Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Kurt Vonnegut

Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.

Stephen Hawking

I’d like to thank some stars who popped in on my life for existing and also for exiting with containment commentary on how cutting or scornful I am. Thought about that and how ugly sarcasm must seem to the Lord’s purer children. How cynicism must smack the holy look off a sinner-turned-saint’s face. Hail Mary and Namastain.

But wait, isn’t this world choking at the brim with paradox and hypocrisy? Don’t purer people show their shock of a thing that undermines them in some way? Their tribe values or their group morals or their own voice? Could this form of criticism be specific to these shiny stars? I thought about how Oscar Wilde boldly wrote out of this absurd world. Cracked some books and realized he might be a twink less vicious than I have been but then that’s apple trifles to tangerine dreams for the Victorian era. A look at modern writers suggests that I could actually stand to open the control valve. The best part of this query was discovering Christopher Moore whose excerpts brought me some much-needed laughter. Looking forward to Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal arriving in the mail.

I was approaching misery before starting our AES section. Audio dudes just don’t talk to women and I’m almost 30 years into the field. I handle gaslight well by now and can remove a few heads to get to the subliminal message in the Russian Doll of it all. But getting to the international arena gave me access to many brilliant thinkers in my field and now I can easily choose stimulating conversation over apathy or criticism from people who just like it simple. I just need to find a pinch of that with a small writing circle. I really like some of the poets on Twitter but what I really want, from within my tank, is to finish a book I’ve worked on then put down then worked on then abandoned for the chance to work with people. Finding a writer or two for mutual support is challenging to do while barely leaving the house. And there are potential pitfalls it turns out like synchronic loops of suffering that start with feeling understood but can end with feeling estranged and alienated until your shadow returns to harvest a clearing. As if life weren’t absurd enough to begin with. I hibernate, mull, thaw, get up, then fight and reason for the energy to dig in anyway so some other surreptitious blamer can ready the rug to pull out from under my summoned enthusiasm. Meanwhile there is still more than enough in the social environment to shake a fist at. Absurdity driven by one materialistic branch or another.

I recently ran into an old acquaintance who said I forgot about your ridiculous sense of humor and I miss it so much. Reread that with a British accent, please. I wanted to reply I forgot about your awkward interjaculatory narration of the actual conversation we are having and I miss it more than Poppycock.

There’s a bit more to that story and my thought reaction that I won’t get into but what scares me is that I may get to the point of reacting out loud to subtext. It’s all absurd, you’re all absurd, and I am absurd. I have just the character for heroically summarizing this sensation:

Let’s go do my thing and hang out. Sound good? I happen to know a good therapist who lives out by Mirror Lake. Let us flit there on my whimsicle. You can sit in back and steer, but I get to ring the bell. Ding! 

It’s such a lively day that even the trip to see Amus Thal will lift your spirit. Spirit, do you need a lift or will you meet us there? Let’s take the scenic route and plus I want to avoid that mucky slump where the land plot twists. It may be a faster route but you gunk up your tires and the whimsicle becomes heavy. By the time you ride back through, more guck cakes on the old muck and compounds the problem. Then by Cross Leg Rd, you’re basically hydroplaning downhill and missing the best part of the trip.

for Amus Thal

Do you ever get the strange sensation that you might be having telepathic sex? No? Me neither. Sure is a pretty day. Yep. Ok, have fun. You too. Yep. Roger that. Yep. Bye! We’ll see ya. Yep yep yeppers.

Allow me to give you a little back story. I was born. 25 years later, I adopted “George of the Jungle” as my theme song, swapping the word “George” with “bored.” In truth, there’s no end to my fascination with plant life.

But enough about me. Why is it so crippling to tell someone how you feel? Just say it: “I miss you and I’m sorry you treated me like a fucking groupie even though we expressed a connection and capacity deeper than the average chat,” said the chit. Chit chat paddy whack chitty shitty bang bang.

I suck at this. Say it: I love your heart and accept all of you but stay away from me because you are a bull in a psychic china shop. Nope.

Perhaps I should give up on this and just go groom the show ponies. They’re up next and will be pooping out poetry prompts. I want to get involved as I get a splash of dopamine with every Like. The overall theme of this year’s word circus is AI. Are we scared as a hole society of losing our programmed ability to feel if we rely on AI to chat about the weather? Do our institutions need to buy different hoops for student ponies to jump through to obey their tedious grail tasks for that golden diploma of soft skills mixed with hard skills mixed with viscous sun-baked skittles? Will a chicken cease to peck at a button if their reward center can no longer be stimulated and how does the emulated pecking of artificial intelligence interfere with our own basic sufferable human right to peck at a button or to one day become a button or to dare to hope to dream that one day we might rubberize the chicken. And what’s next, roosters roaming the garden with their slick oily plumage, rutting and crowing at the crack of dawn like a sight to behold that we get to enjoy while we wake when we please and a lab-grown cell burger drops down from the air vent as the chickens also live and you fought that unmerican meat it at first — those science nerds think they’re so smart with their pansy murderless magical utopian conspiracy to steal our guns — but you’re told you’re very happy with your choice and something about the sanctity of life and there was that bit about a high psi of absorbable proteins that makes this delicious amino burger taste reeeeal good. Is that panko? Jessup? Hand me my beak so I can get this dang breading off and see what the tarnation is under this bun!

I need therapy. Because that’s a new concept. Can you be sued for breaking a therapist’s mind? What if Hannibal Lector went to see Becky Green who just got her certification and Becky said problems and answers come from within. What part of Becky would you choose to eat? Personally, I don’t like to see anyone suffer, so I’d probably mustard an epiphany emoji on my face and float out of there with great relish before pulling over on the way home to cry by the side of the road.

Anyway, hamburger bun, will AI ever mean we get to be more free? Our studies certainly show that people seem to be more productive when given freedom and that happiness is a marketable commodity. One of our biggest findings from that study is how paranoid people seem to be about being monitored. 

It is hard to revisit vulnerability with someone who didn’t notice your efforts or even respond when you said directly what you needed. How many more years was I supposed to sit around and giggle while the men did their important writing? It is almost as if I had no choice but to clear the prairie, Pa. I’m pretty sure it was prescribed fire but am fuzzy on who wrote the script. I’m not proud of walking away and I’m sorry if that made you skip a beat. It’s certainly not fun to try to just forget about someone you care for and just push them out of your limbic zone. It’s like Judge Doom trying to impersonate Arthur Fonzarelli up in here.

Boy do I hate what constitutes a mating dance these days. Y’all are so rehearsed with repeated stories of who you are, what you love about yourself, what will bring you around to what you want to be; riding that addictive neurochemical high—god damn you look good—in the mirror—before it crashes into lovesick depression with a hangover you gotta boohoo through before you can do a long evolution-of-man crawl back to society using the ever-focusing energy of anger. It is a nice sword and it’s really too bad you can’t take it with you. Unless of course the reaper hands it to you then you are the reaper. I just said that. Come on, society, pitch in here. Speaking of pitch, your music sucks. Pulse beats are decent but the monotony is numbing: untzs untzs untzs untzs bitches hoes untzs untzs libido-o-o-o-ooo untzs untzs animal untzs untzs gonna ding dat ho

We’re all so turned on that the hyper-lubrication is actually making our endocrine system ignore its other duties. Luckily our prayers are not unheard here in the 9th circle. And you even get a cup with some string to communicate with Master Skroll up on 3. O great Skroll, I pray to thee. Text me spark and spontaneity and subtlety of tone. I offer thee as sacrifice this hermateacherstudent whose sex has been flushed down a symbiotic drain. O enter me, great Skroll, through my eagerly open authority gap. Dent me with your confident lol. Frolic through my vetiver lumps and bring me sweet limerence with your psychotropic anemone. Trauma-bond to my suffering coochakra with your deep sorcerous DM. Wrap your chiromanic palms around my vulvatic throat and take me to that brinky veil, so that I may actualize my petty fear of death in worship at your feet. Fuck fuck fuck me.

And fuck you, too, she whispers, so no one can hear her or proceed to torture her with their one-dimensional ingrained Scorpion lyrics: The bitch is hungry / She needs you to pull / through the drive-thru so she can get her sack of scorn / Lol / Laugh Off Lung / titter like schoolgirls up on 6.

… Yeah, so I miss you, but this whole slight of hand thing is fooling no one. Gah, so close. Perhaps Mr T can help me explain:

NOTHING’S BLACK AND WHITE, FOOL!
PUNK-ASS ONE-SIDED CONVERSIN ACTIN LIKE YOU HURT
DONE TRIED NOTHIN LET ALONE EVERYTHIN
AIN’T TALKD TO MY GIRL IN YEARS, SUCKER!

*clap clap clap* Thank you for that, Mr T. That was lovely. Hey, call me if you ever reboot your cartoon and need a kicky character whose career is parodying love songs about their dog.

Also, if anyone I know reads this, please keep your concern valves in the OFF position. Don’t turn my writing and expression into some kind of ‘real’ moment that essentially censors me to a shelf where there are knitting needles and makeup tips. I’m not saying I’m some kind of artist or smart or have unlocked the afterlife or anything. I’m just letting it out and am way too naive to know what I’m saying. You have no idea how long it took to appear this naive. Thank you, have a nice day. And for gosh sake get out there and enjoy this spring weather!

Not sure why I wanted to try to maintain another site. It is nice to come back and see some work posted here.

I can’t stop thinking about three themes, but am trying not to blow my wad. By writing about them before they become lyrics or poems. And it’s nice to do something with these cycling thoughts beyond stacking a piece of paper or filling another 13kb of text on my laptop. Do I try another writing group? Stand in line to read on zoom? Get influenced by the words of others and spot patterns or even trends. Ooh, trends. Give a firm smile on feedback like someone likes one piece more than another. Might I then use said feedback to cherry pick before patting myself on the head? Feel downright precious about the loverly evening before nodding off into a snug and smug dreamland.

Between zooms with dozens of students and meets with committees every week, there’s really only one person I want to see on zoom. Maybe two. It’s pretty much one. The other is a hungry ghost. Unus Mundus. My game face hurts and I’m tired. I feel like a fool. And never know who is talking to me in the way that I really speak. Few can really hear me. Cassandra parts her hair down the middle and rises as Persephone. I am a limbic writer. It does not matter what that means to anyone. Humans who go through extreme childhood trauma are chemically marked. And also statistically resilient. Even if you live in the self-help section, there will never be a return to normal or contentment with exclusively normal companionship. It’s chemical. And we are unusual flowers.

Amongst said flowers, I can feel a ruminative longing pulling at me and have to be careful with that tug. It is recommended to allow two minutes to think about a fixation, but there was no other parameter to that formula. Is that two minutes a day or per four minute time increment? Is this metric out of 0.0666667? That last neighbor of the beast is minding its own business but would love to help. I could really use some guide rails with beauty and terror taking up so much lung capacity. Mostly, I need a heads up if there’s a monster who might turn me to stone. So I can wipe any kind of regrettable look off my face: ugly scream or hiss, backslashes for eyebrows over bulging sclera eclipsed by o-gape lips. Or worse, some kind of unsuspecting slack-jawed mouth-breathing look of wha? I don’t really want to be immortalized as a punch line. As perfect as that sounds.

Unusual flowers can bring you joy like no one else, but they can also take the joy away and leave you rattled. I know, that’s my bullshit unmet needs, and I tried hard to set up some dumb rules as if I could just avoid any kind of sloppy handling of my super-glued psyche. One thing after another without knowing anymore where I begin or end and, blammo, I did get knocked out. Creatively wilted. I used to have many methods of healing, but it’s been quite an adjustment going from living alone most of my life, before I felt I could be a worthy companion, to having a 24/7 watch party while trying to keep my mind toons from showing. Somehow I haven’t ruin my marriage but did wave goodbye to many familiar ways of coping and being. After great loss: nil and pain and outrageous acts, challenging death, foot up on the hill, casting scream songs over battlefields; it is not hard to notice my kind there, swathed in rusty sawteeth and phantom arms. Can I drag you or devise a pulley. Can I save you without being killed?

Flower doesn’t get it. If I were a teen, I’d have had Conan The Barbarian open its skull and make me a useless soup bowl. …Conan from the paperbacks and even the comic books, not Arnold. No offense, Mr Schwartz; you looked like someone’s Conan but those overacted blathering sounds were cheesy. Did a couple of bees fly into Ray’s Romano’s mouth moments before he tumbled down a hill? WUHWUHWUHWUH WHOOP WHOOP BULGIKOOOOW. His propellor arms whirling but never quite regaining balance before a final thump. The end. Wait, no, he lives: YAAAAARGLLLOOOEY. [End Scene]

Those sounds ruined the movie. I don’t mean to be mean, but the name “Destroyer” means something to me. You are Conan The Destroyer, now fucking act like it. An archetypal warrior quenched by murderous rage and vindication should not sound like a vaudeville routine. This is serious business, despite your outfits. 

Um, I’ve been working hard on a plan for getting some coping methods back and that plan is coming together now. I figured out how to subsidize a space where I can be alone and hear my inner voice come through it all with me. Reunite. It has been work to prepare, but I am there for longer and longer moments of stories I’d all but abandoned. I can let off some steam by releasing the vocalizing maniac that formed my voiceover and singing skills. It is freeing to have a bit of privacy again to bask in the type of silence I can’t get from a day of audio work. And speak in tongues a bit.

this is a limbic poem
it rattles around kicking up dust
moves the furniture, cleans
up, throws out old rat traps
and all such mistrust
summons magnetic
iron and oxide
leftover rust
blows it to
the wind

scents evaporate faster
in humidity and rain
its memory is etched in there
somewhere
sighs for sensory
association. Makes my fingers
draw receptors through your skin
long and knowing vestiges
draggingly lettered, lovingly intended

please stay longer through this cold day
and fading heartbreak