We have no history.

O you American West,
Bastard child of an orphan nation,
inherit your nothingness
and look out upon the rest of the world
with a numb and empty soul.

Of all the peoples in this world,
with their eras high and low,
histories illustrious and long,
only you have nothing to look back on.
Even your teenaged mother had nothing--
there wasn't even a father or a seed.

Everyone journeys West
chasing that elusive tomorrow sun.
What did they find at the edge of this New World?
Why, the End of the World, of course.

So now there's nothing new ahead
and there's nothing old behind.
Not for us at least
we can't even remember the countries
that our own parents descended from.
Southern Californian is my ethnicity.

Most people don't even think about it,
let alone realize it.
Whatever, right?
We have a new religion at the moment.

I guess this is our inheritance:
loneliness summed up in some stupid, insufferable poetry.
Yeah, well, that's the only thing we can truly relate to.

I've lost touch with my humanity. It's like I went past childhood innocence, jaded adolescence, adult depression, quarterlife crisis, and am now in some sort of meta-funk. As in, I see and recognize my own dilemma, and am bored with it, flipping channels to see what else is on. I've even gone as far as telling my boyfriend about my curse and that quite frankly I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't work out. Who tells people that? Jesus.

So here I am, it's a Tuesday night, I've eaten an apple for dinner, and it's worth mentioning that I can no longer sit in my computer chair unless my knees are drawn up in a fetal position. I don't know what to do. I've been getting occasional call backs to memories of when I was one of those manic pixie dream girls growing up, but now I'm either just too tired or overanalysing it to do anything. The fact is, I don't want to meet anyone new. I feel like I don't even think anymore. This is the most I've thought about it up until this point.

I've been obsessed with records lately. I made a list of all of the books that I've ever read, something over 100 is the number. I made a blog to record childhood memories that I can still recall, as well as a blog to record my insane fucking dreams. Which have been freaking me out for the past few months.

I need a breath of fresh air. I wonder what I should do. Today was actually a pretty momentous day. I got some new music, that always helps, though I don't get a chance to listen nearly as much as I used to in college. I bought a DSLR today, so that should (keyword: should) get my ass into gear as far as projects are concerned. We'll see. Maybe I'll start writing again. Hell, I can't tell my own damned life from fiction half the time.

I read a quote the other day, that a man who had achieved a great deal in spite of great difficulty said: that he always knew the right direction to go to when he found that he was afraid. He said fear lead him to all of his experiences. I guess I'll go freak myself the fuck out now...

it's just us.

You said those magic words in the shadow of a mountain, underneath a lamppost, surrounded by lights and hundreds of thousands of people. Eyes wet with tears, saturating my lashes, dropping off like full, beautiful ripened berries of crystal, those words jarred me out of everything, out of this world, leaving me in darkness, with only your voice still intact. And after all the days we'd spent together, after everything we'd been through, it finally, finally came together and I knew it was true, at least for that moment.

I cried again, this time not for some misunderstanding, for horrible feeling of being abandoned, but rather for myself, because I now realize that all of my insecurities in people, everything I doubted in you was what I really doubted in myself. And how I may someday come to abandon you, just as I fear with as much terror as anyone can feel that I will be as well. Thinking back on the past, I hate myself, but I cannot change, or at least I don't know how. I hope to god that you do.

But I'm not sure. It does not matter for now, right? You are a good person. I have known many good people, and I am thankful for that, thankful to have loved them and been loved by them. And maybe there's something strange with me, where I can't be happy, where I have to hurt myself and leave everyone and everything behind me, I have to keep moving, running. I have to be alone. I have to be able to cloister myself and just feel surrounded by nothingness. I don't know why, but at least I have such good memories of the world outside my head. With your words, I am jarred into a place somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. It's just Us.

The Revelation

It was fucking hot around 11 AM on All Saints Day, November 1, 2009 when I drove down Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim, CA to the run down house that the Psychic operated in. The neighborhood in this area is amazing. The not-so-carefully-preserved 70's architecture, paint peeling, colors a faded garish golden hue, and homeless guys sharing a drag while loitering in the local park, sweltering in the California autumn heat. My car was heating up quickly, the smell of antifreeze and water emanating from the hood. Damn mechanics.

I thought I had gone too far, but the sign loomed ahead on the left, and, making a quick turn I parked down a residential street. There was a house for rent right next door, the lawn of which I walked through. There were turquoise wrought iron screens and gates with the Chinese Double Happiness symbol worked into the design in front. I thought about how grand it would be to live in a suburban palace like that.

Coming to the front door of the Psychic's house, I rang a bell and paused. After waiting several seconds, I thought about ringing again when a shadow appeared. All psychics look the same. They are older, cordial ladies that smell like incense, and dress in very comfortable clothing. They are in a state of perpetual relaxation. They are like bodhisattvahs, the way I will be someday.

She tells me lots of things. I will live a long life-- I knew that-- but that I will have a brush with death. This scares me because I am very afraid of killing myself, and her next revelation, about the dark cloud that hangs above me chills me even more because the odd experience of having your life completely dismantled has definitely been on my recent afflictions list. But then she tells me that God is on my side. God, who I thought had abandoned me when I was 11, when my parents' marriage fell apart, my brother declared his atheism, the other started dealing pot, and I realized that I couldn't trust anyone ever again.

But she really made sense. She told me that it was a curse, that someone had put this on me and my family. And that the source was human, human malice. What a shudder that went through me on that muggy day. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I thought hard about my life, my future, about the old dreams I had of becoming something, of helping people and loving them. And how I barely felt anything nowadays. I wanted to be a regular girl again, who was silly and drew pictures all day and thought of whimsical ideas. Was my life really so far fucked?

I thought about it that night, watching the lights from late night traffic race across the ceiling filtered through Venetian blinds. I sobbed a little because of how sad it all was. How pain and bad feeling could kill you. I didn't want to wake him, but I did on accident, and when he held me I felt better. The caresses and soothing words pulled me upwards, the way you might claw your limbs through water trying to reach the light of the surface, but every moment of stillness saw me sinking further. And I suddenly had a most vivid and terrible image of myself as a living corpse in his arms, emotionally, mentally dead from misery.

On the Day of the Dead, I was reborn. I remembered things, remembered myself. And I knew what I had to do. I had dreams again, but I also had a divine obligation. I had been struggling to find meaning and figure out what it was that would fulfill my psychological needs in this world, but now I know also that I have intense spiritual work to do as well. Somehow I will lift the curse on myself and my family, and I've no doubt that this will elevate me to Buddahood by the end of my life. Saving everyone else... that will come later, but for now, I will find the root of the evil and charge through it with eyes of fire.

Take a Breath

I'm going to take a deep breath right now, and not worry. I don't need to change. I don't need to run all the time. The future is there, it's waiting for me patiently. I can be happy here and now, even though it's not here. I want to just think of You and be happy right now. I want to eat candy and curl up in my chair and read a good book and take a nap and listen to some awesome fucking music and think about crazy things and make up stories in my head. I'm going to not be so serious. I will practice all of that whimsical bullshit I preach and climb fences and go on bikerides and pretend to speak Spanish.

So now the question is, what to do, now that I'm okay with things. Hmmmmmmmmmm....

Blue Night

While the sun sets, the silhouettes of trees forming a natural swampy skyline fly past, ancient and towering. Yet the sun glowing orange sits stationary, silently warming me with lingering rays filtering through the branches, solitary and unshakeable, even as it dips below the horizon, dappling my skin with an ever changing pattern of light. Scratchy folk music wafts through the air in waves emanating from the radio of Your pick-up, and taking a calculated breath, I sigh.

We met again for the first time in years on the cusp of a huge boom in the music scene in our little county. I have become a bonified band-aid tailing my friends and their bands from shitty venues to dusty garages to white trash neighborhood backyards. And my sharp tongue and snappy personality has become quite renowned among the scene. Fluttering about like a butterfly in colorful vintage dresses and soda-pop can ring necklaces jingle jangling about my neck, hovering about in the Floating World on cigarette smoke and laughter.

I stopped by Your garage on a hot day around 1 after work with a friend coming to visit a band mate of Yours during practice. Your name, so familiar to me repeated across my brain countless times since I learned it is suddenly connected to Your face as my eyes adjust to the darkness of your garage as I enter from the bright burning noontide sky. There is sweat on the back of my neck and I'm wearing something old but I forget everything as memories of You flood back into my head. Old gray memories that have frayed at the edges but whose images still retain an accurate likeness to their counterparts in the real world.

And it is apparent that We are going to happen, that there exists that bond between Us that has tied Us together through the years and the centuries and the millenia and through all of time and space.

I am shy at first, so very uncharacteristic. But I have been waiting for this moment for 8 years, 17 years, thousands of years, and am not about to begin fucking around.

You are inexplicably handsome. Boys and girls alike notice it, acknowledge it, and yet you have a certain subdued dynamic, you fade in with the crowd, even though you do not walk among them. You laugh with some hardcore kids from a couple towns over who are high and toting ill-gotten forties, sleeves rolled up to Your elbow, strong, graceful fingers grasping a bottle leisurely. I flash a vaguely naughty smile, which You return, and I know You read into it because I can feel Your eyes on my back as I wade through the crowds charming the masses. And I can feel the tension between us surrounding you like a cloud, a tangible atmosphere that I can feel, flowing from your body and rising up into the night, mixing with the moths and the golden lamp light and the blue night.

Sweet, wonderful, lo-fi plays over the crowd, a mixture of shitty stereo and bad recording but it sounds beautiful all the same to me. And as I talk to a group of kids that went to my high school that are now punk rock, I feel Your hand, Your fingers lightly touch my shoulder. The slightest hint of electricity ignites my skin. There are tons of guys that are into me and girls into you. But time slows down when I turn and our eyes meet, and some hippie girls exhale cherry-apple hookah smoke from their lungs and some guys from the other side of town toss shots of So-Co to the back of their burning throats.

We leave together later that night, laughing, slightly tipsy. The party is still quite lively even though it is late. A few people we know shoot us naughty, knowing glances, and I smile and stick out my tongue coyly. Clumsily tripping over my feet a little, You open the passenger door for me laughing, and Your hands keep on slipping up, touching me, too soon, too soon. I grab them, yet don't remove them; but flash a smile that yearns for You to wait just a little bit longer.

We live more on the outskirts by the old forest, and I see that same skyline of trees, this time in reverse, the moon and stars replacing the sun in a blanket of dark blue as they sparkle and fly behind the ancient branches. Your old house looms in the distance, and I almost don't want to leave the car, You beside me, a foot or two away from my body. There are lights on, but they are just your younger siblings, staying up with the freedom that their summer vacation allots them engrossed in the loud jabbering and blaring lights of an old television set.

We laugh, me hanging onto Your arm for support, and tumble up the stairs. You flick on the light of your lamp, dim, but still warm. The window is open and the summer air fills the room. And as we lay on your bed in the light, our hands searching each other fervently, mouths eagerly tasting, tears stream down my cheeks and soak into your old comforter as I feel all of your love both emotionally and physically coming down onto me. I feel it all, everything, so powerfully, so poignantly. The fibers of your sheets, the fine prints of your fingers on my skin, the light glowing red behind closed eyes, the hot night enveloping us.

And I know, this is the greatest moment of my entire life.

Clawing My Way Out

I'm not going to pretend I was some kind of fucked up ghetto kid from a poor neighborhood growing up. I lived alright, got the things I needed for the most part. Even got the things I wanted a few times. I didn't sell crack or my pussy or anything like that. But I did survive suburbia.

Growing up in a super Christian home would make you think I'd come out with some good ideals. And hey, you'd be right. I think of myself as pretty righteous. But maybe that's just my own innate scrupulousness. And of course, like some stereotypical religious satire, my dad had to turn out to be a freaky pervert and alcoholic. It was a sad sad night when I realized I was the child of a completely loveless, dead relationship. How do you even begin to comprehend that? And then there's the religion. I can understand growing up without a god. But to grow up, 12, 13 years devoutly, and have it all taken away from you, shattered? Witness your preacher father hit your mom who's screaming about divorce, completely out of the fucking blue. Now that's fucked up. I try to fill that gap of faith, that shattered notion that these lives are something more than just a blink of the Earth's eye with other things, stupid things, superstition.

But the worst is my town. How fucking white trash it is. How all the kids drank and fucked each other when they were like 15. I guess that's how most teens are though, I guess. Well, except for me. I felt awkward. I didn't want to do those things. And I felt even worse for not wanting it, for not having experienced it. I felt like I was missing out on something I should have wanted.

I experimented. I was a slut for a year, I'll admit it. Fuckin' a. I went to parties as an older teenager. I suffered fools. I shopped at thrift stores because my mom told me that I was a financial burden on the family. Walked the streets alone at night, crying my eyes out. Jumped out of my second story bedroom window to concrete below over some douchebag guy. Prevailed over the stupid brometal and F-150s with "Froaders for Bush" bumper stickers and Support Out Troops decals. Weathered the shitstorm my brother caused our family for dealing and growing pot in his bedroom.

Watched my parents fight, go to counseling, fight some more. Fell asleep with my fingers in my ears so I wouldn't have to hear. And you know, I guess this is normal. It's just the human drama. But I do know that many people succumb to it. I don't know. Maybe I read into this shit too much. But I clawed my fucking way out of that hellhole. Nowadays I call myself a contemporary artist with influences of Pop art, Impressionism, and Superflat. I study Japanese folklore and learn foreign languages, say I'm a fucking graphic designer and read surrealist novels. Shop at Trader Joe's and Bristol Farms and use a vintage plastic lens camera. I guess I'm just trying to be everything that isn't my stupid hometown.

I feel like I am really coming to know my parents for the first time in 20 years. I talk to my dad, and I tell him I love him now, and I mean it, I am trying to love him. When my mom calls me I tell her when I'm feeling bad. I try to be as brutally fucking honest as I can, with everyone. I've got manners, though. I don't know. When I think about my memories, it seems like such a long time has passed. I feel so old. I'm still surviving my fucking 20's. I wonder what else is going to come along.