The · Broken · Knee

*tracing paper
*decent commic books
*peanut butter
*clove cigarettes
*love, good taste, and year-round sunshine
*a broom not made of twigs tied together with rope (though you can buy a new lap top)
*anything said by any public official about anything at all
*hookers that dont smoke Davidoff Slims
*Finnish postage stamps

Upon return to Russia: Worked for jerks, plus terror at Ilkka having his skull fractured and lying in a hospital bed for a month unable to speak right or remember things that had happened days before. Found a place to live, got kicked out by horrible bitchy roommate and lost my job in same week.

Ilkka recovered completely just to spite everyone who had had the gall to worry about him. Typical. Stress ulcers mean nothing to some people.

Now I live in an old crumbling Cominalka with five other people including a plump 4-foot-tall babushka who's really cool, angry ghosts, and a dog named Basia. The ghosts keep killing all my plants no matter how much water and sunshine I fight them with, and the only thing I can keep alive here are the cactuses. I think i buy a new cactus every week. My landlady is scary and calls me all the time trying to recruit me in her weird cult. I ride my bicycle everywhere, fuck the metro. I have a wash maching in my room, but it's so old (I guess about 1960's?) I cant even figure out how it's supposed to work. It is now an end table.

At 21, I already have developed arthritis in my knees, and it's painful to walk down stairs- what the fuck? 

I sing and play accordion and musical saw in a band. I have taken up piano. I am learning Spanish. First experiences with electrical shock have not discouraged me from new found fascination with exploring and learning how to repair the sort-of-functional 80-year-old electrical wiring in the cominalka.

I have to work after this month in Finland in exchange for housing, and food and money to boot. 

I love Ilkka, my accordion, biking all over the city, Finnish granola, and sunshine. 

I'm enrolled in the State University here in Petersburg for September. Ilkka is working all summer in Tajikistan, and I will run away from Finland and hide under his bed until Uni starts, cause life is too hard without love.

Things you can buy or get for barter or free in Russia:

*a liter of decent vodka for $6, quality beer for $1
*miracles, disaster, cheap and reliable public transport.
*a ticket to Moscow or Helsinki for 10 Euro
*alcoholic mosquitos, and the dream-like Venisian canals of St. Petersburg
*wonder, disgust, and six days of nightless summer sunshine
*big purple $3 fake-Dior sunglasses 

...is going to be the title of chapter 5 of my novel.

Bad Folk is recording this week, and tedium will be ours.

I'm working for a non-profit immigrant/social work agency. I create resource files like it's goin' out of style, and talk to people in Russian.

I'm really behind on everything, and working really hard to stay ahead at staying behind. *snore*

I havent been to work in a week due to being crazy, and not over my old fiance's suicide. I broke up with Adam twice and made up, and he's offered to help me seek counseling. Anyone else who wants to help, please do.

I help out on Bob and Brett's shows at KDHX, or atleast should, even though I havent been in for Brett's show in weeks.

Was getting gas last night after finally leaving the recording studio, when some guy who'd been staring at me from a few feet away opened up his car door to show me that he had yanked his pants down to his ankles and was jerking off wildly. That really made me mad.

Mike from The Bureau of Sabotage asked me to play cello on the CD they are working on. I used to live in their guitar/keys' attic, back when my high school Latin teacher was living under it!

Band practice is my safe place. I'd kill myself in two seconds without the security of knowing that that happens every week.

I got my accordion fixed and got to play it at the Way Out Club for the bnd scramble.

Dont nothin' bring you down like your home town.

Had the day off today. It's national Men's day (or technically Protecters of the Fatherland Day). Great? I think so.

I baked cookies for Sam, my flat mate, and asked him if he'd done anything "manly" today for the holiday. Which is funny cause he's so prissy he cant even open jars for me.

Richard and i are planning to take last metro (there's a shocker) and knock back a few for dead soldiers.

Ah, hope. The masked villain in the tragicomedy of life. It will win your trust and rob you blind every time.

I was impressed and touched with all the emails I got from people concerned about Karen. Rachel was sad that she might be disappearing from my stories. But that’s not the case. So here’s a Karen update: I saw her two days ago. She’s still refusing to leave the hostel, much less vacate the country. Nothing scares this woman. Not poverty, not threats of deportation, not lying, not screaming at the crooked, fully-armed, street militsia “FUCK YOU! YOU WANT TO SEE MY DOCUMENTS?? I DON’T HAVE ANY FUCKIN’ DOCUMENTS!!! I’M MOTHERFUCKING C.I.A.!!!”

Here’s a list of important things I learned living in Avotova with Karen:

1. Living in a foreign country doesn’t mean you have to learn the language, after all, you are too brilliant to be bothered. Just learn all the swear words, and how to order a drink, ask for money, and talk about sex. When you bore people to death talking for six hours about your sex life, remind people that you’re just “honest.”

3. Be sweet. Make tea for the kind old man selling potatoes in sub-zero temperatures. Complain to him about your day. Always tell people “have a nice day.”

3. “Good morning” sounds different in Russian. Immediately when you wake up, alert your flat mates of your arising by cursing at the top of your lungs. They probably need a wake up call anyway. Using a variety of English and Russian swear words will impress them with your worldliness, and prove to your neighbors that you’re a bad ass. Then go in the bath room, and remind everyone as loudly as you can that the sink is falling off the wall and that if Fucking Benedict School doesn’t fix it, you’re going to call the director (who has complete control of your work visa and is ready to fire you) and tell her what a fucking cunt she is. Then chain smoke in the kitchen and tell anyone who will listen everything that happened to you at the bar last night, the night before, what your father said about it, and that if your fiancé doesn’t return from the Ukraine next week you’re going to run away with the Drunken Monkey. Suddenly become sweet and bouncy thinking of said person.

4. It’s perfectly acceptable to give tattoos over 5 inches in diameter with little more than a dodgy cosmetic-tattooing needle, because you used to own your own tattoo studio. Secretly, sign all your work by hiding your initials somewhere in the design. Hehe! They’ll never know!

5. Always be yourself, no matter what. Don’t let the system get you down.

6. If the police ask for your passport, it’s with the school. If the school asks for your passport, it’s with the police. If the police call the school, call the consulate and make shit up so somebody gets fired. Tehe!

7. It’s important to look after your fellow man. If your fiancé moves in, so must his best friend. And obviously, the friend’s ex-girlfriend now needs a place to stay. And all their friends. These people are your “boys,” and everyone knows “Karen’s boys.” And nobody fucks with Karen’s boys. Dote on them endlessly, and assign nick names. The Drunken Monkey, The Master of Disaster, The Sleeping Bitch…..

8. Talk endlessly about how you just cant help having such a big heart, yourself, and how you never ever talk about yourself.

9. Constantly make big plans to get the fuck out of this terrible place, marry randomly, and save the world. Plans are good enough.

10. Nobody know what it’s like to be you. ::Sigh::

One of my earliest memories of Karen is walking home at dusk and seeing her smoking dreamily on the second floor balcony, looking like a fat, drunk Juliet contemplating her next Romeo. She waved at me, and I waved back. She pointed to some guy on the street and called, “Look at this dumb fucker over here! He’s so drunk he can barely walk!”

I really don’t want Karen to get deported. I’ll miss her.

So I’m taking up a hope collection in her name.

Donations are greatly appreciated.

27 December

It really is winter now and Russia is infested with invisible elves. The elves steal anything the can get their clever little hands on. They have beady eyes, and knaw potatoes on the shelves at night squeaking and squealing while you sleep. You wake up and find their beer bottles, cigarette packs, and promises scattered all over the kitchen, all of them empty. They elf off with your wallet when you’re smoking out side the metro. There are whole villages of elves living in this flat. Notably, Karen lost over 7000 rubles, and last night they took a guitar. And naïve, dupable Richard (one of my flat mates who thinks he‘s “seen it all“ from having lived in Amsterdam), ever dedicated to the eternal male cause-- getting laid-- picked up two scantly-dressed Elvin refugees at the Pushkinsaya all-night absinthe bar. The refs took refuge for the night (a wild one I heard!) and also Richard’s laptop.

Elves in Russia are not like Elves in St. Louis. Calmed by nearly consistent solar and lunar cycles, and by the steady rhythm of the Mississip, St. Louis elves live restless and angstful, but mild lives. In winter, St. Louis elves are not wandering the streets in packs, but in the summer there’s dependably the usual surge as a humid St. Louis summer is bound to throw any restless soul into a fever and the elves will respond in kind every time. Ah, crime in St. Louis in those boiling summers.

Elves in Russia are not lamenting low or non-existent cigarette funds at Mangia tonight over pissed-out pitchers of PBR. They are bellowing insults at ancient night-watch landladies in the stairwell and roving packs of wild dogs in the street. Or smoking and swaggering about loudly in unkept stairwells. Russian elves are tough. And they don’t get cold, because they only drink vodka.
---------------------------------------------------

But enough about the elves.

LiveJournal Haiku!
Your name:	etherdots
Your haiku:	with me wilbur and i just fell out of college and ready to go
Username:
Created by Grahame

LiveJournal Haiku!
Your name:	etherdots
Your haiku:	close but lowly friend and you wont find me and you chose from two or three
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Created by Grahame

LiveJournal Haiku!
Your name:	etherdots
Your haiku:	if you are i'm sure you can hear it over the script and then my plan
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Created by Grahame

this one must be about Jon and Kathy's, hehe:

LiveJournal Haiku!
Your name:	etherdots
Your haiku:	there's a darkroom i can see little slivers of dailight at through
Username:
Created by Grahame

wow...

LiveJournal Haiku!
Your name:	etherdots
Your haiku:	huge step for me to tell you stories about what i mean is that this is
Username:
Created by Grahame

Absinthia, in this world of woe, has but one joy: to twirl her lovely baton.

It is true that she knows other pleasures, that she has read every text ever written on the hooey sciences, and that she is an expert on nook n’ cranny noise gardening. It is true, that she is respectably accomplished in every single very mode of travel, including stationary implosion. Her resume entails a long and harrowing catalogue of adventures and triumphs, dotted by romantically tragic trysts with the hallway Gestapo and juvenile holding centers in over-lit basements.

But what takes her mind off of the caustic, the spatful, the dull and lustless world around her is the twirling, the daze, the mindless thrills and chills of throwing a long, hard, sweetly spinning, satin baton into the air! Around the back, under the hip…

For months now, he too has been following, with his eye, the baton's spinnings and flailings. But, he is so not amused.

“What can I do if I can’t amuse you,” Absinthia spits or purrs unhappily.

I regret to say, that a beautiful new calendar is the kind of gift you will buy for a person when you want them to know that you care, but secretly you wish you didn't.

You know what I'm talking about.

Pain, once your lovely calendar -with it's pretty pictures and hokey inspiartional captions- is in the possession of that person and out of your view, will skip merrily to and fro' and play hopscotch along sidewalks ever in the perifery of your vision like a second guess. Will lick teaseingly around the edges of your heart, and make you sigh for no particular reason when looking out windows.

This gift is a Trojan horse. It's casualness, it's practicality, merely a sad disguise for it's true effect: this gift is your stupid inner child desparately, pathetically, clutching -with white knuckles- the big, gawdy, insideous teddy bear of foolish devotion. Infact, his stuffing is beginning to bulge out at one seam like a goiter.

This seemingly simple gift is a BIG commitment. For the next FUCKING YEAR, you will be tortured by selfish curriosities about the calendar. You will first wonder what's being marked in it: Approaching family events? Lame or unanxiously awaited events that must be written down lest they will happily be forgotten, like a cousin's french horn recital or a dentist appointment? Important... dates?

And then, sure enough, you will be raveged with even crueler, more painful curriosities. Does this person think of you now, everyday?? You did give them their very CALENDAR, afterall. You practically said, clear as day, I WANT YOU TO THINK OF ME, EVERY DAY, FOR THE NEXT WHOLE YEAR. WHEN YOU MAKE PLANS, WHEN YOU COUNT DAYS UNTIL, WHEN YOU LOOK AT SOMETHING FAMILIAR THAT MAPS THE PATHS YOUR LIFE WILL TAKE FOR MONTHS TO COME, I WANT YOU TO THINK OF ME. Is the person you love USING your carefully-picked-out calendar? Does it lay unopened, uncherrished, under stacks of books and scattered papers on their desk? Has this person forgotten what you gave them in hopes that they'd be better able to remember?! Have they... re-gifted??

And worst of all, the aching knowledge that even if you could believe against so many tides that this person DOES love your gorgeous calendar as you wished they loved you... Once the year is up, all that maniacal hugging is rendered vain. The teddy bear dissapears into heart-pulverizingly thin air: little button-eyes, protruding goiter stuffing, and all.

By this time next new year, your love will be gifted with a new calendar. Gorgeous, freshly blank, and nauseatingly inspirational.

From someone else.

~*~

And speaking of Trojan horses... "Trojan"..... incredibly bad brand name for condoms, or what? What were they THINKING?

The other band I'm in, Bad Folk:
Tonight at the Way Out Club
With the Good Griefs.

Roller-skated home tonight in the freakin' dark. Not to the place I'm renting right now.... the cold, naily, creaky attic with my sinking air mattress and piles of clothes and mail I don't want to open.

Roller-skated down through the underpass over Laclede into Shrewsbury. Hi-jacked jumper cables, a white work truck, and a tired dad. Thanked him in chocolate and peanut butter.

Somehow, I got home tonight, stumbling clumsily over the cracks in the sidewalk. But home isn't in Shrewsbury, either. Maybe home is on roller-skates?

Home is what is under your feet that you aren't thinking about. It's the movement and the effort that makes home home, and the movement and the effort-not home- that you're stuck on.

Home is what holds you up, it makes unpleasantly nostalgic grating noises against the pavement behind you, which echo down dark wet alleys and off of unfamiliar cars and buildings. Especially at night.

But know that however far away those echos bounce, there's a sad-eyed girl in St. Louis who will always catch them for you in a little satellite dish she made out of wishes, gum, and an old rusty skillet.

And those sad eyes are dreaming always that you're faithfully collecting all her echos too.

I love you guys. You know how to reach me. Don't let New York/Rolla get you down.
xoxo

...was the very accurate title I assigned to the 12 pages I wrote in my personal journal today about ******.

It just occured to me that maybe the 12 pages part is a good omen. An omen that I will be inspired enough to write my honors paper (which is due Thursday and I havent started on it yet)done after all.

I feel like it's two years ago all over again, and the trucks in my head are going to come back.

Ick. Ick. Ick.

And for the record, crying your eyes out sucks all the more in an uninsulated attic in St. Louis in November.

P.S. If you see me, dont bother mentioning this post. This is all the talking about it I want to do. But know that if you are concerned, I dont not appreciate it, and if you are, I'm sure I already know you're my friend without you having to say it. Thanks.

Everyone keeps asking me... Where the fuck have you been?

Er, I moved.

i wanted to move in with Mr Petty. Mr. Petty named my cat. Tofu. (before that, the cat's name was Fiasco) He has a cat of his own, named Easy. I recently found out that Easy's full name is Easy Lunchmeat Kitty. And that Mr. Petty names all his animals after food, to remind them where they stand. I think that's sweet. There was Heavy Barrel and saturday night poker games in the garage-converted-clubhouse. The nieghborhood was alley-liscious... but then Mr. Petty wasnt interested when I brought it up.

Then I almost moved in with Alex. I just couldnt do it.

I live in an attic now, I'm renting it and this place is ... it's pretty hardcore. In the sense that there are hellraiser nails lining my cielings, and i can see little slivers of dailight through the walls where they meet the floor.... and the climate is, um, well, theres a roof over my head, right? I loves it here. I am renting from a young couple, namely my high school latin teacher and her husband. There's a darkroom I can barrow in the basment, and there's these crazy doxins running around REAL LIVE DOXINS... those things are.. fuckin'... animals. And a cat.

Anyway, I dont have a phone yet. I'm going to get one in a week or two but i cant afford it until then. So you cant find me, and you wont find me. I'm sorry.

I am in school now, and I quit my job at the Deli from Hell and now I work at Paper-cut Hut(which is a very good job aside from the papercuts)... This guy I'm ridiculously stupid for is in Maryland but when he comes back he wants to work at Hi-Tec too, and then my plan to never see him again and just pester him online and think about him too much will be rather foiled. Shit.

My best friend got beat up by the cops and went to jail while she was up in New York war protesting. They kept her stuff too... money, food, her whole rucksack. Everything. I'm glad you made it back to Oregon safe and sound.

My new, little red '93 Mazda Protege.... I love it. I'm writing a semi-feminist car 'zine about it in the style of those car porn magazines like "Hotrod!" you know, at Autozone? with the swimsuit models on the hoods of cool cars? My 'zine's gonna be called "Mazda Protege!" and I'm going to take cover pictures of my friends skanked out on the hood.

I'm in two bands.... the Exemplary cosmonauts are kaput for now.
I'm in an all-girl country jug band called Maid-Rite and they actually play in public... we have a show at Offbroadway this week. What'll I wear? What if I forget how to play?

I'm also sort of in "Bad Folk" with Troy Howard and I havent actually done anything with them yet. Like as in, Troy Howard keeps insisting i'm in the band and I dont think so because i've never been to a practice and i think he's the only person in the world that thinks that.

I'm realizing it's really hard working, being a full time student, and trying to support yourself. There are women in some of my classes with kids and full time jobs to boot. How do they do that?? Workin' moms are something else... I dunno, I myself am a single pet owner, and find THAT to be the most difficult job in the world. Cripes.

So no, I didnt join the Witness Protection program. I'm just all grown up.

But dont worry, I'm still 14, as usual.

Hey, Rocky Cast... How come I dont feel like one of you? I can be the first to admit, I am not exactly little miss social skills. I am not saying part of the problem isnt me. But then, Rocky is FOR us fuck-ups, isnt it? So why is it that when I hear about little cast get-togethers and things, it's never something I was invited to unless it was a meeting? I am not always so cold, I really try to be friendly and always try to be funny. I make regular donations to the prop box. One time I even baked cookies for the cast. I have been involved with this longer than half the people up there... So why is it that after having been one of you guys for the past four years, I still feel like we're strangers and I have to prove myself?