4.12.07

11:53 PM me: that's the beauty of grapes megan

11:54 PM anything that round is meant to be problematized

they're not even that round though i guess

11:55 PM meg: youre nutter

11:57 PM so ive started sleeping in a silk dress

wicked funny

fades

i am watching political commentary on msnbc because people who know how to make speeches lull me like songs and stories and knowing voices. they're not. but they sound the same.

last spring, my computer broke when i leaned over the keys with a glass of water in my hand. my body poured liquid and my new thing died.

things are things and i know what they mean. they're empty. but the words are not. documents i had written when i was leaving college and my friends and felt new and myself. photo projects. letters to boys and women.

no one inspires like previous selves.

i want 19 year old me- excited for moving and drugs and self anylysis. i want to ingest my ideas about when i thought that adolecence and all its annoyances and neurosis and fear were over.

i'm eating pot brownies from some girl who didn't know how to make butter. they're pure salt.

i don't want to be young. i want to talk to myself. i want to see progress. and it's lost in the water. i can't recollect anything. i want to read my thoughts.

i am pro-choice

When you are a failed suicide everyone wants to ask you why but they don’t because asking why is socially a rude thing to do. Even the hungriest gossipmongers pocket their curiosities and pussyfoot, pussyfoot like toothless cougars. But when you are a failed suicide before you can leave the hospital you must tell why. It’s like a rule or something…

All the doctors in their well rehearsed concern ask you why and then take your why, your point, with all your poetic digressions, and enter the whole of it into the alliterative parade of helplessness and hopelessness.

“You were feeling helpless, right? And hopeless?”

And because the objective was not to land in a hospital you agree and admit,

“Yes, I felt helpless…and hopeless.”

This seems like a betrayal and it hurts. It hurts because it is false. It hurts because you allowed all the nuanced reasons surrounding your point to be shot, blown into a dusty summation made by a porcine doctor named Chloe. It hurts but you need to get out. First and foremost you need to get out. So, you recite the words Chloe, the good little mama bird, fed you. Again and again you hear your baby bird voice on repeat – helpless, hopeless, helpless, hopeless, helpless, hopeless.

There are many doctors.

The second doctor asks, “Why?” Sweat beads on her brow when she asks so exasperated, out of breath, bored by the question or the thought of listening to yet again another long tale of why woe is me when she in her infinite wisdom and sweat knew the answer before asking. She doesn’t even look at you. She keeps her head down at the papers on her desk. Her hand hovers over a box to check. Remember you want to get out. When you told Chloe why, all Chloe did was nod out the words helpless and hopeless, as if in confirmation, yes I agree she said, helpless, hopeless, even though you hadn’t mentioned anything of the sort. You swallowed those words helpless and hopeless because they were your ticket out and you knew this and you were proud to be so quick. You do not bore her, you tell the doctor with the sweaty brow, “I felt helpless and hopeless.” You say it without a stutter and feel like an actress, a great performer, look at me now! You think of that foolish girl from college who called her play absurdist, how you hated her for saying so because nonsensical does not mean absurdist. But what was happening now, this, this was absurdist. “I felt helpless and hopeless.” Such repetition. The sweaty doctor is appeased. She checks her box.

Then there is the third doctor, then the fourth, and the fifth and you see seven doctors of varied degrees, haircuts and ages and they all ask the same question and you tell all of them the same story of helplessness and hopelessness and you are believed. You are free. Freed! But really you’re only free because your insurance ran out.

You go home and when you get there your boyfriend is sleeping with an old girlfriend, so you envision her face on a platter without parsley and with great malice stab at her eyes with your fork. Her eyes pop like grapes spliced at the pupil but you end it here because you’ve dismissed her as pathetic, as a whore, as one to forget because she is not the point. And you fuck him a few more times because he is good and when he repents you dismiss him too, because he is not the point either.

One morning you wake up remembering the point and shiver in tears beneath your sheets. The point is frightening and has nothing to do with neither help nor hope. You shiver for an hour and your pillow is damp so you leave it for the shower and sit there in the porcelain scoop of the tub with the shower raining on you and you hold your knees and do not cry. You drink coffee and take speed because it is good and keeps you going.

You tell the point to the friend you never trusted and she looks at you cross-eyed. You tell your mother and she cries. You go to meetings and tell the point to strangers and they suggest you get a hobby, fill your time, maybe even volunteer, but these have to do with help, with hope, and help and hope are not the point. So, you go home to more shivers and lie in bed and feel like a two year old’s antipode tugging why not on a string.

peak oil

when i call my boyfriend, he tells me about peak oil. i don't try to think about peak oil because i already feel apocalyptic as it is.
so, i'll put the quote he emailed me here so i don't have to think about it and you can all think about it and then forget about it and then it'll be over and none of us will ever think about it again until it's over.

"the mentioned agricultural crisis will only begin to impact us after 2020, and will not become critical until 2050." BUT this doesn't take into account Peak Oil, "which suggest for sustainability, global population will have to be reduced from the current 6.32 billion people42 to 2 billion-a reduction of 68% or over two-thirds. The end of this decade could see spiraling food prices without relief. And the coming decade could see massive starvation on a global level such as never experienced before by the human race."

nothing to speak of

Last night I had this dream: I was trying to get on the MassPike because I had a hemorrhoid and needed to complete this 5K road race to prevent coastal flooding but the woman at the tollbooth wouldn’t let me enter unless she could crunkle up my CharlieCard. I screamed, “You bitch!” Then all these gay guys came about in tie-dye t-shirts, laughing, saying, “What’s the deal? What did you expect? That’s how things are done around here.” So I hijacked a bus heading to Spring Street and ended up at the harbor with this guy I kept calling Siskin who fed me green candies he kept in his pocket. I ran through a cemetery to win the race and everyone else drowned in a puddle. Victorious!

i'll be back soon meg. just in a stagnant period. bleeding heavily for you.

a poem for aids

I am a dog.

last night i saw a movie

To suck out the juice and reduce it to nothing and put it in a mish-mash of order, I’ll offer a useless film review about a Wild Turkey love affair starring this fast paced bald man "ahhing" and "uhhing" and "umming" his way through these wryly hysterical, seldom nonsensical, these forever mind blowing smart banters and quips that he spoke most likely drug riddled but not addled just riddled, never addled, just riddled. Drug riddled. A cigarette holder fixed to his lip. His outfits – fishing vest, Nixon mask, curly wig, a Vegas visor that I feel like calling a “bodega hat,” striped shirt, tinted glasses, blonde wig, grey wig, many Dad-goes-to-Hawaii button up t-shirts (flora not fauna theme here), baby blue powdered shorts cutting off at mid-thigh. At dusk, without a helmet, he speeds down Big Sur on his bike like a villain, a con, an Invincible, flirting with the eye-drying speed he shifts from first to second, from second to third and on up till he hits the edge facing the thing head on. Take me! he says. Take me! But it doesn’t, it won’t, so he will later with a gun. There is Chicago 1968 when he cries. Alongside nude women he types and the women stand about, prance about, their chaches all bush, so seventies, their tits amazing hanging down. And out come the guns to fire at wild boars, typewriters, trees, to fire inside the house and outside the house and sometimes at nothing at all. He is not Good Sally and the Activist team pulling in on their scholarship wagon, he’s not Baby Jane with daddy’s money either. He delivers punches with his balls intoxicated and his heart in flames and so sets politics on fire. In a Cadillac, with an attorney and a tape recorder he goes out looking for the American dream and is asked by a woman at a taco stand, “What is that? The American Dream?” She thinks it’s a nightclub, a psych ward. He eats speed, drops acid, snorts blow off knife blades (Knives out? Yes? Yes!), takes mescaline – two half doses thirty minutes apart, etc., etc. drug culture galore. Pours whiskey after whiskey like a southerner cradling sweet tea, makes me thirst for a soda pop, a whiskey soda pop. He divorces and remarries. Blows off his head with a gun. Ha-ha! Of course! Fire at nothing, fire at it all! Blasts out of a cannon. Fire work display. Ashes to ashes, ahh, what a rush. Life seems so glorious on film.

may

We lounged about. In our rooms, in the lobby with the grand puzzle, in the big room at the end of the tiled hallway where Law & Order re-runs played out on a twenty inch beast that hummed through commercials and flickered during shows. In the bathroom with the spiders and sticky floor, where Charlotte a woman near forty liked to hide behind the toilet bowl and purr, liked flushing her pills down the drain. But never outside. We weren’t allowed outside. Only outside for cigarette breaks – four times a day, the first one at six a.m. Outside taunted us, it haunted me. It sat there poker faced behind five caged windows that lined a wall of the big room. Outside, a massive tree spurting off branches and roots, which rose through the dirt in knotted knolls up and over the cracked stone pathway leading to a rotting red park bench, passed on in its glory without us. It seemed to march. So deliberate, so callous, I thought I would drown. I wanted autumn, I wanted to rake, I wanted to cut my palms raking, I wanted to stick my hands in the soil and come out with a worm. Beyond the massive tree were more trees, a forest of trees. A drained moat. Two wire lawn chairs thrown together, side by side, one rusting at its feet. A ten foot high chain link fence. A trash barrel full of cigarette butts and small paper Dixie cups. A spider that would bite me while I smoked a Newport with a vainglorious heroin addict name Tricia, a bite that’d turn my left calf purple.

hm.

i have no desire to say anything halfway preconceived or clever or full of contridiction. i turned 23 two days ago. it was very simple and i was upstate at this house. i went swimming and ate alot of exceptionally delcious food and played games in the woods.

aids4lyfe update

megan took a brief hiatus from the world and dropped off the face of the earth. never fear, readers- she's alive, safe and sound, but has removed herself from the blogosphere. thus, i am left to fulfill the aids4lyfe prophecy dolo. we all die alone.

Things that have happened since April (the last time I posted):
-I moved out of my apartment on s.3rd street and in with my friend Bailey on Stanhope street. Bailey is kooky and lovely and acutely domestic. i love her.
-2.5 months later I moved in with my boyfriend, Joe. We live at the Silent Barn on Wyckoff Ave.
-A band called Teeth Mountain from Baltimore played at the house and a girl from the band, Kate, went outside and found a cat on the sidewalk. He was all white and had a blue bell. He his now mine and he is named Suge Knight.
-Joe and I went to Mexico City for eight days.
-I started managing the new Deitch space in Long Island City. It's at the end of 44th drive, right on the water. Mainly, I see alot of kayakers and people who work for Matthew Barney. It's sort of the best summer job ever.

I developed a keenness for suburban Queens and have picked out various blocks that I would like to sit on as an old woman with high socks and breasts that touch my knees.
-

megan if we don't go now, it'll be too late.

the tangible vs. the real- a tricky EQUATION

The equator is an imaginary line comparable to my childhood friends Sheila and Michelle. However, unlike them, the equator does hold some geographical properties. The latitude of the equator is, by definition, 0°. The length of Earth's equator is about 24,901.5 miles. In relation, the geographical mile is defined as one arc minute of the equator. I think all distance should be measured in time.
The Earth juts out slightly at the equator. It has an average diameter of 12,750 km, but at the equator the diameter is approximately 43 km greater. I learned much of this information from Wikipedia. I hope it is true.

Here are some photos of people at various points on the equator:


Check back for forthcoming entries on the prime meridian and arctic circle....wait in vain.

a cup of this, that too.

On Sunday in the late afternoon, Joe and I set out for food near Silent Barn in Ridgewood. There's this place called Breakfast Lunch Dinner around six blocks from his house that I really like because the Matzoh Ball Soup is quite good- I'd venture to say some of best I've ever had.
Anyway, the wind pushed us there and I smoked a cigarette under the awning of my hood. Breakfast was over, lunch too, had to be dinner. There were maybe ten people in the whole place, including the employees. We sat in a booth behind an old man hooked up to a respirator that was placed on the floor beside him. It didn't block the aisle though. I faced him, Joe faced me. He sat at the table alone with napkins shoved into his shirt, unshaven, smiling.
We talked about trips and the night before and the idea that to rationalize something in our small lives is to actually ration it, to allocate parts, to divide and organize. Individual importance must be derived from order, from arrangement, from maintenance coupled with a drop of creation. Explanation falls behind proportionality. Do I ration parts of myself for a later date in order to interpret and conceptualize my current actions? This is muddled, I know.
I got the soup and toast with jam, Joe got various eggs and muffins and sausages. Coffee too. The man got mashed potatoes and peas and turkey, which he blended with a fork in order to properly swallow without choking. Plastic tubes in his nose. The waitress kept calling him Romeo and asking him if he was ever going to take her on a date, screaming to him that Valentine's Day was her birthday, screaming to no one in particular,
"Ok, it's time to do some real work now, real work, ok"
"Romeo, Romeo, more coffee?"
"Romeo, Romeo!" like he was asleep or dead or something.
The point of life is productivity not happiness. The point of life is productivity not happiness. The point of life is productivity not happiness?
He twirled his finger at me around his right temple, grinning, motioning her insanity. I started feeling water in my eyes, smiling back, looking down at my soup. A guy came in and asked the waitress for something to go, he milled around the front and looked down at the old man at the table.
"How you been, Joe?"

i don't know who reads this but

person

Last summer I met this boy outside of a show who said my name really long: wide a's, harsh b's. He drew marker tattoos all over my arms, with maps to his apartment, lists of nice bands, and diagrams of his brain- with the overused parts enlarged for effect. He told me he wanted to make me macaroni and cheese, like the real kind with the crust on top, so I gave him my phone number, drunk. In the morning, I woke up fuzzy. Not home. Not with him. The ink had become big blue amorphous gobs, muddled by sweat.
I met him that day in the afternoon after he had called me twice, and we smoked a joint by the water and then walked up to the northern tip of Greenpoint where there's this park I really like: all views, no people. He kept trying to kiss me, but I just wanted to say all the things I never say because clearly I would never ever voluntarily look this person in the eye again. The pity of my glazed over heart was no match for the conversational road less traveled- weird bodily function dilemmas and aspirational difficulties.
He had: really bad teeth, like all brown and small and yellow, and auburn hair and green skin. If you squinted, he kind of resembled a gnome or a junkie. But eyes wide- he was just a pathetic, strange looking kid. Nothing as I had remembered him through blurred vision, I thought he had been tall or something. He said he liked my eyes. I wish he said he liked how my face turns really red for no reason or that I had cellulite on my stomach or that my skin was really dry around my forehead. But people don't say those things.
Things he did say:
1. You're pretty (Like the eyes thing, generic, not endearing)
2. I hang out with Allen Ginsburg's son/grandson (I do not remember which).
3. I have seventeen tattoos (I did not verify this claim as I did not want to look at his body, it was gangly and disgusting, though he did have several, hasty demarcations on his forearms)
4. I grew up in New York.
5. I hate young, affluent, unwiedly, annoying people who move to Brooklyn (read- you know what)
2 and 3 were meant to impress, 4 and 5 to initiate self-loathing. Neither did either. I did not care. My apathy stemmed from ugly teeth and gross skin, not any notion of idealism. He said a bunch of other stuff about not having a job, various drugs he could procure in a half hours notice, and his dump of an apartment in Bushwick. Maybe I should have at least wanted to be friends with him.
He kept saying my name before every comment or anecdote he offered. GaaaaaaaaaBBy. GaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaBBBBBBBy
I hate the sound of my own name normally, but it's really a fucking nailsonchalkboard response when people I don't know say it commonly, like saying- hi, hello, like, yes, and, maybe, sure, please. Not the same. Gabby, try it out, roll it around in your mouth, gargle with it. But don’t regurgatate it back to me, jesus christ. Fucking swallow it up, guy, don't spit it out.

Test. I never tried to recall or learn his name. I remember this blankness making me so happy, giddy almost, at the time. And the very reason I kept the whole thing going- because I still didn't know what the hell he was called. I kept tossing around possible monikers in my head, smiling with delight, the endless possibility from such a simple thing. I thought of titles that could be chopped up eight different ways if necessary- Richard, Robert, Benjamin, Stephen. Not that they really could.
I wondered if he had been made fun of as a little kid by other little kids because of it, or if his mother or grandmother called him something different. Had he been named for someone who died? Did he have old jerseys from sports he used to play with the word etched in the back or front? Had he ever fucked someone so deep and so good and so hard that his name had sprung from her mouth again and again?
Around five in the afternoon, around the time I was supposed to go meet my friend to go to this show in this backyard, he went,
"So, my dad said, 'John, you've gone too far this time,"
I had been tuned out for good fifteen, twenty minutes, staring off into space, manic with myself for thinking him a Thomas this hour, and it hit me like a slap, like when someone tells you they're cheating, or that you're the part of their life that they hate, or that they don't love you. I reached up, I felt blood coming out of my nose and ears and mouth. john, john, john. So short and bland, like a stump or a chode, not even emblematic of something else. He kept talking. Lips moving, hands gesturing, feet walking. I lit a cigarette and told him I had to go. Pop.

stills

james
gary, indiana
barr
joe
megan

poetic synaesthesia

colorless green ideas sleep furiously

5.17.07

I bought this notebook in a Greyhound station in Spokane Washington. joe and i are traveling cross country on the bus and we left Portland this morning. I feel good and bland and scared and happy. Fearful of my own brain and everything it may or may not contain. But moving is cathartic and i suppose it's time to start thinking again. Portland felt like a test. Stayed in a 24 hour coffee shop called the pharmacy near a park called Couch. Had dinner with a big tittied blond hip-hop business woman with a cross in her house the size of joe's suitcase, and another the size of a bike. went to a lame emo show at a posh bar. walked over a bridge, saw homeless people and cried. but that may have been the fight. maybe not. slept in the coffee shop. joe woke me at six. got six doughnuts at a place that will marry you. wondered if holy matrimony flavored with sacharine and starch tastes better in the end. they had vegan ones too. now, on a bus to moscow idaho by way of washington. woman's been yelling at her blond son behind me for the last forty or so minutes. she has: short shorts, rolls hanging over, gray skin. it's green here, so green. i want to put everything in my pocket. colors fade.

words. words. words

mmm..Rushdie

Her father asked her what she wanted for her birthday. She looked at the driver and briefly wanted to be the kind of woman who could have asked him pornographic questions, right there in the elevator, within seconds of their first meeting; who could have talked dirty to this beautiful man, knowing that he would not have understood a word, that he would've smiled an employee's assenting smile without knowing what he was agreeing to. Did he take it in the ass? She wanted to see his smile. She didn't know what she wanted. She wanted to make documentary films.

I am Frank Zappa's illegitamate second cousin, once removed

No lie-

My mother's first husband was Frank Zappa's cousin. They married in a Catholic church during the summer of 1973, the year she turned nineteen. Five months later, Eddy Colimore became a Jehovah's Witness in a ceremony not much different than the one that made them man and wife. Death do us part, no love and cherish. The marriage was promptly annulled.

The Rothko Chapel

The Rothko Chapel in Houston, TX was commissioned by the Menil family in 1964, and erected seven years later, in 1971. The artist committed suicide in 1970, directly before its completion. The only light in the room comes from a small hole at the top of the dome shaped ceiling- a veritable sensory deprivation tank.

Sistas R Doin it Right

M: i'm starting a blog
G: oh yeah??
M: yeah
G: we should start a blog together meg
M: i think it will be a good way to kill event/thoughts that dont matter
i'm down with a shared blog
G: excellent
M: how do we do it
G: it will be incentive to post
we need a name
M: yes we do
G: like aids4lyfe/sistas are doin it right
M: ha
G: something to that effect
M: i like that.
aids4lyfe
my idea for my blog was to write out things i wanted to die soo aids4lyfe would fit
G: things you wanted to di?
M: like thoughts and events that mean nothing but take up space in my head
like for instance i think fbook is a great way to kill these things
as soon as theyre on there, theyre dead
i'm hoping a blog will have the same effect
G: what are you trying to make room for?
M: new things to kill i suppose
or maybe clarity
maybe i'll get some clarity
G: clarity is good
M: yes i would like it
Sent at 6:58 PM on Sunday
Gabrielle: http://aids4lyfe.blogspot.com/
there ya go cossface