the singing man in the deaf parade--

I sometimes feel like a raving lunatic, or an eccentric scientist or mad prophet, especially when I am trying to explain something wonderful to a host of friends who could not be moved to care or understand.

Sometimes when I am at the library, I feel thus. Or standing in front of a clothes display. Yarn shops, or the word "yarn" also evokes this high and lonely feeling. The intoxicating and unique mixture of several chords and a drumbeat, coagulated into a perfect jelly of song, provokes me into speaking tongues. 

And lo, the image of me traipsing out with invisible vapours in wonder and awe amongst the more solid and sane statues of my confused and pitying friends, how it comes.

Ours is a high and lonely destiny.

I'm going to write something down, and you read it and you say if it makes you feel kind of funny, the way it made me feel.

"And when I have become as young as the child that was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again (for we are at earth's eastern rim) and once more tread the great dance."

- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

No, it probably won't. You'll need to have heard the rest of it all, have learned the whole of it. You'll have to have been briefed in that wondrous lexicon. I have been drinking steadily of the Chronicles of Narnia, one every day for the past few days. If I had not been working yesterday and been busy with the boyfriend before that, I would have finished the last two books already, but I've been slow.

I picked up The Voyage of the Dawn Treader this morning and just finished it this evening, after making beef curry for the boys in the family. The homely stew felt leaden in my mouth, as I read about boy kings and girl queens and talking mice and sailors supping on dazzling liquid light.

like clearing the fox den.

I am excited by neatness. On trips to Ikea, I am filled with a kind of intense joy to see things compartmentalised into sweet, stylish, and Swedish boxes and bookshelves, into underbed storage units. Like Kit and Nita fighting Entropy in the Young Wizards series, it is like watching the Devil get suckerpunched. Fuck you, Mess! In your place, pants! Serves you right, Errant Towel! Etcetera, etcetera.

But those of you who intimately know me will know that I am a notoriously messy person. It is not so much that I like mess or that I am incapable of cleaning, but my mind does not exist on quite the same plane as my body. I am always elsewhere. While I may be blogging on my bed in front of my Mac now, in Garden Grove, in the slightly chilly Southern California night, I am in Nazi-occupied France with the likes of Eli Roth and Brad Pitt. I do not notice the dust on my desk, nor the dirt on my sheets in the way angels in graveyards do not mind the lichen on their faces. They are not there to care.

But I admit sometimes it gets to be maddening, and the sight of the mess in my room throws in me into a mad kind of frenzy. I feel like there are ants all over my back. A rush of blood hits me square between the shoulders, right up into my head, and I clean everything out. I wipe clean the mirrors, dust the drawers. I organise my lingerie drawer into types of lace and colour. I throw out the trash and lo, I have made my peace.

It is the same with this blog, I guess. I come here when my mind goes crazy, when I have all the languages I have learned and all the songs I have sung all crash together like a cacophonous disaster in my skull. And all the long words tumble out like sequinned gymnasts, and all the big thoughts like marching elephants bespangled and proud. All the sad sentences and the small thoughts, the ponderous loon songs of self-abasement, like tiny clown-cars tooting round the ring. And the vain ideas, the lady shimmering bare-back on the white horse, why they come around too, all naked legs in the spotlight, all bejewelled breasts.

And it gets a little bit better. It makes the maddening crowd, the lions and tigers, the bears, it makes them all right. They do not so much snarl as snicker.

I get so many bad dreams I don't know what to do. I don't want to go to sleep, mother. Five more minutes. Five more minutes.

Listening to my brother's croaking song, for he feels like he can sing.

Have been filled with prose and prose and prose, ladies and gentlemen. Prose and prose and prose.

I am more restless by the day. Siiiigh.

Went last night to a Dodgers game with Memo and his friends. It was interesting, I was more amused by the people than I was by the game. I felt all yesterday as if I was in some strange dream. It feels gloomy and balmy by turns. The air is silvery gold, and my bones feel filled with mud.

It is 12:30, and I should be at his house at 3. I need to do laundry yet, and some knitting. 

I feel so curious! I feel like I'm dreaming, even now. 

My financial aid has come in, so I am a few hundred dollars less poor. I pick up my pay check this week, lads and ladies, and I am so glad of it. Money, money, money. A golden balm to blind the eyes.

Have been reading a lot. Finished two books in the last two days. Grazing through the Chronicles of Narnia like a hungry sheep.

Buttermilk Biscuit Bitching

Probably need friends who are less flaky and more tender.

Just sayin'.

Bought new sketchbook, drove all the way to Westminster Library only find that they are closed for the next seven days.

Also need some Ricola. MMMph

Vulcan Mind Meld Me

Volunteered at the OC Fair today, which was intense. Met a girl named Denise who goes to CSULB and is an I/ST major. It was wonderful to hang out with her. Had chocolate-covered bacon, deep fried twinkies, and a Martha Stewart Dog from Pink's. So good. Sooo soo good.

Apres, saw Cameron and watched Star Trek together. I'm crushing so hard on Zach Quinto's Spock. I mean, I was crushing heavy on him even as Sylar, but man has sex appeal as an ice-cold Vulcan mastermind. 

Roar. 

Lately have been feeling the itch of the acting bug stronger than ever. Was looking up classes at OCC and SCR, shuffling my feet before the ice-cold water. I just want to plunge into that mess, but I'm so scared! I don't.. I don't know what to do, or where to go, or who to speak to. Maybe I should talk to the theatre advisor at my school? *sigh* Or Mr. Martin.

Maybe I'll go to him. That seems like the best decision... I miss him, anyway. I want to make amends.... I wonder if he'll accept me back. I feel like I owe him an apology. For creating a rift, for messing things up. I miss him. He said he felt like I was his daughter.

How do you go and fuck something up like that? Something so wholesome and beautiful, "If I ever had a daughter it'd be you." I am the fatted calf, the prodigal son, the spitting image of the home's harbinger. 

Miss Memo a little bit. Miss working a little more.

but it did happen

Just finished Magnolia. Ahhh I like it so much. The sheer humanity of it! It was so tongue-in-cheek and funny, but at the same time so mouthwateringly, eyewateringly tender. MMPH.

I think Doubt has arrived but I haven't yet checked. To be sure, I think my gloves should have arrived by now but they haven't :( 

I have spoken before, ladies and gentlemen, on my struggle with desire. As a Buddhist, I ought to cleanse myself of wants and wants, but I find myself spending most of my time, instead of researching and learning and gaining knowledge, I find myself wanting things.

My mother told me that recently my old Buddhist mentor was in the newspaper. He was the chairman of a large Buddhist organisation, and lived in a small temple in Long Beach. I remember him vaguely from my childhood. I remember hopping around like a kangaroo, and him calling me his little kangaroo. I remember liking him immensely. When I think of him, I picture the Dalai Lama. They did not look dissimilar. 

He was in the papers recently, though he died before I could quite remember. The man--I suppose you would call him the undertaker, he had been the one to undress my dear old monk--had recounted a story of this undressing. He had peeled back those orange bedsheets, ladies and gentlemen, and had found the old monk's underwear patched, threadbare, darned in many places. Of the many, many donations my old mentor received in his lifetime as a Buddhist monk and a leader in the community, he took none of it for himself, not even for underwear. 

On seeing the shabby evidence of my poor monk's selflessness and virtue, the undertaker burst into tears. 

In the light of so much goodness, how is it men can still live so close to evil? Though great things are born all around them, like the nebulous winking of stars being born, like millions of larvae blossoming into life in the dark spring night as we touch our heads to sheets to sleep, we seem to see none of it. We take none of that goodness into our own lives, and continue to want, and hate, and kill, and ignore. 

I wonder if animals know good or evil, or if morality is a new disease meant to control the population. Whether just or unjust, someone seems to die for it anyway.

My point is, I really want a leather jacket. With a hood. And one without a hood, for work. I want one so bad.

And I want to shop at MAC. I want. I want. I cry myself to sleep on the inside, though all it looks like is slavering jowls, wild wolves wishing and wishing.

idle time

i idle like an engine purring gently with park in gear

i idle with the supine laze of a lioness gorged on fragile flesh

i idle like a cannonball grating metallic at the back of the throat

of a cannon aimed straight at your mother's broadside

i idle simply because i can

i idle the way tornadoes are begot in the electric silence

on a sweltering Kansas afternoon

i idle like the last two seconds before tomorrow rushes in

all mysterious and shit

such a lie. i simply am idle.

white lights

Cat's sitting on the better half of the bed.

the day is nearly over. Time runs faster in this room, I swear. I can't wait to work again. Figures I didn't need to attend the orientation after all, and Athena (hopefully!) will contact me on the morrow for my id and shit. Sigh. This thing is taking forever.

Contemplating dropping my Monday Wednesday class since it's like, 11-12. Would give me more opportunities to work, though lord knows I make enough money 2 days a week, I don't need to do more.. But... Sigh. We'll see.

In other news may get a new Siamese kitten.

My brain is just not into thinking lately. Even typing this shit is hard for me. I can't think straight for two seconds. Aggghh.