Truth + Magical Love = Freedom

Arrow's Birth Story

2011-11-21T11:27:00.001-08:00

I know a great mystery has passed through me. I know its earthly dimensions by her weight, her length, her sweet downy head and her pink body with its raw, brand new skin, her legs, fingers and toes still vestigial of the amphibian, the primate. But truthfully its dimensions are so much greater. I remember and I don’t remember; the magnitude of birth cannot be measured by the rational mind, by ordinary consciousness. It is the power that creates and destroys, that weds and cleaves. I call it God though I called it nothing when I was in its wake because there man-made tongues have no currency. Maybe ancients would have called it the fury of God. It was beautiful and terrible and then beautiful once again and I was left trembling, humbled and grateful. Blissfully beached now, washed clean by the oceanic thrust I was sure would annihilate me, just enough salt left on my lips to tell the story.

Wednesday, November 9. I am one day away from being two weeks past baby’s estimated due date. We’ve been so afraid this baby would come early as Izzy Rae had, so it has been quite a surprise to be left waiting so long. I’m embarrassed to admit that my faith is wavering a bit; after the roundly awful experience of Izzy Rae’s birth I can’t imagine that anything would happen this time that might require medical intervention. After all, this entire pregnancy wasn’t consciously intended, though after some cosmic reconciling and bargaining early on we were glad to have her (though we didn’t yet know it was a her and in fact assumed it was another boy throughout). I’d come to feel that this child was giving me a second chance – besides needing a conduit into this earthly plane, the baby was offering me the chance give birth again, in power. Birth had assumed such a Goliath stature in my life since Izzy Rae’s entry. I prattled on about it at questionably appropriate times to questionably appropriate audiences, almost always breaking down and weeping when I retold Izzy Rae’s birth story, and I wanted to be at peace with it, but I knew as I’d always known, even as I swore I’d never do it again, that the only way past is through. It’d become my vision quest, my desert sojourn, my trek through the heart of darkness. It had to be done.

I awake that morning with contractions but that makes it no different from any other morning of the past 2-3 weeks, so I try to stanch my excitement. By mid-morning they seem to be mounting a bit, but are still very mild, so I am still trying to be reserved about the possibility that this is it – I’d broadcasted a false alarm on Izzy Rae’s birthday (November 3rd) when I’d had a four hour ‘practice’ labor and I really don’t wanna do that again. Finally it becomes clear around eleven that this really is it, so Steven comes home on his lunch break and stays. I call Sarah, our midwife, to let her know and she comes to check on me and then leaves Steven and I to navigate the early period together, which is wonderful. Another wonderful thing was having absolutely no vaginal exams throughout the pregnancy and labor. I remember the checks during my labor with Izzy Rae as feeling so agonizing and violative. Refraining from these was one of the many ways Sarah allowed the pregnancy and birth to remain in our hands. She was truly a guardian of the birth rather than a manager of it, and one whom I completely trusted because she never undermined my faith in my body. Such a sharp contrast to the awful doctor who ‘delivered’ Izzy Rae, though in a wry little cosmic wink, that doctor shared a first name with Sarah, minus the “h”. God can be a merry prankster…

I also call my best friend Kathleen to let her know so she can escape work, but tell her it’s not heavy yet and she can probably wait a few hours to come. My mother comes and picks up Izzy Rae, who I’d originally intended to have present for the birth. This day, though, some flicker of intuition tells me no, and I’m grateful my mother is able to take him. Throughout early labor I rock on the birth ball and hang on to Steven during the contractions. At some point I sent Kathleen and Sarah messages asking them to both come at four. Around three-thirty things start to get heavier and I pace back and forth between the bedroom and living room. When Kathleen and Sarah arrive I’m still able to muster a smile and talk between contractions – in fact, my body seems to suspend the intensity for a brief time after they arrived. The birth pool is filling ever so slowly – Steven told me later that Sarah was worried it wouldn’t fill in time and had Laura, her assistant, begin preparing the bed for the birth. I’m not conscious of any of this – this orb of birth closely hems in my attention, most of which is turned inward.

At some point the day turns dusky. Suddenly I can no longer control the pitch of my moans, which edge into a higher register with each contraction. “Let your body do its own work,” Sarah says, and for a time I’m able to allow it, turning my inward eye instead to a blooming, unfurling crown chakra, continually shedding and swallowing its petals. I think of the other women birthing with me now, women who have birthed and will birth, a place where the veil is so very thin. I can see my image of Kali Ma a few feet away, candlelight glittering upon her radial crown, her hard-won wreath of slain demons. But then the contractions assume a new plateau of searing intensity and I’m losing it again. It is such a primal feeling, where the root chakra thromboses with absolute command.

The orange goldfish that Steven jokingly tossed in the pool early in the day has become my talisman, to lose it now would mean ruin. I grip it in one hand and look for some purchase with the other when a contraction hits – the edge of the pool or Steven’s hand or shoulder. Whereas it felt good to score the earlier rushes with low, mellow moaning, now I am keening at each contraction’s peak. “Keep your voice low, let go, let go, it hurts more if you hold on,” Sarah says. Impossible! How can I let go without allowing myself to be destroyed? I feel like my body cannot withstand the intensity though I try to remind myself that it is my own body that has initiated and is carrying out this sacred process. Sarah told me afterwards that I actually said that – “I don’t think my body can withstand this intensity” and I was impressed that I’d been able to not only formulate but voice that complex of a thought at the time.

I decide I need to go to the toilet, now, though I insist it’s not merely pressure from the baby. At this point it feels like all hell breaks loose, the phrase which cemented in my mind immediately after the birth and still seems the only apt one. My water finally breaks while I am sitting on the toilet, though it seems more like it blasts out, the sound and sensation are both so loud. I think my body is beginning to push at this point – Sarah is standing by the bathroom door and quickly says “We need to get you back to the pool now,” and I can hear the urgency in her voice. I remember not being able to think of the appropriate conjugation for “walk”; all that flashes through my mind is “no walk”. I am just no longer a biped. I can’t possibly disperse energy limbward. It feels like my arms and legs aren’t really even there anymore, so totally enveloping is this churning expulsive force that radiates from my guts outward. But she insists and says she’ll help me walk back to the pool.

I am scared. My mind is trying so hard to corral this power into something understandable, computable within its narrow measure. The leap of faith is so great, as though through some opaque membrane – the visual that arises is that circle in the tower enclosing the Alchemist’s lair in The Holy Mountain. There are times throughout the labor that I make the sacrificial jump willingly and others when I feel propelled through it.

Somewhere in my mind there occurs an automatic negotiation – I can’t walk, but I can crawl. I drop to my hands and knees from the toilet and embark on the longest trek of my life – twenty-five feet or so back to the pool, leaving a trail of Arrow’s lifefluid behind me, past stoic Ten Dollar on his dog bed (Tippi Lady Teeth was also a fairly calm watcher, but something about the whole affair brought Dr. Tinkerpaw’s whiny neuroses to a feverish pitch and we had to keep him in the backyard most of the time). I feel like a creature evolving from the sludge; somehow once I am back at the pool I summon my legs to raise me up and I step back in. My eyes widen when I slip a finger inside of myself – yes, there is her head! Sarah tells Steven, with that same urgency, that if he wants to get in he needs to do it now. He must have stripped down quickly but I’m not conscious of it, only that suddenly he is there, behind me, and it feels heavenly to be supported by him.

The urge to push is beyond anything I could have imagined – totally compelling, a primal ejective force that engulfs me. When each wave hist I lean forward, bracing myself against the edge of the pool and taking hold of two hands – one Kathleen’s, one Sarah’s. It feels crushingly disappointing when her head slips back inside after a push, but Laura reminds me that this is the natural process – two steps forward, one back. The hugeness of the sensations overwhelm me, nearly persuade me to give up and keep the baby wombside forever, but this fearful inhibition is edged out by the volcanic thrust that now reigns within my body, igniting anew with each contraction. Wild-eyed, I ask Sarah how much longer this will take and of course she has no concrete answer but tells me to slow down. The impossibility of the request flashes across my helpless mind, which no longer has dominion over my body. I roar out big like a mama lion again and again. It burns and stings and I reach down and feel her head crowning and somewhere in the distance my mind balks but my body roars again and I look down, stunned, to see a head has emerged between my legs. I hear Steven let out an awestruck sound, almost close to a laugh yet not. But I barely have time to wonder at it as again the propulsive force overtakes me and her shoulder and arm pops out, then another, and with a divine slither her torso and legs slip out into the water. Sarah brings her up out of the water and hands her to me. She is wailing just as Izzy Rae was. Her blessed little head is almost perfectly round, hardly molded. Kathleen is as stunned as we are and Sarah reminds her to take photographs. Steven and I gaze at our exquisite prize, still loudly announcing herself, and I can’t believe I’ve done it. I can’t believe I’ve done it.

The aftermath is a blissful haze. Steven gently feels just after she’s born and mistakes her labia for a scrotum, declaring that yes, it is another boy as we suspected. Something tells me I should confirm, though, and a few minutes later I lift her leg and discover she’s a she! Shock, elation. Some minutes later Sarah asks me to stand and squat over a bowl and push out the placenta. We leave Arrow’s cord attached for a couple of hours and then burn through it. At one time during pregnancy I had intended her birth to be a lotus birth, leaving the cord to fall off on its own, but we worry about the logistics of carrying the placenta around with her and deterring the dogs’ curiosity of such a delicious prospect, and burning it feels right. In a couple of days we make a placenta print and then Steven makes a scrambled egg dish with the meat and I blend a smoothie. When I stand in the pool I suddenly know I am going to faint. The feeling scares me and the phrase postpartum hemorrhage flashes across my mind, but everyone quickly helps me get to the bed and Sarah tells me the faint feeling is because I haven’t eaten but a bowl of grapes since before noon. Kathleen brings me fruit and prepares some delicious scrambled eggs for us and although I’m too high for hunger I manage to eat some.

I am so grateful to Kathleen, my midwife and her assistant. While we lay on the bed, luxuriating in our post-birth euphoria and looking in disbelief at this beautiful little creature now with us, they clean up every remnant of the birth. Everyone left us by nine-thirty but I am far too high for sleep. I feel electric, pulsing with the love that pervades, my heart whole-made. Everything is so beautiful – Steven’s skin has a beautiful new richness to it and I am so grateful to be with him. Arrow stays quietly awake for a few hours, just checking us out and looking around. I know my eyes are just as wonder-filled as hers.

IT DRAWS CLOSER

2011-09-23T12:34:00.000-07:00

All the ways old aren't new;
still the only way past is through.

Little stars that form Sir Ion's belt,
before ziggy rat we wept and knelt.

Though sweetness bled from our one tongue,
Like bare nerves plucked, that passage stung.

The cleaving of the cleft is near.
The dust mote's sigh, the nebula's tear.

For the billionth time since time began,
Our Savior pup will be born again.

Bringing it all back home

2010-12-13T08:37:00.000-08:00

Wombrooming again, prodigal return to sphere / sphairikoi of nightsafe. Roiling pyramidal profligate proliferation, bred without effort. It has been given unto me, it will be given unto me again. Parry a whispery willowy knock knock at our door, tarry not there, Papadiabolus' meddlesome interloper. Our pillowed ears will not heed ye. This time we shall go farther than ever before, we shall breach the skyshell of winking sheepdogs-in-flight.

What is beyond? The ferrywart asked.
I did sew his serpentine lips,
for 'twas not his task.

O! his boneflask leaks rum
spoil't from my putrified gum
Slow, slo, composted little one
why goeth so low below, my son?

Mama, I go to the cavern where Argentine syrapy weeps
from Gaia's sweet wounds,
for might my tongue catch as they seep
but one bitter globule, O! Then I may sleep
and Papadiabolus deliver me deep.

[Papadiabolus incantation, 3x]

2010-12-13T08:15:00.000-08:00

Whyyyy

2010-10-04T12:02:00.001-07:00

Why why can't I stop? I am a bad mother. I do not deserve the treasureable diamondeyed child, the featherhaired bodhisattva. He is a babycrystal. Why the devolution? We are born babycrystals spun into the lockature of time still pure from the ride down the ALL's funiculus, still receiving those pranic transmissions so sweetly undammed. Then this backwards movement into fear and hatred and egoic severance from the Source. It is though our shackles slowly grow under the skin. I read once you are on the path you are on it. You cannot fall back into total unconsciousness. But I fall so frequently I'm beginning to doubt this.

Why do I have such horrible dreams? This one I can't even speak of for its appalling obscenity. Yet in my dream it aroused me. The verysame thing that would arouse only disgust and revulsion in awake me. All my judgments return to me, turn back in upon me hundredfold in my dreams. Why does the mind turn so readily repeatedly to that which appalls it? I worry some bookcase will collapse on my son while he rolls and crawls on the floor. And as soon as this fear arrives it spreads it rooty tentacles into my egoic consciousness and will not leave. It prairiedogs often even though I tell myself again and again energy flows where thought goes, energy flows where thought goes, if you think about this often enough it's bound to actually happen. And in my mind I cry "no! please no!" yet the fear won't leave.

Must I go bound? Free me, free me. Please free me. I guess I don't want freedom badly enough yet, don't want God badly enough yet.

"You are locked into your suffering and your pleasures are the seal..."

nice dream #373

2010-06-17T09:31:00.000-07:00

I was in a large cathedral. Kathleen was there, doing something charitable like overseeing a clothing drive. I went into an anteroom off the main sanctuary and there was a young girl performing some kind of devotional ritual. Two men walked in, one tall one short, dressed in white jeans and t-shirts. They had a predatory look about them but I thought surely seeing as there were other parties present they did not pose a threat. One of them however approached me and I began to scream "rape!" and ran back into the main sanctuary but they pursued me. Then I was in a toboggan on the high seas, rowing with my fake family toward the watery grave to which they had consigned their other child. This was secret, however, and I was not supposed to know about it but somehow I did. We reached our destination and climbed down to an underwater chamber and I knew somehow intuitively that they plotted to murder me as they did their other child, my sibling. Suddenly i dropped my baby on his head (so sorry Izzy Rae) but he rebounded cleanly from his crown back into my arms. I don't remember any more.

Holy innuin & holy ull

2010-05-20T12:41:00.000-07:00

"It's almost like they want you to be gross." -Steven Lande

'Tis! Say it with me, I WILL NOT BE A PIZZA STREET PERSON, I will not be a cog stultified by the great gluttonous automaton, I will not be a pestilent pustule piggybacking on the beast of bred digust, to blind to see that which I hate is me, I will not be a helpless handmaid for the Great Satan, body jellied from mal- and disuse, I WILL NOT BE A PIZZA STREET PERSON! I WILL NOT!

mother's milk

2010-03-25T08:34:00.000-07:00

Now that I love my lil guy... I can say...

2010-03-16T11:48:00.000-07:00

I hated him, my newborn. I can speak the unspeakable now that the words no longer bear the horrible weight of truth that they once did, when I was in the deadened thrall of postpartum depression, the polarity that cannot imagine its opposite, the cavern that affords no light. But those nights I wept while this tiny urgent tyrant pulled and pawed at my breasts and I held my breath hoping his ancient face wouldn't twist into that rictus preluding the squalling that made my body clench, then, no, I couldn't say it. Although it underlaid my consciousness like a staticky drone while I bitterly changed his diapers and cradled him and bounced him, trying to stop that awful animal keening of a being unsatisfied, a being that would never, never be satisfied even if milk streamed from my breasts, I would hardly let myself think it. I pushed it down and down and down again because of this: I knew it was true.

Now that his smiles nearly make me cry with joy, now that his suckling warms and lulls us both and now that the crying which once bristled me seems cute, now I can say these words. Now, they have no power. During those first two months, when his crying began every two hours at night as though on cue, it pulled a deep red rage from my dark mire of anti-maternal feelings. None motherly, none tender, none loving or warm. I never abused him, but I sometimes treated him roughly, and my thoughts and anger were poisonous. Exhaustion surged through my body like a drug but somehow I pulled myself up through a haze of half-sleep again and again and, tearfully somnabulistic, trudged to his crib. Though my breasts swelled and my vagina still ached from accommodating his head, the cleaving of cleft that seems desperately impossible until it happens, I didn't feel like a mother. I felt asexual, dried, excised of something tumoral and now tethered to this... thing of no value that everyone else deemed invaluable. A precious baby! I thought mockingly. If I were to dash his head against the edge of his crib to silence him, I'd be imprisoned for life, if not executed. I'd lose everything. And yet what is stopping me? Not love. Fear, perhaps. I'd pick him up and nearly fall into the rocking chair and try to force my breast in his mouth, shedding tears of frustration as his tiny mouth blindly searched, finding nothing and resuming its screaming. "This is what you want, goddammit! Just take it!" I'd yell. I held with split fingers the silicone shield that fitted over my nipple, the flimsy sheath that he, in his hungered flailing, would grip and toss to the floor. The lactation consultant had said that his month-prematurity compromised his suction and he would need it to successfully breastfeed up until around his original due date. A month after that date my efforts to wean him from it only made him angry. To me it seemed a relic of his medicalized birth, some sort of sterile prophylactic that distanced us even more from one another. When, after a solid hour - 45 minutes of nursing and 15 minutes to rock him back to tenuous sleep - I would lie back down in bed next to my husband, I would wait in terror to hear his cry crack open the still sleeping air again.

I have an almost pathological distaste for large institutional buildings and even before Israel was conceived I never dreamed I'd give birth in one. When my water broke at 35 weeks and the hurried nurse at the birth center ordered us to go to the hospital, I wept. The obstetrician assigned to us was a squat, middle-aged Indian woman. Maroon ringed her eyes and pink lipstick that seemed applied days ago flaked from her lips. When I saw that pink lipstick on her crone face the phrase my husband and I jokingly used rang in my head: can't polish a turd. Her words were few and cold, her attempts at bedside manner only meager forced smiles that strained her. She threatened me with a cesarean after only a few hours of slow cervical dilation. For weeks I hated her fiercely. Even in my absence of feeling for my son I hated that she was the one who caught him, that her gloved hands were the ones to greet him as he passed into the world. I hated the nurses that flooded the room as he began to descend while the doctor forced me to hitch my legs into stirrups situated higher than my head. I hated how they screamed 'push' at me as loudly and cruelly as a drill sergeant, hated how the doctor with oiled forefingers violently stretched my perineum, accustomed as she was to women numbed from the waist down and oblivious to my pleading that she be gentler. After the birth she morphed into a superhuman beast in my mind, the ugliest face of Kali, Israel's placenta among the carnage dangling from her many hands. In the weeks to come she became my obsession, the fulcrum from which hung my sanity: I knew I was evil, unfit to be a mother, an impostor female with the womb to people herself but none of the accompanying instinct to nuture. But I was not so evil as she who had taken my baby from me and severed its umbilical, sacred nexus, and handed it off like an organ to her lackeys who washed it of our shared fluids and prodded and inspected it, searching for defects and rating its viability. They brought him back to me briefly, for a few seconds. Displayed him to me like a specimen. He was swaddled in a blanket, quiet and shut-eyed now though he had been screaming when he emerged. In my confusion I hardly knew what to do, and was preoccupied with begging the doctor to be gentle as she pushed her needle through my skin, binding my torn perineum. And then he was gone.

The doctor shoved her fist into my uterus minutes after Israel's birth, her fingers scraping my interior in the most profound violation I have ever felt. I screamed and writhed and begged her to stop and when I threw off the nurse she ordered to restrain me, she curtly told the same nurse to hook a sedative up to my IV. I never lost consciousness but suddenly I was aware that the room was empty save the nurse who had lent her voice to the pushing chorus. "Now, they would do this to you anywhere you went," she said, smiling mechanically, referring to the fact my husband and I had planned on having Israel at a freestanding birth center with midwives. She stood poised with her hand angled like a fin above my lower belly, and now she suddenly and violently began stabbing the rigidified hand into me. Beclouded by the sedative, I heard my screams as having an origin somewhere next to my body. My mouth was only a conduit, but the gut that bore them wasn't mine. After that I remember only being ushered into a wheelchair and pushed toward another room. My husband returned; he had followed Israel to the neonatal intensive care unit, and so wasn't there to defend me when Doctor Death (as we later dubbed her) clawed out the placenta. I quickly fell into sedative-hastened sleep.

I awoke when the night nurse came to take my 'vitals' - an intrusion that occurred every few hours. "I want to see my baby," I said, my voice ragged and low. She offered the wheelchair, but I insisted I could walk. The place where Doctor Death had sewn my skin twice - she ripped out the original stitches when she manually extracted the placenta - pulled and bled anew, but I hardly felt it. I shuffled down the stale hospital hallway and the night nurses looked at me with awed fear, which pleased me. I had no cognizance of how I looked but I knew I radiated instability. My eyes must have been swollen from crying. I imagined my skin pouched and gray on my face, sagging and aged decades in that single night. I felt a subtle psychosis creeping in as I smiled to myself and swore revenge on the doctor who had laid hands on my womb-fresh child. She had marked him, I thought. I rode the elevator to the NICU and made the same blank, dead-eyed demand at their front desk - "I want to see my baby." The receptionist kept wide, wary eyes on me as she pushed a sign-in sheet toward the counter's edge.

He was in the first room, more of a generous cubby in a hallway of incubated, intubated creatures, most of them scrawny wraiths of babies, jerkily animatronic newborns with little flesh on their paltry frames. There he was, the one who was inside me just hours earlier, who belonged now on my breast and not in this glass rectangle, his mouth suffering the offense of what they told me was a "c-pap". The nurse attending him cautiously approached me. "Do you want to touch him?" she asked, risking a smile.

"No," I said, flatly. "I don't want to touch him." She backed away. I don't want to touch him because I don't know him, don't know what he is, doubt his origin of my body, I thought. I sat there and stared at his reddened sleeping body and apologized to him and cried some more. Apologized for bringing him into this, apologized for being the horrible mother I knew I was to be. And then I left, left him there to be cared for by others. He should really be with his mother, I thought. I wonder where she is.

Did I love him before he was born, the person budding in my belly? I know now I did, but then I felt only an abstract curiosity. My husband and I would rhapsodize about what he might look like while his feet rippled the surface of my inflated abdomen before or after we made love, Israel wombbound between us. My husband would squeeze at my nipple, trying to will forth a trickle of colostrum. My mother had given us as a wedding gift a book about marriage written by the pastor at her megachurch. We'd taken it on our honeymoon and laughed at how far we were above it all, the conflict mediation and silly stereotypes - men like sports, women like shoes. But one passage had needled at me, much as I tried to discount it as a flawed opinion resultant from a flawed union of people who weren't soulmates like we were. The author said having children had 'changed everything' - the implication being for the worse. He said he had 'fallen out of love' with his wife after the birth of their first child. Although I understood then intellectually what I intuitively know now - love is not finite, not baled in allotments. Your love with your husband will enrich and bloom even more majestically through your shared love for your little mongrel pup, this sweet and beautiful product of your love and passion. If ye had but faith, my husband might say... But I let the book spook me, and I wonder now if the fear of damaging or losing what I had with my husband drove me to withhold love for our baby.

We quickly assumed a routine while Israel was in the hospital - we went to the NICU every three hours for the feeding (no wonder he hardly gained weight, even after the initial newborn loss), after which I would place those conical funnels over my breasts and pump them to emptiness. The lactation consultants were kind, and helped me from being steamrolled by busybody formula-wielding nurses: "If he can take a bottle, he can feed from the breast," they said. "You have to stand up for what you want." I came to enjoy our routine, our hour-long visits after which we placed him back in his hygenic little rectangle, in the care of others. It was like play-parenting; he was not our concern for two-thirds of the day. Sometimes I would grow frustrated by the ganglia of cords that hung from his body like multicolored veins. They reminded me of my own imprisonment by IV, electronic fetal monitors, contraction monitors that told me my own senses were not to be trusted. But I could still escape. "Time to hang with Billy Rubin again!" my husband would say during the days he we left him to bask under that eerie neon blue light. Finally after ten days we were told he could go home. The nurse who oversaw his release was imperious and know-it-all though she could only be a couple of years my elder; I half expected her to swat my hands away when I went to touch my own child. Lugging the massive seat of molded plastic that enveloped my baby, she walked with us to the main entrance of the hospital. As my husband went to get the car she played at small talk with me. "Aren't you happy to be taking him home?" she asked, perhaps sensing how much I seethed at her mother hen meddling.

I lie him on his little play mat and he bicycles his little legs, now padded with pillowy fat. Oh that smile, those wise eyes. I'm sorry, I tell him now, my eyes burning with the upwelling of tears. I'm so sorry I treated you that way, I wish I could take it back. I love you so much. He looks at me, little brow dimpling with worry, and then he smiles and emits one of those sudden loud cackles. I hope it means all is forgiven.

My love, my lover

2010-03-03T09:15:00.000-08:00

Been so long.

2010-03-03T09:04:00.001-08:00

My child is born...

133rd Dream

2009-06-24T08:24:00.000-07:00

The apartment seems very crowded. Old friend D.C.comes in uninvited, lays down on the couch tranquilly, but I do not mind. S. comes in and demands coffee. I tell her I'll be happy to put on a pot but she says “No, I need pre-made coffee”. I tell her I'm not sure what that means, and she explodes - “get your fucking finger out of my face”. I stammeringly apologize but then am overwhelmed with rage and shove her out the door. I am overcome with shuddering impotent rage and scream and scream at Steven & D.C. Steven smiles, without smugness, just smiles, and D.C. just lays there.

Then I am in a barnyard with the dogs. It is similar to the barn we had when I was a child. Dead and decomposing chickens and cows and geese are strewn everywhere as though they all fell simultaneously of some mysterious plague. Dr. Tinkerpaw goes to sniff one and flips it over with his nose before I can reach him and scold him, and once he flips it over its innards spill over and out its body cavity like overcooked kaleidoscope casserole. A flurry of flies protest the disturbance. Then the chicken flips back rightward of its own accord and begins to walk on shaky newborn legs.

124th Dream

2009-06-19T12:42:00.000-07:00

Most of the dream was unremarkable, but it took a very dark turn at its conclusion. I was in the living room of the house I grew up in with my father. The television was on. I heard a scraping at the door that led to the back deck and there was our old dog pawing at an extension cable hanging from the roof. It was snowing heavily and I worried about him being outside yet somehow was unable to let him in. A film trailer came on the television – something about demon possession – and one of the stars hissed “I... HAVE... DEMONS!” and then the screen cut to a rapid montage of grisly images... rent flesh and monster-creatures being birthed from human bodies, the creatures ripping open natal clefts where they should not have naturally been... My father said “you know, I don't understand what you hope to gain by watching these things.” I turned to him and saw he had transformed grotesquely: his brow had melted down to a crustacean-type shelf over his eyes which had sunk deeply and enlarged hugely and the pupils were hyperdilated and his jaw was clean-shaven though the skin was veined and weirdly pearlescent. IT WAS SCARY! Beyond the mere happenings of the dream there was a pervasive, creeping fearful dread. I woke up after that and though I had to pee very badly I had to wait several mintues to acclimate to consciousness and muster the courage to get up and go to the bathroom. Gene came with me, thankfully.

2009-05-27T08:03:00.000-07:00

JAGUARSHOES PRESENTS...

Ashley Lande
'Truth + Magical Love = Freedom'

PV: Wednesday 10th June, 2009. 7pm till late.
11th Junes - 26th July 2009.

Old Shoreditch Station, 1 Kingsland Road, London, E2.

Ashley Lande's practise is totally self-taught and self-inspired having received no formal art education. After drawing for a number of years her work pushed into a new realm, subsequent to her first experiences using psychedelics. Ashley describes these experiences as an adventure into a whole new world, one that she felt impelled to try and express artistically. The work in this exhibit 'Truth + Magical Love = Freedom' is a definite insight into her psychotropic apparitions. Using the mixed media of coloured pencils, pens, graphite and oil paints, Ashley creates multicoloured collaged portraits. These autobiographical images portray life, death, past lives, the after life, Ashley and her loved ones, as well as Shamans and animals; conjuring a paganistic feel within her work which straddles the border between folk and fine art.

Ashley was born and still lives in Kansas city. This is her first ever solo exhibit in the UK.

"I have had mornings kicking down the cobblestones still wet from the rebirth the pillow of the night still beneath you; illuminations that hold the very air in vacuumed rapture; glitter, glittering glittered things surrounding; the love that pervades, the heart whole-made; the oceanic absorption and magic rhythmic mandala shuddering and rippling outward from its centrifuge which is the centre of all mystery and life; the Christ love received through eyes lachrymaed and I giving back with the only love I know which is absolute surrender but still a treacly trickle upon the flood entering me; leaves that shudder whispery below the unfurling clouds and the diamond sky; visions untranslatable that evade paper but I still try; also I have had darkness that swallows and shapes that do not meet with the shrillest disharmony; candlelit hells spent in the inhospitable spiral of Papadiabolus; rarely I have had hell but more often I have had heaven as should be granted unto all of us."
Ashley Lande.

For further information please contact:

Vickie Hayward

Exhibitions & Events

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Atheism'n'stuff

2009-05-18T08:54:00.000-07:00

Although debates between the (supposedly) faithful and the (supposedly) atheistic always seem like so much impotent, circular wing-flapping prostration to me, I've been reading with perverse interest the series of columns Stanley Fish wrote in the NY Times on religion and the accompanying reader comments. Comments, which, generally, can be summed up as follows: smug repudiation of religious people as zombified, bovine, Precious-Moments-buyin' red-staters, smug repudiation of religion as primarily a narcotic bedtime tale and justification for murder, rape, oppression (denying condoms to sub-Saharan Africans, DUH), smug deification of science as the end of that to which the human race can aspire... and, also, an arrogant (to me) belief that our everyday reality is the ONLY reality, and that empiricism is the ONLY legitimate means of understanding the world.

Just this weekend I was reading Ken Wilber's “A Brief History of Everything” in which he defines the two major modes of spiritual thought: Ascending, which maintains that this life is but a bleak, purgatorial kind of passage to the beyond beyond and terran pleasures and the senses are to be denied and transcended; and Descending, which maintains that revelation is to be found through the sensual, here, now. The modern brand of Hitchens-type atheism seems to be an aspiritual manipulation of the latter.

I like Christopher Hitchens. But back when I still considered myself an atheist I began to read “God is Not Great” and ended up abandoning it halfway through. Whereas normally he seems so sharp, it read so... weakly. I found it fascinating, too, that he justifies his pro-life position by saying that when he saw his nascent womb-bound child on a sonogram, looking at its tiny heart a-flutter and its staticky movements he simply could not imagine extinguishing such a clearly sentient life... but then he herniates himself arguing against the divine. “We atheists just don't need the divine because, well... books! Art! Music!” Nevermind that the greatest of those three are created through a completely engaged, divine state of clarity. I remember he also argued that it was a supreme arrogance to assume that there was a God who had not only limned out a specific and highly detailed plan for your life but also doted upon your every indiscretion and good deed with a mother's overinterest. Therein is the problem of so many atheistic arguments – they're attacking what is so readily transparent anyway – the papa-bear, paternalized-type religion that has evolved from Christianity (which, as Stephen Gaskin says, is something heavy that happened in the hearts of a generation many, many years ago) and mutated, via consumer-driven America, into an institution of convenience, comfort and social control, kinda like television. Don't dig on what the good book says? Well, Jesus didn't really mean all that now... Much of modern religion in America is a means of manipulating the teachings to the Bible to fit modern life, which is totally absurd. What a lot of atheists fail to see is that true arrogance is believing our reality is the ONLY reality, and that empiricism, as I said above, is the only way of understanding it.

Ram Dass' guru told him that LSD was Jesus Christ returned to America. Jesus Christ had to be in material form because Americans are materialistic, and thus had to have something tangible (somewhat) in order to understand him. I believe this passionately. Like Christ, LSD was vilified, criminalized and ultimately crucified by the Roman empire, or the United States. True spiritual revelation is very dangerous to a government. Thus, the paternalized, vacuous Protestant religions persist, while others are marginalized, even criminalized.

DMT is released in the brain at birth and death. Over the course of our lives, without any reminders, it is so easy to forget the spiritual experience of birth. I didn't really have it because I was born through cesarean section, and I believe I was eventually led to psychedelics later in life as a matter of fate. It makes me so happy that atheists and the spiritually bereft will finally know the beauty of psychedelic, spiritual experience and knowing God when they pass from this life. I really don't mean that to sound arrogant – I certainly haven't seen all there is to see. But everyone will ultimately know that which defies words, defies science, defies the reason they so aggressively exalted. It's so beautiful it nearly brings tears to my eyes now. YAY!

When a belly blooms, I know what to call ya now...

2009-05-14T14:51:00.001-07:00

My work featured in Argentinian magazine Revista La Fuga!

farewell little sparrow

2009-04-22T08:26:00.001-07:00

Who will love a little Sparrow?
Who's traveled far and cries for rest?
"Not I," said the Oak Tree,
"I won't share my branches with
no sparrow's nest,
And my blanket of leaves won't warm
her cold breast."

Who will love a little Sparrow
And who will speak a kindly word?
"Not I," said the Swan,
"The entire idea is utterly absurd,
I'd be laughed at and scorned if the
other Swans heard."

Who will take pity in his heart,
And who will feed a starving sparrow?
"Not I," said the Golden Wheat,
"I would if I could but I cannot I know,
I need all my grain to prosper and grow."

Who will love a little Sparrow?
Will no one write her eulogy?
"I will," said the Earth,
"For all I've created returns unto me,
From dust were ye made and dust ye shall be."

BOOGIE

2009-02-06T08:53:00.000-08:00

forever

2009-01-21T14:00:00.000-08:00

We're just spinning leaves in the flight of a dawn little girl

passing through an eternal horizon of time

but I'd like to think as we lie here

that all we've got will be ours forever.

Don't you think we're forever?

I can hear a voice
On the wings of my dream
Little girl
Melting me into love as it touches my heart

But sheltered in the distance of your sleep
Is all that I could love in a lifetime

Don't you think we're forever
Don't you think we're forever

Open your eyes
To the call of the winds
Little girl
Can't you hear them all saying
I'll always be yours

Lying in the misty morning sun
The pillow of the night still beneath you

Don't you think we're forever
Don't you think we're forever
Don't you think we're forever
Don't you think we're forever

2008-10-28T13:32:00.000-07:00

Endocosmic infancy

2008-10-01T13:27:00.000-07:00

Titles for Love Garden show:

"The Kingdom of Heaven Heritable To All (Heralded by Bob)"
"Cosmic Launch from Cleaved Head"
"Wrangled Brain-Tangle"
"Son of the Mourning Star With Fractal Spectators"
"Altar for Purgation of Exocosmic Mind-stakes Through Manual Trepanning, or Skull-Shining"
"Truth + Magical Love = Freedom"

PROBLEMS

2008-08-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

Not big ones, but... when I am being creative exclusively on visual (drawing) terms and then I go to write I find the flow is stanched. Yet the opposite is not so. I can almost always draw. AND it's one of few activities in which I can completely lose myself and pay no attention to time or my surroundings.

Things to come...

2008-08-07T10:39:00.001-07:00

the resolution

2008-07-17T07:45:00.000-07:00

So, we spun and spun around our magical centrifuge. It seemed, kismetically, whenever I got stuck on a thought Bob also got stuck and the record skipped! The symbiosis was magical. We ate some food which of course seemed like an exquisite treasure as it always does when you trip, and we decided to venture outside. We ended up upon our magical glittering throne, our spire to the sky of love love love, the clouds glowed against the emerald sky ("like diamond-scented reality of skies drawn back in secret"). We were like children, we were children again. And I knew deeply and perfectly and completely that Steven is my soulmate. I am so blessed that the universe has rendered him unto me to teach me EXACTLY what I need to learn. And learning cannot come without pain, I know that now. Before this time I was almost arrogant about these voyages, so sure I could never have anything but a splendid time. Now I know you can't harbor a brain-tangle without sometimes violent clearance. But oh, how absolutely 'worth it' it all is.

The trees like big benign gentle creatures seemed to doze and we marveled at the one that strained toward the anterior entrance of the school. We walked and walked and walked, which spurned my tongue to move with words I hadn't thought of in years, words like old leaves skittered down some reservoir in the annals of my mind. Beautiful words, though words which, upon their release, knew their inadequacy to describe the world. Perhaps this is why I have moved away from words in the past year... drawing, though still inadequate, is ever so slightly closer to approximating what really goes on.

We finally came home though neither of us could sleep and we watched the sunrise ever so gently suggest itself until it was morning and we walked down to the swingset with darling Gene who was plum tuckered out but followed as he always does and always will.

So what have we learned? Let go. Open the heart. Do not be attached to bad feelings but also don't fight to extinguish them, watch your own emotions with infinite compassion, as an outsider, like Ram Dass says. Do not fight the exorcism and the Kingdom of Heaven is yours.

2008-07-16T06:42:00.000-07:00

Here, There, Everywhere

2008-07-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

The cosmos cradles our love. It's understood. It could not be more perfect in its completeness. Steven Steven sweet husband of mine, so easy to look at, so hard to define. I love just looking at his face, its perfection. I love his easiness, I love the warm way he looks at me. I love how he's soft and hard and smooth at the same time. I love him over me and in me and around me. And he knows when I know that he knows that I know when I'm being absurd, when I'm being a child. I'm going to get better. I know it's a matter of letting go. His love makes the past just fall away but still my feelings get the better of me but then, I let them. I don't know what it is about my past miseries that makes me feel, sometimes, still attached to them. That they're creatively inspirational is a myth, because Steven inspires me more than anything, ever. I feel like he's so much stronger than me, and sometimes it scares me that I can't go limp. I have to pull my own weight. That is how life is, and how love is. I want to bear his children because they will be born out of our love, they will be children of love. I know there will still be things to surmount, bad feelings to sludge through, and whatever shit the cosmos throws down... but what could life be without him? My purpose in life is to love him and nuture our family and if a body of artwork comes of that all the better but it is not the thing itself. I would have stayed mired in and addicted to chaos if it weren't for him. I would have stayed so shallow. It still comes back sometimes but he's so patient and helps me and I love him so. I drown in it sometimes. The earth was dry before he came and I was still my parent's daughter, but now I know what it is to be a woman. But for the first time it isn't really about me but about him and about what I can give and I want to give more than everything. If ever I were to doubt I only need remember the time I sank to the floor sobbing and he came with me. No one else would do that. Who am I? I am the woman who is loved by him.

Ashley Brown's 115th Dream

2008-07-10T07:24:00.000-07:00

I was tangled in embrace with a mid-aged co-worker. He and I both had our legs bent above us in the air like infants and I rested my head on his shoulder, awkwardly. "I'm awaiting a toxicology report on my liver to see if you can live inside it," he whispered to me. Then: I was at a mundane meeting at work when a large bug with an engorged bright pink anterior body was flying around erratically. It alit on the hair of someone else and I feared it would do the same to me. I had just come from a tattoo parlor where I had gotten a line tattooed down my inner arm to extend the same on the inside of my middle finger. One of my co-workers suggested we huddle to come up with a strategy to defeat this bug. I was uptight, though, and as though inhibited by my hang-ups in a brain weave I could not fully surrender myself to the group mind and thus the huddle. He told me to relax and smoke a joint and I felt my muscles loosening as I did surrender.

I know now

2008-07-07T14:39:00.001-07:00

that it's wrong until it's right, and then ohhhh how divinely right it is! There could be no other way. My beloved and my life and my dreams are the same.

&

2008-06-27T06:50:00.000-07:00

We carried you in our arms
On Independence Day,
And now you'd throw us all aside
And put us on our way.
Oh what dear daughter 'neath the sun
Would treat a father so,
To wait upon him hand and foot
And always tell him, "No"?

Tears of rage, tears of grief,
Why must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know
We're so alone
And life is brief.

We pointed out the way to go
And scratched your name in sand,
Though you just thought it was nothing more
Than a place for you to stand.
Now, I want you to know that while we watched,
You discover there was no one true.
Most ev'rybody really thought
It was a childish thing to do.

Tears of rage, tears of grief,
Must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know
We're so low
And life is brief.

It was all very painless
When you went out to receive
All that false instruction
Which we never could believe.
And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse.
But, oh, what kind of love is this
Which goes from bad to worse?
Tears of rage, tears of grief,
Must I always be the thief?
Come to me now, you know
We're so low
And life is brief.

none of these and nothing else

2008-06-25T06:53:00.000-07:00

Mean & Ornery but Lonesome no more...

2008-06-11T08:44:00.000-07:00

ONE LOVE!

I hate you son I love you son

2008-05-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

dream

2008-05-22T07:15:00.000-07:00

I was planning to walk all the way to California. I was concerned most about the passage I would choose through the mountains. A rabbit followed me, circling and nipping at my feet. Fuzzy tufted little thumper. There is something obscene about rabbits, how powerful they are and how desperately, how muscularly they want to get away from children who want to hold them. I was prepared to depart for my long walk when I realized I wasn't prepared at all; I had no camping gear, no provisions, no map, nothing. For a moment I tried to rationalize and convince myself I could still go; after all, I needed only to move westward and that was easy. Just the word "west" emblazoned on my brain like an inborn imperative. But I knew I couldn't go. Then, a scene: a man and woman dressed in antiquated clothing, scaling the mountain side dappled with green thatches, finally cresting the ridge and looking upon THE WEST. But then the man goes limp, as though his bones dissolved, marrow sucked clean, and dead-eyed he begins to slide down the far side he sought which is very very steep and his body tumbles down down down. The woman follows and as she does her hat's ribbon fashioned in a bow beneath her chin loosens and the hat is born aloft silken ribbon fluttering though the ridge is windless.

BE NOT CONTENT

2008-05-20T08:31:00.000-07:00

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO GOOD! If you can get hold of this book read it immediately. It's out of print and copies appear to run upward of fifty bucks but I found it at Central library downtown.

Umberto album cover...

2008-05-16T06:33:00.000-07:00

thorazine

2008-05-12T10:47:00.001-07:00

For a zine!

TRANSMARITIME IMMINENCE!

2008-04-22T08:14:00.000-07:00

This is an excerpt from my drawing which, thanks to the outrageously brilliant FRENCH (http://www.tapedcopies.com/; http://www.funeralfrench.blogspot.com/), will appear in the upcoming Here & Now show in London! YES PLEASE!

An enchanted evening

2008-04-13T11:07:00.000-07:00

Radiating COMPASSION WISDOM BEAUTY TRUTH LOVE AWARENESS LIGHT in a follicular-molecular-way-down-inside fashion, Gene & I land on the corner of Valentine & Terrace. Some may suspect because of Gene's size he is an appendange of me but in fact I am like a bothersome growth on him, some tumoral sapper of resources and distractor but most kindly he tolerates me. Just as I utter "We are much too much conspicuous here, Gene," beaming COMPASSION WISDOM BEAUTY TRUTH LOVE AWARENESS LIGHT as we are, none other than

!EL PRESIDENTE!

sweeps up in her multifarous amorphous indestructible but indescrible corpuscle-car. The thing is composed of celestial alloy. Now I cannot disclose the identity of the president except to say that she is infinite LIGHT TRUTH AWARENESS COMPASSION BEAUTY TRUTH LOVE, she is all of this with the glutenizing ingredient of REASON. She became president, or rather absorbed herself into the role, through her unique ability to recognize, without ancillary detection equipment, the little baby bud of infinite LOVE LIGHT AWARENESS TRUTH BEAUTY COMPASSION WISDOM and swoop in, sweep up, hasten away and wetnurse it to its fullest, grandest fruition! No other political figure in history has demonstrated this ability to the exquisite caliber of THE PRESIDENT, although James K. Polk occasionally received transmissions he was unaware of his ability and would assume he had a stinker of a migraine and commissioned a manual trepanning for treatment which did not work.

Ever equilibrious, the president kindly tolerates our prostrations our kickings our speech which flutters deliriously like a groundborne bird with one wing shot, round in circles but heartbreaking in its fultile flapping eye-agoggery. Bless that bird and the suffering of every thing which has had to die, slowly, without a visible avatar of LOVE TRUTH BEAUTY WISDOM KINDNESS COMPASSION LIGHT AWARENESS. She drives us through neighborhoods where the porches are heavily peopled, or so we think, but it is only the light. One neighborhood smells like dead meat and I think to shout it out but suddenly there is one person on a porch, a real person, they hold open the screen door and lean and breathe tobacco cumulonimbi into the night air. They do not seem to notice the glowing growing buzzing vessel of infinite WISDOM COMPASSION LOVE TRUTH LIGHT AWARENESS KINDNESS BEAUTY gliding by them toward its infinitude of most dire errands although its emanative surface neverendingly rolls and sheds celestial confetti to the street. Yes, we leave a trail, we make our mark, we sear our way but in a biodegradable manner, not even biodegradable but immaterial from the beginning.

The president however is not immune *yet* from bodily attendance and thus announces the need to void the bladder of its accumulated liquids. We return to the landing site and I am startled to find myself the keyholder to none other than the Temple of Infinite LOVE TRUTH WISDOM COMPASSION AWARENESS BEAUTY LIGHT, what a treat! Gene & I retrieve our velvet helmet, by outward appearances a black hat to which is pinned our divine ward THE POWER OF GOD IS WITHIN ME THE GRACE OF GOD SURROUNDS ME overseen by blue-infused Leon Russell with all four of his eyes. Gently do we walk, we pitter-patter with light high steps and the most sharply articulated Fossian titupperings and we go to a shop with that type of curio printed and bound, one of my favorite types of curio! However the president has wearied from our campaigning our electioneering our mind-pamphleteering for infinite TRUTH WISDOM BEAUTY COMPASSION LIGHT AWARENESS LOVE, and the president's unique intuitive ability to recognize BEAUTY LOVE AWARENESS TRUTH LIGHT COMPASSION WISDOM in its infancy, this ability must be allowed recovery from the exhaustion of its resevoirs. We highkick titupper dance grapevine softshoe back toward where it all began, where so long ago infinite TRUTH LOVE BEAUTY COMPASSION WISDOM LIGHT AWARENESS landed. It seems so long ago.

And here we have arrived, Gene & I, richly nourished still by the funiculus of the cosmos, bestowed with every presidential honor available, catapaulted and shot into the universe and swallowed down into the churning bubbling gut of centuries and expectorated sputtering stuttering at mountain's base, in this case the corner of Valentine & Terrace.

INFINITE WISDOM TRUTH LOVE BEAUTY COMPASSION LIGHT AWARENESS,
ASHLEY & GENE

WHAT HATH I WROUGHT?!

2008-04-10T08:37:00.000-07:00

nicer dream

2008-04-09T06:15:00.000-07:00

I was given a capful of mescaline. It was tinted blue and while we were driving and it was sitting on the dashboard I feared it would slosh over the sides. It never occurred to me to cover or lid the capful. I should have waited but couldn't help myself and took just a tiny sip to see what effects I would register. Nothing seemed to happen and then something seemed to happen very briefly, an optical shimmering, but then went away. Then I was in a large stadium-type classroom and had to climb over the laps of a full row of people to reach a seat. I watched a scene going on some rows down from me - a woman was throwing a tantrum and overturned several plates of snow peas. The woman then climbed the steps in a fury, harping over the poor service and vowing to find another restaurant although we weren't in a restaurant. Then I was in the woods and came to a clearing where within an old red truck two men were making love. I didn't want to disturb them so kept walking. I became aware of my purpose for walking through the woods, that is, I was on a hunt for psilocybin mushrooms. A voice in my head said "the old man planted them here and then tossed glitter on them to make them grow" but I could only find shiitakes and other psychedelically neutral varieties. The old man, this old wizard, appeared and said, teasingly, "now, DID I plant them here? I don't remember!" BUMMER!

nice dream

2008-04-06T12:41:00.000-07:00

I am finally going to see my favorite band THE ENTRANCE BAND play at some venue but strangely the venue is connected to a country club where a benefit gala is also being held so ladies in gowns with shiny new-old skin pulled very tautly around their cheekbones swarm about and look at my friends & I with puckered distaste. The band is getting ready to play and I go up to the very front but I am elbowed out of the way by a girl in a soccer uniform who throws herself (literally) at the bass player (who's a girl in real life, but not in this dream) and they both tumble down together. So after this the bass player rises nonplussed and they start to play but suddenly I really really have to go to the bathroom, a common theme for me. I hate to miss anything but I convince myself that I'll still be able to hear the band playing in the hallway / bathroom so I go in search of the bathroom and pass one of the disdainful automatic ladies on the way. I enter a door I think leads to the bathroom but it turns out to be a blindingly-lit nursery. It's like a hall of mirrors where bars of light line either side of each mirror... it is like an infinite makeup / dressing room. I realize my mistake and turn to leave, but then reenter thinking perhaps one of the nurses will be so kind as to allow me to use the restroom if I ask nicely. Before I can do that one of the nurses hisses "Can't you fathom that for one time something is not about you?" I sputter apologies and back out of the room. Finally I find the real bathroom but some girl keeps trying to talk to me while I'm trying to urinate, asking me if I want to help her report these other girls who are cutting up credit cards over the sink. Per my inability to say 'no' I keep issuing 'maybe's and 'I dunno's. She persists, and I cannot pee.

Then suddenly I am with Kevin Bacon driving through some metropolis that slowly morphs into a war-ravaged African city as we take a series of 'wrong' turns. We come to a dead end and get out of the car and immediately come under attack by a father and son hurling grenades and stink bombs (I know this because one of them yells "stink bomb" as he throws it) at us. Kevin Bacon and I try to take cover and Kevin tries to pull down some fence slats but now they're shooting syringes at us. I feel one hit my thigh but when I look there's nothing there. We're never going to get out of this, I think.

This always happens when I nap.

colicky skullbaby

2008-04-02T07:58:00.000-07:00

DUAL BIRTH

2008-04-01T11:17:00.001-07:00

HI EVERYBODY!

2008-03-31T08:58:00.001-07:00

VERY PRIVATE ARCHITECTURE

MORE THINGS

2008-03-31T08:55:00.001-07:00

THINGS

2008-03-31T08:48:00.000-07:00

Pope Hat Shit Scream No. 1

2008-03-27T11:29:00.000-07:00

Why do some people have the same name? It's a staggeringly stupid cultural system. Stupid! Everyone should have either the same name or everyone should have different names. Perhaps a numerical system if only such a system could be stripped of the residue of totalitarian / bureaucratic dystopia science fiction.

Insanity is more our familiar than sanity. We are rankled by the inane but it is only fear that we are the most inane. "We" are more comfortable speaking as though 'we' is a cluster of polyencephalically fused persons than a single infant in space, which we are the former ad infinitum, but our greatest fear is that we are the latter, that which is hell.

Well girls it is as we had feared: our work has come to the nothing that we tried to overcome, the nothing that we hoped we had transcended concern for but knew all along we hadn't. I had become so attached to it, it had started to smell. So it is either give it away or burn it, and I found a stranger willing, even eager to take it. I only made it because I had to. Oh, yes, this is about my artworks. They are free. "YOU CAN'T DO THAT!" "Oh Ashley you don't want to do that, trust me, you'll regret it. " But why would I regret that? Why should they moulder in my little earthstake seen only by the eyes that generated them? What hell! And not even a fresh hell but a very very stale one.

It's the only thing that lets you swallow the entire universe when it is what you must do, swallowing the universe. Other times it is only an unbearable urge manifest during manic periods. During these periods the drummy thrummy psychogenic chant: I must, I have to, I gotta, a ray shooting in every direction but the most tenuous hold on an unnameable something; fall into the task or fall off. Like the straw game when we were children, the slender red straws that hold the marbles aloft until someone pulls the wrong one and YOU LOSE YOUR MARBLES! How perfect! But what after falling off? It steals your words. There is chatter but somehow of extraorigin. But with it you can DO IT, you can eat the whole universe and you don't even have to chew!

When you no longer believe that you yourself exist, you know the you to which you clung is illusory, but still any other reality is remote and inscrutable, is this the mindfeel of an insane person? You are a stranger but there is no familiar.