i am not aching for understanding as perhaps i once was, when i was younger, full of the need for attention. i do not long for the eyes of some other to come evaluate my being. i write here for no other reason but to write. perhaps somehow to share insights or fears, or merely to offer up the commonality of existence and understanding of one's self, or at least the common search for that so hidden in our own brains and typing fingers, yet so exposed by that very continuation of our existence. i do not stretch my fingertips so fiber-optically for your entertainment, or for your enjoyment. i do so for whatever reason - perhaps i myself do not understand. i write because it is in me to write. i write of myself and all the aching detail that includes in brain and in heart because that is what i know and that is what must be gotten out. why expose it here, in false ink on virtual pages? fuck if i know. i am a journalist of my own life. some people somewhere once enjoyed seeing the words that i so carefully or not extracted from this head and placed onto pages, and it seemed thus appropriate to continue with the providing of it. and i leave here for three months merely because i don't know what the hell else to do. i have so little of the passionate left inside of me and everything i read or see scares me half to death for the thing growing deep in my belly. i am huddling within myself, perhaps cowering. and my hormones and all their changes are making me tired all the time. i am too tired to think honestly about what i feel. and i have a life and a future and a husband outside of the web that deserves whatever emotional insight i can offer so much more than the three people who on occasion glance at this page. i need all my strength for my life just now, and i don't have anything left over to talk about. i could stand here and tell you, if you cared, how terrifying the world is just now - how everyday the news scares me so much i cannot spend the time to think on it - how all the changes happening to me and without me and inside of me are confusing and terrifying in their own right. i do not know just now how exactly to view myself and my life as everything is changing slowly and suddenly. i am indeed terribly self-indulgent, spending all this time thinking of myself, writing of myself, posting myself on the internet. but as i said before, i write because i have to and i write about myself because it is the one thing i am constantly dealing with and the one thing i am at all good at articulating. i always thought, somewhere deep inside, that if we all spent more time contemplating ourselves and our actions - particularly outside the realm of religion or psychoanalysis - that we'd maybe come to deeper understandings of ourselves and our actions and how precisely they affect everything in the world around us. i am trying very hard with all of this contemplation and blathering nonsense that i type in furious monologues onto the computer screen to come to some state of thoughtfullness, wherein i might be more gentle with myself and others; wherein i might know how to be more fully human and somehow serene; wherein i might achieve a peace with the world unguarded by human arrogance; wherein i might come to have my actions more correctly reflect my intentions. i am trying to perfect myself, and i arrogantly thought that perhaps a few people might gain something from my experience and my journey.

there are moments when i feel happy and alive and well. then there are moments where my heart feels heavy with the sorrow of nothingness and i can do nothing but fear my future. i am incapable of articulating that which i feel. i do not have the language for the weight on my thoughts, that thorn in my side. i do not know how to identify, change it, extract it. i can only sit back and wait patiently for the moment to pass or cry and fall asleep. i am no longer lonely with my self, stuck here. i keep myself busy then grow weary and sleep. irrational fears creep in then subside once i've voiced them, float away to wherever thoughts go when they die, become ghosts, still existing yet without importance or weight. i've lost touch with that thing inside me, that worm wriggling, that soul, life, love. i forget it's there yet do not. i am weary from worry. and yet for the first time in my life i cannot worry. i cannot worry about what will happen when i labor. i do not worry about the outcome of the birth. i merely understand the possibilities and allow them to exist outside my brain where they belong. and yet there are other anxieties. they come from nowhere, spring up like ghouls. i am haunted by my own thoughts. they neither stick nor disappear, but float around my brain in undefined shapes, fluttering occasionally to grab my attention without ever fully revealing themselves. i am trapped by smoke and mirrors in my own head. there is an inability to say what it is for the shape is never certain or defined. i am merely saddened, then empowered. then i merely exist, feeding on myself, the thing in my belly holding up my life, supporting it by making my life it's slave. and all these terrible things that come out of my head are stuck here, always, floating and swimming in brain fluid or in amniotic fluid and swallowing me and not letting me drown in the process. and though this has the look of horror written all inside it, i am generally happy, contented though uncomfortable and wallow only when these things attack me - and they do so without warning. perhaps as things of this nature always have. crippling fear and unsubsiding sadness. then moments again of calm and of blue skies. i am myself indefinable, uncertain, unknown, random, expressed by the unseen.

taking a sabbatical from the internet. please pardon my absence.

fear creeps in. as surely it must do, that which is not sure, uncertain, born of confusion and doubt comes and overtakes the brain for seconds at night, while reading. how is it that i let it? why must i eat away at myself, my insides full of all the emptiness i sense, crashing uncertainty into uncertainty and building into a nothingness in me, an absence of me, of action and how to be. for it is always the same question that i am asking and staring at self in mirrors, doubting it, wondering which failure comes quicker and how will i let my life be eaten alive by my life, the things i must do? it is not the mundane that i fear consuming me, but rather it is the mundane i rely on when i cannot rely on my dreams. and how will i be able, when the time comes, to cope with everything my life has become and all i must do - the squeezing of soul out of soul - and how can i muster love and sureness in the face of all that i've never been or done? when others tell me i am capable because i am stubborn, because all of us are capable, i do not believe them. i do not trust that which i cannot see. i am afraid, terribly so. i do not know how to force myself into shadows. i do not know how to become that which i adore, ultimately, but am uninformed of, do not necessarily recognize by sight. i do not know how to overcome myself to become myself, that shadow indeed, that pedestalled and glorious monument of myself in the future, its arms wide open and its face smiling. i am not that me. i am deathly afraid of that me. i know not how to overcome the obstacle of myself to become fully myself and to sell myself after to strangers. in truth i am not motivated enough. i am too lazy. i lay here on my back all day with stomach churning, wishing merely for it to stop and yet not taking the walk that was recommended and having trouble swallowing that which will attempt a calming. and instead of using my time of nothingness, and of misery in order to sit still here in front of the computer, concocting my future and my dreams into words on the page, typing my fears away, i sit still in bed, waiting for the moment to end. but nausea lasts longer than a contraction. i'm working on over a week here. and so too, i do not want for that to occupy the thoughts on the page, so why not just avoid writing altogether? why not simply never work towards that which i most want/fear? why not become merely a shell of myself, incapable and undesirable, mothering and nursing and crying all day long? i will instead huddle in corners, fear everything, be nothing and amount to very little. i will live the life of my title character, created from past and present and friends and smoke, and eat each sleeping pill one by one, stomach filling and spinning wildly, upset by convictions finally mustered for the worst possible task, and die miserably and self-righteously and selfishly and all that. i will instead hate myself not for not doing what i want, but for accomplishing the very opposite, the destruction of myself, the tearing down of all ambition, and the swallowing whole of hope. what beautiful pictures i paint, polar opposites of one another, and i, believing neither to be really attainable, sit in-between straddling dreams of one and the fear of another (or perhaps dreams of another and fear of one), walking nowhere, achieving nothing, and endlessly bitching about it all.

there are only two things that i think about all day: the baby and art. and yet here, i've nothing at all to say about the latter, as it is the baby that occupies my dreams and upsets my stomach. it is the baby that is becoming, ever-so-slowly, yet surely indeed, an overwhelming force in my life, something to consume everything that came before it. all we talk about is the baby and its names and its things that it will need. we call everyone we know to tell them of our news. i take prenatal vitamins and eat six times a day. we read books about the baby and keep a journal about the baby. we know its size and the shape it should be taking. sometimes i talk to the baby, though it has no ears. all my flesh becomes tender and my dreams are taken over by the baby, by my belly, by labor and nursing. i dreamt that i was nursing the cat. i dreamt that i went into labor and spent three hours filling out paperwork. i dreamt about shopping for clothes for the baby. the only thing that i have actually bought for the baby to date, is a halloween costume in the shape of a chicken. my mother thinks this says something about me as a weirdo, or me as a person, though i'm not sure precisely what. jon runs my diet so that i eat beans and lots of dairy and raw vegetables and fruit. we differentiate between good fat (nuts) and bad fat (beef). we check salad dressings and other condiments for sugar and sodium content. at the grocery, we buy low sodium, fat-free, organic soups in cans and ginger ale to calm my stomach. i wash my hands every time i play with the cats. i lay down on the floor carefully, to avoid injury to anything. i wear sensible shoes everywhere i go. i carry bottled water and sunflower seeds in the car for a snack. we looked at the baby section in the store the other day just to window shop. we looked at swings and car seats and plush toys and onesies and receiving blankets. jon was confused as to why everything was pastel. we laughed at the baby clothes encrusted with pro and college football insignia. we examined diaper bags and changing table pads. we saw babies in strollers and babies in shopping carts. every time the phone rings, i talk about the baby. every christmas card that comes says something about the baby. so instead of my life taking on the shape of the writer, with me writing furiously and hysterically, my life has taken on the shape of the pregnant woman. mi es embarazada. i am hysterically and fervently considering the welfare, the future, the present of my baby. it is all that there is here, just now: baby, baby, baby, baby, baby. i am not, however, particularly upset about this. i must simply find a way to return to normal. i must figure out how to become accustomed to myself as the pregnant woman without defining myself as such, without limiting myself to the title.

jon and i are reading great writers and at the same instant, reading about great writers, and we are finding that it is impossible, yet not, to be in their company, and yet here is jon telling me that i should write everyday when i get up in the morning and make it my full time occupation, so that i can hope to achieve, one day, the company of steinbeck (the aforementioned great writer that jon is reading about), with all his honesty he was reaching for, and evidently found, and then with salinger (my dear favorite) with all his mystery, and again too, honesty. how else do you describe a clarity of emotion in literature? salinger is truly amazing in his achievements. the great american writer among us, it's surely true. certainly of the latter half of the twentieth century at least. his achievements - like i said, clarity of emotion in literature, yet without the bogging down of a literary style. there is an absence of modesty, yet an absence of arrogance as well. there is a straightforwardness, a directness about the literature not weighted down with literature. and surely i cannot ever hope to achieve these heights - my honesty is me only. there is no clue into a childhood or out of it here, merely a mentioning repeatedly of the problems of the artist as such and the striving for and the reaching to of greatness, of some hallmark of achievement. there is no mention made, however, of the path, merely the struggle itself. and shouldn't i, the artist, be trying to articulate the path, the paragon of being human? isn't that the ultimate goal? does there need to be an ultimate goal at all? am i not a supporter of the hallmark of storytelling? haven't i always believed in the straight story, as it may be, with it's tiny twists and turns and the absence of arrogance, the straight story more valuable than a encyclopedia of anecdotes, but a story - just a simple, straightforward story. i believe in these stories. i am an advocate of these stories. it's just i've no idea of how to tell them. i know not what the story is. i have no method of pounding it out when i do not see the future in the eyes of these characters, when i have not lived a life filled at all with much of anything, let alone something worth writing home about. what haunts me? the process of my journey haunts me. the journey itself. the end of this journey. i've been frightened of death all my life. how can i write about that? what is there in it? no, don't answer, i'm sure i'll find it on my own and as i make mention of the tiny things that plague me, i'm certain i'll find my own answers hidden in the questions, just as i may have already done. if you ask the correct questions, in the correct, accidental order, you'll find your answers hidden inside yourself. it's almost always true. certainly in matters of the heart, or matters of the obvious, as the case may be. i find it to be true all the time. once i start talking about something, out loud or on paper - once i start to articulate the problem of my heart, the confusion of my brain - everything suddenly clears and i find in my explanations the truth that was hidden from me, i usually articulate exactly what i wanted to know, without needing any input at all. which again brings us to psychology and why it is a crock of shit - because if we just laid on couches in our own living rooms and talked out loud about our problems, we'd probably eventually find all the answers we ever searched for right in the creases of our tongue and the forming of our lips. psychologists merely usher this process along by asking those correct questions in the correct order. all of the answers to your confusion lay behind the mask of the obvious, the costume of the apparent. you are responsible for your own unburying, just as i am responsible for my own greatness.

painting yesterday was about archaeology and psychology. the concept of digging through one's soul to find oneself. where did i bury me? which ghosts of my former selves come back to haunt me? and i find words suddenly pouring out of my paintbrush and they are asking questions and pointing out the varying aspects of how we think of ourselves - ghosts of yourself, yourself of yourself, paleontologists of yourself, then graveyards and death wishes and brain traps and everything spinning and forming the abstract notion of time suspended in the head - of whatever it is i deemed it to be and now having created this concept out of imagery with these hands and the choosing of colors. and i realize how dark my imagery is while i am so happy, so inexplicably so, so unfathomably so, yet true nonetheless - and i am wondering where it all comes from, and as i'm wondering, i'm recording the process and it's only coming to me in snitches of verbal imagery about pterodactyls buried beneath the earth and in my head there may very well be graveyards. in my head there may very well be graveyards - and that is the concept i am reaching for and trying here and failing to explain. which is perhaps why paintings deserve no words. which is why psychology is such a ridiculous profession because it's all filled up with guesswork about the abstract and the cyclical. perhaps only mathematicians could ever say anything truly interesting about the brain and of course if you're an artist you'll always believe that they've gotten it all wrong. so suddenly, here, on the page, zha seems to be as completely off his rocker as i may now sound to you, dear reader, for he thinks he can map it all in some sense or at least attempt the explanation that i am failing so rapidly to merely preface. most days, it is the concept of me as an artist that i address, and very rarely if ever, the art. yet today, it is the art and i am finding with extraordinary rapidity, that i should perhaps stick to my former subject, regardless of how you may tire of it, because i am much better at expounding upon the turns in my head about myself than i am about that which comes from me because honestly, i do not know from where it comes, i am unaware of why i pick the colors i pick when i am painting or sometimes where the poetry is coming from, each line, fragment, watercolor... i can only say that there is a process that occurs between me and the page, wherein a dialogue goes on and the white of a canvas tells me where to uncover the brushstroke, and the ugliness that was there is wiped clear with color. with language and with color, texture, visual metaphor, there is an element of the dreams that i have, or images of what the figures themselves would do, and i throw them in the mix with no explanation and leave the audience to get a sense of a scene rather than to tell them directly everything i intended. i believe that art is for the audience; that it is the audience who should accept or decline an artist's invitation into dreams, and that when delving in whole-heartedly (as when reading a novel or staring, unblinking at a painting), it is the audience's dreams that will be reflected. that is not to say that it is the audience that i am thinking of when i am working, but it is the audience who ultimately handles the work in the landscape of their minds and hearts, and thus, it is always theirs for the having.

blink of an eye. my universe changes by seconds and i am stuck, wrapped in and warped by my confusion, seas of possibility outstretched and contracted again. my body alters and morphs itself, aching, abdomen coursing across muscles and thighs sore and again confused by their ache. my head gets fuzzy. i am out buying books and health food and i am restricted now from everything. and all of this is more than pleasing and more than fabulous because that thing inside, growing, is mine and filled with and created by my love. seven-and-a-half months from now, i will be a mother. and i am thrilled by this endeavor. i am ecstatic by this twist in the story of my life. and suddenly, i am no longer planning my life, it is no longer held suspended in the abstract notions of what the future will look like and how i want things to grow or be in my house or out of it. suddenly, my life has planned me and my life is now being lived by me and will from now on be that thing that i do and not some concept hung in my head by starlight. suddenly it is a waste of time to think here, "what will it all look like?" "what will it all be?" no. now it is. and now i have things to do and responsibility is claiming me by the throat and i am going willingly. now i will do what i have to do to engineer my dreams, because without my hand directing the traffic of my life, like god reaching through clouds, it will not go in the way that i had hoped and the dreams will not take the shape of their making. instead i will get stuck and grow fat with the laziness of destiny-making. i must do that which i want and love if for no other reason than to not be one of those people who wishes they had pursued their artistic dreams instead of becoming merely a mom. i will not regret my life or my motherhood. i cannot let that happen. i cannot let that be the example i lead by. i must instead utilize this opportunity to see through the eyes of my child and be myself the child i once was, only now with the responsible mom in me clinging to my side. i must take chances now for me and the life we've created (even if it is just a fetus, non-viable outside the womb). i must now do what i dream and become me as i am, me as my potential embodied. i must read the tao to understand my life as it is, and grow by leaps and by bounds. everything i've ever wanted is now coming to me at moments in my history when i was most certain of how my future would look merely because of the convictions of my statements. i am ready for my future and to be me as i am now. i am no longer waiting for anything.

sitting on the painting in the cemetery eating sushi. overlooking the city and questioning everything anyone's ever said about me and feeling, once, now able to write, yet having not written. now taking a vacation. me and my husband drinking beer and playing video games. it is not quite the image of me committed to writing as i'd held, but we are now just resting in preparation. and strangely enough, i can say, for one brief moment perhaps, but surely nonetheless - i am happy. i cannot explain it - perhaps it is the friends in the park with the sushi overlooking downtown who give me strength and give me the courage to hold tight in my fist and to run with far into my future and my dreams of me in it or just my dreams of me as they might be sometimes. it is my friends who push me to "engineer my dreams". my friends who force me to believe if however briefly, that i am capable of all that i imagine. that i am capable of being me fully embodied, that i may be now in fact me to my fullest, me embodied, me bottled in me. me as me, as nothing less than all of my potential. i am a package of anna kiss. i dreamt last night of celebrities and telling them "hi, you may have heard of me, i'm anna kiss - would you like my autograph?" they thought it was funny. i'm not sure if i was only kidding or if i'd expected them to reply in the affirmative, that yes, i am anna kiss, and wow, aren't they impressed. my sleeping dreams are as ridiculous as my waking ones.

that once pedestalled comes to me now as putty, unsure and unwilling to go forward or backwards and leaving me to interpret spaces between sentences in not-so late night e-mails. the familiar exists in both the brain and the heartache, the arrogance once so claimed as surely nothing bigger than mere pride, the confidence - now comes, and it is realized that it is tiny, it is fruitless and made up entirely of the empty - that arrogance is combined of confusion and self-loathing and it is claimed to merely go on. and i have seen this in you before, i thought, surely, we must be the same and i am so much of nothing, and here you come to me and it is true. we are filled of the same eyes and the same hands and the same ambition and constant disappointment sprung out of fear. how does one jump off cliffs exactly? how does one commit oneself fully to the starving and the dying role of the artist and terrorize one's brain to extract the comment, the image, the glimpse of heaven embodied in a snail shell? and the question looms at each intersection of what is true and what is merely inevitable and how does one associate oneself with the fame one seeks while simultaneously realizing and holding tight to one's heart the truth that we know - that it too is empty and all filled up with confusion and self-loathing. even that which we seek is corrupted and where, then do we fit in, where do the van goghs and the basquiats fit in? we now hold them in history. they are only valuable in their absence. and it is their insanity by which we measure their genius. and somehow, that feels familiar. so, the question, again, how do we objectively judge ourselves and know of ourselves our ability to create and for it to be meaningful and to not drink ourselves to death in the process? where has the passion to go on existed without the company of misery? is it then possible to commit this brain to that objective beyond all illusions and pretenses and beyond the necessity for clothing or cars, beyond the necessity of love and of some semblance of stability, beyond oneself, one's recognizable self (clothed too, in counterfeited personality, yet with some reasonable depiction of normalcy), beyond all that one knows is the world existed, this reality, to fully envelope oneself in what is potentially, and with some measure of probability, assuredly fatal? is it reasonable to venture into the unknown and live to tell about it? and, to the point, is that your question? or is your statement merely that it is terribly frightening, it is unbelievable and you hate and adore everything and nothing and long, with every fiber, to experience it as both, for the later purpose of extraction to fling, to float, to place onto the page or onto the blank canvas. life is lonely. we want to exist in our worlds and to not exist in our worlds. we want to prove something to ourselves, to prove something to the world - that we are comprised wholly of the insatiable and the magnificent, the creator damned to his own life. and yet i feel that i am missing the point entirely because my words are incapable of cupping this idea in them, of conveying the point of the story and the outcome of the misery of the creative energy of worlds destroyed and built again. your brain as babylon. and so too, your heart. it is an essential aspect of the balance of the universe - that you, capable of such dizzying highs, are brought, here to your spiraling lows where everyone you know is a stranger to you and every word they utter, a lie. here, now, you've touched insanity, how then to escape and be again what you love? no. how then to make use of it for it is inescapable? perhaps. where did you go? what self was it that was not you? here, you feel again yourself, though it is comprised of everything terrible about you. and left is no initiative to accomplish anything. which direction do you turn? which way, which path, which dharma is yours? what precisely are you intended to do, because nothing at all is fulfilling, so wouldn't it then be simpler for someone to tell you? wouldn't everything be easier if you had a patron who demanded of you, whip in hand, to paint all day? wouldn't your role as an artist then be clear? how does one become everything one desires precisely when, in one's head, one is not at all anything like what one desires most to be? remarkably, one is stupid and terrible and worthless, not at all the greatness embodied by one's dream. i am then a walking paradox. i would like very much to own a quiet cabin in the city, where i might feel at home finally, my surroundings built to be like me, the structure formed for it's precise purpose, holding an expressive quality that describes what it's intended to house: an irony. i am a contradiction. i want nothing more than to be a housewife with children climbing all over me. i would like no less than to be a great artist, to be the writer i may or may not be capable of. my words are phenomenally powerful for saying nothing. i alternate between, and at times, exist simultaneously with the notions that i am tremendous and i am damned. i am always busy building myself up and tearing myself down again. i should be hanged for betraying myself. and so often the words escape me to tell you, to say to you, as i cannot say to myself, how beautiful your work, if you would only work, how phenomenal your photograph, how incredible that phrase, and each sits, quietly in the museum in my head, bathed in moonlight and dedicated in your image to the canals of history. i am a fan if no one cares, or if you do not even care, and sometimes i know that you think the same of me, that you are the reflection of me without the constant doubt and without the paralysis. so then, why is it that you are left incapable? you cannot leave me with the belief in hand, hanging, confused, stunned expressions on my face that all is lost because you have changed your mind and gone irrepairably insane, and i might lose you to it. you cannot tell me you love me and trust me in silent sentences and not go forward with what i associate you to be. if you do not soon return to the habit of "fuck everything", then i will not be able to accomplish it myself. i need inspiration inside of me from outside of me in order, that i might do, that which i dream - the jumping off of cliffs and the abandoning of compromise. i am here, and poised with recklessness, now on my count, you go first.

seconds tick by as i read the excerpt of michael chabon's book on amazon, and i am waiting, desperately waiting, to plunge myself into this world, to be what i want most, and to be done with this with which i am exhausted. i am waiting to return here and to see my life before me as something other than a series of deadlines and a continuum of futility. i am waiting to comment on it, to have something to say about my own existence, to have observed something of note in my day, to have felt as though i have learned something worth the reiterating or worth the application of to my life. i would like to see something stunning, here, in the world, and to feel it in my chest. i would like to not feel so useless and counterproductive. i would like for my fingers to have something better to do than to write papers on subjects i find mildly interesting at best and typically, merely trivial. i would like that rather than memorizing slides of art in a dark room, that i go to view art. i would rather participate in art. i would rather have art in my life from the perspective of an artist, where the analysis is about the soul rather than about the allegory. i would rather not formulate sentences precisely to get the best possible intent of out the most possible words to increase the length of the page. i would rather be writing from my heart than from my ego. i would rather learn about and formulate how to be that which i dream than to scribble as quickly as a professor can speak, postulations on the nature of learning or dreaming or being. i am ready and waiting for my life to begin to be again my life. i am ready to take again the helm and to exert some control over my own destiny. i am learning as i go. i am done with learning the path that i might one day view it.

i am paralyzed to create by the necessity to study. i am required to be writing papers instead of poems and on three by five note cards rather than in my journal. i must study for exams rather than create studies for paintings. i am very much looking forward to next week. in a matter of days i will be able, finally, to concentrate on that which perhaps i've been procrastinating and that which perhaps i am a little fearful of committing to, but it will be required by the threat of my own guilt to focus and to commit myself to a life of being, finally, myself, the writer, this person, writing. in a matter of days my new occupation, my new full-time job will be to write. my new station in life will be to explain in words that which i am and that which i've created and how it all happens, each day, every night, all over. my new persona, will be a writer, staying up late and thinking constantly about my characters and what their motivations are, will be, have been in the past. i must spend all of my time now plotting and replotting the path of point a to point b and possibly back. my new office will be in front of the computer or outside on sunny days drinking hot liquids (because it should get cold at some point soon, i'm assuming) and writing furiously, writing manically, writing fervently, writing infinitely, writing perfectly, writing absurdly, writing squiggly, writing sheepishly, writing impressively, writing impassively, writing murderously, writing egotistically, writing narcotically, writing eagerly, writing zealously, writing enthusiastically, writing creepily, writing suspiciously, writing wrongly, writing rightly, writing justifiably, writing writing writing writing writing!!!

i am the good little housewife. i am full of being busy and washing and baking, hands in constant motion, tracing with the fingertip a bit of stray dirt off the table and picking leaves dragged in, off the carpet. i am good and i am productive. i merit the donna reed badge of self-worth for being so devoted and careful to take those steps necessary for domestic tranquility. and still, somewhere far away, a liver has failed and a brain is bleeding, taking with it mi familia. my devotion to my household does not stave off death for those damaged by alcohol, by years of lone star in cans and one singular concussion, one kiss of asphalt and forehead. when i was quite small my grandfather shot a rattlesnake that was eating his chicks. everyone rushed outside to see the snake held high in his hand with two round lumps near the head, two chicks swallowed whole. my grandfather wore a cowboy hat and cowboy boots everyday and a big metal belt buckle. living in texas requires such attire. even for chicanos. when i was twelve my grandfather made me sing "somewhere over the rainbow" for him. when i was four my grandfather was yelling at one of my aunt's cats, kicking it out of the house and i said, "now be nice grandpa, be nice." my grandmother tells this story every time i see her. my grandfather has a giant grill in his backyard that looks like a well. my grandfather owns seven acres of land with five massive oak trees with spanish moss hanging all over. my grandfather collects old metal signs which he covers his barn with. my grandfather will die soon. i will miss him.

disastrous living has made the everyday catastrophic from the miniscule to the major. perhaps not disastrous living. perhaps merely disastrous thought. the constant, incessant buzzing of the analysis running in my head of detailed descriptions reworked and reformed of my head and all that it sees. everything i do comes out of fear. writing now, here, at the computer, not reading up on chardin or indian art or cell structure, is about the fear of eyes reading or looking and finding an absence of new words. its about the fear of being the opposite of an artist, of being untrue to my art. it is sprung of the fear that nothing new has crossed my thoughts today. and then, when i will stop, at whatever moment that comes, it will have come out of the fear of ruining that which i've written, of writing too much and unorganized and ridiculous. it will be born of the fear of what procrastination has brought me to, this fury of fingers typing and working, eyes reading, scanning, the cutting of the pictures to fit the flashcards and the rapid memorization of everything. fear triggers most every move. and this adds to my life, a texture of the damned. i give that to myself in the magnification and dramatization of my life and how it is lived. but in truth there are not enough good days to go around. in truth, the texture of my life is full of these dark holes that i've perpetuated by my own cyclical thought, these holes that i bore in my own skull, in my own mode of thinking and the breathing of my breath through hands and beyond tears, choking, understatements filled with self-hatred, resounding about the room and never landing upon other ears. my heart is crushed between rocks and hard places that i've imagined and placed, there, where the mundane should lie, looking so much like the everyday of everyone's lives, but here in my heart quaking with the sensations of torture. i am my own illness. i am aware, overwhelmingly, of my own hand dealing me the blows. here, on the page, it sounds as though my brain is a prison where bombs are dropped in continuous motion. it is, in truth, merely a melancholy, a confusion, shackled with hand and with fist to me, this mind and body. it is merely my lot and i live it.

influenza. there are no medicines available for what has ailed me and the cough comes deep and with green ghastly phlegm now. momentary no smoking. and no classes. aced a midterm coughing and chewing on leudens throughout, tissues wadded in hand and palms sweated and shoved into the coat pocket. sixty degrees outside and i'm wearing the full winter artillery. hat, gloves, scarf, wool pea coat. bundled up and coughing unable to bike the rest of the way home, i call a friend to drive me up the hill. seems to me the last contact i've had with the outside world. went home for the weekend for my sister's birthday. jon's as well. decorated the cake in the car and saw katie allen and her brother paul walking by - jon and i bang on the windshield to wave hellos. goodbye. and the sinister feeling that though it is not cold yet, as it should well now be, winter has crept and bonded itself to my heart. i could not get the classes i wanted for next quarter and have decided that i will either commit myself fully to the life of the writer, as the writer must be, up late and smoking cigarettes and drinking, typing at the computer the story of the girl, whoever she may be, the composite of me and everyone i've ever met, killing herself slowly, or quickly, but surely dying - or i will most likely hate my life and die it slowly or willingly or somehow. it is how the story will go. and these are not options that i have set before me, on the table, lined up like choices or the holy grail of my life, but rather, these are the choices as i know them to be, as i know it in myself to become. this is what my future looks like. and i am banking on you, the reader, to read. or, as it is more likely to happen, for jon to make enough money to support our future as we have deemed it with our satin finish nickel-plated whatever (probably bathroom fixtures) and the red, red walls of my living room with books. me, writing. because it has come to my attention, and perhaps to everyone i know's as well, that i am a writer and that i must write. that i must write my fictions and my poetry and my vision of the world in all its watercolors and nightmares. that i must write my story as it occurs to me, and my experience as it is experienced by these eyes, this heart, flesh, blood, bones. dust. i am book ended, as we all are, by my past and my future, and i cannot for the life of me, take my eyes or my mind off of either. birth, death, and all that lies in-between, collecting memory and soot. i see my future stretched before me in the great cyclical nature of the universe, spiraling beyond me, outstretched, waiting. i cannot tell you for certain how it will occur, but i know inside of me all about its foothills and deep, reaching valleys. i know all about its tangles of intent and miscommunication, about misinterpretations of me and what i say, who i am. i know about the lies and the heartbreak. i can see all of it spiraling out beneath me in the past. i know that it will all repeat in infinite cycles. and my grandfather is without tumor now, yet in texas, intensively being cared for, unconscious. he is dying. it is not certain, but likely, and i am to make the decision right now about staying or going. i have decided to wait. i will wait to go until the immediate future is clarified. because i have responsibilities here. i have invested thousands in passing this quarter in school, and i have decided to try to do it. this decision is not without feelings resembling regret. but going could not be felt without regret either. there are turkeys to be baked and dressed. there are hearts here to be mended. perhaps that process is lifelong anyway, though. perhaps this heart will never be mended. it has not yet been successful. it seems likely that success will never reach the arteries. there is no certainty with anything, however. there is no certainty worth citing anyways. the apartment is spotless as of today, and there is satisfaction in that. yet not much hope for the future. sadness is trying very hard to overcome me, to envelope me. much like the disease with no cure, it spreads and is fought off by blood cells or by brain cells, and much like this ridiculous war, it is never certain which side is winning. at least not by my watch. there is no way to measure it. there are no words to hold it, no language to clarify or explain. water slipping through cupped hands and so on and so forth. there. i've hit on it finally. words with which to articulate the texture of my life - water slipping through cupped hands.

sometimes i live life. sometimes i can feel life coursing through me. most of the time, however, i'm too scared to do it. to take risks, to prove myself or whatever. i think it's kind of funny i'm supposed to be an artist and yet i'm sitting, cowering away from life like the weight of it will crush me. or maybe life is just the mundane punctuated by the spectacular and i'm in it, but afraid that it won't always be the spectacular because it isn't. afraid, perhaps, that it could be and that i should be capable of seeing it through 'til it's all fascinating, but i most likely won't, or can't. perhaps there is a way to see what we need - to dedicate ourselves to experience and then the art of experience, the regurgitation of experience through art. perhaps there are places in the world that don't resemble hippy communes where people make art all day and live it and eat and drink and are merry etc. perhaps it is up to me to create that experience within the confines of this mall-america, within the confines of my own humble existence, within the confines of this life. perhaps life is not defined by achievements, but by the mundane, by the washing and the caring. i cannot look back and tell you the texture of my life without creating anecdotes, telling the stories as stories, or ending them with punchlines. i try very hard to convey the feeling, the texture of my life as the thing that it is, but i cannot define it with language, so i cannot tell you whether or not i have really lived or whether or not i have been merely racing toward the end of this like a rocket shot from the eternal pocket of dust, of memory, of obscure similies in emails. what i do know is that i want very often to reach the end, or to cut life short. perhaps that is an egotism, and perhaps i already knew that. it's because the sadness is everywhere, all around, and i am trying everyday to write it right, so i get all caught up in myself, and the parts of me that are not myself. but there's an alternate egotism that stops me. that makes me think that i've got something better to do than to weep every day, each night, all over.

*thank you to just for letting me reproduce this email i wrote to him.*

the words you say send me over edges. and i am off of cliffs, careening into the space of my brain, its agony and misery, its inexhaustible depths, where i lay and weep and wail about all my hatred for myself, professed by your words as well and thus only reiterated. the things you say to me are terrible, but perhaps not even intended in this dosage; perhaps not intended to do that which has been done, to commit the act of pushing me over the edge, eyes covered over, not knowing. and yet i find myself falling despite mislaid intentions; in spite of my will to not fall. the part of me that goes on and on for hours, perpetuating the agony, is not the part of me that has control day to day, but rather the unconscious part of me, my molecules fighting off misery and thus producing a variety of its own. much like the flu and the blood cells that fight off the virus, causing your fever and your aches, your cough, your sore throat - something that is not of you that takes control and your body hurts itself trying to get rid of it. my body does not have a say in the virus that inhabits it. my consciousness does not choose to hate itself. and yet i become overwhelmingly aware of my own role in all this. so much so that it adds to the misery. i know full well that i am being ridiculous - that there is no reason for me to weep, the thing is not so much to hate yourself over. the thing is merely the thing - whatever it is that you said. the hurtful thing spoken, yet perhaps not intended. and still i find the truth in your statements. i know that i am self-obsessed. i am aware of my own indulgence of my misery. i am overwhelmingly coherent in all this. so much so that it kills me. or at least it'd like to try. it (me being the it, but not me) would like to slash throats or down pills, starve to death, stick this head in that oven. it'd like to swim very far out in the ocean and not come back, to exhaust itself. it'd like to gouge out its eyes. whatever the method, it is trying very hard to kill me and i am trying very hard not to let it. it's a bizarre dance - the right hand holding back the knife in the left, one trying to hurt the self, while the other is trying to save it. the words dance about on the page even while i am attempting this explanation of that which inhabits my head. there is something growing deep inside of me and i've been learning over the years how to quell its periodic manifestations, yet i've not had the opportunity to diminish them to a nonexistence and it's a doubt that i ever will.

nothing/everything. the plans of my world are falling into being plans and not necessarily into place, but there's a sense of relief coupled with anxiety nonetheless. my plans are not growing from my fingers like words in books as should be their intention. my life is not taking the shape i am intending for it. i am in-between. i am waiting. i am working on the quarter and being tired and uninterested in the lives of those around me and generally pretty uninterested in my own life. i am curious as to what the therapist, were i to return to her as i am supposed to, would say about all this. would i have anything to expound upon - my life, the forms it takes? for right now it is in this amoebic shape, going nowhere, doing nothing, merely waiting for winter to come, to swallow me, merely waiting for the moment when the novel is ripe in my head and thus in my hands - when it is ready to spring forth from the wells of my being. yes, the waiting. currently the thoughts in my head involve balancing the checkbook and doing the laundry - tasks and tasks and chores and tasks. what did i forget to get at the grocery store? how much of this material must i read in order to do well on the midterm? will anyone ever come into the computer lab while i am in here, this huge sterile white box, filled with the heat of these machines and their incessant humming? would it matter? and these thoughts are of the mundane - i am beginning to think that i am of the mundane, that same stuff the rest of the world is made up of, i too, am apart of this, these actions, daily and overpowering, their consequences miniscule and unremarkable. am i too then unremarkable? must i admit that the fantasies in my head of daily life with children and family and my own home are the mundane, the weak, the opposite of powerful, striking, fantastic? must i admit that all that makes me an artist are simply the same things that make others human? that i see the same thing, perhaps not even in a different light or with a different edge, perhaps it is merely the same thing and yet i am struck by it - i am fascinated, and one day, when i have managed my fantasies of my own family and that life, it will all disappear into the cloudiness of everyday. for what is it that keeps us wide-eyed and child-like? what is it that keeps us fascinated by sunsets - the stillness of twilight, anything simple and remarkable? what is it precisely? i have noticed in my time here, on this earth, that there are those folks who make everything we do seem amazing. there are those in the world who make being in a parking lot incredible, those whose smile is an electric storm on your brain, kerouac's mad ones - so is it them? are these, whose aura is so electric we cannot spend vast quantities of time with them, the reason that life is beautiful? or perhaps is it that the world is beautiful already and yet these mad ones become the eyes we need to see it with? is it that everyone is capable of seeing the world in this light, with star-struck eyes, but some of us lose our grasp on how to use them? is it that everyone sees the world as this incredible thing that it is, but forgets when they are wrapped, unconsciously, in this blanket of the mundane? is it possible that i might lose my sight and forget forever? barring that, is it possible for me to write it right, to show the world in my words that everything i see is incredible for split seconds, that the way that light reflects off walls is more full of meaning than a volume of my descriptions of it? there are moments in this life where i am conscious of what things look like and what they mean by looking the way they do - and though i am without the language for it, i hope to be able to convey somehow, somewhere, the meaning and the history wrapped inside of each and everything that i do; that anyone does. i remember specific instances in my history - sitting in an old car with a good friend watching the sunset, talking about our futures; standing above the city in which i grew up any number of times with all the men that i ever loved, feeling truly sentient; and last night, as i was leaving the bar, giving hugs to those i love, finding two friends, deep in discussion, hugging and kissing goodbyes, but holding on longer, squeezing tightly, without words knowing and conveying that i am sorry, for whatever it is, for whatever it might be, i am here and your tears do not need to be hidden. and how do i tell you, with typing, what this was for me, however momentary? how am i to keep telling you, years from now, what i think and make it beautiful, and make it worth the reading? how do i say everything that the world is, everything i know or don't know, when i am all filled up with functionality and the mundane is creeping in and threatening to kill me? more importantly, does it matter just now, or am i trying to fill my time up with the contemplation of anything of remote importance?

i am trying to make sense of myself and my life. i am trying, everyday, to understand where it is that i am going and why i want to go there and how it is that i will reach that destination of which i am ignorant. how can i feel my way along the path without knowing what the path looks like and being blind to my goal? it comes simply down to questioning what it is that i want and what it is that is best for me. i do this all the time. i've written volumes on this. i do not know where my skills should take me or what i should do with my talents. i am trying to be the best writer that i can be without thoroughly committing myself to a life of writing. i am trying to be a great artist without making art. and i am always stuck in the struggle of doing and not doing, of creating and not creating and the guilt and the anguish involved and doing the dumb shit that i gotta do to survive and to be a productive citizen. i am not defined by my station in life and yet i feel this intense need to define what my station in life should be. i am grasping at the air blindly searching for my dharma, without any idea as to how i will choose the path that leads me to it. i am always lost. i am forever confused and aching for some hint of truth, some insight into me and who i am and what i want. all i want is to understand what it is that i want. most likely i will never find out. most likely we are intended for this earth to hack it out as best we can and we will never fully understand what the best is. most likely i must keep turning to myself with a stunned look in my eyes and confusion on my mind, struck dumb and wondering what the hell it is i think i'm doing. perhaps that is what keeps us in check and struggling for the best, on the path to the unattainable - enlightened versions of ourselves staring back at us from imagined futures with organization under our arm and confusion banished to the ends of the universe. most likely, those things impossible about the universe are the only things worth reaching for.

tumors. tumors and tumors and tumors and tumors. and taking apart the word itself and finding only cells that multiply and multiply and multiply and understand no boundaries and cells that react to harsh therapy and innocent cells that die and cells that occupy brains in grandfathers and cells that overpopulate the cerebral cortex and sap all the nutrients and cells that create malfunctions and tumors and tumors and tumors. tumors that come to me in the movie theater, watching drew barrymore and crying because i cry at movies - it's what i do, it's what's expected - i cry at movies because movies are glimpses of lives that i want or lives that i am deeply familiar with or lives that have experienced enough of what i have or have not myself experienced and so i cry at movies and my friends giggle at me because i cry even at previews for movies because they are all the sad or beautiful moments of movies packed into two-minute montages with that guy's voice-over starting every one the same, "in a world..." and then there is the new kevin spacey movie or the new russell crowe movie and tumors coming to me there, as i'm not drinking my two-dollar-fifty-cent sprite, as it's melting beside me in the cup holder in the theater and my friends sitting next to me and i lean over and say, just before the feature presentation begins, that my grandfather has a tumor, it's in his brain, and there, i've said it, and it's been said and i'm not all that worried, because how can i be, he can be a mean old bastard anyway, and he is going to die one day anyway, but i am concerned for my family and what they are thinking, but it is true that i love him regardless of my own life and sometimes in spite of it. that is how family works. the tumors just come to me in the movie theater and in the car, driving, not listening to the radio and not being concerned about those who are cutting me off or driving too slowly in front of me - all i am thinking is tumors and tumors and tumors and tumors for what else is there to be thought about? the brevity of life? hasn't that occurred to me too often and always, as i inch my way towards that drop-off, that cliff of the end, as sometimes i try with running starts to throw myself over, yet always stopping right here, this spot of the immutable present? is that what a tumor is supposed to conjure in the car or in the corner of the party, sitting, watching the drinks and the drugs consumed and feeling sleep pounding at the door of my eyes? should tumors bring to bear the idea of death? or, is it more about a crowding of the brain, a crowding of the flesh and the pushing out of you, out of your eyes and your chest? tumors remind me of the hollow vacuum of my head - how memories go on forever into darkness and into forgetting, how love is never the thought at the forefront where it belongs, how the preciousness of life is held here, where the cells don't regularly multiply, but rather we kill them off by the millions with concussions and with beers, it is here, in our heads where all that we know is stored, where the value of life is held and thought keeps the world together, our reality in hand. it is the tumor pushing my grandfather out of his own body. it is the tumor that occupies all thought, so that the only things that remain are tumors and tumors and tumors and tumors.