bear dream.

i don’t fully remember the dream. but i was camping and i awoke to a large bull trying to kill me and some other animal working to protect me from it.

i was running all around this plot of land and forest. alongside a road or a highway. a bear came. it  too was trying to catch me. i slid under some sort of bench or foundation. some low overhang with a small opening. the bear who was brown then blue was trying to get at me under the overhang. i remember his breath. his tongue on my face. the way his arm curled under me. i touched his long bear claws. was he eating me or holding me? i woke up.

being fucked by multiple people. i rather love this. both in real life and fantasy life. fantasizing while masturbating the other day. the people sort of turned into animals. into wolves. and they were eating me and/or fucking me. i was being fucked and i was being devoured.

fort faggot is a fort design that i began in cleveland. sometime in 2010. i have a design. the walls will be made with strings of bundled sticks. faggots. i just need a place and time to make it. the subtitle is wolves inside & out. somehow this fantasy above will breath life into this fort. i want to experiment with a place that bears this kind of darkness. it isn’t all pretty. and it doesn’t have to be about a scare. it is about walking into the fear, as kate wrote. finding what is dark and desirable together. finding what can be found there.

. . .

reading fire in the belly: the life and times of david wojnarowicz by cynthia carr. excited to have a new long book to read. but woah is it tedious. i like how she holds onto the discrepancies between all of the different people. but i think, so far, carr is too hellbent on finding the true timeline, the true testimony about the true david wojnarowicz story. only sixty-one pages in. i will stick it out… but i am not sure how this plodding along will be come page five hundred seventy eight.

quoting a former confidante/housemate of david’s in the book: “My big question was, do we have to destroy ourselves in order to be creative. I felt like he was kind of hell-bent on it. He wanted that. He wanted the dark part.”

i guess my thoughts about “darkness” accompany a question of acceptability. i find that it is not socially acceptable to be hopeless. ever. (and i say this in a moment of great hope and excitement.) to be grim about the future of humanity, human endeavors, society, civilization. it is not so acceptable to explore pessimism. to play with it. to ever embrace it. there is a discomfort with toying in the dark. there is a fear that you just might not come back. we have to assure or be assured that there will always be a silver-lining. a shiny future to come back to. and it scares me how much we don’t want to let ourselves “go there.” to take up what is lurking behind our grandest hopes and dreams. for fear that we won’t ever return.

it isn’t in order to destroy for me. at least at the moment. it is to see what happens there. this world. the u.s. is scary in its denial. in its lies and superficiality. in the way we can numb ourselves and pad our experience. the ways we have to round off the edges. to make our life palatable. to let ourselves off the hook in the ways that we cause suffering, live off of suffering, deny our own suffering.

this is rather convoluted. it’s okay though to not have complete legibility. but in reading came an addendum to the dream and the fort and the wolves and the bear.

…three thirty one in the mornin

an old post i never posted:

bjork’s song ancestors plays in my shuffle. i’m thinking about toni morrison. yesterday g. asked me to turn my internet sleuthing skills toward finding her essay rootedness: the ancestor as foundation… i’ve been reading it. the question of rootedness/rootlessness came up in conversation with kim this morning. there’s this part where toni morrison is talking about song of soloman. the character pilate, her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter hagar. pilate’s character, the ancestor. the old woman deemed crazy. the daughter one step out of her world. the daughter of the daughter ten steps out. the rootlessness in hagar’s character.

i was listening to kim as she talked about her family’s land in ohio. the decision to keep it or sell it. what it means to the family. what it means to have land. what is her place in the conversation 2 or 3 generations removed.

which is too how I tend to think of my family. my grandparents who had land and a banjo and song and the same hills, the same hills. the way the mines detached my grandfather and reattached him, tethering him by company scrip (coal company currency not exchangeable money… think st peter don’t you call me, I can’t come, I owe my soul to the company store.) only to hang him and his family out to dry when the mines closed. ohio a place of refuge, of displacement for my mom, aunts, uncles. scattered in foreign lands. no money, little means. no real culture left. white trash is white trash. nothing more, right?

i feel it is relevant to post this here to precede this writing. first, because i am reading eileen myles’ the importance of being iceland which i am so thoroughly enjoying. i feel newly in love. second, because of what happened last night. it just seems a good way to go. quote myself, then cut myself off, as if i were an automobile bisecting my trajectory as i ride by in another automobile. see what happens. if i crash and burn. or if i am able to bounce away or steer off into another direction.

i woke up last friday night at 3:30 am. it didn’t seem the result of anything. no dream was lodged in my head upon waking. if anything, it was anxiety about whether it was time to get up for work. it didn’t seem quite this either. i couldn’t fall back to sleep. for a long time. i was in not-quite-sleeping-not-quite-awake state. one of the best places to be. i began trying to remember my 21st birthday. and then every subsequent one after. i began filling in the details of relationships, break-ups, new friendships, school, travel, world events, piecing together a picture of the past ten years of my life.

actually, the feeling of waking this way feels much like the time in 2007 that i had a dream about k’s birthday only to realize the next day that it was k’s birthday.

i was pregnant and had just discovered that i was going into labor. it was sudden but subtle. i told h. and the others with me that it was happening and that i had to make my way to the hospital. i was confident about it but cool and aloof to what was occurring. i held my stomach and led them all silently to the car. we never really arrived at the hospital just several places upon the way. always aware of my womb, i still ate some, gathered clothes, took some photographs, held my stomach. at some point we ended up at a destination but it was not a hospital or a home, just a random nondescript place. i asked myself out loud what the child’s zodiac sign would be and realized s/he would be a virgo. a virgo? i was disappointed with this. but then i remembered that kate was a virgo and that i would be okay if my child was born on the same day as she was. the child would have to wait to be born until tomorrow, the 9th of september, the day of k’s birth.

i woke and realized that this is actual. that k’s birthday is on the 9th and that my dream reminded me to celebrate this day which brought k. into the world.

this is difficult to write. i can’t quite convey the two hours of sifting through all of this. nor do i really want to write out here the chronology. i just think about how much of a fool i had been to a… my girlfriend. we broke up and i think i have been spiraling about the same things ever since. not that they began there. but that began a couple years of destructiveness. of running and hiding. last night, i saw my immaturity. i saw my childishness. i saw myself go through all of these things afraid of myself, of others. i saw all of my hardness to the world and to myself and to others.

i saw events. changes. things that happened. choices i made or places where i needed to make decisions. how these moments could have been moments of heightened intimacy, courage, and learning. instead i look back now and feel i was there as if a ghost. a ghost to my own life. hollowed out by everything.

so what will i do now?
after this experience of waking between a dream and a rock.
choosing to look and to look deeply.
i will start by remembering
every moment, a choice. every moment, a choice.