So, all the old photos I used to have up here of kids getting their faces smashed into wood floors and people dancing to various bad music(s) are now slowly going up on Flickr. Relive my Duluth years, one painful click-through at a time.
I’m currently wearing a purple bikini because it’s too hot to wear anything else. This particular swimsuit has never been out of the house and at this rate, never will. (With the whole non-swimming thing and the aversion to wearing zero clothing in public.)
P.S.: If you’re in the area, stop by the Acadia tonight and see Great Big Dreams and a few rock-jazz fusion bands play. Show starts at 8; GBD’s on at 9:30. Word. I will not be wearing a bikini.
For the second time, I was lost on University Ave., while looking for Prospect Park. I don’t know how this happens.
In other news, I had huge cleavage tonight and my bra straps were showing. I also danced to girl punk.
In other other news, I’m on vacation and my house smells like burning potatoes.
In other x3 news, I’m weary of the drama from which I used to secretly derive flighty thrills.
So, sometimes the best way to be sorry to someone for an awful past action is to just let them be and not chase them around, soliciting their forgiveness. Am I right on this? What a sad, grown-up thought. It’s as if I dropped all my past baggage in the street and then forgot where it was. A good thing, really, but just another notch that reminds me I’m losing time.
Because I never do this anymore:
An order of events from last night…
Chris and I madly cleaned our apartment. We’re inherently neat people, but it feels like we’re constantly cleaning. Actually, it was more like I cleaned while Chris wandered from room to room. He organized the contents of an empty box for 10 minutes. Then, his cousin Nicole and her husband Jake drove in, and we got pizza and I ate it standing up and antsy, while Jake scrutinized my bookcase. I gave him a book on writing. Chris and Nicole took shots of Jim Beam out of coffee mugs, then Jake drove us to The Varsity Theater to see A Whisper in the Noise, my favorite band at the moment. They sound like how Anne Rice wishes she wrote. Except with more rock and a teeny bit of yelling.
At the club, we walked in too early and the owner yelled at us in that way successful businessmen yell at people. We were finally allowed in and claimed a bed in the far left corner. Nicole and Chris took some tequila shots. Since Chris’s drinking is still new, he turns into the guinea pig each time he goes — he had never tried tequila, and so, the tequila flowed. I think tequila tastes like the dry heaves; he agreed.
The band began. I stood in front for a while with a girl who was carrying a wooden staff. I guess that’s the new hipster trend. She was very sweet, however. I was restless and kept wandering up to the bathroom or into the hallway or to the bar. At one point, I grabbed what I thought was money out of my bag and ordered a drink. I handed the bartender a yellow post-it note, with the words “Moonlight, Isle of Shoals, Hassam” on it, which apparently doesn’t fly as currency. I found my real money, but left the bartender with the note. I thought he might like it. I also borrowed a pencil from him and then tried to scribble on a napkin, something about Thanksgiving dinner.
After the band, we went into the foyer and Mary and her new not-boyfriend-but-boy-she’s-dating knocked on the window and we ran into another guy we knew, so we sat for a while talking and then Nicole, Mary, her boy and I decided the place was cashed, so we looped through the streets and settled on the Dinkytowner. I ordered another drink and then Mary and I danced with a bunch of nerdy looking dudes who were slowly pushing us towards the front of the stage. I took my shoes off and my feet turned black. Mary and I talked about orgasms.
Back at the table, an old Asian man made Nicole play pool and she hit an 8 Ball into the corner pocket. (I am not down with pool terminology.) The man had the most evil laughter I’ve heard, worthy of Gargamel from the Smurfs. We ate fries; we talked about Nabokov; we left.
Jake drove us home, and then Chris and Jake went to the studio to record, and I fell asleep with my contacts in and woke at 9 this morning with the usual whiskey-bulldozer-headache.
Tonight: birthday party for twins, one of who looks like me.
The type of city in which I live and the type of people I run with means anything can happen. We can have our own versions of your fucked-up Thanksgiving dinners. I’m happy I can live in a place where I can run into people I used to know in a different stage of my life, and we can co-exist and listen to beautiful music in a club, even if we’re on opposite sides of the room and never say a word. We can gather our new families, drink our tequila and our whatevers and dance and shake our hair and wish we had seen Nirvana live because, man, what would that have been like?
We can do that and we can not say a word, and maybe it’s supposed to be dramatic, maybe there’s supposed to be a scandal, but I didn’t want a Thing. I wanted to listen to my favorite local band, lie on the bar bed, drink with my friends, ask the bartender for a pencil and write on napkins. But there was no scandal — I felt a kind of love acquired only through drunk empathy. I wanted to say — isn’t this nice? Don’t you get how lucky we are? But maybe I was the only one who felt it.
Tonight was good.
My first memory is riding a red tricycle around the golf course we lived on in Santa Rosa, California. I was two and my parents had moved there just before I was born. My father worked for the military — though, to this day, I’m not sure what he did for them. He was gone for months at a time when I was very young, locked in a stuffy room in the Pentagon according to my mother, but I don’t think she knew, either.
My second memory, which might be induced by a picture I’ve seen in family albums, is eating strawberries and petting a baby goat at a relative’s farm. This was just before I got sick with scarlet fever and whooping cough, though I don’t remember the illnesses. I was in and out of the hospital for two years with undiagonosable symptoms. Children didn’t get fevers and pertussis anymore — this was the 80s! There were cures for everything! At my last hospital stay, I didn’t eat for a week and almost died. The family legend is that at the last possible second, I ate a bowl of strawberries and was instantly back in good health. My mother makes this seem like I walked down to the hospital cafeteria and ordered up the fruit and then checked myself out of the hospital, not waiting for my parents to drive me home.
Because of the fevers, I have horrible eyesight and a long history of strange symptoms with no apparent reason. The last normal sickness I had was chicken pox when I was 4. We were in Atlanta by then and my parents had built their sprawling dreamhome on a cul-de-sac in the Peachtree City suburbs. My bedroom carpet was red and I lived next door to a vengeful girl named Jessica who would lock me in her room when I wanted to go home.
Right before my chicken pox broke out, Jessica’s usually gentle yellow terrier, Tiger, picked a fight with Sasha, my Mom’s ancient pomeranian, and tore out Sasha’s eye. I was on the swingset in the backyard when it happened and Sasha came running to my ankles, disoriented, yapping sharply, his eye red and yellow. I ran screaming into the house, telling my mother that Sasha had spilled “hamburger juice” in his eyes. (Ketchup and mustard.)
The next morning, I woke with my chest covered in spots and my Dad telling us we needed to start packing. He’d received orders to move to Europe.
I just wrote a post and then realized, for the first time in my history of the internet, I felt too exposed. And it wasn’t even anything that personal, but, really, nothing past the surface is in print anymore. I might be losing my touch. Maybe I just want fiction now. Maybe it’s too early on a Saturday. I think I know too many people who know how to work the internet. Remember when it was me, you and the BBs?
I went home early from work today because I felt like I might die and now the cat is banging her head against my head, which the internet tells me means love.
For the Fourth, I got twelve mosquito bites and a lot of sleep. Maybe West Nile, too, but that remains unconfirmed.
My brother is getting married in September and I’m getting sort-of married next summer, in the way that I’m not actually getting married, but maybe actually getting married, and it’s very confusing, which means: nap.