LIVEBLOG

by Megan Boyle

  1:27AM: think i’m thinking of that song where the one ying yang twin is like ‘i’d rather see yo ass clap clap in them shoes’

  1:35AM: earlier tonight i was listening to r. stevie moore thinking it was stevie wonder for a long time and feeling like something wasn’t right.

  3:37AM: still in bathtub. exfoliating skin with nails. there is a lot of ‘dead me’ in here. skin. re-filling sugar-free red bull can with cold water. fantasizing about living in some tropical town where you get drinking water in cans every morning. water in cans. seems so good. the way the air would smell.

  3:39AM: afraid to sleep, i think. i don’t feel tired at all. like i don’t want to sleep unless i go to sleep at 11PM but i keep missing my ‘11PM train.’ right now i could be sleeping or i could be doing anything else but sleeping. sleeping does feel good. it sucks that you can only sort of re-play dreams but you can never re-play sleep. er. meditation, kind of. not really. you know what i mean.

  interesting thing: around midnight i felt sudden dawning horror that the ‘turtle shell’/wavy heat rising effect/cross-eyed focus on convex part of the eyeball—like the pattern that was really moving were all of these disgusting boomberang shapes, it was so crowded, they were taking up everything and moving in a sickly maggot way. and. AND! you know what they were? i think? i think they were my rods and cones. i think. i don’t know if you can see those. oh my god though thinking about seeing them, no, stop it, disgusting. i experience this thing ‘tryptophobia’ which is like this dizzying sickness at seeing small holes close together. found out rods and cones aren’t on your cornea, they’re like, back near the optic nerve or something, so maybe i was seeing some kind of inverse image of…i don’t know. if anyone knows about this stuff i’m curious about it.

  4:15AM: ‘liked’ a lot of mallory whitten’s photos from young americans tour facebook album. hard-to-identify positive emotions. everyone keeps looking different. emotions. keep draining then filling tub with hot water and scrubbing tub with yellow sponge and dr. bronner’s soap before tub fills and the sides look clean again. keep pulling off skin. the skin is gray and floating and won’t drain all the way. i don’t feel gross or anything, sitting with it. i was sitting with it before i was in the tub too. have never felt that ‘sitting in your own filth’ aversion people have to baths. you were just…you’re always going to be doing that…baths…i don’t know, rinse off afterwards. man the fuck up.

  ate another xanax to make me tired again. listening to buddy holly. want to like buddy holly. i’m going to try to listen to more music, i used to be a listener and seeker of new music. 2003-2008. ‘music person’ days. hell yeah. have been scrolling through ex-boyfriend’s eclectic selection. he has a lot of butthole surfers. listening to ‘pepper.’ if you are someone who knows ‘pepper’ by butthole surfers and knows that primitive radio gods song with the long title and knows that bran van 3000 song ‘drinking in l.a.’ and knows that placebo song that people think is ‘pepper’ by butthole surfers but is like ‘pure morning’ or something—it will be like ‘teehee we have secrets’ and i will always feel this warm thing and talk about you to people years after we stop talking. i’ll say, like, ‘yeah we both knew all of those songs’ and i’ll miss you deeply but i won’t know what to say to you anymore. it won’t make any sense.

  4:50AM: this soap just seems so versatile…how it makes this tub so clean, makes me clean…soft skin…years…dr.bronner’s. extremely effected by Xanax all of a suddn. 51 hours no sleep. actually slept for like a half an hour in tub.

  5:06AM: no i just fell asleep letting hot water pour on my head. i woke thinking i was surrounded by ambulances on a highway but that i was not part of the accident, i was just looking at it. put towel on my head. no, i put a towel no my haed. no just tyed it up. the water is hot again.

  5:20AM: copied all of this text and opened flickr but there was no where to paste it.

  5:21AM: imovie is opening again.

  5:23AM: just realized wolf voices, coming from the ktchen in Philadelphia na seeing ex-bourfreidn there at kitchen table, sat next to him ‘there is something wrong with your imovie, it’s only playing wolf things.’ then like, flashing in and out of being in a bathtub, a really alert/aware state where i’m thinking ‘write that dream or whatever down, what is going on’ but think i am forgetting crucial parts. except for nap from 12:30-1 or whenever. so since. woke 3:15PM 3/17 and now it’s 5:15AM march 20th

  just slid ti catch something from falling into the water. it was like, one of those things parents have , a sony…you like watch slideshows of difital images on its frme.

  5:18(???)AM: now it says 5:18. i want food more. need to wash conditioner out ooooohok. i think there is a nother eperson in here with me. i can feel them. like it’s Jordan or something. damnit. i’m feeling eyeball things. optic things. imovie closed but i don’t know why opened it. okay.

  5:26AM: feel like i am supposed to tel my parents somethingn soon, like my mom wanted me to reminder her something to r. stevie moore is like wesley willis to me in some way. i am forgetting something about why typing this now. i thikn it was to get ou tof the tub. seems hard. feel like there are bandmates here. i am not quite awake. let water out of tub. damn. water in cans. feel so good abou water in cans, my water in a can. wish cans had tops you could put ack on. take them on the go. there is an ear what is this shit.

  5:32AM: uploading…doing all of this stuff is so. the water is all out of the tub and conditioner is still on my hair. i feel soft. earlier i looked down at my abdomen and vag and pictured a for real person in there, like growing, felt excited, someday!!! get to…yeah…jesus, if you ever feel sad just think about how you can always do this crazy thing to your body and know someone all your life or theirs, rather. can’t talking about it well. want to make breakfast for my kids like michelle illiams in blue valentine only i’d LOVE MY KIDS and play with them because they do say the darndest things, truly, i feel. i’m just one of them too. we gon have fun. shit man. get ready for my baby squad. gonna reshape the game man. or like. what i mean to say is it will be different. ir. what the hell am i talking about

  6:33PM: there is this good feeling you have when you’re younger, like a teenager to maybe 25 years old, that the world is ready for the possibility you have to offer it. there are schools giving you tours, meetings with little committees, loans from people investing in what they think you will bring to the world. people are depending on you, sort of. passively monitoring you, in hopes that the good thing they thought would happen to them will happen to you instead.

  you have all of these ideas about what you want to do with ‘your life,’ which is hard to imagine because it seems so far away. it feels like you can do anything. feeling like you can do anything makes you feel like doing nothing, which is okay, or…what else could it be but okay. they must be preparing another ‘you’ with the training you didn’t receive, to guide and someday replace you, and however you fill your life while you wait is inconsequential. maybe you do too many drugs or have bad relationships or get in trouble with money or police. i don’t know. so you think ‘there is still time, i will take a break. after the break the bad thing will feel over. people will have forgotten and maybe i will have changed or forgotten. then i’ll get back to all of those other exciting things i was going to do.’ there is so much time.

  but the break thing.

  i don’t know.

  you end up 27 waking at 4PM feeling like some kind of experiment. like you have switched from the thing you used to be to a new thing that’s being studied. but you don’t feel important enough to be studied, no one is actually studying you. you have just allowed yourself so many ‘breaks’ after so many ‘bad things’ that you feel the best thing is to isolate yourself from the possibility of more bad things, and sort of hope no one knows this, or. people wonder where you went, you think, but you hope no one is really paying attention, and they aren’t really.

  the ‘experiment’ thing is more like this sensation that the peopl
e who talk to you feel like they need to be careful. they are aware of the things you thought you would be. they want to be careful not to remind you of those things, or pretend you are still capable of those things. you can see when they are being kind to you, just in little ways, like you are way more aware of when anyone is kind to you accidentally, and it fills you with thing, this sadness for yourself and for person who did the kind thing and for everyone who wants a better life. you don’t actually feel the ‘everyone’ but you have this idea that it’s probably everyone, and the feeling…the wanting feeling after the accidental kind thing…the feeling is big enough in your body that you feel confident saying things like ‘everyone.’

  7:14PM: i don’t really know what i mean by all of that. i’m a little bitch.

  WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE BATHTUB LAST NIGHT:

  • dried off and put on pajamas

  • ate 1mg xanax (2.5-3.5mg total, i think)

  • toasted ‘everything’ bagel, spread chive cream cheese on both sides

  • ate half the bagel in bed, looked at internet, probably fell asleep around 6AM

  • woke around 12PM to text from colin asking if i’d fedex-ed him my tenant application yet (application process feels less time-sensitive since i flaked on driving to NYC) and texted ‘i’m on my way, will do fastest shipping option’

  • found the other bagel half, ate it

  • ate three small sugar-free sprouted cookies, one glass raw/unpasteurized milk

  • set alarm for 3PM with plans to wake, write cover letter, go to fedex

  • dreamed something about being an orphan child with sam pink and living in a cement room where we collected things we stole and…seemed to ‘party’…it was fun…we lived in a room in one of those horseshoe-shaped two-story buildings with a courtyard that you see in florida a lot

  • woke around 4PM. colin had texted ‘ok good’

  • ate another sprouted cookie thing and felt xanax things like i wanted to eat more

  • ate half an apple, handful raw sugar snap peas

  • mom made me a tuna melt and we stood talking in the kitchen

  • told mom about hallucinations and how i thought they were eyeball-related

  • talked with mom and ate tuna melt at dining room table

  • drank a glass of ‘hot lips no sugar added pear soda’ over ice

  • looked at internet, re-read parts of this, read emails, read texts from keith and mira. feels hard to interact with people right now which is why i haven’t talked/responded to you (if i haven’t), i have plans to respond to everyone at some point

  • looked at gchats i haven’t responded to from ex-boyfriend

  • typed 6:46PM update

  • wanted another ‘hot lips no sugar added pear soda,’ drank melted ice, thought ‘flavorless but cold is enough,’ filled glass with ice and water

  • asked mom what she planned to do tonight. she said she’d watch ‘downton abbey’ again. i said ‘i thought you thought it was boring’ and she said, sounding a little like george costanza, something like, ‘well, the characters…you get to watching and…i don’t know. it’s really a little interesting!’

  • said ‘i might go to yoga or something…my body…i’m barely moving’ and mom said something consoling i wish she hadn’t

  • walked back to room feeling hellish about seeing the same things for so many days in a row

  • imagined several tasks i could do today that already seem harder/less realistic to accomplish because of eating the tuna melt and bagel

  considering doing more heroin to improve mood. might feel like exercising lightly or taking a walk if i do that. out of adderall.

  7:40PM: under blankets. propped body on pillows. want to drive to washington d.c., maybe. i could see a movie or something. i might do that. yeah. walking around washington d.c. alone tonight, why not. i like driving there. the george washington parkway is pretty but it’ll be too dark to see tonight. excited for warm weather, reliving idyllic 2007 drives to d.c. fully reliving idyllic-ness would require the company of another person who i could joke and have sex and be in love with like i was with the person in 2007. man i am tired of that ‘we get excited about each other and…’ routine. i don’t know. have felt so hopeful so many times. old woman rickets over here.

  10:50PM: have been looking at internet and listening to ‘last days of disco’ by yo la tengo. responded to ex-boyfriend’s g-chats. our lease expires in 11 days. he showed me this song. last night he said:

  ‘honeychile

  ive been pronouncing the ultimate E as a long E

  member when we walked over that bridge’

  the bridge lead to atlantic city, i think. maybe we just ended up in atlantic city later that night. i had started living in the apartment again. this was during the ‘less arguing than joking but usually one or the other, before it got sad’ time. sometimes i’d want to talk about why we broke up or what we were doing together if we weren’t together anymore. then we’d talk more and i’d remember why.

  typed this in phone the morning after ‘bridge day:’

  ‘Light moving through windows seemed fast, flickery/sparkly, Z’s face smiling, the thing I said or read: people’s faces when they’re sleeping or just waking are always honest

  Remembering walking over bridge and how clear and expansive and low to the ground sky was, wanting to hold onto that memory and in that memory how much I wanted to hold onto Z, all yesterday feeling his presence as a kind of absence that must be urgently protected, like when all of a sudden I know I’m dreaming and the dream becomes about how to prevent waking, simultaneously touching and missing him, how easy it was to talk until the drive home from AC, it was almost perfect, then things we’ve done to hurt each other seemed louder and more present than the music, scenery, my hand on his thigh, etc.

  Watching shadows of branches making the light move fast and smelling how he smells, thinking “none of this will stay,” watching his eyeballs move under his eyelids while he slept like they were looking at fast moving things too, finding spaces in his body for my body to fit even though it was uncomfortably sweaty, now im gone in a car with nothing to hold onto

  Now merging onto 95n, a feeling of ghostly temporary deafness/blindness in right side of face, like right now in a parallel universe I’m having a stroke’

  11:08PM: snorted a little more than half the powder heroin quadrant of light blue pill container. forgot i’d preemptively divvied out an amount ‘for next time,’ as a friendly gesture to ‘future me who doesn’t want to decide how much heroin she wants or find a surface to snort it.’ laid in bed and closed eyes.

  just saw mental picture of sitting in my car behind a pick-up truck with an american flag decal that took up the entire back window, on left side shoulder of highway, police lights, i was in the cop car

  pental picture of four of my driver’s licenses falling from a white paper that had been folded in half

  mental picture of the itunes visualizer as just a black spinning oval over a slightly less black background

  what if the itunes visualizer was

  mental picture of…damn…no way to describe, it wase

  mental picture of something about…like…jeusu. forgetting things so fast.

  11:38PM: it really took 30 minutes to type from ‘just saw…’ to ’11:38PM.’ leaving typos to show struggle. keep doing stereotypical ‘head drops slowly groundward then jerks up’ thing like that sleepy kitten viral video on youtube. the first viral kitten video thing. annoyed by difficulty to focus eyes and urge to lay motionless. enjoyed watching all of the image thingies. probably saw/imagined 20-25 things total. some of them seemed hyper-detailed the way dreams can be, like, entire rooms and life contexts/sets of memories.

  11:42PM: got ice water and four chocolate-covered cherry and orange candies. sat at desk to discourage laying down. somehow thought heroin would make me feel less sedentary.

  11:50PM: mom approached my room, talking fast and almost aff
ectedly cheerfully about how she was going to be a person on ‘downton abbey,’ from now on. picture of pill container was visible. panicked and forgot how to minimize things but didn’t want to draw attention to computer. knew my eyes would probably look unfocused and suspicious if i looked at mom. she was still talking. clutched computer to body and turned so screen faced only me. mom said ‘are you crying?’ i said ‘no.’ she said ‘i came in here because your face looked like it was crying.’ i said ‘i’m not’ and she said more things about the show and what she thought i looked like and i looked for other places to look and concentrated on discreetly holding the computer. seemed like it would never end.

  11:57PM: can feel pulse in heels, arms, face. it’s not beating at the same time. all places receive pulse at slightly different speeds. seems crazy to think about where in body speeds are faster than others because that would like…involve…that they all started at a time…i guess i did technically have ‘one first beat of pulse’ but…

  MARCH 21, 2013

  12:16PM: feel heroin effects less. forgot about unfocusable eyes thing. wanted to drive to d.c. will still do that, i think. or no. i don’t know. nothing at all today.

  12:30AM: intense urge to be on a couch, like one of those really ugly, brown, deep couches that have holes patched with duct tape and an afghan draping on it, that don’t look like they have origins in any specific time period…like the couch from ‘roseanne!’ yeah, exactly the ‘roseanne’ couch. making out with sam pink and one of his hands would be on my jawline. the couch. fuck yeah. canned water. drinking canned water. damn. being his female cat who he never got spayed and backing into a q-tip he held up to me. maybe a little vaseline on the tip of the q-tip. seems ‘risky’ putting this out there but fuck it.