dreamattack | a dialogue in pictures

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This is my job. This is my life. Evil taxpaying motherfuckers.

little doves, in my backyard. nothing makes me feel more at peace than seeing doves cozied up to one another in the trees; seeing them poking around in the grass, slowly wandering aimlessly in search of the occasional seed to munch. there has been a fat beautiful dove couple who have been making regular appearances at breakfast time in my backyard.

for Christmas, I gave the boys (the 3 wonder cats) a wonderful cat TV system. I installed a deluxe bird feeder on a pole just outside their window. yes, my cats have their own window. in fact, early last fall, I installed a super deluxe window perch for their outsideland-viewing pleasure. unfortunately, too many hours of all three of them curled up in one 2×3 foot space lead to a senseless act of destruction. their combined weight is approximately 50 pounds. the window perch is designed to handle only about 30 pounds of weight. the two opposing forces collided one morning at about 2:30am. I thought the ceiling was caving in. now, as the perch is permanently screwed to the rim of the windowsill, I maintain their perch haphazardly, by bracing it with either the laundry basket or a TV tray, whichever is most handy at the moment. poor babies — such precious dignity destroyed.

it’s so late … er early in the morning, actually. I have an appointment at 8:45am. ugh. and lots to do tomorrow, er today.

Sometimes I think I force myself to stay up to an ungodly hour because I have such an intrinsic need for quiet time by myself. Generally, this is the only time I can really feel alone and suffused by stillness. I crave it the way many people crave chocolate, or oxygen. It’s only when I’m alone that I can feel truly at ease inside my skin. Sometimes, in solitude, I even feel like I can slip out of my skin and feel the deepest core of myself breathe in great gulping sighs of relief. Such freedom is a rarity, and I cherish it. I hoard it like a selfish child. It’s MINE — touch it not. Noli me tangere.

“dream child is like a bad dream itself”
“dream child is hurt by ideas that cross the line of believability”
“dream child is what lewis carroll called alice when she was younger”
“dream child is “nothing but an embarrassment to the family”
“dream child is not always the one that is ultimately entrusted to you”
“dream child is rather interesting”
“dream child is truly precious and heroic”
“dream child is as impressive as dream master”
“dream child is calling on me right now soon i’ll be at sleep and away for a while i am the helper with the power of gods angry and ready to fight pain in my… ” (whut, whut??)
“dream child is a small girl who flies in a winged boat with her tame bear” < ---- my favorite
"dream child is right here with you"
"dream child is one of these“

5 new cds finally arrived in the post today - belated birthday presents to myself. Four of them are new Legendary Pink Dots cds (All the Kings Horses, All the Kings Men, Hallway of the Gods, & A Perfect Mystery) & the other is a new Edward Ka-Spel cd (Red Letters)

Didn’t go to work today. Just wasn’t feeling like work material. Still feeling somewhat crummy - how this cold wants to linger. It must love me. Instead of working, I slept til noon, and spent the rest of the day hooked by IV to my laptop, cruising the web for imagery salvage. Kind of a digital dumpster diving. I love google’s image search capability. I have a bug up my ass to re-design my webpage, split it into two and house it on two different servers: one nice, safe, friendly page for my family, one page for the rest of the world. I guess it’s mainly because I don’t want them to “run across” my journal. I prefer them to keep their image of me intact, if inaccurate. I’m not entirely certain why, but I really would prefer them not to have a realistic idea of who I am when I’m not busy being their daughter, sister, neice, grandchild, etc. The line that dances between the two personae is not a fine one. The times when it has accidentally blurred have generally ended with unhappiness all around. Shattered illusions, hurt feelings, high drama. Blah. Yuck. Not for me.

As I’m writing this, silly, whiney, clingy, mama’s boy, Ivan, has managed to worm his plump black body into a tiny tiny space between my open thighs, and the laptop, which is on a big pillow sitting on my feet. His chin is resting practically on the back of one of my hands, his left snaggley canine tooth digs into my thumb everytime I try to move my left hand to type. Occasionally he raises his head and looks up & back at me, with that imploringly devoted look on his face, his eyes scouring my face urgently for recognition. When I give it to him, he rubs his forehead across my forearm, lowers his head and snuggles closer to me. Now that’s love. Or maybe the laptop is the warmest thing in the apartment right now.

Off to bed with us!

Under the pines I ask the boy for the hermit.
“My master has gone gathering herbs”, he said.
“He is somewhere in the mountain,
Deep in the clouds where no one knows.”

Jia Dao (777-841)

maybe that’s my problem - besides the hormonal melange clotting in my underpants. maybe I’m trying to live the kind of life of which I’m incapable. my self-indulgent need to constantly over-analyze everything around me, to over-introspect - constantly worrying my faults like prayer beads, checking them to make sure they’re still there. it’s an onanistic exercise in pointlessness. and it drives those close to me crazy.

I don’t always think about things that others think about — the routine things that people need to think about in order to function normally in this world. I forget about simple things like peeing when I need to pee, going to bed on time, and brushing my teeth. I’ve even been forgetting to eat lately. I’m sure I come across as being thoughtless, insensitive, air-headed — I certainly don’t intend to be this way. I just don’t think about it. how easy is it to suddenly start speaking French when you just don’t have a knack for languages?

my head in the clouds, I belong out in the middle of nowhere, where I can write, and paint, and talk to myself and the cats outloud, and forget to clean the litterboxes for weeks on end. it almost seems as if the less time I spend alone, the more disconnected I become. sometimes I’m just a tiny cracked egg floating around in this giant clumsy body - the controls are written in a foreign language - and my hands are tied behind my back.

I’ve decided that I want to be a bird.

I sat and watched a birdy much like this one, today. She hunched her breast against the driving wind and rumpled her feathers out to form a great irridescent feather wall. She clenched her waving branch tight between scaly, spikey toes. She would no less bow to the wind as she would to my fat, horny cat. And she would do so without having to weigh the pro’s against the con’s, and worry about what everyone else would think. Her breast explodes in stacatto thirty-second-notes of instinct. She knows where her nest is, and doesn’t miss her children at night.

Feeling strange and floaty - like my head is a cranky helium-filled balloon floating around, bouncing against the ceiling. bonk. bonk. bonk bonk.

out of sorts in the brain. and headachey, two days now. the cold is still hanging around, bouncing between my sinuses and my lungs, reluctant to take its ball of phlegm and go home.

had a series of very strange and intense dreams last night. I almost feel like I didn’t quite manage to extract my self in its entirety from the space & time travel that my dreams often feel like. of course, the details are completely gone. irritating in & of itself. I’m just left with the strange empty half-memories of shadows - vague forms and cold shapes that suggest an understanding that quivers right at the tip of my brain, but lost. nothing but dull aftershocks, about as fulfilling as dry-humping. The comprehension gone, the cohesion lost. the frustration omniprescent. maybe I’ll find my missing pieces when I sleep tonight. have you ever awoken with the overwhelming belief that you may have answered all The Questions while you slept, but the instant you awoke, you forgot it all?

one hand clapping against a felt-covered wall.

something gnaws at me, twisting my insides in dull metaphoric knots - my emotions pooled in confusing, unspoken tides around my ankles. I have wet my mental pants. I cannot put my finger on it. the feelings slip and slide around like squid in a string bag. I don’t know the names, or won’t acknowledge them, or even fear them. so they hide. I’m a big neurotic bag of goopy things.

- - - -

My fat cat is trying desperately to fuck his little brother. he’s even yowling in frustration as poor Skinny Boy refuses to be the bottom this time. I swear, there’s not a testicle left on my cats (3 boys) - but they’re constantly having little power-play mounting sessions. None of them really know what they’re doing. They just get aroused, begin to sing an enchanting (LOUD) “I’m-coming-to-fuck-you” song, climb aboard the nearest sleeping cat body, chomp down on the poor body’s scruff, and proceed to look really confused. No one manages to park the train in the tunnel - heck, sometimes they aren’t even trying to screw the right side or end of given brother bottom. It would be amusing, if it weren’t so frequent, loud, and didn’t tend to mostly take place when I’m trying to sleep.

- - - -

it’s all probably just the murky spinning ropes of my female hormones as they crest, my ovaries barking out useless, ignored orders to the rest of me - biological shrieks falling on very deaf ears. it’s all in my mind, or my vagina. it’s always one or the other.

I know I’m driving people nuts. I’m reluctant to just shrug off my moodiness as PMS. While, yes, it’s only my second period in nearly a year, and yes - I’m sure the hormones are having a hard time readjusting themselves to being present in my body - it feels unfair to just use it as a crutch, or a blanket permission slip to be a raging bitch.

it’s the way he looks at me sometimes. not just now, but other times, too. like I’m an alien and he has no idea how he managed to meet one, let alone marry it. it makes me feel more and more like a non-person. I know it’s unintentional on his part - but I feel it anytime we encounter a difference of opinion.

I dunno - it’s probably something else that’s all in my head. it’s getting pretty full in there.

I hope it snows tonight. I miss snow so much. but even more than that, I really don’t want to go to work tomorrow. I need some time to reboot my brain.

praying for icy, snowy goodness to come and lock us safely in our houses

and going to bed.

feeling all soft and sentimental … a little wistful, actually. pensive. introspective. leonard cohen has that effect.

he’s asleep in the next room, the cats are fat furry splotches zipped tight into their tight kitty coils, nose to tail, tummy to back, spooned together like three scoops of ice cream, leonard’s “young” voice, two octaves higher, croons to me …

I haven’t had good luck with birthdays over the past thirty-one years. spent all-too-many-a-time in various forms of unhappiness: alone, vomity, humiliated, screamed-at, banished to my room, tossed down the stairs, the loss of all-too-rare friends. Two of my grandparents died on my birthday — #16 and #25 took my paternal grandmother & grandfather — the same day, 9 years apart. There’s something to being born during the time when everything is turned in upon itself, seemingly dead. It got to where I dreaded my birthday-time. I would shut down, emotionally, from whenever Thanksgiving appeared through, and including, the 12th of January.

Capricorn. Ruled by cold, stern, oppressive Saturn. I’ve definitely fulfilled the reverse-aging tendancy of Capricorn. I was a stern little child — chilling and disturbing. Awkward and uncertain. Emotions that run as dark and deep as ocean rifts. As I’ve aged, particularly over the past few years, I have finally been allowed, or allowed myself, to recapture the light that I lost. Well, perhaps not lost, but certainly deeply quelled. The springing, bounding frenetic passion of the child unleashed upon a shiny new world has been a recent and welcome adaptation.

I’m walking new ground now. The past several years have progressively warmed and brightened the light in me. This year, the icing on the cake, so to speak.

Thank you kb.

I was supposed to hang my art show this morning, and the cunt who was supposed to take down this morning decided that it was too busy in the cafe (where the gallery is located) and didn’t want to disturb the people, so she’d sneak down there later and take down her show when it was less busy. So, I wait, and I wait, and I wait … and around 4pm, she finally decides it’s a good time to get started. Of course, it takes her an hour to take down her show. I find out during that hour, that she sold another two pieces in the last half hour her show was up. This makes her total sales for her 2 month show over $4500!! She kept her show up on purpose to milk as many sales as possible.

So, I schlep my pitiful artwork over to hang my show at 5:15pm (I’m supposed to leave work in 15 minutes) … and find that the State Democratic Women’s committee is about to meet in the cafe. Goddammit. So, I set my resolve and quietly dive into the crowd, attempting to hang, balance, and label my show — by myself — because everyone who volunteered to help me has gone home already. Oh woe is me.

So, the cunt stops through the gallery on her way out, and gives me this faux-shocked look at all the loud women around me, attempts to look contrite, and whispers that, gee - she sure wishes she could stay to help me. I openly glared at her, but calmly said that I didn’t need her help.

I’m still sick from this wicked cold I’ve had for the last week, I’m so goddamned tired, and cranky, and pissed off. It takes me an hour & a half to hang my show, whilst ducking as quiestly as possible inbetween the fine cackling society ladies.

And then I get home and try to get on to voice my rant — and I can’t get onto the site - for hours and hours.

And hours.

*sigh* mutter mutter mutter mutter mutter *scowl*

and we don’t even have any stupid milk in the house.

I think it’s time to douse my fury with codeine-laced cough syrup (nummy) and slip into delicious unconsciousness.

shalom.

burny eyes … how they curse me …

art done.

bed sirens to me. sofffftttt biiiiiiggg beddddd.

bed wins.

tomorrow will bring lots to do.

paint
paint
finish painting
drop off laundry
cough
deposit
frames
wire frames
napping
cough
artist statement/titles/etc. to bahbeck

and surely something more …

why in the hell am I watching Montel Williams? oh yeah, because he’s a Strong Black Man, and I respect him. and I have a goddamned cold. in my head, in my chest, in my sinuses. never so enjoyed chicken broth and crackers as I have the past couple of days. I think it’s starting a slow migration out of my chest, tho. I’d cross my fingers if they didn’t ache so much.

maybe I’ll go on a chicken broth and cracker diet. has to be healthier than the Survivor “rice” diet B. jokes about starting.

need to be painting — but I’m drenched in sicky apathy. fuckit. I’ll get it done, I always do. maybe I’ll pull out the crayons and make sticky sicky-head crayon art for my art show. title it “when trapped on the couch - the artist hallucinates” and be toasted as an artistic genius, instead of the drooling mono-cellular being I am right now.

whee-haw. bring on the soup.

sommes *cough* miserables du jour

silly made up french words.

been spinning downward into a hoarse, giddy, excruciating chest cold. made it through my brother’s sepia-toned wedding, our mother’s self-induced drama, 7 hours in a ‘91 Acura from Austin to Little Rock, back home to three fuzzy balls of miserable joy.

B. & K. went to great lengths to make me feel better, unfortunately, the cold is currently stronger then they are. trying to convince myself that the lower back pain that started this afternoon is just cold achies, and not my evil kidneys.

have to paint, frame, and hang something-teen paintings for my “library staff” art show, which opens in three days. was able to lay down backgrounds for 12 pieces this morning before the couch and delirium sucked me in. we’ll see what falls out of me tomorrow — don’t have to go back to work til Wed.