chain-store chain-smoke, I consume you all.

 Just some various fanart:


http://vertigeaux.deviantart.com/art/laundromats-are-for-lovers-127323461

 Essay prompt: 

           Today I went to the antique shop on Coventry Road and bought some army surplus patches for my green jacket. I stopped by the Record Revolution and pretended to know the bands JD was talking about. I bought a strawberry malt at Tommy's and wandered up and down the street, watching my reflection in shop windows. My cropped, blue hair. My big, geek glasses. My messenger-bag covered in buttons featuring various indie bands, superheroes, political slogans and clever pop-culture references. Each one recherché.  

            I might as well have been designed by a team of marketing executives. Every aspect of my being is so carefully contrived. My adorably pigeon-toed feet in vintage '73 converse all-stars (the first year of the custom red stitching). My ripped-up, neon leggings. My grandiloquent literary references. My use of words like "grandiloquent". I'm the lovably snarky antithesis of Hannah Montana. A prefab Juno. My image: pseudo-punk, thrift store chic. Just edgy enough, but without scaring the kiddies. As Poly Styrene would have said, "I am a cliché!"

            What does the word "artist" mean to me? I don't really know, even as I pretentiously apply it to myself. I was watching Spongebob this morning with my three-year-old sister and at some point in the episode, Squidward said, "Art is suffering!" Squidward is my favorite character. He's a lugubrious, quasi-intellectual like me.

            People have told me I enjoy being miserable. While I do not actively seek misery, it always seems to find me, and I console myself with the idea that I am an artist, and we artists must suffer in the name of some higher understanding. Sarcasm and affected perma-gloom lend my poetic dabblings a façade of legitimacy. Sometimes, when this doesn't work, I am left to wander up and down Coventry, acting like someone is search of some higher understanding.

            I like to draw. Does that make me an artist? People say I'm the "artist type". I never have any money, so I've already got that part down. I guess I'm a writer. I write just about every day. I'm even working on a novel right now.

            I had to fill out a survey at school that asked what careers I was interested it. I wrote that careers are for squares, but if forced to choose I would become a cartoonist/novelist/stage actress/rock star/superhero/carny/hobo. They thought I was making fun of them.

                  Fran Lebowitz said, "Very few people possess true artistic ability.  It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort.  If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass." Probably good advice. Art is extremely frustrating. I think an artist is someone who is devoted to the task of communication. As humans we are really always alone, sad little vessels drifting through life with impossible chasms between us. You will never, ever know what anyone else is thinking. But every once in a while Emily Dickenson will speak to me from beyond the grave, and I'll decide that there's hope after all. We are artists because we seek to understand and to be understood. This is the noble pursuit for which Squidward and I are willing to suffer.       

 I drew Poly Styrene, of X-Ray Spex. formed in 1976, they are one of my all-time favorite punk bands. between Poly's shrill, sugary, adolescent chirpings, Laura Logic's choppy sax, and those clever, razor-sharp lyrics, the Spex were part feminism, part anti-consumerism, part sci-fi wierdness, and all charm. moshers and shoegazers alike can head-bang to this shizz.

http://vertigeaux.deviantart.com/art/Poly-Styrene-114592519

Today I walked down Coventry Road, in my pajamas and black overcoat, wearing a false mustache and pushing a discarded umbrella stroller full of aluminum cans. I felt gloriously, lugubriously like a hobo. I saw the tilt of the world just then, and after three Redbulls and an agonizing afternoon spent in the unforgiving clutches of writer's block, I finally came to a very important conclusion:

nothing really matters/ anyone can see/ that nothing really matters/ nothing really matters/ to meeee!!!

Oh Freddie.

Lux Interior died this month.

I learned a new work today: "chickanery" (artful subterfuge) 

 Well the whole fucked-up fam-dam-bly is comin' into town for the holidays. My Aunt Valerie is getting married to some guy she's known for like two weeks (agian. this will be the third time.)! You'd think she'd have learned her lesson by now. The last dude turned out to be some kind of scam artist. He took her car and $5000. Anyway, I already know how this is gonna play out:

Val: I'm fat. Where's the food? I need botox. You guys are boring. I want a kid. I hate kids. It's too cold. My life is so hard. You don't understand.

Mom: Quit complaining. Spend time with your family. It's not all about you. You're a fucking lousy sister! 

Me: Everyone shut the fuck up, I'm trying to sleep!

Yup. And at least one person will end up covered in vodka and broken glass. It's practically an annual tradition. If I wasn't realated to these people, I'd really hate them. 

>> tomorrow is my some-teenth birphday, ladies an' germs! my plans for this weekend? hide from parents. i made cupcakes with seafoam green frosting. it's mah favorite colour lately. one year older, one year wiser, 365 days closer to dying. fa-la-la-la-fuck. 

{fun fact: the only day i hate more than my birthday is christmas}     

in other, less nihilistic news, i'm working on a poem about my favorite poets for The Phoenix (school literary magazine of which i am editor in chief). so far i only have two stanzas or something:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o07g5QVcg4

 that song owns my soul. i can't even express in words how {fucking} amazing and {fuck} i don't even {fucking} know what to say. 

Still working on that  X-files fanfic 100 challenge. If the X F Drabbles club would let me join, I'd post them. I really need to draw something too. I'm in a very dark place, creatively. Just physically and emotionally exhausted. 

I'm going to an Obama rally today. I'd ask Eve to come, but I worry she'll tell me she has to "work" which is code for ditch me and hang out with Nathan. Why do I stay in these destructive friendships with those two? Because I'm in love with them, and they hate me.

I need to lose about five pounds. My skin is hideous. Is there anything for that? Maybe I should stop gobbing on black eyeliner and hiding behind layers of flannel. I just can't feel attractive anymore. And my hair. Don't get me started.  

Well the rally should be fun, with or without my emotionally abusive friends. 

See yall on the flip side. 

The Young Crazed Peeling 

Are you ready to be liberated?
On this sad side city streets
Well the birds have been freed from their cages
I got freedom and my youth

My name is Brody I'm from Melbourne
Fitzroy Melbourne Fitzboy Melbourne
I grew up on Bell St. then on Bennett St.
My mom kicked out my dad for battery
Found a way she found a way out of spiritual penury
Working single mother in an urban struggle
Blames herself now cause I grew up troubled
It hit me i got everything i need

My one heart felt too much from the start
Ive seen people come and go
Living large and living low
You can build up your walls sitting on death row
Let the curtain fall on your murdered soul
You can wash it all down swallow your story
Get smacked off your head go down in downroll glory
You wont solve it committing self inflicted crime
Go on pull the trigger this will be the last time

I speak of the truth the truth of the heart
Like a desperate thirst in a raging drought
Hey youth time flies by
Theres an everlasting battle for eternal life
I love a man from California
Hes the prettiest thing we got the same disorder
The way you feel is OK its never gonna change anyway
 
Are you ready to be liberated?
On this sad side city streets
Well the birds have been freed from their cages
I got freedom and my youth

 This is just something i did for school. Read and Review? 

{SHORT STORY}                                  

    She smelled of lilac smoke and hairspray, and other evanescent, nightly things distilled between her sheets. She’s a red, a dying breed, the kind with constellation freckles, and he’s taken with her. Taken far away. 
   
     She wakes up not to the proverbial breakfast of champions, but to the self deprecating breakfast of poets, of black coffee and cigarettes. Because she’s always wanted to be the kind of person who takes their coffee black, she learns to love the bitter sting.

     On weekdays' six hour grind, the longueur of old routines slips by in an air conditioned hum. They play along mechanically, with practiced ease and bide their time.     
   
     After school they meet at the subway station and ride around until the purest waking hours, drifting through the city, the timeless old attraction. Where he can be her knight in well-worn blue jeans, the self righteous angry-young-man of a generation come but never really gone. Sometimes he brings his guitar and its open case collects change and the sporadic crumpled bill. She thinks she loves him, ink-dark, slipshod, so much soul. He thinks he needs her beaming red and pale. Sometimes, when no one else is riding the train, his hands find her waist and she sparks like a live wire beneath his palms, like the florid thing she is. 
   
     That year both of them felt the world flip like a pancake and be, again; different. She is disenchanted with him now; he seems so young. He'll put away his revolution-talk and happily amount to nothing. It seems they're drifting, splintering helter-skelter into the future. They don't ride the train anymore.  
    
     He comes home one day to find her lying luxuriously across the hood of his dad’s Cadillac, the fine orange netting of her hair flooding gossamer over one shoulder. She seems suddenly thinner, the freckles standing out along her jaw, the sloping line of her abdomen sharp over the hip bone. Maybe she’s lost weight or maybe he’s never paid close enough attention. Or maybe she’s lost weight because he’s never paid close enough attention.

     It's so unnatural, silly really, they way she's laying there, coiled-hot and batting her blue eyes vixenishly. He shuffles his feet because the words don't come easy anymore. In the silence it's understood how she'll sink up and slink off, and how he won't follow her the way he might of only months ago. "See you later," he doesn't say.       

    

     They are strangers now. 

    "You'll meet in college," Lucy says thoughtfully. She crosses and uncrosses her pink-and-black-striped legs and I notice a small hole in the left knee of her stockings. 
    "Oh?"
    "Not at the same college mind you. She'll be an Ivy Leaguer, and you'll be doing some gig at her school…"
    "I'm still in a band at this point?" 
    "Duh! So anyway, she's been an overachieving tight-ass all her life, and here you are this dangerous punk-rocker, exactly the kind of guy Mommy warned her about, come to sweep her off her feet. She's scared, yet intrigued by you. You're loud and unkempt, but she sees that you're also smart and sensitive-"
    "I am not 'unkempt'!" 
    "Jesus Vertigo! Don't get your panties all in a bunch! So you're a clean, well-dressed punk-rocker dude. See how that diminishes the effect?"   
    "Whatever," I sigh. I guess I'm just totally not in the mood for one of Luce's fantasies right now because I've been seriously considering how pathetic my life is and how she's practically my only friend.  
    "Of course, her parents hate you. So you elope in Vegas and-"
    "Cliché."    
    "Okay, you elope in Quebec. Since she's a concert violinist-"
    "Cliché!" 
    "Fine! She plays the freaking bagpipes!"
    "How about a harp?"
    "Whatever! The point is you make beautiful music together. She shows you the love you've never known, and you show her how to have fun and take risks." 
    "And we live happily ever after?" I venture.
    "No!" Luce takes a slovenly gulp of her blue-raspberry slushy. "That, Vertigo, would be cliché," she mocks. 
    I fiddle with my straw. "So what happens then?"
    "You get divorced because she thinks you're a low life with no
future and you think she's a soulless operative of the man." 
    "What?!" 
    "Face it Vertigo, more than half of all marriages in America end in divorce."
    "But I thought we were getting married in Canada."
    "Touché!" She grins."  -Life On The Fringe
It was requested that I post an excerpt from my novel-in-progress. The latter bit is from chapter one, "The Exciting Future Of My Love Life As Told By Lucy Blitz". Here's another, this one from chapter two, "A Brief History Of My weirdness, Including Several Painful Memories": 

i just saw "who killed the electric car". tragic. fucking tragic. the fucking military-industrial complex does it again. all in the name of the bottom line. if you're not furious, you haven't been paying attention.

i need a lip ring, left side. the 'rents aren't so stoked. le prof won't budge. elliot* pierced his own, but he had to take it out cause it got fucked up (told him not to wear a safety pin until it healed). he's going to redo it, though. we could make out in his room, and the metal would tinkle like chimes. how hot would that be?

in other news, david duchoveny (mulder) just checked into rehab to cure his sex-addiction. made my day.

*guy from school. total stoner w/ crazy christian sciences parents. prospective make-out buddy(?).

i ate some stupid ramen. it was so fucking good. and then i ate a whole pack of banana split oreos. i'm supposed to be vegan. i need to quit eating all this animal shit.

i did a half-assed photoshop drawing of mulder and scully. still on my x-files kick. Click on the image for full-view:


mulder and scully by *vertigeaux on deviantART

the x-files own my soul. I'm watching "musings of a csm" right now. I remember it from when it was on tv, but I sort of forgot, so I found this site with all the eps. I'm re-watching them all from the beginning. *ish in love w/ mulder and scully*

the new movie was a bit of a let down though... it just didn't have that x-files feel. the writing could have been so much better. looks like chris "can't-quit-when-he's-ahead" carter doesn't know what to do with a big hollywood budget. sigh.

mulder's first word was "jfk". priceless.

I went to a show tonite with some friends. "the secret handshake" and "breathe carolina". badass. got some moshing injuries, but it was well worth it. bought a sweet tee shirt at the merch table. the music was good and they gave out free cds. I touched Lewis's hair. 

I really want to get my lip pierced. bottom, left side, little silver ring. 'rents aren't so stoked. advice? 

wrote a poem yesterday, in about five minutes. it's really sappy and unoriginal, but I'll post it anyway. I know the whole "punk's not dead" thing has been beaten to death. heh, irony. seriously though, the culture is near and dear to me. 


 

Punk's not dead:

tell them I believe that rock n' roll,

can save my mortal soul,

because I grew up on Don Mclean

and Queen,

James Taylor and James Dean

oh I’m a rebel who’s found my cause

ask not what your country can do for you,

ask “what are we askin’ for?”

tell them all is fair in love and war,

and rock n’ roll

I will not be denied,

decried,

objectified,

I am out of line,

I am a sign,

of the times,

I am not your bottom line

not a member of a set,

not a sure bet

and I beam, and I dream,

and I sweat, and I fret,

on the frets,

up and down on the strings,

like the strings,

in my heart

chord after chord,

am I more

than the sum of my parts?

a collection of chords

and as long as you’ve got your guitar,

and you know who the hell you are…

tell them all is fair in love and war,

and rock n’ roll

 

 

 

babysitting all week. need the money. I want to get my hair done before school starts. rainbow striped bangs I think. can that be done? Jack and Solomon, the kids I'm watching are precocious and awesome. I think I have a crush on their mom. she's forty-something, but she's got this little Kim Possible, babydoll figure. she had on this white tee shirt and baggy cargo pants and she just looked so lovely and petite. also, she's badass, like my kind of adult. she's bi like me and smokes occasionally. cool and whimsical, like the middle-aged version of Juno, the Ellen Page character. blonde. Solomon, the older kid was gorgeous platinum blonde till the evil Rita (ex-partner, ugly custody battle) made him shave it off.

I feel horribly fat. 127.5 pounds today. Ugh.

been doing nothing for days but watching the x-files with chinese subtitles. best cult series ever. star trek is over-rated. I'm in love with Mulder and Scully.

Yes. Pluto should not have been demoted. It's been part of our culture for hundreds of years, and they're going to just now decide to do away with it? I don't think so!