R · is · for · rocket

palin drones are everywhere. no wait, i meant palindromes. palindromes are all around me like little circles of toadstools just begging to be jumped off of. sator aripo tenet opera rotas. each one a beginning, and the next, and the next. no wonder i never get anywhere. maybe, though, there is something shiny just ahead in the grass that i can pick up and sell on ebay for lots of money, no? silver and goldd log DNA revlis.

isn't it funny that people think the world is going to end in 2012? i hope it does! i hope all these jokers are right on the money because that means i can fuck off for the next three years, right? and then the greatest show in the history of mankind starring john cusak and lots of smashed glass? sign me up. one part ancient prophecy and two parts rudimentary calendars and a dash of self-importance served over paranoia. the 2012 tiramasu! what a joke. what a funny, funny joke.

Y'all need to just slow the hell down, alright? I'm here once a month with nonsensical cave drawings and bubbles strung with spider silk and you're all like the prom queens on pcp. Really no one watches me, I know, but I like to super-self-impose expectations because I'm so disappointed with myself at home. I'm trying to write a piece but there's no friction! I need a good story. In my world everyone sits in shitty bars getting drunk between awkward silences. The only thing I'm good at is decorating the tree that spent its whole life growing on its own. Some buddy gimme a sapling! Look at this perfect capitalization, guys. My phone is so smart.

i want to make something beautiful but my mind is atrophied from years of misuse. so i fuck around with photoshop instead of doing the laundry.




the mister helped with that last one, which is why it kicks the asses off the others.

every mystery that has never been solved will expand to fill the space of the cosmos and all the recipes and poetry and maps and models will commit suicide by suffocation at the sight of it.

really
very
much
do
not
want
to
go
to
arkansas
today.
really
very
much
wish
my
headache
would
go
away.
beware
of
enthusiasm
and
of
love.
each
are
temporary
and
quick
to
sway.
at bay
no way
so gay

meteors and last hoorahs and cigarettes ashed into plastic cups. i will deny a drinking problem until my dying day. went to arkabutla, mississippi to see the perseids shower. i-40 to 55 to 69 to fogg rd. just drank coca cola that night and asked joey a bunch of questions about the constellations and which way the stars are moving and why we can't see their colors. i had forgotten how many stars there are! the milky way was visible to the naked eye and i saw jupiter and two of its moons through the telescope. we heard a coyote howl, incidentally after the moon was good and out. i didn't even know we had coyotes.

last night edward's band played a show at the buccaneer. i drank too much beer too quickly and danced a lot when they played. i wore these green italian leather boots i bought off of amy and joey to help fund their honeymoon. i told joey, "these boots are the best thing that ever happened to me." i found some tin-foil on a table and made a headband with it. later, i remember telling diana, "i think i am officially drunk," but it had probably been official much earlier in the evening.

when i saw this book today at the used bookstore, displayed on it's back in the middle of other hardcover treasures, my heart skipped a beat. i grabbed it so quickly. how easily it could've been halfheartedly purchased by some fool wanting to fill a bookshelf! i told a couple people via text message, and neither of them responded, so i must assume i am the only person who thinks it was at all providential.

i really didn't want to post this video because i don't much care for it but i don't know how to embed just the song. it's not the same when you watch it so i suggest you close your eyes while listening, and pay special attention to that bass line, ripped straight from any doo-wop song from the late 50's. the only thing that would make this song a ten of ten is some brass.

a snarky little thing i wrote at work:

a "poem"
look, there is a trick
to using short lines.
watch, i'll tell you about a time i had a date:

he was a friend;
crazy hair, fair-skinned, thin as hell.
one of us had said,
"let's go out fer'real."

i phoned;
his mom, like a mouse
answered, "oh, he took the bus to nashville."
an uncle, a recording studio,
a house in the country.
he'd moved
with a single bag and my jean jacket.

six months he was back
without his virginity.
she'd left his skinny ass for the singer in a metal band.
the jacket was returned
with holes in both arms
worn through by his bony elbows.

you be 1988, and i'll be 1941

fragments, 1 june 2009

just had a pleasant chat with the mr, probably the most important we've had in a while, about individuality and turning corners and other such long-term jargon. i think we gained a lot just now, in that 20-minute interval it took for you to drive back to your mom's house from wal-mart to discover her car in the driveway and the house empty.

digesting infinite jest (and bear with me, i am only 50-pages-or-so into it) is as challenging as it is rewarding. i think i may have stolen that from the introduction but it's true and it bears repeating. we will be spending a lot of time together between now and september and i'll probably document it along the way for my own sake.

something i wrote in my sun-room last friday:
neat little lines to write on. my letters are small today. rewrote a poem, still hate it. 6am, woke up at 5 and couldn't get back to sleep. hungry and hungover. neighbor kid is on his roof gathering sticks that have fallen from the huge trees in his backyard. lord knows what he is doing up so early, or what i am for that matter. he used to come into the coffee shop and bow politely and people laughed because he spoke so formally, the way one would as a prince in a role-playing-game. it's no wonder; both his parents teach philosophy at the university. of course he's eccentric. of course he bows and sweeps his roof at dawn.

i have literally watched this video about ten times today and i think you should probably do the same. chris is in north carolina at a convention and i am in memphis where it is about a hundred degrees, give or take. this morning there was a lady at the coffee shop and i pretended to read my computer screen while i listened to her talk to someone on the phone about visiting memphis, the lovely show she saw at the levitt shell, the temperature is ridiculous, todd is going to that school in vermont, matthew has been playing tennis, maybe i'll make a detour and see you guys. i know none of it sounds particularly bad but i guess it was her inflection or her blonde hair or her pink laptop case that made me want to say, "bitch, get outta my town." it's not really my town though, is it?

went to the bookstore but still didn't find what i needed. went to shangri la; didn't find what i wanted there either. went to sonic and got a 93-cent apple juice slush. went to mifa, they were closed. all i wanted is that damn bollywood record and a sun dress. now i want a big mac. once when i was in hardy, arkansas i tried to order a big mac with no meat at the drive-thru and the lady had to check with her supervisor. in that minute of silence i imagined the two of them debating the validity of my request, as if they were papa john's employees and i'd called in to order fifty pizzas with everything on them.

heavy sky, heavy lids
with weary eyes behind them
weary blood under weary wrists
and heavy wire to bind them

i'm creating something that may never exist. somewhere in clarksdale, mississippi there is a small house with walls painted the color of cheese and olives. in the front, roxy is sitting on a swing and in the back there is a small vegetable garden with fat tomatoes and yellow squash hanging down. it seems senseless for me, a person in constant need of attention, affection, friends and drinks, and venues in which to mix them all, to suddenly and voraciously cling to a potential life in small-town mississippi. there's a job down there that chris may get working for some magazine comparable to southern living. it pays well enough that he would have plenty of time to work on comics and i could work part-time, making it much easier to finish school. something about it just seems right. i don't know. i'm sure after a time i would go crazy with boredom, but you know, maybe not. i just want things to be quiet for a moment.

i think what i meant to say is just that we're all sort of stumbling around in the dark, and most of us are afraid, and it only makes sense that we would want someone to cling to. i think that's what love is.

to keep from crying for no reason, i am going to expound upon some thoughts i had after finally finishing the ballad of the sad cafe. it is a strange story, with a funny little one-page epilogue tacked onto the end called, "the twelve mortal men," which will be my band's name if anyone ever asks me to be in one. it struck me, like all her stories do, but i couldn't say why. after deciding this was my favorite passage, i think i understand it a little better:

First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons--but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world--a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring--this lover can be a man, woman, child or indeed any human creature on this earth.

there is more to that passage and if you care to know the rest you can ask me for it in a comment (or better yet, go read it yourself. the whole story is a quick 72 pages) but the point is that i realized that mccullers is probably my favorite author because her theories on love, which permeate every story of hers i've read, come the closest to my own understanding of it. and it isn't the love you find in other books, or music, or movies, which paint is as something transcendent and beautiful--a sort of answer to something, whatever the question may be. instead, her characters, who are each incomplete and broken, search for love in a desperate attempt to find deeper meaning where there is none. (a side note: this is also why i love her writing style and others like her. things are presented just as they are. any meaning we find is only our own). this does not necessarily mean that to love is a weakness, just that it is natural experience instead of a spiritual one. in her world, the only pure love that exists without weight is between strangers. this is why Singer is so important to the other characters in the heart is a lonely hunter and why Antonapolous is so important to him. this is why it is easier to love a tree, a rock, or a cloud. and this is why to love is so painful--for something to exist only in our minds, it might as well not exist at all.

none of this is nearly as cynical or as hopeless as i'm sure it sounds. i'm just not doing a very good job of saying what i mean. all i'm saying is that i love mick and miss amelia as much as any real-life person because they are no less real. i could take any fool off the street and they would have just as interesting a story and be just as lonely. even my own boyfriend who i love immensely and have fallen asleep next to for many years is a pieced-together story, who's head i will never be inside. my version of him is more complete than yours but i'll never have the whole thing. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved.

i'll only say a few things about my birthday. one, my friends are better friends than me. bonnie hosted a last minute party at her house, my favorite house in midtown, the pink victorian one with the huge porch. i got gifts, lots of whiskey and books and a bottle of st. germain. chris bought me one of those neat little non-intimidating video cameras that only have four buttons. the day after he took me to st. louis where we walked a lot in the rain and slept for hours in an expensive hotel bed. on sunday we visited the city museum, which was everything i'd hoped it would be.

i keep thinking of things to write down, mostly when i am driving, but its never any more than a couple of words attached to too-big ideas. a bit of a rhyme or a piece of a galaxy. i'm thinking too-big and meaning is falling away from me. i tried talking to bonnie about it on tuesday but i had already had too much to drink and the thoughts couldn't find their footing. we sat on her porch swing all night in the damp air and drank Southern Comfort with club soda and these meyers lemons she bought at the fresh market that are like a mix between a lemon and an orange. i kept thinking that it was the perfect summer drink and she kept trying to convince me to move to seoul with her in the fall.

this morning i closed my eyes and saw my breath as a pink thread being pulled into my lungs through my nose.

i'm thinking on a whole pile of things today. things like html and art and writing. a person will see in front of them a mess of meaningless symbols and combinations of letters. one click of a button and it becomes what it was intended to be. centuries from now, will someone be digging around through this ancient information, dusting away at a bone wondering what it once was? will it be decoded? we send eachother secret letters written in the language of our time and i wonder if ever the key will be lost.

i think about these things to cover up the flies and skin and bones and blood i've seen today. the blood of a hero and the rotting skin of a thousand faceless nobodies. i'm thinking of a number between one and ten thousand so i don't have to feel guilty about this fucking leftover quesadilla i'm eating or the bed i got up from. i'm thinking of a number between one and twenty thousand because i still can't stop wondering about those kids and where they are and if they're dead or still in the subway huffing paint because it's cheaper than bread. numbers kill, you know.

it's too much. i couldn't get to sleep last night because of the children i saw in a documentary. i've no time to think right now, but when i do i will write about them. my job is turning me into a monster and there's just no time to stop.

for real?

i can't remember having ever teared-up watching a trailer, but where the wild things are has done it. go watch.

black, black, black, wet night. like bobby's hair or nina's smile. a pause that streched a mississippi mile. oil, tar, sweet cigar. a note held gently like a child. i put a spell on you.