i obsess.

abcess absent absolved. ABS! also, ABC!

First, you need to be sure, BUT SURE, that your heart has been broken.  You need to examine the remnants.  You need to pick them up and caress them, note the shape and size of the various bits, and lightly kiss each piece, but without the appearance of concern (else someone should notice how much of an impression you made as your lips connected with the chunk of aorta or ventricle or chamber, and judge you).  You need to sweep up the too-tiny shards that sparkle, dark, and gather along the edges of your cupped, damp-bloodied hands and, without a discerning tremble, deposit them into a bin and dust your palms against one another, sliding them back and forth, back and forth, in a sawing motion.

You need, suddenly, to focus on something else, and lean, breathing hard, against a wall as you do.

Then you need to determine whether the break matches older breaks.  Hold up the pieces, after having placed them back together, puzzle, puzzled, puzzling, press a little harder here than there, resist the temptation to squeeze any particular piece.  Acknowledge the black ridges of scar tissue, note the ashen spots of old bruising and dead particles.

Then lean some more and get rid of the shuddery achey thing that just tore through you again.

You need to lean in, furrow that deepening line between your eyes just above the ridge of your nose, try not to get your stinky breath on the pieces because CHRIST!, they need to get back into your chest at some point and let's hope they won't be beyond salvaging *and* smelly once replaced.

You need to compare and contrast.

SECOND.

You will want to have a large plastic bag that has a zip closure, not necessarily any particular brand, and you will worry whether that brand name is going to affect the safety and security of your heart's pieces as you place them, one by one by bloodless one, into that bag.

You will note the pulsating and you will wonder.

giving out love by the linkful.

Don't you mind me, now.  I'm just doing what I ought to have done weeks, nay, MONTHS ago.

Glare balefully at me if you must, but I'd be much more pleased if you followed suit.  Bless you if you do, too, because you'll be helping.  And helping is good.  And kind.

(And if you hate people who wear t-shirts, especially mildly funny t-shirts, then so be it.

It's on you.)

in pursuit of liberty.

my house is cluttered.  my mind is equally so.  but this place.  oh, this, this clean, quiet space.  it almost echoes, all of its smooth, glossy panel of white.  i want to bathe in it.  the milk sliding up along my arms, over my torso.  rivulets of it like thick paint all along the achilles tendon of the stem of my brain.  like a white apple.

oh.  steve jobs.  you are GOOD.

(you may now proceed with the laughing at my blinding funny.)

while i washed dishes an hour ago, i recognized my urge to defy commands; even the ones with which i chastise myself.  oh dear.  this is far less funny.  you know what *is* funny?  my pretentious attempts at literature.  no.  not my *recent* ones; those aren't funny.  they're merely brilliant.  i'm referring to my years-old socked-in-a-word-file-o'-garbage-o'-shanter writings.  GOOD GOD I CANNOT EVEN POSSIBLY IN A HUNDREDITION (which, if you were one-eighth as intelligent as i am, you would realize equates to one hundred itions.  an ition, of course, is a cycle of a certain amount of years.  so, you do the math.  suckers.)  (because i kind of don't actually know the *exact* amount of years in an ition.  so if you do the math, then you could tell me.  and then we'd both know.  which would be nice, because i've been sitting here, trying to figure out how many years is in a hundredition for about three entire fucking minutes, basically ever since i came up with it, and it doesn't even look like a real WORD anymore, which is kind of blowing my mind, seeing as how it ISN'T A WORD, FOOLS.  I MADE IT UP.  *smacks chest with palms open* *winces* *coughs a little*  see how i did that, there?  THAT JUST HAPPENED) EXPLAIN HOW TRAGICALLY HILARIOUS MY OLD WRITING IS.  it's kind of like lucky charms, my old writing.  it's tragically delicious!

oh, and all of that?  up there?  yeah.  i'm stoned.

(is she?  isn't she?  gosh!  she might be!  i'm not sure!  i don't know!  i love exclamation points!  i'm gonna use them everywhere for the rest of my durn-fool life, i love 'em so!)

(and then i'm gonna speak in a little lilting voice that will communicate to everyone how proper i am, and no one will *ever* suspect that i cower at anyone's recognition of my deep-seated insecurities in social settings.  no one!)

(see?  not very kidding about the stoned.)

how was *your* day, dear?

Exit Dreamlessness; Enter Ridiculous/Treasured Family Activities of Pure Corny Corn

When I started taking Klonopin two years ago, and you may well remember my near-breakdown from lack of sleep for so, so long, the thing that helped me recognize the ADD, but, more important, made me get some damn sleep, I really needed it.

I don't think I need it so much anymore.  Well, I don't care whether I do.  I've decided to remove it from my schedule.  It's difficult to wean myself from; for two years, I have leaned on it, relied on it, to help me sleep when I simply couldn't believe I'd get through the night without at least one unbearable two-hour-stretch of ceiling-staring and thought-spinning, the maddening kind, the kind where one long sentence uncoils itself from inside the pitch-covered recesses of my charred skull and rises up over me, unbroken, while I stare at its bleached length, horror and fascinating beauty braided together, fine, an indiscernible bind, the sheer endlessness itself the most terrifying portion, feeling at once like a knot tightening about my throat and also like floating in death-like bliss, the softest couch, downy and embracing, stretching and stretching and uncoiling and comforting and frightening, on and on.

I've decided I can face it.  That I don't need to worry anymore; that my body has unlearnt the habit of wakefulness in the midst of hearty, working, productive, successful sleep.  I started believing firmly that I could sleep on my own, successfully, a few weeks, maybe three or four weeks, ago.  Or, wait, it may have been longer, but only a little.  Maybe six weeks.  I suppose it was still late summer, so, yes.  Six weeks.  Something.  At first it was tough.  My heart would begin thumping a loud beat against the bed, leaning out of my chest and into the mattress pad, right through its cage, so loud, so irregular, so discomfiting.  I would feel sleepy but that heart beat would jolt all through me, electric, sonic, distorted but so LOUD, and my sleepy feeling would slip off, ashamed of itself for daring to compete with its master and that giant beat.  But I fought it.  Fought with it.  Sleepy may have deserted me but my mind was damned if it wouldn't win out over the threat of heartbeat wreaking nighttime havoc.  And I kept it quiet, my mind, I shushed it repeatedly.  I insisted.  Stood my ground.  Sleepy would peer around a soft-shrouded corner, a tapestry of webbing ensconced on its brow, and I would nod, and it would steal toward me, and I would embrace it and then we lay together, fingers intertwined, as heartbeat, simply ignored, gave up and settled itself, too, its fingers reaching up, up, through my throat and into my head where Sleepy and I cradled one another, touching us gently.

As I showered today I realized that my dreams, they're coming back.  And that my dreams, I told myself, unsteadily dragging the razor over one aging-skinned shin, are the life-blood of my creativity.  If I am not dreaming, then I am not very much alive.

My dreams are inviting themselves back now that the Klonopin is out of the picture.  I would open my arms like a cape to them but I don't know just how to do it without interfering, so I shall simply be glad of their return and won't force the issue.

But maybe I'll write more, now and then, and maybe sometimes I'll write some honest things here, even though my sister-in-law reads my blog regularly, something I found out this year, something that made me terribly reticent to write here, given our non-relational status otherwise.  I don't feel good knowing that someone who is closely related to me doesn't want to talk to me, but *does* want to peer into my thoughts.  It stings.  But I am going to try to not let that be a daunting thing, and I'm not going to defend my right to say these things, here, even as this is a live broadcast of my head's entrails to the universe, that the portal of the interworld makes it ridiculous to defend oneself against certain people dropping in, because I've implicitly provided anyone and everyone a key to do so, free of charge, because it still doesn't seem right, and I'm allowed to say that and to feel it, too, and so I shall.

There.  Jack and I have to go to the toy store, now, to buy birthday gifts for his two best friends, whose birthdays are both in late October, and then we're going to buy some Halloween-colored sprinkles and bake cookies to put the sprinkles on.  And today is Friday, which means it's Friday Family Fun Night!, something we made up a few months ago and it's now a permanent fixture on the weekly agenda because Jack freaking loves it so.  So, hooray!  Because tomorrow! is! Halloween!  Could there be anything better?  Halloween?  For a 4+ year old?  Who will be Batman?  Nah.  There couldn't. 

Well, except there's Christmas/Chanukah coming.  So that's pretty good, too.  But his focus on Halloween is a thing of beauty, his lack of distraction by the other holidays that loom, the ones for ME that loom all too near all too real, all too requiring of planning and such.

I'm gonna adopt his attitude for today, though.  Since I only have Fridays with him now, and I'm altogether too grumpy and bossy most of the time. 

Adios!  Happy Halloween!  Happy Friday Family Fun Night!

!!!!  (Can you believe me with alla these exclamation points?  It's fucking insane.  !!!)

i'm in kind of a television space.

Between the maddeningly good storytelling on Dexter, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, House MD and The Office (and, sure, yeah, Community, Glee and 30 Rock deserve honorable mention), I don't much feel like resuming writing.  Even though there's no reason to do so in the first place.

But I want to be writing.  Late last night, I wrote in my head, lay in bed and scribbled out thoughts in the margins of my brain, wrote so many pieces, leaping from one target to another, so sure I should be up, writing.

Not necessarily here.  Just - in a file.  Somewhere I could tuck into a slot on the hard-drive and - let drop.  Away.  Away from my psyche.

I haven't been able to get away from my thoughts in recent past.  Part of that is, yes, having hiked apace from writing blog posts, but the other part is -- lots of parts.  Little pieces.  But this isn't a puzzle.  And I'm not attempting to solve it, even if it WERE a puzzle stop looking at me like I'm double-teaming this entry with a television show okay FINE.  I am.  It's Community.  That lead guy is hot, in a not-that-hot-but-super-funny-enough-to-gloss-up-the-looks-a-skoshke.  And he kinda reminds me of that one guy I was nuts about in the late nineties, the one I thought was the one until I found out he was married.  Good thing I didn't fall into the LUUVVVV with HIM.  HahahahHAHAHa.  Boo yah. Showed him.  Yeeeeaaaaah.

Uh.

I'm gonna go get some punkin cheesecake. 

It's homemade.  WITH FRESH PUNKIN.

Yo.

(obsessed about having never) been caught stealing.

(Emailed to me by M.)

The moment I walk into a shop - any shop - I always, always, always assume the frigging alarm is going to go off the moment I walk out. Probably cos it mostly does...

 

Point being that every second I'm in the shop I'm checking myself to make sure I'm not inadvertently stuffing goods in my pockets or down my bra or pantyhose. On top of that I'm usually scoping out the other patrons waiting for a moment when it will be least embarrassing to have said people turn around to see who that lying, cheating mother fucking scouse is that made the alarm go off.

 

I reckon I have a microchip or something lodged at the base of my skull a la Scully in X-Files that makes every alarm in my vicinity go off. And yeah, they're probably coming to take me away right at this very moment.

 

Utterly idiotic thing to obsess about when I've never been done for stealing.

changery.

Hello.  How are you?

I mean it.  I want to know.  Please send me emails about how you are.  Or, more specifically, how you obsess.  *Do* you obsess?  What is it about?  Write that shit out, then, my bitch (said with love), and spread it across the interweb to me in an anonymous email that I shall post it forthwith.  Prithee.

Won't you please?  I'd hate to think I'm the only one who obsesses about shit.

(Only, not shit.  Literally.  I actually *don't,*  surprisingly, obsess about *shit.*  Just everything else under the blasted hot orb in the yellow sky.)

Think of it as the new, more lengthy, less photoshoppy post secret.

I will love you forever?

And feed you cake?

(psst - lildbsnack at gmail)

overexposed.

I got a sunburn when I went to Rio de Janeiro with my host family in Brasil, for our summer vacation, I got this wicked fucking sunburn because, even though I'd practiced my skin up real good at the nearby pool while wearing a Brasilian bikini (picture, please, a piece of cloth large enough to create a pirate eye-patch for a mouse.  Now, multiply that by three, and attach some string in between the pieces.  There's your, er, *my* bikini), I hadn't practiced it up *quite* enough.  En route to the beach (we drove, family-style), we stopped off for the first night's sleep in a town that I wish I could remember the name of.  It was lovely.  (What has that to do, remotely, w the multiple-mouse-eye-patch-kini?  NOTHING.  whee!)  Anyway, we lunched somewhere, the next day, about an hour out of Cabo Frio (the beach that was our trajectory), and the name of *that* town also escapes me, though I do recall it began with an R, and afterward I peered into the shop next to the luncheonette and spied a perfectly edible tangerine-hued bikini made for an even smaller mouse's eyeball, so of course I HAD to have it, snapping it up on the spot.  It didn't cover as much (oh, the silliness in that statement) as the one I'd been accustomed to before, and left a few bare patches of heretofore unexposed-to-sunlight flesh.  Those bits, specifically, one strip on my left breast, and one strip on my right butt cheek, were so scorched as to become raised and leathery.  It took about a year for the skin to lose its slightly-darker appearance.  In the meantime, HOLY SHITBALLS DID IT HURT.  I truly understood the meaning of pain in the days after that exposure. 

I'm going to close up shop, here.

Hold on.  Stop fucking laughing.  I really am, this time.  See, I have a plan.  A several-point one, even.  I'm going to open a NEW shop.  YEAH.  BITCHES.  DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING, DID YOU, SMART-ASS FUCKOS?  (hi!  i like to insult my audience!  -- i don't, really, but i -- just -- oh.  good lord.)

The first part of the plan was to tell you I was going to aim my trusty pop-gun at the belly of this bitch, and the second part was to start a new blog, but to give you some time to beg and plead for the url of the new joint.  And the third part was to possibly explain some of why I'm doing all of this.  Only, I was undecided on the third part.  'Cause OH MY GOD THE TIME IT WOULD TAKE.  You do, you *must*, realize how absolutely fucking wretched I am at telling a story without spending an eternity on the sidetrack-ish portions, if you've been playing along for any length of time, oui?  So there.  You can wait to find out at the new joint as to the manifold reasons why.

For I will list them.

In the interim, you shall have to fold your hands decent-like and be all patient and shit, because SOME PEOPLE are insistent that I keep at this nonsensical business, even though I truly spare about, mmm, five or eight minutes a week for pleasure-writing (blogging not being remotely related to that business of what I would call "pleasurable").  I will say, yes, by golly, I'll say it -- I'm gonna miss this patch of imagined real estate, but shit.  It's fucking time.  Too many bloody unwelcome eyeballs peeled to witness my drivel.  Too many people who read but won't give me a goddam call on the phone to chat.  Which is high -- it's just high.  Who the fuck reads a blog written by a madman but won't call them up on the goddam phone to chat for a bloody fucking minute?  Especially when they could, because they have access to the number, and no excuse as to why they haven't done so, and then it just makes the person writing for the eyeballs all creeped out and shit, and makes that person not want to write on their own little, stupid, idiocy-driven web log. 

I have to come up with a name first, though.  So stick around, chickens and chickadoos, while I ruminate.  I mean, whatever you fucking do, STICK AROUND.  I'm sure it'll be like a veritable madhouse around here in the meantime.  (If a madhouse is still and silent as a tomb.)

(It is.)

(I think.)

Oh!, and email me or comment or some similar shit if you want the new address.  OR, YOU KNOW, YOU COULD CALL ME.  WE COULD CHAT.  YOU COULD ALSO SIMULTANEOUSLY INFORM ME AS TO HOW YOU ARE, TOO, AT THE SAME TIME.  SOUNDS WEIRD, HUH.

*ahem*

pantsed.

Isn't it funny how women can wear both pants and skirts and be entirely socially acceptable but a man who wears a skirt is a freak?

And isn't it funny, too, how women can read men's and women's literature and be entirely socially acceptable, but a man who reads both is kind of a freak?

So if you're a woman and you want to be read by men, you better goddam well stop wearing skirts, is I guess what is to be taken from this lesson.

Because to think that you could keep wearing your skirts and still get the men to read you is to -- well, it's just unthinkable.  It doesn't happen.

Does it?

*

Sadly, I was getting a lot, BUT A LOT, of spammy comment-attempters, for whatever lame reason about which I care not, so I have to close the comments.  Stupid spam-artists.

hungry.

Am currently residing astride a wobbly see-saw wherein one moment I am certain I can fight my way, smiling with teeth a-grit, just by ignoring it, through the solid gray mass of fog that is this life, and in the next very closely-trailing moment I am certain I am among the most miserable of humans ever to try to identify with that one Greek god-dude who had his liver eaten daily by the eagle, merely to watch in horror as it daily renewed itself so as to be munched again by said eagle on the morrow.

Morrow.  Marrow.  Liver.

Mmmm.  Is lunch soon? 

stupid, sexy liver.

And this thing, this life, the one where I compose epics my marrow is sole audience for, captive, waiting to be licked clean and hopeful that it will please when the licking is accomplished, but knowing, knowing, that the marrow will not divvy up the complexities.  Knowing the licker will not have the nuanced palette to divulge its secrets, in that wisp of a moment when tongue meets bony center.

Bummer.