a coloring book.: September 2013

i start work in a few hours. i pass flyers out to people in wicker park for the time being and then I'll become a waitress once Ulysses is done fixing up the restaurant downstairs. I've been thinking a lot about what I have to do. I hung out with an old friend of mine yesterday and it was really nice. I talked to her and I expressed my concerns with how trusting of the world she was, because I'm the same way. It's hard for us to say no. But lately, things have been happening to her and me that have caused us to distance ourselves from things. I'm not friends with someone I thought I'd be friends with for a long time because she's just not a good influence and she's stolen from both me and her. As far as stealing goes, it's hard to prove that, but I just don't even want to have suspicion when it comes to a friend, you know what i mean? Before, my thinking was...well...if I stop hanging out with this person, then I'll miss out on good times, but was completely oblivious of that fact that she was creating bad ones and I was making way for her to perpetuate that by keeping her in my life. It's time to say no.
Anyway, after that good talk, we went out to eat with her dad, her boyfriend, and a friend of the fam. It was really nice. The food was really good. And boy, can her dad talk politics. I mean really. His eyes are very wide and he talks fast. I like it.
I've only been allowing certain people into my life and have now been creating my own rules and actually listening to them. It's been working out for me, but let's just hope I can stick to this. I don't regret the crazy times I had before I changed my way of thinking. They were just so fun. But if I were to do them now, I don't think they would be.
Well, gotta go to work soon.

words and thoughts fascinate me. although i acknowledge the fact that they were useless (as bukowski has previously stated), but even so, i still think they're important.
there are certain things i read that make me feel better when i read them.
here's a list
1) http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/nonfiction/all-speaking-was-like-singing-a-literacy-autobiography/

This will be the room of many hours. Color out and over the white noise electric hum. The bad dreams of my memory, what I’ll have to do. If writing isn’t written out of desperation, I’m not sure I’ll ever have any interest in reading it, I thought once in a colorless sick room. But I couldn’t paint over, and so I wanted to sing. I wanted to make sounds out of the soundless atmosphere, but someone had already done that. In the country there was a bird, the move of leaves, the rumble of faraway jets. I could sing over, but there wasn’t any other beauty and the city, any city is imbued with the music I want to become. I decided to make music out of my tongue’s translation to a story. The story of a thousand broken film reels. The fractured lens, broken canvas, the breaking of the already broken–daylight breaking would be what it is always–solid as a Picasso, then the impressionistic blot of a lover’s fingers stretching into the chords of me that make me sing. The precious things. What I want to say before the saying is done.

I don’t remember when I started to read. I don’t remember much at all, really. The story goes, I’m told, like this: my thirty-year-old mother was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and two weeks later was in a wheelchair. A couple of months later, she went into the nursing home. I don’t remember this. I don’t remember her. And I don’t remember when I learned to read. I suppose reading was this. When she went away, my father said I never stopped playing. I never stopped, never blinked, but something started. The hunger for color. A sense of urgency. Emergency.

All life and love was brittle in between my teeth and tongue: there was a word for this I didn’t know. I took time in stride like so many communion wafers, waiting for enough words to change the world. I was six and I liked God then, prayed long diatribes to a deaf sky over our pasture, stretching grey gone wild and so I was because I had legs and arms and knew how to dance, laugh, scream, fight–this language was the love of life, and I was living every touch of sunset screaming and God this is God the God is so beautiful in the—

I am eight years old and I don’t know what I’m writing. There is writing—I can’t stop. My father stops by my room to replace the typewriter ribbon, but I don’t know what I’m doing, there’s just this fun thing to do in the country where there is no TV and when I’m bored the world goes still and when I’m still, it’s not enough.

I am twelve years old and it is Christmas. I’m in the nursing home, wrapping paper scattered across my mother’s hospital bed. “Open another one, babe” she urges me, and so I do, smiling, gratefully and guiltily. “Just like you asked for.” And the paperbacks with the glistening colors, fuchsia, blues, they smell like progress. My grandmother, who has done the shopping for her this year, and every year, hunches over the bed, gathering scotch-taped wrappings in her rheumatoid arms. What the books are and were are not important, and as an author, I can tell you now: they may or may not have featured certain sun-dappled suburban twins with Anglo-aquamarine eyes and a perfect size six. I would come to learn three years later, I was not one of those girls, never would be one of those girls, and at sixteen, I no longer wanted to.

I want another hour of Lights-On and I am five years old. “Lights-On” is what happens when my father reads the ‘miles to go before we sleep’ song and the story of Goodnight Moon. When lights are off, the reading stops and I say, goodnight moon. Tomorrow there will be lights on again. Until goodnight again, the world dreams because I dream.

I am eighteen and not in love yet, because being in love is a lot like language, and there isn’t a single word, but a series of sounds and that is all and all is one.

I am in love with The Bell Jar and I am sixteen. This is probably a good thing, because I haven’t changed my clothes in a series of days and the sky has stopped speaking. Something starts. Sylvia Plath is the sound of sad, “the sound of colossal things breaking” dad says to me as he hands it to me, knowing I’m already written for.

At eighteen, I’m going to college and I am scared that I am dumb. The future goes something like this: I will get an associate degree if I don’t fail math and science and will do copyediting at the Saratogian newspaper. I’ll edit adds for four-wheelers and prosthetic limbs and work my way up to the Local. But as a first-year English Major, this is what I get: Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, lightning storms that make me cry. And now it won’t stop raining: Carole Maso is water down the face of my greatest love. “Viciousness in the kitchen, the potatoes hiss” is inscribed on the collages I build and build along the walls of my dorm room, dumb girl murals on every inch because there couldn’t be any white. The future goes something like this:

All day, I was writing. All night, I was reading. Early morning, I was dancing, reaching hands higher into the neon strobe lights in Bacardi nights of being twenty-one and untouchable by every midnight. I wake to paper, and instead of a poem, I put Dear Mom, I miss you. And this is the past: I am eleven years old and feeding my mother. It is lunchtime. There isn’t any past. I am always here with the spoon half raised in the air because it is a bad day; she is trembling; there isn’t an orderly in sight. My light is wincing from her pain, how embarrassed she is that I should even have to try. My ribcage is holding my heart in place. We’re alive. There is music everywhere.

The horns outside reach through my windows and I am twenty-five, a poet living in a shit-for-nothing shack. I smoke too much, I swear too much, I’m too gay, I’m beautiful. My mirrors are covered with lines from Neruda, my walls with poems from friends. The radio is always on and I’m dancing. My hair is pink and I am singing. I’m in love with my dreams last night; I’m broken by my dreams last night; the phone rings and it’s not my friends, the phone rings and it’s not a friend, there isn’t any, only this–the static of the phone, my father asking if I am okay, the city sheds its skin and splits in half in the palm of this receiver, and for a moment there is nothing–no car, no touch, no breath or earth and she is gone and I am young and my weeping body is a wanting word: a variation on the concept of a song.

Everything is permanent because nothing is permanent.
And this, the only way.

2) “It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.” - George Harrison

3) “The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly colored and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question: "Is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "Hey, don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." - Bill Hicks

I really don't think there's much to life besides art and music. Every time I think of someone who majors in something outside of it, like math, I always think of them as characters in a story. You can't escape it, in my mind. I really think we're all books trying to find someone who understands our language.
I think math, science, english, they all do the same thing, although they're very different. to me, it's a matter of what causes more enjoyment. what's worth fighting for.
I read my first Kurt Vonnegut book the other day, and no it wasn't slaughter house 5. It was Cat's Cradle.
See the cat? See the cradle? It was a very interesting book because it explored the idea of religion, truth, good/bad, and science. This man was obsessed with truth and so he became a scientist and throughout his whole career, I don't think he believed a damned thing.
It's funny..the idea of exploring things. It reminds me of what Nicholas Gurewitch wrote to me in a letter when I asked him if he ever felt like a puppeteer of words, sounds, and thoughts. People are these covers and you interpret them whichever way you want depending on what you've been through. He said that how people are represented continues to fascinate him and that it's a question he plans to explore through his life. I just think it's funny that he didn't really give me a set answer or even try to and i think it's because him and me both know that there isn't one. God, what a guy. I knew I'd like him. With comics like the ones he makes, it's hard not to. I can just tell what he's thinking. That's why I think his comics are so funny. He's a thinker alright. Which is the best kind of people.
Which reminds me, rolling back into Cat's Cradle", of when this girl told a scientist "you think too much" and he replied "we all do the same amount of thinking. I just happen to be thinking of something else". something like that. It was interesting that there were people who worked in this science facility or whatever it was, and still managed to have faith. No facts were needed. Nothing to be tested, experimented on, just an insane trust in something that cannot be proven. I think one of my favorite parts of the book is when the scientists asks this girl "tell me anything you think is true and I'll disprove it" and so she says "god is love" in which he replies "what is god?" "what is love?"..
I recommend the read and I won't say more because I don't want to give more away.
I've been obsessing with fashion as of lately. It's pretty pathetic. But it's hard to argue that it doesn't matter, because it does. I guess it doesn't if you're in love or whatever, but it certainly does make an impact, I think. It's a very hard topic for me to talk about, because well, I never thought I'd be the kind to pay any attention to it.
I'm learning to accept the fact that a part of me has died. I've gotten through another phase. (remember, I hate that word.)I think at my core, I've always been a nerd and I will always be one. I've quit pot for a year and I'm deciding to take more initiative in my life; stop being so goddamn idle. it doesn't feel right, although i don't regret the time already spent because i've had some very enjoyable moments. i really can't wait to get this stupid tattoo off my neck. it really was a wake up call. it shed some light on the direction that i'm headed and where i want to be. i'm changing course.
i am fucking malliable.