room zero

deadletters @ 2009-12-16T22:51:00

2009-12-17T03:51:50Z

I got my first grade- an A in Beginning Fiction. Not bad. Tonight I finished my last Mechanics of writing class, but I have an extension for my final until Tuesday. The professor is also my academic advisor. Joe has more love for the craft of writing that I bet he can find a cadence in a Chinese food menu. He's a resource for every writer at the New School, one of our patron saints. He wants to review my manuscript as he would any other writer, and j. told me Monday that she has an aunt who's an editor at Random House.
Mighty fuck.
I'm meeting writers, I'm making friends. Before class I was doing my usual stare-at-nothing don't-fuck-with-me walk when a passing body says my name. I look back and there's T. I was in a media class with him last term; he's an exec at VH1 who I see on facebook from time to time. I honestly didn't think he remembered me. I complement his new beard, and he laughs. He reminds me that he's on the quest to discover the ending of 'Megan Wants A Millionaire'- Astrid asked me to ask him if he could find out, as the show was prematurely aborted once one of the reality show contestants was arrested for murder.. so I laugh, and I thank him. He's sincerely seeking this out, and he remembered me.

I got a few more names of people at the end of tonight's class; and again I'm surprised when people compliment my responses in class over the course of the term. Bright, creative people seeking me out and asking if I've a facebook, asking for a night to get coffee or beer and... and do whatever people do, I guess.
I'm writing nonstop because there's a wind-driven chill that kisses your face the second you step outdoors. Winter's deadly, but it's an honest season. I suddenly don't mind being forced to slow down. I'm not fighting this season the way I argued with fall. I think I'm ready.

deadletters @ 2009-12-16T17:30:00

2009-12-16T22:30:14Z

Kafka on the subway.

j.

J.

deadletters @ 2009-12-16T15:52:00

2009-12-16T20:52:56Z

I have so much I want to say.

deadletters @ 2009-12-16T14:14:00

2009-12-16T19:14:34Z

I've been writing with a different rhythm, remembering how to use the typewriter like a percussion instrument. I'm beginning to learn the knockedsideways rhythm of a man with a head injury, missing thesteps, landing on such different steps.

Sarah Kane was so elegantly unbalanced. That poor woman. She didn't know what at all to do with toys when she was a child. No one found her as a child. What a lonely place that must have been, with no one to show her so much at such an early age. She got very smart at navigating emotional parts of hell that grow so familiar by such an early age; it makes sense why she would stay there all her brief life than by visiting stranger, possibly warmer mental climates.

deadletters @ 2009-12-14T12:20:00

2009-12-14T17:20:10Z

Write and delete, write and delete. Write and delete, write and delete. Write and delete, write and delete. Delete and rewrite and ctrl + a and delete.
2,476 entries, a permanent account that I *still* don't know who gifted me, and this? This is a fucking joke.

I lay in bed for an hour having waking nightmares and shivering under the weight of some terrible ideas. I pushed a sleeping Astrid off me and opened my notebook. Two chapter ideas and so many details (how the arms go during the stabbing, where the hands go during the dying, remembering you *could* hang from the pipes at Coney Island High, but did Less Than Jake play there before 1996?), still struggling to name the (other) photographer- the way people stagger after car accidents and the way birds still sing in September.

I'm posting this before I delete everything I just admitted.

I was reading about Icarus and remembered Jack Gilbert. Failing and Flying.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

deadletters @ 2009-12-13T14:22:00

2009-12-13T19:22:33Z

"As our numberless needs emerge from their redoubts and press in upon the electrified glass, will the shoes, like the Grimms’ ancient flatfish, lose patience with our ever-growing demands and return us to the hovels of our discontents?"
(p. 93-94)

deadletters @ 2009-12-12T21:55:00

2009-12-13T02:55:23Z

deadletters @ 2009-12-12T12:54:00

2009-12-12T17:54:47Z

Everyone is looking at me like I'm crazy.

deadletters @ 2009-12-12T11:18:00

2009-12-12T16:18:46Z

I need to get out of this room.

deadletters @ 2009-12-10T07:11:00

2009-12-10T12:11:46Z

xnx

Cnt kp up wht ppl ar syng
I knw im here, were s here?

Rgd crdrs f stl ht s flm
Sldng sdwys agny t brth

all i wnttstslp n drm agn

Xanax notes

2009-12-10T00:26:44Z

I am not enjoying xanax. .25 mg: the worry that 5 mg of valium would evaporate is sustained, only peripherally. It's paranoia-inducing, the sensation that something is wrong... simply unsure what.
Today was a bad day. The drug hasn't helped.
Next week on a day off I'll experiment with .5 mg and see if the anxiety is intensified or erased. Right now I'm less than impressed.

deadletters @ 2009-12-09T15:29:00

2009-12-09T20:29:28Z

Rain all night and all morning, the sky breaking apart into pieces of the day that the bright, brittle sun can pour through.
Last day of Mechanics of Fiction. This was a light class, one of a few A's this term. I have a lot of work to catch up in two of my classes, and I've got a week to do so.
I have Saturday off from work. My Mechanics of Fiction class wants to hold a three-hour session to close out the season, so I'll be spending the 12th staring at the sky from a west village classroom instead of my Brooklyn office.
Which reminds me: I need to read the Great Gatsby before Saturday.

I need to make an appointment with my advisor. For next week. I finally signed up for my Spring classes, and they're fantastic. I still have no major. They're going to give me a bachelor's in Liberal Arts if I don't fix this soon. I keep taking classes because I need to, but I need to choose a direction. I need to think of a career.
I'm immensely looking forward to getting out of nyc. A master's from a university in California sounds like a good way to go, if not in Europe. And I'd be working to that end if I had an inkling of direction.

Note

2009-12-09T15:48:07Z

If you and your wife are fighting about anything- even as trivial as about doing dishes- using the phrase "If I were single...", even to try to justify when and if you are going to wash a cereal bowl, is an immediate, contemptuous failure on your part.

blowing the motivational speaker

2009-12-09T15:16:42Z

The epicenter is a good place to be. It tells you that you can walk in any direction and be free. Just start walking.

The usual suspects

2009-12-09T02:02:45Z

deadletters @ 2009-12-08T18:17:00

2009-12-08T23:17:04Z

deadletters @ 2009-12-08T17:32:00

2009-12-08T22:33:04Z

I was hosting the open mic. Every Tuesday at the muddy cup, in the dim back room that looked like the meeting-hall for the anarchists' local union, I showed around 8 after driving an ambulance for ten hours. As host, I usually brought my own street corner rant/psycho conspiracy theories, a verbal, suicidal amputee ballet with anger-fueled ideas that were hitting each other with prosthetics and shoes in the middle of a verbal moshpit.
I didn't need paper or poetry on a bad night. I sounded like Against Me! doing an a capella "I Still Love You Julie" or even "Miami".
I remember the night I was completely alone. Snowing outside. The back room empty but for me and a large cup of black coffee with two shots of espresso. A few people in the front room, hanging out on the chairs, watching the snow come down. I stood there in front of the microphone and started talking. The room was full, if you let the disembodied voices in my head take seats in the sagging chairs and warped church pews. William Burroughs was there, and so was Baudrillard. The Dalai Lama and the devil playing checkers. Cronenberg comparing notes with Ballard. Henry Miller and Tom Waits and Danny Elfman in the devil costume from Forbidden Zone, smiling at the real devil (who seems scared of him), Frank Black and Rimbaud and Hemingway (drinking a Death In The Afternoon with a .505 caliber shell at the bottom of the glass) I made Lenny Bruce chuckle, I made Sontag nod, I got Patti Smith's telephone number (she looked like she just had the photo taken for the cover of Horses.) And K. came with m., and F., and j. and t. and you were there too. All of the letters I had never sent. They were all there, watching me work.
That's bullshit. I was a loud idiot in an empty room.

deadletters is an empty room. I write like I'm talking to somebody, but sometimes I talk to myself, and sometimes I think I'm talking to someone specific and that's when I'm talking to myself most specifically.
There's a voice for talking about others and a voice for yourself. Everyone does this. It gives you away.

I'm in the second doctor's office in two days. I don't like asking for drugs ("You just like taking them", Astrid adds) but here I am. I'm thinking of 1999. j. was planning on visiting nyc. She'd been living in Hollywood for a while, and restless as she was, needed to travel. We were looking forward to this for a long time; talking online for years but never meeting in person. Then she disappeared. Unresponsive. I waited, but no word. The second night she was supposed to be on my coast it thundered and raged, and in the middle of the night, staring at the computer screen, I pulled on my boots and sweatshirt and ran out into the rain. I ran into the park, dark and drenched like the nest of some vast predator. I ran in the driving rain and booming thunder until I reached the lake, sodden clothes heavy and cold, and soaked through to the bones, and my boots weighed fifteen pounds each and my limbs were screaming with every effort at motion and my hair whipped dripping in my eyes and I ran around the lake again, flashbulb bursts of blue lightning that made the park glow and recede into blindness and when I had enough- the way every runner knows breakdown is imminent, the way a soldier knows the wounds are fatal once they stop moving, and I remember the heavy black timberlands sploshing in the grass with my final steps and I was in the air and I was in the air over the water until I crashed into the lake.

I tried to sink in the shallow water, but floated, heavy as I was, hovering in the dirty water with the rain pelleting into my body. I felt like I failed. I couldn't burn the feeling out of my body so I gave up. I couldn't sink. I found the bottom and waved my arms to push me back to shore. I crawled through the mud, hands pulling me back onto the grass, and walked home.
j. was fine, of course. Some basic mixup. I overreacted.
I don't have any conclusions or grand wisdom. I started writing this in a doctor's office waiting room (having secured xanax in place of the valium I was seeking, and 3 mg lunesta as a bonus), and now I'm on the ferry going to class.

I'm recalling notes from morphine use (again, 1999. What a great year.) The drug works by way of subtraction. All the hallucinogens I'd done showed me things, and opiates devalue the artifacts of the world. I realized, then, the difference between darkness and the absence of light. Elementary subtraction, that going less than zero means something is still active, even if negative. What's that lyric?

"When your last little light is out, I'll show you just how dark it gets."

deadletters @ 2009-12-06T22:31:00

2009-12-07T03:31:10Z

We made dinner. Roasted chicken stuffed with orange slices, butter under the skin. Sweet potato mashed with butter, cinnamon and moleasses. Salad with crispy bits, spinach leaves, arugula, cranberries, almonds.

I just realized why the joker smiles. With certainty. It's a black joke. The killing joke.

I was thinking technology is insidious because we want someone to do our work for us. We don't want to read, we want someone to read for us. We want someone to kill for us. We want someone to die for us. We want the simulation to define us, and protect us, and distract us, and replace us. The simulation is the code of the other intelligence infiltrating our intelligence. Machinelike people make machinelike worlds; creative machines make more creative machines.

I miss when people who did drugs wore glasses. Like Roy Orbison.

All war is stupid. Fighting is necessary in a world that doesn't trust itself, but war is an eternal condition.

deadletters @ 2009-12-06T21:19:00

2009-12-07T02:19:44Z

Kali sucks a warm bone like a hard cock.

David Lynch and Isabella Rossalini

2009-12-05T20:40:50Z

Look at her lips. Look at her face. Like she'd never been touched before.

Who doesn't hate themself?

2009-12-04T23:36:10Z

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; their 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. They enjoy making you relive traumatic memories. 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.
The young guards 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 limb while a fully-grown geriatric has infiltrated and taken up residence in your mind. 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 already 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 online series 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 echo from 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.

#718 is scanning a woman in a grey overcoat, scratching her temple, just barely aware of him lurking just below the surface. He's laughing at her awkward memories of high-school lesbian experimentation when a man walks past that seems curious. He can feel #1013 trying to penetrate the man's mind, but the younger guard's face twisted in frustration. #718 nodded across the terminal and examines the suspect. But it's strange. Nothing's been strange to #718 for a long time. He spends more time in other peoples' heads than his own. He no longer dreams, a side-effect of his job, so he encounters a nagging greed when this man is not immediately vulnerable. He becomes enraged facing the unfamiliar, not having encountered unfamiliarity in many years.
#718's efforts are noticed by the other guards, who glance at one another in bemused, reptilian silence. #718 pushes further, and is inside his head without effort.

There are no objects in the man's mind. There are no words; where there should be words, a total absence of language. The man has no memories, and no ambitions. He is a vast, white space in which #718 rapidly races further and further into, trying to find a crack in the armor. #718 has been doing this for a long time. He's scanned the blind, the mute, cripples and retards and senators and saints and everyone else in God's strange garden. He's seen the defenses people hide behind in their mind, and he's always torn them down to display his strength. He's moving faster and faster along the white space searching for a vulnerability, a flaw. #718 is the law, and this empty man was a threat to his authority.
Two seconds have elapsed since the strange passenger entered the terminal, #1013's failure and #718's subsequent confusion. The other guards all watch #718's face contort, a large vein stuttering in his neck, and he suddenly grabs his left arm before heavily collapsing to the terminal floor. People scream.

Every guard shifts around the strange passenger. Three old men triangulate from afar and approach, the others shuffling unhurried to get closer. The young guards look at one another, fear gathering in their confusion. The old men seize the stranger with their minds, six at once, ten, then twelve, all of the old men except for #718, dead on the floor. Passengers are gathered around the body, screaming at the uniformed guards to call for help, but they're all transfixed by the scene unfolding before them.
The man is still in the center of the terminal, and all of the old men around him topple to the floor at once.

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

2009-12-04T18:22:13Z

The secret heart of obsession is wanting, waiting and wishing for the object of affection to see the depth of dedication they contain. The secret heart wants the object of affection to see the obsessed person for who they truly are, someone overtaken by love. The secret heart wants to be loved as intensely as the one they obsess over. The secret heart knows they deserve as much love as they have shown. The secret heart smolders in secret.

deadletters @ 2009-12-04T07:21:00

2009-12-04T12:21:26Z

The best part of yesterday:

The new, hardass Napoleonic lieutenant is being unnecessarily hardassed about some minutae he decides to take personally, and he's consulting with M. K., a firefighter who is so bored in our division he does a thousand pushups a day. Fifty pushups at a clip.

After advising the littlest lieutenant, M. K. (who does indeed go by first and last name, like Charley Brown) walks over to my desk with a smile.
"He's asking me what do do." He's stifling a laugh. "And I'm an idiot."

deadletters @ 2009-12-02T22:56:00

2009-12-03T03:56:54Z

It will feel real.

2009-12-02T20:14:17Z

This month breaks all my words. The season pushes me down to the ground, and when I get up it shoves me back down again.
The periphery of late fall and early winter has the wayward energy of absinthe. The green fairy sits on your shoulder and makes you mad- mad if you resist. Drink absinthe, and the absinthe drives. You're the passenger, and you will bend around her terrible gifts. This season does the same. I can write without thinking, but I can't write what I need to. That is, my mind and school have drastically differing needs.

My love is so strange, but I'm full of it. I need some black ink under my skin, somewhere between the shell and the throbbing red pump. It will feel real.