Excuse the sentimentality. Here's a rarity:

I am everything but lonely when I am alone.

Alex asked me today why I went back to school and why I went back for writing instead of art. This is my favorite question he has asked me recently.

I am not in school for writing. I always write. The two are happening simultaneously.
In short:
I write because I can not do anything else with compulsion and passion in a fulfilling way. Writing lets my cloud bursts come in aisle three. My water breaks on the six train. I get a nosebleed while I'm driving. Right before I go to bed I write a novel. Most of this is gone before I can write it down. I am not some uber productive Tolkien unrevised hobbit of the pen. NO. Sometimes some words slide out...
I have a tapeworm that eats my words and makes my sentences skinny when spoken aloud. But it's all there buddy... it's brewing. Live. active. generating.

Inside my head I've got the bloat- a parasitic consumption of letters and punctuation. Rotund and starving, digesting and discarding. Sometimes it's raining and sometimes it's all sorts of precipitation. I've got a lot of weather between my ears. Sometimes I think I can't hear because of all the thunderclaps that mimic awkward applause, or the subtle roar of booing.

It doesn't matter if you aren't God's gift to some prize or short-list. If you do it out of passion, you own it.

A lot of this ranting is coming from my cleaning and sorting through old papers. I'm downsizing my archive in a serious way. When I say archive, I'm referring to a collection going back to journals that are purple from fourth grade and contain my first handwritten poems. There are also quips ("I don't like teacher so and so because when he turns off the lights to get our attention his shirt becomes untucked and I can see all of his hairy belly." God help me. It was 1994. I love hairy bellies now!- and also...bellies-ahem) Sorting through this is a draining chore. I can't let go of the written word. Unfortunately, it stacks up to my height.

On to the next one:
I never feel alone when I'm writing. I never feel alone when I'm alone. I can go a surprising amount of time without conversation. Analyze that to death if you like. Let me give you some hints: I came from a fighting family, I still have a fighting tongue, I'm always in love with something or someone, I'm always worried and anxious... I can spend days on end in the woods with a bottle of gin, my favorite book, a bowl of grapes and a baguette.

This is getting personal.
Forward>>
Boil down:
With people - mis communication and the sudden urge to snorkel with them so we can be underwater and together and make noises of exclamation about beautiful things without describing them and blabbing.

Without people - missing the touch. feeling the weather.

This in know way undercuts my absolute love for people. I would just about curl up and die if I couldn't snuggle or make divine connections with really special souls. The older I become, the more I think I would have a grand time holding hands and singing songs instead of saying: "BITCH PLEASE."

New York is such a ginger root.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
So I write because I can't NOT write.
I write when I can and sometimes I just sit in my car facing the Long Island Sound thinking: remember to download this song... remember to... remember. Remember to write down what that fisherman is wearing. Usually I revel in that moment. There's a slight chance that those moments will make it into my upcoming portfolio.

I've got three poems I'm editing. One is serious, the others are on the dangerous verge of straight malarkey. Reuben helped me with one. Workshopping helped even more. Meena has been helpful in her graceful and fluid way. The Olivetree is always filled with the best mashed potatoes. If we were a holiday we'd be Thanksgiving. All the components are overwhelmingly different and complimentary. I've loved getting serious there lately. It's fun to show up naked in liquid latex, but the it's better to me a marshmallow of repressed feelings on a red couch and explode, no? I digress. I digest!

Love,
Rebecca.

lockbox with a prybar. 2009 kickstart and freezepop.

let me.
entertain you.

i went to see gypsy with mom. my christmas gift to her (the big one anyway...she needed something tangible to open on christmas since it's just her and i now...so some sweater giving was involved). patti lupone is over-rated. she was great but i think i'm spoiled by the movie version. i wasn't fond of the way patti-lu held her notes and then warbled them into oblivion with the orchestra taking her out loudly. call me picky. pick me.

break has been tense. tense because all i can do is work those two days of pure joy with the kids im growing with. i am tense because i don't have the added tension of deadlines, rendering me into a self loathing unmotivated beast of heavy handed snooze slaps on the alarm clock. i usually look forward to this time...and it honestly hasn't been that bad. my friend visited from cali (and while i'm too broke to reciprocate the trip to his LA playground i was thrilled to chills when i saw him standing on the street in greenpoint, felt like everything was RIGHT). my other friend, the one i visited in olympia last year, came to ny and i saw her briefly. then they were gone.
and i had my savings. and i had my undershirts. and i was warm, briefly.

i bought a camera with those savings (great inspirational pressure led to this financial whirlpool) and it was a GREAT idea. i missed constant documentation with an SLR. NIKOND80.
i went to some parties (and that was fun), but i really liked going to bluestockings and seeing an awesome queer memoirist read from her book. and i really liked reconnecting with browning leaves that mulched my ears.
i got into blackadder.
mom bought me HBO (what is this luxury??? she is changing our lives in subtle TV channel additions and the plaster of my ceiling is getting caught in my hair) The TV goes when the books start brewing and being dissected under direction. resolution.


last semester did me right. i felt this good (albeit high-strung) connection to what i was doing. most of my friends from around here have graduated and have jobs or are living off trusts or working really hard so i feel like the oddball who has to juggle stress and money and smuggle smiles closed eyed in the florescence of the commute home. i loved reading at the telephone bar. i was terrified. i like being terrified in that context.

i've forgotten how to write sentences. i was writing a thank you note to a very dear cousin of mine who is a most talented women with the most fetching personality and i felt like apologizing towards the end for the horrible syntax. [but] fuckit, it was on my good stationary and i posted it post haste to get it out of sight.

i am excited to set up my writing/creative studio. i want a fainting couch (it's become an obsession). i want a book i can actually read. i've only bought books that are ten feet tall lately. i subscribed to a magazine. beginning of the year- new moleskine time. (haven't gotten to that yet...printer cartridge too) - when the first class of 09 starts i'll retire the one i have. i am proud of my journaling this year. so proud it'll be put in the lockbox with the other serious transitional pieces dating back to my first fuck, first line of coke and first kiss with a girl. had some firsts this past year. locked in with the naked photos and zines.

a "best of 2008" list would be overkill.
im feeling good and hope to meet my own deadlines this year. i want to cook more. i bruised easily this week. i will organize my computer files and papers and studio and limbs into movement and leave the cold inside my jacket when i collapse into the incandescent lightfield i've laced my room with. this is brocade. this is crochet. this is highly complicated structurally demanding networks of dependent elements making new prospects under the microscope of high hopes. this is porous bone passed around.

Hope I don't feel differently tomorrow.

The human body. Created for all of the struggle that can be felt by the gifts we were blessed with!

For a while now I have had a terrible attitude about money. I grew up on the disadvantaged side of the spectrum because of a whole lot of bad decisions my parents made. Staying together, over-estimating people skills. You get the idea. I've known work from a very young age which has it's drawbacks.
For one, you grow up resenting those with no work ethic. I may be lazy when it comes to buckling down and concentrating on details, but I've been beating up the big picture pussy with a dick the size of a bayonet [I'm very old-fashioned].
Excuse the terrible reference and slight to women. Where I'm from it becomes a part of your everyday language. Instead of erasing that, I'd thought I'd give you a peep into what commuting on the NYC Subway is like. Day in and day out.

Of course I'm aching and dying step by step and I reach my front door and the elevator is going to be out for two months and I turn the key and sigh and walk up the flights with the ole "I didn't die on the last landing, I ain't gonna die on this one" attitude.

Back to money though. It's when I'm at my most tired that I really do NOT care. Heading into this gloomy recession has hit me hard. I'm really poor in every sense of the word. At least in the sense that I can not take you out to dinner and I steal rolls from the cafeteria and I will make you a Valentine's Day card with stale markers and you will think I'm creative but really wouldn't we all like chocolates and don't you think I need a haircut and health insurance? Seriously though. I honestly think of my father coming to this country and only having a radio to occupy his home time. Or, of course, interaction with family. OR just hanging out on the corner with people before the days of invasive ring tones and clothing for dogs.

The thing is, I can fall just as deep into the gold filled rabbit hole. I like to spend money because it's such a stupid thing. I'll give you this if you give me that. In reality I don't need what you have unless it is knowledge you are imparting or the ride it takes to get me there. I have a nice watch I don't need and my ex-boyfriend actually buys me stockings and feeds me when I don't have food in my house. I can not put a price on good company or a good show versus an ankle sweller and skull crusher [I'm a fragile boned lady, ask my PediR]. I can not put a price on sidling up to someone with a cheap beer and feeling them out. If someone kicks a trash can and startles a Goddamn CAT I can not recreate the moment of 4:30 am deserted Brooklyn streets. This is my version of "money can't buy you love" or "I will not contemplate slaughtering that woman who is wearing a full length fur in april, for she is radiant in ignorance and rich in a nose broken on purpose to smell the richness of her own shit." vampires of zanzibar. sensory overload!

I always think if I can't live anymore or I lose my house or shelter, if I lose my family, if I ruin everything, I'll just go back to the dirt and make january nights smell like the butter of bare damp trees. yum.

You tend to write uplifting things at the craziest of times. fuckit.

blanking blanket

and here i write the
lion is the walrus;
paul!

things hurt. im prone to bruises and picking at my face. ive cried a lot recently because everything turned into a fucking meat puppets song interpreted through a hobos bad acid trip.
it hurts my face and my eyes.

im so tense my eye started twitching and my jaw is popping like the rock steady crew.

i miss gordy. being away from her is like knowing my favorite pen is being used by someone who translates neruda into german. im never getting that pen back. it was such a fine black thing.

im really terrible. i want to go back to new paltz and live in the cold and let the mice catch the mice catch the flour i didn't bag up properly. i stopped smoking again. i got sick and then repulsed by the additives in my body. i got repulsed by my own sallow skin and the weaker light in the bathroom. i started drinking seltzer because i ran out of diet coke. then i stopped eating meat. finally i started reading murakami again- because after so much thoreau [and such a distance between now and when norwegian wood was read] i needed to be immersed in a corny cob pipe of a dream. "do you understand?" "do you see?"

im repulsed my the material me. right now as i write this i'm in my alaska shirt. the one anyu brought back from some trip. serious pitstains so i wear it in fall/winter when i need a sweatshirt. sweating it out at the homestead! im in pat's pants from when he lived in new york. brian gave them to me. pat still asks about them. they have moose on them. when i went to california [where pat now lives] i wore them every night! also, i am wearing my favorite perfume.
perfume is great because it goes from being contained in a bottle [which may in fact be amazingly beautiful] to being wildly loose on neck breasts and wrists. i never feel bad about buying perfume. i stick with the same one for about two years. people whove known me long and have smelled me consistently tell me i have two scents. i'm okay with that. i dont know if i can ever wear the perfume he gave me again. also, i am uncertain we will ever make perfume [again].
my parents refused to send me to france to perfume school to be a nose. i wound up leading a very terrible life [just kidding, i would never kill myself over spilled anything... well maybe blood. it would have to be perfect and not premeditated]

tomorrow i go to a women's conference at hunter. i get in for-ee because i am part of an organization or something. its at hunter so thats my in[n]. i go there, you know. to learn how to sit quietly and at first be ignored by my peers, then avoid them.

boy, i sure can only handle a few good fellows at a time. i really like to be the sleeper. papow.

in other news:
my horoscope [so accurate i have to share, so scary its true, so true my life has changed and i am again homeless in my home]:

"Reaching understanding with others concerning feelings and emotional issues is a special focus for you at this time. Resist the lure of something that is obviously bad for you. You must be willing to break out of a downward spiral by accepting the inevitable. The line between the foolish and the wise has never been more clearly drawn."

what a fire sign! where's my wet blanket?
---------
-ian and will at arlenes grocery
-mxbx
-tickets to olympia
-cr portfolio
-bankxit

document this:

lol

very funny;-) thanks for the laugh
i am sorry this was sent to you by mistake

At 05:38 PM 2/7/2007, you wrote:

i filled my requirement last semester when i took 100 i believe- do i still need this? im in psych 170 now- maybe you wanna test my blood for stds? let me know if i can get three credits if i test positive for something sexy.
that was kind of rude but i felt like i was on a roll.

rebecca kish.


-----Original Message-----
From: Psychology 100 Research Participation system [mailto:________@hunter.cuny.edu]
Sent: Tue 2/6/2007 1:34 PM
To: Rebecca K---
Subject: Psychology 100 Research Participation system Login Information

Your login information for Psychology 100 Research Participation system is listed below.

User ID: ______
Password: ________


-------------
love hunter. love. it. its a lovely place. i love when im on the escalator and the fire alarm goes off and they become stairs and no one even says anything. they just start walking up. except i just got off the subway so i came in at the basement and im like: "damn yo" but i dont say anything. no one else does either.
i've been writing a shit ton. bad news: i wrote a horrid paper for religion. i said something about a belly button. "coz, you know; its like---finite"

i think i lost power steering fluid in my car. i was on middletown road the other night [you know just chillin in the bronx; like always] driving home and wouldnt you fucking know i pull under the el train, except my wheel wouldnt turn and i already accelerated. this isnt an "i think" so much as "i know."
how, HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS AREKAYE?
well.
a. i know what power steering fluid smells like
b. i think it might have water in it [think-frozen]
c. i just popped my hood and took care of this issue a couple of weeks ago and noticed some non consistent traits and trends concerning fluids.

note: psych170= psych of human sexuality.