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Because this is a perpetual day of silence, with the tape strapped over your mouth to keep from lying, lying, lying.  Because to open, to speak, to sing, would be lies.  And you are not a deceiver, you will try to reassure yourself every minute of every day.  To breathe would be lies.  Because no one knows the difference but you.  Quell your harmonies.  Still your dancing feet.

Because if you cannot speak your honesty, at least do not scream the lies.  Be still, appear reverent, while your heart burns with the knowledge that you lie to everyone, every day, by not coming to terms with the very person you are.

mundane stories from everyday life

today

  I used the drain cover in my shower

  as a tiny cage

  to capture and then kill

  a crane fly

  that was trying to touch me.

  it was very successful.

other worlds are possible

On the far side of Tarbes, a tag artist had been at work.  Funky Chunky Mazee was the signature, and through the French, we couldn't figure out if Funky was saying that graffiti was an art, so in these days when art is a crime, that makes even noble Picasso a beast . . . or if what she meant was actually long live graffiti, the true art, and fuck Picasso that pretentious art world asshole.  Funky's second message was clearer: Think for yourself . . . contest the authorities, advised Funky.  Hibickina and I concurred with our absent new friend.  We were inspired to take the airbrushed ads on the wall behind us in our own inky tagging hands.  But the work day had just let out, and there were too many people on the sidewalks, hurrying past each other in high heels and wrinkled slacks.  I stood between the rows of glossy ads and the busy people who were inadvertently guarding them.  Everyone looked tired or worried and I thought again about the force of fear connecting all of us. 

When we peel back all the layers of pain and distrust and neurotic surface fears, what lies beneath is that infinite primal terror of being stuck forever with no love.  We have built our societies on the pursuit of success: traditionally that's meant beauty for women and power for men, although increasingly these overlap.  Daily, we see around us the dismissal of the ugly, the weak, the old, the powerless.  So we know that one day it could and can and will be us who are dismissed.  Whether we have the tools to fool everyone until we are old, or whether tomorrow someone sees our cracks and stains and rejects us, the fear of isolation is valid because all around us are images confirming that isolation is our destiny.  Buy your way out of isolation, out of dismissal and anonymity, say the corporations.  Try this product, this shampoo, this razor, this cellphone, this car . . . blah blah blah.  Buy in.  But the billboards of sexy girls gaining the attentions of powerful men are empty promises of reward when below them an old woman sits along at a bus stop. 

Corporations sell us tools to aid our division into leagues of power and beauty.  But they lose customers when people start crossing the lines of their own volition.  Often stories are the ways that lines get crossed. Stories enable us to imagine how it might feel, for a moment, to be the teller.  They show us all the places where we overlap and help us understand the places where we don't.  They offer us insight into other times and places, and through their intimacy, they make other worlds real.  They show us that other worlds are possible. 

Stories and streets are powerful venues for contradicting the imminent doom of loneliness.  The public art we make of ourselves in the street, the languages of our bodies tracing postures and assuming them, the paths of our eyes grazing each other, are either participatory or resistant.  Here, in public, we can choose to change our immediate world by remaking our myths and telling our own stories, by remembering how to ask and listen, and by learning to show our most real faces to each other and celebrating them.  Show your warts and you defy the very process of airbrushing the truth.  Risk smiling at the person sitting next to you on the bus, and immediately the message of isolation is undermined.  Not just for the two of you, but also for those watching this unusual event unfold.  The moment we notice that we can make fresh choices every minute, the moment we take Funky's advice and think for ourselves, it's easy to see that we're all in this together.  Isolation was somebody else's bad idea. 

-off the map

I love everything about this book.  Cover bent back, pages annotated with blue pen, Powell's sticker on back.  You can borrow it when I'm done.

stamp

There’s ink on my skin that’s fading slowly, a rubber stamp instead of a needle.

It catches my eye like a shadow,

Like when you’re driving and the sun comes in through the windshield and hits the “you’ll need an oil change when –“ sticker just perfectly and casts it onto your body like a wound.

But this moves with me

Even in the dark.

thoughts on the next five months

I feel like we're all on this conveyor belt, moving towards the end and we're moving at different speeds, and at graduation we're going to fall off the end, and it's ok because we're not falling off the end off a cliff or anything awful but we just sort of tumble off with a bit of a bump and land in this field.  And some people sprint off and hop right on another conveyor belt, and some people wander around a little dazed and then start marching off their own direction.  And some people hit the ground running and jump right into a new activity.  But I'm scared that I'll tumble off the end and just sit there, paralyzed with fear, unable to move the slightest bit, not sure where to go or what's next or how I'm even supposed to start to try and figure that out.  Like, I don't think I can explain how fucking scary this is for me.  I am literally terrified.  Writing this down is scaring the shit out of me.

Oh man.

I've been training my entire life for this moment but in spite of that I have no idea what to do.  Maybe it will make more sense soon?  Maybe things will fall into place.  Or maybe I'm just going to have to be in limbo for a few months and figure that out.  And that will be ok, and I'll figure it out and volunteer and see people and interact with the world.  I won't be sitting in a dark corner with no one around, rocking back and forth, ripping out my hair, while trying to figure out the answers to life's big questions.  I'll still be living.  And I'll figure things out.  And they're not going to look like plans I would make if I was even making plans so it's ok that they don't and that I don't have plans it's ok it's really ok everything will be well.  But I still am scared when I think about those things, a lot scared, and I think I needed to write that down and actually admit that that is how I'm feeling most of the time because people keep asking how I'm feeling about school starting again and then graduating and this is how I'm feeling thanks for asking.  I'm so scared.  But I know that it's not going to be the end of my life.  But I'm still scared.  Is that ok?

Please tell me that it's ok because sometimes I feel so alone in the ways that I feel about things but it so often turns out that we're all feeling the same things about the big things in life but we never share those with each other because we can't see inside of one another and we'll never admit to the bad feelings because for some wicked reason we've been taught that we're not supposed to feel these things even though it's so normal and everyone's feeling them why can't we just be honest with one another for once please?

sand

You came home, lugging a suitcase full of sand.  I said, "This isn't exactly what I meant."  You took my hand and told me to stand inside.  "Now you can be somewhere else whenever you need."  It was better than a snow globe.

pin

Yesterday you came home to find me clothes-pinning leaves back onto the branches of the tree that stands outside your front door.  You love the autumn.  You asked me why I was wasting clothes pins.