LIVEBLOG

by Megan Boyle

  9:22AM: for the past week i’ve semi-frequently been thinking about how i said something like ‘i feel like a richard yates character all the time lately, when i am older this will not be ‘cute” in my book. now feel like i am the ‘older’ age where it is no longer ‘cute.’ most people i hang out with are under 24. wonder if they think of me as ‘older person’ now. the only people i’ve thought seemed older than me have also been substantially larger than me in size. it would make sense if as people got older, they never stopped accumulating height and mass. people would measure death in height instead of age, like you’d die at 46’9” tall instead of 80 years old. age is harder to see than height.

  9:32AM: sat on floor to continue organizing apartment-garnering portfolio. heard loud plangent basketball-like banging coming from the area behind my closet. the noise went away. it started again. irritated by this noise. the starting and stopping of it. it’s the same every time. mom walked to my room and when she saw me sitting beside computer i knew she’d know i’d been up all night again. she started expressing mom-like concerns, abruptly stopped talking, tilted head and looked alert. i said ‘yeah, the noise, it’s extremely irritating.’ she asked when it started. i said ‘just before you walked in’ and irrationally blamed her for the noise. she said something about pipes or leaks, then ‘i’m supposed to call someone if it’s…if there’s a leak, if the noises are coming from the roof. this has happened, the banging,’ sounding like she was struggling to access her network’s default ‘emergency broadcast’ message. i said ‘it’s not coming from the roof, it’s coming from where i hear the baby crying,’ and pointed to the closet. mom seamlessly transitioned back into worrying about me.

  9:52AM: kneeled in front of fridge and ate bites of raw spirulina pie thing. tasted too rich. put it back. thought ‘catch and release.’ currently eating a banana to quell whale noises in stomach. really taking my time with this banana too, like, showing it a good time, being careful not to make any sudden movements while it rests on my calf.

  9:57AM: i pointed and said ‘it’s coming from there.’ mom stood with surprising quickness and i followed her out to the balcony. she asked ‘when do you hear the sounds the baby makes?’ i said ‘not regularly, not lately. that’s a scary question.’ she said ‘oh no! no, no, no.’ i said ‘no, no, no, i mean like scary like david lynch, like he’d have someone say what you just said and then disappear or something.’ there was a noise. mom’s head darted in meerkat-like manner. i said ‘maybe it’s a burglar who has come to give us the lottery, wouldn’t that be exciting?’ mom smiled and made a face. felt attentive to silences between noises. i said ‘it’d be an ‘opposite’ kind of burglar.’

  10:23AM: interested in never sleeping again maybe, dying…somehow…from that?

  12:12PM: fedex-ing my tenant application form instead of giving to colin in person. doesn’t make sense to drive to NYC with incomplete portfolio. 24-year-old real estate mogul neighbor. ‘mogul’ is weird. feel like my hands are skeletal and ‘mogul’ right now. the capillaries or something look purple and webby and close to being on the other side of my skin with the rest of the world. think i’m thinking of ‘gollum.’

  12:21PM: almost always have itunes open and almost never play music. i don’t know anyone who listens to less music than me. remember telling that to tao in a car, hearing ‘seems…depressing…’ after a few moments.

  12:24PM: pictured the annoying hot girl from ‘girls’ saying ‘i LOOOOOVE old woman rickets.’ she’d go global with old woman rickets. take that shit global. that girl has nice teeth. if i were a guy and i saw her across a room i’d say ‘i’d like to take her out back, if you know what i mean’ to the guy next to me. he would know. people are always knowing things. they’re always saying things like that and understanding each other.

  12:39PM: laying under blankets. can’t believe i took so long to do ‘laying’ or ‘blankets.’

  12:48PM: banging noises have been replaced by bumping at a rhythm similar to this thing in the song. hm. i would pay someone to figure out what the song is, maybe. i almost can remember words.

  12:53PM: the song is ‘a sweet summer’s night on hammer hill.’ listening now. it’s horrible when they say ‘boom-ba-boom.’ eyes watered when i felt like i couldn’t continue typing something as embarrassing as the last ‘boom’ of the rhythm sequence. it out-embarrassed me. i don’t think i’ve ever felt this intensely negative about a song, or felt too embarrassed to finish typing something. i kind of like how awful listening to it feels.

  i can imagine someone reading this and being really annoyed by me. seems harder to imagine people being annoyed with me in person. i’m confident about my chill, attentive presence. oh gross. imagine some 18-22 year old guy smiling sexily, taking his shirt off as he scoots himself close to you on your beach towel—you are mostly in the sand and he is taking up most of the beach towel—squinting his eyes and nodding and saying ‘i’m confident about my chill, attentive presence’ at you.

  1:04PM: jens lekman has been playing since other song. this is my ex-boyfriend’s computer, it has all his music on it. going to try to listen to music. randomly selected ‘i’m your boogie man’ by kc and the sunshine band and fast-forwarded to a middle part where it’s. i can’t describe. you would recognize it, probably. i recognized it. i laughed. oh god. ‘here we go:’

  it seems like a club. the lights come on. it is a club. no one is there yet. after a moment a james brown-like voice says ‘give us this day, our daily[not heard over sounds of immense unseen hydraulic power lowering 100’ diameter disco ball that looks like michael kimball’s smiling head, spinning slowly. when the hydraulics stop making noise ‘i’m your boogie man’ by kc and the sunshine band can be heard faintly, but something went wrong, it was sent to the wrong address and is playing next door instead].’

  that’s what the release party for the flash intro to the marketing website would be. i’m crying laughing so hard. i never believe people when they say that.

  1:17PM: i want everyone to be doing this too, liveblogging all the time. a future where no one talks and. damnit. i used to picture this bleak all-white ‘matrix’-like people-harvesting room. the entire earth had changed into this white room where everyone just sat silently, and that was the future. thought ‘maybe that would be good if everyone was liveblogging’ and i guess worse things could happen than that, but i’m definitely not as excited about it anymore.

  1:29PM: i’m not even trying to do anything but just lay here anymore. until further notice i will be laying here. good. the banging noise seems insane, definitely directed at me.

  1:31PM: people think multitasking is distracting and it’s not good to get sidetracked but what if that’s actually how our brains want to evolve? like they want to process a larger and less-related variety of information and do this as fast as possible, eventually achieving infinity or something, perceiving infinite things at infinite speed. seems like i may have not been the first person to think this, vague memories of tao describing something like this in ‘taipei.’

  1:46PM: approaching 48th hour awake. i’m going to have nothing to say for like two weeks after i finish this. i love anyone who has made it to this sentence. pictured ricky fitts with bloody nose, saying ‘don’t give up on me, dad’ as a kind of warning or command to chris cunningham, who has just punched him, i think, in ‘american beauty.’ that part.

  2:12PM: here is an ‘other people’ update:

  • mom asked if i wanted anything from whole foods. i said ‘no thanks’ then ‘chim chim’ quietly, half-hoping i had actually just repeated ‘no thanks’

  • read supportive texts from gian and stephen dierks and felt good and like texts are one of the things influencing me to write more today

  • last night friend of ‘shower noise requester caller’ texted me and sent a picture but i haven’t responded

  • colin the real estate mogul texted ‘ASAP’ regarding something i forgot around 10AM

  • moved car fr
om driveway to new parking spot so mom could drive out of garage. held apple i found on my car’s floor as i walked to condo, thinking ‘mom will feel good if she sees me eating the apple.’ made plans to take first bite of apple once i saw ‘the whites of mom’s eyes.’ saw that i’d left condo’s door wide open but walked inside confidently and nonchalantly, bumping into mom, who i reflexively said ‘night night’ to, then hurriedly bit apple to ‘make up for lost time.’ mom smiled and shook her head a little. i laughed and said ‘night night sorry hello goodbye.’

  imagine all of the homeless people who have hotmail accounts. in the year 4000 all homeless people will have emails but somehow it’s going to be worse.

  2:54PM: experiencing weird light and depth/size hallucinations. the thing i’m mostly seeing seems like it’s everywhere also. it’s sort of weak in that i’m mostly seeing stuff i normally see, but if i focus harder/almost cross my eyes there is this other layer of stuff like, spinning fast, underneath everything i normally see. the layer kind of looks like a patterned neon turtle shell, spinning very fast. it has a still center-point with a concave half-sphere behind it that seems to be ‘wagging.’ the ‘wags’ become smaller and appear more ‘vibrating’ as my focus shifts further from the center point. the thing seems to be gaining other parts with more opacity that move faster. feel like the shape is intelligent, it’s like, an intelligent DMT lifeform that i’m kind of afraid of and interested in watching. have seen/experienced something similar to this on DMT. like underneath the reality i normally experience there is another version of everything—maybe infinite multiple layers of concurrent realities, similar to ours in that they’re also ‘realities,’ where things exist that are similarly conscious but in vastly different ways than humans are, like, unknowable to humans not on DMT, given our limit of only regularly experiencing one consicousness at a time. i sound like i’m on hallucinogens. feel worried a little, about my brain, like this is how the beginning of naturally occurring brain damage feels. i don’t know.

  3:17PM: you know when you look up from underwater in a pool? or see like, heat rising from the ground? that wavy thing? maybe that wavy thing happens on your eyeballs all the time, and that’s what i’m seeing. the patterns aren’t just the wavy thing though.

  this must be so boring for anyone not me right now, jesus. imagining ‘i’m chill and approachable’ 18-22 year old beach blanket guy saying all of this shit to me without stopping and i’m just staring in the other direction and i can feel him smiling or something. yuck. there are people like that. i’ve talked to them. you might be one of them. you are probably one of them. maybe i am also, shit. how can a person talk continuously at another person staring in the opposite direction, like, willfully away. how could you keep talking, then…or like…ever.

  think i only do that when i’m on cocaine. feel like that’s what motivates most people to talk: a desire to find a less-talkative human source to smile and be a repository for their endless talking. something they can really empty themselves into that churns and re-forms all the things they said into minimal blips of encouraging feedback. depressing.

  it might seem like i’m being the ‘talking person’ to you now but it’s different because you are choosing to read this and…i can’t sense you being there…or something…i feel like i’m alone, transcribing my thoughts onto something with RAM. have felt consumed by the menial task of downloading my thoughts onto this document since 9AM, maybe. i know i’m not really saying anything and there has been a lot of it but it feels good. like some kind of exercise.

  6:25PM: mom made a frozen stir-fry thing of general tso’s chicken. smelled heavenly. the chicken was cubed. felt excited, putting ‘only the best’ scoops on my plate. ‘simply the best.’ freely discarded entire scoops that were ‘not as good’ as others. red bell peppers were not included in any scoops that made it to my plate. fuck no. mom scooped things onto her plate and we used probably six accents to say nonsense stuff in a rapid-fire joke thing i don’t remember, which then petered out. i said ‘i’m from france’ without an accent.

  6:38PM: seems like it’s actually going to be hard to sleep. body feels too weird to sleep. watching ‘negatives’/inverse images of silhouettes moving at a different speed than the rest of my vision. keep thinking about parts of ‘nothing’ by blake butler, wish i had it here. feel like i could match or beat blake in a ‘no sleeping’ contest. i could probably do a week. would be good to be on a reality show with him where the object of the game is to stay awake the longest, but the night before the game starts, you are flown to your opponent’s house, to booby-trap it. then you are flown back to your house. the commercial for the show would have a voiceover that would be like (when it’s capitalized it means it’s an echo): ‘two people TWO TWO TWO. who have met once ONCE ONCE [man yells ‘two-thousand eleven’] [man yells ‘the internet’ and sounds like he is falling off a cliff] [no audio or visual for several seconds, then a rumbling, then something emerges in the distance. it is a monster truck driven by an extremely muscular man screaming ‘AT AWP WHEN BLAKE WAS DRUNK’ as the truck roars and jumps over the camera and crashes offscreen] [this is replaced with long, panning shots of a desert at night and desert noises, like desert loons and coyotes. barely audible gregorian chanting can also be heard.] johnny cash’s voice wryly says: ‘what happens when you gotta spend a week in your own house?’ [the desert is replaced with black and white slow-motion footage of a young johnny cash walking offstage.] ‘no-ho-ho rules, my friend. except you snooze? you lose.’ [he is gone. the mic stand remains. a giant can of foster’s beer materializes over the still-cheering crowd. next, the text: ‘foster’s: australian for beer.’] [screen is black] [man’s voice from beginning yells ‘sponsored by foster’s’ and it sounds like he is falling off a cliff again].’ so that would be the commercial. want johnny cash to say ‘the man of the house’ at some point. maybe the show is just called ‘the man of the house.’ i don’t know what the booby-trapping…like, am i thinking the booby-traps would be…? so in order to defeat the other person the traps would need to make them fall asleep. how do you do that. boring comfortable booby-trapped house. seems shitty. you have to make them fall asleep without killing them. no wait you can kill them. if you want. you would still get arrested though it would not be ‘hunger games’ style. then after you murder the other person and win, it becomes another reality show where you’re running from the cops. or no, it’s just the next season of the first show. then i guess you die too, eventually. there will be a lot of seasons. there would be one season where the winner of the no-sleep thing escapes the cops so many times that they actually convince everyone that they’re the president. then it becomes a government reality show. no, they don’t need to lie, they actually run for president and win. because the cops like them. even though they killed the other person. they’re just really good, loved by all. they are followed by cameras until their groundbreaking record-setting death of old age. it turns out they are the oldest person. they were actually the oldest person the entire time. even in the beginning, before they even knew the show was really about being the oldest, they were still the oldest. they did not back down in the face of adversity. they remained older than everyone the entire time. which is really the message of the show. the lesson to be learned: the oldest person wins the race. oh my god. ‘mafia credit card,’ remember that. ‘hunger games’ was stupid.

  11:05PM: right hand smelled like garlic for a long time after touching checkbook. hard to do things that aren’t ‘staring.’ going to scope out the scene in mom’s room.

  11:52PM: laid on mom’s bed while she tried to explain plot of ‘downton abbey.’ seemed like the most impossible thing to pay attention to and she seemed to agree, but would also interject ‘oh i know who that guy is’ comments. she said ‘it’s the only thing on TV, it’ll make you fall asleep.’ i dipped rice cakes in baba ganoush and think i was annoying and interruptive. eventually slid off the bed, like, laughing, feet-first. it happened a little then i ran wit
h it. i said ‘beddy bye.’

  MARCH 20, 2013

  12:22AM: bathwater is running. i’m just going ot do this until forever. ate half of some kind of pill, 1mg Xanax ithink. ate other one . just thought ‘willis is just in the other room, he said he watned to show me something.

  123331

  ookkk anoth athter xaanxn at som e oo==ibe, ijay sruffl is going to better e=vetter i know

  1:12AM: woke in mostly empty bathtub. very cold. drain wouldn’t close so i just sat on it and refilled tub with hot water. when i woke felt obsessed with finding candy i had been eating but guess i ate it all. flopped around trying to always be covered in hot water, thinking ‘sexy seal’ and ‘sprinkle princess’ and pictured someone tossing me a fish and this is what would get me into the maxim top 100 hottest women or whatever. because enough seals voted me in.

  1:18AM: looked at emotional gchats from ex-boyfriend.

  1:23AM: pictured emerging rapper, he’s like, only been in videos hanging out before but he just got to say this line in this song…he’s short and wears this giant shiny thing…i don’t know what it is, maybe a suit or a special kind of lakers jersey, and his mouth has so much grill it that it weighs his neck down a little but he still tries to keep his face up so people call him ‘sunnyside.’ he’s like, sitting at one of those sweet ass round leather sofas in a dark club with decanters on the table which is also a platform/light thing where sexy women’s legs in pumps are walking around and then beat drops and camera focuses on ‘sunnyside’ and he says ‘luhdda see em fart bubbles plip plop in the hot tub.’