Autoerotic Autodidact

This is a collection both of my writing and writings of other brains more accustomed to the intricacies of our economic, political, and sociological systems, and their historical contexts. The overarching theme of everything you'll find here is this: "This Sucks (And Here's How), But You Can Find Joy In It While You Change It." I'm really fucking tired of people recognizing that there are huge, unenjoyable, inconvenient, sometimes torturous parts of their lives that are controlled by Someone Else (whomever that may be), and then rolling over under a coverlet of supposed helplessness or, worse, apathy, convinced there's not a goddamned thing they can do to improve their situations. In this country, for fuck's sake. To these I say,

Fuck You, Retard. If you aren't willing to kick yourself in the head and heart and fucking do something Impossible, Improbable, or even just Not A Good Idea by general Amerikan societal standards, then shut the fuck up and let the rest of us get on with changing our lives for the interesting.

If we don't want to live the way the obscenely wealthy tell us, need us to, then we've got some fucking work to do. Fuck that Life of Ennui bullshit. Fuck the family, the dependable spouse and stinky-spoiled offspring; fuck the house, the multiple vehicles, the steady job, the one- or two-week vacations to somewhere our economic policies and gluttony have decimated; fuck the whole idea of an Amerikan Dream.

I am an American second and a Human first. As an entity capable of pushing my own evolution, it is my absolute obligation to do so. Eating others' mandates for dinner isn't providing the nourishment I need. I must hunt, kill, prepare, and consume my own ideas and parameters of acceptability, must form the tangled and mysterious pathways of my evolving self before some fucking corporation comes along and tries to make it into a goddamned straight-shot superhighway to Conformity.

Get educated, get depressed, get inspired:

...And then fucking DO something about it.

Mama's Favorite...

hokay. remember at volunteer park sunday, when you put your water bottle beside me, "in the shade of you," and i wrote it down and said i'd do something with it? did this on the bus today:



In the shade of you, the long-spent day of you,
Your slipping toward eventide with only trees to give you comfort.
You solace,
You joy,
You end of day and succor,
I am awestruck and unmoving,
Caught in an Endless gasp for air,
In a bubble of recrudescence.
Struck still and slow in the shade of you,
In the quiet and cool.



thanks, mom.
love,
rd

your horses ate my cat.

an introductory letter to a.p. smith, upon my finishing his book "welcome to the land of cannibalistic horses." it was the first (and last, to this point) time i've ever written to a total stranger who inspired me...


(*pouring shots of tequila: one for me, one for you, and one for an unsolicited email from a near-complete stranger who is suddenly tongue-tied and fey after finding out there is another single person not from down-looziana who actually knows and uses the word 'lagniappe.' suck the fucker back, biatch. ...now, go make an ass of yerself.)

Hokay. So. I met Mike Force (illustrator of "Horses") through A~, my sweet-muffin coworker. Bought a copy of your book from Mike the day before he went back to New York. I read it and, uh, would *love* to buy you a fuckin drink/bowl when you're in Seattle. Seriously. At the risk of sounding cloyingly trite, my songbird of a scribe seems to have been hiding between the covers of your goddamned book. I haven't been able to write fucking ANYthing for the past few months. Like I had cottonmouth in my brains and fingers, was too damned dry and scratchy to supply the banana-peel lubriciousness that all those delicious words and ideas need to wiggle and shake their way outta my skull. The mental aridity thing, coupled with a creeping sense of apathetic nihilism...well, just watching us fuck ourselves and each other violently, needlessly, day after day after day... it kinda left this girl, regardless how big my heart and mouth, with a niggling, whispering, "what's the fuckin point?" feeling some days. Or months. You know. The Unholy Lonely of being unable to imagine anything you do ever making any appreciable difference. (gawd, summer's depressing)

Yeah. Anyway, I blew through "Horses," laughing by myself in bed at night, holding my bile over so much of the now-standard American Brand of Willful Retardation, identifying, sparkling, seeing myself and all of us in those bound up words and images. I felt sooooo good when I finished it, so overjoyed that there was someone else out there still belligerently determined to fuck with our federally mandated status quo, to get me pissing myself laughing at the same time...made a difference in my mental outlook.

I'm sorry, did I say it "made a difference?" Yeah. What I meant to say was, It kicked me in the fucking head when I suddenly realized that this collection of essays and journal entries and goofy pictures and, really, a conglomeration of the mental and emotional detritus of one person's experience of the world fucking Gave Me Hope Again. Ha. That's the saccharine shit right there. Kinda gets a little sticky on the tongue, but it'll have to do.

So, yeah, it's like I've suddenly rediscovered my brain's uvula and have been poking that fucker with a stick for at least a week. My eyes burn, my fingers are ink-stained and calloused, and I am constantly exhausted trying to juggle those "up 'til 3" writing purges with my "up at 4" baker's schedule. ...And Lo, I Am Ecstatic.

Thanks, man. Take me up on the drink offer, will ya? I'll wear my cowgirl hat and egregious good humor.

High fives all around, then.

-rd-

Mama's Blood Loss

to my brother, herding goats in spain...

darling delicious delectable d~,

gladder than meat-puppies to get your email today, darlin. missin you like cowgirl boots (that's a hell of a lot). got hair dye today so t~ can recreate the mediterranean sea on my head this week. am almost done bleeding. am respected among my retarded genius friends. i have much to be thankful for.

i think it's kind of funny that you, across an ocean and many mountains, know more about what i'm dealing with than anyone here does. i can't seem to share this stuff out loud and am too damned shy (if you can believe that bullshit) to share this writing with everyone. i, as most other humans, feel a desperation to be understood. that's our true loneliness, i suppose.

so, i wrote this in my journal the other day. my mom's two giant uterine tumors are not getting any better; may, in fact, be getting worse. they can't operate because she only has 5% of her normal coagulants in her blood; e.g. if they cut her open, she's gonna bleed to death. meanwhile, she's already bleeding to death on a slow, daily basis. i'm trying not to worry, not to allow fear to become my bedfellow. oh, but it is difficult some days.
forthwith:

-----------------------------------------

Spoor of temporal movement, of action and reaction, of knowing All There Is To Know. I am not a bit satisfied. I, too, am unimpressed.
And I miss my cat.

There's something creepy and amazing about the course of health, of sickness and wellness in a body. Every breath is someone closer to death. Every chortle and guffaw, every sigh and moan is onespacecloser. ("you're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older, and now you're even older, and now you're even older...")

I don't want my mom to die.

Not allowed. Not allowed just yet.

I do not fear my own death and have, indeed, been dreaming it a lot lately. Last night, I fell from crazy height, hundreds of storeys. I don't remember whom I was with, just that it took ages longer than I expected it would to fall. For the first time in my living memory, I did not hit the ground (been having these falling dreams since I was a toddler). I freefell through a mental process of forced relaxation, supplemented by continual reminders to let go, let go, let go. In the middle of a longwinded, longitudinal plummeting---unexpected,undeniable---my thoughts went back like a killer to a crime scene, forever chanting "Ain't Nothin You Can Do, Baby. Relax and Enjoy."

Tense. Relax. Tense. Relax. Tennnnnsssse...aaaand...Fucking Let Go, Already.

It was me; I was falling forever and over...but in retrospect, itseems I was falling through Mom, falling through her illness.

(Let Go. Let Go. Let Fucking GO.)

I've had this lifelong revulsion for people who cling to a Desperate Denial of the Inevitable. I wholeheartedly salute those who jab a middle finger in Death's grinning visage, who stand chest out and chin jutting, brave and laughing to the end. My contempt is reserved for those who, for lack of any better analogy, throw tantrums, hoping dumbly, blindly that Mortality is as soft-willed as their own mothers. Nauseating, really.

I will not go quietly. Neither will I go snivelling or screaming, making a weak-willed ass of myself, and generally making my own last moments on Earth a conscious hell. It's both ridiculous and unattractive, selfish and futile. I will not behave this way on the death of my mother.
No, sir.
(not that she's going to die, ofcourse)
Nooo, no, no, no sir.

It was New Year's Eve, maybe three years ago, when Mom and I stumbled home from a party and talked about her death. Said she didn't want to scare me, make me uncomfortable---just wanted to let me know she'd thought about it, was planning for it, so her children wouldn't be burdened with an overweight jockey of a coffin salesman atop the saddle of our grief. I wasn't threatened, uncomfortable; I was even grateful she'd taken the time and expense upon herself, though she knows we'd sell our last organs for her everything, anything. See, Death ain't so serious in the abstract. Abstraction warps emotional weight, makes it manageable. It is easier to talk about mortality when it applies to goldfish, or to ideals, or to some far-off Future Person, or just to Not Now.

We had our New Year's Eve planning/confessional long before she knew about the tumors...
...or did she already know? Deep in her cells, could she already feel cool breath on her neck? Did I miss the ground last night because I don't get the easy way out on this one? Because it's Mom who's gonna hit this time? Is she still dreaming the two of us atop elephants, crashing through the jungle, laughing 'til tears streak our dirty faces? Is she falling, too?

The women in my family are so fuckin butch when it comes to pain and tragedy. We grit our teeth and grin sardonically through the whole damned thing. If the pain's too much to grin through, we shoo everyone out of the room so no one will be obliged to suffer our annoyance with us. Ain't nothin we hate more than company that tries to talk us out of our misery. As if we hadn't already tried that. If you want to sit quietly with my head in your lap, that's one thing. If you want to try and soothe this family's savage breast with the Everything's Gonna Be Okay mantra, you are wasting your fucking breath. We're at least two pragmatic thoughts ahead of you. Weknow it's all gonna work out. We fully grasp how inconsequential are our corporeal troubles. We mourn in private. We die in solitude. We are bitches to the bitter ends: jealous of our time, overprotective of our privacy, exorbitant with our Love. Effusive,even.

We smell fear like bees, and will have no truck with weakness. Not even if you're trying to help. ...Especially then.

Like bees, we are honey and anger. Like bees, we smell the stench of our own emotional reaches. Like bees, like poets, like adventurers and seekers, we, too, are

Not A Bit Tamed.

We, too, are not satisfied.

Gathering pollen, creating Sweetness. Immortality.
Gathering swarms, creating Chaos. Death.
Gathering the slip-satiny Folds of Time's Fabric Skirts about ourwaists to ford the realities-deep mud of every Moving River.
We get the futility. And we do it anyway.
Grin at it always.

I do not want my mom to die.

But I will be there, big-mouthed and laughing, when she does.

--------------------------------------------

am i the only one who cries when she reads this? emotional content aside, does it flow? make sense? i'm thinking of posting it to my livejournal pages that i'm veritably sure no one reads.

i'm wiped out. need to find a house this week. and a(nother)job.
i'm not as depressed as this sounds. just a little overwhelmed. but for the pms-hangover a couple days ago, i've been in very good spirits. i'm sorry to hear about your breakdown, for lack of a better term. i hope you are feeling a little better after the release.

goats are a pain (especially to try and *herd!*), but they are some of the purest little meat-envelopes of unadulterated freedom i've ever played with (or milked!). i'll try and take pictures of my newly ceruleated tresses to send you. blue hair always makes *me* feelbetter. :)

how is your health and all that, btw? are you generally eating well and taking care of yourself? t~ sends you bigbig love and hugs, as, of course, do i.

...ah, christ, all i've got is hugs and love for you. wish i could actually give them to you in person.
otherwise, i am and will be your eternal penumbra,
your goat skull and cat teeth,
forever and always,
til death do us confuse,

doxy

Keeping an Eye Out

Note from Mama: "What does that mean anyway? Keep an eye out. Do you remove your eye, periscope-like, and look around? I don't get it."

It's both punishment and threat. See, both eyeballs apparently missed whatever it was you wanted to see the first time. So, then you take out one of your eyeballs, chastise it soundly, and leave it outside on the front porch to locate your quarry.

Of course, both eyes know the possible dangers of staying outside for the night, even so close to the front door. They could be rained, snowed, or hailed on, chewed to smithereens by hungry dogs, kicked in disgust by proselytizing mormons, or taken by crows to fly atop their nests to intimidate both predator and prey, much like the Jolly Roger was flown above pirate ships of yore.

The eyeball left outside (let us call him Slim) is, of course, terrorized and, if he survives, will surely stay alert even while you sleep, afraid to miss anything ever again. This could be a problem if you are an individual who absolutely must have her eyelids closed while she sleeps.

The other eyeball (whom we shall call Verna, for the sake of this narrative), the one that missed the brunt of your wroth, will be incredibly intimidated by your vitriolic measures against her brother and will likely endeavour to avoid such future punishment, by any means necessary.

...However, Verna may also be closer to her twin than at first surmised. In this case, there is a chance, however slight, that Verna might mutiny, sever her own optic nerve, and dive out of your skull to save poor Slim.

While this is, indeed, an unfortunate turn of events, all is not lost. Verna may just want to reciprocate your 'tough love' by showing you that she, too, is not without power. Just give you a little scare to make sure you know that she both gets your earlier point, and that she will not be intimidated by her own host body. An awkward but resolveable dilemma.

...Or your errant eyes could also burn down your fucking house while you're staggering around blinded, hands over gaping ocular cavities, screaming obscenities at the Eyes That Done Me Wrong.

Then, Verna and Slim would hop, squashing and stretching and squooshing all the way, nerve in nerve, out into the great wide world, leaving behind the charred and skeletal remains of the Host That Went Too Far, a grisly testament to the advantages of staying on speaking terms with all one's organs.

~An End~

...damn, that needs illustrations.

After Rope Bondage

To my dear friend, the gentleman who physically introduced me to the art of Japanese rope bondage...

i'm sorry to hear you haven't been feeling well; was wondering where you'd been. would love to call, and am out of a telephone again. i'll be largely restricted to email again for a bit, until i can get a gang of bikers to fuck up the geniuses in the phone company's accounts receivable department.
ahem.
otherwise, i would love to hang out again soon, as well. i had great fun saturday and am anxious to do it again. having done it once, i have a little better feel for what would grease my brain-and soul-wheels a bit better next time. i was totally right in needing c~ there, though i was having difficulty properly articulating the reality of why. quickly (for myself as well as you):

i (consciously) take a long goddamned time to think about stuff. i have worked all my tiny life on maintaining control over my actions, reactions, on forcing myself to slow down and make decisions based on logic and love, not on guilt or obligation. i learned how to shut off my sex drive for the same reasons (largely). the only time i allow these controls to relax (and then never fully) is in the presence of another being that i'm veritably sure i can trust implicitly. lord almighty, but those are few and far between! very generally, i only cry in front of my cat, only cut the reins on my modifier tongue with this particular group, only remove the bit from my libido's foaming mouth with that one. you get the idea.

during tying, as soon as my brain realized i was losing control of my equestrian lustmonkeys, that i was not only not in absolute control of my sensual faculties but might also completely lose control over them at some point, my mental maintenance team just went through and threw the breakers to my muladhara root chakra; just shut the fucker down. i've found that it either (A) takes and act of god to reopen those, or (B) takes a lot of naughty positive personal history and a fuck of a lot of maintenance to keep them open in the first place.

like when a~ was playing with my nipples? a~ whom i adore and have only known a few months? i knew it was happening; i didn't feel much of anything. felt my brain step back, get out its endless pens and paper, and begin madly scribbling notes for future reference. behold my inner clinician, my inner documentarian. i've got notes on how best to kill and clean most birds, on the dynamics (mental, emotional, physical, sensual) of beatings, of rape, of incest; notes on the insidiousness of brainwashing and its association with all religion. every tiny trauma in my life has been documented as thoroughly as possible so that i can turn this shit around and use it as my own personal arsenal. i was trained to be a first-class martyr, but i got no time to be a fucking victim. save that shit for the willfully ignorant. i got sleepers to awaken. i've got living to be eating.

lookit my instincts! all coping with trauma before it even gets a chance to beset me!

i don't feel at all ready to do piercing suspensions yet; am pushing myself through cogitation around it, though. i hate the idea of being afraid of anything and yet have had to admit that i am. it's only amatter of time and patience before i get over it. this isn't any sort of diva rock star nonsense here, just a lustful, focused, absolutely willful pushing of my own evolution. "the goat and cat are waking..."

i live for freefall.
my every waking moment yearns to strain, chest out and pounding,
toward a wide-open apex of experience.

i live for mad veined straining toward a single suspended breath,
an expanded moment of empty,
a shaved single second to sit in time's lap
quiet
open

...slow hungry grinning...

and dive, dive, DIVE toward
~forward~
~the big moving, the swift flying~
(cause, baby, it ain't about the destination)

i live for that subsequent rush of turbulent atmosphere,
the joyfully furious whipping of death's cloak
~undulating, ululating, uncontrolled~
close behind my left shoulder.

i breathe for these high-speed, high-octane, high-drama
dates with the prankster twins of gravity and destiny!
i want speed,want danger,want to dance
close
sweaty
libidinous
with death herself;
rest my fingers on her hip curves,
feel her palm against my neck;
i want to push a fevered cunt against her
and look her grinning in the eye.

~ i reveal what i value by what i am willing to risk. ~

sometimes i just get too full of words and images; or passion feels too full, hot-heaving and squirming. gotta spill now and again. check my overflow to open up my influx. scrape the sweat of verbage from my belly and use that shit like high-quality lube. the 'talking to the bighead' stuff i was doing while hanging? that was once a litany of favorite words (lecherous, libidinous, lusty, lewd, lascivious, ululate, tinntinnabulate, pugnacious and viscous, my philologic puissance found its soapbox in pain). funny the ways we choose to evolve, out of necessity real or imagined.

i've got a cooking date with jesus tonight, so i've got to go furiously plan and obsess over flavor combinations for a few hours. sometimes you can force genius...but it rarely tastes as good or stays as wet.

more tying and hanging!

fear my mighty ego for my verbosity will destroy tokyo!

waving and grinning, stroking my too-few bruises,

rum doxy

ps: let me know if i can do anything for your sick ass, okay? :)

Invitation to a Brainfucking

Gentlemen, it is high time we began convening for semi-regular skull-fuckings!

We are all, we six, aware of the benefits of mutually passionate brain battering and, as primates conscious of our own evolution (a genetic, miasthmatic, monkeymeat casserole turning -O my hope!- into ameliorated starshine), it is our pride-borne duty to set verbal matches to our collective cerebral vitriol, to crack open our uncouth cakeholes, masticate each others' meninges, and enflame the cardboard setee beneath the spreading ass of our Eternal Muse!

Before any of you even consider giving me lame excuses ("I'm busy! I've gotta work/study/get laid/go drinking with my buddies!"), understand this: excuses and laziness are also forms of willful ignorance and thus, goddamned abominations...and I know because I am an unparalleled talent in both excuses and laziness.

So (that said), when do you all want to meet for alcoholic beverages and sparkly-eyed, pointy-toothed, popularly inappropriate, boisterous public conversation about every taboo we can possibly fist into our gaping mouths?

This is me grabbing you by your hair and dragging your flaky asses into something you'll thank me for later. :)

I love, love, love you and will still kick your asses!

waving and grinning,

rum doxy