I remembered what I dreamed last night in the bathroom. My brother broke up with his girl-friend Jamie, so I got together with her.

It was kinda like saving her for him till he came to his senses. I wouldn’t kiss her on the mouth, which caused friction in the relationship, but other than that, it wasn’t too bad. We did a lot of rock-climbing, and she was always talking on this old fashioned, rust colored telephone with a grin on her face. It was kind of nice.

I don’t remember experiencing it in the dream, but it was tacitly understood that the sex was good. There was a whole part that seemed to go on forever where I was examining fruit to put in a blender: Plums. Cherries. More plums. Maybe a pear?

There. That’s enough fodder for a legion of freudian psychoanalysts.

1. It might not do any good.

2. Failure is a self-enforcing momentum.

3. His wrists are shaped funny.

4. I don’t really want to be solvable. What self-respecting ego does?

5. It takes time.  I don’t know how much time. I hate promising my time to anything, even a barbecue.

6. I will flake.

7. Emotion really shoots one’s perspective to hell.

8. Privacy is my second nature.

9. Frightened.

10. I might lie. Actually, I already have.

1. Because.

2. In the space of half a life-time, i still don’t know.

3. My cousin will be married. I am not jealous. Merely humiliated that after protecting her through childhood, I wasn’t certain of an invitation.

4. My grandparents won’t live forever. I want to *be there* before they go.

5. The guy?

6. I lost  a decade some place. It’s not the kind of thing you just let go of.

7. Cus the restlessness gets exponentially tougher, and my insides aren’t scuff-proof.

8. I hate white.

9. Why the fuck not? What do I have to lose?

10. The basic, material conflict:  You might accept at some point that you’ll never be quite what you want to be, but that doesn’t mean you resign to a lemming’s life lived at cliff-edge.

I’m just gonna post my favorite 1 or 2 search terms from each day this week.

my god is a rooster cartoon - I’m not making these up, I swear

rhino genetalia - Now would I order a red or a white wine with that?

how to get over a lover who keeps coming - Just be honest. Oh, and wear a poncho.

poising huge hairy bears - There’s nothing really wrong with that, but it sounds totally obscene.

weird mouth chupacabra - I think its cosmetic aspects are probably the least of your concerns.

i ate your heart - Oh yeah? Suck my cockles.

what do i do with my poisoned leg - ebay!

lol cat bra - I can haz cleavage? 

if a thousand men were not to pay their - No. No, no, no. You can’t just ask half a question and then leave! That’s the shittiest cliff-hanger of all time! If a thousand men were not to pay their what? What? Their alimony? Their phone bill? You get back here and finish the frickin’ question!

Gosh darned googlers.

The sun-speckled pattern of leaves against sky has grown important. In these last years, pinned inside a routine, ignoring the world as it grows more unfamiliar, I can only draw the exactitude of my presence from this familiar change. It’s a ballet: Small, private, lovely, and when I lay awake those nights between August and August, growing almost stagnant in the small circle of my mind, this was my window out into the ever changing world.

Quick to express, always, the fact of ‘getting better’. Do you know, like the relevant nature of size, progress only exists by comparison? Distance, the measurement of space, is a manmade construct, and the word ‘progress’ is simply the information that you aren’t standing in the same place you were before. As far as foreward or backward is concerned, in a world of endless planes and dimensions, there’s really no such thing. Just a marker, ‘Look here, I’m not where I was then.’

The voice in my head is all too laconic as it remarks, “Ah. Well, that’s progress.”

Let’s talk about David. He would walk outside my window all those late hours, right under the dancing leaves. I didn’t know who he was and I was afraid. I didn’t picture ghosts, but something more malevolent. An old shape. Something I knew.

I never looked. The blinds would be open, a provision for when I wake in confusion; like all traditional runaways, I navigate by the stars. He would only pass when my back was to the window. I would freeze, silent, huddled in the dark, waiting for his shadow to cross the bedroom wall. The house is on a lower level than the road, so it gives the impression of passer-bys looming over.

Who was it? What did they mean, walking past a private road at this hour? Why here? Why now?

I could have turned and looked, but to ’see’ is the scary part. It’s never the hook, the claw, the knife sliding through your viscera that imprints horror, it’s the image itself. Not death, but living through the dying. The idea of turning to find eyes staring in at me was more than I could bear. 

So I didn’t see anything to put my fear at ease, either, until the night your falter drove me out.

I insist that your voice is the most beautiful thing I ever heard of. And that night it cracked, and ran in rivulets down my mind and over the tight knot behind my breast-bone, I thrashed around unwilling to find the same old ground beneath my feet.

I’ve imagined myself into this corner, and you made me aware- that it’s this world you live in, and this world I’ll have to engage in if ever I’m to find the person behind that voice.

Do you know the raw material of you disorients me? That you could be flesh, blood, bone. Man- raw as dirt and creek and rotted leaves? That you walk along this same earth, but in a totally separate reality. One I could reach if I could only start in the right direction.

But it would take moving from this place where I’ve grown so still. Moving from the frozen trance where shadows bind me to silence.

That’s why I so love the leaves, I think. They are a part of the real world and my imagination, both. They are an invitation to the world; to dirt and creeks and rotted leaves; to birth and death-

and Life.

So that night I went and walked down the hill after midnight. I felt such a need driving me down, down, past the shadows of trees and the darkness that is such a horror and a fascination.

And half-way down I realized he was coming up at the same time. The impetuous urge to go struck me as suddenly foolish as I walked, defenseless and alone in the dark. Blam^blam^blam^blam, my heart pounded recognizing this form from imagination: My ex looked this way coming at me out of memory; the werewolf came just this way out of childhood nightmares- a point of  blackness separating from the dark, becoming its own approaching shadow.

My hands clutched at nothing, throat working to swallow as the inevitable became unavoidable. What do you say at 1a.m. when you’re about to meet your own murderer on a deserted street?

I said nothing. He grew large and then passed by me. We nodded. It was nothing, and it fell around my ears like rain.

I continued to walk, brain pinging helplessly, and then I flipped around to call at the receding shadow, “What’s your name?”

“Da-vid?” He was startled into answering. 

“Very good!!”

I flipped back around. Maybe he paused. Maybe he went home to retrieve his murder weapon. I was lost into the darkness though, jubilant that I’d met my phantom and learned his name.

I moved on more confident, less fearful, thinking, “Well… that’s progress.”

vzzzzzzz

zwoooosh!

I’ve been packeted up for a few. How vague should I be, in explanation? I d’no. Processing some *shit* with some help from a professional. So my writing, lately, when it comes in streaks or fart-bubbles isn’t at all intended for public consumption. 

The resultant purges have me a little surprised. Surprised quiet. Zip-locked. It’s an “interesting” experience. How’s that for self-distancing?

I’m gonna try to refrain from pscho-babble on here, but pair someone self-involved with a self-involving process and the results can be… nauseating. I’m wholly interested in piecing myself at the moment. Which isn’t to be confused with liking myself, but I’m engrossed, and when I’m not doing that I’m throwing all attention into totally non-wordy, non self-aware shit, cus there’s only so much of that even an egotist can take.

So that’s what I’m up to. I’m sure I’ll lose interest shortly, cus that’s what I do. So stay tuned, there will be more garbledy-gook here. Eventually.

relevant reads

Deep in the night I am awake. Voices, I overhear voices caught up in low, earnest argument. There is an issue of some import being hashed out in this, the witching hour. My mind fires up with all sorts of drastic ideas. Is my room-mate confronting her husband about an affair? Are they discussing a top secret operation? Are they planning the murder of my rather vexing kitty cat?

I turn over and try to ignore the voices as they grow more and more insistent. I am about to drop off into an exhaust induced slumber, when suddenly Meredith shouts, “She’s on drugs! That’s all it means! Nobody even listens to Paula!”

Paula?

*sigh* Oh, that. They’re still discussing the slip up on American Idol. Everyone’s so eager to paint Paula’s bizarre comments into a scandal; likely households across the nation have been divided on what amounts to a moot point.

Apparently, (cus I don’t watch the damn show, and do my best to tune it out) Paula Abdul made comments about a performer’s two songs when he had only performed one. Some people are taking this to mean the show is scripted, and the judges’ judgments are pre-arranged. Others believe this is evidence that Ms. Abdul is judging the contest drunk.

No one seems to have arrived at the obvious conclusion, which is that Paula Abdul is batshit crazy. I already discussed this in a former post. One needs only to watch a single segment from the brief reality show series ‘Hey Paula’ to understand that her comments last night aren’t the intriguing part, what’s intriguing is that Miss Abdul hasn’t stood on her chair, stuffed a banana in her cleavage and performed a lap-dance dedicated to the childhood memory of her imaginary friend, Stevedore, so far during a live taping.

If you happen to catch a recording of the comments, don’t pay attention to her face, look at Simon and Randy. They exchange a significant and not unsurprised look. The look does not communicate ‘What the hell is she talking about?’ No. It’s simply a ‘Crap, how do we manage this one?’ Simon might be a dick and Randy might be a caricature of what a black man would say if a black man were a caricature, but they are also the support pillars, the buffer zones who manage, rather deftly, to defer America’s understanding of how crazy the lady is in the center seat.

But moving on to matters of actual import…. where do you suppose the term ‘cockles’ came from? (Dare I ask?) It’s a fairly weird term. “Ah, that warms the cockles of my heart…”

‘Scuse me?

It doesn’t really sound like something you’d want in your heart. What is a cockle? Can they move? Curious.

Finally, I get some marvelous comments on here, and sometimes I’m rather astounded by the *craftsmanship* that goes into the feedback on this site. Here’s the comment of the day, in case you didn’t see it under the e-Bay post.

(Clarity on the woman moaning bit: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/20/electronic-bubblewra.html Thanks, Paul)

This is some stuff I made myself a self-appointed expert on, and other people actually believed me.

Nudism

National Parks

Dating Tips

(er, whot?)

How to Keep New Years Resolutions

(hahahaha!)

Hard Rocking Lesbian Twins

Chess

Family Cell Phone Plans

(isn’t that ironic, superfly?)

Grubby Lawns

Good Sandwiches

(k, I am an expert on that)

Richard the Third

Teaching Teenagers how to Drive

Based on this list, I think you can probably assume most information on the web derives itself from a completely bogus source.

I’ve never sold something on ebay before, and now that the glorified rush of seeing a plus balance in paypal has worn off, now I hafta deal with the shipping conundrum.  The pressure is immense. Wrapping isn’t my forte. The dealer gets to rate the seller on all kinds of things, and what if my wrapping efforts are insufficient? Or involve too copious a wad of tape? What if she laughs at me? God I hate being judged on indeterminates.

Also, for possibly the first time in my adult life, there aren’t any reams of bubble wrap lying around in swooshy-pop bundles. I always have bubble wrap. It’s like a useless fixture of my everyday life. Now that I could actually use some extraneous aerated land-fill, the stuff is gone. All gone. We must have had an overthorough cleaning spree the last time.

What does this teach us, boys and girls? You should never ever clean and organize. Heed my advice on this issue and you’ll never hafta pay $39.99 parcel post to send a modestly sized electronic item wrapped snugly in a queen size comforter.

*despondent*

I’m gonna be the ebay reject.

Update: I found a ream of bubble-wrap, so you can all relax now. I know that must have weighed heavy on your mind. I also found half a roll of butter-rum lifesavers in the storage closet. They taste…vintage.

See. It’s not a wasted day.