The bridge praying to the mountain

This morning, after unlocking the door and scooting into the driver seat, I watched, for 10 minutes or so, fresh dew accumulate on the windshield. I was 15 minutes late to work. I left a container of yogurt on my desk and the smell urges me to google something loathsome. Any hopeful internal mantra is crushed.

In the tunnel fear grips me like a dog. Whenever I die in videogames or drive like an idiot little prickles run over my body - starting at the feet then up up to my forehead. Driving by myself I always speed and make rageful faces so that people who cut me off can see me angry in their rear view mirrors. My coworker told me about the strip of grass in front of his house, how kids always play on it and look into his big living room window, how it creeps him out. He said there's been a guy, a grown guy, who walks by every day and holds eye contact through the window every time. He doesn't know what to do about it. I said that when the guy looks at him he should contort his face into something creepy or smear fake blood on his clothes. My coworker seems hesitant to implement these ideas. I could imagine the daily staring contest as excruciatingly intimate, as something you wouldn't want to ruin so quickly. 

The mountain, in the distance, reveals itself differently every day: brilliant cumulonimbus clouds pierced by 8am light choke the base, fog, like dust, settles over the summit. The perception of the whole landscape oscillates between biblical reverence and muggy anonymity. You could exalt it or smear it away. Today it is plain and flat, a cardboard set for a western film. 

In the last segment of my drive, I always move to the far left lane so I can look at a waterway underneath a bridge. The bridge smells of ammonia and rain. The nested swallows would maybe see it as a god. Congruently: the structure's bent figure, seen at a distance, makes it out to be the silhouette of a man kneeled in prayer. If it's a brightly lit morning, you can imagine the bridge bowing to the mountain. If the day is dull, I see it as a horse, tethered to the stake, legs go straight down, its back flat and warmed. Driving beneath the bridge, I thought I saw a woman up there, waving two orange flags, crossing her arm in an X, uncrossing them. Crossing the arms in an X, uncrossing them. 

Further along the freeway there is a dead house cat. He's a fattened creature with fine white fur, now matted in some places. The black asphalt made a fantastic sunning spot. This is only the second time I've seen a cat gunned down on the road, even with all the missing cat signs stapled to the telephone poles. We buried a pet cat somewhere in the front yard when I was in 1st grade. I remember watching my dad dig the hole and being surprised at how deep and wide it was, it didn't feel like a cat needed that much space underground. I biked up an down the street while he dug, fearful that our neighbors would think we were burying a dead body. I worried about the brother cat he left behind, worried because I couldn't really tell them apart and regularly swapped their names. I wasn't really sure which one we were burying, which one of the brother cats had died. As long as the other cat lived I still swapped the names, as if the other brother was just in the other room, hiding under the couch. I wonder now if I psychologically fucked up the surviving cat, maybe he believed that his brother was not really his brother but an alternate self living an alternate reality alongside him. When the alternate cat-self died, the brother stopped witnessing himself as a double, and instead became a merge of both realities. I could see that being very confusing. 

Today, the receptionist says "TGIF" in a complete monotone to everyone entering the office. In the kitchen she tells me about the stream she lives next to, about the foxes in her yard, her insomnia. She usually wakes around 4am and stands at the living room window admiring her yard; yesterday she watched a fox kill a squirrel and got so upset she closed the curtains (tight) for the rest of the day and felt complicated feeling towards her house cat. I think about telling my coworker this story as an excellent example of how to get rid of pesky people staring at you through living room windows. 

The fox didn't like the intimate eye contact, it made a rageful face so that the receptionist could see it angry, it reminded her that foxes are brutes.

On my drive home I see a hummer limousine on the freeway, someone cuts me off and I'm too tired to make an angry face. I'm reminded that humans are brutes.

// 

It's hard to feel like you have anything interesting to say, is what I think (a lot) while peering into the computer at my desk, drawing pictures of fruits and vegetables. It's hard to know what to say at all, is what I assume the carrots and pumpkins think, peering back at me. I'm typing this blog post on the clock on my work computer (sorry! hope my boss doesn't ever find this) and whenever someone walks by my desk I quickly click over to photoshop or illustrator so I appear to them as a productive employee. La di da just editing a photo, nothing to see here. I have a secret fear that one day my coworkers and bosses will find out that I spend a lot of random time poking around the internet while at work, and that they'll be like: why are you 5 pages deep on Russian espionage Wikipedia and listening to podcasts about little gray foxes, you're supposed to be writing something about local farmers. 

Ok time for lunch, thanks for reading. 

Transmission from an office park

I frequently return to this internal habit: I read screens and songs and weather patterns for proof, proof of something excellent and heartbreaking. It's something I'm not proud of, something I've resolved (sitting in the metal folding chair out back) to nix. 

I've started a 9-5 confidence-crushing job that makes me out to be the dullest tack in the tack pile (tool in the shed). Imagine me like this: hunched in the swivel chair, arms at 90 degree angels, writing emails for a bitterly normal subset of people who don't read anything written, and for whom I write repetitive slop describing melons, corn, community engagement. Today I got to see "the server room".

There continue to be Big Bang like events, continuously generating (infinite?) new universes. In the mathematics, the universes may have different compositions, different fundamental elements. There could be a universe without atoms at all, a universe made of marbles, a universe of heads full of marbles, one made of unimaginable types of cheese. 

The receptionist is telling someone on the phone about her bone graft, the teeth were getting loose, she explains that they insert cadaver bone to fill the emptying space, the teeth were getting loose, the teeth were getting loose! Sometimes she laughs hysterically to herself. When I die I will donate my body to science so that a receptionist can get a bone graft with my old bones and laugh to herself and talk on the phone. 

Some believe that there are fundamental mathematical rules that underlie the multiple (infinite?) universes. Things like gravity are environmental details (think about how you would float on Pluto but not on Earth), gravity is not a "rule" of our universe, rather an expression of a greater rule (easiest described in a formula). The greater "rule" is the underlying physical reality of attraction. I think it is likely, despite the possibility of infinite other universes, that there is not another version of me also sitting at a desk picking my nose. There is likely not another version of me at all. Then again, I know nothing of statistics or theoretical physics. The only thing we can know intimately is our own universe, be that the internal swirling or greater cosmic expanse. 

Frequently, I see people wandering down the wide paved streets of the office park and wonder if I've been sucked in a time warp and spit out into one of these multiple foreign universes. The people wear crumpled blazers, sometimes wide brimmed hats, ill fitting slacks. 

Bored, I poke the small beast & look at the ceiling tiles to examine the feeling. 

I waste a lot of time, I open 20 tabs on the laptop and the ignorant hope I carry in my stomach withers. The women's bathroom has baby blue stalls, air freshener canisters, two toilets. In the big stall you can sit on the toilet and hug in your knees to your chest and imagine yourself teleporting somewhere else. The blue of the stalls is a coddling color, it mocks, comforts, thumb in the mouth. 

I write things I hear through my headphones into my work notebook and imagine my coworkers reading it after I quit and thinking geez: "Is red herring a real fish and does it taste good on crackers or toast" & "Kepler was barking up the wrong tree" & "Look into Ham Radio"

There's a fun game I invented where you rapidly scroll up and down on a page of text and let your eyes un-focus, then you randomly pick out one word at a time and create brand new sentences:

20 big receptionists, old beasts barking on the ham radio. Marbles swirling and loose, dull tacks imagine a greater hope. Proof of theoretical physics, ceiling tiles, teleporting, the hysterical universe. The people wear headphones, hug hats to chest, don't wonder of anything written, poke the cadaver bone. Geez. I have different compositions of heartbreaking mathematics, intimate formulas, loose physics. Air freshener canisters end work and spit on toilets, I quit! 

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.