sometimes you lie, sometimes i do too

i am alone sitting outside the house where you wait. you have what i want, the yellow dress, my journal.

i tell you a lie, it has to do with how much i love you and how much i'm going to do better.

you stare out your window at me, jerk your head telling me to hide from your girl as she's leaving. her hair is pulled back, that thin frown ever present.

but that isn't the only thing. the only thing that there is, is need. my need versus your need, yours for power over me, mine for my journal, which carries not only my secrets but the secret of jared.

jared was my friend once, he lived in the middle of the city. we used to be musicians. i went to his house before he became an actor, he gave me a book by alan watts. is that his name? something about beat poetry. or the way of the beat poet. some dumb spiritual name for a book that i never read and would never read. spirituality is fake. trust me. i've seen the fake meditators who beat their children and cheat their friends out of every last sense of themselves for the sake of filling up the empty.

jared's boyfriend was there. i was supposed to act like i didn't know they were a couple. what they were didn't matter to me. i was just lonely.

that night we drank and jared kept disappearing, spoons were black, and people were passed out on the floor of that giant apartment building when you go up cahuenga from hollywood blvd. and turn right on franklin. the first building. you know the one.

we were up at the top. there was a fire escape, but no one even opened a window, we just listened to records---the sex pistols, marrianne faithfull, the cure, the clash until one of the needles just made that sound and all of us were too out of it to do anything.

robbie was his name, jared's friend. he died in that room with us, but i left sometime around 4 am, out walking around looking for my car. never afraid of the street. so close to gunshots and the jail that hides right near capitol records.

jared's secret is in my journal. i need it back. he's not going to be implicated, nothing happened, someone just took too much and i thought he was sleeping by the time i left.

you were there too, but i never told you. i didn't want you to carry that with you. i'll carry it for everyone, plus you told me that things made you break, that was when i stopped telling you the truth. maybe we can remember it together sometime. me on one side of the table knowing something i will never tell you and you on the other side asking me for something in exchange for my journal. but, at some point i'll go get us starbucks and i'll put the pill in yours and you will pass out and i will get what's mine.

i have some secrets i want to protect---none of them are mine---you and i lived--- when so many others were dead on accident.

If I Die Before I Wake, Burn My Stories First

If die before I wake, Burn My Stories First

I was looking at the back of the world’s ugliest sweater. It’s the kind with the ribbon that goes in and out of the holes in a line of the pattern. You would like it. You think that sort of thing is pretty. We like different things. You like the ornate, I like simple, stripped down things, distilled to their soul. Other than that, we fuck good. You cook for me, but you have gotten fat and boring. I like the sex, but can’t stand the fantasy football. The way you sit at your broken red computer and lurk there and complain about a dude named Carnival and then stare outwardly when I notice that nothing is going on inside your mind. The brain you pretended to have is all gone and you resent me for that. You aren’t doing your dreams and you resent me for that. You resent me for everything, but won’t say it.

One day you tell me I look like Rosanna Arquette in this movie about a deep sea diver. The next day you tell me, “That jacket of yours makes me want to die. You make me want to die.”

Who cares. We are just wasting days until one of us bleeds out.

Sometimes I float up out of my body and look down at myself and wonder what my mom would think of my low choice in a man. I do not think about what my dad would think, cause that would only hurt. It’s like I’m behind a screen of smoke or some kind of thick vapor that prevents me from seeing the truth, which is your hair is unfortunate and you already told me all your stories and they were all good ones but only about other people. You have no real stories to tell because you have to hide what you’ve actually done to people. If you keep talking about your friends, maybe I won’t ever know.

All you had was a record player. What did we wear? Nothing. You wanted us naked at the keyboard and at the bass. But you couldn’t concentrate. You’d write one line and have to go smoke or call your dealer or text your old girlfriend, the one that loves you even if you hurt her and like to hurt people because you have nothing going on inside. It makes you feel important to hurt her, like you meant something once even if you’ve wasted your whole entire life.

You told me, “Baby? I like to suck a dick every now and then. what do you think of that?”

I said, “I think you shouldn’t tell me about it, but if you really like it, you should do it.”

In my mind I’m thinking, whose dick? Some tranny? Or even if you sucked any of your bisexual friends’ dicks then what would happen to me? Maybe you should use a mouth condom, but even though everyone talks about mouth condoms—does anyone know anyone who has ever actually used one?

You disappear one afternoon and hide in bushes up near Dodger Stadium smoking crack with homeless people. I wonder if you suck their dicks. If they are clean and if they smell like homeless people dirt smell or if they smell good like a clean dick.

Whenever you disappear, I wonder about girls not realizing you prefer sexual contact with boys or men or whatever. I consider that you and I made love for 5 hours at a time without breaks. I wonder what that means and think about it categorically like this: but if he likes cock and made love to me for 5 hours what does that equal? Like an equation for such a thing could equal something tangible. As if making love equals love. Or the words spoken are stand ins for action never taken. I love you, but have to go suck a dick and shoot crack and tell everyone else all my stories so they can tell me I’m amazing. To you, love equals absence. In a way, that’s true for all of us. Love that can equal an absence makes sure you can never really be invested in anyone. Not in the way where if you invested your full heart, that to lose a person would unearth you. Take you apart bit by tiny bit until you were nothing.

One day you came back, you were clean again for 3 days, I dosed you in the bed and gave you Suboxone and Xanax. You told me you were going to see your son. But, then you made pancakes.

“I have to go get high.”

“But I thought you were seeing Jack.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t you see him and then get high?”

“I can’t wait is all.”

“Don’t you love him?”

“I love him but don’t want to give him anything. Same for you.”

I was all sucked out at that point. But, your friend had been calling me over and over wanting to see me. It didn’t mean anything, it was just loneliness. The loneliness of a love that is only an absence not a presence.

I slept with him. I’m not proud nor would I ever tell you. He hated you and called you a cockroach and didn’t understand how you could end up with someone like me. He thought he was better than you in bed and one day, while he was inside of me he said:

“I bet you’ve never had anyone make love to you like this.”

I started laughing. I laughed so hard and long that he rolled off of me and looked sad.

“You still love him, I can’t believe it.”

“No, it’s not love, it’s the obsession with why someone would hurt me. It’s not even the same.”

I call that dude jackhammer because that was his idea of sex. He thought he knew what he was doing even though it was clear he didn’t know and wouldn’t ever know. I didn’t want to take that away from him. It bored me to see someone so engaged in something that didn’t even interest me, but I needed someone to pretend to love me again. Not in the same way you pretended to love me. The way you pretend to love is more believable. That’s why there’s a string of broken hearts all around you.  I always said you should have been an actor.

But, now, I hate you with my whole heart, just like you wanted.

But, I still want my stuffed puppy dog back. The one that was supposed to protect you while you were shooting drugs. He wasn't supposed to be yours forever. He was just like a companion or something. Do you even know his name is Flip Wilson? I don't like the idea of him with that girl you met in rehab. Her talking all baby talk to him and stuff. I don’t like the idea of that dog in your sober living with the dudes that peep each other through the hole in the closet. That dog saves lives and he wants to come back to live with me, but if he has scabies or something then forget it. 

people who hate me make me famous!!!!!!

My friend wrote me a love letter. I guess it's a love letter, because I don't know what else to call it. She is one of my favorite writers in the program at UCI where I am getting my MFA. This girl and another guy, who I will just call BLANK (because I didn't ask permission to use his name) encouraged me and loved me into a submissive state of self-love and openness that has never occurred before or since. I love these two people with all my heart and soul and they make me want to be whatever I am in all its flawed uncontrollable energetic glory.  At some point this summer I asked Kat to remind me who I am. I asked her to tell me what she thought of me and to reflect back that I should stay here on planet earth and continue to be my Lisa Douglass self. As per usual I was looking for some form of validation of a self that I don't always completely understand but that I exist within as I am in this current human body----I was hoping for just a sentence or two of what meaning I might have to people here on the earth as we know it. Instead, Kat wrote me the following thing. I read it on my phone, in a room with people who were very very sad. People who I love. I cried openly, but no one noticed, immersed as they were in their need to stay alive in their own way, just like I do through words. Happily, I share this with you, because I've never had anyone say these things to me and because I have had many people think that I hear things like this often when nothing could be further from the truth. I reflect back to you, to ask a friend to tell you what they think of you, because it might be interesting. I doubt, with my whole open heart, that you will ever get a letter so beautiful and well equipped to keep you going one more day, but in this case, I humbly thank Kat for saving my dear heart and for reminding me that sometimes people see things that I cannot see at all. Namely, myself.

Kat Lewin

                  Lo, we have reached a period in the troubled beginnings of this millennium – a crossroads – at which nothing is as it appears. Banks are government-subsidized for-profit industries, PETA kills tens of thousands of kittens a year, and everyone on the internet is a ten-year-old police officer. It’s an ugly scene, no doubt, and to make it through the day while swallowing the absolute bare minimum of Pills That Make Us Not Feel Feelings (for which I praise the god who probably doesn’t exist), we need one truth to hold dear. Oh it’s time, my kittens, for a manifesto.

And on this worrisome day, there is BUT ONE THING I HOLD MANIFEST: There are very few damn good things in this world. Lisa Douglass is pretty much all of them, condensed down into superdense space plasma.

THE MANIFESTO OF LISA DOUGLASS, BEAUTIFUL, HONEST, CUPCAKE-SCENTED VIDEO-MAKING GODDESS



1. Lisa Douglass is not a goddamn liar. You know how we all loved Catcher in the Rye when we were thirteen, before it became embarrassing to admit you like Catcher in the Rye, because when you’re thirteen everyone you meet IS a goddamn phony and, by gum, you do hate those phony bastards? I don’t care whether it’s embarrassing or not: everyone you meet at thirteen is a phony bastard. Everyone you meet at twenty-three is a phony bastard. Everyone you meet at thirty-three and forty-three – the world is filled with douchebags, and we need to keep acknowledging that so we can treasure the rare prize of a non-phony.



2. Lisa Douglass is not a phony. If your hair is fucked-up, she’ll tell you your hair is fucked-up. If your prose is fucked-up, no one else will tell you. Lisa Douglass will tell you. This is a gift that surpasses that of the wish-granting gem.



3. Lisa Douglass will never say anything about you that she won’t say to you. And usually the things she says to you – the things she says to me, anyway – are the kinds of things you give up hope on people saying because you’re beginning to suspect they’re probably only wishful thinking on your part.



4. Lisa Douglass is unfairly beautiful



5. and the chick has style, that kind of style that you can’t beg borrow buy or fake so if you’re not born with it, look, why don’t you just go ahead and get your Connecticut country house and keep shopping Isaac Mizrahi for Target the rest of your life, because you’re strictly drugstore-smells-alike and everybody knows it.



6. Lisa Douglass’s fiction is the reason we will always need fiction. She’s got that damn heart thing that most people are too scared to even approach. Her fiction makes you laugh but then it jabs you with that those truths that are big and hurt like fuck but you can’t put them away. Lisa Douglass isn’t afraid to butt heads with The Big Lie. Every other lame wannabe New Yorker fiction dude or Saunders-alike on the street fights their heart on the way to the page until it’s limper than a sell-by-yesterday supermarket porkchop. Lisa Douglass pins down that hot thrashing thing right to the page and she doesn’t even nuzzle it. She writes things that hurt me to read. (The good kind of hurt. Everything worthwhile hurts; the rest is just escape, and where did escape ever get anyone? Except Jews in Nazi Germany, I guess. THIS MANIFESTO IS NOT FOR JEWS IN NAZI GERMANY. THEY HAD THEIR OWN SHIT GOING ON AND ARE THUS EXEMPT FROM THESE VERY IMPORTANT THOUGHTS.)



7. I remember details about every single thing Lisa Douglass has ever turned into workshop. Go on. Test me sometime. She is the real goddamn thing and everything she writes gets into your skin and inside of you. Except it was already there inside of you, just waiting to be activated, because it is so goddamn true.



8. Sometimes Lisa Douglass’s fiction is so true and inspiring that it makes me hate myself, and go to the gym and run too long on the elliptical while thinking Why Am I Pretending To Be A Writer Thoughts, and then bang out twenty pages of red-hot prose while thinking, “What would Lisa say? How would she say it? How much of this is disguise and which parts of this needless façade would she crush into the dirt with one of her impeccably stylish boots?” Often when I’m writing fiction and it’s all weird and fake and New Yorkery, I tell myself, “Pretend you’re writing a letter to Lisa,” and you know what? It always helps me.



9. Did I mention Lisa Douglass is unfairly beautiful? Some people don’t think that’s important, and I know people are born with what they’re born with, but for my money, confidence and style make the world more bearable and goddamn is it nice sometimes to be able to look upon a person and think, “Yeah, your presence makes my life feel a little more like a movie I’d like to watch, one that’s filled with excitement and intrigue and Beautiful Things.”



10. Lisa Douglass actually gives a fuck about you. Maybe she gives too much of a fuck – maybe that’s something that hurts her beautiful truth-making heart – but even if it leads to painful vulnerability, it matters. Lisa Douglass writes the flat-out best critique letters I’ve ever read, because instead of talking about nuts&bolts and things that can be taught, she looks at the big picture: how art touches lives, how it makes people feel, how it can change you. It seems sometimes that Lisa Douglass is the only person who remembers What Actually Matters (which isn’t, in my experience, at least, always the easiest thing to remember).



11. Lisa Douglass is weird. Ultimate weird. Mega-weird. Irreplaceable weird. And if there’s anything more worth being than weird, I don’t even want to know about it. You can’t replace Lisa Douglass. Not in a room, not around a workshop table, not in the conversation of contemporary fiction, not in the world. Period. Everyone gives Henry Ford a lot of credit for creating the assembly line, with its interchangeable parts, and yeah, props to the dude for enabling twentieth century convenience – but the thing about convenience is it robs us of doing The Hard Thing, which is true and difficult and therefore the most worthwhile. Lisa Douglass, on the other hand? Roll up your assembly lines. She’s straight artisan.



12. Lisa Douglass is exquisite and magnificent and I adore her very, very much. Anyone who doesn’t is a phony a douchebag a flake and probably a communist.

These things, today and in perpetuity, I hold manifest.

Love love love,

K

This is Us: Dead

I feel them watching me. I am at the side of the basketball court. I hold my breath as I pass by. I know nothing of what they see, I can’t understand myself in that way. What I am to you, was always unknowable, so what I am to the world, is unknowable too. As much as I don’t want that to be true, it is. In my mind there is a ball of light, I don’t know how else to say it. It lives there and gives me all my ideas, but it is not really a part of me. instead it is larger than I am or larger than I pretend. When I think of you, you are in the absence, not in the light but outside of it. You live there and haunt me like a ghost. I have done many things to love you and just as many to hate you. I have tried to forget you, but you are all around me, like air.

When I had my first dog, which was my only dog, I understood that you can love a thing and fear it. Not fear it in the way you fear a monster, but fear it in the way, that the thing that loves you needs you and that you will never be enough for that thing. You are only you. A human. I am me. A girl. That is all I will ever be. I have tried to be more, but I was born this way. Fragile and trying to cover that up. I walk the planet knowing that things can love me, but that I cannot help those things. They will be outside of my reach to make safe or to save. This fact is like a tree. It is there and once you see it, it just is. Beautiful and green and vastly alive, but all alone in the way we all are when it comes down to it. A tree keeps its distance from the other trees, if they are too close, they fight for sunlight and their roots get tangled and they become each other. Or something.

I was thinking in that golden shiny ball earlier today and it moved. It traveled down into where my heart is supposed to be. It is there now, making that spot warm and getting it ready for something. I can’t sleep. I know what’s coming and I’m scared of it. I know I cannot meet the challenge of being anything at all except my quiet self, my real self that I hide because I don’t think you would like it or understand. I am usually on some sort of stage trying to entertain you so I can feel love.

Have you ever held a bird in your hand and felt its heartbeat? Birds are wonderful, I think my Father said that and he’s right. There have been many birds in my life. Broken ones. Dying ones. Healthy fat ones. I have always loved them. Except for seagulls or pigeons. Both of those birds make me sick. Like they are rodents with wings. Scavengers that aren’t actually birds at all, because they pick garbage and do a bird bath in gutters. I realize that doesn’t make sense, but nothing will after this. I am a different thing right now.

I am not of myself in the way that I can describe something as accurate or in the way I am actually feeling it. I have always wanted to say things with precision, but words have an inherent limitation being that we are all animals and communicating as if we are noble and fearless. That’s dumb isn’t it? To be something we aren’t.

When I went to school, I saw kids there. I didn’t know how to talk to them, because I was scared. I thought they all knew each other already and I didn’t know how to meet them. My mother would say, just go and play with them, but I didn’t know how. So, I would walk up to the place that the kids were playing and find something to do with my feet. I was ashamed that I didn’t know what they knew. It made me scared to be alive. Later, I became an athlete at least a playground athlete, on the monkey bars swinging the whole time so I looked busy and wouldn’t have to talk to anybody.

My mother used to say she was painfully shy and her sister looked like Elizabeth Taylor, but my mother looked like Audrey Hepburn and I thought she looked better. Not as fat. When I was little I always thought Elizabeth Taylor was fat, so to say someone looked better than her was stupid. Just be happy to look like Audrey, I would say, she’s thin. I was painfully shy to be myself, never comfortable to be myself. I thought I wasn’t enough. I remember sitting in my mother’s car while she had panic attacks and didn’t know how to drive across the street. I remember being so young and not knowing how to drive and thinking, this is a bad scene, me in this car and my mom freaking out. I didn’t know if telling her to stop acting crazy would make her more crazy. I remember thinking things I wanted to say and then not saying them afraid I would upset my mother. I was very quiet as a child.

When I told my mom I was too scared to go to school, she didn’t believe me. I was scared for real. I would go and no one would talk to me and I’d be scared. Later after I made friends the people I did meet told me I seemed stuck up. I just didn’t know how to meet them and it froze me. I found out if I got sick I could stay home. So, I was sick a lot. Earaches. Sore throats. Fevers. It kept me away from school and I could get codeine. Codeine didn’t help the pain, but it made me feel quiet and safe. In a warm bubble all by myself, but not caring anymore that that was the way it was and was always going to be. It made me happy to be alone. It made me understand I had the best brain and I was the coolest person.

I realized today that I tell people how to be around me, but they don’t pay attention. I am very particular and closed off while pretending to be open. They say they understand how to act, but eventually I see some glimmer in their eyes wherein they think I’ve changed my mind about the directions I’ve given them. I want to tell them, you can only be close if you play by the set of rules and parameters I have given you, but there is free-will and they think they’ll do things their way and that I will like it, it will be good for me—their way. Only their way shuts me out forever. They didn’t listen. I have rules—you can only get close by pretending not to and once you drop the pretense, you are out. There is no other way, it’s because I’m scared of dying.

I think about death more than most people. When I was little I knew that all the people I loved were going to die someday and the pain of knowing it was hard to take. There wasn’t anything I could do about it. I remember finding out. I was in my parent’s bedroom, I even remember the bedspread—it was mustard yellow and brown flowers or leaves or something. My father was on the bed and I was on the floor with my world piggy bank, I was counting my money and my father was telling me stories. I asked what would happen to me when everybody died and he told me I’d die too someday. Why be born at all if only to die? It seems unfair. It stayed—the knowledge of it. Most people know this and can forget it and that’s why they don’t do anything in their lives with a desperation—they think they have all the time in the world. Or feel content in relationships or find stability---But I know it and can’t forget it, so I am awake to it all the time, which is a burden in one way, wherein I’m in more pain and feel things all the time, because no one else seems to know what I know, that we are all going to be dead, so why not try things, at least just once? Why wait it out. I think that’s why I live the way I do, in a way, like I am perpetually on vacation, doing things children do or teenagers do. It’s because we are dying.

Dear Diary--Are You Bored Like Me?

Dear Diary,

When last we spoke, I had been thrown into a jail cell for a long weekend and it was the single best forced diet I have ever tried. What they don't tell you about jail is its like the worst highschool gossip nightmare anyone could imagine. You are not separated from people unlike you, you are sleeping, pissing and eating with them. My friend Anna was looking at a 7 year sentence for heroin possession. She was my jail friend, someone I would only know then and never again. I always like to think she is the one Anthony Kiedis wrote about in one of his songs, "she got seven years for being sad." I was released before her and being held for a very bad crime that I did not commit. My boyfriend had his jaw broken in  four places by some gang in Venice. I had driven drunk and hit the car that came after us. By the time we got home Brett was so angry he jumped up and down on my guitar and smashed one of my chairs to my little antique table. Although I was in bed and crying because Brett could not be persuaded to go to the hospital, the cops came because of the screaming. He told the cops I had broken his jaw with the chair leg. Anyone knows that in Los Angeles, if the cops are called and there is a scratch on the other person, they have to take you in. Brett later recounted everything in front of a judge and I was exonerated and the "crime" was expunged from my record. It was a long nightmare, Brett, but I'll never forget him. He's on me like a stain.

When I got out, I was skinny. The jail was in the middle of Los Angeles, near Beachwood. I lived on Argyle. I walked home and sat down and never wanted to be in a relationship again. 

Goodbye. You write to me next. Start it with---Dear Lisa (Wizard of all things Human) and end it with a sincere statement on what it's like to be you, the only one who hears my secrets. Till we meet again. Goodbye.

A Tale Of The Spider Who Was Actually Satan

A Tale of Why We Are So Fucked—As a Species

Before the Baby Salty Jesus birthed us and we became our non-human selves---it is written that we had once been human. We were real live human beings that liked to kiss and tell and do the Holiest of the holies in front of the videoscreen. But that was before the spider incident which later conflates into the Satan incident which follows:

Once upon a time, in the middle of winter, one winter when we were really fucking cold in our beds and wearing our see-through hot pink number without panties, somebody came to visit us in our rooms. It was the first night after the brand new white sheets and the first night of the spider who stared at us with his beady eyes on our bedspread—wherein we went---why is that spider’s legs spread out like he is about to run the 100 yard dash and why do I feel like he is conscious and wants to talk to me about something quite important?

We were all ears.

On this night of the spider, we looked again and there was a man, this man was Satan.

Remember: Before this happened---We had known how to love one another without fear and we had understood that one text does not make or break any relationship of value and we had been unafraid to do what we liked because there was no fear to do the Happy.

But, what happened was we wanted to be cool, more than we wanted our hearts deepest desires and Satan knew that on some level when he came to us in the nighttime while we were fast asleep in our angelic poses in our beds without wrappers or crumbs but still in a cute outfit. On that night that Satan came, we opened up our beautiful orphan eyes and said to the Bad son of God because he was more competitive than Jesus and corrupted souls through deviant means:

 “Hi.”

Satan the Lord of Darkness had a little contract with him and he was charming and good looking (even better looking than our adorable bedmates who we had just stopped hugging to witness the aforementioned spider)

and Satan goes: “Hi.”

We felt our wholeness right then and there. We were no longer ordinary—we were visited by Satan and that fed our enormous but undeservedly so's ego.

It was terrifying how like a human Satan seemed and how handsome and how we hoped he would text us the next day. (We smoothed our hair in the face of it).

But we weren’t scared of new things at that point, we were still innocent with pure hearts.

What Satan said was hey, you seem cool and I’ve been watching how everyone else kind of looks to you as the model of cool and how you have a hard time with commitment and significant others, so I was thinking you might want to join a club:

The Club of Not Feeling or Caring and Impure Hearts but Look Cooler Than Everyone Else Club. 

We thought we might.

He made it sound so fancy.

So, Satan the Lord of Darkness made us sign a commitment to not feeling human emotions at the expense of our inbred coolness. So, we were like: “OK, what do we have to lose anyway, we are always trying to avoid feelings and stuff by eating too much or too little or buying shoes and obsessing on how to wear our hair in order to be neat and different.” But, really we just said, “OK.” (Because we want to be considered cool and like we aren’t overthinking this shit).

And we signed.

The contract basically said, anyone who loves you from here on our will be seen as the enemy and Lo and Behold it motherfucking was.

After that our hearts were closed off. God and the Baby Salty Jesus were disturbed and kept sending us people who wanted to love us, but we only saw them as suspects in a larger scheme of our newfound paranoia of all things cute and adorable and we read into everything with the one thought: What can this person possibly want from me? Fear Fear Fear Fear Fear Fear Fear Fear Fear Fear Fear I'm Scared, Etc. (Only to be cured with copious amounts of anonymous sex and vast amounts of designer shoes for the girls or car stuff for the boys).

And that is how we became non-human and unable to love.

Please send $200 to Lisa Douglass at her PayPal

fishtwin@earthlink.net

For this most important fact that is unchangeable and why we are all so fucked.

The end.

Why Doesn't He Like Me, Lisa?

I also get calls from girls, going, why didn't he like me? Wasn't I cute enough? Smart enough? Did I bang him too soon or not soon enough or in the right position or it took too long or too short, Etc. Etc.
Here's the Real truth---I sat with my friend, kind of famous for being good in the sack and good in jail, and he told me the real reasons, the ones we all fear are true but never get told because the guys are being polite. His name is not Matt and not Brian and not Gregory and NOT Josh and or JIM (although those are five very good SOLID guesses).

Exhibit one:  Your pussy is too tight. This is the one boys can never say because it harkens back to pre-verbal stage when the insie-dimensions of the pussy-of-the-world---the one belonging to the MOMMY, well.. Yours reminds him of that pussy and he can't have that pressure on him ever ever ever again.

Exhibit two: You text smilicons and emoticons and tell him too many flowery things after he leaves your apartment and before he gets back to the other girl he is fucking. She then looks through his phone and the boy gets in trouble. So he gets FUCKED three times, not just twice like he planned.

Exhibit three: You believed the lie the boy told to get into your pants. It was basically, I really really really like you and even though I have a horrible reputation that all your friends warned you about I won't treat you that same way. In this way, the boy feels he's degraded you and that you aren't that smart. Dumb girls scare boys as much as smart ones do.

Exhibit four: Whenever he looks in the mirror and go: MONKEY! BANG!, you ask him what that means. It just isn't polite to always be asking a dude what everything means. And he doesn't know how to answer you anyway. (See: Exhibit Seven).

Exhibit Five: He likes bigger titties or smaller titties or faker ones or less fake ones or ones with the giant nipples and you only have the tiny pink nipples and he likes the other kind of nipples the opposite of the ones you have. The darker ones or pinker ones or bigger and or smaller ones. (This one can be fixed by painful plastic surgery ONLY IF the dude is willing to tell you his preference--which is very hard to get a person to admit).

Exhibit Six: Your breath is bad, consistently like you just ate a whole plate of salmon. Boys don't like that salmony breath, but are scared to tell you, the only difference is they will fuck you first and then ignore you unlike a girl who if they smell the salmony breath will just think of a cat they once had. (Cat's name: Mittens).

Exhibit Seven: You analyze everything the boy said or did or didn't say or didn't do and you go over it with your smartest friends and your dumbest but sexiest friends and then you call some psychics to see if they can get it right or tell you that very thing that is a match for the answer YOU WANT TO BE true but never is. You analyze it to mean the boy really must LOVE you, that is why he is avoiding you and that is why he said that thing about Mr. Rodgers and that is what the spirit guides mean when they said: HE IS NOT THE ONE (in your mind it still equals HE LOVES ME). Hint which hurts: He's not intimidated or too into you to call. (Hint which hurts more: If he won't fuck you, he doesn't find you attractive---for serious--NO one is going to say out loud--I don't want to bone you cause of your weird NOSE, that's just mean).

Exhibit Eight: The boy didn't like you all that much, he just wanted to see what all the fuss was about and you seemed to enjoy yourself too, so what's the BIG WHOOP? (And you actually did say too much or not make the right sounds during the "special act.")

Exhibit Nine: Cars and motorbikes and "TIME WITH THE BOYS"; and or working too much or not working enough or working on himself---all code for: I DON'T LIKE YOU I JUST WANT TO FUCK YOU AND DISCARD YOU LIKE A FILTHY WHORE but are too polite to say what I want.

Exhibit Ten: Once when the boy was very small he realized he only liked blondes and you, sadly, are brunette, beautiful, but only for fucking not for marrying. DYE YOUR HAIR unless you don't have the skin for it, then MOVE ON.

The boys say sorry they are such cowards, but are convinced that you are cowardly too in too many ways to count seeing how you are the weaker sex only to be used for sex and psychological domination. SORRY, they feel really really bad and guilty but you mean nothing to them.

See: Porn addiction

See: Video Chat Rooms

See: Lying.

Sincerely, boys of the Americas and British Isles (Not Japanese or Kazakstanian boys).

Why Doesn't She Like Me, Lisa? A Tell All.

To all the boys who have been calling me recently telling me that a cute girl dumped them and they don't know why but think they want to know but even as I write this I am doubtful that anyone wants the truth, still I submit the following: 

Exhibit One: Your breath is bad, terrible even and we don't know how to say that thing to you. 
Exhibit Two: Your penis has the same exact dimensions of the one guy that you can never replace because he was WAY more dysfunctional as a lover and we need that dysfunction to feel sad about ourselves and our place on planet earth as the weaker species.
Exhibit Three: You aren't smart but try to be and we don't know how to handle that. We feel scared of dumb things.
Exhibit Four: We slept with your ex wife and or girlfriend and she told us about that thing you did once that you better not do with us but that you secretly hope will get you arrested one day. We actually admire you for doing it too, we think that took balls.
Exhibit Five: We aren't that available but tried to be. There was that tiny window, but then it closed, you were too nice, mean, angry, sweet, horny, not-horny-enough, BLANK, hungry, too skinny, too KAZAKSTANIAN but without the charm, too fat.
Exhibit Six, Seven and Eight: We wanted something different, we aren't sure what, but we'll know it when we see it.
Exhibit Nine: Your voice lacks testosterone and if we wanted a female lover, well..
Exhibit Ten: Your life lacks adventure and seems boring. 
We hope you understand, please forgive us our cowardice but we are fairly certain that you have been a coward too.
See: Ex wife
See: Ex girlfriend
See: Truckstop Bathroom
Sincerely, 
Women everywhere.

Night In Hell at the Chelsea Hotel

Night in Hell at the Chelsea Hotel

The man was married, but not in any traditional sense. Morally speaking, he was getting off his original mark. The Chelsea stunk of perfume and opium. His trench coat was black and he was dirty. Dirty from drinking in a nearby dive, dirty from living wrong, from not being able to love. He brought Dolly with him, if this was his last night on earth, he might as well fuck. She was no whore either; she had nice skin and a pretty smile. She told him the first time she got paid for it; she had been out all night and forgot where she was going. Something about a bus ticket home. She said she had a mental disturbance that made her forget every man she had since that first one. She was smart though and took to reciting Allen Ginsberg's Howl for entertainment every time things got too quiet.

Finally, he said, shut up, and he took her hand in his and they walked quietly up the stairs. From some of the rooms you could hear fighting and others you could hear the white noise of late night TV. He held her hand and then opened the door. They sat on the couch with a bottle of wine. He told her it was going to be a bad night after she was gone. “I don’t have to go.” She rested her head on his shoulder feeling the warmth of two people who needed something they couldn’t give the other one.  He had changed his mind when he got her inside. It seemed too sad somehow to have sex with someone he didn’t even really know except for drinking. Too ordinary. Too every other girl he’d every met-like.

“Don’t you want to?” Dolly said.

“Nope. I want you like this, if we do it, I won’t be remembered.”

“It could be fun,” Dolly said, but made a face that said otherwise.

“I’m not going to be every other guy to you. No way.”

After she fell asleep, the man told himself that he better listen to some music and he better do his drugs before morning.  He gently moved Dolly’s head off his shoulder and lowered her onto his couch.  He pulled the blanket off the chair and draped it over her.  He thought her face was pretty in a noble sort of way, the kind of face that seems wiser than anyone else, only appearances were false, that much he knew. It wasn’t like he thought it was going to be, he knew things he wasn’t supposed to know, he tried it out and he realized he was good at it though, so what the hell, he did it every chance he got.  Some would call it weakness, but others might say it was talent.

He poured more wine. He got the David Bowie album and put it on.  Dolly was asleep so he didn’t put it on too loud.

Ground Control to major Tom

Ground Control to Major Tom

Take your protein pills may god’s love be with you.

Ground Control to Major Tom.

He sat down and dialed hoping against hope she wouldn’t pick up. Why does it always have to be me that calls, he was thinking. She answered.

“I know, I know.  I don’t give a fuck who’s sleeping.”

“Really, is that so?  Do you fight with him like we did? I miss you.”

She didn’t say it back.

Later at four, he put a gun in his mouth and said goodbye for good.

Advice For Writers

Lately, people have been writing to me asking me to help them in a variety of ways. Some of them are cool when I say, look I'm all tapped out, some of them get mad and don't understand my health issues or that I'm in school for a another full year after this one is done. So, here we go--My blanket advice to writers who hate me for telling them the truth and the manipulative ones who try to make me feel shitty for being a real live human barely able to do my own work: you guys can get fucked.

Rules for becoming a writer:

1. Fall in love. It should be noted that there are different versions of love most of which include one person parasitically sucking off the other more strong person, but this still can be used to the writer's benefit. What you do is you label anything love that you can't figure out or when a person acts inconsistent, one day happy, one day angry (like father), and you sleep with that person and you listen to their hopes and dreams and they never ask you about yours and you don't care because deep inside you know this isn't the real thing but the sex parts feel good and you really really really like their nose, but inside you know it won't last. This isn't love, and you won't call it love, but it will hurt you when you end it just as if it were real love because the person with the nose you love will cry and act needy and you will go, where is the one guy and or girl who is not needy and just wants to be around me without projecting their past bullshit onto me and assuming that I feel more for them than they feel for me when usually it is not the case. Don't you remember the story about my dog and how I stopped being able to love after my dog was put to sleep while I was at school? Bambi--I miss him. He loved me. He did hump my leg (not dissimilar from the men I date or even fake date). But, he loved me in a way that no one else can because their private parts steer that part of their brain that they try to idealize and call things love when it is really can I put my privates into your privates and will you be nice to me after and see me as a superhero? 

2. Get drunk and take pills. This part, is debatable, because I no longer drink, but the thing is but when I did drink I DRANK EVERYTHING and drank with a vengeance and drank at people and drank with men without teeth and found myself making out with harelip dude and toothless dude and then had boyfriends that did drugs so I did drugs with them and we HATED each other and HATED ourselves, but it was FUN. The ones who drink are in the most pain and their pain makes it interesting to be them in their confusing sad lives and they are the best writers invariably. I also think the one guy in my class who only likes dogs and hates humans is going in the right direction. 

3. Jail. I think if you want to be a writer and you have never been arrested you can still be a nice writer, many people might read you, I just won't care about it very much. But, I, thankfully, in all my pretentious un-goodness as a human being, am not your only reader, nor will I ever buy your books or think you're cool at all.

4. Look rad. This one is a must for any writer. It doesn't have to do with your face as much as keep yourself cool looking. You have to have personal style. That is very important. A style that is not copied or fake. It is your own and while there may be copiers, no one does your style like you do.

5. Learn to hate. I was raised by Seventh Day Adventist/Christian Scientist/Sometimes Cult member parents and they taught me to never lie, never dance, if you are sick that there is something wrong with you on a deep spiritual level, because you wouldn't get sick if you could pray rightly. I don't hate them, but I have learned to hate ideas. Learned to hate people who try to make me feel guilty. Learned to hate parasites. Learned to hate the things in myself that close off to you when you are an ignorant person. Hate has wings. Hate is memorable. You can write about hate. I'd much rather be hated than almost anything else. I love hate.

6. Read astrology. This one sounds totally dumb, but is as real as the rest of them. Look up why people are acting certain ways and find that astrology answers the most predictable of all the questions you would ever have about said person, confirming what you already know but are loathe to say. Then you can admit to yourself that people can be categorized and no one is really unique or even that different from what it says about you on google. Take me for example Pisces with Leo rising. I am difficult, self-righteous and hard to be close to, but once you are in, I am loyal forever. If you cross me, you will go on my dry-erase board and become one of the people I am on a singular mission to destroy psychologically. It will happen. The Pisces may easily swim away if you do one wrong thing, but they never forget a slight. Not EVER. Serious. And while Pisceans are the most loving and giving of the zodiac, their ability to choose inappropriate partners is legendary as can be seen if you study this blog. But, the leo rising part makes up for it in ways that will make you scared to be alive. All this is factual and should be paid attention to in legions of ways, so that you can figure everyone out and waste a whole shit ton of time wherein you should be writing.

7. Be irresponsible. (Steal stuff, sleep with bad people, say stuff you don't mean, fake love fake people, don't be honest, etc.) This creates the kind of guilt that keeps writers up at night and those writers have very little to do having already worn out their lover, so they have to write stuff down so that their conscience can catch a break.

8. Lie. This one should be obvious to any would be writer. But, you only tell the truth on paper, lying and exaggerating facts makes you memorable and while you never lie on the page you confuse all those around you into thinking you are someone you aren't and this makes you memorable. (Writers, that are real should be memorable).

9. Be memorable. In all ways, be different. Think different, say different things that no one else would say because they are too concerned with being properly human but not a real human. Don't cater to societal expectations. Be a nice person one day a mean person the next. 

10. Write. While this is something that should be obvious to anybody, it isn't. You should write everyday and have opinions about the world you live in that are sacrilegious and scary to others, but don't fabricate this--they must be the secret things inside of yourself that you secretly think but would never ever say because you are too polite to say to someone's face. Say those things. Like when I broke up with you and I said the sex was good I only said it to make your face stop crying. I didn't say it because it was real. 

11. Be more yourself. I don't know what else to say about this one. Only you know what that means. But, if you are secretly copying anybody, trying to be like somebody else in anyway, style, dress, speech, thought, stop that shit and become what you were born to become. YOUR OWN PERSON. 

12. Eat things that aren’t known to be food, like hotpockets.

13. Question God or ideas on God or all the ideas that are in your head and ask yourself, are these my own made up ideas or did I steal them or be infected by someone else’s thinking to believe them. do this everyday about everything until you are able to generate your own ideas not tainted by socialization, weird parenting or psychologically abusive “friends.”

14. Dump people that are dicks. Do not let people around you that don’t make you feel better or suffer in some way, but for sure get rid of the dicks. Especially if they are dumb.

15. Burn things in your oven. Food because you fell asleep, but other things are fun to burn in there too. Use your imagination.

The end.

The Burning

The Burning

And there are other reasons I burned the mattress.

I learned to sleep standing up against the wall

The moon cast a shadow on the mattress

of the both of us when we were children.

You were in your bug phase

The one where we researched the bugs that could exist

in a house with no couches, no tables.

You told me, “They smell like cumin.”

But I couldn’t smell it

We checked our bodies

Cleaned our couches

I still have the vacuum cleaner

It was 400 dollars.

You were married, that’s the one thing I never say

It was a girl who worshipped me

Her name was almost like mine. 

Caroline--Dedication

Some of you know that my friend Caroline Thompson died of an overdose January 6th. I still don't know what exactly happened, and it is a terrible loss to everyone. Before she left us, I had just been offered publication in a journal called Blood Lotus Journal---it will be my piece Try Stuff--it's somewhere on this blog. I wrote to Caroline or called her and told her to submit. Then, she died. Her father recently wrote to me and said her poem On a Drawing of How to Kill Sam Pink was accepted and what did I think of the journal. I told him it was a great journal up that gets looked at by the Pushcart people and they give chances to many amazing new writers--in other words I told him what I knew--please accept. I will be in that same journal with her, so I wrote to the editor and asked him to make sure we were going to really be together in the same issue. She was a poet, and he is the fiction editor, so it took a few hours to figure it out. But, he wrote to me sincerely offering his condolences for the loss of this friend and wonderful writer, and asked if I would like to say anything on her behalf--of course I would, but what could I say? Her poetry is a work of genius? That she was a beautiful human who made me laugh at myself? What? So, I wrote a small dedication and it took me awhile to come up with something that made sense and didn't sound trite. Death is confusing, I'm still sad over it and I didn't want to be indulgent--I want Caroline to be remembered. So, the following will appear in the next issue of Blood Lotus Journal as a dedication to our friend Caroline Thompson. We fucking miss your guts, my dear and you will not be forgotten. 

Caroline Thompson was my friend and fellow writer. She died on January 6th of an overdose that for sure was accidental. I know Caroline’s choice those final days resulted from the thing most of us as writers deal with, an overwhelming sensitivity to the harshness of day to day reality and that she just wanted peace for one second from the brain that she was gifted with. Unfortunately the wrong mixture ended her life and broke our hearts. She was a wonderfully inappropriately funny human who wrote about the absurdity of life in a way that was remarkably disturbed and poignant. I miss her terribly. You can find her work at http://carolineruththompson.wordpress.com <http://carolineruththompson.wordpress.com/> . And who am I? Just another contributor to Blood Lotus Journal. I am honored to be printed in the same edition as my dear friend. I wish you all could have met her. She would have made you laugh your guts out. This little blurb is in her memory and to remind all of us who struggle with such things: life is beautiful, hard and incomprehensibly short. So, do what you love and be yourself and stay alive. Your invisible friend, Lisa Douglass.

Castera Street

Castera Street

On the floor of Nana’s house

---I was sent there because my mother couldn’t handle

my sister and I--

I played with dolls and gave them voices and names

Nana disappeared into back rooms

or outside to water succulents

the plastic pitcher with flowers on the side

I never followed her unless I needed something to eat

she sometimes made me those cookies
white powdered sugar over crescent moons
Later she forgot my name
called me, Janet, her dead alcoholic daughter
I thought that meant I was bad
but had no one to ask
Sometimes I sat in the avocado tree
watching her love her plants

bending down, dusting them in her sun-hat

I wondered why there were no other girls on that street

I asked Nana-- she said it was time to water the garden.
When I slept there, I stared at the alarm clock with
glowing hands while
Nana drew letters on my back
and I would guess what they were
Sometimes I would confuse X with T
because of the angle.
Nana slept with toilet paper pinned to her hair
and I asked her once
“When you die can I have this?”
holding up a beautiful watch with diamonds for initials
I didn’t know what I was saying
She walked out of the room

Her short heels clack clacking on the hard wood floor

He Wore The Shirt I Slept In

He Wore The Shirt I Slept In

I
My ex is behind me

Watching my neck, my ear, my hand to my cheek
I slump down in the black dress
On a chair that belongs in basements
Cold and hard 
My black suede booties slung out into the aisle
Covering the feet that inspired him

To paint the dead thing and stick it on my wall
Leg over leg or ankle stretched out
I am with witch girl

Who swears she sewed her soul into mine

But I can’t feel it
She laughs her puppet arms around me
I touch her face like a lover
And make fun of her blow-job lips
Not quite kissing them, but almost

II
I stand in line and turn to catch him
In the purple shirt
I used to sleep in
Hiding by the coffeemaker
Eyes like a showroom
Full of the things he once loved
And remembering the things he thought I could make him forget
I only glance in his direction then turn
To the two men who want to talk about
My outfit, my style and what they think about
Late at night
I turn again to see my ex hiding, but I can’t see his face
Just the shirt and the torso of my lost lover
He hasn’t been eating
That much is clear