full of moxie and viscosity

seriously, there is no place like home. whatever it is that home is, there is no place like it.

In other news,
I
am
free.

I printed out the novel today. 119 pages. (I printed it single spaced and it was only like 69, but double spaced it's 119). One hundred and nineteen pages about men and me. How much detail can be put into written sex before it becomes erotica?

Lately I've been really uncontrollably happy. When I say uncontrollably, I mean that there doesn't seem to be any controllers- no REASONS for the happiness. For example: I was walking out of work the other day and I said to myself "I don't remember where I parked my car," and suddenly burst into uncontrollable laughter. I didn't really think that what I had said was funny, I was just overcome with intense joy. From way, way, deep inside of me, not laughter that I can say has ever come from someone else. That was epiphany #1- that really crazy feeling of joy has never come from someone else. It has only ever come from me. Which led to EP#2:

I believe that we can only feel emotions and feelings that already exist within us. People, stimuli, work, art, food, music-- they all access those emotions differently. So when I think of people as these banks of emotions, I realize that I can make a decision about which emotion I want to access and stimulate. And even more importantly- I can acknowledge when someone else is accessing emotions that I don't want to feel... and move away from them. Those people do not CAUSE pain, or CAUSE happiness. They just ACCESS it within me. They bring it to the forefront. I have pain inside of me already. (EP#3: If you have happiness, you also have pain. Both emotions have to exist- they're like a sphere. One pole is happiness, one pole pain. It makes more sense for happiness and pain to be the same sphere than for them to be different emotions. They are usually accessed by the same people or situations, just oppositely. Joe Blow makes you 567 points worth of happy? Guaranteed he can bring out 567 points worth of sad. That doesn't mean he will... he just CAN.)

Another important part of that epiphany is that Happiness is Already Inside of Me. And if anyone in the world knows how to get to it, it's me. ME. I Can Access My Happiness At Any Time if I Am Being Healthy And Paying Attention To Myself. That's the truth... which leads into epiphany #4:

Truth and happiness and pain and all of these abstract things that are extremely and universally difficult to define-- they definitely exist. The reason they are so hard to define is because they only exist abstractly until someone translates them. So each of us have our own translation of those truths, those abstractions. Originally I thought that maybe these things existed as Objective Things, and we all had different perspectives on them. But now I think that instead of looking AT them, they don't really have a location until we give them one. They just sort of float around haphazardly until someone decides to have them accessed. Little clouds of abstraction trailing behind us until someone, something, sticks their hand through us and pulls it to them. That's the trick though- in that pull, something changes- we affect those abstractions with ourselves. When they get pulled from abstraction into reality, the concretion of the emotion is only formed by US. So that's why it's so difficult to define- we only know our very own interpretations, our very own translations of these abstract things, these huge, surreal things. Which brings me to EP#5:

Translation. One night I was watching A Beautiful Mind and started crying, then laughing through my tears, and then that same uncontrolled emotion thing started happening- the physical, emotional drive of something beyond me started spiraling and shooting me off in crazy directions. In the midst of all of that, my stupid earthly brain could only think of how great it would be to WRITE ABOUT IT. The translation, of COURSE. No wonder I am so obsessed with writing. That's the way I translate things. Some people find their translation in art, others in sports, others in religion or politics or music or family or pencils... who knows... my translation is writing. I have uncontrollable emotional things happening to me and what I have control over is my translation. Since my translation is simply how those abstractions move through me-- I have to be really careful what I fill myself up with so that the translation is something I like.

It's double tiered, really: I can't control who pulls emotion from me or what emotion they pull from me. I can move away from things I don't particularly like, and I can certainly focus on things that I do like. And when I do focus on things that are beneficial to me, then me, the catalyst, will become more of what I want to be- and then my translations will automatically reflect this. Little things, from what I eat to whom I speak to all the way up to whom I love and how I love them and then back down to the way I speak to strangers on airplanes and the way I look at the CEO of the company in the hallway all the way up to what I read and how I write and with whom I dream. It makes a difference now, not just because I will affect them, which is of course important, but in a different way, how it will affect ME-- and MY translation of these abstractions. It's all I really have in life, I think.

Why worry about tests or money or drama when there are abstractions, beautiful things to be toyed with and cradled and manipulated and drawn out and poured into molds and shaped and displayed? These beauties are not to be squandered. It is no longer a matter of perspective, but now a matter of PERCEPTION. You can look at things from every angle possible, and that's important and helpful. But you must learn to perceive things differently and in the way you want to perceive them if you want to partake of these divinities.

I want a man who will tell me my voice is the most beautiful thing he's ever heard.
Who will tell me he's proud of me for singing.
Who will tell me makeup is junk and to wipe that stuff off before I come to bed, darlin.
Who will drive across the country peddling my record and punch the lights out of some guy who's not listening closely enough to me while I'm singing on the radio.
Who will make me a bunch of babies someday and love them too much.
Who will pull our car over because he can't wait until we get home to kiss my face.
Who will buy my drinks and touch my curls.
Who will tell me my voice is the most beautiful thing he's ever heard.

Who will forgive me for this post, and forget that I'm a selfish, egocentric, greedy little child.

little dirty fingernails
how did you know
i needed a little
escape
tonight?

(between sniffles and wincing
my nose wrinkles more now
than it did
with the stench of relationships
that were not
worth
my
time)

>apologies to the man who read this after the misunderstanding had been cleared. i can at least apologize for words misplaced. you were worth my time.<

Give me a reason to be a woman, Portishead whispers to me today. It makes sense. Give me a reason to love you. Come on, baby, tell me something that will make my skin softer and my breasts curvier and my head a little closer to you and my arms a little more pliable. Touch me with everything. And I cry and I plead, it’s all I want to be. It’s not just the pleasures of the flesh, does anyone understand what I am talking about? There is more. There has to be. I’m so sick of putting my hands on dead flesh. I’m so sick of kissing when kissing is not what I want to be doing. It’s all physical. Have I ever meant it? Have I ever meant it? Have I ever meant it? Have I ever meant it? Yes, of course I meant it. I am incapable of not. But has anyone ever meant it when they touched me? Give me a reason to be a woman. Come on, you can do it.

I feel a lot less social here. I'm not sure which came first- my feeling of not wanting to go out and have tons of friends or the actual not having. I think they came at about the same time. There's really nobody here that makes me go crazy, or makes my brain explode a la Mark or Nathan. Nobody who makes me feel as relaxed as Lizzy does. As loved as my mother does. As beautiful as Tiffany does. Nobody who makes me feel as inspired as Gabe does. It's not a bad thing, though.

I have discovered that explosion, craziness, relaxation, love, beauty, inspiration all exist within me. The need for stimulation is only the need for expansion. We are all catalysts. The bigger things (see above list) look like clouds to me, or big sheets of cellophane in the sky. Stretching over all of us. We are merely translators. Those things work through us really individually and uniquely (is uniquely a word? it is now.) It happens that in Los Angeles I was able to find people who showed me their own translations really appropriately and easily.

What is important now is my own translation. Last night, as I was watching A Beautiful Mind, at the end (of course) I was bawling. And laughing so hard at the same time, at independence, the existence of truth, beauty... and all I could think about in my earthly mind was how great the feeling would be to write down. I was torn in two- my physical, emotional side experiencing a beautiful, unrestrained, unadulterated moment of joy and simultaneous pain; my mental side itching to describe it.

So I don't have to go out, dance, eat chocolate, look at animal, take walk (i don't want relationship, i just want...), but I can live and try hard to be the purest form of me- focus on my translation and make sure that I am expressing the universal things in a very Rachel Roellke kind of way.

(In this Pacific Northwest, a thousand miles away from my mother, a million miles away from my childhood, eleven days past a fake anniversary, and two steps forward from where I stood before, I can feel the rain hit my face, see the difference in colors, find something new- the triangulation of me, not me, and me.)

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"Then it starts again, feel my heart flicker..."
Saucy Monky wrote those lyrics, but Rachel Roellke a year ago could have written them, too. That constant sense of dilution, light flickering on and off, the shade being lifted temporarily, then slammed back down. The flickering of my heart, my voice, my head, my life, really. Everything. From the men, to the singing, to the writing... nothing was quite satisfying, nothing was quite there. But I felt like I was tasting everything, getting glimpses and little sips of what glory is really like. Really intense, potent snippets.

He might kill me for using his name, but maybe not- Dylan is the best example. I felt so in love with him, so ready to move on those emotions, ready to commit to something that I was sure of for once. But we were far apart, so very far- and all I could have from him was the flickering. The moments of beauty, of love, and then nothing. Words of love, then, nothing. A perfect weekend visit, then, nothing. Always flickering, always fluttering, never settling.

(everyone gets quiet here. Dylan is not the best example, of course. there is a much more relevant example, but everyone is sick of hearing about him. it is no longer important for me to mention his relevance to my romantic infrastructure. we all know already.)

Now is different, you see- I'm no longer flickering. It's a different sensation. All of the beauty and love and light is inside of ME now, I am the net, I am the bowl. Now it's drag. I feel this drag to my life, as though something is holding me back, holding me down. Completion of the novel is something I really should be shooting for, because I think this drag has a lot do with that flickering- once I complete the novel, perhaps I will be over the flickering I felt for Dylan. I think I've adjusted my life to accommodate the absence of these men. But I don't think I've fully adjusted my cargo net. I need to stop catching glances of that beauty, and instead capture those same moments, freeze frame, and put them into an accessible medium. My novel.

This is the reason I moved to Washington. I moved here to write a novel. To stop the flickering. And I feel it, the flickering is dying down, becoming less of a lifestyle and more of a mood, if that makes sense. But now, this drag, the pull of loves lost and loves missed is rolling into a heap behind me, attached to my heels, stretching me to my limits. It is time to cut those- and if I have to cut my tendons to rid myself of them, so be it.