Ian S. is sitting on my couch trying to convince me - and we are in a state of easily being convinced - that I'm responsible for his women problems, and I'm worrying he's turning more into Woody Allen by the day, or Spencer Pratt if Ian kept up his loud boisterous way of talking and Spencer Pratt did more downers. He's trying to convince me I'm a cheater and a bad person because I didn't transition seamlessly from euro-traveling singleton to whatever I am now and I'm telling him to chill, motherfucker, chill. "Ian, I'm about to lay some hippie shit on you." "You're about to blow my mind! I really wanna here the hippie shit!"

It wasn't that good. The thorough discussion entertaining the possibility of my mother having a crush on me was far more enlightening.

Things are what we want them to be. 6 hours in South Park and Watson Library thoroughly notating The Subterraneans will teach you that. You want Mardou Fox to be crazy, to be a slutty limitless free-fucking dance of deep sea darkness? You want to blame it on race or drugs or women having "the essence"? You make what you want of things, Leo-Jack and Ian.'

I realized that most of what's going on right now doesn't even matter, which isn't quite helping my depression, but numbers have no feelings and they're the best thing to cling to right now, my number line, my security cable. 10 days. 17 days. 43 days. 60 days. End of the year, free fall

Melinda Remora

Once you start living, everyone else want to latch onto you, commensally. Remora, sucker-fish, along for the ride but not steering the ship. Eating whatever scraps they can get from the actors, the king pins, the sharks of the sea - whatever they can get as long as they don’t take (a) life themselves.

Melinda Remora to Great White Cara: “What kind of sushi does Greg like?” I should tell her what tuna tartar tastes like, just to make a scene. I wanna taste the fish! That’s why I ordered it!

She wants to know more about him, just like she brought up Ian for months after the incredibly brief fact, just like she still asks after Mr. Lewis, jumps at the mention of a male name. She wants to know more about me, which is why they don’t even have a wikipedia intro level of understand of bisexuality, why I have to give them a seminar about how it and monogamy are not incongruous, how the arrangements within my relationships have cease to be any of their business anyway.

Except that they are, there are charges to insurance and forms to be signed. And by god, they’ll sign them, and everyone knows why. “You know, they’re probably thinking, ‘Well, at least she’s living with a man,’ or ‘…at least she’s not sleeping with women.’” Risky behaviors in an unconventional relationship, a-okay. Notarized signatures, as long as the gender’s right.

She just wants to know more about me, she knows he’s a big part of my life now. As if, somehow, he atones for the last year of my life, or the last few years of knowing, or all the signs and questions and suspicions before that. Danny, Danko, Claire, Cay, Ian, Sara, Lindy, Jen, Alex, Sam, Edward, Stephan, Cole, Hilah, Colin, Sara, Kevin, Bryan, Carl - some of those names are female, mom. You’ve seen the postcards from Europe and heard me laughing on the phone in the attic. You know their names; they’ve slept in your guestroom sheets and exchanged pleasantries with you over coffee. Know them, ask about them, you have no excuse.

She’s already(!) chomping at the bit for me to get married, as if an official name erases every name before it. As if a white dress will make everything okay, like it always does – baptism, first communion, confirmation, graduation. Wrap her in white, slit a chicken’s throat and throw its blood on the sheets. I’ve worn enough white dresses in my life, the trappings of my family’s morality and holy propriety. I've curtseyed in front of hundreds and been married to Jesus and St. Ursula, I shook the bishop’s jeweled hand, twice. I’m done wearing white and but I’m still waiting until marriage - waiting until I could marry any of those names on that list if I so choose.

I’m happy, so happy, as long as I forget about you, dear family, for with you I can’t ever be so, because you keep drawing my attention to that one stain, the one you’ve marked me with, immorality. Out, out, damn spot, there’s blood on my hands - but it’s not me, it’s just this role you’ve penned for me. Somewhere there’s a different story, an alternate universe, different society, where I don’t have blood on my hands, blood from sex and countless murders.

(One a month, she says. Of all the methods, you chose one that allows conception and then disrupts it. And you’re okay with this? I’m just saying, we have different morals. As if different morals exist. As if, at the end of the day, the baby-killer and the mothers'-rights-infringer can come together, shake hands, and call it a difference of morals.)

That place is Kansas, the center of the (google) earth, where we’ll live in sin – we’ll bask in it, as long as we have to, as long as sin exists.

Dear Melinda Remora, I’m in love with a man and fuck you, you don’t get to be happy about it. You don’t even get to live off the scraps.

Don't Call It a Comeback

Placing a mirror behind a desk is not conducive to working, Charleston Place Hotel, unless my thesis, or rather, this thesis-distraction blog post were on what types of lighting suit the contours of my face, how to tilt my head just right so that my eyes don't look so deep-seated and tired. Cigarettes and and hitting the sheets at seven a.m. are not treating me nicely. I should stop both, but really I'll just cut back - 3 am a night, 2 cigarettes a day. It's settled.

Against Miley Cyrus's incredibly astute advice for America's youth, I'm documenting the shit out of my life lately, and in turn I'm living it more, not less - although I guess playing sports "or something" might do me some good. I'm going out and seeing more of the people that will soon be out of my grasp; I'm getting on planes and crossing the country on a monthly basis; I'm putting miles on my car and I'm never home on the weekends. I've filled paperback moleskin notebooks with musings and scenes, fleeting thoughts and undeveloped projects. Scraps that I'll never do anything with: "luxury is hiring a cab just to sleep in the backseat," "at half-squint, my eyes look like pheasants," "all the women in this paragard brochure are wearing wedding rings - intentional?" I've written reviews of contributors to NPR's voices, talking about Maureen Corrigan's crisp, appley c's; I'm cataloguing podcasts, treating them like advice from well-respected mentors. I'm going out, noticing more, caring less; I'm reevaluating the standards I've evaluated my life by these past, oh, 17 years, and I think(?) that's okay.

But as much as I'm writing, or taking notes, or rambling, or really whatever you call all this incessant journaling, margin-scribbling, and post-it note sticking, nothing beats having something polished and public. Which is why I want to come back to this, even if it's slowly and scarily becoming more public with every person who mentions they've seen it. Even if almost all I can write are transcripts of therapy sessions and barely inconspicuous love letters. Even if I can't seem to ever make this thing cohesive. As good as raw is, complete and concise are nice, too. More polish, more editing, more.

English 334: Kerouac & Ginsberg

Class notes:
Mills. Channels. Whistler. Lowell. Betty Davis. Kerouac memorial. Textile history museum. Palpable locations.
Oral biography. A shower of roses. Rose. When the flood comes. Canonization. Sprawling. Gary Snyder. Schneider? Snyder. Theater. Oscar Wilde. Lecture tour. April 1882. Liberty Hall. Parochial school. Children's books. Dead at the time. Maggie Cassidy. Inch along the ground. Wrinkly tar. Ulysses's soap. Drizzly November day. The Shadow. Silver Tin Can. Self polishing wax. Hypnotic power. Margot Lane. Didn't bother to put in a plot. Balzacian. Rosebud palace. Like asking water to be wet. 12 people. Haunted. Murmur, mummy, elements, moment.

Memories and thoughts and dreams - go back and forth, seamlessly, same place. Like shrooms.

Mesh of memories. Baby in the river bed. Visions. Mythologized. Color.

Parallel Notes:
Hookah. Spelling. Palpable? Sailor Moon. Canadian kids TV. Eighties hair. Redhead, boots. Kevin. Greg. Day desk calendar. Hershey's Hugs. Belgium shells. Au Marche. Downtown. Dad's desk. Dad's library. Red leather desk chair. Creaking. Creak. Summer. High ceilings. Writing. Notebook. The flood. Vagina Monologues. Lauren. Short hair. dream. Helvetica. Paris walk to class. Lower school. Tears. Tears? 2008. 2000 and late. Jane. Lacy. Septum. Essays. Spaghetti. Linguine. Birthdays. The Chateau. Fondant cigarettes. Cigarette cigarettes. Kiss the insides of your thighs. Death, Knowledge, Sex. Chuckle. Bubbly. Evervescent? Effervescent. Spelling, again. Caricature. Stale. Blue and gold checked coat. Ponies. Sleeping in the Parthenon. Kegels. Shell snap necklaces. The cabinet under the phone, under the remotes. Mom - ponytails, bar chair. Nose piercing. Matthew. Marwa. Mesh of memories. Bags in the back seat. Not shutting the car door. Foreheads. Drunk. Paces. Our steps lining up perfectly.

Death

I finally feel alive, which is why all I can think about anymore is dying. I almost didn't leave the house because my postcard of that eerie self-portrait of Edvard Munch fell off the wall and was sitting on my bed, staring at me. I don't want to drive because of that dream one of my exes had about me dying in a horrible car crash, my bracelets melting into my skin, my body twisted and crumpled. I'm beginning to realize how easily a bullet passes through a skull, cracking like an eggshell, gliding through the brain like the electrical jelly that it is. I've finally got so many things to live for: writing and reading and eating banana crepes with my roommates with the sun streaming in through all the windows of our fucking beautiful house, falling asleep to your voice and having it sink into my psyche. Everything's so amazing, why do I have to feel like death is all around me now?

The Fog

When we got out of the concert, the fog had descended over Kansas City. The parking lot lamps were well-defined, sharp-edged spotlights and we were the stars of running across the black ice and hopping into my freezing cold car. I had been yawning all night, and when the last band came on and the whole building started shuttering with their alt. rock mediocrity, we both understood it was time to go. Even if you did have to write a review for the newspaper.

At first everything was purpley-red - or maybe red purple, I could never tell the difference between those two crayons. “Maybe the whole planet was swallowed by something while we were in the concert. It feels like we’re in the bowels of the beast.” Very Jonah and the Whale, very Pinocchio, but let’s not mix metaphors, although they all seem a little appropriate; I’ve been feeling pretty lost lately, although things are beginning to get a little clear. Write a creative thesis, get an MFA, become a bestselling author and live in a well-maintained turn of the century house.

The fog comes in waves wisping over the windshield. We discuss the merits of the almost forgettable final scene in Men In Black where the galaxy is part of a game of marbles. We feel small – we are small. And then we’re alone on the road and the fog is swallowing us up completely. The red has turned into smoky grey, and I can only see two dashes ahead on the road. All the cars disappear for a while.

It feels like we’re on a bridge! I feel like I might fall off! It’s just like Banshee Boardwalk. Except the giant fishes arching overhead are the eerie floating lights of cars unsupported by bridges, even unsupported by cars.

I begin to freak out, but you’re in love with it all, and if I weren’t too busy being responsible, maybe I could see all the beauty, too. Which I guess is sort of our story, which I guess is why we couldn’t live with each other for a while. And then once you were gone, it was just me in the house alone with my bitterness, and that’s when I knew it was always my fault.

We reached the toll plaza, which floated out of fog in mere seconds – nothing, and then something, with chips and cracks and grooves and dents. Beyond, a curtain of satin gold cast down from the yellowed highway lights. And beyond that ...? I roll down the window for the toll, and then keep it down with my arm out and drive through the low-lying clouds. It feels like the perfect cold, velvety with wetness. And we smile and laugh with our arms out, and for a second it’s clear - there’s still hope for all of it yet.

Flying's a miracle; try not to crash

I’m a terrible writer. The more I read about the processes of other essayists the more I realize I’m not cut out for it: I don’t have the memory and I don’t like to lie. I can’t remember the details well enough to tell even the stories that mean the most to me.

What was it that you said when we were sitting in front of Luncheon of the Boating Party? And I said “Who would go to Georgetown?” and you said “Touché,” which is one of the best-suited words for you. I can’t remember what you said, and I hate it when people forget the joke and remember the punch line. And we laughed because you hate Georgetown and I hate the dog woman, and neither of us really wants to believe that beautiful things are so rotten inside.

There’s not enough time, for Man Ray and African art, for you to be sullen or me to be withholding and not sit back down on the couch. There’s not enough time to wait another 3 years or another decade, but there’s not enough time to worry about it, either. The future is so bright! We could die tomorrow! We’re so free!

On the plane I’m sitting here trying not to crash, but all I can think about is how you said flying’s a miracle. I didn’t expect you to believe in miracles; I don’t, but when the plane shakes, I close my eyes like I do when you kiss me, and I’m not afraid.