| humanity i love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink |
[Jan. 22nd, 2008|03:06 pm] |
Otherwise I compose elegant synopses of existence, savoring names like Ann Arbor or Nova Scotia, almonds and sailors with sweethearts.
I’d like to understand sewing patterns which come on brown tissue paper with dotted lines for scissors. Sometimes I make clothes, but usually I just alter them. Vogue has patterns; I wish I could make designs come from my head onto cloth. Mannequins are expensive but I saw one two years ago at the big flea market in Raleigh. It was forty dollars which is more than I can pay but I wish I had it now. In Brave New World Lenina wears a green coat with synthetic fur, and I thought how nice that would be because it would match my eyes.
I wish one of my friends would come in. I feel lonely.
I would paint beautiful ornate pictures with details and stencils and India ink from strange perspectives and be Russian and then Tim would say how fascinating I am without ever knowing anything about me.
I would work as something and everyone would love me and I’d make lots of money and give it to my brother and buy my sisters beautiful things and pay back Dad.
I’d know important people and go to their parties and be refreshing and clever and I’d know something about everything they talked about and I’d voice my opinions and they would be stunned by how brilliant and beautiful I was.
I’d make bowls out of Tyvek and acid-etch glass and make a pitcher and glass set. Anything. Anything I wanted.
I would talk again, and I would talk with people who weren’t angry when I said anything but who would listen and we would have intelligent conversation and I would use the word ‘apposite' which would impress them.
I would learn to play the guitar and go to shows and afterwards go up on stage and play something ridiculously difficult.
Hopefully no one except Jackie B. will read this. I only want Jackie to because honestly I really think that only Jackie is as self-centered as I am except probably not actually, how could anyone be this self-centered. But that's not to say I don't hope so. |
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| old entries never posted |
[Jan. 22nd, 2008|03:02 pm] |
Lately all I’ve been thinking of is sewing. I have mom’s old sewing machine, but I want to buy fabric and make a coat.
The pictures in the sewing book are disappointing. They’re shoddy and unappealing with a stiffness to the fabric. I prefer voile and calico and wool and cashmere. My tastes are too expensive. One can only indulge with a. dead peoples’ clothes or b. lots of money.
Jason and Jane (Waldenbooks) are unimaginative.
In class I cried and wrote a bad poem. All I wanted was to take the mind unaware, shock and then fill, a lovely black girl with backs of knees or elbows like chalices. I write belles lettres to older men and wonder if I’ll be able to write anything more. Detailing dreams probably wears on the recipient.
Liz won’t give me more than two days for Thanksgiving. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 22nd, 2008|03:01 pm] |
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Briana decided not to come work with me tonight. She’s cooking bananas and the whole world’s going bonkers. Meanwhile I’m just a set of pretty eyes with a sense of the ludicrous. A black saucer with orange rinds and an empty Hefeweissen makes me feel pretty. My fingers smell of orange and cigarettes. What does a honeycomb look like around a comet? We ate honeycomb in Africa but it was black and strange, not yellow like in a bear. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 22nd, 2008|02:59 pm] |
I want scant things, tiny things, on nails or four china plates in the cupboard which is stained in ring because I thought the latex indoor whitewash under the sink would be just as good for the cabinets, it wasn’t, or a 9x13 print of Matisse’s missing a string.
In Help Wanted I’m a snob. Child care is untainted by ink as I copy down a fax number for my resume—opthalmic assistant. Lab manager, elderly care. Must drink tea. I am enchanted.
Oh bright snappy afternoon! How cute I’ll look in a lab coat!
I had to move the scissors from the bathroom to the desk drawer because for a while my hair was getting shorter every time I had to pee. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 22nd, 2008|02:55 pm] |
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Franklin Hotel, Nov. 06 And then how I woke to white and you and confusion in the snow, while the cardinals flashed red and made me think of God smoking a cigarette like a captain of industry, sitting high on the balcony wall over the tracks of his bare feet-- while you steamed in your morning shower and hot coffee burned my throat but I drank it anyway
And I’m sorry because I never told you your face was so beautiful, I’m sorry I never said goodbye really, I didn't realize you were leaving until I turned on the street and thought fuck you're gone I can never tell you I liked you so much, then the snow made my face wet and cold, or maybe it was you, who knows
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 10th, 2008|04:16 pm] |
Whenever I get upset I throw up. Not on purpose, really, but just sick.
I hate when I smile at someone and he looks at me and just raises his eyebrows. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 9th, 2008|04:30 pm] |
My right arch isn't healed yet but I'm going running anyways mostly because Robert is coming home soon and maybe he'll see me running and will get mad, which is nice because it means he's paying attention to me.
Apparently my favorite shoes are called spectator pumps. I tried to paint the white with fingernail polish but it's off-white on the cloth. They say CONNIE on the instep. I can't find them on the internet.
I cut my hair last night because Robert said he was getting his cut and I was jealous. I liked it then (1 am?) but this morning when I woke up I remembered and my belly sank. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 1st, 2008|01:26 pm] |
Currently my preferred response to "What are you going to do when you get your degree":
Waitress with a clear conscience |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 8th, 2007|07:11 pm] |
My friends page is mostly Russian. It's weird.
I'm trying to write a memoir for Wagner-Martin, and it's coming out weird. Probably because I don't know what I'm going to write about. I'm just typing sentences like,
He kisses my mouth hard and runs slender fingers up and down the hollow where my spine should be.
Bah.
Memoirs seem painfully self-centered. I wish I could write about the South. All I know, though, are oak and pine. One should have a good grasp on Carolina flora and fauna for that. I'm using the word "bright" too much.
I spend half of every week with a German. My sentence constructions have become baffling. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 7th, 2007|11:06 pm] |
I don't think I worry about dying, but I'm scared of it. I never ever ever want to die.
But I'm twenty-two. They had memento mori; Posada's engraving was, I thought, funny. Funny or frightening. Every day, every day I remember it. I remember death, it's really not like anything I read. Mommy wasn't beautiful. Her mouth was open and scary. She didn't look like her. Maybe that's why we didn't think to follow the people who took her away at night. God I miss her. And I'm terrified someone else will die. God I'm so frightened. It really is like the prayer:
God bless my father and spare him to me
God bless my sisters and spare them to me
God bless my brother and spare him to me. |
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| me |
[Sep. 4th, 2007|10:02 pm] |
It's my birthday tomorrow, my big wonderful momentous gloriously snappy birthday.
I hope I look real pretty, that everyone looks at me and thinks what a pretty girl.
I wouldn't even care if they didn't know what day it was. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 30th, 2007|08:31 pm] |
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Of course, it could just be that I’m in three lit classes, but still. Reading the Critic as Artist today, and I realized just how tiring it is. I don’t actually care about the Pre-Raphaelites. Strange but true. I don’t know anything about the literary canon, there’s no way I could possibly know the artistic movements in painting. Dada impressionist modernist Victorian Donatello your cupids look the same to me. Robert Frost’s Road Less Traveled is kitschy. I never cared for Matthew Arnold’s war-ravaged beaches, I can’t read playwrights, Wordsworth is tiresome, Tinturn Abbey is only appealing as a picture, Sherman Alexie writes about zits, e.e. cummings confuses me, I’m sick and tired of Chaucer, Boethius, John Gower’s allegories, rot rot rot. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 29th, 2007|12:06 am] |
I'm so very sick and tired of all the Christianity bashing that goes on around here. No! Not even just here! In Minnesota too. Everywhere I go. Day in and day out. I feel like a rock beat upon by the ocean. It's exhausting. I am sick of people saying Jesus fucking Christ, I'm sick of people referring to the "fucking bible," or vomiting vague phrases like "I hate religion." I'm so sick of this spitting and hateful abuse.
Tolerance is a pretty free word these days. To tolerate, I think, has an entirely different meaning from tolerance. Tolerance now means support. As a tolerant person, it's not enough for me to support civil unions for homosexuals (which I do). Rather, I need to also support their right to marriage in a church(which is tantamount to saying I have the right to impose my beliefs in a Muslim mosque-- I wouldn't dare have the presumption!)-- so "tolerance" isn't enough. I have to be one hundred percent behind them, accepting without murmur their demands.
So not only has tolerance got a new spin, but it's also arbitrary. Let us accept and support all that is new, creative, bizarre, shocking, modern, innovative, but never, oh never the orthodox! Don't they realize that there must be something true and enduring about a creed, in order for it to become a creed?
Ignorance turns my stomach. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 27th, 2007|10:56 pm] |
Do you remember when we played dress-up in the basement, with bright eyes and an apron for an Arabic prayer-shawl? You had such bright eyes. I laughed and laughed when you were an old man with an IV, shuffling to get me. You were just as scared as me down there. But cold places are always scarier.
I didn’t know you but maybe I thought we were the same because we were both skinny. Your hands were like mine. When you sleep next to people you probably begin to breathe at the same time. That must mean something.
I remember I wanted to kiss you hard on your mouth when you wouldn’t let me baptize you and I called you a jew.
What a funny time to think of that. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 27th, 2007|10:54 pm] |
Two babies moved in downstairs. They belong to Ray and his estranged ex-wife. Jasmine is seven and Olivia fifteen months. I ask Jasmine what colour her new bookbag is, and she says blue. I lie and say blue’s my favorite colour. Raggedy grin and she runs away to get it. It has these beautiful pastel flowers printed on it in plastic and a tag that says American Princess. The tag makes me sad/happy. I tell her it’s perfect. Olivia is running circles on her brandnew feet.
Their bedroom makes my belly ache. The carpet is stained and Olivia should have a pillowcase. I decide to make her one, out of this fabric with little mushrooms and leaves. I’m wondering whether to put buttons or a zipper.. but babies eat buttons so maybe Ray would like a zipper better.
Upstairs I put the Velveteen Rabbit on the record player as Ray sits awkwardly on the sofa. The girls want to play in my room. I want them to see the Christmas lights at night, but Olivia goes to bed at seven. She’s splayed out like a frog on my pillow only a little bigger than Aldo Melville. It bothers me when people call him dumb things, like Waldo Molehill.
Things that I like to think about:
I can finally lend Adam money.
I want a kitten. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 27th, 2007|10:15 pm] |
Alexandria was not Arcadia. My aunt, my Gertrude Stein, oh she loved me. She wanted
my paper-thin shell, a melange of white and pink, with a pretty red heart to boot. I
was to be in her collection, all dolled-up and clever, with sweet words. "This is my
niece, who writes," she would point proudly, and the adoring generation would murmur
while she, my aunt, would grow radiant in my illustrious shadow. But I came and left,
and she saw my raging ragged heart. She understood my fragility as a child understands
her doll. She molded men as a craft, she found ways and ways to make amber-- she
honeyed me, cloying, to sickness unto death, to sweet sticky paralysis.
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In a place this hot, the leaves hang as newly-amputated hands.
My advocates, my angels with hologram eyes-- cease and desist! The ones I wanted for
friends are married, with wives in sweet bridal veils and large unconscious eyes.
Where are the lovers of wisdom? They have married it, and sipped from the chalice of
certainty.
I have no such holy matrimony. My movements are erratic, my thoughts are volatile. Is
this communicable? Is this disease shared? Uncertainty in all things, all confounding
in intensity/ breadth/width/heighth/depth/measure. There are books I dare not read.
Meanwhile the roaches copulate, the kitchen is overrun.
I've lost flesh like a woman loses lovers.
I meet people:
-- "Have a care, leper heart!"
Fine. Then where are the others?
*aside* (Lepers, as you know, are the only ones who may freely touch lepers.)
-- "My dear, leprosy is a thing of the past. With the advent of blah blah blah, we
have eradicated the riddled. There are no lepers here."
*aside* Riddled mind. I wonder if that means a mind of only riddles and no answers?
A supplication for normalcy, then. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 10th, 2007|11:44 pm] |
But uncle Bruce cares, I think, that I'm lonely here. He fills the days with grass and flowers, and pruning and trees and mowing. Raking the grass is like pulling my dog's hair out during the summer, when she sheds big white-tipped clumps of it, like leukemia except fun. I like to sit in the driveway and pull it out, make piles of amber rooted hair, which then blows into the woods. She likes it because I scratch her belly sometimes.
There are wooden stairs dropping off the lawn steeply to the water edge. They aren't used anymore. There's two fat spiders who decorated, I go there to smoke secret cigarettes and watch them. One caught a locust a few weeks ago. She didn't eat him. By now it's spindle-thin, and looks like paper mache. If you touched him he would crumble into fine locust powder, and there would be more tiny paper mache locust organs inside. Of course he's dead; he's been dead for two weeks.
But if some bourgeois artiste had made him, he would be perfect, dry brown legs curled painfully up in the most unnatural natural way (because that's how he looks). Imagine if he really was paper. And we were told that underneath, there were tiny delicate dry organs that would fall to dust if you even breathed on it. What an accomplishment! The piece de resistance, they would cry, clapping their hands. The women would adore him, the young men would dream dreams of paper mache and fame.
And my locust(or the spider's) is that, but better cause it's so naturally unnatural.
I'm reading Graham Greene at present. It's midnight here and the northwestern sky still hasn't faded. Uncle Bruce says the aurora borealis are better than the best fireworks I ever saw. He says he's going to take me up north where I'll see silver birches. He says the tree bark is really silver, that it shines so you need sunglasses, that you never saw anything like it in your life.
When I was younger, we had gold and silver spray paint, which I used one evening to paint the trees silver and their leaves golden. After that Dad said I wasn't allowed to spray paint without asking.
I wonder what the silver birches look like in the fall with dying leaves.
That, that is what will happen. I'll have thought so much about silver and gold trees that when we get there they're only going to be silver and yellow.
Just like the stars in the telescope, which I'm not really sure what I thought they would look like, exactly. Definitely something gilded and firy.
(you couldn't really improve on starry nebulae in national geographic though, which is probably why so many people subscribe to conspiracy theories.) |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 10th, 2007|08:08 pm] |
I suppose I thought being lonely was like murder, that it just happens in books.
One of the most disappointing things I ever saw was a star in a telescope, which just turned out to be a star in a telescope.
I found my mother's diary in the attic at home last month.
"Sarah is crying again."
"Sarah is still frightened without the lantern at night. It's been two weeks."
"Sarah is being difficult."
"Sarah won't stop crying."
These people will take care of your body, but they won't let you in. There's an impasse somewhere that I haven't figured out.
I only go places in books anymore. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 30th, 2007|10:57 pm] |
these days man lies in ambush for man. our spines waste and we carve out vertebrae like notches on a warrior's club.
how many have you killed?
oh my dear, these are how many times I have died. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 27th, 2007|03:15 pm] |
I wanted to write the woods behind your house, behind the railroad tracks, I wanted to find them and see the circus bear, I would like to feed him blackberries because he would be tame I think, we would eat handfuls until our teeth and tongues were stained purple, we would fill our pockets and palms and you could make a pie and I would help you and we could take it to the woods, past the house, past the tracks where we would find the convicts who would be frightened but we would show them that we love them, and we would give them our pie.
I think that would be wonderful. |
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aflowerchild's journal