all your thoughts are belong to heaven

[I don't remember writing this, it was hanging out in my "draft" posts]
[Sort of reads like a rant against the prosperity gospel. idk.]

Where but in the middle of all these thoughts you think of heaven
- O streets of gold
- O transparent glass
- O twelve pearls
But what is a good fit for me? What will work for me?
There was a time when all that mattered for me were the books I read.
-What then, shall we say, in response to these things?

What color is your parachute?
-O come, 401K

What then are your thoughts interrupted by the promise of heaven?
What then:
-Of horror?
-Must we do?
-Shall we say?

Neverminds

Today, this popped into my head:

"All three schools I got kicked out of had the same school colors. So you tell me- what was the common denominator?"

Coffeeshop blog Aug 17

This will be the start of my third week in Lafayette. I'm still pretty disoriented and really tired. Confused about life, relationships, work, money. I have gone to a nearby coffeeshop on Sundays just to get out of my teeny tiny house and be around people. This place seems to be a Sunday morning meeting place for people wanting to catch up with each other or work on school things. I hear lots of different accents.

Basically, I feel like my brain is muddled and I have nothing interesting to say... ever.

To celebrate everything, here is a picture of a huge agave plant I passed Friday night on a walk.

Ami-with-an-i: Prison volunteer work on a summer afternoon

"I feel drowned by all these years," he said into my video camera

or

"All these years have drowned me"

or

"See, I been drowned by all these years"

or

I am drowning in these years, these years where last month I seen a helicopter land in the middle of the prison yard and that was the first helicopter I seen in twenty years. Since Desert Storm.

or

Drowning is like losing yourself under a number of indistinguishable and indeterminable years, where: gray the Oklahoma winters, gray the grass, gray our uniforms, gray the water gray our food gray these prayers that go up into the gray clouds. 

or

I'm drowning. Can't you see? Can't you hear?

or

Something about drowning that struck me as so poignant I reached for my iPhone to record his words exactly, only no phones allowed in here so I repeated that phrase to myself over and over until I forgot it. Until I drowned right along with them until then we wheeled our cameras and our cue cards and our see-through Baggies of snacks out the prison fences into blue skies and the waiting SUVs to take us for some ice cream down the road at McDonald's.

Farmers Market

I love how these onions are tied with twine. I don't know why it appeals to me but it does.

The Farmers Market in Norman has gotten really good. Cheese, eggs, plants, herbs, onions, peppers, flowers ...

See how awful the yard looks? It's nearly the end of April and the grass is still completely dead.

Post diss.

Even though my defense still looms ahead, I feel like I can finally breathe. My weekends are now MINE! Sitting and drinking coffee out of my chipped mug from Peru, thinking about piles of fun books to read, planning to drive over to the farmer's market, scheduling a trip to NYC to celebrate!

Extrapolating the You Voice

You underestimate, perhaps, the significance of 1988, but that's probably because it's my history, not yours. Or is it? Is it yours? Or is it mine. Theoretically.
What if you were not mine. You. You. And you.
Second person is a voice that is jarring and dissodent. Nobody uses the "you" voice unless they are asking for attention, being ostracized, being obsolete. Passive "being." Academically, death. Postmodern. Are you the protagonist of this story or are you the metaphor for a vernacular threat to high culture? YOU decide.
I met with potential adoptive mothers in a restaurant on Dickson Street. You remember Fayetteville. You remember the fevers after immunization, you remember the first day of kindergarten, you remember you kicked your legs so hard when I came to pick you up at daycare. You remember I taught you to read: cat bat mat gnat fat sat... you. You remember? My mother said I wasn't feeding you well enough. At least that's what I was told. You and I studied words in a notebook, way at the top of the hill in Madison County. Too, two, to, zoo, you. You. I opened all these books for you. You opened all these books. You wrote words and all these words.