Soooo...if I get the chance to get on the computer at home today, I drew a comic strip in church yesterday (that was decidedly not churchy) because I was bored, and because Seth told me to, which I will scan and post up here, because I think it's delightfully tasteful and well-drawn.

But I shan't spoil the surprise until then.

Andrea's dog Princess died. Along with her childhood, and the hope that Jed will ever marry her.

Stupid Jed, I wish she'd just tell him. It's been three damn years, it's not her fault he's a little lot thick.

Sigh.

We made Su's bridal shower invitations. You have never seen anything so vomitatiously Victorian and over-the-top IN YOUR LIFE.

I'd wager.

I make a mean tom ka gai, I have discovered.


Somedays, even my lucky rocketship underpants don't seem to help.


Next week I get the house to meself while the fam goes up to stay in a condo at Bear Lake for vacation, because I said that the best vacation for me would not involve screaming children and lots of water. Last time I was Bear Lake I nearly drowned anyway. (Seeing as I was three...)

Besides, I have to be home, because I'm hosting Su's damn tea party at my freaking house.

And it's cheaper than paying to kennel the dog for a week.


That's about it. Chels is officially emotionally empty. As you shall see by my comic, if I get to scan and show it to you. I have... da mad draw0r sk1llz.

I hate Mondays, Garfield.

One wound up punch of intuition lays flat my whole take on us. You're the girl on the wing of a barnstormer, the tidal rabbit who came of age before her time. We could have been so goodnatured if I'd relented when you insisted, but we've been backed against nature's walls far too long.

You felt abandoned by me, I recall the sunshine as you were melting, and though the comedy softens the fall they still hear us with their ears to the wall. I sold all my evil motives, no icicles stuck in my hide. I'm through with riddles, I know we're little...just help me feel warm inside. Before we take this ride and let it slide into the cracks where fall and winter collide.

I surrender all my gall in a song of modern love. Remeber you're the one who summoned me above any other kind. We could have been so good-natured if you'd relented when I insisted we take a week off, let the garden grow by itself and let the gluttons fill themselves with all the worst of the gory nineties. And though the comedy softens the fall, we still fall short.

You felt abandoned by me, I recall the sunshine as you were melting, and though the comedy softens the fall, they still hear us with their ears to the wall...

I like that line a lot. The sunshine as you were melting. The comedy softening the fall...hilarious, the tragic ways we trod. Too funny, the millions of times we are fooled, and fooled again. Is it ever real? One wound-up punch of intuition. Sometimes that's all it takes. Sometimes it's more than enough, as each little jab and poke does the job acutely enough.

I'm not paranoid. Not really. I just...know things? They fall: in the spaces between words, on the eyelids of each downcast look. How stupid, stupid to ignore them. That small, familiar twist in the gut from background voices. And then? Another year, the doctor says. Another problem. You can't leave, you have to stay. For months, you stay. Aching just to leave, to see. To be hurt again, more. I hate my wording. I can't wind it tight enough in prose, but the poetry is so hollow these days. I force myself to write them about feelings I force myself to have, and they come out...forced.

Suddenly I come out feeling unattached - detached - and restless. Compelled toward moving. My brother reminds me there's no progression in comfort.

Growth is hard, uncomfortable. And I hate it. I am tired of growing. I am tired of so much. Of this...waiting for you, for this impossible reassurance of things.

Oh, the little parts of me break so finely along miniscule lines. I watch them weaving across my arms and up my back, slow-spread spiderwebs of blood and understanding. Resolve. Girl inform me, all my senses warn me your clever eye could easily disguise some backwards purpose. Do you harbour sighs, or spit in my eye?

The blocks I'm building with have numbed my senses. I am fumbling in the dark, for some warm thing to hold on to, and it keeps moving further and further away from me.

And none of this, even, makes sense. It's just me, some self-important meandering enigma that wastes your time with the words that I try so desperately to make mean things.

Doted on like seeds planted in rows, the untied shoelaces of your life nurtured all year then pressed in a book or displayed in bad taste on the table. Problems arise, and you fan the fire while there's a wild pack of dogs loose in your house tonight. Cut from bad cloth, or soiled like socks, add it up and basically people never change.

They just talk...and make plans in the dark, or make haste with ideas that can't help but creep good people out. As you talk to me too much you're assuming we don't always want what's right. Did I strike the right set of chords? You're annoyed.

The goal is to ignite you then move on. You feel ill at ease, you've got no squeeze. And the wisecracks won't make you more stable. You've learned your lines to scale and to time. Why must I remind you now I'm only less able? Cut from bad cloth, or soiled like socks, we're ordinary people we can't help but to change as we walk, and make plans in the dark, or make haste with the boy who can't help but creep good people out. As you talk to me too much, you're assuming we don't always want what's right.

Two fallen saplings in an open field. Snow padding gently on an empty bench. And old woman's jewelry lying unadorned. Cold nesting robins allied for the first time. I know when you hear these sappy lines you'll roll your eyes and say, "nice try."

It's short today. I feel quiet and stand-offish. I keep trying to write, and it keeps coming out all the same.

desperate,
four-day affair.

you know nothing of
your rivals.

a dozen blind struggles
to make him search
the cracks in the walls
and remember.

you hoarded
the keys to this life,

the gold-plated things
you have marvelled.

some celibate lies,
you're always the first
to fall off
for the dregs in the crowd.

Old friends are coming home. Seth and I made sushi and played Battlefront II for 5 hours last night. It was the most fun I've had in...years? Perhaps.

I keep finding realization around dark corners, like the crucial aspects of things that I miss when they aren't...here. I need it.

I need more close to me.

You say the hill's too steep to climb. Climbing. You say you'd like to see me try. Climbing. You pick the place and I'll choose the time, and I'll climb the hill in my own way. Just wait a while for the right day. And as I rise above the treeline and the clouds, I look down, hearing the sound of the things you said today.

Fearlessly, the idiot faced the crowd. Smiling. Merciless, the magistrate turns 'round. Frowning.
And who's the fool who wears the crown? Go down in your own way. And every day is the right day. And as you rise above the fearlines in his brow, you go down, hear the sound of the faces in the crowd.

Do I feel fearless? I've been wondering this week, weaving thought around the subtle difference between a lack of fear and the overwhelming presence of apathy. I think that I have the latter, mostly. And in the apathy, I lost my fear. Or, rather, I can't feel it. I don't care to.

My emotional body has been numbed, and I'm not sure why. I had such a rushed past month of overwhelming emotion, striving, I think, for a semblance of some good thing in all the crap that kept hitting me, and something in me broke. Or closed. Or decided that the occasional good thing wasn't worth all of the garbage...it's easier to feel nothing than to work so hard trying to feel good. Or at least, better.

Especially when it doesn't come.

Don't ask me to leave you and turn back. I will go where you go and live where you live. your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.

Do you know what else I've been pondering? Loyalty. Not in the smarmy, buy-a-bumper-sticker-for-my-country, sports-fan-enthusiasm, go-my-alma-mater kind of way. I mean loyalty in...love. But not like that. Not love-love, but..compassion? It goes beyond that. Not charity, not goodwill, not concern. It's...loyalty that I have a problem with. Goethe once said, "He who does not feel his friends to be the world to him, does not deserve that the world should hear of him." And I do, girl howdy, I do. And none of them seem to understand the depth of what I can give, what I do give.

I cannot help it. If it's asked, I will give it. But oh, the agony of spending so much of life giving away yourself with such unwilled, yet hapless, abandon, and then to wonder why it never seems returned to you in quite equal measure.

There are just some of us who, inexplicably, have this gargantuanly proportioned capacity to give and love and be. I don't know why, I don't know how. I can't hope to explain it clear enough for you to understand. (But then, understanding is such a irregular, immeasurable thing.)

I don't know. The more I think about my unconscious willingness to exasperate myself with such violent loyalty to the people I care about who number in spades, the more I wonder if it's me trying so desperately to give people something to need me for, because I wonder, to myself in darker moments, if I'm worth having. If I give people any semblance of value, when I see so little of it inside of me. I can love you, it's the one thing that I know how to give. I have to love you, because it's easier to emanate love outward, than try and find the small space inside of me that's not willing to hold any part of it for me.

If you need me for it, then you will keep me here. And I like to be kept. It's the one thing that I want, really. People who will just keep me.

This is the story of your red right ankle and how it came to meet your leg. And how the muscle, bone, and sinews tangled, and how the skin was softly shed. And how it whispered “Oh, adhere to me, for we are bound by symmetry and whatever differences our lives have been we together make a limb.”

This is the story of your red right ankle.

This is the story of your gypsy uncle you never knew ‘cause he was dead, and how his face was carved and rift with wrinkles in the picture in your head. And remember how you found the key to his hide-out in the Pyrenees? But you wanted to keep his secret safe, so you threw the key away. This is the story of your gypsy uncle.

This is the story of the boys who loved you, who love you now and loved you then. And some were sweet, some were cold and snuffed you, and some just laid around in bed. Some had crumbled you straight to your knees; did it cruel, did it tenderly. Some had crawled their way into your heart to rend your ventricles apart. This is the story of the boys who loved you.

This is the story of your red right ankle.

I think that's the hardest thing that I've had to deal with lately, as far as the whole Su-Dan marriage fiasco goes. Dan was my best friend, for the first time I had given myself, my friendship, my concern, everything completely, wholly, genuinely. And then had to watch it all cast aside. He knew that if anything happened with him and her, that we could never be the same kind of friends, and he did it anyway.

And that, most of all, has been the hard bit to swallow, that me - real, sincere, seriously vulnerable me - was worth so little to him. It's like being flayed open with a knife that you gave them. I handed him all of my insecurity, and he used it to peel me open, and show my fears and doubt back to me in a way that has, for all intents and purposes, nearly crippled me with a loss of..confidence? No, mostly just a loss at the desire to be so open again. I have to retreat into hiding, and wait for my skin to grow back.

But then, I seem to go through this every time.

And that is what I mean. All this giving, this loving people. It's work.

Oh, how it's work.

Shut out, pimpled and angry, I quietly tied all my guts into knots. I gave up trying to make them, figured it'd take them too long to look up. Besides, it was undeniably clear to me. I don't know why. When every other part of life seemed locked behind shutters, I knew what worthless dregs we all are then.

Lucked out, found my favorite records lying in wait at the Birmingham mall. The songs that I heard, the occasional book were the only fun that I ever took, and I thought I would make it myself. Yeah, the trick is just making yourself. But when they're parking their cars on your chest, you still have a view of the summer sky to make it hurt twice, when your restless body caves to its whim and suddenly struggles to take flight.

Three-thousand miles northeast I left all my friends at the morning bus stop, shaking their heads, "What kind of life d'you dream of? You're allergic to love..." "Yes, I know, but I must say in my own defense it's been undeniably dear, I don't know why."

When every other part of life seemed locked behind shutters, I knew the worthless dregs we are, the selfless loving saints we are, the melting, sliding dice we've always been...

I mean, come on, the best laid plans of mice aft gang aglae...

"Johnny's always running around trying to find certainty, he needs all the world to confirm that he ain't lonely. Mary counts walls, knows he tires easily.

Johnny thinks the world would be right, if it would buy truth from him. Mary says he changes his mind more than a woman, but she made her bet even when the chance was slim.

Johnny says he's willing to learn - when he decides he's a fool. Johnny says he'll live anywhere - when he earns time to. Mary combs her hair, says she should be used to it. Mary always hedges her bets. She never knows what to think - she says he still acts like he's being discovered.

Scared that he'll get caught without a second thought. Johnny thinks he's wasting his breath trying to talk sense to her. Mary says he's lacking a real sense of proportion. So she combs her hair, says he tires easily.

Johnny's always running around trying to find certainty. He needs all the world to confirm that he ain't lonely. Mary counts walls."

Odd, sometimes, the way you slip without knowing it, then wake up and find the hollowness in your voice that wasn't there before. The echoes of untruth in the background of the words you spend so much time building.

For a while, you feel something. And then you convince yourself to maintain the feeling and the something slips away, and then suddenly you feel nothing, but the convincing, and the doing, and the saying is such a habit that you can't stop. And the something, when you look at it now, isn't the same something that you saw worth building a feeling around. Because now it's not something idealized, washed with some rose-coloured paradigm of hope and dreaming. It's something real. Something that can be broken, that dulls in the harsh light of truth and circumstance.

Perhaps it's the same thing. But the somethings are not the same, and the somethings are what you tied your feelings to.

"I was just bony hands, as cold as a winter pole. You held a warm stone out, new flowing blood to hold. Oh what a contrast you were, to the brutes in the halls - my timid young fingers held a decent animal. Over the ramparts you tossed the scent of your skin and some foreign flowers tied a brick, sweet as a song. The years have been short, but the days were long.

Cool of a temperate breeze from dark skies to wet grass. We fell in a field, it seems, a thousand summers passed. When our kite lines first crossed, we tied them into knots. To finally fly apart, we had to cut them off. Since then, it's been a book that you read in reverse, so you understand less as the pages turn. Or a movie so crass, and awkwardly cast, that even I could be the star.

...Over the ramparts you tossed the scent of your skin and some foreign flowers tied to a brick, sweet as a song. The years have been short, but the days go slowly by, two loose kites falling from the sky drawn to the ground, and an end to flight."

How do you find and label the time when you realize that you can't keep doing the things you've been doing? How can you identify the moment when it's not for anymore doing, but done. That you finished whatever chapter of your life you've been writing and building and breaking and manipulating and playing with so fascinated and sure. How does the unsure creep in?

Maybe I let it. Maybe with the wavering, the uncertainty, I left a door open, and it just came. And then, instead of kicking it out, I listen to it. And what it says makes so much sense in the dark,and in the corner, and sometimes in the lightest part of the middle of the room.

"Cough and twitch from the news on your face and some foreign candle burning in your eyes. Held to the past, too aware fo the pending chill as the dawn breaks and finds us up for sale. Enter the fog, another low road descending away from the cold lust, your house, and summertime. Blind to the last cursed affair, pistols and countless lies. A trail of white blood betrays the reckless route your craft is running. Feed till the sun turns into wood, dousing an ancient torch, loiter the whole day through and lose yourself in lines dissecting love. Your name on my cast and my notes on your stay offer me little but doting on a crime. We've turned every stone, and for all our inventions, in matters of love loss, we've no recourse at all."

How long have I been doting? Losing myself in lines trying to explain it and me to myself? To rationalize away all of the small things nipping at my heels? I cannot continue running with bleeding ankles. I cannot continue this road more-traveled.


Where is my yellow wood? Where is my diverging?

"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.