Monday, November 17, 2014

november 17

I barely trust the motions of my body today. I am enveloping space with out matter like dust or the edge of a black hole. Vaguely sick delirious mind disease when the coughing and sneezing stop but my mind is caught in a fog like a house fire sleeping family or now I realize the day is lost from me and I panic and I fear consequence because my studying for French is god awful, I had to call off work with a weird little text message to my boss earlier than he was awake probably and I haven't napped all day yet it feels like it is so. "I've been up all day."

coffee means nothing. laundry is trash. recycling is worthless and I don't want the outside air to invade my body and shake my bones out of order like a puzzle in a wind storm. I desire a snow day. This is kind of like that. An internal snow day. Some vague uneasiness that prevents clarity from forming. I am a muddled cocktail. I have a collage to make about bipolar disorder and maybe this sickness, this mental anguish, this lazy scratching at some white blood cell itch, a miracle to wake out of it tomorrow and yet I'm fucking trying, water, orange juice, smoothie machine, I barely remember the contents of my day, the civil war documentary, the guitar playing, the mindless droning on and on, the french assignments, the dumbness of general disaffection with the self, I hate when I'm sick because it is impossible to function at the level I most desire to function at.

I want to.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

november 11

3:03 - 3:23

So I've worked night shifts at the University bookstore for the last 6 weeks or so. What does one do during the night shift at the loading dock of a bookstore? Until the responsibilities waiting for me this evening, the job consists two-thirds of cleaning floors, either with broom then mop on the faux-linoleum, this shiny waxed surface with little imperfections entombed under a layer of glaze, little black flecks beyond the deepest reach of an all-purpose cleaner... or a vacuum over miles of carpet, playing tug a war with power outlets and wrangling the orange serpent of an extension cord and trying not to knock down displays while traveling in circles around them. I do the offices, back storage, textbooks, sweaters and $60 hoodies, t-shirts emblazoned with the logo of my school, my dawgs, my school I feel barely affiliated with and have no desire to emblazon myself with their logo (as I realize, in cafe racer, I drink drip from a husky mug) and it is veteran's day and a guy came in to ask for a free beer and got it from the beanie-top hat adorned graybeard at the bar who may/may not have just signed a new two year lease for this "shithole of an establishment" (words of a different graybeard in discussion) and they boarded up the obama room for reasons I don't care to ask about immediately. They bury some awful artwork in the walls like rats.

The other 1/3 is spent with trash. Handling trash. Putting bags of it in other bags of it and attempting to differentiate the compost from the recycling from the trash. The fuckers who sit and waste in the cafe seem to be unaware of the posters above each receptacle that has cute little pictures of items that belong there. The aluminum cans make their home in the recycling, if empty. I spill a lot of garbage coffee on myself. I try to save plastic bags because they remind me of jellyfish in the sea. I take the trash out in a big rolling bath tub and put them in the dumpster down the street, out the back alley. Jordan told me one time he opened the back door and heard a shout of pain. He stuck his head out to he a man posted up in the sheltered doorway with a needle in his vein, and his arm dripping blood, and imagine he may have helped this man jam it in. Then we talked about addiction. Psychotic breaks. I have heard a few stories about psychotic breaks in the store. One a drunk employee mocked a slideshow memorial of the late-CEO from a year or two ago during the company banquet. Drinks and dancing occur during this event. The night maintenance team (my team) then has to clean up after but usually continues to drink, says Mat. Beer in one hand, broom in the other. But this girl is saying offensive things during the memorial, making fun of the pictures, and some other employees tell her to shut up. This turns her on to them. She gets in their face and is verbally aggressive. One man takes her drink away "I think you've had enough," and she loses it. Starts screaming at him. Calls him a motherfucker mixed in with inaccurate racial slurs and has to be detained and while being wrestled to the ground, resorts to biting people. Her co-workers astonished, the police come and she continues to fight, and some other employees leave the party sobbing for her sanity. The night maintenance crew of the time sat and watched and laughed and drank beers.

Other time happened a few days ago. A woman, the wife of a publisher who was giving a talk in the poetry section of the store, had, what I was told, a "psychotic break" and was screaming at her kids to help her make pyramids out of books all throughout the store. I'm not sure if she had a selection process for these pyramids but I know the children were too young to be able to reach above the second shelf.

Oh, tonight. I'll drive and deliver and hack the systems of sibling stores in Tacoma, Renton, Bellevue, and Downtown. and listen to french music, the sound of existential silences, rain beating the windshield, radio talk shows, audiobooks from late nabokov, vocal lessons and meditate on the night driving blackness of a moonless sky.

Friday, November 7, 2014

november 7

cold water plumage, my suit is made of rusted iron, my wooden wingspan stretches out with creaks and groans like the slow opening door of a haunted house, oh do my floorboards speak, they speak with each treacherous footstep, a kindred spirit to leave my body ravished with fear and cowering in the corner of my mind where light doesn't hit and the padded walls of blood and arteries are tangled round the musculature...

blonde haired angel with a young attitude flies down with those feathery light wings, so assured they are not fragile- as fragile as a silk woven manuscript from the 1700's.

science and nature writing.

poetry about wings.

Sunday, November 2, 2014

november 2

sleepy with an extra hour given, and the cool confidence required to follow a drunk journey for a lighter away from nice conversation and the lighter is found, cigarette smoked, and our business to our lung capacities is atrocious and I will quit and not pitch in for the next pack of smokes and then the support of quitting will not come to me as any other source than within myself and she wants me to throw down cash and I don't want to pay for a lung blackening as I've smoked casually for 6 years or so and it should stop now without regret or self hate and the drinking may well diminish later but let's begin with the throat membrane burning smoke-lung habit that is shared with only one person these days so the support system is very limited and non convincing and the nurse girlfriend forces him to quit and suffer because she showed him lung surgery videos that she took on my phone while training for bypass and the blood and black clots scared him into subservience and he is happy to be her shadow and yet no longer formed into a body the shape of his own.

carpeted ceilings and roof top gardens. second story pool balconies with acorn shaped lanterns hung over and swaying and squirrels burn themselves on them like mosquitos into flyzappers or flies into lighters or krill into the mouths of whales.

last night the party. the white wine consumed as quickly as the pumpkin beer. the girl on mushrooms who hugged and loved. this reminds me strangely about what my co-worker said about someone he knew who was addicted to crack. that they could feel their skin, each pore, exuding a kind of evil stench, a general bad taste and will, a fragrant feeling of pain and paranoia and shame. makes me think that whatever you decide to put into your body has a shadow life. either the lines of your face, the stench or callouses, the way skin breaks out, the way scars fail to heal, the way a sore under the tongue destroys your articulators. booze fills the skin in a similar way. if she had all she drank in the last five days in one day she would be in the hospital. wondering what caused this binge and the exercise routine to be forgotten. where have I been during all of this? a tag along.

the party. a man dressed up like anonymous was trying to convince partygoers to drink his moonshine, to eat the 100-proof soaked blackberries that rested at the bottom like sunken decayed bones. He was stumbling around, lost his mask, regained his identity, though the feds are after him poor soul. he, anonymous, forgot his night his name and his purpose there in the house and world they all share in a residential police calling neighborhood with dancing and drinks and music and a smiling clown mask sentry guard.

I can't imagine calling the cops about a party as noise complaint. Whoever called. Where they ever young? What could they think would come of breaking up the party?

Other flashbulbs are forgettable. People in half-assed costumes. Music and awkwardness. The usual.