WhenSheWas

When she was a child, she was once gifted an ensemble of lusty imitation emerald and ruby finger-rings, ten in sum, one for each inchy finger, by a patron-relative she held in high esteem. Each false stone larger than the knuckle lent a certain je nous sais quoi to the overall effect of hand operation, and she used these while playing "Madame Octavia", a game that considerably more thought went into than action accrued from.
"Madame Octavia" play consisted of pulling over her head her mother's hooded shawl and sitting indian style on the floor, with the new jewels displayed as she inexpertly shuffled a deck of household Bee brand playing cards. While doing this, she would mumble a set of enchanted words, their many syllables composed almost entirely of vowels, with the barest scantest most sparing use of consonant contributions. These words often, but not always, rhymed, which, I suppose, enhanced their magic.
A set of sample miniature bottled perfumes were also ingredients in the game, as potions one supposes, but never opened since they had converged in smelly accident one afternoon past. That didn't lessen the effect, since it was not the content of the bottles but their sheer number (30 or more) that lent the game its power. It was about possessing the magic, not sniffing it.
Occasionally, introduction was made to the imaginary purchaser of Madame Octavia's (formidable) products and services. "Gooood Eevening, Meester. I'm Madame Occctaaaavia," made to last as long as possible through the quality of the vampiric accent she employed. But mostly the bottles were, at least it would seem to the hypothetical onlooker, merely arranged and rearranged. It resembled an improvised game of chess against onself, an amateur game, with lots of redos and retractions. Finally, the spell would be broken, her concentration suddenly lost, and the game would be abandoned without preserving the ritual's sanctity by marking the crossroads or any other measure of warding off. Just left spread out for anyone to gaze upon, until cleaned up or made to be cleaned and then seemingly, the game would be forgotten. Until some unknown synapse fired and the "Madame Octavia" game resumed for another session.
There were other games of course. There was a game of light and shadows, a game of being seen and hiding, of chair and carpet, of enslavement and freedom, of pauperism and riches, of betrayal and tragic death, of making snowflakes and eating off the floor as the dog eats. There were her pockets, for one thing, there was evidence there more than anywhere else, hers were stuffed with playing accoutrements and aides. These, when found by either of her parents, could baffle, disturb, or endear depending less on content than origin.
It was autumn (the season of schools) when the Octavia game was tucked into the corner of her history, along with many of the other solitary amusements, for good. Along with the pleasures of her own voice and pleasures of script and pleasures of reading and of hiding and the hoarding of pleasures. Along with many of the beloved things that were so much more than things, that signified whole other worlds of meaning dear to her. Along with much of the experiential pleasure in the mixing of things, especially liquid things, and of jumping on things, and of riding bicycles, and of dirt and becoming dirty and being looked at as a dirty thing, and the demands to be made on others in the interest of securing for herself her own happiness.
That autumn the bejewelled and fearless madame relinquished much of her youthful hermitage, her short private life!
Later, when she looked back at that time, she would think herself so small and ridiculous, later when she had become disturbed at the sound of her own speech and quick to find fault with her own script, later when she lived in the world full of Others. But occasionally, in jest, she would still deploy those gaudy fake rings to adorn her toes.
Once in a while, she would take out and examine, meditate on The List. She had composed it at the end of her childhood, when she had noticed that she was starting to lose her capacity to access her imagination. It seemed, she had noticed its dissipation and had taken steps to guard against growth of this kind, by trying to cheat it. Battle-weary, no doubt, she had begun a list, a writing down of all the imaginary games and scenarios that fueled play-pretend. However, in her haste? or out of fear of exposure and ridicule?, she had neglected to describe them, so that they remained coded. The formulas were simply missing, and though she tried, she could not decipher the mind behind the savage hand that penned them. The titles were perplexing, ranging from the succinct "Fish Swim" to the bold "The Portraits Come Alive!". "Madame Octavia" was among the few she recognized, that provoked flickers of recognition, private angst and secret thrill, and the useless grasping. The old country, fogotten tongue, scraps left by the ape. And it was not so much later, when the list was found, that she would have her own children to consult. The rings were relics and The Listing sat, in lieu of being framed, in an accordion folder, among postcards and birthday cards, and more current to-do lists on the floor of her bedroom closet.

orange you glad

i'm no expert, but i think mingus is a cat.
it's taken me a long time, but now i know and can move on to bigger and brighter endeavors. cast the experiments aside. and voyage on.

There's something not quite adding up about living in california. something not as wonderful as my fantasies told it. I figured out that the certain something missing is lots and lots of money. it's a fun killer sometimes.

Kevin and i walk around exploring like venture capitalists with no capital saying, "this store is neat, this restaurant has character, this neighborhood is cool" and then come home and stare at the wall.

we think, "if only we weren't so small!" like the child thinks.

it's enough to make me want to curl back up in academia and sleep for a couple of years.
hipster is an overused term here.
i think i'll have to take a waitressing job even though i really really really don't want to. only i have $13.86 left in my account. i don't want a job at all, actually. In the words of Dan Reeder "i got all the fuckin work i need".
i'm glad the qwerty key system put the '!' before the '$', it shows we had our priorities straight at one time, but i think it's a stretch to put the '#' before the '$' and prophetic to put the '@' on the 2 before the '$' and the '#'.

i had mused about becoming a life drawing model, but apparently it takes yogic powers of concentration. it is one thing to walk with grace, it is another thing entirely to live with it. i don't want to be a model of any sort anymore.
models don't eat anything, and yet they live. how scary.

truthfully i've been kind of depressed ever since my friend Steve told me that he worked for a time making corpses for the X files and get this, he said it wasn't even fun, that it was only a tiny step up from working in a kitchen. making pizza.
how am i supposed to handle that kind of news? the night i learned this, the darkness held its head in its hands as i drifted off to fitful sleep.
anything can be true. like art, it has no standards.

and i have no female friends, which is a familiar state of affairs, but all the more depressing for its familiarity. it's hard to make them when you're fucking gorgeous (well, YOU know). i want a girlfriend, one who shimmers like something to be won in conquest, but also glints like something with its own secrets.

its all so dangerous. meeting new people and trying new things can destroy the sweet illusion that the world is run and business done by those more competent than you are.

i think i'll emerge smelling like urine and camphor; life and dreams.

i watched other people play video games for an hour. what's wrong with me that i want to watch other people battle to the death the arm wrestling champions of the netherworld????

teetering, that's what we are. there's a discernible something in the air, though, like the smallest drop of blood in your mouth, and just as preoccupying.
football is for some people as nature is for poets, you can't understand life without its metaphors. but none of those people live in san francisco. thank christ.

but i need a job. i'd say i'm gathering it more everyday...gathering it into a bouquet of understanding, you might say.
ramen and defiance are natural bedfellows.

the opposite of love is stepping in shit. twice. in one day. the opposite of love is too much unsolicited attention from god.

i kind of miss drama, terrible and engaging.
my network is not so wide that any of it gets caught.

although i have listened to a friend's girl problems, which was distastefully enjoyable. she's full of love so terrible we hesitate to call it love, lest it drag the whole enterprise asunder.

i'm going to take indian dance here still...starting next month. so i'll be broke but maybe not fat too.
my interest in flamenco has waxed and waned, ...but you know i've BEEN to india, i've only dreamed of spain.

and i've been drinking. yes sir yes sir three bags full.
i think i ought to stop.
i'm starting to reek of olives.

But i still thank christ i'm not in philadelphia.
gotta go, i think kevin's getting arrested.

1st installment: Neiman Marcus Chronicles

It's possible to understand how they came to know her. But it's hard to say what they would have thought of her that first day. In Neiman Marcus. Somewhat breathlessly arriving and directly, suddenly with purpose, moving towards the apparel racks. This first time, when neither they nor she knew that she would become a fixture, appearing regularly, though not by the day of the week, nor by the time of the day, but by something in the air... like Mary Poppins. The comparison is apt, and by no means frivolous, because there was something quite fairytale-like about the department store, in general (at least the upper-end ones), and something farfetched about Shawn's emergence and re-emergence in a space-time she never should have occupied, but somehow characteristically, did.
She nervously scrutinized items on one of the racks at first, trying to forget she had just traversed some phantasmagorical boundary between her world and Another, stumbling through the glass double-doors as if they were some gate of stuttering proportion. But now that she was there and the elevator muzak was playing their (her and Neimans) song, she was more curious than anything else, if maybe also a little crazed, about this place and its inhabitants-- animate and inanimate alike. Curious about her relationship to them, and what it would mean to her schema of right and morally wrong, of good and bad modern politics, and taste, or, in other words, fashion (some call it style).
Gradually, she relaxed into bodily habit, fell into rhythm, and browsed like she had been doing much of her life, though usually in very different circumstances (Salvation Armies & Goodwills, as well as the un-Christian thrift and vintage stores, stenched by nostalgic dust, the dead roses of Other glamour, and sometimes swallowed whole by a hungry patchouli). Except that she was now attempting to give the distinct impression to anyone who might be watching that, whatever else she might be doing in the bowels of Neiman Marcus, she was NOT stealing. And, in fact, she wasn't, and had no intentions of doing so, at least not in any literal sense, which made her presence all the more mysterious.
Could the salespeople have accepted that she belonged there by virtue of the fact of her being there? Probably not. Was her arrival perfectly timed with the magical twilight moment during which the mornings coffee began to percolate the spirits of the employed, and everyones minds were engaging elsewhere? Unlikely. Or was it the sheer novelty of the situation that saved her from interrogation? She did not have the orange-red glow of a tanning salon patron, she had not had her hairstyle duplicated from the pages of Cosmopolitan by her stylist, she was NOT rocking a Dolce & Gabbana handbag, and her cell phone was, inexplicably and, yet, without provoking her into a grand tantrum, not getting reception at the moment.

[It's difficult to imagine their impressions because, you see, I knew Shawn from University, I had found her There. I knew of her grasp of Anthropological theory, her Neo-feminist politics, her willingness to disagree with author or student (though rarely professor), how tirelessly she resisted the frustrations of university life. Because, despite all portents to the opposite, stupidity can quite often stand against reason and win, especially in the classroom, by virtue of its own qualities--mainly, its inability to understand, and therefore appreciate, the reason which stood against it. Making oneself understood is always the goal, after all, if you have something to prove. Inventiveness and Eloquence were often her only true Allies in that environment.
I knew that she was intelligent, to the point of edginess, and eager to be tantalized, to be prodded by the ethereal bounty of meaning. I knew how she must have had to scheme to impose this desire on raw actuality, usually constrained to working with what was nearby, ordinary and concrete, and morphing these in her experience of them. She was adept at transforming their disappointing little baldness with her towering personal interest, drenching them from on high in the seductive flavor of a clever understanding.

I knew her socially too, so I knew how she tempted lifes regular architectures to confess their innermost absurdity to this connoisseur of hilarity, and incriminate themselves as well-groomed buffoons. I know that this was possible for her, because I had heard her laugh spontaneously detonate and blow what had seemed to be entirely legitimate circumstances to smithereens, and the many wild anecdotes she told to demonstrate, to those she was befriending, that she could talk the circumstances of daily life into setting off into the wilderness. She could be a simple audacious delight, an energetic funniness that did not rely on its contextShe was always the first one dancing in a crowd. And yet, in spite of all that, she was dishy: she liked to wear high heels for the teeter they imposed, she paid discerning attention to fashions of every culture and subculture that traversed her radar, including the mainstream, she could admit to a few brand name allegiances, and she discussed movie stars and starlets and their big screen manifestations. She was interested in Neimans for all these reasons. The returning to the store would continue for all these, and the eventual happenings would orbit these traits, held together in her being by a personal gravity of selfhood.
But, of course, none of this could have mattered in the least once she was inside, while Neimans was still calling the shots, to the more structured interactions that clumsily or, conversely, with shining practiced eloquence, are executed in the wake of commerce. There was a sacred politeness of service-oriented protocol to conform to, and more or less refined niceties to be exchanged. She was still gathering her bearings, after all]. She was an imposter, for sure, but a curiously disarming one, non-threatening, frazzled and disoriented, maybe, but not crazy by any means.
They might have thought she looked like an art student, maybe a good one, and out of some bizarre reverence the terminally daft feel for the more balmy provocateurs of our species that they can stick this particular label on (and only this one!), were pleased to have her rooting through their wares and skimming their social atmosphere, bringing the shining light of art to their practical lives, in a sense, and this is crucial, finding goodness even among their ranks, as they strived to meet the growing corporate demand for suppliers in the field of relentless consumerism, joining those who aide in the harvesting of the overpriced fashion.
On the other hand, the other shoppers would have certainly ignored her, seen her as an uncertain intrusion and possible hazard, if they allowed themselves to see her at all. She might have been invisible to them at first. But perhaps there was thick tension in the air that day, in Neiman Marcus, while everybody was making their selfish rounds. Shawn might have even begun to perspire a bit, and thought of bolting for the doors, though keeping, through her body movements and well-mannered flipping of the price-tags, an air of nonchalance. But, she would have stopped discerning the prices after the first tag flip, focusing on the bar code instead of the many numbers, which might have actually been her saving grace: the disinterest with pricing putting those around her at ease with her financial status, her ability to make it all seem well within reason.
But it wasn't, and neither was she, not in this moment, not ever, and certainly not there, in Neiman Marcus.

xryatl

it was an enchanted winter that year, under some old crone's last spell, snow one day and summer the next, leaving the heaped white confused enough to melt into parody of itself, as she got younger and younger on the fat of ridiculous circumstances. i remember that winter, that winter makeup-compacts became ashtrays, redheads became indian girls, and memory reeled to sequence a life. That winter the old precious things wanted to sleep in cardboard, dreamily lusted for mothballs, even the musicbox from holland and the inherited birthday pearls, wanting to go inside and be forgotten until the lift and sun of some other era woke them. (but not the teapot which, kneeling in the bathtub, poured new water over our soapy skin, helping to figure out the places neglected by nature because of the curves of our own body).
that winter we did our tarot spread on the floor while you played chess.
we thought of the summer's two, almost garrish, giggling aunties, gray-haired and magical. they could have shared one eye, and we may not have noticed. her gray eminated from the center part of her head, as if only order could spawn age...but it disappeared if the hair was tousled.

that winter, when a gentle wind probed the door and physics acquiesced, we thought always that someone was there and peered at the phantom-laden air with curiosity. we felt something coming.
it was a superstitious time. numinous in its absurdity. a time that needed to rely on something for support in reality, but that something was too finicky to be reliable. a specter something, indefinate at best, at worst ghoulish.
that winter our socks and underwear were the most colorful things we wore, as if we had a secret we were barely keeping, which was creeping out of the puritan black that kept us grounded and severe. we wanted to tell our gaudy secrets, didn't we, but we didn't know who to tell them to and we were very discriminating confiders during that season of mischief.