If you’re at all invested in my writing you may have noticed some radio silence for the past month, due mainly to me finishing off the semester and graduating kawledge with an English degree.
I began writing a big long yappy essay reflecting on my impressionable youth and how inspired I was by spontaneity, “the Road”, and my own canon of literary heroes; and how the routine of college pointed my creative energy in less favorable directions and subdued my autonomous fire and now I’m too tired to paint and write poems, for now. Frankly I got bored writing it and figured you’d be as bored reading it so I decided to dive into the archives of my early writing and journals to have the fever speak for itself.
Most of these were written between 6-5 years ago, when I was just entering my 20’s as some sort of Beat revivalist. They are cute, cartoonish, embarrassing, and have never seen the light of day but give an intimate look into a young woman trying to create herself out of familial ruins in the only way she knew: chaos. I’m interested to see if you can make it through even a few entries. It’s absolute brain vomit that I at least punctuated so it could make a little bit more sense. It’s a bit of a placeholder while I stew away on another essay, but I do think even our past selves need to be seen too, so they can be released.
To my paid subscribers, thank you so much for your financial support despite my lapse and I will make it up to you soon <3 To everyone else, thank you for supporting me through your interest and for sticking around while I’ve grinded away in other directions.
I rather be in the eye of my irrational roaring pursuits than to be a safe distance from my insanity because then where do I stand? The grey zone, muted life, everything would make too much sense and I would sit there spending my time thinking about small town gossip and what else I’m going to distract myself with. I AM THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE YOU ARE THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE everybody is exploding into themselves, chaotic orchestra, it’s all weird it’s all sad it’s all ecstasy it’s messy and beautiful. Here I am trying to speak of the divine infinite of human consciousness and I’m simply typing away at a lit up screen that wants to take over the world someday. If I didn’t have art I’d probably be a drug addict - I don’t have an addictive personality but I have attachment issues with things that make me feel.
I’m growing into 20 and I’m exhausting myself on figuring out what that means. I’m in the wild west of my existence, figuring out how to claim uncharted territory. For now I’ll bite my nails drink a lot of coffee and keep trying to quit tobacco. Everyone should understand.
I have been so uncomfortable with my comfort lately. Everything has become a ritual to the Void, soft white and full of daily porcelain salvations and morning coffees and bike commutes, tea after work, doing the dishes blah blah blah — and my predilection for portaling my body everywhere all over this yawning coast is leaving my body at an ache to talk to all of the strangers and occupy 100s of miles with my single thread. I miss getting around places in a gunshot like Arie and Yago’s fucking cannon of a green schoolbus with Yago sitting up front chainsmoking and Arie blabbing lovely in her Brazilian ways and I swinging around on the hammock in the back, loving over Humboldt; oh my god ending up in rivers waking up to Yago’s cheap coffee and some other unknown adventure. Or walking around SF and Portland with my unreasonably heavy pack and tent and sleeping bag smiling at everyone who avoids my eye contact, taking up so much space on the buses, bumming at coffee shops and spending most of my money on pastries and caffeine; finding more random rides to random places via the futuristic hitchhiking of craigslist. getting stranded in eugene with nothing but a full tank of gas in a car someone gave me and a dramatic cigarette and a lovebelly full of an old couple’s shenanigan like the secret of god unfolding before me and, oh my, even old Shenanigans himself, a real live leprechaun living in this cabin in the middle of Arcata forest wrapping mushroom chocolates and running into all the people from all my stages of life at the farmers market in the plaza and i am swelling at the thought of this never ending summer after looking back at those journal entries and i realized it MADE SO MUCH MORE SENSE WRITING during that time because it was ALL CALL AND RESPONSE and here I am making up calls making up responses to this empty ritual that fills the gaps until the next cosmic explosion of myself splattered all over this country’s roads and what a waste of form; i’m filling in all those holes with the valen that pirates and indiana jones’ her way thru the mediocre Making this Blah Blah loud and lovely FAREWELL i’m going for a drive.
Another morning of the big ol’ Blah Blah, figuring out ways I can burst out of physical existence and break the seams of the things that contain me. Wondering how I end up with things like other people’s vans and cars and free MacBooks and lovers and 3 story red door home and letters, and still worry about how I’m going to replace my typewriter’s ink cartridge. I am simply milling along albeit like a runaway snowball. I can’t think of a better way to pass my time than brain purging, whatever that takes. My dad told me imagination is God once so I’m just trying to get closer to the divine (the more i purge the more room for God right?). i’m creating my own religion. I’d rather no one practice it cuz then who would I be? This is coming from a man who meditates on daddy long legs as he listens to alien conspiracies over static pocket radios smoking cigars in the garage. I can’t think of a better way to spend my life than writing and writing a big book but i can’t help but think why anyone would want to spend days of their life reading about someone else’s, and why i would spend years of mine talking about it, but then i remember why i like jack keruoac and there’s something in the way people talk about the things they care enough to write about in their own language. It inspires me to inspire others to inspire others. maybe one day this whole world will be a loud groaning mess of writers religiously exposing themselves, clicking away on their keys like a symphony of sighs.
I miss my typewriter because everything on a screen is rendered irrelevant to me. Last night i went to a potluck that I just brought tea too and sat around the dinner table and listened to university students pulling information out of the air in such an uncanny and relevant way you’d think they were born with the knowledge of the universe. i sat asking questions about gothic literature and talked about philosophers like bands and learned so much about the wars from the past century and i want to know all the things so my brain expands a wee bit, more room to do cartwheels in my mind is enough room, and then we can play mental gymnastics with our nietzsche information and these students talk about the insidious torture of school and how they wish they were like me floating around in the world, playing bumper cars with other people floating around in the world, surrendering to the entropic flow of the universe, and i say i wish i was like them with superfluous knowledge that you can play with! Its like having a lot of nice art supplies! Lots of channels for human connection and conclusion of the abstract! This girl from Vermont talked about how her and her roommate always argued about whether numbers or letters were more important. I said that numbers are important because they give the letters something to actually talk about, all the calculations and domesticating of the unknown. And that letters are important because whats the point of numbers if you don’t have anything to discuss them with? I proceeded to leave the dinner party of existentialism and ride my bike in the rain in circles and slap wine encased in a plastic bag floating on a big rock hurdling a perfect distance from the sun to sustain life at 67,000mph; life evolved from the beginning of time for wine bags in the rain right now.
Our bodies are clocks, domesticating the infinite timefull souls. Isn’t everything a clock? I make art and it takes me a lifetime to put something in a canvas and there ya have it, time in a box.
If the only time is now, I am enlightened in every moment because I have reached the wisest i’ll ever be. I know as much as i can to act in my best interest in right now.
I am allowed to feel these things in my big nice red door house where the people’s trees grow fruit and smell of magnolias, where these feelings are vaguely foreign and mistaken for hangovers. I still smile because of the Void, because of warm cups of coffee in the morning of our garden, because blues music, because we have windows where windows should be, because the light wants to shine on me from those windows, because there is enough space to explode, because Art, because Words, because Love, because I Am The Golden Eternity, that which would be bored if it weren’t to cry sometimes. do I even breathe when I dont think about it? Allow inhales to yield more room in lungs for Life.
These rats found themselves into the attic above me room. Given, the rain inspired their way into my home. They raid the food in our pantry, and crawl and squeak and scratch as I go to sleep. I give the sad rodents credit for doing what they can to be alive. Inspiring really. Everything just Is in that Way huh.
I find it rather funny that the truest loves of my life are traveling my body and sitting and painting. On the surface level one could say they are conflicting; painting is a fairly stationary activity as opposed to traveling 1,000’s of miles and peoples and rivers and adventures. But not until recently did it make sense that when I wasn’t traveling I was painting. They are both exploration in their own right. When I travel, I explore the time and space of the physical reality around me, expanding the borders of experience and filling in life’s nooks and crannies. When I paint, I explore my inner realms, fostering a greater self-understanding and expanding the boundaries so there’s more room to do cartwheels and explode into myself. These two concepts hold hands in a beautiful ethereal symbiosis. The more I travel, the more experiental tools I have to work with in my paintings. The more I paint, the greater the capacity I have to emotionally and logically grip the world and its happenings, yielding inspiration out of daily moments. In this is a divine balance.
For so long I shamed the innate ‘laziness’ of painting, adopting the sacred physics of Perpetual Motion as the most absolute right and undeniable force of my life and keeping my body busy in almost futile ways to avoid sinking. But once I realized that creating art was its own form of traveling, the mental equivalent of Perpetual Motion, surrendering to its physical idlety became extremely productive. I felt comfortable spending several hours exerting my creativity and honing in on my style and self-expression. I stopped feeling like it had to look any sort of way and started creating something new for myself and the world. Life becomes more and more known and unknown everyday.
In the mornings I drink coffee and write in pure and secret white light, light not riddled with any confusions of the day. Dog simply licks herself next to me and sometimes the bus drives by and my roommates have meek and tired small talk in the kitchen behind the big red door of our big blue house, a halidom. My roommates all go to school during the day so I haunt this space that echoes with the bustle of 10 college students and their parties. It’s made me like classical music and wear flowers more.
I’ve learned we have way too much time during the day to think. If i’m not making art or writing or dancing or sitting with the sun and birds in the backyard, taking out the compost or watering the garden, if i’m not cooking myself a pleasant meal bought with food stamps or going on walks through golden central coast roads, I’m thinking about my mom and her imminent death or worrying about whether my brother has killed himself yet and why he hasn’t been answering my calls, or daydreaming about my dad finally leaving the house and going to Utah and so I sit in the shower for an hour and sometimes it goes down the drain.
Too much time in the garden of eden. And it wants me to pay rent. I start work monday at a classic deli grocery down the hill and across the train tracks, one of my favorite bike rides. The customers are chipper locals and travelers. The hostel and the train station are within a block. Jack kerouac used to live in the house across the street. I used to think he haunts me. We share a birthday. Sometimes I go to Terrace Hill and wonder what Jack must’ve thought in the same spot.
Sometimes I wake up and I don’t know what to do except drink coffee and write. Lost in the dawn. Struggling to remember my dreams after I get out of bed. 11 am is the threshold for obligation. Any time before that I allow myself to float around the big blue house talking to my roommates in morning light and steaming cups of coffee and tea and smoothies and bathrobes. Today I am honoring a dead squirrel by saving his feet ears and tail, and preserving his bones for dead art. My ultimate goal recently is to push my self-fabricated creative boundaries to see where my mind will take my hands to take my art. I learn more about myself with every piece, from color scheme to design to the facial expressions and shapes of the forms from how long it takes me to do something — everything is a self portrait.
I want to make a mandala of squirrel bones.
A lovingly cold bikeride to work this morning, Yes I have a body and yes it feels and oh my it is beautifully uncomfortable. 2 out of 3 people on the deli patio were drinking tallboys on this fine Tuesday morning, ah we are all keeping our own warmth. I went to the patch of grass where I take my breaks and watched the cars and breathed. Busy Osos St. went silent for a wink and I heard everything in that moment. At work I think about if people wanted to change the world 100s of years ago like they do today. Right now I just think about my world and all the pleasant dates i’ll take myself on abroad, filled with wine and glorious simple meals in unfamiliar places and broken english and cobblestone streets with nostalgic tobacco drags and in this hyperconnected world perhaps i’ll sit with no one but myself. Maybe my friends and family wont know where I am, and i’ll be a happy ghost falling in love with foreign boys and girls, haunting european coffee shops and asian temples with coins and cigarette butts always rattling in my pockets. 21 years of Everything and all of a sudden I’m okay with Nothing. Magic is filling the Void. Oh my god i’m spending the rest of my life dancing with a phenomena.
The moment it becomes a memory. When something cuts the tie that you made stronger with every thought, that you believed was breathing just like you. It’s when you’re lying on your cold, wooden living room floor in the dark when all your roommates are asleep and White Gloves comes on and the whole montage hits you, and it does just that — hits you. Its outside of you now. It is separate. And no amount of continual rumination can revive it, it’s so deep inside you now you cant even rip it out, not with looking at old pictures or listening to those songs or thinking its waiting for your return. You curse the time that buried it deeper and deeper, that turned it into wine and got you drunk with every reminiscence. You curse the city you moved to where nothing is golden anymore. There are no halos. All your roommates are strangers and you run outside and everyone’s a stranger and you look in the mirror and see a stranger and you hold onto your past so damn hard so it won’t become one too. A fever of nostalgia and all the city is closing in on you, squeezing it out, your last words are something like “golden hour” but its all too far to hear you.
'life evolved from the beginning of time for wine bags in the rain right now' <3 This was super fun to read valen :) Congrats on graduating!
Reaallly love your wild words and I made it through-- your writing is wonderful