1:25 PM
ME: i feel completely alone in trying to get better and it’s not working
1:26 PM
HENRY: so you want to break up?
ME: not at all
1:27 PM
ME: i would really like to feel better about telling you when i am not doing well. since i’m bad at hiding it anyway.
HENRY: that is pretty much what you just said
ME: no it’s not
1:28 PM
ME: what i mean is my attempts to get better aren’t working
ME: i want to be with you and i want to be better to you and i want to get my moods straight for the long term
1:29 PM
ME: if we could find a way for me to talk to you about my moods when they’re not good, without making me an extra burden to you, that would help me a lot
HENRY: when have I ever said you cannot talk to me about it?
HENRY: I am confused now
ME: you havent
ME: ok
1:30 PM
ME: my reasoning is often that i’m not feeling well, but i don’t want to bother you about it, so i try to pretend that everything’s fine, and then i end up being way more difficult to be around than if i’d just been honest
1:31 PM
ME: i know that what you have a hard time with is the moods themselves, not me talking about them, but i guess when i’m feeling bad i convince myself i should try to hide it altogether
1:33 PM
HENRY: sounds like I am bringing you down then
ME: you aren’t
ME: i’m down as it is
HENRY: I don’t see how not
1:34 PM
ME: it’s not you though, i know it’s in my head, i just think i might have an easier time getting out of this if i could just get over my fear of talking to you about it. you aren’t bringing me down because without you there’d be no one
1:36 PM
HENRY: ok
1:40 PM
ME: i’m sorry that we keep having this conversation. i’ll let you go now, i don’t have anything else to say right now. i hope i can see you soon.
1:41 PM
HENRY: ok
11-24-18
RICHARD SIKEN BOT @sikenpoems
We have been very brave, we have wanted to know
the worst, wanted the curtain to be lifted from our eyes.
This dream going on with all of us in it. 5:17 AM–24 Nov 2018
11-25-18
I am thirty-four years old today and I am still alive and Jupiter, auspiciously, conjuncts my natal sun, which means I should have the best year of my life. My friends come to dinner with me at a place called the Northstar, which has nothing to do with the North Star I used to go to in Seattle. After dinner, at karaoke at Ace of Cups, I sing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on a stage newly masquerading as the Black Lodge, with black and white chevron paint and a red curtain. During my song, everyone watches closely. We sing together. I inhale their delight and exhale my old dread. In the news today, a man who survived a shark attack to his head and neck says he’s more grateful than ever: “It reminds me that God’s in control. That you can’t plan for something like this. It’s given me a new perspective on how I want to live my life.”
11-27-16
Carl wants to meet for coffee. He looks like a corpse, his hair and skin graying. Even ghosts have memories; he does not. He’s like the body the ghost no longer needs. I do not miss him, finally. He says if there’s anything I need to say to him, I should say it. “You destroyed my heart,” I say. “And then I became a powerful witch.”
11-28-18
KENYON REVIEW @kenyonreview
“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
Happy birthday to Romantic icon William Blake! #literarybirthdays
5:30 AM–28 Nov 2018
12-3-18
I keep my memories like figurines shut in a cabinet. New additions: horses chattering, hummingbirds fighting, a dog watching for his person while I listened to passing cars, unable to recognize the one I wanted coming in. In the parking lot of Billy’s work building, I saw an emerald-green frog flattened and bloodied. Down the house’s long driveway, checking the mail one night when I knew he didn’t want me around, we saw a spider too large not to be auspicious. Of what, I don’t know, because a spider has more than one meaning.
Maybe the images are more like cards in an oracle deck. What is going to happen? In the news today, a boy bitten by a usually harmless nurse shark is recovering, and he says, “I think I will swim with sharks again.”
Staniforth, Here Is Real Magic
“I can lead an audience down the hall to the doorway and open it for them, but the final step from ‘trick’ to ‘magic’ comes from them … You don’t want them searching externally for a solution—you want them to believe in their bones that there isn’t a solution, that it was magic they saw, and you want this conviction to resonate inside, deeper and deeper, so in the end the vanishing coin was nothing but a vessel for this inward experience of wonder, which was the real goal when you asked to borrow a quarter in the first place.”
Karl Germain, quoted by Stuart Cramer, Germain the Wizard and His Legerdemain
“A scheme of deception may be used in simplicity as a puzzling trick, or may be elaborated by patter and circumstances into a fine magical effect, or so veiled in an atmosphere of the pseudo-supernatural as to become a veritable miracle.”
12-15-17
Carl told me it would be good to see me while I’m in Seattle. Whatever. A few days ago, we met up at the bar with the Black Lodge back room, and when I told him about my plans to take a look at the house in Everett that was the filming location for Laura’s house in Fire Walk with Me and Twin Peaks: The Return, he asked to come.
Now that he’s in my huge rental SUV, he’s not comfortable with the number of live and studio versions of “Still Loving You” by Scorpions on my playlist, but I frankly do not care. I feel that if I can’t stop loving him, I can at least make him feel uncomfortable for as long as he keeps doing the same to me.
It’s one of those indifferent Seattle nights—the air can’t be bothered to smell like anything, the summer honey sun is so long gone it may be a misremembering, and even mist doesn’t feel like coming through. But as soon as we turn off the main road and head uphill toward Possession Sound, climbing closer to Laura’s house, torrential rains pour down. We park and run to the sidewalk in front of the house. There’s a Christmas tree lit in the front room, lights on upstairs. Something doesn’t feel right: I thought it would feel different, like something clicking, this house from inside the TV suddenly in my real world, but I feel nothing. Maybe I’m inside the TV now. We take photos with the house behind us and a photo of the house alone. On my phone, the photo looks like the establishing shots. I don’t like what I am coming to understand: sometimes, it’s not the real but the imagined that unlocks answers that save us.
Carl sees a hand move a curtain in an upstairs window. I run back to the car; he walks.
As soon as we return to the main road, the rain stops.
Back in Seattle, we go to karaoke at the Baranof. He sings a pretty good “In the Air Tonight” and I don’t tell him so, but I’m delighted, because now I get to end my book with an ending that circles back to the beginning, and I don’t need anything else to happen to me. I sing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” to him. He takes out his phone and stares down into it.
Across the street at the North Star, his School of Rock friends are gathering to send off someone who quit. We sit in a booth in the corner, and it’s as though our thighs are magnetized, two poles the same, repelling each other. His friend asks him to sing backup on her “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” He doesn’t know the words.
Twin Peaks: The Return
In the final scene, Cooper has brought Laura—or someone who looks like Laura, but says she is not Laura—up to Twin Peaks from Odessa, Tex
as, where she’s working as a waitress and has a man’s dead body in her living room.
The last two episodes aren’t easy. Answers don’t come clearly or neatly; the viewer has to work to piece them together, but there’s no key. Cooper once said something about breaking codes to find solutions. According to forum users at welcometotwinpeaks.com, the symbol of Odessa is a jackrabbit. In an earlier episode, Jack Rabbit’s Palace is introduced as an entry point to the White Lodge, just as Glastonbury Grove allows entry to the Black Lodge. It’s a place where a vortex can spin in the sky, opening a portal.
A lot has happened off-screen; Reddit has guessed that Laura has been hidden in some other timeline. Cooper, by traveling through the secret door in the hotel basement, and then by having a rote fuck with Diane in the motel, has unlocked something and can now find Laura.
Cooper looks for her at the diner, then finds her at her house. She doesn’t know herself to be Laura, and she doesn’t know Cooper, but, like I said, there’s a body, and, interested in distancing herself from it, she agrees to go with Cooper on some journey.
The long-but-not-long drive seems to bend time and transport the characters into a reality that is ours, not theirs. The whimsy is gone. They get gas not at the familiar Big Ed’s Gas Farm, but at a Valero.
When they arrive at Laura’s old house, they park and cautiously approach. Her eyes are open wide. She’s watching, taking it all in. Cooper knocks on the door and a woman answers—not Laura’s mother, but a woman who says her name is Alice Tremond. She’s played by Mary Reber, the woman who, in reality, owns the house and lives there.
Laura’s mother isn’t there. The woman closes the door. Slowly, Cooper and Laura turn back to the street and walk away. Watching his back, we don’t need to see his face to know he’s figuring out his next move, but once they reach the street, the camera moves, they turn, and we can see Cooper thinking—trying, maybe, to retrace his steps, track the shifting of time. They both look at the upstairs windows. He looks down and takes a few steps, running through something in his head. “What year is this?” he says. There’s something going on in Laura’s mind, but she doesn’t say anything, blinking hard to shut and open her wide eyes.
Laura! Her mother’s distant voice comes from inside the house, or somewhere. Laura’s eyes are already open wide when she screams. The house’s lights shut off.
12-15-18
Ace of Cups is still decorated like the Black Lodge, but now there are Christmas decorations, too, and when I arrive, the band onstage is playing a song from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer:
There’s always tomorrow
For dreams to come true
Tomorrow is not far … a … way.
I worry about seeing the magician prank caller, because he told me he spends a lot of time here. But my smiling friends feel like a house around me. For a second, I think I do see the magician, but it’s just someone who looks like him. My glasses are off, my contact lenses are in, and my hair is tied up high in a ponytail as I try to become unrecognizable. In the bathroom mirror, I see it: the promise that I can make a new self inside this long-remembering body that flinches as it stores twitching fear. I am all new cells since Henry smothered me. I am twice new since I was first raped. In the mirror, I haven’t even aged, as though not a minute has passed.
12-20-18
ILYA KAMINSKY @ilya_poet
“You might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking.”—Lucille Clifton
12:26 PM–20 Dec 2018
12-23-18
The moon is full. I draw tarot cards for the first time in ages. What is now complete: ACE OF CUPS reversed. Withholding emotions for fear of being hurt—done. I thought the way forward was to become vulnerable and feel everything. But I like this better: being safe at home alone, enclosing myself in walls that are mine. I have not yet found another person to dissolve into, but I made my spirit bigger. Now I keep the fear close. Fear and love are not, as they say, opposites: fear is one kind of love in a violent place, keeping my spirit from getting eaten. It will cocoon me forever.
Twin Peaks
ANDY: This is important, that cave painting in the office, I finally figured it out.
COOPER: What’s that?
ANDY: I knew I’d seen it someplace before. I know where it’s telling us to go, it’s not a puzzle at all. It’s a map.
12-26-18
While I’m driving from Jersey back to Ohio, traffic slows nearly to a stop a few miles beyond the bridge over the Delaware River. Thousands of snow geese cover the hill to my right. They move together and apart. This seems like an omen, but I’m driving, so I can’t ask the internet. I stop at Cabela’s in West Virginia to visit some animals I like. The fish tank is still there. The taxidermy bear is still there. Everything is still there, really, but this time, I notice the jackrabbit against the wall, asking me to decipher its dead-eyed stare.
Twin Peaks, Log Lady intros
LOG LADY: So now the sadness comes. The revelation. There is a depression after an answer is given. It was almost fun not knowing. Yes, now we know. At least we know what we sought in the beginning. But there is still the question, why? And this question will go on and on until the final answer comes. Then the knowing is so full there is no room for questions.
12-28-18
I do not like this date. The man says he can get people to tell him things they normally wouldn’t tell anyone. I pity him. I’ll tell anyone anything. Maybe I’m trying to make them think they’ve gotten close to me. He says he likes dating lots of women because it feels taboo to be let into private spaces. Buddy, even I don’t know my secret parts. There’s no question you could ask that could make me give that up. He asks to make out in my car. I decline.
At home, I set up my new PlayStation, bought so I can find a way to relax and check out from the world. I bought two games; the first I try is Friday the 13th. In single-player mode, I can only play as Jason, even though I identify more with the campers. I barely kill anybody. Instead I wander. It’s always night in this game. It’s always summer. The people who made the game got the place exactly right: these could be the woods I grew up in, with saturated air, the roar of nocturnal insects, leaves veiling the sky, lake just beyond view. As I navigate my Jason from cabin to cabin, fumbling in the dark world, I begin to feel New Jersey summer, with its indescribable smell of warm microbial life flooding my cold, drafty living room. On my couch, it becomes another high school summer night, and all my crushes are miles away, all my plans years away, so I am looking into a screen and asking to be taken somewhere else.
Twin Peaks: The Return
Laura and Dale are in the lodge, still. They stare at each other, silent. Finally, in backward-speak, Laura says, “You can go out now.”
12-31-18
In 2012, Melania Trump tweeted out a photo of a beluga whale with the text, What is she thinking? and even though there’s no edit function, that tweet now has an image of a giraffe instead. Today, Twitter wonders about it. Twitter is saying goodbye to the whole year and getting ready to start over. A few minutes after noon, the Jung Foundation tweets a Jung quote: “Psychological truths are not metaphysical insights; they are habitual modes of thinking, feeling, and behaving which experience has proved appropriate and useful.” A few minutes before midnight, while we are playing board games, my friend tells me the big bang might have made two universes, one a mirror of the other. In the other universe, time moves backward. I don’t understand. Before I can make sense of backward, I need to figure out forward. I’m typing this and the statements are undoing themselves. I have, of course, moved forward, although maybe also side to side, and up and down. What are all the items on the book-resolution checklist? Am I ready to go out now? I’ll check later. Tonight, I’m losing at Monopoly and drinking nonalcoholic champagne. I’m just fine in Ohio, with no resolutions, no plans, nothing on my mind but cards and dice. I’ve got nothing for you. The year ends. I exit the timeline.
IN HIM WE HAVE
REDEMPTION THROUGH HIS BLOOD
There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on earth nations will be in dismay, perplexed by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will die of fright in anticipation of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. But when these signs begin to happen, stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand.
—Luke 21:25–28
tcii'pGam Ganihimi'm’ Guc-DεDi•nihω•'Du. anDω•'Bi’. la'u’Dε' Dεni'ω•'Diha•t
Guc-anDω•'Bi’. Dεni’ni'cna, “SDω•´-tcinDiDa•'tcit-wi•'. tcinDih ω•'DuButswu la'u’-
ma' ‘-tcεntcumi'nω•-yu’ tcinDiDa•'tcit-wi•.”
Long ago when the people saw the (new) moon then they spoke to the moon. They said to it, “We are still (alive) here yet. We see you now that you have come out again, (and) we are still (alive) here yet.”
—John B. Hudson, as told to Melville Jacobs, Kalapuya Texts
WHEN THE WORLD TURNED OVER into the new year, I departed from my festive friends and took to the couch in the house I still haven’t furnished the echoes from. My friend Hanif has been tweeting about Red Dead Redemption 2, and he told me its world includes a magic show. My brother, Nate, said there’s a reservation. This sounded like research. I bought a PlayStation. Since I last played console games, someone figured out how to make them real. Except when you see the faces. They give the falseness away because that’s what faces do.
You play as this guy Arthur, an outlaw in a gang led by this guy Dutch. The year is 1899. Intro text says the West is mostly tamed, outlaws hunted. This gang just botched a job, and they’re trying to get enough money to disappear into the West, even though the West is where they were undone.
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