Dead Crush

My New Digs

2007-10-29T17:07:00.000-07:00

http://imaginarycareer.blogspot.com

Dead Crush Died

2007-09-01T13:40:00.000-07:00

Hi Friends. I don't know if anyone reads this anymore, but I certainly don't think about it very often. That's not to say that I don't think about blogging--I have several new and exciting ideas about blogs want to start. Most relate to dream work and my interest in stuff that my 20-year-old self would have guffawed at loudly while ashing a cigarette into her bare hand.

The dead crush thing seems to be over. I'm still aware of my crushes on dead guys, but I have little interest in writing about them anymore. For over a year and in my head I've been working on an essay about Carl Jung, but I will probably save this for the new blog. In fact, the new blog may be kind of a very long essay about him. As soon as I have have something to post, I'll give you the link to the new site. And if you aren't interested in my new agey mumbo jumbo, I'll totally understand.

I will say that my longing for vastly unattainable (dead) persons has waned since I'm in this "relationship" (I don't know what else to call it, but it feels wrong to give it the name I've given to other partnerships that were so completely different. ) I will say now that I love this person but I will never marry him. I will most likely not get married again. And if something were to happen and we decided to not be together (we aren't physically together now as he is in another country), I would most likely meet someone(s) else to not marry.

I don't know why I felt I needed to make that statement. It's kind of like a vow. My vow to not give over ownership of my parts. It's just a vow for now anyway. Vows should be called Nows. That's all. Thank you for reading this. Love, Shrew

Greetings from the din (cleverly hidden in touristy winter wonderland)

2007-03-11T06:23:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this from the top of a famous mountain in a very cold state. People come here to ski and hang out at apres-ski bars with names like The Matterhorn. The culture is so fascinating--so many middle-aged people who pretty much ski for a living. I never thought I would be dating (dating? or whatever it is) one of these people, or anyone who knows how to snowboard or do anything physical for that matter. The most physical activity choad did was carry his assortment of pansyass persnickety groceries into the house or move his stupid computer from one room to another. I am not skiing, but I did meet a lot of very kind, rather leathery skiiers this weekend at the bar after they skiied all day while I read, slept, and watched HBO at this amazing vacated house which is owned by the carpenter's loaded uncle. The evenings have been spent in the hot tub outside looking at the gazillions of stars, feeling lucky to be human.

The carpenter is leaving tomorrow for his homeland, which means I'll probably be ending my second postchoad relationship. It's ok. It's all just practice anyway. By it I mean life. I can't imagine living with this person or even calling him my boyfriend, because we've never had any future in what we have. The thing is, there isn't any future in anything anyone has, because the future doesn't exist. I spent most of my twenties talking about it and planning it and it was all a big joke. I don't mean that in a cynical way--I just mean it in a regular way. I'm so sick of living in the past and the future. I'm more interested in now now now. That's been the best part about being with the carpenter (well almost the best thing)--it has forced me to stay completely in the present. Tomorrow he gets on a plane and then I have no idea. Will we email each other? Maybe. If I feel like emailing him. Will I call him? No, probably not since he's getting rid of his phone. Will I see him when he comes back next month to do something complicated regarding his citizenship? I don't know. If I feel like it. If he feels like it.

Don't get me wrong--I'm going to miss him. I can anticipate that. I feel sad that he is leaving because we're just starting to become friends. I know that in a year he will most likely come back for good, but I don't know where I'll be or what I'll want by then. I'm writing all of this stuff about the present like the good little buddhist I'm starting to become, but just last week I was freaking about my feelings for him--feelings that sometimes border on the L word. And then right before I left for this heavenly place I told my roommate that I don't really like him and that I was looking forward to having my life back when he left. So this is why I can't focus on how I'm going to feel in a month or a year--my feelings are very tidelike right now. Are always very tidelike actually, depending on which of my inner beings is in charge. Having this sort of love relationship also unearths all of this ancient archetypal crap in me as well. If you could look inside me right now, you would probably see Psyche and Aphrodite in a huge shrieking cat fight while a weird little girl rocks back and forth trying to tune it all out. And Eros--I won't even go into that. Probably a few fifties housewives in there too, vaccuuming. It's hard to hear what's going on under all of this din. Actually, the din is what's going on. I'm just trying to live within all of the noisiness. It will be still soon enough, I anticipate.

Ok, I'm going to go take my meds now.

The Problem:

2007-02-16T15:57:00.000-08:00

I really, really hate my job. The main reason is that I don't know what my job is. The main reason for that is that my boss is a raving psychopath. One minute I'm helping with event planning for an enormous VIP-ridden event (I don't give a shit about VIPs, I've learned, unless they are Emmylou Harris), the next I'm making her foil (single process) appointment with Brad Pitt's stylist and calling the chef to tell him that she needs her crudite on a round plate rather than a rectangular one. Some days I stare at my computer all day and want to off myself. On other days I run around like a crazy person, trying my best to do what I'm asked with only 20-30% of the information I need. Often in heels.

Today I learned that one of my coworkers is quitting in two weeks, which will increase my workload, confusion, and general sense of unbalance that has been accelerating since I got this job about tenfold. I'm kind of in denial about how much it's really going to suck. Maybe I'm just in shock. I had an interview last week for a job I actually want, so maybe I'll get out of there soon.

But for this evening, anyway, I have a solution: 1. Weed. 2. The carpenter. Not necessarily in that order.

Note to Self: Alone

2007-02-11T14:13:00.000-08:00

Today I was reading a submission to the major lit journal for which I am a minor reader, and I had a flashback. I'm not sure what unearthed this entirely forgotten memory, but I think it has something to do with the Midwest, isolation, and hermitly scholarship.

The submission came from a woman who lives in the northern midwest and teaches at a small college with a religious affiliation. Her poems were funny and strange and dense with weird imagery. They were kind of like the poetic equivalent of a taxidermist's workshop (I wish I could say I didn't know what one looked like). Having spent a good deal of time in the small city in which she resides, I immediately felt sorry for her, knowing that she probably felt lonely and misunderstood there. Then I had the flashback which kind of froze me for about a half and hour.

1981, maybe 1982. My family went to visit a colleague of my dad's in the northern midwest, close to the taxidermy poet's state. The woman must have been a research scientist of some kind, since she was a friend of my dad's. Or she could have been a lab technician--it doesn't really matter. She lived alone in a beautiful house that I think I've dreamed about in years since, though I haven't been able to identify the house until today. (I still need to ask my dad about this woman. She may not even exist.) The house was all on one floor, with beautiful pale wood floors in a region of the country that favored highly textured and food-colored wall-to-wall carpet. It was the barest house I'd ever seen: there was nothing in it she didn't absolutely need. She lived there alone and seemed unaware of the needs of children. Ordinarily my brother and sister and I would have complained to my parents of boredom, but I don't remember this happening. I remember eating dinner at a beautiful plain dining room table that was like a door. She had unapologetically prepared some kind of food that kids wouldn't like. She talked to all of us in the same way--as though we were all close friends, even though two of us were 7 years old and one was 4. The most resonate part of this flashback was how enamored of this woman I was. Without verbalizing this even internally, I realized she had the life I wanted. I saw how different she was than my parents: no loud TV, no toys and homework and briefcases and student papers scattered everywhere, no hairy pets, no noise, no churchy friends, no mainstream middleclass comfort. She seemed classless--her house was beautiful but small and empty. I had the overwhelming sense, though I wouldn't have had the language to say it, that she had the exact life she wanted. And the life she wanted had little more in it than herself. I think this is the life I saw for myself when I was small: there was no judgement around it, I just knew somehow that her life was the one waiting for me as an adult, and it gave me a huge amount of comfort to see it.

I think I thought about this woman and her house a lot when I was little. But something--the culture, my inherited religion, my parents' need for absolute conformity--buried it. Then I became boy crazy, began my path of serial monogamy, got married and yadda yadda yadda. And now I'm here, not living alone, but more alone than I've ever been...going on two years of aloneness, just blissful (sometimes) shrewness. And in all this time I never thought of this woman until today. I think I had glimpses of her when I would stare at For Rent signs in Swale, stare at them and fantasize of a space all mine, all alone. I loved helping friends look for their one-bedrooms, because I could imagine moving into those spaces too, just me and my things, and cut out the clingy apendage I had somehow grown without wanting it or asking for it. One of the saddest days of my life was when choad annouced that he was moving in with me. I felt my real life scurrying away as I dutifully accepted his massive media-heavy presence in my my my space, my life as a lone person, the life I was supposed to have.

I want to remember this when I'm in boymode (for lack of a better term). I can't tell if these longings are real or dictated by my hetero and coupled family and our relationship-obsessed country. I think there is a huge part of me that wants to be alone forever. It makes me so sad that a 7-year-old girl's greatest dream can't be to one day live alone, completely alone. I think that was my dream, and I erased it. I could blame it on many things, but I did it. And now I'm bringing it back.

Of course, that dream can't exist without its opposite. I need people. I love that I'm developing a loving cohabitation with my roommate, who is one of the neatest people I've ever met. I'm so happy I have so many funny and weird and smart and lovable women in my life. Part of me thinks that I may live with a woman for the rest of my life. Then on some days I think about how nice it is, how balancing it could be for me, to have a man in my life in that way. But mostly that thought just makes me very, very tired. I'm not saying I don't need to get laid because I really, really do. And it would be nice if that could happen with someone who doesn't suck completely. But he doesn't have to move in...there's no room for him anyway, both physically and otherwise.

That being said, I have a crush on a British carpenter who rides a motorcycle, has a daughter and never wants to shack up. Who will be known heretofore as The Carpenter, should further reports be necessary.

I'm just trying to stay balanced, folks.

PS--was disappointed to learn (via one of her poems) that the taxidermy poet is married

Boys

2007-01-15T15:53:00.000-08:00

I like them. I guess you probably already knew that, since the blog is dedicated to them and the things that made them die. But what I mean here is that I like the live ones, the general boy population. I mean this right now. This may be a brief window so I figured I should probably exploit it while it can. Then I can come back and read this when I start hating on them again.

I forgot how cute they can be. On my birthday I went dancing with NU and my sister at a hipster bar on Britpop night. I had no idea that dudes 10 years younger than me could know the words to "Metal Mickey," but some do. And they are adorable. There were three of them who danced with us that reminded me so much of my first boyfriend and his Morrissey-worshipping friends--they kind of emanated a sexual confusion or frustration that was acted out by jumping on each other. This looks horrifying in print, but trust me, it was cute. It made me nostalgic, especially since we were dancing to all of my anglophile college music. Later, one of them grabbed me. I turned around to look at him and he gave me a totally stoned and adorable smile. Hours later I realized I could have gone to some dark corner and made out with him...yes, I'm still kicking myself. He was probably 24, tops. Also a gay guy hit on me. Maybe he wasn't gay. Or maybe nowadays gay guys want to date girls; I haven't dated in a while. He was really cute too. Was probably unborn when the Smiths song we danced to was popular.

I know I need to date older guys. I like them too, I think. What I'm saying here is that I kind of remember now what the big deal was. Why I spent most of my life boy-crazy. I like them. It's ok to like them. I like myself too now, so liking them will probably be different. I like the weird ways they attempt to emote. I like their clothes and their glasses. I like it when they travel in awkward packs. I like trying to figure them out.

I sense that there will be drama in my future.

Oh Yeah, I Have a Blog

2007-01-09T18:42:00.000-08:00

I'm so damn tired pretty much all of the time that all I can do is look at my life and say "what the fuck?" But due to all of the tiredness it comes out more like "...the fuh..." and is followed by several minutes of staring into space while my dog whines for dog food, my laundry out on the clothesline gets rained on for the 2nd time (I finally brought it in, soaking wet, where it now sits mildewing in the middle of the kitchen while I wait for a nonexistent person to tell me what to do with it), and one of the maintenance guys at work actually comes up to me and waves his hand in front of my face to see if I'm still alive ("barely" is my answer).

I used to be a different person. I'm a Capricorn (my birthday is in 3 days). I got shit done. I balanced my checkbook every week, paid my bills early, flossed, made my bed, brushed my dog's teeth, sent out my poems and entered contests (with the aid of detailed spreadsheets), all while recovering from an abusive relationship, getting married, getting divorced, and preparing to move. I look back at last year and think, huh, that was pretty easy (though deep down I know it wasn't). Somehow I seem to be shutting down. I'm fucking up in major ways. I'm hurting people because I'm too distracted and fucked up to empathize. I don't eat balanced meals. I don't take vitamins anymore (this feels like sacrilege). I am becoming a bad person. And by bad I mean messy.

I could blame it on my job or the transition of moving and learning to be alone again. That would be pretty easy to do. I know I kind of conflate badness with messiness because my mom did this--she grew up in such a chaotic messy environment that I spent my childhood believing that a water glass left on the counter was pretty much equivalent to the aftermath of an earthquake. Here's what I feel like: I'm losing control. Even though I firmly believe that I'm not in control of anything. My head believes this, but somehow the rest of me is breaking down. I don't like it. I don't like it one bit. But I don't think I have any choice but to accept it, because I'm too tired to figure out what else to do.

Here's some things I can still do in the middle of my messiness: Write (weird, strangled things). Dream (though I don't have time to work on them). Work (somehow I'm not fucking up too bad there. Only occasionally. And I'm there 10 hours a day). Sometimes I sleep on a pile of dog toys, the week's clothes, and the several creased books or poem drafts I tried at one point during the weekend to read. Sometimes I wear the same pair of pants two days in a row. Once I ate a Fluffernutter for dinner.

I know you're probably rolling your eyes and thinking "what a pansy ass lame-o," but order is important to me. I don't know why (oh yeah I do--I already forgot that I just wrote about that. See?) That's what I'm thinking about: life if hard whether or not I have enough toliet paper to get me through 6 months. Charging my cell phone every day doesn't really help the fact I feel like I'm sort of crumbling apart. This sounds awful, I know, but I think maybe this is all a good thing. Maybe I'm Learning Something. I'll let you know if I figure out what it is. Right now I'm going to need to stare at the ceiling for at least an hour or two until I remember to go to sleep.

Dead Crush #18

2006-12-30T19:01:00.000-08:00

In case you wondering if I was too busy, scared, tired, overworked, stressed, abused, or paranoid to be bothering myself with this lameass blog, you're right. But I'm not too busy to have crushes. Nosiree. Especially a crush like this. I'm so sad he died. So sad. And forgetting temporarily Choad's oh-so-white fixation with soul music. I may be one of the whitest people alive, but I can dance to James Brown. That's one thing I can do.

This is mostly an excuse, I mean it's completely an excuse to tell my favorite James Brown story. It involves dancing, frivolity, and youth. Three things which are painfully missing from my life. One is about to be gone for good (Dude, I'm going to be 33. 33.)

1997. My 23rd birthday. I'm in Liverpool at a giant hostel with no central heating. Morning: I'm lugging my stupid, cursed backpack onto a train--I have 102 degree fever and my friends hate me because I won't get drunk on the train on the way to London. I just want to die. I don't remember being anymore miserable before or since. England in January is not a happy place, especially when you have the flu. When we finally get to the basement apartment that belongs to the son of my parents' friends, I pass out until around 10. Late evening: awaken, take another dose of cold medicine, put on these weird striped stretchy 90s bellbottoms, and head for Madame Jojo's, the transvestite bar someone has told us to go to. We're delighted to learn upon arrival that it's Deep Funk Night as well as Ladies Night. After three vodka drinks and a great deal of UK Nyquil, I was in what could best be described as a trance. There were smoke machines. There were amazingly beautiful women in amazingly dreamlike outfits. There was James Brown. This was one of the best nights of my life--almost ten years ago to the day. Ten years.

My favorite thing about this night was the radical transformation that took place. I transformed my illness into this spectacular hypnotic state of love and celebration, with the help of JB, mild sedatives, and loving friends. I think I can learn something from this that could help me now--I need James Brown. I need him now more than ever.

Dear Ambien,

2006-12-02T17:08:00.000-08:00

My moving stress is still happening. I keep pretending like it's over, that I'm all settled in and that everything is cool, but I keep forgetting that 4 months ago I was driving across the country with my dog in cage and my mom riding shotgun and my dad a few miles ahead of us in a giant U-Haul. We stayed in a Red Roof Inn together and I cried the next morning at Bob Evans. Four months ago. That's it. Since then, I've had a total of 4 jobs, one new roomate, one dog with a major separation anxiety problem (still working on this one), several nervous breakdowns, a terrible back problem, an insane boss (the one I have now), one bedroom that is so crowded with furniture that I can't walk around in it, at least 6 incidents where I've either gotten totally lost or ended up in nightmarish traffic situations, and drank approximately 200 beers and 30 bottles of wine. And slept maybe 5 hours a night if I'm lucky. Not to mention the whole RMV incident(s). And having to quit a job in the middle of it. Two jobs, actually. And saying no to two interviews recently even though I'm not so sure about my new job. Through all of this, I haven't gotten sick or hurt (except the back issue, which was completely linked to a terrible job situation). I've moved all of my furniture twice. I'm learning how to live with someone again. Jesus Christ, I deserve some kind of medal. Or flowers (I bought myself some today). Or a vintage black leather Coach shoulder bag (ditto).

And you, Ambien. I forgot you were still around. I'm going to drink a bottle of Chimay with NU tonight, I hope, while we assemble her Christmas tree. Then I will drift into your blissful ether, and hopefully I will awaken feeling human again. Sleeplessness makes me into a robot and robots aren't good writers. They're good office-slaves, but I want to be a writer too. Thank you for understanding this. See you soon.

Love,
Shrew

Ending With a David Ignatow Poem

2006-11-26T15:34:00.000-08:00

Has anyone else noticed that I don't write about McChoad anymore? I just noticed it today. The reason I don't write about him is because I don't think about him, at least not in any substantial way. I am a simple person; if I'm thinking it, I write it. I think my confessional filter shut off when I started my existential crisis last year. Actually: filter? What filter? There was never any filter. Which is why my family tries to keep our phone conversations short.

I am so totally single. Single to the point that it doesn't feel weird or awkward anymore to attend the Thanksgiving dinner of my sister's in-laws. I clearly did not belong there, but after quickly acknowledging this fact in my head, I went on to accept a second glass of wine and to eat heartily from an appetizer-laden table, while some gravy-based argument took place in the kitchen. I watched with mild interest as a 9-year-old nephew masticated a child-sized (meaning as large as a child) drumstick. I nodded and smiled when various family members apologized for being so loud and annoying (they're not my family, so I didn't really care). I watched a miniature dog (not mine) wolf down a plateful of Stop and Shop brand stuffing. My sister and I got out of there fairly early, took the train back to my neighborhood and then went and watched totally drunk people attempt to salsa to Pogue covers in an Irish bar the size of my kitchen. It was the kind of day that poets like a lot. There are a lot of those kinds of days here.

Here is the poem. There is no title; it can be found in Facing the Tree:

Where is a rock to bore a hole through?
I need to find a rock to drill
a look through to the other side.
Any rock, any ordinary species.
I'll be happy with a rock.

Live from Smartyville

2006-11-11T15:57:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about going out to do something mildly social tonight, but I can't because I have too much acne. Also my back hurts really bad. And my eyes. And I have dishes to wash and laundry to fold. The house is very, very quiet. There is rice in my steamer, cooking. If I close my eyes, I could fool myself into thinking I'm back in Suckville on a typical Saturday night. But I'm not--I'm here, in the land of the I'm Way Smart and Lucky Enough To Have a Doctor/Lawyer/Investment Banker Dad, So I'm Pretty Much Set For the Rest of My Life. Sometimes I feel too dumb and backwoods to even leave my house. But this is only on really bad days. Today wasn't too bad, but like I said, there's the whole acne issue (on accounta my wacky hormones and one of the most stressful weeks of my life). I feel kind of smart today. But I feel middle class. I feel middle class every day, pretty much, being from Suckville and all. Sometimes I look at the tweeded and bespectacled whiteys that crowd the streets of the city I work in, and I wonder how I got here. But I want to live here. I feel alive here. Like when a woman yelled "Grow some balls!" out her car window at a whimp who wouldn't make a left turn, and then gave me, a pedestrian, a humble smile. That made me feel sort of elated.

Earlier today I felt really behind. And I don't mean behind on stupid work or bills or anything like that. I mean behind in the whole hetero myth of couple and reproduce. The mythical norm. Lots of people my age have their person all picked out already, and have had years to learn to hate and tolerate each other. I did that too, but then it got sucked away, like getting the wind knocked out of me. And now I'm just me. People my age who have been coupled for as long as I was are giving birth left and right or at least thinking about it. But not me. Except today I am. Thinking about it. But in order to catch up with these people, I'd have to meet someone who isn't totally nutzoid which I don't know how to do, develop some kind of relationship, decide fairly quickly that we can stand each other enough to stay together for some length of time, and then begin the process of trying to have a kid, if that's what we want. This whole thing could take years for me. And then I'll be 40 and going into have hormone shots. Christ. Why am I thinking about this?

I don't know how to meet people. I don't know if I even want to meet people. I feel ok being single here most of the time, but today I feel like someone's weird aunt. I don't know if I want to be someone's weird aunt. But I don't want to date. I don't want to find "the love of my life" because I don't believe in that anymore. I don't believe in all of the things I was supposed to spend my life pursuing: love and all that crap. I just believe in me, Yoko and me, right? But tonight I feel kind of lonely. I need to make up some new dating service: for thinking people who don't really want to date. Wouldn't that be the best way to meet someone? Come on single friends, let's do it. Call it I'd Really Rather Hang Out with My Dog, But Fine, Let's Go On a Date, Whatever.

I only have a few breeding years left. Arrrggh, did I really just write that? Yes. It's the weirdo hormones talking. I don't want to give birth. But I do want to have a kid. I like kids a lot. I like talking to them. I don't like boyfriends. I don't like talking to them at all. I guess I need to eliminate the middle man and go straight for the product. Maybe I'll adopt in a few years. And be a weird mom that no one knows what to do with. I'll talk really loud about personal topics in coffee shops while playing Scrabble with my son, Ivor. We'll both be in leopard sweater vests. We won't go home for Christmas; in fact, we won't celebrate Christmas. We'll celebrate Jackson Pollock's birthday by throwing paint at a wall. But I'll take him home to see the cornfields so he knows that his roots are in Suckville. Except for I'll have a different name for it by then, because I'll have learned to love it again.

First dresses, then tresses

2006-11-02T10:49:00.000-08:00

My roomate's friend (my roomate is wonderful by the way--I'm going to dedicate a post to her wonders one of these days) told me that whenever she realizes that she needs something in her life, she asks for it out loud, and then later gets it. It's like praying but without the self-effacement, guilt, and imaginary dead body. It made sense to me. By accident I tried it out during an emergency phone session with my former therapist. During the session I realized that I don't want to be a teacher--that it wasn't simply a matter of getting used to it, I just don't want to do it. Then I said what I did want, which is a professional job doing something somewhat important that I didn't have to think about when I went home, where I would work with hormonal and stress-adled adults rather than with hormonal and stress-adled preteens. And then the next day I got offered such a job, which I just started today (I'm working part time there while I finish the kid job). If it seems like I got this job easily or that it fell into my lap, that's because it did.

Of course, I had help. I wouldn't have gotten the job without NU, as it is within the organization that employs her, and she very graciously let me know about an opening there. But the job I have now isn't the one for which I applied. It's a new position that they're creating for me. It feels weird and a little scary--partly because I'm afraid that they'll figure out that I'm incompetent and send me packing, but mostly because I've never felt that I have valuable skills. I'm kind of in the process of inverting my thinking...I'm employable? Yeah, I guess. Sort of. Someone looked at my CV and didn't immediately send it sailing toward the trash? Huh?

I'm feeling sort of new today. I feel overwhelmed in an excited, butterflies way. I didn't do much at my new job because no one really seems to know what my job is yet. But I think it's going to be good. It feels right, and I'm getting better at trusting these feeling thingies. In half an hour I'm going to go work at the school with the good kids, which happens to be very close to one of the best vintage clothing stores I've ever seen. I'm going to have an actual salary and I think a new dress is in order. And then I'm getting my hair cut, but what I need is a transitional haircut because I've decided that I need tresses. Tresses. I think this word several times a day. I just want to know if it's possible to have tresses. I mean long flowing locks. Because why not.

To Sir, With Apathy

2006-10-26T15:52:00.000-07:00

I've always been pretty good at admitting my faults. I used to just be good at telling people that I'm not very smart or attractive or outgoing. Now I'm also able to admit to the seedier traits, such as jealous, competitive, and mean. I am all of these things. Don't argue with me about this last list, because it's all true pretty much all of the time and I'm ok with it, at least most of the time. The first list is only true some of the time. For example, sometimes my hair actually looks really good, but it hasn't for quite some time. I tried to cut my bangs myself and I now look like a cross between a monk and Farrah Fawcett Majors. And sometimes I amaze myself with the way my brain works, and sometimes I wonder if my mom forgot to tell me about that time she dropped me on the patio. Sometimes I love people and sometimes I'm in the cave. Right now I'm about half in and half out of the cave. I had a party recently with my new roommate and did not end up cowering in the corner for any of it, but I did fail to notice that one of my guests had been hit by a car on the way there. I'm not balanced is what I'm trying to say here. Or actually, I am balanced, though it may come across as the opposite. Also I'm drunk a lot.

I used to tell people that I didn't like sports such as croquet, badmitton, and kickball (these are the games my family likes to play) because I hadn't a competitive bone in my body, and I didn't see the point. The truth is that I'm the most competitive person on the planet and also not very coordinated, and everytime I played croquet with my brother, who has won everything his whole life with no visible effort, I either ended up hitting his ankles with my mallet or stomping off mid-game, red faced and sobbing. Once when shopping in a Goodwill with my friend P., another closeted competitor, we had a silent standoff about a skirt with mallards on it. She had found the skirt, but it was really clear to me that she would never wear it, whereas I would have worn that skirt to threads. I'm not talking tacky preppy mallards here, I'm talking tasteful mallards flying above a lake printed on a perfect khaki skirt. We never voiced the battle, but words weren't necessary. There was a lot of uncomfortable laughter. She wasn't giving up the damn skirt because she found it. I thought something uncharitable about her on our way out of the store. As far as I know she never wore the skirt, and this still makes me feel ansty even this many years (10?) later.

I'm saying all of this, for some reason, because I decided today that I don't want to teach. For over a year I thought that this is what I would do when I moved. For over 6 years I assumed that this is what I would do with my life. I love kids, even the mean whiny middle school ones (especially them)and I love the schools here. I love the thought of summers off and long vacations. But I don't want to be a teacher. I just don't. And it's not because I'm mean and competitive and jealous. It's because I don't think I can really be a teacher and be completely myself. And when I'm not myself all I can think about is what a bitch I am and how I have to change (Exhibit A: my marriage). I want to be a bitch and be ok with it. I want to be me and be ok with it. I don't think I can do this and teach, at least not right now.

I'm working in an after school program right now with a lot of amazing 6th graders. They're writing and playing and saying all kinds of cool stuff. And I keep thinking that someone else should be there to witness it, someone who really would be there even if it weren't for the measly pay. I am not this person. There's this one kid with so many problems, and he's also so cute and weird and smart, and I just don't want to get invested. Not because I'm callous or a bitch or any of the other things I happen to be, but because I'm not a teacher. I think I'm not a teacher. This is one of the weirdest realizations of my life. My whole family is teachers. I am not.

So now I'm going to go figure out what I am. You know, in addition to being a writer. What I want right now is a big, boring job with benefits. A job where I know what I'm doing and other people come to me for answers. Where I'm a professional. Weirdly, this kind of describes my last job, which I thought I didn't like. Until now, I thought my options were office drone or teacher, but now that I live somewhere with more than one employment opportunity, I'm starting to see that my job may be doing something I never anticipated. I'm so surprised that I want the 9-5 thing. That's what I want. At least right now. So this is good to know. But I definitely need a drink. And drugs, drugs would be nice.

I've been addicted

2006-10-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

to this for awhile.

I just spent a good part of this weekend in heated debate about the stealing of Gram Parsons' body. I mean a long time of being very defensive and hating on Phil Kaufman. If you don't know the story, GP's road manager stole his dead body from an airport in a stolen hearse, then burned it inadequately in the California desert, leaving his estranged family to pick up the remains (left on the side of the road) to bury in New Orleans (where Gram is not from). I'm not going to go on and on about how I feel about this. I'll just say that while I know I am obsessed with dead people as a way to avoid the complexities of my nondead life, I can't stand some of mythologizing that takes place as a result of cute guys dying young. Of course, my obsession with GP would probably lessen if he had died of old guy stuff, but I must say that most of my obsessions with dead musicians has to do with their music and not with their druggy deaths.

On a slightly related note: I think GP might still be alive today if he hadn't had a trust fund.

Ok, now I'm going to go get a life.

Your town is very famous for the little girl whose crying can be heard all around the world

2006-10-13T13:59:00.000-07:00

I feel like total crap. I was supposed to go to this wedding this weekend, a wedding I bought a plane ticket for like 3 months ago, back when I thought maybe I'd have shit together by now. Wrong. So last night I cancelled the ticket approximately 12 hours before my plane was supposed to take off. And now I feel horribly guilty, sad, depressed, relieved. I've been pulling stuff like this for quite some time, it feels like. I think I'll be able to go through with something until the very last minute when I'm suddenly like, Oh, actually I can't do that. I can't go to weddings. I may never go to another wedding again. I can't really be social or look at your baby pictures or smile with any sort of sincerity at the sight of some fucking couple holding hands. I can't pretend to be normal. I can't pretend that the fact that I plunked myself down in a completely foreign world with barely any means of supporting myself only two months after getting divorced means nothing to me. Right now I can do the following: cry.

There are other things I want to do. Things I want to watch or listen to as I retreat into my cave of self loathing/pity. But I can't do these things because you-know-who took them. Here's what I currently need, some of which was taken by that fucker, and don't have:

1. The Who's The Who Sell Out
2. All albums by the Red House Painters
3. The Wes Anderson movies
4. The Graduate--that was mine, goddamnit!
5. The Francois Truffault movies
6. Ziggy Stardust
7. For the Burritos-era Gram Parsons to come back from the dead and cuddle with me
8. I really need The Who for some reason. I need it in my car.
9. An ipod because Ijust figured out what one is and I think it may solve many of my problems
10. A job, but I can't even write those words without the panic rising even higher
11. The new Killers album
12. Books written by my friends
13. The new Mary Ruefle book, which may not be out yet
14. A newly unearthed season 8 of Buffy
15. A boyfriend to go get me a bottle of Maker's and then disappear so I can drink it alone
16. Pride and Prejudice on DVD

I'm drinking carrot juice right now that I just got at Whole Foods. I bought it because it was really cheap and I normally really like carrot juice. But this is bitter and strange. Then I just remembered that didn't a batch of carrot juice just give a bunch of people E Coli or something? Cool. I could be sitting in a hot tub at a bachelorette party right now, but instead I'm going to have E Coli alone. I knew there was a reason I stayed home.

I do have some things. Here are the things I have that will help me get through this weekend of shrew-hating:

1. A bed
2. A comforter
3. A warm and loving dachshund
4. Kelly Link (thanks to Nix)
5. A loaf of Seedsational bread (if I can bring myself to eat)
6. The Gram Parson doc but I really shouldn't watch it anymore--it makes me too sad and desperate and lonely

Oh my god, that's it. I was planning on revealing to myself some really surprisingly inspirational information. The truth is I don't have much right now. That's all the news from Depressoland. I'll be in my cave if you need me.

When I disappear for the next 4-6 weeks, it's because of...

2006-10-05T10:33:00.000-07:00

This.

It finally came out on DVD.

Dead Crush #17

2006-10-02T16:53:00.000-07:00

In honor of Rock Hudson, who croaked on this day in 1985, I give you this poem I wrote about him a long time ago, which will never be published elsewhere.

If you want to know why I love him so much, watch this movie.

Like Love, Only Far Away

We made friends over a mutual admiration
for each others’ coats, and then that
turned into love. Love has helped me

to decide that I can’t live in this town
anymore, that I have no use for its barn
theaters, fish-scented trees, novelty

paperweights, and turn-of-the-century
patio furniture. Every day we grow
more tired, and every day there is less

of a bed, more of a pile of dirty magazines
or unclaimed hairpins. But I don’t want
to write about this. I’d rather see someone

famous and dead speak on a subject
of my choosing and write about that.
The person I choose is Rock Hudson

and the subject is animal rescue. Rock
is a bronze statue in chinos and a work shirt.
He gently cradles the napkined biscuit

I give him, rubs his nose and tells me
about the Lab with a severed leg
on Dover Point, the tourniquet and piercing

cries, a tongue lapping radiator water.
I am moved but warn him of the dangers
of running into traffic, how it might not

be worth it, what our human lives are
or are not worth. But he tells me of kittens
wrapped in a towel as his lip trembles

like a broken fawn and the large leaves
of his hands brush his face, he talks
about a wizened Chihuahua trotting north

on I-95, horses abandoned to the white
grip of winter. He excuses himself
to the patio, and I watch through

the sliding glass door as he lights up
and blows smoke cloudward, tears shining
in the late sun. This isn’t going like I’d planned:

my one idea is getting into his truck
and driving away. So it’s back to the barns,
paperweights, magazines, hairpins. I need

to move away, get out of here. I’ve lived
in Maine; I could get work as an ornithologist
or other animal expert. You don’t know

what you’re talking about, he says. He is
not Rock Hudson. He is alive. He is right.
My cries into the skin-scented cushions

are like those of a tropical bird. I’m no expert,
I cry, but I have loved so many things.

First I ate about 100 dried cherries, then

2006-09-21T17:01:00.000-07:00

What do you think about this as a title for my ultra-long new poem:

Post Moxie

Does it need a hyphen? Is it pretentious and lame? Is it just plain stupid? If you need to see the poem, let me know and I'll send you all eight pages of prose (and then say You Asked For It). I'll email it to you. And then you can also tell me how to lineate it or if maybe I should put it into prose blocks. I need to have something to send out, so I don't feel so depressed about all the rejections I'm going to get again from my book manuscript. I have nothing else but this monster. I don't think it's anywhere near finished. I thought maybe it could be a chapbook but now I think it's just going to be another full-length collection that no one will ever read.

I don't think I ever talk about writing here. Have I? I don't think about writing very much. Well, I guess I think about writing, I just don't think about publishing anymore. I'm forcing myself to do it now but I'm not really sure why.

I feel really, oh what's the word, puny. My dog's stomach is making really strange noises. I lied and quit my temp job because I can make three times as much subbing in a private school. I'll be teaching sixth graders about the French impressionists next week. My latent protestantism has kicked in big time and I feel miserably guilty about quitting any kind of job, even one that sucked as hard and paid as horribly as mine did. Lame things about city life make me happy, things such as Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and IKEA. Cool things make me happy too, but I don't do those things. For example, number of times I have been to the amazing libraries/parks/museums: 0. Number of times I have been to Whole Foods: 9. Oh, but number of times I have been to the greatest used clothing store on earth: 1, and it was so choice.

Sorry this post sucks so much. I was going to write something witty and moving, but there's a ferret wedged between my brain and my eye sockets. I am definitely in hover-mode right now--not quite here. Not quite where I used to be. Purgatory. Purge-atory. Which is why I'm desperately trying to cuddle up with publishing thoughts again--it's familiar. It's an angst I can handle, because I've been stressing about it for nearly 10 years. It's an easy stress, because really who gives a crap. It's not a life or death thing, like finding a job. I probably won't die if I don't find a job, but eating will become increasingly more difficult.

I just pulled something out of my ear. I think it's a big piece of soap. I have no idea how long it's been there.

The F'ing Bureaucracy

2006-09-08T08:26:00.000-07:00

I forgot to mention that in addition to being great, I am also kind of a wreck. After way too much whiskey on an empty stomach, followed by beer and weeping in an Irish bar, and before that driving around in a city full of the craziest drivers on earth and almost getting hit by a bus, and sitting in the RMV for 3 hours only to be told that I basically don’t exist unless I can produce an oil bill with my name on it (thank god I got divorced, as the decree is about the only document I can use to prove my signature), and now after drinking coffee prepared unlovingly by a well-known donut establishment (I said light! No sugar! And this has like thirty sugars) the shrew state of the union could be most accurately described as “ass.” Or “assy.”

At the same time, I’m kind of digging the challenge. It is clear that they don’t want outsiders here. Particularly people from my backwards podunk state. But goddamnit, I’m not leaving. You need a divorce decree to prove my existence—here it is. And the burned remains of my marriage license, why not. Would this DNA sample suffice for, say, date of birth? You know, I don’t think it’s that they don’t want me here. They just don’t want my car here. Oh, and they don’t want me to work. But that’s a whole other thing I’m too tired to get into right now. But there’s something about all of the obstacles that seem very New England to me. Hands to work, hearts to god, or something. Maybe I’ll convert to Shakerism, so I at least have a good excuse for ending my line. I think there are still Shakers, right? Like 6 of them up in Maine? In the part of the Midwest I’m from, we believe in hard work only if someone else is around to help out. And there’s plenty of port wine cheese spread and deer sausage and Schlitz around when the work is done.

I had to watch a security guard escort a screaming family from the RMV yesterday. I’m not kidding. And instead of horrified, I felt mildly entertained. So there’s that. But then I cried at a bar when the U2 song “Bad” came on. Fortunately NU was there to make me feel like less of a tool. I feel sad and overwhelmed. I feel ecstatic and depressed. I feel abandoned and that I’m finally where I belong. I feel really alone.

Ok, I’m just going to say it. This whole moving thing would be a lot easier with a partner. Fuck.

Dead Crush #16

2006-09-07T10:30:00.000-07:00

It’s 1986. Fall. For the first time in my life I have a locker. I’m wearing the teal mascara and the obscenely shiny lip gloss that I’m finally allowed. On the rest of me I’m wearing something fussy and shrimp-colored: there may or may not be fishnet involved. I feel grown up in 7th grade, where I get to go to a different classroom for each class and take real notes. No more recess. Just thesis statements and protractors from now on, and my own locker to keep my trapper and silver paint pens which smell really really good. And there’s something so, I don’t know, Degrassi about lockers. But as I open up mine, I hear a group of similarly coifed and outfitted girls whisper as they pass me: “Oh my god, she has dogs in her locker.”

While all of the other pubescent Whitesnake video wannabes were plastering their lockers with the Coreys, Kirk, Chad, and the occasional Benetton ad, I was carefully debating between the Pembroke and Welsh Corgi photos, clipped from my monthly issue of Dog Fancy. I also had dainty Chihuahuas, muscular Jack Russells, and shadowy Weimeraners there to greet me each time I needed my Algebra book, or at the end of a long day of bullying (I was the bullied) when I was most in need of comfort. Though I did have crushes on some teen stars (I preferred Feldman to Haim), my locker was the only thing at school and pretty much anywhere that was really mine, and who I was was a dog lover. So that’s right, bitches. I have dogs in my locker. Just let me get my coat out and get out of the building so I can get on the bus where you can continue to torment me.

Benji was the first dog I really remember loving. His film debut and my birth occurred nearly simultaneously in 1974. While my sister and I agreed on the necessity of Holly Hobby, Barbie, and Strawberry Shortcake, Benji was mine and mine alone. My first hospital visit was made much more tolerable by his stuffed replica, who wore a fake metal tag inscribed with his name, and who had to be pried out of my hands as I slipped out of consciousness in the operating room. My first words upon waking were “Who took my Benji?” I also remember sneaking a battered novelization of Oh Heavenly Dog in with my other less trashy selections at the library, to be taken up to my room immediately to be devoured before a sibling made fun of me.

Benji was played by the somehow appropriately named Higgins, whose progeny (none as cute as the original) went on to play him in subsequent films. Of course the greatest Benji movie of all time is For the Love of Benji. I cried every time I saw it, and not much made me cry in those days (things have changed). Actually, the only things that made me cry when I was eight years old were things involving animals: Old Yeller and the Beverly Cleary book Socks are two other tear-jerkers I remember from this dim vault. The first time I remember seeing For the Love of Benji was probably in ’82 during Christmas break. This was long before my town had a video rental place, so if you were a kid and wanted to see a movie after it was in the theater, you had to wait until they either showed it in the church basement or during Christmas break at school. I walked to the elementary school with other bored kids in my neighborhood, kids who also had parents at work and had run out of ways to torment their siblings and pets. It was always weird to go into the school when it was out of session, and to sit in the huge dark gym on the floor, while some stay-at-home mom served bags of stale popcorn. When the projector started whirring and the crackly sound system started, everyone would begin to cheer and whistle. The main things I remember about the film, which I haven’t seen in nearly 20 years, are that Benji has something tattooed on his paw that bad guys need, some kind of secret code, and that in order to find him they end up in Greece, where Benji faces all kinds of obstacles with a background of Greek ruins. He seemed so alone, clearly not understanding his importance or what might happen to him, in a world of adults and their money-grubbing ways. He was an innocent. Which is also what made me cry during the countless times The Incredible Journey was shown in the basement of First Presbyterian. Those poor animals. They didn’t ask for this life. I mean, for the love of Benji, where do these humans get off treating poor adorable trained animals like pawns in their quest for riches? These are the thoughts that plagued me as a weird little girl, wiping away my tears quickly before mean boys saw when they turned the lights on, before I trudged home in the depressing Indiana winter dusk.

Clearly the Benji pictured here is dead. This doesn’t make me sad; dogs don’t live long. What makes me sad is that there don’t seem to be animal heroes for kids anymore. Maybe some exist that I don’t know about, but do kids still worship animals the way I did? I don’t really know any kids right now, so maybe someone can help me out with this. Along with the other embarrassing things I never grew out of, such as a variety of colorful nervous tics, I never outgrew my obsession with dogs. I don’t really seem to need a male partner anymore, but when I was faced with the possibility of maybe having to give up my dog several weeks ago, I freaked. And realized that life without dogs isn’t a life I can ever have again. It’s very hard for my little dog to adapt to city life—peeing on sidewalks instead of in parks, wearing an anti-bark citronella collar so we can live in a building with other people, and being surrounded by more people, dogs, and trash than she is used to—but she is doing wonderfully. When I think of what she’d do for me, and what I’d do for her…well, I get a little choked up.
(We’re both doing great, by the way—as predicted, it turns out that we’re city folk after all).

Yahoo/terror

2006-07-14T11:13:00.000-07:00

I haven't written about a dead dude in weeks, I realize--maybe even months. My brain and time have been focused on the various closures I'm trying to experience--the house goodbye, the therapist goodbye, the ex-husband goodbye (sans ex-husband), the town goodbye, the neighborhood goodbye, the grad school memory goodbye, the job goodbye (and within that, the office goodbye and co-worker goodbye) and the friend goodbye. I don't really have too many friends left here, but I do have neighbors with whom I kind of socialize on a regular basis. I'll miss their dogs and when we all go out to put our recycling out and then talk until it's dark. I'm honestly not really going to miss very much else--maybe seeing my little dog run through the cemetery. And seeing my therapist. I will miss my little house routine, though I predict that memories of this will depress me in several months. That's pretty much all I'll miss.

Leaving is weird because I don't really have anything specific to look forward to. I do look forward to seeing my twin and NU on a regular basis. I look forward to not feeling terrified every time I leave my house (at least if I do feel terrified, it will be for different reasons than here). I look forward to mystery, I guess. Mystery without a paycheck or forwarding address. If I hadn't started over in so many places already, I would see this more as an adventure. I don't see it as an adventure; I see it as moving, which is hard work. I'm glad I'm doing it, but I feel more tired than elated when I think about it. I never thought I would pack up this house alone and move somewhere by myself. Sometimes I'm just like, goddamnit, where's my goddamn boyfriend? But that's mostly only when I get really tired. Regression. Sometimes I just want to lie back and feel someone's arms around me, as cheesy as that sounds. That's the only thing I truly miss, and it's not worth sacrificing everything I have alone for that. And plus, I'll probably have that again someday. It's weird to think I'll fall in love with someone else at some point.

So anyway, Jesus. I didn't mean to go all Felicity on you. I'll probably disappear for a while. Today is my last day of work, and after I leave I don't expect to really feel like going near a computer for a while, until I'm forced into office dronedom again. But I don't plan to give up the blog permanently. When you hear from me again it will be because I'm somewhere else. With a scabby new tattoo and hair that needs cutting. And maybe a little vial of elation stored somewhere inside me.

It's like when you think Buffy's dead, but then she springs up to deliver a one-liner and kick some demon's ass

2006-06-23T09:38:00.000-07:00

Everything around me is under construction. As I write this, there is one of those crane thingies outside my office window, with a scruffy muscle-shirt dude on it. He is scraping and scraping the paint on the outside window panes. This is what it sounds like: Scriiiiiiiiitch. Scriiiiiiiiitch. Long pause during which I pray that it is over. Scccrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitch. He’s actually looking into my window right now as I write this, and probably thinking, “Wow, this bitch never seems to do any actual work. What is her job, anyway?” (he was here yesterday too, so he has proof about my lack of focus). Actually, he’s probably not thinking that. He’s probably thinking, “I wish she would close her curtains so this would be less uncomfortable for both of us.” Or maybe he’s thinking, “Man, this job sucks. I wish I had her job—all she seems to do is look at clothes online (my computer screen faces the window).”

So I can’t really use my phone, which is about 50 percent of my job, because of this deafening scritching. And then outside my door, in the hallway, two other scruffy dudes are repairing the tile on the floor. They are not using this mini-jackhammer thingie that they were using at the beginning of the week, thank god, but they have buckets of murky water and tiles and other mysterious objects lying all around so I have to say excuse me about 10,000 times a day, and it’s driving me crazy. What I really want to do is scream “Get the fuck out of my way!” but then I’d get fired. Actually, they couldn’t fire me because I only have two weeks left at this job, before I become unemployed and homeless and probably even more disgruntled, if that’s possible. And plus my boss (who retires in 5 days and is just as disillusioned with this place as I am) is very old and doesn’t have feeling in one of his feet and I’m scared he’s going to fall and break his hip again every time he leaves his office.

Ok, so now onto the construction going on at my house. That’s right, not only do I get to hear scritching and thumping and loud conversations and drills and hammering at work, but I get to hear them when I get home too. Because my landlord has decided to do some kind of mystery work on my backyard, on my windows, and on the windowsills. I’m not sure exactly what he’s doing, but it’s clear that it’s going to be happening until I move out. My backyard looks like an excavation site, or like someone is trying to find the hellmouth (Buffy reference). My tiny and nervous dog is going nuts. Seriously, barking and screaming all day. I’m not there for most of it, because thankfully their work day ends around 6, but it is very disheartening to leave one construction site for another each time I change my location. The scruffy dudes working on my house give me dirty looks every time I come home at lunch to let my little princess out. They hate her. I can see why; I’d probably hate her too if we weren’t family (she’s my sister rather than my daughter, if you were wondering).

But then there’s this whole thing where I’m trying to love my fate, as Nietzsche recommends. Or see my life as a series of enlightening metaphors, which Jung recommends, and which I’m pretty good at doing. For instance, I’ve diagnosed my chronic head and neckaches as my insistence on making my head responsible for all of my current stress and agony (moving, future insecurity, divorce, etc.). It’s like my neck is saying “This is way too heavy for me—could we like, spread this angst out a bit?” So I’m trying to let more of myself feel this stress—maybe move it down to a lower chakra that would be more equipped to handle it. Maybe if it was in my hip area, I wouldn’t turn it and churn it and process it so much. I could just let it sit there (what can I say; I don’t have cable).

So here’s my metaphor for all of this goddamn construction around me: my soul is under construction. I’m in the process of becoming something different; becoming who I am instead all of the things I spent so long trying to be (wife, good daughter, poet, successful, blah blah blah). This construction is very heavy and painful (my head concurs). So it makes sense that it would follow me around this way externally. Maybe my external life is trying to take some of the weight for me. My old self slaps me on the wrist for having these self-obsessed and narcissistic thoughts. But the new self emerging from the rubble that was my former life feels at peace with this metaphor. I think I need it to get through these next weeks. Everything that was mine in the last year…my job and my home and my mate…are crumbling and falling away (one of these is pretty much completely crumbled). I need metaphors now more than ever. Making my life one big poem seems to be the only way to get through it, and to see that there is still a spark of some kind of magic there even as everything is being stripped away. Ye Olde Christian me would have called this spark God, and I still do on some days. But everything about Christianity is what forced me to build up all of this crap in the first place, crap that must now be torn down or reconstructed. The only way I can deal with the big C (the one that promises eternal life, not the other one) is to see it as metaphor anyway—it’s so much more beautiful that way. Everything is.

Misery Soundtrack

2006-06-07T06:52:00.000-07:00

It’s probably pretty obvious to you, dear readers, that this has been both the best and worst year of my life. Sure, my former husband cheated on me with a clueless SUV-driving drama queen ferret, but then there is also the whole thing where I’m figuring out who I am, and who I am doesn’t want a damn husband. So there’s a semi-balance, which is really all I’m after anyway.

Last night I ran into ex-fling and he asked me how I’m doing. “Bad,” I said. There just really wasn’t any other appropriate response at that moment. He looked stricken as his narcissism struggled for a way to make the response about him. “Well, I hope you feel better soon,” he said lamely after I asked him how he was and he gave me the usual tepid response in order to prove how together (read: lifeless) he is. “I don’t (hope I feel better),” I said, and walked away. Feel better? I don’t have strep, I’m having a breakdown. I don’t want to feel better; I want to feel how I feel. Actually, the latest breakdown seems to be over. I think I’ve once again gained back the 3 pounds I’ve lost and gained repeatedly over the last nine months, and slept more than 3 hours last night without drugs. And I can usually refrain from crying at work. I thought I was done with all of this kind of stuff last fall, but I was wrong. It’s different now, though. Occasionally there is also some joy.

As with all of my major life events (though none has been as major as this, to date), there has been a soundtrack. Sometimes the soundtrack is only in my mind (like the repetition of the phrase “asshole” or “breathe”) but quite often it emanating very loudly from my car speakers or from my 10-year-old boombox as I wash the dishes. Just as Morrissey’s Your Arsenal immediately transports me to the dorm room where my first boyfriend and I made out on cloudy afternoons, or early 90’s emo takes me back to my friends’ crusty sofa upon which I spun drunkenly after too many cans of Olympia beer, so too (I predict) will the following musical selections conjure up this year of sadness and weirdness and aloneness. Someday in like 10 years I’ll be trying to get my kid to stop screaming, or, you know, on my book tour and I’ll hear Gram Parson’s “Blue Eyes,” and I’ll have to stop and put my head in my hands and remember this and how important and lonely and lovely it was.

This is a weird list. My unconscious probably understands it better than my ego. In no particular order:

X: Beyond and Back: The X Anthology. If you like X at all, I highly recommend this album. It has all of the good songs, as well as live songs and then a whole disc of newer stuff I had never heard. A lot of the newer songs are a response to the 80’s. The best part is that when you listen to the first disc, you can picture Exene and John Doe and all of their punk friends partying in some beach apartment, and when you listen to the second disc, you can hear how sad they are about everything. And really there’s nothing better than John Doe singing “Blue shock!” in the song “Blue Spark.” I might consider marrying again, should he suddenly appear and want to marry me. Even though he’s like 50. Because he’s like 50. Songs listened to over and over: “Blue Spark,” “Motel Room In My Bed,” “The World’s a Mess It’s In My Kiss.”

Gram Parsons: Sacred Hearts and Fallen Angels: The Gram Parsons Anthology. Oh Gram. I think if you’ve read any of this thing, particularly my first post, you understand more or less about how I feel about him. I don’t know if I even understand why I’m so obsessed with him, but I think it has a great deal to do with the song “Return of the Grievous Angel.”

The Smiths: Meat is Murder. Though this may not stick out as applicable to this time period, because I’ve always listened to this in the car.

The Buzzcocks: Singles Going Steady. To be played at high volume in one’s hatchback after a particularly shitty day in January. Or May. In May, it can counter the stupid happiness and beauty that one can see from outside one’s bird-shit covered car windows.

Weezer: Blue Album. “Say It Ain’t So” is one of the best songs ever for your mean red days.

The Killers: Hot Fuss. Along with all of the Gucci-pencil-bag-bearing-14-year-olds in my sister’s 8th grade homeroom, I also find that this album totally rocks. And I am so embarrassed about it. But I’m going to give my little defense spiel and then pretend we never had this conversation. So here’s how I see the Killers: first of all they took their name from a New Order video and how can that be wrong? And like New Order, the synthesized element to their songs rocks. Like New Order, they write really good pop songs with really lame lyrics. (I’m sorry, but you did not have “a fight in the promenade in the rain,” because you’re not from Manchester, you’re from like Pella Iowa. But I think it’s so cute that they want to be English. And actually the singer is not from Iowa but one of the bandmates is—I actually know a lot more about their biographies than I’m letting on because I’m embarrassed about how much time I spend learning these things when I can’t remember whether or not I fed my dog this morning.) I’m fine with lame lyrics. The vocals are kind of Robert Smith-like. Though I do recognize that the band is at best a New Wave tribute band and at worst a crappy knock-off by kids who were in diapers during the first Smiths tour, it’s like I said…cute.

Emmylou Harris: Elite Hotel. Oh my god, I listened to this so much in November. Especially the song “One of These Days.”

The Fall: A Sides. An old standby for anger and sadness. Especially “Mr. Pharmacist.”

This mix tape my friend from college made me about five years ago. It’s all garage music.

Pulp: We Love Life. This is probably the best Pulp album (and if I had to choose a favorite band, which god hope I never do, I might choose them). There are beautiful songs and trademark hilarious lyrics (and not just pervert jokes). For example: comparing a new not-as-good relationship to “a later Tom and Jerry when the two of them could talk.” This was the first import I bought since about 1993 (when they’d come out with a new Morrissey import single about every two weeks).

This 70s country mix my brother-in-law made me: David Allen Coe, Dolly, Tammy, George, Waylon, and Willie. Sad (in a good way).

The Runaways: The Best of Runaways. I think you all understand, or should understand, what Joan Jett means to me.

Green Day: Dookie. I really don’t know why. I don’t have anything to say about this except I’m sorry.

Joy Divison: Heart and Soul. You can’t get divorced without it.

Dead Crush #15

2006-05-31T07:50:00.000-07:00

(At the end she turns into a storm of butterflies and she’s finally, finally free.)

Being married was ridiculous. Ridiculous. I feel like a pack of butterflies (among other things). It’s not good or bad…it’s just me, finally, breaking apart into all of my pieces.

The plane, the plane

2006-05-16T06:51:00.000-07:00

This is about tattoos. People often ask me why I have the tattoo I have, and I often struggle to come up with a reponse that sounds significant. I usually give them a story about one of my exes, who did play a role in why I let a hippie jab me repeatedly in the shoulder with a needle full of ink. I was in a such a haze of disbelief and pain that someone I loved so much had cheated on me for pretty much our whole relationship, that a tattoo seemed like a good idea. It did feel good to have that physical pain to momentarily replace the psychic pain. And when it was all over I had this trendy scar.

It's the symbol itself that I have trouble justifying. I guess I don't really feel like justifying it to myself most of the time, but a few others want it to have MEANING. (Ok, so I want everything to have meaning most of the time too--part of why I write. Another reason why I write: to remove meaning.) I think the meaning was this: to look tough. And to show my parents that I'm someone who would get a tattoo. I'm getting ready to get another one. It was one thing to be a grad student with a tattoo, but now I'm going to be an academic advisor (and whatever I'm going to be after that) with multiple tattoos. I feel happy about being that person. I'm also a poet with tattoos. And apparently I'm also a person who occasionally tries to define herself with phrases based on what she does and what is on her skin. I think the thing that I find interesting about tattoos is that they are permanent and therefore seem to imply a static message about the person wearing them. I don't see it like this at all, though. My tattoo is like wearing my 25-year-old self with me all of the time. It doesn't represent me now. It doesn't even represent me then. It doesn't represent anything. Because I was as undefinable then as now, in the same way that all humans are undefinable all the time. If I were define who I am now, I would say "rapidly changing ether." Or "gray puddle."

So why bother tattooing? Answering this question kind of negates what I've written above. Here's a lame answer: I found this really cool collage that I want to steal and put on my body. Another answer: it's what I want to do now. There's also a part of me that wants to do it in this state where I've spent most of my life. The symbol I'm going to get tattooed on me somewhere (maybe my waist? I'm not sure yet) somehow implies leaving, freedom, and bondage all in one dainty picture (it's from a Joseph Cornell collage). Contradictions. One thing I do know about myself now: I am contrary. I am a walking paradox like all people are. I have no good reason to get a tattoo, which is why I'm going to get one.

PS--I will buy anyone a drink who'll go with me to get it. The drink will be purchased immediatly after the tattooing, and will be consumed outside.

Things I Will Do Before I'm Divorced

2006-05-10T06:31:00.000-07:00

That's right, I'm not fucking divorced yet. I'll explain what's happening, but if you find all of this as stupid and boring as I do, please go read something more interesting. Or skip down to the list, which may be more entertaining.

My lawyer is pregnant and has terrible morning sickness, which is why she's been AWOL. Don't go feeling all sorry for her. I don't. I'm going through some trauma myself and somehow manage to keep going to work and doing my job, or at least contact my students and tell them that I'm going to be out of town if they're expecting something from me. And all they want is a letter of recommendation, not a divorce settlement. But she's finally, FINALLY hired an assistant. She's one of those "invincible" (read narcissistic) type A people I seem to attract like flies to poo.

Anyway, so a full month after she told me I could sign the settlement agreement, I finally get it in the mail to sign. Choad, that choad huffer, had already signed it. (A pox! A pox on him and his stupid signature!) There was some stuff in it that I didn't totally get, so I tried to call her and of course she didn't call me back. I asked a coworker who has a law degree to translate, but she really wanted me to talk to the lawyer because she didn't want to feel responsible if I suddenly lost half of my savings account. So I called the lawyer from work yesterday and She Answered The Phone. This is the first time in 9 months of dealing with this woman that she's done so. But then she tells me that she wasn't really sure what the sentence in question meant either (really? you don't know? I pay you $150 an hour and you don't know?), so she called his lawyer. So now the other lawyer is going to remove this one measly sentence and then print out the damn thing AGAIN, sign it and get Choad to sign again, send it back to my lawyer who will then send it to me, I'll sign it and send it back to her, then she'll send it to the judge who will sign it. Given the history of what should be a very simple divorce, the above proceedings could easily take two or three years. But I'm going to try to be positive about it. Some day I will be divorced. I swear to god.

In the meantime, various other life events will take place. Because you see, I have like 10 zillion other things going on in my life besides the divorce, though at times the divorce is like a mountain and the other things are mere ants, or aunties. So, in my new resolution to believe that the marriage will end soon, I'm going to imagine that in two weeks I'll be divorced. Our court date (which we waived) is set for June 24, and if we don't sign before then we'll have to go to court, and if that happens over a walk away settlement, I will laugh so hard that I'll choke to death on my own mirth. So here are some things that will happen. After they happen, I'll be divorced. And then I'll have to deal with that.

1. I will purchase flowers for my mom for Mother's Day. I will not go home for Mother's Day.

2. I will try to address this very huge issue that has come up in a dream. I will attempt to address it in therapy but will most likely end up changing the subject as I often do.

3. I will go to a woman's prison to give an inmate her diploma.

4. I will answer the phone at work 1,222 times; 122 of them will be from a woman named Mrs. Dent.

5. I will have 35 phone calls at home (I think I hate the phone).

6. I will feel guilty about not returning approximately 4 phone calls.

7. I will reply to 3,303 work emails.

8. I will have 6.2 conversations with any given dean.

9. I will write 14 poems (no really, I will).

10. I will send out to 3 more contests.

11. I will clean up 42 pieces of dog poo.

12. I will listen to 53 stories about my coworkers' grown children.

13. I will listen to 23 stories about how my mom hates her job.

14. I will consume 20 gummy cherries.

15. I will purchase tickets for a bluegrass festival.

16. I will sleep.

17. I will update my Netflix queue.

18. I will buy healthy food and then go to Target. This will probably happen 3 times.

19. I will get drunk 4 times.

20. I will hang out with my friends who have lived elsewhere for a long time. 2 of the drunk times will happen with them.

21. I will be a host to another out of town friend and her baby who is afraid of dogs.

22. I will try to present myself as someone who has her shit together.

23. I will not be someone who has her shit together, but I'll be ok with that.

24. I will not be ok with not having my shit together.

25. I will spend 13 hours worrying about moving, worrying about a job, worrying about a place to live, worrying about being alone.

26. I will spend 8 hours staring at a wall.

27. I will be interrupted while doing something important. This will happen about every five minutes.

28. I will attempt to avoid ex-fling, but will hang out with him approximately 9 times in an attempt to distract myself from the above.

And then there's Maude.

2006-05-09T14:06:00.000-07:00

Someday I’m going to be old. I mean really old. And I may still be single. All of the things I thought I’d do as an old lady like grow my hair really really long or keep pet squirrels and/or ravens—I may be doing these things alone. I don’t really feel sad about it, I’m just noticing it, the way one might notice that Oops, I forgot to reproduce. Guess I’ll be taking care of my own self when I finally get one of those debilitating diseases my family is so fond of.

The summer after I turned 16 my parents made me do driver’s ed, even though I hated driving and was terrible at it. I had driver’s ed every morning at the high school for about a month and it was awful to have to get up and go to that torture chamber when school was out of session. To make matters worse, my driver’s ed teacher was the football coach, a fat stupid bald man who was really mean and who didn’t like girls who weren’t bubbly or hot (I was neither). He yelled at me about once a week for driving on curbs, cutting people off, and doing the other bad driver things I was so good at. He made us drive to the crappy city south of the lame ass college town we lived in so he could pick up his Richard Marx or whoever tickets at a record store. I hated him. Hated. Hated. The other people in my car were the quarterback and a hot “slutty” girl whom all the male teachers pretended to hate while they were staring at her boobs and flirting with her. Driver’s ed was kind of like hell on earth, only it was actually one of my more positive high school experiences, considering the other horrible things that happened to me as a sullen teen. And, oh yes, I failed it. But I’m actually an ok driver today, though I’d much rather walk if given a choice.

After driver’s ed each morning and before I went to work in my dad’s lab in the afternoon (my summer job throughout high school and college—I mostly washed test tubes) I would collapse into a fetal position in front of the TV and watch Maude. Maude came on every day at 10 am. I watched with amazement. Why had no one ever told me about this show? Why did it not come on with the other parade of early evening reruns: Little House, All in the Family, Three’s Company? I remember my dad zoned out in front of all three shows before they went into syndication, but I guess he wasn’t into the shows with feminist themes, watered down and prime timed though they were. But the Seventies clothes (caftans!)! and interior design, the Seventies situations! and Bea Arthur in all of her Bea Arthur glory! I loved her, especially when they’d do those close ups of her looking like she was about to kill you. In one episode Walter (Maude’s second husband) leaves her for Bernadette Peters (does it get better than the 1976 era Bernadette?) whose name I remember to be Cathy Rivers or something equally Seventies Alternative Lifestyle. For some reason Walter brings her to some kind of function at Maude’s house, maybe something to do with Maude’s daughter. Maude takes one look at the girlfriend’s chest and says, in her bored voice, “The bigger they are, honey, the harder they fall.” Being the late-bloomer I was (I still hadn’t entered puberty at the age of 16—don’t ask), I found this to be excellent advice and proceeded to think these words each time I was faced (or looking down at, as I towered over most of the girls in my class) with yet another popular girl’s boobies.

Ok, so why am I thinking about this? Getting old. Appearances are really important to my family. My mom, for example, hinted on many occasions that certain someones may not like unshaved legs or my old habit of dying my hair pink. But what’s worse than the grooming habits of a makeupless pseudo punk weirdo? A saggy unmarried used-to-be-kind-of-cute-but-is-now-just-kind-of-old. I still don’t have a whole lot for gravity to work its magic on, but there’s more there than there used to be. I know it’s the lamest thing ever, but I feel kind of mad that if I’m ever with any significant other ever again, he’ll never know that I used to have a cuter butt. All he’ll get is the middle-aged butt. I think I’m ok enough with my body to like it for what it is, but then there’s that voice: If you would have gotten married at 21 like I did, this would never be an issue. Whoever would just have to accept your butt for whatever it turned into. Forever.

I think part of what spawned this is watching the movie Manhattan last night. When Woody Allen tells his 17-year-old girlfriend (he’s 42) Mariel Hemingway that he’s in love with someone else, he says “Someone my age. Well, not as old as me, but in my age group,” I felt so mad. The way he says “Well, not as old as me,” as if he thinks that the thought of a 42-year-old woman would be too unappealing even for his girlfriend he’s breaking up with. I realize that that was the Seventies and that I probably wouldn’t want to date Woody Allen anyway, but I just feel mad. Because, you know, fuck that.

Anger Mismanagement

2006-05-03T06:27:00.000-07:00

I’ve wanted to write an entry here for some time, but each time I attempt it here at work, my anger or busyness take over. I hate it when I feel overwhelmed at work. And I have been extremely pissed off ever since I got back from a four-day visit to a huge city far away from here, a city which houses many many of my friends. I’m exploring the reasons for my pissed-off-ness, and there are many. I’m trying not to hurt too many people during this period, but I don’t think I’ve really succeeded. Here are some examples of how bitchy I’ve been:

1. Several days ago near my house. I was attempting to have a five-minute conversation with ex-fling while walking the dog on my lunch break. Since ex-fling doesn’t work or seem to need to be anywhere EVER, he clearly didn’t understand that I needed to go back to work or people were going to wonder where I was, because it’s a JOB—you know, that thing grown-ups have. Here is the humiliating transaction:

He (referring to a book that I’ve wanted to read for awhile but haven’t had time for): Have you read this? I think you would really get a lot out of it now.

Me (in a sudden and forceful bitch voice): No. I don’t have time to read. I have that book but I haven’t been able to read it yet. I have like 4 hours a week that I can read.

He (clearly wanting to engage me in a long conversation about a book I haven’t read even though he knows I have to go back to work: starts talking about it as if I have not said the above).

Me: I said I don’t have time to read that right now. Anyway, I’m sick of reading books by men. I’m actually kind of sick of men (sinking sick feeling over how mean this sounded).

He: Maybe you could read at work. (What?? Did you not hear that mean thing I just said? No. It’s called selective hearing and it’s turning out to be a defining characteristic of ex-fling).

Me: I have to WORK at work (in head: you dipshit). That’s what you do at work (though I actually do about 5 hours of real work in a 9-hour work day). I have to go. I’m going to be late. (Turn and walk home quickly, dragging my poor little beast who didn’t even have a chance to pee).

If I really wanted to analyze this, I could: I’m projecting all of my shit about choad’s shabby listening skills; I’m upset because I spent four wonderful days with REAL friends who reminded me that I barely know ex-fling; I keep hanging around ex-fling to gather anger ammunition so it’s easier to stay away from him but this is CLEARLY using him in a bad way. I need a break from him. I need a break from all people I don’t know really well, I think. How long am I going to be a hermit? Maybe forever.

2. Getting into my car at the godawful hour I have to leave for work:

Neighbor: Are you going to vote today?

Me: No.

Neighbor: If I tell you who to vote for, will you go vote for my people?

Me: Uh, I don’t think so. I don’t feel like voting.

Neighbor: Come on, do it for [Name of this shithole town].

Me: Fuck [Name of this shithole town]. (Nervous laughter in an attempt to counteract the meanness of this statement. But I do hate it when people try to force me to vote for a judge in a town I'm leaving in 3 months).

Neighbor: (Nervous laughter).

3. In ex-fling’s house trying to explain to him how I feel because I’m such an “open” and “emotionally honest” person:

Me: (Silence, trying to think of the right words to say) I feel….I feel…

He: You feel resentful?

Me: No. Shut up. Don’t tell me how I fucking feel. (The next day, after I apologized for telling him to shut up, he said “You didn’t tell me to shut up.” But you, readers, see here that I did, so you know I’m not crazy and that he has these weird listening issues).

Several minutes ago I was explaining to a coworker about how I’ve been so mean lately. I said, using my best Al-Anon language, “I mean, I know that no one is responsible for how I feel. I decide how I feel about all of these situations…but I keep wanting to blame someone else…”

She interrupted me: “What are you talking about? Other people are COMPLETELY responsible for how you feel.”

And then we laughed for about five minutes. Because this really is how I feel right now, as much as I want to be healthy shrew. Right now I’m just pure concentrated shrew. And if you’re not me, there’s a chance I think you’re responsible for how I feel about this.

Fling. And then no fling. And then fling again. And then, once again, no fling.

2006-04-18T05:41:00.000-07:00

Just to give you an idea of what the last two weeks have been like.

Surprisingly, I feel ok. Though ready once again to take my vows of poverty, don my wimple of crocheted dog hairs, and settle down into the red (with white polka dots) chakra of self-inflicted celibacy. Actually, I'm not totally ready to do this but I'm going to do it anyway.

Hi, I'm Shrew and I'm Codependent.

2006-04-11T05:25:00.000-07:00

Several months ago, I may have on several occasions used this phrase: "I will never be in a relationship again." It's the kind of thing you whip out when you're desperately miserable and for the 10 millionth time in a day your brain makes you think about your lame ex having intimate relations with his lame teacher. While I don't experience the jealousy I once did (you know, because they kind of deserve each other and the lame sex they're probably having), the above phrase has lately turned into "No, seriously. I will never be in a relationship again." There's not really any drama around it, it just seems like the only choice.

The main reason for this current choice (and I can't really say that I'll do ANYTHING forever or never again, including coffee, cigarettes, or trying on fake outfits in the H&M virtual dressing room) is that I just really can't see how I can be a completely authentic shrew when I have to share time and space with another needy human. I can't foresee the day when this seems like a good decision: to risk losing myself and forfeiting time and energy I now spend on my inner work. And I would be totally fine with this, if it weren't for the fact that there's this other part of me that likes to couple. It may be the whole twin thing. Or maybe it's biological. As much as I hate it (but also love it) there is this weird electricity right now between me and this guy. It doesn't matter if it's the right time, or if I want a relationship or not--the little lightning rods between us don't care about that. Ignoring the lightning rods feels unnatural, but so does giving into them. So right now we're just in this kind of holding pattern of "I like you I like you I like you...stay over there." I wouldn't even say it's sexual tension--more like a drawn-to-ness. He claims that he can sense when I walk by his house--that I broadcast myself somehow. And it pains (and intrigues) me to report that this little phenonmenon seems to work both ways.

Anyway, we're kind of dealing with the lightning rods on a day-by-day basis. My purpose here is to ask any interested reader a question: how (either now or previously) have you negotiated your time, space, and SELF in the midst of what I can't help but see as a soul-sucking endeavor? How do you remain your authentic self? How do you resist codependence in the face of the lightning rods? If anyone has stories or insights, I really am so curious about how other people have made this work. Lord knows I am clueless.

My last vice

2006-04-10T06:37:00.000-07:00

I think I'm going to give up caffeine. I'm not sure how this is going to work, since I've been pretty solidly caffeinated since about 1990. I think it makes my anxiety worse. And it dehydrates me.

I'm drinking a venti Awake tea from Starbucks right now, and my head is saying "What the fuck. YOU may call this caffeine, but you might as well be drinking some damn vitamin drink for all the good this is doing me." If I can make it through this headache, I may be able to make it to the roses and bunnies on the other side. Next maybe I'll give up gummies. And then Ambien. You may not even recognize me the next time you see me...I'll be the one glowing with health, or the effects of a raging migraine. Either way, I'll be squinting and cringing, because this is what the sun does to me, and the sun appears to be back for another round of summer happy happy joy joy, beckoning to the tank topped and the flip flopped of this town. Actually, here's who I'll be: the one on the widow's walk in my widows' weeds, spitting on them. Sorry, I just don't really like summer very much. It brings out the wizened divorcee in me.

Last night I dreamed that I was riding a flume ride, and every time the log went over a huge drop, I would fly up out of it, and a huge rubber band would snap me back into place.

Dead Crush #14

2006-04-07T08:41:00.000-07:00

I first recognized art
as wildness, and it seemed right,
I mean rite, to me

climbing the water tower I’d
look out for hours in wind
and the world seemed rounder
and fiercer and I was happier
because I wasn’t scared of falling off

from “Ode to Michael Goldberg (‘s Birth and Other Births)”

Happy Ashbery Day everyone (thank you to Dan for making me aware of this). It’s also my dad’s birthday.

I don’t even know where to start.

Let’s start with the appearance, because that’s where I start everything. Delicate but wiry. Portrait-worthy (HOW many portraits does this guy have? Larry Rivers’ is my favorite). Flaws obtained by acts of violence (I am a huge sucker for the broken nose. Or any sort of broken anything that heals wrong.) Small and Irish. A dapper dresser. A drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, a phone in the other, and a book in the other (busy busy busy—he creates implied arms). The voice: flat and nasal, apparently indistinguishable from that of Ashbery. And you just know he had the best walk in the world. You just know.

The poetry. I can’t really say anything about it. If I were to try, I would probably just do some kind of high-pitched ecstatic whining thing, or jump really high on a trampoline. Or read you the poems. So instead I’ll just read you the poems. (Actually, you will read them.)

To John Ashbery (not just cuz it’s his day, but also because it’s one of my favorites)

I can’t believe there’s not
another world where we will sit
and read new poems to each other
high on a mountain in the wind.
You can be Tu-Fu, I’ll be Po Chu-i
and the Monkey Lady’ll be in the moon,
smiling at our ill-fitting heads
as we watch snow settle on a twig.
Or shall we be really gone? this
is not the grass I saw in my youth!
and if the moon, when it rises
tonight, is empty—a bad sign,
meaning “You go, like the blossoms.”

A Raspberry Sweater
to George Montgomery
It is next to my flesh,
that’s why. I do what I want.
And in the pale New Hampshire
twilight a black bug sits in the blue,
strumming its legs together. Mournful
glass, and daisies closing. Hay
swells in the nostrils. We shall go
to the motorcycle races in Laconia
and come back all calm and warm.

Poetry
The only way to be quiet
is to be quick, so I scare
you clumsily, or surprise
you with a stab. A praying
mantis knows time more
intimately than I and is
more casual. Crickets use
time for accompaniment to
innocent fidgeting. A zebra
races counterclockwise.
All this I desire. To
deepen you by my quickness
and delight as if you
were logical and proven,
but still be as quiet as if
you would never leave me
and were the inexorable
product of my own time.

If I could go back in time and be anything (aside from or including Gram Parson’s girlfriend or Jean Seberg) I would be one of Frank O’Hara’s female muses (of course most of his muses were of the male variety). Not that I would ever be beautiful or talented or loopy enough to qualify, but it’s my fantasy and therefore I can make myself however I want. Jane Frielicher and Grace Hartigan (pictured above) were two painters whom he revered, and wrote poems about them and for them and just in general adored them. He loved painters—he told Larry Rivers in a poem about him “you do what I can only name,” which is often how I feel when looking at the visual art of my friends. So not only do I want to sit around with Frank and drink with him, I think I just would prefer to a painter. Frank didn’t want to be a painter, but he wanted to absorb them. He wanted to absorb everything he loved—absorb the world, transform it somehow in that birdlike skull, and give us result after result straight from that factory, which I imagine to be filled with toy birds, jittery squirrels, and even more cigarette smoke. He rarely revised, often wrote poems in rooms full of the din of his drunken friends. Typewriter clacking. When I try to picture him, I often picture a blur.

Frank O’Hara would love this day. Though I’m more partial to gloom myself, this is a day for purchasing beautiful things, for teen hormones, for shiny details. Background details that almost go unnoticed because of a preoccupation with an obsession. I love Frank because he’s everything I’m not—his sadness hits him just as hard as lust or joy. It is everything, embodied by skinny, quick-moving legs on a noon sidewalk. No dream world for him. He is his own anima.

It’s so strange how I’m still so drawn to that explosive life, especially at a time when I’m trying to be more introspective. I think it’s because of this plan: after I spend some time in my own skull listening, I plan to do quite a bit of living. Although really my plan is that I have no plan. Inner, then outer? Frank could do both all at once: is still doing it all and it’s called Love.

Shrew's Spleen Corner

2006-04-04T13:41:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers:

I am so full of hating right now. But it's a sedate hating, full of PMS and lethargy. Here's what I hate:

This town
Being single (I hate it today...all it took was that teeny reminder of what couplehood is like, and now I'm feeling like part of a whole again. Fuck stupid crushes I'm never having one again)
My job
Sun
Flowers
Happiness
Students, especially white ones who are really tan and talk really loud and are everywhere
Acne (is it really possible to have it for over 10 years?)
My wardrobe (I swear if I could find one store that sells Levis 545s I would feel much better today)
How boring I am...I can't believe I'm even posting this. I obviously need...something. I tried wine and Buffy last night. Tonight I may try a combination of yoga and meditation, maybe some light narcotics.

Love,
Sad Shrew

Flingless

2006-04-03T05:54:00.000-07:00

It turns out that I'm not really capable of having a fling, at least not right now. Maybe not ever. I have nothing left over to give someone else right now. I'm trying to make up for the 15 years that I ignored myself, and this doesn't leave much room for any of the stuff that comes from any kind of romantic relationship, temporary or not: all of the when are we going to hang out stuff, the my place or yours stuff, the whose dogs get ignored for 10 hours while we hang out stuff, the obligation to check in constantly because by sleeping together we somehow magically became attached to each other stuff. Amazingly, I have no desire to use a person I care about for my own selfish desires. It would backfire anyway. Because for the first time in the adult shrew life, I actually respect someone I'm attracted too. I feel like this is someone I could potentially have a not completely fucked up relationship with, but I can't do it now. And instead of getting into it because of my low self-esteem or some kind of twisted attempt to not hurt him, I just told him I can't do it. This is the first time I've EVER done anything like this. He listened and understood, in the way that he very often listens and understands. There was a good deal of hugging. And then we took our dogs for a really long walk. And then I went home and cried for about 2 hours.

So no smooching for now. It really is ok. (Am I convincing anyone?) I've been made aware that maybe, as a divorcee with a crappy track record, I can still be attractive to people who have their shit together. I may, in fact, have my shit together. And I have a new friend. And soon I'll be gone gone gone.

And I still have a lot of dead crushes to write. Any votes: Joseph Cornell, Frank O'Hara, or Charles Addams (creator of the Addams Family comic)?

Bye bye Angel

2006-03-31T08:07:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, when talking to NU on the phone during both of our lunch breaks, I described the appearance of someone I like as “Victorian consumptive.” After hearing her reaction, I realized that this may not be appealing to everyone. I was kind of trying to promote the type of look embodied by the delicately frail men in Meat Cake comics, or by the vampires on Buffy. Then I thought, Sheesh. I find vampires sexually attractive (aside: so does Buffy)? What’s wrong with me?

Basically it’s probably this: I’m all about the damaged goods. I mean look at my relationship history: sufferers of horrible depression and panic attacks, Morrissey worshippers, goths (ok, just one, thank god), addicts, poets, and slaves to dark, brooding souls. (Or in Choad’s case, a slave to preconceived notions of what everyone else, including himself, was supposed to be. And a slave to cataloging useless information as a substitute for real human emotion. Though they’ve all been collectors. And D&D players, come to think of it, though no dungeon masters. I want a dungeon master.) Their appearances were even similar: 10,000 feet tall (at 6’3, Choad was actually one of the shortest people I’ve dated), about 100 pounds, ghost white skin, dark eyes, and a kind of ravaged look caused by various vices and mysterious ailments. Not to overanalyze (though it is of course what I do best) the tall/skinny thing seems to represent the kind of half-a-person thing I’m attracted too. This look seems to say: “I should be a much bigger person, but I don’t know how to take care of myself. I need someone to help me. Shrew, maybe you could, you know…enable me.”

Which makes it surprising/not surprising at all that the person I’m attracted to now is very vital-looking. Sure, he has crooked teeth (I don’t know if it’s my anglophilia or what, but I’m all about this) and he’s small, but he SHOULD be small. He’s kind of short. And his whole smallness thing goes really well with his demeanor, which often resembles that of an excited little kid (though he’s also good at being a serious adult). Don't get me wrong: he's a total geek. (Also don't get me wrong: we're just friends at this point.) But he doesn't really seem to hate himself. Meeting him has made me realize how much energy one could have for other things in a relationship if one wasn’t constantly monitoring behavior, placing cold cloths on foreheads, and worrying about what new kind of self-destructive behavior these losers could dream up. It's exciting but also a little terrifying, in that it might mean that someday I could have a relationship with a ME component. The thought makes me want to run, a little. It also makes me feel a very tiny little bit like going into one of those Moonwalk things and jumping up and down.

Serendizzity

2006-03-30T08:23:00.000-08:00

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K. Or, whatever, where I live. Good things and strange things. Strange things that are good things. Good things that are only good things that may become strange things. I present three of them, but know that there are a good deal more.

1. Please send your pleasant vibes to this situation: my lawyer and Choad’s lawyer have finally come up with an agreement. A walk-away, where we each owe the other nothing. This is the best possible scenario. (Well, actually him giving me about 2 grand would be the best, but that’s never going to happen.) Not giving him vast quantities of my hard-earned cash will make leaving this cesspool infinitely easier. So I’m ok with the agreement. Two LAWYERS are ok with it, including his. We just have to wait and see how choady that loser can actually be. If he’s willing to go to court over what is probably about $1000 that I do not owe him (which is, in fact, the amount of money he stole from me when he moved out), then some sort of violent act involving a great quantity of bugs will need to take place. But according to my lawyer, HIS lawyer is very optimistic. HIS lawyer. If this happens, I'll be divorced by next week, savings account and inner being intact.

2. About 18 hours before receiving this news, I did a ritual. Fire and a marriage license were involved. I don't recommend performing this ritual indoors, especially when a miniature breed of dog is present (she's fine).

3. I have a crush. On a live person. Also, I went on a date with the crush person. Having a crush is pretty fun, as I haven’t had a guilt-free one in a while. The thoughts of cuddling on a couch or any other such heinous coupling activities remain as unappealing as ever. But talking to an adult about interesting topics is fine. So is making out, you know, if that should come up.

The Good Old Haze

2006-03-23T11:22:00.000-08:00

I just spent a few days with my twin, and I'm now writing from underneath a giant pile of emails and voicemails. So if I'm not communicating with you in the way that you would like or expect, please rest assured that I will soon, as it usually only takes me about 2 days to not care about my job anymore. Right now I'm in panic mode. And yet I still feel the need to share the following.

There's nothing like several days with your twin, a Vandals cassette, several hundred beers, and a 10-year-old photo album to make a girl feel like 22 again. A strange feeling descended this weekend: a long time ago I was an adult. In the not-too-distant past, ten years ago meant Kid. Now ten years ago means Seriously Fucked Up and Confused Adult with Unfortunately Dyed Hair, but Adult Nonetheless. While gazing upon a photo of my sister drunk on Boone's (proof indicated by the empty bottles in the foreground)with some skater dude, I felt panic and strangeness. She remembered the guy but not the night. Recognition of weirdness ensued. There were pictures of me obviously enraptured by best friends whose last names are now big question marks. The real friends are still a part of my life, but what about all of those random people who were so important, like that guy from my Biology of the Brain class? It wasn't that long ago, right? Wrong. It was 12 years ago. Many cans of Olympia beer ago. Hundreds of people ago...they're probably all married with kids. Back when I was an adult.

Dead Crush #13

2006-03-13T09:17:00.000-08:00

After I graduated from college, I did what all of my friends did. I conveniently missed all of the deadlines for my graduate school applications and asked my parents for $500 to go to Europe. And about 6 months, $3000, various drugs, and hundreds of embarrassing mistakes with guys with names like Rhys later, I decided to leave my temporary home in Edinburgh to travel with my friends for a couple of weeks. I was dreading the return to the US, where I would live with my parents and face the reality of my credit card woes and what an irresponsibly trite excuse for a college graduate I was. I wanted to leave the UK with pleasant memories, so I charged a train pass to my one good card and loaded up my backpack with my ten outfits and cans of Stella Artois.

While I was trying to not starve in a city filled with ugly tourists and slimy clubs and annoying rich kids who couldn’t get into Oxford, my friends had been having a sublime time in Galway, Ireland—making out with cute hostel Australians and working in wine bars and hiking the dreamy hills. After the self-inflicted craziness I had been living with for the last few months, it was so wonderful to be in their presence again—to hear their Iowa accents, to do our inside jokes and create new ones, to get drunk and cry on a train and not feel like a total loser.

Somewhere between Liverpool and Cambridge, Raymond Carver joined us. Not the actual Ray, but a copy of his selected stories. A couple of years before, just as I was slowly beginning to fall in love with him, I found out that he had been dead for several years, and was faced with the crushing reality that there would be no more new stories from him. This made the precious few stories we had of his even more precious. We passed the book back and forth on various trains across England, and one night, as I lay in my bunk in a freezing hostel, I heard my friend C. mutter “I’m coming Ray,” as she climbed into the bunk above me and prepared to huddle under her duvet with the battered book of stories. Though I’ve read and reread and taught his stories dozens of times, each new reading always brings with it the twinge I associate with that time in my life: the new horror of being an adult, the sigh of relief that was my friends. Part of my crush on him lies in the belief that he would understand this: that I was a fuckup who needed love.

My favorite is and always has been the story “Careful.” In this story, a recently separated alcoholic moves into the third-floor apartment of a house. On the day his wife visits him to discuss some unnamed business, he has spent the morning drinking champagne and trying to clean out his ear, which is blocked with wax. He and his wife try various things to remove the wax, including bobby pins and baby oil. The point of view is dead on: drunk and tired and scared. The whole story is shrouded by the cloud of champagne and the fuzzy hearing brought on by the wax—the wife’s presence is merely a blur of questions and concern, no real person. The only reality is the fuzziness of this guy’s despair.

Now it’s no secret that I’m attracted to addicts. Which means I’ve had minor crushes on nearly all of Carver’s protagonists. But when the speaker in this story sneaks into the bathroom to get his stash from behind the toilet, it’s enough to make me swoon. Ridiculous. Alcoholism no doubt reduced Carver’s life to barely half a century, but without it, the stories wouldn’t be as painful or stark, as quiveringly shaky as my uncle’s or grandpa’s or cousin’s pre-whiskey hands at Christmas (they’re dead too). Or as mind-numbingly-I’m-alone-alone-alone-alone sad.

So many double entendres, so little energy

2006-03-07T10:35:00.000-08:00

Oh, lord. Last night I dreamt that I was making out with a ventriloquist's dummy. And every time I think about this I start laughing, including when I was in a meeting with the dean this morning. Hungover.

Dude, I Met My Animus

2006-03-01T12:32:00.000-08:00

First of all, I swear I’m not going crazy. I just have a lot of time on my hands. I mean, the 3 hours per day when I’m not at work or dog-walking or cleaning or returning calls from my worried family (but she’s alone! She has no man! She has no friends! She must need us!). But I was introduced to my animus last night. And then burned two candles in honor of him, because it turns out he has two faces.

Apparently, I’ve (or, you know, my unconscious) been waiting my whole life for Jungian dream analysis. And not only have I met my animus (one side of whom happens to be English and very attractive—or at least last night, this was his form), but I’ve met my shadow self. It turns out that all of the people milling around in my dreams are actually representations of me. And my shadow has chosen to come to me in the form of Choad’s girlfriend, which is wicked strange and off-putting. But actually makes sense. And Choad himself is one side of my animus. But they’re all me. There is a huge party going on in my soul, and I’ve gotten pretty good in the last few years at ignoring what most of them have to say.

I get freaked out occasionally by how deeply involved I am with my dreams. But I do believe that it is just as unhealthy for me to spend all of my time in the external world. I mean, for one thing, I'm a poet. And the inner world is pretty amazing. The symbolism alone is enough to make any English major giddy for weeks. And fortunately I have a really amazing therapist who is guiding me through a lot of this. The cool part is that once I start listening to my dreams and actively try to make them a part of my waking life, they’ll probably quiet down some. And I won't feel as nuts in the land of people walking around and doing stuff. But there is too much yelling going on in them right now to ignore them anymore.

Anyway, see you guys later. I’m going back into dreamland…

You know things are grim

2006-02-24T13:28:00.000-08:00

when you start googling your exes. Just to, you know, see what they're up to. Where they live. If it might be worth the 4-hour drive and if they're single and hopefully no longer start their days with bong hits (though I'm not too picky about this) and if maybe they wouldn't say no to one tiny little make-out session. And then not talk to you again for about 8 months or so.

I forgot how certain aspects of being single can be very difficult.

Last Words

2006-02-16T06:11:00.000-08:00

“I don’t know. Fuck you.”

I’m not terribly proud of it, but these were the last words I ever said to E., my boyfriend of about 3 years, before I slammed down the receiver (cell phones are bad because they eliminate this highly satisfying practice of slamming). I don’t remember what the words were in response to. I yelled them, drunk, into a phone at about 2 in the morning. Several days before, I had found out that he had been cheating on me since we started dating, and had slept with about 10 other people during the time we were together. But you know what? I don’t believe that. I think it was more like 40 or 50 people. But it’s hard to tell, because he’s a really good liar, in addition to being a cokehead, a stoner, an alcoholic, and a fan of she-male porn. Not that there’s anything wrong with she-males. He was also incredibly attractive and funny and weird and sometimes I miss him. Lately I miss him.

About a week after this incident, I started dating this 22-year old drummer (I was 27). I had planned only to sleep with him for a few weeks, but three years later we somehow ended up getting married, and now a year later, we’re getting divorced.

I wish my last words to Mr. C were as exuberant as those yelled at E. nearly five years ago. When we went to our first session of therapy (there were a total of 2 sessions, as he was really dedicated to trying to make things work) I said in a really mean voice on my way out the door, “I don’t want to be your friend.” I wish those were the last words. The next (and last) time I saw him was at the last therapy appointment. I had, in my trunk, several garbage bags of the shit he was too clueless to remember to pack the day he moved out. And he had some of my stuff he had taken by accident on that day, which was one of the worst days of my life. We agreed to meet after the therapy appointment to exchange this crap. I told him to meet me in front of the parking ramp where my car was, and in true Choad fashion, he was like 20 minutes late. By the time he got there I wanted to kill him. Instead, we rode up the elevator together to my car and I stood and watched him struggle to get the ripped trash bags out of my trunk, a trunk that still had film canisters in it from when he and his girlfriend used my car all the time to have their little photo-affair. I noted that I needed to remove them immediately when I got home, and perhaps needed to anoint the entire car with sage, to clean out the remnants of their loser love (I did do this about a week later). After he got the bags out, he started to organize the stuff right there behind my car while I watched, because that’s the kind of selfish asshole he is.

“Uh, I’m going to go,” I said impatiently, knowing that if I were to back out then I would run him over. My last words. I got in my car and started it, and then backed up without even looking. I thought, “I’m going to run this motherfucker over,” but at the last minute I looked and he and his stuff had disappeared. I have no idea how he got out of there with all of that stuff so quickly. I felt a little sad…I was looking forward to seeing him scurry to not get hit. But then it was just me and my tainted car and my sad bag of stuff he had taken by accident, just random stuff he needed to get rid of so he would have nothing to remember me by, and I haven't seen him since.

Dead Crush #12

2006-02-15T06:22:00.000-08:00

I was lucky enough to spend my Valentine’s Day with this gentleman, Joseph Campbell. Sure, he’s dead, but in the reality that is a 1986 PBS special with a huge-glasses Bill Moyers that I just got from Netflix, he’s alive and kicking. And when I say kicking, I mean kicking.

It has been so long since I’ve agreed with everything a man has said. Yes, he’s a privileged white guy who got to study in Paris, and his early interest in American Indian culture kind of bordered on fetishism (he even created his own tribe when he was a kid), but he is truly an amazing human being, albeit lucky enough to have been born white and middle-class so that it’s been possible for him to share his brain with the world. When Bill Moyers (I kind of hate Bill Moyers), in the second episode of the series, asks him whether or not the purpose of embracing myths today is a way of seeking life’s meaning, JC shakes his head as if to shake off the depressing notion that life has to have meaning. “No,” he says, “it’s about seeking the experience of being alive.” Seconds later he states that he believes that a human’s meaning is this: You are here. That’s it. Be here—put yourself in the middle of good and evil. The best way to live in the world is to LIVE in it, in the middle of the sorrow and pain and chaos and joy. All you have to do is live. And then, when talking about the Judeo-Christian culture we westerners have inherited, he says “All natural impulses are sinful unless you’ve been baptized or circumcised? Come on.” He’s created his own belief system out of the myths generated throughout HUMAN history, and makes this ok. His belief system seems to be about searching, and he’s perfectly ok with that. He’s also ok with someone whose belief system is about Jesus, or Buddha, or animals, or all three (I think I may fit in there somewhere). He is in the middle of all of it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more serene person.

I could go on and on. I felt so happy to have him in my living room as I got kind of drunk. The first time I really encountered him was when I taught at a summer camp for little geniuses a couple of years ago. The course I taught was called “Heroes and Villains” and it was a great experience for me to totally get my nerd on in a room full of mini-nerds who thought they were in heaven. We studied all kinds of myths, and used Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces as a primary text. The kids really got into him, especially as we traced the hero’s journey through all kinds of media, both old and new. It was really cool to see how ideas of heroes and villains were already a part of these kids’ daily lives—instead of teaching, Campbell’s book seemed to be more of reminder of these archetypes that were already simmering in their 11-year-old unconsciousnesses. That’s why I love him, I think—it is wonderful to hear him speak words that are already a part of me as a human—it’s like he’s saying the words our souls would say if they could talk. Even sixth graders could feel it. Of course, sixth graders are pretty cool.

While I was watching the special, my 90-year-old grandma called. She said “Happy Halloween!” when I answered, and it wasn’t a joke, though she figured out pretty quickly that she had said the wrong holiday. She told me that she had made rhubarb sauce for dinner (which for old people in Iowa means at noon) out of rhubarb she had frozen last summer. She is blind in one eye and losing sight in the other, so we talked about how hard that is for her, though I clearly have no idea how hard it must actually be. She is almost finished embroidering a table cloth, but can’t finish the middle because she can’t see. I got tears in my eyes when she said this, because I know eventually she may not be able to see at all, and she has been sewing since she was a little girl: I have quilt squares that she made in 4-H in 1925. She is going to give the table cloth to my cousin in South Dakota so she can finish it. And for the millionth time in my life, I felt sad that I can’t sew like the other women in my family, that I am too lazy or uncoordinated or not Midwestern enough, as I desperately want to finish the table cloth for her.

It was weird to have this 10-minute conversation and then go back to Joseph Campbell. The Bill Moyers special was filmed about 2 years before Campbell died. I thought about this as I watched, and about how my grandma may die soon and how peaceful she is. A few years ago, the defeatist and pessimist I was would have thought, “All of that work and thinking about existence, and now he’s dead. What a waste.” Maybe I still do think that a little, but mostly because such a powerful life force here surely would help to make this world a little better. I think the best thing I’ve learned from him is that you must go to yourself to learn everything you need to know about being alive: what you think and feel is everything. For me, myself is where god is, it’s where the core and pleasure and pain of being alive are, it’s where my poetry comes from. Self-acceptance seems to be the key to self-peace, and a world full of people who are at peace with themselves sounds like a good place to live. This does not mean a world full of happy people. Fuck happiness. I mean people who have accepted that the world sucks and is also a source of beauty--they are at peace with the paradox. When Jung (obviously a huge influence on Campbell) was asked, “Will there ever be world peace?” he responded, “If enough people do their inner work.”

Shameless Commerce Division

2006-02-10T12:27:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm just trying to say read my poems

Dim Guadalajara

2006-02-10T06:02:00.000-08:00

Please enjoy this photo of me being ridden while the elves are hard at work on a new Dead Crush.

Some Reasons Why I Love Austin

2006-02-07T11:05:00.000-08:00

Could I live in Texas?

2006-02-06T05:51:00.000-08:00

I was only in Austin for two glorious days, but as I sat in the airport waiting to leave, I looked at someone's cowboy boots and felt really sad. Could I be a Texan? No, probably not. L's (formerly of this nonglorious city) husband, whose family has been in Texas since before it was a state, informed me that Austin is not actually Texas and that I should move there immediately. He also told me that it is not the South or the Southwest. It is Austin. Here's what else it has/is:

80 degrees
sunny
literally hundreds of attractive over-thirty men (granted, some of them were dads at the car wash, but I saw no ring)
margaritas
beer
tacos
Texas barbeque
decks
outdoor seating everywhere
cacti and these strange brown slender birds who make really cool noises
affordable and adorable houses
neighborhood pride
A cowboy who casually offered his lap to L. (who replied, waving toward her husband, "no, I only sit on him.")
One of the weirdest costume stores on the planet
one of the best coffee shops on the planet
strange and amazing neon signs
rollerderby
apparently one of the top three cities for single women
jobs for which I may be qualified
all kinds of connections through L's super political and community-involved husband
Adults. Having fun.
Families and couples who somehow don't inspire jealousy and/or disgust
non-white people

I have pictures and will figure out soon how to show them to you.

Ok, when it's July and 110 degrees, I would probably be miserable. Also--Texas? I think what I may have to do is just live there in the winter, and stay in Boston for the summer. My imaginary patron said this is ok, as long as I dedicate my first book to him. I said fine.

Shrew's Spleen Corner

2006-02-01T10:02:00.000-08:00

Dear Residents of the Shithole* In Which I Am Forced to Live:

Please don't pull your backpack on a little cart behind you, especially when you are walking in front of me at a snail's pace and arguing with your loser boyfriend on your stupid cell phone. I beg of you to abstain from this behavior particularly on days which one or more of the following is true: 1)I have drank way too much coffee 2) I just spent $130 on a hairdo that makes me look like an old tired Molly Ringwald on a very bad hair day 3) I have to worry about running into people who a)ask me how Choad is doing (amazingly, there are still people who don't know we split up) b)are Choad's friends and/or whores c)are Sir Choadness himself 4)I just spent 2 hours in a meeting that has nothing to do with my job 5)my lawyer just moved into an office by the bowling alley and will not have email access for an undetermined amount of time 6)I have both wrinkles and acne and will probably be alone for the rest of my life.

You know what, I don't care if you're in law school. Pick up your stupid backpack and shut off your goddamn phone. You're embarking on a life of bourgsie entitled privilege and it won't kill you to suffer for five minutes. And walk faster. Or I may have to kill you myself.

Love, Shrew

*Shithole population=60% acned white boys, 40% tall white law students

Dead Crush #11

2006-01-30T08:05:00.000-08:00

When I was in college, I took a course my senior year called “Elvis as Anthology,” taught by an African Studies professor named Peter Nazareth. Peter Nazareth’s whole Elvis thing was that 1) Elvis had created a “pastiche” of different types of music, rather than blatantly stealing music from marginalized artists, and was therefore a brilliant collage artist rather than a cheating sponge; and 2) Elvis spent his life “twinning” himself to other family members and musicians as a result of his twin’s (Jesse) death at birth. I could go on at length about the pastiche thing, which seems like a nice idea if Elvis was savvy enough to be aware that he was doing this (not so much, in my opinion). But what gives me my feelings of tender love toward Elvis are: 1) The movie Blue Hawaii and 2) his dead twin and his lifelong search for near-perfect twin love.

I wish I could explain how much I loved the Elvis class. I would leave every session with an open but blank notebook—I was too rapt with awe to even take notes. I remember very little from my undergrad years, but I do remember trudging to this course even during an Iowa blizzard, while the rest of my roommates stayed at home in pajamas in front of MTV. I was amazed that it was possible to make a career out of listening to the song “That’s All Right, Mama” over and over for a good 10 years and then writing about it. We spent most of each Elvis class listening to Elvis music and then listening to Nazareth tell us about how the song evidenced Elvis’ obsessive twinned relationship with his mother. In this world, weird obsessions were considered academic and were sometimes even published. For about 6 months, this is what I wanted to do. I stopped writing poetry and started writing essays about Rock Hudson, fifties melodrama, the Beatles. I wrote a 20-page paper on the music of John Lennon, where I examined the significance of double tracking and his codependent relationships.

I thought that my interest in Elvis probably had a great deal to do with his twinness. As a twin myself, I felt so sad for him, as he never got to love his twin and had to spend his whole life trying to recreate this unique relationship with mere singletons. In my early-to-mid twenties, I felt a little bit sorry for the twinless as they desperately looked for love in significant others. The poor things couldn’t experience the pure love that can only be had by people who share exact DNA. What I didn’t realize was that I WAS constantly twinning myself to various individuals, just as Elvis had done with his mother and his wife. These pseudo twins just didn’t happen to be people I made out with.

When my sister and I were 18, we had only been separated once before, that I remember—when I went to volleyball camp for a week at the age of 13 (don’t ask). So when we went to different colleges, she to a teeny Quaker school in Indiana and me to a mega university in central Iowa, it was like having my arm ripped off. The ripping was particularly slow and painful, however—I didn’t really notice it happening, as I was so in love with starting over in a place where no one knew me. Gradually I began to feel it, though: the socket of her absence.

In the meantime, I was hard at work on a very codependent relationship with the girl who lived across from me in my dorm, G. She was my best friend, the first one I’d ever had (it’s hard to count your sister as your best friend). We had a highly competitive, jealous, and drama-filled relationship. One day we weren’t speaking; the next, we devised intricate plans to seduce an attractive geek from our Biology lecture. When G. finally ended up making out with this geek in the study lounge, I was beyond angry, mostly because we both realized by this time that G. was gay, though we hadn’t discussed it yet. When she finally did come out to me and started dating women, our relationship improved immensely, though I’m still pretty sure that what had made our relationship so weird up to that point was that we were probably in love with each other and were both too sexually confused to be ok with that.

Since then, I’m fine with the fact that I often “fall in love” with my female friends. I feel a great deal of love and devotion toward them, feelings I have never purely felt toward the people I sleep with. I have “twinned” myself to about a dozen or so women over the years. What’s weird is that my sister does not do this—she is able somehow to have one long-distance twin, while I need to have at least 2 twins if not more. And I don’t understand why I never make my boyfriends my twins (on a couple of occasions, men have played the role of “female twin,” oddly enough) In fact, I’m often pleased when they are jealous of my relationships with women. It seems like a message to them that I don’t really need them. Yes, it is all very fucked up. Hence the $200 a month on therapy.

But I don’t think I’m crazy. I think my dedication to my friends is a good thing. And I wouldn’t describe any of my present friendships with females as unhealthy (this wasn’t always the case). I don’t know if I do this because I’m a twin. But I’m so intrigued by Elvis and by other people who are twinless twins. Though I am only twinless right now because my twin happens to live a million or so miles away, I recognize that my relationships alter dramatically when I’m not living near her. When we lived together in NH, I had no female best friend UNTIL my sister told me she was getting married. Within months, my girlfriend J. and I were inseparable. Please remember that I also had a boyfriend of two years at this point. Who knows where the hell he was. Well, I actually have a pretty good idea about where he was. Apparently non-twins have this need as well. Maybe we are all psychic twinless twins. Maybe that’s just a human condition.

These days, I’m not looking for any kind of twin, except maybe my inner twin. Usually this would be the point where I’d start looking for another male to torture. It feels really great to make the conscious decision not to do this. I though I would be afraid of the silence after Mr. Choad left, but it turns out that there is quite a racket in my head. It keeps me pretty occupied. And all of my “twins” out there have been essential in helping me to tune this incredibly staticky radio which is my head…much more helpful than turning it off, the way that those nontwin boyfriends convinced me to do on a daily basis for nearly ten years. And the way I let them.

This Has Nothing To Do with Dead Crushes

2006-01-23T12:59:00.000-08:00

It has to do with my own horn, which I am about to toot. I never thought that a journal this persnickety and snobby would like a weirdo like me, but it turns out that when your former professor solicits your work, it helps you to get published in PLOUGHSHARES.

Sorry to blab like this, but I don't really have many real live people around to tell, and my dog just really doesn't care that much if it isn't chewstick related.

It's coming out in April. And my poem in Verse, which was accepted over two years ago, is coming out next month, supposedly.

Ok, done bragging. Now I'm going to do a little dance.

She Lives

2006-01-20T05:07:00.000-08:00

My lawyer isn't dead. She just emailed me. It's a long story, but the main reason behind her disappearance is this: Choad is a total fucktard*.

One of the main things that sucks about actual divorce proceedings is that you not only still have to deal with your ex, but you have to deal with all of the qualities about him that have annoyed you from day one, i.e. the inability to follow simple instructions.

But I believe we are on our way toward settlement negotiations, where we will divide up our one bean and a handful of loose change. Somewhere on the horizon stands shrew, the divorcee.

*I stole this term from Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy. Though she may not have coined it.

The Astral Plane a.k.a. Procrastination Rears its Ugly Head in a List that contains way too much information

2006-01-18T07:44:00.000-08:00

One thing that was kind of cool but also not cool about being married was that there was usually someone around to make out with, even if you weren’t really that attracted to the person anymore. Also, you didn’t have to worry about it being “good” or anything, as they signed a piece of paper saying they would do you forever (at least this is how my marriage appeared to work). One thing that is cool about not being married is that you can do whoever you want, as long as you can convince them that it’s a good idea. One thing that is not so cool about not being married, especially in a town where you’re not really sure where to find unattached people your age who will understand that you do not want a RELATIONSHIP, especially when you’ve just gone off the pill and suddenly your hormones are back along with the depressingly ironic increased risk of the thing the pill is supposed to prevent, is that you spend a lot of time thinking about your imaginary boyfriends. Which I guess is ok. Not “cool,” but just kind of how it is. It seems better than making the list I’ve been compiling in my head of people I think I could convince to have a make-out-only relationship with me. Because let me make this clear: I want no part of a real boyfriend (well, parts are fine, I just don’t want a boyfriend). So in honor of this weird state I’m in (I haven’t been single in nearly 10 years, people—10 YEARS), I’ve compiled a different kind of list. The list of all of the imaginary boyfriends I’ve had in my life to date, in order of their occurrence, though many have had reoccurrences over the years (please see Dead Crush #3 for explanation of Imaginary Boyfriend). I believe this list probably began in about 1982. Please rest assured that I’m not currently thinking of all of these boyfriends. Data, for example: I’m not so into him anymore (although he’s probably about my age now and most likely very cute). Also, the list does not include the nonfamous imaginary boyfriends. There are 40 boyfriends here: symbolizing the 40 days and nights Christ or whoever suffered in the desert or wherever, or the similar months I have gone without smooching. You will notice trends. You’ll see here proof that I am a shallow, objectifying asshole, and I will not argue with you if you accuse me of this. And if all of this makes you too uncomfortable, please look the other way. And yes, I promise not to hit on any of you if I see you in the near future…

1. Jason Bateman (the Silver Spoons years only)
2. Data from Goonies
3. Alex P. Keaton
4. Michael Jackson (youth through Beat It)
5. The guy who plays John Candy’s son in The Great Outdoors
6. Andrew McCarthy (in all movies but Weekend at Bernie’s I and II)
7. Ducky
8. James Spader (only when he plays a jerk, which is most of the time, I guess)
9. Robert Smith (fell in love in 8th grade after I saw him give a guided tour of his house on MTV)
10. Morrissey (really only my boyfriend in 1991—we were just friends after that)
11. Ian Curtis of Joy Division
12. The guy who kills himself in Dead Poets Society
13. The guy who played Joel Fleischman on Northern Exposure
14. The guy who played Chris on Northern Exposure
15. The guy who played Ed on Northern Exposure
16. Kyle McLachlan (as Agent Cooper and in Blue Velvet)
17. Bobby from Twin Peaks (but only briefly)
18. Bono (pre-Zoo TV—I believe I watched the Making of the Unforgettable Fire video no less than 10,000 times in high school)
19. The Edge
20. John Doe of X
21. Michael Ian Black from The State (more attractive now sans early 90s haircut)
22. Hugh Grant (cringe—but only in Merchant Ivory movies. More attractive with early 90s haircut)
23. Steve Malkmus of Pavement
24. Ad Rock of the Beastie Boys
25. Mike D of the Beastie Boys
26. Q-tip of A Tribe Called Quest
27. Rivers Cuomo of Weezer (I know, I know—the Japan fetish thing. But I can’t help it, I have a geek fetish)
28. Jarvis Cocker of Pulp (this boyfriend seems to come back repeatedly—though I saw pictures of him at John Peel’s funeral…not pretty)
29. The lead singers of most British bands from the years 1992-1996
30. Jonathan Richman of the Modern Lovers (The only imaginary boyfriend I’ve ever met—at the Ogunquit Ballroom in Ogunquit, ME. He signed a paper bag for me during several seconds of uninterrupted eye contact)
31. Billy Joe Armstrong of Green Day (I secretly love even new Green Day. Guess that’s not a secret anymore)
32. Buddy Holly? (I can’t explain this one)
33. George Harrison (pre-80’s)
34. Paul McCartney (pre-Wings)
35. Xander from Buffy (seasons 1 and 2 only)
36. Note long pause from imaginary boyfriends during the months/years I was actually in love with a real person
37. Elijah Wood
38. A semi-imaginary boyfriend as I imagined Sam from Freaks and Geeks as an older geek (I’m no pedophile)
39. Federico from Six Feet Under
40. Nate from Six Feet Under (though he sometimes bears an uncanny resemblance to one of my mean exes)
41. Gram Parsons

How do you know if your lawyer is dead?

2006-01-17T11:35:00.000-08:00

I think maybe my lawyer died. She won't return my calls or emails. Usually I do everything in my power to avoid contacting her, as the prices she charges seem more appropriate for sexual acts than for reading an email and taking a file out of a drawer. But I may not need to pay her for these transactions, because she's probably dead.

I think the degree to which I desire to be divorced now is causing me to panic. I actually thought about checking the obituaries in the local paper on my way back to work, just to make sure she hadn't died. Maybe she's just really busy. But I hired her to make my life easier, not to panic more. There is already enough panic in my life. I wish now to take back all of the bragging I have done about her.

If you see her, please tell her I would like to get divorced, preferably in this lifetime. She is fairly young, has glasses and talks way too much. Hmm, kind of like my ex-husband (or HUSBAND I should say, since her disappearance is forcing me to remain married). I knew he was involved somehow. He probably had her killed so he could get my measly savings account. And the shower head. Or maybe they met and realized that their similar hipster glasses and talents for interrupting people meant that they should be together forever and he dumped the chipmunk photographer and they ran away to wherever losers run away to, and she decided that because of this she can no longer represent me fairly and has dumped me just like he dumped me.

Or maybe I just need a longer vacation.

Dead Crush #10

2006-01-05T17:42:00.000-08:00

Every winter I lived in New Hampshire, my friend S. grew a big, bushy beard. And every year, as a rite of spring (which in New Hampshire actually comes sometime in July), he would choose an evening to shave it down to a Selleck-style ‘stache and proclaim that evening Mustache Night. The most exciting thing that could ever happen to you was to hear a knock on your door sometime in late May, when the days were long and the stupid snow was finally starting to disappear, and find S. on your porch in a tie and big old mustache. “Guess what tonight is?” he would say, and you knew, as you leaned on the doorway in helpless laughter, that things were going to get hectic.

The reason I bring up S. is because he’s the only male person I know, with the exception of the wonder that is John Ritter, who has made me pee myself with laughing (Steve Martin ALMOST made me pee. Almost.) I don’t know what it was about S., but pretty much all I had to do was look at him and I would start laughing, even if he didn’t have the mustache. On Mustache Night, S. was allowed to do whatever he wanted. For some reason, this usually meant getting drunk at a bowling alley and trying to feel up his friends, usually while wearing a three-piece suit or at least a vest. Or he would wrestle you. He would look at you cross-eyed and say “You smell pretty” in a creepy voice, and then try to wrestle you. I think every time he wrestled me I ended up peeing, or at least running to the bathroom in the nick of time. S’s girlfriend (now wife) pointed out quite frequently that S. only wanted to wrestle girls. I did have a little crush on S., but it didn’t have anything to do with wrestling. It was his ability to make me laugh until the tears ran down my face. If you can do this, I will be in love with you forever. Or if you have a girlfriend, at least have a little crush on you. (Aside: Choad never made me pee. He did make me laugh on occasion, just not very hard).

This picture of John Ritter is from my favorite Three’s Company Episode ever, the one where Jack and Janet go to some party on a tropical island they have to fly to, and Jack takes tranquilizers with a drink called The Rocket because he’s scared of flying. And when he gets to the party, he’s, well, Jack Tripper on tranquilizers and The Rocket. There were many zany dance moves and inappropriate double entendres. The first time I watched this episode, when I was about 8 years old, I peed myself as I lay on the floor helpless with laughter. And I was immediately in love.

Around this time, one of our church ministers gave a sermon about all of the dirty shows on TV that you shouldn’t let your kids watch. Of course Three’s Company was among them. I think this was at the point where they had Chrissy’s third replacement (Terry?) so the new ones weren’t really worth watching anyway. What me and my siblings really cared about were the reruns of the seventies episodes, which usually came on as my parents were making dinner. Halfheartedly, my dad would come in to tell us to change it to The Andy Griffith show or its equivalent, but he would invariably become engrossed in whatever the Three’s Company Misunderstanding of the day was. When something sexual was implied, he remembered his mission and barked at us to change the channel. After a while, my parents got tired of enforcing this rule, as they did with most rules, especially since it was kind of hard to prevent us from watching Dallas (another condemned show) when they weren’t ABOUT to stop watching that.

The way I see it, John Ritter was made for kids. He was the most brilliant physical comedian that ever lived, and I think he was way underrated. When he appeared as Joyce’s evil robot boyfriend on an episode of Buffy a few years ago, I nearly jumped up and down. It was perfect. I know he was on some kind of family sitcom when he died, but whoever his agent was should have known that he needed to play the weirdest, grossest, most John Wateriest roles available. Was he ever in a John Waters movie? Oh, he should have been. When I was eight, I loved him so much for his weirdness, his silliness. Nowadays I feel that I am often antisilly. I’m too cynical for silliness. This makes me feel sad, as I was all about silly when I was little. I would whip myself up into a tornado of silliness, until my parents would yell at me to go outside. I think I need some silliness in my life. Maybe I should start doing drugs again.

I must say, historically, that girls are way better at making me laugh myself into a state of helplessness and/or urination (though of course the dudes have helped to accomplish at least the helpless state on several occasions). Whoever says that girls aren’t funny (people do say this) needs to spend an hour or so with any one of my female friends. Of course, the things I find funny may not be funny to everyone. One of my favorite moments of crying with mirth (aside from the magic-mushroom induced ones—good times, good times) was about ten years ago, drunk or extremely hung over in the house I shared with my 4 college girlfriends. C., (one of these ladies) and I were lying on the floor, trying, together, to use a bottle cap as an ashtray. In response to something I said (sometimes I can be charming or at least kind of sweet when hung over or very tired), C. asked “Can I marry you?”

“Ok,” I said.

“Can my vow to you be ‘Crunch all you want, we’ll make more?’” asked C. tiredly.

I looked at her as I often did: in awe/disbelief that someone this perfect could be my friend. “Yes,” I said, then laughed until I wet my pants.

Because I don't have time to write anything else

2006-01-04T12:55:00.000-08:00

I really will write a new dead crush soon, as soon as I answer all of these damn work emails (so it might be next week). I have three in the works: Elvis, Joseph Cornell, and John Ritter. Any votes?

What I keep thinking about is how my brother says "All of the sudden" instead of "All of a sudden." Has he always said this? Or is it a result of his new Super Michigan Marriage? He also now has a really strong Michigan accent. It makes me want to say, as I often say to my family members (inside my head): Who ARE you?

That doesn't sum up my holiday season very well. It was kind of wonderful. I spent a great deal of time in a car, I talked and talked and talked, I was given a gift, I sat in a hot tub, I watched a very small baby do a couple of things, I walked a dog, I got drunk, I avoided drama with someone I tend to be very dramatic about, I watched part of the movie "Lust in the Dust" starring Divine, I ate many cookies, I smoked about 8 cigarettes, I laid on a hotel bed, I slid in something on a city street and twisted my ankle but kept beaming through it all because being there made me so happy, I fought with my mom, I held hands with my sister, I watched King Kong (shudder), I went to bed at 10 on New Year's Eve as an excuse to avoid playing games with my family because that's the kind of daughter I am.

Now I have to get back to work because I am wicked behind.

A Long Rambling Christmas Card To Myself (and in praise of people who make me feel like I suck less: thank you)

2005-12-22T07:56:00.000-08:00

I’ve completely forgotten about Christmas this year, which has been magically wonderful. The only times I’m reminded of it are when I see other peoples’ Christmas trees through their windows, or when a student says something about the holiday. My very caring twin offered to let me chip in on the gifts she and her husband are buying for our family this year, so I didn’t even need to go Christmas shopping. I’m skipping Christmas with my family to help my friend NU (who is as much as family member to me as any of them, anyway) move to New England, which happens to be the cutest and most Christamasy place on earth. But it will be ok if I’m with her. I just can’t deal with any “special” moments around a Christmas tree as everyone reminisces about the last year. Last year at this time I was a newlywed, in love, very happy most of the time. This year is different. My heart is broken. Every thing is wrong. I look at my family and feel so far away from them. I love them but I can’t be around them. My brother just got married too. I can’t be around that because I just got married. I just got married. I’m still a newlywed, only soon I won’t be married anymore. Sometimes I just want to disappear into whatever ether has sucked up Mr. C. It’s like he doesn’t exist anymore. Poof. No more husband. Poof. No more shrew. Not kill myself. Just go away for a while. Come back when my skin has grown back. I am currently skinless, though it’s growing back in very sore patches.

It will help a great deal to send NU off into her new adventure. To be around a different family. And then go off to the state I’ll live in soon, too. The next few months are going to suck here without her. But I’m going to use the time to figure out what I need to do in order to be ready to leave. Thinking about the life and the new start that awaits me excites me terribly. My new life as a divorced person. I never thought I would be that person, but I guess no one does. And I never thought I’d want to date a divorced person, but now I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to date someone who WASN’T divorced. How to explain all of that crap to someone who hasn’t been through it. Not that I’ll be ready to date any time soon. But I’m looking forward to DATING, to trying out different kinds of people. No immediate boyfriends ever again.

It is weird not to buy gifts for Mr. C this year (yeah, he’s a choad but I still love him—arrggh, it’s so frustrating). You can’t just turn it off…five months ago I was still allowed to care about him as I had done for the last four years. Everyday there are things I want to tell him, show him, discuss with him. So I guess I need extra gifts for myself this year. I’m totally broke, so I’m just going to give myself the gift of being nice to myself (and maybe a few things from Anthropologie which I can charge). If I feel like having a breakdown, I’m just going to let myself. If I need to be alone, I’m going to do that. One of the many wonderful things about NU is that she accepts me for who I am. I know that sounds cheesy, but it is such a rare quality. I think I’ve said that about people before, but it’s hard to really mean it. With her, I really mean it. I know I can go off alone when I’m with her, and she won’t be hurt or take it personally or any of the other responses that my family often has. When I’m with her I can be bitchy or nice or whatever and she’s just like, Yep, that’s shrew. She never tells me how to feel, she just lets me feel. I can’t tell you what a gift this has been, especially after living with someone who did the opposite.

Several days after Mr. C left, when I hadn’t eaten or slept in that amount of time, when I spent my hours staring at my computer screen with a pounding heart and tears in my eyes, I went with NU to get some food (which I probably didn’t eat). I remember babbling to her about something at the salad bar, and to whatever her kind and patient response was, I said “I wish you were my boyfriend,” and I truly meant it. I guess what my relationship with her and with other good friends has taught me is that I am actually capable of having loving relationships. I haven’t had one yet with someone with whom I’m romantic, but I no longer think it’s impossible. Being around NU makes me feel like I don’t suck completely. Everyone should try to fill their lives with as many people like this as possible. Or at least one or two, in addition to the people you kiss if you have a kisser in your life. I think this trip with her is probably the best gift I could give myself. And even though she’s leaving, like a lot of people I care about have, she’ll still be there. She won’t go into the ether and I won’t have to either.

Intermission 5: The Little Thing Janet Jackson Called "Control"

2005-12-20T07:54:00.000-08:00

Sometimes when I think of Mr. C (codename for Mr. Choad, which is codename for the dildo who left me with rent I can’t afford and a car that’s insanely expensive to keep up and who has forced me to hire a lawyer who charges me $30 to read a six word email so that he could, for the millionth time in his life, avoid responsibility) I get this song in my head. I wonder why. Hmmm, could it be that this fucking moron had and probably continues to have serious control issues? It wasn’t enough that he had to punish himself daily with panic attacks and robot-like adherence to a strict goal-oriented schedule, as well as a monk’s diet of yogurt, bananas, no alcohol, no meat, no anything even slightly vice-related (including sex that rated beyond PG), he also had to inflict his self-denying code on me, a life-loving and hedonistic member of the human race. Because I’ve spent my whole adult life believing everything that my addict and/or control freak boyfriends/husbands have told me, I’ve pretty much believed for the last ten years that I 1) Am crazy, or at best have serious emotional problems 2) Have an addiction problem and 3) Am weak or wrong for doing the things I like in moderation (drinking, eating, smoking), emoting, or trying to find emotional support outside of the relationship (through friends, not lovers). Basically, what I’ve begun to learn in the last four months is that: Oh My God, I’m a Human Being. Humans have desires and even occasionally act on them. Yes, even female humans. And sometimes humans, even the ones with the ovaries, aren’t perfect.

Mr. C pretty much started out in control of our splitting up. In fact, he was in total control of that situation, as I was not in favor of calling the marriage off before we even talked about anything. He moved out, took $1000 out of our savings account without telling me, told me we were getting divorced, started fucking his teacher as he had dreamed of doing all summer, moved all of his shit out of our house including about 20 Criterion Collection DVDs I had come to think of as mine, and then asked me for his stupid bread recipe and our shower head (he got the recipe). During these proceedings, I stood in the middle of various rooms with my mouth hanging open. When I came to about 3 weeks later, he was all hurt that I didn’t want to be friendly to him. He didn’t seem to understand why I wanted to kill him with my bare hands. When I was finally stabilized enough to hire my lawyer, I decided fairly quickly that I wanted to be the one to file for divorce. I felt so out of control, it was the one tiny thing I could take out of his hands, since there was nothing left I could take from him, give him, or ask of him. I thought he’d be happy since then he wouldn’t have to pay the $150 filing fee. Of course, since I don’t communicate with him, I have no idea about how he feels about anything. But in order to file for divorce, I needed a home address for him so the papers could be served. He finally sent me a P.O. Box # which I knew wouldn’t work, so I broke down and asked my lawyer to contact him for his address, knowing full well that this tiny transaction could easily cost me $100. But he wouldn’t give it to her either. He gave her his MOM’S address. At first I thought that this was because he thinks I’m crazy and would show up at his house and rape him or something (as someone who currently has an unlisted number and address due to an ACTUAL abusive ex, I assure you that I really can cause no physical harm to anyone—believe me, I’ve tried). Then I thought that he probably just wanted his mommy to deal with his divorce, as she deals with everything else for him. But now I just see this as his last ditch effort to get one last chance to control me—I take a tiny bit of control by filing for divorce, and so he has to try to control this tiny thing. His stupid address. When I really don’t give a fuck where he lives. And he’s already tried to control everything else I do—I wish he’d just go fucking concentrate on controlling his new girlfriend now. Which I guess he probably is.

The other day at work we got our student directories. I opened one up to his name, and there was the address. I thought, ok, what does this make me want to do, this sacred address which was so carefully hidden from me, to the tune of about $150 dollars? Nothing. It makes me want to do nothing. Did I want to run over there immediately and stare longingly at his windows? No. Did I want to go over hoping to run into his crazy-person girlfriend (she must be crazy to be dating someone who is going through a breakdown and divorce) and rip her eyes out or just throw coffee on her or something? No. All I wanted to do was go down to the vending machine in the basement, get some peanut M&Ms, come back up to my office, and read blogs for a few minutes before catching up on some emails. That’s all I wanted to do. Oh, and not trust him about anything concerning the divorce anymore. Because he obviously doesn’t trust me, though I’ve done nothing I can think of to earn this lack of trust, except exist. He hasn’t given me a chance to do anything. I did leave him one, ONE, angry voicemail. Just one, in which I mentioned that I regretted ever meeting him. But for Chrissakes, he left me with no warning for another woman. Or maybe it’s because I didn’t give him the shower head.

Anyway, if anyone wants this fuckwad’s address, I have it. The only address that really matters to me right now is the one that leads me the place where my stuff is, some of which I’ve had since before Mr. C was even born. The place where my precious little girl dog waits for me, loving me simply because I exist. The place where I can eat, drink, pray, and live without hesitation or fear, without him.

Shrew's Spleen Corner

2005-12-16T13:25:00.000-08:00

Dear Readers,

I want to live in a city! I want to live in a city! I want to live in a city!

For happiness, I currently require:

Real artists, not undergrads. Real museums.
Real "ethnic" food. Not the slop served on one street in this town which stays mediocre forever because there's no competition and everyone just accepts it
People over 30
People over 30 who are not parents
People over 30 who are not grad students
The ability to walk down the street in state of peace and harmony (not terrified that I will have to run into exes and their pathetic associates)
Readings, bookstores, and other writers not affiliated with a university
Many coffee shops in which I know no one
Many bars in which I know no one
Many city streets in which I no one
Dog parks
Dog parks with cute dog-owners, maybe around 38 years old, professional but in some kind of field like entomology, definitely not an "artist" in any way, someone who thinks that it's cool that I'm a poet and doesn't want me to be bubbly or cute and doesn't make me feel guilty for not going on the pill and doesn't act weird when I ask for his sexual history. For laid-back dating purposes only.
Seafood
The ocean
Mountains
My sister

(This isn't very spleen-y, I guess, though in an early version I referred to the ex as "Mr. Choad," which I may use another time in an angrier post)

Love,
Shrew

Dead Crush #9

2005-12-13T16:27:00.000-08:00

Oh James Wright:

What I keep wondering when I read your poems is if your existence in death is everything you’d hoped it would be. I don’t necessarily get the impression from your work that you want to die, but that somehow your questions about the world would have clearer answers if you didn’t have a human body. So I hope whatever vehicle carts your soul around these days is more appropriate for you. Or that you have done away with bodies altogether, and you have other things to think about besides the world.

Your poems have an otherworldly feeling, as though they are somewhere between this world and the next. The people that populate these poems also teeter on this edge—they border on no longer being human; they are turning into something else. The poem “Evening” takes place on earth, but with a character who straddles earth and another world. The speaker watches a boy turn from human to some kind of walking representation of nature (is this a figure from mythology? I can’t remember): “I saw his hair turn leaf/ His dancing toes divide/ To hooves on either side/ One hand become a bird.” The boy is part animal, part tree—he embodies all that the speaker (you) wish to understand but cannot. Fear overtakes you, but when this new creature dissolves back into a human, he understands “Fairy and ghost—but less/ Our human loneliness.” How much easier it would be to live in the world in this way—without knowledge of loneliness. In this way, your writing reminds me so much of Rilke, who often looks to nature to try to understand how to live. I’m thinking of the Eighth Elegy:

With all its eyes the natural world looks out
into the Open. Only our eyes are turned
backward, and surround plant, animal, child
like traps, as they emerge in their freedom.
We know what is really out there only from
the animal’s gaze; for we take the very young
child and force it around, so that it sees
objects—not the Open, which is so
deep in animals’ faces. Free from death.
We, only, can see death; the free animal
has its decline in back of it, forever,
and God in front, and when it moves, it moves
already in eternity, like a fountain.

“Natural” beings don’t understand death, which is why they can live in freedom. Loneliness, for you, seems like a branch of death—without knowledge of death, there wouldn’t be loneliness, because without knowledge of death, we wouldn’t need to surround ourselves with the others who also know that they're going to die. To lose one’s body, to not be human, is the only way to know more about the world of ghosts than the human world of loneliness. But to lose your body, you have to die. Your poems seem to want to figure out how to lose your body without dying, and maybe this is why there are so many ghosts in your poems—they are both part of the living and part of the dead.

Another way to not be human and yet still experience the nature and the world in which it exists is to be an animal. As Rilke writes, animals have death behind them, and so can live naturally in the world. I see the same kind of existence of animals in your work. In “By a Lake in Minnesota,” the world feels full of animals—the twilight is a whale, beavers walk silently from their calm waters, and the moon itself hunts for dolphins. There seems to be no room for humans in this kind of world—and these animal figures certainly don’t need us in order to keep doing what they do. This world was made for them. The only human in the poem, you, stands and watches this, and all you can do is wait for dark in a world that functions so well without you.

The horses in “A Blessing” also exist quite easily without you. I guess the question is, can you exist without them? The horses here have been “alone” all day, though they had each other—it is hard to see them existing without our vision—do things exist without our interpreting them? In this moment it seems that you understand these animals as you haven’t before—instead of the distant watching you do in “By a Lake in Minnesota,” you have somehow, for a moment, entered their world, become one of them, because you see them as lonely. Or perhaps it is they who have entered your world. It is now that you realize that without a body, you would “break into blossom”—finally become a part of nature, as the boy did in “Evening.”

In “A Dream of Burial,” you dream of dying. You are only a foot and a shoulder. You can still hear what is going on in the earth above you. And now you are waiting for nature to take you—your body is finally disappearing. And when it goes, maybe you will join the ranks of the animals at last, those beings that get to live in the world and not interpret it—or take you to a place where there is no death, no loneliness. It is fitting that the angel who waits for you is a horse—that he’s the one that can take you where you want to go.

(Happy Birthday, my dad of poetry...I'm sorry it was all so hard)

Intermission 4: Replaced by a Bible verse

2005-12-05T07:47:00.000-08:00

Apparently, one wedding picture of shrew and the late (ok, estranged) Mr. shrew is equivalent to 1 Corinthians 13:13. Or so thinks my mom, who replaced said wedding picture with this verse, which was printed on fake parchment paper in a tasteful font (something close to Garamond). The original picture was one in a triptych of three black and white photos of the weddings of my brother, my sister, and me. Conveniently, my wedding photo was in the center of the triptych, so it was easily replaced with the verse without destroying any balance or sense of continuity. (For those of you who didn’t have this particular verse rammed down your throat a zillion times in Sunday School, here it is: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” Yes, this was the verse read at my wedding. My mom probably doesn’t remember that.) The change is so subtle that it’s difficult to even see a difference in the arrangement of nearly 20 framed wedding photos that adorn an entire wall in my parents’ house. It’s almost as if I was never married. Hell, it’s almost as if I never existed. But you know, why exist if you’re not married.

The Wedding Wall was created after my sister got married in 2000. The Wedding Wall proves once and for all that the shrew family children are not in fact complete defects, contrary to the opinions of many WL Jr./Sr. High School jocks and bullies. They are not totally worthless because look: someone wanted to marry them. Someone can actually stand being in the same room with these losers. They got married, and can now contribute to society in the way that God intended. Look, there they are in white dresses and tuxes. Never mind the drinking, the Manic Panic, the bad grades, the useless degrees of the past. These former weirdos are FINALLY NORMAL. And, thankfully, straight. Whew!

When I got married at the ripe old age of 30, my mother sighed many audible sighs of relief, and my pictures went up onto the Wedding Wall. She could now close the door on the past embarrassment of having 3 nerdy unloved children, and move into a new future where these safely married humans would hopefully begin to spawn, saving her from further embarrassment. But what happens when one of these former losers proves that she actually never transcended loser status by getting a divorce? She becomes a Bible verse.

While I feel frustrated at being tastefully edited out of the Wedding Wall, I realize that these comments are mean. I need to say also that my mom has been really great through this hellish process. For example: number of times I’ve screamed the f-word on the phone to my mom (not in anger toward her, just in anger over the nightmare that is my life) in the last three months: 4. Number of times I’ve said the f-word ever in my life to my mom previously: 0. She doesn’t even flinch when I say it, nor when I say I never should have gotten married, never wanted to get married, etc. etc. She’s listened to me rehash the whole boring story on daily basis. She lets me say that I’m ugly, I’m horrible, I’m abusive—then tells me that I am none of these things, and she should know because she’s known me since I wore a diaper. She bought me a chartreuse love seat. She is wonderful. But she cares about what the neighbors think. And she wants everything to look pretty and perfect to prove that it must be pretty and perfect. This is the kind of thing you do if you were raised by an alcoholic.

Ok, I think the Wedding Wall shouldn’t even be there because: who cares. Yeah, we got married. Who cares. All three of us have done other things that make us happy, things no one bothers to capture on professional film. But it is there, and my wedding pictures clearly can’t be there anymore, so of course she has to take them down. And she has this really expensive frame, and she really really wants to use it, so something else needs to be in the little slot that previously held a picture of me and some guy kissing, some guy who won’t even tell me where he lives. So here are my suggestions for replacements:

1. Picture of me giving the finger.
2. Picture of me finding out that there's a John Hughes marathon on AMC. A 24-HOUR marathon.
3. The James Tate poem “Goodtime Jesus.”
4. Picture of me and my wonderful female friends kissing each other. In wedding dresses.
5. Picture of me marrying my dachshund. In wedding dresses.
6. A Cornellesque shadow box containing three marbles and a nudie picture.
7. Picture of me curled up in bed reading. Alone. Where I am happiest.

(Oh my God! I should have known that the marriage was doomed. I mean, Corinthians 13:13? It has the mark of the devil all over it.)

Dead Crush #8

2005-11-28T18:38:00.000-08:00

I know, another dead young singer. I promise that I also have crushes on dead old singers, as well as dead writers of comics, dead poets, dead fictionists, dead painters, dead losers, dead homos, dead heteros, dead ladies, and dead guys who were never in a band.

This guy has the scariest voice in the world. I used to freak myself out by listening to the song “Ice Age” on my walkman in the dark in my bedroom until I couldn’t stand it anymore and would have to turn on the light. It was exhilarating. It isn’t just the flat, ineffectual voice, but the eerie clap machine and robotic drums that create this dim parade of weirdly joyless passion. The voice is so far removed from the passion that it has somehow become a new kind of emotion. How can something sound so heartless and heartfelt? It is beautiful because it creates a paradox rather than opposition: a place where something new begins, rather than the turning away or dissolution caused by contradiction.

Instead of making you read a blog entry about Ian Curtis (he hung himself in 1980), I wish I could show you a short unmade film, which stars me at the end of 1993. The soundtrack is the song “Atmosphere,” played on repeat: “Walk in silence, don’t turn away in silence, your confusion, my illusion…” I’m sitting on my mattress, which is on the floor. It’s November and it’s raining. I just got back from Biology and it’s getting dark outside. My walls are floor to ceiling posters, including two wall-sized posters (the Boys Don’t Cry Cure poster and a Morrissey and Siouxsie poster promoting some duet they did). I have a dyed-red bowl cut and wear an old lady dress. I’m chain smoking as I lie back and listen to the music, trying to recover from another exhausting day of being out in the world, before I gather the strength I need to go eat at the dining hall, where hundreds of big-haired and shoe-booted sorority girls will stare at me and my similarly coifed and suited friends. I get up every once in a while to look at myself in the mirror while I smoke. I’m using an antique store tea cup as an ash tray. I am wearing this person like I’d wear an elephant-sized leather elephant suit. It looks ridiculous, though it is soft and comfortable because I can hide in it. I keep trying to make it fit, but it doesn’t somehow, because nothing fits. I’m trying so hard to be one person, because I think that’s normal. I’m a 19-year-old white girl in Iowa and I have no idea who I am. Not too shocking. And somehow the voice of Ian Curtis reflects the sheer terror I feel as I attempt to be this person, though he is also just a prop in this persona I'm trying on. I wish I could show you this me, this me who wasn’t me: a costume with a scared person inside, with many scared people inside, running into and away from each other, terrified because they aren't all exactly the same. Or maybe you should just stop reading now and go listen to Joy Division. Listening to Joy Division is probably better than reading most things; definitely better than reading most things I write. I will say this: no matter how much I tried to be the different characters, one at a time,I always loved the music. I really and truly loved the music, because I didn’t have to be anything when faced with the music. I just had to feel.

I wish I could say that I’m comfortable with all of the people I am now, or that I even really know who they are, but I don’t. I think what I’m getting better at is accepting the contradictions harbored within the teeming shrew psyche. Yes, I like sad scary music by dead guys. And yes I also crave the bittersweet and broken voice of Tammy Wynette. I wish to get totally shitfaced and make out with strangers almost as much as I want to be in the woods alone and stare for hours at a leaf. I want to watch a Real World marathon and I also want to read Ashbery’s “The Skaters” 10,000 times until each word and image become part of my breathing. I want all of these things at the same time. Until now, I’ve seen the contradictions as battling each other, which meant I was either crazy or “unfocused." Now I’m starting to see them approach each other cautiously, maybe give each other sideways glances. The drunken Ashbery-loving me shyly offers the woodlands me a cigarette. “I don’t smoke,” says the woodlands me, “but I don’t mind if you do. I’ll just be over here watching my dog chew on this pinecone.” And the drunken me goes on a crooked walk around the neighborhood in the dark, thinking evil thoughts and loving the world.

Dead Crush #7

2005-11-18T15:48:00.000-08:00

My favorite Johnny Cash song is “Ballad of Barbara.” I’ve been listening to it a lot lately in my car, and whenever it’s over, I get choked up. Sometimes I start crying, and then when I walk into the house crying, (which I do often, for some reason--I do a lot of my crying in the car) I have to tell my dog, "I'm sad," because she always gives me such a weird look when I cry, as if she's not sure it's really me. She doesn't really understand me when I say this, but sometimes she will run to me with both the kong AND the nylabone in her mouth, instead of just the nylabone.

If you don’t know the song, it’s about a man who grows up in the country: “I worked in the fields, and I walked in the woods, and I wondered at creation.” Then,when he becomes a man, he moves to the city. He lives a wild life where people “sleep all day and they wake all night to a world of drink and laughter.” In this world he meets Barbara, whom he marries. She doesn’t care about his country home or his people; in fact, she loves the city so much that by the end of the song she actually turns into concrete and steel. Then the last lines: “Now the cars go by on the interstate, and my pack is on my shoulder; and I’m going home, where I belong, much wiser now, and older.” The way he sings those last words, so slowly and deliberately: “and older,” suddenly makes the whole song about the last two words: running away is something you have to do when you’re young. You have to try out that which is opposite. It’s a way of asking yourself who you are, even if it means abandoning your family, your solitude, your life. When his woman turns away from him, the protagonist knows that it’s time to go back to himself. Instead of regressing, he’s moving forward to the life he used to have. He tried marriage to the person made of skyscraper parts, and now he’s returning to himself, a lone man in the woods, surrounded by green things growing.

Shrew's Spleen Corner

2005-11-15T08:41:00.000-08:00

Dear Readers,

For years, whenever I heard that someone was getting divorced, I privately thought, “Well, they certainly didn’t try very hard. Why did they even get married?” Now when I hear about it, I sometimes get a surge of joy. Especially when I reflect on the oft-quoted statistic about 50% of marriages ending in divorce. Instead of the nattering James Dobsonesque, “This is a travesty!” I think: Awesome. 50% of those dupes actually want to be happy.

Love,
Shrew

Intermission 3

2005-11-11T12:22:00.000-08:00

I filed for divorce today.

It’s been over two months since my husband declared his lack of interest in working on our problems and rented an apartment in some undergrad neighborhood. He told me he needed to be alone for a while, which was a huge lie as he was already making out with someone else. I have no idea what he’s doing now, which is both easier than the alternative and horribly surreal. The good thing is that anything he does now has absolutely nothing to do with my current life. My identity is slowly turning into something fairly novel: me.

Since he moved out, multiple friends and family members have come forward with inspiring stories about various shitty things he has done and said over the years: ways in which he was rude, careless, immature, and basically a four-year-old in a very tall man’s body (people also did this when I broke up with E., the dude I had before him). My reaction to the stories (particularly to one told to my mom by one of her friends I don’t even know, and of course my mom broke a leg running to the phone to tell me) is oh my god, I’m a total tool. I mean, what else am I supposed to think? I spent the last four years of life with someone that bugged nearly everyone I know, and no one said anything (except my siblings). What kind of loser would be with someone like this. Oh, a codependent loser? That's the best kind.
Granted, I’ve often thought the things reported in these stories, and related complaints to my twin and other close friends on occasion. But I see the Saying Mean Things About Exes in much the same way I see Saying Mean Things About Indiana—don’t do it unless you’re from there. Of course, I know that from the friend side at least, they’re trying to show their solidarity and compassion with/for me by dissing on him. And I appreciate it, though sometimes it makes me feel sad and weird (and sometimes I ask for it). I don’t know what my family members’ reasons are. Oh yeah, to show me that I really am a failure after all. Anyway, the reason I’m not with him anymore has nothing to do with how annoying or inappropriate he is. It has a lot more to do with the fact that he is just simply not the right person for me. We don’t know how to make each other happy, and we never have.

Though everything I’ve written heretofore is true, this is also true: I miss him terribly in sad sad late night ways, and I spend most of my days feeling like someone ripped my right arm and leg out of their sockets, switched them, and forced me to walk around like that and won’t tell me where to go. And there are tons of mirrors everywhere. And ledges, many many ledges.

Dead Crush #6

2005-11-02T15:06:00.000-08:00

I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, but part of my attraction to the pre-husband boyfriend (in addition to his resemblance to Jarvis Cocker and his many horrible/fabulous habits), was the fact that he knew various famous people. He had lived in L.A. briefly, where he was the lead singer of a heavy metal band (one that he described as “ironic”). During this time, he knew and hung out with Beck, Rivers Cuomo, and other up-and-coming rockers. In fact, when he left L.A. to return to his native NH, the then-unfamous Beck moved into the apartment E. moved out of. The 23-year-old me was very impressed by this information, and was even more impressed with the music video of E.’s band that was filmed by someone-famous-that-I-now-forget. One of the highlights of the gritty, documentary-style video was a guy in a hot dog suit chasing a sexy waitress.

E.’s other main famous-connection was to Elliot Smith: the sad, sad singer-man who killed himself two years ago. Elliot was E.’s brother’s best friend, and E. knew him fairly well too, at least well enough for us to hang out with him every time he came to the Middle East in Cambridge to perform, which seemed like about twice a year when I lived out there. Elliot had briefly dated one of E.’s best friends, so she always came with us to see him too. What would usually happen is this: we would go backstage to see him and it was awkward and sort of awful, because Elliot, truth be told, seemed awkward and sort of awful. It would get better when we would then meet him at a bar after the show, because by then he would have consumed many, many drinks, and was actually a little bit witty. Then E. would consume many, many drinks, and HE was far from witty. In fact, some sort of fight with a stranger often happened on the nights after Elliot Smith shows—most likely E. dealing with his failed-rock-star jealousy. (Please let me never date another musician. Please.) Once there was no visible fight but E. disappeared for a really long time and came back with a huge unexplained gash on his hand. (I know you’re probably wondering what I was doing with this person, and if so I must ask you to reference Dead Crush #1.)

Elliot Smith’s mythology includes being totally ostracized and ridiculed in the horrible middle/high school years, and that is enough to make me have a crush on anyone. Anyone that can survive that and become famous gets many back-rubbings from me. (I missed 37 days of eighth grade due to the worst bully in the world. If you see him, make sure to gauge his eyes out for me, as I have not yet become famous.) Another reason for my undying love: the song "Pitseleh." And another reason: his covers of not-immediately-cool-seeming-songs that are actually amazing. Like “Supersonic” by Oasis? Who would have thought? And my favorite, which I saw him sing live: “Jealous Guy.” I cried.

I had a brief conversation with a friend this AM about whether or not Sylvia Plath was suited for this world. Was she never meant to be here? I can’t believe that, or believe it about anyone who kills him/herself. The shadow theory seems so much more likely to me. I do have to say that I kind of wish I hadn’t met ES, though I didn’t know him well at all, as I was much too awkward around him (and drunk) to try to have a one-on-one with him. My image of him now is of a very, very unhappy person. Nothing could save him. I can’t believe that music that beautiful couldn’t save someone.

Shrew's Spleen Corner

2005-10-31T16:56:00.000-08:00

Dear Readers,

I hope that my husband’s new girlfriend is patient. The guy can talk. And that she has no needs of her own. And is able to translate his language (a combination of quotes from I Heart Huckabees and the Wes Anderson oeuvre). And is not offended by his sexist humor (and certainly never claims that women in this country have any difficulty of any kind). And that she is not “negative” (of COURSE she isn’t). Oh, and (yes, I’m going to say it) likes having sex that lasts 1-2 minutes.

Love,
Shrew

Dead Crush #5

2005-10-27T21:58:00.000-07:00

I know this one’s really obvious. Except maybe you didn’t think I could have a crush on a dead woman. You were wrong.

I think about Sylvia Plath at least once a day, and have done so for about 5 years. I believe that I’m leading a life which very closely parallels the one that Sylvia led, except I’m not bipolar, am not a native New Englander, and do not have children. Nor did I marry a stuffy English poet. Here’s what we do have in common: obsessive journaling, obsessive behavior in general, poetry, love of beauty and clothing, love of food and cooking, obsession with our bodies and appearances, desire to live as an outsider, fear of life as an outsider, desire for perfect balance of work and love, betrayal by our husbands, procrastination, attraction to abusive losers, fear of our shadow selves. She offed herself when she was my age exactly. I don’t think I’ll do this (I have about 2 months left of 31hood), but who knows. Sylvia may decide that I should (this is not a cry for help, by the way—I still need to publish my book and leave this state for good before I die).

What do I think of when I think of Sylvia Plath once a day? Her pages-long description of the pleasures of elaborate nose-picking (another thing we share in common). Her obsession over whether or not to work, and where the money was going to come from if she didn’t work full time. Her pictures. How she got up at 5 am every morning after that bastard left her and wrote like a fiend before her kids woke up, and wrote the best poems of her life, some of the best poems in English. Her mother telling her, in a letter, “You are a child of the universe. You deserve to be here.” Her poems, of course—these lines in particular:

“I am mad, calls the spider, waving its many arms.”

“The dead bell/the dead bell//Somebody’s done for.”

“I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.”

“Love, love, my season.”

“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” (of course)

“Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.”

“Eye, the cauldron of morning.”

I think about her fretting over sweaters. I think about her making some kind of stew or cake. I think about her in Spain, England, Massachusetts. I think about her worrying about publishing, the same worries I have.

More than a crush, I think of her as my partner. At 31 she had already died twice. Like the other ones who died, her shadow overtook her, right after she finally embraced it.

Robert Johnson (the psychologist, not the musician) writes that the bigger the creativity in a person, the more overwhelming the shadow. He uses Picasso and others as examples. I have felt very overwhelmed by my shadow self the last few years, because in suppressing it, it caused me to be hurtful to someone I loved, someone who happened to be the one who encouraged the stifling of the shadow. According to Johnson, if you don’t honor and acknowledge the shadow self in a regular ritual, it will begin to control you, until you are all shadow. So now I’m trying to figure out what my ritual is going to be. Because my shadow, unsuppressed, appears to be quite large. In fact, it is not only bigger than the shadows of the people who wanted me to suppress it, it is bigger than all of the actual people themselves. Am I bragging? Maybe, though in the past I would have been ashamed to even mention this, let alone exalt it.

Right now, my ritual is screaming various obscenities at a pillow until I start crying. Sometimes the crying begins before the obscenities come out. Sometimes the crying begins the second I step out of the building where I work. The shadow saying, “Can I come out NOW?” Although that might not be all shadow--there is quite a bit of loss in there right now.

I am pissed. I think the whole thing is really sexist. What whole thing? All of it. Life. I feel like I’m not supposed to have a shadow because I’m blonde and nice. I’m from Iowa. I like dogs and babies. I listen and am helpful. And I fantasize about killing, maiming, and arson. I was born with this stuff. I’m not a bad person. No one ever says to men, "Hey buddy, let's see a little sunshine. Turn that frown upside down!" I can’t tell you how many men in my life have told me, no, COMMANDED me, to smile. “Hey, would it hurt you to smile?”

Yes. It will kill both of us.

(Happy birthday, Sylvia)

Dead Crush #4

2005-10-21T16:31:00.000-07:00

Don’t imagine having sex with Jackson Pollock. Just don’t. You won’t like it.

I have been very angry for two solid months. I feel worried about what will happen when the anger goes away entirely. Sometimes it does go away and I feel delicate and shaky. I will be talking to my sister on the phone and will recall a time that my husband said something funny, adorable, or wonderful. He can be all of these things, occasionally. I will feel sad and tormented. Later, I will remember that I made his girlfriend dinner and complimented her stupid outfits before he declared his love for her: a chipmunky person who drives an SUV. Then the anger will come back and I will cuddle down in it, at home once again. My anger has become more like one of those body pillows than like the burning hot spear of hatred it once was. I need it. It helps me go to sleep.

However, the images of the girlfriend make me less and less mad. Two months is a long time to think about someone with no ideas or anything interesting contribute to the fabric of human experience. There are many other things to be angry about: the destruction of the future I imagined for myself, for example. But there are other futures. More than anything right now, I feel sort of…content. I don’t think good things about my husband. The funny, adorable, and wonderful things are like cheap plasticky trinkets now. They are sort of worthless. Pretty and cute, but not much else. I need stuff that is more like very heavy Victorian furniture right now. Fortunately, the furniture is right here inside shrew. I don’t need some dude to make me complete. In fact, I fear how little I need or want a dude. I mean, for Relationship purposes. Am I my own boyfriend? Sort of.

I do love Jackson Pollock so much. I’ve always known that I would name my kid after him. I love any story about him beating the crap out of someone at the Cedar Bar, or overturning tables, or doing other Jackson Pollock drunk stuff. Have you seen the movies of him painting? I want living to be like that. I’ve often been envious of men and the social acceptance of their violence. OK, the violence isn’t REALLY accepted, but I bet a lot more people would have been on the phone in hushed tones had it been ME who punched a hole in the wall at a restaurant where I worked many years ago, rather than my boyfriend at that time. The loud unreal crack of a fist going through the wall. The weird quiet afterwards. I say this as someone who has been hit in the face before by someone she loves: Don’t you wish it had been me? Don’t you kind of wish it had been you?

Intermission 2

2005-10-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

I can't resist another picture of George.

Intermission

2005-10-17T11:46:00.000-07:00

Things I Can Do Guilt-free Now That I Am Unmarried Person (note: I am still officially married)

1. Eat many varieties of meat, including some kind of Portuguese steak.
2. Smoke.
3. Drink heartily.
4. Talk on the phone for more than 15 minutes.
5. Have friends.
6. Write.
7. Make stuff. Spend over one hour making stuff.
8. Hug my dog.
9. Sleep with my dog every night.
10. Talk to my dog on any topic, for any length of time that I choose.
11. Talk.
12. Feel.
13. Emote.
14. Think pure evil thoughts and occasionally say them out loud.
15. Lust after strangers.
16. Lust after nonstrangers.
17. Listen to George Jones.
18. Listen to Tammy Wynette.
19. Watch the Lifetime movies “Sex and the Single Mom” and “Sex and the Single Mom II.”
20. Believe in god.
21. Be uncool.
22. Be totally cool.
23. Hate most indie rock music.
24. Hate all people that communicate solely through movie quotes.
25. Need my sister.
26. Be sarcastic, mean, and unhappy.
27. Be uncute. Be the opposite of cute.
28. Be a total fucking bitch.
29. Be alone.
30. Be alone.
31. Be alone.

One for each year I've been alive. Though that's a coincidence.

Dead Crush #3

2005-10-06T09:12:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wonder if I’m just the kind of person people want to cheat on. It seems significant that the two people I’ve cared most about have done it. Of course, one was abusive and one incapable of empathy, but it still hurts like anything. And of course, they didn’t MEAN to cheat on me. You know, they just ACCIDENTLY found themselves naked with a seventeen-year-old while I was out of town. Or ACCIDENTLY fell in love with their short, annoying, poor-little-rich-girl-codependent photography teacher right under my nose, while making me feel like I was crazy to think that there was anything going on. I probably deserved it, though, right? I mean, I’m CRAZY. I want ATTENTION. I have EMOTIONS.

Anyway. You know who doesn’t cheat? George Harrison. Why doesn’t he? Well, he’s dead. And also I never dated him. I think he did cheat though—he stole Eric Clapton’s wife (aside: Gram Parsons stole David Crosby’s wife). Is that cheating? Anyway, he didn’t cheat on me for the entire 6 months the 20-year-old version of him was my imaginary boyfriend. Kind of like Gram is my imaginary boyfriend now. And HE certainly doesn’t cheat on me. In fact, I’m the best thing that ever happened to him (though this is often THE VERY THING that causes them to cheat).

I told my therapist that the only boyfriend I can handle right now is an imaginary one. She laughed, but I don’t think she knew that I’m dead serious: I have an imaginary boyfriend. And I didn’t tell her that I’ve had imaginary boyfriends for various reasons since I was about six. (Davy Jones of the Monkees was the first one. I used to have a weird fantasy about him naked in a bathroom with Dolly Parton.) It kind of makes sense at six or even sixteen. I think at thirty-one it might be a little sad. But what do you want? My husband just dumped me for his fucking teacher. I’m a little sad.

George did not die young. He was a good boy. Well, he did enough LSD to kill a small donkey. But he cleaned up and lived to the ripe old age of 58. I shouldn’t be flippant about it—I was very sad when he died. I listened to All Things Must Pass about hundred times and cried. He has been my favorite Beatle since I was about four years old, when that Beatles cartoon used to come on TV. He’s always called “the quiet Beatle,” but that’s just a way of not giving him a steadfast identity. He was the only one who didn’t have to thrash around in the persona box created by the media until he was a caricature of himself. Just watch A Hard Day’s Night. Paul is so self-conscious about his cuteness that it’s painful to watch. And John is so focused on being witty that you just want to strangle him. And Ringo is, well, Ringo. George is just himself—a beautiful goofball, a trickster, a real musician. This is the George who was my boyfriend about ten years ago.

The imaginary boyfriend is so much more pleasant than the real one. The way you become my imaginary boyfriend is that I listen to your music on my walkman every waking moment (except now, because I don’t have a walkman) and I visualize different types of 1) meeting for the first time 2) various dates 3) meeting my family (my grandma was particularly smitten with Rivers Cuomo) 4) making out, but usually no actual sex. The real boyfriend: 1) I meet WHILE making out with him, usually 2) there are no dates—you go from the hookup to attached at the hip 3) my family has never liked anyone I’ve dated (or married) because they’re all so annoying and/or evil 4) everything they do is a ploy to make you want to have sex with them, and they usually don’t appreciate a fully-or partially-clothed make-out session after about week one.

I think I’ve always assumed that I can’t have these things with real relationships. But what I’m asking for isn’t that earth-shattering: dates, my family liking them (not so much the whole family, but my siblings, at least), appreciating each other. Not what I imagine most people fantasize about. But I’ve never really had these things, because I’m not very good at choosing. I don’t choose, really, I allow.

So this is telling: Every single imaginary boyfriend is a musician (the dead crushes haven’t all been boyfriends). Usually a guitar player. I think. I guess there was that brief thing with Elijah Wood. But that was mostly a strange desire to make out with a hobbit (I’m sorry this is so confessional; divorce will do that to a person). The real boyfriends have all been musicians too, though most of them half-assed or so driven and goal-oriented that they sucked all the beauty out of it, if there was even any there to begin with (doubtful). The thing the imaginary musician boyfriends have in common: passion. Passion, passion, passion. What’s the one thing lacking in every real boyfriend I’ve had? You guessed it. Oh, let me rephrase that—passion for something outside of THEIR EGOS. Of course, I don’t know if the imaginary boyfriends are passionate in real life. But that doesn’t matter—I’ve never even heard them talk, only sing. I have imaginary relationships based entirely on singing and guitar-playing. And it is enough. I’ve had too many real relationships that are based solely on talking. That is, them talking. Me listening. And listening and listening. Might as well listen to something pretty.

The George songs are the best, don’t you think? Or I don’t know if it’s his songs as much as it is his earnest, nasal voice. He has a way of singing the word “taxman” that gives it about twenty weird half-syllables. His voice is very textured and oddly innocent. But if you really aren’t sure if you’re in love with George or not, please PLEASE listen to him sing Carl Perkins songs. You’ll see him in the way that I want him to be forever: young, skinny-legged, kind, in love with the music. He was kind right up until the end, and I wish he hadn’t suffered so much when he died.

I don’t think I need to give up my imaginary boyfriends yet. They let me practice the art of appreciating someone’s passion. Someday I’ll get to do this on a real person, because I actually believe there are real live passionate men out there who know what they want. They might even want to go on dates. I think adults might do that. And I’ll bet quite a few of them are not musicians. And maybe some of them might care that I’m a passionate person too. Maybe.

Dead Crush #2

2005-09-28T09:16:00.000-07:00

Of course, most of the dead people died by doing stupid things. They died young and so are young and beautiful forever. Not that I don’t also have crushes on dead old people.

Once in a bar bathroom in Dover NH a very drunk 50-something woman slurred at me: “I used to be young once too.” It was a strange accusation. I was 24, probably at my physical prime in spite of the cigarettes and drinking, and I hated myself. I think when they die young, they probably don’t like themselves too much. I am saddened at my attraction to this. I know I’ve already mentioned my love of self-destruction in (male) others. I’m sure this won’t be the last time. I’m also startled and surprised by my steadfast heteroness. But I’ll get into that another time.

So I’ve never really crushed on James Dean, per se. I mean, he’s so obvious. This is mostly an excuse to write about one of my weaknesses. Without the JD model, I would have been without a major real-life crush experience: on the fragile, world-weary, hard-living, touchingly sexist Greaser.

Have you ever waited 7 hours in the rain to meet Morrissey at a signing? I did, circa 1993. Did I see him? No. Did the ten or so pale but tough boys with greased hair and triple-rolled jeans who were somehow mysteriously moved to the front of the line get to? Yes, and one came out breathing into a paper bag. Did anyone else get to see him? No. And there were plenty of other people in rolled-up jeans and horn-rimmed glasses that didn’t get to see him either. It’s not really any surprise that someone who sang “…and the rain that flattens my hair, oh these are the things that kill me…” would inspire a whole white (and Chicano, too, actually) culture of fashion clones. But since Morrissey’s style was based on James Dean’s greaserness (I mean, he left Primrose Hill to film a video in Fairmount, IN, where he lip-synced while lying on Dean’s grave) I credit JD with indirectly creating this whole greaser fashion of the late eighties/early nineties.

My first boyfriend was one of these fake Morrissey greasers. He was very quiet and occasionally used Butch Wax. And fake because his parents were middle class Iowa Democrats who still went to political rallies. The fakeness didn’t make him any less attractive to me, but mostly because I didn’t know there were real greasers still, people who held onto their Vitalis, Levi’s, bikes, and sideburns because daddy did, and daddy before him did too.

But they did exist. And some of them lived in Iowa. Two of them were brothers who drove school busses and fronted a rockabilly band called the Roughhousers. Oh My God. I can’t even begin to explain how in love I was. Obviously from a long line of working-class drunks, they themselves went nowhere without their flasks and Lucky Strikes. (Oh, there are issues here, me being attracted to and idealizing what is essentially a class difference. But the issues are complicated, as I am also from a long line of working-class drunks. These drunks just don’t happen to be my parents. I’m just saying they weren’t POSING, as many early nineties twenty-somethings did, as (some) of the Morrissey clones did. And as I did, when I thought that as a college student I’d ever have a chance with one of them.) Their rock shows were attended by punks and old locals alike. They went NUTS on stage. I believe the genre is sometimes referred to as Psychobilly. It made perfect sense to me.

I had no chance with either of them, as they were both married or otherwise entangled, and, as I said above, they probably weren’t interested in English majors, even those wearing fifties dresses. I don’t think I’d really figured out yet that it wasn’t a costume. It was who they were.

I understood this much better with the next greasers I met (they would hate it if I knew I called them that, by the way) in Portsmouth NH. Also in school-bus related fields (they repaired them), the two J.s were probably kindest guys I’ve ever met. They preferred Johnny Cash to psychobilly, had beautiful cars and beautiful eyes. I met them at a particularly low period in my relationship with E. They were sitting with yet another J. at a bar I went to nearly every weekend while E. was working his third-shift job. I had seen one of the J.s around town and was very drawn to him, so I went to the table at sat down. He was the sweetest, most polite man I’d ever met. His pompadour was not greasy, and he gave the impression of being both large and small at the same time. He refused to let me pay for any of my drinks. He was quiet but very funny. He was from up North and had the reassuring accent of that area. So far, I had only met dads with that accent. I don’t even remember what we talked about, but I felt very appreciated after the months of abuse I’d been suffering under E. J. complimented my shirt, my eyes, and my laugh. He held bar doors and car doors (he had a sweet, sweet, sweet MG that he fixed up himself) open for me. He didn’t ask for my number. His friend, the other J., was smaller but equally sweet. He didn’t really talk to me because he had a girlfriend. I felt incredibly guilty.

This went on for several weekends. J. still had not asked for my number. It appeared that he was courting me in a kind of old fashioned way. I don’t think we ever touched each other on accident, even. He wasn’t all sunshine and roses, though—the guy could drink. I got the sense that he could really mess someone up, but that he would do anything in his power to protect his woman from this side of him. Sexist, yes; but I appreciated it. It was almost like I was experimenting with a traditionally gendered relationship, but with a person I was desperately attracted to, which normally wouldn’t have been the case in such a relationship. The girlfriend who usually went with me on these excursions told me I should break up with E. immediately; didn’t I see now that I could be with someone who was nice to me?

One night we went to the all-night restaurant where E. worked. I still hadn’t told either J. about him. I knew at some point this had to end, but I had hoped it wouldn’t be in the way it did. Of course E. saw me coming in with the J.s. Of course he made a big point of coming over and sitting down and pawing me all over. Of course J. gave me a confused look. And of course he got up and sat with another woman across the room, a younger woman I knew who wasn’t very nice. He made a show of hugging her and then leaning across the table to engage her in intimate conversation. “Is he mad?” I asked the other J.

“I don’t think he knew you had a boyfriend,” he said. He seemed confused too.

Ugh. I’m such a jerk.

I don’t think that J. and I really had too much in common. I think what we both liked was making another person feel happy, as stupid and simple as that sounds. We never got close enough to hurt each other. The more I was wooed by the opened car door, the more chairs that were pulled out for me, and like that. Around him, I became sweet and sort of helpless. That wouldn't have worked for too long.

I’m still drawn to greasers both real and fake, and I can usually tell which kind they are by merely looking. The fakes have modeled themselves on an idea, rather than simply living the idea. James Dean was a model for Morrissey and his retinue: be bad, look good while doing it. The real greasers don’t need this model. They live it because it was handed down to them. I don’t know if it’s anything to be proud of: static 1950s white male “rebellion.” I learned a lot from J. though—he was 100% true to himself. And he looked really, really good in his car. Just like JD.

Dead Crush #1

2005-09-25T18:15:00.000-07:00

Me and Gram Parsons on a motorcycle at dusk. Me and Gram Parsons in the cab of someone else’s semi, barreling toward a creepy dawn. Me and Gram and my loneliness and his loneliness. Gram and my loneliness. I’m somewhere else. See those leaves rustling in a park in a strange night wind? I’m not there either. A bottle many years ago in a park. Part of me might be there. I disappeared.

He died in a desert from morphine and tequila. He cheated and lied. But inside that weakness, the horrifying potential. The weakness in all of them, the potential that leaks out and makes you fall in love with them all over again, even after they lie to you, even after they lie to you for the last time.

The night E. threw a bottle at the go-go dancer I stayed all night in the bar with him as he yelled and got drunker and drunker. I sat at the other end of the bar and watched him. I don’t even know if he knew I was there. Once he picked a fight with someone who made fun of his pink golf pants. It was tempting to make fun of him until he kicked your ass. I watched from a window inside and then went out to help him even though he told me to go away. Once he screamed at my sister, who is the most precious person in the world to me, the one person I’d kill for, (I mean it, I can feel the gun in my hand now as I imagine avenging her imaginary death) on a sidewalk late at night, the night he got arrested at a hot dog stand. I wanted to break up with him then. I was with him for three more years.

What should they do with this love? Gram’s love was so gigantic and desperate. If he had given it to himself, he might still be here. Why do they think that their love can only go to someone else? He was obsessed with loneliness and it powered everything he created. If he couldn’t give his love to someone, would it disappear? And who would he be without love? In “To Love Somebody,” he sings “I’m just a man, can’t you see that’s what I am, and I breathe every breath that I take for you. But what good does breathing do if I can’t have you, if I can’t have you?” In this song and so many others, the definition of man is love for a woman he can’t have or has lost. Man equals unused love. What happens to the man if the love isn’t accepted? He stops breathing? Yes. And what is a woman? Oxygen. And we find this attractive? Uh, yeah. Well, for six months or so. Or the length of time it takes to listen to a Gram Parsons song at least 14 times in a dark room after your husband leaves you.

E. could have beaten me up, could have really hurt me, could have destroyed me. That reality breathed down my neck every time I thought about leaving him. We both knew it was there. It was the little ghost that walked between us. It linked us. “I can’t leave him,” I told my sister. “I’m his only advocate.” I said this the night he told her to shut up and then dropped her off at his friend’s house in a town she didn’t know. I chose him over her, I did it again and again. I chose the slow wearing away of who I am over…I don’t even know what the other option is. I imagine, now that I’ve let another person use me up and leave me, that I’ll find out. I keep choosing this wearing away. Now I’m not choosing it, and I don’t know what else there is.

I guess it’s pretty obvious. I’ve wanted to save someone who thinks I’m their only hope. How can I have been so many people’s only hope? My former sister-in-law used those exact words the other day: “We thought you were his only hope.” I keep thinking I see a glimmer of what they could be through all of the fuckedupness, their desperateness to figure out what to do with love. Sustaining a relationship that’s based on me taking care of them ultimately causes me to detach, like I did with all of them. ALL of them. And then they hurt me, each one more than the last. My reward for being oxygen is always betrayal. I refuse to ever again be responsible for helping someone be who they should be. I want some who’s finished. If only that didn’t sound so unattractive.

He wasn’t really a rock star even though he dressed like one. He wore beautiful clothes; he dressed like an extravagant woman. Near the end, his voice broke and cracked over his sad, sad words. The voice was gone but the hurt was still there, more raw than ever. It was so raw that he couldn’t even sing alone; he needed Emmy Lou to carry his voice with hers. I don’t know if they ever had anything together besides their voices, but he said this about singing with women, “Singing with chicks always seems to work out at least half good, and if you get a really good chick it works better than anything, because you can look at each other with love in your eyes.” But he knew how to empathize. What other man could sing “Do Right Woman” and make you believe him?

I’ve looked at a lot of pictures of Gram Parsons. My favorite thing about him: he’s just a guy. Like many guys before and after him, he ran away. His marriage was nearly over when he ran away for the last time. The things he loved kept him running: motorcycles, trucks, drugs, Jesus, music. They were all a way of transporting him somewhere else. When he died, Gram’s road manager stole the coffin with Gram’s body in it so his stepfather wouldn’t get half of his estate. Even after he died, he was running.

So my confession is that I want to be a savior. Because I know that’s what Gram wanted and that’s what they’ve all wanted so far. Basically, I don’t know how to be desirable if I can’t change your life. I won’t do it again, and I realize that I’m going to have to sacrifice a great deal of my own definition of love, of what it means to be a woman, in order to do this. I may never be in love again without it. So can I ask this: What about my love? Where is our love, women’s love? What am I supposed to do with my love? Why is it always about their stupid love? Also there’s this, if I can actually say it: Love destroyed me.