Happy Chinese Valentines Day: July 31

To you.

July with Paris eating out Nicole

Worst day ever for loud heart. Worse every day.
No reason. The reason is everywhere that was comforting
is gone, everything is absolutely altered. I don't feel safe
in my home. To get out is ending.

Loud loud loud. Short of breath except when I exercise. Made a video
because I need to see how I look from the outside. You'd think you
could see my heart beating in my chest, is what I think. But I can't.
And that is some comfort.

With everything stripped down, away, like everyone said for the best:
moving; new home; facing deep problems (some of them) - I feel like
a fool or not like one for missing how I couldn't just pretend away everything.
And even more recently; thinking I could stop how bad it makes me feel the
years of punishing myself staying with someone I feared and loathed. I'm used
to it and love it. I needed it. When I am not punishing myself that way maybe I
look for other ways. Thoughts piling up; it is exponential I guess. The more of them
the more of them behind. I can think STOP and that seeds off a whole new set. I know
I didn't deserve what I got but I made it. I remember that maybe this isn't real
is some aftereffect. But these are just more piles of thoughts overlapping some
other things. All of it I can live with. Like the knife above my right shoulder blade,
the way my flesh sears when I open the fridge, the wholeness with which my
bed, which once held escape, now swallows me up like a hungry angry mothermouth
full of bright teeth.

And thump thump thump, like I was being chased. How I crave that. I remember clearly telling someone about the happiest day of my life: The day TP's enemy got out of jail and every friend on the road told me he was about to stab me. I carried a silly paring knife in my pocket to work every night that week and carefully waited to walk home at small hours of the night, alone and slowly, heart racing with good fucking real purpose.

The comfort of purpose.
Looking for itthump.

Paris and Nicole Reunite

Elvi

In the past, what I was best at and enjoyed most, was focusing on one very specific project intensely like a film or a story or a demolition. The problem was I escaped into it so I would not have to feel anything. Marrying attention to feeling with intesnse focus on a project seems perverse in some way. Another expample of black and white thinking, I suppose. No wonder I was so fascinated by Gloria Anzaldua's Borderland book a decade ago...all about being in two places at once and so on. Of course her argument was about mestiza consciousness and not my fucking particular coping mechanisms, but it is interesting nonetheless that even though I had no idea how fucked up I was, I was at some level aware of a glaring problem.

This weekend: Elvis, bridal improv, soccer and running down the pain that makes my heart loud and shoulder throb slowly. In other words, trying not to pay attention to all the misteps and mistakes I must certainly be making.

SAMENESS OF INTAKE

I have been worried over the last 48 hours about the displacement of compulsioins on to new areas.

Couldn't think of any thing that was a big deal.

Only that I can only eat Exactly The Same Thing every day. It's healthy, so, that's okay. I guess.
But if I can't get what I eat every day I don't eat.

"I'm No Threat To Others"

Date: July 12, 2005
------

...That's the best kind of hostility. And intensity.

I did _linear_ editing in highschool. That was not fun.

I'll look for the awesome convertible at 10:15 tomorrow just east of
-----, on ----, at ---- 's Music.

later!

Changing Rooms of the Rich.

Trying on dresses is entirely more enjoyable when you have a little stage surrounded by mirrors from which to privately view yourself in. All the dresses fit me but I couldn't stand them because I looked like someone else. Someone who wore these kind of formal dresses. But it was excellent to twirl in the mirror while Jesuspenis sat and stared. She really pays attention when I try things on.

Kendal, on All My Children is now certain that her baby father is not who she thought it was but the insemination doctor who used his access to infertile couples to spread his own seed. He fathered hundreds of babies. Kendal should just forget about it and move on - what's done is done. But instead she is running around her apartment building in her housecoat in a panic.

I left my house today to buy a maid of honour dress for a woman who is pretty much my sister. I left early though because X called and I didn't want to answer and was afraid he'd come over. So I left, feeling free. Just down the road from my house, as I idled in my car to turn left I noticed a man frantically waving at me from inside his vehicle. I always ignore this type of behaviour so I turned away...until the person yelled my name and, to my horror, I saw it was X and he yelled: "Give me a call!" I stared blankly at him through my oversized sunglasses and made my turn.

Distances Recovered; the reward of intimacy

It is good to see you are taking care of yourself and your cold.

Talking to you this morning was very good. It always is. I am working very hard to break
through this awful feeling that I cannot seem to escape. It is about my past, my present difficult
situation, but also my future. I don't trust my feelings right now, but I certainly feel something is
very wrong. I don't know how to put it exactly. Maybe, as part of therapy, I have recognized some
new things I need to do and say that I am not doing and saying. But I am still working on
what actions to take. What things I have left out that will make this feeling go away. I want everything
to be okay, to not feel bad, but that is part of the problem. The more I do that the more distant everything
and everyone feels. I don't know if it is because my therapy last week was about permitting myself
to feel all the things I pushed away for so long and I am finally registering that emotionally. I don't know if I should
just wait and have this feeling pass, which it surely should. I know that if you felt like this I would
want to know. But at the same time, I feel like you cope with these things all the time and it is
no big deal to you. It is back and forth.

I need everything that can be to be a little less hard for a couple weeks. I need that or I cannot
possibly go on.

Intimacy is so fucking fragile. It counts on so much strength. All of my strength has been wrongly diverted - stolen really - by wrongheaded directives.

I just got a very kind and fun email from a friend who, at my encouragement, has started online dating. These are the connections that matter, that mean something and that give strength. Intimacy's reward.

Spectacular Results

Living in an emotionally more complex world, one with variety beyond the distance between rage and hatred, is so new to me I feel at times completely out of touch with reality.

Where once I vacillated between being either perfect or horrible, now I contain such an array of oppositional identies and certainties that used to be mutually exclusive, it makes me sea-sick. I feel simultaneously hopeful about the future while I also feel like it would be nice to quietly die. I feel excited about summer plans with close friends; I want to avoid friends and the new responsibility of expressing my weaknesses and desires. I enjoy being angry about things; it terrifies me to be angry.

It is a fine fucking way to meet a life-altering awakening.

I am not sure if I really feel like this; or is it a result of my attempts to meddle with my anxiety. I know change makes sense; but how much? Is the only thing making me sure my decision to be sure? Then I get bored with it all and just want to take pornographic pictures. Look! Sex! Genitals!

House Cunting

After an afternoon inside strangers homes, smelling their closets and judging how their shaped their kitchen triangles, I finally got it. I did not survive my father's unnamed exploits, 14 years sleeping 20 feet away from Dana, assorted imaginative forms of starvation and a nine year strangulation of emotions just to be here, looking for purification in some freshly dressed $450 000 fully detached "gem." No home, no building, no lifestyle, no investment will ever soothe me.

What soothes me is action. Decisiveness. Spending time with something, knowing when it is enough, and being done with it.

Piecemeal I am completing an ugly break. Not beginnning, but now, finishing it.

Real Estate and Bird Corpse

I am surrounded by starling feathers. Evidence of a bird that has flown down my chimney and, after flying full force into most of the 34 windows in my house, it stopped. It finally fluttered under the cedar chest under my Panasonic 26 “ and died. Bird shit and fluffy breast feathers are evidence of its efforts to escape my house. The spot where it died is stained a darker yellow. When I removed the birdbody it was impossibly light. The darkspot where it lay was matted with the dried juices that used to make the bird heavy. I wiped it up with orange-scented Windex but the darkspot remained.

I have picked up as many of the feathers as possible, but more keep showing up.

I am in this house, in this life too. Last night I had a very vivid dream. Away from the city I remember dreams better. I dreamt that the world was about to end in fire. We decided to go to the epicenter and watch. In the dream I was flooded with relief because I would be free of the complexities that this house, that house, my past decisions, had left me with.

And this morning, I am enjoying the bright day and the warm wind, but I am surrounded by light grey breast feathers. I feel empty and light.