Oldies + 1 Newbie

Photo by Dan Leffel

Photo by Dan Leffel

My sweetie pie Seamus!

Lots of lazy days here lately. It finally hit 100 and MY. GOD. is it hot. I think the humidity has also risen so the heat index is at like 108 or 110 and it definitely feels it. Lots of staying inside in the air conditioning. I want to go swimming but it's too much to even bike down there in the heat these days!

Sweet, Sad, Strange

Song for a Fiddler - 4 or 5 parts now, I think, and counting...
New roommate tomorrow with soft voice, guitar
Summer heat, shadowed nights,
blue-eyed stranger on my porch playing Metzakookia,
Yiddish Blues,
Berdecheiver Khosid
Songs we knew by different names
And always the cicadas,
always the whirring of bicycles and the baying of a dog
Cold beers always and too much nicotine for a jaded spirit
And each evening, the promise of newness,
of rebirth,
of breathless phone calls in the dead of night
The wheeze of the bellows and the song within your bow
Sing it again
It's been a month, you said
noncomittally
And, I think, it will be one more month
before each little piece falls into place
Or someone comes and someone leaves
Someone comes and someone stays
I cannot say
I will keep my hands and eyes for me
For now

Walkabout

Last night I dreamed that I was dreaming of you
And from a window across the lawn I watched you undress
Wearing your sunset of purple tightly woven around your hair
That rose in strangled ebony curls
Moving in a yellow bedroom light
The air is wet with sound
The faraway yelping of a wounded dog
And the ground is drinking a slow faucet leak
Your house is so soft and fading as it soaks the black summer heat
A light goes on and the door opens
And a yellow cat runs out on the stream of hall light and into the yard

A wooden cherry scent is faintly breathing the air
I hear your champagne laugh
You wear two lavender orchids
One in your hair and one on your hip
A string of yellow carnival lights comes on with the dusk
Circling the lake with a slowly dipping halo
And I hear a banjo tango

And you dance into the shadow of a black poplar tree
And I watched you as you disappeared

Stickbugman on my front door.

 You are my sunshine...

Wall of tabasco at store on Decatur St., New Orleans.

Fire spinner at Viva Variety, 6/10/10.

Oy

Damn! It has been a busy month. I moved, I adopted a stray dog, I went on an impromptu road trip, my best friend came into town, I turned 21 and I have been drunk all week and my internet has not been working! Things are slowing down a bit now. I've spent the last four or five days swimming at Barton Springs and it has been so beautiful and relaxing. Currently I'm at a coffee shop catching up with emails and willing for the cloudburst to pass so I can head home. I haven't had a chance to update recently nor have I been able to upload any photos for a while but I will try and get some stuff up in the next few days - I've no idea how many people actually read this but I suppose it's more for me than anyone else anyway :) And I have so many damn pictures of fancy things to edit and be excited about and share with everyone or someone or no one. I love Austin more and more every day.

2005

I recently came across a picture of me from 2005 via an old friend's Facebook and thought, "damn, I'm so glad I don't have short black and pink hair anymore." Then, today, the same person posted this picture of me, also from 2005, and I thought, "Jesus, no wonder I had body image issues for so long..."

I weighed like 92 pounds! I barely even existed! For so many years after my drug phase I struggled with the notion that I would never be as skinny as I was on speed, and I really did not want to accept that. I kept thinking that if I just ate as little as possible and worked out all the time I could get back down to 100 pounds. I think I came close at 107 when I was about 17, but I have since given up on that "dream." Every now and again, though, I do look back at myself as I was and wonder how I really feel about my body these days. I can't say that I love every aspect of my body, but I have grown much more accepting of the parts of it that I don't really like, and I have become more comfortable about things that I used to be super self-conscious of. Sometimes I consider that it might be nice to be that thin again, but then I wonder why it would even matter, or how it would make my life better...the years that I was extremely thin (even when I was off drugs) were definitely the most miserable ones of my life. Even now I find it hard to suppress the thought that being thinner would make me happier. Maybe it would, on some level, being a model, but often times I look at my photos and think that I look much thinner than I feel, and other times I feel much thinner than I look, so I think it's entirely subjective. I've never weighed more than 120 pounds in my whole life and unless I get knocked up or go back to eating meat I highly doubt that figure will alter drastically in the next 5-10 years.

The past week has seen several instances of me being forced to relive or remember my past and I find I have a lot more demons lurking than I thought I did. I suppose, in a way, moving here was a big part of me trying to escape all of that, and while I've physically removed myself from the people and the situations that were less than favorable, the memories still remain in some remote corner of my mind and they appear to be accessible at the worst possible times. I'm not really sure how to go about dealing with those things but I'm kind of hoping that if I just keep living my life and being happy and positive that they will fade away. In the mean time I have a whole slew of new confusion to deal with.

Writings

From some time ago...

Once again it lies in wait
A strange Beast with sultry voice,
it reaches for my hands and feet
and sets its lips upon them
It claws its way into my brain and there settles
under false pretense of love
It seeps lust into my dreams,
drenched in wine and smoke;
it leaves me curious and terrible and draws the air from my lungs
The Beast it leaves me longing for parched sand and foreign eyes,
for monoliths, flashes of colored light
And I, too, lie in wait
Supine in a grassy field,
naked,
a city of clouds swirling round me

As it stands, you are only a collection of letters,
a photograph, a future memory,
an absurd imagining
Further still
And the Beast rests its sparrow feet upon my shoulder
And kisses my neck
Ghastly handsome, it sings me to sleep
And coaxes sweet notes from a violet violin -
I dread the warm hour of your approach.

Canto, per chi non ha fortuna

My head's all tangled up tonight. Here are some pictures.

Unedited. Photo by Dan Leffel.

Unedited. Photo by Dan Leffel.

Photos to follow are by me...

The Inheritance - Michelle.

The Inheritance - Amanda.

Amy Annelle.

Not much to say presently...I'm moving into a new house in June and it's starting to stress me out just as much as moving from California did. Moving sucks. I am completely torn between wanting to have a place to be settled into and stay put and being totally restless and travelling all over the place. What now to do...