New Thirteen Myna Birds Guts

NEW Thirteen Myna Birds is hot and raw and red and bloody and sexy and strange - filled with peculiar offerings by J. Strife-Burgos, Adam Miller, Joseph Goosey, Shane Joaquin Jimenez, Tim Queen, and Roger Leatherwood here: http://13myna.blogspot.com/

“Shroud your guts in red things - duct-taped at each corner - I was a fool to think I had shifted - a trolley of surgical instruments - on her drowned lips - skin to silk - pale as a saint - my secret colors - sweet sacred venom - the music and the blood”

Reverting back to child circles

Sometimes it's frustrating, my brain feeling like it retracted back to how it was when I was a little girl. I was brimming with creative flow, but could visualize my ideas/thoughts/feelings/creative concepts better than I could figure out how to express them the way I wanted to with words.

Over the years I worked my brain up to become uniquely, precisely, descriptively expressive in my own chosen word-based way - but then I lost some brain power. In more recent years, my mental uniqueness did not disappear, but the precision of my word-based expressive abilities dissipated.

Negatively speaking, sometimes it really bums me out that I can no longer express things as well and specifically as I used to.

Positively speaking, sometimes I try to craft my visuals into a different form of art, whether or not I can explain it with words.

Semi-neutral speaking, I don't really know what to do with these other forms of art. (I can creatively entitle them.)

I remember myself down in the dark, dank basement, telling myself fast visual-based stories inside my own head (but unable to extract them with words out of my own head), walking around in circles. 

drain

Today i am feeling drained and uncertain about everything. What should I be focusing on? What shouldn't I be focusing on? Why? I don't know. Having one of my 'what is the point' of working on this, this, this, and this or ANYTHING days. I can't stay on top of it all; i can't stay in between it all. So far I've gotten a few tiny things done and don't even know how I feel about them. Maybe i would go back to bed, except that I already slept for 9 hours. August is a busy month for me and i guess i don't do good with business, because the very concept of staying on top of packing for two different trips, preparing for my dog, cleaning my house, sticking with my new exercise routine, and working on poetry stuff just seems too overwhelming for me, drains me, makes me feel like what is the point of anything? i'm not a good multitasker, i wish I had more energy, but I don't. I used to feel much more energetic; where did my energy go? Tiny little things suck my energy and drain me into feeling like relatively nothing.

Skulls and Ice Cream - New Thirteen Myna Birds - July 2013

NEW Thirteen Myna Birds with offerings by Bethany W Pope, Alessandra Bava, Tim Queen, Lyndon Seitz, Robert Cole, Jeremiah Walton, Sheila Murphy, Phillip Larrea, and Ricky Garni at http://13myna.blogspot.com/

"the bowl of my skull - bones-sparking - flawed but alive - unfed appetite for love - smuggled out in the slit lining - from friction they glow - sweet like lanyards and rope - in smoldering masks - a rubber chicken in melted plastic - a silver platter - imitative of a pyramid viewed from the inside - coconut on the ground - chills hard"

Why I don’t always like the phrase ‘lucky to be alive’

Because yes everyone is lucky to be alive, but repeatedly hearing that phrase directed at me in particular makes me feel as if I‘m supposed to focus on feeling lucky to be alive more than focusing on actually living. 

Because I don’t want to over-focus on the fact that certain life experiences might be a little more risky to me than to the average person.  After all, I’ve always been a bit of a risk taker in certain degrees – and for the most part, I don’t regret that – and I don’t want to feel as though I shouldn’t take any little risks anymore, because I’m so lucky to be alive I should just sit around feeling lucky instead of having a new life experience that might include small risk factors.

Don’t tons of things include small risk factors?  Is NEVER TAKING A RISK really good advice?  Some people might say yes.  I say no.  I’m not saying I’m going out of my way to take silly risks without even thinking, but if I think about trying something different that is not wildly unsafe and I decide to go for it,  then I’d like to be encouraged rather than discouraged.

If I had written this a few days ago, it would have been much more negative, bummed, and upset feeling  - but now I’ve thought about it more, reasonably considered whether it was over-risky or not and decided it wasn’t – and I’m going to do it.

Why should I not partake of a one-on-one new life experience and see what happens?

Insect Mounds and Tales

Yesterday I saw a cicada lying sideways on the ground in front of my garage door, unmoving.  I picked up the seemingly dead creature and carried it into my house, thinking I would appreciate it in some sort of artistic capacity later (a painting, collage art, or maybe just interesting photo positioning).  I set it on the side of my kitchen counter and then got to working on other things.

A little later, I didn’t see it where I had placed it, but found it fairly quickly, a tiny bit farther along the counter, moving its wings – so clearly it WASN’T dead.  I carefully gathered it via paper towel, carried it back outside, set it on the ground and took some photos of it - then I carried it to a tree and placed it atop a small branch where it seemed fairly comfortable, and took some photos of it there.

Shortly after placing it on that tree, a man who lives in my neighborhood, who does a lot of walking (and since we were often encountering each other when I was walking my dog, we finally introduced each other some months ago and got to taking little talking breaks when we see each other in the midst of a walk) was walking past my front yard – and I felt compelled to walk over to him and show & tell him about the cicada.

I also told him about how many years ago, when I was a little girl and there was a cicada influx, my sisters and I would pick up small tons of dead cicada bodies off the ground, form them all into a circular mound, and then position our pet cat in front of the mound and watch it eat the cicadas.(Golly, after what happened yesterday, with me thinking a cicada was dead, but it was still alive, I hope we weren’t feeding that cat a bunch of cicadas that were still alive and turning our cat into some sort of small white casper the friendly ghost cannibal  or something. That was our cats name. Well, not casper the friendly ghost cannibal.  Just casper.)

Then the man told me an amusing tale about how years ago, his yard had a lot of hornets and his little boy and little girl were scared of being stung by a hornet, so they became uncomfortable playing outside.  One day they were outside with him and one of his buddies and were about to head right back in as soon as they saw a hornet.  He asked them why they were so afraid of hornets and they said because if a hornet stung them, it would hurt really bad.  He told them so what if it stung them; it wouldn’t hurt that bad at all – and then he grabbed the flying hornet with his hand and flung it down to the ground.  See it stung me and that didn’t hurt, he told his kids – and then they stayed outside.  As soon as the kids moved away from the dad, his friend said, are you kidding?  Getting stung by a hornet didn’t hurt you that bad?  He said, hell yes it did, but now the kids are going to be comfortable playing outside.

***

I immediately wanted to tell him another story after that, but I could tell that my brain was going to have a lot of word issues if I quickly launched into that tale – and I didn’t feel like getting into the whole ‘why I sometimes have word issues’ talk with a guy I don’t know all that well, so that sort of bummed me out (but not nearly as bad as what bummed me out about my ‘health issues’ later last night, but I’ll get into that later, in a different blog post, maybe).

A little while after talking with that guy, I took my dog for another walk – and while walking him, I concentrated on trying to think of the easy words that wouldn’t quickly pop out of my head re: the next tale I’d wanted to share with him.  The main two were ‘bee’ and ‘lemonade’ – but also ‘pheromones’ and ‘insecticide’. It took me a while to get all those words.  They definitely wouldn’t have emerged in a sudden conversation, unfortunately.

However, now that I’ve finally managed to gather those words, I’ll tell the story to myself and whoever reads this blog. The tale was about how many years ago, when I was in high school, during some summers, I worked at the state fair, in some food booths.  Once I was working in the homemade lemonade booth with another girl – and about five bees entered the booth and were buzzing around a window, so we quickly killed them.

What we hadn’t known but soon found out was that dead bees release pheromones that attract other bees. Within about half an hour our booth was infiltrated with hundreds upon hundreds of bees – and at some point we realized that killing them kept attracting more and more and more, so we stopped killing them.  Since it was a fair booth serving a beverage we couldn’t spray insecticide in there and still stay open – and since the fair only lasted about a week, the owner did not want to close down the booth and lose all sales for a day – so we had to keep it open and be surrounded by bees.

I remember feeling very uncomfortable at first - remembering the discomfort of being stung by bees in the past and worried that now I was bound to be stung multiple times.  Guess what though?  I wasn’t stung a single time that day, even though I had times were a bee landed on me or was crawling on my hand.  After a while, I stopped feeling uncomfortable and realized every time I’d been stung by a bee in the past was because I had been wearing no shoes outside and accidentally stepped on it.  Why would a bee want to release its stinger and die unless that was a defense mechanism or a reaction to being stomped to death?

Hundreds of bees were flying around my head, crawling around the walls, crawling on the table near me, occasionally crawling on my hand and not a single one stung me.  After that experience and what it lead me to realize, never again did I swipe my hand at a bee flying near my face or a bee accidentally landing on me and then crawling on my clothing – because it now seems obvious to me that if you swipe at a bee that would make it much more likely to sting, because it would feel threatened - whereas if you just let it crawl on you for a minute, it will soon realize you’re not a plant brimming with nectars and it will fly away.  I still see lots of people swiping at bees though.

The only time I was ever stung by a bee in my adult life was when I was wearing flip flops, exited a car door and accidentally stepped on one. 

***

Back to hornets though, those creatures are a different ball game. They’re mean, more aggressive, and more prone to sudden random stings. I guess my neighbor is lucky that one of his kids didn’t get stung by a hornet the next day and then lose their father trusting feathers at a young age. 

The Tao of Badass is a Big Gross Money Making Trail of Shit

Why in the hell is this online site related to a book called 'The Tao of Badass' appearing as the main source that's viewing my blog lately? Out of curiosity, I clicked the link and listened to part of the video about the book and the guy is going on & on about how to get lots of HOT YOUNG women to sleep with you every month, even if you're short, fat, bald, don't have any muscle, don't have any money etc...

According to him, women don't really care about any of those things (it's just the media trying to convince men that they do) - and men mostly just want HOT YOUNG WOMEN sex partners.

And women can quickly be triggered to be extremely attracted to ANY man if he does things like look at her lips while speaking to her and give her the impression that lots of other women want him.

According to this video, every woman is basically the same (except that some are hotter than others - and those are the ones that ALL MEN WANT AND DESERVE) - and every man primarily just wants to get tons of HOT YOUNG WOMEN to desire his cock - and to get that, men can trigger all the women they want by learning and following these easy steps (that they need to pay money to receive).

According to this video, 97% of women like men with no hair.  So apparently any bald men staring at my lips is well on his way towards leading me into his bedroom, even if all he really cares about is hot pussy and will pull whatever maneuvers he can to get it.

ALL MEN want tons of HOT YOUNG WOMEN for sexual purposes.

ALL WOMEN can easily be triggered by ANY MAN who follows these easy steps.

Who cares about a man's or woman's true personality or interests or passion or genuineness, as long as they can trigger and be triggered?

I was working on a poem. Why did I take a break and listen to that shit heel crap?  Now I feel like a time wasting barf bag.

Don't bother looking up 'The Tao of Badass' (even if you are an insecure man who wants lots of women and can't figure out how to attract them) - because there's not any one easy set answer that works for all men and women in the world.

This book seems to me like a scam-oriented, money-making piece of shit, suggesting that all women and all men are basically the same and human beings have nothing to do with truth, genuineness, honesty, or unique individuality.

Gross.

 I'm the little witch on the left side of the page, next to Margaret Bashaar and Crystal Hoffman.

they couldn't hear me unless I screamed

Awoke last morning after ongoing odd dreams and even though I wasn’t sure exactly how/why/if this derived from my dreams, I immediately felt the need to write down a note about how I dislike and get really stressed out by some of my family dynamics – not just my immediate family so much as extended family issues that strike me as less love-based and more judgment based, along the lines of telling other people what they should or shouldn’t do (and what they’re doing wrong and how they need to do this or else…).

It’s  probably because I’ve felt such impressions throughout much of my life that I don’t usually like ANYONE (not even a good friend) phrasing things to me as if this is what I need to do unless I want something bad to happen. How does another individual know what I need to do? They don’t live inside my brain, do they? So how can they be experts on what does live in there?  Shouldn’t they focus on what they need to do?  They can offer me their thoughts/feelings/opinions (indeed I like that kind of in depth exchange), but I don’t think they should state their point of view as though if I don’t follow it, something bad or unhealthy is bound to befall me.

*

The dream recollections involve a seen in which I was driving with a group of family members and suddenly I knew that my dog was about to jump out the window on the other side.  In the dream, my dog looked like a white cat.  I kept saying stop the car, stop the car, stop the car, but nobody stopped. It wasn’t because they were purposely ignoring me, but they couldn’t hear me. They could only hear themselves. Until I screamed. 

I screamed, “WE NEED TO STOP!’, which finally got them  to stop, but by then my dog had jumped out the window.  I told them where to drive back to, but couldn’t remember exactly, and we couldn’t find him. He was gone.  I made myself wake up before I saw him dead on the road.

*

I often feel like I don’t matter much to anyone - and sometimes that makes it hard hanging out with people who feel like/act like they matter a great deal. People who even say things about themselves like, “I’m awesome”. I don’t relate to friends thinking/acting like they’re awesome, popular, very attractive, and so many people are attracted to them.

Aside from poetry readings and planned events, I’m not a fan when people think a space full of unknown other people (such as a restaurant or a bus ride) should hear their loud conversation, like it or not.  What if someone is trying to think their own thoughts and you suddenly jump into the space and start forcing yours upon them? I don’t think that’s particularly creatively enlightening or positive or caring towards others; in fact I think it can be invasive and stress inducing.  At least it is for me. 

Why should I want my brain forced to hear someone else’s conversation rather than being able to focus on my own or hear/speak with the person I’m sitting next to, who I’m having trouble hearing/concentrating on because I’m being loudly intersected by someone else’s expression and I don’t want to talk that loud or have a performance style conversation?

I could be wrong; I’m no expert; but I don’t think being stressed to the point of a bad headache by that sort of thing is a result of my brain’s negativity. I think it’s more like that is not my style – and when surrounded by it in excess for an extended time period, it stresses me out.  I don’t want to scream to be heard.

But then I have a dream where if I don’t scream, nobody can hear me.

*

“(I was never a cheerleader in real life.  I was never popular in real life.

What is real?  Why am I sinking down under these misshapen rafters?)”

from my poem, “Vintage Pom Pom Underwater”, which you can read in its entirety here –

http://www.counterexamplepoetics.com/2009/02/giggle-or-gurgle-her-voice-sounds-like.html

It’s one of 11 poems I read this past Saturday, during a poetry reading at the East End Book Exchange in Pittsburgh, PA. The weekend included time with very creative friends (poetry reading time, interesting conversation time, and more), bands, The Oakmont Bakery, and the Polish Hill Arts Festival.

small scales can still sail in their own way

do you ever feel small scale compared to what other people are doing/how other people are thinking/what other people are working on and experiencing? i do. i sometimes feel like i don't do enough compared to others; don't have enough new experiences compared to others; but some of those experiences there's no way i could even handle

for example, i could never be a doctor who performes surgery (but that's okay, because I never desired to be that - although I certainly appreciate the people who are great at that or i and lots of others wouldn't be alive)

for another example, i could never travel all over the united sates or travel other countries outside of the united states by myself for months (but that's something several friends of mine have done/are doing - and that's something part of me wishes i COULD do, but there's no way i could - and i'm not talking monetarily here; I'm talking about my mentality couldn't handle it on many different levels)

maybe some people might feel like they don't do enough compared to me

but then there's the fact that life should not be a comparison; it should be focused on everyone doing what's right/important/meaningful/significant for them; everyone choosing to arrange their lifetime and priorities as they choose

some people are primarily focused on kids/family, some people are primarily focused on art/reading/writing/publishing, some people are primarily focused on spirituality and growing in that realm...

some people are more physically active (including experiencing a lot of different locations), some people are more mentally active (there brain focusing on all sorts of things, even if they're mostly staying in one place physically), some people are neither, some people are both...

i'm definitely one of the more mentally active/brain focused persons (in both bad and good ways) - thoughts, feeling, words words words, writing writing writing my thoughts and feelings - and often that feels very important and significant to me - but on a larger scale, is that personal expression relatively meaningless and insignificant?

even if so; even if i am really small scale, is that a bad thing? 

lots of people are small scale in their own way right?

*

small scale or not, i've had lots of different life experiences, even if they feel like an ongoing circle shape with ups & downs then another circle...

but sometimes i feel as if I'm darkly frothing rather than evolving..

but are dark froths a bad thing?