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’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Once there was and once there was not, plenty of time in which to co-exist and extinguish the various flames while looking into eyes streaming with sincerity. Scattered showers cleansed the forests and motorcycles made love to popsicle sticks that glow. Droplets of sparkle-clean mountains made us laugh. Anguish and austerity, we barely glimpsed through glass globes.

I am blank ashes and soft, weathered focus and torrential outpours of sludge; ice in the furnaces of my history set alight through a blazing dim. And in the din of my fool-proof home, I want fairy lights for dinner. While in their soft calm, mechanical beasts swish glide down city streets. I take a crack at stabbing candor. I point and shoot, and miss them all running. I’m tattered pieces of cloud. You’re humid prayers for rain.

No childhood memories. I spent a few years systematically hacking away at what I thought were the bad memories, not realising - okay, not caring - that I was not only wiping the slate clean but wiping away any recall of said slate.

When I emerged from my self-imposed haze, few things were left. Those were kept alive through repetition and reinforcement. Pictures, oft-told stories. I let others choose my remembrance and bend it to their will, perhaps forge it in their own image. Did it really happen that way, I don’t know, but that is the way I recall the telling of it so that is the only possibility within my current reach.

I handpicked the finest recollections of early adolescence for myself, though. Years of raging angst pounded out in earnest on many a pretty face, pre-teen love affairs with nearly post-teen ex-convicts, brainless. Never a questioning glance at all those stumbling fumbles and foibles of a truly well-spent youth. And firsts: first drink, first smoke, first trip, first toke, first cut, first fuck (no not that one, the real one), first fall. Tiny merit badges of honour and courage and youth, for fuck’s sake, YOUTH! on my well-worn lapel. What? What’s wrong with that? Those who escape relatively unscathed tell the stories on which future memories are forged.

I’m afraid, though. I’m afraid that none of that matters and I’ve forgotten a detail of actual importance, something vital to my overall well-being, my survival. Because once I’d stopped purposefully hacking, the hacking didn’t stop. It took on a life of its own and now I can barely bring back what I said yesterday to take back. I’m great with trivialities. Phone numbers I’ve dialed twice, song lyrics I’ve read while singing along. Beyond that, memory is just a wasteland of unfulfilled longing.