I read your words, and I feel a false comfort. Getting as close to your thoughts as the approximation of writing can get, I feel as though I have not been absent from the primary stream of your life these past four months. Holding the page close to my face, glasses off, wrapped up in a bed you’ve never slept in, I internalize your syntax, I imagine the words I would say in response. The act of reading you feels intimate, like an exchange.

But I know this game. I have been the one across the sea. Time changes everyone, a subtle erosion, and you and I are slightly stranger to each other now than we were. You have been in my thoughts, but you have not heard them. You have not been there in the early morning to hear what I was dreaming. This distance terrifies me. And yet… here, then, comes another opportunity to unpack you. In the passenger seat of a smoky black car in Los Angeles, I will look into your hurricane eyes and there will be new codes to read.

There will always be something new in you to struggle to grasp, always new wild territories of myself to embrace all the more through sharing them with you. The cold slice of fear across my cheeks is merely evidence that hot blood pulses through me. 

Oh, even the self in months to come, raging at some petty infraction, some ill-communicated slight, the self that shatters telephones and takes disaffected men to bed, even she cries out to you, come home, come home. 

Come to the Chi-Town Clown Revue on Sunday. 

Sometimes on the bus home, you realize with a wince fifteen minutes too late that you used the word “retarded” talking to someone with a family member with Down Syndrome, whom you have heard speak about the way they hate that word, how they wish that people would fucking think before they perpetuate something hurtful. 

Sometimes at a play with a friends, you use a phrase that your father’s Oklahoma family uses in a casual way only to remember that it’s actually pretty racist, and your charming, partly black friend makes you blush. Sometimes while talking you can’t help but describe yourself as slutty, while a professor sits next to you. Sometimes you can’t keep your big mouth shut. Sometimes while walking down the sidewalk you can’t help but lose it over the cracks. Sometimes you realize that everyone can see you brush the dandruff of your jacket. Sometimes you assume an intimacy that isn’t there. 

Sometimes you like to think you’re a good person, someone considerate and thoughtful and deliberate with their words. Sometimes you just feel bad.

Mostly I am just really anxious all the time. I’m sorry. I’m trying, I’m trying.

Here, we are approaching the time of year when my hands bleed out of nowhere, when my back aches from slouching in the cold. The time when pulling myself out of bed in the morning drags trails of blood and damp leaves across the floor. When I can’t seem to open doors properly, even when I have the keys. But for now, this? Right now? This is my favorite time of year.

Things are hectic and panicked, the way I claim to like them. I’m performing twice in the next week and a half: at the Chi-Town Clown Revue at the Neo-Futurarium on Sunday, and as a part of the B-side performance series after the October 30th performance of Blood Wedding at Oracle Theater. Of course I’ve got a lot of work cut out for me before either of those things can happen. Not to mention getting my Halloween costume(s) ready, dang. And there are always events to attend.

As always, I’m always exhausted. In my dreams I’m always in a rush, and have longer hair, and when I’m awake I always seem to be late and pulling out my eyebrows and forgetting to shower. But damn, sometimes when I’m walking down the sidewalk, I could sprint with excitement. 

:
s:Oh, 9 or 10 o'clock in the evening, usually.
:
s:No good reason, really.
:
s:As the sun is going down and for an hour or two after, I feel incredible. I feel like sprinting everywhere I go, I feel like kissing everyone I see. Maybe it's the crash from this mania that gets me every night.
:
s:Not being alone. This tends to put a strain on my relationships.
:
s:It's easy to use an excuse.
:
s:I wish it could be October forever.

at the end of the alley red lights spelled out, and girls wore clothes with an understanding of negative space. the end of the world spiraled slowly in my glass, tasting like metal and loam.

on occasion I forgot how to breathe– the air around me weighted, the black fabric of wings fluttering above me to my right

here, this is the ear I can hear with

here, I will wrap you in blankets at the dawn

my heart is hurtling through the ocean, damp and dragged along behind cardiff castles, but these are my hands full of blood, and i will let my eyes get their fill of you in the dark.

*(, or: sometimes, on a Thursday, you go to the goth bar.)

When did I become a person who wakes up at 6am to film a scene for a mini-series, smoke sidewalk cigarettes and go to work in a car bumping casual rap, go to a lecture on media and ontological horror, and then work on the staff of a sex magazine, and then get home to rehearse a clown piece about guidos and fairy tales and childhood and piano-playing?

Oh right, this is business as usual.

(Or, sometimes I have some intense, melodramatic feelings.)

It happens often: either I read it, or I hear it, or I see your childlike mouth make those shapes, on a glowing screen a second in the past– but every single time, the heat under my collarbone blows outward, bursting every artery, every streetlight bulb for miles. I hold my breath forever, I swim across the Atlantic. I am the Atlantic. I am every shipwreck between this city and you. I get quietly drunk, alone in my apartment.

I dream about high-speed trains. I overcome my fear of flying. My telephone commits suicide. The ice melts in my whiskey ginger.

I get minor chemical burns. I have a cleaner kitchen. My bed fills up with tepid water, floating with dead leaves. I am a person in love, and a person in love knows no physics.

Sometimes I think I could fuck you up, bad, with a knife or a broken bottle and all the indignant rage that I can muster. But even still, I hope that every time I wake up in the middle of the night in terror, I hope that I see your eyelashes on your cheek, that it is your hand on my arm. That the small and overwhelming sun under my blankets is always you. 

I want you to be here. I want you to be quiet. I want to hear your voice. I want you to love me until whatever is left of my body scatters in the breeze.

Sometimes I am reading two different things for two different reasons (research for a play, sampling the reading list for a friend’s course), and they speak to each other so clearly that I can’t help but feel that the topic is something I should be paying attention to. 

As someone whose mind loses large tracts of time but clings to arbitrary moments with obsessive detail, the idiosyncrasies of memory have always interested me. And so I wanted to hang on to this paragraph from Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” (from Moments of Being). Discussing childhood memories from the a nursery in St Ives:

At times I can go back to St Ives more completely than I can this morning. I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen. In certain favourable moods, memories–what one has forgotten–come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible–I often wonder–that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it–the past– as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There at the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past. I shall turn up August 1890. I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so we shall be able to live our lives through from the start. 

So basically, Virginia Woolf invented the Matrix. This is similar to how I’ve always thought about life after death–the intense moments of our lives occupying some frequency, humming, waiting to be tapped into through memory. Even after all of a moment’s participants are dead, stopped and rotting, the moment continues, waiting for someone to tune in. But it is always there. I find this comforting, although this thought becomes stranger as I consider the vast, teeming number of moments of my life–even those that, at the time, were overwhelming, were infinitely important–that I have forgotten, that seem irretrievable. Mundane and unique, the life slipping away from my memory is mine alone to lose. Much of it has been shared, sure, but a sense of continuity can only come from me. And what do I have to work with? Whatever I can remember, which isn’t much. An airplane, a pile of dirt, a body of water, a naked body, the smell of something burning. The sounds of people talking. Mostly I remember the sound of their voices, the way the light hit the side of their head, the way they looked so fragile, more than any of the words said. I lose words a lot.

What I am trying to say: sometimes it makes me uncomfortable to realize that my sense of self is based on a fairly small percentage of the data that could in theory be available to me. 

For years, I thought my earliest memory was of a nosebleed on an airplane. On the way back to New York from Los Angeles at two or three years old, the sudden awareness of my body’s spontaneous fragility. Wiping my nose on the back of my small hand, the shock of red, that color screaming at me that my body could be a traitor. That feeling of surprise still strikes me often. I am still utterly convinced that I am going to live forever.

I realized, however, about a year ago, that my earliest memory is from a few days earlier. Universal Studios, Hollywood. The King Kong ride. Sitting in a bus with my mother, staring out the window as that giant face emerged, primitive and furious, and we were lifted into the air. My earliest memory is the scowling face of a huge robotic gorilla, if that means anything.

On the same train ride as “A Sketch of the Past,” I was reading The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salome, one of several books I am reading for research for a play I’m supposedly working on. It’s a fascinating read. She was very much a part of Freud’s circle in Vienna in 1912-1913, and addresses both the progression of various theories and the fluctuating personal relationships among the intellectuals of that time. The journal entries are interspersed with letters, mainly between Lou and Freud. Right after reading “A Sketch of the Past”, I came across this:

If we are inclined to doubt the truthfulness of journals and memoirs, it is not just on account of their conscious or half-conscious omissions. Above all it is because the construction of memoirs, like narrated dreams, amounts to a rationalization of experience, eo ipso a falsification of its latent essence. If a person thinks back over the entire course of his life, he is struck by the discontinuity and poor selectivity of the points that stand out clearly in his memory. Transitions and bridges of logical reflection must do their best to provide the connections. Many “unforgettable” events are strikingly banal, indifferent, or meaningless, while incidents which have claimed our deepest interest have to our sorrow become unintelligible in their precious details. Here too, by means of the associative process, significant latent content may very likely evolve out of the fragments, exactly as with the dream; the picture which emerges in all these lines, broken at the surface but pressing vertically into the depths, is a picture quite different from the horizontal structure of our waking memory.

So, too, a literary technique could be imagined (that old dream of mine!) which would be true to that very unity of formation. 

[…] Freud remarked once that to bring about the construction of the completed analysis from the end to the beginning would require an artist.

And here I think, at least I’m not the only one. These ladies seem to know what I’m talking about.

a friend’s post about processed chicken, which was super gross but interesting, lead me down an unexpected path of horror– anorexia tumblrs. there are so many of them. i guess i should have known– did livejournal not prepare me? or better yet, opendiary? all those creepy self-injury blogs I read at 15? but i guess i just hadn’t thought about it. tumblr is good format for it, thousands of girls circulating the same photos of women who don’t get their periods and faint a lot and have no sex drives. 

i don’t really want to link to any of them, for one because girls with such fragile egos would probably not take it well, and i’d feel weirdly implicated by further distributing the content, but they’re there. so many of them. 

it’s been a long, shitty day and I feel defeated. an adorable hedgehog is dying today. i’m sorry, buddy.

long story short: ladies, it is okay to eat, because one day you won’t be able to eat ever again. or maybe you will just be irresponsible like me, and not always have money to buy food.