written

weighted:
the words of a
wiry poet,

wild the wit
in his eye.

wanton the will
of each wish
as he sows it;

weary,
the wisp
of his sigh.

the mawnin' music shuffle is my tarot reading for the day

after it all when it's said and done
will you come back to me and tell me that
it was never up to you or up to me
- after it all, cat power

you pretend that it's alright
to wait up half the night
and he cant be bothered to phone
you spend another night alone
i'm not trying to make you mad
or act like your dad
it's time that you were told
your boyfriend's an asshole
- yr boyfriend, casiotone for the painfully alone

hard to hold, cold to touch
fall to pieces, treat the rush
in hindsight, with prime time talk.
all your pain will end here.
let the doctor soothe your brain, dear.
- doctor blind, emily haines and the soft skeleton

we salute at the threshold of the north sea in my mind
and a nod to the boredom that drove me here to face the tide and swim.
i swim. oh, swim.
dip a toe in the ocean. oh how it hardens and it numbs.
the rest of me is a version of man, built to collapse into crumbs.
and if i hadn't come down to the coast to disappear
i may have died in a land-slide of the rocks, the hopes, and fears.
so swim until you can't see land
swim until you can't see land
are you a man or are you a bag of sand?
- swim until you can't see land, frightened rabbit

half of you can only speak
the other half will come as you sleep
when you were the only one
in the arms
of someone you would lose
it'll be a while for now
there's so much left to choose
- transport, yuji oniki


she said it's lonely here tonight
she's always sad when she's alone
she said i need you here tonight
she couldn't wait till i get home
she loves me and that's all i need to know
she's part of my life, just a part i won't let go
then she said
love me tomorrow. won't you please promise me?
- love me tomorrow, chicago


and one with indecipherable lyrics, or one that you can hear what you want to hear when you listen to it, that i love: "anne elephant" by someone still loves you boris yeltsin

i like ms paint

edumacayshun

The 100 Best Books For An Education 

(according to Will Durant, taken from "The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time")

Outline of Science by J. Arthur Thompson

The Human Body by Logan Clendening

The New Dietetics by John H. Kellogg

The Principles of Psychology by William James

The Outline of History by H.G. Wells

Folkways by William Sumner

The Golden Bough by Sir John Frazer

The Human Adventure by Breasted and Robinson

The Wisdom of the Chinese by Brian Brown

The Bible - both The King James version and the 1749 Challoner edition of the Douay-Rheims bible

History of Art by Elie Faure

A History of Science by Henry Williams

History of Greece by J.B. Bury

History by Herodotus

History of the Peloponessian War by Thucydides

Lives of Illustrious Men by Plutarch

History of Ancient Greek Literature by Gilbert Murray

The Iliad by Homer

The Odyssey by Homer

Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus

The Dramas of Sophocles, Everyman Library Edition

The Plays of Euripides

- Alcestis, Electra, Iphigenia of Taurus, Medea, The Trojan Women, Hippolyte and The Bachae

The Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius

The Dialogues of Plato

Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle

Politics by Aristotle

On the Nature of Things by Lucretius

The Aeneid by Virgil

The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam

Heloise and Abelard by George Moore

The Divine Comedy by Dante

History of English Literature by Hippolyte Taine

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams

The History of Music by Cecil Gray

The Renaissance in Italy by John A. Symond

Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects by Giorgio Vasari

A History of Modern Philosophy by Harald Høffding

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

The Age of Reformation by Preserved Smith

A Literary History of France by Emile Faguet

Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais

Essays of Michel de Montaigne

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Shakespeare's Plays

Reflections by Francois de la Rouchefoucauld

The Plays of Moliere

Essays of Francis Bacon

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

Ethics and On the Improvement of Understanding by Baruch Spinoza

Portraits of the Eighteenth Century by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Voltaire

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Origins of Contemporary France by Hippolyte Taine

The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle

The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

Gullivers Travels by Jonathan Swift

A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume

Vindication on the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Napoleon by Emil Ludwig

Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature by Georg Brande

Faust by Johann Goethe

Conversations with Goethe by John Peter Eckermann

Poems by Heinrich Heine

Poems by John Keats

Complete Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poems by Lord Byron

Pere Goirot by Honore de Balzac

Salammbo and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Penguin Island by Anatole France

Poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray 

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen

The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin

History of Civilization in England by Henry Thomas Buckle

Works by Arthur Schopenhauer

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Frederick Nietzsche

Rise of the American Civilization by Charles and Mary Beard

Poems and Stories by Edgar Allan Poe

Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Letters and Speeches by Abraham Lincoln

Jean Christophe by Romain Rolland

Studies in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis

The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson

The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler

do you like apples?

another day under the overhang. mine always lasts five days or so, but i've come to expect it, instead of analyze. i prefer the inconsideration of telling me what you're feeling instead of what you're thinking. and you do both so well. i'm just sharing my preference. it's worth the workweek, i suppose. or it can be. maybe that says something about you, maybe it says something about me.

don't leave out a single thing. maybe i shouldn't either. send it off, on wings, like a passenger pigeon, a note to open, uncurl, an anecdote to ease that feeling every time i try to smile at the mirror.

memories, like months, are overrated but probably necessary. it might be years, and i could still write you love songs, still remember the color of the clothes you wore, the corners of your mouth.

this shouldn't sound as bad as i'm sure it does. lifeless results lead to an excuse to never try again. and it's nothing if it's not lifeless. i can't draw you through the color of these windowpanes. i draw the blinds, i turn off the lights. i spend each night staring up at the ground, looking for the reasons i expend equal amounts of effort in trying and lying. how could that be true?

if you miss it, can't that be enough? and what words do you speak when your phobias are the only conversation left? i will sit here, and patiently tap out something to rationalize my inability to actualize. so it's no surprise when you say your head is throbbing or how tired you are.

and loneliness turns into that desperate thing with teeth, with smoke in my eyes, and i don't want to think about that now.

it's exactly what i think it is. they're all gone, it took a long time. you're the only one who'd want to be my valentine. i didn't want that to drive you crazy. i never meant to drag you down, so if i'm dragging you down now i could just wait in the lost and found, if you promise me that you'll be perfect. and i'll promise to come around sometimes. all smiles, saying hello.

shake my hand and take six steps back, have a seat. light another cigarette and have a drink for no regrets, nothing sad, nothing feeling down. we'll wear our halos and look like coffee table decorations.

some lowlit photograph of all the people i can only ever do wrong.

resolving

get a car and move out

take a vacation somewhere out of the country

spend a week on the oregon coast, just by myself

donate 10% of my income to charitable causes

digitize my note/sketch -books

do one big act of service every day

exercise daily (running around in video games doesn't count)

do something with someone in real life every weekend

write for an hour every day, just write, doesn't matter what about

(keep trying to) draw something every day

clean up my music, don't listen to garbage, be more discerning

be more decisive

take a class

read one book a week (comic books don't count)

express gratitude daily

be kinder to myself

not a morning person

so i deleted my fb account. it wasn't worth the hassle i was getting from my mother. apparently complaining about work is going to lead to us losing our house (what?) so i just dropped it. it was dead weight anyway, the only people i cared about enough to check on them are people i talk to on a pretty regular basis outside of fb anyway.

was late to work. i didn't want to be here today, and it seemed like my morning routine just dragged and dragged, my subconscious was trying to be helpful. somehow my phone ended up beneath me in bed and i never heard the alarm anyway.

i'm probably going to have to delete this blog now, too, since i said i didn't want to come in to work. it'll get me fired. this is me rolling my eyes.

guess what?

bah humbug.

i took the afternoon off yesterday, and this morning i remembered why i never ask for time off, even if i desperately need it - it's because when i get back in, my entire shipping room is trashed, my desk is a mess, and i can't find a goddamn thing. including my box cutter.

how am i supposed to run a shipping room without a box cutter?

how am i supposed to slit my wrists?

oh, the melodrama. i would make fun of my histrionics, but today, right now, i kind of really want to.

same old again, i know.

i know. you're just glad you don't have to live it.

"maybe THAT is your purpose for existence, chels, you're supposed to be the cautionary tale, the person who everyone else can look to and go, well, at least my life doesn't suck as bad as hers, and then feel better about themselves."

you know what? fuck you all. especially you, seth. you pedophile. how is your child bride doing, these days?

i think most people who major in psychology only do it because they are trying to understand their own fucked up selves. like a psychology class is going to teach you anything. pfft. all it teaches you is to fake it till you make it.

i'd rather not make it, if that's the only option to get through anything.

i vote the world owes me a giant fucking favor, and if i don't get something amazing out of nothing sometime soon, then jesus doesn't love me and the whole goddamn thing is a sham.

and now, back to the gravy train.

Same as Always

This morning I found the cd case that had all the discs I burned during my year eight months in Connecticut. I've been ripping them to my iTunes library here at work. Listening to them totally takes me right back there. Driving the Toyota Sienna everywhere - basically living out of it - the trees. Oh, I miss the trees so much. I miss doing something that made a difference every day. I miss playing "mom."

I got a holiday card from them two days ago... I can't believe how much the kids have grown in two years. I want to go back, I want to go visit before they move on so much they completely forget me. I sent them Beatles RockBand for the xbox Cory got the Christmas after I left as a belated birthday/holiday present. I wanted them to remember all the times we spent playing Rock Band, just the four of us, Cory and Claudia fighting over who got to play the drums until Claude got halfway through the first song and remembered she hated playing the drums. We'd always have her sing. She was good at it. It was awesome. Oh, I miss those kids. I miss feeling like a crucial part of something. Knowing that things wouldn't get done without me, knowing that I got to - and was capable - of taking care of them. Making sure they were okay, and healthy and happy and having fun.

Now I'm back here. Useless and accessory, stuck at home because of stupid choices from my early 20s that screwed my credit. Working a job that takes no brains, that doesn't want or value creativity or ability. My... all of me... wishes I could go back to that year. Go back to being needed and wanted and challenged every day and being able to go to bed at the end of the day with a sense of fulfillment and accomplishment. I think that's why I have so many dreams about babies lately. I ache to be needed like that again, by someone, anyone. I know the things that I'm best suited for. And it's not packing boxes and beings stuck at home like a perpetual 12 year old.

I'm trying not to be whiny, I don't want to sound whiny, but I want to try and express how I feel and what I'm thinking today. Or, this morning. Mornings are slow at work, usually. And I'm avoiding work because I'm tired and I ache everywhere and it's cold. I feel so old. I'll be 30 in a little more than three years. How did I get to here? I remember being 11, and imagining myself at 21, coming back to visit the family from college, with a car and a boyfriend, tall and gorgeous with long brown hair... stylish and smart and funny... and here I am, 27 and a college drop-out, an ART MAJOR drop-out, short, with short blonde hair and still no car, no boyfriend. Not just visiting home, but stuck at home...

Nevermind. I can't write like this. It's all just the same. The same thing every time. These words aren't new.

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong'. 

Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night." 

- Charlie Brown

oh what gems we pull from these coffers

New Music Sun/Monday yielded up some pretty decent finds! Check'em out, yo.

Knockout by Air Waves




Shoeing the Bones by Cate le Bon




Good Evening by The Concretes




Modern Drift by Efterklang




I Met Up with The King by First Aid Kit




Never Come Around by La Sera




Running Out of You by Keep Shelly in Athens

exercises in futility

the needle: pain shot through, naked light
from the hole in the ceiling
where we kept
that single glowinthedark star

to pull our
thoughts
through.

especially, in these
moments of darkness; blinded.

the pull and roll.
skittercrawl into
the lighthole. where

are you kafka? give
me my axe.

let's do this
shit.


of the dreams that vanish with every dawn
i will say this:

(m)hyster(ia)ectomy(oliosisinomaplasty.)


we adore other gods here now
so, next customer please.
twelve items or less, you're

holding up

the line, and the guy
behind you with the
charcoal brickettes

has a party to get to.

do you need ice with that?


and sleep, that most uncertain vessel
writing passage to distances
you can't span when you're
not sleepriding.

can't or can't afford.
no,  no
the cost is too much.

feel them waving.

certainty is expensive,
and every friend is
better in the dark.


of metallic cables
i am too inclined to speak.
here is another long
gash beneath the skin.
i never took automatonomy.
never needed to, i
i had a gift.


music, take me

or

don't.


but the church bells have gone underground
and so have the moles,
religerosity rolls
down the holes
in drolls
to the tolls
the tolls
the tolls.
bankrolls.


with speech coming out of their mouths like writing
the ultimate allure.
if he really spoke like that,
the only thing coming out of his mouth
would be mine.


already for you with sublime tints
blinded by the visceral edges
of geometry, the quick

wit of parallel corners.

rhomboid you can't
hide from me. i see your
blue hue

the green in between and
every edge
in red lines even
as the lines are
transforming. draw, oh

draw me the untold color
of your shapes in
these movements
in the dark.


where my gestures are seagulls who lose themselves
the low fog rolls in
and my grand movements
fly off in the clouds.

shrieking witnesses
loud, lonely over

wavemass after wave
after wav-
ing always
the hidden waving

drowning lonely, white
invisible
in the
distance.

the tiny three-parter condensed (aka: don't post from my phone.)

Got up too early this morning. Couldn't sleep, the familiar ache of lonely too painful to shut my eyes again. Another night of baby dreams and waking up crying. Part of me thinks that this particular child craving is just a deeper arm of loneliness reaching into my subconscious. If no one else will abate the terrible pain of it, dammit, I will grow my own companionship, my own interdependence, and then never be so lonely again. It's a thought, anyway.

mercurial

marigold is the only kind of orange i really like. is it so odd that i see colors in my dreams? someone said people don't dream in color, but most of my dreams are more significant because of the colors in them. i've never dreamt of losing all my teeth, but i feel out of control of so many things all the time... why have i never had that dream? all of my siblings have had it, my parents have, my friends have. when i feel out of control i have dreams of finding random things trapped in ice, big frozen lakes with strange objects in them. like suitcases, flags, spiders, babies. friggin' babies, always in my friggin' dreams.

do you know what i want to do? i want to go home and practice drawing backgrounds. just backgrounds. i was sorting through all of my old high school art portfolios (i don't have any from college... i gave all that artwork away, or left it at school when i quit, or threw it away when i quit, i don't know why. i didn't want it... anyway...) i realized that i am woefully negligent when it comes to finishing a picture with a fo' realz background. i just draw figures, the important symbolic stuff. backgrounds are overrated, or are for people with patience. i'm not a patient person. a histrionic obnoxious person? that seems more likely.

i should do things, more things, with more people, real people. people have been telling me to get married all week. my sister in law was talking about how big the baby is inside her, and my little brother who's 9, chewed me out for not giving him a nephew or niece by now. do you have any idea how much i want to? how much i want that? and his pouncing on me over it... i tell you, it took everything i had not to burst into tears right there. i didn't realize how volatile that subject has made me.

i have a good friend who is a single mother of three, and i am jealous of her. i keep finding myself in my head wanting to be that, to just have a baby, just go find some jerk who uses multi-syllable words and isn't a complete fuggo and get myself pregnant. i could live off welfare. i have good insurance. i should probably get a car... and then i crawl back out of my head and wonder what the hell my problem is. seriously, what is with this? i am craving babies. inordinately, frighteningly. and every time i sit down to write something on this dumb blog, to type out a sordid clipping of my inner monologue, there are two topics i feel like writing about, and only one that i can post here, but it's getting really friggin' old. i'm sure the whole world (meaning whomever even cares to read this damn thing) knows i want kids. and i'm sure the whole world is sick of hearing it. believe me when i say i am too.

how much does it cost to get a sperm donor? i wonder this. i also wonder if using a sperm donor will make me go to hell, if i technically didn't have sex with a guy to get pregnant out of wedlock.

you know, because going to hell is such a major concern of mine, and always has been.

music, music, music. every song makes me cry. every song makes me think of things i don't want to be thinking about, thoughts that i would like to just erase and cram back into whatever infested ridiculous hole they have crawled out of. my subconscious is in love with impossibilities. i think i might be insane.

i also think i might be bipolar, but i seriously don't know how the hell to figure that out, because i am also a compulsive liar sometimes, and can't even tell a therapist the truth... which is not a good thing. it's like a have a filter between my inner self and my mouth that feels the need to siphon away anything i might say that would convey me as helpless, frustrated, confused, angry and frightened.

I AM A STRONG INDEPENDENT WOMAN GODDAMMIT I DON'T NEED YOUR HELP I AM PERFECTLY FINE AND NORMAL AND I AM GOING TO PULL MY EYEBALLS OUT UNTIL I BLEED TO DEATH FROM THE GAPING SOCKET HOLES OH GOD HELP ME I AM SO CRAZY...

see? it doesn't work. i can type it all out here and it just seems ridiculous and a sad attempt to get attention from, what, three people? they already give me as much attention as they can muster, and i'm pretty sure they've already realized i'm crazy, and that's just me, so you just roll with it. roll with the flow because the flow will just go and you don't gotta know if it's fast or slow... mojito... joe...no...so...

I AM FINE NOTHING IS WRONG MOVE ALONG NOW COME BACK ALI COME BACK ALI'S SISTER.

i think i have a chance with this guy. ha! bullshit. i took art, i know the shades of bullshit and its constant variegations. its mutated spiral regenerative webbing. i am a pro, and this pro don't turn tricks and tell. that's a story for another day.

it is freezing in this room. still waitin' for my carpool home... i think we'll be here for a while.

i think my hands look prettier when they're cold, my fingers are long and white and spidery as they skitter across the keyboard.

what's with the spider allusions tonight? i don't even know. spinneret etiquette.

oh justin, justin clayton, where have you been all my life? i could say anything, you could blow out the sun. i count  my blessings, you shoot 'em down one by one. looking out my window, the city lights flicker and fade. here comes another monday morning. all i think about is running far away. and i don't understand, i don't understand this shallow world. it's not worth fighting, the war's already been won. only one thing matters, only time will carry me on. i'll head south to the coast, watch the ocean from the car. and i'll wish upon the waves until the last drop of bitterness is gone. because i don't understand, so help me if you can. find a way. shallow world. shallow world.

fuck me. fuck that. fuck you. fuck getting fucked. you know, i'd make a great roommate. i cook, i clean, i was raised for the domestic doldrums, they're wound around every other fiber of my being. so, there's that. nothing needs to pan out, it just needs a frying pan, a panacea, a panopoly, a pandemic, a pandemonium... pandas are dumb.

I CAN'T WRITE ANYMORE I CAN'T THINK I CAN'T WRITE ABOUT WHAT I'M THINKING BECAUSE I DON'T HAVE THE CONSTITUTION TO SELFECTOMIZE IN BLOOD AND GUTS ALL OVER THIS VIRTUAL PAGE.

i am not that strong. i was never that strong. god, i'm all alone, and it fucking sucks. fuck you, world.

i wish i lived by the ocean. i could drown with a rock and a roll, stuff my pockets full of my poems and wash it all away in the waves and the dark and the water. and then my writing would mean something, and then people would read it, and then i could get someone to give a damn, because it would be too late.

and late is fashionable, and that's what matters.

versus - crashing the afterglow

spotless

i'm watching the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind during my lunch break. this movie bugs me, i don't know why. every time i watch it, (and i don't know why i watch it so many times,) something about it bugs me. maybe it's supposed to bug me, it's been a few years since the last time i saw it.

do you ever do that? watch movies repetitively but with years in between so when you watch it again, it's surprising. and you notice things you didn't before, or maybe you just forgot you noticed them, or you feel like you've never seen it before, you pay more attention to it, or perhaps you don't pay attention to it at all. And then you don't know what's going on, and you find new favorite moments, and the twists are twists again.

i want blue hair. clarification: some days i want blue hair. somedays it doesn't even have to be blue, i just want something that's a bright, weird, different color. brighter colors. i wish i could pull of blue hair, or that i could have blue hair and not get judged for it... why do i care about being judged?

the first time i saw this movie, i associated myself with clementine. i related to her. i still relate to her, but this time, it's different. why do i feel more in touch with joel's character? i hate this movie.

the first time andy told me to watch it, i did, to be obliging. now i watch it every few years, because it's reminiscent, new, strange, annoying. it's annoying! it's such an annoying movie. it's an annoying movie that i kind of want to live in, the way it looks, the things in it. not the people, i don't care about the people, but i want that world.

sometimes you want to erase people. sometime you want to erase yourself the way you were with people. sometimes you want to forget that you were ever that way, or that they ever saw you that way. you wish you could go back and not be the person they know now, and instead just be who you were before, and keep going on from that point.

rewind, rerecord. repent, resent, release, reprehend. reprehensive, repugnant, repudiate, relearn, revel. revelation, revolution... re re re re re re

this movie is annoying, and creepy. i hate this movie. i hate that i want it and can't stand it all at the same time.

i don't know why. it's stupid. this is stupid.

i'm hungry. and broke till tomorrow.

it's my mother's birthday today, and all i can think about is myself.

annoying.

no matter where we go

No matter where we go, we always arrive too late
to experience what we left to find.
And in whatever cities we stay
it is the houses where it is too late to return
and gardens where it's too late to spend a moonlit night
and the women whom it's too late to love
that disturb us with their intangible presence.
And whatever streets we think we know
take us past the gardens we are searching for
whose heavy fragrance spreads throughout the neighborhood.
And whatever houses we return to
we arrive too late to be recognized.
And in whatever rivers we look for our reflections
we see ourselves only when we have turned our backs.

- Henrik Nordbrandt 

no, you know what?

who the hell do you think you are?
stop pulling me out of the half-light.
i'm allowed to feel some self-righteous indignation or anger.
if i could be mad at you, i would be mad at you.
i can drag my heels.
just leave me here, luminous and alone.
it's mauve for a reason.
i need this grey, this smoke-shroud.
i should have been a chain smoker,
i should have lived in bars.