In the vampire adventure book,

Turn to page 43.

You are a killer.
But you just don't see it, do you?
Just because there's always blood at your lips, doesn't mean your host is eternal, too. Not the way you are.
Look behind you--a trail of fleshy clothes, forms, skins, left behind like banana peels. A trail of blood types, blood tastes (did one have a sweet tooth? Was another vegetarian?), identities, uniquities.
From your side, in the history of your endless shoes, I could see where you no longer remember faces. I can forgive you for their deaths; i cannot forgive you for not knowing their faces, for not keeping them. The door is always open to you; you think you are cashing in one one, never ending invitation.
You are taking the easy way out; you will always be doubly hungry for it.

Gut Spillage (Storytime).

Harry Lime runs.

"Catch me and let me die wonderful."

This is the title of an art piece by someone or other.
It is also the reason I am very bad at playing tag and hide-and-seek: I have such a nasty tendency, such a nagging inclination, to die.

I am both what I am and am not what I was before. I do not wear masks. Not very often, at least. And in any case, this isn't one of them. A part of me, the newer one (but then, I suspect it was there all along--I've just begun favoring), the reflective one, the embarrassed one, is indeed, very quiet. Very pensive. Very humble. Very earnest.

But I am like this now because I was quite the opposite as a child and, under the right circumstances, today, as well.
I have always been very loud. I used to raise my hand for every question in class. I used to play tag. I was weird. I liked to yell. Scream? I think I thought I was a bird once. I used to have little half circles all up my left arm. I was a weird, visceral kid that didn't always understand the what or the why. I played rough. I liked playing with boys, but they didn't always like playing with me. Among other things, I used to always get in trouble at home for getting cut and scraped up, either playing outside or at school, where we ran and grabbed and tumbled and there were nails in between. I lied once and said the class rat had scratched me. We were just playing rough. We all messed each other up a bit.

We chased each other wild. i jumped off the railing and landed on my hands and knees in the gravel once. My heart was beating so fast I think I thought I could fly or something. That bird thing again. A rock got stuck in my palm. I thought it was the coolest thing ever after I stopped crying.

But even then, I had moments when I should have been loud, but wasn't. All backwards like that. I remember getting my head banged into a pole twice because I didn't have the guts to tell you to fuck off. I remember crying after being accused of something I didn't do, because when you're a kid, you can't prove shit to no one older than you. Especially a teacher. I remember hiding under desks, under beds, and running away from the very loud sounds that scared me. I remember being a coward.

I had one brave moment: one moment when I was a hero, not just on my own, not just in the safety of my own mind, but before others. Before a dragon. But then I was back to crying under the piano. But you can't slap that memory out: I remember being a hero.

I haven't played tag or hide and seek or hide and go seek in a long time; I'm a legit adult now, and that's not what legit adults usually do. I'm not sure what would happen if I did. Sometimes, I'm quite certain that I would end up dying in some poor fool's arms like a stressed out rabbit. They do that, you know? Heard it from a friend.


I remember your house smelled spicy and you had a leopard gecko. I liked your gecko. I wanted to like you. But how could I? I think I've spent my whole life fighting. I had an older sibling, for goodness sakes--what else was I supposed to learn to do.
I wish I'd learned a language. I wish I'd learned how to wear a skirt, sometimes.
But I didn't. I learned where to find roly polies and how to catch a garden snake (unwind them or you'll break them) and how to catch moths and frogs and grasshoppers (anticipate the jump) and that the best way to get over someone is to shoot arrows through a milk jug and I know how to climb trees (and test branches so you don't fall down and kill yourself) and how to cut up a good walking stick and how to play salt and pepper on the parallel bars (I was bitchin' good at that game) and--stuff that just doesn't count anymore.

I am a runner. I think I have had anxiety attacks before--I'm not sure. If there's not someone there in a lab coat with a textbook, I don't know what it is. I do not regret anything; I understand that trifles are trifles. But when I recall these particular memories, my chest gets tight. I breathe differently. My memory is crap--I don't remember enough to regret. But my body does, apparently.

I think I can't play tag because my body remembers something, goes "fuck that shit" and shuts down. I can't play tag because they work against me, body and mind--what is writing here? Some silent third, trying to make sense of it. But in those pitched moments, they work in concert against me: they write stories against me. Each is continually winding up the other until I am taut with madness; until something has been written into my blood.

Your face needs only to be seen so many times for the writing to start. Words will stick to you like a clot, whether they belong there or not. You are always being written about, edited, in some corner of my brain. In one hand, the manuscript; in the other, I am winding an anxiety. When I see someone who looks like you, the feeling is instant and sharp. Sometimes, depending on how much it looks like you, on who you are, and how out of context/unexpected it is to see you (not-you), I may stutter in whatever action or gesture I am making.

I have a history of being a bit gingerbread.

Human, After All.

Regarding authors who think they are the authors, all authors, every author, and by doing so, have let the pen fall from their hand too many times, like Serres, who is decidedly a punk.


Do not make plans; Gods make plans. The best plans of mice and men--they go wrong, too. But Godly plans? They end in plagues and floods and mean shit.
Be human.
Be the vapor of a word.
Be a game that will outlive you.
Do not plan what will come after the yes or no of a question; just ask.

Last week, I talked in class. Because it so happened that I had something to say. Because it so happened I had the space to say it. It happened. So?
The week before, I thought my heart was going to explode because of that person-by-person, circular tic, tic, ticking down to when I would have to. Have to. Planned to.

I am Olympia.
I am not anxious until I have been wound.
I am not human in that telescope, automaton without; I am human on the outside, inside, through and through withe the occasional gear. That incessant, long distance gandering through that bloody glass is what makes me mechanical. And the looker, too, with it wedged up to the eye like that.

No, don't go looking for legs and skin (as if they were something to put on); you've already got them. You are human, after all.

Vignettes

On the problem of going off shadows, the desirability of debts, the making of these debts, and the inability to discern where the author ends and the character begins.


What does it mean to see the reflection before the man?
And not even in a good, smooth-surfaced mirror, often--
upturned and fuzzy in the concave bellies of spoons,
dark and splotched through the protective screen on my phone, then the actual screen of my phone,
through a window on a door, just faint enough to tell me your behind me, or else you're far away, and in front of me, on the other side--
What does it mean? I have gotten a few good sketches of him, what I think he looks like. But I have had only these other reflections to go off of; I still have no conception of the roundness of his face, the declivities pushed behind his collar bones.

~~

I do enjoy collecting debts. More than I should. I want all the debts in the world. Not the money, not the things owed--the owing. The wanting. The holes. I am not entirely sure what would be taken when things are given, loaned away like this--there is some animal, some idea squatting in that hole. But at least for now, I do not know it; all I know is holes.

~~
I am just left of a klepto. A collector. A hoarder. Which means that sometimes, I am one. Just like Kreisler, who is just left of Ettlinger, is sometimes that darker man, sees him in the water as his own strange self.
So yes, you're right: it's not a phenomenon. It kinda is just me takin' shit. Because I felt like it needed a place to be, and the place it was, needed to be empty.
I've mentioned before: when I was younger and didn't have to fuss about books and school, I went outside everyday to catch stuff.*
Frogs, moths, snakes, (certain) bugs. But you always let it go, even if you want to keep it. And that's the other thing: you always want to keep it.
More time; more of it. A nice little pile of images. Of trinkets. Of somethings. I do not want the pile or the clutter, or even the actual object; just a symbol, a reminder that I have taken something. That I have made a hole somewhere else. That I am making a pattern. A shape. an etching. When the woodworker sweeps the pine shavings from his floor, there must be pleasure in it; in then looking at the thing that was holed out, carved, made. The object is never the pattern; never the reason. The mail.

~~

When I write, I write from that silly, writerly position where I am half myself and half a writerly inclination. This is problematic, because I will continue saying things that seem as if they apply to me, when really, I have begun talking of what is just to the left of me. I do not mark these switches, these alternations clearly, because that is a messy business--there are thoughts that are both my own and those of the character I am working with. When does Hoffmann become Murr? There is no single point; it is a slow, subtle transition. Abruptness is illogical. The snake that eats the tail of the snake that eats its tail: don't ask me to pull these two apart. It won't be pretty.

Authorship

On the publication of secrets and the difficulty to read something that has been already been read and rendered a hundred times over by a hundred and one eyes that aren't mine.


Ha.

I hope you think I am a ghost.
I hope you think I am writing from beyond the grave, determined little student, just chugging away. I hope you wonder. I hope you pick one up and just look, because I will be looking, and somewhere between my page and your page, something will mingle sweetly, linger, discreetly, and I don't know if you'll know, but I will, because that's what authors do, and I'll get a kick out of it. A yip. A bark.

Ha.

I hope I am uncanny to you. I hope you see what I have written, see yourself, see this different self, and shiver. Because you are there--you may be sure of that. I have put you there. I want you to see yourself at the bottom of a riverbed; pressed into the stars; curled over the earth. I have no desire to render you; no, you must live so I can write. Paint. Feed? Ettlinger really was mad. His execution was all wrong. He should have been a vampire. He should have left his host alive. The larger flea must learn to eat a little thinner--it will be worth it in the end.

~~


But this, this other thing, is not mine at all. And I don't know if I can make it mine--there's so much noise and chatter and fussing and dining that I do not even know where to grab hold of it. I feel I cannot fulfill my role as a proper reader, a proper author--someone keeps opening their trap and trying to tell the story for me. I cannot reach the root or soil with these big umbrella leaves in the way.

Fanglings

What strange shapes we take between the legs of the table, after the feast has fallen around us.

A CWK inspired post, mostly pictures, legging into my TE.

Oh, Simon. First this, then that. Now little bumps on your head. Now little dents in mine.

What have you done this time?

I don't blame video games (I've taken my turn with the gore). I don't blame the media. I don't blame theatrical glorifications. What stains here is my own. I won't say the color; I won't say the smell. I won't say it was next up on my list of things-to-try-and-paint-with. It's not profane, it's not eccentric, it's not Freudian, it's not anything but mundane. And it's just a word I don't want to write right now.



I'm not very good at lying. But I'll do it now--I'll change a past thing for a future thing. What does it matter? There's so many lines lines lines lines lines, who's to say it isn't what I say it is.
No one, that's who. So shut yer trap.
I spilled raspberry juice from my last little painting expedition on my jeans and my feet. Fingers, too, but that's because I was using them to paint the background. It didn't really turn out so good, though. There--that's the lie. Just a contextual one; slightly to the left. Slightly forward. That movement is all that makes it false. But it's enough to cover something else.

"Fell asleep with stains, caked deep in the knees--what a pain."

I was always never more than a half acre a way from the front door when I'd fall into the creek. Sink into the mud island. Drag my calves through grass stalks knitted together with a hundred different spider webs. Play with soot-covered sticks from the fire pit. Crawl in the grass. And I brought it all in with me: dirt, grass, mud, soot, and sometimes the things I found in them. How I loved the things I found in them.

But this was not dirt. This was not filth. This was not anything worth blogging about, not when you're not here to remember it with me.

I am giving you a sham. A scam. A false symbol to fuck up and sacrifice. Joseph in chains--but not dead. An exchange is made. You get something to eat and maybe even spend; I get to keep Simon. Simon? Sorry. Joseph. They both have brown eyes to me. And the Joseph chapter in Serres didn't really make sense to me, so I've grafted him to Simon--the idea, not the character.


In this way, things return. They've wised-up proper and come calling again, sharper dressed, longer whiskered. Just left of the guillotine is a little crawl space--go, go, I'm pushing you there, out of here. Suffer again; but live again. Die Another Day--but not now. Not here. This isn't over. This isn't over. But it is--you won't come back the way you left. But that's alright, the good mother says, the bad mother says. Pasiphae does not make the same mistake twice. Bad mother. Bad romance. Bad child; bastard. But oh, how she loves him the second time 'round. They are so awful together it makes them dizzy.

I am saving;caching;hiding;storing. Storying? Maybe--maybe. When you don't write, I certainly write for you. You're quite the zombie in my head. I am pushing this until it gets into the walls; until the laces begin to hiss away like eager little snakes (but that is wrong--they hiss when they are fearful). I will be putting this off until it grows blue. No; this is nothing to do with blue. Blue is thin here, blue is weak. Until it is azure.

Emergencey Blargh

I'm pretty sure I've met my blog requirement for the week, but just in case I didn't, here's a zombie post that's a chop and paste of a bunch of other old mee-space blogs. I'm pretty sure my dorm neighbors are shooting a nerf gun at the wall right in front of me, and it's giving me a headache, and I had to spit up four poems this week, so I'm just really not in the fresh-blog groove.

I'll give some context for each because, out of the context of that blog, these pieces are safer, and say less. Which is a curious thing.
Context will follow in italics.
Pictures added for fun-ness.

Games.

...I'm getting better, though, at least in theory. I wonder if everyone would know how to play, if only they sat and wondered about things for a time and dug around in their head a bit? Do we all have it in us? Or none of us, at all? There is such a fine line between playing the game and existing outside of it. But it is a sharp line--you are one side, and one side only; ever.

Today, I read that no player could become greater than the game itself. But if this is true, then what are you? No greater than the game, perhaps, but something more, something different from the players, at least. As far as I am concerned, you are currently, presently, and until further notice, a part of the game. And the game agrees.

I feel very divided. On the one side, I am eager; I am giddy. I know the rules, and I want to play. My hands shake, and the dice chatter between them. Thin walls and thick windows. Safe, and even a bit silly. But there is an illusory sense of danger (or perhaps it is something else entirely) that shimmers over it all, like crepe paper, and it elicits a very real sense of thrill.

On the other side, I am still scaffolding. I am not yet ready to play games with larger shadows than my own, and sometimes, I am not sure if I want to. I am very fond of familiar, comfortable things, slow things, easy things. Play, however, requires a great deal of running around, a great deal of care in gestures, in moving and changing and shifting things, just slightly to the left, so that a picture will be made. It is all very interesting, but all very busy, as well....

This was not a very old blog. This was before I swallowed my legos. This was before I lost (read: left at home) my book of rules.

Departures.

"I miss you."

If technology wasn't such a weird, convoluted thing some times, I'd tell you this, as plain and simply as it's been knocking against my brain the last couple of weeks.

It is a bit stubborn and unreal of me, I suppose, because I want to send you these words and be done with it. I don't want to have to worry about what it means if you don't send word back, or what it means if you do, or what you'll think I mean in either situation.

I want to tell you how I feel and then run away from it, because I need to say it more than I need to mean it at this point.

I still want to say this sometimes, but I'm not sure how much for me, how much for you. I don't think I was running then, but I would be now; you'd be uncanny now, unless you came to me, I think.
Which I wouldn't mind at all. I think.

Defenses.

...But, although I do agree with your conclusion that something larger, something profound awaited Birdie, I do not think I agree it would have been as convenient as seeing the sun over the hills. It would have been a lovely literary image; however, I do not think this pretty image does justice to just how messy the process of change truly is (especially that which Birdie attempted). Things are gained; but things are lost. For every timid step forward, we have taken five backwards--through the mud, the grit, the blood, slipping and sliding through the decaying symbols of a world that has begun to nibble and gnaw at your toes.

My point is: it takes more than a night to reach the dawn.

This is in defense of a character I felt got a bit lambasted by someone who I thought was above lambasting. Mostly, I just like the word lambasting.
But I believe this even more now; partly because I reread the story, partly because of Parasites. Transformations are hardly beautiful, immediate things. They are not magicked. They are tortuous and drawn out. They are ugly. They are monstrous. For me, a good werewolf book doesn't blur lines: you must become something awkward, something horrible and miserable before you can be fully changed. You must fever. You must be wretched for a time.
Then you get your daylight.

On the unending ends of things

This, here, this--I will never be rid of this, not unless I chase it out with something else, and then I shall be once again occupied. And even then--there is something of the first that lingers in the second, if only in their opposing but similar purposes, their trade-off (but cumulative, but me) existences.

5.8 PetPetPet

On fleas, mostly.

Do fleas know they're fleas? Do parasites know they're parasites? Does something change if they do, or if they do not?

I know the animals are laughing at us; they don't even know what a joke is.

What is a pet?
Cleverness.
Ingenuity.
Patience.
Sneak.

To be a pet is to be part man.

What does the flea do when discovered?
Pray to shit that, somehow, it reflects back human to its would-be killer.
Time must love me; time, at least, must forgive me, the flea says. But look--seeing eyes, right at you. Do they mistake you for a mole? Do they see you as you are? Curl your legs in and look cute, or else pray they find you cute.

Fuck. You've fucked up, flea. Can you hide? Do you have any more tricks up your sleeve? Or is your only option escape? You've sucked too much, you've sucked too long--can this moment of weakness cost you that much? Everything, really?

Declaration

I have terrible habits; I am a very cruel person, in reality. Not malicious--just a little cruel. Always have been. I caught frogs and garden snakes when I was young. I held a baby bird once (it was on the ground and the mother was gone). I catch moths when nobody's looking. I always let them go; but sometimes, I cannot resist catching them. Even though I have grown into a prim and proper adult--I try to play with things that don't exactly share that inclination.

I am that awful, ridiculous kind of person that can live on secrets and secrets alone, I think. Here I must bring in Derrida, though I'd rather not, because I understand so little of what that man says. There is Abraham, there is God, there is Isaac; there is me, there is other, there is my irl self (that is not an exact parallel, but I will use it until it gives me trouble). I am sacrificing some part of myself, some real part, some continual part, some future part, when I content myself with Other. Content? I do not want this to be the right word. But I'm not sure it's not.

Abraham's silent, secret decision is unforgivably cruel; but the result is not. Far from it. Somehow, I feel I operate in reflection of this; my decisions, my secrets, my stories are not cruel. They are pleasing and beautiful, even when they are terrible. But the result? There is some cruel, copper taste to it left on my tongue, between the grinding of my teeth.

It is not right to catch snakes.
It's not right to lift rocks [to find crayfish].
It is not right to play with toys as if you are one.

I cannot tell what is even going on here. Have I killed Isaac? Do I worship him? Do I abandon him for the Other? The happier I am, the more I drift into dangerous territory. God, what have I done? Nothing--and that is the cruel bit of it. I have not killed him; but he now knows I would have. And that kinda shit don't sit well with no one.

[There is a sweet nuance to the sort of cruel I'm referring to. Like umami.]

I put the Other before Isaac; I put myself before myself. I am all greed. I am all hedonism. But I have nothing to show for it. What is this, then? This hording of nothing--no, I will not say hording. I am more discerning in my tastes. This collecting. This piecing together. But what is this flavor that has nothing to show for itself? I have nothing to be ashamed of--and so I am. Nothing.

Isaac, you are involved. You are part of this secret. But you are the object: you are the secret. If God and Abraham share a laugh at the end of this, it is not extended to you. They are they relationship; you matter, the medium through which it is expressed. You are rendered by their relationship. Come to dinner, Isaac. You are invited. Take a seat--yes, right there. On the plate. You are the meal.

I will say a terrible thing: nothing consumes me, sometimes. It excites me. Not as things do, but as only nothing can. It terrifies me. I see myself in all the wrong characters; too often, Kawabata's. I cleaved Kreisler from Ettlinger in my thought experiment because it was good. But they are not really so different. I am not really so different. I sympathize with Daisy, Emma, Edna, and the narrator. The narrator, perhaps, most, because of that awful penchant for creeping that we share.

That is another bad childhood habit I haven't quite rid myself of yet--creeping. Sneaking. I was very good at sneaking out of the house to play. Outside was the free zone, where you couldn't be found, not behind trees, not behind hills, not crouching between the car and the blackberry bushes. The more I think about it, the more I remember how carefully I used to turn door handles (go to the backdoor--it turns like a mouse), then close the door. Step slowly over the porch step, because it rattles. Don't take the gravel--it crunches. Duck down or you'll be seen through the window.

I loved taking me with you those times, because your doggish footsteps hid mine. And somehow, you knew I was creeping. And it made you antsy. And it made me antsy. So as soon as we made it past all the windows, we ran like convicts.

But I can't run too much here--and never again with you.
So I've internalized it. I've turned my dogs to robots; I've made silicon cats. Hedwiga turned inward--why can't I? I play in mechanical ways. Does this mean that Isaac is dead, through some fault, through some slip? But the Other is still Other.
How horrified they were by the Princess's illness. How disturbed.
But what Ettlinger did was far worse.
And thus it was unspeakable; unforgivable; cruel. A secret. Internalized. How ugly, to watch that foolish man-boy put a bullet through that bird. Put it back. Put it back. God, nobody remembers to put it back. Nobody plays by the rules. She is alone in her game, and that deviates it--dements it.

I did not want to kill him; he was my son, for fuck's sake. Nobody wants to kill their fucking son. And I wouldn't have had to. But something went awry--something interrupted. Or maybe the thing I was waiting for just never came and everything else did. I closed my eyes and felt the angel stay my hand; I felt God. I felt the unforgivable wretchedness of our relationship. It made me weak; it made me strong. The knife was gone--slipped away, or taken, made a secret article by the angel that seized me. I trembled. I wanted to see my son, before I trembled to the earth in this strange ecstasy. But look--
The alter is gone. Isaac is gone. The knife is gone. There is a gun at my feet. I don't know where my son is. I don't know where my son is. I don't know where my Other is. Fuck--what the fuck happened here? I don't know what happened. But I have been divided. Someone has cut me while I slept [because that is what you do to dragons].

I am awry. I do not know where my son is. Will I recognize him when he returns? Will I love him, then? Will I kill him, then? I had not let go--I was interrupted. He was stolen. And now I am weak. I have not been given the chance to learn. To incorporate. To gather. My object has walked away. My medium has unrendered itself. I shudder to think what you will be when you return. A monster. Me.

And what, in the meantime? I am alone with my Other. Halved, it will pity me. It will fill in my gaps. I will be whole again. That is, I will appear whole again.
There is suspension.
There is awe.
There is Aura.
We are waiting, aren't we? Each on opposite ends of the world.

I didn't cut you from me, boy--God, I swear I didn't cut you from me. What? No, I don't know where my knife is. That gun isn't mine--it hasn't even been invented yet. The blood on my feet? Oh God. Blood on my feet. I don't know. I don't know whose it is. Is it yours? If you're going to come back without it, better not come back at all. I'll kill you. I'll kill you then. And I'll weep like a man before the grave. Whatever happened today won't matter then--if you come back to me, without the blood on my feet (if it is indeed yours), I'll have to cut you then. And I'll do it right that time.

But God I hope I didn't kill you. That would be so goddamn fucked up.

5.4 Things I Might Have Said

And probably should have said in class.

However,

(This aptly explains the entirety of my feelings on public speaking.)

So I write things down--so, here are written things concerning the Google advert discussed in tooth-hurty today.

The Google Parisian commercial was a cute and fuzzy sort of thing. First impression: aw, that's charming. But I don't know that google can guide your life like that. There is some misrepresentation, or potential for misinterpretation at the very least. Google does not play that big or that sort of role; it is likely not the catalyst to meeting a girl in France, to marrying her, to having kids. Oversimplification, sir, just a tad. But then, it's a commercial.

And simple things are pleasing. There was no talking; just music and words, actions--and it is pleasing to think of Google as sort of seamlessly being incorporated into your life, superimposed like a slightly opaque, guiding hand.

I do like this commercial, though, because it shows a thought process I'm very fond of. Google, Wikipedia, and Google images are the main places I hit when I'm writing a story about shit I don't know nothin' 'bout. What's this? What's that? How does it work? Gimmie some terminology I can work into my dialogue, some scaffolding, some bones. It's very good for this sort of thing. But irl? How does it stack up to experience? That link he clicked--How to Impress a French Woman--is that really going to work? Rly? And if it does, is it because of that webpage, or something he already has, already is? What difference would it make to go out and blindly experience everything instead of all this preemptive steadying, this research, this rehearsal? If we are rehearsing now, are we acting later?

If the French girl to be wooed is getting her answers from Google as well, ("How to charm an American man," "How to tell him I'm pregnant"), then wait--what's going on here? Things get strange, that's what. If one or the other does it, it is endearing to the audience--we identify with things that need a little help every now and then, a little Google here and there. But if both of them are being helped, are being aided, are almost playing each other with identical goals--what is this? What is going on here? Deja vu: who does she love, anyway? That dashing American man, the clever googling machine inside him, or the Google machine outside?
Google squats on their relationship--makes it pleasant, makes it right, but something's strange, something's off. Perhaps Google has taken something for its own.


I think it was Jesse who brought up that nobody focuses entirely on a commercial when they're watching it on tv, during the super bowl. All there's time for is the logo and a warm, fuzzy feeling. Google's advert does not yell it's message, as loud as it can. But I don't think it means to.
Maybe the advert isn't really about what Google can do for you. Too much work. A movie, or a whole pamphlet--not a commercial. Maybe all we really get out of this, while waiting for the game to come back on and grabbing some chips and keeping the bowl away from the dog and making sure that wag-wagging tail doesn't slap your drink right off the table, is "Google good, Google good." It doesn't need to yell; it's Google. It just has to say enough to keep its purchase on an already yielding surface. Reaffirmation.

Google, like a parasite, has to give a good story to stay. But the story is not a real one--it is amusement. A divertimento. Something to endear the parasite to the host. Perhaps that is the primary purpose of the parasite's story. it is useful to the host second; first and foremost, it must secure its position, its own life, its own survival.

But shouldn't these two things go hand in hand? Doesn't the parasite endear itself by offering a service? That story? Yes, but the story is different--it is the foot in the door. it must be stronger than the later service--it is more difficult to attach than to stay attached. Something must decisively, artfully break through the host's skin. After that? Cake walk.

Anywho--enough of that. Here's a happy Cake Dance for reading (or jumping to the end lulz).

Seadragons later, maybe. I'm trying to blog shorter. And less.

5: Opacity and Venom

[Now, with moar pictures! Thanks to the space captain for helping me figure that one out. :) ]


But venom, first.

So I have a bad habit of leaving the TV on when I do...anything, really. I'm not going to go on about screens--that isn't my issue now. But when there isn't anything good on, I leave it on Animal Planet. And when there isn't anything good on Animal Planet, it seems like reruns of Wild Recon are always on.

There's a cheetah in that picture, but he mostly plays with snakes and monitors and spiders--poisonous stuff. And every one of them has to pay for it's tv spotlight: the snakes and monitors are milked for their venom, and blood samples are taken from the cheetahs and hyenas (and snakes as well, actually). While he's pinning heads and pulling needles, he's always mentioning what these valuable secretions will be used for--antivenom, sometimes, but more often than I would expect, both blood and venom go toward research in human diseases (neurotoxins especially).

I did a lot of interwebbing today, and a lot of reading--the TV on, watching, the whole time. So I saw a good deal of Wild Recon today. Emus, mambo snakes, monitors, gazelle, vipers, hyenas, kangaroo, water snakes...that's all I can remember off the top of my head that was parasited today. Antivenom is another thing, I feel--you fuck with me, and I'll fuck with you to fix it. But after awhile, all this blood snatching, venom milking, seemed almost comical--watching one animal drop after the other, every snake get caught. It seemed silly. Like watching someone get mugged.


But less scary, more whimsy--adjust those dials, Frank. There we go: moar fox.
More clever--more sneaky; heck, the drugs the even use to knock 'em out have an amnesic effect. It doesn't get much sneakier than erasing your footprints from your victim (host?)'s mind. So after a certain point, I couldn't see the human benefit aspect--I forget how all of these secretions are being divvied up and sent off to research on curing tons of human diseases. Instead, it just becomes a very silly, almost mouse and cat (and I mean it to be in that order) game of pulling a fast one on various animals.




You can tell by that sneaky little stance: a mugging's afoot. When the cat's away, the mice will play; when the cat's asleep, the mice will STEAL YA' SHIT LULZ. Well, at least he's sharing (two mice)--though, I don't yet know if that's better or worse.

Anywho, it's interesting how many animals have stuff in them that could keep us from dying someday. Like it's meant to be there. Broken pieces and whatnot. Babbling towers.


But on to opacity.

I started working on my FAFSA today (blargh), and had to upgrade my Mozilla browser to get it to work. And I like it. You can add skins to the browser, but that's not quite why I like it--not the personalization factor. I have it set to "Fox Bubbles" (stay with me, here--I promise this will all get terribly interesting. Someday.)

Here it is--try it on.

Nice, mm? My desktop background is black with a planet on it; my browser is black with these charming, slightly translucent bubbles. And look! My tabs (all five of them) are see through, too. Oh, and the rim of my browser, more opaque than the rest, still shows through to my desktop.

This is, for some reason, endlessly pleasing to me. It is not because it is nothing--rather, it is because it is not; and just barely. There is something delightful about seeing something stretched thin; being able to see it, and through it. What is it?

My finger is not yet on it. But I feel it is hiding in this very long quote from Snow Country, in which Shimamura slyly watches the play between the scenery and the reflection of a woman's face in the window of a train:

In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted together into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mounts shone in the center of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressibly beauty of it.
...the girl's face was floating over [the monotonous mountain landscape]. Cut off by the face, the evening landscape moved steadily by around its outlines. The face too seemed transparent--but was it really transparent? Shimamura had the illusion that the evening landscape was actually passing over the face, and the flow did not stop to let him be sure it was not.
...Shimamura came to forget that it was a mirror he was looking at. The girl's face seemed to be out in the flow of the evening mountains.
It was then that a light shone in the face....As it sent its small ray through the pupil of the girl's eye, as the eye and the light were superimposed one on the other, the eye became a weirdly beautiful bit of phosphorescence on the sea of evening mountains. (Kawabata 9-10)

What I'm looking for is 10% cat: a slender, feline bend ghosting over the shine of a bright and clear water dish.

Will let yoo kno wen I find.

자주색

That's what I find when I look up your name. But that's not your name--it's Bora. Purple. I think it must have been a purple flower, or something. But I'm pretty sure it was just purple.

[this is not a class related blog; if you're looking for parasites, go forward or backward. If you're looking for nonsense, stay here.)

I haven't had the time to paint lately. At all, really. The last thing I painted was a toy lizard I found out by Alpha, and that doesn't count, because I just painted it to look like a guilmon, which is silly, and therefore not real painting. I am still waiting for a chance to paint you. Purple, puce, lavender, magenta, rouge, indigo. In the treeline, something blue-green; no skyline. No sky. Your head in my knees; your fat belly stretched out to the side. I have never met a more comfortable creature. Or forgetful. Or cruel.

You know the way someone will come at you, slowly, if they're trying to do something they know you won't like, and they don't want you to find out until it's too late? I'm not going to do that.
I'm doing this to get over you.
Even though it's not something I can do. It still sounds good, though, doesn't it?

You're too tied up in what I was and who I am now for me to come to terms with anything. But what were you to me, really? A pillow. A damn good pillow. And that's it, I think. Really? Yeah--that's it, I think.

Or is that just what you'd say to me?
And hey--even good pillows are missed, right? But now I'm being the cruel one, I think. Don't worry. I don't mean it--I'm just looking for a way to hide the fact that I'm a sentimental twit.


I think I'll write something about you. A story, or several, that hold parts of you. This one won't go belly up like my nanowrimo one, so don't you fuss. It's the only pretty thing I have. Shut up. Don't wag your tongue like that--I'm trying to be serious here. You'll be the apprentice of a terrible, very stupid wizard. The reader will want to hate you as well, but they won't. You will be too sweet, even when you bite. You will go off on your own and have all sorts of adventures: two crows will tell you to run down the hill as fast as you can, but no, you should have turned around before you left--you would have seen a pair of bones leaning against the tree. You'll roll into a hole in the ground and find an old man with hooks for whiskers. What is he fishing for? Sense, he mumbles, tugging a hook. Good sense. A herring slips out of his mouth. You pick it up with your teeth. A mole bites your rubbery lip. You chase it through the narrow necking paths until you both break ground; you kill him dead. God, what have you done? You've learned something awful from that wizard. Now you've killed a child, dead. Mother mole collects her son. The funeral is held at the edge of the pond. You are present; you push your hands in the dirt and repent. On the other shore, the ducks are laughing. Screaming. making licentious advances on one another. At a funeral? You chase them away, and almost commit your second murder in a day. You would not have killed them, you say? I believe you. I believe you. But it is the reader you must convince.
The woods are full of mud and frogs and crawfish and grass. These are all things you grow to love. You eat the crawfish and play with the frogs. You love them, and they love you. But they are frogs, and so they also love playing tricks. They tell you to see what's on the other side of the mossy fence. So you go. It's very bright. You're very tall. You feel like you're in Oz, but you don't know what that means, do you? So you go back. But not to the frogs. There is tall, dry grass and birds hiding in the grass the way you go back. They spill nonsense as you walk by. You're short and fat again, but you still know it's nonsense.


But where shall I go from here? I am not good at writing my way through holes, as you know--only twisting threads until I've made rope. Will you return to the cruel wizard and...and then what? Is that the end? Will you fall asleep one day, and dream of frogs and mud and never wake up again? You can't destroy that wizard. No sword for you. No magic rock. It would be good for the plot, but it wouldn't be good for you.

And I've forgotten a whole chapter of your sins--what about the little urchin you brought to your master to be sacrificed? Yes, you threw the pepper under the table; and when he was out buying more, you sat and watched the birds with her. And then you pushed her out the window, so she could be one. And she was. Don't you grin like that now--you've still got plenty to be ashamed of. You were a veritable criminal. I do believe you stole from that urchin's plate not a week earlier. And it's not like you weren't well kept at home. No wonder you were so round you rolled down that hill, just like those birds told you to. You poked at the bellies of dead fish and what were you but cruel to everyone save your wizard?

Still. I want you to win. More than that, I want readers to want you to win. Can't you do something, anything before it's too late? Before your cruel wizard slips something foul into your meal that night and makes you sleep forever? I think you should cut him. Cut him good, for me and for you. If not in life, than in death. Take everything that you can from him. His things are broken. His bird is gone. His family is gone. His town is gone. But you are the only one that can make him alone. Do this. Please. Do this for me. It will show you to be warm and sweet in the eyes of the reader, warm and sweet as I've known you. It will make the writer look cruel, but haven't I been the cruel one all along?

Don't worry. You don't have to tell the story--you don't have to do a thing anymore. I'll make the bird tell it, so nobody has to get their hands messy. I don't like birds anyway. And I'll leave a soft, light, purple place at the end of it for you. You'll still be short and round, but you can put your head on my knees and rest for a bit. Just a bit.

4.5 Coda

In connection to the last blog, it must be clarified that one can certainly go too far into these things; there is a point at which you can become a hollowed out skin watching your blood fill a flea. An obsession. Da capo. Da capo. Da capo. If the flea has more [of your] blood than you, who's to say who's who? Like all things, there is a falling point. And there should be; it wouldn't be any fun without one.


Furthermore, on deathy-ness:

"That is what existence is: facing death, being in perpetual difference from equilibrium....The fall kills us and creates us" (Serres 72).

"Ev: (shoots a dark look at him before speaking softly) Have you ever held something broken before?
Le: (toying with the fabric of the couch) Hm? Like a watch or something?
Ev: no. Something alive.
Le: I--(hesitates) no.
Ev: The body is warmest then, in that moment after it's broken, when it's trying to heal. When it's trying to keep from dying--that's when it's most alive. (turns to face him) You were alive when I found you. I don't know what you were before that, but when you hit the ground, you were alive" (onmyroommate'sbookshelf 60-61).

4: Bollenia

This title means nothing. But it pleases me.

I had a moment today. I do not have many of them anymore, these days, at least; I did last year. I was an incredibly nervous person (still am) and it was more difficult to hide there, I think--I was poked and prodded and preened by every sound, every smell then; but I do not feel as many things now. It is a strange thing.

But I did have a moment today. In my Eng 350 class. So I stopped everything and wrote, before I forgot. I do these things without thinking. What? Play. Meshing. Thinking. Editing. This is how I entertain myself in class; this is how I find honey. And this, here, is as close as I can get to describing that process, which is not instinctual, but has come to be close to it:


Turn, turn. I am twisting my pen cap; micron .005. like it is the top of a pill bottle. With just enough pressure, it'll pop up a bit. But a little too much, and it almost slips out of my fingers. I jolt a bit, instinctively moving forward to catch it or collect it, wherever it falls. But it does not fall. I have felt a moment's anxiety for nothing. And as this moment happens, I am thinking of you; artfully, deftly, I smudge that feeling, that anxiety, into that thought. And it is beautiful and pleasing and you are whole. This is what happens when you make pets and toys of fleas.

This is a very difficult thing for me to describe, and even writing in the moment, it has come out garbled. The last line is the truest of them, I think: this is, indeed, what happens when you make pets and toys of fleas. When you play with...yourself, really. No lewdness intended in that statement.

In my Psychology class last year, we learned about the several theories about how reactions and emotions and input work--whether one sets off the other, they happen at the same time, or something of sorts. I forgot a good deal of it. But I remember one of them said that what we feel and what we think we feel are not always the same; responses are not exclusive. I heard that part at a lecture, akshully. It went kinda liek this:

Nora is reading an engrossing romance novel. The male character, Lonshawn, is a dashing cad, except his suddenly head over heals for Deli, the female protagonist. In chapter suchandsuch, Lonshawn becomes very disturbed after Deli does something maybe a tad dangerous. Goes out to get a fruit pie while her attacker is loose or something. Anxious for her sake, Lonshawn grabs her arm and pretty much drags her back to his apartment (all dashing cads have apartments), despite her protest (like any woman, Deli loves a good fruit pie). He says it's because he loves her--dragdragdrag. The violence of this gesture creates an anxiety in Nora; but the follow-up profession of love turns what might have been anxiety-fear-anger-getyourmisogynisticmitsoffmepal into anxiety-nervousness-love'spalpitations. The symptoms are misattributed to something else, something decidedly fluffier. Nora begins to dream of sonofabetch cads who would drag her around by the arm, too.

It is this sort of skewing action; I am aligning parts just left of what they should be to create a desired effect. In the same way that one creates a picture, I work to create a moment. The result is not the same as Nora's, but the action is--that's all I was trying to get across. The verb. The shift. There are very little opportunities for it, and very little time in which to work. It takes practice. It takes editing. It takes thoughtlessness.

The end result is this: I might have simply thought "Oh--that pen cap didn't come off as I expected it too. I suppose I look silly for having jumped a bit." But I covered this thought before it could breath. Instead, I saw a face; both horns and no horns, curled hair and shorn. I saw you, as I remember you; and you, as you are now--as I edit you.
It's become like a game of Where's Waldo now--in almost all of my poems and short stories since then, there will be a character that bears traces of you. I have become so terribly fond of breaking you into pieces: one with horns, one with clay, one a god, one a shade. There is something cruel in all this; but it is not enough to stay my hand.
I could say more here on you and on moments, but I will not; it would be ugly and denatured, and hurt more than just this blog.

It is a pleasant thing, for the artist, to sense the color that sits in the flea's belly through other means. When I paint, I feel it clinging to the corners of my fingers, drying quickly into a stubborn new smudge of skin. When I write, it stretches and shapes out before me, and I see all the things it colors; I see the form, the body of the color.

But artists are just men as well; Ettlinger went mad. He shows there is still a touch of play, a lean toward ruin in the artist. I am not mad; but I am not at all opposed to play. I enjoy what impressions I get of puce through all the world's art; but, at the same time, I take a certain delicious pleasure in squeezing the little bug, just a bit, maybe a bit more, until I can see that good, heavy color through the tight stretch of the flea's skin. It is enticing; it is incensing. It is all a very fine game to me.

And this is as best I can describe something that sits in a large green chair, beyond the reach of my brain.