personal essay week 5 - folks i might have been (unfinished)

CHANGELING

because i took too long and came out wrong. a dry birth. then blistered itchy angry. hold me heal me never leave me. “didn’t i come to bring you a sense of wonder?” doctors said marble cake and mutant. Trina Schart Hyman said i looked like a fairy baby and mama said she was right. after all, she should know, go and see. but i didn’t, couldn’t know, not yet. i only knew: lesions, discomfort, this world wasn’t made for me. 

WATER SPRITE

CROUCHED in moss and caked in mud and soaking sprouting to the sun

BRING the hose over puddle the clover  fountain spray and rainbow days

LAUGH the salt sea through yr nose wriggling tickling pond minnows

moisture pleasure gangly dancer 

ropes of water twist and wind

sit in trees on rainy days

watch the stream run down the drain

a whole world in the moss 

sometimes flying!

MONSTER

oh i only grew smaller. everyone else got taller. lonely little mutant. never knew what went on at parties, never made friends easy, and then i stopped speaking. i missed all the teachings, both classroom and playground, how my breasts would grow round, too soon and too much, examining tufts of new hair down there and compare to the diagram to see where i stand -- is this when i’m called woman?

and then i stopped speaking.  undiagnosed anxiety, depression, and ADD, unrelastic expectations, abstience-only sex education, pimpled lonely and confused, i came to the conclusions that i was built wrong, that i would never be loved, but most definitely never make a baby. i won’t continue the cycle of genes that make me want to die, pitted skin and missing teeth, monster mutant coward creep. 

 

HYDRA

we roared to life in the mid-early aughts, all fire and spit, chomping at the bit. our ideas, countless and unrestrained. you'd think it would be difficult for us to bite off more than we could chew, between three mouths. maybe we just didn't have the stomach for it. 

we slid into a story: built the world so we could tell it, lived in it so we could share it. meanwhile, made out, tripped out, fell down, banged about, raged, and connived, in various configurations of one and two and three. always a party. well, until

i can't go on like this. it's too much it's too much. i can't breathe through the poison. i can't see the swan. 

"OH YES YOU WILL AND YOU HAD BETTER SHIP SHAPE SOON" came the voices of my like minds, one in each ear. i had fallen, shriveled, i'd been cut off. they wouldn't hear that i was done. like rising from the dead, like Euripedes said, when i came back up, now i was two heads. once three, now four, surely we could tell the story, if we put our minds to it, even bigger than before. grow the world, live the tale, multiply each time we fail. 

(when you fell, we pretended not to miss you. what's just one head, anyway? we are legion, leviathan, unstoppable by now. it was as if you were merely sleeping. maybe that was true, but the balance was askew, and the remaining first two couldn't manage without their third. the same poison slithers through our shared blood. you couldn't stay down long. up you sprang, a lucky thing, with two new points of view.)

a polycephalitic wonder, from three to one to hundreds, we forged ourself when we attempted creation. all we wanted was to bring out a story's essence, to see our hero's life through. to make it real, we lived it -- and its completion meant our end. the hero found our weakness: she had been our only purpose, but we made her independent. when she was done, she didn't need us. the hero had the better story. the story finished us. 

 

 

TRICKSY PISKIE // GOBLIN??

whisk up the biscuit mix spoon it out in shoes 

fridge door open

oops wrong room

paw through tumped out trash crash into every owl

smoke butts, only 

butts taste awful 

late night possum pizza party where were you?

dawn wants squatters

bed loves noon

don’t talk about next week, it’s only saturday

some thing wicked? 

come this way

climb up the mountainside, never reach the top

they blew it up 

to reach the rock

pissed in jensen in the stall wide open

bird bone rotten

oak leaf awesome

french broad river

ice white soup

cows’ calls penetrate walls, sing up to the moon

pick through pasture

trip on shrooms

cows low solo sows’ woes good luck sleeping through it 

show up christian 

go home druid

 

WITCH

and i don’t mean some instagram crystals manifest #blessed self-serving bullSHIT. leave me out of it. i wonder if anyone’s ever been scared of you. “why should they be? i’m one of the good ones!” pshhhhh you are the ancestor of colonizers. you are the product of genocide. and when you talk to your spirits, you ask for MORE?? do you ever consider what you could offer? not the wine and herbs on your table, not the exchange you make for your own blessing. what are you willing to sacrifice?

when i crawled out of the bog, and i saw the world i’d come back to, i cried. the ache of emptiness overpowered me. i wailed as i pulled sticks out of my tangled hair, grieving for the barren land. palms and forehead pressed to the earth, i moaned, drank dirt, made mud of tears. here, sing a song to soothe, find ways to patch the wounds. comfrey and yarrow to mend, fire and smoke to clear. implore the elements to guide me, make me strong, so that i might return their strength threefold. 

i see far and wide, it’s too much, all wrong. 

take the day off and put the night on. the moon’s familiar face warms, reminds me that we will keep moving, we have to. we are not always getting better, bigger; we grow in all directions. i love the moon, and the moon loves me back: knowing this sends me spinning through trees, a drop of ink spilling into the night, hungry, ready, ((holding space and growing power))

GHOST

SHOWED UP 

WHERE THEY SHOULDN’T 

WHEN YOU COULDN’T

GIVE HEART OF STRONG TRUTH

GET HEALED ON SILLY THINGS

GO HOME OR STOP TRYING

personal essay week 5 - moment of bravery quick-write

CARE ENOUGH NOT TO CARE

it was some of the worst anxiety i’ve ever felt. why on earth did i think i could do this? what had possessed me to sign up for this course? eight weeks of commuting to another state and living in a tralier with my toxic boyfriend to study… clown through mask? what does that even MEAN? this had to be one of my worst decisions. the class wasn’t what i expected at all. i’m happy to walk a color through my body or make blobs in the space, but… i was not prepared to…. share. 

it’s your turn, baba. everyone has taken their turn except for you. it’s monday night and class is almost over for the week. maybe if you shrink yourself in your chair, they’ll forget you and you can just go back to baltimore and maybe just quit the class and be done. donna won’t let you. 

“if you don’t do your turn now, you’ll be walking around in that mask all week! you’ll be stuck!” 

oh gods i can’t carry such heaviness for so long. i have to take my turn. i can’t. but i have to. 

step behind the curtain - a sheet between two lamps. in unison the rest of the class begins singing “entrance of the gladiators” and clapping in time. breathe the red nose on. breathe through your mouth. shake yourself out, let the mask flow through. 

when you step out from behind the curtain, the singing will stop abruptly and you will have a conversation with only breath and eyes. oh and the worms wrapped up in your bandana. 

you were ready. you weren’t funny. you were poetry. when you weren’t looking, you found the clown.

personal essay week 4 - caught shining

the waiter set my plate down

"thank you" as i'm contemplating

what the fuck i ordered

i rotate the plate to see if this

creature

is more manageable from another angle

mom is smiling secretly

she reveals that

she knows

she is okay with everything

like i knew she would be

but over lunch because of one

silly mistake my sister made?

while she's sipping brown ale and

i'm trying to figure out

how to bite into my sandwich

funny because nothing has happened

we are just doing what we have been doing

plus talking

it's just a proposal

i am insistent.

mom says

"my january baby's growing up

my little girl's in love"

but she's always been

such a silly woman

and hopelessly romantic

so i don't know how to act around my family

they have never known something so big about me

i am so good at keeping hidden

and when this was right in front of them

did they see?

No.

it took a little nudge from a poem

that accidentally got left in their line of vision

not even my mistake

because i know how to wipe my tracks

as i'm running away backwards

so i'm on stage melting under bright lights

EXPOSED

performing a facsimile of my life

i have forgotten how i used to be

i have forgotten my act

i'm trying to seem normal as usual

i have forgotten how to be around her

and i know they can see it now

when i lay against her shoulder

i hope at least they have a memory of who they think i am

that they can reteach to me

so "hi mom!" here's a shoutout to my family

the nosy noisemakers discovering me in here

back again? who let you in?

we'll get a bouncer for this haven

-- my former self, March 2003

I have always given myself a hard time for writing about writing, even though sometimes it’s the only thing I have to say, and probably writing about writing is better than not writing at all. Maybe.


In middle school, I read constantly, and in high school, I wrote constantly. In 2001, my best friend and I started a poetry blog together, which evolved into a writing and art blog with 36 members before fizzling out in 2008, long after Brittany and I were officially BFFs no more.


In general, my focus is terrible. I know a little about a lot, and I’ve quit nearly everything I’ve started. But for a few years, my blog -- writing, reading, web-master-ing -- gave me purpose. Confidence, even. And community! Something I’d been craving, and still crave. This group knew all my truths (even if they were told slant) thanks to my feral free verse. I had no training; I was a runaway train.


These things come back to haunt you, don’t they, the train loops back around the track. My younger sister, also a writer, artist, and steadfast member of the blog, accidentally left the website open one day over spring break in 2003. Of all the damn poems she could have read (we had hundreds of posts by now) my mom found a love poem I had penned just a few days before: “i am wearing your jacket / because it smells like you” etc etc you get the jist.


Mama invited me out to lunch at Boscos, the only local brewpub at that time. I should’ve known something was up, since it was just the two of us, but the thought didn’t cross my mind. I wore the aforementioned jacket, as I had done every single day of spring break, feeling cozy and brave all at once. After the monstrosity that was my sandwich arrived, Mama let loose that she had read the poem.


"My little girl's in love!" Her eyes sparkled over the beer glass.

"We're just talking, we haven't decided if we want to do anything or just be friends. Nothing happened."

"Okay, okay... I just can't believe it, my little January Baby is all grown up."

"Nothing happened!" I picked at my sandwich.

"Well... I just want you to know that I love you and support you, whatever you do. And it’s okay to be gay.”

"I'm not gay, I'm bi."

"But are you more attracted to men or women?"

"Neither! I’m… I'm right.. in the middle." I tried to show her with my hands. 50/50.

“But I want you to know that being gay is not easy, it can make life harder. There's a whole different set of problems..."



This was the extent of her speech. Whether or not she said it out loud, she implied that, if I were really “in the middle” I could choose to only date men, and that would make my life a lot simpler, safer, and happier.


Of course, as soon as we got home, I scratched out yet another poem about the discovery of the first poem, the subsequent conversation, and the acknowledgement that my safe space was no longer private. But even that poem is not the whole story. It doesn’t mention those difficult parts of the conversation, or that even as she verbalized that she was okay with my choices, she implied that they were somehow wrong or would end up hurting me. It doesn’t even mention that I was wearing the jacket and how embarrassing that felt, in the too-big booth at Boscos. It was not a vessel of pride now, but shame.


What the poem does say is that Elise and I were not actually romantic or dating.


~~~~~~~~~~


"It's a perfect day! A perfect day, Elise!"



I liked her as soon as I saw her. Comic book cover printed t-shirt and close cropped blond hair. I thought she would never see me but somehow she did, and my shuttered world blew open wide.



Theatre friends, gay BFF, cool-dork boyfriend (1 year older), and in the fall, a CAR. Decent-ish music tastes, but malleable enough for me to work with. Cruising immediately improved, which was good because that was pretty much all we did. Drove around town and stood around in various parking lots. What else is there, then? Suddenly somehow we had become a true GROUP, the first one we belonged to that we had chosen by ourselves. (At least that's how it was for me.)



It would go like this: Elise would already be with Kevin, so they would pick up Brock and Laylee in East Memphis, then head to midtown to get me, blast Violent Femmes on the way to the Media co-op for indie movie night, then stand around in the parking lot for 3 hours afterwards. They'd drop me off first, which made me sad but gave me time to start blogging before everyone else got home, at which point we would often continue hanging out virtually, via AIM. And we kept on going and growing.



Somehow Elise saw me and now: belonging, mobility, support, identity, self-seen-ness.



It wasn't long before I was smitten. Our group had developed a language of physical affection, dancing, and inside jokes that continued to grow our intimacy with each other. Our vulnerability allowed us to share mental health struggles and tap into half-conscious ideas about sexuality and gender and identity. Oh all the typical teenage things, really! But in this case, practically no one was straight, and if they were, they inhabited omega spaces in some other sense. (We later learned that our classmates called us "the emo kids" even though not one of us ever went through that black eyeliner stage. I decided they were just jealous that we were so full of love and having so much fun.)



Kevin and Elise broke up eventually, and I was there to support her, as I had through her previous break up. I was sleeping over nearly every weekend. Morgan Fox, our friend and mentor, gave us a copy of his first feature film, Three Minutes (Based Upon the Revolution of the Sun), after he found out we had been renting it from Black Lodge Video every single week. The movie is very DIY, very autobiographical, and very gay, and it gave us an opening and a language to start talking about our sexualities. Turns out, pretty much all of us were identifying as “bi” at the time. Elise and I watched Three Minutes while cuddling on the couch at her parents’ house. At play rehearsal, she'd lean into me and I'd stroke her hair. We had been talking about bisexuality for months and eventually started considering whether to let our relationship flow in a more romantic direction.



It was probably my idea, looking back. I was elated, walking on air. She went out of town for spring break but left her jacket at my house, and I didn't take it off for a week. And being what I was back then, I wrote a love poem and I posted it on my poetry blog, of which Elise was also a member. It was a missive, an arrow, supposed to make her swoon. It was an error.



After spring break, after the Boscos incident, I stopped wearing the jacket. Elise and I kept cuddling, but I felt different around my family now. Estranged, even though Mama said I wasn't doing anything wrong. (I wasn't, was I?)



One day Elise called me, so excited, she had just come from from Music Fest where she ran into her ex (GAG) and they ended up hanging out and having so much fun and they MADE OUT and isn't that the best?? I was floored. Had she not received any of my love arrows, in all those months? My sweets and songs. My hugs and hums. I probably pretended to be happy for her, though. I guess I had it wrong all along. I hid the hurt, but the damage was done. Six months later we had stopped speaking. A pitiful fizzle. And it would be years before I felt I had earned the right to call myself queer.

personal essay week 3 - postcards, unsent

daphne,
sometimes i hear your laugh, its ghost, and my whole body misses you.
i'm sorry i tried to kiss your nose. i hope you know.



you bastard,
you were never thursday. you are a goat, no you don't deserve that.
from now on, i will call you what you are: liar. pathetic. unforgiveable.
one day you will try to say my name and it will cut your silver tongue.
one day you will forget me entirely, while i will always work to undo you.



my beautiful friend,
i wish i would have known sooner you were trans. i wish we could have undone each other long before you announced the news on social media. we could have been bathroom buddies, truth tellers, holders of hands. to celebrate scars is to remember our travels. maybe together we could have seen the seams fraying, the tip of my chrysalis unsilking. it's okay, i'm here now, welcome home.

personal essay week 3 - quitting

5 things i have quit or tried to quit
--smoking (semi-successfully?)
--clown class, almost but i didnt (thank the gods)
--chewing my fingernails (complete failure)
--men (doing pretty good with that one these days)
--work (would love to NOT be selling my labor but have not managed that thus far)




“I’m at the hospital and I’m not sure how long I’m going to be here. I don’t think I’ll be coming back to work.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that. But we can wait for you, you don’t have to quit. Do you have a rough estimate of when you’ll be getting out?”

“No I have no idea. I don’t know. I can’t come back.”


Two days after begrudgingly beginning a Wellbutrin prescription, I quit my job from inside the loony bin. The phone hung on the wall in the hallway between my room and the common area -- treacherous territory. At first I was self conscious about using this phone because what if anyone else heard me? Wellbutrin made me shameless. And it gave me a plan of action.

1. Quit job. 
2. Move home. 
3. Make art with friends.

What a delight! I couldn’t sleep and I was barely eating, but now I had plans. I was beginning to feel human again, although the days vascilated wildly between “I live here now” and “worst.”

Humanity was short-lived. Once I was released, I was back on my damn phone, drinking, and yes even smoking again. Home had been a beautiful prospect in my mind, but it turned out all my friends were also suffering from mental health crises and no one wanted to make the same kind of art as me anyway. I tried to hold onto the fire I’d felt, the wellspring of ideas I had rediscovered, but I felt trapped by the constraints of the whole damn deal -- time, money, maintaining a corporeal form, the rigidness of the available paths. Look, if you squint, you can see your own death at the end there. Well then. Why not speed things along a bit? If I’m locked into this nonsense called “life” and can barely make any meaningful choices until I die, why not just become a ghost now? Ghosts can do anything.

personal essay, week 2

Frog prince twins sipping gin and snorting Torchy's. Mind meld magic in the grass outside the party. Sick so special man yr movie's really arty.

 We blew by SXSW. Full contrarian status, I refused the widely used abbreviation, "south-by," and ran around shouting for weeks,* "We're going to southbee! southbee!" Big business tech tycoon nightmare carnival took over the whole town. When I lived in Austin, I hated the whole racket -- the traffic, the tourists, the lines, the logos, the litter, the excess. Well of course I still hate it, so even though I was ecstatic that we had been invited, I was determined to fully embody anti-SXSW values whenever possible. I stayed up late making homemade paper business cards. I insisted our crew get matching jean jackets, the Ghost Fleet. 

 We trash talk, we lip lock, we jaywalk for miles. We dumpster, we long fur, we sweet meat and smiles.

 You know, of course, it turned out to be a lot of milling around, as is the case with so many conventions. We ate cole slaw sandwiches inside a massive, empty sound stage while the adults had barbecue. We became festival friends with a woman whose movie, in the “Midnights” category, was about a female necrophile. Before the premiere, we visited the new GOAT YOGA studio in same dang strip mall as the movie theatre. You can't make this shit up.** 

 While the world hurdled ever onward into the lie of neverending capitalist death show, I found myself surrounded by my best friends, my very favorite people, love bugs I've known for decades and buddies I’ve known only briefly, together, sharing visions, feeding on each other's passion, running from the juggernaut and WINNING. Day drunk, sun spilling in, what a ride. Somehow my favorite people, my best loves, all in one place at the same time. The overwhelm - the too muchness of it - the bigness of us made small by the drone. 

personal essay, week 2 quick write

prompt - write about a person who has been both a hero and a villain in your life.



CONTENT: mention of sexual assault, consent issues, drugs

We rolled all night. When we started to come down, we dosed again. We were sitting on the stoop, smoking, I’d imagine, watching the first hints of dawn beckoning over Druid Hill. Across the street, some techno hippies were breaking down the event they’d held that night in our collective’s warehouse space. You, always a character, never one down to turn down a conversation, probably hollered Hey. We were given a curosry head nod and everyone went back to business. Until a few minutes later. The head hippie passed his van and headed over to our side of the street. “Hey uh, there’s a bunch of smoke in the warehouse, I think something might be on fire.” Rolling or not, you sprang to action. Our rickety old building, nothing up to code, the physicalization of our deep love for community. Oh no you don’t.

Not having any kind of central heating (or cooling, for that matter) we used to keep the wood stove burning during any winter event. The stove itself was sturdy, but the pipe stretched jankily through a hole some punk had put in the ceiling years ago. I seem to recall there was duct tape involved. It seems a solidarity cinder had gleefully blown not up and out of the ceiling, but into it - into the insulation, between the roof and the also punk-installed ceiling tiles. Our warehouse was going to burn down and take our love with it -- food rescue programs, letter writing campaigns, zine library, the stage and the microphones and the amps, and the office containing the collective’s long and storied history…. not to mention the not-quite-legal home of several collective members. Simply put, a fire could. not. happen.

And so you, high as a kite, leapt up on a chair and started to pull the ceiling down. I scrambled across the warehouse, as well as the gardens, sheds, and three (absolutely perfectly legal) houses our collective owned, trawling for every fire extinguisher I could lay my paws on. I also texted our reluctant but fearless leader, Reagan, a woman whose coolness would shrivel you. Luckily she always woke up early (as gardeners tend to do) and it wasn’t long before she was on the scene. It must’ve been 6am by now. By the time she arrived, you were hanging from the ceiling, literally swinging from the rafters, a bandana over your face and an axe in your hand -- all that insulation and smoke floating down around you, a blurry vision.




When you got home from Jan’s house (although looking back, I highly doubt you were honest about where you’d been) you found me at the table in Middle House, though everyone else was asleep. A member of our sister commune had called out another (long-term, prominent) member as an abusive predator. There were a lot of emails. When you found me, I was reading Batman’s letter in which she confirmed yes, this person pushed the boundaries of her consent as well. You put me in your lap and I read what Batman wrote: her history, multiple rapes, monstrous men. You offered me lemonade -- we always drank juice straight from the jar, I didn’t think twice about accepting. I hardly noticed the bitter taste; I was trying to swallow heavy stories. Tears pricked my eyes and your prick -- well I’m glad everyone else was asleep. My body began to move without me telling it to. My mind couldn’t process text anymore. Thursday, this stuff is really fucked up, I feel really weird, I am not in control. How long before you giggled, “Oh shit” and remembered what you’d done to the lemonade? And how could I ever have thought your offering it to me was an accident?

transcribed voice memos from my dog walks

6/7/2021, 1:51pm 

sidewalk squat to get a picture of a gutter egg

two doors down real live robin puddle sputtering full robin

and here’s these sticks

the sticks of men

there’s a dead bird

a dead bird in the yard of hte sticks of men , oh god

he had a lawn and it killed them all

the dogs dog dogs dogs with some paws ouch oh jesus

i’m not ever gonna get used to this - what if i - okay

i don’t know if they can still here me

these dogs these dogs noses and paws

tj’s tryin to wiggle away fey

they never liekd it how i rhymed

personal essay class - week one quick write

cramps grumpy crumpet. blaring bleating trumpet. sticky fickle carpet. yr never gonna stop it.

when t​he​ bell rings in there, ​swings in there, sings despair, try not to care but hey​ you​ over there,
you can't escape the ding ding ding ding crushing twisting cramping.

how about that now, how about you talk to her. what did she ever do to you!

like conjuring my inner critic, i will pluck you, uterus, out and set you up right here on the futon.
it's real hard to get them out.​

the bleeding never bothered me.
​you know i can't abide a lie!
middle school was murder, seats stained, jeans ruined, cruel laughter in the corners.

​this is so boring, i'm bored of myself.
are you writing or reading or even thinking? which one are you doing! pick forgodssake!
you got self conscious and that's okay. are you feeling too vulnerable today?
do we need to go in another direction?

​i didn't mean to pick on you.​ it is just the body of me that is talking right now, so it only made sense.
a sweet bright drop-

you can't stop the squiggles. little worm in there, nast. a lonely sequin on the doormat.
every day i nearly die, and so do you, and so do you.

yr world has really shrunk, huh. all there is, curled and contained. the bedroom. the kitchen.
the walls. the ceiling. the face of yr "honey."
​(​in tarot, the ​figure of the World​ is intersex - non-binary - in between - across - trans​)​
but what about the ant on my pants?
and waht about these fucking cramps?
if i have a body (and so far, i do) will nothing make it quiet?

the World isn't in there. it never was and never will be. the World is too vast and vibrant to be just this. the oven is not the cake. mammals think we are so brave.

don't worry, we're all still god, and so are you, and so are you. i am the white hot center of a web of love, and so are you, and so are you.

the center of me tunes its frequency to the center of Things. it's cool to vibe in, but don't linger. you can't! catch hold of the knot that brought you here and climb back toward it, back to bones and blood and oh, cramps. sing yr thanks to every moon + every womb but bless the ​earthworm, the slippershell​, anemone​. all things god and so are you and so are you​: a sweet bright drop.​

SOME WORDS ABOUT MY DAY

featuring three (3) not-quite cat calls, entirely zero (0) proofreading, and more lists (!) like this

today i'm gonna tell it like it happened. i stopped writing my morning pages about a year ago. i had fallen off the wagon a couple times but at the start of the pandemic, i had a burst of creative energy. lockdown? what a good time to MAKE THIGNS, i thought, so naively. maybe it was just my own crutch that was the trouble - i had gotten accustomed to treating morning pages as a journal rather than a creative experiment (most of the time anyway). and then, april 2020, i had absolutely nothing to report. i gave up almost immediately. now i think i'm ready to try again but i don't know how to start. this can't be it, it isn't even morning! but it's words in whole sentences and that'll do, pig. last night while high i scribbled down some half idea that good writing is like a light fingering. just a soft pleasant tickle. maybe like tingles across your skin and you want the feeling backwards and forwards at the same itme - past present and future all at once. well taht's what you get when you're high i guess! bull bunk! but i'll tell you, i was walking down the street, walking other people's dogs in exchange for green beans, as one does, when i heard a holler. not a cat call, in my overalls, oh no. a construction dude, although fully invisible, seemed to holler to his construction dude brethren, "WHY THE FUCK HAS SHE GOT ONE PANTS LEG ROLLED UP??" oh, that IS me. huh. the follow up question could have been anything, honestly. "IS SHE A DYKE?" / "IS THAT FASHION?" / "IS IT ALLOWED EVEN?" and so on. i'll never know and neither will you. but what struck me about it most is how BORED this guy (and therefore, everyone in existence) must be. what is exciting about one pants leg slightly higher than the other? the truth is that they were both hitched up but one fell back down and i didn't bother to fix it. the truth is even more bored than that guy. so i suppose me and my overalls were happy to do them this service.

a beautiful lady on a motor bike may or may not have called out my name. we both turned to look over our shoulders as we continued in opposite directions. did this really happen? maybe it wasn't my name at all.

at the stop light, a teenager crosses the street in front of me, carrying an empty orange fanta bottle. ever a raccoon, i scan the block for trash and recycling receptacles. i'm thinking, golly look at this kid, carrying his plastic all the way home to the recycling bin, what a good guy, someone out there really does care after all. and then he walks straight into a sidewalk bump of tall grass and "effortlessly" lets the bottle slip from his grasp. two steps and he even does a double take, perhaps to make sure it was a good drop. "NOT COOL, DUDE" i yell after him, but for once, my windows are rolled up and he can't hear me. my raccoon eyes shoot rays of guilt at his back but he doesn't turn around again. i turn left and leave it too.

at home the war against the ants rages on. i'm just thrilled it's spring again and i can see and sing again. the rest of the week looks something like this list: nonograms, group therapy, cheez its, menstrual cramps and motrin, too much hair (me), the smallest hairball (dr. g willikers), K/D kibble, avoiding doing taxes, 7 fans (window, ceiling, and standing) at a time, funderemployment, sandalwood incense, underwear in the bathtub, IPAs, illegible stoned scribbles, and 6 versions of daniel johnston's "walking the cow" plus my own rendition. i need to do the litter box. i need to do kind of a lot.

dream bitties

I don't remember anything about my dream except

Morgan explaining to brock about having to poop sideways

Kat sent us a new selfie of her ex David that he had just sent her. She was gushing about how sexy he is and I was scared that they were getting back together. She sent the picture - and half his body was airbrushed away. He was posing on a bed supposed to be looking hot (also not a selfie, who took this picture??) But with chunks of his body erased. And Kat didnt notice?

soup key

Different neutrals - childhood

Ellie had free reign ish aka whatever you want (within limits of their resources sense of indulgence etc)
I had mama signing me up for random stuff none of which I cared about but played along with until I didn't anymore
Encouraging play looks different
Brett brought the keyboards but I have to make them fun ??
I wish I could just play with everybody
I wish I would've done better before covid
I really need to find something to do
After this one I'm going rogue !!!! Ebahakfhajahdhsahaha

the walls stay wet