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Richard iii

But in Herself,

the land, and many a Christian soul,

Death, desolation, ruin and decay.

It cannot be avoided but by this;

It will not be avoided but by this.

Therefore, dear mother—I must call you so—Be the attorney of my love to her:Plead what I will be, not what I have been;

Not my deserts, but what I will deserve. 

In your daughter’s womb I bury them,

Where, in that nest of spicery, they will breed Selves of themselves, to your recomforture.

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 “All the things that women know how to do: make jam, make love, make up their faces make pastry, adopt little babies, cook meat, dress fowl. I watched my other do those things when I was small. But me, do I know how to do them? I should find out. When she told me that if she had to chose between coming back to earth as a man or as a woman, she had given a lot of thought to it, she wouldn't hesitate, its definitely a woman who runs things, I told myself that I wouldn’t know, i’ve given a lot of thought to it, but I don’t know. Which side. But if I were a man I would know.” 

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I’ve slept with over 40 men, and to quote Joan Baez “My poetry was lousy he said” so I stopped writing about my lovers.

 To quote Usher, “These are my confessions, just when I thought I said all I could say, my chick on side said she's got one on the way, these are my confessions” FORGIVE ME MOTHER FOR I HAVE SINNED. These are my confessions:

I saw the way he looked at me and lifelessly felt his dry lips drop onto my body there was no consent, not even consent out of obligation

His semen spread over my stomach, and the luxurious rag he stood up to give me to clean his mess, his dick still hard, so hard I wanted to bite it off

I cried and called my other when he left.

 I chose to relapse over feeling the anger and destruction of my mind and body already well into decay, crumbling ruins no longer looked at as an ancient relic to be preserved and admired but an old building covered in graffiti, scum, and demons. To quote Richard III “death, desolation, ruin, and decay.”

 When my words were slandered and my heart removed I bought lotion

As if lathering my body in something soft would remove the shards of glass without needing tweezers (step 1)

I took myself to the hospital while my family was in India and I stayed there for many months, my brain was no longer my own (step 2)

 I still miss being addicted to drugs because I lost weight and had enough purpose and was content content content to just exist in my own opium den

 I shrugged and said if not now, when ?

I shrugged and brought my face into the white powder, my favorite facial, each line let me closer to a spiritual place of ambiguity, as if god cared where my body was or who ruined it

The stranger pulled my pants down and push me against a truck in a parking lot in palm springs and I was so high there was no use in screaming

No pay off

Where's the payoff

Who is going to pay me to get off honestly what's a girl gotta do over here

 I feel powerless in my body most days, glued to a person thousands of miles away. I wish that they would leave me to heal, the worst, most red hot word they have forbidden from my vocabulary. To heal is to recover, to fight against the mercy of my circumstance in this case it’s crushing salt tears and mouths widening and screaming, contorting faces, deep growls of hatred.

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Annie Laurie Daniel

Non Fiction Writing

14 November 2016

DBT: A dark comedy

(My Experiences in a women’s treatment facility)

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, colloquially known as DBT, is a technique of therapy best described formally as: “a cognitive behavioral treatment that was originally developed to treat chronically suicidal individuals diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and it is now recognized as the gold standard psychological treatment for this population. In addition, research has shown that it is effective in treating a wide range of other disorders such as substance dependence, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and eating disorders.”

THE ONLY THING THAT ENERGIZES ME IS THINKING ABOUT MYSELF

The waiting room was harshly lit. My eyes were heavy and swollen, my throat sore from chain smoking on the curb minutes before and my nose dripping from remnants of  DOC (drug of choice. DBT is filled with terms for all of our “trigger worthy” vices that land us in such intensive care.)The day after I graduated high school on June 12th, 2015 I was checked into a women’s residential treatment facility in Venice, California. I was eighteen, manic depressive and fresh off of a two year stint influenced by cocaine, harmful and traumatic sexual relations, liaisons and experiences and an overall toxicity that had me fifty-one-fiftyed too many times. A kind therapist and intake specialist had a thick clipboard with all of my information. I was crying, cold, and thirty pounds lighter than I am today. She went through a series of questions required for all intake’s into residential facilities. “Date of Birth?” “March 11th, 1997.” She paused. “Does that mean that you are seventeen?” No, I shook my head. It felt like a pumpkin that had been smashed by angry preteens, orange and rotting, seeds spilling out all around me. “I just turned eighteen.” She continued. “When was the last time you did a DOC and in what quantity?” The night before there were fifty of my classmates packed into my house in Bel Air. We had graduated from Le Lycée Français de Los Angeles less than 24 hours ago. I remembered all the thick white lines and the pink marble of my mother’s bathroom, several bottles of champagne consumed in my honor by myself, and the thick black smoke filled lungs heart and (soul?) before men used my body as their ashtray and I didn’t know how bitter other people and parts of myself could taste. Lonely and lost and very confused. Little to no self worth or inherent values or morals. Manic episodes weekly. Incredibly unstable, drug addicted, borderline alcoholic, uses sexual relations to fill the void and male figure left empty by absent father. “Cocaine and Alcohol, less than 12 hours ago. Moderate quantity.” She wrote it all down. “Why, aside from the obvious, are you here?” I remember shivering in that waiting room, although in the middle of June it must have been quite warm. She offered me a blanket and I accepted. Wrapped up like a baby. Poetry from the dirtiest of mouths makes them howl in delight. An atrocity committed for the amusement of others, a struggle to be heard amongst an unforgiving crowd. An attempt to connect to those who see the filth and hear not the words. “Sexual assault?” I nodded. “Suicide attempts?” A slower nod yes. “Well, then you’re in the right place.”

I checked into treatment alone while my family was on a two month vacation in India, many thousands of miles away. I checked out of treatment alone while my family was in France after their exotic adventure.

(The difference between a relapse and something you can get away with)

There’s something amazing about recovering addicts, regardless of the addiction. We were a small group of women in age ranging from eighteen to late fifties. We each had one roommate in separate room’s of two incredibly well kept houses on the West Side of Los Angeles. We weren’t allowed to use the phone or take a walk without permission from a “Community Consular”, one of the many qualified and over motivational 24/7 staff on location. We had curfews and set schedules and rules and requirements for every section of free time not spent in one of our many therapy groups including but not limited to: ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a unique empirically based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies), CBT (Cognitive behavioral therapy), Mindfulness, Art Therapy, etc. We were loaded into minivans and escorted everywhere we went. It was posh, expensive, exhausting. To be forced into a position and required to examine and evaluate your every flaw and how to potentially...fix it? Absurd. I was an adult, legally speaking, I knew that much. I had lived on my own since I was fifteen, I didn’t need to be babied at rehab. Silly thoughts from a silly girl. I was there for a purpose, for a reason. My extreme emotions that had fueled my art and every action I made in my life for years was now diluted and told to be quiet. Quiet your unquiet mind, someone is paying for you to get better. Someone is paying for you to be healthy and function. I didn’t want to be functional, and I’m not sure I wanted to be alive. Life can be a cunt with its whirring wheels, wheels that are not intact but never stop. That's not to say that there have not been sweet moments among the bitter and alone. There have been sunny afternoons and sleepy mornings and nights that shake steadily until the sun rises. There has been wine poured and champagne kisses that were fucked out of me in baths and showers and beds all across Los Angeles and Paris. Tormented by a love that we cannot grasp. Too much love for the things that hurt us, that fill us temporarily with a feeling of purpose and meaning. Indulging in emptiness and romanticizing pain. Windows open, arms outstretched.

Some really cool people that i met and were really cool to me but the world was a huge dick to them

My roommate was Yasmine. She’s still one of my best friends to this day, the other night we went dancing in Lincoln Heights and drank Gin & Tonics and smoked spliffs and cigarettes in her apartment in Hollywood and laughed and cried about our time in Venice together. We are both Hollywood women, not meant to be confined by the ocean, the salt in the sea only wishes it could mirror the salt in our tears. We stopped crying out of sadness and started crying out of happiness over the summer. On June 15th, 2015 she barged into the house we resided in during those months by the saltless sea off of Lincoln and Rose and screamed “I’mmm baaaaack !” I hadn't met her yet, but she had been temporarily discharged after her insurance failed. 9 years older, 7 inches shorter, beautiful brown haired expat raised in Saudi Arabia with a similar manic depressive bipolar diagnosis as my own. It was love at first sight. We painted in the evenings, and we smoked in the mornings. We waited in line together twice a day outside of the “medicine chamber” where our beloved caretakers would sit patiently as we choked down our cocktail of numbing mood stabilizers and antidepressants and antianxiety and a few others just for fun. We gossiped until early in the morning about our lovers and our dreams and she read “Tropic of Cancer” out loud to me as I wrote her letters in French. The world was unkind to her in Burbank where she worked by day as a “creative assistant”. Men used her body as they used mine and left her strapped into hospital beds hazy and manic.

Ann loved frozen bananas. She was in her early fifties but looked a decade older. A mother of many from North Dakota, she was almost always silent, a woman raised in a time where women weren’t allowed to take up space with their bodies or minds, especially when they were as unquiet as her’s. There was a smoking bench at the facility, a beautiful stone slab covered with vines. I’ve never met an addict (recovered or in process of) that doesn’t smoke, aside from Ann. She would sit with us while we smoked on breaks between groups, our only vice still indulged. We would bitch heavily about our group leaders, our therapists and the many rights we no longer had, choosing to ignore the fact that we were there for a reason and had willingingly removed the toxic black tar from our eyes and hearts. While we blew out smoke and tap tap tapped our hands against our heads, legs and into the dirt Ann would quietly smile and nod. She knew the tax of being a woman too loud for the men around her. There was a girl my age that came into the program in hellfire. Court ordered, a self proclaimed sex addict, borderline personality queen high on compulsive lies. She would regularly reach into the freezer and eat Ann’s frozen bananas. Ann learned to yell when she confronted the frozen banana thief. The gang of gals was sitting in our usual smoking spot waiting to be driven in a godforsaken Honda Odyssey to Pottery Therapy off of Venice Blvd when Ann screamed for the first time, standing up for herself and her stolen frozen bananas. She doesn't deserve to have an abusive husband or resentful daughters. She deserves to live far, far away from Bismarck, North Dakota, with as many frozen bananas as she wants.

I miss myself a lot

I didn’t need help. I was older. I was mature. When I was fifteen my parents moved back to the east coast, the dirty south my father hailed from. My parents always hated LA. When I was fifteen my mother gave me the opportunity to live on my own. He was 56 when I was born, the last after several marriages and children, and he was deeply uninterested in my existence. I was a pet in my parents home. I didn’t have the brains that landed my sister at The London School of Economics, and it was clear I wasn’t going to be following in their path of super-lawyers. “Annie Laurie is such a hoot ! You know she’s an artist ?” I lived with a boy named Max in Hollywood, he was 21, Swiss-Ukrainian, would wear a thick pea coat and scarf even in July and rolled his own cigarettes as he waited for the mail. I went to Lycée and would illegally drive my mother’s BMW to school. It was a charmed life. Shortly after I fled for France for good, elated to be free of smog and freeways once again. I went to school and I took the métro or sometimes the bus. I had a lover named Anthony and I read lots of poetry and I got drunk on Tuesday nights and sometimes smoked hash. I didn’t do any drugs and I didn’t sleep around. I went to all my classes and I made films with my friends on the streets of Paris and I wrote in my diary and slept in on Sundays and kissed a lot of my friends for fun. Independence is earned. I thought that I had earned adulthood by living without my parents, cooking and cleaning for myself in a small apartment, I didn’t ever think I would be a manic, drug addicted, suicidal lady of the night. When I entered treatment I knew that I needed something, but there was no clear self diagnosis. I went back to Paris for a long weekend in May of 2015. Somber and skinny, my friends contacted my parents and suggested something dire needed to be done. I don’t remember that trip very well except for crying on the train from Rennes to Paris. I suppose that’s the trip that saved my life, but I guess I’ll never really know.

Leave me alone;

To be 14 in the south of France

Holding hands with a Romanian girl who I swore was my best friend and who’s name I cannot remember after 3 cocktails, 2 mimosas and a tall Pacifico.

She had black hair and a laugh that was pure. Her hand was smaller than mine, and we laughed while running through traffic in the streets of Nice, before there was terror and her passport rejected by Sarkozy.

I had my first wet kiss, my braces thick and my hair frizzy without my western appliances. I left my purse on a beach in Nice and lost my phone, wallet, and self esteem with a man much older, the first of many to come.

I remember drinking clear liquid that resembled rubbing alcohol but was purchased from a French man in a liquor store that merely mumbled “put in in your purse, don’t tell the police you bought it here.”

My first cigarette in the park, a Marlboro Menthol stolen from my sisters pack. Finally, feeling apart my of my culture. Many men have said “but you’re not really french, are you?”.

No, I was not born there. My parents are not French, one a blue blooded Boston bred heiress, the other a southern gentlemen that worked his way from nothing into deep wealth and the miscommunication and distance that comes with it.

But yes, I respond. Drunk, almost always, do you want to see my EU passport? My father always hated LA and I suspect he’s always hated me. I’m not resentful or angry at my parents. They provided me with so much……..opportunity. They allowed me to fend for myself with a platinum Amex. That was all they knew how to do, burried in their work and their lives. They were happy that way.

 DEAR DIARY: (THE CLASSIC OVERSHARER) (ARE ALL ADDICTS OBSESSED WITH THEMSELVES LIKE ACTORS OR JUST ME) Friday, June 12th, 2015: It is over. I am empty and alone. I am aware that this is the best thing for me but I am sad and scared. I am so deeply sad. Saturday, June 13th, 2015: They say that the first few days are the hardest. I believe it. I’m not allowed to make phone calls or leave this building until tomorrow. Play the game and try and get better. It’s all I can hope for. There’s one woman I’ve met that said she has a finacé and a boyfriend and has been in and out of treatment for over a year. Her mother told me that I look like I’m coming from the stables or a barn. Sunday, June 14th, 2015: Whenever I sleep I have nightmares. Wednesday, June 17th, 2015: The mornings here smell like ocean and grass and nice wood. We don’t have mornings like this in Bel Air. It reminds me of when I was a kid in the south of France, when I was little and very happy to be alive. Tuesday, June 30th, 2015: Today I feel frustrated, untrusted, apprehensive, nauseated. How’s that for mindfulness?

A question commonly asked in mindfulness: “When do you remember feeling loved? Happy? What brings you purpose?” I remember not feeling loved for six months in Echo Park. He was a sculptor, how ironic, as if I wasn’t already made of stone. I wanted him to see the value in me beyond my pussy but as he so often told me “If I can’t commit to my art, how can I commit to you?” I remember not feeling loved outside of dirty punk shows, a place I once considered a community had left me behind as a groupie and nothing more. Now that some time has passed I’m lucky that I escaped those dark sweaty rooms alive, they had nothing to offer me but toxicity and cruel partners with hard hearts and fast fast fast fucking guitars. I remember not feeling loved on the métro from République, raining quickly, my body moving slowly. Are these memories of wasted energy and soulsucking relations and using my body to validate my very existence to all men and mostly myself the reason I was in this situation in the first place? Reflection is key for a good memoir. While I had plenty of time to reflect on every poor life choice and abhorred interaction I had gotten myself into, there’s plenty of thoughts and memories that are still absorbed in the pink cloud of recovery. Sobriety is a mystical concept to me still. I’m livid that cocaine was done in my bathroom in my house a few weeks ago while I slept ten feet away. Friends don’t mess with other friend’s addictions, but my comfort and safety wasn’t a priority when a crisp 100 dollar bill was passed around by my classmates. When I was seventeen I was sleeping with a heroin addict. He was tall and skinny and very mean. YOU DON’T REMEMBER TELLING ME YOU WERE IN LOVE WITH ME WHEN YOU WERE SPEEDBALLING ON HEROIN THANK GOD YOU DON’T REMEMBER WHEN I SAID THAT I LOVED YOU TOO. I had to pull him out of my bathtub when he was nodding off one night at a party. He was wearing a red silk kimono. The dye had started to leak and melt off of his robe like blood. It got all over me as I carried his lanky body into my bed. I locked the door and cried as I put my cheek to his chest, cheek to chest, cheek to chest to hear his heartbeat. I took bumps of cocaine every time I made sure he was still alive. This was my senior year winter formal after party. I remember feeling very alone as I smoked a cigarette in my room waiting for him to wake up. The sun rose, and he eventually rose with it. Gave me a kiss on my face, did a bump of blow, and called a friend for a ride home. “You’re a good girl, Annie.” I nodded. I was a good girl, indeed.

Cocaine changed me in a way that I really liked. I lost a lot of weight and I sure did feel great ! Everyone I knew was a casual user. Most people I know still are. My year and a half sobriety is on December 12th, and I’m getting a cake. You can have some if you’ve never done coke in my house (most of my friends and one of my roommates did not pass this test.) I was aggressive and really happy at parties. I made myself vomit and I felt sublime. I slept through classes and broke into the bathroom at school to stop my bloody noses. I was happy to “function so well on such a great drug.” I had the money for it so I was fine. I was a compulsive liar, and so were all of my friends. I was satiated in my own misery and musically masturbated to my own crash. No one was stopping me, and the numbness that I lived in was far more enjoyable than living in a mediocre emotion of existence. Mundane rituals of Dicté and SAT prep were interrupted when punk boys in beat up cars would pick me up in Culver City and fuck me in dirty apartments in Santa Monica before taking me home to Bel-Air. I really missed my room in France. They didn’t like me talking about it very much. My connection to my home was pretentious and I was a bore. Cocaine made me interesting and more importantly, desirable (the drug and my constant possession of mass amounts kept my musicians happy and unkind.) I had shitty friends and no support system and no stability and that is the end of that.

 THINGS MY MOTHER HAS TAUGHT ME:

NEVER TAKE YOUR PURSE OUT AT THE PIGALLE METRO STOP

HOW TO DRINK WINE WITH DINNER (AND AFTER DINNER AND BEFORE)

HOW TO REGULATE AND RESTRICT EATING. THE ONLY ACCEPTABLE CALORIES ARE THE ONES IN YOUR MARTINI

GUILT TRIPS

THINGS MY MOTHER NEVER TAUGHT ME:

HOW TO FORGIVE OTHERS AND MYSELF

HOW TO LOVE SOMEONE, FUNCTIONALLY

PUSSY IS SACRED, DICK COMES FOR FREE.

The first time I was raped was April 2015. Outside of a party in Palm Springs during Coachella weekend, I waited for my Uber. I was there with a man I had met at a party, we flirted a little and did lots of cocaine. That was it. It was warm out when a stranger pushed me against the side of a truck, pulled my pants down, and fucked me. I was in shock. I didn’t start crying until the next day, when my friends abandoned me at the festival. Alone, I drove home. Pussy is sacred, dick comes for free. It comes when we don’t want it. Now we live in a time where over wine me and my best friends talk about the first time we were raped instead of first kiss stories. Losing a part of myself the second time I was raped by an older student at CalArts, the third time I was raped by my older boyfriend the fourth fifth and sixth times I was raped and I started losing count. When my mother was seventeen in 1973, driving outside of Portland, Oregon her Jeep broke down. While she attempted to fix it herself, two men in their 20’s pulled over and offered to help her jumpstart her car. Instead, they took turns raping her on the side of the road. Against her car. Like mother like daughter, raped by strangers in the night. Strange men with fast hands and a female timidness that won’t leave my bones after years of instruction to smile and make eye contact and be friendly and inviting. Pussy is sacred, so sacred men are willing to do anything to take it from you. Sometimes people don’t believe that you were attacked because they saw you arrive and leave the party together, regardless of the fact that your dress was broken and you were falling everywhere and couldn't open your eyes and your shoes had blood on them and he said that we was going to take you home. He said he was going to take me home. He told my friends he was getting me water and would clean the blood. I hope my blood stained his sheets I hope it never washed out. He said that red was his least favorite color. Funny, because there were dashes of it everywhere (RED LIKE my blood my hair my blood my hair my blood my hair).

I could write about why I ended up where I did and how I got started and the first line I ever did and the first manic episode I ever had and every infuriating moment spent being babysat and driven around in a Honda Odyssey and all the things I couldn’t talk about and all the things that I did anyways. How my art is fueled by my traumas and elations. But for now this is enough and I am enough as I am at least for today. I hope you enjoyed your stay. Cumbacksoon.

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Questions (6.22.17)

Deserve

When did you decide what I deserve ? Why won’t someone tell me what I deserve ? How do I know if I deserve to exist if you won’t tell me ?

Mother won’t you come and get me ? I’ve sinned mother, can you forgive me ?

Was God A Woman ?

What happened to the tracks that lead to Auschwitz ?

When is the next train coming ?

Where does this go ?

Who told you to expect anything else ?

What determines if someone deserves something or not ?

Do you deserve to write the rules ?

How many times have I cried when I told you what I need ?

Why are you always so quiet about it ? are you at peace when you no longer need it ?

Won’t God forgive my sins ?

What was your first//last sin ?

Is inaction a sin ?gluttony & sloth

What makes mud feel clean ?

Are scars clean ?

Where don’t you let the cleaners go ?

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Rain, Pain, Pleasure and Comedy

The God Factor- One Mississippi, Two, Three Lightning striking at different times, waiting game Apocalypse, Sleepover, Ageless Existence What can inhabit roles in different contexts, playing with perspective Concept pf people calling things different names in different contexts circumstance tied to identity mercy of circumstance !! Voices in the space (Emily’s Song & Itsy Bitsy Spider) Cleaning, asking for soap. Emily & Annie not achieving goal of getting “clean" Moment with Grass (dick grass, am I doing this right ?) When we were all in the rain in the big circle, after the thunder countdown & laughter The elements of humor with the desolation Manipulation of people through touching their body and guiding- outside in the rain & impulses

Words:

-Sin, Clean, Mom

-Deserve, Wash, Right

-Need, Train, Mother

Familial Relations, Parent Idea with God ? Having someone else who’s responsible for you and cares for you. 

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Lists Of People Who Have Lied to You

Response In Letter Form

Brief (Could Be Expanded On) (PART 1)

1.Dear Mother, there are too many to count. P.S. Why did you hate me so much before there was hatred in myself ?

2. Dear Mia, I hope you rot in hell.

3. Dear Robert, No one said it was consensual.

4. Dear Lily, I’m not sure why you did what you did but I understand.

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I feel at home when I smell jasmine and clean laundry...when I smell Korean BBQ sizzling on the stove downstairs.  When I smell fresh air pouring into my windows -- winter spring summer fall -- as I soar through streets in my Honda Pilot pretending to be in Pirates of the Caribbean as I blast the soundtrack.  

I feel accosted when I smell butt juice because the 1st time I smelt it was after I was raped in Spain at 15 and was sitting in my bathroom once I finally got home wondering among all other things what that smell was and eventually realizing it was my own smell so surprise surprise for that fun association.

I feel accosted when I breathe in Red Hot deodorant because I remember when I forgot how I smelled under his overpowering, unforgiving campaign to change me.

I feel like a child when I touch a videogame controller, finding in it the childish excitement of limitless dreams and full confidence of a protagonist’s agency.  Nothing can stop me.

I feel powerless when I sit in a barber/hairdresser’s chair.  Also when trying to stretch.

Harmony is people seeing eye to eye and heart to heart; prizing empathy over apathy; not assuming that respect is a given instead of earned.  Harmony is people feeling brought up, not put down, by the systems they are a part of.

Discordance is looking around a place for a day, month, 4 years, and feeling alien, never feeling stable or solid in getting the motivations of some/many and realizing there are truths in my life they will never be able to know.  Discordance is my mind bringing my own victimhood to a place of self-loathing and blame.  Discordance is no one checking in.  

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How do you show someone how much space they take up?

How do you overcome historical baggage?

WHat does it mean to never have agency over one’s own life?

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PHANTASIA FOR ELVIRA SHATAYEV

One of my fav poems, especially as a woman heavily involved in the outdoor recreation industry. I actually have “Elvira Shatayev” engraved on the back of my massive, granola GPS watch. A reminder in my adventures to come.

 PHANTASIA FOR ELVIRA SHATAYEV (Leader of a woman’s climbing team, all of whom died in a storm on Lenin Peak, August 1974. Later, Shatayev’s husband found and buried the bodies.) The cold felt cold until our blood grew colder then the wind died down and we slept If in this sleep I speak it’s with a voice no longer personal (I want to say with voices) When the wind tore our breath from us at last we had no need of words For months for years each one of us had felt her own yes growing in her slowly forming as she stood at windows waited for trains mended her rucksack combed her hair What we were to learn was simply what we had up here as out of all words that yes gathered its forces fused itself and only just in time to meet a No of no degrees the black hole sucking the world in I feel you climbing toward me your cleated bootsoles leaving their geometric bite colossally embossed on microscopic crystals as when I trailed you in the Caucasus Now I am further ahead than either of us dreamed anyone would be I have become the white snow packed like asphalt by the wind the women I love lightly flung against the mountain that blue sky our frozen eyes unribboned through the storm we could have stitched that blueness together like a quilt You come (I know this) with your love your loss strapped to your body with your tape-recorder camera ice-pick against advisement to give us burial in the snow and in your mind While my body lies out here flashing like a prism into your eyes how could you sleep You climbed here for yourself we climbed for ourselves When you have buried us told your story Ours does not end we stream into the unfinished the unbegun the possible Every cell’s core of heat pulsed out of us into the thin air of the universe the armature of rock beneath these snows this mountain which has taken the imprint of our minds through changes elemental and minute as those we underwent to bring each other here choosing ourselves each other and this life whose every breath and grasp and further foothold is somewhere still enacted and continuing In the diary I wrote: Now we are ready and each of us knows it I have never loved like this I have never seen my own forces so taken up and shared and given back After the long training the early sieges we are moving almost effortlessly in our love In the diary as the wind began to tear at the tents over us I wrote: We know now we have always been in danger down in our separateness and now up here together but till now we had not touched our strength In the diary torn from my fingers I had written: What does love mean what does it mean “to survive” A cable of blue fire ropes our bodies burning together in the snow We will not live to settle for less We have dreamed of this all of our lives Adrienne Rich

(also, if it’s not clear, this is not my work, but that of the fabulous Adrienne Rich)

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When transcience is not merely an occasion for mourning, we will have inherited the earth.

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My name is Skip, but you can call me Starshine.

I’m fucking terrified of being an artist because that means there’s no hiding form the shit and the floodgates to the world are open.  #withgreatpowercomesgreatresponsibility, right?

I learned I was an artist when I took my 1st grade Christmas card contest VERY seriously and distributed my image of a snow-covered Japanese temple out to all my white classmates’ families even though I didn’t win 1st place.  That was probably one of the only times I used my art to actually say something -- not to sour a cute story or anything.

I’m realizing I’ve shied away from it all because it’s dang easy to be lazy and jump through the ooh-aah hoops people and society present you that require very little reflection, connection, and actual expression of dis cray life.  It’s also too easy to be a people pleaser - take no stance and you can profess them all!  So, alas, here is my call to arms.  Time to get durty with a u.

I couldn’t move in the fall.  I was stagnant and atrophied.  I was also stuck with nothing but my restless mind that for the 1st time was left to truly sit with shit that has gone down in my life.  Shit I probably shouldn’t let only exist in my mind.  I also realized, both because of the shit and not, that I was my own shackle of atrophy even long before the fall.  No bueno.  Time to sing out, dude.  It’s kinda fucked how much you need to do and say and be and yet you’ve let some random asshole experiences value yourself not at all.  (picture of person stepping on other people with an up arrow, accompanied by “use those fuckers as a step up!”)

The most inspirational thing someone has told me was from my best friend Isabelle at home who said that her favorite and most respected thing about me is my decision to feel even when it seems like the only option would be to shut down completely.  That from the difficult weather, beautiful gardens will burst out in my art once I learn/choose to channel the rainfall intentionally instead of putting up walls to contain the water flow (ok, that was my dumb metaphor, not hers).  Similar sentiment to Banks’ interview that I similarly can’t get out of my head that affirms pools of bad shit being the source for artistic expression.  Taking the magnitude and flipping the sign.

So what does all the shit mean for this?

I am really fascinated, a la my human evolutionary biology concentration, in how we evolved for a world that is not this one.  That our intellect has out-paced our innate and for some reason still the latter so often overpowers the former.  This is one of many things, but I do think it is cool to explore this and try to wrap our heads around why all this fucked-up-ness is tolerated / happens.  I do feel like we are as a species a fancy-ass device that has been constantly updating and focusing on its shiny exterior and UI, but never taking the time or making the effort to truly commit to a software update / overhaul.  And as all us procrastinators know, that type of device is soon to crash.

Okie time’s up -- bye bye.  :3

[frankcastorf-blog]

Lists:

-          Spoiled milk mixed with hot garbage

-          Fresh bread

-          Gasoline

-          People embracing

-          Gunpowder

-          Pine Trees

-          Weeze between laughs

-          Heavy dirt and hot dust

-          Sulphur

-          Sirens

-          Gunshots

-          Dew on grass

-          Splintered plastic

-          Cotton balls

-          Someone sitting alone

[frankcastorf-blog]

Selected Shorts:

I feel enraged when I see pedestrian apathy.

Harmony is

               Roadtrips with friends,                 fast cars,                     o  p   e    n      p     r  a   i     r   i     e     s

                                                               MOUNTAIN PURPLE MAJESTY

Dissonance is

on the floor in my room alone long classes short sights rapid hearbeat shallow breath

[frankcastorf-blog]

Like Artisanal Bread but a Statement

I am Emily.

I am an artist.

I started to love myself when I embraced my art. I’ve worked really hard to love myself. I am terrified to be seen, but if I can love me, someone good can too. I want to be seen. I stand on stage alone. I have worked hard to get here. I got here on my own but not alone.

I smoke cigarettes alone. On the street, concrete against my skin, bundled up in a jacket that still smells like curry. One after another, text messages flicking off my fingers, neon in my eyes. Filling my lungs with thick smoke so that I won’t have to breathe in the cold crisp air and think clearly.

I have a lot of great friends. People who genuinely care about me. People that love me. Sometimes I still feel alone. Sometimes I want them to leave me alone. One cigarette after another.

Sometimes I am on a great journey with my friends. We talk about love and life and bad trips. I realize I have never needed a substance to have a bad trip. We drive.

Sometimes I am driving with ghosts. We are hurlting faster and faster towards an ending foretold long ago. Even so I am haunted, pulling them over seas, on trains, into new loves, new life with me. I am haunted by shadows and promises of what might have been.

I am funny. And as Skip reminds me, a weirdo. I love this about myself. I am proud of where I have come from. The geography of my youth has shaped who I am. I’m proud of that and I am oh so lucky that was the case.

I find god outside. In the desert swells as the sun rises and the land wakes up. In the condensed quiet of the mountain side as avalanches roar closer to the heavens. In the quick current of the goliath sleepin river. In being dragged across the ocean floor, sand and salt in my lungs. Wildflower and hot dust in my mouth. The wisdom of the human race strung through the length of my tendons. An ancient rhythm in my heart.

I am not made to sit indoors all my life. I am too feral for that. I see myself in my dogs. In their compassion and admiration. In their goofy nelect of the rules. In the simple joys. I am aware they were not made to sit indoors all their life. I have seen them chase down/shake till spines snap/pant in excitation/ look up at me and grin. Killing comes easy for them. And in the same breath they are my derpy babies again treading on baby pit vipers, easily dancing with death. They are not perfect. They live somewhere between domestic and wild. In a lot of ways I think they’re like us.

My name is Emily and I am a person.

I make mistakes. A lot of mistakes.

I am an artist           And I am trying to make a difference.

[frankcastorf-blog]

A Collection of Poems that Might Have Nothing To Do With Anything (ya girl Annie Laurie) 

Midnight treat #1

0I wear no makeup in Berlin my face is bare and the cooler air bites my sweaty skin

I think of your art as I make my own, convinced one day you will be proud of me and not ashamed that I’m a performer (you are the best liar I know)

I quit smoking and I don’t have time to drink

I’m not sure if this is called “healing”, what a hot and hateful word !

At least I’m educated at least I’m well read at least I’m very well traveled I will never forgive you and I have no reason to.

 How could you (#1)

How could I (#2)

Walk quickly by.

1

It’s like losing a limb

It was dead anyways

But that doesn’t stop the phantom feeling

Stop

Come near

Run away

Walk quickly through the grass

It’s like eating something sweet when I’m full and my stomach hurts

It’s like being high and ignoring your phone

It’s like being attacked

It’s like being emotionally manipulated and gaslighted for months

It’s like loving someone more than you will ever love another person ever again

It’s like knowing that they will read this

We all heal in our own way

0j’ai dit non. ……//// empty heart

tiny fists

pillow turned from white to black (mascara) spent over 2000 GBP today because i’m a trust FUNd sex\\drug\\ADDICT ADDICT ADDICTE(d 2 u)