in another part of cyberspace;

http://sososadbuttrue.blogspot.com/


thank you for everything.

XOXO

She started having cold sores and unsightly rashes.

Mommy didn't protect Anita. Couldn't wouldn't. Turned the old blind eye. Anita's eyes changed from velvet brown to black lakes.
Bottomless lakes where dirty secrets sank through to the sludgy end. She started having cold sores and unsightly rashes. She would wake up in the middle of the night screaming so the nice china in the kitchen cabinet almost shattered. Mommy just rolled over and reached for the ear plugs. Sometimes Anita wet her  bed. That made mommy furious. Because she hated going to the laundromat. She would say to Anita: You're not a child anymore.

Anita was twelve when it started.

Later Anita started smoking cigarettes and hanging out with boys who drove stolen cars and drank beer and sniffed glue.

Mommy liked to watch TV. Mommy liked to drink white wine with an ice cube in. She liked mail-order catalogs. She liked her boyfriend. Or she liked the fact that she had one. That made her feel lucky, she said. But if she really would have thought about it, about him, maybe she would have come to the conclusion that he really didn't contribute anything but troubles.

Sometimes he would pick Anita up from school. That was the one good thing he did. So why the hell did Anita complain about it? Especially since he would buy her ice cream and soda?

She had just turned sixteen when she finally called the police. In mommy's boyfriend's computer there were many videos that he had made when he raped her in stairwells in public buildings. When he had brought friends along. When he forced her to perform oral sex on him on a polluted beach, behind some shrubs, under a cloud bursting with rain.

I told her that I had hoped we'd maybe make out while watching the ducklings frolic in the pond.

It was all carefully orchestrated. That's what I tell myself when I sit in my apartment, crying into a beer and heating up fish sticks in the toaster.

I am but a puppet in someone's master plan.

So it's OK that I smeared an inch-thick layer of cream cheese frosting on my vegan carrot cake and ate until I had a belly-ache. And it's OK that I said Fuck You Asshole to the Vodafone-guy who refused to help me sign up for DSL in English.
I have one more wall to paint in the livingroom and I've called in sick to do it. I decided to have a crush on the girl at the café. Just because the weather was so lovely and I had been shopping and drinking and felt so alive I didn't know what to do with myself. Carbonation in my bloodstream. Shoes made out of marshmallows.

And then. Disaster. Failure. Rejection. Mega-rejection. We rode our bikes to Treptow Park. They have this really cool Russian monument there. A giant bronze guy stabbing a Swastika with a sword. Then, as we sat in a beer garden, she started lecturing me. Said I was so American. That I always should ask if someone speaks English, before I just order a beer in American or ask for directions in American.

Sure, I said. I should. But as soon as I do that person looks at me like I had insulted them. Because everyone speaks English here. Except for the Vodafone-guy.
Then she said that by asking her out on a date I was acting no better than a dude. I was making her an object. I was copying fucked-up heterosexual behaviors.


Maybe that's how you do in the States, she said, this gorgeous café latte-skinned girl with dreadlocks and a pierced septum. But that's not the way it's done here. The world is big, you know.

I told her that I had hoped we'd maybe make out while watching the ducklings frolic in the pond.

Then she got up and left me with the bill. Just like a fucking girl.

Now Volcanic ash is clouding the air. The temperature has dropped and the skies are gray, gray, gray.

But there's still a light that never goes out. I will eventually wipe my tears, blow my nose, band-aid my wounds.

call it by its real name

There's a fox on the run. She has a bushy tail dipped in white. A small shy face.
She's on the run along the canals. I can't tell what she's looking for, if anything. Love? Food? Just a distraction? A nice way to kill some time. The moon is but a sliver, but through a rift, on the outskirts of the horizons, there's some navy blue spilling out, as a premonition. The fox cuts across Greifswalder Strasse and starts following the street car tracks.
You've got to keep moving, right?

(He doesn't speak, he screams, when he's on the phone)

She sometimes talks to me as if I was an idiot. I guess I am when it comes to certain things. I am at a remedial level when it comes to faking a smile. And it's nearly impossible for me carrying more than two soup bowls without scalding myself, or leaving a trail of carrot-ginger splashes on the tiled floor. I hate that tone in her voice, that look on her face. Hate it. But then again, other times she's very sweet. Tells me how much she likes me, and says I am a good worker. A good worker?
I know she drinks too much red wine upstairs and that she makes expensive phone calls to her Psychic friend. That witch tells her that soon she'll meet a tall, handsome man and she won't be lonely or confused anymore. That love really is a miracle, and that her personal one is just waiting in the wings. The dollars go tick-tick-tick.
She's a fool because she allows herself to dream and to hope.

(He thinks I am unfair. I think he's unfair. He says I'm selfish. I say the same thing about him)

I stopped and watched the fox disappear down the soft slope leaning towards Alexanderplatz. I suddenly ached to be in a forest, and to see her there, threading confidently over roots that beckon for a human stumble. But not a fox one. I dreamed, for a short moment, of those dense pine tree fairytale forests that I think could only exist in Scandinavia. Where distant snow-covered mountains poke star-hung skies, and elves flow-dance on misty meadows.

The sum of the problems is always constant.

Satan if you're there, please touch my shoulder

I didn't remember any of it until recently. Or, I guess I just stopped thinking about it.
But my cousin Claire was a truly wicked one. And then she jumped off a hotel roof in New Orleans. To pay for the life she took. Or at least that's what the note in her pocket read.

Her mom (my aunt) started dating this beautiful black guy from New Orleans. He had chocolate skin and sexy teddy bear eyes. His legs seemed to go on for miles and miles. He was an artist. So was Claire's mom Kate, although she'd only ever shown her work in local coffee shops. But she was definitely a social genius who knew everybody in Sacramento. When she had parties and Claire happened to be there with her braces and bad posture, guests would sometimes ask her: So, how do you know Kate?
Claire resented her mother, because she had more friends and more lovers than her. And she was beautiful in all the ways Claire wasn't. And Claire wasn't very fun to be around, even I, who was six years younger thought her games were childish and that she always smelled like milk gone bad. Maybe that was the wickedness leaking from her pores?

Around the time that Kate started dating Derek, the guy from New Orleans, Claire changed. Almost overnight. Suddenly the braces where gone, and her skin was pimple-free. And suddenly she had breasts that she accentuated with lacy push-up bras. She plucked her eyebrows into delicate arches that framed her green eyes in a way that now you suddenly noticed them. And there was a pretty power in them that hadn't been there before. The same boys that up until then had treated her like stale air started to twist their necks too far when she strutted by.
And she definitely didn't want to play with dolls anymore. Now she wanted to put on make-up, smoke pick-pocketed cigarettes in the upstairs bathroom and talk about the birds and the bees. She said she was no longer a virgin, because she had penetrated her hymen with an eyeliner. There was one gooey drop of blood.

Kate told Claire that it was serious this time. She said that she and Derek were really in love, and that she wanted to marry him. And that she wanted to have his child. And that child would have the most luscious cappuccino skin tone.

One night Derek came over for dinner. Claire wore her shortest skirt and her most effective push-up bra. She kept hitting the champagne pretty hard, especially since Kate was pretty relaxed about underage drinking. The tiny potent bubbles went to Claire's head. She kept on pretending to accidentally brush up on Derek, and she tried playing footsie with him under the table that was set with the nicest cutlery and lit with candles. But he tried to dodge her sock-feet attacks by moving those long legs out of the way.
After about the fifth glass of champagne the dining room was spinning out of control for Claire, the wallpaper became a kaleidoscope and she was trapped inside of it.
I am going to get sick, she said and grabbed Derek's wrist and asked him to help her. Or at least to hold her hand. In the bathroom, after she'd thrown up, she sat on the tiled floor with her legs spread and her panties on display. She took Derek's hand and placed it on her milky thigh and asked him if he liked her.
He patted her thigh in what he thought would seem a fatherly way, and said: Of course I like you, Claire. You are a sweet girl. Let me help you off this floor.

But Claire wasn't sweet. She wasn't a good girl. Because a couple of months earlier she had been in that windowless upstairs bathroom. The one with the linoleum floor that mold grew under, where we used to get dizzy on from stolen menthol cigarettes.
She had switched the lights off and she had said out loud: Satan if you're there, please touch my shoulder. She waited. And waited. Then she said it again. And she felt a chill between her shoulder blades, like a block of ice was held an inch away from her skin. She wanted to bolt out of there, into the safety of the rest of the house drenched in the remains of the day. But she clenched her teeth and whispered through them: I'll sell my soul to you, do whatever you will with it. But in exchange I want some beauty and some action.

She begun pursuing Derek. He wasn't interested at first. I mean she was a child. And he was in love with Kate. But there was a pull in Claire's gaze and a heat to her touch. He found himself swayed. God help me, he thought. Because his parents were good southern baptists.

One day Claire took the city bus to the industrial area where Derek had his studio. She chugged a wine cooler on the bus. She wore a dress than clung to her body – that was becoming more voluptuous by the minute – like saran wrap. He didn't expect her, didn't want her. Well, only a little. Only in the unlit, filthiest corners of his brain where dust bunnies celebrated two-digit birthdays.
She found the building. She found his door. She pounded on it with a fist made of lead. When Derek opened Claire threw himself at him. She hung her arms like a chain around his neck. Squeezed her thighs around his hips like a fox trap. Derek stumbled backwards and pulled her down with him on the Jackson Pollock-splattered floor, And that's where they did it. And they did it again. Kate called several times during. They both heard her lovesick voice on the answering machine: Honey, sweetie, where are you? I miss you, I need you.

And then the affair spiraled out of control. Derek was hexed. Or so he said. And then one night Claire told Derek that Kate was in San Francisco and that she wouldn't be back until the following day. But in reality she was just having dinner with a girlfriend who she'd neglected due to her infatuation, as one tends to do. But now she wasn't doing so good. She was constantly having bad hair days. She felt that Derek's kisses had started to have less tongue in them. She feared he was falling out of love with her, and that she wasn't going to have a beautiful café au lait baby after all.

After dinner she came home and walked in on Derek fucking her sixteen-year old daughter doggy-style in her bed, on her satin sheets.
There was a terrible racket in the hallway and then Kate ran out of the house and back into the car. A strange ice rain had started to fall from the pitch-black sky.
How it happened we don't know. But Kate drove off the road and the car turned into a pile of scrap metal. Inside it her body was twisted into a shape not even a senior Cirque de Soleil dancer can pull off.

Claire stalked Derek to New Orleans. He stopped making art. He started going to church again and grew a beard and a belly.

Claire eventually went on a booze and coke-bender with a male stripper she had met on Bourbon Street. When that came to an end, like all things come to an end, she jumped from the roof of the Omni Hotel in the French Quarter. The security cameras caught her hesitate for just one frozen split second of eternity.
She had this story written on a napkin folded into her jean pocket and soaked in blood.

serial killers read me bedtime stories sitting at the edge of my princess bed

Sometimes melancholy creeps up on me when everything seems to be going my way. And this just happened. It almost feels chemical. I am not heart-broken. I haven't fought with daddy. I found this great new apartment and have been enjoying going to flea-markets to hunt for furniture. I am going to school and making friends.

But despite the sunshine and the baby-blue Berlin sky. The extremely cheerful birds chirping from their nest outside my kitchen window. And the perfectly moist lemon poppy cake I over-indulged in.

It's like the curtain dropped. And I am choking on musty and dusty red velvet. The air feels sandpaper-y to breathe and I am just too tired to keep my eyelids hoisted. Instead I fall into a half-sleep state where serial killers read me bedtime stories sitting at the edge of my princess bed. And I masturbate myself raw with a spiked dildo. And tear the wings off dragon flies.

I still haven't been able to create sufficient meaning to sustain my pitiful existence in this cold galaxy.

the so-called feminist ones wearing sandals exposing yellow toenails curling around calloused toes in desperate need of a pedicure.

something anise wrote in my comment box made me think.

sometimes i get totally disgusted by men. the macho, homophobe assholes with tufts of monkey hair on their chubby shoulders. the so-called feminist ones wearing sandals exposing yellow toenails curling around calloused toes in desperate need of a pedicure. the hot ones who use girls to massage their inflated egos. the psychopath ones making decisions, in their roles as governors, college professors, bosses, that affect the world in an ugly way.

But more often I feel ashamed to be a woman, when there are so many women giving my gender a bad name. I am talking about women who let men walk all over them, and claim to actually like it. Women who get breast implants because they think they won't get a husband with small titties. Women who act stupid. Women who think that a fat diamond ring will solve all of their problems. Women who complain that their boyfriends treat them like shit, flirt with other girls right in front of them, never cook, never clean –– And then STILL not DUMP their lame fucking asses. In those cases I sympathize with the douchebag dude rather than the bimbo Barbie girl. It's a dog eat dog world.

I want women to be strong, to speak their mind. To kick ass. To lay down the law. To use men as sex toys. To be proud of that extra roll of fat. To not take shit. To kick their lame-ass BFs to the fucking curb.
This, of course, applies mostly to hetero women. Of course there are homo girls that suck too, in a myriad of ways (believe me, I am dealing with a sucky lesbian as I type this) but at least they don't tend to fucking crawl in the gutter for dudes. 

Shit, I got really worked up typing this. But really, today has been a perfect day.

Now I want to know what Y'all think?

Sunshine Award

I also got a Sunshine award from the very clever and sweet Cleo over at Youth Is Wasted On The Young

 

The rules of this blog award are:

1. Post this logo within your blog or post

2. Pass the award onto 5 fellow bloggers

3. Link to the nominees within your post

4. Let the nominees know they have received an award by commenting on their blog

5. Share the love and link the person whom you received this blog award

So I will pass this award onto:

1. My girl Tessa over at Apparellel 

Because she has style galore and is both super hot and super sweet. 

2. Left Hand Cuts The Right 

for an endless supply of awesome images

3. Heather at The Dream Machine 

because she seems to be an extraordinary ordinary girl and I mean that in the most complimentary of ways.

4. The one and only Anise at sometimes i am made of light because she knows how to string words along to form the most beautiful sentences and express very personal innermost thoughts. 

5. Hope Chella

another great and inspirational photo blog.

XOXO, Kim

Why have I snorted heroin? Drunk myself silly? Woken up covered in vomit and bruises? Fucked boys with bad breath?

This is spring as they know it here. It's high time to shed the cloak of darkness, in order to see clearly. To not think sullen thoughts. I am sitting in a café called St.Oberholtz in Mitte, Berlin. Twenty years ago this was part of the GDR. Now it's filled with hipsters and Spanish tourists. And Americans like me, disenchanted and disconnected. Accident prone and curious. Love-sick and occupied with various substitutes for God.

A caravan of sirens just blew through the sunshine on the street below the big panoramic windows.

My love interest has been hitting the crack-pipe. She moved out of her home and into a squat-like, crumbling apartment with vomit-looking murals painted on the walls where black mold grows like a cancer.

She was writing me, she said, when she was high and lonely and confused. She was typing in a trance in between hits on the pipe.
She wrote that she couldn't stop thinking about me, and that she longed to trace the lines criss-crossing my palms. She wrote that she wanted to hold me all day and night. She wrote about my eyes; green like pools in tropical forests. (That's when someone should have slapped me hard. Because my eyes are blue.)
All these sappy love-emails, asking me to come back to Berlin and to be her star-crossed lover.
And I imagined us walking hand in hand through this city, where people don't seem to smile out of courtesy, and where psychic echos of past atrocities can come out of nowhere – like tumbleweeds on a lonesome Texas highway – at any point in time. 


And now she's high all the time. Her skin is ravaged by pimples and weird scratch marks. She smells worse than teenage boy foot sweat. She doesn't want to fuck. I don't want to fuck. I don't even think I like her. I think I just wanted to do something crazy, something that would mythologize me and sound good in my memoirs. Her voice is shrill and she talks with food in her mouth. She owns several Alanis Morrisette CDs, and that is cause enough to end this 'thing' before it even started.
So why is she smoking crack?

Why have I snorted heroin? Drunk myself silly? Woken up covered in vomit and bruises? Fucked boys with bad breath?

Is it all about the substitute for god? The hole that can't be filled?

I am filling it now with work, with the apartment I rented and that I will have to furnish. With my new friend, Michael. He works with me at Sandy's place. He's a really good waiter. He's from Georgia via San Francisco and London. He has a really interesting story I will tell you soon.

P.S A lot of my pix come from here: http://ghostwerld.wordpress.com/ awesome photo blog!!!

You will find me making voodoo dolls. You'll find me drinking JD straight outta bottle.

I know you can't run.
But have you ever thought about reinventing yourself? Shedding skin? Coming out shiny and new?

I have become another person. When I come home (read: if I come home) you may not recognize me. And it's not because my hair color changed or because I gained or lost weight.

I get up early. I work as a waitress. I take walks in the park. I don't drive anywhere. I drink Apfelshorle. I signed up for Deutsch classes.

But keeping the darkness at bay is a full-time job even for a cheerful person like me. When I let the guard down an unexplored part of the gray scale blindfolds me. And that black hole makes me a little lopsided. And then the vertigo comes.

You will find me making voodoo dolls. You'll find me drinking JD straight outta bottle. You'll find me stoned and playing scrabble. With myself. Because I am a sore loser. Don't ever take me on a mini-golf date. You'll find me speeding down Mullholland Drive, momentarily intoxicated by the SoCal beauty, but mostly not caring about the outcome. My outcome.

But now I suddenly have a job. As a waitress. I've never done it before. But this American lady, Sandy, hired me for her American-style restaurant.
I like working. It's sort of new to me. 

So there's already trouble in my paradise.

Morning is gray and crisp. The pollution is but a distant unpleasant thought, fading fast from my muscle memory and cells.

I will shall must look on the bright side. I must trust that there's a sun beyond those curtains of death gray. 


The birds are chirping cheerily. Longingly. (If I say lovingly am I guilty of anthropomorphizing?)
The GDR vision of space age; The Fernsehenturm is beaming dull aluminum through the 8 am haze.


I came with a suitcase, the laptop and a guitar. I am a walking, talking cliche. The young American girl taking on Europe. Who doesn't speak the language beyond: Entshuldigung, sprechen sie English, bitte? Far away from home, brave with the visa card from daddy safely tucked away in my fanny pack. Ein beer, bitte!

She is colder than I expected her to be. There's no tongue in our kisses. And they don't aim for the lips either. The embrace is tense and doesn't rub off. She has bags under her eyes. And tales of trouble.It's not you, it's me.

I never learn not to have any expectations. And now I try to look for the signs I missed while being blind-folded by my silly desired to be loved. And I am not even getting fucked.


So there's already trouble in my paradise.

P.S My blogger acts buggy. I hit return and nothing happens. I click the italics button and nothing happens. Advice? Help!

Said that black lipstick wasn't flattering

Drowsiness washes over me like black waves. Threatening to pull me under and push my body down onto jagged rocks wrapped in seaweed. I feel jet-lagged, but I haven't traveled anywhere. Not yet. I haven't even left my room. I can't but surrender to the poison.

Once I sat on a jetty with my feet in a predator-fish infested water. It was a dare. 

I was born this way. I should know better than trying to change.

They used to be concerned. They used to feel sorry for me. I used to see worry cloud their eyes like Los Angeles pollution clouds the California sky. I was a lost cause even then. It was much worse than they ever could have known.

I dreamed about wild horses, dark waters and dark boys with eyes that could suck the light out of any room. Any day.

I wrote letters. Typing away until my wrists were aching.

Still, they just worried and worried. Said I changed too much. Said that black lipstick wasn't flattering on nobody. And not scar tattoos either.

I've always done it my way. 

And I like danger. I like fucking.

I am about to do the dumbest thing. My friends tell me; Oh, you will come home in crutches, Kim. 

But I am a romantic. And an idiot.

And I like danger. I like fucking. Here, my life has become dull. The sunshine and that special California light has started to bore me. I act and react on auto-pilot.

I don't need time to think. It was thinking that got me into trouble to begin with. There are deep groves in my brain made by having the same thoughts over and over again.

Today I bought several grocery store rags, drove to the nearest Starbucks, sat in the antiseptic AC-air and looked at celebrity cellulite while gagging on a Venti Caramel Frappuccino. In the corner of my evil eye I watched the tanned blondes hurry by with their car keys and Blackberries. I felt like vomiting in one of those un-offensive Starbucks armchairs, designed not to irritate anyone. But they irritated the hell out of me. Had I carried a knife I would have stabbed that piece of generic furniture dead.

An old flame says she hasn't been able to stop thinking about me, that she can still feel my feverish touch on her skin.

And I am eating it up, sucking it down.

She lives miles and miles away. I am going. And I am staying gone. Come visit me in Berlin!!!

This house is haunted, right Ashley?

The first cut is the deepest. We all know that, right?

On the jagged coastline of Oregon. Where trees have been forced, by the wind, to become prematurely crippled and hunch-backed. Where sharp black rocks stick out of the cold sea.

That's where the dull knife cut into me for the first time. It left an ugly scar. That looked as if it was purchased in a Halloween-shop.

She was my cousin. I know, this is getting gross. She was 21 and I was 14. We had been visiting for the whole week, my dad and I. It was all in the family. Card games and Sunday roasts every night. My dad and my uncle and his wife hitting the whiskey pretty hard. Me and my cousins sneaking away to smoke stolen cigarettes.

I would mostly play with Ashley, who was my age. Her sister, Heather, was hardly ever around. She was going to college in Chicago.

One night we locked ourselves into the walk-in closet with some dessert wine and a Ouija board. Heather was a beautiful goth-girl and looked like Satan's bride already; her skin so pale it was almost translucent. And gray eyes that would quickly shift into black if someone said something stupid or tried to contradict her. She would beat up Ashley all the time. 'Just because she was annoying and used to eat boogers.'

We are going to talk to spirits, she said. This house is haunted, right Ashley?

Ashley nodded and took a swig from that sickly sweet wine, and passed the bottle to me. We had everything set up and I was starting to get that warm, tingly feeling of alcohol. The candles cast mysterious shadows on us and made us feel really daring, cool and adult, in the best meaning of the word.
Meanwhile, I hadn't even gotten my period yet, and Ashley wore braces and had blunt features and a weak chin that would forever condemn her to be invisible.

So who wants to ask the first question? Heather asked. We all had silly drunken smiles hanging onto our faces. She poked me in the crotch with her sock-foot. I don't know if it was on purpose, but I felt a surge of electricity tingling its way up my spine.

OK, I said, clearing my throat. Who are you? We had one index finger each on the glass. Nothing happened.

What do you want? Heather asked, looking around the dark closet filled with mothballs and unfashionable coats.

And then the glass started to move across the Ouija board, spelling out: I w-a-n-t t-o c-u-r-s-e y-o-u

We giggled. But I could tell Ashley didn't like it anymore.

Why? she asked faintly.

The glass begun to move, faster this time: B-e-c-a-u-s-e.

That's not an answer, I said and pretended to accidentally stick my foot into Heather's crotch.

Then the glass swished away and wrote: K-i-m i-s g-a-y.

Ashley stared at me. Then she started to cry, and bolted out of the closet.

I went down to the beach with Heather, where we polished the bottle off. Our parents were smoking bong hits on the porch, but the wind was roaring though the hills and whipping up dust clouds that covered our tracks.

Don't ask me how, but in a way I knew she was just toying with me. But seduction has never felt so good. Hazy with wine pumping through our veins and blood throbbing between my legs, we tumbled around in the sand.

After she had seduced me and I had gone down on her and was totally blissed out, we slept for an hour or so, wrapped tightly in each others' limbs, underneath her long, black cardigan.

She said I was good and that I was pretty and that she liked girls.

Me too, I said.


And the next day a bunch of bullshit happened that I'll tell you about another time. We never visited Oregon again. And Heather never wrote me.

But I still think about how perfect that time on the beach was.

Where's the burning bush? I wondered.

She came to me. Waxy wings sticking out from her bony back. Hair like a fiery halo hovering about her.

Where's the burning bush? I wondered.

But I was on the boardwalk at Venice beach. Some muscle boys in track suits were seducing an audience of fat mid-westerners with their gleaming chocolate skin and back flips.

Nobody noticed that she sat down next to me. She looked like she hadn't slept for centuries. Neither had I. Daddy is suicidal again. My best friend let me down. I have existential anxiety again. And zits. I don't know which is the worst. (I pretend here to be a goody-two-shoes kind of girl, but I am vain as hell.)

Like; where are you going and where have you been?

And this is what she said to me. My jaw fell down and hung open like a broken mailbox.

She took my hand in hers and my fist melted into her palm and became a soft goo.

Fool's gold glittered on the pacific ocean. One of the regular freaks strolled by, lost in the symphony inside his head. His shoes beyond repair, his head beyond repair.

You and I have always been here, she said. 

And I knew that was true. Her cool fingers touched my blushing cheek. Her flip-flop feet inched closer to mine.

Would you like to come home with me and check out my collection of maps? Maybe we can at least figure out where we are going next? 

lit like a fucking kerosene torch and talking the coke-talk

I am just finally able to see a corner and not slam into it. I am just finally done puking through my nose. The poison has left my body, and I don't feel like poisoning it ever again.

But you know I will.

The moon seems neon-lit outside my window. The neighbor is having a party next door. Kesha is blasting on the stereo.

Last night I drank up and snorted lines and let some guy stick his tongue into my mouth, and pull my crotch up onto his. On the dance-floor, flashing and bleeding technicolor light all over my electric body. He whispered generic sexy come-ons into my ear. I was mostly interested in the sack of snow he said he had in his car.

I don't know how, but somehow I ended up in Malibu, lit like a fucking kerosene torch and talking the coke-talk on some veranda with some people I had nothing in common with. But we pretended to share our deepest secrets and most profound ideas. Drinking Maker's Mark and whatever was on hand as the sun rolled out of hibernation and the ink of the night sky faded into blue.

Then the drugs stopped working. They always do. I felt so alone and purposeless in this world. I felt as if nothing was ever going to change. That all the bullshit was just going to repeat itself endlessly.

And that's hell, my friends.

She dated asshole-guy after asshole-guy. They made her the town-mattress, the ho.

We became fast friends. I had a non-sexual crush on Troy. Her hair was truly the lion's mane with wild red curls, lashing out and pulling you in. Her smile slightly crooked and mild like yogurt. I didn't detect any darkness. Not at first.

She came from another world. The Valley via Bakersfield. The first time I stayed the night (hands on the blanket, mind you, I was still closeted), I woke up in the morning to find her mom chain-smoking, drinking beer straight out of the can and listening to Aerosmith in the kitchen. It was 9 am. Troy's baby brother, wearing a bib and eating Wal-Mart fish sticks,  was trapped inside a cloud of smoke.

It was the first time I became acutely aware that someone's parent was a raging alcoholic. All the other ones, the relatives and family friends, did their boozing and escapism more elegantly.
They weren't Polish blondes with three inches of roots. They didn't wear Iron Maiden t-shirts. And they didn't drink malt liquor.

Later Troy told me about all her mom's boyfriends and how once she'd walked in on her mom getting fucked doggy-style on the living-room carpet, by a guy with a mullet and a hairy back. She said there was a parade of men like that. They drove pick-up trucks with bumper stickers and smelled of sweat and tobacco. The father was long gone, the mother wasn't even totally sure who he was.There had been so many of them, because her pussy was pure magic. At least that's what she had told Troy, and then Troy told me.

Troy started using a lot of eyeliner and getting more drunk than anyone I knew. She passed out in dumpsters. Woke up in parking lots with her panties around her ankles. She was the kind of teenage girl who always cries at parties. Saying nobody loved her, and that she was fat and ugly. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Once she threatened to jump out of a window.
She dated asshole-guy after asshole-guy. They made her the town-mattress, the ho.
But her heart-shaped face always had sweetness for anyone who would hold her gaze for a split second of our fucked-up eternity.
Then we didn't see each other for awhile. Turns out that during that while she cut herself really bad. Next time I saw her, her arms were striped by glossy scars, running all the way up to her shoulders. Some were so deep and desperate that they had cut into muscle tissue.

She said she had been home alone at the apartment. Drinking vodka and sinking a razor into her flesh. Time and time again. Crying and pacing. Crying and pacing. Cutting and bleeding. Swallowing the fire water.

Then, even later, we lost touch. What happened to my Troy?
Does anyone know?

i slapped her. i watched her face burn with the sting.

I remember her nightgown. It always looked ratty, despite the cheery tulip print. I remember her soft doll feet. I loved touching those cool velvet soles to my cheeks, then covered with pimples.

I was desperate. And I had so much anger inside me. I didn't know what to do with it. Except keying cars and smashing telephones.

She had raven-black hair, so shiny you could use it as a mirror. (If you wanted to see yourself, that is). She would fall asleep outside my door. on the flesh-colored carpet. It broke my heart, but I was already to used to that sort of hurt, I guess. When i would wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom; there she would be, curled up with the door sill as her pillow, asleep, her features melting.

There was only sweetness in that girl, Carrie. She came from Chile. Had grown up an orphan. And it was possible, they said, that she had something wrong with her brain.

Who doesn't?

But she didn't know what to do with those toys that are supposed to teach you useful grown-up things. Like how to count M&M peanut-looking balls. Or to fit basic shapes into the right holes. One day I got so agitated watching her try to push a square into a star-shaped hole that i slapped her. I watched her face burn with the sting. Then I watched as the bottom lip begin to quiver, and those brown, sweet eyes that had seen fuck knows what, filled up with tears.

She cried. I cried.

Then I slapped her again.

Oh Carrie, can you ever forgive me?

Because I don't think I can.

wrong side of the morning

a redder shade of neck on a whiter shade of trash,
 and this emery board is giving me a rash

i'm flat out,
you're so beautiful to look at when you cry

There's the back pain and the heartaches. The acne and the belly-aches.

I think there's something seriously wrong with our reality. and I am not just saying this because I stepped in dog shit today and then got shat on by a seagull with a tummy ache.  (I had to stop in at H&M and buy a whole new outfit, and I am not even kidding).

I am saying this because everyone I know is so damned troubled. There's pills galore and razor cuts on soft thigh flesh. Scarring red, then fading to white. Always bearing witness to a psychic pain that became unbearable. There's the insomnia. Like the grim reaper he comes and puts match-sticks underneath the eyelids of girls and boys whose neurons really need to be wrapped in cotton candy for a good eight hours. There's the back pain and the heartaches. The acne and the belly-aches.

There's drugs. My friend, the crack-whore, had her boyfriend commit suicide a few days ago. He jumped off a bridge and the waves sucked him under and filled his black crack-lungs with polluted water. She's shooting heroin now. She is beyond caring, she says. Not too long ago she was a talented student at CalArts.

And many of the blogs I read here, detail the lives of bright young women who binge and purge, binge and purge. For what? To fit in some faggot designer's (please take this for what it is, I am a homo myself) sample sizes? Constructed why? And for whom?

And the violence we commit onto each other. The physical and mental kind.

And clearly, I am no better. I called a lady in an SUV a bitch today. I purchased a pair of sneakers I definitely didn't need. I felt happy with my new possession for about two seconds, then I felt empty empty. So I came home and ate a whole bar of chocolate. To fill the hole. When that didn't work I smoked a joint. It worked for awhile.
Now I have insomnia.

(but I should know. I saw something, felt something. In Texas and in Arizona)

I wish I had a dog to pet.
                                                           ***

P.S This is a self-portrait from Tate Modern, London. Shooting myself in a piece by Jeff Koons. Wishing the world was as happy and colorful. XXX

You don't make out with friends. You just don't do that.

I don't know how many times I have to make the same mistake before I make any changes in my behavior?

I keep on willingly laying down in the same shallow grave over and over. Sure, my thought pattern was blurry and erratic (and possibly even sporadic as I was swerving in and out of semi-consciousness). Sara had a birthday and we were all drinking JD. Avy was there and she seemed really angry. There were other girls and boys milling about like specks of dust on a map of the abyss.

I didn't think you could fall into a K-hole from just drinking? And I had just found out the day before that I am moving to the NYC at the end of the summer to begin an internship at a magazine. One with lots of pictures of half-naked, anorectic 14-year olds with heroin habits.

Speaking about anorectics ... I made out with an anorectic friend. Her eyes nearly drowned me in black waters, sucked me down and under. Her lips eager, her tongue hungry (no wonder really). But I should know I should know I should know. Now that I am rising from the pits with a throbbing headache.

You don't make out with friends.

She came back once. As a brunette.

She came back once. As a brunette. She had a new man, but he waited in the car. Daddy's knuckles turned white, but his eyes couldn't help but sparkle with adoration. She was very thin again. We all went out onto the veranda. She didn't hug me, but she patted my head, and later held my hand. Her hands were cool and soft and I wished we'd magically become conjoined like that. She had presents. A Polaroid camera and a small gold chain with a heart.

Until about a year ago I wore that heart every day. And this is very strange because I tend to lose all jewelery all the time.

I asked her where she had been: Where have you been mommy? I said.

And she said: Oh honey, I've been working. A woman's got to work, you know.

I remember how daddy turned his face away but I still saw his eyes become flooded with tears, almost to the brim.

When she drove off again, with the mustached man by her side, I wondered why she had given me a heart when she didn't have one.

I rather would have been an aborted fetus in heaven for aborted fetuses

My mother.

My mother left without a trace. I was still a kid, a cute kid (there are pictures to prove) with pig tails and band-aids on my chubby knees.

Still, she couldn't love me. She never wanted me. I was an accident, and due to her upbringing she was unable to see abortion as an option. It didn't matter how soft my skin, how blue my eyes, how peachy my cheeks and how dimpled my smiles.

Until recently I felt that I rather would have been an aborted fetus in heaven for aborted fetuses, looking down on the mess other people made (and keep making).

My mother had big dreams. She wanted to become a famous photographer. She wanted to sail the world. She wanted to make a difference for other people.

Becoming a mother aged her ten years in 9 months. Her once perfect breasts begun sag with gravity. Her hips and belly became branded with fiery stretch marks. Her face became wrinkled from frowning. And her mood-swings started tearing her apart. She couldn't stand my weeping. Said to daddy it was the worst sound in the world.

One day she drove off in the family car. She left a note. It didn't say much. It just said that she was sorry and that we shouldn't look for her.

p.s images borrowed (as often) from: http://ghostwerld.wordpress.com/

Like bird chirps, or baby giggles, only more elusive

And then we steamrolled sedona. or sedona steamrolled us.
I got tangled up in the vortex, almost fell from a cliff so red it seemed like a figment of my devilish imagination.
I heard voices in the wind. Like bird chirps, or baby giggles, only more elusive. But still they spoke to me.
This desert somehow manages to be lush in all its dryness.

I tried meditating again, sitting on a flat-topped rock. I don't know how long I had to sit, but it felt like no time at all, and then, again, I was no longer trying. I was meditating. I didn't have to struggle to stop the thoughts from coming. There were no thoughts, just a tingly stillness and a glow. I felt a smile settle gently on my lips.

And I don't think I can eat another animal.

In fact, Daddy and I took a vegan vow. He says he will truly give up smelly French cheeses.

And then we talked about my mother. It was a heavy, but ultimately good conversation. I will tell you all about it later, beautiful beautiful people.

how can I tell this without seeming like a total douchebag or a lunatic?

There are certain things that scare me. Of course. I don't like the shape of forks for example, and darkness can be eerie sometimes. But I am scared of axe murderers, sadistic rapists and rabid dogs rather than ghosts or spirits. Despite having a total angry New Age-man for a father, I've never had any religious leanings. But I have been thinking, at weak and desperate times, that it would be nice to believe in something other than that we'll all die now or grow older.

Yesterday evening dad and I went to a yoga class in Alpine, about half an hour north of Marfa. It wasn't my idea. Then we went to eat at the Reata Steakhouse. I gave into my carnivore urges and ordered steak. It was so rare it stained my shirt. I had really begun to wonder what this trip was all about, and the disappointment started to coagulate and harden into miniature fists inside me. I was looking away, looking bored, drinking my ice tea when dad told me we had an appointment with a healer and that we'd had to get going.

Again, driving south and turning onto a bumpy dirt road that seemed to lead us to the edge of earth or to a grave of quicksand.

And I kept getting angrier, because I kept thinking we were going to turn up at some red-haired hippie lady's house, and that dad would wanna do her and I would be left listening to the last sounds I wanted to hear.

Finally a faint glow appeared and then a modest house, that turned out to be completely powered by solar panels. A young guy, maybe thirty or so, came out on the porch to greet us. His name was Craig.

First we drank tea, then we ... how can I tell this without seeming like a total douchebag or a lunatic?

Let me just tell you this. For the first time I wasn't trying to meditate; I was meditating. And unless there was some chemicals in the tea Craig offered us, I was experiencing a natural high that sparkled and pulsated hot lava up and down my spine, making little supernovas go off all around me.


I fell asleep during the ride back to Marfa, with a big smile pasted across my face. The last thing I felt was the back of daddy's hand softly touching my cheek.


p.s took the photo of myself in the bathroom just as we got back.

and invited all his international art pals to make art in the desert

The night here seems solid, as if it was made out of matte metal. The only sounds coming through are the wind whipping the corners and daddy's soft snoring from the other room.

Once again I left the country. Just because. But only for a few hours this time. We crossed into Mexico via Presidio. And we did indeed have some tacos. They gave me a bellyache. But there was no touching and no I love yous.

Instead there was a sullen man, trying to paste smiles onto his ragged face. Trying, but not succeeding, not to whine about his (lack of) love-life.

Do you fucking hear me complain? Do you know how long it's been? Soon I'll start doing the online dating thing.

We are in Marfa, Texa, staying at the Thunderbird

We did this art tour in the desert, like pilgrims. Famed, and deceased artist Donald Judd moved here in the 70's and invited all his international art pals to make art in the desert.

This whole place is pretty surreal, you should go sometime. Here you are in the middle of absolutely nowhere, you have been driving through a dirty desert for hours without even seeing a gas station, and suddenly you stop and walk into a coffee shop and you think you are in Paris or New York, because it's filled with good-looking people, dressed all in black, and rocking funky glasses that frame their intellectual eyes like an exclamation mark. Here they sit, sipping soy lattes while leafing through the latest edition of some obscure art journal.


p.s my photos.

and we'll laugh and eat burritos and i'll lean my head on his shoulder

i can't sleep. and we haven't gone anywhere yet either. the surprise has not yet materialized itself. and i am not entirely unhappy about it.
but i don't feel happy. and i think that is my natural state.

there's drama among my friends. i didn't get this other internship i applied for.
daddy and I misunderstand each other. we accuse, talk in circles, shovel shit around. this afternoon we'll go. we'll drive into the desert in his jeep, and we'll find that unbreakable bond, constructed out of blood and time. and we'll laugh and eat burritos and i'll lean my head on his shoulder. and he will tell me he loves me more than anything. and all the stars will come out and sprinkle the black desert sky with fool's gold and a lonesome coyote will howl in the distance.

and all the pieces will fall in place and i will no longer fear the black holes gaping at the outskirts of the milky way.

I think maybe that's when I turned into a homo

Oh jet lag, the constant companion of a glamorous globetrotter like yours truly.

Maddy is in safe-keeping in Leeds, the armpit of the world, or at least the U.K. Her mother is a drama queen who spends most of her waking hours consuming services like manicures, facials and body scrubs. Nothing works though, the woman is chin-less and hideous. I hope poor Maddy won't age like her; gracelessly and undeniably. Her mother is probably filled with shadenfreude; rejoicing in her daughter's extra rolls of fat. She actually seems a bit like Avy's mother. Her father is a casanova with more mistresses than Tiger.

My own father is expected back at the Casa later this afternoon. He wants to take me on a trip so we can get to know each other. I guess it's about time as I have embarked on my 22nd year on planet earth. He wants to keep his plan a surprise.


I hate surprises, especially the planned ones. 

Like the birthday (was it my 11th?) when he invited a snake charmer to our house so I could overcome my fear of serpents? I think maybe that's when I turned into a homo.

So I have 102 followers now. Wow! I am pathetically in need of love, affirmation, followers and comments. I worship you all!

XXX, your lovable fuck-up Kim

Toilet Paper Bandage

I had finally just started drifting away, then the cat attacked my foot. I am starting to fear cats, I swear. I look them in their dengue fever eyes and can't help but see their possessed quality.

Last night was a disaster. I, of course, was only trying to help. I said to Maddy that she needed to wash the crusted chocolate and vomit chunks from the corner of her mouth, brush her red hair, put on a sparkly dress and come out with me.

She was rambling on about razors and pills and a never-ending hazy coma, but I still thought that a few pints could cure her.

I love London cabs though, they are so spacious and the cab drivers are totally polite and courteous. Not like the rude NYC drivers that argue with you about the best route to Brooklyn.

We went to a bar in Soho. One that Madonna used to frequent when she was married to that Guy guy. Or so I was told. I didn't even think bitch drank. Anyway. After a beer and a shot I could have a normal conversation with my friend. She actually laughed once, or at least she chuckled. But after three beers and three shots she was crying about the ex-asshole again. She wasn't just gently and discreetly sobbing either, she was bawling. People were trying not to stare, but the show was so magnificent that they couldn't help themselves.

I said; you need to get a grip on yourself. Get some perspective. She smashed an empty beer glass on the table and got a shard and scarped herself on the wrist. It wasn't a deep cut, but enough to draw blood. And that blood made a lady next to us choke on her peanuts. While some meatheads at the bar were laughing.

Out on the street, with a toilet paper bandage, she said she wanted to go down to the Thames and swim until she drowned or died from exposure.

I somehow got her home and eventually she passed out. And I am supposed to fly home tomorrow. I may need to call her parents.

P.S check this out; oneword.com

if she could only be a little thinner, a little prettier, a little nicer and better in bed

Everyone in this world is obsessed with romance, and I am no better.

Sometimes these thoughts of someone that could save me consumes me. And my friend, Maddy, who kindly has been putting me up, is also caught up in the same sideshow circus. She is currently using food to dull the ache in her heart that pounds for an undeserving asshole. You've heard it before.

You've done it before. 

She's been stocking up on chocolate bars, and candy hearts and sour patch kids and Salt and Vinegar chips. And she sits in her bed, in her cold and damp flat, eating and crying. And reading Vouge and Marie Claire. There are chocolate smears all over her pillows and greasy chip crumbles embedded in her nightgown. And the magazines tell her that if she could only be a little thinner, a little prettier, a little nicer and better in bed. If her skin could only be a bit softer and her complexion a bit clearer. If she could only be a tad sexier and have less cellulite, then the world could be hers. She could hover above it, whip in hand and force it serve her.

She vomited in the sink. Black mascara spiders climbed down her cheeks. Nobody ever loved me like him.

But he told you he didn't love you.
Well, it felt like he did. It felt so good. Better than a sugar coma.

Dad called from Sedona where he is staying with a healer. Probably some crystal-wielding psycho with wheatgrass juice in her fridge.

Before I head out to the pub I want to thank Vinda of Super stylish and fun Fashion Atelier for interviewing me and creating a portrait of how I would love to look. Vinda, I am cute, but not that cute.

And to all of you whose fab blogs I have been neglecting this past week, bear with me. I will catch up and I still adore you.

XXX

London (or You can call me Lucifer)

the way you hit me is better than love

... and i am head over heals

and I saw Courtney Love and Hole and all is forgiven. It really is.

right now a big black cat is about to piss all over my Top Shop shopping.

More soon.

XXX

(Or why you are?)

 I hate what I've become, he said.

(you've always been that). 

I didn't like to see him cry. Not because I didn't want him to be sad, but because he looked ridiculous doing it.

I am thinking about going to an Ashram. In India. I need to connect. Or, I need to find myself. I've never known who I am.

(Or why you are?)

Women always leave me, he said in between bites of cold chicken noodle soup.

(Daddy, you are not supposed to chew soup, don't you know?)

And you don't like me that much, do you?

Well, you are my father. I think I must love you.

At that he started crying again.
He hasn't left the couch since his suicide attempt. I've been going to Trader Joe's to pick up cans of soup and bars of soup. Because he likes to take baths. I don't really understand.

I always say the wrong things. There are thick green snot slugs peeking out of his nostrils.

I've decided to go to London tomorrow. I haven't told him yet. I'll cook dinner and then I'll inform him of my plans.

I didn't get a chance to pull out before I had vomit on my hand and arm.

I know it's not even noon, but I am having a beer.

At about 6 am this morning I was puked on my own father. It was sort of my fault, but I was only trying to be of use.

I had been chatting on FB with some guy in Turkey, pretending I could be his everything and the mother of his children too. I fell asleep and dreamt that I was a housewife, and that I was baking a pound cake for the housewife next door, the one with the dreamy eyes.

I woke up to the sound of glass shattering on the tiled floor followed by a dull thud. I ran downstairs and there was dad. My father. I hadn't even known he was at the house. I thought he was in Topanga Canyon. He was on the floor among broken plates and cutlery. A few days worth of dishes I had left behind.
He'd swallowed pills, he told me. He wanted to die, he said, because there was no love left in this world.
Will you forgive me? he asked and looked at me with eyes like soapy water. A drama queen on his death bed.
I told him to go fuck himself and that I wouldn't forgive him. And then I shoved my fist into his mouth and tried to get my fingers as far back as possible.

I didn't get a chance to pull out before I had vomit on my hand and arm.

My father comes from a long line of pill-poppers, in fact we are citizens of a Nation of Pill-poppers.

He rests now.

His puke was rockstar vomit; there were pieces of corn and soggy pills swimming around in honey-colored bile. And one lonely gummi bear.

I want to thank the lovely and talented Erica Clay of alabastercow for giving me the Kick-Ass Blog Award. She's also a vegan. Check out her Blog Herbivorous for some cooking advice.