stasis is a fiction.

anthropology
is the science of drawing
art from our ruins.





the defining moment in every relationship is that in which one or both parties suddenly realize that the situation they had believed themselves to be in is in fact an altogether different situation, and the individuals who created that initial situation no longer exist. it can come about for any number of reasons, or it may never happen at all, but until it does, until you look at each other and say, "wait," and then carry on...

until that happens neither of you can count on anything. so don't be so fucking stubborn. this is a good thing, i swear. this is how you and your parents learn to see each other as unique adults and blurry mimeographs at the same time. this is how you and your best friend understand that you can't always be each other's left arm, and understanding that allows you to stay best friends for the rest of your lives. this is how you and your wife realize that you are hurting each other so terribly by trying to force yourselves to believe that you still want the same things, or could.

change is. sometimes the only way to continue to love a person is to disentangle yourselves from each other and reintroduce yourselves, and move from there. sometimes it's just time to admit that love has become an unaskable question. there is no way to ensure you and the people you love changing in all the same directions, however hard you try.

this isn't pointed at anyone. listen. a few weeks ago my roommate talked to the girl who is the one person to ever see me being nothing but myself. we finished each other's sentences without either of us ever speaking a word. it was a perfect thing, for a while. but what began to happen was, we stopped growing on our own and started growing around each other, into each other. she stopped knowing who she was. i started trying to keep myself from knowing. when she suddenly stopped speaking to me, i didn't put up a fight. it was time. we had both known it. but if we had admitted it six, eight months sooner . . . well, maybe now when she ran into matty she'd ask him to tell me that she says hello. because it isn't admitting that you're different that's dangerous; it's assuming that that means you're over, when maybe you don't have to be. it's just evolution on a micromanagement scale. if you listen to everything all the time, you'll know which note comes next. what you can't do is hurl your instrument across the room every time it makes a sound that's off-key, because maybe the rest of the measure would have put that sharp into perspective.

i don't know what i'm saying. i'm sorry. it happens sometimes.

hey, mister... wanna pick my scab?

radioactive
kitty spit making my face
break out. i have scabs.








last night i had about half an hour's worth of some of the most vivid auditory hallucinations in the history of the perception of sound, for no reason that i can think of. no odd governmentally-generated chemicals in my system, no unusually high stress level, just me waking up out of a relatively peaceful sleep on three separate occasions throughout the night to the voices of random friends and family members and continuing to hear those voices after i was very much awake and aware of the fact that no one anywhere near me was speaking, nor could they have been, since there was no one near me to begin with. i suppose it should have been frightening, but it was really only confusing. i kept wanting to get up to tell them to be quiet, but then i remembered that they weren't really there, and then i couldn't understand why i couldn't make myself stop hearing them . . . such silliness. it's amazing what a human brain stores away without telling anyone. every detail of inflection was flawless in every voice i heard. somehow sounds and sensations are all i remember of dreams. now and then an exceptionally eye-catching or relevant color will stick out (and bollocks to all those quasi-scientists who say we don't dream in color, the hell i don't, don't you tell me about my dreams), but generally the visuals are the first thing to fade. must be something about my learning processes.

so, i'm hot. i'm smelly. it's yucko. but thank you, civilization, for inventing nylon athletic mesh, and thank you summer for not being winter. sweating isn't the best thing ever, but it's a better thing than getting out of a hot shower in early february and watching the water crystallize into a frosty glaze on my skin.

i'll tell you something sad. my plants are dying. all of them. i can't tell if they're getting not enough water or too much water or an excess of direct sunlight or what, i don't know what kills bromeliads and fir trees, but my little heart is breaking for them. they're trying so hard to be brave, and i just can't save them. it's terrible. i never wanted them to have to go this way. more fertilizer? less? i'm at a loss. i always said as long as the cat was still breathing i mustn't have been doing too terribly, but nothing was dying then. *sigh*

do you love scabs? i love scabs. i love everything about them, i love watching them rise, i love the texture of their surfaces, the feeling of new skin forming underneath, and then when they're finally ripe... my GOD, it's just too much, i can't talk about it. when i was in high school my friend's boyfriend gave her a box of his scabs as a gift, and she ate them, and no one questioned it at all. first loves are so free, aren't they? wouldn't it be beautiful if we were all that sort of foolish all our lives? instead we just grow up, scabby and scarred.

i wonder if she thought his wounds tasted different from her own. i wonder how the person stuck behind me in traffic today would like the flavor of mine.