To my Dad.

Approximately Three.

I’m fairly sure I remember the purple flowers being taller than my head, and now they reach my shoulders at best.

They’re still super pretty though, and Daddy’s with me now.

All little girls think their fathers are cool but I have the rare privilege of knowing.

He’s so funny, and always smiling.

He picks me up and flips me over his shoulder.

He drops me through Santa Clause’s Trap Door, and I don’t realize at the time how funny the 37 year old, DJ Dr. Seuss, Karate King, Hot Dog, backward hats wearing, smooth-talkin, former sucker-at-life was, while just making up some random-ass game to make his daughter giggle.

The dry humor starts with you.

“Knights who say ’Ni!’” are funny in precisely the same way.

My scripts are arranged similarly on a ridiculous premise like a lap being Santa Clause’s Trap Door, and end even more enjoyably when the ending drops you.

I know how much you love metaphors and now you know how bad I am at mine.

What’s most important is expressing how everything you’ve done has made me everything I am.

I love you.

And thank you.

This not-first night in this new-to-me house.

The small people are moving by my side, dancing and sinking into my couch as they let me know what's happened.
They're familiar faces, which made me think today that the same is outwardly true of mine.
Obama's long pauses are more greatly defined, either on adderall or due to the shorter format attempting to accommodate the jist of what he said.
I wish I could work with Jon Stewart; I've never said that online some how.
I'm between sub and full-consciously prematurely avoiding rejection; My boggart is effort.
He's talking about the UN global summit on climate change; All seems fucked to me.
Today I told my friends I'd like to be a senator.
"No God condones this terror." -Obama sounds beautiful tonight.
I wish it wasn't loaded to say that.
Why.
Why, fucktards?
Just why.
I love my God.
He's your God, too.
He has to be because the only God I worship is the only one worthy of all of our praise.
Everyone had a high god.
I'm my own God, more easily when I'm high.
But I am him and he is me, and he is the humility.
He/It/Her whatever, the singularity and symbiotic vortex of binary, is the remainder of what I'm not.
So I inherently cannot be more without worship.
I cannot worship myself or else I am stagnant.
God himself is humility because I need to choose to give any shits or be thankful at all.
Only we can control the things we see and know, and while God rules the skies, we rule our lives.
If we didn't then there would be no God.
We would have nothing to think, nothing to think of losing or gaining, because we are nothing.
I think, therefore I am.
And God is, therefore we are.
We are zeros and ones.
He was zero and exploded to be one,  then became our zero and wanted us as one, then gives us zero so we together can make one. The one begins as a zero always, occasionally staying that way.
Then we're born, and swing cyclically in some opinions, but more accurately become more dense, as the zeros and ones compound in ourselves and make us acknowledge they exist.

Advice for Your College-Age Bullies.

Don't fight back when mean girls punch you at parties.
No, no one said your name miss, especially not me.
But since when do drunk ears hear what was actually said?
Logic be damned when pride is at play.
In the same vein, don't yell back when sad girls blame you for their boyfriends being shitty.
Whether or not you knew matters not when the accuser's just so desperate.
She's a doe attacking a Grizzly, and you have to admire that sort of feigned courage, at least.
Maybe no one's ever talked her through handling these things?
But be ready for later, when truth of your genuine concern and attempted consolation are relayed out as straight bitchiness.
Stay proud of the fact you didn't ask her if she knew who else he'd been sleeping with.

Just know, it's not your job to make karma happen.
It's not your job to flawlessly navigate every social situation.
All that can be done is to make your life fun,
The very thing fighting back isn't.

Don't yell at cops as they write you fascist tickets.
Point two after a twelve hour shift was well earned.
But since when has the law stood to reason?
Apparently a uniform makes one inherently more moral than others.
But vocalizing that won't get you home to your bowl any faster.
A month and a half, per tenth of a gram is more than a ridiculous probation.
It genuinely hurts loosing your green best friend, but take to civil action.
It gets more done than calling judges assholes.
While you're in court, the pig will pull your parents outside and tell them how you work at The Gold Club,
Attempt to not loathe his guts.
When he blackmails you to quit, just spend all your new time reassuring your mom you didn't strip.
Instead of acting on the entirely warranted desire to punch him in the dick.

Because It's not your job to make karma happen.
It's not your job to flawlessly navigate every legal situation.
All that can be done is to make your life fun,
The very thing fighting back isn't.

If it took twenty years to admit insecurity's hold on your life, maybe it takes someone longer?
Assuming you're the last to learn everything makes your temper towards ignorance shorter.
There's nothing wrong with giving yourself credit for growth, it's wrong to not help other's find it in themselves.
Punching Lacy back won't teach her the futility of violence.
Nor will losing your patience with Megan teach her some girls are level-headed.
Sergeant Hoyt will enforce laws even if he sees them harmful.
And he'll hang on to his power over the public only as long as we allow him to.
Because all hurtful acts are grasping at straws, by people who've needed help all along.
It's this weird, deep-seeded need for validation through a response to a punch or a phone call or a ticket.
Any reciprocation of hostility shows, that theirs might have been acceptable all along.
And you become not a person, but their proof humanity's all wrong.

It's not your job to make karma happen.
It's not your job to flawlessly navigate every fucking situation.
All that can be done is to make your life fun,
The very thing fighting back isn't.

All that can be done is to make yourself one,
With the people who want the division.

-Grizabella

An Uncomfortable Whiskey Wednesday.

  I'm weird cause of the nostalgic drugs. I'm weird cause of your overly ecstatic hugs, and how pumped you were about lunch. I sulked in the other room, became releived by tragic news aka a new reason to excuse how uncomfortable this Whiskey Wednesday was.

-Griz

Fred, You're in a Technology Loop.

I don't wanna think the way I talk.
Today's supposed to be about help,
And I'll I've done is play on my phone, get stoned and wish you'd come home to me.
Cause I've missed you for days, about 87 or so, and it's doing no good not letting this go.
But the Instabitch holds memories meant for the world.
So I'll reflect, reassess, and try to reconnect what those moments really meant,
Without the eyes of my admirers not solving puzzles no one wanted them to get.
But technology's dull comfort is laughably present in a girl's life who resents it's existence.
You just think you're some type of Renaissance Queen.
You think you're fucking rad and the means to your ends will always be clean
So long as they're bathed in justifications for a disgusting lifestyle.
Take a shower every now and again.
The future isn't your downfall.

-Alyssa Anne

On the Self-Hatred Which Accompanies Literary Melancholy.

  I haven't written anything of consequence publicly since 2009. The shame a writer feels when silent is unconquerable. Though, amusing, since one who believes in the importance of writing does so because it's despondency's antithesis. Yet the type prone to prose parrots their parents failings, through projecting only onto art, as their only children, only negligence.

  You see, the clock is not circular but constantly stretching it's hands, always close to reaching the pen from which it could start documenting time and therefore validating it. But to dissect your ability to affect change from the lazy river in which you're cyclically floating would rile up the water a little and I'm pretty sure your hair is the most important part of today. So don't worry about it.

  Well, until you find yourself with no tether to any former you. If you happen to be someone you hate (which I'm not) then you might hate reading about yourself (which I don't think I would.) But also, if you're a person you hate (which I think I'm becoming) then maybe you should have read more about yourself as a villain (which I still won't.) From there, it's only learning to take down an adversary, and that's basically all I can do (though I really don't.)

  And when self-betterment is ruled out as enough motivation, what's left is just art. It's the desire to see beauty and point it out. I googled poetry and it spoke exclusively of intensity. And of intensity, I have no shortage. But if that intensity is satisfyingly internalized, or expressed to be consumed, which is nobler? As the tree falls in the woods, is a poetic mind within itself heard? Or is duty, to use a word that makes me laugh, to a hypothetical listener enough reason to speak?

  Recognition is a dirty word that drains us. It fuels the saddest amongst us: our celebrities, our politicians, our reality show chefs and our louder acquaintances. And recognition, our expletive, suffocates the saddest author I've ever been. Approval is not friendship as well as respect does not equal love. Documenting the things I know to show the people I love means that I want their money or their admiration, which I do. So where then, is any honor in the life of one who wants to live by helping people live as themselves?

  I can't (but I can) make myself write every day. I want someone to listen but not everyone and my head's been too globalized to grasp less. This has been the most satisfying typing I've had in forever, so there must be something here. I feel like I stumbled on a small spot of grass I used to lay on in the woods. I can lay around and sing, maybe some birds or hikers will hear a bit, but no one's being forced to. This is all I want.

  I smoke to die.

-Grizzly Goldman

To watch the sun grow old and fade away.

  So this weekend i went to the beach. Some parts of the beach weren't fun at all. Such as my friend whom i went with, ignoring me for her boyfriend the whole time. But that doesn't matter to me. Some of the best times I've ever had were by myself. I do pretty well on my own. But that doesn't mean i didn't want some friends with me.

  Sometimes i honestly worry about myself. I dream too much. I convince myself that every impossibility in the world is not a problem, but just a minor setback. 

   

  I sat on the beach in the morning by myself, and watched the sun rise. I got angry at the horizon for being where it was and strained my eyes to see over that place where the water meets the sky. I wondered what i would see if i could make a split between the two. If the water and the sky were to break apart at the horizon, which i made myself believe was not an optical illusion, i might see some sort of other world. Or heaven. Or hell. Whatever may lie beyond what is here and now.

  I sat on the beach in the afternoon by myself, in the blazing sunlight, and was completely conscious of the lack of interest this held for my skin. The sun doesn't affect my skin. It's paleness has always been, and probably will always be, my constant color. Even though i didn't use any sunblock the entire weekend. 

  I watched everyone on the beach playing volleyball, or laying out, or splashing each other in the waves and i felt very disconnected. I sat on the edge of the water and made a drip castle with the sand onto my leg so that it wouldn't be washed away by the waves that just barely reached me. I thought about how cute that little drip castle was and how it looked like the castle in "The Little Mermaid." I kept wishing that being a mermaid were possible, because the ocean is so beautiful, and that small drip castle was so lovely that it deserved to be real. 

  I laid in the dry sand and felt its millions of tiny grains coating my hair, as the sun was nearly set. I was absentmindedly doodling something in the sand next to me while i quietly sang "New Year" by Death Cab for Cutie. Only upon looking at the actual sand in which i was writing, did i notice i had been tracing Simon's name. I continued singing Ben Gibbard's lyrics to myself and stumbled upon a few lines that went "I wish the world was flat like the old days, when i could travel just by folding the map. There'd be no airplanes or speed trains or freeways, there'd be no distance that could hold us back," and laughed about how appropriate those words are. I imagined to myself that if i could just wish hard enough, then i wouldn't be watching the most beautiful sunset of my lifetime, alone.

  Then it was nighttime. It was much past midnight and the sun was dead and gone, not to be resurrected till morning and the moon and the stars in its place. The heat of the day was forgotten as a wind blew over my face, and made the sand just barely dance up in acknowledgement of its presence. I thought about where i was, and who i was with, and my friendships, and my family, and my relationship, and who i am as a person, and i thought about the things that would last, and the things that i wish would last, and the things that won't. 

  

  The night ended and i eventually left the beach. Because a night can't last forever. Just like my friend and I got in a fight and have drifted since, as not all friendships last forever. 

  But the sun came up on that next day, and i saw my family again. The night was beautiful without the sun, and my trip away from home was a pleasant one, but i was happy to see the sun, and my parents, again. They won't always be there, bearing down on me, but neither the sun nor my family are ever truly gone, i just won't always see them. 

  The night and the day both past, and always i had my love. So far away from me but still so constant, until one day when the space between disappears, and every hour and every day and every night will creep on and mean nothing to me, because i won't have anything to lose to that steady procession of days. Because i won't be alone to watch them.

  

  And as for who i am as a person? I suppose i don't fully know yet. But i hope I'll have time to find out.

  And until then, I'm perfectly content to spend my time contemplating all the impossibilities. 

-Alyssa