family vacations

8-31-5

I’m eating squash, corn and sticky rice with the family I live with. They’d come back after being away, when I could walk around the house naked.

I’m taking phone calls about something.

Dinner with Eskimo girl and her mom. Two female friends of mine come to visit.

My friends and I are still inside our clubhouse, talking. We’ve heard construction going on around us all day. But all of a sudden we feel as if we are moving. I poke my head out of one of the windows to see what is going on. The building is being lifted by a crane.

“Do you even know there are people in the house,” I shout down to the crane driver.

“Nope.” He keeps right on.

I’m in bed with my brother, who licks and kisses my ear ___ ____ then when I look down ran the ____ family have fallen out into bed. both ladies come to visit us once we’ve landed. I freak out about ____ and pick up everyone that’s talking which also includes ________ rat race fallen and I forgot about.

Man pushing three tablets up the mountain. It’s Moses. The caption to this B.C.-style cartoon: Suddenly it occurs to ___ that if God could read from the top of a mountain, he could read from anywhere.

9-1-5

Mom and I are vacationing and decide to adopt American names, to make it easier to introduce ourselves. I choose “Monroe”. She chose something like “Buchanan” or “Buckley”. Another Laotian friend goes by “Marie.”

9-2-5

Some friends are having a very exclusive, catered anniversary party. You have to be on the guest list to get in. My ex-boyfriend (their brother) invites me and a friend to attend, but we were non-committal. When we get there, we’re not on the list. My old English teacher is the bouncer checking the list. I have to hold our spot and run downstairs to tell someone who know that we’re not on the list.

“Is it OK to come in,” I ask.

“Of course.”

Later, a guy at the Holiday Inn is showing promotional photos of parties the company hosts, and I recognize myself in the photos. I’m wearing that same green organza dress. It finally dawns on me that it was from that anniversary party. It was one of their off-site catered parties. The hotel guys were lying just by not telling the whole truth.

9-3-5

Blood between both legs with a long-time friend of mine…

Bum in a truck cab in historic Brattleboro—why?

Kindergarteners. 11 a.m. kids are there ready to teach me. Teacher is returning into a building.

9-4-5

Advice to Tom Cruise: 13 bets. Give it two weeks in autumn, when problem is strong so they won’t die…

There’s a festival downtown. I find lots of boxed cards that my employer had bought ages ago that I’d never put out for sale, even though it’s already in its own display case and everything. My fault. I start creating displays in the back parking lot of some other stuff, including furniture. There are already a few tables set up in the parking lot, near the coffee shop.

One of the tables I’m very familiar with—I’ve sold on it before. And I hate to compromise that spot by putting all this there, BUT I need to. The tables would have made perfect writing spots and for a moment I fantasize about setting up my office at one of them. In all this search I find lots of books—I also find at least one note to me about my participation in the festival. Notes of thanks and fan mail. I am bummed that I didn’t receive them back when I just did the perfomance(s). It’s been so long. Stores were opening up. I didn’t get to read them all through.

9-5-5

decided
not to
write
down—
too grumpy

9-6-5

Family at the beach—a large woman with her kids. A girl like a retearded woman I knew back in high school. Red haired and slow. She askes me if I buy Coronas.

“Yes,” I said. She let me taste hers—vanilla flavored. I said I liked it.

“I’ll let you nip on it once in awhile then.”

I was there alone, checking E-mails at the shared computer labs on the shore. Actually while checking E-mails, I found one of those pop-up computer games called “Grow Your Own Trees”. I clicked on it, which brought up very lucious glen marsh with skinny small bamboo-like trees. Double click on a tree or group of trees and it grew rapidly before your eyes. In some instances the land shifted almost to replicate nature—but then I made one clump grow really fast, which shifted the shoreline and opened it up (kinda like the mouth at the bottom of the Big Dog Place).

I looked around and found myself in it and saw what devastating effect I was having on the environment and became afraid of the power that I had. So I went back to checking E-mails. I had gotten up at some point and found a way to move some of the huge boulders around. Some of them ended up shifting into the stream bed ocean floor and then I remember that it made it look more like natural erosion if the rocks also shifted with the land. But again, I took so much that the shore was crumbling. I stopped before it got worse. I could see both how it could look in the future and what it used to be in the past, and hear the lamentation of the destruction and was sad about it, so stopped. Went back to E-mails. That was when the family came. The mother, the retarded girl, the kids. They offered me beer and for a while I completely forgot what I’d been doing before they showed up.

I remember Daughter saying something like "if we weren’t here, we’d be home, hurling Ma’s food (because it’s so inedible) and Pa’s____." I realized mid-thought that I had to go back to E-mails. Mother smiled a little embarrassed at the truth of her daughter’s statement. She’d never graduated high school, but is currently finishing it up—it’s a big step for her. I excuse myself to go back to E-mails.

Before this, the computer lab was abuzz with other people. One was asking me if I knew about my little brother’s winning that writing contest..? I mumbled something. The guy nexct to me said I should help him do a profit and loss statement for the thing, see how much he made out, he meant.

“It was only a $5 prize, right,” he asks. “Figure in materials, et cetera…”

“Actually,” I say, “it’s just five dollar prize money. But they gave him $200 in goods and other things. So it was actually a big deal prize.” The room started clearing out.

9-7-5

woke with a poem in my head about something mundane—a bad poem. But I got up because of the phone. Now I can’t remember anything.

9-8-5

woke to alarm!

9-10-5

Picking salad greens from the garden—it’s big. Someone wants to buy it off us—my family runs it. I am brainstorming how to sell it to the others.

My Taiwanese friend is sick. I go to visit her. Other friends are already there. They’ve been there throughout the illness. I can’t make that commitment.

Mom accidentally leaves her peanuts on the plane when she’s getting off.

“Such a shame,” she says. “They were yummy.” There’s no point in going back for them—the stewardesses probably throw them away.

“That’s how they do it, you know.”

Many more dreams. I’m waking to the alarm.

9-11-5

Mary White is dead.

I am Godmother to a little girl.

But I forget the rest—slept past the point of remembering. Lots of people in my dreams.

9-12-5

There’s a museum that’s closing to the public. I join a series of classics—actually from Nature. I am modeling for an artist lover of mine. Going over topics I’ve modeled for.

“Snobbishness, snobbishness”—a girl-song in the vein of “Doo Run Run”.

9-13-5

I make an effort to be well-dressed even to do little things. Like walking down the street.

Book group meeting at Tea Lounge. We’re talking about poetry. Something about paying—running a tab/installments for some art.