let me lay a little judgement down, let me cast my questions out

don't write for the public, just write.  

don't write for the public, just write.  

don't write for the public, just write.  

don't write for the public, just write.  

don't write for the public, just write.  

don't write for the public, just write.  

don't write for the public, just write. 

don't write for the public, just write. 

don't write for the public, just write.

don't write for the public, just write. 

write as if no one is watching.  

especially your mother's family.

this is what i tell myself tonight as my fingers reach for the keys.  i tell myself: please do not try for eloquence or an even keel.  do not reach toward that horrible expectation to be fucking fair and unbiased and full of benevolence.  i am not a god and don't want the responsibility of one.  though as far as i can tell, gods are really just dead-beats who somehow managed to turn the abuse of neglect in to "mystery".   maybe being a god is the freest thing an entity can be?  still, i prefer the heat of my flesh to the cold skin of aloof perfection.  i turn back through the pages of my ravaged and bent diary and find so many insights to cling to.  and not simply of my own either.  i've recorded the things friends have said to me.  beautiful, intelligent, talented, cultured women who i am stunned by and proud to know. i thankfully had the good sense to write down the advice they gave me and the assessments they made.  whether it be a day ago or a year ago, their words are a balm and a warm hug.  just like everyone else i possess a tremendous talent for convincing myself that i'm Right.  :)  luckily, i am a diarist and can prove to myself otherwise.  my wet and trembling eyes skate hungrily across the thin blue lines that carry my handwriting.  i read page after page.  the ink functions as a mirror.  at times my script becomes wild and loopy as my emotions build and gather steam.  other times, i am controlled.  my script is measured and small, sure of the curve of an N and the beautiful slant of a T.  in the diary i write in cursive so that i can write as fast as possible.  

i will never be able to write fast enough.

what i wanted to talk about tonight is that marriage seems largely like a bunch of bullshit but doesn't that make me sound bitter? does it make me sound envious?  i assure you i am not envious of married people and if any married person wants to know why that might be, i suggest you take a moment and look at how YOU speak about marriage.  y'all don't exactly seem to be a fount of five star reviews.  just sayin.  y'all speak ATROCIOUSLY about what marriage entails.  you use the worst language imaginable to speak about your spouse.  it's sickening.  it really is.  not to mention totally offensive.  WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU STILL MARRIED IF THAT'S HOW YOU REALLY FEEL?  seriously???  why are you married?  and please don't give me that "for the kids" crap.  we are all so beyond that degraded, abusive, deformed logic.  the desire to have children itself is, in our time and place, a pretty thin reason in and of itself to wed.  i myself do not intend to procreate.  i have absolutely no desire to be a mother.  i do not want to bear children.  in fact, i am doing my best to ensure that my particular bloodline has the least chance of survival possible (and if you met some of my family members, you'd understand why).  aside from that glaring bit of judgement, i simply do not find babies to be at all compelling.  i never have.  i have more to offer this planet and humanity than my biological capabilities.  i do not think that raising children would be a worthwhile way to spend my time.  not at all.  and why does everyone seem to throw logic out the fucking window when it comes to this topic???  as if EVERYONE needs to have a baby???  for all you know, i might end up being the WORST MOTHER IN THE WORLD!  but i suppose it's the same dumbass glitch that makes us all believe that, upon someone's death, even the monsters among us go to heaven.  because i'm not talking about the waiters, artists, and chefs i frequently hang out with, i'm talking about regular people in the suburbs.  all the so-called Christians who esteem the institution of marriage.  y'all should hear how your respective mate speaks about you when you aren't in the room.  better yet, maybe you should go to your room and think about how you speak about your mate.  use it as a mirror.  look at how ugly you've become.  look at what an ugly proposition you've presented marriage to be.  think about all the things you deny your counterpart.  think about all the rules you've wrapped around them and your association with one another.  all the little signals you expect to see as PROOF that he or she really loves you.  i am becoming convinced that it isn't love that most people want, it's protection of their fabulously tiny egos.  as i move forward i realize more and more that i am simply uninterested in a conventional life.  i am not interested in being involved in what others have termed a "real" relationship.  if the utter shit y'all are describing is a "real" relationship, i prefer to play house, thank you.

i know 3 couples, maybe, who seem to truly love and respect each other.  their love is an encouragement to me that maybe something different from what i've known exists.  i don't want to be embittered or smug.  of course i want to believe that i belong somewhere and that at some point in my life i will be appreciated.  why do i need it to be "forever"?  nothing is forever.  we all march toward our demise.  death is not a fiction.  we age every day.  we will all find  another white hair in the mirror tomorrow.  while i'm here and while i am able, i want to create as much joy and passion as possible.  i don't need someone to promise the rest of their life to me in order to appreciate the absolutely stunning beauty of their humanity.  the rest of a person's life is a huge thing.  who am i to dictate the terms of it or feel entitled to make rules regarding it?  love is not subject to scarcity.  there is not a limit to how much love a person can feel.  there is not a limit to how much beauty a person can behold and appreciate.  and pain will come regardless so let's just get over our egos and let people be who they are.  if anything, that's what i want.  i want to be myself.  i want you to be yourself. i don't want to be a parent.  i don't want to suppress another human being.  i want a man that i might love to come back to me freely at night.  i don't want a man to lay next to me out of a sense of obligation or pathetic fear.  i've had that and it is torture.  it is torture to lay next to the sleeping body of someone and know, for a fact, that they are only there because it has become expected, because it has become comfortable.  i would rather risk my heart being broken over and over than ever suffer that shit again.  why should anyone think my heart too fragile to withstand the risk?  i'm an orphan, guys.  we're tough. and like most tough motherfuckers, we are capable of tremendous love.  we are capable of ushering forth tremendous compassion, beauty, understanding, patience, and appreciation for the hardships and horrors inherent to humanity.  what i am no longer capable of (and i hope my siblings aren't either) is allowing another person or social expectation to limit the amount of pleasure, beauty, and love that exists in my life.  if someone loves me for a day or a year or 10 years, it is a gift so long as we are both being ourselves.  i don't need an ordination to know it or a tradition to approve it.  my mother would high-five me and kiss my forehead and hug me so tight and say, "little girl, you better suck every bit of joy you can out of this experience".  i know because she said it to me often enough when she was alive.  she knew my heart.  she knew how soft it is, how eager to please and comfort.  she worried that it would be taken advantage of.  it has been, in horrible ways, but i am not afraid of testing other waters.  i know how to be myself.  i know my own death will find me.  i am afraid of it finding me too soon.  i am afraid of it finding me in the midst of some unreasonable fear or expectation that prevents me from knowing the world in all it's sorrowful glory. i am afraid of it finding me before i kiss the weary eyes of another human being who has also been subject to the wrath of this world's winds and retributions.

fin.

DAY 2

.



let me reiterate:  maybe it is true that i am less afraid of you than you are of me.  maybe i have far less to lose? 



as one who understands the total figment of security, i can afford an uncommon brashness when it comes to certain things.  i understand the reality that, daily, i must eat and that, in our culture, that means i must make money.  but that's where my concern for money ends.  i truly don't give a fuck about retirement plans and home-ownership.  the less cages i lock myself in to, the better.  i prefer the wild ache of artistry and philosophy.  i prefer the torture of thinking and living to scrimping and saving.  give me pardon if this apparently youthful outlook offends you.  i don't mean to attack or jibe.  it's only the case that i watched a certain someone plan for their retirement and then die 2 years in to that solitude.  i assure you, she would've much rather kept working and kept experiencing the world if she had known what was coming.  and so i expect an unexpected death as well.  i expect to work right up until that day, like ma mere, louise bourgeois, sculpting in her studio all day long and then dying in her sleep after a full day's work in the studio.  let that be me.  let that be my end.  how sublime.  how ecstatic.  how necessary!  let me move my pen right up til the end.  let me dribble one last blot of ink as i suck in that last, rattling breath.  i don't plan on letting up until that exact moment...  whenever it may find me. 

sometimes pleasure and beauty become the most important things.  i remember my mother saying in her sickness, "suck every last ounce of joy out of this experience you can, little girl" and i parrot her voice inside my heart every chance i get.

sometimes, i am thoughtless.  sometimes, i am no where near as diligent as i should be, as i am capable of being.  there was an era of such prolific artistic production in my life not too long ago and i miss it.  but today, i went running down Shattuck Ave in Oakland and it occurred to me that i was so prolific because my self-worth depended upon it.  the sad fact is that being stuck in a bad relationship has the effect of sapping one's idea of self-worth.  i made so much fucking art because i was actively warring against a life that told me i was next-to-nothing.  it had been that way for years.  and before that relationship too. 

but i'm not blaming anyone for my decisions or my mistakes.  at this point, i am glad to have walked this particular road.  it is the thing that makes me able to look at you and smile.  it is the thing that makes my gaze soften with understanding.  i look at you with such warmth, such light, such appreciation for every awkward moment, every fantastically beautiful gesture and movement.  i look at you and know that i will never have all the information.  there is an entire story, an entire life behind you, within you that i know nothing about.  there have been such beautiful moments and such horrors.  there has been poetry and atrocity all around you.  these things, whatever they are, have made you capable of certain actions.  these secrets have made you long for certain things.  i will not judge you:  the same thing is true about me. 



i come to realize that i am not a simple human being.  i am not difficult either, but i am complex.  as such, i gravitate toward complexity.  i like complex people.  i like complex art.  i like complex emotion.  i like complex thought.  why did i ever think a simple life would be the right life for me?  we are taught to pursue certain avenues.  it is after going far enough down the dictated path that i reached a primary truth about myself:  i don't want a simple life.  i never have.

the regular fears

my internet connection has been failing off and on for the past week and half and has become totally unreliable. i called customer service and they let me know our modem is bad and so a man is coming out today to check it out and hopefully give us a new one. the upside to this is that yesterday after posting about kate's book, my internet was down all day- effectively hog tying me and keeping me from deleting the post... which i sorta wanted to do and was in a panic all day long, waiting for my phone to ring, and going over and over in my head fear-driven conversations and how to explain the difference between art and life, how to use one to inform the other, and that creative license and honesty are an imperative of our times, etc etc etc. ha!

and then i started thinking about lady gaga. yep. she is a recent fascination of mine. and i thought how a lot of people in this country seem to think she's the spawn of Satan and, looking at her work, listening to her songs, and paying attention to her message of self-acceptance and self-love... i really have no clue where these attacks on her are coming from. it's one thing not to like her work, a totally other to label her as "poison for the minds of our children". and i thought: here's this 24 years old girl that has somehow managed to acquire enough strength and stamina to endure such a massive onslaught of hatred and malice, and here i am, a 29 year old girl, fretting about a "review" i wrote about a book i love and posted on my personal blog. a blog which doesn't get a ton of traffic anyway. at least i don't think it does- i disabled the tracker on it months and months and months ago.

but there it is- the thing every person needs to overcome if they expect to be a writer (in the public sense of the word): getting beyond the fear that you will anger or embarrass your family, and speak from a site of truth and strength. let come what may. this is a very very VERY hard thing to do. very.

i love my family. of course i want them to be proud of me, the work i do, and the person i am. we've been through a lot of shit together and have come out on the other side with a deeper understanding of what it is to be resilient, capable, and how to truly practice forgiveness. still, there are some stories that need to be told. they need to be told because silence seems to have (strangely) become the dominant mode of our era. these stories we have need to be shared. and when i stumble across a piece of writing that i am able to see my own life story in, i feel such a huge comfort. i become stronger. i become more confident, more able to not only stand up for the rights of others, but also for my own. i also become more able to forgive, to see the other side. silence prevents forgiveness.

and so, i must find a way to let my words and work keep their wings. i must find a way to shake off fear, run right through it, and just keep digging digging digging. it is a strange world and a strange life and our stories have such value, such power, such music in them. i want to be strong enough to let that fact sit on high and not apologize for the life i have lived and the life i have found as a result.

go watch! it will make you feel better! elated even!

super timely, i'd say. especially based on the post below. isn't this what it comes down to?

this is your poem for the day.


(i HATE it that people are sticking advertisements in front of videos!)