doom+dancing.

a place to put weird things. a way to remember spectacular and unspectacular both.

wearing black stockings and really high high heels and walking in the rain, hair dirty and up in sparkly pins. conversations tilting and twirling away from their origins. but i remember each detail clearly. moderation kills you, right? we aren't adults. we run with newspapers over our heads. we are red splats against the dark, wet night.

it's all funny. the first of its kind.

everyone moves away. there is a place called los angeles. there are places that are cold. not california cold either. something that happens enough, something you make happen, that is tradition.

if you think you're in control, you're wrong. you sit on the bus, near the window, press your forehead towards the strange, gray world. and you spontaneously combust. i guess this is a real thing that happens, the inside of your body creating flame. thank god for distance. you can't light a whole city on fire with only yourself. unless you can.

it's warm inside. he makes soup and i sit with a book at the window. everything feels soft. socks, sweater, sliding across the floor, him. 'we will remember this fondly when we are old and rich,' i tell him. everything he cooks tastes perfect. rosemary. thick slices of cheese. pomegranate and tonic. we eat dinner with our knees touching.

i know why outer space always seems scary. slide all my rings off into a pile on the bedside table. my great-aunt's diamond, plastic, a fork wrapped around pink quartz. planets implode. we float in the sky.

fantasies have their place. coincidental, disruptive, not fantasies at all.

we line up under the awning, our voices up and down the streets. this is like other rainy nights. do you remember those? we sat at opposite ends of a table, our deceitful hearts like badges of pride. the balance of years, where months must go unnoticed. it's precarious if we want to stay here.

some warm, southern night fifteen years ago i slept outside on the porch. we whispered to each other about who we loved and why. when she told me she loved the same person i did i told her, 'no. it's obvious he and i are supposed to love each other.' sometimes it is.

how much it all matters or doesn't, this history, our posthumous letters, they had it right in the olden days, with muses, and lovers, and losing their minds over it all.

but we're more clever than that. while i sleep, the rain stops. it's cold and the morning is real, must be moved through.

what i mostly know is the specific moment. it happened. these things we talk about and connect words to. or we call them memories. i don't know what we do. but the realness of them. my shoes disintegrated in his bed. he played songs for me, ordered in specific ways, with lyrics, and beats that i danced to. he wrapped his hand around the top of my foot while it rained and rained. and even now, in a different life, i know there's nothing i can do to entirely forget.

maybe we open the bible to the exact page.
maybe things that aren't dying exactly could still be like dying in some way.
maybe we hope the gossip gets back, makes it over the atlantic.
or even just to the east coast.

'there are going to be fireworks,' i tell her. why not? that's how in love i am. things blowing up in the sky. any color will do. blue. pink. gold. the kind that burst into a shimmer and fall slow until they disappear. i'm not saying it's easy or that i'm that good at it. but it's everywhere. i can't even believe he has eyes to look at me and i have skin for him to see. we aren't talking composites, comparisons. kindness. trying.

i wake up and it's blue. 'why why why?' i ask.
'i talked to god, and he told me you would never be tempted again,' a man tells me on the bus. i try to avoid his eyes so that i can hope he isn't talking to me.

las vegas.

sometimes there are things i want to explain and cannot. or something i say doesn't sound like, i don't know, a thing i would say. i dream about gambling. the sound of winning. the hypnotic blur of blue and gold. the men who snap their sex cards against their fingers, turning and turning, looking for takers. all this crowded, cluttered mess, and then the emptiness. chain link and desert. the highways that twirl and snake around each other. the palms trees wrapped in glitter. the tricks of the distance and size. it isn't that i appreciate it with irony, i don't. what i feel is not detachment. it's the opposite.

champagne at the bellagio. i dream about the architects. i wonder where the teenagers are. i don't see them anywhere. i didn't know it snows in the desert, but it does. there are emerald lagoons, real ones. i wish i was a girl who wore ribboned underwear, knee-high socks, was able to barely move, but in this unbelievably sexy way. somehow, my sexiness must be both louder and quieter than that. or more ferocious. or maybe real sexiness doesn't look that pretty. i might practice moving like that.

a girl in a fuschia dress with her hipster boyfriend wins 17,000$ on the slots. an old woman in a snakeskin suit falls asleep in her chair. a husband leans towards his elegant wife, her black designer dress and brandy glass, and says, why don't i put in another 150$ for you. i hear a conversation between two men walking by, well you lost a thousand dollars in, like, a minute. the precision of detail, and my reaction, is not what i expected. there is a rainbow coming out of the storm clouds, just the almost invisible, soft end of it. i want a little house at the bottom of this red cliff. colors, the sad little words of them, are what i think of. adjectives. this vast white rock against the matte gray of the storm that misses us. or, this surge of feeling, like the moment before crying, but not because i'm sad. at all. and not actually crying either. maybe that feeling is gratitude. or the feeling of being alive, the all-crushing mad sensation of how hard it is to get around this world, but the minute i do, i think, i will never stop moving.

and i'm rounding this corner into the waterfall. the freezing cold negative ions of it. everyone in love. i mean everyone. and, also, me in love with everyone. the entire sky pink. everyone said coming into the city from the desert was the best part. a half-constructed movie set. the past's idea of the future. the shining, mirror curve of each building. fake versions of real accomplishments: towers, airplanes, sharks. and on my way home i curl up by the shuttle window, nighttime, listening to my quietest music. quieting myself back down again, feeling a much greater distance of travel than what is real, like being awake, but coming back from dreaming. as if that act of waking up was a long adventure. things that should be outside all stuffed inside. gondolas. entire cities. roller coasters that rise from the roof. as i elbow my way through i think of the beach. how people gravitate towards the coast to lie in the sun by oceans. robyn in her gold high heels. domes decorated as good as the sistine chapel. free things. swimming pools. this is the history i want to know: how you end up places. where you spend your nights. how you sleep at night. dreaming about geology. you can just break things open, carefully, see everything. the age, the weather, this proof. once, the ocean came up this far. my sister and her husband. free drinks, our dresses and shiny legs. gold. laughing, mostly. that hard sort of laughter that hurts your face and stops time.

this slow unfolding back, like the improbably descent of an airplane. i can only picture crashing into the lights. is there any other way to enter this? i dream about his dark room where he isn't sleeping. his journal with a blue cover opened to the page about me. and a place i've easily called home becomes a struggle. the patience of it must come from me, like inside me, i know. but everything seems outside. the red glow of the small city buildings of real life. the phone ringing that i answer in my different voice. and his warm room, lying on top of the covers, our glasses filled with champagne. celebrating a real thing. accomplishments. work. i open and close my own journal a million times. i just take to ripping out blank pages. what am i worried about? i keep reaching back into blank space to find the tangle.

so maybe we will leave. go somewhere together. berlin. japan. provincetown. virginia. oregan. i look at a map thumb tacked to the wall and clearly see that i know nothing. what a relief.

camille claudel.

the silver and red tinsel banners that run the perimeter of the car lot.
a rack of fur coats. everything in the salvation army 50% off.
the post office. an old woman standing in line in front of me. i buy stamps and put them in my wallet.
vodka, club soda, lemonade and lemon. reading in the bathtub. cheap bubble bath.
i spill all the gorgonzola on the kitchen floor.
a woman on the bus with a magic wand. she's serious.

a fight.
police sirens all day. B movies. a girl at the cafe with shining zebra print shoes. beers on a heated porch by the dark blue bay. the lights, their perfect, flared punctuation. gchats with old lovers.
it's easier to be happy, it settles in.
a purple dress. a purple sweater.
everything you choose means you don't choose everything else.
stephanie myers had a dream about a vampire, and wrote a book, and published it, and made millions of dollars. i listen to her talk about it in an interview. it seems kind of amazing really. she had three babies and said her imagination was gone. that all she wanted was a fantasy life. that she thought that's the way everyone was, telling themselves stories.

berlin. cuba. a virginia hillside wedding. when we eat dinner at the table in his kitchen we sit really close cause it is so small. in my dream our party is by a dark, blue pond and there is a bonfire although it is summer. i keep saying, 'i have to put on my lipstick.' it's red and my skirt is white, ruffled, from the urban outfitters catalogue.

i remember when p. wanted to name his band camille claudel and i didn't know who she was. i was in high school and i remember being at the kinkos with him and i was wearing this weird dress with giant red flowers on it. and he also told me that the word was background not backround, which made a lot of sense. there is a lot of weird, wrong shit i've thought. i wanted to be in camille claudel too, but i don't play any instruments and i can't really sing. for many years after we broke up i had a strange half-awake dream i'd make up where i was in a band and we were playing and he would happen upon the show and feel sad, i guess because i was famous and looked good and was in a band and didn't love him anymore. he'd stand outside the window and feel what it felt like to not be loved by me.

some places where crazy shit has happened later become shiny-beamed bars with flourescent green owls in glass. we walk there late and drunk. sometimes it's perfect and sometimes it's fucked up, and sometimes it is one then the other, right beside each other.

when she was a little girl camille claudel would make bones out of clay and bake them in the oven and then make skeleton sculptures. when i think about her making all of rodin's hands and feet, and then the floods coming, and then her going crazy...it makes me sad. i can see how this would happen. all the intricacies of our memories and our obsessions. the things we have screamed at the top of our lungs that we didn't mean at all.

daylight.

1. on halloween a bat flies up on my back porch and smashes into the door and windows, a manic loop, and then back out into the city.

2. night of the comet.

3. when i was a kid my parents went to this religious meeting called satsang. my sister and i played in the yard. i don't remember details. i think my memory is instead a picture i've made up of a dark green yard and perhaps the porch of a victorian house.

4. i used to like scary movies more than i do now. i liked them the most in college. in 7th grade i went to this girl's house and we watched a scary movie about clowns. it made me homesick. we saw a bear in her yard. she was the first girl i knew to take cold medicine recreationally.

5. ever since i decided to go to vegas, vegas is everywhere.

6. i finally finished 'shantaram.' it's the longest book i've read since i read 'the count of monte cristo' in elementary school. now i'm walking around my apartment eating popcorn and trying to decide what to read next. this morning i got dressed by just layering a lot of things on top of each other until i felt ready to go out into the world.

7. when patrick swayze's wife was on oprah it made me cry.

8. today was a beautiful, blue-skied day. i lay in dolores with steve. it was so perfect i think my bones melted.

9. one hour more.

10. a woman on the bus with a star tattoo on her cheek. her daughter in a wheelchair wearing a heavy metal t-shirt. the mother puts her face in her hands and cries.

11. him dancing in a devil mask, those shiny shoes. him standing up. striped socks and shoes with no laces.

12. swimming pools. places it's too cold to ever go swimming. sundays. places there is never thunder. southern gothic places i have never lived. swamps and marshes.

13. this.

14. reading 400 short stories written by other people.

15. my knees in the glow of the videos. some funny, some too long, some hypnotic. i bet i'd be easy to hynotize. mostly the world is like a mildly psychadelic thing anyway. these flickers and patterns of ghosts. the things i whisper to the corners.

gypsy.

-the city streets flood. a body is found on the bus. by this, they mean a person who has died and is now a body, not alive. when we talk about dying, i wonder how many of us mean it.

-ideas: a courier, a mystery, a trilogy, something at a carnival, gypsies.

-what you are worried about is not gonna be what gets you. so, bankruptcy, new orleans, airplanes.

-when you are young, no one wears ties. everyone wants to be cool. but you get older and then people find more practical concerns. once you bathed in 10-gallon buckets and got drunk in quarries. now, you are a millionaire. there isn't much to do with that except sit around. all the windows in the world looking out onto views to die for.

-i think i might be a good psychologist. the psychologist at work is fashionable and wears intricate fishnets like mine. we pass in the hall and smile at each other. 'we're twins,' i say. when i close the door behind me i have this strange feeling of sinking. i laugh.

-i didn't learn any of the things you learn in 12th grade. i missed it all. i go through life worried that people will notice. when the subject of footnotes comes up i nod furiously. yes, footnotes. there are other things: sylvia plath poems, for example, that are more interesting. apparently i thought so at the time too.

-he's in med school. someday he will be someone's doctor. he advises me not to donate my body to science, not that i would. i used to write wills about conceptual things, more like confessionals, trying for post-mortem wit and flirtatiousness.

-today was ok. i ate this yogurt, i dipped my spoon in it and my brain just got away from me and said, 'nothing is so bad. this day will end. and someday you will be dead.' i could hear the rain all the way inside the depths of the thick-walled building, all its gray hallways, where i have few ambitions. outside them, though, try to stop me.

-"she came out of the ocean and dried herself like the gypsy girl, ankles caked with sand. she could feel the sun burnishing her shoulders. hair wet, deep in the emptiness of days, she walked her bicycle up to the road, the dirt velvety beneath her feet.' -james salter, from 'last night'

-this boy on the bus looked right at me and i looked right back and wondered how close we were sitting to where the person had died. imagine just getting on the bus and having a destination and just not getting off again. i considered him. he looked tired, and had those nice knees that some boys have, really square. i considered describing my wedding to him, something irreverent like the french riviera. i barely know what that means. there will be splashes of lanterns, illegal fireworks, people falling down hills. he won't be there. we won't go on a date. he will not fall in love with me.

-i used to see neil hagerty of the royal trux at the post office all the time. he and jennifer herrema lived on my road. they would go to wal-mart at night and buy sunglasses and shoot guns. i think they've long since broken up, as has their band. the cool purple house they lived in has an overgrown lawn now and a nice car in the driveway.

-i lived in an empty four-story brownstone. complete with haunted chandelier and blue-silver ghosts. i made things up, and they came true.

the next 70 years.

it has to be the smallest detail. such as, the abandoned bus station. the strawberry floating in champagne. walking through the geese, the fog, by the bronze buildings, and home. it is 3am. 5am. it is dancing in a green dress, him pulling the ties of it. the times we don't get shot by gangsters or fall out the window. it is laughing so hard my hands prickle. dream a lot. your soul, like it has been laid out to dry in the sun, and is perfect. moth wings and pearls and tiny bones.

holding a napkin soaked in diner water to my lip. hibiscus over ice. hydrangeas, expensive and fluffy. oakland, the highways, the hard orange glitter of returning to the city. it is the first four bites that taste the best. girls in black and red dance in cages. jumping up and down, our arms around each other. i read bad stories with bad titles. i overhear boys on the bus with stupid lines. i was going to dress up as myself for halloween, but that isn't ironic enough. no one would get it. i'm wearing my poncho. standing in the book store. we are all over the city, sprouting up unexpectedly. we are french. we are hip-hop stars. we make up names to places that do and don't exist.

the botanical gardens, warm but overcast. a hand-me-down coat from los angeles. croquet. my grandmother forgets the name of a book and goes through the alphabet. she remembers when she gets to g. i do want the photo of my parents, may 1977, despite their divorce 32 years later. there are things we do wrong. ways we overreact. boots and necklaces and tablecloths and bars, all hot and stuffy and full of games.

perhaps i have kissed him a million times. on thursday it feels like the first time ever. it does. it makes me laugh and blush and feel embarrassed. fall asleep and wake up. fall asleep and wake up. the oldest people at the intersection. gossip and singing songs. theories about other people. ourselves. each other.

most of the time it seems i can't control my face. whether it is dreamy or scowling or in profile. there are the names of plants and trees. the air, how it turns bottle-green, opaque, silver-sunshiny, matte, flooded, night.

marc jacobs and the dental school.

there are two drunk men on the bus in the middle of the afternoon. one of them steps on my toes. the other one gets off and falls on the sidewalk.

at the dental school there is a crazy woman in the waiting room. she's doing a tooth-care related crazy person monologue. she is telling us not to eat cookies or candy. to make sure to use listerine. she goes on and on, always intricately and perfectly on-topic. i start to feel really weird listening to her. the quiet looks of people pretending to ignore her. a man beside the wall on a stretcher.

after not feeling poor for like a second, i feel poor again. i feel like the drunk men on the bus and like the crazy woman ranting in the waiting room. i do. a girl in a nice jacket and fashionable jeans looks at the drunk man who has fallen down. i feel a lot less like her. some days i want to high-tail it out of san francisco. like, far far away. i'm like a teenage runaway checking out a map of the world. burma. belize. marfa.

at the dental school everyone has their appointments in a giant, fluorescent room so you see everyone with their mouths open, lights shining in. all the people who can't afford to go to a real dentist. the student dentists are all kind, professional. the one in the cubicle across the way from me is a well-pressed, soft, clean looking man talking about his trip to hawaii. i should have chosen a more pragmatic profession. i should have married for money. our teeth are all up on giant screens, the x-rays enlarged.

'you have such impressive teeth,' she marvels to me.

my teeth make me think of my grandfather. he also slept with one foot out from under the covers like i do.

when i see little girls who are sisters i always think of my sister. today on the bus there were sisters, ages 7 and 9 perhaps. they each held a bag of licorice and were doing an elaborate game of hand-gestures that included tapping the bag, making a gun, doing a peace sign, and other things. they laughed uproariously. i accidentally laughed too. i felt such an ache of sadness it made me feel like an old woman on my death bed. i think often that about half of me, if not more, would be an entirely different way if i didn't have a sister.

here is the weirdest thing: i'm delirious with happiness. i fly under the ground in a train towards the bay. and when i glide up the escalator i see him on his bike. there are things about the world he wants to show me. pelicans on the dark water.

kate bush playing in the living room on a fall-ish, slow, morbid friday.

rice and gin for dinner.

the expensive shops of fillmore street are gross. i flip-flop down the hill. the marc jacobs store. a heart-shaped compact. i spray his perfume on the tips of my fingers and think i could come here every morning or before every date and do this. it's in a violet colored bottle and it smells nice. like the kinds of things that kill you.

so many grave undertakings, none of them permanent.

"hi again," the boy at the marc jacobs store says. he means from the other side of the counter when we were both over there thirty seconds ago.

"hi," i say. i flip open the heart compact and grin into it, checking out my impressive teeth.