There’s this guy driving around chasing me and he says my grandma’s gonna get shot and then people will tell them or tell on me, eventually they would get back to me but they were looking and he would call me and say “Shirley Kerly I know you wore a red cap today and then you decided to do this.”
It’s time to rent a limosine and go to Las Vegas with my friends and…it was probably Bradley’s idea but then he decided it wasn’t a good idea anyway that ended with a bunch
of people giving eachother dress? haircuts in the kitchen and I stabbed someone with scissors but it was comical in the end because we had to try so many times and it hadn’t worked out it was like a play. The dress haircuts were really fun snipping around dresses people were wearing over their clothes, tailoring them, they were all too big. It was really nice.
Changing my clothes in the field behind the factory I told somebody to wait for them while I explored and found some clean ones. I wanted to change into them. Who was I with? It was so brilliantly sunny out and strange there. I think I was with Justin and maybe Bradley. While I was mid-clothing/nude a bunch of worker guys showed up. I fumbled and of course had trouble putting the clothes on. I took Katie, Dale, and Fernando and they had built a sculpture off to one side and I had built something to, by myself, of course, off by myself in the corner. They left a big note on theirs about “don’t wreck this! or we’ll wreck you!” and I tried to explain to them something like “you just have to accept that things fall apart…” You can’t expect it to not get wrecked if you’re building a sculpture in an abandoned factory. I can’t remember what I built or what I made. It’s the same factory always, always is in dreams, different parts…old creeeaaaky. Like my parent’s basement and the scaffolding of an imaginary NYC and of the real factory and that place where the chicken factory by the railroad, factory up north, all those at once.
Something is stuck inside the walls. Pieces of palm trees and bamboo, a commercial. Weird yellow golden. Wandering through empty coffee packages, just empty things and empty rooms. Instructions in thick books on how to fill them.
Cartoon people like from the Sunday paper. Green and white striped shirts. Nothing too perfect. Survey: a dry piece of the rock-bottom. Up from below. Arson is a bath invented by an owl. There’s a nice big empty chair looking at the ocean. You were part of the three/the dream. It was black outside and shiny. I didn’t open it yet, didn’t read it yet. There was something in the sky, no message. Like thin leaves on the surface of water, taking time for things to shiver their way up there.
Just the photographs and buttons are enough. I know from the same place. There is someone from the same place.
Throwing a penny at the sky: even if it falls faster than (up?) it’s okay.
Feb. 18 (above)
Taking to Paige from CESTA about so much work being done in the space. The space became like a communal tent. Talking about the connotations of the world tent. After politics. And oh shit something else. Reading an email invitation from some girls or bands that needed photographers, about time and space, and I hoped it was still there.
Biology/Science class. I was a student with all of my students. The teacher was giving a demonstration where he poured a bunch of soup on the floor. I expected it to start being like some hack job/stain remover guy but he wasn’t, he was proving some theory that at the TIIIIME made sense. Now I’m not so sure because I can’t remember.
Went to a Christmas party at Sally/Mcnally’s house. I was really late. Really confused. There was a huge amount of food and wine, liquor. It was really decadent. I was there with Katie and were trying to leave but we needed to say bye to Sally but she wasn’t around. There was all this drama because she was leaving her husband and it kept being that night and the day before and the morning after all at the same time. In the dream she had a bunch of sons. One of them, named Abraham, ofcourse, was quite cute.
I was babysitting…maybe myself. At Victor (from radiophx?)’s house. He had two houses. He was at work. Before the Radio phx meeting. I worked too late. I was six or seven hours late to the meeting. There was this cold, weird piece of steak on the plate for me and they all thought that I was going to announce that I was going to quit but I just got there and didn’t and oh man.
Idea for a pretend talk show called “Spirit-ish Dang” where they play bad jazz in the background. We talk about pseudo metaphysical religious ideas; a text msg. from Tom; a movie based on a Chekov short story. But the movie was modern and Chekov was "like way back in the day" …but the movie was really good. Space-age possibly.
There was a drink called “sea breeze.” It came in a sunscreen bottle. I had some left over from when I was in the Czech republic. I was looking over this article I’d written when I was at CESTA, it was about some woman named Brittany who was a friend of the art exhibit which was some kind of walk or parade down this mountain. Somebody was pulling a toy airplane behind them. Apparently it had to do with feminism. Or more like (serious voice) “post-feminism…” I was having a birthday party at a cabin I was living in. Trent—why does Trent always show up? He’ responsible, I guess. Helping me clean beforehand, or something. We’re listening to Beat Happening. I had, not only THE whale shark, but a big green shark too! Several other stuffed animals. This is a little disconcerting. Um. That’s where we were drinking the sea breeze drink. Right as I was waking up. People were beginning to arrive for the party. A van pulls up carrying people who are sleeping. Awake and asleep in the back at the same time. My brother and Jacob Newton are lying in a sleeping bag back there. My brother got out. He had an orange hunting sweatshirt on. I was worried that my neighbor’s (but why would I be worried- I lived in a cabin!)… I worried about my neighbors because it would be loud.
Nick had a confused, socially-awkward, worried look on his face. But he hadn’t gotten to the part where he told me what he was worried about yet.
I was showing my mom that I was on a website for the article I’d written for the thing in the Czech Republic. Except the caption they had on there was about goat herding. I had long hair. It was confusing. Kate was home, too.
I go inside the building that’s next to the Freeman’s house, where Rambling Rd. Pediatrics used to be. I was going to ask Diane if I could borrow a camera that I was sure she had, but instead I went inside the building and there were old pianos and arcade games everywhere and the electricity still seemed to be on. I found a nickel that was ten times the normal size lying on a piano bench. I put money in one of the pianos and one of the machines and it turned into this grocery store where everything had fallen off the shelves. Inside the store I ran into my brother, Bojean, and Drew and they all said they were coming to my birthday party and they didn’t know each other.
…recording the noises of something crunching underfoot while walking really good noises of walking, they were yellow-ish, the things. There was a thing that looked like my sound recorder I plugged it into.
You came home with me to visit my family. Taking a shower. Couldn’t find soap, asked me for it. I brought you some grapefruit and the crossword puzzle I stole from my mother’s room. Even though she was about to mail it somewhere. When you came out of the bathroom you were wearing my clothes. They fit you. You seemed smaller than I thought you were. Since they fit you. It wasn’t even a test. Wasn’t a test. My father saw you wearing my clothes. I thought they looked good on you. Kind of.
“You can spend all the money on young one/anyone? you want” this is a guy telling me a story after he didn’t go very well at a poetry slam and booooy I did spend forever. He was telling me about hitch hiking to get there and how he got these really great clothes from a garbage bin and a guy who nearly slit his throat and some lady named Shelley who wouldn’t go to the thing with him, and this kid he met whose cell phone number he had just in case they wanted to call to hang out.
This guy was the guy that Time magazine named “Man of the Year” in some move of super-sentimentality they named some random unemployed construction worker whose daughter was fourteen years old and sent in a ruler for some reason, in order to say “you should choose my dad for man of the year because when I hold this ruler up to his face or his cheek or something…”
Earlier I was crawling around and ran through the secret exit to the factory, the dream factory that only exists in my head. I was there with two other people who hadn’t been there before… we were spending too much time there, just sitting in the sawdust and talking and I heard people coming so I decided I had to get out of there. I went up to the secret escape part where you climb up over all the heating ducts and stuff and I had to walk out by the part where there were people working in the research and development area and there were security guards. I walked briskly out, well, almost out, I was doing really good even though I didn’t have shoes on and my clothes were all baggy/raggedly and I didn’t look like I belonged in this computer part of the factory but then I fell asleepin mid-escape. And it kind of (spoken with corners of mouth splayed out and pulled toward shoulders) meshhhed up mah plans…
some flooded lunchroom at an irish catholic school, all the cups and tables and chairs floating, filled up with water.
Went to the casino with my grandpa and grandma, they gave me change to turn into tokens to play games. I met a little kid and her mom at the coin changer booth. The mom was working and the kid was doing some worksheet for school about ethos, pathos and logos. I started talking to the mom about how tough times were and she said before she had this job her family had had some really good streak of luck or something and they’d driven their camper out somewhere to clear some land these people from Chicago bought and they’d just been backpacking.
Going on a ski trip in the alps with my brother and my dad. While I’m packing I find something from when my girlscout troop meant in the basement of the church. My backpack was handmade, it was a huge cardboard/wooden box that went on your head (it resembled a desk). It was really uncomfortable and unfashionable.
Message relayed: “yes there is love there, but be careful what you…put in it? Make of it?” It’s okay to love but don’t rely on it.
I left a note on my shoes. It was a post-it note. It said “I lied, I’m sorry.” I put it on the garage door so that when my parents got home they would know that we were home and we hadn’t gone back to school like we were supposed to. It was my idea to put the post-it note there. My brother was home- we were somehow adults, but also, maybe eleven at the same time. We were talking about a sociological idea…some kind of response…and night clubs. Earlier in the day we were supposed to be in school but the younger siblings that were us, but not us at the same time- two or three girls and a boy-we came home for lunch. We had like five cats and the garage door was open and one of them had gotten out and stayed out and gotten injured somehow. It looked like a little piece of watermelon, the cat…an eye or just a little sunflower seed. Maybe that was its name, Sunflower. Anyway, the cat got injured and we got sad, and we didn’t want to go back to school. So we didn’t. But the neighbor lady caught us, saw us. We tried to lie to her, said we got immunized and that’s why we didn’t go. But that’s not true.
To-do list that I can’t remember. Doing something for Justin. The whole while walking through the woods, remembering walking through the woods. Remembering walking through the woods populated by roadside trash and the ugly backs of heads. I think this represented my memories of j.nemier and some creepy dude from a football team. Talking to my mom about taking painkillers. We were sitting on a roof somewhere. It was windy. We could almost not fall off. I don’t know what we were doing up there it was awful. She was telling me about a play that she forced herself to write when she was snowed in. It was about somebody in Paris who couldn’t leave their house either but it was in Paris and that element helped her…write it?
Crashed some Jewish wedding with Karrie. I had a 12 hr. layover at JFK. There’s a slideshow that went with music where we saw some pictures of Charles Darwin, or someone named Charles Darkin. Maybe both. Maybe the same guy. Facebook with video intros to people’s pages. Brian Lee’s slogan was “.,..ya busy?”
Saturday, February 5, 2011
So I've been using a tape recorder in the morning instead of my semi-illegible handwriting. Lots of information. Maybe too much...
jan 25 2011
there was a textbook full of weather pictures they did the same thing my phone does
how it shook and moved
it was important for driving
it might’ve been stormy
I cannot drink fast enough, running out of wine. At my family’s home, getting ready to go see bud for the last time or what my mother says will be the last time. For some reason she thinks that I don’t care to go and that my brother and I both don’t care. And this is not true. Kate, and Nick, and Mom are all going together, leaving me with my dad, which is fine but they’ve been picking on me. I hear Kate say to my mother that I said—I never said this— “I hated the smell of condoms so much that I had to wash them before I used them.” But that’s not true! That was some thing she was bringing up about how I was going to get pregnant.
Some holiday hangout with my family. We have this crazy dance circle in my grandma’s house and me and Allison, Billy and Clara, and we’re all really young. There’s some soul cover of a Michael Jackson song. My grandma started shopping at the food co-op.
In somewhere that looks like Euguene for a conference. Walking by myself by what looks like a lake. I see people who are in love. A black woman who looks like she is pregnant and her husband go into a house. They look happy, wrestling on a bed.
But then I am not there for a conference,
maybe for a friend’s wedding…Brittany is there and Anna is there, well, pretty much everybody is there, it’s one of those deals. We’re all in some big old building and it’s kinda leaky and rainy and everybody’s gonna read poems and dance it’s gonna be a goooood time. Britanny talks about photographing this girl she used to be friends with, until the girl got some weird disease that made her age really fast and Brittany didn’t want to take pictures of her because she didn’t look like the same person anymore.
Some time at Beth Staples’ house talking about bartending and she has this great old big that’s a family heirloom filled with handwritten recipes for drinks. She has really big eyebrows and looks like she’s in fourth grade.
Everybody at this wedding or wherever I was, they had on old pins, not on purpose but they just all did, kind of like the penguin one that Justin gave me that I’m wearing and they all had some story behind their’s.
Sometime when I was wandering in the pacific northwest I stopped by Kevin’s to get something and could just hear him and his girlfriend talking, not the girlfriend he has now, but some other one. I could just hear them making fun of someone about office supplies. I still didn’t want to hear it but I guess it was okay.
(not asleep yet. 1/26 no 27…
(Let’s Go To A Death Metal Concert)
The building is burning, I am in my pickup truck.
The fire and smoke make everything look like a movie from the seventies.
In the movie, I am the woman. This is a problem—
sitting in the sink applying lipstick, clamoring for something.
You are tan and unconcerned. This makes you beautiful.
I don’t know where the plot is going. It’s that long part
during the first six hours before we say anything.)
I went in a church because I wanted some… I thought I get some wax that was melting. I thought I could use it for some project I was working on. When I went inside I got scared about stealing inside of a church so I grabbed a candy cane and sat down in one of the pews. It was really, really dark in there except for some candles. They were playing 104.3, some terrible, new song about cowboys where they say “giddyup wah ha ha ha ha” you know, I mean I don’t know. There was a confessional booth in the back and I was sure there were priests in there that were gonna see me stealing the wax. I can’t remember what I even needed it for. Then I fell asleep in the church, woke up, ohhhheuuehheee! Scary.
I tried to get m to move back east. He kept doing the dishes and didn’t move.
Fernando had this plan we were gonna have to murder someone and I don’t remember why. We were testing the gun out outside my apartment and some test-blood got on the ground. We tried to wipe it up with some hydrogen peroxide but it started bleaching the sidewalk. Someone across the courtyard was watching me.
Wandering through a town that didn’t used to exist but exists now it’s somewhere near my hometown. I was with maybe Allyson Boggess and Anna Herdeck. We were gonna go out to lunch somewhere, it was all adult-like. We’d been wandering around the town for so long that I’d ended up seeing names or signs or references to ex-boyfriends of mine and I felt like a skeezy little person.
Talking with Alex or Ryan maybe but I was mailing it in the mail and trying to describe everything like he was here like on the phone last night and there was a green room. It had carped like the color of my sweater, like the color of lichen. This room was where we had once manufactured tornadoes in Kalamazoo. We being my friends and I, somehow.
Jan 29
I’d been trying to tell a story about making out with somebody to my brother but I didn’t want someone else to find out so I confused the story so much that I don’t even know what I was talking about. I really didn’t know. And my brother said “was he a truck driver?” And I said “yeah,” but that’s not what I meant. And there’s a piano. Hmmm.
Something about it was textural like the inside skin was good and the outside skin was…good. Maybe I was talking about zucchini, maybe I was talking about books, tuxedos. I don’t know.
It sounds much better than it looks. And It feels much better than it sounds.
Some story about Hibachi suits, which were some suits for Japanese…fighting?
I went to get ice cream with my family somewhere maybe near Yellowstone park. It was talking forever, like an hour. Of course I was last and I didn’t know what I want because I don’t like ingesting things like that. I ended up flirting with someone who worked there and they took me in the back to show me how the ice cream was made but really we just smoked some pot and then somebody brought me an old-looking bottle of Corona. It was very pretty and had a navy blue label then I remembered my family was waiting outside and I got all paranoid. The kids had some deal worked out where they didn’t have to pay rent and were working for very little money. They seemed alright, for (?) hippies.
Tom had been sending me these scripts as text message things. About how he was or where he was but there were so many theres and wheres and hows of them I had to take a break and go walking out in that snow forest. This is he was from Vietnam war and I was a woman on the sidelines of the Spanish civil war but I lost my phone so I didn’t know my lines. I had this beautiful dress and in a tent in the middle of some grassy set of a battlefield. He walked in through a door and put something in a laundry basket.
Out walking in the woods after I was watching a weather report that said it was going to get cold and snow here. I was walking somewhere that looked like Asylum Lake but it was in Arizona. All the leaves that were still left on the trees were incredibly orange and the path was soggy and flooded but also snowing, I almost went into the lake. I realized that there were so many animals and things I was stepping on…little deer and these little coyoteish things but they were tiny, the size of a chihauha, but a little bit bigger. I realized in the water there was this big wolf-thing swimming so I held really still and then it stood up and turned into this lonesome old man. It was kind of scary.
I lived with Brittany somewhere near Portland but in Oregon, a few hours away. There was mail delivered to our apartment. It was not for us. It was the wrong address. I told the postman I would keep it no matter what but before I even saw it but Brittany told him he should take it and deliver it. I saw it in his hand it was from ?. There was some note about pictures, a tape. Jealousy? How do I deal with it in my dreams?
I was listening to and watching the weather report about snow they did this thing where they showed what it would look like if the colors were all enhanced and the leaves were all oranger. Before I was actually walking in it. They said “wonder what it’ll look like when we get all that snow.” And the other newscaster was like “wonder what it’d be like to get married out here.”
My grandmother or my great-grandmother was staying with me, or next door or something, and she was laying down to go to sleep. She was talking about how much her body hurt, how painful it was and I could feel it for a second. I was telling her about something about thinking how good it would feel for the pain to be gone, how dying would be some kind of release. I could feel her thinking that as if it was some release as she went to sleep.
What is a mating can? They keep them over there by the dirty dishes. This is funny to people who have been doing dishes together. When they’ve known each other for a long time, when they’ve been hidden under blankets together when someone’s mother is in the next room.
This was away from the town where I’d been living in and collecting mail. This was near or in some lonely mountain range. I’ve been there before climbing rocks when it’s almost really windy like that time on dmt on the beach in san Francisco, that windy that sound. But it was a different season and this was a really lonely western mountain range. Something that makes you think of pioneers.
Tom asks me if I am happy when I seem him very rarely in the dreams of late. Maybe I went to visit him. I went to visit him. I don’t know if I’d said I was coming. It was confusing as high school.
I had to take a trailer full of firewood or kindling to the coast. Outside the window was a blue and white fishing pole that wasn’t used for fishing it was used for opening the window if you can’t reach or there’s only some special way to it.
I went to go see my father. He was re-planting a garden. He helped me fix a moped/bbq grill that one could drive around town. I was getting ready to drive it but we didn’t have a helmet so I wore two winter hats instead.
Listened to a special segment on the radio about people who were vaguely related to other people who did something that made them famous but not necessarily. Oh, it was the interview with the nephew of some guy who wrote some songs that were really popular but they weren’t any good.
I was gonna go sledding if I could just get one more word…collecting them from strangers, not the words but the definitions…in empty olive jars and kombucha tea bottles and twigs outside.
I was on some tour where I was collecting the definitions of things from strangers: just talking to them about what different words meant. It was really good, really good, I wanna do it.
The words would collect inside the jars, looked vapor-y almost. My mom understood and also we went to the thrift store and we had dreams about The floor looked like the floor of the church where there were girl scout meetings and everything was stacked in no particular order but it fit nice, concentrically. It just matched up, the edges matched up. All the vaccum cleaners I saw earlier were there. Can’t remember what we bought but we got something…
Went to a conference with J-Lo and I kept seeing her in the morning folding her underwear with my landlord. It was disgusting.
I made muffins but I kept them in the bathroom and they got really really big and moldy like right over night. Somebody showed me a picture of Drew and Ben from Portland changing the sign from Umpqua bank to Wachovia bank. There was a caption like “An Old Haunt” or something.
Rabbits would grow wings but they were just decorative. The couldn’t use them to fly with, they looked like couch cushions or saddles.
Phantom singing, fake book covers, something about antelope, a pair of pants, I was taking a test that I didn’t know the answer I didn’t know about a person who was technically dead, they were having a “brain surge” something that happened that made them still able to survive the thing…what was it? One of four answers and I got it wrong on the practice test the year before and I didn’t know what to do and somebody said it was aspirin and somebody said it was codeine but I didn’t know what the answer was. It was like I was back in high school except all my students that are my students now were my fellow students. There were these women in the hallway they were dressing up for school projects like you’d never believe—there was this girl that was wearing normal clothes but she had her hair done up like an angel, like a greek goddess… she had these weird tufts on the sides and her hair was sticking out, literally, well, no, figuratively, well for like… ahhhhhh three feet. There was another girl with really good hair for a different project but I can’t remember it but they were so into. Dramatic. Excited. Paraclitus? Paracletus? Was one that they were dressed up as. All the people that were taking the test…we were in a house. There was a beautiful attic. IT was almost like a party before it but then there was a test. I think my census boss was giving the test. I think his hair looked like the girls’ hair in the high school hallways. There was something having to do with flying and canoes. We were on teams. But I got there late. Why? I was trying to cook something, I think, in the yard. A different yard. Yes. There was a box of meat that I’d found in my parent’s house that I’d found. We had company and we were running low on whatever you put on the grill. I was walking through the house with…smelt? It was some kind of fish but it looked like a box of air filters and my dad told me what it was. It was still frozen. I was gonna cook it like that but he said “first you have to defrost it.” I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Near the house of young people taking a test I was in a bedroom that looked like my friend Anna’s bedroom from childhood, kind of like an apartment in Traverse City where I’d last seen zw… He was there with his eighteen year old Latina girflfriend? She was just so young and quiet. It was weird. She left with her friends who looked like these girls I saw when I was running through Mesa. They were also very young. All I wanted to ask him in a polite manner was “whoa whoa why is your girlfriend like half your age?” But he started going on about some how I care about you and haven’t seen you for years and years, which was nice and believable but I was annoyed because his shirt was buttoned all the way up to the top button. Not annoyed because I wanted him to take it off, but because it looked like it was too tight. Yeah.
I just wanted to show people how flexible I was.
Driving around with Trent and somebody else who’d moved out west, telling me what the difference… No, I was talking about Trent? The difference between living in the “buried east” and the “lonesome west.” How the lonesome west was scarier, but better, there was more…opportunity? here. We were driving through Seattle. I was helping somebody move. They had a room open to sublease and I wanted to take it but I started thinking I might get into grad school. We were driving around and the sky was many different colors at once blues with gray streaks in it just before sunset, kind of thing in the air where it had rained, but it wasn’t raining. The sun was out and everything was all glisten-y and the air was all… You know…like it is up there… Clean? Maybe.
I was working on a project with Ryan involving video. I was in Kalamazoo home to visit. I asked my mom if we could use the vcr for something. We had a video tape it was wrapped in something pink, this had nothing to do with the project, it was just what I was keeping it in.
Made muffins. There were cranberries in them. I remember when I was in Seattle-ish. It was that road [this is in Portland…] that curves at the bottom by the fruit stand on the hill coming down from Woodstock, 16th or 20th… I used to ride my bike by there when I worked at the sandwich shop. Somewhere in the car, maybe in a barn, somewhere else, maybe somebody’s parent’s talking about working as a janitor during world war two, needing so many rags to clean the blood up… how people are squeamish now.
Sleeping on the/a sun porch during Thanksgiving or some holiday. Stopped by to say hello. Ended up staying out of politeness. It was gum. There was so much gum. Mashed potatoes, seaweed, people moving furniture. Dogs. Dogs. m was there but he looked like someone else. It was like visiting another life. Like that actor from the shining. Or a raggled version of Bob Dylan from the Desire album cover, so confusing. And Trent was there who looked younger than always like always. Stopping by a stranger’s house for some holiday and they expect you to stay. Andy Woodard was there and he was apologizing. We were moving something, trying to do something across the country and the boy who I was with kept changing who they were. I don’t know. Fernando and his brother Carlos were there and they looked the ragglediest of them all but everyone seemed to be sunburnt and unshaven and dirty. Wherever we were… I don’t even know.
A little old Chinese woman who was friends with whoever I was with…we kept having to pretend that my stuff was the other girl who I was with’s stuff. She was friends with this woman who was somehow helping us. I had way too much stuff. I don’t know where I’d been or where I was going. I think I’d been out in the woods. There were light bulbs we were collecting from her house. There were clothes everywhere, these purple tights, some little girl writing messages. I’d been with my family. My cousins were all there. How confusing. At one point my aunt was talking to my grandma and my grandma tried to show her something in her eye and the front of her shirt goes up a little and my aunt says “oh, that’s how you keep looking so young, by getting cold?” …cause her stomach was showing. It was funny in the dream.
Watching footage of me as a child. I had bright orange hair. Then, later, I’m this age of a little younger. My mother says to me “you know, you’re young now, but when you grow up you’re going to be a lesbian.” And it seems to make sense to me how she said it.
there was a textbook full of weather pictures they did the same thing my phone does
how it shook and moved
it was important for driving
it might’ve been stormy
I cannot drink fast enough, running out of wine. At my family’s home, getting ready to go see bud for the last time or what my mother says will be the last time. For some reason she thinks that I don’t care to go and that my brother and I both don’t care. And this is not true. Kate, and Nick, and Mom are all going together, leaving me with my dad, which is fine but they’ve been picking on me. I hear Kate say to my mother that I said—I never said this— “I hated the smell of condoms so much that I had to wash them before I used them.” But that’s not true! That was some thing she was bringing up about how I was going to get pregnant.
Some holiday hangout with my family. We have this crazy dance circle in my grandma’s house and me and Allison, Billy and Clara, and we’re all really young. There’s some soul cover of a Michael Jackson song. My grandma started shopping at the food co-op.
In somewhere that looks like Euguene for a conference. Walking by myself by what looks like a lake. I see people who are in love. A black woman who looks like she is pregnant and her husband go into a house. They look happy, wrestling on a bed.
But then I am not there for a conference,
maybe for a friend’s wedding…Brittany is there and Anna is there, well, pretty much everybody is there, it’s one of those deals. We’re all in some big old building and it’s kinda leaky and rainy and everybody’s gonna read poems and dance it’s gonna be a goooood time. Britanny talks about photographing this girl she used to be friends with, until the girl got some weird disease that made her age really fast and Brittany didn’t want to take pictures of her because she didn’t look like the same person anymore.
Some time at Beth Staples’ house talking about bartending and she has this great old big that’s a family heirloom filled with handwritten recipes for drinks. She has really big eyebrows and looks like she’s in fourth grade.
Everybody at this wedding or wherever I was, they had on old pins, not on purpose but they just all did, kind of like the penguin one that Justin gave me that I’m wearing and they all had some story behind their’s.
Sometime when I was wandering in the pacific northwest I stopped by Kevin’s to get something and could just hear him and his girlfriend talking, not the girlfriend he has now, but some other one. I could just hear them making fun of someone about office supplies. I still didn’t want to hear it but I guess it was okay.
(not asleep yet. 1/26 no 27…
(Let’s Go To A Death Metal Concert)
The building is burning, I am in my pickup truck.
The fire and smoke make everything look like a movie from the seventies.
In the movie, I am the woman. This is a problem—
sitting in the sink applying lipstick, clamoring for something.
You are tan and unconcerned. This makes you beautiful.
I don’t know where the plot is going. It’s that long part
during the first six hours before we say anything.)
I went in a church because I wanted some… I thought I get some wax that was melting. I thought I could use it for some project I was working on. When I went inside I got scared about stealing inside of a church so I grabbed a candy cane and sat down in one of the pews. It was really, really dark in there except for some candles. They were playing 104.3, some terrible, new song about cowboys where they say “giddyup wah ha ha ha ha” you know, I mean I don’t know. There was a confessional booth in the back and I was sure there were priests in there that were gonna see me stealing the wax. I can’t remember what I even needed it for. Then I fell asleep in the church, woke up, ohhhheuuehheee! Scary.
I tried to get m to move back east. He kept doing the dishes and didn’t move.
Fernando had this plan we were gonna have to murder someone and I don’t remember why. We were testing the gun out outside my apartment and some test-blood got on the ground. We tried to wipe it up with some hydrogen peroxide but it started bleaching the sidewalk. Someone across the courtyard was watching me.
Wandering through a town that didn’t used to exist but exists now it’s somewhere near my hometown. I was with maybe Allyson Boggess and Anna Herdeck. We were gonna go out to lunch somewhere, it was all adult-like. We’d been wandering around the town for so long that I’d ended up seeing names or signs or references to ex-boyfriends of mine and I felt like a skeezy little person.
Talking with Alex or Ryan maybe but I was mailing it in the mail and trying to describe everything like he was here like on the phone last night and there was a green room. It had carped like the color of my sweater, like the color of lichen. This room was where we had once manufactured tornadoes in Kalamazoo. We being my friends and I, somehow.
Jan 29
I’d been trying to tell a story about making out with somebody to my brother but I didn’t want someone else to find out so I confused the story so much that I don’t even know what I was talking about. I really didn’t know. And my brother said “was he a truck driver?” And I said “yeah,” but that’s not what I meant. And there’s a piano. Hmmm.
Something about it was textural like the inside skin was good and the outside skin was…good. Maybe I was talking about zucchini, maybe I was talking about books, tuxedos. I don’t know.
It sounds much better than it looks. And It feels much better than it sounds.
Some story about Hibachi suits, which were some suits for Japanese…fighting?
I went to get ice cream with my family somewhere maybe near Yellowstone park. It was talking forever, like an hour. Of course I was last and I didn’t know what I want because I don’t like ingesting things like that. I ended up flirting with someone who worked there and they took me in the back to show me how the ice cream was made but really we just smoked some pot and then somebody brought me an old-looking bottle of Corona. It was very pretty and had a navy blue label then I remembered my family was waiting outside and I got all paranoid. The kids had some deal worked out where they didn’t have to pay rent and were working for very little money. They seemed alright, for (?) hippies.
Tom had been sending me these scripts as text message things. About how he was or where he was but there were so many theres and wheres and hows of them I had to take a break and go walking out in that snow forest. This is he was from Vietnam war and I was a woman on the sidelines of the Spanish civil war but I lost my phone so I didn’t know my lines. I had this beautiful dress and in a tent in the middle of some grassy set of a battlefield. He walked in through a door and put something in a laundry basket.
Out walking in the woods after I was watching a weather report that said it was going to get cold and snow here. I was walking somewhere that looked like Asylum Lake but it was in Arizona. All the leaves that were still left on the trees were incredibly orange and the path was soggy and flooded but also snowing, I almost went into the lake. I realized that there were so many animals and things I was stepping on…little deer and these little coyoteish things but they were tiny, the size of a chihauha, but a little bit bigger. I realized in the water there was this big wolf-thing swimming so I held really still and then it stood up and turned into this lonesome old man. It was kind of scary.
I lived with Brittany somewhere near Portland but in Oregon, a few hours away. There was mail delivered to our apartment. It was not for us. It was the wrong address. I told the postman I would keep it no matter what but before I even saw it but Brittany told him he should take it and deliver it. I saw it in his hand it was from ?. There was some note about pictures, a tape. Jealousy? How do I deal with it in my dreams?
I was listening to and watching the weather report about snow they did this thing where they showed what it would look like if the colors were all enhanced and the leaves were all oranger. Before I was actually walking in it. They said “wonder what it’ll look like when we get all that snow.” And the other newscaster was like “wonder what it’d be like to get married out here.”
My grandmother or my great-grandmother was staying with me, or next door or something, and she was laying down to go to sleep. She was talking about how much her body hurt, how painful it was and I could feel it for a second. I was telling her about something about thinking how good it would feel for the pain to be gone, how dying would be some kind of release. I could feel her thinking that as if it was some release as she went to sleep.
What is a mating can? They keep them over there by the dirty dishes. This is funny to people who have been doing dishes together. When they’ve known each other for a long time, when they’ve been hidden under blankets together when someone’s mother is in the next room.
This was away from the town where I’d been living in and collecting mail. This was near or in some lonely mountain range. I’ve been there before climbing rocks when it’s almost really windy like that time on dmt on the beach in san Francisco, that windy that sound. But it was a different season and this was a really lonely western mountain range. Something that makes you think of pioneers.
Tom asks me if I am happy when I seem him very rarely in the dreams of late. Maybe I went to visit him. I went to visit him. I don’t know if I’d said I was coming. It was confusing as high school.
I had to take a trailer full of firewood or kindling to the coast. Outside the window was a blue and white fishing pole that wasn’t used for fishing it was used for opening the window if you can’t reach or there’s only some special way to it.
I went to go see my father. He was re-planting a garden. He helped me fix a moped/bbq grill that one could drive around town. I was getting ready to drive it but we didn’t have a helmet so I wore two winter hats instead.
Listened to a special segment on the radio about people who were vaguely related to other people who did something that made them famous but not necessarily. Oh, it was the interview with the nephew of some guy who wrote some songs that were really popular but they weren’t any good.
I was gonna go sledding if I could just get one more word…collecting them from strangers, not the words but the definitions…in empty olive jars and kombucha tea bottles and twigs outside.
I was on some tour where I was collecting the definitions of things from strangers: just talking to them about what different words meant. It was really good, really good, I wanna do it.
The words would collect inside the jars, looked vapor-y almost. My mom understood and also we went to the thrift store and we had dreams about The floor looked like the floor of the church where there were girl scout meetings and everything was stacked in no particular order but it fit nice, concentrically. It just matched up, the edges matched up. All the vaccum cleaners I saw earlier were there. Can’t remember what we bought but we got something…
Went to a conference with J-Lo and I kept seeing her in the morning folding her underwear with my landlord. It was disgusting.
I made muffins but I kept them in the bathroom and they got really really big and moldy like right over night. Somebody showed me a picture of Drew and Ben from Portland changing the sign from Umpqua bank to Wachovia bank. There was a caption like “An Old Haunt” or something.
Rabbits would grow wings but they were just decorative. The couldn’t use them to fly with, they looked like couch cushions or saddles.
Phantom singing, fake book covers, something about antelope, a pair of pants, I was taking a test that I didn’t know the answer I didn’t know about a person who was technically dead, they were having a “brain surge” something that happened that made them still able to survive the thing…what was it? One of four answers and I got it wrong on the practice test the year before and I didn’t know what to do and somebody said it was aspirin and somebody said it was codeine but I didn’t know what the answer was. It was like I was back in high school except all my students that are my students now were my fellow students. There were these women in the hallway they were dressing up for school projects like you’d never believe—there was this girl that was wearing normal clothes but she had her hair done up like an angel, like a greek goddess… she had these weird tufts on the sides and her hair was sticking out, literally, well, no, figuratively, well for like… ahhhhhh three feet. There was another girl with really good hair for a different project but I can’t remember it but they were so into. Dramatic. Excited. Paraclitus? Paracletus? Was one that they were dressed up as. All the people that were taking the test…we were in a house. There was a beautiful attic. IT was almost like a party before it but then there was a test. I think my census boss was giving the test. I think his hair looked like the girls’ hair in the high school hallways. There was something having to do with flying and canoes. We were on teams. But I got there late. Why? I was trying to cook something, I think, in the yard. A different yard. Yes. There was a box of meat that I’d found in my parent’s house that I’d found. We had company and we were running low on whatever you put on the grill. I was walking through the house with…smelt? It was some kind of fish but it looked like a box of air filters and my dad told me what it was. It was still frozen. I was gonna cook it like that but he said “first you have to defrost it.” I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Near the house of young people taking a test I was in a bedroom that looked like my friend Anna’s bedroom from childhood, kind of like an apartment in Traverse City where I’d last seen zw… He was there with his eighteen year old Latina girflfriend? She was just so young and quiet. It was weird. She left with her friends who looked like these girls I saw when I was running through Mesa. They were also very young. All I wanted to ask him in a polite manner was “whoa whoa why is your girlfriend like half your age?” But he started going on about some how I care about you and haven’t seen you for years and years, which was nice and believable but I was annoyed because his shirt was buttoned all the way up to the top button. Not annoyed because I wanted him to take it off, but because it looked like it was too tight. Yeah.
I just wanted to show people how flexible I was.
Driving around with Trent and somebody else who’d moved out west, telling me what the difference… No, I was talking about Trent? The difference between living in the “buried east” and the “lonesome west.” How the lonesome west was scarier, but better, there was more…opportunity? here. We were driving through Seattle. I was helping somebody move. They had a room open to sublease and I wanted to take it but I started thinking I might get into grad school. We were driving around and the sky was many different colors at once blues with gray streaks in it just before sunset, kind of thing in the air where it had rained, but it wasn’t raining. The sun was out and everything was all glisten-y and the air was all… You know…like it is up there… Clean? Maybe.
I was working on a project with Ryan involving video. I was in Kalamazoo home to visit. I asked my mom if we could use the vcr for something. We had a video tape it was wrapped in something pink, this had nothing to do with the project, it was just what I was keeping it in.
Made muffins. There were cranberries in them. I remember when I was in Seattle-ish. It was that road [this is in Portland…] that curves at the bottom by the fruit stand on the hill coming down from Woodstock, 16th or 20th… I used to ride my bike by there when I worked at the sandwich shop. Somewhere in the car, maybe in a barn, somewhere else, maybe somebody’s parent’s talking about working as a janitor during world war two, needing so many rags to clean the blood up… how people are squeamish now.
Sleeping on the/a sun porch during Thanksgiving or some holiday. Stopped by to say hello. Ended up staying out of politeness. It was gum. There was so much gum. Mashed potatoes, seaweed, people moving furniture. Dogs. Dogs. m was there but he looked like someone else. It was like visiting another life. Like that actor from the shining. Or a raggled version of Bob Dylan from the Desire album cover, so confusing. And Trent was there who looked younger than always like always. Stopping by a stranger’s house for some holiday and they expect you to stay. Andy Woodard was there and he was apologizing. We were moving something, trying to do something across the country and the boy who I was with kept changing who they were. I don’t know. Fernando and his brother Carlos were there and they looked the ragglediest of them all but everyone seemed to be sunburnt and unshaven and dirty. Wherever we were… I don’t even know.
A little old Chinese woman who was friends with whoever I was with…we kept having to pretend that my stuff was the other girl who I was with’s stuff. She was friends with this woman who was somehow helping us. I had way too much stuff. I don’t know where I’d been or where I was going. I think I’d been out in the woods. There were light bulbs we were collecting from her house. There were clothes everywhere, these purple tights, some little girl writing messages. I’d been with my family. My cousins were all there. How confusing. At one point my aunt was talking to my grandma and my grandma tried to show her something in her eye and the front of her shirt goes up a little and my aunt says “oh, that’s how you keep looking so young, by getting cold?” …cause her stomach was showing. It was funny in the dream.
Watching footage of me as a child. I had bright orange hair. Then, later, I’m this age of a little younger. My mother says to me “you know, you’re young now, but when you grow up you’re going to be a lesbian.” And it seems to make sense to me how she said it.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Giant Celestial Microwave: December, January...
1/19/11
Sitting on a couch-bench bus stop in Eugene / Edison Neighborhood, Kalamazoo. I was using a giant magic 8 ball that someone had modified to have collage answers from old records/magazines. I found $14 in the couch, gave up my magic 8 ball to some bratty teenage girls who were wandering through siren noises on James St.. I went to a gas station to squander my findings on chocolate soft-serve frozen yogurt, but the machine was broken.
--
An ex-lover writes this about me: “you were wearing those earrings,
the hooped ones with the clasps/ you could never tell I they were open or closed/
always asking me to check/the pleasure I have gotten from that/the witnessing of necks.
---
On the airplane, the stewardesses forgo the safety demonstration
instead we are given an in-flight tutorial in two parts:
first, how to play one-person poker: the right hand is the dealer,
the left dangles below the tray table, a gray germy mystery.
After this: how to sleep alone
the best positions for the lonely
in an airplane, in a person, prisoner of one’s own body,
for use in daily life.
---
A woman in a lacy Victorian era pink dress is speaking about the house burning down. She is on the second floor in front of a spinning wheel. Everyone else has made it out of the house. She can see them clamoring in the dusty street below. I don’t understand why she doesn’t leave. I realize that the woman is me as I look down and see how the pink dress never ends, how it flows out to the perimeter of the room. As the heat rises the dress expands and balloons up to cover the house. My body crumples inside it. I imagine a wedding cake too close to the sun, that giant celestial microwave. I am the figurine. The groom has escaped. My wax body melts into the foundation. My dress, my house
burns a mushroom cloud, a saccharine dent, that last breath choked with charred lace, an implosion.
--
Went “water” skiing behind a truck, wearing boots in a river with Sara B and Brittany. We needed gas money. Brittany shaved the back of her head. We were such teenagers.
--
M. shot me in the leg. But maybe I just got hit by a car or hurt myself skiing. Threw apple juice at me but Sarah Kramer? was there and threw it right back. It hurt like hell but only looked like little teeth marks or BB gun scars. I made it to my parent’s house screaming and thinking I was going to die. My mother could not understand what all the fuss was about.
---
Diagram-Mechanisms for Unanswerable Questions:
each one was living on a piece of fabric: a cross between a brown paper bag that has gotten wet, canvas that has been soaked with oil, an intestine blown up to make a balloon, ephemeral and bright the way that bush on the top of ridge was lit up by the sun… inside of these wrappings were all sorts of things, scale being a complete non-issue: tents and trees and cities and sounds, all of them whirring along. A bird tattoo had left it’s ink and flesh, was hopping around and put some footprints in one of them. They were the same size as the rooftops and the silverware.
--
I move back to Kalamazoo. I go to a new café across the street from 4th Coast and I feel like a traitor but I am with friends who need quiet concentration from me. I order a medium coffee and it comes in a large bowl, slightly larger than a bushel basket. I have to kneel on the ground beneath a spout and pour it into my mouth. This is part of some advertising gimmick because the place is called “The Coffee Bowl” or something worse. It was raining downtown and my boots kept squishing down like they were socks. MY hair was shorter and I was working on a collage from an old sheet music book that I’d seen before at Kevin’s house but apparently had decided to steal.
---
Playing a game with folded cards, pieces of paper, and objects that represent each family member. Alison was a pine cone. Grandma Vickie took Nick and I to get ice cream. She drove…terribly. It is some skate boarder neighborhood friend’s birthday.
---
1/5/11
Nick, Kate, and I are crossing a road. Kate is taking care of us like we are still children. It was Halloween and she was taking us trick or treating. We kept trying to explain to her that we were adults without costumes and it was unnecessary. Outside an elementary school we see a kid dressed in a full body paper mache costume of “Mr. T as a Native American.” My brother trips and falls in the road and there are ambulances and EMTs and he is dead somehow. I wake up crying.
--
My dad gives us hamsters because he says he likes the smell.
There are cereal boxes in the house that have fold-out mirrors on the back of them so that the cats can check themselves for dust mites.
---
1/2/11
In an anonymous refrigerator/metal room. A girl asks me to go down on her. She refers to the lips of her vagina as “hot bullets.”
---
1/28/11
“Dear (?), Thank you for trying to visit last night. What a long succession of libraries, waiting rooms, and movie scenes I went through in order to see you.”
Storm standing outside and a long black snake angling its way through my toes (poisonous or dangerous).
A co-worker from the retirement home wrote a play based on his high school escapades. It was getting good reviews.
---
12/14/10
Read to you last night,
I drank you from a little yellow cup,
from a little yellow book—
but my glasses fell off before I woke up
I don’t remember what it said.
---
12/11/10
Justin and I are on a road trip, we are driving a portable RV style aquarium. We snuck ourselves into a big fancy aquarium dome and traded in our little black goldfish for some big fancy orange goldfish and a bag of sea salt chips. We could breath underwater, of course.
Sitting on a couch-bench bus stop in Eugene / Edison Neighborhood, Kalamazoo. I was using a giant magic 8 ball that someone had modified to have collage answers from old records/magazines. I found $14 in the couch, gave up my magic 8 ball to some bratty teenage girls who were wandering through siren noises on James St.. I went to a gas station to squander my findings on chocolate soft-serve frozen yogurt, but the machine was broken.
--
An ex-lover writes this about me: “you were wearing those earrings,
the hooped ones with the clasps/ you could never tell I they were open or closed/
always asking me to check/the pleasure I have gotten from that/the witnessing of necks.
---
On the airplane, the stewardesses forgo the safety demonstration
instead we are given an in-flight tutorial in two parts:
first, how to play one-person poker: the right hand is the dealer,
the left dangles below the tray table, a gray germy mystery.
After this: how to sleep alone
the best positions for the lonely
in an airplane, in a person, prisoner of one’s own body,
for use in daily life.
---
A woman in a lacy Victorian era pink dress is speaking about the house burning down. She is on the second floor in front of a spinning wheel. Everyone else has made it out of the house. She can see them clamoring in the dusty street below. I don’t understand why she doesn’t leave. I realize that the woman is me as I look down and see how the pink dress never ends, how it flows out to the perimeter of the room. As the heat rises the dress expands and balloons up to cover the house. My body crumples inside it. I imagine a wedding cake too close to the sun, that giant celestial microwave. I am the figurine. The groom has escaped. My wax body melts into the foundation. My dress, my house
burns a mushroom cloud, a saccharine dent, that last breath choked with charred lace, an implosion.
--
Went “water” skiing behind a truck, wearing boots in a river with Sara B and Brittany. We needed gas money. Brittany shaved the back of her head. We were such teenagers.
--
M. shot me in the leg. But maybe I just got hit by a car or hurt myself skiing. Threw apple juice at me but Sarah Kramer? was there and threw it right back. It hurt like hell but only looked like little teeth marks or BB gun scars. I made it to my parent’s house screaming and thinking I was going to die. My mother could not understand what all the fuss was about.
---
Diagram-Mechanisms for Unanswerable Questions:
each one was living on a piece of fabric: a cross between a brown paper bag that has gotten wet, canvas that has been soaked with oil, an intestine blown up to make a balloon, ephemeral and bright the way that bush on the top of ridge was lit up by the sun… inside of these wrappings were all sorts of things, scale being a complete non-issue: tents and trees and cities and sounds, all of them whirring along. A bird tattoo had left it’s ink and flesh, was hopping around and put some footprints in one of them. They were the same size as the rooftops and the silverware.
--
I move back to Kalamazoo. I go to a new café across the street from 4th Coast and I feel like a traitor but I am with friends who need quiet concentration from me. I order a medium coffee and it comes in a large bowl, slightly larger than a bushel basket. I have to kneel on the ground beneath a spout and pour it into my mouth. This is part of some advertising gimmick because the place is called “The Coffee Bowl” or something worse. It was raining downtown and my boots kept squishing down like they were socks. MY hair was shorter and I was working on a collage from an old sheet music book that I’d seen before at Kevin’s house but apparently had decided to steal.
---
Playing a game with folded cards, pieces of paper, and objects that represent each family member. Alison was a pine cone. Grandma Vickie took Nick and I to get ice cream. She drove…terribly. It is some skate boarder neighborhood friend’s birthday.
---
1/5/11
Nick, Kate, and I are crossing a road. Kate is taking care of us like we are still children. It was Halloween and she was taking us trick or treating. We kept trying to explain to her that we were adults without costumes and it was unnecessary. Outside an elementary school we see a kid dressed in a full body paper mache costume of “Mr. T as a Native American.” My brother trips and falls in the road and there are ambulances and EMTs and he is dead somehow. I wake up crying.
--
My dad gives us hamsters because he says he likes the smell.
There are cereal boxes in the house that have fold-out mirrors on the back of them so that the cats can check themselves for dust mites.
---
1/2/11
In an anonymous refrigerator/metal room. A girl asks me to go down on her. She refers to the lips of her vagina as “hot bullets.”
---
1/28/11
“Dear (?), Thank you for trying to visit last night. What a long succession of libraries, waiting rooms, and movie scenes I went through in order to see you.”
Storm standing outside and a long black snake angling its way through my toes (poisonous or dangerous).
A co-worker from the retirement home wrote a play based on his high school escapades. It was getting good reviews.
---
12/14/10
Read to you last night,
I drank you from a little yellow cup,
from a little yellow book—
but my glasses fell off before I woke up
I don’t remember what it said.
---
12/11/10
Justin and I are on a road trip, we are driving a portable RV style aquarium. We snuck ourselves into a big fancy aquarium dome and traded in our little black goldfish for some big fancy orange goldfish and a bag of sea salt chips. We could breath underwater, of course.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Better Late Than Never... from September until the Present...
--
We were holding little collections of bones. The brown insides of a cuckoo clock. The mouse bones inside owl pellets inside the owl’s house. Two bodies in the belly of a crow. A town designated as a black hole: hands and knees and teeth clattering.
--
On a bus trip to nowhere. Near Denner St., hungover with starvation tendencies. The bus windows look like displays of photographs of migrant workers waiting in line in parking lots. The coffee I am sipping, always too hot.
--
G. wearing that coffee colored nightshirt. I dream of making rejectable soup all night long.
--
C. giving me a piggy back ride through a pool. I’m touching his back, some really great muscle before his hip, his hand. I’ve left my purse somewhere down the beach or boardwalk. We’re in some mish-mashed European villa/MTV spring break scenario. I am jogging down the boardwalk and see some acquaintance following me. I think he is making sure I am safe. I see an ice cream café which is next to an apartment I remembered living in before, where my purse is. The woman who runs the place is busy sweeping up. The guy who is following me is pretty far behind. I recall running fast to impress him. I see the WC and remember also that I’d been wanting to take a shit. I decided the guy would think I was running so fast just to use the restroom and think that’s pretty funny. So I go into the stall and the toilet’s hanging up on the wall like a mailbox or something and this makes me realize I am dreaming. I think “oh, right, whenever I dream that I’m in Europe the toilets are so confusing.” Since I realize I’m dreaming, I realize that it will be no problem to go back to the pool and put the moves on the guy giving me a piggy back ride. I start running back down the boardwalk. My alarm goes off before I reach the pool.
--
I want to go on a bike ride near the river with Nick and Tess. My grandma is babysitting us. We pretend to be sleeping after she gives us an enormous plate of cookies and tucks us in. I think I am an adult so it seems preposterous. I fidget and finally escape. Along the bike path by a river we see J talking to my mother about some miscommunication- a shirt with words printed on it. I got thrown back into the house. Still fidgeting in the bedroom, wanting to leave. A boy shows up in the driveway asking if I can go on a bike ride. I walk into the living room wailing “Can I leave? I’m 26!” I realize that I can leave. I go into my room to grab a special drawing to hang on my bike like a flag because this is a tradition of sorts. I look through a collection of different drawings that people have given me and choose one with golden spray paint from Justin and then he is the one in the driveway and we are looking for drugs.
Walked into the river with a big net in my hand. My mom and Nick happened to be there too, just hiking. The net got twisted in a rope above me but luckily it fell in the water where Nick and Mom caught it.
Rode back down the bike path, on a unicycle this time, and my mom and J are still amiably chatting. I know I look really dorky on the unicycle but thought that since J was so young it wouldn’t matter.
Back in the bedroom, fidgeting, waiting for that bike ride again. The light is on and we didn’t eat all the damn cookies yet. We put sleeping bags under the covers to make the shape of our bodies. We are looking for bug spray before we go to the river. There is a tube of really special face sunscreen that Tess finds and I wrinkle my nose at her and tell her there isn’t very much left and it’s not even bug spray but I know she wants to use it because it’s not the big ugly cheap bottles that my family usually buys.
--
Looking out the window of a well-lit motel room—
A bee flies into my ear. M. tells me he’s still in love with me.
---
--’s current girlfriend drops him off at my parent’s house cause he needs a place to stay. He has a million stories to tell about the old gang. His right hand is bandaged and he appears to be staying indefinitely. I guess I am too, but my hands are okay. We eat a strange meal standing up in the kitchen, probably tortillas and cheese over the sink. Talk about trials, trains and phones. My mom says “it’s good to have you home, stay as long as you want.” She says this to him, not me. I spy around the stairwell and watch his girlfriend say goodbye to him. I notice that she doesn’t even kiss him. I feel satisfied and wicked at the same time.
--
A really great book cover:
A diagram of a swimming pool from above. There is a white plank diving board and grey sidewalk like an xy axis on the perimeter. The teal area for the water has an “x” drawn through it.
--
A Trip to Marinita
It is like Saturna, but real funny. A little island I am visiting with my mother. At the ticket booth my mother and the man running it become very distracted talking about basketball, this is surprising because she doesn’t usually talk about basketball, the sport. I almost missed the ferry there and had to jump from boat to boat. I have a key to some apartment of Bradley’s with me. It’s on a pink paperclip, and I almost keep losing it.
--
A voice says “but you’re holding a fish.” I look down and I am holding a very active fish. It is almost all head. Its orange scales all the same, nearly a cartoon.
--
“one regrettably flickering
lightning bolt you are
driving mine t-shirt and
chickory bloom
fire sun free smell of summer rot
you are the body handling
my sadness in this season.”
--
We shiver delicately somewhere we’ll never be. Seward, Alaska or some other white-bordered tourist location.
--
Justin is talking to my mom while Katie and Fernando and I are surfing drunk in the kitchen. There’s a picture of Lindsay on top of a car that she’s selling.
--
Working with kids up north in the stream-land.
Had to put cookies on a table. A fallen tree/see-saw.
“Be American,” written on one side “A tree” written on the other.
Remember to drink water.
“Is this a coyote Daddy?” a child asks.
“No,” someone says, “This is a kid’s tooth.”
--
Rented an apartment in BC – all orange walls and it came with this huge rolltop wooden desk in the kitchen. It had this loft above it, it was the BEST PLACE EVER but then I remembered I had a place in Portland too and I had job and a lease or something too. Jason and Brad were standing on the ferry waiting area with some drug that you mixed with baking soda. My eternal slumlord landlord was grinning there with a silver tooth. But the apartment was sunny and warm. It was so good. I tried to trade it to Brad and I was embarrassed that I’d so impulsively bought it that I couldn’t live there. But he said he couldn’t live by himself and had to stay where he was. It was just so sunny and orange.
--
Some dream about “theraputic” sex. I am mailing some package of salmon somewhere. On the deck of a ship two women stand with really nice tan legs. There is a radio show where a caller tells a story about doing it while her parents are sunbathing and somebody reads a story called “Ode on a Sunbonnet.” Fucking somebody with blonde hair before leaving for a rafting trip. It’s so cold on the ship and I wish I had more than the sweatshirt I was wearing.
--
Four kids in the deck of a boat, practicing moves on them in the dark. Hardly being graceful but I had to tell them that they were. In the pool with them. I wander out. Yuck. Too much male energy.
--
Changing clothes on the beach. Just a little leopard print standing somewhere closer. Naked in a statue doing a spell. A boat. The only sustainable nuance, a case of Bud Light.
--
Below deck with the stewards and the bus boys. Men who are more polite than anyone I know.
--
Prayable.
She’s holding “pray” inside of her mouth. Milking her tongue from the other words used up more easily, unbreakable—all the words that go with vacant hosts/hands.
--
Nick sang songs that live more like “boxy aint comin’ home no more.” He was still in a pleasant mood.
--
A sign for a bike trail with flowers. A church that’s good with land temps.
--
Went to go see F. He lived at the end of a dirt road on a hill in California/Northern Mich. But he wasn’t home when I stopped by and there was a young man in a suit on the porch. I said I’d just drive F’s truck to the end of the road. He drove my neighbor’s truck. I drove the truck but it had no brakes. I crashed it into a tree but then it turned into a bike and got a flat tire. I was back in Michigan, in the kitchen, my mother feeding me something warm and said that F wasn’t home because she’d been with him, he’d taught her to play some carousel songs on the piano. And she thought it was weird he’d never taught them to me, but I told her I’d scared him off with all my sheet music.
--
Watching an ex-lover climb into a taxi with another woman. D. says that they’re probably at his house all the time now, wearing blue silk sheets and writing poems. I watched the woman’s jewelry and boots jangle and clank so royally.
--
We need a blanket for going on a walk. Anna is with me, adventuring. My foot-gloves are made of fleece. I tell her about how I really lost my mind in Tabor. We are leaving school in a country town where there has been a dance. All the men are wasted in the cabs of pick-up trucks, smoking secret cigarettes.
--
I am watching a video that Brad made. At the end there are carrots covered in ice falling from the back of a delivery truck and when the ice shatters it sounds like chimes suspending. We break them with our fingers like gently chattering teeth.
---
Home for Christmas. Mom makes me look at a picture of “yellow.” Just yellow in a jar.
--
Flying somewhere. In my carry-on: spearmint, damiana, rolling papers, a picture of me as a young kid. I look just like my great-grandma in the picture.
--
I was on my way back to Europe. At my parent’s house, trying to park a car, trying not to feel too ugly, not to bring too many clothes. A girl I knew in high school was standing around the neighborhood. -- was out in the yard trying to fix a car that was next to A‘s car. When I get to Europe there is a pile of bedding in the corner of a room that is still all rumpled, crazy and fucked up from my last night in Prague. I am still trying to park a car in my parent’s driveway. I need help parking the car. My mom is mad about this because she “has a job to do.” I watch an action movie starring large, tough women.
--
I drove to Grand Rapids by myself to go to a show. Maybe it was near the cabins. Watched K taking a shy girl on a date. He told her that her nose was “intimately” attractive. I was talking to Sara B. about some boy I was going to bring home for Christmas. How I bought a Scrabble game, how I wasn’t gonna use it. Cameron from MFA was crouching on the ground imitating an action movie. Cameron who lives in England called from England. Nothing was working right, not even the word games.
--
Standing in z’s kitchen. He’s making hot chocolate. It is early morning. He is wearing pale green underwear. His mother is there talking to us. There has been a gigantic rainstorm and the roads are terrible. I drive back to Kalamazoo anyway. I am driving my old minivan. Tapes from the future are playing on the stereo. We (who am I with? Nick?) spin out on Stadium. The minivan turns into my old truck. A small pygmy? child is with us, kinda like the sidekick kid in Indiana Jones movies, but much smaller. We give the kid a bow and arrow and set him on the dash like an archer pointing to the sun. I feel very happy even though we are going to a funeral! The snow is melting. K might right with us. I smile.
--
Went on a trip. Had been with my family. Jean-Marie my neighbor and his toddler, Kamani, was there. It seemed fitting. Somebody got all excited about someone in the park who used to be in a band called “The Toaders.” The guy’s name was “Yoader Toader.” I think it was a jam band so I didn’t really care. But the woman who was talking might have been the lead singer and that was more interesting. Kamani kept wandering off. Jlo showed up and helped out.
--
There was a mini-train like at the zoo that was near the place where Brazil and Portland are connected. Behind it is this funny tide pool thing and Bradley and I go swim in it. I find this midget back there with his mother and am intruiged by the midget. I want to be alone with it, but its mother just wont go away. I pretend to be distracted by a yellow leaf but when I look at the leaf it springs up and turns into a jumping goldfish and then back into a leaf again.
--
We strap a piano and a sailboat to my corolla. Driving out on the Oregon coast with nick, kevin, assorted roommates. We ride the waves sideways and they hit the piano keys and the tide just right. We all have life jackets and they can’t believe I’ve never tried this before. But then the tide goes out and the piano smashes on the shore and we have to pay a fine to get it towed back to town. I am wearing a pair of shoes I found on the side of the road. I found some keys and charms in the gravel parking lot and went to let a pet bird out of my car I also remembered that there was another cage with two parakeets in it next to the car and I kick the blanket off the cage…
--
A news story about Fernando being a fugitive. A map of all the apartments he’d lived in and hid from the law.
--
Census boss is staying at my parent’s house as a boarder for some conference. I was visiting home and kept leaving my credit card at The Green Top. Sara told a story about me chasing her through a shopping mall with a tape recorder playing a Dylan song. At the bar there was a Jukebox that Veejay made that would only play songs that people had dedicated to people in the small hometown past.
--
I am teaching a group of middle schoolers how to play some game that involves chess and animal impersonation, words and movement…it barely makes sense. I have no discipline. Karrie is there, observing my class, and she gets upset.
--
Spelunking? Or, at least hearing a very old man give a description about it… his coins somewhere buried below the earth. He lived outside of town now and only had one friend who could help him get down there. He knows exactly where it is. / getting high with R. some silly night under a bridge.highway overpass, and we looked down and drew a picture of us how we looked from above, looking down from above, all glittering with coughs of laughter.
--
F came to visit my family for a holiday dinner. Mom had a ceramic jar of his father’s that she wanted to give him. I went to the bathroom and everybody thought I left. Flying ensued.
--
A call for artists: there is a place where the sand is so full of bees it is buzzing. We need to figure out a way to make them attack in pleasant and surprising ways.
--
The feeling in one yard different from another. Looking up at moving clouds.
--
You could “order” fortunes where they just wrote your name in the blank spots in old kids’ books. I was with my family. Nick had been doing the fortunes all by himself. One arrived by mail that Fernando had ordered for me and him. My mother ordered a tank to drive in and it had just arrived. I went with her to some arts event downtown or a trip and we borrowed my Dad’s truck. My dad managed to crash the tank while we were gone. It was prom night. The crash was in the newspaper in a newspaper box on the front page, my dad in a wrecked tank.
--
Digging/excavating up an organ that looked like an accordian typewriter that would play songs that aligned with the planets/movement of the spheres. Ginger and Shuichi had buried it in the Rodin crater with some old postcards. It was baby blue, of course. I saw my grandfather’s Coors semi-truck sitting in a parking lot all by itself.
--
In a park around the corner from my house except it wasn’t here, more like the idea of Denver. There was a memorial statue and it had all these metal structures that could control the flow of air over them and then control the shape of the clouds. Tom told me about it after he woke up there somewhere parked nearby. The little kid who lives next door found an asthma inhaler in the dumpster and was using it over and over.
--
Waking up somewhere else with the remnants of magic. Costumes? Climbing metal fences? Batting cages?
--
Skateboarding with my students on the highway ramps that are rollercoastery skinny loops between Grand Rapids and the old part of 131. A concrete maze. Nick and Dylan are there. Ended up somewhere with some of my students. An apartment. I started free style rapping with out any warning in order to impress them or something. Right when I realized what I was doing, my raps started to get real lame… all I remember saying was “Cause I’m the weirdest English teacher/…where the grass is… greener.”
--
The longest-lasting residue of the human race will be its shine.
(due to toxic chemicals and indestructible plastics)
--
Murder Mystery
No digging on federal land.
I can’t look for a body.
--
Back in Kalamazoo with Sara and Sara and Dan Foley at that house on Dutton St. but nobody we knew lived there. I’m covered in mud. I’ve either been horseback riding or skateboarding. Trying to swallow a pill. Mucinex or something. Just can’t. Thugs? follow me into the house.
--
“Some people just can’t make it past Pennsylvania.”
--
Someone has died and my grandma is compulsively eating baked goods and crying.
--
Brit and Alex in Seattle, I go to Alex’s house and there are exotic cacti and grow lights all over the stairs. I keep wobbling and getting poked as I walk. Nina is in charge of some literary journal and she wont let my poems in. I try to fly with Brittany from Portland to Van Couver. Kevin takes the light rail with us but we don’t buy tickets and get in trouble and miss our flight. The airport where we got tickets was a little metal teal sea vessel at the end of a dock. Like an old tea box. I go back to the hotel where I was staying the night before. It’s really expensive. I try to sneak in. I remember I left my tape recorder in the room along with some goopy underwear. There are snowboarding books on the walls and I realize I’ve been confusing Kevin with the character from some documentary about some “artsy” man who has glasses and Kurt Cobain hair milling around on a wood floor in the opening scene.
--
I lived with the Pollens’ in a one bedroom apartment and they kept getting mad because I was smoking inside. I worked in a grocery store and kept going to visit someone in another department and this was a grocery store I’ve been in a lot in my dreams it’s never-ending a meijer/d&w hybrid.
--
I found all these musty banners and posters and old super 8 films my dad made about the post-beat era. A segment of the film showed him and a friend walking through a furrowed field with nothing in it yet. It was like my junk field (rural deep dream) thing but in the past.
--
Wading through mud. Helping a little kid put a paddleboat shaped life preserver on his head. Somewhere I was speaking to my dad about trail running.
--
This is Bud’s Story About Riding the Train
“Grandpa Kerly said I could have 14 drinks on the train, but no more than 14! At this point [after drinking 14 drinks] I begin thinking ‘what’s the difference if I have just one more…’ So I did. And then I lit a cigarette on the train. I got yelled at and went into the bathroom. I closed my lapels in the door. They looked like they’d been eating a paper towel sandwich.”
--
Nick has a job where he has reading buddies. His is some little blond kid who is really sassy and hilarious. Her grandpa is there too.
--
My family took a trip to see Scott in prison. We fought the whole way there. I didn’t know that that’s where we were going so I was wearing a mini-skirt and some gaudy athletic shoes and was cranky because I hadn’t gotten to eat the dinner (bran flakes and whiskey) that I’d planned on having. We were in a red Ferrari convertible. I accidentally slammed my mom’s hand in the car door. Also Nick had brought some rich friend of his who was a “little bastard that was only along for the ride.” I remember wishing that more American cities had reliable public transportation. I woke up with the chorus of that song in my head that goes “get your booty on the floor tonighight…” repeating over and over.
--
I received an email from a new friend that addressed me as “dear fish head” or “dear fish brain.”
--
I was going to make biscuits. The woods looked like a Bruegel painting. I was out there with Tess. My boots were socks or felt like the bottoms were at least. Tess knew about the crush I had. She always knew about everything but was nice about it too. Anna was googling our high school class to find out who had turned into Nazis. Tess gave me pasta so I had to eat it.
--
was attending some art school in an Italian village that closely resembled the Vine neighborhood. I kept having trouble transporting this enormous backpack with materials for class (large plastic hopscotch maps and blow up turtles and various other crap), it would slide off my back and it was heavy and I was hiking sort of lost in the jungle. I’d always get there late and misunderstand the directions. One assignment looked interesting, something about “stemmed” words or a list of interconnected words with the same stem… but it disappeared when I noticed half the people had created sort of scrapbooky crafty looking maps of islands. I went in the bathroom and was buttoning up my pants as I left and ran into Josh j. I haven’t seen or spoken to him in years. He looked at me and said “so you still only have the one pair of pants you really like, huh? You’re exactly the same.” I think I sneered and was gonna say something like “well so are you,” but I woke up.
--
There were orange trees in Europe, outside of a church. I was climbing on the brass roof, dragging my bicycle with me. A man inside was playing some mysterious seven-stringed instrument made out of a wooden shell with a paper napkin with stitches inside and the roving platonic secular non-church church choir was warming up there. I only ended up on this roof after trying to escape Rachel Andoga’s apartment where I’d been given a piece of cheese that was about the same size as a large piece of bread.
We were holding little collections of bones. The brown insides of a cuckoo clock. The mouse bones inside owl pellets inside the owl’s house. Two bodies in the belly of a crow. A town designated as a black hole: hands and knees and teeth clattering.
--
On a bus trip to nowhere. Near Denner St., hungover with starvation tendencies. The bus windows look like displays of photographs of migrant workers waiting in line in parking lots. The coffee I am sipping, always too hot.
--
G. wearing that coffee colored nightshirt. I dream of making rejectable soup all night long.
--
C. giving me a piggy back ride through a pool. I’m touching his back, some really great muscle before his hip, his hand. I’ve left my purse somewhere down the beach or boardwalk. We’re in some mish-mashed European villa/MTV spring break scenario. I am jogging down the boardwalk and see some acquaintance following me. I think he is making sure I am safe. I see an ice cream café which is next to an apartment I remembered living in before, where my purse is. The woman who runs the place is busy sweeping up. The guy who is following me is pretty far behind. I recall running fast to impress him. I see the WC and remember also that I’d been wanting to take a shit. I decided the guy would think I was running so fast just to use the restroom and think that’s pretty funny. So I go into the stall and the toilet’s hanging up on the wall like a mailbox or something and this makes me realize I am dreaming. I think “oh, right, whenever I dream that I’m in Europe the toilets are so confusing.” Since I realize I’m dreaming, I realize that it will be no problem to go back to the pool and put the moves on the guy giving me a piggy back ride. I start running back down the boardwalk. My alarm goes off before I reach the pool.
--
I want to go on a bike ride near the river with Nick and Tess. My grandma is babysitting us. We pretend to be sleeping after she gives us an enormous plate of cookies and tucks us in. I think I am an adult so it seems preposterous. I fidget and finally escape. Along the bike path by a river we see J talking to my mother about some miscommunication- a shirt with words printed on it. I got thrown back into the house. Still fidgeting in the bedroom, wanting to leave. A boy shows up in the driveway asking if I can go on a bike ride. I walk into the living room wailing “Can I leave? I’m 26!” I realize that I can leave. I go into my room to grab a special drawing to hang on my bike like a flag because this is a tradition of sorts. I look through a collection of different drawings that people have given me and choose one with golden spray paint from Justin and then he is the one in the driveway and we are looking for drugs.
Walked into the river with a big net in my hand. My mom and Nick happened to be there too, just hiking. The net got twisted in a rope above me but luckily it fell in the water where Nick and Mom caught it.
Rode back down the bike path, on a unicycle this time, and my mom and J are still amiably chatting. I know I look really dorky on the unicycle but thought that since J was so young it wouldn’t matter.
Back in the bedroom, fidgeting, waiting for that bike ride again. The light is on and we didn’t eat all the damn cookies yet. We put sleeping bags under the covers to make the shape of our bodies. We are looking for bug spray before we go to the river. There is a tube of really special face sunscreen that Tess finds and I wrinkle my nose at her and tell her there isn’t very much left and it’s not even bug spray but I know she wants to use it because it’s not the big ugly cheap bottles that my family usually buys.
--
Looking out the window of a well-lit motel room—
A bee flies into my ear. M. tells me he’s still in love with me.
---
--’s current girlfriend drops him off at my parent’s house cause he needs a place to stay. He has a million stories to tell about the old gang. His right hand is bandaged and he appears to be staying indefinitely. I guess I am too, but my hands are okay. We eat a strange meal standing up in the kitchen, probably tortillas and cheese over the sink. Talk about trials, trains and phones. My mom says “it’s good to have you home, stay as long as you want.” She says this to him, not me. I spy around the stairwell and watch his girlfriend say goodbye to him. I notice that she doesn’t even kiss him. I feel satisfied and wicked at the same time.
--
A really great book cover:
A diagram of a swimming pool from above. There is a white plank diving board and grey sidewalk like an xy axis on the perimeter. The teal area for the water has an “x” drawn through it.
--
A Trip to Marinita
It is like Saturna, but real funny. A little island I am visiting with my mother. At the ticket booth my mother and the man running it become very distracted talking about basketball, this is surprising because she doesn’t usually talk about basketball, the sport. I almost missed the ferry there and had to jump from boat to boat. I have a key to some apartment of Bradley’s with me. It’s on a pink paperclip, and I almost keep losing it.
--
A voice says “but you’re holding a fish.” I look down and I am holding a very active fish. It is almost all head. Its orange scales all the same, nearly a cartoon.
--
“one regrettably flickering
lightning bolt you are
driving mine t-shirt and
chickory bloom
fire sun free smell of summer rot
you are the body handling
my sadness in this season.”
--
We shiver delicately somewhere we’ll never be. Seward, Alaska or some other white-bordered tourist location.
--
Justin is talking to my mom while Katie and Fernando and I are surfing drunk in the kitchen. There’s a picture of Lindsay on top of a car that she’s selling.
--
Working with kids up north in the stream-land.
Had to put cookies on a table. A fallen tree/see-saw.
“Be American,” written on one side “A tree” written on the other.
Remember to drink water.
“Is this a coyote Daddy?” a child asks.
“No,” someone says, “This is a kid’s tooth.”
--
Rented an apartment in BC – all orange walls and it came with this huge rolltop wooden desk in the kitchen. It had this loft above it, it was the BEST PLACE EVER but then I remembered I had a place in Portland too and I had job and a lease or something too. Jason and Brad were standing on the ferry waiting area with some drug that you mixed with baking soda. My eternal slumlord landlord was grinning there with a silver tooth. But the apartment was sunny and warm. It was so good. I tried to trade it to Brad and I was embarrassed that I’d so impulsively bought it that I couldn’t live there. But he said he couldn’t live by himself and had to stay where he was. It was just so sunny and orange.
--
Some dream about “theraputic” sex. I am mailing some package of salmon somewhere. On the deck of a ship two women stand with really nice tan legs. There is a radio show where a caller tells a story about doing it while her parents are sunbathing and somebody reads a story called “Ode on a Sunbonnet.” Fucking somebody with blonde hair before leaving for a rafting trip. It’s so cold on the ship and I wish I had more than the sweatshirt I was wearing.
--
Four kids in the deck of a boat, practicing moves on them in the dark. Hardly being graceful but I had to tell them that they were. In the pool with them. I wander out. Yuck. Too much male energy.
--
Changing clothes on the beach. Just a little leopard print standing somewhere closer. Naked in a statue doing a spell. A boat. The only sustainable nuance, a case of Bud Light.
--
Below deck with the stewards and the bus boys. Men who are more polite than anyone I know.
--
Prayable.
She’s holding “pray” inside of her mouth. Milking her tongue from the other words used up more easily, unbreakable—all the words that go with vacant hosts/hands.
--
Nick sang songs that live more like “boxy aint comin’ home no more.” He was still in a pleasant mood.
--
A sign for a bike trail with flowers. A church that’s good with land temps.
--
Went to go see F. He lived at the end of a dirt road on a hill in California/Northern Mich. But he wasn’t home when I stopped by and there was a young man in a suit on the porch. I said I’d just drive F’s truck to the end of the road. He drove my neighbor’s truck. I drove the truck but it had no brakes. I crashed it into a tree but then it turned into a bike and got a flat tire. I was back in Michigan, in the kitchen, my mother feeding me something warm and said that F wasn’t home because she’d been with him, he’d taught her to play some carousel songs on the piano. And she thought it was weird he’d never taught them to me, but I told her I’d scared him off with all my sheet music.
--
Watching an ex-lover climb into a taxi with another woman. D. says that they’re probably at his house all the time now, wearing blue silk sheets and writing poems. I watched the woman’s jewelry and boots jangle and clank so royally.
--
We need a blanket for going on a walk. Anna is with me, adventuring. My foot-gloves are made of fleece. I tell her about how I really lost my mind in Tabor. We are leaving school in a country town where there has been a dance. All the men are wasted in the cabs of pick-up trucks, smoking secret cigarettes.
--
I am watching a video that Brad made. At the end there are carrots covered in ice falling from the back of a delivery truck and when the ice shatters it sounds like chimes suspending. We break them with our fingers like gently chattering teeth.
---
Home for Christmas. Mom makes me look at a picture of “yellow.” Just yellow in a jar.
--
Flying somewhere. In my carry-on: spearmint, damiana, rolling papers, a picture of me as a young kid. I look just like my great-grandma in the picture.
--
I was on my way back to Europe. At my parent’s house, trying to park a car, trying not to feel too ugly, not to bring too many clothes. A girl I knew in high school was standing around the neighborhood. -- was out in the yard trying to fix a car that was next to A‘s car. When I get to Europe there is a pile of bedding in the corner of a room that is still all rumpled, crazy and fucked up from my last night in Prague. I am still trying to park a car in my parent’s driveway. I need help parking the car. My mom is mad about this because she “has a job to do.” I watch an action movie starring large, tough women.
--
I drove to Grand Rapids by myself to go to a show. Maybe it was near the cabins. Watched K taking a shy girl on a date. He told her that her nose was “intimately” attractive. I was talking to Sara B. about some boy I was going to bring home for Christmas. How I bought a Scrabble game, how I wasn’t gonna use it. Cameron from MFA was crouching on the ground imitating an action movie. Cameron who lives in England called from England. Nothing was working right, not even the word games.
--
Standing in z’s kitchen. He’s making hot chocolate. It is early morning. He is wearing pale green underwear. His mother is there talking to us. There has been a gigantic rainstorm and the roads are terrible. I drive back to Kalamazoo anyway. I am driving my old minivan. Tapes from the future are playing on the stereo. We (who am I with? Nick?) spin out on Stadium. The minivan turns into my old truck. A small pygmy? child is with us, kinda like the sidekick kid in Indiana Jones movies, but much smaller. We give the kid a bow and arrow and set him on the dash like an archer pointing to the sun. I feel very happy even though we are going to a funeral! The snow is melting. K might right with us. I smile.
--
Went on a trip. Had been with my family. Jean-Marie my neighbor and his toddler, Kamani, was there. It seemed fitting. Somebody got all excited about someone in the park who used to be in a band called “The Toaders.” The guy’s name was “Yoader Toader.” I think it was a jam band so I didn’t really care. But the woman who was talking might have been the lead singer and that was more interesting. Kamani kept wandering off. Jlo showed up and helped out.
--
There was a mini-train like at the zoo that was near the place where Brazil and Portland are connected. Behind it is this funny tide pool thing and Bradley and I go swim in it. I find this midget back there with his mother and am intruiged by the midget. I want to be alone with it, but its mother just wont go away. I pretend to be distracted by a yellow leaf but when I look at the leaf it springs up and turns into a jumping goldfish and then back into a leaf again.
--
We strap a piano and a sailboat to my corolla. Driving out on the Oregon coast with nick, kevin, assorted roommates. We ride the waves sideways and they hit the piano keys and the tide just right. We all have life jackets and they can’t believe I’ve never tried this before. But then the tide goes out and the piano smashes on the shore and we have to pay a fine to get it towed back to town. I am wearing a pair of shoes I found on the side of the road. I found some keys and charms in the gravel parking lot and went to let a pet bird out of my car I also remembered that there was another cage with two parakeets in it next to the car and I kick the blanket off the cage…
--
A news story about Fernando being a fugitive. A map of all the apartments he’d lived in and hid from the law.
--
Census boss is staying at my parent’s house as a boarder for some conference. I was visiting home and kept leaving my credit card at The Green Top. Sara told a story about me chasing her through a shopping mall with a tape recorder playing a Dylan song. At the bar there was a Jukebox that Veejay made that would only play songs that people had dedicated to people in the small hometown past.
--
I am teaching a group of middle schoolers how to play some game that involves chess and animal impersonation, words and movement…it barely makes sense. I have no discipline. Karrie is there, observing my class, and she gets upset.
--
Spelunking? Or, at least hearing a very old man give a description about it… his coins somewhere buried below the earth. He lived outside of town now and only had one friend who could help him get down there. He knows exactly where it is. / getting high with R. some silly night under a bridge.highway overpass, and we looked down and drew a picture of us how we looked from above, looking down from above, all glittering with coughs of laughter.
--
F came to visit my family for a holiday dinner. Mom had a ceramic jar of his father’s that she wanted to give him. I went to the bathroom and everybody thought I left. Flying ensued.
--
A call for artists: there is a place where the sand is so full of bees it is buzzing. We need to figure out a way to make them attack in pleasant and surprising ways.
--
The feeling in one yard different from another. Looking up at moving clouds.
--
You could “order” fortunes where they just wrote your name in the blank spots in old kids’ books. I was with my family. Nick had been doing the fortunes all by himself. One arrived by mail that Fernando had ordered for me and him. My mother ordered a tank to drive in and it had just arrived. I went with her to some arts event downtown or a trip and we borrowed my Dad’s truck. My dad managed to crash the tank while we were gone. It was prom night. The crash was in the newspaper in a newspaper box on the front page, my dad in a wrecked tank.
--
Digging/excavating up an organ that looked like an accordian typewriter that would play songs that aligned with the planets/movement of the spheres. Ginger and Shuichi had buried it in the Rodin crater with some old postcards. It was baby blue, of course. I saw my grandfather’s Coors semi-truck sitting in a parking lot all by itself.
--
In a park around the corner from my house except it wasn’t here, more like the idea of Denver. There was a memorial statue and it had all these metal structures that could control the flow of air over them and then control the shape of the clouds. Tom told me about it after he woke up there somewhere parked nearby. The little kid who lives next door found an asthma inhaler in the dumpster and was using it over and over.
--
Waking up somewhere else with the remnants of magic. Costumes? Climbing metal fences? Batting cages?
--
Skateboarding with my students on the highway ramps that are rollercoastery skinny loops between Grand Rapids and the old part of 131. A concrete maze. Nick and Dylan are there. Ended up somewhere with some of my students. An apartment. I started free style rapping with out any warning in order to impress them or something. Right when I realized what I was doing, my raps started to get real lame… all I remember saying was “Cause I’m the weirdest English teacher/…where the grass is… greener.”
--
The longest-lasting residue of the human race will be its shine.
(due to toxic chemicals and indestructible plastics)
--
Murder Mystery
No digging on federal land.
I can’t look for a body.
--
Back in Kalamazoo with Sara and Sara and Dan Foley at that house on Dutton St. but nobody we knew lived there. I’m covered in mud. I’ve either been horseback riding or skateboarding. Trying to swallow a pill. Mucinex or something. Just can’t. Thugs? follow me into the house.
--
“Some people just can’t make it past Pennsylvania.”
--
Someone has died and my grandma is compulsively eating baked goods and crying.
--
Brit and Alex in Seattle, I go to Alex’s house and there are exotic cacti and grow lights all over the stairs. I keep wobbling and getting poked as I walk. Nina is in charge of some literary journal and she wont let my poems in. I try to fly with Brittany from Portland to Van Couver. Kevin takes the light rail with us but we don’t buy tickets and get in trouble and miss our flight. The airport where we got tickets was a little metal teal sea vessel at the end of a dock. Like an old tea box. I go back to the hotel where I was staying the night before. It’s really expensive. I try to sneak in. I remember I left my tape recorder in the room along with some goopy underwear. There are snowboarding books on the walls and I realize I’ve been confusing Kevin with the character from some documentary about some “artsy” man who has glasses and Kurt Cobain hair milling around on a wood floor in the opening scene.
--
I lived with the Pollens’ in a one bedroom apartment and they kept getting mad because I was smoking inside. I worked in a grocery store and kept going to visit someone in another department and this was a grocery store I’ve been in a lot in my dreams it’s never-ending a meijer/d&w hybrid.
--
I found all these musty banners and posters and old super 8 films my dad made about the post-beat era. A segment of the film showed him and a friend walking through a furrowed field with nothing in it yet. It was like my junk field (rural deep dream) thing but in the past.
--
Wading through mud. Helping a little kid put a paddleboat shaped life preserver on his head. Somewhere I was speaking to my dad about trail running.
--
This is Bud’s Story About Riding the Train
“Grandpa Kerly said I could have 14 drinks on the train, but no more than 14! At this point [after drinking 14 drinks] I begin thinking ‘what’s the difference if I have just one more…’ So I did. And then I lit a cigarette on the train. I got yelled at and went into the bathroom. I closed my lapels in the door. They looked like they’d been eating a paper towel sandwich.”
--
Nick has a job where he has reading buddies. His is some little blond kid who is really sassy and hilarious. Her grandpa is there too.
--
My family took a trip to see Scott in prison. We fought the whole way there. I didn’t know that that’s where we were going so I was wearing a mini-skirt and some gaudy athletic shoes and was cranky because I hadn’t gotten to eat the dinner (bran flakes and whiskey) that I’d planned on having. We were in a red Ferrari convertible. I accidentally slammed my mom’s hand in the car door. Also Nick had brought some rich friend of his who was a “little bastard that was only along for the ride.” I remember wishing that more American cities had reliable public transportation. I woke up with the chorus of that song in my head that goes “get your booty on the floor tonighight…” repeating over and over.
--
I received an email from a new friend that addressed me as “dear fish head” or “dear fish brain.”
--
I was going to make biscuits. The woods looked like a Bruegel painting. I was out there with Tess. My boots were socks or felt like the bottoms were at least. Tess knew about the crush I had. She always knew about everything but was nice about it too. Anna was googling our high school class to find out who had turned into Nazis. Tess gave me pasta so I had to eat it.
--
was attending some art school in an Italian village that closely resembled the Vine neighborhood. I kept having trouble transporting this enormous backpack with materials for class (large plastic hopscotch maps and blow up turtles and various other crap), it would slide off my back and it was heavy and I was hiking sort of lost in the jungle. I’d always get there late and misunderstand the directions. One assignment looked interesting, something about “stemmed” words or a list of interconnected words with the same stem… but it disappeared when I noticed half the people had created sort of scrapbooky crafty looking maps of islands. I went in the bathroom and was buttoning up my pants as I left and ran into Josh j. I haven’t seen or spoken to him in years. He looked at me and said “so you still only have the one pair of pants you really like, huh? You’re exactly the same.” I think I sneered and was gonna say something like “well so are you,” but I woke up.
--
There were orange trees in Europe, outside of a church. I was climbing on the brass roof, dragging my bicycle with me. A man inside was playing some mysterious seven-stringed instrument made out of a wooden shell with a paper napkin with stitches inside and the roving platonic secular non-church church choir was warming up there. I only ended up on this roof after trying to escape Rachel Andoga’s apartment where I’d been given a piece of cheese that was about the same size as a large piece of bread.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Emancipation
A library. A library full of men. No, no.
A class for women about weoponry.
A woman's best weapon is her body.
Upon learning this, Patricia went out and bought a ramshackle trailer.
She then used her body to demolish it.
I was hurt in the splinters.
The other women were better.
Spiggots in the water garden.
K's advice: "I slip better."
9/1/10
Composing a letter about Abraham Lincoln's body type--
razor sharp and thin; austere sunk cheeks and wrinkles, long limbs.
What made him so attractive?
A class for women about weoponry.
A woman's best weapon is her body.
Upon learning this, Patricia went out and bought a ramshackle trailer.
She then used her body to demolish it.
I was hurt in the splinters.
The other women were better.
Spiggots in the water garden.
K's advice: "I slip better."
9/1/10
Composing a letter about Abraham Lincoln's body type--
razor sharp and thin; austere sunk cheeks and wrinkles, long limbs.
What made him so attractive?
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