Ass Cookies and Christmas

The holiday season is not my favorite time of year. I am not a Christian, or a Jew, or black, or whomever else get a celebratory day this time of year. I celebrate the NEW YEAR! Horray! I made it through the last one, and I get another365 days to create chaos. It's a wonderful celebration. But back to the obligatory Christmas crap I have been pressured into putting up with and participating in. It all began with the Dickens' Village. My mother has been nagging me to take these collectibles from my childhood and put them on display in my super-sweet pad. My first concession of the season...

Then came the Tuesday before Christmas, and all through my house, creatures were stirring (cookie batter) but I didn't see a mouse! Carie came over and I made cookies to give to my neighbors in the ol' folks home.. However, I am not an expert in the kitchen. But I figured, we have supplies and the internet - what could go wrong??

Well, in true Xmas fashion, shit went wrong. I can break and bake some TollHouse cookies all day, but when it came time for me to actually make cookie batter.... Well first there was the brown sugar incident. I learned that brown sugar is not supposed to be in rock form. And I broke my only bowl in my furious frenzy to mash down my sugar rocks. Ok - one batter down the drain. Then I tried my hand at chocolate chip cookies, using the brown sugar crumbs and some water. I followed the recipe (I thought) and off to the oven went 30 some chocolate chip treats. In a moment of pure genius, I told Carie that we ought to try these before we package them, just in case they taste like ass....And they did taste like ass. They can only be described as chocolate chip cake-textured rocks. But I was out of supplies and short on time, so off the ass-cookies went to the frosting station (everything is better with frosting) and into the festive tins and beautiful handmade snowflake cards. I even had to add a few store-bought cookies to make up for the ones I burned. Great success!!!!

I posted a picture of this tin because my cat promptly ate the paper snowflake the moment she was left alone with it. It took Carie three tries to get the perfect pot/heart snowflake! At least the moment can be treasured forever... on my blog. Happy Holiday (whichever one you celebrate)

A Recipe for Beef Wellington

I must admit, my favorite part of living alone is not having to answer to anyone about how I spend my time at home. For example, this weekend I didn't shower. I didn't mind, my cat didn't mind, but I can see how this might appear to a roommate. Also, I decided on Sunday that I was going to do yoga naked and drink bloody mary's. It was a lovely afternoon, and despite not having a cocktail shaker, and I rather enjoyed my hillbilly bloody marys. About half way through my first, and in the downward dog position - A story idea popped in my head. Now, stories don't give themselves to me like this. I process stories, I plan stories, I know stories before they form on the page. But this idea was foreign and it just seemed to appear in my brain.

I sat and I wrote, with a bloody mary in one hand and a half-lit cigarette in other. For hours, this absurd story just flowed out of my fingertips. I am still working on my final scene, but I know what I want to see happen. In fact - I kind of knew this whole story before I knew the scenes of the story. I know most writers like to make it seem that there is some magic in what they do.... but truthfully, there isn't much magic in my arduous tinkering with words. Until this piece... enjoy a taste.

She smelled like another man. As she lifted the linen duvet and swung her long black hair into bed, my nostrils filled with the scent of her sweat and another man's musk. I was barely awake, just tossing and turning in the same fragmented nightmare, when she crept into bed. I smelled the sin on her, like many other nights. She never showered and I would never ask her too.

I laid still on my side of the bed, wide awake, and listened to her fidget under the heavy blankets. She adjusted her pillow with a careless wanton for sleeping bed mates and sank dramatically down into it's plump feather. Her long black hair splayed over the pillow, spilling near my face. Silently I filled my lungs with the smell that lingered in the air. I waited until she settled before I reached to her, pulled her closer. My hands navigated over the deep curves of her side, dragging lightly over her clammy skin – baby powder and sweet, maybe lubricant. It felt lovely still. I snaked my hand down past her belly button to the wetness between her legs. She sighed in recognition. I pulled her to me and let her sticky skin press against mine. I knew I would awake smelling like sweaty sex – another man's sweaty sex – but it didn't bother me.

My alarm buzzed brutally through the dark room. My heart rate quickened and I reached over to shut off the noise. I didn't want to wake her. It was 6:30am. She wasn't very pleasant at 6:30am. One morning, I was so lost in the percussion of pots and pans, I didn't hear the alarm. She woke up first and swung her arm over hard, whacking me in the face, “Get up and shut it off,” she hissed. I had a black eye for the next four days.

One morning, after I showered, I returned to the bedroom to dress in silence. She was naked in the bed, the covers thrown wildly over herself. The first sunlight peeked through the cracks of my custom-order vertical blinds. It was shining in the room like the crack of light in my dreams. I looked to her, one breast exposed outside the cream satin sheet. The light beamed off the barbell through her pert nipple. I decided to not put on my pants so quickly and sank into the overstuffed chaise lounge, resigning to risk pleasuring myself to the sight of her vulnerable nipple illuminated by the morning sun. I bite my lip to stifle my moans. I knew she would punish me severely if she caught me, but that only added to my excitement. It was only after I had thoroughly cleaned myself and buttoned my trousers that I tasted bitter blood in my mouth.

Bliss

Don't ask too many questions
answers aren't permanent and don't satiate.
Try to ignore the gnashing in your middle -
the pit of doubts and unspoken parania

Close your mind and float along,
try your best not to focus your eyes,
on that blur around you -
that Reality; so hazy and fleeting

Once you convince yourself
that you are better off not knowing,
you can drift away in ignorance
and feel your own bliss

Sketchy

I am in vicious denial over the creeping seasonal mood change. It's way too early! My excitement for fall has been stiffed by my hermit-esque lifestyle coupled with stress from every angle. This stress, this anxiety, this depression is ricocheted back and forth inside my mind, like some crazy light reflecting in a house of mirrors. I am not a suitable candidate for "pulling oneself out of it". I really have very little control over my mental health, contrary to what most people might believe.. My hate receptors are awakened. I spent my summer surrounded by beautiful people, having wonderful experiences and being joyful in the sunshine with the ones I love. No hate, no time for worries or self-doubt. No time to be bothered by gnawing insecurities that scream at me amidst all these beautiful people. I was filled with love and some of that splattered over onto my self-image. I feel like I have set myself up for a fucking disaster when the pink cloud crashes into the muddy earth.

That sad weeping girl inside me is always right when it comes to this stuff. I am delusional. I am not one of the beautiful people! My life is punctuated by periods of oscillating self worth. I am the person consumed by self-hatred six months out of the year. I compare, I hate, I fall short, I agonize, I scrutinize, I hate, I cut, I drink, I hate, I drink, I drink, I drink. And just when I think I couldn't hate myself more, I have a brief moment of exo-perspective and I realize all the people around me that are blackened by my hate for myself.

My self-esteem is a joke and maybe that's for the best though. Masochism and pain are somehow more inspirational and moving than a "healthy" self image. Nothing ever gets accomplished creatively when I actually believe in myself.

***This blog is not open for rebuttal, not a fishing expedition for contradiction***

Ash Wednesday

Snippets of Ash Wednesday

He watched her nearly five minutes frozen and dumbfounded, with his jaunt arms dangling uselessly by his side. With a deep breath, he collapsed into a nearby chair, never taking his eyes off her. It would be over soon; there was nothing he could do to help her. There was never anything he could do to help her. Yet, he felt obligated to watch. He lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly. Scanning the dim room, he found the spoon on the nightstand to her right. She was still breathing and eerily still; her eyes closed and her body languidly splayed across the patchwork comforter. He moved quickly to retrieve the blackened utensil and plopped back down in his seat. Fixing a shot, he was thankful she sent him out to get more. He didn’t see the need for the extra trip then, but she had the money and insisted. He was only gone for a half hour. “There is no way I would know what she took” he reassured himself. “There was no way I could have saved her”. The nightstand was littered with lottery ticket wrappers, an empty dust covered mirror, and a bottle of pills he hadn’t seen before. No label.
After a minute of rooting around callous and collapsed veins in his forearm, he found the sweet spot and pulled back on the plunger. Blood rushed up into the syringe mixing with the tar-colored medicine and with one push, warmth spread through his body. Licking the blood from his arm, he leaned back in the itchy refurbished chair and stared at the bed. She was dead. He felt nothing, but that was to be expected. That was the point.

Poetry

The glorious failure of the beautifully fucked

Beside you - I am dwarfed
limp limbs barely tread water
I resign myself to blissfully drown
in your endless aptness

Ever too timid to put on display
my trivial array of talentless efforts
Keep dancing for me tonight
While I struggle not to fall

Reflections of Youth

Sometimes, it's those longing feeling for the days when I didn't care, days when I didn't stress about life, days when all I needed was ten dollars and a sharp needle. Those days when I was high, gloriously high, dopey and soft, and I thought that I was at the peak of human experience, with my heroin. The simple beauty I found in watching my blood rush up into the syringe, the thrill that was pushing down the trigger and sending my medicine directly into my being, and the pure eroticism of licking the blood off my arm. And the existential glory I realized when I was outside of reality, floating in pure euphoria. Those hazy days when I thought I knew where God was..... in my spoon

Sometimes, I can almost give myself a heart attack when the thoughts of smoking crack interrupt my thoughts. The smell and the sounds of burning rock in a pop bottle, the taste of bitter plastic in my mouth and the inevidable ashes on my teeth, the isolation of being locked in a hotel room with NOTHING! except the endless pursuit of more. MORE MORE MORE. And the dirty, disgusting lengths I would go to just to have MORE, whether I wanted MORE or not - I always needed MORE. I can remember running myself in cirlces, chasing that buzz. When my mind goes there now, it's like throwing a wrench into moving machinery: everything stops! I feel the stress and that anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach and I am thrust right back THERE. Back to that hotel room, back to the ghetto, back to that experience. But I know now, I can never run far enough or fast enough to escape the crack. The crack turns me into a monster. A monster that will always come back once you open that door and show it the light of day. A monster that will destroy everything for MORE

Sometimes, all it will take to put me in one of those awful places is a certain song on the radio. Or a street name where it all used to go down. Or a smell that reminds me of a junkie ex-boyfriend. Or the hours of 5pm - 7pm when I could give you a play by play of what I would be doing a year ago. The running and gunning. The phone calls. The hustle for money and an available dealer. The search for an empty parking lot to shoot. The sense of relief. Or a feeling that I haven't felt in so long because I smothered it with narcotics. I have been forced to re-define everyday life - but sometimes the past sneaks up on my and threatens my very existence with its nostalgia for what was. But my new reality can fight it back; back down into the dark corners of my mind where I know it is lurking, watching my try to stay sober, and waiting for me to be weak so it will have a chance to pull me right back into it

Belle Isle, 1949 by Phillip Levine

We stripped in the first warm spring night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,
melted snow. I remember going under
hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl
I'd never seen before, and the cries
our breath made caught at the same time
on the cold, and rising through the layers
of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere
that was this world, the girl breaking
the surface after me and swimming out
on the starless waters towards the lights
of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks
of the old stove factory unwinking.
Turning at last to see no island at all
but a perfect calm dark as far
as there was sight, and then a light
and another riding low out ahead
to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers
walking alone. Back panting
to the gray coarse beach we didn't dare
fall on, the damp piles of clothes,
and dressing side by side in silence
to go back where we came from.