February 2012
1 post
I keep waiting for winter to happen. It snowed today. Laura picked me up with her car (a car!) and we went to work and worked and then we went to the Y and worked out and then she dropped me off at the mouth of my alley and I walked up the alley to the back of my house and the dead rat is still there but a little more worn, a little stiffer from the cold. It’s not the right kind of...
January 2012
1 post
There are so many people circulating in this wonderful, scummy city! Yet I am surprised that I will see someone on the train for the first time in a year and a half, that my favorite band from ten years ago isn’t my favorite band anymore, that a former classmate will grow out her hair and sit next to me at the Super Wash and there will be the jaunty dance of which one of us idiots will say...
November 2011
4 posts
To complicate a dinner.
Tomorrow, I will wake up early, give Dax two bowls of food and a change of water, carry a flourless chocolate cake with roasted pears and a blue backpack of clothes on the Blue line to Damen where I will take the 50 bus to work, work, carry the cake and pears and clothes again but on the 66 bus to the Blue line or maybe to the Red line but definitely to the Loop where I will meet up with Stefan so...
October 2011
2 posts
The month.
Little Sister performed at a fundraiser when I was home last month. Someone said to her, “The music I listen to is very rhythmic. I don’t hear any at all in what we heard tonight.”
Little Sister responded politely with something smart in the intelligent, kind way. I wanted to respond with something smart-mouthed. That’s the biggest difference between us other than age and...
September 2011
2 posts
The internet provides little relief so here it is.
My first morning back in the midwest, my mother sent me a text message about my cousin. A valve in his heart collapsed in on itself a while ago from too much pressure but it’s okay because he got a new heart, so lucky at 28 and so soon. Then yesterday. The thing about having parents whose second or third or forth or whatever language is English but your primary language is English and not...
August 2011
4 posts
Sitting next to a playwright during a production...
An early work of a poet’s. Ed knocked over a can at the beginning of the second act, but the playwright seemed more annoyed with the crinkle of someone’s snack behind us and also the play. My opinions are: wow, something about heavy hands, the words too pretty and too the same for each, near twee, but so very lovely and clever, a meander and then a sprint to a place that didn’t...
When I get upset, I often lay myself face-down into a pile of bed linens as if it’s an attempt to get quiet and concentrated enough to divine what I mean or want to mean or why I’m mean. It is sad planking. I was thinking about getting iced and how I never watched any videos about it but I knew what it was and how it bummed me out, somewhat, that it felt like it was straight up...
July 2011
1 post
I don’t know what to share lately. Here is what I had for dinner, here are some things I bought, here are scraps of notebook jottings.
David used to say that a summer was over if you didn’t at least start doing the things you planned to do This Summer if July 4 came and went.
No sewing or knitting projects, no issue number two, not even any cakes to bake and decorate for some...
June 2011
6 posts
1 tag
mixtapes on actual tapes, weird.
Lindsey, Ed, and I are driving down to Bloomington. We are camping. I set up a tent for the first time last night in my backyard. It is my first tent. My second time in Indiana. Dax chucked up the grass he ate and some ants tried to eat it but I sprayed them with window cleaner and cleaned up the puke too. I don’t know the next time I’ll be in Philadelphia but I’ll be in Indiana...
3 tags
Reading a former teacher's new poetry book is like
Having a dog instead of a cat.
3 tags
Cleared out space under the bed. Found zines. Sometimes I think I ought to rename Crushing Loneliness to Crushing Pile Of Everything All At Once And Then There Is More.
1 tag
I never forget about winter. It went from winter to summer here in an instant, but it’s still only spring. My radishes are doing well. I am concerned about the lavender because it’s in too small of a pot hidden behind the basil and the plant I don’t know the name of but is red and fuzzy and poisonous. This tan. These freckles on my face. My arms.
When I wrote concerned it came...
May 2011
5 posts
1 tag
WatchPygmy Lush - “It’s A Good Day To Hide”
1 tag
1 tag
not actually but maybe actually
me: i hate everything
those are my feelings
hate
hate
hate
smitten
hate
tired
hate
smitten
hate
nothing
feelings
in summation
Lindsey: is hungry a feeling?
because you forgot that one
April 2011
10 posts
1 tag
“If you had all the room in the world, and all the time, none of this would...”
– McGee and Stuckey’s The Bountiful Container
1 tag
the weather.
A thing to do is count the short lives lived (developed personas, more like, chances are, right?) and a year or a month or a day gets in and I will remember it clearly, think about the jacket I was wearing, the food (quiche for a time, almond brittle another), oh the food (the season’s first split CSA box with Sean is a beaut).
Make a pile of clothes to donate before going out for the...
2 tags
get a grip.
Rosmarie Waldrop, “Like Holderlin”
got up early left the house immediately tore out grass bits of leather in his pockets hit fences with his handkerchief answered yes and no to his own questions lies under grass wilted flowers in his pockets at the fence I pull my handkerchief he liked to say no “I’m no longer the same man” and “nothing is happening to...
2 tags
2 tags
"The Rejection of Closure"
Sometimes I purposefully miss things. Scroll past. Walk a block around. Let the timer go until I can’t stand to hear it anymore. I am not a timely person. I am often late with the odd occasions I decide to be early, though I constantly gnaw at my nails, the inside of my mouth, lip.
In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what...
The most meta thing of all. Duh.
People on the internet don’t know how to read. It makes me a little sad. And I don’t really care about these folks lives. You know you know. Oh I know. I’m good with my thumbs. I know. This is what I’m going to post on my tumblr. I know you know. I figured. I’m a little smart. Yeah. I really want Chinese food. (“That is a man who knows poverty.” The bar...
Watchplainlines:
Tonite. Doors open at 8pm.
Gonna carry a dozen bottles of wine in the rain for this.
March 2011
6 posts
2 tags
The first time I ever felt love outside of the familiar sense was when I got upset and leaned over to get something on the other end of a desk and my friend kissed my elbow and that was alright. It was strange because it was the first time anyone had really kissed me and I know it doesn’t count because of context and all, but I count it, mostly secretly and sometimes. I was 16 years old. I...
1 tag
lately and often.
me: i sorta want to go home and spoon with my cat and a hot water bottle
in my bath tub just in case i shit myself
with blood
and poop
ew
...
me: also. sick. i'm getting it. something is going around at work.
Lindsey: which sick?
me: cold
my throat
disease
the plague
botulism
i don't know
one of those
...
Lindsey: i feel like there are two sickenesses: vomiting and not vomiting
me: no vom-ing here.
just pooping
and snot
Lindsey: yuck
me: and blood
I am sitting on a bench at Damen and Wilson waiting for the bus and the sun is nice and the sky is that pale morning blue with white wisps of clouds and it’s been so long since a year ago or six months ago or any other time ago really.
Spring is almost here and there are the birds and the buds and all of that, but I know it’s coming when the pop punk gets into heavier rotation. A...
In workshops, the teach would read a few pages of a story and ask everyone to guess who wrote it. Teach would try to be tricky and read Melville or another Someone, but it would usually be student work.
In Devon’s class, Cristina guessed a story was mine. “Why?” “Because the parents were the Smiths, clearly, Monica likes The Smiths.” And we chuckled because she was...
3 tags
This is what we started the morning, my 11th in a... →
I saw you two guys earlier at the consumer truck and you were eating your ice cream like little boys and I though ‘Those guys aren’t so tough. They’re eating ice cream, what a bunch of swell guys! I saw you eating ice cream pal! You’re bad now but you were eating an ice cream cone and I saw you. That’s the shit you can’t hide! Ice cream eating ...
“I am possibly lonely. I was trained to turn loneliness into laziness. The...”
– Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut
February 2011
14 posts
Sourpatch - “GV”
The old utensil...
1 tag
2 tags
but positively
At an editorial meeting yesterday, this tumblr was described by others with the words desperation, failure, wieners, cats.
Well, yeah.
3 tags
1 tag
To be shouted at and to be playful.
Or to be ambiguously ethnic and a woman at the same time.
Why yes, the thing you should say to me when I am carrying boxes down to the FedEx guy is, “Korean? Vietnamese? Which one?”
When I am coming back up the stairs, you should give me that awful look and say, “Venezuelan? Filipino? What are you? Korean?” Yes, both of you should join in.
That this is surprising every...
7 tags
Heaving sincerity against exhausting cleverness. Man, my mid-20s are tough.
1 tag
Deciding the sort of person who'll approach me,
depends a lot on whether my hair is curly, straight, tied back, up, or braided.
The person who said I hid behind it, but the friend who said I was more of myself with it curly and down. Once, when straight, one mentioned the softness and roundness of my face. The men at bars, on buses, at intersections. The way my hair feels on the back of my arms, the back of my neck.