on despair.

this is one of those unfortunate days when my neurons misfire, and somewhere in the neurological highways and byways, something goes horribly wrong.

realistically, it's quite likely the medication, which has the little-known (but highly incident) side effect of causing "a sharp rise in aggression and violent hostility." on most days, it would bother me, pacifist as i try to be (until something i hold dear is threatened at least), but today i don't really care. the medication's also supposed to keep me calm, help me sleep. we don't need no thought control, and all that jazz. but anyway, while it keeps me calm, or "suppresses the nerves firing in the brain," i find that little things that have been building up inspire in me the profound urge to strangle someone. hit my roommate upside the head with her vibrator. expose all her dirty secrets and watch her flail, drowning, lost upon a sea of angry gen-Xers who all want to make her pay for being a part of the problem.

i used to mix this particular medication with alcohol a lot, back in the day, as binge drinker that i am, i can honestly say that i don't really remember at all whether i felt hostile when i mixed the two, which i'm now told is very dangerous. but danger is my middle name, i say, not something ladylike, prim and proper, like 'rose,' and i chose to laugh countless times in fatal quantities in the face of death, and i mixed the two all the time. how i managed my life so far without lapsing into a coma is beyond me, though there are gaping periods of my life that i look back on and wonder, really, if i was more than a walking vegetable, for all the good those years did me. deadly cocktails were a passion of mine, an every-day-of-the-week habit, a way to exist in the world without having to accept it.

truth be told, and i'll admit this to no one, dear reader, no one but you, they were a passive suicide attempt, like when i was younger and would wear dark clothes and walk in front of traffic at night. if the car hits me, i'd say, then it wasn't my fault. i just happened to overlook the responsibilities of pedestrians, i'd say from the pearly gates, and look what happened to me. terribly unfortunate, they'd croon, and they would put their arms around me and nod solemnly at my tragic misfortune. if my body wasn't strong enough and by some fluke my heart failed, dear reader, i was certainly not going to be at fault. no one would blame me. i was just some dumb kid who didn't know any better. even though i always know better.

i had made the grand sacrifice of no longer taking out my distaste with the world and the despair that comes with it on my flesh, and so i need another, psychologically valid, alternative. i had not ceased to despair when i ceased to express it with thin red lines down my arms. i had not woken up one day and discovered all the wrongs in the world righted, walked outside to see sunshine and rainbows and butterflies in a world with no pain, no murder, no genocide, no rape-- i had grown perhaps more determined than ever that if the world was going to kill me off (like it's fond of doing to all the good guys), then by GOD, it would be held accountable.

i am shattered broken glass
and you are merciful enough to bleed
picking me up with your feet.
truthfully, i haven't felt shattered since we met
(or, more honest still, we reunited)
and i know i will ever more be greater than
broken porcelain.

I'm thinking that the layout of the new book should be as follows:
chapter
dream
chapter
chapter
dream
chapter
dream
chapter
chapter
chapter
dream
chapter
chapter/dream

not that exactly, but something like that. something so that those of like bent will yearn, even strive for the dreams, will go through chapter to chapter to captivating dream, and those a little less fey will find the dreams mere oddities, worth sitting through while waiting on the chapters. quirky, they'll say. a bit odd, they'll comment. but definitely worth the 14.95 that a book costs now a days.

and there's still the matter of the fiction book and the non-fiction book and the two children's books and the screenplays and the second act of impenetrability to make it something more grown up so that i can get productions of it around the state, and then the country, and then a better part of europe.

and maybe there's hope for my over-indulgent poetry as well, for words too big for their pages. maybe there's a way to do that as well, or to make something come out of countless photographs too big. everything about me, too big. this is the root of my obsession with space, the true heart of my minimalist bent. my words, my voice, my sound, my hands, my head, my heart... all too big.

sometimes i feel as though her greatest gift to me lies in her ability to plunge her hand deep into my core and pull apart little pieces of me. jerking them free of me, she will study them carefully, lovingly, and then place them back in my hand, so that i can make sense of them. make sense of myself.

No matter the circumstances, there's something deeply rooted deeply within us that causes a knot in our stomach when we think of our lover's ex lovers. We stress and strain and try to rationalize it. It doesn't matter, though, that it was forever ago, or during adolescence, or during a period of heavy drug use... it still bothers us.

And I'd like to think that it's less the age-old obsession with property and virginity, but something deeper, something of more substance. A spiritual wound, almost, and we look at our lovers knowing full well that theirs was a lifetime explored in preparation for us, and we cast such salves over gaping wounds, regrets about our own past, profound desire that it would be simpler... ever simpler.

desi-joe-rebecca-sean-rachel-nate
mel-da3vid-bonnie-keith, da3vid-anime courtney-james
laura-combs
whitney-paul, troy
caitlin-josh-rita-phillip
josh-winter
marc-brendan

on grief.

We have tacit, tactile grief, to the very last of our ranks. We have the kind of grief that wails and throws things and rebels against the unfairness of the world when we are buried in the deepest recesses of our solitude, grief memorialized in t-shirts, music selections, food choices, accessories when we are out among the world.

Love, to us, in a lot of ways simply means taking upon oneself another's grief. We don't argue when someone chooses "Goodbye Blue Skies" on the jukebox at lunch for the 47th time this month, we understand that fashion suspends for the blue sneakers held together with duct tape, worn in memoriam for a slain comrade. We don't push for details or speeded healing when someone's eyes glaze over at the mention of The Princess Bride. We just accept that for us, it is and has always been easier to force our sorrows upon pop culture and by entangling art in its many forms with the distasteful memory of heroin overdoses, shouting parents, sexual assaults, and in villifying the association, we can forgive the world.

The biggest problem that anyone in our generation faces lies in the daily struggle to do just that: to forgive the world.

the prodigal returns.

i finished my cv. somehow i can make a cv, but not a resume? i don't know. i can't even explain how they're different, except one's american, and one's not. maybe my brain just doesn't work like it's supposed to.

but my cv is pretty decent. lots of art shows and awards and so on. but i feel masterfully lame that i'm not doing any of that stuff anymore, and not even for a good reason... just because... i don't know. because i make excuses. because i don't have time. because i get so overwhelmed with the rest of life and the world and instead of doing something with purpose, i get bogged down in the day to day.

so i guess i'll work on that. do the things that mean a lot to me, a lot more often. be the golden child once again. the camera should help with that... with the photography aspect, anyhow. i need to find and enter more photo contests, though. that would be a good start... because i can't win if i don't submit, right?

stevie helps a lot to keep the magic in my life, too... and i hate to feel like i'm not making use of the glamour that she contributes to my welfare, to my life.

so... time to get back to work, i guess.

these are not the words that i would like to be saying to you

i'm trying to come up with my resume and my CV, which is a lot harder than i'd anticipated, because i've apparently done more than i realized. a lot of it is art stuff, art shows and play productions and so on and so forth...

did i ever really do anything but write? i don't know. but that seems to be, mostly, what i have to show for it now.