a rumble a rant a rave

ok so i'm not really gointg to pitch a fit and whine and cry one here at all, but really, a lot of things have been bugging me lately and this is what i want to say.

listen. last night i had to sleep on the floor of my sisters bedroom and i didn't flip you off in public. you know why? because you'd probably think that had the power to send me to hell for eternity. bullcrap. so i just put my hands inside my sleeping bag and flipped you off like 30 times instead. let me tell you, that middle finger after having no solitary time onstage since that time i was dard to walk down the hall in first grade with the bird held high, it felt good. i had a flipping off frenzy, just me and the floor. but you were on the floor. duh. i don't think its fair whne you say "hm" to what i want to do or be. you ask me where im going to school, i give you an honest answer and you "hm" me. is that fair? no. ok, if you don't believe in me, just say so. that or don't say anything at all. i spent 4 hours at a coffee shop by myself today. i preferred to be in a booth eating by myself where it was 40 degrees and my butt got tired of sitting and i read 50 pages of ibsen all because that was monumentally better than being picked at by you.
and yet i feel bad. i feel bad for seeing you only 3 times a year. im afraid i'll turn into you. i'm afraid that when i get old like you i'll try to climb stairs only to find out that i can't and that i need to hold on to something. im afraid that i'll turn into you and think that having children and cleaning house and cooking hot meals every night are the duties of a woman, which aren't bad, but they're required, apparently. i don't want to tell my daughter that her husband is fat. i don't want to tell my daughter that if she doesn't stop eating then she'll look like her daddy's mother, who was fat and soft and died at 52 years old. hell, i think, at least she was happy. i just don't want to be you. i love you, but i can't be myself around you. you were the one who told me i couldn't have communion because i wasn't baptized. but mom still said you loved me and i didn't understand.
but i still sleep with that blanket that you crocheted me every night, because you said it was made with love, and on that day i believed it.

this is the best thing i've read in a long time. and basically the only thing that i've liked in english class this year.

"Love Poem"
My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases,
At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,
Whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen,
And have no cunning with any soft thing

Except all ill-at-ease fidgeting people:
The refugee uncertain at the door
You make at home; deftly you steady
The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.

Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers' terror,
Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime
Yet leaping before apopleptic streetcars—
Misfit in any space. And never on time.

A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only
With words and people and love you move at ease;
In traffic of wit expertly maneuver
And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.

Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,
Your lipstick grinning on our coat,
So gaily in love's unbreakable heaven
Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float.

Be with me, darling, early and late. Smash glasses—
I will study wry music for your sake.
For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.


i love that poem. in other news, i have to wake up at 3am to write a paper about it because i have no motivation to write that paper as we speak. noice

hi. i'm lesa kochecki. i'm 42 and 18 at the same time. i think i'm going through a mid-life crisis.

i wrote this when i was falling to sleep. it's so strange what just goes from brain to hands to keyboard when you're dozing off or right when you wake up--like the odd boundary between dreams and reality. i certainly hope this isn't my reality--but i was thinking a lot about middle age, and about how people say that they never really grow up, they just literally grow out. and this is the beginning snippet of a story. i hope a good story. but a very messy one too.

Lesa Kocheckie: age Middle. sitting reading a janet evanovich book in bed under a qvc ordered booklight that clips to the page.she has cotton balls in her ear so her husband's snoring, despite breathing machine and nose strips, won't disturb her. her husband's arm is draped over her forearm and she has to avoid it to turn the pages of her book.
"Get your arm off of me. No I know that your left arm always has to be draped over me when you go to sleep at night or it’ll fall asleep and then blah blah youll lose circulation and die. You big oaf. I don’t smack you in the face for having that loud breathing machine and disrupting my dreams of making out with george clooney. The least you could do was keep your arm on your side of the bed and not resting on me.
I have to pee"
Lesa kocheckie flings her husbands arm over his stomach and gets up, goes ot the bathroom, flips on the switch and we see a middle aged woman with showing roots in a tigger nightshirt and her husbands boxers. She squnches up her face and makes an o face to smooth out wrinkles. She pulls back her face and turns to the side sucking in her cheeks. After peeing she gets on the scale and weighs herself, looking away. The scale reads 142.
"Excellent. Just fantastic. The last two digits are my age. Damnit. I guess I've reached the golden weight."

i feel awkward writing that because i have no idea what it feels like to be middle aged. weird. i even had to invent a word--squnch. noice. it'll be in webster's with "bootylicious" someday. one can only hope.

someone needs to make a movie of Winesburg, Ohio

I'm not a writer, I'm more of a rambler.
I think both on paper and when I'm talking to people--like I just spew out these unintelligible strings of sentences. My storytelling teacher told me that, well I mean, not really that but a version of that when I went up on the stage to tell a story about new york last week. I go up there in my rain boots and mismatched dress and something like 3 layers of shirts and i somehow sit indian-style and tell my story. and when im done he goes "you got up there and you're all slouched down in your chair with your rainboots and i thought: lily tomlin. and then you started talking and i was like: you are lily tomlin!" i, of course, have a very vague idea of what he is talking about. maybe lily tomlin wore rainboots at some point in her life and sir crosby hunt just decides that i resemble her. well, i go onto youtube to see about this resemblence and what do i find but lily tomlin and the director of I Heart Huckabees fighting and cursing and yelling at each other. That or a clip of her sitting in a huge rocking chair talking like a 5 year old.
so either a) i have a horrible temper like lily tomlin or b) i resemble a 5 year old.

great, just great.

anyways. I had to write a lesson plan today for school, and (even though it was a day late) i actually enjoyed it a lot-weird. i think it was because i had to teach a lesson on winesburg, ohio--by sherwood anderson and someone needs to make it into a screenplay and then a movie. here's a little snippet.

"In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before his eyes. . You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques. The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a women all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. when she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering. the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write.

At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end he wrote a book called "The Book of the Grotesques."

I saw it once and it made an indellible impression on my mind. The book had once central thought that is very strange and has always remained with me:

In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a gerat many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful. The old man had listed hundreds and hundreds of truths in this book. Hundreds and hundreds and they were all beautiful. And then the people came along. Each as hea ppeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

It was the truths that made the people grotesues..."

i love it. plus Wing Biddlebaum is the name of a main character. Can't get any better than that, can you?