people work better when driven (insane) -iv)

No, don’t be scared. Just pay attention, brush your hair out your eyes. Sit up straight. This is the haircut we have been waiting to get you, I mean, the cut you wanted. Listen to your heartbeat for a minute… see? Just talkin’ about it turns us on. Everything changes. You are not who you thought you were. You have been touched! You can’t tell? That’s just because you’re still waking up. Come on, we can urge it on, ourselves! Purchase that fresh electroshock device on tv. DIY brain fry.  Sanctioned by many, legal in a half dozen states, yours included! Just send that self-addressed, self-licked envelope to the Pharmaceutical Brain, Newark, New Jersey. If you postmarked it yesterday, we will send you a bunch more. Paid On Delivery. That’s if the FDA doesn’t intercept it, on its way from our factory on Better Buy Island, never heard of it? A landfill we filled off the west coast of Mexico. Not anywhere near the other one, Narco Domingo.

Wait, if your’e a superuser you can skip all that nonsense! Download the mobile app on your rooted phone. Make sure you pay some dude on craigslist a couple of bucks to root it. Or your favorite tech-savvy son or daughter, of a friend of a friend. Or anyone on a subway under 40 can do it. Probably before you reach your stop. Go ahead! You can super-use someone. It’s not against the law! They might even decide not to bitchslap you with their skateboard. Kids these days. So likable. So unlovable. Figures. Their mentors were people like me, genXers. We taught them well. Everything they haven’t learned from that show I(Almost) got away with it. Props to the discovery channel and subterranean skies. Thanks to the exorbitant cost society pays, to distribute unprofitable PR department lies.

Anyway, about that haircut, the perm. The DIY brain fry, I mean. You just have to agree to the terms. You don’t have to read them, silly. Touch your touchscreen. Swype the bitch. Come on, now, let what’s left of your imagination run wild. Anything goes! Twinkies and Michael Jordan just came out of retirement. Well, Twinkies did. MJ must be next. They didn’t go nowhere. Just waited for folks to miss them enough. Peek-a-boo! We missed you. Okay okay! Yes, I will do it, stop begging. I shouldn’t have told you my age, I suppose. Just be aware, I have boundaries these days. Don’t think I will troubleshoot right out of my clothes.  Story of my life. But I have started a new chapter. Okay, now listen, take your android and bump mine, just do what I say. Otherwise this download’s gonna take you all day. Hey, step back! I don’t need to smell your breath. Just the phones will touch, that’s as close as we’ll get… and Boom! FEEL IT?!? the shock? Works off the same principle as static electricity, I suppose. I’m not a scientist, exactly, not at all. I met a few of them, though, in Evanston sub-basement tech halls.

katya (blue#8)

So now you got you’re app on this icon on your homescreen. 4 whenever you cannot see straight. Hair in your eyes, resentments and lies. Commuting home, next to thighs, legs and thighs. Google it, if you want, there’s no user manual. All i know is this beats your average triple shot machiatto. Here take this gravity brush. Your hair is standing up. Won’t do for the interview. And welcome, sweetie, welcome to the clear full of light. You heard me. I can be trusted. Pro Bono. All right? The clear full of light. Three i-sheets to the wind? Just touch your pretty icon, and then think of me, or someone sweet. Your i-sheets will be reconciled. Virtually, in a moment. Better than a half-litre dry gin, to dissipate a heavy London fog.

I know it seems like some kind of fancy new perversion of reality. But reality and virtual, makes some sweet virtuality. To be driven. To tears. Motivated. No fears. Insane, but not crazy. What we would pay for such a fresh way of being? And yet, I hasten to say – we give it all away!  The only thing to do. The only way to be. No impediment. Not anymore. Not like you. Not like me. About time we insourced our own change wrecking crew. Refashioned our images. Pulled out the memory foam and replace it with goose down. Airbrushed our waterlogged decaying fuckin’ attitudes, man. Photoshopped for body parts, hearts, minds, and soul. Took the noise out. No more or less deviation than extreme. Left the ranks of the thundrous wonderbread, of regimented, swing shift disciples. For the graveyard shift.

A federated gang of the driven insane! The formerly motivated, headhunted, cubicled, well paid soldiers of fortune. The Dr Whos-Who of timestamp travel efficiency. Clocking in and out the central artery. Before and after a series of bypass surgeries. Endless summer construction. Parking our asses irreverently, in the very middle of the street. Former pretenders, talking heads, Wall Street cutouts and stitched material. Whatever. Today we don’t think first. We take our shots through farmers market produce. Filtered water, front and back. No hangover necessary. Please and thank you very much. Long the long stretch of endless paper pushing. Short the short life of rigorous dreaming.

Katya Mills 07/13  katyamills.com

January ’13 (reminiscent ’12) -ii)

The holidays.
The fucking holidays. 

They stole my heart. Beat me down. They disappeared my cat Drama.I cried like a baby. I slept like i never slept before. Like sleep was going out of fashion. I waited in line to pay for my character defects. Stopped taking my meds. Stopped writing. My computerswallowed a system driver I had fed it accidentally, back in early December, and it took me three weeks of troubleshooting to figure it out. Meanwhile,my eyes shot blood.

 I was drinking tea. Well, I was supposed to be drinking tea. I had bought this dope electric kettle at Target. She was a beauty. All chrome chassis. I tried to show her off, but I guess I was the only one impressed. She was a miracle machine! She told you what temperature she would cook the water. She gave me choices. I liked having choices. I could turn her . I could turn her down from 212 degrees to 190, 180, and so on.

I would have been drinking tea if I could do anything at all. I thought about drinking tea with my ex of the year previous. Maybe to make amends. Maybe to heal. Last year was bad. Real bad. We were facing the holidays together, hoping to support one another through it all. The plan backfired, however. We turned on eachother. We were stressed. The earth quaked below us. Grand mal seizure style. We did not play nice, once the game got to a certain point. Like that point in Monopoly when someones getting raped by hotels and all they do is roll the dice and pray they will hit income tax or any other inbetween spot on the board…cause they haven’t  a chance...

life fully hydrated -vii/fin)

The curtain closes and lights go down. Everyone and desperation herself comes along and bulldozes through everything, just to get in touch. Human resource department? So and so demands we run that by such and such. Now and then but no later than now. And no sooner than then. Translated? do not put it off. Rather than be something distasteful, choose to be nothing at all. Nothing. Nada. Substance? Dissipates like the audience down the aisle… like confetti, down, tumbling down from the sky.

Okay, well, i keep tryin real hard to turn this moment, this day, this memory falling like heavy sitting room drapes over me; my thin and fragile half-broken quarter-bleached thin volume of a history of my life as dramatically raced through the last seven or eight years i suppose, the length, so very recent some days or weeks in my memory, and much of the rest falls out into moodswings of greater density and greater into an anonymous telltale of a nervous lovin heart (52 bpm on the average this week). And how would i possibly be truthfully reporting dedicated personal vitals to you? Who do i feel like today? Well, this is personal but I will tell you, no bullshit… an unemployed, overeducated, working-class downgrade. From automaton to human being. The best fuckin dowgrade you ever fuckin seen.

As for the rest of them? The contradictions were stoppages of their so called progress with questions filling up all that cold air in their heads, teeth showing with rembrandt smiles. Twenty thirteen, and the whole operation suddenly seemed on edge of the ice ready to fall into the pond. Back to serene. No longer obtuse. No longer obscene.

For you and me, me and you? Like waking out from under the worst of worst dreams. Like that time back in ’98, you know, up in Chicago. Where latin kings played with queens behind victory gardens on Pulaski. There we were. Homeless in the mind. Looking for the same old shit. Fragments of water, dripping off the lake street el trax. When what was underground rose to the surface, and into thin cold air. So easily. Icicle clear.  Meeting your conscious understanding, even at any odd angle. Life fully hydrated. Frozen into stalagtite-hard times.

This was life on her terms.