I'm tired of swerving to avoid hitting vultures in the road! Tired!

I culled from the Board all the dreams I've posted about, and every summary brings back the images and feelings instantly. I've been meaning to start a journal for about five years now -- not for purposes of analyzation, which I think is mostly bullshit once you go beyond the basic, but for the Archive of Me.

PS Not a psychopath!

Kim Basinger was my lesbian lover, except she was much older. As we embraced I told her I loved her because her body was soft and had no sharp angles.

I don't know. It's hard to communicate the desperate sadness of the dream where Nicole was dead and I was still talking to her visible spirit, and she was allowed to stick around until I drove back home because no one wanted me to get depressed and drive off the road to kill myself. Every mile was just less time to talk to her, and I remember turning to her in horror and shock when I realized she was truly gone and this talking ghost was all I had left for the next few hours.

Then I dreamed about driving into the Delaware.

I dreamt that I got raped by an old man and woman, who were admiring my blue Roxy purse in a creepy fashion beforehand. No one believed me afterwards, because the police were in league with them. The worst part was the moment I looked into the blank smiling stare of the female lieutenant as the old couple waved at me from outside the station.

Oh Sir Anthony Hopkins, don't be a hot Welsh sociopath!

Oh man. I was in an art class, and he took us hostage, but didn't eat us. Just killed us off sort of slowly and randomly in gruesome ways. Where were all the freakish art supplies that can easily double as effective weapons? Didn't have any, didn't have any until someone gave me a gun, but six shots to the face didn't phase him. No more weapons until the end, when only three of us were left and now equipped with kitchen knives. I cut off some of his fingers. He kills the boy behind us suddenly. Me and a friend take the opportunity to slice his head off. Post-traumatic stress abounds.

I dreamt someone (Nicole) took away the most important thing in my life! My Batcave! Then gave me a headboard instead! Oh my god.

Some sleazy man tricks me into taking off my shirt in front of him by dropping a palmetto bug down it. He does the same thing to Avril Lavigne, who I convince not to become a hooker now that she feels cheap and dirty. We are upset, and Andy Dick counsels us. Later I am in a ten-car pile up on the highway. I watch a family die in their mini-van as a semi plows into it, running over their little girl in the process.

My happiest dreams always feature Bono. Last night he was correcting some song lyrics I'd printed out as we sat on the floor together, our knees touching, not saying anything. Orgasmic.

Armageddon was approaching, so Travis built a magic platform that would take me and him and Nicole into outer space so we would survive the destruction. I was trying to figure out how to take pop with me, and paper for writing letters, but I started crying because there would be no one left alive to receive my postcards from outer space. Also, I knew that I was never going to have sex and make babies with everyone else being dead. At the last minute everyone started running into their underground bunker while we floated away.

All the time now, I dream about babies. Just owning the cutest fucking babies ever and loving them like the day is long. Babies with blue eyes! Babies with dark hair. Babies whose fathers are always absent. These dreams are way more disturbing than any of my regular gory dreams, because the need to procreate stays with me ten times longer than, say, mutilation images.

THE BABY DREAMS JUST WON'T FUCKING QUIT. Now they're combining with the gore-dreams. Oh, look, I can't jump that gate while running for my life because I'll drop the baby! I'll drop the baby and the serial killer will step on him!

My themes now are less with the baby-having and more with feelings of helplessness and despair. Women being assaulted, but I can't kill the rapist because he is impervious to my gunshots. Little kids raped and murdered, but I can't find them alive, only dead in the killer's car. My boyfriend being tortured and eaten slowly, but I can only receive the evidence in the mail.

Let me just say that I am non-plussed.

I kept vomiting, but it wasn't nausea, it was an inability to keep food down. Somehow this was much more gross. I would eat a salad, and then start coughing up chunks of the salad. I vomited into my bra and water-hosed myself off.

Ha ha! Holding a baby, a new baby sister. Ha ha! Her eyes explode! In my arms! She's bleeding everywhere! Eyes are spurting! Ha ha! No one can drive me to the hospital, because they all have to pee first. Ha ha!

That's hysterical upset laughter. Jesus hell, how do I function in society?

A little boy gets his fingers cut off when the car hood falls on his hand. A little girl is lured away by a sexual predator. I find out that you can't strangle sexual predators with your Old Navy scarf. Dead janitors in closets. Prison.

I watched Bono do soundcheck, and then he was flung on top of me thanks to a random earthquake. We wriggled together, and then I got to select all of the songs played at a Pearl Jam concert. I held Eddie's lyrics. Eventually he took them away, because I kept wanting him to play Low Light.

I had a board dream. There was flooding and mass destruction, and I was in the backseat of Scott's car with kT riding shotgun. I think I'd been bad, because no one would speak to me, so I was probably evil. It was raining like a mother and we passed a field and saw Margaret sitting on a fence in an orange and pink and yellow flowered dress, and we slowed down and she started running after us. I lowered the window and stuck my head out and Margaret shouted hello, and then explained that she was planting cabbages and reading books in the field behind and it was lovely and she wasn't coming with us to eat chicken. Back in the car, Scott was complaining that he wasn't going to get his last paycheck. We drove on.

It's hard to get online and do my business around here, sharing the phone line with four other people and trying to hid my gay smut and my website and the websites of people they know from them as I read. Also, I now Do Things with my time, a frightening new concept!, and these activities include but are not limited to Extensive Child Care, Tap Dancing, Future Math Tutoring, Cooking, Cleaning and Learning Tae Kwon Do From My Mother In The Kitchen At Night. There's still Painting, Carpet Ripping and Possession Reassignment.

Flap heel heel pickup heel toe heel.

I was going to post about discovering my brother has found fanfiction.net, but I couldn't stop shuddering to do so. I can't even go into it if you don't already realize the implications.

Been watching the same poker tournament in bits and pieces for what feels like weeks now. I already know who wins, but I can't catch the final fucking hand. Tonight a roach crawled down my leg during a tense moment. My father does not brook my usual reaction -- hysterics -- so after it was taken care of I walked it off, pacing around the living room and feeling vaguely ill. (The cat pointed out the roach crawling on the wall after I flung it off in the dark, but couldn't be assed to catch it.)

My life is still in upheaval, and I just want to hibernate. My reactions to major life changes make me feel like killing myself, mostly. Or at least this set. I've gone from college student in my own apartment to living in my 8-year-old brother's room with my things in the attic and garage. I have to wear pants ALL THE TIME now. There's no Batcave. I haven't been alone yet. I can hardly masturbate, either from being overtired or cat inference or time constraints. For the past ten years I have lived either a three-minute drive, a two-minute walk or in the same box as my best friend and as such I have been spoiled beyond repair, and I want to stamp my foot and throw a tantrum. I'm about to develop separation anxiety. There's never a quiet moment. I am a creature of routine, I feel safe in familiarity, and now it's all blown to hell and I just want some fucking Johnny Depp and pirates and a can of fucking Coke!

I've got digital cable now, though. That almost cancels out all the previous bitching and moaning. I won't apologize, though, because I hate the world and most especially My Website.

More hours in the day. I need them.

Being Home is All About: watching La Femme Nikita reruns. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Restless wanderings. Lethargy. Playing football in the yard. Making my male Sims love each other. Perpetual sheen of sweat, and kitty fur stuck in the sweat. Cooking and cleaning. Washing my sister's hair in the driveway with the garden hose and the bottle of new Pert Plus that makes your head tingle all cold and shivery. Dividing my possessions into abstact piles. The hot laundry room. The hot porch. Scrubbing my face.

In the seventh grade my goal was to memorize Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in its entirety, although it happened on its own without any real effort on my part beyond the daily 2x viewings from Christmas until May.

Now my goal is to see Samuel L. Jackson's entire catalogue of films. He makes me happy like candy and kittens, hookers and ham!

My sister and I share the same twisted sense of humor. I thought it was a fluke when we were watching a television program and saw a character fall off a horse, breaking a leg, and we both started laughing like maniacs. Then tonight, during Hunted, (Oh Benicio!), a severed leg on screen made us instantly giggle.

Bled all over myself despite precautions. "Why is my leg sticky? Because there's blood all over the blanket!"

Recent dreams include babies vomiting on me and becoming impregnated by anonymous seed.

There's the cats' Advantage on my face. It's tricksy like that. So are they.

Crap. Too much crap. Too many physical possessions, people saying I ain't paid my bills, people being assholes, my head hurting. I feel very mean and upset and sort of floundering and disappointing.

Dinner was good tonight. A lot of meat.

I moved out of the apartment and back home today, and have been faced with the entirety of what I own in this world staring back at me in storage bins and cardboard boxes. Some in the garage, some in the attic, some in my brother's room, some in my father's closet, some in the dining room. After dinner my mother and I cleaned out my father's closet, where I packed away everything I didn't take to college three years ago. At the time I thought I needed to keep these ridiculous things -- printed out pictures of my favorite band, happy meal toys, a fire extinguisher sign -- but tonight I went through it all and turned eight boxes into four, yelling at myself every twenty seconds that "I DON'T NEED THIS ANYMORE, I DON'T NEED THIS ANYMORE," then turning my head and handing it to my mother to be trashed.

Blargh blah alkdsjfs! Suck my dick, upstairs neighbors! Why am I plagued with immature assholes? Is it a beacon I send out?

AOL cut off on me while I was talking to Fran and then had the audacity to be unable to reconnect afterwards! What the fuck! I hate AOL! AOL can blow me!

I have to take apart my desk to get it home (and out the bedroom door), and I don't think it's meant to be dissembled. I will break it, and then I will cry on my floor with the pieces of Atticus surrounding me. On Wednesday I am leaving G3 forever with my belongings in pitiful pieces.

I need more boxes! I need Advil! I can only express my complex emotions in childish demands!

My life is at a painful standstill 97% of the time, and then suddenly, things all happen. Fits and starts! I cannot take it.

I am graduated, or something! My boobs itch. Also my side.

Eating Twizzlers, waiting to be taken out for lunch.

I just kicked the mythological ass of my last test at this godforsaken institution EVER, and walking home I have never felt more physically gross. I stopped in the kitchen and drank water from the gallon jug and immediately took a shower. I feel like collapsing in the batcave to celebrate my last day of sleep-deprived undergraduate-ness, but I have to get pictures taken in a few hours, which means I have to do something with my face and hair, and we have to pay the phone bill, and buy foodstuffs for tomorrow's G3 Party Explosion!, and what the fuck. There's packing, and leaving, and painful things I have been denying all season.

The immature and irrational ex-roommate finally got her key sent to us, and I answered the door in a half-naked bum rush, grabbing a towel to cover up with, hoping the knock on the door was indeed the familiar rapping of our new mailman. I almost expected a bitchy note to be sent along with the key, but then I reminded myself that she does not leave that kind of physical evidence of her highschool-ish behavior & attitude behind. Sometimes I think we would have had better luck asking a 15-year-old sophomore to move in.

It seems I am always answering the door in a state of disarray lately. I keep trying to enjoy my last bits of time in the apartment exercising my right to not wear pants, and people keep knocking, leaving me screaming at the door to hold on while I try to find where I dropped the skirt I was wearing earlier. Then there was the pesticide guy, who lingered in my living room for the sake of NASCAR conversation, while I tried to sit quietly on the couch with my hands in my lap, hoping the way my short skirt -- the first thing I could find before he unlocked the door himself -- covered all necessary areas.

Cried during a 50 Cent song. Tears of unabashed sadness and sympathy! What the fuck! Fucking fuck! I love him! I love him!

I made faces at a cute three-year-old child in the supermarket, and she made them back, copying my raised eyebrows and pouty smile. Ovary flare-up! Ovary flare-up.

Those new Bounty commercials showing men cleaning up? So fucking hot. Do they make porn for women like that? Because I'd watch it. Regular men going about the house and tidying up -- I'd come right there.

At 4:41 AM Thursday morning, the sound of a screeching roar woke me up. Why, the upstairs neighbors decided to spend half an hour moving more things in! Up and down the steps, clappity-clomp, like fucking billy goats over a goddamned troll-owned bridge, the troll being ME! Jingling keys, fucking whistling, moving the furniture around on their hardwood floor!

I should have stabbed them. I keep trying to convince myself that I cannot kill them and get away with it. Prison is bad.

Today, when I knew they were in and hoping they were trying to nap from their early morning inconsiderate forays, I played Soundgarden as loud as I could. Because being petty to rude strangers -- nay, I think it was completely called for -- really makes me happy.

Sort of set my arm on fire a little. Arm-hair only casualty.

Our former roommate behaves exactly like a child. She makes up rules about when and how she wants to pay rent, and expects the world to work magically around her. You cannot have a conversation with her over civil financial matters because she hangs up. You catch her in lies and she avoids the subject. I don't feel anything but sorry for her, however. We have been polite and fair. We have acted like grown people should. We have made reasonable requests and avoided harassing her over matters she surely would have brought up if the positions were reversed. We have not screwed anyone around, played games, gone back on our word or destroyed her belongings like she did us. What right does she have to play the indignant victim? I don't understand, but then again I don't understand irrational people ever. That's exactly the problem.

Somehow my rage and anger has disappeared, though, and I feel very calm and uncaring. Maybe because I will eventually have my say, and because at the end of the day I do not have to be Ashley.