an office for the damaged

adventures?

As a wind blows quietly through you to break your heart.

I read an article, “8 things to do before you turn 25.” 

“5. Stop hating yourself.”

I’m a person, and I’m trying.  That’s probably all I can do.

And as you think about her leaning in to kiss some new face, in the same moment you sit on the bed in the guest room of your mother’s house, and you start to forget you have friends somewhere out there in the world that, for some reason or another, genuinely love you.  You forget that life is more than just right now, and that how you feel right now, you won’t feel like that forever, and you probably won’t even remember it, and you will look back and laugh at the end of your 24th year of life, when you thought you were terrible and everyone hated you and really none of that mattered, because if you really were terrible, you probably wouldn’t care so much that you were terrible, and if everyone hated you, they probably wouldn’t talk to you.  Or they would say they hated you.  Or they would do that thing, that I feel like most people do, where they act really super nice to you and then pretend to spit on you as soon as you aren’t looking.  sssllllalaaapptt

You’re a person, and you’re trying.  That’s probably all you can do.

I’m turning 25 in less than 2 months.  I will probably spend my birthday alone, but refuse to not get drunk.  I may end up getting way too drunk.  I’m turning 25 and I spend so much of my time trying to act like I’m 30.  Not because I want to act like I’m 30, but it seems everyone I know acts like they are at least 30, and so I seem so immature by comparison.

Hey, world!!  I’ve got nothing figured out!! Ya know what, I’m okay with that.  

I want to fall in love with the moon and the sun and the air and I want to laugh louder than I have in a while.

****

Creating artificial circumstances to have staged conversations about real topics.  Are we that starved for genuine human interaction?  That we decide to fabricate the interaction, sacrificing the authenticity?

****

No filter, no filter, no filter.  hashtag no filter.  Jesus Christ didn’t have a filter.  Not even filtered water.  I think, probably…

****

When did I become such a cynic, when I used to love the world and everyone I knew and all I wanted was hugs and for you to love me to?  And now when I look down, I start to think and frown.  I think before I would hide it, because I wanted to be loved and accepted, and then I realized, I didn’t need.  And I started to hide.  But I still want love and I want to go to a vegetarian barbecue with a bunch of people wearing denim and smiling and drinking beers and laughing and singing spontaneously all together in unison, and we’ll all hug each other, and maybe there will be dancing.  

The last time I said, “we’re going on an adventure.  Why don’t we have adventures?” I had to go to the ER with my friend past 4 am.

Ke$ha and Piss

I just watched Ke$ha drink her own piss.  Ke$ha is my role model.  Goals :: start an art movement inspired by Ke$ha and her teachings.  

In stores, I like to touch everything.  I find it hard not to do the same in museums.  Ai Wei Wei’s exhibit would have been much more interesting if I could have touched the pots and learned how they felt and connected with them tactilely.  But we have rules, and rules function to separate us from the art, to create the hierarchy, to establish the value of the object, to reinforce the mythology of the art object.  

I will piss on your hierarchy.  Ke$ha pisses on your hierarchy and drinks the piss, too.

Sunday School

Who ever thought poetry would be cool again?  When I was a teenager, I stayed up all night writing poems and posting them on MySpace.  I stayed up all night writing rambling lines about blood and sweat and tears and loneliness.  The document collecting all of my teen angst.  I saved them all to my desktop and I hold on to them as the intangible diary of my struggle through youth.  Not much has changed, ten years later, rambling abstract impressions of some experiences or emotions or whatever, to collect in an intangible arrangement of pixels representing, well, something.  

The incredible drive of humans to “belong to something” or just to hold someone’s hand and really mean it.  Like going to church every Sunday but way sexier.

beautiful floral beings

from fall 2012

 

beautiful floral beings

 

1

I have flashing memories of the free fall and the bungee cord seemingly not quite kicking in, seemingly letting me fall forever into the ground and further into concrete, through concrete, into nothing, into everything, I have these flashing memories and I relish them and they hurt—they hurt because they are gone, because they are real, because I can still taste the air, sharp and cold, and how it felt rushing through my entirety, my being, my body, and I can still taste the tequila, straight up only slightly watered down by melting ice, that didn’t have enough time to melt very much because we hit everything so hard then.  We hit everything so hard, because everything was hitting us so hard, we didn’t know what else to do, but a magnum of red, whiskey diet, Jameson on the rocks, tequila shots, and a pack of American Spirit blacks, on repeat, on repeat, on repeat, styrofoam cups and a blanket with a crocheted cat.

2

I need to recount it now or I will let it dissolve into the past.  I need to recount it now before I reset the hard drive and delete all that miscellaneous experience that will spread malicious content into my bloodstream if I don’t trash it now.  She said, you would light the house on fire just so you could jump out of the window, through the flames, to see it burn, to cry with the neighbors and the firemen, to collect the ashes afterwards, and ultimately to be broken, to then rebuild from nothing, just to burn it all down again.  Maybe I would.  Maybe I did.  Explosives in the backyard—they told me it was dangerous, but the flashing light, I found so attractive.  I had to burn it down to build the fantasy—to crawl into my own rabbit hole where I could stop time.  I pulled you in with me and taught you how to play pretend.  And I pretended I had love and I had hope and I had beauty captured in my pocket, and it wasn’t going anywhere, and there was only happiness and no pain and no hurt and everything was good and nothing was bad and money didn’t matter because I owned all the banks and I ran the reserve and I printed all currency myself. But even the most carefully constructed imaginary structure can topple so easily, with the slightest exhale of words whispered from reality—my delusions now are just dust adding to the pile of ash of the bridges and homes I’ve burned for the sake of my delusions.

3

You’re gonna have to grow up someday. 

4

This chair leans back far too far.  The coffee is cold, a little stale.  The room is uncomfortable, right on the edge of chilly.  The white cinder block walls remind me of third grade.  I could just paint a wide stripe about three feet up around the perimeter, in a vivid primary color.  Not a place I would choose, but handed to me, I suppose I have to make the most of it.  White cinder blocks don’t feel real to me—fiction never suited me, to read nor to write nor to live.  Baby, I need something real—and if I went and pressed my hand against that wall, with just enough pressure, slight pressure, I believe the wall would give way and reveal to me it’s nonexistence.  And upon this revelation, the wall and I would have a wonderfully colorful and intriguing conversation not about the weather, because the wall and I don’t waste our time throwing around trivial and trite phrasing about the sun or the gray or the cold out today—but about the implications of the crossings of our existence and how hopefully from this tiny point on the trajectory of time, we will continue on our little lines in the plane of this universe or whatever existence, go forth, changed, a new lease on life.  I fell into the wall, stood inside the wall, became the wall, and felt what it was to be still and silent and supportive.  I let everything move around me and realized in this experience, I felt the weightlessness of freedom while the cinder blocks held me there, and I became the cinder blocks.  

5

I will not be the stranger in my own life anymore I will know myself on the inside and out and I will let the evil rot away and decay and I will compost it and let it grow beautiful floral beings.  

 

quiet confessions of tiny melodies

from fall 2012

 

quiet confessions of tiny melodies

 

 

 

I never liked roller coasters.

Except for the ones that went in loops.  I kind of liked the Tilt-a-Whirl, and so in comparison to my hatred for the others, I loved it.  When at the county fair, and everything, by the end of the week, starts to smell of a mixture of dirt and vomit and weed and cigarettes and sweat and carnies and fried foods.  Everything can be fried at the county fair.  And you can hear the local talent crooning on a stage somewhere on the grounds built to look like an old barn or something.  He’s fifteen and he’s famous here and everyone in town thinks he should try out for American Idol, because, boy, can he sing?  And, oh, but, yeah, he will be famous one day.  One day.  

 

Growing up, I always thought I would be famous one day.

That when I played a song at the talent show at the county fair, they just didn’t get me, they just didn’t understand.  You got to get out, y’know?  Get out there.  Planning my escape, to California, of course (because California is not actually a state within the Union, but an imaginary land—a utopia, in fact—for sad misfit teens who hope to sleep forever so that they can constantly dream they are living happily in their sun-bleached beachland) where people would finally get it—the nuances of a carefully crafted folk punk lo-fi alt-pop pseudo-electronic-mostly-acoustic-avant-garde-experimental singer/songwriter all of fifteen years old convinced of her own wisdom, his own heartbreak, my own insight.  Where people would finally get it—a queer kid with nothing else but a guitar, a pen and paper, and a voice.

 

A voice. 

A single individual instrument hosted within the body, the cords form a timbre that no other instrument can form, no other human can truly imitate to perfection.  A projection into the world from one’s own body.  A whisper—an intimate confession into the ear of another, I can send vibrations into your ear canal, triggering your synapses to feel an extension of me inside you.  I will never be able to be closer to you.  

 

I always wanted to be close to you.

You as in someone, maybe even you, now, in this moment, as I get to whisper these words into your ear.  I never felt more alone then I did at the county fair, especially on the main stage—the First Citizens National Bank Amphitheater, eff dee eye see insured—under a burning spotlight, ready to whisper and scream into the microphone, performing “Farewell to One-H” (maybe you don’t remember it—it’s a lesser known hit—to catch you up, it tells the heart-wrenching tale of the unsympathetic destruction of nature as inspired by hurricane Ivan and the frailty of human life “but the birds (ie seagulls and maybe herons) fly around unaffected by everything/well I wish I were a seagull, I could fly away/but I’m a people so I’ve got to stay”).  I actually won a little ribbon that year—Honorable Mention—planting the seed for my incredible unstoppable beautiful and magnificent ego.  But I was still entirely alone.

 

I was entirely alone until I whispered into your ear.

And you understood.  Everything.  Because I was in you, and you were in me, and we were one.  We found California and we learned it had nothing to do with California at all, because it was in Tennessee.

 

I went to California.

I hated it. 

 

I hated it, and I finally realized what home meant.

I never understood home.  Until I had to leave and only then did I realize that I had one.  Tennessee, I drew you permanently on my skin.  I drew you with a single black line, to form your boundaries on my arm.   Put the ink into my skin so I can tell the world forever who I am and where I’ve been… and to where I will always long to return.  A soft hum in a lover’s ear, a secret song that I will share with you, quiet confessions of tiny melodies, sing to me, sing to me, sing to me…

Or whatever.

I would want everything and nothing all at once.  I’m constantly worried that I am boring.  I want to make mad beats and speak softly into a microphone like an ear, saying strings of words tied together cleverly that express feelings or whatever.  Ethos like pathos like jackfruit nachos like love or whatever.  

I have to pee but I don’t want to move.  

I need better headphones. 

“It was like all my problems were waiting at the door while I was sleeping.”

I remember the corner of the kitchen and I can’t shake the memory.  There were no witnesses.  It’s possible none of it ever happened, and I made it all up all along.

Cardboard Cutout

Nice people wearing nice things hanging in a nice house doing bad things.

Free time and solitude lead the mind away and back around to the heart, and here we are feeling things and thinking things and coming back around to face the emptiness of everything.  Maybe I just keep talking to convince myself that there is something left to believe, and to convince myself I do in fact believe, and that maybe one day it is all worth it and things make sense somehow or is that when everything becomes boring?

I need to remember the power of outsourcing.  Outsource laundry.  Outsource cooking.  Outsource art making.  Outsource feelings.  Outsource thoughts.  And then I get to the brilliance.  Outsource conversations and picnics and drives and smiles and laughs and let there be nothing left to do but bask in the brilliance of outsourcing.

SENT. i have been too busy to think and feel for so long, and too exhausted, with all the stress and work, so now all the thinking and feeling happens at once and i am spiraling.  CB: ***-***-****

Sent: May 12, 12:30 am

Reminder: bury your feelings, choke them down, only talk about happy things, make jokes and laugh at inappropriate points in the conversation, write people off as soon as you believe they are unworthy before you think that maybe they have deemed you unworthy, because really it’s all a game of who is the first to dismiss, get the ball in the hole and you can make a tally mark on your score, you can talk your way out of this hole, and once you convince everyone you’re the asshole, you win, because then you don’t have to deal with them anymore, and when you end up all alone, you can at least have a glass of bourbon to talk to, and maybe consider joining a club for assholes, weekly gatherings, everyone will end up angry, it will be miserable, scratch that maybe, maybe you never wanted to be the asshole but it’s too late now, and you know you, you dive all in, all cards on the table, no regrets, until everything is breaking, your life functions somewhat like your brain, too many trials, tangents, nothing ever finishes, you maybe will pick up where you left off five minutes ago, but you may forget to get back around to it, and maybe the moment passed and you keep thinking about that one thing and how it just passed and you lost it forever and you’re back around to eight minutes ago when you remembered when you were fourteen years old and you thought all you needed in the world was love but you would never have it and you’re twenty four and maybe you’re back just where you were at fourteen but fourteen year old you didn’t trash your life on purpose just to see what would happen, fourteen year old looked eagerly into the sky at a world full of possibility and pensively looked into yourself feeling empty and alone, and i guess not much ever changes, but sometimes you got to let go.

I guess I never had the chance in life to destroy my own existence properly.

There is sound somewhere singing into my ears and I can’t quite hear it well enough to know if I love it or hate it or don’t know where I’m falling into the ground.  

So I can listen to Dashboard Confessional and again go back to being fourteen and crying and screaming and singing and whining in my room.  Because nobody cares at all.  Reminds you… reminds you… memories…  

Everything is starting to remind me of something, and usually it’s of something in my life when I was a better person, more caring, more kind, more present, a better friend, a broken, more productive human, maybe, maybe not, maybe not so invincible, maybe more vulnerable, more removed, more alone but less alone, less fearful but more terrified, less protected, more giving.  Now maybe there’s nothing to give but a drunken debate on the sidewalk.  Let me fall to the ground, eat the grass, cry into dirt, and end up in the back of a cop car not knowing how I got there, because I might as well make my internal destruction external.  It will make a better story.  Train wreck.  We love ‘em.  Roommate says, Amanda Bynes, treadmill, flip flops.  Watch this.  (Abridged version.)  But why should there be anything wrong with running on a treadmill in flip flops?  I’d say that makes more sense that a lot of things that I do on a daily basis.  I’d say that maybe I should be on a treadmill in flip flops and maybe I would start to feel a little better, or maybe I would start to feel.  

What would you say is the main emotion you express in your work? 

There are no emotions here.  Only rationality and concept.  Emotions are empty.  Feelings are irrational.  I wouldn’t need to make art to express.

It’s a bit more complex than that.

Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.  Fuck you.

It’s 1:30 am and I’m upstairs in my parents house, in a bedroom that was called mine when I was growing up, but I never lived here.  I’m surrounded by nice furniture that holds nice dishes everywhere in the room.  This is upscale hoarding.  Maybe this is how people fill themselves to stop feeling like I keep feeling even though I keep trying to not feel.  Dishes.  Furniture.  Nice things to look at and be able to say these things are mine.  Possession.  

I’m a cardboard cutout of a human.  How convincing.  You thought I was real.  So convincing.  Just don’t look at me in profile.

To dance.

I’d rather dance all night and forget about progress.  Progress is constructed within the patriarchy, so our notions of success are rooted in capitalism.  Done with that.  I believe wholeheartedly in not working very hard.  The Leisurely Manifesto.  Measuring success in belly laughs and lazy afternoons that bleed into evenings that reach into the early mornings.  Love is a sunrise seen emerging from the night.  A cigarette shared with a friend because you both ran out and it’s the last one and neither of you should be driving.  Moments make life, and they blur by when you’re too busy to notice.  I don’t get to dance enough.  I don’t get to play in the dirt.  I forget to listen to music simply to listen to music, how I used to listen to music as a teenager, angsty, locked in my bedroom.  CDs on repeat.  Now I can’t imagine sitting still to listen.  I put on a record but have to be cooking or cleaning or working or eating, never sitting still.  Oh, how I’ve been indoctrinated.  The ever constant approval seeking drive to please, to please, to please.  Where did my rebellious spirit go?  I’ve isolated it in my head alone and disconnected myself from my heart.  Forgot what it is to feel without thinking.  Energy too sapped by the mechanisms I’ve imposed upon myself.  I always thought I wanted freedom, and then I signed it away the first chance I got.  Where is the hope?  I want nights that never end and I want people that can feel.  I’m worn out by selfishness.  I want to give.  I want to give you everything.  I want to transform myself into a tiny version so I can travel into your earhole and walk inside your mind and really start to understand how you feel.  I mean, you, reading this now.  I want to be inside your brain, and walk across your neurons as a tight rope.  Balancing act.  I want to be a vibration.  I will become sound and I will enter you and you will hear me and feel me and I will become electricity and I will fire on your neurons and you will have me.  I want to dance.

The Charade

You can track the timeline of my semester on my Tumblr.  If I disappear, you can assume that the semester has caught up with me, and I no longer have time to write because I’ve become too busy with my school-related responsibilities.  Ironic.  My art education prevents me from writing regularly.  I’m too busy making videos of slamming my body into a door repeatedly.  Sorry, guys.  How can I afford to be writing right now?  Why, I’m waiting for the said video of myself slamming my body into a door repeatedly to render, of course.  So you have an estimated one more minute and thirty seconds to experience whatever I can manage to ramble in that time.  Don’t worry, there will be even more rendering this evening (morning?) before I get to sleep for a couple of hours before continuing on with the charade.