day 13: sometimes i think it would be better

sometimes i think it would be better when someone dies, especially if they die all of a sudden, to pretend they are still around. like if someone you and all your friends know dies, you could all just talk to them and joke around as if they were still there and could hear you but couldn't respond. it'd probably be really funny and then you wouldn't forget about them so quickly. it might be better that way.

day 12: i borrow money but i never borrow cigarettes

i borrow money but i never borrow
cigarettes. i borrow names.
i lose parts of the computer; the keys,
the period and enter keys,
the panels on the back that keep the battery in the dark.
the tiny screws that are impossible to find.
she will catch me stealing
pictures from the living room
shelves. cigarettes stubbed out
on the sill and stuck in the rivets
where the window panel slid up
so easy
and the cold breathed out and stopped
the dust
in its coward tracks. i'm in love but i'm lazy, warbled across the lawn
weaving dark paths into the shadowed
and infinite bushes. the cars sweeping in time, my metronome, the cold on my ears came in singing.
the old song on its side
and leaping.

day 11: matthew aizenstadt

matthew aizenstadt drove the car withe the windows rolled all the way down and the heat on full blast. he smoked cigarettes. he thought about swinging a bat.

day 10

this girl whose real name i wont say, i'l just call her madeline retard ( thats re-taaa-rd not reeee-tard). she works at the place where some art was at and i came to pick up some art. she had a friend there and she talked energetically to him in front of me. i felt like she was talking to me but she wasn't looking at me. at one point she said "so much for keeping it on the D L... her voice lilting at the end of the seductively held long L, it was by no means a subtle introduction to whatever it was she intended to follow it with. Her friend however (a gay man wearing a vest and seemingly obsessed with pretty people) butted in, turning the subject towards something more directly focused near the center of our akward encounter ven diagram. unbeknownst to my observation at the time, madeline retahrd was having none of the segue attepting behavior of her beanie-adorned friend. no less than six minutes passed before madeline retahrd cleared her throat, "so much for keeping it on the DL!. she said, this time only louder," chanel tagged a photo of me and julio at plume" ohh, i guess she wanted me to know that she and julio were dating. why did she want me to know that julio and her were dating? the odd thing abut this story is that i assume she used the phrase "so much for keeping it on the dl" to psychologicaly manipulate me into telling more people she was dating julio. haha i thought, you idiot, this is so obvious. but thing is, it was SO obvious and because she repeated the "so much for the dl" phrase not once but TWICE, and because she wanted ME to tell people about her love life, I have been repeating and repeating this story. i feel largely responsible for knowledge of her new relationship. in some ways, really in all ways, i dd exactly what i assumed she wanted me to do. who wins?

day 9

one of these days & these boots, i think, when i remember matthew aizenstadt in the highschool cafeteria after a thre year dissapearance. typewriter tip tip tip tip tip tip tip tip tippta aye tip ta tip ta tip ta aye, could be my morning excersize, yoga, a walk to the curb (no mail) and backwards. calm down oldbaoy, i'd like to think but he doesn't need it. he's happy. they're all happy and they're all hapy without me and maybe they might want to get coffee or they would get coffee if i wanted them to, too, but some of them wouldn't ask unless i asked first and they don't need me. they're happy and they don't owe me. that'sa good thing. its a good thing being happy like a cool pillow. i have the cats and they owe me a lot. i have all the receipts and the film negatives which nothing ever happens to. they just either get lost or they don't and they just stay there. a lot like matt aizenstadt, i think. matt aizenstadt and his fishbowl metaphor and his girlfriend lindsay and not speaking anymore and the higschool assembly third row and the sunroom couch once and in the car once driving with the heat on and the windows rolled down, the insistence that it was always this way and it had to be this way. the thinking of it as a new thing & curious.

day 8: invention is invention is invention

invention is invention is invention. the math score times the word count times the third chord times the substitute teacher and the substitute teacher's diploma divided by the substitute teacher's current day dreAM. living off pickles and oatmeal in tennessee, we didn't stand still or stay sober long enough to lose our cool. and paige was so thin then, wearing lycra leggings, you know, the drugs really took her and i guess she must have been suprised. free cartons of cigarettes and serving ice cream. $1.00 for a pickle in a bag of juice, we'd buy it at the gas station. you get a certain pride about living as free and as dirt cheap and barely as you can, easy, you get a certain pride, its a kinda test so i don't blame any one, i don't feel sorry. one thing about living on the road, you lose the old anchorage and the heavy feet, you are weighted by the hours. sometimes they mistake me for this though, the boy thinks hes falling in love and he's never falling in love. he's always just falling, tries to make it so i can't stand up. tries to drape his sandbags over my shoulders when i wouldn't notice. i do not curl into a peachpit. i am tired, so tired, so tired, i say and fall down like a puddle and sleep like a puddle and evaporate silent and stealth-like a puddle. one thing about life on the road is the one day it rains in montana, the next day the rain picks up and puddles up new york. first it was knoxvilled and tennessee and we weren't sure it would all work out even when it did. i remember the glass elevator and paige at the desk counter, zonked, and saying stuff about a boyfriend and a missing key and knowing she thought it was real smooth, you know, and zonked, and knowing the guy would just do it, probably would always do it. sometimes you're getting away with it and you don't even know it, sometimes you're not getting away at all. i'm not sure what it was then. meaghann cannon in the shower stall with the door closed and sitting on the tile by the drain. she was wearing a fur coat, giving me the gist of her low self esteem. im sure we were connecting, but i was too high to be nervous. better to drink the clear drink in the day and if they take your picture or put you in the camera you could be drinking water. you could be in the campgrounds, shitting in the woods. on ecstacy onetime, i forget about the urinary tract and have to pee so bad i nearly go, have to kneel down on the grass, have to wait in line. thing is, once you pee, its all ok again and nevermind. like the time we took the bus to amsterdam and the bus stopped. i thought it was a cigarette break. they were all putting their coats on. so i put my coat on and walked off the bus. turned around and looked at alma through the window. she was rifling through her purse. pulled out a cigarette and catching her eye, the bus pulls away from the curb. like it wasn't even happening. like there was some mistake. like the driver would just pull up a bit, because someone needed part of the curb. but no, the bus keeps going, pulls out of the stop, brussels. brussels, i am running down the street- no money, no phone, no id, no words, just running and like its not even happening. three times i lose the bus, three times i find it just ahead turning the corner. minutes before the highway she is stopped at a light and i am running between the cars, praying at a red light and then banging on the sides and then gasping for air and supported under each arm. one minute running through brussels and the next minute everything fine and beautiful. not a cigarette break, so it goes.

i built a little businessman out of steel wire, braized him together, dressed him. i strung him up on a swing and strung the swing to the ceiling. i said swing and i pushed him. my father spends most of each day in the office and used to steal my hair dryer, drying circuits. once had a car with a broke ignition, strung up the wires so the ignition started by pressing the floorboards. the squirrels were so big in michigan, they foraged in packs. we called them snow gophers. bent down and watched them eat. invention is invention is invention and so on.

day 7

there are more pictures of me in real life than there are on facebook, how long will that last?

i am facebook friends with people who i know are dead, how long will that last?

facebook is consistently prompting people to feel badly over not catching up with my cat on the internet, i know because i am one of them, how long will that last? someone puts down the book and thinks they made it happen just by reading it, is he wrong!

someone puts the book down and thinks its finished, are they wrong!

someone puts the book down after theyve already fallen asleep!

someone puts the book down because they feel insulted as a southerner and they never open the book again!

someone reads only the last page of the book/someone reads only the last sentence on the last page of the book and screams!

day 6

online bank of america asks you three private questions only you would know but usually only asks one question at a time. this is after you enter your password. you enter your password after bank of america shows an image of you sitekey which you look at before entering your password which must have nothing to do with your sitekey. my sitekey is a lavender teakettle. alex's sitekey is a chocolate frosted donut with sprinkles. i don't know anyone else's sitekey yet but i should write that down as an idea for a scatterplot. i am never keeping up with my scatterplots. the three private questions only i would know that bank of america asks me are one, what is the name of your first pet? the name of my first pet is pansy. pansy was a hamster named after the flower. i was big into hamsters for a while. i think its the cheeks, the mechanical stuffing of their cheeks with the little hamster paws. like winter could be coming anytime. hamsters would be great with their gym memberships. pansy died, obviously. two, what is the name of your first boyfriend/girlfriend? sometimes i get this one wrong because i write scott chappell but its really just scott at bank of america online. scott chappel was my first boyfriend and we started going out in mrs. davis's 5th grade class. following months of emotional footsie torture i wrote scoot chappel a note. the note said do you like me: circle yes or no. scott chappel took the note overnight and wrote maybe in the middle of the note and circled that and then erased the maybe and circled the yes but i could still see the pencil marks, obviously. scott chappell was a smart kid. in highschool he played football and for some reason knew how to juggle and ride a unicycle. i think he went to duke, some relation to the military, i don't know. scott chappell's mother had one eye that was always winking, some kind of surgery that went wrong made one eye smaller than the other but in a really kind way. three, what is your father's middle name? this is the one it asked me today. my father's middle name is wayne. i think thats a great middle name. i used to be obsessed with middle names. today i thought of how john wayne hated indians and the movie quiet man. i love that movie, moslty the old man at the end.

day 5

vegetables & mickey's & dinner theatre for one: dear america, how many want the same, bright green bottles. dear america: you say i'm ripping off allen ginsberg, america? allen ginsberg is dead, america, you don't know him. he's gone. dear america, i once wrote a letter to a girl who wrote a letter to santa claus and it was the sixth grade. dear america, i don't understand my comforts and i never meant them. dear america, i'm lonely when the trees go down and the lights turn on. dear america, i am moving to new york and sometimes i say it is my favorite of all your children. america, who is your favorite child, is it new? if your last name was york wou8ld it maybe be new. dear america, i drank a diet dr. pepper from a can. it cost me 88 cents. it made me proud. does diet dr. pepper make you proud? dear america, i scare so easy, i fall straight down when they take out the trash. dear america, i grew uyp in a suburb. i sat on the curb in estonia, a gypsy begged for change. i once lived on rue de la baume, the man by the metro stop kept asking for change. once i saw him with a snow globe. i'd like to drop a euro in the hot chocolate machine upstairs and not understand the billboards. i like when you can ride a train when the today feels like riding a train. i can't do that here. i can't hear myself speaking, my voice has been muffled in my ears and i have to rip the papers down by toimorrow. america, do you have a state where the sun won't go down and how do i get there. america, i can't trust you right now and i don't expect an answer. you are not the shining sea and neither am i and please lets just not pretend.

day 4

i am riding down king street in tory's mini cooper. through the window i see cainnon on the sidewalk. in the second where he would have seen me too he begins to almost convulse and then sneezes, violently. i like that i see him in the moment of a sneeze and then right after i don't see him anymore and i only see the gesture and don't hear the sucking in sound or the sneezing out sound. i think of mimes and how a few years ago that famous mime died and i never knew before that there were famous mimes. they are having a christmas parade today and there is a vendor on the corner of king street selling balloons in the shape of spiderman and dora the explorer. there are also reindeer balloons but i think there are more dora the explorers. at the grocery store i steal a packet of vegan cheese. sometimes i think it makes me sick and maybe that is why i steal it. sometimes i think i could love roland because his father committed suicide by overdosing on heroin. i don't know why that is. my father never died but he fell asleep at the dinner table on thanksgiving. he was drunk and i guess it is easy to get drunker than you thought you were getting but i also thought he would know better by now since he's had such a long career. when i was hiding in the living room on thanksgiving i heard brandon in the kitchen say one of my most favorite things. he said get these bowls away, i don't need bowls. they keep slipping and breaking my ship apart. sometimes i think i would like to have kids just so i could write down things that they said and then maybe i wouldn't have to think anymore. maybe if they were my kids i would want to play with them. i don't want to play with children when other people are watching, there's too much expectation. i like to talk to them though and teach them tricks. onetime mike asked me to fill-in for his mad science partner and i said okay because we'd get 20 dollars each. the mad science gig was at a catholic school which he never told me and i said i wouldn't have come if he had told me but i probably would have. i wasn't a very good mad science assistant. my mad science name was jessie the jokester and none of the kids thought it was funny. and then i started seeing all the kids as little adults. everything they said to eachother changed the course of each of their lives and meant too much about their parents. and the women who corral those kids at church things are always snarky, almost always. the one woman had pale blond hair and was narrow and looked like a mean librarian. librarians, at least in highschools, are almost always mean. one boy kept clucking, all he did was cluck. not incessantly or loudlky just normal clucking. the boy had to sit by himself on a bench because hye was clucking and couldn't go into the other room when the other kids did. he had a single mother and i don't know how it happened that i found that out but i remember it was true. my job as a mad science assistant was mostly cleaning up confetti. i sat with the boy on the bench and i drew a mustache on a popsicle stick and held it up to my face. then i handed it to him and i told him the next time someone asked him his age he should pull out the popsicle stick under his nose and say 35. i was hoping to change the course of his life, i guess, or hold his hand without touching him. at first he held the mustache up the wrong way but it didn't really matter.

day 3

all these wires are loose and could zap us! today is not my birthday. today tyra banks is thirty six years old and two days ago she was thirty five. alex bought a pill for her cat and said it would make all the fleas go away but she didn't tell it to me. i sat outside at vickery's at a two person table i'd never sat at before. i fucked with the waiter only i wasn't fucking him but when i am happy or being honest a lot of times people think i'm fucking with other people. the waiter didn't think i was fuycking with him. he liked me and i know it. i said i had used to think that red stripe bottles were bottles of cough syrup and older and cooler kids went to parties and drank cough syrup. i'd seen pictures. it was casual. finding out the truth about something like that is as difficult and accidental as finding out where to buy fantasia cigarettes. i'd seen those in pictures too. the day i sat outside in a place i'd never sat before i relived three years of my life out loud. i told a story about doing bumps of coke off my necklace in the upstairs hall at my old house on spring street and i was wearing the necklace. i wondered how many hands had touched that necklace. it is a metal tooth that hangs on a chain. i asked my friends today if they thought i could be a stand up comic and they didn't sound very enthusiastic. i could be friends with sarah silverman! i said. i promised to buy my mother so many houses when i was 8 years old and what if i never can? i am afraiud of who would forget sooner and to whcihc one of us it means more. there are some people i would like to be rich for. if i were rich i would pay those people to hang out and keep doing what they're doing because they're so successful at living. living your life well is a pretty hard thing to do. what if you are the master at living your life well and no one will pay you? or you have to work and having to work is the one thing that ruins how well you live your life? i would like to be rich sometimes so i could pay people for living their life well.

yesterday was december fourth and i wore someone else's hat to someone else's party. the hat was a bear or the shape of a bear head. it had white cloth teeth. whenever i was introduced to someone at the party i bent my head down so it was only the bear head and lifted my hands up like claws and said raaah. some people laughed at that and some people said i looked good which wasn't really about the bear and maybe was because i'd borrowed someone else's clothes and looked like a slut. i get a lot of compliments anytime i think i look like a slut. my mom would always stick at least two of her fingers down my pants in the dressing rooms. she was very concerned that anything might be too tight and she thinks i am still growing probably even now. i had to learn how to swivel myself around to avoid her and then i stopped buiying clothes at stores. no one needs to buy clothes at stores and thats just the truth. sometimes when i am home now my mother will ask me if she can brush my hair and i will say no because i have a lot of hair and i don't even like to brush it and she is going to hurt me even though she won't be trying to. once i'd said this and then i took a bath and came downstairs and was looking in the refrigerator and i felt some kind of rake or claw approaching from behind and i swiveled around and it was my mother and she was trying to brush my hair. one thing i have learned is that you can't guerilla brush your child's hair and get away with it very easily.

day 2

excuse me i am trying to see how many people i can creep out in the library just by holding this piece of paper over my mouth, excuse me.

day 1

i keep getting messages. there are these people who are upset with me. they write me letters. they say, you never respond to my messages. they send more than one of these letters, so i send one back. i say soda water, chipmunk. they send me another letter, they say- that is not a response. i send a letter back, saying soda,water, chipmunk (s). eventually they will write me off forever. if i saw any one of them on the street i would say i love you i love you i love you, forgive me. it is not the kind of thing you can say in a letter. if you said it in a letter you couldn't say it on the street. i've been thinking about cali8fornia, i'll tell them. you came on the day i was thinking about california and a chipmunk on the wire was electrocuted right in front of me. it fell onto the sidewalk outside the library. no one else noticed. maybe they did and they poretended not to. can you imagine? forgive me. i don't deserve it. i smoked a cigarette while lookin at a dead pigeon on the street. i am cruel and unbeleivable. my ears are so small it must mean something. who would make ears so small. my parents have normal sized ears, i've seen them. they used to have a rotary telephone next to their toilet in the master bedroom. can you believe that? i used to listen in. can you believe that? of course you can, look at me. sometimes i am a senseless braggart. i don't even know if california exists. onetime this pigeon was dying outside a record store in paris. i saw it when i was coming out. i'd just been to see picasso. i was buying my poarents billie holiday records for christmas, frank and nancy sinatra. can you believe that? billie holiday, sinatra from paris. what a crummy gift! and anyway this pigeon was dying, just sitting there. strange how when a bird is just sitting there it clearly means the bird is dying. everyone knew it. i couldn't leave and i couldn't save it. i just stood there and stared at it. i looked at other people to see what they would do. what should we do? i wanted to ask them. i didn't even know how to say "what should we do in french. can you believe that? if you move to a foreign country you should know how to say what should we do in french. a woman with a fur collar yelled something at me. she seemed offended. what did you say? i wanted to ask her. maybe i knew, i can't remember. the only things i ever really said on my own and with bravery were, avez-vous du biere? and je ne suis pa un chaval (i am not a horse) once, to Alma on the street. she said the men kept clucking at her and the gaul! i said je ne suis pa un chaval! and she thought i was very good at french, was a prodigal leaner. really it was just that i'd remembered the word for horse and it was an easy sentence. i skipped so many of those classes. paris is always either beautifully grey or tragically grey, always one or the other and i wish i knew how to say that but i don't. soda, water, chipmunk (s).