fun

I changed a flat tire this morning
setting me back twenty minutes
late for work
and I’ll be riding on the spare until tomorrow morning
where I’ll get set back on my heels $350 for new tires.
Clearly overdue.

“If you liked your job, they wouldn’t call it work.”

I hate so many things about that adage that it’s nauseating.
Why are you speaking for me?
Who are they?
I actually like hard work, but I hate you.
If I could pay my bills, I wouldn’t get so irritated.

I sleep better when it’s cold.

A month ago, I would have cried about it.
She’s moving to the west coast.
He’s building a house two months after he said he’d come back.
They’re not going to help me, because they can’t.

They, in this instance, are my parents.

I suffered through a ten minute confrontation about why I don’t like Halloween.
I don’t think there’s a holiday that I do like anymore.
Juneteenth?
One person told me that I’m “denying all fun in this lifetime.”

Simply put, I don’t find most things enjoyable that the mass population has deemed fun.
I’m not going to apologize for that.
I don’t consider it a problem until I have to hear about how I should consider it a problem.
Fuck you.

Peers

“You wouldn’t be doing this if corporate America…”
and the rest washed out in a high pitched monotone.

You have no idea who I am…or why I do this.

You’ve grown your pretty blonde hair longer than you should
and put a sweatband through it
as if you’ve decided to mimic the 60s.

I once stumbled across a picture of my dad looking similar
although, he also sported facial hair
and witnessed what you romanticize while getting high.

The local college students stand outside the capitol building
smiling
planning for a holiday they should have grown out of a decade ago
but it’s reinvigorating to add sex and alcohol.
They stand in a huddle, none of them strangers.
They stand with hand scrawled signs telling me that I’m the 99%
but I bet they didn’t bother to look too hard into anyone
they may or may not have voted for a few weeks ago

Going down the party line on the ticket for a sticker.

I guess it’s better than the small mobs that used to accost me
for utilizing any woman’s health clinic.

Four square and a few tweets ago I ran into you
while I was working third shift.
You said you were attending the local community college to become a journalist
and I tried to hide my reaction.

Your hair was short then, and you were drunk.
I hope I never run into you again.

Hmm…

Fuck

If you were Russian
Chechen
Georgian

even Turkish

but…you’re not.
It’s too far.
Your country is too closed
and I am the wrong sex
with the wrong vocabulary
and the wrong personality

to successfully use you to get
from point A
through you
to point B.

It’s so tempting, because you’re so much closer. You’re almost close enough. If you were from any stretch of the EU that distance would quickly close; but I know you want to own me, and you’re from that same fucking area where you could very easily

own me.

I can’t risk you getting what you want amidst a whole culture that will crush me if I’m surrounded. Hell, the subculture here is almost enough to suffocate me. It’s a sacrificial price that’s entirely too high.

I think you know that.
I think you’re smart.
I think…you’re barking up the wrong tree, and I don’t fully understand why.

I like this niche
for the most part
when talking is kept to a minimum.

I’ve been dealing with some heavy news that has reaffirmed for me that I’m not inclined towards family. I’m not maternal. I’m not warm and fuzzy. I’m not even particularly feminine.

It’s almost as if you want to break me.

It doesn’t make any sense.
Do you think I’m bluffing?
I honestly don’t understand.

What the fuck am I worth, broken?

You like my crippling honesty and my direct transparency.
You’re amused by my combative aggression and grinding stubbornness.

You.

Attempting to bait me–to bribe me–is unabashedly indicative that you’re smitten with the train wreck that I already am without halfassed patches and fixes, plaster and lipstick.

Well, it’s still flattering, but the stakes are set high if you really want to break me.

If you were Russian…even Turkish
but you’re not, and you’re not, and you’re not.

Just have a good time, and shut the fuck up.

By the way, if you want to know what nondenominational agnosticism is, you’re not going to find a prepackaged, sweet little answer here. I almost appreciate you looking it up somewhere other than wikipedia, but this is not a reputable spot, and I have no intentions of catering to that flawed presumption.

I don’t know the answer. I don’t care that much about the question.
That doesn’t mean I’m wishy washy. It doesn’t mean I hold the door open “just in case.”
It doesn’t mean I’m hypocritical or indecisive or misinformed.
I don’t identify with a group of values set under the heading of “nondenominational agnosticism.”
I’m not apathetic or merely twiddling my thumbs waiting on an air tight convincing argument one way or the other.

I’m sincerely sorry that the tag brings you to my vacuous rambling about poverty and emotional constipation, because that’s clearly not what you’re looking for.

Good luck.

Maybe you’re right.

My personal history tells me that I’m not the kind of girl that you can successfully take home to Mom as if to say, “Look what I can do!”

I’m not even the kind of girl that you can introduce to your friends.

Given this track record, I’m not sure why people propose marriage in the eerie glow that we’ll just run off in reckless abandon to live happily ever after.

I find that even more unappealing than meeting your mom.

I’m sorry. I am. I’m close to killing that part of me that wants a romanticized ideal that oddball me never bothered to properly construct in the first place. I’m just not cut to the right shape or size, and you can’t keep trying to shoe horn me into conservative heels or scatterbrained left flip flops.

It’s not compromise. It’s just impractical…and wrong.

I just want to love you for a while. Just until you change your mind about who you think I am compared to who you think I ought to be.

I can’t.

I can’t continue after the shift. For that, I’m sorry, and you can call me whatever you need to call me to make sense of it. I’m never quite what you’re looking for once you actually take the time to look at me.

It’s a personal failing on my part, and for the most part, I’m okay with that. It’s for the best concerning all involved.

Petty Internal Rivalry

I should be sleeping.
I work in a few hours.
Do you know what I’m doing instead?
First, let me tell you how it started.
It started, because I finished reading shit by an author you recommended when I couldn’t stand Thoreau anymore.

This is all your fault.

It progressed when I couldn’t remember how to spell that girl’s last name.
The one you said wrote better than me…over a decade ago?
Typing it into google brought me to a website featuring two amazing people I would love to forget.

Thanks. Thanks for that.

They…paint, if you want to call it that. I don’t. I’ll call it shit. I’m sure it will be very successful.
All shitty things are

very successful.

Somehow, this led me to another successful venture of a former associate’s entrepreneurial business stints.

This reminded me of the wonderful [Censored] I gleaned that information through the old-fashioned efficacy of Small Town, USA.

I know you couldn’t care less about these people. I personally hope for your sake that you don’t even fucking remember them, but I have to stomach the fact that they are my contemporaries. These are the people I am measured against. I am measured against them, and they come out leaps and bounds ahead of me.

They do not suck at life.
They are not horrible, wretched, festering balls of caustic failure such as myself.
Even if they are…even if they’re losers; hopeless, worthless pathetic wastes…they’re still better than me, because they haven’t resigned to it. They don’t know yet or haven’t acknowledged the possibility that it could be true. They’re still thriving, dreaming, ambitious creatures overflowing with vitality.

Fuck. My spirit was crushed when I was a kid, and I stopped fighting before I hit adulthood.
I’ve got nothing.

I can’t tell whether I’m jealous or disgusted. Am I dumbfounded or repulsed? Do I really hate them, or am I just so fucking downtrodden that…resentment isn’t even remotely satisfying anymore.

Clearly they deserve happiness where somehow I do not.

I need to be more drunk.
The revelation of the moment is that I am not drunk enough.
I cannot be drunk enough to make the world spin right!

Drink up.

Stop now.

You have to stop now.
Fucking listen to me for once.

Stop.

You’re smart.
Testing told you long ago, and everybody knows.
That’s not the problem.
You know.

You’re clever.
You’re driven.
You found him.

Stop.

I need you to stop now.
You’re being completely irrational.
It’s madness.
It’s sickening, methodical obsessive self-destruction.
You have to stop.

He’s an asshole, and you know that, too.
You know what happened.
You made a decision. It was the right decision.

It was right.
You were right.

Stop going back to it.
Stop going over it.

You have to stop.

—

Every time I move, a box or two goes missing.
I haven’t bothered to fully unpack in close to four years.
The cups are missing.
The records.
Somewhere, someone opened a box
or it still sits unopened
filled with nothing but pamphlets handed to me on the street.
For the past two days, I have been searching for a box containing nothing but clear, glass plates.

Have you seen it?

In good news, I found the bag containing the back speakers to my surround sound…so that’s nice…you know, now that I’m in the process of packing things up again.

—

I gave you an ultimatum.
I was serious.
You have four more days.

Don’t disappoint me.

This is my Wasteland

If you’re looking for a screed on politics or fashion or literature, you’re quite simply looking in the wrong place.
I lost interest in contributing to the clusterfuck of “shared knowledge” around the age of nine, and I stopped forcing myself to produce the shit under the guise of information before hitting 20.
This does not mean I am a vacuous, self-absorbed, sycophantic neophyte; but if you would prefer to think of me as such, it makes very little difference to me.

no working title today

I walked in to a fight about money that snuffed out the last entrails of smoke in your fire.
I thought you were going to start throwing punches.
Later, you revealed that I’d read the escalation properly.

I don’t remember exactly when things changed for you.
I suspect it may have been around the same time you started talking to me.
That’s the general pattern, as I seem to passively attract dissidence.

Anyone of much interest to me also happens by only in passing.
The few exceptions always amount to a great deal of trouble.
That said, I would rather see you leave than experience the full mess.

I’ve already identified my interest in you as unhealthy.

So you want a bit of unpretentious honesty…

I’m tired, but I can’t sleep, and now it’s too late to sedate myself if I expect to function for work in the morning.
I’m hungry, but I have no food.
No food at all beyond sunflower seeds and little packets of emergen-c.

In short, I feel like I’m dying.

I quite simply do not know how to survive in the face of my parents’ arrival tomorrow after work.
I spent the whole day puttering about my rooms.
I cleaned my bathroom, and I watered my plants, and…I moved boxes and piles of shit around
without accomplishing much.
That’s not true.
I accomplished great things.
I can now walk in one door, go through my bathroom, walk through the other room and out the other door.
Previously, I could walk in one door, hop over some things, and squeeze into the bathroom. The other room was completely defunct, and the door was blocked off.

I’m so hungry.

There are stacks of books in the small space here in front of my computer that is my designated sleeping area.
I’m sitting on a stack right now.
My chair is stacked with various, stupid, useless things that were previously buried.
I do not currently need a container full of paper made by mud wasps, or a bag of sesame seeds (which, by the way, are all but inedible by themselves).

I’m tired.

I moved in more today than the five months since I’ve been here.
Has it been five months?
Yes.
Yes, it has.
I hate it here.
I don’t want to see my parents.

They promised to feed me.

Sometimes
a lot of times
I want to be that girl that I hate so much
that happy, vapid, self-righteous girly girl that everyone loves so fucking much
that tweets numerous times that the greatest iced coffee is the iced coffee with ice made out of iced coffee, tee-hee
convinced so completely that she’s not only worthwhile but
smart
and successful
and good.

Delusional?

But I hate her and don’t want to be anything like her at all.

What’s wrong with me?

Brandon Alexander Kelly

I have your high school diploma.
It’s mounted crooked, and this small imperfection bothers me much more than the fact that I have the original hard copy educational merit certification of a complete stranger.
I gave it to my egg timer.
Previously genderless, nameless, but in the shape of a red and white chicken; I thought the moniker fit well.

Now

I cannot find my chicken.
He has gotten lost in what was honestly a very rough move for everyone involved.
Glitter exploded, even though I specifically asked the asshole helping me to be careful with the box which was clearly marked “glitter” as a precaution.
He said it didn’t matter and that he would buy me new glitter if it spilled.
I decided not to explain that such collections were irreplaceable, and while I know where that box is, I haven’t opened it since moving.

I know tragedy awaits.

I just thought you should know that I’m throwing your diploma away today, because I can’t find the chicken it now belongs to and have relinquished ownership back to you for these last few minutes.

I’ve taken it upon myself to realign the mounting which was originally accomplished with an impressively high quality double-sided tape. If I should ever find my chicken again, he shall retain your name and level of education, but plastic ticking chickens don’t really need paperwork. They’re really best left alone under the assumption of illegitimacy.

Well, you look good.

I haven’t eaten anything in four days but sunflower seeds.
I’ve been living on Emergen-C, which is fucking disgusting.
I’ve had a fever that I’ve worked through
sweating
and shivering
and I keep pulling a muscle in my upper back
over
and over
again
trying to get a solid hour of sleep
and failing
for something like two weeks.
“You look different.”
Hmmph.
“Well rested or something…”
Ha.
“Feelin’ good today?”

Actually, I feel like shit and don’t want to be here, but thanks.

“Well, you look good.”

Fuck that. I acknowledged you, now get away from me.
At the first opportunity, I vanished.

Do you think they would come?
Do you think they would still do this to me if they knew what it actually does to me?
Would explaining to my family why I avoid, ignore, evade and make my vain attempts to escape their worry, concern and affection make them feel better or worse?
Do I owe to
honesty
or
the charade?

I still have to tell myself daily that you don’t love me.
My family does.

I drown in bad news instead of blue juniper dust, and I’m the only registered voter in the house.
It doesn’t feel good.

Phishing

“I disliked them all immediately, sitting around acting clever and superior. They nullified each other. The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of writers. Like flies on the same turd.”

-Bukowski. Women. 1978. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. 53.

Like Vonnegut, Moore, and Adams; Bukowski is a surefire literary phishing device. It’s the equivalent of asking a pre-teen if they’ve read Stephan King, or that fucking Twilight Series…or Harry Potter. A reference point.

Bukowski was not my first choice. I’m not a huge fan. Never mind why. We all have our preferences.

I started with Dostoevsky, Camus, and then Celine, followed by a biography about the most amazing Russian man alive.
Edward Albee, Flannery O’Connor and only then Douglas Adams.
Finally, you bit with Bukowski.
I’m reading his work now, because I’m emotionally exhausted and needed something light.
You didn’t bite hard. Although you referred to him as amazing, you were not aware that he wrote novels and short stories in addition to poetry.
I found that disappointing, because I prefer the short stories to the poems.
They’re all a comfortable, quick read; but again, we all have our preferences.
There’s no accounting for taste, but at least it can be cataloged.

I wondered at that, have you bothered to read more than one or two of his poems?

I shouldn’t be interested in you at all.
You have an exclusive live-in girlfriend that’s four years younger than me and twelve years younger than you, and you work the same dead-end day job that I do. You don’t even have anything going on the side.

I’ve met her, by the way.
Your girlfriend.
She wasn’t at all what I expected.
The encounter actually cheered me up considerably.

I’ll be able to host again soon.
Why don’t you bring her along?

You’re not the reason…

I don’t like the way you interrupt me
when I’m clearly busy.

I don’t like how you congregate where I’m working
and expect me to entertain you.

Where’s my tip?

I don’t like it when you watch me
and then act like I’m not worthy to demand
and acquire
that eye contact that makes us both uncomfortable.

Be uncomfortable for a second, asshole.

I don’t like the things you say
or the way you say them.

I don’t like you, but I guess that’s all on me.

I don’t think I’ll be losing any sleep.

Purehearted

I hope you took him home tonight, because you have the time
and the means
and the conscientious foresight to doubt that you will be good for him.

You will do better than most.