eggplant

This time, it was in the city. We had our badman clothes and our guns pointed up and out. We made it to the big metal trailer where everyone was - the klieg lights came on and everybody was running around, and John pointed his gun at the man's head or maybe at mine. I don't remember. Then the kids mobbed John because they don't have their own guns, and John came back when it was light with a face full of cigarette burns and no bullets left (but he only had one anyway, and we all know who he used it on). We got worried because our guns were empty, so we walked around a little until we found the police. We walked straight by them - they didn't say anything or look. We each picked up a long half-cylinder filled with fresh-hewn granite bullets, rough and glittering. I had to make sure the police didn't see what we'd taken, so I made sure everyone turned the bullets to face their bellies. We went through the rest of the city like this: marching back with wary eyes and belly-shields. Your mom told stories to comfort us on the way, and we all laughed, but at the last crosswalk the cars were too fast and we lost her on the other side. We went on; it was dark by then, so we put our spoils down in the side yard of a house and decided to crawl across the tops of the hedges. Someone played a song, or sang, but I'd never heard the song before. I stopped near the end of the hedges and went back to check on our bullets. Of course, they were eggplants now. I marveled at this simple fact of nature just as the sun rose and turned the houses green and gold. Read More...

old notebook

8/12/06

"I had a dream that a young woman was to be reunited with her son. She knew who he was, but he didn't know her. She was afraid to tell him. It wasn't the right time, so she watched him, drank him in. Tried to live a life already past. It made her happy to know that he was good, and a little secretive/excited because he was oblivious to her presence. It never occured to her that he might deny her. She only had this complacency, this contentedness. Those few moments will never come again."


I remember that she was watching him in a park, talking with his friends. I still wonder if I was the woman in the dream, or I was watching the watcher.

I've also been unstuck, physically, lately. It's gotten advanced enough that I can tell when my mind is going to skip to a place - I can anticipate it now, and I can figure out where I'm going before I get there. It's not always someplace I've been to before. Read More...

unfamiliar place

Since I was a child, certain things have awakened certain memories in me. One particularly strange one is the feeling of hot water on my face - for some reason, it brings to mind images of the houses I've lived in, of nondescript nights that I really have no reason to remember. These memories are always quite vivid, often including odd details that strike me as highly quotidian and insignificant - a TV show that's no longer running, the color of the tile in my dead grandparents' bathroom, and so on. Now, those occurances, by themselves, aren't that weird. What really unsettles me is when something causes a memory to rise and I realize that the memory never happened.

I remember playing with a little train-shaped keychain my grandfather had. It made train noises when you pressed a button on it - whistling, chugging, whatever other sounds trains make. I also remember that it evoked an black-and-white image of a train coming out of a tunnel. After this, the memory's "camera", so to speak, would move onto to a little townhouse next to the train where the lighting was vaguely pre-electric and dim and the wallpaper was a faded calico pattern. Needless to say, I have no recollection of ever seeing this image outside of my mind. 

There are a lot of other occurances like this one, but I think that's the first I remember happening. I've never heard anyone else mention it happening to them, but it doesn't really cause me harm or cross my synapses or anything, so I'm prepared to let it slide by as weird quirk of the brain.

And no, I didn't read "Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge" until a couple years ago, so there's that.

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Anyway, you know who I miss? Cibo Matto. Fuck. I was going over why they were so good in my mind earlier, and I couldn't come to any conclusions. Anybody who's got their shit together musically does the sort of fusion that they did back in the day, and there's no shortage of weird Japanese bands out there now. I think, though, that no one has replicated the strangely ominous edge those two had in their songs. Viva La Woman's lyrics were all about food, but some of the songs were fucking scary. It was like you were being taken on a trip you reluctantly decided to go on, and the stuff that you're seeing now is so vibrant and jumbled that you can't completely process everything and your sense of reality begins to blur. 

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