That's right, Brougham

I have always felt like someone who should drive some old, beat-up car. Preferably a GIANT one with loose steering, rusted paint, and no rearview mirror. Well, it has finally come to pass. The absurdity of my life is now reflected in the absurdity of my car. I am the proud new owner of a 1987 Chevrolet Caprice Brougham. Purchased for $75 from a 36 year old virgin with an apartment messier than mine.

Assuming it breaks down less than my last car, I can now do any of the following: go to the grocery store whenever I want, be the last person to leave the party, be the first person to leave the party, buy full-length mirrors, drive to the wilderness on the spur of the moment, visit any and all of my friends who had a kid in the last year, put junk in my trunk, get stuck in traffic, flirt with guys who work at places with "lube" in the title, take people to the airport, flee.

But there is no way I will be able to parallel park.

sultry night

driving home, windows down, listening to ibrahim ferrer, elbows touching. and he said, "all you need is the occasional perfect moment"

More re-discovered quotes from post-California.

"We become who we are by a series of involuntary half-choices." A.S. Byatt

"We all choose partial, interested stories/histories - perhaps not as deliberately as I am making it sound here. But consciously, or unconsciously, these choices about our past(s) often determine the logic of our present." Chandra Mohanty

i want someone to crack me open because doing it myself is proving problematic

Yeah she asked me again for the 6th time.

What is the point?

I thought I would avoid the whole writing about work phenomenon, but my boss just came in to ask me the same question - for the fifth time. And I gave her the same answer - for the fifth time. Her asking the same question over and over again would not bother me so much if it wasn't for the tone of voice she uses, which suggests that I am an incompetent scatter-brain who cannot get her shit together to make this one simple change. Except the incompetent scatter-brain made the change FOUR MONTHS AGO, when she first asked me to.

Isn't there some sort of magical cave I can enter on some numerologically significant day after various trials and tribulations (some involving virgins) to find a wise man /power animal /leprechaun /goddess /monkey /magical spinning wheel that will reveal my soul's purpose unto me? I heard on NPR there might be one in San Antonio, under the sno-cone vendors in front of the Alamo, where blue stalactites form from the drip-drip-drip of raspberry syrup. Would I trust the rest of my life to a goddess who lived in a sno-cone cave, fingers stained the colors of the rainbow from FD red #40, FD yellow #5, FD violet #2?

Yes. Yes I would.

"The quaint tragedies we invent - and undo."

Time to face the facts. I prefer craziness over harmony. Getting riled up over calming down. I struggle against harmony - I fight it.

This may finally explain the state of my apartment.

suddenly transparent

A re-discovered quote from Kavalier and Clay that captivated me for a little bit post-California. "The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire would be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might not have existed in the first place."

One night at Flipside a few of us started talking about poetry and the poems that we know by heart. It was really intriguing and somewhat telling to see what kinds of poems people have committed to memory. The poems that Ali knew were the kind that comment on love, flirty poems, fickle poems, men and women poems, Dorothy Parker-ish poems. Conor of course knew lots but focused on dirty limericks. And my poems were about things vanishing, things lost - lost love, lost self. And it felt as if we were suddenly transparent, as if anyone could see the metaphors and ideas embedded within us, the ones that cause us to move, to react the way that we do.

Everything vanishes.

questions

I discovered some writings from my time in California and realized that I have been asking the same questions over and over and over again, for years now. The fact that the same questions keep appearing in my life is not as troubling as the fact that they keep disappearing - that I forget how certain questions and ideas consumed me for a while. Then a few years later I start to itch, and question, and become wrapped up in that question again, in all of its chenilley goodness. Except I never remember that I spent a year bundled up in that particular blanket before. I forget how much it meant to me previously.

Maybe it has something to do with my episodic obsessiveness. Or that everything is temporary. Being sad that I am no longer sad, writing as a tool against forgetting, that sort-of thing. Those are two ideas that I have spent some time with, that I have come back to. But that is just it - there is something that is not fleeting about questions/ideas, something that is not temporary, since the questions come back. There is something somehow cyclical about the process, some sort of cyclical fleetingness. Some kind of movement. That seems to be closer to the heart of the matter. Perhaps it is just the nature of questions. As sweet, pseudo-stalkee Seth said, "Questions are alive; answers are dead."

I hate my uterus

Wow. I just tried to convince an ex to date me again. Three times. On the phone. Once while at a bus stop, holding back tears and blowing my nose on my shirt. Shortly thereafter, I bought champagne, ice cream, and cigarettes at the convenience store. I drank the champagne out of a measuring cup.

I am 100% premenstrual. Oh, cruel sisters estrogen and progesterone, why must you brawl so?

"The only thing to really fear in our lives is that we'll harden, and that we'll justify our hardening." Pema Chodron

royal dancing monster princess

I watched Sesame Street briefly this morning and there was a royal dancing monster princess. A ROYAL DANCING MONSTER PRINCESS. How do I apply?

Nothing that trembles or bleeds...

Blood and tears

Another attempt at bike riding with Chris ended in blood and tears. Maybe I should avoid bikes in his company.

Cops

Cops have no subtlety or nuance

Disappear

Maybe I will disappear entirely.

Time

"Why does the time of childhood and youth seem so long and the rest of life seem to go so quickly, to be so short? Time is the potentiality of experience, the number of experiences

"As we are, experiences happen to us - we do not, and we cannot, use them consciously until we learn to control the physical and emotional energy that pours out when when we are confronted by sudden, unexpected occurrences. For example, a person reads something in the paper, or hears of something, and at once he becomes identified; he feels intensely; and valuable emotional and mental energy is wasted; he has shortened his time. The same with difficult experiences with people, which may cause us to unwind, in a few minutes or hours, years of potential normal unwinding.

"Time is the infinite, absolute, potential of all experience."

adventures with Matt

obsessive mancala playing, trip to the clinic, fortune-teller construction, learning how to knit

sushi happy hour, tipsy from half a beer, sitting on bench on Congress, unexpectedly fooling around on new sofa, drinking sangria on porch, christmas lights

I didn't know it, but I was there for the puppet show

mindfulness and restlessness. restlessness and mindfulness. capricious, changeful, fickle, fitful, flighty, fluctuating, fluid, impulsive, inconstant, indecisive, irregular, irresolute, irresponsible, kaleidoscopic, mercurial, mobile, movable, mutable, permutable, protean, restless, reversible, shifting, skittish, transformable, transitional, uncertain, unpredictable, unreliable, unstable, unsteady, vacillating, vagrant, variable, variant, varying, versatile, volatile, wavering, whimsical, cursory, ephemeral, evanescent, fading, flitting, fugacious, impermanent, meteoric, momentary, passing, short, short-lived, sudden, temporary, transient, transitory, vanishing, volatile, etc.

things i saw and heard in the rain: half rainbow over woman in a petticoat lowering her umbrella in the shower, cyclists, the cover of the brother's karamazov used as a book mark, wavy brown hair held back by shiny bobby pins, a kiss-me-i'm-valerie shirt ("What's your name?" "Valerie" "Funny you finding that shirt"), two men in orange shirts sitting next to one another, "Ah, so you're a generalist. You want to know what's going on and how we got here", "you're a triple seven, that's high spiritual, high consciousness", "I bet your walls are lined with bookcases", austinites cozied up together under the covered patio of spiderhouse - uncle tupelo playing, woman with pink hair and a truckers cap tranquilly sitting in the rain holding two dachshunds, a cell phone disguised as an austin chronicle, the ringing of the aforementioned cell phone, "Are you here for the puppet show?", "I feel like I've won something!", dachshunds barking at orange and white cat, a puppet show whose main character was a hermaphrodite, trees ever-crisp and alive in the rain.

I feel like I've won something, too.

Self-remembering

"Self-remembering never becomes a habit."

better

pillows in pillowcases, soft and safe. better.

Grumpy and nihilistic for days now. Not even cake and ice cream or drinking in the rain made a dent. Hopefully it is roommate related and thus temporary.

Moirae or Erinnyes

Three grey-haired nurses sitting on a bench outside the health center, smoking, feeding pigeons cheese puffs and white bread, laughing.