Monday, July 26, 2010

Katie Didn't

I was sitting on the steps, near the mailbox,
watching late night cars catch up
with thier headlights and then pass by

and i was wondering if i loved the moon
enough to walk a mile underneath it
and then swim underneath it
all alone.

while i wondered the moon rolled
slowly through the sky
out from behind a tree
and, after an hour, it had found a piece of open sky
and was staring right at me,

and while i waited for a sign
the invisible bugs predicted in the past tense,
a history that hadnt happened yet,
of 'katie did' 'katie didnt'
which wasnt helpful
so i didnt go.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Dead Dream

I am pretending to be dead. I am lying on my back on the floor of a courtroom, my feet toward the judge who is looking down on me from his podium.

Someone, who is sort of my brother, is trying to prove to the judge that I was married before I died.

The brotherish person lifts my hand and shows the judge that I have rings on my finger. I know that the rings are fake and I am worried that the judge wont beleive that I am really married... (There are large pieces of plot missing from the dream, as though i began watching the movie halfway through: whether or not i am married, I dont remember.)

The judge inspects the rings on my hand and I'm not sure if I should make my hand tense or let it be limp. I don't know how dead hands are sposed to be and I am sure that the judge is going to notice that I'm not really dead; I also really want him to notice so that I can stop pretending. So I open my eyes... but no one notices.

The judge pronounces me married and dead and then they put me in a car where my Zaydie (my dad's dad) looks down on my face and says that he's sad that I am dead but in a 'everyone dies' kind of way.

Then my grandma (my mom's mom) is there and she sits with my 'body' and watches over me while we drive somewhere and I lie very still with my eyes closed. I somehow know what is happening as though I can see. The imagery of the dream is vague as though I am imagining it based on what I can hear.

Grandma talks to me, but sort of like praying, not directly to me, but to herself, talking about me... remembering me. And I wish she would stop because I assume that if she's talking to me then she is also looking at me and I am uncomfortable and I want to be able to move around.

I move. I want her to notice and then I will be able to get up!
But she must thnk that its normal for dead bodies to shift a little bit, because she doesnt say anything.

Next I am lying on a low rock wall near a field where the rest of my family is having a picnic. My grandma is still sitting near me and I am still moving.

...In my bed, in real life, as I near the end of the dream, I keep flipping around and moving my arms trying to get comfortable, and that is slipping through into the dream where I begin flipping and moving my arms on the wall beside my grandma who says, in this really bewildered, sad, mourning and not understanding way, "Katie, why do you keep moving?"

And then I wake up. I look at the clock, hoping that it is morning so I can get out of bed and not have to sleep anymore. It is exactly 3:00.

Looking at a clock exactly on the hour always makes me think of the scene where the clock tower chimes and someone looks up from something bad that they are doing and says to an empty room 'I'm afraid its the witching hour" and suddenly the room is full of ghosts and the tower continues to chime or the red digital numbers to blink and...

I can't go back to sleep for an hour.

Every time I start to drift back to sleep, I wake myself up, as the feeling that I'm not allowed to move creeps back over me. I have to keep telling myself 'you're not pretending to be dead anymore, because you never were dead, because that was all a dream" but my body feels heavy, as though my arms and legs will be stuck where i place them and my blankets are heavy and I'm too hot but the open ocean of black space outside the blanket is not safe.

And the feeling I am left with when I finally calm down is: "I really really don't want to be dead right now."


And it was all sort of inspired by this card, where dead people stand in their coffins and look up at the angel and wait eagerly for judgement... or maybe the dead people stand in their coffins and look up and eagerly judge the angel.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

A Weekend in Parks with Molly(s)

At 9:40 I get on the train.
On the train I listen to my ipod and decide that if i ever make a movie about my life, Belle&Sebastian will have to score it.
When I arrive at GC, I stand under the ceiling and call Molly P.
'Hello.... did I wake you up?... sorry, go back to sleep.'
I call Molly M. She doesnt answer so i text her: Heading to Molly p's area in approx three mins. If you call me before that i might come to where u are. Hi!!!!"
I wait for three minutes and she doesn't call so I take the shuttle to the 1 and then wait for the 1, standing on the platform, in the wet air, avoiding the eye of the middle aged father wearing a cow boy hat. He is standing with his two fleshy children and his fleshy wife and he has a lion king flyer sticking out of his cow boy jeans. I can hear the accent in his expression.

A group of acapella singers come down into the station and sing to us. I dance, ever so slightly, stepping from foot to foot, trying not to smile as widely as I want to.
I take my hair down and put it up again. I bake in the wet heat.

I arrive at molly p's a half hour later. I look up in the direction of her window.
"hi. I'm here. are u still sleeping?'
She is so I say i'll walk around, maybe go to the diner and wait for her.
I walk. I dont go to diner. I get blisters on the bottoms of my feet. I get lots of odd looks, i assume, because of my dress- dark blue with pink and yellow and light blue galaxyish patturn... I end up near spring street.
Molly wakes up and says she'll meet me at a park. when i get there she i already there, standing in a fountain.
We go to mollys house. I trade my blister shoes for a pair of Molly's flip flops.

We go to the bank and both deposite our paychecks. My first paycheck ever. I dont know what I'm doing, i dont know where to sign or how to prove that i am me. but the teller cant tell.
We both get 100 dollars worth of our checks put in our accounts right away, that brings my balance to $110
We go to a bakery and share a tiny square cup of yellow lemon custard and an iced tea. Molly says that this bakery is the competition for the bakery where she works.
the boy who serves us the lemon custard says it was only his second day working. It's only molly's second week working at her bakery, she doesnt say anything to him about this cooincidence. I would have. because the boy is beautiful.
we go to a playground, sit underneath the jungle gym and eat the ice thats all thats left of the iced tea. we talk about being little and how when we were little if our parents wanted to buy us ice cream we got ice cream, and if they didnt want to we didnt get it... and how helpless being little is.

I walk molly to work. I buy a sandwhich from her bakery. She rings me up.

I get on the A C E (?) to union square to meet molly m.
I meet her in DSW, where i try to buy a pair of sneakers that will save my weekend- molly's flipflops are blistering between my toes.

Molly M suggests we go uptown to a real comfortable shoe store and buy me comfortable shoes. First we go to a starbucks where i stand online for the bathroom for ten minutes and talk with a beautiful black man about bathrooms and how if the starbuckses of NYC ever decide to put up those snide "restrooms for custumers only" signs, then the city will start to smell twice as bad.
what we meant is that starbucks is the only place left to pee.

Molly and i sit on a curb on the edge of union square and we eat ice and talk about loving ourselves.

We go uptown and buy me a pair of expenisve 'comfortable' shoes that, after two blocks, give me blisters on my heels and the bottom of my ankels.
so, back downtown, i buy a six dollar pair of shoes at goodwill so i can stop wearing the expenisve ones so that ill be able to return them. the goodwill shoes give me blisters too so we buy band aids.

we stop at molly's apt where i wash my feet in the bathtub. and bandage my heels, my arches and my toes.

Then out for indian food where we sit in a window and then take a lot of food to go because we always order more than we can eat.
We talked loudly about how 'if i like someone, the idea of them liking me back makes them unnatractive even if i really like them, i dont want to ever catch them flirting with me" and a man follows (i mean i think he follows) us for too many blocks, walking too close to us, listening to our angst.

Back at union square we sit on the fountain and listen to a boy with, what molly decided was 'an attractive back' playing his guitar, standing on the other side of the fountain, with his back to us.
A homeless man asks the boy 'what do you know how to play?"
And the boy answers "bob dylan, paul simon."
And i call out, from behind him, admitting to eavsdropping "paul simon! paul simon!"
and he turns around and sees me and sings "april come she will..." in his own altered rythym that lends itself nicely to the song.
and the homeless man sings "setpember I'll reeeemmmeeemmbberrr." because that seems to be the only part he knows.
And i take off my shoes and put my feet, bandaged in green and purple and blue band aids, on the fountain wall in front of me.
I sing along and drum on my legs.
Then the boy plays some other songs and the homeless man dances for two homeless women who molly decides are his two wives.
Then molly walks around the fountain and, dropping some change into the boy's guitar case, tells him 'we're gonna have to hear some more paul simon."
and the boy turns around and sings to us "...i dont know why i spend my time- writing songs i cant believe- in words that tear and strain to rhyme." and I almost cry because of the song, and the wind that blows strongly through my hair and the chattering voices of the homeless on the bench and the sound of cars passing and the faces that go by and the man who splashes his children's faces with water from the fountain- that's filthy- but in that moment was fit for a baptism.

And then molly P and Alice arrive a present us with out 12am tkts to 'Inception'
The boy is packing up his guitar when i walk, barefoot, around the fountain and tell him 'i just wanted to tell you, before you leave, that you made my night."

he is kneeling next to his guitar case, he looks up at me. "wow. thank you." he says
"paul simon is my favorite and that was my favorite paul simon song." i smile
"im chris" he shakes my hand
"katie."
"ill be back later, ive got to hang out till i make train fare."
I think about the three sacajawea coins that i gave him ten minutes ago.
"well we're gonna be around," i tell him, watching him buckle up his case. "we're waiting here until 12 when our movie is."

But we left, we went to wolfgang's and sat on his roof.
then went to the movie.
at three we were walking back to molly p's, where i was spending the night.
we passed a tall black woman, man,,, or woman...threatening a small white man.

'the streets seem scarier than usual" says molly.

in the morning we walk a million miles from molly's to st. marks where we eat brie melted over avacado on baguette and wolfgang tells me that 'cliche' is a french word. which i guess i knew. but. "i thought it was ours too."
he says cliche also means 'like, a picture" in french.
i pay for half a cab fare for molly p so she can stay an extra fifteen minutes at the cafe before going to work.
Molly M, wolfgang and i go to see "kisses' at the Angelika.
for a moment Wolfgang thinks he cannot afford to go. Then he finds forty dollars in a different pocket of his wallet.
"it was a tip." he says.
Wolfgang is a french tutor.
Molly and i accuse him of doing more than tutor french. We think that a forty dollar tip for a fifty dollar lesson is pretty impressive.
"I know. Right?" he says. "...and he always buys me brunch at expensive restaurants."

we see "Kisses."

In the bathroom i run into Nora Zehetner, the actress from "Brick".
She's wearing a bandana on her head and she looks up as she passes me on her way to the sink.
I grin at her but dont say anything.
...I dont get starstruck...

when I come out of the stall she is putting on lipstick standing at one sink, i go to the other sink and wash my hands, i cant bring myself to look at her without anything to say to her. and i dont have anything to say.
I hold the door for her as I leave the bathroom, she takes the door from me and I wonder if my wet hand left water on the door that she can feel.
Molly, wolfgang and I leave through the bottom exit and then I see Nora leave through the top exit. She walks down the steps and meets her friend, and I look at her friend because I am curious about an actress having a friend and the friend is an actress who i recognize but cant place. I watch them walk away. Noticing that they arent wearing anything particularly great... jean skirts and tank tops.

Five minutes a couple of blocks later I realize that the friend was Clémence Poésy who plays Fleaur Delacour in "Harry Potter" and the girl friend in "In Bruges."

Molly buys a soft serve chocolate and vanilla twist ice cream cone from a man with a thick accent who tells me that i have beautiful eyes... at least thats what we think he said. Wolfgang laughs at my vanity, at me because i assume that that was what the man said...

Wolfgang says that not being able to understand people with thick accents is one thing that makes him very uncomfortable.
Molly can't control the dripping ice cream in the ninety degree heat, so i take it from her and control it myself. Im licking it and returning it to a manageable state when Wolfgang says that that means I can give good head. It makes me uncomfortable to eat it after that so I give the cone back to molly and let it drip on her hand.

I get on the R and get off at times square and walk through the hot, wet-aired tunnel to port authority, feeling greatful, as i always do, for those signs that could lead you anywhere, but are always honest and always lead you where they say they will.

and I get on a bus and it takes me home through NJ and through, to my great confusion, the campus of 'rockland pyschiatric hospital" where there are at least twenty brick buildings overgrown with vines and with boarded up windows.
"cinematic heaven" my dad says when i tell him about it.
the new building, a tall ocher colored skyscraper, towers over the abandoned buildings.
there are crazy people seated in the bus stop, but none of them get on and no one got off.

Home.

Entry From My Journal (written in early June)

"I'm trying to keep secrets" i think.
I'm trying to keep secrets, I think I'll tell someone.
"Don't tell anyone." I think.
Why not blog: "I'm trying to keep more secrets." that will be the title of the blog and the post will be empty.
Good idea!
But I'm not allowed.
The fact that I am now keeping secrets is the first secret. No one needs to know.
I am trying not to imagine you reading this.
While I write this I am imagining that you do not exist.
You do not exist, no one will ever read this.
I am unselfconsciously scrawling across the page, ignoring all images of you and how you feel while you read this page which is all about the fact that you will never read it.
...and yet here you are reading it.

I'm hopeless.
Hello.

Monday, July 19, 2010

'Kisses'



most beautiful movie ive seen in a while...
beautiful as in cinematic. as in photographic. as in gorgeous and detailed and thoughtful and simple and crisp
and occasionally in black and white
and occasionally in color
and always in christmas
and mostly on wheely shoes.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

The Way She Moves

How many artists/ bands have written songs called 'Superman" ? ...a few.

and how many artists/ bands have written songs about 'the way she moves."

"something in the way she moves, or looks my way or calls my name." -James Taylor
"ba dadada daaa daaa something in the way she moves, attracts me like no other lover." -the Beatles
(sort of)"She's got a way about her. mmmm." -Billy Joel
"i like the way you move... badada" -outcast

James Taylor and The Beatles... those two are just so similar to me.
Not in story, but in the 'room' that they take place in in my mind...

When i visualize songs they are very rarely characters acting our the 'story' of the song. They're almost always presented as, sort of, sets that i wander around and look at while I'm inside the song.
once i had a dream that took place inside Eleanor Rigbey and when i woke up i knew immediately that that was where i had been.

'The Long and Winding Road' is on Fire Island, even though all the roads there are actually unusually straight.

"Country Road" by james taylor takes place somewhere near the Bear Mountain Bridge, so does "Carolina" even though both of those dont belong there, thats where i remember hearing them for the first time... in the car on our way to or from green meadow, in the car, tired, early in the morning or tired in the afternoon listening to "Hourglass" Mommy's favorite cassette.

'Something' by the beatles and 'something in the way she moves" by James Taylor take place in the same place.
but 'Something' takes place inside the house and "something in the way she moves" wanders around the yard a bit.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Int. My Mind- Lately

I always stare at him and he's starting to notice.
Notice the staring, not the compliment behind it.

"I can't help it," I tell him, when he confronts me about it in my daydreams, "I have very little control over my eyes."
In my daydreams he asks "Why me?" because in the fantasy I am sort of a prize, and he doesn't think he deserves me.

Monday, July 5, 2010

the fourth of july

Three nineteen year old girls, wearing stars and stripes bikinis, sit in a fountain, in a tiny park in soho in 90 plus degree sunshine. A triangle of traffic surounds them.

Seated on the roof of their 'Quebequois' tour bus with it's icon of the goddess blowing wind out of her mouth, some canadian tourists crane their necks around and stare at the patriotism in the water.

A man with a pony tail, is minding his own buisness, reading a paperback book with his bicycle beside him in the grass, leaning his back against the fountain. He looks up and notices the girls who are balancing like balance beam walkers on the narrow wall of the fountain.

They walk up, up the steps that water tumbles down.

At the top of the fountain there is a curtain of water and the man with the pony tail suggests, quite platonically, that the girls take pictures of eachother through the curtain of water... which they do.

the photos, taken with a waterproof camera, warped by the wall of water, come out distorted, give the girls double smiles and double heads... wobbly outlines...

Later, a young man, walking through the park, past the fountain, carrying a floppy bag of potting soil, approaches one of the girls.
'are you allowed to be in there?" He asks her.
She's seated on the bottom of the fountain, up to her upper ribs in water, she shrugs.
"some cops walked by and they didnt make us leave." she tells him.
"thats because your three girls in bikinis. i cant imagine they'd let me stay if i went in there."
"maybe if you wore a bikini."
"maybe. are you from around here?"
"...around here..." she doesnt feel like admitting to suburbia... not at this exact moment.
"so should i go get my bathing suit?"
"only if you have a bikini."
"i have the bottom of a bikini..."
she thinks this has gone to far so she laughs and slides away, across the slimey bottom of the fountain, trailing her fingers over the surface of the water.
the young man and his friend walk away with their soil.

one girl makes white wing designs in sunscreen on the other girl's back.

later they collect all the pennies and arrange them by year on the fountain wall.
then they make new wishes, one decade at a time and toss the pennies back in.
a few of the pennies skip across the top of the water but only by accident, when they try to make the coins skip the coins just fall heavily to the bottom.

much later there are fire works.