Incongruent

(written 7-25-12)


It is the plight of my book-reading film-nerd soul that an improperly resolved storyline hurts me in my anger place.

Bad ending make Keri cry hurt!

Heh. There’s so much to talk about, so many words that I need to squeeze out...but jumpstarting my pen is hard this morning.

I suppose because all of the hallways and staircases in this house of mine are shifting again, and, as usual, I am helpless to do anything but stumble blindly into the uncertainty before me. Wandering and, in a practiced dance with futility, wondering where everything will be once the dust settles.

Family of souls, tangled, eternally resonant.


It strikes me as interesting, the mild draw that humans feel to a descent into madness.
As if, ever present in all of us, there is a voice that speaks to us of chaos and absurdity.
Destruction.

The not-talked-about relationships between movies (all of American culture really) and violence-versus-sex have been on my mind a good amount lately, and the ways they directly affect me have been directing my trains of thought. For instance, the idea (and vivid accompanying mental image) that I, along with my fellow humans, accept that asphalt and concrete and buildings all around us are normal things, silently rejecting the truth and facts of sizzling pavement glop being poured over the face of the Earth. Scorching and burning and melting.

It may sound like a stretch to connect these two thoughts, stretching a thread between violence in movies and parking lots, but as I was pondering the gnarled and marred flesh of the ground underneath the sidewalk I walk on, I couldn’t help but think of Harvey Dent’s open and pitted jawline. Of Gustavo Fring’s bare cheekbones laid visible beneath rent skin.

I see these things as congruous.

(Congruently gruesome, the cruel some pay
no mind to what’s on mine.)

As for incongruent...watch me now as I put on a skirt and some good sensible shoes to go help make someone else’s fortune. Watch me as the steam slides up out of my coffee cup and up into the air, my mouth open and brain absent.

Ugly in the Light

(written 7-19-12)


Ugly in the Light

clarity's eluded me the entirety of this plight
i held myself up like a saint just fighting the good fight
but standing here before this mirror i see another side
in the dark i dwell and always tell of lessons there to learn
i took a seat and patiently awaited there my turn
but with the spotlight over me i'm starting to discern
i'm ugly in the light
ugly in the light
in darkness i'll reside
so ugly in the light
so shoot my love up like a drug and feel its glorious high
your head will spin as you begin to feel the stars align
but soon you'll wake, your heart will break and the beauty there will die
i've something to confide
i'm ugly in the light
so in darkness i'll reside
so ugly in the light

The lyrics and the grit of this song really speak to me. Particularly the third stanza... it restates in plain english a feeling that I’ve had inside my chest for a while. I feel sometimes like there is some primal jungle power inside of me, a sensuality touched by Bast and a hedonism fueled by Bacchus himself. A mischievous desire to touch all and love all but in a way that they are not sure they have been touched or loved, but they know somehow they've changed.

So shoot my love up like a drug and feel its glorious high
your head will spin as you begin to feel the stars align
but soon you’ll wake, your heart will break and the beauty there will die

I’m listening to the song I linked, “Ugly in the Light” by Katie Grace Helow. Feeling...quite peaceful. I’ve got the gentle body hum of someone who spent a long time on their feet and finally gets to sit down. Kicked back, I watch the late summer afternoon quietly drifting into view through our plate glass porch window. A golden ochre hue of dog lays on the carpet beneath my feet, lazing in the silent happiness that I too am feeling. Silent. Happy. 


I know the urge to touch your face and feel your being’s shape
I am an unknown stranger, but you feel the comfort take
And soon you will know me
And soon you will know

Hey you, come here and talk to me

(written in May)

A different day, another viewpoint.

I think that it’s brainless
To assume that making changes
in your window’s view will
give a new perspective.

I agree with this in varying degrees on varying days of the week...for instance, it’s awfully hard to have anything other than a contented smile on my face with this view.

I so greatly wish I had a beard to stroke so that I could rest against a tree in Memorial Park on a gorgeous Sunday in May, wearing flannel and plucking at a ukulele in between smoking cigarettes. I’m trying hard not to be creepy but not staring at you is equally difficult as you drum on your tiny guitar to the music in your earphones.

Oh man. Sometimes I forget that real life is more entertaining than television. I say this as I sit on a sheet spread out on the grass of Memorial Park, notebook out, watching the people around me. All of them different and every time I people-watch the characters randomly refresh. There is the aforementioned beard-stroker-uke-picker, there is a guy practicing moves with a small orb that are straight out of Labrynth. I kinda want to go sing “Dance Magic Dance” to him but alas I shall refrain. :)

I like to imagine that every stranger has passionate sex with the partner of their choosing.

How do you shout to a fellow person out chillin’ in the park “hey, we should chill together, my name is Keri!” or maybe perhaps “I am down to do the things you want to do, and I am content to lay in silence next to you!”

Home is wherever I'm with you

(written back in January)


Home is a familiar feeling, a state of mind that I reside in. Home is a constant, even through moments when I feel like I lost my key. Even in these tear-blinded wandering moments when I feel like a little kid walking home after school only to find I’ve been locked out...

But I’m never locked out.

The best thing about the home I’ve built (and I have built it; painstakingly, organically, slowly and joyfully) is that it follows me around, like it’s been surgically attached. I’m never more than a day or two out from catching a glimpse of home in my peripheral view and going “oh yeah! Check you out, hot stuff. You awesome home, you.”

Home is resting my freezing toes against your warmth as you play your silly boy video games. Home is having my headphones in and tapping my popsicle feet on your bare thigh. Home is the fact that I have a quota to fill per hour of letting you catch me smiling at you. Home is the fact that, in the rare moments this occurs, you let me cling against your chest with silent tears tracing down my face and dripping off my nose because the world got a little heavy for a minute. Even though I’m sure it scares you when you see me losing against the storm clouds... but I think you understand now that by your presence alone you bolster me with the strength to fight them off. I joke about it “filling my meters” when we get skin to skin and I cling tight to you pressed up against that nook between your head and your collarbone, but I’m dead serious. I honestly can’t remember how I used to cope with life before I had the evanescence of your warmth, the luxury of your touch.

Home is cradling your head in hats made with my hands, knowing that I have touched literally every inch of the yarn that keeps you warm.

House of Leaves - Page 49

“You okay, Truant?” Lude asked.

But I saw a strange glimmer everywhere, confined to the sharp oscillations of yellow and blue, as if my retinal view suddenly included along with the reflective blessings of light, an unearthly collusion with scent and sound, registering all possibilities of harm, every threat, every move, even with all that grinning and meeting and din.

A thousand and one possible claws.

Of course, Lude didn’t see it. He was blind. Maybe even right. We drove down Sunset and soon veered south into the flats. A party somewhere. An important gathering of E heads and coke heads. Lude would never feel how “empty hallways long past midnight” could slice inside of you, though I’m not so sure he wasn’t sliced up just the same. Not seeing the rip doesn’t mean you automatically get to keep clear of the “Hey I’m bleeding” part. To feel though, you have to care and as we walked out onto the blue-lit patio and discovered a motorcycle sputtering up oil and bubbles from the bottom of the pool while on the diving board two men shoved flakes of ice up a woman’s bleeding nostrils, her shirt off, her bra nearly transparent, I know that Lude would never care much about the dead.

And maybe he was right.
Maybe some things are best left untouched.

Of course he didn’t know the dead like I did. And so when he absconded with a bottle of Jack from the kitchen, I did my best to join him. Obliterate my own cavities and graves.
(obliterate my own gravities and caves)

But come morning, despite my headache and the vomit on my shirt, I knew I’d failed.

Inside me, a long dark hallway already caressed the other music of a single word, and what’s worse, despite the amazements of chemicals, continued to grow.

Important

7-13-12


I’m sitting in Centurion Cafe (where Rhianna works) forcing myself to eat some sausage and write some words real quick about this silly week that I’ve had; starting with jumped-to conclusions and a touch of personal stigmata, ending with reconciliation and a laugh at symbolism.

I resent what inspires me;
the struggle between apathy
and irony

For the record, little notebook, I feel back to normal and, dare I say, at peace. I mean yeah I know that I don’t know anything about anything right now, but I know who my friends are and who my love is.
This is important.

All that being said... I love House of Leaves. It’s rare that a book is dense and easy and light and oh-so-dark, all at the same time.
Like...suddenly being made aware of the very limited scope of human sight. Suddenly being made aware of the unknowable blackness of “behind” which is always there, always.
In broad daylight.

Oh man, my existence is a puzzle.
Dasein...muss es sein?

Sidenote, here are some things I am currently appreciating. Obviously House of Leaves is awesome, and I equally appreciate that it is Josh’s book and that I spent a half hour this morning and yesterday morning reading it at his apartment. Good creepy goodness, not to mention how immensely satisfying it is to have someone to read/talk books with. It’s fun to livestream my commentary to him, especially when he points out stuff that I missed. I know it’s silly but no one except Jon (and honestly this played a very large part in my overlooking all of Jon's eventually deal-breaking flaws) has interacted with me like this in regards to books... at least no one I’ve dated. I’ve noticed recently that I haven’t been reading. I have stacks and stacks of books that I haven't even looked at since I bought them... poor sad neglected books...lol.

Things I also appreciate... I appreciate cracking a smile on a baby’s face and the way that a toddler falls asleep (though she doesn’t want to) when I stroke her hair and sing to her. I also love when I’m writing next to her and she’s trying to grab my notebook and pen...hooray for toddler life. :)

No words of consequence

7-9-12

Oh Muse, help me tell the tale of a woman who would still refer to herself as a girl. Help me tell the tale of a woman whose heart is large enough for a person to climb inside and make a home, and still somehow big enough for another person to follow...and another and another and another.

Oh Muse, help me shake these ill-conceived thoughts and half-realized epiphanies loose from the crannies. Help me put words to these intense flashes of vestigial emotions in the hopes that I can clear the cobwebs and be done with them. I imagine my brain to be the chaotically organized library of an eccentric professor with stacks of books and papers and torn slips with hastily scribbled memos peeking out all over, and I keep meaning to clean it all out... but it’s not quite that simple. With each stack of miscellaneous memories and ideas lies the distinct possibility that some old trains of thought will get roused, stirred, whirring to life like some ancient mechanical widget shaking the dust off and following me around, buzzing around my head. I can’t help but wonder if every human silently deals with the parade of phantasms lurking in the darker recesses.

Oh Muse, why can’t dead things continue to be dead?

But let me tell you, Muse, that this is no new phenomenon. I have had the undercurrent of Nostalgia flowing constantly deep below the sheetrock I am comprised of for as long as I have had memories to recall. When I was a girl I was nostalgic about being a child (short lived as those days were) and as a young woman I waxed poetic about being a girl, about the “days gone by, lost forever.” And now... and now I am still a young woman. I am a young woman who has read too many stories and fallen in love with too many fictional characters. I see now, I see how this has affected my thoughts. I look around this cluttered library and realize how the fiction and nonfiction sections have all been placed in the same stacks. I see how I have begun to fictionalize real people and give them the same love that I have for storybook heroes. Real people that exist in the same universe as myself, real people that and oft are affected by the ripples of aftershock I feel whenever I accidentally kick open a long closed book.

Oh Muse, help me learn the difference. Help me understand that all there is is this moment that I am in and that in real life a book can only be read once.

But muse...as easy as it is to understand the source of the problem and also the rational path to my own peace of mind... well, it is not so easy after all. It is not so easy when I am cleaning a stack of papers and books and I am suddenly struck by the astounding nature of all of my life, and the idea that love can only be generated. That love, even old and obsolete love, continues to exist and must be accounted for in the history books. Indeed, in order to properly sort out and index this brain of mine, muse, I have to let myself be taken on these involuntary field trips of the psyche.

Unfortunately, and perhaps most vexing to me, I have to take these journeys alone. There is not a soul alive to whom these stacks mean anything besides myself. Even the ones closest to me wouldn’t be able to discern the real meaning of my cranial consumptions, but I don’t expect them to. I am intimately aware that each person’s mind is a booby-trapped playground all their own with an individual set of “shit I can’t bring myself to let go of for unspecified reasons but probably mostly because I’m selfish and stubborn.”

So off, alone, I go.

You may ask, muse, what exactly it is that I’ve been blabbering on about. Well I’m not exactly sure and that is what keeps my fingers in constant motion.

It started the other day when I tripped on a small stack in a far corner, one that I had long thought was archived and dispensed of. So I stopped in my tracks, right then and there, and I got to work. Clearly this was a decision that produced mixed results. Basically, muse, I should have left well enough alone.

Don’t get me wrong, muse. This tale is not one that shatters the earth, it does not have our heroine making terrible decisions or deciding to turn her life upside down solely to chase an extinct feeling...nothing of that sort. Our heroine just wasn’t prepared for the face-to-face meeting that blew through the mental library like a sudden gust of sharp wind, leaving her to shuffle through the now-scattered pages yellowed and musty with age, the pages that HAD been indexed and archived.

The event itself was no major thing. The aftermath, when picked through and objectively observed, was only a slight annoyance. Each moment and each scribbled word carries the maelstrom back into the past where it belongs, where it can’t affect judgement.

On the surface simplicity

Ocean pulls me close and whispers in my ear... the destiny I've chose all becoming clear.

There are feelings that I can't name, emotions too complex for statements or newsletters. Sometimes all it takes is the combination of a song and a scent, and other times it's an eyebrow accidentally raised that says too much.

There are times when the boxes I keep are accidentally opened, out of carelessness or arrogance; boxes that perhaps should have been locked. Smoke creeps out and licks at the new air, salacious and inviting, strands of fluid vapor forming a beckoning finger.

Come.

Ocean reaches for me and I dip a toe in. I dip a toe in because I don't want to fully relent to her clutches, but the shimmering vision of vapor simmering has me shaken and vulnerable.

Ocean pulls me close and whispers in my ear, she whispers to me like the forming storm clouds whisper to the shore. I can see clearly a secret that most reject as her cool lips brush my neck.

Come...come and see the directions of the sea. 
See the waves thrash and break against the shore.

See the currents that would go their own way...
The conflicting crashing currents that all do what I say.

There are dark reaches in my mind that sometimes decide to speak up.
There are dark reaches with tiny fingers that can pry lids off of boxes.
Dark reaches that are awakened by the scent of Irish Spring and the sound of exasperated sighs.