summer update

this post is for my mother. she says i've been neglectful of this blog and since i privatized my twitter account she has even fewer things to do on the internet. hi mom! miss you and home. please send cafe bustelo.


i found this dead bug in my dollar-a-head haymarket celery a few days ago. i was going to throw away the whole bunch but then i reevaluated the decision and thought about my financial situation, which is somewhere between market basket and total despair. and then i thought about how many bugs had hatched and crawled and died on that very celery plant as it grew, and i was no longer grossed out, so i cut off the section where the dead bug had laid (it was resting conveniently on the bitter white bottom part of the stalk) and washed the rest of the stalk and cut it into sticks and tossed them with yellow bell pepper and raw zucchini and fig-infused vinegar.

here's a close-up of the bug. i don't know what kind of bug it is except that it's exactly what i always imagined gregor samsa to look like in his transmogrified body. and doesn't his mother or gretchen pull one of his legs off?


not much else is going on. it's been raining for about a month and it doesn't look like it's going to stop anytime soon.

o l i v e / u

sara made dinner tonight while i bit the pits from spanish olives and spelled love notes on the kitchen table. i think we are very happy here. honeymoon stage, i guess: she is to my left now, arms all full of bracelets, reading another book from my queer identity class last fall. i like school and i sort of wish summer didn't mean no classes, but it's been nice to breathe air and curl around my coffee cup for a while. i have been rummaging through my art supplies and dabbling, the past few nights, with ink, watercolor, copper wire, bits 'n' scraps. the result has been a handful of very small things; some abandoned, some crumbled, some mildly pleasing:

miniature ink drawings with watercolor, colored pencil, thread and pastel crayon.

sartre takes a smoke break in the tuileries. i don't have pliers in my new place yet so playing with this resulted in bloody fingers. the petals are recycled from a lit mag i don't care about.

i started reading Ulysses today between calls at work. it's about time, i think. at page 43, so far i have learned a great deal of greek and latin and laughed out loud probably a dozen times. will report back in a week or two. fleshier summer reading list to follow, as well.

the wind, again

yesterday i finished reading richard brautigan's "in watermelon sugar." it is now my favorite book of all time. not to get cosmic or anything--in the past i have expressed a desire to, one day, write a book myself, but after reading "in watermelon sugar" i no longer feel the need to write a book. i may, however, write a supremely presumptuous and overtly psychoanalytical scholarly article about "in watermelon sugar" and submit it for publication in the oxford journals. for the first thirty pages or so, i was convinced the watermelon fields were acres and acres of color-changing buttocks.

anyway.

when i was a freshman i made this dashti out of an old coathanger, some scrounged supplies and a nazar bonjuk. for a while it chased the bad spirits away from my bedroom in my parents' house but i think it has really found its home here: at six o'clock the sun comes in and scatters jewels all over the walls of my new room.


tonight we are having (mostly) cupcakes and wine for dinner. the wine is white and almost gone and the cupcakes are yellow cake with pink sugary tofu cream frosting, sprigs of mint and fresh raspberries. sara and i made them together.

new bachelorette apartment

freezer contents: carrot cake rice milk ice cream, soy protein links, gordon's london dry gin. i love our new life

this week

tonight i finished my chapbook, "Buying Lube at Whole Foods." you can't buy a copy because i only made one, and it's my final project for my gender and performance studies class and will be in the hands of my professor (who is very very very very cool) tomorrow. still, now i can say that i am the author of an original chapbook, kind of, i guess.



newish destruction/addition to an oldish painting. i kind of like it, although spending so much time around Serious Artists the past few months has got me feeling a little silly thinking i can paint at all.


i have a story in the new emerson review, which is chock full of delightful words and pictures by a whole mess of talented americans. (they even published charles bukowski once! let's tell that story again!) pick up your ***free*** copy today

today i continue to exist in the universe

i was up with the dawn and went running, which is something i have not done in too long a time. boston is beautiful the past few days, coming all alive and languid instead of disappearing completely, at night, outside my window. i feel very transcendental and microcosmic and shit, like the inside of me is an echo of everything on the outside, everything hearkening and winking stars at each other through endless floating webs. for right now it's a nice way to feel.


(evidence here)

i climbed the hill to whole foods this afternoon but they didn't even have plantains, so i couldn't make tostones for the vegan food festival like i wanted to. what kind of organic grocery store doesn't have plantains? but i bought chanterelles, to cook tonight in olive oil, and an apology avocado.

in four days i will pack up all my things and move somewhere else. our new home is four steep flights of stair creak up, beside the gourmet cheese shop. almost one hundred years ago, in our neighborhood, a molasses tank burst and a tidal wave of molasses rushed from the distillery into the streets, killing 21 people. they say that on warm days your feet still stick to something dark and viscous that seeps up from between the cobblestones, and ghosts with crushed lungs hack up sugar crystals that scatter about your ankles.

things i made this weekend

this scarf (two skeins)


this oil painting, "curmudgeon with diminutive meatloaf" (close-up; meatloaf not shown). it is never going to dry


i feel productive and generally good, nourished, placable

kallie and i made this movie

we made it together, the walrus's name is kulu, we also made a hypnocake that ended up on the cutting room linoleum
the EEA hiatus show went really well, this looked really cool looping on a tv in the darkness
i love when my friends make music. i just want to eat their songs all day and listen to them squeak and warble inside my belly.

charisma

this is my favorite bukowski poem
it is the only bukowski poem i truly love
it can only be found in "burning in water drowning in flame"
i had to look for it tonight because it is relevant to a friend's life
poor kid

i want to share it with everyone, i am going to put it on my blog. the writer is ivre morte in the motel in the sky so copyright schmopyright, i won't get in trouble right


CHARISMA, by charles bukowski

this woman keeps phoning me
even though I tell her I am living with a woman
I love.


I keep hearing noises in the environment,
she phones,
I thought it was you.

me? I haven't been drunk for several
days.

well, maybe it wasn't you but I felt it was
somebody who was trying to help
me.

maybe it was God. do you think He's there?
yes, He's a hook from the ceiling.

I thought so.

I'm growing tomatoes in my basement,
she says.

that's sensible.

I want to move. where shall I move?

north is obvious. west is the ocean. the east is the
past. south is the only way.

south?

yes, but not past the border. it's death to
gringos.

what's Salinas like? she asks.

if you like lettuce
go to Salinas.

suddenly she hangs up. she always does that. and she
always phones back in a day or a week or a
month. she'll be at my funeral with tomatoes and the
yellow pages of the phonebook stuck into the pockets of
her mince-brown overcoat in 97 degree heat,
I have a way with the ladies.

caroline bergvall

a mystery man (upcoming feature?) at the ICA recommended her to me; download these they're cool

lately, i have been reading alex lemon's "mosquito" and the latest elimae

lately i am plain sad for you, future lover

i have a story publishing in the next issue of emerson review, it ain't the paris or mississippi but it'll help validate my major for my parents

wonderful haberdashery

i love maira kalman and i just found her blog. i love her because she is in her sixties and still has the same issues that i do, except she is not teenagery about it (when will we stop being teenagery. do i have to get preggo or get an internship. do i have to pay off my $30,000 in stafford loans.) so it is somehow fresh and reassuring in a paradoxical way. maybe my issues will never be rectified or rescinded from whence they came and i will be 65 and still writing letters to put in the translucent pink paper bag on my desk and never show anyone. but that is ok if i am going to be a little like her.

if you are sad, buy this book. it is full of wonderful loping limps and wonderful hats and gigantic question marks like hanging birdcage chairs that you can tack to your ceiling and sit in and mull over. she even goes to visit louise bourgeois!



there is a girl in my poetry seminar who is like a hunched-up baby finch with candy-cornflower blue eyes. she wrote something funny and sad that has been repeating in my head. it is delightful to finally sit in a room full of brilliant poets. her reading voice is small and honest and could probably dub the lines for a nervous cartoon forest pixie.

it is very cold in boston tonight.

i have a question

why do humans have toenails

why
why


there are dead things growing out of your feet and you have to like
maintain them

and girls paint them

small oceans

yesterday i went to the new england aquarium. have you ever been looked straight in the eye by an 80-year-old sea turtle that weighs more than you do, i have


i no longer feel like i did when i made the last post. i wrote a poem about a gooey duck. it is actually spelled "geoduck" and pronounced gooey duck but i will never look at "geoduck" and instinctively think "gooey duck." people have been talking about geoducks a lot around here, lately. i switched out of my fiction workshop and into another poetry seminar, which i guess isn't fulfilling any sort of requirement at this point but is a nice comforting place to be. i have heard good things about the professor and a lot of my friends are in the workshop. i am looking forward to it.

everyone is being weird in the world today. in africa a goat was arrested on a double charge of bank robbery and black magic, malika told us this morning while i made coffee.

here is a video i did of a jellyfish in gatorade-blue water



i recommend everyone go find a book by kenneth patchen and read it, he is definitely invited to my dinner party.

(this entire post should be in parentheses)

i have been thinking more and more about the things that propelled me to throw everything away while i was on the island for christmas, because it wasn't just moving. i guess i have been thinking that maybe i can gradually destroy all evidence of my detailed existence in any physical past, i can go to the bedrooms and mailboxes of all the people i have known and quietly take all the letters i have written and pictures i am lurking in the background of and just put them somewhere. or get rid of them, but when you put things in the trash they do not stop existing. i don't think that the average person considers things like this when they toss away grapefruit rinds and credit card solicitations. "matter cannot be created or destroyed or created be cannot matter." at the same time i want to knit myself behind a wall of white yarn in a garage filled with crystal teardrops on toothfloss and pale feathers shellacked to the walls. i want to cover my hands in glue or gloss medium or wax and then peel it off when it dries into a translucent glove. i want to fold mythical animals out of tissue paper and line up glasses filled with water to all different points and lick my fingers and run them along the edges of the glass and find different tones and then rearrange them, and then maybe i will just stop existing and if i had destroyed all the letters and pictures and sharpied my face out of your yearbook (which i did not sign) i wonder if anyone would notice and maybe it would be nice if they would not.

pour your body out

we saw pipilotti rist's pour your body out at moma on sunday and it was great. a bit of an overload on the giant feet, but otherwise, absolutely great.


from the fourth or fifth level balcony (my photograph).

i have been knitting, even though i'm a sloppy knitter so far. i have knit (knitted?) a scarf and a half, and alecia and i are going to do stitch 'n' bitch when we get back to boston. lately my hands are feeling itchy and limber and they want to do things. i have a saw that kevin is going to teach me how to make beautiful strange music on, and i bought new oil paints and commandeered my deceased grandmother's button collection. i want to make things.

treasure beyond measure

bored to tears in my childhood home, i have taken to pillaging our magical attic and the darkest depths of my parents' closet and adopting all the duds i find. maybe i have been spending too much time reading fashion blogs written by twelve-year-olds, and i should probably be embarrassed, but witness exhibit a:
    
my dad used to make and sell these calico patterned shirts, in the style of turn-of-the-century seminole ceremonial jackets, when he lived on the bowery in the 1960s. he says this one is "crude" but i think it is "way fucking cool" so i took a leopard print belt and voila, instant minidress. the leather jacket is brain-tanned moosehide, hand-embellished, and was bartered for from a cree chief in northern quebec. it was then reconstructed by my father over the course of twelve hours by firelight at a sewing machine inside a teepee in north carolina. then he wore it all the time to get seated at elaine's because the maître d' thought he was some kind of rock star.

in my last post i talked about one of my dad's many fantastical adventures in the hippie days of yore. excavating the closet, obviously, prompted a slew of fresh fables. we have been getting along well since i have been home so i figured i will blog a little more about his life, which both fills me with joy at the stories that lie waiting to unravel in my future and makes me think he cannot possibly be honest. look at all the cool things that have happened to him:

1. he ran away from home when he was like 16 and hitchhiked to florida on a watermelon truck and never came back
2. he saw a rollerskating chimpanzee at a steakhouse
3. he got drunk with evil kaneval
4. he had a job making seashell ice cream on a navy ship in the north atlantic
5. he took a nap with 25 iguanas on some ancient ruins in puerto rico
6. he got drunk with princess leia
7. at woodstock he camped in the mud for three days and subsisted only on a can of spam which he bummed of off a hell's angel gang member
8. he drove off a mountain and broke his spine in half

hardly anything cool has ever happened to me in my life, ever:

1. paloma picasso told me she liked my dress at a dinner party (when i was 3)
2. the one and only time i ever went skiing i was stranded at the top of a black diamond trail, abandoned by my friends, and had to be saved by a polish man with a prosthetic leg
3. this halloween i shook hands with john kerry while i was wearing a flamingo costume
4. once i ate nothing but carrots for many weeks and my hands and feet turned fluorescent orange

THAT'S IT! my life is a joke. almost nineteen and a half and nothing to show for it. i just sit here. bloggin'.

tomorrow kallie is coming to visit and we are going to pet some sea creatures and cook delicious meals and create filmographic brilliance (maybe) so i am at least excited for that.

"the wall"

this british guy did an interesting project, i've been watching all the footage even though none of it is particularly moving or purposeful (which is kind of nice):
"The Wall was composed by 54 people over a period of 12 months. In 2006 I stopped throwing stuff away. The kitchen got full of plastic milk cartons. And the green tops. Eventually the council put a plastic recycle bin outside my flat so the cartons went into that. From 1st January - 31st December 2007 every visitor to the flat put a green bottle top up on the wall - postman, alsatian dog or whomsoever - they got their bit of blue tac and a bottle top and hummed and hahed and made a decision. February 2008 I drew the stave on, over and within the dots, and since then various folk have been interpreting this."

there are clarinetists, synths, banjo, tambourine, i can't tell how seriously any of them are taking it.

thinking about being a human being makes me feel really weird and uncomfortable

my dad told me a story about how he met wavy gravy from the hog farm commune at a yale party in 1970 and wavy gravy asked him to make a balloon in the shape of a pig, so my dad did, then the hog farm people ritual-sacrificed the balloon pig. jefferson starship was there too and then wavy gravy kidnapped my dad's friend julio to tibet and they made a movie called red ball or red orb or something. the movie is about hog farm hippies doing drugs and looking for a maharaja in tibet and nepal. i couldn't find it on imdb