insomnambulant

nothing written makes sense therefore sound.

squeamish

The warm-weather reprieve meant that my furry friends went out to play but the chill of last night sent them running back into the house and I lay in bed listening to the scratching going up the ceiling, the clanking among the leftover pots and pans in the closet under the stairs, a knife in the middle of the kitchen floor, and my half-hearted trolling of Craigslist for new places to live has become a more urgent quest.

I haven't told my landlord yet because I have no idea when or how and hoped to leave the college-kid lifestyle of moving every year behind, but there are the vermin, and the small kitchen, and I can't walk to the next block over at night, and I get a new sex offender registry notice every few weeks in my mailbox which makes me more suspicious of these sketchy men hanging out in the alley that empties out across the street from me and the guy who wanders up the street wearing a t-shirt that says 'The Voices In My Head Don't Like You,' knowing that they probably don't.

I never used to be so skittish, but it's so painfully evident that I live alone in the almost-hood and I pick the streets I walk down depending on who's hanging out on the corner and how often I get hollered at. I wasn't raised with fear of the city, and I'm not really afraid the way others are, but I feel the vulnerability of being female, young, and unaccompanied too keenly here for comfort.

And then last night, I'm trying to plug up the holes in the apartment with steel wool, and stick some in between the window and the cardboard wedged in there and end up disturbing a nest of the critters that have caused me a month of sleepless nights, and I feel the squirming bodies beneath the cardboard as I'm trying to keep them from coming out of the wall and figure out what the hell to do and end up stumbling up to the attic to peel away the insulation and drop green kibbles of poison down into where I know they're swarming, and end up crashing at the neighbor's house. It's the first night in months I've slept like the dead. I need to get out.

bleak and bright

Strange dreams and scratching noises, the back screen door slamming, hoping that the engine revving outside my window isn't my car being driven off, wondering what that noise is in the stairwell, waking up to find a kitchen knife in the middle of the floor, I need to get out of here, and despite sea changes not so rich and strange, I am reminded of the love that I am surrounded by and that I'm not as stuck as I sometimes feel, that there are ways to survive and still live.

So I got introverted in the woods, taking paths arbitrarily based on bodies of water and groves of pine and birch.



The sun was fading ever so slowly and the golden light filtered down into the valley.



My mom used to take us here when we were kids to go hiking, and then me and one of the guy friends came up here late one night to climb the stairs of the overlook and it was so dark we could barely see each other and the forest was alive in ways that reminded me of childhood fairy tales.





I felt euphoric in the solitude, fragments of verse and hymn echoing, that though the wrong is oft so strong God is the ruler yet.



I never used to care that much about getting out to the woods, in part not having transportation for so long but I crave it now. Maybe it's living in a place of concrete and rust, needing green, needing the canopy of trees, and the inverse reflecting of the waters, a place that still feels primeval even with the roads on each side and the light pollution that obscures the stars. There is beauty even in the trees stripped of leaves, the peeling bark, the eroding cliffs adorned with ferns, the marshy lowlands. Here it is easier to get alone, to feel small in a way that's not crushing and strangely beautiful.

there can be no other means to the end...

A year older and I look in the mirror and the lines across my forehead and between my eyes get deeper, the smile lines at the end of my eyes more defined, and everyone's way more excited that I came into the world almost three decades ago than I am, and I'm able to distract myself long enough that it lifts the cloud of melancholia for a few hours before it settles in again.

There are feelings so strong that I feel paralyzed, even if I know they're not completely grounded in reality, that heavy sense of failure, of mediocrity, of trappedness, of being alone and unloved. I know it's not due to a lack of anything. I have everything I need and enough to share, and I lived with six roommates and dated people and felt the same as I do coming home to an empty apartment,looking at other places to live and feeling the economic constraint of underemployment, of wondering if life will always be like this, fighting off the loneliness, despairing over the creative arts in search of catharsis, the endless dark nights of the soul. I've done everything I can, and I don't know what else to do.

just to wake up tells me, hell I must be brave

As I watched desert warriors play songs of protest and assertions of humanity, the drone of electric guitars, the heartbeat catharsis of calabash and djembe, the voices drawn out and chanted, as the hippies and hipsters and boomers and the girls in hijab sway and clap. They've had lives I can't imagine and struggles I can't comprehend and I'm tired from being awake from so long and zone out with my eyes closed, taking in this sound. Desert Sessions aren't just for swanky stoner rockers, after all...





I wake up exhausted, staring at the ceiling, asking for divine sustenance because it's not in me. Exhaustion and depression, post-quarterlife crisis of conscience and existence, further torpedoed by monumental shifts of power meaning more frustration for yours truly. It's not that it's so bad, but just with everything else, with the pent-up frustration, I ended up in tears today, but thankfully there was class-cutting and city-wandering and spiritual introspection as therapy to put things back into perspective.



And Mia Zapata's fabulous cut-too-short punk rock fury. It still kills me that for all the female-fronted punk bands, the Gits don't get more attention. I loved this stuff as a frustrated art kid, and as I've gotten older and dealt with more suck, it's stuck for me.

the last minutes

Cramming the first draft of a paper, trolling for citations, a brief interlude in Pittsburghia with friends from the old days. We listen to Creedence and the Stones just like old times, watch hockey, laugh, drink, play broomball Clerks-style on the balcony between two houses, walk up to the overlook at Mount Washington to gaze over the glittering metropolis nestled among rivers and hills. This little tradition has lasted eight years now and what I love about this little crew of people is their openness to others, the conversations had, and the way that we keep cycling back into each others' lives every few years.



I'm thankful that others have driven and that I can sleep in the car, lulled by the sound of 90's tuneage, waking up the next morning in need of caffeine, still feeling somnambulant and warm.

And then it's back to the daily grind after the lack of sleep, as we debate kinder gentler machine gun hands in class and I say too much incoherently, but I just can't agree with seeing the world through the binary of men and women, and it means nothing to me. Was I ever idealistic about people in large groups? Even in my days of starry eyes I don't think I ever was.

And the last hour is brutal, piles of things beyond my control and pay grade and ability because I can't be magical and compliant all the time, and I find myself getting angry, feeling resentful being constantly patronized, trying to hold in the angry salt eyes until I can be out of this building because I'm tired, praying for grace to keep calm and put things in perspective, trying to be thankful for what I've got yet resentful for feeling used, though that's the way of life for the peonage. I guess we're human resources and that's what we're there for. It's the ennui of perky holidays and innate nature sneaking up, just two more days til painting and sleeping in and just being away.

next week, I'll be twenty-eight

I'm still young...



Age being relative, that is, the lines beginning to indent the skin, ten years of adulthood and how things have changed, the idealism burned away, the abstract raging against machines replaced by greater knowledge and subsequent despair, knowing that these cycles of depression and creative undulations, of faith and doubt, will always be there in one form or another, that there will be ways to continue to create and do so in ways that are ever more beautiful and well-executed and that despite living alone or in the company of others, even with an ever-comforting divine reassurance, there will still be some degree of loneliness. It's the human condition and I'm learning to accept it.

I always get depressed on the day of birth for no real good reason, probably some degree of seasonal bleakness and the onset of holiday consumerism (what's up black friday), and that nameless angst that always seems to hover. It'll be fine, I just need to get through.