Painting in a Cave

2011-02-23T15:32:00.000-08:00

A thread of teal pollution
Seams the skyscrapers together
Stitched together by elaborate tattoo bridges
Double fingered cigarette smiles
Dimly lit by bamboo vases
Our outdoor tobacco pagoda
Long sidewalk night stretching for blocks
Street people, flashy cadillacs
Drag queens and yuppies on dinner dates
Because that's Rose City
And it's true
I checked out my yoga instructor
Frequently,
All through class
Which is almost sacrilegious
Because hippies do yoga
Like Christians do church

microfiction

2011-01-01T20:59:00.000-08:00

Things to remember:
http://www.bearparade.com/iwillneverwriteabook/2006/04/my_life_is_a_typo.html
"Yesterday I was Talking to Myself" by Ellen Kennedy

http://buweb.binghamton.edu/pgay/micro.fictions/fat/fat1.htm

Microfiction library
http://buweb.binghamton.edu/pgay/micro.fictions/

http://www.storybytes.com/

Idaho 2006

2010-12-31T01:02:00.000-08:00

A wilderness type of fucked up,
Wondering what kind of drugs
The writers from the Disney channel are taking
while penning Phineaus and Ferb
They went to summer camp and definetely brought something back
Some kind of freefalling
That feeling of being alone,
for the first time,
on the edge of nowhere
terrified of goddamned badgers and wolves-definetely-
buttfuck egypt Idaho
with guys who roll in buck pee
to disguise the smell of country folks
who
eat elk lasagna
like it's nothing

Blackout in a Stranger’s House

2010-11-03T11:27:00.000-07:00

Mcmansions are the backdrop
To this block party barbecue with
prestigious housewives
in velour track suits and
we don’t belong here.
We were just hipster plant-sitters,
stealing liquor from urban professionals,
too busy getting drunk to water the plants.

In my en bloc amnesia I wore an Edwardian lace gown
with opal buttons that my bearded acquaintance
touched with his guitar hands, while
he breathed, smiling,
he called me a landscape artist.

Which was a bad move
Because this was a tenuous imaginary past life
and his beard imploded like fiberglass and gasoline
all over the wilted houseplants
Drenching his wall of synthesizers
And midi cables
in a salty deluge
and in my rage I am yelling
“and how the fuck are we going to get tickets
to Godspeed you Black Emperor?”
All those vicious baristas they
also listen
to that refinement of
looped glockenspiel
and spindled cello
consumed inevitably by a wall of static

D.H. Lawerence and the Feminist Perspective

2010-11-03T11:07:00.001-07:00

Anne L. Tomlinson
Professor Terry Dehay
Eng 298
5/25/2009
The Feminist Perspective: Ambivalence
As a woman, is it foolish to consider the option of suicide against a future of humiliation? In the beginning of D.H. Lawrence’s story “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” the reader is faced with the questions of limited choice, helplessness, and their proclivity to a woman of fallen aristocracy. The rising action binds the protagonists Mabel and Dr. Jack Ferguson together. The romantic climax transforms Mabel into a powerful catalyst for Jack’s realization of real love. From the feminist perspective, Mabel emerges from her personal transformation as a sexual woman, an ambivalent, unconscious force bound by antagonizing societal roles.
Initially Mabel embodies the typical domestic role. “For months, Mabel had been servantless in the big house, keeping the home together in penury for her ineffectual brothers. She had kept house for ten years” (240). The “big house,” is a reference to domestic prison and her formerly functioning wealth. When her father died he left them destitute. She is broken and endures ten years of housekeeping for entitled men unused to limited means: “She had suffered badly during the period of poverty. Nothing, however, could shake the curious, sullen, animal pride that dominated each member of the family” (240). This pride is evident by her stubbornness, and her brothers who are each associated with animal characteristics, “(T)he horses were almost like his own body to him…. He would marry and go into harness. His life was over, he would be a subject animal now” (235). Mabel is associated with a dog three times, which is derogatory but it also speaks of her quiet, unquestioned loyalty to her family. Her brothers are also left in an uncertain class position which forces them into domestic life, and although they are all frightened about their circumstances, Joe “did not care about anything, since he felt safe himself.” Female servitude alienates her. She “did not share the same life as her brothers” (234). Alienation and loneliness has deep affect on Mabel. She is chiefly described as “impassive and inscrutable” (236). Impassivity is a symbol for sexual frigidity. She has never had the opportunity for passion, and it was the easy routine of wealth that previously sustained her along with devotion to her dead mother. This devotion is akin to the worship of Mother Mary, the Christian embodiment of motherhood and quiet devotion.
In patriarchal systems of thought, there are the “two polarities, of Mary the Virgin and Eve, of good and evil,” and these “came to dominate… in images of Life and Death of the Virtues and Vices, of Body and Soul, of the Fountain of Life and the new Fountain of Love, and of the good and bad women from the Old and New testaments” (Grössinger 5).
Ecstasy, piety and martyrdom is the state where Doctor Ferguson sees her at the graveyard, she “seemed so intent and remote, it was like looking into another world. Some mystical element was touched in him” (241). When Mabel decides to kill herself she is empowered to reach an end, she is “mindless… persistent, she seemed in a sort of ecstasy to be coming nearer to fulfillment , her own glorification, approaching her dead mother, who was glorified” (241). The doctor functions to stave off death in the countryside. He is also a hypochondriac, he “could not bear the smell of the dead, clayey water, and he was mortally afraid for his own health” (245). Fear of death is also fear of the unconscious, which is represented by woman, in her sexualized, “sinful” Eve-state. When Mabel walks into the lake to commit suicide, the doctor must follow her despite fear of drowning.
The foray underwater is a powerful plot device, and it is also a symbolic delving into the transformative unconscious. Jung said that water "is the commonest symbol for the unconscious" (qtd. in Taveras,“Jungian Dream Therapy”). When he pulls her out of the pond, he is being a Doctor and a hero with masculine honor and virtue. He is a white knight with chivalrous motives and noble intent.
As the story progresses the narrative tone changes. This happens when Mabel visits her mother’s grave. The third person omnipotent perspective switches. The language shifts from Mabel’s languid paragraphs to the aggressive and rational perspective of Dr. Ferguson’s, showing us a window to his complex feelings, and his transformation from rational doctor to a conflicted man.
D.H. Lawrence uses the motif of opposites to create ambivalent undertones beneath superficial dialogue. There is tension between what is said and what is meant and between rationality and foolishness. When Mabel asks the Dr. if he loves her, he replies yes, but “[T]he word cost him a painful effort…because it was too newly true…. and he hardly wanted it to be true, even now.” Then he kisses her “gently, with the one kiss that is an eternal pledge. And as he kissed her his heart stained…he never intended to love her” (248). What his characters say lacks depth and contradicts with what they feel in their unconscious.
Dr. Ferguson has an out of body experience: “But now it was over. He had crossed over the gulf to her, and all that he had left behind had shriveled and become void” (248). This powerful, transcendent moment is brought on by the kiss of the resurrected Mabel. After she almost drowns, he breathes the life back into her and takes off her clothes to bring her around. This convinces Mabel that he loves her and initiates her transformation from a desolate, impassive girl to a woman who will crawl up to a man, kiss his knees and look at him with the “flaring, humble eyes of transfiguration, triumphant in first possession” (246).
Dr. Ferguson had no intent of loving her and finds her initial advances revolting. “When he rescued and restored her, he was a doctor, and she was patient.” She was a sterile, impassive object to him. Rational professionalism meets its opposite; irrationalism; “He had no single personal thought of her. Nay, this introduction of the personal element was distasteful of him, a violation of his professional honour.” (247) His sense of duty inspires us to question knighthood. Is he only chivalrous due to the professional training of a doctor? Why can’t he say no to her?
He can’t say no because he is in control. The sexual roles are reversed. Although she kneels before him, she is initiator and he sees her imbued with power. “It was as if she had the life of his body in her hands, and he could not extricate himself.” (246)
The disgust mixes with attraction because “now it had become indispensible to him to have her face pressed close to him: he could never let go again….” But moments later, “as it were, suddenly, he smelt the horrid stagnant smell that water. And at the same moment she drew away from him and looked at him.” (248) She smells like death. She can feel his disgust, and it makes her look at him with question, with “doubt, the light was dying from her face… He could not bear the touch of her eyes question upon him, and the look of death behind the question.” This terrifies him into embracing her because he cannot “bear to look at her anymore.” (247)
This is a reversal of typical sex roles because He yields to a Her. “It was horrible. And yet wonderful was the touch of her shoulders….her face. Was she perhaps mad? He had a horror of yielding to her. Yet something in him ached also.” (247)
The narration is stream of consciousness, so we can feel the emotions shift against each other and scrape off the inside of Dr. Ferguson, “That he should love her? That this was love! That he should be ripped open this way! Him, a doctor!” (248) He kisses her, and yields to her just before she begins to cry. Crying is an unusual thing for her because she previously had a face that never moved with emotion.
How manipulative is Mabel? Is she crazy with passion from a near death experience, or is she calculating a new future, one where she can trade her sexuality for room and board?
One must wonder if she intended Dr. Jack Ferguson to see her walk into the shallow pool. Did she wait all day for him to come back the way he came just in time to rescue her? And why not manipulate him? He is a young single Doctor: a quick fix for her situation. One must doubt the innocence of Mabel, and wonder if her timing was mere coincidence.
If you cast a particular actress into her role, she could seem coy and manipulative; she “was sitting there drooped into a muse. He saw a tear fall, and his heart flared hot. He saw for the first time that one of her shoulders was quite uncovered, one arm bare, he could see one of her small breasts; dimly, because it had become almost dark in the room.” (249) How purposeful is this exposure of her body?
He asks her why she is crying, and she “looked up at him, and behind her tears the consciousness of the situation for the first time brought a dark look of shame to her eyes.” (249) This rational, patriarchal consciousness comes to swallow the expression of sexual unconscious and colors it with guilt. This is where one could draw on the assumption of hysteria, which was thought to be a nervous condition brought on by the sexual repression of women in the late nineteenth century.
Guilt contains and changes her energy, and when this happens she loses her domination of him. The post-kiss shame, doubt and shyness are her acknowledgments of the strict sexual mores imposed on women. If one only extracted the dialogue from this story to write a play from, it would be a trashy romance novel on stage. It is the unconscious of D.H. Lawrence’s writing that creates mystery and tension, as when she wants to leave the scene to get him dry clothes but he does not want her to go. He grabs her on the arm. His physicality frightens her, the “penetrating grip of his hand on her arm distressed her….He released her… and she wrapped herself in the blanket, looking at him rather frightened. And still she did not rise” (249), he is resentful of her leaving him and being in control, she tells him to kiss her before she goes, “[H]e kissed her, but briefly, half in anger” (249).
Is her shyness fabricated to avoid the charge of hysteria and sinfulness? He tells her that he must go, and she looks at him with melting wistfulness which compels him “to kiss her, gently, passionately, with his heart’s painful kiss.”

The return of consciousness causes her to lament that she is too awful to love: ‘And my hair’s smells so horrible,’ she murmured… ‘And I’m so awful, I’m so awful… You can’t want to love me, I’m horrible’” (250).
The moment has passed and she is struck with remorse for both kissing him and her near suicide, which is a sin. He reassures her in the last paragraph of the story: “‘[D]on’t be silly, don’t be silly…No, I want you, I want you,’ was all he answered, blindly” (250).
The shift back to her perspective implies her conscious or unconscious domination of events. The last statement in the story switches back to Mabel’s perspective, where she sees Dr. Ferguson speaking “with that terrible intonation which frightened her almost more than her horror lest he should not want her.” (250) The story began on her stubborn terms and ends on them. Mabel always “hold the keys of her own situation” (240). She is relieved that her feminine wiles and series of dramatic gestures weren’t in vain. Playing the victim inspired a convenient heroic rescue of her economic future, her physical life, and her immortal soul, but one must wonder just how guileless this victim is.

WORKS CITED
Grössinger, Christa. Picturing Women in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art.
North Dakota: Manchester University Press, 1997.
Taveras, Maria. "Jungian Dreamwork." Jungian Therapy. 8 May 2006. Jungian Therapy
Resources. 15th May 2009. < http://www.jungiantherapy.com/dreamwork.shtml>
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. London: Virago, 1997.
Stolley, Karl. "Feminist Criticism (1960s-present)." The OWL at Purdue. 10 May 2006. Purdue
University Writing Lab. 12 May 2006 .

Blackout in a Stranger’s House

2010-11-02T16:25:00.001-07:00

I went to a street barbeque
prestigious housewives
too skinny to be happy
in velour track suits and
I don’t belong here.

We’re just hipster plant-sitters,
stealing liquor from young urban professionals,
too busy getting drunk we forget to water the plants.
In my en bloc amnesia I wear an Edwardian lace gown
with opal buttons that my bearded acquaintance
touched with his guitar hands, while,
he breathed, smiling,
“You landscape artist.”

This made my unrequited love for him
and for his beard
implode like fiberglass and gasoline
all over the wilted houseplants
in a salty deluge
and how the fuck are we going to get tickets
to Godspeed you Black Emperor!

Lunar light neatly camoflaged

2010-10-13T13:51:00.000-07:00

Under the big sky the west enraptured me
Suspended momentarily under a vast grey sky
The fenceless outfield stretched to forever

Solar prominence, “looping into the atmosphere”
Surface of oil being burned
Coast larkspur
Thrive in serpentine soils made toxic due to chromium –
Vanquishing “unnecessary mountain passes”
In each direction
Of Nepalis concerned with corpses
Collecting on their holy mountains and
Canals carved in “chopped up wetlands”

Orange roughies
Stalked shrubland in search of prey
Thriving ambush artists
can throttle much larger game
Behind some tussocks. Blackest of caverns
Icing porous limestone-
Pitall traps. “Handrails and electric lights.”
Megafauna boneyards from extinction spasms
“and a dramatic disruption of the hydrological cycle
affects the growth of apples"
To make fall's hard cider. Elegant zingy pear liquer
Crimson butterscotch bigleaf apricot tinged
Pop of icy blue swirled strappy leaves
Harvest gold. Flowers, loam, herbs and leather

One time on a canoe...not done yet

2010-10-11T12:14:00.000-07:00

I remember one time I went canoeing and I got fired from my first job at a summer camp. It was because of another camp counselor. His name was Rusty, which I now understand was completely ironic because he was half Saudi Arabian. Rusty is a Midwestern handle and it says nothing of the Middle East. Most people thought he was Hispanic. He was exotic for Oregon: coffee colored with hooded-beneath-the-hijab eyes, and a square jaw covered with a persistent beard. When he made a point he would splay his hands on hips, roll his shoulders back, pop his chest like a table, and flash his superman face. From this pose he would intone the most bracing, solemn voice of authority; “On the wall. Now.” Then he would fall into a giggling fit to break the silence. This made him extremely popular. Other counselors would often be forced to pry seven year old girls from his calves. He was strict and set his expectations high and early, so parents liked him and moms flirted with him innocently.

My camp name was Autumn and I was good with kids. I wasn’t very good with teenagers, but I could work with young boys and girls equally. This skill became a curse when I was assigned a cabin full of seven year old boys for a week. I was nervous about the gender difference, but they were too young to associate me with cooties. I let them be boys, so this meant I had to allow lots of farting and an obsession with sticks and rocks.

I was relieved by my time off, which was broken into two hour periods in the middle of the day. Most counselors slept because they comforted homesick kids late into the night or patrolled the narrow footpaths between cabins to catch the diehard romantics sneaking out. We always told the kids, “This camp is not a hookup camp,” and I wish I had taken my own advice.

Every day at break time Rusty and I pulled our plastic mattresses on to the back porch of the counselor’s cabin, which was separate from the rest of camp. As I sprawled onto the plastic mattress in the sun, I saw a frog that had been smashed into the porch and dried in the heat.

“You should totally show this to your cabin.” Rusty said, leaped up and found a pronged stick while I grabbed a mason jar. He scraped it into the jar and handed it to me like an expensive gift.

“Do you think this would make you sick?” I asked. He was propped on his mattress lazily, with one leg sprawled in front of him. He was wearing a sky blue, long-sleeved thermal shirt and dark brown khakis.

“What - if you ate it? You’ve been spending too much time with little boys. Hell yeah you would, you need to gut an animal before you eat it.” He said. I remembered that he was a hunter, he had told everyone about dousing his clothes with elk pee to avoid being detected by his prey.

“I can’t believe that you are a hunter.” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re Arab.”

“Yeah, which means I could be hunting infidels if I wanted,” he grinned broadly. “I fish too. Actually, this frog would make great bait.” His eyes expanded with excitement. “I’ve been waiting to ask you. We should go.”

“Fishing? Tonite?” I said and his face fell.

“We have to. I’m going crazy Autumn. I mean, I have a cabin full of eighth grade boys and you have a pack of first graders. We need mental help. Fishing does that.”

That evening I waited until all my kids had been asleep for hours and I crept out on to the footpaths. It was two in the morning, and I could hear the director snoring. I remember that I pressed my back against the cabin with the frog jar between my hands. I used the moonlight to see and pulled a hood over my head. The night was crisp and alpine, and I shivered with adrenaline as I walked the trail to the lake.

Rusty was already in a canoe when I got there, wearing his black overalls on top of a wool sweater and he had a little kerosene lantern. His fishing pole dangled off the back of the boat.

He wanted the frog immediately. He rinsed off the ants and threaded it onto his hook expertly. I took off my boots and socks and stepped into the canoe, the ripples swelling out away from us with the sound. The sky was crystalline and it reflected off the water with a cinematic quality. I kept thinking, “Here it is; the most romantic moment of your life,” and tried to keep the thought from showing on my face. Rusty was in hunting-mode: his eyes cupped the horizon with keenness. He pulled out a flask of whiskey and we finished it between us, quietly, and with a purpose. I was on the rowing team at my high school, so I was comfortable paddling us out into the center. Rusty had rigged a line with five hooks and rock tied to the bottom for bass. He had spent the day digging for worms while playing commando capture the flag with his cabin. He still had a little dirt on his face and moss in his black hair, but his beard looked clean and soft, so I reached out and touched it. He laughed softly. He liked people to touch his beard, and let anyone. I drew my hand back.

“You’re such a physical person. Do you mind it ever?” My voice sounded shamelessly intimate as it spread out over the wilderness.

“What?”

“People touching you all the time.”

“It depends on the intention. Mostly people touch me for good reasons, like you just did.”

“But… don’t they want things from you?” I asked.

“Do you want something from me?” He grinned. I buried my chin into the collar of my sweater; staring at the kerosene lantern and feeling my face fill up. It was at was at this moment we should have been watching the trail to the lake.

The director was watching us from behind the boathouse with high powered binoculars. He saw everything from that point on, and when we came back to the shore with disheveled clothes, a rainbow trout, and a buzz; he took the fish and the flask from us.

“You two have thirty minutes to get off the property or I’m calling the police.” He said. “I know this is the most common reason that counselors get fired, but neither of you can expect a good reference.”

And that’s why I got fired from my first job.

Prompt: Worst poem ever. We've been through this.

2010-09-28T11:27:00.001-07:00

Had to write something offensive and bad for poetry class. Don't judge me.

How she loves kittens in cowboy boots with dewy eyes,
They make her giddy, joyous, excited and disturbingly aroused-
Like its her birthday
And she's wishing on a DQ ice cream cake
For that magical colon cleanse
For detox therapy, to evacuate her bowels of hearts and rainbows,
That were probably impregnated there alien style and incestually.
DMT was probably, maybe, definetely involved.
Because that Jah positivity is heavy, man, irie
Uncomfortable so much
to make you get a bra fitting
Cuz its so itchy,
It's jock itchy.

There are no stray animals out there, they ate them all.

2010-09-28T09:46:00.000-07:00

You motor-boated her that night
I got you a tweakin puerto rican
You passed out on the table
cuz there are like a million
Filipino neighborhoods barbecuing dogs in Alaska
I swear this one lady would eat your soul,
if you put a fish on the conveyor belt backwards.

That time I went like a woman
Didn't even shave my mustache and guys were hitting on me
Their excuse: it was dark.
Fine, I will be Santa this year
as long as I get to say, "You hoe hoe hoes"
I could be the only black guy in country music
Do you know how much play you'd get?

This dog liked cats so much he ate them
so that's why my neighbors poisoned him
While the cat was getting chewed on by that pitbull,
I thought there were two cats getting eaten
But that momma cat was beating the shit out of that pit bulls puppy
"Jeez," I thought, "gettin revenge?"

2010-05-12T12:33:00.000-07:00

Dreamt I was shimmying up the Fremont Bridge , like it was a new hobby of mine. Someone had built a log cabin in the sky and I was hanging out with a woman who could sing in synthesizer.

I love the best of Craigslist

2009-09-29T19:04:00.001-07:00

I have approximately 1,243 chickens that need to be transported, i began my journey with my mini van but just was not working out, too many trips and too much shit and feathers, and with no ac it makes it very difficult when constantly tempted to roll the windows down, and because doing it all by hand i have lost 1 out of 4 chickens with my first 3 trips. if you have reasonable transportation for this chicken operation plz let me know. thank you.

-Matt

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/hou/1290743016.html

"I wanted to paint nothing"

2009-09-29T15:38:00.000-07:00

In 2004, a panel comprising 500 of Britain's most esteemed artists, critics and historians voted Marcel Duchamp's Fountain the most influential artwork of the 20th century. Created for the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, Fountain was a urinal – a common plumbing fixture purchased from a wholesaler in New York City – signed by Duchamp with the pseudonym "R. Mutt" and rotated so that it lay on its back. A porcelain bowl designed to collect piss was recognized as the single-most important contribution to art in the past century. Ahead of Picasso, ahead of Pollock. Matisse didn't even make the list. Among the world's aesthetes, there were scattered cries of foul. And just as it had in 1917, Fountain ignited a debate over the meaning of art.

That Fountain would inspire objection is to be expected. After all, Duchamp had no hand in the creation of the object itself. But what he did do is re-contextualize it. He presented the urinal in a way that forced the viewer to consider it differently, thus shifting the burden of understanding from the artist to the observer. It was an affront to tradition, an assault on paradigm. And with the creation of Fountain, Duchamp accomplished one of two things – he either gave birth to a new kind of meaning or obliterated the need for meaning in art entirely. But whichever door it was that Duchamp kicked open, one thing is clear – Andy Warhol sashayed right through.

If Duchamp was challenging our perceptions, Warhol was challenging our depth. Prompting us not to delve deeper, but to worship the surface. When he began to make waves in the New York art scene with silk-screen images appropriated from mass culture, Warhol was simultaneously heralded as a genius and a fraud. The acolytes of progress saw him as a great leap forward – as someone who had the courage and vision to not only embrace the vulgarity of modern culture, but to elevate it. To sign it and call it art. Warhol's critics saw a gimmick. A cheap trick. A charlatan passing off mass produced novelty as original works of art. And as his career wore on, the debate surrounding Warhol never subsided. His appropriation, his factory, his dubious means of production … Marilyn, car crashes, 50 Campbell soup cans … They all left people asking – is it art or is it crap? Is it meaningless or is it profound? Warhol's work inspired a litany of questions that were never answered in the artist's lifetime. And after his death due to complications following gall bladder surgery in 1987, the questions became irrelevant. One of Warhol's most famous aphorisms proved true.

Death means a lot of money, honey. Death can really make you look like a star.

In death, any doubt shrouding the importance of Warhol's body of work dissipated. Though the errant dissenter may still exist in our midst, Warhol enjoys almost universal recognition as one of the most important figures in the history of art. Prints that were selling for peanuts in the artist's lifetime are now fetching hundreds of thousands –if not more – at auction. His Marilyn diptych, a repetitious silk-screen of the starlet's iconic countenance, was deemed "the Mona Lisa of our time" by Jose Mugrabi, Warhol's most prolific collector. And although Mugrabi's opinion is arguably biased, the same British panel that ranked Fountain number one placed Marilyn at number three. But perhaps the most compelling argument for Warhol's cemented status is a recent poll conducted for the BBC in which he beat out Michelangelo for the title of the greatest Western artist of all time. Could a Campbell's soup can really be the Sistine ceiling of our age? And if Warhol and his appropriated imagery represent the apex of artistic achievement, what does that say about modern culture's capacity for meaning?
I express hopelessness. - Takashi Murakami

"Art has changed over time," says AK47, a London-based ‘art terrorist' famous for kidnapping Banksy's The Drinker from a public square in 2004. "We're looking at things more simply now. We live in a fast world and we don't always have the time to soak it all in." Speaking by phone in a raspy Yorkshire accent, AK47 explains that Warhol was the first to really embrace the advertising mentality which has come to define our culture and shape our understanding of art. "That doesn't mean that art is shallow," he explains, "it's just different."

"When punk rock first broke in the UK," he continues, "people said it was the end of music. They said it was just noise. Now the Sex Pistols are a major reason why music and culture are what they are today. It's the same thing with art."
Louis Vuitton Ad
This ad is from the back cover of the totally vacuous Andy is 80! special issue of Interview, June/July 2008.
It was, argues AK47, the very cultural groundswell that began with Duchamp and Warhol that has allowed an entire generation of artists to expand and distort the notion of meaning in art.

When British artist Tracey Emin was shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize in 1999, she caused considerable uproar by displaying her installation piece My Bed at the Turner exhibition. Removed from her bedroom after a days-long bout of suicidal thinking, My Bed is – literally – Emin's bed, awash in the physical manifestations of emotional unrest. Used condoms, empty vodka bottles and urine-tinged sheets all serve to offer the observer a voyeuristic glimpse into the artist's wounded psyche. Or, to look at it another way, its just a fucking bed. A dirty bed, but a bed nonetheless.

When asked to reflect on his Campbell's soup can series, Warhol once said "I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing and the soup can was it." There's quite a bit of difference between nothing and the essence of nothing. One is the mere absence of substance while the other is a much more profound metaphysical contemplation. So when considering meaning in art, we have to ask ourselves – how much we are willing to see? How much of the burden of understanding we are willing to bear? Do we want to see a soup can or do we want to see a meditation on nihilism? Do we want to see a dirty bed or do we want to see the raw, gaping wound that is the artist's life? Do we want to see a urinal or do we want to see a Fountain?

Takashi Murakami, a Japanese multi-media artist commonly hailed as the Andy Warhol of the East, has made a veritable mint churning out cartoonish, fiberglass sculpture from his very own Tokyo-based factory. Employing production methods that would put Warhol to shame, Murakami is one among a generation of artists (Jeff Koons comes to mind) who often have no hand in the physical creation of their work. Instead, assistants working in the manner of an assembly line produce pieces according to the artist's specifications. When I first came across Murakami, he struck me as the perfect example of capitalism run amok in modern art. The epitome of art as a highly synthetic product – created only to feed fame and generate profit. But then I read an interview in which Murakami, describing the nature of his work, said simply this:

I express hopelessness.
Suddenly his art didn't mean what I thought it did.
Despite all of the profundity surrounding modern art, we surely can't allow ourselves to become too awestruck by the artists' professed intentions. Considering Warhol's ability to manipulate his image in the media, its certainly possible that he was more concerned with producing a good sound bite than in painting the essence of nothingness. And Murakami may very well be less interested in expressing hopelessness than in mitigating his staggering financial success with a dash of existential despair. But what value is there to be found in speculating as to the artist's true intentions? Whether they mean to do it or not, Warhol and the generation of artists that has succeeded him are the ideal ambassadors for the age in which we live.

Artists have always held a mirror to the face of society, showing us what we have become. No matter what he actually saw in the soup cans, by elevating them to the level of art, Warhol managed to encapsulate the increasing emptiness of modern existence. Whether he was commenting on that emptiness or contributing it is a question we'll never answer. And whether consciously or not, Warhol was the first to see that humanity was spiraling into a vacuum of self-obsession – one where brand names and fleeting fame would exist as muse. In that way, Warhol was profoundly relevant – maybe even more so than Michelangelo. Warhol was Zarathustra on the mountaintop, a herald of the coming nothingness. The first to say, whether intentionally or not – if you want more meaningful art, build a more meaningful world.
-Sarah Nardi
ARTICLE

2009-05-31T12:26:00.001-07:00

She was there with tiny wrists, motley clothes and keyhole eyes. She had developed a taste for absinthe, and it made her think she could channel Lewis and Clark to psychically speak through her. She told me, "Clark has a manly voice, and Lewis is actually very effeminate."

GRIZZLY BEAR: his biblical eyes were gold with drunk.

2009-05-29T15:06:00.000-07:00

I have no time to prepare for Leander, standing ready and immediate, cupping his cigarette. I always hesitated on the steps before I walked inside. It gave me the time to gather myself up, like a sail. Their porch is grimy and littered with garbage. Leander watches as I claw a newspaper from a rusted over barbecue.

“Hey, those papers aren’t fucking cooked yet. They’re still pink in the center.” He says, his eyes shining up hot, reflecting the urban night.

I flick my glance up. “What if I like it raw?”

“I thought you liked it over easy.” Leander wears a cashmere button-up, vintage Nike high-tops, and the merino scarf I gave him months ago. I wince from nostalgia and I shove the paper back into the barbecue. He lights up.

“Harrison, holy shit, how the fuck you been?” He likes to let the cigarette flop around his mouth while he speaks. I remember that he rolls his cigarettes deliberately, abstractedly, trying to mask the intent to kill himself slowly.
I ignore his question, “You look rough.”

“Harsh.” He looks thoughtful. “Have some?” He asks, and pulls his familiar flask out. I take a deep pull, enjoying the metallic set on my fingertips. I taste the hot sprawl of whiskey.

“Skyler started playing yet?” I ask because disjointed static is wailing out of the house.

“No. That’s some beardy guy from Colorado.”

I take the opportunity to stroke my beard. “Beardy guys are hot right now.” I brush past him, skimming his hand with now empty flask and open the door. I walk straight to the basement, noting with pleasure that I had the last word.

I find Skyler on the roof ringed by women, incensed and ardent already. He’s that kind of drunk.

“I see you guys are hoarding all the good beer.” I say, reaching into the half-rack for an IPA.
“Nice manners, Harrison,” Mercedes interjects. She sits by Skyler with her knees tucked under. She looks thinner than the last time I saw her, when we made out at the Pink Floyd laser light show in high school. Her dyed hair is fastened tight by a corsage headband. She wears earrings fashioned from fish lures and a black and white striped shirt.

“Nice shirt. You French?” I ask.
“No,” she gave me the once over, taking a sensuous pull off a joint. “Are you homeless? Too bad I left my Patagonia polar fleece at home, otherwise I’d give it to you.”

“Shut up Mercedes - you’re the one who stinks. I can smell Calvin Klein’s Hobo Chic from here.” Skyler said. The other girls laugh and their voices are hot with praise like a gospel song.

He plucks the joint from Mercedes fingers and passes it to me. He has my back, despite that he’s given into Mercedes’ desperate attempts many times before.

“Harrison,” his biblical eyes were gold with drunk. “You meet Liam? He’s downstairs – he’s from Seattle.”

“Ugh, I hate Seattle and everyone in it.” I say. I finish my beer and grab another.
“Let’s not go there.” Skyler: classic conflict-avoider.
“We don’t need to; it’s settled. Portland has a better music scene, weather, and scenery. Seattle has better caffeine addled, Kurt Cobain wannabes and more angsty lesbians - which is why it smells like fish.” I am drunk and clever.

“Portland wins. Obviously.” Mercedes says with her sarcastic face that I’m sure she thought was cute. She is trying to get back on my good side. Slut.

“Well, you’ll know Liam by the bear skin coat.” Skyler says.

“Shut. Up.” Mercedes treasures any opportunity to be vicious. “Is it real?”

“Yeah, it belonged to a grizzly bear.” Skyler: classic nonchalance.
“Where the hell did he get it?”
“A friend of his from Alaska sold it to him for two grand.”
“Who spends two grand on a bear skin coat? He must be a trustafarian.”

“You’ll see... It’s about that fucking time anyway.” Skyler rises.

“For what? Senseless murder of an endangered animal because it’s chic?” I say, the whisky flaring.

“I don’t think its chic per se, I think he’s being eccentric,” Mercedes twirled her hair. “A rabbit fur coat would be chic. Bears are coarse - almost sexy.”

“You mean like big, hairy dudes who call themselves ‘bears’ or literally bear fur taken from an endangered animal is sexy? Because both sound really fucked up to me.” The whisky is burning my throat now.

Skyler stands up. “No – fucking no, it’s not that time.” He can smell blood in the air. He is a shark.
“Come,” he extends a hand to me and I stand slowly, my vision spinning into vertigo. I notice the steep incline of the roof.

The smell of gasoline and yesterday’s rain whips around us as Mercedes wriggles through the window. I follow her and Skyler down the stairs. I can feel the other girls behind me, silently, pressing into my space.

I run my fingertips down the wall as I go down the stairs, and maybe I need the support, because a molten rush floods the veins in my face and spreads to my fingers. I stumble but don’t trip. The basement is moldering and bleak save Christmas lights strung over old mattresses to keep the sound in. People are wedged in between the furnace and the foundation, holding water pipes and elbowing each other self-consciously.

I watch Skyler’s shoulder blades flick as he graspes the neck of his antique cherry mandolin.

“Sweet relief. No electronics - just melody.” I say.

“You are such a closet hippie, Harrison, can’t handle a little harsh on your mellow or electronic music.” Leander has crept up behind me, in a way I used to like but now find disconcerting. He put his arm around Mercedes.
“Remember when you were slinging pastrami for the man?” He has to bring up.

“Shut. Up. Oh my god Harrison. When were you a male escort?” Fucking bitch.

“I worked at a deli.” And my veins are tingling with fine hatred.

“For a hot minute. One time his coworkers made him try this exotic type of cheese-”
“I thought it was a cousin of Gouda.” I interrupt. “Turns out it was head cheese, which actually isn’t cheese at all, its pig’s head ground up and mixed with gelatin.”

“And then you’d be a bitch about it.” Leander is always telling people to “keep it real.”

Skyler walks up to the mike and takes it from the beardy guy.

“That was Connor everybody – also known as Larks Need a House. If I ever want to play my set I have to hit it up now, so sorry Connor, but I’m cutting you the fuck off.” Skyler laughs to imply he is joking but also serious. He sways loosely, his hands plugging into microphones and instruments. He often plays three different things during a set.

He tests a long high note, from the guitar, then his smoky throat, to the mandolin. His voice is ethereal and he is drunk enough not to be a perfectionist.

“Running out this herd of ghosts,” his collar bone flares and lifts under the pressure of his voice. “They argue… The weaker silences… That. I. Love.”

Taut, evenly formed notes foam up out of him. “What can I do?” He shudders beneath his t-shirt and the sound rolls out. He manipulates the synthesizer and the beats thread up my legs. The sound tie-dyes the walls. It makes me remember.

When we were tripping on mushrooms, I had coaxed Skyler to eat pine needles with me. We could taste the sticky familiarity of pine, the hysteria of mouthing them - straight off the tree. The giggling had made us choke, we couldn’t breathe. Nonsensical things had flurried out, just to feel the sound roll in our mouths. I looked at an old growth Sitka spruce and remembered what I had learned about trees. I put a branch in my mouth and was alarmed at its musky, minty way.

“You’ve got to try this man.” It tasted fucking epic.

“Dude, are you eating that tree? Don’t fucking do that – it could be poisonous. It could be hemlock – isn’t that how Aristotle died?”

“This is a Sitka spruce you fucker, and Aristotle did not die from chewing pine needles.”

“But a Sitka spruce is a spruce, not a pine. You know what, fine motherfucker, you want me to eat tree, I’ll eat tree.” He hesitated, and then thoughtfully, delicately ran his mouth over the branch tips.

“Wow.” He started chewing. “What the… damn. This tastes like gum.”
Soon he was chewing a whole pine branch like cud. He turned to me and said; “This is good. I bet this would run off a herd of ghosts – you just breathe minty fresh on them and they’re out. You could be a hippie ghost buster with this shit.”

In the basement everyone else is yelling and hollering with supreme drunken satisfaction, for their own reasons – their own similar recognitions, repressed admiration, for the sentient lusts and hot weighted silence dismantling before our eyes. He is a musical alchemist. The basement floods with people, everyone presses up close to each other and sways. The room heats up and - the song is over. The sound cuts out quick with a high tech, teeth-shaving scream of feedback.

“Fuck.” Skyler says. And then the power went out.

Someone hoots like an owl, and the room fills with whispers like smoke inside a glass. Without sight, my other senses rear up powerfully. Someone is pressing up behind me, and if it’s the guy in the bear skin coat I’m going to flip out.
“What are you doing?” I say - my voice is a low, angry hum masked by the whispering crowd.

“Oh, is that you Harrison? Sorry, I’m being crowded.” It was Leander, panicking. He hates crowds. During the freak hail shower during the Sasquatch festival last summer, I witnessed him freak. We clawed desperately through unprepared hipsters wearing sunglasses in the storm. He’d had a panic attack right there underneath a snapped off picnic table umbrella, choking and sobbing, trying to find a sphere of personal space.

Disappointing. I am surprised by my mixed rage and lust it makes the hairs on my arms stand up. I had wanted a different explanation. My hand found his shoulder, “Let’s go upstairs and get candles.”

“Skyler, where are your candles?” I turn and yell over the top of the crowd.
“In the foyer on top of the bookshelf. You have fire?”

“Yeah.” I had fire.

Backcountry Trail Crew, 2008

2009-05-28T13:58:00.000-07:00

Journals from summer of 2008 Backcountry Leadership Trail Building Crew

August 21st
Today I got Ian to give me his gummi swedish fish without noticing. Then he accused me having Jedi mind powers. But all that I did was sit behind him and demand, "Give me the fish. Give me the fish. GIVE ME THE FISH."

This summer I spent five weeks in the woods building trail with a crew of 11 other people. I went three weeks without showering, and spent 40 hrs a week building bridges, sawing, heaving rocks, building drainages, and moving extremely large dead logs. During our third week we were hiking five miles to work everyday, and then five back. It was the single most difficult and rewarding experience of my life, and is so memorable because it was so concentrated and I was surrounded by other young people who wanted to be leaders. Here are some things I jotted in my journal from this summer, so I don't forget...

August 4th
Today was really hard, I felt very sluggish in the insane heat making ROCK WATER BARS on top of Bingham Ridge near Mt Jefferson. Was aching to swim in Midget lake or put my head in the creek. Also wanted to explode my physical tension - any way possible, massage, sleep, a fight. I was itching for anything. Being out here really wakes up my primal instincts exponentially.

A map of the trail our crew maintained in a week (it's in red dots).

And the next week (Also red dots): We camped at Midget lake and worked all the way to Swallow Lake

August 5th
Today we duffed 3,500 ft of trail after hiking 5 miles uphill, in five hours. After that, we get back to camp; took a 20 minute break, then broke our entire camp down (including bearhang, kitchen tarps, and our tents) and packed up for a 2.5 weeks of food and gear, then hiked an excruciating 1.5 miles to our new camp by a beautiful lake with views of Three Fingered Jack. No more ash ridden burn area! We are camped at the base of wet, 100+ yr old Douglas Firs. They are so ALIVE. I appreciate them so much more after spending a week and a half in a burned out, shell of forest.

However trying, this day was a good one. One our painful and weighted hike down I tried to manage my breathing and relax myself. Towards the end of the hike I was delirious and praying for help to make it without stopping... "Lord is my strength, Creator my sheild, my light, my strength, my strength-" I had a heavy, hallucinating mantra going to help me manage the horrible pain. Ian was behind me and turning different colors and swearing, I was worried he would push himself to passing out - I wouldn't put it past him.

After we reached the junction I felt light, and alive, and I was so overjoyed with sight of our new campground that I danced around, and almost cried. I felt very helpful and energized, despite hiking 11 miles and working for five hours. I set up tents with Ceci and then immediately got on dinner. Ian was helping me, he was beyond exhausted and couldn't move to help me. I ended making up CRACKED OUT DEHYDRATED FOOD; mashed potatoes with bacon TEXTURIZED VEGETABLE PROTEIN, asparagus soup, corn and stuffing all in the same pot! I put the corn and the potatoes in first when they should have been last and got chastised. I was really worried that I had ruined dinner for everyone. The stove kept blowing out. I was frustrated.
Finally mixed everything together, as it cooked Ian sprawled out onto me, I was sitting at the base of one of those beautiful living trees. A thunderstorm then started and rain came pouring down. The only comforts we have out here are sleep, dinner, the promise of a return to civlian life, and each other.

Smoked Salmon

2009-05-26T18:47:00.000-07:00

I smoked out of a salmon ice sculpture this weekend.
I would not reccommend it unless you like your face numb and wet.

Shady Root tonite

2009-05-22T14:07:00.000-07:00

This band is playing tonight at The Siskiyou pub in Ashland Oregon starting at 10:45. I am their roadie.

Please check out the guitar solo at 1:20-1:50. BAD-ASS.

A poem and a song

2009-05-03T21:44:00.000-07:00

Open clear fields of
eyes
soft mannered
with a testostrone
hum
And I wanted to put my fingers
In his mouth
When I helped him with that kegstand

*
You shoot guns with skills-
And I cry when I see road kill
But I still like you
And we can agree that a CEOs with golden toilets
Makes us want to get violent
/
Get Rowdy
/
Say howdy

And enjoy being an exotic commodity
In a rural economy

Get five types of retarded
Cuz the party's just got started

Trip into a portal
Gettin orbital
Dimension of your own creation
Because we're just
A stop on your destination
This is for my generation

Maybe I'm out of my element
But there's no stoppin it
An exotic commodity
In a rural economy

Lookin anthropologically
An exotic commodity
In a rural economy

Old poems

2009-04-24T14:53:00.000-07:00

I tore off his plaid shirt
“Grunge is dead you dumb motherfucker!”
Fuck your raincloud wet dreams, your battered windows
Fuck your drug habit, your undeserved omnipotent judgement

*
Electric plasma
Thunderous static breeding
Blood brainstorm idea

*

We body trace stars
Dark blue velvet weightlessness
We swim nude at night

*
Ugly Poem

Oil-slick Rick
Likes lipstick teeth
And cellulite-Jell-O
Wriggling on his rig

He’s a terrifying exhibitionist

You’ve probably seen him on East Main
Smearing lip-gloss on his ass,
To make relief prints on window panes.

*
"Billy goat gruff
Huffs and puffs;
'I love goat muff-muff."

*
Strands of smoke
Comb him at the door of night.
On him I mark; refracted gold,
Dark fire, glazed, ornate beadwork
And ivory, bone-tuned organ notes
Ringing in his “Say yes.”

Always awake at first light,
Always telling without voice,
“Stop dreaming about the medicine time.
It’s outside.”
I woke, and I was bathed in the iridescent sight
Of his ring of fire, dyed with flight
That sings the fight of morning blind.
And he smells of the sun-facing-side
Of a Ponderosa Pine;
Of charred wood, cardamom,
vanilla, liquid heat.

My photographs without context, except that I know some goodlooking folks

2009-04-24T14:37:00.000-07:00

A villanelle-Form and Meaning

2009-04-24T14:36:00.001-07:00

Pornocalypse
Sucking on the pacifier of perfection . . .
Enables one to fetishize the dichotomy,
Between reality and distortion.

The sparkle of limelight soaks the skin,
While they drink liquid dry pornography,
Sucking on the pacifier of perfection . . .

Where does ubiquitious media begin
Its technological lobotomy?
Between reality and distortion.

It has made the gene pool thin.
Through electric sodomy,
Sucking on the pacifier of perfection . . .

To be sexual with an airbrushed alien;
Is to have a clinically defined pathology,
Between reality and distortion.

Through exercising false locomotion,
They dissolve the dichotomy
Sucking on the pacifier of perfection . . .
Between reality and distortion.

I wrote my poem in a villanelle style because I wanted to juxtapose the subject of pornography saturating modern life with a formal, older style. I found that during the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a resurgence in the use of villanelles by “New Formalists” because many poets were disenchanted with the abstract, alienating, and formless poetry of their peers.
I also liked the rhythm of the A, B, A1, A2 broken into three line stanzas and alternating repetitions because it rises and falls the same way a sexual act could. Yet, because I was writing about the false “locomotion” that is represented in pornography, I wanted my lines to have an imperfect metrical length. I wanted it to sound not quite right and leave a bad taste in the reader’s mouth. I used the ellipses at the end of the line, “Sucking on the pacifier of perfection…” (1,6,12,19) because it reminds me of a faltering or a pause, and hints at an insecurity or a need to be comforted or lulled. Pornography comforts the way that a Mcdonald’s cheeseburger can comfort a hungry commuter in a hurry - it addicts them to food that is tasty, intense, but ultimately unreal and not nutritious.
Bibliography-
Haddow, Douglas. "Pornocalypse Now" Adbusters 13 April 2009. 20 April 2009 .

Still not done, but closer - ANY ADVICE OPEN FORUM

2009-04-01T11:16:00.001-07:00

IT BELONGED TO A GRIZZLY BEAR

He had always liked to come up behind me. Waiting for him, for he was always late, at a train station, or in front of a movie theatre, he would creep up behind me and run his fingers up the length of my spine before cupping my mouth, to save me, he'd say, from the humiliation of my girlish scream.

Now, I hesitated on the grimy, littered porch of Skyler's house to prepare myself for him. I did it like a sail, letting the unfamilar urban wind, and two pre-game shots of rum, radiate and fill me with me false confidence.

I didn't have time to prepare, because when I turned around to see who had opened the door, Leander was standing there - immediate, cupping his cigarette. He watched me claw a dirty newspaper from a rusted over barbecue in anxiety.

“Hey, those papers aren’t fucking cooked yet. They’re still pink in the center.” He said. His eyes shone up hot, reflecting the urban night.

I flicked my glance up at him from the scummy personal ads that I loved. “What if I like it raw?”

“I thought you liked it over easy.” Leander wore a cashmere button-up, vintage Nike high-tops, and the merino scarf I had given him months ago. I winced invisibly from nostalgia - shoved the paper back into the barbecue. He lit up.

“Harrison, holy shit, how the fuck you been?” He liked to let the cigarette flop around his mouth while he spoke. I remembered how he always rolled his cigarettes deliberately, abstractedly, trying to mask the intent to kill himself slowly.

I ignored his question, “You look rough,”

“Harsh.” He took a drag off his Marlboro. “Want?” He pulled his flask out and I took a deep pull, enjoying the metallic set on my fingertips. I tasted the hot sprawl of whiskey.

“Skyler started yet?” I asked. Disjointed static wailed out of the house.
“No. That’s some beardy guy from Colorado.”
I took the opportunity to stroke my beard.

“Beardy guys from Colorado are hot right now.” I brushed past him, skimming his hand with his empty flask and opened the door. I walked straight to the basement, glad I’d had the last word. Leander was dynamic, and aloof.

I found Skyler on the roof ringed by women, incensed and ardent already. He was that kind of drunk.

“I see you guys are hoarding all the good beer.” I said, reaching into the half-rack for an IPA.

“Nice manners, Harrison,” Mercedes interjected. She sat by Skyler with her knees tucked under her. She looked thinner than the last time I’d seen her, when we made out at the Pink Floyd laser light show in high school. She wore a corsage headband in her dyed hair, earrings fashioned from fish lures and a black and white striped shirt.

“Nice shirt. You French?” Fucking Parisian art-bitch mystique.
“No,” she gave me the once over, taking a sensuous pull off a joint, “Are you homeless? Too bad I left my Patagonia polar fleece at home, otherwise I’d give it to you.”

“Shut up Mercedes - you’re the one who smells homeless. I can smell Calvin Klein’s Slut Nouveau from here.” Skyler said. The other girls laughed and their voices were full of hot praise like a gospel song. He plucked the joint from Mercedes fingers and passed it to me. He had my back, despite that he’d given into Mercedes’ desperate attempts many times before. “Harrison,” his gold, biblical eyes were deep with drunkenness. “You meet Liam? He’s downstairs – he’s from Seattle.”

“Ugh, I hate Seattle and everyone in it.” I said. I finished my beer and grabbed another one.

“Let’s not go there.”

“We don’t need to; it’s settled. Portland has a better music scene, weather, and scenery. Seattle has better caffeine addled Kurt Cobain wannabes and more angsty lesbians - which is why it smells like fish.”

“Portland wins. Obviously.” Mercedes said with her sarcastic face that I’m sure she thought was cute. She was trying to get back on my good side. Slut.

“Well, you’ll know him by the bear skin coat.” Skyler said.

“Shut. Up.” Mercedes jumped at the opportunity to be vicious. “Is it real?”

“Yeah, it belonged to a grizzly bear.”

“Where the hell did he get it?"
“A friend of his from Alaska sold it to him for two grand.”
“Who spends two grand on a bear skin coat?”

“You’ll see... It’s about that fucking time anyway.” Skyler rose.

“For what? Senseless murder of an endangered animal because it’s chic?” I said.

“I don’t think its chic per se, I think he’s being eccentric,” Mercedes twirled her hair. “A rabbit fur coat would be chic. Bears are coarse - almost sexy.”

“You mean like big, hairy dudes who call themselves ‘bears’ or literally bear fur taken from an endangered animal is sexy? Because both sound really fucked up to me.”

Skyler stood up. “No – fucking no, it’s not that time.” Always a mediator, he could smell blood in the air. He was a shark. “Come,” he extended a hand to me and I stood up slowly, my vision spinning into vertigo. I noticed the steep incline of the roof.

The smell of gasoline and yesterday’s rain whipped around us as Mercedes wiggled through the window. I followed her and Skyler down the stairs. I could feel the other girls behind me, silently, pressing into my space.

I liked to run my fingertips down the wall as I went down the stairs, and maybe I needed the support, because a molten rush flooded the veins in my face and spread out to my fingers. I stumbled on the stairs but didn’t trip. The basement was moldering and bleak save Christmas lights strung over old mattresses to keep the sound in. People were wedged in between the furnace and the foundation, holding on to water pipes and elbowing each other self-consciously.
I watched Skyler’s shoulder blades flick as he grasped the neck of his antique cherry mandolin.
“Sweet relief. No electronics - just melody.” I said.
“You are such a closet hippie, Harrison, can’t handle a little harsh on your mellow.” Leander had crept up behind me, in a way I used to like but now found disconcerting. He put his arm around Mercedes. “Remember when you were slinging pastrami for the man?” He said.
“Oh my god – Harrison, you were a male escort?” Fucking bitch.
“I worked at a deli.” And my veins are tingling with fine hatred.
“For a hot minute. One time his coworkers made him try this exotic type of cheese-”
“I thought it was a cousin of Gouda.” I interrupted. “Turns out it was head cheese, which actually isn’t cheese at all, its pig’s head ground up and mixed with gelatin.”
“And then you’d be a bitch about it.” Leander was always telling people to “keep it real.”
Skyler walked up to the mike and took it from the beardy guy.
“That was Connor everybody – also known as Larks Need a House. If I ever want to play my set I have to hit it up now, so sorry Connor, but I’m cutting you the fuck off.” Skyler laughed in a way that implied he was joking but also serious. He swayed loosely, his hands plugging into microphones and instruments. He often played three different things during a set.
He tested a long high note, first from his guitar, then his smoky throat. His singing voice was ethereal. He was drunk enough not to be a perfectionist and he would always be a better musician when he was drunk.
“Running out this herd of ghosts,” his collar bone flared and lifted under the pressure of his voice. “They argue… The weaker silences… That. I. Love.”
Taut, evenly formed notes foamed up out of him. “What can I do?” He shuddered beneath his t-shirt and the sound rolled out. He pushed on his synthesizer, and the beats threaded up my legs. The sound tie-dyed the walls. It made me remember.
When we were tripping on mushrooms, I had coaxed Skyler to eat pine needles with me. We could taste the sticky familiarity of pine, the hysteria of mouthing them - straight off the tree. The giggling had made us choke, we couldn’t breathe. Nonsensical things had flurried out just to feel the sound roll in our mouths. I looked at an old growth Ponderosa pine and remembered what I had learned about trees. I put a branch in my mouth and was alarmed at its musky, minty way.
“You’ve got to try this man.” It tasted fucking epic.
“Dude, are you eating that tree? Don’t fucking do that – it could be poisonous. It could be hemlock – isn’t that how Aristotle died?”
“This is a Ponderosa pine you fucker, and Aristotle did not die from chewing pine needles.”
“Fine motherfucker, you want me to eat tree, I’ll eat tree.” He hesitated, and then thoughtfully, delicately ran his mouth over the branch tips.
“Wow.” He started chewing. “What the… damn. This tastes like gum.” Soon he was chewing a whole pine branch like cud. He turned to me, brayed like a sheep and said; “This is good. I bet this would run off a herd of ghosts – you just breathe minty fresh on them and they’re out. You could be a hippie ghost buster with this shit.”

In the basement everyone else was yelling and hollering with supreme drunken satisfaction, for the own reasons – their own similar recognitions, repressed admiration, for the sentient lusts and hot weighted silence dismantled before our eyes. He was a musical alchemist. The basement flooded with people, everyone was pressed up close to each other and swaying. The room heated up and suddenly the song was over. The sound cut out quickly with a high teeth shaving scream of feedback.
“Fuck.” Skyler said. And then the power went out.
Someone hooted like an owl, and the room filled up with whispers like smoke inside a glass. Without sight, my other senses reared up powerfully. I realized that Leander was pressed up behind me.
“What are you doing?” I said - my voice was a low growl masked by the whispering crowd.
“Oh, is that you Harrison? Sorry, I’m being crowded.” I could hear Leander panic. He hated crowds. I remembered the freak hail shower during the Sasquatch festival last summer. We clawed desperately through unprepared hipsters, wearing sunglasses in the storm. He’d had a panic attack right there underneath a snapped off picnic table umbrella, choking and sobbing, trying to find a sphere of personal space.

Disappointed, I was surprised by my mixed rage and lust, it made the hairs on my arms stand up. I had wanted a different explanation. My hand found his shoulder, “Let’s go upstairs and get candles.”
“Skyler, where are your candles?” I turned and yelled over the top of the crowd.
“In the foyer on top of the bookshelf. You have fire?”
“Yeah.” I had fire.

ALTERNATE ENDING

Upstairs the wide Victorian windows revealed ours as the only house on the block that was dark. Filaments of tension moved between the golden squares of industrial light from the streetlamps.
“Power surge.” Leander said quietly with relief vibrating in his voice. “We have to find the circuit breaker.”
“We need candles first. I don’t trust any of you sticking your hand into a circuit breaker in the dark.”

I knew where Skyler kept his candles: with his lotion, condoms, and handcuffs. He wasn’t ashamed, nor was he vulgar. I sparked a lighter and found the velvet box in the foyer. Leander gasped with scandal when I opened it.
“Is that a lavender-scented blindfold?” He wouldn’t touch it.
I shrugged, “I’m not surprised.” There was a reason women loved Skyler. I lit a match, lined the candles up, and felt my lust wane and gather with each quiet, new flame.
It wasn’t worth it.
I would just feel empty afterwards.
“Here, take two.” I handed them to Leander.
“Man, these reek of sex and vanill-“
He shut up because we saw the bear skin coat at the same time. Liam was passed out in it, on the living room couch in the dark, with a beer in his hand. He had the face of a little boy turned hustler, his hair was slicked back. His face was pocked and garnished with silver piercings. He was wearing a sequined tanktop beneath the coat. He looked like someone who had robbed Mariah Carey. His little pointy goatee made me angry, and I felt the blood coursing in my throat.
“Hey, hey bro.” Leander nudged Liam’s calf with his Nike high top. “He’s passed the fuck out. What is that? Is that a bear skin coat? What the fuck is up with the sequins?”
“It’s from a Grizzly bear… Wake up douche bag.”
“Shhh… shhhh…” Leander said, the candles flickering in front of his face, “I have an idea,” he was whispering, “So my uncle once staple-gunned a picture to a guy’s forehead.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Shhh! He had just gotten back from Vietnam dude, he wasn’t in his right mind but it he said it was hella funny. We don’t have to staple gun anything. We can superglue some of this bear fur straight on this guy’s face.”

A teacher once said

2009-03-30T09:53:00.000-07:00

"If you Batman, you got to wear the cape."

UP IN THE WOODS - beautiful song

2009-03-13T18:12:00.000-07:00

The drum. I know 20 songs here. My man is wearing a blue shirt.

2009-03-13T10:51:00.000-07:00

Trace Minerals that Heal

2009-03-13T10:37:00.000-07:00

We pulled them off the 1-5 Northbound
Follow us in our beat up Toyota
To this Hamlet corner
A town that could have only been
Because of Shakespeare

And the very very first hippies
Back in the late 1800's
Discovered the healing water
That tasted like rotten eggs and 7-up

All along the banks of the old Lithia river
Past school buses, old intellectuals from San Diego,
and theater kids from all tribes

We said here you go
Here is heaven
Past the facade,
By the quiet creek
Where we cup drumming water
And monolith glacier triggered boulders
In the cleft of five mountain ranges
Churned and boiling happy spring rain
This is it

2009-03-09T15:47:00.000-07:00

Everyone needs to read
The Reader
by Berhnard Schlink.

An attempt at one long sentence - if you let me

2009-03-02T15:16:00.001-08:00

Laying drifting laconically in a silver shimmer, he was shivering and glowing around hard – something I try not to take for granted as many folks cant even get close to shimmering, with long barges of cloud shadow casting timelapse photography across his golden face in the pitch dark night; no, not everyone can do that, so I was feeling him glow with that soft warm fire through the muscles of his hands, when he started to twitch – flutter, flutter, flutter - a spasm shot right out of his back where we were touching and blasted through my body, and I twitched too, I spasmed hard with him and we both started laughing like what the hell how did that just happen-

“Did you feel that, I just conducted that shit” and we were laughing and then I recalled that the first time he touched me; my body lit up hard from the inside out, from my feet to my face and made me blush and the shock was the same and I told him so and he said, “You are just imagining things,” goddamn it, “I am not imagining things, you just felt that too,” and I bit him hard, and stole the covers to make a point, because I am too infantile to utilize rhetoric – especially about something that defies logic and not to mention the laws of physics, gravity and the general feelings one can have for another person – he could literally electrocute me, and sometimes when he’d look me in the eye and all point of reference would be gone, “If you really let me pour out into you, if you really let me, you’ll be hooked up, and you will have power.”

city loathing

2009-03-02T15:10:00.003-08:00

sandy sawmill corpses endless highway
traintrack impersonal ants
one collectively clenched traffic muscle
smell of industrial waste
sweating mcdonald's chemical feast
neon food poison cigarettes the need
for self destruction in degrees

liquid

2009-03-02T15:10:00.001-08:00

I overflow easily
my boundaries blur
grow glow pulse
I want to pour into
him, a tree, bleed sky
in my sleep The Dead plant seeds
in me, i was harvested by
my patient ancestors

Ashland

2009-03-02T15:07:00.000-08:00

Where the walls breathe you in
Tucked, folded in between layering flotillas
Lamps blazing on dewed jewel-hillsides
Flickering with ghosts who can’t feel the weather,

We can fall asleep midstep,
Voice pulsing with vowels
No one ever told us
That we could
Do that
and blow things up in the microwave, alone
again

Fucking a poet

2009-02-25T22:24:00.000-08:00

She was sorry - knew they shouldn't have fucked
Shouldn't have took advantage
Of a grief driven horny mission
To make love to someone else
For once
Especially one so inspired by post-dance-party drunken fridge-magnet-poetry
That was the worst about it,
Fucking a poet
like that.

OCTOPI CHAMBER

2009-02-25T22:19:00.001-08:00

Grafted octopi neurons are highly concentrated. Hence, bamboo equilibrium must be maintained. To navigate, chart and intrepidly voyage – we need to siphon negative ions. The gradient will be maintained to simulate the filmy surface of the ocean floor. To avoid octopus karma – the worst, most squeezing kind – we must provide shrimp packed mason jars to open and a short tank wall that is easily surmountable.

Octopi are good at escaping, they revel in it. We must provide opportunities for project octopi freedom.

However, we will always capture the octopus because we use a highly calibrated scientific facility. We know what is up. That is the point – we maintain “drama levels” for the octopus and recapture him every time. When you walk into the octopus room you must assume the attitude of surprise if you find him curled around a table leg. You must also pretend to be very afraid of eightfold strangulation. Real fear helps. To assist in fear generation, imagine rows of octopus teeth grasping your face in the state right before falling asleep. You must imagine yourself wearing a hungry octopus hat.

singing

2009-01-07T13:30:00.000-08:00

Sing from your diaphragm
Relax
Don't overcontract or push too hard
ProuNounce your CoNSTaNTS
Sit up straight, shoulders back
Deep breathing
Pick a pitch and stick with it unless you are trying to make a point
Do that thing where you feel the vibration of the note in your nose
Practice, vary your sound

2008-12-08T23:30:00.001-08:00

Everytime I go back and read what I wrote a year ago
I find myself much changed
much less extreme
and it is this way every time

To witness but not to partake

2008-12-08T22:43:00.000-08:00

I'm back-
Where a spider weaves a storm-
To tell of a flood-
To pass on the message:

GOD WANTS US DEAD IN A HURRY

A shifting liquid storm...
When the light falls that way,
It means there are fires in the hills
Trailing red swaths of exposed earth,
That lace the mountain air.
All the while blue distances heave
with the passage
Of moonlight so desperate
clawing beneath
To the tugging groundwater
Basking,
Belly to the dirt,
Listening to the day
Pulsate through the earth

The Red Road

2008-03-04T23:52:00.001-08:00

When you went under
and unwound like a lingering
I choked on my mornings
Why
God? I’m a reasonable man

Walking that long red road,
I’ve got to let the living go.
Or the ground will crack and fold,
To take
The shadow of things
That grew through you.

O’ how light
Would flow
through you now.

You have fallen from a nightmare alone
You have strangled the morning with sobs
Begging a stranger, starving, weak and sorrow
To tell you that “You are a good man, my God”
Watching water where we cannot follow

To the secret windows
Where they sit, where they are
In an old grove of elms your grandmother planted…
Waiting

Alex, the Bill Clinton Chauvanist

2008-02-23T14:56:00.000-08:00

Last night I spoke with the Bill Clinton Chauvanist about the poem I gave him.
He came over with our good mutual friend to my new home in an old manor house by the creek. We were having a small party. He was wearing all brown cordouroy and I couldn't help but give him shit about it, and everything he said, he's just such an easy target and I just know him somehow.

I was telling an anectdote about being the only female player on an all male baseball team. I was eight years old, and inspired by the sport and a budding feminist, I made a petition and sent it to Bill Clinton. I wanted women to play professional baseball. I got quite a few signatures, and I got a signed letter and a photo from him in return.

I was telling this story, and then Alex turned to me and told me, "You'll like this, my dad worked on the superfund sights for Bill Clinton and went to a banquet at the White House. We have a picture of them together." His parents were Ecological spokespeople for Walmart as well (I know, can it get more evil?).
"Why did you think I'd like that?" I could feel my eyes dancing with surpressed laughter, which is how I usually look at him. "Because of the title of that poem about you?"
He shook his head and shot me that horrible Ben Afflec grin but didn't say anything. "What did you think of that poem? We've never talked about it since I gave it to you."
"I still have it. I keep that poem. I know exactly where it is right now."
"Wow, that's a surprise."
"It's good to know someone who actually sees things - who has insight."
"Well, that's incredible. I thought I totally freaked you out."

Then later on, I started laughing at something he said, "Are you completely heartless? Jesus."
"What, did you think I was serious?"
"You're just that convincing as a soulless bastard Alexander, I can't help it." I've always called him by his full name, it's kind of a mean psychological trick because he once told me thats what his mother calls him.
For most of the party I was occupied with a particularily intense drunk dial, so I was holed up in my sun porch listening to the drunken footfalls around me. At one point Alex came in my room and dropped a piece of paper off with a some drawings he had made in day glo paint. "This is for you. I made it for you."
So now I have my name in day glo in return for an insightful, malicious poem.

And we were at that piano often

2008-02-18T22:17:00.000-08:00

When we weren’t at that piano
we were walking to ease restlessness,
and sometimes he’d play his mandolin to the cemetery where I had kissed him and
we never spoke of again, but he did
jump right into an open grave because it was a good photo op.

A week or so later, we were in bed touching like children,
but I'm past puberty,
and his singing breath trembled at my ear,
and we were in a small room with his music hands, and I could not help it; and somehow he brushed my hair back from my forehead with his drunk magic, and kissed that ol time religion to my mouth

My SOU poem:aka retard college

2008-02-11T11:44:00.001-08:00

Riding my bike everyday,
Fills me with rage.
I get very particular,
about my personal space.

Metallic cape guy better not get
in my personal space

I get uppity and self important
like most bikers

I went to the SOU art museum
and someone had done a piece
Called "Cutting"
The medium was razor blades and blood on 14X16 paper

I went to the SOU art museum
And I had to look at shapes
Placed
Like liquid art deco waste
Molded into unoffending rubix cubes
I can make art.
I will get "Cutting" wet
And paste it to The Rubix Cube Shit
So I wont have to look at either.

false translation

2008-02-11T11:43:00.001-08:00

Homophone from Cesar Vallejo's Trilce VI

El traje que vestí mañana
no lo ha lavado mi lavandera:
lo lavaba en sus venas otilinas,
en el chorro de su corazón, y hoy no he
de preguntarme si yo dejaba
el traje turbio de injusticia.

A hora que no hay quien vaya a las aguas,
en mis falsillas encañona
el lienzo para emplumar, y todas las cosas
del velador de tánto qué será de mí,
todas no están mías
a mi lado.
Quedaron de su propiedad,
fratesadas, selladas con su trigueña bondad.

Y si supiera si ha de volver;
y si supiera qué mañana entrará
a entregarme las ropas lavadas, mi aquella
lavandera del alma. Que mañana entrará
satisfecha, capulí de obrería, dichosa
de probar que sí sabe, que sí puede
¡CÓMO NO VA A PODER!
azular y planchar todos los caos.

My false translation:

The trajectory vested in tommorow
Has no grace lifted from the veranda
No lovers touch under palace trellises
And in the fire of your cancer, no one knows
The pregnancy of your disease
A trajectory of tinged injustices

Of whores who know hay fever vaginally
and misery faked at climax
all the licentious parasites smoke, today has cost
A revolver taste where soft once was

Today trades misery
For lovers
Captain did proposition
fraternization, selling female vocal chords
For his supper without that revolver
For his supper where tomorrow intrudes
In the garden’s underwear made of rope ladders
"My voice?"
Lavender colored days. Whose tomorrow intrudes
Satisfied, copulating the moment, dividing
a problem in the self, he who shouts
“COME ON OUT AND SHOOT ME!"

For loveless pleasure has cost us.

Apocalypse...now?

2008-01-23T09:51:00.000-08:00

The moonlit tide
Is atomic and the color
of distant dead planet sunsets

Across the grand garden of Earth
Basil, rosemary and thyme,
crystallized,
into a plasma of
exploding infinite,
salt fires
on skinless beasts

Riding
Dead water
On this hulking ghost ship

Odysessus

2008-01-22T13:40:00.001-08:00

Penelope and her obsessive compulsive tapestry
the woman wove a forcefield
She threaded it into her hair
stitched to her skin
A rich mandala of color and light
dominated by witches, mermaids, monsters
and Gods
A hint of master's face
flickering in torchlight
raised and eyeless
lit like a blade

one night she cuts it out
shreds it to ribbons
and floats down to the beach
naked save moonlight

the gravity is unbearable
so she joins with the sea
only to wake up the next morning
and weave it all over again

Creative writing II

2008-01-15T16:46:00.000-08:00

Sound poem using J and Lo

Led astray was the jaybird
Lording glittering jasper
In his loam-filled bamboo nest
Lo, and behold!
He was turned macaw on treasure
Lo, and behold!
He grew fond of screaming at jaywalking squirrels
about the weather
_

The most unpoetic and unemotional love poem we could write

Your features are symmetrical
And I don't need to weigh you
to know you don't eat too much
You have good hygiene
If we made love
You wouldn't need a paper bag
or good, soft lighting

Melting mansion

2008-01-03T02:14:00.001-08:00

Last night dreamt I was walking along a sandstone path next to an aquaduct flowing with water. I was in the desert, it was very warm outside, I could feel the sun on my skin. I was led to a very large old mansion that was falling apart. It was full of children, and I realized only a few of the children were living.

The light would catch one of their faces and they'd become transparent for a moment, with their flesh hanging in threads. There was a room that would do the same thing... a nicely furnished, stately room melted before my eyes into an attic with missing floor planks. Violet, dirty curtains draped the musty furniture. For a while I ran from the dead children and tried to avoid falling down to the lower levels of the mansion, and spied on them from a loft. But then the kids started to play games with me, and I was soon laughing with them.

For some reason I always dream of giant old Victorian houses that linger with the presence of the dead. Why is this? The house I grew up in is Victorian, 100 yrs old. In the early 1900's it was a school for girls, but it is by no means large. The houses in my dreams often having moving walls or trap doors, or winding staircases that lead to secret chambers. What does it mean, Sigmund, Jung, anyone?

Peace on Earth

2007-12-25T02:12:00.000-08:00

I am truly, truly mystified at how things come to pass. I wonder if I am alone in many of my ideas, desires and inclinations.
Sometimes, things are just so ludicrious and outlandish that I take a step back and laugh at myself and the tangled webs that I weave myself into. Being fickle,irresponsible, magnetic, and scattered suits me and O', how it plagues me. I am one giant inept debacle, but I find it too goddamn funny to be phased. There are too many beautiful, sacred, hilarious things around.

Even Christmas is getting to me. I look around at everyone I know and fall in love with them.
I often hope to get lost in love, for it thrusts me into the heart of what I find beautiful.
Listen Children, for there is a legend, that long ago, before Coca Cola created Santa Claus, Christmas was about something entirely different...

2007-12-15T21:18:00.001-08:00

“If you want to become full, let yourself be empty. If you want to be reborn, let yourself die. If you want to be given everything, give everything up.” – Lao Tzu

Oregon!

2007-12-12T23:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, through the site called www.couchsurfing.com, I was contacted by a 25 yr old from Berkeley named Jeff asking if he could sleep on our couch for a night or two with a friend of his. Rosey and I thought it was great idea, so we invited our first couch surfers into our home. They came over with a case of beer, a PT cruiser, a GPS, walkie talkies, headlamps, and food. We proceeded to get drunk, rowdy, and happy. Didn't fall asleep until the sun was just rising after a night that was beyond surreal...then woke up at 10 o clock and headed out towards Crater Lake. Up and up, out into the woods. The woods got thicker and thicker, we stopped in a very backwoods litte town called Prospect where we posed in front of an old wagon for photos and climbed in between two three hundred year old Doug Firs that had grown together. Jeff and his friend Greg were hysterical. Jeff was a redheaded, fast talking political activist with intense leadership skills and Greg was a demure East Coast type who was majoring in Demographics - which means the study of populations.
Proceeded up the mountain. Made up a rhyme;
"Billy goat gruff
Huffs and puffs;
'I love goat muff-muff."
The snow started increasing, the woods got deep and full. The PT Cruiser warbled around the road. We stopped at a big empty lodge and pulled three foot long icicles off the roof and did battle. The sun was shining, blaring against the white snow, and snarls of clouds rippled through the sky. To the top, where we were met with a long shining expanse of deep velvet lake, night blue, ringed by snowcapped mini peaks. Crater Lake. We bathed in its glory, took photos, ate lunch and fed pretty black and white birds. Visited the visitor center where I chatted up the lady behind the counter and she told me I should try to get a job there. Then, we fucked around in the snow like reckless kids, Jeff at the helm and full of fire. Down the mountain - further! Immediately we were sliding all around the road, spun out - backwards, and we were lodged in a snowbank. Piled out, dug out the car, pushed like maniacs, and freed the beastly PT. Drove about five more minutes and then flew right into another snow bank. This time we were a bit deeper. ODOT stopped and helped us, burly mountain men with orange vests and deep wood drawls. They even broke our shovel! Jeff clambered under the car and took immediate charge, tying on the chains. Finally, we freed it and had a good Go Team!

Got home, ate pizza, napped good and hard, then to the hotspring. At the hotspring in the wood lined sauna, a large group of men broke out into song and sang in rounds. I even joined in after I learned a little. Ah. Then this morning our travelers left happy, and Rosey and I drove up to Mt. Ashland in the epic, meandering sunlight, where we sketched Mt. Shasta.

For Caitlin

2007-12-08T01:25:00.000-08:00

She rides a golden red sail
Charting sea currents with a telescope
To the rhythm of the stars
Her hands are anthropomorphic:
Trailing vines and bluetones,
Bird wings carving treesongs,
they spin a sky shaped web
Out of the hair of strangers

The writing life

2007-12-05T13:44:00.000-08:00

A poem is a moment dismantled. It is a note, a sliver, a windowsill daydream projecting onto someone from the inside out. I like to collect threads and weave them into myself. What is there to learn about the dynamic human spirit? What is there to know about poetry; skill, tact, art? There are quiet chalked lips kissing colored paper. There are layers and layers of invisible hands spinning webs, looming quilts - playing the harp. There are children born intact and hungry for words. There is paint splattered gore, there is ugliness transmuted into white orchids. There are paper airplane loveletters terrorizing your shit. There are night dreams that linger for years, painting the nerves beneath skin, sending recurring themes in electric impulses. There are kindred writing souls out there, music catches them off guard, they sigh at the sight of a snowy field at night, colors can fill their bones up. And the inked impulse to write, write, dark confounding pulses - a bound, dead tree scrawled with a whole life.

Introduction to Intertribal Dance at Southern Oregon University

2007-12-05T03:55:00.000-08:00

To name it would be alltogether wrong

2007-12-05T03:31:00.001-08:00

Will I always long for invisible things?
I was told once that "there is no grey,
If it doesn't feel right it probably isn't. "

I want some
thing I do not deserve,
yet I have been given much,
I am grateful,
But I want to be humble.

2007-12-03T23:27:00.000-08:00

My best friend Caitlin's little brother screaming as she attacks him, he has the best scream ever.

Why I love Ashland

2007-12-03T23:12:00.000-08:00

From the top of Mt. Ashland.

Intangible comfort

2007-12-03T14:14:00.000-08:00

Asleep yesterday morning very early under Pendelton blankets on the couch...in weird half sleep. I hear James moving about distantly. Feel him come to the couch and fix my blankets - in that half second, as he does this, I smile to myself and think it would be a hilarious joke to roll off the couch at this exact moment... I turned over myself rolling slowly couch still there and asleep and get caught in the blanket rolling and I. float... I feel strange a little later half expecting to be on the floor, intangible almost like James had wrapped me up in a net, like a blessing in my sleep.

Weird dreams

2007-11-29T16:00:00.000-08:00

Dreamt about watching the Vagina Monologues in an auditorium. It was intermission. The guy in the panda suit who wanders around campus was there. Two young unfamilar writers; one of them was wearing an indie shirt and was asking everyone, "What do you think of it?" It was annoying, but I couldn't help but admire his lilting country drawl and that spot in the very center of his breastplate - the shirt did fit nicely, I'll give him that.

Many times I'll be thrust into a dream with long threads of story culminating, as if I've lived a completely different life and am unconcioulsy aware of millions of minute details and layers. It's like waking up in the middle of a movie I've seen many times before, but don't remember the end of.

Then dreamt I had a pack of kittens. Awwww!

Black swan

2007-11-26T14:08:00.000-08:00

Dreamt that I was photographing a couple swimming in the ocean. They were holding onto each other beneath a tall dock, and I was swimming with my camera in my hands. When I gave the word, a pile of flowers would be thrown onto the couple from the dock. When this happened I ordered them to kiss. This repeated many times, the flowers, the kissing, etc. Then a dead black swan floated next to them and I photographed it, and it also became covered in flowers.

So, a few things make sense-the ocean is the unconcious. The ocean is infinite. Photography; the eye, the past. Flowers; kindness, passion, perfection, and in still life paintings they often represent the fleeting of the present and hint at death. The couple; relationships. Black swanas...? I didn't know.
So I looked it up.

For some 1500 years the black swan existed in the European imagination as a metaphor for that which could not exist....

Thom Yorke's Black Swan;

We are black swans, black swans
(but I made it to the top, but I made it to the top)
And for spare parts, we're broken up

Joshua tree?

2007-11-20T22:40:00.000-08:00

So, I want to go backpacking out in the desert during winter break. I am completely prepared to go it alone, but company would be fun. I asked Noah what he thought about it.
“Going out to the desert by yourself, I don’t think that will help you, Annie, I think that will kill you."
To paraphrase:
"Yeah, well I’ll come with you as long as it doesn’t turn out like this: we hitchhike there with a guy who will only drive us if we smoke a pound of hash, and then you dose me, in the middle of the desert. Completely stranded. And I have No Idea what’s up because I’m tripping on acid and you chew on my foot because, naturally, we're starving to death. As long as that doesn't happen, you know - I guess I'm cool."

Here is a photo that I took of Noah playing a crazy organ.

A pocket of silence

2007-11-14T20:54:00.000-08:00

There is blue braille under his words
He tells me that lies sound like a tongue grazing metal.
Stalagmite fissures erupt in his eyes,
he's molting-
Long sheaths of static fragment.

I can tell he wants to troubleshoot all over-
maybe in my face, maybe fatally, but his mouth
Suddenly fills with white down feathers;
"I'm magnified in this...quiet," he says,
I don't want to go back in there.
I get hungry all the time
And the vitamins taste like walls
My hands feel detached-"
I interrupt, "How is the quiet different out there?"
He looks at me long
Those pupil tendrils throbbing to the beat of his words,
"It's a heavier quiet, it's alive."

City nostalgia

2007-11-13T15:10:00.002-08:00

Sitting on top of a roof by the Willamete River in downtown Portland.

Break down my concepts, I kick it complex

2007-11-08T10:34:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I set out at about two with a large cardboard sign that I had scrawled "North" on. I walked through Ashland carrying it above my head. I had walked about a half hour before a woman and her three year old pulled over and picked me up. They drove me to the freeway exit. Her child was incredibly cute and asked a million questions. After that, I was picked up by two hippies heading to a commune in Wolf Creek. They offered to drop me in Grants Pass, but I wanted to see what Wolf Creek was like. It was a very backwoods little town. I wrote,
"Backlit mountain communes
Crystal refugees, man behind the counter,
all indigo eyed and heavy with presence.
Fog licked hills
strangers passing me flood dimmed headlights
and all is rushing flame of time
colored fall flickering ore of the earth
I am wating by the side of the road
Slip pepper spray up my sleeve
I chew my lip, eyeing everyone as a potential ride
Where am I? Wilderness.
A fountain, a campsite, a gas station, I wait.
What if there's a clever trucker out there
With an eye for mischeif and a hatred for hippies?
I wait.
I must admitt I enjoy the adreniline of this
How often do we get to risk life in our padded box?
I wait, scrub jays diddle daddle, make bamboo throated screeches.
Patience - I beeseech you!

The light had gotten very intense-it was about sixty degrees in the sun and fifty in the shade, the sky was clear white blue. I was wandering some obscure road with my sign and my big backpack. A trucker leaned out his window and told me he was going to Eugene after he dropped of some mail. He was a postal truck. Now I've heard some stories about truckers and hitchiking, on the one hand, they are very likely to pick up hitchikers because they haul long ways and also get lonely, on the other, they are usually creepers. This guy said he grew up in Talent, near Ashland and lived in Eugene and there was something in the way he spoke that signalled he was harmless.

He came back around and I climbed into his huge truck. The man driving me was either extremely intense, or a very good pathological liar. He said he'd lived in about six different places, that he used to have dreadlocks, that he worked on a chicken farm, that he'd found false teeth in an abandoned house full of gold caps, that he was a locksmith, that he was creating a generator for a car powered off of magnets. I just let him talk, enjoying it. He was a very nice guy, and would honk his horn every time some cracked out little kid would do the arm pump. I think I also sold him on the concept of yoga, because if he wasn't a chronic liar - he had horrible back pain.

We stopped every little while in little podunk towns to drop off mail, and at one place we stopped right next to a huge abandoned Mason lodge. While he was unloading, I explored. A huge paper mill was billowing in the distance, the sun was setting. I ripped off one of the boards and revealed a broken window. Two bats burst out of the darkness, and I ran back to the truck. Back on the road.

Finally, to Eugene. I walked to Caitlin's bunkhouse and she met me with enthusiasm and sushi. We drank a nip or two of wine, and headed off to an extremely large church.

Where we saw Krishna Das:

It was incredible. It's hard for me to transmute such an experience, especially to those of you out of context. I wonder how easily one would write it off as hippie bullshit. So I'll just say that I laughed, cried, prayed and sang.

Thursday night, my good friend Joel, who had been hitchiking up to Eugene from Arcata, was stranded at the Seven Feathers casino in the dark. He called his parents, who called me, because he had forgotten my number and was without a cellphone.All of this seemed just Joel's luck - he can be very unlucky (whereas I have a bit of luck, the luck of the Irish perhaps).

Immediately I remembered that my friend Spencer was driving up to Eugene, and got a hold of him. If anyone can handle an adventure, it is Spencer. Spencer was born and raised amoung the cornfields of Indiana, but was predestined to be a Dead Head. He came to Ashland where he was amazed that it was okay to be a hippie. He plays some funky guitar, and is constantly mouthing off. I remember in the dorms, I'd be trying to go to sleep on a Tuesday and would hear him screaming repeatedly,at two in morning, "It's not sleepy time, it's rock and roll time you mother fuckas!"
"So, go, find Joel, find him!"
"Okay, I'm five miles away! Find Joel. I'm gonna just scream his name out the windah!"
"Look near the Burger King!" In my mind I could see Joel unhappily scarfing a huge burger to cope.
Miraculously, Spencer finds Joel - in front of the Burger King. Joel had no idea he was being looked for, and totally flipped shit when he saw Spencer. When we met up with Joel in Eugene, we also realized that he had been picked up by our good friend ChronicClaus, who gifted him with a giant bag of weed and had slept on our couch for the week prior to this one!!

Then, I saw Bassnectar again. He threw down. I almost passed out a few times in the show from sheer exhaustion and the lack of air from all the hippies mobbing it up. Then walked around the U of O campus until five in the morning with Spencer and Joel, musing on the night, and climibing trees.

Then just floated about Eugene for a couple more days, went to a holiday bazaar with Caitlin and her grandmother who bought me chocolate and an excellent dinner. "I just tell people I'm rich." I really enjoyed the vibe of Eugene and just languidly absorbed it. Joel, Caitlin and I ended up watching Into the Wild. I highly reccomend that movie, we were all stricken for hours afterward, and it seemed to be exactly the vibe that Joel and I were on, with our recent forays into hitchiking.

Then Sunday came, and Joel and I hit the road. We stood at one exit for a while, and a man in a mini van picked us up and dropped us off on the highway, in between an exit and the full on I-5.
The full rush of traffic rippled over us, we couldn't hear each other speak. Homeless guy after homeless guy pestered us. Then, miraculously a very fit lean old guy motioned to us to get in his truck. His truck was very large and spacious, and I ended up sitting on his cabin bunk for the entire duration of the ride. The man turned out to be very, very quiet and nice. He seemed a bit lonely. I read the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.
I ended up leaving the man a nice little note telling him, "Thank you so much for picking us up. I enjoyed the general neatness of your truck and your person." I then drew some mountain ranges and big flower on the back, and left him a little shard of a crystal on top. And that concludes my adventure.

Art as vanity

2007-11-05T09:36:00.000-08:00

"People say, 'You're incredibly arrogant,'' Watson told me. 'I say, when you're dealing with a species that's as arrogant as the human race you've got to be arrogant to believe that you can actually change it.' He regards civilization's greatest artistic and cultural achievments-from architecture to music to film-as expressions of human vanity, 'worthless to the earth.' He sometimes asks people to imagine the outrage that would occur if someone were to destroy, say, the Vatican or the "Mona Lisa," and he compares that with the indifference that people exhibit toward the mass extinction of plants and animals. 'In an anthropocentric society, a harsh judgement is given to those that destroy or seek to destroy the creations of humanity,' he has written. 'Monkeywrench a bulldozer and they will call you a vandal. Spike a tree and they will call you a terrorist. Liberate a coyote from a trap and they will call you a theif. Yet if a human destroys the wonders of creation, the beauty of the natural world, then anthropocentric society calls such people loggers, miners, developers, engineers, and businessmen.' "
-from the article Neptune's Navy by Raffi KhatchaDourian, an article about Paul Watson and his fleet including the Sea Shepherd

Read the full article, I reccomend it.

I talked to my dad last night and was impressed that he's belonged to the Sea Shepherd society for twenty years. Way to go Pops!

Adbusters.org

2007-11-02T17:47:00.000-07:00

"One can make the case that we have lost the capacity for abstract thought. When we read, or listen to the radio, the mind forms images in response. The same can be said to occur when an illustration provokes the viewer to consider its symbolic relationship to reality. Abstraction encourages the mind to bridge the distance from suggestion to reality. There are certain tribes in Africa that do not distinguish between dream life and daily life. We find ourselves in a similar condition, but our virtual reality fails to serve our deepest needs.

In our world, reality has been replaced by forms of entertainment that require little mental activity and encourage inertia and apathy. How else can we explain the incredible indifference to their own lives and interests that characterizes the American people at this time? The misrepresentations of government, the outrageous dishonesty of business, the attacks on our civil rights, the collapse of our educational system and the failures of our social safety nets have produced almost no response or indignation from the American public. When Bush orders an aircraft carrier moved at a cost of $1 million so he can land on the deck without San Diego being visible in the background, he is aware that this manipulative misrepresentation will not affect his popularity, even after it is disclosed. I am certain, as it becomes increasingly obvious that we were deliberately lied to in order to justify a war with Iraq, there will be no general sense of betrayal. We no longer understand the relationship between cause and effect." -Virtual Addiction

Full circle

2007-11-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

Last night, while he was trpping on Lsd after a night of Halloween at four in the morning- I gave The Bill Clinton Chauvanist the poem I wrote about him last spring. This man and I, if not's obvious, had a really nasty falling out, and with good reason - he's horrible. He's completely heartless, but that's always something I liked about him. I know this man is going to either go very far in life by being an evil heartless bastard with a charismatic, endearing streak, or drink himself retarded at 27. I had always wanted to show him that poem, because I think it was my first success at writing a poem that was heavy handed and spiteful, so I scratched out an edited copy of the poem for him and gave it to him. It will probably reinforce my reputation amoung that group as being "spooky," but I hope it resonates.

BLAHRHG

2007-10-29T12:08:00.000-07:00

I am sick wrapped in a blanket watching Return of the Jedi. Someone needs to hold me or AT LEAST spoon feed me, asap.

mercurial

2007-10-28T21:41:00.000-07:00

I am much too capricious for my human form. I say I want quiet, but there is always the want to dissolve, to travel, to absorb new ways of life. I need flight, I need transfiguration. O, I am feverish and morose pining after invisible things.

Creative Writing Class Excercise, poem 3 of 3

2007-10-28T20:47:00.000-07:00

There is a stone plain
That I wander.
I know in its' refracted light.

In my fever inventions,
Violent embroidered night terrors
Crease strorm fragments
Across fogged eyelid lattices.

A library of memories
Echoes through me
Like shattered clay

Vacay

2007-10-21T16:55:00.000-07:00

Visting places is often more stress than it is worth. I am ready to hunker into Ashland now for a good while, I want to be enconscend and anonymous in a little ball wrapped in quiet in between two mountain ranges. With this coming winter I am ready to burrow into the vein of small town life and write myself sane, complete. I want to evolve. Seeing Portland this weekend, and Humboldt the weekend before, was a double edged sword of drama, stress, and too much fun to the point of mental, physical, and spiritual taxation.

Aesthetics

2007-10-15T23:40:00.000-07:00

"Mistrustful of passion, the twentieth century gradually came to doubt beauty itself. The contrast between helping the suffering and painting them, between fighting for them and writing about them, became starker and deeper.
Wary of the ability of art to transmute the greatest horrors into objects of beauty, philosophy disavowed it and relegated the beauty of human beings and ordinary things, inseperable as it is from yearning and from the body, to biology and psychology, to fashion, to advertising, and marketing."

From the book Only a Promise of Happiness, The place of Beauty in a World of Art

Creative Writing class excercise

2007-10-11T01:33:00.000-07:00

The prompt was, we had to start with, "It was all too wonderful for me."
*
It was too wonderful for me. I looked at my friend Dorian who was silloheuted by miles and miles of multicolored light fading into New Jersey. He caught the look in my eye.
“You look drunk!”
“I feel drunk.”
We were forty stories high on Daisy’s penthouse balcony, surveying the New York City skyline. Central Park in fall spread out like black fire before us and was buried in a crystallized matrix. Not a city, but The City.
I was dizzy, I was electric. I smoked a cigarette feverishly and breathed in a hyperventiling, metronoming wavelength. New York was everything, it was the red hot heart-center of America.
Dorian and I fell into a manic discourse on the nature of the city, talking over each other; shifting tectonic plates, thousands of immigrants, the nature of money, nicotine and Crystal. And the city at night! The cloak of anonymity, the subway, the criminals, the grime, the radioactive Hudson River, the throngs of the powerful! Daisy’s parents owned an art museum; there was an authentic Andy Warhol staring me in the face when I went to the bathroom. Oh, the obscene wealth! Sinatra’s voice started winding through my mind. New York, New York, I want to be part of it…
I had to go inside, my ecstatic vertigo was lingering on insanity, I was eyeing Central Park like a soft pool to jump into. Come fly with me, let’s fly away…
Inside I was meted with an intimidating gaggle of blossoming socialites. Dorian had briefed me earlier, but I was still grasping for the proper social ettiquite. “That’s Andre, his parents literally own France. He works the door at Lush.” He was wearing a silver gray suit, (“Armani,” Dorian had hissed in my ear,) his hair was completely smoothed back and immaculate, and his body was tuned. He
smelled like money.
He wasn’t particularily handsome but every woman in the room was watching him. He could have charmed the wedding dress off Princess Diana, mile long train and all, walked out on her the next morning, and left a fifty on her bedside table. There was grace and music in his every word, his steps, his eyes. Suddenly, he turned his attention to me; “What do you think of New York?”
I stopped myself from melting-that artful eyebrow raise, that resplendent skin, the millions in dental work, a pedigree of perfect breeding. My euphoria bloomed with a deep blush, buoying my courage. I looked at him dead-on, unflinching, and said, “It’s terrifying.”

Ashland, again

2007-10-10T00:26:00.000-07:00

Todays list of events...
Went to Small Group Communication where we reverted back to kindergartne. We built structures made from pipe cleaners, straws, crayons, note cards, popsicle sticks, glue, tape... My group made Rapunzel's castle gone to Burning Man. It was at least three feet tall. Other groups made; a bird, a drive in movie theatre, a pretty beach house, and a murder scene in a garden. We did it to study group dynamics but came out with some pretty epic art pieces as a result. It's very strange working in a group learning about working in a group watching yourself work within a group...

Then went to creative writing with Craig Wright. He brought his adorable son who drew on the board while he learned. I greatly enjoy Mr. Wright but am not ready to describe him, I don't have a handle on him at all yet.

Then to Intertribal Dance, where we drummed, sang, and danced for the first time. I danced with my instructor Brent in front of the whole class as an example, and was incredibly humbled. He is so radiant with presence and spirit, and he's a natural performer so he knows how to play up his charm. Brent's kid Justice was there again, and his other daughter. Justice bit her, and had a bandanna on, like a real G. He did sommersaults and cartwheels in the back while Brent drummed.

Then tonight, watched Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, a Spanish movie with a crazy young Antonio Banderas who kidnaps some actress so she'll fall in love with him. After that, an arborist/treesitter/tree engineer came over and drank some wine with us and talked about living in a tree and getting pepper sprayed in the face at a protest.
To finish, I am impressed with today. Oh Ashland! I am in love with you, all is a vision...
Now it's raining. The creek is louder, and water is flickering through the tree out my back window.

A pen drawing of a tree I did a few years ago.

Moon baths

2007-10-09T00:39:00.000-07:00

"The moon baths crystallized many of Sabina's desires and orientations. Up to that moment she had only experienced a simple rebellion against the lives which surrounded her, but now she began to see the forms and colors of other lives, realms much deeper and stranger and remote to be discovered..."
-Anais Nin

Whooping It Up In The Uncanny Valley

From Adbusters #68, Nov-Dec 2006

One minute I’m sleeping like a goddamn baby, cradled in the web of a strange but pleasant dream. The next, I’m desperately trying to extract myself from the tangle of sweaty sheets, stumbling towards the bathroom,
and propping open the lid before blammo.

After that, everything becomes crystal clear.

“You okay, hon?” Shannon called from the bed.

There I was, clutching the cold porcelain bowl, trembling like a china cabinet in an earthquake, tears streaming down my face and vomit stinging my nostrils. I wanted to say, “Great tofu tetrazini last night, Hun,” but a more decisive answer was forthcoming. I kicked the door closed and aimed my head over the hole just in time for round two.

When I’d finished she asked through the closed door if I’d be going
to work.

“Yes.”

“How about tea? Want tea?”

Was she intentionally making her voice sound high and pinched? I belched in reply. It felt like a blow torch had just gone off in my throat.

“Mint’s good for this sort of thing.”

“Fine, fine, whatever,” I said, wiping the whole side of my face against the toilet paper roll.

It wasn’t until I had gotten into the shower and was pissing a warm, orangey stream down the drain that I realized just how good I felt. Damn good. You know the way that so-called unpleasant things – like taking a huge shit that leaves your rectum raw and bloody, falling off your bike and winding up with a leg full of gravel, or fucking the wrong girl at the right time, because one or both of you is married and you’re twice her age – can make you feel really alive in an eerie, this is it way? Well, it was like that. So, when it happened again the next morning, I celebrated by running Shannon’s bidet, swishing the water around my mouth, and spitting it full force against the open toilet seat. The following day it came at my office, just ten minutes before patients started arriving. In the middle of HWY 10 gridlock the morning after that. Wonderful, wonderful feeling every time. Before one gastric disaster could finish, I found myself longing for the next. I even tried to spur these episodes by closing my eyes and imagining that feeling of untenable fullness, a surge, and then, ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.
-Read the full story Here Now

Creepy

2007-10-07T19:07:00.001-07:00

Saw two opposums fighting ruthlessly in the little stream outside my bedroom window in the middle of the night.

That's a good line Jesus

2007-10-06T15:48:00.000-07:00

When I woke
I had walked through their valley
Of the shadow of eyeless dead
“O’ fire walk with me”

I saw sheaths of flesh hang from obese ghosts
Hungrily mawing the apocalyptic cud
Doomsday! say the naysayers
Doomsday! say the children of love

Water, run with me!
My skin is searing!
Light, protect and keep me
Dark Horse Jesus Waits
He has sex with pagan angels
Under bridges
He’s a charismatic
He circumsized himself
With a seashell in the desert
While singing a sea shanty
In a cowboy hat
And he won’t return my calls
He’s too busy horsewhispering
And trading crystals among
His harem of 16 year old girls
They’ve all given it up to Christ
He even wears their flavored lipgloss

We were a couple once
After our first kiss,
He tasted magnanimous.
Noble, tall, soft and kind,
Slow and weighted-
He whispered My Name, and then;
“You’re soul is the spirit of God.”

I was dizzy,
I was breath, the thrum of voice
I was laughter, I was laughing, I was lush canopy
Spreading skin-thin over light
And I told him,
“That’s a Good Line Jesus,
You should use it in that book
You're writing.”

----
("Fire Walk With Me" is from David Lynch's Twin Peaks.)

Last night

2007-10-06T15:02:00.000-07:00

I dreamt that I was with this beautiful blonde, tall man, who grabbed me by the shoulders and sat me down. He said, "Have you ever been hypnotized before?" "No." "Would you like to?" "Sure." Instantly, he dug his fingertips into my shoulderblades on pressure points, then relaxed, drew soothing hands across my brow, then did this langorous, groping swipe down the center of my face. I instantly fell into a relaxed trance, it was wholly vivid and felt intoxicatingly good. Suddenly Caitlin was there at my side, and he consulted her. "Do you want her to make up a grocery list for a puppet or pretend to be a drunken abusive mother?"
"Drunken abusive mother."
I fought out of the trance heavily, I was incredibly wieghted and all my motions were slowed - "No." I bit the man's arm, "I don't want to be hypnotized anymore."
Other mismatched parts of the dream - visited the side of river looking for a drowned friend, was chased up boulders and had to manuever a spider hole in order to escape.

A few nights ago dreamt that I was at a hippie festival by the columbia river, and there was a giant haunted pirate ship moored there with dark greenish, magenta sails. Rosey, Caitlin and I climbed into the ship and realized it was also a church. Up to the attric where things levitated into the air and flew around and tried to kill us. Jumped ship and went swimming in the river. Yesterday morning found out that there's going to be a post-Burning Man festival under the Fremont bridge on October 20th, with all the weird feeling one gets when faced with a coincidence. If there's a pirate ship, will I board it? If my pow wow isn't that weekend expect to see me in the city.

Introduction to Intertribal Dance

2007-10-04T19:14:00.001-07:00

Today I went to Introduction to Intertribal Dance and sat in a circle. My instructor, Brent Florendo had his young son Justice on his lap - who was so pretty I thought he was a little girl. For the entire duration of the class this child sucked on a lolipop, made screeching noises, rolled around, bit his arm...towards the end of class he even started running and jumping onto Brent's lap and he didn't even flinch. Sometimes he'd bop him on the forehead and say, "Fry bread" and the child would laugh uproariously and behave for a little bit.
The full scope of the class finally hit me today. Brent has been trained as an opera singer and is a professional dancer in many different styles. He's also one of those teachers that can see right through you. I will be receiving dance lessons, vocal training, instruction on drumming and Native culture all at once. I understand that
this class is probably very specific to Southern Oregon, with it's background in the theatre and the rarity of native american studies classes in general, and I am grateful. I will also get to sing, dance, and drum in a pow wow, and I am excited.

On Ashland

2007-10-04T10:47:00.000-07:00

So, about that tightly strung little yoga momma who lived below us?
Well, that letter I wrote had an excellent effect, and she wrote me back and gifted Rosey and I a small yellow candle with a bee on top.
"Dear Annie,
Your note and gift made my spirit soar! Thank you for your courage, honesty and willingness to make yourself vulnerable by expressing yourself so truly in your gorgeous note and by giving me the beautiful stone (which I have in a special place)."
Then it goes on for about two pages, and brought tears to my eyes. I love small random acts of kindness, as Henry Miller says,
"But I gave! The effect was dizzying. No one can estimate the results of a good deed, of a kind word." Tropic of Capricorn.

I enjoy waking up early enough in the mornings to have tea and look out my porch at the rolling, yellow hills and then the green ones behind me. I have a beautiful view. Last night I wandered Ashland alone for an hour at about eleven o clock. It felt like a complete ghost town. Walked by the graveyard and felt the pull of frightening October. I let out long toneless whistles, and felt affonted with the vibrating silence. Then a girl rode by me on her bike and hit some minute curb and almost crashed violently, but saved herself. I decided I shouldn't, even causually, try to conjure the dead at night. Despite my personal history of being related to the Eddy Brothers.

I've always been a bit spooky I guess.

Photograph is a portrait of me done by Nick Abruscato

Mental Grocery list for Winter

2007-10-01T20:00:00.001-07:00

Understand the full value of silence
Develop a passable but confident singing voice
Memorize stories and poems for campfires
Read like a motherfucker
Finish a short story
Remain active

Love letter

2007-10-01T19:45:00.000-07:00

All these whirlwind feeling notes skimming seashell skin palpitations and bleeding heart sentiments, you always were sentimental, with your cornflower blue eyes and easy, sensitive mouth. You flow deeply and with full resolution. I enjoy watching feelings flit through your shoulders, can see your jaw tighten, your eyes seethe with quietly subdued rage.
We are absent and we stare into the abyss screaming echoes at each other about love and full throated emotional transaction. Your finger between my eyebrows and I am transported into your spirit suddenly, a brief spasm of crenalated, microscopic time shifting through our breath. I want to mix breath, I want to mix breath into praying and singing. Why do you sit there, channeling, pulling out the deep dark waters behind your eyes-exuding that auramatic pulse. I want to tie you up with vines and rub rose petals across your eyelids, lick honey off your wrists, I want to magnify the shining flash of your mind against the sun and watch you expand with light.

Dear S.L.

2007-10-01T19:43:00.001-07:00

You smell like Dolce and Gabbana’s
Misty, post-sex Evian shower
Your sneer is like
Indian children going blind
from stiching your Seven jeans

You laugh at plebian customs
Such as Old Navy and tap water
You laugh at lesbians
And Asian tourists
Gawking in Times Square
Before I came to your New York City
You warned me,
“Don’t even think of tilting your head
To crane at a skyscraper,
Or I’ll renounce you,
On the spot. Seriously,
I won't know you."

Goddamn Corn-fed, Bill Clinton-Chauvanist

2007-10-01T19:25:00.000-07:00

He is American
I can’t help but admire his jawline
The smell of cologne, the smell of money, smell
Of dead Confederate boys, of Mexican slave labor
Of napalm-raped natives
Long valley of the shadow of the dead
Reflected in his drunk eyes
The veiled handshake he used-

He threw a man through a window,
On a ruse!
He plays lacrosse, like all chivalrous
21st century men
He snorts lines off Guns, Germs, and Steel
prays for an imperialist sunrise to ease him

He and I are kin,
With our upper-middle class faultlines
Unpure Protestant bloodlines
and horrible Manifest Destiny design

An unfinished collaboration between Dali and Disney

2007-09-30T13:45:00.001-07:00

Destino
I'm not sure if it's out yet, or when it will be.

An Ashland fever

2007-09-26T18:47:00.000-07:00

And now I am sick, sick, sickly. That hippie fest kicked the shit out of my immune system. I'm pretty sure I have a fever right now.
Still feel a little out of place in this quiet Ashland town. My landlord is a bit psychotic, he turned off our electricity today and I found out that he used to spy on his previous tenants. We also have a very tightly strung little yoga momma below us complaining about our music constantly. I guess she called and complained to our landlord, so I decided to write her a very charming little note and gave her a tigers eye stone as apology and "peace offering" for being a loud college student "who likes to dance alone to loud music in her kitchen." I also asked her if there was any way we could compromise and have one incredibly loud hour a month.

Last night was very cozy. We had a potluck. My friend Ryan cooked for Rosey and I while we went grocery shopping. When we came back he had made polenta slices with tomatoes and mushrooms. Then he picked me up in the air and twirled me about. Rosey and I made a couscous vegetable dish and sat around our coffee table picking apart an artichoke and dipping it in lemon butter sauce that our neighbor Jake had brought over.
This morning woke up feeling like a hot swollen postule however, and feverishly treked out to albertsons to get my photos back from the festival, only to find out that the professional film I recieved was slide film, which is alright I guess, because one day I can sit my children down, throw on the projector screen and show them what happens when you do drugs.

You thought I was kidding

2007-09-26T18:11:00.000-07:00

My friend Andrea Michelle Goering took these photos, she kindly drove me out to the festival and shared her tent with me. Click to enlarge!

The Sierra Nevadas from that scary road.

The porch stage, one of three stages.

The field stage at night. Now imagine smoke machines and millions of laser lights.

The field stage crowd during the day.

More of the field with art domes.

This was the forest stage, by far my favorite stage. Just before this photo was taken there was an intense thunderstorm.

Bassnectar throwing down on the Forest Stage.

The opposite altar.

Symbiotic festival

2007-09-24T22:38:00.000-07:00

Raw miss-matched excerpts from my journal:

September 20th, 2007
Driving through California musing on the American dream and the wild gold rush west. Skyscapers rising out of a vast expanse. The leaves are just beginning to flicker with that fall color, I can't believe it's almost October. It's the fall equinox this weekend and I'm going to a giant pagan celebration in the woods. Oh California, you prostitute. Fields of yellow grass, black oaks, vineyards, pockets of patchwork hills. Ah! The Sierra Nevadas are heart-breaking. One lane unpaved winding road. Purples, yellow, golden green, red scrubby rocked woven slopes of molten gray. Oh I could cry from beauty here. Rust colored fissures ...driving up a trail cliff cliff craziest little road ever.
-
Arrived at camp. Saw a shooting star and shared a meal with my vegan neighbor, shaman, dance instructor Shaun. It contained garlic, spinach, avocado, bell peppers, and broccoli. I am embarrassed by how unprepared I am. I only brought cliff bars, nutrigrains and nuts! Rosey and I are separated and there are probably at least 400 people camping here in the dark. I'm going to walk around making our peacock noise in order to find her. The smell of sage and incense is thick.

---
So, what I've seen so far
Hula hoops, drum circles, hack circles, costumes, teepee in the middle of camp. Talke to a woman named Lynx who had built a giant altar which consisted of a pentagram made of branches covered in colored scarves, statues, crystal balls, masks, flowers, mirrors, shells. She gave me an intricate lacey scarf because I remarked upon it. Then walked into a grove of short trees strung together with prayer flags, completely empty. Forest Stage. My companion was a smiley boy with colored tibetan vest and dog paw slippers named Zack. We came to a booth full of colored vials with essences of flowers and crystals. Then smoked out of an intricate blue pipe the length of my arm with intricate black swirls.
----
Dancing in a dust storm in a grotto of oak, a porch decorated with colored Japanese umbrellas, elaborate mosquito netting, twinkle lights, a hallucinogenic projector screen...Spent half an hour in a crystal booth, handling them. Very tired... want to save energy, it's only the first night!
Friday
Going to bed early - its 3am or so... flashing strobe light, a giant teepee with Israeli toursists. Greeted cars for four hours had fun meeting people. Was given:
1 toke from a bowl and a tecate from a very pretty blonde woman in a huge truck
3 rolls of expensive film from a professional photographer shooting digital
Raw cheese and chips sitting on a bed of lettuce from two cute hippies
The adress and e-mail of a beautiful man in New Zealand
Meeting strangers is beautiful. Already feeling the love. Got some delicious pita bread as well. I am being careful to save my energy and scrounge as much as I can. I guess the Grateful Dead used to live here, it looks like an old hippie commune and is covered in lodges. The sky is astounding, the stars are crystalline and thick here... wearing glow in the dark nail polish and scarves for skirts... must sleep.
Sunday
So much for notes. What happened on Saturday? Tripped acid. Sat around a fire talking about God. Got some cantaloupe. Muffins... sleep.
Today: Hobbit asians. People fighting with lightsabers, chasing each other with bubbles. Took two rolls of that professional film. People grope me just when I smile at them. An Italian man took my photo and told me to part my lips and then kissed my cheek and said Ciao. Got hugged by pharoh in a gold ass-less sarong who told me I was innocent and full of perfect white light. Got rocks from a beautiful 6'4 shirtless man who told me he kept all his power in his hematite. Played hacky sack with gay hippies. Then a cracked out lesbian yoga freak saw me doing Warrior 3 and did it back to me and then groped me. Got mushroom tea from a shaman named Russel who also fed me multiple meals and gave me chocolate for the mere gift of my company. Russel was a spirit guide full of gifts, magic tricks, science, art, imagination, crystals. Went back to camp and Shaun gave me mushroom honey to put in my mushroom tea. While tripping a man named Cody painted my face and I fell into a full, peaceful trance state. Then touched up what he did, wearing a psychedelic silk dress with fire tendrils creeping around my eyelids, blue branches painted on my cheeks.
Meditated in the meditation lodge multiple times. Saw a man and a woman doing the most beautiful, mystic, conversation, improvisational dance. Then the man walked on his hands. Heard a woman ramble about angels. Watched a presentation about a man protesting the Chinese occupation of Tibet by standing at Mt Everest base camp, a thunderstorm started at this point to the cheers of the entire camp (of 3,000 people). More random experiences, everything was disjointed and time didn't seem to exsist at all:
A few nights later while I was sitting on the ground and a full blown hermaphrodite walked by completely naked. A woman read my tarot cards. I watched magic trick after magic trick. Washed dishes as a volunteer, got potato noodles dangled in my mouth by a stranger, drank coconut milk, watched men twirl from silk ropes in a tree. Watched an intense ritual underneath a tree full of dancing wearing full on headdresses and cloaks made from goose and raven down feathers. Layed in a hammock suspended between two trees, watched a smoke machine, blasting beats. Saw Bassnectar in the woods, watched the sun come up while dancing. Felt like a primal being worshipping the harvest. Must sleep.

Main stage last year, very similar in design but this year's was prettier.

Go forth and adventure you dirty hippie

2007-09-19T12:44:00.000-07:00

Symbiosis Gathering
Volunteering there this weekend. I'll try to document as much as I can.
I will be seeing Bassnectar, who I will be seeing for the third-ish time. And also, Sphongle:

Sphongle - D.M.T. live at Solstice Music Festival

Ha!

Last night I hitchiked from Hawthorne street to downtown Portland with a thirty something year old man named Stephan who had been studying Neutrinos (sp?), which I guess are the wave lengths supernovas give off that don't follow the laws of gravity or something. I don't know. But it made me very happy that I didn't have to wait for the bus for forty five minutes. I had to get up to my friend Caitlin's house and play The Real Game of Life. Chris got aborted and then won the game with his next life, Caitlin was a prostitute, Martin tried lesbian sex but it didn't work out, and I was poor and in an abusive relationship.
The night before last I took a group of motley men up to a rooftop where I scaled a fire escape barefoot. Crawled around on my hands and knees with two shirtless men playing Vietnam. Then, slid down an unsteady light pole in a skirt.

Time Note

2007-09-16T13:25:00.001-07:00

I can smell the infinite on the wind
Sunlight cyclones dust particles
Sifting sand envelops the piano string
I watch the curve of your neck
Through the window, teasing
Bright eyed ancient seer slipping notes
Through the keyhole in your throat

I should have never woken your magic.
You cast your shadow too bright,
A nuclear moonbeam into the screaming night

Male/Female parable in the patriarchal religion

2007-09-16T13:23:00.000-07:00

The sun wove a string in Her throat

And crucified the moon against the sky

His bread, His body, His blood, His wine

His sunlight unrivaled in brilliance

The soft, lolling moon needing illumination

Yet one half of Her is forever hidden

And it drives the sun insatiable and mad

And She loves the Earth, She belongs,

To the magnetic attraction

Her pulsing, reflective tide in the sea

Divine Communication

2007-09-16T13:21:00.001-07:00

As She spoke,
spiderwebed emotion flitted across His face
She used her milisecond divinination
to thread churning light through His skin

He told her that He explored deep chasms of sound
And He weaved fire
from the song of a sparrow

She told him:
You are just a space to be filled
a great element to be distilled
crushed and blistering with the weight of my
spiraling through and picking out what I want to keep
the magpie weaving jewels and stars with which to sleep

"But I'm afraid of your magnet, we're attracted"-Eskimo and Sons

2007-09-14T20:08:00.000-07:00

Feeling nostalgic. Two musical projects from ex-boyfriends...
The drummer, my first real boyfriend
Another drummer and the singer on "Backstage Pass." Boyfriend of two and a half years.

Music

2007-09-13T03:11:00.001-07:00

The vibrations catch me-
off gaurd
flowing through a crowd,
or watching the wind
comb through water
my organs hum along.
magnet caught a tide,
in the city my cells divide
pulsing-
static-
waves
the beat gathered my muscles;
expand, contract, explode.
when i closed my eyes i could see it;
the iradescent, shifting forms,
the rythm of nature bending
the white noise
into light

My morbid short story I haven't finished

2007-09-13T02:51:00.001-07:00

He tried not to notice the pull on the woman's jeans as she crouched down. Her symmetry drew him in; the long, slender legs. "That's a crime scene." His voice faltered tellingly.
She looked up through a shock of brown bangs - no, her hair was auburn. He'd used an auburn crayon once, instructing a second grader what "inside the lines" meant. The suicide was Blood-Red, no, there was no Blood-Red in Crayola's line. It was congealing Black. He doesn't talk about suicide when he visits gradeschools, he hands out stickers in the shapes of badges and warns them against talking to strangers or eating too many vitamins.
She stood up slowly, "I know." Her voice resonated from her stomach and emphasized the glint in her eyes. "Squad cars, yellow tape," she paused, "empty ambulance."
"Then what are you doing?" He was surprised by the softness in his voice.
"My brother's in the C.S.C.U." Crime Scene Clean-up. "I'm a journalist. I'm out in the field with him today. He called me up, told me it was a decent one."
"It was a suicide."
"It's good for my brother. You see, this girl jumped. At least she didn't shoot herself in her room. Have you ever had to pick skull fragements out of a teddy bear?"
He was quiet. No, he hadn't. Someone reached into their car to flick their lights off. The cop felt a muscle relax in his body, the blue and white spinning had been making him dizzy. Dark clouds hovered overhead, heady and black with rain. None of it fell yet, merely hinted with it's humid air and that smell. The hairs on the back of his neck and arms stood up and called his attention to the gathering silence.
She flipped her hair, "Besides, I knew her."
"You have blood on your shoe."
"Oh, jesus." Her whole face contorted, the muscles gathered in disgust.
"Were you close?"
"No." She spat on the dead teenager and tried to whipe some of the girl off on a patch of grass. "This is typical of her. Selfish."
The red van pulled up. Men piled out in white biohazard suits and masks. A man with only pale green eyes showing approached the woman. They stared at each other for a moment. She stepped aside. Crossing her arms she let them go to work, merely flicking her glance backward when the coroner arrived.
"If she hadn't jumped off head first there wouldn't be such a huge splatter range." She lit a cigarette and looked at the cop when he stared at her in disbelief.
"What-" She choked loudly, doubled over, and sobbed hysterically.

Whiskey in a glass flask from the 30's

2007-09-13T01:10:00.000-07:00

Tonight an adult invited me into their garage to smoke with them out of a can. He couldn't find his pipe. He torched roaches that he had been collecting and pinching from our neighbor, and he was using a super long candle lighter and I worried about the aluminum curdling in my scarred lungs.
After that he gave me a ride to an apartment out on Division where I met up with old friends and new ones, more transplants invading our fair city (where we lay our scene). One of them told me that he had brought three suitcases full of books. I commanded him to open them for me, and they spilled out over their unfurnished apartment. Art books, fiction, instructional manuals, memoirs. There were names I recognized and those I didn't; Focualt, Thoreau, Vonnegut, Camus, Chomsky, Hesse, Hemmingway... I was mystified.

I asked him if he knew Henry Miller, who I've been citing frequently here and get the incredible urge to read to strangers. I want to memorize long Miller passages and recite them everywhere- at parties, in a lover's ear, on stage, to myself as a prayer. Last night I read it to Caitlin in a hot tub, and afterward she lept into my lap.

Back to tonight though. We drank from a flask, and talked art, majors, deprivation of senses, physical contact, peppermint oil. I was impressed by my new friend, and enjoyed listening to him. He liked me also, "I barely met you but I already don't want you to leave." He seemed like someone who is educated beyond health and sanity, but he was happy. He grabbed Noah's hand and spun him like dame. Later he spun me too, and I mused happily that I had already been spun that afternoon by a man with large dark eyes.

This new friend suggested a group adventure, "Adventure!" We drunkenly mobbed, seeing as there were seven of us, to a rose garden where the Colorado-ites obessed over the sight of a wet slug. Then made our way to a garden roundabout full of shurbs artfully placed in a circle. The bushes were large enough to make groves with secret openings. We found a broken, dangerously heavy frisbee, cartwheels and pinwheels were executed, a man on a bench watched us while he drank beer. Bushes were plunged into without any regard for safety or spiders. One of the boys tried to stalk us but failed miserably, he crashed loudly through the bushes and came out sheepishly. Then somehow tackled another boy to the ground and grabbed onto him with his legs, "where I'd wanted you all night," he said. We laughed uproariously. Then to Voodoo Donuts, where'd I been the previous night with an intimidating 8.00$ bucket of forty donuts, waiting to hand out to hungry, drunken strangers. We bumped dance music and the city was ours.

more dream writing

2007-09-11T03:05:00.000-07:00

He has electric moods that blister through whole rooms. Time conforms to his will.
He internalized the melding of magnets, and released it across a sea of sleeping puppets.
I follow him through myraid, templed dreams. I need, I need. The walls fill up with light, they tremble with it. Last night, we sat in the woods and pulled gems from the hearts of trees. We put them in our mouths. Our gravities kept increasing and decreasing, back and forth by each other's mass.
There was no future, past, or present tense - everything was simultaneous.
I knew looking at him would smite me, so I closed my eyes and took in the scent of fire as his shadow bled into my stomach lining.

Nostalgic flashback

2007-09-09T04:24:00.000-07:00

Sea of Dreams, San Francisco 2006-2007 New Years Eve.
What a wonderful trip.

2007-09-09T03:12:00.000-07:00

"'Hello! Hello!" There came to his ears the hum of far off planetary orbs rolling through ethereally cushioned space. It's no use, he said to himself, we're traveling in different orbits. The world was simply a microcosm and macrocosm moved according to the crapice of a demented monarch.
By the time he reached Times Square he was drunk with well-being. He felt the ebb and flow of bright, liquid blood in his veins. With trip-hammer rhythm it rose and fell, dilated his heart, bathed his vision, surged through his pulsing limbs. Bright, red, liquid blood: in a state of euphoria it made men wise, lucid, sane; diluted it produced flaccidity, neurotiscism, despair... Blood was potent, fecund, magical. Blood was an ecstasy of pain and beauty, a miracle of creative destruction, a particle of the divine essence, perhaps the essence itself...Where there was song there was blood, and where there was worship there was blood. There was blood in the sunset, in the fire of precious gems. Everywhere where there was life and song and drunkeness and worship and triumph there was blood."
-Miller, Henry. Crazy Cock

Arnold Bocklin, Self Portrait With Death

Saved conversations from years ago:

2007-09-03T23:06:00.000-07:00

akaria1212: coffee And adderall!?
S.L: You think I pulled a 93 average this year at a leading prep school on Flinstones vitamins?
*
Akaria1212: What if all this bad stuff that's happening is my karma?
S.L: If it was that simple, I'd be lying in a ditch with a dirty shat-on syringe coming out of my left arm and my right hand wrapped around some homeless man's herpes-covered penis.
*
Akaria1212: is your boyfriend still annoying you?
S.L.: Kind of. He's a paradigm of virtue. It makes me want to shoot up meth, attend an orgy, and kill puppies.

Where I camped last week....

2007-08-31T02:46:00.000-07:00

but these pictures are from last year.

Intoxicating tree musk

star points threading lunar eclipses keeping time relative to mach 3 depths night in my blood, cedar my breath, glacial lake

my smooth slate skin sleeping dormant volcanic scar still reeling from post apocalpytic flirtation seeping thermals and billowing mile long caves breathing catastrophic coitus anthropomorphic spirit animals startling me to predatory paranoia - fuck its going to eat me. Wild, rampant, alone without a microwave, rapt, silent in a hole...waiting.

Flew kites naked in a lava bed covered in dried spiral silt patterns The Worm Flows and June Lake with that waterfall

Silver gelatin mould of mountain sparkling with heat, still smoldering, undead.

A lush canopy opens up to alien black rock canyons dripping with a decade old cataclysm. Fell asleep in my journal woke reeling from otherworld music
lilting soundscape water played percusion and light sawed it's bow against strings of trees every pore vibrating with minute tonal differentation millions of colors screaming simultaneously-"Look hard! Look how you take your eyes for granted."
I have traveled miles for music that took eons to create, the whole scope of a life condensed.
And then spreading

Rock

2007-08-30T03:03:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I get sick of soft indie music, or lilting-drug induced classic rock, and I throw on some Secret Chiefs 3. Check out the last song on the bottom called Horsemen of the Invisible before you listen to anything else. Renunciation is pretty sick too.

"Over three years in the making, Book of Horizons is Secret Chiefs' most expansive and coherent statement, an alchemical fusion of Morricone-esque cinematic grandeur, midnight surf guitar, traditional Middle Eastern rhythms and time signatures, demonic death metal, and electronic deviance that yields a work of undeniable force."
-Jonathan Zwickel, Pitchfork

I saw them live in Eugene and it was Mind. Blowing. I want to marry the violin player.