SOTD – Norah Jones “You are not my friend”

Norah Jones “You are not my friend”

Help me breathe,
Help me believe,
You seem really glad that I am sad.

You are not my friend,
I cannot pretend that you are.

You made it sting,
Your voice is ringing,
Just like the boys who laughed at me in school.

You are not my friend,
I cannot pretend anymore.

You found the place,
No one should ever go.

I’ll be ok,
’cause when I back away,
I’m gonna keep the handle of your gun in sight.

Another Weekend Come and Gone

That one was faster than average, I think due to spending most of Saturday in a drugged-out haze, in search of some form of sleep. Prescription meds can be a good way to find some rest, but a good way to lose some serious time too.

In other news, I am no better at relating to other people than I ever was, and tend to spend most of my time befuddled, running into walls and banging my head against them. I must really like that. People confound me. But I have it on good authority that I am dealing with some really confounding people, so it’s not entirely my own fault.

Dinner at the Stables on Saturday, for which I was barely conscious, but the food that I came home with tasted good the next day, so I suppose that was a success. Big Ass Indie Craft show was visited, but is mostly a big blurry cloud of felt and string and buttons—aside from the utter FAIL of parallel parking I tried to accomplish in front of the place. Was it my imagination, or was there a cop standing there? I think I ran over a curb too. Let’s see, after that I had another nap, some going out, an extremely ill-advised adult beverage, threw a minor fit, was consoled and then came home and went to bed, all piqued-out. I no longer remember what my issue was, but I was angry about it, dammit, and I was not going to take it anymore. So there.

Sunday was blissful, chilled-out normalcy, yummy brunch, yummy Mexican for dinner and the worst movie I’ve ever seen. And now it’s Monday again, and I resolve firmly to do much better next weekend.

Really.

Not that that sort of vow has helped me out any in the last eight months, but maybe this weekend?

Maybe?

OK what?

OK is this just an insane image/headline juxtaposition, or is it just me?

Wednesday Playlist – Number Songs

Absurdity & Understanding

Pondering my love of the absurd lately. Nothing delights me more than intelligent (or even quasi-intelligent) nonsense. I love a puzzle that can’t be solved, a random delightful quirk to tease my brain. I like it in language, I like it in imagery and I like it in people.

I don’t think things should be easy to understand. If they’re easy to understand, they bore me. Sometimes I like things dark and obscure, and sometimes I like things that are just plain bizarre.

An image from one of my favorite photographers, then and now, Jerry Uelsmann. (http://www.uelsmann.net) Of course he was and is the master of darkroom technique, unlike my rebellious know-it-all self.

When I was a photography major, I remember being very adamantly opposed to using proper darkroom techniques. I had my own grand 19 year-old’s artistic vision, and it did definitely not include 359,000 Ansel Adams shades of gray. At yet another critique my professor said she enjoyed my work, but it wasn’t showing technical competence, since she wanted to see that I could produce something that didn’t look like a Xerox copy. I was arguing with her that I had no interest in photographing mountains and trees and other bullshit and then reproducing them in perfect grayscale. I remember so disinctly the “Aha!” moment that followed what she said to me next.

“When you use proper darkroom technique and have images with a full range of white, black and gray, what you are saying to your viewer is that the world you are presenting to them is an understandable place.”

I couldn’t believe our level of disconnect when I replied to her “But, what if that’s not what I am trying to say?”

Why would I ever say that? Why would I even make that representation, in my art, in my writing, or anywhere else?

I don’t believe that for one minute, that the world is an understandable place. There’s no bigger lie than cleaning things up to present to people as some sort of reassurance that they’re meaningful and simple and can be fathomed. I firmly believe that the world is complex and strange, and the more whimsical things there are in it to confound and delight me, the better. I don’t want simple. I don’t want easily understood. I want the absurd and will be satisfied with nothing less.

Anyway, I’ve written a rather absurd thing that will be up at The Grand Conspiracy tomorrow, and I hope that you enjoy the nonsense with me when you read it.

Tomas and the Onions

Tomas was eating an onion. It was his third straight day of eating nothing but onions, and he was beginning to feel the effects.

For one thing, his piss had started to smell like onions. For another thing, he was really sick of onions.

They were only the white ones too, not even a variety of yellow and red and maybe a fancy sweet Vidalia. Just plain white onions. At this point he’d settle happily for a leek, or a clove of garlic. He’d like some dandelion greens, or maybe some chicory. He’d eat any damn thing that grew in the damn yard.

He looked morosely at his fingers, clasped around the plain white onion, and then took another big bite from it. He swallowed the juicy mess down. He pondered his index finger again, gave it an experimental lick and then nibbled at it tentatively. It was no good. He lacked the tenacity to bite it right through. Godverdomme! He thought of hurling the onion away in disgust, but then reconsidered and set it gently down on his plate.

Tomas looked over at the dog. The dog was eating steak tartare. He seemed to be enjoying it, too. The tags on his collar rang merrily against the edge of his white porcelain bowl as he devoured its contents. What an annoying sound! Few things had ever been more irritating.

This really was some bullshit. Narrowing his eyes balefully, Tomas glared at the dog and thought it had some damned nerve. He was no fan of dogs in the best of circumstances, and these were not those. Overall, Tomas figured that dogs were good for only two things: incessantly licking their own balls, and all other types of shenanigans.

Tomas’s stomach made awful gurgling noises as he pondered the dog’s dinner, but his gorge rose as he tried to bring the stupid white onion with two bites out of it back to his mouth.

He was not sure if this whole thing was going to work.

Mount Rainier

Mount Rainier

Originally uploaded by rasone

This image has been the background on my pretty pink Vaio laptop almost since I got it – and I don’t know if I will ever change it. It’s just a beautiful, perfect image, and I wish I lived inside it.

Countdown

It was seven hours and forty-two minutes until the party started, and so far Cassandra’s day had felt like a series of stops on a low-budget bus tour of a grotesquely humidified Hades.

She squeezed her car into the yellow-striped space closest to the doors and stepped out into a hot swamp of exhaust fumes, festering overfilled garbage cans and fevered consumerism. The stench of it smacked her wetly in the face, but she barely noticed.

The mall was chilled and busy, humming with people who needed things, or at least needed to need something. Her first stop was the clothing store where she hoped to find a dress. It was three hours and fifty-six minutes until the girl working behind the counter was breaking up with her boyfriend. It was three hours and fifty-two minutes before she would come home an hour early and surprise him jacking it on the couch  – having pathetically frantic phone sex with that whore. Three hours and fifty-four minutes until he explained to her quite calmly as he zipped up his jeans that, yes, he’d been seeing that whore on the side —and he really thought they both needed some time to think about things. In the space of those four minutes, in the dirty living room with an empty bag of potato chips on the floor, the last two years and four months would somehow come to mean nothing. But for now the girl smiled, distracted and polite, and asked if Cassandra needed any help. She did not. She found a suitable dress that she bought without trying on.

As she left she saw a young woman sitting on a black lacquered bench, patiently waiting for her husband to exit the video game store. It was three years, four months and a day since they’d been married.  It was four years, eight months and nine days since she had realized that afternoon by the lake that this man was the only possible mate to her soul. It was twenty-six days and two hours until he would be crushed to death in the small blue car that got such great gas mileage. It was twenty-nine days until she would sit on a red overstuffed pew in a cavernous church, numbly listening to a strange man wearing hair spray praise her dead husband, whom the man wearing hair spray had never met. The woman turned as her husband came out of the store, excitedly describing his purchase, but then her phone rang and she shushed him while she answered it. She chatted with a friend as they walked away together, their hands seeking each other out automatically, their steps falling into an easy matched pace.

Cassandra stopped next at the nail salon, and there she chose a color that matched an accent in her new party dress. For twenty-seven minutes she laid back in a vibrating chair while a small dark-haired woman (Three years until her first child was born. Eighty-six years until that child died.) tended to her toes. She looked over at a young girl whose mother was getting a manicure. The girl was seven and wore an outfit almost identical to her mother’s. She swung back and forth in the chair, feet dangling off the ground. It was another seven years, three months, twenty-two days and thirteen hours until a sweet, sweaty boy at a pool party would convince her that yes, everyone was doing it and, no, you couldn’t get pregnant your first time. Turns out you could, actually.

Cassandra’s last stop was the cosmetics counter at the mall. Tapping brightly colored nails on smudgy glass, she waited for the sales assistant to fetch her particular shade of red lipstick. It had been seven weeks and three days since the assistant was told that the lump under her arm was something more than nothing, and it was another seventeen months and nine days until she would be told that, despite her young age, the cancer had spread too quickly and there was nothing to be done. Impatiently, Cassandra waited to pay. She had things to do, places to be. It was six hours and seventeen minutes until the party started and she still had to go to the grocery store. There really wasn’t much time.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

The Grand Conspiracy | Countdown

I have a new post up at The Grand Conspiracy today. It would please me greatly if you’d go and read it!

It was seven hours and forty-two minutes until the party started, and so far Cassandra’s day had felt like a series of stops on a low-budget bus tour of a grotesquely humidified Hades.

via The Grand Conspiracy | Countdown.

An “Aha!” Moment, and the SOTD

Can’t write this week. Thought it was because I had no time, but I realized it’s more about something else.

I’m happy.

So this week every idea I’ve had to write about is a non-starter because my writing is normally always about misery or pain or confusion, and I don’t feel any of those things right now. I am sure I will again soon, but this week I am glad to be blocked, just a little.

Unicorn – Apoptygma Berserk

You hold the candle I once lit
You shine your light
When you forgive I cry
You run your fingers through my hair
And tell me it’s worthwhile, it’s all worthwhile

Even when I hate myself
Even when I feel your pain
when you cry
Even when my heart is cold
You assure me it’s worthwhile, it’s all worthwhile

You see what can’t be seen
You repair the damage done to me…

A Conversation

It started out as a conversation about curtains, and ended up as a conversation about everything he’d ever done wrong.

She didn’t know what business he had opining on curtains, anyway. She’d only asked as a sort of rhetorical silence-filler, more to hear herself thinking out loud than really elicit his judgment. Who knew he’d have anything to say about anything?

For his part, he just didn’t like the god-damned curtains, considering them not only ugly, but somehow oppressive and stifling. If part of the money going to purchase them was his, he’d go ahead and say if he didn’t like the fucking things.

“It’s not as if you ever gave a damn about this place until five minutes ago.” she bit out spitefully, wrapping fistfuls of fabric into great messy wads and shoving them back into the plastic packaging.

“Excuse me for not wanting to live in some kind of crazy funeral parlor-slash-funhouse, all right?” He stood with his arms folded, a bit concerned with where this conversation was suddenly heading, but semi-determined to see it through now that he’d started it.

“This is just like you.”

Oh shit. She was hissing the words out now. And it was never good when things were just like him. Or he was just like things. Neither of those were good. Maybe he should back off.

“Look all I said was that maybe…”

“Oh I HEARD what you SAID.” White and red plastic bags crackled violently under her hands as she finished packing the offensive curtains away; and then he watched her stalk out to the hallway, heard the closet door being yanked open, the bags thrown inside, the door slam shut. It couldn’t really slam because of the carpet in there, but he heard how she intended to slam it, all the same.

“What you seem to not consider, what you seem to never consider as you spout your opinions about the things I do, is that perhaps home decorating is not your fucking forte, and you should stick with picking out gatefold LPs or Japanese-only pressings of CDs no one ever wanted to listen to, or overpriced television sets that take up half the motherfucking wall. So why don’t you confine your opinions to the type of goofy game console we need to buy, or what new version of some other time-wasting piece of crap we need to invest money in this week? Maybe those things can be your areas of expertise, hmm?”

She was back in the room and doing some kind of self-righteous straightening up now. Pillows were being forcefully fluffed, this morning’s paper was being viciously tidied into a rigid, angry pile. How could she make newsprint rigid? He couldn’t even square it up again after he read it.

“…and maybe you can leave the curtains to me? Since apparently you were only happy enough to live here with bare fucking windows for more than a year? Letting the neighbors look in? Making it impossible to even sit in this room in the morning?”

Now every sentence sounded like a question, but he knew better than to answer.

“But no. No. Even though you can’t get off your ass to do a damn thing, you can certainly talk some shit about what I take the initiative to do. Although when you’re sitting there in the dirtiest jeans I have ever seen, because you haven’t done laundry in more than a month, I really would suppose you might have something more important to think about. Really.”

Now it was her turned for crossed arms, and they faced off at each other across the room like wary gladiators.

Heh. Wary Gladiators. That would be a good band name. His mind wandered pleasantly away from this angry little room.

“You inconsiderate ass, were you listening to a word I just said?”

Whoops.

“Yes, I heard you. I shouldn’t be doing… things. I should do other things, and leave these things to you.”

“Are you being a fucking smart ass?”

He shrugged ruefully “Not on purpose?”

“Look.” She was quiet and calm now.

Calm was very bad, and set all his skin to prickling.

“I just don’t think this is working.”

Wait, how did we get here? His heart was beating furiously now, his attention laser-focused as all of the blood went rushing either into or out of his head – he couldn’t tell which direction it was going.

“No… sweetheart no. It’s just curtains. They weren’t so bad. I didn’t really look that closely. Let me see them again.” He was all flop sweat and appeasement now. This wasn’t right. This was some weird nightmare argument. Where was the morning alarm? He wanted to roll over and cuddle against her back, to inhale that warm smell at the base of her neck and plan a lazy Saturday in bed together. This was definitely not right.

“It’s more than that. It’s everything. It’s the things you do.” She looked away now, her eyes inspecting the carpet, which he suddenly remembered her asking him to vacuum. A few weeks ago.

“It’s the things you don’t do.”

She looked back at him and he saw a terrifying thing on her face. He thought it might be resignation.

“I’m unhappy here. Being with you makes me unhappy.”

He sat down heavily on the sofa, stunned.

He’d always thought all conversations should have an emergency reset. It seemed he was a little too late to put that plan into action.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

New Conspiracy Today!

As always, I would love to know your thoughts! :-)

The Grand Conspiracy | A Conversation

It started out as a conversation about curtains, and ended up as a conversation about everything he’d ever done wrong.She didn’t know what business he had opining about curtains, anyway. She’d only asked as a sort of rhetorical silence-filler, more to hear herself thinking out loud than really elicit his judgment. Who knew he’d have anything to say about anything?For his part, he just didn’t like the god-damned curtains, considering them not only ugly, but somehow oppressive and stifling. If part of the money going to purchase them were his, he’d go ahead and say if he didn’t like the fucking things.“It’s not as if you ever gave a damn about this place until five minutes ago.” she bit out spitefully, wrapping fistfuls of fabric into great messy wads and shoving them back into the plastic packaging.“Excuse me for not wanting to live in some kind of crazy funeral parlor-slash-funhouse, all right?” He stood with his arms folded, a bit concerned with where this conversation was suddenly heading, but semi-determined to see it through now that he’d started it.

continued at…  The Grand Conspiracy | A Conversation.

Clean, Clear, Cloudy

It wasn’t like she wasn’t going to drink it. She was looking at the bottle and pondering whether she was going to drink it, but really the decision was made and it was going to be drunk. It was already drunk, in the finality of reality, just not yet in the present tense.

The bottle was clear and cold and so was the liquid inside. What it did to her was hot and decidedly murky rather than anything crystalline. But that was afterward. The crisp burn of that initial drink always presented the razor-sharp illusion that clarity would be forthcoming— although that had never before been the case. Maybe this time.

So she was going to drink it. It was inevitable. And yet still she pondered the bottle, the glass, the counter top, debating. He’d only left a moment ago. He could come back. Anything could happen really.

He wasn’t coming back, but he could. There was no law of physics preventing his return. Except the one that declared that it wasn’t going to happen.

She resented the space he left. She resented the silence, not full of his words. Not full of his sounds, his smell, his energy. She resented him for being not-there, for daring to go. She resented herself for her dependence. And she contemplated the bottle, the thing that would fill up the space and blot out the empty house. She was going to drink it. Drink it all.

She fingered the glass, feeling it warm slowly under her hands, seeing it smudge with the oils from her skin. The smudges bothered her. They didn’t fit this tidy picture. She picked up the soiled glass and rinsed it in the sink, drying it with the cloth that hung there specifically for that purpose. She set it, newly pristine, back down next to the bottle and listened for the sound of the unopened door. No, he wasn’t coming back. And she was going to drink this bottle of liquid magic and forget that fact.

She picked it up, unscrewed the lid and inhaled deeply of its contents, which she then poured quickly down the kitchen drain. Yes. She was going to drink it all. One of these days, when he was busy being gone. But apparently not today.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

Clean, Clear, Cloudy

New post of mine up at The Grand Conspiracy. Pretty happy with this one, love to know what you guys think!

It wasn’t like she wasn’t going to drink it. She was looking at the bottle and pondering whether she was going to drink it, but really the decision was made and it was going to be drunk. It was already drunk, in the finality of reality, just not yet in the present tense.

The bottle was clear and cold and so was the liquid inside. What it did to her was hot and decidedly murky rather than anything crystalline. But that was afterward. The crisp burn of that initial drink always presented the razor-sharp illusion that clarity would be forthcoming— although that had never before been the case. Maybe this time.

Read more here

The Choices We Make

OK so here’s a story about how the choices we make affect us in unexpected ways.

Tuesday night I made a decision to be social way past my bedtime. I also chose to drink almost an entire bottle of wine.

I chose to protest the end of social activities with “Oh, it doesn’t matter, I don’t have to get to bed early.”

As a consequence, I was as worthless as a dessicated sponge mop all day on Wednesday. Worthless at work, brain fog, no higher cognitive powers at all. So I chose to come home and take a nap.  But I had also chosen to turn off my air conditioner, so I was hot and sweaty and tossing and turning and my nap was unfulfilling. I was still tired. So I chose to go out and get some chai and do some writing at the nice, cool Gelateria, because I had to get something done for The Grand Conspiracy today. That went well. But still I was sleepy. Then I came home and took a shower. When I got out of the shower I faced the prospect of dealing with my hair (+/- six hundred hours of hard labor) shaving my legs and then liberally applying lotion all over. I chose to skip the lotion, because it would save me five minutes and I just wanted to go fall in bed, dammit.

That meant this morning my legs were dry and itchy. So I chose to scratch them. And I scratched them so hard I chipped a nail. And now I have to go to a work luncheon with a chipped nail, like a total trashy hobag. So this is what I get for trying to be social. Do you see?

Protected: Dark Night of the Soul