poukledden

a text adventure.

For all I know, this has been passed around a lot. If not, enjoy!

Someone in the complex was just blasting "Start Wearing Purple" by Gogol Bordello. How deliriously awesome.




Writing tonight, words coming slowly like trying to remember a dance from long ago, from before legs ghosted into phantom limbs. But there are words, at least, and the phantom limbs tingle with the promise of life. If only I can remember the dance, and the art of not cutting off one's own limbs.

A new post at skin hunger: The Red Box.

Nite, you lovely, lovely people.

Work, same old same old, not a bad day, a bit slow, boss in a good mood so an easy swinging shift, all in all. Home to eat and then sit at the computer and write for a while, the first time in a while I've written cold at the computer instead of scribbling in my moleskin. Odd feeling, after so long, like when you put on an old pair of glasses you wore for years, but haven't in months. Productive, though, a story actually forming under my fingertips, enough so to cause momentary feelings of giddy joy.

My favorite Jethro Tull song:


Cough. Yes, I have a *lot* of "favorite" Jethro Tull songs. And right now I seem to be a hitting a mood where various bits of music old and new are speaking strongly to me, and Tull is one of those. Ian Anderson has always been a bard singing to the pagan within me. Funny, though -- right now, it's Tull and Nick Cave and Emilie Autumn and flashes of Yat-Kha, Gogol Bordello and Calexico. My muses are varied, what can I say. I mean, hell, I'm posting to my blog with a Tull video and a subject line straight from Cave. What the heck?

After a long day at work, a happy hour or so writing. Exhausted, bleary-eyed (as much from allergies as sleepiness), but typing. Right now it is strictly For Me, wandering stream of consciousness stuff. Explore, get my feet wet, rediscover a joy in words.

Odd, the thought storms that erupt. A pondering on the smell of the Volvo leads to a series of memories that lead, in turn, to the realization that there's a suite of machine smells that signify, to me, death. And remembering sitting in the car before it came to life, and the silence inside was so deep, it was like you were in a void outside of the universe, only  a few car creaks and pops to break the voidness. Sounds from outside muffled and dull, the silence humming in your ears until you wanted to scratch at your skin to get it out.  And then the low roar of the engine would break in, and the radio would turn on, and the universe was human once more.

The only semi-decent story that I've ever written was, not surprisingly, one of the few times that I opened a part of my life and looked at it, not to dwell but to acknowledge, understand and transform it.

I find it remarkably hard to talk about my life. There's a host of reasons -- shame is one, because for years it seemed I did nothing but hide and collapse slowly, so that I see it as an emptiness that has no fertile ground for imaginative work. Ray Bradbury had his childhood and his later, active life to work with and build from, to create all those amazing stories. I had, what exactly? Which is, of course, bullshit, something I've been slowly gloming onto lately as I think over the broad strokes of my Life So Far. If I want to play the Ray Bradbury game of nouns that have powerful associations for me, I can think of a bunch. The Mall, the House on Twilight, The Campfire, The Empty Desert Lot, I could throw them out by the dozen if I really got going. I have lived, whatever the mishaps along the way. And boy oh boy, let me tell you, I have felt.

But I still deal with the secret despising of my life, and all those missteps and ugliness and you name its. And on top of  that, there was a simple act of hiding, not acknowledging it, pretending it wasn't there. Denial as survival strategy. I got good at that in high school, for values of good equal to near brushes with self-destruction. I got, frankly, good at lying, to myself as well as others. Honesty, when it comes to my life, is hard.

I've been thinking a lot about my life lately. Not nostalgically, not with self-pity, but just thinking about it. And all those Bradbury nouns are tumbling out, things that invoke hurt and pain and joy and fun and silliness and hope and sadness and disillusionment and you name it. And I'm aching to tell it all, sing it all to you folks, and to the world. I want to tell you about why I really hate malls, about what Cheech and Chong have to do with Wilderness Survival Badges. I want to tell you about the Donor, and not just the bad bits, but the good bits, too, his awkward attempts to reach out to me (driving to IBM post-thunder storm evening, the mountains around Tucson a ring of fire; him taking me home after getting my wisdom teeth out). I want to tell you about The Volvo, and about my friend Joey, and the empty desert lot we played in, and how much it hurt, years later, when they put up houses there. And the Creek, and the coyotes on cold winter nights, and poor, lost Smudge, whose short life seemed to be the tragic acting out of the House on Twilight.

And it's so close, I can feel it, it's churning inside me, so many feelings and thoughts, so many random memories of my life suddenly suggesting stories and ideas wanting to burst forth, and still that block there, so strong that the simple act of trying to write a livejournal entry about my hatred of malls turned, tonight,  into a spinning in circles as words fled the scene in panic. That old defense, that old self-hatred, still trying to strangle the poetry in its crib.

It's making me dizzy, let me tell you. And it's a thing I Have To Do, because if I can't write as Gregory, I can't write. That's the lesson of the One Sorta Good Story.

So I spent several hours today wrestling with an idea, or set of ideas related in topsy-turvy down-the-rabbit-hole ways. Tried to find words. I had this idea that it was going to be a creative essay or some such thing, a bit of a meditation on, well, our old Volvo, liminal spaces, and family shit. All yada yada deep personal impress the chicks with your sensitivity kind of stuff.

Got nowhere.

I mean, I have all these ideas jumbling around related to this, but I realized the route I was trying to take was just not one I could take. Didn't feel like me. Mostly, I think it's a matter that I think so much in terms of Story that my best route is to fictionalize the heck out of it and see what happens. I think, in part, that I'm so used to *not* talking about personal stuff, that my tongue gets tied up. Or fingers, as the case may be.

Of course, this could all just be because I'm in the mood to write something weird and supernatural, maybe the kind of story that Suspense Radio Theater might have done in one of their more Fae moods. I mean, there's got to be something supernatural about a rust-colored Volvo station wagon with a singing gas tank.

Most of this thought storm came about because of the realization, vis a vis liminal spaces, that my sister and I grew up on Twlight Trail. I'm amused that it's taken me a decade and a half (from the time I started studying Anthropology and got introduced to the idea of liminality) to have that hit me.

In other good news perhaps indicative of a thawing of the creative chill, or downtime, I've been in over the past year, last night I realized the direction for another story. Interesting things, it turns out, happen if you turn John Keats on his head.