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Okay. Breathe, breathe, breathe. I am standing on the shore facing a tidal wave.

Or, even better, I am a rubberband that is stretched much too tautly. Little plinks pull me down and I vibrate, but eventually I am just going to snap and strike out in futility.

The past three years have been a practice run. A drill. Simulated combat under controlled circumstances.

This is not a drill. This is the war.

This is the year of the tiger? I heard that weird things happen during that. I'm looking for full moons and swinging tides to explain the chaos, because shouldering it and not asking questions is not enough any more. I'd rather find an external source, some smoldering mysticism to blame. Until then I have to content myself with placating internalized falsehoods and picking my cuticles.

This is war, right? We fight. We fight. We fight.

We arm ourselves, kick and scream at the wicked things, and hope for the best.

i feel ya buddy

remind me

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3. Mic check.

You ever hear a song that makes you feel like a damn hand puppet? Just like someone shoved their hand up your ass to make ya sit up straight real fast?

I heard her and sat up straight:

Hey, Jesus, What Gives? We Miss You! Come Back!

I used to be afraid of very few things. When I was a child I pretended to be afraid of swing sets and falling out of moving vehicles, but really I was aware of how brave I was. I would ride horses. I would climb trees. I would get lost in the woods.

As I got older, taller, bigger and less outspoken, I started developing other strange fears to replace the old ones. I was no longer comfortable with the ocean pulling the sand from beneath my feet as the waves retreated back into the sea. It felt to me, like it wanted to take me with it. The idea of the moon’s gravitational pull, tugging back the ocean to expose its tide pools and thoughts and feelings, little living secrets, made me nervous.

Similarly, I stopped cloud-gazing and staring at the stars, which I used to find hopeful and beautiful. I was on a friend’s ranch one time, and looked up, out of the absolute darkness, and saw so many stars I thought that’s all there was, that I was in space, alone, hurling along like some kind of a sci-fi nightmare. It felt like suffocating.

We are taught to require a modest house in a modest neighborhood, where children can play and trees are sequestered into neat, attractive rows. Sometimes, when I’m driving down over a hill and I can see a basin beneath me, I remember that all of this used to be underwater, and there they are, those houses that stubbornly stick up on the hill like unwanted barnacles, dominating the landscape.

We are born red-faced and screaming, and we stay this way- dominant and needy, pure emotional little wrinkly beings until we are ruler-slapped into submission and put into little boxes that are full of boundaries and rules and then given our inbred, inborn self-centeredness that We are all that matters. This world is ours for the taking. Dinosaurs died for a reason.

In my backyard, there is a crepe myrtle. It is feeble. It’s little blossoms constantly fall, as if choosing death to escape the heat, and they fall to the ground, where they are trampled, or they choose death by drowning and float into the pool where they are ultimately sucked into the filter or scooped out by a net. When I was a kid, I used to pluck the big, resistant ones off a different tree that grew near our old house, and then I would turn them over, little pink frilly dresses, and play ballroom with them. Sometimes these little princesses would go on adventures in magnolia-leaf boats with an acorn captain, and they’d sail down the wild river, doomed to wander the seas eternally.

The poor crepe myrtle in my backyard is so tired. It’s tired because it doesn’t belong there. He was put there on purpose, to help break up the monotony of the concrete and rock, so he’s manicured and planted. I can’t help but noticing the exhaustion in more of the inappropriately placed plants in Texas. At some points in the summer, you look outside and see brown grass on the median, brown trees, gray-smoggy-ozone-warning skies, and from inside your artificially cold car, it’s like winter. When you step outside, you feel the hot air hit you in the face, it’s a lie, all lies.

There is a park near my home that is a swath of land in between neighborhoods that I believe was made into a park as an afterthought. Or perhaps to raise the values of the houses. Nonetheless, there is a “park.” That over there is a “river.” Behind you, behind the fences, you can see trampolines and Irish setters and the occasional abandoned piece of plastic childhood. In this “river” there is a “waterfall” and you can see the little hints of pressed gravel from the tired water running down unenthusiastically. It is not there for nature. That park doesn’t exist for conservation. It is there so people can ride their bikes and run and plug their ipods in and sweat along that concrete sidewalk, more proud of their loss of calories than their commune with the outdoors. The sun is dominant, punishing, and the park closes at dusk, so you can’t even stick around to stargaze or stare down the moon if you wanted to.

Once, on a dare with myself, I watched an eclipse on the internet, out of morbid curiousity, to see if I could handle it. I was so terrified, even as I was sitting in my protective house, aware of the computer, and it was broad daylight. When it happened, in that little box playing on my screen, I lost my breath. It was magnificent, but in a terrible, apocalyptic way. It doesn’t just look like two massive celestial beings matching up- it looks like a damn hole in the sky. It looks like a giant hole in a big black sky, and we’re all going to get sucked up into and spit out into nothing, nowhere, the great beyond. It went on forever. I wildly imagined that he was keeping the sun, that we wouldn’t get it back. Then it was over, and we were done. It came back, of course, a beaming reminder of the divine to shine anew.

I am now afraid of very big things. I can no longer swim in the ocean, and when I’m in my little pressurized cabin gazing at lift off, I can only stare at the dropping sky until I get dizzy and then I shut my window, shut my little world, plug in my ipod and become nothing. Our solar system (please note my overconfident use of the word “our,” we are so self-centered) I find to be impossibly perplexing. I am afraid of big things because I have come to terms with our inevitable irreverence. We are insubstantial. We are not only endangered ourselves, but as an overconfident race, we are quickly using up our resources and damning ourselves, our eternity to a less glamorous fate than we intended. What are we waiting for? I once fought with a friend, who quickly defended the human race, as the beautiful optimist she is. I asked her about Jesus, and when he was coming back, and when he did, what she would be expecting. The second coming of our dear lord obviously equates the apocalypse, so is this what we are waiting for? Even those with the Great Hope Our God are waiting for the end. We’re all waiting for something, for the light to turn green, for the morning to come, for our Prince to come, waiting in the wings to go onstage, or waiting for Jesus to come back and take us away from this place. That must be why we are using up all we got while we’re here.

I have a more practical view of the matter. We will be undone, our songs unsung, and we will neatly be replaced. We will return to dust. We put our dead back in the Earth, and she eats us up; we offer our bodies so she can get that carbon and iron and nitrogen and calcium, yum, taste that sapid flesh. As far as the parts of us we can’t see-that electricity that makes our synapses fire up and that ever-elusive soul everyone’s going on about, I’m not sure what happens to those. I suppose if you have a God you can trust he’ll take care of your luggage, make sure you get it later after you’ve touched down in your final destination and de-boarded, but as for the rest of us, we’re all just floating along, sometimes bumping into each other and experiencing momentary touches and connections, but for the most part, we’re alone.

I am afraid of very big things. I found a word recently- chromomentrophobia. Fear of time. I am not afraid of the physical prowess of the great beyond, and I am not even afraid of that stinging salt water itself, but more or less the notion that it will be there long after I am. My inevitable path hurtling along towards mortality terrifies me, because it means I won’t be around to see the end. The second coming. The Big bang. Armageddon. Nuclear Holocaust. I am disappointed, because I just want to know how it ends.

ce soir j'ai mes devoirs à faire, vous savez la routine

I wrote the following on the back of a take-out menu at work a couple weeks ago.

I live in a city now. Growing up in Mississippi I used to lay awake at night and listen to the absence of humanity; I would instead hear the ever-present crickets and the swishing and swaying of ancient tree branches. Sometimes a dog would bark out his frustrations into the open night and rip up the silence. Once there was a whipporwhill outside my window.

Next I lived in the squished suburbs of Texas, which held a constant stream of car doors slamming and smart business suits clattering up to their front doors. I used to lay awake in the early mornings as the chain of cars started up and began the backing-out-of-the-driveway-ballet.

Then I was in a dorm way the hell on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line. I heard routine mowers and I heard the distant dull echo of empty voices on television, and always, always, ripples of laughter in the hallways, part of an ongoing joke I was never in on.

Now I live in the city. There is no single discernible sound, just multitudes of overlapping voices, alongside the constant rumble of motors and horns, growls of trucks, the sirens screaming injustice against the night, bicycle bells trilling for attention, and sometimes a dog barking, but here he's speaking out of turn. I'm a part of something much larger now, some grand wheel in motion I have no control over. I am a part and I am apart.

long time no see

I am revving my engine. It's hard for me to write papers, especially when I live in this busy city and there are so many things to distract myself with and so many little details in my home of which I obsess over...and the rain is raining and the couch is calling and I just want to zone out in front of an old black and white movie.

I have to write a paper for my philosophy class which kind of makes me want to pull my hair out. One by one. Isn't that a disease? Anyway.

My nails have gotten too long. It's becoming difficult to type. You can always tell when the school year picks up because I'll chew my nails all off in order to type faster.

My philosophy paper is on love. More specifically, Plato's Symposium. I'm listening to sad love songs and putting my ear to the ground to try and figure something out. I chose to write about the discourse of Aristophones, which essentially states that the reason we seek out love is because we were once great big beings mushed together into one and then ripped apart when we got too strong and Zeus felt threatened.

Like this:



I loved that movie when I saw it in high school. I should rewatch it.

We are too nubile to take on this assignment. We don't really know love yet. Most of us are unbruised still.

My original thesis was going to be something about the "physical implications" that Aristophanes has "enumerated" within his discourse so as to illustrate the "tangible manifestations" or our "perpetual search for love." I think I'm going to change my thesis statement to "WHY?" instead.

Ennui

I need a back rub real bad. I've been working ALL DAY EVERYDAY, you know, like a real grown up.

I'm like a real person now. I commute to work, I eat with real silverware (alone), take care of a pet, update excel sheets, spend exorbitant amounts of time in front of some type of electronic screen and therefore have entered the suburban despair of adults that is in stark contrast to my evident youth. Ugh.

I'm so bored, y'all.

It kind of dawned on me last night as I was sitting on the floor, folding clothes that I need to mend. The t.v. was blaring nonsense and I had done nothing with my afternoon/evening.

I am bored. Like, identity-crisis bored. Like....chop-al-my-hair-off or call-ex-boyfriends-I-haven't spoken-to-in-years-bored.

I love summer. Don't get me wrong. I just have been spending too much time alone.

I can't wait for Sanders to move innnnn.

Time's up. Going home.