I knew it was time to leave my Master when my friends stopped telling me their secrets. Because they knew everything went from my ears to my pen, and from my page to his eye. Was that fair of them, of me? I miss him. I did not dance at my former Master’s wedding—I did not stay even long enough to eat falafel and chocolate cake. I was in the middle of getting over the flu, that was one excuse. I went because he invited me and I love to please. It’s not something authority figures are always prepared for in me, but I like following rules, and I enjoy doing what I’m told. I know everything is in my best interests. I left when I realized it was not. How can I stand naked before someone whose eyes are elsewhere in the room? He beat Anna and went out to smoke a cigarette, leaving us, her harem sisters, to bring her back to earth. Perhaps she found nothing wrong in that, perhaps it is even what she preferred, but I could not forgive the possibility that it could have been me. My relationship was between Robin and Sassi, and suddenly there was Kassi and Akasha and Lady Aliyah and Sassi was at home in a tactful silence and Robin outside smoking a damn cigarette. Menthols, Kools. The same brand as me. I used to smoke Newports, then Newport Lights, what does it say that I switched, that still over a year later all I smoke is Kool Milds? And none of my friends know why I left him because none of them understood why or how I was his in the first place. And he didn’t even look surprised, terribly, when I told him. And then I stopped keeping a journal altogether. I stopped keeping a journal when I left my Master—why? Because there was no longer anyone reading it? Because suddenly it was neither one thing or the other, not private as it used to be nor public as I was used to? Did Robin even read all those notebooks, after all? I think I wrote them faster than he could read. He admonished me for sitting in a chair in my own fucking house, at my own party. Maybe that was when the tide really turned. Was I still being overly impressionable? Did I leave because I couldn’t stand the weight of my own friends’ disapproval? How much did the Celexa have to do with it, really? Sometimes I still do those exercises, kneeling, placing my hands. I still even remember some of the Gorean names. Not the standing up straight bit, though. And I wear those black low-heeled sandals Tim helped me pick out. I like to think he and Sassi would be proud of me |if they saw me in them.|
¶ 7:06 AM 0 comments
August 29, 2003
I would love to know who I used to be. On drugs, on kinky sex, on the strange green high of overworked hardcore sobriety, on a neighbor’s couch. Damnit, who is this person others know and miss? Who was I and where did I go, why did I leave me stranded here? I write down everything , every single thing sooner or later. But I lost this. I lost my rage. I lost my sureity of being, if not right, then at least aware others were wrong. I lost not caring. I lost the sadistic spring-steel strength of me, bold and bright and careless. Traded sadism for sympathy. I miss being me, being strong like me, being sharp and fierce like me. Stupid like me; taking strange and unexamined risks. But no one can be 15 for their whole lives, nor 21. So I keep telling myself, anyways, is that the balm of truth or wistfulness. Stupid, savage sophistries. Robin always said the only thing I lacked was self-confidence; I may have gained experience since then, but I’ve lost what sense of self I may have had. And this bores me. Being so constant chronic scared and anxious bores me, uncertaintude BORES ME. I should go out more…..?
I’ve always hated eating in front of others. Edith Nesbitt. Eating and reading, which is not the same thing as reading and eating. While eating. My own preference, personally, is for eating while reading. I stopped nursing at two and taught myself, obstinately, to read, at about four, what I did for the two years in between God only knows. Played with my food and looked sullen, probably, no one can really picture me as a social child, not even in babyhood. Even as a toddlerwas misanthropic, I liked babies only until they started to talk. I threw blocks and walled myself up in sofa cushion forts, drew pictures of castles so ideally impermeable they didn’t need to bother with drawbridge or moat; there were no doors. My past is as much imagined as remembered—is it like that for everyone. When did I become conscious of the existence of others? I don’t like being conscious of myself. Right now I even miss being stoned. I don’t miss--. I miss the smell of Jared’s ciggarettes. The texture of his woven black and white blanket, the particuliar flicker of candles on his walls. I don’t miss him.
I miss the way Sassi used to look at Robin, the longing look, the slow nod unself-conscious eyeful look, the look she used to give him before Kassi and Akasha, before Windy and Alyah. Before he tried to rescue everyone. Before the divorce. Sassi’s divorce and sudden full availability, real-life 24-7 complete with kids. Before he began to fost her off with Bob, Whipmaster Bob, Fiona and their whole clan. Before he changed our vows for jewelry. It made me long to join their family.
I was born in Ohio despite being born in Maine. Wasconceived in Virginia, Lynchburg, or so I'm told and the calculations come out right to place it there, probbaly. Lewiston, Maine,always thought it was Auburn [where] born, as where parents lived, but birth certificate says Lewiston, Maine. Writing is a way to distance oneself from the past?
What is Trevor looking for in all those horroscopes he conjures up? Is it the same, as I look through dictionaries for the same kind of information, I mean?
There is nothing inn this room or place to help me at all to concentrate my thoughts. Is that okay? Nick Drake is Bryter Later background blues: I am jealouse of a sparer life. I am running out of patience with myself and the process of trying to write something reasonably good, something with a reasonable chance of being important. I don't believe that people are basicly good. I don't believe people are basicly anything, sometimes I almost don't believe people basicly exist. Sometimes truelly it's easy to forget the world means a place full of creatures living and verbing and not just a large amount of space and nouns. I do like nouns. This thing, that thing, here,or there. It's verbs that throw me, confuse me, interact with me. I'd like to dream through a world where everything's [illeg. line--washed away ink.] me. ¶ 6:42 AM 0 comments
Doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results – insanity.
Doing the same thing over and over without expecting different results – amnesia. ¶ 6:08 PM 0 comments
My mother insists that I was not born a boy. “I was there, after all,” she says. “I’m pretty sure I remember the doctors saying it was a girl.” My mother had one of those natural births peculiar to the 1970’s and caveman days, so I can’t blame her poor recall skills on dope, either.
“Gender is an artificial cultural concept,” my boyfriend explains after catching me looking at gay porn three times in a single month. “It isn’t real.” He will stop being my boyfriend the day my body changes.
Gender may be an artificial concept, a social and abstract ideal, but my body is very physically not. I can hardly pass as a lesbian, let alone a gay man. I have peasant-hips, tiny, crooked-finger hands and a rack most drag queens would kill for. In high-school I experimented with Ace bandages, but I don’t think anything short of NASA quality rubber would have actually worked. It is hard to be taken seriously when you have pumpkin-sized breasts.
My best-friend insists it was a botched circumcision. He defines a conundrum as “You go off to a doctor’s appointment one morning and when you come back that afternoon you’re a man.”
I’m stunned every morning that I wake up without a penise. Without balls.
Genital surgery is still pretty primitive, and I’m too afraid of needles for testosterone shots.
When I was 17 I had my breasts removed, as much of them as the doctor would remove, pounds of fat. I woke up with size C’s and rage. I woke up seething under a pair of large C’s. This is not what I wanted. I wanted pecs. I was willing to compromise on small breasts, the kind that are basicly swollen nipples under a wonderbra. And a pair of curving and bubble-pocked scars. My body has never been beautiful.
I think of a line from a story, “Men will turn into women before your eyes,” I think of what my life might have been like if I had been born a boy. Would I still have been raped? Would I have so many scars up and down my legs? Would I look similar, would I be more attractive, would I still have an impetus to write. More self-confidence? Because of course I’m not wholly male, either. Extremes, is how Scooter describes me. I like the extremes of both genders and I like them even better smashed up together. Sharp-faced girls with boys bodies and tattered hair Visiting gloves and top-hats. Prom-dresses, stockings, and safety-pinned combat boots. My alter egos are neither male nor female, or rather they are both at once. I am no longer male or female. I am not confused, God damn it, not about this. This is not the body destiny planned for me. If I was a man I could have children.
¶ 5:53 PM 0 comments
I dreampt I walked past Art’s house
and a haggle tooth crackedhead artist lived
there, we walked past a window to see
a huge collection of graffiti style
paintings on the wall and him half
leaning out. I was with another
person but I don’t know who it was,
I felt their presence as a
lack of being alone. And we
walked all over Dayton together.
Maybe it was one of my imaginary
friends.
rolled up poiny bags of coke and
songs that make your eyes feel like
old glass. I'm afraid of running out of
secrets.
I just finished reading a book in which
there was a quote by John Dunne,
"Other men's crosses are not my crosses." And
this is true. But the thing is, other people's
secrets become our own. And maybe this
is why I write. As a way of
safely excising myself of the ominous
burden of secrets. Somehow, once memorized
in whispers and furtive glances they
are absorbed, never to be forgotten.
Perhaps some day they'll discover in the
body, somewhere between belly and ribcage
and organ, a small dark sac somewhat
firmer than the liver that holds secrets.
And when it starts to give or rip,
circulating repressed toxins back through the
mindstream, that's what causes sudden
madness. It could explain the bizarre
dementia sometimes seen in elders, the sac has
stretched and grown brittle, dripping half
remembered secrets back through the body.
Maybe someday they'll have a cure for
it, or downtown marches to fund vaccination
drives, school kids selling candy-bars door
to door for the cause.
“We become our deaths.
Our names disappear and our lovers leave town,
heartbroken, crazy,
but we are the ones who die.
We are the forgotten
burning in the streets
hands out, screaming,
‘This is not all I am.
I had something else in mind to do.’
always and only that
when there was so much more she had to do.”
Skin (p. 222)
Dorothy Allison
I dreamt I was doing all these things, trying to find my way back to old playgrounds….re-tracing old bus-routes….and the whole time I was trying to keep up with Alice via cell-phone but she was doing all these different things too and the connection was never really clear and always static or both of us busy or trying to talk at once and not understanding and finally at the end of the dream I had just slid into my seat in a class I’d taken years ago and gotten really lost trying to find and the teacher was about to start so I had to hang up and I told Alice something like “I’m sorry, I gotta go. Love you…. I’ll talk to you later.” And I hung up. And just as the teacher started writing on the blackboard the girl behind me tapped me on the shoulder and when I turned around she was all indignant like “what was that about?” I stared at her blankly and she said something like how that was the most impersonal good-bye she’d ever heard and asked who I’d been talking to, and I told her a good friend, and she said she sure couldn’t tell by listening that I thought of her that way, and implied that whoever I’d been talking to hadn’t either.
I have the dreadful tendency to refuse to see that I may need medications as much as any one else. Like, it’s all very well for friends to take meds, and they have surely helped, I feel absurdly different when I think about them being prescribed to me. Like, what’s wrong with me? How is this going to change me? What are the side-effects? How is this going to interact with other meds and drugs? And what disease do they think I have that they believe this medication will help? I geusse I still have a lot of suspicion/cynicism about the whole thing from when I was institutionalized, even now so many years later. It’s been seven years, sometimes it feels like decades longer and sometimes like only a couple years. I cannot stand being lied to/misled, especially when it is “for my own good”. And I did so shitty on Prozac. And Zoloft. And then they wanted me to go on that epilepsy medication with weekly bloodchecks for liver damage….ugh. God only knows what that would have done to me. Anyways, I know I have problems with depression (see, that’s why I do this ‘cause I probably couldn’t admit that directly to anyone) and I know, through logic and a surfeit of psychological reading that depression is a clinical/behavioral problem and is best treated through a combined approach of medication and therapy. But God, what does it say about me for that to be so nessesary? I’m afraid of my parents being right. I’m afaraid that doing any kind of therapy-meds thing is tantamount to admitting I am actually mentally ill (which is basicly what it means) and they will be proved right all along. Do you know how many times the father has informed me of my impending schitzophrenia over the years? And even though I should know better, even though I am perfectly well aware that he is the last man on earth whose judgement I should trust in anything, every once in a while I believe him. What other kind of escape can there be?
¶ 5:36 AM 0 comments
When I was little and scared, or before going to sleep in my blankets I would daydream that a tribe of friendly teddy-bears would adopt me. It’s the first thing I can remember fantasizing and even now I sometimes go back to it, like a nostalgic adult taking a tour of babyland. I don’t understand everything I see there. I think in my original mind it wasn’t bears specifically, just big friendly animals which would make sense because I wasn’t very attached to any particular bear until I was about eight though I had a wide variety of amiable stuffed animals long before that. I think I figured there must be some special place my stuffed animal’s knew about, wherever they came from, wherever it was they went when I was at school and they pretended to eat the play food my sister and I thoughtfully left for them. I had an interesting sort of logic; I knew perfectly well they couldn’t live off play-dough and pictures of eggs and tiny empty boxes of fancy looking crackers, so they must get food elsewhere. My parents probably didn’t feed them, and they probably didn’t eat the sort of food we ate anyways so they must go elsewhere to get it. I sort of figured maybe if I was very nice to them they would bring me with them sometime. I miss having a cat.
¶ 5:12 AM 0 comments
Remembering random trivial details from a past life rather than anything important. Imagine someone being constantly bothered by memories/frags from a previous incarnation and after extensive retrieval processes discovers they’re just as meaningless and irrelevant to world peace as most memories from one’s present life. What if someone invented an equation/process/machine that proved reincarnation occurred but was pretty much like the present and just as uncertain about life/god/future and the meaning of meaning. What about a drug [like Verdi’s description of DMT] that gave people a cascading series of memories from their past lives and they were all things like random visual or auditory/sensory flashes without context? Would people invent narratives around them?
The girl dropped her head down
on the desk, grateful for the
brief rest. She was supposed to be
doing geometry, but as far as the
girl was concerned, survival was
more important. The girl did not sleep
much at her house.
It took hours for her
to fall asleep, and then she
would wake up a few hours
later, shaking and terrified from
another nightmare. The girl’s
nightmares were unusual, in that
they rarely had monsters or
ghosts or things like that in
them. The girl’s nightmares
were fragments of memories
that she tried not to remember.
Sometimes, often, the
girl would wonder why she
even bothered with it all, and
would briefly consider suicide.
But suicide to
the girl seemed like the
coward’s way out, and
although the girl was afraid
of practically everything, she
did not like to consider herself
a coward. Besides, it wasn’t
that she didn’t enjoy living, on
the contrary, the girl loved
life. She loved the way
the sun felt when she
stepped out of the shade. She
loved the way tree-bark
felt, warm and alive.
She loved the way the
ground felt when she stepped on it,
the dirt sinking just a little
beneath her weight. She loved
the way leaves smelled when she
crumpled them in her hands, fresh,
green, alive. Most of all, the
girl loved attention, particularly
from friends, the girl breathed
attention the way
normal people breathe air, she
needed it, and she would do
anything for it. The girl would
have sex with a stranger for
attention. She would rush up to
someone she had never seen
before and ask them outlandish
questions for attention.
Often she even pretended that
she was crazy, psychotic, so that
people would pay attention to
her. Whether the attention was
negative or positive hardly
mattered to her, as long as it
was there. She did not enjoy
being hit, but she would far
rather be slapped than ignored.
It wasn’t that the girl was
spoiled, at least, not completely
spoiled. She was just unsure of
her own existence. She had
to have people reinforcing
her reality, or she would have
trouble believing she was
there. Sometimes the girl
cut herself, she had several
ugly scars from it. She cut
because the pain meant that
she was real, that she existed.
The girl was crazy;
She distrusted her own experience.
It is not a direction you would cast dice to stars to find. Beyond serendipity or mere misstep and entirely undeliberate, still. Walking to a pond on a day in February that smells like a dirty sponge, one accidentally trips and falls splash into a mud-puddle--this is chance. Walking to the same pond on the same day one trips and sprawls into a stone-lined cache of Salinger's unknown rejected writing, mainly porn. This is the fate tarot cards represent. And then you can continue to the pond, or read them and begin masturbating there in a rain-swamped trough with caterpillars heaving themselves over your ankles and the taste of rotten leaves and preserved hamburger wrappers in your mouth. If at this point you unsnap your plastic raincoat, cast down your umbrella and let your hand begin tentatively stroking your mud-sling jeans, then you are adept at finding this direction. Only idiots and optimists speak of bad luck, or good, or luck as opportunistic at all -- it is not. Luck is the April fool's trick of minor deities, the smell of forgotten thoughts. Luck is the direction necessary for adventure.
The primary value association of any given number is fundamentally quantititative and static, whereas the primary value association of any given letter is fundamentally qualitative and dynamic.
Of course I fuck in ones and threes. I think in ratios and value efficiency. Any complete ratio requires three numbers: two are given alongside each other and one, the quantity that ratio describes, is assumed. Three is the lowest common denominator of love, sex, time and a good story. There is only one devil, there are only two choices between a rock and a hard place, but all good things and most gods come in sets of three. Three is the holiest and dirtiest of numbers. One is the lonliest, and most aesceticly pleasing. Two is useless, neither a shape nor a point nor a mystery. Geometricly, algebraicly, physicly, two is the most self-involved of numbers. Logicly, two is fundamentally shooting blanks.
It is not the blue pills. It is not the last messy apartment complete with broken dishwasher, cigarette-scored couch and rapidly approaching end-of-lease. It is not the pink pills, the endless polaroids, the calloused feet, crumpled pay-stubs and negative bank account. It is not the drawer full of journals, the little round white pills for nervous days, it is not the mailbox full of circulars and bills. It is you in a chair in the next apartment. It is the CD rack and the bookshelves built and the TV turned off and the radio quiet or static and it is the realization that you could stay in this chair for days for weeks for the rest of your life you could die in this chair before anyone could ever find you again.
¶ 4:12 PM 0 comments
In a foreign land you're always looking for clues. It's hard to know which things to pay attention to, which sounds to listen for, which words to look up. You watch the eyes while the hands are picking your pockets, you focus on body language but they're gesturing to someone else. By the time you've found your place the light has changed. Your reaction times are glacially delayed--faces and uniforms blur. You're in the dream where you struggle to move through air that resists you like water. Bodies leap by in easy running air--you can never catch up; By the time you've called for help they're too far to hear and you cannot determine in which direction to move. The drowning dream.
"Is this all there is?" we ask each
other wonderingly -- hungrily
"is this all there is?" in the makeshift
solidarity
of cousins invited on gilt-engraved cards
to pine with some distant rich relative
and upon arrival are served
skimpy salad, and nothing
else.
"Is this what we have gotten so dressed up for?"
Imagine, that one day your favorite stories
stopped being told, and you, who had never
aspired to be a story-teller, seemed to be
the only one left who remembered them.
You tried to repeat them to children and
friends, but grew confused, leaving out important
passages, doubling back to reiterate irrelevant
details, forgetting the outcome altogether.
Imagine with each repetition the stories grow
more garbled, the perspective more kaleidoscopic,
so that insignificant backgrounds, perhaps the
pajamas you wore when first hearing it,
overshadow everything else and you grow to hate
your own meanderings, the smell of your
own wet frustration.
I am too tired to haunt you—
fingertips telephone-calloused
I have memorized the molecules of your scent
taste-bud mapped your body
breathed myself through your lungs;
now I am dripping you
and still unhappy.
