Lulu’s Loose Screw

Back in 2016, I was writing music reviews for  Indie Band Guru  and collided with the brilliant likes of Breanna Barbara. Her debut album,  Mirage Dreams , had just been released and I had the privilege to capture it on the  virtual page . A few weeks ago, I had the flattery of Barbara sending me her new single, and so here I am, and here you are, looping through the orbit once more.   While her entrance burst down the doors with a steel-boot kick in  Mirage Dreams , Barbara withdraws into a softer more subdue tone, drawing the curtains closer in “ Big Bang Blues .” With Breanna Barbara as captain, we dissolve into a warped illusional dimension, shimmering with drawling sounds, shape-shifting rhythms, melting mixtures of blue hues.    Barbara’s voice emerges over a cascading clash of classical guitar and bass, her voice steady—like a rocketship coursing through the atmosphere and soaring through the uproar of space—as the instrumentals t...

“Green? Gross!” He tosses the skittle back inside the package, digs out another color.   “Reeed! More like it!” he says, throwing the sweet treat to his tonsils, forgetting to chew the flavor.  His fingers fumble inside the bag, scoping out the next letter of the rainbow.  ROY-G-BIV.   “Grape! Yes!” He shovels it in, forgetting about the “Green again! Ugh! “Aw damn! Didn’t realize there were only three left! Shoulda saved the grape for last.”  He scrunches the wrapper and shoves it in the right pocket of his hoodie. He pulls up his hood as a light breeze strokes his cheek gently.  Florida winds always feel like summer time. Even in February. Beady eyes squint out in the twilight behind a gun glinting underneath the single shine of the street lamp.  “Hold still,” the voice of the beady eyes projects.  Hands up as he had learnt from television and movies, or from the innate consciousness of the tone of his skin,...

Empty.  My thoughts are empty. No, my brain is empty. Like when it’s 1:30 in the morning and you got your fan circulating in the background. Clearing out your mind. I think these white-noise boxes are designed to suck out the thoughts from your brain. But isn’t that what I come here for? Every time, I sit here hearing nothing but the same static from the sound screens. Anything repetitious can drive you mad. The heavy beats of water dropping on my air conditioner from the neighbor’s air conditioner upstairs. Leaving me blinking in the darkness at 3:15am. Just staring. Waiting for sleep to muffle me. Smother me in its sweet blackness. Sleep. The buzzing is dilating in my brain. Crescendoing and decrescendoing in a blur. Can sound become a blur? A blurry image? The haze of a desert morphing into a mirage along the horizon. Constantly seeing mirages. Whirring in a disappearing-and-reappearing act rapidly. A portal.  Maybe the silence of my thoughts, that emptine...

Originally handwritten in diary: November 10 th , 2016/ 11:38pm Typed/Edited for this blog: January 2 0 th , 2018/10:30ish pm I never told my parents, my sister, my ex, or my own diary (until now) about the time I was sexually assaulted. I had been grabbed, groped, assaulted twice on the platform of 42 nd and Times Square before. I remember what I was wearing the first time: a short orange polo-looking tennis skirt with three plastic buttons down the middle and vertical pleats along the bottom; tucked into the skirt, my most-prized worn-out paper-thin black Guns N’ Roses shirt that had the band stenciled in white on the front and their name featured in an orange banner above them. He just slid his hand up that orange skirt I loved to sport and disappeared in the crowd as I spun around to see if anyone else saw what happened to me. I remember standing on the platform full of nameless strangers, watching them blur away, further and further away from me. That was in ...

While everyone is all abuzz with excitement over the “new” IT , I left the theater very underwhelmed. Admittedly, I was a seesaw of emotion from the pre-production phase, being that Stephen King is my favorite author, and the 1990 IT my favorite horror movie (I watch it annually, every fall, and have for decades). Even still, I followed the events unraveling over the readaptation for years with rapt anticipation, went through all the news, from one director dropping out to another picking the project up. I was even there when Eddie Izzard was rumored to play the infamous Pennywise. So I went into this new movie, trying to shed my bias, but within minutes, I was let down. I remember being really iffy before the movie came out, and remember the trailer completely changing my mind. I went in thinking, maybe this movie will be closer to the book: it was not. I went in thinking, I hope the same magic is saved: it was not. I went in thinking, maybe the movie will be amazing ...