Wednesday, December 23, 2009

GUYS AND DOLLS.






TONIGHT I GOT SO OVERWHELMED WITH ENERGY THAT I WENT OUTSIDE IN THE SNRAIN. IT WAS GREAT. Fancy pants is probably a little worse for the wear, but I got some lovely pictures, I had an epic self-dance party and my hair is now marvelously crazy. I MISS PHOTOSHOP. I went i-photo crazy, truly truly, I could not stop from taking picture upon picture. My plan was to write like crazy, but I had too much energy, so I took pictures instead. No one is walking around in the winter, especially when it is raining/freezing which means that I can wander along the river walk and run and dance and do really as I please without having to worry about much of anything. Today, i am elated for no particular reason at all really, the harshest weather seems to bring it out in me. I wish the my cousins were around, particularly Swelch who ain't afraid of the weather and will go on long cold walks with me and talk about everything or nothing and giggle and oh man, i miss herrrrrr. my friends have maybe, possibly, temporarily forgotten me, or not forgotten but rather, are all with each other and happy so i am straying from their thoughts. i know this is ok. i mean, i am convincing myself that it is, because it is but it is not something i have come to terms with which is why i tend to drive most everyone crazy from time to time. this blog was supposed to be solely a creative outlet, not a place where i talk about my feelings, (unless in a poetic way) and this right here, is a mess, but i can't help myself. no one reads it anyways, 'cept for my swelch, and she doesn't mind. i have a nervous/excited energy and it won't go away and it is times like these when i am pretty sure i need to be in love or something.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

WRITERS BLOCK

and by that i mean, work is preventing me from my creative process because right now, i really really want to write, and I can't because I hate being sleepy and if I write i will go to bed late and if i go to bed late i won't get very much sleep before i have my full day of work tomorrow. so i am making a prayer to the writing goddess (thank you Dana Kurtz) that my desire to write sticks around for a while so i can get some shit done.

last weekend was THE weekend, why my family and I live for december and our friends (who are all full of love) brought their daughter (made from love) and she was charming and she loved me, but the greatest thing was the way she said "this, this, this mama, this" to everything, because she didn't yet know the names. and somehow, i felt like sometimes she was saying "this mama, this" as though to explain a feeling. as though to say "THIS IS IT MAMA, THIS IS LOVE AND JOY AND MAGIC". I am sure i am weighing this poor 2 year old down by putting too much weight into what she said, but either way that is what I was thinking.

i will make that a story somehow too, i had to write it down before i forgot.

sorry this lack poeticness or proseness and i will be back with tomorrow to 1) edit like crazy 2) write some more rough drafts.

Friday, December 18, 2009

SHE ONLY WEARS SHAWLS FROM DUBAI

She only wears shawls from Dubai. They are elaborately decorated, brightly colored, and drenched in the scent of incense. She has the palest skin you've ever seen, so translucent it seems as though you are seeing through her. She paints her cheeks with rouge, giving her the appearance of a porcelain doll. Her eyes are a dirty grey, and when she cries you could swear it was just the rain. I'm not quite sure just what she is. I would say an angel, but that brings to mind something more ethereal than she really is. This is my mother.
In the mornings she makes us tea with a drop of lavender and tells us about our father, who died when I was nine and my brother was five. She tells us what he is wearing today, and how he burnt his toast this morning. She tells us that today, he has an important meeting, and that we better wish him luck before we go to school. She is not crazy with grief, she just doesn't want her children to grow up without a father. So when we get in trouble she says "You just wait until your father gets home" and so we go to our rooms and we wait and wait and wait but he never comes. Even though I know he is not coming, that he will never barge into my room with an angry look on his face there is always a tiny part of me that hopes he will. That my mother's denial will manifest itself as him, live and true.
When I was three, I used to curl up in a ball on my fathers chest, the sound of his breathing and unsteady heartbeat lulling me to sleep. It probably reminded me of being in the womb or something, at least thats what I've deduced from the things I've seen on the Discovery Channel. My mother is too small and fragile though, so after he died, we had no one to rest on. My little brother cries a lot, and even though I am just a kid too, I do my best to keep him safe. My mother always says "It's ok, daddy will take care of it," but he never does, so I do instead.
Sometimes, I hear my mother moan from her bedroom. The first time, it scared me so I snuck into her room with a baseball bat, only to find her all by herself rolling around in the bed naked, doing strange things. It made me uncomfortable so now, I sleep with earplugs. Right before dinner my mother mixes my daddy a drink and sets it on a coaster in the den. At first I just dumped the drink down the sink, and carried the empty glass back to her saying "Daddy's done, he told me to put this in the dishwasher," but now I just drink them myself. It really didn't taste good the first time, and I wanted to ask mother if it was medicine but I was afraid I would mess up her happy delusions.
When my mother goes to the grocery store I crawl into her closet full of shawls and wrap them around myself and hum myself to sleep. The purr of the muffler always wakes me up in time to hang up the shawls and run out to the car and help mother bring in the groceries. My little brother usually comes and helps out too. He and I put the groceries away, and sometimes we take turns hiding the groceries from each other, and days later we will find an orange hidden in a cereal bowl or a pack of pop-tarts in the cracker box.
Sometimes I go days without sleeping, but for the cat naps I take in my mothers closet among her scarves. It's really not that bad. It's kind of like dreaming for days straight. Except for that you're not dreaming and nothing really happens. On nights when I can't sleep I play the old country records I found in daddy's study. I like their slow drawl, they never quite put me to sleep but they offer me some comfort. Daddy used to say "country is good for the soul". That new pop country stuff isn't what he meant though. He only listened to old time country, real country.
During one of those times I hadn't slept for days, I crept into my mothers closet for a few hours while she was away. While I was laying in the dark fingering all of her scarves a questioned formed in my mind. Where did all these scarves come from? My mother wasn't one for shopping, she still wore the same pants she used to wear before I was born. Yet she had piles and piles of scarves, beautifully colored, and I had no idea where they came from. In my sleepless state, when I heard the car muffler I ran downstairs and asked
"Mother mother, where do you get all of your beautiful scarves?"
"Oh, daddy gets them for me whenever he is in Dubai on business."
"But daddy's dead." It really did just slip out, I don't think I had ever even said it aloud before. And with that, my mother dropped the groceries she was carrying and went inside and sat down. She didn't cry, but her eyes were glassy. "Mother? Mother? Mother?" I yelled. She didn't look up. She sat in the chair for days and I prepared her drinks, like she usually did every day for my dead father. She drank them slowly, methodically a sip every five minutes on the dot. After days and days of sitting silently, she finally looked at me and said matter-of-factly "If your daddy is dead and doesn't get me the scarves, who does? Hm?" and because she was in a delicate state and I didn't have another answer I said "I suppose your right."
We never brought it up again, and my mother continued to pretend daddy was still alive. She still commented on his outfits daily and made his nightly drinks. I spent months and months pondering the shawls, I swear they just appeared out of nowhere. Finally, I realized that my mothers denial was not strong enough to bring back daddy but rather it manifested itself in scarves.
Together, we worked to try to deny him back to life, but he had always been stubborn and he never did turn up. I stopped drinking his drinks but they continued to disappear, so I thought we were surely making progress. I started buying him ties for Christmas, telling him "Oh that one will go lovely with your navy blue shirt." I started answering the phone pretending someone was calling for him and running around the house yelling "DAAADDD! DAAAAADDD!!! PICK UP THE PHONE." But it wasn't enough, despite our best efforts our denial was not strong enough to bring him home. My closet slowly transformed into a nest of shawls just like my mothers, I would spend hours just sitting on the floor and talking to them, not because I thought they'd talk back, but for the exact opposite reason, because I knew they wouldn't say anything at all.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

MADISON

It is home, for now. Really, I feel happy here, and I love my roommates and I love my friends. I see my new friends distinctly as friends of an older me. We talk about things that matter, without talking about them too seriously, but in a comfortable way. It is what I need, always, people close to me to talk to, just about things whatever they are. I love it here, as I suspect I could love it anywhere, with the right amount of time and the right amount of effort, you can make friends and love where you are. I am trying to turn a little more flighty, or not so much to become, but to allow myself to be. I used to think I didn't have it in me, but I keep surprising myself and realizing I was just holding things back because I assumed they were wrong. We can not do good things all the time but we can't do bad things all the time either, I am trying to choose my bad habits carefully.

Madison is my home for now. I am never homesick in the true sense, where you miss something so much that it turns into a physical ache, a dry heave. I can't believe the semester is already over, and even though the speed at which it passed is scary, it is also nice because I have done more things in one semester than I did in a whole year and I feel good about things. I am a little distant from my words today, because I am so sleepy, and sleepy is the exception to the physical and emotional detachment, I feel it in my mind and throughout my body, my whole being just begging me to shut down for a while, to stop thinking at all. Sleep is strange, and it scares me a little, all of the things I might be missing while I'm sleeping. Though I suppose I am missing just as many things when I am awake, so I could either choose to be scared all the time or be scared never. I used to choose the first, but I'm getting smarter.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

FREEWRITE?

After being knocked on my ass, for a brief moment, I am back on my feet. Potentially? I am learning to be more resilient against myself. In another conversation with my mother, I told her "I am learning to get along with myself." Which is the truth the truth, I am learning to get along myself in the hopes that it makes my interactions and relationships with other people better, stronger, healthier, more honest. Oh it kills me, almost literally but I coaxed myself out of it by whispering between whines "be the tree, be the tree, be the fucking tree, savannah." And yesterday I was driving in the car talking to myself in a casual tone, which I thought for a second might make me crazy, but then decided that wasn't the case. I am trying to find the right balance, which I have never really had much of I tend to lean towards the extremes. Sometimes, I forget just how much I love my cousins, I forget that we are connected by weird invisible threads that seem to get tugged every now and again to remind us. I believe a lot in the things I can't see and I believe whole-heartedly in the science of welchiness, some weird mix of traits that we can't seem to escape no matter how far away from each other we move. We weren't even raised the same way or in the same places, and yet here we are, half the same.

THANK THE GOOD SWEET MOTHER NATURE FOR THEM. because sometimes when I am drowning in self-pity, or whatever sort of troubled waters I've thrown myself into, they are around to listen to me mumble and ramble and to calm me down.

Some things are hard to cure, they are, they are, but I am tired of dwelling, so I am going to eat cookies and love things forever and move on from all of the things I have stuck myself too. Yes paved parking lot I will accept you and stop accusing you of stealing my ever-favorite potholes. Loving things forever is scary really, but I see no other way to do things.

A day later my cousin writes:
"I once had a conversation with Pam about this disconnect and how it is maybe endemic to most of us, Welches that is. We live in our heads and our hearts more than we live in our bodies. We do not always connect with what our hands are doing, do not accept an innate flow between body and brain."

and maybe that is what I am trying to do, trying to understand the connection between my emotional self and my physical self, when really I don't see one. I can always remember feeling, I don't know where they come from but there is the "8th grade summer feeling" and there is the "Middle school nerves" feeling, and a lot of feelings that don't have names, but they are each different, and I know they are different, and I know that there are not enough names for all of the feelings we have. But I can connect feelings to physical states, but I can not connect physical states to feelings. It is always the feeling that comes first. I wonder if that is backwards from how most people do things. But sometimes I feel some weird emotion and I sit and think what is this from, what is this from? until I get a flash of a memory, usually me in a car, or me in a room or me with someone important and then, then I remember. My memory seems so blurred, even the things that happened this morning seem like a dream, but the emotions never do, they are the only things that ever seem real after the fact.

I wish everyone I knew had a blog full of their inter-workings, because I find them inspiring/interesting/they seem to help me push through the things in myself that scare me.

Friday, December 11, 2009

NO, CLOWNS DON'T SCARE ME, WATER DOES.

" i feel
like a loop of the last eight frames of film
before a slow motion lee harvey oswald
gets shot in the gut and killed,
alone putting three coins into a washing machine
next to a caulked cracked wall
in the basement on fairmount street"

"how did i get so unlucky?"he thought as he stood toes edged close to the river, just inches away really. he couldn't do it though. she was swimming in the river topless, and he could manage to even stick a toe in. the night before, they were lying in bed and she'd asked "what are you afraid of?"


ok. this is going somewhere but i am tired and have to work in the morning, so i will leave it at this pile of nothing for now.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

THE SOFT HUM OF THE FREEZER DEFROSTING

I suppose I am too sleepy to even produce any word vomit of any creative sort. Poured it all into a letter and a chat with my mother.

Today, I finished the Brothers K, after many months of reading it on and off. I would have to say it is my new favorite book, I have an overwhelming amount of love for it and all the characters. I can't explain it, I really can't but it has had an odd amount of impact on me, as though I know the Chance family personally and have been with them for all of their ordeals. Maybe it is the fact that I haven't taken the time to read anything that isn't for school, so I was both reminded that I love reading, really more than most other activities and this mixed with the greatness of the book put me in a stupor. Really, it is a book that must be read, I need to get my hands on my own copy so I can read it again and mark it up.

("fuck you death, and fuck your boring artwork")

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

A THRIFT STORE FIND

It seems strange to buy someone else's personal effects when you really think about it. Most of the time it is just things they didn't really want before, but you always have to wonder, maybe it is something more important. Maybe it is something that used to mean everything to someone. Do you thinks that inanimate objects can hold feelings and memories? I think that all the walls of old buildings hold secrets, I like to imagine that if you held your ear up against them you could hear them talking. Things too. I found a bundle of postcards at the thrift store in portland and I read them. I didn't buy them, it seems weird to buy letters that are not even addressed to you, but I read them and they didn't say much, but still. I heard this story on NPR about some people that found a bunch of letters and spent forever trying to find the woman who had wrote them. It was fascinating. I wonder if anyone will ever read my letters besides the people I wrote them to. Or perhaps they just throw them out after giving them a good once over. I save most of my letters and postcards. I am a sentimental sort of a gal. I tell people that I love them too often, and they tell me not often enough. It seems like I am always reaching and reaching for people but I can never quite grasp them. Maybe I'll start writing letters to no one. Maybe I will leave letters in library books and in coffee shops and in classrooms. Maybe someday I will learn to be content.

WHY DID SHE ALWAYS SMILE WHEN HEARING THE WORD MOON?

Not to go all mother Earth/sappy on your ass, but she and the moon were kind of in love. And by that I mean she was in love with the moon. And by that i mean... I'm just not quite sure. There was a comfort that she took in the moon, it was big and bright, but never as in your face as the sun. The moon just seemed to get it. It understood when she was sad, and when she was so full of happiness that she didn't have a place to put it, so full of happiness that she was sad again. The moon is always watching over the ocean, and she fancied herself like an ocean. Swallowing everything, even when it tried to put it back big, lonely, beautiful, never quite sure what it was looking for and struggling to be happy with what it had. Maybe that is too much personification to give to one body of water, but there are certain things you attach yourself to and she had the moon and the ocean. She liked things that were big, bigger than her, they kept her in check while simultaneously being the only things she could ever relate to. They made her feel calm, or as calm as she was ever able to feel. Mostly, they made her feel overwhelmed, but calmly so? You know, things really don't make sense when you try to explain them. You know, things don't really make sense when you try to avoid what they really mean. Really, things just don't make sense. The only time she had ever felt "calm" not like she was reaching for something more was for a short time, when she dabbled in romance, and I am sure she wasn't complete then, but something felt a little more whole. it's hard to say what makes people feel complete. maybe nothing, ever. maybe that is the point, though i suspect really, there isn't one. But she always smiled when hearing the word moon, because it was like smiling when remembering your late grandmother, it fills you with a lovely sort of nostalgia in such a way that you can't keep from hinting at a smile.







DID ANYONE NOTICE HOW MUCH I LIKE COMMAS? COMMA CRAZY COMMA CRAZY.

Monday, December 7, 2009

A SOAPSTONE ASHTRAY

She took a drag from her cigarette, she was working on perfecting her technique. She was now a pro, she could inhale without choking on the smoke, a true sign of an amateur. She'd been in her room for hours, had used up half a pack just trying to get it down right. A soapstone ashtray sat to her right, it was full of the remnants of her newest project. It might seem silly, but no one wants to look like a fool. Her mouth felt like a desert, and she liked that, she closed her eyes and pictured miles of sand, there was something terribly appealing about the idea of nothing, nothing at all just herself, the sand, and whatever sort of little creatures there are around in the desert.



http://www.toasted-cheese.com/webcal/webcal.cgi
(a prompt a day)