down in me

the reason i’m here is that this thought was too long to tweet

was just thinking that i really want a greenbean casserole and an oreo cookie pie but a specific one, i think it was 96 or 97. me and my boyfriend were invited to our friend’s house for thanksgiving dinner. our friend loved gregory corso and me and him were putting a zine together. he had introduced me to bukowski and burroughs. he wanted to be a writer and i thought that was okay for him because he was jewish and poor and he had a beard. writing was never okay for me. i am latina and my stepfather laundered money for the cartel and my mom enrolled me in modeling school at the age of six. his mom used to clean the classrooms at school.

at thanksgiving the school made a ‘canned food drive’ and they gave her the cans and a big turkey and she cooked it for me and him and his sister and my boyfriend. it was the most delicious thanksgiving ever. we had like five kinds of pies, mashed potatoes from a box, a million casseroles made with vegetables from a can and a sauce of campbell’s soup with crunchy toppings of like corn flakes or funyuns and a massive turkey and cornbread and stuffing and that bright maroon cranberry sauce in the shape of a can. i remember thinking ‘so this is what happens to the cans collected by the food drive’

or something i don’t know. someone nice says i haven’t blogged so here i am, blogging. well, not because of that, i don’t know. just because i’ve been thinking that we are really all animals and consciousness (my favorite trait in humans, self-awareness) is a super cruel joke that happened out of nothing. here are two things i have been thinking about which i emailed or said to separate people and which are part of this idea which has been slowly gathering in my corners like a fatass dustbunny.

i always feel like i miss someone, but it’s someone i don’t know yet and i am not even being romantic. i think there’s this big hole in all of us that will never be filled, this longing. i think it’s evolutionary. striving to fulfill this constant need is how we ensure survival of the species. but on an individual level it just seems so fucked.

i think everything i’ve ever written has some longing in it probably. i am longing right now. i think longing is what everyone is trying to cure or fill with drugs, alcohol, with abusing people, with food. longing is the universal disease, i think. i think longing is tied into our biology somehow, like longing is the emotional manifestation of evolution. our bodies tricking us into ensuring survival of the species by giving us this abstract feeling of constant need that cannot be fulfilled.

i don’t know, i might be talking a load of crap because i am longing.

i wish to be a faster, clearer thinker that’s more able to elucidate but i guess those SAY NO TO DRUGS ads were right. if someone smarter than i has read a philosopher, or like dawkins or something, that expands on this idea of longing, or the idea of complex emotions being directly tied to science or evolutionary concepts or something, can you comment or email me? i am too tired to google something so nebulous or that i have such a tenuous handle on or maybe you can derail me to somewhere better or more interesting.

p.s. i like what tao lin is essaying recently. i used to think he was a little bit just hype but his essay on koko and his essay in the observer this week (but especially his essay on koko) have really moved me. i didn’t remember that essays could move me and i know i am late but i am reading EEEEEE and really enjoying it.

okay bye, i love you. because without you i die, you get me.

People getting soft and maudlin. People lining the streets with linoleum. The terrace full and wanting of people. Back when women were strange, their dewy limbs, their warm freckled faces. Women were statuesque, their fine burlesque, their hips caressing the gauzy insides of their flowing dresses.

You didn’t see them back then, those people. Those people queueing for their just deserts. You didn’t see the gushing rivers, the women scrubbing themselves in their long underwear in the current.

People freely kissing on the porch, their eyes upturned, their mouths pressed together, their hands held. Your friends all smiling. Your wild weathered insides, nose breathing gentle, a newborn fawn wet with placenta and bleating on new life.

one. i am three years old and there is a big party with loads of people and my grandmother and my mother love dancing so they are dancing and laughing and happy. maybe it is a family party. lots of people and i am too little. all i see is legs. i look for my mother literally to hide in her skirts and she’s wearing this blinding gold and diamond bracelet and a gold seventies dress and i remember everything about the fabric of the dress. it’s not bright gold, it’s gold like shiny dijon mustard, a muted, elegant gold, the tiniest sparkles woven through giving it its polished sheen. my mother’s warm flowery perfume, like blooming yellow roses is all i smell and her dress all i see and i feel safe and happy and beautiful and loved.

two. i don’t know if i remember this so much or more because it’s a yellowing photograph in one of my grandmother’s many albums, but i must be again three or maybe two, my hair is a bowl of golden brown ringlets someone poured atop my head and my eyes are honey wide and glittering and my lips are wetpink and i am sitting with my feet on the bed next to my dad’s big, sunspotty hand and i am chubby in that lovely baby way and i am wearing a soft onesie the color of a babychick, the kind of onesie with the snap buttons and the feet attached with the white vinyl for soles, and the cotton fabric is so warm against me and my dad is looking down at me and he is smiling condescendingly and i feel safe and happy and beautiful and loved.

I see you and your face is shook tonic water, fizzing, your eyes wet with drunk and I want to love you, I do. I want to brush the lint off your coat and pretend I say nothing but instead I make jokes and I see you, and your teeth you are showing.

in your face i do not care for i am happy. and what problem is it of yours if i take a tab or twenty-five, if i hustle in the nights if you are incapable of laughing anyway. a magic mistress misses the distance between herself and the furor of her pursuers. but i am not magic. i am see-through and tired and alone.

and it’s godly when you love everyone you meet. sick sweet when you feel the reflecting flesh and you think this is nice and everyone is good and we will all be happy in caring for each other. forever. when you are soaked up to the shoulders and no one can see you that is a good thing.

meanwhile my bark dries and peels and the promise of fruit is distant in the current. it can be spring or may or june but my pollen has ceased pollinating. i will flower given the energy to grow which may be never. i will invent a secret story and play it as my petals drift.

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.