"words complete our fantasies, fill in their gaps, support their inconsistency, prolong them, enrich them with what cannot be seen or touched"

theoretically,
i want to take you to the violet hour
and make sure you don't pay
and get us shithoused on their red rum punch
launch myself at you
once we're all but drooling in the lamp low chilter world
knock you back in that stupid, ridiculous, high-backed velvet chair
knock your chair into the other stupid, ridiculous, high-backed velvet chairs
so all the people who are the sort to go to the violet hour on a saturday night
hate us
and we get kicked out and told not to come back
i hope we can still go across the road for margaritas
i hope we're bruised and maybe there's blood in my mouth
theoretically

just ask and you shall receive
beyond your wildest dreams

and you already know how this will end

i have a feeling things are deceivingly well-ordered in southeast portland

i.e. where is the trash that corresponds with the lifestyle

i think for me it's nearing time for a trip to somewhere that's bearing the brunt of all this neatness

a common now is achingly situated and aware of itself
there is no plain hour to lean on in the wake
of the musuemed hours already come to pass.
we are held in the hollow body of time
wondering and never resting

there is something i would like to get off my chest:
in general the present does not exist !
unless
it's a constant rug being pulled or
a kaleidoscope anguish
between what was
and will be

seventy five per cent of moments feel brittle to the point of crumble
fragile with the residue of mirrors.
and for some this is it:
from beginning to end
uncertainty humiliates
our attempts
to hold on.

this is terrifying?
it is if you're not IVed to smoking weed
or working or drunk
we're so busy
making it look like we're alive
and that this is easy.
as if we have nothing to do but coffee around and look into reflections of ourselves
in store windows, car windows, pages and screens friends and lover's faces
as if nonchalantly extant.

i think we're dying because we're not swept off our feet or
taken out of brains so we stop thinking about it all.
we go on buying smiles and orgasms!
as is if there is a tic toc enough for such boredom.
loathe the person that says with their life:
i survive casually
living is something just happening to me, unplanned
my flesh and i ride it out.

and love?
the thing we all hold out for
love tries to be a feeling of reflectionless light
that strips back the lies we're hiding behind.

we realize that we could be having more fun
or something along the lines of we need to die
to even begin to want to be alive.
but right now it seems we're just flat blind

our bulimic quest for
possibility +
authenticity

is a storm of endless jars
each holding a little bit of something
but no single jar seems to have enough to be anything
never much, never quite satisfying.

loose ends

geez i am feeling so confused today about what the fuck i am doing here

!

i am craving depth and desire

and history

and memory

and houses of poetry

made of air and skin

more solid than my current lists of numbers and words

piles of paper and cardboard,

glass and plastic,

everyone doing their little part of this city game

i am frustrated

i have this new stupid job

knocking on peoples' doors

making them care about wilderness and pay at the same time

i don't know how long i will do it for

it makes me want to leave my life

doors swinging on their hinges

that fraction of myself crumpled up under my stupid binder as the rest flies away in a blaze

on the other hand

it is a good challenge--

an opening--

an opportunity for tiny performances if i can summon the chutzpah--

stones rising up into my throat

what is possible seems to change so much from moment to moment

face to face

what is prioritized, what is the reason,

each one with its own world of rules and experience

it is so easy to think myself into their skins and feel bounded for a moment

of course they too are probably barely contained by their skin

and then materially all we city-dwellers are living in little boxes

moving among little boxes

that is undoubtedly part of the confusion

we are not talking about answers

most things seem wrong

but i don't believe in dichotomies

i am speaking in mythic proportions

of a need for mythic proportions

or else nothing makes sense,

nothing to weave together these cups of coffee and text messages

moments of silence and noise, money changing hands,

walking around saying words

(like 1:30 4:30 $ @ && ? , " " @ * :: 3 50 1000 = /)

as a tactic for fighting the fight,

why we try why i try

why do we do what we do

what do you believe in

and how do you remind yourself that you are a powerful and magical creature

ugh ugh ugh monsters monsters monsters

a poignant note

i wrote some vday letters to queer prisoners as part of a nationwide thing on vday a couple weeks ago. malic was there :)

i've already gotten some new penpals from the deal.

unfortunately, i also just got one of my cards returned to me in the mail. sticker on the envelope said the letter arrived at the prison, but was rejected because it was against their rules to have anything on the outside of the envelope besides the name and number of the prisoner, and my friend had drawn some pretty + colorful hearts all over the outside.

hi

where are we in the attic only
rain sounds us between
the night unfolding

our love is in here
i know it is
small as mouse
alive dead as everything
scuttling around looking for crumbs
what else?

our love was a banquet
and now i am

in the basement
where i saw the mouse
scratching at the floor to
get at the rain in the ground i suppose
whispering a wondering how is it going to end

that's odd i think, i thought
what have i dreamed
my brother i dreamt up ?
to me it is a year's worth of emails landscapes named and so forgotten between
everything i am is waiting, to be converted into mirror.
everything i was an iteration of desire for normal breathing not scared secrets.
not mamas with black teeth. fathers of no eyes.

then i found the day in a boy's face
i tell him over again
come to me in sunrise form.
lick my skin
make me forget my name
if it means burning down talking
cradling books crying out
loud is my blood
and not being more unperfect!

than i am now
loved
by birds
even as my ugliness was crowned
they like me
getting high in the dark fading
unfound even by hunger and boys.
birds they like to see my soul walking on its stilts.
in the softest morning when i wake
they are funny breathing brown songs.
we laugh my white is skin tissue paper from europe with dark beetles to see through.
as boy i am broken many times
shadowlove crushed all my baby skulls
baby turtle baby cats baby shrimp so precious and weak
because he had to be strong.
and never not.
i am strong because i know i am aching
but how else do i dance
and dress up a mystery in a beard
how else
do we see
out of what we want to be


sorriness is in having grey rock for a heart
it will take many days
soaking in our hands and lips and breath
to make what was red soft again.

i swept the floor and in the end i swept my insides out

right back at you
knocking on the door
sword to sword
eye to eye
we get to where we are
to see each other
only after we figure out
how to love this world
giving what is alive in us
even if it is dead

love begets love
smile a smile
even a wound smiles
and a smile requires its own end
la la back and forth
your words have found my shape and gather around it
love gathers around the boundary of my world
that is how i am know i am still here
words foaming at the mouth
the heart can lurch across the floor and say hi i am pet
feed me
the next day i am sitting in your lap
purring

seriously - this even keel is so easy to smash.

I am trying to find the source of my anxiety with my fingers. I look for my anxiety with my fingers deep up inside my cunt and hold my breathe for longer than is probably good for me. I swallow everything in a grey public bathroom and try not to cry out. Can I collect the buzzing, secret, trembling coldness in my heart into a hard knot and work it out of my body with my fingers?

The Teemz system of establishing reality includes two steps. First absorb, then connect to something else. Things cannot be ratified unless they are referenced in at least two sources. When the cold sinking feeling first appeared, I had no references. I thought this was internal. What if there's a deep vein of anxiety in my culture?

Caroline:
and also

why is everyone so sloppy (possibly a generational problem)

etc.

1:14 PM for example

http://fuckiminmy20s.tumblr.com/

ew

Caroline: thoughtcatalog.com

is realy really bad for you

me: do not read anymore

cannot

too sad

1:15 PM Caroline: yeah i mean as long as you can maintai the mindset like

this is bad for me

doesn't reflect my life

isn't relavent to me

it's ok

but like at 3 am when i am sad

and it is making me cry

it's not ok

1:17 PM me: ya

1:18 PM i've been trying to put my finger on what i think could be called the "thought catalog lifestyle/frame of mind/attitude"

because i think it might be endemic

to our youth

and

it's

really

really

bad

1:20 PM Caroline: yeah

a fetish for loneliness and moroseness

me: and also being a hot mess

Caroline: yeah

1:21 PM kinda like this mindset taht we were all dealt a horrible terrible hand

and are doing w/e we can do deal with it

including binge drinking and wearing bird sweaters

me: right

coupled with the belief that we deserve a whole lot better

like the best

because we're all so brilliant

1:22 PM Caroline: haha yeah

me: and so it's all tumblr/embarassingly vague blog posts/passive agressive status updates

1:23 PM and poor choices

Caroline: yeah there is no greater ideal

or goal

just like

ennui

fetishized ennui

me: erotic boredom as presented by american apparel

1:24 PM it's some late roman empire bullshit

1:26 PM Caroline: haha

our great decline

me: i believe it

Marc Auge: He says time has changed. So much is happening, constantly, persistently, significantly. "What is new is not that the world lacks meaning, or has little meaning, or less than it used to have; it is that we seem to feel an explicit and intense daily need to give it meaning; to give meaning to the world, not just some village or lineage." We suffer from a problem of scale. Time itself is stretching out and more interminable perhaps then we ever thought possible. The system we created is quickly becoming more than the sum of its parts. Does this create a strange, unnameable suffering in the minds of the people I know? Why is everyone "fucked up" and do they really all have "issues"? Is someone lying about this? And why would they? And even if they are lying, what is making them lie and why do they wear their injuries like badges of honor? What part of our lives makes that a desirable quality in a friend/lover/associate?

What if everyone is just terrified?

When my heart goes sick and my whole self gets freezing freezing cold, I always think, "There is isn't enough time" and what I mean is "I'm dying, I'm dying, I'm going to die" and what I mean is "I want to take off my skin and leap into everyone else" and what I mean is "Fuck me fuck me fuck me." I think I must be standing before time, shaking, on my knees and hoping to be smashed to pieces. Salivating and girlish, hoping for debasement. I think. Maybe I'm wrong.

I want a solution that seems like going forward, not a reactionary one. A solution that doesn't include the phrase, "turn off your computer." We have made everything we have of our own accord and I will not refuse our inventions. I do not want a solution that attempts to return us to some sort of Eden-like, pastoral paradise, a time when we were clean, because we were never like that. I'm just dizzy on this shifting plane that it's hard to see what's right. And it's hard not to return to my conviction that the mundane will sustain life and keep it same same until some virus swallows us up and really nothing is wrong except that life is in fact boring and therefore a little sad.

In short, don't move to suburbia. Ever.

EDIT: Christmas vacation, Sara and Eliot and I read a New York Times article about how pop songs reflect fears about the world ending. They site "We Found Love in a Hopeless Place" and "Dancing Til the World Ends." If that's not proof, then I don't know what is.

a brief interlude, pt. II

http://squidpunkd.blogspot.com/2010/04/briefest-of-interludes.html


one of my many names. will come back to haunt me, for sure,
(along with james.)
they will receive their proper placement in my life some day
quentin, rest in peace for a hot second i'll see ya later

maybe kinda like how i loved Eliot before i had a friend with that name
(i named objects eliot, i named myself eliot for a week, neither stuck around)
so maybe they won't be my names
but someone else's?

going by q/queue/cue? these days
z feels better
eliza feels good too
something's afoot
something's abutt