What a Day to Start a Journal

Well, I think my ESP clocked into this one. My soul mate just had a baby. I can't eve fathom what to write about it except... yay!

Reboot

Henceforth, this shall be....

A JOURNAL!

Something has happened to me

I don't even care about Halloween this year. This is bad sign. Two years ago I made Jack-O-Lanterns. Last year I tried to find a good party and almost fought a drunk Dominican man while dressed as a dead French whore.

This year I just want to sit at home and ache.

Late night musings from a porn reviewing hermit.

Hello, little blog. We have spent some time apart. Much has happened, and my hands ache.

But you know, it just came upon me, this thought, as I was doing some watching of pornography for work... How strange it is that we have made the experience of pleasure a "bad" thing in our world. How odd that our bodies' greatest purpose and greatest joy has been morphed into something hidden and degraded and unclean. I was watching a sensual and erotic scene, really a celebration of the body and the ritual of sex, and I thought, "Have we always been like this? Wasn't there some time, some place far away out of memory, when this was beautiful and not forbidden?" I see that there are dangers in it and I understand the desire of the powerful to contain it, but why must we fall prey to the fear and shame they pile upon it? This is who we are. This is what we are here for, on a very real level. Why these fences and booby traps around it, why not celebrate it?

Not that I am exempt from the shame and the corruption. I feel it intensely when I approach pleasure--pleasure is something we do not understand here. It's too base, too instinctual, too unearned. But it is earned, and it is our privilege as humans to experience it. Ah, to just relax and enjoy it. Wouldn't that be something?

Musings before putting in my two weeks' notice...

Nearing the precipice. Ten days to go, and I'm already feeling light as a feather, which is a cliche I particularly do not like to use because during these last ten days of rotely repeating the same menial, meaningless tasks I have performed, and loathed, for almost three years, I will be staring at a bronze Fernando Botero sculpture called "Leda and the Swan." In which Leda, a customarily round Botero woman with no expression on her face, is being mounted, and raped, by a similarly round swan. It is really obnoxious to have this thing sitting across from me--a bestiality sculpture to round out my miserable time at this gallery. Soon, I'll be free. But Leda, poor Leda, will be stuck under the avian sonofabitch for all time.

The Crowd

I have had an unusually large amount of red wine this week, and I feel somewhat light...

"'The apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals on a wet black bough.'
Ezra Pound found the formula,
The houses are rectangular,
But life is curved, not angular.
So when things start to strangle you,
Remember:
Rain still falls on the halls of power.
New babies being born every hour.
And the eagle keeps watch on the old clock tower
Over me...

Lord, unchain my hands.
Let me sing inside the crowded trams.
Let me dance among the traffic jams.
We're gonna sleep on the St. Kilda sands.

Lord, unbind my feet.
Let me mingle with the good people we meet.
Water rising up into the street.
Unbind my feet..."


Keepin' it real...

Deeeeeep breaths

The past two and a half months have been mountainous, ups and downs, crevices and chasms, my brain and heart and desires have been opening up and vehemently snapping shut, flying and falling in quick succession. I haven't been able to make sense of any of it.

I'm trying to find a space in my head where I can calm down and consider everything that's happened. There has been pain--so much pain that I haven't figured out what to do with it. I haven't had time to DO anything with it, and the time I have had, I've been so exhausted that I haven't even tried. There's been elation and possibility and hands stretched out to help me up, but the pain bites at my heels so steadily that the elation quickly transforms itself into fear--the synapses get confused and the signals get crossed until all I can feel is stress bearing down. I think I need to clear out some space for myself, just a big expanse in my head, or on the floor at home, to spread it all out like so many magazines and slowly, carefully, quietly, organize and redistribute my impulses until there is a structure to the madness around me. Or at least some kind of integration of it into my self, not my heart or my head alone. I need silence, candle light, solitude.

I don't know how to get that.

Nervous laughter. Nervous laughter. Keep talking to fill the electrified space there over the coffee table, shove words into it and through it to put something up as a shield from that face. These sounds are all apologies for something I have not done, and they are slamming into you, falling back helpless, just piling up at your feet like so many wasted minutes I've spent wondering. All to just teeter on the top of the carcasses of syllables on tip-toe, waving and yelling only slip on the glassy surface of your eyes and tumble back down to where I am, here, yards away, just laughing and chattering and picking at my cuticles. Nervous twitches. Nervous glances. Not a thing.

A Bad Poem About Nothing Much

As March dragged itself along on its sodden belly,
The pricks and pains were first brushed off as weakness,
The psychosomatic results of imagined trauma. Grit your teeth and bear it. It could be much worse.
Rain pounded at the earth, though,
And in the chill weather the mud mixed itself into cement to suction at the wrists.

Aches set in; the pangs of previously ignored injuries returned;
Diseases revealed themselves and with them the anxieties they'd been guarding,
Like dragons with heaps of treasure usually enfolded and protected in leathery wings
But now sparkling clear in the light of the spring sun, covered in mud.

And yet we kept on, the sucking noises turning our stomachs at each forward movement, Crawling through the muck just to get to April.
The creeping pain was increasing, though, and looking down,
There it was, the razor wire hidden in the puddles.
We'd been eviscerating ourselves all along;
the stress and muffled joint pain had been only warning signs of bleeding out.
Now we look back, and there are our guts all spread out behind us like bloody slug trails.
How unappealing.

But here we are at April, and the nadir of mud-puddle infections is behind us,
Somewhere in our small intestines.
We're free now.
No organs to weigh us down and just that spring sunlight to fill us up.
We may not be better or faster or stronger or tougher,
But at least it's warmer now.

Manual Moping: typing up my turpitude

The crush of it all,
the never-ending list of things I must do,
it can't be that bad, really.
I sit all twined up around myself on the subway,
trying to become a singularity but less significant,
just a glob of aching joints that others cannot scrutinize.
But I do not want to blend in.
I can't, anyway, my skin is too shocking, my hair is not dyed that color.
I am out of place.
The stares press into me while I mumble to myself,
repeating the litany of my anxieties, my daily tasks,
so I can forget the gnawing that grief has been doing around my orifices.
I think it's hoping that if it chews away at my ear holes enough,
meanwhile liquifying my insides--grief is an arachnid,
I hope you realize, silently trapping its prey
and holding it motionless for fear of moving forward,
being caught again--while the pressure of stares and tasks and stagnation
continues to mount,
eventually my brains will come squirting out of my ears, nose, mouth.
All over the sleeping man across from me,
if someone gets on at the next stop who looks like her
and catches me unawares.

I am not an artist, it seems,
just a story teller.
There is a difference.