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august 31. i found out a wonderful thing about turtles yesterday.
there are prides of lions, herds of ponies, passels of 'possums and
schools of fishes, but do you know what a group of turtles is called? a
'pitying' of turtles. i want to be part of a pitying. august 29. Then the whole, chunky body comes out. august 26. sunday is an unday. writing my donkey storeys. drinking my root beer. looking out the window, a little afraid of the man with the crotch cut out of his sweatpants who stands there before me. i wish people could see through houses and see other people sleeping in their beds. i think everyone would like each other a lot more then. august 24. deviant dictionary i was trying to think of the word 'cetacean' today, to describe a zeppelin. if i never write a word down, i usually forget quite how to spell it. my misrememberings cost me dearly. 'Cock sucking'? Oh yes, 'cock sucking'! That's exactly what I meant! Thank you dictionary.com! blegh. august 23. aye, 'tis a nancy-boy he be i for one think i look very smashing festooned in my new pirate garb. august 22. we were going to go visit our chickens tomorrow, but my car's broken down. i feel sick and sad and don't want to drink anything except for root beer. i like being in bed. I put on my new spectacles this morning. They don't seem to work very well. I must look at things for a very long time, holding very still, in order for them to come into focus. Being under them makes me feel like a gloomy little lobster staring out of a tank. I probably need to get the prescription checked. but i feel the wind touch my feet. august 21. A boy ponders through pastures, goes night-walking on the edge of a meadow. He holds common flowers in his hands. A piece of hair is tied around the bedpost. To deliver the parcel of bad dreams. I had to ride my bicycle for a long time tonight, and think. There's no one left to say goodbye to. And I never really said hello to anyone. I rode in circles. I stopped and stared at the dark hill in summer. It makes me sick to my stomach. But people die, too. I should promise not to kill myself, because if anyone ever liked me as much as I liked him, I would hate for them to get that feeling in their stomach when I was gone. How eyes ache for the other side of the glass. A donkey, a comet.. Sarah's too weird to have sex. In some context or another, my sister said that to me while I was driving her to the airport on Sunday. I didn't really protest. I just let it settle into my brains. It was the first time anyone had ever offered up any explanation. I read The Recognitions a few years ago - thousands of pages and I only remember one sentence: Can freaks make love? I wrote it in my notebook, multiple times, like some refrain. Mr. Gaddis never told us whether or not freaks could make love. I sat on the front steps this morning with muffin and lemonade for breakfast. Some of the trees around my house are already shedding. I have picked up three or four orange leaves and put them inside books. One of them I gave to my mom. She lives in a very ugly, artificial neighborhood. The muffin had to be force-fed. I had no appetite. Down the street, I heard the voices of people pruning. I watched bees carrying blood. I came to a sudden resolution that I would never have sexual intercourse with anyone in my whole life. I felt very cheerful about this. By the time the day was over the outlook had changed entirely, and I wanted to have sex with somebody as soon as possible. What is sex like? A mishmash, or a walking wall, of hands and slugs coming towards me. Let sex be a dynamic mishmash of hands and slugs. All my decisions are superfluous anyway. august 20. I'm happy. I'm happy because my toothbrush is red. Then again it's four o'clock in the morning. august 19. I see clearly in artificial darkness. I see you. There are azaleas all around you. It is only a color. You are only a color, hovering or drowning or whatever. You are thumping in the bottom of the boat? Pull shades on all, for human's sakes. Lead the donkey around the room by the ear sockets. I've offered you cyclones; I've dredged up every feeling. You are between me and the world like skin grafted onto skin. The mouth of the harp is all rusty. The albatross had lice in its wings. The reel to real machine was broken by a shaft of light. I've been kissing people in a lot of dreams lately. And feeling it - feeling more than I ever did the time or two in the past that I did kiss actual people. I don't know how to live more than one month or moment at a time. I don't know how to get from anything I imagine to a place outside myself. I resolve to take the boy by the hind neck and pull his mouth into mine. I would've done it too, if I'd had a bowl of cereal for breakfast that left me feeling particularly invigorated. I am always feeling particularly invigorated, and brave and good, until I actually get somewhere. If all it means is I never get to kiss people, that's okay. But I think it means more than that. I think it means what it means that the first time I typed that I accidentally said, I think it means more than dead. The word 'kidnapping' also came to mind. august
17. my whole famawee is in town this weekend. both my sisters plus a pair of decaying demons from north carolina, and some other, miscellaneous demons from maryland. i would rather go into a coma than try to "talk" to any of these strangers, but i feel somehow obligated to show up, as cookies will be present. tonight i ate dinner with my dad and sisters at a yummy nepalese restaurant in st. paul. they have big eyeballs all over the place, but no mango juice. Sister 1: "Why is the skin around your mouth all yellow?" Sarah: "I dunno." Sister 2: "Didja get in a fight?" Sarah: "Yeah! A knife fight!" Father 1: "She's jaundiced." Sarah: "No'm not." Father 1: "When is your doctor's appointment?" Sarah: "Never, so far." Sister 1: "I thought you already went to a bunch of doctors." Sarah: "I did! The eye doctor.. the dentist.." Sister 2: "Next is the gynecologist!" Sarah: "No way." also got told i smelled bad and that my arms were disgustingly thin. someone who works in one of those stores at the mall that sells shit like 'zucchinis 'n' zebra's milk exfoliating body wash' is telling me i smell bad. now it's all lightning but no lightning bugs. i listened to my low album the other night to ward off the ghost and it was sort of pretty. ghosts like low, silly. what'd you think they listened to? weezer? Morning is molting. Clouds tear themselves on the top of the fence. When I wake up in my bedroom there are pieces of grey fur scudding across the wooden floor. The breath on the windows smelt all of tangerine peels and cigarettes. Rotten cabbage and half a donut waiting in the sludge beside the gate. I miss opossums. They were very magical. They came out of the woods at night, all by themselves, and sometimes one accidentally got trapped in an empty trashcan. The next morning we would set him free. It was a spectacle worthy of the greatest excitement! A morning with a 'possum in the trashcan was better than christmas for me. I'd sit in the driveway near the staggered railroad ties that stepped down into the woods, and my dad would slowly tip the trashcan over on its side. It would take forever for the opossum to come out once the trashcan was lying down. My dad always said 'possums were very shy. I thought they were shy too, but not timid. When a 'possum emerged from the trashcan, he was very curious despite the strange things around him. He paused, and sniffed, and squinted at the sun. Of course you could tell he had not had a good night's rest at the bottom of the soggy trashcan in a pool of blackened gruel. His lovely pale fur had been ground into with slime and ashes! And his whiskers drooped, and his eyes were full of sadness, but I thought he was beautiful. My dad always had to say something mean about opossums. "Ugly summsabitches." "No," I'd hiss, "'e's pretty." Sardine-colored creature. I never saw one run. They'd amble out of the trashcan and make a beeline back to the woods, to whatever pile of sticks sufficed for home. They always did seem a little out of place in the daytime, tail dragging through last winter's dead leaves. If you really want to see a 'possum, you must stare into the night without detours or meanderings, searching the treescape for a ghost in a gypsum sweater. august 16. befuddled by donuts once again last night i dreamt that somebody loved me. but i can't figure out who it was. i.. nevermind. i like leaves. that's it! i like leaves and candy! i wonder if i'll ever see my best friend again. august 15. After her teeth were broken with pincers, she was given the choice of renouncing Christ or being burned alive; she lept onto the fire herself. and if that's not good enough for you, there are no less than three different saints you can pray to for protection against diseased cattle! that ought to come in handy! august 14. the secrets of the "muppet crotch" have been withheld from me for too long. so i found them out myself: Your crotch has "googly eyes" and it wants to eat cookies. i actually imagine my crotch is mostly full of dust and cobwebs and flocked with moths. some ginger snaps might be nice. got a bunch of chemicals hurled into my eyes this morning. made me dizzy. now i'm eating hummus and watermelon! august 13. It makes me happy you're vegan. Most of all for the animals but also because almost every animal rights activist in my town loves bright eyes very much. I'll let you know if we ever start a campaign focusing on the enormous battery cage operation in nebraska or go there for investigations and to do rescues. Then who knows? Saddle Creek rocks againt exploitation of chickens or somesuch. Migrating clouds. Mumbling anteaters. One night only. your eye open and ringing. he trots forward like a hunting fox: I didn't know you were even aware of the existence of James Dean. some slug jumping through the grass at night? stopping to lick his paws? Last summer was a magic lettuce long before the invention of ice. The year they sent us to school in a trailer was the same one that baby fell down a well. And we sat in the trailer, monitoring her plight. I dreamt an ocean with many hands harvesting.. I stopped to point out the place in the playground where I thought people had sexual intercourse. At first I wanted to go there. The grass was flat. In other parts it seemed sewn by tails. A portrait of us with our brother's entrails. Like donkeys had been rolling there. I'm worried about my stupid teeth now. I never noticed it, but the very back ones on top barely even come out past the gumline. august 12. carefully-wrought crickets available
for perusal! Tonight I made a story called Extinction of the Crickets which is fully illustrated and reenacted by badgers. It was inspired by a life-changing moment when a cricket jumped on my stomach. If you want one you'll have to ask, because it comes in paper format only. i start to wonder about the breadth of the world when my own webpages are the only things google turns up when i need something. vegan eiderdowns aren't in big demand, apparently.. august 10. blast. there were only about three shows i wanted to see this whole summer, and now the second i am moving to vermont who should be coming to town mere hours after i leave but built to spill, and bright eyes two days later. blast and more blast. buckets of blast. i guess it's appropriate, though. this is probably the end of all that. you know the only shows i'll be seeing at bennington are gonna be avant garde ukulele performance pieces or something. well. if'm lucky. august
9. Holy smokes. You won’t believe the crazy shit they do at the dentist these days. Apparently, all the allure has gone out of simply having clean, healthy teeth - now they have to entice people back with the temptation of pointless technological devices to stun and amaze them! They still choke you with lifesize pieces of magnetized plastic and give you worm-eaten polar bears to cuddle while they scrape into you with their sharp metal sticks, but it’s much more interactive than all that now. It used to be the patient never had much more involvement than maybe choosing which flavor of fluoride they’d like to suffocate on for half an hour, but this is the 20th century! Er.. 21st, I guess. Anyway. I walked into the office and sat down, and there was a big television on the wall opposite me. I didn’t think anything of it, and if I had, it probably wouldn’t’ve been something like, "Oh boy! I hope they’re going to project live-action footage of my teeth on this television set by means of a gazillion dollar microscopic camera set on the end of some magic wand shoved inside my mouth, because hey, if you’re gonna put all this other crap in there you might as well make a movie of it. Capture all the toothy scenery and swishing saliva there is to see!" Well, that’s just what they did. The lady thought I’d be all impressed, but I really wasn‘t. "Ugggfh! Gfffh! Thaf mah mouf?! Ifs aww waffery! UCK!" "You need to simmer down for me, ’kay?" "Nuh! Mafe it fop!" No one wants to see that kind of stuff. It is like watching your organs shimmer and secrete beneath a bright light. Ubersturbing. This was punishment of some sort; torture or humiliation. We went on an entire field trip of my teeth. "See how your back molars are worn smooth? That’s from clenching your jaw all the time. We can make you a rubber mouthpiece to wear at night!" So this is like a geography lesson, I thought, where the mineral deposits have been eroded by decades of saliva washing over them in waves. Or is it like the white cliffs of Dover? After about five minutes the thing stopped working, and a still of the flat tooth froze on the screen above the words ‘no input’. I suddenly felt so proud of myself for grinding it down like that! I was a Renaissance sculptor! I started hee-heeing because the lady couldn’t get the camera to work anymore. It escalated into braying. I think I made her mad ’cause then she turned on me with all her scratchy tools. In the end I got rewarded with a cool stegosaurus sticker and the offer of a new brush. "Let’s see what I have here.. would you like green or blue or purple?" "I already have a toothbrush." "You don’t want a new one?" "No.. mine has a fox on it!" "Ah. That’s much cooler." "Yes." Suffice to say I politely passed on the mouthpiece. I'm never going to the dentist again. august 8. i'm going to see the dentist tomorrow for the first time in about six years. i've never had a cavity. my orthodontist died in a helicopter crash, so he watches over my teeth like an angel! there is a patron saint of teeth but i can’t remember its name. somehow managed to practically shred the entire arm off my old nightgown while sleeping.. and i woke up and thought it was like james dean's head, because they said it was almost completely severed from the rest of his body when he died. august 6. sorry everyone. i'm really tired of computers right now. everytime i sit here i just end up typing long, feisty things on message boards in defense of lobsters and vegan marshmallows. i am beginning to realize how much it's going to wear me out being around people who aren't vegan, much less animal rights activists.. but then i remember for january and february and a half i'm interning at farm sanctuary! my spirits will be replenished by donkeys! august
4. it feels like it should be someone's birthday today. august 1. the rain is the boy's ghost kissing your shoulders with tongues of hay and grass, weathervanes and lightning rods. july june may april march february january & december & norris & the dreaded biscuits |
