Caliber

I'm coming on a caliber year.

My friend Tom coined the term "caliber year" year. A caliber is the width of the internal diameter of a gun barrel (in inches). Guns are generally designed in a limited number of measures. I can't recite them all off the top of my head but some are: .22, .36, .38, .40, .44 and .50. So when your age is .22, .40, etc., it is a claiber year.

I used to own a .22 rifle as a bonus in a housing move but the cops took it away because it wasn't registered. Too bad, because that house was about a mile via three turns off the gravel road and sometimes coyotes and cougars would do battle around the house in the middle of the night. So I would walk out of the house, shoot the .22 across the corn or soy field, depending on the year. The field was about 20 acres, which was key since .22s have a long range & I didn't want to hurt anyone -- just run off the coyotes and cougars.

Anyway, back to the caliber years -- my .38 SUCKED. No ability to hit a target steadily unless that target moved. I hope my .40 has better aim -- it's less than 6 months away. I'd better start practicing.

Evil Diva, Banshee Bitch

Evil Diva

This is me

When I flash my tongue, silver

Razor, sing my blood

My gunfire cracks

Through the canyon

Yes, my throat

I am that bitch in sequins and

I am the naked warrior

I lead the battle with my shrill

Sing death home

Home and howl, keen

Through the night

Through the canteen

And whiskey spews through my nose

And love from my lungs and

Wicked, wicked lies

The green in my eyes

The gold and brown

The earth in the shadows

My hips in the sway

In the mist, my lips

Sing you home

Sing you home

Sing you

Wave-particle Duality

The landlord painted the backyard sewer cap and all of the stray cats are rolling on the fresh white coat and getting high. I'm trying to get the drunky ladies out for end-of-the-work-week Friday cocktails and they sound like the temperance league. My nephew is fevered, my dad is tubed and my son is steadfastly working his way into the 1%. I'm getting unspecific orders via text, PJ Harvey is coming through me and I'm skimming the quantum theory of mechanics on the internet for shiggles.

Seasonal shifts bring out the strange.

Photo by Ted Nelson

Purify

I am not neat by nature.

Growing up, my mother instituted "Saturday Chores" for my sisters and me. We had to clean our bedrooms and then were each given a scouring assignment: front room, kitchen/ tv room, or bathroom. Kitchen/ family room was the worst. You had to clean the stove, fridge and scour the counter tops. You had to pick up and put away all of the flotsam and jetsam from tvland and scrub the floors. The floors were tough because you needed to accomodate the kitchen floor linoleum and all of its grime then dump your water and work the wooden parquet. Our house was pretty small but ma did a good job embodying every type of housing wing in about 1000 square feet.

The bathroom was grungy but easy. Swipe up the mirrors, scrub down the sink and then the toilet. Change the litter box. Scrub the small floor, then scour the tuband shower walls. Strip down and take your shower while rinsing away all the scrubbing bubbles. Hop out, dry off, throw on your sweats and mop your way out the door.

The living room and hallway assignment was the longest process but the most soothing. The walls were an astonishing bright green and the wall-to-wall carpet the color of the forest. You had to oil all of the colonial wooden furniture and shelves, remove and dust all of the books and knick-knacks and then vacuum the carpets and cloth on the furniture. You also had to vacuum under the furniture -- no cheating! Strangely, cleaning the living room always made me feel kind of Zen.

The motivating beat for Saturday Chores was ma's vinyl. She had splurged on the entire Beatles Apple Collection. Also, there was Steve Goodman, the "Three Legged Man" and Billy Joel. (Trust me, if I never hear "For the Longest Time" again, it still won't be long enough.) I enjoyed dancing & dusting to The Last Waltz by the Band. But nothing beat cleaning to Jesus Christ Superstar.

And now for confession number one. I can sing the entire original Broadway soundtrack note-by-note and word-by-word from the Overture through John Nineteen Forty-One. I once won two tickets to a performance at the Chicago Theater on Johnny B's morning show by calling in and singing a medley from the score. Through the years, I definitely have had some strange wins and losses.

And my losses and my nature have led me to the juice of confession number two. My apartment is a horrible, disgusting dastardly wreck. It looks like it was hit by a dust storm, followed by a mental monsoon and sealed with a hiccuping hurricane. And when you add my nature + earning a master's + a ridiculously menacing cerebral blow, you get Disaster Land.

So today, I put on Jesus Christ Superstar and sang it word-for-word while scrubbing the grease stains and soot out of my kitchen. Mostly. I still have to scour the floor. Damned Saturday Chores perfectionist upbringing.

(Image is "Purify" by Rachel Combs-Gullick.)

Witching Hour

I am not a nice girl. I am not a sweet woman. The clock just struck truth and madness. I started this mermaid symbology to tap into my inner beauty but my inner beauty is dark and strange. On Saturday I was toted in a bicycle chariot up California Avenue by a potion brewing warrior. We kissed in the shadows and now I finally release my inner mother nature. This year, boys and girls, mother nature is tsunamis and tornados. She is moonstruck coyotes clamoring at the cataclysm. She laps up chaos and laughs at your dismantled structures. This siren sings sailors from their personal bondage and throws mona lisa smirks from her island.

Swim, bitches, swim.

(Credits to Dean and Diamanda Galas for inspiring this train of madness. Also to Tray Mead for the image.)

These Theses

I'm trying to concentrate and create my thesis paper, so suddenly every other thing in the world is interesting and intersecting. Which would almost sound raunchy if it wasn't so dull.

My thesis is on cravings. Does treatment with such-and-such device reduce cravings? Unfortunately, the people being rated are already lacking cravings in life which is why they are seeking this treatment in the first place. This muddles the data.

Muddles... data... It's all gone uncertainly Heisenberg on me. It doesn't matter, I guess. I just have to do a remotely comprehensive presentation and then turn in one stack of paper so they'll hand me a stamped one.

Hey, I almost sound like pre-June 2010 Jen, again. I think I'll have to add a picture of a topless mermaid, now. Then we'll all feel better.

I'll work on flowing sentence structure after my thesis.

"Haunted...

...of your precious love. Of your precious love."


I noticed today that I posted on St. Patrick's Day in 2010, 2008, and 2007.
I don't have much to add today. The world has gone mad & will get worse with the current struggles in Japan, Libya, Wisconsin & Egypt. According to the end of the Mayan Calendar, we may be done in on December 21, 2012.

We all have the true Luck of the Irish. So "may the road rise to meet you and may the wind be always at your back."

"Don't ask, tell...

...I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell."
-- Charles Bukowski

I don't have the tolerance to swallow the bullshit anymore. I am terrified of the whole I have been breathing through for seven years. I am a pussy. But I endure. I get up and I go to work and I bust my brains and my boss says I am not up to this work anymore because my short term memory is scarred. I am a pussy. My exboyfriend called me a pussy once. I told him pussy was tougher than cock. He said yes. Pussy is like good tires. It stretches and flexibly spreads around the road's barriers. Pussy is the toughest mover and shaker. I am a pussy.

I am not me. I lost myself nine months? seven years ago? I am waiting for my map.

I probably drank too much tonight. Right now, I perceive a level of vision that lets me see through the trauma drama bullshit that I am supposed to live up to... that I could never live up to. Tomorrow I will face my come-uppance when I am pointed out as incapable of fulfilling my occupational requirements. I fulfilled them yesterday and I was still called a failure and they were never my calling or destiny in the first place.

I am going to hell. Thank god, I don't believe in it.

This is not where I belong. I haven't walked the road home in twenty years. Actually, I don't even remember what my house looks like. What home is. I do see my sisters of mercy on the road and I don't want to leave them. I don't want to disappoint them. And I can't find my way back home.

There's no place like home.

Suck it up, bitch. Quit being such a pussy. Go to hell. I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.

"Look at the people. Watch them pass but don't follow them..."

I hate myself right now. I feel like Bukowski only I can't drink, so I'm unable to write poetry or get seduced by multiple women in their twenties even though I am bulging and aging, too.

Why can't I write poetry because I'm not drinking? My friend (and ex-lover or whatever) is a performance poet. He told me he quit drinking for six months once and he couldn't write even one poem. Then he said, Screw sobriety. This is pointless! And I think I agree with him.

What is the point of following all of the ragged rules of boredom and convention? I quit bartending and now I file endless reams of paperwork. Also, I have all of these stupid health problems, I weigh oodles more, I'm constantly fighting with my natural sleep cycle and I'm not getting lotsa loving. Everyone wants to fool around with the bartender/poet but nobody wants to bother with the fucking Program Coordinator. Another friend (and ex-lover or whatever) is a farmer and says this is Mother Nature messing with me so either I learn precise organization (whether or not I value it) or else I'll drown in the next flood or get strangled by red tape.

When I used to be a young hippie punk mama only using herbal remedies, I was raising my son on bar tips and spending our free time mountain climbing or soaking in the springs. Now I'm a paper file organizer, an excel budget designer, a weight gainer, decreasing in health and memory but caring for people with severe anal missle retentions and more importantly, those suffering from hearing the voices and oddly linked thoughts which doctors try to treat with pharmaceuticals. And our studies are being funded by the pharma companies, of course.

Way back in the day (1000 years ago) people like our patients might have been respected as the shaman of the tribe and although they might live in solitude a mile away from the rest of their people and although their predictions may or may not have been true, at least they valued and trusted themselves and were respected by the tribe.

The prediction of a very cold winter or the tribe needing to do battle with another living down the river may have been heard from the schizophrenic shaman's internal voices or sensed by her paranoia or perhaps even connected with her delusion. Maybe it wasn't a truly divine enlightened prediction as much as a statement of the perpetually obvious in a tone that was cryptic. Or maybe this type of future descriptive insight and understanding is brought on by a perfectly proportional brain?

Maybe enlightenment and psychosis are relational. The words psychotic and psychic are separated with nothing more than an O and T. Separated by nothing more than respecting the differences as opposed to prosecuting them or infiltrating them with chemicals (like when I drink after a bad day at work or an old man swallows viagra or those few people who are still employed take Ritalin or Concerta each morning to make it through the day).

Or maybe I just don't know what to do with myself.

(P.S., I found the picture in this post at a site called My Health Guardian.)

(P.P.S. The title is part of a line from a poem written by a lady I used to work with & for.)

Muscley Mama

I'm slowly getting better. My doctor is giving me steroid infusions for 3 hours a day, I'm starting to remember words and I'm going back to work on Thursday.

********************************

Do you think I'm sexier on steroids?

Ironically Craving

craving: an intense, urgent, or abnormal desire or longing

What I crave and what I do are not presently joined. I crave a long sleep on the warm grass but I sit at a desk and read articles about craving. I craft a grant about craving scales as they relate to addiction while I crave sunshine and birdsong and leisure but my arms are strapped with plastic tubes to the keyboard and so I crave as I create an explanation of craving.

I have officially drowned myself in the existentialist sewer.

"Every Day Is a Yellow Day...

... I'm blinded by the daisies in your yard."

-- Prince

Margaret, my psychic friend (or friend who is psychic), told me I'm all yellow bursting solar plexus, right now. I'm hiding out at home with a low-grade fever and sore throat and can feel my flesh burn, chill and hum and letting dreamland envelope and possess me on my couch all day, again and again.

Once upon a time, I was a psychic friend. Sad and freaked out people would call the 900 line and they would get to talk to Mia (one of my AKAs) and she would tell them yes, of course, the cards and the stars and my guides say yes, you will be loved again. That's what most callers wanted to know.

Then, I moved to New Mexico because it was new, said so in the name. I used to do romantic things like move across the country to a place with a poetic name and get paid to be a charlatan with an AKA and sleep with strangers named Krishna I met at the river and believe the stars could guide me to my heart. (Now, I'm logical and practical although I still believe in dreamland and evidently my solar plexus has started bleeding yellow in the psychic plane.) Anyway, in New Mexico, I met Margaret an expat Scot who lived in a trailer in the foothills and owned a store called the Lyceum where she read playing cards. Really, she had you pick seven cards and she would hold them to her cancerous breast and recite all of the harder truths you knew but didn't feel like realizing and you could fit them into whichever context you felt you could hold in your palm without spilling them on the floor. Later, she cut off her right breast and started predicting with amazon precision via telephone which is how I learned to always bet on green and that today I am pouring yellow.

Illogical Evolving Equinox, Combat and the Saint Patrick's Day Blues

The equinox is almost here and my body is conspiring to get knocked up on me again, as it does every year when dark and day share nicely. Sharing perpetuates itself in its selfishness.

St. Patrick was a sharer in another way -- well, first he was a slave and then a priest and then an orator. He christianized the Irish (an act which may be blasphemous) but also convinced them to abolish slavery 1000 years before Columbus dug the Middle Passage. So that probably mitigates any personal gripes I might have with monotheism and organized religion. But still, Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular are such BDSM institutions like heroic (modern Western) medicine. This post pretty much seems to be about me opening the assault rifles on any institution I'm supposed to have surrendered to or am currently selfishly sharing with -- so you may want to look away quickly. And recently a friend of mine said it's always combat with me. That must suck, knowing me like that. My presence is never restful or soothing, unless you're an infant or going through a bout of psychosis. I can rock colicy babies to sleep on my knee and I can calm someone experiencing active psychosis. I could describe the steps I take in both of these cases, but it probably wouldn't make a logical pattern -- it's more like when your physics professor tries to teach you calculus or engaging your lover in combat. On second thought, it's nothing like that.

I don't like myself at all today and I'm also thinking one million pornographic thoughts. So maybe ego stroking and self-loathing are an expression of selfish sharing which is quite likely the driving procreational force in humanity.

During finger therapy all of the OTs cryptically discuss amongst themselves how snappy and cruel one surgeon can be. Personally, I find him to be very compassionate and kind of sexy. But I don't work for him, either. Of course today, a second-tier somebody else mentioned in a whisper that Dr. That Guy just really needs to get some. But once you start speculating about what someone else is getting, it might mean that you aren't getting enough either -- or maybe you just want to be the one to give it to them.

Doesn't everybody get turned on by cruelty at some really basic, reptile brain level? And truthfully, all of us guilt-ridden girls just get juiced-up love panties for doctors. We want to marry them and sue them and do what they tell us and then blow them in their exam rooms or maybe we just love surgeons in self-defense because there they are convincing us to let them pierce us to the bone even though it hurts and costs and scars. We let them tie us to the table and slice apart our skin and maybe knock us out and maybe keep us awake -- completely at their discretion and we never, ever question the choice, really. We just surrender.

But then we catholic girls are fed guilt and surrender on toast from baptism and we're told to die virgins like St. Maria Goretti or second best, surrender to the yoke of holy matrimony and pop out lotsa babies in 10 month intervals so there will be more catholics and consequently we have lots of weird sex & worthiness issues because the only ones really enjoying sex in our religion are the child-raping priests since only they can absolve sin which came to earth via Eve, etc.

Probably all of that crazy Catholic sex between Yahweh & Mary (not Joseph) and St. John Bosco & the oratory boys and even Adam & Eve actually happened on the Equinox which can never be a birthday but is often a conception date which is why the pope tells you life begins at conception but we girls know it doesn’t really count until it comes out like the sun, so really its solstice you’re waiting for, Holy Father, you just didn’t notice because of all of that blinding sunshine.

(The top image is a painting called Lady Doctor by John Woodwark. The Birth of the Sun King is by Hetty MacLise. I found it on her blog.)

"Science and Mother Nature are in a marriage where Science is always surprised to come home and find Mother Nature blowing the neighbor."

-- Justin's Dad, from shitmydadsays

Muskrat Love

I have this gnawing suspicion that I am not living my own life. Like maybe I accidentally spliced the tape of my internal soundtrack to a copy of America's Greatest Hits and I'm walking around singing about a horse with no name and Ventura Hwy even though I hate those songs and they aren't even in my key but they stick in my head forever. In my dreams lately, I'm the only one who realizes those people gathering on the sidewalk are actually flesh-eating zombies and the Program Director insists that I bring them in for an appointment right away because they are just a little psychotic. Somehow he doesn't notice them spitting out fingernails and eyelashes. Meanwhile, my supervisor is giving away the last water in the county to these zombies who really are just waiting to snap her neck and chew on her brains and Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man that he didn't already have and there isn't even a power button on the goddamned sound system. It just gets louder and I'm almost grateful when a crackhead knocks me down and starts repeatedly stomping on my face.

And I'm working on a graduate degree in this discipline and you really can't even think about a career shift during a recession with a kid about to go off to college. So just keep kicking me in the face, crackhead, just keep kicking. Sooner or later I'll either pass out or remember another melody and then I will sing all of the notes to some sick acid rock guitar solo in a perfectly pitched wail and it will drown out all of the Sister Golden Hairs who will hold their bleeding eardrums and slip on all of the shit leaking out of their state-of-the-art septic tanks and I will not document how many days the tank has been leaking and I will not pull the records of the purchase date and I will not write down that their eardrums are bleeding nor the causality and I will not fax a picture of the event to the FDA within 24 hours. I will just laugh and scratch out all of the band America's lyrics with a leaky, puddly pen and I will never, ever initial and date those blobs of ink. I will just laugh and sing all of the acid guitar solos that used to accompany my dreams and also all of the original Tom & Jerry soundtracks louder and louder and louder until we all finally admit that life is just one great, big fat Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- or maybe a Quantum theory of observation -- and if we don't wise up, it's going to seem like the flesh-eating zombies are eating our brains but we still have to get up at 5:55 a.m. and go to work and think about the best way to identify an error correct or how to keep that crackhead clean once he's kicked it.

Monday Night Purgatory

I wanted to go to Weeds tonight for the open mike poetry because it was the annual Erotica Valentine's reading but I'm feeling decidely UN-erotic. I've never been very good at writing erotica, either. My work goes quickly pornographic and it doesn't take long to turn completely hardcore. Then Gregorio sent out a message that there would be filming and we should dress up and then possibly fall in love with someone. The pressure was mounting. Then I got my period (see what I mean about the suddenly hardcore) and had to drive to the far south side to visit someone in the hospital. Also, whenever I go to Weeds I end up drinking a bunch of tequilas and the next thing I know it's 4:30 a.m. and I'm getting thrown out of the Old Town Ale House. I wouldn't feel right tomorrow morning asking the patients how much they've been drinking while tequila and lime seep out of my pores and the seven dwarves sing "heigh ho" in my skull while driving sledgehammers against my temples.

I hate working in the mornings. It is decidedly not erotic.

Cram It

I like this picture. I ganked it here.

Fashionably Late

I went with my friend to her big work shindig last night. I didn't get the memo about the dress code. Most of the women were wearing little black dresses with tights and shoes very much like the one pictured here. (Call me old-fashioned but I'm pretty sure you aren't supposed to wear hose with open-toed shoes.) I wore jeans and my peely red leather boots. Sometimes I feel like Clint Eastwood. That's probably why everyone was casually feeling out the true nature of the relationship between my friend and me. She and I are friends, not "girlfriends" but still, I refused to debunk that myth. That would be very un-cowboy of me.

In keeping with the flavor of the evening, we slipped away before the dancing and went to the secret bar. There was a cowboy band playing complete with a violinist and a lead guitarist with a 1950s era Fender in virginal white which contrasted nicely with his black pearl snap western shirt. The band was good. The lead singer was Australian but everybody knows Australians make the best rednecks because they're from the Deep South.

I can't remember the name of the band but my friend had to pass the tip jar because she's outgoing, trustworthy and was wearing a nice femme outfit. I guess that makes me the butch -- well, that and my Clint Eastwood glare.

Entropy, Equipoise, Electricity

Inspiration slapped me upside the head last night but I couldn't locate a computer and then her fingerprints slid down the drain during my morning shower. Then I hardly got anything done at work today but I did learn a new word in class: equipoise. So that's today's theme. And all things being equal, here is a random list.

1. So far, this year is better than last.
2. My index finger is still disfigured.
3. Will you still love me in spite of it all?
4. Will you still love me tomorrow?
5. How the underpants stole Christmas.
6. Men are often quite fragile.
7. It's hard work keeping the species together.
8. It's harder work keeping the civilization together, so call your mother now and thank her for every stupid holiday celebration she put on, even if she was kind of a bitch for the three preceding days and nobody really cared that much if there wasn't any green bean casserole.
9. It may be inadvisable to quit all of your vices at once.
10. Friends or lovers?
11. Friends and lovers?

Happy New Year!

How perfect to end this dastardly decade with a blue moon! Goodbye to the aughts and Happy New Year, everybody. Let's make the world a sweeter place in the teens.

Love to you all from the bottom of my emotional ocean.

-- La Sirena