vanillaaf

[vanillaaf]

Disclosure: One

At this point, for you the deadbolt is engaged on my plans and ideas. You're the bankruptcy my self esteem wasn't bracing for. You're the red tape. You're the worst.

[vanillaaf]

The sludge at the bottom; chug.

Here at the bottom of this lack lustre cup of cocoa, we treat the unlocked doors like prison bars. We gulp it to the end. With the windows open it's nearly plausible that something better is out there. It's almost giddy, what the fresh air stirs up in the controlled stagnant heat of this indoor microcosm. It's not hell, but it's not far off. I don't need what I thought I did. I value what I forgot about, and I bitterly resolve I will never go pulmonarily hungry again.

[vanillaaf]

The Error Proof Test or The Other Side of Trying

Say most things have been crumbling like wet-dried beach sand posing as a sugar thin layer of pavement. For a while now, really. Irrelevant background to a real mess. Time elapses. You’ve become a human contraceptive-armed combatant. Not with a daily pill or some alien piece of plastic buried in your womb, because fuck that. Your game is a sexual nightmare of spermicidal gels and rubbers, films and flaming side effects. Hell, perhaps on rare occasions you drop 50ish dollars on Plan Alphabet Pills when your brain really wants to get antsy. Point of the matter is you don’t need anymore obligations and you’re as careful as possible. You are the ball at the end of a chain as it is. You roll when you get momentum, but those iron links, they couldn’t let you gain enough speed to actually break off. Despite the time you’ve spent sanding and subsequently patching a particularly weak link. In addition to all of this overkill double wrapping and whatever the hell else you’re up to, you’re also the type that likes to test the water monthly with hormone sensing tests. Reasons as unfounded as they are, you can’t help yourself. The need to see that single line is compulsive, urgent, and real. Until one day, there’s two lines. What? Two parallel lines. How? Two separate tests. No. "What in the literal fuck just happened, body?" Your emotions simmer. Slowly at first, but they're boiling furiously soon. The research on how not to do this starts instantaneously. You find yourself sitting alone on an examination table in a sensible dress with paper draped over your bare legs and feet like a tablecloth. The next set of medications will be black with a sheen that reflects the fluorescent overhead lights like a black widow in your brain. Awful freedom that you’re not positive you can face. You are going to face it, you’re there. Trembling with sweaty palms and tears pretty close to spilling out, you’re going to do this shit. Your heart has been a flighty twit for way too long. Time for some analytical follow through for once. At least this once. A light knock breaks the solitary confinement of the empty room and the nurse tells you “The test came back negative. I don’t know how, but I tested it twice.” "Is this an experiment..? Something psychological, a sucker punch of a trick?” The traffic on the way to this disaster was gridlocked to the point of missing the appointment. And somehow you made it just on time, only for this to happen. Two positives, one negative, and a tornado of worry picking up speed. “Come back in a week and we’ll see.” Phone calls. Brutal research. A third test the following day. Positive. Five days of terror. Flashbacks of watching shows with women delivering unexpected cargo like stowaways on a ship. "How are you here? If you ARE here, are you wrecked from the mixed drinks and Plan Alphabet pills? Son or daughter of a bitch.” False positives? No. Chemical pregnancies? What? “Who is the dad.. How can it be me?” Ugh. You’ll smash that face if those words come out again, but they do, and you don’t. Another layer of worries. More discouraging psychological warfare. Four days later the cramps start. The flow is stupid heavy. The consistency is..different. The tears are hot and free-flowing. Is this a bullet dodged, or a devastating loss? Can both be true at the same time?

[vanillaaf]

Lit match to a wax heart.

[vanillaaf]

Maybe instead of those awkward gatherings you've planned in the past ..trying to isolate sects of work friends & their friends from the pack into some mismatched personality teeth clinching convention.. maybe this year think of the top eight most interesting/creative/admirably witty people you work with and try to isolate them into a mutually inclusive mismatched personality teeth clinching convention. Next year: Do more drugs.

[vanillaaf]

Heavy on the synth.

The next door to door salesperson to knock on my door should be aware that I'm extremely giddy over Bluebell scented Mrs. Meyer counter spray. The first five minutes, following being greeted, is when I rattle off an oral essay I've concocted on why I'm infatuated with this smell ..Which will lead into pleading with you to "Just spray a spritz. Seriously. Smell that? It's the smell of the future. Get me out of here. Please."

[vanillaaf]

"Tell me about your pallet garden sketch." It's lopsided drawing executed by index finger to phone screen. It does not equate vision resolution or any other satisfying sensation. Fuck your fantasy. Your big words. Your hot bitch. Your side chick. Your face. My face. Grind it. Primarily, Fuck my improper assessment of the state of things. A daily event that has become something to be counted on, like grey Oregon rain, an eastbound train, amber waves of grain. If your brain is stuck in a trench as deep as Marianas, tell no tales. Pull no punch. Deliver it straight to the enflamed appendix of someone you once pined for. Fawned over. Planned on. Set the past and future on fire. Ah, and pretend you know where to start on that, by the way ..I know you have no clue. The cycle of days is constant. The mood set like a stain. Tensioned strain taut enough to break fiber, tear a poly-cotton blend, crumble solid steel like a ball of foil. Synthetic and real. It's all "fuck how you feel", dished from both sides now. All sides now. Come together, right now. Over me.

[vanillaaf]

expel, repel.

Heart beat out of control, I lash and grasp at all the wrong things. The debate on how much I time I should spend suppressing the sniveling and complaining feeling that "life isn't fair" internally.. is a scale, tipping toward the prevalent side of action lately.

I brace myself to pour my guts out to a qualified stranger for the first time at 3pm, in a part of town I rarely go. I'll spend the next two hours trying to discern whether or not this is a move I even want to make. Throughout the drive there, I will flush with heat and get nauseous-nervous about whether or not this will help anything.

This secret meeting is just that..I never shared my plans to try and sort myself out. At this point, I doubt there would be a positive reception. I expect no reaction at all, complete dismissal. That's what I'm accustomed to. I know my silence and sneaking out of routine adds to the cloud of unjust suspicion thickening around his perception of me. The weird lurid accusations that have cropped up, I don't even have the will to argue down. I don't have it in me to care.

There's not really a choice at this point, just the whisper-to-scream feeling that stalling isn't an option anymore. I need someone else to tell me what this is, what I am, we are.. isn't good now. I need another person,  someone with pedigree and unbiased expertise to give me the grand analysis. However shitty that ends up being.

This whole thing might set my world on fire.

Oh well. Light it up, motherbitch.

[vanillaaf]

Connie Chung, and things to come.

I sit as close to the record player as I can get, thinking of the past, future, and present. I'm listening to a 4 year old ask for her jizz-lipped Barbie-Princess-knock-offs to be set free from their multi-pack. I had a nauseating day of pretending, passing. I had a problem pretending to be. 

I crave that week alone in Astoria. Drinking beer from brewery mason jars,  with regional corporate, dreaming of the future, and hoping it turns out. In general. I hope the future turns out.

[vanillaaf]

youcangoyourownway

It's highly likely having my wisdom teeth removed knocked loose some unharnessed capability to see things for what they are.

I don't have the slightest clue what I'm thinking lately. I feel the persistent need to change something or someone, nearly everyday. Maybe it's me, or him, or them, or all of these people, or that couple over there, or that shit I saw on tv, or this story I read online, but I can't keep it up forever.

My point is, I don't know where my True North is, and I don't know what to do to balance the "equation".

I play twenty question roulette all the time, and it's exhausting:

Do I deserve this? Is this acceptable? What do I change? How do I know if this decision is absurd? Who does it affect? What do I do after I do the thing I want to do? Can I fix this? Does this need fixing? Should I fix this? Is this normal? How do I make my point, and get results? Is anything ever just..peaceable? How do other people do this? Is it me, or my brain? Am I just outright crazy? Do other people go through this? Am I overbearing as fuck, or what? I don't think it's me, but..is it? Who can I tell anything to, objectively? Why is everything so god damn difficult?

My high school Geometry teacher used to use the phrase "plug and chug" for replacing variables in equations, in reference to "seeing things through to the end" blah blah..I've been applying that shitty advice to my real life for over a decade. Somehow I thought this theory was transitive from math to living.

I am not 16 years old, contrary to the verbal projection. Promise.

FIN.

[vanillaaf]

tea tinted piss stained wet nap.

I've diagnosed feeling incapable as of a form of paralysis. Wilting plans, indifference, crippling self doubt, off-the-charts cynicism, spiked with possibly irrational resentment..splayed out, dried up, roasting with jasmine flowers, and rose oil.

Toss that mess in your mom's candle powered ceramic potpourri burner, joining us via thrift store shelf, circa 1991. Now, you've got yourself a signature home fragrance. Breathe it in deep, let it out slow.

Unfortunately, your work here has been ruled borderline useless so far. Easily, you've written off other people's differing opinions and concluded on more than one occasion, if they could just align themselves with this simple system you've concocted, all of this shit would work out "just fine."

The general consensus is your wits are scattered off I-84 EB, somewhere between here and the souther border of the next state over. You continually direct those laser-bitch-beams at the wrong people. At some point it becomes heavily apparent that the focus will be shifted, with any luck it's at the right time. The time where you can rise up in your uncoordinated glory, and remember how to parallel park this mother fucker, just like the old days.

This is no promise of achieving that. This is a reminder, sometimes the real answers to these questions are buried in impenetrable roadside blackberry thickets. Right now it feels like they are the actual guard rails meant to keep you from careening off. Maybe you can salvage this whatever-the-hell, after all. So do it.

[vanillaaf]

Clandestine Plotting; the Interview.

What do you know about pressure?

After the great deluge of personal and professional missteps I've rained down the last couple of weeks, I feel some loud need to just..IDK, put my thumb through a peach. Control. Take charge, or whatever.

What are you on about? What does stone fruit demolition have to do with getting your collective shit together?

As the possessor of the uncanny ability to make an Olympic Game out of the small frustrations involved in everyday life, I know I'm flailing around. Like a tree in a windstorm, like dust in a whirlwind. I have the control of a piece of chewed gum, stuck to the bottom of some miscreant's shoe. Resisting each step, but grinding into the tread with every step.

Well, that's not going to do. What can a respectable flower like you do to remedy your situation? Oh, I haven't thought it through that far. I daydream and justify thoughts and scenarios so impossible or ridiculous that the fleeting feeling just feels like what I assume an asthma attack could feel like.

You must be cray. That doesn't sound anything like your wise 17 year old self saying, "Regrets are a waste of time."

I've lined up and punched every past year of myself in the face, going back 15 years. They formed a single file queue, and I just let them have it. They didn't mind. They knew they had it coming.

I've never actually punched a person before, so I'm sure my form was lacking the usual "oomph" a seasoned, well-weathered fist can deliver. I still felt pretty bad about it later. I offered them each a care package containing: A cold compress, some kleenex, a piece of fruit pie, and some valuable advice scribbled on a steno pad page that I washed in a pant's pocket.

[vanillaaf]

Fescue Wild

I've been catching flak for killing a dot-to-dot pattern into the grass with Round Up. Call it ill-usage, call it blissful negligence. I was just trying to rid this lush Kentucky Blue of its Dandelion and Clover scourge. Who am I kidding, I'm 93% sure this is some low grade Bermuda grass, heavily laced with spongey moss.

This herbicide was the adult application of one of my genius childhood dreams. I used to theorize it was possible to let grass grow around 4-6ft high. After the proper height was met, a maze/path could be mowed in, that would lead to a hand thatched hut.. to camp out in exclusively during the warmer months.

I lived and breathed that dream for years. A part of me would die every time my dad would rev up that Toro motor. No self respecting kid would deny the opportunity to be close enough to snack-raid their parents kitchen and plead for money to pay the ice cream man while still being almost autonomous. Living in cut off shorts, and jelly shoes, ratty pony tails, dirty faces. Summer hobo chic.

Now I just settle for burning holes in the Earth with a spray pump. Never cross a woman with a vendetta.