Staring at the Sun

-bits from the work

"By the twenty-third passenger window on the midnight train I wasn't supposed to take, you asked me if I was seeing anyone and I inhaled stars, binding them in a boxed set in my respiratory machine's gathering madness and the stars' velvet aurora lights the soul strings of my soul and lights the edge of the howling window like nothing I've ever seen and without knowing it or thinking it I respond that I see you. Because I do. Somehow that stolen collection of December stars reconstructed the language of my stringed respiration so that it was unable to orchestrate quite the same, while you and I balanced elegantly on the air reserved only for triple trombones and splitters of majesty."

"A cast-away graveyard of cigarette butts and homeless hearts. We try so hard to walk, anywhere, besides the sidewalks of life. We design walkable rollercoasters, and then discover they already have a father and mother."

Natural Causes

-bits from the work

"And we came back, but yesterday was already born and had grown old amongst the wheezing, pencil-sharpening waste of our everyday youth. We came back and it was a jilted town, struggling to swallow the winding veracity of the clock that could no longer tell the high from the dry. Every building was maddeningly mud-caked in ghostly negligence. And you wonder what we did day to day. You wonder how strange it is that we left, praying to be ruined. You wonder how this one happening kept us from downfall, yet ended up falling into the eerie hopeless emptiness. Without us."

We Were Promised Jet Packs

You know that it happens, we grow old.

Between diving into the espinaca dip and deep dishing on our agreed distaste for the dirty talk diction, an old friend and I caught up over my break. It was more refreshing than applying a heavy coat of Mango Burt's Bees. And DAS refreshing. She brought up some good points. One being, that I've changed. A lot. I know I have. The pseudo anklebiter that bounced from hookah bars to musicals, high on the organic energy of life is no mo. I wish that it could be enough. But it's not anymore. Not because it's too expensive, but because once replaced, it can never be reproduced. We get older and with each passing moon, we unconsciously fold the panorama of our adolescence into origami, filling canisters with these creatures of nostalgia until they brim over. It is only then that we wake to foreign temperaments and realize we have jettisoned these sacred vessels to the moon.

I was blessed with a semi-charmed pupilage, but I somehow convinced my fool of a élan vital that along with my diplomas, I had also graduated from that part of my life, mostly scar free. Right? Riiiiiii-ong. WHERE THE FUCK IS MY DIPLOMA PROVING THAT I WAS DONE, THAT I PASSED WITH PRETTY PASTEL COLORS? Nonexistent, apparently. We're knitted armor for our adult identities, yet when we come home, they unravel with the slightest grievance. For the family is too blunt an instrument to ever stay perfectly compact.

Yesterday's Parties

"I'll go for that, and smile when I
pick sand off myself in the shower.
It is the way Scotland looks to the South,
the way we enter friends' houses
to leave what we came with, or flick
the kettle's switch and wait.
This is where I want to live,
close to where the heart gives out,
ruined, perfected, an empty arch against the sky
where birds fly through instead of prayers
while in Hoy Sound the ferry's engines thrum
this life, this life, this life."
-Andrew Greig

-bits from the work

"Everything swirling, fast, so fast, that it dwelled on seeming ingenuine. We douse the fiery, inconsequential judgements we had consciously wrapped ourselves in. And it was just us, hanging on dearly to exonerated, sputtering utterances unfettered by the bud and the stars. Faces swam past our fishbowl swoon-diving, but we only had 16-year-old, swollen eyes for each other. Each minute the last minute."

"Heart-breaker waves, I long to love but can't. Sea salt teased my nose & tongue & eyes & I succumbed to blindness. Still, I strain my ears to make out the ocean's wanderings, of secrets whispered and lost in the unconsciousness of the waves. I've followed my nose to this spot of breadcrumb trails and sorry childhood beach days. I stay that way, slow dancing in the salty film, and this is where, finally, finally, you first find me."

"After your initial reaction to the shedding, lovelorn wallpaper, you want to reach out and touch something. But everything is immaturely competing for your attention, like three forgotten children high on the prospect of wonderfully indifferent, parental praise. And when the television deepens and eventually dulls their building block blues, their hopes drop into one rainbow on the floor."

And a new earth

"We swiped our leathered lungs for cotton balls; coughing up blood and frustration that our hearts somehow still could not fit."

"I've written pages upon pages trying to rid you from my bones."

"You can say we were satisfied in the swirling hybrid of glory days and clenched teeth, but there goes our insect skeleton. We unknowingly shed our june bugged love shells in the afterglow of the dog days, leaving it pinned to a tree. Will the future see it as the deconstruction of a relationship in its own art, or will it only be seen by the dog barking below the sapling?"

Scrapped interp intro that doesn't quite fit the puzzle:

      - "Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon of finding meaning where there is none. From the Rorschach inkblot test to seeing the Virgin Mary’s face in a grilled cheese sandwich, we want the world to be known and mysterious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us. But whether we’re looking for evidence of God, or maybe just for company, under ordinary circumstances, pareidolia provides a psychological explanation for many delusions based upon sense perception."

'Put down the pipe and watch this' video of the week:

One word. HOLY. 

"You are seeking little other than the peaceful parade of pictures on screens. The tranquil melody of corporate lullaby. There is a war being waged for your minds and you're starting to forget just how free and powerful you are. Re-imagine the world: a world that shifts its shape with every passing daydream that intervenes your daily routines and the narcotic moments of creative bliss. Everything is on fire all the time."

      - 

Someday, when I'm awfully low...

"It doesn't hurt, it feels fine

The trivial sublime

I'd like to turn off time

And kill my mind

You kill my mind

Paranoia, paranoia

Everybody's comin' to get me

Just say you never met me

I'm runnin' underground with the moles

Diggin' holes

Hear the voices in my head

I swear to God it sounds like they're snoring

But if you're bored then you're boring

The agony and the irony, they're killing me, whoa

I'm not sick, but I'm not well"

I'm rock & rolling stoned right now and I can't tell if the music I'm listening to at work is actually good music or if a toilet flushing would meet my eardrums' musical qualifications currently. Because I'm feeling everything way too much right now. Thank goodness it's Friday. Haven't heard back yet from the New Yorker. Have no idea what I'm doing next year. Actually, that's a lie. I have an idea, a ridiculously beautiful, throbbing idea, but have no clue as to how I can execute this in a semi-successful, limited bleeding fashion. General Outline: Problem, Cause, Solution. Need to get a big-girl job. Needs to be in Chicago. Why? Second-City in the windy city. Get it// got it// good. 

Based on the previous statement, it would be appropriate to assume that I, indeed, will be trying to "make it" as a stand-up comedian/writer/director/actor? WHAT THE FUCK AM I THINKING? But I have to have a regular job on the side, along the fine lines of public relations & ad copy writing (& stripping). Jokes. So I'm going to do this, DO THIS. Any other job I've ever kidded myself into believing I could seriously do was never real. In order to do this, I'm going to have to give up a lot. It's going to be ungodly hard and I'm going to want to chicken out and take the easy way out and find someone and settle down and consequentially put my ideas and dreams and work away, in the weakened, yet hope-hoarding crevice between my bruised rib & my broken one. Because even if I get off track, I will die before jumping off this trackless train.

"It takes a long time for her to figure it out."

"And the way he looked at me and we both knew. And then people came and left and we didn’t care, we were finally alone and concentrated."

"You swear that there is still good in this world, and that is your lullaby every night."

"The way you can tell you've been mourning even in your sleep."

Gone Crazy, Be Back Later

-bits from the work circa 07/08

"She paints her fingernails & before they're dry, she starts chipping away at them. A "worn-in" look, she says. Her hands are worn in. When we look at her she makes sense to a degree, and then you get to her hands and you don't know what to do with them. No matter what she's saying, her hands echo so much louder her rawness. She does everything to keep them in the shadows: rolls her sleeves down, teases gypsies with her collection of jewelry and bracelets, and when she drives- she barely holds the wheel. You wouldn't even think she was driving, but sitting elegantly in a chair at a dishonest party- arm outstretched- just a bit- toward the receding horizon of hands she plans on shaking."

"Oh how I remember you. A drunken mess of appendages we waited so long to meet and could never untangle. And now we both know this is not the people we're supposed to be. We're in the wrong places, in the right place. Our hearts caught in a half-collapsed spiderweb, unable to beat for fear of wrecking this pure feeling. You walked in and I was on the moon; breathing became an extraordinary complication, drowning in white-knuckled, muted frustration that devastated me everywhere at once. We fashion easy smiles on easy faces, but our eyes are as big as the love crumbs we recycle the horrible and ordinary with. This is it. This is it. I know I'm late to embrace this rose-tinted brain wave, but don't shrug your shoulders of this- this- this- this- this is it. But it's never enough. With you we have the world I've always imagined. By the time I finish this thought, you're already gone. And oh if you knew what it meant to me."

"He waits, his wits the last thing he owns. Not wanting to become a schmear of society: the beaten pink gum on the concrete, sprinkled in filth and now it's pigment is the color of a dirty eraser."