go-o-o-o-odd lo-oo-o-o-o-ooves a terrier

Fri|06.07

Reading this, I recommend it.

Ummmmmm.

Slow week. Tired. But not TIRED tired, just annoyingly so.

Blah blah blah blah blah.

spitting out pieces of his broken lu-u-uck

Tues|06.04

Feels like Thursday. I'm much better now, thank you. Tired.

BLAH BLAH BLAH!

I hate the smell of travel. Like a long car trip. Or bus. Smells. Fumes from the car, upholstery heated by the sun, not enough air to go around. Warm soda. The slight shaking that never stops of the moving of the car or bus, the moving moving moving.

I'm so glad I'm home.

water never tasted so good

Sun|06.02

Ugh. I feel so sick. SICK! Nothing is helping. I'm not tired, can't sleep, but am miserable awake. I feel nauseous. Nothing is fixing that. It started on the bus, it was the strangest bus I've been on. City bus, I mean. I mean! WTF???

Okay, it's one of those electric hybrids, and the seating, is just. How do I describe. You get on, and there are the normal seats, running along the window, then a couple rows facing the usual way (the front), then you hit the back door and all hell breaks loose: there is a row of sideways seats up some STAIRS, there are two seats facing each other after a large bump to accommodate the tire, and then the back row only has three seats instead of the customary five, and and and. It's like the back half is another compartment. Third class or something. You could do anything back there without anyone up front knowing what you were up to.

And traveling on it, my GOD I thought I would just ... you know. VOMIT. AND THEN, THERE ARE NO STAIRS! Seriously. Except to get to that one seat I mentioned. The back door and the front door, no stairs. I thought maybe the driver had gotten stuck at the wheelchair position, but no. THERE ARE NO STAIRS. Okay then.

Did I mention the motion sickness? Okay. So I got home and was shaking and dazed and bleck and thought maybe I have my contacts in the wrong eyes? Could that be it? So I take out my contacts and that wasn't it. I am just ILL. Nothing is fixing it. Gooddaammmiittt.

Wah wah wah. Poor me, right? Right.

(ALSO: I have an unholy cough that keeps getting louder, maybe some neighbors will kill me? One can hope. You know they want to.)

To clarify yesterday, when I said I've been feeling how I felt two years ago, what I meant was physically, like a sense memory.

no sugar tonight in my cawFEE no sugar tonight in my TEEE

Sat|06.01

I can't believe it's June. In my head when I try to think of what month it is, it's March. But that's wrong. Because it's June.

Sometimes I get flashbacks of how I felt at a certain period of time, years ago, when a song plays or I smell something familiar. I'm sure you do, too. Like, when I hear "So Alive" by those guys I can't think of the name of, from 1989, I remember my last summer in Boston, walking to work in the heat. Even at 8 a.m. that summer was unbearable. I usually had that tape going in my headphones, I loved it. Love 'n' Rockets! That's who.

Anyway, I don't know what's reminding me of this exactly but I keep thinking of two years ago about this time. I was working a lot and not doing much else. I wanted to be writing again, or hanging out with people who write, but I didn't want a class or a weekly group. I ran into this article while surfing the 'net (I think the Internet connection had just been added to all workstations, and so my abuse began) and joined the apparently now-defunct author-author site that the piece mentions.

What a great idea, to have this at my disposal, whenever I felt like logging on. People from all over the place, who were either professional writers or were trying to be, chatting, critiquing others' works, and there was no set time to meet, the forum and posts and stories were always there.

So, I tried to break in. I'd been using the name Cleo while posting on a different bulletin board, and liked it. I extended the name to Cleotyne, which seemed familiar to me somehow. I couldn't decide whether I should put an N in the middle there, to make it Cleontyne, or possibly Cleontine. I did a google but couldn't really find a definitive spelling. And it could be a male or female name, apparently. Years before, while living with the ex, who I can't think of a pseudonym for so he'll be "the ex" for now, I had decided on the alternate name of Angel Jones and was still enamored of it, so there I had my full name, Cleotyne A. Jones. Wow, what a long sentence. Nope, not changing it.

So I signed up, but while doing so couldn't decide what posting name I wanted. Cleo Tyne? Cleo Jones? Cleotyne Jones? I panicked and typed in cleotyne, no caps, no last name. That was one thing that people there were wary of, an obviously fake name, and the other was just me being new. It took a while for anyone to talk to me, which was fine. They all seemed to be friends, hung out on the site every day posting. No one was funny, and that took me a while to notice. I mean they were pleasant enough. There were a lot of flame wars, which were sometimes hilarious but mostly were embarrassing to read and kind of frightening.

Little jokes I threw into my posts were either taken seriously or ignored, maybe because I wouldn't use emoticons. I was still figuring out the posting thing. I wanted to be part of the group. I knew once people got used to seeing my name, they would talk to me.

Submitting a story helped. So did giving feedback to other people. Participating in a flash fiction session was a lot of fun. After a while I realized that I only liked a few people, and they didn't post as often as the people I was growing tired of. Why wasn't anyone funny? Where was the FUNNY? And the arguments, my lord.

People argued against using pseudonyms; should people who used them be BANNED? What an eyeroller. Stupid shit like that. On the fourth of July someone dared to wish everyone a happy fourth, and was promptly flamed long and wide for being pro-America (this is from other Americans) when really, she was just saying hey, happy fourth.

I think I visited the site through July, maybe part of August and September of that year. By then I had a much more time-consuming obsession in another corner of the Internet, and was reading funny, funny things. DELIGHTFUL things. And I wandered away from that author-author site. I wonder what happened to it, other than it died. I wonder why. Or if it relocated to a different name, or something.

I don't miss it, not at all. Just curious, and have been feeling how I felt exactly two summers ago.