Vampires too hate sand in their picnic lunches

I'm feeling bret easton ellis withdrawal symptoms.
I have the desperate need to consume cocktails in the afternoon. I never want to take my sunglasses off, even in the midst of afternoon downpours. My lust for new items is beginning to consume me. My social commitments, starting in about a week's time, will exhaust me, and I simply have no host of vapid, soulless trend mongrels to lap up my uber savvy whinge-fests.
With all that being said, it's been a couple of years, BEE, time to dump another mind-bending, culture schlock, pain tome on the slavering masses.
Solitude...
like my daily multivitamin, is beginning to give me a vague sense of nausea, and I'm afraid I'm forgetting what either one is good for anymore.
I feel so removed from all things as they happen. Perhaps this is the preferred state of the author. I should, by all rights and purposes be writing my flour addled brain out. It's not as if I have an abundance of cognitive challenges in my current line of work. In fact, I am at the point where i no longer feel present in the bakery for most of my time there. I measure out the recipes, assess whether my employers are suffering any breakdowns and, provided the air is mostly clear, my conscious mind climbs out of my skull and goes walkabout. In the rare instances it does stick around it gets so bored, I find myself telling long wandering stories (not that I don't do that anyway) but I've begun tossing in full blown lies just to keep myself entertained.
I know how this one ends, I think petulantly, blah blah blah, and he frog walked out of the gymnasium on tiptoe...I might as well toss in a blood spattered pair of sneakers by the locker room, or some missing electrical tape-oh what the hell-"so that's when his crotch hemorrhaged and we had to use a back pack to keep back the fountain of blood nevermind Mr. Brault battling the vultures with an improvised jockstrap slingshot..."
I suppose I'm doing my brain absolutely no good coming home after work and watching Weeds online until I'm too tired to keep my eyes open anymore. Meh.
In other news, Bob and I are watching Roman Polanski's 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers. It's freaking hilarious. I think we have to find it for owning sometime. How our collection managed to survive this long without it is beyond me. It is a bit unnerving to see Sharon Tate in all her redheaded, 60's glamour, but Polanski himself is actually foil to the Professor Helsingish Vampire hunter in the movie, and he's just so bumbling and adorable and hilarious you can't help being sucked in (oh dear god I didn't see the pun until it was in writing, forgive me).

Life consists of gueurilla pastry gifting...doorknobs beware lest ye bear such strange fruits as scones, croissants and oatmeal cinnamon raisin rolls. I gave my downstairs neighbor a loaf of garlic sourdough, and she told me to swing by the edgewater for a margarita. I guess this means she's not a vampire.
Also running in the morning down by the willows I enjoy the views of Salem's fattest; the yacht club, SUV driving, oversized sunglass camouflaged trash rubbing shoulders with hispanic barbecue parties at ten in the morning with lots of little girls with incredibly long dark hair in many variations of ponytail screeching and running while fast food trash blows by like tumbleweeds amongst the geriatric ocean gazers literally out to pasture while their scrub-clad caretakers smoke and curse by the arcade. I run beside bitchy girls on cell phones slumping off to the filthy beach, beer bellied fathers giggling as their yoohoo bellied sons taunt the seagulls, every variety of soccer mom running faster than me, and the somehow still pure and perfect tiny children toting sand buckets, eating popsicles, digging at their ill-fitting bathing suits and crying while their parents rub gallons of sunscreen into their flesh.
This is summer in massachusetts.

Sometimes you have to be alone with a dog and the moon

Can't sleep for some reason.
I'm tired, and there's a cuddly sweet lump of boy in bed, but I can hear the wonderful, soothing sound of summer rain drumming on the asphalt outside, and every so often a wink of lightening reminds me that no matter how tightly my thighs grip the mechanical bull, I am so not the one pulling the lever from "graze" to "murderlation".
After everybody was gone from work tonight, and I was all by myself peeling north shore sourdough out of the oven, I started singing out loud.
It's been a long time since I listened to my own voice. I realized I've forgotten most of the songs I used to know by heart. It's sad, sort of like, looking down at the ground and thinking about not tripping over tree roots while you walk, then looking up again and realizing you missed the best parts of the walk, and that parakeet in the tree back there, because you were worrying about the little stuff.
Yeah...I don't know what happened to the vast wasteland of depeche mode lyrics I had at my disposal once upon a time. They all rinsed away down the drain of "shit that I need to worry about because I'm obsessive about being a grown up and getting my life together".
I'm really bad about that lately.
I don't want to go see anybody, and I have the biggest trouble making plans when a friend volunteers to see me. I don't feel as though I have anything remotely interesting to contribute. At work, I listen to my stories. I become irritated as my voice seeks to fill all the hollows and cracks of silence. There is such a blanket of weird when nobody's talking in that place. I just go on and on about nothing. Already I've talked too much about my childhood, growing up weirdness, all that bullshit you don't share with people unless there's a solidly decent bottle of wine nearby, and your hair is literally let down, and with one hand you massage your scalp and gesticulate wildly, while the other bobs the glass of shiraz up and down and all around.
Oh my god.
I have no idea when I last had wine...let alone any decent stuff.
I am coming to the realization that the quality of my life is beyond poverty stricken and romantic. I've careened desperately into boring and paralyzed...at least that's my worst fear.
Three in the morning, not a soul to talk to. No idea what I'd say if I had that soul clutched in my gritty, dough-crusted little fists.
I miss people.
I miss the girl I used to be.
I think I brushed by her a couple of nights ago while the moon was full.
Out on the common, walking Cass at midnight. Threads of black cloud wove the darkness unsteadily enough so that I couldn't read the book I was hauling around with me. Suddenly I became aware of soft strains of violin music coming from somewhere nearby. I followed the sound, until i reached one of the many big old houses split into apartments that make up my neighborhood. Standing across the street from it, I could see the windows of the top floor on the right hand side, lit up and the curtains drawn. The glass itself must have been opened, because I could clearly hear somebody practicing on their instrument.
I stood under the unreliable streetlamp in plain view of the musician, vaguely impressed by the proximity of the funeral home and the shadowy-ness of the entire experience. More than anything else though, I wanted to see the person making the music, and he never appeared. It was difficult to believe that I was anything but alone and enjoying a particularly imaginative auditory hallucination.
I don't think I would mind I were.
At any rate. Solitary violin stalking and the compliment bob gave me on Monday morning are the two things keeping me alive this week.

The Lonelies

Terror has been seeping slowly into my breathing patterns for a while now, this very discombobulating sensation that I am losing losing losing losing pieces and people and places and memories and giant hunks of my own self which drop off as I lumber along barely noticing the itchy spot where I was once complete.
Hi,
my name is terror. I am the bandage you wrap around yourself to keep it all together, and guess what? Now you suffocate.
I sometimes really feel like I no longer breathe. I just anaerobically survive in the placating madness of routine. Somehow, if I just make it through this next hour, I am one hour closer to life being better.
Life being butter?
Forgive the madness...it comes much quicker, much sleeker in the night, in the wee hours, in the lonelies.

Perhaps that's where I should have begun in the first place.

Lonely Mountain

On De Lonely De Mountain,
is a quagmire fountain
a precipice field
and a garden of fleas

Where the quagmire's stucking
the fleas do their sucking
the field unmakes plucking
of the mountains vast seas

So we built it a mansion
a manor of speaking
a house with a voice
and a window that sees

without blinking our fingers
the house made of tinders
is aflame and then cinders
if you only say please

yet no travelers come striding
nor sailers their riding
and the ventured unwinding
their breadcrumb trapeze

so a girl sits unwriting
a song for inviting
and watches all the fleas blighting
under a famine of breeze

come to me someday
and play on the wordplay
i still think of you fondly
and our exchange of disease



goodnight.

In the literal sense

My free-will astrology horoscope says I should ask a lot of questions this week.
Question #1:
Why did I let Bob talk me into deleting all the music off my laptop, in an effort to prolong its life? Erasure...erasure I miss you!
Question #2:
How could I have overlooked the cure for so long? I've been losing my mind for two years now, and I just dabbled in the auditory wonder that is robert smith. As of the concert last monday, I've simply given up any sense of decency, and tumbled headlong into a mad orgy of cure albums. Lucky for me, bob has been decadently dimples deep in cure albums since forever, so I have plenty of choices. I delve into album after album, era after era, tube after tube of blisteringly red lipstick, and I just can't get enough. Currently, the album Wish, is completing my life.
Question #3:
Ever have one of those moments, a perfect one, and have an odd thought strike you? Okay, that was vague...
I was sitting on a bench in the common today, drinking a gigantic stein of peach iced tea, reading Neverwhere, and enjoying the breeze and the sunshine. A little ways off a group of children were throwing themselves into soccer practice, a man in a black business suit was dragged by his tethered dog through the foreground and high school kids lounged around the gazebo. Sitting there alone, it suddenly popped into my head that someday, forty years from now, I will probably be doing the exact same thing. I will be musing about lost opportunities, grieving losses, thumbing through memories, tripping over people I haven't thought about in years, and then yanked back to the present moment by something very small, a tickle of hair on my ear, a distant giggle, the smell of a flower, sudden strong and beautiful.
What will I think then? I wonder, in that identical perfect moment, forty years from now. How lonely will that bench be really?
Question #4 Speaking of lonely, How long will it be before Bob and I have a day to spend together again?
Almost two weeks.
NOT IMPRESSED.
Our schedules are flagrantly incongruent, and so i must content myself with brief tickle fights in the morning, slow descents into sleep in the crook of his arm while movies natter through the night, notes on phones, dishes left behind, a fucked up razer in the bathtub...I'm living with the ghost of my fiancee half the time it seems. Or maybe I'm just haunting him.

That's it for now...plenty of questions left I'm sure...

Still here

Okay, sure.
You write a bunch of journal entries about how you hate everything, and it all starts clawing up out of the tar like a big hairy tarantula with thousands after thousands of legs, and it begins putting sticky blackness in your nose and mouth and eyes, and soon you just spew it all out, back and forth, but it keeps coming like the tide filling holes in the sand.
Then something happens.
Something small and insignificant makes you start thinking about the good things, how they used to feel, how the breath in your lungs was once sweet and light and beautiful, and then you start writing about how maybe you can't see it and feel it but you can at least remember what a mouth empty of poison felt like, a mouth that shaped words and sang music and screamed with laughter.
It begins to write itself, and you can press your eyelids up a little further than you could the day before, and suddenly slits of light begin appearing between the blackness, and you start shaping things out of those bars of light, you start pestering yourself to push the skin further apart and let your eyeballs breathe a little deeper, and then one day the universe hurls a chance at you, and maybe you'd given up and thought this was it and nothing would ever come for you, no rope would ever tumble from the clouds, but it does, and you grab it, and it's terrifying, and the rope burns your hands and runs hard and scratches your legs, and you cling to it anyway, and then suddenly spiders are peeling off you like layers of your own filthy skin, and fuck it's blinding, the pain of so much light is unbearable, what is the smell of something coming back to life, and nothing pressing hard against your eyes makes you frightened to pry them apart from your cheeks, but the lashes come unstuck, and breathing gets thinner, easier, more liquid, and you open everything all at once, eyes lips lungs nostrils fingers legs ears and everything is more beautiful than you ever remembered or imagined or dreamed, and you wonder how you ever lived in that half existence, how you ever managed to hang on, but this is real now, this is life, this is hope, and it's all still here, and so are you.
So are you.

The Sow and the Lord

Alas my darling pig!
Bob and I recently began netflixxing (I heart making up verbs) seasons of the television series Lost. I was somewhat proud of the fact that I have managed to duck pretty much every tv trend of the last ten years by extremely limited exposure to the great evil box, but dammit, a few series have sunk my battleship and rendered me slavering for the next installment. Previous offenders include Queer as Folk and Six Feet Under.
Bob, that dastardly boy, was tipped off by some toolbox coworker at Church (otherwise known as guitar center, where he works, but we call it church, and you pronounce it like pimp lucius: CH-UH-TCH) to the addictive qualities of the stupid show, and here we are, balls deep in season two.
Now, along with a desperate desire to know just how does miss evangeline lilly keep her armpits baby bottom smooth on this nairless, razorless paradise, comes the ever constant idea of what I would do if I were in a similar situation, stranded, marooned, lost, completely cut off from everybody I'd ever known.
Before I could really think about this, I decided to do a little research, and I sat down and read Lord of the Flies, another one of those supposed "classics" that I just never got around to, and lo and behold if there isn't one hell of a sow killing that goes on.

What do I make of this?
The Lord of the Flies is decapitated head of a sow the boys slaughter in an overtly sexual display of violence (lots of mounting, stabbing downward, butterflies flap nearby, and the boys anally rape the creature with a spear before slitting her throat).
Post-gutting, the leader of the hunters, apropriately named jack, offers the head of the sow on a spike as a sacrifice to the much feared "beast" of the jungle. Later, a boy named Simon, lost in that neck of the woods, awakes from a stupor face to face with the leering skull, and conducts the theme-solidifying conversation with it. "I am part of you" says the lord of the flies, as the buzzing (symbol of hell) grows louder, and slowly unconsciousness approaches the boy in the form of the head's black hole of a mouth.

The desecration of the loveliness of sow is perhaps a delicate subject for me, being that I'd so recently named it the masthead to my Jess-gets-back-to-fucking-writing-and-making-her-life-mean-something project, but just the same I feel like the two must do battle inside everybody's head at some point.

The desire for perfection in oneself versus the unavoidable evil imbedded in humankind.
I know I've sought the unattainable before, and I thought settling on being the best damn sow i could be was pretty transcendental, but what if my evil is inherent?
What if seeking the perfect contentment of self is what makes one the perfect victim, and only after we are violated, murdered and desecrated, offered to the fucking invisible fiends of the jungle, do we reach the point of true enlightenment?
All the artists who die...their lives so lamented, their work so much more valuable due to the brief time of its creation. Yeats, Plath, Lennon...were they pigs who reached their artistic apexes and had to be cut down in order to become the ethereal gods of art they are today?
From the time I was ten until I was seventeen, I was certain that in order for any of my writing to be worth a damn, I had to die before my eighteenth birthday. All the greatness, all the poetic justice in the world wasn't worth the deification of a torrid fling at creation and then an abrupt tragic end, and I know now it was of course a foolish and ridiculous desire/notion, but perhaps a kernel of truth was there.
In order for a person, say a writer, to truthfully encapsulate the human experience mustn't he experience both sides of the extreme; the sublime perfection and the death and slander of oneself?
Should it be at the hands of his greatest fans that he be destroyed? Is that what makes it all the more poignant? In showing the writer the end of his humanity are his executioners actually revealing the path to his finest art?

Leave me alone on a train too long, and this is where we end up.
Weigh in people.
I'd love to imagine somebody, somewhere actually read this.

All that glitters is sometimes snail slime

I've been trundling about my daily business under the mantle of some serious misery for the last five months. It's amazing to write that number and realize it really has been so long since I last felt unencumbered.
I keep trying to put my finger on precisely what it is that makes me so desperate, and all the usual suspects line up next to the height chart, and some are defiant (money), some are ashamed (eating), some are virtuous (writing), and some refuse to turn around and be identified.
So I make another cup of coffee, crack the spine on another book and log in another train ride.

I am adding another instrument with which I can notch the wall.

A writer without writing is like a snail without a shell. Sure, it's heavy as fuck, and you curse the damn thing as you slime a trail up the garden walk, but damn it, it's yours, it found you, you made it, and it loves you as you love it, and you'd die if someone tore it from your back.
So I've been starting journal entries and abandoning them, beginning stories and deleting them, writing blog entries for an hour and then when the internet craps out and deletes them, just walking away from the computer and making another cup of coffee, sitting down and watching Lost.

Bob practically yelled at me last night to finish the story I started almost four years ago. I kept fighting him because I haven't written on it in so long, I didn't think I had it left. I made a thousand excuses, and then I opened the document and stared at it for an hour.
Tonight I started writing again, and maybe it's garbage, but it's my garbage, and I'm lugging it around until it's done.