Memos from a Week

 1. What does it mean when you dream that your neighborhood is flooded with nine feet of water but you just swim home from the drugstore, fairly confident now that you’ve been practicing going around in the water for a month, and when you get home there’s a white bird in your kitchen. 

2. Things on the internet that need to go away include fitspo pictures of Nike models in sports bras sprayed with fake sweat looking determined while holding a barbell, pouring bottled water over their mouths, and misusing their Godess-given will and determination for the sole purpose of looking good in overpriced Lululemon pants. 

3. Your imagination is colossal and a bit grotesque and barely controlled and totally out of sync with you who present yourself to be in the world and sometimes you think you are having a slow, protracted nervous breakdown from the energy expended trying to keep it in check, this raging Mastiff on a frayed leash, this drooling mutant insisting on itself. I mean, everyone thinks that sometimes, right?

4.  Note: When you write your article about online roleplaying games, do not say: We are not possessed by demons, we are possessed by our own life force, our incredible power is bent back on us in a world unequipped to accept the magnificence of our offerings. Poetry no longer decodes our desires and if any does, we don’t know where to find it, so we pour all of our nobility and our repressed physical courage and our keen intelligence and our telepathic connection to nature into little pixelated beings that resemble us, that remind us of why we once came to this planet to be alive. Because you're pretty sure someone probably already said that. 

5. It says something undesirable about you that you will swim but you won’t put your head in the water. You won’t full immerse, fully commit at least not without all protections: cap, goggles, nose clip and sometimes not even then. You used to dive down to the very bottom holding your nose, eyes squeezed shut, hair fanning out all over. No, you never dove. You were afraid of diving. You got down there somehow, though, but that was when you were seven and didn’t know any better. Even then, like now, you wouldn’t backfloat. You just keep flailing and fighting and your relationship with water never changes.  

6. Purchased this week: Ant poison, watermelon, Tree of Life window sticker,  jumbo marker the color of cherry wood, large safety pins, fifteen live crickets, a used copy of “The Underachiever’s Manifesto”, tickets to a bagpipe contest, an MMORPG where you get to join the Illuminati, and milk.

--Kristen McHenry