I'm offended. By what? By a lot of things. I'm offended that the cheese on my French Onion Soup that I so loyally lusted after on the train all the way home was not more melty and delicious looking when it arrived on my kitchen table. And despite my persistence as a cranky, disgruntled waitress whose long, tireless days on flat feet are misunderstood by her patrons, I'm offended that the Sunday night bartender at the Tavern was not more cordial. I'm also offended that the peanut butter I just bought after weeks of resisting the urge did not form a better marriage on my tongue with the soup than I'd imagined. I'm offended that though bayleaves are lucky and I should be glad the cook dropped so many in my soup, they were too flavorful. I'm offended that you the bartender at the next joint down did not fall out of the door at just the right moment, question my food selections, flirt with me and sweep me off my feet. I'm offended that the guy at the next place was not more enthused at my inquiry into his plans Tuesday night considering his incessant text messages a few nights before. I'm equally offended by the plain and the meek as some people are by the loud and the brash. I'm offended that I think love is waiting for me behind a dark, sticky neon counter. I'm offended that I could make someone cry. I'm offended that anyone would take anything I say seriously. I certainly don't.

I always need a candle lit.
A swarm of tiny flames floating
around the room like sea dragons
or specters. I lust for light. I need light more
than wall street needs tai chi
and a stiff drink. Playful light,
light that smiles slyly and talks with its hands.
Light with thick, steady claws whose chest
expands like a hot air balloon every time
it opens its self-satisfied mouth to flicker.

Light with a blue belly, and an elastik spine.
Light that will fidget and flinch,
let me press and poke at its skin
No matter what.
Light that stings but won't scar.
Light that shames, shies and shuts me up.
Paints my cheeks hot like the surface of Mars,
light that makes me talk too much!
Light that reveals all.
Light will know when we meet,
when every blessing, blister and blemish is exposed
that it is melting wax for a good thing.

Every year my favorite color changes.
Some years I am growing more mundane
and others more manic,
depending on who I am in love with-
and the flavor of the barbed wire lips
that keep scuffing and scratching the insides
of my charming cheeks.

My sweetness ripens, expires and blossoms in waves.

A spring tree could just be.
Just. boring as crisp, colorless asphalt
Or ferocious and fascinating as
A cluster of wasabi peas
Brewing like a bad dream`
a bad dream like chemistry.
the kind of chemistry that scores a horrific grade
with the bland people, and
and a rakish A with the ruffians and rogues.
Me and my bad dream are 23
Watching everyone graduate into
Adulthood and we still believe in breaking curfews,
poetiks, fortune cookies and
the rascally glow of 4 AM.

I lose the wrong people in my lungs
like goggles or a piece of jewelry
in the ocean, they sift and sink
slowly to a soft crater at the bottom
carved as smooth and useless
as the pits of a mancala board-
I can’t get them out and I can’t see them
I might only be able to touch them if I hold
my breath, but I’m too afraid of dying
So I don’t get too close. I swim back to the surface
And guzzle down air.

I reread the lines I have written you a thousand times
and excavate them for mistakes.
I wonder why the past flees from me
why it only lets my fingers fool themselves
into grappling with the split hairs at the end of your tail,
the tips are pink and black, and only
the worn and weary parts that were about to break
and not become you anymore.

Why is my heart constantly recalled?
My heart was poorly manufactured-
there are recall slips all over the city
about my heart, how it is dangerous
and not to be used at home.

Yellow butterflies, yellow butterflies, yellow butterflies fly around Mauricio Babilonia when he is falling in love in One Hundred Years of Solitude. I haven't updated this journal in what feels like a zillion years. Kevin passed away from a heart attack last week. I searched his name on Google and it popped up in a livejournal community about Boston. Fragments and scintillas of Kevin are still swarming in my lungs like a beehive and each time I breathe heavily one of them escapes.

Christ. . . it's been ages since I've updated this thing I'd almost forgotten the password. I have a blog now and I've kind of grown attached to that. In reality I wish I could divorce myself from the exhibitionist, voyeuristic nature of online social networking but I'm shallow and self indulged so I kan't. Blast!

I have everything to report but I'm too exhausted to get into any of it.


The tone of the main act in my life as far as work, school, friends, lovers etc. seems to change almost weekly, especially recently. It's unsettling and oddly relieving. My emotions never know where to return at the end of the day. My perseverance and indefatigable energy towards life has been prevailing more than ever. There seem to be so many options that could all vanish at the drop of a pin- I think Michelle and I are learning that. It's scary. The ephemeral truths of this life are dizzying, and make the moment more urgent than ever. What else? That's it really I think. I just don't want this thing to dissolve into the tumble-dryer abyss of the internet. Apparently I've actually been missing a lot of marvelous posts on Wooster feed. Maybe I can import this whole journal to an archive on my blog- and then abandon it all together. I truly take refuge in the fool's paradise of violent rebirth. I love to trash and delete things. Although negating the fatalism I've clung to so dearly for so long is a new philosophy I've recently adopted that has made everything much less heavy.

. . . I am tired, but I want to say something. I'm not sure what- I just want some cocky, overzealous words to spill out my mouth like flakes of fresh grated gold, that I am hording in the crickled and cracked cave of my mouth- I am a pirate or a looter of some sort, I have stuffed the last of the gems and jewels in my mouth, and they are starting to fall out.

Lately my mind is almost exclusively focused on cycles. I think back constantly to my childhood to when I was 7 or 8 years old in South Africa and dressing up and playing with our dogs Bonnie and Clyde- and even then feeling as though I lived in this tiny bubble where my eyes were constantly glazed over and trapped by infatuation with shallow delusions. . . . I have been registering changes in my mood and the needs and motions of my body as simply belonging to a particular moment that will inevitably repeat itself in the near future.

. . . I have felt, read and heard all kinds of things this week and each cast its shadow or sunbeam across my face making my eyes look like Mediterranean minerals or seedless pits. And the most useful thing I emerge with from it all I found in the fireplace of my bed caves Saturday night.

Quit acting like a wolf. . .

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. .


Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence

- Rumi

The tangle of fear-thinking. I love that. I love tangles.

Fructifying is a lovely word. It is suggests everything as curious, exotic and colorful as a prickly pear.


I find it very therapeutic to shower people with affection if I adore them and tell them to fuck themselves if they piss me off and find it very difficult to genuinely refrain from either expression if the emotion is sincere.


The job market is bleak. The economy is bleak. Gaza is in ruins. What is Obama going to do with all the convicts being held at Guantanamo if he shuts that hideous, humanless brainchild of George Bush Junior down?


Shell and I are up to the point where all we can do is laugh at how quickly we both know exactly what’s popping up on Craig’s list. We are two virtually skill-less beautiful, voluptuous young women, about to graduate and totally broke in the dead of winter- we would only be beating a dead horse if we jumped out of buildings like they did in the 30s so instead we laugh. She thinks I am paranoid, but really I am laughing now.


People love to be abused and blown off. Fact- they respond to it better than puppy chow. This is a sad, miserable truth that has rolled around on the ground in front of me and begged for a belly rub all week. I have guiltily scratched a few times but never gotten on the ground and meowed for one myself, though I’ve come close- keeping a straight spine is not the work of weaklings.


Though it cost me a day of California sunshine and beauty I secretly loved being trapped at the Philly airport under the numbing glow of phosphorescent lights watching plane after plane take off like elegant, dignified birds from the rainy tarmac- in the mean graces of my fresh cried eyes and the loud scrumple of the insulating metal blanket some airport angel in the form of a tall, overweight dark skinned man gave me in the middle of the night, robbing the bagel stand for little corners of bread sticking out of the next morning’s box- I was pleased by this surprising void in time. I am always enamored by the in between.



California was perfectly rugged, sunny, generous, mountainous and replete with shady characters and best bitches. It was everything a good vacation should be in your early 20s.


I got 3, 4, 5, 6 timed who knows how many exactly- but I know now more than ever that all I want to do is love. This is an enlightened perspective to emerge with from having been totally deceived and manipulated by an older man- thankfully the sweetness born of incessant kisses and cheesy music has driven me to that happy desire.

In the wake of unemployment I am more on top of school than ever and secretly loving it. I feel my brain unfolding and awakening like an old, rusty sleeping train first getting back on the tracks- it squeeks, it squmbles, squinters and looks half admiringly, half resignedly at all the other plump academic head cases moving around it.




That said- I am a little jaded with this form of learning. Sitting in small desks in dull classrooms, with one person up front yadda yaddaing on about a lot of things he or she has probably only learned through an endless series of papers and texts. I am ready for a new form of growth. I want to go hiking. I want to meditate. I want to take a vow of silence. I want to fast- and live off of a bowl of rice a day for 50 days. I want to have no choice but to know the broken violin tunes of every ligament sin and sliver of my visceral existence.



The only problem is I have roughly 800 dollars to my name and rent to pay in less than two weeks and have filled out so many applications since last Thursday I could probably be incarcerated for the death of an entire forest- and still I am not kissing ass at the tips of ketchup bottles and overpriced alcohol, yippeeeee.



But when I am- I will certainly get some gear, find someone who cares and scurry up the side of a mountain till my calves are crying, my lungs are meek and all the sky can do is knock me out.


Aymen, January 2009.

I haven't used this thing in a cajillion, bajillion years. I think everyone should get a blog. . . that means you. all of you. get blogsssssssss- now. read mine.

criminalcurls.blogspot.com

I hope in our next lives we can dream how we dress before we wake- and like getting up to brace the day out of your own coffin- we all get up looking like 20s chumps and gangsters with feathers and fadoras- or something flashy out of ancient egypt. then i will die happy. if i wake up as an egyptian goddess- just because i dreamt so. aymen.

I always want to save my texts with Tedd for a little book or something someday- because they are always so rich and kitsch.



C-Bear: Yo- I have mad school work ta spit between now and Friday and I have to work Friday night but let’s get crazy when I’m dooooooooooooooooooooone.

T-Bear: Wooo hoooo! Goin crazy! I’m down.

C-Bear: Haha gangsta- I knew you would be. . . More pyroworx maybe?

T-Bear: Ofcourse! We’ll do it all.

C-Bear: Hot air balloons, camel rides and recipes from the anarchist cookbook too?

T-Bear: You got it. Explosives and alcohol go hand in hand- if I may be so bold.

C-Bear: You must be- the bolder, the better. The times demand it.





T-Bear: Do pirates take bathes?

C-Bear: Ofcourse not! That flies in the face of centuries of rum mantras and dirty tradition.

T-Bear: Not even when they go home to see their moms?

C-Bear: No way- they get home stank as a fish market dumpster at 3 am and their Mas shove 'em in the tub like rabid felines.

T-Bear: You think?

C-Bear: I'm sure- everything's about the klan. Ma gets them klean then on their way back out to sea they roll around in the seaweed and sand for a while to get salty and smug again.

T-Bear: Maybe.


We're also contemplating a keen kollection of fantastik words and kriminal quotations.

Is this waitin' on fries?
Yeh- but wait- let me tell ya-
Never trust the hippies-
she wanted that natural childbirth shit
you gotta do it with style you know?
so how'd you do it?
Just like that! I did it with style-
Don't talk ta me about the burden of makin' fuckin babies
God! bearing a woman when she's pregnant-
I used to be blonde- what color am i now
greyish-brown that's right. i was a blonde man-
so we did it all
months of that hooo haaaa hoooo haaaaa shit
awwll the fuckin' time hooo haaaa hoooo haaaa
and we're all set up-
for the baby to be born
in this fuckin' hippy's home
and what happens? baby comes a month early!
he smacks the steel window like a cue.
so i throw all her shit in the car
and we drive over to the hippy's house
and I says- look- we're having the baby now
we're ready for this-
and what do they do?
the hippies tell me to take a fuckin' hike
they weren't expecting us for a month.
god damn hippies. never trust the hippies
so what do ya do? i've got a screaming woman
in the front seat- and a trunk full a
her clothes and peee wee baby shirts
and nowhere to go-
his big pink mouth hangs open
like a toucan ready to eat
over tiny tinfuls-a-baby onions
spring ravioli and molten chocolate cake.
is this tuna?- no it's mahi
fuck, she wanted tuna.
so I turn around and start headin' to the other side-a-town
wait- i gotta run this. no let me just-
hold on. i'll be right back-
ok- they're fine. so you're driving-
i'm driving- we get to the bridge
and you know what happens?--
shit. coffee. i'll be back
what happens? you wanna hear the end of the story
or what? you keep takin' off like that.
yeah- so you're on the bridge
and we run outta gas! we run outta fucking gas.
the hippies sent us hiking
and we're outta gas-
so where you goin' with this?
I never heard the end of the story
alls that ta say- i hear you, i hear you
about your biology this, sperms-eggs yadda
yadda that-
but don't tell me- he says
don't tell me reproduction don't take its toll on the male
I think the tax might be even higher-
whaddya think Paul?
Paul's 24! What does he know?
Gawd damn right Scott-
esaaa mierda hooooo haaaaa hooo haaaaa
fucking hippies.