You can't shut out the world with lidless eyes,
You can't pretend this isn't happening.
That this isn't your world
You can't live in a house of cards, that's set to fall
Send me a postcard for your future.
I'll be stuck here, still
My pen likens to my knife
Serrated in my piercing thoughts
I cut through my skins
Airing out oceans of blood
Oceans of secrets
Rosarching my page
a game
i always lose.
You can't pretend this isn't happening.
That this isn't your world
You can't live in a house of cards, that's set to fall
Send me a postcard for your future.
I'll be stuck here, still
My pen likens to my knife
Serrated in my piercing thoughts
I cut through my skins
Airing out oceans of blood
Oceans of secrets
Rosarching my page
a game
i always lose.
I've said this so many times, I wonder if it's finally true.. Today will be the last day I spend thinking of you.
"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known."- Invisible Monsters.
"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known."- Invisible Monsters.
"When there's nothing else to burn, you have to set yourself on fire."-Stars
Harry Edward London London Oranges (HELLO), everybody!
Well...
I've been a busy little bee, as of late
When I was little, even when I could read myself (I learned early), my parents used alternate nights tucking me in and then coming and reading me a chapter of the book we were working on, and then gently kiss me and leave in the semi darkness of my nightlight in my pink princess bedroom to dream the rest of the story as I fell asleep.
My mother and I worked through the Series of Unfortunate Events books, the exciting, contradictory, alliterative and cynical series about the adventures of three orphans on the run from an evil Count. We never did finish the series, as by the time the last three books came out we had lapsed in our routinue and I was thought to be too old.
I still regret this.
My Dad and I read a couple dectective series, and some juvenile horror books, like Goosebumps, but what i remember most was a random book we found at the library book sale, called Pizza Zombies (his favourite food), where kids turned into zombies with pizzas for heads. I don't remember much about the actual story, but I do remember how much my Dad got into sharing it with me.
One night, I took a candid picture of him while he was reading, with a disposable camera left over from a school trip, that had a couple pictures left on it.
His face was so full of excitment, happiness and pride, like he was a little kid full of awe at everything, at the same time as a father proud of who I was becoming, and of finding his footing in raising a child.
This is my favourite picture of him, captured in this moment, both of us children at once.
I never told him that. I should.
These are some of my most cherished memories. And I think my parents enjoyed travelling back into fantasy worlds of childhood, just as much as I did.
On Friday, my friend and I who are both seventeen, by the way, decided to go see the 18A rated remake of Friday the 13th (seeing horror movies has become our thing, we`re starting to dissect them now) in theatres (the movie is really not that great, it was pretty run-of-the-mill, but the experience of lying our way in was the experience). She`s got a fake id, that says she`s 21, and so when the guy at the counter asked our ages we both said we were twenty one, and he apologized for asking us and gave us our tickets. You probably haven`t seen me, but I look younger than my age, so I guess he was just bored, and frustrated that he had to work Friday night. The agism continued when we actually got into the theatre, and saw that the only other people there were a couple of giggling 15 or 16 year old girls, and a row of eight 14 year old boys, and us sitting in the back row laiden with popcorn and milk duds, and talking loudly about graduating high school, university acceptances (we both already got in! Yay!), and the counter guy accepting us as 21. So then an usher comes in and ask the boys to see their ids, and then a middle aged guy sitting on his own jumped up and said he was one of their dads and was there for all of them (awkward movie to watch with your dad! Sex scenes, topless scenes, and gore! Oh My!-but you have to put up with a certain amount of fanservice to guys in slasher pics. It`s all a part of the have sex, you die paradox). So the usher then looks over at me and my friend and the other girls, dismissively and leaves.
And he doesn`t come back and we get away with it! Commence me and my friend laughing hysterically (yes...we`re so twenty one) for ten minutes after he leaves.
We would have laughed harder, if we`d known about the late sequel, Jason Takes Manhattan. Seriously. That is the title of a horror movie. It sounds like a comedy or a parody, doesn`t it.
And strangely, the biggest criticism of the movie, according to wikipedia, was that Jason didn`t actually take Manhattan.
Odd
Another creepy story: So I`m walking home late yesturday after choir practice, and this random old guy in a bright red car (midlife crisis, much) drives up beside me and disapears down the road. A minute later, he`s back driving by me, but slower this time, he`s so busy watching me tha`t he`s not watching the road, and he drives into a pole.
I, however just keep walking. This is all too much like the first ten minutes of a horror or crime movie for me.
But my street`s creepy. Old guys do this kind of stuff a lot (not to the same degree tho), especially the construction guys who always seem to be on my street and wink or jeer at me when I`m walking and no one`s around.
And this is Milton! Its supposed to be safe!
And I have to think, that scars are a fundamental part of living, of growing into your body and marking it as your own (like children will grow up to do will tattoos and piercings). Scars mark us, (in movies with doppelgangers, magic scars always reveal the true identities), they mark us for having lived.
I've lived, and I have the scars and birth marks to prove it:
-the small dent above my left eyebrow-a paralyzed nerve from one time I feel off a chair onto the kitchen tile floor
-the reddish circle (faint now) on my right knee from a fall at the pool where i ripped through three layers of skin
-the scar tissue in both my earlobes from a pair of earings that the skin grew over and I had to have surgically removed (eww. I know)
-the lone, very small pit in my forehead from a scratched chicken pox
-the tiny chip, invisible chip in my right front tooth, that I can only feel with my tongue, from trying to be cool and turn my Ipod off with my teeth (yes. I can not remember how this was supposed to be cool
-the slit around my baby toe on my left foot that I woke up to find one morning, as if someone had tried to cut it off
-the small birthmark dots, a few on my arms and one by my collar bone, another right under my left eye
-the rorschach ink blot-ish sploch birthmark on my right forearm
-the Marilyn Monroe beauty mark just above my lips (I don't have to draw mine on!)
-and my favourite, a distinctively heartshaped birthmark about an inch long on the back of my right upper thigh
The scars, the marks are a more telling description of what I look like than any physical description I could give.
I have to wonder, what would it be like to kiss a mouthful of scars?
In history, today we were talking about Machiavelli`s idea that human beings are naturally inclined to selfiness, and that good deeds are actually selfish in nature, because they are done for the advancement, or for good feelings by the person who did them. Being me, this got me thinking of the episode of Friends where Phoebe struggles to find a selfless good deed, (she even lets a bee string her, `to look tough in front of all the other bees`, without realizes that that would cause him to die) and has a really hard time finding one.
Unfortunatedly....I can`t remember how it ended, or if Phoebe disproved Machiavelli and found a selfless good deed.
What with all the random facts and scraps of poetry up there, its a wonder I can even remember my own name.
But then again.... I keep switching what I want to be called, so that`s not really fair.
Saturday night (a shot rung out, add one to the body count), my dad, my sister and I watched The Beatles` A Hard Day`s Night (it`s been a hard day, no it`s night) on a sadly Elwy Yost-less Saturday night at the movies (the theme: Rock and Roll Revolutions). Such an awesome movie! The one liners are great (iconic!), the footage is crisp, and there`s an entire scene of them frolicking through a field and running around.
Footage like any kid would give you if you gave them a video camera and told them to film something.
It`s striking how young they were then, barely older than me, in their early twenties, and already done so much.
Seriously, if the Beatles didn`t make it as a band, they could have had a future as a Monty Python-esque comedy troop.
And Wilfrid Brambell`s really a clean old man. Creepy teeth though.
Later that night, my sister and I watched Be Kind Rewind, on my laptop as we made frozen Samosas. You know what I really wish they`d sweded...Breakfast at Tiffany`s!
Imagine that for a second. But Jack Black as Holly Golightly, not the girl in the movie. That would be entertaining.
Imagine him with an affected accent saying, ``It should take you exactly four seconds to cross from here to that door. I'll give you two``.
Thrilling ain`t it.
I had the stupid idea of letting it slip to another friend, at work Saturday that there`s a certain guy out there, that I wouldn`t mind being asked to Prom by (I am not in denial, I know no one will ask me). So she spends the rest of the meeting trying to guess, and I have a hard time telling people, even my friends the guys I like, because I`ve had crappy friends who`ve betrayed me before.
So anyway, a group of us are working in the library upstairs and she`s still trying to guess or make me try her, and a guy I`ve been trading sarcasm with over our new `technology agreements`, comes in with a laptop, and tells me that he`ll play me a song that will make me want to tell him anything (ummm....ok). And then he plays Tiny Dancer.
What the fuck is that supposed to do
But this is the same guy, who spent several of our last meeting alternatedly falling out of his chair, and eating Stride gum wrappers. And when we get back the room for end of the day wrap-up, he commanders the gold wrappers from my new pack of Lush, the new wrigley tropical flavoured gum (the best gum ever! Go try it!), and making his plastic spoon into a slingshot, shoots that all across the room at people who aren`t paying attention or are falling asleep and suddenly find themselves alert and wondering where the sudden air raid came from.
But I did spent most of the afternoon, carrying around my plastic fork from the February birthday cake we got over lunch, and pretending it was a sceptre, so who am I to judge
DC..... why must you be so contiuously awesome.
After being told for months that Watchmen was awesome and that I would love it, I finally caved and started on it. So far, SOOO good!
I actually want to see the movie now! Unfortunatedly, I don`t have anyone to go with.
sad.
But what else did I expect from DC, the Coke of comic books, sure, Like Coke has Pepsi, DC has Marvel, but ultimatedly Coke and DC come out vastly sucessful and superior. Not that half the guys I`ve dated, the band of Marvel freaks (two of which asked me too go see Spiderman, on the same weekend) would agree.
But I`m right.
You know, I am
Sorry to all you smooth romantic princes out thers, but sometimes the beast with his rough, protective nature is just hottter!
So I was just editing a poem I wrote a few years ago, and it got me to thinking about how important a single word can be, and exactly how much it can change what something says. Here's my examples: Is it the curse of human beings, as in a curse that the species has, or the curse of human being, as in a curse that comes with the action/philosophical act of being human, rather than the physical
Just a little lowercase s, changes everything. This I see, can be applied back to life. even the smallest thing, with the least amount of significance can change everything, make your life, your fate completely different
Actually this ties back perfectly to Writer's Craft today, we started a unit on cause and effect themes in writting, and read a narative essay where a man laments a decision he made, not to help a man he saw who was crying, in a dehumanized society, and compare it to Robert Frost's famous poem, beloved of graduation speakers everywhere, The Road Not Taken. So, of course it got me wondering, what will be my road not taken? Will I regret staying on a relatively safe path, afraid of what could happen if I stray into the unknown (Wolves will eat grandma?) or give myself over to adventures. My biggest fear at this moment in time is that at some point, a long time from now when my life has been settled and my decisions have been made, I will look back and regret the path I took. The path I've been on, so long I no longer remember where the road started. (this is actually a lie, come to think of it. My real worst fear is that no one will ever really love me. Because sure, I have family who love me, but this is an unconditional love because of who I am in their lives, not who I am as a person, on my own. Someone who has decided to love me, not done so automatically).
The idea of a fickle fate, and the impact of these small decisions, also chased me on to english class, where we finished our reading of Oedipus Rex (really fun to read things like this when you`ve actually been to the places in the story). As a kid, I'm sorry to say, there were three main things that I used to learn how to read: Shakespeare plays(intially through my beloved audio tapes of Shakespeare Without The Boring Bits), A book in the school library on the lives of saints or a comic strip volume of the old testament (both of which I read almost like historical fiction, full of betrayal, murder and affairs, not to be religious in the least. My favourite was Sampson and Deliah, or St. Lucy who gougued out her eyes and gave them to a man who said they were beautiful), and Greek myths (I could recite all of the gods and goddesses-Artemis was so clearly the best). For the Greek myth of King Midas (the golden touch guy), I first learned that the word ass could be used to als0 mean donkey (Midas had donkey ears, as a curse), cue a first grade me calling mean kids asses and then telling the teacher I just meant donkey. Yes. I was that girl, the same girl who came into class one morning in Junior Kindergarten, sat down at my desk and said fuck under my breath, because I thought it was something you said when you were frustrated.
My mom really shoulda been a sailor with that mouth
(By the way, for a more sophisticated word to use to make it sound like you're insulting someone is pulchritudinous, which actually means beautiful but sounds ever so fugly)
Anyway...That really got off topic! When I started on about faith, I meant to mention the idea, seen in both Perseus and Oedipus, that you can't avoid or go running from fate, because often, it is this very idea of trying to escape a certain fate that makes it happen in the first place.
I guess fate can be applied to almost anything out there.
I have to wonder though...what if my soul mate is siting right in front of me, I have never noticed, or have been too scared to say for fear of what would happen, what he'd do or say. I'm too say to say I just might love you, and miss out on what might have been.
It's like that movie Sliding Doors, where there a two alternate versions of Gweneth Paltrow's character's entire life depending on whether or not she missed her train, one of which got a really bad hair cut!
"I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon --- his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good."
Did you ever see music, a sound that you could reach out and touch?
Write the songs that breathe.
That speak the air in a thousand dying breaths
and float far above the ground
Let the unsaid words between us inhabit the air.
See that's what's intriguing about something prim, constrained and proper...It always conceals something darker and unsettling.
As always,
Your Dream Catcher.
CRAZY BITING SHRIMP!
