Thursday

On my mind today


Decadence vs. Morality

Tension vs. Relaxation

Conscience vs. Flippancy

Guilt vs. Not Giving a Shit

Accommodation vs. Expressing (or Having) Opinions

Pacifism vs. Aggression

Thought vs. Non-Thought

Sex vs. Celibacy

Love and Openness vs. Cynicism and Repulsion

Lauri vs. Reality

Dishes vs. Anarchy

Acceptability vs. Rebellion

Instinctual vs. Analyzed

People vs. Privacy

Life vs. Death

Self-Hatred vs. Acceptance of Blandness

Happiness vs. Depression

Masochism vs. Mellowness

Hypocrisy vs. Hypocrisy

Hope vs. Fatalism

(Xmas '87)

Tuesday

More Photos '87







Floor Plan (From a Dream)




Something Strange Happened on the Train


Yesterday, on the el: my thoughts were hazed with a blue-gray mist.  I had met someone who turned my concept of life a full 180 degrees.  We had spent nine hours together, doing nothing more than opening ourselves.  Trusting, but still strangers.  On the el, my head was stuck in the night before.  We did not touch, but our words touched.  I felt I wanted everything from him.  Not sure he would comply.

Thoughts took me out of my physical form.  I was an orb on a brown, vinyl seat.  A woman stood in front of me.  She stood and swayed against the movement of the train.  For a long time, I stared at her, her pale purple sweater, her red flannel pants, her green socks, and her black nurse shoes; her bags and her confused mumblings.  And then I saw, in her fisted hand, a plastic bag containing water and five goldfish - white and orange.  They swam below the hand of the crazy woman.  They shook in their water.  I gasped.

The train swerved, and then halted.  The bag dropped.  The floor came alive with water spilling outward, and fish, dying in the air.

I knelt down to the floor of the train.  The water seeped into the knees and shins of my pants.  The fish danced a nauseating, acrobatic death.  I clutched one in my hand.  It flipped its gold and white.  I kissed it once, and then held its head up to my mouth.  I parted my lips, and with one fast bite, the fish was decapitated.  I pushed the head out of my mouth with my tongue, and I started for another fish that limped along the serrated rubber flooring.  I repeated the same process I had completed with the first.  I developed a sickening taste in my mouth, of stale water and metal and what I imagined to be secretions of saliva or tiny brains.  I moved on the the third fish.

The crazy woman looked at me with terror.  Her fish were being systematically sacrificed before her eyes.  Her forehead wrinkled, and her expression became pained as she looked down at the small pile of bodies and heads that lay in front of my knees.

Other passengers turned away.  One woman, with a comically made-up face fainted onto another woman's shoulders.  I moved quickly to the fourth fish, and finally, to the fifth.

The fifth fish moved only slightly.  My kiss was real.  I brought it dearly to my lips, and then bit fiercely down over its head.  I felt its death in my hand, and in my mouth.  I pulled it out from my teeth, conjured up some saliva, and spat on the wet floor.  Ceremoniously, I took the fish heads and bodies and put them back in the plastic bag, and gave them back to the crazy woman.  Then, I walked off the train.

Last night, I dreamt I vomited millions of tiny goldfish heads.  I would repeatedly swallow and throw up the little heads, and I kept looking into their eyes.  Their eyes. . .

He has such beautiful eyes.  I am obsessed with them.  I carry myself limply through life as my mind wanders on and on.  I am senseless and irrational.  And I look so forward to our next meeting. . .

12/1/87