Narcisa is not for weaklings or idle spectators. This book is for the kind of trail-blazing rebels who make our world memorable.

Have you ever been with a new lover, someone you found on a beach somewhere, and they scare you? But you take them to your blanket anyway? And you gaze into their eyes anyway? And you give them your body, inch by spectacular inch? Anyway? Well, there is this moment when you realize you are about to lose yourself in the Other, so you hold hands to try to stay on this earthly plane. But you cannot, because, by now, their spirit has overtaken you, gotten inside of you, and started to rearrange things. Tiny animal noises emanate from your mouth or their mouth—you cannot tell whose anymore, because, at this point, you are one being.

It is not that way with all lovers, of course. And it is not that way with all books. But with Jonathan Shaw’s Narcisa, it IS like that---it takes you beyond your mundane, day-to-day life, and plummets you straight into the Abyss, where Satan is your only tour guide and his sprung angels attend your wounds.

You become something else after being with such a lover---and after immersing yourself in such a book. You become a person who was once predictable and easy to define, but is now someone beyond description or comprehension.

You can’t really transmit something like this to anyone with mere words—they must fully experience it for themselves. There are things one simply cannot tell another person. They must have their own first-hand knowledge. Prison. Jail. Obsessive love run riot. Sex. Drugs. Murder. Betrayal. Love. Addiction. The Bottomless Pit. The Dark Night of the Soul. You get the picture.

Jonathan Shaw’s Cigano and Narcisa are two lost souls, living in the gutter, but staring at the stars. These characters come from that special place where the animal meets the divine; the place where one fights the other for their stake in unspeakable things. Things at once profane and sublime. These characters are both entertaining and tragic. They are the train wreck you cannot look away from, because to miss a single crucial detail would be a disservice to your own soul.

I always say school gave me back my brains. It also did something to my nervous system that no amount of sex or accolades or external validation could ever do---Jonathan Shaw’s Narcisa gives you back your soul and your heart in that same special way. It is a must read for anyone who struggles on this earthly coil with questions of sincerity, the search for God, or the tragic-comical, angelic and delusional quest for new life through another's body, mind and soul; questions whose answers are so disappointing and uninspiring, we might even consider death itself a worthy alternative.

Jonathan Shaw deals fearlessly with such questions, and hands them back to us in a way we can understand, and thereby be freed of our need to self-destruct in the face of such a drab disappointment of a world.

We are yours Jonathan. Do whatever you want with us. Your book is not only life-changing, but might even teach us all how to be more bravely authentic. How to be courageous, even at the precipice of death. We are with you. We are you.

Do not look away from this book, dear reader. If you are of mediocre stock, of course, that would be the only way you ever could look upon such a harsh vision of Truth. But even if you have a suspect genetic lineage, this book has the power to restore whatever you were initially meant to be.

Narcisa is not for weaklings or idle spectators. This book is for the kind of trail-blazing rebels who make our world memorable.

 Jonathan Shaw is at his finest and darkest here, but holding up a literary torch so blindingly bright, the reader can fight his own demons with it, while seeing exactly where, what, and who they are.

- Lisa Douglass
SALVE OGUM!!

to all my friends and frenemies---at least i have the balls to stand for something

to all my friends and frenemies: a note about the human condition. the only reason a frenemy is in your life is to teach you about yourself or to awaken the parts of yourself that are dormant--to remind you of your own dreams your own lack of integrity, your own shady shit---get fucking angry---gossip, do your very worst, cause the brightest lights cannot be diminished--they just burn bright so you can see yourself and remind you of who you really are---underneath all that phony posturing. and you can resent them all you want, but in the end, if you really get that---you'll love yourself more by knowing all the people that bug you and call you out and annoy the fuck out of you--cause they are just mirrors of you. that's all they are there for, so you can love yourself in all your glorious flawed fuckedupery. those are your friends. 

your frenemies are the ones that fake smile at your face so they can be liked but then talk shit behind your back or fuck your dude or jack your shoes when you aren't looking. 

one dude said to me today that i was terrifying to him. he was secretly in love with me but i was in all my uncensored glory, cause most of the time i don't say what i think cause it's too much and people find me to be "too intense." some days i don't care that much. i'm like, oh yeah? like cause i did drugs with dangerous people and i know that they always had my back cause i was for real, that makes me terrifying? and he's like, no man, you say the honest thing. i only said it cause there was a girl in the room who was hallucinating and i wanted her to know i hallucinated for my first two years in the fucking thing that i won't name to not be boring to the rest of you.  my friend is all----you've been to dark places and have no shame about it. actually, i can't remember what he said cause i was thinking of how i was going to return shoes and go to unemployment today and how i was going to start my life over just like the rest of you. but, i was listening sometimes going--most of the time, i edit it down cause i know you don't like it. and that's as shady as fuck to not just be whatever i am and say the real thing all the damn time. but, i gotta exist with the rest of you shut down, dishonest motherfuckers and i get lonely up here thinking all these crazy thoughts all by myself. 

i'm in these self help groups. and i won't advertise or say which one it cause for me it's touch and go. i never know if i'm going to stay or not cause if i decide to stay, i'll just leave. i do that with relationships, once i define it i'm out. so, i don't decide on it, i just keep going there--if i define it i feel trapped and my mind will find flaw with whatever thing it is. anyway, it's kind of a trendy thing to do in LA, but i don't know if using drugs is a disease or if it's just we like to get off. i don't decide that shit. i just don't like how much money it costs going to jail and i don't like how i act. and i don't like how i cut out all the people that love me, which i do a fair amount of drunk or sober. i don't like how i'm cut off from my own heart and have no more voice in the world. so there, we are in this vast movement trying to help others and ourselves, but what we have is an excluding fucked up hipster thing. 

it's like you get invited if you be gay and out. or you get invited if you keep your mouth shut or if you have a famous last name or if you can kiss the asses of the people around you better than i can. you get univited if you don't play by the rules and don't know how to talk to people or are a little bit shy. you get univited if your clothes don't look right or your bone structure isn't blue blood. fuck that. dudes. if drugs kill you, how you gonna pick and choose this shit? i think it's weird. it haunts me cause i have seen people die, kill themselves on purpose and on accident. i have seen dumb people say stupid shit like if you are on meds you aren't sober and then watch a beautiful 19 year old boy hang himself because that dude was under a doctor's care and needed to stay on the meds that kept the voices at bay. listen. i'm no advocate for anything except check yourself motherfuckers. we are in this fucking thing to stay alive. i never like to out myself about it cause i'm not a bastion of anything about it. i'm not all fucking spiritual, cause that shit almost killed me dead. i'm not all social there either, so what? i went back to school and i lost friends when i did it and going back to school was worth it dudes. that shit changed my DNA and my nervous system. so fuck.

fuck gender segregation that was a made up thing back in the day. talk to whomever you want to. you might save a life just by saying to a dude--you might be crazy, but i hallucinated and told someone who thought i was crazy and i don't hallucinate now. and if i OBEYED THE RULES, i would have said, you need to be talking to a dude. what kind of shit is that? plus, stay away from creeps but they ain't all creeps and it isn't fair to judge it like that.

there's this dude standing outside this morning this program of altruism. he is just learning to read and he was reading the other day and all these people were like--why the fuck are we having to wait while he reads---well---because he is changing his life--he is learning to read---no one speaks to him---no one says hi to him cause he doesn't look cool and he has two bags with him----and a fucking hope in hell that glows outside of him that his life can be different and he is going to make it so---that shit breaks my heart. he is full of love---last night when i ran into him he said he is learning to read by reading comic books and the little bubbles and i said---fuck the haters dude--you are doing it--you're doing great--don't give up. he is trying. shame on you for that shit and shame on you for hating anything that you don't understand. ain't we all just people anyhow? just be authentic. if you authentically hate a dude who is learning to read or do you hate him cause he don't look cool? or cause he's a little fat? or lives out of two bags--that dude has more class than the rest of us cause he's willing to look like he is, not a pretender---just being real about it, yo. go do something you can't do and let yourself be humiliated. that's why i go to dance class---to be lame out loud and to sometimes be brilliant and either way my spirit is happy---i'm not in a writing class to be the best in the room either. my ego gets enough food. fuck all that. do something you are totally fucking scared to do today and i will too.

i know i know, we're all scared of each other and it's just easier to talk to the people you know. i swear this is just cause that little dude today made me cry at my own lack of humanity. my own fucking lack of humility. my own lack of actually noticiing him today and saying hello. i'm yelling at me more than at you. 

why is it so easy to like the good looking successful people but not one person was talking to this sweet dude? i'm embarrassed for all humanity and embarrassed for my little tiny problems that are all made up anyway. fucking hell. there's my rant.

The Christmas That Everyone Forgot But Me

I had a dream about you. You came to my door wearing a giant bunny costume. No one spoke to one another. You sat on my couch and we both stared forward. You told me the story of your childhood crush on a boy and how you thought about him still. You told me you kissed him in the closet and it made you scared and happy all at the same time like crushes do. I didn't care. Everything was supposed to come as this giant shock to me, only nothing in dreams ever are. You spoke as if the secret was weighing on you, but I just left you there and made us hot chocolate. We were silent while we drank the cocoa. Me holding your giant bunny paw. We sat there in the godlessness of a state where you cannot let the person you love into you and I played us a playlist that another boy had given me---someone I blew off because I didn't feel like being owned---and we fell asleep, you on one side and me on the other, just like in life. In the morning you had taken off your bunny head. I told you, you are perfect. Love is love. I don't want anything from you and you don't want anything from me and that's the only reason you are here. I made crumpets covered in maple syrup and powdered sugar and one of us was crying. I can't remember who.

While eating our crumpets you told me you didn’t know if liking boys the way you do meant something bad. I tried to tell you human sexuality isn’t bad, it’s just bad if you do something you don’t want to do to make a person like you. You told me that many lifetimes ago, when you were a little boy in school, people made you nervous, but sometimes it was a girl and sometimes it was a boy. I’ve had many people tell me I make them nervous over a lifetime. I’ve had gay boyfriends. I’ve been conflicted about my attraction for gay women whom I always feel safe with. I never understood why regular girls didn’t like me. Gays are more real. They don’t lie. I’d rather be running up a mountain and climbing a tree than having my barbies play dress up and cook. Who wants to cook? Not me. All my boyfriends cook. I just ate a fig or a handful of nuts rather than have to cook. I’d rather be writing things that might change the world.

You looked stricken. You told me that you judged yourself for being pretty. But, boys are supposed to be pretty, I tell you. Boys are supposed to be prettier than the girl. Look at the animal kingdom. Plumes of feathers attract the female for example. But, no one tells you what to do when you are human. When two boys are pretty, it’s just normal. Sometimes a girl with lots of testosterone and no reason to identify herself as a heterosexual or a homosexual or even a bisexual gets thrown into the mix and then everyone wears costumes cause they just can’t handle that kind of thing. How can you handle someone who doesn’t claim to be anything? How can you exist if someone refuses to identify themself in a way so that the rest of the world can then categorize them? Maybe that’s why I make people nervous.

You started to cry. I see you cry all the time. You wipe your tears away and when I ask you how you are you say fine. But I can see it. You aren’t fine. You will never be fine. I know the type. I am that type. 

I hope you're always a mess. That's the best compliment anyone ever said. Your messes makes other people's success look so ordinary. I don't know if you'll survive it. The way you feel stuff. 

The crumpets bored us--I mean they were there but we didn't care about them the way we should have. We wanted to pretend we could draw each other close and not push each other away, but we knew that would never happen. It made our souls sick. I told you I’d wear a blindfold and you could stay as the bunny and we could kiss. I could be a boy or a girl with your eyes closed. And we could see if we liked it. I told you I was a pretty good writer of love letters that made no sense but STAYED with a person. I told you I’d write to your childhood crush, the boy you loved. I told you that we’d find him on Facebook first to see if he was still good looking and if he still had bee-stung lips like you remember and an interest in Poe.

You hugged me then. You didn't let go. It was the only time you've ever done it and I doubt it will happen again. The way you can love a thing but you know it will die someday. That sentence hung in the air like a fog killing anything real and replacing it with fear.

How can you trust someone won't hurt you, when that's all anyone ever did? You know and I know we won't be able to help it. 

But, we looked up your crush and it couldn’t have been him, because this person didn’t look the same. They were old now and fat with the weight of the world on their face. Not like us, we keep the weight of the world in our hearts, that's why no one can ever tell. You never got old. You were still very handsome and very pretty. I told you I’d help you find another guy in this city and you could try it out. I don’t care if you’re gay. Everyone is gay at some point. People always try to argue me on this point, but that’s cause they lack the thing inside themselves that allows them to be ridiculously honest even if it embarrasses everyone.

In dreams you don’t have to lie, I tell you. We can be naked or with our clothes on. We can go deep emotionally and one of us will wake up and be in denial it ever happened. There is nothing to fear in the great big world. You can love someone openly who will never love you back because you are the wrong gender. You can date a gay man like I did because you were in love with their mind. You'll want to communicate it physically at some point. You should just do that. You can push away your feelings but once you let them out, you will simply stop crying so much. I will hold your hand. I won’t leave. We will be what they talk about in books. Soul mates who are real friends.

I tell you in dreams is the only time you don’t avoid me. I don’t know the reason cause you say you don’t know. No one is honest in dreams. I tell you that I lie to people to not hurt their feelings cause I think they like me more than I will ever like them and I don’t know how to say that thing.

We build a fort with my couch pillows and we light a candle in there. We say a prayer to a god who most likely can’t hear us and even if he could would find our prayers too routine too ordinary to answer. We don’t want to bore god, so we build an effigy to the boy you want. We make him beautiful, but not too beautiful to not be sexy. We make him smart. We put a tiny tie and tiny shoes on him that we stole from the Barbie set your sister had. We name him Norman after a photographer I know who is so cute and messy. We write a love letter detailing your love to him. A person who doesn’t exist.

I ask you, “Are you incapable of feelings?” You don’t seem to like the question so I pet your head and let you cry in my lap. There’s a record player and I put on my record from my last boyfriend that was kinda smart and kinda break your heart emo radical. We listen and are amazed at how such a skinny kid can make such smart music. He is our hero for at least 30 minutes. I remind myself that his courage to scream out the rage in his heart was just in music, not in life. And that part made us both sad. The effigy burns and you don’t see what I see. That you are trapped. Beyond where I am. You keep yourself away from me because to let someone in only means disappointment. We don’t even talk. I crawl out and get a pad and pencil. I want to draw something I’ve never seen  before. A magical creature that can keep our secrets. Someone we both can talk to.

I ask you to be my friend but not in that fake everyone lies to each other way--that kind of thing kills me over time. The most important thing to me is just to see whatever it is that makes you hate yourself so badly, I remember in life when we are awake, no matter what I ask you say no. You have built a wall to keep me out. I don’t know why it’s there and you say you don’t know either. But, I think it’s there cause I can see you. It’s like I can read your mind. And I don’t care. I will keep your secrets. YOu can lie to my face, but I still know. You should stay away from me. The fire inside of me is intense and I will never back down or let you be mediocre. You know this to be true.

When I wake up the couch is there and there is a bunny costume, but you are gone. I realize no matter how long I wait, the thing I want, which is to just know you, will be withheld and the sadness of it makes me want ice cream. In the middle of winter. Ice cream seems dumb. So, I heat it up on the stove and I sit in my jammies on the couch and I don’t turn on the TV and I don’t look at a book and the computer is closed. It’s just me and my heart. Alone. On Christmas.

Boo

i was thinking of halloween. i was wondering if i spelled it right. i was thinking of the rage of man. you wouldn't understand it unless you were in my head. my heart was open last night, i had a long talk to her about it, i said, girl don't be foolish, love can't exist. and here we are. you and me. we can't be what we wanted, that's obvious. can we get into daddy issues now or should we wait? we could tear each other's clothes off or laugh until we cried, but instead we pretend we don't feel it.

i had a boyfriend once. everytime we made love i thought of my father. he is the only man where that happened. i had to break up with him right away or i'd be some kind of perv and i'm pervy enough all on my own.

do you remember sneaking up to a girls door and putting a flower on it? before stalking existed?

you told me you were suffering, but does that mean you are still talking to somebody? i hope you are. like in my dream where no one is talking but we are still communicating while lying on our pillows in our separate houses, thinking no one can read our minds.

in one dream, you were on a video screen talking to me. i think it was from this story you told me where the person can write into another person's thoughts. you were talking to me quietly, you were being held prisoner, but somehow managed to tell me things. it was good to see you. it had been too long.

then later. i was drinking trying to make the drinks not be drinks. but they were. this guy who asked me to marry him from across the pond was sitting there and was telling me how i was some kind of fraud but i was cuter than in my videos. i just knocked the drinks back and back and back. i called you. i asked you what was a number between one and 100 worth remembering. what was a feeling worth remembering.

you didn't answer the way i wanted you to. i wanted you to say, listen, come over i'll rub your head while you sober up. i'll read you a story. the one i told you about where the kids live in a village and they learn about sexuality but in a purer way that we learn in the village called America. but, instead you just say something that requires no answer. it wasn't even a number. i made it sexy cause i wanted that, but it wasn't like that. it was like saying CANDLE and then making that into DO YOU WANT ME TO COME FUCK YOU. it is the way my brain works. i had forgotten you were a prisoner and not allowed to say whatever you wanted. i had forgotten our code CANDLE meant god, i miss you.

it wasn't the guy calling me today saying, please tell me when i can see you and me going, soon. soon. soon. but, really?

i don't know how to do anything. i'm afraid of hurting him. he promises i won't hurt him, but i'm still afraid i will. i hurt people. on accident. if i get naked in his bed and we exchange our hearts we will be hurt. so just roll in leaves and crush them and say you like it and forget people. people cry when they crush. leaves just make a crackle then it's over. people take longer. the first cut, then the second cut, then the third cut, then the realization that this isn't going to last. then it keeps going. sometimes for months. sometimes it never stops. sometimes it stops in a day and fucking was all that it required to make it stop. but you can't count on that. can you?

stop doing that to people. open. shut. open. shut.

the last guy did this didn't want to be friends, but i tried to. i guess it was insulting to him when i said, if you are scared to fuck me at least lets be friends. our brains and hearts like one another. but he didn't want to. he just wanted to be mine. and i couldn't do that. or he couldn't. all i know is someone couldn't.

how can you really? when you have that kind of chemistry? you can't. so, i keep checking in with myself going, is there a tree with a fruit and a name of a fruit that i shouldn't have eaten and is that tree you? and can't we go back somehow to where our bodies didn't know what it would be like?

he told me he writes, but i wasn't allowed to see any of it. he told me we'd be friends but then didn't tell me anything. i realized he wasn't what he was those thousands of pages on IM.

i want to see inside of your heart. to me, that is friendship. to you that makes a bond or makes you nervous or whatever. or create a deep disappointment. i crave you to disappoint me.

everytime i see you i want to fuck your lights out on the floor. right there and i have to act cool and i'm not feeling that. i'm feeling. fuck this thing. fuck it.

can i say all this without you gettting mad? you wouldn't be nervous if you just acted normal. like if you'd just let me see whatever dark thing it is. it won't scare me. i've lived a life of dark things. i've fucked my boyfriend seven times a day because we were on lots of drugs. i've locked the door on people because we'd go dark and i only wanted light. i've hated birds because their songs were too loud. can you imagine hating birds? they are beautiful. how can someone with a real heart hate them. well, i have. drugs do that to you.  i've been happy when bad things happen to people who hurt me. you think you are purer than me because i admit these things to the world. but you aren't. you are way worse. you think sex is bad. when only lying is.

do all guys only like you because of your tight vagina? or because you were a dancer? or because they think they'll get sprung. nobody likes a sprung dude. that just seems backwards.

someone will ask me about why i am not using capitals and let me say, it's Halloween or Holloween or the harrowing of the hallows. don't ask the mundane on this day or you will be cursed.

back to me--you are too shut off. i am too open, like as per usual.

i told you guys from a certain continent don't like me, or like me too much or hate me. that doesn't matter, i'm in love with somebody else. also from that certain continent and he's been showing up lately. he isn't handsome  like i remember or even tall. but we'd kiss and laugh until 7 in the morning. he was the last person i had chemistry with.

he looks great in photographs.

we were like children. he told me everything. he told me about the girl before me who had a pound of cocaine in her freezer. he was the last person i fell for. i'm still in love with him, so you don't have to get any crazy ideas. want to know why? he was honest. he opened himself up and showed me what was in there and he told me, "if i fall for you, i will run and you will think you did something, but it's just what i do." he wrote long letters to me on the daily. this guy also said i made him nervous. nervous about what? i would be sad if things didn't work, but i'd want to keep him as my friend. he was my smartest most funniest friend. i loved him. i know that isn't cool to say. but i love people and once i do it just gets stuck like that.

he ran. then talked shit and like that. i did think it must have been something about me. three of his friends came after me. it was world-class asshole-ville but LA-style.

but god, i miss him. i miss his words. i miss him telling me his stories, even though he was too scared to let me read any of them.

before that there was a guy. i was engaged to him. our bodies fell in love. then he started using drugs again. he's doing that now. we aren't connected anymore, so it doesn't hurt like it did when we were together.

do you remember being open? and how you could tell the whole world anything? that was before you were going to die. do you remember knowing that you could die and you'd never see the people you loved again? do you remember being scared as fuck that you'd lack the words to communicate what you felt in your heart and your girl would be so sad or a girl you left would be too sad and they'd be dead before you knew it and all you would have had to tell them was you were too scared or insecure or liked somebody else?

you and i met. you came to me and were open. you told me your fears and how hard it is for you to get close to anybody. i wasn't banking on anything. i had seen you for months and you were too surrounded for me to talk to.

i'm not like the other girls. that's  the part i keep forgetting. part fairy dust part i'll fuck you up.

so you shut me out. not only out of who you are, but out of all you do. i get these one sentence texts from you sometimes. i watch you fall in love with every new girl you see. but i don't care about those things. i care only about your heart. but, since we aren't going to fuck and we aren't going to cry in each others arms and we aren't going to be normal friends where i make a costume for you and make you wear it.

instead i'll tell a story.

it was halloween. the ghost was following me down vermont saying things like, why don't you just get a job already, this is boring. i said---and please listen, because i am not a ghost, i am a human. my soul isn't like yours. i need human touch and companionship. i die working for the man. i don't have a solution yet. i'm working on it. "work on it when you're living in your car, whatever happened to acting?"

the ghost was laughing. remember me telling you that ghost laughs are totally fun? they lift you up and out of your body where you feel like a balloon. you float up and out and look down and you go, what the fuck. i don't need humans. not when i have a ghost.

halloween is supposed to be all ghosty, but my ghost goes, halloween is like amateur night, like as in if you drink a lot or party all the time so is New Year's Eve. these ghosts that don't know what they're doing come up and they lurk you so you get all scared. but, they aren't adept. they are just players in a great big game no one has an answer to. oh, and like you're the ghost who has all the answers? and then the ghost stops me, i don't know how something made of vapor can do that. i guess it's the same with thoughts or love or a feeling. the things you can't see are the most tangible.

do you remember when you were engaged to that crack addict? the one from ireland? he lived with that giant fat lady and he'd fuck her and not you because the emotional risk was too much for him? but you'd get drunk and he'd read the bible to you and tell you how you couldn't suck his dick unless you were married cause jesus wouldn't approve and you just sat there going, this guy is going to die an awful death and i'll say yes just to fuck him but it won't matter in the end cause he looked so sick the last time you saw him you were glad you never touched him even though at the time it was the REAL DEAL LOVE?

this ghost had been around during all the fake engagements. during the real ones. during the guys who lived here, during the guys i said, i don't love you anymore. i never loved you, i just needed you and now i don't. sorry. the sex was fun. you cook great. i don't cook, so it's good someone did or we would have died. i loved you and now i don't.

ramblings about a human without boundaries in a world where everyone is closed.

But what of fairies? Do they grant wishes. Fingers on a keyboard, a devotion to notes. Or do they remember your mother for you, when all your brains are focused on whatever life you are trying to build. You play until your fingers bleed, but do you remember the bunny shaped pancakes she made for you on Easter? There was a woman and it came close to love, her chemicals inside of you, her skin was too white but you fell in deep. It was back before the Superdome. A homeless guy with a blanket stole her from you, but you can see how that happened. We all went hungry beyond just food.

In a flash your mind is blank. We are covered by clouds, these actual feelings. We put them in boxes. Safely away where no one calls you on it. But there was one girl, who always seemed confused. She didn’t have the heart to tell you how you hurt her and in the same way you never visited your father---always a justification—he was mean when you were only eight. You tell her, you just need time alone--not to ever worry, but the answer is clear. You like somoene else better. You straight up ghost her whenever there's something else to do and call that friendship. You keep all your secrets because that's the way to keep things peaceful. No one wants to hear about other naked bodies if they aren't you.  Just look up, they tell you. The people you avoid are suffering, but you don't care, you suffer too. You think love is relegated to the mind and forget that people die without human touch. You are touching everyone else, so at least you are doing your part. There's soul in it, but not the kind you thought there would be. You just don't have the guts to tell the truth. You have never been an outcast. The answers aren’t where you are looking. The answers aren’t relegated to the heart. Or the limitations of the mind. They are beyond the clouds. Beyond human understanding. Beyond what you once thought was cool indifference. The answers are in the bodies and in their ability to communicate. 

One day you leave. You are older now, but not too old to obey the blood in your veins. An old tired black skin look on your face. Your teeth were white. But, now you just rely on your wit. You kept the good ones away. You took to the ones that kill hearts. Just like we all do. In the lines of the road, your car chalk, the road chalkboard, you see a future. Something to look forward to. But in the distance is a cloud. It contains all you’ve done to the people you love. It is jagged and not going to produce sound so loud that the whole world will be free. It will produce something unthinkable and it will open you like so many people tried to before. You will be open and you will pull the car over and you will ask yourself where are those people who loved you now? Are they with a new lover? Someone not so shut down. You tell yourself you warned them. But, you never tried to let them in. Letting them in could have killed you, that’s what you never say.

Les Plesko--This will not do you justice, I'd rather stay silent, but I'm doing it anyway.

On Tuesday, I got some shocking news that my friend and long-time teacher, Les Plesko had died. Amanda Copeland posted it on my wall. I didn't have her number, she didn't have mine. That's the way it is sometimes. You know a person but don't have their number. Anyway, I pulled over and she called me to tell me my friend and mentor had died yesterday----this last Monday, September 16th. I posted something on Facebook immediately as I'm prone to do because I know lots of our mutual friends see my wall. I said something about Les listening endlessly to my suicidal ramblings. This is before i found out he took his own life. What I want to get across here, is that no matter what I say, or what I am feeling, it will not do proper justice to the impact this person had on my soul and heart. In fact, my life was quite aimless before I met Les and probably changed its course because of his encouragement and support of my writing. He was my friend. He listened to my tragic boyfriend choices, my suicidal tendencies, my total self-indulgence with rapt attention. Les was a person who liked me as much as I liked him---he found me interesting during a time that was an extremely important thing. He didn't want anything from me and I didn't want anything from him---and in any setting that is a rarity.

We are meant to write something for our friend and teacher--a booklet is being put together, but everyone has already turned stuff in and I'm late because I'm not doing great in my head about this. A backward swan dive off a building? I guess there's a romance to it, but it wasn't supposed to happen to him. Not our Les. The reason I am late is----How does one write a thing for a person who was the most influential to them as a person---how do you write something for someone who maybe gave you the courage to be the type of person you have become--a person with balls and opinions and an I don't give a fuck if you like me or not attitude? I have no fucking idea. So, I'll tell a story or two. Tell you how we met and how like all people I meet that I have an instant affinity for, Les Plesko meant something to my heart. We looked at each other and knew. You know how that is. It happens with lovers and friends. A bond is made and it is permanent even if you don't know why. Like you just know the person as if maybe if souls are energy or chemicals last lifetimes, that you might have known them before this. It was like that.

This next part is boring, even to me, but it seems like you might want to know it. So, I'm saying it for you and to honor Les.

I was just starting out writing again after years of not doing it. In fact, I had been doing other stuff, stuff that didn't inspire my soul--stuff that kills the soul, inch by day, by incredible inch. I took a class and the first thing I wrote got published. It was a short story about me and my friend getting picked up by this old lady who had cocaine and Les was not my teacher at that time---Les was my second teacher. For anyone who knows me I have the sheer blind audacity to apply for the advanced novel class, novel 5 wanting to skip the other classes.  I think and Les told the administrator that his class was full but that my writing was good and to try next time. I am a jaded cynic, full of innocence at times but mostly I just think everyone is lying to me. Whatever. I still applied again and was allowed in.

I was writing a book of short stories about my life doing drugs with trust-funders and with trannies. It was boring but flashy. A total cliche, but Les liked it and like he does told me what was working which was my sentences not the stories. One day, I came in with something else. Les told me to abandon my book and work on this thing. It was called No Tell Motel. I trusted him but was mad because i had 200 pages of the other thing. Les said--fuck the other thing, those stories will always be there. This is special. Then, I won an award for the first chapter of that book. Then I got the first chapter published---all before it was even a book. Whatever. I told you this part is boring.

Lets get to the meat.

The only time I have ever cried in front of a man is during sex or after sex because of the beauty of it, not because someone touched me funny when I was little. But, I had never written a sex scene. It seems too intimate to write down, you know? But, as an exercise, I remember writing this sex scene where this dude fell in love with this girl's asshole. It was worded better, but to tell you now seems too trite. The thing is, is there was this dude in class it really upset. And everyone thought it sucked, but Les LOVED me for it. Because I was brave. I was being brave enough to suck openly on the public stage in a class of people who might have judged me. Some people told me that my bravery helped them, but there was one dude in particular who would say mean stuff and throw tantrums--eventually we got along, but it was long after my sex scene phase. So, a few times after class, I drove home crying. The point was not that someone stared into someone's asshole and fell in love there. The point was not the cottage cheese ceilings, the point I needed to learn by failing. And I needed bravery to do that. Les was safe that way. I felt like I could try things and he would laugh, but still find the shining thing inside of the clot of dirt.

Les was the type of person you could tell anything to and I am the type who since I knew Les had a swat team with guns drawn on me at my door combined with a terrible loneliness that comes from not being able to tell anyone that would understand the story or why it happened. Les heard my stories and he told me to write them down. But, to lose the self-indulgence, cause someone had to eventually read this crap. If I could lose the self-indulgent emotionality, I could be good. I took that note to heart.  The writing comes first, put your suicidal thoughts into the writing and it will heal your soul or at least you'll have something you are proud of.  But don't write about it cause that would be boring. Write about almost anything else. Which is what i did.

At the time, i thought i was the only one who wanted to kill myself. i wanted to so much of the time most of my friends thought i was crying wolf or lying. But, i wasn't. Les knew this because he was like me, he felt that way too. We had a pact that if i was really going to do it I'd call him. If he was going to do it he'd call me.  But, obviously that didn't happen.

My friend Patricia reminded me once that we all talked about the ways we'd off ourselves. I had a broken heart at the time. We laughed and joked, but i was really hanging on by a thread. We told each other the ways we'd die.  Not to be selfish, but to get rid of the intense pain i was feeling that i can barely articulate, but that I feel in my bones. Many people feel this way at times and no one ever says anything. But, I am that annoying. I'll call people and cry to them and make them talk me into staying here. I'd tell Les him how bad it was inside of my mind and he'd say, "Who cares? you're a pretty good writer."

Les had the sensibility of a well tuned junky. The kind that can get anything they want not by asking but by not asking. He and I were similar in that way. We liked our independence. Les wasn't fancy. He was cool. He'd say totally inappropriate things and eat a ton of chocolate and say stuff like, "Who needs teeth, anyway?"

Les told us to write everyday, but i didn't. I was in UCLA trying to get my degree. I was a mess, trying to hold a relationship together. I'd write my ten pages that day, like an hour before class. Les never judged me and he heard a LOT of my bullshit. My sadness. My self-pity. My crap. But, here's the thing, he knew what I know, that while we might want to, no one can actually understand the depth of another person's pain. We can lie down in churches. Make snow angels in the dust. We can hold hands. We can be a silent witness to each other. We can press our bodies together wherein our skin tells the story that our words can't. Humans are hobbled this way. Hobbled by language and its limitations.

We knew stuff just by looking into each other's eyes. When i could find his good eye-- a constant thing he made fun of----"Look at this one!" he'd say, but I couldn't remember which one i was supposed to look at.

As for what happened. Les made it into my dedication for my thesis for grad school and I didn't tell him. Janet Fitch told me I reminded her of him when I met her at Squaw and that we should meet. But I didn't tell him either of those things. At the time, I was too depressed to think of anyone else.

Les made it clear this was his choice and I will honor it as I honored everything about him. It might seem heartless to not say goodbye, but goodbyes are so fucking hard aren't they? Les was close to the soul and in my estimation one of the smartest people I have ever known and one of the most inspiring. He was a hero to many of us in life and will remain so in his death. If he couldn't go on, it's okay. I understand. I miss him and I'm mad but just because I think I could have talked him out of it doesn't mean he wanted to be talked out of it. I'm sad I won't hear him laugh or make fun of things or say how much he loved my writing. But, he is out of pain and for that I am happy.

I love you Les. You gave me some kind of direction to an aimless life. I will never forget you or the last words you spoke to me even if I can't say them out loud.

Take care and don't be a stranger. Amen and goodnight my friend. I'm deeply sad that you left us. Your friend always, Lisa.

What They Never Tell You

What it’s like is I was in this dream where you were this fucking angel floating up and out all the way up into the sky way up to the ceiling of the whole history of the world. And I go, look Maddie, that angel’s got glitter coming off her in giant plasticine waves of blue and white fluorescent light and Maddie goes, uh huh.

Maddie was naked. Lying on the floor making snow angels in the blanket her old man left the last time he came to hang out here. And what happens is Maddie’s arms go numb and she starts to cry. Crying out JOHNNIE, what the fuck did you do, did you dose me? MY ARMS ain’t working. What the fuck did you do? Only I didn’t do fuck. I was just there staring up at the crystalline angel of death of this reality and thinking to myself, why isn’t she naked so I could get a vision inside of here to finally see how the human female animal works. And I go to myself, no chick who had my heart or I was just fucking let me look up there with a flashlight and it was something I had always wanted. BRAN muffins. Do you remember how we used to think Bran muffins were like some kind of god’s gift when really they weren’t good unless heated and covered in melted butter? Some diet. But, there was just her floating up and above us---that angel chick. Maddie on the floor me on the side of the bed. The bourbon almost gone as and as right then it dawns on my brain that my heart had become this thing. A thing I covered up with mud. The dead mud like Rudolph used on his nose from Rudolph the Claymation one from childhood. Whenever he got around that one pretty reindeer chick his nose would glow out and burn off all the mud. BRIGHTLY GLOWNG. Like he couldn’t cover his true feelings. Remember when he covered that shit to make himself fit in with all the ordinary reindeer and they laughed at him and called him names like BLINKY, fucking BLINKY ON AND BLINKY OFF and it didn’t matter, cause the name stuck anyway even though after the clay on the nose made his voice sound like he had adenoids. Do you remember adenoids? I haven’t heard that shit in a million years.----BUT----then after the mud took away the sparkly shine of my heart, then I put TAR on it. I let the tar dry so it was like this sticky ball of tar heart thing.  And then I put a quick drying glue on it over that and heated it up with a flame thing like you use not when you solder, but when you start a big fire or smoke a hit of crack. Like that. That was what was going down when Maddie had a seizure and her eyes aren’t looking anywhere on purpose, just kind of everywhere at once like as in if she were a fucking crazy person or a retard, no offense to anyone who is. But the angel of death was like talking about this dead cat and how the dead cat was fun to gut but even in the morning or mourning of her twisted guilt she licked the knife. And all of a sudden I call 911 cause Maddie ain’t faking. This is it.  And while I waited for the ambulance, the glittery angel taunted me with all my fears since childhood. Like you aren’t good enough and don’t have the OP shorts, instead you have the fucking KMART shorts cause your mom doesn’t understand how you’ll get your ass beat if you don’t fit in. And the whole time you’re rocking and saying to this angel. Please stop being mean. Just be cool, man, you’re a fucking angel from god and stuff. But angels don’t listen. That’s what they never tell you.

the shallow things you can throw away later

you didn't expect her to be this way. what you expected was the biting screaming kind of thing. but instead it wasn't. she held your hand. the veil of toughness left completely and it startled you. you came too quick and then you tried to tell her how shitty that made you feel and how if she kissed you she'd fall in love with you, so you were only trying to protect her, but then when you go her on the couch you kissed her cause it's all you ever really wanted to do. you got so angry that you felt something and you sat there after making excuses for yourself holding her hand with your face buried in her chest. she pet your hair. "you'll get used to it, it really isn't a big deal." but you avoided her afterward, you acted mean when she said, why aren't you talking to me like you used to. you said, "if this happened and i wanted you as my girl i'd hate you forever." she laughed and said, but we aren't in love. i love you, but not that way.

you make excuses for how to not see her anymore. you tell her you are rehearsing or too busy when all you really do is comb for chicks on the internet. you keep meeting them and seeing them and deciding that nothing really matters cause you live at home. you miss your ex. you don't have a job and even if you did you think it's in bad taste to buy a coffee for a girl. it sends the wrong message.

you've read too many of those books about how to act like you don't like someone to get laid and you have become a hollywood cliche. she tells you she sees beyond all that and it makes you think she is deranged for liking you because you really are a douche. a total douche who runs around town telling people what kind of pussy a girl has or how someone's ass is too big or how the girl smelled weird or had nipples that bugged. in fact, your hatred of women runs so deep that it's all you can do to not tell them to their face how phony most of them are. but you have nothing to give them, that's the part that makes you hate them. you don't love yourself. that's the other part.

she isn't phony. and her vagina is perfect. like an alien you tell her. if an alien were a 15 year old hot girl.

if you give your heart, you will die. dead like forever.

so, you act like a dick and it empowers you. you tell yourself that she is out to capture a man, you never see an ounce of purity in anyone because you don't have an ounce of purity. or if you do, it's locked down deep where no one can crush you anymore.

she tells you how she's still in love with someone else and he hates her now and it doesn't matter because guys hate her all the time. you laugh at her suffering. you tell her she is annoying. you think when she says it makes her want to die that she is lying. you don't care about her at all. you actually hope she dies too. then you can feel better. cause no one on okcupid ever asks you anything tangible. once she's gone, so is your connection to the earth. you pray to god for that. but she doesn't die. instead she persists.

she tells you about the time the gang beat up her ex and how he had his jaw wired shut and he would go into the bathroom and slice open his chest saying, "look what you made me do." it creates distance because now you are among them. the men who loved her and the love turned to hate. you are ordinary--a person without your own thoughts on things, you are only concerned with what other people think. you are just exactly like them because you are too afraid to just be yourself.

what this does it make you die a little. every single time you see her, you hate her more and more. and she says, we never even fucked enough to get it going. and you go, yeah, but i don't want one of us to catch feelings and you mean her, but that's because in her case it's always "them" catching feelings and you want to kill her ego for it.  if you knew anything, you would know that her heart might like you, it might think you have a great big brain and it might like to fuck you like that one time you took her from behind. but the thing you will never get past is your hatred for women and your taste for killing anything good. if you can squish a girl and bully them enough, they will give up, you hope. then THAT will make you a man. you don't know yet you don't have to hurt others to be happy.

whenever she is around all you can do is think of getting her naked, so it doesn't really allow for friendship. you tell her, i have to fuck a bunch of other girls right now, cause fucking you is like going to the olympics. in the way where you don't fucking go if you don't train first. and you think the thoughts that everyone thinks to themselves and never says. if i were a more authentic person, if i were kinder, smarter, better in bed. but then you think again. there can't be any picket fences, you like younger girls and even if she is the best lover and has the best brain, you like the ones that won't call you or connect with you cause it is they who make you feel safe. safe and alone so you won't be too disappointing to them. you don't want something real. you want shallow things that you can throw away later.

you walk out into the street and look for something to kill. killing has been on your mind a lot and you don't want to tell her cause even though she is innocent in many ways---too trusting and not judgmental, she would not go for killing even a baby mouse. baby mouses don't feel anything, like they don't have names and stuff, you tell yourself. you are going down to the river, where you can kill something. you don't want her to know. you avoid her and you hope she dies somehow so you can kill things without her knowing. you are deathly afraid to be around her as if she will know things like a mind reader or a gypsy knows things. there was a time when you couldn't look her in the eyes and that time is back upon you. she can't understand how her vagina can make a person feel scared or less than or insecure, but you know she has never been a man. and doesn't understand man thoughts. the bad thing is you have absolutely no one to tell. you can't tell anyone because this one guy in your circle used to be her boyfriend and then another guy liked her and bailed to go fuck around as much as possible until his soul got better. you are a shitty person and no one will tell you that because they don't know what you are doing and how you feed on other people's pain.

all you really wanted was to take from someone. you didn't know that she was more predatorial than you, so you can tell yourself anything you want. you still know what is true. the reason you can't be around her is that she makes you hate yourself more than you already do.

Banksy Liberated

The Banksy has finally been liberated because the gas station changed owners. Fuck to the yes. The old owners kept this little doll carefully hidden for YEARS. Tonight she is free. Thank FUCKING GOD for new shop owners.

Amen Los Angeles, we can finally sleep now that our art isn't hidden. Now, let's rally to free the one outside the Beverly Cinema.

I made the poor dude inside take one picture then took several thousand more. I don't know how long she'll be there. You know how people like to steal shit. 

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.