I don't know what I'm doing

I don't know what I'm doing. I hate new things and I hate to learn ESPECIALLY when it comes to computers. It took me five minutes to find the tiny little thing that says "new post" so I could write this.
Today I found out that the only person (out of the trillion people on e-bay) the only person interested in buying the amp I want to sell is the person that lives up the street that I was gonna sell it to in the first damn place! I could have skipped all of the bull-crap of figuring out how to set up an e-bay account and how to use my digital camera so I could post a picture. I could have avoided communication with a-hole e-bay snob-nerds who just wanted to give the "newbie" a good hazing. I hate e-bay. I don't want to know that there are that many people in the world consuming and consuming and I CERTAINLY do not want them to be able to CONTACT me! For god's sake!
Today I looked into editing my profile for this blog. I clicked on it and I scrolled down and I felt one of my hairs turn grey. I couldn't do it. Why am I like this?

Meeting minutes/Q&A excerpt

Things we concluded at Friday's meeting of our literary collective:

1. Graphic novels actually take way longer to read than regular ones.

2. God has turned his back on humanity.

3. We liked the Dr. Manhattan creation chapter.

4. The chapter head font looks like Absolut Vodka ads.

And here is an excerpt of our conversation with Alan Wesley Moore:

Venom Literati: Talk to us about the role of women in your book, because it seems to us that every woman in it was a total whore.

Alan Moore: [Pouring himself three-quarters of a water glass full of wine, then settling into lawn chair] Well, it's just like R. Crumb said, and I'm paraphrasing here, but I make comic books I can masturbate to.

Venom Literati: What about race then? There were three black people in the whole book, and the woman was the whoriest woman of all. Could you speak to that?

Alan Moore: Erm. No.

Venom Literati: Okay, then, let's talk about nuclear war.

Alan Moore: [Rapidly drinks wine] I'm tired of being that Alan Moore.

End scene.

Alan Moore Is Coming!

Very weird, very true coincidence: My friend Sarah J. and her husband are flying in tonight and will be joining us around ten o'clock. Her husband's name is Alan Moore.

For. Real. Also, he has bangin' hair.

Copycattin' around

Kathy and I discussed the possibility of uniform design for all members of Venom Literati who decided to supplement with their own blogs. I did not conform to either Kathy's or Megan's templates, but if y'all think they should be the same, I'll submit.

Without further ado: The grown-up.

Syphilis Is Back!

This is the quote I saw on the tail end of a Chicago bus this morning while I was driving to work: "Syphilis Is Back!"

As if Syphilis had just returned from a long hiatus, war, or exile. As if Syphilis was the name of the husband or puppy who mysteriously disappeared a decade ago, and now he has shown up on your doorstep: panting, drooling and humping your leg. As if this is something we should all be jumping for joy over. As if we should be gratefully baking cookies for Syphilis and hanging Welcome Home signs.

What does this have to do with Venom Literati? This is a blatant example of exclamation point abuse. Clearly the phrase should read: "Syphilis Is Back." And have a picture of a looming shark underneath it or something. Here the period would denote the seriousness of the topic, whereas the exclamation point completely confuses the tone of the statement, en-chippering it.

Beneath the quote is the question: "Have You Been Tested Lately?" Which is fine, but it reconfuses the already confused tone. I don't know how to say this: it just doesn't work. My fear here is that this could cause an epidemic. People will be lining up to get their Syphilis. The infected will be charging for it. The whole world will go crazy as Nietzsche did after suffering from it for years. (I heard somewhere that he actually enjoyed it; it made him super horny and manic-y.) Okay, so maybe this will be a good thing...

(On a side note [I can't bring myself to make an actual post for this], Kathy, you have inspired me to make a blog. (Background music: that song that goes, "you give meaning to my life--you're the in-spir-a-a-tion.") It is a writer's diary. It will be me bitching about writing, writers, not writing, punctuated by moments of extreme hubris.

It is called Slightly, Briefly Illumined. Right now it is BO-RING. If it continues to be boring I will rid myself of it. That is all. But yes, we must all have our own blogs.)

If anyone knows Alan, please tell him this letter awaits him here.

Dear Alan Moore,

You seem reclusive. You have bangin' hair. We are also reclusives with bangin' hair, which is why we would like to invite you to the next meeting of our literary collective, Venom Literati.

We will be discussing Watchmen. Also, we are totally a gang of awesome female superheroes: Subtle Sabotage, The Interruptor, The Voice, The Blade and The Lovernator.

We will throw a cream pie at you, promise and forget to pay your mobile phone bill, sing you to sleep, derail you mid-speech, and make what you suspect to be--but can't quite confirm is--a really cutting remark.

Did I mention that we're super-hot? And not just ComicCon hot. Actual hot.

If you do not show, you will spend the rest of your life fearing Awkward Silence.

Your friends,

Venom Literati

letter to our b.f.f. tao

dear tao,

what's up, fruit loop.

do you have alan moore's email?

you are invited to our next meeting, this friday at 8pm. it's at sarah and abby's house.

this week we are obsessing over watchmen by alan moore. that is why we need his email. the letter we wrote to him will also be posted on our blog. you can read it at www.venomliterati.blogspot.com

confusion nachos are not from your book. they are a dish at feed the beast. feed the beast is a real place. at first we thought it was a joke but it isn't. confusion nachos are regular nachos with lots of elements mixed around.

Don't feel sad, Tao Lin. We'll write to you, too.

It's time to write to our favorite terrifyingly bearded graphic novelist, Alan Moore.

By the way, I like the idea of giving the authors of our book club books short-notice invitations. Maybe in 25 years, every author around the globe will feel a tingling anticipation twice a month: Will this time be the one? Will they receive the VL invite? Just think, all of that potential for joy or devastation resting in our hot little hands. The power!

Also, I don't like that we're a "book club." It makes me feel simultaneously like a second grader and a suburban mom. Let's be a collective or something instead.

I'll start:

Dear Alan Moore,

You seem like you're reclusive.

this is not poetry

i just started my own blog.
it's called this is not poetry.
i will put poetry on it.
i feel silly.
my sister-in-law's brother invented blogger.
he probably feels awesome.
i don't.

Life, Death, and the Toof

I know you have all been anxiously awaiting news about my teeth. For all of you who were out of town, I know your trips were made less enjoyable by your constant worrying about my wellbeing.

The update is: there is nothing really wrong with my teeth. I went to see an oral surgeon yesterday (who had REALLY BAD teeth by the way), and he said I am one of the lucky people in the universe who has enough room for her wisdom teeth. I don't have to get anything yanked.

This was kind of relieving, but on the other hand this guy was the only dental person I've ever met who seemed cool--like someone I'd want cramming his hands in my mouth. And he only does oral surgery, which I don't need. So my chances of meeting another cool dental person are now nil. This makes me sad about my dental life. The dental future looks grim.

I know Tao Lin will be disappointed by the news that my teeth are AOK, and Kathy--because she wanted to do the string-tied-to-the-doorknob thing. But the surgeon says that adult teeth sometimes move around. So maybe I will get to be one of those cool adults with braces! Or maybe I'll just get me some grills. (There are some great fucking pictures on this site! I can get 6 gold teeth for $649.00!!!)

I think I have another tooth that needs a root canal--maybe I can just get grills instead of a crown??? Diamonds are like the hardest matter on the planet, right?

Of caves and chardonnay

Abby and I went to Maquoketa Caves in eastern Iowa this weekend where I discovered that I don't like crawling on my belly into the unknown. Getting muddy, though: That's cool.

What's not cool? Being a vegetarian in the land of hog slaughter. Consistently, the only viable menu option was spinach 'n' artichoke dip. Saturday night, at the fanciest joint in Bellevue, we paid forty bucks for a slimy pile of iceberg lettuce, the aforementioned dip and a bottle of Yellow Tail. We could have recreated this meal for approximately ten bucks, wine included.

Also we stayed in this half-awesome, half-terrifying old hotel room above a saloon, where the mattress dipped toward center and the pillows smelled like old people. It had a magical mirror that gave chiseled abs to our reflections. I tried to take a picture of it, and the camera shut itself off.

Often, I yearn for Iowa. I want a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, or maybe a series of small cabins where all of my favorite people live and do creative things. I want to be alone(ish) and outside.

Should I end this post with an extended spelunking-as-metaphor-for-life passage? Naw.

I have been reading Tao Lin behind your back

I have been reading BED even though I'm supposed to be reading Watchmen. It is more "mature" than Eeeee eee eeee. I like Eeeee eee eeee more.

I also just added links to Matthew Simmons' and Blake Butlers' blogs. They are good.

I am typing this from Texas. It is hot here and everyone has friendly feelings towards the president. They would love to have him over for dinner. I wouldn't mind it, but dinner with me would be different than dinner with people from Texas. Not worse, just different.

Sarah, have you been hanging out with George Perec behind our backs?

Cuz your post totally reminds me of Species of Spaces and Other Places, the book where he pretty much catalogs all of Space--well, a lot of space, anyway.

I like this section, entitled A Few Banalities, which is part of the chapter devoted to beds:

We spend more than a third of our lives in a bed.

The bed is one of the rare places where we adopt roughly speaking a horizontal posture. The others are much more specialized: operating table, bench in the sauna, chaise-lounge, beach, psychoanalyst's couch...

Techniques of sleeping: the idea that lying down is something natural is quite inaccurate (see Marcel Mauss, 'Techniques of the Body, in Sociologie et Anthropologie, p. 378; the whole paragraph...would be worth quoting.)

And what about hammocks? And paliasses? And bedsteads? And box-beds? And divans deep as the grave? And straw pallets? And railway couchettes? And camp beds? And sleeping-bags resting on air-beds themselves resting on a carpet of earth?

Three pens, three monitors

On my desk, there are three monitors. They are lined up in a row. They are 19-inch flat panels.

They obscure my view of Kathy. I made a gap between two of the monitors so I can peek at her when she talks to me. My boss pushed them back together once. I think. Someone did. He is the most likely person to have done so.

I do not run the free world. I do not operate a spaceship. But I do have three monitors.

I also have three pens on my desk. I hardly ever use them.

Tao Lin's superpower is being awesome.

In preparation for our foray into the world of graphic novels with The Watchmen, I think each of us should identify our superpower, and come up with a superhero name.

We will be able to use this information when we write to Alan Moore.

This is my superpower: I can take a lot of information and synthesize it quickly. I can also read really, really fast. Thus, I am The Librarian. (So, in direct opposition to tradition, my glasses are part of my costume, rather than part of my disguise.)

Abby is The Interruptor. This is useful when trying to deflect people from giving you news you don't want to hear, for example.

What are your powers, fellow Literati?

I am in a great mood today!

I visited my arch-nemesis yesterday. Peripherally. I went to visit someone else, who just had a book published (which is a collection of these comics), and my arch-nemesis was also there.

Have I told you about my new quest for positivity? It goes like this. I say, "I am in a great mood today!" Then people look at me like they don't believe me, and I have to explain why I said it. Then they laugh. At me.

So my experience with my arch-nemesis mirrors Kathy's, and I blame my new-found positivity. He doesn't have vampire fangs or speak unintelligibly or contradict everything I say. Sure, he's a quirky fellow and worked during the party (which in the past I would have said indicated his severe martyr complex), but he ain't The Devil. Or even my arch-nemesis anymore.

Cliche of the day: Time Heals All Wounds.

I am in a great mood today!

To-do list item one: Identify new arch-nemesis.

Tao Lin, pull my tooth out already!

That's right. I need someone to yank my wisdom tooth. Immediately. I think my jaw is about to fall off.

In next week's message I will ask Tao Lin to yank it. I would trust him. I think he would do it brutally and gently at once--brutally, but with caring; with empathy.

I love Tao Lin.

Pay Attention To Us, Dammit!

So, we wrote to Tao Lin to invite him to come to our book club discussion of Eeee Eeeee Eee, and he neither showed nor wrote back. I spent the entire evening glancing at the door.

Now it is time to force him to pay attention to us. How? With words, or course.

It's time for another exquisite corpse letter. I'll start:

Dear Tao Lin,

Our discussion of Eeee Eeeee Eee went way better than it would have if you had showed up. If you had been there, we all would have felt shy. So there.

Additions?

I still love elimae

I added some links to Megan Martin's and Della Watson's work below, but since no one will ever read that post again I've added them here. Just now. Also, here are some other poems on elimae that I like.

I Am Happy Just to Say Something, Not Quite Empty Field, and Sunday Morning Prayer to the God of Emo Wood Nymphs by Mike Young

I like the title of this poem by Helen Peterson

A Fun Adventure, the MFA in Hamsters and I want to have a threesome with ants by Tao Lin

There's also some fiction by Tao Lin

I just found more poems by Tao Lin.

There's also a poem by Justin Taylor, the editor of the Apocalypse Reader, that book that we may or may not read. I didn't read the poem because it looks boring. I hate poems. I love poems.

Morning With My Boyfriend

Morning with my boyfriend goes like this:

The alarm goes off at 6:30. He springs out of bed. He is one of those people who springs out of bed. I think I used to be. Then I got real. Who wants to get out of bed? I find it impossible to spring out. Sometimes he will snooze, but after one round of snooze he springs out of bed. Oh wait, first he screams very loudly for the cat. Then he pampers the cat for about 2 minutes and says, "Get outta here you little fucker."

Oh and before the cat I get my morning kiss. I have always gotten a morning kiss from him immediately upon waking, even when we weren't really together and I was blinded by lust and convincing myself that we were--probably because of the morning kiss, which is a super husbandly thing to do; I think I would say to him, "you know that morning kiss means you want to marry me, fucker." Now, if I do not get my m-k for some reason, I feel very hurt and analytical all day, especially if the cat gets pampered and I do not. And if he doesn't do it immediately, I get in his face and remind him with sad-eyes. Then he takes pity on me. Then he springs out of bed.

Sometimes he comes back in at some point and turns the light back on even though there is no reason to turn the light on because it isn't really that dark. I make a whining noise that goes on for a long time and dramatically put my head under the covers, even though the light isn't that bright because it's so bright outside. I keep staying in bed until after he leaves for work. This sucks because I then have to make the bed every day. But it's very Zen of me, to get up and make the bed, and to put all of myself into the making of the bed. Because that's how I think of it. Not.

When I finally get up, in the living room there is often a bowl of milk with one Honey Comb floating in it. I always say I'm going to leave it there, but then I don't. Because he does things like hang my purse up. So I do the bowl. And I wonder about the single Honey Comb, and later I ask him what he thinks it says about him, if it's like an artwork he's leaving for me or something, and he tells me to stop analyzing his personality via cereal.

I guess the bedmaking is ok because he makes the coffee and usually there is some left. However, we have about 10 coffee thermoses, all of which are either in his car or at work. And we have fights about the thermoses because I never have one to take to work. What good is extra coffee if there is no thermos in which to transport it? I often blame him and the thermoses for my financial situation, because if there is nothing to transport my coffee in, I have to buy coffee--and that dollar a day adds up: it is like saving a child. I also hate the thermoses themselves for taking up so much space in our cupboard. Half of them don't even have lids.

When we didn't live together, he would just take mugs of coffee in his car with him and then his car would fill with all the mugs. Or all the mugs would be at work. And I wonder if he started with the mugs because all the thermoses were at work, too.
---
An excerpt from the next installment, Evening With My Boyfriend: "We watch all those cooking reality shows, and also Makin' the Band w/ P-Diddy. I get sad when people I like get booted and make sad faces/noises and he says: Oh Jesus. Even if they are bad I will whine and be sad for them, and he will remind me that that person fucking sucked. And I will say, yes, but he was so sweet and cute.

We also quote the cooking reality shows, as in, for example: "That's a very nice workbench you made, but did you make the wood yourself? Because you definitely had time to make the wood yourself." Because on America's Top Chef one of the chefs, Lia, who is really dumb and lazy, makes a modernized version of Beans and Franks with store-bought sausages and the judges totally bust her for it."

Action verbs

My friend sent me this article from the Miami Herald. It's pretty kick-ass.

Here are some words that I like from it: burly, thrash, beat-down, chokehold, kneed, awesome.

We-blog

Hello! Doodiedoodiedooo! I'm writing a blog. Do you LOVE it so far?...........Wow! 15 minutes just passed and I haven't written a thing. How strange.......jeez, what time is it? 12:55!!!???? I started this thing at 11. Why don't I have anything to say? What is wrong with me? concentrate. concentrate. Maybe I can tell you about a dream I had last night! I don't remember it. I can't think of ANY dreams right now. I'm blank. A big green slate and no chalk to rub on me. A giant white board with out any dry-erase markers...oooohhh they smell sooo good. Where was I? I'm a mental defect with nothing, NOTHING to say! I wish I would fall off a cliff with cunning and speed.....Blog. Blog. Web log. We-blog. Well? What do you think? My very first blog. I have high hopes...maybe a new career.....

Alternative Career Paths II

My alternative career paths consist of pretty much everything outside of what I'm doing right now. You'll notice from my top 5 that none of them are even plausible, and that I'm pretty much fucked as far as ever having a career I'd like. But my Fantasy Top 5 are as follows:

1. Bank robber. Totally. Except I would ideally want to do this back in the day, on horseback. I'm not very interested in train robberies, though.

2. Jewel smuggler. (I'm lazy; these are my top 2 because they = lots of money and excitement, and no real work schedule. I could work, like, once a year. But then I probably wouldn't be very good at either of them.)

3. Professional athlete. Preferably tennis player or track star. But I would like to be naturally talented and not have to train very hard.

4. Writer/travel writer. Again, the natural talent thing would apply; then writing could actually be fun.

5. Ex-Pat. I understand this is not a real career, but I would happy wash dishes or clean horses' stalls in the South of France or someplace...

6. Personal assistant to James Bond. Or just a Bond Girl.

Hypnopompic hallucination

Occasionally, as I am waking up, I will hallucinate.

Also, I am paralyzed during this hallucination, which makes it, like, 500 times scarier if the hallucination is scary, which it usually is. In fact, 75 percent of the time the hallucination is scary.

This is called hypnopompic hallucination with sleep paralysis. (More observant readers might already have discerned this from the title of this post.)

Here's a record of past episodes:

1. Year after college, waking from my usual sleep schedule of 4 a.m. to 11 a.m., I hear someone pushing a box full of stuff down the hallway. I knew no one else was home. It freaked my shit out. I thought I was going kee-razy.

2. Year after college, same sleep schedule, there were rats on the ceiling, and they were falling on my feet, then scrabbling around. Just my feet. Scrabbling. Shit: freaked out.

3. Two or three years ago, saddled with a more adult sleep schedule, I discovered upon waking that someone had constructed a beautiful tent that was all sparkly around my bed. Also, the door frame of my closet was painted shiny gold. A little freaked out, but pleased with the general improvement of my boudoir.

4. TOTALLY JUST HAD ONE. I "ran" 20 miles this morning (ran in quotes because we do walk/run intervals), and I was napping it off. Then, alluvasudden: There is a man. Standing over my bed. Who says, "Work it out!" The man was smallish and didn't have a face. I damn near had a heart attack.

It ended; he disappeared. I got up, looked around the apartment to make sure he wasn't there. He wasn't.

The End. Turns out that wasn't a very good story. But I feel better now.

I love Cooper Renner now

Some of you may remember when I named Cooper Renner my arch-nemesis last year. If you don't, I named Cooper Renner my arch-nemesis on July 3, 2006. I submitted some poems to elimae and he proposed edits to one. Here is how I told the story to Sarah this morning:

"He didn't like the poem. Which is fine, whatever. But it started out as 20 lines and he cut it down to three. Then he said something about how elimae seeks to 'pay close attention to language,' and some other things with that grad school talk where you put people down in a hidden way so that they don't know you're insulting them. But I've been to grad school and I know." Then I said his name in the way that Jerry Seinfeld used to say "Newman."

Then I searched my email account for the old emails so that I could read his scandalous edits to Sarah. It turns out he didn't edit the poem down to three sentences like I remembered. He cut three or four lines of it and said this:

"I would like to propose to you a fairly severe edit of "Departure" which will remove even the hint of causation and "sense" from it, and focus on sharp images and language. Please let me know what you think."

Which is much different than the message I remember, which went like this:

"At elimae we pay close attention to language. You are terrible."

Most editors never respond to me at all. Cooper Renner was way nicer to me than most editors. I love Cooper Renner.

Elimae has also published our friends Megan Martin and Della Watson, as well as our newest favorite writer Tao Lin. I love elimae.

I remember July 3, 2006. It was dark. Everyone left town for the 4th of July. I stayed in Chicago and felt sorry for myself for being all alone in the world. I remember moping down the street of a completely deserted Magnificent Mile. But that probably didn't happen either.

Cute fruit

I used to think the cutest fruit was a raspberry. I was wrong. Clementines are the cutest fruit. Plus they're delicious.

This picture makes clementines look huge, when in fact clementines will make you look huge.

My own personal top 9 alternative career paths

1. Life coach (catchphrase: "Quit dickin' around!")



2. Biometrician (specializing in being able to identify others by their walk)



3. Entrepreneuse (with my very own chain of book clubs called "Book It")



4. Professional tape-ball player
   
   
5. Millionaire (duh)



6. Writer (whatever)



7. Whiskey critic (Irish preferred)



8. Movie director (provided that an already-famous movie director is willing to adopt me)



9. Data entry

Tao Lin vs. Miss Piggy part II

What I was driving at is that in Eeeee eee eeee, much like The Muppet Show, animals intermingle with humans as though it were nothing unusual. And it's delightful and cute, but then when you sit and watch humans talking to Muppets for a while, it starts to get super creepy. And awesome. And weird. And awesome.

Like, I have a huge crush on Miss Piggy but if she suddenly showed up in my living room I would flip the fuck out. I'm just saying.

Not my mom

I just googled my parents. My dad has a bit of a web presence, but my mom is nowhere to be found. She is off the grid. Here is a picture of not my mom, but someone with my mom's name.

I Don't Wanna Hear About Yo Boring Ass Dream, Mutha*!$%@*!

I will be frank: I hate hearing about peoples' dreams, unless they are Kathy or Sarah. If somebody says: "I had this fucked up dream last night," I immediately tune out. But Hugh Laurie and the rollerskating white nonlearners are pretty great.

I used to date someone who had the most literal dreams ever--they all took place at his childhood home, or his high school, and nothing interesting or absurd ever happened in them, except for the occasional tornado, which he was scared of in real life anyway.

So whenever he said: "I had this fucked up dream..." I knew that really it would just be the same dream, on repeat, and that I was about to hear it for the thousandth time and feel overwhelmed by a huge sense of deja vu that then extended to my whole life.

I think there is a problem with that, that maybe there is a problem with you if you're having the same dream over and over AND it's boring and literal and about high school. This should have been a sign. Why did I not see it? The interpretation of dreams should be a tool to remove stupid people from our lives--or to lure hot people (like Hugh Laurie) into them. We should listen more carefully.

I used to dream about cats, black cats, clinging to me while I ran around in abandoned buildings and leapt around on the scaffolding. But not anymore. I don't really dream that much, but when I do it's always different and always absurd, which maybe just means I'm scattered, or that my life has no boundaries or foundation or something, which is probably true.