Hati & Katrina

Perhaps this is actually a dream journal. 

I enjoy waking up and writing about my all night long, wildly vivid dreams alongside coffee and slipper feet. 

I find just being horizontal I can remember them- walking into a darker room, or even just tilting my head back and closing my eyes, letting my jaw go slack, they come rushing back like the tide, so much information filling in all the little divots in the sand. Soaking in, always the same, always new.

I go to great lengths to shield my psyche against most of the outside waking world. I decided when I was about 16 years old that I was the type of creature that wanted to be in the world, but not quite of the world, and should limit my exposure to mainstream culture, foods, sounds and environments that would clutter my psyche, and perhaps this is why I have this vast playing ground for nighttime dream worlds to run a muck. The textures and feelings and scenarios are so vivid. 

The histories of my selves and the characters are long and lush and complicated just like in waking life, but I know about them, in my dreams I understand why the people are doing what there doing. I have this inner dialogue with myself about it, and seem to respond to the situations with more empathy and grace.  

I am in Orlando Florida,  last night in the all-white hotel bed I, my hair stained the pillow case pink, I passed out after our first night of shows here.

In my dreams I was in a troll land that switched back in forth between being human and troll space. The whole structure of the cities were crumbling, we had to run for our lives, I was crying as I tried to pack my small bag with one costume, I had to leave my roller derby skates behind, they would eventually sink into the water as the flooding was coming fast. 

Cielo was my husband in the dream and he was a human when I was a troll person- we switched back and forth throughout the dream, never in the same place at the same time. 

It was impossible for me to tell when I was what, I seemed to be the only person not able to see my change. It wasn't that the characters looked that different, it was just a magical quality that changed there energy in this way, that you could "see" them, and the humans had harder edges to them, seemed "bigger", held space more like cut out paper dolls rather that closer to the earth and mossy vine-y, soil like energy... that the trolls had

As I walked up this one stairwell it crumbled around me. It was tight and spiraled up like the staircase in my old flat in the south of France. I was naked and was apologizing over and over about it. On the rooftop were other troll like people who ran and jumped off the rooftops and down into moving trucks and the undulating sidewalks . 

 I tried to collect my little sister who was little like a doll, my bag, my lover, in the end I lost everything. I was floating in the water, hanging on to a wrought iron rail on someones  stoop of their back door that was floating down the flooded city. I was hiding from the humans. Cielo was to remain human and me a troll. 

There was a dark beach and us refuge troll strangers walked down it, wet and devastatingly empty, watching the paper doll humans erect hard cornered paper-architecture where our magical spaces had once been, before all the crumbling and cold water flooding.

on the ship

I had these epic dreams...

I was on this huge ship that was moving through thick contaminated water. At the end I helped the men bring up the anchor, I had to squeeze though this terribly small space to get to the anchor room. Low on the floor, like a crack under a door, I pushed my body though and found myself in the red carpeted room. It was like the Queen Mary rooms, but larger, redder.  All the carpet smelled like boat.

 I was looking for Jenny all over the ship. I made a mermaid tail out of foam core, clear packing tape,  a blond wig. I was swimming in my tail through the water. I had a dance partner mermaid. She asked why I looked so much like a man. I was more of a merman. I caught myself in the mirror and I saw a stranger man face I had never worn before. I kept applying make up but I couldn't paint on the face I was used to seeing. 

The whole dream I was terribly sad. I knew she was on the ship. 

It was miles long. 

The last time I saw her we were in a room full of people rolling around on the crazy patterned hotel carpet, rocking with the enormous boat, bodies silently flailing. She didn't seem to see me, she looked like a stranger. It was a carpet party, at one point I asked the librarian DJ if she had any Ladytron. I felt like I was in fifth grade. The bodies all around moving like empty soda cans, I was drenched in loneliness. 

 I wondered about my tail. 

My mother, grandmother and aunt were all in one dark room, talking about my dad. He was going to jail and they all shook there heads knowingly. I kept looking at the alarm clock and trying to figure out the time, the day, where she was. I knew she was on the ship and I couldn't find her. My hair was all wet and I got off at the wrong stop. 

I looked the map and I was going south when the campsite was north. Along the beach I found washed up fabric and tried to make myself a home that would work. I knew she had shifted and I was lost along the beach with strangers. My mom was somewhere crying and I wondered about my sisters and what had happened to them, I knew about Jenny and her stranger face, and mine.

Pack luster

I did in fact turn 27, but I do believe that I am unraveling in a way that feels like I am turning younger. 

I never believed "I knew everything" as a teenager, or child or young adult. I always felt solid in what I knew I knew. And knew that I didn't know so much. 

What I went though and analyzed and regurgitated and processed and touched and painted and had feedback from sane trusted others; that sorta thing I could feel pretty secure with, saying that I "knew about it". 

 I knew what I did not want to be like, long before I knew what kind of person I wanted to become. 

People who are older and much older then me will know I am young. 

Children who look at me will know that I am colorful, pink fun like Bratz Doll and older, a lot older then them. They will think about when they are "grown up" and if they will know anyone like me, be like me, wonder how they might be. 

I think about children and homes and owning cars and having health insurance and payment plans and taking vacations, having a storage space or garage with outdoorsy equipment and holiday decoration boxes labeled and writing books and having big family friend annual get-togethers. 

I think about belonging to a thing that is bigger than me. 

I've always wanted that. 

To be apart of something. I have felt the most satisfied in that department when I was in colleges.

 One summer I spent at Cal Arts on the hot, eucalyptus smelling Valencia campus. It was the first time I had ever felt what that belonging feels like. I was surrounded by fantastic artists, queer kids, seen by them, loved in a way I could feel. I reeled in the company of the brilliant minds all around me. We were the 15 year old out casts of our public schools, but here, all together we could dance, make art, play music, write, act, do stuff we just know how to do more than we knew about anything else. 

 We were all going to grow up and make stuff.

I spent a different summer in another Pre-Collage art program at UCSB College of Creative Studies. A campus that felt generally dull, but the College students who were our dorm leaders or whatever, I loved. I was the "Diversity Leader"  for the Student Activities thingy for the summer, at the time I was an "Ally".  I was a teenage girl who kept falling for gay boys. I had never seen a "butch" or "gender queer" type female person, I didn't know about it. I was attracted to the "queer quality" the boys had, delicate features, boy smelling, eyeliner, chipped nail polish, messy hair, I adored it. 

At MICA, we worked, we all just worked so hard.

Roller derby in Baltimore brought about the most intense feelings. I became apart of this huge, crazy intense family, with a mission- skating. We trained, worked, played together. It was the most intense time.

All my perceptions of sports changed after that. I understood about what it means to sweat, that the body is a machine. What it means to want to cry and vomit and shit you are trying so hard. 

I would ride my bike around, see a roller girl I felt exponentially safer knowing they were sprinkled throughout the sketchy streets of Baltimore. It was a secret all girl gang and everything in my life felt buoyant, easier, lifted by being 1 of the 60 women in the league. 

Life is different when you move in a flock around and around in a circle, with your hair flying and music blasting.

 Life is peaceful with wheels humming around the rink. 

I am a pack animal. I fare better with the whole. 

For never wanting a normal job, I am such a team player. The idea of accomplishing a thing together is so much more exciting to me than to create just my vision. I always talk about this. Things are so much more interesting to me when I am terrified to do a thing that the others all wanna do, and I do it and the shape I thought I lived in changes again, and again I don't know who I am, I un-do what I thought I knew, and I am younger.

writing things is easier than speaking

 I wrote on old thrift store type writers for years. 

Even in collage weirdly. But I went to art school, so we carried things like huge paintings and super long rolls of paper around the city campus, not laptops in black bags with nice pants on. We smelled like turpentine and had charcoal all up in our nostrils, fingernails caked with paint and ink and everything else we used to make with. 

My childhood neighbor had a pen pal who lived in some far off place, from our southern California beach town. I was always super envious of the letters she would receive, with stickers and little doodles, boring kid updates about visits to the dentist or a school field trip. I never had a pen pal, but was always super intrigued by a relationship of letters. A written interaction with stamps and time and government workers seeing to the absoluteness of its delivery. 

The bulge in an envelope arriving in the mail, the odd shape tweaking the clean lines of the symmetrical paper still drives me wild. The way Valentines Day cards have a few pieces of candy, sealed inside the small red house, holding the colorful cornstarch shapes. Candy is disgusting mostly, but send it in the mail with a glitter glue note and its the most magical thing I've ever seen, to precious to be eaten.

 I remember in high school senior year borrowing this old junker of a computer to write my collage essay on... I don't think it actually was the kind with the black screen and the neon green all cap font, but close enough, painful. It crashed and froze up every 2 seconds and I re-wrote my essay over and over. I practiced being Zen and deep breathing, I tried to "let it go" and "find my center" every time it lost the whole thing.

That was back when I drove a car. It had a cassette player in it. I loved the way my car smelled, how I was all alone in it with my mix tapes stuffed into every crevice. The car was a home. I sang in it, I cried in it, I made out in it probably... though I remember the crying part more so than the make-out sessions. 

I was really good about putting on lipstick while driving, I guess I learned that when I was a kid though, the whole putting on lipstick without a mirror trick. Its easy, my older sister taught me how to apply a whole face of makeup when I was six, seven maybe. Red lipstick was the name of the game then. The inside shape of that car was a great shape to hold a crying teenager.

I have those long high heel boot shoe boxes full of rolled up, wrinkly, random journal writings. I would crank out the pages and fill up boxes and boxes of  paper, all misspelled and XXXXXX'ed out. One type writer lived on the front porch, one lives on the book shelf, one lived on Sarah's little wooded chest she gave me when she moved to Africa. I wrote her letters and stuffed them inside the draws of the chest. I never mailed those.

Two times in my life I have sent handwritten letters out to sea in bottles. 

The first time in the south of France, the second,  on Christmas day last month from Vashon Island. I have never found a message in a bottle before. But I think it's think romantic. 

Years and years ago when I wore short hair, in a graffitied bathroom of a San Fransisco club I wrote a love note in sharpie on the wall. I had never written that type of confession before, but I was love sick and knew that we would not be together; it was a private-public place I could put that. This blog is similar. a private-public gritty, layered space,  just behind the door of the booming music, a place to try and salvage the sweaty make-up face, wash the sticky spilled drink hands, perhaps experience one of those magical moments that you randomly encounter in ladies room. 

an idea of "woman" xo childself

Poni is flying to India today. 

Ben made a square for a quilt for the baby.

Mom had her phone turned off.

Krystal is finally happy.

I fly to San Fransisco tomorrow.

In my dream Breesea was in the house with her straight blond hair.

Did Kara ever come back from New York?

In my dream I jumped off the terrace to get away.

Crying all night does in fact change your face forever.

Cielo lives with cats and bunnies far away.

Inside my pinata heart everything knows it's exploding.

paper mache' and cut paper strips and dyed paper pieces and little hoofs and eyes.

Last night I was swimming in an overcrowded lap pool. 

It was highways of floating bodies, above and below me.

I jumped out on the side after many near collisions and found myself in my "WILD" "THING" cheetah one-piece I loved when I was six. 

I couldn't believe I fit into it still, my dream body was shorter, childlike but with my today mind inside, and unaware I was in a dream body, dream lap pool. 

Dripping on the cement I knew everyone could now read the words running vertical down each side of the swimsuit. 

"WILD" in all caps, on a clear plastic-ey strip that ran all the way down on the left side, and 

"THING" on the right side, see-through with the words in black font. I knew when I was a kid the see-through quality was risque'. 

I liked wearing it in my best friends back yard, when her super hip and dangerous beautiful mom would be laying out with her friends topless by the broken jacuzzi, horizontal under the California sun. 

We would jump on the huge white rectangular trampoline in our one-pieces, and I would try to look at them,  wanting to be a woman like that one day.  The Yard was overflowing with stuff. A shed in the back with pin ball machines, dead cars laced with tagging and vines, bikes and skateboards abandoned by her brothers "cute" friends that came and went, a huge aviary full of colorful birds, and on the ground, bunnies, with their holes and babies, digging their way in and out of the jungle house. A forbidden tree house, clothes lines heavy with baby clothes and sexy panties and bras. 

Beautiful little girls running around screaming about "where is the cordless!" and they are "skateboarding to the store!". It was The Moms House, and everyone knew she was the most beautiful creature in town, as were all of her many children, dangerously beautiful. 

Once she noticed my "WILD" "THING" cheetah print one-piece, I felt the divide between girlhood and womanhood, chasms separating the two. 

We jumped and my beautiful and mean friend would perform all the tricky flips, sometimes I would get on the springs and from there I would watch the tanning women from across the yard.

Stoic, tan tan oiled bodies-breasts like warm muffins, perfect vintage accessories, long neon acrylic nails, a boom box full of music, a cordless phone atop a stack of magazines, lovers that came and went,  a mystery. 

In my wet, hyper-vigilant adult-child state I looked for somewhere to hide, to get away from all the lap swimmers in my "WILD" "THING" suit.

on friday i'll be 27

What I was planning to say is that last night at my show the host was wanting to create an original moment with any willing audience member to play the piano while he sang. They would improve on a theme shouted from the drunken audience.

He found a beautiful young woman with super curly doll like hair to play. The theme they got was "you don't know shit about shit". 

I was hiding behind the thick red curtain, as I usually do at this venue watching the peoples faces watch the show. 

I like to stare at them for a long time. You can sometimes read their lips or think that you can read their minds, or how they are or aren't digesting the show. 

It's tight quarters in that club, high heeled crossed legs hit the front of the stage. Glitter flys out of gloves and panties and into drinks and onto empty dinner plates.

I watch them watch the dancers, so animated, exploding with energy and camp and bling and shiny cartoon faces and intricate, one of a kind ridiculous costuming that comes off their bodies in brilliant and thrilling ways. 

I watch the people watching, they are happy looking, free...tentative, judging, stone, confused, drunk, unhappy.

We don't always live in the world the people coming to see the show live in. They want to see a thing they may not know about. When you do know about it, perhaps it's less magical? No. It still is heart wrenchingly beautiful at moments to me.  

When you learn all about the thing that you are enchanted by, are you over it, or more invested, more curious, more energized to go deeper? 

On Friday I will have been bellydancing for 11 years. 

So yeah.

The host and the doll hair woman are going at it. He's struggling to get into her dark song she is improving. He finds a road in and I love it. From behind the curtain I know the song they are making is funny, but I am holding back tears.

This summer I began saying frequently  "I don't know anything about anything. I feel like I am zero". 

This was a really new place for me. freeing and terrifying. What about all the things I have tried and figured out and discovered and known and solved. 

No, everything in the house ended up in the pool:

The nursery furniture, the blender, the bedding, the chairs and bikes, all the silverwear and dressers and bookshelves. 

forget the house.

you don't know anything about anything.

that house was infested. burned, blown away, crumbled. 

What house? 

I'm not going to fish my pillow out of the deep end and insist on sleeping with it.

I'm not that crazy. I'd rather sleep with nothing. See if perhaps my head even requires a pillow at all, I don't know, not all heads want the same thing...

It's sad though, looking at all your things floating on the surface, ripply looking down at the bottom. All the books you knew about, touched, believed in, slowly warping and unbinding themselves, turning back into pulp.

What do you do?

How do you exist after that? Without even a hobo stick with a kerchief at the end holding a small bundle. 

Ideas are dangerous. I don't want to hold on to them too tight. I really don't know. I feel empty of knowing. What I thought I knew is waterlogged, I am floating in a life boat. Its unbelievable what i see below me. everything is green and blue and black. Things that I held in my warm hand, kissed with my lips and treasured, are covered in moss and muck. Everything is wet and everything wet is terrible and sad. my hair is soaked from the rain and tears and my hands are white with white raisin fingers. all my make up is washed off and underneath my mom says i looked like i used to when I was a kid. She hasn't seen me out of drag in 15 years. she says i look like my grandmother. I look like her grandmother, i look like the ocean, i look like the riptide I swam out of, i look like unrecognizable moss covered objects that sunk to the bottom.

I float out of the boat. Up real high you can't even see the ocean. From here it turns into a blanket. You can even pretend it's warm. I think about finding a pillow to match. I shake my head and remember about them. I float and think, still, "I don't know anything about anything, I am zero".

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.