i obsess.

full of piss. and more piss.

You know what bugs the bejesus outta me?  (I'm sure you're on the edge of your seat.)  It's the phrase "these uncertain times."  Like, when people get all twisted up about "these uncertain times," and wring their hands a bunch while sighing and looking morose.  FUCKing HELL.  Show me a CERTAIN time.  Yeah.  I thought as much.

And another thing, while I'm ranting; you know that whole business about how celebrities shouldn't read their own press?  That ought to apply to your own blog comments, as well.  No matter how lovely and wonderful and encouraging it is to get feedback, with the I-must've-just-orgasmed-I-feel-so-glowy vibe that attends a heap of praise in the comments section, you really, REALLY shouldn't read that (awesome) shit.  Because it totally fucking warps your sensibilities about the writing itself.  First, because you get all over-confident and swaggery about it, and after, because you recognize people are, oftentimes, just being nice, and sometimes even just being ass-kissy or using your comments section to pull people to their sites which seems almost cruel but then I've probably done it on occasion.  Probably.  (Uh, probably?  Tell the truth, Debbie.  Okay.  *wrinkles face in disgust*  TOTALLY.  Ugh.)

Anyway, once the whole comment-thing stops mattering so much, which it never does, it always matters, so my full-of-shitness is apparently running the show this evening but I SHALL PERSEVERE, but the comments thing *does* sort of stop affecting you as much as it did in the early days, so as least that's something, it isn't *quite* as painful or soaring or whatever, and you're *kind of* capable of writing a sentence without agonizing over whether certain bloggers will stop by and be amused or impressed or bowled over and subsequently flatter you with their genius responses.  You kind of manage to tune it out, sorta.  On occasion.

But you just shouldn't fucking read it, read them, at all.  The comments, not other blogs.  Although, to be honest, sometimes you shouldn't even read those, either.  You should just steer clear altogether of the blogs you read that convince you to never write, because then you've fucked yourself.  It should be obvious why.  And of course you'll fail miserably at that, you'll read them anyway, because they write like liquid jewelry, the kind you would never tire of, and you love how they think and how they compose and articulate and it thrills you, but DAMN if it isn't dispiriting to recall you'll never write anything approximating what they can, and you just can't manage to coerce yourself to write afterward.  So that's shit.

Because, you love to do it.  To write.  It is, more than anything in this world, what you wish to be doing, at almost every waking moment.  When you're not doing it.  When you're DOING it, you kind of hate it, and hate yourself, and how imperfect your process is.  But when you aren't writing, you kind of loathe everything keeping you from it.  LIke a jealous bastard of a lover who you fucking despise but cannot get enough of, you want to be stabbing them and licking the sweat off their skin all at once.

Anyway.

Yeah.

some like it lukewarm.

It's so weird to wake up every day and feel it, feel the thirty-six years all settled into me, pressing down on me, and to rise and stumble because the years don't just feel heavy, they also have wreaked serious fucking havoc on my ability to walk gracefully.  And this breath, my GOD, my mouth, it's truly like I am renting a pet hostel from an extended family of miniaturized nutrias, that, while I've slept, have done nothing but have stinky nutria-sex all night, in my mouth, and it's warm and rancid and dry and my teeth feel like small, cheap, generic Legos, all clattery and clumsy.  But that isn't the worst part.  The worst part is my hair.  Not the gray chunks (which used to be, even up until several weeks ago, merely strands.  Separate strands of gray kind of quietly spreading throughout my hair.  Turning into a fucking gray-hair army, it seems; they're uniting in a subtle-yet-discernibly hostile takeover of my scalp.  I don't care as much I thought I would, though).  It's the FRIZZ.  The curly hair that has always been my bane, oh, it continues.  Not the curls.  The old-lady frizz.  It's AWFUL.  It's like Einstein and

oh who the FUCK am I misleading with this?  This lunacy.  It ain't me.  I'm not writing it for me.  I'm writing it for you, today, and it feels like complete bullshit.  I have to just face facts:  I can't make myself write.  I thought I'd try, but all the trying is doing is giving me a pain in my gut, and there's a streak of bile headed for my mouth as I clatter these stupid horrid words out.

I can only write when I can.  No matter how hard I try to convince myself that I'm in charge of this thing, this setting-down-of-words in long, pale strands, I cannot cheat. 

It doesn't seem fair.  So many seem to be in such firm control of their writerly parts.  I am in as little control of them as I am of my hair going gray, the skin on the backs of my hands growing thin and the veins there looking more luminous and blue and traveled all the time, the apparent transparency of this aging and of my participation in its full-throated bloody rapacious scream, and that's fine, I suppose.  It has to be.  Seriously, I could kind of care less, because I'm so caught up in the minute scrap of control I have over my writing, after all of these bloody evidenced years.  So many stories I ache to release in a sublime thrust all over the page, so many stories I want to vomit and shriek and spurt and shatter and whisper and they're all holed up inside me like so many useless children I'll never birth and I'll be gasping my last stupid breaths and the only thing I'll leave as evidence of my existence, finally, is the terrifically bad nutria-sex stank.

When all I ever wanted to do was write.  (Well, and sing and dance and fuck and strip and gyrate and snowboard and drink and carouse and bust up assholes with my sharp fists and get high and talk high-falutin' multi-layered trippy nonsense with all them stupid fuckers.)

(And drink good, black tea and climb into the hills and smell the damp under the trees and examine the underside of a fern, acknowledge its curly edges and the wee rust-brown spores gracing the lengths of each branch, and read the classics and consider just what so-and-so meant while staring down a bloody sunset with glittering eyes, then finding someplace simple to rest and eat my little sandwich on hearty bread and a hearty lunch of William Carlos Williams or Vonnegut or Salinger or Dostoyevsky or, oh, beloved Fitzgerald.  Rising, strong in my body and fortified, enriched, in mind.  And THEN off to the strip club for a night of hilarious banter with drunks after -- and during -- my silly stripper antics.  Sometimes accosted by a frisky friend in the dressing room, sometimes pleased by it, sometimes annoyed, always intrigued.  Who would want to touch me, embrace me, kiss ME?  Why?  It's all so strange, our mingling, as people.  As creatures.)

I've stored up enough experience to get me through the early to middling years of parenting, I think, but - will I drag it out and kick it into some kind of literary shape as I would do if I could but MAKE IT SO?

I must bear with myself in this unquixotic struggle, this banal battle of unholy proportions, while I fight to dare my muse to strip, while I use all my wiles to convince her to pull those drawers down around her ankles and shove her naked ass against some stranger's steamed glasses.

And I'm gonna do it, no matter the shame coursing through her now.  She'll get used to it.  Grow to like the feeling, even.

i'd say it's about time to hang it up, if i could be certain it wouldn't make me begin posting furiously in response.

Which simply means I have an uncontrollable urge, on a constant basis, to behave like an adolescent. 

At best.

FUCK, I miss blogging.  I mean, I miss writing.  I don't miss what blogging has kind of become, for me, which is this nightmare of social obligation that I cannot uphold.

I care about the people I have met through interaction created as a result of my writing here, but I do not crave regular social interaction.  I'm not super-good or whatever at that shit.  I kind of hate having to be social.  Mostly, I want to be left alone.  Sometimes, of course, that's absolutely untrue, and I wish ardently to be flitting, mothlike, diaphanous, under a moonlit night, threading through a maddening crowd, smiling, looking fantastic, making the other moonlit creatures laugh at my insightful jokes based on the quantum theory of poo, and wisely gleeful at my sojourn through life as a young, beautiful, diaphanous creature drawn to that one low-hanging light over there in the corner, oh, life, how long and beautiful you will be, how I will remain lovely and fresh and dew-bedecked, how there will always be other young, diaphanous creatures to love and fuck and kiss and spurn and worship and laugh with and oh, how that light beckons, I must just sneak only the merest inch nearer, I must just peer into its wizened depths for but the smallest speck of an instant, so that it may whisper its glowing secrets to me and I will grow only more beautiful and young and life will open and become more wonderful and the sounds will deepen and all the world will spin in a constant WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED WHY DOES IT BURN??? OH GAHHHDD WHAT! WHY! WHO THE FUCK SHOT ME UP WITH THREE AMPULES OF ELECTRICAL METHODONE HOLY FUCKKKK!

Owwie!

That's how it feels, somehow, lately.

Now that I am no longer beautiful, I can say all of these things, because my life is no longer that of the one where what people think matters.

It does not.

And I am glad.  I am glad to know this part, this clarity, this growing clarity that brightens and brightens and stings and burns the retinas, although that could also very well be the pain my eyes give me now in this era of my time from looking too long and too well into the depths of a stupid-ass computer screen, and from other equally eye-beauty-thieving shit.  I mean, don't get me wrong, I could read/ogle glowing screens from here until my personal eternity has quit me, because I am a suckling wretch at the teat of technology, but I will not score any points in the eyeball-beauty arena.  It ain't easy on the eyes, is all I'm saying.

(Okay, that was weird.  I had to spend, just now, easily a good minute trying to relocate my finger-stance on the right side of the keypad because I'm still getting used to this ever-so-slightly-smaller keyboard on the new netbook I work on, and it felt sort of like senility, like I had never seen the keys of a typewriter before, I scrabbled my right fingers over them attempting to place myself, place my extended-digit-self on the pad, and it was like forgotten-yet-known and so - scary.  Should it have been scary?  I. don't. know.  Yes?  Sure.  What's right, what's wrong, when your hand cannot find purchase on the keys of your mind's table?

I'm gonna give myself fucking Alzheimer's at this rate.)

Oh, the scourge of needing to write, and knowing how trivial, in the end, the pursuit.

There is no rhyme, no reason, and I should be loathe to share this nonsense, this drivel, and in point of fact I am, but I am compelled.  I am fire, I am heat, I am this stream of syllable and pronoun, and all while I whisper, faint, at night, late at night, when no one cares to listen, when I am shush and tuneless and all keyed up, and I turn disquieted on the spit in my steadily-deepening bed-coffin, there, in the night, I am burning it into my own little soul that I will never, no, never, write the things that matter, the epics, the torrid novels, the novellas, the pamphlets, there will be no great production, I will not matter, in this historic river I will not be trumpeting from the heights, I will be small and quiet and my voice will crack slowly and break into crumby bits that will not even float downward into the rocky crevasse and remain, stubborn, black, but instead dissolve, a foam of gentling acquiescence slipping out to sea.

I love these late-night rhythms of blur and tangy oblong heady chopped-up soups I whip up out of a child's purple cracked-plastic bucket filled with dark stars and cold, wet sand and dreams eddied into these arms, these fingers-of-brain that tell me stories when I cannot dream, cannot conjure my own dreams, am dreamless as I am currently barren, as I stroke my fingers down the length of the cave's walls and find etchings that remind me of a time so long ago that nothing hurts there, it is all wine-dark and wet and cool and there are gentle whispers of breeze along my forearms and about my neck, eliciting shivers that remind me I would prefer to go inside to the rickety rented house and away from the cold, but not quite yet.  Not yet.  Not when the chill and the stars and wine-darkness can cajole me with their guilty asides.

I long to know what they would tell me, but I am too impatient.  I must run inside!, now, and huddle close in a dog-hair-bedecked blanket, one that does not quite cover me, and I must choose between wrapping it around my neck while my feet dangle, bare, chilled, outside its snug embrace, or giving my feet its shelter and leaving my neck and shoulders naked and forlorn.

The hot cocoa is delicious but it burns my lip and is short-lived in its intoxicating splendor.  Why is nothing what it promises?

Oh, what I wouldn't give for the perfect cup of cocoa.  The one that is bottomless and hot but not stinging.

Fingers-for-brains, what say ye?  To bed, to curl up in crone-shapes and remind me of my pending death (which may be ages from now, but what's in an age, you fucking wretched bits of flesh and bone and sinew and shaped so very like the fingers of my forebears, that you would remind me of my own brief fling with this flesh fresh-that-is-not-fresh-and-grows-less-so-by-each-tick-tick-tick?  Hmmm?  Callous.  You're all callous as fuck)?

Obama's on Leno.  Tivo just winked on, but it can seriously fuck itself.  It cheated me out of a new episode of The Office tonight, and for that I will curse it roundly before allowing it to worm its pathetic way back into my life tomorrow at some stupidly weak point, preferably in the afternoon and we've gone and had some decent form of exercise and I can give myself the admirable excuse of having exercised our bodies adequately in order to feed on tivo's meager offerings for a few slices of hour.  Fucking tivo.  Ugh.  Tivo doesn't even deserve a capital letter at its front, the wretched brain-miser.  I could write things, you know, you beast, if I weren't slaving for you, panting to make my way to you and fall captive to your nightly spells of pithy, neatly encapsulated 22- and 44-minute dreams.

God.  What would Hemingway have to say about tivo.  Would we even know?  Would Hemingway have managed to escape its hungry maw?

I'm fascinated to ponder that.  I have to believe he, as well as my other literary heroes, would have stayed just out of reach of the miserable brain-eating machines.

Better me than them.  I am the martyr.  Yes.  Look to me so that ye may be saved from the existence of watching anything and everything your television shows you so that you do not prescribe thoughtful thinking on your porr, beleaguered brain.

I will bear that crass, er, cross, for you.

(I don't really think it's necessary to say anything.  It's cool.  I got you.  It's all me.  I got this one, baby.  I got this.  That's just how I do.)

class A asshole.

I'm a dick.  I assumed the worst about someone.  Namely, my brother-in-law.  Turns out, he was defending another person when he got cold-cocked by the (small college) town fuckwad and cracked his skull and almost died.  And I assumed he was antagonizing someone.

I'm an asshole.

I'm so glad he's alive.  So goddam glad.

Oh, and speaking of class, this morning, in an attempt to rush through a right-hand-turn with a signal attached to it, the guy in front of me refused to pull up LITERALLY six inches so I could narrowly angle through between his car and the one parked near me on the curb.  I honked, and he turned and yelled at me.  I demonstrated, with clever use of finger-gestures, the distance I required to sneak through and turn right.  He yelled some more and turned back to face the intersection.  I honked again.  He turned and yelled again, more violently this time, and I showed him, again, quite patiently, I thought, how far I needed him to inch forward in order to move along my required route.  He yelled some more.  I shrugged in acquiesence and squeaked through the minute allowance of space.  By this time, he'd rolled down his window (I assume in order to give me some more information about just why he couldn't possibly pull his car forward a few inches), and I spoke back, with more finger gesturing.  Just the one finger, though. 

I did this in front of my little boy.  Who said, mommy, but THE LIGHT! IS! RED!, and who apparently didn't notice my nonverbal communique to the other driver regarding where he could go, because I'm certain he'd have said it in a perfect loop for the rest of the (albeit brief) drive to his school.  Mommy!, WHY DID YOU POINT WITH YOUR FINGER AT HIM LIKE THAT?  MOMMY, IT'S NOT NICE TO POINT WITH YOUR FINGER AT PEOPLE, MOMMY.  Etc.

See?  All class.

Sigh.

alexander mcqueen slums through target. which i'm good with.

And if I weren't perpetually freezing, even in summer, I'd buy this.  (Okay.  Fine.  I dislike revealing the guns.  I don't want people to fear me, for chrissake.  I just want them to tell me I'm rad WITHOUT my having to terrorize them with my sculpted-by-nature biceps.)

(You are so welcome.)

(I really fucking adore saying that lately.  Especially just to impress people with my overall d-baggery.)