That DJ does not love you, girl in the flowery dress

pictures from the Dan Deacon show at the CMA Solstice party.

That DJ does not love you little girl, who styled her hair so carefully before she put on her mother's curtains and ventured into the world of benefactors and sponsors. He wants to love you, moppet head, but he knows you are 22, and bereft of the way of the world. Let me explain...take off your messenger bag and listen.

First, here is the first time you fall in love, and poof, there goes that love up in smoke, like a pellet gun shooting pigeons. After this moment, you know that trust is non-existent, and connections fluid like the saliva in your ex boyfriends mouth.

Then oops, here is your first long term job, the one that was only supposed to pay the bills before you hightailed it to Chicago, and now suddenly it's your five year anniversary and you're on the Spirit Team. Decorating people's cubicles in streamers, people who would probably not talk to you if they knew what you thought about at night.

Here is your hope for a stable beautiful existence. The kind that exists in coming of age movies, where the old person shakes their head knowingly and drinks some lemonade and doesn't tell you about the body in the basement on purpose. Boom, there it goes! Erased by kitty litter, and smelly shoes, and those bananas you never threw away in the fridge even though trash day was Sunday and you were waiting for Sunday to throw them out because otherwise they would just stink up the trash bin. You are going to die of potassium deficiency. Or that horrible cat dementia caused by contact with feline feces.

There are all the little dreams, dying like stars, right? Bullshit metaphors. More like rotting away in a phosphorescent garbage heap in the dark sea that is your middle school days. You are a dying Angler Fish. Want to go back to school? Want to join the Peace Corps? Want to be beloved? Want a dog? Want to go into space? Want to write Catcher in the Rye? Kablooey. Drink some more.


And as you grow old, out of your glowing twenties when everything was so vibrant, so color saturated, so photo-shopped into memories of rag-tag-ness and sluttiness and nights you didn't spend with him, lying on the ground watching shooting stars because he never took you to do that, but he took every other girl with a name ending in y, though you talked about nights in sleeping bags so often. Those things are exploding before your eyes, disintegrating into crappy domestic abuse pamphlets, into conversations about assholes and crazies, and life will never be as good as it looked like it could be then. You'll never be cold together again. You'll never crawl shivering into the covers after showers, or fall asleep on the way home, or stop to drive around strange villages in Southern Ohio with gaming arcades. Those things never really existed, they were just in your mind. In fact, as the smoke dissipates, you'll realize those things never happened for him. Just for you. And with every 2 am conversation involving a man named Jacques and another pineapple vodka, you'll feel yourself slipping deeper and deeper into the disconnection. Into the realm where people are vague shadows and hugs don't actually touch and names are all anybody knows, where politics and music become excuses for talking about yourself and if you have to go to the grocery store one more time by yourself, you might just buy a carton of cat food and call it quits.

Here's a bunny. The fucking bunny doesn't care either.