This is more profound than myspace. And I did it years ago. Now Chelsea and I are both doing it. 


I am: with Chelsea.
I think: about objects a lot. And make jokes.
I know: a lot of people in this town, and they all have the same walk.
I have: no cat. Want.
I wish: at 11:11 almost every morning and every night.
I hate: when the guy at bingo says "N, as in Nancy."
I miss: a couple of people in particular.
I fear: being unsuccessful.
I hear: Belle & Sebastian a lot these days.
I smell: coffee and everything is better.
I crave: intimacy, but not the way you might think. And cigarettes.
I search: online for the definitions of words I really should know. Then I clear my browser history.
I wonder: how things went for you today.
I regret: not treating my old roommates better.
I love: but I'm not sure how to talk about it.
I ache: after volleyball. In the best way.
I am not: as well-read as people think I am.
I believe: you, but I don't understand.
I dance: poorly.
I sing: cabaret well, but never will again.
I cry: seldom. Tried. Can't.
I fight: still, when people have no idea we're fighting.
I win: people over, eventually.
I lose: at bingo every week.
I never: drive in silence.
I always: am really hyperbolic.
I confuse: mistakes with lessons.
I listen: but I can't always respond right away.
I can usually be found: at the Mug, home, or school.
I am scared: that I missed a lot of chances.
I need: coffee, cigarettes, and bagels.
I am happy about: scholarship.
I imagine: things too vividly, too often, and too hopefully, I think.
I can't: stay home these days.
I say: "dude" a lot.
I write: some pretty excellent dialogue.
I play: the piano sometimes, if you can believe it.
I must: think I'm invincible, the way I've been carousing around Ypsilanti lately.

"'Cause the bravest thing of all is always hope/ Goodbye, goodbye"

There should be a word for the kind of listening that is like "peering" with your eyes.

Something to describe me concentrating on specific strains of laughter in order to figure out who's on that porch across the parking lots, through the trees, where I can't see. 

There should be a word for knowing my early thirties will be the best yet. 

    For that sweet spot during the year when we're the same age. 

       For the way I feel beautiful when I wake up and no one is there to see it.

There should be a word for who you are to me. Just one.

Maybe the word should be "bravery." Maybe "hope." 

Reflections, if you will

The first thing that happened today was I woke up and checked my email. It's obsessive; I do it from bed. My professor had already responded to a frantic email I wrote him not 8 hours prior, and used short sentences to tell me everything would be okay, and to come up with at least two solutions to what was bothering me. We'll talk Monday. I rolled back over, silently, infinitely, thanking him for responding so promptly and gracefully on Mother's Day morning.

The next thing that happened was that I made coffee, and reminded my roommate that it was Mother's Day, by positing that we feel the same way about this morning. I feel bad about reminding her, and wonder if it was a big deal when her mom was around. Because, in fact, we can't feel the same way. Alive is alive; I can't know how she feels.

But I do feel like that woman doesn't belong to me. Like anything I say about her is subject to scrutiny by those who know better. That I have no room to criticize. That any anger I have is misplaced.
Mostly, I feel like being caught by the kitchen mirror with thin, downturned pink lips, dark brown eyebrows, thick hair, and her chin is a flight of my overactive imagination. Like seeing yourself for a moment in a picture of some television actress.
But letting down the guard of my pale skin, big blue eyes, and his tiny nose, there we are.
She and I aren't frowning, this is just our listening face.
There are the habits I can't explain. Coffee, cigarettes, picking at my cuticles, and cracking my jaw. Language acquisition. Insanity and self-deprecation. Falling in love?

My 17th birthday wasn't so long ago, but 27 gets closer and closer and ten years is a long time.

So I'll call her mother today, affect an accent reminiscent of Baton Rouge, talk about the cats in the backyard, and remember the palm trees lining the streets of Houston, Texas.
Then I'll probably look at the photos of a tall woman whose name no longer exists. She's pretending to use a turned off personal computer terminal in some office somewhere, during the late '80's. She's wearing a blazer, and smiling awkwardly at the man presumably taking the photos. His name still exists, because that's how marriage and divorce works in the West, but I just call him "Dad."

I would never wear my hair like that, pulled back in a simple ponytail.

Come, Oh, Come On, Immanuel (Did You Really Say Those Things?)

I never thought I would be the kind of person to worry about the imminence of September, 2011,
or wonder if the sky would come apart over LaGuardia

- or, like, maybe at the last minute this 747 will get reception and I can send one last text,
or waste it on being called "honey."

Why is Jesus always riding in on a cloud? That would make him look so small!

Back, Midwest, in Ypsilanti, where there have been 3 Christs, at least, already,
our own mess-of-a-siah will trudge algae-covered from the Huron and Cross himself a street.

There are no fig trees here to hide in (hear that, Matthew?), let alone to curse!
There's a bomber plant down the road somewhere,
but there's nothing with seeds on inside on any plane I've been on.

We haven't seen fruit since 1971,
 and the names "Willow Run" and "Wayne" seem appropriate, but I can't put my finger on it.

("Let the dead bury their own.")

"Please secure your own mask before assisting others."

You can't stand anywhere around here and be more than 6 miles away from what used to be a body of water....

"In the event of a water landing, the cushion underneath your seat will serve as a floatation device."

Everyone's so hopeful in Manhattan! (And I hear they'll "never forget"....)

Cheers to the drying of the Detroit River!

("I thirst.")

Out East the glorified gutter, the Hudson, over-fucking-floweth.

That explosion of glass and metal, and business-people and faith in humanity 10 years ago was probably worse than drowning. I missed it though, and I have nothing to forget.

My Dad's spent 40 years in this desert.

I'm taking the scrap metal from this Delta bird of prayer to dig myself a fucking well.

("You are right to say you have no husband.")

(JULY 2011)

WCW Never Said Anything About Those Chickens Eating, But Sometimes I Assume I Get It

Tell me to paint something, please;

keep asking why it isn't done.

Remember William Carlos Williams and the chickens?

The red wheelbarrow always reminded me of you, I think it was because of your glasses, or maybe your hair.

I think I can remember one important thing about everyone I know.

I remember his eyes being super important but I also always remember stuff wrong.

I could still draw his hair if I wanted to.

I read a book of Tao Lin poems and then I broke someone's heart.

I remember sitting at the gas station reading about streetlights knowing that the guy pumping gas and buying menthols wouldn't understand them.

I probably drew the hair covering the important eyes later,

or made a little picture of some chickens eating seeds and failed to color them in.

And I am a writer, a writer of fictions, I am the heart that you call home

Painting is kind of like writing is kind of like living.

For my best friend, Sarah, who embodies my Charles to Sebastian, I painted this picture of Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte, as portrayed by Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews:
In drafts, it looked like this:


Now it looks like this:


It says "every place that I've been happy," in reference to this scene:

“On a sheep cropped knoll, under a clump of elms, we ate the strawberries and drank the wine.... we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile.....the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a fingers breadth above the earth and hold us suspended. ‘Just the place to bury a crock of gold,’ Sebastian said. ‘I should like to bury something precious in every place that I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.’"

Every place that I've been happy. Mmmm.

So, when you're painting, you probably draw first, then you paint. One's drawing is never reliable. It gets some of the angles wrong - the eyebrows and the shadows on the lids. Those are hard things to draw. When you're looking at someone, you take them for granted. A real artist knows never to take eyelids for grated.

When these drawings are off - even a little - the painting is off. Sometimes, the painting being off in color or shading actually makes it more recognizable as a painting of, say, a banana, or the Eiffel Tower, or the stars of Brideshead.

But that doesn't mean I drew them right. I made them palatable and recognizable, but Jeremy Irons' skin is not yellow, and the shadows of his face are not green.

When I talk about my friends, their actions are not black,nor their virtues white. Every time I talk I am developing another layer to the beautiful canvas of fiction that creates our life.
But it is not real.
It is not who they are, no more than a self-portrait is who I am.


So you have to be careful about art. It's your life, and it's here to stay.

tum. buh. lurr.

another version of who i am happens here:
http://lizzydeeter.tumblr.com/

art projects will probably be documented on there. so keep tuned.