#used an entire bottle of yellow paint plus almost another one of those big bottles of yellow paint

[maudiemoods]

HAHGAHAHAHG FINALLY!!!

I used poster boards of different thickness and a LOT of yellow paint!!

[possibly-meaningless]

Dailies - Home from home

23.07.19

It’s technically morning, with the fans snoring like pirates in hammocks, or alternatively white rattlesnakes, and the water outside taking it’s turn to blow unevenly on my singular body which cannot sleep. Someone is fading in new lights at the window, just fast enough to get your attention. New Haven, picking an outfit. Not for us, mind you. Never for us. For logics unknown and in no need of explaining, for no sake at all, but certainly decided.

24.07.19

You walk out into the morning which is like drinking from a stream., putrescence consistent, insect karaoke, packed lunch of sandwich and plumb. Your career is waiting in the howling tunnel, but for now you are walking errands and eating sunscreen. Answer your own question, if no one else can, buy what you want for breakfast. I’d rather a life than your kind of efficiency, the grind of a waiter scraping your own. 

Je suis complètement larguée, perdue, levée d’ancre, un petit rafiot qui traverse la rue dix fois pour en retrouver un grand, vide, rudimentaire, à peine construit, alors que la nuit grésille et présente des étoiles. Il n’y a pas de maison en mer, et quand vient la fatigue, les seules certitudes qu’il y a ne sont pas reposantes. 

25.07.19

It was one of those moments you know can exist, where you receive a long and genuine moment of practical kindness from a cook vinyl collector whose girlfriend sold you plates and glasses, who knew New Haven so pretty well and drove to your street without a GPS, and helped you pick up a table and chairs, and when you listened to music to remantle the table you found your apartment beautiful, and when you left you talked to someone fixing something big and funny in the grass with tape, and walked past the smell of fresh pizza. And if you pay attention you’ll notice your gait is wider, your shoulders back, that loud cars are listening to music they like, and that the power poles sing just as well as cicadas.

26.07.19

Blasted be this bus– bad day I suppose. Learn from mistakes only. I’m torn between a headache and a dedication to being Buddha-like, to mourning the unlikely refund, the upcoming exhaustion on the Uber, Lis’ exhaustion at her work. I chose to be here, yes. And I will make of it what I can. There is no reason not to be, once I have cradled my little suffering, to coo like the toddler in the yellow dress and earrings, you are traveling, you are traveling, your time is never wasted. 

It’s as if I cannot be on this Jersey Turnpike at any time but at eye-hitting sunset. As if the world will not allow it. Perhaps it was the first loving thought I had for this place that assigned me to it, and that I am now the sole designated lover of the gold cutouts on the Passaic river, this residence of cars where mere accumulation forms our departing products in the dust. If so, I am to see it as itself, not as a shallow safari of white and red metal birds, not as a child’s toy-strewn floor, the working hand on a veiny body. I am to see it strange billboards and all, a land bent to utility, understanding of its own gas-fumed complexity, tarmaced and bolted, where flatness is walls, having picked me.

27.07.19

Auntland is just so damn well written. And Lis is working god knows where but always impressing me. My friends are beautiful in a way that simply means I love them. She stops in the antique store where I do not, tells the Roman coins to me. How does one organize a store like this, where paintings are stacked, unnamed, painted wood and cursed carved jade? What went on in a Mayan mind, in this unpolished mosaic mirror? We should buy a castle together. We don’t recognize the Manson murders. We eat cumquats from the branch, and figure out how we are gods. I paint, and Eli knows government secrets. The buses are socialist free. Ten meters of crying DiCaprio, whose girlfriends are never over 25. I decide who lives or dies, who gets to take the scooter home. What a delightful Chekov’s gun, what a connection of inanities. And with the would-be limes that glued circles into my palm so that I must fill them with wisteria fuzz, we took to the painted wood and wrote: OAI. And in the Georgetown chalk dust of the building we found nothing exciting at all but sent off our exploring nonetheless, we took the eraser and wrote: OAI. 

28.07.19

We buy plums, small and mottled, skin the best, and get them in a plastic bag. We joke about the poem, freezer plums, while the heat gets at my shoulders you touch, use your neck to protect me. The juice flecks our elbows with purple paillettes, and the lace at my breast. I’m intrigued that you like me, intrigued if you like me. A line of sweat rolls down your back from your bra and another from of the fold of my butt. I say, not to you, “see what I meant about fruit?” with the slit of the plum open at my thumb and use my tongue to finish the fleshy pit.

29.07.19

É, T, ohielleu. Je m’appelais comme ça avant. Maintenant il y a à ma place quelqu’un de très bien, mais de complètement différent, en chemises rayées, les yeux fermés au soleil, riant ou riante selon le jour, montant une étagère seul(e) et repensant à ce que moi j’ai senti en me disant ayant sept ou huit ans. Ça me va. Cette person ferme les yeux et voit une photo qui n’existe pas, d’un balcon espagnole en sépia. Elle s’amuse à habiter n’importe comment, et aime beaucoup, tout court, d’une manière que je ne pouvais imaginer que par le biais de moi même. Elle pose toujours des questions, ça c’est bien. Elle pleure d’autres choses que de désespoir. Elle a fait la paix avec elle même, et sait que tellement d’autres trucs vont venir lui foutre dans la gueule. Celle dont elle a le plus peur de voir en colère c’est moi. 

30.07.19

The dump outside my apartment seems to be getting fuller every time I go home. Every day, I encounter a new insect. I think « I’ll come back for this later, and if it’s gone, then it’s gone » almost as if I’m thinking it was meant to go. The world has been trying to make me believe in predestination. My bottle of Gamsol spills in my suitcase, but it pools entirely into the dustpan at the bottom. When I lift it up, it spills, but only into the suitcase cover. And it cleans the spray paint off my hands. The ruins of cardboard valleys smell, that is the clearest reminder. They enter a state of being trash and immediately start to smell. I reach into the dumpster for what I need— magpie mind, magpie means. This is the sink I will be drinking in for the next year, and the stove doesn’t work. I walk the cupboards into the house like Easter Island heads.

31.07.19

Warm and sticky, legs and teeth, rain or percussion, swipe and reloading. Misspell a dinosaur. Cool yourself down, cold brownies in the fridge, muggy but just muggy, not hot, waiting for imaginary clothing, talking about drawing clothing, think of opening the window to the wet air, stay pinned by your laptop like by an at-home cat. Film over your teeth, laugh track in a song, chattering gutter, TV-show noises, waiting to go to a task, ignoring the pressing one, pick up your phone, write down a number, stand up, be light headed, sugar nourished.

Skill number one: drink water when you are drunk. Ceaselessly gulp, breathe like a bull into your glass. Why drink, when you are embarrassing enough sober. Blind men would find you bottomlessly stupid. Find the time to find this funny. Laugh about what matters. Think about going dry. See yourself stumble, again and again and again, off the walls, into bed, into formless conclusions.

01.08.19

Something not quite like a headache leaning against the side of my head. It’s the screens, I know that, and maybe the lack of sleep that I intent to maintain, and the beer today after the last night’s Old Fashioned, the earbuds I stole from a lost and found just parsing sound through my ears. My phone screen is sick now too, necrotic pixels growing only when you check, like the pea plant on the windowsill. A vision clouding while I continue to smile, not to sound morbid, of course.

02.08.19

If your body has decided you are going to cry, and no amount or quality of your usual thinking is going to save this (remember, this is also matter of luck and means) find yourself a comfortable place or places to do it. Jaywalk and scowl at the cars, ask the sun for cancer-freckles, worry your music with volume, drop yourself from finger-height like a pill into a glass— any form of cutting off will do. Don’t actually hurt yourself. Learn to recognize the good habits from the bad, the healthy from the fucked, palpate your own side, train yourself to make the right decision.

03.08.19

This place is one big noxious noise and I am not using it to its full effect. I am the one white Bollywood dancer who goes on the dance floor to think. I do this during sex too. My thoughts take monster forms on the dance floor, legged, entering. I dance like a writing, like a thinking, like unlocking the heart of an encyclopedia: Americans dance on their heels, and I would stomp if I wanted to be masculine. Eye contact changes everything, not only for you, especially for others. Look at the two women grinding— couldn’t that be you? Would you know how to give yourself properly to that hand? Would you squirm? Would you fear? You’ve stopped asking if you seem awkward or brave. The question has been eradicated. You’re working out of line, and doing nothing at all. You are looking at the halo lights and watching your carrousel mind melt in a black plastic shape where you’ve decided to put yourself for nothing. Couldn’t you do more? White woman you are, cleavage-key, dancing sexy for the Hindu gods? What a waste.

04.08.19

The sea reminds us the strongest, because every ripple is a mountain where one crest is the sand and another is the sky, because a half of you is pushing through jade hip by hip, because you are driftwood-sun-dried and the water takes your breath in weight or in drowning lap. We are reminded when we sit on rock, and the wind and heat does the all of us, when our bodies are just another thing for the world to be on, when the being there is just being at all, smelling seagull fallings (fish, shit) while the ocean talks to itself.

05.08.19

We dolly our furniture in dark processions, clack and bonking from pavanent to pavement, sweating evenly. Once again a ferry, this time two-manned, this time jolly, stopping traffic like spirits on the street, chatting shotgun through the tower of trays, legs, drawers, scraping wrists and ankles, puzzling at our load on a corner then off again. Simone can’t tell if she pisses Matan off. In living with strangers she doesn’t mind being bossy. Dish towels are clean and not for cleaning. She refutes claims of her dirtiness. I find she is someone who is very sensitive to gender roles. Abby Adult says adult beds are not in corners. I climb up the walls to give myself a red canopy. Stash and steal and crowd and clutter, Howl’s bed, magpie’s mind, treasure box. Let me live somewhere I can get lost.

06.08.19

I am folding myself into this house like into a blanket, filling every corner with some hand-sized glee. The moving and choosing fires off the part of my brain that is a mouse pushing levers, saving grains, planning for later, living like cooking, by habit and precaution. Cameron had nothing in their room. These are two sides extreme, both beautiful, both in their own flavor correct. My choice is to be fret-tired and worn in a moment; rather than lacking or scavenging later, bumped and familiar with frustration or money-spending. I like the bartering, the cooking with nothing, the piling and stringing things up. “Your DIY aesthetic” says Matan, strange and insightful again. Birds will make a nest to see it torn down the next year.

07.08.19

The storm like me back it seems. I talk about her incessantly, of when the kites fly low and remind me of the sea, of the way the sky presses on the city and makes you notice it, doing what you’re doing but doing it with your eyes on a corner between roofs were you see her scheming the rain, first drizzle then pour. And I make my ferry way, pressing my umbrella between my fingers and phone, braced and ready for the trick to fall, eager in the waiting like happy prey. And when you do start love, you have humor: you growl somewhere to the side-ear and fall just on the chorus of Don’t Let Me Down while I join in and soften just as it stops. You have me laughing clamorous and soaked and clear.

08.08.19

I dream that I am Theo, lost and boyish and cut-off from everything and especially myself expect girls and history and whatever excites the mind to marvel. Let me read again, now that I am slightly weak, now that my mind is playing tricks on me again, listlessly making me believe I am worth no one’s time. I want something to sparkle for me or damnit I will go and find it. I will go to a play tomorrow and I will be in New York and I will read on the train. By God I will be good at this if nothing else.

09.08.19

“Pay attention” says Ethan, “to how your body feels.” Is your phone less reactive, or is it the cover screen? The chord, the block, or the device? I stand evenly on both feet in the line at UPS. I return every eye that meets me, insistently— look at me, I am looking too. Pay attention. My face feels gathered like a half-raised first. My step clacks, my back is straight, I am no floater, Theo. Where is my benevolence? Why must it depend on, vaguely, if Adrian is sleeping with Lis, if Holly cancelled on me, how my body decides to wake up? Who am I being so cool for, so impenetrable, when I have said so often that I refuse to defend myself against people?

10.08.19

C’est drôle comme rapidement je me remets à aimer. Il faut aller trouver ces choses: la pièce de théâtre indépendante et un peu étrange, l’établissement au nom russe, la tartine un peu brûlée. Florence me pose les questions comme il faut: non pas, comment vas tu faire (qui est une bonne question, mais pas la première) mais que vas tu faire. Je sais déjà ce qui me fait frémir. Tout ça je le sais. Il s’agit d’être radical. De savoir être radical. De choisir. D’aller chercher. Savoir rester heureux est vraiment un art— étrange d’ailleurs, vu que le monde a tellement à donner pour être heureux.

The AC in the train starts up again. There’s a helpfulness in the air today, like the summer doesn’t want to end, is sunny, and sea-like, glowing and streaked with clouds. But the movies are closed until September, and I don’t understand it. The coast has put on its best, I can tell, but doesn’t dare ask me to stay and I am ignoring it— going home. Never have I felt so invited to roam little Connecticut alone. But I am going back to my duties, sad-no smiling to the sun, as if I am an adult who truly must. How symbolically heart-ending if I were to sit inside today! I’ll go, no I will. I’ll take Natalie or no one but I will. You cultivate what you want to be, Caleb said it, we all agree— nothing has so clearly been that occasion for a good habit.

11.08.19

And we didn’t go to the beach in the end— we will, because we have a car now, but we have not yet. Instead we took the car to Lowe’s and the storage unit, and made a copy of the keys. I sat in the back seat with the sea in my hand like a toy I’d been told to be quiet with. Trent slid his hand over the wheel and he and Natalie held arms over the front seat like parents, in a way signaling to one another they’ve just felt affectionate, but must for now keep it seemly for the children. I take Natalie in, big eyes on her for long moments. Bare-chested Trent eating strawberries over a chair makes me stare. I want a moment with Nat alone (walking to the car, at home while errands are run by Trent and her mom) to raise the back of my hand up and point to my finger: the ring? As if to ask: how are you? How much of who you are with me can I still expect to see? And then, no matter the response, to say: alright, I’m glad.

12.08.19

The walk to work is always interesting. I face the sun both ways, cross like an accomplished idiot, stride as if to prove to the summer session students, and the tourists, and the construction workers, that this place is mine. The air is carpeted with the hum of HVAC and wired with cicadas, cool and rustling near the graveyard and parking-lot hot near the Whale. A painter camouflages a new building into the sky and an old man coughs on the steps of his house, wearing all red. New Haven calls for climate emergency, and for gun lessons, and for a twin pack of cigarettes (and of course, to Tax Yale). I am only a certain amount of native here.

13.08.19

Last night called for rain which came and stood, grey boots in the window at my awakening. Thanks to it now I am under the burbling skylight, wedged into the service stairs like a young délinquant, barefoot, sandal-tanned and flecked with black with but only waiting for my flats to dry. Donna Tartt narrates over me in alliterative phrases stuck there since high school English: “widow Dido,” “Popchik, Popchik.” She makes the packing of my lunch seem frantic. I am misted in parts and soaked in others. I contend with the parts of my commute I have the least affection for when they offer me shelter. Boring duties are renewed with care (I check my bag like a friend) and the umbrella surprises me with a watery caresse. The pour stops and starts in uncaring moods, while I marvel at the fleck of dry sand on my fingernail, as expertly dropped as a seagull’s bird shit.

Making food, spiked-seltzer drunk, feels like something I should be doing in my early twenties. Still in my shoes, not quite bumping into our move-in mess, navigating to the stove where my peppers are patiently cooking. Technically drinking alone, I suppose, although Nat and Trent are in the room next door. They’re as if teenagers had gotten married, playing locked-up video games, eating pop tarts and pop corn. I’m being mean, but still. Give me a friend other than myself to be arrogant and drunk with. 

14.08.19

The day has felt like a skipping record. I sit with my shoes awkwardly up on the bar of the old geology classroom table where we have our lab meeting, legs apart, changing the position of my hands to look more like the men on the team. I’ve been wanting to project to them, and to convince myself, that I am confident, and unashamed of myself as a researcher. The flattened squamate skull Kelsey has been segmenting all summer spins evenly on the projection screen like a rainbow screensaver. “It took me a lot longer than I’d like to admit to figure out how to make it loop in PowerPoint,” she says, in the bored and awkward silence preceding Anjan’s arrival, “does anyone hear that ominous beeping noise?”

As the meeting goes on I feel bad for my cynicism. Anjan is helpful, and full of feeling; he kicks his voice into a fury about how the auditorium in the new science building will have no exhibits for modern research, only stupid, dead, drunkard white guys, dried out carrions in their graves whose work we refuse to shut up about. Pisses him off; he’ll go up and give them a piece of his mind. “How about you Alice?” eventually he turns as he does for each of us to ask about my progress, paused and attentive, a gooey ring of white exposed all around the iris. “That’s good!” I flicker my eyes around the room, unsure if I have ended my explanation. “If you’re working on vomeronasal projections you should look up nervus terminalus– nerve zero. It’s kind of an old theory, might be totally wrong but you never know. It’s worth looking up. Some of those old dudes tend to say more interesting things than some people in the field nowadays.”

I think back to the ominous beeping at the apartment, poked through my reading by the musical sting of Trent’s medieval strategy game a room away. He and Nat hadn’t realized I was home at first, and had cooed at one another in a way I knew I would only hear now as they would never do it around me again, and talked about how mushrooms tasted like cum, Trent explaining that he had, yes, sampled his own cum which is why he knew what it tasted like. I made myself coffee, which I never do, half milk and three spoons of sugar, feeling like a thief for taking from Nat’s Knick-knack teapot. Worse, I catch myself wanting a drink, in pathetic emulation of Theo’s own self-seriousness, the brooding, world-bereaved young man, for whom defensiveness is not only perfectly reasonable, but noble.

15.08.19

Jack, you came up in conversation with Nat. There’d been a build up to it all week, me thinking about morality and self-image, feelings of guilt, feelings of rancor. I sat on the couch, wrapped up into myself, furrowing my brow because I wanted to feel myself do it, wanted to put myself here, guilting profusely over every movement and word I said. I was too arrogant, didn’t notice when Nat stormed out that morning, I steered the conversation wrong (“how do you learn to do that right?” had asked Max) toward myself, or towards the wrong kind of comfort or advice or recognition, sloppy, really. Just sloppy, when you can be deft. And I thought about how guilty I felt for what I’d done to you I said, “if I forgive myself for what I did, then I am no better than him for forgiving himself, for absolving himself of the need to think of the pain he’s caused, and the pain he might cause in the future.” The difference, of course, and I don’t need a shrink to remind me, is that I need to hold us both to the same standard. That does not mean I’ll happily dismiss you to my advantage as deranged, or a dick, as you surely do me (I can almost hear it) but it does mean that I can expect for you to think on your behavior as much as I have mine, and when you do not (I have no way of confirming that you do) work accordingly. Same standard for you and I Jack— simple as that. For me and you and everyone else. Mix and match.

16.08.19

The next day I wake up thinking “let’s try impunity” and what an immediate delight. I walk and I see: GMC pickup, electric pole panel, security camera, parameter, when was this constructed? Are they working on Payne Whitney? Yale facilities vans have reference numbers. Brick patterns on the windows, tinted glass, where does this bus go? My voice picks up, I am un-embarrassed to speak, I listen to rap and move around the lab. I work. On the way back the air is breath-hot, and mercury light pushes out from behind the clouds in blingy prelude to a storm. I’ve selected a song of Lis’ that pulls my confidence all the way up through my spine, two gender-fucking voices, one slapping and modern, the other age-old and trilling.

17.08.19

I didn’t think I wanted to swim until my feet were in the water. Perhaps it is like weighted blankets and hugs that make you cry: being held never uses the front door of the mind. There is movement, my froggy propulsion through the water, and then there is the off-handed way the ocean sloshes to the shore with you still in it. I cannot conceive of the volume in any other way but the sea. Knowing what it is like to drown can change everything. Barnacle cuts are pink and radiant but impossible to feel, the opposite of paper cuts, which I suppose makes sense in more ways than one. I tie my ribbon around my hand like a tribal fisherman, hung up by all limbs in the water. I accost the dead skin on my heel. I speak and sing to myself. I do not notice the fog until it is in.

18.08.19

Shovel-fulls of visions arrested on their way to meaning. The day is jumpy and bored until. I am marvel-bound until I am talking, at which point I am stringing conversation and looking at your tattoos. Your eyes are clear, like lemon beer. The walls flake, and your photographs are grainy with dark, looking for fish in the deep. A sense of light, an understanding not semantic. A re-wiring. I climb and make, I sit in your smoke, I show the different angle which is absurd and funny, makes us tiny toys. You are from Moldova, I have to remember. I hold your hand on the backseat. You were talking yesterday about the moving holes of LSD. 

19.08.19

The sequence of the day has seemed completely natural— something a hobbit would set their watch to from the porch, looking out into the turning of the world. Chris was around, and will be for the next few days since his New York conference got cancelled. We both understood the afternoon so well before carrying it out: we would both get chai lattes and bump around the Willoughby's unembarrassed when our orders get messed up, say we should “make the usual walk to the Div school” and stop to sit in a tree by the observatory, perch in the stormy wind like two academic birds in the Marsh Hall belfry, and chat about efficiency, and language, and morality. At work, it storms. I pack up to walk home some half hour after the rain and head to Stop and Shop in the gold-dripping postdiluvian afternoon: an excuse to see a neighborhood that isn’t mine, where streets fan out into the unknown, sparse with people and rife with churches, a zone I’ve not yet added to my mental map. I buy bread, hair ties for my roommate, “nice” jam for the other, slot them in my technicolor backpack, and glide home on the sound of crickets and seagulls beaming through the limpid air.

20.08.19

I’ve decided not to go to work (Laurel hasn’t asked for me, I’ve figured out the extraction problem on my own, I’m getting lunch with Chris and Julia near the med school, I’m not even getting paid anymore, I have other things to do, and if she needs me she can just text). The only thing I’ll be missing is the chill of the lab, without which we are faced with an unclenching strip of hot, humid weather than I scroll across the weather app on my phone. The apartment is still as whispery as a wood: spoon tinkling once against my chosen mug of tea, Trent or Natalie taking a rising sip from the vape pen, mindlessly clicking at a video game, against the faraway in-and-out of chittering cicadas.

21.08.19

Around 1:30am we left Viva’s and dropped Jenna off with her three-year-faithful, less-successful-than-her boyfriend (Andrew? It would be weird if Chris slept over with him walking around the one bedroom apartment in the morning) but the rest of us had other prospects. I guarded Christina like a puffed bird while she changed in the trunk of the car from a black striped shirt to a black striped sweater, and helped list the roofs in the area. I could do Dwight, Kris had the password to the Howe Street roof, and Cameron still technically had keys to the whole building, but their first suggestion had already taken it: the creepy, stony walls of St Lawrence Cemetery mausoleum. 

Next, drinks: I had half a bottle of mango-nectar orange juice in the fridge, and a flask of vodka that’d last been used at dinner on Friday for one of Christina’s mosquito bites. Nat and Trent had moved in with a dreg of Maker's Mark, which was waiting on the kitchen counter, and Kris, of course, had more vodka at home. Halfway out of the apartment, waiting for Natalie to get dressed and join us, I couldn’t help but laugh at our situation: we’d pulled into the parking lot like a bunch of gangsters, crouched over the giant electric fan in the back seat, Kris smoking and blasting some dark, full, floor-of-the-mind Witchhaus for the entire tenement to hear. We were making things exactly as we wanted them, speeding off onto a road that was empty and ours with the arrogance of a Neo-Tokyo biker gang. 

Campus, which had felt like a kingdom until yesterday, has been retaken without a breath of effort. The air smells like a firecracker, and the dorms like shoe-box houses. People have started partying, and practicing, and working, as if they had spawned there already in the act.

22.08.19

I am drunk and sober enough to write. We are magnificent tonight, you would see it. Our kisses barely hold back— I kiss Kris on her rough, shorn head, I rasp at her slenderness, the meeting angle of smile and cheek, I kiss Keduse on his good man’s t-shirt, on his Egyptian locks, the enamored look in his eyes and hands, I kiss Cameron with hands around the waist, into bony rebellion, hated and going, spirit that knows me in a pair, dyed hair. 

And for those who are not with us, I have planted a kiss on your neck— feed me more alcohol. For those who are too lost to stay— you are guiding yourself, and we are here waiting. For those who are trying us, getting their feel— our love extends to you too. We are the city, that much I can tell. She is in the blinking foreign, she is in the dollhouse lights, she is in the streets of police and the things out of their sight. The drug dealer, the broke, the roped-up nervous boy, and those who’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to look for. 

She is the stage for us, the in between. She knows I see her— she is the mint I bring to my lips with inexpressible longing: wilderness of love. I cannot smell it without knowing it exists. After all, she is here: kiss them, she says, for I cannot quite do it in a way they will understand. Dutifully I do, and imagine hers, smiling sadly, pearled horizon, born dressed. I will miss you, Christ! God I will miss you! How much I owe, and this fantastic longing, it stands for all the rest of it! What tender love I will feel until I am torn from this.