MadameBastet-firing-neurons
Yesterday was Career Day
Or really "Dress- up Day"
Dress up like what you want to be
when you grow up
Sydney breezes by me "I'm a movie star!"
I will have to get your autograph I say
Dress-up day!
No one told me; I didn't get the memo
Dress up like what you want to be when you grow up
I would've come as a child again.
Another round of Super Star letters.
Dominique says "I have a stuffy nose."
I said, "I do too sweetie."
A moment later, she comes over and hands me
a Kleenex.
I am
truly
touched.
The simplest, tiniest act of giving from a sweet 5 year old
and it is like the sun shining after 1000 days of rain.
Natalie and Maia's ongoing feud erupts into new battles.
Each comes to me, each on a different side.
Maia: Natalie is always copying me!!
Natalie: Maia she is so mean to me! She made me cry three times yesterday!
Oh I have been down this dangerous road before;
it is a mine-field.
To Maia I say: "When Natalie copies you, do you know that means she likes you! She wants to be like you!"
To Natalie, who is much more fragile, sensitive, I draw her in, and she runs for
a hug.
"Natalie, Maia doesn't mean to make you cry. You girls can be friends right?"
Two little heads bobbing up and down.
Two minutes later at lunch, I'm certain the feud has begun anew.
Later, after lunch, more word bombs are launched across the table.
We are drawing beach scenes.
Jamie to Tanner, "Why are you wearing long pants and a long-sleeved shirt at the beach?"
Tanner's face falls. He snarls, "I'm not! You're just - just trying to be mean."
They start to gang up on Tanner. The words start to fly.
I can see the explosion coming. The tears start to form.
I stave it off. Tanner fumes, "It's a wetsuit."
"That's right! It's a green and black wetsuit!" I affirm this.
Now they've moved on to Griffin.
He's about to crumple his paper; he's been destroying his work a lot lately.
He doesn't like it. I feel the impending implosion.
"Griffin! No! Please, if you don't want it, can I have it? Can I take it home and put it on my fridge? I love it. It's fantastic. Really, I want it."
And suddenly, it has worth.
Tanner does not cry.
Griffin doesn't throw his work out.
I feel like
I've saved the free world.
And if you want to know why we go to war with one another
go to a school and spend a day or two
with a class of 5 year-olds
and human nature
and there is
your
answer.
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
MadameBastet-firing-neurons
MadameBastet-firing-neurons
The city is a dead paradise now.
All of the glamour once so prevalent here,
born of necessary illusions beneath golden poppy skies
and picture-perfect palms has turned to gore.
It is a place for the macabre now; a living, breathing horror show
of the dead, the dying and the desperate.
And yet, and yet...we are still fascinated by this concrete metropolis...
in the same way we are mesmerized by the slow-motion appeal
of a bloody traffic accident.
We observe the city in the same horrified yet detached manner we would
a mangled steel wreck - with a sense of shock and fear, disgust and terror.
We don't want anything at all to do with it and yet we feel compelled by some
great mysterious force to look at it, to live it, revel in it, worship it; indeed
we sacrifice ourselves to it...we sacrifice ourselves to the city's false Gods unwittingly on a daily basis
without ever realizing it.
We worship words, signs, figures, images, visions, illusions, ghosts, fairytales and unrealities. We worship and we believe.
We have become a city of seekers and searchers forever needing to fulfill the empty, vacant, black hole that is us.
We do not discriminate. We will fill these voids with whatever we find, with
whatever this neon nightmare has to offer us.
We hide in our stucco houses in the hills and cross empty streets in the valleys,
our eyes to the ground, raw and aching, leaving a trail of pathetic need and desire wherever we go.
Once upon a time, this city promised us something.
We can't quite remember what now, but we know that it promised us
something wild and wonderful, big and bright...something that would be all ours...something that would make us SOMEBODY in a wasteland full of nobodies.
It was the promise whispered in the palms in the warm dusk of the Santa Anas;
in the promise found in the glinting white-capped lapis lazuli seas,
It was the promise of cocktail party voices and laughter echoing down the canyons...the promise of happily ever after, of incandescent swimming pools and glittering valley nights.
These were the promises that brought us here, away from nowhere...the no man's land we existed in before...away from the dull greenish glow of cheap TV's glowing through screen doors....away from tin box heavens we wasted away in for so long.
And yet, and yet.
We are beginning to suspect. We are beginning to suspect that the city lied to us; played with our oh-so-delicate senses and sensibilities as it so loves to do.
We're beginning to walk the star-crossed streets less, and huddle in our beds more, listening to the pre-dawn traffic, and wondering.
We're beginning to wonder if somehow, somewhere, we took the wrong path down the infamous yellow brick road, despite the directions being so very, very clear...despite the golden stars leading the way...despite the signs, the lights in the hills, the whispers in the winds.
Our senses have been slowly and silently crushed into a pulp of complete senselessness; indeed, sensory overload is simply a way of life in this hole - everyone knows that. Didn't we get the memo?
Come on...you used to bleed with the stiffs on the eleven o'clock news -
now you wait impatiently for hockey scores and Lotto numbers and joke about the Death and Dying report.
Everything screams and begs for your attention here and you are forced to give it away.
Blaring neon and fluorescent lights bore down on our skulls, blinding UV rays burn the vision straight from our corneas. Grinding metal on metal causes the blood to run ice cold from our ears.
The roar of engines, the screams for help, the wolves howling in the glittering hills at night; all the sounds have become the same...all the sounds have become The Noise, the collective drone of Hell.
Hypnotized...and yet we are still hypnotized by the great, grand illusion, by all that glimmers and glitters and glows silver and gold in the darkest, most depraved recesses of our minds.
We hope. We forever hope that what we are living is not a lie...THE lie.
But somewhere, where truth lives, if indeed it lives and breathes at all, we know it is all a lie.
We know we've been fooled; tricked again by our own sad, wanton desires, our basest, most pathetic needs.
We know that what we live for does not exist; it never has.
And yet we live for it anyway; because without the illusion we will have to come face to face with the reality: who we are, what we really do with our lives, what we cannot and will not ever do.
So we live out our days in silent, desperate hope and spent our nights in quiet fury...a rampant rage that threatens to break out of us like a grotesque alien and consume us whole.
And we have, in some small place inside of us, given up on the idea that the city is our friend. Our futile attempts to bargain with it, to appease its obscene appetites, to make a deal with it...have failed miserably and we know there is no future here but we have no where else to go. And it knows this.
We are as dead as this paradise.
And what we see at the end of each day....the warm, orange glow of the setting sun...the ice blue sea...the winding highways...the lights flickering down the soft curves of Sunset...the palms waving slowly in the summer breeze...what we see we know does not really exist here...except inside of us.
For all we see is a mere projection of what we once hoped to be true;
that we could go somewhere in this beautiful place
that we could be someone here
in Los Angeles.
The city is a dead paradise now.
All of the glamour once so prevalent here,
born of necessary illusions beneath golden poppy skies
and picture-perfect palms has turned to gore.
It is a place for the macabre now; a living, breathing horror show
of the dead, the dying and the desperate.
And yet, and yet...we are still fascinated by this concrete metropolis...
in the same way we are mesmerized by the slow-motion appeal
of a bloody traffic accident.
We observe the city in the same horrified yet detached manner we would
a mangled steel wreck - with a sense of shock and fear, disgust and terror.
We don't want anything at all to do with it and yet we feel compelled by some
great mysterious force to look at it, to live it, revel in it, worship it; indeed
we sacrifice ourselves to it...we sacrifice ourselves to the city's false Gods unwittingly on a daily basis
without ever realizing it.
We worship words, signs, figures, images, visions, illusions, ghosts, fairytales and unrealities. We worship and we believe.
We have become a city of seekers and searchers forever needing to fulfill the empty, vacant, black hole that is us.
We do not discriminate. We will fill these voids with whatever we find, with
whatever this neon nightmare has to offer us.
We hide in our stucco houses in the hills and cross empty streets in the valleys,
our eyes to the ground, raw and aching, leaving a trail of pathetic need and desire wherever we go.
Once upon a time, this city promised us something.
We can't quite remember what now, but we know that it promised us
something wild and wonderful, big and bright...something that would be all ours...something that would make us SOMEBODY in a wasteland full of nobodies.
It was the promise whispered in the palms in the warm dusk of the Santa Anas;
in the promise found in the glinting white-capped lapis lazuli seas,
It was the promise of cocktail party voices and laughter echoing down the canyons...the promise of happily ever after, of incandescent swimming pools and glittering valley nights.
These were the promises that brought us here, away from nowhere...the no man's land we existed in before...away from the dull greenish glow of cheap TV's glowing through screen doors....away from tin box heavens we wasted away in for so long.
And yet, and yet.
We are beginning to suspect. We are beginning to suspect that the city lied to us; played with our oh-so-delicate senses and sensibilities as it so loves to do.
We're beginning to walk the star-crossed streets less, and huddle in our beds more, listening to the pre-dawn traffic, and wondering.
We're beginning to wonder if somehow, somewhere, we took the wrong path down the infamous yellow brick road, despite the directions being so very, very clear...despite the golden stars leading the way...despite the signs, the lights in the hills, the whispers in the winds.
Our senses have been slowly and silently crushed into a pulp of complete senselessness; indeed, sensory overload is simply a way of life in this hole - everyone knows that. Didn't we get the memo?
Come on...you used to bleed with the stiffs on the eleven o'clock news -
now you wait impatiently for hockey scores and Lotto numbers and joke about the Death and Dying report.
Everything screams and begs for your attention here and you are forced to give it away.
Blaring neon and fluorescent lights bore down on our skulls, blinding UV rays burn the vision straight from our corneas. Grinding metal on metal causes the blood to run ice cold from our ears.
The roar of engines, the screams for help, the wolves howling in the glittering hills at night; all the sounds have become the same...all the sounds have become The Noise, the collective drone of Hell.
Hypnotized...and yet we are still hypnotized by the great, grand illusion, by all that glimmers and glitters and glows silver and gold in the darkest, most depraved recesses of our minds.
We hope. We forever hope that what we are living is not a lie...THE lie.
But somewhere, where truth lives, if indeed it lives and breathes at all, we know it is all a lie.
We know we've been fooled; tricked again by our own sad, wanton desires, our basest, most pathetic needs.
We know that what we live for does not exist; it never has.
And yet we live for it anyway; because without the illusion we will have to come face to face with the reality: who we are, what we really do with our lives, what we cannot and will not ever do.
So we live out our days in silent, desperate hope and spent our nights in quiet fury...a rampant rage that threatens to break out of us like a grotesque alien and consume us whole.
And we have, in some small place inside of us, given up on the idea that the city is our friend. Our futile attempts to bargain with it, to appease its obscene appetites, to make a deal with it...have failed miserably and we know there is no future here but we have no where else to go. And it knows this.
We are as dead as this paradise.
And what we see at the end of each day....the warm, orange glow of the setting sun...the ice blue sea...the winding highways...the lights flickering down the soft curves of Sunset...the palms waving slowly in the summer breeze...what we see we know does not really exist here...except inside of us.
For all we see is a mere projection of what we once hoped to be true;
that we could go somewhere in this beautiful place
that we could be someone here
in Los Angeles.
Sunday, May 07, 2006
MadameBastet-firing-neurons
MadameBastet-firing-neurons
Zoe sits atop her pillow
in her usual queenly pose
her furry head cocked to one side
as if to say
"Oh what a day it has been indeed!"
Today is Sunday
and the sun came out for the first time
in so so long
I can't even remember the last time I saw it
Which is good
because I was beginning to think
I might have to put my head
in the oven
and then I remembered
shit!
I have an electric oven
and a very, very small kitchen.
It was warm and sunny and I ate Swedish pancakes
for brunch
and wept for a man I did not know.
His name is Grant McLennan and all I ever knew was his music
and it is so heartbreakingly beautiful
it almost seems an insult to try and describe it.
He died in his sleep yesterday and of course I thought "Why?"
Because one doesn't normally die in one's sleep at 48.
And then I thought why does it matter why?
Why do I need to know why?
He is gone, gone, gone
Forever gone!
And all the answers in the bloody universe won't bring him back again.
I, of all people, should know that game by now.
Zoe ate baby food for dinner.
42 people died in Iraq today.
I could not buy any cough syrup at the market
because the market does not sell it anymore.
Why? Because the fucking meth addicts kept coming in
and buying it to cook it up in their labs.
They don't keep it behind the counter -
they just don't even order it anymore.
So I coughed and bitched and cursed those
with trashier demons than mine.
So I'll cough I'll cry I'll survive
and go watch The Sopranos.
I'll miss a man I never knew
while Christupha shoots the works
beneath a full moon.
Man do I hate Christupha.
What a mook.
Zoe sits atop her pillow
in her usual queenly pose
her furry head cocked to one side
as if to say
"Oh what a day it has been indeed!"
Today is Sunday
and the sun came out for the first time
in so so long
I can't even remember the last time I saw it
Which is good
because I was beginning to think
I might have to put my head
in the oven
and then I remembered
shit!
I have an electric oven
and a very, very small kitchen.
It was warm and sunny and I ate Swedish pancakes
for brunch
and wept for a man I did not know.
His name is Grant McLennan and all I ever knew was his music
and it is so heartbreakingly beautiful
it almost seems an insult to try and describe it.
He died in his sleep yesterday and of course I thought "Why?"
Because one doesn't normally die in one's sleep at 48.
And then I thought why does it matter why?
Why do I need to know why?
He is gone, gone, gone
Forever gone!
And all the answers in the bloody universe won't bring him back again.
I, of all people, should know that game by now.
Zoe ate baby food for dinner.
42 people died in Iraq today.
I could not buy any cough syrup at the market
because the market does not sell it anymore.
Why? Because the fucking meth addicts kept coming in
and buying it to cook it up in their labs.
They don't keep it behind the counter -
they just don't even order it anymore.
So I coughed and bitched and cursed those
with trashier demons than mine.
So I'll cough I'll cry I'll survive
and go watch The Sopranos.
I'll miss a man I never knew
while Christupha shoots the works
beneath a full moon.
Man do I hate Christupha.
What a mook.
MadameBastet-firing-neurons
MadameBastet-firing-neurons
There is a darkness
only I can see in
and all those who are lost to me
are not even gone.
There is not one still body
left without breath;
nor an absence of life
which I can truly call death.
But the losses are all the same
and a death is a death by any name.
There is a darkness
that reveals itself to me
not in seconds or minutes or hours
but in some strange eternity.
And voices I used to know and call friends
have faded far away into the event horizon;
And reasons for living and dying begin to blend
and there is no choice I can truly defend.
There is a darkness
only I can see in
and all those who are lost to me
are not even gone.
There is not one still body
left without breath;
nor the absence of life
I can truly call death.
But the losses are all the same
And a death is a death by any name.
There is a darkness
only I can see in
and all those who are lost to me
are not even gone.
There is not one still body
left without breath;
nor an absence of life
which I can truly call death.
But the losses are all the same
and a death is a death by any name.
There is a darkness
that reveals itself to me
not in seconds or minutes or hours
but in some strange eternity.
And voices I used to know and call friends
have faded far away into the event horizon;
And reasons for living and dying begin to blend
and there is no choice I can truly defend.
There is a darkness
only I can see in
and all those who are lost to me
are not even gone.
There is not one still body
left without breath;
nor the absence of life
I can truly call death.
But the losses are all the same
And a death is a death by any name.
MadameBastet-firing-neurons
MadameBastet-firing-neurons
What if they said this is all a dream
and you could not be labeled a failure or a success
a tragedy or a triumph
there would be no saviour nor salvation
and there would be no cross to bear?
What if this was just a fantasy
and all the nightmares were just that
and you could wake up any time you wanted
and have all you ever wanted
come back?
I do not think of you very often you see
in your home away from home
in that grave in the cemetary
in fact I rarely come to see you anymore
(Have you noticed?)
I'm too busy keeping my head above water
in this place above ground
I gave you my penance years ago
a half decade of obsessing
where did he go?
What's behind curtain #1, #2, #3
I did everything but call a Seance
to bring you back to me.
Now you have to understand
You chose to leave
Fact or fiction
Random chance or destiny tried and true
I cannot ever from this crazy place
get back to you.
So what if this were indeed a dream
and nothing really mattered
Like your decision one meaningless night
to pull rank
pull the trigger
leave body, blood, bone
and family
shattered?
What if they said this was all a dream
and there was no tragedy here?
Triumph was futile
and there was no cross to bear
and you never existed
and I never cared.
What if they said this is all a dream
and you could not be labeled a failure or a success
a tragedy or a triumph
there would be no saviour nor salvation
and there would be no cross to bear?
What if this was just a fantasy
and all the nightmares were just that
and you could wake up any time you wanted
and have all you ever wanted
come back?
I do not think of you very often you see
in your home away from home
in that grave in the cemetary
in fact I rarely come to see you anymore
(Have you noticed?)
I'm too busy keeping my head above water
in this place above ground
I gave you my penance years ago
a half decade of obsessing
where did he go?
What's behind curtain #1, #2, #3
I did everything but call a Seance
to bring you back to me.
Now you have to understand
You chose to leave
Fact or fiction
Random chance or destiny tried and true
I cannot ever from this crazy place
get back to you.
So what if this were indeed a dream
and nothing really mattered
Like your decision one meaningless night
to pull rank
pull the trigger
leave body, blood, bone
and family
shattered?
What if they said this was all a dream
and there was no tragedy here?
Triumph was futile
and there was no cross to bear
and you never existed
and I never cared.
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