And I guess...that I just don't know

At work. Heroin. Velvet Underground. It's been on repeat all day eeeeeer day. Look it up if you don't already love the song.

"And I guess...that I just don't know."

On the Eve of the glorious Geneva, & I'm stuck.

Things I'm thinking about:
1. I'm not going to live past 30. (Edie sucks for putting that in my head).
2. I want to go talk to a shrink, but I can't tell them everything. I just. CAN'T. And I'm not going to be real with them and I doubt that one rainy day I'm going to have this Lifetime syruped emotional breakthrough and realize that THE REASON why I'm so messed up is because my random family friend molested me when I was little and I repressed the memory my entire life until now. Okay that's not funny to joke about. But I hope you got the reference.
3. This blog is my desperate, pathetic attempt to find that reason.
4. I love studying people.
5. I've been doing all this research on anti-depressants. Honestly, I would like to try them out. I need to feel things again. Really feel things. Instead of the big three: drunk, high, hungover. (Sometimes a combination. Les bi honest, MOST of the time. It's like a 'you pick two' from Panera. But the bowl you get is not made of bread. It's either a toilet bowl or a leafy one.)
6. It's been almost 2 weeks at my internship and the other intern has never gone to the bathroom. Or sneezed. Possible robot? Totally.
7. When I get obsessed with something, I literally get an UNHEALTHY obsession with it. Oxymoron? Nah. J. Lo in "Enough" (brilliant film) doesn't hold a flame to how many black eyes and sucker punches society's been swinging at the English language. & helloooo "Heroin" played 137 times yesterday on my phone and 87 so far today. (Really depends on my state. Not Nebraska. Please refer back to #5's 'the big three.') Currently, I'm obsessed with: Lars von Trier's "Melancholia" (even though-ESPECIALLY BECAUSE it's not out yet), perenially drunk artist's personal lives, Bon Iver/Bon Iver, talking about Bonnaroo, & annotating "The Love of the Last Tycoon."
8. I need to run a half-marathon by September. How? No idea.
9. I'm so sick of America. I PHYSICALLY NEED TO LEAVE THE COUNTRY AND EXPERIENCE DIFFERENT PEOPLE AND PLACES AND THINGS. I am obnoxiously jealous of my amazing sister who gets to go to Argentina this summer and Spain in the fall. She deserves it. And two of my best franz have gotten to play the European black keys several times now. And everyone always gives me shit about it. "Wait- I thought you were going to Ireland?" or "The fuck is wrong with you? Why didn't you go?" BECAUSE WE CAN'T AFFORD IT YOU FUCK. But when I go, I'm doing it right. I'm not going through school or taking a class (unless I want to), I'm doing the 'backpacking between bars and benches' thing.
10. My sister's the only one who will ever really get it.
11. I always get my hopes up.
12. Find me something that stirs my soul-strings.

Oh yeah, I'm planning an escape.

Age of Consent

Instead of stopping, we stopped thinking about it.


It's just like you told me it'd be

It's nothin' nothin' nothin'

Nothin' at all



Final Fiction Draft:

“Scrambled Eggs”

After, but slowly, she composes her disordered state of mind and walks out of the room for the last time. She struggles to shrug off the room, the hallway, the stairs. Knees betraying her, she buckles at every crack.

Henry’s apartment is three doors down. It’s not exquisite, but it sure is something. He’s simple and sweet and fully incomplete. (She’s been floating towards his room for months now.) She knocks curtly, and stumbles inside.

When she first enters the apartment, she’s reminded of another time. Of a girl she once knew who owned a beautiful, nostalgia-drenched apartment. Yet the apartment was overlooked and forgotten like a middle child in the growing shadow of their older sibling. It was forgotten because this girl drove a motorcycle. She was surprised at seeing any type of residence at all because she's one of those people one can't quite picture living anywhere, except maybe in hotel rooms. Even after the motorcycle girl took out her keys, on the verge of opening the door, she still really didn't believe this girl lived in the fancy complex. It would, after all, be completely like her to "borrow" an apartment from someone.

But as soon as she peered inside, she knew it was the girl’s apartment. The hardwood floor she sensed was there was not only invisible, but the piles of clothes on the floor were shaped into mountains and valleys, mocking any notion of a floor at all. The clothes were permanent, perennial fixtures in the room that looked like they had been there for years.

Awkwardly, she looked around the room for something, anything that reassured her that someone could actually live there. Hung stark on the bare walls, she spotted a calendar. She waded knee deep in clothes to get a closer inspection; it was four years old.

While the apartments were from different times and were obviously dissimilar, they shared more than just calendar accessories in common. There was something surprising and familiar about both of them….that she couldn’t put her finger on. She turned around in circles in Henry’s darkened room, hand and finger outstretched, unconsciously searching. But she came to the same conclusion that she always did: that this apartment complex was strange. Paint-splattered people, pasted into the decorations: replacement decorum for the lack of furniture.

Yet she’s never felt more at home. Or so she’s told.

“Are you the gal that loves motorcycles?” Henry quivers through nervous veneers that will never know a real smile.

“Henry, come on now. She doesn’t even remember her own children, let alone a motorcycle her husband owned thirty years ago,” Isabel says.

Then, out of the silence, the girl’s eyes break through the mascara-grown ivy of her lashes and she opens her mouth, having no idea what might come out. Her pupils dance and leap, pushing the swing of her former young self up, up, higher and higher, cradling its youth.

It brought her back to that swirling, cathartic time she spent the night in the tent in some old school friend’s backyard. It was raving, spitting rain that took its last wind of ravage on the little tent that could. All seven comrades had left except for her and her quite possibly narcoleptic friend.

The tent had all but completely collapsed; the roof balancing on an invisible tightrope an inch above her face. And with her narcoleptic friend swooning in her dormant unconscious, she felt completely alone. It was swollen heat, selfishly adapting to every nook and cranny of her personal space in the tent.

At any given moment, with the storm fighting and letting down on the tent’s emaciated coat above her, she felt like she could die. It was so awkward, yet realistic: it was the one sincere moment in her life she could keep, think back on, and remember as a time she had survived within her thoughts.

Unexpectedly, she’s jolted out of her memory by moonlight that is pouring and struggling to get through Henry’s sealed-off, curtain-drawn windows looming over her small frame. However, she stays completely still; looking past the curtains and the windows to the moon. Until she finds it: a small tear in the curtains, so small that she had overlooked it before that. Suddenly a brilliant light is dancing in her eyes, and she grins and purposefully draws her hand and pointer finger up to the split with tender precision- the illumination-just there, strange and familiar and consciously stretched-

“She wouldn’t remember how to brush her hair if I didn’t show her how every morning.”

Isabel’s throw-away remark fractures her thought bubbles and she quickly closes her mouth as Henry brings her to his window and murmurs, “Look how bright the stars are tonight.” She looks. The stars form a 1963 Royal Enfield Interceptor motorcycle; she’s wishing, for the hundredth time, that her head wasn’t scrambled eggs. Her eyes shrink back into their fortress and she trudges back to her room: witness to nothing.

But no one comes clapping, praising this final, sad epiphany. No one comes except Isabel, the nursing-home nurse. Isabel tucks her in her bed, puts the bed-pan in plain sight, and arranges the picture frames cradling her smiling family she hasn’t seen in years. “After my nap, I’ll tell a wonderful story, Isabel,” she swears as she slips into dormant nothingness. She stays that way for a long time, and then, she dies.

Dharma Bums

I've been in a funk and I've got the mean reads. I'm angry because something was taken away from me. About three weeks ago, the Speech & Debate Team's funding was cut. The program was cut. This is just one more thing that can be added to my list of "things that are out of my control." Fuck that. I love performing. I can't imagine my collegiate experience without speeching. I've been performing in some way or another officially since I was in the 6th grade, unofficially since I was a fetus. The idea that after April 20 I will never perform again freaks me out. What do I do after college? I went to college never intending on actually graduating and finding a real job and living in the real world and becoming a real person.


One of my pieces this year revolves around defining what art is.


And that got me thinking. Why do I do Speech? Why do I make movies? Why do I write?


I do all of these in what is probably a vain effort to somehow control the world in which I live, recreating it in a manner that satisfies my sense of what the world should look like and be like. I’m just interested in the truth. And what I like best is the complicated, messed-up truth. The one that’s so imperfect you know it’s true.

We Cannot Afford To Be What We Have Become

"There's your karma, ripe as peaches."

"You never die enough to cry."

"But why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?"

"We should be wondering tonight, 'Is there a world?' But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world, because there is really no world, cause sometimes I'm walkin’ on the ground and I see right through the ground. And there is no world. And you'll find out."

"My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet. As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind. I'm a wretch. But I love, love."

"This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do."

"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."

Pocket Jokers

My parents raised me "young." I don't think they really had childhoods, and because of that, they have been refusing to unhinge their fixation on it. I'm actually surprised I didn't end up more weird than I already am. My siblings and I were raised in a bubble of books and imagination with tinted windows so that we couldn't see the sun. My parents were and are very strict. My parents still don't want me to grow up. I love my family; I couldn't have asked for a better childhood. But now I find that the very holy childhood soaked in a golden aura of nostalgia wrapped in a bow on a shelf in the living room of my upper story- is something I'm starting to resent. My parents hardly know me anymore. They have no idea what I'm actually doing- both good and very, very, VERY bad things. If I died tomorrow, and they found this blog and all of my writing in my room and heard stories about me and found out some of the things I've done, I have no idea what they would do. I can't help but wonder that if the chances of them reading this are very high, then why am I doing this?

Lunar Eyes

Airport Running.

From Locust Ave to Lindbergh Drive, we swam through blue, green, red, and more blue lights. Each its own- each blinking, ever patiently, howling like forgotten wolves into the moss-forest of the night. Blink. We're halfway through our run and see the state prison to the right. The sky-high electric fence reminds me of the tense, forced, metal-mouth smiles of my grade school days. "Thank god," I think. Blink. Above Radiohead's mellow sound we hear something. Without hesitating, our eardrums smile, greet it, and offer it a strong drink. Blink. My bracelet is caught on Henry's coat and I laugh and then my cheeks blush past pushed roses but I don't care I'm floating on in the indifferent dark watching the lights slow dance outside my window and I cough in an attempt at covering my revocation of our material, jewel-on-leather connection until just then- Blink- just then- Blink- I unleash my seat-belt chains- Blink- roll down the window-Blink- and fling my soul into the night, attempting to catch the airplane in its splendor of power with a poor fisherman's net. It teases me then laughs in a fleeting, almost-kiss. Blink. I look down at my hands. Blink. I light a cigarette. Blink. I realize that we're really hunting planes on these memory-erasing rides- not running with them- but from our lives. We're sad and twisted, blink-ing, unimportant lights, each of us in solely in love with tomorrow.

Paranoid Android

Things I'm Thinking About:

+My days are owned by my nights. I can't say no to people. I can't say how I really feel to someone. I drink too much. I smoke to get through the week. I don't care about anything. It's getting to the point where I wish my life was just a stretch of weekends. I mean it practically is, but it's still not enough.

+Whenever you say your own name, it's always, always awkward. You never say it out loud, you confirm it over and over again in your head. When you have to introduce yourself to someone, you will always hesitate, you might even mispronounce it.

+The weather report was a death sentence.