september 5th, 2021 - & onward
picnic table by duck pond with the moon seeming very large knowing what the other person is attempting to say but avolitionally alexithymically not assisting
in the slightest, mid interstate panic attack, sweet frog, a basement with a dehumidifier in it, a mysterious unidentified tornado siren while in a garage
on a mattress, "vision flashing red & blue" from stress, sleeping in a basement closet away from the others out of anxiety, sitting on basement stairs
behind the door & accidentally overhearing an easily misinterpretable exchange, a stuffy gasoline-smelling garage with the walls covered in collected
license plates, chasing a big dog across the neighborhood with the brother anxious because she's on thin ice after intimidating a neighbor, pigeon guy
nearly drops a big industrial light into the pool & kills both of the other people, accidentally snooping a facebook message that suggests a very
unfortunate choice of person will be stopping by, a hamburger car spongebob toy sitting on the floor in a rotting ballroom with piled up mattresses,
a rotting tropical-themed restaurant, anxiously googling motel directions as the batteries of both the car & the phone i am using threaten to die,
the miraculous decoding of abbreviated confessional tumblr posts, secret rockstar flavor, sitting on a person's lap during the drive to a nature
trail because there is no room in the car, mike's hard lemonade, handmade birthday cake, horseland, SSRI withdrawal, skunks, kowloon by shinjuku
mad - "this song kicks ass!", hounds of love by kate bush, the inner treaty by sun araw, girl with a pearl earring by johannes vermeer, a girl
with narcissistic personality disorder named Rose appears with two lackeys & punches his mom in the face, a pitch black stone room in an abandoned
building with bibles scattered everywhere, burning a sigil to encourage the car battery to survive the trip to autozone, silently spectating gnarled
recursive arguments that feel like dripping battery acid on my grey matter, walking several blocks to a park at the first sign of tension then later
noticing a police car & just knowing in my bones where it's going, hold your colour by pendulum on the bluetooth speaker at the park, a golden retriever
in a decorative pool of water, trying my first Take 5 candy bar, filming a crane or heron or whatever sort of bird, being frightened by the yelps of
a pack of coyotes, lying on a concrete inclined surface that leads into a river, dlp 6 by william basinski while trying to sleep in the car in the
parking lot of a particular section of the nature preserve, walking to a gas station on my own for batteries without anyone's knowledge late at
night & getting roped into an anxious conversation with a guy named Skip, having to brake for a car riding a unicycle in the middle of a random
residential street in the dead of night, the ep projecto, velocity design comfort by sweet trip, the land we all believe in by cerberus shoal,
ferrets at a pet store, riding in a ferris wheel, accompanied at the fair by a guy with a pigeon on his shoulder, playing yu-gi-oh, having
a short awkward private conversation with pigeon guy who says he thinks i'm really cool, incredibly drunk guy ranting about how "weed is
trash" & later signing my birthday card with a fake name that is an anti-semitic internet meme, glimpsing the cat named after me, getting
very winded from a simple walk up the block then realizing i just literally ascended a mountain, walking back down with the far end of the
street wobbling significantly with my footsteps because of the parallax, feeling like the car is flying through the mountainous terrain
awestruck, fog-drowning giant wind turbines, "(laughing) the weather just gets progressively shittier as we approach the city like it's
this epicenter of misery," amo bishop roden by boards of canada, letting the pigeon attack my fingernails, being introduced as the creator
of that meme ms paint dog comic, seeing a commercial for fifty cent frosties & leaving on the spot to drive all the way across town for them,
visiting a childhood bedroom & wearing a genuine ancient child-brony-phase fedora, fulfilling an oath to chat with someone's dad about the
residents, carrying a tiny pathetic chihuahua through the woods in a purse, balancing on a big fallen tree branch & having a very old man
approach to sweetly say that i reminded him of times he spent in these same woods when he was young, asking about the weird bump i found
on my scalp in the shower & being told that it's a giant engorged tick & having a frantic situation ensue involving peppermint oil,
consolidating all the scattered in-progress water bottles into just a couple of water bottles in a foul confluence of all three
people's dna, finding a fantastically entertaining stick - a natural toy- that is very springy with a sharp bit on the end so
that i can swing it & skewer leaves like it's a scorpion tail, two or three strangers approaching under a park pavilion during
a despondent conversation to randomly pray for us & it actually cheers us all up even though none of us are religious - sort of
breaking us out of our mindsets & into fresh ones, sitting on an island of gravel at the far end of a rain tunnel by a park,
playing europe endless by kraftwerk on vinyl in the basement, live coverage of the tour de france on a hotel tv, family guy
on the arm-mounted tv in a hospital room, "you pass flawlessly so walk with a spring in your step," shrek chess, foil-wrapped
7/11 burgers, leaving my bag at jack in the box & having to rush back, four people crowded in a tiny basement bathroom absurdly
eating slices of mango in the belief that it will enhance the effects of weed, absolutely hating my every attempt to smoke weed
& never wanting to do it again, missing the historic solar eclipse, low budget knockoff versions of 3d-animated children's movies,
watching ms paint webkinz cartoons on a hotel tv, vaping caffeine, being referred to as a pizza box, "popsicles" pronounced like
"Socrates" while driving to the wal-mart neighborhood market, being confronted by cops just as we try to start trespassing on the
abandoned campus of a mental institution, ain't no rest for the wicked by cage the elephant at another sweet frog, staring at
cloud-filtered moonlight dimly glinting off the surface of a lake & commenting on how strange it is that those glints are
ultimately sunlight, gas station employees with delightful & affectionately hostile camaraderie, trying a spiedie & feeling
underwhelmed, watching a crab in a fish tank endlessly eat dirt, tripping as i get up from an absurdly constructed park bench
& spilling my frozen custard from a famous local custard stand!!!, all three of us lie flat & quiet on a playground structure
as the lights of a police car tensely search around us like a shark - we are not supposed to be here after dark, he puts his
chewing gum on the brick & it becomes a fossil that i stop & look at to this day, the city does some work to the curb outside
his mom's house while i happen to be staying there so my acclimation to where it is gets subverted - i trip & fall carrying
a whole case of mike's hard lemonade & scream (thinking i broke them all) - my waist gets cut & scraped up unreasonably bad,
Daisy the dog is carrying an unopened fortune cookie around in her mouth - his mom says it's her baby - i later message him
about this & he too says "it's her baby," suggestion to huddle like penguins, rubbing Daisy the dog's belly in the funny
way that makes her growl, at the junkyard hypnotically watching tons of mosquito larvae writhe around in a car trunk full
of stagnant water, first kiss, the "coral sunset moonlit sands" candle that's still exactly where it was on the little
table in my room, "become tactile," the four hundred dollar coat with a tragic backstory that i still own, the floppy sun
hat we giddily resolved would be purchased for me the moment we saw it at the mall - now hanging on my bedpost, the beanies
i wore, the dangly rubbery armband toys from the gas station, sitting across from each other in that gas station & wordlessly
bobbing back & forth in sync, the brilliantly sunlit field day at S park with the floppy sun hat & the little dog - she smacks
a leaf onto a table & it seems to vanish into thin air - i laugh hysterically at her incredulous & defeated stare, his trademark
green hoodie, the freezing cold late night walk across the bridge to that gas station - his phone balances on its end on the table -
clutching my coffee to warm my hands on the way back, sitting under the st. louis arch & she kisses the stone bench we're sitting
on - leaving a very distinct lipstick mark, stupidly getting drunk & lying on the couch upstairs to escape another vicarious argument,
thingy thing by muck sticky blasted in a tiny stationary car with his friend at the wheel, the "meme cd" - shrieking when 'let me hit
it' reaches the chorus, meeting her brother as he plays zelda breath of the wild, christina grimmie, finding a turtle on a rural street
on a misty day, my bag shoulder-strainingly heavy with cans of soda, an attic full of mementos - a vhs tape she recorded with a friend
from school, hotel breakfast with lots of elderly people - boys that we suspect are human traffickers ask us to travel around the country
with them selling magazines - a pair of scissors anxiously hidden in my coat sleeve, a park with a genuine gnarled girder from the
twin towers on display - it turns his stomach to look at, he shows me how you can take one of the plants that look like skewered
hot dogs & strike it against something to make its seeds explode everywhere, 'create desire' by angelspit as we first cross the
new york border, ke$ha, 'boots & boys,' build me up buttercup, wubbzy gets send to bed early, as soon as we're driving into st
louis a truck with a giant cross on the back - apparently a local fixture - passes us & i start laughing hysterically, laughing
hysterically at the flo rida 'you spin me right round' song, eating canned mac & cheese being the 'opposite of throwing up,'
drinking malibu & watching a cgi dog movie, chicken town, mountain dew voltage, mashing up the chihuahua's food with the
pen that i still carry in my purse, the chorus to 'bye bye bye' by nsync echoing across a parking lot like a ghost as we are
attempting to patch things up - genuinely one of the most surreal experiences of my life i think, horchata rockstars
behind the gas station - sitting by a dumpster, always in that same back left seat of the van, watching the sunrise at
E park, before we part ways for the first time in three months i place a beanie on that seat's headrest & wrap my scarf
around the 'neck' part in a symbolic display that turns out to be kind of insincere on my part - by this point i am possibly
a bit traumatized & would just like things to remain civil until i can have some time to myself to process everything,
melancholy as we prepare to drive me home from st. louis thus spelling the end of the life-changing two-month ordeal,
playing 'crash bandicoot: the wrath of cortex' in that st. louis basement, wearing a completely absurd maid outfit,
he gives me a kinder egg that i keep in my freezer for years, "holy shit" in that first moment on that first day as
she steps out of the van & we all regard each other face-to-face for the very first moment, as we drive to the motel
on that first day we listen to the ep projecto & i sit quietly - awkwardly - uncertainly, the second or third meet
kicks off rather more humorously as they frantically usher me into the van to drive somewhere gravely important -
they realized there is a Hobby Lobby nearby & have always wanted to know what's in there, held under a tree -
photographed being held under a tree, dressed up in the four hundred dollar coat & other festive attire - standing
in my doorway - dancing back & forth to "j'ador les jus d'orange" by glue70 - waiting for the van to turn the corner,
holding his hand at an extremely difficult time while i use the other hand to post simply the word "Weight" on tumblr
over & over because i express my distress like a terminally online freak, watching a goanimate video & laughing to the
point of incapacitation because a rainbow minecraft skeleton just starts saying "i love xbox" over & over for at least
a full minute, falling asleep in the same bed while listening to like nine tabs of goanimate videos that all have autoplay
on so it is like evolving white noise - every once in a while one of them does that thing where they yell really loudly,
so there'd be one distinguishable voice rising out of the soup going "no!!! i said i'm not going to olive garden!!!" or
whatever, lying on a tennis court at night with the song "safe" by skeleton, a man named Bash trying to help us fix the
van out in front of a gas station after the initial realization that the alternator bracket snapped, a guy from the
Chinese restaurant in the St. Louis mall giving her progressively smaller objects to pick up with chopsticks,
the guy from AutoZone leading her out of the AutoZone & down the street to go see "Dennis" the welder who
repair our alternator bracket for free, the QR code coupon debacle at the mexican restaurant, a guy near
the nature trail & waterfall in the middle of the street trying to get us to pull over but we don't,
people pulling up to M park in a truck & making some sort of chaotic commotion - "get your bag" for
we immediately intend to leave, a man trying to give me a counterfeit twenty dollar bill, Michael buying
us a phone headphone jack audio broadcaster device, the goth girl exiting Sephora, seeing a decapitated
squirrel lying in the road at the dorms & it's so gruesome that we can only find humor in the extremity,
a campus police officer tiredly pulling up & confronting us by the fountain, trying to sleep in the van
in the college parking lot & taking off when a police car seems to begin circling us like a shark,
seeing the guy who walks around Binghamton in a cowboy getup & quietly losing my mind while no one
else seems inclined to acknowledge him, as we walk along railroad tracks i feel a prick in the bottom
of my foot - i begin walking on one foot & he helps keep me steady. i take off my shoe & we see that
it is like... one of those plastic pieces you plug into a wall outlet to child proof it but it's very
big & instead of plastic prongs it is metal spikes that were long enough to just barely puncture through
my shoe clear to a shallow depth in my foot, a lady paying for my toothpaste just to get me through the
line faster because she's in a rush, an argument is going nowhere so they both agree to just halt it by
simultaneously taking klonopin - they get all loopy, watching him tear the head off of a deer skeleton
with his bare hands, accidentally saying something upsetting while we're doing british accents, talking
about it with her on the car ride to wal-mart, walking as a group of five at Buttermilk &
purposefully startling C by... well i perpetually have a bluetooth speaker affixed to my
bag playing music & i both sort of lingered behind & simultaneously turned the music
down gradually - exploiting the natural association between my distance & the volume -
then i quietly walked back up with it very quiet, & quickly turned the volume up