ZERAPHIM

venus without furs

2010-05-13T20:47:00.001-05:00

I turned your head towards me. You were looking away, and I was so close to you, staring into your eyes. I used just my fingertips to coerce your chin back. I kissed you very lightly, just nipping at your lips, sucking them gently, making it clear I was not about to let you kiss me at your own discretion. You turned your chin away gently, I brought it back and continued. Your cock twitching and growing against my leg with each suck and nip of your lips. You turned your head away again. I bring you back, lock your blue eyes to mine. I have no idea how else to break your anxious preoccupation. You have asked me for sex; why not let yourself overcome your mind, your thoughts, and come to the moment, and why not let me guide you, getting turned on in the process? I finally feel in sync with you, after so many times falling out of sync, your rejections that you don't call rejections, the way you seem to want me and then change your mind. The loss of your lust.

Finally you break contact with my eyes and turn away. "It's too intense," you say numbly. Angry? Depressed? Why can't I seduce you anymore? Could I ever, to the extent I wanted to?

I pull your chin back again, testing-- can I be the leader here, is this something to be overcome? But you turn your head back away, this time with decisive force. You're done.

Don't ask me to love you anymore. A lukewarm love that satisfies you and leaves me empty. I don't want to hope to make love to you again. I don't want to look forward to it. I don't want to ever believe it will happen again. Because now, even when we begin with your consent, you become unresponsive, weird. And then we stop. And you say nothing is wrong. You're just preoccupied. You're just not a highly sexual person. Highly sexual meaning having sex more than thrice a month. I start to distrust myself. I send you away because I am too aroused, I am afraid I'll touch you even though I know you're disinterested. You begin to tell me I pressure you. My heart breaks with remorse at those words. I do not wish to hurt you. I cannot be your platonic boyfriend.

I need to be needed. I need to serve through dominance. I need, I need.

We will be separated by December. Then the winter will come: cold winter in our little attic. And we will be friends, but there will be pain. It will not be new pain, created by separation; it will be the reminder of the inability of love to erase what we already were.

zines chapbooks & poetry @ the alchemist's closet: free shipping!

2010-02-15T14:41:00.000-05:00

Happy Valentine's Day from The Alchemist's Closet! I am offering free domestic shipping from today until the end of March. I'd love to have you stop by and see what I have to offer.

Specializing in Strange Zines by Queers, Trannies, Feminists, Anarchists & Punks. You will be sure to find Something to titillate your Mind & Expand your consciousness...

All packages come sealed with wax with a special (mystery) gift.

http://www.alchemistscloset.org/

Call for submissions! APMT 1.2: this is what we call family

2009-11-02T12:43:00.004-05:00

Call for Submissions!

Alchemical Postmodern Theorist: explore no-identity politics, radical culture & queer liberation

Issue two of my zine, APMT, is about family. APMT 1.2: "this is what we call family" explores family in all of its brilliant permutations. Is family defined by one man, and one women, and kids? By two married people of any gender? I am seeking to move beyond the gay marriage debate, and into the territory of chosen, post-nuclear, extended and queer families that break boundaries and practice radical new forms of support and encouragement. At the root of the revolution are groups of people who depend on each other, who are imagining and re-imagining 'family' all the time. I would love to have you be a part of this zine. Share your experiences with family: contribute a story, photograph, artwork, poem or article.

Stories, artwork and photography related to more traditional families (about having a child, marrying, or about parents, siblings, and grandparents) are more than acceptable, but these stories will be only part of the zine. Whatever your usual or unusual family structure, I would like to hear about it.

Deadline for submission is December 30, 2009. I'll accept pieces up until Jan 7 if you let me know beforehand.

Transmale/Biomale parenting in mainstream news

2009-04-29T22:09:00.002-05:00

Andey (left) and Leaf Nunes with their son Antonio. "We're a gay male couple that got to have a child the old-fashioned way," said Andey, a transgender man. Leaf is biologically male, while Andey was born female.
(ABC News)

bathroom disclosures

2009-04-14T18:01:00.004-05:00

My horoscope for today reads something like: Everyone can see how you're feeling today. The best idea is just to express yourself as you go through your day.

Funny thing about Wal-mart is that I'd never worked with so many people before, who were not much like me superficially but that tried to treat each other like family. In my two months at Shaw's, I never made even an acquiantence, and no one made an effort, either. At Wal-mart, people try to connect. They sometimes even act more comfortable with me than I am with myself. The most common example of this is telling me to smile. Somehow, if I am feeling shitty, no matter how much I try to keep to myself, some random employee will tell me to smile.

I hate being told to smile, especially when I'm feeling crappy.

Well, today, I had been feeling really low. Angry and low-energy and antisocial and depressed, for no particular reason. I know that I feel that way not because of anything happening in the present, but just because I've been through hell and feeling low is my body's way of slowly helping me heal. I expect to be depressed. I don't need to be forcibly cheered up, although I understand that that makes sense to some people.

So anyway. That first part of my horoscope was so true today, because my heart truly was on my sleeve and this woman, this other employee, could instantly see that I was depressed and told me to smile and be bubbly and that would make me happier. Hearing this I felt about ten times worse. The personell manager walked by and called me Ma'am, even though I've told her to please not do it. At this point I felt like I was about to walk off the job or hit my head on the wall.

I wandered for a few more minutes, and then went back to work. I felt my spirits lift a little, because it can be genuinely nice to interact with customers and help them, and this does cheer me up a bit sometimes. Then I had to go to the bathroom.

I usually hold it for as long as I can before I make my decision whether to go and which bathroom to use. This time I opted for the public women's room. I saw an elderly woman walk in, and then waited about ten seconds, the time I figured it would take for her to enter the stall and close the door. I try to get in and out of there without anyone seeing me. Management forbids me to use the men's room.

I timed wrong. I walked around the corner just as she was closing the door to the stall, and thus was facing me. Her mouth fell open and she stared. I usually just ignore things like this, and go about my business in a pissed off and put upon way. But for some reason, perhaps because she was staring and there was no one else there, I said "Hello."

She startled at my voice and started to explain that she had thought I was a boy because my hair was short, but then hesitated and became unsure of whether her second assumption was true, either. I started to talk to her.

"I have a lot of trouble with restrooms. It's because I'm so androgynous. Whether I go in the men's room or the women's room, I have problems. People stop, and stare and gasp," I told her. "If I use the women's room, especially, people are shocked and offended. I have had people call security on me."

She looked completely shocked. "But why?" she said. "Are you--are you a male--? Or?"

"No," I said. "I am, physically, female."

"I have no experience with this," she said. "I mean, I have heard about it on TV."

"I work here," I said, fingering my badge. "The management will not let me use the men's room in the staff office."

Again, she looked shocked. After a long pause, she turned to go into the stall. "Well," she said, "You just do your best."

Her words were still echoing in my head as I used the men's room later that day, and every day after that.

"Hey, I'm here."

2009-03-08T05:34:00.004-05:00

I am on a beach, having a therapy session. Myself, my mom, my grandmother and my great aunt are there. My great aunt seems to be expressing fears for me; we are talking about my transgenderedness. Then, it becomes apparent that she is not talking about that at all. Instead, she is talking about herself: her own feelings of suicidality associated with my being transgender. Sometimes, she tells the therapist, she just wants to suffocate herself. The therapist is understanding and moves to come over to her. I debate internally over whether to go over to her as well, and I plan to have a sassy attitude and assert myself best I can. I distinctly imagine the way my foot tracks over to her, defiant, will look in the sand.

Suddenly I tune in again to what she's saying. She's turning to look at me, and says suddenly and in a voice dripping with anger, "And sometimes I want to take a chainsaw to her [sic] while she is sleeping." She seems utterly serious. She repeats her threat once or twice for good measure. And I decide to escape.

I run from the beach into a warehouse. It is large and dim, and filled with huge rolled up rugs and long, low tables. I run though the warehouse, trying to think of how to get away in the smartest way. I suspect that she can run faster than I. I escape the first room, but for some reason I decide to go back and create traps that will cause her to fall while she chases me. I place a slippery, loosely rolled under-rug sheet on the floor and hide under a table to watch for her. She doesn't slip much, but she does wheel around and start searching the room I'm in. I am hiding under one of the low tables, and I keep moving to keep my body in the shadows as she runs around the room. She reminds me of Wanda's Seeker in Stephanie Meyers' book The Host.

After a little bit, I see that I can't hide from her much more. It's too stressful, anyway, the fear that she will catch me and my desire to protect my dream body from the fear induced by her hurting or killing me. It seems like she sees me anyway now, but I'm not sure. I lock eyes with her and stand up. "Hey, I'm here." I say, and as she starts to come for me I wake myself up.

Seduction, Dominance & Energy

2009-02-22T11:33:00.003-05:00

I stumbled across a woman's blog today who is socially and intimately involved in a group which I had not heard of prior, called the Seduction Community. This network of "pickup artists" (men, generally), both online and in bars or "lairs," practices a set techniques aimed at helping them pick up women-- pre-scripted lines, dominance behavior, "female psychology."

It is not hard to see the positive and negative sides of the idea-- on the one hand, it corrects some erroneous notions that some men hold about women. The Seduction Community teaches men not to buy women things to try and convince them to like them. Good idea. On the other hand, it seems to espouse some appalling notions of the highest good in life as being the biggest player, the one who can sleep with the most willing females.

The whole issue, though, brings to mind something for me that has been tangentially on my mind for some time. As a girl child, I was socialized by my mother with a set of behaviors that serve me incredibly badly, and especially when it comes to dating and sex.

Like most girl children, I was taught to be polite. Polite at all costs. Polite and nice and girly and kind even when I felt uncomfortable, even when I didn't like somebody. Polite when an adult gave me a creepy feeling. I was chastised for rudeness, told repeatedly that I was rude if I didn't thank people, say you're welcome each time, accept invitations. This is the way, of course, that most of us are socialized; however, there are stark differences between the socialization of boy and girl children.

In a relationship, I was taught to be needy. of course, this was not said, this was not taught as such. But I was taught a particular type of insecurity about myself. When I got into a relationship with E., I learned about this trait of mine much more thoroughly. Five months into our "relationship," I realized my self esteem had fallen greatly. I was dating someone who slept with everyone in town, it seemed, except for me. I was tagging along in our relationship because I wanted to be wanted. And I was not. E., like some other people, based his need for someone inversely upon how much they need him. The more I needed him, the less he needed me. The less I needed him, the more he wanted me. I was deeply aware of this push and pull, yet he seemed utterly oblivious to it. Our continuum of need flipflopped by the day, or the hour. Neither of us were aware enough to stop it. Finally, we agreed to separate.

This neediness, it seems, is part of what the Seduction Community wants to help cultivate in women. What I am curious about is---is there a middle ground between needing and being needed, where a relationship is fun, a playful tug of war? Would that be an enjoyable game? That is to say, must we accept the paradigm of need (of dealer and addict, as Ruiz analogizes it) or can we transcend it entirely?

I guess I have been somewhat in favor of transcending it. It seems tawdry, a little, and unneeded. For awile, I have sought a "new paradigm of relationship," an elusive third option. Is this third option, of mutual benefit, a transcendence of the mental realities of needed and needer? Or is it a fine fluctuation between the two? And, if two people genuinely LIKE each other, is all of this rendered moot?

Seduction Community may help to empower men, and perhaps even help them to relate to women better, less desperately, with more balance. Yet, in its many practices, it seems to overlook that simple idea of mutual liking. Game playing CAN keep a partner off balance and interested for a long time. E. kept me off balance and made me THINK I liked him for a long time. But I eventually realized I did not. I was attracted to my own need.

With M., I put a fair amount of effort into our friendship at first, and did expend effort in making sure that I was coming on well, not overly needy, and guiding the depth and intensity of our conversations in a somewhat calculated way, yet it was not something aimed at seducing him. There is no reason for me to pursue sex or intimacy in this way.

Rather, I wanted to see if I could get a better picture of myself, and see what I was habituated into doing in a relationship. I learned a lot by breaking my habits. Something like the SC--or many other programs aimed at establishing social dominance--can be so valuable in helping you to see where your learned submission lies. Yet their real value is there--in the seeing--and not in your ability to adopt the "new program", the new habit, and become successful. That success is just as much a false image as the failure you were experiencing before.

With M, I have ceased my energy expenditure in guiding the relationship. I feel fairly lazy. I am not sure If I'm presently feeling a great attraction to him. If getting close to him results in finding that I genuinely like him, I believe it is worth it to expend a little extra energy.

Again and Again

2009-02-11T04:36:00.005-05:00

I haven't written in so long. Not sure why. I've been hopping along in my little life, wal-mart, bus, internet, school. I took the time out this early morning to read my journal again, and realized I'd neglected to write for months. I do write in my paper journal, but without great depth or length.

I fear that I've lost some talent for writing. Is it a loss of intelligence or a loss of self-assuredness? Is it a simple effect of the fear itself? For it seems directly triggered by it. I do endure periodic rounds of fear that my medication is causing a loss of intelligence, but I must not pursue that thought too much more.

Wal-mart is dulling me, making me a flat fig-leaf. At first it seemed it was doing something to me, something deep and great, not by virtue of its own virtues but as part of a process guided by God himself. I was beginning to feel some kind of stirrings of a connection between the spiritual and political, something I had not thought so possible.

Martin has been obsessing me a bit. I can't figure where to place him in my mind, this man whose intelligence and gentleness of mind feels akin to my own, yet who the baser aspects of my mind struggle with daily.

Perhaps I could make this oath to myself: that i will allow myself to be at whatever intelligence level I am at; to not criticize or condemn my own mind for not living up to my idea of its potential. I know the struggle is not yet over, and still everything appears as if it is on one side or the other.

There is the constant urge to evaluate (Judge); to think this or that, to pair or contrast or compare; It is quite amazing to see the tangled threads of mind I have developed (through little fault of my own) over the past years. I strive for no judgment, but it is not hard to be a bit surprised.

My desire for him seems to eclipse my ability to be with him in other contexts, to overwhelm me; and since I tend to judge harshly for oversexuality it becomes a bit trying. Let it suffice to say that I am turned on nearly all the time while with him socially, but especially when I have been away from him for some time. I know there is no shame in having sex with myself and that is a solution of sorts.

For so long The Parasite has been harsh on many aspects of myself and others, and my mental environment has resembled, at times, a battlefield of pain and blame. So many things are difficult when they 'seem' like they ought not to be.

2009-01-01T23:08:00.002-05:00

here on the island of misfit toys

2008-12-02T22:32:00.002-05:00

My mother told me that I was going and fucking up my life yet again. Sometimes when she gets mad she abandons logic and begins to say things which I, in my best attempt at being impartial, find to be totally factually inaccurate.

Ruiz endowed me with this gift of impersonally taking things. I know, because of Ruiz, that nothing my mother said to me about me was because of me. The little itch-makers in my brain would have me bound to believe that it was because of me. The itchies really go for that stuff. Guilt, blame--complex, tangled webs of them, if possible.

I was blessed with two parents. My mother, at her core, is a vibrational strata of pure awareness, which is able to love without thought or condition. My father, at his core, is a vibrational strata of pure awareness which is able to love without thought or condition. However, acting within their respective mental frames, my mother believes that she wishes me to be protected from harm even if it violates my own wishes, and my father believes that he has utmost faith in my ability to thrive.

As such are my perceptions, I also imagine that my mother sees what she believes come true for me, and my father as well.

I, at my core, am told that I am a vibrational strata of pure awareness which is able to love without thought or condition...I believe this often.

I Live With a Paranoid Schizophrenic

2008-09-26T23:33:00.003-05:00

Sitting down beside me, you
cup your head in your palms and rock
back and forth to comfort the aching of the wire

they implanted in your head so they could hear
your thoughts & maybe assassinate you on the street tomorrow
i go to reach for you, but i know better

right now, three thousand miles away, sixteen hundred
Canada geese rise in flight from the muddy gray waters
of the Columbia.

Tonight I will sleep twisted in my sheets,
my digital clock blinking out the hours,
the scent of rain in my dreams

In your room, you smoke your rolled cigarettes with trembling fingers
one finger on the dial of life, one poised over the dragon's mouth
like him, the Dragon, you too are too tired to sleep

like cigarettes
nicotine fingers
wet windowsill.

2008-06-08T12:32:00.001-05:00

luv comes stumbling

drunk like me

in a stone coffin of skin,

i turn my face toward the wall

my sighs have bones

Being Pure & Fruitful

2008-05-03T20:05:00.002-05:00

I aspire to learn more everyday
about surrendering to the Heart of Love

About giving up my personal will
to let others know how much I care

To understand more about my own emptiness
my shortcomings and inadequacies
in the name of giving my greatness
to the very Name of Christ.

Clothed Females

2008-03-16T14:51:00.007-05:00

Searching through Google images looking for body parts for composites, I found that a search for "naked male" returned a large number of results with naked men being touched, laughed at, looked at, penetrated, etc., by groups of laughing clothed women. Initially, I though that they were someone's semi-personal photos of bachelorette parties, etc.

Clicking on the images brought up whole galleries, most of which were denoted by the abbreviation "CFNM," Clothed Female Naked Male. The websites stated that this was a 'fetish' or 'niche' enjoyed by both men and women, involving...well, exactly what it sounds like.

The women in the pictures are often attractive, but they don't really look like they're on display. They're not neccessarily thin. Their clothing is sometimes businesslike, other times more like club or party wear. There are often a group of women, most of whom are looking on with bemused expressions on their faces. They look like they're having fun, and their main bond is to each other, not the man pictured. The men are often very cute and attractive, and shown with attitudes that range from smiles to apprehension. Many of the pictures are taken from parties and naked public events; others are staged for the sites.

One of the things that interests me about this niche, and these websites, is their wide lense; while they're often basically about male submission or vulnerability, they deviate from mainstream femme-dom scenerios pictured in pornography in a number of ways. Generally, femme-dom material produced for mainstream male viewers shows a vanillized version of a mistress/s, whose role of control is little more than an idea directed and controlled by male producers and viewers. Ideas of active female sexuality are being produced by males and according to male fantasies, this scenerio made slightly more distasteful by its "female domination" tagline.

#1 Google Image result for "femme dom."

Though there's probably a basic fantasy [in CFNM porn] that one's naked body will certainly inspire worship and probably cocksucking by a round of horny females, the power dynamics are different. Clothes, especially professional clothing, implies power and agency; nudeness, passivity and objectification. Normally, the clothing worn by the woman in a femme dom scenerio is itself fetishistic in some way, whether full latex in more specialized, serious BDSM pornography or slutty, revealing clothing in mainstream B & D. In CFNM, the fact of the clothing itself is fetish enough, further placing the females in active roles, but without the sharp delination of costuming and Mistress/sub relationship present in femme dom.

Oddly, that typical delination and sharp, stylized role-reversalin maintream femme dom often serves to reinforce the idea of the normalcy of male dominance. The fetish stems from the twist on power relations, the partial activation of the duality opposite to patriarchy, which, once reframed within patriarchy, becomes sexually exciting. That is, female dominance, encapsulated and repackaged as male titillation, can not only become more sexually exciting than male dominance (due to its manageable 'naughtiness,' or twist on standard dualities) but has negative political and social ramifications as well, since it allows and teaches males to contextualize expressions of female power within a male erotic framework.

I find CFNM interesting in its minor transcendence of this point.

Hey Shithead, I Have Something To Say

2008-03-15T22:20:00.003-05:00

Fuck you, with All of my power.

I'm waiting...waiting for you.

Pride of Baghdad

2008-02-28T17:46:00.004-05:00

"Freedom and destruction land atop timeless solidarity and it is unmoved."
-Michael C. Riedlinger, Critical Analysis of Pride of Baghdad

"Perhaps, over time, these ideas are less tangible than we tend to believe and more intertwined than we wish were convenient."

The City of New Orleans

2008-02-21T13:57:00.003-05:00

by Steve Goodman

Riding on the City of New Orleans,
Illinois Central Monday morning rail
Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders,
Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail.
All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out at Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms and fields.
Passin' trains that have no names,
Freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.

CHORUS:
Good morning America how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

Dealin' card games with the old men in the club car.
Penny a point ain't no one keepin' score.
Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle
Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor.
And the sons of pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel.
Mothers with their babes asleep,
Are rockin' to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel.

CHORUS

Nighttime on The City of New Orleans,
Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee.
Half way home, we'll be there by morning
Through the Mississippi darkness
Rolling down to the sea.
And all the towns and people seem
To fade into a bad dream
And the steel rails still ain't heard the news.
The conductor sings his song again,
The passengers will please refrain
This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.

Good night, America, how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

Short film

Power from the Greenwitch

2008-02-19T14:48:00.002-05:00

I was at my friend Rowan's friend Lyra's house last night with them, watching The Forbidden Zone on VHS. I had been feeling powerless and anxious for a few hours beforehand, and the movie was helpful on that regard in the way that monsters and indignity and ugliness are liberating. I have thought a lot on the subject of monsters. As a child, I believed that naughty but basically good monsters inhabited the space under my bed. The children wanted to eat me, but the adults would reign them in. I dreamed, like most little children, of many sorts of stunningly beautiful, horribly evil monsters.

I was feeling odder and odder at Lyra's and let myself outside into the cool, starry night. I have mentioned in past entries that I am in the weird position of viewing my own internal geometry in all of its complete disarray. It is like a horribly messy room, rife with broken furniture and picture-frames and dusty, crawling with the occasional roach or mouse.

I'm not quite sure what it was like before the past year and a half, but something tells me it was not this way. I'm quite sure that there were "whole" geometries in me, intact furniture, structures which although contiguous were mostly mysterious to me. My life was deeply unknown to me. And now?

What of now? I have no idea. I cannot imagine that I am going anywhere good. Most bizarrely, in many ways I don't care. Sometimes I feel like I am asleep while I am awake; ei., like my brain is in a REM state while I am 'awake.' This is deep, drowsy, sensual, dim, and pleasurable. It seems like the deepest illusion and yet is crystalline in clarity. It is temptation in a high form; my soul wants to... just... nibble it.

So my aim is not to become a dreamer non-stop; as I know the dream of the culture contains ten times more nightmares than fantasies. I am not going to be a monster or an angel. Schizophrenia does not interest me completely; it seems to contain a vicious softness, like a feather bed that smothers you slowly, gaspingly, lovingly.

Hope is a bird whose feathers I've teased out with my teeth. If I chase my ego through forests, I must be cautious not to cut down all the trees in my destructiveness. I wonder if, if the ego is not understood as distinct from the environment, if this is what we call dreaming, both the asleep and awake kind? What a worthy enemy--what will we see?

Greenwitch

2008-02-17T20:30:00.004-05:00

I again feel like a dual creature, and this time in a more advanced, whole, and yet confused way. Life has continued to progress, which although obvious, begins to seem shocking.

I was once a human, amazed, terrified, awed and excited at the intrusion of non-ordinary reality into ordinary; feeling frightened & blessed by the ways in which I had been selected to experience non-ordinary powers. I undertook an effort to take on shamanism as my full occupation, to commit all my energy and life to non-ordinary reality, forever.

Now I am still present, still telling myself that I am human in a material framework. Originally, my sorcery was begun as a rebellion and all difference was construed as freedom.

The more I used my strength against the idea of the World, the stronger I became.
Now, I am not like this anymore; there is an amphibiousness to it. An adult-ness?
Where's the center, the heart of iron?

From the book Greenwitch:

"FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN shall find the harp of gold
Played to wake the Sleepers, oldest of the old;
Power from the green witch, lost beneath the sea;
All shall find the Light at last, silver on the tree."

Implicit Awareness

2008-02-04T22:06:00.000-05:00

I am at the unique standpoint of being able to see my disintegration, to view the shards of what I had come to think of as my "being" washed away or pulled apart. I may very well be insane, or I may be a prophet of madness. I am at the point where I look at the illusions I have held before and no longer have to fight their truth as much; I look at them and they are not so true, and therefore are not relevant. Anna says, "..someday Brandon is going to be a great spiritual leader," and my ego somersaults in my stomach, does cartwheels in my ribcage.

I think of all the schizophrenic prophets and I wonder how I could be a great leader. I look at my softness, my worrisome thought processes, my dis-integration. I have hacked my way through a jungle, and I've wrecked a lot of beautiful vines, too. They grew back, though not in the same way.

I've changed in some ways and yet I haven't changed in any. There is a temptation to hold up the statement of not having changed as evidence of transcendence. It doesn't matter. What things I have felt are not personal to 'me'. I bow to them.

I miss Gregory. The secret of life is: "shhh...Listen!" I am an Idiot and a God.

Horseshit On Bridge Back From Terebithia

2008-02-04T16:33:00.000-05:00

I told the children's community clinic doctor that I was taking Klonopin and asked if they could refill my script. No! We got into an argument. I was not surprised or angry that she would not refill the script--I think that's actually a sign of integrity, and appreciated it--but that she was insisting I go to a mental health provider. She said (yelled) that I needed to see if I had 'an underlying issue' and that I don't just have panic attacks for no reason. No? Really? But, I argued (yelled), I know why I have them. I get scared about things during the day, but I don't feel it, and then it all comes out at once. She paid no heed to this explanation. I told her that psychiatry and me have some major splits of opinion. I said I'd rather solve my problems with spirituality and my own intelligence than psychiatry. She said that made sense but I should still get help! I said psychiatrists love medications, they give them out like crazy! She said no, they can SHOVEL THEIR WAY INTO MY MIND! I recoiled! I said everybody has some type of anxiety! She said to leave her out of it! She went and got me a list of sliding scale community clinics. Community clinics are full of LCSWs trained to deliver tidbits they learned in two years of college through the haze of their own mental illnesses that inspired them to major in social work! I didn't say that, though.

Ok, lady, so you are right. I am sick. I didn't want to say this for a very long time, but I guess it's true. She said that the fact I've moved twice across the country at 21 is a warning flag to her. I wanted to yell something about traveller kids and not understanding transient youth culture. But I really am lonely. I really am drained by always having my next move on the horizen. Every place is equally cold, dry, disconnected. I am tired. I am willing to become comfortable.

Barack Obama

2008-02-04T05:20:00.000-05:00

Reading through Obama and Clinton's respective position descriptions on Wikipedia and VoteSmart, I found myself standing more and more behind Obama. His positions are clear and strongly liberal. Hillary is a moderate and has reversed her positions to make them more palatable over time. I believe she probably has genuinely changed her mind about some things, but for the most part she is a politician. I credit her with an evolving and deep understanding of the war in Iraq and with having an outline of an exit strategy that primarily employs economic means of establishing peace. She's a diplomat and I am guessing she is a very good one. Nonetheless, I hate to see her falter on whether homosexuality is immoral or if prisons are too full or not full enough.

However, reading through Barack's positions, I was disappointed to learn that he is strongly in favor of gun control, so strongly that you get the idea that he'd like to ban them altogether. In fact, he has tried to pass a bill banning the sale and possession of handguns. Not only is this in conflict with my personal beliefs and my rights, but it makes him unelectable.

He's a favorite of the Democrats right now, and in the narrow incubator of the primaries he's coming across wonderfully. But already fringed by his color and relative youth, he will have a tough job convincing Republicans over to his side. He still has a chance, however, if he is very straight-shooting, fiscally conservative, and socially permissive. He could capture both Republicans looking to return to more dignified roots after the embarrassment of G.W. as well as the entire Democratic voting base.

However, if he maintains his position on gun control, he will lose virtually every Republican voter, left-voting libertarian, plenty of moderates and a small number of Democrats. He will capture perhaps 35-40% of the vote, and 15% of those will only be voting for him out of fear of all things red.

Be Out

2007-12-09T02:50:00.000-05:00

"BE OUT. Someone, somewhere, will refrain from putting a bullet through their head because they see you living a reasonably happy life with the kink that they think makes them worthless."

-Raven Kaldera

Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree

2007-12-06T23:50:00.000-05:00

He and I are curled up like a double spiral, our faces almost touching but upside down to each other. We're on an unused wooden stage tucked away at the back of the Dragon's Den courtyard. We're breathing in concert, my breath in and his out, and I know that our breath is the same force, being pulled back and forth between our lungs in perfect harmony. Together, the curl of our bodies forms a great seashell. He exclaims, "I understand you, I understand you!" I giggle with relief, noticing for the first time that I have never really wanted to be loved. I have only wanted to be understood.

David lopes over to the door of my truck. He arrived yesterday from Atlanta. He looked cleaner, better dressed and clean-shaven, more aloof than before. I had missed him and now he is here, but he isn't part of me anymore. I ache for the emptiness he has left. I know he's leaving again tonight, after only a day in town. "I can't be here. My life is going nowhere," he tells me as we drove over the Claiborne bridge, past the perverse cityscape of neon pink boxes littering the lower ninth. I am silent and dry inside, but back at the house, I weep over the balcony, but he doesn't hear that I'm crying. He walks away.

I slide over and David gets into the truck with Charles and I. "I'm leaving tonight for Atlanta and I'm joining the Air Force," he tells us. His voice has a distant, grating, medicinal quality.

"That's fucked up." I tell him. I'm looking at distant building, not at him. I feel very tiny and far away.

"I know." he says.

We talk for a while, and for a minute, he almost changes his mind when Charles tells him about Greenpeace and their boot camp. "You could be traveling all over the world and fighting the real war, Yo."

He almost jumps on it, but he's off it just as quickly.

"This is just something I need to do for myself. To better myself. There are opportunities I can't get anywhere else but in the military." He sounds like he's reciting something he doesn't particularly like.

I give him every bitter, pointed response I can. I try to counter his argument at every turn, to convey the deep disgust I feel.

"I don't want you to think less of me, Brandon, because of this choice. Do you?"

I don't answer that question. "I'm going to love you for the rest of my life, just because that's the way it works."

He's quiet. "I still think you're cool, David." says Charles.

We are in the warm pitch dark of a hotel bathroom in the early morning, hot water splashing on us in the jacuzzi tub. It's just the sound of his breath, this memory, the feel of his foot on the edge of the tub. I pull myself out of the bath when my phone rings, and the ceiling light makes everything deeply white. He looks at me from behind the parted curtain, hair plastered to his forehead and his eyes wet, desirous. My mouth tastes like the center of him and my blood feels like it's running with grated metal, that stabbed feeling I always have when I touch him, mixed with the dizziness of arousal and hunger. I dress and leave, the early morning light on me on the balcony, a coworker's truck, a meeting.

You shift in the driver's seat of my truck and tell us you'll be back to say goodbye, and unceremoniously get out and shut the door. I sob against the steering wheel with no attempt to hide my face. "Go ahead, and cry, Yo. This is worth crying for." Charles says.

The army general in charge of procurement is preparing for at least fifteen more years of protracted struggle on multiple fronts.

"Wanna get in the back?"

Charles and I get in the back of the truck, under the camper-top. We curl up under his sleeping bags and I lean back on him, tired.

"I remember you told me that you used to cry and your parents would cover you up with blankets," he says.

I giggle, and then giggle more. I've thought of something.

"What?" he says.

I try to refrain from telling him, but eventually I do.

"Imagine that it's summer now, and not winter, and Murphy and David are driving away with their windows down, and I'm never going to see him again. I'll poke my head out of the back of the truck and yell, 'HEY DAVID! Remember that time I ate your ass out in the jacuzzi at that hotel? That was fucking awwwesome!"

Ginger Sunset Expired

2007-12-03T02:47:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I don't want sex and violence together. Sometimes I just want violence.

A psychological need? A sexual one?

I can only laugh with myself about the straight men who crush on me, thinking I don't want them, that I'm withholding sex from them. If they only knew the type of ache I feel. If their desire stretches over rivers, mine stretches oceans. The sharp and unbearable beauty of their skin, their faces, the pale and twisted roads I could wander over their bodies. Sometimes I feel like an enormous wave, held in place and shivering.

I, asexual white girl. I, delirious boy, who could worship your feet for hours. Would suck your cock, tongue your nipples, anything for the pleasure of feeling your hands defining my body, for the feel of the spread of my wings.

Cyclone

2007-11-22T13:37:00.000-05:00

There's nothing I can really say
The world seems so big
The sky is an endless trip

I didn't want you any other way
Than the real way
I hadn't found it yet and I let my ego destroy all
It goes that way so often

he said "just remember that everything happens
for a
reason"

To Know the Things That God Left Behind

2007-11-22T12:35:00.000-05:00

I woke up this morning with my arms wrapped around your warm, slight body.

As I opened further into day, memories came back and my body became more wooden beside you. We'd had sex last night; I'd gotten out of my car, eyes still dry and sore from tears shed on the drive back home and gone to your house, into your door and bed. Having sex with you is a form of slow suicide; a deep and scarring violation of my self. I'm on top of you knowing that this is what I am supposed to like, to do, this is the central tenant of what it is to be a girl. I wake up hating myself and say as much, softly, and you don't really mind my saying that. You cuddle with me and I struggle between enjoyment and resistance; to love this sensation or to love myself?

You answered all of my questions honestly last night, even though you must have known you'd lose me by doing so. Yes, you are completely and utterly straight; everything you've ever done with a male person has felt wrong or awkward; if I had the same personality, looks, and so forth, and different genitals, you would unquestionably not be in the same bed with me.

"I need ambiguity; it is the space I use for my imagination, so that I can feel turned on; I use these little things about you to pretend just enough."

"I know, and I know I just took that away from you, and shot myself in the foot by doing so."

"Would you have sex with an angel?"

"It depends upon the angel."

"I want to know if you have just enough ambiguity to be with someone who was not entirely female, who was in some small way not a girl. If I knew that I could be with you entirely; to know that you wanted all of me; both halves, although they are not really separate but are one; I would like to really be here with you, to be whole."

He looks at me quietly and with an essential sadness and a love that has motion. "You're beautiful."

A Rock to Turn Over in the Roof of my Mouth

2007-11-11T16:42:00.000-05:00

I don't mind the fucking. I don't mind our sleepy bodies wrapped together under a blanket, kissing. It has none of the pornographic attitude to it, and so puts me in a mindframe of a kind of equality. Neither of us are very big, so in moments like this I pretend we are living in a sort of innocence, where we are humans before we are genders.

Most heterosexual men remind me of me, of how I have been in the past, with boys, the boys who remain uncounted and remembered mostly for the curves of their hips, asses, their faces while they came, a brief sensation of silk on fingertips. The pornographic quality was what I was going for; a hypervisual concentration on skin, rhythm, the way they looked with me in them. It was an ego trip, a seamless indulgence, absolutely enjoyable, and empty.

You laid me out naked in front of you, you were between my legs on your knees and I was somewhat in the air, my back and head resting on the floor. I am completely and terribly naked. I experience this briefly, and then this is replaced by another sensation. I feel like I have been severed by a knife; there is singular, blind, forcible shutdown of my presence on a level akin to shock. I am conscious and yet not conscious; I experience my body as a sensation of pure violence, during which I am present somewhere in the background, separated and unharmed.

What causes this? If we consider that gender is a point of attention on a vast continuum of experience, and there is a discontinuity between the gender experienced on this superphysical continuum and the gender perceived on the physical continuum, a tension is created between the two points, a ripping and rifting. It's hard to know much about it, because of the tearing that occurs and the way that I stop feeling, reacting, thinking, for a moment. I would think its nothing less than a roundhouse kick from physical reality rendered to the delicate incorporeal spirit.

I think I rolled over and wrapped up in a blanket but I don't remember for a while after that moment. In my traceable memory, there is a block of warm darkness etched over the next five or ten minutes. I know that you wanted to know what, why, how. What do I want, how do I want it, what can you do? I am flustered and vacant in the face of your insistence, my mind is some flair, some rushing of mechanisms, reminding me of an abstraction of a circus, whirling and crashing. I want you to stop asking. I'm begging unconsciously pleasefortheloveofgodunderstandthatIcan'ttalkrightnowthatIamnauseous
thatIamdamagedohfuck

I try to speak. "Please...this is extremely hard for me, please. I'd like to explain, but I've already told you everything and you're not satisfied. Please try and understand that this is extremely hard to say and I don't think you can understand it when I do say it, I'm sorry, but I cannot say this right now, I am too vulnerable."
"Yes, but this is kind of extremely important."
"I know."
"It's kind of really important. I need to know what you want to do."
I'm thinking to myself only that what I need is to not talk about this. If we don't have to talk, it makes it less real. I don't tell you anything except "I don't know"s. You jump on them and tell me it's not alright to not know. I wish you'd give me a moment, a fucking moment to think, a minute to say 'I don't know' so that I can tell you. I want to die, I want to die. I can't breathe and I am choking and I can't breathe.

We Speak Absurdity Here

2007-11-07T21:31:00.000-05:00

"Being."

"I was as warm and moist as a spring sunset on an applecart."

Jesse returned and hugged me and petted my hair, having had the break from me necessary to recontextualize our experience, to leave all awkwardness in the past. He was more attractive in the conventional sense than before, having let his surf-blond hair grow in wide stripes of yellow down past his eyes, sticking out under his baseball cap, and I found this disappointing. We quickly ran out of things to say to each other, and I left him sitting outside, talking to Sam.

"You will go to the moon. But not all of you will go to the moon.
You will leave behind parts of the rocket that have held the fuel you have burned.
When you arrive at the space station, you will be in just the tip of the rocket."

I dream all night of sex, hours of sex and tangled bodies. The bodies are friends' bodies. All day I am chaste and all night I dream of sex. In the morning, as I wake up slowly, I feel exposed, as if during my waking one might peek in and see what my thoughts are.

"After a time, you will depart again in the moon lander. The moon lander has no means
of self-propulsion; it will get a push from the space station. That big push will send the moon lander all the way to the moon."

Lost dances in the kitchen and I listen to her tapping. She is cooking Popeye's chicken in the microwave. It's so odd for me to meet her, me who had considered her existence before meeting her in the flesh. I know so much about her and she doesn't appear to know anything about it. She told the administrators here that her name was Hallie Burton. She went down to the Block to get mounds of food for her "seventeen hungry children." She's the headmistress of the house of Lost Boys and Girls. I wonder what it means to be lost, in this sense.

"Once you get to the moon, you will not have any means to get home."

Poetry Doesn't Want Anything Except the Death of Everything We Love

2007-10-30T12:06:00.000-05:00

New dream in my dreamjournal.

Considering the many ways of being here, with friends, in the world; of being here, period; of be-ing.

Ted asked me what my most abnormal belief was. I was talking about how artists, through their art, express sentiments, beliefs and experiences far from ordinary, things that were they expressed in daily conversation would elict strange looks and gossip; in the workplace or other professional environment these expressions would be simply unacceptable. Art is the only sanctioned venue for extreme oddness. Ted suggested making art on that very subject, but I see that as very much done. If art is created to address the issu, as it has been, that art is immediately permissible again. The viewer will not and cannot grasp the subject matter except in the forum of art. An understanding that goes beyond that would require a paradigm shift in the viewer. This is, to me, similar to the way most people understand being transgender.

Many people will profess to support transgender people, will feel like allies, will be angered by any perceived affront coming from others, and will be as kind and as lacking in judgment as can be. Yet they will continue to see an FTM as a woman and (less often) an MTF as a man, and see genderqueer or third-gendered people as their birth sex, too. Their understanding remains solidly in the original paradigm, just as someone who doesn't allow what they understand from 'art' to truly cross into everyday life, even if that is the point of the art in question.

The paradigm shift needed in the transgender arena is to refuse to see the body as empirical evidence; that is, the body becomes secondary to something more incorporeal. It is much more common to nearly make this paradigm shift. Even if the idea of physical reality being secondary to something else is apprehended conceptually, it is still apprehended within a conventional sphere; thus it remains a concept.

It would follow that anything one could write or speak or paint, etc., is already nullified by virtue of its medium.

The end purpose of art is our liberation [the destruction of everything we hold dear or sacred.]

Ill Feelings

2007-10-27T18:00:00.001-05:00

I can't learn. My body hurts...I feel wrong...I am twenty years old and I have no skill. I have no degree, no college education. I can't play sports, run, ride horses, kick ass, or build shit. I cannot fix a bike if my life depended on it. I cannot build or repair a computer, I have not made much art worth looking for. I can cook okay. I barely have enough energy to get up.

My skills are not anything that exists in this world. My body is small and my bones feel like they are full of holes. I am a black sun setting over desert.

I cannot think of a single person who has less skill then I do, who knows less. My main creative urge is to slit my wrists.

I ran as hard as I could toward enlightenment and nobody can see the difference;

Sometimes I think I am an explosion;

no-one i know cares as much as i do. I lose my lovers because

I am as soft and vacuous as a banana going warm and moist in the summertime,

as a creampuff sun setting over a country tract house,

I made art and no one called.

The Cold Wet Dirt Reminds Me of Home

2007-10-27T12:33:00.000-05:00

We sat on my tailgate outside your apartment
and our twilight words were dripping in my tears
you were skirting the cage of the tiger
that i keep locked up in my body: i asked you to be with my flesh
to nestle your head into my shoulder
together, let's ignore the bloody segments
of limb that we followed to get here
to your adobe house in the desert where i picked
the bones clean

I want to be everything: I am coming unravelled
like the spoon wrapped in cloth caught in a tiger's mouth
i struggle to make my words seen
i don't want your pity
i want to feed the world to lions

CUZ YOU HAD BLOOD IN YOUR EYES
"it ripped right through our flesh, the children of the moon,"
IT WAS THE SAME

I don't know how much longer I can go explaining
that i am broken and slit from throat to dorsal fin

I want the deaths of all my childhood birds back
wrapped in the endless white cloak of winter
"and the strangest things seem...suddenly routine."

I want you to see who I am not

I am not going to...
let's throw a big party

"suddenly i'm Miss Beehive 1963."

i won't give you

2007-10-23T23:23:00.000-05:00

a solution to your insoluble problem.

If I Was Your Woman

2007-10-23T23:09:00.000-05:00

Christmas twin falls idaho
is the oldest memory
she was only two
it's the first time she felt blue

I have set myself as far apart as I could
For I wanted to see into the nature of things
I am immersed in a feeling so big
I am missing you
without knowing who you are

I love you
with all of my being
I didn't know I'd ever see you but now
my head aches with the knowing of you

I see all the young in white
huddled in a spring rain
i could crack open with poison
i crawl into my sandbox to escape the pounding wet
i can't avoid the train

i wonder what the old think
of the brand of the young
the way they wear black on their luminosity
the old have no use for black

i could cry i could crack
in your treehouse thunderstorm

stuck together yeah

I Don't Want Your Oil Money

2007-10-18T15:37:00.000-05:00

Wait--yes, I do. No! No, I don't!

The fact that wealthy multinational corporations, not the least of them the oil and natural gas companies, contribute millions of dollars to partially or entirely fund environmental restoration projects means that these projects will function as a high-budget, glamourous PR stunt with minimal environmental impact. Projects funded will be high in educational content and low in physical environmental remediation, and even lower in advocating for effective policy change to protect the environment.

The corporate contributers' influence will be mostly invisible--that is, it will be reflected in what is not shown. It will, at times, also be visible in the form of donor honorarium and product placement. In all ways, projects funded by major corporate entities will reflect their interests.

Non-profits funded by corporations, which are the direct beneficiaries of capitalism, will never effect environmental benefits, given that capitalism is in direct, violent and unavoidable conflict with the health of the planet.

I Didn't Know Her But She Thought She Knew Me

2007-10-09T15:49:00.000-05:00

she brought it down in the wet wet sand
then up to the acres of sky in her hands
then across to the isles of green stretching on
then down to the underground rivers of song

she wove ten thousand spiderwebs trembling with light
she wove sixty white geese from thought on her mind
she turned a pail of milk on its head
and drew forty five lessons from the spread of its dregs

mona was restless, empty and virile
she could make grown men cry at the sight of her smile
she hated politicians and made rapists embarrassed
she placed upturned tacks on the seats of psychiatrists

one day she hoped someone'd take her home
to the small distant planet that she called her own
she built a spaceship made of twig and red wire
got herself inside and she set it on fire

The Number of the Beast & the Sweet Taste of Failure

2007-10-03T19:47:00.001-05:00

"I'm counting down
The number of the Times
So when we get the sign from god
I'll be the first to call."
-Dresden Dolls, My Alcoholic Friends

We're all waiting for the day we
get to Fail our final event;
Whatever we do for good or for evil is
done in the spirit of self-immolation.
We are operating in desperate straits
and since our first days on Earth
we have learned the language of predicted disappointment.

All the talk of peace and Love on earth is
a bunch of crap.
If we wanted that we would stop fucking around
and do it and do it and do it every day until we died of it
and wake up again from the grave and fucking do it some more--

WE DON"T WANT TO DIE
WE DON'T WANT TO SEE
WE'D CLIMB A MOUNTAIN NOT TO SEE WHAT'S IN FRONT
of our faces.

We want suffering.
We want to die unbelievable and quarralsome deaths,
we want wars that rage for centuries and obliterate us kill us all
what we really want is children with no limbs
what we want is an arsenic picnic
what we want is no more whales,
we'll do it all lace me up tight till i bleed on the line
Because we want to not have been born
We are sorry for all that we are

We can't take it back.
We can't make it ok.
No amount of suffering will
bring Adam back into Eden
will restore that apple to the forbidden tree
will put Eve's hymen back in her crotch like a nested songbird.

What we really want is to get shot in the mouth in front of a bunch of onlookers
What we really want is to eat poisoned food from the enemy
What we really want is another holocaust, Godfuckingdammit
We want unabomber subway massacre beaten wives and french fries giving us five
million different types of cancer
We want insidious violent grotesque blasphemous suck-off festival of chocolate and dim lights
We want murdered lesbian witchdoctors on the evening news
we want stonings
we want to drown those little girls on improperly installed pool drains
WE LOVE IT WE LOVE IT
WE FUCKING DEMAND IT 24/7 FEED IT TO ME

we suffer because we love to suffer.
because we have never learned to feel good
because we have no idea how to really Love
because we have no idea how to dream
any other dream.

Put down your sword for a minute and listen to the heartbeat of the supreme majestic.

Forest of Vines & Suns

2007-09-29T18:54:00.001-05:00

There'll be times
When my crimes
Will seem almost unforgivable
I give in to sin
Because you have to make this life livable
But when you think Ive had enough
From your sea of love
I'll take more than another river full
And I'll make it all worthwhile
I'll make your heart smile

Strangelove
Strange highs and strange lows
Strangelove
Thats how my love goes
Strangelove
Will you give it to me
Will you take the pain
I will give to you
Again and again
And will you return it

There'll be days
When I'll stray
I may appear to be
Constantly out of reach
I give in to sin
Because I like to practice what I preach
I'm not trying to say
I'll have it all my way
I'm always willing to learn
When you've got something to teach
And Ill make it all worthwhile
Ill make your heart smile

Pain will you return it
Ill say it again -- pain
Pain will you return it
I wont say it again

I give in
Again and again
I give in
Will you give it to me
I give in
I'll say it again
I give in

Depeche Mode, Strangelove

Desire on Ice

2007-09-21T22:44:00.000-05:00

Since the brown elephant, touching belts have been a more carnally charged experience. the brown elephant is a thrift store in one of chicago's gayborhoods complete with changing stalls whose doors extend from the bottom of your butt cheek to your shoulders. I bought a sweater and a black woven leather belt. Before I bought the black one, I considered one that wasn't my style at all; camel-colored, very worn and supple, simple. I would have passed it directly forward if not for that texture. Perhaps the belt had been misappropriated in the past somewhere in this very neighborhood and was communicating that experience to me. Whatever the cause, its textures, its knowledgeable give, flashed an image onto the screen of my mind as quickly and surely as the turning on of a projector.

A lover (I won't say which) is in front on me on his knees, facing away. Hands bound (or is it cuffed?) behind his back. The small, cool buckle tight and hidden in my palm.

I don't have that belt now. It's holding up an elderly gentleman's slacks. It's visible behind the belt-loops of a traveler kid's black jeans. It matches perfectly with a seventeen year old girl's cream colored miniskirt.

Yeah, right.

Not this belt. The fashionably minded won't notice it. The practically minded will find fault with it's worn patina and return it to the rack. This belt shops for you, not the other way around. It's looking for an owner, a strong hand, the right mind. It's looking for a master, an extension of its own mind.

I wasn't that man.

I didn't have the courage. I don't know how to say what I want. I don't know how to imagine what I want into being, into your body. Dreams that are real, fantasies into reality. Now when I touch any belt, I remember right down to the base of my spine, right into the humming tip of my clit/dick, what I could do to you if words weren't just rocks in my throat. If the sharp young prick of my desire was released and made whole with your matching will, with your submission, then made supple and subtle and vicious by my own growing strength, age becoming wisdom like oil rubbed into faded leather.

Every Scorpio wants to split his lover open and see stars.

light blue sun

2007-09-16T16:06:00.000-05:00

Tonight I am going to Krishna dinner! I have been going to their dinners for three months, prior to leaving this city for a month and a half. I missed the food, which is delicious. But tonight I am also going to the service. My intent for this section of my life, at present, is to combine ritual (a regular daily rhythm; a system of waking, eating, working, and playing that is life-affirming and easy), with a limited but reverant push toward experiences of beauty and truth, guided by circumstance and energetically sourced from the calm and self-contained nature of the ritualistic life-style.

I am working at the greenhouse in City Park. I have spent the last few days painting the interior walls; the colors are beautiful.

2007-09-14T21:20:00.000-05:00

A date to see a movie. we stop at mcdonalds. "they play great music at this mcdonalds." He goes to the bathroom and I wait. Private schoolkids everywhere. He gets out, we start walking toward the trolley station. He tells me he's got to get a rat!
To dye it!
"What color?" he asks me.
"Green."
"That's right, I dye it green, I call it Navy Bean!"

We're sitting in the station, he's considering another rat color. Pink! "I'll call it Pinkie. But its got to be a girl, because I don't want people thinking that rat's all over me, you see what I'm sayin'? They tell me my rat's got balls a third the size of its body."

"I can see why you're attracted to me." He says. I give him skeptical eyes. I feel that all my facial emotions are magnified, like I am in a movie. I convey skeptical. I cut my eyes to the right, I lift my eyebrows. He's off in another world.
"What if I got my facial piercings back? I used to have fifteen. Two snake bites," he shows me the scars, "Three in my tongue in the shape of a pyramid," he sticks out his tongue. I regret that I am aroused. I feel like a butterfly collected, wings spread and pinned to the cardboard. I feel like a female lead in a Tom Robbins novel.

"I am a prostitute, but I got to survive, I'm not sorry. My mom was a prostitute too, she used to dance in Vegas. She made thousands of dollars an hour, before I was even born." he's facing me, straddling the bench.
"You're a prostitute?"
"Used to be. I'd rather be naked and beaten and starving, I'll starve to death, I'll go into shock crawling on the ground before I--shit, you see, love is for sex, and sex is money and music is money, you see what I'm saying? You know that song, what's love got to do with it. But I don't think she meant a dude. But no, you can't pay me for anything. Save me from it, maybe. Whatever's left of me."

On the trolley he faces me talking and touching me. I wish that didn't feel electric. "Man, you're great, let me ask you, let's see this, the LIVER, man. What do you call a doctor for the liver?"
"Hepatologist." I have no idea, but yet I know.
"Fuck, yeah! That's what I'm talking about. Hepatologist! That's what I mean about you. Hepatitis C," he says wistfully. We get off the train and walk into the quarter.

We're walking this way and that. I can't tell where we're going. Suddenly he veers off the sidewalk.
"You want to go to the movie or you want to take a nap?" I have no idea what he's talking about. He's leading me into a fancy hotel. People are looking at us strangely. This is a really top-notch hotel.
He's bringing me up to the desk!
"What are you doing?" I ask. I feel fourteen and twenty-eight and eight years old.
"Thought we were going to take a nap."
"No, no, we're not going to take a nap." I exit. He's unflappable. He drags me to a bar, dances. I walk out, he runs after me. I tell him I'm going home. I feel like a giant snail, curving into a giant abalone shell against his constant verbal presence. I wish I was an actual woman or man or anyone who wouldn't feel like an alien shellfish hooked on a bait of desire, strange hermaphrodism unvisible to male eyes, cut up and packaged as female love, shrinkwrapped in styrofoam.
"Can I walk you home? Can I walk you home?"
"If you want to." He does. We go to McDonald's and he makes a hilarious scene. We walk back to the trolley stop in the center of downtown.

---

"You're so hot. You're so fucking hot."
"Why do you think I'm hot?" stiff in my cowboy boots, on a date with a straight man, peering down the empty tracks to look for the trolley.
"you look just fucking like that woman from the Fifth Element, you know, with the red hair. Yeeahh!"
I look at my shoes. Fuck, no.
He dips his finger into his fries, coating it with grease and salt. He drags his finger gently down the inside of my thumb.
"Little worm," he says softly.

He stares at me and raps continuously. I wish I had a mini recorder, I wish I was with him to record him, and not this. He puts his arm around me, I remove it. I shrug away from his touch. He stares at me and licks his lips and babbles and cuts his eyes and pulls down his baseball cap. I feel as if I might fall off the planet. I'm finding that being in the same universe as him is a sexual experience, let alone the same trolley bench. I want to exit this play, to find myself on Neptune's empty shores.

"You and I," he says, "Could have the hottest sex in the world. Triple fuck, no joke. But I see how it is, you and I are going to be the best friends in the world. Hottest sex, yeah, shit! I want to just - ugh -- right here!" I wish I was Evangeline. She would know what to do. But then, she's a girl. They'd go nuts together. She's the kind of girl who will go to Hell with you if she gets to dance and punch you in the face on the way.
We're in a trolley station, next to a haggard-faced blonde he calls Paps. She's on his wavelength. They trade rhymes, laugh, fall into each other.
"Isn't she beautiful?" He gestures to her, wearing his baseball cap.
I can't think of a word to say. She's the ugliest person I've seen in weeks, transcendental love aside.
"If you like that, just imagine her naked with me giving it to her from behind beside the McDonalds!"
This is real horrormovie stuff. "I'm all set." I say stupidly, and he grins at me as if I'm reasonably intelligent. I feel like I've fallen into a vat of tar and pleistocene bird bones.
"I want to conceive a child...we could make a baby, right here in the station, man, oh..." He puts his arm around me, then his hand on my knee. He continues to babble about the baby until trolley comes.

As it pulls up, he pulls me into his arms. "French. Like the french."
I divert his kiss into a hug, step onto the train. "Thanks Charles."
"Am I your hero?"
"Yes."

The Birthplace of Choice

2007-09-09T16:57:00.000-05:00

The thrust of modern society with all of its ills is the removal of sacredness from all things. In our television-driven culture, sacredness is exchanged for brand development. A vestige of sacredness survives as the erotic allure of the product, its commodified "essense": the scent of freshness, the coolness of rugged self-sufficiency, the exoticism of a western adaptation on an ethnic art form.

The very concept of sacredness being a removable aspect of a thing is new. If it is a detachable quality, separate from the thing which it inhabits, what is it, really? We experience some revulsion at the sight of a symbol stripped of its proper context, raped of its sacredness. Appropriation of a cultural symbol is a delineation of a multidimensional source material. It seeks to find the emotionally satisfying or titillating part of an intranslatable experience and reproduce that experience in a flattened-out, safe form, for profit in a rapidly changing marketplace whose short attention spans will again drive the push for new sources of coolness and packaged cultural difference.

Read the full article at http://dangeroustosociety.angelfire.com/choice.html.

Cameron's Bridge

2007-09-06T11:51:00.000-05:00

(This is about the dream last recorded in my Dreamjournal)

I lay with Lewis last night & my heart was a blue glass wrapped in vines & tangled wire. His words
were knives that wriggled their way into the heart of my dismay, prying apart the heated & close ventricles. I felt a low vibration in my heart, as it pricked up its ears at our conversation, and then the excising of flesh as it was turned away by the blade.

I can navigate a roller coaster in the dark; my active mind has become so stripped and efficient that it wastes no time on indulgence, makes no wandering misstep during times of need. Months of walking in the night of my mind have made me headstrong and steady. This is crowning achievement of my male self; a reactive agility.

"It's clearly not enough," says the dream of the dogs. After getting off of the roller coaster, I stepped into a small cave. I continued through it without pause, had no respect for the mysteries it might contain. And indeed, when I was halfway through, I was attacked by dogs who ran from nothingness and latched onto my arms, halting me. My male self was effectively neutralized and disempowered. Agility, efficiency, and egotistical drive are not much when you have got tiny mutts latched on to both of your forearms and you're flailing them around like an idiot.

This is where the female self steps in. She has the solution. Since our strengths are also are weaknesses, we can say that the masculine part's strength in navigating the roller coaster was his weakness in failing the second, trickier, female test. Was the female side's weakness in the roller coaster was her hesitancy, her desire to stop and assess feelings first? Unfortunately, I didn't find out in the dream what her response would have been to the second challenge.

A possible course of action would be to enter the room anyway, with a submissive attitude, and let the attack potentially occur, as a type of sacrifice designed to bring the female counterpart into control. Lewis rejected this outright, but it's hard to tell if it's a misunderstanding or if he truly rejects it. He suggests that I stay there and "try and understand."

Life is a little room, full of too many small, annoying, debilitating things, I said.
It's a little room and a big room.

It doesn't have to feel like a little room, he said. It can just be 'where you live.' You can feel comfortable there.

I didn't want to imagine getting comfortable in that little brown hole.

Krishna's Planet

2007-09-02T02:36:00.000-05:00

My little Hare Krishna Life & Death book explains it this way: The impersonalists leave the atmosphere of the Earth. They visit many planets, and stay for some time. They experience vast and untranslatable things. (In fact, I do not even remember all of the things I have experienced, much less have I experienced all of the things that have happened to 'me'.) Eventually, the impersonalists fall to earth- what a jolt!- without experiencing Krishna's eternality, his endless and timeless pleasure.

The personalists, on the other hand, have a personal love for Krishna. They worship at his feet. They pass the other planets, or perhaps visit with them, but know that those planets only grant differing variations on the life-decay-death scheme, and they continue on to Krishna's planet. Upon arriving, they stay forever.

The book contains no ideas on how one might begin this communion with Krishna, except through chanting. I'm curious because I myself left the atmosphere of Earth & found the Eternal Night Garden, the Heaven of Paths, the subjugation of all of my desires to one, with in its infinite wisdom purged and satiated me. And then it ended! Or rather, it didn't, as it had never "begun," yet certainly I no longer had my eyes open in its kingdom. Why?

It may have been a simple issue of timing, and yet it feels more logistical. I ran out of fuel. Partway to the planet, running on vapors, bailing out of the lander. I feel extremely vacuous. I know I don't have the "fuel" to make it the whole way. In fact, the way stretched out before me like a room crossed halfway each time--the last moments were the most critical to get through, the last minute was as thick as glue. don Juan: "You need drugs to provide the final amount of energy." But I have lost confidence that I am actually going somewhere reachable, to a real perch. I know drugs could extend my energy and concentration hours more, but it would just be more. Not everything, just more. I know I'm not running my life properly, often, but when I do run it well I ascend so quickly but on a staircase so rickety that I'm back to my starting point in mere hours or days.

So now I expect nothing. This is part wisdom, mostly fear. I still want badly to be perfect. My body is a suction cup, siphoning on to energy sources--lovers, people--using them to hold me up somehow, give me structural support. They won't, mostly, but I quietly build bridges of my thoughts, of my created and fantasized material about them, and use it for support. It works, mostly. It gives me something to hang on to.

More Feelings in Your Soup

2007-08-25T02:53:00.000-05:00

I guess I must talk about my feelings more. Namely, that I am sick of greying them out like I do; sick and angry!
I feel like folks schooled me in not having or expressing strong emotion. I am careful to keep all things very casual, including relationships, as everyone else seems to. Sometimes they are not casual for me and I feel very strong love. May I say so?

I talk with Lewis and sometimes I cry and he doesn't seem to mind. I cry because I'm scared, and I think of the past and I feel doubtful.

I try to keep in mind that I chose my life as it is now, and no one forced me to it. Nobody took away anything from me, either; I chose to end those things. I do not know if my reasons were good or not.

I taught myself all my life to be stoic in dramatic matters. It seemed really noble to me, since my parents were out of control. In relationships, too, and when others attempted to hurt me, I have always strived toward total nonreactiveness. "It doesn't matter," is a theme, but not neccessarily a real deep-seated belief that brings joy.

I've been around the block a couple times and I don't have the same naive as I did before, but I am still aching to experiece the marrow of life, and to go back and get at the blood and beauty of all the past situations, too.

I went to Millenium Park in Chicago, IL today and saw the two brick towers that water streams down. Each tower, on its facing side, has a video that runs of a child's face, mostly still but then moving in an expression. The two faces speak to each other or move and grin or sometimes spit water out.

Above the brick towers there is a balcony overlooking a restaurant's outdoor area and it holds a giant statue of a reflective bean/blood cell shape. The surface is so shiny as to look almost like a flat living photo of the things behind it. It is incredible.
It is a very good statue for a city because its outside surface shows a huge, curved panorama, but inside, as you walk under in the curve, it shows just yourself and your friends and you become the stars of the show. I think it nicely contrasts the way of being part of something extraordinarily large and the way that enables a total focus on just oneself and one's peers.

Greyed & Broken Links of Sky

2007-08-25T02:18:00.000-05:00

I am longing. I spend a lot of time in analysis, in sputtering through past memories, but barely glazing their emotional surface.
The things in my near past bring warm tears to my eyes if I merely discuss them for a minute or two.
But for the most part, I am good at feeling nothing. Depression is 'nothing.' Anxiety is 'nothing.' But mostly, I spend my days feeling worn out, bored, and uncomfortable. These are not emotions. They are states of non-emotion.

I would like, perhaps, to feel again but haven't any idea how to start. I can tell you why I stopped. I reached the point where (through feeling my feelings & loving my self) I had moved beyond needing to experience many of my feelings. But since I did not stay there in that mental place, I returned and again had feelings, yet could not or would not acknowledge them. What is wrapped up in feelings? Joy, and sadness. I feel both of these, yet neither.

Inventory

2007-08-22T14:10:00.000-05:00

I'd like to get two piercings in each ear w/ silver rings and one in my nose (right side); chest surgery and then get my chest tattooed with lines; more body hair (on my belly especially), be in very lithe and muscular with no body fat.

I am still so disoriented with this female body, no matter how I have tried to become used to it.

Hearts & wire & clover

2007-08-20T23:55:00.001-05:00

I love you I love you I love you I love you

I had forgotten how to breathe lately
I still don't know how, completely.

I felt like life required batches of courage such that I was overwhelmed and left
beached and worthless, empty shell of courage on the tides.
I would cough up ocean-water and then the water would be swept away on its business on the other side of the world, and I would be drowning dry on this beach.
Is that really what happened? Did God go & abandon me, leaving me to find company
among mollusks and insentience?

I miss you I miss I wish you;

wings of desire; nod of knowledge,

Chicagoland

2007-08-20T13:47:00.000-05:00

escaped from the parents in central maine, took a train to a city full of tracks
What is it about trains--perhaps they remind me of dinosaurs.

Is it fair to devote one's life to the complete study and knowledge of a scientific field of study, without pausing to take into account complex social or emotional issues?

Could I excuse myself into a life of studying paleobotany?

Deathbringer

2007-07-24T16:27:00.000-05:00

she's got five wings on
five eyes
that stick out like needles
in a pincushion

& there's very little that can be said about it
there's very little but the knives that are stuck in the soil
there's very little blood, really

and she's knocking on the wooden door
she's got four fingers wrapped up in a fist
she's got four fingers against the door
i can't resist

she's got me crushed into blood

i can't come white & sheetlike in the blonde sapphire breezez
i can't come clean in my own hands
i got on top of a wooden crate & looked
in 3 directions over the levee
& found the tugboat & shlepping white flags
waving skulls & crossbows against the darkening indigenous skies

Fwd: Men's Emotional Exploration Has Been Cancelled

2007-06-11T21:42:00.000-05:00

I've been having a terrible past two days. I'm, I guess, too old to be so angsty. I judge myself as I would be judged. If I get too lonely, there are always places to relieve that loneliness, in the unhealthiest of ways. Always the offer of sub-par sex with whomever heterosexual and well meaning friend. (There is always judgment folding down from the heavens like sheets of rain.)

The mysteries of the Aquarius mind. This is what started it all, two days ago. Nervousness upon waking, left unended and open-ended. This is my own diaspora. I am so lonely--All of them have left.

If I believe others are discompassionate to those in need and celebratory of those with confidence, might we infer that we treat our-selves in a similar way? I called Eric rather than mope. He brightly informed me that he and his fiance Evangeline had broken up. He told me about the night she'd left and what he had done, and with not a trace of pity or embarrassment about his losing control. Thanks for being vulnerable. We'll pretend we're all eagles, to the point of killing ourselves over it.

I don't know how broken I am. I sometimes believe I will cough up the ocean-water and ascend into the sun. I think I'm skating on top of the waves like a hobecat. I want to extend love to all the deepest corners of the earth. I want to not apologize. If we are what we are, then we are perfect, forever, but simple to forget.

I think when God made the world he left in one part he meant to take away, and that's the sliver of reality that keeps us from the truth.
And when he died, he left one sliver of truth in our heart.

And YOU KNOW I GOT great big batwings
'N I got three arms to carry you home.

I blew off steam last night by playfighting with everyone around. Roz punched me in the arm a few times, after we helped her concentrate on things that made her angry. It was a good punch and my arm hurts today. My body also hurts allover from my three rounds of wrestling with Martin and restraining Mike for torture. It took a few hours of grass clippings in the ears and socks, asphyxiation, joint overextention, tickling, and tagteam good-cop bad-copping, but he's on our side now. Fighting other people is the positive alternative to fighting myself.

What I am trying to say is, stop judging and you will not be judged. As I type this my glance lands on a pile of nails and I remember, near unconsciously, what its like to have them through the palms. We all lived Christ's story, and we all paid for our sins over and over, until we couldn't anymore.

Tombs, Vines, Ripples...

2007-06-06T17:41:00.000-05:00

More and more we understand the value of the in-between spaces that are broken,
and that their repair comes with certain forceful new understandings, generated in the underlayer, detrius of waterlogged branches & grass, human understandings amiss...
we shouldn't (and won't) rebuild n.o. the way it was, because there are forces that don't want that.
the reclamation of that smaller and shadowed contingent of society, of wilderness
when S/he takes hold of us we will not hold back, but will go forward with every inch of our shallow human breath, whoosh.

who will become one with the sun? who will awaken first, to a world new,..and forgotton?

sisters and brothers, to the ocean, to the levee. monster...

2007-04-19T15:35:00.000-05:00

I'm leaving for New Orleans in a few days, tomarrow being the most likely candidate. I've lost most of the wind out of my sails over the past couple of days. I'm going alright, but the liquidy conciousness that had catalysed my initial visions has shifted to a more secondary position. I feel massively calm and sort of bored.

Time has become an even more intriguing factor in my life. An interesting scenerio manifested itself a few days ago while Norm and I were staying in a cabin during a large rainstorm. It occurred to me that words were like products, produced in a single moment yet were not connected to that moment, and were without source. I've been having a great number of dreams with vastly differing content but the same interesting feel to them.

Also, I am finally completed in my initiation, although one more circumstance is yet to be. I could write about these parts, of which there are 3: CRISIS - COMPLETION - aNGel (x). A primer for the beginning Shamanic practicioner. Maybe .in. the. future.

I am in a back room of a warehouse. An older janitor is chatting with me. I am a girl. I can tell by the situational dynamics, the words he uses, etc., that he is going to rape me. I recognize that the situation is a mere story, and I feel no aversion to being raped. The idea of preventing the rape appears to be just that, an idea, with no values attached to it. I decide to play out my part in the story and make no attempt to prevent the rape.

Something that I note about these dreams is clarity. They are not dreams, but are not awake-states. I am a being of perception, and know that dreams I percieve are other worlds, simply scenerios to which I am witness.

skeleton

2007-04-07T13:05:00.000-05:00

What day is it? Where am I? I swear I just spent a week in bed with you, I swear we just slept for two days on and off while people banged on the door. Last night (was it last night?) I poked my head out, I ventured out into the living room still mostly asleep and stupid with the comfort of being with your body, and this woman descended upon me.

Me: (Poking my head into the dining room)
Cori, at this point a complete stranger to me: OH my GOD, look at YOU!
Me: Huh?
Cori: Look at you, how cute are you! How ooold are you?!
Me: 20?
Cori: YOU LOOK SO YOUNG!
Me: It's part of my appeal
Cori: And you're so cute! (Hugging me and squeezing me, seemingly from all directions at once)
Me: Mff, grrff, schmff!
(At this point Cori actually lifts me off the ground and swings me around a little bit)
Me: Schmuff! Puttmedown

I've been wearing these black jeans and white dress shirt for ages and I smell like hell and my lips are red as fever. I am a giant succulent rose that has begun to decompose and has sticky, dense spots, the colors and smells of disease, cum, flowers on a compost heap. I have the brief urge to have a zipper tattooed down my front. I want to show that flesh is temporary, that wanting is a knife that separates the flesh from the skeleton, and leaves me naked as bones on your bed, after we have consumed all the parts.

digression

2007-04-02T20:33:00.000-05:00

Accepted norms and gender roles in dating

Popular culture sets up a game in which there are rewards and punishments (mostly, the illusion of them, though with younger teens, the punishments and rewards often become very real.)The game also contains the illusion of winning, but in truth, the game can't be won, and for good reason. To have it all (to be perfect) would mean the end of consuming. Thus, the game requires a constant stream of products to simply maintain one's position; in addition, there is the looming specter of age.

"A Slightly Chubby Woman on a Diet"

In certain pop culture contexts, thinness just looks like a lack of something--a cutting away, a type of violence. There isn't anything wrong with being skinny, but it is much more beautiful to just Be.

Tsuris: Trouble, Aggravation

2007-03-31T19:30:00.000-05:00

I am sick of replaying your comments to me in my head, and sick of hearing my therapist's derisive voice. I am sick of finding out after the fact that little has been like it should have been. I am sick of wondering when I am going to have a lover who really loves me, who can understand and want me for who I am. I know I'm complicated.

"I don't understand. Why can't you just be a girl who prefers a certain kind of sexuality with men?" -My therapist, with disdain
"Can't you--aren't there men out there--who would want to play the role of the woman, and you play the role of the man...you know?" -My father
"Are you touching your pussy?" -Brian, during sex
"You actually like that?" -Brian, while I'm touching his bum
"I feel like holding you down and forcibly [having intercourse] with you," -N., drunk
"You're not that hairy." -N.

I am not a girl who needs to be brought out of her shell or shown the tender passion of your lovemaking. I don't cover my chest because I am insecure as a woman. I cover my chest because I want me and you and the universe to understand who I am. You want me to be comfortable? Try accepting me as I am. I'll show you everything.

Image from trannypunk.com

2007-03-30T23:22:00.000-05:00

Recently, I was contemplating different options for altering my body, and I had a brief and intense vision of my post-operation chest. I could see the scars, and with that vision came a moment of knowing--not desiring or wondering-that I was going to have chest surgery, that I was seeing my own post-op chest.

I have an attachment to my breasts. It isn't about liking them; rather, it is that they are part of my body, and I've had them for 8-9 years now. The other part of that attachment is my feelings about my size. I am hesitant to lose any flesh, even flesh that seems superfluous. I both love and hate feeling like a child.

Often I think that my ideal set of body mods would be more testosterone, followed by surgery to cut the ligament holding my clit/dick (more length) and a chest reduction. There a few problems standing in my way, mostly that I can never settle on anything. I've never regretted taking T for four months, and I love the leg hair and happy trail acquired.

Oh yeah, and I love Norm, and miss him.

Note to self: Dr. Perry Johnson in Omaha, NE.

New set on Vegporn: Exam Table

2007-03-30T21:16:00.000-05:00

Oh, the things that will prevent me from ever having a career in politics (I once wanted to be president of the United States) or being Miss Universe (the very hairiest).

Your Imperial Majesty Most Greatful, Most Faithful

2007-03-29T19:50:00.000-05:00

I have licked up your tears with a forked tongue
I have strung your tears out like dewdrops n sewn them together
Into a spiderweb's nightgown:
Tears u shed for yr daughter, yr childhood, and for the madness of love; and
for the emptiness inside of my cunt where u wanted to spread yr seed like starbursts
on an empty clouded sky.

Ashen Fingers & Immutable Blue Skies

2007-03-29T18:57:00.000-05:00

I left Portland yesterday. I walk on the Earth and the Earth walks with me.

Day: 2
Location: Dennis, MA
Miles Travelled: 212

Goodnight, Moon.

2007-03-23T09:32:00.000-05:00

The last couple of days have felt brutal. I have arrived in Portland and my friend Zoe is at Broadway Crossings [the crisis unit of Ingraham].

If I am to have a lover, ze needs to be queer-not straight, not gay, not bisexual. I'm not sure I want to hold out any hope or expend any effort towards love whatsoever. Having sex usually means being compromised in some way or compromising someone else. An extended relationship with someone often means being eventually seen as female as the person sees more of my body, sees me in moments of weakness or emotion. This is especially confusing for me right now as I am in so much of a state of transition with my psyche, my gender, my life in general. But dating people who are very queer (usually genderqueer or trans themselves, involved in trans issues, interested in radical sexuality) has always been successful for me; everything else has not been. I want to be seen as human being who lives in a female body. This is even not correct, for I don't feel I live in a female body. How do you know I do? How do I know I do? My body exists in potentia when it is not known. If it happens to manifest as female at every recordable opportunity (ei. when undressing) that does not definitively prove its femaleness. I REALLY FUCKING HATE GENDER.

I feel very much in my body--very much female--today, and last night, and the sensation has been very negative and extraordinarily alien. I felt so male upon waking yesterday morning and this resulted in one of those hopeless sexual situations where each partner wants distinctly separate things and often have very different sexualities. I also-likely without reason- felt laughed at and not taken seriously in my masculinity/sexuality by Norm, and had a loss of self confidence. I feel awful, actually, and have since then. Everywhere I go, I do not want to interact with anyone, because I know I will only be seen as a woman. My body is so small and thin. If I have to be taken for a woman and told I am a woman and treated like a woman, can I at least feel like a woman? Could I at least appreciate things that I'm told come with being a woman? Could I at least understand womanhood? I want to go in the woods and make my campfire and cook my food and be around things that are sentient and green. I want the world to go fuck itself. Call me anything you want, I don't want to be a part of this anymore. I can't handle it.

Someone stole almost all of my food. Since it was stolen from Zoe's locked house inhabited by passively negative sentience, am I wrong in thinking that it may have been stolen by spirits? Or did I just put it somewhere and forget about it?

2007-03-19T01:14:00.000-05:00

She won't let me fall

there is a hole in the baseboard of this wall
and through this hole i see the boy i know

and the guarantee that life will always pick me up

and never let me take on water

bail me

if i could become a frame through which the goddess acts
upon the world, and not be there at all:

its so strange to me not to care about Love
it pleases, indistinctly

i do not know the difference between together and apart
and a little porcelain doll with a broken head
says there's not any here.

Louisiana Thunder

2007-03-18T23:53:00.000-05:00

New Orleans has been on my mind again, specifically thoughts of a trip down there with my truck for a month or two of work with Common Ground or Wetlands Restoration again this Spring. I miss that smell.
This feels right, right now, yet I am cautious. I am moving into/between paradigms right now, and it is like my life before last week was a string of time, and that string was let go and another picked up. It leaves me with a mind full of questions. What of what I learned before is valuable, what is not, and how much must I debase & prostrate myself now? Totally and completely, I think. What do these dieties want with me and how may I best serve Them? What is the whole and ultimate Truth? I think I may begin planning this trip now while I can still taste it in the back of my THROAT.

This Is the Only Truth I've Ever Told

2007-03-18T03:31:00.000-05:00

At an earlier time, I was studying humility--I say studying, not practicing, because I have very little and at the time likely had near to none. Humility was a language I'd never spoken. I came across several things in quick succession: Do I want to glorify others? The idea was new. My next thought was designed to challenge myself, and I asked myself, "Would I still want to be enlightened were I the last person on Earth to recieve it?" This again was very alien to me.

I grew up believing in myself very strongly. I had decided to do so and did. My faith was unwavering. As I grew older, I soon began to conceptualize my place in the world, and in particular the Sixth Sun and the tranformation of reality. At a relatively early age (19) I began to conceptualize how I might take part in the coming change. I saw that as my generation got older, they would accumulate dysfunction and gradually lose their brilliance, innocence, and clarity. I could clearly see the difference between one year and the next. I saw how suffering broke down those I cared about, my "angels." I knew what my role was and I was nearly at the point at which I could accept it. I set as my goal to be the 'first angel not to die.' This meant that I would be the first person of my generation and class to be transformed. This would, of course, transform the world. I saw myself in a very glorious position, and one that would serve the world.

Time went on and challenges ensued, and I made sure to back down from all of them at critical points. I already imagined myself to be so much braver and more lucid than anyone I knew because I was experiencing things far beyond what was expected. I have developed minor to medium, wonderful, wide-ranged abilities in many psychic/consciousness-bending areas for which I am incredibly thankful and joyous. (I can't get this sentence right, but let it suffice to say that I am grateful) I experienced things I had no idea could be possible, too wonderful to be described. I excused myself from participating further with the forces that scared me because it was just "too much for me." I figured it was more than could be expected of anyone. I figured I was already so far ahead that I could sit down and chicken out, knowing that no one else would do what I was already doing.

I was very wrong. I have found that others I know excel much more quickly and with dozens fewer obstacles. They seem to be built simpler, despite seeming at times in the past hopelessly complex and rooted. They let go and surrendered to the flow like it was natural to them. To me, it was not. All the hardship, the crushing decisions, I had allowed to be so powerful to me because I thought I was by myself. When I see others taking them in stride, I realize they weren't so big after all, and all the mountains I made for myself and imagined so large are not so large. Big surprise.

But I did so well. So well. I never knew I could do that. And do so much so fast. It was just that I had so much self importance, but in some ways, I had very much the right things.

Today I thought to myself of something I'd read yesterday, that one can only do one's best. This is in the Four Agreements, which I've read before many times. However, I seem to not have caught part of it in the other readings. Don Miguel goes on to state that if one does BETTER than one's best, not only is the person harmed, but their energy is depleted and everything takes them longer, not the same time or quicker. I have felt horrendous for months because I do better than my best. I thought to myself, ah, I will just be me, and do one unit of work for one day, 100%. I will be one unit of Brandon, and not more nor less, for what I am has to be enough, and if I act as if it were not, it will never be. I will approach Satori a dozen times, a hundred times if neccessary, and I will never pass through. So anyway, I asked myself again today if I would want to recieve enlightenment were I the last person on Earth to recieve it. If every other person who I've looked down upon were at the finish line, encouraging me on, and I the very last one, I who could not understand something very key.

And I thought about how my friend Zoey was drafted into the service of Dieties and was re-formed and said that I had helped her, that she could not be where she was today without me. And how I had opened Zoel's eyes way back when, had made my mother more open-eyed and helped my father be a different man. How odd that I had helped so much while being so down now. And I thought, if I could be in the service of all of these people, I could be the humble servant of all of humanity. And they could all cross before me, and I could help them selflessly, and I could watch them go until I was the very last, and I WOULD STILL WANT THAT. "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first." And I realized then that nothing would be better just desserts for one who divined themself to be First, and whose very firstness made them the very last. Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, "If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all." (MK 9:35) Jesus of Nazareth makes not one but FIVE first-last references.

Jesus also says "Many are called, but few are chosen." I used to--and I mean quite recently--obsess about my role in the revolution and whether I could "succeed" or "fail" or whether it was destiny or free will or so forth. It occurred to me that nature is redundant. Redundancy seems, to me, to almost be a rule of nature. So if there was to be a conciousness change, wouldn't redundancy be built into that system, so if one avatar failed, there would be others to light the first torch/es?

And here's the thing about me. I am not innocent enough. I have had thoughts I ought not to have had. I have some problems I can't figure out how to get around.

I can't think about things without thinking about winning. There are others who will come before me. They will slip through like fish. I will not want them to, because I will not want them to come by their reward so easily (If you're not familiar with the Parable of the Vineyards, Google it as it explains this magnificently). I didn't want the solution to be that simple for some people.

It is amazing to me that all I have to do on Earth is be myself, that I could be a child and a mere student of a great cosmos. I believe we will have enlightenment when and how we want it. Our whole lives must be exactly as we want them. At the moment that one can choose enlightenment with their whole being, and not just intellectually or sensibly or emotionally, then it is theirs. That is the power of choice. It is every move we make. We move our own mountains.

I can't damage Divinity. I know nothing about it. It is more glorious than I am, it is everything that is glorious in me. There is nothing "I have" that is in any way helpful. Let me tell you the one thing that scares me and makes me suspect I'll turn away from 'truth' again. I had such wonderful things happen, states of being that were crystal clear, in motion, sharp as diamonds. Like those unenlightened Ascetics and their ability to fly, to enter the bodies of animals. Do I get those things if I'm enlightened? I wouldn't want it to be soft. Would I just sit there and rot away, not caring a whit? Because what I really wanted was to keep moving for a long time, to be an alive animal, to be a prism eyed child on the precipice of reason. Not afraid of life nor death. If I can clarify, just tell me. I am really interested in knowing more about this; if you have any kind of solution, please tell me?

This is all the truth that I can recall.

"WELL WHAT THE HECK I WENT AND DID MY BEST
AND BY GOD I REALLY TASTED SOMETHING SWELL
AND FOR A MOMENT, WHY, I EVEN TOUCHED THE SKY
AND AT LEAST I LEFT SOME STORIES THEY CAN TELL,
I DID. AND FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE, I DON'T REMEMBER WHEN
I FELT JUST LIKE MY OLD BONY SELF AGAIN."
-Jack the Pumpkin King

Addendum: None to Speak of.

Bullydogs

2007-03-17T23:43:00.000-05:00

Check out the links I put under "Blogs & Sites of Interest." I put some of my friends there whose blogs are especially interesting, and activist and Pagan websites, as well as Bad Rap because they save abandoned and abused pit bulls, a very misunderstood breed that are some of the best behaved and most beautiful dogs. Get a pit bull if you want a wonderful dog who will love everybody in your life. Pit bulls aren't always for people with other pets or little children and you should not buy from breeders. Adopt from a responsible adoption program that socializes their dogs extensively.

Why do pit bulls have such a bad rap? It is because they have been used as guard dogs. This probably evolved from their use in dogfights--they are built, tough and have serious teeth and jaws. So, people want pit bulls to guard, or to be a tough scary dog to show off to their friends. This leads to pit bulls being treated like monsters and left at the end of a chain to grow progressively more violent and aggressive. The problem with using pits as guard dogs? Pit bulls weren't bred for violence against humans. Dogfighting dogs need to have a strong bite inhibition against human handlers. Pit bulls don't bite people naturally, but their reputation as mean dogs led to bad treatment and bad breeding. Pits aren't naturally aggressive. They are super-happy, bouncy dogs that love to cuddle. They won't protect you, but their reputation might.

Butterfly Box

2007-03-13T21:21:00.000-05:00

Shortbus came out on DVD today, but the sole copy at Edge Video was out...

Life continues to be baffling and time is shortened and compressed, taking a good long while to get through but not uncomfortable; rather like a heavy cream. I am watching The Illusionist and the manipulation of time is mentioned and demonstrated. The Illusionist is able to drop an orange slowly, and then plant an orange seed and have it grow into a small tree in a few minutes. What does the viscosity of time mean for humans... how does it pertain to our destiny? For enlightenment must be a kind of manipulation of time.

It is so new to me, this idea of the worldview free from the impetus for approval. I still write thinking of the reader and zir response, not because I believe that is the best thing for me to have in mind, but as a default mode of understanding and operation...one I would desperately like to leave permanently in the dust.

My newest focus and plan is to follow the Four Agreements, and to look into another area which I will not mention here, as it is most personal.

"He cut me in half...I came out whole."
Maura O'Connor

Goldenrodpink Morning & the Core of Unfathomable Beingness

2007-03-12T15:39:00.000-05:00

I lay in bed last night and felt my mind slipping away from me. What happens after the destruction of the ego? Why did I pretend that I could return to life as it was before, rather than going forever and on into the future? In a soft and hot jungle of mind, I couldn't rest; I squirmed in the sheets.

Dawn came, and I got up and went out. At the road by the lake, the passing cars seemed unfathomably loud, and I wondered why there were so many at 4 am. I started on a private trail leading to the camps nearby, my feet breaking through the crest of snow. The day was dawning with stunning passion and alacrity. Someone else had walked this path before, and I stepped in their iced footprints. There, at the clearing, their footprints turned about, and I stepped onto the crust of snow. It held me as surely as it would a bird.

I walked across the snow to the shoreline, behind the dock that had been pulled up for the season. The island was visible from here, shot through with pink and gold. On my back, the sky above was an unfathomable blue, a color that has no known name or composition, dawn's own color. Static birch trees hung in the sky above me, their branches touching the flat bright-dark sky, and it reminded me-or it was-the dream I had had once of the place at the edge of the world, the eerie, still, manmade quality to the trees. I was affected--I felt in me the freshness of morning and the world and its utter lack of understanding for the hell and darkness I deigned myself fit to live in. Joy has no room for pain-- Joy is just joy and joy and joy forever, never understanding a purpose for stopping.

I got up and walked to the clearing again, spying the untouched snow in its center, and I knew I wanted to run to it and dance in it, but wondered if it would collapse under my weight. I thought about fear and how if I was to travel, really, and see the world, if I was to look at everything and anything, I must get used to operating without inertia and fear. I ran and my feet marred the crest of snow but it did not break in the least, and in the center I found myself in a spin, and I spun and spun and in a moment I fell down and then I got up again and I fell again.

And in that second, I experienced a shriek of joy, aloneness and aliveness, vibrating straight through my whole being and I was shaken clear out of my body and knew what I couldn't understand but it made me remember...

I walked out onto the ice despite its frosted wetness and the whole pond was lit up by pink and yellow, lit from north sky end to south sky end. I walked very slow and quiet. I knew that I hadn't really known anything right all of my life, and that all my struggling and suffering was for nothing, and I knew there was something I couldn't understand. I knew also that I'd come this close before to knowing it, and even farther too, and I couldn't understand it. I knew there must be more to it than the sentence blocked out in capitals in my mind: IT ISN'T LIKE THAT...(FOOL!) I talked up to the sky and laughed and cried that this was true and real and there and that humans lived in the shadow of the sun, that we suffered and struggled as did I, never able to grasp the unfathomable truth, that all we had to do was simply to love, and that there was no game and no winning of it, and there never had been...and how wrong I had been...

And that the truth was far more beautiful than we would guess. And I knelt and put my hands together and said, "Whatever this thing is, I can see it but I cannot taste it! Please, deliver it into my arms." And I walked off the ice and cried in an ironic way, wondering if our minds would ever be big enough to apprehend such majesty, and laughing because they wouldn't and it hardly mattered, and shaking a little in the knowledge that I was surely going to forget again before really remembering at all!

"Breaking open the sun on a fine young goldenrodpink morning
with pink traveler's suitcase words and saying:
yes, this is living, yes, this is dying, yes, yes yes."

Post-Shower Blues

2007-03-10T18:24:00.000-05:00

But I always forget that, after the rain, there comes the Sun.

Half-drowned but with Breath & Fruits of Fall

2007-03-10T17:44:00.000-05:00

I am nothing. I used to be a person worth knowing. I was constantly painting, making films, devising direct action schemes, was a great lover & a good friend. People loved me; people wanted to know me. Now there is nothing. I believe my own family wants to get away from me sometimes. I no longer have a personality, a job, a position on anything, or goals of any sort. I no longer see or sense beauty. My friends are very few, and even around them I am uncomfortable, sensing that something is ajar in the composition of the physical and cognitive world.

At the height of my experience, locked up & away in the cat's tower, I considered how I had divorced myself from seemingly every aspect of my life and come to spend most of my days walking about weakly, or buried in bed, and an ironic female voice spoke to me: "If you DO nothing, you will BE nothing."

It was both an admonishment and an instruction.

I am at my mother's house. My future is an open-wide casket, which could be a calm resting place, shut away and safe. I feel hope growing drowsily inside me, like a flower opening. Once I understand that I can please no one with my development, where will I be, and what will I see? Such a deep dearth of love, beauty, realization and understanding, such a narrow shaft of light that I have available in my life, does admittedly have myriad positive effects. Those effects can perhaps only be realized once the shadow is lifted. It is like weaving a very small, threadbare peice of cloth in the dark. With so little to work with, I have learned to make each stitch of my work impossibly spare and perfectly ordered, so that come sun or rain or whatever season, I will no longer be swayed by the external temperature.

An added benefit of this that would be oh, so nice, would be if I could no longer give credence to whether another cares what I do or not, if the opinions of others could be like water under a very strong bridge. That is part of the reason I have moved off of Livejournal, to distance myself further from the readers of this journal. If they do read it, I want them to come to my own territory, my own website, to do so, since it creates a delicious sovereignty.

Holy Ghost

2007-03-09T23:34:00.000-05:00

Last night I talked to Gregory on the phone for a few hours... I believe all that it would take for me to come face to face with total non-conflict reality would be to look into the eyes of someone who was pure, who was not pretending anything, and this has made me afraid before-- afraid of finding there's nothing behind the curtain; of looking into my own face forever.

When we both know there's no up or down, nothing to gain or to lose, no judgements, what is it that we could possibly want with one another? Would we make something up to want?

2007-03-08T18:37:00.000-05:00

I packed up my ice skates to go skating today, but the cold was too intense for me. It penetrates right through my gloves and jacket. I don't mind when it's brisk or even cold, but there's a certain kind of cold that's not just an absence of warmth, but something aggressive, something that scares you in a way that's primeval. This is when it's -20, -30, with windchill. I camped in my pickup truck's bed during this type of weather twice, once in a blustery, snow-covered seasonal campground, parked behind a massive tower of stacked picnic tables. Twice that night, my nightmares were interrupted by the passing of a train on nearby tracks. It wasn't till the end of the second passing that I was able to place the sounds and lights of the mechanical giant as being that of a train.

My dreams that night were of sinister creatures that were anatomically wrong- one of my least favorite types of dreams. I know now that these "animals" in my dreams are the dysfunctional thoughts that I have that I'm most ashamed of.

I also had one of those "darkness" dreams--this one of travelling backwards in the truck bed down my own road, in the dark. The dreams are interminable and daylight seems impossibly far away. No one is available to help and light is scarce.

I saw my therapist today, again, for the first time since I had just turned 17. She is very smart... She accepted all of my wildness without so much as blinking. She doesn't believe that I'm delusional, which is a great start, I think. She quickly let me know that spiritual breakthrough is not limited in any way by age, and I felt a little embarrassed.

2007-03-07T21:31:00.000-05:00

"I'm a good citizen but I want to taste The Unfathomable Truth. I aspire to be defenseless before its committee."
-Ryan Kamstra, "Suicide Boys", www.velvetmafia.com

hypoglycemia

2007-03-07T17:30:00.000-05:00

This blood sugar thing is getting out of hand. I can't seem to stay awake, and when I am, I'm often too out of it to do anything. I feel really muddled and drugged.

I'm practicing being assertive, and this is really new to me. I've spent so much time trying to address conflict with nuetrality or kindness and never saying what it is I want. Most of the time, I don't even know what I want. I try really hard not to offend anyone, or bother them in any way...no wonder I have low self worth sometimes.

I was checking out stuff on roller derby online. Maine has a roller derby team (Vacactionland Vixens). It looks extremely fun and reminds me of my dream last night... nevermind the fact that I can barely remain standing on my rollerskates.

"A woman came up to me and said
"I'd like to poison your mind
With wrong ideas that appeal to you
Though I am not unkind"
She looked at me, I looked at something
Written across her scalp
And these are the words that it faintly said
As I tried to call for help:

There's only one thing that I know how to do well
And I've often been told that you only can do
What you know how to do well
And that's be you,
Be what you're like,
Be like yourself,
And so I'm having a wonderful time
But I'd rather be whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
There's only one thing that I like
And that is whistling in the dark

A man came up to me and said
"I'd like to change your mind
By hitting it with a rock," he said,
"Though I am not unkind."
We laughed at his little joke
And then I happily walked away
And hit my head on the wall of the jail
Where the two of us live today.

There's only one thing that I know how to do well
And I've often been told that you only can do
What you know how to do well
And that's be you,
Be what you're like,
Be like yourself,
And so I'm having a wonderful time
But I'd rather be whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
There's only one thing that I like
And that is whistling in the dark"

-They Might Be Giants

Syndication

2007-03-07T14:00:00.000-05:00

I'd like to find out how to syndicate posts from this Blogger journal into my new, yet-to-be-created personal hub website. However, I would also like the Archive to be available on the new site, with entries listed by title rather than soley by date posted.

New Blogspot Website

2007-03-05T21:00:00.000-05:00

This is a test post.