that time i took photos, often outside, far away from computers

First Alex drove me to the airport from New York City after everything got packed all in a hurry.

Then I flew to Detroit and my Mom picked me up in the airport and took me back to her apartment which felt familiar and nice even though I'd never been there before.

On October 1st Interlochen, my boarding school, was hosting its class of '99 reunion and so my Mom drove me to Kalamazoo and then Ingrid and I drove upstate to Interlochen and everyone was there.

I went away to boarding school for my last two years of high school. My Mom and I were fighting one night and I wanted to say something dramatic and so I said I was going to boarding school. I don't do things like that anymore.

There's a part in The Big Chill where someone says to someone else, "I was the best I've ever been with you people," but she's talking about their time at the University of Michigan which I also, incidentally, attended, though I was arguably perhaps at my worst with most of those people. But at boarding school, I was the best I've ever been with those people.

So it was good to be see faces that have only changed a little bit and people fully intact. We changed I think, for at least a little while there. Or maybe we just did that thing you do where you have to put on certain personalities for someone else because you've always suspected there's something inherently unwired and abnormal and unacceptable inside of you and you have to at least give it a try -- to be something other than that.

Maybe I am just speaking for me. Maybe everyone else kept it all this time but regardless we all got it back.

See it's Saturn Return.

Sarah says, you know I'm supposed to say how we all have changed but we haven't. Delp (our writing teacher and surrogate father) said, the craziest thing is that you all look exactly the same. Then I said no I look haggard and weathered and I think I want a face transplant and everyone said the thing they always say about how dumb I am to say these things.

See Interlochen was a place where I felt authentic. Somewhere in the woods, there's a center in me I am simple without. Most people have places like that, or I hope they do.


When I first got to Interlochen I was fifteen and sad. I was catastrophically sad. I was sad like a person who doesn't think sadness ever stops or changes and then it did. I left boarding school liking things I'd been discounting for a while as overly sentimental and more importantly too painful to lose at the end: friendship, poetry, the apple fritter things they served at breakfast.

On the last day went to Delp's new cabin. Everything felt peaceful. I was with Meg and Ingrid and Sheetal and Delp and everything felt right.

When people asked me what I was doing I told them about Autostraddle and everyone said they liked it or was impressed that I get to do what I get to do which is write, and work with other writers and edit and have ideas and be creative and work with other creative people, which is the thing I was doing and the program I was in At Seventeen. Unlike every single other person I've talked to about my work, not a single soul at Interlochen asked me how we make money (I'm amazed, honestly, at how f*cking tacky people are sometimes). It was just good.

Then we drove back and then I was at home with my Mom. She was really nice to me and made sure I had everything taken care of before I left, like my teeth.

Then I got on an airplane and the airplane landed in Oakland, California! So far away!

From there I did not use my technologies, except for ordering pizza. bcw and I looked at a map and a travel magazine and decided to go to wine country because there's an attraction there which promised famous fainting goats. If you would not drive 1.5 hours north on the West Coast Highway to look at fainting goats then I don't know what to say for you besides I'm sorry.

See two French children hugged and then the geyser exploded. It only explodes every 45 minutes.

Then to the big castle we saw out the window which was a winery also by this rich man who wanted his own castle. So we drove up there and conducted additional photoshoots in the spirit of fitforafemme. Eventually in the future you'll probs find out what we were wearing on her website.

Also later to Twin Peaks to smoke and look at how big the whole world is and how we were smaller then. I could see everything, even through the clouds & fog afterwards which will always be there, sometimes. There's nothing a person can do about it. Sometimes you just have to get through it, and grope in the darkness and remember earlier how the sky turned purple and you were glad to be here.

We are reading Inferno for Autostraddle Book Club

Sunday came and wasn't the best day ever for some reasons so we sleepwalked through Alcatraz where we learned that men are powerful and they know how to control other men, especially the bad ones. Then there was dinner and then I went to Taylor & Kelsey's and we had wine and later me and Kelsey got sick. All of these things were fun however except the sick part.

Everyone ran Autostraddle without me quite well, even if Laneia was driven slightly crazy by the task. Let's be real, we're all crazy already otherwise we would be at Buffalo Wild Wings right now.

I'm at Taylor and Kelsey's new apartment in Oakland. It's nice to be here with them. I usually hate crashing but this isn't a crash so much. It's a landing or something, although temporary.

Sometimes I get super scared and most of the time I just try not to think about scary things and instead think about things that make me laugh or smile.

On Sunday my grandfather died and now it's Wednesday and I am still scared to call my Grandmother because I don't want any of these things to be real. I call but it rings and rings.

I just want the ocean right now.

I just want an audio tour of my life in a foreign language I don't understand, and someone who can translate it for me.

I just want a home by the ocean I'm lying I want to never have a home ever again. I do I want a home by a lake. I want to be in charge of a thing.

I just want to get into a space where maybe I could stay for a while, lying on the kitchen floor reading Inferno.

I feel relaxed and the sun goes down behind the buildings every night.

When I get a place I will feel better. I know there is fear underneath my ribcage and my stomach and all the other parts. The visible parts. I am lying on top of it, smiling and eating tomatoes.

New York City is a hard place to live. To fight all the time for a small patch of overpriced land. I love the city but the living was hard, and at some point it wasn't worth it. You fight against unspeakable strange malice every day at least a little bit, you go somewhere overcrowded or get elbowed on the train or you are forced into an overpriced cab ride due to emotional circumstances of some kind which are making you feel bad enough, thank you very much, city, I do not need that expensive cab-ride in my life when I am so sad or mad or in a hurry.

So I feel good, I think. I'm behind on all my work. I just read two pages of Inferno and looked through my bag for chapstick, which I couldn't find, and then i thought my phone was blinking but it was really just this mobile Virgin web thing I had to get.

I just want a tree. I just want ice cream.

I got ice cream, I want a treehouse.

I feel like everything is about to change for everything, even you, I said in the car.

I just want to do things when I want to do them and most of all help people. Is what I want. I need you to trust me on this even though I seem so far away. Not geographically but like in my brain. I am. I mean, that's exactly it. How I want you to be happy.

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.

Sunday Top Ten, Part One: I Wish I Had a River I Could Skate Away On

It is a truth universally acknowledged that it's lame to open any piece of writing with a quote -- even a self-indulgent blog post (update for those not aware: as of May 20th, 2008, "blogs which employ first person narratives" are the default "lowest possible form of written communication/art," ranking only slightly above: emails from technologically incompetent grandmothers, the Yahoo! front page headlines, Goofus and Gallant, Nicholas Sparks novels, negative comments on youtube, text messages from pre-adolescents and the screenplay for Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo). But it's also a truth universally acknowledged that the truth is a silly animal and there's no hunting allowed (we saw the signs this weekend), so I will persist -- I will open by quoting someone far wiser than I'll ever be. Although ... actually, I did just talk so much nonsense that the opening's already taken care of (opening with nonsense is punk and not lame), therefore I'm not opening with a quote, except that I secretly actually did. Hey-oh!

The Great Jim Harrison (The Legends of the Fall, After Ikkyu & Other Poems) once wrote: "One day. Standing in the river with my flyrod, I'll have the courage to admit my life." My writing teacher transcribed this quote in my "book" (I have this special book of my favorite poems & stories and I'd give it to friends/mentors to make a page or 2-3) underneath a 70's b&w of himself (my teacher). Above the photo, my teacher wrote: "Marie - Don't forget -- you owe me a big check so I can do a lot of thinking." See; I was supposed to get famous (due to my fingers allegedly being on the pulse of my generation -- a grave miscalculation), make money, and then send him to Montana where he could fish and think all his life.

Missoula, Missoula, Missoula, I'm yours. Eugene, your name is so terrible that you must be terribly lovely and green. I went to Ashland (same state), there were mountains, they were beautiful.

That's what they do (mountains). They sit there, look good.

I was upstate for Memorial Day weekend -- Alex's family has a cabin up there. Last night I came home. The sirens started after dark. A few, then a hundred, and then helicopters, then the people on the street with something to yell about and loudly. Seven innocent people shot, a few blocks away: "The gunman is still at large, and residents have been advised to stay in their homes." I miss East Harlem sometimes. No cab-drivers or delivery people or friends dared to tread into Sparlem, but people danced to music there. Here, on the West, music just thumps out of cars like it's fighting with the pavement, there's no dancing.

My favorite is NY1's article today, which ends with "two other unrelated shootings also happened in the area last night." (Subtext: "but we don't care.") -- shooting a 13-year-old boy in the leg? How the fuck does that happen? Seriously. How the fuck does that happen?

I don't know. And so, I keep talking about myself. Which I don't know either, but I know it enough to try to talk something. Crazy. Burma. Shoot.

Missoula, Missoula, Missoula, Santa Monica, San Francisco, Eugene, Tacoma, La Jolla, Raleigh, Anchorage, Chapel Hill, Concord, Santa Ana, Savannah, Interlochen, Missoula, Pierre, Charlotte, Colorado Springs, Mesa, Missoula, Des Moines, Providence, Montreal, Sioux Falls, Southampton, Escondido, San Antonio, Tulsa, Thousand Oaks, Topeka, Lafayette, Baton Rouge, Little Rock, Clearwater, Athens, Missoula. Those all sound nice. Literally.

One day, standing in the river with my flyrod, I'll have the courage to admit my life.

SUNDAY TOP TEN: Things I Used to do All the Time but Hadn't Done in Long Time, Until Recent Time.

TO BE COMPLETED IN TWO SEGMENTS
PART ONE : 10-6
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10. Hiking in the Woods

Once upon a time, I didn't own a laptop case but I treasured my hiking backpack. The straps were adjusted for my then-narrow boyish hips. I needed help to cram a sleeping bag into its lower pocket.

Saturday I was standing in the river and remembered everything.

Specifically: rivers I'd crossed before, tents slept in, that wilderness survival class I'd taken at thirteen where I had to build my own shelter from tarp & sticks and sleep in it for three days (but! I was young and we got mooned by the boys. All we could see was leaf-shadows on pale pre-adolescent ass, but what a thrill! Mooning!), getting lost in the Smokies, trekking the Tetons, singing bad hip-hop with backaches and bandanas somewhere in Northern Michigan. Afterwards I'd forget how bad my back hurt and remember the Nalgene bottle and the smell of fire.

It's always bizarre to have dozens of strong memories of a certain activity -- a non age-specific activity -- and then realize the memories are all at least ten years old, like when you go to the doctor and they ask when your last physical was and you feel like it was probs last year but when pressed realize, omg, it's been way more than a year.

I missed the woods. Hark!

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9. Gone w/o Internet for over 48 hours

In the week preceding our recent jaunt to Malibu, I'd been wallowing in an imploding and increasingly boring state of depression/anxiety. Haviland said there was no internet at her temporary Malibu digs but 'cause Haviland's technologically impaired, I took this to mean, "I feel there's no internet in my house, but also I don't know how computers work and therefore I'm sure that You! Riese! will find the magic key to wireless." Howevs, I was wrong, Haviland was right as she always is. (First rule of fight club is "Haviland is right") Ixnay on the interent. This weekend upstate -- also, no internet ... and nowhere to drive to and get it, either. And ... it was actually totally ... fine. In Malibu everything was shiny with big lapping waves, upstate everything was green and familiar and safe. Wireless, shmireless. Once the panic passes, it's a whole new kind of calm.

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8. Talked to Strangers A LOT

In the past three weeks I've met Alex's family & friends, gone to two parties in one night, hugged Leisha Hailey and interviewed -- on camera -- a plethora of B-list homosexual celebrities. So, screw you, ex-boyfriend who said I had no social skills! (I mean, I don't. But whatever.) (Sidenote; nothing wrong with the B-list. I think I'm on the W-list or something, optimistically). I think waitressing was my old unreal social outlet, I miss it sometimes. Good workout.

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7. Hung up On Someone, Over and Over

This technique, employed popularly by dramatic adolescents, can also be enjoyed by full grown adults, if the situation merits. Have you ever had a hang-up relationship? You know what I mean? I had one, 4-5 years ago ... it made me insane and anxious, 'cause I never knew when he was about to hang up and depending on the circumstance, call back or wait for my call back, etc. If I hung up -- would HE call back? How many times would he have to call back before I'd pick up? Vice versa? OMG how did this become my fucking life, etc.?

Once you get used to it, hanging up becomes really not so different from just saying something. As an adult, I feel it's only necessary when someone insists on saying things you don't want to hear. Or! You can take "hanging up" and raise it "hurling phone against the wall," that's fun.

I made the poor decision of raising the topic of Emily Gould's article -- and subsequently, the "self-indulgence-of-bloggers" debate -- with B.

B.: "You're such a good writer, Marie, and you have so much substance, and so much to offer --"
Me: "Wait, slow down. I'm going to transcribe this for my blog, because I'm very self-indulgent and want to air all my personal conversations in public. Okay, got it -- I'm at "so much to offer," keep going--"
B.: "Okay ... really?" [laughs] "You have so much to offer, and yet you're wasting your time on things that are superficial -- I wonder whether or not it ever occurs to you that your endeavors are not as fruitful as they might be, or that they might be superficial, or not be worth your time as much as other endeavors."
Me: "Like what?"
B.: "Like not writing for a body that needs to be entertained. About lip gloss and manicures."
Me: "I LIKE LIP GLOSS AND MANICURES!"
B. : "You say you feel empty, you might want to look at your work and ask why you feel empty --"
(I hang up)

B.: "What if I was your -- your creative writing teacher, coming to tell you this, would you listen?"
Me: "Yes."
B.: "Because of academia's institutions and --"
Me: "Because I'd take this advice from anyone other than you."
B.: "So it's just 'cause it's me."
Me: "Yes."
B.: "So, then, don't listen to me."
Me: "I'm not, when I do, it stresses me out and I can't write anything. Don't read my blog if you don't like it."
B.: "I'm only saying this -- and continuing to call you back when you hang up on me -- because I believe in you, weirdo, and I want to read your blog. I love your writing."
Me: "You haven't liked anything I've written all year."
B. "I liked that auto-portrait piece."
Me: "UGH. Okay, you didn't like anything besides that."
B.: "Okay, tell me what was the content in your most recent post?"
Me: "Nothing. Nothing it was totally irrelevant, worst blog ever, you should just read Elif Bautman and Arts & Letters and The Guardian UK and skip my vapid blog."
B.: "Just tell me what in that post --"
(I hang up)

And so on. Eventually we reached a truce related to different feelings about art vs. entertainment and clearly life in general. Whatevs. "Blog" is such a weird word, it sounds like "bog." Which is a swamp. "There's just no pleasing you, there's just no talking to you." (Ani DiFranco) But I don't know the answer to the question, "why do I do it?" The answer I gave: "I don't know yet." I'm ok with that. It'll be my final answer.

Seriously, I wish everyone in this neighborhood could just truce for like 20 seconds so that a solid hour of my life that could pass without the sound of sirens. I'd prefer to hear cows or chickens.

If I started an Emily Gould fanclub on facebook, I wonder if anyone would join it. Actually, that idea is probably so May 26th, and it's totally the 27th already. The slogan would be "If you don't like what she's doing, don't read it, weirdo."

Emily has spoken:

Q: Like you, Joni Mitchell was extremely self-referential. Many people liked this at first, but they eventually grew tired of it. When she finally stopped writing about herself and turned her attention elsewhere, most people had already lost interest and moved on. Do you worry that the same thing will happen to you?

A: Have people grown tired of Joni Mitchell's self-referentiality? I haven't.
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(me neither)

*
6. Rode Bicycles

As I mentioned in "Top Ten Sport," bike-riding is one of my favorite life activities and has always been. Remember when you didn't know how? I can't imagine that anymore. I sold my bike when I left Williamsburg though and then the guy I sold it to emailed me and said that he'd fallen off the bike and was paralyzed for life or something and it was my fault for selling a bad bike. Except that I'd ridden it the week before, so whatevs, and also he test rode it around our 'hood before paying for it and riding away. Really I don't know what to say about that whole incident, it makes me itchy. Riding bikes in NYC is like Frogger. Riding bikes upstate, or along Venice Beach, is like perfect. Except for the inner thigh sweat and going uphill.

So anyhow, one day, standing above a river on a bicycle, I'll have the courage to admit my life -- lip gloss and all. For now; sirens, gould, self-indulgent english muffin eating. Ehhh. Scream.

Sunday Top Ten: There Must be A Thousand Things You'd Die For, I Can Hardly Think of Three

Sometimes I do weirdo things just to see what'll happen or go to idiosyncratic places simply for "the cultural experience." My definition of "cultural experience" is highly subjective and indiscriminate; it includes all things unpredictable, paradoxical, peculiar, highly specific, micro-culturally revelatory or secretly expository of pathos/propaganda/unspoken dichotomy. "Cultural experience" isn't this ambiguous category's proper name, maybe it's "things I enjoy solely because they intrigue me."

My best attempt at defining what I'm talking about when I talk about "cultural experiences" is example. As you can see, these experiences are not about Fun or Pleasure. In fact, they're often un-fun and not pleasurable.

A Tegan & Sara concert ISN'T, a Spice Girls concert IS.
Doing a reading ISN'T, being on an internet sex & dating panel at the MoSex IS.
Space Mountain ISN'T, Carousel of Progress IS.
Working at The Macaroni Grill in Michigan ISN'T, working at The Olive Garden in Times Square IS.
Taking a plane from Chicago to New York ISN'T, taking a Greyhound from Oregon to Chicago IS.
Six Flags ISN'T, the Clinton County 4-H Fair IS.
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*

i. Before All That

I blame A., who wrote in the "farewell Marie is going to boarding school" book my friends made for me in '97: Experience is the bread of a writer: sadness & happiness, prosperity & desperation, virtue & vice. Whatever you experience, whatever you feel, will increase the genuity of your writing 100%. That line about the bread; how trite/true, but also ...

... it made me think of Zingerman's bread-ends, the fifty-cent bags we'd pick up for lunch when short on cash, smear generously with free packets of mayonnaise and then eat on the back lawn of our hippie alternative high school while the older kids, stuffed into inherited cars in various stages of erosion, smoked pot and ate real sandwiches. Everyone's car had something special wrong with it; no air conditioning, broken parking break, occasional inability to start, 1-4 windows refusing to roll down, faulty wipers, a consistent "check engine" light.

I wanted to be an older kid, I wanted a car, cars were freedom, cars enabled experience ... "how vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live ..." (Thoreau)

10) Of all the cars in that lot, I liked Jack's big red pick-up the best. Nearly ten of us -- lying on our backs -- could fit in the truck's deep bed. A bisexual before it was trendy, Jack sported multi-colored hair and he safety-pinned political opinions to his motorcycle jacket. He seemed slightly dirty always, which grossed me out & made me uneasy to touch him, but everything grossed me out then -- I grossed myself out, most of all, which's why I hid beneath layers of oversized clothing and caustic, off-putting snobbery.

He liked to drive us (us=a tight self-righteous clique of 14-15 year old girls & scrawny boys) places and not tell us where we were going (which panicked me, my Mom was strict, I had to be home), like U-Mich campus buildings with secret rooms and hideaways. We'd climb in windows, shimmy up fire escapes, slip into small cubbies of unused space where decades of punks and squatters had left wall scrawls for each other, maybe even for us. We'd just sit there, then, crouched together, checking engines, breathing, whispering, wondering what kind of architectural accident made this happen, brushing hoodie-sleeves, until Campus Security pounded on the entry we'd sealed shut -- the best part was the running out, trying not to get caught. We wouldn't; we had the car, the cool metal sending shivers down the backs of our necks, eyes to starry sky.

He talked a lot about one particular place that I knew I'd never see -- "the scariest place in the world," my girlfriends told me, thick with privilege (their mothers allowed such expeditions, mine wanted me home and always calling from sanctioned locales). Jack took my best friends there -- I had no details; outdoors or indoors? in Ann Arbor? Dexter? Ypsilanti? Detroit? Farther? an experience, a pit, a darkness, what, what, what, what's so scary, what's the secret, what kind of darkness and how deep? and they'd say, "we can't tell you anything about it, it's a secret, but it's scary." I still don't know what it was -- maybe it was just a lie, a metaphor, a story they told to piss me off.

I needed to get older and fast so that I could go look at weird things and scary things, too.

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[photo by Vivian Joyner]

**
ii. Now

I'm a nonstop repository of anecdotes and after spending a few consecutive days subjected to me telling weird stories about things I've done for fun or considered "a good experience" ('We used to go to Cabella's hunting store for fun!" "Why?" "Um, 'cause it was weird?") ( I found every anecdote clearly incredibly relevant to whatever we were doing at the time), Cait asked me if there's anything I wouldn't do "for the cultural experience."

"Of course," I answered quickly, but couldn't think of anything just yet.

"Would you go sky-diving? Bungee jumping?"

"Oh, I'd totally do that stuff, totally."

Full disclosure: I'd just justified taking us all to Epcot Center's "The American Experience" "for the cultural experience." And it's not that I think I've had some wild life, I just -- I don't know -- maybe it's more deliberately weird since I like to write about stuff? I feel both firmly in this normal world and often dashing valiantly into others and I think it's got something to do with cultural anthropology.

***
iii. The Aforementioned Anecdotes

9) "You're in for an exciting adventure" at Arbuckle Wildnerness in Davis, Oklahoma, where wild animals come right up to your car for an authentic wildlife experience. Ryan was ecstatic -- THRILLED -- to bring me to Arbuckle during my first visit to his Oklahoma home (Ryan shares my taste for weird things; we spent most of that break video-interviewing people in Wal-Mart about religion and immigration). You're supposed to roll down your windows and feed the animals and Ryan thought it'd be a funny cultural experience to roll down and lock his Jeep's passenger window, so all at once I was attacked by five emus pecking furiously at the cup of feed in my lap, nuggets flying everywhere. He laughed so hard he could barely breathe, then unrolled the back window so they could get me from behind, too. I was screaming, totally scarred for life, never hanging out with emus again ever, it's only puppies for me from here on out.

8) A temp agency in Michigan I worked for over holiday breaks had a $10/hour position that entailed wearing a Tony the Tiger costume for a professional recruitment event Kelloggs was hosting at the U of M business school -- I was like, this is the best job of all time, sign me up right now. They needed a Toucan Sam, my friend agreed enthusiastically (neither of us cared really about the money, we just wanted to wear the costumes). It's so hot in those costumes! You can only wear them for thirty minutes or so. They wouldn't let us take photos, which was the point, we brought our Nickelodian four-square cameras too ... but whatevs. We snuck a few pics during one of our ten undressings (30 minutes on, 30 off, 30 on, 30 off):

*

7) EuroDisney: So, as mentioned in this blog, I visited Paris, solo, for no reason -- to feel romantic & pensive, I think, but some freakish curiosity drew me to Euro-Disney/Disneyland Paris. I was 18, hadn't had many chances to be alone yet in my life -- adolescence is, by definition, a constant subjection to company (as is boarding school and college) -- and this new freedom over-rode the potential awkwardness of visiting a theme park alone. I wanted to see what America meant in France, how it was bought and sold and translated over here. I wanted to see if the precise recipe of commercialized but ultimately well-conceived Americana could succeed here without tasting like photocopy. Would the dreams still be full-color, like they are here, in the Florida and California sunshine? I'd seen a documentary about Euro Disney's financial failures against initial expectation, and I love huge commercial enterprises in ruin most of all. I mostly took pictures, like when the weather turned:

6) Yes, I made everyone go to "The American Experience." We were drunk for about an hour (did you know Magic Kingdom doesn't serve drinks? They don't, but Epcot does. Champagne in France, obvs), and if I could go back in time, I wouldn't force anyone to sit through it rather than riding that buzz all the way to Imaginary Morocco. Howevs, if I hadn't been attacked so viciously for this decision, I would've made everyone go to the Hall of Presidents at MK (sober), which I think they would've liked less. ALSO if we hadn't visited The American Experience, we wouldn't've been outside at just the right moment for this lesbian couple taking photos of themselves to ask us if we wanted to take a photo of them which was a total lesbian moment, and then Cait got run over by a wheelchair.

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iv. Answering That Question

But then there are things I think would be valuable experiences that I haven't done but want to,

and then things that I think'd be valuable that I haven't done ... and never plan to, like these:

5) I've heard from those-in-the-know that heroin is the purest most ecstatic high ever but also instantly addictive. Plus, I'm high on life: sunshine, raspberries, unicorns, etc. Mostly, I'm freaked out by that scene in The Basketball Diaries when Leonardo DiCaprio's coming down from Heroin in a locked room. Also, that freaky baby crawling on the ceiling in Trainspotting, that was serious, imaginary babies freak me out. Also, heroin's so 90's!

4) Food's great, love it all day long, totally, but I'm not exactly a "foodie." There's absolutely nothing on earth I haven't tasted that I think I must taste to be alive -- I mean, most food tastes like other food, right, but different? Has tasting something new and exotic ever changed your life? I mean, obvs there's things you oughta taste that could become culinary staples, like salad & ice cream. But I'm not gonna taste pork chops then suddenly start preparing it for myself every night. There's only so many ways food can taste and so many feelings food can trigger. No interest in duck, quail, dinosaur, kangaroo, water buffalo, raw fish sushi, pigs, rabbits, or any other dead animals, especially ones with bones. Foodies always act like if you don't taste their latest concoction of dead animal and ambigious Chinese vegetables that somehow you're refusing to taste the very marrow of life itself, condemned always to a boring existence of Wonder Bread and American cheese. The last thing I need is another kind of food I enjoy shoving down my gullet, it's hard enough to choose meals as it is. I guess actually this isn't "something I think'd be valuable" and shouldn't be on this list, but too late, already written. And so well, too!

3) Once upon a time, my life's dream was to be one of seven strangers picked to live in a house and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. I'm too old now anyhow, but 'cause of the internet and the general abundance of digital, easy-to-reproduce media (and the reality-recap shows they spawn), being on reality television's officially lost its allure. In fact, I'm petrified of television in general, unless it's something I'm editing myself, like vlogs for my own website. (Speaking of vlogs, I'm gonna have to start interviewing replacements for Haviland in this interim period, like on The View. First up: Lozo. He's not a lesbian, but he's a lesbian supporter.) Like I don't wanna be one of those clips they show over & over on VH1 specials; Shandy confessing her hot tub tryst to her boyfriend, Bree throwing a fork at Stephen, Vanessa attacking Brandi's hair, Tyra yelling at Tiffany, Stephen slapping Irene in Seattle, OMG ... I start to hate myself after editing my own vlogs for a few hours, I'm sure I'd be appalled to witness what a real editor would do to me but it would've been nice if a camera-person'd been there to capture Cait getting hit by a wheelchair, as mentioned above. The woman goes: "you backed up into me!" as if it was her fault or something.

2) In the introduction to her essay collection A Little More About Me, Pam Houston talks about edges she's been to and mountains she's accepted she'll never climb and says that in the five years it's taken her to write this book, she's "run more than 40 whitewater rivers .. hiked in the backcountry more than 3,000 miles ... visited 43 countries on five continents ... had search parties sent out for me twice ... been on more than 400 planes and been told to get into crash position for landing four times ... been to every United State except North Dakota ... put a total of four hundred thousand miles on three different cars." In this interview, she says: "My father, when I was growing up, was very fond of saying, 'Pam, one of these days you are going to realize you spend your whole life lying face down in the gutter with somebody else's foot on your neck.' In many ways, the aim of my life has been to prove my father wrong."

Almost everything Houston's done is something I'd like to do one day, too, except for the essay where she camps out alone for a number of days in twenty-degree-below zero weather to build character. I've just spent a bazillion minutes trying to track down this essay, beginning with my shelves and ending with the often frustrating annals of the internet, to no avail. I'll just say I hate extreme temperatures, and if you own A Little More About Me, speak now!

1) Anything involving: forced socialization with large crowds of socially confident humans without interruption for long periods of time, waiting in really long lines.

*

*
MY: And also [I liked] how you described yourself as the person who has friends that are slightly more adventurous than you, and it's your job to say, "Yeah, I'll do that." To make it okay.
EILEEN: It's like telling the story from Sancho Panza's point of view, not the hero, but the hero's friend. It's a more passive position, but you can describe everything that's going on from there because you're constantly watching.
(Interview w/Eileen Myles, Index Magazine )
*
"I like to listen. I like to look and to watch. Maybe I have an Attention Surplus Disorder. The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention."
(Interview with Susan Sontag, The Paris Review, 1994)
*

Stuff I've Been Reading: January 2008 Edition

"A Hilarious and True Account of One Man's Struggle With The Monthly Tide of The Books He's Bought and The Books He's Been Meaning to Read." -the cover of The Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby does a monthly piece in "The Believer" called "Stuff I've Been Reading," about "the how, and when, and why, and what of reading—about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it’s going badly, when books don’t stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you’d rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time." For those of you who aren't into reading, let me add that Hornby wrote the novels High Fidelity and About a Boy. I bet you liked those movies, right? Lozo can quote About a Boy. See, I pay attention. I'm bloody Ibiza. I once turned down an outing w/a cute boy to see Hornby read at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. "I've got dork stuff to do," I explained. It was the most crowded reading I've ever been to aside from David Sedaris , which actually involved buying tickets. A few weeks later, cute boy cited my choice of a reading over drinking-beer-with-him as one of many reasons he crushed on me. Anyway, now he's married to the same girl he was long-distance dating then, so it worked out for everyone: him, me, his wife, Nick Hornby, Lozo, all the lesbians in the Niagra Falls area, and you. So right. Hornby's first column (with full text available online) contains more mission-related detail -- I personally discovered "Stuff I've Been Reading" via Hornby's book The Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of 14 such columns, which I read in '04. Last week, while reading The Believer's 50th Issue, I thought: "OMG! I should do something like this on my blog!" That's right; I'm going to talk about the random books I read and I'm floating this idea -- a monthly column -- on a bright burning ray of hope that at least 3-4 people will care? Also, The Believer (fantastic magazine, p.s.), has a particular favorable-review-only policy, which Hornby describes like so: "The Believer has taken the honorable and commendable view that, if it is attacks on contemporary writers and writing you wish to read, then you can choose from an endless range of magazines and newspapers elsewhere -- just about all of them, in fact -- and that therefore The Believer will contain only acid-free literary criticism." He got in trouble for trying to circumvent this by stating that although he couldn't comment on the overall quality of a certain book, he'd say that Crime & Punishment was definitely better. I generally believe this too -- there's no point in totally bashing a book, unless it's soooo super-super bad that I no longer care about the author's well-being, like Pure by Rebecca Ray or Smashed or anything by Ann Coulter. Generally I wish good things upon all authors and writers of books, even Dan Brown and Plum Skyes. Also, I wouldn't want a good writer to google themselves, find this, and be like "OMG, who is this nobody saying bad things about me? Where's HER book?" to which I can say: "I'll never tell/I dunno, I can't spell." But also I have an honesty problem. I'm going to see how this plays out, hopefully in the author's favor. Most of these book links go to my amazon associate account's a-store, which means if you buy something through that link, I'll get about two pennies, and I think by 2020, those pennies will add up to approximately 30 bucks, and then I'll buy everyone their own dog-purse like Tinkerbell and obvs , hook the world up with a Coke. That's not why I'm doing this, I'm only mentioning it 'cause it'd annoy me if you bought a book I talk about by opening a new window when you could just link through here and therefore help Tinkerbell get a flea collar. Just a few more things: -I'm following Hornby's format (BOOKS I'VE BOUGHT, BOOKS I'VE READ), with a few of my own additions (MAGAZINES READ, WEBBERNET, and BOOKS BORROWED/LENT OUT) -When I say (finished), I mean that I started it in another month but finished it during the month in question. -It's good to have someone in your life who engages with literature even more intensely (or as intensely) than you and can make recommendations -- this role has been filled by many peoples over the years, including my agent when I worked at the agency every day, Krista when I lived with her, Meg/Ingrid/Sheetal/Delp/John while at Interlochen, etc. Right now it's a friend who I'm going to call "B." (named after the second letter of the alphabet -- the first is too confusing, 'cause it's also its own word) because it makes me feel literary and mysterious, like a spy in a really juicy novel by my favorite author James Patterson. JK! Never read JP, but he sounds thrilling. Maybe I'll have a contest about B.'s identity and you could win underpants.

JANUARY 2008

BOOKS BOUGHT: Party of One: A Loner's Manifesto, by Anneli Rufus A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, by Haruki Murakami Drown, Junot Diaz BOOKS READ: The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, edited by Tobias Wolff (finished) Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress - Susan Jane Gilman (finished, audiobook) A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto, Anneli Rufus Re/Search #13: Angry Women, edited by A. Juno & V.Vale BOOKS LENT/BORROWED: The Safety of Objects, by A.M. Homes - to Alex The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls - to Haviland n+1 (literary journal) - from B. JANUARY ISSUES OF MAGAZINES READ: New York Magazine (4), The Believer, Marie Claire, Glamour, Nylon, Curve, The Paris Review, Esquire, Bust, Bitch, Missbehave, n+1, Women's Health, Lucky, Vogue.

**

I don't smoke, I don't need to lose ten pounds and I could never give up the drink, so my major New Year's resolution was to Read more. I mean -- I actually already do read plenty, but I want to do more concentrated reading of books (sitting down. reading.) -- I'm always reading online, at the gym, or while waiting for something (e.g., Godot, the doctor)/in transit, but I also bitch to whomever'll listen that no one sits down to read anymore. That means I'm bitching about myself, which is bad for my self-esteem. Also, January's a hot month to execute this kind of thing 'cause the weather is shitty, there's plenty o' new books from holiday season, and I went on vaycay! Pre-vacay, Cait and I went to a tiny used book & music store on 72nd where I got A Room of One's Own and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The latter is likely to stare at me and beg to be read for at least five months, but it had notes in the margins, and so I had to get it, I love other people's notes. The others I got that day at Barnes & Noble -- Drown 'cause Diaz's new novel's been all over the year-end lists & award circuits and I've enjoyed two stories of his in The New Yorker this year (Alma and Wildwood) , The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 'cause a commenter told me to read Murakami and it was on a front table and I thought "a-ha!" and Party of One 'cause I saw it on a table last summer and have wanted to read it ever since and thought now is the time. A lot of my reading choices are influenced by B&N table selections, which troubles me, w/r/t the ability of B&N to dictate cultural trends.

i. The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories Though the actual ability to read a ton on vaycay is totally overestimated, especially when your friends are as fun as mine, I do find airplanes specifically conducive to reading -- flying from Newark to Fort Lauderdale, I finished, finally, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, which I've owned since the high school writing class I bought it for, back when I used highlighters instead of pens -- I've made an orange mess of Dorothy Allison's (BRILL!) "River of Names" and Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" (one of the best short stories ever written). Apparently we were only assigned a few stories in this book, school is awesome. I've got a few books like that -- unfinished that I carry from apartment to apartment -- and I always end up reading them when I've just finished something else, haven't picked up anything new & exciting that fits my mood and need something to take with me on the train right away, I'm like, OMG, "Hello, you! I want you back now, let's get it on!" and then I pick it up. I'm totally OCD about reading anthologies: I force myself to read every story/essay, even if I've read it before, and I didn't mind re-reading Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," Mary Gaitskill's "A Romantic Weekend," Kate Braverman's "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta" and Joyce Carole Oates' anthology staple "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" It took basically all of December and January to read this book, especially when I got stuck on stories I didn't like, e.g., stories about Native Americans or Pioneers. I'm into post-electricity lit. The anthology was understandably heavy on men w/midlife crisises (and their corresponding issues with alcohol and/or fidelity), and stories related to war veterans. Wolff himself wrote one of the greatest war memoirs I've ever read (In Pharaoh's Army), so it's probs like the Best American Essays that Susan Orlean edited that was suspiciously heavy on birds and nature. It also introduced me to some new writers I want to find more of, through stories like Scott Bradfield's "The Darling" (which I read on the Metro-North, which means I must've read it in early December, which means I suck at life to finish it two months later, wtf was I doing all that time?), Robert Stone's "Helping" and Ralph Lombreglia's beautiful portrait of my favorite kind of dynamic -- the Sancho/Don Quixote thing, aka madness & its sidekick -- "Men Under Water." There were also stories by many other writers I've enjoyed like Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford and Joy Williams. What a canvas! I feel much smarter now. Good call, Mr. Driscoll or whomevs. ii. I Also, Coincidentally, Need a Room of My Own and 500 Shillings I started A Room of One's Own on the plane and felt fully retarded for not having read it 'til now, it's clearly the basis for everything that anyone's ever thought ever, especially women, lesbians, female writers, and smart people. The book itself continued to fall apart (literally) as the trip continued, its pages threatened to fly away at the Tranquility Pool in Key Biscayne, and it's currently bound by a rubber band. Normally the combination of old-school writer + falling apart book + poolside = not gonna happen, but I was totally into it and read it in about 24 hours, even though I was in paradise and the pool was tempting. Also, it was short. Woolf addresses the issue of a woman being unable to write when she's expected to raise children and be financially dependent on her husband -- a burden which has lessened significantly since her time obviously, though not altogether -- and I found myself thinking about how writers, women in particular, are now expected to work full-time, maintain a social life, and somehow ALSO write novels, which's really hard. It's romantic -- the slaving away on one's laptop during the Metro-North commute, scribbling poems on napkins while waitressing -- but it really blows to have to do that. 

  iii. I Have Been Alone For a Very Long Time My therapist right now won't talk to me about my desire to cut my social life by 75% (from perhaps two live encounters a week to 1/2 a live encounter) until I'm completely finished reading Party of One: A Loner's Manifesto -- which's billed as "a recognition of loners as a vital force in world civilization rather than damaged goods who need to be "fixed"' because she knows how I get with books. How I get = I want to change my whole life when I get into a writer's particular ideas. So anyhow, I finished it a few days ago (it was an easy read), and I still feel it's time for me to stop apologizing for my inherent anti-social behavior and not let people be mean to me about it! I'm a loner, I love myself, I'm okay, I'm good enough! Combined with A Room of One's Own, I feel a large majority of my seemingly irrational or psychologically unsound beliefs about the world (and being a writer) have been validated through literature this month. I'm even more self-righteous than I was in '07. It's probs how a lot of people feel about chicken soup for the soul, but I don't like chicken soup because I don't like chicken in that context, I doubt my soul wants any either. My soul is vegan. The writing in Party of One (which I began reading on a beach chair, pausing frequently to read passages out loud to Cait, like this one: "Someone says to you, 'let's have lunch.' You clench. Your sinews leap within you, angling for escape. What others thrive on, what they take for granted, the contact and confraternity and sharing that gives them strength leaves us empty. After what others would call a faun day out together, we feel as if we have been at the Red Cross, donating blood.") got a bit over-the-top and melodramatic at times and, had I not been in the author's camp, I probs would've found the defensive tone offensive (which I guess was the point) (isn't it annoying how I keep writing in brackets?) but anyhow I loved it, it changed my life, just like it changed the life of amazon reviewer I.B Cooper. This is probs how angsty depressed teenagers felt discovering Elizabeth Wurtzel. It's like "OMG! There I am! This is mememeeme!" In fact, I've got SO Many feelings on this topic, and was SO inspired and excited about this book that I'm saving it for another post -- next week or the week after. Get excited!

iv. Adventures in Audio So I listen to audiobooks, which is totally uncool. But I joined audible about a year ago 'cause Krista told me to, and I want to pack every vacant minute of my life with consumption-of-literature and/or archived episodes of This American Life. I'm still perfecting the sort of book to listen to -- nothing dense, important or complicated (you'll miss about 25% of it unless it's for a long road trip), nothing I'm reading to admire the writer's style specifically (no underlining), nothing that might suck (I can't preview it or take it back) -- but I think that short humorous essays are generally a safe bet, e.g., Jonathan Ames' I Love You More Than You Know and Wendy Spiro's Microthrills. In January I finished the brilliantly titled Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (Susan Jane Gilman), a memoir who's name I'd run across a few times when doing market research for my own book. The book, like most memoirs, didn't grab me right away -- I'm well-versed in the childhood w/urban hippies stories, and as I read in The Guardian this month, "childhood is never interesting" -- but I was fully engaged by the time she reached adolescence and adulthood and started crushing on Mick Jagger. Refreshingly free of man-hunting stories, Gilman's voice is honest, entertaining and quick and her stories were pleasurable and funny, like good chick lit. (There is such a thing.) Had I read it in print (I should've), I would've probs found it less cutesy than I did -- the reader's voice was grating & my heart is 95% darkness. Oh well, too late now. I listened to it while I walked, washed dishes, waited in line at Starbucks, did crunches, rode crowded trains. If anyone listens to my hypothetical non-existent book this way, I'd be horrified. iv/a. Every Girl Is Straight Until They're Not? When I read memoirs by ladies, I'm always waiting for the moment when they go gay, even when there's no evidence that they will. I just like to imagine that every female artist at least thinks about going gay for a chapter or two, right? Even if it's not in the blurb or anything? I'm like: "This affection for Cindy from down the street is gonna result in nudity real soon, I just know it!" "She says she ADMIRES her college roommate, but she really means she wants to go down on her! It'll happen soon!" I've plowed through many books waiting for the gay moment and then I'm inevitably disappointed when the heroine marries some kind patient sensitive man 3/4 of the way through instead of getting a girlfriend and riding off into the sunset. These non-female husbands generally have non-threatening names like Tom or Aaron and hover vaguely in the background pointing out the heroine's neuroses which he inevitably finds endearing. So, dear reader, SJG never went gay, though she was presumed gay for a chapter, which's something I guess. Wow, I'm thinking about it right now and it's quite pathetic, really, my attachment to this false hope. v. Fire Just Waiting For Fuel B. told me she was ordering Angry Women 'cause she'd heard it had a good section on Avital Ronell, her obsession of the moment, and I was like OMG, I HAVE that book! My Mom picked it up for me at a garage sale randomly last year -- it's "16 cutting-edge performance artists" discussing a wide range of topics "from menstruation, masturbation, vibrators, S&M and spanking to racism, failed Utopias and the death of the Sixties." Given a context (B. wanted the book), I developed renewed interest in it and kept it next to my laptop most of the month, picking it up every now and then, even sitting with it open on my bed and reading it. All in all, I read probs about 20% of the book, though I looked at all the photos, there were lots of naked ladies doing art and being radical about sex. I heart heart heart books like this even though I might not finish the whole thing 'til 2010. They feel like glorious relics from forgotten times (1991) where I imagine (read: I know nothing) the written word was a vital and revolutionary force in counter-cultural political movements, like the radical pro-sex feminists of this book. I don't think people realize, in general, how hard these women worked -- even as late as the 90's -- to make things possible like women's erotica and Toys in Babeland as well as lending their force to the pro-choice movement and bisexuality acceptance groups. We're still fighting, obvs ... I hope. Admittedly the only interviews I read from start to finish were Kathy Acker's, 'cause everything she says is magic, and this woman Linda Montano, who does art-as-life stuff, which's what I wanna do some day, except I just wanna do it for fun, I have different plans for what I want to do to changing the world. 'Cause a lot of this work is so fringe-oriented that it almost negates itself by not even reaching the audience who needs to hear it most -- preaching to the choir and alienating the masses. I guess ideally the choir will gain steam and revolt, inspiring the masses. Anyhow, Montano and Teching Hurst ROPED THEMSELVES TOGETHER for an ENTIRE YEAR. They had a contract: tied at the waist with an 8-foot rope, never touch, and stay in the same room. This woman is serious, it's crazy, I love it. So that's what Tinkerbell and I are going to do starting now. ART AS LIFE, Y'ALL. I love crazy radical feminists. I don't know what's happening to me, I'm becoming who my mother used to be before she bought a house in the suburbs. With her wife. And her wife's adopted children, one of whom is African-American. NM. Also I read significant portions of interviews of Susie Bright (who edited the Best American Erotica 2007, which I was in. She interviewed me about it here), bell hooks, Annie Sprinkle and obvs Avital Ronell. Actually the last one I xeroxed so I could read it at the gym, discreetly shading the photo of Ronell naked and dressed in tree branches with my towel. I know I'm not supposed to read serious stuff at the gym, but I'm not gonna be alive forevs, I gotta maximize my time. Abstract theory kinda makes my head hurt, I have to read it slowly to understand, 'cause I'm slow. Mostly, the fact that books like this EXIST -- that enough people made its printing worthwhile, and only 16 years ago -- is inspirational to me as a woman and as an artist and gets me really excited about political and social change. In the 90's. Also, the Ronell interview was really long. I'll finish it though seriously. * MAGAZINES AND THE WEBBERNET (in brief): I read a lot of magazines, often linking to my fave articles in the auto-fun so you can be my BFF. I'm really digging this new magazine Missbehave -- hot design, interviews of people I like (e.g., Ellen Page, Bjou Phillips) and a voice that sounds a hell of a lot like mine. Also it's great for collages (other great collage magazines include Nylon, Flaunt and Bust). Like Nylon, it's a magazine you really must hold in your hands, the online experience is incomparable. Of the plethora of magazines I enjoyed this month, my fave articles were Nick Flynn's "The Ticking is The Bomb" from Esquire (the reason for mentioning "The Allegory of the Cave" in our vlog, actually) and Eileen Myles' "Lost in Canada," from The Believer. It's "an elegy to a lost notebook." Also, for anyone who's ever written in the second person (myself included) -- read this. You will need to read this, it will feel necessary. I have a really bad habit of sometimes reading magazine articles almost all the way through -- through like ten "ctd. on page ___ ..."s and then for some reason, NOT reading the last two paragraphs. It's really unforgivable, I'd hate it if someone did that to my article. I also don't know why I do it. But when B. said she'd enjoyed the Flynn essay up to the last two paragraphs, I was like "erum, yeah, skipped those, holla, maybe that's why I loved it." Then I read 'em, and they were retarded. Cait, the only other person on earth I know of who followed my suggestion to read that essay, agrees. Skip those grafs if you read it. Just thought I'd throw that out there. Anyhow I'm working on this habit. Like the Obama/Clinton piece I read in New York Magazine yesterday-- the last two graphs were the heart of the article, wouldn't've missed them for the world! B. lent me Issue 6 of n+1 'cause there was a section called "The Intellectual Situation" that addressed a lot of things I think about alot w/r/t publishing and books, which I read on the return flight to Newark. You guys, airplanes are the best! Except there were these crying children I wanted to kill, I kept looking at Cait and/or Alex and making axe chopping gestures towards the children that their parents would've noticed if their heads weren't so far up their children's over-mediated assholes. Anyhow, the n+1's got a great piece about Gawker that caused a lot of hulabaloo in December for basically declaring its demise and death ("Gawker: 2002-2007") and a brilliant essay that uses the case of the Virginia Tech shooter to explore issues of identity for Asian teenage boys who feel outcast or unsuccessful for one reason or another, like the author of the essay. I do a lot of internet reading, which's why my eyes ache all the time. B. says I can fix this by doing eye exercises like intermittently looking up from my screen across the room and focusing on a far-away point. This goes back to me needing a room of one's own, like a really big one, with long hallways. I link to things I like a lot in the auto-fun usually, or talk about them, so I won't talk too much about the highlights of my internet travels. The Myles essay inspired me to dig around and find out more about her (why haven't I heard of her before?!!! I don't know?!) -- and I think she's one of my new obsessions (my other new obsession is Jennifer L. Knox, who's interview in Bookslut made her my instant hero, I want all her books of poetry now). Myles edited an apparently super-important book called 'The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading," which you can buy me for President's Day if you want. Check her out: Eileen Myles Dot Net. B got a subscription to the Harper's archives this month, which's nearly as exciting to me as Krista's NY Times Plus subscription! This is total dork candy, like I flipped about the Atlantic archives going online for free, too. Since B.'s investment, I've enjoyed many delights, including a fascinating article written about Mary Gaitskill when Veronica came out (" Walking Naked") and probs the best thing I read all month, "A Lie That Tells the Truth: Memoir and the Art of Memory," by Joel Agee. I actually had to call B. right after I finished just to breathe and go "that was amazing." Probs how Lozo feels after watching a really good touchdown kickoff tackle or whatever, omg, you guys, the Super Bowl is on Sunday. Also, I got my hair cut, see:

 

HAIRCUT! This will help me read for sure. Also it looks totally different today than it did yesterday, life is so crazy. Cait and I went to that place where they have porn star names, I forget the name of my hairstylist, but she was really serious. It's so trendy, I might really have to go out.

You're Heavy in My Mouth

I'm gonna start opening my blog with scenes from the movie version of my blog, like they're doing on The L Word with Jenny's movie. JK, this is a blog, not a teevee show. Silly rabbit, tricks are for kids. I find the pressure of an opening paragraph simply too much to bear. Still with me? OK so, someone suggested "Top Ten Things Riese likes to Put in her Mouth" (re: "Top Ten: You Tell Me") or something to that effect. I believe this stemmed from the initial suggestion for "10 Ways to Eat a Reeses," which was an amusing convo I enjoyed watching from my emo cave (also, I provided the answer to this in the comments, should anyone be interested). One week at band camp/boarding school we were plagued with a series of random, lengthy power outages, during which we could perform small bursts of anarchic behavior in the safety of temporary pitch-black-night. Somehow biting and sucking on each other's fingers became one of our favorite past-times. Like many of the witty anecdotes I share here, that looks a lot weirder on the page than it seemed at the time. Anyhow,that'll be number 10.

9. Ice Cream and French Fries...

Are my favorite foods. This seems to surprise people, 'cause unless you're my mother, Ingrid, or it's Summer '07 and your name is Carly, you've probs not seen me eat a lot of french fries or ice cream. That's because I don't want to be happy. In fact, I don't talk much about food on here --probs 'cause: 1. I did once and Hav didn't read my blog that day, 2. My Mom was a nutritionist and taught "food, facts & fun" at the Y and used my bro & I as taste-testers and class-testers, thus the topic is old news to me, 3. 'cause I'm about as qualified to discuss food as I am to muse on Russian literature ... clearly my Lean Pockets & Peanut-Butter-Crackers consumption rate suggests I've got no taste when it comes to food. HA! no TASTE! Get it?!

But since I'm talking about things I wanna put in my mouth, I'm gonna really open up. Let you see the Real Riese. Here's my opinion, in great detail, regarding ice cream & french fries ...

8a. Ben & Jerry's ice cream is the best ice cream ever. E.g., Phish Food, Everything But The ..., Chubby Hubby, Half Baked, Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, Cherry Garcia, Peanut Butter Cup, Mint Chocolate Cookie, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough.

8b. Obvs hands down totes Arby's, re: french fries, but there's some noble efforts that challenge the Arby's lockdown (it's the curly fries, specifically). These include Grandma's Kitchen @Interlochen, Red Hot Lovers @Ann Arbor, Applebees, Zen Palate's yam fries, In 'n Out, and the kind made from real potatoes that you get at foodstands like at fairs and stuff.

8c. Also, I like Haagen Dazs Dulce de Leche, cheap Neapolitan ice cream from the deli, Edy's whole fruit bars, those ice cream bars you can buy in Vending Machines or at the case right by the cashier a the corner deli -- Strawberry Shortcake is the best flavor, you know what I'm talking about?, also; Breyer's Cookies & Cream, also ... when eating soft serve: the first bite that is both cone & soft serve is the best, Butter Pecan, my Dad's sundaes = hot fudge & mixed nuts & Breyer's Vanilla, push pops named for cartoon characters, the time I chased the ice cream truck five blocks in my socks 'cause my parents said I could have some if I caught the truck and they figured I wouldn't but I wanted to be Maniac Magee and I did, creamsicles, Friendly's (their sundaes are out of this world, the one with reeses pieces and stuff? OMG so good), walking to Stucchi's in the summertime for the Raspberry Cheesecake Ribbon, Vanilla Almond Fudge Toffuti, Colliders, Dairy Queen Blizzards, dilly bars, the magic shell butterscotch and chocolate when we first discovered it, the final reward of the sundae area at cheap buffet restaurants I loved as a kid, like Ponderosa and OCB, when we went to London for three weeks and all my brother ate was chocolate ice cream, Superman flavored sherbert at Washtenaw Dairy, ice cream with my grandpa at United Dairy Farmers the summer I stopped eating and all the bicycling we did right after because I had to compensate and because that's what he'd been doing, that summer, to compensate for his loss, was fix antique bikes and then we'd ride them. It was a perfect afternoon -- the weather-- Ohio, oh, Ohio. And also; green tea ice cream and mocchi balls -- the gelly outside, the ice cream inside, omg --

We'd bike to Baskin Robbins too, in the summer, Kristyna and I, we felt like adults but also in an Audrey Hepburn movie, and we'd eat our cones outside on the barely stable plastic picnic tables and watch our bikes and look at people and cars. We'd go across the street to Panorama and rent a movie like "The Craft" and ride home and watch it, our legs pulsing like hot ice.

8. Cigarettes
I don't smoke, really, I totally don't smoke. I don't smoke because if I did smoke, it wouldn't be so unbearably delicious when I do smoke -- I wouldn't get lightheaded and dizzy, I wouldn't feel like I was having Grown-Up Candy instead of a pump of an addictive substance.

7. My Fingers
The real reason I get regular manicures is 'cause when I don't, I have a bad habit of eating my fingers. Like, the sides? And biting my nails, obviously, which's why I get black nail polish. Also because I'm cool and I want to be like Linsday Lohan. Was. In 2005. Or whenever. The years just bleed together, when it comes to famous people and wtf they are doing with their super-important lives.

6. Pens & Pencils
Apparently? I don't recall eating my pens, but there's some telling bite marks.

5. I can't talk about because there are children reading this (also, just to be perfectly clear, it does not rhyme with "dock")

4. Milky Way
I used to be the straight-edged innocent, so I'm still surprised every time I find myself in the position of the corrupter rather than the one being corrupted. It's the "me"/"not me" thing -- it's always the "not me" who inspires other people to do "bad things." Like, for example, psychedelic mushrooms. (I am hereby sacrificing my ability to be employed by anyone besides my present employer). But [redacted] months ago, I told a curious friend that when I'd done shrooms before, it was totally mild and not weird, and therefore she should be enthusiastic about giving it a go. I figured since it was a drug that affected psychological capacities, it was best that the psychology be optimistic and determined regarding the next few hours of its function. Howevs, I was totally lying! When I'd done them before ... it was soooo weird! I'm actually totally unexperienced in most areas of druggery, despite my rugged and street-wise exterior. Thus, my one prior shrooming experience was the weirdest I'd ever felt in my life (this second & more recent time -- where I was the one suggesting it, instead of the one it'd been suggested to-- was not weird at all, perhaps you saw the video), fo' sure, like I was making love to a Milky Way bar with my mouth and throat.

Spring Break, March '03: my U-Mich friends were mostly abroad, I was in New York, staying with my ex Mike (all names have been changed) in Astoria. I'd just purchased a coat that was hybrid Bob Dylan/Jordan Catalano (brown, wool lining, sheep whatevs, vintage) and I was wearing it with overpriced jeans and a green Hollister hoodie. My hair was platinum blonde. My mood that (near) spring was a kind of bursting optimism & fluttering excitement because I'd just left a dull domestic relationship and was working on my senior thesis -- as a creative writing student, my thesis was a short story collection, a culmination of everything I'd done thus far in life. I felt very much on the verge, etc. I'd doubled my eyeliner application.

I had a small dinner & several drinks at The Yaffa Cafe in Soho with an Interlochen bestie while texting Blake, my new paramour back in Michigan. After dinner I went to the Olive Garden to meet up with Mike -- I'd met Mike there in '00, we'd worked together as servers and he was a bartender now -- I had a few more free drinks while everyone finished their tables. Blake called: he was drunk, he missed me ... he told me he was falling in love with me. I said something that meant "I've had a great deal of free drinks and I feel like a shooting star" but sounded like "Me too." I was also falling in love with me, too, though (not Blake yet, but I would eventually), and I was falling in love with falling, and so, when Mike asked if I wanted to do shrooms, I said okay. A group of OG employees -- friends & strangers -- returned to Mike & Brian's apartment in Astoria.

And so we did said drugs. There was lots of Hospitaliano. The ceiling was moving like a tricky Magic Eye cartoon. Things were carved in the ceiling -- animals, maybe, or just a design, maybe the animals were in my mind. I opened and closed my eyes, but saw the ceiling just the same. I opened my eyes and was faced with Mike's eyes and he told me to open my mouth and I did, and he put a half a tab of ecstasy inside my mouth (which I'd never done before, either), and when it was in my veins he told me what he'd done.

Brian played Dave Matthews on his guitar, and Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, Jeff Buckley. Mike's ex-whatever came over and lounged on his couch like a siren in an old movie and rolled a joint with a joint-rolling contraption she told me Mike'd bought her in Amsterdam. Her hair was beautiful, dark red.

I went to Mike's room and lay on the bed and next to his bed there was a bag of miniature Milky Way bars and I realised I was starving, and so I started eating these Milky Way bars and it was like the candy was making love to the inside of my cheeks, like the caramel was a sleek sexy fish on my tongue, like the entire Milky Way galaxy had been crammed into my mouth by an ambitious cosmonaut and was now exploding inside my cheeks like cotton-coated pop-rocks. Brian came into the room and lay on my back while I ate Milky War bars. The inside of my eyeballs danced. He put his hands on the backs of my arms, and then on the backs of my legs, but he wasn't touching me, he was just feeling around, like you might touch a wall in the dark on your way to your room. Then he got up and said "I'm sorry," and dashed out of the room. A chocolate-caramel-nougat angel climbed inside my mouth and curled up and slept there, and then I did too.

This is what I said about it, when endorsing it to aforementioned coruptee: "All I remember from doing it before was that I had these Milky Way bars and they were really good, and I don't even like Milky Way bars."

3. Push-Pops, Caramel Apple Pops, Ring Pops, Blow Pops, Dum-Dums
I used to keep a push pop in my bag like it was chapstick -- wholly necessary, better be prepared, you never know when I'd want a suck. I've been accused of an oral fixation, but I think that's lame, like something girls used to say they had to let boys know they were easy. Do you know what I mean? We all have oral fixations. We have teeth, they want to bite/chew, we have lips, they have very little purpose except the obvious.

I go through serious long addictions to these things. Like, I used to have a giant three-tiered push pop that took me about a week to finish, I'm basically seven years old.

2. My Toothbrush and Toothpaste
I get scolded at the dentist 'cause apparently I brush so often that I'm brushing away my gums. I don't care, I want minty fresh breath, obvs. I go through a toothbrush a week, about, and keep extras almost everywhere I've ever worked or played. Ingrid and I used to like to get in each other's faces and brush our teeth for no reason. Again: boarding school. We do these things, I don't know why, but we do.

1. Other Mouths
When it all comes down to it, there's really nothing else on earth as wonderful as kissing.

I love how lipstick can suggest
a grammar, and how, in sleep,
the mouth gives up its posture
like something defeated.
Isn't a morning kiss, then,
a kind of restoration, a love test
for the one who wakes first?
I love what we must forgive.
So good to find them, the people
who've discovered fraudulence
in their lives, who've cast off, say,
a twenty-year lie.
I love how they listen to poems
as if words were necessary
daggers or balm, their faces proof
that the soul feeds on wild riffs,
every sort of truth-scrap, the blues.
I love that the normal condition
of the soul is to be starved.

-from "loves" by stephen dunn