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.

"this guy's nobody, and if he's somebody, i don't give a fuck." -john gotti

nearly 10 years ago, whilst in europe and planning my return to washington, i researched the bellingham area from a computer in grenoble (and to this day, i feel incredibly embarrassed by how i perpetuated the Ugly American stereotype to the unfailingly polite hosts... another story). what i'd heard about bellingham sounded ever so bohemian and free-thinking (and within close proximity to the lower legal imbibing in canada). found a house for rent in sedro-wooley for, i believe, $400, which sounds absolutely otherworldly now. mentioned it to my parents, who'd lived in that area for several years while they dropped out of WWU and unexpectedly had to raise me. "sedro-wooley?" my mother said, scorn detectable over the international connection. "there's not a lot going on there..." "everything gets moldy" my father added. i never did go there (it's about 20 miles east of bellingham)... until today.
drive N on i-5, through the perpetual traffic of everett, and take the darrington/sedro-wooley exit. sail through cornfields, past barns with "apples! cherries!" painted on the sides, past kids obliviously riding their bikes into the road, past trucks flinging rocks off their loads, past little hamlets with old-timey gas pumps in front of their general stores (that are actually called 'general stores', with 'drink sprite' signs), past many american flags. sedro-wooley appears to have not changed in 30 years. the buildings are low-slung, houses with empty porches facing the streets, everything glowing gold. i stopped at the gas station to use the loo. very tanned flaxen-haired kids were debating what kind of candy to buy. motorcycles idled in the parking lot. it seemed like the kind of town i would want to have my grandparents live if i was younger, so i could visit them and sit on a porch swing and catch fireflies and have cookouts and play fucking stickball or something. rather pleasant, but i left feeling extremely relieved that i never moved there, no matter how distracted by love and optimism i was.
on the way back i saw a dirigible balloon (some car dealership) off the freeway and suddenly remembered my dream from last night. it was a desertlike setting, but i somehow knew it was alaska. the mountains in the distance were purple; the foreground was flat and sandy. sunset. there was a huge rainbow-striped hot air balloon in the sky, and as i watched a gust of wind tipped it on its side, the fabric blew up, and the entire thing caught fire. it remained aloft. "i can't believe i was ever in one of those" i said to whomever i was with (unseen but familiar in the dream- my dad, maybe?) "yeah, we were lucky" he replied. i admired the colors against the arid backdrop; clinical, abstractly mellow, not terribly agitated by any of it.
i could interpret this as a tidy yet lurid metaphor of my current distance from all my recent life-shite, and it would make a good amount of sense.

amber and sweat rearranged by the ceiling fan

things are peaceful... talked to my friend from olympia for 2 hours, the phone leaving a sweaty swath, remembering how much i miss her. walked downtown so my landlord could show my apartment... a rather melancholy prospect, but distracted by hoping the cats don't shit ferociously while i'm gone. the place is about 90 degrees... good luck, mark. ha ha.
decided that taking to the sea is a fine way to augment the cloying heat, so i took the ferry to bainbridge island, something i hadn't done in years. this is a beautiful piece of the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool. a fool! i got off the boat and walked around winslow (?), which was a bit too precious, and the shadeless glurp of the sun made me a bit unmotivated to explore much. rode back at the helm, hair blown back, the skyline looking clean and shiny, watching couples with their arms around one another and a toddler tearing across the rough deck on his hands and knees. ended up in queen anne, where at the bus stop a completely psychotic man who looked like the toxic avenger was screaming about how he's going to "fucking KILL bill gates, and that motherfucking cocksucker paul allen, and the military fucking raped and killed my daughter, and they cut her up into little fucking pieces, and in ten minutes you're all going to be fucking sorry, you're all going to be fucking dead, and medina and bellevue are going to be fucking bombed, and I'M GOING TO KILL YOU TOO, KERLIKOWSKI [seattle's police chief], YOU FUCKING PIECE OF COCKSUCKING SHIT"... et al. he also threw the N word into his epithet, then noticed the 3 black men also at the bus stop and added "i don't mean that in a racial way", then started babbling about how he's moving back to detroit, apparently to establish, alors! how you say, "CRED" with the disgusted black men. please note that this was all punctuated with him taking off and putting on his shirt and hacking copious wads of phlegm. he asked the group of us (8 or so) if anyone had a quarter. the bus pulled up and he adopted a kaiser sose limp, saying to the driver that he'd sprained his knee and needed to get to the top of the hill. the foolish woman let him on for free. he got off before i did and i watched him walk off normally as the bus pulled away, his mouth moving.
i love seattle.
tears for fears are playing. it is time for me to finish the NY times crossword now. yes, i have always used pen.

"i got kicked out of the boy scouts for eating a brownie"

it is hot as fuck in washington right now, as it is everywhere. yesterday seattle broke the record at 97 slippery degrees. i met my new landlords to sign the lease. they were extremely nice, both sick with some sort of gastric ailment as they were... he has a rather unnervingly dry manner about him, while she seemed much more expressive. their 13 month old son circled me with precocious curiosity, at one point pawing my sweaty back beneath my tank top. his hand positively slid across my skin. the only salvation to meeting people that will be controlling a large portion of my life whilst literally dripping perspiration, my jeans sticking to me, was that they were also.
the air here is utterly stagnant. the skyline appears brown from a distance. the mountains are cauled in murk. my sinuses are throbbing.
it should be cooler by the time i move. god, i hope so. i am a fan of the extreme weather, but only with the option of relief. i even found enjoyment in the sphincter-puckering cold of alaska, when my eyelids would perceptibly stick to my corneas when i blinked, because there was always a heated refuge nearby.
i am always whinging about something, it seems.
i complain about the little things and swallow the huge problems with little expression. the ugliest issues are the ones i stress about whilst driving home from work, the focus of the day giving way to another night stretching out, aimless, missing what i cannot have. i told him last night "i cannot respect myself if i keep going back." i got off the phone and cried, but briefly, because it is pointless to cry without an audience. and i wondered, as usual, if that was my last chance at love, if a fucked-up version of 'love' is all i deserve, if my fucked-up version of love is everyone else's bliss. and then i start to think of what a pain in the ass it would be to have to share my bed with someone, anyone, much less my life, and i feel a little bit better.
and the ms... every mild twinge scares me more than i can even admit to myself. if i pretend the potential for further problems doesn't exist, it doesn't, right?
i do not have to work tomorrow, or today, now. i can even ignore the midnight oil playing. stretch, skin salty.

heavy on the adjectives=new life philosophy

on the 18, slumped in a ray of sunshine, fretting inanely about the blind cat's new habit of pissing in the hamper- the bus stopped and lowered itself (a disabled benefit- makes a resigned hissing sound) for a sour-faced old man, pants pulled up to his rib cage and secured with faded suspenders, four lonely bottom teeth and a disarmingly thick head of ted kennedy-esque hair- staggered to the closest seat, which happened to be next to a woman and her baby. his countenance completely changed. i could barely hear him speak to the baby in a singsong voice, smiling, and suddenly he seemed like a kindly grandfather, not someone whom fate had grabbed by the testicles. it was easy to picture him young, laughing, falling in love, proud. ah, this self-imposed isolation leads me to florid rhapsodies.
windows are raised in all of the older buildings. summer in a largely un-air-conditioned city... curtains bow inward to dark recesses. i imagine sweaty bodies on bare mattresses, listless fans atop dirty refrigerators, painted walls slightly slick.
(the solo thom yorke is actually quite wonderful... good warm-night music.)
walked through occidental park today. it was actually very pleasant- reminiscent of gastown in vancouver. i hadn't been down there much since the city cut down a slew of trees to combat the seaminess of the area... it was oddly deserted. brick streets, sun filtered through leaves, ivy snaking up buildings. the ethiopian restaurant i used to go to is long gone- i don't even recall where it was. the walled-in 'waterfall park' is still there, locked- a tiny industrial corner surrounded by 15' iron bars, filled with flora and a huge fountain- i used to consider it my secret seattle oasis. walked up 2nd ave just as the majority of downtown released its workers for the day: a shady corridor punctuated by blinding slits of sunshine, pedestrians obediently waiting on the corners. that eerie (eerie due to its ephemerality) sensation of well-being came over me. i walked along with no physical impairment, nowhere to be, feeling like a ripe piece of fruit.
...now i feel as if i am missing, forgetting something... that giddy and ominous premonition that something bombastic and bizarre is prescient, that a week from now everything could be utterly, irreversibly different. i don't know why.

yes...everything is groovy...?

wandering through a sunny sunday, i decided that 'please' is the sexiest word in the english language. the way one's mouth has to move to form it, the vulnerability it offers... obviously, context like 'please fuck off'' or 'please get your fat ass out of my bed' notwithstanding. the lyrics of 'i'm your man' are perhaps the most alluring example. that whole song... sheesh... first time i heard it i was about 13, in my friend's parent's chevy suburban, and i wanted very much to have someone howl at my beauty like a dog in heat.
walked downtown, through crowds of sunburned shoulders and fannypacked tourists. watched a girl tap dance outside the market. watched someone else taking a picture of a lipringed woman glaring into space at the fruit/ristra booth- a gorgeous onslaught of color, and surely one that will be passed around the picture-takers' hometown as the Quintessential Seattle Photograph. sampled an elixir of orange, pineapple, rosemary and sage and was told by its creator, an intense-eyed man, that i must be healthy because i can 'taste the kick.' went into the listening booth in the subterranean vinyl shop (entrance off a reeking alley) and blared 'la rossa.' thought about spenard. listened to a woman from iowa shrilly berate her spouse for missing the bus stop to their hotel. walked around upper queen anne, past homes selling for $597k- read a story in this morning's paper that to qualify for a 30-year, 20% mortgage in queen anne, one must have an income of at least $120k. feel like a fucking imposter for soon living there again. sprawled on a lawn beside a building with "danger! hydrochloric acid!" signs affixed to it, the lawn covered with tiny daisies, and wrote in my journal, covered with aphids by the time i stood up. on the bus back to my current lair i sat behind a man who loudly counseled another guy on how to remain sober.
i do nothing but walk, watch, and listen. or so it seems.
with all this valuable (i guess) Me Time, i came to this realization in my journal: "i want a man who is self-destructive and self-aware. i want him to call me hideously inebriated in the middle of the night and tell me that he needs me. i want to be the one who tells HIM 'it's going to be okay.'"
:a lack of personal restraint. does that make me a sadist or a masochist?
why am i even fucking admitting this?

so i got a call on monday stating that the person in front of me had gotten the place, the resultant funk of which i have already articulated. wednesday i got another call: she had declined the apartment. by some miracle i seem to have passed the credit check (having NO credit, only collection notices from the thurston county library system, this baffles me) and thus the lair is mine, i guess, to be made official this sunday. i am agitated as a result. this represents an entire new fucking change in my grass-is-always-greener frantic approach to life. i am excited and disgusted at the same time. i console myself with the basic truth: my current lair, beloved as it is, is not worth the $795 they are charging as of 1 august. i fucking hate renting. i hate landlords, i hate communal hallways filled with other people's cigarettes and bad music, i hate passing drunk couples on the stairwell when i come home at 2 am wearing scrubs covered with dog hair and cat piss, i hate laying in bed listening to my neighbors fuck. that said, i love my place. i am really fucking sad to leave.
i sprawled on my floofy rug for a long while this afternoon, playing with the cats, watching the leaves alter shadows against the ceiling. i looked at my possessions and tried to remember where they all came from, what their stories were. remembered being alone in amsterdam, nauseous with loneliness and near-constant marijuana, taking everything out of my backpack and spreading it out on the bed (ah, the rainbow house hotel... lovely place) and finding great reassurance in this tangible evidence of, i guess, ME. i had carried a thing of nag champa with me, the scent of which saturated the top pocket of the bag. to this day, every time i burn that shit (about the only incense i like) i think of that era.
this is one of those days when i want to get completely fucking shitfaced drunk. i cannot have just one. there is no point to just one drink. i haven't gone to a meeting in months. i didn't like sitting around listening to people complain, mostly because their complaints were valid and i felt like a whiny imposter being there. there was definite benefit, however, to getting outside of my own turbid mind. i only realize this when there are no meetings nearby.
my mom's dad suffered fairly severe angina a few days ago. apparently he was born with 2 instead of 3 valves and one is completely useless, so the doctors are reccommending open-heart surgery. meanwhile, my grandmother is showing signs of dementia- she is 90, so she is entitled- but this whole situation is a bit stressful to contemplate as well. i am not concerned for my behalf, for i've never been very close to either of them, but i'm worried about my mother. i hate being peripheral to things i absolutely cannot control.
was it pollyanna, that cunt, who coined the term 'glad things'? or the glad game, or something. i need to focus on happy stuff for a moment.

all in the details

i spent a fair chunk of yesterday stomping around feeling morose. it was the first holiday i'd had off in quite some time, the sun was shining, and i was too busy being petulant because everything was closed, the apartment i'd wanted went to someone else, monday at work was an exhausting nightmare, i have no friends in seattle, BLAH FUCKING BLAH. but then! for no perceptible reason, my mood began to change for the better. was it the shouting match i witnessed on the #15 that resulted in one man being ejected from the bus? the luscious sweaty neck of the backpacker in the seat in front of me? sideways rain finally usurping the entropy of relentless sunshine? frozen mangos? rearranging my lair? the savory man at the newsstand? the small trifles add up to a colorful whole. perhaps i just stopped lamenting what wasn't and started digging what is. yes, that's pretty much it.
walked through the muggy night to the road above the interstate to watch the fireworks. there were shitloads of folk in various eschelons of drunkenness, repose, and coupling. an old man twirled with scarves. kids shrieked. it was a happy vibe. i ended up weasling my way up to the barrier fence with nary an obstruction to the view. yes, i despise everything that independence day stands for, liberal limp-wrist that i am, but fireworks are fucking brilliant. crowd reactions to fireworks are even better. the sky lights up and the world looks downright beautiful. after they ended i turned around and realized that the street behind me (a steep incline) was completely saturated with bodies. everyone clapped when it was over. i walked back uphill feeling very happy about life. "psycho killer" was in my head, which seems very erroneous now.

a lab was brought into work today. he had been hit by a car yesterday and seemed to be doing poorly, so the owner hit him over the head with a hammer 'to put him out of his misery.' he woke up today with the intention of burying the dog but the dead dog had wandered off. unfortunately i did not get a glimpse of this extraorinary beast, but the triage tech said it was wagging its tail "and looked pretty good, considering."