dis.cords

moving towards 

on phones with cords we 

wanna be okay but we 

not

mobile hotspots 

hooked up with all the bars

then out of touch 

again. traveling up the stitchwork 

of our scars

umbilical we anticipate 

gettin cut

#katyamills

story

Maze 2:14:1 Storytelling

Book Two

Daughter of Darkness Series

Chapter 14:1

In the last episode 2:13:4 Ame and Bless are lying on top of one another, lifeless after a fight. Ame is underneath and goes to get up, when her friend suddenly takes the friendship to another level.

story

Maze 2:13:3 Storytelling

Book Two

Daughter of Darkness Series

Chapter 13:3

In the last episode 2:13:2  Kell is nowhere to be found. Ame is trying to help Freddy get some tools and Bless is standing around smokin menthols and playing her entitlement card and making jabs at her. The streets are gettin on her nerves.

‘because i can’

American attitude art
by Katya Mills, 2014

people work better when driven (insane) -ii)

You would worry when I started talkin’ about culture. I would be sad, when you were tellin’ me about the future.  We would worry , at the bottom of some grave just above sea level, just outside New Orleans. At the top of some skyscraper, in Chicago.  Short days getting shorter, as winter came on. Worries becoming more defined, less complicated as time went on. Less akin to fear. More real. And I could still talk to you and you, me, but neither of us could talk to anybody else. Sometimes. Lots of unintentional broken promises in the world. But why? Was it something about all the air traffic competing for attention, packets and waves? Digital signals. Analog overtones. Low def signals. High def undertones?

Anyway, I didn’t expect to be put on trial in Judge So-and-So’s  court, either. Who plans out their court appearances, precisely, like bottle-ship builders? So why were we there? Public scrutiny over our could give a damn about our in-laws  presentation? To be backhanded for being attracted like mothra to roman candle, to our favorite chosen outlaws? For our multiple citations for  by-law window breakage of some corporate glass house?  Ya. I guess we’re gonna get black for our wool designation. I never asked to be anything. An icon. A nobody. A sentimentalist. A freak. A mentor. A bleeding heart. An outlaw. A witness. I never asked to be an witness. Did you? I just was one.

I never wanted to dig up dirt on anyone. You never wanted to unearth the once savory bones of goodwill gone bad in an microcosmic corner of a lemon-mustard seed culture, sitting between continents like a refrozen sorbet on dragon roll rotation. But when called, one must avoid perjury. We have a strong defense at the ready. Your honor, please, let me call the most dysfunctional family in the greater regional area, to the stand. Ya, they can all fit in the witness box. They speak in unison. No questions, your honor. Just let them knock around up there for a minute. Their presence alone tells volumes. We rest our case.

 We are certainly not guilty of crimes against humanity, ourselves included. It’s not my fault my dna bleeds german. Objection! It wasn’t your preoccupation to study the figures on automaton optimization protocol. I was born in the seventies, man! In the usa. My job was to be free to be me! Not some blueprint come to life on any sale of the century showcase! You were not conceived c-section after a long night of difficult breakbeat breathing, just to end up hanging on some arm or olive branch, for an hour every week! Were you? I was not born an accoutrement! To help sell fine sports cars, toys of the nouveau riche! No! We’re not going at a discount in a dollar store anymore, to someone who looks the part. A good study for consumption! I am no notch in the belt or raggedy rag in the hair, anymore. Trying so hard to protect them from some sun.

We must have early stage alzheimers, you and me and them. Its those iron pots. We gotta get rid of those iron pots…the studies have shown. How many times have we told us? This is where the real crime occurred. In the kitchen. Heavy metal. Its no good for our soft shell brain cells. Shit! Have we all been frying our eggs in it, again? Goodness gracious! Almost forgot to admit that into evidence. Who signed off on iron, in the first place? Was a backroom deal, I bet. Steel got edged out by some caucasian’s half-baked sales pitch, on some back-nine golf game. Before aluminum and Tiger Woods.

That’s how it must have gone down. We may not remember when, exactly, but we were brainwashed by the nine iron lobby. That should shut the door on the case. Now who gets life served up behind steel bars? Whose gonna iron this out? For driving me and you (insane)?

Nobody.

Why? Because we work better, this way.

Katya Mills  07/13 @ katyamills.com

People work better when driven (insane)

We were byproducts of bygone days of dirty damn flowerpushers! some suggested. Some of those who said such things, were people we trusted. Others were not. Caring, the act of caring, also had not yet withstood the weather to delineate a clear empirical map to know it by… best we could do was water the plants when they looked like they were dying. Or eat the wonderbread in the pantry before it went bad (or before some other kid ate it). We were young. Americans. Still, we were a decade from the first beacon of datastreams reflected back through space and time and taxpayers monies lumped into pretty grants all in a row, which would inform us to take hold of the ropelift (though only with fortified canvas gloves, if you expected not to get rope burn) and not let go of the new mentality of a culture embodying less that we could explain. A culture less caring? A culture less careful? A culture more populated and therefore less personal?  A culture going through a difficult growing stage? Define caring. Define personal. Define growing stage.  Then we might work to fight and hate and hope to someday prevent the very clear and concise examples of what for sure could never be mistaken for caring, ie, that which results from neglect.

So we all got to learn what not to do, in the presumption (or ignorance) of expecting some other behavior modelled often after someone or anyone who spent their time preparing to blow sunshine up atleast ten asses before each day was through. For the extremity could not be laughed out the room. Why? Well, because you can never have enough sunshine. And second, there could be no question of getting as far away from neglect as possible, which therefore gave allowance for extreme acts of incorrigible kindness. Whoever pastes the biggest smile over their bad news like a bandaid, got the props. Now that’s the world we grew up in. Feel sorry for us now? Nah! Shit, we could have been born in a minefield. We could have had to push a lawnmower, to make the blades cut.

Studies show that cars work better when driven.

Empirical data can be an addiction when its not a nuisance. Well, adhering to that stat, and changing out people for cars, one can (manipulatively) propose that people work better when driven. Define driven. Or just add a (silent) adverb predicate, in order to clear up any confusion. and voila!  my life story and maybe yours: 

People work better when driven (insane).

black denim daisy dukes (subsidized surveillance mix)

i was out there facing you and the world. through a portal i chose. nonlinear travel into the membrane of a postmodern club. on a bright near-life evening experience out. to subdue the indoor perry mason addiction tv blues. subdue with dub and sweat and light and you. to be overcome with the light of the darkness. you night owls, you know. kinda like a blindness toward the runway descent. looking  to land. hoping to avoid catastrophe and chain reaction seated screaming affairs. i do not like to fly. not even in my dreamscapes. like some of you. unlike the rest. and somewhat casually dressed. like always. no formality, out there facing the usa big city nights, at this time in recent memory. i will tell it to you as unencumbered as possible. hope you don’t mind getting it raw like this. with or without punctuation, paragraph, or other accoutrements. i like to call it liberated. shorthand-like. abbreviated, but def not lazy. def not. no deliberations. no hesitation. pushing my speech out of the nest. opening another chapter of free thought. typed out. no hype. typed out. no ribbon. no tape. red, white,  or blue. untaped, out on the wire. out on the net. without a net. full on frontal nudity. the air, brushed aside. the moon drawing the tide. the tenses got tense. tensile. disappeared out on some plank i made for them to walk. eat shit and die, i said. they didn’t hear the verb at the end of that sentence. they will not. they won’t. and wherever words drown down the slow pull of gravity underwater, they are as inaudible as the world dipped  in hyrdrogen cannot be heard.  the air dipped in hydrogen. a nice thing. i can hear myself think. i can pause and take a drink. drink the air and its free. like i thought this post was. like i thought my thoughts were when i shared them. like i prayed and hope my life was here in the states. the country. the place i reside. the vip lily lounge pad from the dangers around me. the darkness. the dark waters. giving me the premo. the premium democratic freedom. fuck if i haven’t paid for it! this stream of life that carries me on a plush pillowtop eggcrated fuzzy boombox of elastic sound and fury. i could stand up in the madness. i could leap off the stage into it. i would feel fingertips massaging the backs of my long legs. my caboose would later tell rolling stones in the post show interview how seriously it felt touched. my black denim daisy dukes got backside bankrolled by princes and treated to marigold sugar candy and treated like queens.  Singlehandedly accelerated and driven to pole position. all my confidence safely locked up in the muscle. usa club scene. protecting my confidentiality with a simple dance step to the left ,or cut to the right. or billy jean my way down the glass lit floors. three hundred watts of white light. a couple hundred pounds of black and white heat. all the onlookers fell back with their cash in hand. struck by the collision of lady’s night in the theatre grande. Maxell tapesque wind driven back in gale force, to cock block a stalker. with a hurricane eye, to allow in an admirer. or a gentle game of verbal chess, to challenge a so-called friend. those who were there to do what i said, became visible (and quite helpful). see i just needed some help to get my truth across. needed your help to brita filter out all the fluoride and dilute toxins in the mineral water of my mind. to goldpan my fucking stream of consciousness bitch. like my friend Viva reminded me on the phone it’s alright to be a bitch. to push back against the bullshit. the whole world is helping us now. check the newswires, you’ll see. because clearly we have subsidized an nauseating affair in our nation. clearly the nsa has strapped a probe on and given us free colonoscopies, with a search warrant. it is more than kinda upsetting. we paid for it. we asked for it once, but got it forever. we did not check for the expiration date. it did not have one. a National Surveillance Archive the size of the lone star state, processing all communications everywhere. domestically and internationally. coveting my metadata and yours. digital forensics will haunt us in the future.  any and all off the cuff remarks we made over text, skype, on outlook or gmail, in our blogs, on our cellulars – is all being processed and audited and red-flagged if necessary. excavated and highlighted, in the low light of some intelligence agency analysts daily debriefing. the question mark has scythed the exclamation point. i will be lucky to make it out with my metaphors. intact. analgesic. in the half-light of the trance. the serenity of the dance. between me and my freedom of speech or silence alike. privacy never made it to the door. because she was already holed up straight squatting in the vip lounge. with the 360 degree view of the dancefloor. with the two way unclouded lead crystal glass floor downloaded and secured to the scenery. profound. delicate. profound plus. glass bubbles, built to shatter. hey, that’s autoglass. it beads. no matter. our big city club scene. over a decade into the new millenium, shines. solar panels recycle the light. shafts appear and strobe out before our very eyes. maybe we need the electric current. maybe i had to plug into the dotcom sitcom to see it. maybe it started the clock on my energy bill. may be pushing time into analytics. maybe space jammed in the eye. maybe gelatinous. to the very fibers of our being. maybe i didn’t care. maybe you do now. maybe we will tommorrow. all i know is what i think snowden knew when he short-circuited his life as his life was. by uncovering what he was made to do, the way he has.  this subsidized surveillance shit needs to end. acid drop it into the clubs and put it in white light and acid wash jeans. and surveil it.

Katya Mills 07/13  @

blurred bits and waves by K

katyamills.com

the collective, politically-based idea factory (and the rubix cube, on wheels)

Culture! On the rise. On the thoroughfare of decline. How much a paradox, culture. Always. But why? This became the question for the intelligentsia and the intelligence community to unravel, or turn and grease and turn through slippery hands and minds and collective politically-based idea factories in all its holographic glory so to cover all possible aspects and leave no stone unturned between heaven and all hell;

touchscreens by iphone

mapped by google

imax projected

rubix cube on wheels

virtual pac-man (on miss pac-man)

codified

doublemint, latex-sprayed, triple helix, malleable, homeland security shookdown, std- proofed, double your fun, confessional-sanctioned, pope-approved, double your pleasure, avatarian recreational.  Yes. Tasty technological treats borrowed from the highest ranking military and intelligence officers’ quarters somewhere in death valley, near a secret desalination plant airlifted by drones from Dubai in the middle of the night many moons ago, just so many unknown miles from the alien docking pads to earth, drowned out by the lights and sounds of the postmodern resurrected Las Vegas metropolis. And vehemently disowned by the Administration. Yes. Tasty technological treats, tax-appropriated out the yingyang circa 2001, handled by the freshest natural born citizens with the cleanest slate records and very possibly robots or droids or blowfish poisoned, shellacqued zombies-4-freedom

USA – genotyped

anthropologically- profiled

fingerprinted and man-handled

cornea-scanned

debugged and rooted, microchip implanted, samsung manufactured, cloud-protected, supercomputer hardcopied…with an added feature of complete and unlimited playback *  of all lawfully yet non-transparently gathered fresh NSA data, mined exclusively from you and that dude who lives next door to you** until cancelled at anytime.***  Guaranteed current and fashionable (though maybe emaciated or soundbytten or heroin chic) and filtered of  all administration-branded nonsense (including the trade journal or democracy-when? kind). They performed such wizardry from their desks and satin stitched loveseats on backyard balconies jutting out of  their ivy hideouts. Or else, for those with the proper clearance who were constantly mobile, through remote desktop controls permeating clouds with passwords and repititious ID scans in the nondescript (and unsuspecting) offices of community college mudhuts across the country, or, in cases where time got crunched,  free wifi local coffeeshop hotspots created and protected easily for short periods of time across the grid. Always cloaked, though purportedly transparent. Wherever.

Unfortunately at times the two were inseparable. The circus and the intelligence wrapped up trying to find meaning in it. Increasingly ineffectual… all this was made quite a bit more restless and anxiety-prone inside the collective heads of the pushing 350 million population, where the diminishing rate of return

of dopamine

of serotonin

of norepinephrine

by the heavily taxed 99% of neurotransmitters getting fucked with****, under auspices of heavy pharmaceutical rotation,  toward an approaching parallel yet still tangential moving target of drain and leaking of energies on the vertical axis of collective coping mechanism function. Which translates to something really potentially ominous on the horizon, which you and me and your mom (and the Beverley Hillbillies, too) within our greater cultural context, could not , cannot, and may never be able to afford. So Sorry! Please move aside and make room. Next?!

* for 30 days, on American taxpayer credit, to be charged $9.99 thereafter a month for continued use, if necessary or so desired

** ‘you ‘ denotes any US citizen anywhere, on or off American soil. See the Patriot Act for further reading

***in a flex plan catered to current political unrest akin to arab spring but potentially closer to home

**** just like us

by Katya Blue

k in denim by k

, 07/13  katyamills.com

rock out the red and white blues

Wanna really soak  up our red and white blues?

No ifs ands or buts?

Wanna love like you never loved before? Then we gotta take it now, as is!  Shaken and stirred, with cracks in it, explosive in the sky tonight. Even in the dry heat of Sacramento, thirty miles from where our ancestors once rushed for gold, for the freedom wealth bestows. Celebrate the land we have inherited! Ring church bells and show our true colors, all the same.  We gotta locate ourselves on the map, and rock out from the self-referential. Bass heavy; we don’t need no trouble from the treble. Rock out so hard, anyone can hear you.  Poor Canada’s getting rocked tonight on the border. Canada, overtaken with our red and white blues.  Sound waves. And the poor fish on the shelf , in the three touched seas: Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf of Mexico. The salmon heading home, like we must as well, to the place of our personal and collective birth.

We can celebrate, the same, as those who came before us. We can set the precedent for what is to follow. But it has to be today, the defragmentation. Don’t put it off any longer, if you can. Just do the best you can! Impart upon our children that quality so magical and worshipped overseas, those freedoms people climb over one another and stampede and bum rush our stage for! The mosh pit of American lifestyle will not be subject to litigation! The tangible running up against ourselves is the only way for freedom. It cannot be prosecuted. It cannot be tamed! On the formerly solid now slightly cracked and bruised foundation of capital that got us here. Our foundation keeps us. But of course, it will always have cracks in it, that will be exploited by the earth when it quakes. But American freedoms, like mother nature, are a force beyond any judicial resolution. Not to punk justice. Just to represent what is true, though unfair!

We are the same, but we must honor the truth. There are great divides between us. The division of ethnicities, long since established and still enduring. The feeling we feel when we meet someone we never met, yet feel something deeper than the acquaintance. Something predisposed. Something heavy, yet intangible.  We can only be the same if we honor the truth of our differences. The native Americans, the tribes,  are always separate from us. We are not the same. Our ancestors settled the land in a predominantly violent and unsettling fashion. We cannot forget.  If we want to be free to celebrate what we have in common, we must first come at one another eye to eye, fingerprint to fingerprint. We can only connect from the longitude, the latitude, the experiential essential of confronting the divine at the crossing. Where converge the distinction of free spirits, the generosity of real attitude.

Take your punk out the trunk and display it for one another. Only then can we share our red and white blues. Something wonderful. Something source. Confrontational. Conversational. Electric! Divine. An equal sharp and undying thirst for the wild brand of freedom that pushes all boundaries out to infinity. Limitless freedom.  The kind the flying Wallendas know when they tightrope a quarter mile canyon, sanctioned by the Navajo tribe. This is the pure kind of real, definitely punk, red and white blues, we share. Where we get hot rocked by the us in the USA.

Sure, we will have our differences, we will partition and crack up and wikileak and fissure and branch arterial out to the very capillaries. But the blood returns home venously,  in the veins. Returns home to the heart that we share. The wild heart that risks everything, just to have it all. No borders can stop it. No barbed wire can hold it back. Pumping red white and blues out into the twenty-first, mother-loving, century. Meet you there. In the light. Wearing black. Painting red and blue over white.

Katya W. Mills  katyamills.com 07/13 – Daughter of the American Revolution

snowed in and data mined -ii)

My grandmother sold antiques out of her big red barn attached to her little red home. This was long after my grandfather passed away. She lived the remainder of her years in Melvin Village, which was across the lake from us. My father would go down to the dock in the summers and turn on the blower in our powerboat, which meant the engine had five minutes before ignition and my brother, mother and I had five minutes to get our sandals and shirts on,  run down, take the lines off the cleats, push off, and jump in. Then on our way past the 20 mile bay en route to Melvin Village.

The lake was wide open as the sky back then. Kinda like the landscape created by the internet. Both could be dangerous, too. Lots of rocks and shallows needed be marked off by buoys, and many boats still got lost at night, and some still struck the jagged glacial remnants jutting up from the earth but hidden below the surface of the water, and some got hung up and a few still sank. Often the larger berths, the sightseeing boats whose lineage had been photographed and put on walls behind glass, ended up driftwood floating across the broads and past rattlesnake island.

Every winter, the lake froze over completely. At the height of winter it was often so cold we could drive out on the lake in a Jeep, and the ice was thick enough to hold us. We would skate the frozen lake, and dad would load our arms full of pine wood he cut down and we stacked in the summer, by the woodshed. I remember holding my arms out like a forklift, and he would ask is that enough? and I would say, just one more before heading back to the house and dropping the wood in the bin next to the giant hearth, for the great fires we would build to keep us warm at night. We would need to be prepared for the storms, the nor’easters, which powered over and knocked down trees and power lines, snowing everyone into their homes.

I remembered all this in great detail, after watching the news this morning. I turned off the television and sat out on my back porch thinking about it. I closed my eyes and tried to feel that feeling I felt so long ago, of being snowed in. I live in California now, so it has been a long time. But the feelings remain strong. The quality is insular. With all that snow around you, five or six feet high, the home becomes  even more protective and warm, like there’s an extra layer of that fluffy pink stuff they packed the walls with back then, along with  asbestos covered piping. Reminded me of cotton candy we got at the fair.   tbc

by Katya W. Mills  @ katyamills.com  06/13