ways to make violet:

With seaslugs. And the utmost secrecy.

Pescetarian

I didn't like being a pescetarian. When I told people I was pescetarian, I had to explain what pescetarian meant. Then I just started saying, I don't eat meat... except for fish. Of course, when I said that, someone inevitably said, "You mean, a pescetarian?" subtext: lol you fucking idiot. So I went back to saying I was pescetarian. "Um, it sounds pretentious when you say that you are pescetarian. You should just say that you don't eat meat except for fish." Fine. I will make my self-righteous stomach stop eating fish. Now I'm a vegetarian elitist. It's funny these words pesceterian and vegetarian can be used as nouns. And if they can, does that say something about identity? I mean, you really are what you eat. I mean you are more what you eat than who you sleep with, I think. If you consider things in a material sense. You may also be your decisions about eating, but I'm not sure.

A Man Named Leroy.

I am facebook friends with a man I do not know at all. I'm not sure when we became facebook friends or why. He is an older, evangelical pastor; and, he puts up statuses that I feel so differently from I find them fascinating. Thats why I don't delete him from my friend list. Yesterday, he commented in no uncertain terms that married men and women should never be alone with a member of the opposite sex. Ever. (Unless they're family members.)

Forget or forgot? Forget... forgot....

Forget. Present tense.

Forgot. Past tense. I remember that I forgot.

Forget. I forget. Forget what? I don't remember.

Dear Cloud,

Please be my messanger. Here is the message. It is inscribed on the surface tension of water. (I heard that if you drop water on pennies, the drops will hold pretty tight-- so heres some pennies I'll toss up with the water. Consider it a tip if you hustle fast enough.) How can I personify clouds after a metaphysics class? Only human beings have free will. You, cloud, will have to go as fast as the wind determines.

Whats the message? Who is it for? Well first let me tell you what you will see as you go about your way. You'll travel first down Kingston Pike, a road that streaks like a comet's tail west from downtown Knoxville. Its a lesson in universals, as most stores along the pike is a store one could find anywhere else in the U.S.... even South America and Europe maybe. McDonald's-ness.

And as you go past the long road you'll see little cars like metal scooters that shuffle in definite patterns. My mother and father's house is along the way: a brown geometrical shape on a green lot. The contractors and realators used the word "lot" to describe the space my parents purchased to build. I personally prefer the word plot, but for some reason no one says it any more. "Lot" is the preferred word, Personified Cloud. And is a GPS devise not just, after all, an attempt to personify a cloud? Or to atleast to inhabit a cloud? Since I have seen my parents' house from GoogleEarth, Personified Cloud, I can tell you what you will see. You'll see the driveway. And since you are not frozen in time like Google Earth, you will see the current season laying with the landscape--winter. You might see Frankie's truck parked near by. He is an independent contractor from Cuba who does a lot of work for my parents. Pass by all this, Cloud, pass west to the I40 split towards Chattanooga. Then I75 south.

Soon the Appalachian greenary will yeild to scrubbier varieties of trees. The land flattens out... Which could be expressed in some metaphor about ribbons or folds, or water pooling sideways but why should I bother.

Go south, south, souther still. Theres cities along the way; feel free to check them out. I think they may burn your eyes, as they reflect the heat from the sun, and the light. Mostly the light. Its white like you are. Clouds and city-sun reflections share the universal "white-ness". But if it doesnt hurt you too much to look on, Cloud, you will see toddlers going to class. And Star-Bucks employees smoking on their ten-minute breaks. The clouds from their butts wont make it just yet to join you. You'll see not much. Outside cities, cities like Birmingham, theres the interstate. You can count the roadkill you see, Personified Cloud. I'm sure somebody does. I'm sure its a graph somewhere, so don't worry if you are the worrying type (thats discouraged BTW): the roadkill is being managed. I wrote that in the passive tense so we don't know who is doing the managing. It diffuses the tension that way.

So focus now, not on the two-thirds deer in the margin of I-75: her eyeball reflecting your shape overhead; focus on the horizon. And say a prayer for the dead animal. Prayers are as universal as McDonald's. On the horizan you'll see jets and commercial flights. Like, birds, I think of clouds looking down, but you must look up as well, Personified Cloud. You can look up to the sun , as a mentioned before, and now as night is falling you can look up to the stars (dont be fooled, they are much bigger than you, Cloud, just not right now. They are bigger and smaller than you). Do you have any closer insights to space? When you look up, it must be full of things you do not see. The ozone layer, or other sphere layers that cushion the Earth's raw bulge, for one.

Even further South, you see the city New Orleans. But even before you see it, you hear its noise. The sound spills out chaotically from the West Bank, the Causeway, Frenchmen, like crayon marks scribbled outside lines from a coloring book, even when that kid was trying to be careful (you're welcome for that metaphor, Personified Cloud.) The Monarche butterflies migrating to Mexico from the Northeast skirt around New Orleans. Thier stealy constitutions are limited by their delicate wings... they do not trust their little bodies to make it unpunctured or unsmooshed in that tragic place. No one in New Orleans has seen a butterfly before. But you go there, Cloud. To places with palm trees against red bricks: the vision so startling you forget any other time you've seen a brick before, or a palm frond-- this only counts as the first in history.

Whats the message? Who is it for? Forgive me... I forget.

theories of progress

1. Everything is getting better over time.

2. Everything is getting worse over time.

3. Everything does not progress or regress over time. Or, everything changes over time, but not for better or for worse.

4. Every life individually progresses, but things start again for the following generation.

5. Everything repeats through cycles of progression and regression.

6. Everything gets more complex over time. Where either (a) complexity equals progress or (b) complexity does not equal progress.

7. There is no time but the present. The past and future do not exist. Similar to point three?

"Everything" comes to mean the sum of existence, past and present, good and bad, where progress is +1, +2, +3... regress is -1, -2, -3 and no progress or regress is changes that cancel out always to 0.

In the case of theories 3 and 7, there is no historical entities to consider in the weighing in of everything in existence. There is not anchor of comparison over time. There is only the fleeting present.

In the case of theory 4, there is no "lump sum" or karmic unity between entities of the world. There is only individual merits, so one success is not connected to others' successes or failures.

A question: Is progress an unhelpful word if it can only be utilized in terms of better or worse? Success or fail? Even if we shy away from the extremes, by talking of "baby steps" and "gradualness"... that is the binary scale on which many of us measure.

Two confessions

This person said, do you know how sometimes you're on your laptop and you get on Facebook when your bored and avoiding doing something? One time I was bored so I got on Facebook, then I was bored on Facebook, so I tried to get on Facebook while I was already on.

And I said, sometimes I feel so weird that I don't even feel like shopping.

MRS. GRANNY:

You can call me Mrs. Granny.

JANELLE:

Mrs..... Granny?

MRS. GRANNY:

Good Girl!

Shall I tell you something Henrietta?

JANELLE:

My name is Janelle.

MRS. GRANNY:

That man down the street? Kevin Marshal? You know him?

JANELLE:

Mr. Marshal.

MRS. GRANNY:

We used to be lovers.

JANELLE:

I should go on home.

MRS. GRANNY:

Alright deary.

Two days later.

JANELLE:

Mrs. Granny?

MRS. GRANNY:

What is it Henreitta?

JANELLE:

I'm back, and I brought some fig newtons.

MRS. GRANNY:

Oh, whats that? I can't see you in the light so good.

OFFICER 1:

Mrs. Granny, this is the NOPD.

MRS. GRANNY:

Henreitta?

OFFICER 1:

(to Janelle)

Get back girl. You did a good job. Now run along.

JANELLE:

Sorry Mrs. Granny!

OFFICER 1:

Mrs. Granny we want you to come with us now.

MRS. GRANNY:

Why would I do that. Oh no.... no. Stupid kids.

OFFICER 2:

Will you eat this?

MRS. GRANNY:

I dont want your food.

OFFICER 2:

You don't have to be afraid, ma'am.

MRS. GRANNY:

I'm not scared of nobody, no way.

OFFICER 1:

We need to excavate her.

MRS. GRANNY:

Exca-who? I know about ex's! And x-rays, and exoskeletons, and exits-- and no-o-o thanks! I'll stay right here.

OFFICER 2:

You're getting your drawers soiled.

MRS. GRANNY:

Get back! You're vulgar.

OFFICER 1:

Ma'am, we're trying to help. What do you eat?

MRS. GRANNY:

Beetles.

OFFICER 2:

Where do you sleep?

MRS. GRANNY:

Under that car.

OFFICER 1:

Have you been taking drugs?

MRS. GRANNY:

Stop putting words in my mouth.

Get going. Don't need no one. Nobody. No way, no how. I know how social security works!

TRESemme.

Laying on my couch, reading Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, I considered, after not doing so for a long time, Aristotle's Poetics, and the pity and fear that a spectator may feel for the tragic hero, and what corrospondents of such that I may locate in my own life and what I may expel in catharsis that is according to Boal who says that according to Aristotle is anti-political, or a rather threat to the political equilibrium, then my roommate came home. And seeing the can of hairspray I had on the coffee table, she asked me if I had been huffing. No, I answered, I have not been huffing the hairspray.

If you give up trying to talk to people, do all things you do not know how to say or do not try to say, go away? Or do they become burried under an avalanche inside you? If a person is burried in an avalanche, they should make a little burrow, a space to breathe. But even then, that cant last forever. If, at the bottom of your avalanche, you think something is protected there, you may check to see that it has been gone for a long time. And the the little alcove space is empty.

While I am on the subject of snow, I would like to add that if I could, I'd take the white print-out of my play script and ball it up into a lumpy snowball, and lob that snowball across a feild and watch it slump into a pile of mush. Someone younger than me may then collect that snowball and turn it into snow punch. The sort to which, in a crystal bowl, one adds cream.

Dear Autumn,

Driving over the mountain from Asheville, I saw yellow leaves... but then again what did I really see? A leaking ceiling. A droop-horse turned on her back, legs folded like a rabbit. I didn't see her long before a green sheet replaced her flee-bitten coat. Dear Autumn, dear colder still, dear dead pony. I tried to write a play once. The joints didnt even fold nicely, but squeaked like a metal gate. Some horse stalls are lined with shredded paper. Dear one long month, dear November, dear second fiddle to December. Dear colic, dear infirm, dear feeble, dear deaf, dear fate. I tried to tell my mother, about the mare and the play. I don't know what she heard, but she stood and sighed: lemme get your winter pansies.

Is there something there?

In metaphysics class while discussing Anscolmbe's argument for the existence of God, a young woman challenged the premise that the best things are better if they exist in reality rather than just in the mind. A man then asked her if she would rather be an idea or be real. The woman didn't know what to say to the question besides the fact that she would rather exist outside of an idea. But many nights later, she thought of the better reply: would he, the man, rather her exist in his mind than in reality? For it seems that many men would rather women exist in their minds than in reality. And many women would rather men exist in their minds than in reality. And many people say that people exist in minds and in reality. But I'm not sure if thats necessarily true.

Meta-Power Thoughts at SSREC Conference.

Ok, do you get more power from being unified with yourself? Or is power like atoms, where fission creates a burst of energy (like lightning from a stone or heat in a reactor)? And, to extend the nuclear metaphor, perhaps self-division ultimately has toxic consequences. In social movements, groups want to be harmonious, otherwise risk dispersion. But its the fissures, the dissent, that brings about change/action/newness/rebirth in the first place. Am I conflating power and energy? Should I not?

Second Dog Lesson

Chipper loves his squeakers.

He has a toy that resembles a fox tail. Not a literal fox tail, but the toy human children play with where a weighted ball is sewn in one end of a long sock. In Chipper's toy, the sock looks like a mink or a ferret, and the weighted ball is gone in favor of a squeaker-- sewn into both ends. Chipper starts by finding the squeaker (activated by squeezing or teeth chomping) and sqeaking it over and over again. He then tears into the fabric until he rips the squeaker free, and completely chews it into a silent, mottled, spitty piece of plastic.

Chipper has done this with every squeaker toy he gets, because he loves squeakers so much and is just trying to reach closer, still closer to them-- to grab the squeak and pump it like a heart, to have the squeaker until it is not only his, but of himself. This process, once begun, always results in the destruction of the squeaker. Therefore, there is no pre-emptive precaution to preserve the squeaker, except to never sqeak in the first place. And I can't get Chipper to promise to that.

First Dog Lesson

Chipper wants to play and Sawyer only knows how to fake fight. But his fake fight is just like his real fight, but Chipper doesnt know which kind of fight it is , and Sawyer is too scared to fight nice, then Chipper's play fight starts getting like a real fight because he's mad that Sawyer wont play any other way. And they both dont understand why I yell at them so meanly to knock it off when they are both still wagging their tails.

American Discontent

Why does Europe have better buildings? Does being around amazing architecture make laypeople smarter?

My Secret During a Poetry Reading in October

Forgive me, but your laugh is so loud

that I laugh less: a tactical counterpoint

to balance the space.

I try to dispell

resentments I may incur towards you

whenever your innocent gaffaws engender

the curtailment of my own amused yawp--

So I focus instead on the Buddha's

doctrine of negative action....

and choose to recall

how, after all, "the laughing Buddha,"

is too, a statue.

tech-love

We will not be as startled by the rise artificial intelligence as we once thought. That phase of human horror at the undead, the Frankenstein, and the robot is fading away each day now (link) as we work to normalize the uncanny. And what will soften this once-thought-of-as-threat is that our technology will develop as people develop. We would be alarmed if babies all of a sudden appeared and behaved just as adults. But they "develop" (you know, like software and hardware develops) and once they start talking and making decisions, we are ready for them to do so. We also love our babies, for the most part.

Like babies, iphones are gradually developing. Its not alarming to us now that our iphone "listens" and responds to our touch and voices. In fact, we are proud of the iphone! Did it just say what I think it did?! is our delight when we first engage with our upgrades. We giggle at its awkward voice, its answers (amazing if its right, endearing or frustrating if its wrong-- just like any infant). We are proud, because we love our iphones (link). I won't put quotations around love, because it does not need any qualification and it isn't ironic.

Also like babies, we have certain mysterious origin stories for iphones. The stork, or God, is responsible for children, and in a parallel formulation, Steve Jobs brings us iphones. God is dead, and humans are free to be and become. Jobs is dead. What will our devices become?

my roommate

I think if one was trying to figure out what makes a good person, they could get very confused and turned around. But maybe what is irrevokably nice... in an indefiniable way, that may be cross cultural, universal, and resonate with even alien species entertaining the same query... is tidyiness. Not in a stiff, depressing way and not in a look what I do, its a big deal and whats your problem anyway way-- but in the way that the person, whoever they are, takes care of the things they own and makes things clean even when they dont have to. Maybe its the only merit-making, and the rest is superfulous. Maybe its just Jess.

It amazed Ms. Kinman that she still awoke in the early morning time thinking of Harry. He was the single cause with a multitude of effects, the catalyst for Ms. Kinman's internal processes that continued to simmer and unfold for years after the initial event. Often times she considered herself as her own self-contained, self-perpetuated stove, or even an island star-- fixed in its own equilibrium of actions and reactions with no apparant relation to the world around her, save chance reminders of Harry that came from the outside like pre-daylight churchbells clamouring into her closed eco-system and startling her from sleep with messages of space, air, and tempo.

Something is wrong. Mizzie would think to herself for not the first, twenty-third, or even fiftieth time that day. The insidious notion was not borne from any intuition inside her. In fact, the absence of such as sense, an absence of worry or fear was precisely the genesis of the idea-- something is wrong. And from this something is wrong that liked to waft up from Mizzie's pillow in the morning time, an I feel nothing followed shortly after, perhaps simultaneously as its sister. The lack of emotion caused a certain inaction in its subject-- a no pressing urge to discover the sate of affairs-- only instead to passively acknowledge that something may be amiss and that this acknowledgment of unjustness, say, bred no feeling of paranoia or the least concern for Mizzie. In fact, she wanted to take a walk through the park to spell out what intuition told her that her absent intuition could mean, but just the thought of untangling what was looking more and more like a mass of previously unseen thistles, Mizzie felt sleepy. So much so, that her eyes closed and closed again as she tried to decide the order of her brain thoughts and how many doorways could something pass through before she lost sight of it completely.

I am wretched girl she admonished to herself. But the pathetic accusation, whether it stuck or not, on Mizzie's conscious had no affect on her morale. I am terrible loathsome un-awake creature. She added for good measure. Lazy too. Something turned over a little in her stomach. There, she then thought, some beginnings of a conscience. But she knew that wasn't right either.

For the record, I was sensitive and creative for a few days in November 2009.

So w/e

Whats the difference between repression and discipline? Is 'discipline' knowing what you are deciding not to express-- whereas 'repression' is when you never get a chance in the first place to properly acknowledge what you deny? Is there really any difference at all?

Between complacency and happiness?

ETC. (I assume but will not pursue. After all, I am no huntsman like some of out great authors. Only that tipsy girl at the other table who sometimes is serious and sometimes isn't.)

Noes and Yeses

I heard a great actor speak the other day. For years I've known his reputation but never personally encountered him except at a distance. Last night he was at rehearsal, and what I heard him say was only a sentence or two. He directed the two actors on stage go back to the section with "noes and yeses" and even the small way he said the two words "noes and yeses" I felt the tingle of huge meaning. Maybe it was a sacred reverence that I detected in his voice, a reverence for noes and yeses and all the different ways they meet each other and roll around. I was afraid of the history of noes and yeses then, just by his causual intonation. This was a wise and great actor.

Gotome 1

Once upon a time, there was a baby named Gotome. The child grew and came to know forms and letters, the names of the wildflowers, and the assemblage of numbers. One day, Gotome's friend, another youth from the town, asked her-- why are you called Gotome? But Gotome did not know why. So she went to her school teacher and asked him-- why am I called Gotome? But he did not know why and instead told her to ask her parents. So she went to her parents and asked them-- why am I called Gotome? But her parents did not know why and instead told her to ask her grandmother. So Gotome went to her wise grandmother and asked-- why am I called Gotome? But the wise grandmother could only say--

You must do as you are named. The rest I do not know.

So Gotome set and thought. How could she do as she was named?

update from the planet Zed

The baby alien play has a due date: November 22.

bamboozled

I'm at my parents house, house-sitting. Initially, I was sad to relocate for the week, the place being a ways from campus. But now that I am here, I feel like I am on a special "retreat." My mom has made a sort of Eden out of the lawn; so when I'm out in one of the wooden rockers reading I can very easily imagine that I am a novelist, relaxing* on the "estate." The kitchen is stocked with fresh peaches, tomatoes, onions, dips, crackers, coffee, salmon, and cereals. The clean house has a peacefulness spread through all the rooms. In fact, the Stout-House is a perfect example of the Utopian household in Ben Jonson's poem, "To Penshurst." In the text, as in my parents' home, the mystification of labor surrounds the masters and guests of the place-- and comfort and necessities spring up, is if of their own accord, to meet any wanting hands.

I wonder if it will be possible to write anything interesting this week while I am in floating on the foam of reality.

*"The Writer on Holiday", an article from Roland Barthe's book Mythologies is another example of mystification. Instead of labor and effort becoming mystified, (as is the case in my home: first because of the distance between where our food/furniture/etc. is produced and purchased, and second because of my visiting here results in my not even collecting the mystified home-objects in the first place) Barthe's explores how the act of writing is specifically mystified by journalistic portrayals of authors on vacation. One of my favorite cultural reads from Barthe's book.

Zoo-Bop

The Zebtones, in concert, soaked in blood. Their collective zen entranced them to kill. The stunned crowd explodes. "This is the new level, man!" Above the mass, electric hazzbahs pop occasionally.

playwriting workshop

LAST EXCERSIZE:

Characters:

Ladybug Sticker Babies.

Mother Sheet.

Spear.

There is a huge group of ladybug stickers. Since they are immobile, their little voices all call out, clamor, and crawl around one another. Which is to say, they overlap.

LADYBUGS:

Its warm on this ledge

Who left us out here?

The girl

The girl

The girl

Dont you remember?

Oh look inside the living room

Oh wow!

Cool!

Lamp! Lamp lamp lamp.

Its green and huge.

Whats a lamp?

Its warm.

Like the ledge in the sun.

And the white paint on the window sill.

The girl.

She’s warm.

The SPEAR enters, singing like a troubador.

SPEAR:

Oh I ramble through the jungle

Step step step

Do you want to hold me

Defend golden Incan troves with me

Uh uh uh

Keep me in your hands

Thrust thrust thrust

Baby

In the jungle

Thrust thrust thrust

I’ll attack I’ll protect

But this is a two way street.

I need someone too baby

Use me, misuse me

Ill use youuuuuuuu

Thrust thrust thrust.

Good evening little ladybugs.

LADYBUGS:

You are so big and threatening.

It’s a giant.

A skinny giant.

A giant stick bug!

A stink bug?!

Ewww

SPEAR:

Don’t be afraid, I'm only dangerous in the wrong hands.

LADYBUGS:

We are never dangerous in anyones hands.

SPEAR:

How nice to not have responsibility. You don’t bare the burden of violence.

LADYBUGS:

We are still a little scared of you.

A little.

Yeah a little.

SPEAR:

I miss the jungle. I miss the canopies and the sloths.

LADYBUGS:

Why are you telling us?

Yeah why us? That’s not our problem.

We’ve never seen the jungle. We go with handmade cards. And sometimes lists. We’re sort of like tadpoles. Yeah. But we’re afraid of ants. Yeah.

SPEAR:

I thrust. Oh its wonderful! Have you ever seen a thrust?!

(thrust)

LADYBUGS:

Ah!

SPEAR:

(thrust)

LADYBUGS:

Ah!

SPEAR:

(thrust)

LADYBUGS:

Ah!

SPEAR:

Don’t you like this?

A new voice emerges, deep and maternal. Singular.

MOTHER SHEET:

No, no, please stop.

SPEAR:

Who are you?

MOTHER SHEET:

I’m the paper sheet, these ladybugs are my children.

You are frightening them with your abrupt thrusts.

SPEAR:

Well then you should raise them to be more fearless.

Then there is a noise of a loud slide, like a rolling metal wave.

SPEAR:

Ah! Whats that!

MOTHER SHEET:

The patio door. Oh fearless one.

The ladybug children snicker.

The MOTHER SHEET gathers steam.

MOTHER SHEET:

And who are you to tell me how to raise my kids? I shelter them and keep them close the best I can. I try to keep them with me, as a family. Sometimes that’s nearly impossible to do, but its not my fault! I wish I had to teeth to bite back the sticker peelers.

SPEAR:

Maybe I could offer you protection.

MOTHER SHEET:

Maybe you’d corrupt my children.

SPEAR:

Trust me.

We are a unit. We stick together. Go back to where you came from you… you big brute.

SPEAR:

Paper sheet! Don’t talk that way to me!

MOTHER SHEET:

Keep away from me, keep away from my lucky tiny babies.

SPEAR:

I’m not trying to hurt anyone. I cant help how I was made. Its not my fault.

MOTHER SHEET:

Its not my problem.

SPEAR:

One time… someone used me to kill a tiger. I hated that. One time… someone used me to kill another person. I’ll never forget that. It gives me nightmares.

MOTHER SHEET:

Its not my problem. I have to keep my family together, when something bigger is always trying to pull us apart.

LADYBUGS:

We want…. ICECREAM!

Icecream!

Icecream!

Icecream!

Icecream!

MOTHER SHEET:

Sh! Now quiet!

Spear. No one has talked to me in a long long time.

I have the uncontrollable urge to tell you something.

SPEAR:

Whats that?

MOTHER SHEET:

To her self in angst

How can anyone keep secrets when their children are always around?! Stuck on me like…she whispers as softly as a drifting iceburg) burrs.

SPEAR:

Just keep whispering. They wont hear.

LADYBUGS:

Yeah we wont hear.

We wont listen.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

MOTHER SHEET:

Ah its no use.

SPEAR:

I think I know your secret.

MOTHER SHEET:

How could you?

SPEAR:

I’ll write it down for you. You can read it and see if I’m not right.

He writes. A screen comes down.

The words are displayed on it. They say:

I’m tired of caring for my children. I love them. I’ll always love them. But that doesn’t feel big or important. That feels like default.

MOTHER SHEET:

Oh yes. Oh yes. Oh no.

Maybe I’m not cut out to love. I am an object, so what is my purpose? I think I’d like one.

SPEAR:

To be used.

And whats use, but mis-use? Lets find a trap door. Lets slip out.

MOTHER SHEET:

My babies…

SPEAR:

Find them other sheets of paper to stick onto.

MOTHER SHEET:

Not so loud.

SPEAR:

I can’t hear them.

LADYBUGS:

Mom?

Mom?

Mom?

Mamma?

Silence.

at the french market with sweet lou

artwork by Dan Fuller.

I like these less as paintings... more as sets.

What kind of collecting am I doing? What is the difference between magic and nostalgia?

pop quiz ditto 1-2

Circle the following true statements.

Do not flip to the next page unless the bottom corner says GO.

Stop when the bottom corner of the page says STOP.

Make your mark heavy and dark.

1. I was as happy as a clam.
2. I was as miserable as the night, that slurps wet on a pillow.
3. V. found an anthill.
4. The problem was an anthill.
5. A molehill is an anthill is a mound of beans.
6. The letter left un-mailed whimpered, then watched T.V.
7. S. threw the toaster.
8. The toaster never feared.
9. I lost all the paper clips.
10. S. didn’t throw the toaster.
11. The toaster was afraid.
12. If G, then H. If J, then K.
13. If G, then K. If J, then H.
14. If A, then B.
15. If A, then I.
16. If B, then I.
17. C. wants V’s beauty.
18. V. wants for nothing
19. The cat and the dog were friends.
20. The cat and the dog were enemies.
21. It was red.
22. It was rain.
23. On a Sunday, the running in the park.

the cearig at sea: an opera in two acts

Act I

scene one: the try outs

scene two: the fight

scene three: a winner emerges

scene four: Carina's theme

scene five: the captian's pursuit

scene six: who and what, skuttlebutt

scene seven: no day but today

Act II

scene one: abject pleasures/ come to me

scene two: its always you/ Carina's theme

scene three: the deferment of love

scene four: mutiny

scene five: in death we part

scene six: the captain's pursuit reprised

End.

One day I'll go in the fridge drawer with a knife and grater, sample all twelve kinds in there.

Writing is telling the truth, and I want to tell the truth. Except when I am in the rare position to actually be able to tell it. In that case, I don't want to anymore. Which is also how loving and adventure and Nirvana go.

Instead I will tell a smaller thing, and its the feeling of the grocery store. Here, I watch a girl in the cheese section perusing. She is an unhappy person, who sleeps most days and spends her waking hours on adderal, xanax bars, alcohol, weed, and sometimes cocaine. I love the different kinds of cheese, as does she. I am from T., a well off family. She is from T., a family of millionaires. I watch her for signs of our differences, but that's like trying to tell a human from an android in Phillip K. Dick's novel. Irish white cheddar makes one shape, and something softer makes another. I could describe the red wax and distinct aroma here in detail, but I don't recall the distinct aroma after all. Is there a distinct aroma? And red wax seems to say enough. But this girl, in addition to larger wedges that catch her eye, also selects the smallest square packages to purchase. These are my fav. I always get them, she says. They have a simple black and red plastic wrapping. And after throwing seven in the cart, she looks at the price sticker and sees that each mouthful-size package is three dollars. She laughs and puts more in.

BASEBALL IV

We lost the game, But it was a great game. Slide home. From somewhere else I see my red, round home the way mirrors show Belinda her nose.

What does home mean to you? I’m playing baseball.

No heat, no sun, just breeze enough to fill a field like a balloon, with bits of grass sticking to the plastic. It’s a jam up that everyone likes—like mud on white pants and ice cream glued to your shirt – Home is the baseball field only turned into a collection of stuff that doesn’t move even when it moves, and is mostly in the left hand kitchen drawer Slide that thing open. Days so full, they’re oozing and you want to lick it. God it gets in your stomache then and wont let go. You want to shake it free but free in the way that it sticks around forever. I’m in that drawer too, curled up like a cabbage with the double AA’s and paper clips, watching me swing a bat.

Every house needs a junk drawer.

And we gave it our all, until we couldn’t any more. We went home, then, which

at the bottom of the day is shaded and closed as a cauliflower. Its already evening there, at home

—its ordered alright in ways that things stay if they move but are mostly in the left hand drawer

of the kitchen, where they sit in there but sort of change up how they are. Slide that thing open: looks around with her hungry spider hand or as if a light is stuck at the end of her finger so it rummages in that drawer that’s normally dark but sometimes light. That light could come either from a window—the sun is real, but the window is fake, so are the batteries. In case you wanted to keep track. Home is where the spiders only move to remind you that they mostly don’t. Home is where they cant. I sit still or move, depending on whether the drawer is opened.

Home tends to stick when you try to turn to the next page as if like what the hell these pages are fucking stuck together.

To clarify

Sometimes I think of you, and I miss you, and my eyes water. But thats not really crying.

Thumbelina Adventures

Thumbelina's interests: small bugs, wedge heels, miniture ponies. Female, its complicated (I find the sink rim insurmountable so that I need a floss-thick jungle vine to find the shelf behind the bathroom mirror. As I love myself but cannnot reach my reflection, I'll label that complicated.) Political views, whoever is looking out for the little guy. Religious views? I'll take the God of small things: toenail clippings and spider poop. After all, its not all just poppie petal beds and hickory nut boats here in this shrunken body. Its finding someone with hands small enough and heart big enough to touch me right and say Dont worry, Babe, I'll help you fight off the miserly moles.

Sepulchre. Tabernacle.

These are namura jellyfish.

They will be in my next apacolyptic play.

Also, barfbrains, I love your blog. Thank you.

I could strike out every "post" and stuff them under my seat. I ought to set myself on fire, and run out to the sea.

A Complaint

House Bill 229, the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, passed in Tennessee by legislaters Dunn and Campfield:

“Human sexuality is a complex subject with societal, scientific, psychological, and historical implications; those implications are best understood by children with sufficient maturity to grasp thier complexity. Notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, no public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses sexual orientation other than heterosexuality.”

These claims do not necessarilly follow. Perhaps what these bill makers are aware of at some level is if they were to spell out, logically, their decision-making process, it would be riddled with prejudice and irrationality.

While implemented, the bill encourages adolescents, leaving the “child sphere” access to information about heterosexuality, but delaying mention of homosexuality until they are already well into the “adult sphere” of high school. By banishing homosexuality to the later of high school instead of the graspable present-- we are placing a multitude of other implications on the nature of homosexuality.

We all have become unconsciously habitual-ized to the association of the word “adult” with things that are “dirty,” “unknowable,” and unsafe for children. Consider "Adult super stores." They are understood by everyone to be places that sell licentious sex-products and porn videos—we are clued in by the one operating word in this title: “adult.” And just as “adult superstores” are topographically located on the margins of towns, off the side of the interstate, away from homes—we are similarly locating homosexuality as outside day-to-day experience. By now legally casting homosexuality into this category we are perpetuating a fear. A fear of otherness, AIDS, and immorality: a fear that we have created. As Donna Haraway reminds us

“Biological and cultural determinism are both instances misplaced concreteness— i.e. the mistake of, first, taking provisional and local category abstractions… for the world, and second, mistaking potent consequences to be preexisting foundations.” [1]

By marginalizing homosexuality we are producing consequences within the population-- and in turn mistaking these consequences as inherent facts of matter. This is about justice. Heterosexuality isn’t any safer than Homosexuality, yet because we tell kids this is so, than we make it so.

What I am saying here is something most people already know. In fact the objections to be found with this sort of legislation cited above and this sort of thinking in general are so many and so obvious that perhaps many of us get tired of combating the same blindness with what feels like duh- answers. In this grey world moral-ambiguity, this sort of legal decision-making is one of the few things that is so unequivocally wrong. What are the words I am looking for with all of this? Oh, here they are: Fuck this Shit. But, fuck it any way you want.

---

[1] Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto.

The Henley Street Bridge is Closed but I Could Still Use the Gay Street Bridge to Visit South Knoxville

The road went straight up I swear, straight up so that my car, though a v-8, still said you've got to be kidding me. When I was in Martinique, our tour took us through road capillaries, yellow and blue buttoned homes futon as cultural sites of interest. Here it is not much different with me, oogling at the neighborhoods over the bridge like a bird foul scratching at the corn kernel

saying how about that. Each home popped up like a well made picture, they even added the rust to the pink tricycle, a slightly different shade than the dogwood blossoms. I didn't make eye contact with the woman at the mailbox, the shirtless man belly up in the yard, the dark face looking out the door window. My car was a gondeleir rigged on a track of Dollywood's newest hot attraction: Take the Car Through Appalachia.

the love tunnel

This is how you feel love. Its simple. There is a love tunnel that you imagine. Along the wall there are alternating white and pink stripes like a candy cane. The colors swivel up like a fun house room. And at the end of the tunnel, you place a picture of who ever you want to love. The picture can be anyone.

"Disclose/withhold

Disclose/withhold

Disclose/withhold

Diswith/closehold

Diswith/closehold

Diswith/closehold"

--Fifteeenth Chapter (.blogspot)

P.J.'s heterotopia

Space: PJ's

Formal entry procedure: reciept=authentification for "coffee shop" zone.

Rules of "Coffee Shop"

-Use internet.

-Private/public person, is one available for interaction? Or closed to social advances?

-Look tired, busy, and/or forlorn

-Find romantic interest

If I enter into the coffee shop heterotopia, and my purple sweater falls off the back of my backpack, is that within the theory of abjection? My sweater was once "of me"-- then fell off without my knowledge. When the man in line behind me got my attention to return it, I felt embarrassment, as if I had dropped my dung unawares, or left a slime trail. If I had shed my sweater conciously, I feel like that embarrassment would be absent. The sweater acting outside of my control, yet of me, is the source of the discomfort. Frankenstein a hightened form of this with his monster on the loose?

A coffee shop like PJ's holds many incongruities inside its boundries: CNN shows me footage from Iraq; the woman on the phone beside me is speaking Spanish; everyone's internet windows are open to images and illustrations from around the world.

we woke up

We woke up with the umbrellas scattered around us. Carol was last to open her eyes, but the first to speak. That was one sick thunderstorm last night she said as she pushed some umbrellas off her legs. I wanted to agree but I also wanted to disagree so I didn’t say anything. Lets clean all this up said my best mate, Poppy, and we reset the rest of the umbrellas. Thanks for the download everyone said to me but I was already ready to get out of there.

Times When I was Little that I Thought I was Molested But Actually Wasn't

1. At daycare, B.'s little brother who was my age. He did not know how to fasten his pants back up after the bathroom. He waddled into the playroom, concerned. I looked away out the window. Dirty foods by memory-association: apple juice, cheerios, and hot dogs without the bun.

2. Always my play-friends' little bothers. At R.'s house. I was five and leaving to go home. He was two and busted in naked. This mother laughed at him hugging me-- but me, a baby and brother-less, was shocked into red silence. I could not go back to that house which was blue/gray painted wood which was my favorite type of house. I did not tell my mother.

3. At the neighborhood pool. I was seven. He was K.'s stepbrother (back when I think, divorce and remarriage was still new and strange for me). He was six and this was on purpose. We were playing Marco Polo, and he squeezed my butt. The move was too confident and precise to be a blind and desperate gesture. I noticed also that his mother smoked cigarettes. Through naivety and upbringing, I associated the two evils as probably related. No one else I knew smoked besides my Godmother, whom I loved deeply. I did not go to the pool with K. again.

Epilogue.

In fifth grade, we had a puppet show to tell us about abuse. We were instructed that if someone touched us in embarrassing places that we should tell an adult we trusted. I burned for days with guilt for not speaking up. And for many years, I worked hard to convince myself that these events never happened.

the shaping place

New Orleans, as a city, funnels you. People here act a way that they wouldnt somewhere else. Each bent and gridded street shoots us around in a predetermined pinball machine. New Orleans is why M.'s romantic interest starts flirting and kissing other girls when she leaves town, why W.'s hook-up doesnt call; it is the overwhelming rule of the realm. We take the avenues allowed to us, start and stop on Rampart, Deacator, Camp, and Claiborne to find ourselves under shady trees or in a small store-- getting lost in the museum of New Orleans where each public statue, drunk pisser, and well-walked pooch is an homage to the idea of New Orleans. Its such a simple list to agree on, memorize, and recreate. We all perform New Orleans in New Orleans becuase New Orleans demands it.

science fiction meets nostalgia

In my rear view mirror I could see a girl behind me in the night. She was clicking her lock button so the car headlights would flash. In the dark it looked like a giant primordial spark of flint. She must of kept clicking her lock button because the flash would happen again then again, like a whip crack that she commanded. Looking into the mirror felt like looking into a story book. I am eight and reading about a cold boy on the wooden floor of an inn. He is about to place firewood in the furnace but until then he is honest, virtuous, and freezing to death. Meanwhile this girl in my mirror is calling the light out of no where and I want follow her, if she goes, to some house surrounded by palm trees. But also I want the light to keep ringing out as if it were hitting me each time. I wonder who is in control of the universe and if this girl is in the center and if this is a story of the safe or dangerous variety. Is this the future or the past that I see? How can it feel like both at the same time?

She learned to rue the day that she said the name of home like it was any other place.

The Day My Father Mistook My Mother for a Bird

She was pecking cornmeal on the table.

He said don’t touch her, the smell of your hand will cling to the wings, then no one

will touch her. We watched from the verandah the way she rustled in the yard than howled

like a cat locked in the laundry room.

I think that’s her whistle said Dad.

The laundry room is also a nursery for baby clams-- we counted them and found nothing but sand in their soft parts.

We tried to feed them to her, but Mother Birds do not eat clams. Instead

she takes tufts of our hair to fold into a nest in the kitchen, a shrine of bike helmets and science fair posters. Mother

sits on the rubble until she’s all of it: the bottom half meets her top half and a she’s a twister board that no one plays.

The pile is an ice dispenser and an emerald. Somewhere is her metal eye.

We do not touch her.

This Painting at the KMA Looks at Me While I am Look at It

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A white room is here and out there. Between is a painting’s faint space, which is looking to who? Me or you? I was trying to— I was looking for— but now I can’t remember. Your hands are at my waist and neck. Our feet find the carpet— your shoes, Dear, are utterly ridiculous. I’m not sure where to direct my apologies to, on your behalf— this small red flower in the center might do. If I could leave— but the door is just a line. The line is the floor and the ceiling and your mouth. What is more real in that room, this room— than the edge of a wall, an end table leg?

There were flowers then, and some rollie pollies under the log. Now nothing turns over and each shape is fixed. The thoughts I had exited the frame last year. I thought we were here to see the art I want to murmur not so nicely in your ear but I can already hear what you don’t say which is you are the art darling Get out, get out, the only thing left for some giant hand to pluck up is that cardinal on top of the pear tree. Not featured in this exhibit: that cardinal, the frog in my mother’s pond, things I dreamed about when I was eight, Garfield, there’s not room now for even the water drops on the corners of their mouths. I look out from the corner of my eye.

A Woman in White Significantly Shrinks Before Her Relocation— Is She an Egg?

The sink rim collects trinkets: flabbityjibbits, wire whisks, a mobious strip of smells

curl up the wall to watch fruit flies sputter for a strawberry leaf inside an eggshell.

In the kitchen, an organic death star floats in white curtains before the freezer.

This is our ingénue—in the air. Each of her ruffled steps fill the square inch of an eggshell.

Like white bread, she sops up the corners to bow out at 11 o’clock,

cramped for space, stepping on eggshells.

Someone has packed small suitcases for her move to the compost heap: juice &

tea bags pucker for a pattern instead of horizon-less eggshell.

Damp walls wheel out microscopic waterfalls from each pore—

what is a ladybug to a red paint fleck, or our Thumbelina to an eggshell?

The faucet drools over 12 cracked huts, a hedge of 6

baby snails chant oh no, it’s raining off my eggshell.

A small bloom descends to the floral armchair, Ponce de Leon rests panting

as a princess, then shoves on for carpet-colored jade & endless rounding eggshells.