14:27 - Friday, Mar. 05, 2004 survey #2
my long awaited (har!) second survey is up for those of you who give a fuck here. uh, it's... fun!
09:08 - Friday, Mar. 05, 2004 decomposing
The Skip passes Regent Drive and this wild eyed guy with a half-beard and a big black bag gets on and sits behind me. 'Excuse me, do you know what time it is?' he asks me.
'11:40,' I tell him.
'Oh man. Aw, man. Shit. Geez. Jesus Christ,' he mutters, all in a string, glancing worriedly out the windows of the bus at the sky, at the ground, at the law building.
'....is that bad?' I venture.
'Yeah, well, no, my class ended at 11, 10:50 really, and it took me forty or fifty minutes to get on this bus, I just, it's just that I don't know how that happened, I mean where those forty minutes went, what I was doing during them or why it took me so long or what. You know, I think I know you from somewhere but I can't figure out when or where or what.'
My policy is to be nice to strangers on buses, so: 'Well, what major are you?'
'I like to call myself an...' (here he mumbled but I'm pretty sure it was) '...an international slave.' He stared at me, smiled, and nodded.
'Well, the reason I'm asking is because I'm in music and those classes are fairly small,' I say back.
'Oh yeah, me too,' he exults. 'I play tuba. Hey, do you want to hear a musician joke?'
'If it's a short musician joke. I'm the next stop.'
'Oh, well, okay. Are there any, um, steps we can take to ensure that we can continue this conversation at a different time and place, then?' he actually said, in those words.
'I'm sure I'll see you in the music school,' I lied, because he's totally not in the music school and also because I was trying not to laugh.
He started the joke even as we were pulling up to the stop. 'So some people hear some strange noises coming from Beethoven's grave, and...'
'And he was decomposing,' I toss over my shoulder as I hop down the bus steps.
09:41 - Thursday, Mar. 04, 2004 i can't make fun of couples anymore
She spoons mango and sticky rice into his mouth as he spoons it into hers, arms crossed, pressed together, and she knows now that there is no turning back.
22:00 - Tuesday, Mar. 02, 2004 mingling noise like a city
If there had to be one single representation, crossing time, but not crossing place; this one place crossing time, it would be this
camera panning, etc, but sporadically, and emphatically, interspersed with something that seems like looking through half lids, dimmer, darker.
A purple Japanese fighter fish swimming in circles around the bottom of a water-filled cheap wine jug, the two remaining fighter fish, blue and orange, with ragged fins, sharing a small round bowl. Witch on the wall with a silkscreened pot leaf next to, inexplicably, a wetsuit and a Fight Club poster in another language. Nintendo on its side, Super Nintendo tangled with its controller cords. A broken beer bottle spilling cigarette butts across the dusty wooden floor. The remnants of a robot suspended in the front pine tree, remnants of the first time machine hanging over the back porch. The second time machine spans the kitchen with curly wire and tinfoil. Am empty pinata shaped like a meatball stares maliciously from the corner, riddled with holes and filled with BB gun pellets. A boy drinking what looks like Pepto Bismol, but is milk with strawberry syrup. Another boy who hides his Chocolate Chunk Chewy Bars in the linen drawer. Herbie Hancock and King of the Hill mingling noise like a city.
18:44 - Monday, Mar. 01, 2004 kicking off march
I started thinking about what would happen if I had to gather everyone I've ever told a lie to into the same room and tell them all the truth, one by one. The number of people is huge. The embarrassment factor would probably cause some contemplation of suicide. I'm sure everyone has these skeletons in their closet, but probably not in the same sense. I cheated and wrote all this into an assignment for fiction and changed the names, or didn't -
After death is a roomful of everyone I�ve ever lied to sitting in a circle in orange plastic chairs waiting for me to set the record straight.
Maybe this is hell.
All I know is that I was crossing Church St. and there was a truck horn blaring and then an implosion in my chest. Ruins from the inside out, fading and swirling into a sudden quiet. Dirty white walls, exposed beams slopped over with stucco, bright orange plastic chairs filled with - maybe this is what they mean when they say - demons from my past. Setting's a lot like my apartment, but demons as in hell?
If I�m in hell I�d sure as hell like to know it, however sure hell is.
This is excruciating. My fourth grade history teacher looks exactly the same as she did when she busted me for cheating on a geography test and I got out of it by crying and saying over and over again, I didn't do it I didn't do it I didn't do it.
She knows this, but Ms. Blair, I cheated because I was addicted to Full House and I watched it instead of studying, and I knew I could get away with it because I got straight A's anyway and who wouldn't believe a straight A student?
I can�t just say it. Anyway, there�s no big red man with horns and a two-pronged fork making me do it. But these eyes. All staring at me, although I guess I don�t know how they can be here and alive at the same time. Maybe the world ended when the truck hit me. Maybe a truck hit the world.
If a truck hit the world, why should it matter if my kindergarten best friend knows I didn�t emigrate from Russia when I was four? Why should it matter if my mom knows I didn�t really go bowling that night, but drove her car directly through downtown Chicago in direct defiance of her paranoia concerning her brand new Mercedes? What kind of effect could it possibly have that I hid the chocolate ice cream I spilled on the underside of the couch cushion, deftly flipped over eight years ago? If a truck hit the world, why is everyone still staring at me?
Maybe the truck can�t hit it until I spill my guts.
It won�t end until I do it and everyone�s dead faces shine out from beneath their baseball caps and cowboy hats like spears.
And that is so all the unimportant stuff, but if it weren't, I couldn't put it in a diary entry and all would be moot.
I'm trying to update more, because how much I write is directly correlated to how intellectual (that's the wrong word - deep, soul-searching-enough, purged, clean, analytical, complete) I feel, and also, how well I write. All I've been writing down lately is how I feel between the hours of midnight and nine a.m. on select weekend nights. How much can you write about that, anyway? That is an area where maybe not analyzing as much is probably better and healthier.
There are only two people in my entire circle of acquaintances who I actually actively dislike right now, and those two people are my fiction teacher, who teaches directly from a writing manual and counts words in papers and gives midterms on things like the upside-down check mark (conflict, rising action, crisis, denoument, resolution), and my voice teacher, who has this tendency to psychoanalyze me every time I come to class ('did your parents yell at you all the time about your posture? Your defense mechanisms include putting yourself down and running away. I bet you're too shy to sing in front of my class. Stop bringing negative energy vibes to lesson.' Maybe I would if I weren't being torn apart by a latent disciple of Freud.)
