i feel like i am about to do something really weird

like give away everything i own, including my hair, and join a sun worshipping cult in the weird new age-y part of arizona. and then two weeks into it realize that i am miserable and bald and want to go back to my old life but i can't because i gave all of my money away so i'm forced to live in a women's shelter in tucson where a lady punches me in the mouth for my ipod nano that is like two years old anyway, and knocks out all of my teeth. and the next time abby and sarah come to visit chicago they will find me face down in a trash can with my legs sticking up in the air, and it won't even be my first day of crazy.

i want to live in poemland

I spent a couple hours today reading Chelsey Minnis's Poemland. The reasons I love Chelsey Minnis are sort of endless. Here are some:

1. I can read her books straight through; I can fly through her books; usually I make it to page 5 of anyone's poems and feel tired and like I need to take a break or enter a coma. But I can eat Chelsey's poems one after another. They are light like rice cakes. They are delicious like rice cakes aren't. You do not feel heavy after eating 126 of them.

2. She has planned and bought the most awesome "death outfit" ever: "White boots, tan suit, orange shirt and pink necktie." She should probably design a line of death outfits. People's death outfits are usually so bland and awful.

3. She can write so accurately about how awful it is to write things. "Poetry is like waking up drunk in a lemon yellow room," or "If you want to be a poem-writer then I don't know why...It hurts like a puff sleeve dress on a child prostitute," or "With my poetry I want to barricade myself from other people's poetry..." I hate when writers write about writing, unless they are Chelsey.

4. "I am so drunk I'm seeing toy bats"

kumquats are the stupidest fruits

They look like they are going to be awesome and interesting because they are very small and also have a weird name. They are like the tiniest oranges. They are like grape oranges. But they are sour, and their rinds are thick. Nothing can be done with them. Also, I am not sure if you are supposed to eat the rind. Kumquats need a new packaging designer.

Pinch Punch Ch. 5: New Rule: Plus-sized Models Clause

Ch. 1 here
Ch. 2 here
Ch. 3 here
Ch. 4 here

Only four (4) plus-sized models are permitted in The Pinch Punch at any one time. If you see a new plus-sized model at Entry Day ceremonies and her hair is the same color as yours, you have the following options:

1. Knit your contraband jump ropes (eyes in the back of my head) into a ladder. Attempt escape.
2. Dye your hair (NOTE: Ash-blonde and blonde are the same color. Black and blue-black are the same color. Red and auburn are the same color. Brown and dishwater are the same color. As is chestnut.)
3. Use your switchblade in any way you see fit (NOTE: I am not encouraging, or even condoning, violence).
4. Sex-change operation.

NOTE: Hair-dye option is included so that you may face off with the least burly of the plus-sized models admitted.

NOTE: There is no such thing as a male plus-sized model.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Four new plus-sized models have been admitted to The Pinch Punch! See TYRA for your sex-change operation today!

Crotchety old man post

I hate Twitter. I hate that when I was watching the Miss USA pageant last night, Miss Teen USA was live-twittering. I hate that the word "twitter" appeared at least 25 times in the OK Magazine that I impulsively bought. Then this morning while driving to driving to work I listened to a story about how Twitter is both helping and hurting traditional journalism.

This is a new development, this Twitter over-exposure. It happened yesterday. I hate Twitter.

It's the enormous eye thing

So, it took me forever to figure this out, but the reason that I'm rooting for Allison so hard on America's Next Top Model is that I think she looks like our own Katerina. There are the enormous eyes, the pillowy lips, the thing where everybody thinks she's totally the sweetest person on earth because of her enormous eyes when she really draws pictures of Tyra with her nose bleeding.

Donald Barthelme, you're dead but I still have a serious crush on you.

Oh Donald Barthelme, you are dead. Dead and you look just like an Amish cowboy hijacker/bomber. Still, you are my celebrity crush of the moment. I have just re-read your brilliant story "The Balloon," which is so brilliant and lovely, which is a picture of your captivating brain, which I cannot wait to put on display for my students tonight, who will never, ever understand "The Balloon" or your captivating brain, and will therefore have to complete what I'm calling a "Postmodern Scavenger Hunt" in order to sort-of understand it. I think you would love a postmodern scavenger hunt, Donald Barthelme, and I wish you could create one for my students instead of me, because it would be way better, and then they would love you like I do, dead and Amish as you are, and we would all climb the balloon together just as it crosses 47th street, and there would be quiet applause for us from like 3 people.

Harmless vandalism

There have been three (3) occurrences of harmless vandalism at our house since we've moved in. I am recording them here just in case the next step is breaking in to our house and tickling us until we cry, or something.

1. The fuck balloon: Sometime in late August/early September we awoke to find a partially deflated pink balloon on which someone had written the aforementioned naughty swear in large block letters tied to the ironwork on our porch. It was creepy.

2. The open but mostly full Coke can: About a month ago we found the aforementioned object propped on our garbage can against the house, almost as if someone had been casually leaning there, looking in our window, sipping away. Also creepy.

3. Spray paint stain: When we came home last night someone had spraypainted something on our porch. There was white around a negative space corner. There was a spot of white on our railing, too. Very very creepy.

Who is doing this? Who? And why?

She is in the air right now.

I Am In the Air Right Now from Greg Lytle on Vimeo.

Returning to our original vision

Amazon just informed me that Stacey Levine's new book will be arriving in my mailbox on or around 5/6/2009.

We haven't had an official book in a while. This book should be our official book.

Yes?

Why can't library cards earn us airline miles?

I have been amazingly literate lately -- for me this means going to the library twice in the last month. I'm pretty sure I'm going to stop buying books altogether, because library books are so much more pleasing to me than anything I purchase.

Why are library books always better? I feel practically compelled to eat them (literally), while if I buy a book, I can only read like 3 pages a day. I complain about books that I buy, often dislike them, and will very likely never read them again. Maybe because I spent many years trying to create an impressive library and I only bought books that I believed should appear on display in my home, so that anyone who visited my home would be impressed by my eclectic and fabulous literary taste. That was in college; it alarms me that I still know people who read and buy books in this way -- to display them. That is gross.

That is what the Auersbergers in Thomas Bernhard's "Woodcutters," which I just finished, do: host disgusting "artistic dinners" and invite the kinds of people who buy books in order to display them, in order to display their own books. If you would like to be completely grossed out by the future godawful personalities that of many of our contemporaries will inhabit by the time they're 50, you should read it. It is lovely and hilarious. A man narrates an entire novel while angrily sitting in a chair in a dark room at a party, picking apart all the guests and refusing to interact with them. Also, this book has also made me almost completely certain that I am about to abandon American literature completely...

A trio of old ladies just made fun of me

Me: Sitting in a breakfast hotspot, cheerfully observing this table filled with old ladies who all had the same spun sugar hair, and I was all like, "aw, ain't they cute." They had these complicated canes with handpainted designs on them, and I couldn't figure out whether they were sisters or lovers or just VL in the future. One of them smiled at me, and I smiled back. That is how cheerful I was. One of them dropped her cane, and I thought about picking it up for her, but then I thought that maybe that was insulting, so I didn't.

And then they all laughed these dry, smoker cough-laughs, and I saw an arthritic claw pointing at me. "She looks so tacky!" the one wearing the most jewelry rasped in this I'm-trying-to-talk-quietly-but-my-friends-are-mostly-deaf voice.

They totally made fun of me. Old ladies.

This summer I am going to write:

1. A Family Drama.
2. A Musical. Actually it will probably be more like a rock opera.

What? So it's a short list. That's still really a lot to write.

Miami Beach was chock full of celebrities, and I didn't see a single one.

Also, it monsooned basically the whole time we were there. Also too, I got a sunburn that turned this eerie maroon color after a few days, even though I had slathered on the 45 and lounged under a palm tree. The second half of that sentence is the result of having read nothing but women's magazines and Twilight all week. And plus also too, there were a ton of spring-breakers there. And I saw a huge blue jellyfish.

Act V: Desecration by Kittycat

: I am pissed! I can't find any of the pictures I used to play Barbies with on my computer! I think my evil boyfriend may have murdered them! Grrr! Now why would someone want to murder an image of Elizabeth Taylor or Wayne Koestenbaum from their photo albums? I don't get it. Luckily I've been drinking, so I'm not that pissed.

: Also luckily I was not among the murdered images! I guess I am just that likeable. Or else this is a dream, like the one you had the other night about living at the Playboy mansion, where you had to borrow Holly's backless pink satin shirt with the polka dots, that your boobs kept flying out of. I thought it was strange how you felt so uncomfortable in Hef's shower with that random dude. To me it seemed like great fun!

: Um, excuse me, but how did you break into my dreamlife?

: Crowbar, fork and knife, and the very crafty meercat I hired in the alleyway.

: I am no meerkat! I'm the Gato, otherwise known as McFuzzy VonStubenKitty! Now it is time to claw your face off!

Pinch Punch Ch. 4: Room 4832, Caravaggio

Ch. 1 here
Ch. 2 here
Ch. 3 here

So I was running down this Mediterranean beach, full of mania and malaria and mead and sunshine and oceanwater and a history of stabbings, to deliver my paintings to the pope.

This is what I replay in my mind all day long in room 4832 at the Pinch Punch, where I am allowed to drink only the vile liqueur TYRA calls her “specialty,” where I am allowed only jars of fingerpaint in the three primary colors with which to create my masterpieces. That I was almost there to deliver my paintings; that I was almost pardoned for the 357 murders I had committed the week prior; that I was almost free again. That I…

“Watch it again and tell me what’s missing, says my 19-year-old roommate Kashmir. “I just don’t think it’s right yet. Something about the beesting rings so false.”

Before he arrived at the Pinch Punch, Kashmir was a film student at West Suburban Community College for about three days before he fled because his brilliance “could not be contained inside the walls of WSCC.” He has teeth like a vampire and carts his projector everywhere for “necessary impromptu viewings.” Since he arrived he’s been making a film about my life, which he projects onto our wall at all hours of the day. Kashmir’s masterpiece began as a 12-minute short and has devolved into a 200-hour miniseries, which documents every itch, scratch, and orgasm of my existence.

"Watch it again, watch it again,” he says, so that I spend every minute of my current “life” inside the Pinch Punch reliving my life as it was before I arrived here.

Since I’ve existed in the Pinch Punch, I have not been in love (forbidden), nor eaten a French fry (forbidden), nor broken a sweat except those induced by drinking (the only exercise I enjoy is jumproping, also forbidden). There’s basically nothing left of the old me, so who cares that I wear a wig and swimming trunks at all hours, that I am a state of complete disrepair, that I stand in the shower for days at a time without turning on the faucet, thinking about washing then deciding against it? Who cares that I stab for entertainment?

“The bumblebee that stung my tongue that winter didn’t sound zzzz like an airplane, you bastard; he sounded like a puncture wound doused in hollandaise. Not fucking béchamel. Hollandaise. Their sounds are completely different,” I tell Kashmir.

Lately everything I tell Kashmir is a lie. TYRA says no books unless she wrote them or has read and approved, which means no books, which means no research for Kashmir. Fuck Kashmir. TYRA is in love with his vampire ass and allows him any artistic freedom he desires; he is the ultimate reminder of my former life.

Why is he wasting his life creating films about me? I don’t ask—I cooperate and tell him his project is way too brilliant for WSCC and pray that he destroys his whole life creating a botched miniseries of such impossible detail that no one will be able to watch it for more than ten minutes at a time without crumbling into a heap of boredom.

“Hollandaise…hollandaise,” Kashmir says.

Kashmir definitely grew up on Applebee’s; Kashmir will never travel the world, except to visit other suburbs.

“Can you describe that for me?”

“It’s like how your face tastes after I stab it.”

“I hear the new pope wears saucy red leather shoes made by a shoemaker in Genoa, which cost $600 a pair, but which are free for him,” says Kashmir, to spite me. “Wouldn’t I look fucking fabulous in those?”

“I think the new pope is a bastard, and that when I deliver my paintings to him I’ll wait for him to pardon me as his eyes to go afire with the love of Christ. Then I’ll then stab him in those fucking shoes, steal his robe, and make myself pope.”

Kashmir giggles, slaps me on the back, tells me I’m “such a card.”

He thinks I’m kidding about the stabbing, but stabbing is all that keeps me alive. Kashmir and I share bunk beds, and at night I stab stab stab up through the mattress, but his young skin rejuvenates itself immediately, frequently digesting my switchblades.

“A switchblade digested by pasty juvenile vampire skin is not the same as a switchblade destroyed,” I said to TYRA after I lost the first three to Kashmir's bellybutton.

She said: “Nu-uh girl. Same difference. You shouldn’t stab things that are so soft. The softest things are the evilest things. It’s the soft things that will seriously fuck your shit up.”

That’s when she put the humiliating purple wig on my head and told me I had to wear it always, else be sent to the Pinch-Punch vats.

I’m up to switchblade #7, but I can't help myself from stabbing everything in sight.

Remember that one time we all dressed up like Jon?

We were sooo ahead of the times. Probably they didn't even think of the idea of making Watchmen into a movie until some movie exec saw a group of Dr. Manhattans traipsing through Chicago.

Act IV: The Conflagration

: Richard Burton is my true love!




: Unless you're doing a character voice, Ball, there's gonna be a beatdown.




: Careful, he is a soothsayer, which comes from the Old English. And means truth. Also, he believes in lucid dreaming and spontaneous combustion. So do I, come to think of it.


: I'm growing out my hair. Lizzie, did you hear me? I'm growing out my hair!




: There is no such thing as violet eyes!




: Okay, I get it. You're pushing my buttons. Attacking my mythology. Did Jon hire you?



: I don't need other people, Taylor. Frankly, you have insulted me. I'm going to go hang out in outer space for a while. Why don't you join me?



: He's baiting you, Lizzie! Don't--Lizzie? Lizzie? NOOOOOOO!

act III: the lumination

: i fell asleep in the tanning bed and woke up glowing. my eyes are so full of light!




: oh lizzy, you sparkle like one hundred galaxies! your head is a beautiful gleaming orb!



: be careful wit dat sheeeit, yo




: john, cram it. i have diamonds in my skin! diamonds!




: you shine like a nuclear holocaust!




: awww sheeeeeit

Act II, Elizabeth Taylor enters

: Eli, OMG, that sweater is gorgeous. I am so glad we bought matching sweaters at H&M the other day! Also, I'm happy to see you're wearing the BFF diamond heart pendant I gave you for V-Day!

: Oh shut UP and stop asskissing! We're just in a scene together, Wayne! And I also wish you'd stop following me into the tanning bed - there isn't room enough for the both of us in there. Also, for the record, before we begin this scene, may I state how much I hated Slumdog Millionaire? Its half-baked characters, flimsy plotline, and overall nauseating generic-ness? I found it quite yucky, particularly when the brother gets shot in the heavyhanded bathtub of money.

: Really?!?! I sort of loved it. That was sort of my favorite scene. But while we're on the topic of things we hate, I'll have you know that I was NOT at AWP in Chicago, although I did fly to Chicago simply so I could hang out in the hot tub at the Drake all during the conference and get all pruny. I was in that hot tub for 3 days straight. I feel fucking amazing!

: I think I'm more of a cornflower blue, rather than whale-blue. Or a suffocated-baby blue, perhaps? Ooh, that's morbid. Jon don't do morbid. Who am I, anyway? Why am I in a scene with two people who won't talk to me? Why wasn't I invited to read at AWP?

I'm in love with a playwright

You know me. I hate plays. I hate them even when people I love are in them.


But I have been reading Sarah Ruhl plays over the last week or so, and, heck, I think she deserves some serious Wayne Koestenbaums. I think I would like to watch her plays. I think I might even want to play peripheral characters in her plays. That is a weird feeling. Wait. I think I might want to write plays. Let's write a play! Oo, let's! Kathy, you can wear antlers and vampire teeth. Oh wait. Someone already wrote that.


Really though. I miss our collaborations. So I will start:



: You are blue, like a whale because blue whales aren't really blue.




: No, I'm really blue.




Your turn!

it's time to talk about nonsense

who thinks joaquin phoenix is being for real and who thinks it's some of kind of clever actor game. abby, you will know.

i thought maybe possibly he could just be going crazy until they interviewed casey affleck about it (who is making a documentary of joaquin or something) and he was like "...yeah, he's giving up acting to be a rapper. so what." this makes me think they are in the "cahoots."

what do you think.

Separated by handsomeness

Danny Boyle looks like Morrissey's less fashion-conscious older bro.

we need more poetry videos, here's one

Heart attack

Apparently women are dropping like overweight Persian cats due to heart attacks because there are all these new commercials to make us aware that our symptoms are different. Women who look like they are in their mid- to late-30s say things like, "I didn't even have any chest pain. I just felt kind of tired." And then they weigh an old woman, and show us that she weighs 120 pounds, implying that even if you are a skinny little bird a heart attack awaits. Which means...you (the abstract you, the "vous") are about to die.

I took my pulse like 400 times yesterday because I was home sick, the major symptom of my illness being extreme tiredness--I slept for seven hours yesterday during the day, which means that while I was awake my index and middle finger were more or less constantly pressed against my throat. The other major symptom of my illness clearly being paranoia.

This morning I continue to grapple with mortality. I am drinking enough coffee that my whole body vibrates a little each time my heart beats.

Kitties are Trainable, Too (Just not Mine)

Since it seems clear (Sorry Abby) that none of us will ever have children, I have a new plan for our cats when they are not reading classic novels--agility contests! I learned about them while watching my favorite public television show, Nature.

So, they are just like the puppy agility obstacle courses, except for cats. And except that the cats don't want to follow the rules, and they climb over hoops rather than through them, or they get distracted and go check out something else when they're supposed to be competing. And except the owners aren't competitive at all. I bet there is lots of drinking at cat agility competitions.

I wish I had a picture of the Persian I saw attempting to run and jump--it was just like huge ball of fur sort of waddling along and occasionally lifting off to jump like a furry cloud.

Celebrity Crush #814

Rufus Sewell is sooooo dreamy. Here are the reasons why:

1. I cannot stop staring at his face. Abby says this is because he has a skeleton-face, and that is my type. I see why she would say that. This is true. However, I truly don't think he has a skeleton face, and if he does it is a beautiful skeleton face. So there.

2. He has a really good American accent. He is one of the new crop of English-masquerading-as-American-agents-of-the-law on television shows that air in the hour before the news. This is, by the way, the new formula for a hit show: Find an English dude and make him an eccentric genius with a female sidekick.

3. He looks like he's holding something back. He is coy. It is obvious that he has unplumbed (and possibly unplumb-able (?)) depths. His eyes say "I am telling the truth," but his mouth says, "Or am I?"

4. He looks totally different in period costuming. He looks like a dashing pirate, even in armored skirts.

5. Oh wait, his cheekbones are totally skeletal. Hot.

Chapter Three: Entry Day

Chapter one here.
Chapter two here.

I can’t tell if the tiny monkeys are growing, or if the plus-sized models are shrinking. I don’t know why the Howling Girl didn’t plan ahead for the eventuality of her head bumping and plodding along the linoleum behind her as she makes her way to breakfast. She should bind a pillow to her skull.

All I know is that cloudy days at The Pinch Punch are the worst because TYRA has a spoiled child’s version of seasonal affective disorder.

The morning Pinch-Punches are gray and reek of regret and liquid foundation. A profound melancholy settles on the residents, and they half-heartedly smack around billiard balls, hoping that someone watched something interesting on TV the night before so the silence can be broken.

Epileptic seizures abound in the lobby. It is an Entry Day, and a charming new guest’s melodic timbre haywires synapses amongst residents. There is nothing like an epileptic seizure for bringing you down. People say the pants-pissing is the worst, but I say it is bleeding-tongue.

There is a collective unconscious wish for harmonicas and sunglasses. The lights flicker, hiss, and sink. The Howling Girl finally shuts up. Everyone’s got the sniffles; their sleeves crust with mucus, their eyes crust with sleep.

Serious issue

Christian Bale yells with a scary voice. I think he has been working too much lately and might want to come pick me up for that vacation in the tropics we planned so long ago. I promise not to frustrate him.

k+ and I made American Psycho jokes, but so is everyone else. So here's a mash-up with Newsies instead:

NSFW F*ckin Newsies! @ Yahoo! Video

Pinch Punch Ch. 2: puddin’, Tragic Audiodiary I.

Chapter one is here.

“When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray…I cannot clearly say how I had entered the wood; I was so full of sleep just at the point where I abandoned the true path,”

No wait, shoot, that’s Dante. It’s hard to make an audio-diary, but the note in my rollerboard said I have to record my journey or be banished to the Pinch-Punch vats. Crap. I hate the sound of my own voice and I can’t think of anything to say. Crap. Okay, let’s try that again:

How does one fall through a skylight into new life? In the dream I was knitting an endless afghan with which to cover the earth, in which to wrap it, to snuggle it, until all the icecaps I had always meant to scale melted, wetting the earth’s blanky like a baby. In the dream I was also the earth, and also the afghan, which was woven of scraps of paper sack, heirlooms from past centuries, barbed wire, and the fine blond hair of little sisters.

The sign did not say WELCOME. I would not have known this because I crashed through the skylight and landed face-up on the bar, faces of drunks looming above me like funeral flowers. I couldn’t tell if they were laughing or crying. They brutally brushed my hair, so that my scalp bled pleasantly. My whole body bled pleasantly upon my arrival, as if my old life were draining out of my body.

Whoa, audio-diaries are super-dramatic. I think I love audio-diaries. They make my life seem way more important than it is.

“What do you drink in your neck of the country, sister?” said the bartendress. “Cuz I know
you don’t come from ‘round here.”

She was a giantess, with gold fingernails like claws, or switchblades, or switchblade claws. She looked vaguely famous, but I wasn’t sure; I am a knitter; I don’t believe in television.

“Um, I was knitting an afghan in which to cover the earth?” I said.

“Caravaggio! You’re supposed to be barbacking! Paint me up a Pinch-Punch chaser for this freak-ass transient!” She tried to snap her fingers, but her switchblade nails just sort of clacked together.

“Fuck off, TYRA, or I’ll stab your tits,” said Caravaggio in a Boston accent.

He sat Indian-style atop a table in the darkest corner of the bar, wearing a purple wig and wildly patterned swimming trunks. He began fingerpainting a portrait of my dream. In the painting the earth was being smothered, not happily bundled; the earth was suffocating. He made suffocating noises as he painted to ensure that I understood this. He poured the painting into a frosty mug.

TYRA slammed a shot glass full of glowing liquid down on the bar.

“Um, is this a liquer? Because I’m a knitter, and I don’t believe in--”

“Drink up!” TYRA said. “Or Caravaggio will stab your tits.”

“Drink up or I’ll stab your tits,” said Caravaggio. “Cuz that’s what I do for a hobby, is stab tits and play my brand of bocci where I throw the balls at people’s faces. See that broad over there? The plus-sized one? Check out the number I did on her.”

“They call me Ye Old Blackeye of Bloody Tit now,” she said. “I used to be called Sunshine, after the bread.”

Everyone at the bar chanted “Pinch-Punch, Pinch-Punch, Pinch-Punch.”

I had never done a shot before; this one tasted like the sweat of tiny animals, namely teacup piglets. It kicked my ass right off the barstool and onto the floor.