Boo to depressing stories. Tonight, I am hitting up Stiftungsfest, which is the oldest festival in Minnesota (held in Chris’s hometown) and also the nerdiest, at least according to this picture of the bands playing. You really can’t beat a band called “The Sauerkrauts.” I hope I get their autographs. The whole house, minus Rick, is going out to drink Scandinavian concoctions, eat Scandinavian cows (well, not all of us) and listen to tiny men in lederhosen play Scandinavian instruments. I will be bringing my camera and Irish heritage and also plans for a revolt. It’s about time there was Norwegian-Irish conflict, don’t you think?
I’m sure I could blame it on Mars like everyone else is doing or on PMS, which is my excuse about 3 1/2 weeks out of the month, but all I can think of is depressing stories to tell you. I apologize for that because who wants to hear depressing stores? Well. I do, sometimes. Depressing stories are good when you are holed up by choice, gray-faced and squinty-eyed, loading up your playlist with the World’s Saddest Songs Ever and you want to read gloomy things because if someone else in the world is feeling sprightly and chipper than the world is even more unfair that you thought.
Anyway, two summers ago, Erik dumped me for a month. When I think back on it, it seems quite random and unexpected, but I know something must’ve been leading up to it, though I can’t remember seeing it coming. I was living in Duluth, working at the financial aid office and the theatre, while Erik lived in Hopkins, running sound at Valleyfair and interning at a recording studio. This was Erik’s first summer away from home, on his own, experiencing a social world I’m sure he had no idea existed. In Duluth I was doing nothing exciting beyond working a lot and going out occasionally with the roommates or theatre kids, and I was more than envious of Erik’s sudden social butterfly status.
Erik and I would talk every night in the beginning, but then the phone calls began to get sparse and he began to sound more rushed and distracted. We had only seen each other a few times since the summer began, and both times he had seemed subtly annoyed that I was taking up his time and space.
I went down to visit him in July sometime, already feeling a doomsday vibe. I dressed in my best hotyoungthang outfit and tried to appear energetic and overly affectionate, which wasn’t my usual shtick. He was even more distanced, barely looking at me, chewing his cheeks, brushing off my attempts to kiss him. I finally asked him what the deal was. I was sitting at the desk in his room, thumbing through the Yellow Pages to find the number for Chino Latino so I could call and make reservations. He was sitting on his bed, not looking at me. When he didn’t answer, my hands began to shake a little. I called and made the reservations. I told him we needed to leave now if we were going to make it.
We got in his truck and then he spit out a jittery, nervous monologue in which he informed me that he wasn’t feeling the passion in our relationship anymore, that something had changed (but he didn’t know what) and that he didn’t think it was going to work out. My heart was about to leap straight through my teeth. I told him to stop the car. He pulled into the parking lot next to Lake Calhoun, and I jumped out. He followed and we sat on a bench in front of the lake in complete silence. I remember being marveled at the fact that there were runners at this time of night - especially female ones - and also at the perfect reflection of the quarter moon in the water. Finally, after what felt like six days had passed, I stood up, told him to either stay with me or break up with me, and sat in the car.
I wasn’t crying, yet. I watched him from the car, sitting at the bench with his head in his hands. I was sweating, though it’s wasn’t more than 60 degrees outside. Finally, he walked up to the car, got in, and with the biggest gulping sob in the history of the world, told me we needed to take a break. So. There it was. He asked me if I still wanted to go to dinner and I answered by crying with my mouth closed, the kind of stifling crying that is the weirdest-sounding and oddly the most heartbreaking. He felt terrible, apparently. I was still supposed to spend the night that night and I didn’t want to drive back up to Duluth in the dark, so I told him if we were going to get through the night, I needed to get some sleeping pills so I didn’t stay up half the night crying like a little baby.
I stayed in the car while he ran into Walgreen’s for me. Suddenly, after two months of barely noticing I was in existence, he was attentive and sensitive from guilt. When he came back to the car, he had the pills, but also my favorite kind of ice cream and a red plastic apple with a removable top that he thought I would think was funny. This, of course, only made me cry harder.
The next morning, before I drove back to Duluth, I gave him the top of the apple and told him he could give it back to me if he decided to be with me again. Then I drove off, slowly, not even crying, but instead feeling like the saddest girl in the entire universe.
To be continued, not because it’s interesting, but more because I don’t want to cramp my front page.
I just remembered a scary life moment. Last July, I was driving back from Duluth to Hopkins, where I was living that summer. I can’t remember my state of my mind, but I think it was just before things began to get really sticky in my head, a month or so at least before I dropped off the Earth. I know I had been visiting Erik in Duluth, and was now trying to get back in time to see a Sunny Wicked gig, so I was in transition, trying to prep and acclimate myself for a different world. It was at least an before rush hour, and I was in the left lane, speeding a little. In the middle lane was a young man with a shaved head in a red convertible with Florida license plates. He and I had been playfully racing and passing each other for twenty minutes or so, nothing serious or dangerous, just your garden variety automotive flirting.
My exit was coming up in a few miles and, as usual, I wasn’t completely sure which number it would be. So, without thinking, my eye still on the racing Floridian, I reached down into the floor of the passenger seat for my notebook with directions in it. And my hands slipped off the steering wheel. I shot straight back up, but my hands were too slick and the car was swerving, slip-shodding, jiggling. My mind was whitewash blank, as minds tend to be when these things happen. I watched the green nose of my car slide into the middle lane and then into the right lane. There were cars in front of me and cars behind me, but I somehow managed to snake through both rows. I ended up in the right lane, my car pointed the correct direction, my speed at 30 miles per hour. I kept going, my entire body not shaking yet, but so tight that in minutes it would have no choice but to shake. On my left side, I saw the man in the red convertible fly past, without even a glance in his rearview mirror.
Thirty minutes later, I was rear-ended in rush hour by two 20something blonde girls, but by then, I didn’t even muse about my fortune. All I could see was the slow expanse of gray road sliding past my car, and the way the traffic parted for a split second. My heart never sped up, or stopped, or skipped a beat. It was as if everything had suddenly become the world’s most fucked up mirage.
I have been afraid of cars ever since.
I push it too much, this trying to make people know me. And it’s not just any person because I am much too shy for just any person. It’s the boyfriend, the ex-boyfriend, the acquaintance who can’t quite figure out if she likes me or not. So, I push old journals and poetry and photographs on people; I hand over unorganized piles of information and say, “Make some sense of this and get back to me.” No one ever makes much sense of it.
And on that note, I wish the 80s had never existed, which is a lofty wish, considering I and many of my friends would be unalive. I know I’m supposed to be an 80s child or whatever, but the 80s and their grotesque excess makes me cringe, and it really hurts my heart that 80s music is making a comeback. I listened to the new Dandy Warhols CD tonight and wept. Power ballads! Synth! Wawa chords! Song titles like “Heavenly.” Please God no.
And on that note, I was really craving garlic buttered toast tonight, but Chris wouldn’t go with me to Firestone Pizza to get any, so I had to contemplate going to the grocery store for some of that Texas Toast in a bag shit, but I hate grocery stores more than I hate 80s music. I tried to think of where the Texas Toast would be, but was drawing a complete blank and the idea of mindlessly wandering the fluorescent lit aisles for three seconds longer than I needed sent my fried nervous system in a hissy, so I thought I should call the grocery store and ask them where the Texas Toast was, but I knew once I got there and got the toast and got to the checkout lane, the clerk would totally know I was the lameass who called at 10 PM on a Sunday to ask where the Texas Toast was. So I went to McDonald’s for french fries instead.
Chris has fallen asleep on my bed in his tennis shoes and his face smushed in a corner of the wall, and it is going to be the biggest pain in sixteen worlds trying to get him to go downstairs for bed (we sleep in his room because it’s not as stifling hot). He does this thing where he opens his eyes for a second, then sits up on his elbows like he’s going to get up and walk, but then shifts position and falls back in the corner. I’m thinking I may have to employ the glass of water to the face method, but I don’t want to dampen my sheets.
Make some sense.
What in the world is there to say? I promise there’s nothing. Actually, there’s everything, but it’s a dry spell, we all know that. All I have for you is stories of second-degree burned fingers and cracked tooth fillings, and who wants to hear that? (My fingers are a nice pale yellow and bastard amber color - thank you thousand degree pot lid!) I’m going to stop writing about how I have nothing to write about, but isn’t that what they tell you in all those creative writing courses and “how to write a novel” schemes? If you have nothing to say, write about that, as if anyone in the history of three universes wants to hear that. And write for yourself, they say, too. Well, I don’t really do that. The expunging of the sentences are for me, but the words are for you.
Stagnation! Summer is ending, and everything is still in cryogenics. I have things coming up, like friends visiting and state fairs and meet-ups with internet people and evenings trips to Duluth, but none of that may happen, either, because that’s how things seem to work lately. I’m at the mercy of something stupid, and it’s not a person and it’s most certainly not God, which is what my brain file conjures up for the word “mercy” for who the hell knows why. I guess those summers of vacation bible school did some slick trick, though all I actually remember from those summers is playing the triangle (or was it the cymbals?) in the VBS jazz band and coloring Jesus’s hair purple in some lame coloring book and one of the teachers telling a girl, whose sister had recently committed suicide, that suicide would send you straight, directly to hell. We were ten. Lovely sentiments.
Where did that come from? Suddenly, I am remembering many church things, like being kicked out of the bell choir when I was eight because I couldn’t read music and then running down the steps of the church, falling and spraining my ankle. Church was painful, apparently, and I’d like to keep it that way.
Anyway, the point was that I have nothing to say, and I don’t, but I will because things will start happening, or I’ll make them happen, or someone will make them happen. The most entertaining stories I can think to tell you are the amusing arguments Chris and I get into (like, how I started charging him for use of my Cetaphil since he always filches it and never buys it and how he swear he doesn’t use enough to pay for it, and…yeah), but even those lack a certain storytelling luster.
You should tell me things. You know?
Morning face.
I have this feeling I have something to write here, but I don’t know what it is. It’s that feeling you get when you wake up, knowing you have this great exciting story for someone, and by the evening, it’s gone out of your head. What was it?
It wasn’t what I did today, because all I did was take a nap and eat a red popsicle and watch Star Wars and sauté yellow peppers and baby portabella mushrooms and walk to the grocery store (and then walk right back out when I realized it was too hot to deal with the 60 million people crowding the tomatoes.) It wasn’t what I did yesterday because that consisted of Things and then a latenight roadtrip for hot coffee, even though the night air was just as boiling and choking as the day had been.
So. I guess it was nothing. I always feel like I’m forgetting something lately, and not just on here. I have epiphanies and prophecies teetering at the tip of my tongue. When I see you, I will probably open my eyes brightly, smile excitedly, as if I’m just on the verge of the most wonderful thing you’ve ever heard. And then it will fly back down my throat.
It’s isn’t senility or brain damage. More like a vague suggestion, the dim numbers you can’t quite make out on a house you’re slowly driving by on a party night. You know? Maybe not.
. . .
You know, I do write other things that don’t try so hard to be something, and I write them here sometimes.
Also, Kevin Fanning’s
Posted by: Zosia | 08-16-2003 | 09:08 PM
Posted in: General | Comments (0)
Sunny Wicked at the Urban Wildlife Cafe. You haven’t been to one of these gigs in a while, so you’ve forgotten the rushed routine. Three-fourths of the band is consistently late which gives the other one-fourth, the bassist, a coronary. The equipment is loaded in. You take guitars, smash your thumb in the car door. Everything is assembled on stage, as the sound guy and the light girl take their places. The sound guy looks typical - dark clothes, alterna-nerd features. The light girl is different, however - older, blonde, pink-shirted. While they sound check, you grab a drink from the grumbling bartender who does not look you in the eye. This is typical, as well.
Either the venue will fill up, or it will be near-empty, with clumps of band girlfriends and parents in corners of the room. You drink quickly because you don’t do so well in social situations lately, and then you drink another. It is between that drink and the next you achieve perfection. Your shoulders, always strained, drop; your brain, always a corroded unorganized mass of wires, untangles. You are here and you are filled with the kind of goosebump joy that comes from watching people you love do something well.
So. There goes the band. The lead singer is wiry, ferocious, a superstar, but you know that last night he ran around with a paper towel tube on his nose, pretending to be an elephant seal. There is the guitarist, in a long sleeve poncho in a 90 degree room. There is the bassist, the hipster of the group, with his serious pursed-lip stare, but you know one time he hid in a recycling bin in the middle of campus at 11 PM during an impromptu Hide-and-Go-Seek game. The drummer, his blonde hair peeking through the strobe lights.
You want so much for them to make it. Because they’re good, they’re original, and no, you’re not just saying that. They deserve more than these half-empty venues, being paid with greasy red drink tickets and pats on the back.
The music ends, one last drink. You sit at the bar, grab hands, kiss cheeks, wipe sweat, chew ice cubes. In the hallway, you make phone calls. In the club, you make amends with old friends. You crane your neck in the general direction of the next band playing, but nothing stirs you.
You load out equipment, smashing the same thumb. The moon is silver, full, gloating over the city skyscrapers. You take pictures. On the car ride home, you half-sleep against the window, trusting the driver because if he knows how to rock and roll, he must know how to navigate back roads at midnight.
This is going to be dull and fragmented, mostly because the state American health insurance is hurting my feelings.
I was hit on by four fifteen-year-olds this afternoon when I was walking back from the grocery store, and I was totally unsmooth. I was trying to be the mysterious worldly older woman, but instead I think I stuttered and invited them over for dinner. Whatever.
Tomorrow night at 9 PM, Sunny Wicked is playing at the Urban Wildlife Club. You should go because they play good songs and because I will be there.
Today was the first day I felt like I was at home. I mean, obviously, I’m at home because my name is on the mailbox and bills come addressed to me, but I mean the comfortable type of feeling, where you walk up the sidewalk, sweaty and tired from the heat and you see your house and give a relief sigh because, whew, you’re home.
I’ve always liked this house - it has a good vibe, mostly due to the lovely people who live here, but I just hadn’t quite slid into the groove of living here. I still never remember where the damn silverware drawer is. I haven’t quite mastered the art of distinguishing whose footsteps are whose on the basement stairs, and the air conditioner still gives me a minor heart attack every time it roars on, but I feel a little more settled. This is the first evening I’ve sat contentedly at my computer with the routine I have been perfecting for ten years, which is low light, candles, tea or coffee and music playing quietly through my cheap speakers. I like this. I like the baby blue of my carpet, and the beige Levenger notebook I scribble lists and fragments in, and my new, and very very ugly, 10 dollar lamp that sits on my too-short night table.
I have a lot of things going on, internally-wise. Everything external is smooth-sailing and warm and fuzzy, but I do have a lot of uncomfortable things to work out within myself (cue the harpist for the inner monologue!), so I haven’t been able to say this in a long time, but:
Today was a good day.
I have an actual piece of spinach between my teeth right now. I’ve never had that happen to me, and I almost don’t want to take it out, if only to live the cliché for a few moments longer. Fortunately, when I grow tired of it, I can go to the downstairs bathroom and peruse about 40 different brands of floss because Chris, apparently nervous about a sudden floss shortage in America, has bought out the entire floss industry.
. . .
Yesterday, I went to the Carver County Fair
At the fair, I saw:
1. A chicken yawning
2. Goats in assless chaps
3. A polka band playing Unchained Melody
4. More gorgeous, thin and tall teenage girls than I have ever seen in my life
5. A man with a huge penis naked from the waist down (I’m guessing he’ll never forget to lock the door on the porta-potty again)
6. A llama eat a little girl’s hair
7. A pig racing track
I heard:
1. Chris’s 7-year-old cousin say that the “mechanical bull is killer!”
2. A tractor pull contest, which sounded like the apocalypse
3. Goats and roosters making noises that I thought only cartoon goats and roosters made (one rooster, I swear to God, said, “cock-a-doodle-doo” and I almost had a stroke)
I ate (in the span of one hour):
1. Corn on the cob
2. Cheese curds (their motto: “Guaranteed to put five pounds on you!” and yet there was a line almost out of the park in front of the stand. Crack!)
3. A veggie gyro
4. Mini-donuts (Chris: “Do you want some of my donuts?”; Me: “I hate donuts.”; and then I ate 11 of them)
5. Potato skins slathered in fake cheese
6. A wildberry smoothie
7. Popcorn
During the hugely populated fair, we managed to see Chris’s entire extended family, only because I think they secretly own the town.
Now to find floss.
Three apologies:
I’m sorry I ate one of your java fudge popsicles only sixty seconds after you told me not to. I know you were waiting until after dinner so we could have one together and marvel collectively over the miracle that is Starbuck’s ice cream, but I couldn’t wait that long. It called to me, sweetly and drug-like, from the freezer and the moment I heard you walk away into your room, I ripped open the box like I was rabid and starving.
I’m sorry I spilled tea on your floor. I told you, not an hour earlier, that I would spill my tea because I was nervous and in a new place, and I always spill things when I’m nervous and in a new place. Fortunately, I had drank most of it, so all that spilled was a few liquefied sugar crumbs and the snapped pieces of my stirrer, also broken out of nervousness.
I’m sorry I kidnapped your maroon hooded sweatshirt and then lied about taking it. I know you liked that sweatshirt, but I did, too, and I needed at least something to remind me of you. I’ll only wear it once it gets to be colder, and I’m cross-legged in front of my computer with goosebumps on my legs. You won’t read this, but if you do: you can have it back, if you come see me.
In the music box on my corner shelf, there are two photographs that smell like mildew. I’ve only had them in that box for a year, maybe less. I didn’t know paper would mold that fast. In one picture the two subjects are blinking and have wide toothy smiles. The girl is dressed for Halloween with fake blood drying on her cheeks. The boy has blonde hair. It’s brown these days. The same boy is in the second picture sitting in a red-checked chair by himself, reading a letter. This photograph is half burned. The edges are black. I don’t know why I keep the pictures. They’re not the best quality and they don’t remind me of a special event. But they’re there, and I forget they’re there every few months until I have an urge to open the box.
. . .
I am funnier in person, you know. A class clown, really.
I didn’t explode, though after I deplaned, I thought explosion would be a very likely outcome. Not because of jerky terrorist action, but because I sat next to a woman on the plane who instantly became my best friend forever when the moment I sat down, she said: “I’m not drunk enough to be on this plane right now.” I had planned on having one drink during the flight to calm my fried nerves, but instead, I had about six, all bought on my new best friend’s company tab. The plane ride turned into a slumber party. We analyzed every celebrity in People magazine and completed two crossword puzzles in under 20 minutes and then proceeded to high five eight times and toast each other when we finished.
We did each other’s make-up and swapped relationship turmoil stories, all the while the very conservative woman and her daughter next to us looked like they were ready to call up Salem, Massachusetts and have us burned in the town square. The flight attendant warned us that when we got off the plane, the effects of the alcohol would double, but my new best friend waved cash at her and we drank more. On the ground, we both stumbled to the baggage claim. And I spent the rest of the night feeling like my insides were on a cruise to Jamaica. But it was worth it.
. . .
I’m conscious, as I often am, of what vibe I extend on this page. Chris mentioned that his good friend (who I’ve only met twice or so) read my website and had a million questions for him, ranging from “Does she really drink that much?” (no) to “She wrote about being jealous of the girls at your show. Is she always like that?” (no) to “Is she shy? She seems shy” (sometimes). I often think that what I write here is more real than my social, “real life” personality because I am less guarded and more articulate and more eager for you to understand why I say and do the things I do. But maybe that’s not true. I’m not an alcoholic, jealous mouse, but maybe I’ve portrayed that image. Who knows? It’s interesting, and often embarrassing, at least, to hear what my words have been contexualized as. So, who am I?
. . .
Minneapolis is breezy and smelling of lilac. I’m homesick for Virginia, the first time I’ve been homesick in many years. I’m homesick for my family, but mostly, I think, for the town. During the viewing and the funeral and the clusters of people I was surrounded by, I had a faintly locally-patriotic feeling of, “This is my home. This is where I was raised. These hundreds of people have known me since I was 12 and they are my roots.” You know? I’ve never felt rooted to anything before, really. And now I feel a bit traitorous, for the first time in four years, living away from that.
It is nice, however, to be back with my roommates. Today, Chris and I pawed through the stuffed animals at the grocery store and named each one, and then ran through a sprinkler like TV sitcom kids. We kicked back on my bed eating Skittles, and then I flopped on the couch in the living room with the other kids in my summerweight dress. I suppose I’m still young, after all. Whatever that means.
