hey look! i'm a picasso!
“Nothing could be sadder, than a glass of wine, all alone.” — Solomon Burke, Cry To Me
Beg to differ honey, but i’ll miss your music…
Solomon Burke, Cry To Me
Nov 07 2009
Open Letter To the Cockbag Who Smashed My Car Window and Stole My Purse
I ran out to get cat food and then to the Market Of Choice just to grab some Ramen Noodles and Yogi Calming Tea to have a quick, cheap snack at home with a friend in need who stopped by.
I was going to go to yoga, and do some homework for the 3 classes I am taking this semester at PSU, but your violation of my privacy and peace of mind upended my entire evening and probably my weekend after I’m through sorting out repairs and replacements.
You were probably scoping the parking lot for people like me who felt safe and believe they live in a nice enough neighborhood where they can leave their home doors open in the afternoon or run in to get a few groceries, like me: with just a cell phone and the necessary bank card to travel light and not have to lug in bags in order to take more heavy bags out. You were probably in this particular grocery store lot because it’s kind of upscale, with hard-working people who drive decent cars in a good community.
You probably think I was just some little rich bitch who could afford to have her well-maintained, red Volkswagen Rabbit broken into and not have it take any serious change out of my bank.
You were wrong, jackass. I’m a newly married, 1 year resident of Portland. I’m a college student and I keep my things nice because I pay for them and honor the work and balance it takes to maintain an orderly lifestyle that is not beyond my means. And it’s not the pride in the car – I paid extra money to buy a Tri-Met pass so I can ride the bus to school so as to NOT drive the car everywhere and it can’t be replaced – it has to be repurchased. The unfortunate thought is, some derelict dipshit like you would happily ride public transport for free on my dime, so they don’t issue me another one for free. Thanks a lot, you freeloading douchebag.
It took me nearly 9 months to find part-time work for a psychologist. I got the job on my birthday and it was a gift after I had a car crash and minor surgery all last year but came out healthy and happy and back into the work force. After you broke into my car, I was timely enough to cancel my personal credit cards and freeze all activity on my credit report before you tapped into them. But that didn’t stop you – you took the business card belonging to my kind, socially and ecologically sensitive and responsible boss. You took a card, that with my job so new, it wasn’t even in my name yet. It belonged to the woman who worked there previously and I used it mostly to buy flowers for the office. You cleaned out the checking which subsequently withdrew further into the linked savings account. You stole not only from me, but from someone who you could probably stand to see for emotional and psychological help, you morally depraved social miscreant.
Damn shame your absentee mother was an emotional suckhole when present and didn’t love you enough to teach you right from wrong and your father was a treacherous carbon-based life form, soaked in alcohol and permanently affixed to the living room chair when he wasn’t getting a ride home from the police. Everybody hurts, bitch, and your suffering is not special and the world doesn’t owe you a seat-warmer in a snowstorm. Your beginnings aren’t your only road map, you have the ability to toss the shitty hand you are dealt and to overcome – especially in this country. You have the power to decide if you’re going to turn out like Nelson Mandela or Charles Manson. Seems like the wrong people are in prison, but some people still manage to embrace life and not take it. You have too much leisure time. You need to work, contribute, make sense, make love, build and fill your life with meaningful people instead of robbing people in order to make your life easier, you lazy turd.
I know times are hard. I know jobs are scarce. I know people are hungry. I know it costs more than a quarter now to call someone who cares . . . but you stole not only my important IDs and cards, you took paper and snapshot memories of trips to Rome and to the British Virgin Islands. You took a moleskin sketchbook I have carried all over the world to write in and jot notes of things I want to read and learn about. You took a dog-eared paper copy of our wedding vows that I carry with me to remind me, to be grateful and to think back on the beautiful day my life changed and moved forward in love and companionship in this crazy world. You took fortune cookie papers from dinner nite’s out, letters from friends, reminders and receipts, my favorite lipstick and a very functional nylon, waterproof purse my husband bought for me as a gift before seeing the Blue Ridge Parkway on a beautiful Summer day in Virginia. I am glad I have my memories, my health, and my husband – the cards and IDs can be replaced, but you took some very important keepsakes, you heartless bastard. There was $5 in that Japanese paper wallet I received from a dear friend for my birthday many years ago. You should just send my bag back to the Market Of Choice, minus the one card you went shopping with. Do one thing right in your whole worthless life. Lucky for me, my old driver’s license was in my wallet so you don’t have my address. You do, however, have some handsome pictures of my husband. An intelligent, kind, respectable man who works for a living and provides a comfortable, stable life (unlike you and yours) and whom I carry in my heart and carried with me wherever I went until you took the wallet with the pictures. I want those back too, you greedy fuck.
I’d hoped you bought some diapers and groceries for your family or paid some medical bills or fixed your car or bought some presentable clothes so you can find a job. I’d really hoped you didn’t waste it on frivolous bullshit that most people buy whether or not they can afford it. But you went on a little shopping spree at Target, The Auto-Zone, Sears, EB Games, Fred Meyer and Safeway, Radio Shack, plus a few other random nonsense places ranging from $75-$400 a pop. Really? Your vacuous, emotional needs were met at a video game outlet?!?! I hope that purchase was for the child you never spend time with. No – I take that back, I hope you spend time with your child.
No – forget all that . . . I hope you haven’t reproduced at all. Shitty examples of humanity shouldn’t be replicated and populated into more window smashing, thieving-ass fools.
I am stung, but acknowledge that I must be more vigilant, that my senses were telling me not to park there; that you were probably the creep pretending to talk on his cellphone but were actually just swimming between cars like a shark looking for prey. I described you to the police and the car you parked all retarded and cock-eyed. Here I was, worried you would back out and ding me, but you were more the hit-and-run type. There’s security cameras monitoring the parking lot and though I neglected to memorize your plate, if that WAS you, the cameras and backup have it. I did manage to remember that big, dumb cranium of yours and so will they . . . in jail.
It’s all on video too, fuckhead, and a CD his being burned for the police investigator, as is the record of all the store locations by number that you essentially “robbed” in your route. Soon enough, total frauds like you are going to go down the hard way. Despite the senselessness in random acts of vandalism, theft, murder and general fuckery in the world, I still believe in the positive nature of the universe. I have witnessed that there exists a beautiful chaos and a balancing system in which the practice of goodness is paid in kind and the asshatery practitioner loses the head to put it upon. Living like you do, especially if you cross the wrong person, and you will, this all leads to inevitable consequences and death, and death is the ultimate equalizer. I trust you will arrive there well before I do, you miserable prick.
But it’s all good . . . your ignorant, selfish act has reminded me that it’s ok to lose things and that I will still survive. That it’s good to take stock and periodic (or in this case, forced) downsizing once in awhile is a necessary regulating system. I am reminded to unclutter, to simplify and to cut unhealthy, unnecessary attachments that don’t serve me. I don’t need “stuff” to be happy or to live. And that even after my mood, my day, and my organizational flow are turned on their respective heads, my husband and friends can strip all the worry away and take me to dinner to get my mind off it all and prove I can still eat and sleep well knowing I am thought of, respected, and loved. This is more than you may ever have. This is the emptiness you try to fill with “things” that never will. This lack is what drives you take what isn’t rightfully yours. This is where your skewed sense of value ruins your life. This is more than likely, your fucking problem.
No matter how many windows you break, how much you steal, how many people you wrong, how many places you go, how many times you start over, you will never get over the mountain of lies you tell or out of the rotten, bottomless place you dwell. Not until you join the civilized, sweet part of humanity. The part that doesn’t take from each other so weightily that it causes them to suffer. The part that gives, even to a fault. The part that honors the idea that we are the keepers of our brothers and sisters and we lift ourselves by lifting them up as well. The part that strips it down to the basics, and points out the blessings and is grateful for the people that try, even in thin times, to comfort and feed their loved ones when they realize that something has been taken, but all is not lost.
I know you won’t read this. I know you don’t give a shit, not really, else you wouldn’t have taken such a careless shit on my day. You wouldn’t have smashed and dashed like a common criminal. You would’ve kept walking and kept waiting and kept hoping for a change in your life or imagine it – get out of the twisted, polluted, self-absorbed cycle you’re mired in and do something the fuck about it. You, sir (I guess this by your string of purchases) don’t deserve the honorific, courtesy title of a man and are truly lost. And I hope that you are found.
By wolves.
Apr 10 2009
The Egg Moon & The Deer-Woman
The Firebird Does Not Learn
She is an egg and every shadowed glance,
every silent forest destroys her.
She is newborn and the shark-tooth grit
of the earth clings to her wet eyes.
She is in flames, the jeweled fire
that everyone remembers,
and then, what she had not foreseen,
She is burned and not consumed.
Burned. She feels her feathers
knit together. Burned. It hurts her
to heal. She is still.
She dreams of the next dawn,
a darkness, a nest of ash.
~ Kate Horowitz
::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: :::
Tonight was the full moon. The 9th of April. The Pink Moon. The Egg Moon. Even the word April sounds like rain; it spittles from the mouth with the open promise, the gathering of air for the “A” and the plosive “pr” ending with the tongue lap of “l” at the back of the teeth. Water held back, pressed behind the dam. But that rain, as the rhyme goes, the April showers hold the promise of May flowers. Considering the wild rains Portland tends to get on the regular, i would wager that despite a couple of stellar 70 degree days that visited us early in the week, there is still a good bit of watery April left and that will require some patience. Next full moon – The Milk Moon. The Flower Moon.
Luckily, the flowers are already showing their pretty faces in the garden; purple and pink hyacinth carries on the air like a honeysuckle perfume, the camellia trees in my yard bloom bright red, some mottled with white stripes, the yellow, white and violet crocus and buttery daffodils are plenty, and the tulips have unfurled their emerald green bunny ears, though the buds are still closed tight as peapods, so many meditative eyelids, dreaming something deep and colorful. A flurry of cherry tree blossoms drift into the yard; heavy Spring wind casting a false snow, a white mimicry of Winter’s last stand.
While wandering the perimeter of the house, i found a lonely patch of trillium, a trifold of green heart leaves lifting up triangular white flowers, a basket of stars, everywhere in 3s. i’ll add a photo of that soon . . .
But that’s the best part of Spring – everything coming back from Winter’s sleep, seemingly, from the dead: the flowers, the trees, the animals, the goddess Eostre, Jesus. Me.
I’ve been feeling better, i’m cooking more and enjoying all the smell and tastes and textures of food. Something happened last full moon, some strong anxietal force moved through me. Some part of me died a little, something, someone else resurrected. It was what i asked for, and lately, as i am sleeping more soundly, it is a common and powerful theme when i dream. Death, rebirth, fire, water, flying, wings, feathers, hands in the earth, digging and digging, biting and scratching my way through.
Two nights ago i dreamed i stood in a huge backyard, a large farmhouse behind me. It wasn’t quite an open field as it was fenced off. The grasses were tall in places and something straw-colored was moving through the area towards me. But all i could see were its dark eyes and furry antlers. It seemed to be part moose or reindeer and masculine – it was so large, but as it drew closer, it became softer, graceful, almost feminine despite the large antlers on its head to indicate male. It was more a Mule deer, a buck.
We both approached each other cautiously and as the deer stood still before me, it morphed into a woman. It occurred to me that i should invite her for dinner; a big party was being thrown by extended family, though it was no family i knew of and no occasion i could name. When i introduced my new friend to the men in the family, they leered a bit, patted at her long legs and lap asking why she was so quiet. I explained that she was foreign and didn’t speak the language, so the deer-woman just smiled softly at them and looked strangely at me. i grew anxious as we visited because i felt that at any moment, her glamour would break and she would morph back into the powerful, antlered creature that would bound through the room, kick over furniture and dishes and smash through the back door to escape. The thought plagued me so heavily i pleaded with my eyes to the deer-woman and indicated with my head that we should go back outside. She nodded and followed me.
Once we were outside, she became the buck again and wandered out into the forest where i followed her/him. A bright shock of sunlight stunned the deer and it turned on me, knocked me over, bleating, snorting and biting at my neck. It was part murder, part mating. The world went dark in a swirl of tree canopy, pearl grey sky and clouds of shattered eggshell.
When i woke, it was the woman again beside me, waiting for me to rise. My sense was that i was dead, but undead. Not quite vampire, but stony, pale and cold. i was able to move fast, to levitate, to fly and could bring someone with me, transferring the powerful ability to them, with them, so long as they linked hands or an arm with me.
The deer-woman had someone with her now, and i had a faceless someone with me. The four of us flew around until we came upon a memorial site. A grave with no body. A decorative brass commemorative plaque. With my name on it. But it was not my current married name. It was my maiden name: Andrea Jackman. i wiped dirt away from the plaque, collected cigarette butts and trash thoughtlessly discarded in the grass surrounding it and threw these things away. i felt sadness, but also, realized, it was not truly myself that was lost or dead, but a previous incarnation of self.
This lead me to seek out the mythology of the deer, the stag, ways to interpret the dream. Some of it i knew, but some of what i found amazed me in my own psyche’s ability to deliver the message.
It begins even in Neolithic Cave art where the depiction of people for hunting or shamanistic practice, dress in deer hide and wear antlers. In Classical times, the ‘Stag God’ was paramount to the Scythians and other peoples across the Eurasian steppes. To the Hungarians (my ethnic background) there is a great horned doe, which shone in multicolour lights and its antlers glittered from light.
There is the Spring renewal, the chase after the stag is a hunt for the return of the sun, searching for its light and heat which during Winter is taken away by the stag. The girls of the legend are the does, the daughters of light (Leukepius in Greek), who return the light and fertility of the sun. For that reason they have names which indicate “light, white, burning” Dula=Gyula,Gyul…, Sar=gold, light, stag. Bular or Bugur=stag in Turkic.
Ancient Norse mythology tells how 4 stags run in the branches of the ash and browse the foliage of the world-tree Yggdrasil, eating away the buds (hours), blossoms (days) and branches (seasons). Their names are: Dain, Dvalin, Duneyr, Durathor and are thought to represent the four winds.
In Greek mythology, it is the Keryneian stag, a fantastic beast with golden horns and brass hooves sacred to the huntress-goddess Artemis who turned herself into a white hind (female deer) to avoid being violated by two giants.
The deer is also a central religious image for Buddhism. Buddha is often pictured with a deer, and legend tells how he first preached in a deer park. The deer image itself representing innocence and a return to the wilderness.
In Celtic mythology, the deer is a magical creature, able to move between the worlds and many tales have humans transformed into deer. For example, St. Patrick was said to have transformed himself and his companions into deer in order to escape a trap laid by a pagan king. Cernunnos, the Celtic Horned God, was depicted with the antlers of a stag; he is said to be a god of fertility and plenty, and to be the Lord of the Beasts. According to some, his antlers symbolize a radiation of heavenly light. Images of stags were supposedly used to symbolise Cernunnos in non-human form. In the Welsh tale of Culhwch and Olwen, the stag is one of the oldest animals in the world, along with the blackbird, the owl, the eagle and the salmon.
In some parts of Asia, deer are considered to be conductors of soul and thus the robes of shamans are usually made out of deerskin. Likewise, many Native Americans believed deer and other animals with forked horns and antlers represented forked or double nature. When the Cherokee travelled during harsh winter weather, they rubbed their feet in warm ashes and sang a song to acquire powers for the four animals whose feet never were frost bitten – opossum, wolf, fox and deer. To the Pawnee, the deer is a guide to the light of the Sun. The Panche Indians of Colombia believe that human souls pass into the bodies of deer after death and therefore eating the flesh of deer is forbidden to them. In ancient Mexico, deer were sometimes depicted carrying the Sun (similar to the ancient Steppe myth and the Scythians).
The antlers of the stag are compared to tree-branches (the world-tree Yggdrasil) and since they are shed and re-grown every year represent fertility, rejuvenation and rebirth. Carl Jung noted that “the stag is an allegory of Christ because legend attributes to it the capacity for self-renewal … In alchemy, Mercurius is allegorized as the stag because the stag can renew itself.”
This close to Easter, my mind is swirling with birth, bunnies, blossoms, eggs, animals, the moon, the sun, Christology, oh and sure, i’ve some room for chocolate in there, too. After all, it is the sweet delectables, the luscious plenty, the little gifts, and the small rewards that make such great love and transformation possible. But was my dream telling me to lay off the Twilight series by conjuring a vampire deer? Was i truly dead? Rutting? No – i’d like to think it’s the change on the horizon, the promise of sun, a great white fire i am still chasing after in the woods. Some promise borne out of rain, softening the edges, washing away the ashes, waiting for me to rise from a bed of flowers and turn my head up to the clouds of shattered eggshell to see the robin blue sky.
Aug 10 2006
Exquisite Cognomen or "How to Name Our Pain"
i am not politically inclined to comment.
i am not so easily terrified by ‘terror.’
i avoid most news to maximize joy.
but i have some thoughts on these things,
in grand universal brush strokes . . .
::: ::: ::: :::
Exquisite Cognomen or “How to Name Our Pain”
In the world, there is forever fever:
We read the signs,
blazing in historic orange.
We straddle our majestic fates,
ride our caution horses up to the edge,
and prepare ourselves to be known,
We drop our weapons in the dust,
and unveil with the other prairie dogs — a global disrobal.
We read too much tar for no pleasure,
while we patch ourselves up with nicotine band-aids.
We let the talking heads scare us into the show,
We become cancerous clowns in the tumor circus.
We cannot duck and cover in the Alcoholocaust.
We cannot stay dry in the headswim of worry
and forward motion.
Compartmentalization leads to:
rubix cubicles,
paralyzed prizes,
spastic plastic,
and Tupperware death,
All the ever meanwhile,
Howling sweet exultations
and consuming quietly our consummations
so that we may die pure
and be saved by our cleverly patented,
widely acknowledged,
billions served,
guaranteed
one-hundred thousand mile drive chain
Luxury Christ.
When we hunker down
And cast our last breath under the elective curtain,
when they unearth our sterile bones,
will they say they truly understood what fine
encyclopedic creatures we were ?
Will we leave bones?
Bones for wolves to make soup,
for women to make breastplates,
and for men to make cages to keep their wolves
and women warriors in.
They may see the hinted drop stitchwork,
the soft, green loop to crochet the new world from,
but will they want such a pattern to follow?
We who all succumbed to communal self-butchery and burnings.
With the burden of our knowledge,
clinging to our near-death faces
though we wake in the night,
suffering insomniacs,
bloated and blue,
— information gorge syndrome —
well coax the current thickening lump and swallow,
and fall back against another chainlink, razorwire
skinless sleep.
Well, for now, caustic dreamers
of blameless, paranoid, age-defying landscapes,
let us multi-task our spiritual trash,
complicate the workable and fertile into fiscal orgasms,
and reduce our grand and beautiful ideas to slogans and acronyms
that suggest other equally unplugged words.
Let us muck around in newfound dark,
continue our acid intercourse,
bring our weary and our winded before our glittering
revolutionary hearth.
But we ask that you ask your loved ones to cover their nettles,
so we cannot trace the frightening highway back to the ocean,
or the forest,
or the desert,
so we do not name the extraneous scar across the trellis of a thousand nations,
so we will not offend our impressionable guests
at dinner date death,
so we cannot recognize our very same,
unrefined pain.
How do we not weep when we know our name is like a dirge,
strangled from threadbare angels.
The earth groans under our weight,
impregnated again and again with a stifling humanity,
eggs rolling off the edge of the earthen table
set by Columbus —
tiny, hopeful, rudiment vessels,
unpacking the cargo of the daunting future
while crushing the orange partitions of the past.
~ Andrea E. Janda
Oct 04 2004
Kaete Girl Dog
my dog – well . . .
our dog, the family dog died.
Kaete (kay-ta) died and was buried
on our property.
We spent last nite with her, petting her,
holding her head, she looked at us and
we talked about her as if she were
already gone – a eulogy in progress.
we told her stories of all the reasons
and ways and times we loved and
appreciated her.
it was a beautiful nite on our deck, she
sat on a blanket and we covered her in
another, so she would be warm, as she
could not move.
but she heard us, and knew us, and watched us
and loved us as we loved her – chasing our cars
and putting the cat’s head in her mouth to lick
and moaning as if to speak and all those you forget
when someone, or some creature is no longer there
to fill the quiet space . . . .
i love you girl dog.
Mar 07 2004
rutting in the Spring
rut 1
n.
1. A sunken track or groove made by the passage of vehicles.
2. A fixed, usually boring routine.
tr.v. rut·ted, rut·ting, ruts
To furrow.
rut 2
n.
1. An annually recurring condition or period of sexual excitement and reproductive activity in male deer.
2. A condition or period of mammalian sexual activity, such as estrus.
intr.v. rut·ted, rut·ting, ruts
To be in rut.
+-+-+-+-+-+
don’t you find it interesting
how a cold winter
where escape tracks
are left in the snow
and the boring routine
of being trapped inside
can lead to the fervent Spring
where animals crave
to be tangled together,
mating in new
and interesting
shapes.
here is the same word
with an entirely
opposite meaning
and indeed . . .
the exhaustion
and death of one
does always lead
to the blossoming
of another.
Oct 18 2003
soon, i promise . . .
my dear deviants
of sweet repore . . .
forgive me for
my tardy thank yous
i have read you all
and have been trying to
keep it light.
this week has been awful 
we lost a four-year old
member of my family
under suspicious circumstances.
i dislike my journals
to bleed personal
difficult information
but there is something
so very very wrong
about a tiny coffin.
i believe in life
of all things
especially
the small
and defenseless.
Aug 03 2003
falling stars
my grandmother died.
i am in Detroit trying to soothe my mother
and i am charged with the writing
and delivering of the eulogy.
they wanted me to sing,
but i’m not certain i would perform anything
other than shudders and the choking back of tears.
best that i speak of light things
and celebrate her life.
if any of you have any advice
or well-wishing or thoughts on eulogies
and funerals, please share them with me.
my grandmother was Protestant,
but never really attended church
she believed in a higher power – god per se
but did not want to be buried with a rosary
or delivered into a church before burial,
so i will be speaking of her at a funeral home.
we bury her on Wednesday.
she was 81.
when people lose someone older in their family
sometimes, the thoughts and emotions are disconnected
— they forget that the person was ever young.
my grandmother was a tough woman, sometimes cruel
but it was also in her home i spent the first 9 months of my life
she saw me even before my own father who was at sea
and in her hallway was a long mirror i always loved
and would push myself against to stand.
i left fingerprints there as an infant
and when my mother and i left to our first home
my grandmother refused to wash those prints off the mirror
for nearly a year.
Irene Paull is her name, and she was a good woman
strong with a deep capacity for memory and tenderness.
