down in me

i’m giving up on writing and living and stuff. seems pointless that the sun keeps coming up every fucking day. even though you can barely see it from where i’m standing there is a sun and it keeps coming and making light of things on the daily, making light of loneliness and self-esteem and lack of empathy and etc. i want to get a friend that doesn’t mind to fuck me when i am sad. i want to have a friend that doesn’t mind to. do you have a friend? what’s he like? i want a girl to give me a lapdance like i’m a boy in a story inspired. will your friend sing to you when you are in the bath? i want a friend that calls me names like baby and shitface and love. if i were your friend i’d call you and i’d mean it. i want to move to ohio. should i move to ohio? seems like shit is popping in ohio. i guess i’m at that point where i’m no longer a secret and i want to be serene, you know what i mean? i’m sitting in the sun because the other chair is occupied and that’s okay. fucking sun. just kidding there is no giving up. there is no london and ohio there is just death and life and everything is the same as everything else and i am you and you are me so you should really stop writing this now and go do something that someone thinks is worth something maybe.

you used to be excited to receive an email from me. when the counter said (1) you immediately thought that maybe it was me and a small dolphin would do flips in your stomach. now you groan a soft groan and click away until there’s nothing left to click and then maybe you roll a cigarette and come back and click on my email and give another soft groan while you skim it before clicking delete.

this is how i see you sometimes when i think about myself. how many words i’ve thrown at you people. i think that if i were a giant crater my face would definitely glow like a pale moon. is pale moon a cliché? i don’t care.

did you read the insurgent yet? i’m not going to shutup about it ever.

i am excited about a puppy story i wrote that is forthcoming in elimae. i have never said the word forthcoming that much before. i get why people use it in that way, feels vaguely hopeful. like maybe we’ll actually never die. yes i am declaring that the word forthcoming is good and just and only pretentious in the way that attempting to live life is a pretension, that is to say, existentially.

when i think about elimae my body feels like a giant bowl of mashed potatoes that are really creamy because your mom mashed them up lovingly with an extra pat of butter and splash of milk. i want to eat me with biscuits and gravy and fried chicken and grape soda and throw up double rainbows all over america so that guy can come hard ribbons in his pants again shouting WHAT DOES IT MEAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i want to make reactions in you.

sometimes when i scratch myself i want to open a big hole in my chest and pour vodka lemonade in it and pump it out through all the pre-existing holes in my face.

oh my god i just wrote a long blog post! i feel good about blogging lately. feel like i am single-handedly reviving ‘the personal blog’. what? don’t eyeball me that way.

ok, ok, maybe i am not single-handedly reviving blogs. i just like saying the words single-handedly, it makes me feel driven. i actually want to be ridden like a pony.

i think what i’m saying is that this guy is also writing and sharing again and that fills the heart-shaped balloon in my chest with nitrous oxide and makes my brain tickle and my fingers go numb.

finally, in honour of the ani smith down in me blogging revival of 2010, here is a poem:

Some of the burns are to the point of scabbing and I feel intolerable

there is a fuzzy brown bear sitting on my sternum
he sings things and paws me but it doesn’t help really
i wish we never stopped writing emails
emails were the most hopeful
i lost something when i tried to gain something
all of life seems so difficult
like washing my hair was an accomplishment today
raising eyelids will be an accomplishment tomorrow
even though i have done it almost every day now
it still feels like forever
this turmoil
is good for blogging though, right
except i lied
my hair is still dirty
i implore you to feel me regardless

I feel like I want to know something about you, to know what is about you, your limbs, but it’s really more subtle than that, this something. To know what it’s like you in me. Perhaps because you’re the first to show me some kindness, some kind of. And me, I am very compassionate. I see those things, behind your face, I talk and when I say things, I try to make them real things, and I don’t think about them too much, I spill them from my gut, lay them before you and think you’re smart enough to pick through.

I like it when to see you watching me, the things I do, the odd things and normal things, but in my way I do them and to know that you notice, you see that I see. But it’s so much more subtle than that, even all this description gives it more weight than usually it has. In truth, it’s not a spellbinding, or lightning or love, or a hundred other fifty carefully selected words. In truth, it’s nothing, less than nothing, a minute of someone’s forty-two minutes, a minutiae, a dead pet, a lost friend, a split-end, etc. Something everybody has, sort of knows, but doesn’t pay its due attention. Maybe love is just extended curiosity, desire just a question, a need to know. But what happens when the questions are answered is that the reason for divorce.

Hi,

I have been going through a thing. But my god I miss you. I think about everything we don’t share and I feel crazy happy. Or neutral. I am remiss. It is easy to back and forth all day with nothing to show for it at night. I wanted to tell you that True Blood made me homesick. I recall my hatred and it feels like love of a sort. Always was an escape artist.

I meant to do these things more: travel, write, write, travel, blow bubbles. I did the last one again yesterday (thank-you Jereme). I go through cycles where I forget to play, to be a kid, to masturbate with a strange hand; skip to my own lou. I don’t know what a lou is, but I think I need one. A man sat to my right and sang a song. I loved him more in fifteen seconds than I’ve loved myself in twenty-nine years. I’m thirty-one.

Thing is, I don’t remember which arc of the circle I’m on, I just continue, round and round. I fear the judgement often gets to me and gets me to stop what I want. Even where I felt most free. I now feel like wasting time, like losing fights, but not hopeless. After all that looking over my shoulder and freaking out I’m just calm or numb, something uninspiring. Like the quiet after a hurricane: fresh and battered. Ramshackle torn. Salty. Immobile. This isn’t justification, though. Just a thing to go through. Like everything.

I must wrap up for now. I must tend to more mundanity.

Love,
 Ani

Lights are off save screen glow and the room is five below optimum. There’s a baggie of musty moist greenery on the coffee table like richly soiled fresh-cut clove grass times 50 billion. It makes my tongue curl and water. Also water bottles, fresh and cool and a bowl of rock candy on fancy sticks of bamboo and the most comfortable chair ever. The most comfortable chair ever facing an old Nintendo game system, the chair’s arms snaking controls round mine to show me button combos and pistol aim to pixelate our eyes. Well, my eyes because you’re a comfortable chair and chairs have no eyes. Comfortable chair, fetch me my bobby socks and pull them over my cold toes, you rock. You make whirlpool feelings good in my belly and ears. You make glow in the dark trails appear to follow everything.

I put the dinars in your mouth and we go off down the boardwalk.

How can we justify each other’s nightmares if we’re both too proud to throw them out to watch them flail in the open water. I put more pesos in your mouth. Third-world hungry currency for your world-weary country throat. You never did like to travel but you sure went far. We exchanged time and excuses and a little side of care, but not too much.

My meter’s very regular unlike my period, but I’m not supposed to talk about that either.

My voice inside my head it sounds like an old hep cat, it sounds male, weathered and torn, a crappy photocopy, like a long ago tree rustle; sounds like a man reading out loud from a hidden book. It sounds like anything but.

I’m out of cash.

Do you think this American time telling machine accepts universal rebel currency?

I think I’m going to need a calling card.

The pitch. You know, the pitch. The pitch for the book man, the pitch the PITCH.

Fuck.

What are you doing? I don’t know. Exchanging a momentary thrill for a lifetime of office christmas parties and crackers. Not sleeping. Eating poorly. Drinking in moderation. Where are you going with all of this, you had it in your mind, had it so crystal there once. Everything you would say, how you would say it and when and with what emphasis on which word - and the right words. My god the right words. Words clean and true and unmistakably genuine. Felt. Understandable. But also open to positive interpretations and with rooms for discussion in houses of concern.

The fucking pitch, man. You can’t talk.

Okay, listen. I’m just a girl so I don’t know much about these things, right. But it seems to me - because I have been doing some thinking - I know crazy, right? - funny fuck - it just seems to me that the way we are going about this is all wrong.

You can talk, all right? You can talk now. Toucan sam, three bottles of aspirin, that bicycle you let them run into the lake, the video camera he took while you were out getting him breakfast with that video of you trying to show your friends how to be cool on acid. Your mother’s reprehensible face melting distorted. The time you threatened your stepfather with a glass bottle and how you would have killed him if he hadn’t backed the fuck up.

God, you would have killed.

For weeks, this idea in my head. Big strong guy, light features, white shirt; he leans over a girl, a brunette. Places a large hand on the crook of her neck and it nearly covers her shoulder to ear. Soft he pulls her to him, she willing. They kiss. Surprised and pleased by her ready compliance, his hand releases her mid-kiss and lingers there, in the air next to her ear. Like a magician, savouring a magic trick, an internal ta-da. This idea - this scene - in my head for weeks, but I couldn’t recall where I’d seen, which movie, what video, whose website burrowed so deep. Twisting and turning I then remembered, oh, yes. The girl was me. And the kiss was that kiss. That same one. Revealing different facets of that same kiss, like a buzzard circling a brilliant cut diamond, turning it over and over in my mind.

Hi,

Thank you for writing me. Sometimes, when I’m reading your words, I press on my laptop screen to make the light ripple and pretend I can dive into the electric sea and reach you. I have to stay content with listening to our favourite bands and reading about your misadventures in the Pacific Northwest. I drink cocoa and smoke continental cigarettes. You know what problems I have with contentment.

I have been thinking a lot, you’ll be surprised to learn, and I think I have figured out why so many women of our generation are seemingly bisexual. It’s not sexual attraction, it’s jealousy that craves empowerment. I think this is true for a fair few and unfortunately, it means our dreams of an androgynous, open-sexed utopia will never be fulfilled thanks to our own nature. We’ll have to dream up alternate fantasies again one day soon.

I have also come to the conclusion that men would be better if they had snouts. Like bears. And maybe big paws, too, though I am not as sure about that as I am about the snouts. I have thought about snouts a lot and it makes very much sense to me. The word snout makes me think of Russian army generals in a sea of white snow with their mink fur hats. Add a snout and you’ll see what I mean. For some reason I imagine the snouts of bears are more beautiful, more pure and clean, than those of dogs, but you know how it feels when you’re lying on the floor and the dog sniffs your hair and neck and behind your ears?

I love you truly. Please don’t leave it so long before writing me again.

Yours,
 Ani

We navigate through the wild life in each other’s gardens, like a symphony that’s missing certain, essential instruments. We touch a wild flower here and dodge an ornery bee there, but we don’t get the aerial view, nor do we show it. Where once there was green grass, now sits a hardened slab of concrete, entrenched. Some nooks in the garden shine with glorious brightness, while others are drenched in shadow. In some well fertilised patches, all kinds of strange flora grow; others are barren or worse. But we won’t talk about those. Not now. Not yet.

Because you have, your own means, your own way, all your own. I don’t know you or I do to some extent or no extent, but I appreciate you, wholly and without reservation, for one reason or another or a combination thereof.

You are the most quite tender soft beauty girl alive! Well, the fifth most, anyway. I give you a dildo called Christian Bale and you tell me it’s a mathematical equation of fact.

I know, but like, who cares, right?

I’m glad the temporal association to this particular aural sensation is a downturn statement of superbly low intensity. What I mean is that it’s intensely low. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t mean that at all.

But their description of her shaped my idea of beauty; an idea that would endure in me for the next 30 years. They were fuckers, they were. But that’s another time, for another time, to be forgiven and relegated to the box of abstract ideas remembered fondly and vaguely forever.

I suspect I’m not seeing the right colours. There have been clues, but how to know for certain.

I was created solar, seafaring, sanguineous. Carved from embattled men, rallying cries and rape. The product of colonial tiles set in the sun baked bones of a well-structured terrace. My salty tears were used to water the crops, raise the tides of the dusty river and pound the white linens clean. My earthly nature robbed; the moist black earth ripped from my lush, fertile grip. I’m rainforest flights of red blue-green, large-beaked and feathered. I decorate decay with lashings of emeralds and gold.

On a breezy night, on the veranda of a cabin perched on the side of a mountain, I lounged on a multicoloured hammock while an olive boy kissed me. He pretended to be shy and pressed his lips to mine, gently concealing his eagerness. His baby skin chin, baby smell, babyish. My baby fat cheeks, pale-plump squashed against his lean face. I inhaled coffee grass, baby hair, muddy mountain goats and slept with my hand in his.

I tried to recreate my hammock lain dreams some time later. I lay like the dead, fingers tightly interlocked over my breathing corpse stomach. Turkey vultures circled crying overhead like horny men. Within minutes, an intrepid sparrow took a shit on the side of my face. I ran into the house hollering. They wanted my body, swinging warm in the colourful threads, flanked by pines and common garden snakes.The next day I took the hammock down forever and recoiled from a beetle on my way back inside. I’m western concrete, earth-devouring and misspent youth.