cosmic jackie in philly was right. i like this way too much to not have been a dandy in atleast one of my past lives.

i keep singing this in a falsetto while changing the diaper of a screaming hungarian woman at work. it doesn't deter her, but her eyes always widen and zero in on me while i do it. also, i want her crown.
 

(@work, 3 am, severely underslept/overworked/angry/

emotional/gay pms-ing, trying to change the diaper of my favorite elder paraplegic zombie doll)
HER: (mouth moves) ..... ...... .....
ME: did you say something?
HER: ....... ......... ......
ME: what?
HER: .... ......
ME: uh? one more time? (puts ear right by her mouth)
HER: (rasps/croaks/whispers) i'm...so happy..i have..you..to..take care of...me...
ME: (smiling/crying)
HER: ...sorry

on tour. woke up alone in the dark last night in a van with no lights after having a series of short nightmares about murder, ineptly disposing of bodyparts& botching fake 911 phonecalls. looked over & saw lying next to me in the van is an old woman. i reach a shaky hand over to her face to feel if she is real&her skin crumbles like a stale pastry.i start shrieking,can't figure out the door,scream more,climb out the window, stand in driveway,realize i am an idiot.
ps: this is my band

(2am, answering the call light of a withered woman in bed)
ME:hello!
HER:cliff, i need you to talk to the people.
ME:who?the medaid?
HER:no.the people in there.(points)
ME:that's a wall.
HER:it opens up.they come through.
ME:who?
HER:the little boy.the man who says it'll be ok.there's 3 of them.
ME:cool
HER:what?
ME:nothing.are they here now?
HER:yes.uh.no.i want you to tell them to leave me alone.they listen to you.

one of my favorite metal bands of the past decade called it quits yesterday. i blame ludicra for being one of the many convincing converging forces that, for better or worse, caused me to decide to move to the west coast one night almost 5 years ago. to be fair, they also had a pretty adorable rhythm section. r.i.p.
 

last diaper i change every shift belongs to the hungarian.she screams like i am raping her the whole time,but i can't just leave her lying in shit.last year she lived independently in an apartment.then the stroke happened,crossing some wire in her brain &causing only hungarian to come out of her mouth: "EEYOI!!" is her husband's name shrieked (and phoenetically spell),but he's not there,so i'm learning hungarian phrases:
 http://translate.google.com/?tl=hu&q=undefined#auto|hu|hello!%20i%20am%20here%20to%20help%20you.%20i%20am%20here%20to%20change%20your%20diaper.%20please%20don%27t%20hit%20me

the diva is 100 yrs old.never leaves her room or stops complaining.she is a sunless transparent deep sea creature&you can make out every vein in her body.skin tears like kleenex.voice is a gargle of mucus&she scolds every shift,accusing me of starvation as i bring meals&of suffocation as i apply cannulas.today i found her in a cower:"GODDAMN POLTERGEIST HIT ME"&then an ambulance took her away.

WHEELCHAIR WOMAN:(seeing me)Hi tim!
NURSE:that's not your son!
ME:hi! how're you doing today?
HER:oh i'm great. i never thought i'd run into you here, tim. whats new?
NURSE:that's not your son!
ME:i'm working. a bit too much actually.
NURSE:he works here.his name is myles.
WHEELCHAIR WOMAN:(crying) oh tim it's so good to see you. i've missed you so much. did your wife have the baby yet?
NURSE:(yelling) THAT'S NOT T--
ME:yes.

(3am knocking on door of 96 year old)
YOLANDA:Hi honey! i coma to you with my graveyard trainee. he need to see your baby.
ME:..?
96 YEAR OLD:ohh..(rolls over in bed, tosses back covers revealing near bursting colostomy bag).
YOLANDA:oh! such a big baby.myle, you think?
ME:yes?
YOLANDA:honey,myle take care of your baby.
ME:yes?
96 YEAR OLD:how is my baby?
ME:it's a boy?
YOLANDA: you see?you can talk shit with her.

NURSE I WORK WITH: um..could you do me a favor?
ME: sure. what.
HER: could you? like? take care of room 517? for me?
ME: ok. is something wrong?
HER: no..it's just..
ME: what?
HER: he just...you know? creeps me out..
ME: why?
HER: well.the other day? i was? like? helping his use a urinal? and he..
ME: ...got a massive hardon?
HER: yes!
ME: he did the same thing with me.
HER: oh.
ME: you're not special.

"this one time i come in the room in middle of the night and the man? he yelling yelling and he have the bm is all over his hands and on the bed and on the floor cause he trying to remove all by himself and ohh i put on gloves and he yelling yelling terrible names at me but i still do cos *shrug* this my job and his wife? she find out and she tell me "you an angel" and i say "i no angel. i yolanda." -coworker

there is a paralyzed skeleton woman at work. she doesn't talk.i change her diaper a couple times a day,feed her puree'd food&stop her from choking.i wonder why we put her through this.yesterday i picked up a book she'd written.in the1st chapter i learned that "demon" &"mosquito" sound similar in korean,so when i saw a bug in her room i asked if she had a "demon net".the grin&eye contact i got back was startling.

two friends of mine in philly did a tribute for leonora carrington, who died friday. one of them was responsible for originally turned me on to her writing. r.i.p to one of my favorite artists as well as writers.
 

i was cleaning up lunch in the nursing home&a confused man in a wheelchair crept up to me asking if i had something he could do.i gave him a pile of napkins.he began folding,talking about his days as a chemistry teacher.midstory he burst into tears&kept gesturing to the napkins,unable to speak.i thanked him,shook out the napkins & handed them back to him.he resumed folding&i went back to work,understanding.

dreamed this dude is fucking me cartoonishly hard and midway one of his thrusts there is a sudden awful muffled broken glass sound inside my body like a vase being smashed in my guts and this river of black tar shit starts immediately flooding out of me all exploded sewage tank style completely covering him and swamping up the room till i'm waist deep in my own waste trying not to breath too much back in but not really panicing until this BEING surfaces out of the moat like a fecal gollum and grabs hold of me and fights to pull me under and i struggle against it for dear (?) life until i realize it is just hysterical and sobbing and trying to get me to hold it while it cries. so i do.

Story about my friend KC written for a memorial book on her birthday. For her son to read, uhh, someday when he's older?

brook honeyford stencil on the wall outside kc's old bedroom @the farm
 "
What follows is my contribution to a memorial book people are apparently assembling for my friend kc,  who died 5 months ago. I was stuck at the time in the middle of nurse assistant training here on the west coast, so I missed out on the funeral and all the services that followed. In a way, writing this has also been my attempt to give myself as much personal closure that losing someone you really love will allow. Her birthday would have been today, but I think about her all the time.

 KC AND THE STORY OF BROOKE HONEYFORD                             
 (for her son Chase to read when he gets old enough to understand, or willing to try to?)     

    In 2006, I moved back from Baltimore to my native homeland of Philadelphia and it ended up being a total fucking disaster, although I have to admit, for better or worse, I was in some great company the whole time. I'd left town a little over a year beforehand in an attempt to escape suffocating my manic depressed self inside of a shelveless refrigerator one night while living alone in an efficiency apartment, so I was a bit wary about returning "home" for another round of possibly fighting whatever it was that drove me away again. For one reason or another and despite my best intentions to make things right, philly has never really worked out for me, but that's a separate essay, or perhaps a series of self pitying manuscripts to write someday.
    Anyway.
    Although i was born and raised on the other side of the Schuylkill , much like a whole secret tribe of people I've come to know, love and return to over the years, I came of age in West Philly; in the basements, in the warehouses, in the squats, in the punk houses, in the coffee houses, on porches with couches, inside ethiopian bars, at the foot of grafittied produce trucks, against the bulletproof glass of cheap chinese food places, quarantined inside of medical testing centers for cash and wandering a number of ever-vanishing but strangely romanticized sacred abandoned properties when i was feeling feral. Naturally, when I heard of an open room at a familiar house on Walton Avenue full of people I already knew, I made my move back.
    "We're like a fucking 'best of west philly' compilation here." I remember telling someone when i unpacked and mentioned the household lineup. Although I only knew KC loosely from her dating a friend of mine and us both hanging around a crumbled warehouse underground music venue in the late 90s, she quickly became one of my favorite"album tracks", so to speak. With a room directly below my own, I pretty much had her stuck on repeat every time i walked by. I also promise that is my last  abuse of this tacky metaphor for this paragraph.

                                              *Farm stencil by house resident Brad Dumville

     It's hard to explain to an outsider, given how most "normal" people only experience group living through college dorms, shortlived periods of  singlehood, or a craigslist necessity they're free of by their mid 20s, but it should be noted that, at best, there is an almost orphanage-like slumber party quality to a good punk house. "The Farm" definitely had elements of this--mixed with a lurking disfunctional streak characteristic of most of our shared upbringings--but still, above all things, it was a filthy, comfortable, needed home and in some sense we all recognized and honored this, despite ending up there for different reasons. In the case of me and KC, we bonded over a mutual history of depression and addiction, some peice of shit boyfriends, some dead friends we had in common, a love of metal, dark humor, and hatred of our miserable restaurant jobs.
      At the time I was a freshly retired bike messenger turned hoagie deliveryman on two wretched wheels. I hated every humiliating minute of it, but it made playing music possible, my boss couldn't see me half the time, I had no better ideas and I could sleep until the afternoon everyday. Also the fact that I was drunk every working minute made the urge to bitterly spit into promising young Penn Students' food an almost controllable impulse. All my bases covered, I suppose. KC was a waitress with a set of jellyfish resembling transparent rubber inserts tucked into her bra like armor each shift ("you'd be surprised how much it helps tips some nights."). I'd occasionally put them on inside my own shirt when she came home, wait while she was obliviously distracted by her jewlery making or busy ranting about how hard it was to stay sober and clean in food service and hope she'd look up and laugh because I had no solutions to offer that I was trying myself.
        Anyway, to cut to the chase, there was this one waitress who KC worked with that she held in high regard. very high regard. unreasonably high regard. KC fixated on her. KC idolized her. The waitress was called Brooke Honeyford, a woman with a name destined for a future in newscasting. or hollywood. or atleast porn. A name I should probably not use because she is, afterall, a real person, who I don't even know, despite what I, KC, and various members of the household eventually transformed her into.
        I'm not entirely sure when it happened, but at some point KC began comming home from work talking about Brooke all the time.
        Brooke Honeyford; alpha waitress.
        Brooke Honeyford; blonde and sassy.
        Brooke Honeyford; said the most brilliant thing today.
        Brooke Honeyford; the best thing about the job.       
        Brooke Honeyford; too beautiful for the restaurant.
        Brooke Honeyford; walks with all the best tables and cash.
        Brooke Honeyford; going places.
        Brooke Honeyford; trying out for a film now.
        Brooke Honeyford; does corporate espionage in her free time. seriously, can you beleive that?!?
        ..and I listened to these stories, possibly more than anyone else in the house, partially because my late hours meant i'd be the only one awake when she came through the door with tips and a new Honeyford fun fact, but also because i knew that deep down, at the end of the day, KC needed something positive to report back about when she was going through a recognizable rough patch herself. In a way, having a Brooke Honeyford of my own became something i secretly longed for. i looked around me but just couldn't find one and i guess i became a little jealous. or something.
        One night, KC materialized, giddy, with an autographed black and white glossy photo headshot of Brooke. As I stared back at the bob cutted bombshell frozen in a vidan sassoon ad pose and put a face on the revered name for the first time, I decided that she'd finally gone too far. There is a special sadness you get when you notice qualities in your friends that are so outstanding but at the same time so completely beyond the radar of their self esteem. KC could weld. KC could paint. KC's cleopatra costume at the godzilla wedding in the mummer museum was worthy of heiroglyphic preservation. KC was at her core, one of the toughest people I've ever met emotionally. In short, KC was too amazing to pin this mere mortal's image to her wall. Knocking down her Brooke Honeyford altar was the only way to save her.   
        I'm not one for planning much in life, so while KC was filling me in on the night's Brooke Honeyford celebrity guest appearance, I went with my gut impulse and made my move. Interrupting in the name of KC and all things worth saving in my world, i channeled the most psychotic, catty, venomous, evil, rumor spreading, bitchy junior highschool girl i could muster. and she came roaring out of me, complete with lisa frank stationary, hoop earrings and neon pink nailpolished talons.
        "oh. my. god, KC."
        "what?"
         "stop. just stop talking about brooke."    
         "why? i thought--"
         "KC, i can't  believe you even talk to her. didn't you hear?"
         "what?"
         "KC, BROOKE HONEYFORD IS A WHORE."
         "what?! you don't--"
         "BROOKE HONEYFORD IS ADOPTED."
          "ok, now you're getting--"
          "BROOKE HONEYFORD IS RADIOACTIVE"
          "ha ha. i have to go to bed. enough."
          "SHE DOESN'T EVEN KNOW"
          Not easily discouraged, or maybe a bit too into beating jokes to death, i continued this the next day. and the next.  and soon the rest of the house chimed in, singing a chorus of mindless slander:
          "BROOKE HONEYFORD HAS A PARASITIC TWIN"
          "BROOKE HONEYFORD IS A DICK SHARK"
          "BROOKE HONEYFORD'S PUSSY SMELLS LIKE DRIED CUTTLEFISH"
          "I SAW BROOKE HONEYFORD LAST NIGHT ON LANCASTER AVENUE AND SHE HAD A BEARTRAP CLAMPED ONTO HER LEG AND SHE DIDN'T EVEN KNOW. SHE WAS NUDE. I SAID NICE SHOES."
          Eventually, even KC joined in.
          and then , just when i thought we'd worn her down and exhorcized the demon disguised as a waitress from our beloved friend, KC made a startling confession to Michelle one night on the porch:
          "i autographed brooke honeyford's headshot and made it out to myself. She never signed it."
          Our blood went cold. we were horrified. desperate times call for desperate measures, so Michelle valiantly snuck into KC's room, stole the headshot and made for the nearest xerox machine. a couple hours of light table and razorblade carving paper sorcery later, she produced a guilded spray paint-ready image stencil of Brooke's face. It looked utterly fantastic. our weaponry had arrived. The plan was to use guerilla tactics starting at KC's room, spraypainting Brooke Honeyford's head onto everything we could think of in a trail from our house to the restaurant to Brooke Honeyford's apartment lair, with an assortment of nonsensical slogans beneath in a home depot font proclaiming "ADOPTED" "BEAR TRAP"  "PARASITIC TWIN" "CUTTLEFISH" "NICE SHOES" "DOESN'T EVEN KNOW" and last but certainly not least, "DICK SHARK".
we were going to save our friend from a fate worse than a lifetime  imprisoned in Brooke Honeyford's convent. unfortunetly, before we could finish, KC came home, caught us in the act, freaked out and dailed Brooke up herself claiming her "roomates have formed some insane cult around her headshot, complete with merchandise. don't worry. they'll make you a tshirt." ..As if. This slight betrayal, along with the disappointing discovery that Brooke Honeyford was surprisingly thrilled with the attention, caused us to abandon the entire scheme. We did, however, manage to stencil Brooke's face onto both KC's wall and directly onto the glass of a certain mirror. Legend has it, if you stand just right, you can see Brooke Honeyford's face imposed directly over your own reflection. That's just cause there is a little bit of Brooke in all of us. I recognize that now, KC.
 i love you. I miss you. This is one of the weirdest things I've ever fucking written. I hope it doesn't offend someone you love too bad.
               I don't know. I guess you had to be there. If nothing else, I'm really glad I was.

                                                                 R.I.P  KC

i traded one of my dead birds   today for a fully sequined antique jacket that makes me look like the missing link between a matador and a goldengirls cast member. a feast and hallucinogenic egg hunt at the vessile followed. special thanks to this rabbit and the camera/phone i had in my pocket with the lense that melted when i set myself on fire while trying to cook and as a result, only takes pictures like this now. in closing, i have recently met a fellow who resembles a really hot version of jesus christ.

happy to report that i will begin working in a nursing home monday. four years ago in philly i was breaking into an abandoned one in the middle of the night. hooray for progress. so happy to put the past 4 months behind me.

yet another week of nursing home job interviews under my belt. have a strangely good feeling about the one i had today, despite my 4 month track record of striking out. who fucking knows, though. i've reached a point where i'm no longer afraid of being rejected. progress? confidence? acceptance? apathy? doubt? dementia? it's all blurring together.
 

ME:(to a wheelchaired 93 year old crying,ignored, in corner of the nursing home) Can i help?
HER:(sobbing) i..want..a lawn!
ME:a lawn? like with..grass?
HER:yes
ME:could i mow it?
HER:yes
ME:we'd have some pink plastic flamingos?
HER:yes
ME:&some flowers?
HER:yes
ME:&a coy pond?
HER:yes (smiles,toothless)
ME:want your legs moved?
HER:yes

"mid august two thousand and six
south arm of uganik bay
kodiak island, alaska

dear myles

i write to you as a last resort, all other methods having failed, all other avenues found to be blocked impenetrably and irrevocably.
i write to you as a supplicant, with open hands and hope-filled, desperate heart; i seek your intercession with a powerful enemy of mine.
i write to you knowing that if there is anyone in this brutal and lonely world of danger who can help me it is you, myles, ranconteur, man of fortune, and friend to the jellyfish people.
there's no need for pretend humility--your affection for the jellyfish is well-known. you've proven yourself time and again as an admirer and staunch advocate of those strange and not-so-elusive creatures, those quiescent invertebrates that most people would dismiss as mindless and sedentary blobs. while others jeered, you championed those spineless sacs of goo, and it is for this reason that i believe they will listen to you.
myles, gentle myles, i beseech you: by all things holy and unholy as well, please, reach out to your jellyfriends and ask them to stop getting caught in our net and pulverized by our hydraulic spool. it sucks a great deal; the pieces of them get into my eyes and make me cry, which always makes me feel like less of a man, even though i was raised in the bay area. they are a burning soup of pain, and i fear them, and i hate myself for being afraid.
please, myles, you have to understand--the situation is dire. the jelly legions march into our net in tremendous clouds, tirelessly and without end. happiness and sadness are one to them, for they possess only the most rudimentary elements of a nervous system and are entirely oblivious to the anguish they cause, oblivious even to their own mangled, gory deaths. in the face of such relentless assault, what can mere men do? your aid is needed. time grows short, our strength is fading.
dear myles of destruction, very distant cousin and help of all unwashed malcontents since you appeared to wilder in the basements of philly, the problem that torments me i place in your blessed hands. remember OH! blessed myles that rarely has it been known that anyone who sought your help was left unaided. with confidence, humble and repentant, full of love and hope, this favor i implore.

your most devoted petitioner,

Andy"