oh sweet NOTHING

i received a comment from a fucking spammer? gah!
mellow washes of pleasure... having nowhere to be. it was actually sunny today, after dense morning fog obliterated the world past my deck. fog-free, i can see clear to lake washington from my lair: i am actually directly across from zymogenetics and their 4 smokestacks (the bldg was once a seattle city power facility, i believe). i have spent the last few days, apart from working, being holed up in said lair (including xmas eve and xmas itself), alone, doing a fucking jigsaw puzzle and listening to the top 1000 classic rock songs ever!! on kzok (www.kzok.com). it has actually been rather enjoyable.
xmas at the ER involved the usual litany of euthanasias- 16 total, not including several that expired of their own accord. one cat was 21, another 19. i euthanised a seagull with a broken wing. there was "chewy" the pygmy goat who had lost her ear whilst attacked by dogs- "van Goat!" i said, but no one laughed. the table in the break room was laden with sugary detritus. everyone was irritable and sluggish by yesterday. i almost brought helix in to add to the pile of corpses. his prolonged decline has been causing me more stress than i care to admit. much of my hibernation was, in part, to spend time with him. but damned if the fucking wraith doesn't keep surprising me. he ate dry food zealously today. so he gets to live. he still purrs, he's still happy... just much, much more lackadaisical and reclusive. i lose all ability to apply my knowledge when my own guys are affected.
enough weird-lady-cat-talk, thanks.
at least half the people here, myself included, still have their scarves on. it is fucking freezing here. this is the first time i have been warm and not uncontrollably mucoid in several hours. that would be an even cooler statement when affixed to other random things, like riding in an elevator, or riding an elephant, or

wheee!

ah, sweet benevolence, you are a fickle lover, but such an incredible one that i am constantly seduced anew into imagining this is my reality.
(i shall not speak of the provocation.)
i walked around through the frantic throngs of last-minute consumers, feeling quite at ease. i love aimless days of selfish strolling. sampled truffle sauce and fudge at the market. truffles... they get in your soul, much like saffron or fenugreek- initially pleasant, then a bit overbearing. played with toys in pioneer square. read a twinkie cookbook at elliott bay. smelled fancy candles at the pseudo-provence shop run by the art garfunkel doppelganger. (best candle smells of late: tomato, mahogany and lettuce- not all together. and for the record, since i'm already babbling, i am not a candle person per se. cheap votive candles are sufficient, if anything. but i need to smell and touch everything. security guards must hate me.)
lovely and wonderful things of the past week:
-the message on my phone: "it's the weekend before christmas. are you feeling it?" spoken very sarcastically.
-toasted crumpets in my new toaster
-"things put on cats" calendar
-sexual innuendo magnetic poetry
-being able to talk to someone about nilla wafers, buck owens, shooting stars and sony boom boxes, in practically the same sentence
-realizing that the theme song of the week is actually "whenever you find it" by trey anastasio (wherever?), who was arrested for DUI near the vermont border a few days ago, possibly at the exact same moment i was listening to his cd
-hearing 'what condition my condition is in' and turning it up VERY LOUDLY
-purring cats and the sound of rain as i lay in bed
-coconut tea
-chocolate tea
these are the flaky, silly things, but mush them up and a glob of goodness may well emerge, or at least provide mortar for the shittier chunks.
this is a good place to be.

balletic eyes are crossing

spent the day with my parents. this has lead to weariness. i helped my mom make fruitcake (apparently this is not just an urban myth) and it was actually very tasty. i asked if they had any wine and she got a huge smile on her face and said "really?" very excitedly; i had 1.5 glasses and she drank the rest of the bottle, as is usually the case at family gatherings... she proceeded to get more and more animated, much to my father's obvious consternation. i gave them a box o' swag from trader joes, the coolest grocery store in these parts if one is seeking out, say, corn relish or dried banana strips or chili mangoes or prepackaged naan. they surprised the crap out of me with 3 framed pictures that i'd drawn when i was a teenager. i hadn't seen these drawings in years. it made me actually cry. those are very nearly the coolest gifts i've ever received (right up there with the glass starfish that hangs in my window, the 'golden ticket of wuv' that lives in a box above my stove, and the original 1969 life magazine of the beatles.... but i digress...)
xmas is bullshit, really, but there was something comforting as fuck about seeing their tree in the corner, with ornaments i remember as a kid- it made me feel nostalgic and oddly melancholy, a reminder that we've all gotten older and distance has changed the dynamics. they also gave me a photograph of us posing beside an iceberg in portage lake- back when the glacier actually produced icebergs. i was about 9. my parents are smiling and youthful; i am wearing a bright pink parka and glasses, scowling.
the situation with my oma and opa (my mother's parents- uber deutsche) is severely fucked up. they had an appointment to tour and put a down payment on a unit in an assisted living community (and to further my hatred of such treacly euphemisms, the place is called "the willows", as if there are willow trees around here) and completely blew it off. my grandfather is still driving, despite the harsh reccommendations otherwise of his doctors and family. "they are two incredibly selfish people" wrote my uncle's wife in an email to my mother. replied my mother: "it is difficult to believe that we four kids were raised by such ghouls and turned out fairly functionally." (i am delighted by her usage of "ghouls" to describe her parents- not only is it mostly accurate, it is an allover fantastic and far too underutilized word.) realizing how much crap she's put up with from them for her entire life is very sobering. "any story we tell about our childhood involves one of us getting punished for something," she wrote back. "there are no real happy memories."
i asked my parents tonight if they considered their childhoods happy. "yes" my father said immediately. "i thought it was normal to have a dad in a wheelchair." my mother laughed bitterly into her empty wine glass and proceeded to tell a story about when she was about 10 and it snowed. her parents went to the store and she was put in charge of her 3 younger siblings. "don't go outside" they were told. "if you walk on the snow you'll kill the grass." it rarely fucking snows in tacoma, so once the parents were gone they went outside to play and made a huge snowman ("the biggest on the street!" said my mother), all being very careful to walk in the bare grass of the snowman's wake. when oma and opa returned home there was no marvelling about the snowman or how cool the weather was; they were instructed to line up and pull their pants down ("because the belt hurts more on bare skin") and opa spanked them all. yes, with his belt. i hear stories like that and wonder anew how my mom must have felt to watch my father punish me. i never had The Belt, thank fucking god, but i did get smacked around, and once i received a black eye. "do you think you had a happy childhood?" my mother asked me. "sometimes" i replied, smiling to keep it light, feeling guilty for knowing that my crap is nothing comparable, feeling grateful as fuck that no matter how horrible shit once was between the three of us, we are now adults and friends who are able to talk about such things. my mother immediately flitted into a story about when she and my father took mushrooms and were too freaked out to go to the laserium at seattle center. apparently elton john was playing the colesium (since reinvented as key arena) that same night, circa captain fantastic, and the crowds attending were dressed up in full elton regalia: huge glasses, feathered hats, haberdashery. it rubbed them the wrong way. i was seconds away from relating my similar tale of mushrooms on hallow's eve, tweakishly being served food by a corpse with a dagger protruding from her bosom, but decided against it.
i am ignoring the paranoia of earlier in the week about the new guy. i think we're on sort of the same page, maybe. i am not going to jinx this any further with my circuitous trollop, so enough of that. sountrack of the past several days: trey anastasio "sleep again." (the first part of the album is very mediocre; the last part improves... just like phish...)
12% of americans name their boats 'serenity.' thank you, uncle john's bathroom reader, and thank you parents for having it laying around to school me.

i am a fucking asshole.

sometimes we fuss and fight

so the amazing man of prior entry went rather crazy on me... after a second very nice evening i recieved repeated voice and text messages calling me a "princess" and signed with x's and o's (symbols that repulse me almost as much as, how you say, emoticons... i dislike cutesy shortcuts and acronyms in general). what the fuck? it was our second time hanging out. i didn't even fuck him! i was a bit captivated by him until this. i don't know what to do. he is out of town right now. my instincts instruct me to hide, but masochistic curiosity wonders if perhaps it's just a phase, and perhaps he is calmer and more sane than he's currently letting on.
there are appealing and horrifying eschelons of nuttiness. my lure towards the former tends to get me in just as many sticky fixes, i suppose.
after the storm, a man (27 years old) was walking his dog in gig harbor and stepped on a fallen live wire. they were both electrocuted, both killed. the dog was brought in to my work to be scanned for a microchip, to determine if the man was his owner. people are still without power around here. 12 have died. there was a huge multilingual warning on the front page of the seattle times today about carbon monoxide poisoning from gas stoves, indoor barbecues, etc. apparently another, more demure windstorm accosts this area by friday. is this receiving national attention?
that first guitar chord from the pointer sister's "fire" is a truly lovely sound.

tenuous euphoria

the cafe is playing mu`m. they are very, very ambient... apparently their music was composed to be heard underwater- they got the idea whilst cavorting in a drained swimming pool. i saw them a few years ago. they were marvelous but what i remember most about the evening is how unbearably hot the club was.
last night i went to a figure drawing group- listened to the entire catalogue of modest mouse (and the more i hear, the more i fucking love them) whilst remembering how fucking much i love to draw. it has been a while- apart from the near-constant compulsive doodling. the walls of the space were lined with mexican saint thank-yous, painted in lurid nightmarish hues. "thank you lady of guadalupe for the gardener who fended off the wild pigs as they attacked me" was one, with a boy being ravaged, blood spurting. "thank you lady of guadalupe for my husband not finding out about my affair and for blaming himself for the gonorrhea", etc.
after the drawing i went to the croc to see the spoils, pink mountaintops, and kinski. kinski i have seen before and they are always fucking amazing- very intense, atmospheric, fuckable music. the spoils were great and the pink mountaintops were incredible. i found their cd for 70% off at tower today (6 more days before they close... very unfortunate). i was in a very jubilant mood after the drawing, akin to a mild upper, thus making it much easier to meet someone who fucking blew my mind. i saw him and thought "whoa. oh god. this is how it's supposed to be." carnal and intellectual fucking lust. jesus christ. i have been grinning like a dumbfuck all day. even if nothing ever manifests it is reassuring to know that the girly froofy hornball facets of me are not utterly numbed by cynicism and despair.
and there was a storm. thursday i was languidly decorating my lair in copious xmas lights- the place rather resembles a whorehouse now- when the rain started to fall. i decided to go on a stroll. in the hour that i was wandering under ominously creaking trees, watching people bail buckets of water from their flooding garages, seeing lightning flash, smirking at the parking lot of aurora avenue, it rained over an inch. the wind got worse later that night. i was over at a friend's house, watching 'the office' (which i'd never seen) and 'the daily show', when it got really bad. garbage cans were rolling all over the street. his dog was panicked- "he hasn't gone out in 7 hours" he said. when i drove home my car was being blown around- entire blocks were underwater- and the illuminated xmas tree atop the space needle was buckling into the shape of a cat's claw. friday dawned calm and sunny. driving around today, entire parts of town are still without power- businesses are closed, intersections are 4-way stops. i saw several huge trees on top of houses, leaning against power lines, splintered into the road. it was rather eerie. my parents, south of olympia, are still without power. "but we're sitting here watching 'sex and the city' with the xmas lights on" my father said smugly. they are running their home off their motorhome's generator. ah, the excess of america. (and yes, they really were watching 'sex and the city', though he would be quick to blame my mother.)
it is now cold as fuck outside, relatively, and they are now playing the dead, and sitting here with my tea, i feel a humble apex of contentment.

the fibroids of fear

last night the wind was blowing the torrential rain sideways. i cracked the window and listened from my bed, cats askance, feeling content with life. i have been out a few times with a new guy. he is very quiet. i feel rather somnambulous around him. but he has potential. perhaps. oddly, i have not really thought about it much- almost indifferent, really- and it is only when i speculate on that indifference that i consider it at all.
i want to be swept off my motherfucking feet. eventually. i have been having SO MANY SEX DREAMS! (the capital letters emphasize the rarity of such reveries.) i also had a dream last night in which i was sliding sideways down an icy hill in my vehicle. prescient? indicative of my perpetual flux? i was not harmed. i landed off the road in a snowbank. "hmm" i said aloud. the sky was clear and the surroundings glittered whitely. i once read (in a fruity 'dream interpretation' book) that 'dangerous' activities/situations in which one is nonchalant/unafraid/unscathed signify optimism, or at least acceptance, of dramatic life changes. i appreciate this assessment, despite the bullshittiness of dream analysis in general; this is the same happily rueful mood i derive from a really good horoscope.
'never my love' plays. this is one of the most gorgeous songs ever. how many fucking mix tapes have i put this on?
saw 'candy' over the weekend. that is a fucking excellent film. i exited the theatre pleased that i have not ever experienced heroin addiction. my hedonistic lines must be drawn somewhere. if it comes to some small pretentious screen near you, i heartily recommend. i also recommend: mango habernero salsa; singing along to nick drake whilst driving through pouring rain; not pressing too hard on the open fontanelles of 3# chihuahuas; the view from my lair on a misty morning as last night's nag champa clings to the walls; the man at the computer next to me (with a skull & crossbones do-rag) dancing in place to "lonely too long."
reading about sensory deprivation whilst sprawled on my floofy rug- sensory overload, tactily speaking? in the '70s studies were done with university volunteers: hands encased in padded tubing, placed in 98.6 degree water in black, soundless chambers, ears plugged so they couldn't even hear themselves breathe. after an average of 2 hours most of the participants begged to be let out (their only tie to the outside world being an emergency alarm) and none of them could be coerced to reenter. the longest duration of anyone was about 20 hours, and he had to have in-patient counseling for a few days afterwards. deprived of sensation, everyone in the study reported intense and horrible hallucinations. theories why: the brain believes the body is asleep and starts to dream; unused/underutilized portions of our conscience, the nasty parts, are able to flex their will in the absense of other distractions... the horror, for me, would be the isolation. i crave being alone but only with the option, at any given moment, of remingling with society. i would start to panic that the monitors of the study would yawn, check their watches, and decide to go home, leaving me bereft and hand-entubed with only my fucking psychoses for companionship... never to return. sensory deprivation would give my neuroses legs, hair, and teeth.
i am reticent to proofread this, having a hunch that it is nothing more than a laughable run-on, so shall post as is. proofreading is for the weak? (and writing in a blog is for the socially stunted...)

"happiness is a sad song"

i have done absolutely nothing of import today, and that's okay, i guess... i tell myself. i paid a stack of bills (including $300 for 2 months of electricity... i am never home, but i do leave the thermostat around 80... i always promised myself that unto my own devices, in my own lairs, i would never be fucking cold. so i am not. i am poor and stupid and wasting precious resources, but whilst sweating.). ate vegan bacon bits out of a plastic bag- very fucking tasty, i must say- like chunks of brown salt. wandered around the goodwill, where i was one of the only people not wearing some sort of hijab. it has become apparent to me that i am no longer a tourist here. i have left the rumpled sheets of honeymoon bliss and am dealing with the annoying tedium of reality. and i miss him. i am dealing with the pain of saying goodbye all over again- how many times now? it has been over 2 weeks since we've spoken. "don't contact me, don't come to seattle, don't be around" i told him. mindfuckery, like a plant, will die without nourishment.
i found a journal from '98... when i was planning to move to prague. i was, unsurprisingly, miserable then too. i was writing about getting there and having those several weeks alone, being completely unreachable, pretending i was single, wondering if he'd arrive and i'd be gone. a few days after i'd written that he was the one who left, to live the czech dream while i was relearning how to smoke camel wides in a foul motel room in albequerque. i read it with a smirk. "serves me right" i thought. i was incredibly fucking arrogant to believe that i was the only one dissatisfied in that relationship. that same knowledge applies here. perhaps if i pull my head out of my ass well enough, i will eventually cease to make the same fucking mistakes over and over again. it must start somewhere.
every truly sad song is one with a memory, especially a lovely one, that is no longer applicable. the one that first comes to mind is "god rest his soul" by 31st of february (later the allman brothers), but i heard ac/dc "touch too much" on the radio the other day and very nearly started bawling. emotional evocation is proof that one has lived, i suppose.

"you can run your car on this mother"

this week at work has been frenetic and draining. today was deathly slow in contrast. for a while i was the only tech on the floor. i reformatted the controlled drug logs. somehow busywork is much more exhausting.
'the lady is a tramp' is playing. the guy who works here must adore sinatra... it's usually playing. i must say that i enjoy it more than the klassic rawk calvacade of boston and ccr that used to always blare. he is always struggling through a crossword puzzle when i arrive. he is very nice and very, very gay.
my brain has stultified. here it is, in print.

"bummer" used without considering the dumbass-insinuating reprocussions

mania undulates in ~2 week spurts. i am so hyperactive and edgy that i can scarcely stand myself. i want to get into a screaming, passionate argument, be thrown down and fucked, get obliteratingly altered. instead i am chastely sipping asian jasmine tea and listening to dirty blues. externally i may even appear fairly combobulated (is that a word?).
saw dick dale for free at easy street. i fucking love that store. robyn hitchcock and dick dale, free, within a week and a fifteen-minute walk from my lair? this is why i moved. he is talented as fuck but a bit of a blowhard- kept babbling "check this out! wasn't that cool!" his 14-year-old son was on stage with him. he (the son) appeared mightily disgusted by the whole thing. talented little bastard. everyone clapped the loudest for him. of course he ended with 'miserilou'. afterwards i took a bus into the cold, crowded heart of downtown, the streets filled with vagrants and groups of yelling teenagers.
there is a book of americana via kodachrome that i highly recommend to anyone with a passing interest in lurid post-war kulture. oh, the days when women wore white gloves to go to "the City", when junior sprawled askance in front of the telly, when meat was red and marbled and the potatoes twice-baked into regal whorls of gold.
i read a thing about the nostalgia of those days, the era when kids played outside all day, when everyone knew and liked their neighbors, when everyone sat down for a well-balanced family meal... and how the kids who grew up in that era are now the adults who build fences in their fuck-you suburban enclaves, whose children are obese and lackadasical with strong controller-thumbs and paltry educations... and how perhaps that Wholesome Yay-Kin rearing wasn't all so positive after all. it gave me pause. apparently.
nostalgia is ignorance, romanticized- ignorance in forgetting what actually was. i sound stoned, but sadly, i am not.
the city is cauled in dense fog. it fits my mood.
may i add that my workplace ladles on the bullshit? i had a fucking staff meeting today, my day off- 60 miles roundtrip for an hour of chest-thumping crap-bleating drivel. the management there is so "good job, great idea" while discussing nothing of import- 15 minutes of today's meeting were devoted to the holiday party and should they hire a santa for the kids and if you work that night you probably shouldn't sign up for secret santa (and thank fuck, i do work that night- the better to not flaunt my barren-uterused atheism) and bring in canned goods for the food drive! the only part of any of it that made all of us laugh was the note about "if you feel a breeze, pull them up please"- a reference to the new assistant's affinity for lo-rise pants and the resultant ass-crack, rhyme courtesy of one of the doctors. "our resident poet" the manager said, not sarcastically.
i have been able to recall enough of my dreams lately to know they are pleasant and sexual and populated with people i know. there is no undercurrent of malice in any of them. being awake is a comparative bummer.

riding high in april, shot down in may

i have just had a most vexing last few hours, instigated by getting lost in fucking west seattle and missing my class, thrill kill kult blaring all the while. i am now at a cafe in my dancing clothes, trying not to think too much about the parking ticket i received this morning, or how sad it is that all the happy snow has melted. i was waiting for a bus downtown and an older man next to me struck up a conversation. "i had to work on my birthday" he said. we started talking, chit chit chatting, and he asked if he could buy me a drink. my bus was pulling up. i declined, wished him a happy day, and left. on the way home it struck me how sad that was. i hope he found someone to celebrate with. we are all lonely souls, ultimately. at the bank today the chirpy teller reccommended direct deposit, and my first thought was "but that's another opportunity for me not to interact with another human being", so i declined that too.
went to the fancy-pants downtown library and read smutty housewife porn as the brief sun splayed against the brick across the street. by the time i emerged, depressed and aroused, the sky was dark and people were walking brusquely from their jobs. this 4:30pm darkness thing is sucking my fucking soul. among sundry other drains.
but sinatra is playing, and that does wonders for my temperment.
i am in the far corner of this place, offering a stunning vantage point. the man next to me is looking at pictures of automobiles. two monitors down, someone is actually playing fucking solitaire, which is one of the most "no wonder this culture is so fucked up" things i've seen lately. now the auto-man is looking at missed connections on craigslist. oh god, he's after my heart, and he doesn't even know it.

of lice and zen

i am completely lost here. i honestly have no idea where the fuck i belong. i am doing my damndest to see the best in things, the humor in the multiple foibles, but i finally snapped tonight after something especially inconsequential (involving a lack of an outlet for my all-but-defunct laptop). i ended up crying in my car in a dark parking lot behind an italian restaurant that was blowing garlic plumes out of its vent system. couples holding hands walked by, oblivious. and yes, there is humor in this: it is melodrama at its knee-slapping finest. i just wish there was someone to tell it to.
i saw robyn hitchcock play a free show at easy street records this afternoon. it was filmed for the sundance channel, they announced once i got there. he was fucking brilliant. i, however, felt like shit (not to be vile, but it was fairly literally; thanks, ever-present ibd, for making my life fucking hell- surely this is contributing to my mindset). thus, if one ever sees "robyn hitchcock and the venus 3 live at easy street" on the sundance channel, look for the wet-haired urchin in the green sweater, leaning against the used cds and appearing nauseous. that would be me. my god, he was good. he did a cover of 'what goes on' that made me especially happy.
i learned today that humans and giraffes both have 7 vertebrae in their necks. giraffes' are simply longer. also, a group of larks is an exaltation. all i need now is a fucking cocktail party.

also grimly insightful

i just received a junk email... always charmed by the random words in the titles... mad libs of the future. today: i manna at oblivious. that is fucking brilliant. it should be on a shirt or something.

post #100!

i am pleased that the tantrum-tirade i composed earlier was interrupted by the library computer crashing; perhaps i can preserve some modicum of dignity. my birthday was a welter of shit, a series of slaps upside the head to remind me that i know better. it is impossible to change anyone. all i can do is walk away. again. and again. there is an imperceptible line between optimism and mouth-breathing stupidity.
a sensation of serene dankness has consumed me since. i am in a good mood overall, i guess, just weary of feeling disillusioned. i have listened to "i can't wait" by the white stripes far too many times to count... and then, to pep up even more, "hotel yorba." drove north today to see the flooded fields- seattle has had 15" of rain so far this month- and ended up stuck behind a semi hauling bales of hay.
it is cold as fuck today. downtown was saturated with bodies, everyone carrying shopping bags, obliviously flailing their arms. the xmas lights are lit, which always cheers me. a woman carrying a bottle of beer was walking her disobedient dog on a very long leash at pike place. he was at least 10 feet ahead of her, running into kids, going into shops. "he doesn't like short leashes" she slurred to some people ahead of me. i bought nothing today, apart from a 40% discounted iggy pop cd at tower (r.i.p.- and it's only 4 blocks from my lair). i have always despised xmas, apart from the aforementioned lights- the more lurid the better. the rest of it... the radio at work yesterday was playing horrible holiday music and some of my coworkers were jubilantly singing along to "feliz navidad", and i felt like a curmudgeony asshole.
holidays mean fucking nothing anymore. i still have that little-kid oh-boy! flicker, like in elementary school when everyone celebrates and gets to make decorations- but all holidays, ultimately, are for kids and the religious. or for couples. holidays, for little-fish-big-pond workaholic atheist spinsters like myself, suck.
one of my coworkers does stand-up comedy, and after work on tuesday a group of us went to see him perform. he was very fucking good. it was therapeutic to be in civilian garb, drinking vodka, laughing with people i work with at racism and masturbation. things can be so fucking easy.
"oh, that was gross. i just coughed up part of my lunch."
-quote from work (the aec feeds its minions)

towards blue lips and a breaking heart

a baby potbellied pig (named, unfortunately, "peanut") died in my arms today. it would have been rather eerie had i not been at work at the time, i suppose.
rain has given way, temporarily. i have been looking into fares to alaska. very homesick of late. i just want to have some tea at side street and do the crossword in the fucking anchorage press. i think about the star in arctic valley, the stagnant ice floes at point woronzof, the smell of kobuk coffee, the nasty popcorn at darwin's. i have a version of alaska that has been immortalized in permanent 2002. part of me doesn't want proof of how things have changed. my childhood home is now occupied by strangers. my best friend is now married with 3 kids. the barren swaths of south anchorage are probably all breeder-box subdivisions now. but something keeps nagging at me to go and see it all for myself, and i tend to be fairly relentless and obsessive until i sate my curiousity.
there is something masochistically satisfying about proving to myself that no, you can never go home again. that said, does seattle feel like home? no. i am a tourist without a timeline here. a tourist with laundry to put in the dryer, so must go.

a murky storm of shit

in the past week:
my good friend from work wrote me a rather nasty note, accusing me of having shat upon him, that he will need time to be able to hang out with me again. i miss him a lot. though i was always completely honest about my platonic intentions (which, overtly, they were and are), i am guiltily aware that he felt a bit differently.
T and i conflicted over the exact same fucking things. "why do you seek out and invent drama?" i asked. communication has been much better overall, at least from my end, until tonight, which i will have to rectify later to assuage my, again, guilt. fucking guilt, everywhere, always. it does not need to be like this. life is supposed to be easy, dammit.
i finally saw my grandfather today, hence my sour and uncommunicative mood. i met my mother at my grandparent's house in puyallup. he is much improved from his initial stroke-state but there is definitely a major change in his entire demeanor. he is sullen, forgetful, spacey. he demanded my mother take him to the store, even though my uncle had taken him yesterday. i got to visit with my oma, who is sentient enough to break my heart. "when i first met him i thought, this is great, he'll be able to take care of me when i'm old," she said (she is 90, he is 75- go oma!). "i never thought it would be like this." we all went to his doctor's appointment. his mouth hangs open now, his features slack. he couldn't figure out how to open the car door or fasten his seat belt. he'd forgotten the shopping list and therefore half the groceries. we all went, per their suggestion, to cattin's, a denny's-esque diner, where i pretended not to notice him putting copious amounts of syrup on his eggs instead of his pancakes (though he may have intended to; he ate it all). "we have to go back to the supermarket" he insisted afterwards; i stayed outside and morosely smoked. throughout my mother was being far more patient than usual; it wasn't until the five-hour mark of the visit that she became snappy. they are finally accepting of a retirement home. it especially bothers my grandmother, who is reluctant to even have neighbors help mow the lawn. we got back to the house and he went into another room and shut the door. "you're leaving now?" he said, more as a statement, so my mother and i left and went our seperate ways, she to meet my father at a New Brewpub in olympia, me to drive back to seattle through rush-hour traffic, chain-smoking, blaring music but not bothering to sing along.
i am so afraid of growing old. not old as much as... compromised. that is why the ms spectre terrifies me so. at the restaurant i was the only person with non-grey hair and healthy posture. i felt somehow brittle by proxy, as if youth and health is somehow a fallacy, a delusion that lasts for a few decades to no real end.
in happier news: it was very slow at work yesterday. someone had brought in a great horned owl that had fallen from a tree in their yard. after a few hours of monitoring and realizing it wasn't going to improve, i euthanized it (22g through the heart) and the doctor dissected it for us. it was fucking fascinating. their trachea is bivalved. they only have one ovary, on the left. ("llamas are like that too" said the doctor. "they only carry in the left branch of their uterus. most animals favor the left.") their skulls are completely overtaken by their optic orbs and ear canals (which you could easily fit a nickel inside, if you were wont), their brains very small as a result. afterwards the doctor cut off the head to add to her skull collection. i thought she was kidding at first. "how do you get the meat off?" i asked. "do you boil it?" i had this creepy image of her smiling over a cauldron. apparently she puts it in a barrel of horse manure with some worms. "they do a good job" she said. veterinary medicine is a surreal vocation indeed.
as i was walking downtown tonight i felt that hypocritical, familiar pang of loneliness. then i remembered how i, inadvertantly or otherwise, pushed everyone away. "i don't deserve friends" i said aloud. somehow the alas!ness of that, the laughable self-pity, made me feel a small bit better.

a. susceptible b. lover of love c. befuddlingly optimistic d. taken

uncannily: after our first meeting post my grumpily serving the papers personally, we came back to my lair, he suggested van morrison, we drank a bit of wine, ended up professing our love for one another. the prior entry is eerily prescient now. oh god. if i think about it in any logical past-v-present fashion, i get panicked; "what the FUCK?" i berate myself. but if i don't muddle through the icky nuances, if i just allow the moment to be what it is, if i revel in how four month's passing seemed utterly nonexistent, if i cease to contain the shit-eating grin occluding my features... i am such a fucking hypocrite. spastic. the present is all that matters. yeah.
it is sleeting sideways. a scraggly man in a sopping anorak said "i hear it's supposed to rain today" as we waited for the light to change. i am full of good will today... tainted ever so slightly with the vertigo of the rug about to be yanked from underneath.

benevolent exterior belies internal fisticuffs

i drove into lightning on the way home from work. every 2 minutes, the sky to the north would illuminate horizontally. it put me in a better mood.
i will not fully actualize how truly stressed i am until this enire divorce debacle is over. i have been slogging through a morasse of moroseness over the last few days. even the torrential rain hasn't cheered me. all i have done is work, drive to and from work, and feel tense. i want to fucking throw a tantrum and recieve a prolonged, genuine hug -not at the same time- and cannot seem to achieve either.
my new schedule means that i never see daylight, apart from sloppy commute towards tacoma, and that surely doesn't help. i get off and it's dark, cold, and everything is closed. i have fantasies of coming home to the smell of cooking, lights already turned on, van morrison on the hi-fi, a warm hand greeting my arrival with a slap on the ass. i want to be with someone who won't make me wince when i see them in my bed the next morning.
listening to air tonight. it is good for when leaves blow across the windshield.

3 buck chuck

there is something quite eerie about this place. horrid schmaltz is playing on the hi-fi ("i'll love you 'til the 12th of never... and that's a long, long time") and faces are staring numbly at glowing screens. i cannot tell if i am exhausted or simply burned out. it poured today. one of my coworkers and i stood under an eave outside work, smoking, watching the torrent blow sideways, the puddles rearrange themselves, the sky dark grey at 3 pm. i drove home listening to pete sinfield, taillights blurred red, gliding. walked downtown with strong winds and wet leaves. tonight the city smells of garlic and meat.
this is the sort of melancholy that feels sensual. truly: few things are more anticipatory than sprawling languidly in a warm bedroom, an open window showcasing driving rain, a blanket scented of one's own skin.
'tis a full moon tonight, or nearly. go on, look.

i get a fever that's so HARD to

spent all hallow's eve in surgery- eight hours, anyhow. first was the 3 week old puppy with the inguinal hernia and severe aspiration pneumonia who went into respiratory arrest mid-procedure; then was the 5-hr TPLO nightmare on ruby the german shepherd. i discovered halfway through the surgery that i am coming down with my first cold in 18 months- nothing like relentless snot whilst wearing a surgical mask.
there is something very satisfying about leaving work at the end of my shift and thinking "i fucking earned every penny today." pity that i am exhausted and unable to fully enjoy the costumed ribaldry around me.
i feel much better about everything now (see prior post, or don't). i obviously need to take a bit of a breather from my little hedonism-bender of late. abstinence is not for me, apparently, but there is definitely a middle ground somewhere. curses to my addictive personality! it is fascinating to observe what one's mind can conjure...
it is cold as fuck here. blazing tea, swing music, my hair lank and staticky... why, i could almost be back in anchorage.

reflecting light, absorbing darkness

this is way too fucking personal to post on a computer, but i'm a fucking nit, so shall.
the debauchery of the last 2 months hit me with a wallop last night. i did mushrooms for the first time. it was a very interesting experience, a disconcerting fluctuation from ecstacy to bereftness, jitters to melt. i was sweating and tearing and salivating and having to urinate every 20 minutes. i never lost clarity of what i was and what the drug was doing to my mind- a very pleasurable facet of this particular high, much like acid. but then: we took a polaroid of ourselves and i looked fucking terrified in it. it was one of the most frightening things i've ever seen. to see fear in anyone's eyes, much less my own, is horrible enough. and my mood crashed. i became completely withdrawn. i was sitting on my knees on my floofy rug, staring at the seattle view, of the cars on i-5 zipping past like manic red ants, and i started to cry. i suddenly saw myself as a very lonely, silly girl... and as someone who is trying to reclaim an irresponsible youth that she has no place in. i was a sweaty fucking woman on yet another drug, with a second pending divorce, a chronic (however latent) disease, neuroses up the wazoo, and an oblivious 20-year-old BOY sprawled on my couch humming some stupid indie-rock song. what the fuck had happened to me? how can i feel so immature and so fucking irreversibly OLD all at once?
*
clarity, however artificially attained, is a bitch.
*
i ended up going for a walk, alone, at one a.m., sober. it was cold and windy. i walked quickly, enjoying the feel of my body moving, the air hitting my skin, the unbelievably lovely views from my neighborhood. the streets were lined with huge chestnut and maple trees, the sidewalk thick with leaves, windows of stately homes dark, clusters of pumpkins on front porches. i thought "this is who i am, this is when i am most pure: alone, ambulatory, appreciative." it is always therapeutic, meditative even, to hear the sound of my own breathing. i returned to my lair fairly reluctantly, knowing that he was upstairs (in the same bed, clothed). all i wanted was to be alone. i lay on the rug and played with the cat. the apartment building next door was having a very raucous halloween party. shrill laughter interrupted the sound of the wind.
in the morning, grey and cold, we left for me to go to work and drop him off en route, only to find that the place i'd ended up parking last night due to the party-clogging lack of options had gotten my car towed. there is a very specific feeling of desperation when looking at the empty spot where one's car is supposed to be. 2 bus rides, prolonged ass-freezing, a very fucking bad mood and $260 later, i rescued Pink from the barbed-wire cage in the sphincter of south seattle. i was only 45 minutes late to work.
i feel like i am fucking rudderless. i always feel fairly discombobulated and without purpose, but everything gelled in my mind a bit too fucking blatantly last night. i suppose i was simply, finally aware of what i already know.

both minted and minty

bless tower records... purchased 3 more cds today... including, at 25% off, the men at work album that i listened to OBSESSIVELY my first few months back in AK circa 1998... a cold, horribly depressing winter, driving to arctic valley in my subaru, staring morosely over the cityscape, 'what the FUCK' resonating cruelly in my head. i lost the cassette in one of my many moves. it will be interesting to hear again.
the week in technicolor recap:
friday: got lost in the bowels of puyallup, so did not see my grandfather. fetched friend from work, where they were operating on an otter from the zoo. it had torsed and necrotic intestines and ended up being euthanized on the table, but not before stinking up the place with a fetid fishiness. i took pictures that have not been developed yet. we drove back to seattle and drank port and played dice.
saturday: fucking beautiful. breakfast at randy's, a former denny's by boeing field, the interior disarming shades of orange and magenta, the waitress with her black beehive saying that she'll be back to take our order after her (mimes smoking) "attitude adjustment." went to the waterfront to find souvenir penny presses, then to play with his '60's polaroid beside a fountain as tourists glid by stupidly in their rented segways. drove to bellingham. climbed a hill in utter blackness to reach the 'watchtower' above WWU. saw the fog roll in from the bay. slogged back down the hill with no visibility and limbs numb from cold. ate excellent french fries at the horseshoe cafe. drove back in the same surreal mist, listening to 'blonde on blonde'; arrived at my lair to watch felix the cat cartoons.
sunday: up early to work the 10am shift in tacoma (my hours have been changed again). we parted in the white light of dawn. work... enjoyable, competent, busy. this week went by quickly.
tuesday: in the room of the place he's staying, reading aloud from each other's journals, at one point him saying "i could make love to you right now and mean it," the subsequent 48 hrs saturated with the knowledge that this is one of the fucking nicest things i've ever been told. it was hard to leave. practical, very practical, but i did bang my hands against the steering wheel once i'd turned the corner.
i was 'specialist tech' at work, which involved anesthetic monitoring during one dog's MRI and surgical assistance during another dog's hemilaminectomy. the doctor is a chatty sort. "do you like music during surgery?" i asked. "sure, my cd's are right there" he replied, and i opened the book to find... the backstreet boys, george strait... thankfully my surgical mask disguised my grimace. he did have blondie's greatest hits, so we blared that whilst cauterizing dachshund flesh. cautery is very satisfying. it smells like barbecue and makes a sizzling noise.
the remainder of the week... details, just clutter. i am very much loving my silly little life currently. it has finally gotten interesting in a not wholly negative way.
why did the chicken cross the playground?
to get to the other slide!
bless your clever, stretchy soul, laffy taffy.

i like u. do u like me? yes_ no_ maybe_

i love autumn. last night the air around my neighborhood smelled of garlic (from the greek restaurant) and wet leaves. as i neared downtown the aroma changed to steak and chlorinated hotel pools. it was incredibly windy all the while. today is cloudless and my sleeves are pushed up. spent the morning with workers outside my window, trying to decoupage, watching helix vomit. he is fucking wasting away. for the last couple of weeks i cannot help but look at him through the eyes of a 'professional'; that is, if he were brought into the hospital as someone else's, how much disgust would i have towards the selfishness of his owner in keeping him alive so long? but then he purrs, or what have you, and my clinical resolve is squashed.
the tower records a few blocks from my lair is going out of business, so i bought 2 cds en route to my current locale (downtown, listening to dr. hook, drinking ginger peach tea...): nick drake and eloy, both surprisingly difficult to find in this selectionally discouraging berg.
when traffic clears i shall head to puyallup to see my grandfather for the first time since his stroke... grave trepidation about this, though he is said to be improving... and then to fetch vice-boy for a night of something platonic. oddly, the more my life is clogged with distractions, the lonelier i have felt...
cover your eyes! pathetic adolescent shite! what i want: a verbose, scurrilous, socially bewildered man. tall. my age. odd work schedule. local. marvelous musical taste, fruity-artsy, a litany of bad habits, liberal, cat-oriented, appreciates his mama but doesn't fucking worship her. simply is rather than describing his every trait. accountable. self-aware and self-deprecating. able to drive well whilst receiving fellatio. willing to buy me tampons when i need them. is not a vain, snively prick.
there are surely oodles more. however, i have mortified myself enough, so shall stop. tra-la. whatever.

drugs were invented for people like me

staring at a blank screen. work was fun. the radio was on a station that played everything from prince to toto. one of the assistants sang along enthusiastically to "walk of life." i felt competent and mellow. now i am avoiding doing laundry. ah, the rigors of reality.
my problem, my lament, my ISSUE, if one will: i can never fucking settle on anything. i am so perpetually searching for the bigger thrill, the newer experience, no matter how detrimental, that i impatiently breeze past wholly adequate substitutions. i want my breath painfully taken away.
life is very interesting right now. how often can i truly say that?

or: fuck logic. just say yes.

after driving home last night, through rain and saturday-night revelers, sober, i began to feel really sad, and it took great willpower not to turn the car around. we had another great day, but now there is a weird undercurrent of melancholy because i told him how i was fairly incapable of being a Girlfriend right now. we were sitting beside a fire at the time of that conversation, friday night, drinking bellinis. "are you sure?" he asked. "no" i blurted immediately. "let me know when you change your mind" he said. goddamn him for always saying the fucking right thing.
i don't want to reveal my litany of neuroses to anyone. i already have with him and he seems to appreciate me anyhow. i wish i knew how things are going to be: with the bigger picture, with my health, with my divorce, with my state of mind.
i want to be in a stimulating relationship. sexually is *almost* an irrelevant priority. i want artistic stimulation, i want to be impressed by how they think, i want to see the world in novel hues. and this is how he makes me feel. i am a better human when i'm around him... for the most part. so far. fuck. here i go again, deprecating, sabotaging, overfuckinganalyzing, driving myself mad.
missing someone when they're not around: i am fucked.

too fucking honest

i am a fucking hedonist by nature, augmented with an unwieldy amount of conscience. i have higher expectations for myself than what i often demonstrate. perhaps i am just tired from the last 48 hrs of mayhem and need some alone time, as i tend to get very twitchy and irritated when i don't.
chronological recount:
tuesday: swapped shifts so i could get off work at six. he had the same hours. i drove to tacoma in brilliant dawn, feeling quite jaunty, only to check my phone and realize that my mother had left me a message, informing me that my grandfather has had a serious stroke. he is improving, as of yesterday. got to work. was stuck in surgery for hours, trying not to snicker at the doctor's choice of crappy soft-rock on his ipod (tegan and sara, for example). left work, me hyperactive, him mellow, and drove to seattle in pink twilight. bought a fifth of bacardi. drank a healthy amount at my lair, then walked downtown with the rest in a plastic bottle. slurry-drunk by the time we got to the showbox. leaned against the edge of the stage and gushed over architecture in helsinki. somewhere along the way he said "because i'm drunk, i can say this: i really dig you." "i really dig you too" i replied untidily; we proceeded to maul one another. after the show i went to the loo, but the queue was too long, so i went outside to wait, but neglected to tell him i was doing so; they wouldn't let me back inside because i was, by this point, very repulsively inebriated, and i vaguely remember politely apologizing for my state to the disgusted bouncer. he emerged from the club and we staggered uphill, giggling, crashing into shrubbery, the sort of display i would roll my eyes at were i not the participant. no, we did not have sex. i am glad of that.
the next day: it gelled in my mind, as sun gushed through the windows, as i sneaked out of bed to let him sleep: he is a friend. he is a friend who i care very much for, and as such i will not fuck it up with weird romantic bullshit. there are too many caveats to this situation to list. suffice it to say: it is a bad situation, one that i am both admiring and horrified of myself that i even got into. we went out to breakfast at a bowling alley. everyone else there was ancient. it was a good vibe. the windows were tinted glass. the food was delicious. we went to the zoo. cloudless, red leaves, both of us in very good moods, watching spiders spin webs, the wide-eyed secret creatures of the nocturnal exhibits, staring into the kind face of an orangutan. greek food in fremont. sitting on the end of a dock in west seattle, wakes from invisible boats making the pier undulate, passing a joint, feeling like i was on a slow roller coaster into the heart of downtown. and then the abstract sadness that is still persisting began to set in. i became very introverted. i loved being around him but desperately wanted to be alone. i wanted to go back to my stupid apartment by my stupid self and read a stupid magazine and be depressed. why the fuck would i, at such an iconic moment, want something so pathetic? because it's familiar? because it's comfortable? because i'm more scared than i want to admit? we ended up renting 'broken flowers.' it is a good movie, but very ponderous and slow and sad. why it's touted as a comedy on the fucking sleeve befuddles me.
i was relieved to be back at work today, though incredibly self-conscious about the fucking hickey on my neck. none of my coworkers have mentioned anything about us, but it is fairly fucking obvious that something has been transpiring. but just when i get panicky about everything, when i start to suck into my own toxic head, he has a talent of saying or doing just what i need. and this is the truth that makes me stop and think "you know what?... this is pretty fucking cool, and i deserve to be happy, i deserve to have fun... and i shouldn't worry." when i dropped him off en route to the clinic, we smiled awkwardly at each other, then he said "come here" and i leaned in, tense about what uncomfortable thing might happen, and he kissed me on the cheek, and immediately everything was easy and right again.
ultimately, what? we are friends. i don't want more. i either want a really fucking good friend, like i have found in him, or i want some lothario i don't give a fuck about emotionally whom i can merely ravage. i am nowhere near ready for both in the same person. perhaps i never will be, or if i am, it will not happen. life has already demonstrated this to be a fucking rare, if not impossible, thing.
unrelated witticisms from the 253:
"tacoma: 200,000 alcoholics can't be wrong."
"glassblowing: it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye."

'til my seas are dried up

five days in a row of work at the aec (see where i work! www.theaec.com)... busy, death-filled days. leptospirosis is once again rearing its hoary, zoonotic head. it is hard to deal with the same patients for multiple days and watch them slowly fade away. i had roscoe the dog in my arms as he was euthanized today. took helix into work with me on saturday to have his renal values rechecked. they were shit, as i expected. he is 6.4 pounds. he used to be about 13. he still purrs and licks his stinky canned food, but it won't be much longer. he sleeps on my cd books a lot. tomorrow i go to fucking olympia to talk to someone at the fucking court about my divorce. he swears he signed the rejoinder i served in february (agreeing to the terms of my filing) but they don't have a copy at the court, so i re-served his parents, and i got off work today to recieve the message that he isn't signing again, so i will probably have to file a default, and i am extremely fucking disgusted by him, the bullshit concept of marriage, and how much more difficult it is to get a divorce than to wed. it really should be the other way around. i want it over. soon, soon.
...i said this the first time i got divorced (unto itself, already a white-trash statement) but truly, if i ever get a bug up my arse to indulge in MATRIMONY again, someone best fucking kill me.
on an unrelated note: 'bubble' is a dreadful movie: self-important, tedious, annoying.
on another unrelated note: about a week after seeing 'blue velvet' (as aforementioned) i happened to be at the nitelite bar on 2nd ave (adjacent to the moore): a total dive, with xmas lights and hardened, older alcoholics slumped over their bottom-shelf $2.25 drinks- the sort of place that, were the bathrooms not so surprisingly clean, one would expect to leave with a case of scabies. and they played 'in dreams', roy orbison, and it was perfect and perfectly eerie.
pleasing things of the last week:
-my teapot still functional after i forgot to turn off the burner (i am on a boullion kick)
-ike and tina, over and over and over
-the ethereal dead jellyfish in the surf at owens beach
-being serenaded with a wonderfully cheesy '70's song
-plans to see architecture in helsinki on tuesday
-learning exactly what a 'dirty sanchez' really is (thanks for telling me, fellow female tech)
-hitting the vein on a seagull (though i was euthanizing it at the time)
the problem with 53 hrs of work in the last 7 days, plus 12 hrs of illogical commute: i haven't had much time for a life. obviously.
me: "how's it going tonight?"
hypersmiling man serving me tea: "i'm getting a migraine. but i'm treating it with coffee, and when i get off work i'll be treating it with beer."

dewy stamen, bruised petals

according to the cia 'personality profile' (www.cia.gov) i am a 'thoughtful observer.'
according to my actions of the last few weeks, i am also one of poor work ethic, silly stoner habits, and propensity of snogging boys drunker than myself.
tomorrow i go admire the ruins of the original western state hospital, a mental asylum in beautiful steilacoom washington. apparently the juggaloes have taken it over, but we shall be there in the innocent sunlight. is the juggalo thing local to western washington, traffic, meth, and horse-fucking capital of the united states? i rather hope so.
soberly i sip my iced blackberry sage tea. my inner librarian always wins the fight of personality.

tail feathers ashake

it has been a week of lightening the fuck up, revisiting vices (responsibly, even!), feeling incredibly unmotivated at work, my agitation renewed this evening by contact with my kin... whom i love dearly, but i am too busy feeling optimistic to be reminded of everything i could possibly be worrying about instead.
this is my first night to myself in a while. it is peaceful and pointless at once.
from the past 7 days:
everything dying or being euthanized at work yesterday, two in my arms.
architecture in helsinki.
calling in sick, cough cough, and spending a sunny thursday hanging out with my work/vice buddy on 3 hours of sleep. that was a fucking good day: toy stores, greenhouses, hot tea, indian food, walking in the sporadic rain.
driving to blaine today, admiring the beast-scented bucolia of nearby lynden, deciding not to micturate on the shirt someone had thrown on top of the pile in the port-a-potty. sunny, hot, listening to french talk radio. i cannot enter canada until i replace my stolen passport.
deer alongside the road.
his friend's dog's "fuck bunny": a stuffed animal that the unneutered dog molested until all that was left was the head and a bit of stuffing. "it was crunchy and yellow."
banana chips dipped in tahini, a variation of the earlier theme.
the 23-minute yes song currently playing overhead.
the construction at my building. they are replacing the deck railing. at 7:30am daily for the last week and at least another. hammering, grunting, knocking down chunks of concrete, having boisterous man-chats. right in front of my window. the building is enveloped, christo-like, in plastic. i have no view, no privacy, and no circulating air. it is rather womblike.
my new work schedule, effective 1 october! sun-wed, 1-10pm! i have 3 fucking days off in a ROW (haven't had a consecutive day off in months, much less all 3) and fridays and saturdays... yay... perhaps i shall enroll in a trapeze class on thursdays.
lightening the fuck up is indeed the key to happiness. i have never been adept at this. but it is getting much, much easier lately, and i am having much more fun.

blissss in sssibilance

(note to self: do not watch "blue velvet" directly before sleep ever again.)
ever have one of those moments wherein everything seems orchestrated for your benefit? i had that narcissistic experience en route to work. half the sky was blue blazing sunshine, half was dark ominous clouds- i love when the climate cannot decide. and on the radio, they played 'cover of the rolling stone', then 'ride on', THEN 'lay lady lay', and after i got petrol they played 'i put a spell on you', and i arrived at my toil feeling quite jaunty indeed. the tape i made for my friend at work was well-received... i do enjoy making tapes, archaic a medium as it may be. by the by, COOL SITE, postpunkjunk... as if someone made compilations from my own collection... i shall have to acquire the means to actually utilize it instead of being reliant on public terminals. yesterday i went into the Famous New Downtown Library for the first time. it is a very marvelous place, cement and endless ceilings, orange and yellow panels, intercoms somnambulous in tone, the ambiance the way i imagine someplace in tokyo to be.
it has been a day of excited happiness for no concrete reason... giddy. i must bottle this and splash it on my pulses.

poked and prodded

so i just got a piercing, and i am riding the resultant giddy wave. i needed to do SOMETHING. 2 piercings, one captive-bead ring, halfway up my right ear. it looks pretty nifty, if i do say so. it was a very impulsive move. i was walking down broadway and saw an open sign alit.
what did i do in the dusky hours prior? drove around whilst blaring "it's a rainy day, sunshine girl" (i need to rotate the music in my car), read the new issue of people magazine (i mean, a dense and provocative work of literature...), and was witness to something very surreal: traffic around 'fraternity row' in the u-district was horrible, and i was immediately grouchy because i was stuck on a hill with a stick shift, but then! the din of many merry voices rang forth, and suddenly there were about one hundred people carrying bass drums, tubas, and other cumbersome instruments running across the road, congregating on the side street, and jumping into a very commendable version of 'louie louie', complete with synchronized bows and dips. it made me smile. actually, it put me in a really good mood.
i have been struggling with the admitted stupidity of living here. i keep thinking "seattle, prove yourself! justify your exhorbinant (misspelled) rent, your horrible traffic, the soul-sucking commute, your lack of indoor smoking, the nine months of no local soul mates with propensity for fuckable music, varied cuisine, grassy lounging, and pop-culture obsessiveness..." and then i see things like tonight and i exhale langorously and think "okay. okay, seattle, you wily maiden... that was pretty good."

dammit!

i keep vowing that i will never contact him, numbers deleted from my telephone, knowing that it is all a toxic shitstorm to nowhere... complicated by the annoying knowledge that he's the only one who seemed to properly understand, or at least empathize with (same thing?) the nasty, dark corners of my personality. so i had to go fucking read his fucking blog. articulate asshole. thanks for the posterior shout-out! grr, i say.
anyhow! it is suddenly rather nippy in seattle proper, to my glee. i walked around feeling saucy and sunlit for a good part of the day before realizing that my sweater was buttoned unevenly. i am slowly slogging through 'heat', bill buford (not the drummer), which is deeply entertaining and makes things like uncured lardo sound almost appetizing. his mentor in italy told him to "live like a butcher. butchers do not sleep. they eat nothing but meat, then go home and make love." carne, carnal, flesh, flesh. there is something quite sexy about that. my friend said "it's too bad you're a vegetarian. there are a lot of good restaurants in tacoma", then began describing a hole-in-the-wall mexican joint, grocer in the front, butcher in the middle, a tiny taqueria in the back "with FRESH meat!" i then admitted to him my recent shrimp cravings, unfulfilled... but for how long?
yes, moderation... i am an adult, after all. i should be able to balance my internal and INSANE hedonism with a respectable public veneer. it is becoming unflatteringly apparent in the last few weeks/months how much i smothered a lot of fun, wackadoo, irresponsible spontanaeity whilst wed. i keep reminding myself that i am only 27 years old... old enough to know better, young enough to do it anyway.
i must venture back into the sun now.

dangerous levels of hedonism

got ridiculously stoned last night. it was enjoyable. i am falling off the fucking wagon. i feel like a rubber band about to snap. all i want to do is get severely intoxicated and fuck wantonly. i am having difficulty concentrating at work. the self-imposed moral chastity of the last few years is gravely tenuous. i keep thinking "why the fuck not?" ...but i am enmeshed deeply enough in this new, pure-of-mind&body 'habit' that i feel quite guilty and stupid for even considering the alternatives.
perhaps it's just remembering who i used to be... who i still am and always was, but primly denied. perhaps i am simply the sort who is meant to be high and devil-may-care, flighty flighty flighty.
(and i am also the detrimentally introverted nerd who wastes precious time typing a fucking solliloquy about it instead.)

i've got it bad!

spent the last 6 hours of work in surgery... handed it over to another tech when my shift ended. bilateral sacral-iliac fracture repair, conducted by the cheery surgeon who actually TALKS, though the surgery was a fucking nightmare and nothing was connecting properly and he would grow rather quiet, but at least he likes classic rock, and 'godzilla' came on, and keesha (the keeshond) did very well under anesthesia, on my watch at least.
i feel like leaping around now. standing in one spot has never been my forte.
coming to this cafe when i obviously have nothing sentient to offer- i do so because it is my 'third place' and i am too wired to go home.
'think pink' was on the radio on the way here. they played 'set the controls for the heart of the sun' and i recalled laying in my bed in nice, headphones, large windows showcasing streetlight-lit leaves. that was a marvelous place. if ever one is shabbily moneyed in the cote d'azur, do stay at les orangers hostel. it was my home for six weeks.
one good thing about france: i would never hear 'hot for teacher' on the hi-fi, as i am currently tortured with here.

virility? peurility?

i am a pile of fucking nerves. zingy, in an unpleasant way, as if i've had too much caffeine. i want to talk to somebody. no one to talk to. spent the morning decoupaging, the afternoon walking in sunlight. bought fun underpants. got a pile of free records: traffic, canned heat, 12 years after. did the crossword whilst listening to exceptional music. it has been a good day. so why do i feel as if i'm not yet privy to a horrible event that has already happened?
i allow my world to become far too small, at great detriment. tunnel vision. it has always been a problem.
the longan fruit thing has been monetarily curbed, for the next few days at least. in its place: banana chips dipped in peanut butter. fuck yeah, man.

not sexual

the last few days have gracefully illustrated the phenomenon i mentioned earlier: glorious moments that must end, and once ended, the disorienting emptiness and the myopia of "is that my life? did that really happen?" perhaps it is because i am existing on 3 hours of sleep. i've spent time with one of my coworkers, someone that i really fucking clicked with, someone who seems to just get it right away. he felt like a friend i'd known for years. we talked until 6 am... or whenever it gets light around here. later today, at the pointless, 'motivating your staff 101'-esque employee meeting, watery bloodshot smiles were exchanged, and that was all. and i left tacoma with fantastic marigold sunlight, listening to the fucking velvet underground whilst mired in dreadful traffic, and i felt very fucking sad.
there is a definite lyricism to pointlessness. walking through the graveyard on queen anne hill under a perfectly full moon. staring up at the radio towers. the bus driver wearing teddy-bear antennae and greeting us with disarming cheer. the vista above salmon beach in tacoma, staring out at the narrows bridge, the beach several hundred perilous feet straight down, the trees sighing. it is nice to be reminded that this is how life can still be, how it is and was, how i want very badly to be back in those moments and revel in the novelty of it all. being back at the stiflingly hot cafe, arms sticking to the grimy counter, indulging my girlish solliloquy, seems a bit more pathetic now.
fuck yes... 'into the mystic' just came on. all right, i take it back; there is beauty and poignance in every facet of every moment. this is a damn fucking good song.
i haven't been this tired in a while.

this actually sounds rather tasty

*j'aime les etats-unis!*

Newest Fair Food: Deep-Fried Coca-Cola
POSTED: 9:35 am PDT September 5, 2006
DALLAS -- There are fried Twinkies and even fried candy bars.
Now, vendor Abel Gonzales Jr. has come up with a new artery-clogging concoction for the State Fair of Texas. It's fried Coke.
Gonzales deep-fries Coca-Cola-flavored batter. He then drizzles Coke fountain syrup on it. The fried Coke is topped with whipped cream, cinnamon sugar and a cherry. Gonzales said the fried Coke came about just from thinking aloud.
Gonzales' diet-buster wins the creativity honor at the second-annual Big Tex Choice Awards Contest.
Judges for the contest chose Shirley London's Fried Praline Perfection as the tastiest fried delicacy.
The two won out among 26 entries such as fried macaroni and cheese and a deep-fried cosmopolitan.
London said she came up with the fried pralines idea after buying pralines at the fair last year. She plans to sell the pralines alongside fried marshmallows.
Gonzales achieved notoriety in 2005 with the fried peanut butter, banana, and jelly sandwich -- selling an estimated 25,000 of the treats, according to the fair's Web site. The site said London got media attention in 2004 with her fried marshmallows on-a-stick.
This is the same state fair that brought about the corn dog. The Web site said Neil and Carl Fletcher conjured up a sweetened corn-battered wiener on-a-stick and sold it for 15 cents during the 1942 State Fair of Texas.
The fair begins Sept. 29.
Distributed by Internet Broadcasting Systems, Inc. The Associated Press contributed to this report. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

huddle closer for warmth

i get my mental high just as my physical self succumbs to exhaustion... thus, bloodshot and weathered, i am out on the town. work was busy but not hideously so, and coexistence was blessedly smooth. 'careful with that axe, eugene' was on the radio during the drive home- such a fucked-up song, undoubtedly the stimulus for '10:15 saturday night.'
i had a harold & maude hankering last night, which happens fairly frequently, so watched the movie for about the 30th time. it is still my favorite. saw another hal ashby film, 'one final thing', that was completely different but almost as wonderful, and i recommend it heartily.
one of my coworkers has an uncanny resemblence to bud cort as harold... mixed with andrew mccarthy. while i consider it a positive thing, i am reluctant to tell him.
my mind is racing today. it is crashing into things en route. unfocused. this is usually the babbly trill before the thudding doledrums.

I Take No Pride in Mocking the Bereaved…
Posted by DAVID SCHMADER at 02:52 PM
However, this “Wanted” poster, found on a number of street posts in the Central District, demands comment.
Okay. I understand that people can care deeply about ferrets, which for a certain kind of person reportedly make delightful pets.
However, I sincerely doubt that the average person, coming upon a loose ferret on the street, will be willing to lure it indoors and feed it yogurt. Far more likely, the person will do everything in his or her power to beat the disgusting hair-snake to death, perhaps with a shovel.
Still, if anyone’s seen Cookie, please give Pam a call.
In the meantime, here’s a most disturbing photo of “The Easter Ferret.”
permalink discuss in forums post comments (11)

red at night, sailor's delight

"a little bit of loving makes it all go right." -buddy holly
this quote, humorously enough, accompanied an article about male impotence in today's paper.
my work-angst was assuaged somewhat by a late-night chat with the boss. after, as is my nature, i sprawled in bed and panicked about the repurcussions of my confessional. i fucking cried at work and everything... i never have been able to control that, one of my most hated qualities. i am a fucking adult and still snivel when my ego gets bruised. the only time i don't cry is when i'm on antidepressants and ALL of my bodily fluids dry up. that should be an advertising slogan: i hereby trademark it, now.
so i was laying in bed, hecatomb kneading whorishly into my left axilla, wondering why i've been especially high-strung of late. it then occured to me that tomorrow would have been my three-year anniversary. since we are still technically married, i suppose it still is. and the thought fills me with complete revulsion. i want to pretend the entire era never happened. i no longer feel guilty about not missing him. i don't miss anything about it. but something about Official Dates are unreasonably daunting... as if tomorrow is a day that, in another world, with another outlook, i would be celebrating lavishly. in another world i would be laughing with my husband, and our child would be almost two years old, and we would actually converse and coexist. having clarity of how fucked everything was and is... that is the horrible part.
i spent much of today in a grim stupor, walking through downtown under maxfield parrish skies, reading at elliott bay, admiring luxe furnishings through store windows... wanting to be fucked in the worst possible way. blared "black dog." drank 'emporer's warrior potion' tea, which i ordered because the name was so wonderful. bought more fucking longan fruit, which i am currently obsessed with (an obsession that should be tempered soon, for they are $4.59 a pound at the import grocer). aside: the original sign for the fruit said "logan nut" (asian signage, grr), so i spent yesterday at work babbling about this glorious new fruit i'd discovered, and no one knew what i was talking about, and now i know why.
currently, i am in a much better mood.
whilst showering i started compiling a list of good words.
solliloquy. luscious. apogee. salubrious. glee. opisthotonous. yes. charlatan. ennui. mydriasis. squishy. xylophone. clostridia.
more to follow.

sometimes i fucking hate people. no, this is a fallacy. i hate unwarranted rudeness. i hate dealing with miserable humans who take out their self-loathing on the rest of the world. i hate huffy eye-rolling narcissists who bitch to everyone but whom they are bitching about. the human dynamics of my job reminds me of ostracism at a junior high cafeteria table.

deep blue collar

surreal work moment: the male dalmation with urethral and bladder stones, unable to do more than trickle, sedated and held down by 2 technicians while the doctor tried unsuccessfully to catheterize. "i need an extruder!" she barked, and i was the lucky, gloveless one to lean over the dog's piss-dampened body and unsheath its penis... for what ended up being about 15 minutes... as the other new doctor, a surgeon a mere 4 years older than myself (very quiet guy... kisses the asses of the dvms, ignores the nurses...) fiddled around with another catheter... all of us ended up being covered in various layers of lube, urine, dalmation hair, and saline. never did get the fucking thing passed. cost constraints... euthanized. i did a urinalysis afterwards. unneutered, 10 years old... the sample was filled with tiny urate crystals and many motionless sperm. canine sperm looks exactly the way a photograph of human sperm does.
and as i stood there, hand cramping, slightly cyanotic and unspeakably ugly dog penis drying out in my hand, i thought about how peculiar my vocation is. i had that thought again today as the 40#, dead weight spaniel i was holding proceeded to urinate all over my shoe. or when i was syrine-feeding a baby squirrel. or when i was doing a cardiac stick to euthanize a stray cat with a maggot-filled abscessed foot. at one point one of the techs emerged from surgery (pylorectomy on toodles the poodle) and loudly proclaimed that the treatment area "smelled like butt."
but as i was driving home, through the forgiving glow of downtown seattle, "ride on" played, my favorite ac/dc song, and i got a renewed burst of energy... or a boost of morale, at least. 'tis the li'l things.

unfortunately mired in a cynical world

i already knew this...


Your answers suggest you are an Idealist
The four aspects that make up this personality type are:
Summary of Idealists
Make sense of the world using inner values
Focus on personal growth and the growth of others
Think of themselves as bright, forgiving and curious
May sometimes appear stubborn
More about Idealists
Idealists put time and energy into developing personal values that they use as a guide through life. They may seek fulfilment by helping others improve themselves and often want to make the world a better place. Idealists only share their inner values with people they respect.
Idealists are the most likely group to say they are vegetarian, according to a UK survey.
Idealists enjoy discussions about a wide range of topics, particularly those that deal with the future. They are typically easy-going and flexible, but if their values are challenged they may refuse to compromise.
In situations where they can’t use their talents or are unappreciated, Idealists may have trouble expressing themselves and withdraw. Under extreme stress, Idealists may become very critical of others, or lose confidence in their own ability to cope.
Recognition for their work is important to Idealists; however, they are also good at spotting false praise.
Idealist Careers
Idealists are often drawn to jobs where they can help people reach their potential. They are also attracted to careers that allow artistic creativity.
It's important to remember that no survey can predict personality type with 100 percent accuracy. Experts say that we should use personality type to better understand ourselves and others, but shouldn't feel restricted by our results.
Overall results
The graph below shows the percentage of people with each personality type out of everyone who has taken this test.
Big Thinkers
Counsellors
Go-getters
Idealists
Innovators
Leaders
Masterminds
Mentors
Nurturers
Peacemakers
Performers
Providers
Realists
Resolvers
Strategists
Supervisors
[
{
'PercentShare' => {
'leader' => '5.04973866127129',
'counsellor' => '5.75788231326926',
'idealist' => '8.69162030011802',
'supervisor' => '5.70730062384084',
'big_thinker' => '6.68521328612376',
'peacemaker' => '5.80003372112629',
'provider' => '3.55757882313269',
'strategist' => '6.70207384926657',
'performer' => '3.44798516270443',
'nurturer' => '7.91603439554881',
'mastermind' => '5.90119709998314',
'resolver' => '6.42387455741022',
'go_getter' => '4.10554712527398',
'innovator' => '8.63260832911819',
'realist' => '11.3555892766818',
'mentor' => '4.26572247513067'

What makes you squirm and say 'yuck'? Test your sensitivity to disgust

i was once told i had tie-dyed eyes

that decadent melancholy when the air on exposed skin is like the last touch you know you'll get from your true love... yeah... that was yesterday afternoon. i went to one of my favorite places, the conservatory at volunteer park, and drew the plants i was most fascinated by. euphorbia balsamifera: "this plant radiates peace," i scrawled next to the picture. apparently i was feeling rather schlocky. i sat on a park bench and watched people watlk their dogs, long shadows over lurid green. "bin gay?" someone had written on the concrete beneath me. i wondered how many acts of sodomy had occured where i sat.
irvine welch did a reading at elliott bay books. i got there in time to hear a story of a man who thinks he's accidentally put a hex on someone, so he goes to a witch to see if it is, in fact, possible, and reversible. he has no money. she says she can only help him if he has sex with her. she is a corpulent, homely woman. but he does. in grotesque detail. irvine welch stories make me want to never stop bathing. the man himself: about six feet tall, bald, untucked t-shirt, delightfully incoherent brogue, smiled a lot. someone asked if he got his ideas from personal experiences. "based on what i just read, i am reluctant to answer that" he answered. he said that the early twenties and mid-forties are the ages he's most intrigued by, because they are both eras of dissonance, personal reevaluation, confusion... when you question who and why you are. i agree. afterwards i walked through downtown, which grows incredibly seedy at night, and waited at the bus stop as a tiny, glowering man slumped over in his electronic wheelchair glided back and forth. he would stop in front of me and glare from the corner of his eye. it was rather unnerving, especially since his head only came up to my waist. "hello" i said politely. he hacked a bit and drifted off.
today: triage, relentless, hot sun, nonstop running. one of my coworkers made fresh rolls in the lounge. they seemed to put everyone in a good mood. i fucking love my job. it is almost one a.m. and i am still riding the high of competency. i am not even going to waste time on worrying when it will abate.
blasphemous confession: i really do not like elvis' music, never have, and i never need to hear any of his songs again. the pop-culture, peacock-windowed, sweat-soaked myth: transfixing. thank you, random sirius station, for reminding me of this.

sinking into siesta

met with a friend from work to see camper van and cracker on tuesday. they were brilliant, as usual. they also encapsulate the flux of the last 8 months. the last time i saw them was the night i got the apt in seattle, the 1st place, and thereby solidified the end of my marriage. it is interesting to note how much fucking happier i am now. and the songs still sound fantastic. after the show we went to beth's, ubiquitous beth's, and then she crashed on my sofa. it is an amazing feeling, to have a friend. i sound like a pathetic little kid. things are looking up. again.

"aunt jessica was dreaming about food... LOTS of food..."

it is true: 'magical mystery tour' is a fucking dreadful movie. i couldn't even watch it straight through. the only redeeming parts: the zabriskie-pointiness of 'flying', and seeing bare breasts in a beatles film. (aside: did not know until today that 'death cab for cutie' got their name from this. i always thought it was a randomly horrible monniker.)

this has been a very good day. it is hot, the sun was shining, and i felt more frivolous than i had in a while. went to hempfest. it is held at myrtle edwards park, which encircles the 'shore' between downtown and the grain silos of interbay; the water was sparkly and the air smelt of marijuana and barbequing meat. i was offered a hit before i even got there; i politely declined. the sweaty masses were a pleasing olio of grey-haired, tie-dyed couples and teenagers in paraphenalia t-shirts. lots of fake marijuana leis and coronets. a man on stilts. i bought a hardbound book from the hare krishnas. learned i can qualify for medical marijuana, should i desire... so shall begin my second career as a dealer? one of the bands was absolutely horrible, a tuneless drunken lemmy, if one can imagine. the other i heard was a reggae band, of course, but it made me quite cheerful.
i have been resonating from the movie i saw last night. 'lost in translation'... hadn't gotten around to it until now. my fucking god. the ending was brilliant. i was laying on my floofy rug in a shirt and underwear, 2 in the morning, and i audibly said 'oh god' and began to cry. his smile was the best part.
loneliness allows for instant rapport. i know this well. would such situations work outside the moment? i think not.
when i was in paris i met a guy from zambia -white, of the british-invader variety- and we impulsively went out for the evening. we walked to the eiffel tower, he bought me a flower, i don't remember what we talked about, but it was so marvelous to be in that fantastic, succulent city and SHARE it with someone that everything had an exaggeratedly sexy patina. we got back to the hostel and mauled one another in the stairwell. and then... morning, AWKWARDNESS, a feeling of the night before not being any part of my life- not my dull little existence!- and he left town, and i left a few days later, and... that was that. i must say, though, that being by myself the next day was even more depressing, because i'd had a taste of how fun and rich things could be.
everyone is 18 at heart, and believes in true love, and feels that same giddy rush when the right person grins back... and nothing, nothing is more sensual than a touch with nervous restraint. everything after that is, in a small way, a bit of a letdown.

"get thee to a nunnery!"

yesterday was a well-controlled clusterfuck at work- i was floor tech- felt harried and competent and useful. stayed an hour and a half late. got into my car around 11.30 pm and started for home... and the exit onto the freeway was closed... and the high of work dissolved with a thud, and i was left alone in the dark with my neuroses and a complete disorientation of my surroundings, frittering around the Bad Part of Tacoma (insert "all of tacoma is a Bad Part" joke here), having a full-on fucking panic attack. my hand started to feel odd, heavy, stiff, and terror over 'is this a new bout of symptoms? what happens next? what if i never recover? how am i going to get up the stairs at my place? did i not appreciate the last 10 hours of physical fluidity?'... i took deep breaths. i smoked a few more cigarettes. i sang along with the radio. i held my arm out the open window and fully relished the tangible air. and eventually i found the way to the freeway. a deceptively tidy metaphor, that.
sometimes i really hate my mind... like a chatty, sloppy roommate who lolls around all day... i want to slam the damn door in their face.
things really are good... apart from my fear of the unknown/impending, i am asymptomatic. i dig my vocation. my place feels more like mine. i walked downtown tonight after i got home from work. it was a purely through-glass-observer feeling, and not a terrible one. i passed restaurants with windows open and people smiling in candlelight; one place had a banquet table laden with wine glasses and the group was clapping and taking photographs of each other as i walked by. celebrations... big events in their lives... and just another day in mine... interesting. the cinerama premiered 'snakes on a plane' tonight; on the radio they were interviewing people who'd been camping on the sidewalk since yesterday. when i walked past the movie had already started and the street was littered with debris and someone had written in chalk "this way to SoaP heaven!" and i laughed out loud.
when i got to the silly internet place that i love because it stays open until 1 am and they have good tea and it's always incredibly hot inside, 'i'll be your mirror' was playing, and i had a serene solidified moment of "this is all i need", and i feel much better now.

running the risk of dislodging the clot

i was relieved of my left upper wisdom tooth today. the extraction took all of 2 seconds, with me saying "seriously? is that all?" through a wad of gauze. i haven't even taken a painkiller. tops are the way to go, man. when my bottom 2 were removed it was 24 hrs of blurred hell and gerbilled cheeks. my face isn't even swollen now.
curled up on a purple velour chair at the university bookstore to read time magazine- excellent article about 'everyday life in baghdad', accompanied by a horrifying photograph of an iraqi boy in a plastic bag at a morgue. there i was, curled on a purple velour chair... sleeves pushed up, head exposed, nothing more than sunshine and harmless transient urine hitting the picture windows, freedom to amble about, freedom to smoke, to read almost whatever i want, able to live alone and have a job and drive a car and use tampons and have an iud and get a divorce and get an abortion and go to a dentist and have a sanitary, efficient experience... fuck... i could go on ad infinitum, but shan't. nothing is appreciated until it is threatened, really, and this can be applied to everything.
shall cease the stoner epiphanies now, i swear.
placed my first female dog urinary catheter yesterday! in a stray chow with a shattered pelvis! it was a moment of triumph. i was grateful that my boss was there to witness it; i fear she may think of me as a hyperactive, albeit earnest simpleton.
i am drinking hot tea against doctor's orders...
so a while back i wrote some chirpy dreck about 'this REALLY good song, 'i'm feeling good' or something', and have spent the last few months quietly obsessing over who the singer might be. appropriately, my humbling enlightenment came at a fucking barnes and noble... it's michael fucking buble`, whom i know nothing about except that his name is usually in magazines in the same breath as, say, sarah maclachlan... so i always assumed it meant 'music for forty-something divorcees to fuck to.' nevertheless, it's still a pretty good song... egad.

perhaps it's the weather, hot sun and frigid shade, buildings appearing clean-lined and shiny- autumnal clime, shall i say. this weather reminds me of certain things to the point of aching. i was on the bus, light slanting through smears, looking out over the (from a distance) brick austerity of the u-district (up close it is a rather shitty neighborhood), and i felt homesick for my past. does that make sense? i thought of riding my bike through the rare snow here, coming home to someone, making love in the afternoon, hungover mornings with hungover company, kicking dead leaves on seneca street, the swingset at elderberry park. immediately i have to consciously remind myself that throughout this nostagic ballyhoo, the present -the well-lit, very satisfactory present- is slipping by. and then the fact that i have to REMIND myself of such plebian notions makes me rather depressed.
but when the bus got downtown i witnessed a purse-snatching (a purse-snatching! it sounds so indignant, so nellie bly!) and the resultant busload of comment cheered me somewhat.
my landlords are out of town and i am watering the hillside of flora in their absence. the neighbor on the other side of them, brian, came out to talk whilst i hosed. he has lived in the building for "embarrassingly enough, 20 years." nice guy. apparently the building was built during the '62 world's fair. it is lovely to live among plants. my sunflowers have already died.

trivial details matter the most!
1. what is in my refrigerator?
red grapes, black grapes (not as good), organic butter, fake mayonnaise, soy sauce, mushrooms, unopened honey-mustard salad dressing, hi-cal canned cat food for the helix, iced green tea in a water bottle
2. what is in my car?
disco ball, glowing octopus, nodding armadillo, dirty scrub tops, empty cans, cigarette butts in a bottle, 'from a basement on a hill', bag of pennies stolen from my yelm days
3. last movie seen?
match point or happiness... it's been a while
4. last song heard that didn't cause revulsion?
u2 'zooropa'
5. last book read?
'the way it spozed to be'- nonfiction of a first-year teacher at an inner-city school and the CALAMITIES that ensue
6. new experience of the last 7 days:
seeing a spinal column and the connecting nerves on a dog having disc surgery

allow me to interrupt myself! disc surgery is refreshingly primitive. the incision is done with laser and electrocautery, the inflamed disc-bits are chiseled out, and the column is left bare at the surgery site, covered with cellophaney material so the tissue doesn;t stick to the nerves during healing. the skin is stitched up and voila. i imagine it is not too dissimilar in humans. the dog recovered on valium and morphine. she was still sleeping when my shift ended.

"a woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more you beat them, the better they be." -george sanders

spent the day sweaty, watching couples with their arms around one another, hands lazily gliding up backs, giggling smugly into warm necks. i am not bitter. perhaps slightly nostalgic and rueful... or still residually revolted by the clusterfuck crowd at the show last night. went with a coworker and her friend to see hell's belles (the female ac/dc cover band) in tacoma. they are amazing and i wholeheartedly recommend anyone with the means to see them immediately. but NOT if they are playing in an area near an army base, for the crowd will be rife with thick-necked groping fools. the first man to fondle me was, truly, all of five feet tall. he followed me around, stroking my arms, my torso, until i finally told him to "please fucking STOP right now", or something. then there was an older man with a MOUSTACHE who kept trying to put his arm around me... it's never the appealing guys. perhaps that is what makes them appealing.
my coworker was drunk and in a very good mood. i was sober, fresh off a long shift at work where i was squinting into a microscope all day (interrupted by the exploratory on the dog who'd eaten a rock... the rock was in the colon... i got to glove up and dig it out through the anus... such a glamorous career). her friend was also pretty sober. we stepped outside for a cigarette (no longer can one smoke indoors in washington, bastards) and agreed that it would be a much better show if it was all-female.
today: bought sunflowers and a suzanne vega cd that i used to obsess over when i lived in fremont. played 'headshots' repeatedly. the moon is almost full, the air still heavy. everything up to this moment has a path, a story. the onus of being in the same general vicinity over the last few years: i have a clear recollection of what i was once thinking, doing, hoping, and where it's gotten me now.
okay, fine... i want to get thrown down and ravaged. i want a novelty fuck.

peace? could this be? for now, it is. I AM DOCUMENTING IT FOR FUTURE PERUSAL, or disbelief. things are looking up.

first the digs, then the lovin'?

i was moving until 7 am. i watched the sun rise from my new lair. i feel really, really fucking good.
there is nothing more disgusting than cleaning an apartment i am moving out of. mostly unbeknownst to me, i'd been living on a fairly substantial layer of cat hair, potting soil, claw sheaths, dried-out plant bugs (they look like tiny shrimp...?), shards of cat litter... as well as a tub lined with black mold... and i swept with a broom that reeked of cat piss. i didn't think i'd let the place go as badly as i apparently did. it was also an icky reminder of how i'd ignored the half-assed way the place had been cleaned before i ever moved in; behind the stove was a huge hair-encrusted food stain that extended to the refrigerator door... and i never used the stove while i lived there. yesterday was an unrelenting series of grime, sweat, bruises, and stairs, blessedly interrupted for a few hours when my folks drove up in their el camino (the "conquista"!) to help me move the big stuff. we went to sushi afterwards. veggie tempura rolls are highly recommended.
there is a window above the (lemon yellow!) bathtub in my new lair. i took a shower whilst listening to my neighbors talk and cook something that smelled very good from the open kitchen window below. i am able to admire the hillside of petunias and feel the breeze whilst the upper half of my body is naked to the world. it is a glorious feeling.
tiresias (the blind cat) navigated his first staircase, and a brady bunch-esque one at that, with admirable aplomb. i only saw him fall once (7 stairs up?). all the beasts seem extremely happy with the new digs. perhaps they were tired of slovenly collegiate shitholes as well.
i did come to one realization: i have too many fucking plants. 4 carloads of plants, actually. i may never move again.

give it a whirl, girl. be like the squirrel.

saw the raconteurs on thursday. they fucking rocked! i felt like a bit of a buffoon for going by myself, but once the music started it was actually preferable to be alone. 'your blue veins' and 'store bought bones', in particular, were insane live. it made up for the white stripes debacle of last summer- the concert at the gorge that i ended up missing.
i officially move tomorrow. i am shirking my responsibilities at the moment, obviously. there is only so much i can do with all my rubbish still in the apartment. i am packing things that i haven't touched since unpacking them 7 months ago. i am excited. it will be poignant to leave the capitol hill lair, though. i have a profound fondness for this place- what it's represented, most of all. i was laying on the filthy carpet this afternoon, reading 'the smithsonian', helix asleep on my ass, and it started raining for the first time in months, loudly hitting the leaves outside the open window. i will miss that. i will miss the perpetual bathtub leak and the senile toilet that requires holding the handle down for the entire length of the flush. i will miss the misaligned shoji screens and the '50's sliding kitchen cabinets and the 1940's oven that never worked but looked really cool. i will miss the ceiling fan and the silver radiator and the built-in shelves and the escher painting i glued to the medicine cabinet.
i will not miss the bad music that my neighbors enjoy, or the shit parking, or the dungeon of a laundry room, or the leaking ceiling, or none of the non-sliding cabinet doors latching, or the obnoxious drunks shrieking on the street at 3 am. the other night i was on the front steps of the building, circa 12.30 am, and nonchalantly watched a man urinate against the side of the building across the street: an older guy, fairly average in appearance (i.e not a blatant vagrant). i thought, 'hmm. i hope he doesn't piss on my car next.' it will be nice to not have those thoughts any more. in my new hood, people will break into my vehicle, but they probably won't want to climb up the hill just to micturate on it.
one of my coworkers just returned from alaska. loved skagway, hated juneau. "it's the most horrible place on earth" he said. "it made me very angry." his brother has lived there for a few months, "so now he's like a local, all gross..." "did he grow a beard?" someone interrupted. "yeah, but he can't really grow a beard, so it's all patchy..."

'i don't know' is a waste of life

obviously i had not been 'letting it out', emotionally. tense from a long and painful conversation the night before, feeling horribly sad and guilty, fretting about moving and weird 'symptoms' and the fear that i am on the precipice of making yet another life-changing and potentially catastrophic decision... i was back tech at work, the one responsible for the hospitalized goings-on, and an IVDD bulldog was admitted with a slew of treatment orders. i spent a good 15 minutes trying to place a catheter in one of the veins not already fucked up by the referring DVM; the doctor kept coming over and making condescending comments; the assistant was being far mopre patient than he needed to be; i was growing more and more frustrated and abruptly, to my complete mortification, i began to cry. "i need to go" i remember mumbling to the assistant. "i'm sorry." i locked the door to the bathroom and sobbed into a paper towel. it was stupid then and it is stupid now, but i have to say, i felt much calmer afterwards. everyone at work that noticed my little breakdown was very nice and understanding. i feel immense gratitude that i work among pretty cool people- people that i have also seen behave neurotically and get stressed out and act obnoxiously on occasion- all traits that make me like them much more.
i was exhausted by the time my 12 hr shift ended. driving home feeling residually morose. stopped at the store and noticed my strabismus acting up behind my glasses, making me feel that i was walking at a tilt, a creepy after-hours drug addict despite my ER scrubs. in the nearly deserted parking lot (past 2 am at this point) a woman in the car next to mine said she liked my bumper sticker ("we are creating enemies faster than we can kill them"). we ended up standing in the parking lot of the QFC talking for about forty minutes... about everything. family, spirituality, northern california in the '70's, grocery shopping when you're hungry, the weird and wonderful coincidences of life. she was 58 years old with a very melodic voice. the cynic in me kept trying to detect a glimmer of insanity in her mannerisms -for i am the only sane person that lurks around the grocery store at 2 am, correct- but couldn't. she was like a fucking angel saying everything i needed at that moment to hear; all i needed, i suppose, was another warm and cognizant human being to remind me that we're all going through life, and that it's going to be okay. i drove home feeling like i was either going to start crying again or accidentally bash my car into a wall.
twelve hours later, hot and sunny outside, in the cool confines of the libbrary with my apartment slowly beginning to unravel many blocks away, it is one of those instances (these usually last only a few minutes, but sometimes much longer) when, if asked what would be the one thing that would make me the most happy, i would have no idea what to say.