Surreal Vanity

Tickets & Hotel with waterpark are purchased for Johnnys wedding in Omaha, NE.

... patience was never my best virtue.

21 days till my birthday!

Mom was in intensive care the day before Mothers Day and I have just heard about it. She thought I knew... I guess the family 'telephone line' isn't working very well. It worries me.... the ever persistant reminding of her mortality. I wonder if Plato is right and some more perfect version of her exists in a separate plane of reality.

I have this fire under me to write. I think I'll do just that later on in the day when it's quiet and the kids are resting.

I was thinking of Billie today and I went sifting through old writings of mine. I found this and although they were once my feelings, they reminded me so much of his.

i want to know how to love me, so i don't have to love you anymore. i want to be somewhere far away in the desert or the ocean, or a church on an island out in the middle of the sea. i want someone to want me, like i've never wanted me before, so that way i could feel like there was a sense of sensibility outside of myself, always true to myself, which is something you could never give. i want to breath without having to feel like i'm on a respirator. inside this mind, i want to stretch out and touch each side and not feel hindered by the words i cannot ever say. life is as life is, and just never goes my way.
i want to know how to love me, so i don't have to love you anymore. i want to fit these colors together so that i don't have to think anymore. there is no one here but concentration and he has a lot on his mind.

so many things to look forward to.

i think i'll just burst into a million bubbles.

Fate and I are having an interesting journey currently. I stopped off to have coffee and sent you a balloon note. I miss you.

I've been collecting all these seashells along the way. Some are hard and rough like calluses on the fingers after decades of hard work. Some are smooth and soft, baby fine. I put them in my pockets until I can go home and wash them clean, tend to them, and watch them shine - shimmering on the mantel of my heart. Each one so defined and special in their colors; each one I was so blessed to even touch.

I thought about you today. I thought about what paths we've walked. Our conversation about ducks in the back yard vs. the streets of a mad city. Did we choose our lives? When all those years ago I said I would walk, without question, this path with Fate... did I know that through all the shadows I would cross I would come here to this point staring off into the metaphorical ocean of self.

In a few weeks they are giving me my smile back. I wonder what it will be like to smile and not think about all the unecessary imperfections of my person. Will I really be happy? Am I doomed to never be satisifed with even those things that I desire so much in the world? I don't know... perhaps we are simply tragic and that is how it works for us.

My words are like salve on the souls of so many misfortunate people and only misfortunate in the way that they do not have what is within me to have. What is within you, when you look so deep and find me there also.

The night is growing and I am tired. I only missed you, missed the genetics that created me. I hope you are well and that your begger does not haunt you tonight so that you can sleep.

Love,

Manda

irritation seeps into my skin
clouding over decades of waiting
for a single happy moment

i closed my eyes
closed the screens
and walked away into the inhale

i'm tired of the word, 'disappointment'
it comes in many flavors like baskin robbins
and packs on lbs of guilt with its callories

i thought i was okay till i realized i needed a diet
and fast this evening away with emotional water
like liquid nourishment for the malnutritioned soul

"There is lovemaking that is bad for a person, just as there is eating that is bad. That boysenberry cream pie from Thrift-E Mart may appear inviting, may, in fact, cause all nine hundred taste buds to carol from the tongue, but in the end, the sugars, the addictives, the empty calories clog arteries, disrupt cells, generate fat, and rot teeth. Even potentially nourishing foods can be improperly prepared. There are wrong combinations and improper preparations in sex as well. Yes, one must prepare for a fuck--the way an enlightened priest prepares to celebrate mass, the way a great matador prepares for the ring: with intensification, with purification, with a conscious summoning of sacred power. And even that won't work if the igredients are poorly matched: oysters are delectable, so are strawberries, but mashed together...(?!)

Every nutritious sexual recipe calls for at least a pinch of love, and the fucks that rate four-star rankings from both gourmets and health food nuts use cupfuls. Not that sex should be regarded as therapeutic or to be taken for medicinal purposes--only a dullard would hang such a millstone around the nibbled neck of a lay--but to approach sex carelessly, shallowly, with detachment and without warmth is to dine night after night in erotic greasy spoons. In time, one's palate will become insensitive, one will suffer (without knowing it) emotional malnutritiion, the skin of the soul will fester with scurvy, the teeth of the heart will decay. Neither duration nor proclamation of commitment is necessarily the measure--there are ephemeral explosions of passion between strangers that make more erotic sense than many lengthy marriages, there are one night stands in Jersey City more glorious than six month affairs in Paris--but finally there is a commitment, however brief; a purity, however threatened; a vulnerability, however concealed; a generosity of spirit, however marbled with need; an honest caring, however singed by lust, that must be present if couplings are to be salubrious and not slow poison."

"Speaking of that, this is not an easy time for lovers, either. With the divorce rate up to sixty per cent, how can anyone attend a wedding with a straight face anymore? I see lovers walking hand in hand, looking at each other as if nobody else was alive on the earth, and I can't help thinking that in a year, more or less, they'll each be with someone new. Or else nursing broken hearts. True, most lovers don't work at it hard enough, or with enough imagination or generosity, but even those who try don't seem to have any ultimate success these days. Who knows how to make love stay?"

"Prince Charming really is a toad. And the Beautiful Princess has halitosis. The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn't that be the way to make love stay?"

"Love is the ultimate Outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is sign on as it's accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free."

"Sure. It's not at all unusual for love to remain for a lifetime. It's passion that doesn't last. I still love my first husband. But I don't desire him. Love lasts. It's lust that moves out on us when we're not looking, it's lust that always skips town--and love without lust just isn't enough."

"I have an idea that love is a lot more exclusive than popular songs have led us to believe. Now lust, lust is democratic, all right. Lust makes itself accessible to any clod or clone who can muster enough voltage to secrete a hormone. But like you say, it doesn't stick around for long. Maybe lust gets fed up with democracy after awhile, maybe lust just gets bored with the way it's spent by mediocre people. Maybe both lust and love demand something more than most of us have the stomach for. These days, centainly, folks seem more concerned with furthering careers than with furthering romance."

"When two people meet and fall in love, there's a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it's usually too late, we've used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It's hard work, especially when it seems superfluous or redundant, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay."

"The mystics say that as soon as you give it up, you can have it. That may be true, but who wants it when you don't want it."

"Love is not a harpsichord concert in a genteel drawing room. And it sure as hell isn't Social Security, Laetrile, the Irish Sweepstakes, or a roller disco. Love is private and primitive and a bit on the funky and frightening side. I think of the Luna card in the Tarot deck: some strange, huge crustacean, it's armor glistening and it's pinchers wiggling, clatters out of a pool while wild dogs howl at a bulging moon. Underneath the hearts and flowers, love is loony like that. Attempts to housebreak it, to refine it, to dress the crabs up like doves and make them sing soprano always result in thin blood. You end up with a parody. There're lots of pretty sounds that describe "like" but 'love' is more on the order of barking."

"When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. It's that simple. This suggests that it isn't love that is so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection may be merely a device to put us in contact with the mystery, and we long for love to last so that the ecstacy of being near the mystery will last. It is contrary to the nature of mystery to stand still. Yet it's always there, somewhere, a world on the other side of the mirror, a promise in the next pair of eyes that smile at us. We glimpse it when 'we' stand still."

~Tom Robbins 'Still Life With Woodpecker'

"Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano,. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.

Does that mean that chain smokers are religious fanatics? You must admit there's a similarity.

The lung of the smoker is a naked virgin thrown as a sacrafice into the godfire."

~Tom Robbins

the words stung in bright bold blue letters
a present formal noun
with capitals at the beginning and no period
i was doing better when i removed them from my personal dictionary
even if i kept finding them in the thesaurus
i'm attracted to synonyms
i'm running away, shutting out all proper nouns
in hopes of deflecting yet another essay of how the verbal form of Love
does not work outside of metaphors
80 seconds and 12 hours later
i am still on personal writers block
the tragic part of my soul awakes
injecting me with a creativity i once knew
but fear replaces the vowels, loss the consonants
and i am left writing in some foreign language
about politically correct sentencing structures
i want to embrace sorrow like a bottle of whiskey
given to a recovering alcoholic

i just never liked hangovers.

the smooth taste of bitter black coffee with vanilla bean
mornings concoction
i couldn't sleep last night with all these thoughts swimming around
helplessly drowning in the ocean of my reason
my mental lifeguard is on vacation and the DO NOT SWIM sign
doesn't seem to be working very well

my friend sat across from me all night flying
sometimes i would watch the way his hands move
precisly, within the rhythm of his wrist
i couldn't find anything to say
just released myself into the void waiting for sleep

i haven't heard from my dad in a long time
it's begun to worry me
you take forgranted the people who are always there
and miss them every moment they are not
i don't even know where he is anymore

i'm tired, newness comes today in position
sickness eats away at a small eardrum
and i am caught between rising to the day
and staying behind ... time is running out

all done in irregular intervals

<3

things are going great. save the packing and the moving ... seems like everything is fitting just perfectly.