The First Question Will Be: What Were You Thinking?

Dear [You],

Last week I was walking back from The Y, it was getting colder like it was about to rain and I was listening to depressing music because happy music is so you know, fundamentally dishonest. I was thinking about how it was looking like I’d probably end up spending Christmas alone this year (I did) and how last year I’d planned to spend it alone but Alex made me spend it with her family and I’m glad she did that. I’ve always said ‘I prefer to be alone’ but I realize now I’ve been lying about that. I just don’t mind being alone, but good company could be better than none.

I could be alone forever. Maybe that was a thing we could've done forever, together.

I don’t think you realize how much I miss you. But that’s what happens in arguments like these when everybody’s right/wrong and nobody makes sense and at the end of the day it’s me being me and you being you.

Last year I spent Thanksgiving alone but this year Haviland and her friend Ashley came up from LA -- it’s my fourth Thanksgiving with Haviland. You and me weren’t talking much then. I wondered what you were making and if I’d ruined it.

When Haviland & Ashley arrived the night before Thanksgiving, I was still in the hospital. Not a big deal but when you don’t have health insurance, everything’s an emergency, like having a pager in the 90s. After bcw/m. got off work, she met me there and I drank Dr. Pepper and we did a crossword puzzle and about a billion hours later, I was called back.

I’d been sitting on a bed back there for an hour when Haviland marched in and extracted me. It was very cinematic. I'd been in a screaming match with the senile World War II veteran who’d been yelling about the Chinese & the Jews and calling the nurses the n-word and then said something about my ‘tits.’

It’s sad when a person’s dying / sick / drunk and you learn how they really feel.

You don’t want to know how anyone really feels.

++

++

We left the hospital in Ashley’s Prius and it felt like a spaceship. I felt like everything was gonna be okay. I leaned -- or burrowed, really -- into m.’s shoulder, in that space between collarbone and chest and I felt so safe in there, in that car, with those people. Everything felt easy and peaceful in a way things haven’t felt in a while. Old love, new love, the future.

I’d moved into my apartment two weeks before Thanksgiving, after spending ~6 weeks on Taylor & Kelsey’s couch where every morning Taylor would make coffee or I would and Kelsey always woke up last, look who just got born. Most afternoons I’d be in m.’s living room -- smoking, writing, editing, talking to you on g-chat. I know you say I never talked to you then but I did.

Kids kept killing themselves in October. I feel like I’m working the suicide beat, I said.

Or m. would arrive at TK's looking defeated from the endless interrogation that'd been unleashed upon her after being brave enough to say to her now-ex, This is how I feel, and how I feel is that this is over.

You don’t want to know how anyone really feels. Honesty was never the point, we just need to believe that it is in order to do anything at all.

The key was to avoid eye contact. Maybe then we could avoid seeing eye-to-eye or looking too long but people are animals and animals are magnets w/hearts sometimes.

This was when I was still allowed to go there; to the apartment m. & her ex still shared while she looked for somewhere new/the future. But things happen and you can’t just go everywhere anymore. Things happen and people cry and your boxes are in the street.

People tell each other how they really feel, and then everybody’s crying.

You don’t want to know how anyone really feels.

That’s how life is. It’s fair. A person gets what a person deserves or sometimes gets what someone else deserves by proxy which is also your fault.

If life was all open doors and purple sunsets then it wouldn’t mean as much when the sunset would be so beautiful that you actually stop to kiss on the sidewalk. Even assholes like me can do that, I know that now. I can see the sun rise and set every day in California and usually it would set while we were taking our daily walk like old people needing a stretch. To Safeway, Berkeley, Piedmont, the city. Or just around. Sometimes we’d just walk around.

What if trees and sky were all I needed and I was just afraid to be a thing worthy of light? What then.

By the end of the month most of the walks were to look at apartments. First for me, then later for her.

I feel like everything is about to change for everyone, including you.

The thing that's blown my mind for the past few months is how people will hang on to a thing that's completely stopped working, if it ever did -- that is, the ex-girlfriends of many of my friends; the ex-girlfriends who fought to keep a tired thing or fought just to make sure everyone felt equally attacked. It's savage. It just feels so savage to me and I can't shake it.

Why spend your life sitting in a car on the side of the road, hazards blinking like a wolf crying.

All I really want in life is to never want a thing that doesn't want me back. Maybe that's even worse. I don't know how to fight for a person. I'm learning with you, even though it's not like 'that.'

No. I'm not learning.

But I'm studying.

++

On Thanksgiving m. moved into her new place and Haviland was here and everything felt easy except you, and we'd tried so long to run in opposite directions and still ended up where we ended up so I knew by then there wasn't any way to fix it. And that's the worst part. Someone on formspring asked me why isn't love enough? And I think I said, it is. Gotta give 'em hope, you know.

m. & Ashley made Vegan Thanksgiving ‘cause Hav only eats twigs now. Then m. played guitar and they all sang while I watched. It was super gay/perfect.

I love how I took Emily’s part and you took Amy’s, Haviland said to m., like we didn’t even have to discuss it.

The next night we played frisbee on the quiet street and I was wearing tights but can’t remember why. Later on we got stoned and I was talking about feeling psychic and Ashley asked me if I felt like I might have had wings in another life. Like that I could’ve been an angel or something.

You know better than that, though, don’t you. You know I’m not an angel.

Haviland has a lot of feelings about light now. Maybe I would’ve laughed at them in August but now it’s December and I like them. This is a thing she said to me:

Haviland: “You are choosing light now and I cannot explain the massive difference I see. You can’t control [people], you can only wish for them to make the light choice and keep doing it yourself. And surround yourself with other lightworkers.”

thanksgiving 2010

[I was lying before when I told you I liked the darkness. It was a defense mechanism, for when the other kids would be splashing away the goldenest years of their brilliant athletic youths and I’d be sulking inside with a book.]

[I didn’t know the darkness was a thing I could change.]

[I couldn't. Not in New York. In New York I loved the darkness. But I'm almost 30 so I have to stop that.]

++

Anyhow I was talking about Christmas, how I was walking back from the Y and thinking what if I bought a ticket to where you are. What if I just showed up. What would you do then. I thought about your hands over your face going no-no-no and pushing the door away and I almost cried for a second but didn’t.

I don’t cry much lately but I did the night I sent you that terrible email. It was lots of things: a fruitless day at the health clinic, my family losing interest it seeing me for the holidays and doing so too late for me to make other plans (but that’s unfair, probably, like “will you buy me a plane ticket ‘cause i can’t afford one myself” isn’t necessarily the best barometer of love). But mostly I was crying about you.

I do cry about you, I have cried about you. In the afternoon with pre-sunset whiskey, on my bed in child's pose at night, scrunched up like a baby dinosaur (my spirit animal).

I want you to like me again. I want you to admit that you still love me. I want you to admit that you know we still love you but that would be admitting that we’re not bad people and then you’d have to like me again.

What if me and you were just two people who met somewhere else at some other time. Like we were astronauts who spent too much time eating astronaut ice cream and not enough time shooting valiantly to the stars. What if we were waitresses together, smoking cigarettes and waiting for our rides after a dinner shift, blowing smoke valiantly towards the stars above us.

What if we were those people instead of who we are.

What if we were infinite? What if we were infinite and I showed up on your doorstep and said I know you don’t want to be fixed, but I heard from a friend who heard from a friend that you said you felt broken.

What then.

+
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You deserve/need a giant girl with a heart bigger than your whole body -- I'm not just talking about you now but also you and you and you. You’d sleep cradled in the scoop of her enormous ribcage, which’d be larger than a significant tropical body of water like the Gulf of Mexico. Lake Huron. Swan Lake. What you need is a heart bigger than a jet plane. Higher and faster and bigger.

Not just you, all of you.

What if my little heart’s more like a motel where you can sleep for a while but someone else might need the room tomorrow and I’ve gotta clean it first. It’s on a little brown raft crawling out to sea/see. What if I kept you there though.

Do you remember last October when everyone was partying in the room after the Equality March and I was sitting in the hotel hallway talking to you on the phone. I’m obsessed with how socks feel on hotel hallway carpet, dashing to see friends in the next room. For ice or something. What’s funny is earlier that day we’d been on the National Mall and m. and julia were both there too but I didn’t know them yet. I could hear Tess talking and Katrina loud-talking and Alex laughing because Alex has the best laugh in the whole world. She was/is/willalwaysbe my little lightworker, and the lightest thing I ever held in New York.

Do you remember that?

I’ve got rooms & rooms and my socks on the carpet and they’re filled with you all of you and I wanna live in every room forever but that would mean believing I'd ever been invited.

+

Everyone tells me you just need time but I miss you all the time. How long is time. I don’t think we’re meant to understand these things.

+

I can’t explain why it’s true that I love you in this/that way but can’t always be the thing you want. Nobody’s made me want to be everything as much as you have. I tried to do everything from here which is so far away from a place where I could touch your face and I ended up doing the worst thing of all the things.

It's a thing.

So many things can be true at the same time. Different feelings at the same time.

+

I never expected more than one (now dead) person could ever love me. I thought you were all lying. Now I don’t know what to do with all the people who probably really do love me but who I know, i KNOW, would not really like me if they met me, even if they’ve already met me. Every time someone tells me they love me, it feels like a surprise party.

I’m sorry I didn’t believe any of you who said you loved me. I’m sorry I just don’t know why you would, it just doesn’t make sense like why anyone would love Love Actually or beef jerky.

I realize I'm comparing myself to a bad romantic comedy and a piece of meat but maybe that's actually the most perfect metaphor I've ever pulled on you.

I was lying when I said I hate everyone. I love everyone. Everyone I've ever loved; I love forever. It's a long list.

I was lying when I said I hate everyone. I love everyone.

That’s the problem, Sid.

++

++

Sometime in October, my little heart slipped out on its own. I wasn’t unhappy. I think I was just outside. You weren’t the only one who complained and still even now I don’t know what happened because I don’t remember changing. Everything seemed perfectly natural and I loved you and everyone just the same.

It’d been so long since the world promised up oxygen I was semi-interested in breathing. I wasn’t writing things down because when you write a thing down it starts to exist. Sometimes i need to keep my stories in my head, close to me where nobody else can see them.

What if I tell you a thing and then I lose track of the meat of it, like a pen or my sanity.

What if I showed up on your doorstep.

My little heart was dashing around in slow motion or slipping into patches of darkness with m. where nobody could see us and we could forget about the rest of it -- an overhanging tree, some ambitious cross-fence foliage -- on Oakland’s night-time sidewalks. Corners. The damp, lukewarm California night. Fingertips. Her palms. My bones were on fire.

One night all four of us got kicked out of the hot tub, when only moments earlier there we were being sparkly wet and unemployed and fucked up in California at night in a tub of hot water with our shirts off? Stumbling home later, like sparkly wet animals? It was a Saturday night, it was a good night.

The feeling of being young. Not in the sense that I’m younger in years, but that feeling children have of life being totally infinite and incomprehensible.

++

Signing for my apartment in my apartment when it was still somebody else’s apartment

So now my life is pretty simple. I wake up and do Autostraddle and sometimes go to The Y, or take a walk alone, and at some point later, m. gets off work and at some point she comes here or I go there. Then I burrow like a thing. Like I'm a thing who laughs and smiles and everything.

I didn’t consider the possibility of this.

I don’t consider possibilities, good or bad, that I don’t have control over. My problem is expectations, my boyfriend said to me in high school on the dock of Green Lake, I just need to stop expecting anything, and then I won’t be disappointed.
I thought good point.

So I don’t. But now it’s become everything: I literally cannot see tomorrow. Tomorrow does not exist. I can’t even write to-do lists anymore. I can't warn you of anything. Maybe her and I have the same problem, that way.

Expectations are too much for a writer/psychic -- give me a possibility and I’ve got the next five chapters and they’re so gorgeous I can hardly believe the pages are mine to turn. I used to want things. Ages ago. I remember being on the bunkbed in my Dad’s apartment, underneath my brother, where I learned how to cry hysterically silently so he wouldn’t hear me.

That’s what growing up is, or was. You learn how to cry silently. How to throw up silently. How to walk silently. How to feel silently. How to break silently.

Things happened that we didn’t want/expect/predict.

I mean since I’ve gotten to California.

Things like the purest most unexpected happiness ever.

I'm sorry I couldn't warn you.

I did not consider this possibility.

Because it’s not what I do, and because there were so many reasons not to.

++

The point of this is that I love you. The point of this is that I’m sorry. The point of this is that I don’t have a giant heart after all. I’m just me on this fucking raft.

I want to be a lighthouse but I’m only a flashlight. You know what I mean?

I love you though. I'm not what you asked for, but I'm still what you have. I can't touch you but you're a thing I am keeping and nothing can change that.

Not even silence.

I will fight for you forever even if you never let me win.

++

While unpacking I found a letter Carl had sent me a year or two after I moved to NYC. Not a letter really. A note.

A piece of paper he’d cut in a heart shape and colored red with a marker. And a note with it that said, be careful. It’s the only one I have.

We haven’t talked in ages, me and Carl. I put it on the wall on my bulletin board to remind myself of that -- that sometimes being careful with a heart isn’t the thing you thought it might be.

On Thanksgiving I gave thanks for my friends but I called them “my family.”

++

I'm glad Haviland was here, I told m. when they left. I'm glad she was in this space after I moved into it. Like someone from before.

Like she blessed it?

Yeah, yeah. Like she gave it her blessing.

A thing to be thankful for.

++

Did I ever tell you that I picked Berkeley for you and what I knew you’d need. It doesn’t matter anymore.

Things tend to matter more when you can’t say them.

I guess that’s the thing about us.

I could just tell you everything and anything and you’d get it and you’d tell me something and we could go like that forever.

I just wish I could still tell you everything and anything.

I wish my life hadn’t become a blog post you don’t want to read.

When for so long; you were the first one I told.

Are You There Blog? It's Me, Autowin!

+ We had a team meeting tonight. Like a real one where real things happened!

+ For most of last year I'd wake up and for the first hour of every morning it'd be this game of detective trying to figure out what I'd done the last hour of the night before. What I'd written (the typos! what a laugh! how silly I was!) and to whom. Glasses and ashes and lots of open tabs.

It was like the opposite of laying your clothes out the night before school. I talked a lot about purpose but I felt powerless as a concubine; still but swimming furiously. I think those were all things I needed to go through but I'm still not sure exactly what I was doing. You start doing something and then you just keep doing it. Suddenly; then constantly. It kept me safe in a way because I had secrets I had to keep, there was no question.

+ Sometimes I caught myself mattering

+ Sometimes it comes back. One thing will feel wrong and the darkness unfurls enthusiastically from my chest and stomach, like an airy familiar evil pressing out against my skin and brain. It's a fear of losing things that I truly like and love and things that I feel are good for me, which is a different kind of fear than the fear of losing something you love desperately and absolutely despite how clearly rotten it is most of the time.

+ That happens less and less now but when it happens it's not just the fear, but the fear of more fear.

+ I don't want to be the girl who cried let's change the world but I feel whole right now, and solid. No one is crying here, no lies, just love, I mean it, I love it. I love life so much that I want you all to love it too, for all your right reasons.

+ Besides that fear I mentioned before, the crippling panic demanding attention like a child crying in public. Then it passes, like everything does. Sometimes I have fear about money and that's a new panic, like an itchy panic. I try to push it out of my brain.

+ We have this little temporary castle in the sky for another week or so where we can have meetings for Team Autostraddle. It was sweet tonight to talk to Laneia on the speakerphone and talk in real human voices. We talked to our programmer Tess on the phone a few weeks ago which was also awesome. It's been sweet to do things like eat pizza and talk about our dreams. We have like twelve interns which is awesome, and two came over tonight, so it was me, A;ex, Stef, Brooke, Robin, Carlytron, Tinkerbell who I put in the washing machine so now she is really clean and fresh-smelling, and Haviland!! and Intern X and Intern Jessica. If Crystal had been there/in our time zone that would've been perfect obvs.


+ A few weeks ago we had an interview rescheduled but Robin was already in the city and wanted to shoot something and so she was like, let's go to Brooke's, and so I was like, okay, and then A;ex and Carly came too, and it was fun! I look super serious! See:

+

+ Anyhow then we got to interview Julie Goldman last Sunday which was awesome awesome -- Robin took photos and Alex video'ed and I asked questions. Also two weeks ago Laneia and I started a feature we're doing about lesbian YA novels which I really love a lot. Also we did a Hot 100 and it was funny.

+ That's all. Just checking in! Hi guys! I just wrote "High guys!" I'm not high. If I was high I'd have a lot more metaphors.

My Ambition Was to Live Like Music

[picture/lyric concept forthcoming has been shamelessly co-opted from my cryptic friend Juan at Achtung Baby!, who I interviewed tonight because I wanted to, 'cause it was related to what I write about here. I'll put up the brief q&a tomorrow on autostraddle, first q at this post's end.]

[I thought I was gonna have time to edit this today but then all this stuff happened. So I hope it's okay. I guess it's like a blog, so there are no rules, just right.]
I started with music like everything, like girls: it was on and I was there. I loved it from where I stood but I couldn't get close, so I mouthed the words while everyone else sang.

I was one of the only girls I knew/know who couldn't sing or dance or play an instrument, and I was jealous of the girls who could. That was one reason I never felt like a girl but more like this half-breed androgyne child on the outside of things girls could do. All I was sure of -- I mean unsure -- was girls and music.

I started this blog for a girl. Girls are a lot like music, I think that's why my favorite love songs are written for girls. Lesbians specialize in achy raw gutted acoustic love songs [songs you either ADORE or completely despise because they annoy you] and gay boys put out the best pure happy thumping pop songs you'll ever hear. Because when girls make music for girls there's so much room for drowning, it's bottomless ... and a man can write a song for a girl that splits your heart right open. But it won't climb inside your heart and claw at the inside of your gut with a guitar string like a girl-for-girl song will. Girs-for-girls can be wide open and not worry about losing political capital in the process. They can just wail wide open.

But I think I grew up listening mostly to boys. I liked my parents' big record albums, heavy things, but I couldn't make the record play myself. I had a portable cassette player I'd carry around with me so I could listen to the right music all the time, record things, or, later, provide a soundtrack to our music videos. Just because.

On Saturday mornings we had Carole King and french toast with Shabbat dinner's leftover challah. It sounds so fucking cutesy now, like it's about music AND food, like the Jews with the hippie music and flat, sweet slices of bread. The sun shining on us like dust.

James Taylor. The Who. Pink Floyd. The Beach Boys. The Allman Brothers. Some big brassy showtunes, like Gypsy. Mostly though I loved The Beatles. That was where music began for me. There was The Beatles, and then there was other music, and all other music was considered as it related to or differentiated from The Beatles.

The Beatles sang songs about boys -- about what it was like to be boys who liked girls, but it was more about the liking itself than the object of their liking -- and so I grew up listening to these songs about boys sung by boys, their yearning animal mouths almost kissing the round bulbs of their microphones. There was a period where The Beatles started writing songs about teenagers and sometimes songs about men who were dying, but you could still hear the Boy in it. After The Beatles I had a phase of The Bangles and Paula Abdul and Debbie Gibson. Then The Police and INXS and Phil Collins, and then junk throaway pop like New Kids on the Block. Then a period of love songs -- big uncomplicated love songs with simple names sung by women who knew a few things about life like I Will Always Love You and Total Eclipse of the Heart and Save the Best for Last and Now & Forever. The first cassette tape I ever bought was Madonna's "Like a Virgin."

But I grew up with The Beatles. We listened to children's music too -- Raffi, Free to be You and Me, The Gemini Brothers, The Song Sisters, Really Rosie, alleged recordings of muppets singing. Those gigantic records were bigger than my head. We had every Beatles record.

I remember the wild trippy colors and pictures on the cover of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover. I wanted to memorize it, and then later announce it to a room like I was just guessing. A lot of growing up is finding places where you can just memorize something instead of doing too much work.

Then it's nearly the mid-nineties, and I move on from the uncomplicated by-women-for-men love songs to songs by men about misery and being scared about the increasing distance from being a boy. Nirvana, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails. Then we got softer as the decade itself soothed out. The Lemonheads, The Fugees, George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars, the Grateful Dead, and the first threads I ever heard of Ani DiFranco. Then onto mostly Billie Holiday and Gorecki and musicals, just music too fantastic to not be theater.

Then I just listened to music made by my friends, or soft poppy girl-boys singing about cartoons, like Belle & Sebastian, The Sea & Cake and Heavenly. From there it's been all over the map. Every year I have at least one period of Just Hip-Hop Hop Hop Just Hip Hop and at least one period of Ani & Chris Pureka & Melissa Ferrick and at least one period of dying men like Jeff Buckley, Martin Sexton, Rufus Wainwright.

My relationship to the girl-on-girl music is more private than the other songs. We just can't belt Fiona Apple together, that feels lonely, you can only belt it alone. But there's other music I feel safe belting in the car - I was remembering earlier about the night we drove home listening to The Killers and I knew you'd tell me later that you felt infinite and then you did and I thought then we were safe for some reason. But that was just girls and music and the drunk airless night.

Thanks for telling me about your favorite songs last week.

Some time later, a Beatles-themed restaurant came to Ann Arbor called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club. They randomly booked good shows at night, all the good indie bands. The catch is you had to play a Beatles song. These bands -- mostly boys singing about girls or girlish boys -- skinny/fat boys with bangs on purpose and so many feelings -- always chose Hey Jude. They liked it's mournful, young thudding spirit. My friends' band did something else. Twist and Shout, maybe.

Stef is at SXSW. I went last year with Crystal, Cait and Tara, which feels a lot like yesterday even though clearly -- look at us -- it isn't. Cait & I were dedicated to the "Uh Huh Her - and - Uh Huh Her - only" Project and Crystal & Tara got out and saw lots of bands including a band called "The LK" 'cause of the name and it turned out to be really good.

Even though I've never known how to do music, I've always ended up with musical people, good dancers or musicians. Except Chris. I'm remembering a bar on the main road in Ypsilanti -- which I remember as always gray, rainy -- Theo's? Cheap, with red lights, Hey Ma and Ludacris's Growing Pains and Jay-Z's booming swagger got inside these kids like hormones themselves -- something untouchable, something they could never shout that loud themselves -- this desperate sex filled the air. It was gross power; the kind that felt right at the time.

I'm not noble, there's always a girl or music or both. I think one of the first songs I ever really knew was "I Wanna Hold Your Hand."

I'm glad I was raised on The Beatles because it made me hopeful, because I think their music was inherently likeable & pleasant. Their music even at its trippiest or most indulgent was an earnest beating thing you wanted to bop about to. You kinda want to french kiss The Beatles. Hard! "I Saw Her Standing There" was my favorite. What magic -- the way she looked was way beyond compare. Way beyond compare!

Because music is more real than anything else, it's like it doesn't exist 'til you turn it on.

But now that you know so much of my fact, it seems even more naked to dare to write fiction, or to write like music. Fiction which I hold so dear. Which come to think of it was probably also for a girl, to some degree, and because of music. I don't trust writers who don't have music happening all the time in their head, like in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter [quoted in that picture -- "All the time -- no mattter what ..."] and I don't trust musicians who don't read. I trust nearly everyone, because Paul McCartney told me I was way beyond compare.

Do you remember when you were first allowed to pick your own music? Or girl? Even if you've already made a choice, the permission is rich, as endless as music.

Question #1 from my Exclusive Interivew with Luna Dot Typepad Dot Com . He's in Austin, Texas right now too but he always is.

Q: "I thought you were a female lesbian or bisexual when I first read your blog. Does this surprise you? Why or why not?"

A: "It did not surprise me because for some reason since around a year into the blog's existence, I started to get emails from some people assuming I was a girl. When it first happened I was surprised because I could not step away from the source and inspiration of my posts and think of it in any other way than a guy writing about a girl. If I read it objectively I can now see how it could appear as a female lesbian. With one objection though: Leonard Cohen worships women but in my mind his point of view is distinctively heterosexual so I would expect quotes from him ( and Charles Bukowski or Bono among others) to lean more towards the fact that a guy was writing the blog."
[the rest of this Q&A will be on autostraddle "tomorrow"* with maybe some other stuff about gender/art.**]

[he picked: Love is a Battlefield ]
[I picked: a catalog of increasing disasters, sex for depressives, the art of losing -- god! I'm morbid tonight!]

There's a lot of blogosphere people at SXSW. I hope you're all about to have a kickass time. If you're there or not you can answer a question: what's something you want someone to say to you tomorrow? Or you can just say something else. Or music.

*I have a very loosely defined concept of "time."
**Usually when I split posts up, it's to make all the comments in one spot on one blog or the other, but this time it's 'cause I genuinely wanna add some stuff to it before I put the rest up "tomorrow," it's not like a gimmick.*
***FYI we made Advice Vlog #35 !!

Automatic Fun of Inauguration Day 2009!

Eight years ago in my silly little diaryland diary I wrote: "I need to start an island like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach." I believe I'd just seen the film. Luckily for y'all readers and for The Macaroni Grill (they had the pleasure of employing me later that year), I stayed right here in America and did not "start" my own wild island of peace and savagery. Now I can never leave the country, 'cause I've lost two passports in two years, but this isn't about me, this is about TODAY! How does anyone "start" an island, anyhow. I am an island!

Seriously from now on this is about everyone else, for example:

1. Barack Obama
This is super awesome, today is gonna be sweet, and I look forward to talking about it on the interwebs with y'all. NYTimes has some cool features, check it out.

Related:
- Poll says most black say MLK's vision fulfilled (CNN)
- Bush-Era Abortion Rules Face Possible Reversal by Obama (WSJ)
- MSNBC Inauguration Day Coverage (MSNBC)
- Israel pulling out of Gaza before inauguration (CBC)
- Will Obama get rid of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"? (@san francisco chronicle)

This site, WebTV Hub, features a comprehensive list of where you can catch the inauguration online. Here's a few:

• CNN - Streaming the Inauguration in partnership with facebook where you can see the status of your friends update as you watch the live event.
• BBC - Live coverage of the event & other stories from around the globe as the Inauguration takes place. (BBC)
• MSNBC - Broadcasting the event from its website.
• PBS- PBS will offer coverage of the event and also has a brilliant library of videos and dialogue of Inaugurations speeches from past presidents. (PBS)
• Current TV - Live coverage integrated with Twitter for live online discussion of the event.
• New York Times - Streaming Inauguration coverage from its homepage.

I was raised by politically active idealistic parents determined to enforce a gender-free race-free hopeful mentality. I was sheltered, in some ways, by a community safe enough to be so progressively idealistic. I believed back then that our country was on the inevitable verge of potential blossom -- counterculture and dominant culture could come together and better yet was about to, and then we'd all evolve -- and then I grew up and for the past eight years have witnessed the obscene opposite of that, something quite dangerously different.

I'm glad that we are finally here. I believe this is a new place from which change can begin. Not because Obama is a "celebrity president"/hopey mchoperson, but 'cause he's just cool. He's cool. We'd like to have several beers with him.

2. Crystal's Birthday - January 20th. She's in Australia. You can wish her happy birthday at her blog, right here. I love her.

3. Haviland's Birthday was January 19th. I hope that you have already wished her a happy birthday. I love her.

4. Natalie's birthday was January 16th. I believe there was sheet cake, I have strong memories of vodka. I love her.

5. More Auto-Fun
- Iceland Melting - poems by Eileen Myles (@vice magazine)
- Another Nation: Only One Mexico (@chronicle of higher ed)
- FourFour Recaps gay Real World Brooklyn: "I'm not saying that I'm going to recap The Real World every week. I'm not not saying that I'm going to recap it either. Right now, all I'm saying is that I can't very well be expected to hold my tongue when I see something like this..." (@fourfour).
- Our Chart: Officially Over. I did that save-webpages-as-PDFs thing I should be an expert at by now, it's what a writer must do to save one's portfolio when the site goes under. Sigh sigh. You have 'til January 26th to gather ye rosebuds before the OC ghost town shuts off.

6. Quote(s)
"Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love." (Martin Luther King, Jr., "Where Do We Go From Here?" 1967)

"Now there are some things we all know, but we don't take 'em out and look at 'em very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even the stars ... everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings ... you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something wa down deep that's eternal about every human being." (Thornton Wilder, Our Town, 1938)

"Old" and "new" are the perennial poles of all feeling and sense of orientation in the world. We cannot do without the old, because in what is old is invested all our past, our wisdom, our memories, our sadness, our sense of realism. We cannot do without faith in the new, because in what is new is invested all our energy, our capacity for optimism, our blind biological yearning, our ability to forget — the healing ability that makes reconciliation possible." (Susan Sontag, Frankfurt Book Fair Speech 2003)

what we write about when we write electron blue & 8against8 contest results

[picture = barnaby ward]

[Results of the 8 against 8 contest in a video at the end of the post, for SON recap click HERE.]

So anyhow, back to memememe and my feelings. Much like the Dow Jones Industrial Whatzit, my feelings go up and down. Not that I understand, even abstractly, what the eff the Dow Jones actually IS, but my feelings about feelings are perhaps also quite conceptual -- they've got something to do with chemicals or the imbalance thereof, they fluctuate hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute, and are subject to massive drops and/or gigantic sky-charging leaps at any unexpected juncture.

Some humans choose to regulate these involuntary emotional fluctuations via the drink or the blow but ultimately these things kill you and/or ruin your life [and consequently lead you to Intervention, the best/worst show of all time]. So in lieu of smoking or xanaxing ourselves into rock bottom, we do the next best thing to get us through today which is making BIG plans for tomorrow! And what better time to make big plans for tomorrow than RIGHT NOW, this amazing moment in our nation's history when we've been assured & reassured that today is not gonna rock at all whatsoever.

So I've had a few ideas. I have these ideas all over the place, who knows where ideas come from, they just appear. I jot them down in my notebook. I have about 5-10 notebooks. Tomorrow I will get organized and consolodate my thoughts into less notebooks, obvs. (no I won't! i never will!)


In the interest of sharing with the group, I have transcribed below my collected notes more or less. one item is re-written from one page with variations, you'll see what I mean.

Autowin's Colossal Notes on Life:

- Ppl will return to roots, live in trees, etc., grow vegetables in the garden. will unite humanity, hope = seeds/soil.
humans not intended for such evolved desire, intended to hunt and gather (boring?) (what did artists do?)

- I should do national novel writing month i mean why not.
must totally restructure life, take self seriously
make schedule stick to it
SERIOUSLY

- unified by collective lack-of-wealth
a lot of sales at american eagle

- eventually things will become cheaper, like vacation
books, love

-things that give me hope: The West Wing, raspberries (raspberries are perfect - right? they are the perfect berry. if we can grow raspberries, we can do hope too)

- i totes heart rock bottom, it's where we finally meat each other

- universal problems --> universal understanding --> revolution?

- why do we always have to be the ones to move? why can't the republicans move ? where? they need a country (alaska? if rachel moves to nyc?)

- things that give me hope: The West Wing, raspberries, the cruise, poetry

- 1998: smoking w/krista in motel, reading southern lit out loud, coffee, cigarettes, pancakes, fudge, listening to ani like we meant it.
-2008: guitars seem too earnest

- the past keeps getting farther away, chronologically,
but closer and closer, emotionally, maybe i should've paid attention at the time

-things that give me hope: The West Wing, raspberries, the cruise, poetry, the fact that after all these years i still think ani difranco probs said it best, dancing, toast

-eyebrow wax has been on my todo list like every day

-why do i have so many friends who think that i have too many thoughts per day? they should try to keep up! we can have a race like odyssey of the mind.

-ladies and gentleman, the fabulous stain removers

--things that give me hope: The West Wing, raspberries, the cruise, poetry, the fact that after all these years i still think ani difranco probs said it best, dancing, toast, obama, perfect pens

-writers should go on strike -- no more writing for free
then what will everyone read?
perez?
i mean REAL WORDS

-goal: make new room represent a more organized, streamlined mentality

-find projects to pursue & use the pieces as blog posts -- see my drafts, give feedback. and "professional" feedback?

-i just need to write a novel next month. that will make everything better.

--things that give me hope: The West Wing, raspberries, the cruise, poetry, the fact that after all these years i still think ani difranco probs said it best, dancing, toast, obama, perfect pens, perfect books, purposeful pointlessness, alliteration.

++
It's hard to focus on more than what's in front of you
Electron Blue
Tomorrow's gaining speed on you
It's all you want to do, you,
You know where to run
You run Electron Blue

(R.E.M., Electron Blue)
++

Who won that 8against8 contest? Well, everyone who sent a photo or forwarded me proof of their donation to Equality California was entered in a drawing, which was held this afternoon at approximately 3:45 P.M., in my apartment [a.k.a. Haviland's apartment that I'm staying in for one more day] while A;ex should've been working, but needed to swing by to get this bright blue headband I'd borrowed. Very important. Then I made her do this.

Prizes:
1. Best of "Good Dyke Porn" DVD, courtesy of Bren, who donated it to the cause! There's a hot photo to the left of my window now 'cause I opened her window in a new window. That's the magic of Firefox and eyesight.
2. (2) copies of The L Word Season Five DVD Set. [I'll be giving away more copies soon, with a full promotion/contest thing]
3. (2) copies of Auto-Insomnia 'Zine #1.

Here we are, let's see who the big winners are. Unfortunately no stuffed animals or small children won prizes, then I could've gift-wrapped. Email me with your address if you've won and I will mail it to you sometime in the near future probably.

8 Against 8 : You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Hello! Welcome to the last day of 8 Against 8, which's what happens when 8 gay ladies stop being polite and start saving the rainforest. Over the last week we've gotten My So-Called Life back on the air, become eight less by curing cervical cancer, gotten the word out about fedoras, fed & clothed a million skinny naked ladies at the gym and raised nearly $12,470 to support the No on Proposition 8 efforts. (!!!!) In honor of our last day, I have a lot of feelings, which you'll read if you get past this paragraph and so forth.

It's been tough keeping up on everything -- like the bajillion emails from people doing super-awesome things related to the campaign -- so I apologize if anyone's asked for a shout-out and hasn't gotten it ... YET! I'll try to work you in later. Like "OMG, so I have these feelings about myself, watch this video about no on 8," etc. I feel like I'm due for a mental breakdown, which's primo advertising placement, let me tell you. All I need is for that woman to come back and start a fight and/or poetry slam with me in the comments, traffic will skyrocket.

Who's hot today? Besides Laura and Maggie, who are hot every day:

(L to R, row-by-row:

a;ex vega, carly, rachel,
natalie, haviland, riese,
vashti, stef, tinkerbell,
marlene , suzanna, eric
krista, rebecca, autumn,
laura, ms. jackson, jack,
renee, milly & georgia of lesbilicious uk, gemma,
asher, liz, crystal,
allie, lynn, razia
poncho, erin, couch,
sinclair sexsmith, meghan, maggie
caitlinmae, littlefoot, ewok
raye, rachel, a.k,
lieutenant teddy, judith, judith
samantha.)
++
Okay so let's get down to business:

1. This is your last chance to WIN! a copy of The L Word Season Five on DVD by sending me your photo for the No-on-8 quilt or donating [actually, it's totally not. I've got several more copies that could come your way over the next few weeks for other reasons, TBA]. You know, The L Word? Returning to DVD with THE COMPLETE FIFTH SEASON on October 21st in a collectible 4-disc set, including all 12 dramatic and deliciously provocative Fifth season episodes from Showtime's successful long-running series featuring all of the beauty, chaos and complexities of a group of women who inhabit Los Angeles's lesbian community plus behind-the-scenes special features? [That's what I'm supposed to say, right? I'm really good at PR.]

2. Or you can win other things.

3. This is your last chance to WIN! for doing something that will benefit the entire world. Future chances to win will be more self-serving.

---

8 Reasons - 8 Against 8 - Why No on 8?

8. Because ultimately it's about freedom -- Prop 8 asks the state if there's still a case to be made for hope and consequently, for America's founding principles.

America's an idea, a philosophy, an evolving social experiment that now has a chance to begin again. We have a chance on November 4th to choose a new, hopeful and dramatic path that would make our ancestors proud.

The thesis of our path: Love & Equality will Save Us All. We've gone dangerously retro lately, despite the fact that those who've earned a voice (a.k.a. the "liberal media elite") clamor for a return to our initial philosophy: celebrate diversity, do not prosecute deviants. Because if you haven't hurt anyone on purpose, I believe your life is inherently legal.

7. Because until I heard Obama's '04 Convention speech, I believed only one America remained possible: a business, a military superpower on its last lap, a theocracy. Because we're at a turning point. This election will determine if America's a theocracy or something else. "Something else" = land of the free, home of the brave. Home of the tolerant.

6. Because although I don't understand -- and I cannot relate -- to the Yes on 8 folks, and I think they're wrong, stupid and unevolved, I am willing to share this land with them on principle. I mean -- I don't believe in a G-d that denies happiness or judges anyone on anything besides these two simple questions: Are you an asshat? Do you kill or hurt? etc. That's all that matters. Beyond that it's technicalities, tricky scriptures that direct repression and suppression of desire. I believe in desire.

 I believe in pleasure and the inherent goodness of everything a person does with pure intent -- anything a person does out of desire to make the world a better place and to not hurt anyone else in the proccess. Because what better place to live in than a place of fulfilled desire, a place where hope, ambition, pleasure and honesty can thrive?

Because I'm willing to accept the existence of the Yes on 8 Parade in exchange for their acceptance of me. I'm offended by their intolerance, disgust, and condemnation, but I'll accept it. They can lock me out of their churches, but they cannot -- THEY WILL NOT -- ask the government to follow the example of their churches. That's not the G-d I worship or pray to and that's not the government that I auto-be governed by.

++

5. Because relationships are messy, the fallout's complicated. We lose so much (our money, our minds), the art of losing is inevitable to master, and life is complicated and sometimes divorce's clean, rational proceedings are an unexpected blessing in the wake of messy, complicated breakups. 'Cause if straight people get shotgun weddings, I want them too. 'Cause the temporary insanity that befalls two people already prone to rash, unwise decisions and leads them to marry suddenly and against better judgment -- those are often precisely the relationships that need the legal protection provided by breaking up legally.

'Cause when my friends said if I didn't at least call the police they would -- and I did -- and the police came and they read & listened & told me, "We're all gonna die. She didn't say she was going to kill you soon. She said you were going to DIE soon." Which was well & good 'til they asked, how do you know her, and I said, she was my girlfriend and they rolled their eyes so far to the back of their heads I thought they'd never come back my way. They'd never look at me the same again and they didn't. They said anyone could've written those emails. [ha!] and as this conversation went on I wanted to pummel both of these cops with the strength of a million men, the kind of legitimacy granted by the heterosexual union, but no, certainly I knew by now that it's easy to look at two girls together and think it's just playtime sleepover, without power dynamics and rings there could be no crime.

4. Because marriage is the first step towards being considered legitimate at all, because it'll get a ball rolling that one day could land in our court. Same-sex domestic abuse is chronically unreported. Victims feel they are not taken seriously. This is true. I just tried to type a sentence about how things may have gone differently if she'd been male but it made my stomach hurt so I stopped.

Because when the shit hits the fan so many GLBT people are left on the floor, staring at the ceiling fan, amazed at how easy it was to lose it all. Shit.

++

3. Because I want to be proud of America! Because it's embarrassing to be on this team right now.

Because I want America to be Team Honest, where people come clean and get rings and dresses for it.

2. Because we're so Behind

We're the only industrialized wealthy democratic nation to criminalize prostitution and aggressively prosecute sex workers (and don't confuse willing sex workers with sex trafficking and sex slavery -- that's a whole different ballgame. That's like comparing people who run factories to people who run sweatshops, it's just not relevant to discuss side to side, even if it's the same work being done).

'Cause we're talking logic here people. The same kind of logic that says if we don't pay for everyone to get educated, we'll pay for them to go to prison and/or rehab later. If we don't pay for everyone to get healthcare, we'll pay for the emergency room bills they never pay themselves. 'Cause it's logical to losen up the laws that are based on church-originated views of sexuality -- whether it be prostitution, abortion, sex ed or gay marriage -- and get logical. Sex work (like abortion) happens whether its legal or not, and regardless of how you feel about it or your church feels about it, it's a proven fact that sex workers are safer when their industry is regulated & subjected to health checks & they aren't afraid to go to the police when they're raped or hurt.

It's time we get free.

Everyone else is giving universal healthcare and everyone else is giving gay marriage and

wtf America
this was supposed to be YOUR GAME.
wtf, America,
live up to your fucking potential, you asshole.
be freedom.
create a country where everyone is allowed to do what they want, SEPARATE CHURCH AND STATE FOR CHRIST'S SAKE.
wtf, america, stop being a douchebag.
you've been talking shit for years about how you want the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free ... and you've become a church-state, which's so lame.

Because the past eight years have seen us lose our freedom of speech -- the very thing that set us apart from the oppressive regimes our parents' parents came here to escape.

1. Because if you want to immigrate to this country to be with the one you love and you are gay, you cannot.

Because that is discrimination, plain and simple.

++
18.
"Imagine all the people, sharing all the world."
-John Lennon, "Imagine."

Because if you respected my opinion that much, you wouldn't make it illegal. Because it's about time we do something revolutionary. It's been centuries since we threw the tea off the boat and what have we done since then? What have we got to show for ourselves now? Are we ahead of the game anywhere?

Because you can hate me and hate what I want with the fury of a thousand suns but you live here, with me, in this ridiculous yet oddly beautiful country, and so you're gonna have to just let me have this one.

Right-wing Yes-on-8 America, take one for the team. Team Freedom. I'm not being sarcastic this time. Thank you Ms. Jackson, I am for real. Imagine the flags blazing, Little Edie style, imagine the fireworks and Born in the USA and a landscape suited for conflict and division and hatred but simultaneously a landscape that gives us the space and the permission to diffuse all that and live life in peace. Where there is tolerance, and absence of judgment, a love will inevitably follow and that love ... is worth the struggle. Worth the letting go.

We have a chance, you guys. We have a chance to turn this all around. I've not learned much in my life from the government of these united States but I've learned this: 1. money is the stupidest thing ever, 2. war is retarded, 3. hope is sexy and 4. sex is hopeful.

Let's yearn, kids. Let's roam free with all our division and religion and misguided pretentious self-serving ideals. Let's let everyone do what they want with their lives and not tell other people what they can or cannot do. 'Cause this is America, yeah? We're Pilgrims and "Indians," ready for dinner?

I mean can you imagine if on November 4th we give IDEALS a bailout package? What I'm saying is no matter what crashes or breaks or shatters to never ever be fixed again, I hope this is a country where we can afford to dream. I hope we become that dream, outrageously little and better late than never and shimmering where it's shattered, glossy as glue.

[Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon at their wedding June 16th, 2008.]
Del Martin died in August at the age of 87.
An activist, Del fought for gay rights all her life,
and was finally able to marry her partner after 55 years together.
See: above.
+
donate.

i've seen the worst of you too: auto fun of the day 9.12.2008

[david bicho]

---

quote: "the greatest lie of all is the feeling of firmness beneath our feet. we are at our most honest when we are lost." (kierkegaard)

---

links: [I think every time I do auto-fun, I will personally implore you to read one of these links regardless of how you think you might feel about it. this time, it's number 7.]
1. mostly i am excited to hear about the heartbreak and hardships: tila tequila don't work right. (@fourfour)
2. "There is no negotiating with insomnia — you are at the mercy of your brain’s whims, like a pregnant vegetarian who finds herself eating slices of bologna slathered in jam": jessica cutler'strouble sleeping? read insomniac. (@the smart set)
3. holler j-beals: top ten sex scenes involving food (@nerve.com)
4. the sixty-day war: with one hastily made decision, john mccain upended the presidential race. an investigation of the bloody new political realities. (@nymag)
5. i knew it! talking is good; too much talking may not be: adolescent girls are totally talking like way too much -- "the term researchers use is “co-rumination” to describe frequently or obsessively discussing the same problem ... it has intensified significantly with e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging and Facebook. And in certain cases it can spin into a potentially contagious and unhealthy emotional angst, experts say." (@nytimes)
6. i didn't actually read this, but adam, maybe you will: over my dead body (@n+1)
7. i will forever remain faithful: how lil wayne helped me survive my first year teaching new orleans (@oxford american)
8. re: dream house ... decorating with books. (a bunch of links @bookslut)
9. fragments from palin! the musical (@mcsweeny's)
10. what makes people vote Republican? (@the edge)
11. the many faces of sarah palin! including the vlog! (@wired)

---

insomnia poem #13

remember when i used to sit alone
in my room all night
alone
i mean it i could write and write
riding a spaceship of dark cave and starlight
alone

the first rule of autowin club is
don't talk about bliss or
you'll knock it right over.

the second rule is
alone is the new multiplication
see: it's more, not less.
double the me, double the auto-fun
girl why don't you run

i used to like going to sleep before you
and waking up to hear about what i'd written
the night before
like maybe you'd read it
before i did
like you knew about me
before i knew about me
like time travel, which i love
and also doves
seem like nice birds

speaking of birds when i was a kid
i'd make lewis play pretend with me
we were birds, our nest a trampoline
you know
a place to feed and sleep and care
and by that i mean
a place to bounce
a place to flounce
a place to fly

what i mean is
i think i confused
home
with jumping

alone.

On the Night I Die I Swear I'll Sleep Outside Your Window OR "My Life as a House"

Me? I'd keep my library on the wall's built-in-bookshelves. Hardwood floors. Exposed brick. Exposed book. We don't need mirrors if we have each other, we need windows to see what's out there but not too much everything, 'cause then we won't be able to see each other anymore. I want us to really look at each other is what I'm saying.

I had a house once. I mean -- I lived in a house, and it was mine as much as anything can be yours when you're a child and don't really have anything but still believe that you will, one day, have everything.

I nested there, as surely and solidly as anything in the world could've been my nest when I was a child and didn't really have anything but still believed I would, one day, nest somewhere else, somewhere spectacular like in Troop Beverly Hills or The Little Princess.

I never liked adventure stories of swashbuckling, journeys, warriors, quests -- I liked novels where precarious girls in frocks and bare feet discovered secret worlds in the wardrobe or in a box in the attic, stories where adventure was as local as wallpaper.

Natalie, my bestie from college who I lived with at two separate addresses there and crashed with last week, saw her Fiji dream house in Architectural Digest. Simple, clean lines, beautiful, next to the sea, surrounded by mountains and green, endless green. Open & floor length windows, glass walls and the bamboo bedroom walls open up to the spectacular sea. Hardwood floors, lots of ceiling fans, crisp linen, a beautiful kitchen where she can see all the people she loves sitting at once with wine and laughing. Stainless steel everything. Huge bathtub. Colors, and light, and dreamity dream dreams.

And when, at thirteen, my parents got divorced and we were made to leave that house I owned [or thought I owned] I left kicking and screaming, literally, staging a sit-in on the blue carpet in the style of the Vietnam protests my parents had told me about. I said I could not go. I demonstrated this by burying my head in the carpet. To my left -- the closet I'd turned into Samantha (a doll)'s bedroom. To my right, the futon and my loft bed and my desk where I wrote stories on my loud clanking electric typewriter.

To my all around -- my walls; posters of places I wanted to visit (like New York City) and hulking portraits of my hero Nolan Ryan who kept on pitching 'til he won.

Haviland wants a place like this hotel in L.A. called the Visceroy, like 60's stuff like in Bewitched [her typo was "betwitched," which's better, yeah?], the decor from I Dream of Jeanie, and lots of mirrors and of course the beach, always the beach and the waves, and the wind in her fairy-tale hair.

In the fifteen years since leaving that place on 431 Crest Avenue [like the toothpaste], I've switched addresses 23 times. As unhinged as that's made me feel, I've established certain precautions -- I always know where I'll be at least two weeks before I go there. I've never, for example, had to crash, or put my everyday things and furniture in storage, or couch-hop. A luxury, sure, but for me it's hardwired as hardwood and the only thing that keeps me grounded in a life of freelancing and freewheelin' and now, no legitimate roots anywhere, noplace I've ever lived that'd have me back or even knows my name.

Carly: "my dream house is whatever house Robin is living in. What, too gay?" Carly's dream house is not too big and it's modern but not cold, and there's a pool and room for dogs, and she can entertain or just sit around and watch tv in her pajamas. She says, "I can't figure out if that means I want a house on the beach in CA or a penthouse in Manhattan. Guess I'll have to get one of each!"

At boarding school near the end of my junior year, my writing teacher invited his workshop over for dinner. I rode my bike there, it was on campus. I had lots of coffee which was still a drug to me then because I was 16 and full of hope and spirit. I didn't say much 'cause I was shy, but I remember the books in his room, and the warmth they created with their words and possibility. I remember the brook in the backyard, like a cheesy watercolor rendered beautiful.

I remember, remember tangibly, the feeling of whipping through air on my bicycle from his house afterwards and thinking, "Marie Lyn Bernard the world is at your fingertips/handlebars!"

That was when energy, not oblivion, was my drug of choice. And I decided that night that when I got home for the summer I'd build myself a cave -- I'd always loved that shit, the treehouses and secret clubhouses -- a cave no-one else could squeeze into -- a place where I'd read poetry and write brilliant brilliant heartbreaking things. I'd write a novel, I said. All I needed was the right space, the right cave.

Adam's number one awesome houseboat is MacGuyver's. Distant second; Duncan during the relevant season of Highlander. In his elementary school sketchbook he drew his dream house -- he sketched it. It was a castle. With a moat. And a wing for his mommy because he was/is that kid. And he went on to form his romantic archetypes from the relationships in fantasy novels which wasn't healthy but the women were plucky (he chose the angsty young sorceress nobody understood, not the ditzy princess in distress). And then there was a real-life man with a real-life wife who had spines; spines of books, candlelight. That, after all, is his dream house: "I would probs want more light than he got, but it was night when I was there, so just about anything would have more natural light than nighttime."

And so, here I am. Basically what happened was I was all set with the apartment and then five days before I found out it wasn't going to happen ... I don't, and won't, go into detail, because it's my life as a house too, and it's complicated and I hate myself already for typing this sentence already.

Alex wants something she can build with her own two hands, with materials from her stranded desert island, but she realizes that fantasy sounds a lot like nightmare. So then there's this: a margarita shack on the beach in Mexico, where she'd sleep in a hammock and make margaritas all day. But then there's this too: the tree-house. That Swiss Family Robinson house in Disneyworld, anything where she could be inside and around a tree, the warmer the better.

But the whole situation leaves me unhinged, lost, and that's why I'm couch-hopping. I feel dislocated, like Houdini could pop off both of his nice shoulders you know? My Dad used to talk to me about Houdini a lot. I liked how Houdini was stuck in this tiny space and could dislocate his body from himself and that was how he made magic.

I realize, oh I realize, that there are children in Darfur who'd love to be sans-address but have a bed to share with a friend or a couch to hop to, close one's eyes on. Perhaps if I didn't realize this, it would be easier to figure out how I feel. But every thought I have is overrridden by the other thought; the thought of people who are sleeping on the streets, who need more than my change/change.

My short list includes the loft from Igby Goes Down, The Factory, that house in the Hitchcock movie with the cliff chase and the hanging, Walden Pond, the house my writing teacher lived in, and more and more and more that I will think about tomorrow and then add 'cause this post is totes incomplete, like you and me and everyone we'll ever know.

Caitlin. Wants a house on the beach with a pool and a backyard and she imagines her dream house to be like in Life as House, the movie that said: "I've always thought of myself as a house, I was always what I lived in. It didn't need to be big, it didn't need to be beautiful, it just needed to be mine. I became what I was meant to be, I built myself a life, I built myself a house, with every crash of every wave I hear something now. I never listened before. I'm on the edge of a cliff, listening. I'm almost finished. If you were a house, this is where you'd want to be built" and "What? Do I still love you? Absolutely. There's not a doubt in my mind. Through all my anger, my ego, I was always faithful in my love for you."

And so, nowhere I am. And so I do not know who I am. And so I want more than anything to be proud of myself. Which won't set us free but Who I Am is the great mistake in a life full of mistakes.

And so tonight I will go to sleep, ideally, though I've struggled with sleep the past few days 'cause I'm not good with strange spaces, and so I panic, and so tomorrow I will wake up, and I will go to work, and I will, if I have the time, attack this post and try to make it into something as glorious as four walls, as something I could dig into, as something I could keep. Something I can own, as much as any child can own anything.

if I gave you my number would it still be the same

Remember last Sunday? I do, but only generally. Like; I'm aware it was a day. I'm aware it was different than today. A whole week ago! I believe, in the bestest brightest way possible, that Part Two of the Sunday Top Ten: "Back in the 90s" will be coming later this week. Clarissa will explain it all, it'll smell like teen spirit, and all ye younguns will sport your hot outfits in a photographic retrospective envying the Amy Grant soundtracked Graduation Video that played at my middle school graduation.

Do people still give slide shows? Is there any chance ... like ... any chance at all ... of going back? To slideshows, black and white teevee, the milkman, 'zines, etc?

Wait. NEVER MIND ... I couldn't ever go back to 1995 for real because ... if it was 1991/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9 ... there'd be no Uh Huh Her. Who would be Tinkerbell's new number one band? Would you still believe in something?

I don't have a brand new inventive post in me right now so I'm gonna ramble instead. Honestly, it's so fucking weird to think about how from now on I'll never be posting from that little cave I lived in until yesterday! The cave where I lost my mind and lost ahold of like -- ME! I mean ... wtf? That space ... that room ... that emo-cave ... has been so central to a certain phase of evolution and similarly to a certain phase of solitary self-destruction.

You get into a routine. You're up up up up up up up and more up up up up up up and then down. There's the computer, radiating possibility of connection without having to face anything, really, face to face, and what if I don't like your face? and if you dare to go outside I was proven right right away -- yes, you're right, people are annoying, and they talk too loud, and want all the wrong things.

Speaking of the nineties ...

So I felt anchored in that emo cave like I've never felt anchored before. As in; not at the port. But drowning. Anchored by the weight of books, hundreds of books and the shelves that held them. By running to the hospital with photocopies while my limbs wondered if I'd ever eat or feel again. Anchored by an empty bank account, that silly meaningless determined vessel.

Anchored by the weight of moving in at a low point and never really recovering and this week has been a blur of wishing just once I could move without mourning and then remembering how often I used to. How many times I moved not only without mourning but WITH determination.

How I used to move with pride, violently alone.

When in doubt: go. Did you hurt me? Time to go. A fight? Let's fight for the door except that wait just kidding, I'm already there, and that do you hear that sound that it is the sound of it shutting.

I knew, after all, the danger of depending.

Because, speaking of the nineties, one day I dared to write in my diary that my Dad was the only good thing in my life and the next day I woke up and went to school at Pioneer and then during 9th hour because I didn't have a 9th hour I went to McDonald's with my theater friends and I ate two cheeseburgers and french fries and a Coke. We came back to school and there were messages for me.

I read the messages & waited outside alone for the woman who'd left the messages to come pick me up. She drove me away from school 'cause what had just happened while I'd been eating cheeseburgers is that my Dad died. I'd told my diary he was the only good thing in my life and so then he died.

So. At 14 I became fierce, cold, and mean. Violent without touching. Violent 'cause when I said "fuck off" I meant it and I stayed that way for years and years.

This thing where I depend? That thing? That's new to me. I mean, I'm so new at it. There's not many things I'm new at anymore but I'm new at: being broke, not going to a physical workplace every day and also I'm new at depending.

Because back then? You'd never catch me caring. Like in public. Alone: alone I could do anything! I could cry, cut, starve, fuck, try try try to feel something -- ANYTHING -- anything else.

And this brings us to the part where I'm trying to roll up my own carpet to leave the dorms that semester and I have to ask an RA to help me 'cause I realize suddenly it's a physically impossible task and per ush I'm the last one in the dormitory, determined to do it alone, because that's what I DO, that's what I DO! I do it alone. I don't want help. Help is for people who can't hack it on their own, help is for losers and I, I, I iiiiiiii am a winner. mememememe.

I had my own money from my Dad and on top of that I always worked as often as I could so I had more than enough so I can pay for you and you and you and then ultimately memememe. And the RA says "Sure," surprised of course that that girl (the only first year student to actually request a single, the girl who didn't wanna meet new people and at 19 had already lived away from home for four years, like in a CITY ) (that girl who liked to dissappear on walks to places the other kids didn't know about and for a few weeks had to disappear to her home and stay with her Mom even though she hadn't done that in years. That girl who'd locked everything in SO TIGHT that it made her too sick to move) was talking to him at all, let alone asking for something.

"Why are you doing this alone?" he asks, squinting his eyes like I'm crazy.

I say, "My Mom's at work," even though she's not. My Mom asked if I wanted help and i said No, No, No, NO! I will do this alone.

I'll be Little Orphan Annie despite the facts. I'll beat you to the door, I'm telling you, don't fucking test me, when I run out it'll be like a slammed the door in your face but FYI my face is so over your face it needs a whole new word for Over, and Face.

Those who've gotten away from me:
read this, and call.
Those whom I've hurt:
I wanted everything, or not enough.
It was all my fault.
-Stephen Dunn, "Loves"

And I kept doing that. Packing up car after car alone. Doing everything for all the wrong/right reasons. But all around me I saw people depend and I though that was maybe a good back-up plan if this plan ever failed.

So this lead me, ultimately, to 2004, moving out here (alone) and busting a tire at 3 A.M. in New Jersey. My whole life was in my car and I was fucking determined to make it out alive and alone. I was saved, ultimately, by a good samaritan in a serial killer van. But before he came I don't know if I was ready to disappar or determined to keep going.

Natalie says; "You know, you always do things I'd never do 'cause I'd be too afraid it'd kill me and maybe that's just 'cause you're not like --" and then [the pause].

Chelsea says; "Marie, aren't you? Afraid?" when the topic of death comes up one afternoon in the dorms (the one I couldn't move the carpet out of). No, of course not, I say, paying only half attention. How silly. Here, is here, and here is okay. And there is with my Dad, and so that's okay too, and so what's the big deal? Death is not THIS but that doesn't mean it's not okay.

When did this change? When did I change? When did I start caring so hard that I had to stop caring even harder?

And where's the middle ground, between me and not me, between anchors and flying, between leaving and refusing to leave? The line between love and hate isn't all that thin, but the line between love and love? It's a gulf. It's a terrifying gulf and as you try to leap across it, hate will grab you by the horns and it will hurt and if you make it to the other side ... that's love. And now you've earned it after all.

I don't know. I don't know the answers to these questions. Right now, thanks to Team Crisis (A;ex, Stef, and -- for the very very heavy stuff -- A;ex's friend Eric, with his man-muscles), all my shit is now in a storage unit. Or in the trash or at the salvation army or sold or donated.

With me: I've got a suitcase and my heart and a desire to move into a middle ground where I can be on a Team without needing a Team Crisis.

Right now I'm in A;ex's basement in Long Island. I have abso-fucking-lutely no idea where I'm gonna live or really what I'm gonna do, like with my life, and that fucking pisses me off, and will probs gaurantee at least ten more panic attacks this week, but my Mom always told me that thing about lemons and lemonade. Like how you should make lemonades out of lemons if that's what you get. And another thing my Mom taught me is that people can fuck you up but people can change. People will change, no matter what the stakes. People CAN change.

And who doesn't like lemonade? Assholes, that's who. People who can't spare a nickel. Look. If I can spare a nickel, you can spare a nickel.

I hope I win the calendar contest, I'd love to know what day it is, how time passes, you know. how we go on.

So anyway here I am in the middle of wherevs in the basement 'cause there's no wireless upstairs and a;ex made me dinner. We sat outside on the back porch and I thought oh my god it is so quiet. And I thought, if I'm gonna do this, I mean really do this, I mean get back to the mememememe I was before I somehow lost it ....

I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but sometimes when I trust someone else with gravity it's like my heart looks at me and is like, "really?" and then before I can answer it goes, it flutters away like the happiest bird of all time. It goes before I answer, like it has wings I'd never noticed before, I'd just thought "what nice shoulder blades you have."

I mean that first my heart drops to my gut, and then directly to the sky. And then it disappears. And I watch it go and I nod because I'm okay with that.

And I guess what I'm saying is; everyone I love, I need you now.

I need you because I don't. I need you because I want you, because I want to choose who I want close to me. Because ... actually, ultimately ... like you've shown me a million trillion times ... I can't really count on anyone but me.

And so I know that. And so after that, I mean after learning that again ... I've chosen to count on you. And you, and you, and you. I want to love you all and I can't let anyone else tell me what to do or who to love if I'm going to just be true to myself. And so I've chosen to count on you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and trust me, you know, I've got my back, and I'm sorry, for what I said, but I've got it, I've got my own back, here's the trust fall, and here's my trust, and let me, because, it was my turn to decide and all I know is that I should.

"Listen, my truest love.
I've tried to clear a late century place for us
in among the shards.
Lie down, tell me what you need.
Here is where loneliness can live with failure,
and nothing's complete.
I love how we go on."
-Stephen Dunn, "Loves"
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