Theme Week 13: Vignettes
I never expect him to remember those things, my quirks. Day and night I never thought he paid that much attention. He never shows it.
Maybe my mind is the problem? I have a selective perception framework sometimes. Emotions tend to get in the way a good amount of the time when I'm trying to focus on rational thought.
I looked out of the corner of my eye, still hurt and dissapointed, watching his arms move with the steering wheel as we turned on to Stillwater. Despite my boredom I felt no desire to argue but to just be miserable, as I always do. Confrontation isn't my strong point, but it's also not a weakness. I guess you could say it depends on the situation.
His voice remained shrill and demanding, in a concerned sort of tone. His worry and curiosity for my current state of mind was intermixed with anger, and I felt sorry for him. I felt pity for the things I make him feel; Though sometimes it's a wonderful time.
College has brought me to extreme boredom with my life. The lack of freedom gives me resentment for every minute spent not doing what I want, I think to myself how it will be when it's overwith, and then I'm overwhelmed with the spitting image of an hourglass floating in front of my frontal lobe. The incessant '
tick tick' of my biological clock is saying, "too bad, you wasted your youth and it's gonna be too late tomorrow to play".
Theme Week 12: Me without me #2
5-minute Thought Process.Stupid. selfish. shells. shellfish. crabs. Sallon. winter. snow. angels. heaven. God. shit. poop. diapers. babies. parenting. mom. work. Walmart. fat people. facial hair. Dave Grohl. Nirvana. pot. leaves. nature. animals. wild. crazy. let's get stoned!. Lenny. Superbowl Sunday. popcorn. wrinkles. pug. dogs. slobber. Bugaboo. St Bernard. chin kegs. rum. coconuts. hammer. nails. Larry. inferiority. Josh. love. marriage. fear. nightmares. Freddy Kreuger. claws. lion. jungle. snakes. Timmy. jail. anal sex. catholics. Ms DiFrederico. english. essays. research. information. learning. grades. judgement. arrogance. money. things. desire. sex. condom. latex. Grammy. smothering. fat. hugs. lonely. tired. sleep. late. in trouble. nipples and stickers. rage. bottled up emotions. stress. pain. complaint. annoying. whining. children. candy. halloween. masks. hiding. fear. danger. death. coffins. black. white. light. sun. stars. telescope. pirates. boats. water. swimming. summer. sunburn. aloe. lotion. lubricant. sex toys. porn. boys. inhibitions. drugs. Billy. cocaine. Johnny Depp. scissors. paper. trees. bonsai. small. insignificant. thoughts. cycle. washing machine. clean. dirty. stupid.
Theme Week 12: Me without me #1.
Necessary Life Preparation ChecklistDoc Marten Classic shoes (properly roughened, toughened, and frayed)?
check.Several blue jean flares (frayed but not hole-y)?
check.Grateful Dead Tshirts (dancing bears, tour bus, and traditional logo)?
check.Mismatched drumsticks (pro-mark and ziljian signature)?
check.Striped toe socks in various colours and patterns?
check.Fake foam birkenstocks (a little puppy-chewed and mud-splashed)?
check.Misplaced keys?
check.Chewed fingernails?
check.Half-eaten pecan pie?
check.Various sterling silver rings?
check.Unused checkbook?
check.Josh?
check.Sketchbook?
check. Camera?
check.Moeny?
ha!Hooded sweatshirts?
check, check, and check.Fret?
check.Rusty Cavalier?
check.Brain?
mmm... nope. Oh wait, yes, check.
Theme Week 11: Distance, Frame, Alienation
You don't know what love is until you come out of it. True love is that moment between life and death where your whole life flashes before your eyes. You learn to love when you learn the desperation of what it is to live, how precious the human life can be. You don't know what true love is until it really is gone.It was a dream that was real, and a reality that was a dream, and this is what I learned.
So many people say that they believe in love at first sight, in true love and soul mates and romance. So many people are disillusioned to the point where they think love just happens. Love is easy, love is grand, love can make you happy; But love is a feeling, just like happiness is a feeling, that can be changed just as easily as a smile can be wiped off of your face. It's a clay, a mold, play-doh.
It has to be shaped and poked and prodded and tooled, it has to be baked and rolled, twisted into snakes, squashed into patties, squeezed through a spaghetti press.
I remember getting those little play-doh sets as a kid. My favourite part of the set was when I put the multi-coloured twists of dough into the plastic doll head, and put it back on top of the body, squishing spaghetti rainbow hair.
The worst part was when it was mixed too much, and it turned a lovely fecal brown color.
Things happen to me that way. I mix them up too much and then they turn ugly.
I never think about the possibility of mixing the brown with tons of white, and then red, to maybe make it a pretty coral or pink again.
I guess you could say there will always be a little element of that brown in there, but the rest of the white and red might make that insignificant. Just a figment, a memory.
Theme Week 10: Irony
Mother says to her Daughter: You are so creative and talented. You should really keep going with your artwork.
Grandmother says to her Granddaughter: Honey, That's wonderful! You're so good! Will you draw me something?
Daughter says to Mother: I don't want to pursue this as a career.
Granddaughter says to Grandmother: No, I'm not good at all. I don't want to draw another picture of your dog.
Mother says to Daughter: If this is because of your boyfriend, you better let him go, because I've seen what you can do, and if he doesn't surpport you you better damn well let him go.
Granddaughter says to Daughter: Oh honey, You love to draw , why don't you want to do it for life?
Daughter says to Mother: I know Mom, I can make my own decisions.
Granddaughter says to Grandmother: I just don't.
Daughter heads up to her room and tapes a piece of paper to her computer screen. On the screen there is an image herself. She traces the contour outlines, rips the paper off, and begins to pencil in the shades of grey.
Theme Week 9: More Than Words
My senses are clouded, shrouded by this burning, brilliantine shine coming, and the gold glitters. It pulls me under, down, around, yet I can't describe the taste, the touch, what I see. It feels sweet and yet, like a torture knwon to everyone. No matter how much pain and fear it may bring it is wanted, craved, and only someopne can give it to you. It brings life and death and turns you upside down and pushes you into the mud when you thought you were already beneath the soil, crawling where the worms crawl. You see it but not at all, I feel it but sometimes not at all, I can see it, but sometimes not at all. It lingers yet I don't hear its presence all of the time, and you, you hold it, and cradle it in you.
Theme Week 8: From Small to Big, From Big to Small
Lifting my eyes to the blank canvas, I can see the weaving of the threads that construct the solid surface. I can smell the clean white stretches over the pine of my eisel. I can smell the tangy bitter smell that comes with acrylic paint, and my eyes tear at the mere sight of the brilliant hues. They sit in their own little mountains, their own little worlds, these dancing globules of color and light and liquid and brightness. The seem to reflect the light of the sun and everything that is alive.
I close my eyes and let an image form in the still blackness of my closed view, and lift my arm to dip the bleached horsehair bristles into the thick, wet oblivion. I open my eyes and see a deep violet dripping from the fibers, and slowly draw my mind into life, in dimension, in feeling.
Various colours make their way and blend their cool and hot temperature throught the image, bringing out a fire that has rested for far too long.
A friend of mine once told me to take every little ounce of hatred I held for my life, the people in in, and the people out of it, and dip it in paint, and smear it all over the place. They told me to let myself loose on a wide stretch of canvas, in the deepest, darkest, and most brilliant way that I could. I haven't quite gone that far yet.
My mom bought me a Lucas Proffessional painting set, with a full set of acrylic paints in the most beuatiful shades I'd ever painted with. It came with a french eisel, a wonderful set of horsehair brushes, and many other amazing things, that I never thought I would own.
I painted my walls with those colours and I painted wood and I painted lovers and animals and superheroes, but what I had never painted bits of me. I think I was always afraid to see what would come out.
Painting is now something that can be therapeudic to me, I mostly paint when I am angry. Anger is my weakness, there is so much of it lying under my skin, in a way for everyone and everything, but mostly for the fact that I cannot be in control.
Therapy is overrated in a way, I think. Psychologists sit you in a chair, probe you with questions, and than declare you crazy when you so much as express an emotion, and administer medications with side effects that wouldn't get Evil Kineval on the boat.
Doctors in general are like that now, the whole medical industry isn't about helping people anymore, it's about money. Physicians give out pills left and right, hell, they even give you free ones, because they're paid good money to do it. "This might make you sterile, but hey! You're heartburn won't bother you too much, except it might give you a silent uncurable form of stomach cancer! But I can assure you, that only happened to 200 of the 3500 lab rats we tested it on".
Everyuthing is about money. You can't live with it, you can't live without it, it won't buy happiness, and it won't make you feel better. It'll buy you a good strip-tease, or a dirty night with a french prostitute, but it won't pay for the long-term STD damage.
Theme Week 7: Character
Listening to the tick-tick of the naked white clock behind me on the wall, I contemplate the look resting in my mother's eyes. I've never known her all my life, despite every moment I have spent and lived with her. She is still a stranger to me.
A lot of things in her past have caused my mother to become a brick wall. She appears to have no weakness and no depth sometimes, yet once in a while I can see a stitch or two come loose. I remember one day, watching her tumble to the floor in tears. My dog Malcolm, had shit all over the floor, and she had woken up in a good mood (something she rarely ever does), to have it ruined. She hated my dog. She loves him now, but she hated him then.
Her eyes are a hazel-green, a lot like mine, except they don't change colour as much as mine do. I don't really know her natural hair color, she's always bleached it nearly white. I think it's the same ash as mine. I don't look much like her, her nose and mouth are different, I have much longer eyelashes, but we are still similar. At one point I thought we had nothing in common. A lot of people tell me that she looks like Bette Midler. I think she's much prettier than Bette. Lord knows she can't sing.
I remember getting caught shoplifting when I was 11. I was forced into it really, you know the peer-pressure deal, and I remember the guilt I felt as I hid underneath the table in tears, while the cops decided what they wanted to do with me.
She was silent on the ride home. For once I think she actually understood something. She seemed unusually lenient with me, I was never punished. She said to me that I didn't need it, I was already punishing myself enough. She was right, the tears were not in fear, but for guilt. I felt I had disappointed her that day, disappointed myself. She didn't punish me much for anything, but then again I didn't do much that required penalty.
Her hair is very curly. Not tight curls but medium, tangled curls, they can't decide if they want to go one way or the other. My hair is waved. She never liked her nose touched. Much like her father's, it's long. It's strong, with a little round knob on the end, that turns up slightly. She is an attractive woman, though her lips are thin.
Sometimes when she smiles they don't look thin, but they are. Her eyes crinkle up now, they didn't do it so much before. American Spirit cigarettes, that's what she smokes. At 38, she is starting to look beyond her years. She always says she's going to quit. To her, quitting has always been one ciggie every three or four days. I used to laugh and tell her she's going to die. I get scared thinking that maybe she will.
She gets up early every morning, despite the late shifts at the bar. She tromps down the stairs, hair standing on end, eyes black and blue from sleep, or lack thereof, and opens the cabinet for her beans.
Starbucks, espresso or French roast always. She'd scoop the beans into the grinder with a tinkle of plastic, and I'd wake up to hear it chop away at the little black morsels. As it brewed, the whole house would fill with the skunky aroma of the black stuff, and I would smile as it tingled my nose hairs. She drinks almost a pot a day of the stuff. I don't know how she can afford that much caffeine in her bloodstream.
It's her lifeline, Starbucks. Now I'm addicted to it.
The clock still ticks behind me, and I smile at her, as I cradle a hot mug in my hands. We sipped it together like sisters, and all of a sudden I seem to know her, though I know nothing about her at all.
Theme Week 6: The Placeness of Places
A room has six sides, like a big, cardboard box. The four walls, the floor, and the ceiling. Sometimes they seem to shrink back and strangle you, and other times they feel like they're too far away, in the space you have it's lonely, and cold.
I look at my four walls and smile. I can see a lot of life is in this room. I hated watching it slip from my fingers. My very first bedroom, one I could call my own, with crimson walls covered with poetry and prose, and blends of acrylic paints drawn into shapes and pictures only my mind would hold. There were a few times I abused it, my space. There's a hole or two in the plaster.
I remember one came from wrestling around on the bed with Josh. Somehow both my heels ended up going right through the painted drywall. I wasn't scared about that, I was scared about the, hitting the other side, the hallway. My mother was so mad.
One of the whole is right by the chimney, now unused.
"why don't you get your lazy ass outside and smoke your cancerstick 100 feet away from the house so other people won't have to stew in it?"
I hated my sister for that. She just sat in her room, smoking and smoking, and it would seep through the floorboards and the cracks in the walls and soak in my blankets and by hair and my nostrils. I woke up many days with a sore, raw throat, from the two of them, both my mom and my sister, smoking in the livingroom below my space.
In a way I'm glad I don't have to sleep there anymore.
Sitting on that bed,
my bed, on the last night I was going to be there, in my space, did bring me to tears. I cried over the memories. A great majority of my growing up was done in that room, under the stained glass chandelier, and the glowing neon stars, and the posters dotting the walls. I grew under lyrics painted and shakespearean sonnets in chunks around the corners. The pine floors were the nicest in the whole house, laquered and well-cared for. I cared for that room. I think the floors were the original planks from when the house was built in 1901.
I remember when the foundation was restored. When they jacked the house up, I sat in my room, and watched a crack slowly form, like an earthquake, in the middle of my Pink Floyd "The Wall" mural. I watched the paper wrapping of the drywall split as the house straightened out. It was eerie, knowing that fixing some parts ruined somewhere else, much like plastic surgery, or medication. You take a drug just to get side effects. Ironic. I guess what's even more ironic, is that it was almost pointless. If I put a marble on the floor, it still rolls. I guess it didn't fix it as much as my mom would have liked it to.
None of this really matters much anymore, though. The space isn't mine anymore. Tiffany smokes her cigarettes and writes all over the walls that were once so brilliantly stained with bits and pieces of me. Where my murals were, she let her friends doodle and sharpie them to death. Where hidden messages in red crayon were written for me to find, my mother scrubbed and painted over them, in a sickening, periwinkle blue. Pieces of my life with Josh have been erased, because she didn't like the red.
I will always rememebr what my space was, because it was mine, the only space I could ever call mine. It's not even Tiffany's anymore, It's my littlest sister's now. Which I would have much preferred than Tiff having it. It looks so special to see Morgannes colourful display of care-bears and barbie dolls along the red walls. It's a much happier place with the innocense of youth in every corner.
Theme Week 5: A Good Story
Sometimes it seems like everything in my life has been a dream. I can't quite remember everything that happened as vividly as I would like, but damn do I remember how I felt at the exact moment it happened. I'm like a tidal wave, I start out reacting in a small way, and I roll and tumble and fumble until I'm this huge stomping, roaring, emotional machine, destroying everything small enough to be destroyed.
Being 14 is really hard. I don't care who you are, if you're the preppy kid, or the goth, or whatever role you play in school, it's always tough in some way. I think I've always had it rough, but the worst was really when I finally got it good. I moved around a lot. I changed schools quite frequently, so I never really got the chance to make or keep too many friends. The longest I've lived anywhere was when I lived in Walpole MA, for about 6 years. Thankfully, those were most of my growing years, where I went from child, to teenager, to child again, and to where I am now.
I used to walk into school fearing everyone, not knowing whether or not it was ok to say something, or if I was reacting to a joke in the right level of laughter. I walked on eggshells through most of middle school. I finally found a little niche with a few people, people I'm still friends with now, and we had a lot of fun. We weren't quite the nerdy group, or popular, we were just good friends. I used to walk into my friend Libby's house and open the fridge to pour a glass of cherry coke, like Kramer. Her mother would just ask me how my day was, and if I had a lot of homework to do, much like my own mom. I spent nearly 80% of 7th-9th grade doing just that, sitting at the dinner table in a family setting, because I didn't really have one.
I went into my first year of highschool feeling pretty good. I had friends. I hadn't had friends since the third grade. I'm actually still in contact with my best friend from the 2nd grade. Isn't that odd?
Well, everything seemed to be going pretty good. I even had a boyfriend once in a while (yeah, you gotta love freshmen romances). I dated my friend Anthony on and off since the 7th grade. We were really just great friends who fell in love with one another and then fell out a few times. He's a good guy. Just not for me.
In my life things would get perfect, I would have everything I wanted, and right as I felt like everything was OK, the bottom would just drop right out and the pieces would crumble all to the floor... My mom wanted to move again.
I got into many an argument with her over this, did the teenage thing, blaming her for everything, sometimes I still do it. I will never really know what could have happened if we didn't leave, I'm curious to know, but not curious enough to repeat it.
When I got here, to my house, my new room, (my
own room for once), I hated everything. I hated life. I hated the world. I hated my mom. The only thing I loved at the moment was my boyfriend (who was back in MA) and my cat Fret, who is still here, might I add.
To make matters worse, I got dumped (which was utterly horrible, much more so than it should have been), and no one in my new school liked me. My mother deemed me arrogant, and I deemed me doomed for death.
At one point it was so bad, that I came close to suicide, once or twice. The harsh reality of life didn't satisfy my tastes. Like a lot of troubled teens, the plastered walls in my room were punctured, I gained a much more vulgar vocabulary, I got stoned, played music really loud to piss everyone off, and I was pretty lonely. I stuck to the internet and music, it became my life.
I got over that phase eventually, but that was only after I had fallen in love with someone else. I saw in him myself, which I loved and hated at the same time. I feel that love itself, is seeing what you hate most about yourself in someone else's eyes, and loving that person because they help you to realize what you can become; A mirror you want to caress
and smash at the same time with your reflection, because it hurts so much to see the beauty and the horror all at once.
I grew to love this place, Maine, with all of the trees and all of the animals and all of the potholes. Well, not so much the potholes, but everything else has more a place in my heart than I ever thought it would. I remember the last time I visited home (before the concert trip, and yes, Walpole will always be my home), and I was kind of disgusted. I felt choked by the smell of the air and the construction all around the highway (the big dig), and the dirty water and boats and seagulls covering every nook and cranny. I was horrified at the stupid drivers, and the arrogance of city-dwellers. Yet, through all of the disgust, I remembered that I did call this place home, and I love the combination of love and hate I have when I go back.
When I took Joshua to that concert, we stopped in Walpole on the way home, so I could finally show him where I grew up. Needless to say, he was horrified at some of the shitty places I had to live in, but fascinated that I
had lived in so many places. I finally got the chance to show him a place
I knew, instead of his constant tour guides of Maine. I smiled at the highways I used to hate, and at the school I used to dread walking in, and the apartments I wished had burned to the ground. I smiled because I felt like I was home, even though I had it pretty rough.
I have my own little piece of history, and it was great to finally show it to someone else.
