Plathological

bump in the night

Oh god I could die. Can’t make a move in here without walking into a parent. I’m not reacting well to this at all. If I want to make a private phone call I have to hide in the bathroom and speak softly. In lieu I'm communicating left and right through email and I don't think I'm getting myself across very well at all--email being a much lesser form of communication. Oh god. Whatever, oh god. i can't put a single thought together. frustrated as all fuck--what is wrong with me??? i need to calm down. i've been reeling since i got home last night and it's no better now. no part of me feels like myself right now.

It should have been obvious?

“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Staring at the wall,” Mum says.
“Why?”
“Because I like doing that today.”

"you don't know what you have in your hands," my father, re my art.

My parents are here and my place has turned into alcoholic central. As I write this my parents are passed out on the floor, my father in black cords and some form of green belt, my mother in my clock shirt--the one with all the frozen time pieces on it. For two days we’ve been drinking past our weight and buying pink, wing-backed chairs from North Carolina. Last night my father pulled out a rosary from somewhere on his person and held it out in the air between us, asked if I know what it is that I do. Not knowing what he meant by that showing all over my face he then went on to say that I stole that rosary when I was five. He decided to keep it because he thought this stolen rosary would guide him. Earlier in the night, I put the candle back on the table, since I noticed it had been set on the floor. “There was a reason I put this light on the floor,” My father said. “It’s direct light. This light is forward light. It’s the light from my job. Welding is light.” I said I liked welding and kept it on the table and that's when my father said I didn't know what I had in my hands, and my mother said, "She has nothing in her hands. She has nothing. She is empty handed." She spent the rest of the night coming up with contradictions while peeing, saying things to my father or me like, "You know what she is. She is one who has imagination." And, "She's not strange. You just don't understand." And, "You will take amazing photos. I promise you." I was talked about all night as if I wasn't even there. I had to ask my father the Polish word for brave because I had at that moment forgotten it and wanted to say something about my mother to her face. Though I didn't mean to make her cry more than she already was.

he had a tag on his pants! what was i SUPPOSED to do??

Joy-toy has just reminded me about the time we were drunk on Jack Daniels at the auction house and attempted to bid and buy the sales clerk. From hitherto, I resolve never to forget that day again. And am now forever indebted to her for recalling this moment to my mind, which had left the JD auction house memory behind. Thank you, House of Joy.

an important question about the purity test

In regard to the purity test below, did anyone else notice anything strange concerning the checkable options in the final section? They swiftly go from something like double penetration bestiality to piercing your ear. I have been wondering, for almost an entire day, how “piercing your ear” falls into the worst-of-the-worst category. Isn’t piercing your ear something that ten-year-old girls eagerly take part in? I’m not saying ten-year-old girls can’t have ugly metal crap dangling from their ears and participate in double penetration bestiality, I mean, who am I to stop them, but in relation to this purity test making any sense at all and in the even greater scheme of human beings holding the title of The Ultimate Category-Creating Species because we so need to make sense of our environment, I am confused. Unless piercing your ear really is just as disgusting as practicing necrophilia on your dead Aunt, and thus I have been right to avoid having sparkly crap dangling like the last star to ghetto Bethlehem against my jaw-line. My mom has the kind of bottom-line brain that could easily answer this for me. And this is something I just cannot ask her, sadly.

since my parents are coming to visit tomorrow:

i am not a person???

You scored as Neither. You think neither like a man or a woman. What you are you may decide for yourself. Most people will consider you strange, alien, weird or funny. You are probably quite interesting. Neither 82% Either 79% Male 71% Female 36% Should you be MALE or FEMALE?* created with QuizFarm.com

strategies: lost hope all the way

What? Almost an entire conversation about miscarrying glass after making love to superheated sand, sending albinos to sleep to help them find some pigments? Maybe I wasn’t there at all, as a neutral spy. Regardless, my mother’s spine is crumbling, there’s just no other way to put it. And from time to time in this heat, I put my head in the fridge, which smells of stale beer and not much else, makes me more dizzy than the heat itself. My fridge sucks. What the solution to these temperatures is, I do not know. Am starting to consider purchasing a bathing suit for the first time in years. Don’t even know where I would go looking for one, though I see them in window displays from time to time, somewhere around here. Maybe Jenny Lopez would have some pomo-off-neon in a girly way for me at the Bay? Oh god, I hope she dies, she’s falling behind my needs. I think I’m going to take a bus out to the Sooke Pot Holes, swim in my underwear all day and when night comes, dress like a rock and find a bush to sleep in, evade the park patrol. I think it would be best to do this for a week. Though I know for a fact that the “park patrol” up there is a bunch of young boys living on kerosene and grunge albums, so as if they’d do anything to a girl painted grey and in her underwear other than give her beer. I don’t know. I can’t think straight. I don’t belong in the arctic, either. Relatedly, last night, the breeze through my window and onto my bed was the sex. I was in a very bad grade, girl-writhing-for-no-obvious-reason porno, but only to the naked eye. oh god it was good. Last night Graeme was talking about "how you say?" cutting the air with a knife, and I almost went to my kitchen to cut a thickslice of this misery away. I've no doubt it'd be the shape of my ribs, sweat hanging off them like glass beads on an abacus.

coming and going

I dreamt about a horse, the autumn. It was a bay quarter horse, a stallion, which was strange because who rides a stallion through the trails? I was comfortable enough riding it that I mostly controlled it with my heels, the reigns looped loose. When I dismounted it collapsed to its belly by the water buckets and started to talk to me. Said I played too rough. I told him I didn’t understand because neither him nor I knew the direction from the other side of the park to here, where we were now, this basic barn. Could be anywhere. He said he didn’t know either, it was just too hot out for riding, his knees were buckling the whole time.

portraits go boing

if anyone evvvvvvvver wants to model for me please don't be shy to let me know. i'll take mannnnnyyyyy rolls of film of you without hesitation (I will look at it more along the lines of you giving into my deranged needs than you showcasing your no doubt well deserved vanity). i prefer people to nature shots because i feel the former give me more to work with/against, though maybe it's time i get back into scenery as i am learning many interesting things about focus these days and there are many things to see here. anyway. should probably post some scenic shots sometime soon. also i feel a sick need to remind graeme that while he was (and is) away, i have managed to accidently burn a hole into the ass of his pants because i am just that absentminded a woman. by that i mean retardtastic.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

also, this song makes me insanely happy when I’m all nail-biting and stuff:

suger money radio fm!

nuclear reactions

I’ve lost my touch with the South Africans. I’ve forgotten how to communicate with them. Cold fusion supposedly happens at room temperature? It’s well above that in any room now and I don’t know what to say to them anymore. I just do stupid shit like struggle with my outer garments, which are invariably seared to my skin with the sticky-fusion properties of sweat. What’s special about water? my junior high science teacher asked. After many wrong answers from the class, including, surprisingly, mine (in junior high there were a few bubblegum chewing friends I only managed to keep because I let them copy my science homework—idiots. how much gum and lipgloss can you pass around, you little whores? and do i really care enough about gossip to tolerate hanging out with you after school? yes. yes i do.), he just told us: it sticks. Very well, it sticks to the bodies of young, naked girls as they climb out of the shower, hopefully slipping, and falling on their backs. It sticks, but not as much as the memory of you being the biggest sick fuck, ever. WATER STICKS. Well fine, but so does the image of a short and pale polack, about to faint; it sticks onto death, though, inevitably, failing to make headline news: one more girl with too little fluid to make adequate small talk with the South Africans, yet another momentary loss of vision--kerplunk.

busy dying at sea. by that i mean kelowna. hem.

my body my belt of land

I used to think you are an aged thing, and that I myself am aging does nothing for equation. Now, I think I have a good effect on everyone but myself. Maybe my role really is to be muse and maybe that’s a stronger position than I once thought. Or maybe I’m standing with my legs parted on either side and am being drilled straight through the middle, hence making desire both the driving and conquering force in my stillness, and awkward, forward motion—picture a longhaired giant stomping wide-legged across a crop, drought below, eyes too large for the scene her shadow makes on the dryness and ration it casts itself over. Picture her knowing how far she has strayed from her initial speculation. Picture her working this into a loose metaphor of a sofabed located in a room where it's colder than it should be, but being defeated when it comes to preparing the line because she does not know if she's the subject or the object here, and it's made even more confusing by the twofold-unfold functions of both.

sigh. old DB crossprocessed photopit nostalgia. SIGH.

i need better image hosting. photobucket keeps downgrading the resolution of my photos and it's infuriating. anyway, the best part was that he gave me this look that said, "you obviously snuck into the pit with a fake press pass. and that is universally amusing. Because you’re lazy and wicked as all humans are." i use best part loosely--fa fa fa fa fa fafafafafahhhh.

mother, health, my worries

What she thought of her dog, she does not think of herself; the dog’s long dead and she airs on the side of rigamortis, sits with an arid lean-back, as if perpetually receiving quite the blow from the on-call nurse in a waiting room, vending machine around the corner, its hum out of reach. For not being a dog person, she had one. Now she takes supplements to give her what she’s not getting from the sun because she spends daylight working with knives on a counter top, some evenings heading home from a pillrun.
“100 pounds. That’s not healthy,” I say.
“I know,” she says, “I’m not healthy.”
I hold the phone as well as I can against my shoulder, turn my eyes towards the window, what’s left of the rain making its way to the scant puddles distorting the black tar of my courtyard. I’m waiting for her to tell me she has cancer. I’m waiting for her to tell me she has her quiet moments on the brink of affection when she can’t stop smoking, or sitting in front of the piles tenderized meat--or doing both while thinking of the abdomen, the animal fur that no doubt passes over it as she sleeps. Passes over, shedding and waiting to be fed. She drinks two oversized glasses of soy milk a day, just like I told her to but her bone density’s falling faster than the light of a heavy chandelier—electric, its frame centuries old and barely dangling above our heads. I can't be Socratic with her; that's her domain and I can't just throw it back in her face like that.

Every point is infinity? this is a minor technicality. i mean equation.

At one point last night during the beach jam, I pranced over rocks and white driftwood to squat behind the designated peeing log, only to realize, mid-pee, that I was urinating while a woman, a cove away, had a miner’s light on her head, shinning it right on me. Ok. Whatever, baby shine a light on me. I finish doing what I'm doing and zip up my pants and kind of start to wonder what the fuck then prance back to my mickey of rum which is still safely held between Steph’s thigh’s of steel, awaiting my prancy return. M says, Good thing you’re not Pee Shy and I think about this for a second before realizing you learn something new about yourself everyday, and that that was without a doubt one of those moments of acute self discovery. The cove to our left housed a rave. Are they Actually Ravers?, I asked B, disturbed. No. There wasn't a stick of glowing neon on any of them, he said. People imitating ravers who imitate what it’s like to be the biggest loser ever? Holy fuckshit. Amazing. Then I requested an Elliot Smith song for like the tenth time (by then it had become drunken habit. don't ask why--it was supposed to quell something. like loneliness) even though they're like Yeah, we're surprised. We're telling you WE'RE SURPRISED but we don't know any [[bitch shut up]] we're trying to please her majesty over here and you're too busy peeing with coal miners to even pay attention. Or something like that. Anyway, I got home. Somehow/through much cliff action. I got home, listened to my messages and accidentally deleted Xavier's message when he was like two sentences into talking and I still don’t know how. I have never accidentally deleted a message in my life until that moment so it really sucks that it had to be his, especially since I was falling down drunk and really, really damn happy to hear his voice after I had stuffed myself with way too much Slovakian pita out of a grocery bag while walking back. Loose crumbs and bruised knees everywhere. I was like beaten crumb lady. I fell asleep naked, after a long talk with Clarke that only served to make my sexual frustration about 597000 times worse because halfway into the talking I snapped back to sober reality and noticed I was in a "conversation" (Now. Please remind me: who called . . . . . .WHOM, over here? That person has no manners at all. Shame. God. It's way too late to be Calling People. not a one manner . . . &tc. I trudged on, questioning the nether forces of reality I had propelled myself into) with someone I needed to promptly whore myself out to (is how I felt). Now, that just sucked. gosh. wow. take that, szpakattack.

mother right

And if the battlefield was cold. Copernicus, this, is not one serving--the ends are flat like a sprat can, providing not one, but two surfaces to pry back from either side, handheld opener.

running out

Quitting doesn’t work so well; bad theatre in the same time zone.

birthdays

Uhhhhhhhh…so anyway. Now I’m twenty-three (23): heartbreaking work, really. Weak starts like oh, that's a terrifying bang! and so sleeping with both windows locked, shut, then waking to that stalled air. In the mail—cutlery, and bay leaves, etc. Cards, my stack of personal checks. Remaining here, a sludgy blindspot to the clock, its batteries drained, each second dragging its jaw against the kitchen counter more languorously than it should. Tick- - - -ti - -ck. It’s falling behind the hours by the second. Etc. I realize this entry sounds like transcribed autistic speech. You always have the choice of reading it aloud, which I myself have found is more fun than not, the majority of the time. I won’t discuss my weeping because then I’d have to describe, explain (etc.) what a sensitive little girl I am and I’m not up to that--but it was heaving, well into the Greek Tradition, unable to open presents in front of people, too easily touched. And so: thankful, motherfucking grateful, for the privacy. but anyway, it's nice: two, three, (2,3) etc. Last year was nothing if not much too symbolically cyclical--hit a two, reach another. etc.

signed time

If you’ve taken any note, and why should you since this is the type of typographically obsessive thing that I’d only find anomalous and justifiable (if at all excusable) in myself (subconsciously produced, loose textual patterns are barely forgivable--especially when they elicit so much useless, self referential analysis out of a person): I’ve been using question marks sporadically. I’ve noticed myself unable to type them where they would be considered grammatically appropriate. They’re making me itchy so I've been forcing myself through them when I can. I’ve been finding them demeaning in written form---not so much when implied in my speech and nose-to-nose interaction, though I’m too Socratic for my own good. I’m in this state where I’m finding all questions rhetorical. This is a problem. Whenever I am doing something or thinking something I am at least five steps ahead of myself. That’s a rhetorical state of being. Why is this rhetorical state a problem, you ask? I’m always racing to catch up with myself, what I see. Answers are solved before I can even think the questions out fully. I find this happens quite naturally, though the other end of the spectrum is: nothing is ever set in stone for me once it’s done, though it's always done before I even begin. In one sense, I am falling prey to my instinct by living only in instinct and nowhere beyond. I feel I am separating two forms of life here: textual vs. actual and recognizing how I have diametrically opposed physical reactions when I am engaged with the same activity in either form. WHAT THE FUCK? Do you see my problem? My instinct is telling me it's a simple one of transposition and resulting displacement through binary inherent therein.

(I’m actually not sure if you do really see). I mean: god, I've just asked a question, like: I don't know let me apply my state in grammar as for humanity. In other words: being so balanced in two modes (of "reality") makes me hyper unbalanced. And so basically: structuralism (what I have to work with, in all its forms and please excuse the gross pun) is driving me mad, as in: crazy, because its greatest detriment (possible side effect) is loss of vision. Don't say Frank O'Hara didn't warn me, because by god, I memorized that poem of his from the first time I read it: four in the morning, age 15. Now my sightline's all blurred like a used punchcard, just like Frank said it would. Thanks, Frank. You died so strangely for a writer, though I don't ever remember you using the word "punchcard," and I wish that made me feel more than it does when I'm alone, and thinking about it.

Canada Day, Part II:

Would it be at all better if there weren’t perpetual sirens, schizophrenic and/or alcohol fueled screaming and/or caterwauling, accompanied by helicopter after low thumping bladed police helicopter circling my apartment?

Yes, most likely.

Is there anything I can do about it?

Yes, in a loose manner of speaking:

Have fun with anxiety disorder, as in:
Hide.
Hide on my settee.
Sit there for twenty minutes, thinking who are these assholes? before realizing that answer is already known: The Fellow Countrymen (i.e.: whole families, mixing with the usual late-nite crackheads on my precious little block).
Try to eat avocados, not quite ripe.
Mostly fail at the eating.
Leave my windows wide open so I’m at least mildly aware of what’s going on, somewhere out there.

Such as?

A Guido in fuzzy cowboy “hat,” bigger than all my limbs stacked after a massacre, seats himself on the backseat of a white, banana boat convertible parked by the glassed front doors of my building while I read my mail in the lobby. Supposedly, he’s dating the fat cyclist a few doors down from me. I saw him, later, in the grocery store. I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of being made aware of his presence for the second time at all, but I heard someone behind me say, “YEAH! WE CAN MIX JAGGER WITH THAT!” and instinctively turned around to glare my best jagger-is-best-left-alone purist glare, however, upon seeing who it was (NB cowboy hat redux dumbmouthed yokel wannebe wildwest asshole), I fled into the Baking Needs aisle. I hate baking, so don't generally like to see a need being associated with it. But am, as we may not be aware, rather fond of this country. And people who actually know how to bull ride and barrel race. Now, I ask: is this anger or a simple point of logic. I want to go to the bank. I want to get a hot dog. I want To Rest because my landlord is coming early in the morning tomorrow to gather my rent and I don’t want to open the door with smeared eyeliner, all glands reeking of vodka and wearing a skin-coloured kimono again. I want to read in bed. All these actions will henceforth be accompanied by the constant tinge of "wooooooooing" that only comes out of the mouths of people who just don't know how to be drunk because they were never breastfed as children and now vocalizing mimetic aggression is the only way they know how to attract well heeled bitches to their mimetically aggressive, and otherwise wilting, cocks.

by the building

I live alone, in a building constructed to look like an urban valley, fenced in fuse boxes large as puffing chimneys. I’m learning to fall asleep on my back, tilt my chin up towards the window behind the top of my head before I look clean-cut asleep—recognizing the clarity of the stars by the strain of that tight pose, emotions that are both necessary and ridiculous. What more could you ask for than gulls? Spread, white birds that fly all night with barely a caw. Also: Canada Day.