of dislocation & graceful unravelling

youknowyoulovemexoxojennifer:

Color of the Day: Ashes of Roses

This is the color of my grandmother’s nice dresses, and the color scheme of her powder room, including the decorative rose-shaped soap collection (which were never to be used, and so tempting).

“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.” (Thomas Szasz)

[in which I am at the (st)age where desperately trying to collect & archive remnants of my own past is the only writing that matters]

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Alright, so usually IDGAF about GPOYs with ~famous people~, but I found this on my computer tonight and it’s silly & ridiculous & just ripe for the bloggin’.

This is a picture (credit: Amul Kumar) of me with my favorite singer, Dax Riggs, backstage at the Howlin’ Wolf in New Orleans, July 2004. I had just discovered his music a few months earlier via a dangerous mix CD from a crushboy in Pittsburgh, and made it my Personal Mission to find someone to road trip with me a thousand miles to see him play in a bar because These Things Are Important. My new, older boyfriend at the time agreed to this absurd excursion because if you can believe it I was once a Manic Pixie Dream Girl who knew How to Have a Good Time & I’m sure he relished the opportunity to ~teach~ me about How to Have Sex in Hotels and Other, Sneakier Places.

In any case, after the show, I interviewed Dax for my zine and, like, nearly died. This interview is still on the Internet (?!) and I’m like, nearly dying. (If you click through, please note that, again, I was 20 & coming off a Serious Artistic/Existential Crisis & could often be found at shows shoving a tape recorder in strangers’ faces and asking them to define “what punk means to you” and “what is the role of the Artist in society?” WHATEVER.)

Noteworthy Self-Indulgent Moments of this Photo Include:

- You can tell I am hella nervous because arms crossed & forgetting to cover my teeth when I smile.

- I might’ve been drunk.

- Scally cap & plaid because this was during my Irish Punx phase because Dropkick Murphys and validating my watered-down broke-ass ~heritage~.

- Short skirt, y’know, just in case.

- OMG why did I ever get all these tattoos.

"The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of my Melancholy Whores (2005)

(Source: deus-e-x-machina, via follow-restlesschance-instead-d)

peripatetic (ramble)

Most of my writing comes from my 1.7-mile walk home from work at night:

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"Living [at Spillage House] was such an amazing experience for me. It was the most nurturing, caring, friendly environment, where everyone could do their own thing and just let their creativity run wild. I miss that place so much. … Hold on a minute. Oh. I had a call-waiting and it said ‘Mom,’ and I was like, ‘but I’m already talking to Mom,’ but that was my Real Mom. I gotta go."

late-night phone call from a friend & former punkhouse roommate.

Ah… the Persistence of Memory. (…It’s still there.)

When I moved out of Spillage after putting in three years’ time, I was burnt-out and on the verge of a nervous breakdown, suffocating under a pile of dirty dishes and unpaid bills and empty bottles of booze, and there were times when I’d fantasize about tearing that goddamn house apart, ripping the siding off with my bare hands and, like, I dunno, taking a sledgehammer to the bathroom.

But we mustn’t forget the good times.

waza-loo:

this new batch of drawings is amazin

(Source: anastasismess, via rustbeltwhiskey-deactivated2012)

Toward New Orleans on the Ponchartrain Causeway, July 2004 | selenographie & Amul Kumar

“I carried that fabulous and carnal image of New Orleans with me like a poetic wound for the next two years.” —Andrei Codrescu, from “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” as printed in New Orleans, Mon Amour

“I was in a sort of ecstasy, […] Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations … Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call ‘nerves.’ Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.” —Stendhal (syndrome)

Sometimes when I am feeling plagued by self-doubt, I suddenly remember about how I was voted Most Artistic when I was a senior in high school. This was 10 (!) years ago, and so a somewhat meaningless & very infrequent memory. When I was a senior in high school, I was extremely depressed for reasons which have since eluded me (perhaps thankfully). I had become distant from all of my friends & was no longer speaking to my best writer-friend, & thankfully, again, I have no idea what we were fighting about… but I believe it had something to do with insisting that the other was a big ol’ self-righteous poseur when in reality we were just jealous and insecure. I don’t know. I skipped my “real” classes and luckily most of my teachers were supportive of this as long as I wrote the papers & passed the exams. Then I could go and work in the darkroom all day, or go to the Vis Comm room to work on screenprinted t-shirts & airbrushing band logos onto carpet remnants, or visit my favorite English teacher who forced me to write a paper on Allen Ginsberg instead of Emily Dickinson, my first choice, and subsequently fueled my desire to go Kerouacking across the Southeast a few years later.

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