Short fiction on the common gull

I was a seabird, I had a fling with a grocery store clerk. The first time I visited I bought an action figure and some grapes, I only did it because I wanted a discount on oranges. He liked my beak and the fish I caught, didn’t like the way I talked. He followed me around like a dog, I ate things out of the trash a lot. The grocery store was very bright and beautiful, the aisles very clean and straight, I hadn't really seen something so holy before. The whole thing, in my mind, was like a grid of gleaming thread, pulled taught in 90° angles. I only did it because I thought I was at church. Merriam-Webster told me that the word gull originates from the Welsh "gwylan", that it means "to deceive", that I am therefore a deceitful creature. Maybe I just like listening to the radio in strangers' cars and watching lots of tv. 

The clerk was pretty boring, now that I really think about it; his shoes were terrible and dirty, they looked like rotten mussels clamped onto his feet. Mussels tend to be like that, brave and stubbornly resigned to idiocy. The tide pools teem with this sort of personality, such resilient organisms are no good at chess or watching movies. The suburbs around the grocery store were similar, but the beasts that resided there had no need for survival instinct or knowledge of the tides, they placated themselves with sports and large vehicles. Despite all these relative comforts, they still couldn't find the time to actually be good at anything, besides maybe grilling and walking the dog. 

He really liked strawberry milk, the clerk, the kind in the yellow bottles in the back fridge, pulled from the teet of a mutated bovine. He'd sit in the parking lot and clutch the bottle, nursing like a terrified infant, I found him repulsive and endearing. 

The grocery store had wonderful grocery carts affixed with little flags. I would watch the flags stumble down the aisles, small armies of unhappy fathers and depressed college kids jockeying for cereal and pasta sauce. The speakers leaked electronic and folk music, dribble curated for the self-loathing individual who frequented a store like this; the employees were allowed to play one song a day (this was a grave managerial mistake). My favorite person was this woman in the deli department, she would use the huge whirring blade to slice hocks of ham, she seemed to be quite skilled at this. The song she selected was Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, fitting given her profession. The clerk told me this woman has won the county pie-eating contest 4 years in a row, that her favorite pie is coconut cream pie, and that she is unhappily married to a bank teller. I frequently wondered why she wasn't the mayor. 

Most of what I learned about the employees and customers was in little lists like this: the lady who collected the carts in the parking lot only wore green underwear, the old man who arrived early every Tuesday morning and waited for the store to open did so because he wanted the "freshest muffins", the delivery truck driver would sing Ave Maria in a beautiful operatic tenor if you asked politely. Sometimes a baby, bored out of her mind in the shopping cart baby seat, would hoist herself out of the metal enclosure and into the stand of tomatoes, piled high beside the cart. This happened enough that the store's owners employed a tomato security guard, a balding man in a black polyester cop outfit who stood dutifully, for 8 hours a day, beside the glittering display. He seemed to me like what I had heard about god; he was hell-bent on protecting the red fruit from harm, and offered constant unsolicited advice about which tomato the passing customer should purchase. He told my clerk that he looked like "the type of fella who should only be eating beefsteaks." The clerk took this to mean he should adopt a carnivorous diet, which is how I ended up in the back of his car guarding a bag of nearly spoiled pork chops. A little red puddle was starting to form at the bottom of the brown grocery bag that held the meat, which didn't concern me, but definitely would have bothered the clerk. In general, the summer was like the red puddle of pork chop juice, stinking and commonplace, a period of time that didn't really concern me. I took a lot of photos and wrote a lot of things down, I stared at the wall almost endlessly. The grocery store offered silent company. The pork puddle stained the car seat, the clerk got fired for picking his nose, never spoke to me again.

 

Waiting for the water to boil

 Been waiting a lot for water to boil on the stove. I made this song on my microkorg and SP while waiting.

(live footage of waiting for the h2o to boil) 

found this helpful video 

wav wav wav 

practicing my sp skills for imminent chalk talk tour, feel like a toddler confined in my room playing with a robot calculator 

Last night I awoke alone in bed, in my square room, in 4 a.m. darkness. The horizontal lines of light cast by the window shades have become so distracting that I sewed some curtains. Otherwise, I'd stay awake far too long waiting for car headlights to launch a phantasmagoric puppet show across the wall, it's very entertaining. 

Then: my muscles are huge, I'm a bodybuilding protein pumping steroid humping animal. I watch as, cornered in a meadow, a young rabbit crouches in prairie grass. He is strong, he can swim, he is friendly with moles and squirrels. Something has found him here, in the tall golden field. Blinking, twitching, breathing near the dirt. I understand that the rabbit's brother collects smooth stones, pebbles, when the stream bed curls up under drought. The shelf at home is lined with these talismans; they are all given names and kissed goodnight. The men in their hats pulled low rarely understand things like this, that at home there is a shelf, that things must be kissed goodnight. I've got a song stuck in my head, always have something like that stuck in my head. Moose can't really sing, can't really dance. The men watch me from the bog, watch me from their blinds, from their boats, hats always pulled so low, peering down cylindrical tubes. 

Someone pokes me in the eye, "hey that's my eye, stop it."

Awake, I tie up the curtains, I lie in my bed for an hour, and watch two flies circle, it's very entertaining. On my to-do list, I have written "avoid the slow spiral"; the flies didn't get the message. 

//

I am staring at the profile of a squid suspended in a tank, "my friend would like to order the calamari". The squid once had a dream of being a birthday party noisemaker, one of those paper tubes that unfurls when you blow into it. The squid listens to many conversations: they drool gibberish sentences, Latin phrases, big biting words. The squid thinks: do you know what those mean? do you know you sound like an idiot? do you know I'm very alone?

Recently, at a party, someone told me I was "a good spectator". I went upstairs, sat in a bean bag chair in the dark for 10 minutes, left the party without saying bye. I walked home, humming a Liz Phair song. I have this superstition that if I hum to myself while walking alone at night, I won't be kidnapped or followed (you've gotta have fear in your heart). 

I have a dream about a shrimp cocktail joke: One time a squid invited some shrimps to a cocktail party... thank god the shrimp declined the invitation. When I was younger I would submit captions to The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest and wanted to be a cartoonist for the local newspaper. 

That morning it takes two hours to peel an orange, eat it. I leave the apartment (finally), and a freeway billboard shouts Silicon Breast Implants Via Belly Button!! I picture myself a wood statue with a light affixed to my back, it curves over my head like an angler fish. The light is bright and shines directly into the middle of my chest very very hard - it's desperate and infantilizing. At an intersection, I watch a rabbit, huddled in some tall weeds, eat something. I can hear him breathing, near the dirt. On the radio, a man who sounds perpetually out of breath explains that to ensure a moose is dead, poke it in the eye and watch for any reaction, "hey, that's my eye, stop it."

Sounds

Alone on a pull-out couch in a Boston hotel last summer, I kept myself awake for two hours repeating the line: I wish I was a pane of glass, sunlight pulling through me, I wish you stood there, sunlight pooling through you. I wanted to make sure I would remember it in the morning. I used the omnipresent mysterious "you" that appears in oh so many a song. I think I told the specific "you" person that I wrote this thing about them(?), which feels embarrassing and very vulnerable and sort of unforgivable now. That summer was definitely weird and lonely in the way that: I felt like a big ship unmoored, floating around with a lot of other boats, and all I could do was call people I missed on the phone. Driving all around the east coast, my bandmates and I noted the suffocating invasion of the Kudzu plant, its omnipresence was apocalyptic. This summer is shaping up to be lonelier in a much worse way, where I'm no longer a ship but instead a rock or something sitting mutely on a shore. Anyways, I'm working on the live instrumentation of the-song-that-this-lonely-hotel-rumination-turned-into and decided to listen back to the original garage band demo I concocted using the piano in the living room of the college-house I used to live in. The piano has this awesome cello setting that I used a lot throughout the demo and now I think about that specific sound often. Here is that recording sans lyrics/guitar:

My favorite part begins around 4:20. Sometimes there's a repeating note that sounds like a submarine morse code signal, sometimes there are awkward silences where the absent guitar/vocals fill out the song. Sometimes you can hear my roommates in the background, or me shifting in my chair. 

Most of the above writing reads to me like grammatically incorrect personal dribble. I think that's partially true and partially the loathing and "talking to the wall" habits that spending a lot of time alone in the summer does to a person (or at least to me). By talking to the wall, I mean literally speaking out loud to my empty apartment for multiple hours of the day, no I'm not crazy, I just like talking to someone smart (haha get it). Writing things like this blog post and throwing them into the wasteland of the internet feels basically the same as when I talk to myself at home. 

Listening back to old recordings, I find some voice memos from almost exactly a year ago of me reading aloud some stories I wrote for a creative writing class. I was living in Berlin, and whenever my dear roommate left for class/the grocery store I would start reading everything I wrote aloud. At some point I started recording myself, so I could listen back and see what parts of the stories I wanted to change. My neighbors in this apartment building had a weekly musical get-together where they would sing old German folk tunes. In preparation for the caroling, my neighbor would tune and play his violin, which frequently didn't sound like music but more like shrieking. Somehow I was never able to capture the singing all that well because the birds in our courtyard drowned out most intelligible sound. This is the best recording I ever got: 

Re-reading and re-listening to things I've written/collected/recorded sends me into a strange stupor that is both boring and soothing. 

These lines from a post I made in November still feel true:

I check my email 17 times a day, the five, six, and dash keys of my laptop are broken, I rarely pay attention, my body experiences sensations like an anemone. 

A couple days ago someone texted me that there is a praying mantis crouched inside of them. Once a day I notice a baseball sized rock crouched inside of me. 

Sometimes, I go to the bathroom and make excruciating faces at the wall, open my mouth as big as possible, scrunch everything, curl my neck back and forth.

I feel serpentine and wicked moving through a crowd. I am neurotic (at times) and completely exploding (at other times). 

The house is much too cold, the floors much too dirty, my circulation much too poor to play the piano. I have thought this for many years.

Tomorrow morning before noon I will grin grin grin, my teeth silverware, yes you can use them, yes I will wash them in the sink. 

I stare at videos and images and blinking lights and old photos of and dig a deep hole and walk down into the hole and decide the hole is nice and maybe I’ll live there for a bit. 

I read palms and songs and weather patterns for proof, proof of something excellent and heartbreaking. 

Last night I dreamt of a symphony hall filled with dogs, silent.

I make vows of silence, usually on days like today. I say nothing important, I listen to the rats fucking in my heater vent. I eavesdrop on all my roommates.

Later, I will wash my hands backwards and upside down. Take an asprin. Lay awake as silence pans through and around me.

I am a satellite dish on my bed, silver oh so silver. 

Alright, now that I've circulated old writing you've probably already seen on this blog, it's time to have a conversation with my glass shower wall. Cheerio! 

Collected gibberish from the month of May & a little bit of June

The fields, plowed straight, point at the distant mountain range and say "yes that's much too wild." Indeed, much too wild, jagged, and dipping greedily down then back up. Clawing at the horizon line. The lambs eat the branches, soft leaves sprouted out that morning. But lambs don't grow here, those are not lambs. The cut pruned planted grape vines shrug along in their rows, a weak imitation of fence posts. Raisins of wrath, indignant and sweet. The car is humming, the trees are humming, the gas station toilet is humming (only when you flush it). 

Do cicadas listen to church choirs and political rallies and think "ah the 17 year cycle begins again, those awful locusts have hatched, they're looking for mates and figureheads."

Two people stopped at a light, in different cars, take off their sweaters at the same time. Above them is a bushy tree that someone has cut a neat right angle into so trucks don't hit their heads. 

In the operation room I kept wanting to tell the surgeon how sweaty my hands were, "hey hey feel this", he was playing Katy Perry on youtube, there was an ad for burgers. In the corner, a little spiraling eddy, inevitably, I glance at it. I wake up and cry the entire car ride home, I put on my sunglasses to look "nonchalant", I send my roommates a video of me beatboxing. 

I eat so much apple sauce, soon I will weep applesauce. 

Blue pigeons watch me from the field next to the gas station parking lot, they blink and express negative opinions on my haircut. Topped fruit trees, razed into a sheet of mangled leaves, wave their flat hands, thinking "indeed, much too wild." The landscape drones on. There are tires in all the truck beds bigger than me. The semi driver has got his baby's bear strapped to the front grill, bearing down the plowed asphalt, the road is always rational, he thinks. 

There's a blue tarp shimmering out in a field, like a sign of god, or something dead. 

The road points at nothing. The trees are humming, the 17 year cycle begins again. 

Corny and cheesy and jovial

Sitting down to do a final listen through of the new album mixes before sending them off to mastering and the room is glittering. Three fat flies are bumping into the window, the curtain, my forehead. Two apples in the dish are all brown and gross looking, remember to throw those away after this. I installed a grammar/spell correction extensions on my laptop and every single sentence is red underlined, SHUT up! I've got these white curtains my mom bought for me when I first moved here, they're all puffed up by the wind like pregnant ladies. They're dancing with the flies to this song. Yesterday I edited a field recording piece for a sonic geographies class and now I keep hearing dog barks in the snare hits. I'm doing interpretative dances to this song, I closed the door so my roommates can't see. Should I choreograph a tik tok dance? Should I hire someone to choreograph a tik tok dance? Or take a cool selfie video to the song? Know what I mean? That lowkey social media marketing...

One of the songs on this album is something Nina and I wrote a year ago when I was living in Berlin. She sent me a voice memo of her playing guitar & I recorded some keys and miscellaneous sounds on iphone garage band (shoutout the apple wired headphones mic). The birds outside of my apartment were freakishly loud, so in the demo you can hear them screeching in the background. Nina re recorded the guitar on that song in our producer Austin's backyard and again, the birds could not be tamed. Bird synchronicity across time and space. Some whistling I did on that demo (I was trying to communicate with the birds to please tone it down) along with some sounds I programmed & recorded with my microkorg made it onto the final mix. Feels special to hear those now, a year later, in my Berkeley room with less obnoxious birds and with a new chalk talk album on the horizon.

I'm looking at fabrics stuffed at the back of my dresser to make a puppet for a music video idea Fia had. Anyone good at making puppets? Anyone have a cool puppet to donate? I'd like to run a children's puppet theater, or make money writing children's fables, or make livable money as a musician. 

Listening to Katie singing on the album makes me want to zipline to new york and give her a big hug and jump up and down saying yay yay yay thank you I wanaaa hold u like water in my handss!! I love being in a band with my best friends. It's so crazy to have known and played music with these people since sophmore year of highschool. I think they're all so cool. 

Ok enough blabbering, can't wait to release this album yipeeeeeeeeeeee 

Train be my feet

The round black olives, beetles sweating in their plastic. A green line tears through me, a sling shot stone, sounds like the flange of a bow when it hits square between the shoulders. In Salinas a man takes out the trash, waving waving waving at the passing train. Two girls with their fathers, in tutus, a car brimming with beaming ladies and a leathery grandpa. They take out their trash at this time every day. Watch this gleaming panopticon wink by. Be weightless, say the instructions, wave wave wave, say the instructions. 

Out the window I can see the plan of a house, a body in bed, dissatisfied lumps digging holes, filling holes, drilling wells for slick petrol. Power lines grin Cheshire into the horizon, a beam, a void, a hunch. The hills like the heads of bald men. The calves on their toothpick legs, swaying beside their mothers, their small eyes gleaming like little nails. Seeing all this, I am scifi and porous, 4,000 horsepower could get me there. Through the mountain pass I'll just need a mule. 

You can tell it's a floodplain. The houses have their Christmas lights still up, the land is gouged and tired, fish gutted under deep-rooted oaks. A tern turning in a widening gyre, eyeing the masses for her mate, courting in aerial dance. Four knighted lamp posts en garde in the Walmart parking lot, four shadows of blue, illuminating the flatness of a loss felt under 11pm fluorescence. Do they have a wife and children at home, do they return at sunrise?

I'm pointing at you out the window, yes, yes, look up.

The pyre of industrial cow holding pens burning into a distant night. Aluminum cans and silver strips hoisted like alien flags strike fear in small coal crow hearts. A strange fractal of palmed drug deals, toilet flush, song of a thrush, kick-back lounge chairs. It spirals into dry valley dust, California shining on the billboard overhead. At every prolonged stop figures glowing orange at a point step off, crush butts with their heels & nod in silent agreement. Cough. 

A vacuum of sound leaps bounds and is found under train car four. It's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone. I've wanted to be kind, to encompass some type of wisdom, of silence, of solace, of nice hairdos.