Wednesday, November 30, 2016

LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS

Just awoke from a dream so vivid I'm writing it down. I was newly wed and listening to various Beatles songs with my new husband. "Lucy in The Sky With Diamonds" began to play and I started sobbing. The song had such a powerful effect on me it was as if I was hearing the song for the first time. I remember thinking in the dream,"Fuck. Who needs drugs? This song is a drug. And The Beatles are still alive and will always be alive inside this song."

A few months ago I bought Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on vinyl. I made my son, who was eight at the time, listen to "A Day in The Life" and "Lucy in The Sky With Diamonds." I thought for sure his mind would be BLOWN. He sat there with a bored expression on his face and started making weird little distracted sounds. I said,"No. Show respect. This is one of the greatest albums ever recorded. You have to hear every note of this song. I'm just making you listen to this song and one other. When you get older you can listen to the entire album on your own." He was very relieved to return to his video games after listening to those two songs. Maybe he'll never be a Beatles fan. Maybe we have to find great music on our own. But I did turn him onto "Love Will Tear Us Apart" years ago. And at one time he loved "Spanish Bombs."

My son's middle name comes from my favorite uncle, whom I lost to lung cancer in 1999. My uncle gave me his Magical Mystery Tour album when I was in kindergarten. "I Am The Walrus" lit a bonfire inside my mind. It terrified, repulsed and fascinated me. That song planted a seed that grew me into the manic writer I am today. I share my dreams and fantasies and fears and compulsions and sad little love affairs with anyone who stumbles across this spastic space, this glittery unicorn diary with the busted lock. To be a writer you absolutely have to have a functioning ego and a touch of narcissism. You have to assume the world gives a damn about the stuff that floats through the hallucinatory rivers of your hopeless romantic mind.

You have to have energy to write. You have to have energy to fuck. You have to have energy to love, really deeply truly madly love, a motherfucker who may or may not deserve it. It never is about deserving. It's about taking, giving, allowing. Needing. Wanting. I'll never be a Buddhist. I'll always grapple with desire. It takes energy, massive energy, to record an album like Sgt. Pepper's. So thank you, George Martin and John Lennon and George Harrison and Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney and everyone else involved in the endeavor.

Monday, November 28, 2016

The day the fish died.

Men won't let me write. Men muzzle me. Men talk at me from the kitchen about shark steaks and mushroom rice. I'm wearing donut pajamas in the afternoon. My face is wrecked from stress and bad food and toothpaste. White toothpaste zaps zits. Men murder me in my sleep. I'm dead. I'm dreaming of a writer's retreat in New Mexico. I didn't sign up for this. No one will sympathize. We get the hell we pray for.

Last night I swallowed two blue pills and read about Jessica Wakefield's wedding and sobbed because I am still twelve and in love with Bruce Patman and I am still five with a broken heart and a sore ass because Daddy has a leather belt and he ain't afraid to use it. No one can find Goree, Texas without a map. You love a man. You lose a man. You write it all down and that is betrayal and that is suicide. I know what it feels like to burn at the stake. That is hyperbole. That is projection. That is metaphor. That is Mercury in Pisces squaring Saturn in Gemini tight. I've been burned to ash six or seven times. That is understatement. I've ascended but not terribly high. That's Truman Capote with a dry martini in one hand and a pen in the other. He's still signing autographs and two nooses still swing in Kansas.

Do I love a motherfucker deep enough and hard enough and true enough to gouge out my own eyeballs and cut off my own arms and eat my own fingers? I pretend to be a mermaid but I don't dwell in a deep cold magical realm where sailors are the only lure. I live in the desert. Everything is spacious and dry. I might be a lizard of some kind. I know I'm not clever enough to be a spider. I'm not always one web ahead of tonight's juicy fly.

Once there was a workshop and my story was about a fish. The story was really about me. The fish didn't ask to be put in my story but there he was, splashing his little splash. I cannot pronounce his name under penalty of death. Today the fish died. He's still floating black in his too small aquarium. There will be a burial of some kind. "Fish don't ever last that long. He lasted five or six years. He had a good home. He was an only child."

I have some graves to visit but first I want to grow my own flowers. I'm tired of buying things that die. I'm tired of getting what I pay for. I've got blood on my hands. I've got blood in my eyes. I don't know what white is. It must be nice to be pure. It must be nice to be a bar of Ivory. It must be nice to be buried in snow or encased in ice. Glacier. Yes. Quite. God I want that feeling.

Saturday, November 19, 2016

maS aRco iRiS


DISCLAIMER

I got a lot of work to do. This is work. You can probably smell my disco sweat. You can probably taste my rainbow pegasus wedding cake. I am married to this process. I am married to myself.

This is secret diary busted lock celebration. Any last words? Eat them. So delicious. Dumb with yum. Wash them down with green apple wine cooler. Pour out the last swallow for all the dead homies. Baby. We have now achieved nirvana.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

This is fiction.

The fish is going crazy in the aquarium. The fish is too large for that small glass box. This is a story. This is not a story about a crazed fish. This is a story about a woman. This is a story about a girl. This is a story about a cipher. This is a story about a phantom. This is a story about a gringa. This is a story about a white rainbow. I do not know her name or blood type. She drives all over Texas crying to the Patsy Cline moon. Maybe you've met her at Valero. She never picks the winning cards. Scratch and scratch and scratch until there is blood. There is no dinero. One day she dreamed up a simple white wedding cake with a turquoise flower on top. One day she petitioned Our Father Who Art in Heaven.

God, she said. Look, she said. And she meant every syllable. God. Look. Please. Mira. Mira. Broken glass and me in the middle. Her in the middle. Bad luck for seven years. Saturn on her shoulder. YOU WILL LEARN. Bitch you will EARN every tortilla. Am I good enough do I look good enough is my lipstick the right shade will you drink my lemonade and ask for mas? Green sauce. Verde. Put me in the corner. Stuff me in the closet. Su chorizo por vida. God. You. Us. I'm confused. I was voted most likely to suicide in each creative writing workshop. Who is God and who are You and what is Us? Deleted text messages. Poisoned carrier pigeons. Blocked at Facebook. The phone rings and rings and no cubic zirconia, bitch, and no buttercream frosting, bitch, and no Corpus Christi and no sacraments and no redemption. What is sacred? Sangre. Daddy's sangre all over El Alamo. My double Sagittarius maternal grandfather...white, quite...dying his love into my ear from hundreds of miles away. Bridgeport by morning. Hell by noon. South of no north. "I love you so much. I love you so much." And I am worth exactly nada.

Hemingway is dead. Hemingway wrote fiction. My dad is alive. My dad lives fiction. "You're Hemingway without the typewriter," I told him once. She told him once. She is not me. She is a product of at least one imagination. She could be a tumor. But she won't kill you.

DREAM WEDDING CAKE


Wednesday, November 9, 2016

SWEET VICTORY IN JESUS

I just shot myself singing a familiar hymn from my childhood. The video is at Instagram. I blame my poor socioeconomic status on Instagram and a few other things. I dropped out of college the first time because of "The Real World," "Saved By The Bell" and "Beavis And Butthead." That go getter gene must have skipped a generation.

I come from hard-working barely educated blue collar Texans. Oilfield. Factories. Grocery stores. Dairy Queen. I'm certain my family members voted for Trump. We barely speak. We speak when someone is dying. We speak because I'm the mother of a beautiful, sweet, bright boy. Everyone loves him. My family has failed me. I have failed my family. And the world continues to turn and these are the days of our lives and all my children are available at eBuLLieNCe PReSs because as the cliche goes, my books are my babies.

My son is also my baby and today I apologized to him for this shit show that he has inherited. Am I complicit? Of course I am. I voted for Hillary but that is hardly sufficient. We aren't allowed to live in the dream sand singing karaoke and writing our little poems then show up to cast our little vote once every four years and bitch when a reality television buffoon gets elected. We are all complicit. There is real work to be done. I lack the gene and my natal chart is shit but I better get ambitious and smart and lucky real fucking quick because I don't want any part of this monstrous world that we have created. I have to stick around. I have to fight. Leaving the country is not an option. Suicide is not an option. My son still sucks his thumb and calls me Mommy. I've been called all kinds of colorful things all my life but nothing breaks my heart like Mommy. I do not deserve Mommy.

I would like to deserve Mommy and achieve some semblance of peace before I finally die. That is why I'm here.