insrsting-blog

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I was walking home from the convience store around the block having just purchased a pair of tallboys and a fizzy water from the nerd who watches family guy and tng on a laptop next to the register on the swing shift, and I had been thinking something about addiction and the nature of living in a city versus living somewhere rural and then I was thinking about a— or I had a sort of idea about there being a need for emotional socialism, or something like that. Earlier, while sitting in the tub, I had read a thing in a book that described two types of society: dominator and partnership models. They were described as one might imagine they’d be described as after hearing their names. And ours is a dominator type society and something about trump always having to be the best or at least better than most and how the other day my friend had described to me how the Shoshone people she had been embedded with had traditionally functioned as a partnership society with strong feminine values. And I was walking up the stairs to my building and walking in and getting my keys to my apartment out of my pocket I thought, in a manner exactly like remembering that I needed to do something and had for a time forgotten—like to return a phone call, or something—I thought, oh, shoot, I need to talk to the cowboys and tell them to stop killing all these indians.

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damn I remember being on a road trip w my dad and older brother years ago, I musta been like 12 or 14, and it was late at night and my brother and I had fallen asleep and I had woken up in the night while my dad was still driving and my dad has put on a cheap trick cd and he is listening to it and driving through the desert toward bakersfield and he doesn’t know that I am awake in the back seat looking at him and listening to the music with him and after a spell he stops to buy a diet coke at a gas station in the middle of nowhere and when he returns to the car with the diet coke he sees I’m awake and he doesn’t make much of it but he tells me a story about— or not even a story really but just he tells me that he used to listen to cheap trick when he was younger, in high school or college or something, and that he likes this song or that song or what have you. and we drive on into the night listening to music together, and my grandparents are waiting for us.

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This morning I woke up and looked at my phone and peed and went to make cereal but I had no cereal and I thought to make eggs but remembered I didn’t have eggs and so I showered and dressed and ate some pills and held a tincture under my tongue and I drank water and put coffee into a mason jar and then I grabbed a garbage bag on my way out the door and I put the bag in the dumpster behind my building and then walked across the street to wait for the bus. While I was waiting I noticed a man walking toward me. And he— Something was up, like, he wasn’t walking right. I guessed he was disabled or inebriated and he was walking toward me and staring at me and I felt uncomfortable but figured he was probably coming over to wait for the bus like I was.

But when he was like 10 feet from me he suddenly fell forward and didn’t put his hands out to stop himself and his head sort of bounced off the curb in a way that didn’t immediately seem disturbing but which now seems disturbing. And I didn’t know what to do for a moment and I looked at him lying facedown in the gutter and when he didn’t move for a few seconds I moved a few feet closer to him and asked if he was alright. He didn’t answer so I asked again and he kind of stirred and lifted his head a little and made a terrible moaning sound. And I asked again if he was alright and he moaned and I could see blood beginning to drip from his face. And I sort of half stepped toward him asking again if he was good and he was again silent but seemed to be starting to notice the blood and just then my bus arrived.

And I knew what I should do was to help the guy up and see if he was okay and if he wasn’t okay then to get him help to make him okay. But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to get away from the situation. So I got on the bus. And the busdriver asked if the guy was okay and I said that he had tripped or something but seemed okay and I walked toward the back of the bus and sat down and the driver pulled forward a little and said something out of the open door to the guy laying bloody in the gutter, asked if he was okay or something. And I don’t know what the guy said in response but I could hear him say something. And the busdriver said something about I’ll call someone to come get you and then he closed the doors and drove off. And the busdriver, as far as I could tell, didn’t call anyone.

And later, sitting on my bed, in my room, drinking beer and watching basketball on my laptop, I thought what it means to die young. How in the not so distant past people died young all the time. It was aberrant to live into your 70s in like the 18th and maybe even 19th centrury. Or at least I think it was. I thought about the part in Madame Bovary where the guy… Mr. Bovary… I forget his name… The part in the beginning of the book where he is sort of on his own in a city bigger than where he was from and he is going to school or something and he has his first sexual experience and he drinks and gambles a little and… Maybe he’s going to medical school? And I thought about Hunger by Knut Hamsun and all these literary figures who lived during a time when people died young. And Dostoyevsky. And it’s fine. It’s all fine.

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Obtuse is something for me.

Obtuse

I don’t

I’ve been doing things and thinking I’m knowing what I’m doing but I think I don’t. I think I only see my actions in a small… context… something.

Short sighted.

I wonder what it is to be long sighted. Would I feel more positive emotions if I was… If I did that.

Hmm, yes, insrsting

I want an intimate person to try to kill me. No weapons. If they succeed it will be fine and if they don’t it will be fine.

This is not

In this Montana of 300 song it sounds like he increases his intensity for the whole song, constantly getting more intense, but maybe this is not exactly true. Maybe he uses tricks to make it seem like that. That doesn’t matter I guess. This song is cool.

I like it when he says, “to us she was a loving mother but to other motherfuckers she was clientele”

Just involuntarily manifested mental image of motherhood as like a lavender-colored, vaguely hugging-type movement.

My cousin is a mother and a fuckup and her daughter is a sweet kid and my cousin she hustles a bit but is also a fuckup.

Today I asked someone if they wanted to have a kid or to raise a kid and after a while they said they wanted to have a kid. I told them I wanted to raise a kid.

Michael Caine in Hannah and Her Sisters is confusing. Who is that guy. Woody Allen makes sense. Mia Farrow makes sense. That e e cummings poem is something.

If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.

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and I felt bad because I think I caused and contributed to some level of emotional distress or uneasiness and I didn’t want you to feel that way, to experience emotional distress, and I especially did not want to be the cause of that emotional distress, and I felt bad that I didn’t have the skill or ability to properly navigate the situation which caused all of this, then felt ashamed that I didn’t have that and that I had never developed it or even tried to develop it in any significant way, and I felt resentful of the situation into which I was born and I felt bad for blaming my parents’ actions for my actions and for essentially abdicating responsibility for my inability to properly communicate or socialize or whatever and, by extension, your emotional distress of which, I’m pretty sure, I was the cause. And on the bus there were people with funny accents, two men and a woman, maybe from england or somewhere near to england, who also had a baby with them, and the baby was held tightly to one of the men’s chest by some kind of device, and the baby was young and pink and chubby and was clutching the man’s chest and staring at me or the woman seated in front of me, and I was looking back at the baby who seemed warm and well cared for and I was crying and I wished I could just clutch to someone’s large chest, to not be aware of complicated emotions like shame and regret, to simply ride a bus in the care of someone who loved me while I stared directionlessly at the world around me

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some things in life that I have enjoyed

music made by black people

my mom

my siblings

movies

restaurants with waiters

wilderness

firelight

wearing clothes

sharing pictures with strangers on the internet

cannabis

basketball

ancestral food preparation techniques

making art

books written by depressed, intelligent people

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beans it was filled with feathers. like a 4ft round pillow, and it had a denim cover. and it was often occupied by me or my brother and occasionally my mom. one of the three of us. and i remember spending a lot of time laying on this thing with my face down and barely hanging over the side and feeling around for quills of feathers poking through the cover, picking them out, enjoying the feeling of the feather sliding through a stitch in the denim. and if— at that age, between maybe 5 and 12, if I ever was mired up in the sort of thick, damp depression I have come now to know pretty well, I would ask my mom or my brother to put the big denim pillow on top of me and then, if I really felt awful, to pile other couch pillows and blankets on top of that. and the weight of it made me feel better. safer, or something. maybe has something to do with the pressure a baby might feel while it’s still in a womb.

anyway I would lay like that for a while, with all this stuff piled up on me, and after some amount of time I might cheer up and burst out from underneath spraying pillows and blankets all over— or sometimes I’d ask my mom or my brother to jump on top of the pile and squish me to death. sarcastically, I’d ask them to do that. and they would jump and I’d pretend to die and then I’d laugh and then life would resume for me.

and so that’s something I can say.

but I don’t know how I perceived all this back when it was happening, I don’t remember that. obviously I have some opinions on why I did this thing now, but my motivations at the time are long gone and I think irretrievable. and I don’t know what it really is all this pillow business, if it’s what I think it was now, if it’s my retrospective perception; or if it was just something that happened at a time that came before the present time.

I hope that death feels like being buried under a big denim pillow.

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mashed sweet potato maple pecan cakes as “bun” for pulled cranberry duck “sandwich” topped w dollop of creme fraiche and garnished w chive served w rosemary lemon candied beets and brown butter carrots

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Girl 2 seats ahead on bus w oily curly hair between chin and shoulder length, flannel shirt, silver rings, blue fingernail polish half chipped off, shoulder bag, and clutching giant backpack on lap and atop the backpack an extremely worn book whose jacket had been taped over w yellow duct tape and on the front cover written the words "thank you" in block letters w the T colored in. She scribbling in the book furtively, secretly, passionately, a little desperately. I only seen the back of her head and I want to see her face and I want to know what she's writing in her book and so I'm keeping an eye in her direction hoping she turns her head or whatever. Every time someone gets on the bus and walks past her she stops writing closes her book. And while I'm sitting hoping to catch a glimpse I'm thinking it would be nice to know what's in her book, to ask her and then to know, and in my head I'm thinking to say "excuse me miss I noticed you writing in this book and it seems like its something you been doing for a while now and... I was just sitting back there and felt this desire to know you or to see, like, who this is in here. In you. In this body you got." But then she would speak and would become something more than a secret, she would be real. I would have to say to her, Please don't say anything. Sorry, this seems aggressive. Um, do you know schroedinger? Please don't answer that. He was some dude, a physicist I think, or a philosopher. I don't know. But he had this thing which I think is called the uncertainty principle that he demonstrated by positing putting a cat in a box and also some poison food in the box and then closing the box. And the point of this thought exercise or whatever it is is to determine, without opening the box, if the cat is alive or dead. And what he thought the answer would be was 'both'. The cats alive and the cats dead both at once. And isn't that what it is when I saw you from back there. I see a body, I see a notebook into which you're writing bits of yourself, but until I engage with capital Y you you're not quite exactly a person. You are. You are person. But mostly an interesting image that I perceive, right. I mean like, you're obviously a person but also obviously just a reflection of light shooting into my eyes and that information translated and annotated by me, creating something that is both an image and a reality both at once. And man, I shouldn't've said anything to you.

And while I was thinking these thoughts she got off the bus and walked away and through the window I noticed she wudnt wearing a bra, which was nice to look at.

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Wikipedia List of Ghosts

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Mightier than Estë is Nienna, sister of the Fëanturi; she dwells alone. She is acquainted with grief, and mourns for every wound that Arda has suffered in the marring of Melkor. So great was her sorrow, as the Music unfolded, that her song turned to lamentation long before its end, and the sound of mourning was woven into the themes of the World before it began. But she does not weep for herself; and those who hearken to her learn pity, and endurance in hope. Her halls are west of West, upon the borders of the world; and she comes seldom to the city of Valimar where all is glad. She goes rather to the halls of Mandos, which are near to her own; and all those who wait in Mandos cry to her, for she brings strength to the spirit and turns sorrow to wisdom. The windows of her house look outward from the walls of the world.

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Sometimes, after naps in the afternoon on weekend days I’ll wake feeling very hot and my heart will pound, and my body will feel dense and heavy. And that happened today. I had slept from around 4pm to about 6 and when I woke the sun was setting and it was about 6, half past 6. And what I did, was— What I did to combat the feeling I described, which is a really terrible feeling that leaves me unable to do most anything but sit silently for a while in discomfort— What I did was bite a klonopin in half and drink about a liter of very cold water and then remove all of my clothes and open the windows in my house and stand in a cool shower, where I payed special attention to wetting my scalp and, like, my face—rubbing the top of my head and the front of my head vigorously so as to feel the skin move around on the bone. And this seemed to make me feel better—cooler and lighter—and then it was nighttime and I cooked a meal.

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animals is better than humans but that doesn’t mean I want to hang out with animals all the time. is a sentence I might have said to end a relationship. there have been a few— quite a few sentences like that in my life. usually communicated in text message. one of them was about a hypothetical portrait of me, I remember specifically.

I’m allergic to most animals. makes it hard to be around them. any thing with fur or hair causes my bronchial passageways to tighten and my eyes to itch and this happens even sometimes not around animals. more-so lately, or I’ve noticed it lately. seems like when I leave my house or more generally move any direction away from salt lake city I start to wheeze and scratch and weep. further away I get the more severe the symptoms.

what is this?!

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there are some times when I’m out and about or just— or just like sometimes doing nothing and I’ll maybe be listening to music or looking at a thing and I’ll start to cry. usually due to some stimulus like a thing in a song or a person or even some, ummmm, some like, just some light. and I’ll start to cry but not really cry, like I won’t shed tears but will just feel the feeling of tears forming in my face, and then the stimulus will be altered or move along and I’ll stop crying or stop starting to cry. this has been happening frequently especially lately. and I think to myself afterward how I would like to be able to produce tears at least and fully realize that emotion. but it passes or I pass it and it— it’s transient. and I imagine this it’s like two trains passing near each other.

the amtrak line “the california zephyr” runs through salt lake city from chicago to sacramento and it passes through the west desert here in utah and even I think through the salt lake, on tracks laid on an area of land manmade but in the water. and there is only one train going west and one going east, last I checked, and going west it arrives every few days in salt lake city around 3am and then runs through the desert and the lake in pitch dark unless the moon is out. and when the moon is out and you’re traveling through the water you can see the moon reflected in the water and it’s beautiful and... y’know. and you’ll pass the train going east and sometimes you can see lights in the sleeper car windows and flashes of people in the windows and seeing this is, for me, something that creates a feeling of desperation, like trying to lay hands on a ghost as it passes through you. and I imagine that this scene seen from above, like an aerial view of this passing, might create an entirely different feeling. two trains below going in opposite directions both carrying passengers and each passenger with their own reasons for doing what they are doing but all of them being people who are doing things.

on one trip going east to salt lake from sacramento I remember one passenger in particular who boarded in reno and seemed to be maybe 50 or 60 years old and he wore clothing that a poor child might wear, a graphic tee from a thrift store and dirty pants. and he had braces on his legs and carried a large case and he sat across the aisle from me and after he interacted with train employees a few times I guessed he had mental disabilities and he asked for help with almost everything one might ask for help for. help with the large case he carried, help with the operation of his seat, help with standing and sitting, help with making reservations for the dining car which would be serving dinner soon, he asked for directions to the bathroom. and he did all of this with a smile and genuine stupidity and with such enthusiasm that it was obvious that he was very excited to be on this trip. he spoke to everyone who would listen and everyone who wouldn’t, and I learned that in his large case he kept an accordion and he was going to provo to play a concert with his church band at brigham young university. and thinking about him now I feel tears forming in my face.

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My dad’s mom died when she was young. Maybe 27 or maybe like 42 or something. She had a heart… thing. I heard she had a heart defect related to an illness she had as a newborn. A doctor said to me once, when I had recited family history for him, that maybe it could’ve been scarlet fever. My dad was 8 when she died. He and his twin brother and his half sister and his other half sister went to live with their aunt, who has been my grandmother.

And— My dad doesn’t know who his father is. My dad’s mom had, I guess, a lot of men. And one of them, my aunt Letitia’s dad, he was a barber. And my dad told me that once a month or whatever they would go down to his barber shop and he would give the children haircuts. And my dad says to me in the car one day that in a discussion he had with his therapist that his wife has pressured him into seeing he recounted that at the barber’s shop there was y’know like a menu board or whatever that listed prices of different cuts, ranging from a buzzcut to a “style”. And this barber would buzz my dad’s head and give his twin brother, my uncle Richard, a “style”.

Um, wait. Um. Lucille Ball from the I Love Lucy show, her father died when he was 27 from typhoid in 1915. He had worked for Pacific Bell. And Lucy... she said later, in interviews, that she didn’t remember really what happened the day her father had died except that a bird had become trapped in their house.

I moved recently and my dad and my brother helped me move and when we arrived at my new house my dad stayed in the car for a minute and talked to me and my brother about his separation from his current wife and their apartment they would split time at when they weren’t at their house with their kids. And he said about his anger management classes he’s been going to. And my brother said things about his girlfriend and we all seemed in agreement that things were what they were.

Lucille Ball was severely afraid of birds most her life. My dad took a nap on the beach on the 4th of July.

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at this new place I looked at the landlady was this tiny belgian woman name elizabeth and when I got there she showed me in to her mansion and showed me a few apartments in it and then I went to her living quarters to do an application and there is cnn on a small tv and a tiny caged dog barking like crazy next to the couch but elizabeth she threw a blanket over the cage and said a harsh word and the dog was mumbling and then quiet. and she talked to me a long time and I was surprised at her mental acuity and ability to weave threads of conversation so much more adeptly than I am given her age, she was maybe in the 60s or 70s. she had a thick accent and I was confused about where she was from, I thought maybe somewhere in europe where they had lots of trees but in her conversing with me she mentioned living in mexico and I figured she must be from there though it didn't quite match her accent or appearance anyway I didn't think too hard about it. but it turned out she was from belgium and had lived all over, in switzerland and in some place with a name that I couldn't understand but which she said is known for being the vacation spot of the richest rich and offered a wide variety of luxury spa experiences. and she had lived in tangiers and orlando and liverpool, where her husband was from. and her accent I then realized was of a belgian who had learned english from someone born in liverpool. it was nuts my dude.

anyway she was saying about her father who was 7'2 and who fought in wwi (born 1894 she said. 24 years older than her mom she said) that one time when elizabeth was a girl a priest had seen her and her sister (who had something wrong with her brain) playing in a bunker built by germans down the street from her house and the priest had asked them if they go to church and when elizabeth told him no he told her to come by and that about this time she would be receiving her first communion. elizabeth knew about first communion from her schoolmates. she went home and asked her mom and when her dad heard elizabeth ask why they didn't go to churche he became upset and asked who had talked to her, where he was, and she told him and he quickly walked to the door and outside and elizabeth went to the door and looked out and saw her dad walk up to the priest and pick him up and punch him in his face and then put him down and walk back home. when she asked him why she couldn't go to church her father said "some people need to believe in this in order to live, but we do not need to believe in this."

years later elizabeth had a studio of her own and was going to school and working and one day met her sister and they went downtown to get coffee and they spoke about their father and the priest and her sister says to her that when her father was young, he and his 2 brothers had gone to a boarding school (which still exists today and has existed for hundred of years) run by catholic people in which sexual abuse was rote. and when they had tried to abuse elizabeth's father when he was only 12 years old, he had escaped with his 2 younger brothers. and he took them to the docks in antwerp and hid them each on a boat and told them to not show themselves until they were sure land was in sight. he couldn't go home and was only 12, but being so tall he went to the army and told them he wanted to enroll and they believed he was 16 and accepted him.

elizabeth told me that one of her uncles had ended up in the congo and was adopted by natives and became a highly respected and well-known missionary in the area, building churches and schools etc, and that he had corresponded with her father and she had seen pictures of him with his "black buddies".

the other uncle elizabeth heard nothing of except that he was in america. and when she was still young, elizabeth told her mother than one day she would go to the united states and find out about her uncle and in response her mother had been supportive in a way like she knew the task was impossible but yes, sure honey, of course, right

and when elizabeth came to utah and asked her husband about mormons and he told her about their genealogy library, she went and in an hour and a half found her uncle and he had lived in tennessee and died in 1969. she said when she came home from the family history livrary she had looked at the drawings of her mother and father on the wall and said to them "ha! I found him!"

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The drain in the shower in my bathroom is what I guess you could call a slow drain. Old, gummed up with what have you. I think a previous roommate of mine broke something off down there while trying to fix it and just made it worse. Um, sometimes it flows pretty well and things are nice down there but never for long. I’ve tried doing liquid drain clog remover but that doesn’t seem to work very much. Had a professional come in one time and whatever he did cleared it up for about a day or two before it went back to being… whatever—bad. There’s this sort of rusty looking cover built into the floor of the tub between the opening of the drain and the hair catcher that sits on top and this metal piece down in it makes it impossible to really get in there with a snake or anything. Blocks entry, something that looks like it’s been there a long time. The thing what seems to work best is this little tool I use when I clean some of my drug paraphernalia. A little metal rod about 4 inches long with a hook on the end. You can get that through some openings in the weird cover thing and scrape around just below the lip of the drain and pull out a few gross hairs and the like, though the flow is never permanently restored and the scraping sound it makes when you’re in there going for it just cuts right through me. It’s been this way since I moved in here 3, 4 years ago. I’m supposed to move out next week.