"Our despair is domesticated and gives us peace. Only hope remains. Wild hopes, their screams shatter the night and rip up the day." - Yehuda Amichai

Shattered nights. I've been building piles of crumbling emotion around the shattered nights I've been wading through. Shattered by hope, it's an interesting idea. How often the compilation of big dreams becomes the weight we break our backs to carry.

I have been thinking. A lot of thinking...about...things. Can I explain it? Can you hope to understand, and...if you did...would it really matter? Would any of it really matter to you, and make a difference?

They flutter behind you, your possible pasts...some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost...She stood in the doorway, the ghost of a smile haunting her face like a cheap hotel sign. Her cold eyes imploring the men in their macks for the gold in their bags, or the knives in their backs.

I've always loved that line, the imagery and way it's worded: "The ghost of a smile haunting her face like a cheap hotel sign." Can't you see it? It's a perfect image. A sad...image. It's a good simile. Normally I don't like similes. Don't ask me why.

Somedays my life is a pile of disjointed quotes whose interplay and relationships only make sense to, well, me.

Oh, it's been tempting. So tempting this past week. But I will let it waver and settle in the amber of uncertainty until it becomes tepid and hard, and I can chip it out and throw it away. Or against something, watch it, too, shatter. Explosions into a thousand shards of each thing I tuck away with a doubt and a whimper. Some days I am amber-full, like an old tree, hoarding the pieces of things caught in my slow-to-change way. Maybe some day I'll find them again, and hold them up to the light, seeing them in a different way that the one they've settled in so comfortably now.

"Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding anyone." - Gertrude Stein

I struggle in the quagmire of wishing it all knew what I meant. What I know. Of knowing what I wish it all means. Of meaning what I wished it all knew. It only winds tighter the further up and further in you go.

What do I mean? It breaks so easily along the weakest lines of things. When you move enough times in, over, across, beyond, through some things, you only weaken them. And they will fall apart. It's not that you intended its breaking. It's that you loved it so much it could only ever be broken.

"A reassuring platitude: "I love you" became the constantly-handled coinage of a relationship daily devaluing itself."

I wrote that once, in a poem. I don't know why it keeps coming to the front of my mind. Swimming somewhere in all the doubt and the ether.

My room is finished. The walls are painted, the furniture is back. It's gold as gold as gold as gold. With a red dash here and there. The new bamboo blinds are hung, and hanging. The light breaks through them into a plethora of filigrees and falls across the bed that finally has a frame and isn't on the floor anymore.

In my rush to get to work this morning to log out of msn messenger, which I realized I hadn't logged out of on Monday, I left my cell phone sitting by my bed. It hasn't been used much lately, and I suppose it was just...something made suddenly forgettable.

I brought my music, but the batteries are dead.

I had a five-hour conversation Monday night with someone I don't know. It was fun, I had forgotten how enjoyable it can be, discovering a person, some new perspective that breathes and sees and owns a life. Something that at least for now is not at all a part of yourself, of the world that you've built around you.

I take comfort in little new things, when the old ones have found their place and there's room for something else in the compartments of my attention.

My gamer pride was stabbed, gutted, and devoured in the flash of blinding light this past week...

I am not as good as I think I am when I'm alone.

Which, I suppose, has far more implication in every other aspect of my life than I give it credit for.

Perhaps that's a meaning I don't know yet. But it's wedged itself in rather uncomfortably. And I will stare at it, annoyed, until I can learn to understand it, and accept the fact that it's there.

Perhaps that has been my problem all along.

Don't ask me why I write these things. It's something I have to get out, put down. Sometimes it makes the sorting of answers easier, and sometimes it only gives me new questions.

"While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words, dying to believe in what you heard, I was staring straight into the shining sun."

At least the Floyd will never leave me.

Odd, the-off weeks when the lightning of change forks its way through your soul and leaves you singed and electric. That's how I feel.

I feel like I keep clawing my way through distractions, because it's easier than staring at truth in all its bared-teeth and snarling glory. How bright and hollow the grimaces of our dreams can be when you meet them unexpected around a dark corner.

I have five minutes to crank out some semblance of a cool blog post. (Okay, fine, it doesn't need the semblance of cool...like any of my other entries fit that category...)

I hate my job. Truly, I do. I've been such a slacker the past couple of weeks, coming in late and leaving waaaaay early, just to spare my coworkers the problem of me punching them all. In the face. Till they're not...alive anymore. And it also spares me from gouging my eyes out with a plastic spoon. I need to take up...I dunno. Spearfighting.

Some people need to go get an ice cream sandwich. I mean new job. Chelsea needs to go get an ice cream job. I mean sandwich. I mean - d'oh.

My room is officially half-painted. And completely clean.

I'm actually thinking of selling my KOTOR games to get some new ones because I have no money.

AND...

I'm going fishing this afternoon because they've finally changed the fish licensing, so that it doesn't expire Dec 31, but one year from the day you bought the license. WHICH IS AWESOME. Because now I can fish all year. Instead of just for 6 months, which is what normally happens.

Did I mention I hate my job? I do.

It was such an odd dream. I can only remember it in snippets. Dylan following me home one day, me completely unaware...In no town I've ever been in. I had stolen two axes from a firetruck at a crash scene because some crazed insurance salesman had purposely ran into one of his clients for some reason or another, and I THINK Dylan had been hanging around watching the scene, and happened to see me. He kept calling me, and I pretended to ignore him, just to see if it would irritate him. I ran (the axes gone now, no idea where) to this brick townhouse, in the front door. The main floor of it was some sort of art gallery, and my apartment/room was in the basement, where I kept all these statue things I was working on. The game was to hide from him, so I ran down the back stairs into my apartment, and locked the door. There was something I didn't want him to see...I didn't want him to see me the way I was...which was odd, because I don't remember anything being different at all. There were lilacs growing in a corner of the room, and it was messy, because of all my projects. Anyway, he suddenly comes in the back door of the apartment and knocks over all these statues that I had just finished arranging...OH! And there were suddenly these two creepy ex girlfriends of his there in the basement, and they were all yelling at me, and shoving my stuff around while I was trying to fix the ruffle on the hem of one of the statues that had been broken, and he took my hand and was like, "let's get out of here" and we ran upstairs and suddenly all of these people from church were there in the gallery, and there was this weird party going on, and he was still holding my hand. A bunch of my old friends from high school were there too...old boyfriends, and Dylan and I went from table to table, talking to them, introducing them all, and I was happy, and everyone kept saying how happy I was, and David Bowie was performing a small cafe-esque type of concert on a tiny stage at the back of the room, and even HE noticed, and decided to take pictures of us. And Dylan kept pulling faces and making me laugh, and he never let go of my hand. We were talking to my old boyfriend Dave, and playing a game or something, and he was like, yeah, but he's not as hot as I am, and I was like, whatever! And I made Dylan take off his shirt to prove it. And I was right. We left Dave and Collin, I think it was, and walked around...and he gave me a piggyback ride and we went outside and there was like, glitter in the air or something, because everything was sparkly, and it was late sunset and we were in a park and everything was green and orange and purple and red and glittery and we laid down on the grass and watched the sun spin away from us as the world threw itself into the stars.

And I know none of that made much sense. But it does to me, because I can still see the images in my head. It was a cool dream. I woke up happy, if not a little weirded out.

So yes. That was the most eventful thing that happened to me this weekend. Other than painting half of my room and then sleeping in it with the door shut and no ventilation, which I think contributed to the oddness of the dream. I wrote some poetry, but I don't have it with me, so I can't share it. I will post it later.

Meanwhile, I'm at work, pretending I don't hate my job and humming along to my rather loud music.

In other news, random Chels quote from class today:

So, the question was: What gives you the right to write poetry? How do you start a poem? What do you have to say that is more interesting than the process of the paper's creation?

Nothing does, really. I write because I have to. In my life, only two things are imperative: to breathe, and to write. T.S. Eliot once said that "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

I can't remember who said it, but one of my favorite poetry quotes says something along these lines:"A poet is someone who, in a lifetime of standing in out in thunderstorms, manages to get struck by lightning seven or eight times."

At the end of the day, I don't know what gives me the right to write poetry. I do know, however, that the desire to write it, for me, is insatiable. I am continuously compelled into some form of verbally constructing my life, my keen feelings, my moments of glory and agony, into something solid. Something I can wrap my mind around, and feel pour out of me onto the page. For me, in so many ways, writing poetry is a kind of exorcism. Of coping. Of reaction. Of catching the smoke of subconscious thought in my fingertips. It's gold-panning for the occasional eternal ideas that so often in life lie just beneath the surface of things.

If I cannot tell me to you in some distilled and simple way, how will you ever hope to know me?

Yawn. Today is my last day of my stint as a temporary full-time employee. It's been three months, and I can tell you right now, I'm wholeheartedly sick of it. Sure, the money's great, but when you have no time for anything but your job, you realize how much life must blow for your dad, or your other friends who seem to work ALL THE TIME. It's been impossible for anyone to play with me, and I miss my friends. Hooray for having the afternoons and evenings back to myself. At least temporarily. I think it's time for Chelly Bean, here, to find herself a new job.

Go figure it happens the same week I finally get the last of my music collection downloaded to my iTunes. (Can we say junkie? I'm currently at 84.6 straight days of music, capacity-wise.)

Rhino is hiring currently, and I like the idea of working retail at a game store, however, I'd prefer to be accepted at Gamerz Edge (poser name, I know) which is a local gamers "mom n' pop" if you will. I mean, since I lost the ability to hang out at the D&D shelf in Media Play when they went out of business...I figure I'll take the next best thing. I dunno. I should check out the old record store and see if they need some summer help. That was the best. Nothing like a discount for a music addict to get an adequate fix and still afford to pay the phone bill.

Yawn. 2 more hours. Then I can go home and play Fable. I can make it!

Ummm....let's see. I didn't write anything new. Though there was a lot of revising old poetry. I'm trying to put together a manuscript for a book which I've apprehensively entitled "Mercurial." It'll be mostly comprised of my favorite pieces from the batch I wrote during a rather emotionally telling previous relationship. It's at least the most complete body of work that I have, because it's a time period with a definitive beginning, middle and end. I'm working on it with my poetry comp. professor, who has been an invaluable resource as far as that goes. She stretches me with my work. A lot. It's great.

Went up to Grandma's yesterday, and helped put in a sprinkling system. Girl howdy, with all the yardwork I've been doing these days, you should see my guns. I'm ripped - and better - tan. Woohoo! However, I'm totally aching, because I got to be the trench-digger. I should have been in the army. Or a migrant worker. (I think I'm going to hell. It's my Utah-native elitist white republican fear-of-diversity upbringing. (Are you Hispanic or Illiterate? Oh wait...) <--- SEE?!?!? I can't help it. ERRR I could, but choose not too. I mean, why quit if you have a good excuse? lol)

Anyway, yes. That's it for now. Not much else...oh, one thing cool - we went up to the Logan Cemetary to leave flowers for my two Grandpas and Grandma, and my 4 uncles and aunt and everything. It was really cool. I was talking to Grandma (the one who's still alive) about what it was like to lose 5 babies to stillbirth. And she was talking about the amazing lessons it taught her and as she barely finished talking, some guy about 50 feet away, who I hadn't noticed, started playing "Scotland the Brave" on his bagpipes. It was awesome, because my Mom's family spent 5 years living in Scotland while my Grandpa built churches. I have decided that the bagpipes is one of my very favorite sounds in the world, and I REALLY want to learn how to play them.

Last item of business: X3

I hated it. It made me want to punch people. And I spent the whole movie with my friends telling me to stop crying and yelling at the screen, because the actors couldn't hear me. I you have any sort of affection for the real X-men stories, don't see it. It's not worth the money. Sigh.