Stop being jealous. I’m serious. Or, if jealousy is too packed in your brain, if your evolutionary core says jealousy must occur, then stop being cruel to others because you’re jealous. I’m convinced jealousy is the only reason we’re mean to each other. Mary Oliver says, “You do not have to be good…you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” My therapist, who was not so good, said, “If love is all you want, then love is all you’ll see.” Is that too simple? Maybe.
But I think the world is cracking. I never believed it when people said that. I always thought — well, every century people think the planet’s going to hell. It’s history smacking back. But this is the first time in my life I’ve felt unsafe being alive. So prickly! New Orleans is gone and our government is free-falling in the ocean of no checks and balances, and people are being mean and calling it “aggressiveness.” Don’t do that. Don’t cling to one another, but don’t let someone fall when they don’t have to. I told myself: gas prices aren’t the world. But are they? Is it naive to say gas is just gas? Because it’s not, anymore. Gas is what’s winning. It’s choking everything and I walk from my car to work and I smother.
I get doomsday-ish every time I’m about to step on a plane. I shouldn’t worry because by now, I swear my mother’s faith in everything will keep all my planes upright. But I don’t think there’s an abundance of hate, even though there’s evidence everywhere. I think there’s a whole skinfull of love and we don’t know what to do with it. Too many people need love. It’s too overwhelming to live.
I think Mary Oliver knows best. You do not have to be good. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Don’t trample. Don’t be afraid the people you love will be taken away. Just give them soup when they’re sick and a guide for their arm when they’re old, and if they leave, then hold yourself until someone else needs holding. I think we can all do this. I don’t think we need to be jealous. The jealousy is all on paper, and there’s no one you really hate. No one has it better than you. We’re all directionless and wanting in the same silly universe. The world is blowing away, but you’re still here, and you’re fine.
Last night was great. “Great” is the new “awesome,” apparently. I lounged on the Varsity’s red satin beds with Chris and friends, and scribbled notes in my old journal with red pen for the review I’m writing and took pictures with my dinosaur camera. I can’t read half my notes now, but I can decipher the feeling. I think. My article notes are interspersed with a written conversation between Mary and me because I’m deaf as a doornail during shows. I also enjoy mixing metaphors. As a sidenote, I’ve known Mary for well over a year now, and had never seen her handwriting until last night. Thank you, Age of Internet!
I stole a set list and didn’t tell one of the guitarists why I was doing it, so he flashed me a confused look mixed with suggestive eyebrows. I went backstage and felt like a Behind the Music fly on the way. Those scenesters, man. What can I say? One musician leaned against a table, rolling a cigarette, nodding his head, “Minneapolis just doesn’t understand desperation or rage, man.” Then his sister called down and said his Mom had a cooler of beer, and did he want it down there? Back to reality!
One of the best parts of the night was after the place was closed down. Chris was backstage talking business with the bands, and I was sitting in the lobby at 2:30 AM, trying to put my notes together. The place was quiet except for staff cleaning up. The bartender came out exhaling, mumbling, “I’m glad that’s over.” A guy played the piano by the front door. The streets were empty except for a few girls in dresses walking back to their cars.
I sat at the bar for a while with Erik and two of his friends, feeling sleepy, drinking water, but also at ease. I’ve found a contentment in the late-night bar scene, with my elbows on the bar, watching the gears slow. The lights were low and the people left were laughing and telling stories. I could’ve crawled into one of the beds by the stage and slept, and felt safe and surrounded by affectionate, murmuring people.
There was no need for ninjas last night. There was a sweetness, and I left feeling okay with past and future. Present, too, I suppose, as it is.
I fly to Virginia on Wednesday for a few days. Someday, I’ll do a search and see how many times I’ve mentioned my hate for flying on this site. Let’s hope there are no snakes on my plane.
I have a feeling if anyone has guff to give me tonight, there’s going to be trouble. I’m in ninja-mode.
Also, I hate all my clothes. I was going to treat myself to something new, but then I had a pound of grease and cheese at Barbette and now I feel poisoned. You don’t really care if I wear the same thing as always, do you?
I think Joan Jett might be in order.
Today, it was cold enough for me to wear a sweater and sweaters are A-OK by me. I also got exactly 55 minutes of sleep last night, and I feel like I should be embarassed to say this, but the truth is, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Six Feet Under finale. Goddamn! The kitchen sink also would not stop dripping. Repetitive noises make me batshit. I’ve never dated a snorer and, to be gentle to all the snorers out there, think I would have to jump clean through a window on a very high floor if I slept with one.
There are many good things in the works right now, but I’m somehow reluctant to tell anyone in real life what’s going on, and even though many of you aren’t real life, many of you are and so, no juice for you.
. . .
Flickr memory time!
In this particular photo, I’m dead sick with mono. I’d never felt so horrible in my entire life, save for the two days I had the Norwalk virus, 48 hours in which my ability to be within two feet of Gatorade and Saltines left this planet for all eternity. This picture is from the 4th of July, 2003. Chris, three of my good friends and I had moved from Duluth to Richfield four days earlier, a move that tested every ounce of my will to live. I was physically ill and feverish during the entire move, but I was also hollowed out and sad. Duluth had been my home for three years and I didn’t leave it well or even especially willingly. I left because everyone who still loved me was leaving, too, and I didn’t want to stay in a city full of ghosts and a lake I could no longer look at without wanting to rock up my pockets and dive in, Virginia Woolf style.
Leaving Duluth meant leaving my ex-boyfriend and the house we had continued to live in together, despite our break-up. It meant leaving the friends with whom ties were strained, if not completely wretchedly snapped. To me, and I live for the physical metaphor, coming down with mono was a perfect farewell to the place. If I’d had to leave it healthily, with a clear, unfevered head, my brain would’ve exploded. It’s almost as if my body said, “Here, I’d like you to feel absolutely shitty for a few months — I mean, REALLY shitty, like, believe me, you’re going to beg for someone to rip out your bones and beat you in the face with them to make you feel better — because then you won’t have to concentrate on what’s actually going on here, which is, of course, that your entire life is changing.”
Every 4th of July since childhood, Chris has gone to his family’s cabin up North. He has a sprawling extended family, exactly the type you would see in a movie about…well, about extended families. For the 4th in the picture, he stayed home with me because I was sick. The rest of our roommates were gone, and I would’ve been alone in the house, muddling in my mono self pity. I don’t remember specifically asking him to stay, but he did, knowing his family would be disappointed and knowing he would be disappointed. It’s one of the nicest things anyone’s done for me. We’d been dating just over a year at this point, but it was one of the times when I had a small inkling that I’d landed in the right place, as those things go.
We were sitting on the front porch of our new (now old) house in this picture, watching the fireworks from over by the mall. They were shitty fireworks and lasted for about five minutes. I could barely sit up and was balancing a gallon jug of water between my knees. Chris had his arm around me, and, man, you know, I couldn’t help but kiss him.
This weekend was shows, starting with the Como Avenue Jug Band (soon to be at Jug Life) at the Nomad. What can I say? The jug band is Andrew’s side project, though it’s quickly exploding all over the cities and becoming more of a main event. Rick sits in on the banjo sometimes, as well. They used to practice in my basement and while my ears can block out the best of all annoying sounds, the spoon clacking and drunken yawling was not ideal for, say, concentrating on anything more difficult than breathing. But the jug band is wonderful and they feed my soul. I’m going out on a cliche limb here to say that the music scene needs this genre more than anything — 10 young musicians (and a dog), playing old-sounding tunes and having such an excellent time doing it that I’m compelled to move to the front of the room every time they play. Granted, after a few drinks, I’m compelled to move to the front of everything, but the jug band is heart-filled escapism at best.
On Saturday, we hit up Diamond’s Coffee Shoppe in Northeast for some Tuesday’s Robot action. The lead singer of the jug band was in the audience and sporting an arm sling and a black eye he didn’t have at 11 PM the night before. The story went something like: half pint of whiskey, bike accident, loss of pants, waking up in a sleeping quadriplegic woman’s house. This guy is not the type of person who tells you these details because it’s a great story. Quadriplegic women just seem to happen to him, and he has a quiet acceptance of this fact.
Rickrobot played a song that made Chris and I cry, but we’re both big babies when it comes to emotion, so this wasn’t anything surprising. The set was low-key and bantery. Rick’s voice has really changed — it’s a lot more gravelly, which may or may not have to do with his smoking habit. His songs have changed, too. Less childhood theme and more self-searching “holy fuck, I’m growing up” type of thing. Diamond’s has the aura of a high school hallway, with the blank walls and garish eye-bending lighting. It doesn’t seem like a place that was ever meant for music, and given the fact that the musicians must supply their own PA system, it probably wasn’t. The hot chocolate, however, well: if I were ever in a situation where I was forced to declare a last meal…you can guess where this is going.
Today, I went to the animal shelter for fun, and tortured myself over the older dogs in the kennels. I can’t keep my shit together around dogs. I love cats and have one myself, but there’s something about dogs, especially senior ones with watery eyes and gray snouts, that stabs me dead. I spent 20 minutes petting an old black lab with the unfortunate name of Burpie, and then I sat in my car for a while and figured out how an 80-pound dog could work in my 700-sq ft apartment with a cat who hates anything unhuman.
Tonight is: peppermint tea, a cool night and the gnawing in the back of my brain that only happens when I know I have to go into work early.
Well, I’m sitting in the coffee shop across the street with wet hair because our power went out a few hours ago. I took a shower and had this elaborate vanity plan of actually drying ALL of my hair, instead of just drying the top of my head, which is what I do in the mornings. But no! The power is gone. I guess that’s all I wanted you to know. Also, my laptop gives me motion sickness. I’ve tweaked everything possible with it (brightness, steadiness, height, etc.), but it still makes me feel like I just got off one of those twirly midway rides.
Tonight’s plan is go to shows, though Chris and I always seem to argue right before we go out anywhere. He tends to take his time with things. This is an understatement. Chris is the slowest person in the entire world. It takes him sixteen hours to put on his socks in the morning. He has to contemplate the nature of each hair before he shaves his face. I’m more the type who rushes through things impulsively and usually end up bruising myself or tearing clothes, but, damn it, at least I get there.
I feel like doing my own missed connection:
To the girl sitting in the corner of the _____ coffee shop, with wet, sloppily braided hair and a bleach-stained t-shirt, looking like she’s on some kind of shipping vessal: you should go back to your apartment and convince your boyfriend, who called you this morning tipsy on the Jim Beam he drank to motivate himself to clean the apartment, that the tortoise doesn’t always win the race. He is probably still putting on a shirt, which is what he was doing when you left 30 minutes ago.
Okay, I will.
I’m pretty much the queen of ugly faces.
I’m not feeling particularly nostalgic today, mostly because a few things are happening creatively, as in writing about future events, instead of obsessively re-hashing the old. I don’t want to give specifics. I’m completely gunshy because when it comes down to the fine line of the various -versions, I’m more of the intro than the extro. I’m not afraid of most people, but I can’t do small talk without feeling like one of those goddamn Precious Moments statutettes. I actually said to someone this afternoon, “How’s the weather out there today? Pretty cool?” I know you sometimes have to do this and not every conversation can be full of dirty secrets, especially not with the guy who’s there to clean the carpets, but still.
. . .
One memory, sponsored by Flickr:
I moved to Duluth, Minnesota in January of 2000 to attend school at UMD. I didn’t know anyone, save for Abbey, whom I had grown up with in Germany. I moved because I was all sorts of messed-up from a break-up with my high school sweetheart and the general craziness that seems to follow me whenever a major change occurs. I left for Duluth with no apprehension; or, at least, I don’t remember any. My Mom came with me and we arrived in the middle of a huge snowstorm. It took six hours to drive from Minneapolis to Duluth and the whole time, we were in a blind, screamy panic — we were Southerners! We knew it snowed in Minnesota, but this much? All the time?
I enrolled as a musical theatre major, since theatre was all I ever wanted to do and had been doing since a young age. Musical theatre required several dance classes, and I was awful at dancing. I’m still awful at dancing. It’s mostly a confidence issue — I can keep a rhythm fairly well if I’m stone drunk, but sober, in a class full of beautiful skinny girls with mile-long legs, well, I stumbled and was the equivalent of a drunken game of Jenga.
One day after dance class, I said, “Fuck this!”, dropped the class and decided to dye my hair blue. I have lots of these intuitive impulses and they usually end up being better for me than the original choice. Well. Abbey and I took the bus to The Electric Fetus and bought bright blue Manic Panic dye. At first, I was just going to do streaks, but as we sat in the dorm bathrooms, I gave another fuck it and told her to dye it all.
The result was not blue. The result was chlorine-green and I laughed for three hours straight. My fucking hair was green. I was in DULUTH, MINNESOTA of all places, 900 miles away from family, looking out a window where the roof of the building next door was covered in two feet of snow and my fucking hair was green. What a Midwestern twilight zone.
The dye took three months to fade completely. When I first met my group of friends, they didn’t know me as anything except the “girl with green hair,” and so.
I look pretty peaceful in that picture. I mean, what I could I do? I suppose I could’ve dyed my hair back, but I was never one for do-overs.
The most disturbing thing I saw this weekend was a camel having an anxiety attack at the fair. He was in the “exotic animals” tent and was surrounded by a sleeping kangaroo and several hyper ring-tailed lemurs. The camel kept pacing in front of his fence and bleating with every third pace. Kids tried to feed him by shoving their palms under his nose, but the camel would jerk his head away and bleat again.
His caretaker went over to him once and stroked his neck, but the camel kept crying and pacing and kicking up straw. He looked like he was going to jump over the fence into the crowd and even made a few running leaps, but he never went through with it, though he could’ve easily scaled it. I kept watching him even when we were out of the tent. The whole “caged wild animal” plight was, of course, sad, but there was something else, too, and I can’t stop thinking of his restless, panicky camel eyes. (Which are much like Bette Davis eyes.)
. . .
I write about these things, these old boyfriends and anxious camels, because they feel so close to my skin still. I don’t want to relive anything, really, but those old feelings seem unattainable. That’s not accurate. Maybe: I think if I can reconcile memories in stories, they seem trimmed and clean, like fiction. They didn’t really happen, so they’re manageable. Is that it? I don’t know. Why does anyone focus on memoir?
I had a happy childhood. My most interesting tragedies have largely been my relationships, and so I write them down. But I have a way of loving people that splinters my logical universe and then the loved never leave. Maybe it’s the 16-year-old in me that never left. Maybe this is the result of having epic relationships during formative years (the boyfriend through high school; the boyfriend through college, and now, the boyfriend through learning-to-be-an-adult). I grew up with these people. We’re witnesses to each other. Why am I the only one witnessing? Am I a writer or just a self-indulgent pack rat?
Yesterday was hula hooping at the Pizza Luce block party:
and
furry chickens at the Carver County Fair:
1. I just finished watching The Devil’s Playground. Amish kids seem so much more into personal responsibility than your average teenager. Even when they’re completely fucking up, they’re all, “This is my fault, not my parent’s.” Way to go on that.
2. I’ve been wearing these ugly black ballet flats with everything lately. They’re uncomfortable and cut rivets into my arches, but so they stay. It’s mostly because I can’t wear open-toed shoes at work and I am the Queen of No Shoes or Little Shoe as Possible and so, the black flats.
3. I’m vaguely ill, with the aches and the back of my sinuses filled with gunk, and I’m being cranky about it. Chris is at a Vikings game. He had free tickets. He knows nothing about football.
4. Typing on my laptop for too long makes me nauseated. I assume it’s the LCD.
5. All I want in the world now is a huge, greasy hamburger and I’ve been a vegetarian for five years.
6. I better feel better by tomorrow because: Pizza Luce block party and the Carver County Fair.
7. Harry Potter is not so much capturing my attention. I’ve been reading it on and off for two weeks and falling asleep each time I pick it up.
8. While walking into work today, I was really hoping someone would pick a fight with me. I’m normally passive and not much into conflict unless you’re my boyfriend or my computer when it breaks, but today, I was making up argument scenarios in my head and coming out as the silver-mouthed victor each time. Sadly, no one said anything remotely rude to me, and so, my reputation is still left as sweet and gentle-hearted. Which maybe I am, but I don’t think so.
9. I would like a drink right now, but I’m afraid to mix it with my sinus medicine. Sweet and gentle represent!
God, I can’t stand this type of restlessness. Nothing is appealing or, I should say, the things that are appealing aren’t doable for a variety of reasons, so I’m stuck in the apartment, walking circles around the cat, trying to get her to do something interesting. I dumped a half gallon of catnip on her scratching post and she sniffed and promptly fainted of boredom.
But I’m not bored — to me, boredom implies a dulled mind, rolling around slowly, absorbing nothing. My brain is zippy, but can’t pinpoint what it wants. I came home from work and made lunch, then cleaned the kitchen and the living room, then the internet, then the examining pores in the bathroom mirror, then the contemplating what to make for dinner and how I can time it just right so it’ll be ready when Chris gets home, and so! Here we are.
The outside world doesn’t tempt me. Nature is beautiful, but it’s not fulfulling. Everything seems to involve driving somewhere to spend money or sit, and my body, to the capacity it can (which is often limited due to a number of grizzly things I won’t go into just yet), well, my body wants to swim or scream or pull someone down a huge slippery hill. I remember the type of thrill that comes from full-bodied breathing, laughing and exertion. The feeling remains close enough to remind me I haven’t felt anything of the sort in a very long time and, so, I’m flailing at everything.
Live music will sometimes give me the warm-stomach feeling, but it lasts only as long as my second whiskey and then I’m back to watching the cracks in the street as I walk to my car, wishing to be anywhere but where I am, wanting to be asleep or to be wide awake, but achieving neither. What’s going to jumpstart me? I’ll be finishing up school next month, which will be a stimulant, but what then? And after that? My body can’t travel where my head wants to go. I want the type of adventure that happens next door — different enough to induce joy, but close enough so I can leave when I want to. I used to get this combination in affairs, the romantic and sexual kind, and while I suppose this is still an option, it’s not as attractive. Stale, even. Exhausting, more like it.
So it’s: a vegetable medly of carrots, summer squash, red pepper, red potatoes and portabella mushrooms with goat cheese gouda for dinner and then sleep. It sounds good to the traveler, but is only routine to the grounded.
We’ll continue with the song memory exercise. So, here’s Bleed American by Jimmy Eat World and, really, this is an album I only like because it’s familiar. But: so, there’s this image that flies to mind when I hear the “I’m not crazy because I take the right pills” line, and it’s of a thin curly-haired blonde girl in a red zip-up sweater. I’m standing in the Kirby Ballroom, helping untangle microphone wires for Rock Stock*, a two-day music festival Erik planned for the UMD campus. The girl is helping, too, but she’s mostly fidgeting all over the place, a strong case for anti-caffeine legislature. The song is playing and she’s bobbing her head in super-speed motion, singing along.
And I’ve been jealous of her the entire time she’s been here, though I can’t pinpoint why. Okay, I can pinpoint why: it’s because she’s been extra friendly with Erik and Erik and I are almost over, and everything feels like a threat, from the way he stands in my doorway in the mornings, chewing on his cheeks and studying the threads in the carpet to this flitty young blonde girl who stays at his ankles. But then she sings that line, and her voice is absolutely pure and clear, echoing off the celing mirrors. Everyone stills for a moment to listen.
We’re all staring, and the cords are wrapped around my fingers and turning them white. She notices the looks and giggles like a skipped record, then sprints to the other end of the room to help Erik in the storage space. I want to mangle her, pull out her hair. My stomach burns the way stomachs do when someone you’re trying so hard to hate does something beautiful.
In retrospect, I think she hung around Erik because she thought he had a cool job, with planning festivals and schmoozing with bands. But the only thing I could think when I left the ballroom that day was: what do I do what do I do to keep this going and how do I keep her out of it? I knew her for two days, but that was enough to give her everything, make her carry the weight.
*The Rock Stock mention is at the end of this entry, but the whole thing, really, is about what I’m writing here.
There’s much needed housekeeping going on. I’ve changed a little in each section, though more changes are needed. As Labrador would say, everything is now made with love for baby. In regards to the cast, I never know who to keep on and who to keep off because, let’s face it, I write a lot about people I don’t speak with much and for history’s sake, it seems appropriate to retain their references. I like to write as clinically as possible when talking about matters of the heart. I also like to blame my inability to let go of the past on creative license.
It only took two songs into Alligators in the Lobby to realize the CD I remembered so well wasn’t this one, but John Hermanson’s earlier solo album. This album isn’t bad either, but I prepared myself for this highly emotional magical mystery tour listening, and now I’m just like, “Oh.” I mean, this CD isn’t bad, but it’s deserving of the “oh.” I have the urge to make some biblical-type parallel and say I wish people were like this, and what I mean by that and what you can probably guess, is that I wish the old friends I have squatting in my head didn’t live up to the expectations I have, but they inevitably do. I think, “Man, she was just so incredible to talk to and she made really great German Black Forest cake,” and then I see the person again, and they’re carrying a prize-winning cake*. Figures.
In other news, I feel completely out of place in most of downtown Minneapolis. Walking down the street last night, I feel smothered by well-groomed perfumey people and I had the urge to turn to vapor and slip in grates. It’s unsettling to judge a block full of people solely on what they look like, but I certainly don’t look or smell like that. I don’t think I smell like anything. Chris told me I smell like pennies when I’m upset, but that’s the extent.
Oh, it’s definitely John Hermanson who I want to make out with and not Alva Star. The songs on the album which feature his vocals and lyrics definitely stand out while the rest fall a teeny bit flat.
*Entirely fictional person. It also took me three times to write “person,” as my fingers wanted to type “Persian.” I suppose my fictional person could also be Persian. Your discretion.
P.S.: To make this review complete, here are the songs I do remember from this album and continue to like: Beautiful, 74, Alva Star and Girlfriend.
This will be a placeholder for a story I need to tell later. I just came back from a long walk and I’m feeling strangely energized, strange only because exercise usually makes my lungs shrivel into sad raisins. But I’ve been exercising more than usual lately, and I can tell my legs are smoother and harder, like I’m something amazing, such as an Olympic runner or, at the very least, someone who can walk up three flights of stairs without ripping out all her bones and stabbing herself in the stomach.
But I was thinking of when I was in the best shape of my life, which was during a play I did at school called Conference of the Birds. I had the most incredible experience during that three month period, and I almost want to say it was the most incredible experience of my life, but I’m wary of superlatives, as I fling them around too much as it is. But how do I articulate this play? I can’t, which is why this is a placeholder.
Our rehearsals revolved around group movement meditation, which I can only describe as getting your brain in a place of zen and then doing whatever your body impulses you. This could be a headstand or a long, stretchy ballet with a partner or sixteen cartwheels or even just sitting in a corner with your hands on someone’s back, feeling the zaps of their energy. It sounds like what you might sneer and call “new-agey,” and I suppose it is, but I’ve never experienced anything like it. We would do this for hours and feel like six seconds had passed. In a way, I was closer to that group of people than anyone in my life. I felt like I know each part of their skin and could anticipate the smallest movement, from their fingers to their ears. It was beautiful and quite pure, an idealistic love. One night, white sparks flew from fingers. I did a headstand. I carried a boy twice my size on my back across the room, like a winged rescue. I can’t go into this without feeling like I’m cheapening something.
The point was, after the show ended, my muscles were limber and quick, like a cat. I remember after the last curtain, I went back to my room and had the urge to spread myself on the floor and take inventory. I didn’t recognize my body and wanted to remember it. I didn’t take inventory and I regret it because my body soon went back to its dormant state and I lost the ability to take risks. I mean, at a cast party, I ran, naked, down a hill with the girls from the cast and jumped in Lake Superior. I fell most the way down the hill, scraping up my shins and knees, but I didn’t care. I don’t know how to swim. Didn’t matter. It was March. Also didn’t matter. I just did it because it felt right and I had a joy that smothered fear.
My body isn’t anything close to what it was during that time and it never will be unless those same people and I gather in a room and hold each other. It’s the type of graciously loose magic that can be re-created, but only if everyone’s present and remembers. I miss that body.
It’s not always going to be like this, this site, with the naval-gazing and the cheese, but, something’s breaking and here it is.
I’ve lately been mildly obsessed with listening to an old Alva Star album. It started when the Varsity played a Jimmy Eat World song from Bleed American, a CD I listened to daily a few years ago. This led me to think of other music that reminded me of that time period, and so, following the train, my mind latched onto Alva Star.
Alva Star is a local band who plays rarely now as the members are involved in more fruitful gigs. I don’t remember when I first heard Alva Star, but it must’ve been when Erik worked as the campus music coordinator for UMD and received a press packet from them. Enclosed was an 8×10 of John Hermanson, the lead singer, and Erik brought home the picture and claimed if he was into guys, he’d enthusiastically do John Hermanson. This became a running joke for a while, and I even exchanged a few e-mails with John once when trying to get him to mail me an autographed picture for Erik’s birthday. (The picture, unfortunately, never arrived.)
I listened to their first CD, Alligators in the Lobby, in my discman on the way to school each morning my sophomore year of school. There was song on it whose chorus went, “You’re beautiful, as an actress…” which appealed to me as I was in a BFA program for acting at the time. On a few mixed CDs Erik made for me, he put this song as a title track. He was always supportive of my theatre — for each play I did, he’d have a vase of beautiful flowers waiting for me at my backstage mirror with a sweet note attached.
There was also a song on the Alva Star mix I had that began, quietly and rather mournfully, “Step outside, light a cigarette in the rain and wait for it to end..” (I seem to rarely recall names of songs.) I remember driving back from Minneapolis the summer Erik was living there, talking to him on my cell phone. This was a few weeks before we broke up the first time, so there was an uneasy tension between us. “I think I’d listen to this song,” I told him, prophesying, “if you and I broke up.” There was silence and all he said was, “Why?”
I’ve seen Alva Star a few times, but the moment that sticks the most is Fall 2002. This was after Erik and I had broken up for good, though we were still living together. This was before the break-up slid into what people shudder and call “nasty” — we were still talking, though it was a stretch to say we were friends. I was heartbroken and making a fantastic mess of my life, so I went to see Alva Star play in the Bullpub, a hang-out spot on the UMD campus. (The Bullpub has since been torn down and is now a hallway that leads to some fancy 50s-style diner.)
There were only a handful of people there. Erik was running sound. I sat in the front, right on the floor and stared up at John Hermanson. I was in the mood to let music heal me. As most people can understand, sometimes it’s the only type of therapy that works and my body was a whistley broken vessel, ready for glue. John Hermanson looked down at me and then, with just his voice and no band, started singing, “Step outside, light a cigarette in the rain and wait for it to end…”
I didn’t cry, but something in my chest simultaneously crushed and flew. I could feel Erik in back of me and I wondered if he remembered what I had said those years before. I stayed sitting until the end of the show, then I got up to leave. I touched Erik’s arm on the way out — nothing intimate, just something to let him know I was there. He didn’t flinch or even look at me. And that’s when I knew it was over for real.
I just ordered the CD again, as my copy has been long lost. I don’t want to necessarily relive the way it makes me feel — but I think I need to remember something forgotten, and this is a start.
Enough of this website hiatus riff-raff. I know I’ve said it before, and this has been a particularly long dry spell on zosiablue.com, but it’s 100 degrees outside and the internet burns inside my internety fingers. I’ve developed a sudden antsiness about writing, mostly because my intentions have changed. Many times when I write, it’s because I know who my audience is and I aim certain things to certain eyes. I don’t know who my audience is anymore. I don’t check stats. I’m going into this with a blind eye and a head full of stories. I write things now because they’re ready to come out, in some splattery form or another. Some things — most things — are nostalgic, because I tend to stick to history that way, but who knows.
I’m waiting on a lot of things this week — decisions from schools, jobs, a new AC adapter for my laptop, a new mouse, an old Alva Star CD. I mopped the apartment floors with a powerful sort of listleness. I’ve bypassed a few potential weekend adventures because of exhaustion and a craving for domestic routine, but the urging has passed. I still want adventures, the kinds I’ve always written about, but they need to come in another form — I’ll have them with the music and the bitter liquor and the now smoke-free clubs, but I need a grown-up version. Something with more meaning and less drama. Where does that come from?