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

short shit films

 

Dull Ziplock

CLick tHe iMaGe 

click for the short film 

disappearing within myself, pt 2

 I lost myself between the telephone wires. the failed communication became certain satisfaction at all my failed attempts. he always comes back when the tide is drowning out all the land and there is already nothing left to take. we sit here planning our futures, and I can't help to think of the conversation I held before, with other boys dressed in polos or rip to rags t-shirts. each of them gifted the faith of death sooner than anybody in the room expected. I stopped loving you when he died. before the night I spent months trying to fit myself into a pair of jeans you would have liked, starved myself from humanity, and forgot the face of the boy on the telephone. the same night I was convinced of the concept of pain ending. his life ended. I hated you for it, the strumming of your guitar ringing through my ears for the first time brought back memories of him crafting me lullaby's to drown out his fear of going to bed alone. I hated you for it. but I stayed because I didn't stay for him. and I grasped on to any life you held and begged for u to exist long enough for me to see u happy again. but you left. in all the ways you were meant to. and so I'll leave too. in ways you never excepted. 

Propaganda Cow

Holy Cow 

In the midst of haunted hallways and abandon homes, lives the bastard. He is Phoenix's finest most unconventional magician, juggling hobbies, skate tricks, and huffing paint. 

I meet him on the outskirts of shea, covered head to toe in dirt. He was spraypainting a dog on the side of my junkyard honda. Hat placed always facing west. He didn't speak in mumbles but rather screams of currents, echoing off the walls from the gutter in which he called home. playing the song that turned me mad. (objectively speaking I was always considered mad, or a clock missing a few gears, but I like to consider myself more of a light switch. giving myself time and places).

He told me about his business. It was the type of business you'd whisper or change the topic around the police or women in Christian atter.

 He sold carrying pigeons to men on the light rail, each of the ankles of the government official birds held tiny flyers promoting "holy cow!" a short film created by Aiden Shabkie and his gang of misrepresented street dogs. Ripping up property and making make-shift rails. It was a dangerous business, that could get him and his mates locked up on the farm, milking cows and throwing eggs for the rest of their days. But they didn't care, or at least Alex didn't. He was used to the life of crime. 

He found hope in it.

 After I went mad, they must have gone west, tracking the chemtrails in search of more junkyard hondas and abandoned swimming pools. I can't tell you when they will come back or what new propaganda poster will be floating around the telephone lines. just that they will... and it will be more destructive than the first time. 

-katbird02 

disappearing within myself, pt 1

The thing that sucks about this whole situation, is that I cant promote my shit-stained blog. I mean you can take the blog but you can't take the girl out from the blogger lifestyle. I've been a shit writer in all types of confinements. jumping out of windows and catching bus rides to the nearest mailbox to insure people there is still a brain inside this locked up body. I mean we've all heard about the moleskin journal and my ability to make pads of paper into police officer's interests. 

confinement in my ideology isn't confinement

I mean my bedroom walls can be anything I want them to be, 

the rattling of my car and skipping of the radio is just like the good old days.

reading books that make you envy their life and strumming mumbles on that untouched guitar.

we forget how much complicity is held within the simplicity due to the fact that robots and technology took over our twilight zone reality.  

who are we when we have nothing? 

no social media, no outgoing call, no screen to hide behind. 

the empty stillness of the world, 

when was the last time you sat quiet enough to hear the white noise, 

how did it make you feel?

was it a type of paranoid high, where you swear to god the cop siren in the song, is actually a cop siren and he's going to pull you over?

even though you've heard that song a million and ten times, the uncertainty of consistency. is going to eat your hallow brain alive. 

and you can't do anything about it

I know the sun is going to come up tomorrow and these words will just be something I use to fill up the time or make a mission for delivery. 

but it's still uncomfortable, to be so still, to be the quietest girl in the room, to be the only girl in the room.

katbird03

WEB SET WITH BOYTHYE

 Frankie, this one for you:

WEB SET LINK

Believe it or not, in the midst of editing a brutally honest, self-degrading blog, that hopefully will resign in the draft grave. My sticky fingers went to Frankie's page in hopes of filling the uncomfortable confrontation I made between my laptop and the narrator's thoughts. I ended up saying fuck you to the blog and devoting my concentration to the cinematic vibrations of my phone where little Frankie was trapped in. 

North Carolina

"Now that I'm done consuming it's time to shit some stuff out"-Frankie

Haven't known Frankie for that long, but I do know that fool can make you let out a god-awful laugh and give you witch-like smile lines. Frankie's voice is the combination of a proud father and silky smooth whiskey. When consuming the web set, I seem to have time-traveled back to childhood memories and was surrounded by all the beautiful things I loved in the south, and Frankie's guitar luring strums built the structure of the lake house I visited as a child, the way I remembered it all magical and book-like. each song became a comforting understanding and the fabrication of the life I wish I had back in the south. When Papa Frank had a political outburst over the grill, calling out weird family members and the kids who steal otter pops and our cans of worms. Papa Frank told us tales around the campfire, consisting of concrete cowboys, haunted citizens with mouths full of lies, children with chicken legs, and the god awful truth; that Jesus sometimes has no comment.  He gave his viewers, a nostalgic-filled experience, trapped us in pink tackle boxes, and made backhanded compliments on my taste in soda pop. But in the end, Frankie tucked us all in, let the fireflies out of the man-made mason jar night light, and gave us things to dream about. 

I'm looking forward to being a part of more web sets and cant wait to see what BOYTHYE "shits out"! 

katbird02 xoxo

finger printed bruises

I don't really have anything nice to say, 

I'm also extremely sleep deprived,

running off three diet cokes

I think the main thing I hate about the human race is our need to be on top, I've watched girls fight over shit dog men in order to get some sort of recognition, or temporary lust. girls fight over girls just to get some sort of popularity, and a foot up in dominating the human race. In America, we profit off of the failures of others. 

we are "the fuck it all generation"

the "cancel culture"

the "mistaken"

the "overly empathic and impassivity"

there is soon to be nothing left to burn

and it doesn't even scare me 

It's all human nature, this is the "Natural man" they all talked about, we are the examples psychologists and philosophers use and we are all just as bad as each other. 

katbird

 

tramp stamps

 

The night started with backstabbing Hatz and ended with the out roaring from my favorite local band. The set was fascinating and created an out-spoken aura. The starting band Oversea quite literally gave the audience a foreign music experience with an ultraviolet twist to sonic rock. The trio consists of Jason the drummer, Stephan the bassist, and the god-like screeching vocalist Valarie. The band Overseas played one house show before going on intermission during covid and really working on the chemistry between the mates. Despite the chaotic police appearance Overseas still managed to put on an awesome performance and show Home Invasion a new type of talent! 

The second set was Rosemonte, a high school band that started a year ago. The ensemble contains Max the vocalist, Noah the drummer, Colin the guitarist, and the kickass bassist, Ally!  Rosemonte played a radicalized sesh and gave the audience "indie Radiohead" vibes according to Ben Bates, a member of another local band called Reruns. Their youthful talent is absolutely shocking and definitely a band that should stay on your radar. 

The final set was worth the fucking wait.. 

Bummer Girl gives life a new purpose and fans tramp stamps. They gift us an atmosphere of lust and family with their cocktail mix of midwestern emo and rock. Cameron Demecs shredded the guitar till the crowd became nothing but sizzling chords, while Joey Step plucked the bass into a heart-throbbing experience, Walt Wilson (sugar cowboy) injected the audience with straight caffeine as he flirted with the crowd using only his vocals and cryptic dance moves. This was all topped off with Devin Divichi's neck-breaking, curb-stomping, drumming. Bummer girl is the living proof of a higher power. We appreciate them for their uplifting art and the compassion for their fans/friends. Bummer girl ensures the safety of the community and the underage kids that crowd surf around Home Invasion and can not be thanked enough.

ALL and ALL these bands were throat grabbing and so far my all-time favorite setlist. A special thank you to Home Invasion for providing the space and securing the safety of the community when faced with unexpected complications. Also, thank you to the people who came to support the music scene and stayed all the way to the end regardless of the time! <3

xoxo

katbird02

catch Bummer Girl and Rosemonte next week at Rebel Lounge

https://therebellounge.com/e/bummer-girl-152159871271/