Empty Your Head

Pride and non-pride are the same.

Proof I know something, proves I know nothing.

I am not an idiot, but I can blank slate-ify.

Memorization takes time and patience.

Time. and Patience.

My brain is good.

Elevator Art = Waste of Time

1. Contrary action = living it up, throwing it down
2. LA Story soundtrack = Titanic soundtrack
3. nonspace no save = I’m holding my tongue holding on to responses, I had to take time to think, we haven’t quite found a rhythm but that’s intriguing, I’m afraid, I want to unwrap, there’s no up down left right, but there’s something that makes me want to adventure, yes, it’s that fearlessness yet again, part-time superhero origin story.
4. Skating through museums = tableaux in elevator
5. good intentions + nervous energy = tongue-tied

Alliteration and Time Experiments

Game 1. Improv games in real life. Start with rewind. At any moment in everyday life, shout "REWIND!" and you and your fellow life livers must reenact the previous moment exactly. Requires observation and listening skills. Also may extend this to include half-life.

Game 2. FIRST CHOICE! in real life. Make others say something other than what they said.

Game 3. Drink and connect the dots. People you thought you knew become connected.

Game 4. Act again! In a play! Feel a tear well in your eye and feel like a real actress again. Being an actress is only a matter of connecting to your humanity. So there... I've just connected to my humanity again.

Game 5. Tennis. The game is- to grunt in success for every failure. Make a team name (TEAM WOLF, Aoooo, or Team Fro Lion, ROAR...) and make memories to last a life time.

Game 6. Kiss cheeks of strangers.

Game 7. Wear a new dress. Give a piano lesson.

Game 8. Sit with Sal in the diamond lights on Cherry street contemplating heightened reality making reality reals vs mundane. Pataphysics or metaphysics? Alfred Jarry anybody?

Game 9. Whisper SUPERMALE to yourself at the coffee shop, feel your legs stick together, love the thick zipper, love the thick sky.

Game 10. Remember waking up, after a night of compiling a playlist of best songs of ever. Yes this is me.

Game 11. Put product in your hair and complain.

Game 12. Crush confessions. (My heart beats loud for you.)

Game 13. Listen to a much respected woman's harrowing escapes and horrifying stories, and pinch yourself. Know it could be you at any moment- your head smashed by a bottle unsuspectedly after parallel parking. BE CAREFUL!

Game 14. Be extra careful.

Game 15. Wonder what you did to deserve the best summer of all time. Love every minute, suck it in, reflect, love it, hold it to your bosom. BOOM BOOM bonfires in your body, every moment something new and old, life goes by and allows you to be so many people, and contain so many realities, it blows my fucking mind.

Game 16. Oh yes, and always flirt. Playful. You can say "If it helps your concept of reality, so be it."

Game 17. Shoe beer.

Game 18. Smash the cigarette, I repeat myself.

Game 19. Careful creatures, curiously coping consciously condoning creation

A morning ritual

Game 1. Wake up with fiery vague ambition, write a few sentences about it, with the promise of something more, which may or may not be fulfilled.

Game 2. Read a story and cry.

Game 3. Start a new project- to read all of the nobel laureates in literature. Starting with Singer. Write about your experiences. Tears are one thing, thoughts are another. Left foot is will, right foot is reason.

Game 4. Consider writing a different kind of blog, rather than a journal-masquerading as games, life as a series of tasks and games and tricks, just reviews. Simply. Done.

Game 5. Make a list of morning rituals. At least 10. Try for 10 weeks, each ritual, and decide which morning ritual creates a better life. Thus far the summer's morning ritual- wake up, stretch, talk to Faust, smile, flutter eyelids, float, stretch some more, admire the moles on my arms, recount dreams, pray to the Powerful Goodness, sneeze, cheerios, internet.

Game 6. Write at least 3 pages of the nonsense in your head. Release!

Kid Yourself

These games are tricks to play on yourself.

1. Kid yourself. Even when you've been wisely warned by a best friend, "Don't waste your time." This means go ahead and send spontaneous text messages to a very foolish but right-textured gentleman when you said you definitely wouldn't.

2. Kid yourself. Embarrassing interaction with somebody who may or may not be real. Le sigh.

And ...

3. Love yourself whilst kidding yourself, realizing you will have to give up this nonsense tomorrow and get honest.

4. Send a lovely woman on a sober scavenger hunt for her "hen party."

5. Go to that special spiritual musical realm and remember where it takes you... and why you go there. Haunting dream memories return, walking on a water bridge, sitting with coffee overlooking foggy cliffs, seals at the beach, everything in one swift heartbeat, swirling in tones, multitudes of moments, in one.

The Ben Franklin Effect

1. Do me a favor, will you? You will probably like me more, and I will like you more. Ask somebody to do you a small favor, and you are quietly manipulating them. Don't feel guilty about it either, Jew. "In the words of Benjamin Franklin, who famously observed the paradox and for whom it is named, 'He that has once done you a Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.'"

2. Watch something on the Discovery Channel about the Human Body. Learn and forget the name of the fight/flight hormone, then research it only to find "adrenaline" which we all knew.

3. High fives with elbow gaze.

4. Awkward social situation- silence. Acknowledge it. "This is awkward silence, isn't it? Well, don't worry. I don't believe in awkward."

5. Think about Charlie Chaplin.

6. Run, scantily clad and preferably overweightly and unattractively, through a crowd of middle-schoolers in Oakland. Absorb the comments and laughter of 13-year old boys. Every once in a while, it's important to hold your face up to the distorted middle school mirror. That should be the only time you do this.

7. Make a found poem of conversations you overhear. Make sure it is a direct quote, not a paraphrase. Today's selection: "[All they got is] big cocks." (paraphrase) Is that the right way to use those brackets? I love using brackets in a quote.

8. Use brackets whilst paraphrasing a quote.

9. Create rough percentages of the smells around you. For example, the hallway at the Athol apartment in Oakland: 63% cat piss, 7% stale sausage, 5% sweat, 10% hipster vomit 5% generic urine, 10% sweet stench of homeless

10. Make a collage of tough bad-asses, or in the words of Amy Sedaris said, "Make a self-esteem collage using pictures of other people you wish you were."

11. See how many Oakland parking tickets you can accumulate.

12. Question everything.

13. Indulge in crushes. All is well.

Walking with a New Mind through Ducks and Antonyms

Game #1 Find the opposites in your life and the lists. List what you have and then the opposites.

Love, the opposite of suicide.
Mother goose, the opposite of Father Duck. They follow each other through the streets to the park from the lake and wait for somebody to giggle through them until they fly.
Certainty, the opposite of uncertainty.
Comfortable, the opposite of uncomfortable
Isolated fool, sad clown, the opposite of happy (un)clown
Here, the opposite of there.
Alone, the opposite of together.
Sound, the opposite of silence.
Child's pose, the opposite of warrior.
Corpse pose.
Specific, the opposite of vague.
Hidden...
Fear opposite of courage.

Game #2 Describe today in your favorite song lyric... "I stare at the scrape on the heel of my hand til it doesn't sting so much... and until the blood dries... and when somebody asks if I'm okay I don't know what to say." (Wild Sage) Why not? I'm listening to it right now. Another straightforward in-the-moment present song to try to get me where I am.

Game #3 Ask some people to give you some words about you. Chew on them.

Game #4 Stay silent, erupt in discomfort. Pockets and pouches.

Game #5 Identify turning points, such as the moment the play became a musical. (When they turned around in a musical burst toward the audience, different levels.) Identify the point when I softened.

Game #6 Dress up in costume, write a new song. (This actually did happen) And turn it into flashdance. Make suggestions, and stake a claim, and hide.

I'm doing it anyhow, I'm walking through it. It's very uncomfortable, with some interesting moments. Woke up, went to a meeting, counting my gratitudes, trying to be here, and whenever I'm in a new place, I am vaguely aware that all of these sights and sounds are absorbed. I will remember these fondly vaguely weakly strongly when I'm home again, and that's a beautiful thing. Era is captured. I'll remember in one memory breath yesterday's run around the lake, the people I saw, the hot heat, the Berkeley yoga class, the constant tension, the heart stopping and going, the sadness without crying, the isolation in light of everything and everyone, trusting I am closer to where I need to be, faith in nothingness, new songs, costumes, ideas, investments. Chewing gum, new planner. Little moments, little connections. Yesterday's rehearsal...
those games. To feel so connected and in tune with a group, what a glorious gift! That is the most precious thing, the thing I desire require and do indeed have at times in this life. That feeling of being part of a community.

Quirky moments of humor. Certainty with uncertainty. Who else might that describe?

I dreamt last night that a murder I committed came back to haunt me, would not leave me alone, limbs reappearing in dumpsters, I had to reconnect an old gypsy's body parts. The horrible guilt of something from my past... but I couldn't have done something so bad! was the thought. and yet i had.

Resurrecting Old Games

Game 1. Sit at the piano or an instrument you play. Spontaneous songs with major 7 chords cheer me up to no end.

Game 2. Sit at a non-instrument thought to be impossible to play, like a tree. Try to play a non-instrument like an instrument. Tell me how it went via smoke signals.

Game 3. Prank love calls. Call somebody and wish them well. See if any one will accept kindness. Random acts.

Game 4. Find an axe. Write "random axe of kindness" on it and take it upon yourself to chop down things that are problems in this world, like terrorism. Do other heroic things inspired solely by puns.

Game 5. Wear something lacy, masturbate to the fantasy of telling people you are an ascetic non-masturbator.

Game 6. Draw little sidewalk chalk pictures of Christ saying "PSSST FOLLOW ME THIS WAY" and they will lead pedestrians somewhere significant/insignificant of your choosing.

Game 7. Slip psalms like love letters into the hands of strangers.

Game 8. Speak in rhyme all day.

Game 9. Take the genetics book your aunt wrote, cross out some random (or patterned) words, and write profane things in their place.

Game 10. Introduce yourself to two new people. Treat one as your inferior, and one as your superior. Then forget that and switch roles.

Game 11. Continue your blog of life games, continue to ponder existence, grow a Nietzsche moustache and try to seduce women who are afraid of this moustache, embrace a horse, dance naked, pretend you are Napoleon, and excuse your behavior by telling others you are a nihilist with syphilis, or a Sisyphus with syphilis.

Game 12. Forgive yourself for being an upper middle class spoiled nobody who feels life is something to play with. It's not.

Game 13. It is.

Percentages

Most of the time I am practical and thinking of nothing except how everybody is right. Most of the time I am thinking of the past, the future, and of things sprouting out of my pores and becoming light and sunshine. Most of the time I am thinking of how I can use language to talk forever and ever about nothing. I am impatient when you talk about details. I am impatient when you are talking, and impatient when I am thinking. When are we going to get to The Point? I ask. Get To The Point.

I asked a few friends what they spend their time thinking about. Sometimes it's fantasies about reality. I am not impressed by anything except humor.

1. Draw a picture of your mind. Google a brain picture, print it out, and then separate it into how much time you spend thinking about things.

2. I am confused by my several different selves and my confusion. A few of my selves are passionate about several things, and confused about everything. Passionate about connections, but scared of people, except when we connect over everything except being human. Like music and shit.

3. I am okay, I just need to breathe, apparently.

Look at Me

Watch me dance Watch me jump into the pool I'm a ballerina, Mommy Look at me I can play the piano Look Mommy watch me eat breakfast Watch me digest my food Isn't this neat? Look at me Look at me Look at my IV Look at my blood drain Mommy watch me bleed You gave me blood Mommy thank you Watch me masturbate and scramble words and be dishonest with everybody I meet Watch me cry Look at me retreat from reality Mommy Look at me I'm growing big and strong and I am now in the 25-34 age bracket according to the El Pollo Loco survey. Look at me I have a blog. I am beautiful and I love life and I want to be honest and I want to know what I believe, just like you. Introducing games to play with yourself.

1. Game One. Start a blog about games to play with yourself, in which the first entry is written from little girl to Mommy- functions simultaneously as a vague emotional purge and an apology for blogging. A blogpology. I ablogogize.

2. Game Two. Humans make plans, god laughs.
Outline plans for somebody else's life. Could be as simple as a to-do list or as extreme as specific wife-hunting instructions. Must be detailed. Hand it to somebody on the street. Exercises in taking direction.

3. Game Three A. What's the difference between an exercise and a game and a question?

4. Game Three B. Dilineate your paradigm and stop talking gobbledygook. You're not smart, you just breathe.

5. Game Four. Play the presents/presence game. Consciously construct sentences observing where you are and what you are doing. Is that how your mind works? My mind is mostly spinning around obsessions, too busy to actually think about what is going on around me. I tried not doing that today. Today I walked to the hospital to see my mom and as I walked through the parking lot I started making observations and making sentences in my mind about what I was experiencing with my 5 senses. When I did that I remembered... "This is a tree. This is a pink flower. There is a man with a shiny bald head. There is a woman with sandals. She is pretty. There is an older man walking with a limp. Is he feeling okay?" And I actually remember seeing these people today. No judging, just seeing. Is that how you guys do it? I think my obsessions and addictions have crowded out actual thought and learning lately... time to fix it.

6. Game Five. Become a scientist. I think I would respect myself more if I did.

I can make myself cry, I can't make myself vomit unless I think too much about what my insides look like.

I often feel like a complete idiot. This blog is purgatory.