Tuesday, August 21, 2007

living quietly in the universe, changing little and being little and seeming invisible.

i remember big silos across the armington sky's eye, cornfields and frightened wooden fences on both sides of us, as we drove down and down, end up in a old basement with cardboard posters of judy garland, naked lightbubs that looked damn fine, like trapped lightning, the whole room covered in a funny kind of thunder. i remember sue with us, mom's skinny friend, she had some kind of cancer and a tall husband. when she smiled she looked like a happy skeleton.

later in other memories i remember a short boy with a shaved head who talked all the time and would always ask me if i was a mute or something and his house was covered in stinky clothes and broken stuff, his mom would spend hours colouring in spider man colouring books and singing along to these old records with songs like "love potion number nine" and "midnight train to georgia" and their house was a ugly style of white living in front of a big long old field that had a tiny forest between it, and the kid with no hair was building weapon's in the woods and killing little things with it, rats and stuff, we chased rats around with a hammer sometimes and played jokes on his sister, then one day during a black out we found him in his sisters bed, naked and kissing her, his dad beat him up and i don't remember going back after that. his mom used to get her hair done at some fancy house in the suburbs and the colour of the house was the colour of the birthday cake at the supermarket.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

my mom needs some kind of operation and there gonna take parts out of her. i follow her around alot and sit in rooms with her and ride in cars with her and i mostly stay quiet, it's better that i don't say how i feel, it'd only make me embarrased and she might cry or something rotten like that. she's real nostalgic and nervous all the time, she tells me stories about arizona and other kids from arizona and lincoln, illinois. she tells me she loves me alot and her stomach hurts all the time.

two cornfields across from lincoln dairy queen, the state fair always happened, i don't remember dates or nothin, on the way i would bend over and see burned up worms, they get hot and stuck to the gravel and then they bloat up and pop. the dust at the fair made me cough alot and i used to steal things from the smaller kids around and watch the pigs get weighed and listen to them cough and grunt and squeal. they had one hundred foot slides and all kinds of candy and people giving away religious books. you could hear megaphones everywhere and i really liked all that screaming, i used to just walk around yelling and nobody could hear me because of all the megaphones.

i kissed my first girl when i was six, she was named tiara and she had nice clothes and brown skin.

jessie's older brother taught me how to say "suck my cock" in spanish and he would kill kittens and birds with a shovel all the time for fun. he used to smoosh a kitten and say fun fun fun, he said he learnt it from his dad. jessie's parents where junkies and all there ever was to eat at jessie's house was cornflakes. i remember going to his house all the time and it looked like a haunted house and smelt like trash and they were always watching the same superman movie, his parents i mean, they slept on the fold out couch and watched superman all the time. i thought they were dead once, but they moved. jessie's older brother taught us how to steal and break into houses and get into cars and let the brakes off.

sometimes i would hide in the weird alleyway behind our house all night because i thought the cops were looking for me and i would do drawings and hide them under a tree and practice writing letters to my mom about how i was innocent and the cops where liars.

i have been thinking alot about outer-space, my favourite thing to do is to cast my eyes at the clouds, cause at night they are a different kind of black, i like that because i didn't think black could be different from black.

i have alot of eerie old stories to tell and all, but how do i do it is the hitch. i hope that this is like a movie, really big and bright, like an arcade game or when you look at a lightbulb real hard and then close your eyes and it doesn't go away and it hurts your head.

Monday, August 13, 2007

my fear about death and god and people makes me think strong, lonely thoughts. i feel brave walking around in the dark when nobody is there. becoming less involved, attached, moving around the universe like a phantom or a silly ghost, a dumb kid in an ugly black chasm finally making it. making it to solitude and disconnection through movement. yeah, some kind of dream. some people write me and say they miss me, some strangers send me mail telling me i'm brave and beautiful and smart, some people hate me and make sure i know it, but when i climb out my window and look up at oblivion with all it's stars and planets and greek gods and modern myths, it all leaves me. and then once it's gone, like magic, ideas are everywhere, and they all belong to me, and i'm alone with them. no big dirty people, no stupid maps, you don't need a map when your making the world up right in front of you.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

we moved around lincoln alot, i have memories of sleeping in cars and waking up under powerlines with lightning bolts moving around my head and barry taught me how to piss offa the roof at night when mom was asleep, i would climb out my window and piss a hundred feet down into the dirt, but i called it "pissing on hell" and then i'd howl like a coyote and crawl back through into my bed with the ninja turtle sheets. and i used to give my pancakes to the neighbourkid across the way, past the bushes where dustclouds always seemed to kick up and he would eat the pancakes even with the dirt in the syrup and later he got cancer or his mom did, but they were gone either way. when i remember him now in my mind he seems like a boy made out of dirt and wax and fly paper and made some twine, very un-permanent and ready to die.

some nights i would take alla my clothes outta the dresser and pile them on myself laying down cause i liked the weight on me, like when night came down it came down on me really and sometimes i would empty out my pillow case and go and steal the tin foil bases of these tiny white candles mom baught for 10 cents a peice and i would go and bury them out in the back yard which was mostly dirt and i'd draw complex maps, including ideas and instructions of what to do with them, the ideas always ended with running away to join the peoria freak circus, except there wasn't a freak circus in peoria, there wasn't anything in peoria, except tired, ugly dogs and old men and gymnasts and factories. except i bet there wasn't that either but that's how i remember it is all.

Friday, August 10, 2007

the snow was getting to where it looked like a water damaged picture of snow, white in the middle and bleeding out into everything else, and my voice starting hanging around in the air like it was part of the wether and i walked past all kinds of brick buildings and play grounds and highways and bars and alleys and hookers and drunks and christians and junkies and all. i snuck into a house and most of the windows where black completely and in one room there was highchairs and cribs, some of them real broken, all piled up in the middle of the floor, the walls where stained and peeling and black and grey and brown and mis-shaped. i stayed in there all day writing cuss words on the walls and crawling through the cabinets. there was alot of dust and grit and when i got home i had to wash my hands.

and then days later, maybe months, i never knew much about time, i was at paul's house and we pretended to assasinate his dad through the window in his back yard and then we climbed the side of his house and jerked open his bedroom window to read comics on the roof and assasinate people who walked by. and paul told me all kinds of stories about his older brother and how he could beat up an ox. and we went to his mom's house sometime later and stole half of her disney land money from a giant plastic pig she was keeping it in, and we bought alot of gum in a brown paper sack and chewed it like animals in his moms basement after we snuck in through the small window that was foggy and not clear to see out of and we listened to his brother's rap records and called our teaches bitches and faggots and motherfuckers and cocksuckers and assholes and we hid the rest of the gum under the heater to keep it away from his dumb family and went back a few days later to find it had melted from the heat.

in lincoln, illinois all the grown ups seemed to be drunks and when i remember them now they all seem like film characters or something, but sad and empty, easy to kill somehow.

a time later when i was re-arranging my room, putting books in piles according to colour, i decided that i would just pack up all the stuff i had and go and sleep in the forest with the cobras and the deer and the bear cubs and the wolves and the ox and just cut out a living as an animal too, killing fish and growing fur, but nothing ever came of it, i couldn't get out the door before i got caught by my aunt eedie, who had diabeties and was real loud and hoarse in her throat, she sounded like a hollywood banshee when she would get to hollerin at me about something like running away.

Thursday, August 9, 2007

a persons ideas about time can make things seem short and sour, that's how it seems when i look back at all the howling and stomping and quiet and waiting and the illness and bad luck. god's dumb voodoo didn't work and in the end it all happened at once, everything just happened and now i am here, left alone in a room to think about the smog over new orleans and the magical properties of a rooster's claw and the mud by a riverbank where i caught a turtle. any of it, all of it. i wasn't born into feeling alone, but i learnt it quick enough.

me and the christian kids from next door made a fortress behind my grandmas house, i took comic books back there and used to tell the christian kids that i didn't need god cause i would bea the devil up if he ever came here and we had a neighbour with a dirt back yard and bastard dog who bit anybody it wanted and i used to make sport of jumping over the fence kicking it while it was asleep and then getting back over before i lost my ass to it. and her mom was fat and had alot of ugly boyfriends one used to be on her couch watching jerry springer all the time and she took me into this room of her house where they had a nintendo and the walls where piled up the sides with dirty clothes and porn magazines and trash all over and one time me and my cousin josh stood on top of grandmas car and yelled out that she had big fat titties and she went inside and then one of her mom's boyfriends came out after us, fat and stomping and shoutin so we let out into the corn field and threw things at him cause he was too fat to catch us.

it's a goddamned punch in the belly when somebody asks me simple questions these days, i gotta get outta here, i'm angry all the time.

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

staying still to watch things come and go, turn out the lights cause it's easier to invent things, shadows are only new animals that you haven't named yet, solitude is beautiful and so big and so lonely and lit up, but only lit up a little bit, even when someone comes to hold your hand and get nervous with you, it's hard.

walking around my back yard, thinking about the dirt and the big eternities at either end of my life and a girl i have a crush on, the other day alex made me smile and giggle because he made like he was trying to grab hold of the sky or claw it down over the steering wheel. what the hell am i supposed to do about all these ideas? is it right that i should feel rotten as hell if i can't explain it? these little thoughts, memories, these things that could happen anwywhere and do happen everywhere, they aren't special, words only bust them up, they make the hard stuff romantic, they make the sad stuff seem funny as hell or profound. it's the smallest parts of being alive that pull me apart, just when i am alone, ready to be alone and i think it is time to stop thinking about other people, it comes to pass that somebody likes me and they wanna spend nights with me sneaking around and laying low and writing in empty houses.

damn, i bet everyone you could name has sat alone in a room and wisht to think of nothing, wisht to want nothing, wisht to be nothing for hours or years only to get up and leave the house and realise that they were still something, to walk into a door and have people turn and look at him there, existing, standing there in perfect being, not see-thru, not made up and not nothing at all. this happens to me all the time and i am defined by the fact that i let myself be when i find out i still am. that's all it is that makes me who i am, the fact that i haven't stopped being him yet.

i can't wait until i am in a new country, alone, riding buses for a place to sleep, with nothing to lose, laughing at old thoughts of fireworks claustrophobically exploding in my dreams.

Sunday, August 5, 2007

mom's sick, she's knows me, she knows i'm quiet when i'm hurt. i don't mind her dying, she has lived and seen things, but she's scared and i can tell and this hurts me. she's such a strong woman, she'll probably scare death off anyway.

whatever kind of horror there was i always learnt to live in front of it and i think i got that from my mother and mostly having no choice anyway.

short segments of my past come to me as if i lived in the desert, i think of this time and all things seem to be worn down and pale, like pictures of the parts of my life that i wore out. the sky and the mountains and the dust and the people in cheap clothes all look like postcards of themselves. this could have been anyones life. the strangers in supermarkets look like dressed up dinosaurs, howling and eating stupidly, like violent jerks, so sad and beat up. there are little plants everywhere, growing out of the desert, but they all die eventually. there are coke machines and candy bar wrappers and statues about history.

i remember parts of hospital, watery colours and my body was always hot and you learn to live waiting around for someone to tell you how you can live. people i didn't even like gave me toys and came to see me, but it's always felt private, alone in the company of many. other people have nothing to do with what i remember about hospital and nothing has changed, i rememer visits from months ago, trying not to fall asleep, trying to stay quiet all day to have the energy to see somebody, being quiet, being alone around other people again. watch the light ebb and flow around, fragment itself, get smaller and eventually go out, then do it again in a few hours. get quiet because i'm hurt. don't move, don't speak, sit and watch the light go out, have ideas, but don't write them down, just have them for as long as you can.

Saturday, August 4, 2007

the things that gave me purpose and reason seem stupid. i'm alone and cold, all day i sat in an empty bath tub trying to read, but i kept falling asleep and the words seemed harder to read everytime i woke up. something about my bathtub makes me focus, but i felt so alone it was hard to think about other ideas.

it's all i can do to try and only exist sometimes.

indra told me a story about this house she lived in and the man who lived there before them fashioned opals and jewelry and all, but he killed himself and there was this box full of un-shaped jewels left in the house, but her parents or her grandmother, i can't say which, threw them out into the dirt and she used to dig them up all the time when she was younger. and i repeated in my head for a couple of blocks while we walked together "dust and diamonds." even though she told me they weren't diamonds, the way somebody remembers something is important, even if you just started remembering it.

i go for walks at night now, i make fog with my own breath and i pretend that i am the only one who ever got born sometimes, it's lonely, but only if i can't trick myself into thinking i'm the only person alive.

eternity is not knowing about time and not wanting to know.