December. Central Valley, California

December. Central Valley, California. I have a need that defies reason that beckons like these fields we cross at eighty miles an hour in the afternoon, dug into channels of upturned soil, the rows of planted seeds as far as the eye sees, to get lost and make meaning in these worlds of words.   #katyamills

jamming the transmissions

I could be accused of feeling my way through the world and it's not so bad. I would rather be a disheartened sentimentalist   than a computer or a religious fundamentalist. I guess I am still learning not to react, to check my feelings by my reason. I wouldn't shut them off. A world without feeling is a cold place, anyone who lives there could show and tell you. Most supposedly even-tempered people, are they really smooth around the edges? Don't most of them have a vestibule full of anger jamming their transmissions? Won't this pressure need to blow like an aortic aneurysm, and soon? And the people closest to them will naturally get the blowback. The residue at the bottom of a pot left on the stove to boil dry. I return to my seat in the auditorium. The giant screen. The sentimental film. And have a good cry.

this time, last year

Companion to last year, this time


This time, last year, well.... i was pretty tore up. Looking forward to nothing. Twelve twelve twelve, and the end of the fucking world. I was living in a truck in Richmond, California. Not a nice place to live, really. Definitely not a nice place to live in a truck. It wasn't my idea. It wasn't my truck. Just shy of forty, and just shy of some incomprehensible impending doom I could feel, lurking around the corner. Literally.

This time last year, I was rescued. From an abusive relationship with a kid I met at a vending machine. He had sold the machine out of the cookies I was hoping to buy, with what was left of my bank account. Little did I know he would sell out on me, a few months later. Back to black. He went from telling me he would take a bullet for me,  the day we got mugged in De Fremery Park, to holding a fragment off a mirror he shattered, in my face. For real. All we ever had in common were those fucking cookies he sold out on me.

All I was left with was my impoverished beat down self, in the end. Staring at that metal coil behind glass, wondering how my spirit got consumed. I had all the time in the world to figure it out, this time, last year. Unemployed and unemployable. Mental Illness is a bitch. Causes you to get another degree in pharmacology, just to get baseline. When emotional flatline is your goal? you got problems, kid. Another degree in chemicals, had a reverse lake effect on my mental illness: took me a degree deeper into my chaos. Paranoid about people. And twelve twelve twelve. Unemployed and unemployable. Board and care, no longer cared.

I became bored. And careless with my self. That's what you get, when you take the road never traveled by. Who gets involved with an ex-dope fiend turned dope fiend, by choice? Mental Illness is a mother. Another landlord had had enough. I was about to kick me out of me! For real. Mental case. Up all night. Up all day. Writing? Yes, of course. But that was the last of my sanity, I guarantee. Never lose gratitude for cold cold reason. Always appreciate your frontal lobe. Do not sell it on the black market, like I did. This time, last year.