so mirrored
Last year I was reading about the tagging of monarch butterflies to track their movements during migration and I was kinda disappointed because I was expecting something beautiful, something that would shift, but it was written for fact. But I’m still thinking about it now, how many I saw in texas, like so wild for it, must have looked like a freak, arms outstretched walking a college town pushing into a patch of milkweed to take a picture again and again. If you look up the place that arranges the tags you can watch a video called ‘how to hold a butterfly’ — one of the ways to do it reminds me of how you hold a cigarette. When I’m working I kind of always divide things into whether it’s writing for fact or beauty, and I shouldn’t have been so disappointed because connecting butterflies and cigarettes wasn’t something I expected to have, but that’s looped together now.
New notes still exists even if the updates are infrequent and this is largely something that makes me write when I don’t feel like it, big time moving between all the same things over and over, and you can still read it if you like knowing someone elses’s notes,
The first note I made this year was minerals, attitudes which is an old note and something I want to think about again. Everything else has been so mirrored. I archived the old newsletters last week and it was the first time I’d seen all the images stacked in one place and that made me laugh and also made me feel more like myself than I have in forever, minerals minerals minerals, fire, smoked out scenes, a lot of highways, stretched landscapes, I do sometimes get bored of the things I’m attached to but I can’t really help that, same as I can’t really help doing things I know will upset me - - - before I went to the ranch I kept looking up the hashtag ‘horse riding accident’ and seeing posts about fractures, crushed pelvis, some bloodless injuries, but then everyone said they always rode again even if they were terrified.
It’s better now, it’s felt like there have been more things to write down. I know what I’m supposed to be doing but all I want to write about is tornadoes, I already know how that one starts and mostly how it ends — maybe kinda like the only time I let myself believe god was real was on the 1-80 and - - - and then a bit later + that was on a videotape in my parents living room. And I know that and I said you’re making me shy but I was making it up so I didn't seem so — fits into it somehow, and probably cool and careful devotion was not for me has a place as well.
Maybe it’s also having a better hold on how things can turn into something else, like the dudes I saw hotboxing in their car while I waited to steal a branch from a dogwood tree and how that becomes a scene in something I haven’t written properly yet, but would start with two flower delivery drivers smoking in their van, the whole backseat piled with reflexed roses.
That was a perfect night and maybe you’re thinking about your next perfect night too. Maybe my next one will end like they often do, with me touching the busted collar of my t-shirt listening for the glitch in the rain sounds I loop when I need to go to sleep. Maybe I’ll be able to write this thing about mapping moods at a party, maybe I’ll figure out a place for ‘and he’s telling me about his dependency on artificial tears’ and ‘whole world romantic illusion’ and ‘not even a forgiving crescent of the moon out to help me’
The best time to make notes is still checking out of a crowded room to make sure you don’t forget something, the best prompt for anything ever is using ‘you said’ as a start and then letting it shift into whatever else. Notes like that turned into sometimes weird things make me feel very beautiful like accidentally, perfectly cutting along the rib of a lettuce leaf in a dim bar, sometimes I am still thrilled when someone points out I have a heart shaped face + these are some others from the past little while
clear fantasy / to touch the busted collar of my t shirt and try remember I would feel like myself again / twilight so fast, driving to california to get a car / hear my neighbour greet her man at the door saying I missed you I missed you, don't know how long he was gone for / conversations getting stilted to start, always something about the weather / ‘you can repeat that as many times as you need but I gotta say that it'll take forever for it to stick’ / and every time we looked at a painting she’d tell me what dark thought she imagined the woman in the picture was thinking and I said I didn't want to play ‘memeing the art gallery’ and she said - - - / at the party looking for a real cigarette / how I was kneeling meant I had the heel of my foot pressed between my legs / she said she was sensitive to spirits and I was sensitive to ------- / the light shifted again, we have so much further to drive, / ‘give me the cigarette for the photo’ she said and I did because really I would do anything she asked, I would do anything for the photograph / to not tell anyone that I was keeping the spent shell from shooting my horse by the sink in the bathroom, reminding me that there wasn’t anything I could really keep / dividing of desire? / says ‘I want to feel how fast your heart is’ and I let him even though I didn’t think I knew him well enough for that kind of intimacy, kind of thing I would run from / and how they’ll hide their babies in the tall grass if they can, or how if a calf dies the mother will lick at it to see if it’ll come around, you know, things to make you cry if you weren’t used to it like us / exalted or p asked me how fast can you fall in love / I don’t know, I had tornados on my mind