thank you for courage. i can't help it, we started so many things we never finished. i hate you for that. it was never promised, that's true. inspiration has no responsibilities -- my faulty thinking has always been to conversely put exuberance into the stranglehold of guilt, penance, then inhibition. afraid of affecting too much. "afraid of succees". Ok. So I accept. because I can't keep living that way. And really, I don't hate. I don't miss. I don't want back. I want want. I want wanting. I am wanting. I am working on wanting. but I thank you for courage. I can't help but see myself as nothingness before we triumphed, before a we existed however briefly and however much I scoff at it and its infantility. scourge on vonnegut and his "nation of two" coinage that glitters as it flips in my head. again, this pout. i feel right now that it comes from the sense of injustice that I am stateless. pragmatically, no. historically, and by application, yes. god, does this chick ever make sense?!? one gravitates towards art making because it is a house for the soul, it is a nation with its own governance, it is a place to put your stuff down and make something (dinner). it is a shelter, but it is only ever a shelter or place for a visit (a park ranger's cabin in the middle of a gorge). put your shell back on your back and be on your way. there is no home, and that is what still yokes our minds together, literally, the wooden bar across our shoulder blades ... who is it that masters us and bears that grateful whip?

i am thinking about you.
BBC Radio 1 is playing 80s music, and I am thinking about you.

"Don't you... forget about me. 
As you walk on by
will you call my name ...
Don't you ... forget about me ...
Or will you walk away"
(Simple Minds)

You and your caged teeth and your caged heart and our caged embrace, these things still make my vision swim and my throat constrict and my lower lip pucker and pressure itself against my upper lip to contort my baby cheeks into an old hag's.  

This is interesting to me, what you fulfilled of my 80s dreams.  Hidden 80s and early 90s dreams I never ever understood.

Oh, our ethnographic love.  Our end of the era eroticism.  Our fashion fetishism.  My daddy santa claus preacher man Validation-Salvation complex.  Your ... well, for once I will refrain from speaking on your behalf.  From thinking for you.  From beating you to the punch.  One day, you tell me.  Your what, exactly? 

It was Ours.  That's what makes me hurt.  That's the pus in my lungs.  I stared at that lostness at sea in your eyes so long I dropped my map to find my way out.

I find myself wondering what would happen to my constitution if I could be prescribed a testosterone patch, for the sickness of "missing a man in my life" ...?

I can't believe I put these thoughts on a public forum.

the freestyling needs discipline but bear with the chatter-natter (persistence makes the minor character a Lead)

I wake up this morning drowning from last night's storm in old memories, surprising only for their clarity: the touch of crispy grid-cotton white uniform on taut, brown skin; the smell of longing in early morning misty hours, a secreted phone conversation immediately post-parting saying, "I love the sound of your voice"; anesthetic aesthetic of brown-mahogany deli tables, a conversation years later discussing that evaporated possibility ... men. I'm hungry.

That wafty post-colonial post-Romantic boarding-school-import-education-infused, forest-longing, escapist-songing, melomamadrama of Arundhati Roy has given me rose-colored cornea for the last couple days. For all her repetition and paperback two-word sentence punch-tuation, apparently, it has opened up my own past to the realm of senses I was too devastatingly lonely to notice, then.

"Then" is a word that can say a lot. There is a lot of space between the recognition of "now" and "then". What words have we for those spaces? "Just before", "around that time", "in the period of"... no no no. Between "now" and "then" there is a heavy confounding of breath molecules and invocation of postures, gestures, unfulfillments, exciting heights. A bubbly brew in the cortices. A trip. A travel guide, for which you wait and hope for a title. But when? Where are we going?

Did you know? According to journalist and spiritualist writer, Guy Murchie, with each breath you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and--owing to the wind's ceaseless circulation--over a year's time you have intimate relations with oxygen molecules exhaled by every person alive, as well as by everyone who ever lived. So says Rob. Go on. Click the weblink. Your Socratic brain says it's all hobbledy gobbledy fake-is-feel-good Gaia-one-earth predatory-soul-lending. But you want it. You want your future told like that forbidden fourth scoop of ice cream. You want it like the itch you can't scratch, the pimple you can't squeeze, the happy couple...at the other end of the bus. You look to your reflection between the gaps of the stick-on advertising on the windows of this double-decker. You try to make it look to an imaginary other people that you are staring romantically at the wonders of the old city when what you are really doing is making sure you are still there and that it is still the image of you that sits on this seat.

Interesting use of hyper-hyphenetics produces amalgams both adjectival and noun, depending on the reading. Spoken aloud, a previous sentence should rather end with "predata-metada-soul-lust-mortgage-lending" in order to complete the steps (of the word dance). Like this: "YOUR SoCRAtic BRAIN says IT'S all HObbledy GObbledy FAKE-is-FEEL-good GAIa-ONE-earth PREdata-MEtada-SOUL-lust-MORTgage-LENding." Can you tell I've spent hours researching Theodor Seuss Geisel and systems of scansion? But go on--click on some freewill star-logic. Believe a little. Lick that cone. Smear "nuss" flavor on your lips like lipstick. Then tread gleefully past the borders of your pink with this naughty wet like a greedy kiss on a wintry autumn night.

The news today, in sum:

adjustable rate mortages ninjas no income no jobs no assets multiple properties fraud involved buyers sellers brokers and appraisers devastated Cleveland people take loans they can't afford predatory lending been the subject of a lot of consumer side perspective inappropriate loans often through aggresive suits the borrower that they can't afford when it resets marketed consumer understands not all sub-prime lending. Give me examples of when you came across really shouldn't have taken them.

Accounting:

2 hours since I came back from breakfast and word count minus news transcription equalled 341. Damn. But I finished researching the Dada catholics and current Indo-feminist writers Marian and I talked about yesterday. And everything from Brahman-Atman to Spinoza to the Gnostics that I owed myself and evolution to know. Knowing is my drug (upper). Better than sex? I am giggly with joy that there is a literature festival here in September. In this exile, in the vastness of unwanted choice and budget travel survivalism, I feel worlds of desire colliding like tectonic plates in my skull. America, Europe, Singapore, haha what a size differential, high school, college, systems of thought, systems of status, dreams, hopes, fears, old, new, Old World, New World, culture, citation, dreams, always something to talk about, always something to do, freedom of being, freedom of belonging, heaviness of being, heaviness of belonging, laziness, comfort, appropriate, ugly duckling, paunch, wanting to be, never enough, thinking too much. Recreation and profession. Leisure, life, application, "usefulness". When he was around 45 (he retired when he was 49), my father took a wood-turning course in England where he learned to turn goblets and bowls and spoons.

Etymologies + the future begins now

The first line of my first book will probably be: I never like the first line of books. I am probably not alone in this thought or this unique idea. I am probably not the only contradiction. I am never quite as alone as I hate or would like to be.

Parenthetical [:] implicit in this stream of thought is the self-commentary that judges "being the only one" as signature of penultimate originality = genius + success, relegating to the trend of the creative industries ["The Industry"] the irony of the fact that success is not predicated on being The Only One, but rather to be consistently new, and the search to be consistently the Newest New is a continuous scavange for the unnamed oxymoron, or oxyoxymoron, or oxymoron-triple-squared. A string of impossibles and impossible connections. A pearl necklace fills the intestines. A hand talking to a hand talking to the table talking to the bedpost talking to the side of the right ribs. The bee-watcher and bee-watcher-watcher. Always looking for the source and criticizing simply by naming. Underscore through a stare. Highlight in the air an imaginary neon juice. Staple together a dollar bill to a kelpy medallion from the deep. "Stationery technique".

The first lines of books irritate me because of "the bump." It's like "the bump". The Bump is when a performer is "off-stage" (are you ever?), in the wings, probably, waiting for an entrance. He or she is an empty vessel. Thinking about drippy make-up and how the air-conditioning is too cold in the theatre. Taught not to disrupt the curtains with unnecessary movement standing next to it, said performer may shake some hands and feet, but otherwise stands pretty until: THE CUE. Ensuing THE CUE is THE BUMP. It looks, in caricature, a little like a still body standing on a travellator when it just starts at highest speed, but instead of being propelled down the body is flown upwards, all smiles, big jump or just fancy cut-slice-choreography.

So I want a little more "in". I read every line of the publication details page as if doing so will darken the house lights, shush the gossipers, blip the cell phone ringtones to silent, and open the curtains. Momentary blackness. Aaaaahh. Anonymity precedes image and imagination.

How to pace a reader's eyes in a novel except with an onslaught of words? Perhaps my first book will be a picture book, square, and large format; to turn every page takes the physical effort and detail of spoon to mouth.

Did you know that the plural of oxymoron is not oxymorons but oxymora?
Did you know it comes from late Greek oxymoron, from the neuter of oxymoros (pointedly foolish), from the Greek Oxys (sharp, keen) and moros (foolish)?

(Incase you're wondering, this latest series of musings comes from a fiction-novel-binge post-audition. I become 13 again when feeling unaccepted leads me to stuff stories into my eyes like grain to a mill at harvest. Escape!)

First lesson in the New University For Casual Science

THE SCIENCE OF APPRECIATION
(Roy may call it the god of small things)

Scribblings from over a grosse coffee on schlesisches strasse, berlin:
I feel like a really old person--my handwriting is as small as my voice is as small as my conservatism is as small and directly proportional to my interaction with people. Little.

Every new place I go is my newest favorite place, which is directly proportional to the number of cents I save on my always favorite items.

Is this ego? The pursuit of feeling good. Safety in quiet, warm things.

A new sort of travel writer--she doesn't go far from the door but has means in a few steps to assess the diachronics of out of body experience. Home is my body. Out of home equals out of body, just eyes. Coffee bean eyes.

Today, in world news, somebody apologized to somebody else for their ancestor eating the other's ancestor and the second somebody's ancestor massacring in revenge. I am still unclear about who apologized to whom -- he whose papa's pre-papa cannibalized an invader or he whose mission-filled pre-papa post-slaughtered.

This makes world news perhaps because not much else of relevance occurs in Fiji, or because we are fascinated with the taboo of cannibalism, or more likely because it is still important. My day excursion to the Museum for Ethnology highlights to me the somehow uncomfortable amassing of sacred, religious, daily, costume, and functional items belonging to far, far away peoples by Western men. And suddenly all of modernism falls into place--I see not New Ireland's Malagan effigies of the dead, but Albert Giacometti's Woman with her Throat Cut and Hands Holding The Void. An invisible synapse crossing a gap between areas of my brain snaps, slapping my forehead from the inside out: of course! The roots of German expressionism, surrealism, ja ja ja ...

You know, when you become preoccupied with documenting and collecting something for posterity you can entirely forget the content or significance of the material at hand. Have you noticed that? Just today, like when I decide to make a habit of copying the text from one of my favorite on-line periodicals, I have to read every article twice because I retained nothing. And even now, my day has not been magnified or changed by the information as usual, but I have a different sense of gratification because I "have" it, a salty gratification, salty because it always wants a little more ... it's a greedy and guilty amassing for the sake of a greater cause (FUTURE) ... rip of the butterfly wings off your harmonious experience and put it in a glass box. It's worth it. It's worth it to others too. But walking through such a museum is so much like conducting a speechless interview with the dead , I am glad I limited myself to the time limit of "free thursdays 4 hours before close" lest I petrify in the lostness of my own non-culture (exhibition hall: LOBBY, archiving of the instant present, those whose blood and genes come from the non-documented).

The human being as object -- can this mean that the person is not objectified?

PUBLIC ACTION --- PUBLICATION --- PUBLIC ACTION --- PRESERVATION

In non-scientific, casual observational study, I notice my thoughts questioning the nature of culture and slaughter in relation to practices of nourishment and strength. Video ethnographies at the museum display a sacrificing feast of pigs during the festival of the dead. All the village's men gather together holding strings and are presided over by wild priest dressed in fronds. He dances and sings around the men and around the mounds of black-skinned boar before the people can come together to hack at the sitting flesh. Butchery as a non-specialized practice.

In a non-scientific, casual observational study, I notice my thoughts questioning the nature of culture and slaughter in relation to practices of social order and public transportation. U-bahn excursions in Berlin are encased in boxy cars with row benches; in the Schnelle-bahn the seats even flip up flush to the windows, so everyone could be standing if necessary. Blame me and my pop cultured imagination. But the linear nature of transport design here does lend itself to shaping the human mass that gets transported within it as inhuman, as object, or cargo. Human disposability in correlation to the shaping of the public mass.

Just thoughts, but uncoincedental, or accidental.

Berlin Finds Me

THE EXPERT POSITION

My last days in Vienna were housed in the apartment of another dancer in my ProSeries, Nici (Nicole) Rutrecht. Nici is the one who, when working together on an improvisation assuming "The Expert Position" (that is, on anything, tying shoelaces, baking cakes, nuclear physics -- the point is just to assume the confidence of the position of expertise and apply it somewhere, relevant or not), gave an authentic lecture-demonstration of the expertise of getting lost. No, wait, pause a second--yes, that's funny. And sometimes tragic. But funny.

Not so much in her honor as for that expertise and propensity which we inherently share, I busied myself by (some would say, "lost myself in") burning the full "Twin Peaks" Season I from her collection (which also included full seasons of "Married With Children" and "The Golden Girls", proudly shown to me through squinted eyes at odd hours pre-bedtime !??!), working, cooking fishball dumpling noodle soup for my new Austrian friends, and getting myself lost in the Vienna woods.

BIS BALD IM WEINERWALD: See you soon in the Vienna Woods ...

At some point scaling a steep, non-marked patch of hill so dry it was like digging my toes and desperate hands into an endless vat of fine sand, I found myself thinking, "This is how random tourists end up on the front-page of the local paper, as they slide to their death on a random patch of non-marked hillside." I also thought that this is why they ALWAYS tell you NOT to go off the beaten path, and told myself as such non-too-infrequently as I made vertical sprints between trees and fallen trees that served as holds for my climb (yes, I bet they made a sound, and it probably went something like AAHHHHHH as they fell). End of story is that no bear ate me, I did not slip, and I only scared one Australian tourist at the church viewing platform atop the hill as I emerged from the bracken like a lost baby goat in a yellow t-shirt. Ja. Inventory for the lost includes many treasures, including a glorious Danube panorama from within privately owned vineyards, evidence of a yet unfinished house emblazoned with the title (JU)STill MARRIED (JU crossed out), hours of fun with weeds I still consider flowers (dandelions, those purple ones, those white ones, the little ones, you know), a brush with poison ivy or similar rash-plant, and many, many, many, many trees all by my lonesome. Dirt and rock beneath my feet, I couldn't have been more content.

(pictures pending)

WIEN-BERLIN LINIEN: 20:30-06:30 (with a drop-off in Dresden, 03:30)

Having agreed over the phone to sublet an empty room from a law student here by arriving at her doorstep off my 6:30 am overnight bus from Vienna, she sweetly and very, very apologetically tells me at a bleary-eyed 7:30am that a friend needed the extra room. Rather than being fully out of luck, however, I'm full of it-- she found me another room, this time in a 5-person converted warehouse loft wohnung (shared apartment). Although not completely finished (concrete floors in the shared space), it's totally cool (refurbished bathroom and a full-on bar countertop) and in a young, artsy area. And with a flexible exit date. My plans being so haphazard, that amount of flexibility is important ... I'd actually like to stay in the city longer, seeing as how impressed I am by it, and hopefully pick up a decent amount of German. As McDonald's would unfortunately say: "I'm lovin' it".

So I am here, trying to make some money-recoop working for Jeff (still, the health magazine) and getting recovered from the pure hedonism of the end-of-festival partying in Vienna in time for an audition starting Saturday. 6 hours a day for 8 days, I am really hoping to survive to the end, if not for work (but really, yes, please, for work) then for a decent workshop experience. The choreographer is young and upcoming but blazing on the scene -- American, educated in Amsterdam, and up till now based in New York, he's looking for 4-5 performers for a new piece contracted (for creation, I don't know about performances) here in Berlin from November to April 2008. I imagine he's now starting to get a lot of funding and commissions from European sources, hence the shift of base. Would I move? I hear your motherly worry (some of you). I don't know -- the audition is a two-way process.

But Berlin is nice. Very, very nice. A fresh mozzarella and tomato sandwich on a sunflower seed roll with a Segafredo cappuccino for 3.30 EU. Very high syllable-per-description to money ratio, which is, in terms of Quality Of Justification rather than Quality-Absolute (is there? is it not all perception?), a respectable ranking. These are the economics of budget travel.

The room I am in is lined with intelligent books, by authors the likes of which I have kept at the distance of at least a 7-foot pole since college days to protect me from my own hunger for obtuseness. Going to order an Englisch guidebook from the bookstore across from "Trendy Army Store" (I cannot help but wonder, and think I am right in wondering, if this crassly-named store is run by Chinese importers), I discover that B-Books is actually a relaxed and inviting storehouse for public and hobby intellectuals alike, with titles on every -tic and -ology and debate you can imagine. I'm in heaven!

The man I'm renting from is a German who looks and speaks like a Brit, has many leather-cased notebooks and 1950s paraphenalia to make him appear as such, and walked in on me by accident with no clothes on and broke the door handle doing so (the door handle often breaks, sometimes of its own accord, but not of its own will, rather like in response to world events or to the fluttering of a schmetterling's wings in Kyoto, for example. Schmetterling was one my first German words. It means "butterfly".) His name is Marian Kaiser; Kaiser's is the name of the local grocery store; I have never before thought to question the cultural origin of the 'Kaiser roll' before now; I am staying in his room; Marian Kaiser told me how to get to B-Books and also mentioned the 1 Euro Bookstore I found on my own where I found one thing worth buying, from which I will now quote in sign-off:

"If I am not mistaken, and if all the signs which are piling up are indications of a fresh upheaval in my life, well then, I am frightened. It isn't that my life is rich or weighty or precious, but I'm afraid of what is going to be born and take hold of me and carry me off -- I wonder where? Shall I have to go away again, leaving everything behind -- my research, my book? Shall I awake in a few months, a few years, exhausted, disappointed, in the midst of fresh ruins? I should like to understand myself properly before it is too late. ... if I had an iota of self-knowledge, now is the time when I ought to use it."
Sartre, Nausea, entry dated Monday, 29 January 1932