Ta-ta!

Blogger and I have endured a long and mostly happy and healthy relationship together, but you know the drill...we're all each other has ever known and we're ready to spread our wings and give new things a try, blah, blah, blah, etc. etc.

Blogger...well, he lived here before I did, so it only seemed fair to let him stay while I proceeded to find new digs over at tumblr (who's already a lot sexier, more exciting, and frankly less of a bore).

Living at tumblr I'm hoping to make some new friends, keep some old ones (preferably the cool ones with good haircuts and expensive shoes...err, I mean the ones with interesting thoughts and experiences and well-written content. Obviously. Obviously.) and update you all as to my whereabouts and whatabouts more frequently than I've been recently doing.

If you care at all, I've changed my surname but not my given, and I'm here now.

HTTP://NIGHTGOWNSANDCIGARETTES.TUMBLR.COM

Blogger, darling. Don't be mad at me. It was great while it lasted.

Adios, muchacho!

Their Satanic Majesties.

Allen Ginsberg makes me cry at my desk sometimes.

In San Francisco Ginsberg saw a $1 an hour psychiatrist, Philip Hicks, who asked him what he would like to do. "Doctor," as Ginsberg recalls his answer...

"I don't think you're going to find this very healthy and clear, but I really would like to stop working forever. Never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now, and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone - maybe even a man - and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence. Then he said "Well, why don't you?" I asked him what the American Psychoanalytic Association would say about that, and he said . . . if that is what you really feel would please you, what in the world is stopping you from doing it?

A brief excerpt from David Burner's Making Peace with the Sixties (Princeton University Press, 1996)


Oh god. My thoughts exactly.

A Eulogy, To One of the Only Things I Have Left From Back Then

When I was fifteen I was asked out by the captain of my high school’s football team.

I didn’t care much, didn’t kiss him even. Went red-faced nonetheless.

15 year old girls, we do things like this.

But I? I was in love.

My high school had a mezzanine in a library full of winding, yellowing dog-eared pages and the smell of text that’s lived longer than any of us within it. Who can honestly say that they don’t love that smell, want to suck it up into a jar and wear it every day, the smell of knowledge so much older and greater than oneself?

I couldn’t keep it then, and I can’t now. So I went there (every day), sat there, and put on Definitely Maybe. I still, some days, wish I had it in a bottle somewhere.

I still, some days, wish I had the sandwiches my mother lovingly made me that back then were carelessly, terribly thrown into garbage bins prior to entering that place.

15 year old girls, we do things like this. Was there any part of my head that wasn’t, in some way or another, sad and sick?

Probably not, but someone, something, else loved me anyways.

And so I put on my headphones, and put on Definitely Maybe.

Supersonic. That solo. Blew my mind and gave me heaven. Every. Single. Fucking Time. Fifteen years old, no place to go. It gave me everywhere to go then (and still, now).

Then, when I was nineteen, there was D’You Know What I Mean. Taking me through 06:17 train rides, had me standing purposeful and thin and in a black pea coat that looked exactly as I meant it to, as I wanted it to (and still, now).

She’s Electric when dancing in my childhood home’s backyard, in faded grey track shorts and frizzed out summer hair, reflecting Californian sun for the first time, electric under my skin and swinging a little white dog, dying, round ‘til neither of us could take another breath or breathe, breathe, breathe out and drown in the staccato joy of strums and sound.

Hey Now! was highway car trips through West Virginian mountains and Carolinian plains that had alligators in their ditches. Scared us all.

Morning Glory, and I’m calling home from neon sign lit South Beach payphones on calling cards with my brother holding the receiver while I talk into it, afraid of the spit that others have left on it, afraid of anyone finding the three stale menthols I’ve hidden in a CD case in my motel room drawer, as if I lived there and had made a life there for the four night stay.

Some Might Say, my first driving test. I failed.

Listen Up in a car, driving home from early morning dreams in coffee shop windows, knowing that I really, really don’t mind being on my own and feeling it so deep throughout my bones when he sang it, too.

And I can’t say what it was about that album, those songs, that took me everywhere I needed to go in my head, but it did. It did at fifteen, and it did at every year I’ve been in between.

And now, at twenty four years old, it’s all over and, in another sense, just beginning.

I don’t feel like anyone could really ever understand what it is that I feel for those songs because, in a certain sense, they can’t. They’ll never hear the sunrises and being still drunk at work with Champagne Supernova, they’ll never feel the 3 a.m. Yonge Street walks alone of Cast No Shadow, or smell that library, full of sagacity and future, with the whole glorious fifty one minutes of Definitely Maybe.

And then one day, the makers, they’re gone. Like everything, every moment, every one of us in time.

That’s okay, though. That part of me is too.

But if I ever need to go back? They know, and I know, where to find me.

Mirages of Matchstick Men (and you).

Sublime Oh Nine.

Made it through, didn't I?

It's not so cut and dry as beginnings and endings in some respects. And I don't know what I want to say right now, but I know I want to say something. So writing, sitting here on bones and in skin that isn't as uncomfortable to be inside as it was at this time last year, feels more right than I know or have any words to type. I need to say something honest, start this year with honesty. Be a real, apologetically honest human being.

hon·est (ŏn'ĭst)
adj.

1. Marked by or displaying integrity; upright.

2. Not deceptive or fraudulent; genuine.

3. Equitable; fair.

4. 1. Characterized by truth; not false.

   2. Sincere; frank.

   3. Of good repute; respectable.

   4. Without affectation; plain.

5. 1. Of good repute; respectable.

   2. Without affectation; plain.

6. Virtuous; chaste.

All of them. And find out what I've actually been hiding from all these years, and if it's really as scary as I've made it out to be in my head.

It's hard to trust, but it gets easier the more you do it.

And splitting yourself into a million selves? Easy. The only part of it that's a little tricky is maintaining them. But finding yourself, being one single self? Harder than it looks.

But it gets easier the more you do it.

Happy New Year!

and you just keep on getting closer.

crystallized from Fake TV on Vimeo.

Hi, hi, high.

those who don't never will. but those who do?

Rise and shine to you.
For you
The moon and the stars and
The sky. There is always
Quick heat in mouths touching, built
with brick around
frost, and hung
with a thousand particles of
light around brick.
Stolen, not taken. My world
is the same as any other (because
what is a world?) if a look is taken
at the brick and
the frost, the lights
in the dark.
But between? There, in the
tiny, apparent barren space that
no one bothers
or, maybe, looks close enough
to see?
There is a rise
and shine
to you
For you
Always sticking.
It is steady, it is even. and
I?
I have seen what a world is after all.

A year, in review.

This season. It doesn't feel like a single one that's come before it, not that I can remember.

Last year, same day. December 21. I wrote this.

Months and years past of train ticket machines click-click-clashing my passage to and from a place that I knew was my home. I took a train again this morning in a sweater two sizes too large for me, and stared out a frostbitten window knowing that I don't know where that home is anymore.

And, far more significantly, knowing that it's alright to not know.

I expect that having figured everything out at the age of 23 would make for a horribly dull, albeit easier and more manageable existence. I could be wrong, of course, so if there's a 20-something (or 30, or 40, or ever 50-something for that matter) out there who believes that they've obtained such clarity, please send me an e-mail...I'd love to hear all about it. So, for the time being, I'm unsure as to what direction this is all going in, and I mean that in the broadest sense possible. Past, present and future blogs, schools, careers, homes, shoes, cigarettes, planes, trains, automobiles, holidays - you name it, I've probably not quite figured it out. And the great clarity I've been seeking for a longer time than I would like to recollect kicks in when I remind myself that it's not something I even want. I'm in love with not knowing, and for right now that's good enough.

A few days ago my oft-alluded to man and I sat in our beautiful tropicana coloured kitchen nook, where we sit most every evening and enjoy the beautiful meals we alternately prepare for one another, and we talked. We always talk.

It's nice, being with someone who likes listening to you talk, likes the way your face moves when you listen to them talk, likes talking to you.

Our talks range from making silly noises and singing at one another to examining existentialist treatises to congratulating each other and ourselves on the accomplishments of the week (songs, chapters finished, meals made, dancing fun had). This time we talked about happiness. What it means, where you feel it, whether it's in your chest or bones or stomach or skin or brain or all of then at once. How it doesn't change who you are, it lets you be who you are. And even though I still don't know what it is, or how to explain to anyone how to feel it like I do...

Happiness. We came to this conclusion. When you can just be, it just is.

And this? This I know.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Not Here.

There's courage involved if you want

to become truth. There is a broken-

open place in a lover. Where are
those qualities of bravery and sharp

compassion in this group? What's the
use of old and frozen thought? I want

a howling hurt. This is not a treasury
where gold is stored; this is for copper.

We alchemists look for talent that
can heat up and change. Lukewarm

won't do. Halfhearted holding back,
well-enough getting by? Not here.

- Rumi

Us.

People sometimes forget that every beginning is an ending, too.

The change, the change...it all happened for a reason, didn't it?

I've made it. I'll keep it.

It's you, always.

Dear Yoko Ono

Dear Yoko Ono,

I like you.

You're strong.

And I think I understand you. Mostly.

Some afternoons I sit here in this very spot that I’m sitting in now and I watch you on my computer screen: burning it with all your clipped words of white-hot love. It helps me sometimes…I think.

It helps me think.

Either/Or.

And there you sit across from me in the screen, sitting the same way every time: being positive, elegant, generous and loving and all of the things that we all should be. We all should be…and yet none of us are. No one I know is. I try to be. I know I’m not.

But you! You are.

Even after the merciless and horrible things the universe has brought upon your tiny little head, still full of your shiny short hair at 73 years old, you are.

See, if I were you, Yoko, I don't think I'd ever be able to say I love you again.

And you! You do. You say it every day, to everyone and no one at all.

God, you’re so fucking strong, Yoko.

You make me entertain the thought that I, too, could maybe be as amazing as you are one day even though I’m admittedly selfish (and, quite simply, not as amazing; simply in that I never want to have to be). But I still entertain it. I let it loose up in my head, like hair that’s been confined from tight braids it’s been in for weeks, like a child who’s eaten nothing but Pixie Stix for days on end and runs up and down the block to burn it all off.

This kind of simplicity? It’s so nice to have sometimes.

I wonder, Yoko, if you too sometimes get sad or bored with yourself, and the feeling that you’re not actually very good at anything at all?

I try to be creative most days.

Most days I can't even tell if it's working or not.

Most days I think I could do anything at all and none of it would matter to anyone but me.

Or it could matter to everyone, but I think it would mean nothing to me either way.

What is being creative anyways? Just…creating? Well, I could create anything then. I could write you a letter, I could draw pictures of paper coffee cups piled up on desks with words like I’m so fucking sick of this scrawled over them, I could draw them over top of worse renderings of with tiny waists and long legs of extra-terrestrials spreading their fingers atop the open palms that face their audience in surrender, saying come in, I’m letting you in, have a fucking look and don’t fucking look at me and I could make a million dollars.

People make a million dollars making much stupider, much dirtier, much more inane things than these.

I wish my mind was clean.

I wish I could make a million dollars.

I wish I didn't wish to know everything all the time.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is…I feel like you must sometimes feel like I do, Yoko.

Do you?

You certainly never show it. I'm working on that, too, the not showing of it. Not letting it get in me in the first place is hard enough, but at least not letting it out...it's kind of like those affirmation things that you’re supposed to do when you’re depressed. Someone told me to do them when I thought I was depressed, but I don't think I really was. Just sad. I did them anyways.

So tell me Yoko, please, because I actually need to know whether or not it’s true.

Do you ever get sad? Do you ever go on your early evening walks and feel nothing but loose street gravel below the soles of your little feet, do you alternate between conversations and shapes and numbers in your head, do you find yourself unable to speak of it, not because you don’t want to but because you don’t know what your insides are made of, let alone what words to use?

I hope you do, Yoko. I hope you are sad sometimes. I hope you hate sometimes. I hope you’re just as confused and fucked and afraid as the rest of us.

But as much as I need to know that you’ve got bad on your insides too, Yoko, don’t worry. I know you don’t. It’s why I like you.

Writing a book.

...for me, it goes a little something like this:

1. Your water breaks. And the words, they come pouring out as though every major artery in your body (heart included) has just been swiftly and mercilessly slashed open. It's all kind of disgusting really, or would be if not for the fact that you're kind of excited because you're having a baby goddammit!

2. The birth commences. But you had to take public transit to the hospital during rush hour, and now that you're finally here, not one kind soul is being magnanimous enough to stab you in the ass with an epidural. Yep, this part fucking hurts.

3. Postpartum depression sets in. How on earth do you get this monster to go to sleep, or at the very least stop caterwauling at you for five minutes? You're approaching the beast from every angle, and it's deflecting your advances like a pro.

4. It is a screaming terror of a toddler, and there are moments, more frequent than not, wherein you believe that it is either you or it. Only one shall survive, and it's not looking like it's going to be you. You feel inefficient, paralyzed, and just about ready to put the thing up for adoption. Or kill it. There's always that option, too.

5. Alright, it's finally learning to talk and walk and is even starting kindergarten soon. Every day gets a little bit easier, and maybe you're learning to be good at this whole thing after all?

6. Ah, so this is why people do this. It's quite nice actually, having a little partner, a little consistency in the day, watching it grow into a more compact, recognizable version of yourself. You start to enjoy making it after-school snacks and tucking it into bed at night.

7. Nuh-uh. Wrong again. Did no one warn you about the terrible teens? It's become its own person, or so it thinks. Stays out too late with boys, talks back at you, is openly smoking cigarettes (and, you suspect, worse) and is its 'own woman', or so it thinks. Still lives under your roof though, and therefore your rules. Thems the breaks, kiddo.

7. Evil, evil teenage years. War of the wor[l]ds, every day. Where did it all go wrong? You need a vacation, from which you consider never returning. Or, once again, killing it. You brought it into the world, you can take it out. Right?

8. You can't help but sometimes marvel at what you've created, and the fact that, via some semblance of both a competence and will of your own, it's still alive. Holy shit! And really. It's quite beautiful, smarter than you usually give it credit for being, and objectively pretty damn cool. Still a pain in the ass sometimes, but who are you kidding? You love it to death.

9. The bittersweet day comes that it's accepted into college. You knew the time would come that it would fly the coop to go and become someone else's problem, and after all that you've been through, it's more than a little bit exciting. You'll see it on holidays and for the occasional visit when it needs money/attention/affection...but it's never going to be just the two of you again and you both know it.

10. "Hoorah! You're free! You're freeeeee!" chants a little voice in your head, over and over again. Yes, indeed. You are free. And you miss it terribly already. You sit back. You finally take that vacation. And you wish with all of your heart that it's being taken care of, that you taught it how to take care of itself, and that no harm comes to it. Ever, ever, ever.

Disclaimers:

1. No, I have never had a child. This is just what I imagine it's like.
2. I am currently somewhere around stage 8, occasionally reverting back to stage 7.
3. I think it's self-explanatory, but publisher/public = college/world.

I am a golden god.

yep.

Wednesday mid-morning coffee break.

Sometimes I just don't feel like using my words or my brain because sometimes it all just comes out the same way as it did yesterday and sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who knows what I mean.

Do you know what I mean?

Sometimes I don't want to write I just want to look at pictures of Anita Pallenberg in 1968 and study the angular sharpness of her face and wear more fur smoke more cigarettes draw my eyes black and heavy and wake up at whatever hours I want.

Sometimes I just want to be horrible and not care and not bite my hands, not hate my arms every time I pass by a mirror.

Sometimes I don't want to read about hope or love or see any more long-legged girls in beautiful outfits that I could never fit into or afford.

Sometimes I want no one inside my head but him and I take back everything I've done and...just, sometimes, oh.

Oh. Suck it back, stamp it out, oh.

half the world away

Don't accept anything less than big love. Massive, consuming, fast-paced, scary, wonderful, overwhelming, huge love. The kind of love that makes you want to put post-it notes with sweet nothings written on them all over his suitcase when he goes out of town for a night. The type of love that makes you suddenly understand why your mother has made you take your vitamins and fed you beautiful meals your whole life. Because long days and heavy eyelids don't matter when you've got big love. Nothing can keep you going like big love, because there's nothing in the world like it and once you find it? Oh my god you'll know.

Monday (Mondaze)

Currently laughing hysterically at my desk thanks to this.

My nearby co-workers surely think I'm some type of mental retard, but whatever. Thanks, internet.

Be-in.

Everyone should know how it feels to stand around in a muggy August hot kitchen, drinking wine too fast, talking too fast, changing songs too fast in the company of friend-love and love-love, wiping the smudged eyeliner out from under your eyes to see, so clearly, exactly where I am.

To be 23 and on my own was great. It was great, terrible fun. And it was what I needed, even when I didn't know that I did.

But to be 24. To be 24 and not on my own is more happiness and more sadness than I've ever known. And everyone should know how it feels to feel both.

Because when I'm wiping the playground sand off my best friend's shoulders as he runs off into the night, chasing something that even he can't say, I wish these moments of swing set park declaration huge, massive, overwhelming happiness for every living, breathing, thinking thing in the world. I watch the rest of them jump off picnic tables and let their feet take them where they're going. I know that just because I've been found...well, that doesn't mean that so many aren't still lost.

But the greatest thing about a love like this?

All it takes to heal the world inside my head is having him, at the end of the night, to rest it on.

As promised.

I wrote nothing to actually write here today (and for that I do of course apologize), but being the woman of my word that I am, here's one from the archives that was published earlier this month. Enjoy, darlings.

Make Out

phones with broken buttons

call back with broken words

typo send backs

on his back in my bed

for four days on end our heads

are not quite right but nothing ever

is when you're in the thick of it, wanting to live inside of a perfect

silver book of things that cannot be named until

you've at once known them, felt them and lost them

if only for a moment

in time.

It's not what you think.

Given my last few posts on here it may seem as though happiness has, to a certain extent, depleted me of my creative resources where writing is concerned in consideration of the fact that my posts have been...well, virtually non-existent.

But rest assured, my dearest few readers, I'm actually writing more than ever. The novel is coming along at a pace that surprises even myself, the short stories are being banged out on the weekly, the poems don't stop falling out of my fingers and it's all actually getting published. Which, of course, means I can't publish it here first due to the simultaneous submission rules. Such is life, and such are the consequences that I'm more than pleased to live with.

Alas, I am going to attempt to be at least a bit of a better blogger, starting today. Just don't expect anymore boy-directed nihilism, as I'm quite simply and honestly more and more in love with my man with every passing minute.

Real post tomorrow, cross my heart!

The universe giveth and the universe taketh away.

Dear asshole that stole the one thing I own that I actually care about (a.k.a. my bike) while I was out of town for the weekend cottaging with the man of my dreams,

FUCK OFF AND DIE.

Love, and many exes and ohs,

Lush