quickly quickly because there's a lot to do
everything is happening
except in the dull moments when it's not
and the panic moments when it is, but it's too much to bear

i hate work, i want to work, i need work
i've lost the thread a little bit about why or how
but i keep looking

i see a play or seven
i hate some, i need some
oh god
i saw black watch tonight
in an armory of all places
(why don't we use armories more, they're so oddly beautiful)
i meant to see black watch in 2006
but i didn't because i was young and things don't matter the same way when you're sixteen
so so so
it's so good
plays about masculinity
of course i love them
because there's so much dancing and singing and fighting
as i walk the three blocks home
i whisper under my breath
as my heels click on the pavement, imitating those brave boys
"if there's any thing at all that i ever do, ever, may it be like that"
please
please
please
i draw a salt circle round my mind
i offer up my spectacular weakness, my bone-breaking pleasure-seeking
like salieri on my knees in church
this sink hole ache will bleed herself dry to have a glimpse of that
i will slice open goats
burn every stick of incense
and i will try to work, try so hard
stephen fry says, "everything that motivates me in life is emotional and appetitive, it is not intellectual...my whole life has been driven by nothing but desire, for all kinds of things, it started i think with sugar, it was an almost feverous desire, it was absolutely enormous, it was replaced by cigarettes and sex, it was the same physical thing...and love and passion too, the intellectual side is the slave of that desirous side."
you can have that
delete it

once i was an automaton
and i am glad that i can feel again
but i miss the old girl
the serious little girl
who craved little but the chance to work and then be alone

i suppose that might be wrong
i don't care?

lake atitlan is vast, but tiny compared to lake michigan, even tinier compared to the ocean. and this gringo new age community, these indian weavers and coffee-pickers have such a well-contained life nestled amongst these volcanoes. one can easily forget there´s life elsewhere- banks, universities, capitol buildings, squats, salt flats, the massive variety and expanse of our earth.
and ill leave the lake, ill wander... in search of novelty, ecstatic emotions, the sublime?
and deborah will sit every morning in front of her tienda, sometimes blue markings under her mascaraed eyes.
are our sadnesses similar? how does their depth compare and in what proportion to the respective bodies of water at which we gaze?
the vastness of wanderings, the elevation of the intellect, don´t translate to the sublimity of experience.
leaving judgment behind....
Fernando, the mexican artisan I live with says, ¨I love, but I have no feelings.¨he has no attachments, didnt blink when he lost his three thousand dollar golden watch, never cries.
we have different kinds of spiritualities. i like to get ecstatic while dancing, hoot holler and sit in circles of emenating love.
but he is not more spiritual than me and i am not more spiritual than him and deborah with her child at 16 and the rest of her life selling mangos at the tienda in barrio 2 is as spiritual as either of us.
quantities are useless anyhow. didnt marx teach us that?

i hear that as mountains get older they get flatter. imagine a world that will one day be totally flat, all the mountains get old and lose their points, sucked down millennium by millennium to the crystal earth core.
or is there always regeneration?
will there ever be a flat world? will i ever attain equanimity and calmness of emotion?

I better go jump off the diving platform into the lake and cleanse all these ruminations. value? thought? sensuous experience?
´the wilted flower of her youth´
heehee

raining, in medium form

we were never what we think we will be or how

together

or separate

unite

disunite

feel it

unfeel it

how did it end

how will it begin

also am i the only one who feels this way

das licht der oeffentlichkeit verdunkelt alles

a thought

(finding light on rainy days)

"...even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth..." (p. ix)

(finding realness amid apocalyptic promisings, or feeling real anyway)

"'all passions, even the most unpleasant, are as passions pleasant' because 'they make us feel more real.' this sentence strikingly recalls the greek doctrine of passions, which counted anger, for example, among the pleasant emotions but reckoned hope along with fear among the evils...in hope, the soul overleaps reality, as in fear it shrinks back from it. but anger...reveals and exposes the world just as...laughter...seeks to bring about reconciliation with the world. such laughter helps one to find a place in the world, but ironically, which is to say, without selling one's soul to it. pleasure, which is fundamentally the intensified awareness of reality, springs from a passionate openness to the world and love of it. not even the knowledge that man may be destroyed by the world detracts from the 'tragic pleasures.'"

(p. 6 of "men in dark times" by hannah arendt)

#1 of 10 days of rain a-coming,

last night a woman dragged across the street screaming across from the haus

and what do we do! what do we do? what do we do!

radioactive tendrils

what do we do!

rainy days--

what do we do!

for now, dark dark dark petting cats shared showers thinking what we think we are

this is nice.

from the hope archive

"When trying to live hope, we believe it helps first to start where we happen to
be.

Hope works better when it's here.

Second, we believe that it is helpful to
think of hope as the acknowledgement that nothing is fixed (though much is
experienced as stable), that nothing is necessary, that nothing has to be the
way it is.

Third, we find it helpful to think that we are active participants in
our experience of meaning, power, and social interaction and in and through that
participation we are always-already making a difference. The job, it would seem,
is to make the character of those differences transformative.

How is always a delicate issue.

For us, the fourth element of hope is that gentleness is both a possible and a powerful politics.

How to begin to consider the effects and influences of our lives in the light of at least fourteen degrees of separation, especially if we don't just think in terms of people living right now?

An understanding of hope is, for us, very much an understanding of the politics of possibility and the possibilities of power. "

in other wor(l)ds, it's a sunny day of a rainy week here in oakland--half of hot mess converges at the library, i run around stealing supplies for a sex toy workshop, i smoke cigarettes, we make bread. the buckwheat groats in our oats were pretty sour this morning and i had a scrabble hangover when i woke up. what makes a life? i am feeling myself rush in small things, rush when i think i am relaxed, to do all the small joyful things i want to do. something funny in that.
there are tiny baby plants growing in egg cartons in our front lot and i feel my days to be closely intertwined with their progress, their minute but almost visible growth.
today, down the block, someone got shot in their car because they had just won the lottery. paul says it is black self-hatred. i don't know exactly what to think. similar with the japanese tsunami, nuclear meltdown, may 21 judgment day, peak oil crisis, birds falling out of the sky and cars running over bicyclists at the sao paulo critical mass...what to do? what can we do? today i will bike around, make bread, make sex toys, hug my friends, nurse my new tattoo, read some marquez. is that wrong?

happy birthday lelz!
another pisces... geez, all my friends are dreamers.

I am in San Marcos taking shiatsu classes and learning magic tricks from little Guatemalan boys.
quite happy, brilliant, etc.
but thinking... that maybe this central american journey is soon coming to an end.
how will it end?
I am starting to rely too much on my tarot cards. the hanged man says chill out, go with the flow, wait and the answer will come.
but my tendency to jump the gun says... I would love to visit chicago. wow. so, pregunta:
will those I love currently living in Chicago be there for the duration of april? perhaps bike around town with me for a couple weeks?
will it be warm yet there?

imagine... flying! no more crowded chicken buses and ladies selling coconut water and cashews. sterile grey seats, sterile little plastic food trays. time-space leaping.

i am coming to resent white people here, somehow. like, we talk alot about all of our internal baggage that we are letting go of, delving into the harms of our past, releasing...
and then I talk to veronica selling banana bread on the street. my age, providing for her 5 sisters and brothers. smart, beautiful, funny girl.
somehow, I can connect with her better than the folks at the meditation center.
somehow.

also, parasites, geez. need to stop being a raw foodist here.
also, cacao is really yummy. i´ll bring some back for you all if i come to chi-town

an update

hello my darlings
my first post about not drinking mentioned that the start date of my experiment was january 26th.
that was just 4 days before my 23rd birthday. I broke the fast last saturday, march 5th, for a total of some large amount of days.
as i sit here now with a mug of wine, i reflect on the fact that it was nice. i had more energy to do other things. i don't think i'll start drinking every night again, at least not for a while. what a waste!


by the way if you want to see something that might have something worth seeing over the weekend that I made you might check out crowdCTL.com. It's a thing.

check

one: maple syrup
flamin hot
anti freeze bile of the mommabouge
time collapses in on itself
i casually refer
to
autumn