isn't the idea of blog an oddthing? something i keep trying to get my students to tap into, you know, when i have students. which is not now, or next semester, when i will not be teaching via obstancy and irritation and the idea that maybe i might actually accomplish something if i'm not off-and-on paying attention to x-amount of other folk's shit. not shit as in shit, but shit as in woah, lots of stuff to deal with and try to face headon.

i am allowing myself a moment of contemplation for what the next chapter ensues, because really, when i'm done with school here, that's it. that's the big sheebang of being an artschool dweeb. and i guess by standards of everyone else and myself included, that's when i should start that thing called 'career'.

is teaching my career? and if it is, what am i teaching?

it's hard to teach when you think the product should be the most intricate world-we've-created-outside, every time, with each person you interact with, all of their own life considered. (because the rest of the world, with its war, and bills, and infights, and religion, and boring repetition, and cynical walks... asks for so much of us, god it would almost be better to be a fisherman)... and that takes time, time one should know has a direction one believes in at least in form. not to say i don't believe in support, in being the person a kid might lean into because you see the fight she is fighting... but truthfully.

somedays, i don't know why in the world they are fighting in the first place. what exactly do they need to express?

so, i won't be teaching this next semester. i will be writing supposedly and 'supporting myself' somehow. i will have to train myself to find nourishment, heh, beyond education. (holycrap)

and... basically, i should be writing a million bestsellers that involve intricate narratives that give intricate understandings of intricate psyches, but the problem is, what i really want to do is,

um.

all i can say is, for the first time in a very long time, i want every second of it.

and i want to learn something new so badly, and i want the history and baggage, history development linear detail; i want the patience, i want to be aware, i want to be superconscience of not making choices based on what's (n-t) there, but on what i want and what is wanted from me, and not to discard everything i've come by the hard way, but not to lose because i'm too scared (of producing, of opening, of disappointment, of toofasttooslow, of my own body, of being wrong), or too bold (that it is what is wanted). but every second of it.

there haven't even been kisses, just the space between letters faint, unformed, soft with i . c o u l d .

a public private space, this blog thing. that's what i'd really like my students, um no-students, maybe myself, to notice when i force them, arm-held, towards the zappy what-the-fuck-is-this. not a journal tucked away under the bed, but something revealed. a filtered straining outward under the original content. and what is the filter made of, anyway? sand, wire, mesh?

she makes me a composite of flowers every day, brings them over, slipping the pigments in under transparent guise of... of...

here is my cresciendo thought, the part told, because it makes me think and not know: a pot given (but not yet physically, not yet with the word, but ready, made for -- someone else, composed with the corporideality of mn, specifically, chosen, planted, held that way and sitting there complete in the knowledge of full interum no matter what, simply because, yellow, planted with shade. i never knew it was a shade plant, that one i kept seeing and wanting. i didn't know what to put with it. i just knew it should fall over the shoulders of the yellow given and broken pot, so i took the idea in and asked for that opinion, her opinion; and when it came to it, three plants, the cascade, blue like before; the other down-leak full of nostalgia because i pressed its blossoms between my fingers as a child and thought about what might come out; and the one suggested... presented as a body sensual, an open yellow below. and there were others discarded, and i went with what i thought matched, but the idea.)

that i actually made an overflow for someone i could really care for. water every day, and make coffee for, and not to mention, you know... let myself accept from. pause in breath for. smile for/with/to.

and how long that takes. and what that means. and whether. and why. and if. and because every second feels enjoyable nomatter. yeah, i'm saying that now, as a kid kicking back to visit the family and go fishing with no idea of what will still be there at the end of it, i'm wanting this energy expended and exchanged and held soft between my dirty fingernails as something to really feel good about.

that's all. just to feel good about.

ah blog. publicspace. life changes just when you think it won't.

although i'm still looking.

Labels: etchsketch

Super fun on Thursday. Despite or maybe because of the eternal blush. Yep. I read an unfinished piece and then a little short story. The unfinished piece was something I was writing the day before and the day of the reading... even more last minute than I usually do, and I was feeling sheepish that it wasn't finished, but I got so much good response, and some laughter, and good vibes from all my friends who showed up and some new folks, that I was positively happy. Also, Lane and Jeffrey Brown were great to read with... Jeffrey even making the sounds for his comic book panels; I was totally wooed into buying one of his chapbooks.

By the end though, I was exhausted. I ended up cutting out before the after-drinks were even full-swing, and trying to walk to the Fullerton red stop, but ended up quite a bit further than that, on Broadway, and so caught the Broadway bus home.

At the time, I was wearing my Reed sweatshirt and an older man struck up a conversation with me about what a good school it was, and had I seen the movie with Diane Keaton about that school - Reds, or something like that. He was really funny, and when he got off the bus, right before, he leaned over and said, "You're much too cute to be out alone by yourself." And I had to giggle as the bus continued on.

When I got home, I totally crashed out and slept for hours and hours, which sucked not because the sleep wasn't great, but because I had to do laundry, wash my dishes, and take a shower before work that day. I had to do the former and the latter quite badly since...

...I had a date.

A really lovely date.

Here is another picture I took the other day at the lake:

Labels: etchsketch

Here goes:

This Thursday at the Lincoln Avenue Powells, I am giving a reading with Lane Williams (a co-student at SAIC and author of A&P, which I understand is only one of his blogs, the 'esoteric' one as he calls it) and also Jeffrey Brown, a comic book artist (we're basically opening for him).

It starts at 7pm sharp. Haha, that was a shoutout for all you writers. It will actually start 7pmish.

I will be the one blushing, mostly in my ears. During my reading, if you choose not to pay attention to whatever I'm reading (I still don't know), you could possibly watch the color spread upwards from chest area, neck, ears, and across my cheeks until I step out, ten-twelve minutes later, from behind the podium. I really hate and love giving readings, but have been trying to make an effort to extend my capacities since it does, in its own little way, and much like this blog, give me energy to channel back towards the writing.

There will also be beer and snacks, depending on how much I can carry on the bus, since Lane has never been very good with the "showing up with food items" side of affairs.

Please come. And cheer for me. And laugh, even when it's not funny 'cause I really like that.

*

Other news: today at work, one of the managers gave me a pot (over)priced at $40 just because it had a crack in it. Then when I was all squiggly with glee and went out and picked out a flower I know I shouldn't be buying because I have less than a month left for this summer, and I'm not sure c2 is committed to watering my flowers, well... when I brought it back and went to pay for it, the manager said,

"Oh c'mon, Just take it, for god's sake. It's yours, here you go, I'm putting it near your backpack."

From 20% discount to free, free, free. It made me happy and I carried it home through the alleys pressed to my boobs, grinning, and one man smiled and said, "hello mamacita," as I walked home. It was the yellow pot, the pink flower, my purple-shirted boobs, and me feeling happy after a day out of the city and a generosity from the only manager I like.

p.s. The owner still precedes to smile intensely at me whenever he sees me, and say Hi, and nothing more, never bitching me out ever for anything, more's the joy for him than me as I would be disappointed in him and make him feel small somehow, I know I would.

I'm happy today, and off to call my mama, and then to write something pleaseletitbegood before heading off to bed.

went down past the concrete, drew the thirsty bucket from a communal cool windfall, and each and every once was simpler, like water, without sunlight or its pet land. eventually we are all branded to belong, across the salsa slick of twirl one to two, three. would like to believe in a history without voice, a dust without trace, but don't. but i don't can't this is what i offer. seeing means finding what can never have been mountain. this, i mourn. this, silent, i balance on my toes with a toe in front then behind, then my hip shifts, nobody sees our, happy about this, my own, (y)our, it, i will die as silent as a punk concert falling in the forest, with nobody around. with every body at attention, because a stadium will be heaven and a flash, i've heard her say through the static of communication. through the dipping leaving no no no churn of a long still well.

I went out of Chicago today for the first time in sixth months and it was so perfect, so warm and humid and full of splatters, full of green I didn't know existed here, and I was perfectly near happy, not perfectly happy, but perfectly near for the first time since last summer down on the beach back home, and I'm so homesick I think I can't take it; no matter what people say about Chicago and all the events and music pouring out the doors and the festivals and energy and people coming in and out and moving by, it cannot ever find me that dirt of home. No matter how nostalgic or angry or lonely I get out there, the west coast is built like a lung or an arm, and my arm is missing, my arm fell off, my arm and hands, my lungs are inhaling.


Strange how it took a trip of heat and flicker cottonwood, of cherrypit spittings and walking on the sand with my feet falling through into heat and lifting one step at a time slowly to keep my back and body intact, and a quickswim in the shallow shoals of a lake that left my hair greasy and wirey like maybe a bit of salt made its way out here, and flipping through the blue which wasn't too cold, just right, and emerging to dry over hours with my wet breasts blurring through in splotches on my shirt, and then feeling my stomach, feeling it finally move around, want something, what the hell is it that I want?, and knowing I haven't been finding words for anything, no words no new no language can touch anything because I don't even know what one could think about anymore... funny how the green of one place, its perfect place, could remind me of a free I didn't even know had left me.


We - a friend of mine, ls, and her roommate - went to Saugatuk, near a place I applied for a fellowship this summer but didn't get--right along a "river" and "lake" that feeds into lake Michigan. We found ducklings in town which ls says are too old to still really be ducklings, and also a yacht club which reminded me of a how my old man got kicked out of a yacht club for attacking a woman on a club picnic, how it was just him, my sister, and me, out on an island and he got drunk and she got drunk and she started yelling at him, and he picked her up and spun her around on his shoulders, and even at seven I knew what he was doing was a shift, or strange, bizarre, a grown man spinning a shrieking woman around on his shoulders. And how they took her off him and then banned him to the dock, later to be kicked out of the club, and how he walked down there and took out his knife and threw it into the wood of the dock so that it quivered and how he said if she came down there, he'd kill her, he'd slit her throat, and I took my sister back up to the picnic and got us food and felt bad about abandoning our dad, and so went back down and sat with him with our legs over the sides, kicking in the water.

And we found t-shirt shops, and kayak rentals, and the sound of the wind through leaves, lots of leaves, and now that I've heard it there, I can hear it here, right now as I write, thousands of particles rushing through the air and making motion for no sake, no sake at all, but for the dispersal of elements, and how it's the most silent sound, the most music, around.


I think I will give my back one more week and if I don't feel like I'm getting better, you know, more like I can actually move without worry or consideration, then I am going to quit and go home. I'm going to quit on Chicago, I think. Although I'll come back and finish up school, I might finally recognize that I wasn't meant to be here.


I felt a little silly today, and less sad, and more. I felt annoyed with work, and how the deal there pushes all these small considerations into extreme focus until life can't be about the very moving and enjoying or being solitary happy or feeling what is to be felt, rasta. I mean, this doesn't have to do with the cutie, who texted me a couple times today with sorries, etc, but more about how I myself unrelated to whatever latch myself to anything that feels like living.

I'm listening to ec's "angles and corners" mix right now, and strange how her music makes me miss her, like a vision never shared elsewhere, that's solitude for you.

I'm giving a reading this Thursday at Powells, and I haven't written anything I like for an eternity.

I'm going to work tomorrow.

I'm thinking about home.

Today was really good.

Why has it taken me six months to venture out of this city? Do I think I will see it clearly only if I am completely submerged and wrapped plastic within? What an absurd thought.

my back is still on its way out from this job as cashier - all the up down, bending over, lifting and sifting, and sometimes i think it's going to stop, right there, and every single one of my vertebrae is going to hop out of its spot on the column and i won't be able to work, won't be able to enjoy the summer, won't be able to go fishing. i'm really worried about being in shape for fishing.

i keep thinking i need to quit this job, even though i've hardly saved anything after my new-camera purchase, but health comes first, right?

so, other than the money, why don't i quit?

well, it all comes down to a big crush: there's a wooooman in annuals who i just can't get over feeling light-headed about every time she passes by. i make google-eyes and blush, i can't help myself. i shiver if she touches my shoulder. i get shit-eating grins and spend my evenings strategizing ways of stealing a few seconds out of the mad-nursery rush to chat with her. and finally, we're actually talking... in fact, she hunts me down from time to time. so, give me another week or two and i might get up the nerves to ask her out.

basically, i'm not quitting this job and am thus putting my back at risk because i want to glance at someone once or twice an hour as she moves around the flowers with the sun on her back. jeeesh.

Labels: etchsketch

This was drawn during birth.


Drawn while you were on the toilet, drawn before (ie in front of) the dictionary, rubbed on the wall as you made dinner, pressed in my arm when there was nothing else, drawn even though, and while you were making narrative (something to follow through); this is the story of the lines between already there.

We searched for god, found him full of grace, ourselves full of more, and less; this is the story of how we followed each parent towards death, wondering and fearing, creating out of ignorance, sickness and cancer- which is all art, our ignorance, our attempt, our failed success, many big words for the caterpillar to take a chunk from. This is the story of me, liver and innards but bloated, slugs rasping the leaf, trying to find something more intricate than what is seen, made, understood. Nothing but a big mistake made bright through attempt. This is the story of you, a person full, systemic in capillary, artery, platelets, and firings or fire or fury, a being cubed within spirit.

This is the story: a girl holds on tight to the vines and sees herself flying, she holds tight to the tethers, she goes down to the brightlit store in an attempt to find yellow goggles to fly with, and white crispy sheets to land upon. She dreams of a family, of little blushes, of people constantly making around her through the advent of their passage through time, and this happens. But everything is a surpise. One person finds wisdom through love; the Other reaches for a knob that might lead that direction, but finds herself locked with other doors wide as a sky in telefocus.

This is the story of where we are. Don't worry, we are all humble. And while I trot the lives I want to despise, you prance the lives of desire. It's where we are, because crayons are strange and unique and no less than where we were before. They are full of electricity, and immobility. Pigment but a mode of reflection.

Gas prices skyrocket and you and I search for Buddha, looking for the longest ears on the subway or road in hopes that these lobes might reveal a meditative ease erasing everything distressing until it becomes an anorexic plate of salvation. But paths don't reveal themselves; they are only something walked upon.

In my dreams, story chastises me. It tells me something: here is a cherry, red and completely contained. Sitting upon a white space of moss and mold. The dream lets me see this, then it lets a girl approach. This, it says, is story: a girl walking towards a red cherry resting on a pate of white fuzz. Describe it, describe the path, and you are halfway there. Why do you fight, it asks. Why do you avoid time?

Hell, I don't know, but all I want to do is speak what we feel about the cherry, sitting there, a little mouth unspoken, a creature full of exposition and sentiment.

Nobody understands anything through exposition. I am resisting here in my state of optimistic obstinancy. I go to land and stand sullen before. How wrong it is to ask for a heart, a mind, a home. Without a specific reason, Oz has no red poppies, only wretched monkeys with wings. I draw my colors, sun-hidden along the stomach, open depth along the surface.


There are more systems than I have found.

Last night, I was wending my way home at around 1:30, tired, a little drunk, pleasantly content in the night's warmth (ah, Chicago, city of extreme temps), when I decided to pop into the corner store to grab some gum for my bad beer-breath. Went in, grabbed my gum. Ahead of me in line was a very short Mexican boy who had two bags of Dorritos and was looking furtive. He quickly pointed to the condom shelf behind the cashier and asked for the grey package, without looking at me. I decided he was a bit embaressed and looked the other way for him.

When I looked back, the condoms were nowhere in sight and he was sorting through his change to pay for the purchase. His tab was $6.22, and he had five ragged dollar bills up on the counter, then pressed another dollar of dimes and nickels towards the cashier, then wrangled another two dimes up from the depths of his pockets. He got a panicked look on his face and said, "I don't have the two pennies..."

The cashier was looking brutal, and started saying, "Well, you're short..."

At the time, I was digging through my change for my own purchase. Lo and behold, there were two pennies sitting on my palm. Before thinking about it, I picked them out of my change, tossed them on the counter with a flick of my wrist and said, "For Luck."

Must've been the way I said it, because both the cashier and the boy started laughing. The boy picked his stuff up, ran out of the door. The cashier rang me up and then tried hitting on me.

Ain't I the cock of the walk? Some kind of condom-penny angel in the Chicago night streets.

Yesturday, I reasoned it out to my benefit.

And bought myself an external hard-drive and a new camera. The new camera is far more fancy-fangled than my last one, although about the same as the one I borrowed last summer during fishing (by borrowed, I mean stole from a person I was working with who never used the damn thing). My reasoning behind this outlandish purchasing is that art begets art and if there's enough reason to be photo'ing, then there's more reason to be writing. Since I'm both excited and nervous about getting back into the groove with my now-1.5-months here in Chicago--during which I really need to finish the writing for my thesis project, which means a lot of new writing and a lot of revising--I figured I'd add a new muse, Melete, to my other digital muses (Calliope the iPod and Polyhymnia the computer).

So, you'll be seeing a lot of photos hopefully now that I have this influence, and imagine me in the background trolling my imagination for the forward writing-mo that I see my Muses and my happiness (because I am happy, I should mention) creating. I thought i'd start with more photos of the porch haven flowers:

as the newsman said last night... "well, it only happens once in a blue moon." or about every 2.5 to 2.75 years, according to web info. and last night's one was a spider walking blue on its net: