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DAY 50

Why is it that I seem to age a year with every week that goes by? My pussy hairs are turning white, not blonde as originally suspected. My greywhite head hairs are in full bloom; short, wiry, curly, like pussy hair actually…

I was talking in Group last night and someone asked how old I was, and I didn’t know. Its like your name or your first love slipping out of memory – these things I’ve anchored myself to are moving way from my consciousness, being replaced by survivalists mantras:

– never smoke in bed [I am right now]
– never tell someone ‘always’ or “forever”
– smell it before you eat it

and suddenly, anything vital is gone.

 

DAY 51

We’ve renamed ourselves. We are not the people we were. I’m ready to accept that, now. I asked her id maybe she had a friend who’d like me better – our fling was too far out for me and was taking me to extremes of depression and irritation. Why did we have to stay up til past 3am to fuck? Why did her pants fit too tight around my fingers? Why was I so ok with everything being so dirty while she needed it all to be clean? How far beyond philosophy could we go?

 

DAY 52

“Like a god to me.” I used these line carefully but what the fuck? Was I supposed to pretend that Steve Madden wasn’t the closest thing to Jesus I’d found since renouncing the holy spirit?

Now everyone’s all “this water is like a god to me.” And “getting paid is like a god to me.” It’s too serious. God is fatal, now.

When curvy white women hide their bodies can it only be for warmth? Every girl on the inside is under dressed, underfed, eats magazines. I’d love to see a room full of skinny women eating their own children on paper.

 

DAY 53

Now that I’m moved into my motel room I feel like I can breathe. I’m less nervous about my stuff, for starts. And I’m able to decorate so much better. Without being able to collect weird art and posters I felt like I wasn’t myself.

My precious astroturf is at the front doorway, where I can put my bike on it, and still rub my toes in it when I take my shoes off at the door. It’s got one of the chairs on it, and I sit there and look out my picture window of the motel room and dream about the future. The chair is a comfy one in a stiff purple brocade. It matches the bedspread, which I have unfortunately not had a chance to stuff into a hole somewhere and forget about. It also matched the curtains but I ripped those out as soon as I could get up on a chair and do so. They were the super heavy no-light-gets through variety and I need to know when it’s daytime and night. I want to see the horizon out my window, the road that leads east to the CityZone and west to the neighborhood. I’m living on the edge as usual.

I love this motel room cuz it’s a two-roomer, technically so there’s the front with it’s weird desk and couch and the vestibule/closet and then the back room with a bed and the bathroom. I always love a little division of space, a physical manifestation of compartmentalization. Bed activities HERE and thinking activities HERE and dressing up activities HERE and so on. I want to keep separation so I can feel like I have lots of spaces to be in, here in this little apartment. People around and bike grease on the sidewalk. I want to make an art project that everyone here makes with me. Maybe, sometime. First I need to just be able to breathe deep…

It’s nice to be ready to settle I guess. My set of suitcases and bags is finally, and permanently unpacked. I live here now.

I live here now. Whew. Christ. My old spot was full of a lifetime of collected vintage furniture, pictures of people I loved, and a shit-ton of jewelry. This spot has my little nooks filled with the things I took with me and the things I found, but it’s not as charming. I keep going out looking for fabric[s]. Cole told me about a rad spot that used to be a Buy-the-Pound and I think we’re gonna go out there this week. I really hope so. My ceiling needs fabric and I need some more colors in my life.

 

DAY 54

I thought about one of my old lovers today, thought hard about her.

There’s this place I carve out in my heart where I can only feel the power of the feelings I’ve built with specific people, whenever we built it. It’s like I have endless space in there and this corner has this love and another corner has another sweetie and I can remember that at times I have felt blessed. Once upon. Even though I sit in this shitty motel room I’ve started to decorate like the corners of my dusky mind, even though I’ll never go home, even though the air quality will never return to tolerable for most of my life.

I remember being held and being loved and I don’t feel lonely when I go in there. I can go in there only sometimes, when I’m not anxious or about to go to work or drunk or trying to be tough on someone else’s behalf. I can go in there when I’m by myself, scavenging on the streets, riding my bicycle, stoned late at night.

It’s so hard to be so tough, to feel like I have to be so tough that I can’t sit around quietly letting myself be loved but there it is, life, that great divider between what we want to experience and what we do experience. Tonight I was tired and writing and accidentally wrote in a letter to my friend, “lets open our legs to the power of the universe,” when i meant to say some other shit entirely. I guess I mean it though.

But It’s not exactly safe to hang out all open to the forces of the universe and wanting love when what I need to be wanting is to fix my roof and make some more allies or maybe friends and learn how to can shit. GODDAMMIT.

I don’t want to can local shit and deliver it locally, I want to hold hands with someone who makes my heart squeeze and look at the sun setting over our dying planet and talk about how maybe its not dying after all but being reborn and think that maybe I’m not dying but being reborn, too.

I am thinking about someone who is almost certainly dead. There’s been no word of her or about her being alive and so I must assume this so I can go on, so I can sit in that little love place. Someone was talking about her as I was passing by in Rhizome earlier today, about the work she did and I walked away. How could they have known we loved each other? Everything we love is in our own realities and there’s no translation from our tiny interior worlds into the great knowledge that looks like social worlds.


DAY 55

I try to have one conversation at a time with people about how we’re going to heal, how I’m going to heal. I think up what I’ll say, strategies like: Lets Write Down Our Feelings And Burn Them, or Maybe I Should Have Let My Mom Pray For Me After All, or Lets Make Sure We Tell People We Love That We Love Them. I try to go one person at a time like Kurt Vonnegut’s Ice-9 but unlike Ice-9 I am slow and sometimes I fail to crystalize.

 

DAY 56

We went to the Buy-the-Pound! It was me and Cole and this girl Jackie and her girlfriend JD. I like anyone who’s named after liquor. We rode out, an hour at least, winding through streets I never would have remembered on my own. Yes, people; I need your help. This new place is also confusing.

We made it out around 1 or 2, to this warehouse in a vaguely industrial suburban zone. Like how these places used to be in cities because that’s where poor people were and then they got moved to suburbs because rich people wanted to move back into cities and so of course they got to. Don’t ever be a person to tell me there’s no class war by the way. If you don’t think there is its just because you are winning it.

Anyway omg the STUFF I GOT. Yes, I can live, and I do live here now and I’m fucking decorating. If I have to stay in my room every third or fourth day because I’m too fucked up with sad memories to leave the house then damnit I’m gonna be stuck somewhere pretty. Poly-cotton blend is over obviously. But no one cares about wool, linen, cotton and silk and those are where its at for housewares. The new curtains I got for the front are sheer mustard yellow and will make my purple chair look like a throne.

Some magical moments ensued. I picked up a white and pink-print dress and held it up, and admired it for everyone. JD said “Wait!” and dug in their dusty bin for a few seconds, then held up a coat in the same fabric. Shit damn I got a vintage set. I pulled a bunch of plaid shirts for the art project I’ve been thinking about, got sheets galore, and the THING I’M DYING OVER: a linen panel that has a print on it of dogs, horses, ladies, fruit, and guns. FTW what else do I really want in life?

The folks running the spot charged us underweight and I felt a rush of community. Do I look like I can afford this? No, so, thanks.

I also got some new shoes and purses, a weird painted poodle kitsch art thing, and three picture frames. I’ll use two of them for some postcards and a poster I got at rhizome, and one I’ll leave empty. For many years I had an empty photo frame in my room. I used to say to myself I’d fill it with a photo of the person who was coming to fill my heart, as a reminder. I filled it once, for two years.

My poor heart, this thing must be empty for now. But I love it as a reminder, it’s green silk velvet frame a demonstration that I have a heart at all. So often I just don’t even want to remember. Hearts are distractions and love is a brutal battlefield.

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