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.