Fuck That Shit, Little Nightingale: Let Me Show You What Love Is.

Coffee in hand: pressed, sweetened and delivered by hands that should surely be in the business of hand modelling.

Fever Ray* is playing loudly in the other room (the bathroom, technically, so that all audience members may enjoy it).  A copy of Morrissey's autobiography, a gift from a thoughtful boy, sits on the end of my deep blue comforter, his iconic tipped chin taunting me to pick it up.

Things are beautiful and blooming slowly as they should be.  I picture a rose opening, slowed to a speed that would require a full year to reveal it's glory.  Simultaneously, and quite in contrast to what I am experiencing,  I keep thinking of Wilde's story of  The Nightingale and the Rose.  If you've never read it, and have a slow day today because of the holiday, check it out.  It's brief, beautiful, horrible, and has something to accept or reject within it. Give it a read.

(pause)

Here's the deal, folks:

When you want something, go get it.  However it can happen, and especially if it requires some lovingly sneaky and/or diy tactics.

I can never express the power of simply being around people who treat you like the kingqueen (Yes, the combination of the two words:  Minus the connotation of empire; plus all of the connotation of luxurious costumery) that you are.


be well; be loved

k.

*****

*=Fever Ray is the solo project of the woman from The Knife.  I've been into it again, lately.  Here's the track that just finished- although all of it is pleasing. Fever Ray-Triangle Walks

Candlelight From Within Red Glass (The Time Capsule of Memory)

8:04 pm; In my favorite cavernous bar. Elton John's Your Song just came on over the speakers playing here, and with it, the most vivid imagery of the last two minutes of a few hour long drive from long ago.

Pulling up after an endlessly curled and narrow path supposedly for cars, to reveal a driveway.

Moss. Forest. Deep green black parted to reveal a strange and crooked beautiful castle disguised with white paint, doilies, VHS tapes and antiquated cookbooks.

The beginning of a weekend that is engraved in my mind for beautiful and horrid reasons, both equal in their weight.

I bled so much those months. Every time you would do something awful, I would start to bleed.

Somehow it makes sense that the entire weekend the pulse of a hounded rabbit haunted my throat, relieved in syrup, intermittently, with the deepest slow of meditation. 

Do you know that when you left that night, and came back thinking I had stayed because I wanted you it was, in truth, because upon your slamming of the door, it began again. I ran to the bathroom because I could feel the blood coming. And it kept me there. It filled the white porcelain of your bowl. So thick of crimson against it's ivory hands.  

It's all so sad, now. The carpet of that castle looked like dried blood, and it would be roughly a month until you decide to slit the throat-down-to-the-gut of that memory.  Looking back, I can see all of the soaked walls. How could I not see it then?

Light within red glass: A light glowing from inside this body of blood.  As if my entire body wanted you away from me. I never told you that the bleeding started the day that I met you.

Oh, it has nothing to do with hindsight. It has everything to do with the truth hidden in plain view.  The jewels hidden in the closet as false as anything I held in my hands those few nights.

How strange it is that our bodies know more than anything we can think or feel. The bleeding stopped the night that I left you. 

But that weekend the pizza was warm and somehow, within that, there was still a love that existed- malnourished and acidic as it may have been.

All feral animals begin to trust by virtue of food.

I am no exception.



(link, here, to Elton John's Your Song)

I hope you don't mind
that I put down in words
How wonderful life is
while you're in the world.



**

Title: Catholicism
Image: Closer
Non-Fiction Source of Inspiration: Steve Stern's The Memory Box of Pinochet, historical trilogy
It is my father's birthday tonight.  This, too, comes as no surprise or lack of inspiration. 

Hymn of Disappearance

Libraries are churches.  They are tornado shelters.  They are not-quite fallout bunkers.

When I am scared, panicked, or lacking in the faith required to continue, it is where I find myself.  In any country, in any city, in any language.  The feeling is distinct from that of bookstores: There is no selling happening, here.   It is sharing, loaning, borrowing.  Questions are created with three times the speed as they are answered.  My pulse quickens at how much information and beauty exits under one roof. There are posters encouraging people to read, and to learn.  The phrase "life long learner", "the people's university",  and "right to privacy" are common place.

As a child, I would dive into my curiosities with nothing more than a slight blush as I nabbed a title from its place in the Dewey System.

Ghosts, the occult, dreams in the 100s. Religion in the 200s. The arts in the 700s. Literature, poetry and theater live in the 800s. Nothing else mattered to me, although I was vaguely aware that technology was in the 600s.

100, 200, 700, 800.

Over the years, these numbers have served as my emergency contact information.  They have replaced the memorized phone number of parents and neighbors. They have stood in for crisis lines, prayer circles, and the emergency pull chains one finds dangling from the ceiling of hospital-room bathrooms.

In times of distress, I look for the icon for LIBRARY (block person reading a book), walk directly into their doors, and stand in front of these very ranges of numbers.  In doing so, I know that something will salve me.

Change my mind.

Distract me.

Engage me.

Intrigue me enough to shake what is haunting me, or to give me lesson enough simply to understand it's beauty.



-k.

Heaven Rolling Off the Top of an Eyelash

4 AM in a warehouse very far from home. It's cold and my eyes have that insanely-late-or-insanely-early feeling of strain and sandpaper. Yet I am excited. Cold, my fingers burn a bit, but excited.

One of the things I love about my job are moments like these. Being forced out of bed at ungodly hours to travel to an yet unseen destination and end up flirting with the shop steward dyke with bleached tips. Swoon. I will always have a thing for Teamsters.

Lately, I've been shedding a particular type of inhibition that has always vexed me. While I have always been a sucker for adventure and for taking chances, there are areas in my life I tend to play it OSHA level safe. Regulating and over thinking. Padding and keeping away from open flames. It has to do with brains and intellectual vampire-ism. At times I get shy persuing someone's brains and insight because people tend to read it as sexual interest when it is not. (Certainly, both elements may be present, but here I'm referring to intellectual or life skill interest only). Over time, I've become much more conservative with my leaps towards learning from people who specialize in something I'm interested in- although it is my preferred way of learning- because of their misreading of what my passion is about.

Nothing feels sadder to me than someone going from telling me about their knowledge and insight to trying to make a pass at me. I feel betrayed, somehow. Like when someone tells you they love literature, and then you find out that they don't even read much- they only said it because they thought it would make you like them.



--k.


(title: you know, like when a raindrop hits your top eyelashes and they keep it from going into your eye.)

Cut the Conversation, Just Open Your Mouth

"If she had ordered me to throw myself down then, I would have done it! If she had said it only as a joke, said it with contempt, spitting on me-- even then I would have jumped!"

 -F. Dostoyevsky, The Gambler

It's opening time. The scent of dry cedar is mixed with just-below-frozen air. I've been obsessive as of late, and it has been as enjoyable as warm wax upon a wrist.  Fyodor and his dirty knees: How can I help myself? Ever since I came across that tiny book that was part of a mini library of classics, I can't stop reading him.

Am I the only one that reads Dostoyevsky like the big, glorious bottom that he was?

About a year and four months ago, I listened to Dostoyevsky's tale, The Gambler, as an unabridged audio book.  I ended up recording a change purse of excerpts from the narration. They were such deep displays of submissive desire.  It was incredible, really.  Yet not entirely surprising.   

It's Polina, it's all Polina! Maybe there would be no schoolboy pranks if it weren't for her. Who knows? Maybe I'm doing it all out of despair (however stupid it is to reason this way). And I don't understand, I don't understand what's so good about her! Good looking she is, though. Yes, it seems she's good looking. Others lose their minds over her, too. She's tall and trim, only very thin.  Seems to me you could tie her in a knot or bend her double.  The print of her foot is narrow and long.  Tormenting. Precisely tormenting. Her hair has a reddish tint. Her eyes, a real cat's. But how proud and arrogant she can look with them.  

Four months ago, when I'd just entered their service, she had a long and heated conversation with De Griers one evening in the drawing room. And she looked at him in such a way that later, when I went to my room to go to bed, I imagined that she had given him a slap- given it a moment before- then stood in front of him and looked at him.

That evening, I fell in love with her.

(pause)


I mean, come on.

And how gorgeous to describe someone by the quality of their footprint: That a footprint could be, and is, tormenting.

Incredible.

I close my eyes and tilt my head back.

(longer pause)

Sometimes, when people ask what, exactly, a bottom is, it seems so hard to explain.  And yet, this inexplicable leaning that a person may have has the instant ability to quicken a pulse and smudge want so deeply across a face.

Bottoms amaze me all the time. No matter what it looks like from an outside or constructed eye, it will always be the bottom that has the actual power in the relationship.  Tops would be nothing without their bottoms, and bottoms will forever blow my mind with what they want to, and will, do. 

"Well, yes, yes, to be enslaved to you is a pleasure.  There is, there is pleasure in the ultimate degree of humiliation and insignificance!" I went on raving.  "Devil knows,  maybe there is in the knout*, too, when the knout comes down on your back and tears the flesh to pieces..."

(longer pause)

I let my chin drop back to center space, and open my eyes slowly, and take in the room.

Oh, surely this says nothing of me or of Fyodor.

Only that I would like, very much, to be lost in a forest with him.  Simply to see what would transpire.

 

Beauty and pleasure to you on this first night of December,

-k.

***********

*=A knout is a multi-tailed whip that was, as I've read, used in Russia to flog criminals.

All images: Calyx tumblr
Title: Lyric from Fascination Street/The Cure
 All italicized text:  The Gambler.  This is a particular translation of the text. The exact passages, shown here, have quite different translations in other versions.  So strange to think that in the other translations, I would have barely anything to connect to.  I will cover my eyes and pretend that this is the most exact one.

(We Live Half at Night)

6:27pm on the evening before Thanksgiving- I'm listening to The XX and the sound of the dishwasher running in the kitchen of a house that is not mine.  I've lit three candles, placed them strategically around the room, and shut off all of the lights.

(November is the month after that in which I tend to think of him, but it is this month that he will be coming to visit.  This week, actually.)

I've been feeling protective of myself as of late. My life. My doings. My constructions of accomplishments.  Is this strange? It is toward no one in particular.

I've been thinking in mathematical terms, lately.  Summing things up.  Dividing things. Subtracting. (Not multiplying. Never multiplying. Some do. Carrie just had her baby today.)

Unrelated, I am thinking of what I had wanted, in a moment, for Thanksgiving this year.  Then, I simply stopped wanting it.  And here I am, in this warm house that is not mine, in candlelight and the reassurance of the dishwasher.

Upstairs, a conversation of smiles is being woven between a long distance sister and her brother.

-k.

title credit: part of a lyric from The XX
photo credit: Logan White

*****
Upon the suggestion of a film genius friend of mine, I recently watched the film Night of the Hunter (1955).  I read a bit about it first- German expressionist in style and, according to a number of famous film types, the film introduces Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), as one of the most memorable villains of all time. The use of light and shadows (and hilarious use of animals) is absolutely gorgeous.

If you get a chance, watch it.  If anything for the underwater scene of a dead body that is breathtakingly beautiful and unforgettably creepy.   Although I won't spoil that scene for you, I will give you a taste of some of the shadows here.

So That's the Kind of Little Devil That Crouches in Your Heart, My Lad

Last night I dreamt I was caught in a flood that was pushing through the streets on an unnamed city.  The water was filled with blood, shards of glass, and photographs of bad memories.

Light would catch upon the glass and refract through the water as I was tossed beyond my strength.  The sopping photographs and their freeze-frame atrocities rushed past me, as if pulled by an underwater vacuum.

Slamming movement and arms askew as I wondered whose blood- and of how many people- it was that I was struggling through.

*****
Title credit:  A partial line from Dostoyevsky's The Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov

I'll Suck My Tongue As a Remembrance of You

My nails are the color of wine-almost-black.  It makes me think of the last bit of wine left in fancy wine glasses sitting on tables and by kitchen sinks after a party.

I've been using a soap that smells like almond croissants and butter. I stay in the shower too long because of it and, when I get out, I crave the type of pastries that melt in your mouth like a silk, edible ribbon.

Tonight has been one of candles, polished wood, ink, and paint.  Violins and pianos have been filling a room with too strong of heat- the type of heat that places dust in your lungs and the deepest thirst in your throat. The door to this room has been a revolving carousel of both unexpected and experienced visitors.

The applause that bursts in between the songs on the live album I'm listening to somehow accentuates each person's entrance.

It also cheers the silence that blooms after each exit.



-k.


**********************


Title credit: Lyric from Possibly Maybe/Bjork
Photo credit: Javi Dardoof of Anatol

Red Curtained Windows Lead to Suspicions of Witchcraft: The Doldrums of Cliche

I have never been particularly fond of actual roses.  Their scent reminds me of funerals, weddings and particularly bad dates.  That said, there is a deep red ink that I use from time to time when hand writing letters to people that is, indeed, rose-scented.  I have become accustomed to, and have even come to enjoy, ink-stained fingertips that smell faintly of petals.

This may simply be a part of the season of reconsideration has been enveloping me as of late.  I've been reconsidering aspects and entities in my life during the past few months- an experience quite different than regret or even changing one's mind:  Taking a few steps in one direction or another can alter the light cast on that which you are observing, and it is this illumination that I find myself enjoying.

-k.


 ****************

In other news, there will be a revival of Cabaret that will include Alan Cumming as the Emcee in 2014. Needless to say, if you place tickets in my eager little palm, I will go anywhere with you.

Dear Emcee I have always been in love with

(photo: Alan Cumming as the Emcee in Cabaret)

The Savored Blurs of Fascination

" "To tell what happened" is inconceivable and futile, or possible only as invention.  The idea of testimony is also futile and there has never been a witness who could truly fulfill his duty.  Anyway, you always forget far too many moments and hours and days and months and years, and the scar on a thigh that I saw and kissed every day for years during its known and lost time.  You forget whole years, and not necessarily the least important ones."

--J. Marías Dark Back of Time

The scent of pine and dirt has been rubbed deep into my clothing as of late.  I've been holing up; reading; writing. The images that are conjured around me leave their scents in my clothing and hair like campfire.

It has been enjoyable, to say the least.

With the time change comes the more dramatic descend of the dark. One can be watching the sky, feeling the slight sting reflection of the clouds in their eyes, only to blink, and open to a sheet of black.

(Did you hear it tonight? The moment you opened your eyes; the quick sound of a sheet pulled taut.)

(pause)

There is a paragraph from a book I am reading that I can't stop thinking about.

The sentence of it threading through my mind in this moment is this:

All anyone has to do is introduce an "as if" into the story, or not even that, all you need to do is use a simile, comparison or figure of speech ("he was acting like a jerk", "she flew into a rage"-- the kind of colloquial expression that belongs to the language more than to the speaker who chooses it, that's all it takes) and fiction creeps into the narration of what happened, altering or falsifying it.

The kind of colloquial expression that belongs to the language more than to the speaker who chooses it, that's all it takes. ("Crossed a line", "it is what I must do", "paint oneself into a corner")

This is what I keep thinking of.  These drops of dye into the water that unravel and spread.  These slight stand ins for communication.

These expressions that belong more to the language, than to the speaker who chooses them.  



-k.

(photo credit: billy kidd)

(scent: Norne, by Slumberhouse)

Underworld Photography

 I know the passionate lover of fine style exposes himself to the hatred of the masses; but no respect for humanity, no false modesty, no conspiracy, no universal suffrage will ever force me to speak the unspeakable jargon of this age, or to confuse ink with virtue. --C.B.







It is Devil's Night again, this year, and I am curious about everything.  I am lying on a couch in a living room in a house that is not mine, and whose owner is long gone. There is a slight scent of spice in the air.  Sharp. Cinnamon and pepper.  I'm not sure where it is coming from, but between it and the excitement of being left alone in the house of a person I barely know, I can feel my body coming alive.

I've been remembering, lately, my favorite non-scandalous parts of the body to have kissed: My neck, collar bone, and back. Do you know the feeling? A simple description in a book can spark it's memory and ignite you into real-world action.

I've been enjoying the blue lit light that comes through the window of a new lover's room.

Read that last sentence again, slowly.  Pay attention to your mouth, teeth, and tongue as you do.  These movements, more so than the words themselves, describe, precisely, the pool-room-water-reflection unwrapping of the last few evenings.


--k.


*excerpt from Preface II of a second edition of The Flowers of Evil, unpublished, by Charles Baudelaire

photo credit: Brett Lloyd photos; backstage Louis Vuitton

Beauty in Light, or, Saying that I Slowly Fell in Love with Moss Man is Not Redundant: It is Necessary.

When you are in love with someone, everything feels important.

Clothing is sniffed. Ticket stubs are saved. A forest in a rainstorm is documented from a speeding car.

(pause)

It will rain again soon.

Every once in a while with large, pelting raindrops.  The kind reserved for the thunderstorms of the Midwest.


(Moss Man, in repose.)

(Moss Man, emoting. It was difficult, sometimes.)

(photo credit: me.) 

(The) Angel was a Devil

Shame is tiring.

And as much as we can tell ourselves it is not ours to feel, there is an entire world and its finger shaking (visible; invisible) to make us flush with it so.

(pause)

I am not bad for not wanting a ring on my finger.

Many years ago, I had a ring made to match that of a ring I saw on Alan Cumming: a two finger, thin metal ring.  A slender, stylized nod to brass knuckles.

The ring was a gift to myself when I reached the age that people start pressuring you to marry, and inquiring why you have not yet done so.

The artist let me cut the metal for it in his shop. It fits over and connects my ring and middle fingers: a marriage I understand.  Such codes these wedding rings are.  A glance at a ring finger can tell you something and nothing all at once:  Upon a seeing my left hand, I wanted them to be taken aback or slightly frightened before they thought to inquire.

(pause)

When I was 15, I read Emma Goldman's essay, "Marriage and Love".  It supported and informed my feelings towards marriage.  As these ideas have grown and evolved to fit the world surrounding me today, it is beautiful to see that others were moved by the same words.  One of the best current essays I've read on the topic, written by Craig Willse and Dean Spade and recently updated from it's 2008 publication, begins with a quote from Goldman's original essay. You can read it, here:  Marriage Will Never Set Us Free. 

(pause)

Shame of class, race, gender, sexuality, intelligence, type of work, desire, obsession, gift, trajectory.

Ask me how I put myself through school, and I might tell you.

Ask me to tell you everything, and know that I never will.

You will have your straight back, high standards, and pride.

I will have the taste of sweat and honesty in my mouth, and the attention of wet cement in my eyes.

You will hear of me: The ash of my extinguished shames will write stories into your skin of what you could have.  There's no need to be afraid of this. It is only my existence.  I know that sometimes, the gilded window frame from which you gaze can seem the polished bars of a willingly-entered cell.

And although you don't voice your doubts (for you are encouraged not to), I can see the terror that secretly flashes in your eyes when you wonder what it is, exactly, that you have built around yourself.

--k.

*********************************************
-Photo credit: Sandrine Zondervan

-A tip of the hat to Alan Cumming, Brecht, and Weill.   This is a song that plays inside of my mind at least five out of seven days of the week:   The Ballad of the Pimp

-The title of this blog entry is a reference to one sentence from the following excerpt of The Three Musketeers. This scene was referenced in a book I read, more recently, and it has served as the backdrop to my mind for the past few months and, today, the influence, inspiration, and reason for this entry.  (This is mid-scene. A woman who had been the love of a count is being described):

Her beauty was breathtaking. One day when they were out hunting, she was thrown from her horse.  While she was lying on the ground, unconscious, the count hurried to loosen her clothes- so she might breathe more easily.  He bared her shoulder. You'll never guess what was on it, D'Artagnan!"

"Then tell me," said D'Artagnan.

"The fleur-de-lis! The mark of a convicted criminal was branded on her shoulder!  The count's angel was a devil! So he tied her hands behind her back and sent her off to be hanged."

Athos buried his face in his hands.  Struck with horror, D'Artagnan could only stare at him.

The next morning, Athos told D'Artagnan, "Forget what I said last night.  When I drink too much, I tell the most ridiculous stories."

But D'Artagnan could not forget his story.

When I Was a Child, My Mother Told Me the White Flecks on my Fingernails Were From Telling Little White Lies

I've been thinking of subversion in plain sight, and of erasure as of late.

I've been in a class that's taught in Spanish going through the movements of Realism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Naturalism and related information that has me tugging back the timeline of history of art and literature.  I'd never really learned much about these things in English, so it's been a bit of a carnival of a code (art terms) within a code (Spanish) within a code (half-assed mental interpretation to English).  Suffice it to say (specifically as it relates to this Pre-Raphaelite business) that there has been more than a handful of glances into the English window of what our professor refers to as "Santo Wiki" (Saint Wiki).

Hot nose owner

(pause)

Aubrey Beardsley has been one of my all-time favorite illustrators.

Let's begin with the obvious reason to get it out of the way, and to usher my embarrassment out of the room:

As many of you know, I have a thing for people with broken and/or distinct noses.  I don't know what it's about, exactly, (which is to say that I know exactly what it is about but will never tell you) but he would, without question, fit within this category of nose-owner. (See above).

However, it is the aesthetic and content of his illustration, in conjunction with the questions about his sexuality (surprise) that leaves me in love and craving his ghostly hand to reach into the present day, and keep drawing.

Let me show you the first drawing of his that I saw and immediately fell in love with.  It is also one that, ultimately, would be the drawing that lured Oscar Wilde into commissioning him to illustrate his play, Salome:

The caption reads, "I have kissed your mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed your mouth", which fits the story. Interestingly, a few French speakers have said it can be translated to read, "I have fucked your mouth, Iokanaan, I have fucked your mouth". Iokanaan is John the Baptist. The translater was Boise (Wilde's lover), the writer Wilde, and the Illustrator, Beardsley. I'll leave it at that. Smirkingly, but I'll leave it at that.

After seeing the illustration, Wilde supposedly sent Beardsley a copy of Salome with the inscription, "For Aubrey: The only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance."  Of course, Wilde was also super offended and slightly pissed at what Beardsley would end up coming up with, insinuating that Beardsley's illustrations shined brighter than his own Salome.  (Whatever, Wilde. You are clever in your words, but stop being a Pretty Pretty Princess. You can't bring a choreographer as your escort, then pout when they outshine you on the dance floor.)

Santo Wiki reports, "Although Beardsley was associated with the homosexual clique that included Oscar Wilde and other English aesthetes, the details of his sexuality remain in question. He was generally regarded as asexual."  

We all were, doll.  Particular vanillas and straights try to frame us all as asexual or broken or perverse or, somehow, all three.  

As I slide my fingers down the timeline of history, it is incredible to feel ("Incredible", here, meaning "sad" or "disgusting") how many beautiful queers were erased, blurred, imprisoned, and killed. Beardsley's story is mid-grade and privileged in this regard. There are so many stories that get darker, more invisible, more blue and purple blood vessels, more dead.  

And as my fingers slide back up and come to rest on present day, it is still happening.  

(Here I'm thinking of so much but of the rate of murder of trans people of color, specifically.  How the sound of self-back-patting about shit like It Gets Better and same-sex marriage drowns out the sound of violence that targets gender non-conforming people of color in a way that deems it an unimportant topic, and the people as disposable.)

And as my fingers slide back up and come to rest on present day, it is still happening.

I've been thinking of subversion in plain sight, and of erasure as of late.

 

-- k.

*************************************************


In other news:

1) I can't stop dancing on my bed.

2) This week's link to share is via my friend Lewis and has to do with alternatives to calling the cops:

Here

Mistaking a Streetlamp for the Moon ("Somewhere, Sometime"*)

Getting back on track towards what I love and to love, itself:   Waking up excited about the day and curious about both the weather, and the words printed on the pages within the books upon the shelves one of my favorite libraries on campus.  Last night was learning together with thirty-some other people stuffed into a classroom with eager questions and slightly shocking answers.

Things have been good lately.

I've been smiling like some person who is just re-learning how to smile.  Over the past few months, I've forgotten how easily I laugh- and how much I love to.  Even last night, when I stopped for some late night pizza in the University area of town and found out too late that someone had loosened the top of the crushed pepper shaker, I had to laugh.  A red, beaded mountain of heat atop my little slice of pizza, and all I could think was, "Man, they got me.  This shit is funny."

(pause)

[Here's what I can say:  I know we live in a Capitalist system.  Still, you can't try and cage or own your partners.  Jealousy and insecurity and bad childhoods are no excuse for trying to control another person or their actions. Saying horrible things to someone else because you feel horrible about yourself only goes so far as even the flimsiest of excuses.  A beautiful heart and a brain of brilliance still has a responsibility to manage what they say with their misdirected fire as best they can.  And sometimes when they do, it's still not enough: May those who love you lift you up.  You are, without a doubt, worthy of all the light in the world.]

With that, a 'thank you' and an 'I love you' to my friends, former partners and chosen family who remind me of what love is, and what it can be:

How I adore, enjoy, aspire to, and savor the eccentric, creative castles of love that we build together.  Everyday.  They will always illuminate the path that feeds me, and continually lead me through such incredible worlds that 'do not yet exist' according to most.

Such gorgeous scissors and brushes and songs that we create with, and such light that spills out from a love that seeks to share and connect:

May we continue to play and love and learn to our heart's content.  We are all in this together, and there are so many more worlds left to be imagined and enacted --      and must be.

Until soon,


--k.


************************

(Regular-people quote worthy story of the day)

A group of five high-school aged guys are standing around talking shit.  One of them starts showing the other guys his phone and talking about how he's taken to looking up pictures of girls in yoga pants. I take note of this and wonder why I didn't think of it first.

Suddenly one of them, the biggest, toughest looking of the lot says (scandalized and slightly pissed), "Yeah, man. You know Jake? He told me he wears yoga pants because he says they're fucking comfortable." His eyebrows raise; his eyes widen.

There is a pregnant pause.

The five guys glance quickly back and forth at each other like anxious dogs- their mouths slightly open. Expressions of "who is going to correct this?!" across their faces.

Finally, the "coolest" looking of the five- blonde hair, blue eyes, slightly Justin Beiber-esque haircut with diamond earrings and a sideways, crisp looking baseball hat- steps forward and says,

"For one: What's he doin' putting yoga pants on?

And for two: What's he doing with his life??"


****

(photo credit: still from The Balcony)

*= Partial lyrics to Ache

Respective Perspective

Roughly 2:01 am, and I can't sleep.  Too much on my mind, too much sugar in my blood. Had an enjoyable conversation about horrible things with someone I arguably should have hung out with years ago.  Everything in it's own time, as they say, and tonight was just the night for a long conversation hidden away in the corner of a dark bar.  (The kind of bar with those brightly colored candles-in-their-own-holders lighting their tables. The kind of candles found on back porches in the summer time.)

Anyway, what I remembered tonight is that context is everything:  What looks bad from one angle, can look like a drop in the bucket from another.

It's all relative.

(pause)

I'd like to give a shout out to all of the union people in my life- in this state, and all the others.  The thing that strikes me most about you (us) is that you're some of the only people, in these parts anyway, who know what it is to fucking share, and know what it is to not shame people around class and money.  (Unless their rich as fuck and not sharing.  Then, shame away.)

And lastly: Thank you to the wide smile that let me tuck her in like a maniac tonight.

At risk of sounding like The Creepy Guy at the Bus Stop:

You're so pretty when you smile.


-k.


P.S. I am over my quoting famous people phase. Now I will be quoting random people.  Like the man working at Fred Myer on the north end at 7 AM who said, "I'm not afraid to be cool.  I can't wait until my daughter starts high school. I'll be like 'Oh! You want to wear booty shorts to school? Well what do you know? *I* want to wear booty shorts, too." Thank you for existing, and I fully hope that you follow through on your words in actions.

Show Me Your Palms: The Art of Giving and Hiding, or, The Filth Inside Our Pockets

"There, I saw something amazing:  The darkness mixed with light."  

- J. Genet

                                                      

It is the season for exactly what I want.

Bleached sheets.

Garter belts that hold thick tights I have cut at the very tops of their thighs (how I hate the 'drop crotch' of ill-designed leg wear).

Worn pages.

Mugs filled with heat that will steam the view I have through my glasses.

Candles in glass votive holders of crimson, emerald, cobalt - reminders of the stained glass comfort of childhood Catholicism that will forever wrap itself tightly around my body any time their lights flicker in a darkened room; images of hands clasped in desperate prayer.

Analog photographs of stirrings and their candid decisions.

Burials.

The consideration of butterscotch.

Wet soil and the treasures that mistakenly disappear within it. (It can be so hard to hear the things we lose in the rain).

Resurrections.

Seance, perhaps, and all that is akin to it.

Motions towards strangers you are curiously drawn to - if only because it is fall, your interactions are steeped in what streams from your headphones, and you are kept in the protection of that warm, woolen scarf.

Blankets

and secrets

and revelations of every sort.




Surely the spread of sky will grant me this.



-k.




*****************************************************************


I've been having a lot of conversations about worker's collectives with roughly four people- all connected to unions and/or labor related work- living in three different parts of the country, lately.  It's been exciting to a potent degree.  Coincidentally, I've been reading Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of Hope, and it has proved to be quite a beautiful and fitting accident of accentuation.

Here's an article just about one of the places in the world that this has been happening.  Comparing the overall unemployment in Spain to this one part of the Basque region in Spain, and it speaks for itself. A friend went to research and learn about the system.  In any case, something on my mind as of late:

Mondragon

***********************
Jean Genet quote from this 1981 interview, linked here for you, below:

Oh, Jean. You're such a privileged fuck, but you give voice to a particular filth and, for this, I thank you.


(photo credit: darkdaze tumblr)

Wait, My Dear: For You Have Dropped the Glove I Just Slapped You With.

The great epochs of our life are where we win the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.


                                                                    --Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, but as discovered/read on the first page of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany




When I was a child, my father would always walk on the side of the sidewalk closest to the street. When asked why he did, he told me, simply, that it is what gentlemen do.

My child's mind raced to imagine the root of such chivalry:  Perhaps the implication that one would catch the harshest hit of a car spun out of control across the sidewalk was considered gentlemanly.

I liked that.

It was the day I decided that I would become a gentleman.


(pause)


A woman who dresses as a man who dresses as a woman who enjoys fucking and not fucking and literature.

What is the threat of it? What is it that makes people love and hate and love again, only to hate?

I have no idea.

I am pondering the Dandy, and the antiquated lace that lines my heart. Hand written letter above email.  A present in the mail in replace of the splooge of necessity.

I take my time.

In that way, I am old fashioned.

Flamboyance in a slightly timeless manner.

Your mean words will not hurry me, nor will they keep you warm tonight.