Collecting these to upload them here was an odd experience. They begin at the bottom of the page in 2019 - before then I suspect the things I was writing were not in the same digital format, and are now forgotten in some diary tucked into a box under the far corner of my bed. Reading these small things in reverse chronological order made me notice the hill I had been climbing through the past two years; I turn back and look briefly behind me, noticing for the first time that I can see a little further to the horizon than I could before. It feels odd to me because while I don't conciously feel any less angsty now than I did then, the pieces seem more and more poisoned the further back they occured.

I am curious whether it seems that way to another - whether the writings reflect that experience or whether it is just the memories I have tied to them.

Perhaps someday I will take the box out from under the corner of my bed and digitize some older writings and truly embarass myself.

Grandma Jo died this Sunday.
I am trying to think about something worth writing, something profund or interesting or worth sharing.

I'm failing to do so - I was scared of her when I was little, didn't understand her in adolescense, and haven't seen her since.
She feels like little more than a stranger to me, somebody I know about, but do not myself know.
She had been in a memory care facility since late 2019 or so.

I called my dad shortly after he texted me about it, and he didn't feel well. He very nearly let himself cry on the phone with me, but instead he ballooned his voice into a rapid, shaky, tremolo shouted bass-falsetto; wrenched it immediately back to a hoarse whisper then- all together again, mezzo-piano, adagio, the air esccaping slowly, measuredly.

He had started working on a booklet of photos that he has taken for Grandma's primary caretaker to show her, of Californian birds and mountains and their scrubland.
I want to ask him about it. I want to ask him to finish it, but I don't know if that's a good idea. I think I will wait a while and see.

I've been moving for the last two months and I've been trying to think of something intelligent to say about it.

I've been failing to do so. I'm tired.

It started with an email in the last few days of July: "Details about your upcoming renewal for Z104!"- I managed to actually open it. That evening I drank four beers and made a spreadsheet with all of the apartment complexes with studios and one-bedrooms and all of the basement levels and mother-in-law units for rent in southern King County around $1500 or so per month that weren't owned by the same corporation as the landlord that had raised my rent by 19.47 percent. The spreadsheet had only six or seven entries. I only managed to speak with three of them over the next few days, and only visited two. One of them is where I live now. It is very pretty. The apartment is much smaller than the last one and it costs more too. It smells like cigarettes and the crackheads in the woods keep waking me up at night, but I can hear the trains just like at grandmama and granddaddy's house.

There is odd feeling of foolishness following me- the feeling of home that I had about the previous apartment, seemingly misplaced in a single email.
I lived there three years and did a lot of playing and working and hopefully growing there too. The ugly taupe walls with the bubbling paint disappeared at some point. The life they gave shelter to seemed to confer that same property to the space itself and it breathed and stretched and groaned with me. I stopped noticing the cold of the underground bedroom and began marking seasons by the creeping of slugs onto the kitchen linoleum in summer.

No slugs here- I'm on the third floor and I have far too many blankets for this bedroom. I'm not used to sleeping without my pajamas. I keep glaring at the poorly mounted drawer in the kitchen and the chipped enamel on the tub.

All my things are jumbled together in blocky towers of boxes here and there, books in the kictchen, blender in the bedroom- cardboard, cardboard, cardboard.

I've been trying to think of something intelligent to say about the process of learning this space, learning to feel at home here, trying to learn something from my feet in the new carpet.

I'm tired.

Haven't found the toilet paper yet.

Think that's all I really have to say.

The rain sounds pretty tonight.
It's been falling slowly all day,
at odd intervals, I think-
but I had things to do, and the windows closed, so I didn't listen.
It was never like this back home:
The rain would thrum on the aluminum awning like thunder for only a few minutes at a time.
But up here, on any given night,
you can throw open the windows and pull a few extra blankets on, and listen as it whispers into the ground and you sink slowly into sleep amid the cool night.
I've been looking for grad schools and a few are back in California again.
I sometimes with the last few years had happened differently,
that I had ended up in a different place-
but that isn't really true.
Really, I just wish I weren't so afraid, becuase-
sitting up in bed in somebody else's hometown,
listening to the rain in the middle of the night,
I realize how badly I would miss it.

Grandmama had a not-stoke again today.

Yesterday at around 3 pm, my dad created a whats app group called "Grand Mama" with only me in it. I was at work and it was slow, so I saw it and nearly screenshotted it and sent it to my brother as a joke. Nearly half an hour later, he added my brother to the group- about 15 minutes afterwards he messaged us that Grandmama had a stroke the day prior and had been in the ER ever since having tests done. Four so far, with three more scheduled- today Mama told me that they did a CT scan, and an MRI, and stuck twenty five nodes to her scalp for an encephalogram, and took a picture of a horizontal plane through her brain in three different directions, and that a nurse hooked a few diodes up to her torso and spun a 3D ultrasound model of her heart this way and that, pulsing in real time on the computer screen.

I drove home from work last night and barely noticed. I was trying to remember how I felt while grandaddy was dying.

I got another text much later that night after the melatonin had kicked in so I could make my early flight to Christmas the next morning that Grandmama had not had a stroke; that while she had all the symptoms of a stroke, all the tests they ran showed no evidence for a possible cause of a stroke. Dad said that stroke-like symptoms are common for people with C3 stenosis- Mama, who was in the room with Grandmama and the specialist told me that it’s something the specialist knows can happen to between five and ten percent of people who have had corrective surgery for spinal stenosis.

Grandmama had another not-stroke again today. She was telling me about Catalpa worms and Catalpa trees and the words started coming out of the right side of her mouth and -

“Kathryn,” I got around to her left side.

“Kathryn, I think it’s happening again!” I have never heard Grandmama’s voice with an exclamation mark before. Mama was there with a chair and I lifted her into it, but by the time she was all the way onto it she had full faculty over her left side again. We kept her talking for a bit and she squeezed Mama’s fingers and moved her left leg and her lips and her tongue and sat upright and she seemed nervously afraid. I have never heard Grandmama seem nervous or afraid before. I have heard her feel defeated while Grandaddy was dying and then brave and depressed and then raw and alone for quite a while, but never afraid. Never even nervous.

She stood up and she told us what it felt like and then slumped leftwards and I caught her after she had already righted herself and she - “I’m okay. I’m just fine. See?” All out of the right side again.

“I’m okay. Fine. See?” She looked, wild-eyed and deploringly around to us for confirmation, but by then she was okay again. We talked for a while and she said that she had better go to bed, and walked down the hall without any trouble, both of us flanking her uselessly, patronizingly, scared beyond our wits.

Nothing. She got to bed just fine with no help from either of us and Mama told me everything she had in her for about an hour in the living room with all the lights off, almost nervous and almost afraid in a way I've never heard her speak before.

I saw the strongest wind I've seen in Kent today. I was making soup and I heard a semi truck roar past my apartment - they use this road after the cops go home as a shortcut to skip the lights on 67th street - but it kept roaring and it was 11 AM and I was making soup. I stood by the sliding glass door and “Wow. Wow!” I said. I ran outside and immediately ran back in.

I went through my google drive a few days ago and read through most of my homework from 2013 onward - I remember during an exercise in the creative writing class i took in my freshman year of college that a bassist in a folk punk band told me i had a really strong voice in my writing that he admired - a solid two thirds of the pieces i wrote for that class are about cigarettes. I couldn’t find that voice between those pieces. I remember the mindset I was in at the time though.

I cut my finger today. Not badly, but enough to scare me into working through the rest of the head of cabbage at half speed.

The left side of my jaw hurts when I open it beyond a slack position. For a little bit I thought it was from my wisdom teeth shifting around, but then I figured out that it is a rare fungal colony in the marrow of my jawbone that will expand to my brain stem before the end of the week.

Actually, my best guess is that it’s from grinding my teeth.

I’ve been drinking a little more than I should this week.

I will never be good at everything - I just cannot be. Some of my interest must remain passing simply by virtue of the sixty ticks on the clock, but I crave- I desperately flair out my coattails and strut as though I am.

I know this in my most private hours. Before I can realize it, I have turned the lock closed on my front door and run back into the other room, flipping off all the lights in apartment along the way. I shut the bathroom and dance nervously into the bedroom, slamming the door closed- gingerly! Do not crush the internet cable along the baseboard. I hurl down the blinds and spin the faceted plastic stick between my palms and they groan down, darkening the room save for their perforations. I kneel down in the closet, fists balled up under my chin, teeth gritted in prayer and the fear trickles and rushes and roars over me.

“Is it ever too quiet around here for you?” I startle - it’s 4:55 and I’m playing pokemon at my desk.

“Not really-“ I turn and watch as he performs a double half-step shuffle back into the entryway of my cubicle, the hands jammed into his pockets gyrating him a full bobbling revolution each time, “it’d be this quiet at home too.” He nods, one hand floating up to prop its elbow on top of the cubicle wall.

“‘Cause I mean, it’s only three of you- and Tim’s gone, so. I guess there’s DDA people over on that side-” he turns and gestures vaguely toward the other side of the building. I am suddenly conscious of just how empty the massive space would seem without the cubicles. “I don’t know. I just feels so empty.”

“Doesn’t bother me, I guess.”

“It’s gonna be weird in October when all the management starts coming back to the office,” He shifts his weight to his other foot and his other elbow. The corner is broken and the sharp plastic sticks into the bottom oh his arm. “October 8th,” he says, without taking a breath. His other arm floats back to his side. His elbow hovers, then the other arm he tucks- his elbow re-centers itself, the other arm, he wiggles it down to his side- he folds them.

I blink. “Yeah, ‘cause, um. No-“

“Yeah October 8th, they're coming back. The management.”

“November-something, right?”

“Yeah, November is when everybody starts coming back. Gonna be weird,” He trails off, nodding, eyebrows smooshing his forehead up against the bottom side of the bill of his hat. My eyes notice that he is color-coordinated today, alternating Seahawks blue and green from his hat to his shoes. They say Nike though. His words slowly pick up speed: “I don’t- I have just,” his hands jam down into is pockets again, “No words for what to call this whole… plan.”

“Did any of the workgroup you were part of go into that plan?”

“No!- they. No, they didn’t even take it into consideration, they just sent that email out.”

He was part of a workgroup that spent 24 hours a week for two whole months to develop a three-phased plan to return to in-person services.

I blink, then spin around. “D’you know what this email is about? One of the automatic ones- the other, here, is the annual trainings one, I assume. But this one, ‘Annual HR Checkup’-“

“Annual HR Form… no, I don’t know what- Maybe it’s those forms we have to sign yearly…”

I open the link in the email. It brings up a bunch of new readings from the HR documents policy. I’ve seen the titles before, but only read half of the documents before.

“Must be new-“ I push the keyboard tray in and slap the tops of my thighs. “Well!”

“HR… gonna be weird with all everybody coming back, especially with. Yeah, it… Like it’s not often that I have to escalate an HR thing, call up my boss even, say ‘yeah this needs to go up to the top’- about some discrimination I experienced today, even.”

His hands stop flying pinwheel gesticulations around his face, and everything hunches into his ribcage “‘Cause- I told you about my needle phobia, thing, right?-“

I nod and croak out a “yes” into my mask, which he uses as consent to to launch himself into a pantomime of the entire experience. His story is so strange that I don’t think it actually happened - it is like a lie a child would tell. I start playing with my rings to try stop wringing my hands. I am squirming and my legs won’t- I can’t get comfortable, I stick them up into a relaxed pose, feet propped onto the recycle bin under the desk, but it’s too flimsy and unstable, and the position takes every muscle in my legs and back to hold. I refocus my eyes.

He isn’t paying any attention to my body language, he isn’t paying any attention to me at all, actually, he’s looking up over the sea of cubicle walls, eyes wide above his mask, their corners pulling away and down, their eyebrows arced up in the middle. His head spins with his torso and his hands and he wont stop talking. He is in the way. He is blocking the way out of the cubicle and he won’t stop talking. My belly clenches in anger and frustration and it pulls me into a real sitting position again. He is starting over, faster this time-

I start to notice his words as my abdominal muscles relax. “Yeah, and cause I’ve been hearing that its you vaccinated people who could get me, us non-vaccinated- real sick”- I suddenly remember what his hairline looks like without the hat pulled down over it. “-but it’s fine cause I mean, some people here who are like really into the politics of it, the ‘Oh, you have to…, you know- they know I’m not into the politics of it and all, I mean you know. Like you, you know I’m not into the politics of it.”

At the last ‘politics’ I notice the pain pulsing under my shoulder blades as my back struggled against my belly to keep me upright- it breaks my focus and one of my teeth grinds hard against another behind my mask, but my eyes stay sunny and I nod assuredly, brow furrowed, lips pursed thoughtfully, but he can’t see that. “-aw hey what time is it?” He leans forward as if he could see the time on the computer monitor by doing so.

My chair hurls itself around, coming to a jolting halt against the desk.

“Five-oh-five.”

He says something through a smile as he walks hurriedly away and I laugh and tell him to have a good weekend.

I have driven through the Ojai valley twice. California looks alien to me now: all yellow-brown clay dust and asphalt bleached nearly white from the sun, spiderwebbed with the shadow of the scraggly live oaks crouching above the ground- but it smells like home.

I drove through the Ojai valley twice, and smelled the fountain in the park, all copper pipe and old ceramic, all water falling conspicuously through the fountain where there is otherwise none, in the middle of a desert, be it by asphalt or by the yellow-brown clay dust. No other fountains smell like that.

I drove through the Ojai valley well after dark, rushing through the hot air and the scent of the scraggly live oaks. No other oaks smell like that - like oil and dust and thick, rough grey bark, and short, spiky grey and brown leaves lining the side of the road, climbing doggedly into the hills.

There was a fire near my house today, 188 acres- I stood in the driveway, white cement burning my pink feet, and heaved gulps of the orange plume as best I could, tasting the home I haven’t all the way forgotten.

I took multiple showers today, as hot as I could stand - as hot as the knob goes. I cover myself in lavender soap and duck back under, letting it steam a cloud of lavender into the air around me. It stings my eyes and clears my sinuses if the water is hot enough. I push hard into the muscle under my shoulder blade, trying desperately to jam a thumb into the sore spot from my bad posture.

When it starts to hurt I stagger out, dizzy and pink, and drink as much cold water as my stomach can hold.

“Oh these cheese fries kick a** my man,” Fieri’s proclamation is cut short by a mechanical bleep, overlapping a little more than just his expletive.

He grins through a mouth of food as he looks into the camera, cheeks ballooning as he swallows- but the weight pulling at the corners of his eyes remains. Perhaps he didn't mean to, but he tells you something between the flickering cathode images: there is joy and sadness, sensations of flight and drowning, within each breath- you needn’t favor the crest or valley.

My Dad’s Secret Recipe for Grilled Steaks

After being plagued with weeks of nightmares, I have finally passed through the gauntlet and received a reward for my trials and tribulations: my father revealed to me in a dream his secret recipe for the perfect grilled steak.

My Dad’s Secret Recipe for Grilled Steaks

Ingredients:

3 steaks, generously seasoned with salt and pepper

3 whole roasted red bell peppers

1 ice-cold beer ;)

Let’s cook!:

1. Pour yourself that beer into a tall glass, king!

2. Hold it up to your face and look through the bottom half of the glass as you bring the ingredients out to the grill.

3. Turn the grill onto medium-high. Once heated, plop the steaks down and cook for 4 minutes on each side, or until they are as done as you prefer.

4. Once the steaks are cooked, take them off the grill and submerge them into the bowl of water along with the roasted bell peppers.

Way of the worm

Knows 0 words

Knows 0 fools

Knows no bounds

Ruthless

Wiggle

No wave, no aesthetic

Eat the dead

Eat that dirt

“stay wet”

Leave ALL stones unturned

I smile, and the wolf mother bares her teeth, ivory lattice resting upon flesh of ultimatum, provocation, and violence, twins turned inward, anger made to feel righteous. Her heart beats red not simply of Ares and Artemis - for all who eat must kill - but with the red of Rex, decadence and velvet, of blood pounding in my ears as I trace heritage back through standing veins of megalomania attempting divinity. I love my mother and my grandmother - I will begin only to count with them.

I twist and I turn in a sunny disposition, all cuffed jeans and floral tee, corners pointing up.

My collarbones are beautiful in this boat neck but not as deep and not as stark as I imagine.

It is sunny so I push aside the blinds covering the sliding glass door and pose; an L between the floor and the wall - one leg crooked, the other straight, sipping coffee.

My tortoise shell cat matches my clothes, soft earth tones and green eyes. We watch the ants crawl through the carpet - she longer than me.

Slipping, I skin my onion knees and cry as I peel my weeping paper skin, I am shucked by hands not mine. I feel like I want to rend, and in my confusion, from behind clenched teeth, I pull the hairs from my meat- I am bare and clean, finally seeping my sugar blood. I hiss a sigh of relief like so many crab-shells and scrabble against the stock pot’s walls.

Working retail has taught me

anxiety over the Rules

denial of my wishes above others

and not to think less of myself but

worse, to not even think of myself in the first place

But i remember before I worked retail

I was acidic, abrasive

looking mostly for validation

and afraid to talk to people