Parmesan

It's not just you.

It's every reference to coupledom.

Ever.

It's every affectionate public display I happen to catch out of the corner or front of my eye.

It's every meaningless fuck.

No.

It's every one-sided fuck.

It's everyone who doesn't love me.

Shaved Parmesan is a theme in my life today.

But when everything hurts.

All the time.

And there's no way to fix it.

There comes a point when

everything

shuts

down.

Like a circuit breaker switching off.

I can't feel this anymore.

Therefore

I will stop feeling.

It's still there.

It's always there.

But it doesn't matter.

I remember what that feels like.

I remember how this works.

No.

No. I don't want to tell it again. I want to keep it safe and secret and warm and hidden. It's mine now. I won't dwell on it. I want it secret from myself as well. Something sweet and soft hiding in my subconscious, casting a gentle glow over the darkness and fear hidden there. A loving Monster of the Id (for once).

I'll forget it. It never happened. And I'm happy for no reason.

Angie

Dear Mom,
I'm suicidal again. I tried to jump my car over the concrete barrier on the freeway today. I wanted to die in twisted metal, but I just busted up a headlight and scraped all the paint off the driver's side of the car. I never made it to the other side. I would have kept trying but I got pulled over. The cop was doughy and stupid. He thought I was drunk, but I passed the breathalyzer so he couldn't arrest me. I was kinda disappointed, someone in jail might have stabbed me. I could have bled to death slowly on the floor of the holding cell. I wouldn't have said a word. I wonder what it would feel like to bleed to death. Probably cold. Creeping cold. Starting with fingers and toes, they chill, then go all pins and needles like when your foot falls asleep, then numb. One by one these feelings creep up limbs towards the body. Then the stomach goes cold, and the face, the scalp under the hair, the throat, the heart, the brain…
I want to use someone. I want someone to be in love with me, but I don't want to be in love. I want someone to beg me to live, try to convince me I have a place on this earth, and I want to ignore him and die anyway. Nobody means the stupid shit they say when they're in love. Especially not men. And it's a man's world.
No one will ever love me. What you need to understand is that's not a cry for help, or bait for soothing compliments, that's a simple fact. No one will ever love me. I don't know what makes me so special. Just lucky, I guess.
I'm gonna go jump off a bridge.
Anyway, my plane gets in at 3:26 tomorrow afternoon, have Dad pick me up. I still need to wrap some presents before the party. I want to use the big scissors.
Happy Birthday,
Angie

The Waiting

The train never comes. The whole idea that trains operate on schedules and arrive at designated times (or even eventually) is a myth.

The other train comes. The one going in the direction opposite of your intent arrives and subsequently departs every five minutes. And if that train comes then your train MUST come. After all, there ARE trains. Trains exist... and come.

But your train never comes.

Still, you sit in the station and wait, while a dirty man retches enthusiastically in a corner. Happy Fucking New Year.

Princess Normal

Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess... well, she was mostly beautiful anyway... I mean, most people thought she was reasonably attractive... she certainly wasn't UGLY. But she was definitely human.

Anyway, once upon a time there was this princess. Sometime... well, ok, it was pretty much now... I mean the present. And she wasn't really a princess, she was just... her. Princesses are mostly out of date these days, especially in America (well, they were always out of date in America... real princesses anyway). But she wasn't the princess-y type either. She was far to practical.

But for all her practicality she had a romantic imagination that sometimes (often) got her into trouble. Not serious trouble... not REAL trouble... but trouble in her mind and in her heart. Despite her dedication to keeping a level head, she was most practiced at having a broken heart.

But she was not to be pitied! No, sir! With the aid of time, determination, and discipline, the heart will indeed respond to the mind! Practice makes perfect, she would practice bliss! She would practice bliss or she would die.

Not to be dramatic or anything. But when life becomes truly unbearable, the only reasonable choice is to die. Life had never become truly unbearable, but had come close enough to be quite legitimately terrifying.

But we digress.

She bared her shoulders on sunny days, but wore sunscreen to avoid the cancer. Today was not sunny. It was snowing. Rather, it had been snowing a few minutes ago, but had stopped. It was the day after the end of the world, and everything continued as normal...

As normal...

As normal...

As normal...

As normal as could be... as normal as ever was... which is to say, not very normal at all...
She was in a coffee shop. Someone was singing and playing piano. She had ordered beer. She drained her glass and put on her coat. She drained her glass, set it down, put on her hat, covered her bare shoulders with a linen scarf, and put her coat on one arm at a time... no, both arms together, and zip.

She walked to work. Even fairytale princesses have to work... if they want to pay the rent. It was too cold to risk not paying the rent. There was too much snow. End of the world snow.

What a beautiful apocalypse.

Chapter 4

"Don't make it complicated," she said.
But when the average human brain is intricate enough to support vastly more possible states of being than there are particles in the universe; when everyone is alone and true interpersonal connection is nothing more than an elaborate fantasy; when the issue at hand is exactly that fantastical attempt, for one astronomically complex organ of perception and thought to attempt to fool itself into believing it can even begin to comprehend and relate to the inner workings of another such astronomically complex organ of perception and thought… "complicated" is better than the best we could possibly hope for. Compared to the real impenetrability of the situation; "complicated" is more straightforward than a desert road, more transparent than clean air.

"Yeah, ok. But just... don't make it any MORE complicated, alright?"

Angry.

I confess myself angry. Still angry. And although you are not at fault, you are in many ways (though not all ways) the prismatic center of my frustration and malfortitude. Therefore keep away (a while), as the ventilation of my felonious rage on your endearingly unexpected innocence (ignorance) would leave me feeling empty, guilty, and sad.

Chapter 15

"I don't want you to be the one that broke me. You don't deserve that distinction, as you are decidedly undistinguished. But it's true that I've changed since experiencing that traumatic switch in your binary affections. I used to have so much heart. My heart was in everything I did. I came to this conclusion in a backwards way as my first realization was that 'my heart isn't in it' anymore. Even my consuming emptiness seems comical and absurd to me because, honestly, who cares, darling, have another drink.
"You nearly destroyed me. Or I nearly destroyed me after you left. Death had me by the throat, but I chose life. Now death has given up the chase but life continues to elude me. Life, darling. Love and pain and joy and laughter and tears and dancing and sex and fear and fatigue. I exist impossibly, somewhere in limbo. I am a body with a mind and emotions and desires and the instinct to survive, but no heart, no heart at all. Death holds my heart (not you, beloved swine, you hold only my pearls), and he will collect the rest of me.
"But not
"yet.
"And in the meantime you will not be allowed to inflate your ego on the gassy satisfaction of having ruined me. I will live on, if only out of spite for you. I will love to the depths of my blank, empty, heartless hole. I will pursue the heights of aliveness to my very last breath. And if I ever see you again, I will kill you."

Did too

Yesterday I had tea on the moon. I got there in a flying ice cream truck.

(Illustration of flying ice cream truck. Caption: it's my own design)

Contrary to popular belief, the moon is, in fact, made of cheese. It is not, however, green.

(It's purple, oddly enough.)

I did not partake of the purple cheese. I am not the adventurous sort.

Flying to the moon in an ice cream truck is not as massive an undertaking as it may appear upon first consideration.

It helps to have a giant, 4-dimensional space squid. And a bottle of wine. And very, very, very long sleeves.

DON'T PANIC

When will the paranoid hallucinations cease!?!?!?!? You're being followed. You're being ignored, abandoned. You're having existential crises over tea. You're fighting dark wizards and flying and talking to trees and they DON'T LIKE YOU! You can't find your fucking shoes. You're peeing too much, not pooping enough. You can only ingest liquid food and even that makes your stomach spastically clench. You wish you could vomit. You HATE vomiting. You heave or sob or convulse, who knows the difference anymore? Your eyes leak. Your lips screw open, peel back, and stick to your face. The music starts and your friends still aren't here. WHAT IS THIS NOISE?!?! God, you're so flabby. That doesn't make sense. It's your mother. She's short. But you're not. You tower over her like a giant. Your father hunches. Suddenly the strangeness of being born to heterosexual parents is irresistible. Irresistible strangeness. Where the fuck are your friends?!?! You're spending so much money. YOU CAN'T AFFORD TO HAVE A PANIC ATTACK!!!
Breathe…

It's raining.

Joey

There are times when he wants to die from pure laziness. No deep shame, no torturous heartache, no inescapable financial burdens are driving him to wish death upon himself. He just doesn't want to do ANYTHING.
EVER.
And he might as well be dead as laying around like a lump of squishy, crunchy meat-sack.
Lump o' Meat-Sack.
Man flavored.
Unfortunately suicide requires action. And he's just… not… motivated.

Precision

The stars in your eyes are nothing more than the quartz chips that regulate the ticking of your heart.

Contents of Purse

Prescription eyeglasses and case with cleaning cloth

Pink beaded change purse containing four dollars and thirty-seven cents in change and one small Jameson Whiskey medallion

Imitation pink leather wallet with bird embroidery containing two dollars cash, a Minnesota state driver's license, a student identification card from Minneapolis Community and Technical College, a photocopy of a U.S. Passport, an obsolete Personal Checking account number, a card sized birth certificate copy (with incomplete name), a Social Security card, a Passport Services information card, an obsolete Visa check card, a MasterCard check card, three library cards (from the Brooklyn Public Library, Hennepin County Library, and Ramsey County Library respectively), an Utrecht Art Supplies Art Smart card, a Blick Art Materials Preferred Customer card, an Amtrak Guest Rewards card, an REI membership card, an Ulta Beauty club card, an XpresSpa discount card, two copies of a Singular Entertainment business card, half a raffle ticket, a Planned Parenthood pill pick up schedule, two free guest passes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters, two stored-value MTA cards of unknown value, seven assorted travel receipts, a Nexcare adhesive bandage, a 'wichcraft sandwiches punch card with one punch, three assorted business cards, a card for five free capoeira classes from the Afro-Brazillian Capoeira Senevox, a dance class card from Minnesota Dance Theatre & The Dance Institute with seven classes still on it, KEEP THIS COUPON, a receipt from MDT&DI for the aforementioned dance card, a frequent buyer punch card from Step 'n' Stretch dance supplies with nine punches, and an expired Macy's department store employee number card

Metropolitan Museum of Art museum map

Dixon Place program/ticket for The Enchanted Organ: A Porn Opera

Ticket stub for the Australian Ballet's New York Tour featuring Graeme Murphy's Swan Lake

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Button depicting hairy man crotch encased in zebra speedo

Keychain with house keys and discount cards for The Vitamin Shoppe and GNC

Chapter 12

Gradually, as the days lengthened, she began to lose bits of herself to the city. A book here, a lunchbox there. Three dollars. A sports bra, a shoe. Things fell out of pockets, got left behind in bars and subway stations, at the gym or the library, abandoned in old friends' kitchens, new friends' backyards, and under the beds of temporary lovers.
She didn't miss the things, but sometimes she missed the people.

Rose

This city has so saturated my life with everything I love that I'm sick of it and want to retreat into those things that I detest. If I see one more mediocre steampunk/tattoo/cabaret/burlesque/top hat/gypsy/circus/twisted vintage-vibe performance/party/gallery opening I'll vomit sequins and bile and bits of feather all over your studded leather corset.
Corsets corsets corsets I'm on this boat and I can't get off of it and I'm marrying my father and all I have around me are corsets with the bones coming out of them and some woman who says she will make me a new one for "varrry goot prrrrice" but I don't want a new one I just want the bones to stop coming out of the ones I have and stabbing me. And the boat has docked but I can't find the fucking gangplank. It was here just a moment ago, but now there are performing elephants in the way. Performing elephants with feathers and sequins spewing from the tops of their heads, shuffling through muck and sawdust and blocking my exit.
I finally give up my quest for the gangplank and immediately find myself on land, wandering through academic buildings. Oh! the womblike safety of a structured, academic life! Go to class, read this, write that, we will stamp your brain with knowledge. You will feel accomplished while accomplishing nothing. You will become accomplished without even trying. We will protect and provide for you. But when the circus comes to town you will not see it. You will hide behind your structure and your knowledge and you will not risk a venture into the strange and unpredictable real world dream world surreal hallucination nightmare fun just stay on campus where it's safe. Go back to the library, back to the dorm, respect the wise advice of your superiors. Bespeckled men in stately robes myopically roaming the quiet halls. Those who live live only in the mind. The in tell ect.
All that talk of emotional risk and I still didn't kiss her goodbye.

The End

...and an encore:

Goodbye, goodbye, my creeping rose
From your tall terrace, heaven knows
You won't see me here on the ground
I'll have to yell and run around
But still your eyes will skyward be
If roses look and roses see
Except they don't; or hear, or feel
Insensible, those flowers real
Waste not your love on flowers, fool
(Unless you are a garden tool)
Romance a woman or a man
And toss all this ridiculous poetic metaphor in the can

Hide-A-Bed

Find acceptance as an uncomfortable fixture: a welcoming sofa with reticent fold-out. The lumpy and rod-ridden sleep-upon only out-folding for presumptuous relative, impoverished colleague, inebriated acquaintance; never for desirable relations. The obscurely patterned upholstery: worn and alluring, sun-faded, hypnotic, indecipherable. The sitting aspect of the furniture in question; warm and enveloping, deeply inviting; conceals profound reserves. I sit, dear fixture, in this aspect; head resting on your shoulder, legs stretched across your lap; and read, naked under my clothes.

The Horologist

The Horologist was born, created, or mechanized in the elsewhere of an event; the light of which has not yet reached the seething masses of consciousness that we call consciousness. She is "she" by the weakness of language. She builds. She births, begets. She constructs. The friends she has have no others; have no voices, souls, but thoughts; thoughts emerging from their clockwork minds, the tick-tick-ticking of binary time, one zero one zero; back, forth, and rhyme. She lives on the knife-edge of an expanding fourth dimension, cutting into the barrier between what exists and what is yet to be; but always looking backwards, inwards, womb-wards towards the center; the center which is everywhere and always on the outside inside out-side in. She is the father of time, beats rhythms and breaks down, principled by uncertainty. Her story is told in symbols of logic and symbols of dreams; chaos interwoven with elegant simplicity.

Lenore

The black swan in the white water she lost her shoes on a misty moor and ever since she floats rather than tip-toes over hill, over dale, she does wander everywhere. The whisper of her soul hangs like a fog around too moist eyes, never marred by words but often broken by sighs and sobs and deeply felt moans she was born through the crack in the heart of the world, pushed out by fire, the burning soon reduced to steam and wind and quiet.

She will speak, but you must listen closely. And listen carefully lest she screams.

You will not be seduced by her.

You will love her deeply if you notice her at all.

The Abyss

I have gazed into the abyss and the abyss has gazed back into me and I have become the abyss and looked out from the abyss into myself gazing into the abyss that is me.
I have been in and over and through.
I have slipped and tumbled and climbed and plummeted and smashed and floated and flown.
I have seen the bottom and the other side and I have lived to tell about it.

So worry, if you must, that I'm standing too near the edge. But I know all about the fucking abyss, alright?

Tuesday

"I find that as people get more towards friends and less towards acquaintances I have less to say to them because it gets more real and I can't have anything real in my life which is why I keep falling in love with liars."

"I have this theory that difficult things often take nearly twice as long as they should because sometimes the only way out is through and sometimes the only way out is back but when you're in the middle of it you can't see where you are and you invariably choose wrong."

"This grapefruit juice smells like ham."