once, I felt artistic

I had a date to the Portland Art Museum. It worked. I mean the museum. I went to the Art Place in my mind, and started having all sorts of ideas and dreams. I mostly wanted to do 24 Arts, with 24 people and 24 hours of pure Art feelings and doings and nothing else. 24 is totally arbitrary, any number. But basically I want marathon art, followed by an exhibit, including some fun and games like group meals and documentation and things. Maybe a trip to the art museum to kick it off, get outside of our pre-doings.

Okay, lets be real, I planned it out more than this. Bella wants to go to the party soon though, so I can't be too detailed.

-Start by setting up you supplies at a station in the SU (know your media or at least be ready to use a few)
-Go to the art museum
-Come back, start
~have some group meals pre prepared through the night, then have a cook out late in the game as we're setting up the opening.~
-have a bunch of art up! Party?

Lame? I dig it.

I just got spoon fed a bite of Tillamook Mudslide by surprise and it was amazing.

Just because I saw her tonight and it made this whole senario seem like such bullshit

Here's what I did with Benzos/my newer thoughts.

When I have misunderstood I start erasing things.



I am barely breathing, and I'm saying WRONG WRONG WRONG and wiping my memories along with my conclusions. Everything becomes fuzzy: the sun melts into the clouds and I fall into oceans of grass with no blades, all dull.



Maybe I hate to be wrong so much that I try to forget that it ever happened, or maybe I'm just trying to purify my information and throw out invalid data points.



I would rather remember; I would rather be confused but remember it all. I would rather not have to dig for smiles because a subconscious part of my brain has decided that the important part was all of the tears that I didn't see.



I want to scream when I feel my mind moving like this. I want to install magnets under my fingertips that attract all of the beauty I have experienced, strong magnets that won't let it slip away because something pushes me to wash my hands while I hopelessly watch the salt and dirt flow into a porcelain sink. I want the sound of my voice to sing callouses over my life and protect it, there, where it is. I want to always be touching it.



Here is an example. The biggest loss of my life, since I have never been to a funeral. I remember when it started, but only because I wrote it down. I drafted our demise. The memory is like acupuncture needles in my chest, shaking with me when I cry, making raised red spots around the entry wound to remind me that they were there.



She received a felony in the mail. The wrinkled white rectangle spit out pills, round and white, like small wedding cakes. She saved them for weeks. With no particular auspicious sign, a warm, dark night slipped the envelope into her pocket, and a pill into her mouth.



She ran into traffic. Oregon traffic at 11 pm, so I really mean the road. Am I her mother? She was chasing a dog. We parted ways.



I found her again. Her core dragged her extremities like excess baggage. Her heavy head drooped to her heavy chest and heaved to look left or right. Her feet fell so hard that it's a wonder the concrete didn't shatter. She couldn't remember, which thrilled her, because the pills were supposed to make her forget.



She drooped and I sat, and the carpet held our bodies like a nest. “I'm taking another one,” she slurred. I ask about the proper dose and she said that she'd take all of them tonight. What could I do but trust the friend who sent them?

She didn't seem happy. She didn't seem sad. She seemed in touch with her emotions, in the kind of way that lets them boil over before they're completely processed. But her emotions often get stuck in the processing stage so I thought it could be healthy. It seemed alright. She didn't want to remember, after all.

We follow our way into a new building, letting others chose our direction. The rooms were brighter, and we sneaked away to find an unlocked door with the remnants of an Official Event left lonely, waiting for us. It was beautiful: a gift and a privilege strewn with crumbs and cookies that hadn't found a host. We stood together, invisible to the world, watching through a window in the door. Bodies walked by that never looked our way. We could hear the hullabaloo of Friday Night, so far removed from this quiet treasure. Vases of flowers littered the room. I stuck elements of the centerpieces in my hair, mostly roses and other blossoms. It was pinned in such a way as to accommodate many of them, and my head felt heavy afterwards. Maybe I felt closer to her. I wanted to put some in her hair. "Only the ugly ones," she said.

Our raid complete, we returned to the outdoors and spun dizzy circles all the way to the bus stop. We sat on cool steps and she opened the envelope for the last time. “Where are they?” There was only one pill left. She was confused, had she lost them? No, I explained that she'd taken all of them. The last one slid past her tongue at almost the same time that her frustration found words. She yelled at the people walking in the dark, too far to see: “Why don't you see how smart you are?” I guess I shouldn't have assumed that it was them she was talking to. How loud do you have to yell to reach your own ears? A question for the ages.

She said that she was unhappy, and I said that I didn't know how to make her happy. She said it wasn't so important to be happy, especially here and now. I told her that I loved her, so much, like it was a consolation prize. She said I didn't love her enough. She asked me if I was crying. She was surprised.

The bus came and the driver asked what she had taken. “It ended in -azapine” she said, and he laughed, saying that they all ended in -azapine. She fell off of the seats, denied the need for a safety belt, fell softly between the passengers' feet. She tried to follow people as they dismounted, mistaking their journey home for a pilgrimage to a party. She asked me to marry her and for some reason it scared me. We got out at a friend's house, and I was unsure if I should follow her in. I went with her to make sure that there was someone there to look after her. Ask she walked up the stairs she said “I want to die” and she laughed and I stopped breathing.

It's not the kind of thing that you can predict an arc for. Now I'm talking about the depression as well as the drugs. The next evening she made sushi and tortured us by drinking alcohol as we begged her to remember that people die from that cocktail. She claimed that if she could make sushi she was sober. Later she insisted: “I remember making sushi!” as if her arms hadn't fallen like rocks, as if her neck had bones in it, as if she'd spoken with her own voice.

I don't know if we're at the end of this trip. I don't remember what it sounded like when she giggled her flippantly suicidal remark. But I remember the angles that the stair's made at that instant. I remember a gleam from the banister. What am I forgetting?

We are far apart now, physically and emotionally. I can't talk to her. It's too much for her and she doesn't want to speak to me anymore. She says I've made it worse, she says it as if she was prey and I hunted her.

It's not my friend in that body, it hasn't been her for years. Or at least, that's what my censorship tells me. I know that we held hands once but I can't feel her fingers. I remember looking into her eyes and saying a spark that lit them, glowing reflections of the incandescent bulb by her bed. I remember clay in her hair, her laughter echoing in the cups she made. But I feel like I'm inventing the memories. It's as if I wasn't actually there. I was a ghost and she must have looked through me. I couldn't have been there for her joy because when I walk past P204 I can still see the silhouette of my outstretched hand when she told me not to touch her. I can't be in two places at once. I feel a marionette string holding up my arm as we get further apart, like a tug on my sleeve as I stand in the hall and try to find smudges from erasers beneath graphite lines that I'm suddenly pushed to retrace and retrace. They're bold mistakes.

She says that she will contact me if something changes, and that I should do the same. I should have called her at the beginning, that night, such a difficult night, and stopped this river from carving such a majestic canyon in us. We used to throw around the word “soulmate” but now it sticks in my throat--who designed that word--it is ugly and dry and fits no mold that I have in my mouth.

This is not the story that I meant to tell. I wanted to remind myself that I don't remember the pieces that she said were lies. Eating chocolates in your room is a fantasy. Driving north is a dream. Our feet, side-by-side, in the cradle made of couches, like the smell of food from a restaurant I have never been to.

These pictures are left out in the sun, and they are fading. I took the glossy prints of her off of my wall, because they broke my heart, I put them in a drawer. Some things are lost to darkness, some things are lost to light, but I'm not sure that she has a shadow because it has been so long since I saw her.

It's the end of the story and I've found oxygen in my lungs again. I doubt everything. I will make up these tales until I don't know what is real and when I see her again I want the truth to drench me and saturate my mind. At this point, I will believe anything.

Unsure whether to laugh or cry

I know which would be healthier. Did I write about the electro final? It was torture, I had a terrible panic attack during and after. It finally ended hours later when I carved "CHAOS" into my stomach with a knife. The knife was dull, so it was almost invisible in a few weeks. But moments after the jagged S had beaded blood on my abdomen I started laughing. How could I have taken it all so seriously? Didn't I ever want to get laid? No crop tops for the first few weeks of summer, missy. What a choice.

Not that there wasn't any damage done. I definitely said fuck it to the quantum final. Imagine if I had counted the tears. Maybe next time they break my heart I'll get a bucket and fill it with salt and water and blood that I buy from Ottos and I'll stand in the breezeway and poor it over my head and say "At least this time it didn't come from my body."

Or I'll just give them a receipt. Excuse me, physics department, but I have had to use a lot of my own blood and salt to write this thesis and I have bought some replacements, please send the check to mailstop 1011.

Um. I realize this sounds a lot darker than I expected it to. I'm not saying I don't need therapy, but I'm saying that these would be melodramatic things that would make me laugh because the feelings that back them up are really so thin. It's the best way to shred the veil of sadness over my life though. I embrace it, and then feel how hollow the thing that I have just held in my arms actually is.

I did the same with Edith. I wrote this new version of Benzos last night (between the hours of 12:30 and 2:30 am) that is so dramatic and exaggerated. It helped.

heart so heavy

is a beautiful song.

though the earth still spins round
north still up and south still down
hey I get confused
I get turned around
the world's gone crazy

I think that I was in love once, but the memory is hazy

it was long ago in a very flat land
I fell in love with a brown eyed man
who said I'll shake you, and take you
for all that I can
well I headed west when the shit hit the fan
staying north of the equator
oh looking for something greater than love
but nothing was greater

with a heart so big and a heart so full
a heart so heavy

I know what the map's about
the coast goes north the coast goes south 
and the ocean, it flows right into your mouth
like a delectable beverage

my job was counting the curls of smoke rising up from the reckage

intoxicated against my will
I've got a rosebush here with thorns that could kill
a roof sagging under a serious bill
I've got lavenders on my windowsill
the perfume's hanging heavy

no don't come in yet don't open the door
I'm not dressed I'm not ready

with a heart so big and a heart so full
a heart so heavy

sweet romance please stay away
keep you gone for one more day
oh keep that delicious longing away
I can't take it

I can pump up to play the part
and I can't fake it

~fuckIcan'trememberwhatgoeshere~
I can't hold on and I won't let go
I can't say yes and I won't say no
and I'm stranded, shivering in the rain and the snow
totally naked 

with a heart so big and a heart so full
a heart so heavy

~Rebo Flordigan
supposing I actually remembered all of the lyrics right.


oof my heart is heavy though. Well, it is a little lighter because I tried to express to Edith how much this tangible pause is hurting me. But the physical pain makes it impossible to forget. My organs are tense. I thought that maybe I could adapt the Benzos post into a writing sample for the creative writing class that I want to take, but now it just feels like the beginning of the end. Too much. Can't.

I think maybe if I could rewrite it maybe it would help me sort things out.


 Anything to feel whole again. More art. More self.

The thing that made it harder today, that took me to the point of breaking the silence, was talking to a friend who had felt very anxious when I had felt carefree, and I didn't realize at all. I think that I am an empathetic person, maybe too empathetic, so it shocks me when people feel so differently.

When I have misunderstood:

I start erasing things.

I am barely breathing, and I'm saying WRONG WRONG WRONG and wiping my memories along with my conclusions. Everything becomes fuzzy: the sun melts into the clouds and I fall into oceans of grass with nary a sharp blade. Maybe I hate to be wrong so much that I try to forget that it ever happened, or maybe I'm just trying to purify my information and throw out invalid data points. 

I would rather remember; I would rather be confused but remember it all. I would rather not have to dig for smiles because a subconscious part of my brain has decided that the important part was all of the tears that I didn't see.

I want to scream when I feel my mind moving like this. I want to install magnets under my fingertips that attract all of the beauty I have experienced, strong magnets that won't let it slip away because something pushes me to wash my hands while I hopelessly watch the salt and dirt flow into a porcelain sink. I want the sound of my voice to sing callouses over my life and protect it, there, where it is. I want to always be touching it.

Why are we so weak, that we can't remember two versions of the same story? What part of this humanity contract (signed in bile XXX, what is my name) precludes remembering my life start to finish? I never throw away my drafts when I'm writing. What breaks inside of me to cause the loss of all of this information?

Maybe. Something. On the tip of my tongue. The next letter of the word. The right adjective. I before E. Inventing words. Clowthy. LOST.

The Oldest Profession

The oldest profession usually refers to prostitution, but let's be real, physicists were around before anyone got laid.

This might be a good alternative title for my Scientits zine. Not that it's any less provocative, but at least its not weirdly objectifying.