.

Before Sleep

I am my most gutsy before sleep.
Time rearranges in a hallucinatory
clarity that can only be managed
when I am so fed up
I rise above routine, ashes, other
people's frowns, smiles and responses.
It's four in the morning, my brother
is having seizures and I will sleep
through my alarm in three hours.
I am my most gutsy before sleep.
I'll go find those doctors and catch
pharma on fire and their way
of taking my age and drugging them
until we're all sitting on a bus, staring
straight into anothers' eye but we can
not be lyrical.
If you want a piece of me
find me before bed, when I pick up
the phone and divulge my secrets
to resonate with a world
where I have none. it's free,
it's 7 AM and there is no alarm,
I break things and walk naked.
My life is held down by a rottweiler
blocking the entrance to the amusement park.
I need an invitation, a straightaway
into a morning fable when the sun
rises and everyone wakes up,
walks away and Lou Reed sings,
"I do what I want
I want what I see!"
Hallucinatory sleep, I feel you coming.
Here it is! My life has begun! My death
is only inches behind me,
I see now. I love you now.
The edge of the world is no fear.
The sound of the gates rampages my nerves
with steel grates and laughter in and out of
train capsules.
I am running to the runway, the flight
to "goodness this winter won't be death
without you!"
Secret monsters breathe before me.
I am my most gutsy before sleep.

Lately I keep blushing so hard that my face starts to itch.

I like being a blusher. What about you?

Cloud cover

Amputation seems a regular concept in my life for the past two years. I have lost more than I have been able to build up. Life is funny that way. I could feel bitter about my need to change my mindset but I am learning that this is more my fault than anything else. Because that is the only responsibility I can take. Otherwise, it's undirected anger that lacks any kind of productive quality.

Sitting on New York's trains brought this reality in a full facade. People looked drab and empty but I knew that they were anything but. It's impossible to suggest that human lives are stable and steady and no amputations take place. Did I not amputate my entire childhood? Why was it so easy then? I had nothing invested. I spent more time creating my "own identity" instead and it never seemed to occur to me that one day a line of amputations could feel so incredibly difficult. 1 the past is the past 2 and what is bad for you will be bad for you.

Part of me isn't even sure how I got here. For months I find myself this person who has little mass, aware of their own part in some kind of universal structure. My identity means little and everyone looks at me differently. To loan companies, I am their pawn. To old friends, I am the enchanted child. I was at my most attractive because I was not real. To my childhood, I am the only adult around. One looks at this and wonders, what the fuck am I, then?

I just wake up in the morning and realize my smallness in the scheme of things and yet the importance that somehow I perform to optimum levels. Because if I don't, where will I ever be? I will be nothing. I will be a mass. But then, what's the point, we're all the same, right? We'd have to be kidding ourselves to believe that somehow we are better, more wiser. I don't need to be ninety years old to know that it takes a real fool to die thinking they are the center of the universe.

I think in the end what is happening is total disillusionment to every single previously held notion about the world. This has happened before, but not to this extent. It isn't bad. I am not unhappy about it. I guess that happens when you are put into a vicarious position because you are aware that everything that is meaningful to you has the possibility of crashing right before your eyes again. What do you stand for then? You just stand in the clouds, smoking a cigarette, waiting for another five minutes to pass so you can reevaluate shit again.

annnnd... I'm rambling. I am certain I am having one of those crises that people have around this "time" or whatever. They visit doctors and get medicine and nothing seems to solve the problem. Because there isn't a problem and there isn't a solution. I wish I couldn't see through the bullshit. Maybe this is one of those things that no one could teach you about before because there wasn't such thing "back then". History fails to be certain. And now it's normal. It's not unpleasant. It's just... there. It's a lack of sirens in New York. It's a plane hovering over the city. It's me staring in a foggy mirror. What the hell am I looking at?

New York

Don't work too hard

two gems

Hair talk

I have to say that the beginning of my pixie cut about a year ago was freakin' adorable. It was awesome. It was 22. But watching it grow an inch reminded me what it meant to look like a newly wed Meg Ryan in the 90s. After reviewing pictures I know what that looks like now. It was cute, but I have just escaped my adolescent and early young adult trauma years to enter a new kind of young adult trauma. I don't know who the hell I was kidding when I cut my hair off and my old roommate, who was obsessed with the "image" of adulthood said, "Oh my god! You look like a real woman now!" As if I wasn't an actual woman to begin with, instead, just a woman equivalent to a shaved vagina or something?

visitation

I have been visiting my family in St. Joseph for the weekend. And well, something usually comes to mind to write about but this time I feel very blank. It all seems so typical. All of the depressing news, the routines, the migrated sense of self. I am starting something new, apparently. The old isn't fun anymore. It's not depressing either. It's just there.

I learned the news about a good friend of mine from high school going to prison for possessing child pornography. I wish I could hear something good about my old friends and my old life besides one's new sex offender status. Sometimes it makes me wonder how I got to where I am now. It makes all of my mistakes in my college education child's play. I ran away from something for a reason. I ran away and I am happy that I did. Running away isn't the best idea all of the time but sometimes it takes you some place you wouldn't have been before. Anyone who says it is always a bad idea may be wrong. Granted, nothing was accomplished but the run. But I am here. I wouldn't have been before. I can't say that staying in your muck trying to fix all of the problems right then is the best idea. Did you know that's stunted growth?

Maybe I am no different. Maybe there are issues I should sit around in a white room with and have a therapist resolve. What does one say anyway? It's worthless. Just go find a pen and paper. Oh, all of the resolutions. I'm just lucky I got away with some peace of mind.

Changes are happening anyway, I am sitting here at my parents' house missing out on various awkward situations happening in Kansas City at the moment (convenient they happen when I am not in town. Phew!) Every time I end up here I know things are about to start changing directions. I come for a cleanse of some sort and then am off on my way.

We all have our stories. I'm no different. Time goes somewhere, I guess.

humph

I feel like this. This week is getting ever so closer to over and I am glad. It has been a bad week. I spent the beginning of it sick from trying to quit drinking so much coffee. My addiction was so bad that if I wasn't drinking coffee straight all day I would get a headache. And I did. And I threw up. And I threw up again from caffeine withdrawals. Finally this morning I made a pot and drank it after I found out that my cat was put to sleep and I looked like a fifty year old woman, no joke. It's the fifty year old woman days when people choose to talk to me and that's always nice. "Hey man, yeah, I know, I'm not fifty... I'm just, I'm just no, I'm not starving myself. I just threw up my breakfast because I didn't get my stimulant for the morning. No no, I'm okay. I know, it's weird. It's gross. But you know, mid-autumn cleansing and such. Yeah, I know, don't try to get me to speak logically about my life. It's just I uh yeah I won't smoke your cigarette."

When people say that I am as much of a god as god I think that it's funny. It's like, look, obviously I am not because the world isn't Akira, okay? Where is my flying, bouncing, fat creature to save me from reality? I don't see it anywhere.

.

my love for shit


love is like a song about me. love
is dreaming, dreaming until i reach an airport terminal
and say "goodbye future, goodbye past. i just
want to see you and fuck your brains out
until your glass eye venom is out of me."
love is telepathy. love is having harmonious bedrooms.
love is dirty and ravenous. love is not white
and it's not placenta. it's painterly. it's a bouquet of tiger lilies.
love is knowing. love is not a screen.
love is running, chasing, tearing apart the forest fire of life
for always taking it away from me, letting it get away
even while it burns in front of me.
love quizzes me to submission. oh, my range soul.
love is not real. it's flickering and it's time for bed.
if i thought i could stand a morning after death
wrangling the wretched lost flavors of your fuck while i sleep
i'd be something mental and psychiatric if you're into that.

.

Go check out booooooom.com and check out all of the forts they have going on for their fort making contest. I am so happy right now.

booooooom.com forts

.

Self portrait, What to do with your theory, 2007

death!

I told myself to quit posting a bunch of unruly prose gasping on about how annoying my life is at the moment but unfortunately, I am going to do it again.

My childhood cat is dying and she may get better. I am not sure what the case is but I always know how sick pet situations go. She was my kitty. For so long, before I moved, she liked me and only me. This kind of thing is always enjoyable as well. She kept me sane during my teenage years so having a cat that hated the rest of the family made me feel special. One day she ran away for three months and then came back. Soon afterward we had to remove one of her legs because a bullet shattered the entire bone. There were two things I hated after that: guns and people with guns.

I didn't take her with me when I moved out of that house at eighteen because she was an outdoor cat. She came in a bit during the winter but the outdoors was where she preferred to stay. I could not have an outdoors cat in Columbia so I left her where she was comfortable.

But now she's dying and I am not very happy about it. I already had plans to go visit my family next weekend so hopefully she'll be okay. Apparently she got some kind of infection and is in an animal hospital. She may pull through, she's a trooper and is not that old.

This time of the year brings bad tidings for me anyway, but it is usually closer to November when the nonsense happens. Two Novembers ago I lost two cats in two days and in the same week I had an aunt that swallowed nails and died the next day. She died the same day that her mother (my grandma) died (in 1986) and in the same hospital room. The entire winter I was in a weird "friendship/relationship" with an alcoholic and spent most of the time I received that news sitting in his apartment petting his cats and smoking cigarettes. He was more intrigued with the nails story than I was. There are few reactions that you can have to something like that. Oh, my aunt swallowed nails? She died in a style comparable to Sylvia Plath? Those are the genes that I have in me?

I don't know how this entry went from cat to nail swallowing. Anyway, Audrey, please relax and make a line break. Please.

.

This is awesome.

Hilary Pecis

my name is not ashley

"Hey Ashley."

I don't care if someone gets my name wrong. But Ashley?

More youngins to lighten the load.

One of my better hairstyles at nineteen. I also believe this may have been the moment where I decided to quit dressing horribly. Or maybe it was just in this photo. I gave away that shirt in a clothing swap about a year ago. I'm just still pissed about it. It was not flattering to my shape but the design on the chest was awesome. I bought it at Gadzooks but no one would have known that. ;0). Remember that store?






Me after a dye job with pink and dark brown. As you can tell, I was a troubled teenager. I had a knack for all of my seriousness.











Me and an old friend during a Devendra Banhart show. I still stick by this show as being the best I have ever been to. It was right after I got that tacky piercing. You can see gunk in the picture if you look close enough. I hope that isn't too gross. Anyway, I just remember having to continue peeling it off every five seconds because I was anal about that piercing for the four months I had it. Sick! I am not sure how I got my drinks.

Thanks, Edna O'Brien for your fragmented sentences and poetic prose. Shrunk and white can pull the stick out of its ass. Art. does. not. have. boundaries

except murder. That's just me, though. According to some people, it's okay to lock up a dog in a room on a chain and let him starve to death for an installation.

Old photos

Me at fifteen with my best friend at the time. She later unfriended me so she could become friends with people even weirder than I was. One of them also said that I had an imaginary friend so it freaked her out. High school was not very awesome to me.


After viewing several old photo albums I received an objective lesson that I may not have had otherwise.

I'd rather spare you all with the details of my personal issues and I am not sure who reads this blog. I don't care who does, I hope that people do read my total nonsense + poetry. But sometimes I am certain that there are people just looking for their jollies to be filled when they find out that me and my melancholic entries are revolving every day. Fortunately, that's just how I write and the reality of my life is never going to be experienced by another human being except myself.

Now, on to more embarrassing photos for everyone's entertainment (and my own).


Me at age fifteen or sixteen. I spent quite a bit of my free time dressing really fucking bad and taking pictures of it. I was weird, antisocial and lived in St. Joseph, Missouri. What else was I going to do?
This is when I was eighteen, I believe, after I moved out of my parents' house and to college. I got a facial piercing, ratted my hair and started yelling drunken obscenities at people during parties. My fashion got a teensy bit better but was still terrible. I believe at this point in time I was yelling something bitchy at this guy who had a huge crush on me and couldn't leave me alone after that one time when I made out with him during the Colbert Report.

This is also me at eighteen taking a drag off of my first cigarette. That was recorded because everyone thought it was hilarious. My boyfriend at the time was so shocked, if I remember correctly. We broke up soon afterward. But it wasn't the cigarette.



It's funny how I cannot relate to any of these people (me) like I could when I was them. I mean, they are still in me, but I am just improved in the slightest. There is something to respect in all of them but I can't imagine actually going back there. The past is weird. I am really ready to move on to better things. I just feel like I am stuck in a stagnant pace, like I am meant to keep reviewing over and over and over and knowing every mistake that I have made and why things happened the way they have. Because very little, if anything, just happens for no reason. I have not been able to drop it because I have not deserved to do so. But I am ready when that time comes.

I'm going to be posting these entries more often. I have so many of these pictures that I have to share.

Shakespeare blows more than I

I am not too happy because I think I may have a case of Swimmer's Ear but I am not sure how. My biggest fear at the moment is that it's some kind of spider that got into my ear and laid eggs or something, you know, that disturbing wive's tale about why you should keep your ears clean, etc. But it wouldn't even matter if I kept my ears clean. A spider can still crawl in, right? I don't know what I would do if I got a spider laying eggs inside of my ear but I don't think I can handle the thought of it. I am certain I would panic.

Does anyone know if this is actually possible? I refuse to look up things on the Internet because I know that there will be a ton of horrid stories about surgeries and what not. I could go to the doctor, and I probably should, but I don't want to get weighed or take a pregnancy test. All of these things are against my personal beliefs. I should not have to be weighed like I am in a scientific experiment. And forcing me to take a pregnancy test is sexist. Men don't have to ejaculate in a cup to see if they are fertile, right? If I am pregnant I will find out on my own. All I want to know is whether or not I have spiders in my ear.

Anyway, the rest of this week should be a breeze because I don't have any more tests until Wednesday. I blew the day today. I thought bitchy thoughts and didn't do very well on my Shakespeare test. Basically, I blow. The whole time on the test all I could think about is a spider in my ear. I tried to study but ultimately I need to pay better attention to Shakespeare next time, no matter how much I hate reading his work. I have the whole semester to make up for the fact that those history plays made me want to double knife myself. I know that it's cool, Audrey, that you're in the middle of five books and can seem to enjoy and comprehend and think about each and every one of them, but maybe you should save all of your energy on SHAKESPEARE THE GENIUS. Right? Oh well. I feel like I am dosed down with so much Anglo-Saxon white history garbage I could puke up spiders. I should do that, maybe rid myself of the spiders in my ear. Hopefully I can start writing some poems again this week now. I have a clean-apartment in the future, salad and hummus and a drawing with my name on it.

Crossin' my fingers,
Audrey

I am crossing my fingers this week and hoping I don't blow it.