tripping the light fantastic:

I think Connecticut Victoria would get mad at me if I stayed home this weekend. You know, all "Well, Tom Brosseau invited me to a party in Portland, and I had a free ride with a coworker who just happened to be going that way, who also asked me to go skydiving -- but I decided to stay home and put together my desk. And you know, like, get my laundry done, and stuff. I'm really glad I didn't go. Look how clean these floors are!"

Right. I would seriously just about fist-fight myself. Besides, as it stands I think we'll be back by the early afternoon on Sunday, leaving plenty of time for varying levels of sloth and domesticity.

From somewhere up above ten thousand feet,
*Victoria

it's funny how I just get struck with all kinds of achy sometimes. settling in to the new place, a day off of a raise, at a lovely dinner with a view and suddenly it's time to go. cue walking to the car, craggy mountain ranges like hastily torn construction paper layered against this cut-throat busted sunset that just won't quit. and then cue all the right songs, and all these stretched-out moments, and a shuffle button doing such a good job that it's starting to hurt.

black and whites and blues and glass and tabletops. worn-out floors and lamps on chairs on sheets on couches. the sounds of different walls, tiny ants crawl down the hall, and I'm anchored here like a radio station to amplify and pull all the words through, they're just right the first time. typing, not writing. but still.

{and I didn't understand / when you reached out to take my hand}

I really am closer than I've ever been before, on the edge of all this tangibility, not waiting for anything or anyone, riding the fringe of all the amazingness that's been practically thrown in my lap. and still, tonight, driving up broadway, stopping home to go out when I should be home sleeping and I'm tired and worn a little thin but for some reason I'm not sleeping - I'm practically sideswiping cars on my way up to the light because it's got me so bad that I have to take my book out and scrawl illegible blue ink all over the place. shifting. driving. praying for a light to get it down before another thought steals it all away, before it's gone forever. to grab that snapshot, the way the mountains looked and that particular shade of pink fading into dusty dime-store lips.

home, with a few weeks looming before my year anniversary here (which I will promptly celebrate by leaving the following day for chicago). it's a year and it's five lifetimes and five or ten minutes all at once, with a half-dozen versions of myself under my belt and folded into pages of some notebooks on a shelf. and me, afterward, glorious, sleepless, amazed, sunset-ingesting, lyric-laden, and free.

update: I'm not going to try, I actually am going to do this on my way back from chicago. with a photo pass. desperately attempting not to throw up on my shoes.

*sigh. I might shatter into a million brilliant little pieces, right on the spot. there's the whole part about how I've never been to austin, and how I don't know where I'm staying, and how it's about a hundred and thirty-five degrees there in the middle of summer, but whatevs.

...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

And yes, I'm well aware - "I can has" anything is right up there with fake moustaches, bromance references, man-scarves, and all kinds of douchebaggery shit that is _so_ last season/year/lifetime - but really, there's no other way to put it. It's bliss. It's luminous. Pure and unadulterated happy.

There have been all these times that I've been posting about being free and happy, and how it was all Angela Chase hands-off-the-handlebars time, and references to how I never would have asked for things to get this good because I didn't know it could be like this - but I am here now to tell you (yes, you) that Life Is Rad and I Am Happy. All the time, mostly. As much as I can be without the aid of any mind-altering substances. And it's the kind of Happy that I've never been privy to before. It's like how Kristin talked about, when she was living here and I was in the recruit-ee stage, going, "You know, sometimes I'm just going down the street and I realize that I'm like, smiling. All the time."

I'm smiling.

All the time. Kind of like this:

So, the job is rocking and rolling. It's getting on ten weeks plus and I think I'm on to the sea-legs stage... there was a lot of crying and throwing up to start with. But case in point, the same thing that happened last week happened today, and it was fine. (Last week I almost started smoking over it.) Sleeping helps. Eating regular food helps. Scooters helps - a lot, to the point where I'm trying to figure out how to rationalize getting one.

And there's all this funny stuff happening too, stuff that I call "science project time." During SPT I observe my actions and kind of take some mental notes, and think I should be writing them down, and then I don't write them down, but when the actions come up again, the notes just kind of appear on instant recall. Take, for instance, the fact that I am now Remembering To Do Things, as opposed to Forgetting To Do Things. RIght? I know. I'd be on the way out of the apartment and realize that there was something I wanted to bring, or forgot to do before I left, and I'd pretty much start flogging myself in the middle of the sidewalk, and I'd keep going to work or wherever I was going, telling myself what an asshole I was for not ____________. Now, when the same things happen, I'm all, hey brain! Thanks for firing that extra neuron or whatever! And I go back and get it, or decide it's not important, or whatever the case may be. Isn't that weird? No? Well, I'm sure most people learn how to do this stuff when they're, I don't know, five, or whatever. But still.

The other one is that when I go to get pissed off or set out to have a bad day or decide that something is hard or that I can't do it or something, a part of my mind goes, "You know what? Maybe it's nothing. Why do you want to get all jacked up about that?" And so I fake say to myself, "Hey self, maybe nothing is wrong." And ten minutes later I either believe it or have forgotten about it - but even six months ago everything I touched was embedded with clawmarks. Deep, bleeding clawmarks, all hurting and everything felt like tearing my skin off all the time and it was just awful. And now? Nothing.

For this girl, these things are huge.

Huge.

Could life have really been like this the whole time, and I just didn't notice? Is that even remotely possible? My dad read that book "Conversations with God" (wherein said God was really the dude writing the book, who finally admitted it years later, after book sales and paid multi-thousand person talks and online communities of people backing him up - awesome, right?) and he would talk about some of the shit "God" said, which I suppose would be applicable on a bunch of levels, no matter who delivered it - but Cheesebag McLiar book or not, it spawned conversations about needing to experience not having something to get to the joys of having it: being cold to really know warm, being alone to appreciate togetherness, and on and on. Point is, maybe I wouldn't even know how rad all of this stuff was if I wasn't so familiar with how not rad things had been. Was. Were. Fuck.

Already, it's too much thinking - like spending all of this time on self-analysis really is waxing poetic and it's just unnecessary and wasteful. I think that when I need to be thinking about shit and looking at whatever is giving me a splinter at any given moment, it will be just that - like a splinter, I mean. Necessary to address, with disregard to timing or convenience. I mean, you don't sit around figuring out why you don't have splinters and what shit would be like if you did, right? It's just like, not there.

(In Brian Krakow voice, really. Ha.)

Really. Is this me? Has some alien life form taking over my existence, skipping down the sidewalk, going, "Look! I've got nothing to worry about!" even when there's still real-life shit going on? Is this perspective maybe, or some level of internal or external forgiveness? It really doesn't matter now (because there's no splinter), does it? No.

I've got nothing to worry about.

Except love (strikethrough - lust) & rockets (or fireworks) & moving for the twentieth time in sixteen years (and that's pretty close to accurate).

*Victoria

It gives me great pause to say this, but I will:

Things are just falling into place. Or seeming to be so, at least.

The figurative honeymoon is over at my job - while I've been welcomed into the fold and all with wedding invitations and being taken up on catsitting offers, I'm also catching the other side of the family lash - no one is hiding their ugly. The drunk cousin everyone works around, the misdirected anger, the taking of emotional temperatures, the misunderstandings... everything is on all of our sleeves. I love it, and am momentarily frightened (and then empowered) by the learning curve. Curve. Curveballs. I want to go to another Mariners game.

The ADD has been completely unnerving today. To the point of having to give up on work-work and focusing on a getting a bunch of personal stuff off my list instead, because I can't be trusted with the details. So much happens every five minutes - work is a hundred and ten m.p.h., I'm getting back into a round of shows (Lemonheads this Friday!), I found the perfect apartment at my fingertips without even trying, I'm running budgets and fulfilling photo orders and running into people at my job in bands and keeping up with my hair dye and now I'm packing and giving my cat as much love as my schedule will allow - and eating too much sugar - and perpetually running fifteen minutes late. But it's because everything is good, not because I'm bonkers. Well, I am bonkers. But in the good way.

Things I have been offered thus far since I started querying around for free/cheap stuff: a leopard print footstool, a huge new television set, and an upright piano. OKAY! I'll take it. And I think someone just emailed me to clean the apartment for half of what all the other people were going to charge. (FTW!) It's... it's fun, this trying to keep up with it all. I kept getting all scared. But really, it's rad. It's not that shit is happening, it's that rad is happening. Rad happens, I suppose.

Rad happens.

Am I ever going to stop worshiping Glen Hansard? I don't think I will.

So, lumberjack mansions and Jesus Christ parking lots and and roomfuls of heroes who can't come clean. Unstretching, bumping into walls, onward upward and crawling out from the underneath of things. So funny, all domestic, all everywhere all the time, all the girl people want to stop by and say hello to, the girl with all the plans and all the happy. I think they're (you know, Them) putting one of my pictures of Pearly Gate Music in Mojo. No fucking shit. Painted windowsills, plants and animals, square black-and-white prints of Audrey Hepburn and forlorn souls heading down black hallways on black stairs, huge sheets of children's writing paper, other people's lyrics... pictures of the corners of things. Poster frames. The irony of twin-sized beds, the keys to the city, the soft sidewalks of our town, bird on a wire. And me. And like, destiny and stuff.

And Pearly Gate Motherfucking Music. For reals.

:*

seriously. mercury is in retrograde. that explains like, everything.

seriously.

so, I know this is typing and not writing, but the blogging has been pulling at me lately. friday started my first annual best birthday in seattle ever, when laura asked me to go see mike doughty at the triple door - the asking in and of itself was grand, and that guy seriously sad-bastarded my face off. ache, and bottle up the stars, and six-minute songs about one girl in one dress and staring at an ad on the side of a bus. after, because of course I'm figuring she's asked me because everyone else said no, I find out that she sought me out to come specifically. she thought I'd dig it, and besides, she hadn't seen me in a while.

me. laura hadn't seen me in a while. you know, 'cause we're friends now. whatevs, right? right. pinch me. just another friday in the city. shooting the shit with mike doughty for like an hour as the staff cleaned up the triple door, and hugging laura musselman on the fifth floor of a parking lot.

saturday was full of gradually increasing sunshine and a rad fucking game at safeco, even though the mariners lost (they wound up taking the sox at the end of three games, though). friends, and a little sliver of skyline, and garlic and laughing and the whole world felt like love and baseball. even before the garlic part, walking up, just the air and the park and the everything, I found myself like, skipping down the sidewalk. totally excited. freaking out a little. I mean, ollie and I bought fingers, for fuck's sake. he's allowed and all, you know, since he's six and everything. me, well, I am too. but it was kind of funny, all debbie harry blonde chunk of hair and a sasquatch shirt and chucks and a big fucking foam finger. good game, good game, good game.

today I slept until I was done and went to a luncheon-y thing and soaked up the last day of being 32, via some ridiculous sunglasses, a little quickie nap, and a few hours with bree and some of the fiercest gay dudes I've ever met. like, if I wasn't there with her, I'm sure they would have completely slaughtered me. but I was, so they didn't, and it was this bizarre little piece of a movie, where they were all caricatures of themselves on a long white vinyl booth inside. walking down the street with aviator sunglasses and a big pile of gay-badass. and as I type there's a cat on my lap and the iron heating up for laundry so I can go love the fuck out of my job tomorrow.

who's got it better than me? really.

the more I reach back east, the more it affirms my leaving. the more I say yes to everything, the more my life explodes with amazing. the more I show up for the hard parts, the less I have to hate myself. the more I believe in all the little (and big, but those are easier somehow) pieces of myself, the more space I get in my head. and then I remember things like taking care of how I look. and the feasability of dating. and instead of looking around wondering if I'm alright, I look around and tell myself in that moment that I am, and the shit kind of works some magic on the rest of the knots in my head, and... I didn't know it could get this good. I thought maybe it might but that other people got to feel this good and stuff, you know? I didn't know it could all happen to me. it's really slicing all the proverbial fat out of my relationships, because they either fit or they don't, kind of like shoes. only more important than shoes. but then shoes are pretty important I suppose.

I'm just so full of all this good stuff. it must be getting boring to read about. but this downtime, this quiet, this lack of anything - for once - isn't because something is wrong, it's more because everything is right. not aching doesn't mean that I need to be doing something else. kind of like when I thought I couldn't write without red wine. only different.

dammit I'm tired. the iron is going to blow up if I don't go use it, and the loft is beckoning. I'll just finish tonight out in the middle of these old mix tapes, and wish for a little bit that I would have posted something more interesting. but I suppose this might be all I have to say right now. all this, and that I'm compulsively checking to see if the frames are going to go on tour anytime soon. like, twice a week, I'm all over the internets about it. it's sort of ridiculous. but it's my ridiculous. and I love it.

x.