Melissa Blue

First the bubbles float up from the sea in this new world of mine. All the butterflies are blue and cover the trees.

The Melissa Blue are a haunting family of butterflies. They belong in an ice forest. They're bluetiful and look cold to the touch. I like the guys with the teardrop-black eyes, grey fur like a wolf-fly.

Deep in my heart they're pitching oil in buckets, and little blue butterflies are haunting up here and there, one at a time, breaking for the sunlight. Someone's big fucking hand is in the way, I think it's mine, closing over the well. But I have to get that oil out of there.

Winter

First snow in Denver! It's bringing out the ghouls. Nightmares are heightened in the one-bedrooms, and last night I felt a warm hand holding mine, putting me to sleep.

At Victoria's Secret, I caught a little boy lying under the dressing room door, staring as I tried on lingerie. When I told him to leave, he didn't react right away.

I just wanted to feel attractive. The holidays make me all weird. I crave ice cream and frozen yogurt shops. Cold comfort foods. I want to wear petticoats and expose my throat with something pretty hanging from it, a necklace, inexpensive quartz. In the winter I want to dress up every day and dance, strapless silver dresses. It all feels so melancholy this time around, except in those first few moments when the snow starts falling.

Peeping

I looked out the peephole in my door today, which I find to be a very creepy thing - I try not to use it. My neighbor's door was wide open. She and a man swayed arm in arm. I walked back to the couch and placed my hands in my lap, thoughtfully considering the couple in the tiny tunnel with their arms wrapped around each other.

Then suddenly "OW" and "PICK IT UP" and the door roared shut. How do I describe the sound? It was like. "I'M FUCKIN' SERIOUS." She isn't nasal; it's piercing and flat at the same time. While they're tearing at one another and storming in the hall - and she is pissed off, her voice is a cat with its hair raised - I'm on my couch, wondering if anyone's parents dance together anymore.

Wonder

Oh hello.



My story "Movie Man" is featured in A cappella Zoo's print journal, Issue 5. You can read it online for free here. The story was a present to a filmmaker friend: a magic homage to some of the best directors in the world.

Yesterday I received an acceptance letter for a much darker story. Publication is slated for October 2011, lead story. A gangster and his prey in a hospital room of creatures. I was furious with the world when I wrote it.

My computer finally died the other night, and as I read the letter, the power went out. I opened the shades in the living room and flipped the blank pages of a paper journal. I want to write letters, I want a pen pal. I wonder if Kerouac's is the most current diary in existence worth the bother. I didn't write a thing.

I'm glad the good is coming with the shitty. It's so much good, it's so bad, it will get better as long as I keep writing. People should know what's really happening in the wells; we've run out of water and someone broke the only lantern in the night, and we all cut ourselves on the pieces. We need a ladder and clean clothes. I'll pen the letter.

High School Reunions

Last night, I worked the registration table for a 20-year high school reunion. It was a time bomb. Mother figures with hot pink bangs. Bangle bracelets. Orange skin. Suited in body glitter like space cadets. One classmate gave us her breast pump for the night.

The men fished out their old wallets with the condom rings. They pulled their wives into domestically violent bear hugs -- those couples aren't ever having more children after the husbands collapsed the fucking birth canals.

The popular crowd crept into the event for free. They duped some clown to steal name tags. ("I only went to this school for eight months," he told me. "I'm just here to check out all the old people smirk.")

I watched the prom queen, at the start of the night, grab her man's collar and drag him away from the registration table. They didn't check in, but I wasn't sure until it was too late. They are the ones who started the whole operation, ushering a total of twenty or so big babies through the back elevator. I'm not starting a confrontation with a 38 year old dressed like a video hoe.

Myself, I was an embarrassment in high school. But I didn't know the extent of my damage then, so I felt all right. For one thing, I was pretentious about my writing. I studied the thesaurus for fun and came into high school puking adjectives down the front of my shirt. "In Lord of the Flies, everything is turned upside-down by the noxious smashed coconuts of sex drives-"

They published my gaudy book reviews in the school newspaper, and I bet my peers cringed. I would believe it if somebody told me my teachers were making fun of me to their friends at the bar and their spouses. I would now if I were them; I would root against myself as the student.

In the ninth grade, there is no benefit to the habitual mispronunciation of words like welkin, facade, cerulean. "Her eyes were orbs, ebony wood." Nor the repetition of "verboten" in a single P.E.A paragraph. I used "sanguine" on a regular basis, and it is a fact that I opened my freshman Lord of the Flies paper with the phrase "their humble tropical abode."

I'm not blaming the teachers. I take responsibility for my shit writing. Why would they want to discourage me? They expected me to get fixed in college.

ATTENTION: LITTLE SHITS

The rose garden is full of knaves and bewitching, gypsies and tramps. Whores in red satin dresses grinding the lattice. Cher plays all day from the mocking birds in my hair. We can't stop grinning, and the evil thoughts begin to chew through our chests.



The miniature house is the color of frosting AND IT'S HAUNTED

Office World

So far, the office world is not becoming of me. The collating machine is named "Hal" after the villainous computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. You have to walk over skulls and crossbones to access the paper tray.
My first week was rocky. On the first day, I made 385 copies of the wrong document. On bright green card stock. The boss lunged at me, arms outstretched, and shrilled out in desperate panic, "WH-WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!"

I actually had to jump out of her way. Her freakout opened my eyes to my own demons: I'm wholly impulsive, and my emotions carry me away sometimes; they blow me up with colors, I get excited. I walk on clouds and lava, clouds and lava.

It's really fucking annoying to be on the receiving end of a fiery personality like that. I saw the future of my impetuousness in that crazed little woman's eyes.

I gave a couple of the girls in the office this whole speech about standing up for themselves. Who am I to tell them shit, I know. "If you're not respected here, get the fuck out!" I said. "You, you want to paint! Paint! Quit taking their shit."

I can see how that was irritating of me.

Women's Fiction

sigh.

Christian Haterade

I hallucinated picketers outside Planned Parenthood on my way to work this morning. They were robed in rags and scarecrow hair, three vagrants holding cardboard signs written in an alien language.

Later in the day, I found a beautiful hardcover book about the hippie generation. I would have a zero-tolerance policy for naked females riding my shoulders at a concert. I can't believe how many men were willing to have all those bare, bushy labium wrapped around the backs of their necks like feeding animals.

The book was abundant with protests. Middle-aged parents marching in support of their gay children, holding signs like, "I will not be a closet mom." A plump man in a business suit, "I am proud of my gay son." There were photos of the women's liberation protests at the '68 and '69 Miss America Pageants. Racial equality protests. A profusion of protests to end the war.

Things are different now. It seems the majority of protests in this nation are hags and fundamentalists taking a piss on the things I thought were no-brainers in Now, The Future: GLBT rights, and a woman's right to decide her body's fate. What the fuck happened to us?

The Self-Deception Questionnaire

If you answer "no" to any of the 20 questions, you're deceiving yourself. 1. Have you ever felt hatred toward either of your parents? 2. Do you ever feel guilty? It asks if you have ever made a fool of yourself. That was the... mission statement of my childhood.

#3 is obnoxious. Does every attractive person of the opposite sex turn you on?
You can recognize that a man is attractive without being attracted to him. It's like how I know that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has boyish good looks, but


That can't ever turn me on.

I'm going to skip to the end because #5 is Do you ever get angry?

18. Have you ever enjoyed your bowel movements?
YES

19. Have you ever wanted to rape or be raped by someone?
Everyone is an animal. I've never wanted to be the rapist. I guess the closest I ever came was my first lucid dream.

It was me and the man I liked in a dark concrete hallway. We stood between two metal bookcases. Everything was black but for one fluorescent spotlight on us. The eyeballs of my sleeping body were pounding against the lids as they spun; I felt it while I dreamed. I examined my crush's beard hairs individually. Each blade was in high-definition; long and glossy black, as thick as slices of cheddar. I could zoom in on them until one blade was bigger than my hands could wrap around, and zoom back out. His beard hairs are what I remember best, that streak of shine, and the thickness, and the plenitude.

I was only partially in control of the dream. I did whatever I wanted to do, which was stare into his beard hairs like I was tripping mushrooms. But he was resistant when I tried to kiss him. I went for it, and his face stiffened. He leaned away from me. Rather than become flustered, I said to myself, "This is a dream, and you will kiss me in my dreams." I placed my palms on his cheeks and don't remember the kiss. I think that glitch in control was my demise.

My second and final lucid dream took place in a warehouse. The air was musky with brown daylight. I jumped from rafter to rafter. A zombie jumped after me. My heart dropped like a roller-coaster when I took flight. But I knew I was dreaming, so I had a lot of fun with that zombie. Even though that's all I did. Just jump. Jump. Jump. Jump. Jump.

20. Have you ever thought of committing suicide in order to get back at someone?
I get urges to do stupid shit all the time, but it's never a vendetta.

When I was a teenager, I went on a cruise and contemplated jumping overboard. Kicked my toes up and gripped the rail. I knew I would never do it, but I gazed into dark, hypnotic waves each night and fantasized about my doom. Glanced up a lot, expecting to find birds, and then back down, to the healthy black splash of the sea. Would I break my neck, would the boat chop me up? Sharks?

I still consider sliding over third-story railings at the museum like a rag doll, and swan-diving down the center of a spiral staircase. I contemplate crashing my car into phone poles, plunging my hand into a turbine or weather-vane. Poking my tongue on a hot stove. Jumping in front of a magic spell, Avada Kedavra. Tipping an ant farm above my head and drinking its contents. If there's an opportunity to lose a leg, or free-fall down an elevator shaft onto poisonous glass, I'm contemplating it.


I heard about this questionnaire through the WNYC show Radiolab, episode "Deception." Find the podcast on iTunes, for god's sake! And find the full questionnaire here: www.wnyc.org/files/radiolab/Self_Deception_Questionnaire.pdf

New Mexico

I spent Memorial Day weekend in New Mexico, a lagoon of flowers and mish-mesh nature. Cactus plants puckered like gorgeous monsters with bed sores. Beer cans galore.

I was there visiting a friend's family. His grandmother might be immortal; whenever she buys a sterling silver crucifix, they say it turns to gold within hours and polishing doesn't help. Everyone in the family is stumped and weary. She says to me at breakfast, "Your dress is pretty," and later that day, "What are you, girl, a hunchback?"

I hope I'm a tough broad when I'm old. I think the majority of old people are capable of punching a hole through my head.

The whole family is as frank and quick-witted as its matriarch. Says one aunt, "I worked as a receptionist in a doctor's office once. I didn't answer those fuckin' phones."

It is the middle of the country and the farm dogs run in packs. They're wearing lipstick, eyes of human drug addicts, aggressive. As we drive through the neighborhood, four dogs gallop round the bend and bum-rush my car, hairs raised, dried blood. They bite the tires until the spinning rubber makes them squeal.

The dogs are either run over, or they're eaten alive by a rival pack. They trail your heels as you walk. One of them will rear up on his hind legs and crack you over the skull with a Dos Equis bottle. His cronies then all rise to their hind legs, holding their lower backs like old maids, the wise pit bull putting on his specs. They'll form a circle around your soaked, sunburnt body. You wake up in a sweat. Cigars thicken the air. You're in an upside-down camper, hogtied beneath a table at which seven dogs sit playing poker. One of the little guys leans down and blows you a smoky kiss. You have no idea what will become of you. All you know is he's the most interesting man in the world.

Sunday morning was particularly lovely due to a call from A cappella Zoo, a "web and print journal of magic realism and slipstream." They want to publish my story "Movie Man." Fall 2010 issue. Boom.

This is Teeny! She's one of the good guys.

The Euro

European spa women hate me. I've been interviewed by a handful of them. She always has an exotic accent and never-ending calves. She's Romanian, but she lived in France, muse to the Count of Paris and the painters; she's also Hungarian, skin made of vitamin-rich dandelions. Her wardrobe is accessorized to death with gold belts, and bracelets like ringworm round and round her arm.

I have the WORST interview handshake, uncontrollably clammy. During my interview yesterday, the spa owner looked me up and down. My suit was black and clingy with dog hair. Euro cougars are put off by how unsophisticated I am, too exuberant, splashing smiles like waves, talking with my hands. I put red eye shadow on my mouth when I want lipstick.

Saturday in the backyard

This was my Saturday

Etsy Outtakes

I made a dinosaur necklace.

I don't think this shot's going to work.

Bible Stories

I lived in Virginia for close to two years, from ages six to seven. The church sermons were conducted by a ventriloquist dummy. Dude was in character for hours.

Throughout my childhood I had a variety of ticks, which is excellent news when you perform church songs in the children's choir. I would squeeze my eyes really, really tight, like long, painful blinks. If someone drew attention to it, I would do it in rapid succession, I couldn't stop.

Some teenage boys that I knew were in the audience one Sunday, mimicking my facial ticks, laughing, pointing it out to the Lutherans around them, who smiled.

I kept looking at them throughout the whole performance, studying their faces as my own swirled in circles and disfigured itself. It turns out I didn't look like a monkey, but a, fuckin', mentally retarded little girl.

Centipedes

Centipedes, and my coworker found a Skittle in the men's room covered in ants. I've seen an old man stride from the unisex bathroom snacking on a bag of pretzels.

We have a couple regulars in the business of disemboweling themselves at work. Whenever one of a few specific employees comes out of the bathroom, you pretend you were just strolling by, kicking off from the wall with your heel. You know they just wrecked that facility.

I love the break room, too; ants making hills out of the cinnamon sprinkled to deter them. I love it all.

On the wall during my visit to NYC.

Let's end on that happy note. New York, I knew you once, fleetingly. My best friend's roommate's rooftop was the best place on Earth for over a week. It's as much as I'll get for now.

Pyramid Scheme

I was intrigued by Onyx Wholesale when they first called me about an interview.
"We are closed Fridays," they said.
"It's the only day I can do it."
"Oh shit girl."

"I know. Sorry."

"Girl. Let's work this out."

Suite 204 is a hip hop video:

Several men in suits and cornrows disperse when I enter.

In reception sits a gigantic boombox like a computer. Rihanna wails and we all raise our voices.
Three dancers pirouette in and out again.
Pollock-esque triptychs hang on the walls. "The boss did those."
ELLA ELLA ELLA ELLA.

Everyone beautiful and loud and dancing down the hall.

The receptionist talked breathlessly to me. She left friends and family behind in Los Angeles to pursue the American Dream in Arvada, Colorado. She had no idea that an earthquake hit California. She kept the conversation going, boom boom boom, never allowing a lull.

Kyle wore a navy, pinstripe vest. He had the "Jack Sparrow sparrow" (his words) tattooed at sunset on his forearm, and his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He took me and another young girl into a white room with a desk, no computer, and a framed Obama poster on the wall. Kyle said I was "challenging his English skills" with the word emphatic. He babbled about how perfectly wonderful my personality is. "I'm weird too," he offered out of nowhere, "I'm into weird stuff, too." He said entry-level assistant manager positions paid $30,000. He said the fragrance business was "recession-proof."

Kyle manipulated me and the other girl against one another.

Kyle: Would you need to give two weeks?

Girl: Well I'd like to, it's courtesy, there's one guy who's really mean and nobody seems to like me, people don't like me for some reason, I really hate Papa John's, it's a bad environment for me.

It was easy to act like he was blowing her off with the way she behaved. He gave her a time to call them later that night and dismissed her from the room. I was held back for further questioning. I told him our schedules were incompatible for a second interview. Kyle was getting frustrated.

"The second interview is about three hours long, but it's worth it."

I would have seen that other girl again, among a coliseum of weary-eyed degenerates with eating disorders. She wasn't blown off, she was pushed aside to bait my ego.

The Scam

This is an alleged pyramid scheme that has allegedly done hideous things to other girls. You can find my favorite report here at ripoffreport.com:

http://www.ripoffreport.com/Sales-People/Onyx-Wholesale/onyx-wholesale-fraudulent-perf-e2y7f.htm

The most ticklish moment of this report is the raw hot dogs. By ticklish, I mean horrifying.

"They paired us up for a contest. Whoever out of the two people sold more bottles didn't have to eat baby food and raw hot dogs when they came back. I thought great. They gave us our box again and sent us out with different leaders."

"When the day was finally over and we showed up at the office with no bottles dropped, i really didnt care.

That is until i found out that the girl i was in the contest with, didn't come back. So i was now competing with some girl who didn't drop any either. So i was happy that i didn't have to eat baby food. Then they made us have a dance contest. Well since i won, I didn't have to eat it first! What?! I still had to eat baby spinich? OH no!!! I refused and almost threw up from the smell alone! Chris dragged me out of the bathroom and forced it down my throat!!!"

I was suspicious from the first phone call when they seemed so clingy and accommodating.

And this poor, poor dummy made it to the hot dog suffocation stage.

I don't wish to discourage people from speaking out against disturbing and humiliating scams. I'm sure this report saved a lot of time and money for tens of people. Those that Google a prospective employer before it's too late.

But god damn dude. They sang songs calling you a "weak piece of shit." I bet nobody's ever gotten that far before. They were running out of ideas.

"We learned horrible songs that downed people and we told we were FNPs. Famously New People, or F***ing new People. We were also told if we quit we were WPS. Weak Piece of SH**."

Also, I love this moment of honesty. I tried to screw my friend over, but little did I know...

"Well Monday we were all to write down a list of people we knew and we were going to have a contest to where we could make $950 dollars. It was to go to our friends and family and sell these perfumes. They were rendition but we had to tell them they were the real thing.

I tried it. I sold two bottles to an old co-worker and she said it was out of sympathy because she used to work there. She also said she would let me find out on my own how the company was because she didn't 'want to kill my dream'."

Kaboom! Don't cheat.

The owner of Ripoff Report is being sued for extortion* and still I think this woman's story is real. Even if the owner is guilty, honest people can go on there and file grievances. I could go on there and click "file a report" if I felt like it. People should have a forum to speak out against mistreatment.

The description of the first interview is identical to my experience:

"I called the number and a girl named Ashley had answered and there was music playing so loud all I could understand was over 18 and come for an interview in 45 minutes. I had to call back 3 times to get clear directions.

When I arrived, there were 3 boys and another girl sitting in chairs, music playing pictures of parties all over the walls and a young girl telling cheesy jokes.
I gave her my name and she gave me questionnaire to fill out and told me that Iris would be with me shortly. I went into the "group interview" with a guy and another woman. It was very short, but the questions entailed of what my goals were, how much money I wanted to make and why I wanted a new job.

Iris asked us 3 all the same questions and gave us each a call back time to see if we made it to the second interview.

I called later that night and was told what time to be there for the 2nd interview."

Post-Interview

My interview was yesterday, and we had scheduled a second interview for the following week. I was just so fascinated by how far I could take this.

Now that I know how bad it can get, I'm amused but uneasy. It's creepy, knowing you've walked in and out of the spider's lair.

Some woman called me early this morning.

"Hi this is random calling from Ox!"

They always slur the company name. I didn't understand the first time they called me.

"Oh hi I've accepted a better job offer. But thanks."

The nasal mew, "Awwwah! I was really hoping to see you!"

That upset me. Her role is to fuck with the heads of desperate people. "I know!" I exclaimed, and then in a casual voice, "I actually found another pyramid scheme, so I'm going to go with them, but thanks and have a good one."

As I hung up, her disembodied voice droned in the balance, devoid of charm and humanity, "O..h. Okay..."

She may have actually been a man. Her voice dropped so low and metal like a robot.

If the attendance policy at my current job allotted more breathing room, I'd have gone to that second interview with a cameraman.

If you didn't visit the website like I probably wouldn't, this is the company video.

Part 1

Phoenix | MySpace Video

*http://www.scam.com/showthread.php?t=11587

A Character Study

In the apartment complex in Denver, all of the neighborhood kids stuck together. There were dozens of us and we had our favorite cliques, but we would also play epic games of hide and seek -- and late-night manhunts, all of us versus three other apartments in the area. I believe kids today know it as Halo.

There were fun moments. Some of the kids were sweet. Those ones moved away pretty swiftly, right through my fingers. Good kids were hard to come by.

The children who stuck around were out of their minds. For me and them, this wasn't a funny detour as we awaited a house. It wasn't that way for me in the first few years, anyway. My mom worked hard.

I was a gullible kid. I walked into the lion's den time and time again. I have no idea why I kept going back for more. I was recklessly social before AOL came around.

The least of my worries was the Jugglette. She was a teenager, which meant I was mature. I never told her that her velvet posters made me antsy, and I even found a song by Twiztid that didn't scare me to pieces. I was less awkward in those years, now that I think about it; I didn't share every crazy thought in my head and drive the ones I loved to bewilderment and blank stares. I recognized the things that made me uncool and I swallowed them like raw eggs.

The leader of the insane children was named Chad. I didn't know what it meant to be a Chad back then, but he sometimes exposed his dick to me when I entered a room and I figured it out. I would round a corner and BAM Chad's wailing penis, so ugly that I took off running.

Here is my case for why I don't care if Chad is alive or dead in 2010:

1. Chad trapped me in a storage cubby once with a damn combination lock. I thought we were playing hide and seek, and he told me to climb in, "we'll share it." He left me there for something like twenty minutes. Maybe it only felt like twenty, but it was way too long. My fear of the dark was beyond normal for my age; I don't remember if I went bananas or just rocked back and forth.

2. Chad framed me for vandalism in the laundry room. His mom was the cleaning lady. His own mother picked up the broken crumbles of the window blinds, and the wet leaves her son stuffed in the washers and dryers. He poured Mountain Dew all over the floor. I don't get it. That's your mom.

3. Chad held my head underwater in the outdoor pool; he was too young to know he was holding me under for so long that, when he finally released my hair, I would fall in the grass and dry-heave, and my vision would black in and out, and I think I was carried home by another friend's older brother. I do know that Chad just laughed and went swimming.

(To be fair, there was at least one other guy, in his late teens, that held my head underwater on a different day. It was all the rage.)

4. Chad was fourteen. I was eleven. I don't know why the teenagers hung out with me. I was his "girlfriend" for about a day in fifth grade. We broke up because I wouldn't kiss him in the laundry room. I didn't know that was part of the deal, I just thought he would never hold his girlfriend's head underwater. He had really crazy acne.

Chad's best friend was also a charmer. At the pool, he whipped my thigh with the wet chain of his necklace. Even though the welt looked like a massive blood-filled maggot pulsating across my thigh, all of our "friends" said it never happened when my mom went on a prowl of phone calls. He apologized on the school bus; even though he got away with it, he looked scared. All of those dumbasses had that Lenny strength.

My fondest memories of those days were three-hour summer bike rides by myself along the creek, and the last couple months before I moved to the suburbs, when I met a neighbor girl that I probably could have been friends with for life. Kids don't keep in touch.

Evermore fondly, I visited the dog shelter every weekend, usually alone, sometimes with a friend. The Denver Dumb Friends League was a sanctuary. I was there at least once every weekend, I attended religiously, for years. I got to know a lot of the dogs, and sometimes I cried when their shelter space was suddenly empty; but I also cried with ridiculous joy when I saw the "adopted" sign over their bios, and they'd wag their behinds and bark happily up at me like I was the one taking them home.

Dreamboat of Constellations

I had this thing published to a poetry anthology in fifth grade.

I'm from a small town in New Hampshire. I wore floral dresses to school every day. My teeth grew like arrows in all directions. We moved to Virginia and my head was spinning. I wrote that poem in Colorado.

The children from my elementary school years here in Denver were different from the quaker babies of my hometown. They smoked cigarettes in fourth grade. Most times, the apartment complex was a hell hole in terms of friendship. Excluding a random beautiful girl named Julie, the other kids were trashy and dysfunctional. I was a vulnerable small town kid. They chased me down the sidewalk with magnifying glasses.

They locked me alone in a room full of bibles and blared Korn and Rammstein because it made me cry. I clawed at the door and begged them to let me out like I was locked up with a killer. That music terrified me to my soul. I was still listening to cassettes of the Troll dolls singing "Pretty Woman" and "Kokomo."

I started expressing myself in third grade with drawings of dark castles. All this fear was welling inside me and I had to let it out. I realized my hands were inadequate. By the fifth grade I was half-atheist. I strongly doubted Jesus, and I was petrified of going to hell. I was really angry and I wrote a poem about a white light.

If one of my friends were to lock me in a room now and blare Tool on the other side of the door... I don't know what I would do. I was going to say "call for help" but that feels melodramatic. I guess I would just wait patiently and think about the Schism music video, and all the ways I would kill my friends with the pink lemonade can in my hand.

Chat Roulette

Piano Chat Improv guy is very, very... talented. Colorado represent.

I am obsessed with Chat Roulette. I've been on twice, about eight and three minutes respectively. I'm fascinated with the world's obsession, I guess.

Wait for the shitty release starring Jesse Bradford of Bring It On fame. He sees the murder on Chat Roulette. He and Ali Larter have to stop the killer (James Woods) before they're next!

By the way, iSight from MacBook generation 2006, you have helped little in the efforts to uplift my self-esteem. My lips are very very dark and red against my face, and my chin is The Overtaker. It is my lost twin stuck to my face, a fetus with a wrestler's arms. I'll grab Piano Chat by the scruff of his hoodie with my wrestling fetus arms. Sing about that.

The Second Great Flood

My kitchen flooded today. I was doing the dishes when I noticed a large puddle in the corner. I followed the trail back over to the sink, beneath which the trash can (empty, I never use it) overflowed with muggy water.

I lost my phone for about twenty minutes, and when I found it I called my building manager.
"Your what?"
"The pipe! Maybe it's missing a nut or something I don't know!"
"The pipe? Do you mean the drain?"
"Something broke."
"I'll be up in a few minutes."

I hid some wine glasses and bottles of cooking oil in the cupboard. I shoveled water from the trash can with a mug until it could be emptied into the bathtub. I cleaned the hell out of that tub later.

I only had two towels to mop up all the water. I didn't use a mop because a mop just kind've swirls around in the lake like a tentacled creature. I had to uhhh use a couple t-shirts.

Just now, I stood to close the window and realized my jacket and the lap of my pajama pants are damp, which is a feeling that makes my skin crawl, damp clothes.

The church bells are ringing in the distance at 9:21 pm.

The Madame Telling Time

After a two-minute tutorial on crimping in the middle of a bead shop, I decided I was a jewelrymaker. One word from now on.

The thing holding my pieces afloat is my imagination. There's a lobster clasp but you know what I'm saying. The stainless steel wire I use can hold up to ten pounds, which is knowledge I maybe never should have been privy to, because I'm challenging it.

I've been using a ruler on the internet to measure the wire for my jewelry; for the time being I have misplaced my tape measurer.

This is The Madame Telling Time.

She is a flower with a nest of pearls, green-gold leaves, one snail,

and I made her string so, so, so short. I had intended to make a choker with some left-over materials, and then I found this watch... It looks good attached to the flower, which was originally attached to this dreamcatcher that I had no inspiration to finish.

I'll be restringing her, because this is just ridiculous:

My tendons strrraaain against the bone-like white. Looks painful.

Cafe Netherworld

I went on a bit of an alcohol bender when I turned 21... the revival of my first bender when I was 17. It only took a few months to remember that because of this first bender, I didn't go to college and now I'm working in a warehouse.

I live in downtown Denver, so it is really, really convenient to bar crawl every weekend. As I started winding down again, I abandoned the bustle of Market Street in exchange for the dive bar next-door to my apartment, Cafe Netherworld. The name is 100% befitting if you drop the cafe part. I'll never understand that part. Although, the food really is good bar food. The baristas are small, sassy women with lip piercings and buff arms, the intellectuals are all wearing leather and look depressed, and instead of a cappuccino machine, there's a fish bowl that wins you a free shot of their choice when you sink a quarter.

The walls are painted black and strewn with life-size mannequins: skeletons, vampires, and one gigantic sarcophagus in the pool room. It's not a clever pool table, just a coffin hanging on the wall between the Family Guy and Sopranos pinball machines.

Netherworld is a kick. I've had some really fun conversations and also very serious conversations on that patio. People leave you alone, and the few that don't turn out to be insane professors and Scottish cliff-divers. Great bar for talking and shooting free pool on Saturdays. I like a place where I can hear myself think.

But those party animals sure do open their throats when they get outside, and it generates a considerable amount of activity outside my window while I'm trying to sleep. The drunken singing is amusing, but the rest of it is dark, break-ups and blood-curdling screams. I've almost called the cops before; women sound like they're being fucking raped when they argue.

One time my friends and I went to Netherworld, I think after a Rockies game or something, and we waited for our beer with such flushed, confounded faces, we were disarrayed:

The bar was swarming with half-naked roller derby girls. I didn't know there were forty-five players on a roller derby team. I accidentally grabbed so much inner thigh that night, you couldn't move! but I think my three male friends had their hands above their heads the whole time.

All the regulars looked so dejected. They were betrayed to the bone, what little slivers of them I could discern through the sea of women pulling their shirts over their heads. Cafe Netherworld is, for most of us, a chill space to grab a cheap drink; for others, it's a haven to escape the girls going wild and the pretty boys in sweater vests.

As the derby girls kissed and played pool by clenching the cues with their ass cheeks, my friends and I huddled together and sang The Police very passionately. I don't think we could have done that under normal circumstances without the goths ejecting us. Hot girls bring party.

There is one bartender at Cafe Netherworld that I have a hard time looking in the eye. He happens to live a few doors down from me, and I run into him on occasion in the hallway, or outside our building hunched over the street and throwing up profusely.

He is never sober, which is fine with me, I don't care if you get your life together or not: but he stumbles into me and it's time-consuming. He just walks right into me, stumbles back, and stumbles into the wall. Since we're going to the same place, home, I have to time my dash around him, anticipate his drunk maneuvers. I used to do that annoying football shuffle that people like to do when you get tangled up in passing. I'm not scared of him, I just can't trust somebody with those dead, glazed eyes.

He's had an escort lately, usually a woman who looks at me in a way that I interpret to be apologetic. I also heard that one night he was very drunk, and somebody at the bar shouted, "Better get a couple people to carry him home this time!" Then everyone laughed. They're coping really well with his disease.

Cafe Netherworld recently relinquished its ownership. I don't know when the switch is going to happen. And though I'm glad it's turning into a pub and not a Walgreens, I will miss that gothy little hell hole. PBRs are $2.

I wonder if my drunk neighbor will continue to work there. I don't know if he could throw back as much Guinness as he does Coors Light without imploding like a star, and I definitely don't know if he could abide by any sort of dress code. I've never seen him out of the same exact blue flannel shirt, I swear I haven't. Been here two years, folks.

New neighbors

New neighbors moving in across the hall. "Across the hall" is about two feet. I'm writing this story about how sunflower seed addiction can spoil a new marriage. This, however, is... somehow more noteworthy:

There are two girls, and a guy keeps fading in and out, but he doesn't seem to be important to this scene. After bellowing "I LOOOOOVE IT" in a grizzly voice from the gut, the girls spend their first ten minutes in the new apartment abusing the speaker system next to the front door.

BEEP

"HELLLLOOOOO."

"Hehehe."

"Okay okay okay!"

Racing stairs and opening door. Probably a celebratory hug that twirls them in circles for a few seconds.

Closing door and racing stairs.

BEEP

"Hehehe."

"Can you hear me that's so coolllLUH."

"words"

"Does Jordan want to try? Let Jordan try."

"Jordan doesn't care," says Jordan from a distance.

The walls of this apartment building are pretty thick. Concrete with white paint. I learned the hard way when I thought I would be hanging a hammock in this cluttered hovel.

Actually the hard way would have been attempting to nail the hammock to the wall or ceiling and instead crushing my thumb, or piercing my wrist. My step-father just looked around and told me it wasn't happening. That was hard to hear, though.

I've never been able to hear my neighbors on the speaker system quite so clearly as with these ladies. Maybe that's because most people just buzz you in, or mumble "youhere?k." They don't pretend it's speaker phone in Stacy's bedroom.

I've had my fair share of commotion from #22 in the two years that I've lived here. Angry bald lesbians with a cow-patterned great dane. Gay anti-pot activists. Metrosexual asshole with the one long black piece of hair in his face. The raging bassist and congo drummer at 12 on a worknight. The gothic couple. The guy and girl with the bikes that I saw headed out through the iron gate of the building, and for some reason I barreled right between them anyway. I don't mean anything by it, sometimes I'm just in my own bubble, or my feet just escape me, or who knows what social illness that is. The guy mumbled, "We were... walking..."

I do think the excitement of my new neighbors is sort've sweet, and they aren't even annoying me, per se. I remember how elated I was when I found this place. My gray heart yearns to know other people's giddiness. And I howl with excitement over much pettier things than a really awesome apartment. So I get it. They are some noisy bitches though.

Jewels and jiches

I made two bracelets today. I plan to have my Etsy shop up and running soon. I just have to find a bunch of bracelets I've misplaced.

BATPEARL.

The stuff of my gothic dreams. Blood-red rose bead with deep textures, and black icicle beads. I may or may not be attaching one last object to the rose.

LADY ANA LEAF.

Brass leaf charm, lady bug attached to a turquoise bead, cork pieces. I made this for a friend of a friend's birthday, but I don't know much about her other than "the color blue is good."

I wish to represent myself

A list of six prospective author bio pics. I definitely think I would want to choose from one of the following.

#1.

#2.

raw! romantic!

#3.

#4.

#5.

I wonder what kind of horrors I am repressing from this day. His mouth is so round and cherry-red, I don't understand.

#6. my Beyonce phase

By the way, that damned gorilla loved me. This is what happened when my boyfriend got too close:

Story submission update

I received my first rejection letter with personalized feedback today; it made me so happy I had to be reminded it wasn't okay to shout in the workplace.

"I found the narrative more distant than I prefer; I didn't get as much of a sense of Ilian's motivations or emotions as I would like. I also felt that the full text of the song interrupted the flow of the story, and took the focus of the present events more than I prefer."

Thank god for feedback! I made the story bigger and better. I edited the song and cut it in half, I gave Ilian memories and psychology, I added beach sand and ferris wheels! I was cocky about it at first, but they were just so right... I've taken this and applied it to my future. I should never aim for emotionless spectacle.

Potty humor

Yesterday my boyfriend got a taste of what it would be like to live with me. Before he came over I was purging the refrigerator of rotting creatures, and while waiting for the toilet bowl to get ahold of itself (I had just flushed the hell out of some ancient watermelon juice) I poured into it at least a half-gallon of chocolate soy milk; I even thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be just like me to forget to flush this and leave the sight that will scar my man for life?"

An hour later, there goes my boyfriend to the bathroom. He shuts the door and there is a moment of silence; he later explained that he tried, but nothing could persuade him to urinate into that murky brown nightmare. So he flushes, and now I'm in the living room remembering what I'd forgotten, and I contemplate letting the joke ride out.

However, I know he is probably so mortified that his bladder has already begun to shut down forever, just a brick building below his stomach, so I call out, "H... hey. Did you have to flush anything?"

There is a pause, and then, like a lamb in headlights, he calls in a far-away voice, "...Yes..."*

He thought I was sick with the king of hostile ass-eating parasites, and said he loved me enough to plan on never mentioning it. How sweet and childlike his voice was in that moment. Cutie! He really, really didn't want me to know I was a monster.

It's hard to say whether I'll be self-conscious from now on ascending the stairs ahead of him. Does he view my backside any differently? Has it become a brand new canon in my body waiting to throw him down the stairs and bury him alive? I would never do that to him...

Luckily I have a history of wearing my underwear and/or eyeglasses to the shower, and walking three blocks to my car without realizing there's an inside-out Care Bears sock hugging my keychain. Shame on him for believing the explanation could be so logical as diarrhea in that toilet.

I asked about the milk patterns in the water; the last remnant of what I poured was dark syrup. When he flushed, a deep chocolate cloud ballooned up the center like a dragon's tongue reaching out for him. (yeah babe? was it like a dragon's tongue then? the groping hand of the devil?) I should ask if he almost cried.

Look how good he is to me, and all I do is give him grief.

I don't intend to be wasteful, the watermelon etc. I am just so unused to having anything to snack on and rarely visit the fridge. You know how at your parents' house you seem to be opening and closing the refrigerator door all day? You're not even rummaging for something to eat, your heart's not in it, for some reason we just have to do this and drive our mothers crazy. "MELISSA LOUISE."

There's a clockwork to the habit that doesn't quite translate into independent lifestyle. There are fanged dust mites wearing sheaths of my dead skin cells and swinging from the rafters of my pantry. The cupboard hinges are crusted shut from neglect, and the plates and silverware sing sad songs that keep me up at night.

That is actually an exaggeration. It is the godforsaken water heater that keeps me up all night -- and the first nemesis encountered in my book. You really, you just... the hate in my heart for that water heater...

I am incredibly lucky to have a mother who insists on supporting my food supply when she can now and again. I would have disintegrated sometime last March if it weren't for that woman. I have marathons of toast and salted pasta for weeks, and then suddenly I am feasting up to my elbows for seven long days on english muffins and salad and so many delicious apples. It doesn't sound right, does it? It feels so right.

Thanks mom! I'm your grown adult daughter! I plan to return the favor with everything I've got, it's half the reason I am so tenacious in the pursuit of my writing career. As my book continues to push freer and grittier boundaries, the swimming pool in the backyard of her mansion becomes bigger and bigger... If I leave in the bit about masturbation, I'll have to do something over-the-top. Adopt a highway in her name.

The point is don't ever ever buy soy milk because you'll never be brave enough to test it when you think it's gone bad, it's so much trickier than animal milk, which is courteous enough to curdle. That carton will be the elephant in the refrigerator for weeks, deterring you from ever eating again.

*I can't believe I made the cliche leap from past to present tense so fluidly. Only the baby boomers tell a story like that. "So she says, she says to the guy, she says."

Third

I now have six stories circuiting the market! I received an e-mail from The Cafe Irreal informing me that my short story "Movie Man" is under consideration for the March 2010 issue. I receive the verdict on April 16th. Regardless, I am titillated by the recognition; it propelled me to submit two new short stories tonight.

"Movie Man" is the greatest story I could think of to receive attention for the first time. I wrote it as a Christmas present and never expected anyone but its recipient to read it. But it turns out I like to submit stories until I pass out. I worked hard to make "Movie Man" an homage to the brilliant minds of film and personalize it all to the tastes of a very passionate and particular man. Somebody out there is digging that I go on those benders about Jan Svankmajer's clay private parts.

Fan...t...fic

Fantasy fiction was my first love. It started with The Lord of the Rings in the seventh grade.

No, it started with winning the bonus vocab word "gruesome" in third grade, which I'm still so proud of in adulthood that it's awkward. I drew a medieval castle for a school assignment that year. It had vines very precisely coiled and colored, and windows with faces, and I remember a girl standing in the mote with hair of the brightest yellow colored pencil I could find. There was a lot of activity in those castle windows, people and places and things, nouns, loaves of bread levitating in mid-air.

I procrastinated for two years. My poem "Dreamboat of Constellations," a highfalutin work, was published to an anthology in fifth grade; the same year that rather than actually reading a book for the weekly book report, I composed elaborate reports from my imagination and babbled about them to the class, my voice hyper and fast and warbling with my lie. I did it every single week for the exhilaration, not of laziness; I poured a lot of energy into making those books sound fully realized; beginning, middle, and end, protag- and antagonist. The only fake title I remember is "The Red Bookmark."

I didn't want to read when they told me to read; I wanted to create. The teacher must have investigated those books. I think he is a fucking charming individual for letting me continue without ever saying a word. It is because of this betrayal that I am the only young adult who has not read A Wrinkle in Time.

I procrastinated for two more years, reading only Stephen King and becoming bored with it.

I read The Lord of the Rings in seventh grade and made lots of awesome LotR fan shirts. I saw The Fellowship of the Ring so many times in theatres. Orlando Bloom became my effeminate fantasy. "I HEART Legolas" in Sharpie. I spelled it out like that, I HEART him. But in seventh grade I hearted everyone. I met a boy in an AOL chatroom; "I HEART JOHN" on a post-it on my chest, which I wore all over school.

I started writing my first book in eighth grade, a fantasy novel that I gagged over all summer under a tree of my former elementary school. There was a female warrior with purple dreadlocks, a teal-skinned alien that spoke an exotic language (hsilgnE sdrawkcab), and a lot of 'juniper melons' in the a;sdghkladgs trees. It was a far cry from my Dreamboat days.

My second attempt to write my first book, I was nineteen. An urban fantasy of which I had a couple hundreds pages completed, and a flourishing outline. There was an alcoholic vixen with purple dreadlocks, a hero with a cheetah's face, and a monstrous rabid pumpkin that pulls the vixen underground with its vines. The cheetah, whose name I forget, saves the hungover broad from being eaten. He does it with bow and arrow.

I deleted that project about a year ago. I didn't save a trace.

Then I got a job working with used books. I had by this point exhausted the libraries of Tolkien and Palahniuk and found the classics for the first time. I was introduced to the beats (belatedly, I say, as Dharma Bums would have serviced me greatly in high school). I read Updike and Vonnegut and Joyce and I can't imagine having never read any of it! I realized I was missing out on true inspiration. I didn't go to college; I won't learn anything if I don't educate myself through other people's masterpieces. If I had never broadened my library, I don't know... "Catcher in the Rye is really good," I'd have as a stock response to a real bookworm. "One Hundred Years of Solitude, eh? Never heard of..."

I considered writing under an androgynous pen name so that nobody would know I am a woman - that awful stigma, I thought, of a creative woman! I could tell that wouldn't work as soon as I started brainstorming my alias. More a-sexual than androgynous. Sam Howell, Howl Junior...

My sole purpose in life may be to write a book and get hit by a car, whatever it is how short how long, I know it's writing. I should stand by my writing and let it take my name.

If I was missing anything throughout high school, where I fooled around and didn't apply to college, partying my face off instead of studying my chosen path in fiction writing: I missed that vital influence of a female writer. There is something about it, a woman who aspires to write looking up to a woman writing. My greatest influences are mostly men, and I love those men to death; but then you read Sylvia Plath, and suddenly you are cranking out 8,188-word stories in first-person narrative, a style with which you have always struggled, and they're stories that make you laugh out loud because you're so happy with them.

Anyway I'm not writing fantasy fiction per se.

One. Pictures thousands words

When I should be writing but my mind demands to wander, Etsy.com is my go-to website; it conquers my lust for window shopping while taking me into some crazy new worlds.

MYSTERY

Bring on the mutilations by torchlight. I love the wooden doll parts because I have a thousand and one ideas for a scandalizing mystery just by looking at them.

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=39090669

NATURE

Visions of the Earth's future crust. Strange insects. Doe-eyed primates in the elms. Cracked robin's eggs scattered around black-buckled feet.

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=11542706

BEAUTY

Black and white films are lit so beautifully, particularly those of Frank Capra's era; he coaxed the shine from an actress's eyes like honey on the moon. There is always a kiss so urgent it contorts the couple's mouths with pain, and there's a mishap on the train, and somebody loses their temper inappropriately. 

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=15362398

FANTASTIC PLANETS

The pressure gauge spilling its brains.

I used to think I hated science fiction. Backwards languages, teleportation devices, ray guns. But the whole time I had been feeding on apocalyptic worlds. I dig a robot now and again. Not a cyborg, not that; a good old-fashioned tin man. I love the cogs and curls in this blue lady's skull, and I'd meet her on the street.

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=32792730