Bridget Callahan is Your Best Friend

The thing is, you never forget the apocalypse is coming. As the election days count down, I feel the red oxide tinge around corner, sneaking into the wallpaper carpet car doors. It’s a gnawing rusting sensation, the air smells like pennies taste. My bathroom reeks of cat pee. I’ve scrubbed the litterbox, the linoleum, poured an entire jug of ammonia on the mess. Doesn’t matter, the cat is out to get me, she pisses on the floor, she misses the box on purpose. My car grumbles when it starts. It’s sluggish and old and heavy. My clothes never seem clean , and I worry that I smell like cat pee now and no one will tell me.

So this would be the beginning of my apocalypse, my dirty filthy apartment, an incontinent vengeful cat, a dying hunk of South Korean metal with poisonous paint flaking off the hood. I’m trying to forget this dying of days feeling by drinking, often and with friends. Last night, for instance, I crumbled as I drove home in the semi-darkness, thinking of the lies in the cute pop song while it contrasted with the bare steel frame of highway and dead trees. I tried to imagine how I wanted my life to be, a jumble of live music and bars and parties. But as I thought of these scenes, past scenes when I’ve done those things and been that girl, what I thought of mostly is how tired I was during it, how dirty everything was, the stink of my clothes when I peeled them off and the eye shadow lint collected in the bags of my face. And it all just seemed like so much effort with so little payoff, except for the actual band itself, or the actual alcohol itself. I like my friends, a lot in some cases, but we’re all so alone in this. Every person a little time/space capsule, completely unrelated to the other capsules it bumps into. There’s a commercial on TV right now advertising an internet radio/download service, and in it the girl with impossibly long legs is falling thru the sky, lands in a bubble, and floats along oblivious, until she falls into another empty bubble. And I suppose eventually she will fall into an already occupied bubble, or two bubbles will merge or something. But to look at it, with all the open sky around her, the chances of that happening seem about as likely as being in a plane crash. Which are about 1 in 11 million. The thing to do then is just keep bumping into other bubbles, maybe form a bubble tandem, bubble train.

That’s what I did last night. Dressed up my bubble all pretty and thick and went to gather with the other bubbles. Cause when you crumble, being full of blood and guts and sticky chemical bread pudding, you don’t really have the luxury of being swept off. You have to congeal yourself again, whether you like it or not. Besides, Halloween is a great night for looking at urban decay and ruined hollow houses and dirty black permanent pavement. You can pretend it’s just part of the background, and not like, the condition of the whole fucking world.

Excuse me while I finish another freaking bottle of Cranberry Pomegranate Juice. Maybe that’s another sign of this collapse, the sneaking prevalence of pomegranate in everything we eat and drink. What used to be the weird cool fruit to eat with mythical connotations is now probably most likely for sure Soylent Green. Which is why I’m addicted to it, I’m a people person.

Laura’s favorite holiday is Halloween. She and Jessica literally spent a few hundred dollars more on decorations this year because they realized their already extensive collection of blow up bats and cobweb lights weren’t enough to properly fill the big house they moved into a few months ago. So there was like, stuff everywhere. There were LED gravestones in the border garden. Lights in the trees, the windows, human heads hanging from the porch, Laura was a nurse with a nasty grin. Jessica was a “bitch”, which is a ghetto witch with a lot of bling. Buddy’s mummy costume made him look like he was trailing toilet paper behind him all night, and Doug’s Frankenstein neck bolts managed to stay on despite…well, despite. There were couples and a sleepy baby dragon, a fire pit and a very cool Halloween cake Buddy spent like a week making. It was three tiers, with purple frosting and gummy bat and coffins. The one school girl there was actually not slutty, ‘cause technically she was Trish the Dish, with Jay and Silent Bob. We talked about how glad she was she never really went to Catholic school, and I told her about how Tara feels nothing in her legs from years of winter waiting at the bus stop in her Magnificat skirt.

It was comforting to have both parties, first the sexy strangers party last week, and now this, the “aw these people are cool and they’re glad I’m here and we’re just gonna get drunk in the backyard, listen to Axl Rose, and meet some new people”. I got there at 9:30pm, finished the champagne by 11pm, had a nice guy politely feeding me jello shots, talked about lactation porn and the election and macaroni and cheese recipes. There were no political fights, mostly ‘cause the republican was the one giving me the jello shots. What’s with republicans feeding me alcohol these days?

It was insulated. I didn’t want to leave, I never do, but I had to work at 6am, so I left around 2? Maybe. I don’t quite remember. But I do remember the hard clicking of my heels on the sidewalk, and the still photographic quality of the streetlight shining on my car. I remember the inside of my car as a kind of ingrained wash of dirt and ash, the ash is growing from the car. And I was out of cigarettes, but I didn’t want to stop for them. I just drove, straight and narrow and I listened to the Mountain Goats because I think he is one of those musicians that really defines me. When people ask me who my favorite band is, I should say him. All those songs about people screwing each other over and hanging out but separating, and really being okay after someone leaves cause its just a person after all and they could have died instead of left but they would still be gone so what’s the difference? Also, if people didn’t leave, then there wouldn’t be any room for new people. Because certain roles in your life are not built for multiple casting. If you only have this boyfriend, how will you ever have another? If you only have this best friend or this circle of friends, how will you ever meet the next circle of friends?

The air was warm and smelled like rain and leaves last night. I drove around by the train tracks, wishing I had some really cute cartoon to draw on the underpass supports, a whole bag of paint and stencils and time. Sometimes its good to be the girl in black tights and eyelashes, by herself on a warm November night, thinking about graffiti and also how much you love this underpass in particular because you drive by it every day and it comes after a really sharp downhill curve that makes you feel like a racer. There was a guy at the party who looked exactly like Peter, Buddy thought so too. We talked about it in front of him, and then Holly his girlfriend told me about her best friend dying while she was fighting with her and I told her about Peter dying and that feeling that’s left when you could have said “yes I’ll go to the show” instead of “no, I’m too depressed” and then your best friend dies at that show and everyone else was there to watch it but you weren’t. And even though it’s sick that you wanted to be there when he died, you did and no you don’t think its sick, because you don’t have that chance to say goodbye to someone very often and it was right there for you but you lost it. So it’s important to always see someone the minute you want to see them, and as often as you want to, and it’s important to do things with them and talk to them every night and be available for death scenes.