Head to toe, spirit to soul

Is there a breaking point? It happens in slow motion. Breaking points work outside of the normal flow of time, weaving past, present, future quick quick quick all at once. That makes sense to me - a dramatic fork in the road can shatter a reality.

For a split second, all of my life's traumas and depressions rolled up microscopic as a pre-Big Bang egg a quark could swallow exploded soundlessly. It washed over me in waves so tidal they drenched every wall inside me head to toe, spirit to soul. I thought I would die for a moment stretched on in ironic limitlessness. I felt sad, helpless, angry, shamed, fearful - my mother's face at the center of it all. Then, it was over as soon as it started. It was like a RAR file spontaneously unzipped then recoiled.

Lapse in sanity is just a tiny lapse in our linear world, a glimpse of a far more enduring version of reality, truer than the kinds in which we typically participate. I still have no idea why it happened or what it means - just that it happened and could be the introduction to something more significant to come.

Kill it with fire.

Twitter = Twatter and I'm not sleepy at all. Kill it with fire.

Also I want to see NIN/JA on 5/16 at the Cricket Amphitheater.

Thank you, Flintstones

The moon looked like a giant stone brushing the treetops as I drove home tonight. Craters across its surface seemed magnified, prominent against the dijon yellow hue the moon gets when viewed at that angle through our ozone layer, so low in the horizon. If I had pulled over, I may have been able to count the depressions, mapped this natural mandala. I could not help but think of the Flintstones because it seemed too large to be real and the craters were so clear, they looked artificial, drawn as backdrop to animation.

Ancient, cosmic beauty? Ridiculous cartoon? Why would my uncensored thoughts juxtapose the two? Is it profound? Does it mean something? My left hemisphere has just barged to the forefront and informed me it's my way of staying awake at high speed while travelling down the freeway. Sweet.

Dismemberment dreams

There was a girl in a locked room of the large house. I tugged and pulled with all my might but the door wouldn't budge. I could see her face through a window panel in the door itself. Her face distorted from a combination of being forced against the glass and agony. She was being attacked by an invisible force.

I remember how urgent I acted but inside feeling quite calm from time to time - like I had run out of emotion or perhaps there was a part of me that realized this had to be dream. Somehow I ended up on the other side of the door with her. I, too, was dismembered. The lighting would disappear and flicker back on to reveal us in stages of varous dismemberment. We were both still alive and I kept wondering why it wasn't as painful as I would imagine. Legless, just a body from the waist up and I dragged myself to the window through which I had seen the other girl with such horror on her face. Outside, instead of the other room I saw a beach, warm ocean water.

The mother who isn't really my mom at all stepped into the field of vision. The other girl and I had our bloody hands spread against the window toward her. She couldn't see us or sense us but we could hear her speak. She was leaving the house, moving. At first we didn't realize but she said it had beenm 10 years since she'd heard from us, 10 years since I somehow made it into that room. I wanted to tell her to stay but she could not hear me.

Flash back to when the house was freshly moved into. A room opens up to the beachfront/ocean. Every time we walk by it though, the room changes on its own. First we walk through it to the ocean. We dash into the water, swimming, playing until the giant waves scoop us further out to be attacked by piranhas. More dismemberment dreams. After the piranhas have had their fill, we are swept back to shore. Rush through the door and it shuts behind us.

We run to tell others in the household about the ocean and that room, yanking arms practically out of their sockets. By the time we reach the room, it had frustratingly transformed into an innocent, regular room without the door outside to the beach. Just a few windows, plain square room. It's laughing at us.

There's more dream but I can't hold on to it all right now. I think right about now I have woken up too much to remember.

Irony is a big, old, honking bitch

Lately, certainties seem to slip through my fingers. I can grasp all I want, set all the clever little traps to get that "extra edge" but all for naught. I swear that the truth is lurking right before me, so close I can physically feel it. Vague but as tactile as breath scraping across my skin. The big April Fool's joke is that Certainty does not exist - and that's the only certainty! Irony is a big, old, honking bitch.

Today, I vented about work and hopefully didn't get anyone in trouble in the process - I want to retract it all and fling it down the garbage disposal where it belongs. Desperation is sticky and I can feel its slime trickle down all over me. I think when my office nameplate launched into a suicide dive to my feet while Kelcey talked about her earring flying out of its place was an omen.

I am flawed, imperfect, terrible. I think that's what I'm supposed to learn from this. Not that it's "OK" but that I should know better by now. Now, that I am lifting this thin veil of ignorance to what I have allowed to happen inside of me. My heart endures but I've been treating it like an enemy and wrenched it from its natural partnership with mind. Speaking of which, this self/soul mutilation has fostered a bloated mess that clogs clear vision. I picture some grotesque alien with a flabby head so large its prone to drag limply behind me as I trudge along.

It needs to stop now.

Butchering the tree of me

I woke the other morning with the dream tree echoing in my mind. Off center. Unnatural. Butchered. Altered. Sad. These are the words that describe the tree. Its image stays with me.

In my dreams, there is a "school age" white girl with long, slightly wavy hair - the ends feathery and brushing mid-back. I believe she is my mind's symbol for myself when I am watching from third person perspective. I have seen her in other dreams.

She was leaning against a white painted fence without the vertical pickets. A black book bag sits at her feet and she is reading in front of a one story suburban house while standing beneath the tree's canopy. A boy shows up and I shift perspective between the boy and the girl as they have a conversation. I don't know if the conversation is important. The autumn sun is setting, streaking gold and plum strokes across the sky.

Suddenly, while I am the girl, I fixate on the tree and realize that the trunk is far to my right and the canopy is simply the rounded leaves growing from a single, long branch with its tip resting on the roof of the house to my left about 25 feet away. The leaves to the right of the trunk don't overhang the trunk more than a few short feet. I look up. Someone has woven a wire lattice for a creeper plant to twine itself, giving the illusion of a fuller canopy than it really is. All other branches have been cleanly sawed off, close to their source.

This realization saddens me, saddens her. The tree's natural growth, it's organic symmetry has been brutally altered to meet the aesthetic preferences of those dwelling in the house and the city. The result is a this dramatic lopsidedness. Unbalance.

The tree is me. The sadness that wells in me stems from the part that does not like what she sees. I play my role well at work, at home. But for all the effort I have butchered parts of myself that I held sacred to cater to "their" symmetry, "their" ideals. I think it's interesting that the RIGHT side of the tree (right brain) is the side that suffers all the cuts while the LEFT side of the tree (left brain) weighs heavily on this house for support. It hangs high because of it, and serves it's purpose well, but it's still fake.


How to turn what I built on the left side into genuine achievement and how to re-teach the right side to grow again without detracting from the left?

Where the Buffalo Are

So my brother decided to resurrect our old hard drive from 5 or 6 years ago for...whatever his purposes are. He salvaged my old documents and to say the least, it's been like finding a time capsule of HORROR and DISMAY at what a silly teenager I was.

He found a creative piece I wrote less than 2 months after I turned 17 for one of my two history classes during senior year of high school. I was enrolled in 2 history classes - 1 IB World History class and 1 "remedial" US History for the easy A to make up for my dismal grade in IB US History the year prior.

The teacher asked us to write from the perspective of the Native Americans during the European colonization of the United States. I think I was a bit liberal with the prompt and wrote in a style loosely inspired by Toni Morrison's Beloved since we had read it for IB English. Since the hard drive crash, I have been looking for a copy of this piece ever since.

I not only turned it in and got an A, I printed it out in red italics - AND read it out loud to the class for extra credit. It's a fucking wonder they didn't send me straight to the school psychologist:

Chance Hilott
US History – 6

Where the Buffalo Are

Her side rises with my head against it. I lay my head on the soft down of my mother, ensanguined with blood. Mine and hers, our blood, it bleeds into the milk she leaks. Precious, life-giving elixir, tainted with blood, human and animal. I hear the Earth our bodies rest upon, the Earth which we cannot separate ourselves from, I hear her cry out, drink in our blood. She observes her own children go mad with greed, with fury. She weeps. The breath snorting through my mother’s nostrils fades. We see red and are blinded by it.

We cannot do a thing.

My mother and I. We cannot close our eyes. The men without skin scalp my sister. I see her fall to her knees before me, her eyes meet my lifeless ones before she falls silently to kiss the Earth. Her blood feeds the Earth too. My mother’s body shudders. I shudder.

There…I see my father wrapped in the red mist. He wrestles with the skinless one. Something happens, and the skinless one falls. My father wipes his brow as he watches the Earth drink the blood of her skinless son. My father explodes! His body collapses on top of the skinless one’s. They embrace, their blood merges as one stream. The Earth drinks and cries.

The skinless ones. They crush my baby’s skull with stone. Yesterday he said, “Mama.” They rape my aunt. They spit on her, scratch her face and slice off her breasts with their wolves’ claws. They drag her ravaged body behind their horses. They slice her neck but her eyes are open. They laugh, their mouths move. They chew us up and spit us out. Their smiles are stained with blood, coating their teeth like oil. They carry our scalps on the point of their sword, mocking our way. I cannot see anymore.

Nothing but red.

It consumes me. I cannot cry but my soul weeps. I cannot moan but my soul wails.

Where is my mother? I forget. Where have all the buffalo gone? My heart hurts. I am so tired. My eyes hurt. I do not like the red. But I cannot close my eyes. Blood, the Earth’s breath stinks of burnt blood, like copper. The skinless ones taste the red too. Some of them hesitate because of it. Most are propelled by it. I cannot see the blue sky. There’s too much red. I cannot see the buffalo. Too much red. I cannot see the Earth. Too much red. I cannot see my mother.

Too much red.

I cannot taste her milk. I gag on metallic blood. My mother’s blood. The skinless one’s blood. The buffalo’s blood. My blood. The Earth swallows it all. I want water. But the red is too dense, thick like cotton. I cannot breathe. Singing. Who is singing? I need to taste the singing. I want to taste that song. I need to hear the milk. I can hardly feel it when they take my scalp. My eyes are open! But I don’t care.

Who is singing? I have to touch it…I reach out for it with my mind. I have to have it. Her song carries me away. It is mine. She whispers to me that she will take me to the buffalo, where the milk and the water are. Where the red won’t hurt my eyes. Where the red can’t clog my throat.

She says that my mother is there.

She says that my sister and father are there.

She says my aunt is there. And my sweet, sweet baby too. But she cannot carry me there until the red is gone. Until we are set free.

So still I wait.