*
I wait in the dark huddled like an animal now, but it is an animal I have come here to meet, an animal I am seeking to purge and correct, and to do so I have had to turn myself into an animal too. The time for tender thoughts is adjourned.
HA JAW IF YOU COULD SEE WHAT I SAW
WHEN I GLANCE IN YOUR VICINITY
YOU’D FUCK OFF TO INFINITY
YOUR EVERLOVIN’ WHOM
*
What is going on here jaw I am so scared and freaked out this isn’t funny any more why is the whom doing what he is doing and is he even who he says he is???? There r times when I cant trust anyone or anything even myself justiny
*
I’ve secreted myself in one of the upper rooms. I hold in my hand an implement, an editor’s tool, the exact weight and shape of my indignation at the doings of The Whom. My blog must not be spoiled. I will defend it, I will defend it with my life. I need look no further for a cause than dear little justiny, of whom I see no sign. I suspect the poor creature has pocketed her- or himself in a cupboard somewhere, nibbling on stale crackers or fingernails with teeth chattering in fear of The Whom’s depredations, to reemerge only when the foulness has been purged. The quarters of my blog must be made safe for those who’ve come for solace here.
*
O jaw u should of seen it when u weren’t around he was dominating this place just screwing with everyones minds pretending he was u and sayin if im the jaw u r my bubble gum u r my popcorn u r the gunk in my back molars and u ought to wait im gonna floss u out eccchhhh gross jaw hes such a lowbrow cant u do sumthing signed desperately yrs justiny
*
More ruined rooms, unbearable even to specify in this log — so many of them now, chambers of my soul forever sealed against the night.
*
I built too near the sea. The salt air corrodes the inlaid rosewood veneer. And at the moon’s perigee the tide licks my door. On some nights I sit in the parlor of my sad savaged blog and think it was only a dress rehearsal, a dry run. That I will build another blog elsewhere and make its seams tighter, armor it and therefore myself better for the world. But to abandon this one now would be to betray justiny. I say this to myself even as I hear the waves crashing nearer than I ever wished them to, the waves that are like a pulse of hatred beating in my forebrain.
MISS JAW I FIND YOU
ELEPHANTINE IN ALL REGARDS
WHY NOT JUST BUMBLE OFF TO THE BONEYARD
THE HONORABLE WHOM
*
We coexist, invisible to one another, an uneasy blind roundelay within the forgiving architecture of my blog. Here, I find evidence of justiny’s self-effacing encampments: squeezed-out tea bag neatly wrapped in a paper napkin, glass bearing a wilted daisy, scattering of dandruff, faint odor of lemon verbena or chamomile. There, I wander dismayed into rooms Whomed: overturned or demolished in derision, furnishings all glued upside down on the ceiling as in sophomore japery, library volumes with their pages torn or twisted from their spines, a turd curled in an ashtray. Once, I found a parlor cleared of all its treasures and bric-a-brac, which had been replaced with paper slips, fluttering on the floor like fortune-cookie fortunes, each bearing the name of one of the vanished items: wicker love seat, brass birdcage, croquet set, and so forth. I conduct my rounds in mournful diligence, reordering what can be reordered, sealing off quadrants when I must. At certain times I persuade myself an admirable stasis is attained: My blog abides, adapts, is made worldly by its users. At other moments I feel we three stalk one another: prey and predator that have each come under my roof, my own role unknown as yet. It is then I think I hear the blog ticking like a bomb.
*
O jaw dont ever leave us again like that u scared me so bad im shaking all over the place cant u see you’ve got responsive abilities now especially 2 me yr number 1 fan justiny
*
I decided I ought to take a week away from my blog, to absent myself from the site of creation, therefore to allow the inhabitants dwelling there to regulate themselves. It is an egalitarian space I have made, with its own social ecologies, and it would right itself, I was certain. When I returned I found someone had set ablaze the guest book, as well as the burnished ebony Bible stand on which the guest book had stood. The blaze singed the plaster scrollwork ceiling, soot and ash from the pyre forming a kind of rude tombstone or epitaph to itself, like the remains of a Klansman’s torched cross or the horrendous skeleton of a lynching tree. I hadn’t the heart to repair the damage to it and instead sealed the alcove where the guest book and Bible stand had been placed, and now though the blog has innumerable rooms and no one would miss one little nook or alcove, I feel it as a missing limb, a deletion imposed on me by forces malign, a first mortal blow.
MISS JAW YOU GOT A LOTTA ADMIRERS
BUT FOR MY MONEY YOU JUMPED THE SHARK
BEFORE THERE WAS A SHARK TO JUMP
GO BLINK IN A BLIZZARD
AND MAKE LOVE TO A LIZARD
THE WHOM
*
Dear jaw be strong you cant let the haters get you down yr blog is a very fine blog with two cats in the yard now everything is easy cuz of u also try imagining a place where its always safe and warm come in you said ill give you shelter from the storm xo justiny
*
A descreator, a desecraptor, a desacritter — why such difficlutties spelling the word? — has violated the hallowed corridors of my sanctum. I found his words slathered in dripping red bold graffitist’s capitals unscrubbable across the raw terra-cotta tile:
MISS JAW
WORMS SUCK EYEHOLES
YOU SUCK GUMBALLS
THE WHOM
I’ll content myself imagining such a soul writhing under its own torments, and not give the defamer even the honor of my rebuke. He’ll have moved on, I assure myself of this. Shambled off to pick on something his own low size. Still, I see his little haiku as if neon-imprinted on my eyelids’ interior when I shut my eyes to sleep.
*
Someday the world will build a highway with an overpass leading to a cloverleaf feeding to an off-ramp to a parking area that will be full of tourist buses full of visitors hungering in anticipation, there to join the multitudes tramping hour after hour clutching snack-bar goodies as they marvel through the corridors of my blog, then to reboard amid the waves of satisfied oglers clutching geegaws, key chains and can openers and T-shirts from the gift shop adjacent to the restrooms near the parking lot of my blog, but until that day comes I hear the steady pulse and recoil of the sea and see the moonlight through the skylight and reflected off the polished banisters and I know that if it is only justiny, whether she or he is alone or stands for secret lurking others now or in the future, I have made it and it is good.
*
A first appreciation has come. A tentative thing, a shred of sensibility, something that tiptoed in on little cat feet and graced me with praise. A he or she, I can’t tell from the byline: justiny. I wuvvv your blog, justiny said in a note, a seashell-pink crayon scribble on a fragile curl of tissue, the equivalent of a whisper, a thing I found stuck to my boot as I made my proprietary rounds, polishing brass railings and marble doorknobs and suchlike, and which I might so easily have failed to notice. I had a moment’s impulse to whisper back: My blog loves you too, justiny, in its way. But I think my blog’s love is more cosmic or Buddhist, more impassive and impersonal, than to need always to answer. My blog is for all ears that might listen, and who knows how many that might be? justiny happens to have piped up. (Barely.)