Sniffleupagas

Instead of pec-ularialy celebrating my sexuality the Long Beach way (May 18 and 19 are our pride days, and the star who graced pride’s main stage this year was celebrated illiterate Fantasia Barrino! H-I F-A-N-T-A-S-I-A), I willingly drove to Riverside.

Pec-uliar.

Riverside makes me feel like I’m a protagonist in a Camus novel. Its dullness leaches my ability to morally arbitrate between good versus Republican. My ethical self becomes comatose. Moroccans of Riverside beware.

Too bad Killing a Carob isn’t an existential fro yo flavor.

So anyways, I descended into the bat cave that Riverside’s DIY Print Fest was happening in and the odor of DIY slapped me. The smell of DIY  makes me want to DIE. It’s part BO, part BO, and part BO. Dirty vegana. Despite its funk, DIY inspires me. People doing their own shit? That’s just cool. You don’t need a press with a bunch of shy consonants (KNOPF) to be a writer whose shit skitters through the world and into the minds of others. All you need is a brain, a heart, something to write with, and an unmonitored copy machine at your workplace.

I roamed  tables of zines, stickers, and quinoa eclairs and flipped through this manual.

As I was learning about “the pigeon,” my colon began to do it. I flew out of the bat cave, entered the light, and stomped up the street, looking for someplace where it was okay to let my asshole  see the light. I found a cafe with a woodsy bathroom that I stayed in way too long.

After I was done TCBing, I couldn’t stop pretending I was lost in the forest painted on the walls.

Panicking, I assumed a concerned lookout pose.

I wondered how long it would take for rescuers to find me. I worried about the imaginary drugs in my car. Then I remembered that I was supposed to be reading at 3:15 and  looked at my phone.

I hiked out of the forest and back to the bat cave.

RIVERSIDE WILL DESTROY YOUR MORAL COMPASS.

I performed my poetry-like substances on a floor-level stage with a pencil-drawing of an angry cat meme hanging behind me. I sold some books, traded some books in return for zines about polyamorous cats, and without killing a carob, left citrus city to return home and change into an orange party dress that hasn’t seen the moonlight in six months.

Now, let’s add TJ:

With our faces stuck like this, we drove to a fiesta where we spared the valet the shame of parking our Honda. We carried two bottles of Fess Parker port topped with merkinesque coon skin caps uphill, to the front door of our hostess’ house, which  politely dangled off a cliff.

In the sea of beautiful people in the backyard, we might’ve come across a female actress who created a character with the same initials as me: (OMG) MKG!

What I might’ve noticed about her was that when I compared our toes, I was wearing the Les Miserables version of the high-heeled sandal she wore better. My tattered, little whores of the French Revolution just wanted to eat cake. Her Marie Antoinettes glittered, but I didn’t want to smell her feet. Since I was nervous, I wanted to stick my hands in her armpits and then smell them like this…

My Thoughts on Turning 36

One thought that I just had about turning 36 is that 3+6=9 and 9 is an inverted 6, which, when repeated 3 times, becomes 666.

What is the significance of this satanic non-sequitur?

I have an imaginary frenemy named after a multiple of 3: 9.

I didn’t play with imaginary friends as a child. Back then, all my friends were real, although I was once visited by my hamster’s ghost, briefly.

I can’t remember how 9 came about. I think he was born one day when TJ and I were joking around with one another and sometimes when we do this, we’ll lie about somebody imaginary who is vigorously bothering us and then we’ll run with this lie and make this imaginary asshole’s antics so delightful that we build an entire relationship with him or her and sometimes, we even find handwritten notes from these imaginary people in our mailbox. We have several of these imaginary frenemies. One lives in a jar and she’s a real bitch.

I don’t want to tell you too much about 9, but he does have a tail and his own page at the national registry of sex offenders. He’s always losing body parts, like a leper, and he loves to bother. People often mistake him for a non-human simian. Though he’s imaginary, TJ and I are not the only ones who interact with 9. There are others.

 9ish.

Something I worry about is this: when I turn 36 or when I turn 37 or when I turn 38 or when I turn 39 or when I turn 40, will my mind become a boring Jello? As I age will I become more irrelevant than I already am? As I age will I get uglier?

I feel that as I age, I look more and more like a snapping turtle and have juxtaposed a picture of myself with one so that you can see what I mean.

See?

I actually wouldn’t mind being a turtle because I’d love to carry my bedroom on my back.

Another thought that occurs to me about turning 36 is that I have had a change in priorities. Before, when I pondered the question, “Which super power would I rather have: flight or invisibility?” I’d automatically select invisibility because of the obvious financial rewards I could reap as a thief and also the serious gossip I could score. As I mature, and become wise like the turtle, I change my mind about which super power I’d prefer. I’d prefer flight. Flight could come with equal financial rewards, especially if I was the only flying Mexican-Polish-American woman on earth, and how awesome would it be if I was the colonial woman on your wing?

A Series of Mugshots of the Author as 19th Century Male Criminal. These Images Are Meant to Inspire Fear, Lust, and Confusion

Blind Mary Ingalls Singing Please Don’t Let This Feeling End

Sometimes, when I’m allowed to dress myself, I come out of my bedroom looking like a cheap magician.

I do this to myself.

TJ doesn’t harass me for this because she loves me unconditionally. (P.S. on Friday night we watched Django and I couldn’t stop calling her Tjango. The T is silent.). Also, TJ suffers from a condition known as hair blindness. She can’t tell when people have changed their hair, and deep down, I worry that this handicap might also affect her ability to detect aesthetic wizardry.

Thanks to my new iPhone 5, I am now able to prevent myself from stepping out looking too magical. You might be thinking, Just look in the mirror bitch, but  the mirror can’t help me. It lies. In it, I see myself looking normal. Totally muggle.

My iPhone selfies tell the truth.

Lesbian magician. I saw men in half.

I changed out of that stupid shirt last night and put on a puffy sleeved blouse that helped me get a couple of steps closer to the look that I really aspire to: 19th century prostitute of color.

An attraction to dramatic sleeves is my true sexuality.

Anyways, wearing these sleeves and a pair of cavalier boots, I drove TJ to Silverlake, where we met our friends Annie and Schubert at Home. Home is a restaurant. Over quinoa (do I have any readers named Quinoa?) and mac and cheese, TJ confessed something very dire to the three of us: She doesn’t know who The Pixies are. We advised her never to share this information with anyone. We also discussed Justin Bieber’s monkey and what exotic animals we’d own if given the opportunity. I said I’d like to own a husband and wife team of tortoises so that I could hear them make love.

Clack.

Clack.

Clack.

Instead of sticking around Home for dessert, we were in the mood for pie, we headed over to the Cavern Club  Theatre for the evening’s big event, Little House on the Prairie-oke.

Needles to say, LHOP-oke was life-changing. The show featured snatches of LHOP, such as when Sylvia, not Plath, got raped by a clown, mashed together with karaoke hits that urged us to continue believin’. The most uncanny thing about the show was that watching it, it felt as if it’s creators had gone inside  TJ’s head, extracted all  her obsessions, seasoned them with even more camp, and then vomited them onto a stage beneath a Mexican restaurant.

Before the show started, our host did tell us to shut off our phones and he kept stressing how novel it was that we were watching a performance in the basement of a Mexican restaurant. Clearly, this host is unfamiliar with my childhood. He also told us not to take pictures or he’d get all Boston on us. He added that he found Suspect #2 hot.

In addition to Suspect #1 and Suspect #2, this is the third most recognized Chechen in the United States.

Although LHOP, the TV show, was supposed to be about the sweet, kind Ingalls, the bitches of the Olson family, Nellie and Mrs. Olson, stole it.

Revolutionary Chloë Sevigny impersonator Drew Droege played our Nellie for the night and this brings me to my childhood femme icons.

As a little girl, I was a tomboy to whom beauty mattered. In addition to my mother, the females I believed to be most beautiful in the world existed inside my family’s television, and I believed that everything would be better if I could be them. Who were these idols? They were:

A) Drew Droege aka Nellie Olson

That scowl, those curls, that haughtiness. I worshipped that cunt and loved the lengths that she went to to be evil. She inspired me.

B) Nancy Oleson

This back up Nellie, you know, like the back-up Becky on Roseanne, continued to bring the evil and the hair. She grew up to become Ann Coulter.

C) Mrs. Harriet Oleson

The epitome of glamour. And what a body. And a good mother. EXTREMELY LOYAL. Had Nelly or Nancy grown up to become Chechen terrorists, you bet your ass Harriet would’ve defended them to the gallows. Take note, mom.

D) Smurfette

Best television complexion circa 1980s

and finally…

E) Vicki Ann Smith-Lawson

What’s not to love about a red-headed female robot with severe social deficits? I wanted the dress and the batteries.

To catch the extended run of Little House on the Prairie-oke, go to The Cavern Club Theatre and get your tickets NOW!

I Will Not Be D’Turd

One time, TJ fell asleep and I stuck scissors in her hair. I opened and shut them a little bit.

When TJ woke up, she groggily walked to the bathroom but emerged running.

“What did you do to me?” she cried. “I look like Andy Warhol!”

WELCOME TO MY BEAUTY SALON, VALERIE SALON-ASS!

Sci-ssor me, Va-le-rie!

Valerie Salon-ass, lesbeing, attempted murderer, but most importantly, WRITER, wrote, in her S.C.U.M. Manifesto that, “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex[!]“

I have a very hardworking friend, Griselda, who could do this in a Saturday. Afterwards, she’d go tend her garden.

In preparation for a Valerie Salon-ass art tribute I’m going to be staging on April 25 at my local Redbox, Redbox represents both wimminkind and the automation that Salon-ass predicted, I’ve been re-reading S.C.U.M. Manifesto, and a copy of it that’s been living in my thrashed Marc Jacobs tote slipped out as I was digging around in it while driving three youths to go perform some community service.

I was serving as their feminist chaperone and intellectual leader.

The male youth riding shotgun grabbed the manifesto and read from its first page and then babbled irately about how Salon-ass needed to be roughed up. I thought to myself, “I think emphysema, pneumonia, and the patriarchy did a pretty good job of that.” As if it was burning his fingers, the youth tossed the manifesto into the backseat, where a female youth caught it and took up the task of reading from it.

“This makes sense,” she said in a tone I’ve heard others use when discussing gospel and operating instructions.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah. It matches my thoughts about evolution.”

To salvage the impression that the two male youths, there was another one riding in the backseat behind me, were developing of Salon-ass, I explained, “Solanas believed there was hope for men. Find the part about the Turd Sessions,” I instructed the female youth.

She flipped to this portion and read about the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM: “Men in the Men’s Auxiliary are those who are working diligently to eliminate themselves, men who, regardless of their motives, do good…”

The female youth went on to detail Salon-ass’ suggestion for aiding the Men’s Auxiliary in doing good and as she did this, shotgun-riding male youth aggressively critiqued my driving. Imagine this sound collage, “…SCUM will conduct Turd Sessions, at which every male present will give a speech beginning with the sentence: ‘I am a turd, a lowly abject turd,’ then proceed to list all the ways in which he is…” over “God, Gurba, drive faster,” over “I’m driving the speed limit, I could just let you out here and let you walk the-” over “SHUT UP WOMUNN.”

Capping off this collagial exchange, the male youth behind me shouted at shotgun-riding youth, “QUIT ACTING LIKE A TURD!”

And that is how you have an accidental turd session.

The shotgun-riding youth and I enjoy arguing with one another, and while performing community service, we jousted with shovels like the bros we are.

I am such a

Chef Cat

TJ and I went to Little Tokyo to have our tempurature taken and have some soy. Many people don’t know this, but Spanish is high in soy.

Yo soy...

Yo! Soy!

For some reason, my Japanese lunch was brought to me inside of an Ikea bookshelf.

After much green tea, I had an urge to visit the john. On the way to it, I found a picture of our chef.

ARI-GATO!!!!

Although we were given ice cream as a dessert, we still ducked into some bakery that was hosting a donut hole suggestion contest. You write your donut hole flavor suggestion on a slip and if you win, your donut hole dreams become reality.

That’s really suggestive.

We walked to the Geffen Contemporary with our desserts and while some would say it was closed, I call it discrimination.

We drove to the downtown MOCA instead.

Strolling into the first gallery, the man who was guarding the Rothkos glanced at my shirt and started to sing, “Ahhhhhh, FREAK OUT! LE FREAK, C’EST CHIC!” He continued serenading me and dancing like my mother while TJ muttered, “Don’t make eye contact. Stop making eye contact with him.”

We ran away from him but not before we leapt in front of that Rothko everyone on Facebook has been using as their pro-gay marriage equality symbol and shot a double selfie.

“Oh my!” I said, strolling towards scribbles, “a Cy Twombly.” The dude guarding the Twombly rolled his eyes. “Its more fun if you try to decipher what its saying,” I told TJ. “John Waters says so. Take a picture of me with it!”

TJ did and said, “Try to look normal!”

Every time I could sense she was about to snap a photo, my instinct was to look psycho.

We left the Twombly and walked past the tiny glass box Tilda Swinton will be sleeping in when she visits LA.

On to the pet steps.

And throwing gang signs in front of the Basquiat.

This Claes Oldeburg thing looks like something that would tour with Sister Spit. It would sing and dance to EDM or queercore dub step while wearing shoes made out of ketchup, love, and sporks.

TJ adores prison-related art and thus greatly admired this portrait titled Hoe Squad.

Here she is again, with a massive scrote.

At the gift shop, which is next to a big pile of trash a.k.a. a major work of modern art, a salesgirl admired my golden goober.

“If you go hungry, you could eat it, too.”

I shook it for and she listened to my nuts rattle.

TJ dug through a bin with all sorts of buttons in it that said cute things like Boob 1, Boob 2 (I think those are for your nipples), CHURCH IS GAY, AND I’M ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA. The salesgirl pointed at that last one and said, “This one is the best!” and started cracking up, to show us that that is her creed. We will be giving one of these buttons to my father. It says ALFGHANISTAN.

Whelsh

Some lesbians are into whales.

Some lesbians are in Whales.

So how did I become Whelsh? How did I come to take this selfie where I’ve got mad chola face like I just climbed up in this muh and am about to jump Yahweh’s favorite fishing lure, Jonah (in Sweden is it Yonah?) and claim this bitch? Can’t you picture me all up in that O.T. prophet’s grill screaming, “This shit ain’t blood in blood out, ese! IT’S WHALE IN WHALE OUT!”

Never mind how Jonah started a fire in a whale. Where’d he get those hot dogs? I know. They’re magic. The Bible is magic. Hot dogs deep inside of whales magic.

Well, I sort of wound up in Whales because of Chinaman.

This is seriously his grave. He’s buried in the little old cemetery nestled in the oaken hills of Los Alamos and his grave is so stark and so like WTF? OH MY GOD?! THERE’S THIS PERSON BURIED HERE IN CALIFORNIA’S BFE WHO’S REALLY FAR FROM HOME AND ALL HE GETS IS  A ROCK WITH HIS GENDER AND NATIONALITY OF ORIGIN? WHAT IF HE’S REALLY A FILIPINO? I noticed his grave once a couple of years ago when my dad took us to the graveyard for a stroll and he and I oohed and ahhed during our first encounter with the AA. Anonymous Asian.

CHINAMAN is super sad but also kind of soothing like that’s it. You live, you work, you do things, maybe really cool things, such as build America, and then you die and are mostly forgotten except your perceived ethnicity lives on with a side of gender. What will your legacy be? BLATINA? DOUBLE RICAN (COSTA, PUERTO) DUDE? WHITE BITCH? PART WHITE BITCH? WANNABE WHITE BITCH? GINGER MANCHILD?

I strongly feel that CHINAMAN might not even be a CHINAMAN. People throw around the word Chinese like they throw around Mexican. Pupusas are Mexican. So is Brazil. And the Pope. And Spain. Thpain.

I went to see CHINAMAN because of an urge to pilgrimage. I’d made a pilgrimage to the giant clam in Pismo Beach a few days earlier in the name of all that is briny and vulvous and for some reason, I felt like visiting CHINAMAN might soothe something itchy inside me. Rub some psychic aloe on it.

You know what? I kissed my dad’s head before leaving home and got Rogaine on my lips.

That sounds like a refrain from a rap song:

Rogaine on my lips/

Rogaine on my lips

You know what else is fun? Taking the word sunshine out of John Denver’s song Sunshine on My Shoulders and replacing it with Rogaine.

Rogaine on my shoulders make me happy…

Near CHINAMAN, I spied this pile of wooden things stacked next to a shack where they keep the shovels and I thought about how the wooden things could be repurposed as really cute bookshelves. I contemplated picking them up and loading them into my car and I even pictured how I’d arrange this cemetery furniture in my living room and what knick knacks and books I’d put in or on it but then I remembered that the last time I stole something important from a cemetery, my friend Stan would up running into the Black Dahlia’s ghost in my living room. His vision, however, might have been a side effect from eating a three day old, unrefrigerated Jumbo Jack.

I left the cemetery empty-handed and went to use the public restroom at the park at the foot of the hills. On my way to the toilet, I found an interracial couple sitting together on a little bridge spanning a crick. They were doing the strangest thing. They were reading.

Getting back into my vehicle, I drove south, through Buellton and past the tunnel Dustin Hoffman drives through in THE GRADUATE. That tunnel is a very safe place. Around it, in those mountainy hills, mountain lions are just waiting to eat your face.

I got to Santa Barbara, pulled off the road to get a snack near the mental hospital where Edie Sedgewick was held in captivity, and wondered what flavor Nixon was into.

What would Watergate taste like? Deception? Water? Hyperhydrosis?

With a styrofoam bowl of fro yo cooling my crotch, I drove into Santa Barbara’s hills. I was ready for another pilgrimage. I’d brought Melody Owens’ DREAM JOURNALS with me and am writing a review of it for another blog and I had the idea to photograph the DREAM JOURNALS in dreamy places. I figured what better place than the Natural History Museum with the life size whale skeleton splashing around next to the parking lot?

That whale skeleton was really integral to the shaping of my scatological imagination.

Dad would bring us to the museum, make us get inside of the whale, mouth first, and narrate how we were being digested. I would imagine being chewed and liquified as I walked along its skeletal shell and of course, at the end, Dad narrated the whale pooping us out as cacitas and then we’d go look at the natural history exhibits as happy pieces of whale shit.

I explained this to the woman whom I paid my admission fee to and she gave me a look like shut the fuck up.

I didn’t care. I will take you on my nostalgic voyage whether you like it or not.

I posed DREAM JOURNALS all over the place but didn’t get to pose it with the bees.

The bees lived in a hive surrounded by glass so that you could witness them working and the most soothing thing in the world is to leisurely watch others work. This is why, in college, I loved to spy on my neighbors through their skylight.

The bees, however, were gone, according to some museum broad they had to get rid of them because nobody knew how to take care of them, and that seems like a bum excuse if you ask me. They were taking care of themselves but whatever. Anyways, here’s a gull barfing a Cheeto and here’s a link to some of my poems that are online today.