I wrote a poem today

I dreamt last night

That I could tap my veins like maple trees.

I hammered the spike in

And blood poured onto the snow.

video store porn

I used to watch porn all the time. I had a favorite actress (sasha grey), favorite website (qmov), favorite genre (not going to share). I learned about blowjobs from porn before I could drive, and as I got older I learned many more tricks that made my sex life awesome. I got older, and busier, and then I stopped watching porn. I can't exactly say when it happened, or why. Maybe it was all those gender studies classes at columbia, maybe it was all my friends now working in the sex industry, maybe it's the fact that (excluding age-fetish porn) the overwhelming majority of the women in porn are several years younger than I am. Younger. Younger than I am. And I know fuck-all about life and the world and how shit works.

The local video store has become a significant part of my life ever since I moved into an apartment with minimal internet - not nearly enough to run netflix - but tonight was the first time I braved the maze to the adult section. I guess it never occurred to me before. I browsed for maybe two minutes before I left feeling like a failure, like I've failed my own sex life and I've failed every one of those women by even walking in there. I know that not all sex workers are slaves, I know that plenty of women choose that life and are happy and empowered there. Congratulations, ladies. You're doing god's work. My feelings have nothing to do with you. Well, that probably isn't true, but that's not related to what I mean to communicate.

I don't understand why I'm having an emotional response to the porn at the video store on my block, but I am. I used to be able to enjoy porn and use it to enhance my life, but now it just leaves me confused and unhappy. Why?

If I subdue the massive anger I have at the industry's overwhelming abuse and cruelty toward women generally and it's own actresses specifically, which makes me violently nauseous, if I focus, for the sake of argument, on porn featuring only consenting, happy women, I'm still mired in this confusing anger.
Is it inadequacy? Maybe. Maybe this reaction is rooted in the conviction that because I can not and will not perform the tricks with my orifices those girls (because really, these actresses are mostly younger than I am, so if I mean to be accurate I shouldn't be saying women) perform with theirs, that I am Less Than they are sexually. Than I don't fuck as well as they do. That they have raised the bar in the male conception of femininity to a height I do not aspire to and will never meet.

So, no. I don't want to watch porn any more. And I don't like the idea of it in the damn video store. Get your porn on the internet, privately. And turn down your music and get off my lawn.

Short fiction nine

The dog was the problem between us. That's what I thought then at least. Now I can see that any first year psych student would have been able to see that the dog just bore the brunt of the problem. It had taken root in each of our minds separately then finally  merged into a single great growth between us, pushing us apart, our timber creaking, to make room for the giant it planned to become. My need to comfort the dog during storms, to make him feel safe and protected, to find the perfect place for his bed that would guarantee he'd be able to hide from his myriad spooks but also would never feel alone or isolated - how could I not see that all of this was my own fear and anxiety sprung  wholly from my head like (Zeus' child), my internal horror at my own manners, my nagging shame of being Less Than assuming the form of that greatest of Danes, my dog. 

No, the personification of my darkest anxieties and fears was not godlike at all. Zeus would never have personified the part of himself he both loathed and couldn't understand. A closer analogy for the projection of my anxiety onto the dog would be some kind of south American parasite  - it was an anxiety capable of consuming my entire identity and, unfinished, fabricating a loose system of hollow reactions and downcast eyes to pass as humanity to the few peers not immune enough to it be repelled by it automatically. 

So the dog got lazier. It turned out of course he wasn't just lazier; I'd infected him with my depressive-anxiety. The dog and I manifested our symptoms the same way. We stayed in our beds. We were silent; I dont know whether he would have spoken to anyone if he could have.  I recognized the vacancy behind his eyes from the mirror I looked into every morning while brushing my teeth. I recognized it before I even saw it, I suppose, in his eyes or in mine. In that place the mind is emptier than a vacuum. It doesn't even have the force to suck thoughts in in order to crush them infinitesimally. It had neither content nor force. I barely remember living there, because memories need to be tied to words like balloons to those little sandbags to be retained, to be kept, but in that place there were no words in my head  so any memory that may've found something with which to fill itself must just have drifted off. 

I've always had nightmares. I'm afraid of a lot of unreasonable things that I don't tell people about. As the summer melted into a sunny fall the nightmaresstarted coming for me during the day. I fell asleep midday, unwillingly, pulled by dreams i didn't want. 

Nightmares slid long fingers into my conscious mind and pulled me down into their myriad darkness, like long seaweed catches an anchor, until i was moored in their phantasmic depths, crying out loud from the watery deep of my screaming dreams: I woke, angry: angry like the man shaking me. 

"Don't fucking interrupt me. Im working, asshole."

I nodded, how many times?.

I said "yes." 

I said "I'm sorry."'  

I said "I didn't mean to." 

I tried to sit upright. I held a novel open on my thighs. So many novels, those long afternoons. But the long pale slimy fingers reached around my mind, dug their nails into the gray matter between my ears, worked my brain like dough, and took me again. I was so quickly lost to the primal fear of nightmare. 

It was a cycle of fear that led to more anxiety. I got quieter, he got angrier. In the mornings I woke up slowly. I made weak tea and returned to bed to read, but my eyelids were heavier than steel weights, they pulled down. I rolled my eyes up to fight them, and he found me passed out with my eyes rolled up into my head.

I tried to tell him how hard I tried to stay awake. I described staring at my hand, mentally demanding it to lift, to push me up, but he didn't want to hear. I told him how many times I felt myself standing and walking across the room, only to stand at the sink and look at the bed, seeing myself still flat across it. They call it sleep paralysis. He didn't like to hear me talk about these things,  he thought I was asking him to solve a problem and proving his impotence by making him admit to not knowing how. I just needed to talk, to know another person knew what I was fighting. 

I slipped into nightmares before I was even asleep. I laid in bed staring at the hand I couldn't move and yelled his name, I screamed for help but heard no voice come out. Nightmares. He couldn't hear me. A sleeping girl cannot cry for help any more than she can raise her hand. He saw those moments as symptomatic of an illness he didn't want in his lover. He didn't like me to talk about them, he thought I was sick and he couldn't fix me. 

I told him about my dreams, about the faces in the windows, about the presence I felt standing over me, about the Danger walking through our rooms. The distance betwee us just pushed further.

The nightmares got worse.

My voice drifted ever farther from me. Overcast mornings left fog clinging to the windows and I never really knew whether I was dreaming or awake. I lived in fear of the nightmares. I spoke less and less. My silence was my only weapon against the fear that would reduce me to tears if I tried to share it. He got angrier. I think he felt helpless. 

"You have to tell me what's wrong. Why are you so miserable? It's every day now. I can't live around this." 

"I don't know honey. I'm sure it'll get better. I'm just tired I guess." 

I may have dreamed those conversations. Maybe I dreamed the fights too. Some of it must have happened. Something made him leave. His shouts bounced around in my head for a long time after. 

"You're empty. You're silent. You're looking at things that aren't here. I can't live with you while you vanish. You can't even say what you're afraid of!"

I left the house less and less. The nightmare fog oozed out of my dreams into my waking life. The barrier between the two dissolved in the haze. 

I started sleeping through my days and couldn't sleep at night. I became nocturnal. The nights were simply too threatening. The setting of my nightmares, the men attacking, the fear and Danger, was always night; I had to stay awake then to make sure they didn't become real while I was vulnerably asleep. One night I returned from the grocery around two am, my eyes still reeling from the abrupt shift away from supermarket fluorescents to the inky black road and flashing stop lights. My dog followed me inside, a faithful and trustworthy shadow. I flipped the kitchen light on and swung open the refrigerator door and my skin shifted its' position on my bones. I jerked my body around to put my back against the humming appliance and face the sputtering lightbulb over my kitchen sink. Had I just turned that light on a moment ago? I must have; it only then kicked into a steady emission of watts. That bulb always took a moment to kick into full power illumination. So it must have been off when I got in. My lungs grabbed desperately for more air. I always left that light on when I went out. I'm afraid of the dark. I wouldn't be able to walk through a dark kitchen to get out the door. The refrigerator kept humming behind me. I stood motionless for what felt like a long time before my lungs could accept air deeply and slowly. I'm sure I forgot. I must have turned the light off without thinking and then forgotten about it. 

The nightmare voice made me count the knives in the kitchen drawer while I made tea, and bring one with me to my bedroom.

I fell asleep around eight that morning, and the things I saw in my nightmares blurred the fear the memory of that strange fear I felt in the kitchen. The dog was whining when I woke. 

short fiction eight

A woman's pride lives in a cool, dry place near her core, tucked safely between the spaces holding her security and her confidence. Her pool of pride pours into the stream of her dignity that flows along her spine and keeps her standing.

A half-assed return to blogging.

So, yeah, I didn't update this shit for like six months. I can't imagine this is upsetting to anyone at all, but despite your total lack of reaction to my absence I'm returning. I'll probably fade off again shortly.

Since my last update not much has happened that a reader would need to know to understand future posts. I got a boyfriend, he's great. I doubt there will be much about that here but just in case. I'm not stripping anymore but I am a bartender at a strip club. I do expect to thrill you with tales of that development. It's not great, but it is funny.

I mostly wanted to kick this shit back into life to muse on the following: I think I ruined some really great records by overplaying them in rehab. I still can't listen to Imogene heap. Huge bummer.

So much for new thoughts.
I'm gonna just post the openings to a couple different stories ive been working on.

Fuck everybody.
Alexandra Elisabeth

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feeling feelings

there are times when, no matter what one does, one is dragged into unnecessarily messy situations entirely outside her own control. this happened to me the night before last. i desperately wish i could relay this story in the active tense, but unfortunately i had no agency in almost any of it. the whole mess blew up in my face; i happened to be holding the grenade when it exploded, but i certainly didn't pull the pin.
i know who did pull the pin, though, and i must admit my deep, deep disappointment in him. but let's set the scene before we walk through its combustion.

i was very proud of the arrangement i found when i moved to ohio. open, casual, liberated - i'd never been able to apply those words to my sex life before, but here, i could. i had no reason to worry about boys at all - i had one when i wanted one, but without any of the thinking or feeling usually attendant to official relationships. it was ideal. we honestly had no expectation of each other - i could and often did leave town, he could and often did keep other girls here. the only requirement was that we do everything openly. we knew what we were getting from each other. that, my friends, is the dream; to be able to say "you do you" without any hesitation, to be genuinely unbothered by where he goes in his spare time, to be free from any of the responsibility and emotional burden of a relationship - i never met his parents, i didn't have to throw his birthday party, i didn't have to know his darkest secrets or fuck him when i was tired. our time together was strictly fun: all PDAs at bars, running jokes, lazy mornings...  we could share all these things completely securely knowing that no one had to get hurt AND i got to brag about being liberated from the social pressure to couple up, while getting laid without sleeping around.

however, we must all learn at some point that utopia is never real, no matter how desperately we wish it to be. my paradise was not founded in the honesty i require. turns out, my anti-relationship wasn't the picture of modernity i believed it to be, for my man hadn't found a string of girls willing to participate in our experiment. instead, from the perspective of the poor child who texted me in the middle of the night on friday, i was the girl helping her boyfriend cheat on her.

i do not like to be lied to, i do not like to be manipulated, i do not like to talk about feelings, and i do NOT like to be blamed for another person's mess. therefore, i was, as you can imagine, slightly less than thrilled to wake up to a phone vibrating with hateful messages from an incredibly upset girl who somehow knew all the worst parts of my history and blamed me for stealing her man. luckily for me, this girl is a decent and reasonable human being, who quickly understood that had i known she'd been lied to i never would have participated. we spoke throughout much of the next day, and though i promised her that i would wait until she'd had a chance to yell at the boy in question before venting my anger with him, talking to her longer just made me angrier. since he's no longer answering his phone, i've taken to the internet to bitch, following in the footsteps of millions.

how can a man just lie to the people he's so sweet toward - the people he purports to care about? if this is something he's capable of, doesn't that make him less a man than a boy? if he continues this behavior into his thirties will he be a little boy throughout his life? is there hope for a person who exhibits this behavior, who values the people around him so little? i can't stand that he misrepresented himself to me, but it's something i'm relatively used to. the part of this story that absolutely makes me want to stab him right in the balls with a rusty flathead screwdriver is how he treated the girl who thought she was his girlfriend. this is a person with whom he's been sleeping for MONTHS - i know, because she asked me if he and i were together on NEW YEARS. her emotional investment in their relationship was pretty high, which he must have known (probably also why he decided against honesty) and consciously decided to take advantage of. i can't imagine any other way for this to have gone on for, again, MONTHS with her imagining monogamy. and then to drag me into his mess? the whole point of sleeping with him was to avoid emotional messes!

i'm very upset, which isn't a state i enjoy. because of this dbag's irresponsibility, i can no longer hang out with any of the people i've taken to spending my time with here. what was about to be a kick-ass country summer will now be a drawn-out battle with the university of michigan and a lonely wait for my return to new york. great.