The Rabbit Hole

I seem to have tumbled down the rabbit hole... perhaps I have too many irons in the fire at the moment. I have been researching Angelica and Tobacco with untamed glee for the past week or so, and I keep attempting to synthesize what I've learned into some sort of blog post, but as soon as I begin to write I find more information that leads down another path, which leads to more information, which sends me down another path... etc. So, Angelica and Tobacco will be another post. Until then, I've unearthed a few words from the massive, sprawling pile of pages that is the mound of the ouroboros nonsense-book I've been writing for the past two years or so. As I try to edit this jumbled mess, I'm noticing I have a tendency to loop my sentences around like endless unhinged carousels--they run on and on and on and then fly off the handle into some random corner of the universe, totally unrelated to wherever the sentence began. I'm not sure whether this is something I need to harness in a bit & try to tame, or whether it is just characteristic of my writing and I should just let it be what it is... Maybe when I finish this writing project I will have found the answer... most likely I will have only found more questions, but that's one of the things I love about creative projects. Here's a snippet:

Inhaling deeply the odor of her body, the odor of the green light that had borne itself into her and was now traveling throughout every inch of her skin, she heaved her limbs into the misplaced laughter of the scattered light around her. The world was hallucinating, and she was peaceful in the center of the commotion, laughing, laughing, laughing...

Her head grew heavy and fell back onto the carpet as she slid the length of her body down off the bed, rubbing one way, rubbing the other, feeling the growth of the carpet onto her skin, and into her skin; it tickled her, and she began to laugh again. It felt as if someone was running their fingers through her hair ever so carefully, gently enough to make the small hairs on the back of her neck stand at attention, harshly enough to make her neck twist and her eyes close.

When her soul was quiet in that space there was no longer a world outside her, no longer anything else but her throbbing brain and its false silence, a convincing impostor of peace.

In this cocoon the green-eyed girl could feel her tiny caterpillar feet twisting in their reach toward ecstasy--soft, slow ecstasy that dissolved her body down to nothing—here, she was the caterpillar when it was no longer a caterpillar, when it was nothing but a soft pulp of potentiality awaiting its transformation into another life-form. When she inhaled this poison (her poison) she was inhaling the breath of that other being that lived in her veins, the hollows of its body thriving and throbbing, whose head lit up like a crazed frog when electricity coursed through the long rubbery strand of cord that attached its heart to the wall.

She ran—ran away from it, dove into the water of the pool, of the tub, of the river—to wash herself clean, to purge her veins of this scattered clattering energy—she swam back and forth, back and forth in the water as the bats dipped their wings into the green glowing liquid. But it was useless; the surge had taken her over, she could either ride it out or succumb to the frantic jumbling of her electrons underneath the skin of her skull—she was not actually sure that she had a choice, or that it would make a difference. So she ran--ran out of the house with her brown suede coat on, slowed only when she was far away at the end of the street, slowed to a fast walk, and paused to light a cigarette in the dark and started running again, onto the next block, two streets down she turned left, propelled in a senseless motion and paranoid about the gazes surrounding her, the people hiding in their houses with the lights off, normal people. She worried that they would see her--multicolored hair flying around her face with black eyeliner smudged around her eyes, smoking as she ran, coat flapping awkwardly in the wind, cigarette dangling limp in her hand, shaking and scattering ash all over herself, wearing torn stockings but no shoes-- sometime before midnight. She had run down this street in disarray many times before, and whatever the normal people saw they probably could not believe; she imagined she looked as if she was a piece of the circus that had cracked and lost its way, lost a wheel, and was hurtled in a violent splash of colors unevenly rolling down the street...and what could normal people say about the circus, anyhow?