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There is no inverted country

...and if there is, you won't find redemption there

11/24/11 11:42 pm

I was thinking back to a time last year, when for a brief, beautiful time, everything in my life felt so easy and so clear.

I'm not sure where that got lost, it was somewhere between here and there, I think it was still hanging around when the snow was falling and we made curry puffs and watched a little dog race like a rabbit through the snow, but then winter turned to spring, and then summer, and it was final, nothing changed, everything was stuck, and like every good atheist, I lost my will to believe.

Still, every time I wrote "All you need is love," I really did believe. 

It's not easy. At least it's not as easy as it looks. Ice cream on paper plates is also a lie. And when they tell the story of everyone else, they skip over all the parts where it was just unbearable. 

If I could do anything in the world, I would go on a long, long trip.

When I wake up, strawberry fields is where I want to be. 
Current Location: Springfield MO
Current Mood: lonely lonely

11/17/11 06:54 pm - what I should have said

I'm not really sure how to say this except that I don't feel comfortable anymore. I don't feel accepted. I don't even feel adequate, really. Definitely not safe. 

It's not really anyone's fault, particularly, but the majority of human interactions I have nowadays seem to be fraught with that sense of apology, where I am always waiting to be found lacking, and trying to explain preemptively why I am struggling so much. The subtext of every conversation seems to be, somehow, whether  I can defend myself. I have no faith that I can defend myself. Someone is always looking over my shoulder. Someone is always judging me. At least that's how it feels. 

One day one day one day I will be good enough.

But not today.

All anyone has to say is "You should..."

...I'm drowning in I shoulds. 

(I should do the dishes, get up earlier, work harder, stay in touch better, stop procrastinating, ship my product, stick up for myself, write more, work less [or conversely, on the days when i manage to write to the exclusion of all else, work more, write less], put other people first, stop putting myself last, take care of my health, drink less, exercise more, eat better, meet my deadlines, ask for less, stop needing anything, put the food away before I go to bed, see a doctor about that cough that won't go away, send back that form and try to prove to the Missouri Department of Revenue that I did in fact title my car, months ago, clean the upstairs bathroom, do my nails once in a while, moisturize, buy some shoes that aren't broken, buy some sweaters that aren't stained, call my brother and tell him how much I love him a little more often, put money aside for taxes, add to my IRA, join the gym.)

If everyone always did everything they should, no one would ever have any problems.

I suppose that's why it's so hard to imagine, now, how free I felt, and not even so long ago, when all those shoulds dropped away and there was nothing left but strawberry fields, forever, I suppose I was incredibly selfish then, doing whatever I wanted, immune to any kind of judgement, guided by nothing but my own impulsive desire. I was lost then of course, totally lost. 

I wish I could find my way back to that place where I was when I was lost. 

It was nice there. 





Current Location: Springfield MO
Current Mood: apathetic apathetic

11/16/11 10:19 am - telling a true horror story

I

Painted our dining room yesterday. Transmuted from a dull mossy green to a pale sandy peach with oyster trim. What a difference. Today, the kitchen. 


For the longest time I had a dream about houses, a different house every time, spawning new and undiscovered rooms, rooms I'd never noticed or known. Rooms in unexpected places. Unfamiliar doors that led to unfamiliar hallways, and foreign worlds beyond. 


My house is like that now. 


Bigger on the inside than the outside. Full of odd territories. Unexplored mysteries. Basement nightmares. There is a minotaur that lives somewhere between the walls, and a space can't be measured. 


That five and a half minute hallway gets longer all the time. 


(Because of course it is quite obvious. That a house which would be built without that desire to communicate... would not look the way your house looks today.)


Oh well. 



II



A long time ago I wrote about inventing a language for horror and I didn't even know what I was talking about, but I do now. 


You know the building blocks, I think, if you've been watching the news. 


Here's the deal and I'm not afraid to say it anymore.


There is a special place in hell for anyone who hits or harms a child. And not only that, but there is a special place in hell for anyone who enables them, who watches and stands back and does nothing, I guess because they're too afraid of the abuser themselves, or maybe because they have it easier when they preserve the status quo. 


I won't mourn them anymore. Hell is where they belong.


When you see the expression on the face of the police officer bending to beat a helpless, unresisting, unarmed protester, when you see that giddy look of the powerful who has the opportunity to hit the powerless, you understand that it's all poisoned to the core. 


That language for horror?


It was our parents' language -- the language that says that violence is power, that intimidation is strength, that the person who wields the weapon is always the one who wins. 


It is our country's language -- and as the bombs fall on foreign cities you know what we say? "This hurts me more than it hurts you."


I don't think so. 


That language for horror, you will need it. To translate the look in the child's eyes when he discovers that adults stick to their own kind... that no matter who knows about his pain, no one is going to help. 


That language may not be my native tongue (god I hope it's not) but I speak it fluently. 


How To Tell A True Horror Story?


Tell the truth. 

Current Location: Springfield MO
Current Mood: depressed depressed

11/12/11 08:26 am - fml.

In a painfully boneheaded move, I spilled an entire mug of hot tea (Lady Gray, if you must know) all over my desk, including my five-week-old MacBook, which was in turn a replacement for a two-year-old Dell laptop whose screen suddenly decided it was no longer interested in displaying the happenings of this bleak, bleak world. 

As high-tech and forward-thinking as the Mac products supposedly are, you'd think they'd be more tea-positive, but no. Logic board fucked. Not like it was Coca-cola or anything. 

Anyways, so I now no longer have a working computer again, and, I also no longer have the most recent version of my novel, which was itself salvaged from a corrupted text file that I tried to transfer between computers before I had Word, and which for some unknown reason (vaguely related I'm sure to my own self-sabotaging idiocy), I failed to back-up every single time, despite my heroic efforts to work on it in the midst of the breakdown of pretty much every factor of my day-to-day life. 

Actually this whole time period is sort of reminding me of this one year in college, it was my sophomore year, I was 17, when I suddenly just reached this breakthrough with my work, I started writing cyberpunk, I started thinking continuously about this William Gibson quote I read about finding the future in the present, and it was fall amidst the construction-happy, growing megacity of Emory University's campus, and I saw it everywhere. I wanted to write all the time, those stories were all I cared about, but my computer was broken -- at the shop forever -- so each day I got up an hour or two early and went to the centrally located computer lab (It was called Cox, if you must know) and worked on things. Of course that was before the cloud, I was transferring and saving stories  via floppy disks, how utterly ridiculous, and my school email account... one way or another I lost most of the things I wrote then, too disorganized to keep anything. Not that it really mattered, it was the doing that mattered more than the end product. 

I don't even know what to do now.  I mean that on more of a metaphysical level than an actual technological one. The technological one is easy, send into the shop, file an insurance claim, pray my hard drive survives, hope it doesn't take too long until I once again have a functioning workspace. The metaphysical level is more difficult because I can't help but feel that this is all some kind of obscure and inscrutable message that I should probably work on deciphering, but probably won't. 

(I didn't even knock over the mug of tea per se. I was pressing a spoon against the inside of the mug, applying pressure to the outside of the mug with my hand, while applying equal pressure to the inside of the mug with my spoon. I'm sure you're aware of the relevant physical principles. The spoon was one of those heavy duty clear plastic ones you might expect to find at some of the nicer picnics, come picnic season. Suddenly, no prior warning, it just snapped in half. Pressure suddenly removed from that angle, the relevant physical principles applied. I wasn't even pressing it that hard. The whole thing was rather uncanny.)

For all the times that I wrote "just give me November," this is the point where it all, actually, becomes something else: did I say that before, too? Every November has somehow been a door into the next stage of my life, that has always held true. I'm back where I came from, so what happens now? I'm tired, I'm sick of this, maybe I've already failed the test. 
Current Location: Springfield, MO
Current Mood: distressed distressed

10/20/11 04:30 pm - through the turtle's teeth

Moving again, for the third time in what, a year now? Unbelievable. Almost unbearable. 


Cursed to wander the wastelands, I suppose. Not surprising. Maybe even deserved. I've certainly felt the allure of false gods along the way. 


But at least every year is different. 


I made a vow to write everything down, but I really can't say much else. At least I took more pictures of the last house, I guess I knew at some subconscious level that we wouldn't be there for long, not even one full turning of seasons, just a brief flashing by of dead winter, spring, summer, the first turnings of fall. We found that house suddenly, it was our second day here in town, sunny outside and not even that cold, thirties and forties perhaps, late December and it hadn't yet snowed. We drove around the neighborhood, noting the many "For Rent" signs, scribbling down numbers with messy handwriting in the moving car, calling landlords then and there, just making as many appointments as we could. We liked our house as soon as we saw it, a frumpy little cube of mint green with an angled swoosh of a pointed facade and an odd little diamond-shaped window. Within a few hours it was ours, for the time being. In a way we made it our own, painting walls, putting up shelves, turning the garage into a studio and the backyard into a potted plant oasis, a garden in the summer. But in other ways we never really settled in, still closets full of unpacked boxes, still forwarding mail. Premonition perhaps, probably just laziness. 


The house made me sick. I suspected from the beginning, actually; at first I thought it was something in the water, partly due to my mysterious rashes after showering, partly due to that damnable fracking commercial. It turned out to be something in the air, and in the walls, and in the floor… I would have had a much better year if I hadn't been so fucking stubborn; but that's me, I  don't care if the bridge is fucking rotting out from under me, once I'm halfway across I don't want to turn around. It was our home, our first real home together, and I didn't want to give it up. I kept telling myself to be stronger, to pull myself together, to have more energy, to stop feeling like shit. When I was growing up no one ever told me "Some things aren't your fault." Everything has always been my fault. 


But whatever. I did, in fact, choose this. I wanted to live in interesting times. From the birth of the universe, my soul has sought them out.


In chaos people typically become who they are; I think that's why I know and love each of my siblings so well, and also why they know themselves. We never wanted to be like everyone else, or maybe we just knew we couldn't pull it off. In chaos everything comes together, we find ourselves, we find each other; that's what I want to think. We find our true friends. We find the truth. 


Is that the way it is? 


Maybe it is all just completely random, maybe nothing happens for a reason, maybe it's just chaos, and nothing else, but I'm still bound and determined to turn it into something, to assemble the pieces, however slowly, into something larger, something we can all agree upon: a narrative. I have been collecting pieces, actually, some of them come to me in dreams, or daydreams, some of them come to me while reading the news, others while reading history, a few while talking to my brothers, others are just there in the spaces, waiting to be found. I am picking the pieces out from between the turtle's teeth, but hey, look, it's turtles all the way down. 


Everything happens for a reason. Don't doubt it. Don't doubt it. Don't doubt it. Chaos is contagious, though, so be careful.

I love you all so much. 


Current Location: Springfield
Current Mood: weird weird

9/16/11 01:31 pm - The hero's journey.

Fall is happening so quickly. Winter is nipping at our heels. A few perfect days of blue skies and chilly mornings and sunny afternoons were swept away as suddenly as they came. Now it is drab and dreary with a sky like wet cement. The backyard is filled with withered yellow leaves that tumbled overnight. A few pepper plants, still struggling to survive, are finding their days unexpectedly cut short. The chickens wander around the backyard in their typical unblinking confusion, ripping apart what remains of the basil and sage. 
Yesterday we made a final few preparations for the season. We put a roof on the outer portion of the chicken coop, protecting their yard from fallen leaves, and eventually fallen snow. And we carried in the houseplants which spent the summer parked outside. Now the inside of the house is welcomingly verdant and green. 
(Over the warmer months we ran a sort of houseplant laboratory, or factory -- from one $10 plant puchased last December when we first arrived, we took dozens of single-leaf cuttings, which we sprouted in the warm, bright environment of the kitchen, each one lodged in a glass jar. When their roots filled the bottom of the glass we transplanted them to flowerpots, most of them pilfered for free from garage cleanings or even the side of the road. Outside for the summer they flourished and thrived and multiplied.)
Now there's nothing to do I guess but hunker down and wait for winter; some blankets over the windows would be nice, since they leak and whistle and the drafts are getting cold. Last night I made chicken noodle soup; like pasta, it's as satisfying to make as it is to eat. Working slowly, chopping onions and carrots, I listened to Joseph Campbell on audio CD, thinking that a pot of soup on a cold day is its own kind of mythology, a sort of talisman we hold against sickness and harm. Chicken soup especially. If there were still shaamans and medicine men today it would be one of their best cures. But this morning at 4 a.m. I woke up cold. I scrabbled for blankets and as usual there weren't enough. 
The change in temperatures has done a number on my allergies, or my immune system. For a week there's been an ache behind my face, especially around the eyes, and I'm so tired, so tired I just want to curl up like a bear and hibernate all winter. Likewise our house is too old to withstand much more. You can feel it listing under the tyranny of another cold season. You can hear the wallboards disintegrating as they struggle under the weight of yet more damp. I know how it is, we are too eager for our challenges. In the end the best you can do is survive. 

Current Location: Springfield, MO
Current Mood: cold cold

9/6/11 09:08 am - stuff remembered

Summer flew by like a dream. "Time flies when you're having fun," so they say.

But they're wrong: time flies when there's nothing else for it to do. Time flies when there's nothing to break up the days.

And in my mind I spent so very little of it here. I was in all the other places that exist in books. Seven novels of The Company by Kage Baker kept me busy in July and they took me everywhere. Past & future, worlds that were & worlds that weren't. Then there was Julian Comstock and 22nd century America. And Brakebills and Fillory. And the post-Spin world where all you need is an Arch to take you somewhere else. (No matter where you are, one lifetime isn't enough.) And a science fictional universe where everything is made up because it's all in somebody else's book, even if that somebody else is a version of yourself. And a futuristic Thailand when the consequences of all our sins against the world & our children have been made manifest; call it karma I guess. And there was the mirror universe of Our Tragic Universe, which cannot really be called real -- it is only the projection of a species far superior to our own. (Scarlett Thomas. This was was one of my favorites.) And there was the cloistered universe of Jane Austen's sitting room where girls like me hardly dared to dream that they'll ever escape; I guess then, as now, the only refuge available was that found in words. 

Oh, yes, and there was New Manhattan/Noir Manhattan, the city in black & white. I'm still writing it, of course. I'm always still writing it. I wrote twenty thousand words and deleted forty thousand more. It's all so far from perfect but I'd rather be there than anywhere else. Over the summer, the city began to conform to a kind of map: for the first time I saw the streets laid out in their careful symmetry, the neighborhoods touched by past lives radiating out from the Wahlstrom fountain bubbling at the center of the whole, the seedier neighborhoods down by the harbor, the thoroughfares coursing uptown, the Childress House in its aging gentility, and still Ray's Goldfish Boutique where it all began. 

When I try to remember this summer, I suppose that's all I'll remember, but there were a few other things. The heat was suffocating; I found out what 106 degrees feels like. It feels hot. We swam in the public pool for $2.25 each. The lukewarm water was almost respite. For a month it was too hot to cook; we cooked outside. The bugs gathered around us in swarms, descending with glee. I finally figured out why people hate mosquitoes; they never bothered me before. Bug bites became a fact of life, unavoidable. And the fucking flies, everywhere, always. The garden never amounted to much; it was destroyed by too much rain in the spring, followed by a month of drought in oppressive July. And it never really got enough sun to thrive. We gathered a half a dozen cucumbers, a dozen or so small tomatoes; the banana peppers and the jalapenos really excelled, we had plenty of those, and plenty of basil and sage. The rest died in the sun or was finished off by free-roaming chickens. They like snacks. We have six now, we gave the two roosters to a friend with a farm where they have room to roam and crow to their hearts content. Only one hen has begun laying yet; it's a bantam and its tiny eggs are less than half the normal size, and mostly yolk. Still there's something incredibly gratifying about finding one there every day, nestled in the pine shavings. Earlier in the summer we took the dog on walks to the park when it was ten p.m. and dark; we'd stroll aimlessly through the grass, stopping at the watering fountain to fill up his black plastic bowl so that he could lap noisily and splash it all over the asphalt. There were young people playing tennis and the occasional creeper sitting on a picnic table in the shadows, obscured by dark. In July when the heat came we stopped going to the park; even at night it was an arid ninety, flat and still. I spent long days working downtown, trying to get paid; then a few long days in the library, trying to make something beautiful. Too bad the two never go hand in hand. We drank cheap white wine with ice cubes in it; it was the only way to keep it chilled. In the evenings I cooked and listened to NPR, feeling so happy to be alive; in the mornings I cleaned up the kitchen and listened to NPR, feeling a certain contentment at the way things are. On the weekends we listen together to Car Talk and Prairie Home Companion and the musical programming of our local affiliates. Sometimes "all you need is love, love is all you need" is the easiest thing there is. Sometimes I feel so much in love I can hardly stand it; the outlets are never great enough. Is this how it's supposed to be? I didn't think so. I thought desire might abate by now, but it's stronger than ever. I'll remember that, too. 

For the past two months its been inconceivable that it could ever be cool again. Then fall came literally over night. One day it was too hot to be outside, even in shorts; the next morning it was sweater weather. A crop of yellow leaves (I never even noticed them fade) scattered across the grass. We spent a couple hours yesterday working in the yard, returning the straggiling remains of the garden to its primal state, rolling up wire fencing, sending unrealized tomato plants back to the compost from which they came. Two of the chickens figured out how to fly to the top of the fence, but changed their minds: there's nothing out there that they don't have in here. Not us: all we want to do is jump the fence and leave it behind.

It's going to be autumn again and then winter; I keep thinking about the way the wind sounded in our attic apartment in Kensington, the way that the yellow leaves swirled in miniature whirlwinds along the frost-bitten sidewalk as I walked the dog to the corner and back again, always stopping in front of the boarded-up house on the other side of the street where passersby had thrown their trash and a hundred other dogs must have stopped to pee. Humans have messageboards, dogs have trashcans. I remember the first night the radiator came on and how it spit and shrieked, waking us up into a flurry of activity: no longer would radiators be an acceptable resting place for wayward laundry. 

Now I remember my happiness then and it really seems unbearable. 

Current Location: Springfield, MO
Current Music: Azure Ray - November
Current Mood: hungry hungry

8/31/11 11:29 pm

I wish I had something to say, but I don't.


I guess I could always try making things up... 
Current Location: Springfield
Current Mood: lonely lonely

6/25/11 09:18 am

"The fury is deadly, as if I were locked forever
In a room with movies of bridges collapsing
Too rigid for the quick wind"

6/3/11 08:47 am - gypsy blood

Improbably to be in Atlanta again. The heat is tangible. The buildings are shiny, sheathed in glass that reflects the sun. The people are stylish in that Coach-couture way, like if you spend enough money on your purse and your hairstyle, you'll pass for cool. Everything seems so bright; cities glitter more in the south. I've been feeling it for a while and now I've decided it's true; built during that narrowly defined era of glass, steel and concrete, heat islands among the hot beating sun, devoted continually to the pursuit of the new: they gleam.

I've missed it here, very much. Not quite enough to come back forever, but close? It's so much of itself, which is saying something, in a way. Mostly I just want to be anywhere else.

Recently someone told me I must have some gypsy blood in my veins. I was amused, I heard it before, I'll hear it again, it still makes me smile. But of course I do: my grandparents were immigrants, always in search of the new. They came to America looking for it, whatever it was.

I'm still looking for it: the American dream.


Maybe it doesn't exist anymore.
Current Location: Atlanta
Current Mood: hungry hungry

5/31/11 11:10 pm - it's not up to you

I've been slogging through this story very slowly; I'm so tired of the whole fucking thing. I can tell it's getting better; it is getting better. But I'm sick of writing it. Most days I feel like I'm pushing a boulder up a hill. I dread sitting down to write.

Now I wonder if perhaps my current intractable view of the world is influencing the work: I've been cutting, cutting, cutting relentlessly, trimming words, slashing sentences, erasing paragraphs, pruning these pages down to ghosts of their former selves.

I wish I could strip it all away. I want to cut it down to the core.
I want to be nothing else & nothing more.

This place is a wasteland for me; since I was sixteen I've never felt so alone. At least once a day I fantasize about leaving forever and never looking back. I always assume I can make it for at least one more day, so there's no need to begin packing yet; and I can, so I do.

Art is a thankless job, but so is everything else. So that's something.

I suppose lately it's just that I feel like I have so little to offer. The past is all so complicated; I can't find any honest words to tell my own story. The present is empty and the future is a blank. Whatever it was has leaked away. Hopes mostly dashed, spirits mostly crushed, the gap just keeps growing.

Mostly I'm just afraid that by the time I figure out how to say it right, I'll have forgotten what it is I need to say. 
Current Location: Springfield
Current Music: Bjork -- Vespertine
Current Mood: exhausted exhausted

5/6/11 12:51 am - 25

Funny. I thought I'd have more shit figured out by now.

But at least I can finally give myself license to cuss. Because come the fuck on. If you got energy to get worked up about a few four letter words, you've got it a shitload better than I do. So chill. 
Current Mood: depressed depressed

4/27/11 10:01 am - poison oak & flood

I
 
Lodged in my brain was a dream of a flood; it's been there for years. (Last night I visited the place it began). The dream of the flood is a dream of flight; the waters rise & rise, until there's nothing to do but build rafts and float away, leaving it all behind. The dream of the flood is a dream of escape. From the loneliness. From the loss. From the banal. From the desperate isolation of suburban life.

Just a reason to run away.

The rising water came, but it wasn't enough. Escape for smaller things, maybe. Slugs. Snails. Perhaps snakes. Birds, though for them the concept of flight is immaterial.

Not for me. I'm still stuck here.


II

Once I wrote a story about a door, and the door is in the kitchen, and the door leads to a basement, and down the basement stairs you go, again and again, into the water, into the flood, into the muck, to battle the thing that just won't stop.

Now I have a door and the door is in the kitchen and the door leads to a basement. The story came first.

8 pm, dark outside, dark downstairs, we ventured down the basement stairs; I stepped off into the darkness and my shoes hit water. Splash. Splash. Splashing our way through the dark to find the light switch. I thought: Now, this is it, terror, loss, despair, are you down here, can we finally fight?

No. It's still somewhere else.

And I wrote a story no one wants.

I hate the way that fiction always precedes life, never the other way around; you write about loss and everyone leaves, you write about dread and it comes to life, you write about nightmares and they find you first.

Down the basememt.

Into the dark.

Splash... splash.


III

i'm a single cell on a serpent's tongue
there's a muddy field where a garden was
i'm glad you got away, but i'm still stuck out here
my clothes are soaking wet from your brother's tears


But it would be hard to say goodbye to my books.
Current Location: Springfield
Current Mood: disappointed disappointed

4/5/11 01:37 pm - sprout

In celebration of suburbia, I've embarked on an adventure in gardening.  

It turns out that raising seedlings is a project in embracing the fragility of life. I just said my goodbye to a second round of cucumber seedlings. Someone should have warned them: No point in growing _now_.  Two days after you poke your heads from the dirt, the sun will dissapear for a long & dreary week. You'll grow too tall in search of the elusive light, your stem will become thin & insubstantial, and when the sun finally shines, your leaves will grow too large too fast and send your whole top-heavy body toppling over to wither and die. Better luck next life. 

The broccoli seedlings met a similar fate; a week of gloom and they turned yellow, passed out, fell down, died. Then the dog stepped in them, finishing them handily. In a fit of pique when we went out for dinner without him -- the nerve -- he also kicked over a heartily thriving bucket of basil seedlings. No love for pesto futures in this house. I set the dill seedlings out in the sun too long and they withered and died in an hour. The indoor lettuce grew moldy during the week of grayness & gloom (truth be told I was feeling a bit moldy myself), and had to be let go.

Outside things are faring better: a new crop of lettuces are thriving, their leaves already bigger and greener than the indoor weaklings ever were. Collards and turnips are looking vibrant. Onions grew inches in a day.

When the weather's warm for good I'll set out the remaining tomato and cucumber seedlings. They're fighters.

____


In other news. Last night I created a vaguely Thai fusion dish from 20 cents worth of ramen noodles, stir-fried with a sauce made from peanut butter, soy sauce and rice wine vinegar. Mixed with baked tofu. Topped with a generous crunchy helping of bean sprouts and shredded carrots. And of course, served with rice, and dowsed with sweet chili sauce, my new most favorite condiment. It was pretty fucking delicious. In fact I was so pleased with my creation that I decided I should probably start a Thai fastfood chain where everything is made out of ramen and peanut butter. Named -- wait for it -- "Thai On The Fly." 

If only punch line business ideas were a more profitable endeavor. I would probably be rich by now. 
Current Location: Springfield, Missouri
Current Music: John Lennon -- Mind Games
Current Mood: happy happy

4/4/11 06:24 pm - the april condition

Despite differences in latitude, summer seems to come earlier every year. No matter. The dictates of DNA mean I was made for long hot days and murky warm nights, generations of my Adriatic ancestors finally saying: Yes.

Obsessively I guard the memory of diving off a pier into the still blue waters beyond the Croatian coast, moss slick stones and ice cold salt. While trudging through Brooklyn-sticky days of burnt asphalt and Peurto Rican music. Or basking in the first warm breeze of a midwestern summer.

The self that has remained frozen in place can finally unfurl.

For nights sleeping unclothed next to open windows to feel the breeze. Outside, the restless April wind yawns and roars, but through my silicon earplugs, it sounds like the crashing of surf.
Current Location: Springfield, Missouri
Current Music: Lady Gaga - Born This Way
Current Mood: rejuvenated rejuvenated

3/20/11 10:07 pm - again

 I had every reason to anticipate how lonely this would be.

But for some reason, I'm still surprised. 
Current Location: Springfield, Missouri
Current Mood: tired tired

12/2/10 10:37 am - they'll tell you, you can't sleep alone in a strange place

Another season slipped away; autumn is now as unretrievable as the summer before it, and winter creeps in with obstinate assurance. We remain absurdly, undeservedly, implausibly full of bliss. It is not quite cold enough for gloves and hats and scarves. It is not quite close enough to Christmas for shopping and baking and pining after perfect trees, at least not for procrastinators like us.

Where will we be next week, next month, next year? I don't know. Everything remains unsettled and undecided and always up in the air. I can't remember a time in childhood, or after, that I ever felt remotely secure. My house has always been a house of leaves. The stairways unpredictable, the walls disputable, the space conflicted and unconfined. Too much space to walk away in and be walked away from.

This is the only justification I will offer for events yet to come; not that I'm required to offer any at all. It's my life, after all.

I watched The Last Unicorn again. In my head I was still puzzling over the conundrum of a butterfly turning into a man; the paradox between human ascendance and the fall from grace. When I was five I didn't want her to become a unicorn again. Was it my five year old self who didn't understand, or was it learning to regret that made me lose the truth and lose my way?

We need to fall in love to find our way home, but love is the hardest home to lose.

The lines are drawn now, and and no longer do I need to fantasize about breaking through.

Because up here, above the clouds, everything comes clear.
Current Music: sigur ros -- untitled track 3
Current Mood: loved loved

10/29/10 02:34 pm - windows, towers, tunnels, doors

  
#1: When I was six my parents read the Chronicles of Narnia to me and my sister in its entirety and I've obviously never been the same since. If I have kids I'll read it to them too. Followed by His Dark Materials. Harry Potter, maybe, if they beg hard enough. 

 
#2: I love New York City but it finally occurred to me that my favorite time of day is the twenty-minute walk through Ditmas Park, the place that feels like New York the least -- perfectly suburban, an oasis of grassy front yards, falling yellow leaves, dogs and driveways, school buses and stop signs. What does it mean?


#3: If there was ever a weekend I needed to crawl down the rabbit hole... this is it. 


 
Current Location: Brooklyn
Current Music: The Beatles -- We Can Work It out
Current Mood: sick sick

10/17/10 09:16 am - nor'easter

 Winter came over night blowing in from the northeast and the wind rattles the windows for two days straight. The radiators came alive at 4 a.m. one morning histling and whistling. We scrambled in a mad dash to remove all the stuff we'd stacked on top: plants especially, who were totally unprepared for an unexpected heat rash. I've been wearing brown leather boots and a red and black checkered jacket. I feel as ever in Brooklyn that I am exactly where I'm supposed to be, much as I still fantasize about all the wonderful places in various spaces, open fields and rocky islands, fantasy European cities where the old world still shimmers in the cracks.

[Two days marked a year since I set out for Santorini. All I have now is a perfectly unremarkable painting (and photos, and friends, and a gold-rimmed shotglass, and a yearning for the perfect falafel sandwich that can apparently never be fulfilled). But as I stared into those watercolors, that world came alive for me again once more if only for a moment. And suddenly I was able to resolve for myself a question we'd talked about, sitting on stones on the edge of a cliff, exploring the rocky stretch between the ocean and a tiny yellow church. I will go back. It will be different, of course, and so will I, but that's the point: certain places pull us back, magnetically, become part of our psyche, teach us how to grow. I know a few of my places already.]

Yesterday we spent the day in Manhattan. It's been so long (too long) since I've been there in the daytime; it's nice to remember. We wandered around the farmer's market in Union Square. Flowers and fresh fruit everywhere, vegetables I've never eaten, homemade bread and jellies, invasion of the gourds. Tiny pumpkins still make me happy (I might be eight on the inside). I feel so happy to be alive. An old-timey bar for a snack and a coke (my boy made me poke my head into the men's bathroom when no one else was around, because it was like stepping back into 1929). I can't decide if the city is more beautiful in the fall or the spring. Browsing a bookstore in the west village. Their taste and selection was so impeccable I couldn't find anything to buy: I owned all the books I liked already. All this made up for the misery of shoving our way down the mess of slow-moving gawkers on Broadway to find a place to buy jeans. (The reason for our trek: I was down to one work-wearable pair, the others full of holes and one the victim of an unfortunate sharpie attack; his so tattered they hang together only with the assistance of safety pins). Finally successful with the jeans, we fled. We ate dinner at a tiny Spanish place wedged into an intimate corner with a succession of guys on dates, drank sangria and ate seafood and rice, way too much food though, we'll be eating for days. The long long ride on The F-train home (the downside of living in Kensington buried down here in Brooklyn, but the rent is so so cheap).

Ditmas Park grows more beautiful by the day, the falling leaves yellow on the sidewalk, the light of sunrise, sunset, filtering through the green and gold leaves of the massive trees, I fantasize daily and it keeps me going. The days have been exhausting. The nights, passing out by 11 pm, aching with tiredness. I know what I'm working toward, but it's hard. I know where we're going, but it still seems far away. I miss my family with all my heart.

But I still have a lot of places to go.
Current Location: Brooklyn
Current Mood: happy happy

9/10/10 10:09 am - Flatlands

 So I'm back in Brooklyn. But in a completely different place. It's like the world is starting again; for some reason these revolutions and remakings are the thing I love most. I always want to begin again.

(No matter how many times I ask "what's it all mean?", it comes back to this. A world to explore. And there's always, always more.)

Walking through the city brings it to life. I think that's why I love Brooklyn more than any other place; I know it better, through the details of day-to-day life, all the things you miss when you're speeding by. Walking brings intimacy. There are things you come to know, even if you don't know you know them yet. And slowly the city flickers into high definition, high resolution, like the way you learn your lover's body: birth marks, beauty marks, tattoos and stray hairs.

So Brooklyn again, autumn again, and Kensington for the first time.

Fall remains my favorite season. (Though sometimes when I'm inside, watching the white clouds drift across blue sky, the wind rifling through the dying leaves, that feeling comes floating in the open windows, and all I can think about is Atlanta, how content we were.)

Kensington supplies its own moments though: sitting on the stoop drinking beer, waiting for the sun to reach that perfect angle behind us, until the darkened windows across the street narrow all that energy into a single beam, bright on my eyelids, warm on my face. The children playing complicated yet chaotic games on the sidewalk. The corner markets with their stacks of produce; the fruit and vegetables always look so much better piled up in the open air.

My route to work takes me through beautiful wooded neighborhoods with mature trees and open lawns, real front yards. Then down Flatbush, like passing into a different world: the wide, airless street, the pawn shops and fast food joints, trash blowing down the grimy sidewalk, people standing in droves waiting for the bus, the smell of garbage everywhere.

Two worlds, side by side.

Mind blown, heart open, body evolving, I finally begin to hope.

I hope that fantasy is not so impossible, redemption not so unlikely.

I hope that there is an inverted country, after all.
Current Location: Brooklyn
Current Music: Arcade Fire -- The Sprawl (Flatland)
Current Mood: cheerful cheerful

9/5/10 12:20 pm - Worlds beyond

Coney Island has a kind of timelessness that makes life seem longer, or at least more long lasting. I like to think of an aged essence that remains even when all outer signs have dissapeared or changed. Though I don't believe in reincarnation.

All that matters is that the background to the photographs we take of ourselves in our heads can retain some kind of continuity with past and lost landscapes, otherwise we're all adrift.

He said that he regrets its fall from what it once was. I don't, but I've always been drawn to places that are lost, forlorn, torn apart by disintegration and decay.

(I've been thinking about watching Carnivale again, once the cold weather comes. In a way, it started everything. While bringing everything else to an eventual, inevitable end. I need to go there again.)

But, so: even in loss of true form, even in decadence and decline, caught between incarnations, or blind in the culture of evening, past return.

It remains enough to exist.

(The lighted windows in the towering brick of the projects, flickering outside the windows of the train like a film strip. The bartender pouring a shot of Absolut Brooklyn into a flimsy plastic cup for a patron to try; Long Island indifferent, "You're not insulting me." Raw oysters on the half shell with lemon juice and hot sauce; still think they're gross. French fries and fried scrimp I can get behind. The stiff breeze off the ocean whipping my dress. The kids clambering on the play equipment in the dark, beneath dead floodlights. Drifting past empty trashcans on the boardwalk. In the background, the constant blare of bad pop songs, distorted by speakers, and the whirring circular patterns of seizure-bright lights. And the endless screams of children.)

I guess after everything the places I like most are still the ones with some ghosts.
Current Location: Brooklyn
Current Music: Kate Bush
Current Mood: peaceful peaceful

8/29/10 05:07 pm - the suburbs

 Once when I was 16 or 17, scribbling in a notebook, my baby sister asked:

"Desi, what are you writing?"

"I'm trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up."

"Save the whole world?" she suggested.

No pressure or anything.



I keep stumbling upon pockets of truth in the confusion. Clarity in the darkness.

Islands of awareness strung together, an impossible archipelago. To admit its existence would be disastrous: the coherence of our current world depends on a lack of understanding.

The boundaries of this dimension are porous, maintained through careful self-deception. Foundering on the fact of land, while all you see is the open sea.

I'm tired of keep quiet.

I'm sick of looking away.

When the truth is so obvious.

And its implications remain so elusive.

Life is too short. Love and art are the only essentials. Family is all that matters. (And the families we build through love are just as important as the ones we inherit through blood. Belonging is a choice.) If what you believe doesn't change the way you live, than you don't believe anything.



But the older I get, the harder it becomes. My love points in so many directions. The stakes keep getting higher. My map keeps getting bigger. The days get shorter, and so does the time.

And I just keep wishing I was brave enough to tell the truth.
Current Music: Arcade Fire -- The Sprawl (Flatland)
Current Mood: frustrated frustrated

8/21/10 11:46 am - the city

The first apartment: with creaking wooden floors, the smell of Puerto Rican food always in the staircase, the cats on the fire escape beneath the wire-hung laundry and the weeping tree, the thunderstorms outside the open window, the ash tray full of Pall Mall butts (not mine). Lying in the grass in Battery Park on 4th of July, waiting for Conor Oberst to play. Beers on the roof. Talking with Germans over gin & tonics and listening to conversations in Norwegian float over my head. Too hot for wearing clothes. Walking beneath the shadow of the JMZ, hearing it roar and rattle over my head as I bought coffee and fruit in the morning. Riding it across the water to see the city spread out beneath the sun, the projects looming close, the graffiti-scrawled buildings dropping away, giving way to the glittering skyline.

The second: the own place, and the life to live with it, like going to college all over again. The parties. Smelling like cigarette smoke in every pore of my skin (still not mine). G&Ts at 4 pm. Going to Sputniks for $3 wells. Eating french fries. Meeting him. Harold & Maude, fried egg sandwich at 4 a.m. At home I experimented with different foods: bread pudding, sun dried tomato pesto, butter nut squash, I began eating kale and collard greens all the time. I experimented with a sun dried tomato tofu spread, on the baguettes from the store round the corner. Going to Greece, coming back. Pulling my bags down the street past the soaking wet garbage in the cold and wind and drizzle, realizing for the first of many times that like love, this city turns on you in a dime. Eventually I came home to a dark apartment full of broken bottles, cigarette ash everywhere, trash spread across the floor, appliances broken, power out. It was time to move on, again.

The third: vegetarian thanksgiving with feasting galore, a bonfire in the backyard, drinking wine in the wet leaves, fully content. Watching Pi, riding the subways home. Another rusting fire escape, another blue sky. The pretty boys. The brutal brunch. The first snow, racing in circles around the block, falling laughing in the snow. Too many epiphanies that never paid off. The blizzard that stranded me in Park Slope, and riding cafeteria trays down the snowy hill in Fort Green. Vegan food in Harlem. The infinite bookstore crawl, falafel in Caroll Gardens, rocking out to our friends bands, finishing that bottle of whiskey. A vegan dinner party where people read Whitman aloud, played guitar, went out for more red wine and got too high. Dumped over waffles, the irony. Finally, alone, and the city could be itself. Brutal. Cold. And always fuckng snowing, like Stalingrad over here, darling. Central park with my siblings, and sushi for dinner and book browsing, and holding hands in Times Square. And begining again. Beer on the balcony and purple tulips at Fort Green park. Walking to the tattoo shop in Williamsburg and getting drunk along the way. Band of Horses in Williamsburg and Blue Moon on the beach on fourth of July. There was lots and plenty more.

The city was its own story, a needle pointing north, I'm sick of feeling so lost. The broken compass. Forgetting the way home.
Current Location: Charlotte
Current Music: Cee Lo Green
Current Mood: nostalgic nostalgic

8/11/10 10:37 am - colorless color


In North Carolina again.

Super Walmart, Bojangles biscuits, endless television, sophies and flip-flops, oppressive heat, less construction on the buildings and more on the roads, strip malls, southern accents, long car rides, $3 wine.

Outside the dining room window an enormous spider has built the perfect web. The spider is 3 inches long, the web spans the length and breadth of the window, a symmetrical oval mirroring the spider's own shape. And the spider sits there. And waits.

Meanwhile, I drink my coffee.

Eyeing the fruit trees in the backyard, wondering just how inedible those apples and pears really could be.  

I thought New York was hot and humid but it was nothing like this. I've been reluctant to go outside at all. Except for the past weekend at the beach, where there were waves and wind and surf to help keep cool. Still & all, those daily mid-morning and early-evening walks which were warm and sticky in Brooklyn would be just about unbearable here; I've realized that if I want to stay in shape, getting up to run at the crack of dawn may be the only way to go.

Mostly, I feel overwhelmed and I have nothing left to say. 

Early nineties decor
We wanted to play, but we had nothing left to play for
Current Location: Charlotte
Current Music: lady gaga -- speechless
Current Mood: bored bored

7/23/10 12:06 pm - Violets for Lee & more

 
If you enjoyed my story Violets for Lee, live now at Fantasy Magazine, you might also be interested in this author spotlight, featuring Q & A with yours truly about the story behind the story, the search for sugar, the other door, and the implications of bare feet. 
Current Mood: calm calm

7/21/10 10:50 am - Happy writing news

 My short story "Violets for Lee" is now live at Fantasy Magazine. Read it here!
Current Mood: happy happy

7/9/10 07:28 am - e venerdi'

 
Setting out to set out for my third ReaderCon in just a few minutes.

Between New York and summer time and words and friends and always love, sometimes I feel that my happiness has become overwhelming. 
Current Location: Brooklyn
Current Mood: excited excited

7/7/10 10:17 am - still love noe venable

We used to play "light as a feather, stiff as a board"
We used to play at listening in to the darker world

Will you still love me when you see this tower come down?
Current Location: Brooklyn
Current Mood: hopeful hopeful

7/1/10 01:37 pm - signs and omens

 One of my plates randomly broke yesterday, cracking completely down the middle into two jagged halves. 

Another one did the same thing today. I was in the other room.

I feel that this a sign of something sinister, but I'm not sure what. 

6/28/10 11:39 am - the city as it happened

Today I thought about Belgrade, as I walked down the sticky sidewalk in the suffocating heat of midmorning, shuffling in my flip-flops and shorts. Maybe it's the air: the way it hangs, hot and dense like a coating of deep-fried batter.

It was easy to imagine myself back in Belgrade.  

(Laundry pinned flat to the drying rack and slowly curling inward in the intensifying heat of midday, streaming in through the wall-to-wall windows, the red roofs clustered below. Walking slowly down the side of the road, sweat pooling in the small of our backs, dust kicked up around my heels, waiting for the bus. Ice cream carts everywhere.)

I thought about a story I wrote based on a story I'd never read, set in a city I'd never visited.

Now, having been there, I could never write that story.

Knowledge gives texture to our fantasies, even as it restricts their shape.

(Lying awake with the windows tilted inward, hoping for a cool breeze to liven the darkness. Italian peppers, ripe tomatoes, sour yogurt, luscious fruit and fresh bread. The shop windows with glittering displays of fashions I would never wear: sequined, cleavage-baring dresses above teetering high heels. The twisting overpasses, clogged traffic and heavy smog just like Los Angeles, billboards the size of buildings with insistent sex appeal, the train station from another century with bored employees sitting beneath the exchange signs.)

Lately I've been longing to go, anywhere, just to be alone for a while with any world that's still taking shape. I like the feeling of being on my own, alone, with my pack on my back, nothing in the world to worry about except for what I'll eat and where I'll sleep and when I'll bathe. I know it's exhausting but there are times that I wish I could live like that forever.

Or just load up my car and travel across America, landing where I fall. I'll do that one day.

(The outdoor cafes with linen on the tables and snobby waiters, holding high their trays of sparkling water and tiny espressos. The hot creaking buses where nobody pays. The booksellers on the sidewalks and the cobblestoned streets, just like New York. Hiking up the mountain to the monument at the top, stopping to refill our bottles with ice cold water streaming from the tap in the ground. Adjusting to the idea of a political landscape that views Bill Clinton as America's worst villain. The manmade lake washing up on the pebbled beach. The beautiful girls.)

It is hard to imagine such a city. It has too many contradictions and it exists in a language I can't speak. Though I could try. I'll do that one day, too.

Imagine this.

You're setting out on a great journey that will take you across continents, navigating the divided worlds, crossing rivers, climbing mountains, speaking a hundred different languages as you go, sleeping under a thousand different roofs, different kind of roofs even, some made out cobblestones and others made out of shingles and others made out of canvas (flapping in the breeze) and others invisible, nonexistent or unneccessary, leaving only the wide open sky and the ceiling of stars.

You're setting out on a great journey, yet you're exactly where you belong, have always belonged. You're exactly where you need to be.


So keep moving.

Remain at rest. 

Stay hungry.

Stay content. 


I'm working on it. 
Current Location: Brooklyn
Current Music: The Cure -- Friday I'm In Love
Current Mood: content content
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