"sleeping in piles" -- a discussion

Dear Chelsea, As you know, I have had a lot of experience bedding down with various assortments of people. Some of my favorite memories are from doing so. For the past few years, however, I have been trying to escape (as I so often do) from such multiple encounters because I have been "valorizing" -- a good academic word -- sexuality that involves me with men. This has been so destructive in so many ways, yet there is always the allure of doing what is socially validated for women to do -- have sex with men. Associated with this recent tendency to couple with men have been my drug use, (crack) which makes me compulsively give blow jobs (sorry to mention this); and an attempt to be independent (stand on my own two feet) and not depend on other transsexuals or women for my self-definition. I feel that whenever I do so, especially in a two-way relationship, that there is competition and conflict about who is the "most womanly." Back to sleeping in piles. For me being with many other transsexuals at once was liberating in that I could at last feel equal and safe and equivalent to my partners. We all had something in common and that was a somewhat amorphous/fluid sense of self which did not stand up well when attempting to function within categories of gay/straight/woman/man. There are some emotions, some caresses that only a trannie is capable of, and that only that another trannie can reciprocate. When you're in a pile, love seems to have no bounds. Also, it is generally a way to lower barriers that transsexuals put up against the world to protect ourselves. We always try to hide, to disappear, and this multiple sexuality allows us to represent our full selves with a number of others like ourselves, giving strength, "confidence" and a measure of human fulfillment. The reason why it seems that multiple encounters work better than one on one encounters to achieve these goals is that the Feminine Archetype (the Goddess) is grounded in us (as transsexuals pre-op, non-op and post-op) through each of us being at once aspect and whole of the community which we make. For us to separate means to seek being "outside the herd" and lessens the divine sexual communion. I best remember, of course, Bear Mountain, when about seven, eight, or was it ten of us, were in a van at Bear Mountain State Park in New York. You and Barbie and Kelly Bishop began to "publicly demonstrate" your affections, with Kelly being the encourager of others (at least me) to join in. I can tell you that I felt that I was losing boundaries and inhibitions that kept me from being in touch with my own humanity. I was in awe of your perseverance with Barbie, and I felt gladdened to express my own sexual power with you. As the long (was it six hour) evening passed, each of us encountered every one else, and communicated love and caring in a dance of warmth and eros. The next day I remember going to "Survivors of Transsexuality Anonymous" and announcing to the group that I had been with everyone in the van and that the sex was liberating and far more helpful to me in coming out to myself than going to that twelve-step group for months with people desperately clinging to every aspect of their male identity that they could. Sexual and Gender Liberation went hand in hand, and in the one or two years afterward that our group, often changing members, encountered each other in the van, traditionally with copious amounts of marijuana, I made many acquaintances and relationships that I hoped would be life-long. I remember one evening going over the Brooklyn Bridge with K.D. Lang singing "constant craving" and thinking that I was living the epitome of love. Just two more paragraphs and I'm done. As an introduction to one's self and to communal sex, sleeping in piles is a great help. However, sometimes it can be abused when lesbian transsexuals, especially, make compulsive passes at others to join in. I think this reflects a certain lack of maturity that may dissipate with time. I learned to be the focus of one such group for a brief time, and I realized that being the mother or teacher of such a "herd" is a great responsibility, that it is a way to gain respect for oneself and others, and that it can bring into the world community where none existed prior. It is a self-run, self-originated and self-regarding way of becoming who we are. No doctors, no peer counselors, no rules or outside expectations is capable of this. I hope the above is helpful. Please e-mail me and let me know. Love, Julia

A depoliticization of fear

Trying to be feverishly focused when I need to be relaxed and communicative often interferes with my goal of accurately conveying my thoughts in a manner helpful to myself and others.

I am at the library, again. I cannot use my computer, which I just bought last week, because it is not hooked up to the internet.

Topic A for me, as usual, is my personal happiness, which is perhaps annoying to you my readers but for me is an absolute necessity, given that I have tried to survive with next to none, and have found that I CANNOT do so.

So, I'll just write what comes to mind related to the above paragraph.

As I sit here, I am aware of potential threats from others to myself and from myself to others. I am simply always aware that if I look at someone the wrong way I may suffer some unpleasant consequence. This condition in my awareness causes me to be anxious and perhaps a little withdrawn. These feelings interfere also with my feeling happy. So?

I think that perhaps this feeling of tension is purposely produced within the structure of this society in order to keep people like me (transsexuals) permanently on edge and thus unable to effectively live our lives. Perhaps this sounds paranoid. I can only cite the fact that it is much easier for non-transsexuals to ignore, blame, derogate us rather than for them to address their insecurities, which are produced within the very same society.

To me, political person that I am, the question thus becomes, in whose interest is it that these feelings are present? As usual, the answer seems to me to be anyone who benefits from the absence of the expression of love in social relationships. These are the people who are afraid of losing the face of domination, who either prefer or do not know how to reject the cold comfort of sadism -- not the fun kind -- for simply being alive. The fact that there are such people (and I have often felt that in my past I often verged over into this category) means that the need for change is still present, and still compelling those who can answer its call.

I should say here that the way I define this change is -- personal liberation. I know for myself that it is only by losing fear of myself that I have been able to work my way up to writing something like what I am writing now. The crux of personal liberation is sexual and gender liberation: when no one fears themselves or their sexual and gender impulses/identities/practices/selves, then violence and hatred must be visible and limited rather than invisible and insidiously omnipresent. That's what I hope.

Since it is better to live these changes out rather than endlessly describe them and analyze them, I will allow the pudding to be the proof.

Love,

C*

P.S. I've been seriously delinquent in being kind to others. I know what I need: friendship.
There's still a lot of fear of the world. And I can be happy.


P.P.S. Ms. CEG, thanks for being my friend the other day.

Leaping Lamentation

Worst Words from a Shady BITCH


Cast before me, often I see
Creatures of vast number,
All of them me.

Dykes and Didacts, failures and friends;
They wake me from slumber,
And capsize my trends.

As kind and helpful as I have been,
They see no other than
Honey as weapon.

They call out Her names at all the corners;
Thus She has found me
Preaching and Leaching and Scratching the mourners.

Now that I'm flushed out (with all of me here),
I say pleasantry's a Woman
That one ought not jeer.

Foreign Body

Mary
Crack
Strength
Julia

Happiness
Love
Friendship
Boring



As far as I know the only words that serve to describe the condition I am in today are:

Bowling
Targeting

Bisexuality

stamp out targeting

Since there is such an undeveloped basis for writing anything cogent or useful or even expressive and emotional, I have no other choice than to make sure you read this.

Tessier-Ashpool

(Remember those names, CG?)

Fined the place where I go wrong

Feelings afraid of strength.


Strength as hateful as a fool.


There is time now to understand the vagaries of friendship and trust.

There is hope that coming to terms with failure will allow me to understand why I hate Sylvia for taking feelings that I could not accept and making them something that gave me nourishment.

I can only say that when I was the age I was at then -- 35-38 -- I knew that people wanted beauty and that they saw that in me. I resented having to be the image of the beauty that I had even though at times I reveled in and took advantage of that need of some who were very close to me.

I was feeding and fed.

I was giving and given.

I was hated and hateful.

Certainly there must be a way that the knowledge that I have betrayed the person that could see beauty in others as well as herself can keep me from destruction. I don't know.

People need to seek happiness and that means that I must ask for myself of myself what it is that I know, sustain, feel and bring to life that is not destructive.

Craziness
Hate
Happiness
Strength
Taste

Crack.

Believe.

Love,

C*

WTF

When your best friend is arrested for a serious crime and other sundry associated activities come to light, what is the best response?

WTF.


I hope that she finds what she needs to find, and that time will diminish the pain for all of us, her included.

P.S. I'm sorry for any needless WTFs I may be responsible for.

Love,

C*

Goddess as Lover

New York is the perfect place for a maniac.

I used to sense my mind shifting its various plates, angles and gewgaws in rampant instability as I roamed the streets of the Wes Village trying to fulfill my roles as ecstatic wanderer, sham hustler, misfired observer and seeker of the immediate comforts of lit-up byways, people and other scattered sustenances for my questing, disintegrating neediness.

Angry and frightened, weakened by self-doubt and impersonal mental tortures, I found there was escape into the always altering setting of people whom I would never know, and who would never know me. I loved to put on a self-conscious show as a mysterious presence slipping past those who safely belonged to the neighborhood on my way to some often really dubious assignation with a person, substance or simply a shelter from my incessantly molting consciousness. I was an urchin and I was in my early forties.

Everything changed when I lost my home(s) in Brooklyn, Hoboken and the Catskills and became briefly genuinely homeless. Then the brilliance of the sun and the reassuring green of June foliage became backdrops for hard benches to sleep on and indiferent people from whom to wait for a kindly look or an offer of a meal. I discovered the desolation of being ousted from a cocoon I wilfully shrugged off in favor of crack.

crudite one

FEEL



Lectures draining life

Feelings bearing strife



Angles measuring mind

Angels losing kind



Sexual peaks made

Angry freaks jade



Best is letting go

Wise to make a flow



As love disappears

Stay near raving queers



Gasoline shocks stares

Move under the flares



[Ventilate/don't mutilate

Winter's now here/sensibility, not fear

Touchy-Feely

Pure Thought


Like throwing acid at someone's face
Like inventing the hydrogen bomb
Like throwing up razor blades
(I had that dream)



Feelings do something else
Like hearing
Like being
Like hearing yourself be

Words from Home

Deosil
Widdershins

Varieties

Establishing a friendship

Ecstasy for love



[Say it]

Peace





Me doing well, and gratitude to all who have had patience for me.


Saying it, meaning it.





I seem to have been afraid to ask,

Where does the Goddess act as I do?

The answer is, a person

Blessed Be,


Rose de la Murray

Fooled You

Ha! I was going to write more on the subject of my intrepid heroine Murray, but I've decided to write about myself, cstar!

I am saddened and disturbed/distressed at the moment. It seems that no matter what effort I make, no matter what pressure I put on myself, I make everything terribly confused, chaotic and difficult for myself and others.

I am occasionally able to reach for the happiness inside myself (beginning yesterday) but there's always something...

e.g., Miss JKH saying she wouldn't want to contact me about living anywhere near her.

You'd have to know what happened, and then I would have to reveal the identities of some of those who read my blog and their friends, which I won't do.

I really truly hope that with all of the tensions, stresses, uncertainties and imminent destruction in the air, that I can resolve the emotional issues I have, which are primarily NOT MY FAULT and somehow make relationships with people who truly care about me NO MATTER WHAT.

So, love always,

cstarmare

P.S., I thank the Goddess for what I have.

A Jurassic Jaunt

Murray crouched in frigid horror as the Pteranodon screeched like an eagle ready to gut its cowering victim. The flying reptile descended with talons outstretched and leathery wings cutting through the overheated air.

What to do, thought Murray as she dived behind a boulder. Is this oversharpened osprey a symbol of my desperate plight, or do I get up and slice its neck with my knife like a restaurauteur about to show a leg of lamb to an eager customer?

Quickly, she rose up and grasped at the Pternaodon's scaly legs while aiming for the flapping edge of its left wingt. The talons swifly ripped at her limbs and back but she held on as she cut a ragged hole in the fearsome dinosaur's exposed membrane. Rapidly the monster began to tumble toward the ground strewn with just-cooled lava and pumice one hundred feet below.

"I'm happy because I like to be!" called Murray to the universe as she rolled herself into a tight ball preparing to hit land. As she and the reptile fell side by side she caught the look of dead terror in its eyes. 1-2-3 she counted, then felt the surprising splash of sulfurous water. "I'm a world of feelings and I know it!" she thought as she reached the bottom of the shallow pool which was just deep enough to support her and her emotional work. As she came to float on the surface, she laughed aloud in delight swimming toward the nearest spot of earth, where she saw the dinosaur's corpse lie.

Next:

WEB OF GUILT

Your Poetry Corner

In the moment

I'm a grasshopper
In an American scientist's cage.
His name is John Smith.
What was I before this,
I wonder, but he knows me as I am now:

The species, the genus, the family,
boxed for examination.

Later, he meets his lover.
John asks, what will I be after this?

I think the answer ought to be
Slow in coming.

Poetry: The Lost Days

Dear Readers,

Had a pretty good poem I wanted to blog, but I seem not to have brought it here to the Library, so here's one of the mediocre ones for your persual.

What I know:

Hell is sex

A place where
boys cry

A place where
doves sigh

A place where
fiends try

A home for
"gently..."


Thank you, thank you.

I'm feeling extremely distant from my mother.

Trying very hard for the Goddess to prevail.

I guess I must learn to trust.

May your days be full of beauty.

Love
cstar

What I Love

Stillness/Meditation

Leisure

The feel of being in my body

Telling jokes

Listening to jokes

Dancing

Looking sexy, beautiful

Writing

having money to buy ?

Making friends

Discussing emotions

Philosophy

Poetry

Being by the sea or the mountains

Sex/masturbation

Electric fans

Reading

Having a place of my own

Looking out windows

Listening to/helping people

Trying to be a better person

Watching news

Hoping to learn about the environment/my body

Walking

Friends

Lovers

Clothes/Makeup/Hair

Houses, cars

Freedom

Love

Magic

I briefly note that the above list is not etched in stone, and I reserve the right to add to or delete from it.

Thanks!!!!

Love, c*

Have a good one

Today's a great day, it's all headed my way
tomorrow's not yet come and yesterday's far away.

Forever and ever, be happy.





That's all for now.

Love, c*

attempts to prevail

Maybe I have not attained the state wherein my concerns do not outweigh the concerns of others, where harmony rather than individual interests prevail.



The fact is that no one other than me can ever understand my life better than I can. Since I live in a particularly intense milieu, perhaps it is incumbent on me to express MY ideas of what I'm about so that others do not make mistakes or suppose that they have the right to decide for me what I do and how I live.



First, it is clear that I do not handle pain well. I do not handle most emotions well. For instance, anger. Now, it so happens I have been in and out of therapy (mostly in) since the age of 16 (and I'm now 45!). Until now there has been no urgent reason to work out these problems (which are very near the core of what is going on with me) but in this instance, it seems that not only is one of my friendships on the line, but perhaps all others as well. It is not a pleasant feeling to have people gravitate away from one.



I am angry, frustrated and apprehensive. [I can hear so many of you saying, "so are we all." ]

The way that I have arrived at this state is by being more than usually careful of and aware of not only the things that I say and do but all the implications thereof. Perhaps this surprises you. Perhaps it seems that I am rather careless of others' feelings. More accurately, I am frozen in the overload. Most people do not care at all (or so I've been told) of what others think , feel or need. People are all out for number one. This is what a particularly bitter and cynical psychiatrist once told me.



I CARE BUT I AM NOT THE ONLY PERSON THAT CAN MAKE THE WORLD LIVABLE.



My feelings are not the answer for hell.



They are hell.



I have made this so very difficult.



I am loving, helpful, and interested in the well being of others.



Be loving, and remember that there is love.



I need love.



Bitch, there is something else to say.



I will no longer justify the means by the ends.



Money fucked me over.



And money is still fucking me over.



And I am tired



I know for a fact that I have fun when love is the topic A.



So let it not be topic A.



Shaida Kamdar and I made an agreement to survive together.



My parents made such an agreement also.



And further....

Rest is the

A Day in the Life of...

Just here at the Public Library in Sierra Vista with my Mom, who is wandering around looking for books to read while I use the computer. She was formerly looking at the 50th anniversary yearbook of my high school. There were pictures from the early 80s and I was able to identify several of the students shown.

I really want to (as usual) say so much, but I've forgotten what, so I'm just going to write what comes to mind.

First, I'm planning to go to Wyoming this weekend. I am beginning to realize that Wyoming may be no more accepting/receptive than Arizona, and probably less so. The woman I will stay with is already hinting that she's going to want money from me for this and that... As one of my ex-friends used to say, those friends who ask money from you to stay with them are not your friends. But she is an ex methhead and prostitute, and she grew up across the street and she's far away from my mother. We must have SOMETHING in common. What's going to happen? I'm nervous. Her husband doesn't sound like he's all that nice or pleasant. He drinks, she has gone back to drinking. There's some mysterious substance that she has mentioned I might use (as an "option"). I don't know. I'm aware that I may be willing myself into a place where I get high again, but right in the moment, I'm not so very eager to let that happen. Whatever.

I had a really intense and productive session with my therapist, Jeff, this Monday. He asked me whether I had "mourned my male body" yet, and I had to tell him I had not. I asked whether I should send a casket down a stream, and he said I could perform a ceremony or otherwise address this need of mine.

We also discussed how I had discounted many of my feelings of judgment during the time between my coming out and having my operation. He asked me whether it might be that judgment was a "human" thing. Of course I agreed. Now I have been struggling for the last few years to be non-judgmental both to myself and others, thinking that this might be one key to my having relationships with others that were solid and "rewarding." Perhaps this was one more obsessive error on my part. Right in this moment I kind of resent the fact that it was put on me to change. I am changing, but if I have any friends, they're just going to have to accept what it is, I'm changing into, and that's a BITCH. I'm so sorry I'm not something that I'm not.

Still doing mostly lazing about the house, reading and watching TV, cooking and a little cleaning. Anticipating the bus trip, scared.

I just finished a book!

The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong.

It was certainly informative and thought provoking, which I suppose may be the source of the writer's popularity. However, I became somewhat confused with all the different historical developments of the Axial Age and her take on them, and what I thought of them (as usual). Unless you're a scholar in the field and know the evidence, it's not easy to make the kind of JUDGMENTS of some conclusions that I'd like to make.

What was perhaps most interesting was the general fact that the civilizations of the era between 1200 b.c. and 200 b.c. were in parallel shifting from religions of sacrifice and ritual to more interior means of achieving personal liberation from the hardships of life, and the particulars of this transition were influenced heavily by the interests of specific social classes and states within history.

Truly there is much to learn.

What I would like to say in parting is, "More Power to Freedom!"

Something else: I am very much in need of pleasure (of diverse kinds). How can I reach beyond this pleasure-denying place without endangering my life? As CL (who's she?) said, everything in moderation. Is that possible for me? Only time will tell!


I hope someone will contact me


It was good to speak to JKH.

Blessed Be,

c*

Oh, fucking crap!

But first, a Poem

Wheat grows toward
A beautiful night.
Papa's found an orchard;
Mama's got the light.

And one more

Tangerine Sea

Mexico fried trees
Elated stars wheeze
Sexual bondage a mirror
Loving kindness is nearer



And another by William Bar (me)

Opinion Claims Moose

Sharing feelings takes emotion
Increases it, raises it, to devotion.




So back to subject number one -- my hypocrisy.


I was keen to become a prostitute. At Survivors of Transsexuality Anonymous (an old, largely forgotten "support" group), the women who worked seemed much more feminine, aware, womanly and knowing than the others who were largely dweebs. I had begun hanging out at Sally's ("dressed") and knew that I could get money for coke by having sexual contact with the habitues of the place. I was frankly envious and determined to show that I could be proficient in the profession. I was in it for money and power and showing off my ability to "love." Sex to my mind seemed secondary to seduction. I did of course have sex with the men and occasionally found it fun, especially when high.

When I became sick of the degrading acts I performed, and more aware of the self-destructiveness I was displaying, I attempted to turn away from it, only to find that there were many reasons to continue. In particular I tried to protect other girls. I was shocked to find that most did not take to "protection." Obviously they also had their reasons to work.

For some reason I just did not see myself in others who were trying to seduce men and benefit from it. It shocked and dismayed me that people would persist in that, because it had caused me damage. I learned not to try to interfere in what seems to be a rather common introduction to the life of being a woman.

More:

I tried to make love a reality within my "career" and at the same time was intensely interested in pursuing an image, money and being shady.

My choices had seemed limited when I came out (and they perhaps were). I wanted to prove myself. I wanted to look beautiful and sexy. At the same time it seemed to me that I was destroying my life, that I wasn't getting what I expected, that I was disappointing myself and my parents. I used to cry and bang my head against the wall in the bathroom in despair and desperation. So, did I choose what I did for similar reasons as anyone else? Probably. Do I have a right to judge? No. Have I judged? Yes.

--Bitch was my friend--

And now is it closed?


Au revoir
c*mare

Why bother writing?

There's anger, despair, disappointment.

I'd rather write about something that happened, but I don't know any way to make it better for me or the other person involved.

I passed judgment on someone with whom I acted as if we were the closest of friends. I said she liked/chose what she did, as if I didn't.

The anger and the distress I feel have everything to do with fear.
I fear believing that there is anyone who can be comfortable with my self. I know that I am not comfortable with myself.

Let me, dear readers, enumerate what it is I am uncomfortable with. Perhaps then you can discern for yourselves what it is I am doing that has resulted in this emotional and "spiritual" impasse I have reached.

First, I do not like having to define myself as different from other people. It seems that I need people for something other than sounding boards, sources of support, etc., which is what I have let friendship become for me.

I would much rather understand that the pain and anger I feel are derivative of hatred. I hate the strength I must instill in myself to subsist in this ignorant place. I don't feel like I need to know everything that I have to learn to "subsist." I am pretending all the time that I can simply live in my head and everything will be all right because that is where I am safest and strongest.

The alternative is to feel.

Feelings are very scary. I know that all I have to do is tell you what they are. They are stupid feelings like anger, disgust, and loneliness.

I'm sure I must have made others feel this way myself or I would not have internalized them so thoroughly.

I just want to say that despite my hypocrisy, that I am doing what I have to do to understand the imperatives of this moment. Sameness can only be acceptable if all can be a part of it, and it is clear that I cannot realize the hopes and dreams of others while judging those hopes and dreams.

Since I have spoken hurtful, judgmental words, I need to be happy with the consequences, because they are all I have. I just don't want to believe that people can do what they want without there being a crackhead making life miserable for them.


Misery, unhappiness and judgment/superiority do not mix.

I just want someone who loves me to know that I'm a bitch.

I just want someone who sees me as a woman to know that I am a hateful person because hate treats me to death, and death ends all the turmoil.

Sexuality for me is a way to achieve love. I cannot go around fucking people and then expecting to feel good about it. However, I am probably mistaken in my approach. I have been in this place that hides sexuality so long that I don't allow it to be a reaqlity in other's lives.


This anger is simply that I cannot make you my lover because you are the same as I am.

I need to know that wishes to become the other people in your life only result in unhappiness.

I need to feel that I am good.

I need to feel that love can exist without force or domination.

Where can I go to live?

Where can I go to let it be?

If I have been a phony to others, let them know that Goddess will let it be.

I'm afraid of anyone who knows me to be a freak.

I don't know how to stop demonizing those parts of myself. Just embrace what the Goddess has given.

Need. Flattened passion. Stupidity.

I have found mysself a moose.

Strong, direct, practical.

Stay sexy.

Goodbye.

Julia Murray

Bitch crackhead

Feel-Good Poetry (It was good for me to write)

A Lover

The Goddess is good
Beauty feels good
My thoughts are soft

Sex is a will
Journeys seem beautiful
People try love



Her People

Prick Prick Prick
People People People
Hers


Response and Reaction

Love is good
People good
Julia stupid

Alexander, Alexander, Alexander

A: Why, I'd call her last post tendentious, paranoid and ignorant.



B: It's a little shaky, I admit



A: Didn't seem to me there was anything shaking there.



B: She's just trying to say that the anger is about home.



A: Home?



B: Her love for her life.

A: But anger?

B: The Goddess knows what love is, and life is something that belongs to it. The anger is about knowing what she needs without knowing what to do about it.

A: Oh. Fascinating.

B: Yes, isn't it.

A and B: Good luck c*! [stay in touch]

Personality and Society: an analysis

It is giving life to give personality.

The ability to live according to one's feelings, conscience needs and impulses is good.

Attempts to control personality by placing controls on its expression is a denial of individuals' humanity and of the sacredness of life.

When societies control populations via behavioral methods, that is exactly what occurs: an attempt to encroach upon personality. This may ultimately become a means for societies to destroy resistance to social domination by elites of those they rule.

It is imperative to allow the free development of personality as a source of and guarantor of social development. People can and do learn to treat each other with full recognition of each other's humanity. Basing society's development on individual lives is the road to justice, peace and harmony.

Life is its own first priority, and its impulses are the means by which humanity may find its destiny and fulfillment.

Heh-Heh

So I didn't edit the post below. I just wrote it.



To make it more understandable, I hope: the game of How do you feel, Mrs. Peel, at least to some part of my mind, is when you try to learn to feel as a woman by asking others (women) what they feel. The part after that is an attempt to state what I feel.



As far as "hard fragrance": seems to equal "hard lesson."

As far as "errors," that's my friends.

As far as wanting to the Goddess to be Bruce: I can't say much about that except that apparently that was and perhaps is true for me. And I'd have to say that it wasn't possible: so, given that fact, all the ground I have to stand on is the next line, "treat me like a bitch."

Sorry to end on such a crude note.

Perhaps I'll try to be a little more light and superficial. I think I actually have gone as deep as I can go.

Yours,

c*

Pater, Pater, Pumpkin Eater

I'm a gonna do with this post what I haven't been doing, and that is to edit it. I'm also going to edit the last few posts as neither the poetry nor the writing have been living up to what I expect, and I'm sure what the readers look forward to.

Parents
Pain-Prayer
Shame
Anti-Establishmentarianism
Fear and Change


Fear prevents honest communication among people. The pressure to know life as I prefer it (rather than as it is) derives from the knowledge that no one can provide happiness without asking for love in return. This quid pro quo, if you will, may seem an obvious fact of life, but to me, great difficulties have arisen in relation to asking for and giving love.

Fear that people have power to alter my destiny at their will and behest has led me to avoid allowing myself the time or the energy to accept and rejoice in the destiny I have chosen (living in this body).

There are many people who attempt, through whatever means they can find, to love and be loved, but fail because some part of them feels that they do not deserve to receive love.

Certainly this has been true for me.

The abuse of children by parents is inexcusable, particularly abuse that stems from emotional neediness on the part of the parent, attempting to recreate in the child the parent of the abuser, alternating blame or even violence with needy requests for love.

I know for myself that I have relied on my friends to provide for me parent figures to alternately depend on and blame for the condition of my life that I have feared to accept for what it is -- fear of love based on fear of a person who can only be happy by playing a big game. That game is, how do you feel, Mrs. Peel? I deny life because life is my way to sing. And I can only sing when I'm practical. Practicality needs a rose and a rose is love and beauty. Beauty needs friends, but that's the friendship of the Goddess. I want her to live. I need to know she's my angel. I'm afraid to get that hard fragrance: bravery and prayer are friendly to things that give hope -- those "errors that tried me", and I wanted her, the Goddess, to be Bruce.

Treat me like a bitch.

Be nice and be fabulous.

Yours, Julia Murray, a poison pen.

For Stonewall Saturday: The Philosophy of Science -- a lament

Are not these the goals of Science?

No devouring Mother (communal)?
No parental Sister (maternal)?
No fallopial Daughter (intellectual)?
No kind Father (prophetical)
No attractive Brother (practical)
No joyful Son (h'storical)
No assailable self (organical)

But

What genes inside you
Make love to free you
From isolation
and doubt?

Why can't an X or a Y
go back to eternity
And one cell'ed shun
all mouth(er)?

Can't solution be made
That makes it all paid
For all you to have
it out?

Alone to be someone
free from anyone
who scares you
about

What's INside:

Simply put,
the OTHER one's foot?!

***

Now pity is had
For some mothers and dad
to go around
and around;

May you find
through study and plan --
being alone:
no one can.

Now all are each other
So don't even bother
To take from you
Your self.

Can you see that
your sister's your brother
your mother's your son
and that's good for everyone?

Best wishes from me
(Emphatically)
c*

The Inside Mess

Sharing is so fruitful,
Blazing in the night;
Amazing to behold,
and craziness to fight.

The window for the Goddess
is opening to see
what hope there is for us
to soften calamity.

Perhaps you ask what else there is --
Inside you, look -- and know,
that love is there, as sure as life's aware.
SUFFICE THE CARE; YOU'VE PAID THE FARE.

Whence Hate? A DRAFT

Perhaps I worship God because He's Clear;
With Clairvoyance like a Bombardier.

So would my hate derive from certainty
That He can see eternity?

From which place I might suspect life,
in which Feelings and Desire are rife?

Does this High-Throned God want you and I
to bring about a murd'rous histor-y?

True that some who submit and pray to Him
may ask God kill, some kind of vermin:

Even those who wish to live peacefully,
Such people cannot abide lovingly.

But for that, I can accept that I
pray for SANITY.

More awful and worse is that MY will
blinds me to love and humanity:

I am bound to learn that change must come:
That inside me is the way to be at one:

Friendship means equality;
and Dreams are not for me alone,

But all who live on Earth, our home.

Freeplane Verses

Boring – the intrepid twist of shame
Crack changes Julia into Julia

A stain on her correction,
A stain on her presence.

Shaida might give a friend
Praise.

Seek praise , seek horror, seek the life of trust.


***

A fraction of pain
Treats ending for a her.

***

Jasmine B.
Anger at she

Less to more
And plea

Gangway,
I’m free!

***

Silly intruder,
You have fled
Training for parents.

You have uncovered
Mothers
For Peers.

You have stained
People
To change the home
That is bitch.

People are trying
To say that you
Need a learning whore.

Gassing randy was not
For you.

I am thanksful
I am greateful

I am surrendered to thought
And priests.

Devastation

I really need help from someone.

My mohter really threw a screwball at me and I think I'm going to move.

Any thoughts? Questioins? Advice?

Help?>>>?????

Goodbye to All That

A Mess


(At a Table
Goddess—Fable:
Anger – Able.)

Within a clan
There was a plan:
The god is man.

So mother frayed;
And brother played;
While I: charade.

Around the ghost
We still do toast
He who cut: roast.

Not knowing night
For bearing plight --
Love begets might.

(Pounding out this
Was not amiss
From seeking kiss.)



Slightly better

Pleasant is the stair
Going up somewhere.
Mattered little then,
Martyred, battered wen.

Patient for a dare,
Angry at a pray'r.
Stopping life so that,
I'm a void somewhat.

Passing lights do glare,
Some finale tear.
"Arrogance is bliss,"
Filling me, you hiss.

STAR, sorrow, sickness, stagnation, strength 1999-2009

The last decade (1999-2009) saw some of my best (though small) output in politics and poetry and prophecy.

I made my relationship with Sylvia Rivera, partially, a pretext for writing about her and her politics, abandoning Chelsea, with whom I had had a similar relationship, to the wolves. I learned a great deal from her and Kristianna Thomas'leah about what activism is, and how to write as an activist (more in three years than in all my life previoiusly). Sylvia reconstituted STAR, and I became the secretary and word-person who put her ideas on paper (though in a much more pompous and legalistic fashion than they came from her mouth).

After three years (2002), Sylvia passed away, and then my father three years later (2005). During this time I abandoned myself on and off to the Hospital, including ECT and a stint in the State Hospital, along with a suicide attempt; and to prostitution and drug use, from depression, guilt and politics, again, and also because that was the life I chose and the life that seemed to promise a building of personal strength.

Thanks to the encouragement of Ms. Jamie Hunter and others, I began to see my talents as worth pursuing in a slightly more regular fashion and learned to see the poetry in all the crazed jottings or weighty prose that mingled in my notebooks. I began to read other poets, including Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, WAlt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Anne SExton, Nikki Giovanni, Alexander Pope, Robert Graves and others. I also began to search for the roots of anti-trans religious bigotry in a priestess' perspective through reading many books on religion and myth including Roman and Greek antecedents and parallels to today.

2007-2008 I found a need to reconstruct what still was black and white and mean/violent thinking, which Nathan Schiller and later Antonia Cambareri directed me towards.

In 2008 I had what I thought was a near-death experience that transformed my motivations for writing to more positive and happy, loving ones. I had focused on the Queen of the Universe as the Queen of Death for so long that I forgot that life must for any individual have happiness as its goal.

Then there are these Blogs.\

Next, a promised essay on ????

The boiling point: writing life 1988-1999

Okay, I got married (1988). She left (1991), I dropped acid, came out, met my community and CHELSEA, started estrogen, became part of an unintended orgiastic community (1992) transitioned to full-time, became unemployed transsexual, i.e., sex worker(1993). She came back (1994).

I abandoned grad school sublimation/ competition and coherence (repeated sterile attempts to formulate and reformulate Trotskyism) for spontaneity and the TRIPPIE (Transsexual Hippie). Rusty and Chelsea in addition to breaking me of the straight man revolutioinary thing, gave me a much more free understanding of human possibilities beyond the binary Man/Woman system.

I started writing what was going on inside me, combining automatic writing with self-awareness in a healing perspective. In other words Artaud combined with pagan devotion combined with the transgender culture combined with what my friends taught me about who I was. What's that mean? I started to write barely readable but uninhibited lines of poetry that invoked the Goddess I knew to be in me and evoked (I hoped) through raw unedited fonts of language Her Divine presence inside of each of us.

At the same time I felt driven to stay hooking through needing to write aboiut it and community. In other words, I became a political whore (big mistake).

I imitated the possibilities others showed me but I brought concerns and language that were my own. (at least that's what I'm saying here).

1995-1997

Even more hell broke loose. I was labeled and institutionalized psychiatrically (where I discovered a bunch of people with a lot more skill at fighting the imposed reality than I had) and where I filled notebooks with what I thought were deeply original records of my thoughts, e.g. poetry read graphically across the page. (It turns out Rimbaud? had done it a century before). I also wrote political slogans that us politicized queer people used at demonstrations to demand our rights, at least in the City of New York.

1998-1999

Did I write?

As the title of the post says, I began to write life.

Reading: Lesbian mysteries, WEll of Loneliness, Lesbian comics (see something common here?). Also gay classics. Lots and lots of history and culture imbued through the memories of my friends and the deaths of so many from the life we are forced to live. (Right, Julia, you were forced.) Gay classics as well; began to read such pagan perennials as Starhawk's work, Drawing Down the Moon, The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.

I decided at some point to rather make history than write about it.

Writing and Emotion, Ages 15-45, continued

From 1981 to 1988 (18-25) I was in the throes of private college and graduate education (on scholarship). I won't try to bore you with a complete account, but I will touch on some of the life-changing reading I did and some of the life-changes that were occurring along with that reading.

First, there was the enormous increase in demand for reading and writing. For the first time I was intimidated not only by other people but by the books I was made to absorb in as little time as possible. Secondly, there was drinking. I discovered that people liked me more, drunk. So I did not do well my first two years in college, averaging a 2.5 GPA. Thirdly, there was exposure to some of the great "pagan" philosophers who predated and influenced Christianity, a fact I had had no idea of. After reading Mark Twain on the violence and inconsistency of the Bible I became an 18 year old atheist. Fourthly, I found that on the one hand there were so-called smart people who knew and debated and debated the tiniest points of fine distinction among theories, and then there were the relatively laid-back, often well-off students who I eventually figured out were at Stanford to replicate their parents' lives. I was not one of either group. I spent much class time dozing off.

Emotionally speaking this was a time of more crisis. I blacked out during drinking, threatened suicide once or twice, impressed at least one woman enough with my "illness" that she recommended psychotherapy, which I rejected because the therapist put down my small-town origins. I could not say even hello to other people for months at a time. I was one of the two least responsive people in my freshman dorm, and by the time I was a sophomore, people would commonly ask me if I were drugged even though I was simply withdrawn into my own daydreams.

At the same time I was becoming a better writer. Freshman English was an important course for me since I learned so much about organizing my thoughts, making arguments and doing it with proper diction and grammar. I read Strunk and White. Other students also influenced me with their better high school educations. My writing became much more polished and also polarizing. My writing class was divided into two groups to read each other's essays. One of the groups said my writing was extremely poor, and the other said it was the best in the class. The instructor herself told me I was in the top ten percent. Now I achieved some of these affects by coming up with very strong theses and then defending them to the hilt in the strongest language. At the same time my skills were increasing, my thoughts were becoming more rigid, which would eventually lead to some extreme consequences in my life.

Sexually speaking, I met my first out gay people. In the early 80s at Stanford, gay people were mostly marginalized, and I was afraid of that. My Resident Assistant early in my freshman year was gay, and he tried to get me to think about myself differently, but I was too scared to begin. I was beginning to get occasional passes made at me from men and I received comments like, "you shouild be a dancer" in gym class. Instead of coming out, I began to masturbate everywhere, in class, in the library, just standing in public. I would surreptitiously shave my body and then take showers when no one else was awake so that no one would know about my terrible "transvestism." I was obviously in extreme stress, and totally isolated in this world where 86 percent of the students declared themselves happy, but I did nothing about it.

My second two years began my contact with Marxism and socialism. My grades went up. So did my mental grandiosity. These years really ran into the two years of graduate school in New York at the New School. So much happened, but the upshot was that on the one hand I had these increasingly grand and absolutist political and intellectual preoccupations, and on the other hand I had my hidden, repressed desires and "activities."

I began in my reading to learn about "methods" of reading that would obsess and confuse me, particularly Sartre's Problems with Method. I began to hear about the deconstructionists who were trying to criticize dualistic thinking in philosophy and literature, at least. I became less and less able to simply communicate my thoughts in a clear way, and more and more obsessed with perfection. I sublimated my anxieties and my sexual and gender ambiguities into my writing, justifying, I believe, to myself at any rate, my not coming to terms with myself.

Moving to New York, of course, would eventually tip the bucket over in many more ways than one. Next to wanting to learn whether "Marx was right," was my wanting to "dress up in public." I spent an interesting night in Times Square in heavy makeup and a miniskirt which I had paid for by stealing money from a trick the night before (my first time) hearing the comments from the crowd that I was "disgusting," that I was a "man," etc., etc. I had actually thought that no one wouild notice. I thought I must surely be psychotic because my idea of myself was so divergent from others'. The next day I went to my (closeted?) gay professor's class on history and historiography and tried to slip back into the woodwork.

(Just writing about this makes me angry.)

In the next post I will write about coming out, becoming political and the last few years of stasis and danger (doing drugs and selling my body for no apparent reason) and what kinds of writing I have done along with those times of change for me.

Writing and Emotion, ages 15-45

In the time just before the period I'm going to write about in this post, the early to mid-70s, when I was 10-14 years old was when firstly, I began to read more adult books such as Jaws and All Creatures Great and Small, and then to turn toward science fiction, as so many in that generation did, and fantasy. So I read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I started reading Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein along with some slightly more contemporary authors. Asimov's Foundation Trilogy gave me the image of a society in which a hidden power could predict the future based on social facts. Clarke of course wrote 2001, A Space Odyssey and other books in which mysticism about the future of the human race combined with the technical achievements of space travel. Heinlein wrote the great Stranger in a Strange Land, which introduced me to alternative conceptions of religion and also of transsexuality, giving to me one of my first and most intense feelings of longing for change in my life and in my body. I was transported to another reality which was ecstatic and was my own.

I also began, through school to read Dickens and those scary books for me, Lord of the Flies and Planet of the Apes, tales of human endeavors gone awry from within and without, with apocalyptic consequences. I also began to read histories of the Vietnam War (just concluded), biographies of military leaders, as well as Westerns by Zane Grey, The books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, of Jules Verne and of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan).

I was saved at age 14, and tried to take literally the word of God, but for some reason it always put me to sleep.

My father, to his credit, would weekly bring me to one of the post libraries and wait as I picked out my next set of reading material.

What interests me in the above list is that it is an expression of idealism and apocalypse from the mid - 19th to the mid-20th centuries, with the anxieties of all of that being transmitted into the brain of a relatively young person. Also, there was a basic conservatism to much of the literature, certainly missing the incredible experimentations that were going on in the time in literature in breaking down writing, narrative and character to their elements and perhaps putting them to gether again, probably not. I was not reading Donald Barthelme. I was not reading Susan Sontag. NOr was I even reading Beatniks such as Jack Kerouac or Alan Ginsberg, much less anything political about the civil rights movement and struggles over the War in Vietnam that for adults was still the major subtext of American politics.

Sexuality, however, was beginning to slip in on the sly. I read, for instance, Shere Hite when I was around 14. I would avidly scan books for mentions of sexual intercourse, for tales of transsexuality and transvestism, etc. These inclinations would only intensify as I grew older.

Now at the period which I am concluding in middle age, but which began in mid-adolescence, I began to notice the great differences in development between me and my peers. I was socially turned inward, was competent at and interested in strictly academics, had virtually no rebellion to speak of. Between the age of 12 and 17 I went to exactly one party. But at the same time I had burgeoning emotional tides and cross currents that were ripping me apart inside. I began to dress in my mother's clothes (usually masturbating when I did, but that's another story, isn't it.) I made semi-public excursions into the night which usually ended with me being scared and exhilarated, and once in danger of being molested. I had exactly two friends that I informed of my "difference," and for both of them, one my counselor-suggested "girlfriend," and the other my buddy from playing war in the desert and getting high on pot and wanting to seduce him, it was an occasion for laughter.

My parents were, despite my academic success, unrelenting in telling me whta to do, where I coiuld go, who I coiuld see. At age sixteen my come-home time after church on Sundays was ten o'clock! I was becoming more and more angry, particularly with my father, who declared that our house was not a democracy adn that what he said went. But I didn't express any of it, except through slowness and confusion and an internal temperature that was reaching a boiling point. It was when I reached a place where I couild imagine ants crawling inside my head, torturing my brain that I finally turned to the only mode of expression with which I was comfortable, writing. I lay there on the living room floor as he watched TV, feeling the ants, and started to write angry angry words down, shaking the while, so that of course I drew his attention. I think he may have read what I wrote. But I had finally foiund a way to escape inner destruction by bringing out the feelings I had.

That same year in one of my English classes, I learned automatic writing for the first time. While others barely wrote anything, especially not anything interesting, I poured out thoiughts on sex, on feelings, on my life that shocked others in the class, since they knew at the age of 16 I had not even had my first kiss. Fortunately the English teacher had enough presence of mind to keep the other students from harassing me very much.

In the transition between late-adolescence to "early adulthood," if that's what to call the college years, I became ever more outwardly conservative while most nights praying to wake up as a woman. I read more and more about transsexuality when I was a high school intern at the University of Arizona. I became more and more hardened to my individual needs except when expressed at the feet of the girl I was obsessed with. I was competent enough academically to go to Stanford where the next shocks of emotion and writing, combined, sent me into near catatonia and the beginnings of self-destructiveness that only at this point am I learning to live with.

Enough for now. Continued in next post.

effective, organized and lucid: writing present [Incomplete draft]

This post will not appear in the usual unedited (or nearly so) format. Instead, I will write in an orderly fashion, first, about the art of writing as I have learned it; second, about a topic -- not chosen at this moment -- which will illustrate the first section; and third, perhaps a set of verses which will conclude and epitomize this post (hopefully in an entertaining way.)



My understanding of writing and reading go back to the mid-sixties of the 20th century when I was about three years old and began to read street signs and other material to my mother. It is perhaps interesting to note that I did not begin to talk until relatively late, but when I began (according to my mother) it was to speak in complete sentences. Some of my earliest memories include reading books to myself at the age of five or six. The titles of these books were, for example, "I can do anything, almost," "The Golden Book Dictionary," (Illustrated), and of course the tale of The Little Train who Could." Slightly later, around the age of six or seven I began to read science fiction, a broader array of children's, especially boy's books, but also the Beverly Cleary books about ? and her sister, Ramona. By the age of eight, I would check out ten books at a time from the library and read all of them (three at at time) in two weeks. I read Dr. Spock's Baby book two or three times by the age of eight -- so I knew what child raising techniques ought to be applied/were applied to me at the age they were applied. Also Time/Life publications and Reader's Digest were available and fascinated me, along with the World Almanac and of course the Guiness Book of World Records.



I say all this to demonstrate that I was an early and avid reader, of books with rather adult themes, and that my parents very much encouraged me in this, thus influencing heavily the course of my life, not to mention my thought process, my political views, and the course of rebellion and reformation that these led to.



All of this activity happened outside school. But in school, I was just as interested, able and active at least with respect to reading and writing. Now, the time I began school was the late sixties and early seventies, a time of great upheaval around the world. I, however, being on a military base in Southern Arizona, having a conservative NCO for a father and an overprotective mother, missed almost all of this, except in the unavoidable dribs and drabs on the news and such liberalism as popular culture allowed in children's television.



There was also much debate and change in learning to write and read. Phonetic learning was considered radical and dangerously tending to functional illiteracy. Bilingual education was an innovation which many considered threatening, since it tended to legitimize the populations of Mexican and other Spanish-speaking immigrants (and citizens) that were at that time widespread mainly in the Southwest.

The upshot of all this, reader(s), will be that the way I learned to write heavily influenced both my mode of self-expression and also my self-image such that, along with the confusion about reading and writing, there came confusion in my emotions and identity. Each reinforced the other (at some level, obviously.)
Continuation in Next Post

Love,

c*

A commentary on the last post

A lot of energy goes toward feeling like there's some kind of happiness beyond the immediate moment. I am beginning to learn that is not true.

As a matter of fact, I believe that with all the destructive impulses I personally have within this fucked-up world (I decided it was "fucked-up" last night), that I know that all this effort at communicating is only a way to avoid the facts that I am so loathe to recognize: God is nice because he believes that he can be the all in all, and he wants to know the boundaries that the goddess sets so that he can one day be the goddess herself.

I am not anymore the friend to myself that I was.

I am, instead, a relentless foe to the bitch that made me afraid, meaning the woman that I fled so that I could be happy. That bitch is a lover and a fair miss to the god.

I cannot be the fair miss of Her life (that bitch).

So I am tamed.

Enjoy the facts that you are alive and very funny for Her, and that's all.

Crack

A few choice morsels sent in the breeze

Bears flammbe on motorcycle seats
Sirocco in the springtime
Galadriel marry me

SExuality encompasses such a wide array of activities, thoughts, wishes, desires, dreams, hopes, feelings, and of course ecstasies, that there is no reason to think that I can or must write about it as a "whole."

Okay, Love under Will.

What exactly is that?

To me, there is a very large overlap between the two such that each is an aspect of another. Without one, there would not be the other. I know this is a commonplace statement for a pagan philosopher such as myself, but I've got to start somewhere.

Victory over another part of Creation has the quality of creating Victory over the Victor.
"She is coming"
I am glad you know that.

You know, those Indians killed settlers.

I have to believe that with every bone of my body, down to the deepest darkest marrow of them, that I am loving because there is no Goddess unless I make her.

Settle and live.

Be happy.

Yours,
"c*"

Chelsea Goodwin: Her Life and Work

Ms. Chelsea Goodwin is the hardest working transgender woman in town.

Her exact provenance is a question she attempts to leave in mystery, preferring to claim origins from across the U.S. and around the globe. I find this to be part of her appeal. That she may be from a Merovingian family or from the Lenappe Indians allows me to know and accept different aspects of humanity in myself -- usually opposite to the ones I am consciously attempting to portray.

Before you go, "hold on, Elsie, what do you mean by that?" let me assert that the great majority of us live in confusion and despair precisely because we are seemingly inescapably tied to no more than one half of who we are, thereby being enslaved to the other, denied or hidden "halves." I believe that Chelsea, by being a "variable" in so many respects, can and has helped free people to be all of themselves. At least that has been true for me.

I believe that Chelsea has been in places that are very rare for any human being to attain. I've been in a lot of places ("within") myself, and I recognize that Chelsea has taken on aspects of reality that give her energy to understand and influence others lovingly that can only be possible because she has been where that person is coming from themselves. So, with her, nothing human is alien to her, though she always fights one person trying to make others unfree or controlled or treat others unjustly.

Chelsea's shamanistic personality goes along with, in my view, a very difficult life in which she has faced rejection from some very intimate relations. I don't want to state who may have rejected her or what manner of rejection it was, because I don't know for certain. (And at times I have also rejected her.) But I do believe it was witnessing the destructiveness of human relations to herself and being happy anyway in the totality (good Sartrean/Marxian word) of what the Universe is, i.e., the Divine Feminine, that goes along with unconditional love.

This is all a line of shit that is taking me nowhere.

She loves me. She comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, and that's what life is all about. She wears some really cool duds.

She deserves love and recognition.

She taught me what it is to know that life is to claim as my own.

She led me to teach myself that honesty and sincerity are the beginnings of love. At least for such like me.

She also worked in the Strand, and she's a great reader, and she's got good taste in women.

If you're reading this and you know her, she is a bitch. I can think of no higher compliment.

Let me say just one more thing. She put into effect what others only talk about. Motherhood is part of that. In other words I have been a really poor her.

So, let's be nice.

Yours,
Julia (c*)

(Not the Actor)

Paring, Editing, Deletion, Censorship vs. Honesty and Compassion for Myself

To be brief:

I was going to edit my post from last night, since it is contradictory and presents me in a pathetic light, but also because there is one possibly offensive line that some people might use against me sooner or later.

I have decided to leave it in, since I believe that no one will take what I said in the most literal and physically grotesque way. I leave it up to you to interpret that, and I leave it up to me to work out the feelings behind the statement with myself and my therapist and those of you who prefer compassion over hate.

Thank you.

Love, c*

Clear as (a) (b)/(h)ell(e)(?)

Snarkety snark snark!



Welcome to today's commentary!



I've been meaning not to be too very forthcoming about the motivations and criteria/desiderata? behind the making of those plans that I seem endlessly to make. But reality is what it is and perhaps getting this out there will help me be more certain and better prepared than otherwise.



Please someone turn the volume down, I can't hear what's in my heart! Thank you!



Should I go to New York, there are two scenarios.



First, I throw myself right back into crack smoking without regard for my finances or my health/life, and return to the world of street/bar prostitution. My money runs out within a month or two, and I'm stranded, perhaps without a place to go.



Second, I use the time that I have to search for work/try to impress someone that my writing is good enough to hire me to at least proofread/copyedit some sort of material in their publication, or perhaps good enough to itself publish. Realistically in this economy and with my social skills/interview skills, I'd be lucky to find anything. So, along with this, I would have to declare myself solidly middle class, meaning that I eschew anything/position/person that interferes with my standing on an equal footing with possible employers/clients. Yes, I said clients, because part of this "middle-classness" includes being a whore. It's not going away. I may just have to hide behind something more or less legitimate. In this scenario, any crack smoking is just an occasional reward for a career moving more or less smoothly.



Now, realistically, what may be coming is a mixture of the two. For I lack the organizational/social skills needed to carry the second one off effectively and totally. At least I believe that I have finally found ways to be more assertive, to be less shackled by my past dependent relationship on my father.



This brings me to my current relationship with my mother, which is becoming more and more dependent for both of us. Though I often feel she is trying to push me out of this nest I've sometimes befouled, and I feel that our emotional lives together reflect a certain marginalization and uselessness for me even within my family (-- as one of my doctors asked me, "What are you doing here?"), I recognize that perhaps what I need to do first and foremost is learn to take care of her. This would seriously curtail/put on hold some of my hopes and dreams -- "negative" and positive. But I would be doing my job as her daughter. But would I fuck up? Would she give me the freedom and responsibility necessary to do what I woiuld need to do. And why is it that I am giving up my freedom to her to begin with? NONE of my mother's friend's adult daughters live with them, no matter how advanced in age or declining in health the mothers are. As usual it seems what people are asking from me and what they are hoping from me are two very different things, and to me, El Stupido c*, it is very confusing to sort out which is which.



I need to let my mother know that I will always be her daughter.

I need to embrace her every day.



I need her to know I feel strong and capable and worthy of success, i.e., happiness and safety, right now.



I need her to believe in me.



I need to remember that despite some pleasant moments we've shared that I've been very bad to her. Rude, disparaging, sharp. I have not treated her as I would myself, or rather I have treated myself, the part of myself that is her, as I have treated her: badly.



The fact is that I have been so afraid to be nice. I do know I love her. I have to love her enough not to be in any more danger, or at least not to be caught in any more danger: not do anything I can't prevail in. I need her to know that, due to a lack of faith in myself and the Goddess, I do not feel good about myself and perhaps never will, that this is as good as it gets, so I need to act on my freedom and be my own person.



I think she knows that I need her.



I think she knows that she is my hope. Perhaps I have to be hers also.



I need to speak to someone who can help me sort through all this, because I know she's going to find out what I am. I hope that she doesn't make me feel bad. I hope that she will believe that I love her. I might not.



I hope she knows that I am the woman I wanted to be.



I need to start making the home that she has made for me.



(Wherever and whenever I am.)



Maybe I want her to know I can be happy without her.



But that's not the fear that I have.



The fear is that I will never be her lover.

So now you know I'm either incredibly self-aware or very sick.

I need to be the thread that takes me to my destiny: a kleised pen.

I'm not going to say what is happening.


I am the only person that I can give love to, withoiut there being a her.

I cn give without people hruting me.

I am a friend but not the Goddess' daughter.

I feel like a biitch but not the way I wanted to.

I love the Goddess.

no more selfishness

no more.

i'll go where she wants me to go.

Poems to make up a Verse (pace Chelsea)

Led by me

Malevolent affection
Original for us

This time,
evolve.


O'Leary's blarney

Palatial accretion
of a misnomer dream

Change a direction
and believe the unseen.


***


Weather the Vain
Enchant the Rain


****

Terror

Gone to my home
Tom and my poem


***

Myth is
Oh, modern!


***


Western Molester
Patient and clean

May you achieve
Your final glean


***

Passion's a wish for
Kissing Sylvester


***


Walking a pleasure,
Fairies' measure.


***

(Same name:
A morning's warning)


William's young, riding
Tossing, then tiding.

****

Omen for Julia
Game is Steering

But seriously, yolks!

I've been writing this blog for over five months now and I've learned virtually nothing from it except that I can somewhat regularly arrange my thoughts into words, sentences and paragraphs that, although they are perhaps without intrinsic worth to justify them being so, are accessible to the whole world via the internet.

But I've rarely gone back through the writing to tell whether I've made any personal or artistic progress. My impression is that for me it has been an accessory to my emotional and thought process such that I can for the moment understand what is happening to/for me. However, it has been less than perfect at teaching or informing others about how to do the same for whatever ailments/advantages we may share in common. I don't think it reads as well to you as it does even to me.

At this moment, I may compare my life to walking down a path at night in a rural area like my mother grew up in eighty years ago. There are few signposts I can read with my lantern. There are few landmarks such as streams, bridges, barns and neighbors' houses that can guide me in my journey home or my flight to somewhere else. The model Ts, As, the horses are driven by people who may or may not feel the need to show kindness to a middle-aged woman (not to mention transgender woman) who appears to have lost her bearings. There are no phones to use along the road, and many houses do not have their own line. After hours of walking without knowing that I am any closer to my destination, the question becomes, where and how do I rest?
My home is unavailable to me whether from distance or familial choice; strangers are not apt to take me in; "charity" is far away and humiliating to accept. Further, where and how I rest will influence my plans for the future. I may have to spend days working off boarding fees; I may not reach safety and will have to defend myself without much ability to do so. The moon is bright, but it is beginning to rain and I am beginning to panic.

This was to give you a word picture of what is happening with me. Today I told my mother that it was clear to me that my presence in the house was too much for her. I called several (3) agencies in Tucson that the gay and lesbian community center there had recommended as having services for transgender people. Two of them had no housing services, the third I am waiting to hear from.

So far, so bad. I know no one in Tucson. Boardinghouses there are, I hear, rife with drug consumption. Violence is as bad as it used to be in NYC 10-15 years ago. But I would be close enough to my mother to be able to visit her in these years ahead.

I don't have Medicaid any more (I make 60 dollars too much a year) so I may not be eligible for any of these budget-cut programs anyway.

In New York I would have a personal introduction to my boardinghouse, and have at least the chance/breathing room to find another place to live. But one of the reasons I departed there was that my definition of love, which is the ethic of street living, was political and not from the heart. I came to know that I did not belong there and perhaps was in danger. I do not know whether I have changed enough to reverse that judgment.

On the plus side in New York, my mind is heavily affected by the New York state of mind such that even if I have enemies there, I know who they are and what they are saying to me.

I have some money saved, so were it not for the likelihood that I would find temptation, I could theoretically find a private apartment or roommate situation. But I am mentally ill. I do need care. I do need to face reality. Whatever choice I make will have serious drawbacks, call down a lot of family and friend pressure/criticism, and will leave me at best far from fulfilling those tantalizing goals called for instance, a writing/teaching/political career; or even a typing, secretarial/office career.

I need to be aware that I am on my own in a way that I have never been before. There's a lot to be said for that.

I need to go where I can give aid and comfort even as I am receiving it.

I need to relax and know that there will be an end to it and that I am a lover and a good person.

I believe that whoever reads this will in some sense know that i am not being very gentle with myself and that this may lead to danger.

Gently, gently, I can and will find succor, even if it only at the bosom of Nature. I am willing to go wherever the path leads me. I hope I have your thoughts and prayers.

I have been very spoiled, or at least sheltered.

I am going to be okay, because there is kindness and justice and beauty within me and they will always win over cynicism, doubt and judgment.

Love, c*

Top o'the Morning to ya.

I AM ALIVE!

c*mare is a bitch!

Places

Answers to questions unmade

William the Conquest

Salem the Pain

Galley of my ship
Staring at my strip

Chasing down a quicker
Known as A. Randy W????

Gosh, I'm cute (clueless)

Stanford University was the place where I found that
phoniness and cruelty made for success;
Oxford University was the place where I found that
transsexuality glimmers,
socialism simmers,
and God was my point.
(And lies were my lovers.)

I've been there
And that's good.

Sex interests me because
I love it.

Thanks so much for your wine

Be a friend

***************

To be NICE!

Clients say hell was a goddess
I know the feeling.

A lover says "Yes, I am here and I love you."

A hunger is c*

A flow is a pony

Shame is not dirt/dirt is not Shame

Players only love you when they're playing.

I'm going to do a few drawings and call it a day.

Heifer is good, so be it.


I love you and I like it!

More May Words, from c*'s note-book

The best antidotes to greatness are knowledge and culture.

***

Throw open a gate, and begin to steal
A mountainous debt that feelings make real.

***


Stefan, impassioned, freed the last slave;
Arete in truth, weeping a tear;
Maria, by the hearth, dark and serene,
keeps to her work, a friendless queer.

***

List all your change;
Claim all your mange.

***


Life gives a place for all who can face
that many are chased, but no one is "chrased."

***

as/ter/oid

***

Trying to be worst -- sibling competition
on my part -- a judgment.


***

sybil/e


***


God is angry, fierce, ferocious

But

Julia love Julia


***

Crack is truth


***

Me crazy


***

Issues with Sylvia

her life/kendor/bisexuality

***

To Do

5/28/09

Look up English/Classics/Religion programs NJ/NY

Call about train fare 6/5/09 ????

Put poetry on e-mail

Write

Mop floor

Look up "Hermetic philosophy" on Amazon


Sometimes boys are soft.

It's the alternation that makes relations what they are.

Disrupt Rainbow Heights Schedule

Sea b-low

Today’s poetic reflections – May 28, 2009

How do I want to be happy?
By giving myself to myself?
Or by giving myself to others!

Personal friendships
Impersonal thoughts

Arranging flowers
Digging the bed
Raking the soil
Troweling in the seeds.

Betterthan crying at the
Death ofa mother.

Sexuality and sorrow --
Doubles for your pleasurable perusal

Strong and doubtful
Leisured and likeable

Analyze, propose, dispose
Your benefit or your life

Headlines say
Go thataway

Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond
Partners in hate

Embrace your vitality
And don’t look back

Bio-Her
Is Good

Crying out to your guardian angel
She is home






Appliance I


Your mother’s sheltering arms:
Not an appliance

Mysteries encamped
Trains
Mainly to be

Hey, hey, just playing with you!!!?

Sharing the strains of anger and doubt that i sometimes present as permeating my life, my awareness, and my being, I sometimes forget that I can and do carry on with a modicum of good humor and sensitivity and hope.

There's a lot to write other than these tempests in my teacup.

There does not seem to be a spreading forth of individuality, individualism and toleration due to this government. All the good things are rather distant and legalist to make change, to allow transformation (CHANGE) to derive from individual's lives, aspirations, abilities and hopes (even pleasures?).

Looking at the material arriving several times a week from Change.org, the democratic party affiliate that is taking on all these issues that Obama presented as urgent to address, I detect a rather moralistic tone in matters sexual. I too am against "human trafficking" and for "gay rights," but where is the party for (excuse the anachronism) getting it on? Where is the encouragement of broad-based sensuality and sexual liberation?

First, Obama is a lawyer, not a crowd that likes to let out its silk underwear in public; second he has allowed himself as a Christian in good standing to rely on faith-based initiatives. These seem inherently to put the kibosh on having a good time. And he's not that great a dancer.

Without some sort of acknowledgment that human sexuality is at the bottom/top/middle of the human endeavor, and that its distortion and manipulation is the aim of the majority of the cultures the President wishes to embrace in his more friendly globalism, there will be no end to the gender wars that underlie the economic and political conflicts that are sweeping the world. Didn't he read Civilization and its Discontents by Freud (written in the 1920s) and REJECT its premise that society can survive only if the erotic is channeled toward family and work? Maybe even embrace the power of Revolutionary Love to carry humanity past "society"?

Speaking of anachronisms, where in time are the churches, synagogues and mosques Obama from which Obama derives support? The 1920s? The 1820s? 2020 is on its way, and people are still rigidly adhering to either puritanical standards or frenetic sexual expressions that are parodies of what I at any rate need: the chance to pursue desire with partners of my choice openly and publicly without shame or guilt and without rigid gender or economic strictures to that choice.

It is not surprising that a President that has yet to address the issues of gays in the military or trans and gay people dying by suicide or murder due solely to heterosexual hate, is slow to evoke the power of sexuality to make CHANGE. He really needs us trans people to let him in on the secret of how human sexuality really works and where it can take us (and him.) He is attractive, isn't he? Maybe he just needs that little epiphany that contact with our community can provide.

What I surround

Emptiness descending--
Fear a lover;

Cream splashes out,
mixes with the rest;

Dark anger
becomes clots of blood.

Slaves to this pain (or that)
are friends to Home:

They knock at the door
for a daily hit.

Pain is the pleasantry,
Slavery is the crime.

******************

Be your mother's friend, but don't be her housemate. She's not going to be there to let you know what happened to you.

Once a little time has passed, I will see you and yours.


Love,

CSTAR MARE

To the Wall, To the Limit -- a first approximation

What a great line in that song of several years ago.

To live freely and passionately is my hope. To integrate kindness, caring and sexuality will help lead to that end.

I believe that re-integrating these aspects of my life will begin by making my mother's home better for her. This is something I've never really done, but I think that not only will she be happier with me, I will be happier with myself and have some realistic idea about what it is I need in the way of household work if and when I move.

I believe that the time of trepidation and anxiety is slowly coming to a close. The decisions I shall make will re-integrate my life in such a way that it will become clear that what I do and how I do it -- productively, constructively and freely -- is what is meant to be for me.

My dreams are to be loved as a whore (I wish I knew why); to be a writer, scholar and perhaps teacher of the art of the humane (perhaps something different from the humane arts). And of course to do it with style.

I believe that I have accepted myself to the extent that the above is coming into reach.

To know where my limits are and learn to work within them will bring me to the place where obstacles will turn into gateways and my life will take on a meaning the Goddess smiles upon.

Now comes more work.

c* to c* and you

Try very hard to know or imagine that there's a place that you will find pleasant.

Afraid of Goddesses that win,

straight the moose

William the Conqueror rested until he could not really hold a glove [or the glove couldn't hold him?]

And for me that's a trial.


When you find the answers that you are looking for,
Give back to the ones that you love a friend who lives for you

Muse/museum taking me in unwonted direction.

STrong is beautiful, but lessons are good to be kind and happy about.

Places, graces, paces.


ANd that 's all, folks.

What to Worry About

N.B. These lines are from my n.b.

What to worry about

I wonder if people like themselves

I wonder if the Goddess is a beautiful woman

I wonder if I can live forever


* * *


Goddess like forever
Beauty like c*
*c was JKH/Pain = bread in french

Bread needs seeds



* * *



Living the Dead

Men chair apparent
Lesbian rest dare
Clay rest home

Lose love a lonely rose


* * *


Hope is good to Harry



* * *


The Brambles of Everyday Life

Stare goddess
Pare

I see


* * *


c* Mare
= Sister Mary
or
Caesar Murray

* * *

Letter


c* needed c* so
Loving would live




Lesbians are home




* * *



philosophia

Words have a value called help


* * *

human being is with you

The love of women is good




Seeing Obama at Notre Dame: "Beauty is Love"



You think I'm bad, but I'm really c*






_____________________________________________________________________

Mess

Poetry no good rotten


Fret

Bare

Come












c* mare

A peaceful morning

Ways of knowing that you are home:

You don't fret

You don't treat yourself as a person

You don't collide with the movements of the household orbs

Blaming is not good.



Sitting, buying, banding

JBM

THe Dawn of the Bimbo

So, I'll be the secretary without much to play for.

There's a lot to do, and I'm a Murray.

Mush on.

What is done with Rude People?

Since yesterday's rudeness on my part to one of my readers, I have discovererd that I have few friends because I let no one in. I hope to do that.

Not so fast, right.

Nothing is likely to begin friendships other than freeing myself from pain.

It's not happy to be this poison -er.

Hunter is Goddess.

Must move .

Artemis, please release an arrow !!!

Homely clients need not play.

STamper.

Bitch wanted love, and was proud.

Find girls in the life.

Adios,

Julia

The air -- it's so clear!

To be deliberate, considered, discursive, and fully elaborated in my writing is of course my ideal and is the guiding light of what I do here.

Right.

The fact is that there is no single way to arrive at readable writing that expresses something important to the writer or to the reader.

I have been as varied in my approach as I can be within the limits, usually, of some sort of seriousness of intent and often content.

In this moment, I would rather throw all that by the wayside.

Sometimes, as politics is too important to leave to politicians (or war to generals), writing is too important to be done as a compository set-piece.

alsdkjroeaijfdlkjjRRRRSSSADSS!S!

The Goddess is -- TedslkdjflkejelkjrrA
ANd Faarressdrlkjr'Srlkjeoijd
r

GateeeeerrrsssatadjlfkjerR

Law is somehow fdjslkrjewaer

Gaze at me and you'll find a RSARSRSATRRR

Laazy Is Good.

Say, this is not all that productive -- but it is spontaneoius, so it brings something out of me that otherwise wouild not be ddffpresent. So, here goes!

(Automatic)

GEkrRSRdkrkLRSRSDRDWaRRrWwaRRRRR

Lamination is for all the good people who have insisted on their own way of living.

I hate the way that people find themselves to be some sort djkrl;akjsdrljkr

Crazy



LaRRRRRRSSAARR

and I am jdfldkrer
Chatrrrsasrkl

BsadsdrR

GSDSRRARRJJ

SJUSSS

Anmd there's a lot further to go.

Please be patient, as I am in the midst of devolution/deterioration/sinking to a bottome that I have to say is a kind of instrumentless landing in a fog over an unknown landscape.

I hope I'm still here when it's finished.

You are patient, so I thank you, gratefully, in advance.

There's just so many ways to avoid saying that Julia is very friendly.

To the wrong people, if you know what I mean: "friendly."

As in nearly 200 unprotected and often anonymous sexual encoiunters.

I'm going there.

Why is it that people have the idea that I am hoping for friends that will give me presence?

I am more interested in embracing all that is profound, invigorating and sensual about being a woman, and living a life that does not deny that to me or rto anyone else who can devote themselves to the pleasure that freedom can bring.

Please understand that there is joy, ecstasy and hope in even the emotional depths, unto the moment of death (I believe).

Can you please remember that all that is of this world/the Goddess/(EVERYTHING) is to embrace gratefully and humbly and with love and respect for ALL that is alive, which is to say, ALL.

When the end comes for me as JUlia/Estoril/Brigid I will panic, I will be afraid, and I will be home.

I hope I will be with you.

LOve and happiness,



Tears of Estoril.

Basic Survival

This is one fucked up world

I'm just going to write whatever comes to mind, then go back (maybe) and edit it.

Right now I am having an existential panic attack over whether or not I can survive in this place. The fact is that I HATE the people here. I know that I do really terrible things like look at women the wrong way, disrespect people because of race and class, etc., etc. But that is for the most part something that takes place in my own brain and I am constantly striving not to let that be the basis of what I believe or how I act.

Today I went to the movies with my mother. I just could not stand the way people were looking at me as an object of amusement and as subhuman. These people are local yokel fool/redneck/stupid/arrogant/mean/bitches and their loutish mates. If I had any guts I would have called them out, leading of course to being hospitalized or jailed. Maybe it's worth it. AFter all, it was day time and probably they weren't armed. Instead I imitated how they were looking at me, at my Mother, so SHE would "know how it felt," WHICH WAS DIsrespectful to her. Then I just left. I couldn't stand it. So I bought a book: The collected Oscar Wilde. Good choice.

Then I walked to the parking lot and my Mother drove me home.

The movie was STAR TREK!

Anyway I felt devastated, angry, hopeless and at my wit's end. It appears that I don't belong here or anywhere else, and for whatever combination of reasons I allow myself not to stand up for myself. I felt like smoking crack and made an abortive attempt to find some. I made the remark to my mother, who chided me for doing drugs, and finding them more important than anything else (not true), that what I found was a problem were people who decided to be just like everybody else instead of being themselves. I think that hit home. It did nothing for our "relationship" this beautiful Mother's day.

Then I made the mistake of making an emergency call to my brand new therapist, that absolutely worthless son of a bitch. He managed to listen to me through my tears, said a few perfunctory "I hear you's " or something along those lines and AGREED with me! that I should lie down for a while.

I felt like tearing down this world, or myself or both, and I get to go to bed.

I am extremely frustrated. I am isolated. and this is a danger for my (see title) BASIC survival.

As far as I'm concerned, the people who advocated that I come here did so out of either a misguided sense of pity or an active desire to keep me away from them. My readers can guess who is who.

I don't know where to go, because I did make the decision not to go back to New York. Right now, I just feel like hitting it, except my mohter wouild probably a) beg me, cry, etc. not to go b) have me hospitalized; which is, I haven't said here, what she wouild like to do -- LONG TERM. She has the illusion that there are places for people like me. The only place for people like me is to fight or die, and I'm not going to let anybody decide for me which it's going to be.

So to those of you who know what I'm saying, I salute you for your struggles every day; and for those of you who don't, or dont' "care." FUCK YOU AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON.!

It's a Quarter Past Three, and nobody's here but me and me

To DO:

fIND A WAY OUT OF MY mother's house.

Understand my decision not to go back to New York

Train my new psychiatrist and therapist

Learn to accept the future I have embraced while not walking over others in the process.

Not see myself as subhuman for liking to do what I do -- orlet others see me that way.

Write, research, work for money as tutor/personal care assistant/office-retail worker/lowpaid service worker

Prove to others that instability is not all bad , even if it's not what it's cracked up to be.

Embrace myself and new friends.

Get people here to understand just how far behind they are in their politics and thinking.

Find someone with emotions that they aren't afraid to talk about.

Be very very careful about how/whether I involve myself in side activities.

Be happy

All of the above seems extremely reasonable and desirable to me, and I believe I deserve change in a "positive" direction.

I hope that if I offend anyone with my behavior or words, that you will let me know that I have done so, so that I can not do it to you or anyone else again.

Jeez, this coffee makes me optimistic -- the next illegal drug.

I really want my readers to understand that though I may be in isolation for a reason (many of them), I am still committed to advance our cause insofar as it is the cause of justice, and I will talk to and behave according to the needs of anyone whose life has made them the object of hatred, scorn, ridicule or violence.

I've been there in some ways myself.

I really am needing to feel that someone out there is metaphorically holding their arms out to me, that I am not reaching out to thin air.

Suggestions as to how I can change, or whether I shoiuld just move on and barrel along at full speed toward my destiny, are welcome!


Love, the Queen of the Portuguese Beach Resorts