last show.

 The clerk mistook me for an abused housewife. Placed in a dress surrounded by a color I despised. My arms star-speckled in bruises from the series of shows I misplaced myself in the nights, weeks, and months before. I stumbled into the Moreland house after a series of stubborn car alarms and failing engines. In which I meet the start of Fight the Vomits set, seasick and star-struck, missing belly button rings and the crashing sound of my already cracked up head meeting the concrete. didn't affect the rush of the gravel below us. 

I greeted strangers I meet before, shuffling make-believe names waiting for somebody to catch the inconsistent storyline. we danced, threw arms, bodies, and rocks into each other as if we defending our family's name. greeting each other with unexpected smiles in between each song. the strangers I've met who clashed and fist-fought sat in unholy matrimony on a color-changing bus. swaying in and out of conversations as commiserates setlist roared in the background. I observed each band enough times to know when to look up during the clashing of symbols and synonyms. enough times to feel a part of something more than a setlist. 

I consider myself the type of person who plans each step but found myself slipping off the color-changing bus before I even got the time to process the familiar song humming in the background, played by a band I had not yet had the chance to hear before. Pushing Pluto created a retrograde of sounds, spinning the songs of bands I thought I knew. creating a type of urge to keep pushing my insomniac legs as I shook the pins and needles out of my hair, neck, and kneecaps. I wish I could have experienced the type of environment Moreland Home provides long before cops and robbers decided to play a part in the evening. Wondering a series of car alarm thoughts surrounding if Id ever find a type of safe haven like this again. the series of different ways I could gather up crumbled change in order to keep it running. And if id ever be greeted with another full set performance by pushing pluto. 

hannah/teddy/katbird/smith/whoever

i fucking hate this dress... reminds me of farmers and cooking for people with bottomless stomachs. also heyyyy.. um kinda a review but also more of an observation of the environment... ummm... yeah.. idk if I'm gonna keep blogging ab this stuff, but this is for the two dudes dancing on the bus... goodnight.... 

. 

the metaphorical house

 MY STORY AND MINE ALONE.

Everything good around you always has a price. 

The undeniable truth of this all is, no matter how gold and green the situation looks on the outside there is always some sort of dark twisted karma that has been brewing behind the sparking lights. I hate to say I was lucky in this situation, that the years of older men playing with my pigtails trained me to not trust men in suits, or father figures, or people who pretend to be your friend. 

I understand my existence and the space it takes up and the undeniable sonder that every human holds. I'm not unique in any other way than the way my molecules take shape. I knew then what I know now, that I was just a girl. 

I caught the signs of a man trying to make my innocents into something more and I understood the game, my position, and all of the plays I needed to make in order to escape. I know I held faults and lost pawns between each move, but again. I was just a girl, who had been searching her whole existence for movie-type bullshit that created the idea that a girl could ever be loved past her worth.

 It started simple, like how all games did. We traded music, movies, and cereal. which became late-night talks over-caffeinated hearts and the dissection over my childhood trauma, relationships between past lovers, family members, and reasons why I never returned to the south. He used each piece I handed him in a way to build power, he used my desperate need to get out to keep me trapped in a position of need. In a metaphorical house with unlocked doors that held consequences. 

I stumbled on a tight rope existence between being a girl wanting out, waiting for a paycheck, and not wanting to create an unhealthy work environment. cause sometimes having a metaphorical house with unlocked doors is better than having a house with barred-up windows and stainless steel doors. 

I gave him everything he wanted, agreed to all the rules, and played his game, constantly strategizing in my stuck position. I was hopeless at certain points of the game, surrounded by people who worship his every move and praised him for the empty acknowledgment he brought them. but in certain settings, I found hope, in people who felt the advantages he was taking. The first time was when a friend gave me a pocket knife after meeting the owner of the metaphorical house. the second being the time a customer joked about getting me help. the third when a blonde stumbled in asking me my age and if I felt comfortable in the metaphorical house. yet the hope was empty, the pocket knife couldn't protect me, the customer never figured out the punch line to the joke and the blonde never came back to check back in on the condition of the house. And the terms and conditions he wrote me regarding the relationship between a minor and an adult didn't even shock the professional I trusted with my secrets. the whole world was blindsided and took sanctuary in rose-colored glasses that kept them safe. 

The thought process between staying in the game: pedophilia in my study, is a habit, a need, urge, an uncontrollable want. and falls along with the same idea of any addiction. if he wasn't using me for his urge or a daily dose of fucking with kids, he was going to do it to someone else. So I stayed, long enough to find out, that my heroine existence wasn't strong enough to keep him captivated by only me. In which I knew the game had to end.

I started to bring friends to the shop to prevent any misconduct. but only introduced him to more kids who fascinated his interest. I began to watch him use and manipulate other women in the scene to profit use and discard. I felt disgusting and just as responsible as him for not forcefully ripping off their rose-colored glasses and showing them the unlocked doors before they held consequences. But I was too late. the coffee had gone cold and the muffins had all rotten. so I ended the game and left the metaphorical house and accepted the consequences. 

I don't think getting out was cowardly, just never warning the people who bathed his feet. I knew they were good people with extremely large hearts but I was unsure of the devotion they held for him and if id just is considered another girl from the art scene making a big deal about something nobody would care to hear. But here I am.  Allowing the world to make a decision on where their devotion lies, with a man who counted down the days till my 18th birthday. 

dollar coffee

I sleep on crumble pieces of paper, marking my existence

the first girl I ever wrote about asks me to do it again

I contemplate all the memories of her, that I kept track of in a scrapbook long before she knew of my existence

when she was just a girl stumbling around the halls of empty elementary

fast forward 3 years and she is a tween crying in my bathroom

and for the first time, it feels as if there is a person in my hallow home.

I am decorated in pearls and a goodwill dress sewen to the fitting of my first homecoming and the dress has riped in my attempt to get low enough to hear her.

 I pull out a pen-soaked journal and my forbidden mouth reads the embarrassing lines between a poet and an emerging teen with a learning disability. and she is laughing. 

starstruck with the embarrassment of admitting the feeling of pain and my romanticism that surrounds it.

There's a type of resentment I feel or guilt for being the girl who lit the first cigarette or introduced her to a new type of healing that surrounds chaos and self-harm. Or the fact that I allowed her to resign there years after.  Using her as an example of my good doing and a constant reminder of who I once was or who I wanted to be.

we are both merging adults now and I watch the chaos pour out of her like damn that had been filled past capacity, the citizens running for shelter and the self-proclaimed mental reevaluating themselves. Her boots are pulled up past her caff and her hair is ever so changing.  from motorcyclist, road rage, consuming music, last-minute business ideas, and are plans of getting out. I always self-proclaim as a girl who always changing, yet I still find us sitting on the empty porch guzzling cigarettes and dollar coffee, asking the sky when will are adrenaline rush starts to feel like a rush again and less like our Sunday mornings. 

 

Francesca Kula

Arresting the emotion is one of the hardest criminals to catch. Always shapeshifting and becoming whatever the viewer deems innocent or guilty. We seem to have lacked understanding of the simplicity and force-feed our emotions onto art. But behind every great work, there is an artist, a person, a whole living creature just as complex and their art becomes the stories they fail to tell with words. 

I first meet Francesca in broken-down physics class. She was the introduction of beauty and brains and completely broke my black and white thinking. That some people are born all brain-like and successful. while others are made of mog-pog glue and emotions too deep to conceive. Francesca was different, the calculated form of art mixed with dark thoughts she kept stuffed in her portfolio. She captured every moment she could and made the forgotten homes in the hallowed city, more than just a place I go when I have nothing left. The houses before her arrival were never less beautiful, The structure never changed and the light never stopped flicking. She didn't shapeshift the story into a different reality or make it look better than they actually did. She captured it in the way they were. Allowing the emotions of still objects to liquified in her art. 

History is often overlooked and the memories we hold pass just as fast as they were created. But every now and then there comes someone great, a person built to not only tell their story but to give us the sense of nostalgia we have lost and remind us of all the beautiful parts of life. Francesca Kula, the time-traveling
photographer dancer is without a doubt one of the Greats 

-katbird02