Imaginarium

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

I rarely go to movies. I don't have a tee vee. I don't read newspapers or magazines too often. 

The "real world" generally bores me, scares me, bores me. 

But, I just saw this movie "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" and I am swooning.

I want to drag all my costumes through the dust, tease my hair into a carnie mess and acquire a cheetah spotted snake to perform magical dances with. 

I want to have a band of wild and intense characters play music for me in the show. I want to wear lace up high heeled boots and tromp around the cities of the world seeing things, being things, inventing things.

I want to make the "real world" more magical.

pink agenda part 1

Being in charge of ones self is hard work. I'm such a rebellious trickster. Always trying to weasel my way out of tasks that need to be done, and putting off everything "adult" until the most dire moment.

My mom says I just need a personal assistant, that there's nothing wrong with me. It's just that I am really good at some things, and have absolutely zero interest in others. 

I feel like there are 27 wild pink kittens scrambling around inside me. Wanting to climb up trees and get stuck, sleeping in circles, mewing non stop-crying for a bowl of cream, catching birds, dragging critters around, bringing them in the house.

Unruly.

I'm exhausted with all the kitten commotion. I have no time to wait in lines, make important phone calls, buy stamps and shop for toilet paper. 

I'm emotionally shellacked to the pink agenda.

my human feelings

Too much of anything can be unhealthy. I realize this as I sit in my pink pajama pants and grey American Apparel t-shirt that I have been taking off in only short increments to enter the world, only to return home and immediately put them both right back on.
I like to wear socks, I like to crank the heat, I like spicy tea in a cute cup with the right amount of negative space to fill with piping hot water, i like to wear my disgusting pink, once fluffy slippers, i like not wearing make up at home and having my messy hair down.

I like to think about me being older and younger and how I was and how I might be. I am over being jealous of my 16 year old self. I am now envious of my self at 47. I think about my tattooed arms when I'm 72, and how my voice might sound, if I might not be afraid of singing then.

Sometimes I want a personal trainer, a life coach, a therapist, a guru, a sargent, a boss, a mom, a professor, a dietitian, a dance teacher, a stylist, a yoga teacher and a million other specialized people to get up in my face and make me live a life.

Tell me things like "you cant wear pajamas all day and stay inside feeling human feelings. You need to DO, like, a verb."

I feel like crawling inside my white fluffy stuffed animal cat that's also a puppet. I would like to snuggle inside the kitten nest and feel different ways about life from there.

where is my waking soothsayer?

Every morning I wake up on the wonderful white couch on this island and talk about my dreams.

I survive well in the nightmares. Recently I have had lots of survival dreams, despite all odds, I make it through. I wake up un-harmed, but often mentally and emotionally reeling, untill the dreams fade away like in a steamy bathroom, slowly revealing the mirrors reflection and the true state of my clean face and helmet head hair, parted and dripping.


Every one's in my dreams:

my sisters, mom, my old best friends, beloved teachers, ex-girlfriends, ex-dance partners, ex-co workers, new crushes, new dancer friends, new lovers, new best friends, long lost friends, long lost lovers, insects, giraffes, whales, snakes, firemen, sailors, grandmas, bed skirts, pinatas', broken glass face, sandpeople, hero's, soothsayers, healers, dogs, crabs, small doors, every color, changing colors, fast skateboards, splintering ships, drunk people, dying families, sobbing me, all knowing me, heartbroken me, in-love me.

In my dresams I am braver.
In my dreams I say everything.

of the world

My Astrological chart says I have a hard time "in the world", knowing what is real, concrete verses the unconscious, the dreams or fears or visions.
My therapist says she has seen me floating, untouchable.
This summer I felt the strings holding me down, a point of connection and tension to an anchor, suddenly cut.

All my balloons of me gently floated and dispersed into the vastness. I knew it was happening. I have this ability of knowing exactly whats "wrong" with my life, how and why and what should be done, but just the awareness doesn't necessarily mean I have the machinery to turn out the solution.
I had balloons all over, spring, summer, fall. Stuck in telephone wires, blown into space, caught by a kid-who drug the wilted thing around until it shrivelled into a grubby, finger printed liver shape.

A "Foundation" is such a fancy way of living a life. I had never experienced it before then, and then, I lost it.
I mean, I guess I don't need it, I'd survived this long without the deep trench that's needed for all the important stuff, connected intricately, allowing the building above to function in these modern ways we've grown accustom to.

When I was a terrible nail biter kid I was obsessed with the idea of being a woman with long strong nails that would click across the desk, across a type writer, across teeth. I imagined women like that didn't obsess about anything. They were strong, secure, had their hair wrapped up in a clean bun and drove cars, with the shiny hard nails glistening as they turned the wheel.
My imagination was severely vivid as a child. I still wake myself up talking in my dreams and nightmares. I'll be Fighting, Falling in Love, Crying, Giving Brilliant Speeches.

As a child I couldn't wait to grow up and be away from my family and that house. I wanted freedom from day one, and simply could not handle any type of corrupt authority.
I would envision her again, the nail lady, with her clean hair, and watch her walking down the street alone. Living alone. Buying and wearing clean fancy clothing. She was me, who I was going to grow up and be. She never had a husband, children, any family but perhaps friends? Maybe a cat? She walked proud. She was always alone.

I know I am still "young". I know it takes a lifetime to figure it out, and that I'll never be perfect or healed in some fantastically angelic way.
Back to the foundation, I don't have the tools to dig the trench and lay the bricks, connect the plumbing and figure out the wiring and all that bussiness. I'm seriously not interested in learning any of this, it's dull to me. But I don't want to be constantly untangling myself from strangers magnolia trees and intersection traffic lights. It's terrible to feel like there is no bottom, like the lower half of my body is hacked, like a barbie with the legs ripped off. No base, just falling, just floating into space with arms reaching around frantically, eyes looking down, knowing what's happening, seeing it happen.

a New Shape

2009 is over. Thank God. SERIOUSLY.

On my first day of this New Year, that is sure to shape up with much cleaner, concise, purposeful lines-  unlike the ripped, burned, gnawed and unraveled edges that created last years shape, (that resulted in a ambiguous pattern that I am still unsure what to make with it) I rode my bike far. 

I set out to jog to my friends New Years Day get together. I put on my jogging attire and imagined in my mind how far Beacon Hill might be from my home. A few attendees of the New Years Eve party I had performed at the night before had offered to drive me home, as they saw me unsuccessfully hailing for a cab outside the venue. On the ride home with the strangers they said "when I used to live on Beacon Hill I would take 23rd ave all the way through." 

So in my jogging mind I thought "well if they can drive that way, I can run that way". 

I have this power with directions, I just "know" where things in the world are.  I have an innate sense of direction. Which is probably due to the fact that I grew up on the Pacific ocean and it was really simple to get a grasp of it. The sun rises over the mountains in the east and sets over the ocean in the west. The town was only as thick at the shore, four horizontal streets running east to west and a splatter paint of houses and twisty roads up in the hills; before they became mountains. And the town was held just like bookends between the two geographical masses. 

Then I imagined myself super sweaty in white running shoes at this "get together", without even a purse, just an i-pod and a ponytail head, and thought, "Heck, put on something respectable and ride your freaken' bike". Which I did.  

Thank goodness, god only knows how I made up the story in my head about Jude living on Beacon Hill, because in reality she and her girlfriend live about 15 miles south of that hood, like outside of Seattle basically. Across the Duwamish River. 

I rode my bike up the steep bridge the crossed from the industrial area of south Seattle with huge trucks and huge-er planes, across the thick grey river to "South Park", their neighborhood. Instantly I saw that THIS is where the delicious Mexican food was hiding! I had no idea. Brightly colored storefronts and signs I couldn't read, I was so excited, I fly to San Fran just to eat a decent burrito. 

I was a perfect winter day for a long ride. It was grey and misty but surprisingly not too cold, the wind was strong, but again, not too cold. It felt powerful and hard to ride against, the invisible force pushing the tears from my eyes and the snot from my nose, at moments threatening to take me and my ridiculously lightweight bike frame away with it. 

Arriving at the house was a dream. I stored my bike in Jude's basement where she has her music room. The first thing I noticed were all the posters from Baltimore shows we had gone to and bands we loved loving together. It felt like home, looking at that kind of wallpaper that has been absent from my life for so long. 

Upstairs on the fridge held up with a magnet, was Jude's girlfriends high school I.D. In her picture she has one eye closed, like a cartoon wink.

She went to the same high school in the sliver of a beach town that I went to, that all my three sisters went to, that my first girlfriend went to, the same first girlfriend who happened to also be at this New Years day 2010 get together. 

Lesbians run in packs and I always joke about the cross over and trade-off girlfriend situations etc. etc. that happen in the Lesbian communities and circles. But I actually really love moments like this. The interconnectedness of the communities from city to city, and all the music and art and friendships and lovers and memories.  So many long distance feelings, love letters, heartbreak and scandal. Packing up our lives and driving across the country for a better chance at visibility and safety. Breakups and makeups and sadness and healing. 

I suppose that house felt so good because it had been so long. I've known Azsa since I was twelve. I moved my life with Jude from Baltimore to Seattle. We have seen so much together. We've had a lot of time to digest.

So I guess when I am talking about all the clean lines and sharp patterns I'm after this year-maybe not so much. 

Perhaps it's just that up close they are coarse and you see all the imperfections and methods of creating that shape that are not so pleasant. 

But if you zoom out, with time, the overall shape is solid and the focus is a bit blurred, so the loose ends and desperate cuts don't seem so hostile, you just get the general idea of the thing... 

Is this true? Is this helpful to me? Is that shape just one word in the story? It's how we tell ourselves our story,  and then how we shape it in our mouth to tell others, it comes out a bit different, safer in voice form. 

I know I am too close to all the trauma of 2009 to see any sort of shape at all. 

It still feels terrible and dirty and I can't put a story to it. 

I know that's how all the shapes felt as they were forming. It's like birth, a total mess, a blob of a thing and it's not till way later that language comes. Perhaps I'm still struggling with the placenta mess and I wont know for quite a while what I've actually made.

night walls

I have this feeling in my legs I had when I was young enough to still be tucked in, when bedtime was always loathed and elaborate plans were concocted to stay up later, to hang around and soak up the adult-ness of night. It' s a feeling of textured wall, cool and slick with gloss finish paint, running along the backside of my legs. My heels, my calf's, my hamstrings. 

When I couldn't or didn't want to sleep when I was little I would always push my booty into the right angel where the twin bed and the wall meet, put legs up the wall and move them. The two fleshy lines would make shapes and have conversations, follow each other and sometimes lift off the wall into outer space and land again, back on the cool bedroom wall. It felt like the safest place to be, feeling the texture exfoliate the back of my little person legs as I ran them across my dark bedroom wall. Watching the legs I was merely a spectator of life, I wasn't in the legs,  I was in the audience at their show, I preferred this feeling, the watching, the not being.

  My first bedroom,  my nursery had bright blue walls with hot air balloons painted on the wall next to where my bed was. One was a Valentines Hot Air Balloon that was pink with red hearts. I loved staring at that one the most. The Balloon room was tiny,  and I found joy in the smallness of the room and that we had that in common. 

 My last memory of me in that room was my small self on the bed by the hot air balloons sobbing. It was the kinda crying you do so hard that your throat gets achy, your body shakes, you are dripping snot everywhere, your eyes feel ripped at the edges from all the wiping, the linens around you are wet. You try everything you can to imagine yourself in a different place, a different person, a different story. You give up, deflated, a  slop human mush on a lunch try bed, and sleep. That was the sound in the air with the Valentines Hot Air Balloon. The animal sounds of a child at night. Painted Balloons sound beautiful- they sound like cartoons and donuts and bubbles. Together we made that small room shake with our big feelings.