~APRIL 12, 1998~

"how can you have a day without a night?" i really need to slow down. it seems that people and activities and opportunities and responsibilities and addictions keep pouring in at every corner, and i don't really mind, except that sometimes i feel like i hafta be a bitch and cancel, or decline spending time with friends.....but this sista needs her solitary shower-floor minutes. without it, i get too cranky and it feels like so much of everything is going to take place of too much of nothing.

strange things are afoot at the circle k. we've been having a little bit of a tiff with the washington state liquor board at the sleeksqueazy and so we're hoping to remedy that within the next few days. one of the really shitty things about seattle, and washington state in general, is it's puritanical stance on alcohol and all-ages joints. back in the day, we small, rowdy chillun usedta rip and roar to a variety of punk faire at the then-all-ages ok hotel, which would be considered pretty fuckin' far from a "family" environment, as it was always sleazy and dirty.....but we made do. the ok was one of a few all-ages joints here in the city......and unfortunately the first one to receive the treatment by local authorities. beginning by citing tickets for breaking fire code (oh shit, there's three more people in here then there's supposed to be) the city and state began harassing the ok until they realized they were fighting a losing, and costly, battle......thusly switching their venue to an over-21 atmosphere. this was continued by local authorities on all other all-ages clubs until the oddfellows temple shut it's doors completely, as did the over-18 dance club, the underground. the goal of the city is to disallow any form of entertainment for teenagers.....and they are accompolishing it quite nicely. the speakeasy has offered local jazz/ambient/lounge musicians a venue to play to people of all ages, cultures, backgrounds, and ideologies. it has offered a near-wholesome environment for teens to hang out in, learn, share, communicate, and most importantly, stay out of trouble. at this time the only fully all-ages club in the city is the seedy rkcndy which rarely supports local acts and has much of it's events filled with out of city/state artists. i don't consider touring acts to be a negative by any means, but i think it's extremely important to offer the rich musicality of some of the extremely talented local jazz musicians to a crowd of people, young and old. the only other jazz venues in the city are over-21, and this is a question of exposure, of opening up genres for young people that they might not have considered before.....

like most things in this country, and this world for that matter, short-sighted individuals filled with fear have dictated a "solution" to a "problem" that really has deeper roots than their oblivious noses can sniff out. by disallowing the speakeasy to continue in the vein it has fashioned for itself, the message local government is sending to underage citizens is one of paranoia and idiocy.

you'd think that on the brink of a new millenium, we, as a society, would have cleared up a few issues. i mean, fuck, we've had thousands of years to work out the kinks. if we were a computer, we'd be running like a well-oiled machine.....unless we were built by microsoft.....but maybe, deep down, bill gates is an amazingly witty political satirist. do you get it?

~APRIL 13, 1998~

i watched the film lorca the other night, which was an art-haus rendition of the disappearance and death of federico garcia lorca at the beginning of the spanish civil war. it inspired me to look for some of his works, mainly because, for his time, he was an extremely controversial artist.....and i think it's socially relevant to find out exactly what he died for. was it worth it? is it ever worth it? i have a feeling i'm going to find myself utterly disenchanted by yet another example of the lack of vision inherent in the human spirit. if only i knew now what i knew back then.

in the same film-watching-session, my near-infamous-partner-in-crime derek danger and i had the displeasure of sitting through the moralistically disturbing classice porno devil in miss jones. this film was disgusting, and if they thought, way back in the seventies, that it was a turn on.....maybe our generation actually are pussycats, because this flick was so beyond the call of good taste, and i'm not talking about cum shots. the depravity the film documents is explanation enough as to why this film was one of the first pornos to make it into the mainstream mindset. it was raunchy sex with a social message: look what can happen to you if you get too consumed by lust. being of the hedonistic bent myself, and a strong believer in pre-millenial inanity, it was discomforting to watch such an outright christian-stained example of rebellion.

about a year and a half ago i was in new orleans and i awoke in the night from a rather unsettling dream having to do with underground armies and post-millenial timebombs. i think it amusing that we measure time at all, but the fact that in the entire western collective psyche is coming upon some an amazingly "important" milestone is reason enough to sit back and watch the fireworks implode. it's one of those things that if nothing "happens" certain people will make sure they do. i mean, so many areas of the world are suffering in destitute poverty and famine, based on some of the policies the american sub-government has made, and it seems fitting that perhaps we should fall, all in the name of karmic retribution. whenever i dream of a world lost from itself, which happens more and more, i write it down, so that when it actually happens, maybe i'll have a map to find my way around. the only question i have is.....if i'm dreaming it, am i foretelling this society's decline.....or just mine? and if it's just mine, will a map even help? or will i be so lost i won't remember what i wrote, or what it even means? yeah, y'all know how i'm always battling, straddling, that fine line between meaning and nihilism. i don't want to be nihilistic, and i think i have too many quirky beliefs about the cosmos to qualify in that arena, but when do things start making sense? when am i who i'm supposed to be? like i told good ol' juxtaposition jason the other night, i'm a slacker at heart.....trying to figure this shit out is tiring. if you know anything that means something, fill my box, let me know.

i mean, i don't even celebrate easter anymore.

~APRIL 15, 1998~

"tie yourself to me, no one else, no......you're not rid of me." so, death and the maiden. i've always had a particularly stoic view of death. i mean, i've been to funerals without shedding a tear.....but today was easily one of the hardest days of my life. i had to put my childhood dog to sleep, and with her went my childhood. she was my last string, really, to how my life used to be. she was faithfully chillin' at my parents' house.....always waggin' the old tail whenever i came home to visit.....she was always forgiving of my long absences. and as i held her today in her last few minutes, the finality of her end so intrinsic to the end of my childhood brought me to tears.....how can you convey to an animal how much her mere presence on the earth relieves you? i tried my damndest to express all the love and appreciation i have for her petit existence.....of all the shit we went through......and i kept thinking of photographs at thirteen of her dressed in a hawaiian shirt and sunglasses.....girl scout camp beads strung around her neck.....and of how i held her and cried so hard the day her puppy was hit by the ups truck.....and of how sublimely accepting she was of my selfishness, my childishness, my changing mind and body. it's hard to say to a being that was so fixed in your developmental stages, "hey, sorry, i've outgrown you.....and, well, this is it." sure, i feel guilty about some things, but they are things i can't change and i will have to live and learn.....and last night while i held her, for the last sleepless night, i realized how, as ever prophesied, what i've been searching for so forlornly, what i've been striving for since i can remember, is right in front of my face. we all have to grow up some time, right?

after we put her to sleep, my younger brother/partner-in-crime/sweet friend and i drove to port townsend.....listening to U2 over and over again. see, last night, i sang running to stand still to my pup.....and without knowing it, my brother put it in and we sang it at the top of our lungs and cried and sped into the sunshine. i wanted to take my top off, i wanted to swim naked in the freezing waters of the hood canal, i wanted to do something, anything to stay awake. to not let this feeling of divine revelation exit as fast as it entered. and i know it will.....once i find something else to complicate it with. one of the drawbacks of being a hedonist is vivid reality. rather beautifully, though, it's one of the positive points.

living out loud felt the best when i learned the peace of shutting my mouth and listening.....to nothing and the sun.

so, this one goes out to miss packy.....the stray that never strayed, no matter how much i did. here's to you, my dear sweet mutt, you know we always got along famously because we are both spoiled brats. nothing like looking in the mirror.

~APRIL 22, 1998~

i think i was almost comatose.....my head was in such a state of extreme delusion, i feel like i woke up out of a daydream.....it's strange when you think everything is going amazingly well and that you're in this space or that space and things might start happening, etc......and then something happens and you realize you need something, someone, anyone, anything.....you need someone around to hold you while you cry.....or someone to laugh at all your jokes.....cuz your cat just doesn't understand things enough anymore and you are wishing you could find that blastedly beautiful person with whom you can pick up and hitch hike with for no reason other than you feel old and you need to breathe in the crisp air of the rockies or the stagnant stank of new orleans.

and it's not really depression that skanks its way throughout my ovaries and knees, it's not really fear that makes me ill with the thought of having to do all this again, by myself.....i'm not sure exactly what it is. i wish i did, oh how i wish i did. i saw this interview with a woman and she was talking about starting over again, she was saying that she gave herself permission to start anew. she taped one of her baby pictures up to the mirror and rebirthed herself. and i saw a magazine about trying to find meaning in this upcoming millenia, and even though it should, it does not comfort me that i am not alone in my frenzy to find something, anything worth a damn. in fact, it makes the harsh reality that maybe nothing means anything slide home all the fiercer....it's easier to hope that i'm a slow learner and that everybody else has figured it out.....and that someday, by sheer force of will, i will, too.

perhaps it's the disembodiment of "work" that leads to this element of disconnection. was meaning more easily defined when we were weeding and tilling and working a great majority of the day just to sustain? could we associate the concretes with abstracts better? i have worked on farms, i have tilled and plowed and sowed, and actually, at this bloody moment, i want to be in those fields again, working hard as hell in the blistering sun.....but the abstracts i learned from those concretes are but juvenile shades of the abstracts i need to understand now, so i guess it's not something that can be a part time gig. it's gotta be 24-7.....constantly approaching new concretes and associating them with new abstracts. an athelete may feel this way, and i know that my boredom and disillusion only come in when i have ceased to challenge myself.

i often read tarot cards, as only one of many dimensions of trying to understand what's going on around me, and the sadness i've been experiencing is a mourning for the death of my previous self.....or is it? have i changed that much? or am i fooling myself? i'll never know. and if i did, i'd never tell.

~APRIL 28, 1998~

"and i'm trying to spell what only the wind can explain."

first, i suppose i should apologize for all the drivel i've put y'all through the last lickle bit. i've been in a strange form of ambivelent depression that, although it still lingers, i seem to have broken by sheer force of endurance. the life-long journey of discovering where meaning lies is not something that can be revealed on the toilet one night, even though i've read it often happens in that manner (or some other similarly humbling fashion.)

it's an important thing for me to be self-suffecient, and for me to feel the independence to be and do what i want to, but i do occasionally suffer from the all-too human ailment of extreme lonliness. i think, perhaps, i'm finally getting over the brunt of my not-so-recent romantic crack-up.

there's one thing that's altogether lovely in regards to depression: the amount of solitary time i put in has proven to do wonders for my demeanor in all areas of my life......and although i'm in no space to broach the subject of dating in a hot-n-heavy manner, i see the light at the end of the tunnel, in many shades of my life, and i take comfort in the most sagest of advice, "this too shall pass."

so, offa dat.

i had a rather interesting experience last night. picture this: miss ~kat~ flyin' down a "rural" rez highway, tailgating a stupid-ass truck, mumbling under her breath about how she hates this road and that she's tired and she wishes that this fuckin' truck would go a little faster and why the fuck did the asshole pull out in front of her and etc., etc., etc.....when, rather ironically ranita bonita emits a rather sickly GARUMPH!!! and rapidly loses speed, gas pedal givin' no kind o' love, engine reelin', miss ~kat~ cursin'. ranita, forever the trooper, decides to give out right next to a guard rail, leaving absolutely no space for saftey.....forcing miss ~kat~ to get out of the car and push it to a little turnabout roughly two hundered feet down the road. luckily, the stop occured on a semi-slope and so miss ~kat~ had some help from gravity. but, now......there she is, on the side of one of the top ten most dangerous roads in america at about eleven p.m......stuck halfway between two gas stations, each about four miles away.

okay, i'ma stop with the third person bullshit. anywayz, so there i am, on a completely unlit stretch of road.....and what do i decide to do, on a whim, in lieu of hitching to either of the gas stations? i decide to go 'splorin'. across the highway from me is a road that an ex of mine from highschool used to live on, so i thought, well........lemme just jaunt down here and see what i come up with. halfway down this shady road i notice an elderly gentleman standing out on his porch smoking a cigarette.....so, i approach him.

at first, as well he should have been considering how cliche-serial-killer my line was, he was wary of helping the young woman whose "car just ran out of gas up the road." due to the paranoia of his eighty-two year old wife, who had just slipped off to sleep, he refused me access to his telephone, offering, instead, to drive me the four miles to the gas station and back.....this, of course, was much more preferable in my opinion, so we were off. he was quite a comical old feller, makin' cracks left and right about everything from lawn mowing to social security, and i was quite amused by his gravelly-voiced catch-phrases. after helping me get gas and taking me back to my stranded vehicle, he stood at the side of the road with me while i got the car all started up again and purring like only rana knows how......and he said to me something that made my night, and the following morning......"i told the guy who delivers potato chips up at the four corners that, at seven thirty a.m., my day was going splendidly, simply cuz i woke up. at my age that means a lot." it made my recent ambivelence to life seem juvenile and ungrateful, so, when i woke up the next morning, i looked up at the sky and said thanks.

~APRIL 29, 1998~

so, let's have a fiesta. this ole site recieved it's first award a bit ago, and i forgot to mention it.....although it is a grand, and utterly prestigious award, i fear i may have recieved it as the result of nepotism. i don't care, though, really.....cuz i still got it. here it is:

if, by chance, you care to peruse the reason behind the nepotism, or if you get a hard-on for nudiegrrrrl pics, i've been working on this page containing trashy-artistic renditions of some saucy photographs of miss thing and other equally juicy femmes. regardless, it's nice to know my particular brand of shady-know-nothing-artistry is appreciated by a select few. but then, you've been coming here for awhile, now, so i must be appealing to someone.

i had this strange dream last night involving my hair.....and as i just recently combed out all the nasty dreads that had formed in my raunchy bed-head in preparation for a salon visit, i think my psyche might be giving me clues as to where i should head with the ole 'do. for some reason i'm thinking along the lines of blue with various streaks of other colors, but we'll see.....if i'm bold enough to revisit my youth and go candy-colored.

fuck, i can't believe i'm talking about my hair.