stingrays and spiked worms...

...were creatures i dreamed about the other night. swam together in some indistinguishable sea. the stingrays floated like jumbo jet-liners atop the sea's surface. i could see blood swirling through their tranlucent wings, paper-thin enough for the sunlight to seep through them. now the spiked worms were invisible to the human eye. head and tail coiled together like an ouroboros, these worms settled over your wrists like bracelets, only for steel spikes to explode out of their bodies and directly inward into your flesh. difficult to wake up from this one.

there's a boy

and he uses words like "enamored," "suitor," "jouissance." he regularly quotes keats, wants his remains to be blast into outer space when he dies, and comes over with dog treats for lola. we giggled our way through a (bloody) stage-version of titus andronicus, especially the human pot pie scene. on friday we're going camping...in his backyard. pitching a tent, reading with a flashlight.

o, doth he make me woozy?
aye.

down the rabbit-hole

can you tell that i'm just a wee bit obsessed with time these days? past present future present past futurepastpast pre-sent futuresenturentsapast...well, i certainly am, thanks to this grad. seminar i'm taking this semester on the time of theory. it's been a whirlwind. i'll never look at time in the same way again, but as an heirloom of a handkerchief that can be crumpled, unfolded, re-crumpled, re-unfolded, so that a multiplicity of histories can touch in a simulataneous moment that is always moving, never fixed. what a sham time is! yet what a sham it is that we let it still dictate our lives! there's even no escape in knowing...

forget spiders

i'd like to believe, instead, that the living ghosts of your past crawl through your mouth while asleep and overtake you in sleep, in dream, in waking consciousness. an incubus of sorts that allows you to hold some creative freedom in interpreting the ghosts' words.

tidal waves

i had a dream last night that i half-drowned. i was aboard this rickety, wooden ship (i think somewhere around newfoundland) when tidal waves lurched forward out of the sky with their clenched, white fists ready to mince me to bits. i remember the only refuge from these waves was underwater, where everything was so silent and still. the best part? i could breathe underwater for up to 6 hours. i'm still convinced that i see glimpses of my "past" life in my dreams. perhaps i was a sailor in the 16th century. or was i simply sea anenome? i swoon over the idea that we're all indiscernable, even ghostly fragments of the past, present, future. makes me think about which pieces of me will live on even if there is nobody left to remember.

hello world...

...meet boy. look like one at least. decided to chop off hair (again) on a whim. now left with mullety-wig that got shred to bits in a lawnmower. perhaps i can play the gender-confused card. if i slick my hair back, i could pull a mean david bowie impression, i bet.

anyway, attended a recommended lecture today by lee edelman (who basically resists any notion of reproductive futurism and the Child as the privileged locus from which such discourse is reproduced/reiterated) and ended up watching gay porn. he had a point, a message behind it. but it was strangely strangely strange to simply spectate upon gay porn like a detached "academic"...i mean, multiple men were masturbating into a "collective" pitcher literally collecting massive amounts of ejaculation, and this guy was saying how the director was letting the "lips of [their] assholes" speak. hum. this is why i sometimes have to rethink what i'm doing, why i'm here. i need to get writing again..creatively. not too happy with where i am lately. feels forced. must revert to the natural - if there ever was such a thing.

goodnight world.

the death drive made real

my other is always an english professor who's completely out-of-reach. he's most likely a) married/committed, b) has kids, c) is gay, d) or is some combination of the aforementioned points. no fair, i say. why is it so impossibly difficult to find someone with the least bit of intelligence and wit to boot? is it that my "least" is a standard set too impossibly high?

no troll or elf sightings...

...but the surreal landscapes of iceland:

vikings, elves, and putrid shark, oh my

hello iceland! (well, in t-minus 3 days)....

so direly in need of escape as my bum is literally sore from sitting so much + my "fainting couch," as some friends have deemed it, and i have become inseparable due to the innumerable hours spent reading/writing there. i'm beginning to think if i don't detach myself now, i'll melt between the cushions as another material casualty - same category as chump change and ancient food crumbs. also my mind is beginning to resemble putrid shark + seeks a jolt of imaginative fury, renewal, oblivion, stimulation of the sublime kind. not sure if reykjavik will render that, but at least i can pretend i'm living out some of those icelandic medieval tales i read last semester.

disturbing, some?

the other night, matthey barney's character from the cremaster cycle appeared in my dream...except he was dressed like willy wonka, top hat and all, attempting to slaughter me.
sigh, i still remember when i served him a coke + bjork, a mojito, during my waitressing days in nyc. he was subdued, quiet...on the shy side. it could've been love.

demigod #2: nietzsche

tonight i'll sleep with his untimely mediations beside me. i wish i could have been there to embrace him when he sacrificed his sanity to throw his arms around a horse being beaten without warrant...or so, that's how the myth goes.

"forgetting is essential to action of any kind...it is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting...there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing."

rants of the cinematic kind

how is it that ghostrider is #1 in the box office right now? i'm truly sorry (which means, not really), but i admit it...i'm a film snob, through + through. i don't understand how people can sit through such films as ghostrider, because i said so, norbit, night at the museum, etc. i suppose i should try to be more proletariat-minded, but i can't quite help it. i fall into the 'ol arnold school, as much as i'm inspired to resist.

saw va savoir tonight, thanks to netflix. jacques rivette is a demigod!!! i heard of him before when i once took a class in the nouvelle vague, but it wasn't until a friend recommended la histoire de marie et julien that i understood why rivette was even worth a breath. i'm beginning to discern a pattern. love, destruction, it's all intertwined and i quite like it. happy endings don't ever happen, do they? it's just all part of that plug-and-chug hollywood formula. or perhaps it's just my personality. love, destruction, it's all intertwined.
this is completely a diversion from above, but i also learned that every second, a star somewhere in our universe explodes. hm. isn't the rumor that every second, another person is born? i wonder if there's any legitimate correlation.

pan's labyrinth

the love of my life, to the right. seriously though, this film was the stuff of subterranean + unconscious dreams. just adored it.

the funny thing about astrology...

...is that yes, it's absurd to believe but so believable sometimes. susan miller (of astrologyzone.com fame) has been pretty dead-on in other months and so far, february too. i'm embarrassed to admit that i consult ms. miller + such a chees-i-ly designed website for something as unpredictable as existence, but i'm a sucker for diversions, especially if my week's reading is impossible to get through. lightens the load. i read my horoscopes half-seriously, and sometimes, well, the other half of half-seriously recognizes a touch of familiarity in her words.

reality tires me

that's it.

under the influence...

i suppose it's whenever i get into a car or plane - some man-made machine to which i must surrender all power+control over my life - that i'm reminded of the fragility of life itself - that at any moment, our bodies could be torn asunder by some force beyond us. i start thinking about existence, therefore causing the fractures between mind and body to become all the more apparent. as i was driving yesterday, i could no longer tell if my foot was on the gas pedal and/or brake. or i didn't trust my mind - if i were to tell myself to accelerate/brake, would my body follow? i was almost testing myself on the road, dangerous by all means: when pit against the other, would mind or body prevail? or would they arrive at some safe middle ground of reconciliation? oh, blast. i need to stop living my life as if it were a movie. keep it natural. i also tend to conjure up wildly absurd tales of epic proportions with every stranger i meet, sending me down a path of destructive disappointment. ma coeur- poor, vulnerable beast that it is. would i be able to drive a car like a normal person if i were a simpleton?

hiroshima mon amour

in the coming weeks, i'm teaching both the screenplay (by marguerite duras) and the film (by alain resnais) - the film easily falls into my top-5 list. there's nothing quite beautifully filmed, written, and all interwoven in a haunting love story that finds its very force in its eventual unraveling. it had to unravel for it to ever be "an impossible love." but i'm horribly biased. about the film, resnais said, "what has to be filmed is the impossibility of filming it," that somehow you could only "suggest the horror" behind the atrocities of wwii and the hiroshima/nagasaki a-bombings as the moment its reality materialized on screen, it somehow lost its horror. echoing what okada's character says, "[il] me donne un grand désir d'aimer."

dreaming of dead babies...

...two nights in a row! the first, i killed by drowning it in a profound rain puddle from the night before...and the second i witnessed being killed by some enraged, faceless man who hurled it against a bathtub/or across the bathroom (i can't remember quite exactly).

what do dead babies in dreams signify? a google search suggested that they represent some part of me that's forever lost or in lieu of dying...another interpretation points to a personal regression - that somehow, in my abandonment of responsibilities and rationale and all those other r-words, i'm being infantilized. hm. the dweller of le treizieme etage believes both and neither.

surprises...

...a week full of them, actually. friends from england (whom i met while in peru) were in town: ellie + tom. and so, i spent most of the weekend in a drunken stupor. manuel munoz also entered my life - began reading his short story collection, "zigzagger," and it's just beautifully written. munoz certainly possesses that rare quality of moving his reader - i've been left breathless after a few stories, struck by the kind of painful pang that fills your body with a familiarity that you're not quite sure from where it originates. teaching - i've got 18 students and so far, they seem as a collective, quite lively, intelligent, and curious. i'm beyond excited to get to know them + see where they're headed with their respective research interests. it's just a bit intimidating, i must say, knowing that they're eating up your words, that there's a kind of responsbility i'm supposed to assume over their education.

architeuthis dux...

...otherwise known as the giant squid. i spent my saturday night watching a documentary on the discovery channel detailing the search for this ever-elusive octopod. perfectly content to do so, too - i've always had this freakish fascination with the underwater, alien world that's existed before us + continues to carry on as it always has, no matter how much we land inhabitants spin out further advances in science, technology, culture, and all like markers of a progressive society. i like the idea that the giant squid, the beluga whale, the great white, the portuguese man-of-war, the seahorse don't really care for us at all. all our years of impressive history shrink to trivial dimensions. to them it doesn't matter who we are or what we've done - just that we've come and gone without irreversibly disrupting the balance of their liquid universe that answers only to the magnetic affection of the moon. respect the giant squid - what a weird, weird creature with its oddly phallic shape, sprawling tentacles like medusa's hair and luminous round eyes shining as glowing saucers drifting in space.

took me a while...

...but i finally trudged through sartre's nausea. not that it was difficult to finish, just a bit on the depressing side. i guess my thoughts aren't as original as i hoped they would be. just mere reverberations of the questions that have plagued human existence from the inception of time. i exist but why? for what good? i see my hand. i feel it as it types upon these keys. brain and fingers are somehow intricately wired beyond the physical realm. yet my hand, my typing, these thoughts do not validate why my chest heaves with a fullness of breath that is transient, is lost in the moment between now. and then.

i heart seattle

i returned from the sexy city this morning after a red-eye flight. the past 4 days exuded rain-kissed bliss, seeing one of my dearest friends, zahra, whom i met/taught with during my short-lived stint as a college counselor in nyc. she's a rarity - after all, there aren't many people i can tolerate for extended stretches of time, nevertheless collectively exterminate any waking sense of time at some neighborhood coffeeshop, pen or book poised in hand. no, i didn't get to climb the space needle, probably as i didn't really have any burning desire to do so. but i did get to have a personal walk-through of 3 branches of the seattle public library (the downtown one's brilliantly posh and modern with shocks of red + neon green at various turns), meet genuinely friendly people that reflected back to me the own inner self-absorbed ice queen i've become, watch bonjour tristesse at a place marked outside by a sole sign reading "cinema," and in the pitch-black at some state park, carkeek i think, sip wine out of valentines-day paper cups on a walkway hovering above the train tracks right by the shoreline.

something unlocked inside of me...

...as i stood in the shower with the lights off, and the water was relentless. i couldn't remember where i was or why i felt the need to feel the water against my skin. it must have been that last date, where the crystallized weight of my delusions collapsed upon me all at once, and i could see what a basketcase i had become. i remember it so vaguely, which means i remember it not at all. certain details are always exaggerated, or tempered, or shall we say, tampered with. histories of that kind always tend to be subject to sabotage. so i have already claimed that something unlocked inside of me and it was this: the top row of my teeth had all of a sudden dropped to my tongue as a denture of sorts in perfect symmetry. i soon discovered, as i picked up my teeth, that they were attached to my upper gums and when i pulled them, making them level with my eyes, i could keep pulling. and so i pulled and pulled until everything pink and red and all shades on that end of the color spectrum lay piled at my feet in one bleeding mess. my entrails filled the tub up to my knees and the water could no longer drain but began climbing over the tub's edge and onto the tiles. i stewed in my own mess of insides, unsure of what to do. already i tried swallowing the furthest end of the trail. going the other way was an impossibility as my teeth were still attached. i waded my way out of the tub over to the clouded mirror, leaving a trail of scarlet footprints behind me, and when i looked at my reflection, clearing the steam with the back of my hand, i saw for once how old and ugly and empty i was. i looked like the spitting image of an aged salieri from amadeus. my skin had shriveled up, sucked into some invisible blackhole existing beneath the surface, and my scraggly hair writhed like worms over the many bald patches that afflicted my head. and i smiled gums. all gums. opened my mouth into darkness that cast an expanding shadow over the mirror, the bathroom, and all the rest of the house.

then i awoke, paralyzed in the firm grip of my dream. i felt like i hadn't used my muscles in years. i'm afraid to open my eyes, and forget these overnight images even though they exude horror from another world, in fact they are the horror.