So Watch Your Head and Then Watch The Ground, It's a Silly Time to Learn to Swim

Though I honestly never sat through/paid attention to/understood The Matrix and therefore never grasped its widespread appeal, I frequently employ "there's a glitch in the matrix" to describe how life's going. E.g., this week. April is the cruelest month ... and so on. Disclaimer: I've been a little feverish for a few days now. I might just be talking crazy.

Life today isn't all that similar to life a week ago. Things keep happening that don't make sense, that seem wildly inappropriate, inspiring metaphors about being underwater and existing inside giant cottonballs.

Yesterday: my head felt like the moment the jets turn off in a hot tub ... a durrrrring pool of disappointed/subdued dumb bare skin. I didn't even do auto-fun! There's auto-fun in this post though, it's at the bottom, and footnoted throughout. I'm playing with it.

Does this happen every late March/early April? Last year, my entire life fell apart in about four days. In '06, I lost Lo & gained Haviland. '04: his other girlfriend & I paid him a surprise visit to tell him what we knew, '03 I fell head-over-heels for him in the first place. But those events (which ultimately in the scheme of things are fundamentally unimportant, as concentrated and personal as they are) aren't what I'm talking about --

it's more like when you walk outside and feel like everyone else outside has been transported to earth just that very morning, and you're still fumbling about like you've lived here for years.

Maybe we're still stuck on semesters, compelled to begin transition this time of year. I still call the last two weeks of December "winter break."

Some people I once knew seem so far underwater that I'm fairly certain even if I strapped on an oxygen tank and got all deep sea diver about it, I'd probs just hit my head on a coral reef (I can keep going with this metaphor ALL DAY, all night, watch me go!) or get hugged by a dolphin (yeah! That's my way of saying "this can be good or bad or neither." Dolphins! Manatees! I speak the secret language!)

And then; the most random people showing up in my inbox. Or on my facebook ... (1).

Yesterday I couldn't think/update (synonyms, maybe) 'cause it was my fourth morning running on no sleep 'cause every morning I'd been woken up by this noise, which I so kindly recorded for you because I am: 1. insane, 2. bitter:

boomp3.com


So I figured I'd do the things I'm usually too anxious to sit still and do: I got my hair did by a trannie named Mariah from Texas. Now I look like a Bobsey Twin, which's fine (I've just been avoiding mirrors). I'd like to solve some mysteries or whatever it is that they did, first mystery: wtf?

Yesterday's weather was impossibly, aggressively sunshiney. I've been waking up from crazy dreams and then lying in bed for impossibly, aggressively long periods of post-dream reckoning -- the things that happen in my subconscious battle reality for possible truths. (Also, duende. (2))

You have plans, or something to say, and then a whole day passes where you have nothing at all whatsoever to say in a way that feels selfish and stark. Sometimes circumstances get you down (3), sometimes you wanna stop (4), but luckily I am a compulsive over-share-er and cannot ever stop (5). Obviously. I must breathe, blog, pay taxes ... (except that I just realized, err, I haven't paid taxes. Maybe I should. I think I'll contribute to the purchase of one soldier's pair of socks. Ideally, a schoolbook, but let's be real here, this be George W country.)

So my swamp-turtle mind felt the world recognized my silence and responded in kind -- my Blackberry was a little, silent turtle with nothing to share. Then I accidentally dropped it, turned it back on, and it exploded with everything I'd received that morning and afternoon at once. Also it's deleting messages at random.

Also a stranger just called me and left a voice mail recording of the news announcing airline-related information. An accented voice goes: "Hello? Hello?"

Last night was the book party for Dirty Girls at Sutra (6) (6a) (6b) ... I managed to rally for about three hours before feeling feverish again. For the first of those three hours, Alex and I got lost somewhere between chinatown, soho, the lower east side, the east village, and bangladesh. Luckily I like to walk. (7)

(Next week! "In the Flesh" at Happy Endings Lounge!)

**

The first glitch experience happened in 2000 -- it started when all my tips from an eight-hour lunch shift at The Olive Garden were stolen, meaning I'd just served approximately 545 unlimited soup salad & breadsticks lunches for fun, which's funny in that not-funny-at-all way. I came home to find roommate Sarah in a hot panic -- she'd just done the same thing w/her Blue Water Grill Lunch money, couldn't find it.

So what do I do -- I meet Meg at a The Columbia Cottage (Chinese, uptown, free wine) to drink 'til I forget about it, then jet to Times Sqaure to see The Matrix with a boy, paying just enough attention to grasp the glitch concept and then therefore apply it immediately.

"What are we doing?" The boy asks as he walks me home.

"What are you talking about?"

"You and me, what are you doing," he asks. "I'm 27, I don't play games."

About twenty blocks later he kisses me. (Reader: I'm nearly 27. Do I still play games? Did I then?) I sit on the steps and wonder how that happened & what I'm doing.

The next day : still woozy. Woozier still when Sarah & I choose a champagne brunch ("Are you celebrating something?" Um, yes, being served though we're only 18? But instead, this raw deal: we toast "To the future!"). 3 P.M. hits and I'm napping.

Apparently I'm still woozy when I wake up @ 6 p.m. and buy a plane ticket to Paris for no reason.

Ryan calls; he's fucked up an audition, this never happens, he feels disoriented and confused and do I want dinner before our friend's birthday party? I do, we do, and circa midnight, Ryan and I actually fall asleep on a couch in the pulsing downtown nightclub Roxy. We wake up confused, he wants another drink and I don't so we squabble and I flee home. Sarah's there.

"What are we doing?" Sarah asks.

"What are you talking about?" I respond.

"With our LIVES," she responds, but I know. I already know. We're college dropouts. We serve bad food, lose our money, sleep & drink. Her harp collects dust in the corner. I sometimes use my laptop for AIM, when the dial-up's working. What happened to all the self-important yearnings we had in boarding school, still so fresh on our sad young literary tongues? (8)

Later, I'm lying forlornly on my bottom bunk when Ryan arrives home and joins me (his bunk assignment is "top"). We apologize for fighting over nothing. He tells me about his fruitless gay bar hopping and flavored martinis.

"What are you doing?" He asks. Like, why am I so often sick? Why all the throwing up, all the almost fainting starry-eyed surprises? Why aren't I reading enough? He then tells me everything I'd ever wondered about, like what happened (with us) in high school (what were we doing? trying to be straight?). He answers all the questions I'd never have asked and then he gets to the point ... the real secret is: he loves me so much that he even admires me, and he demands I do more. Admires me? Why?

I tell him: "I don't know what I'm doing."

He knows: I'm serving Fettucine Alfredo, kissing boys who don't read books, sleeping mid-day and buying plane tickets to Paris just to see if I can (I can).

"You need to take yourself seriously," he says.

Across the street, The Beacon Theater's back doors extract happy, solid, stable people. Though I suppose they'd probs think the same things we'd been thinking if they'd seen us from their window: "Those people are happy, and know what they're doing."

But we don't.

For the first time since dropping out and moving to the city with Sarah (who has her own room), Ryan and I sleep together in the same bed of our bunkbed. It's a tiny thing, but we sleep like angels. (9)

**

I think they finished drilling the holes in my sidewalk, finally, so I slept last night.

I'm pretty sure my stomach is lined with something toxic like rubber (and you are glue, which is why everything we both eat bounces off me and sticks to you).

I considered the master cleanse, 'cause I feel like there's just something off inside me, but the way it was described to me made it sound like it'd probs make my ass bleed more than a night at Babylon with Brian Kinney (yeah, I said it). Also I think I said I wanted to do it when Stef did it and Cait said "Don't do it!" and I said, "okay."

I went to the cheap Chinese massage place yesterday, which's like China, only smaller. I was too in the zone to even think about the thin curtains and the other people, the lack of privacy. I honestly just wanted to lie there forever, as it seemed to be the only place on earth that might demand nothing from me. Simply by lying completely still, I was doing my part.

Basically, here's the symptoms: hot flashes, nausea/vomiting, cravings for strange foods, inexplicable breast growth (without the corresponding overall body-growth), sluggishness, moodiness ... possibly I'm preggers, which'd be impossible unless on the off chance that I am, in fact, Marie Magda-Lyn. For all you heathens out there, that's a reference to the Immaculate Conception. Not to be confused with The Immaculate Collection, Madonna's best album.

I like this poem. (10).

---

quote: "When I think about it like this, I can't help asking myself, "Where is there any logical consistency in the world?" I don't know -- maybe the world has two different kinds of people, and for one kind the world is this completely logical, rice pudding place, and for the other it's all hit-or-miss macaroni gratin. I bet if those tree frog parents of mine put rice pudding mix in the microwave and got macaroni gratin when the bell rang, they'd just tell themselves, 'Oh, we must have put in macaroni gratin by mistake, or they'd take out the macaroni gratin and try to convince themselves, 'This looks like macaroni gratin, but actually it's rice pudding. And if I tried to be nice and explain to them that sometimes, when you put in rice pudding mix, you get macaroni gratin, they would never believe me. They'd probably just get mad." (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles)

---

links:
1) Facebook Gets Frisky With Your Most Feared "Friends" (@ny observer)
2) Peggy Munson writes a playlist to her poetry book (@largehearted boy)
3) Dan Savage: "I just fucking can't." "At a Loss" (@the stranger)
4) Emily, formerly of Gawker, does an Obituary for Personal Blogs (@guilt & pleasure)
5) Your Guide to Internet Oversharers (@gawker)
6) Babeland says that my story had them at hello, which makes me feel special/glad to be the first story in the book. (@babeland @dirty girls virtual book tour)
7) Converse Turns 100 (@the smart set)
8) Why Does it Take So Long to Grow Up? (@The American Scientist Online)
9) Prologue to "All the Sad Young Literary Men" (@n+1)
10) Embarrassment, by Brenda Shaughnessy (@poems.com)

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