|
|
Friday, September 2nd, 2005
|
|
|
give what you can!
http://s1.amazon.com/paypage/PELYGQVJ8Q7IB/104-1001661-5459941
they accept any amount and even take credit cards.
i know it seems like whatever money you might have wouldn't be enough to even make a dent, but five bucks could feed someone, or buy the gallon of gas that will get rescue workers where they need to be. so, you know, go! now!
|
|
Wednesday, July 6th, 2005
|
|
|
made the call and asked for help, insurance and my body willing i'll be out of this place and onto someone's nice warm couch. we'll drink tea and when i go home i'll drink whiskey and in the morning we will run our legs out of our skin again. danielle promised funnel cake and coffee past midnight and ben promised a black and white movie and his friend who is a glass blower. i kiss my two fingers and tell them to forget what they're for, lately i've got more promise rings than promises.
anna and i drove to the indian reservation on fourth of july to get tans and our body weight in explosives. we played joni mitchell on the way home and sang offkey and it was nothing special but i didn't want to be anywhere else. my throat is bleeding and our neighbors set off bottle rockets all night, gunpowder smells and sparks in my hair. there's a part in stealing beauty where jeremy irons is dying and he says to liv tyler who is saying goodbye, "i enjoyed watching you. all that beauty. aren't we lucky?" and i try to concentrate on my memory of it as i'm leaning far, far out the kitchen window waiting for it to rain.
sometimes i am very happy, but the summer seems to last forever and i just forget too fast.
|
|
|
( i am currently madly in love with the following things--> )
Ok, so when I typed in "being sad all the time" this came up-->
I THINK THAT ABOUT SUMS IT UP.
i checked out Venus as a Boy from the library and also Todo Sobre Mi Madre. oh, and also Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. News, Reviews? Anybody?
if you could please recommend me:
1. a movie i haven't seen(i haven't seen many movies)
2. a musical artist or album or song
3. an unorthodox activity to do on a summerish day
i would really appreciate it.
p.s. am working on letters. am lazy slothful penpal but will make good on promised packages. just give me a little longer.
|
|
|
Photo by John Hryniuk --> www.inthedarkroom.com
driving down highway 5 at 3am, alone in Mike's car, the radio dj is playing the 30 most depressing songs he can think of and i realize over again that this new version of unconditional love isn't the deep understanding i always thought we had, it's just experience and distance making us too apathetic to care about the damage we're inflicting on each other. flailing our hearts around and calling it freedom, or bad dancing.
truth is, i need you the way you used to be. because together you're at least half of me, probably the better one and without you, i am suddenly not myself. it's a hard thing to realize that my whole identity hinges on the way my words bounce off your eyes.
he offered me a cigarette but when my fingers shake like this the only answer is to make a fist. sometimes i can laugh away your rattle in my ribs but when i miss you like this i rev the engine and open the window and let the air hit me until i can't feel my lips.
|
|
|
if i don't get out of the city state country soon i am going to explode. going to parties and watching the dreamers and wanting nothing more than to drink wine for a week straight, play hungry hungry hippos, read bad poems out loud and pass out on the couch. i'm not using people as escape plans anymore, but i'd like to take you with me all the same. and continue getting high in checkered bathrooms, turning cat litter into zen gardens, details. hanging my legs out my second story bedroom window, praying for fire escapes and change and for someone to dance with, with rhythm and a soft neck. trying for the opposite of a dial tone, and to stop having cupcakes for dinner. seriously discouraging early onset diabetes and people who leave bruises on my lower back.
lately i'm having double nightmares where the second one is dreaming you've woken up and the nightmare came true. i double dreamed my mother had cancer last night and believed it until noon.
i know i'm making no sense but lately i've got nothing to say to something that doesn't talk back and no one's a smartass, and no one talks back.
at least i know exactly why i keep trying to talk when it's clear i have nothing to say.
|
|
Wednesday, April 13th, 2005
|
|
|
april j. in our kitchen
"I AM MORE MAN THAN YOU'LL EVER BE
AND MORE WOMAN THAN YOU'LL EVER GET."
dear life,
when i work i like to think as little as possible and it's about the only time i get any peace. anna sits on my bed with tequila for her and painkillers for me and we tell stories because she can't sleep and i can't rest. i refresh cnn in the middle of the night to see who else has died and i feel this drive then and always of I'M ALIVE, i'm scared shitless and hysterically happy for no reason except that i am alive and it is now.
even though i'm a ridiculous child lately i feel much more like a woman than a girl, and on days when it fits i wonder why i never wanted to grow up. sometimes i touch my hips just to make sure, sometimes i just know at the strangest times, like when i'm carrying groceries home or looking someone directly in the eye, or sitting on the edge of the bathtub watching the water run off my legs. this idea of being full is in me, it's in my handshake, so when i feel it, you do too.
i'm drinking red wine and reading politics, scribbling in my journal. things have been good, i am good good fine good, only just now i turned on the sad chick music and resisted the urge to hold my head in my hands and feel pretty fucking sorry for myself over nothing. romantic karma.
i feel so stupid because you know i KNEW, i knew it would happen like this and i can't believe i let myself get so vulnerable over something that was so clearly nothing to everybody else. it just felt like sliding into magic, and i thought maybe things could just be easy for once. possibility is such a beautiful drug. i'm still waiting as if he's coming. who "he" is isn't really important, it's the waiting that's the problem, because fuck that! i am damn good company even alone. i feel a little lost in my life, like being stuck in a washing machine, everything is familiar but the colors are spinning all around your head. eventually all that's going to be left of my heart is a postage stamp, a half tank of gas and a little brown box with RETURN TO SENDER written all over it. and the dust i kick up walking away from it. the wine has started speaking for me, and it's a sentimental fucker, so i better stop here. it'll be no big thing in the morning. and for now i'll just let it be.
anything but love,
g
|
|
|
Neil: You actually own a dress? Is it red?
Me: It's black.
Neil: Oh, like your heart. ...and my lungs.
Me: EXACTLY.
expected call and response.
Dear Neil.
You are a hopeless metrosexual.
faux fur and flowered shirts,
Gabi.
Dear Gabi,
if you weren't so clean and pure i would have taken you to the orgy. be home soon.
Love,
Neil
( you're so vain )
m. tells me his theory that men and women can't be friends and i pretend to get indignant but the truth is, i'm almost out of hope. nearly every boy-friend i've ever been realy close enough to has turned romantic or sour or just awkward. but that's only nearly, not all. somehow i'm holding out for all of us to grow up and appreciate each other more than hormones and (post)teenage confusion. someday i want to have a list of reasons i love my boy-friends that doesn't always have to appear simultaneously with the reasons i am not in love with them.
|
| Time: | 2:58 pm. |
| Mood: | upset. |
|
|
in the great words of Bridget Jones: I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it. Well, I meant it, but I was so stupid... After all, it's only a diary. Everyone knows diaries are just... full of crap.
|
|
Thursday, March 10th, 2005
|
|
|
I'm feeling confrontational. Walking down the street looking everybody in the eye, come on come on look around my eyelashes for once, i'm ready for love a fight. The weather is warm and so is everything else, friends always hug me as they leave our kitchen smelling like my brownies and danielle's gorgonzola cheese. My little Italian dumplings. And even when i am alone, i am much better company lately.
In physiology we learn about a cell's memory, how it stores antibodies as codes for diseases we've had, even after the infection has cleared, to protect us from making the same mistake twice, letting in the things that will surely hurt. I wonder why my emotional memory doesn't come with this feature included, my body always seems to have an unfair advantage.
On the phone today Geraldine(**name changed to protect the hairy) says: "I took care of my mustache today. It made me think of you." She tells me about Antarctica and her plans to become a penguin whisperer while imitating her mother's british accent, David tells me about the infinity problem and black holes in exchange for synopses of the novels most likely to help him pick up chicks. She says, "Honey, if it's love- you'll know, you'll always know." Trust me.
Sitting in our breakfast nook midafternoon with the music not too loud and reading Tobias Wolff, jars of peppermint tea and holding my breath because if i could just stop time at this one moment with the amazing superpowers of my brain i might just be happy forever. Come on cells, I'm thinking: please remember this, if you can remember this, you will always know where to find it.
|
|
Sunday, February 27th, 2005
|
|
|
|
his grandmother keeps sending him lottery tickets in little envelopes with flowers. he always loses. i don't know if she really thinks he'll win, or if she's just saying, i think you'll live long enough to spend a million bucks.
|
|
Monday, February 14th, 2005
|
|
|
i look at you and think how did we ever get so vulgar, and even the ease with which the flatline silence enters and exits seems clumsy, like trying to talk with a fat lip, fumbling apologies back and forth. your hardness is still pressed against my stomach. i don't have a single loveletter that wasn't followed with the words i hate you.
this year i have one broke-ass hand with about twelve feet of badass looking medical tape around it, three platonic valentines, one quarter bottle booze, my life, lovers not yet discovered. blood cell memories, broken broccoli, hard against soft, used condoms on the sidewalk, and a good deed to redeem us all.
valentines day, you dirty bitch, you haven't got the best of me yet.
what else is there but to beg
for the triumph of hope over experience.
|
|
Thursday, February 10th, 2005
|
|
|
on the phone today i told my mom i'm going to see the vagina monolgues tomorrow for the third year in a row.
she said "what, are you fixated or something?"
german freud pride. whut.
|
|
Friday, February 4th, 2005
|
|
|
they gave this to my grandmother after she had her first big stroke, to help her talk again. this summer my mother and i visited her grave, and the grave of my uncle, my mother's younger brother who lies next to her. their headstones are the same marble as our countertops in the yellow california kitchen. it was july green, forgotten about except by the faithful, two old german women and their dogs who brought flowers and cleaned weeds. many of the dead were younger than my mother is now. she held my hand and said, "it was what she wanted," and i understood without knowing. the lines around my mother's eyes kept getting filled in by the sun, even though she is past sixty she looked very young. my ponytail drooped and sweated down the back of my neck; we were both young.
oma said to me, there is no hell, liebling, only what people have created on earth.
every night for the past two weeks i've dreamed about someone i love dying. they fill up and float away like translucent balloons, the only string attached to my palm, and they pull and pull until i have to let them go or be pulled away with them. we talk about the correct stages of dealing with death and no one ever includes resurrection. i think one day i will be eighty standing in front of it, and still feel like everything's just begun.
|
|
Sunday, January 30th, 2005
|
|
Tuesday, January 25th, 2005
|
|
|
+ Pants with holes in the crotch so wide it has gotten obscene. Not so obscene that someone might kick me out of their house, but just obscene enough that they might take me in.
+ Deciding only to read slim books from now on. Have read Sarah by J.T. Leroy and most of Diary of an Emotional Idiot by Maggie Estep(highly recommended!) and some short stories by Amy Hempel over my last four lunchbreaks. Telling people I hate Tolstoy because he's fat. Instant gratification.
+ Cats named Pterodactyl
+ Saul Williams Thursday? &Michael Ian Black Saturday
+ My mother for letting me call her Bertha, and for calling me Mabel
+ Going to the beach and burning the last christmas tree, faces and hands holding lighters right up in the white gas, and screaming and the smell of beer and the ocean and three boys in a truck driving home naked
+ My communication teacher who said he doesn't grade on a curve because that means the worse someone else does the better it is for you. We live in a society where it's necessary to hold others back to get ahead, the individual over the collective. He said it's all about giving it away, there won't be anything to get if you don't give it away. And I realized I've been living my life that way. Sort of resenting it every time i had to do something for someone else, worrying that i wasn't getting my "fair share", worrying that i was giving more love than i was recieving. Stupid things, like putting away someone elses dishes or just being nice even if i am in a bad mood or getting the phone when we're all too lazy to get up for it. I think this is the one thing I really want to change this year. I want to give it away, my love, my time, my resources. That's the only way it will ever make its way to me or anyone else. MY LOVIN IS FREE COME GET IT WHILE IT'S HOT.
+ i might give up pants for lent
+ peeing in the street
+ Putting cookies in the toaster and eating them with tea
+ eight story beginnings and no endings. no endings this year, only beginnings.
+ i always come back to what she said to me, she said she didn't know if the feeling she got before she went to sleep was happiness but she felt free and that was enough.
|
|
Thursday, January 20th, 2005
|
|
Sunday, January 16th, 2005
|
|
|
|
5am is possibly the loneliest time ever, and it's still on its way. the world suddenly became deserted, waiting for that rare and famous breed of 'morning people' to get out in the world and for the parties to wipe the alcohol from the corner of their mouths and finally peter out on some ugly couch in someone named eddie's old basement somewhere. i'm still waiting for you like you're coming. but in the meantime, i've been making up secrets for myself, eating apples with knives, eating mouths with mine, listening to the harmony of the dial tone and the phantoms crunch across our roof. the street outside my window is hazy with streetlights breathing out their own dirty yellow heat, inside it's hot, lazy lungs breathing out the rest of the buzz. the two things i want most are a hug and a cigarette and i wouldn't take either even if they were offered. maybe, in the great words of stefanie, "right now, i just really want some ice cream and some, like, Kenny G."
|
|
Wednesday, January 12th, 2005
|
|
|
|
So I've been considering whoring my body out for science. Well, to be completely accurate, more for the $500 science would give me for going off birth control, peeing in a cup and eating alot of rice krispies for four months. Stefanie says I should sell my kidney on the black market, I could get alot more for it. It took a long moment to decide that a bathtub full of ice and scalpels might not be for me. Somehow my imaginary line keeps getting further and further behind me. I like to wave at it when the sun is shining and I've had too much wine and remember all the times we shared together. Still, I really don't want a job with a hot dog hat. What's a kidney for anyway?
|
|
Thursday, January 6th, 2005
|
|
Monday, January 3rd, 2005
|
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
amateurnight's journal
