Envy.

That skydive, that preternatural flight, was absolutely extraordinary. I needed to see this particular part of our planet from just that height. Needed to see Nurse sharks patrolling from 1200 feet. To run my toes through the top of a rainbow. To pass through cumulus clouds with my own fast-moving skin. I needed to fly through rain into sun. Needed to feel a planet impacting my feet, so gently so gently. Needed, just for a few moments, not to be jealous of the birds...though I envy them for much more than their effortless flight now. Now I know the soft, open whistling that composes so much of their auditory lives. I cannot help but want to hear it, too.

जुम्प. A Good Day to Die.

A couple of weeks ago, I told my Otter that I wanted to get off the island, off the Keys. Gettin kinda feverish with my lust for space, for breathing room.

So today, I got up, had Cafe Sua Da and a fresh-made bagel, and then, under the aegis of the literally-minded Otter, tossed myself out of an airplane, two miles up in the air, with some guy I'd just met strapped to my back.

...As you can see, I was terribly indifferent to the whole endeavour...

Honestly, it was one of the sweetest, most exquisitely beautiful things I've ever experienced. I totally expected a titanic adrenaline rush, expected to be giddy, shaking and stuttering when I hit the ground, but instead I was happy, calm, fulfilled. Grateful, more for the experience than for my continued life. There's nothing like participating in something 'common sense' dictates is a Really Bad Idea to make your blood flow a little more smoothly, to remind you to breathe.

...It's so...

Y'know, it's so calming. It really soothes me to put my body and my sanity in Harm's way; it soothes me to teeter at the edge of an airplane door, over 10,000 feet up, and know that today is not my day to die...and if I'm wrong, if it is, so be it.

It's a beautiful day for an Exit.

I'm still not really sure how to function in the Day-to-Day, in the mundane; but if you wanna throw me out of an airplane, drive 85 mph down West Virginia mountain roads at dusk, or dunk me in the Atlantic with a spear gun I don't know how to use, wearing a 20-year-old pair of fins...well, then! Baby, it's on!

I did go spearfishing a few days ago. I managed to get all the job-baking done in about 4 hours, then ran home to meet Otter and team up with a hardcore, shark-hunter friend of ours for an afternoon's shenanigans in the big Blue. I was more anxious learning how to use a spear gun in the high-rollin ocean water, with an inebriated Otter and a Captain on a killing spree, than I was falling out of that Cessna today. Fer damn sure. I was prepared to hit the ground and die instantly if anything went wrong in the air; I was not prepared to suffer, or watch anyone else suffer, the injuries I imagined a misfired spear gun could inflict on human flesh.

Unfortunately for my documentary madness, I forgot both an underwater camera and my super-cool, super-retro, early 60s turquoise-colored bathing cap with white plastic flowers. Pity. 'Cause with my beautiful bathing cap and a spear gun? I'd look like the love-child of Aquaman and Esther Williams. I'd look like the love-child who, early on, fell in with a gang of surly chefs and rebellious literati, who chain smokes and has a fondness for both saporous sinsemilla and herbaceous elixirs from South of the border.

Photos for my imaginary posterity.

Funny...

I thought that after plummeting through the troposphere, I'd be spilling over with verbiage, with my effulgent circumlocution, what Otter calls my "high-wire vernacular." Ain't the case, apparently. I can feel the spill coming, can feel myself full and needing an overflow, but I keep stopping short, keep getting distracted. I'm a goddamned butterfly today instead of a Luna moth; I am driven by distraction instead of burning passion. My heart is too calm.

...Huh.

And here I thought peace was something I needed more of.

म्म्म्म. The Kitchen of Inebriation

Mmmm...
This is how we do it in the undulating kitchen:

Simmer Chayote (a.k.a. Merliton) with Jalapenos.
The Peppers' texture is mellowed by squash, the squash's subtlety set afire by the chilies.
Drain 'em, chop 'em up with Avocado, Cilantro, Chipotles. It's just enough smoky red to accentuate the layers of soft, creamy greens; the herb and pepper's vivid viridian to the squash and stone fruit's berylline subtlety. Sultry, creamy, sinfully sensuous textures playing footsie with cheek-reddening heat.

Fresh Corn still on the cob, whole Tomatillos, quartered Red Onions and navel Oranges, whole Jalapenos and cloves of Garlic, Coriander and Cumin seeds, a little Thyme: toss in olive oil and roast together.
Fresh, sweet Costa Rican Pineapple, cut 3/4" thick on the latitudes: smear it with Date Sugar, Molasses, Olive oil, Cayenne, roast it 'til it softens a little, 'til it browns a bit, 'til all those earthy flavors really lock tongues with the sunshine, 'til Soil brings Sun closer to the ground without compromising either's intensity.
After all that roasting, everything falls beneath Knife: cobs kerneled, vegetables and pineapple chopped, caramelly oranges squeezed over all. A handful of chopped fresh Cilantro. Good sea salt. Smoked Paprika.

Lasciviously rub cold muscle, Rib Eye, with Spice, --Spice!-- complex and hand-mixed; a great part of the mix's heat supplied by homegrown, home-dried, home-ground chili peppers from a friend in New Smyrna;
This Spice is so spicy, it sends me into convulsions of sneezes when Red, Red Meat hits hot Cast Iron.
Sear it. Bloody rare. Cut on diagonal, 1/4" thin or so.

Tortillas (masa o harina), warm and soft, homemade if I'm not too muddled to deal with all that kneading and rolling.
Perfectly ripe, raw Avocado.
Two really stoned and inebriated cooks, terribly in love and surprisingly self-satisfied.

Tuck in.
Let the grinning begin!
Let Fingers and Teeth commence their voracious degustation!

मोवे ओवर! Interdependence Day

On this our Interdependence Day, I would like to call out those who believe we are truly independent and ask them...from what, exactly, do you believe we are independent? And is this really an ultimate goal? One that we even understand? And what's so wrong with interdependency, especially when contrasted with codependency? And why do we so resent anyone else fighting for the desperate independence of which we, ourselves, are so proud? Why do these series of rhetorical questions always come back to the same goddamned one: Who the fuck are we to think we have the right to tell absolutely anyone, anywhere, what to do or how to think? How out-of-control is that ego?

Bluh. It's not even 6a.m. and I'm already clambering up on the first available soapbox--not really making much sense about it, but definitely making a mess and a ruckus. Most days I just wake up growling, y'know? Not mad at anything, not in an ill mood, just...ready to sink my teeth into some kinda meat and shake the life out of it.

However, it's kinda difficult to pontificate wildly about the ills of the Earth when I am otherwise so deliciously happy. When all possibility lies prostrate and smiling mischievously before me. As I sit in the burgeoning dawn and try to put down Some Great Meaning before I head off to my meaningless job, I am aware of my Otter, on my vision's periphery, sleeping soundly, sweetly, on the couch, ensconced in pillows and fuzzy blankets and beauty, O! in beauty... My anger melts in the face of this Love. It's funny how immediately my Life To This Point has begun to make sense (even if my ramblings this morning do not). I dunno. Maybe this shit happens to everyone. It's a first for me. The first time I've watched so many movies pass my eyes and make sense,
make sense!
Like,

Oh, That's why I went through that terrible, awful, heartwrending, mindnumbing bullshit; so I'd be really ready for this really amazing, fulfilling part now. Okay, I guess that education doesn't suck as hard as I thought it did. Fair's fair, in a really fucked up kinda way.

Everything, everything has clearly led me to exactly where I am at this moment. The lessons I've learned, from rolling in the various piles of shit the Universe has left out for me, are duplicitous and deep and often seem ridiculously, unnecessarily dramatic. However...

...well, sometimes you do what you've gotta do to get through to someone, y'know? Especially someone as goat headed as I am. Ain't no way in hell I'd've been able to accept, and I mean really gratefully openheartedly accept, the Love I am being given now were it not for some murderous bullshit knocking me off my Pedestal of Untouchability and showing me that vulnerability doesn't always mean defeat. Sometimes it means we get to refuel and fight even longer, become even stronger, pair our righteous anger with heartfelt compassion. That's a pretty powerful lesson that I maybe only could learn by powerfully violent means. I never in a million years would've accepted the gifts I have been given had I not been metaphysically tied down and forced to accept them at some point.
And lord knows I tried to struggle, tried to wriggle out from under it, tried to deny, deny, deny, until finally I collapsed and had to admit,
had to admit
I couldn't stand in the face anymore.
Had to admit Mama was right,
had to admit the wisdom of my own wisdom,
had to admit that we deserve to be loved as much as we deserve to be punished.
Had to admit I deserve...
...I deserve...

I deserve the Struggle, deserve the Fight, deserve the Pain because I can feel the PainFightStruggle a thousand miles, a thousand years away. I deserve my Cassandra-sight because I will not, I cannot ignore it. I deserve my heartsickening Empathy and merciful Anger because my voice and will cradle and strengthen them. I deserve punishment for humanity's ills because I hold the root of these ills within me...

...And I've known this shit since I was a little kid, yo. Kind of a fucked up thing for a 9-year-old to understand on a fundamental level.

Thing I didn't get, am just beginning to get, was the whole Love part of the equation. Like, I figured I was this one-woman emotional balancing act, the Scales of Justice made fat and bone; all evil in the world could enter through me and be somehow purified into love, love that would then leave my flesh to find those who needed it most.
And, y'know, sometimes it worked. Sometimes I really nailed it and was able to give some beautiful succor to those who really needed it.
Sometimes I was able to save people.
But the Love...

Oh, the Love.

Man, I had no idea I needed Love like other people needed it. That I maybe needed it more than most other people needed it 'cause I was draining it outta myself so quickly, so often.

I was empty.
Empty and desperately tossing down whatever I thought might take up space in the reservoir. Empty and without hope of there being another living human who could possibly comprehend all the girls in my head, all the pounding ache in my heart (and most of it not even mine!), all the rage in my muscles, and understand that these are Love.
These are how Love escapes my skin, this is how Love looks when it is under- or malnourished.
This is the burning in my eyes, the vitriolic admission of Need that my lips will never allow to escape,
not ever,
not never.

And then this Otter,
this Otter walks up outta the river, outta the Ocean, outta the water that surrounds my solitary island, and it looks me dead in the eye and sees those fuckin girls hidin out and gettin lazy and jaded, and they see the Otter and feel kinda like lookin at god and feelin ashamed of being naked and damned if they know why, and they kinda sheepish stand up slow and increasingly brazen, defiant; and the Otter grins at my all-girl firing squad and tells me it thinks it'd be just grand if I(we)'d come swimming this afternoon, and it's not like we could say no, y'know? In fact, one of the more mischievous girls said,

"I would absolutely love that"

before I could shut her mouth,
before I could remind her, remind her that we don't need,
we don't,
don't need...
don't need any mythic creatures because there aren't any on this continent, not any more, not besides me,
and I don't really remember the old Magic, how to turn the Earth inside out, 'cause I got tired of having to justify and explain it,
so I just kinda quit and
kinda forgot and
and just ended up with all these voices who weren't allowed to speak, who grew swollen throats and milky eyes and bitter, icy hearts.

Tell you what...a talking Otter who laughs and swims webs of bubbles around my body, who can not only see all the girls behind the screen door, but also entice them out to play, an Otter who accepts, without question, that Mama found me under a mushroom at the foot of the tallest tree in the forest (glowing blue, glowing blue),
an Otter who can
See.
Me.
...That's something I shouldn't walk away from.
Can't walk away from.
Not after all this, after all this leading up to...
This.

This is my Interdependence Day.
I thank the Water for this Otter, for these lessons indelibly written in my heart.
I thank the Sky for showing me my weakness and reinforcing my strength.
I thank Tragedy and Disaster for laying me low so that I could be raised up.
I thank the Otter for needing me as much as I need it, and for reminding me of things I had long forgotten.
I am grateful.
And holy.
And going back to bed.

Like I Didn't See It Coming...

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
hell (6x)
fuck (4x)
shit (3x)
fucking (2x)
piss (1x)

...HELL yeah! I'm the Profanity Princess!

मोविंग Moving In & On

Been hipshot, off balance, skewed and skewered for so long that I've become accustomed to it. I forgot to remember where my produce grew, where my sustenance sprouted, where the mushrooms erupted from the earth (truffles being a product of the Earth's orgasm). And now...

Now I'm moving in.

That term, 'moving in,' has acquired so many nuanced layers recently: embarking on a nesting with an Otter outta the Mississippi River, outta Baton Rouge; moving into a markedly different phase of life, rife with all the possibilities I've aligned in my Cassandra sight/saint's light; moving to New Orleans, come December; moving to new rhythms, or moving newly to the old; moving into my new skin, shiny and smooth beneath my molting layers. Moving,

Yeah. Moving...

Got this shift change happening, see. Can feel the Old Guard slumping at the mouth of the Ice Caves, and lo, this burgeouning Southern heat is melting down the walls, dropping stalagtites like swords, and I am on the run, bolting into Recrudescence.

I am anxious. Ravenous. Though I'm nowhere near ready, I want the high-speed journeying now, now, now. Key West is a boon become a burden that my shoulders ache to slough, and the laying down is just around the corner. The laying down and taking up and multiplying magnificence by massive magnitudes and oh, Atlas, --O, Atlas!-- your little sister is not leaving you so much as running ahead to clear your path down the Mississippi's steep and muddy banks, to secure your ferry across the Algonquin's Big River. I'm movin in, brother, into my sea-mammal Papi, movin on to my real life's work, and I have never felt more sane or more at home.

लोवे Alligator Death Roll

My beet-bloody platelets are in a microscopic logjam, and oh, and oooh sweet jeezus none of them know which direction leads back to the Heart,
to the Pulmonary Precipice since, y'know,
the Heart is everywhere this week, is smeared rice-paper-thin and foie-gras-rich across the long skin's surface.

And I,

I just,

uhmmm...I just gotta put this in metaphors of food and drugs and mental illness or else I won't be able to get it out at all:

I've got my Manic on and oh, Oh! it feels delicious! Mania's such an addictive thing, a goddamned narcotic, stronger than any pill or powder or apocryphal elixir;
and y'know,

y'know,
Fuck You if you don't dig it 'cause
I have done the shiniest meth and the most virginal cocaine,
I've spent long, tawdry weeks wrapped up in bottles of mezcal and pills,
my veins have met the points a time or two,
and still I stand 50 feet tall, shouting my lungs bloody,
absolutely certain in my knowledge that this particular mania,
that this high-tide drowning,
this rash of fissile lightning bugs,
this thoracic nitroglycerin,
this BlueAlligatorDeathRollLove bullshit is way waaay better than any padlocked-cabinet-strength amphetamine. It's the very best bit of the bipolar rollercoaster that undulates serpentine in the long acreage of my spine.
I am high, muthafucka,
and I mean High
on some sorta uncontrollable compulsion to participate in a total molecular exchange with an otter from an alluvial plain and,
and oh,
oh, I twitch and jitter for this,
and oh, I want to go on feeling this until I die from it, and
and that's what I'm talking about, y'know, that sensation of not really wanting to physically die, but wanting even less to ever come down, to ever hit the end of the high, the end of the trip, the end of the spiritual headfuck, the end of the endless dinner. I want to peak like this forever, want to feel like this when my body finally expires, want to be neck-deep in the understanding that all the other trauma and pain and annoyance and sometimes downright tragedy was

Worth.
This.

Was totally worth this single instance of hyperbolic excess velocity,
this simmering, pregnant, primordial swamp of possibility and communion.

When you're ready, baby,
Oh, when you're ready, I want you to wrap your scales and tail and 1200-pound crushing power jaws around me, cause when I come down,

oh when I come down....

गेट Get Your Filthy Proboscis Away From Me!

NoSeeUms.
A.k.a. Biting Midges.

I had never heard of them, much less run into any until I moved to the subtropics. They, however, apparently know me well enough to recognize my inherent value as a meaty, freckly, nonstop, Vegas-style, gorge-'til-you-explode, insect buffet. I am covered with the results of their gnawing on my flesh. I look like I got in a fight with an icepick-wielding madman, like my body is the arena for the Insectival Olympics. This is ridiculous. Everyone who's seen my legs recoils, to one degree or another, in some shock, some disgust. The NoSeeUms win the gold for Prolificity; Mosquitoes take the silver in Amount of Damage Inflicted with a Single Bite.

The concensus is that I am allergic to whatever filthy, disgusting, virulent plague these barely-visible parasites carry within their miniscule bodies. Most people, when bitten, host small bumps that annoy for a few hours, maybe an entire day; I break out in winding hillocks of tumid pestilence, little lumps of un-ignorable itching that, within minutes, start wending and swelling their way toward my heart...my heart. No joke. It's fucking freaky.

Of course, most of the places I really, really, really want to travel are rife with hundreds of thousands of bazillions of these rotten beasties, as well as umpty-dozen other worms and insects and arachnids that wouldn't think twice (assuming they think at all) about burrowing beneath my skin, into my veins, and swimming upstream to where the blood is really fresh and delicious. I mean, I'm flattered that my flesh is considered to be so goddamned succulent to such a wide variety of creatures, but seriously...get your filthy fucking proboscis away from me!

...Gross!

I'll Take A Lifetime in Four Months, Please...

...Yes, yes, of course I'll pay in sweat and blood; I'll take the ulcer and the Hard-Way lessons. I'll take the whole sleep-negating lot, only 'cause I'm impatient and goatheaded and saddled with unbridled curiosity like that. Just, y'know, couldja bitch-slap the living hell outta me until I can stand in front of my own ego and look it in the eye? That'd be great. I've spent months working on my Ten-Mile Stare.

Jesus tits, it feels like I've learned a lot recently. Or maybe I haven't; maybe I'm just now noticing what 7 years in Seattle has taught me, how those years molded and affected me. Either way, I am still having a difficult time not loathing most people, but I am suddenly more comfortable with shoving them around and taking their money.
...No, wait...
I guess that's kinda true, but its opposite is also true. I still can't stand the willfully ignorant (which is, what, 97% of the human population?), but I am at least not so interested in trying to save them from their own fear. I've become a lot more comfortable with saving myself, and...it's nowhere near as cold and savage as I thought it'd be. In fact, sometimes it's just fuckin great. Sometimes it feels like I fit into my own skin like no one else could, and sometimes I even remember who I was when my mama found me under that giant mushroom: a ceruleal star with a great, wide hunger and a moon-chewing grin.

Tonight, I am blowing off my culinary obligations for a couple hours just so I can write. I haven't made that choice in weeks. Hell, looking back at these posts, I suddenly remembered that, Hey, wait a minute...I can write! Oh yeah! I, like, totally forgot and stuff! If I hate working the professional kitchen so much, what the hell am I still doing there? I mean, the dining car on this particular Opportunity Train is providing more hard and fast lessons than any I've been on in quite some time, and that is precisely what I want (always, always, always), but, y'know...I already know how much people bore and annoy and disappoint me. I already know that the -Ridiculously Long Weeks Stressing the Fuck Out Over Something That Should Be Joyful and Creative and Communal and Is Instead Competitive and Heartless- thing is not for me. Y'know? I figured that one out pretty early. But I love the food...the goddamned fooood! And so I keep coming back 'cause they keep asking me back, and I keep killing my writing opportunities with sleeplessness and stress and, currently, a return to unabashed alcoholism. Though I am aware how appalled I will be, next time I see this post, at how scattered and inelegantly worded and ranty and simpering this little tirade is, I am high as hell, riding on great blue Joy in my veins...not "joy" like heroin or something, but Joy like the kind that bumps my skin when I sit down to write. It feels so goddamned good to selfishly spend a few hours doing what I'd really love to do for a living instead of bowing before the Gods of Sustenance I choose to worship. Feels like playing hooky from church and feeling finally free to live Life instead of acting it out, a minor character in someone else's seen-it-before play.

I have other ideas for interacting with food, ideas about which I am terribly excited and may actually pursue. But the writing has to be there. And the reading. And the not giving a fuck about whether or not anyone else agrees, or cares, or whatever. I just write 'cause it gives me joy. And if I'm happy, so is absolutely everything else I come into contact with. Who could help it?

Right When I Needed It

Oh, Key West, you found me just in time.

It is snowing back home in Seattle, and here you have me sitting in a long, loose, terribly vivid skirt and tiny shirt, under the royal palms and papyrus, caressed by a hundred felines, teased by mosquitoes and tiny lizards, entranced by brown pelicans, vultures and ospreys and wild chicken families. I have made and eaten wonderful food. I am in love with your piece of the endless Atlantic. Your residents warn me of their strangeness and their eccentricities, but they breathe calm and lovely to me.

Thank you for embracing me when you ignore so many others. Thank you for giving me what I did not know I needed. Thank you for your joy and your passion, freckled as they are by humanity.

Behold my newness, scrubbed clean of my grey skin, my eyes unpeeling and a breath of future wisdom at my neck.

I will do right by this opportunity.

Cucurbits and Tubercles

(...or Squashes and Root Veggies, for those of you who don't garden, speak Latin, or make love to words like an OCD logophile)

I love eating food in season, not just for its superior quality, but also for its perfect fit with the turning year's mood swings. In the segue between autumn and winter, just around the first frost of the hermetic season, root vegetables (tubercles and the like) attain a sweetness and a depth unmatched at any other time of year. They are perfect for roasting, for steaming and blanching and sauteeing and frying, for mashing and smashing and bathing in butter. Burrowing roots and tubers are the winter kitchen's blank canvas.

The other great autumnal rock stars are the brilliantly armored winter cucurbits---the humble squashes. O Kabocha! O Calabaza! All you earthly-hued cousins of sweet meaty flesh! You cry out, insistent, for heated sacrifice. You are tragically resplendent hollowed and roasted, your shiny skins filled with your own dressed innards. I love you sweet and savory, creamy and rough, smeared on face and speared on tongue. If root vegetables are the canvas, winter squashes are the ochred foundation painting. These two are the basis for comfort & joy in hearthside hibernation.

Scattered and smashed and artfully married with these are the brightly colored palettes full of winter fruits, window-grown herbs, late-harvested grains and cold-tapped sugars; apples and quinces, sage and thyme and rosemary, hard wheats and rich, earthy molasses and maple syrup.

These are the foundations of our burgeoning cuisine. These are the meals of preparation and promise. The pumpkin colored carpet leading to the dirt-velvet burrow. These are the offerings of hunt and forage, of stiff-fingered plucking and digging. This is plunder hard-won from the cold & sleeping earth.

Dine well this winter, sweet gastronomes, and be grateful for each mouthful, for every morsel pushed backward on the tongue.

...Are Those Feathers I Smell Burning?

I have been so full, during these last many months of growth and opportunity. This nonstop balancing act of homage and betrayal and calm, calm, calm has left me largely unable to write with any kind of regularity. I'm too close to see the thing, too close to make out details... "The Thing," of course, is the trajectory of my life-pattern segue, the path from There to Here to There. The overgrown machete-cut trail of murder and love and bewilderment and beauty. The Artery of Understanding....

And I still don't get it.

I reckon that's what I'm doing here: trying to figure stuff out. Writing down what knowledge Experience has given me. Trying not just to remember, but to live what my Mama taught (and continues to teach) me. Trying to acknowledge with my Absolute Everything the rhetorical query of George Eliot, "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?"

Of course, I am only now realizing that sometimes "making life less difficult" entails adamantly demanding others Piss Off and leave me the hell alone so I can think. I used to be so good at that when I was still a belligerent teenaged drunk....

These days, in lieu of shouting, I am moving 2725 crow-miles away (to a subtropical island, no less) before I leave the US entirely for a while. I'm afraid Seattle's oyster-broth winters have been in my hair a bit too long. I've got too much rain in my eyes to see, too much blood on my skin to be able to feel anything but vicious extremes. And christ almighty, the whole Terrified-to-Idiocy climate of oppression gaining momentum in this country is making my goddamned skin crawl. People are getting dumber and meaner, and I've been exposed---to my last howling nerve---to too much cruel and violent bullshit this year to be willing to put up with any more. Period. I'm not saying I'm the only one stripped to the marrow. Not by a long stretch. I'm just done keeping my bones in the petrol-fire. I'm done seeing it, smelling it, being reminded of it every day. I'm tired of coughing up loathing every morning with my coffee...

So, I'm getting out.

Giving myself a metaphysical electroshock. Letting the sun burn the bile from my skin. Engineering my own recrudescence. Planning my own bonfire, my own smoldering ashpile, my own PhoenixNest from which to rise.

Lo, I am already on fire.

Bullfighter

(Seattle)
There's an oil painting of a bullfighter, mesmerizing a wild-eyed bull, hanging in our dining room. It used to hang above the fireplace in the Palindrome House. The painting is old and crackly, beginning to lose flakes of color and layers of vividity. Its kitsch value keeps it around, as well as the inexplicable draw it seems to have on every person who spends any time with it. Yesterday I noticed something new: the painting is pocked with dozens of tiny holes. Like from dozens of tiny moth mouths.
Or from the edges of a shotgun spray.

Now I can't stop staring at it.

They're probably not shot-holes, though, right? I mean, every other shotgun blast I've ever seen (like the one through my bedroom wall) leaves holes a bit bigger than the ones in the bullfighter's bony hip, in the bull's meaty flank, peppered through the mustard-and-gangrene sky that seems to sicken them both. And the painting was still hanging when I went through the old house, so I have no idea whether or not those holes continued through the wall behind. Still...

It's everywhere. I can't go anywhere in this town without feeling the tap-tap of tragedy on my right shoulder, waiting for me to turn around so I can see its wide, bloody grin.

I get it, already. Jeezus.
Leave me alone.

...Of course, it won't leave. Can't leave. Is maybe bound up here forever, caught in the silken nets of fog that extend over the valleys, tripped up in the pointed tops of needled trees and in the teeth of mountains. My shoulders are not big enough, despite my Atlas-training, to shake this grinning, gnawing beast free. I have to get outside the pit, outside the fight, to see what I'm dealing with. It may only be a tiny thing with big teeth and bigger bark...but it may be a monster. Either way, I am ill-equipped to continue fighting. I need to recharge, to shift my perspective. I cannot in good conscience keep ruminating our little Tragedy when we live largely untouched by the Great Tragedy of the world. I need to go and meet people wiser than I, people who live beside the Great one all life long and grin in spite of it. Or because of it. People with wider views of suffering and joy.

UnAmerican.
Unspoiled.
Uninterred.

Incensed

so, apparently the pentagon released the new edition of the army field manual today, a revision that implicitly denies soldiers the rights to torture prisoners, that says that soldiers must obey many of the guidelines of the geneva convention, etc. within hours of the manual's release, bush gave a speech saying that the cia needed to torture people to get information, even though the only admissions we've been able to use have been given by people who were not tortured.

so, basically, what i'm hearing here is that bush just likes to fucking torture people.

he endorses the cia tactics that not only break international laws (that the u.s. agreed to, back in the day), but break our own laws as well. dude! this almost makes bush's speech two days ago, the one where he compared bin laden to hitler, seem almost funny. yeah, bin laden's a pretty twisted fucker, from all accounts, but bush is the one actually setting up death and torture camps, right fucking here on u.s. soil (and of course in cuba, cause we love the irony). oh yeah, and bush also acknowledged yesterday that we have secret cia prisons. isn't that great? he flat out, openly said, "yeah, we're totally torturing and unlawfully imprisoning people, but i betcha they're terrorists! and we gonna torture 'em until they admit it." this doesn't just sound like hitler's germany to me; this sounds like a cross between hitler and the horrific spanish inquisition, where church fathers (elected of god, just like bush?) would either kill you if you were a witch (terrorist) or torture you until you confessed you were a witch/terrorist, at which point the victim was usually dead or dying anyway. this is not okay; this is not stuff that happens to someone else; this is our motherfucking country, our words and votes and hopes that this megalomaniacal monkey is twisting to fit his depraved and downright cruel wishes. i don't know what to do to stop him, you know? maybe there's nothing i can do. my goddamned vote certainly doesn't mean anything, though i cast it again and again and again. i mean, when our own supreme court rules that the u.s. must follow the guidelines of the geneva convention (and the courts made that statement--again--on 29 june of this year) and then the puppeteer president says, "uhm, ...nah... we don't gotta do that," what the fuck are we to do? at this point...hell at the point three years ago when the idiot declared war on the entire middle east (one impoverished country at a time), we had every constitutional right to publicly hang him for high treason. with as many other treasonous acts as he's committed since then, we could probably kill his whole fucking family, rape him, and then set him on fire, just like the 5 u.s. soldiers did to the 14-year old iraqi girl, abeer hamza, back in march.

our country is being run by the powerhungry, by the cowering congress and courts that bow before them, by a homicidal maniac and buildings full of complacents afraid to lose their seats on the bench; it's being (over)run by a bunch of fucking skeksies. ugh. what's a gelfling to do? stay awake; stay aware. this gelfling will fight with the most powerful weapons i've got: the tempered steel of my words and the indomitable muscle of my love. always fight, always couteract evil with love, as powerfully as i can.

and fer cryin out loud, stay informed:

http://www.notinourname.org/
http://www.phrusa.org/ (physicians for human rights)
http://www.votersforpeace.us/
http://www.counterpunch.com/

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