you can break my face but you won't change

listened to this song while walking Ozball today and thought of z. I know you guys were taking more of a generally east-west route, but try not to get confused and kill a horse/nun.

welcome! and oh what a state we find ourselves in

welcome, bex and caro, to this spongy visceral mess--
(or darkened quaker-esque meeting hall)
i like to think of it as the dank fold between the femur and the ephemera.

write freely, free lovely: your words-thoughts-poems-freeassociation-sketches-pictures-stories-songs-breaths-learnings-mindflips-lessons-confessions are welcome. conventional grammar not enforced. i love hearing what you're up to.

oh and don't mind the friendly chinese 'botpuppies. they don't bite, but they comment vociferously.

with the approach of the total solar eclipse on sunday, i'm glad to think we are loosely webbed across oceans and words as the moon's shadowy finger is drawing its tip across the pacific. celebrate somehow if you like! these are magickin days, or so they say.

and a sidenote: t.rex and i just folded another 100 copies of the game zine! free(&wh)eeeeeeeeeeeeee! get a lil stack from the bäo or if yr faraways i'll send you one. good ol family fun.

Exhortation now that we're older

Goal One: Learn to love structure or perhaps the destruction of it or perhaps knowledge of it to reconstruct it and make it new again. Resist the common urges of your synapses to wander and wiggle through the world of your brain stew. STRUCTURE STRUCTURE STRUCTURE IT. Not in a necessarily WMP-y kind of way or a bell curve or a Aristotelian tangle but enough to say exactly what you mean. Spill no more milk, tumble no more tunes from lips, button up. Will you be able to say in a year "Limitation inspires creativity" when you do not believe it now? Probably not (secretly you will still believe that you yourself already contain so many limitations that further limitations would only offer less and not more). Think about how rules that you could make up could be AWESOME. Is this subversion or is this acceptance of a rule-based, competition-driven, have/have-not societal mode? In a year, will the opposite be true and will you cycle back to where you are now?

Learn to interact with, face up to, acknowledge, and form opinions on

• borders
• edges of bodies
• skin and cell membranes
• tripartite religions and storylines and how every bullet pointed list must contain more than three bullet points
  
• spacing in text
• silence and noise (John Cage and his listless mumble)
• line breaks
• the place where exhaling ends and inhaling begins or the other way around
• lines, queues, waiting
• age

Goal Two: Ask yourself - "When the words come out and on to the page, why do they come out in a block?" or "Why do you like things that are parallel as opposed to perpendicular?" Really answer these questions.

Goal Three: Stop ignoring these questions. Stop ignoring structure. You must decide whether or not it is your friend. Prose is not the only model of living. But also, don't jolt awake when your dreams follow some semblance of reality, when there is story-line. Regard every impulse with suspicion. See if you can reformat not only your words but your very neurons.

basically
unlearn your functions

hop over here
and here

and over there
because
well
the thing is

there isn't enough time to stay the same.

if you give a brain some ice cream, and then take it away

yes i will second rolly in describing saturday night's rave as a lake. i swam as a dance-filled genderconfused body through all the high school girls and the shirtless bros. everything was seeping with sex and straight at that but i forgot being uncomfortable and danced and danced. and then oh! the wonders of hyde park that i had not seen before. we do live in a [sometimes] beautiful place.

in other wise,
when so many of my days seem the same, i'm trying to gather little pieces that are maybe something other than chemically influenced moments.

inspired by the garden at 55 & woodlawn, which is full of tomatoes and cucumbers, jalapenos and marigolds (sometimes people on the street stop and wonder at the garden and once i gave some people some tomatoes and they were so confused and surprised, as if the lack of a cash register in proximity to vegetables was a syllogism or a logical gap)...tmo and i cut down a path through the weeds in a lot next to our house and i dug up the earth and it's going to be a garden. so far, only mint, but we're sprouting tiny seeds on the top of the fridge and there will be leafy greens and life. we're also starting a compost pile, hopefully. my interest in gardening is confusing to my mother.

also, i got a job at istra-under-the-train-tracks making coffee and putting gelato in little little plastic bowls. i haven't started yet, not till the 24th or so. at my "interview" he asked me to describe the flavors of the coffee and i said "bark" and he said "vegetal" so i got the job.

and at the character party on friday night, rolly and i went as a sibling-pair of runaways, trevor (8) and daisy (6) with stuffed animal friends (trevor and alfonso) and swedish fish. i remembered that parties are boring for kids even though everything is potentially interesting. we were on a hunt for monsters who eat children, but no one seemed to know where they were, or offered us roundabout ways to fix the problem--a unicorn, joining Jews for Allah, voting for a particular serbian candidate. in the end a woman from the future won the staged election; revolution was a close second.

and maybe that's it, for now.

update:
oh, also, tmo and i decided to get married so i can work in the EU and also to validate our sacred religious commitment to each other and so we can become a social unit of reproductive machinery. the first part is true.

Gabe's Ballad: Balmy Summer Nights

Frankenstein appeared on the river and he leapt into a pile of smoldering leaves. He turned and saw the herd of oxen bearing down on him. "I'm really not that artistic, but like BAOOOOAHHHAOOOHAHHHHH," and scarred for life in the best way ever, the boy leapt down the rocks and pummeled to his death. But an old woman found his shoe sticking out of the junkyard of life. She unwrapped her shawl and filled the shoe with her spit. Pass, she threw it to the leapard that had appeared in drag on the rocks. The leapord adjusted his polka dotted tophat and smiled with a devious grin. "My my, what have we here." I'm just listening to this, but I'm bored BAOOHHHHAAOOWWOWWW. I think I see the development of a crazy cat woman. The woman drenched herself with the loafer-spit and laughed manically. My head is empty! said the leapard. No, that's what they said. Fake fishing. I'm leaving this room, BAAAAHHAWWOWWW. Now stop a moment, fuckwad, let's backtrack.
Frankenstein, looking for meaning in his life, decided to teach the leapard to dance. The leapard stretched out his elegantly painted claws to flip the switch on his stereo which began to blast songs of the old ages. She stood on one paw, her whiskers quivering in the moonlight. They meet a dolphin that can walk on land. It teaches them techno. They entered into a romance, all three of them, that will go down in the annals of polyamory. But their love affair did not last long. It shone brilliantly like a star, and then burnt out. That is all. Shortly thereafter, and only briefly before the apocalypse, there was a festival of mammoth proportions. Hamsters on a wheel, a human ferris wheel. They were celebrating the coming apocalypse and engaging in orgiastic raving. Religious leaders commanded them to eat 300 clementines each and glues the skins to their skin. Unfortunately, the jubilant people could not find enough women named Clementine. Many many miles away a woman named Clementine rode through the ocean in a small boat filled with marshmallows. Clemetine was omnilingual, she spoke all languages, including the language of the ocean and the trees and the wind. But when deprived of marhsmallows, alas, she was deaf and dumb. BAAAOOOAAAOWWWOWW. She ate all her marshamallows, called the apocalypse, but didn't hear it, so she survived. Vegan marshmallows will not save you on a boat. Don't eat marshallows because the apocalypse will get you.