When I gave Trailer Guy a journal he got kind of upset. He seemed to believe his ex had put me up to this. Or the other girls. The other girls had given him a journal.
The journal was handmade, section-sewn, which is my favorite, because it opens all the way. A section-sewn journal doesn't  have that spine tension. You don't want tension when you write. Barriers. A bad keyboard. Bad pens. You only want to think about what you need to say. You need to focus on the words. 

Trailer Guy wrote in the journal, a few lines, and then left it. A signal it wasn't wanted. And I threw it away without reading what he had written. What a waste a time. To make a journal, gift it, have someone write in it and then leave it. Rude. 

Of course I read what he wrote.

It was boring and sad. Just like him.

He wasn't boring or sad. The writing wasn't boring or sad. I forgot what he had written. Mostly. He had said something about how you shouldn't put your thoughts out there because then people will know you are crazy. He didn't want to sort it out. Or he didn't want to try. 

Emma Clarkson did not write a book about soap-making. Emma Clarkson does not use soap. Emma Clarkson is AI. Writers under Tabby LLC are AI. Written by AI and read by AI and given names. These people don't exist. 

Rosa Hallwar is not a real person. She has been given narrator credit on Spotify for the audiobook "Gravity and Grace" by Simone Weil dropped on February 13th 2025,  

The image of Weil on the book cover looks goopy, made by AI. 

AI has the goopyness to it. And Rosa Hallwar isn't real because she's also the "Juniper" voice on ChatGPT.

It's weird to give a name to a non-person. 

I like jobs that you don’t have to think about what you’re doing. 

Jobs that you just do and your brain can do something else. Whatever it wants. 
In school, my brain did whatever it wanted to too much. The teachers commented on it at the parent teacher conferences. I was a day dreamer. 
School is not also automatic. You have to think about what you’re doing most of the time unless you’re smart. I’m not smart. It’s one of the things I’m most mad about not being.
I don’t mind if my hands are occupied. When I’m working my hands are usually filled. Sometimes for my job now I have to take calls on the radio. It requires me to put things down, take out the radio, and push a little button, and affirm I’m listening. 
I’ve made everyone since becoming middle management just say who they are and what they’ve done and promised beforehand I heard them and thank you. 
I don’t want to put the things down. 
I also don’t want to stop thinking whatever it was that I was thinking. 
I hate being interrupted in a daydream. It’s why being alone is important. I get into it deep. When another person’s around I can’t go that deep. 
The other day there was a moonrise that was supposed to be extra epic. I invited a guy I was talking to on hinge to drive to Redmond and see it at my sky gazing spot.
He said “sure, sounds good. I’m a little nervous but sounds good,” which was sweet to say. Showing vulnerability like that is cool these days. But then I realized I didn’t want to lift out of the thought patterns I was having all day to be around new energy. And I realized to see a moonrise by own self gives god a good opportunity to talk to you and I didn’t want to miss that.
I guess being alone means god gets to talk to you. And I always kinda want to be ready for that. And it gets in the way of things, like new energy. Maybe that’s a cop out.
I hated teaching. Teaching was the ultimate job where you have to be physically and intellectually present at the same time. I always hoped an autopilot mode might sneak in but it didn’t. I was always present. Making eye contact. If anything, I wanted students to feel seen. In my regular job I try not to make eye contact with anyone unless I know them. And even then. I’ve developed a great sense of NPC disassociation. A real uncanny valley softness in the eyes. But with students I tried to make meaningful warm eye contact so they felt ok to do art and make mistakes or whatever they needed to do in the space I cultivated for them. It was so exhausting because they were so unhappy. Being a kid is the worst. I was a kid once and it was so horrible. A kid in school anyway. I don’t know what it is to be a wild kid. To be a kid in school is lousy. School takes away from what could be a good fun time of one’s life. I can’t even imagine. 
I like knowing how to read though. 
I remember learning to read and write was so hard. I’m grateful for that. Before I could write I wanted to write so I drew letter like symbols on a paper hoping to infuse them with meaning. Learning read and write wasn’t easy, despite wanting it so bad. When “writing” I don’t remember if I had a good story to put down, it was just the act in and of itself, alchemy and transformation of the inside to the outside. 
To share. 

But before we go too far I need to ground this story in some place or moment. We can’t just be in my head. Or if we are, we have to make a room out of it. Let’s make the room the one I’m in right now. A hotel room. A Wesley snipes movie Passenger 57 is on representing all the horniness of the 90s. From the perspective of time all the plot points have been laid for the story to knock them out one-by-one. All predictable. The love-interest. The baddies. 

A man walks by the window screaming profanities holding a thick book with lots of pieces of paper poking out, reference tabs. He seems to be in a state of crisis, psychosis. Anthony walks behind him a little bit later. 

In the hallways I move like a scared animal, not wanting to seem approachable. A older white man in the hallway has been locked out of room 9 and asks to be let in but I tell him “sorry I can’t help you,” even though I can. It’s policy, but I’ve been unhelpful to everyone lately. 
I think about checking in with Anthony later about the guy. 
Anthony and I give each other a hard time and he’s not sincere often but I am. And trailing someone who is going through psychosis with the intention of buffering anyone from potential harm would be stressful for me. 

My foot hurts. I think it might be the man from room 9 cursing me. He watches me dart from room to room fully aware I could help him. All I need in this last room is an ice bag which my brain calls a sandwich bag. My brain gives names to things and oftentimes they become the real name everyone on the team uses. It’s hard for us to have labels and speak about things which have no name. It’s hard for us to pull out of the deep-think we cultivate while cleaning rooms. 
Cleaning rooms is hypnotic. 
If you’re doing it right you enter a trance state. 

In a new room someone has left $5. Noël calls me to the front desk to give me $40 from another room. It’s not the money I’m after, it’s the trance state. The no-think zone that was pulled away from me when she called me to the front-desk. 
I’m working with Haley today, who understands this deep state thinking. Sometimes someone will ask “how are your rooms?” And I will have to surface a bit to answer, “good,” even though I know i should try and remember if there was anything interesting in the trash. A clue. Treasure. A cool shaped box. 
I’m thinking of that NYtimes review of that autofic. 
"Writers of autofiction have been accused of trying to preempt criticism by couching their work in self-awareness. That's not the play here. What preempts criticism of 'Next to Heaven' is simply how bad the book is."

I’m thinking of that text from my sister this morning:
“I wake up to go to the toilet and I always see left over poop Particles from bobs morning poops. I need him to do a second flush lol”

And my response:
“I clean my toilet almost every morning with toilet cleaner and a brush. That stuff is waxy and won’t often come off with two flushes. Nor will a flush to get flecks in other places.
Which is to say, not because I’m a clean freak, but my poops are gross af and I’m afraid I’ll die at some point during the day and someone will have to see it.”

Emma says she can’t think for the whole department. When Emma is here I don’t have to think. But I try not to make her think for me. Yesterday she did some thinking over a toilet with me that had a broken flush mechanism. 

There were so many previously unknown words to have to make up or discover and wield to try and talk about it with maintenance. There’s a part of me that loves learning these words and having this world of connection and accessibility open up. A lot of the time my brain can’t or won’t access words. Names. We make a lot up. 

Here’s the part where I look in the mirror and describe myself to you. Here’s the part where I snake the drain and the smell of brimstone makes me swallow hard. The sight of hair mixed with black chunks. Why does our brain feel like these things are in our mouths? My sister has a fear of clusters because her body is afraid of infections. She almost failed chemistry in college because she couldn’t look at the textbooks without feeling dizzy. Without her heart racing. Because of all the microscopic slide images of cells clustering. 

Trying something new and being bad at it is so embarrassing. We’re trying to reset that narrative but it’s just a fact. When I was teaching, making eye contact with everyone, I saw it all the time. It’s horrifying. I’d come in and show an example, an example I hate that I created that the kids think is quality, and they try to reproduce it and they hate it and themselves. And I tell them I hate myself to and everything I create and it’s part of the process. I tell them there’s almost no joy in art and that I’m sorry we have to do this. The best part was in the beginning, when we believed we could. Before trying. If we could just stay there forever I would. 
Sometimes the teachers would come around and also tell the students their art sucked. In the program I worked for it was supposed to be my job to teach the teachers on how to execute an arts curriculum in public schools.
This involved encouraging teachers to ask leading questions about choices rather than critiques/praise. I could never get around to doing this because they often let me know I sucked. And I wasn’t helping. I was making messes that they would have to clean up. Or tell a custodian to, who would vacuum while I was trying to talk. 

A man asks where the bathroom is. 
I let him talk to the side of my face without turning. I tell him it’s up the stairs and past the front-desk. I point. I demonstrate that I have no social skills. This used to be a trick, because I had social skills. But now the antisocial persona is taking over and when I need to be social I’m weird and quiet. 
It’s hard to think of a relevant story to add to a conversation. 
It’s hard to tell the story and know if it’s any good. I have friends who listen and don’t interrupt. 
One of the things I’ve lost the ability do is listen to myself while telling the story. I gotten accustomed to staying in my body, and when I tell the story that’s all that can happen. I used to be able to scan myself and those listening to know when it’s important to tell a little lie, or exaggerate something. Or find a way to remember something about the listener to tell in a way that it will appeal to them more. I just tell the story and am done.
In this way I’ve deepened my authenticity. This was the goal. There’s this person who talks for me and tells discreet lies and I hated it so I’ve been reeling her back in recent years. The hope is to integrate her with a more authentic version of myself.

Is there anything worse than hearing the same story twice? 
Telling the same story twice. 
Sometimes I’ll let someone tell the same story twice. Sometimes I’ll let someone know I’ve heard it before. Sometimes I tell them I’ve heard it before they and they still finish it. Leaving out no detail. 

When my hips hurt I do a kick like the munchkins in the Wizard of Oz singing about the lollipop guild. I’ve never done it in front of anyone. 

There’s nothing worse than a memoir that’s aware of itself 

There’s nothing interesting in any of the rooms I’ve cleaned today except for money, which is the least interesting thing ever.

In the room I’m in there’s a package of half-eaten pickles which ingredients say contains no sugar, a half-eaten whipped dip that contains dairy, and $20. 
There’s also an empty bottle floating in the ice-bucket of water.

The guest left a pair of blue striped shorts which I bring to lost and found. They are very cute shorts. From what I can tell from this room I would probably be friends with these people. I like liking people that I’m cleaning rooms for. It’s why the clues are important. I tell the front desk when I hand them the shorts “these remind me of Jack,” and one face offers recognition. 
I also found a map in this room of the High Desert Museum. 

I say we would be friends because the pickles and white wine, but we could never be friends meeting this way. My biggest fear is someone coming back to their room and seeing me. I feel like a potato bug when a rock is lifted.
I like being a secret. Until someone sees me I don’t have to exist. I am just a doing thing. A cleaning thing. Not a person. To be an energy doing, not a person, is to embody something magic. To be a person is gross. The nakedness of being caught cleaning a person’s room while they’re in the room is humiliating for everyone. It dispels the myth. 

My favorite segment is on the tourist channel. “Visitors Channel.” It’s a geologist and historian walking around the Peterson Rock Garden.
I don’t know how long this segment will air. Maybe a week or two? They walk through the garden and talk about the mineral history and the social history of all everything. They seem like they’re both on mushrooms, and I feel like I’m on mushrooms watching them. They also seem to be children and falling in love. I’m also in love. They get softer and dreamier as the program moves on. They show surprise and awe and humility at all the things they see. 

The hallway smells like pot. I find a penny under a bed I’m inspecting. I throw all coins onto the sidewalk. I hate coins.  

I turn on the tv in the pickle room. CNN is on and I let it play while stripping the bed. They’re talking about the Israeli Iran war 

Ugh, the pickles are spicy. 

Tommy didn’t give me his French fries at lunch. 

This new room smells like that too-dry man deodorant. We would not be friends. The memory of this smell is of dating Tyler early on and he smelled like that. Everything about Tyler was amazing except his smell so I steered him towards a new deodorant at the grocery store. We settled on a kind of cedar deodorant. He’s since thanked me for this help as women have loved it. 

Sometimes I catch myself in the mirror and think “ah ok she is cute,” and sometimes I see nothing. 

My vagina feels like it’s clearing its throat. 

We keep running low on pillow cases. 

Anthony and I hid our faces from each other in the hall.

The service berries are ripe. 

There are some folks in the hallway and I said “sneak by ya” and this woman said “not sneaky if you say something” and I laughed a loud hollow laugh and now feel bad because that was rude of me. I just want to be invisible, but people already sense me as invisible. It’s impolite to say “move.”

Writing a story is a lot like riding a bike without training wheels. You can feel your body lock into the balance and momentum. But then you have to stop at some point. I never know when this is. The story will end in a crash. I’ve been using chat gpt to write the endings. I don’t use the ending they produce but I want to know that it’s possible. Like watching a simulated version of self slow to a stop, slide forward on the seat to straddle the bar, and put her little foot on the concrete. It would be impossible to know this and execute it, you just have to know it’s possible. 

Since November, before sleepy time, I’ve made a habit of leaving my phone somewhere far from reach. During this time, I read my inner child a bedtime story, only a page or two, as my hand falls to the side, book open, lights still on. 

“There is no harm in putting off a piece of work until another day,” I read from Antoine De Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince. 
“But when it comes to baobabs, that means catastrophe. I knew a planet that was inhabited by a lazy man. He neglected three little bushes..” The following page depicts a man holding an ineffectual little shovel surrounded by trees that have overgrown and cracked his planet.

“Raggylug continued to live in the swamp,” comes from a book about a rabbit of that name by Ernest Thompson Seton. 
“Old Olifant died that winter, and the unthrifty sons ceased to clean the swamp or mend the wire fences. Within a single year it was wilder than ever; fresh trees and brambles grew, and falling wires made many cottontail castles and last retreats that dogs and foxes dared not storm.”

The dreamy children’s book lessons drift into my subconscious and become fodder to chew on the following day. 

The messages from The Little Prince are well known to be a disguised allegory motivating the French Resistance during World War II during the German occupation. The baobabs symbolize fascism. The tedious daily chore of uprooting them becomes the quiet, essential resistance. The planet’s implosion beneath their roots reflects the occupation.

“Children! Watch out for baobabs!”

And then we have the message of Raggylug, the rabbit who is able to thrive in land abandoned by domestication. But aren’t briars like baobabs? Making spaces uninhabitable by humans, foxes - only a place for rabbits? 

“Predators,” I remind myself. 
 
What are the baobabs and what are the briars? 
Are we rabbits or men?
What is ‘the work’ and what is ‘the wilding’?

Some days the work feels urgent. Other days, the most important thing is to let the world grow as it will. Listening before judging. 
I’ll never feel fully confident about differentiating. And I think it’s about noticing. 
About staying in relationship with the land, even when we’re too tired to tend to it. 
Staying in relation to one another as complexities emerge.

“On ne voit bien qu’avec le couer. L’essentiel est invisible pour le yeux.”
What is essential is invisible. One can only see truly with the heart.

Some days we grab the shovel, and other days the brambles tangle - not out of neglect, but trust. 

There's abundance in rest, and wisdom in attention.

When I wake to turn off the lights, I’m the adult tucking in my child. 
I want to do my best by her. Have her grow up in a fair and kind world. Not fall for the myths of scarcity. Not cower under fascism. 

Tomorrow will be the work: the tough conversations, the community building, the grim news on the radio, the planning, the noticing. 

For now, drifting back to sleep, I let my little rabbit dreams get lost in the thicket.  

Yesterday I held my sobbing friend after she ran over her dog. She screamed and stomped her feet - her energy felt like a bomb. Like a house on fire with propane tanks inside going off. We held her in the way I’ve seen soldiers jump on grenades in movies, taking the energetic blasts with out chests. But we didn’t concave. We didn’t collapse or deflate or scatter. It’s energy, after all - invisible, intangible. You just knows it’s there, you feel the tightening and release of it as a witness. The heat, as a person outside the burning house. You just hold on.
There were the other bodies, my two big man friends. Collectively we enshrouded her. She’s tiny and fierce. Like a dagger or flint knife. Our energy felt heavy, a fire suppressant blanket. Like the water on the inside of a plane gutting out over a forest fire. We were heavy and still. We held on and held on and held on. I didn’t know what was happening. The grief made us a singular body, the grief guided us what to do. It orchestrated us in a way I have never known in grief.
“Your body will know what to do,” the hospice nurse had said in ‘Dying For Sex.’
“The body is wise.”
She listed the things that would happen in the dying process with excitement.
The hallucinations, ‘the rally,’ (a kind of seemingly unnatural resurgence of energy which leads people to believe recovery is possible), then the slowing of breath, until one big exhale followed by no inhale. It’s all very normal.
On the floor of the kitchen we reminded our friend it was not her fault. I was unaware of this concept of shaping the narrative during these tender raw time. It seemed less words were better. Or just repetition of essential details. It’s not your fault. It was an accident.
You just have to be yourself in these moments. You just become very still and pat your friend over and over and over. That’s what we did and it felt like the right thing to do. She screamed a lot and said the same things over and over and I could feel the grief coming in waves and waves from her body as the energy got lower and lower. Less passioned. More deflated. Dampened. But still angry. Just deeper
“This wasn’t how it was supposed to go,” she kept saying.
“This is so stupid.”
“It’s the stupidest,” I had said.
It’s exhausting. The grief. You must burn a billion calories. During it all one of the friends went grocery shopping and came back and made macaroni and cheese in the kitchen we were all in with the lights still off and the sun had set. Covered in snot and blood and tears. I’ve never seen a birth before. So much of the human experience I’ve seen in movies. Soldiers on bombs, dying, childbirth. It’s all kind of rare and exceptional to our lives surprisingly, these big moments. It makes us prepared in a way, but then we can never be prepared.
I got her a water, it always seems to be one of those things, water. And a linen kitchen towel to catch all the fluids. You grab a blanket. The friend that make the macaroni gave her a bowl of macaroni. The energy of the grief centers everything to its needs in a best-case-scenario. It’s like a halo, or an micro-atmosphere shapes itself where nothing was before. Everyone orbits around, the gravity immense in some stages. A somatic entity,  a life force of its own volition. It requires us to do things. Compels us to act. Compels us to be still. Water. Linen kitchen towel. Macaroni and cheese. All things are adjusted to make the space in the center.
This friend and I have this understanding of heartbreak. That you can never really fall out of love. And that’s it, with no other wisdom to follow through. You just have to say goodbye and hurt.
“What’s next,” she had asked, somewhat rhetorically.
“You grieve,” another friend answered and it felt like trying to fill up a dry lake bed with a drop of rain.
“You just grieve.”

"My love language is trying," I find myself saying. Mis en place. I made a new pine needle coaster when I realized a boy was coming over for lunch one day and I had only one for myself. He didn't stay long. I looked at the pine cone coaster foolishly around that time. Such gaudy excess. You eat at the table, then move to the couch. Then you are watching a movie and not talking. I haven't got to that stage. We give up before then. Before a show can begin.

Alt text: as generated by Chat GPT: A bearded man wearing a black hoodie and a baseball cap with "Evans Fabrication" embroidered on it smiles warmly at the camera. He is seated at a desk, hands resting near a large amethyst crystal surrounded by small, flickering LED candles. A ruler and a pen are also visible on the desk. In the top right corner, a small video call window shows another person with blonde hair tied up in a bun, leaning over a notebook. The background is a simple office or workshop setting with a whiteboard or bulletin board partially visible behind him.

Alt text: as generated by me: "I bet you're hating the lighting in here," Tyler says.
"Nahhh!" I protest, looking around the harshly lit space. Overhead lights. What Liz Lemon would call "grocery store lights," that make everyone look terrible like one "just got out of the ocean in a 1700s painting."
We talk about the time we used to face-time during out distance courtship and within a month I installed a lamp by his desk.
"Here, this'll make it better."
The phone camera goes Blair Witch Style as he collects electronic tealights and an amethyst crystal.
"I feel like this face-time is going to start costing me $10 a minute when you start divining my fate."

Who am I to wear the golden dress and dance with the king?
Torn from the pages of "Leaving my Father's House," a psychoanalytic testimonial of three women assessing their role in the patriarchy, the line is teased from the story Allerleirauh, a tale of thinly disguised incest where a princess wears three gowns to impress the king.

There's a kind of magic at a thrift-store, it's where the good lord sends me my short-term romantic omens. Which is to say, if I can find the dress, I can imagine the date, and from the date will come the love.

And from love will come..

I often leave buying nothing. God won't speak to me.

Or the omen portends loneliness.
It is always just a chance.

The perfect dress and they'll never leave..

It has been the same story again and again this winter.

When I brought up being a deeply flawed human incapable of attracting a long-term relationship, my therapist said, "What if it's not about some deep, unfixable flaw? What if it's about patterns - learned ways of relating and, of protecting yourself, or reacting to closeness? Patterns aren't flaws. They're just grooves we fall into because they feel familiar, even when they don't serve us."

Around this time, in this part of the cycle, I realize I like someone.

And I realize I can't be cute anymore.
I realize I have to be a person, and exist in a third-dimension.

It's that feeling of rounding the curve of the body with your palms, just enough to time to have soaked in some broad and minute details. Enough to time to know you want to stay around awhile, and then the uncertainty that follows that realization.

Asking isn't cute. I've done it twice with bad results.

My therapist will say, "Love isn't just this thing that happens to some and not others, like a lottery. It's a living, growing thing, shaped by connection, timing, and choices of two people. And the fact that you want love - real, enduring love - means you are capable of it. People who are 'too much' for the wrong ones are everything for the right ones."

So I look for the dress. To dance for the king. But moreso, the dress that can shape itself into all the versions of me I hold inside.

We're watching Love is Blind and I start to fast-forward through all the second/third date conversations.

They're so boring.
They're always so boring.

Everyone so shocked another person values God and Family and eating and Nespresso and new patio furniture every summer.

But just now I realized maybe I'm scared of being bored. I'm scared of what comes after getting-to-know, fun facts, caught up on the lore. 

You can never know all the lore.
But sometimes we stop asking questions.

Maybe my fear isn't whether the dress is dynamic enough to attract and soak in, but a fear of when a dress loses it's magic. Maybe I'm afraid of not being magic anymore. Existing third-dimension. An
d god forbid a fourth.

There is this purple dress I haven't worn yet.

It's a spray tan and patio kind of thing. It's cava and oysters and two full of months so maybe in May after stuff has come up and we've gone through, and around and things have gotten a little complicated but we're moving our pawns forward.

Still scheming. The things we've come to love outweigh the fear that once paralyzed us.

And fuck the king, but not the dress.
And god save the person who is willing to dance.

https://open.spotify.com/track/5aS6eku2Klhl8k2VYnE5cd?si=0ba88a9a0ea949d7

Having to play the friendly-reminder game.
You're fine. You're going to be fine. We are sitting in a chair, not tarrying near a cliff.
The full moon yawn, beacon in the South waking me up through your curtainless window. A car drove by and you raised the blanket to block my eyes.
Why this energy comes, I'll never exactly know. There are no tigers to fight. No cave to hunker in waiting for the storm to pass. The children are fed. You cross yourself in vain.
Yet it comes. Venus blazoned in the sky watching, Mercury to follow soon. Perhaps it's the scrutiny which makes my nerves pace.
Last night I set them all to bed, seeing who was awake gazing at the ceiling. A kind of Madeleine orphanage of parts. None stirred, but none slept. Pious. They knew there was nothing to be done. Nothing to make it better. Nothing to say or analyze or weigh or consider. They just had to lay down.
Why must it be this way?
Nothing to eat or drink. Just through. Nothing I can write or say, or that anyone can say to me at this point. My mind becomes feral and we must all be patient. We must all let it run it's cycles among the hills. Sow its oats.

To get on the record that Caitlin and I came up with the concept together. That it doesn't belong to me. That it's rooted in the idea others can borrow. That it's not mine. That it's a divestment from social media. That it's a response to the misaligned values of platforms that connect us. That we want to take our voices and content away from that power.

Things I use social media for:

Stay connected to my friends and strangers who I admire
Current events
Current opinions on current events
Keeping a finger on the pulse of social events
Sharing what I'm doing
Wielding it as a tool to control my narrative as a cute creative
Announcing workshops/commission opportunities
Monitoring social status/influence
A continuous tether to social movements
Contact with the way language is changing
Keeping up-to-date with trends
Inspiration
To suck up the times when I don't know what else to do and simply doomscoll

Tools I will use to meet these needs outside of social media:

Fliers, bulletin board, the free weeklys for mainstream local social events
Relying on friends in the network to let me know
Newspapers, magazines, (New York Times, New Yorker Magazine) for current events and trends. I only ever read captions and headlines anyway. How hard can it be to flip through the New Yorker at the library once a week like I caught Josh doing once?
Defining myself by some other metric than overshares. Most likely a trust fall but also this blog, this website, little guerilla projects
Cindy Crabb wrote "Creating a visible public presence" as a means to cultivate a shitty little town into a punk rock town and I coudn't agree more. "Posters, flyers, graffiti, public art. Nothing is more depressing that a town with punks that just post on the internet, nothing is better than walking around a shitty town and finding an Anarchy sign spray painted behind a grocery store." Also Cindy Crabb says more in one fucking sentence than I could in an entire book.
Graphic novels from the libary to suck up the idle time. I also have Josh James' zine on my bedside and other books I've picked up weird places.

It's like I can never open the window wide enough. With my eyes I vacuum up every little shred of light. Continuing to tuck myself into the nook of my phone. The endless rooms of an ever extending mansion. To be connected. To be part of something. And to participate in that thing. The place to curate a perfect home, despite all the plugs. We don't even see the advertisements anymore? They're part of it at this point.

Joe today, on the couch. Less nervous that before. Both of us. Mad with a kind of desperate fire. Eating messy greasy tacos I made.

Crafting the recipe for the perfect tortillas.

Step one: End the federally funded terrorism at the border.
Step two: End the continuous threat of violence and deportation of white nationalism
Step three: Amalgamate as a society. Learn Spanish to fluency. Have an integrated friend group.
Step four: Then you will make the perfect tortillas. Because someone will teach you.

The protest. Honking horns. A woman yelling out "HONK ONCE FOR TACOS AND TWICE FOR TAMALES" and just laying it on. And then just wanting to puke they had to be there in the first place, being brave, deserving so much more than the bullshit they've been handed. I'm reminded this is irl.
In the screen: The man in the PTA meeting talking about his son crying after school from racial-based bullying. The white dad saying "then why'd you come?" and everyone screaming him down.

How many of these glimpses shape my reality? What will happen when I "see less"?

Not everything is for you to sieve through your main character syndrome Rachie (that's what Joe calls me). What you see is what you're meant to see. What you're meant to know will find you, whether you're looking out the iphone window or the real window.

Opening the window wide enough. Closing the other one.

Listening: "Montage (feat. Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe) Radio" from Swiss Army Man
Listening: Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

“Get in Rosie, we’re starting a new life,” I tell the fawn-colored pit-bull who has jumped into the passenger side of my Subaru.
Her person is calling her name.
Parked in front of me, a Subaru spilling with snowboard packs, a foam mattress.

Mine spills blue mesh sacks, bundled linens from the hotel, unloaded three at a time.
Plowing through the push door of the laundromat.

60 lbs, the xxl washer advertises. I can’t tell how much I carry in my arms.

What is 60 lbs? A ten-year-old? A bushel of apples. “Up to 6 baskets,” a sign indicates. A volume estimate. A weight estimate.
“Asclán,” is the Gaelic word for “as much as one can carry in their arms.”
I felt this word in my bones the first time i read it. I am the kind who fills my arms, with as much as I can carry. The ant who sees the crumb ten times it size and says, “this one.”
“Can I help?” You say, when the car is loaded. When the house is unpacked. I smile.
“You coulda,” is my reply, smiling. Often wryly.
Asclàn, a unit of measurement, is both a volume and weight. It is three blue mesh sacks of strangers laundry. It is three bags of groceries. It is an industrial size copier. It is a Rosie, ready to go in the passenger side.  It is you.
My last name, Carman, is meant for “one who pulls the cart,” in English. A name I also feel in my bones.

“You are built to pull a cart, to lift a heavy load and bear it, to haul up the long slope, and so am I, peasant bodies, earthy, solid shapely dark glazed clay pots that can stand on the fire.” - Marge Piercy

Carman. There was some question of its authenticity once. My namesake grandfather conceived out of wedlock. Who’s to say the name in the birth certificate wasn’t a government assigned patriarch?
A DNA test cleared the uncertainty. A line rife with cart bearers. Peasant stock.

The secondary namesake, a more sanguine representational running along the matriarchal branches: Lee.
The meadow-dwellers.
If I was born to pull a cart, I exist in body that is also guided to frolic. Asclàn is bouquet of flowers, a spoonful of honey, a lamb.

Today it is laundry. Tomorrow I hope to frolic.

In a social justice training, 2018 probably, the person on the microphone let us know, this work wasn't supposed to be easy, or fun. She wasn't having fun. What she wanted was to have an island where the Black people could go and not deal with this shit.

"But here we are."
Trying.

And I wondered about that today. That mis-rememory, twisted over time. Memories are rebuilt proteins they say.

This moment we're in. Pointing at maps. Maps with different labels. Yelling.
At least I'm yelling. In my car. Tear soaked screaming on 97, my commute to work. Pointing at maps, drawing big x's here and there. The old man saluting them off the runway East. Republicans scribbling "Finish Them."

"Isn't that why we came here? To the last place? Having been run out of everywhere for raving. All those try-hards do, resent your smile. Ear to ear. In the face of unspeakable lost," Wiley writes.

We make our own islands I guess. Step away and see who comes with. Away from the erosion of continuous compromise. We gather our people. We want to know how far we can go when we are simultaneously seen and loved. Go inside. Who we can become. No raised eyebrows, the best of the worst. Violence. Nothing to reduce. Only to add. Who would we be then? Who are we when we are loved?

So the island of continuous becoming. Wherever that is for us. Wherever we can find it. Scrap together a hut and invite a few friends over to listen to records and drink cocktails made from the bottles you brought upstairs and and and.

لن نرحل writ on the limestone surfaces in Sheik Jarrah, "we won't leave."
"Find a place you trust and try trusting it for awhile," Corita Kent's Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules.

As if we can't understand the need for placed best settling as essential for developing.
"Nomadic groups," you say. "The corruption of competitiveness and illusions of ownership in post-agrarian civilization."
The daughter is passed from the father to the husband. Her title changes.

Caitlin and I talking about such a place.
"It's a hut."
"It's a shed."
"It's a shop."

On a parcel of land out of town. Or some rented warehouse. She's setting up lights and sound equipment. I've got bins of printing press material. Blow the dust off the office copier given to us by the nonprofit when they got the grant funding for a new one. Maybe they'll come for us someday. Watching Gaza. Realizing there's a force of evil so great we don't have the option not to work.

The work wasn't supposed to be easy. Or fun.

"But here we are."

Pulling out our phones, scrolling through the compost, to find the first Jonathan photo. And I find a million photos of Sousa, because Sousa had been my love then. And hated Jonathan. Because the fight in the lawn at the Officer's Quarters. And I had abstained from documenting Jonathan at that time. Out of sensitivity. But I had found one. Smashed between Sofie and Kali and a name my head refuses to remember. Why is that? Why does memory change? They say every time you can recall a memory you reconstruct it. Did I eat olives in France the summer of 2006? Did I eat the wet cake made by Alex?

Sizing each other up, side by side, not touching. Wondering how to love this person. If it's possible to love a person such as this? When time passes, little hints, we wonder.
Someone asked me today "So... what's your story Rachel? You're smart, cute, and attentive. And single?" (verbatim, with the misspell). And my mind spooled. There's so many explanations. Timing. Me. Them. Communication. Tolerance. Chemistry.
I told you, you smelled of ungrieved longing. Months later I realized you smelled like love-at-first-sight. That might've been the combination. The us.
"Can I smell it?" Josh had said, and I pointed to the center of my chest. "I put it here," and he put his face to my chest and breathed in. I forget what he said. "Doesn't it smell like graham crackers? And brown sugar oatmeal?"
Unbridled optimism. Walks by the waterfall. Love. One of sorts anyway.

He was wondering too. How to love me. If it was possible. It was too new to say.
Not in a hurry, and also not wanting to know the answer. Holding the question made it all possible. Standing there. I didn't want a palm read or a tarot read or an aura photograph. I didn't want an omen. I just wanted to be there and not know.

Playing dumb. Meant to excuse myself for that. I knew what question he asked when he wondered if I had someone to connect to about art. I knew what he meant. He had someone. I wasn't going to be that someone. A big role was filled already. There were little roles to fill. Kissing. Fucking. A bit part in the scheme. In the wants and needs. He didn't want to challenge this other thing. I didn't want to. To have a need filled is to hold your place on top of the caterpillar pile. 

I will be something. Even if it's just a question balanced in the air.

There's that moment midwinter when you actually don't want the days to get longer again. You begin to crave that full Icelandic never-day. Weeks of it. Months of it. There's a temptation that we can materialize into the shadows forever. It becomes the day that dredges, illuminates what the night couldn't full metabolize. Beneath the crisp winter sun our formlessness emerges, clammy and undernourished, mumbling mouthfuls of abyssal dreamspeak. As if we haven't brushed against a person that wasn't incestual kin in uncountable days. Beveled teeth see-through, hair gnarled skull flat like a neglected infant. Swathed in oiled canvas hooded capes, skulking like orcs by the horizon skating sun. Take us in Night One, deity of the forever pitch. Enshroud us in your starless cloak so we might never skulk among faded hope.

50 years left. 4 more hours until sunset. Still I'm gonna take my time getting there. Get lost in eddying moments. Fall into my unconscious, into sleep-walking, weaving in-and-out throughout.
"We are the same person," I had said, smiling. I was very touchy last night.
Ace talking about sending postcards that never arrive.
"I love that they get lost in the ether," she had said.
Saying everything we longed to say, everything they longed to hear. It was in that letter.
Alicia is telling me about the sheep tattoo Josh just got. A little box with three holes poked in it.
"Dessinez-moi une mouton svp," il dis.
The letter that never arrives, the sheep in the box.
When we all kissed it felt like theater of love. Maybe just for me. Everyone seemed grounded in their bodies. Arriving to the moment, lips and tongue and saliva. Chapstick making its rounds. Kennel full of cats with no one washing their hands in-between pets. Tension unraveling. Big bottle spinning between us. Remembering I hadn't been kissed since, June? And, even then, was that kissing? Was this kissing? Kissing being love, and love being something trickling out in myriad ways. Part of it.
Love for me is that oneness, that agreement of oneness. There's this big love I'm in right now, my body like one of those blow-up turkey decorations in the front-lawn. Cumbersome and lofty. I carry them with me. I don't feel separate. I wrote a list of those people, but even then, it feels bigger. The way you're dreaming of your mom but it's also your best friend and boss and the barista and the kid in the second grade.
We're peeling potatoes and I want to go instagram live. I love the things that take time, and I want to capture them. I want others to see them, and I want others to make them. It's like that Norwegian slow-tv movement. The shipping barge along the sound. Slowly moving by people dancing on the shore. We're peeling potatoes talking shit about mean children we've met in out time. Camera pans out. Taking in the entire picture. The roof. The clouds. Slow-life. Staying grounded, undemanding. Peeling the potatoes over the same bowl felt more intimate than the kissing.
It's the theory-of-forms, glimmers of shadow in the torchlight and I actually don't need to see any clearer. Blinding light of the sun beyond the clammy walls. The implications are sufficient. What's that thing they say in the spy-movies? "Enhance, ENHANCE." Until you can see the license plate and the blood type and the ovarian cyst and the first heartbreak and the perfect strand of silver hair.
For some reason I squint to unfocus my eyes. I want to see less, feel more. I'm still collecting data, just a as vigilant as the nerd in the white van hunkered over a laptop.
Josh sent me an mp3 through text yesterday.
I never tear into packages. Three holes sufficient to peek in on the perfect sheep. Existing in the cool shadows, "look he's fallen asleep."
He's been sending me poems and I absolutely cherish them, and listen to them over and over and over.
"Love beginning means return." A tidal pool, a "querying wave," a nebulous gesture we don't probe or ask why. It's exactly what I want to hear. It's the next clue. It's announces the next act.
I have four hours until sunset and I'm still gonna take my time. I've got forty years until, what? Sunset?
"One day," you said to me, "i watched the sunset forty-four times!"
When you die, you can't see sunsets," Hayao Miyazaki had said.
"Maybe you BE sunsets," Kim had said, "And enjoying the sunsets in this body with this spirit on this day is *emoji of chef's kiss*"
I turn to you while the sun sets. It's not the sunset, it's your face watching the sunset I wanted to see. I wanted to see your thoughts quiet, lost in nostalgia of some other sunsets you've woven together throughout your time. We haven't been counting, haven't been keeping score. Your softness and serenity. Another day getting lost in the myriad.
"Name three memories," I would never interrupt. We stay quiet. I want to ask you something, but don't.
An unopened package. A vague shape. Whatever I am, it's the myriad. It's all the kisses. It's all the unsaid words. Letters that don't arrive.

"You still doing pages?" I text Tyler.
"Yeah! Missed one day cause of work super early but going strong. You?"
October 6th we started. I've been doing them longer I guess. Little morning exercises laid out by Julia Cameron. They're sweet. Sometimes I write about nothing, usually coming from a place of ascending from the unconscious. Dream echos. Trace of spaces moments before inhabited. And I write about what I want without overthinking it. Not quite in the place to remember limitations. Embraced by the possibilities of the morning. Reminding myself of the story, the rhythm, the narrative. Where we left on the character arc, what plot-point are we exploring today? I'll get unrealistic. Things I couldn't think at the end of day rife with a million small disappointments. My morning-self so optimistic, lulled.
I yawned at work the other day. "Don't do that," my coworker Josh told me, "are you tired?"
I told him I was calm. That I yawn when I'm calm. Later another coworker told me I looked tired.
"This is just how my face looks now. I'm older. I'm not tired, I'm just settled."
The sleepy morning writing grounds me in something I haven't been able to put into words. It follows me throughout the day.
I mull long, drawn-out fantasies, sleep-walking, keeping to myself. I don't wind up as easily, an uncomfortable feeling, so I'm grateful. On a run to the top of Pilot Butte yesterday I counted by breaths, not my steps. Steps were too fast, it was making me anxious. As labored as my breathing was becoming it was more relaxing to count my inhales and exhales. We're working in longer units now, as a means of survival.
We're taking things page by page.

My brother reminded me today, "Champagne My Game is a good game. You're just gonna find people playing it one day. I'm convinced I came up with drinking jenga..."
"I'm looking it up, 'Champagne My Game.'"
"No, don't," he said, "AI will steal it."
"It's ok if they do," I reply, "I just need a time stamp on when it wasn't a google-able term. To make sure it hasn't been already circulating in the cultural zeitgeist."
I do not say that last part. But I want you to believe that I did.

What comes up is a cheugy t-shirt and a romance game that's actually sounds similar to our game.

On the website it reads:

"Players may be asked to:
Answer questions,
Give an opinion,
Discuss their inner feelings,
Perform small acts of love,
Examine their likes and dislikes,
Drink Champagne
and more....
This game is a powerful recipe for a romantic makeover, guaranteed to keep that spark glowing bright...."

Ok, so it pretty much already is a thing.

Our version goes like this:

You're in a group, a full champagne bottle between everyone.
Someone is holding it, presumably the person who brought it or the person who opened it.

Whoever is holding the bottle starts.

The person can ask a trivia question.
The person can ask a personal trivia question.
The person can ask what they are thinking (i.e. "what color am I thinking of?)
The question or challenge can be whatever the champagne bearer wants it be.

Everyone in the group yells an answer. Sometimes there is a lot of intensity.

The person with the champagne bottle can make any challenge or question.
The reward is the champagne.
The person who gets the right or best answer is handed the champagne bottle and can drink from it if they choose.
This is a germ-sharing game.
Ideally you play it with people that you don't mind sharing germs with.

The rules of Champagne-My-Game are whatever you make of it. It's supposed to be low-stakes. And drinking champagne is treated as a reward rather than a punishment like in other games.

Examples of Champagne-My-Game questions can be:

What color am I thinking of?
What is the capital of Nebraska?
What is everyone's love languages?
When was the last time everyone got laid?

The person with the champagne also has the power to simply guide the conversation for the moment. The gathered may take a moment to discuss the capital of Nebraska or love languages or the abundance or lack of being laid. The champagne bearer has the responsibility suddenly of being the host, guiding the flow, and potentially interrupting the conversation with a question or challenge.

It's one of those choppy yell-over-each-other party opportunities.

My brother says having the champagne is like having "the talking stick," that crucial tool of democratizing a space with allowing everyone to have a moment to take stage and speak.

Social intelligence check, if someone is "losing" at Champagne-My-Game, recognize, and shoot a question or challenge they can succeed at.
There aren't points, and those who have had the champagne passed to them often should acquiesce to players who haven't in a gesture of grace and social awareness.
This isn't competitive, it's cooperative.
The intention isn't too dominate, it's to share. 

Shooting a oddly specific question to a person who hasn't gotten it passed is essential. You want to make everyone feel shiny for a moment. If they don't want it passed you let everyone struggle with the question.

What is the French word for "purr?"
What was the color of the hat Ben Franklin wore when he lost his hair to syphilis?
What killed Socrates?

Whatever.

"We gotta figure out what to do with the bottle when the game is over," Gary says.

"I mean, it's not to pay with the family but ideally the game turns into spin-the-bottle," I respond.

"When the sun comes out,"
we say
in voices tinged with
violet and yellow
Longing

A memory
My fingers blood-tipped
from picking
tearing my inside skin out
red poppies against a
weathered fence

Alleyway walks at midnight
balmy, we could've been naked
writing ourselves into
cautionary tales of
hags who steal the lilies
unless offered cool broth

Sylvia Plath spinning words
"these dreaming houses"
murmured spells as we take
the streets from the winter

Admitting we aren't brave -
"Sweet summer child"
you had said wryly,
we only fight our battles
in summer
Sticks and pine cones and
beesnest and honeycomb

Winter is no time for war
No time for playing
"Promise me we'll go to the river
one hundred times this year,"
Hold me to it.

I want to immerse and emerge
until I know no death
Until the cracks of ice have
softened into bitter
dandelion stalk -
Into tulips silky butter.

06 January
Divinely commissioned to liberate France from England's clutches, Joan of Arc left her country home in search of horse, sword, and a suit of armor. At nineteen, guided by saints, she accomplished her mission, then was betrayed and burned at the stake. On her birthday, we are reminded of the principled and ardent fervor of youth.
-from Patti Smith's, Book of Days

Deposition
More than 5000 feet of salt accumulated as a restricted seaway evaporated and refilled 29 times. As the nearby mountains eroded, their debris washed into the basin, put pressure on the salt below, and forced the salt towards the sea.
Uplift and Collapse
The flowing salt hit a long, deep fault and formed a "salt wall" two miles high, three miles wide, and 70 miles long. Later, it was buried by more than a mile of sediments that eventually became rock. Regional uplifts then wrinkled some of these overlying rock layers, creating long parallel cracks. The mile of rock eroded, exposing the cracks near the surface. Water seeped through the cracks and dissolved the salt below. Without support, the overlying rock collapsed, forming today's Salt Valley.
Fractures and Fins
Closely-spaced cracks along the edge of Salt Valley continue to erode. As they widen, thin walls of sandstone, or fins, are left behind. Many of the arches form in these fins.
Arch Formation
There is no single or simple way that arches form. Like most things in nature, it takes a combination of processes.
Cracks in fins and the contact layer between different layers of rock are good places for arches to begin. Both mechanical and chemical forces attack these weaker spots, and begin the processes which form the arches.
Mechanical Weathering
Water enters the cracks, freezes and expands, relieving inherent stretches in the rock. Gravity pulls out loosened pieces of rock, enlarging the opening.
Chemical Weathering
Slightly acidic rainwater saturates sand that accumulates between fins. The calcium carbonate "glue" that holds sandstone together is dissolved, rocks fall, and fins get thinner. Eventually an opening forms.
-some plaque you sent me

"The number of variations that occurs naturally, and the things that are formed are absolutely incredible, and beyond human imagining. Imagine what a 2 mile tall "salt wall" must have been like to see. George RR Martin thought he was being creative with a 700ft tall wall." - something you said

Going to my mom's later, to dig up my journal when I was 17 in France, read my reflections on being in Rouen, the place Joan of Arc was burned. There's a photograph in mind, taken by a disposable camera, of Emily and I in a throng of ten-year-olds. I don't know how are why we made this happen. This limited memory is fine, but I'm looking forward to record.
How do we tell our stories?

Megan wrote me the other day. "I do not have eloquent words that have been thought over the Atlantic Ocean like C. My words are twisted and paused like a bird trying to fly in the winter wind." She investigates the land. Brushes over the bones and hand morphed things with a soft brush. She comes to Redmond from time to time I hear when there isn't snow. I wonder what it would be to examine the land, spend time with it.

Cari left me rose quartz dice in exchange for letting the dogs out this morning. I licked them, hoping they were salt.