engulfed

writing in this may be one of those terrible mistakes i make over & over again like stroking a beloved pet that happens to be on fire, but it costs nothing to feed unlike my other mistakes & hell i can't turn down that kind of bargain [& it's been so long i've probably been written off as another Casualty of Societal Ills, those murky unnamed semiotic thugs lugging baseball bats with facile labels like "drugs" & "violence," trotted out dutifully whenever something bad happens to wiggle their fingers & terrify infants]. must step lightly else end up knee deep in tar-pits, those dinosaurs so embarrassed having been caught & forever immortalized in the "wrong" neighborhoods - i swear i was just passing through, couldn't possibly have any business here, t-rex on the corner peddling dino-smack to sweaty stegos & that brachio-fuck with the long neck, he's a crack fiend just look at him picking crumbs up out of the primordial ooze.

so here's what happened, the abridged version: little blue riding hood sets off down the merrily noble path of grad school, is going to be a Successful Journalist or at least uh Overcome Past Obstacles, slips through one semester by sleight of hand, but inevitably the good times are hacked off like a gangrenous limb: how many other joyfully oblivious little microbes can bounce through their days, minding their precious business, even managing to get to class once in a while, when all of a sudden OH SHIT WHY ARE THE COPS KICKING DOWN MY DOOR - one cop & nine EMTs sent by the concerned souls at New York University to remove my apartment's door from its hinges because i "looked sick" according to some fleck of dogshit without so much as a medical degree to qualify such esteemed judgments. chased into the down-elevator with blood pressure machines & doors slide shut practically on their grasping fingers but this escape is not to last, a peaceful afternoon at home becomes microbe's nite out at the lovely, posh Emergency Psychiatric ward in a bushwick hospital renowned more for its bedbugs than its quality of care where i'm sent home the next morning because "uh, we don't know why you're here, there's nothing wrong with you." nothing wrong with me except a frothing horde of concerned citizens that is. time to put another coat of good intentions down on that road to hell, it was starting to CRACK UP.



so my academic endeavor once more ends in total abject failure, that costly trip to the funnyfarm forcing me to miss just enough classes to - oops! - fail by default/leave in disgrace, but check out that silver lining - i have a "job" writing so i can adequately pantomime that i haven't atrophied completely, & if i repeat it enough times i can convince myself it resembles my journalistic intentions, but really i'm just documenting the mysterious inner workings of the Investment Banking Industry with an enthusiasm of the sort found only on buy-one-get-one-free-day at the local crackhouse, i mean these suit-tie hybrids are getting biographied like never before & i no longer have to commute to grand central to retrieve my pay from the mouths of lions. now the lions come to me to be driven away by INSUFFICIENT FUNDS notices.



to fill various yawning voids am applying for what will hopefully be 2nd, 3rd, & 4th jobs because at this point trying to recover a social life is one of those unlucky jokes where all the muscles involved in laughter suddenly go medusa on your ass & turn to stone leaving you an inconvenient garden ornament. hey if i can be universally loathed for shit i didn't do at least i can have money about it. it's nice to know people care so much about my well being they will take it upon themselves to spread hideous rumors - not only of the hideous things i HAVE done, of which there are plenty, but of hideous things i HAVEN'T - thus making the world look at its watch & decide well maybe we don't have time to get a drink tonite, i have to get to work early tomorrow, it's the moon's first day of preschool i have to drop it off in Mars' orbit for daycare, no hard feelings hm? fuck you i'll put another hole in your ozone layer so big you'll need skin grafts. if i sound bitter it's probably because i am, but i've been a little out of touch with my feelings ever since they filed that restraining order against me - you know how it is

no matter how sassily you confront reality, all hands-on-hips sideways strut & menacing flip of hair 'this is a dream' - "o really, well, what gave you that idea" 'I'VE HAD IT BEFORE' "you've had apples before, no? and yet you refrain from questioning their existence, filthy drooling hypocrite that you are!" and QED, hand falls off hip like dead fish, hair falls out head for embarrassment of conspiracy-to-flip's painful failure & collects in a spaghetti-entree heap on the parquet, well what did you expect, confronting reality like that? no one knows their place any more, no one at all

my facebook account has been hacked & it is likely i won't be able to retrieve it - no matter how many times i reset my password, the site claims my email address does not exist or is already involved in creating a new password, which speaks to an ugly web of tangled relationships i thought outside the realms of purely digital capability, but hey whatever clueless scumbag would hack MY account - instead of, you know, one belonging to some successful, well-loved individual with her whole future ahead of her or some shit - is obviously capable of no end of utter bestial stupidity. so hey! look for another account with my name on it in a few days when i give up on trying to regain control of this one.
[the site even sends me email updates so i can keep track of all the things i'm not doing. even though, you know, my email account isn't affiliated with any usernames or anything, uh, at all. clever little robots]
[to those who still read livejournal & were expecting a grand epiphany, hey maybe i'll start writing in this again - o wait the site's deserted]

as if i'd stop breathing THAT easily.

but first a eulogy for 2009, year of the living dead. to save space, it was not the best/worst of times, but the BURST of times. we saw tall buildings leapt in single bounds, entire oceans crossed without the intervention of our porcine "boys" in blue, foreign & altered states, the world's most expensive piece of paper letting me know that the last four years have produced Something To Show For Myself that's more than the people of the state of new york vs helen misspelled-last-name [only the smrtist wurk in teh cuaort syxstim]. my net worth is full of butterflies & the occasional propeller-chopped manatee, my brain has met the wrong end of a cookbook several times over, & i'm so full of holes i could be a blockbuster movie plot but you know what they say THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME IS WHERE THE HEART says fuck it i quit & you pass out on your way to work

you have it all backwards, the clouds are in your head & the ground is on your feet, at some point something went horribly wrong. harmless entertainment grew teeth & an agenda & we're not sure which is worse. i admitted defeat but nothing got easier & fiction beat truth to a bloody pulp & took its place. case in point: exhibit a, b, c, etc. alphabet soup laced with predictions of the apocalypse, now with 50% less substance. the decrease of substance being inevitable in the style of death & taxes & by taxes i mean those burnt-out-looking guys in the foam statue of liberty crowns trying to sell tax prep services on greenpoint ave, i'll never make enough money to have to pay the fuckers that's for sure [look ma it's a silver lining! no junior that's just the sun glinting off the windshield of the car that's about to hit us. time to EMBRACE FATE!!!!!]

finding out in 2/3 months if i am accepted into grad school because doing things you swore never to do is the new black/grey/beige & therefore totally fucking inevitable. Hey It Beats Working!^TM & like pardon my eclipse but where did my writing go, exactly, every time i slip something in its drink in order to drag it back home it escapes & i'm all hearty vegetable commute on the 4 train to & from corporate finishing school, here is where you learn to sit in a meeting & not nod off & fall out of your chair, here is where you are taught to make small talk not messes, here is where you constantly fight the urge to off yourself ian curtis style with the cord to your computer mouse. but HERE will soon become THERE, as blissful unemployment looms on the horizon, never thought i'd be shunning the almighty paycheck but let's face it minimum wage is not worth the sensation of stuffing my brain down a garbage disposal from 9 to 5. foot in the door while the door slams repeatedly. you only live once & most people don't even pull that off & if i don't stop wasting my time it will waste me instead. i can hardly wait.

"but i wanna be a person!" comes a wail from the street. that's right, child--aim high; the evolutionary ladder isn't for the weak. hell, just last night someone was strolling this very same stretch of broadway wailing a tonedeaf rendition of Tainted Love alternating with a heartfelt ode to pussy. reach for the stars & you may come away with a few restraining orders, but it's nothing time won't heal like a big ticking band-aid. or is that a bomb? the only way to find out is to push the red button, & there's no time like the present to destroy the future!

the closest thing to accountability i'll ever touch: no more tomorrows until the functionality gap is closed. please don't ask for an explanation, you will not receive one. from the minds of the spiritually flaccid: though i walk through the valley of death i'm probably too fucked up to notice, & when the days of butchered biblical verse are upon us you know something's gone horribly horribly rotten in this tail-chasing literary swamp, where every burst bubble brings you closer to the last page. no peeking goddamnit. lend me your grappling hooks, i'm out of here, this "routine" is turning me into an unholy furniture-vegetable hybrid capable of little more than blinking & snarling. & not much of a snarl either, more demented housecat than enraged tyrannosaur. the land of opportunity shed its skin & left me to vacuum up the flakes. i turned in my two weeks notice before time dawned does that count? & for once i'd like it in time rather than money because we've seen what i can do with money & it isn't pretty. so--temporal alms for the porous, five minutes ago.

& then at some point you realize you are sitting in an apartment full of burnt out light bulbs worrying about who will save gary gilmore's eyes. with Ryder Pales deader than the new years' resolutions of a thousand obese suburban housewives & Mickey Western's second album floating in limbo somewhere between bad production & apathy in Miami i'm hardly even playing music "these days" except alone, instead interviewing musicians younger than me about their relative Successes & well this wouldn't be a problem except i can't write songs & try attracting potential band-forming entities when you have no material as bait. might as well stare at a wall & start asking it idle disney-villain questions concerning fairness, injecting apples with poisonous substances, hell why stop at apples. not my fault all my seemingly-cohesive bands evaporated [a small comfort when EVERYTHING ELSE wrong with this picture is, indeed, my fault] but 3am theremin alien-summoning isn't going to get me back to glastonbury.

"i never write anymore." oh go stab yourself in the prefrontal cortex helen. seriously i bet you'd be REALLY GOOD AT IT.

LET IT BE KNOWN THAT just because i'm not all up in your shit bringing the sweetness & light 24/7 doesn't mean i'm on a dream-date with death. but if it were suddenly reported that i died, what would be the immediate suspicion of All Whom It May Concern?
a) murder/intrigue [incl. suspicious "accidents" reeking of Foul Play, etc]
b) OD ["we never should have gotten her that Tickle Me Overdose doll, ted!!!"]
c) someone let that bitch get behind the wheel of a car again
d) self-immolation as "art project"
e) boring old REAL accident of some kind
f) doesn't actually die / spends rest of life riding the subway swatting imaginary bats off herself [we all make fun of hypothetical bat-lady because a lot of us fear becoming her some day, & i blinked an L train car full of bustling vaguely menacing prohibition-era travelers into & out of existence one night last week when the real passenger count of the train car was around 5, not 200, & it's only one small step for mankind from there to imaginary bats. who are all these people & what are they doing inside my eyelids]
*disclaimer: killing people is wrong!!!!!



reality + i are still at war but i'm going to win this based on the fact that reality doesn't know it's a competition. & won't until it's TOO LATE. go on & call ignorance bliss until all the oxygen abandons your lungs in disgust, but for example wouldn't you rather know about that guy behind you with the machete? & while you're looking over there...EXCUSE ME MISS WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THAT HAYSTACK sorry, thought i dropped something...

i have finally found a job; being off tour & unoccupied was going to kill me, & still may if i can find the time to be killed. applying to grad school because my brain is rotting in my skull & i am incapable of rescuing the poor beleaguered thing, instead sleeping with the proverbial enemy, busily lining up the neurons for the firing squad & handing out last cigarettes like that one cheerleader who periodically nods off & catches her hair on fire. so: an attempt to plug the ever-expanding burning hole in my pocket/head/alibi by "keeping busy." stalking another train, playing detective through elaborate daydreams. have a fountain of rocket fuel now available in new legal flavor thanks to the unlikely wonders of wondrous unlikely things, & JUST IN TIME because i need to accomplish everything five minutes ago. or else. when there are at least three tasks at hand at all times & unmultitasked hands are the devil's playground & who let that BEAST loose in the pharmacy can someone call security--oh wait--we are security, & we are 100% fucked

ladies & gentlemen please be patient we are building the rocket ship that will get us out of this hole. we expect to be finished on approximately 17 september 2012. watch this space, cuz it's watching you & a watched plot never spoils. we are methodically replacing the butterflies in your stomach with pterodactyls, & it's going to get seriously meteoric in here. b.y.o.bathos or sidle up to the bar & ask for a gin & catatonic courtesy of the host body, it's going to be a loooooong night.



[& for those curious, CLICK+OBSERVE, this is your bonnaroo on _____]

good advice from bad people: don't go crazy unless you're sure you know the way back. cross my mind & hope to die. someone stuck a needle in my eye but i swear it wasn't mine, officer

semiconscious in a series of rooms is no way to spend the future, & the slippery-slope argument is possibly the last i'll ever have with myself--heartfelt philosophical extremes beating each other within inches of their lives for weeks, then i start swearing Never Again, then "again" happens, regular as clockwork & probably more so given my propensity for melting clocks & breaking watches. i know it's all in my head, but so am i. the snake choked on its tail a long time ago & we have yet to dispose of the body. please select a gravesite after the beep.

i made my decision quite some time ago, lit up in helpful neon against a cosmetically-darkened night sky for your viewing pleasure & if you missed the public announcement i still wear it on my sleeve 24/7, not even necessarily of my own volition! your unwillingness to SEE the writing on/off the wall is more of an affectation than anything in the sold-out braille arena, but everyone wears sunglasses these days so slipping under the radar is as easy as 123blastoff. groundcontrol is on an eternal lunch break, though it never seems to eat lunch, hope you know how to pilot that thing. spending too much time by myself is guaranteed to skew a few perspectives, not all of them mine, & without practice i'm absent the requisite pack of lies to deny everything. blame it on the weather, blame subway delays, blame the economy. a whole 52-card deck of blame. i'll need every single one by the time this is over. there is a science to Giving Up, & also an art. "guess which one gets laid more often." van gogh's ear was quickly repackaged & sold as a sex toy--EARotica. you know you want some.

then every time i interview for a job the whole meeting falls flat on its face by which time i'm already mentally half out the door to avoid the semisweet sorrows of parting. it's all fun & games til your own adventure chooses you, especially out of a police lineup. i mean they said make something of myself, A Mess seemed only natural! it's my CALLING. nothing new here: distancing myself from reality by cloaking it in stilted terms associated more with hideous outofcontrol science projects than human emotion, because, as a star delusion-architect i feel it's my duty to accomplish this with as many unnecessary flourishes as i can get away with. & then some. because, the more the merrier. cultivating disasters for company. someone snap me out of this please.



[not to mention, again: "oh you've lost weight!" sorry that was just my mind it ran out to play in traffic & never came back i think it got abducted by FAILiens can i interest you in some of this nice supple cult literature really it doesn't bite i promise ok no come back some other time with, like, money. no i don't want to talk about it, no i don't want to talk, can't you just talk to yourself like everyone else]

THOU SHALT NOT BOTHER

[then it's old habits: "why die hard when you can live forever?"]

tunnel vision effectively dynamited by a month of touring, a dutifully shattering earth, & an unrelated black eye. yes, again. but eyes aside, there was the much-needed reminder that i belong on stage with these bands rather than floating half-buried in muted heaps of plush nowhere, especially accompanied by the colossal mindfuck that was glastonbury [fire-breathing vehicles with functional claws! attempting to sell bibles autographed by jesus &/or satan while dressed as jim jones in order to publicize our show!] or even the hippie-saturated fields of bonnaroo where we "artists" were treated royally & drowned in free vodka hello: Fuck All This Shit, I Wanna Be A Rockstar. again. even the microscopic venue we played for one of our london shows where it was almost impossible to play without hitting an audience member. onstage-bliss cancels out all the inconvenience of 12-hour flights, layovers in toronto full of angry airport bartenders, cheap tents in fields that let the rain in--hey look what i get to do. & whatever mess of my life i make back here i can say: i didn't LOSE my shit, i MISPLACED my shit.

whole notebooks full of Observations from the festival just itching to be transcribed. keep itching you fuckers. hell is slowly but surely freezing over. give me a few more existential crises & you might notice the NYPD car flapping its wings just outside the window--it's not just your eyes playing tricks on you. silly eyes, tricks are for prostitutes. but: committing acts of Real Live Journalism is not implausible. need to set a deadline but i fear deadlines, have nightmares about them rising up out of the realm of metaphor to wrap themselves around my throat & strangle me. actually my nightmares have far less substance but uh. similarly discouraging of sleep. but my new SECRET WEAPON ensures i don't have to.

& now that i've been back home for a week or two am settled back into my seat under the microscope with the glassy-eyed hypnotic edge-of-seat audience leaning out with drool pearling on their lower lips waiting for me to fuck up. hey news flash: i fuck up EVERY DAY. the cat no longer wants to come out of the bag, did i get stuck with a defective cat? AM i a defective cat? & who's to determine which side is IN the bag & which is OUT? i am alive & you are dead. [the existential equivalent of fingers-in-ears LA LA LA I CAN'T HEEEEAAAAR YOU]

was walking down 11th ave & a woman with cameradude in tow runs up to me earnestly asking What Is Your Weight Loss Secret? Is America Fat? & i had to exercise all the restraint in the universe when responding. the universe is no longer in restraints. so it punched me in the face & that as you can see is why i have this beautiful black eye. the end. & they all lived happily ever after, if you call that living.

if i can get all my publicity shots taken with a .22 rifle we’ll have nothing to worry about ever again i promise . . .

spitting in the future's eye is not recommended. when things get too transparent someone pours ink in the tank & we all put on our wool glasses, it's third rate second nature what do you expect. there is a lot of catching up to do. i graduated [!] & am going on tour [!] with two different bands in two months [!!] & hereby disown the recent past with a flourish worthy of a bank-vault full of sequins, i'm simply relieved to be getting the technicolored fuck out of here. the last few months have been somewhat like prolonged immersion in a tank of cement. "but seriously i can get out of this any time i want!" HA again. i hate to say i told me so but that's what other people are for, right. IF YOU PLAY WITH FIRE YOU ARE LIKELY TO DEVELOP A FIERCE & INSATIABLE APPETITE FOR NAPALM. or maybe i was born with it

& i wish i could say i REMEMBER graduating but there's a little hole in my memory there which is only too perfect considering what the four years leading up to it were like. there are great beaming photos of me looking like cat-choking-on-canary in my silly square hat but hey! they weren't taken close up enough to see the OUT OF ORDER sign behind the eyes! score one for selective unconsciousness, score two for THE AMERICAN WAY. & for my next trick, i shall disappear completely, off the face of the earth, for an extended period of time--stop me if you've heard this one before...

it won’t be pretty, & neither will the aftermath. quit while you can, pet the jelloid kitten sitting in your skull where your brain used to be, remember you did this to yourself. bed is made, commence telling the truth in it, or b) wake the fuck up & smell the towering inferno. just because a horse can be led to water does not mean it is not a plot if i am asked to follow it. ie: what the fuck do I have to gain out of this being-led-to-water, i have a full bottle in my purse, are you going to try to drown me while the public is distracted by the bucolic scene of this stately stallion sipping at the stream? is the pope blue in the face? who would jesus do? why haven’t my vitamins been turned into amphetamines yet? all these goddamn questions are making my eyes climb out of my face like it's a burning building which well,



the point: here tomorrow, there in a few weeks, & anything in front of that may as well be an oncoming train, sometimes it's not worth taking your sunglasses off

oh yeah &: Ask Me About My 90 Page Thesis, hahaha

THE FUTURE'S SO BRIGHT IT EXPLODED! details after the jump, from seven stories up with love

rewrote the textbook definition of Living Dead in hope of sealing myself out of the deal, sort of like 'prying' open the jaws of death with a mean right hook but violence is the tried & true method for a reason, kids, it's hard to tell a lie with half your teeth knocked out & even harder to believe it. THESE THINGS THEY GET BETTER. in a few months i get my much-needed vacation my fleeting chance at stardom & my ticket out of here all at once. better not fuck it up, right? CUE LAUGH TRACK. only thing keeping me from excitement-induced combustion is the little matter of may, the merry merry month thereof, you know i hang disasters over my head like fucking christmas ornaments nothing like a little "adversity" to put the spring in your step & the winter in your discontent. but like won't it be funny when i graduate college. i thought so.

& reintroducing miss underbelly 2009 & while the vowels all falling off my keyboard testify to the fact that i am indeed writing see it's going somewhere, it's For A Cause, it's for effect & the lights haven't even come up yet & we're still fishing our stuntmen out of the east river. i mean. just can't wait for this all to be over, i'll wake up one day with Accomplishments & away goes trouble down the [hatch] drain. trouble travels by vein anyway or so i've heard. falling out of my chair in the middle of the night to make gravity jealous. turning green like it stumbled into the ATMosphere & got asked to play a bit part.


i propose a toast to going places i shouldn't, & for a semi-annual denial of being dead, incarcerated, in rehab, comatose, etc--methinks the lady doth protest too little. in this twilight-zone-stuffed minesweeper universe where curiosity regularly goes on killing sprees even in the absence of my daily-renewed bouquet of freshly-plucked deathwishes i can only respond by becoming fatally mellow. & my component molecules turn away from each other arms folded like they aren't gonna speak til someone gives in. meanwhile i hear the roar of a big machine, & see the future getting fat off the present. would you rather pass go or collect $200.

"you look...dusty." happy as a filled-in blank i tell you. statistically delicious. you can have my walls when you pry them from my cold dead peripheral vision. & there's me switched into grinning-idiot mode for an incongruously rosy future. lead us not into temptation? you're WALLOWING IN IT. permanent midnight in the garden of good & two-shoes.


[the illustrious & fabulously costumed mickey western band]

this picture was taken the night i dragged my unblinking self from station to station up & down impossible stairs white-knuckled gripping the rails having left my eyelids somewhere on gates avenue. putting on my makeup in the mirror watching my pupils migrate to opposite sides of my eyes, disinterestedly. but you can't tell. DEATH'S DOORBELL: RING & RUN. this was also one of the best shows i've ever done, by all accounts? better living through chemistry, right, hazardous materials with hidden agendas. walk like a public service announcement talk like a menace to society. stand up fall down repeat as necessary before you finally learn your lesson. these things don't happen too frequently & we could be here all night. in fact we have been. what's your excuse. getting more full of holes than my plotlines. mayday mayday

preternaturally relaxing weekend later aboard schroedinger's bus to the frozen north, fireplace basking & all was however temporarily right with the world. fast-forward button is back on but it's ok i'm becoming one with the evidence. you can pay in cash, credit, or attention. you are the sum of the sleep you lose. THERE IS NOT / THERE WILL NEVER BE anyone on the other end. ground control called, they said they quit. in a voice strangely like my own. funny how that works funny how i don't, life lived as an out-of-body experience is imminent because one of these days the way back in will have occluded entirely "while i was out." this isn't just a parade of deadlines it's a veritable beauty pageant of the fuckers, watch them twirl, bat deadline-eyelashes, & perform while your own life inexorably climbs the scaffold. my, what big problems you have! the better to bore you with, my dear. i make sheep's clothing look damn good.