This Happens

Reasons to Keep Writing

Because when something ugly and violent is done to you, you won’t be the same

Because the people you trust will be gone

Because your definition of “painful” will be irrevocably altered

Because you’ll forget how to be around humans, or because keeping up the pretense will be exhausting

Because everything, your neighbor roughing up a drunk girl, your coworkers talking about assault like it’s a disease against which you can inoculate, some bro in a bar saying he totally got raped playing Call of Duty, everything will make you want to scream until you’re out of breath

Because you won’t scream

Because you’ll feel like he left a wall around you and you’re choosing to hide in it

Because you’ll feel like a pussy and a ghost

So the only thing left to you will be the words

So you’ll try to write them the right way

By “You” I mean “Me”

So you feel like you should paint, because you have this thing thrumming in your body and it doesn’t have a name but it is like excitement and patience and like laughing and crying and like rage and breathing. It is raining all around, through the gaps in the garage, and you make the perfect playlist for how this feels and for how the air should sound for painting, like a mix of sad soft voices and rain. You think about love and you feel love and you think it would be good to copy a poem by hand, and you dig through books for the perfect one and even though you always say you don’t care about poetry, e. e. cummings makes you cry and smile the more you keep reading, and Sylvia Plath and Stephen Vincent Benet and even fucking Robert Frost, kind of. This poem by Carl Sandburg feels right, because it isn’t for you, which is funny because the poem is called “For You.” You paint some shitty jar and try to make it like fireflies making light but this paint is cheap and your hands are too cold, everything is cold and a little damp, you live in a garage, idiot, and painting is hard but it makes you feel peaceful and also insanely vibrant, this weird mishmash of calm and so happy it’s almost supreme rage, no fucking name for it, like too much caffeine and smiling while you break something and all of that like meditating. And now you won’t sleep, you’ll lie there and you’ll feel like you are vibrating and glowing. Tomorrow you will be tired and shitty but tonight is good.

Blurring Lines- Fiction Edition

Elia and That Writer in New York and Tempe

I hopped off the bus. The rain was coming down lighter, now. Misting the waxed edges of the parka. I stood under the eave of the book store and tried to wipe off the water from my body before I dripped all over everything inside. My heart was pounding and I felt like I was going to throw up, my mouth getting too moist, that metallic taste around my throat. I rehearsed in my head, anxious that I wouldn’t be able to find Barrett despite the tiny scope of the store. ‘Excuse me,’I said, smiling, to an imaginary girl working the imaginary counter. She probably had on striped wool socks and wore thick-rimmed glasses. ‘Is Colwyn Barrett reading here today?’ Then she’d tell me how to find him, and I’d find an inconspicuous spot, and the knots in my stomach would lessen a little. I calmed down and walked in.

I didn’t have to ask. The shop was even tinier than it looked from the outside. He was in the center of the room, leaning into a podium. The place was packed, every aisle thick with listeners. I pressed in behind a stack of cookbooks, my parka swishing loudly. Barrett was looking down at his hands, or at the book in his hands. He was wearing a thick cabled sweater and low-profile canvas Nikes. I thought he looked older than when I’d seen him in Tempe. His face looked hollower, temples lighter. Maybe I just hadn’t noticed before. He didn’t look up while he read.

In Tempe, all of the artwork at the gallery was ugly, and the music was loud, electronic bullshit that Andy would’ve probably liked. Norah and I drank wine and laughed at it, until we found Bree’s vinyl airplane sculptures, floating toward us out of neon lights she’d built, and they had this ghosty, sad beauty, and we drank more wine and watched the airplanes.

“When we were younger,” Norah yelled against my ear, “like, twenty, Bree and me used to go hiking and we’d take these shitty wooden toy instruments with us.”

A tall, dark-haired man stopped beside us, softly scowling, to look at the airplanes. He scratched his shoulder through his gray sweatshirt. Breathing became a little tougher.

“Slide-whistles, bird-shaped ocarinas, maracas, miniature tambourines…”

Something in his face caught my attention. That, and the fact that people were walking by, young artists, paint-factory-explosion hipsters, sliding eyeballs over him and talking quieter. Breathing became tougher again. I tried to conjure one of the poems in my head, the one about a white city filled with snow, white trees, white train tracks, but it dissipated.

“…we’d drink those little bottles of booze, perfect with the little instruments, and we’d just lay in the grass and make up shitty silly songs…”

Bree whirled around a corner and Norah danced over to her. The man beside me looked like he was waiting for space to keep moving. He didn’t really look at the airplanes, just at the air in front of them. I took a few steps to my right and he instantly moved away, striding to the patio, a cigarette already in his hand. I watched him go. A curvy red-headed girl slipped next to me.

“Did you read his zines, or just that novel? I mean, if you can call it a novel.”

I squinted and drank more wine. “Zines. Some poems. Not the novel.”

“Personally I don’t see what the big deal is.” Her hip brushed my leg and I wanted to laugh. “Colwyn Barrett used to be this underground darling and now his prose is just too self-aware, too structured. It’s like he forgot how to write associatively.”

I pretended to drink even though my glass was empty. It was obvious. I snorted a little. “People change,” I said, smiling, giving her my empty glass and following out onto the patio. It had been a few days since my last cigarette. Hopefully Barrett had some extras.

Tour idea for bands that have female vocalist

cliffyworldpeace:

cerceponx:

eerieboy:

Bands:

• Punch
• Rape Revenge
• Bikini Kill
• xKingdomx
• Cerce
• Best Coast
• Headwind
• Cerebral Bore
• Lauren Lavin
• The Femme Uke

That is all I can think of.

YO OK YES PLEASE. Bikini Kill reunion and Rape Revenge on the same tour and we get to play? Also you forgot Curmudgeon, Congenital Death, and Deathrats (reunion).

Goodness hahahaha

Shouts out to Lauren.

I don’t know who made this but I agree

(Source: eerie-boy)

New Hobby

Lying in bed and pretending I don’t exist