notching the spacebar

FNA officially scheduled for monday, looks like it’s vampire kitten bite chic for the holiday season. i gotta figure out how the fuck to wear a scarf like all the grown up pulled-together types do it. with me it always end up looking like i recently did some kind of john cleese rolling stumble into a t.j. max dollar bin and have yet to comprehend i picked up hitchhikers. or maybe i could simply prepare myself, psychologically, for a few days of wearing my hair down? when did i stop being able to do that? funny, the things you lose.

*
i’m starting a weekend intensive tonight and am already tired. i need to figure out community altar pieces for: sex, pride, self, power, and passion. originally i was going to put an appropriate-feeling assemblage piece at each, but then i really thought about packing up “allegory” (self, obviously) and carrying it around baltimore’s historic mount vernon neighborhood; i broke a cold sweat. don’t think i’m quite ready to subject that one to the local elements. i don’t know. part of me just thinks: yeah, just pop my current bottle of synthroid up there. because i’ve come to the recognition that some of the things people love most about my personality hinge more on chemical checks and balances than i want admit.

*
used to be when the sky fell in i’d hole up with cleo the winbook for a few hours. go all mary magdalene over jesus’ feet on her. light up the vigil altar and really lose it. forget my own name for a few hours so i could write the pain through. not through me and out the other side, unless you count that as the screen. more into me, into the deepest places it could go, process that chemistry, see what came out of it. then i’d post some or all of it on livejournal and go to sleep and when i woke up in a couple hours, i felt like i’d done something. not anything world ending, not anything worthy of praise, but something other than staring the abyss into the pre-dawn light.

p appreciated this grieving ritual. one thing i got going for me right now: he'd be pleased, probably, that i've done at least one of these for him. “you should publish a book,” he told me at the thai restaurant after reading what i wrote about katrina. “anonymousblack responds to tragic world events.” he’d buy that book, he said, and i know he would’ve. i can see him out on chicago street corners, handselling it to passers-by. p was always trying to get me to make books he could buy and sell for me, for better or worse.

i must be getting older. nothing in me but abyss staring, tonight.

sorry, p.

(so is it raining in your bedroom?)

i don't know.

the streets are rife with violence but it's no match for people's minds.

i don't know. i don't want to talk about it, but then i do. i try to write about something else, but it always works its way back around. written in from the side, from above, from below, from somewhere in between. always from somewhere in between. usually, at least. i don't know how to ask for what i want or what i want or how i want it. what do i want? probably to want something. that seems likely.

ideas for the iron pentacle sex altar:

fun factory layaspot, 2005 model (red)

rape kit*

sister's hospital tags from my nephew's delivery

frogs mutated by my hbc altered urine*

letters from ben

letters from not ben

lyric essay about sexual initiations completed in 2014, currently being read by a loved venue, problem being that i submitted it impulsively and am not actually sure that unleashing it on humanity is any kind of good idea, *sob* (but seriously, folks! what a fantastic analog for sexuality in my life!)

cowrie shell(s)

neruda-related

[blue lotus stamens (sold as curio only)]

'black rose,' black phoenix alchemy lab

spent cannabis*

dead butterflies

[every starved afternoon mss]

blindfold

temptress, dark muse

beat, bowery electric

....maybe i'll just put kaja up there

[untitled assemblage piece from 2009] (new pictures needed)

yab-yum statue

asst. [sundry], candles, ink, pornish, oils herbs rocks teeth and bones

*not technically in author's possession (probably for the best)

i am full of lies. biopsies will not occur until 12/22 because doctor's admin person, who is still my hero, no sore feelings, forgot to plug me into monday's schedule. it's fine, means monday i can sleep the sleep of the recovering intensive-goer.

time to pack.