a love affair

...the world owes me nothing, and we owe each other the world...

lovely weekend. i've decided to have a love affair with the city.

i made friends with an ant named ramona underneath a tree in the glorious spring weather. also, dining on hippie fodder upon the lake, while sitting on old picnic tables and watching squirrels [and boys] climb the turrets of elegantly deteriorating architecture. a birthday party was held in my honor (as well as for the champions of WISPIRGs 10% energy bill and a belated st. patty's day shindig.) drunken escapades with mardi gras beads, entire bottles (pronounced bo-tull, like the british do) of captain morgans entirely for me

"do you have a crown on your head?
then the captain says F-U.
stay away or we'll hook you."

green beer in giant beakers, miraculous feats of dancing madness and cloves on the porch. oh, and approximately 85 pictures. the secret restaurant of langdon which serves me sicilian shrimp and sun-dried tomato tarts and darjeeling tea in a fancy silver pot. flaming cinammon and bananas foster, piano men in black and white fedoras, and us gorgeous girls. the capital is, of course, featured in several candid photos (interrupted only by traffic...) while coldstone is the hotspot for dessert...yum for amaretto raspberry deliciousness.

there was drama of course (there always is). but it all fades when one falls asleep.


i might wave goodbye.
but probably not, baby, probably not.

it's my birthday and i'll blog if i want to

happy spring!


or not. seriously, cold weather? not acceptable. it's the VERNAL EQUINOX. not winter. VERNAL.
i'm ready to be unproductive as all hell outside in the warm sunny spring wisconsin weather. ready...go.

[it's fun to be in madison on my birthday] to himul chuli's! and other places. this has been the longest celebration of birthdays, ever. maybe that's what happens when you turn 20. after that, you're old. ha! <--- that's life, laughing.

favorite things: postcards of murals from prague. birthday wishes from a certain 4 1/2 year old assef. spending way too much time on writing, and not enough on nearly anything else. birthday wishes on my wall. wint-o-greens. seeing all my favorites, randomly. being destined. m. ward and ani difranco and imogen heap and dave matthews. bob dylan, obviously. the thin red line. white bread & toast, calvin & hobbes, and mutts. manatees. humpback whale song integrated into incubus (the warmth). underwater scooters, dunn brothers, and super target. grasshoppers, mini baileys, and pasta anti-McManus. ellipses. dancing. hugs.


Maybe all men got one big soul everybody's a part of, all faces are the same man...If I should never find you in this life, let me feel the lack. One glance from your eyes, and my life will be yours...Look at this jungle. Look at those vines, the way they twine around, swallowing everything...Oh, my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes, look out at the things you've made. All things shining...War don't ennoble men. It turns them into dogs... poisons the soul.

forgetting gravity (revised)

here's the story...i'm sure it'll change again (they always do...). enjoy. feedback is lovely if you so desire. even bad feedback. i like to know what people hate. [i like to know what people love more.] so there that is. i hope the many facets of the title make sense. questions, concerns, outpourings of odious or amorous affection...if you love me you'll know how to find me.

forgetting gravity

There were voices coming from the heating vents. I could hear them, especially just before dawn, that time when the sky starts to converge between star strewn dazzling and translucent morning clarity, when everything is glowing in hazy brilliance. At first I thought I was imagining them, the voices, as if I was searching for sounds that didn’t exist in the vacant silence of our old ocean-dwelling house. The way the old cypress is leaning, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was gone in the morning. The floorboards creaked in protest, even when I danced lightly upon them, the foundation rustled and settled like some great giant stirring in the night, and nothing will ever drown out the persistent whisper of the ocean. Yet the more I listened, the more I realized I was not hallucinating. It’s so old, it’s got some sense of wisdom, I swear. You ever think of trees as something else? There were voices coming from the heating vents. Swirling through the air and then slowly absorbing back into the tired walls. Something about them was familiar though, the voices. No, not a man Mags. Something majestic, and gentle. An elephant, maybe. Like an itch tickling the roof of my mouth, just out of reach from my twisting pink tongue; I could not shake the feeling that I had heard every word before.

∞

You said we had to do something magnificent and chaotic and ridiculous before we were too old, before we lost our sense of urgency, our desire to hear the entire planet in old ballads about the kinds of obsessions that don’t even exist in movies anymore. They’ve been erased, you said, censored by a technological lust for advancement. An infinitely expanding capitalistic rainforest crawling in armies of ants. You said we had to do something extreme, so that in forty-five years we could look back on this exact moment of our lives (you hissed those words like cherry bombs) and remember everything as though it were being replayed in choppy stop-motion 8mm film. But with the sound amplified twenty-one hundred times through a funnel made of Fool’s gold, and the pictures flying between our retinas and the glassy surface of the universe. An amalgamation of this moment, in the same way collages of faded magazine clippings begin to resemble the faces of old beauty queens. You said we should burn everything to the ground and watch the flames dance in the wind from miles away, up high, from the bluffs or from between the branches of some faraway tree. We would sit there and let our laughter ripple through the air, watch it bounce off the ozone and plummet back down to earth in crystallized bullet casings. I had no idea why we had to be so far away, but when I asked, you shrugged and said that fire is only gorgeous from very long distances or from deep inside the sparks.

You said you wanted to be able to fly, without miles of nylon sail strapped to your back, without being stuffed inside the skeleton of some clanging metal bird soaring on jet fuel and carbon monoxide. I was jealous of your uninhibited fantasy, of your ability to forget the constraints of gravity and the clumsy anatomical structure of men, to allow the voices of millions (every one shrieking the impossibilities of it all) to diffuse just like radioactive ash, containing your ambitions in a single perfect thought, the shimmering opalescence on the surface of a pearl.

You woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, your heart pounding like a timpani in the basin of your chest. That night, the waves crashed across the expanse of the sand and licked feverishly at the perverted metallic form of a bicycle half consumed by the beach three miles from our house. Thing was, the bicycle had been abandoned twenty feet above tide line. You said you’d felt a fissure somewhere deep inside the earth, below levels of granite and iron and fossilized bone, you’d felt the center of the earth splinter. You said that we had to do something magnificent and chaotic and ridiculous before it was too far gone, and when I asked what it was, you never replied, never even flinched. You didn’t sleep for three days, pacing the house like a haunted wildcat, brown eyes cloudy with sapphire smoke. The morning of the fourth day, you ran out the front door in a flurry of white sand and silhouette, your fallen coffee cup disintegrating into ten thousand tiny pieces on the front porch, scattering like apple blossoms in the early light. I found you standing ankle deep in the ocean, your threadbare plaid pajamas hanging wearily from your hip bones, dragged down into the surf by the weight of the water. I pressed my breasts against your back and slid my arms around your shoulders, absorbing the energy radiating from your skin before it sent catastrophic explosions ricocheting through your nervous system.

∞

The voices were growing stronger. At first it had just been yours, weaving in and out of the air, hesitant to expand like it was afraid I might actually hear you, and remember. But days went by, and I started hearing parts of whole conversations. I recognized our words, bits and pieces of that year when everything had changed. I heard my responses echoing, following your long-lost words and twining their way through the rooms of our house, like cypress roots. Crawling the walls.

“Mags?”

“Mmmhmm?”

“Did you feel that?”

“No.” She rolled over.

“Are you sure?”

“Mmm.”

“It was an earthquake, but different. Deeper.”

He was wide awake, she could hear it.

“The house seems fine, Simon,” she grumbled, half asleep.

“I’m going to go look.”

The bed shifted under his weight as he stood. Creeeak, creeak, creak. Footsteps down the staircase. The opening and shutting of the front door. Silence.

“Maggie!”

She sat bolt up right, startled awake and blinking into the darkness.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“The tree! It fell off the cliff!”

“What? What tree?”
“The old cypress! I was looking out the front door, and I noticed it was gone, so I walked out to the edge, and it’s in the ocean, Mags, it’s in the ocean in flames!”

“Is it still storming? I don’t hear anything. Maybe there was a lightning strike.”

“Nothing. The sky is clear. And I can see for miles.”

∞

We were flying across the ocean (although we were in the belly of an airplane, you said to pretend that it was only you and me and thirty thousand feet of space, that we were the only two around for miles, sailing along on the currents of the wind like seagulls.) I asked if this was magnificent, and you grinned. When we landed, deep in the heart of the Sahel, where everything breathes like sandpaper and even the water starts to seem like an illusion, we couldn’t help but feel the guilt of our own luxurious waste. It was terribly magnetic in a way that the silver-boned skyscrapers and the frenzied fluorescent streetlights could never be. We had tried to escape, thriving on that abandoned ocean inlet on the northern coast of California and letting the saltwater hum through our bones. But we were still steeped in wealth, transfused in a society that blindly neglected to recognize its own absorbent disease. You said we had to see it first hand, to have any hope of encompassing our ignorance. To see it through our own eyes, away from the glossy magazine photos. In multiple dimensions that were not trapped on the screen of some humanitarian documentary. Like to see it would make us feel our privilege, make it sink into our skulls and allow us to appreciate what we should, but couldn’t.

My mother warned me you were on a philosophical mission, that what you were looking for couldn’t be satisfied by a vacation in the third world. I defended your motives, stood on your soap box and declared our intentions noble, and inspired. But I had doubts; I wondered if maybe they were right. Maybe we were being ridiculous, and that all the magnificence was missing, stuck between the ideology and the righteousness. Your voice was stronger, had always been stronger, than anyone else’s, and I listened when you told me it was worth it. This trip would make our eyes wide with recognition, and the repercussions, however great, would be well worth the swelling of our souls. So there we were. As I stepped into the blistering heat, my mind instantly emptied and left only molecules of air. I said we were in danger of evaporating. You said it was jet lag. I was uneasy. I believed you.

∞

For awhile, the voices were all from our house – I even heard them in the same rooms in which they’d been spoken, amplified like I’d suddenly burst above the surface of some invisible lake which had been flooding my eardrums. But then something changed. There was a buzzing, a heavier weight to our voices, to the words, and I recognized them almost immediately. The air was hot, and dusty around them as they floated, and I knew at once where it was they were echoing from then. Africa.

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”
“How do you know?” Her voice caught in the back of her throat, sticky with tears.

“Maggie,”

“I mean, Simon, you could be-”

“I’m sick Mags.”

She didn’t say another word.

I couldn’t focus, wandered around our house in a trance. I could feel myself slipping into memory, losing control of my sense of time. I drifted between the past and the present, never really knowing if the voices were coming from my lips, or from the walls. I forgot that it was just your voice one day, and I actually started speaking to you. But as my old words joined yours on layers in the air, long since spoken, I realized again that you were not there. And then suddenly, I was thoroughly, terrifically embedded in the past.

∞

The next few days we traveled, taking in all the romance of the savannah and the compassion of the people who melded into the horizon as the ghosts of the Baobab trees. The ghostly remains of a lake echoed in permanent waves of dusty red earth, a line of sediment the silent witness to the water’s final exodus from the ground. You pointed to the hollowed lakebed and told me if I dug down deep enough, I might still find it, that it was only lingering out of sight until the sun stopped being so angry. I told you that you sounded like my grandfather, like you were trying to tell one of the old stories, and that you weren’t nearly wise enough to pull it off. You pulled your sunglasses down over your eyes so that all I could see was my own reflection, and flashed a grin. Said, whatever you say babe, and then howled like a wild thing. You were at once impulsive and leery, both irrational and maddeningly sane. When we came into the village that first night, I watched as the orphaned children flocked to your ankles, ran behind you as you flew about in the dusk, pretending to be a bird with your arms flung out to the wind, hoping to take to the air.

The contrast between their world and ours was deafening, and it infiltrated our thoughts like the red dust which collected everywhere but the whites of our eyes. In the stillness of the night, their laughter rippled like silk in my ears, but in the morning the razor edges of their elbows cut holes in the air around their bodies. Our last day came, and I said we had to go, had to leave to catch the plane. As you explained to them with tears in your eyes that we were leaving, you threw your arms out into the air, and it was like the silk had come to wrap itself around the razor wire, their voices bubbling around me. They ran to your feet, begged with their eyes to soar with you again, and you finally relented as they held their meager arms out like wings.

We stood by the gate, watching as the airplane picked up speed across the tarmac, wavering in the elastic shimmering heat. As its wheels left the earth, our seats empty, I looked at you and mouthed, We had to stay. You pulled me to you and kissed my forehead. Asked me if this was chaotic, if we were ridiculous, and I laughed, one great burst of terrified rapture.

The longer we stayed, the more we realized how ignorant we had been, to assume that the Baobab trees were graceful, rather than grotesque in their starved appearance. How careless we had been to have forgotten why so many children ran wild without the careful eyes of their parents. The ones who ran behind you in the dusk picked at their skin, itching relentless sores and sucking on their sweaty fingers for salt. The army doctor, a grizzled man named Mandelay, sat in the shade of his hut and grumbled affections into their tiny outstretched palms every morning as he waited for the medic supplies to rumble in on rusted wheels. He warned us not to become attached; these were the bone children, he said. These were the children born into shallow graves.

There were maybe thirteen in all, ranging from seven months to a little over eight years, and the oldest ones carried the babies on their backs in pouches made of canvas. There was one little boy, small for his age but older than he should have been, who all the others followed around. He was always serious, but the constant presence on his back was that of a cheerfully squirming baby girl, still too young to be named. The baby was constantly in danger of tumbling out onto the ground, as wiggly as she was, but the little boy seemed to sense the onset of those precarious seconds, and I never once saw him lose her to the rules of gravity.

“She needed blood, Maggie! What was I supposed to do, leave her to die?”

“She would have died anyway Simon. Mandelay said she was born too weak to ever-”

“Mandelay gives up on them before they even draw a breath and you know it.”

“He has to! The man would die of a broken heart if he gave himself false hope like that.”

“So you think we should leave them out by the graveyard then, let them rot away their sickly

days?”

“Of course not, why do you think I wanted to stay here? Do not accuse me of being cold-

hearted Simon.”

“Well if you’re the one to say it.”

He lowered his gaze, knowing well that he had gone too far. She gaped at him, sputtered angrily.

“I can’t believe- I can’t believe you think that, that I’m so, so,”

“You know I didn’t mean it Mags,” he tried weakly to apologize.

“How could you have, I mean, I don’t even understand how it happened.”

Now she was pacing the tent, refusing to look at him and muttering to herself.

“I’ve seen you do it so many times before, I can’t figure out how”

“My hand slipped, Mags, it was a freak accident.”
“So many times before.”

“Did you hear me? Maggie?”

“How can it just slip like that, in that quick of an instant?”

Simon moved towards her, tried to get her attention, when she spun suddenly to face him, her mouth shut tight.

The lost lakebed was also where the bones of many animals lay, and where the children went to spend passing hours of their days. We would often see them carrying pieces of the skeletons around like battle spears, waving bleached white bone through the air and letting the wind whistle where the marrow should have been. Once, three of the older children walked past our tent carrying aloft the great skull of a bull elephant, the stumps of its tusks sawed off jaggedly, still etched faintly with chainsaw steel. They said nothing, but it was obvious from their faces that they now commanded respect. As they passed, you pulled me down to the earth in a clumsy bow, and though she refused to glance sideways, I saw one of them smile slightly. It’s the bone children, you whispered.

Beneath the scorching sun of the savannah, everything eventually shrivels and crumbles to dust. Late in the afternoon at the height of the dry season, the children all came running, waving their bones and shouting. At first we thought it was only a parade, another celebration of the discovery of some long deceased creature. But a shiver of fear ran through every nerve in my spine as I noticed that the little boy too old for his age walked slowly behind the gathering cloud in the wake of the others. Just as I was about to rise from my seat, you leapt out into the sunlight, calling his name into the sky. He stopped before you, in his arms the slender form of the baby girl. Her tiny ribcage rose and fell so lightly I was terrified that I was seeing only the vibration of heat in the air. As you turned towards me, the baby cradled in the expanse of your hands, all the color drained from your skin and an iridescent glow traced the outlines of your bones.

We had never felt more needed, more connected to the rest of the planet, as if by leaving behind the world we had known, we had somehow managed to stumble across the single most important point of infinite space. Then one prick, one slip of the finger, a slight of hand magic trick, revealed to us the ruse, and every atom came crashing to our feet in an instant. The words reverberated in my ears, and my stomach buckled and dropped between my feet. You had been crying, rattled out of your body and thrust into the trembling and transparent shell of another.

“Maggie.”

His voice was a gentle inquiry, searching, waiting to wrap his words around her like the warm folds of a down blanket. But she fought back.

“Don’t ‘Maggie’ me, Simon.”

“There’s nothing either of us could have done-”

“Lie.”

She spit the word at him through her teeth. Her eyes bloomed turquoise.

“We knew what we were getting into, we weren’t blind. But we stayed anyway.”

She was silent, the muscles of her mouth moving angrily. He tried again.

“We can’t pretend like this is some greater tragedy, Mags. That’d be contradicting everything we’ve been trying to do, why we’ve stayed for so long.”

“It’s bigger to me, Simon.”

Now he was angry, righteous.

“You think you’re the only one hit like this? The only one in the world to suffer this much? Look around you, babe. Look at the flies in their eyes, and the babies with bellies the size of melons-”

She cut him off, her tone so low he could barely hear her.

“Don’t you dare patronize me like that. Don’t you dare. You have no right to pull that shit with me.”

“But it’s true, you know it. What are we? Memories? Mitochondria? Who are we? Huh? Maggie, tell me, who are we to say that I shouldn’t have to die like this, like they do? We surround ourselves with this, and then expect to be safe?”

“Fuck you.”

She was livid, the tears streaming openly down her cheeks. They left paths he tried to erase with his fingertips, but he couldn’t, and they shone resilient like the blue-gold of exposed indelible ink. She closed her eyes and let him touch her for a moment, let him sink into her skin. Then suddenly, she found her rage again, and slapped him hard across the face.

“Mags, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m scared too, Maggie, but I swear,”

He dropped to his knees and held his head between his hands.

“I swear, if you can’t hold this up, if we can’t-”

His eyes squeezed shut and his mouth fell open as he struggled to stifle the silent wail.

We were flying across the ocean again, but this time no one was pretending anything, and I couldn’t help but choke on the stale oxygen of the cabin when I thought of us, sailing thirty thousand feet up, and stuck inside an airplane. I looked out the window as I felt the plane begin to drop, the telling, twisting feeling of the loss of altitude uprooting my insides. Thick cumulonimbus billowed up around the wings of the plane, like they were trying to consume us from the outside. They came too close, though, and rushed away in panic from the ugly metal body, curling and heaving in every other direction. But they hung quietly inches from the plane, waiting for any opportunity to eat us alive. They were the kinds of clouds everybody stares at as a kid, the kind that become pirate ships and hot air balloons and dancing pink elephants. I wanted to ask you, right then, if you remembered the night you thought that elephants were trees and I wanted to tell you that I believed you. That I didn’t then but I did now, that I never should have doubted you, and that I was sorry. But when I turned, you were asleep, snoring softly into the curve of my shoulder. How had I not noticed you asleep on my shoulder? I didn’t wake you until the plane had landed, screeching and jolting into the blacktop as if the ground had been a surprise, as if it had come suddenly from out of nowhere and crashed into the underside of that machine, so heavy with the weight of its suitcases, and its passengers, and all the weight of the atmosphere bearing down from the sky. As we walked towards the terminal, I looked back, half-expecting the plane to be flattened. I was longing for California ocean air: sunny, every particle filled with moments of levity, free from the heavy dust of the savannah; but instead, each new breath I took was darker and darker. As if the weight had followed us across the world, pouring in from behind and sweeping around, seeping in through every crevice and fracture. My chest was tight, and you were tired – deep down bone weary tired, the kind of tired that sleeping never fixes, the kind that hovers over you and makes you run towards everything, just so you can give in to the fatigue. You were tired, and I knew it wasn’t jet lag.

I wanted to be in your bloodstream, to find the cells and attack them, attack them bodily one by one, rip them to pieces with my hands, with the claws surrounding my eyes, as if I stared at them long enough they would shrivel and disperse, fly into the air and away from you. I started singing, lightly at first; waltzing my way into their mortality, as though if I could get through to their middles, I might convince them to go elsewhere, to grow wings and take flight, dissipate into the atmosphere through the supernova explosions in your eyes. But they wouldn’t let me in, growing harder and more brutal in protest. They were the sand on the blade of a saw, vibrato, scattering in rhythm with my voice, faster and farther the louder I sang. I gathered you in my arms and traced all the lines of your body with my fingers, trying desperately to memorize you before you dissolved, hoping that if I could retell the curves of your muscles where to grow, the bronze of your skin how to illuminate, I could capture you in my hands and hold you there, away from the edge that promised to swallow you whole.

But I couldn’t, and one day, you flickered and died like a piece of driftwood alight in the waves. I watched you float for what seemed like days, but was probably no more than a few moments. The yellow-orange glow of flames spread across the surface of your dried cypress arms, licking and grappling for oxygen, longing to escape from the water that was eating you alive with cerulean fangs, dripping in morphine. Slowly, they quieted to a dull red glow, and you were left breathing shallowly just above the white caps. I heard you hiss and moan beneath them as they overcame you for a moment, and I thought at once you would be caught against the shelf. But the sea brought you back to me, and I sat on the tiny bones of the universe and whispered old conversations into your wooden ears.

∞

She was sitting in her empty house, there on the coast, when she heard him.

“Listen to that wind, Mags. So majestic, and terrifying at the same time. Like the air is threatening to whisk away your memory, your presence if you don’t take it in your hands and hold it out of sight.”

His words sunk into her consciousness and settled in between her synapses like lead feathers. They were all around her, coming from the heating vents. But he was saying things, combinations of moments, and conversations that had never existed.

“It’s breaking, deep down near the center, where everything starts and everything ends, that’s where the splinter begins, too. And we’re all falling in one at a time, through the cracks and the holes, tiny glass beads through the palm of my hand. Can you feel it Maggie?”

Every time he said her name, his face flashed in her mind, like it was his eyes that the sound was coming from, and not his vocal cords, the whispering walls of the house. Like she was him – her name meant something different when he said it. It was like she had taken all of her memories of him and forced them into what she remembered of his voice. He was speaking, but it was in words that he had never said.

“Can you see me?” he asked. “Can you see me? You said we were in danger of evaporating, and I’m afraid you might have been right.”

She nodded her head, trying not to reach out towards him, knowing that he would scatter - apple blossoms in early light.

About a month after the voices started, there was a massive squall, the worst since I’d been alone. The power went out with the onset of the storm for the first time in years, and I dreamt of you. But instead of being a man, you had changed into a killer whale and swum away into the sea with only the flip of your massive fluke for a farewell. I begged, through the glass of the living room window, for you to stay behind and sleep awhile longer. You were right there, next to the glass, bringing the whole ocean to the side of the house. I could see it foaming and rolling, searching frantically for ways to sneak in, to surround me and fill my mouth, until I could no longer speak. Imagine that - an entire ocean, wildly jealous of me. But I guess I could understand, I wanted you to stay behind with me just as badly- when you disappeared everything rusted inside and left only singing empty space.

The house creaked in the wind and woke me up, the summer squall whistling like a swarm of angry sand pipers, a chorus of their frightened soprano flying into the old weathered boards. We always went up to the attic when it stormed at night, read by flashlight in my grandfather’s overstuffed armchair until we fell asleep, limbs entwined. If you were ever away, I used to sit in one of your old dress shirts, because then you were next to me. Because then my arms were your arms, at least through the sleeves. I hadn’t been to the attic in over a year, but after lying in our lonely bed for an hour, I took the blankets in my arms and clambered up into the attic to find you. The window was flapping in the wind, there was rain collecting in the crevices of the floorboards, and the details of the dream had already begun to fade. Within minutes, I had drifted back into unconsciousness, lulled by a deep bass humming thrumming drumming hidden beneath the staccato breaks of lightning.

I was staring through the glass of the living room window again, but the sea had receded, leaving a coral reef graveyard gasping in the open air. There were still pockets of water, and a thin layer which glistened like azure oil spilled across the reddish-bronze dust of the savannah. My eyes traced the expanse, catching like a broken record at one point just shy of the horizon. No matter how hard I tried to focus somewhere else, my vision would glide back, as if there was some magnetic field reaching across the space and filling the void behind my pupils. Suddenly as I watched, a horde of elephants, all of them at least twenty feet tall and some even larger, spilled through a hole in the air. It had appeared out of nowhere, ripped by some invisible hand from the cosmos. Their eyes were glassy, wild with panic and glowing like topaz; I could see your reflection in each of them from miles away. For a moment I stared in fascination, scared if I spoke I would somehow forget how to breathe. Gradually the muddled feeling in my limbs vanished, replaced by a horrible sense of dread that spurred me towards them, frantic to make them stop. They were running straight for a cliff, their massive grey chests heaving in terror, and the ivory of their tusks glinting as they swung their heads desperately in the midday sun. I ran into their midst waving my arms and shouting their names one by one- How did I know their names, had you whispered them to me? - but none of them seemed to hear. They trumpeted and screamed to each other across the thundering of their feet, one hundred thousand tons of flesh pounding towards the edge of the world. I could see swarms of tiny hornets, steel tongued tiger lilies, snapping at their delicate ears, torturing them with razor wire, and driving them in a timorous flight to their deaths. As if they were blind, each and every one of the elephants leapt from the cliff, still bellowing as they tumbled like hibiscus blooms on the wind, disappearing from view in terrific flashes of light just before they reached the ocean floor.

it always ends up to one thing, honey

there's a hole in my heart you could drive a mack truck through. still, does that really matter?

somedays i walk around with my whole world stuffed in a bag made from old jeans, and spilling from the pockets of my lime green coat. as weary as my shoulders become...these are my favorite days. these are the days i see familiar faces on state street; leaning against lamp posts, conversing with pharmaceutical [street] monks, absorbed in an affair with the crosswalks. these are the days in which i feel that i am actually participating in my life. adding to this feeling: brown plaid shirts, gustavo santaolalla, paul's books, challah, mental soundtracks. also, orange tom the piccolo man has the most adorable bell on his bicycle.

ABSOLUTELY 4th STREET: bob dylan
BLESSED TO BE A WITNESS: ben harper
MASTERS OF WAR: bob dylan
(I BELIEVE IN) TRAVELLIN' LIGHT: belle & sebastian
LAST TRAIN: travis
HOW CAN I TELL YOU: ben taylor (cat stevens cover)
OUT OF LINE: the bravery
COSMIC GIRL: jamiroquai
TILL I RETURN TO THEE: the pogues
WILD: poe
HOW SWEET IT IS: michael buble
EZ: pete yorn
NO WOMAN, NO CRY: the fugees [or bob marley]


i read a lot of love letters today. can't decide if they made me feel better, or worse.
sorry for being a bitch... it's a self-preservation thing, you see.


does it make any sense to you?


i'm always thinking of you, but my words
just blow away, just blow away
it always ends up to one thing, honey
i'm always walking with you, but i look
and you're not there
whoever i'm with, i'm always, always talking to you
i'm always talking to you, and i'm sad that
you can't hear, sad that you can't hear
it always ends up to one thing, honey...

techno-ballerinas need loving too!

take me away, take me away
you said that you were gonna stay
but you're always lying anyway
everyday, sinking in the quicksand
follow me down the drain
[travis]

i'm so glad i've discovered my pattern...not. is it masochistic? am i picking them? i can't tell. and it just fucking sucks that it keeps occuring in the same way and i never see it until i'm on the inside. which is difficult to escape from. because i've got a heart, ya know? it becomes attached, to little things, mostly, and i begin to grow minor infatuations. which expand. and sprout fangs. [at first i don't recognize that they are fangs, because i'm blinded. but once i'm on the inside...out they come. stuck in my sides, like thorns, ripping away. steel-tongued tiger lilies, my friends.] what is it about me that lends itself to this sort of attraction? why am i that girl? i've definitely become her, no doubt in my mind now. i swear i'm worth the time and effort and energy and love [is this the biggest one to give away? and i just come in too late? is that it?] to be first. i won't take second anymore...i can't take it anymore. i guess it all comes down to the perks of being a wallflower:

we accept the love we think we deserve.

am i accepting less than what i deserve because i haven't had evidence to the contrary, to say that i deserve more? am i just taking what i can get, and what i get is this? do i deserve more? not everyone ends up that way, in the end. the old maid is no fairy-tale. and now i'm almost afraid to get into anything because i've become so insecure about the lack of action in the past. double-edged sword! i may be a basket-case of a mental girlfriend by the time it finally comes around. please don't give up on me if i haven't managed to remedy this in a reasonable amount of time.

ANYWAY...

i'm really excited about the workers' rights center. social welfare in action, becoming more involved in the spanish community [and i realize more and more every day how much i adore hispanic culture...] finding a focus for my bleeding heart hippie-self...i think its a good thing. new goal: coffee shops. fuck the cold, i'm going up to the capitol. that's where all the adorable stuff is. if i want to find inspiration, i've gotta walk a little ways. writing. my f-ing face off. seriously. fighting through writer's block [it's going to be bloody]. drinking liberally, but not outrageously. for the pure enjoyment of it all. a nice orange martini once in a while is never a bad thing. getting my arse to costa rica, if at all possible. espero que entraré en la pluviselva a ver los animales y los árboles y las cosas hermosas del mundo. ROADTRIPPING it with my wife. we will be spontaneous, and you will hear stories, and gasp in disbelief.

did you really do that? you will say.
and we will respond, why yes. yes, we did.

being ambivalent about:
-environmental conservation [i'druther be a preservationist, but then, i like people way too much. and it's just not feasible to say "preserve this!" and then tell all the starving farmers in peru that they have to move elsewhere.]

-getting a real job. [i want to be a writer! that's it. i feel like a slacker, but i keep telling myself that's just societal pressure. the only 'real' job i can see myself having right now is working in the peace corps through something...i don't even know what. teaching in niger, venezuela? maybe i'll just keep serving terms...and come back to the states every 2 years for a bit? you think that's a good idea? yes?]

and this is how my mind has been spinning.
-dave eggers. [big blue sea]: bob schneider. [satin in a coffin]: modest mouse. becoming a techno-ballerina. [headlock]: imogen heap. red notebooks. realizing just how much anastasia krupnik and harriet the spy have affected my (pseudo) adult life. protesting the cold by adoring jack johnson. apples and cheese. apples and peanut butter. entertaining my inner (coastie, siberian husky, hermit). dark chocolate covered espresso beans. gray tennis shoes with dirt. killing my oregano plant daily, one poor shriveled brown leaf at a time. orange spice tea. [i'll be your lover, too]: van morrison.

i am a maelstrom, a monkey, a masterpiece.

happy VD. two days early. so shoot me!

We were drawn from the weeds
We were brave like soldiers
Falling down under the pale moonlight
(rob thomas makes me swoon, yet again.)

is everywhere else in the world this surreal? i hope so. kind of.

Weekends have been growing more and more ridiculous since my return to Madison this year of 2006.
Ridiculous Weekend # 1: arguments in the den, with revelations [ending at approximately 6 am.]
Ridiculous Weekend # 2: chuck norris roundhouse kicks me in the face with a jug full of blush rose/ cabernet savignon
Ridiculous Weekend # 3: mexican food segweys to brazilian dance parties that escalate into terrifically dramatic/awkward treks back to sully

i am writing a (pseudo)short story for class, and i intend to enter it into a creative writing contest, hopefully awarding a certain amount of prize money in my general direction. (when it is done - at least as done as i ever make them - i will put it on this here blog. you can read the thing if you would like. it will be rather long. i believe i'm up to 6 pages, single spaced, 10 pt. font [in gill sans] at the moment. good luck with that.)
still have nowhere to live.
my mother likes to send me boxes full of tea and espresso beans for valentine's day. included: little post-it notes with smiley faces all over them. conversation hearts. mike'n'ikes. RENT.

speaking of which...valentine's day fast approaches. still no valentine. and it's not bothering me this time. ! are you surprised? i bet not as surprised as i am. i might have changed my mind by tuesday, but as of this sunday evening, i'm happy solo. although i wouldn't mind having someone to speak to me as samson does to regina spektor:

samson came to my bed
told me that my hair was red
told me i was beautiful and came into my bed

my hair isn't red, but the verse is too pretty not to sing that part. try it sometime...it'll make you cry. i swear. [regina spektor: samson] i think there is actually something stirring, something chaotic, but i haven't uncovered all of the details, and they keep fluttering away like infinitesimally tiny flecks of gold on the breeze. sometimes boys are just as skiddish as horses. maybe if i go slow and easy, talking softly the whole time [and carrying treats? i hear boys like food...] i can get close enough to find out the truth. i'm afraid of what i'll find...but at this point, self-preservation is a dull substitute for actually living. (as masochistic as this sounds...coming from an existentialist, it isn't that terribly bad. consider me warned. you have all survived, and i have grown from your stories.)

final note(s):
-i still hate econ
-samba dancing in spanish class = amazing
-girls make friends with their enemies, boys beat them up
-i need a chiropractor
-dick cheney is an idiot
-postsecret (it's VD themed this week...)

"You start out with a good relationship with the wristband, you know its there for you and you respect it and love it...then slowly it starts to get a mind of its own, ya know? Like, it gets a little tighter, and maybe it starts to cut off the circulation to your hand. Pretty soon, its so tight, you're fuckin' dead. And then you get your arm amputated, and you see the wristband with someone else, walkin down the street all happy together, just like you used to be, and you're like fuckin' be careful, man -shows (pretend) horribly disfigured arm- fuckin' wristbands...YOU GUYS ARE THE SHIT! Aw man, you know it. Fuckin' sing! You know this...sing! Sing! Aw shit. Y'all made this the best date of the tour man, have a fuckin' happy VD. Enjoy your VD!" - Matty, 2/14/04, Ascot.

i give up

i give up.


reading something that i think is really glorious writing makes me uneasy. dave eggers is married, and this makes me want to cry. i have a terrific crush on my ta. i may be too liberal for non-profit work. the world revolves around money, and this makes me want to burn all currency and start over with cocoa beans. at least chocolate is edible. i'm getting really excited about [possibly] living in a co-op. volunteering at the worker's rights center and the therapeutic horse stable are my goals for the week. i have writer's block. putting my hair into a ponytail takes at least three bobby-pins.


i give up.

and he said wake up, there's a mountain outside
that makes no sense, she said, mountains only come out when the ocean stops screaming
he said it has
she said i can still hear the waves beating themselves into oblivion
and he started to cry.
she asked why
and he said it was because nothing had ever disappeared so quickly from view
she said nothing?, walked towards the
door in the floor, and then
disappeared over the side of the mountain.

the sound of an alarm clock makes me crazy.

i'm beginning to think i want a studio apartment. as much as i'm afraid i'd be lonely...i am more afraid that i will end up committing some sort of serious felony by living with others. boys drive girls crazy, and thus cause them to be annoying and shrill and distracting. i dislike being around girls who are currently in a state of insanity because of a certain member of the opposite sex. is it some sort of viral disease? more likely a severe hormonal imbalance. apologies to others for this affection in myself [i know it's happened occasionally and from time to time.] whatever it is, i am going out of my head.

insomnia is fun, except when you have to get up at 730 in the morning. at 730 in the morning, insomnia is like a bag of bricks swinging wildly at your face while your bed whispers in a most ingenious voice [very similar to viggo mortensen, and on occasion with a slight australian lilt ala heath ledger] "i am a hole of comfort and safety and warmth. hide beneath my blankets with your head upon my pillow and no one will know the difference" and just as you almost succumb to its wiley seduction, the bed vanishes, and in its place appears a textbook, which is dancing around, waving its flimsy little arms and chanting "no sleep for you, sucka!" i actually sometimes hear these things. is this bad? my textbooks are really mean-spirited. thus, my owly expression in the morning. but they cannot pull off the slang use of the word "sucker" (nor would they be able to pull off the word itself if they were to say it correctly, because they are textbooks, and not gansta rap stars) and so i laugh a little bit. but then i realize that i still have to stay awake, and start scowling again. ergh. i am SO not a morning person. civilization does not exist before 1045. thanks for offering, i'll be unconscious 'til then.

+ brown sweaters
+ reading poetry in the morning to wake myself up
+ understanding econ
+ naps (my saving grace)
+ brokeback mountain
+ having my best friend back in the country

- having to understand econ
- 850s
- lying eyes and uneasy social states
- apartment hunting
- back problems
- bad food

our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up
we're just a million tiny gods causin' rain storms
turnin' every good thing to rust

perusing the habits of an opal-eyed hermit

i am in a tizzy. therefore, indulging. violently. ok, not quite violently...but pretty hardcore. [i can't believe i just wrote hardcore in a blog. blech. is it worse that i'm talking to myself about writing badly online? i should probably stop this.]

indulging in what? comfort things. music, food, people, books. movies, TV, habitual activities that make me feel lighter and less dramatic. comfort things.

.righteously-angry comfort music: ani difranco [gravel]
.revolutionary comfort music: bob dylan [times they are a changin']
.beach-bum comfort music: jack johnson [banana pancakes]
.love-song comfort music: jason mraz [after an afternoon]

.spunky-yet-heartwarming comfort movie: october sky
.accepting-my-mental-state comfort movie: girl, interrupted.
.discovering-the-non-phony comfort movie: igby goes down (see holden caulfield for a definition of "phony")
.all-things-80s comfort movie: the breakfast club

.old-school-cool comfort TV: M*A*S*H
.dramatic-healing comfort TV: ER (specifically older episodes with george clooney)
.manhattans-and-stilettos comfort TV: sex and the city
.cartoon comfort TV: the muppet babies or the new adventures of winnie the pooh

.obliviously-cheerful comfort habit: dancing on bascom
.broodingly-thoughtful comfort habit: writing in the dark
.insomniatic comfort habit: listening to the lake at night
.endorphin-charged comfort habit: running to picnic point



that is all.


"I wrote 2000 poems one year. I don't know what they are about, I never figured that out, but I believed in them. I used to chase my friends around with my poems trying to get them to read them and they didn't want to because then they'd have to tell me how horrible they were."

mismatching tennis shoes on sundays

i like lists more than complete thoughts at the moment. oops.


champagne, raised in slender glasses, bubbles rising infinitely. a toast, 10 days late.
to the boys in thug boots and bling, wearing oversized sweatshirts and cornrolls...thank you for singing gospel harmony while waiting for your food. you made my day. to every woman in a car at a traffic light, music blasting, wailing along to the heartbreak songs in that throaty voice which only comes out when you really want to cry. to bad coffee and donuts at 7 in the am. to indie film makers and movies about small children with big eyes and curious voices. to slinky black skirts, white silk, and skanky black heels...every girl needs skanky black heels. [well, not really. but they're really a lot of fun.] to old high school english teachers who remind you that a) terribly amazing things are in store, b) not everyone needs to be an engineer to make money, c) not everyone needs to make a lot of money to be happy, and d) costume jewelry is never out of place (on the right person). to recurring dreams about destined cats and endlessly disappearing hallways. to awkward sentences and supremely awkward questions. to kitchens in the twilight hours: assef's, kristen's, kate's. these are some of my favorite places. to falling in love with someone because of their mouth, and to falling out because of the words that come out of it. to being dirty! eating vegetables! liking trashy detective stories about new jersey! to sleeping until noon, eating ben and jerry's at 2 in the morning, and wearing no socks in january.


.i've been thinking. [cat power]
.have you ever. [creedance clearwater revival]
.i've got dreams to remember [otis redding]
.can't cross over. [miriam makeba]
.the only living boy in new york. [simon & garfunkel]
.house of the rising sun. [the animals]
.rainy day women #12 & 35. [bob dylan]
.beautiful soul. [jesse mccartney] <--- this is my guilty pleasure song. don't give me shit for loving it. i won't take it.



like a tiger in the dark you were hungry from the start
am i losin' control am i losin' my soul just tell me, am i losin' you?

there's (no) sex in the champagne room

no ____ one ____ defies ____ artificial ____ light
I'll cut all your wires I never cared Cut all your wires What can be there? It's dead. And all the invisible arcs Are caught in my head And the invisible arcs Are caught in my head


happy fuckin' 2006!

grocery shopping in heels. wontons and apple gouda quesadillas and sex [and the city...clearly]. trivial pursuit rematch: guys vs. girls. pop culture queen. [accidentally] forgetting assef, and having to retrieve her at 1147. champagne flowing from the rooftops. party on pill hill (!) sneaking in like we're in the underground railroad. "they can't count!" huge walk in closets and nice rugs and dancing and hot convention happenings. attempting to sleep on futons and on floors and everywhere in between...unsuccessfully. being awake at 730 and wanting coffee (but not getting it until 12). mixes with rainer maria and simon and garfunkel and otis redding. losing things in the giant house of a thousand rooms and ten thousand doors. caribou with my girls. how are we going to top this?!

That's another reason I love New York. Just like that, it can go from bad to cute.

mr. zimmerman's 115th dream

Ah me I busted out
Don't even ask me how
- mr. zimmerman*

feeling ridiculously hopelessly romantic and also at the very same moment, impossibly, absolutely crying.

let me sing you a waltz...out of nowhere, out of my blues...

baby, you are gonna miss that plane
i know.


sidewalks. cafe lights, tea stains on pages. mascara shadowed eyes in the morning with ruffled hair and thinking of the truth. movie addictions. bananas foster. bursting into tears and then babbling incoherently while pacing. humming and dancing in apartments with wood floors and big windows and record players. [lists]. dr. pepper and diet coke (not together). traffic lights hanging from lampposts over bridges made of steel and suspended like unravelling film.

again with this bullshit? no. i won't take it. are you bored? i am not intermediate entertainment. there was a time when that would have left me begging for more...and i'm not far enough removed to forget how it (still) sometimes makes my head spin...but not now. it's hard to see passed all the promise (because it's there...humming in the background like some twisted soundtrack made of silk and steel wool and rusted barbed wire) but i know what's behind it...and as much as i'd love to ignore it and pretend like ignorance really is bliss, i won't. those 3 seconds, so many months and days and hours ago, ingrained themselves on the insides of my eyelids in inverted colors like radioactive heart beats, and i am not stupid enough to open my eyes and forget. i'm jaded, you're careless, and we're both walking parallel to nothing that will ever be.


"All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac." saul bellow (awfully cavalier of him to say...but oh so true.)


*bob dylan, of course.

layers

honest eyes in precarious situations
drinking catawba juice straight from the bottle
drinking smirnoff straight from the bottle
small gray puppies with blue eyes and big feet
rediscovering old dusty corners
machinery row and the electric earth cafe
yeruba mate and lapsang souchong (they both smell like bonfires...)
hand written notes
holiday naps
making christmas/hannukah/kwanzaa cards for veterans in coffee shops with my wifey
not knowing what to do with said cards after they've been made
old men singing bob dylan covers
warm skin
recognizing what i don't want
layers

Your mouth is open wide
The lover is inside
And all the tumults done
Collided with the sign
You're staring at the sun
You're standing in the sea
Your body's over me

deadly nightshade

i'm in need of some deadly nightshade.
or maybe a trip to thailand.
possibly a camera, so i can actually take pictures of things.
sleep is another possibility.
a muse? yes.
the bamboo plant i got, but what about the iguana?
bob dylan was right about everything... ani too.
i have the strangest dreams...

we were driving in the car, you with your black down vest, me with pink rubber galoshes, sticking out just past the seat. i remember feeling like it was our secret, that i was sitting in the front, that we were driving on the "wind-y" road, that we had stopped at the gas station and you let me have a sip of your coffee even though she always told you not to. there weren't many other cars, which made the headlights stretch far off into the distance; i always tried to find the end of their luminous echoes, but they moved too quickly, running ahead of my eyes. and around every curve, across every hill and valley, when another set of lights approached, with that glowing above the horizon which announced the arrival of some other being into our universe, i would stare in rapture. incredulous that they would DARE to intervene on our time, our time! and also in terror that they would discover us, tell someone where we were, break the sanctuary of that rusting ford sedan into a thousand discordantly unequivocal pieces...but would that really have been so bad?

because the world owes me nothing 
and we owe each other the world

i have one constant ache in the back of my mind, the pit of my stomache, the middle of my heart... for domino.
no matter how many years pass [has it been almost 4 already?] i look at that picture and i see this rose gray appaloosa with molten chocolate
in his eyes and i still remember the way he smelled in the summer.  there was a sort of stillness there, in the way he would come...he settled
my uncertainties, my insecurities, my doubts. as strong of unrequieted love i've felt from no other.  he gave me a body to lean against, warm and
full and steady, all the things i wasn't.  there is something that horses do which no other creature is as wonderful at doing - as strange as it may
sound to someone who doesn't have an afinity for these wildly beautiful things, the most comforting moments in my life [...surpassing hugs from old
friends and bowls of soup in january  and sleeping in on sundays...] were those in which horses placed their noses in my outstretched hands, pressed
their massive heads against my ribcage and just stayed still.  not needing to move...no place to be but there, in that place, with me.  dom did that a
lot.  hugs from horses are like hugs from people, but better somehow.  not better, i suppose, because they're different sorts of hugs...but regardless
of the fact that horses have no arms, those hugs are just as good.  the funny thing is, dom was not a calm horse by nature. as an appaloosa, he was
inherently high-strung, skiddish, and stubborn.  he was even the first (and only) horse to throw me from his back.  yet there was this surreal connection
between us, an understanding.  i did not hold those lapses in sanity against him, and he did not define me by my faults.i don't think about him everyday...
in fact a lot less often than i used to.  but every so often, every few weeks, a prickle appears behind my nose and my eyes start to grow hazy and
i bite my lip for a moment...all because of dom.


David: You're not blind. You're drinking Jack Daniels, and when you drink Jack, you start in with that...
Frank Sinatra, she shot me down, give me a cigarette, "King of Sad" thing. 
Brian: That I do. Give me a cigarette.

buggers, i'm trying to save their souls...

-mental cartoon-
.guy is holding hands with girl as they stroll on beach.
girl: i've never had this much fun on a first date
guy farts
girl:did you just fart?
guy: no, i think i stepped on a duck
-wide shot: duck running away, seriously hurt.
-colin mortensen

the entire world is being erased by snow, one cold-hearted molecule at a time. the world is coming to an end! the stars are falling all around, turned to embers and ash, and no one is making eye contact until they're forced to run for shelter in the warmth of central heating and the indoors. i really would like to be a sarcastic asshole today, but i'm in too strange of a philosophical mood. recognize!

being an existentialist can be either a) the most comforting thing in the world, or b) absolutely terrifying. i like to think that it is both sometimes, but that's just because i thrive on ambivalence. people, for example. my favorites are the ones who have so many levels it baffles my mind trying to figure every angle into clarity...except it never fully happens because they're never fully finished. you can be an asshole and i'll still adore you just as much! in fact, it's likely. as long as you make me realize big bloody-bodied truths and notice tiny infintessimally small details and really understand that you're being geniune. this is crucial.

Cuz I have had something to prove | As long as I know something | That needs improvement
And you know that everytime I move | I make a woman's movement
And first you decide what you've gotta do | Then you go out and do it
And maybe the most that we can do | Is just to see eachother through it
We make our own gravity | To give weight to things | Then things fall and they break
And gravity sings


i miss my classes.

what?! who does that?!

apparently, i do. call me sentimental, call me a loser, call me what you will. i've enjoyed the people who have surrounded me this semester. maybe it's a sort of bittersweet affection in some cases, especially when in conjunction with the grueling, grating, obnoxiously difficult work that is involved in class, but as i have a tendency to become attached to places when i find a sense of solidarity and connection, that's whats up. to my writing class...thank you for being a friend to my mind. toni morrison was speaking of something totally different when she coined that phrase, but it's really what the class has been to me. not to mention that so many of you are sooo talented i feel like a failing amateur in comparison, or that you've given me some of the greatest compliments of my entire existence, but really...its that i can see bits of myself in all of you and i really crave that. this weird haven of self-criticism and terror and amusement and ridiculousness and infatuation and identity, that only really comes when you find people together who have a surreal sort of similarity haunting their staggering differences. i hope we keep some semblance of that...but even if we don't, we'll all be able to go read each other's sh*t when it's published, eh?

[sh*t being censored because it isn't actually shitty. i refer to it as such because the connotation of that word in this particular context embodies so much more than anything else ever could. talk about a contradiction in the pervertation of the english language...i also happen to believe that fuck really is one of the most versatile words available to our tongues. i adore that word.]

ILS...i've really already discussed the very twisted way we became a group (bonding over the most ridiculous amount of studying and mind boggling information ever is rather masochistic.) but i'll miss that too. i'll miss the class as well, even if allen is a pretentious asshole. but as i mentioned earlier, i usually end up loving assholes. hating, yes...but the love is more important. the entire history of the universe according to...fair trade coffee and tapestries? i guess so. we don't know exactly what we were supposed to take out of it...but i think that's ok. existentialism and solidarity! woo.

history discussion is a bunch of crazy people talking about huge ideas that have eaten the life out of society and are threatening to eat us for dinner and spit us all out in a pile of ravaged trash and apathetic bull. we refuse! and while we're doing it, we'll make all the pop culture references and go on as many tangents as possible.

hot raspberryrum chocolate
the raspy quality of the british voice when speaking of grave things
a new ladies' man, and consequentially, colin mortensen
the onion
buttons and home-made holiday cards
dirty blue shoes
radiohead song titles


wretched little heathens. buggers, all they'll eat is spaghettios. i'm trying to save their souls, but they just won't have it.