request.

someone just asked me, "ummm, laura, can you only send happy news stories from now on?" ummm...sure. when there's only happy news to report. meanwhile, while you're holding your breath, i'll keep sending along the stories that display the truth as i see it. me, i'll keep breathing.

flair.

do it with flair, baby. do it with flair.

walked out of work today, and macy gray kept getting through the shuffle..."i am a sex-o-matic venus freak when i'm wit you, and i will stop it, only when you tell me to". i like the image of me walking through the k street lobbyists singing macy, stripped of my annoying work shirt. flip-flops, dress pants, white tank, ipod, cigarette in hand, shades, hat by ray hands. do it with flair. even if you don't know what the hell you're doing, do it with flair. make the white men in suits and shiny shoes cringe at your boldness. singing like i don't give a shit, making a fool of myself, but sometimes that's what you gotta do. especially when macy's on. because if she tells me anything, it's that my heart may be broken, but that's no reason to sit out this dance.

more macy gray..."it's been three days since you called and hung up on me when all you wanted was to hold me tight. now you're sorry and wanna make it up to me, but i think i need a little more time. when. i. see you. i'm gonna kiss you all over your face. when. i. see ----" whoa. i saw you. woman walking down the street with just about the best muscle definition i've ever seen. shoulders back. infectious smile. just came back from the gun show. do it with flair, baby. do it with flair. i saw you. make me wonder where your joy comes from. loving the flair. loving the rain falling on my body. umbrella in hand. unopened. nothin' but love. and macy's on again.

powered down.

so, i spent most of my day traveling and waiting and traveling and waiting and traveling some more. it made me a little nervous and anxious - i don't like anything too far outside my routinized daily life, i guess. at the moment, craving nicotine. had 2 packages of smarties - why is something as chalky and almost tasteless as smarties so damn good and addictive? i guess it must be the same part of my brain that considers smoking to be the closest i've gotten to having a religious experience. people at work are being friendly and playful today - it's catching me a little off-guard. particularly since i tend to be guarded and paranoid while at work. my neck is starting to ache from the sudden movements. someone is yelling *yikes* down the hall. yikes, indeed. i am officially hooked on sudoku. just so you know. oooohhh...usher's on. no sense in trying to concentrate on anything now.

guest blog

because sometimes people say beautiful things that need to be shared. and sometimes people get bored with my incessant posts. lucinda williams has got nothing on you.


a country western song, with no rhyming

I leave my new job each night more or less forgetting to call the friends who have called me, instead spending my evenings in a new town probing the gap in my heart where my friends were, when they were with me. I'm so tired of consulting a map to find a particular grocery store. I'm a tourist in the town where I live, temporarily a tourist in my own life. When I'm exhausted by the lack of my own meaning, I find myself grasping at the meanings supplied by makers of books, tv and movies, and by the events in the lives of people whose window shades stay up after dark. I worry that my previous, noisier life, was just a firmer grasp on a meaning just as ephemeral as the ones that flash before me now. This town feels like a layer on top of another place, a Saran Wrap keeping me from the odors and flavors of something nutritious underneath. I drink a lot of water and pay attention to my food and exercise, as if training for a life, but not this one. Last night I sat and read on a library lawn, and the children playing around me search for walnuts under my purse, as if I were not there. I shared their doubt.

stealth.

after finally finding my futon mattress late last night, which i'd been looking for all day it seemed, bella pushed the door open, the way she does every night, peeking into the darkness, on guard, as it were. she stands there for a minute, surveying the scene, then cautiously enters the room. slowly. so slowly. as if unsure that the laura she knows so well is the same laura after a day out in the world and in her head. never can be too cautious. when all of her was in the room, i got up and pushed the door shut again (timing is everything - do it too early and it scares her so we have to start the whole process all over again as she'll retreat back into the hallway), which inevitably makes her jump. i laid back down, willing sleep, but also following bella around my room with her familiar sounds - licking whatever plastic she can find, sharpening her non-claws. as i fell asleep, i wondered when it was i fell in love with her. i felt her circling my body, finally nesting in the space she managed to create between my calves. about 30 minutes later, i woke up suddenly, maybe from the heat generated from bella, but i don't know. last night was a night of getting up and laying back down and getting up again. bella stubbornly refused to move through all of it. she just looked at me balefully with her big sleepy eyes every time i turned on the lights or moved. this morning, as i lay there staring at the ceiling, wondering if the day was worth getting up for, bella moved up and crawled on my chest, purring like the mad woman she is as she sprawled out as if she owned me. she does. i've decided i fell in love with her because she bided her time. she never asked more of me than what i wanted to give. i guess i'm not an all or nothing kind of girl. if you want love from me, you have to be patient. and willing to follow me around sometimes. and willing to not follow me around sometimes. i wonder if my restless sleep as of late reflects how i've been sleeping through my days.

trouble.

the admonitions are frequent. i talk with my mom on the phone about once a week. often more. always, there's a reminder to "be safe". "be good". and i think, if only she knew that my wild days and wilder nights consist of me meticulously (sometimes) recording my thoughts. my life. which makes me wonder at times, at what point does one stop having a life for fear that there's something in the living that she'll miss? some thought that might slip away from an already precarious grasp, never to be seen again with the slightest break in concentration. perhaps this is where my intensity comes from. does my mother intuit, like i do, that my greatest dangers come from what i allow myself to think? what i allow myself to see and then roll around in the batter of my thought? perhaps this is where my yearning for a deep fryer comes from.

oh, and did i mention that the highlights of my week have been, fairly consistently, rousing games of trouble? i'm confident in asserting that it's the pop-o-matic combined with the bright colors (the primary colors plus green - why that secondary color? good question. i've been wondering that as well.) that does it for me. and if laura breaks it with her heavy handed pops, there will be hell to pray. at least, that's what i told her last night. hand to god (that's what she said). sometimes i find myself saying words and phrases i had never considered before. and sometimes, after moments like that, i find myself sitting there, grinning like an idiot, so thrilled at the possibilities of language. there will be hell to pray, my friend. there will be hell to pray.

that's hot.

laura, i have some work for you to do.

ani's pulse. that night we got kicked out of two bars and laughed our way home. that night you leaned over and threw up into your hair. and i held you there thinking i would offer you my pulse if i thought it would be useful. i would give you my breath except the problem with death is you have some hundred years and then they can build buildings on our only bones. a hundred years and then your grave is not your own.

laura,

two white cops.

i

let's just hold here. keep holding. let's just stay here.

colors of bennetton ad: driving along the potomac, looking for a place to sit. looking for respite. hunger.

have some work

two white cops.

for you

pulling over the colored ads. passing over the whitewash.

to do.

my pulse.

why would you do that while i was standing here?

i would offer you my pulse

translation: why are you trying to drive past me, while i am standing here?

if i thought it would be useful.

laura,

car in front: black man.

i have

car behind: black woman.

some work

car in the middle: pulse

for you to do.

cars on the road: luxury lives in luxury suvs pondering why the cops are wasting time questioning the terrorists when the policy is shoot to kill, craning their necks for a better view.

laura.

i start sweating the moment i step outside.

you

(reminding myself to breathe, deep breaths, not the natural shallow ones caused by this heat)

have

her hands were shaking.

work

why were her hands shaking?

to do

8 shots fired in point-blank range. not 5. 8.

fuckabees

white cops, watching the cars go by.

laura.

waiting for an opportune moment.

you have work

waiting for an illusion of luxury that they can shatter.

i would offer you my pulse

to do.

but the problem;

the problem may be that it's no stronger than yours.

wanderer

so, my brother just left town after a weekend in the big, bad consumptive city of dc. he stayed just long enough so that he could take his soul with him on the return flight. i wonder if i will be that lucky.

i'm not so sure what i'm doing with this whole blogging thing. okay. that might be a bit of a lie. i decided recently that i have aspirations to be a writer. for real, a writer. no qualifications. at the moment, there are many many qualifications that i attach to *writer*, and the goal, i suppose, is to write through the qualifiers so that in some auspicious moment, as i'm sitting outside, listening to my ipod and watching the people walk by, watching my life go by, i might be able to say, yes, i am a writer. no qualifiers necessary. i'm not there, though, so i want to put my thoughts here, so i can access them without having to try to find all of those random pieces of paper with the scribblings of my pilot pen that holds the best parts of me, perhaps - the questions, the tangents, the confusion. all of that. and i am forever losing, at least temporarily, these parts, and i know that there is a loss there for me, even if i'm not entirely sure what exactly it is that i'm losing. i'm hoping that the sense of loss i carry around with me will somehow lessen with each word that manages to find its way out of this convulated mess i'm in.

maybe i crave conversations but dread talking with people. hence the blog. hence a lot of things. and, i figure, with no luck in finding a physical space that i can call home, this might be it. building it, as it were. and, some of my friends have them, and it's just nice sometimes to read those thoughts that they'd probably forget to tell me about by the time we saw each other again, the space of which is almost always much too long. enough explanation, though. it seems as if i am forever explaining something or another.

anyway, my brother got me thinking about a lot of things. his older-brother protectiveness/truth-telling (laura, that's what love is. you make compromises. that's what people do when they're in love. how can you be mad at someone who would give up everything to be with you because all they know is that they love you and they have faith that that's enough? or, laura, isn't this what life is? of course you're always striving for the next thing. that's what we do. that's what we're supposed to do. when does it ever become enough? never. never. or, me: hey kev, what would you think if i just quit my job and put everything i had into being a boxer? him: what?! i'd think you were an idiot. me: oh. or, laura, who the hell wants to eat an elephant? or, unnamed 3rd party to kevin: hey, you need to toughen up your sister - that's what big brothers are supposed to do. kevin: actually, she's the toughest out of all my siblings. and so it goes.) managed to cut through some of my bullshit. but there's more there, i'm sure of it. i'm working on it, though. this is the best weekend i've had in a long time - something about being with someone who's known you forever and loved you forever, even if, maybe because, actually, we're very very different. but alike enough such that when i'm around him, i'm not frantically trying to put words together to try to explain why i think in the ways i do sometimes. and he had tickets to the gun show. rockstar.