And...we're back.

I had to take a little blogging vacation, I was getting too paranoid about the over-exposure of personal information on the internet, the swarm and strange omniscient feeling of a thousand staring eyes.  Even if no one is watching at all, I installed a statcounter (wave, it can see you, too) and realized only my dear few read this thing anyway.  But, for a few months there, I really had to close up the slats and batten down the hatches.  Pardon the terrible metaphors.  But I missed blogging.  I'm back.

Back, and, then, to what?  What has changed?  It's January.   I last wrote in October.  Katie and I are still planning our wedding, which draws ever closer.  A few holidays happened...yes.  I grew a bit disillusioned with tumblr, which seems so image-based and less tolerant of lengthy text posts.  I separated my personal from my professional tumblr and found both to be less fun. I think part of the frission of disclosure, the glamour of vamping before the invisible eye of the computer, was that it was so scandalously labeled with my full name.  Heavens.  I'm unemployable for sure.  And, well, still unemployed.

After a bit of a health breakdown, I'm back up to normalcy again.

First the ears were lavaged with the scary-looking syringe, by the nice folks and the LA Gay and Lesbian Center.  It is so amusing to me that gay culture has advanced to such a degree that I can go to an all-gay hospital and get my earwax/deafness problem addressed.  It's good to be a lesbian in Los Angeles.  And now I am no longer Helen Keller.

Then, of course, in the usual way that things go from better to bad to worse to horrible to awesome to hilariously ridic and back down to broken, I ran out of Ativan for two days and was all sorts of out of sorts.  Luckily I didn't end up in the ER this time, as I avoided espresso shots (multiple and singular) and wikipedia surveillance articles, I had my hands full with sleep lost over auditory hallucinations of circus music (later figured out to be the neighbor's windchimes), mixed with fears of gang shootings.  I pulled myself off the mattress, threw water on my face and went to the psychiatrist, who wrote me extra refills on the anti-anxiety meds, and told me that my fears of walking at night in Echo Park were very real, that gangs were not funny, that I was right to feel that danger did lurk in my neighborhood at night.

And for the first time he asked me about my plans for the future, as if I had a future beyond being a mental patient.  I told him about featherless, and he seemed very surprised and pleased.  He mentioned work or school, neither of which I really feel quite ready for (well, school I can't afford, I'm about to default on my loans already, and work....who would give me a job, if they aren't hiring my more sane and qualified friends)

But productivity.  I told him about the novel I'm working on, and about how I'm thinking of taking a writing workshop to help focus and drive accountability in the text.  Basically to kick myself in the ass to work on this book.

Then I went home and slept, renewed my prescriptions,  slept even more, and finally the Ativan and Topamax and Abilify on my system evened me out and I felt better, normal, functional.

I had realized, earlier that day, lying on the bed next to my sleeping girlfriend. Waiting and wanting my anti-anxiety medication, all the anxious worried came back.  My fears that after, essentially, being out of normal society for three years, not working, not being in school, just focusing on my disorder, taking medication, going to therapy....that I had lost fundamental skills and functioning that I would not be able to gain back.  Sure, I have a lovely and supportive group of friends, I am not totally isolated, and they have helped me keep from becoming an alcoholic recluse.  Katie has been integral to my healing and regaining functioning.  But it just takes the lack, the absence of one or two of these little white pills, and the whole fragile structure falls to pieces.  I feel like it would be irresponsible for me to commit to something like a full-time job, knowing that I could fall apart at any moment, that my stability is so fragile.

But, regaining confidence after being out of the loop so long, it is difficult.  It has been a long, gradual process, for a long time I would never think of going to a bar, or a club, or an art event outside of CalArts.  Now I feel more comfortable doing these things.  The long trajectory from the pit of isolation in post-graduation psychosis in North Hollywood to now, where things are moving up and coming together, it is a journey, and it is not yet over,  I have a long way to go.

My attempt at Katie's Dulce de Leche cake came out looking more like this:
Yet was quite delicious  Not a crumb remained the next morning, when I awoke from my drunken stupor.  Yes, I overindulged a bit in the vodka department, too much stress over too many commitments, a day spent cooking from dawn till dusk, washing sink after sink of dishes, the tension of entertaining when one must put on the bright face of happy house.  We are happy here, in the happy house, and it is true, we are.

But there are those moments when I drop my lipstick and take an extra Lorazepam just to make it through the party.  Perhaps we have been entertaining overmuch.  It is the mania, and it is the hypomania.  Bipolar disorder plays tricks, it plays the trick of , "I'm normal," and the trick of, 'If I take my pills I'm just like everyone else and everything will be normal."  And in many ways, on many levels, I act like and have the capacities of a normal 33 year old woman.  Who hasn't worked in three years.  And who hears voices on the north side of the apartment.  Who will clean the apartment loyally and not leave it until 3 pm each day.  Who thinks her mail is being stolen when it doesn't show up.  Who checks the mail seven times a day. Who takes five pills a day.  Who is a lesbian.  Who has paranoid delusions.  There are many reasons that I am and am not quite as others.

I am working on an novel and it is difficult as always.  Featherless is coming along more successfully.  We are quite excited for August's lineup of poets, which will be announced at the beginning of the month.  There is talk of a combined reality institute and featherless happening, a date has not yet been set for this, it is in the very nebulous planning stages.  I am finding that I really enjoy setting up and holding events.  It is exciting  to watch each one take shape, as we gather the writers and the bartender and door people and frantically run around the day off with veggie trays and then in a warm wash of light it all comes together, in Brenda's beautiful Wordspace.

 

Aalpha Pharmacy Waiting Dirge

Rue McClanahan died this morning
And I cried a little bit.

In the Aalpha pharmacy, with
Just one set of each product set in a line,
yellowing in time
under the cameras, watching,
and the pedialyte,
dirty white tile,
I wait for my pills.
With posters of runaways,
I wait.
The people who sit here look poor and insane
And I realize I fit here
I have become so.
This is not a surprise.
This is not a surprise.
I was headed this way for a long leg of time.
They are sticking the labels
They are tightening the lids.

Rue McClanahan died this morning.
And I cried a little bit.

Well, the medication switcharoo seems to have been successful.  I traded in lexapro for wellbutrin, lamictal for topamax, and left the abilify and ativan as they were.  After a week of this I have noticeably more energy, I'm more alert, I need far less caffeine, and I'm losing weight.  I squeezed into a pair of pants that had not fit me on the Reno trip.  Yay and hurray.

This week Stephen had his "Toon town frottage cottage housewarming," an afternoon mad hatter garden party that was just acres of fun.  Damien took a truly career killing and heeelarious facebook album which I shall not link to, but post my favorite picture from:

Damien, new friend, talented photographer, and all-around swell guy.  This photo really captures me and katie in wuv wuv wuv before all of the chaos broke lose.

I really wish I had taken more pictures of this party, the view of downtown spread out below, the table spread with wine and flowers, the sangria, the costumes...well. oh well.  I tend to bring my camera to social events, and then get inebriated, put it in my purse and totally forget about it while I romp around.  Oh well.

Anyway, my car is back from stolenville, which I am extremely happy about.  I'm supposed to pick it up today, as soon as someone (Stephen, hopefully) wakes up and can drive me over there.

The internet is a strange place.  I've been exploring tumblr, which is so seductive, with it's hi-res photo capacity and chatty hipster interface.  See below.  This photo was taken on the footbridge that runs from my cul-de-sac over the 101.  I emphatically did not write that, nor do I know who did.

But, in the realm of poorly thought out meme blogs, or tumblrs, if you must, I woke up one morning with this idea: lesbiansbunniescupcakes.tumblr.com.  It still needs quite a bit of work, and I'm thinking of dropping the cupcake factor, as I just don't think cupcakes are that great.  But, hey.

Feeling a bit better today.  I went to see my psychiatrist and got a pill switcheroo.  Off with the lexapro and lamictal, on with the wellbutrin and topamax.  I am feeling pleased and hopeful.  Preliminary internet research predicts drastic weight loss, I'm so, so ready.

It's a hot night in echo park and downtown shimmers from the window, silver and orange skyscrapers tipped with red lights.  The ground is darker than the sky, the freeways hustles always.  The cat and rabbit are flopped, waiting, waiting for the evening to cool and the fan to end its squeaking.

Last night was really horrible, the death of Athena just triggered this horrible depression, and I kind of went off the deep end.  They are together again now, and it is time for me to move on. I can, I should, I just really should hose off and move the empty cage, fold it up in the closet so I don't have to look at it and see death.

I'm hoping that the new antidepressants lift me up a bit.  There's only so much one can block things and blind things.  Last night I was staring the perceived emptiness of my life square in the face, and it took ambien, ativan, a good nights sleep and some quality time with my dear girlfriend to really put me to rights.

My life is not empty.  It was, I think, the feeling after finishing two fairly all-consuming (and again narcissistic) projects, that of redoing my website with the tumblr platform and embedding my blog with amazon tags (hi, amazon) and enhancing the links and pics and whatnot.  As I'm on SSDI, I have to assign myself projects or else I go batshit. 

An old writing teacher at CalArts used to talk about my thesis as an effort to fill the void with anything and everything, whether drugs, sex, rampant socializing, boozing it up, etc...  Now in my newly cleaned up life, there are far fewer things I am willing to throw into that void.  I seem to have latched on to the internet as a way to fill that, the emptiness of living, free time mangement, etc...

That's an equation I can accept.  I remember the old devil's bargain a friend and I made, pinky-swore, that we'd rather be drug addicts than fat. I'm done with drugs, and trying to be done with fat.  What next?  Veganism? Scientology?  Reiki?  Master Cleanse?  Oh hell no.

I'm lashing my wagon to pills.  please, get me over this pass.

Bunny o-clock.  Giblets has come to live with us.  He is a swell little guy, just recovering from the big snip and acclimating to our home.

Nevada is a little perturbed.  I gave her some wet food, and a talk about her baby brother.  We'll see.

Another blog that comes to mind, supercute: hipster puppies

I apologize for the overuse of the h-word in my recent postings, it's the sort of thing I like to mock.  Having taken subculture far too seriously in my younger years, it's amusing to poke fun.

These helicopters that swerve and dive outside, why?  I used to think they were coming for me, in further excesses of paranoia.  Now that I've got my meds straight, this is less and less the thought.  But so many.  This is Echo Park and thus and so...I don't know, there's graffiti, is this some big gang hub or am I just remembering 1993's Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life)? Saw it in the theater in high school,  that's how old i am.  I just know there are a lot of sneakers very carefully painted hanging from the telephone wires.

But the Echo Park lake is beautiful, and I've been taking long walks around it.  This is the view out our window.  I had some fitness plan involving religious walks around this every day...apparently I am bad at discipline.  The fitness plan is hopefully to be enriched by some wellbutrin, I have to go see the psychiatrist and get a med-switch.

And that's all for now.

This post is brought to you by margaritas, thanks to Myke.  I am trying an experiment in, well, not drunkblogging, but tipsyblogging.  Katie is finishing up her homework, and I am bemoaning the fact that the Washington Blvd Concert blog seems to have been eaten by spam and shut down by the blogger gods.  While this is perhaps a tempest in an innertubes teapot, the concert long-over, it just seems a pity that all of that interesting documentation is erased.

The negative factors currently at play

1. I have a flat tire
2. I really can't put off the food stamp office any longer
3. I have to make an appointment at the free clinic to find out if I have face cancer.  wheee!!!
4. My grandmother told me she didn't approve of gay marriage....I'm engaged to a lady.

The positive factors:

1.  Katie is amazingly beautiful
2. Vanessa Place reviewed the poetic duo in The Constant Critic
3.  Hot glue-gunned myself some new typewriter-key earrings
4. Omar is back from London
5. Disability check arrives tomorrow
6. Don't have to do taxes this year

And the other most up and down factor is that I seem to have put on quite a few extra pounds in the last few months.  I'm considering going back on wellbutrin (as opposed to lexapro, my current anti-depressant), as it made me super-thin.  Curses to these beauty standards and all that, but, really, I can't help remembering little cocaine-addled size zero me, and considering that I'm now a size 12.  I would like a healthy avenue to being somewhere in between there.

I have decided that it might be wiser to stop looking for the cameras all the time.

All of this anxious paranoia came to a head on Saturday, after a really lovely week of perhaps-manic partying and the like:

Monday: Bunny funeral, sadness and vodka.
Tuesday: Stephen and I went to wildness, met some nice people and danced, it ended up surprisingly fun.
Wednesday: Cozy times with Katie
Thursday: Alex Castle came over, and he, Stephen, Katie and I drank and played the ungame.  At some point I put on the romper and romped.
Friday: Woke up with a nasty cold sore, but then Jonathan came to visit, we hung out with him and Rob and Stephen, did tarot readings, ate pupusas, had a lovely day into the evening, when Stephen's friend Mario came over and we all did interpretive dancing in the kitchen.

Whew.  I am not usually quite this social.  Problem is, somewhere along this lovely trail of amusing funtimes, I ran out of ativan/lorazepam.  Took the last one on Friday, and work up Saturday with an ungodly case of the withdrawals.

So, no make-up, just a bloody pusing cold sore (lovely!). I work up early after a restless sleep, rife with nightmares of voices outside, the police stalking me, my creditors investigating me, my parents, even, whom I know are way too busy to stand outside my bedroom window.

I woke up around six and decided a booster shot of espresso was necessary.  Had four shots from the machine, then read the wikipedia article on surveillance.  This is probably the worst thing I could have done.  I had taken my usual pillsies that morning (abilify, lamictal, lexapro, but no ativan) and read a little bit of The Peep Diaries, so by that point my paranoid psychosis was in full swing.  Armed with Katie's big black hoodie and peering anxiously out of the curtain, I decided that there must be someone out there watching me.

Looking for the camera, looking for the camera.

And then...the withdrawals began to escalate.  I had chills, shaking, shaking so hard I thought I was heading into another seizure.  Voices whispering watching.  I kept throwing up first coffee, then bile, then water, then mucous, more bile, forget eating anything today.

Katie woke up and we decided I should go to the ER.  This is the sort of decision I had been fearing for along time, because I fear being locked up in the psych ward again, of course, and I'm not so keen on the huge bills.
But, ativan withdrawals can be fatal, and I knew my immune system was way down.

The hospital ended up being not that bad, not at all as bad as I had anticipated and feared.  There was no one else in the Emergency Room except for an old couple and a young women crying hysterically into a salad bowl.  I got in fairly quickly, and after telling my story several times, showing them my prescription bottles and
talking to a social worker who thought the cold sore indicated domestic abuse....soon I was sitting there on the stretcher with a pill of subcutanious ativan dissolving under my tongue.

All the jitters and the voices and the seizure-fear shaking gushed into a warm pile of loopy-loos.  I felt normal again.  I felt happy and silly and calm.  Soon Katie and I were joking about what the devices on the wall must be for, and all was well.

So after that experience, I've decided I must be more careful, both with allocating my prescriptions (I have a pill wheel), and with doing things that aggravate my anxiety.  The night after getting out of the hospital, I watched Lawrence Welk with Katie and Stephen, and drank chicken broth and popsicles.  Slept for the entire next day and night after that.

Now it's Monday, and time to think and work again, if I can.  I'm on my third cup of coffee, and it must stop here, I think, no more caffeine.  Katie-dear is still sleeping.  I have been thinking about what I can do to not feed the paranoid anxiety, and that means:

• not going to things like the Psychiatry Museum of Death
• not researching surveillance and especially not on dubious internet sources
• not rereading The Peep Diaries, as much as I would like to
• taking one mg in the morning and one at night, as opposed to both in the am.
• Stop looking for the cameras.  Sure, they're there, there were several in the ER, even in the room I was in, but it just validates the paranoia to keep spotting them.
  

While I can't say how many people have died from excessive reading of Harry Potter, here is a list of people who have died from Lorazepam (Ativan).

• Michael Jackson
• Anna Nicole Smith
• DJ AM

Strangely I only know about famous peeps, as they don't release the lurid details of normal ODs to randoms like me.  But, of these three they each had a veritable pharmicopia of other things in their systems, not just this delicious white pill.

This revelation has led me to try and quit drinking, which is working out reasonably well.  Thanks, lamictal, for making my attempts at social drinking end up with me still sober and headachy, and everyone else loopy loos.

  However, today is my birthday - I'm 33, whee!  Jesus died at 33.  I certainly will not.  I'm feeling pretty good for a no-longer spring chicken.  I remember freaking out when I left my teens.  My thirtieth birthday was such fun, glossed over by calartiness, that I wasn't too upset.  However, today I'm facing adulthood full square in the face.  Yipes.

It's cool, though, really.  I'm enjoying where I'm at right now, if only I could kick the writer's block that steps in front of me, like a fierce Tyra Banks, and says, "what, you're thinking about writing?  how could you, you have nothing good to say!"  So then I blog about my personal life, and everything's ok until the next time I get the urge to write another novel, which I really want/need to do.

But the question, as ever, is what to write it about?  I could just do short pieces until something jells, I suppose?  I recently lost all the data in my external hard drive, I dropped the damn thing....urrrgh.  So unless I retype a bunch of shit, the old fragments I might have cannibalized are gone gone gone.  This makes it seem even weirder.  I looked back on the folder of stuff I'd printed out the last time I got all charged up, and so much of it was shite.

But in other news, I'm going to be reading in "A Day in LA: Washington Blvd Art Concert", on October 11th.  Katie and Omar and I just went driving through Culver City in search of the perfect spot(s) for our readings.  I found a great big blue-poles and glass building called, "Imperial & Wholesale Electric Supply."  It's right next to the river and the intersection of Washington Blvd and La Cienega.  I'll be there from 4:30 - 5:00 pm, with the reading starting at 4:45 pm.

I'm really excited about this.  I haven't read out in public since the Next Words reading when I graduated from CalArts, and that was at least a year ago.  Possibly two.  Time gets weird for me, y'know.

But Katie found an amazing spot, it's an old broken down church.  This spot is so cool that Katie has people asking to share it with her...I think the answer is no.  Katie Katie Katie my lovely girlfriend, yay for her, she's also started a blog, finally seduced by the blogger application.  It's called Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, which means the struggle to come to terms with the past.  That's also the name of her zine, which she will be handing out at this here church around 3:30 pm.

I'm sitting here waiting for darling K to come home from school, defrosting the birthday steaks, drinking coffee that is probably a bad idea.  Oh well, It's my birthday, dammit.

There is this strange thing. This Ativan thing. Ativan and Lorazepam are the same thing, the latter is the generic name for it. Last summer's text, Lorazepam and the Valley of Skin, was dedicated I suppose to dating whores and benzodiazepines.

It will be a year now that I have been on and off this one. Prescribed to me, yes, by a psychiatrist who seems not to realize that the withdrawals can be fatal. Every month I have withdrawals, every month I go back on again.

But on a more cheerful note, I recently found out that Britney Spears is on Ativan. D-listed had this to say about her conservator double-dosing her to keep her sedated.

Somehow this is funny to me.

That felt really good. Really good. I was looking back over this and realized that a few entries ago I was on bliss farm. It's called Ativan. It's a great medication. Every month I run out of it, and the real weight (I can't bring myself to say weight of the world, It's the CalArts talking) I don't know, I crash really badly and hear voices for a bit and get really cranky. This time I accidentally took too many when I was going to my grandmother's funeral, which involved a lot of extended parent time, including a 10 hour car ride with them on the way back home.

Here's a few others for the list, it's really satisfying to complain right now, and I'm awake, so why not. These are more trivial. They are also less obvious. Wow, that's obvious.

1. Blogs with ads all over the sidebars.

2. The fact that my mental health office is so overwhelmed that they have 400 people and two psychiatrists, so I see him for 10 minutes every 2-4 months. During which time he throws pills at me (thanks!!!) and is notably absent if they backfire.

3. The fact that I'm so overwhelmed by living (and the clutter in my apartment, which is getting really gross) and a number of other things that it's immobilizing, and instead I pop pills and complain.

4. Lights going out in my apartment. Wow, it's darker. And I wonder why I can't/don't read books anymore and instead read internettery obsessively.

5. I was thinking about all of this overwhelmed feeling, my difficulty with cleaning or sometimes leaving my apartment, and traced some of it back to my parent's impossibly high expectations of me. From youth through high school, I excelled, gifted program, lala, straight As, won awards, driven, all that, blew it out early, and then I went to college and had a nervous breakdown. All that schizophrenia and bipolar in the family, that has popped up all over since, came bursting out. Now, a decade later, I've actually accomplished some of the big things I wanted to do, but somehow for them it's not enough.

My father's father (schizophrenic) used to sit him on his knee and say, "don't end up like me, get an education, get ahead in life." And so he'll sit down and check off how many children of our generation have doctorates. It was his big dream to have his daughters get married, have kids, get PhDs, have great jobs, etc.. etc...

Well, I'm never going to do those things. There would be absolutely no point to me getting in more student loan debt. I'm fundamentally unemployable. I don't play well in groups. The economy is in free-fall. I barely made it through my masters. I'm done.

Anyway, he projects onto me his wishes and expectations for the life he wanted me to have, and he's a good and kind man and all that, but...it's so unrealistic. My mother, too, she's great, but she has this whole idea for how I was supposed to turn out, and I didn't. And they love reminding me of how I'm failing.

Anyway, Ativan is great. It really helped me get through that car ride. Thinking about my parents expectations is really depressing. I should probably save it for therapy. But wait...I'm not in therapy.

For some reason I've had a lot of trouble getting myself to sit down and write. Anything. To the point that I feel ridiculous calling myself a writer. It feels so pretentious, really, but it's a nicer catch-all identity than eccentric deadbeat who has given up on life and needs a kick in the ass to... to... do any number of things. Finally today I sat down and made a list of things that had been bothering me that felt so obvious they were not recognizable to someone.

WTF???

1. Obviously...Scientology is a creepy cult! I went walking in Hollywood today, and, like anywhere else in LA, there was a giant, ridiculously opulent Scientology building.

2. O...hai, i'z in yr list.

3. Obviously...private student loans, I'm the wrong person to prop up your collapsing economy, I have a degenerative brain disorder. I'm mentally ill. I don't know where that money is going to come from. This one because I realize now that it's become my hobby, getting mouthy and overly personal with student loan people, namely those that call about the ridiculously desperate private loan I took out to go to CalArts. The federal people, bless-em, have this wonderful ability to defer endlessly, but this bank...wow, you only have a year's deferment...wow, I have to fill out a form that explains how it's all going to change in a year...I owe you ungodly thousands of dollars...DEGENERATIVE BRAIN DISORDER!!! It makes me feel like one of those lonely elderly people that get all excited when someone calls them, and then get all chatty with the telemarketers. It's in fact, very much the same. But, in a sense, I don't know what else to say. This brings up all these issues of making bipolar disorder my identity...my mother would say "leaning on it." But, then again, I'm on disability, I'm living on a very tight budget right now, and, really, I feel amazingly lucky that I still have my apartment, I will live on crackers to keep it, but, WTF CITIBANK???

Oh, by the way, thanks for the amazing education. I now plan to sit on it and let my brain turn to slush.

4. Obviously...website + rats (does not equal) small business. It used to be amusing when I got these sales calls. It's not anymore. No, I don't want to promote my small business. No, my employees don't need anything. They eat birdseed. Okay.

5. Obviously...guy that chased us off that mall-ish courtyard by the Kodak theatre today. No, I'm not impressed by you sticking your face in the fountain. Please stop chasing me. This sort of shenanigans makes me so glad that I'm the sort of orderly mentally ill person that does not harass strangers on the street. Take away my funding and the vault of pills...might get there. I love making idle threats to the internet.

6. Obviously...Seagrams has all the gross vodka flavors. Wild grape? Espresso? (this is sort of like caffeinated Cisco...danger) Blackberry? Is Nyquil far behind? Did you play tennis with the guy from Smirnoff and lose?

7. Obviously...Tegretol is not helpful. I'm not making foolish manic decisions, but it's yet another Faustian bargain, of taking it before I go to bed and waking up in cold sweats of four foot tall cockroaches chasing me as I vomit sardines and wake up in a sweater dress caked with my own feces, only to wake up again and realize...yes, this happens every time I take it before bed... Or, alternately, taking it in the midafternoon and feeling like I've been lobotomized and being socially retarded for the rest of the evening, only to realize, well, it's an anticonvulsant, so if I go off of it, I'll have seizures. Fantastic.

8. Obviously...cockroach problem is not eliminated.

A fabulous day is today. I am sitting with my dear darling Katie, and we just had band practice. We are gong to a reading tonight. Oh joy.

I just spent a week in San Diego and Reno learning about yurts, stew, and how many rats is a lot to deal with.

I am happily medicated. On D-listed, they refer to the Britney Spears tour as the "Don't be A'scared, Ahs on mah meds" tour.
Think of this as the "Don'd be a'feared, I'm on mah meds too!!! except I'm not going anywhere.


today is a day of leather and pink cupcake costumes. I awoke thinking of prosciutto cupcakes, and now I am one.

Wake up - pills
Go to sleep - more pills

Absence and presence. Preiscence. Premonitions.

Seratonin Sangria Santeria.

I go to sleep, and dream of sick rats, dirty, squabbling, dying. I wake up at 8:30 and they are sweet blue furballs, round in their shoebox.

Video killed the radio star
Internet killed the zine.

But what's going to off the internet?

I remember making zines, feeling there was an evil creeping voicelessness of being a teenage girl. Now there are avenues of expression, so many.

My glasses lost, I cannot keep up.

It's time for lists.

Books I am in the middle of reading:

• More, Now, Again, Elizabeth Wurtzel
• The Virgin of Flames, Chris Abani
• Starting from Scratch, Rita Mae Brown
• Bloom, Fall 2005

What is secret and what is exposed, what is kept and what is discarded.

I live in Los Angeles, with its dance between public exposure, dense cult secrecy, and willful exploitation. I like it here.