Measures of Personal Sucess/Personal Measures of Sucess

1. low stakes sexting
2. the rain the wind the snow and my ruddy cheeked genes don't make a good pair, i show up anyway
3. i have something to hide
4. early december, bus ride through indiana, i am scared of the man who talks to himself and mutters, "i been in the penitentiary most of ma life" and the municipal waste treatment plans don't seem beautiful to me and i know it's hilarious that i live in illinois but not in illionois, but at least i'm not claiming america looks like one place, you know?
5. my nail game/the best ass for twerking/my fuck-me face
6. my hand is on the seam-ripper
7. can you dj?
8. my whole body doesn't want me to say, my spine runs into a pin point and my veins push up to the surface of my skin and someone notices my hand shaking and maybe i need a beer before all of this, but i'm still saying it all anyway
9. still not dead yet

some people in the woods have web access

"Axes" by Mark(ie) Aguhar, queer genderqueer transfemme brown artist in Chicago who committed suicide earlier this year (1987-2012) - http://markaguhar.com/tagged/drawing

related : http://youtu.be/NGe0hHvAGkc "ugly" by 2NE1

"As the (generational) effects of global capitalism, genocide, violence, oppression and trauma settle into our bodies, we must build new understandings of bodies and gender that can reflect our histories and our resiliency, not our oppressor or our self-shame and loathing.  We must shift from a politic of desirability and beauty to a politic of ugly and magnificence.  That moves us closer to bodies and movements that disrupt, dismantle, disturb.  Bodies and movements ready to throw down and create a different way for all of us, not just some of us." 

- from "Moving toward the Ugly - A Politic beyond Desirability" on Mia Mingus' blog Leaving Evidence, keynote speech from 2011 Femmes of Color Symposium in Oakland
http://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/moving-toward-the-ugly-a-politic-beyond-desirability/

one feeling

coming back from witch camp
2 days later we drove into the city
to go to a dance space
and have a circle, shared breaths,
pushing pullling sweaty fleshy sinews
dance dance
and i feel it so hard
so sad
to dance in the presence of humans as the only life in the room
no roots to tickle my feet up to my knees
no branches to inspire my waving arms
no tall grasses to nudge my inner thighs
no sun shining to squint my eyes
no insects to buzz and "disrupt" with their divine intervention
bird calls
the scent of broken yarrow
non-humans can be our greatest teachers
in this dance of living, of feeling

Mr. O'Hara,

Frank,

King of Bourbon and Trembling Empress of the Island Manhattan,

My darling,

I miss you today.

Can I tell that the only thing pinned up in my drab office cube is your Song? Printed in a tiny typeface so you have to be close (as I am) to read it. I don't do this as hopeful gesture. I know you cannot visit me because you are dead. Your note is an instruction and I keep breathing. It serves.

I think you used to laugh at Allen Ginsberg for keeping so close his hero Walt, for writing poems to him, for crying out to the bearded American wonder when he, Allen, was drunk and awash in pills on your bathroom floor and ruining yet another of your parties. "Walt's dead, Allen," and so on. Cheeky, witty excuses for your sobbing compatriot to your other guests and so on. Banging on the door, "Allen, Allen, ALLEN," and so on. I'm sorry to exult you in a way that would make you laugh.

But, darling, dickhead, my angel, whatever you laid out in front of me, I've yet to learn. I remember when we met. Your sunshine sluttiness wafted in on dust motes. You were somehow filthy and read in a classroom. A classroom creaky and old as sin, under a teacher who would rather write than speak, but in a classroom nonetheless. You were beatific even with a mouth full of cock. Or so I like to imagine. My first salt circle, my first protective spell, I put around me with your words on my tongue. Clunk went the pipes on the third floor and the sirens wailed up 55th street and the police came in to strap her into a wheelchair and I clutched your lunch poems and my tears splashed the phone and in the interval I didn't have time to understand what you were trying to say.

Will you come back, my angel? Climb up to my apartment again? There are no fire escapes like in New York, but hanging out on the back porch has the added sweet irony of standing atop wooden exit structures in a city that burned to the ground not so long ago. You'd like that, wouldn't you? Throw your head back and laugh, won't you? You'll love the internet and I think you'll quite like the music they're making these days and I think I could help you to see the merits of beer.

Please, Frank. Darling, dickhead, my angel.

I miss you.

wonderbread and wonderboy go for a walk in the woods...

do you know the story of the lupin lady?

also, dwelling in history: http://alitheavenger.blogspot.com/2008/08/recount-decount.html
practicing radical inclusion of past selves....hmhhmmhm oh berlin, oh my heart. one of many.

wanting a cigarette and questioning that desire--replacing it with stretching, yogastic satisfaction

thinking of-
healing?
how have i changed in the past year?
did college make me articulate?
how do i act on my radical politics?
does something matter if i can't articulate it (that is, spread a revolutionary consciousness)?

also geez-o, it's raining like a mofo on this thin-tin roof
& i'm thinking of population decline
(http://www.windward.org/private/articles/population01.htm)
hm bleak--whaddya think?

preparing to leave safan tomorrow morning,
leaving a red-purple-gold palatial shit chamber in my wake
gold seat fit for pillow princes and size queens alike
like the swimming idea of green tomato pies
like boletes, browncapped children of the forest fairies who live in the galls,
like two goats dead in four days and we wonder and we wonder,
like business plans are deep conversations, like
if you weren't raised eating expensive air then you'll never understand the difference
like whatever---

i am not a fountain! i am a jungle-jumble-menagerie-wet-furry-paperback-wonder!

last night i dreamt that my father was elected president (everyone said, "even if he doesn't do anything, it's a great sign. he's the best president we've ever had, and he doesn't have to lift a finger.") and that i was wandering from house to house looking for someone to give me shooting lessons.

also last night, after a day of wine tasting and cheese tasting in sutter creek,
maggie and i constructed a ritual for ourselves--of celebration, gratitude, making-space, becoming-present. drew from the rituals i had done with you folks, under the full moon on the beach before the jammin, at the sky factory under a sacrificed pinata, the queer interfaith ritual at the point this spring quarter, also the masquerade and wedding parties, also more small things of ritual and symbolism...
it was really good. we ate olive-garlic-rosemary-sourdough warm bread and kombocha squash and beans and rice and mustard greens and red wine, danced in the mud under a cloudy sky and screamed and howled and sat and were quiet. i imagined my chest to be like an advent calendar, full of tiny little doors, each door opening onto a field of stars and dark matter and space. i imagined opening each of the doors. we folded pieces of paper in half and wrote-drew "things we are stuck on/that control us" and "things that bring us strength, make us present" and shared some things (our papers looked totally different)--we planned to burn the former one, but decided to hold onto it to keep it conscious, think healing instead of throwing out. ("radical inclusion of past selves" has been a theme in my thoughts since az mentioned it in willits...it's a process.) i made some small commitments to myself, small daily rituals. it left me exhausted and good-feeling last night and quiet today.

drip drop
drip drop
drip drop

on being obliged to watch

on tuesday, whitey the sheep was slaughtered*. i felt obliged to be present for a lot of reasons, none of them peer pressure--i wanted to bear witness, to experience the impact of a life passing to take responsibility for the role of death in producing a meat- and animal-driven lifestyle, to face my complicitness, to see which parts or which people seemed cruel, if any...i don't think anyone is particularly cruel, and it's not easy for anyone. walt says that if it were easy, one shouldn't be doing it--there's a risk of detachment, of becoming too capable of killing something without thinking about it too much. i took the opposite route, holding on tight to the memory of whitey eating as she bled to death from her neck, slowly crumpling onto the ground but never in pain, never bleating--in short, remembering life as the cost through the process of removing the hide, fat, organs, cutting up the meat into chunks the next day.

in some ways, the experience of watching whitey die and the next day eating a bite of her was a beautiful closed-loop system...her body going to nourish windward, the people and earth and animals, and the impact of the flock on the land is being balanced so that they can survive the winter and to make space for new lambs to be born. i'm coming to feel and recognize my place in these cycles and circles of things--domesticator and cultivator but also spreader-of-seeds, feeder-of-bunnies, enricher-of-earth, consumer-of-predators-and-prey. the truth is that i, and most people i think, don't have nearly enough information to figure out how to choose a diet or way of living that impacts the earth as little (or as positively) as possible...monocrop agriculture and the cultivation of annual grains has fucked a lot of shit up too. and although humans have fucked up a lot more than our due on this planet, it also doesn't seem quite right to put us on the top of it all, the Ruiners and the FuckUppers...the earth has evolved along with us, animals evolved to live in synchrony with humans, cars replaced natural predators in controlling the deer population...how do we begin to take responsibility for all this?

something is always dying for us to eat,
and i think that is one reason i felt obliged to watch.
watching whitey get hoisted up, dying quietly--it didn't make me want to eat meat, really,
and when i ate a little it tasted...okay, i guess.

all my little molecules and cells, nourished on this and that, more and more from this land, from the garden and the goat milk and the soft white wheat, and eventually i will be eaten by a tree hungry for bones and calcium or some grasses or maybe some critter. who knows. but that it as it should be, i think, in this cycle of nutrients and lifegiving and lifetaking. life and death and birth go together, cycling and cycling and keeping each other in check--what separates us is not our faces or our speaking abilities or our ability to build televisions, i think, but our sense that we have a choice about how we want to compete or cooperate, take responsibility or destroy, take lives gracefully in order to live or destroy life in order to dominate. we don't know how, or we have forgotten why, to keep ourselves in check. how to recognize that the resources for us to live and bear children are no longer available...because they're not, we're past topsoil and living on fossil fuels, eating and drinking this painfully extracted blood of the earth.

and what to do with all this knowledge,
all this information that we were never told,
i was never taught,
some of me craves cities and traveling, people people people,
easy small relationships, opening myself daily,
i am not ready to settle and dwell. not here, anyway.
but it lets me see the possibility of how it might be done,
how we might live responsibly with the land and its critters--plants and animals and bacteria and us.
nothing is easy. but we have so many choices.

*the words chosen carefully to describe death are prolific...culling, harvesting, giving death to, slaughtering, butchering, doing...rarely killing.

for the good life is out there somewhere, so stay on my arm you little charmer

from my journal at 7:30am today, or 8pm on monday 4 u, 

dunno if it will be interesting at all

what IS interesting, is that it is RAINING

not as hard as it did i'm sure during winknight's stay in summer 05, but wow i was soaked earlier walking to and from dance. i haven't seen a rain like this in... who knows. certainly not in washington nor in pune so far. so june or july in chicago. it's wonderful except that the water on the street is full of ambiguous matter.

ok ok.

i'm at home [in hyde park] talking to justin on gmail, skype, phone or something. he is at the baohaus, i have to go soon [to india? somewhere permanent, so there is an urgency] but i want to see justin before i leave but i project that he is reluctant or doesn't think it is important [or like seeing me when i'm about to leave would just open up new wounds or something so it's better not to see each other at all... a familiar train of thought for me]. i go there and find my vest/package, sand, no rock, cigarette wrapper from cigs i bought in bombay. justin is kinda sorta in the other room[i originally typed 'kinda aorta'!].. i don't think i actually physically see him. [second or third dream where this happens! i havent seen justin in weeks]. i go through give away boxes of clothes and take a striped shirt from ali. 

SWITCH

i'm wrapping electrical chords around irons, playing "like a virgin" by madonna, britney, and christina [remember that vma performance where they kissed and it was scandalous?]. then scene change to wearing wobbly high heels (like from the kingfisher swimsuit calendar model reality tv show) at a dilapidated opera house. amulya mandava is claiming something about rewriting/organizing some great music masterpiece of orchestral music by a composer i don't like but i can't remember who, now. the stairs are difficult. i hear someone say "it won 2 tonys". when we get to the lobby i'm with granny, granddad, and mom. the opera-food-place is baking $3 cookies and granny remarks that they're finally baking their own, and needs to throw something out. 

SWITCH

in a mildly dilapidated grand building [the opera house after being abandoned in 50 years? which reminds me of the train station in bombay... marble floors and nice stairs, but dirt and funny smells everywhere]. i'm finding anastasia and ali, they're in class or something. i'm doing something with blue ink. it's raining and coming through the roof. i pee while walking down the grand-ish stairs [same scene as walking down stairs in opera house, only no high heels and i'm with a&a] . i'm not wearing pants. there might be more. a&a are nonchalant, not interested in me.

then? the interview with the nice couple, how they met. through craigslist. a cute ad. they have fun! they do such n such! then i see he has a computer. on the side of the building. it is big, about 3 feet tall-- looks like "tsunami dream" comp of my dad's. outside, still colonial bombay architecture, 

THEN do i go to the part where i am part of a murder scheme? i waylay someone (the target?) by reading something to them, and then a guy down the street shoots them. i move on and question the ethics of what i just did. maybe that person was hannah because i also dreamt that i read a long sentence from a yellow paper that was my high school transcript with multiple clauses, conflicting imagery, weird vocab, also claiming that india was in africa. hannah said "what does that even mean?" ad we're like yeah wtf i dunno. 

also at some point i'm stretching in some kind of gym class and my legs look more like granny's and a little diamond-like shaped (like harlequin babies) and some dude shares that he used to know a kid who had it who could never poop. but that when he was a kid his poops were too watery. maybe the kid with weird skin died? or had some other strange ending. 

============

that's the end of my journal entry. wow it was boring, but i was so excited writing it this morning. i can pretty much clearly identify where all of these images situations and feelings come from in my conscious life, so in a way, i thought that sharing this with you all lets you know how my unconscious is processing the stuff i'm seeing thinking feeling and talking about. instead of writing those things down directly. home, love, place, bodily discomfort, language, death, buildings, art, where the fuck i am/am i.

In-class, internetical conversation between T'mo and Toast

T'mo: i feel like i can't use words in this room

for fear of offending people

Edoobs: same, i hate it here

my mood is instantly worse

i hate everything

life sucks

ive never felt so sad and lonely

i am completely drunk

my veins are filled with heroin

i can hardly see straight

but strangely my spelling is largely unaffected

my hearing is shot

my eyes are filled with pus, i dont know why

1:47 PM i forgot an apostrophe in the contraction above, i think it's because i'm so drunk and obliteratedly high

everyone looks like chicken thighs to me

i forgot to look at the coupon booklet for the local cvs this morning

my grandmother will never forgive the extra cents i will spend on my afternoon gatorade which she will count when i get home

after counting all of those wasted cents

she will detract all of them from my marshmellow allotment in my hot cocoa

1:48 PM which she makes from a box of packets she bought in paris during WWII

which is secretly a douch-ing kit

but i've never had the heart to tell her

people simply thouhgt that douch-ing was improved by the use of cocoa in WWII

me: you are making a fool of me right now

Edoobs: this statement has been proven false numerous times and it's appalling that she still thinks so

i can't shit but i can pee freely, an unexpected turn of bowel events

1:49 PM the clouds are closing in

the sun is dying

this is both metaphorically and literally true

when it dies, which can only seem likely to happen in my lifetime, today or later this week

i will be sad, and literally, dead

1:50 PM this turn of events will come, probably suddenly, but with open arms from my end

because im so depressed and blindly and deafly drunk and hig

h

i have lost my will to live anyhow and have decided, until my imminent death

to pursue a major in human development

which i find ironic because i've made up my mind that no human develops, only wallows further in the great mire of human turds and elephant shit

1:51 PM i have no strange or specific love for elephant shit, it is simply the nature of reality

pure and squarely simple

i've called out for help but grandma stifles my cries with exotic fruits she hurls at me with a water balloon launcher, an appartus she bought on sale and often reminds me of

my ability to type slows, the darkness descends

i ask jesus to pull my plug from the great cosmic machine to which it is attached

1:52 PM he grins and with a jowly and somehow jaundiced drool tells me assuredly that he will not help

i died.

1:53 PM T'mo: el oh el

path to knowledge

recently i am reading "the teachings of don juan: a yaqui way of knowledge." it is intriguing. more on that later because i am low on juices.

today i am in pittsburgh
this morning i was at oberlin college in oberlin, ohio, which alex tried to convince me was about 10 blocks by 10 blocks but i insisted was more like 12x15. probably more like 11x9 depending on how you count them.

last night presented 3 serendipitous events in close proximity (10 minutes):
1. on my way to a questionably compelling party "above the coffeeshop," i saw a familiar face and pointed and said "i know you!" he stared and started and it turned out to be theo, my ex-girlfriend's ex-roommate's boyfriend. too complicated. but a kid i met several times when i hung out at the shoreland 2nd year. possibly a little worse for the wear, but lovely once he overcame his shock.
2. someone found my lost bali shag tobacco pouch (nearly brand new) and returned it to me! of course i rolled em a spliff in return.
3. i met nikeel's (sp?) sister while smoking outside this too-full party. she did not deliver a philosophical manifesto. she was also lovely.

actually i realized that i visited oberlin exactly a year ago this weekend. upon my last visit, i wrote a love letter/thank you note (are they so dissimilar?) to oberlin (here if you's curious). what a strange regularity--when my plants grow in spurts and my period comes as often as now and laters to quik snax or rare as laundry day (that is, not often)...it is funny that such cycles would reveal themselves.

i took deep breaths and watched people work and live. i smoked too much and watched a college scene from the outside. it made me want to go back to school and also never go back to living in academia.
i also thought about how many young lives thrive in close proximity and how easy it is to not wear a helmet and accidentally get run over by an 18 wheeler. i think i'll start wearing a helmet. i advise you to consider it (if you haven't already).

all for now
love to the baohaus&others