[bland]

untitled by eriver


___so he decided to write about the things he knew about. _but there were less of them. many less. cardboard boxes. things with four corners and straight lines and rooms with harmless air-conditioning.

so he decided to write about things he knew nothing about. _but there were too many of those. everything in the boxes, and bordered by the lines, things entrapped on one side of the line or the other, and the question(s) of whether the line ever ends and if it does, what happens at its tail-end :: none of which really matters. (it doesn't).

sometimes you feel nothing. and that's fine. writing about 'nothing' is pretty hard. 'nothing' is actually a pretty amazing place to be, such vastness - caverns of emptiness - think an anti-ocean, the whole volume of an ocean but worth of emptiness and silence. it's not easy to express. sometimes you feel allamazingeverything at once. that's crazy ADD writing right there. you just go nuts, start at one end and run like a madman till you drop.

but then there's sometimes you feel... beige. missionary position. 4/4. generic questions HR always wants you to fill out with catchphrases like 'leadership' and 'enthusiasm'. when it gets like that there's just nothing to say. there's no poetry to such blandness. none none none. and that's what makes it hard to write.

i need sex with strangers or rooftop sunrises or children with little red shoes who tell me stories or middle of nowhere car accidents or just accidents or _t_h_i_n_g_s_ freaking-some-any-please--goddamn thing to happen to give me a heart attack small enough to remind me i'm alive and there's enough amazingness worth dying for to bother.

there used to be a bottled-up feeling i'd get. i would let it build up, and just let it sit and sort itself out into thoughts and images. then i write it out. it would come out more-or-less how it had planned itself to be and that'd be that. an exhalation. very nice. __but it hasn't been around in a long while. no bottled up feeling. maybe i'm not alone enough. i don't know how people manage marriage. someone around, all the time, around around around. just moving and speaking and even when they're not moving or speaking you can hear their noise and you know they're there. causes shifts in the weight of air i think. temperature changes. two noises and it's a whole different universe. alone is it's own universe. it won't share, it's selfish as all everything. it's an endangered species, everywhere i go there are its enemies trying to capture it. and of course it's like a rainbow when you have it in your hands it's gone. poof! and gone. maybe you hold a butterfly coloured roughly the same way, but that's not what you were after. 3 million butterflies maybe. arranged in the right way. pin-pointed in just the right spot(s) and from the correct angle it'll look like a rainbow. ___just maybe though.

dear god why am i bored? i dont' 'do' boredom. i don't get bored i have too much to read. but i am bored. tired and stifled and not really sure what to change because my usual practice is to change... well... everything. you. even new eyes.

i'll go the gym again. and get a girlfriend with blue hair who uses the C-word alot and then recites Montaigne. buy stuff. not sure what. an ipod? is that right?, is that a good place to start? and i'll stop going to classes and instead sit and read Just and Unjust Wars by Michael Waltzer (which is pretty much the only thing i feel like doing right now). oh: and be a sailor. that would be fun. the piano is annoying me because i've been playing annoying music. so ignore that. take up the accordion instead.

all of the above.

kick some blood back into the stone.

Q looks for a job

Mallesons Stephen Jaques (commercial law) <-- boo.

International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia <-- yay!

Clayton Utz (commercial law... a bit of energy) <-- boo

Special Tribunal for Lebanon <-- yay!

Minter Ellison (commercial law... oh, add corporate to all the above) <-- boo

Special Court of Sierra Leone <-- yay!


conclusions of study?

i'm a hippie. fml.

thoughts (fragments)

strange lifeforms by luis dechtiar


the day actually starts at 12:01. not when i wake up , not when it's light out.

[he looks at the time 12:57am] , an hour already it's been newness.
[he smiles and licks his lips] , new new new 'how beautiful' he thinks.

and newness makes him happy at 12:59am monday morning. a new darkness. there's less to worry about this new darkness. it's not the end of something. not the middle. we're not stuck in it. left alone with it on our hands like the old car that doesn't start in the garage. it's the start of it. the A of the alphabet. a whole 25 more to go. the whole periodic table before us.


*___*___*

so he does nothing. swims in it. eats mini muffins and takes a minute at the end to pick up crumbs and eat them too so his fingers are a little oily.

sshhh. don't speak she says. he says nothing with a smile. and she smiles back. he picks up another crumb , asks if she wants yogurt. she shakes her head reminds him i don't eat yogurt. she almost adds remember? at the end but realises he probably doesn't. maybe he does. who knows.

he gets a text on his phone: send thingee in today.
he responds: GF-secretary service, exceptional. please renew subscription another yr. direct debit.

later they dance. in one dream or some other - every whichwaythere is always someone dancing. always? she wants to know._ a l w a y s_ he says definitely.
and the music always plays.
and bodies are always warm.
and lips are never far when you need them,
and hands grow like trees and when you are sad one's not far away
and we grow up to be cherry pies and dandelions and piano melodies ,
and we die like our perfect sleep : an island floating on our own most memorable laughs and the smiles of daughters and highschool boyfriends and ivy dangling

and that's why we're dancing he says loudly , shouting it as he gets out the shower , comes running out naked and laughing , leaving a slippery wet streak behind him like a snail ; she's startled and laughs ppeeenis! and they both laugh (and take out their notebooks and jot down the date and time to remember it for ever and never) what a gift, i thought it might be valentines day she says.


*___*___*

i am old enough now to feel it.

it's lovely.

i once wrote a story about a boy who inhaled the nightsky.

i am old enough now to feel it.


*___*___*

i've been listening to, and love very much..., a LIST:

(1) ::M∆DE::IN::HEIGHTS:: __(you need this)

(2) Shostakovich, string quartet No. 15 in e-flat minor

(regarding the opening elegy Shostakovich told the Beethoven Quartet, before they premiered the work to play it: so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience start leaving the hall from sheer boredom; of course that's impossible. instead it inhabits the air. takes over your room like four separate ghosts, sitting on the side of your bed and behind your desk, and your lounge chair and one on the couch besides you, sitting patiently, and seconds turn into leaves and fall drop out the sky and dry up)

(3) The Invisible Insurrection by Desolate

(4) The King of Limbs by Radiohead

(5) Dark Storm EP by the Jezebels

(6) Ravedeath, 1972 by Tim Hecker

fuzzy love, fuzzy time, fuzzy how it all works or tries to and changes merges grows or jammed and hated is pushed from one to the next discontinuous discontiguous ...


*___*___*

he wakes up sweaty. not remembering anything.

and hungry.

he hopes he dreamt of being underwater. walking along the bottom. everything was blue. it sounded like a pipe organ. everything was slow so he had time to remember it. and it was slow so he had time to let his body feel it. and it was dark. and silent. and still. and those are things he loves and tries to fit into his bag wherever he goes ; and failing 9 times out of every 8, he wants to dream stillness into being. get home from work and walk to the closet and get it out like a jacket and put it on. and then it is slow. and wear it to sleep so he dreams slow. and not take it off when he makes love so he dies slow.

eats cake for breakfast. with tea. and reads the new york times on his iphone and scratches his head trying to play a move on scrabble. gives up on all three and walks to the glass and looks out over the lake to assess the coming sunlight. he remembers the day started four hours ago. has been sitting waiting for him. excited like a puppy. ___he finishes his tea, puts the rest in the sink, and decides to dream a little more of aquatic pipe organs.

Walking In Los Angeles by Kate Micucci

notpoems

i.
when i wake up i cannot move.
i try stretching, playing my piano, religion;
fantasies about braiding black hair,
about adopting a mountain range, counting
all the things i've lost and found.
so i sit on my couch.
stare out the window, watch it rain in summer.


ii.
donuts. frozen drinks that you slurp till your brain hurts.
chocolate bars. my blood thick and heavier from the sugar.
(muffins the size of baby's heads and cupcakes dainty and
gorgeous as Marie Antoinette) so thick it can't be pumped,
i'm cut and bleed in gelatinous raspberries. emerald and
candied geraniums. i smile and put it to my lips.

do you need gas? she asks as i pull in and stop the car
nono, craving cookies. (yumyumyum)


iii.
it's nothing, it's a hole in my middle name.

i am a ghost ; to many people, i am a foreign long-distance oh-yeah-remember-him? name.
former once-upon-a-time girlfriends who might from time to time remember my hands on
their waists and feet they'd never let me kiss. former how's-about-a-time roommates who i slummed with and ate $5 noodles sitting on the side of the road at 2am

it is weird to not exist to so many people.

i am introduced to her. i say hello, she asks to hear my name again, i say: for your whole life you'll remember a sunday afternoon when i watched from the hallway you come out the shower and put on your underwear. and the window was half open so the milk grey sad rained on dream of afternoon infected our lives forever more and you turned and saw me and picked up your lotion and and held it out to me. ___she asks about my name again, but i've already told her all she'll ever remember.


iv.
you should be standing on your own two feet by now.
that sounds lonely. __standing on just two feet. __i think i prefer to stand huddled together,
standing on the backs and shoulders and feet of people who love me.

(and when i walk i hear a small army every step i take)

3 petit pieces : a response to MB

allison in london 2011 by lina scheynius



i. the furies

it got noisy. sometime post-youth this was. felt like wind, someone had left a window open in my head and the buzz of it ... couldn't hear a damn thing. so i sat in quiet spaces and listened to it, like deciphering the rain (which is also possible with enough time and skills in cartography). they were murmurs. little snippets of voices. ostinato words that i didn't quite, couldn't quite want to make out. home home home. that's an example. words that had no meaning. the ghosts of words. memories i wasn't ready to dispense with. phantoms of myself. buzzing and humming.
___and just like that it'd all be silent again. smile-worthily silent.

and just like that (again), i'd hear it. distant at first. Sartre's flies. a hum. micro-conversations i've had/hadn't had/couldn't have/didn't want to have/wouldn't have had if i'd known/didn't know not to have had/ bleeps and blurps and mixed up with images of skinny girls' wrists and single high heels on my floor i'd kick on my way to the bathroom in the dark at night ; houses i'd lived in, rooms with no windows, Haifa's geraniums, yellow couches we kissed on, the whiteness of breasts in the moonlight, like bones or clouds made of dead gossamer ... and all the words it takes to say those things scrambled and mashed, here it comes now, like waves waves waves upon a shore, or knowing you're about to fall down some stairs .:: the buzz grows , fractal geometries ..::: closer now ;: dispense with formalities, when it hits i'll sink into a corner and stare off into nothing like a junkie or a tulip in a coma till


___and just like that it'd all be silent again. smile-worthily silent.

(these are not the kind you see. except to see them coming)


ii. by the river i sat down and wept

he hands me an empty bottle and asks me to comment, i tell him i cannot, which does not please him. but the party rages on. all around me. youth, or some similar tragedy with a rhyming nickname. and i follow my shoes around and try not to notice all the things i notice which make me feel a gajillion miles away in another galaxy somewhere where all of this makes as little sense to everyone as it does to me.
a girl approaches me, a little tipsy and fingernails painted what colour are your nails?
- that's a lame question to start off with.
- that's a shame, i was hoping you'd say 'tangerine dream'.
- what?
- your nails. 'tangerine dream'. or maybe 'psychedelic ruby'.
- that might work, psychedelic ruby.
- you're a psychedelic ruby.
- you're weird.
- better that than the alternative.
- which is what?
- unsmoochable.
- are you hitting on me? why do i feel like you're hitting on me?
- i want to smooch you, and then ask you questions.
- why not ask first?
- if you give unsatisfactory answers then your smoochfulness may vanish

(after i get lost between the magic of her long neck and red hair and her breathy alcohol breath that rises and falls here and there ; people walk past us, and i'm a little sweaty and i'm uncomfortable with my pants still on with the sudden lack of space in my pants - so i pull off, and say hey space cadet, she looks up waiting for the next question ... are you happy?
(these being words that have made her sad) (which i don't understand because this is the germ cell of every question anyeveryone's ever asked anysomeone else. if not that then what else? by now she's repacked herself into herself and gone to blahblahblah.
my sweat subsides and i can move in my pants again. my shoes move and i follow, and about a zillion miles away the true me is sitting reading something interesting in the quiet and i am saved from myself and all this.
___hey q, you leaving? i'm asked by the front door; but how can i comment on that effectively? empty and empty i respond ; which makes no sense to him, but which means quite simply: but i was never here.


iii. run. rabbit.

having stated the facts in clear chronological order, i suspected i would receive suitable advice. but he just sat there and stared at me. i indicated that the future is wordless by not saying anything. but representing it in silence. i stared back in other words. (and in other words i stare back all the time.) (that's what i do when i write. stare back. summon forth to me little damsels i have saved in the cozy bits of 2002 for my own personal remembrance)

the stage is set, but if it rains the whole thing will be wasted. i see a mime with a white painted face and he walks up to me and says if it rains we're all f&cked back to new caledonia. i ask him if there's not some way around it , couldn't you just pretend it wasn't raining? and he tells me he'll think it over in the restroom. ___(a few minutes later he returns). ___no he says. ___the performance is slipping up he says. i'm not sure what he means. he could very well mean the performance is the act of slipping up. he sees i'm evaluating the two options. he indicates he meant the whole thing, the whole show, the spectacle of the scaffold he says (by which i imagine he meant Friday 3:04am when i write this) is coming apart. he continues:

at the limbs is where you can see it most. severance. time starts to drift off. space (you get fearful of large spaces for a while. other times, the closet is suddenly not good enough. and age is age, and you bounce from birthday to birthday and realise somewhere between 26 and 28 you lost another hub cap and your mom calls everyday to see if you've found a job yet and you pop your pills like breath freshners and paint your happy face and walk out into monday mornings and thursday afternoons and eat burgers and sweet talk sweet looking girls into going to the movies with you and sooner or later you just realise being what the everyones are calling 'well' is a freaking mountain obstacle mission impossible to climb).

he'd keep on going but then we hear a deep rumble. thunder. well then he says, at last the time has come. sooner or later, the sky was always going to fall. i'm not sure if i agree with him on this point but he cuts off my thoughts :: heed well my advice young man. what follows is another round on the merry-go-round. you know where you are, you know the rest, you know all of everything. i disagree with this too, and i say but i know nothing.

he's walked away. he's moving briskly so he's far along already. he turns his head over his shoulder and shouts back: fine, try that one out then.

i'm not sure if i'd gone out looking for advice. but as it starts to rain, i'm pleased not to feel to cold about it all.