I am not just leaving Seattle. I am leaving a life that I have not understood for a long time: one that has not represented who I am, who I am becoming or who I want, ultimately, to be.

Be a person who can say wow, someone who can be amazed. Be amazed today. Repeatedly.

What we believe we will see informs what we will see. What we believe we will think informs what we will think. What we believe we will feel informs what we will feel.

I want you to ache.

I passed a donkey on my way home tonight.

Driving to Seattle for the weekend last night, I passed Hanford as the sun was setting. The telephone lines in the area always remind me of crosses, grave markers.

I feel safe knowing where all the poets are right now, and that they are on the other side of the continent from me. AWP is like my ADT security system, protecting me from unwanted poet intrusions.

How I ache for land that has been abused, neglected and forgotten.

Tonight, I saw a dozen horses crowding one another on a small hill.

Since passing the Hanford site tonight, I can’t stop thinking about the Hanford site.

If I were in a gang, my gang name would be “The Bloodjet.”

Today, I am trying to work out what bothers me most. I think it might be systems.

I try friendships on like clothing, and find most of them too small—or their overall effect unflattering.

My husband is going to find me locked in here with all this cake.

All my shames are mismatched.

The capacity animals have to trust, even after enduring unthinkable suffering and abuse, simply astounds me.

Staring out this window has everything to do with learning something about my life, and about living.

I just misread the words “living room” as “Mignon,” and now I miss my mother.

It is with the first look in a mirror that we come to know ourselves as a thing, as an object, and as something that—inexplicably—exists both inside and outside of us.

It is when we forget who bakes our bread, who processes our waste, who maintains our water lines, who buries our dead—it is when these people become anonymous that we can live inside the delusion that we have no attachments, no dependence, on others.

Living is controlled falling.

I am tired of egocasting: I want to write something else, read something else.

In the end, even our feces is turned into a commodity. We can’t take a shit without being sold.

I awake, reminded again of our dimity convictions and freckled human nature. So it is; so we are.

The signifier and the signified enjoy no relationship other than the one we impose through language. That bond can be broken as soon as perception is broken, challenged.

At first I felt like a trinket. For a while I felt like a person. Later I felt like a freak.

Search term that led someone to my site: “senile warts and irritable bowel syndrome.”

When I am an old woman I shall wear people.

Tomorrow, something will happen.

I am the voice of unreason.

I rise and greet this broken nose of a day.

They are coming to take my weekend—the minutes and the hours. I just know it.

This idea that everything must be solid, that everything must last forever, I think it’s misguided.

It seems to me that we are more committed to our own suffering than we are to just about anything else.

Whole relationships these days are representational rather than experiential.

You don’t need surgery to figure out the heart.

I am tired of encountering ossified minds.

I made a paper angel out of my trash. Jon made a square snowflake.

I feel small and dull and flawed.

Writers don’t have secrets; secrets have writers.

I want to sell books labeled “self-help” so I will have no obligations to research, accuracy or integrity.

I think I have my day on inside out.

Craigslist want ad: “Great Pay to $0K Immediate.” Hey, they’re advertising my job!

Please think about what you say before you go splatting it all over the place like explosive diarrhea in an elevator at the Imperial Palace in Las Vegas.

I love fast computers the way some people love fast cars.

The only thing worse than being around one awkward person is being around more than one awkward person.

How I feel: like I was invited to a party only to be sent home upon arrival for wearing the wrong dress.

It is only once we are rendered useless that we may come to know how much we are, or are not, loved.

I don’t think I have a reading disorder; I think I have a reading disease.

I want to be a painting. I don’t mean I want to be painted. I mean I want to be a painting. I think it would be nice: everyone looking at me and no expectation that I do anything in return.

Dear Hands, How did you manage to change the word “glad” into “gonad” in the email you just sent? Love, Dana

If I came with a dislike button, a lot of people would push it.

Everything I am doing right now is in the spirit of questioning and exploration. Deal with it.

My defense: They were 67 percent off, so I got 5,900 percent more than I needed.

Make love not waste.

Life is a lottery ticket, and most of us are losers.

I am fluent in two languages: English and LOLcat.

I have tried my entire life to dispense with any sense of urgency.

Soon we won’t even speak. We will simply mediate one another’s lives.

Nothing draws attention like attention.

Everything that can be turned into a word can exist in language.

Blowing out the candle isn’t going to help if the house is already on fire.

Loving me is the first step toward hating me.

I no longer have friends; I have personal associates.

Spent all day figuring out the story of my trash.

If people came with a dislike button, I would push it a lot.

When I was young, I was alone but wanted to have friends. Now, I have friends but want to be alone.

I have Barry White and 53 cans of Coca-Cola on this snowed-in Thanksgiving. What more could I want?

Another dead varied thrush at my house. Fell out of the sky, faulty. A man, a witness, walked into my driveway, picked up the bird and brushed snow off its feathers. He turned the bird, examined its body. Satisfied, he gave it a heave-ho into the air. The thrush flew, feebly, in the shape of an upside-down “U” drawn by a drunk’s hand, then went, clean, into a drift of snow—a missile leaving a bird-shaped hole.

Last night, I misread a line from one of Elizabeth Colen’s poems as: “Here we take mattresses into our own hands.” I was all, “Wow. It’s like she really knows my family.”