Echo

i live with a general dissatisfaction with myself. it gets me to do things, to set goals, to push myself in search of change. It’s a bitch but a taskmaster. i used to fight it a lot. then i’ve learned that a better life didn’t necessarily require changing the forces inside you. sometimes it’s about balancing. i live with a general satisfaction with myself. i’ve learned that if i focus on that and keep that level high, the feeling of dissatisfaction will work with more focus towards that feeling of satisfaction.

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Faith

people you don’t trust tend to be untrustworthy.

Question: How can a guy who has uttered the words, “I want to fuck you so badly,” claim I’m judging him when I say I won’t visit because I don’t want to get slept with?

Answer:

Ladies, don’t fall in love with men you meet on prison penpal sites. The first date is awkward.

dear whitney,

let me tell you what i’m learning about when fish combines with scorpion. you know how they win? they get you to believe in it for them. you find yourself working to help them win. even be kind of a cheerleader. their helplessness is endearing, but then you realize, wait…how did i get to this place? this is not my beautiful house. this is not my beautiful wife. and you realize, they fucking came in through the backdoor and got all up in your head.  i finally understand what you did to me all those years we lived together. my bright ideas, indeed…

cities are alike in some ways. blue skies, gray skies, black skies. through dark and light. doesn’t matter if it’s made by man or beast, everything’s bigger than you. just the people around you happen to be the same size.

my earliest understanding came from watching an army of ants eat a peach that had fallen under a tree. it didn’t matter what was happening in the world around me. They formed a line and took away every single usable piece of that peach.  you can scatter them, scare them shitless. they aren’t idiots. they would hide, wait out the threat and form their line again. one lesson that stuck with me for life–they always came back for their dead. it didn’t matter how many they lose trying to get that body. they always come back to carry them away.

whenever i think about god, i think about those ants. whatever their understanding of me was, as a force of nature, as a force of evil, as a force of random happening, they coped and pushed forward, always coming back for their dead. to an extent, i had the power to decide their fate.

to some people, every person has great power. to some universe, everyone is a god.

so if i am a god to a world so small, then where in the world is the god of me? and i tried to look for the biggest things i could find.

and some nights, looking out, i encounter something so big the sky opens up, peeled back like a dollhouse rooftop to reveal another world. And wherever it was i thought i was in that moment, i find myself in my bedroom, waking from a dream.

My friend, Sarah, sent me a link to this t-shirt and asked if this is what I look like when I’m chasing after a man.

I told her, first of all, I don’t chase. Second of all, I haven’t had that haircut since college.

Bonobo at the Showbox on 4/25. Yes.

Laudanum. For boys and girls.

In 1898, Bayer launched the best-selling drug-brand of all time, Heroin. (article)

Brand New By Tomorrow album by Money Mark.

A song for spring.

Love it.

Another 3x 9 day falling on a sunday. Plan for a good one.

This kid’s scared of me.  My cousin had told me he’d called her the next day trying to get my phone number, claiming he wanted to talk to me, that I’d read him or something. Of course she didn’t give it out. Of course that’s the right move.

I was walking through the gym in Fremont one late morning a few weeks ago when this guy called me over. It was Parkson’s basketball teammate. I never remember his name. Devon maybe. I remembered he was coming off an ankle injury so I asked him how it was. Meanwhile, I notice the kid he had previously been in conversation with was this olive-skinned kid who looked kind of familiar. And he was staring at me, bug-eyed. I said hi at one point but he was frozen in that expression. I’m pretty sure it was the same kid. That reaction really didn’t seem normal.

Remember how I swerved into the path of a bike and got hit because that hooded guy was following me? As I was walking home last night, I looked up and realized that crack ho who had hugged me last week was staggering in front of me, and I nearly crossed through traffic to get to the other side of the street.

Did you ever see that scar? It was an asphalt day.

Or were you already gone?

Do you remember the rain?

All those ghosts and ghosts of steam and smoke, released.

The smell of the ocean.

The night it whispered. To some, to one.

Where you were when you knew.

When you knew you knew.

This storm was created for you.

And for entire nights, it danced.

In this post, I tackle the question:

At What Age Do Boys Become Such Lying Little Ma’fuckers

My little 6 year-old cousin Edison once told me we should get married. He thinks I’m a 12 year-old Goddess. We have a very questionable game of trying to karate kick each other in the butt as a greeting to each other, which may prove to be either the most glorious or most dysfunctional element of his childhood memory. I suspect it will be a hybrid. But if there’s one thing I demand from our relationship, it’s that he be scared and awed enough by my presence to always be honest with me.

But now the little ma’fucker’s testing the boundaries of my trust by looking for little ways to try to trick me. Probably he’s secretly still miffed I turned down his marriage offer.

I asked him a few days ago if he dressed in green for St Patrick’s Day, and told him how I’d forgotten; he could have pinched me. He wrote back and said no one told him about wearing green and he didn’t get pinched. I thought that was strange, since St Patrick’s Day is still a kitschy holiday in schools so he should have known about wearing green or getting pinched. And knowing how much my uncle and aunt love putting those two kids in matching outfits for any occasion, he and his brother were probably decked out like limes. I asked again if no one told him and he was emphatic. So I gave it up to a cultural cross and took it at face value.

But I swear, if a picture surfaces of him and his brother dressed as leprechauns, he and I are gonna sit down for a talk.

if the universe deems you must concede some battles in order to win the war, you must concede those losses and move on, believing in the bigger picture.

He said, a lot of people in this world are numb.

He said, it’s like that video where you’re counting the passes and you never notice the gorilla until someone points it out.

But what about people who saw the gorilla?

What about those people?

What else can they see?

I want to do despicable things to this video.

We’ve known each other for half a lifetime. We’ve even pretended to be sisters before. I asked her to use one word to describe me.

“Secretive,” she said.

“Me?” I was genuinely surprised.

“Yes, you. It’s your thing. You’re hard to keep track of. Where are you living now? Who are you dating? What are you getting yourself into?”

“If people asked I would tell them.”

“But that’s the thing. Who knows where to find you to ask?”

“Can I ask you a question?”

Light hair, thin hunched shoulders and big round eyes. She and her boyfriend had been having tense small talk all night. Something about her made me think of a rabbit.

“Are you a writer?”

I nodded. Smiled.

“Is that something you went to school for or, studied…to learn?”

“I think I’ve always been writing things. Sometimes I believe writing’s a compulsion. Whether it’s something you want to do, it’s something you have to do. And so you try to shape your life the best way you can around it, even try to do something productive with it.”

She told me she’d just read Stephen King’s autobiography, and that he’d basically wrote so much until someone finally noticed. But he wrote like he had to get it out whether or not people were there to read it.

“Writers are the most haunted people on earth, ” I told her. “They see these other worlds, they hear their voices. They carry the burden of expression, to release all that’s inside. But whether they’re haunted by demons or angels, the writer has to decide.”

Her eyes were like moons forming question marks, her face seemed to gravitate . She looked on the verge of falling into me.