Florence

Tomorrow Rachel and I are leaving for Florence, Italy.  We’ll be there for six weeks, studying and drinking and eating, etc.  I’ll be bringing a personal journal to do some old-fashioned travel writing by hand.  Whenever I go to an internet cafe I’ll try and remember to do a small Twitter update.  http://twitter.com/farmyardagency

Ciao

Abducted: Tangent During Interrogation

I couldn’t see anything.  No, I’m not saying that in retrospect I was young and couldn’t see how things really were.  I mean, that’s true, but I really couldn’t see anything.  Like my hand in front of my face was invisible.  Anyway.

I could hear the water.  I could hear it seeping from the cracks in the wall.  Each fissure was an exit, a light, not a light because of the unbelievable darkness, a release, a relieving, a reliving?  I remember closing my useless eyes and just, you know man, listened.  Have you ever tried that?  Just listening?  It’s nice, but only briefly.  Think about how different and dull and depressing life would be if we could only hear and feel.  No sight, nope.  I bet some of my hippie friends back in college would say, “no brother, you got it all wrong.  We just need to listen to Earth, just listen to Her and us and absorb and become assimilated.”  Back then I would have agreed with those people, but if things were really that way then how would love work?

“What?”

Love, man.  Yeah, write it down, listen up.

Now I only have experience as a male because that’s what I am and I can’t tell you how it is for all my sisters, but this is how it is for me.  When you first feel that ache, that swelling, that something in your stomach, your chest, your throat, your head, your self, when you feel that, man, that’s love.  Hey, and don’t get that confused with lust, man.  That’s more of a burning and a different conversation for a different life with a different guy that ain’t me.  But that feeling, whether it comes sooner or later when you look at that girl, it comes when you’re looking at her.  You can’t hear her and feel love, can’t touch her and feel love.  Make sense now?

“Yes, at least one thing has become clear, though unfortunately not your intended metaphor”

I don’t talk metaphors, man, I talk reality.

“We understand your ignorance and stupidity and understand now that it must be destroyed along with your confused ideas about time, but especially space and your existence in it.  Not to mention your misconceptions on what you call ‘reality.’”

What?

The dominus Part 1

The dominus lives a life.  Just a life.  Not a good life, or a cursed life or an okay life.  Actually, he used to live a good life until he did something really bad and unspeakable (who knows who might read this some day!).  The bad thing he did was so bad that two things resulted from it.  First, he lost the capital ‘D’ in his name.  No longer would be he dominus with a big ‘D.’  And to make sure he didn’t cheat and capitalize the ‘D’ as the first letter of a sentence, the word ‘The’ was placed before dominus.  So he became known as ‘The dominus.’  Second, his good life was demoted to just life.

This second consequence actually turned out to be of some utilitarian use.  It sort of physicalized the phrase, “well, that’s life.”  If something unfortunate–not really devastating though–happened to someone, they would just shrug their shoulders and say, “well, that’s life.”  But many of the people that lived in Cavern didn’t really understand what that meant.  “What do you mean, that’s life?  Where is it?  I don’t see anything.  I can’t point to something ostensibly and say that it is life, can I?”  Living in Cavern robbed most people of the valuable skill of thinking common sensically.  But if The dominus was around, someone could point at life.  Well, sort of, at least.  The dominus was the closest physical thing there was to ‘life’ with no adjective coming before it.  Besides, even if you say I’m wrong, at least the confused person would look at The dominus and say, “Oh, okay, I see now.”  Close enough for them is close enough for anyone.

Order!

“Now I know that none of you think you are guilty, but I assure you, one of you are guilty.”

Allegory turned to Krystal and said, “how is that even possible?”

The dominus continued, “Now I know you may be wondering how I would know how one of you are guilty when I also know that none of  you think you are guilty.  It’s sort of like how that one time Allegory told me he was feeling a sharp pain in his back and I did him the service of correcting him and telling him he was not in pain after all.  It’s all about perspective, you see.  I happen to have a different, and more correct, perspective about your guilt and Allegory’s pain than your own perspectives.”

Everyone blinked and nodded and looked to the left and looked to the right and smelled the conglomerate of foods behind the double doors behind them begin to lose heat but get it back from the flame underneath the silver but not silver dishes.

Allegory’s side body was drenched from the cascade of sweat coming from his under arms.

“I really was in pain, you know,” he was going to tell Krystal but instead told himself first because the dominus said to tell yourself something before you tell it to someone else.  A sort of reviewing process.

TBC

1/03/08: or, Meteors and the Year of Crafts

To my left there is a little China man with spectacles that are framed in a black plastic.  No, to my left is a wall.  To my right is the China man.  Sorry.“Sorry.”  It sounded like honey on her stomach.  Off-brand honey, not the good stuff.  Not that I even knew or know what that sounded or sounds like, but that’s what it sounded like to me when I said it.“You have nothing to be sorry for.”  Then she laughed and I died inside or felt alive for the first time or one or the other.  In the times that we live in it’s pretty cool to be morbid and fatalistic; but I’m sure someone thought the same thing when they were my age and are one hundred now.I don’t even know why I keep glancing at the China man.  He probably isn’t even Chinese, wait why would I judge myself quietly to myself?

[Unreadable after this last sentence, the letters have blurred on the page and it's impossible to bring them into focus with one's eyes and also with the proper tools.  The letters become clear and legible forty five pages later.]

Fir

A tiny little speck.  It moved up, following another speck just like it.  They and the others just like them were moving at a speed somewhat comprehensible, higher and higher.  But it wasn’t the kind of movement like walking or swimming to the surface of a swimming pool.

The sun, three feet above your head, beating beating down.  You can’t feel your hair but it burns burns and it drives you insane knowing how it’s aflame but really not knowing after all, then wondering if that really is the sun.

Shadows.  The cool blanket of darkness.  The heat visibly radiating from my knees, creating waves and circles under the sheet.

The trillions of specks are fatigued.  They recess into nothing, into reality like needles or a bug’s defense mechanism, and I recess into the unconscious space of my unconscious.

Restless here, resting there.  Every thing subsides.

Kittens Inspired by Kittens

Dead Dream

Last night I watched the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, so that may be why I had this dream.

———–

I’m a child, probably nine or ten.  I’m living in a farmhouse.  I look out of a first floor window into the night.  There is a full moon, I remember being surprised at how the stars seemed to be fighting for room in the black sky.  The interior of the house is completely unfamiliar to me as I recall it now, but in the dream it felt like home.

Rachel is sitting at a table in the kitchen, not doing anything inparticular.  I step into a dark bedroom, lit only by the light of an open window.

A figure shrouded in a gray, hooded garment is kneeling on the bed and is hunched over.  I don’t know how I knew the clothing, or robe I guess, was gray since all I was able to see was the figure’s silhouette.

Without my knowing I have had a physical transformation.  I’ve grown up, probably to the age I am in reality.  I discover that this figure is a man and we begin to fight.  I’m not sure why but it’s probably because he was an unwelcome intruder in the house.  The fight ends and I am its winner.

I go to the kitchen but it seems to take a really long time to get there.  Rachel is still sitting at the table.  I go to a drawer and take out a small serrated knife with a black handle.  I hold it in front of my face and examine it.  Rachel finally asks what’s wrong.  I tell her that I just fought someone in the bedroom and won the fight.  We get up and walk together to the bedroom without a word.

The man in gray seems to have disappeared at first, but it turns out he was lying prone behind the bed, out of sight.  He gets up and stands before Rachel and I, looming over us.  I can’t make out his face because of the hood.  The man undergoes a transformation then.  The gray garment disappears, he shrinks in size, his body widens.  Now standing before Rachel and I is a middle-aged, heavy set, balding man.  He wasn’t recognizable to me in the dream, nor is he now that I recall it.  He wears a long-sleeved button down blue shirt, no tie, equipped with pens in the breast pocket.  The shirt is tucked into ironed khaki slacks, held up by a black leather belt.

The man holds up his hands in front of him and says, “Don’t worry about anything, it’s all right.  It’s me, it’s Lawrence.”

I say, “What the fuck Lawrence?  Fuck Lawrence, what the fuck.  Fuck.”

Lawrence says, “I know, I know.  There is this.”

A wave of relief washes over me, I remember my muscles actually relaxing.  What harm could this fat little man do to Rachel and I?  I think I even smiled a little.

Lawrence reaches into his pocket, pulls out a .32 caliber revolver, points it at my chest, and shoots.  I am killed instantly.

Rachel and I are walking down Saint Mary Blvd, in front of PJ’s and Campus Copies.  We are walking on the street, heading towards Johnston.  There are cars on the road but they aren’t moving.  There are hundreds of people around us on the street and sidewalks, all walking towards Johnston.  I look at Rachel’s face and it is literally glowing with happiness.  Her smile is so big it’s abstract.

I am suddenly filled with terror and dread.  I realize I am dead, but Rachel is alive.  I then either realize that Rachel does not know I am standing next to her, or that the memory of me is quickly leaving her.  I suggest the latter because as I was looking at her I could feel myself draining out of her mind.  My eyes widen then shut.  I grab my head with my hands and begin squeezing it like a vice.

——-

I’ve been having a lot of vivid dreams like this one lately.  I wonder if it has anything to do with the weird films and texts I’m studying in the Freud class.  Something that I was thinking about is that all the people walking down Saint Mary might have also been dead, but I’m certain that Rachel was alive.

Well That is That and This is This

Sven looked up because before that she was looking down.

In her periphery she could see the dark and shimmering and slimy and slick brick walls of the alley.

When she looked up she could see the moon on the narrow highway of sky that cut through the alley’s walls.

She took a step forward, heel-toe.  She took another step forward, heel-toe.  Heave-ho.

“Hello?”

She could feel her voice bouncing playfully against the walls, higher and higher into the sky to freedom and nonexistence.

She sneezed and wondered how that was possible.  She liked to think that golden dust from the stars and sun meandered from space to the earth and found their way inside of her, making her heart swell and her eyes itch.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.  The tendons inside her head swore at her.

She jumped up into the air and held herself there, hovering inches above the ground.  Water dripped from her fingertips and permeated through the brick when they fell.  She could hear the water spread under the ground, wandering aimlessly without purpose or intention.

She spoke but there was nothing around her that could hear, not even the water or dust or moon.  The walls and the bricks were too loud with their absolute certainty of where they stood in existence.

She blinked and as she did so all of her eyelashes disconnected and floated to the wet and dirty brick, like a dead tree losing its needles after being shook by someone.

SPAH Sappin’ MAH Sentry!

What it do?

Here’s my fall update.  I would like to say that I will start keeping up with entries again, but who am I kidding?

Another fall semester is coming to a close and right now is the perfect time for procrastination.  It’s those two or three weeks that are hectic and full of stress and nights where I only sleep for about three hours and I start going crazy AHHHH.  But I’m not procrastinating since I’m here in New Orleans posting this.  How could anyone get any work done here?

Well, uhh, The Wizard of Oz is on so this has become very unimportant.  I’ll be back to post someday.  Promise.  Heh heh heh heh.