once upon a meteor riot / letters

—

Prime / 16 March to 14 April

Dear Jillison,

Have I given you my reasons yet? I wanted to tell you, no one else has to know.

A meteor riot may last as long as there are still mistakes for us to learn.

When we I started sending you these letters, I should have warned you: Sutures. Yes. Always hungry. Yes. Never, ever, ever, ever, going home.

—

You can collapse a sky by coming too close to it. Even if the past has yet to make its impact, even if you wait there, waiting for it to crash.

I should have told you, “OK, you know all of this about me already.”

–Mostly melodramatic, maudlin, under-imaginative.

-Pock marks on top of pock marks.

-Track marks on top of track marks.

-Craters of cartilage, itching or missing or mostly gone.

—

Nevada / 16 May to 14 June

Dear Jillison,

“The assumption is you’re drunk… When you drop things like that, when you walk like that, when you act like that.“

“Oh.”

“It is an act though, right?“

—

I know you don’t remember. I’ll tell you again. This is exactly what you told me:

Stubborn. Engages almost exclusively in all or nothing thinking, delusional, frequently “injured.” Anti-patterns in each pulse. Irises sinking like sacks in a lake. Black eye permanent.

Voice like this.

You said, “That’s how you know it’s me.”

Is there a lesson here? A moral? A point?

Fragile as ash fall and anyone could be just like you. Anyone could be just like me.

—

Hurricane / 16 September to 15 October

Dear Jillison,

What is the opposite of wisdom? Folly? Ignorance? Fatalism? A type of tooth? Should I know by now?

When it comes to the mortality, it seems we are not often encouraged to look at the details.

What a difference a couple months make. I had a very different story I was trying to write before. The thing I’m afraid of, is change. The thing I want, is stagnation.

When it comes to the mortality we are not often encouraged to look at the details.

—

“Blushing. The most peculiar and most human of all the emotions.

― Charles Darwin, Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, 1871.

Transcendental anatomists in the 19th century theorized that the bones of the skull were “cranial vertebra“, or modified bones from the vertebrae.

The theory has since been discredited.

—

Grable/ 16 October to 15 November

Dear Jillison,

Firecracker’s dilemma.

Honestly, Jillison. A lot of the time when you dare someone to leave… they will. That has to be scary to know. What if you turn into the things you hated all along?

Most of the time, when you dare someone to leave…they will. That has to be comforting to know? An explicit reinforcement of causality. At least on a larger level the classical laws of physics still hold? General relativity has not caught up yet?

I tried covering my throat in cut black cloth. I tried to forget how easy it is for an afterlife finds its mark.

“I brought up lonesomeness again, and not being understood at all except by some women everybody hated.’’

― Grace Paley, The Loudest Voice, 1959.

—

Castle / 16 November to 15 December

Dear Jillison,

Do I ever look like a girl to you? Do you ever think of me as one? Kind of? Not at all? I never ever know.

She has this complete and rigid dedication to this spiteful creation, this spiteful self-conception.

Very stubborn, obscure, confrontational in her own overindulgent way. And aesthetically, still quite pedestrian.

Don’t forget Jillison, I get letters from you too. I’ve taken what you said as truth.

There is a time we all fail. We pause our own disintegration just long enough to explore the wreckage of a warmer person. We dig out the hidden teeth in each other.

Jillison, if you still think you don’t know me like that? Trust me, you know me like that.

—

Plowshare / 16 January to 12 or 13 February

Dear Jillison,

Here is what you taught me to remember.

Atoms against atoms, all light is the afterlife of mass. No impact left to tell, we are hardly here at all.

Suns out of socket, sky out of socket

Skin separated by serrated angles

Spine like a torn white string.

—

It was a makeup year. A mechanical year.

The oldest recorded love poetry is 4,000 years old and describes it exactly the same as we do now.

Melodramatic, maudlin, under imaginative.

—

We were twin signs, kept making the same mistakes. But if we’re this close, call it a miracle, call it a mirror kill.

Call it every meteor riot couldn’t we couldn’t run away from in the end.

dark swan astronomy / hospital 6

—

We slept back to back, with sixteen windows along each spine.

Jillison understood the curvature of carrying nothing, back starting to bleed, another accuracy of the dark.

The present often meaning a single event being considered, infinity is not that which has nothing beyond itself, but that which always has something beyond itself.

Time becomes ambush and ambush becomes time.

insect century / hospital 7

—

You worked at the church, waited for the animals of your family to die. Hundreds of acres of skin and stitches and still no surprises.

They disgust us because they show us what we are, always, eventually. Small, scattered. Confused. They make a mockery of our pretense of “progress”.

Legs moved like a hydraulic system, unnatural, mathematical, controlled by blood pressure, judgements of lesser parts, meaningless never ending methodical action.

—

Insects have their own scenery of denial.

I remember a lot of movement without momentum. Angular. Divided. I remember they came out like an ink storm on the sheets and the bedspread.

We took out the mattress and then we took out the whole room.

—

Jillison. Listen to me.

Don’t ever mistake activity for achievement. They already had a name for that, they called it the insect century.

Do you still not understand what the problem is? I don’t understand the entomology, that’s what you said.

Jillison. Listen to me. This is the truth. Your past comes with you. If you have any insects, you have all of them.

outline tectonic / topics of concern / letters

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Grable / 16 October to 15 November

Dear Jillison,

I want to be vulnerable with you.

Most interactions are either transactional or performative. We’re too self-conscious to listen. We’re thinking about what we’ll say next or how we’re being perceived.

All the posturing destroys any chance for a genuine connection.

—

A question worth asking: If you looked into the world’s most honest mirror, what would you see?

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Mother Night, 1962

Maybe I should stop going into the men’s bathroom.

—

Castle / 16 November to 15 December

Dear Jillison,

Causality is a common lie. We only believe in it because our brains evolved for it: Tool making implies a world of causality. This action leads to this result: a very direct illusion.

You used to repeat yourself. You told me over and over.

This weeks theme is garbage gray. The goal is to pay attention to the illusions, knowing full well your brain is complicit in constructing them.

Possible theme: fragments are existentially valuable. Inherently valuable.

“The movement of animals closely resembles in many ways the random walks of dust particles in a fluid.”

—

Plowshare / 16 January to 12 or 13 February

Dear Jillison,

Now the loneliness was evenly mixed with the air. Settled like pollen and dust on table chair and dishes. Thin little lines lay under your eyelids.

When you were a child, what did you think happened after you die? When did you start thinking about death at all?

I tried to remember the phantom limb of where we’ve been. Maybe there once was a room where I knew what to do with months like these.

—

Prime / 16 March to 14 April

Dear Jillison,

Do laundry. Go to work. Order/pickup medication. Pack what you own. Find a temporary place to live

No money for concealer or caffeine. Reschedule face hair removal appointment for when you might have money. Read an old story.

Move? Publish a book? Get arrested? Maybe throw up again?

Be kind to yourself. Talk to friends. Fuck dissociation. Wear what you have. No makeup necessary. Fuck dysphoria, Go into world. Listen. Laugh at yourself. Actually make the trip to get your pills. Be kind. Get a good night sleep. Write.

—

Confession: I have noticed this violent masculinity to our writing. Short clipped sentences Too much force put on the period and line break.

The only form I trust are fragments. What possible problems could this cause in our relationship? In all relationships?

There’s got to be a lot more change in my life. Let’s start with the way I write / think / collect / obliterate information.

–continuous omissions / distortions

–copying always / scavenging others

–entirely broken as a generative machine

–trash collector / plagiarist

Shortcuts, cheats, so many breaks. I collect scraps all week, just to leave them out.

—

Nevada / 16 May to 14 June

Dear Jillison,

“The map is not the territory…”

Positive shame versus problematic shame. I tend toward the latter. Internalize. Over-personalize. Ignore external conditions and chance and circumstance. I catastrophize. I feel like I can’t change things, I lock in a spiral, I withdraw myself from others.

Habit loops contain three parts. Queue (Trigger). Behavior. Reward.

A lot of addictive and destructive behavior may be caused by unacknowledged shame. Concentric circles of denial and absence.

—

We are so reliant upon the human face to read/understand intention and motivation, the face is a communication array.

A lot of gimmicks, too many gimmicks. The mask is an ancient performative tool.

It is easy to become sentimental. It is easy to make poetic promises. You are right to see these tendencies for what they are: flawed, human.

—

“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”

― Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, 1985.