fireworks
july 4th, 2000

sometimes you just want to vomit on paper. for me, my words have always 
carried messages from some inner realm of my psyche that i don't pay much 
attention to in the day-to-day back-and-forth life that i lead. sometimes 
my stories and poetry prove themselves prophetic. sometimes my words take 
note of things that i actually believe but choose to ignore. i miss those 
days of wayward ramblings every now and again. and they happen, 
occasionally.

i have a vitamin B-12 deficiency. actually, it's not medically proven, but 
such conditions are genetic, and such conditions exist in my family. and 
the lack of vitamin B-12 in my system explains nearly everything that has 
ever been medically wrong with me. it amazes me just how much of a 
person's life is totally controlled by chemicals and hormones and 
vitamins. well, all of it. it's a bit depressing, though. it makes you 
feel more like a machine and less like a living being. that seems to be a 
tendency with the modern scientific mindset, anyway. everything loses 
personality and deeper meaning, because everything can be explained and 
rationalized away. we are nothing but a sum of chemicals and cells. kinda 
scary, that.

then again, i suppose it depends a lot on your perspective. on one hand, 
yes, we are just a sum of the flesh and the bone and the blood and the 
chemicals and the synpases that are compressed together to make a body 
that functions, and when something goes awry with it, then there is a 
malfunction somewhere in the system...but then, you set yourself to 
thinking just how totally amazing it is that this mesh of cells and matter 
and glucose and water actually shifts when you want it to and moves when 
you ask it (well, most of the time) retains memories and water, holds 
conversations and emotions, and these emotions are the product of some 
manifestation of chemicals, and these memories are simply electrical 
impulses going off in your brain, but it doesn't make them any less real, 
or any less amazing. in fact, it almost makes it more so if you think of 
it in very depersonalized terms. amazing that the chemicals and the 
electrical synapses can come together to form something so intricate, so 
unique, so...you. and your perceptions take in and process reality, being 
nothing more than a mesh of chemicals, and it's life, and you are here, 
with your own mesh of chemicals, reading, typing lines into online 
journals.

i love life.

we went out to buy fireworks for tomorrow. (technically, later today, but 
you know how it is.) there are fireworks stands all over the highways out 
here. fireworks around the fourth of july is simply an intricate part of 
the culture around here. you can't survive childhood without shooting 
bottle-rockets out of pepsi bottles, or lighting roman candles, or blowing 
up inanimate objects with firecrackers. (granted, i went to high school 
with some people who got a kick out of blowing up animate objects, but i'm 
not particularly proud of that.) people will spend over hundreds of 
dollars on fireworks for the fourth of july around here. case in point, my 
mum and myself walked into the fireworks booth and were looking around, 
when a man standing in front of us began the following conversation with 
the vendor:

vendor: "may i help you, sir?"
man: "well, i'm not sure. i'm lookin' for some fireworks for my 
five-year-old son to shoot off. he said, 'dad, go get some fireworks' and 
i'm not sure what he'd like."
vendor: "sir, your son is too young to be playing with fireworks."
man:"well, yeah, but he really likes fireworks."

myself, i just got some sparklers and some pretty-rainbow-showery things. 
i tried to pick out things that wouldn't make a whole lot of noise so they 
wouldn't scare Ash. my daughter who was once afraid of absolutely nothing 
is developing some strange fears. for instance, the vacuum cleaner. and 
the doorbell at my grandparents' house. she's been pretty jumpy lately, 
but i figured some colorful sparkles might be neat for her. myself, i was 
terrified of fireworks as a child.

i started to compile a list of things that i liked last night. things that 
make me happy. i have a lot of them, and i'm nowhere near finished. so 
far, i've discovered that i love my daughter (of course), counting crows, 
folk music, poetry, coffee houses, comic books, striped toe-socks, 
anklets, the colour purple, SARK, mountains, trees, honeysuckle, rocks, 
the ocean, bare feet, partly cloudy days, cheeseburgers, wings, 
butterflies, tambourines, night skies that swallow you whole, jupiter and 
saturn, hot chocolate in the wintertime, snowflakes, cotton candy, fairs 
and fairgrounds, ferris wheels and the twirly-things, pancakes with peanut 
butter, toys and jewelry, magnetic poetry, ice cream, babies and children, 
trampolines, stuffed animals, neat pens paper and blank books, snowglobes, 
music boxes, bubbles, driving, radio stations, drip candles, kangaroos, 
australia, america, getting lost, ireland, friends, 80s movies, permanent 
markers, and paperclips. not nearly a complete list - i love lots of 
things. i suppose i ought to categorize to make it easier - favourite 
foods, favourite places, favourite people, favourite tv shows...but 
there's something neat about jumbling all of one's loves into a big 
miscellaneous list. it's like letting someone step into my room and see 
what's all over the floor. granted, i don't keep kangaroos and ferris 
wheels in yhe floor of my room, but you get the idea.

i may be taking a break from diaryland for a while, except not really. i 
want very badly to publish my old, old journal entries on the web. for 
example, i kept a fairly regular journal my sophomore year in high school 
for my english class and i would love to share the entries here. so i 
believe i will start adding entries from 1994 here now. those are the 
oldest journal entries that i have found that i would not be totally 
embarrassed by showing them (only slightly embarrassed, perhaps.) in 
publishing older journals, there will be long lapses of time where nothing 
will be written, however. after my sophomore year of high school, i 
stopped writing in journals for a very long time...in fact, i didn't take 
up the practice even semi-regularly until i got into college. i'll try to 
scrounge up bits and pieces here - i may even resort to ransacking old 
letters and notebooks where i would jot down an idea or two here and 
there. but so much of my life from my junior and senior years of high 
school became embedded in my work, in my poetry and short stories, in my 
rants and ravings. and more than anything, perhaps, the book i was writing 
(and still am, though not as regularly as i would like). but all things in 
time. just don't be surprised if the next entry to see is dated 1994.

for now, i think i am going to put my little tired and sore self to sleep. 
not to sleep in the taking-the-dog-to-the-pound kind of way, but in the 
wow-a-pillow-under-my-head-would-feel-really-good kind of way. night 
night.


alligator soundtracks
july 4th, 2000

i'm sitting here playing ode to joy on my daughter's musical alligator 
keyboard. i really should be cleaning house, or getting myself ready for 
this afternoon, or any number of things. but i have words in my head so i 
decided i would let them spill out for a few minutes.

i've been discovering possible adventures close to home. i picked up a 
copy of appalachian life when i was in town yesterday and have been 
mesmerized by all of the neat things there are to do in this area that i 
simply didn't notice before. just up in abbingdon, virginia, there's a 
bookstore that has celtic music on certain fridays every month. and there 
are some delicious-looking resturants in johnson city, and art festivals, 
and some outdoor family-oriented concerts in ashville on the UNCA campus 
which i plan to call to get more information about. and there are so many 
plays and paintings and storytelling workshops - i am more than pleased in 
my findings. lots of things i would love doing, lots of things i am sure 
Ash would enjoy. of course, i won't be able to do nearly half of the 
things i would like to, but a few adventures are better than none at all. 
i want to find coffee houses and poetry readings again. i want to start 
haunting flea market and yard sales for hidden and unlikely treasures. 
they always say to begin your adventures small.

i've always painted myself the victim all of my life. in all of my 
stories, the characters i created that i identified with, something 
horrible would always happen to them, and most of the time they would 
always die, and they depended on the kindness of strangers and friends, 
and had absolutely no strength of their own. i have a difficult time with 
such characters now. it is part of the reason it is so hard for me to 
finish my book - charlotte is hounded by the men behind the curtain, 
raped, abused, ignored and beaten by the world, and then she finally dies. 
and yes, she gives a bit of light and wisdom to everyone she encounters, 
but she is a weak and flimsy spirit, with no hope of ever being 
self-sufficient or ever truly harvesting her talents and abilities. it's 
very difficult to write like that anymore, and there is a secret building 
fear building inside of me that's totally afraid i may *never* finish my 
book, that the time for it has passed, that it has served it's purpose in 
my life and i should start work on something new, with a new voice and a 
new perspective. it's only bothersome because there was so much effort 
there now entirely going to waste...but i suppose that is the way of 
things.

i finshed where the heart is yesterday and have started on dave mckean's 
cages...looking at his cover art has inspired me to take up painting 
again. i'm by no means a lifelike artist by any definition, but the idea 
of mixing media in such elaborate ways is very appealing to me. like 
painting on photographs, and using doll-house windows. i think i'm going 
to attack the craft section of walmart after i get my paycheck.

i have sometimes wished that i could play a continuous soundtrack in my 
head. every moment of my life seems as if it should be accented by music. 
i have even been known to think in song lyrics. showers and baths are best 
set to music, cleaning the house can only faithfully be done with stereo 
speakers blaring choruses at me. the biggest reason why i love driving so 
much is because of the constant soundtrack in motion, when i can sing 
along at the top of my lungs with the windows rolled down, watching life 
speed by on either side of the road. i really should have asked someone to 
play my music during labor. though honestly, i just wasn't thinking about 
it at the time. or much of anything, really, except "ouch".