Name something. Anything.
Tell me about Quizno’s.
Hopkins, MN, Summer 2002. I was paying 300 dollars a month to live in a basement room with no windows. I wasn’t allowed to have overnight guests and my landlord thought I was morally corrupt. My three-year relationship with my college boyfriend, Erik, was coming to an agonizingly slow end. Erik and I went to Quizno’s for an early lunch one day, thinking lunch would be neutral territory. We got in a fight in the car ride over, something stupid - it was always something stupid then. We fought about things that didn’t matter because the things that did matter were suffocating. We walked in the restaurant, completely silent, got our sandwiches, sat down. I said something under my breath, I don’t remember what and his cell phone rang and I shoved my sandwich across the table at him, grabbed his keys and ran out the door. I scraped my elbow on his car door getting in, and I sat there for twenty minutes, holding my arm and watching him through the window.
The bathroom mirror.
Oh, that’s an easy one. Duluth, Fall 2001. I was upstairs not writing a paper when I heard loud panicky voices from downstairs. I ran down, and saw my roommate Beth standing by the front door with a towel wrapped around her leg. Apparently, the bathroom mirror had shattered and sliced her skin several layers. I took her to the ER and we sat in the waiting room for two hours, intermittently lifting the towel to gross ourselves out. By 4 AM, when a doctor could finally see her, we were giggly with sleepiness. The doctor who stitched her was dark-haired with a soft voice, and she wrote us both notes to get out of class the next day, which didn’t matter much for me, since I was on my way to failing school, anyway. When we got home, Beth’s boyfriend Chris was asleep in her bedroom. I crawled in bed next to my boyfriend and dreamt of ice.
Your front tooth.
My left front tooth overlaps my right, and since I was young, I thought if I spent a certain number of hours each day pushing it back, it would eventually straighten itself out. Summer 2000, I was camping at a music festival. I was drunk, and had just spilled a bottle of vodka in Andrew’s sleeping bag and he was understandably pissed. I started crying, just a little, and Matt grabbed my hand and took me to sit by the fire. He told me to push my tooth back - it would make me feel better. Then he handed me a book of matches - which is something every crying, drunk person needs - and asked if I wanted to learn how to light them. My whole life, I had never known how to light matches. He instructed while I pushed on my tooth, and then handed me the pack, and I struck the book, and lit every match, one by one, while a band played somewhere in the distance. I leaned my head against Matt’s shoulder, and smelled of sulphur.
Do you ever let go?
Does anyone?
I’m quickly sucked into other people’s dramas, people I’ve known for exactly five minutes; people whose entire relationship with me consists of a “Hi, Jennifer, nice to meet you,” and the release and tension of the couch as they sit next to me. I ask strangers a lot of questions, especially when I’ve had that third 7&7, but I never ask the questions I really want.
Immediately I want to say: tell me the most gossipy and dramatic part of your life right now. No, I won’t think you’re whining or too emo or whatever excuse people give when they feel guilty for not being the shut-up box of angst the world requires them be. Instead, however, I always ask: what’s your passion? And that inevitably leads to the drama I actually want since most passions have hang-ups and hang-ups lead to love, and we all know love is where the good dirt is.
I’m never who I think I am in front of strangers. I talk fast and smile a lot and make jokes and segues, and I’m sincere about all of it. I’m not faking. But I feel like people get the wrong impression. I’m no gregarious bubbly butterfly. I sit in silence in my free time, reading things, legs tangled and curled, flipping through my playlist, playing online Scrabble, scratching behind the cat’s ears. I wear pajamas and unbrushed hair. But, you know, I think everyone is like this. Maybe all the party-people who I think are partying twenty-four hours a day are actually sitting at their computer right now, doing the Times crossword online, listening to bad pop and picking at the red polish on their big toe.
I want to know these things, too. The most mundane and the most dramatic. I’m not ready for anything in the middle.
Someday, I’ll go to a party or a club or a rock show and it’ll be no big thing. I’ll throw on the mascara and the tight young thang shirt five minutes before, hop in my car and rock out. I won’t get nervous and jittery, and I won’t even need this extra sparkly eyeshadow that would be pretty if it were standard for corpses to be pretty. Meaning it makes me look corpse-like. I see the future and the future holds this: me, running in from a full day’s work, smelling of printer paper and other people’s work cologne. I slam my keys in a basket by the front door, flip on The Cure on the stereo and change my shirt in the bedroom. I think: eyeliner? Nah. A spritz of something not too intimidating, and then keys back in hand, I’m out the back door before the house even realized I was there.
Most of the world needs to slow down, but I need to speed up. If only copious thinking really did equal enlightenment like they lead you to believe.
It’s Spring! So here’s a Spring picture I took last year at this time in Duluth. There was ice on the lake that day and I was wearing a big puffy coat that didn’t keep me from freezing to death, but I’d take Spring in Duluth over Minneapolis any day. Not that there’s anything wrong with sun and no ice, but it’s just not the same when one is surrounded by strip malls and Taco Bell wrappers.
Today I: ate pistachios for breakfast, helped my roommate shave his head in the backyard and handed in an application for a job in which the median age is 16. I’ll have to get over my teenager phobia for that one, though, really: I didn’t like teenagers when I was one, and I don’t like them now. All that youth! And arrogance! And possibility! I much prefer to be surrounded with jaded, hopeless 20somethings with bad haircuts.
Tonight, I’m going to rent a documentary on chimpanzees, and then tomorrow, I’m going to go to a party and bond with hip young hot thangs. I’m going to sit on a couch, lotus-style, and clutch my cup and smell like smoke and going-out perfume, and I’m going to forget that I ever did anything else. There must be a career in capturing the perfect party moment, and I’m determined to find it.
Uh, yeah. I got delayed. I’ll be flying out tomorrow. Honestly, I’m not sure I want to go back. But life goes on.
I fly back to Minneapolis tomorrow, and it’s entirely possible my eardrums will explode mid-air. They’re so clogged at this point that I’m reading lips and laying on pianos to hear the vibrations. Or whatever deaf people do. I’ve already postponed my flight once, so I can’t do it again. I mean, I can - Northwest won’t chain me to my bed and keep me from flying or anything, but they will charge me another hundred dollars and to someone who has probably not a hundred pennies to her name, this isn’t a good thing. Oh! Woe is me! Middle-class poor, with jammed ears.
Dane broke his leg. He called me the other night and said, “I broke my leg!” and I didn’t believe him and practically made him send me his X-rays, but it’s true - his leg is cracked and he’s down for six weeks. I’ve never known anyone with a broken leg before. I wonder if that’s something tax deductible? For me, I mean? By knowing a shattered-leg person?
Tonight: reading Chuck Palahniuk novels because Joey of A Softer World once told me something I wrote reminded him of Chuck, and I’m completely relishing that name drop because A Softer World is a gorgeous piece of the internet and Joey, who I’m actually not really on a first name basis with, has cool tattoos. Also tonight: celebrating my Irish heritage by hawking green phlegm into the bathroom sink. Mmmm.
Oh, and I finally successfully rode my bike while I was here, and it was everything I hoped it to be. I rode into a Southern sunset in 60 degree weather and felt invincible. Then I toppled over into a muddy ditch. Karma, you know.
You know how people say home is wherever you are? Well, for me, home is wherever I’m not. When I’m in Minnesota, I get restless or sick and want my parents and my dogs and Virginia. In Virginia, I want Chris and the cat and Minneapolis. When I’m here, I drink coffee out of a tourist mug from Duluth. When I’m there, my room is wallpapered with Virginian photographs. Maybe I need an in-between. Would that be Ohio?
Childhood finally passes. Good-bye, creek on the Parkway, with your wobbly displaced rocks and high grass shelf, perfect thrones for the queen and king of 13-year-olds. Good-bye, moonlight on the basketball court, your light a carpet for fumbling hands and necks. Good-bye, dusty brown bike and good-bye slanted driveway. I don’t know who lives there now, but there isn’t even a ghost of the low words and missed kisses; of the downturned brows and bitten lips of 17.
I knew you when, but you’re nothing now. A history without a context, really. Something remembered with a shrug, a fuck and a flick of ashes. I said: “Wanna go to lunch?” He said: “Maybe next time, I’ve been working so hard this week, I’ll catch up with you next time, we’ll do coffee, take care.”
But we won’t - we know - because good-bye first love, the squinty, tangy sweetness I can’t even recall.
And I wonder how soon the rest will leave? When will it be - good-bye, Duluth, your gray docks and white lake spread like a lazy, summer-satisfied teenager over a just-made bed. Good-bye 13th Avenue. Good-bye upstairs room, with your chips in the wall and your floor dirty with talks behind doors.
Good-bye, second love. That hasn’t left yet, not in the sense of the first. There is still a lingering: “Oh;” a loitering exhale. But not for long. It passes. I know that now. It passes and I never remember the same again.
Okay, I had an entry up here, but it was so awful, I had to take it down. No, seriously. I was trying really really hard to describe how quiet it is in my Virginian neighborhood, but I failed miserably because I have the worst case of writer’s block in the history of the universe. I know a lot of people get all antsy-pants when people start whining about their writing troubles on their website, but I think the process is just as important as the product and, so, it gets discussed. Oh, the process. The only way to say that word is with your best Maggie Smith accent. Go ahead, try it. Good work.
Anyway, the only good phrase that came of the deleted entry was my description of Minnesota air, which was the “Northern bite and slap,” and even that blows the big one, so now I’m back to square one. Just know that my backyard was really quiet and dark tonight, and it was a little eerie, but it was also a nice change from the mall and construction zone I live next to in Minnesota. Also know that it’s the same temperature here as it is in Minneapolis, yet I can sit on my back porch in a little tank-top and sleep shorts, bare feet and all, and not turn blue. Hence where the Northern bite and slap line came in.
I was going to sleep at 10 PM, and now it’s 2 AM, and I’ve been awake way too long, and I was planning on going running in the morning in this quiet neighborhood, but morning won’t be happening as planned. Sweet dreams and while you’re praying for world peace and the defeat of George Bush, please include my incredible lack of writing muses in your thoughts. Except don’t, as that’s incredibly selfish of me to ask. Okay, maybe. Oh, whatever, goodnight.
Tomorrow, I’m flying to Virginia for an impromptu visit. I was told it was so warm and sunny that my dogs were molting and panting at an exponential rate. I just checked weather.com for this coming week, and it looks like the temperature is dropping down to the 50s, so no tan for me, not that I’ve ever been tan in my life and am I really waxing about the weather?
I’m not deathly afraid of flying anymore, at least, not outwardly, but it’s still a chore for me. I have to prep myself for the crowds and their nervous sweats and the calf-wrenching, literally mile-long walk to my departure gate, as flights to Richmond are tucked back in a supply closet at the very end of the Minneapolis airport. I once made the mistake of wearing fancy strappy shoes for my flight, and ended up with a shredded heel and a bruise so deep in my big toe that it remains there to this day. (That might be a sign of some other malfunction, like a cancer or scurvy or slow-toenail growth, but I’m pretending it’s a quaint bodily quirk.)
The inside of an airplane smells like melted plastic and the salty aftertaste of funerals, and I inevitably leave the plane with a headache and a new case of allergies. Once I’m in the air, however, I feel brave and smooth, because, really, there’s no other appropriate way to feel as panic and sadness have nowhere to groove at 33,000 feet.
It’s not a happy occasion I’m going home for, but it’s always a happy occasion to be there, so I’m looking forward to a break from Minnesota and its hearty work ethic and red cheeked ruddiness. I need to be around some wilting Southerners for a while, people I can sit on a porch with and comment on grass seed and squirrels, not that I can’t do this in Minnesota, but there’s a charm to it in the South, a cultivated snobbery about minute landscapes, and I really have no idea what I’m blabbing about, so just know that I’m leaving the state tomorrow and will return on Tuesday, with sporadic updates in between. As usual.
Look for thrilling new content here in the next day, updated and backdated and breakdanced. I guess I went on hiatus without even knowing it. In the meantime, consider this scandalous picture of me.
I say, one drink past my self-imposed limit: “You know, that was the best day in my life. When anyone asks that question - what was the best day in your life - I say that one.”
He nods in agreement. “Yeah, we really had a lot of fun together.”
“No,” I press him. My tongue is burning with the olive from the gin I didn’t mean to order. “I just mean that day. Do you remember it?”
There’s a pause and he smiles, but the smile is sideways. He’s watching the sound guy untangle cables on stage. “Sure, I remember it. It was great.”
I open my mouth to continue, then fill it with the lip of my glass instead. The liquor burns and I turn my head.