Never saw the lightning.

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I have got to strike a balance or I will go fucking crazy.
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blow out

One time I was riding along a Texas highway with my boyfriend. I have an incredibly selective memory, so the fact that I bring this up, means that recalling the moment is significant especially if I was then able to find a file for it in my dusty ten story internal library... for means of referencing it now.

I wasn't driving the car. I didn't have a car. I had a motorcycle, and that doesn't make for too many cross country conversations with a partner. If Ihad been driving... we would have stopped the car.

It was a boring and typical stretch of Texas highway. We were high on each other's company. Listening to music. Waiting for the next ridiculous billboard to insult. Thankful that we weren't toothless, proud of our intellect. Maybe even satisfied that we hadn't died by 20. Whatever.

I look out my window and I see cotton growing in fields as we cruise along. As soon as I see it, I say, "Stop. It's cotton." My boyfriend laughs and we continue at the same speed. I say, "Seriously. Stop." He keeps his foot metered on the pedal and says "Why?" I say, "I want to pick some." He laughs again and we continue to move at the same pace. I think I start to panic. I can tell that the fields will end soon and I will have blown my chance. I say, "I never picked cotton before." It was true. I had only bought balls of it to wipe off my grease paint and had filled my guilty soul with stories of slaves destroying their fingers from picking it. I had to do it, you understand?

My boyfriend thinks I am kidding, then realizes I am probably serious, only my kind of serious is more insinuation without anger. But once that insinuation has been ignored (since I rarely push people) there is no telling how I will retaliate.

He did not stop. And I was actually really upset about it. I think he was afraid to "lose time" or be caught trespassing. Trespassing? The cotton was growing through the fenceline. I was one girl wanting to feel it in my hands. How could anyone have cared? If anyone had cared, I would have paid that price gladly.

I haven't forgotten about that, and I knew at the time, I should have thrown a fucking fit.

That's one story I want to share.

This other thing, isn't really a story.

I have very light colored eyes. I hate flourescent lights. Can't handle bright lights at all, but I hate talking to people with sunglasses on because I think it is self engrossing. So half the time I wish I could hide my eyes and shoot out the streetlights.

I was telling my sister in law about how people with lighter colored eyes are more affected by light than others. It was something I had read. I was convinced. Then she told me that she had read something about huskys. She said that they had such blue or whitish irises because of the intense amount of light that was let in while enduring long days and snow in the northern regions. I don't know about this. I need to know about this, but opted to make my notes about my sad cotton picking story instead of research.

Cotton... light eyes... the world is full of thoughts and blown out the sides with needs.

mechanical dissent

I was told that there was a scorpion in the driveway this morning and a ladybug hanging upside down in the kitchen window.

My Kurdish friend is going to do my hair tomorrow. I put off carving into my haystack until here because I wanted herto do it. She's a Paul Mitchell big wig who is tired of event planning and wants to get back into the creative aspects of hair. I'm the perfect candidate because I have a shitload of hair and apparently my natural shade is one step removed from the lightest shade possible.. except Albinos I guess.

This house I am staying in is large. 3,000 square feet or so. There is a neighborhood committee that requires that you tell them if you are going to build a deck, soften your water, or do anything funky with the landscaping. Funky might mean something like put a strange bush too close to the curb.

The neighbors on one side are referred to as the Taliban, because they didn't bring a cake when these guys moved in and they didn't wave back. The response? Dress in a burkah and trickor treat and then put a large crucifix in the yard at Xmas time.... Yeah... Not a Metropolis. Apparently these guys have a green beret friend that informed them that "They don't wave becasuse you are the Infidel and they want to kill you." If you could only see this neighborhood... A sleeper cell? How fucking absurd.

I am not saying that I want a purple house. I want the option to paint my house purple. I am not saying that having a zealot for a neighbor bothers me, but I would prefer Muslim to Christian. I would really prefer nothing to everything else. Nothing to everything else.

I am tired of bared teeth and gutted glimpses of little nuclear families... set in their fashion. Set in their diabolical and safe communities in the middle of nowhere. The only additive being fear and consumer comfort and stale renditions of atypical fight songs to ward off the unknown.

How could you sit in a small stadium watcing Junior score a point if everyone on the bleachers next to you were closet fags and openly prickish? How could that be progress? How could that be where you want to go? Tennis? Are you kidding? Do you file that under Athletics or Down Syndrome? (My apologies to Down Syndrome.)

I guess I don't miss it here. I felt like an alien looking at new products on the shelf at the most basic grocery store. Still I was trapped in some ADD like haze as I tried to figure out what the fuck I needed. None of it was to live. I wasn't stealing tortillas and cheese anymore to live an extra day. I have credit cards I was ashamed to display.

I am moving back to pen and paper. Screw this mechanical dissent.

dreamsicle.

I have been tormented with dreams probably no stranger than those visited upon the depressed and beaten upon savages of any era.

Still...

There is a girl who appears in my dreams in the same fashion.

She starts out having fun and partying with the natives... Any natives in Any Nation, and after a spell... I see her start to get out of control. I see the giant rubber mask start to slip off of her head. I don't pay attention too much because my mind is elsewhere at the gathering, but her head gear is most intriguing.

There is a man in a corner along a fenceline out of sight. He occasionally draws the attention of the party goers because he is making some kind of art. They accept him. He seems interesting. I get closer, more out of trying to find a corner to be comfortable because I am not so comfortable here. I feel like every one in the crowd is operating on a different time piece. I feel like they are wolves waiting for a reason to cut my throat... In some ways I welcome it, but it's a dream and I know that if I want to get somewhere I have to be willing to be the victim... and I have to appear as if I can't fight.

I move around the muddy swimming pool and dodge drunkards having the good time I kind of wish I was in on... Kind of, except I hate them. I hate them and I can't tell you why in any way that seems sensitive or giving. I dodge them and I am not afraid at the same time.

As I come upon the artist at the fenceline, I see that he has strung before him several canvasses suspended from a wire. They hold portraits. He has flipped them and is painting from the guides of shadows from the portrait's other side. They are mine. I made those original portraits. I left them amongst friends and strangers and they must have been uncovered as easily as some dumb teen crime novel.. if they were even hiding... He has them now. But I am not angry. I am hungry. I am looking for a comrade in this backyard Poltergeist.

I am fascinated. I don't tell him who I am. I don't tell him that they were mine. I only watch and wait for the wolves to lunge at me when they are too drunk to masturbate and seek violence for pleasure, as they splash and spit from the muddy pool at anything that seems ill fitting. IN this corner with this thief, I feel safe... But I feel like my escape plan lacks space for an unsure brush.

From the corner of my eye I see the girl. I see the girl I have seen before. She wears a rubber mask that covers her head. She jumps into the pool. Her Osiris Horsehead mask starts to slide off and I realize that her skull has been cracked and half of her brain is hanging out.

I move to her and beg her to sit while I check out her skull. She acts happy as if she knows and it isn't a big deal. Her friends are oblivious to the danger and start to harrass me for giving her shit about swimming with a fractured skull and brain exposed. They start to push me around and I can see her laughing with no cares as they move me from the shallow end. I see the artist at the fenceline covering my paintings, stopping only to watch and memorize our expressions...and I go down without a fight.

Because I know they have a 30 second attention span.. ALL OF THEM.

Ruffage.

My brain is a mess. I can't sleep. My mother says it is the time change and the stress of travelling with a toddler. It could be. I prefer not to think literally right now. Literally is a kind of front door "honesty" that doesn't cover everything.

I have been missing something. I am kind of a moron and I guess in a lot of ways I am always missing something. I'm slow to the take on fancy jokes but I can pick up on the unholy ones before the slumlord even knows he was trying to make me laugh. I laugh when people say horrible things that I think are supposed to be funny. They were only meant to be a horrible thing. I knew that. I knew it before I smiled.

I do miss my muse. Don't I have a right to one? If freedom wasn't my right would I fall in line?

I am in line. I have always been in line. Even when I am scraping friends off of the shoulder. I have been lost. I knew I was in the woods. The woods are beautiful, but I am not the wood. I am not the ruffage. I am not the wet earth. I am not the bugs with sharp teeth who burrow into flesh. I am not flowers after rains. I am not a sun scratched upon by highest branches.

I am a desert with a boom box. And I am too hot to stay here.

Poke A Haunt Us.

Essentially I have been making the same entry into a "daily" diary/blog for a few years now. Everytime I start typing, I want to say the same thing, but I always say everything else to avoid saying that thing. And, to be honest, I am not sure I totally know what that thing would be. It would have to be a pretty significant statement wouldn't it? I'm not a philosopher though.

A friend of mine told me one night on a late night village booze cruise that he was astounded by my thought processes.. my art for "critical thinking". He held his head close to his lap to keep the porch light out of his eyes, and I just looked at the back of his head knowing what was truly going on there. I had just told him that all I had gotten out of my primary education was a general education diploma. After the stunning 5 second silence that followed what he thought was my admission, he picked up without hesitating... a rather... thoughtful and missionary tone with me... a sincere and reflective kind of courtesy that generally makes me gag... and I just wanted to start up my tank and go home and finish my beer and listen to my one dimensional "prog-rock" and forget about anyone's needs but my own.

It isn't a matter of feeling insufficient. It's about finding friends. I haven't really been finding them, but you know, Just leave it there. Dropped off. Delivered. Done. Now, bring on the next tomorrow of swimming in a sea of self obsessed and handicapped, base, human interactions and let me act like a retard again who has no goals.. no dreams... no Nobel Prize winning drafts flooding My every cell. And I'll sum it all up with another fucking " Hello. How you doin? ... Oh yeah... Ooooh Truly?? When is this shit going to end? Yeah. .. MMMM I know what you mean. It's insane. Hope you (insert appropriate dog day joke here." Profit from all the loss..... (Right on.).... Left on.

My brain has been on repeat for about 2 months now. I could go into why. I could erase your brain of anything worth remembering for the next 4 hours trying to help you understand the simplest conclusions that I have come up with here. I'm not saying I'm complicated. I am saying that this place is complicated. Each conclusion is like a brick wall and never like an open horizon. You'd think I would be up to the challenge, for all you know about me. And the thing is... I have been doing nothing BUT be up for this unreal challenge every moment of the day since I came here. My reputation is important to me, but more important to me than that, is being able to make people around me comfortable. You might say, "Yeah right. Every time we ever hung out you were so quiet. You would always keep to yourself mostly, or make jokes..." But I know every last one of you, my friends... who I feel slipping away... Have called me FIRST when shit was really fucking bad for you. I was just wondering if .. you know. I could want to call you for a change. I haven't felt like you were there in any way but to use me. Like I said, I could go into why.. Maybe I'll just go my own way.

I am writing all of this as if I expect someone to read it. I guess, because I am not some basket case diary writer who hits the privacy button and thinks that anyone cares more about your thoughts than your credit. I'm also not a novelist. .. Though I do have one story in my head that I have always wanted to write. I might as well share it, because even if the handful of you who came upon this blog "stole" it... I'd like to see what you would do with it, and it would always be more potent in my mind regardless of what you pulled out of your ass. But to address my trepidation with bearing all in this blog, I guess. .. I wonder if my employers read my thoughts... (as an aside). Wonder if my friends and if my enemies read my thoughts here, and truthfully it doesn't give me a boner to think they do. It kind of bothers me. I assume that who I am is obvious to everyone I deal with on a regular basis, but that doesn't mean they really know what they are getting.. and there's always something in me that wants to curse them with the back up black wings.....

I always assume that my ideas are too extreme for business. The strange thing that I am finding is that... the Earth is desperate. If you can form a sentence and ask a question, there is someone out there who wants to answer you. But there's no accounting for communication. Accounting for Taste is like Doing Roll call for Manners. The only people saying "present" are simply the bored assholes who showed up and not people you should ever really want to dine with let alone set your savage swine against.. to gain.

I know better than anyone that my ideas aren't really extreme. My character is extreme.

So, my idea is this. There's this small Alaskan village on the Bering Sea. The weather is wild. The population is 50 at the most any given time of the year. There's no law enforcement. There's no church . There's no grocery store. You look at the black night, devoid of city lit reflective skylines and think of the dark ages. You feel as if you are one step removed from the Dark Ages. IN fact, lately... there's been nothing but death and misery. Strangers are proudly telling you that they are praying for you. Soon people start seeing strange things. They start imagining things. They become far off. They choose their words carefully when they run into other villagers. They want to see if someone else has seen it too. They can't decide if they are seeing blurry and late night alcoholic hallucinations or ghosts or trickery with the lighting. They wonder if what they saw has anything to do with the stories they have all been told. Anything to do with how they talked to their grandchild today, or anything to do with how much fish were in the net. The stories they all heard by gaslight or moonlight.

The sick girl who was sent away to seek medical attention with the strange seaman during a terrible storm. (Terrible storms aren't cliche' here.) They never arrived at their destination and there was no evidence of wreckage.

I have it all layed out in my mind. Scenes. Conversations. Effects. Tension. All of it. But whatever. She's not a ghost, and the joke is on the Village. She's the ship wrecked child, grown, having really lived the subsistance and spiritual life of those "Here's How We Lived Without The World" true stories... creeping out residents who are simply losing their minds.

There's nothing complicated about any of this. Except maybe me in there, and you out there, wanting to help me, and that's not complicated. That's something else....

I keep saying how fucking crazy it is to live here. Is who I am changing?