I think the time has come for me to give in and look into Movable Type or some such automated service. I have a lot more to say then I get down on here, but often the idea of trudging through and creating archives and things wards me off.
This was who died. I met him when I was 17 and I didn’t see him often after that, though he remained a close friend of my mother’s. Not to bombard you with this cliché, but I couldn’t stop thinking about him after the night I met him. He changed my life subtly in the sense that I was 17 and highly fidgety and insecure, and he made me feel good about myself. The funeral was today. I have lots to say about it, and maybe I’ll get it all down at a later date. I’ve never been to a funeral before, and I am not a public crier, but when the bagpiper walked in the quiet church playing Amazing Grace, it was over for me. I have never heard a more beautiful, mournful sound in my life.
I’ll be back in Minnesota Friday night, hopefully unexploded. While I’m not too worried (yet, we’ll see on Friday) about the new terrorist alerts, it still makes me a little edgy, especially now that the air marshals are being taken off the flights. Let’s hope that little number will ruin America’s confidence in Bush and he won’t get reelected.
I just got back from falling down my wet back porch steps. My feet are covered in mud and crepe myrtle leaves. I feel a bit like I’ve been floating in a river.
He won’t make it through the night. This was Wednesday. That phrase has been repeating, echoing, bouncing off your brain wall. He won’t make it through the night. Why the night? Why is the night the one that’s impossible to finish? What about the night exhausts the cells, weakens the will, frightens the spirit? He won’t make it through the night. But he did, actually.
Sunday will be it. Please, no outside visitors, his last remaining days will be spent with family. His last remaining days. Does he know? He is deep in coma, morphine-clouded. But something must know. Sunday will be it. And it was, actually.
So what? what now? He was alive and now he is not. I shot straight up at 11:34 AM. The phone ring invaded my dream. This is it, I told Chris next to me, this is it, this is call. I pulled on jeans, a shirt, went downstairs. That wasn’t it. He was still alive. Back to bed, my arm around his sleepy skin. 11:39, the phone went again. This was the call. This was the call. He was alive, and now five minutes later, he is not. Where is the shifting of energy? Where is the cosmic earthquake? We knew this was coming.
I watch my mother pull herself together, make the phone calls, get dressed, go to the house. We sit stiffly in the living room. My mother has told us to tell anyone who calls that he has died. We look at the phone in horror. What? What?
Time is hot, and it laughs, the easy Buddhist belly guffaw of something that knows this is just how things go. My mother returns. He died in his wife’s arms. What? What? Please don’t. Because: can you imagine? Can you? All your love, a knife, sterilized and sharp. All your love, dissonant brass, in this human being, in this voicebox, this Adam’s apple, this nape of neck (how you touched it! how you touched it, with no thought, while watching the news or dozing in church). All your love, desisted, in the crook of your arm. Gone. Not slowly, more instant then you believed. The speed of sound is humbled by this man’s death.
There will be a viewing. I’ve never been to a funeral. I’ve never been to a viewing. I have a viewing of heart, of being 17 and bored in a winter power outage. Of kicking back in the squad room with my mother and her colleagues, of being half in love with him by the first hour and being what they call a goner by the second. Of learning about his remission, and being thankful that this laughing man with the shiny eyes would not be a medical journal statistic.
He was alive and now he is not. I am alive and I will not be. My parents, my brother, my beloved boy, my dogs are alive and will not be. My mother’s gold yearbook, smelling of must and heat. These pictures, these gangly, funny, toothy teenagers. Who has died? Which girl with the varsity cheerleading letter, who thought she was going to be lithe and honey blonde forever, is rotted bones? I am surrounded by dead things. Nothing has lived, not these people, not my memories of being a gangly funny toothy blonde teenager, writing awful poetry about my startling insecurities and my broken hearts.
He was alive and now he is not. Try to imagine the universe. Try to imagine an apricot-colored dart frog in the Congo. Imagine my love for you, swift and featherlight. Imagine her feeling the very last waning thump of her husband’s heartbeat, the breath, the catch in the throat, the air in the room, the cloth in her hand, the feeling in stomach, the white knuckles, the head screams, and then nothing.
None of us will make it through the night. In the morning, there is nothing there that was alive in the musky evening. I am alive, and I will not be.
Neither will you. The dark swallows. We are nightshade and white honeysuckle. We are rotten bones, and we will not make it through the night.
There will be a viewing.
Chris came to visit me in Virginia for the weekend on a very whimmy whim, so my writing is sparse. Right now, he and my brother are playing a racing game on the Playstation downstairs and calling each other weird curse words, like “monkeynuts” and “cockrobin.” I will have more to say at a later date when I am not trying to pull my boyfriend away from Dirt to Daytona
It’s been a rather odd week, full of supreme highs and terrible lows. I wouldn’t even know where to begin in telling you, but I will tell you that today I sat on the bay of the Appomattox River in the hot 3 PM sun and thought how I would never leave Virginia again. Isn’t that dramatic? But immersed in the fish and dogwood smell of the river, with my back to the heat and the slow sweet silence of a 100 degree Southern afternoon, the thought seemed entirely rational.
This writing is, unfortunately, a crime against humanity because it’s an update for the sake of an update. Sometimes, I can’t stand to see my poor gray and blue (not intentionally Confederate) webspace bearing stale writing, so here is something new, though I have nothing to say at all.
I could say: this morning, before my dentist appointment, I ate a banana. As I was brushing my teeth, I contemplated flossing and then decided against it because I was late and plus, it was only a banana. When I walked into the dental room, there was a poster on the ceiling of a monkey wearing a dumb shirt, eating a banana with the words: “Floss After Every Banana!” It gave me chills, in a 1984 sort of way.
That reminded me of the time I went with Chris to a CD duplication shop to pick up the copies of his Live With Orchestra CD. I was standing outside the office, watching the owner of the shop talk to Chris and I kept thinking to myself that the owner looked a lot like Penn or Teller, but I couldn’t remember who was who in the duo. Chris called me to come in to sign something, and when I walked in, the owner said ominously, “Penn.” I had another 1984 chills moment until I realized he was offering Chris a pen.
Also: today, while at the eye doctor, I mentioned I had just come from the dentist (or rather, I drooled this because I was still shot full of Novocain and chipmunk-cheeked), and my eye doctor got really excited, and then whipped out a picture of him and my dentist from when they were both 12 years old and in Boy Scouts together. It’s a small town.
That’s all I got. Some external links:
Chris wrote a funny entry on the Sunny Wicked blog.
Kip is a really beautiful photographer
Poke a penguin (a link completely filched from Dane)
Okay. Sleep.
Thoughts about home:
Though it’s going on almost two years now, my family continues to be baffled by my vegetarianism. Today, I was asked if I ate mushrooms. Five minutes later, I was asked if I ate sugar. And then for the grand finale, I was offered bacon because that’s not “real meat.”
It always takes me a while to get used to the fact that people constantly want to talk to me at home. I mean, I’m grateful I have a wonderful family who takes an interest me, but I’m not used to constant talking. In the house I’m living in now, and the previous house I lived in (actually, the whole last four years of my life), there’s always been an unspoken rule: if someone is in their bedroom, you don’t really go into chat all that often unless you need something or you need to confide or you’re bored out of your skull and absolutely no other alternate entertainment is present. Even then, chit-chat is minimal. When the person is in a communal area, such as the kitchen or living room, that’s usually a sign the person would enjoy conversation. My family is constantly popping their head in while I’m reading or typing or even bathing to ask me questions or to chatter. And while I don’t mind it (I’m only home twice a year, as it is), it’s rather unnerving when someone has asked me if I’m doing alright for the twentieth time because I want to scream, “YES, FOR GOD’S SAKE, YES!”
I know my family is a little worried about me because I came home looking sickly from all my various ailments and also a little depressed because I tend to be a little depressed now and then, but still.
I really don’t understand how my house accumulates what it does. From my vantage point, I can see a small lamp with Homer eating a nuclear waste-filled donut as the base, a stuffed pig, a headless Darth Vader and a keychain that says “Exotic, Erotic and a little Neurotic.”
During this writing, I was interrupted twice, once to ask if I eat bananas, and another by the dog, who barked twice, threw a stuffed monkey in my lap and then rolled on the floor.
I feel like I live in Willy Wonka’s personal home, sometimes.
I lived, though it was questionable for a while and that was before I even got to the airport, but I won’t get into that, just know that a lot of dramatic weeping and death threats occurred. After many shots of the appropriately titled Southern Comfort, and then a glass of whiskey consumed in thirty seconds, I was sufficiently plastered enough to fly without worry. I’m too sleepy now to put actual thought into what I’m writing, so I’ll leave you with a transcription of some of my drunken scribblings from the airport and flight:
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I’m flying to Virginia tonight. I am a white-knuckled mess, as usual. I’ll be updating from home, so don’t fear. Just use your best levitating spells to keep my plane from falling.
Do you have any idea how much I censor myself on here? If you could see how wide apart my hands were right now, then you would know, but you don’t, unless you’re hiding behind the purple tree outside my window, which is highly possible since it’s dark and my windows face into an alley.
But censoring. Yes. I do it for a number of reasons. One is that I have this grandiose notion of self-preservation. I know there are people who have known me in my in-the-flesh life who dislike me, for whatever reasons they have convinced themselves of, and are antsy for me to show a vulnerability. This isn’t an egotistical statement; it’s unfortunately a fact because don’t we all know people who feed rabidly on weaknesses? So, I keep my pride and my underclothes in check.
I also censor because I have this overwhelming nervousness about sounding like an immature young whiny-girl, which in truth, I am. I mean, I don’t have a job (I will, but not now). I spend my days in ugly outfits eating straight from sauce pans and spying on the Best Buy across the street and congratulating myself for walking through Target without having a fucking seizure because seriously, that place is big and that place is colorful, and you have to be drunk or perky to enjoy it, and I’m neither.
I have 200 dollars to my name, a faulty incomplete college education and many many dreams, desires, etc., put on hold for personal reasons that I will not dare delve into because I am INVINCIBLE and INVULNERABLE. But do you see? People I admire, online and in real life, are getting internships and have retirement funds and self supported apartments and scholarships, and I cringe everytime I write drivel about thongs or having the flu or about stupid orange cream pops because I am pale in comparison to retirement funds! You know that video-game- playing greasy-haired 20something stereotype you always hear about and cluck your tongue about and are glad that’s not you? Well, that’s me. Thank you very much.
I censor because I am so worried about everything I write, how it sounds – am I witty? does this sound beautiful? Is someone going to find a way to be pissed about this? Are all the people I admire the most going to like what I write or are they going to think I’m a stupid blithering flyaway with no organization and no real talent or thought process? So, my writing becomes stilted and awkward because I am trying so hard to be smooth, to be the Don Juan of internet words, when I am still, and will forever be, the dorky long-haired girl in huge glasses and weird clothes sitting in the corner of the classroom thinking of ways to bring The Babysitter’s Club to her hometown.
I censor and I censor and I censor. And I’m telling you all this now because I really wanted to tell you about the dumb fight I had with Chris instead of stuffing it under a locked entry in my Livejournal like I usually would. I wanted to tell you how he came home from his gig, looking radiant and flushed and like a rockstar, I mean this kid is the essence of rock after these gigs, and how I was in these ridiculous blue running shorts and a camel-colored clubbing shirt, and my hair was ratty and my face was breaking out.
And then I wanted to tell you how he started to rave about his gig, and how he started to rave about all these girls from his old high school who came to see him and how he’s going to hang out with them, and I just know they’re gorgeous. I just know they have perfect model bodies and perfectly trendy piercings and colored hair and beautiful smiles and sparkling personalities, and here I am in the dumbest shorts in the world (seriously, they are terrible), with leftover ice cream drying on my shirt, and I am not sparkling, I am cranky in fact, and shit, I didn’t even go to the gig for reasons I don’t want to go into, and here are these beautiful beauty queen girls (one was a Dairy Princess, I just know it) flocking to the gigs, while I sit at home, spending five hours trying to figure out how to work the goddamn cordless drill, all while wearing the dumbest shorts in the world.
And because I was mad at my shorts, and mad at my inability to do anything right, I slammed the door, and ran upstairs, and now Chris is left bewildered thinking, “Damn women, who knows why they do what they do?” I’ll tell you: it’s because I’m no Dairy Princess and I’m wearing bad shorts.
This is why I censor. Because my paragraphs will be dense; they will be chock full of vulnerability, giving those with the proper weapons the ammunition to snipe me from the alley. I’m just a stupid girl, really. I’m 22 and I’m eating ice cream for breakfast and I’m scared of the light. This is how these things work. The more I reveal, the more I want to say, “Look, here’s how I really am.” But I have no idea how I really am.
Does this explain it?
I guess I don’t get sexually harassed enough to be jaded to the concept, but I was shocked yesterday as I was walking into the local hospital to get shit for my latest ailment, an ear infection (“swimmers’ ear,” a misnomer since I don’t swim and the closest I’ve been to water is the basement shower). Two gray-haired, slightly chubby 50-year-old men were parked in a red convertible with the top down outside the hospital. As I was walking past, the guy in the passenger seat gave me a crooked smile, and being distracted as I was, I took it as something friendly, managed a smile back and said, “Hi.” Well. I walked two more steps and was met with the low lewd sound of the man calling, “Nice thong.”
Um. What? For one thing, I wasn’t actually wearing a thong, but that’s besides the point. Who in the hell harasses someone when they’re walking into a hospital? Do midlife-crised 50 year olds really believe that 20something ear infected girls walking into a hospital would enjoy a yelled critique of their underwear? I stopped in my tracks, and my mind went blank. All I could sputter was a weak, “Fuck you,” before I walked deliberately into the hospital, and then discreetly pulled up my pants to make sure no thong-imposter underwear was in view.
Seriously. I know this type of stuff happens all the time, and I know this was a minor harassment in the big sea of nasty harassment, but honestly. It felt like such a degradation. I wish I had been able to form a wittier comeback, but I was ear infected and shocked.
. . .
I was hoping to get home earlier, but I won’t be in Virginia until Thursday. I finally have a desk and bookshelf, thanks to Chris who bought it and then he, Andrew and Luke (who stopped by the other night, fresh from Australia) who put it together. My desk faces the back entryway, so I feel rather like a receptionist.
My ear is better, but I can’t take any of the antibiotics normally prescribed for such things because I’m allergic to every single one, so I’m toughing it out rather than face horrible side effects. Hopefully, it won’t turn into meningitis or mastoiditis, and hopefully, I can step away from the internet which feeds every hypochondriac fear I have and be productive.
Last night, my lounging buddy and I walked through the neighborhood at midnight, eating orange cream pops. That’s a start.
Now, I don’t want keep doting on my new household, but seriously, how cool is it to walk up from the basement and discover 3/4 of your roommates sprawled in the living room, drinking Southern Comfort straight from the bottle, eating cherry pie and watching Clash of the Titans, totally Mystery Science Theatre style? It’s cool, believe me.
I’m always walking into events like this lately, never starting them or staying very long. I just like the snapshots, the momentary glimpses of something resembling a life.
I think I either have a migraine or the beginnings of a stroke. Hopefully: neither
So, for those who have expressed concern over the fact that I’m living with a significant other type person after I just went through a nasty break-up with my last boyfriend while we were living together: thanks. I know. Seriously, I did think it through, you know. I didn’t quite blindly leap into a new housing situation without remembering how Erik slept on a mattress in the concrete basement and I slept on a couch because we mismanaged our joint belongings. Oh, I remember, all right. This time around, I have my own room, on a different floor, with my own bed and a plan of action if a break-up occurs. Chris and I talked about this very subject at least thirteen thousand hours, and decided we’d be okay. We have a much better level of communication than my previous relationship, and even though we may have bitchy little arguments over him buying the flavor of ice cream he knows I HATE with MY MONEY, or over me storing my collection of water glasses at the foot of his bed, we still end the night in relatively good form.
. . .
Lists:
Good Things In Richfield Not Present in Duluth
1. Crickets
2. Weather
3. People that aren’t white
4. Fair-minded parking police who give warnings instead of ten dollar tickets right off the bat
5. A Best Buy Clone Army (I walked in and 32 blue-shirted robotic looking employees leaped on me)
6. The Gardenburger Sub at Subway
7. Me
Things I Don’t Miss About Duluth
1. Living on a hill and having the toilet paper in the bathroom unravel by itself and roll to the center of the floor
2. Many of the people I left behind (though not all)
Things I Miss About Duluth
1. The lake
2. Everything else
Things That Make Me Feel Better About Missing Duluth
1. Harry Potter
2. Vegetable lo mein
3. Watching Chris, Rick and Andrew play a board game RPG by candlelight with my fake skull in the center of the table
4. Checking our mail because the mailbox is in a closet and it’s fun to keep opening
5. Walking to Taco Bell the secret way, which means almost getting tetanus on the spiky metal fence you have to crawl through
6. The fucking sunset across France Ave. I mean, God damn.
7. Having a constant cacophony of instruments blaring through the vents, from a trombone to a ukulele to a vibrating frog
8. Sitting in the rec room in the mornings with my roommates
9. Bouncy beds
10. Care packages that include dental dams and plastic M&M lights
I wish had thrilling stories for you about my new, wild, young, 20something life in the big city of Minneapolis, but unfortunately nothing new, wild or young has been happening. Everything is decidedly stagnant while the house looks for jobs and tries to burrow into their niches. The last three months have felt like a drawn-out summer vacation, which isn’t nearly as good as it sounds when you’re unemployed and not 12 years old.
Today, Abbey and I kicked back on her bed and ate cream cheese wontons while watching the final episode of America’s Next Top Model. There something gluttonous about stuffing yourself with fried cheese while watching gorgeous gazelle-like women pouting in bitch heels in hotel rooms. The boys are off at a coffee shop, doing their music thing. I’m now in a pair of Chris’s green cargo shorts with my hair unwashed and scraggly, feeling like Avril Lavigne should be belting “Skater Boi” from the hallway.
The sunset was bright red tonight. It was red enough to strike me dumb as I sat in the turn lane for the strip mall. I didn’t shield my eyes, and for 10 minutes after, black afterspots dotted everything.
I’m going home to Virginia, like I mentioned, any day now. I can’t wait. I have three dogs, two parents, one brother and all the sanity in the Southern world waiting for me.
So. The good shit is that three of my new roommates are downstairs arguing over whether “capey” is an appropriate Scrabble word. Earlier today, Rick was flopped out on the basement couch, writing a new song on his acoustic guitar. Two days ago, Andrew yelled, “Yahooo!” after taking a shower. His voice bounced off the tile and under the door and rattled the windows. He said he was just excited about the water pressure.
We have screen doors that smell like a deep Georgia summer, and through the mesh, I can see the crescent moon, surprisingly clear despite all the industry surrounding the house. The heat is oppressive and wet, but the basement is mint-cool and full of dozens of instruments and games like Battleship and Candyland. There are speakers taller than me crouched in the corners, next to a record player which was playing Bob Dylan, softly, when I woke up this morning.
There’s fresh mango and strawberries in a purple bowl in the refrigerator. In a little while, I’m going back downstairs to lean against Chris’s shoulder on the couch while the roommates and I plan our housewarming party.
I’m still sick and a little sad, but all of the above is good shit. It’s how a house should be. With my previous five roommates, we thought we would be a cozy group of bohemians, drinking coffee out of large mugs in the mornings, drinking beer out of cold bottles at night. But we never were. We were more a disgruntled family than anything, and while we loved each other, sort of, we were better off without each other.
I have hope for this new house, the dynamics and the sweetness. I’ll be in Virginia next week for a while, so hopefully I’ll come back less frenzied and ill, ready to enjoy the good shit in all its misspelled beauty.
. . .
Sunny Wicked has a blog up now. It’s going to be funny.
The repairman came through; my white blood cells didn’t. I’m still sick, living my days through half-lidded hazes, up at an hour at a time, down for five more after that. I think I’m probably going to have to go to the doctor at some point, considering I’ve gone through about every bad symptom a body can have. I can’t settle into the house when I’m like this, which is disconcerting. My room is in shambles. I have a bed, unslept in, shoved in a corner, and my computer sitting on the floor amongst thousands of boxes and books. I’ve spent most of my time in the basement, in Chris’s bedroom, curled in a corner of his bed, watching little brown birds perch on the edge of his fire escape. The rest of the house has been put together while I slept, so everytime I dare to venture upstairs, I walk into a new house. There’s a table where there once was a box; there’s a shelf where there used to be wall.
I feel as if I’m never going to get well or used to this new place. I wake up disoriented, groping for Duluth light switches. I look in the mirror, and I’m not quite sure what I see, as if my body hasn’t fully arrived. I am hologram. I have always lived here. I have never lived here.
It’s depressing, to say the least.
. . .
For the 4th , Chris and I sat on our new front porch and watched a mediocre fireworks display. I didn’t mind, though. The past three years, I’ve randomly ended up alone and sick on the 4th of July. This year, I was sick, but with my lounging buddy, so I suppose the quality of fireworks didn’t matter so much.
I am sort of alive, if being on dial-up and being just about the sickest I’ve been in memory counts as existence. Our cable modem will hopefully stop acting like a bastard tomorrow afternoon, and I won’t have to resort to short, unsatisfying spurts of 56k. I’m moved in, which was quite the chore considering I was deliriously ill the whole time. This is really the first day I’ve felt like what could be construed as human, but even that is waning fast. Never fear! Everything will return to normal once my white blood cells and the cable modem repair guy have triumphed. In the meantime, I’ll either be hunched in a corner of my room, deskless, next to the air conditioner which I’m pretty sure was made in 550 BC, or either curled up in a little ball of unhealthiness in the basement.
Until tomorrow (repairman willing).