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?

Anne Lamott quote~Religion

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Annie Dillard Quote

Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"

Lenny Bruce quote

"If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses. "

Lenny Bruce

Epiphany in a village of untethered dogs

I don't think we use the word "Omega" enough in every day conversation.

General Knowledge questions.

There's a public phone 20 meters from my front door. There's a big sign that I painted, "PHONE". Sometimes I fantasize about destroying the phone, or fucking with the phone booth. Like, painting all the walls white and splashing buckets of red paint on the walls, or plastering it with personal ads from the other side of the planet, or painting glow in the dark messages for the drunks hiding from bears...

For the past two weeks, there's been a guy who is here to help build the harbor. I don't know what his job is. I think it's operating the dredger. Just a guess... but he wears the same clothing day in and day out. A black shirt with a southwestern collar, a white ball cap I haven't seen the advertising on yet and blue jeans. He talks for at least one hour a night. He always has his back to the entrance, leaning on the tiny shelf, probably inhaling urine, rotten wood and beer as he stares down hanging his mouth on the receiver.

Sometimes he sits on the small shelf, which cuts his head off from my view. I prefer him like this.

It has to be a woman he is talking to right?

If I had a different mind, I could think he was the Mujadim, or an alien transmitting coordinates, or a time traveler-risking his every cell to make proofs of us, or an angel trying to save us, or a simple man misplaced and lonely.... or just one blip on a screen that doesn't have more than two dimensions.

I think none of these things.

I wonder if I ever wrote poetry.

Special Meat: Frigid Green Remorse

I was thinking that an ice cream truck who served only meat... Different kinds of meat, and sold no ice cream at all, could do pretty well in some neighborhoods. Boroughs all over the planet. The important gimmick, besides special meats and special treatments would have to be the music though, just like an ice cream truck. And that music would have to be drums. Drum and bass if you stretch it. I'm not saying that every community is ready to make the leap from whimsy to carnage... but, well... You could have fooled me.

This place is the changeling without resolution.

I am overloaded with intense feelings of resentment toward the adults. For half I feel sorry. For the other, I feel a certain cutting edge camaraderie watered down with a sloppy helping of slothful-fleshy-indignant-entitled-going nowhere-one sided "best" friendships. There are certain cards you cannot play when you live as a minority amongst natives. Just saying that thing alone can get you black balled, and the fact that it doesn't make any sense at all, does have meaning. It is meaningful.

So sadly... I must not be the one. I must not be the one to turn my spirit and my gut inside out as if totally impaled, stripped and burnt to all hell for just one lick on a sugary stick, until my years just glue up and leave my mind with a carcass of earnest interests: shoved with some heavy hands wearing disposable gloves into a pit on the edge of the village perimeter like some trash without any kind of god at all. You can't understand unless you have been in a place like here. I have been blasphemous, when all I speak is ... a truth without Earth.

By the ONE, I don't mean Jesus or any other out of body politic. But it might as well be that absurd for the way things just slack and sway. Then the tears come when everyone is full of syrup climbing the walls to Hell and Heaven with eyes alight and hearts ablaze, and then the sun rises and who can we blame now when we can't stand to see each other in the light? I'm not saying anyone should blame themselves, but at least for me... I'm not willing to let my fists fly until I have hated myself with all I possibly can. And all I possibly can is all I possibly will ever have.

What a complete cluster fuck. All of this. This potluck of dressed up best dishes from houses broken and petty who were once brilliant beacons on a long chain of rich and undeserving misery... dragging my wooden spoon into the quagmire to add my secret recipes, with love, and to go untasted. Truly.... Bastards.

I am sure you don't know this one thing I am about to tell you. I believe it so, or certain presences wouldn't be waiting like hungry baby wolves out on the water to come and see for themselves.

3 weeks, to the day... maybe even to the hour... after a body has drowned, it will rise to the surface after traveling the ocean bottom in frigid green remorse, and scan the shoreline with eyes in the back of it's head... for faces still crying.


This place is crawling with moths, on this, the 21st day.

A Cake Walk at Bathory's

There's beauty in the grotesque. But not because I have anything to do with either the beauty or the grotesque in the things I "observe" like a fucking ledge walker. And I can't even separate them, the beautiful and the grotesque. I only have my hands which have done good and terrible things to haul in my ethereal load. I have my eyes which show me what the atmosphere chooses to show me when I choose to keep them open. I have my mind which develops the film it is given and the processing is subject to the quality of supplies and environment.. which means... the final picture is just a picture by just one more person. I will always have my mind and my hands and my equipment, so what good does it do to pretend I can grow and share thoughts with others? Others are one more product of a string of developments who may or may not have had all the chemicals to bring out the grays. Dimensional. Totally dimensional. Why the questions. Why the hope. Why the fuck do I use blogger.

Gag.

mukluk yuk yuk

Didn't get to do the toothbrushing deal yet. Had another emergency. Had to ship a guy out of here who had something serious going on that we just couldn't identify. The on call physician at one of Anchorage's medical hospitals says, "So we pay ten thousand dollars to get them out here for alcohol detoxification.." They're jaded. I get it. I say, "That sounds fine. Because that's not what's going on here. We know this guy. Something is really wrong this time. We don't have the resources or tools to help him if he totally crashes. He looks twice his age. He can't do anything for himself. It's not for us to figure out your financing issues. You need to bring this guy in." etc etc. .... I hate this time of fucking year. It's absurd the preventable accidents and casualties. And all these elders around us are dropping like fucking flies... and they all see it coming and just can't seem to correct their course. People have started t o look at us like a necrotic finger that used to once be bountiful. People feel sorry for us and disgusted, all the while supporting the system that causes this island depression.

Drowned. He Drowned, and here we all are... as we were but without him.

6 nights ago, we lost one of our own villagers to the sea. I have been doing damage control.. counseling grief.... if you knew me, you would probably laugh. Hard. If you were me.... You wouldn't have a laugh left.

In the mornings I run the clinic during June, our Hell month. Quadruple the emergencies and accidents. The village is predominantly elderly and children. I volunteer at the Recreation center every afternoon for a few hours. 15 kids or so from between 1 years and 14. I assign 4 sheriffs at the beginning of each "shift". Juice patrol, chair patrol, stick patrol and janitor control... The kids like the power and it saves me so much time. All great kids... what a fucked up place sometimes. I ordered 600 bucks in rec games and stuff that will hopefully lift some spiritis. We built a giant cardboard robot. His name is M180 "the twirlin pirate robot". Its a candy and soda free zone now.

Tomorrow I will give them a pop tooth brushing quiz. I have the red tablets that expose where you didn't brush. Maybe I'll post pictures.

Life is fucking Purgatory.

dial 555 something something.

I have been waiting for the Hanging call. I will wait for the Hanging call until I receive it. I fight every day against the Hanging call. Each piece of news i receive braids the knot. I fight every day. I hate every day. I hate every day.

I have no one to talk to about the mechanics of strange and life.

Facing Years.. Blowing Yes Men.

The most recent defense attorney claims to be best friends with the Prosecution (as they all have claimed while passing us across the rich knots on their skull and bones stationary sets to the next guy on the list.) The State has offered my little brother 8 years. The return offer may be 2-8 years with possibly 1-2 years release with good behavior. What a fucking joke. I don't even have enough scars to count how many murderers have gotten less for outrageous and heinous crimes, and as of now, I have a fucking score of scars. Not about me though. Kind of about me though, because I am running out of friends and people who will understand this impossible situation without giving the State the right to think for them.

I would have more confidence in the abilities of these private monoliths to take care of kid gloves, if the retired Nuclear Submarine Commander of the extended family hadn't been reduced to helplessness just trying to convince the fair ground guards just to give my brother his anti-psychotic medication after being denied it for two weeks... as if that was a favor to us and not them. I've said it before, but how else could you support the dangerous delusions of a paranoid person than to arrest them at customs and then behave like fucking Neanderthals with no concern for protecting the delicate balance of mental and physical health of a man by ignoring doctors orders? Are they just totally ignorant? What is the fucking deal with getting prisoners with mental health issues their proper care? Doesn't this shit cost us billions? I'm sure it does, and guess what else. ... The billions pay for jackasses to drop the ball. Who the hell runs this crap shoot?

Don't answer that. Sometimes I forget that we execute people and we vote.

I flip through the dial like an insane bitch trying to find some piece of humanity I can tolerate.

And by the way, the defense and prosecution attorneys get along so grandly because they fucking bank and like to spend their down time shooting birdies and tossing the bankrupted "gifts" of desperate people into the painful psychic mix of exclusive cigar bar cocktails- sucking every bit down- just to deal with the "humanity" of our deepest pain with the most detached system possible, while maintaining a Western Front.

It's business for them... and really really personal for me.

The equation for how war starts can be located above.

Los Angeles lovers can have each other.

The facility holding my brother in Los Angeles, has not been giving my brother his anti-psychotic medication, he tells my mother. No word on Extradition yet. Two counties are possibly interested... Meanwhile, a mentally ill young man sees all the fantasies we refused him come to life, and we fall in on the sidelines of the horrordome as part of the bad men crew.

Extradition

Kid Gloves is not contesting Extradition to a Texas court. He is medicated. This entire ordeal happens from a customs arrest to a Los Angeles jail cell. It falls unlovingly right into the paranoid expectations of a schizophrenic who believes whole heartedly that the Bell does indeed toll for him. Has his loving family now become his enemy? "Positively", he states that he seeks resolution. His articulate mannerisms, I can only hope, will bring him a decent/luke warm judgement. The trick with the courts is to play or not to play the mental health card. It's logical to assume that the courts are educated about mental health issues. I doubt though, that they will be less than medieval in their handling of his case... Why? Well... For starters... Prisons BANK and Prisons are private industries that benefit from handling the mysterious and free radicals that society chooses not to be civil to and progressively treat.

I make no excuses. I don't think that my brother makes them either. I wish I could tell him how fucked up I thought things were, if it didn't mean he would scratch his eyes out to escape through them.

Woe be gone

Kid Gloves was arrested at the Los Angeles airport yesterday entering the country. Suckage.

Current Biggest fear

That......


That... All my scrambling to make decent reasons for hanging in there (reasons that I know are total bullshit) won't convince you to stick around... and that you will look at me with your sunken and intelligent eyes and say, "sounds good, sis. ha ha" And then two days later, the phone will ring.

Cheaper Minutes

My closest family members are all in Australia right now. There's some decidedly heavy family shit going down currently, and I haven't really sorted it all out... That's for starters.

I have a calling card that I use. I can dial the 32 digit number to reach my little brother with my eyes closed and my fingertips sawed off. The calling card costs me $40 bucks every time it recharges for about 400 state to state minutes. When I call Australia, 40 bucks gets me about 30  minutes. I know there's all kinds of ways to get around this charge, but I'm not going to join the phone circus to do that. Mapping out times and locating "cheaper minutes" and planning "talking time" with people I'd rather call whenever the fuck I feel like it, doesn't appeal to me.

If I run out of time, I usually get disconnected after the computer voiced lady tells me, " You have one minute of call time left." I'm the only person in the conversation who can hear this, and I always have to give 30 seconds to find the best place to cut them off and tell them that we have about 30 seconds of the issued and approved 60 seconds left to wrap it up. To tie the loose ends into unforgettable knots.

Normally, this happens at super fucking wrong times. Well, maybe it's actually the perfect time, I don't know. Take this for example. A couple of days ago, I called Australia and everyone was getting ready to make a drive out to Boreen Point. Its a place that my family crawls back through generations. There's tons of stingrays from what I can remember. It was lush, and full of mystery at night. It smelled of rotten fruit, which made the fresh fruit taste all the sweeter.

The drive to Boreen Point was on a long and winding road where you'd hardly encounter any other car for miles on end. When you did see a car, you strained as they got closer to try and make them out. In the blink of an eye... size them up.

There has never been one instance when a car came at mine, with only a painted line separating us, that I didn't seriously count down to death and prepare to see the flashing images of my life Usher me to my final exit. It's like there's never any possibility other than a collision in my head on any highway.

My mother says that they are going to visit my Grandfather's grave and she tries to run right into the next punch as if it's a roll and I detect my mother tripping over her lips gumming out the words "grandfather" or "dad" interchangeably, but that's because her tongue has had absolutely zero practice saying them to me. My patriarchs have always been concepts.

So, I wasn't completely shocked when my mother said they were going to stop by "Dad's" grave during the trip. Normal enough, if you always knew your grandfather even had a grave, which would imply he had a death, and that people in my family knew there was a cause of death and that there was a man who they had all loved at one time or another who just passed on, and he was physically lowered into the Earth by someone who probably got paid to keep books on shit like that, and was anyone even fucking there? Were you ever planning to share that with me? I never ask for details, and that's probably why half of my childhood memories are dreams and not legacies. I don't blame my mother because it causes her pain like no other to talk about it. But it is significant to note that the memory of my grandfather, and how he means anything to me, is based off of a totally different understanding of the past. I'll be 34 in a couple of months. Maybe you could send me a photograph to round out my collection to ten. Sure. I'll trade it for a painting. What would you like? I'll see what I can do, and then you will see too.

It took me about 5 seconds to hear about an overnight grave and process my feelings about just learning it. Then the operator said, "You have one minute of talk time left."

I was always told my grandfather lost his mind while fighting with the Light Brigade during WWII in Papua New Guinea. Fair enough. He comes home. I am told he talked to light bulbs while I sat on his lap, so I don't know if we ever connected. No one seems to think so. Then, he ups and leaves his wife and 5 kids. End of story.

This is where my imagination apparently created other pieces of who I thought my grandfather was. Don't worry. This won't take long. I "dreamed" I was walking on a sandy beach and came upon a hut. To enter you had to pass through a wall of hanging beads. The floor was sand. My grandfather sat there, and I walked to him and I think we hugged. What we felt can't be reclaimed and won't be dismissed by someone else's account.

I thought that was a memory until I asked my mother about it and she seemed kind of freaked out and said it must have been a dream. So, no telling there. There is of course the obvious, my grandfather stopped by my sleeping body on his way to hell. That's where all sick people go right? I can't think of any religion that ever truly did a fucking thing to Crush War. It's your job to sway me that's for sure, you believers.

There was never in my whole life a mention of a funeral or a place or whatever. I always assumed our family had a sadness because he just left and no one ever knew what became of him. I am starting to put the pieces together though, and I guess I can understand. Loving someone with severe mental illness is sad when you are helpless to heal them when they are around and crushed when they are gone without your helplessness even, and there was so much lacking from what you could communicate and share. That was ten seconds into the thirty seconds left.

I told my mom, time was running out. I asked her if he smoked. She knew the brand "Avatar" or something apparently no longer available. I asked her to leave a pouch of it on his grave. It seemed to surprise her that I wanted to do that... maybe because I had never offered or asked to give something to commemorate my grandfather's "passing".... maybe because I didn't know there was a fucking grave to begin with.

She said yes no problem and we would talk again soon and she loved me and my brother loved me and my step father loved me and would I kiss my child from them all etc. etc.

It's possible that if I tell my mother I never knew there was a grave, she will reference how I live in my own head because she must have told me the only three times I wasn't paying attention. I think my argument would likely be, a grandfather should be burned into your soul and not something you could maybe have remembered wrong or dreamt. Need more information please. I'll work on the processing, but I can't promise that I can handle my attitude.

Don't worry pops. You're in here.

Brown Paper Dog

It's so nice to be able to open the window. It's been another long winter. Etc. Etc.

Big City Lights I

When I went to Brooklyn, I stayed with my glorious fag of an actor friend. He shared an elevator sized 2 bedroom apartment with a guy he had nothing in common with and barely knew. He said I couldn't be in the place alone because of house rules. I would have to leave when he left for work. I could ride the subway into Manhattan and walk around. So I did.

I walked around for twenty-four hours.

Alot can happen in 24 hours.

Just five minutes please!

My daughter is driving me crazy.

There's 24 people on the island right now. Several boats have been going through to pick up pot gear for fishing. Boats are heading North of the Pass into the Bering Sea for a brief Herring season. I used to work on a boat during herring. I had to pull out 20 or so random fish from a haul and snap their backs in half, record whether they were male or female and how much they weighed. Nasty. Float planes flew overhead radioing coordinates for fish schools to boats below.

A boat at the city dock made an announcement on the VHF radio. We all communicate here by radio as much as phone. They said, "This is the fishing vessel______. We have a bonfire going on the beach north of the city dock. We have refreshments (likely beer unless they also have chick tracts and koolaid). We have good music. Hospitality is a wonderful thing. Come and join us. Share your stories with us."

That kind of invitation is pretty rare. A few years ago, this fisherman named Snakey Pete (Snakey as in Delerium Tremons from acute alcohol poisoning) called me on the radio to tell me he loved me or something like that. I told him to have another drink.

I made the guys on the boat an mp3 mixed cd and sent it down with my husband.

I took the next two weeks off of work. I'm lucky I have so much paid leave accrued. I can take long breaks every couple of months. How do people do it everywhere else? Not too much drama workwise this month. Just burned out on caring.

I sent my little brother a loaded ipod. He was really happy about it. He also said the similarities to what songs were about and his own mind freaked him out. That sucked. Hopefully I didn't send him down the rabbit hole. What else am I supposed to do? Mash peas for him and talk about clouds?

I haven't been able to paint in forever. No painting with a toddler. No sense even trying.

The sun is up until midnight and she thinks it's much earlier. She rebels when I try to get her to sleep. She's full of sentences this week though.

I've been working at the library here as the sole librarian. The library hasn't been open since I opened it a year ago. I had to take a hiatus because my kid would have been destroying all the books and smearing feces about. It's good to be back in there. It's good to have actually digested a book after going so long without reading. Baby steps.

I'm glad summer is here. I like the change in scenery. I am not crazy about the rush of traffic and all of the generic questions people passing through ask. I just avoid them. I must seem like a neurotic housewife.