A Little Madness in the Spring: Auto-Life, Interrupted

This post contains some true things about the True Life of Auto-Win. Like the MTV show True Life, but sans midgets, cheerleaders, Ritalin, binge drinking, video clips and annoying clank-clankity music.

I was gonna delete this post, morning-after bloggers-remorse style. BUT...I've been better at keeping up with others' blogs lately, and it seems many of us are: 1.drunk, 2.sad, 3.angry, 4.bored. Though I've never been "4," and lately not "1" either--I figure, there's some value in honesty, [even from me!] sometimes, since apparently everyone else [including Don Quijote] is doing it? For collective 1-4 ennui? We shall overcome, etc.?

What do you think?

Not like I should always actually be honest/semi-serious [I can never be ALTOGETHER serious]....but sometimes.

[I'll get to the intern/job stuff, my multi-tasking readers. You're all mighty fine, and I mean that.]

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i.

A print-out of the last post, given to T.B. for copy-editing:

"I have never seen so many hyphens in a document in my life!"
[Clutches document, laughs, makes 'AAAarrrgh, Auto-Win!' face]
"It's driving me insane! Why do you think I'm in the psych ward?"
-T.B.

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Present events defy us, the past
Has no such scruples.
-Jack Spicer¹

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ii. Tuesday Morning, 5.22.2007

This morning I awoke with blood on my hands. I mean that literally: smeared red-and brownish, both hands, across all lines palm-readers read, blurring any remaining fortune. I know that might sound gross, but have you seen Battle Royale? That's gross. This's just what happened this morning when I woke up at 9:18 A.M. with blood on my hands. Yup, just my hands. Weird, right?

I foolishly expected a logical source: torn hangnail, chapped n' cracked lip, violent encounter between me and the nails I've employed to nail the fitted sheet to the mattress. Nothing.

It'd be like me to assume this means that I'm symbolically guilty of doing whathaveyouever to some other human and, subsequently, my victim's sought vengeance in the night, sneaky like a coal-bearing Santa Claus. But this morning, honestly: any potential symbol would be...like, a reflexive verb? An unvert must not be homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, or autosexual. He must be metasexual. He must enjoy going to bed with his own tears. English lacks the morphology of reflexive verbs that other languages feature, which's why we pretend like EVERY verb has equal potential for reflexive action. It's like the linguistic American Dream. [Even "worship," "love," "run," "peel."]

But hand-bloodied is REFLEXIVE starting now.

I don't know what that means, really. I think it's like: Auto-Win, get a manicure?

So: iChat. I'm the girl, Lainy is the dog. Icons, weirdos.

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iii. A Love Poem to Angelina Jolie

T.B. gave me her tooth two days ago: Sunday, May 20th. That morning, I brunched for Heather's birthday. She got appropriately sloshed, it was fantastic. Seriously.

I was walking from the train station: I have something for you, T.B. said on the phone. You're not going to like it. It's a body part.

It would've been amazing if she'd been like: What's up, Auto-Win, here's my heart [plops heart into hand] and uh, ripped off my foot earlier. [Places foot in my other hand, bloody.]

*
"I know stealing a foot is weird. But hello, living in a house where there's a foot available to be stolen is weird."
-Claire, Six Feet Under
*

T.B. wrote a blog about the tooth-giving incident, which she obviously deleted within 24 hours, as is often her way.

[During Visiting Hours, T.B. attacks mad-quick duties, like fixing my typos and deleting her blog, on her Crackberry.]

The tooth-blog was posted via phone dictation, however, and when I was reading it back to her I accidentally said "truth" instead of "tooth." She told me to leave it in: tooth/truth.

[Her name drop: death: a tooth among strangers. Jack Spicer.]

Anyhow, she took the tooth back, put it in her mouth, and I commented on the blog that I could've left it for the Tooth Fairy, if I'd kept it.

"In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down; a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest; and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: tables can be clocks; faces, flowers."
-Susana Kaysen

Like: I coulda put it under my pillow for a fairy who would've turned it to cash or gold or else. Bling-bling-bling goes the alarm clock.

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iv. Kleenex

Then this afternoon, I had a very brief nose bleed. [Still, this isn't near as gross as Battle Royale or Kill Bill. Also some bloggers talk about bathroom activities, and I don't do that, like, ever. Not in real life either.] Why'd this happen? No clue.

I've only had two real ones, ever, both times as a kid:
1. U of Michigan basketball game, sitting in the nose-bleed section. Everyone made that nose-bleed in the nose-bleed section joke, over and over again, until I got an ear-bleed.
2. In line at Wendy's in Ann Arbor. Anticipating Frosty, receiving Kleenex.

So maybe that was it? The real cause of hand-blooding? Something's loose in there? How immature of me.

"If reality isn't my picture of it, I'm lost."
-Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless

I found myself remembering the morning he² [no name, totes purposeful elusiveness] left my room and then my house with a nosebleed: up all night on blow, he called from his car, he was bleeding all over his shirt and driving too. I was writhing with really poignant misery. I'm coming down down down down.

Later he called from bed: Marie, my shirt's bloody, I might die in my sleep, okay?

He slept for six hours or so, maybe: he had a date with his other girlfriend that afternoon. I crashed/burned, woke up 14 hours later and met him at Champion House [Ann Arbor, MI] for Hibachi Shrimp. That's a place where they cook the food in front of you and do knife tricks, and it feels very much like being hit over the head softly with a puppet when it's just two of you, like you want to say: "You can cook that privately if you want, it's just the two of us?"

For me: one night only. For him: blow stuck around til he left Michigan. That can happen in Michigan. That can happen almost anywhere, actually. Or something like that.

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[Vintage riese and devil-kitty.]

v. Roof-Top Soccer

Last night [Monday, May 21st], post-2N, pre-bed, I went to Tara D.³'s on Claremont. I drew her a picture of herself. I messed up almost every body part [breasts too small, arms w/o elbows, one leg disconnected, etc.] and then wrote DEVIL-KITTY on it, referencing her former Myspace name.

Her friend Elliot told me I should be making advertising money from this blog with my traffic, and the best way to do that'd be to tell all of my readers to just click the gmail ad, even if it's for something lame, like Mother's Retreats or the "Are You Gay?" quiz, and then I'll get money. OK do that right now. Thanks.

We played soccer on the rooftop. Tara's got a good view. It was so dark, I could barely make out the white orb of soccer-ball, but bodies: always, heavy beating bodies. Tara, Angelica, Elliot, Tom, Caroline. The weather was more-or-less perfect. A violent flash of lights and sound and someone asked What's That just as Tara D. said Firecrackers and someone else said gunshots and I said The Apocalypse.

For a moment when we'd first arrived to the roof I said: It's so quiet, and Angelica said: It's nice, it's rare.

"The view from his office on the first floor of the maximum security-ward building was restful: trees, wind, sky. I was often silent. There was so little silence on our ward. I looked at the trees and said nothing, and he looked at me and said nothing. It was companionable."
-S.K., G.I.

We went back inside, downstairs, to a vague drum-beat. Back in the living room:

Tara-D: Are you gonna get off your computer and come back to the world?
Me: [to computer] THIS IS MY WORLD.

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vi. Girlfriend, Interrupted

Just before emerging from her room to hand me the tooth, T.B.'s roommate looked me in the eyes, clutching her blue bathrobe, hair a-flutter beneath flowered headband and wild eyes: We might have to call the police. They're trying to freeze us out of here. It's an icebox.

The next day in the cafeteria, it's just T.B., myself, and T.B.'s mother when the the roommate--now ex-roommate, as they switched rooms the night before because: "My roommate's totally crazy. Like TOTALLY CRAZY." -T.B.--joined us, due to aforementioned cold and her new roommate kicking her out. She's made toast and is spreading peanut butter on it with her fingers.

Someone closes the door. [Someone from the outside!] The now-ex-roommate asks: "Why'd they close the door?"

I say: "They're locking us in here."

T.B.'s Mom [as we laugh together]: "Don't say that! Don't encourage her!"

The now-ex-roommate goes on to cause an alarm-lockdown-inducing ruckus.

Whoops.

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vii.
"Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?"
-SK

"One wants to get something off one's chest. One doesn't know quite what it is that one wants to get off the chest until one's got it off. But I couldn't apply the word intention positively to any of my poems. Or to any poem."
-T.S. Eliot

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¹: Jack Spicer's one of those poets you can name drop to look super smart and avant garde, it's even hipper than hipster [Dave Berman, Fredrick Seidel, etc.] Like, if you already know who he is and you read that name-drop, you'd be like, "Wow, Auto-Win is hard-core." You can't get any of his books anywhere, not even amazon, you have to go to some special rare bookstore. Like Tickle-me-Elmo at Christmas-time.
²: An ex.
³: This girl's been footnoted before...I met Tara on craigslist in March 05. In good times, in bad times, we'll be on each other's various sides forever-more. Lives with Lainy near Columbia, where she's in grad school. Not to be confused with T.B..