Nina Longfield
April 2015
Nina Longfield was born and raised in western Oregon. She received her BA in English at Marylhurst University. Despite extensive travels through North America and Europe, she continues to reside in the heart of the Willamette Valley along a branch of the Yamhill River. Writing is her therapy to combat reality. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in Eye on Life Magazine, MReview, Parable Press, Wolf Willow Journal, Ariadne's Thread, and the forthcoming issue of Illumen. For more, please visit at www.ninalongfield.com.
Technical Delirium
insert one screw with one flat washer through
The thing is nothing is real. I mean the world is changing and everything that had substance yesterday is obscure tomorrow…
secure with another flat washer and one hex nut
In the beginning, there was the word. But the word is fucked. There is no truth left in the word or the world, and the word is the world. We have to erase the past to start the future…
before tightening, you must level the joint
Joint? What joint? Was that in step 3 or step 6? These instructions suck! Can you see what I mean when I say the world is changing? It's chaos; that's what is causing it. Change is everywhere. We are all just too stuck in our own mundanity to notice…
once level, fully tighten screws and nuts
Do the people who write this crap think we're insane? Never mind the white-bellied pollachius, bring on the bollocks. Or something of the sort…
level at all corners
If we only learn to open our eyes and see what is real, can you imagine what kind of bizzaro place we might be living in? Most people sleepwalk through life because they cannot take the intensity of the real. The real is out there and it is not pretty…
tighten the screws and nuts
You know what this world needs? It needs a Dummy's manual for being human. Something to tell us all what the fuck is going on. Yeah, someone ought to write that. And it should be issued at birth. After they wrap the baby in its gender defining blankey, they can place the manual in the bed with it and the baby will grow up hugging it as we used to hug our teddy bears or dollies…
caution, cabinet is very heavy
Fuck yeah, of course its heavy. It’s a fucking cabinet for fucks sake. Anyway, I had this dream last night and I wonder if it means that I am going crazy or perhaps I would be happy locked away. In this dream, I'm sitting in a small room - no doors or windows - I don't know how the hell I got in there and I'm not doing anything but sitting on a hard metal framed chair – the kind of chair with stiff something-hyde vinyl stuff on the seat – anyway, I'm just sitting there – not doing anything – I should have been screaming or wondering how I got in there or how I was going to get out or banging my head on the wall – but I'm smiling – I've got this ridiculous grin on my face like I've just come – there is a mirror on the wall in front of the chair that I am sitting on – that's how I know I'm smiling – I'm not concerned that someone could be on the other side of the mirror watching me sitting there on that hard stiff chair – there is no other features to the room just grayish walls on three sides and a huge fucking mirror in front of me – I don't get up once during the dream – and then I wake up all sweaty and gross…
brace
symbols for a technical lay:
= : lay approximately parallel to line…
┴ : lay approximately perpendicular to line…
X : lay angular in both directions to line…
C : lay approximately circular relative to center…
₪ : lay approximately sixty-nine relative to center…
fastened
But it occurred to me that this was the means to happiness. Just sitting and being. It's almost like sitting and shitting, isn't it? If more people would just sit and let the experience of life wash over them, the world would become a much happier place for the rest of us who want to live in the real. Lock away the whiners, the planners and those who think they are the rulers. Then let the rest of us just be, and live in the real…
tighten
Wasn't it Plato who wrote about the real versus the ideal? The ideal is much to sublime for me, to mundane for real life. We must seek the real if we are to be free of the routine. Remember there is more stuff here on earth than is dreamt of in heaven or hell. Heaven doesn't have the nads to be real, it's much to sublime there, and hell is too hemmed in by guilt to be free...
to specified torque
Have you ever been straddled by depression? There is no fuck more pleasurable or painful than depression riding you. It rides hard, without mercy, without love, without hope. Didn't Emily Dickenson once write, "hope is a mechanism with wings" or something like that or maybe not. But if hope has wings, mine is a harpy that flies in at night and sucks me without bothering to sheath its talons or conceal its teeth. Ouch. It makes things hard…
using a rubber
For protection, I always wear a hat lined with lead – that way no one will know what I am thinking. It's important to protect your thoughts, you never know who might be out there lurking about seeking access to personal information. One whiff of my thoughts might land me in some uncomfortable space – like a room with no doors or windows and only a hard chair in front of a mirror with no clothes on…
mallet
…and someone getting off just watching me from the other side of the mirror. One touch, no waiting. My neurotransmitters are bouncing off my brain walls and puking all over impulsing synapses. Things are getting better towards the end, which is worse than before…
with metal
The neophyte in the corner is tied up under his own bondage, fetal, weeping. Sometimes it's easy to go too far, and then you can't come back. Life is like that…
screwed tight
---
Bataille (Erotism, p19), the real explained:
"The stirrings within us have their own fearful excesses; the excesses show which way these stirrings would take us. They are simply a sign to remind us constantly that death, the rupture of the discontinuous individualities to which we cleave in terror, stands there before us more real than life itself."
