davis jane it's hard to remember. i was young then, even now i close my eyes to remember what it was like in autumn, what it was like in summer, what it was like before i knew there was anywhere else. my mom sometimes tells this story that when i was three, i escaped. i was supposed to be taking a nap, but for whatever reason i couldn't sleep. i got out of the room and out of the house and made the trek down the street to the park. i was playing there i guess, and an alert neighbor who knew something was wrong returned me to my home. sometimes i think that's the story of my life. if it was hot outside, i'd take the dog for a walk, usually ending up by the lake, and we'd go swimming, and i'd come home dripping with muddy water and the dog would shake it all over my dad's white bmw and he'd get mad but we'd just have a car wash, because car washes were just another excuse to get soaking wet. i remember my mom's cooking. it was different then. she used to cook meatloaf, and we'd eat it with ketchup. her friend jerry, the one with the looong grey ponytail, taught me to eat everything with ketchup. he put it on ice cream. i would never go quite that far. i took classes at the davis art center. i took weaving - i think my dad still has one of those horrid things - and then later my brother and i took cartooning. and even later i acted there in plays, starting out with small roles and ending up as juliet. sometimes me and some other girl would go to the skate park and flash the skaters to try to make them fall. usually they just laughed and tried to impress us with some trick. when i was thirteen, i wore down a black eyeliner pencil a day, reapplying before and after gym class, when other girls were brushing their hair. the four of us (to this day i can't believe i had friends) would ditch class and steal bikes that weren't locked up, being sure to steal helmets because davis police would ticket you if you didn't. we'd go to ray's and get sandwiches. where did i get the money? the money that later went towards cigarettes...? last day of eighth grade i had my first cigarette. i didn't know when to stop smoking it, and the butt burned my fingers. my friends laughed, and i felt stupid, but i knew i had learned for next time. i had the biggest crush on ian mackenzie, who's probably working at some pizza place right now, still in davis, 'cause most people never leave. i wore vans and sketchers, and i was a t.a. for the history class, which meant that i would change a guy's grades just because he asked me to. valerie lear and julie boucher were both massive cunts with horribe hair. to this day i hold a grudge that they had ugly hearts. yes, we've all done hurtful things, but i still have scars from what they said to me. and the ultimate embarrassment from when my parents and alex lichtig's parents decided we should all have dinner together. and my brother and alex were talking the whole time, and i tried to join in, thinking that the next time we were at school, we would kind of be friends, bonding in the fact that our parents didn't understand the social hierarchy of the school: alex was a cool kid, i was a goth kid. apparently i didn't understand the hierarchy of the school either. i've spent my life trying to get farther and farther away from davis. i left after that year to go to school in "the city," sacramento. i applied to nyu and got in, and i moved across the country. but there's something deep inside of me that's still living there, this little girl with long golden hair (dein goldenes haar margarete) who had two big black labs and knew that davis wasn't the world. 050223 ... karl still in davis. 050601 ... Dallas whoo whoo 120709 what's it to you? who go blather from