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Monday, November 23rd, 2009
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10:38 am - Away = write as if someone can hear you whisper
Dillinger Four on the truck stereo.
labourissuesinthetoydepartment
"Know your place"
It's like a voice
That won't go away
Live vices we hold to tradition
Like children not allowed to across the street
Starving for some recognition
Where want and honesty meet
Nothing known can match the bitter pain
Of knowing happiness is just beyond the reach of your chain
And the overwhelming feeling it will be the same forever
Now here I'm looking down a hole again
Treating damage and despair like they're long lost friends
With no remedy at all
I'm just waiting for the fall
Staring out the window
Like what's outside's unattainable
Cover me with roses for the funeral pyre
Shoot this dashing carcass out to fucking sea
I can't wait, in this state
This voice, these hands
Don't feel like they're really
Me
I'm the blinded who can feel that he's surrounded by walls
And relief is very seldom cheap
Now I think I'm gonna snap
Like prey in a trap
Watch as desperation takes a seat
Forgive me my trespasses
Like I know I'll trespass tonight
Don't want to hear any voices at all
Even if they're saying I'm alright
Memories beating soundly on the body
Cursing what's left of the sorry shell
I'd give anything to make this heart stop pounding
Staring out the window
Like what's outside's unattainable
Now life's like a b-movie
That no one wants to see
Here comes the zombie
Portraying me
What was once so crystal clear
Is now cranked past the norm
And I can't take it anymore
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10:21 am
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9:48 am
Two hours of highway ahead and I'm fishing through the grey box that contains everything I've ever written.
She's already five kinds of unhappy.
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8:58 am
Stranger Than Fiction always brings me to the brink of tears, but last night the scene that got me was when Will Ferrell s playing the guitar in Maggie Gyllenhaal's apartment, so unselfconsciously that it pulls in magnetically. I broke.
I've never seen a white Selectric iii. I don't think it exists. But it's beautiful regardless.
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Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
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6:37 pm
Chest pains all day. Thorns wreathing my heart. Stupid fucking lungs. Stupid overdose. It was the entire drive home, cold in the left side of my chest.
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6:06 pm
Market research shows that the number of friends I have who understand me now equal zero.
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5:59 pm
Sorry, S., I deleted your comment by accident. Please repost.
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3:12 pm
Pidgeons are one of my favorite creatures. I know a lot of the ones around metrotech by their markings. One flew into my truck this morning, and I know if I didn't kill it I threw it into the highway where some other high-speed metal monster crushed it. I felt terrible.
I was walking nowhere for lunch when I found this on a sidewalk.
Poor little guy.
I know. It's the way the world is. I'm sure he'll make a stray cat happy.
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2:49 pm
She writhed, stifffening and moaning on the bed. Waves of diagonal pain coming through Molly contorted her across the sheet, and she kicks the blankets and pillows off before contracting into a fetal ball. She sobs, a wet wail from the bottom of her stomach. The sound lurches through her throat and she disentangles, rolls over weakly, and vomits more orange Gatorade into the bucket.
Jacob is in the chair, leaning over, his face masked by his hands. She shivers and claws the blue blanket off the floor. "ThisisworsethandyingthisisworsethandyingthisisOHH GOD. Oh god please stop. Please stop. Pleaseplease-" The door buzzer steps on her voice. Jacob stares at the intercom, and presses the dirty Open button.
Six locks unlock and he opens the door to Emma ascending the stairs. Staring him down, she hisses,
"What the fuck did you do to her?" He steps aside to give her room to enter and she still shoves his shoulder, pushing him limply aside. She starts consoling Molly immediately, and he watches the beautiful girls, one crying, the other soothing. Molly has her eyes closed, moaning,
"Ohh.. Emma.. I love you, I love you so fucking much.."
"I know, baby. I love you, too." Her green eyes look at the black window, her teeth set as she rubs Molly's back. Emma sees the wet bucket half filled with sharp-smelling sick. Her voice wavers. "What is it, baby? Did you get some bad shit?" Molly propped herself on her hands, sitting up and fixing Jacob with the sharp brown marbles of her eyes. Emma pets her damp, stubbly head.
"It's him." Emma's green eyes flick on him. "He's making me sick." She pulls a t-shirt with Mickey Mouse on the front, pulls it on inside-out. As if the two girls were alone in the room, Emma asks quietly,
"Sweetie, what did he do? How much heroin have you done?" Molly pauses in the frustration of incomprehension.
"Not enough. I'm still sick. Never, ever been dope sick like this. It's him. Makes me sick. In my head. He's.. toxic, you are A FUCKING BIOHAZARD, you fucking. Bastard. Creep." She has those eyes now, lit and looking to fight, but she's trembling with the effort to yank the plaid green skirt over her hips. Her pupils are staring pinpricks of ink in shiny brown fields.
Emma considers Jacob, standing in his corner, with a trace of sympathy. Her slender fingers quickly lace Molly's boots, and she helps the sick girl to her feet.
As they take the first steps, Molly's leg kicks out, knocking the bucket on it's side. A puddle forms on the wood floor beside the bed, orange and green, soft and thick.
He doesn't move, but eyes them as they walk past. Molly spits,
"That's what you are. Sick."
The two girls leave his apartment, and descend the stairs, one a disgraced, haggard calamity, the other a clean-faced angel who catches one more glance of Jacob's timid eyes as he shuts the door.
Even at the bottom of the steps, Emma hears the sharp snapping of six locks
over Molly's babbling sadness.
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9:02 am
Work today. Nothing but work. There's a book full of characters who all hate each other, crowded in my head, but I kicked them out. Tired of that conversation, tired of that city's noise. There is no city. Tired of my own noise. No radio today. Stare at the paperwork, stare at the screen. Scribble and click for ten hours and go home.
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7:59 am
7:30 AM highway through Brooklyn with the sun smashing everything with light. I'm not even driving my usual highway speed- I'm actually doing 55 in the far lane, and I see the pigeon in front of the truck for an instant before he bounches off the plastic shield covering the radiator grill. His wings were flapping hard, and maybe he got sucked into the momentum of the approaching truck. All I saw was a flutter of blue-gray before I heard the thunk. I didn't see anything after.
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1:59 am
The two last chapters of a book no one may ever read, hazy lungs, shaky hands, heavy head, hoarse throat, inkstains, amateur lobotomy pornography gone. Alarm goes off in four hours. Pushing on my eyes to drop blood pressure now.
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Saturday, November 21st, 2009
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10:05 am - Penderecki morning
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Friday, November 20th, 2009
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8:14 pm
On the train to the new tattoo. A few ideas in mind.
Barbed wire and strange, dim streets outside the slow train windows. Last exit.
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1:09 pm
I got eight hours of sleep last night. Overthrown by the sleepless nights, 10 hours of work followed by classes in which I generated coherent, cohesive statements that make the heads in the room nod in agreement, and all the time spent on trains and that fucking death barge, last night I made it. Sitting on the couch, the tv going but I'm not focused, I felt like I'd been smoked down to the filter. Astrid saved half a milkshake for me in the freezer, and I sucked on the straw and smiled with certainty that I was going to crash. Crawling to bed, the sky pulled it's blanket of stars and gentle clouds across my shredded mind until everything was not.
Eight hours of sleep. Today I'm awake. I'm calm. Muscles at rest. Posture correct. It helps that it's sixty degrees out, and in five hours Astrid's getting her quarter-sleeve/backpiece begun. Maybe I should get a new tattoo today too.
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5:56 am
Awake again. Surrounded by cats. It's so hard to get out of this bed.
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Thursday, November 19th, 2009
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9:06 pm
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9:04 pm
When exhausted, dead on your feet, forgot why-you-endure exhausted, or any generally suicidal state, I prescribe Andrew Bird's "Fiery Crash." On repeat.
That is all.
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12:43 pm - Security (revision 2)
They have new security guards at the terminal. The new ones wear sunglasses and stare at you like mannequins. There are old men, dressed shabbily, with faces lined like broken leather and eyes the color of stale dishwater. When one of the guards sees your eyes your head feels like razor blades in apple sauce. These are people that monitor your interior.
The uniformed amateurs are clumsy; sticky fingers rifling through the drawers of your mind, laughing at your poetry, making copies of your memories of sex to trade later on. The young guards are training on you. You hear their thoughts step over yours the way you hear a clumsy intruder on another floor of your house. You see the people being scanned this indiscretely, yelling obscenities into the air, "Get the fuck out of my head!" They wave their hands in front of their faces as though beseiged by flies.
They leave your head primarily out of embarrassment. They gain confidence as bullies do; they find victims too weak to fight back.
The older guards are more insidious. They float in your subconscious like a hot tub, a telepathic voyeur listening to your synapses spark into unfolding waking dreams. You're walking through the terminal, concerned with catching your train, and some 72-year-old from Omaha is calmly cutting off his fingers in your mind. While he rests, they regenerate like a lizard's severed limbs while a fully-grown geriatric has infiltrated your mind and has taken up residence. If the uniformed guards overturn your house while they ransack it, the old men are already in the family photos on the mantle. Beneath your notice. They make you forget where you were going while convincing you they've been there all along.
From deep within the cortex, they can hypnotically implant memories to make you addicted to heroin, make you believe the six mutilated bodies in the swamp are your fault, or that you cannot stop thinking of having sex with Hello Kitty. They make you buy $600 worth of lottery tickets a week, and if you win the funds suddenly withdraw to a "charitable organization" you've never heard of.
Where the uniformed guards stand propped up like wax figures, the old men loiter and linger in the terminal, spitting on the floor and picking up discarded cigarette butts. All of the guards stand alone. Each can sense the other picking up their prey, and can smell the ozone discharge of a deep scan. But they never interfere with someone else's work. The signals cross, distort, and nobody can see anything. There's also the increased likelihood of inducing a seizure in the passenger having their brain gangraped by simultaneous investigations.
The guards on break cheat at checkers. They all smell like coffee and cigarettes, and the younger ones write terrible fanfiction about serial killers, making them into heroes with super powers in a war against a culture obsessed with hallucinatory rules and laws. One series popular on the internet focuses on Jonestown, Guyana in 1978 as an Edenic paradise on earth. The conflict comes when the devil gives a press conference to prove, once and for all, that he does not exist.
People walking through the terminal are bombarded with the same message once every 46 seconds:
"Attention passengers. People entering the terminal are subject to search at any time."
But these messages pour out of blown, broken loudspeakers, painted a municipal yellow and hanging loosely from arbitrary walls. The message is broadcast in 12 languages, but is broadcast at different times and the echoes overlap and echo off one another creating a string of multilingual gibberish. "Attention passengers.." while hundreds of people in motion feel their skulls rearranged before they reach the door. "Attention passengers.."
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7:25 am - November dreaming
Whirling knife party in a savage room, a pot boiling the flesh off a human mandible, book burnings, bodybuilding monsters having missionary sex with sexless, anorexic skeletons, plague towns being quarantined and burned- special sequence involving high-speed pursuit of school bus being strafed with machine gun fire before limply toppling onto it's side. Everyone inside is burned by men in silver, fireproof Level A uniforms with blowtorches. Magazines full of models who have had their eyes surgically extracted and replaced with black scleral shells that allow them to see like an insect sees, never needing to blink. Glossy black lenses glistening in the flashbulb glare, and the model set nationwide perpetuates the same knowing smile. It's fucking creepy.
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