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.

The brighter the lights, the more I want them in black and white

My Little Attic Tree


I don't have much to say today. I'm done with Christmas, and getting everything ready for New Years. I've avoided reading anything about resolutions or plans for 2009, because there's no reason to bring down my self-esteem, no matter how temporary the effect is. NYE is my favorite holiday, because it's a time for having a really good uninhibited spectacularly silly good time. But in order to achieve that zen like state of awesomeness, preparations must be made, both physical and emotional. First, take the time off from work. Spend money like you're proposing to someone. In a way you are, you're seducing the new year into spending the night, maybe calling you the next day, maybe having your babies. Second, do not think about what you should be doing to yourself for the next 12 months. Instead, focus on what you'd like to be doing to yourself right now, and only for the next 24 hours. Reward yourself for surviving the past year and all the incompetence that came with it.

So I'm off work, and I'm going to Baltimore to get nasty drunk at a Wu Tang concert. I will send you pics, maybe. In the meantime, have these from my holidays...

You know how some girls take pictures of all their friends every time they go out? Well, I now find myself taking pictures of all the inanimate objects and scenes I want to remember.

Beggar.

Polish people love bread for every holiday. We stock up on carbs in the winter for hibernation.

The Best Fruitcake In the World, Monk Fruitcake.

Eggnog ice cream on apple pie is very very good. Especially because eggnog ice cream tastes like rice pudding, so it's like two major desserts in one!

This is probably an iconic picture of Dad. Because of the slippers, not the TV.

And Mom makes the pierogis. Lots and lots of pierogis. She also complains when I take normal pictures of her, so she gets a blurry action shot.

That is not my house by the way. That is the Magical Castle of Christmas Spirit that appeared on my street sometime shortly after Thanksgiving.

And the neighborhood children have been mysteriously disappearing. But the neighborhood nutcracker and stuffed polar bear population seems to have skyrocketed.

This no laptop thing is killing me. Examples:

I attempted to call someplace the other day...only I have no phone books.
I wanted to go to a bar yesterday....hmmm where can I find ones that are open?
I made awesome eggnog ice cream yesterday and took pictures...that you can't see because I can't upload them at work.
I need to buy a bra.
I need to get the hell out of dodge for New Years, but have no way to mapquest, buy a hotel room, get concert tickets.
I watched 4 straight hours of Star Trek the Next Generation yesterday.

All of this is a serious arguement for getting a phone with internet. Or an eye implant.

Edit: I thought of all the horrible things that could happen to me without internet access at home.

1. I could have a plumbing disaster where all my pipes burst and I'm locked in my house, and since I can't call a plumber, locksmith, or someone with a crowbar, I drown.

2. I buy a new face cream without researching it, and it turns out I'm horribly allergic, and I'm blinded.

3. I try to go to Baltimore for New Years Eve with no map of the city, and I get very very lost, and drive straight into a gang war. And I die.

4. Overdraft fees.

5. Paris Hilton dies in a freak plastic surgery accident involving embalming fluid and chihuahua stem cells, and I know nothing about it.

Oh my god, STILL sick.
For those of you that don't see me in real life, I've been sick for THREE WEEKS now. Basically, I got sick the day after I got a flu shot, which they give out for free at work. We all line up in the cafeteria and off the clock nurses stick us with efficiency. I've been getting flu shots for years, to no ill effect. But the day after this one, I woke up full of snot and with a pounding sinus headache. And it has been getting progressively worse for three weeks. Until Thursday, when I just couldn't take it anymore, and I called off work. And here I am, Saturday, and something in my body is changing...

-For instance, I can now purr. In the back of my throat.
-Also, my skin is much clearer, and stronger. I used to get a red snout anytime I touched a tissue, and sickness would cause my cheekbones to become pimple farms. Now I'm porcelain, even the sensitive nostrils area.
-I don't need as much sleep, I seem to be able to function fine on less and less. I feel confident I will reach the point of needing no sleep sometime in the next few days.
- I smell different.
- cold medicine has stopped having any effect on me, even for fun.
- I crave salt.
- I watched Little Women on TCM twice in a row last night, first the black and white version with Katherine Hepburn and then the technicolor one with June Allyson. Then I pictured Jo and Professor Baer having sex.

I'm not saying there's any need to worry at the moment, only pointing out that the flu shot seems to have concealed some secret government formula to turn me into a German.

Following a theme

Things I Doubt:

1. I doubt that I understand anybody. I harbor suspicion that I am oblivious to lots of things about people that I should be noticing and appreciating. Craziness especially. What if nobody is really who I think they are? What if I am very delusional, and you all are completely different than I think you are?

2. I doubt that anyone understands me. Sure, I know my friends and family love me, but love is so subjective. They love parts of me that relate to them. Do any of them see the full complete picture of me? I feel extremely see-through, and I'm not exactly discreet. But maybe I feel that way cause I'm with myself all the time. What's it like to only experience me broken into small distinct pieces? What about me do they really dislike? Why do I only feel whole and secure when I'm by myself? But the reason this is a doubt and not a fact is because maybe, possibly, everyone understands me perfectly and I'm not that complicated.

3. I doubt that I've ever really loved anybody or anything the way other people love things. This doubt can be overshadowed by gas clouds of drunken happiness, but in reality, I could leave tomorrow and if there was someone else to fill their places, I would be okay. I would miss them. But as long as I stay distracted by new things, I'm fine. Do my friends who get this about me understand that it doesn't make them any less valuable to me now? Does everyone feel this way about people?

4. I doubt that I am pretty. Because I am fat. But I see myself as very pretty, so you know, this is more related to #2.

5. I doubt that I am smart. Because so much that goes through my head seems to be repetition, and also increasingly negative. And I doubt that a smart girl would give any of these useless nasty thoughts any room to grow, but I do, because they're more entertaining than television. Also, when I go to open mikes, I tell everyone how good they were. And I mean it. Which doesn't seem like the smartest thing. It seems like a dumb girl thing to do. Some guy on Tuesday told me I was a "good soul". Since I know that I am very much so NOT that, it makes me think that I must come off as dumb and nice to these people, cause isn't that what you say to dumb nice girls who smile too much when drunk guys are talking to them? Or it's what you say to ugly girls. Also I use the word "that" too much.

6. I doubt that I am ever going to live a life more interesting than this. Even though I know my life changes constantly, and I just need to say yes to some things I have previously said no to. But it seems like so much effort now. It seems like I could stay in this apartment forever, at this job forever, doing the same Cleveland things. Most of the time I have faith that I won't, that I will find something else to do, but....well its winter. Winter makes me see everything as permanent.

7. I doubt I will ever go back to school. I highly doubt it. I know I should, if only for my intellectual health. But it takes so much money and work. I consider paying off my car to be my biggest accomplishment lately. And the only effort that required was paying my bill on time for three years. If something like a car payment can be so hard and stressful on me, how could I ever do something bigger than that? I am a child.

8. I doubt my own sanity. Sometimes I feel like I must be mentally retarded in some subtle way. Other times I feel completely disconnected, floating in loose space around a Sims game, an abandoned character. In fact, most of the time I am vacillating between one of those two things. Every once in a while, I feel controlled and powerful and magnetic. Those are the only times I feel confident in my sanity, when I can talk to people and really be in the moment and not playing some weird part. But I haven't figured out how to leave that mode on full time. And I can feel my skill at faking that slipping away as I get older.

9. I doubt the level of trashiness in my life. I try hard to not be trashy. But maybe I have been all along? Or I'm descending into it? Trashy people don't know they're trashy, do they? I mean, they must have some clue, otherwise we wouldn't have country music stars. But what if I'm just poor dirty uneducated opinionated trashy? I really like Britney Spears.

10. All of the above combine to make me doubt my superiority over the rest of the human race. But then I remember that the guys who have loved me have been smart, interesting guys. And my friends continue to be my friends despite my perpetual boy drama, and inane ridiculous statements, and inability to call them. And in five years I will read this list and go "oh my god, HOW 29 is THAT". And if I work it correctly, I have at least 50 years left to prove to some segment of the population how much more talented than them I am. I'm just a slow learner when it comes to things that aren't on tests. I'm a baby, really. I'm an adolescent mind. The gestation period for my brilliance is just a little bit longer than the average human. I'm Apple, twenty years ago. Invest now.

Thanksgiving is a weird safe holiday. There isn't any religious stuff or political stuff to alienate people. We don't have Thanksgiving parties. Instead we spend all day at home, smelling things cook, eating crackers, and in my family's case, sitting around on our various laptops silently orbiting around each other until dinner. Which is at normal dinner time, not 1 or 2, I think because there is no way my family could get everything together before 12pm and why would we want to? We have the day off work.

I like the whole all or nothing aesthetic of Thanksgiving. There's this feeling of eat it all now, as if tomorrow there is no possibility of us starving or not having a job or being homeless. It's less "I'm so grateful for this" and more "I have utter confidence in this".

Which is what I was thinking about yesterday while driving. There was the predictable story about the new cabinet picks on the radio and I was contemplating the pure middleness of our new president, when I realized that all this "hope" we were sold, and ate with the vigor of a butterball turkey wasn't really hope. I don't think any of us thought he was going to get into office and suddenly all our liberal fantasies would come true. But we'll trade away extremity for what Obama is really selling, confidence. I love driving around, thinking about politics and elections in Lebanon and inflation in Ghana, and having confidence in the person who runs my country, who decides what move we make and what kind of player we are. It means I can listen and think about these things with actual interest again, instead of crippling abject terror.

So Thanksgiving is also about confidence. Confidence in our money, and our family, and our country, and ourselves. Maybe we sometimes make the wrong moves, or the answer the wrong questions, but in the end it will work out, because we're us. And look at all this food we have!

Then tomorrow we'll go back to doubting and eating leftovers.

Today was a weird day.
I woke up and got mad.
I stayed mad all day.
But I got a great evaluation at work.
I couldn't go to Jay's because I had to stay at work too late.
Then my car battery light came on while driving home, and I barely made it to the front of my house when the car just died. Kaput. My windows are still rolled down though, electric you know, so if you wanted to steal a bag of dirty clothes or some chicken stock, tonight's your night.
Then I got upstairs and my cable box was dead. Which is a clear sign that God hates Jennifer Aniston.
And the flu shot I got yesterday is totally making me sick.

But in my email I got a message from Kucinich's office saying I was on the waitlist for inauguration tickets, as well as a warning that these are standing tickets only, no food or drink allowed in the area, and there's an expected 4 hour wait with no restroom facilities. But I did get on the waitlist, which is AWESOME.

So, you know, it's a very mixed day.

Also, I've spent the last few days with visions of a vagina headed marching band stomping on an abandoned baby, bouncing around behind my eyeballs. I need a breathalyzer on my phone.

ALSO how is it that 30 Seconds to Mars is successful enough as a band STILL(not to mention EVER) that they can film a music video on an ice floe in the Artic circle? And how is it helping the cause of global warming to accelerate destruction by building an airstrip, have giant heavy machinery brought in, and then twirling your scarf a lot? Polar Bear Revolution Motherfuckers. They will eat your head Jared Leto.

UPDATE: Sometimes the universe isn't out to kick you while you're down, cause sometimes it's just your battery not your alternator. Even though you have a weird old South Korean car, so your battery is 100 dollars. But its still not your alternator, praise Yeesus Hallelujah. Times like these make you grateful you still live in the same city as your parents. Especially when right before your car died, you were busy screaming at the ex-boyfriend who usually took care of all your car problems.

So I'm back home now. And it turns out you can't throw a drink in anyone's face anymore without everyone in Lakewood knowing about it.




So I smoke a lot of cigarettes and watch bad tv while my cat claws me to pieces cause I left her alone too long. Why do I keep doing it? Why do I keep fucking Sean when I know I'm going to be hurt burned eviscerated by him, and why do it when I hate him so much? And why does he do it when he hates me so much, and tries like hell to stay away? It's been our whole relationship, which goes beyond familial or romantic or friendship, into the realm of Russian tragedy. Tearing ourselves to pieces and then trying to mend it, but failing. Always trying, again and again. Our families hate us. Our friends hate us. We hate us. Oh god, it never really stops. He comes around to me, or I go to him. It's a magnetic steady detoriation of the ties that bind.



When you can't actively love someone, it's better to actively hate them, than to have them gone from your life forever, blank over done. And if we stop giving each other reasons to hate the other one, then eventually we'll have to stop the interaction altogether, and just start living life without them. It's an apocalyptic thought. One of us will do it for real one of these times, will just separate and go away and not come back. But it probably isn't going to be me. It's probably going to be him and it's maybe already done. I did cover him with pineapple juice, in front of people. Wish I could tell you it was me that was the sensible one, but it was never going to be, and anyway you all knew that before we even got started, seven years ago when the shit hit the fan. You all knew I was screwed, and he was screwed. It was inevitable we would both be destroyed by the purely natural preordained completely unavoidable sometimes quite enjoyable combustion. I tried, remember? I cut the bloody cord months ago. Its just I keep trying to tie it back together now, cause I feel like I'm bleeding to death. And I'm tired of saying "one" "other" "us" "hate" "love" "fuck" "always" "probably". I sound like the margin doodles on a high school copy of Jane Eyre.



I feel so old, because I am old. I feel like I can't possibly build something with another person again, it's too much energy and process and frankly I just give up thinking I need to move on from this. Even the focus required to distract myself is too much. I'm just gonna stop trying to be strong or smart or crazy or justified or vengeful or independent. I'm just gonna be nothing for a while. And watch Numbers. Which is seriously the worst show on television.

Now that the party is over...

Here's the things I need to work out in my soul right now.

1. I need to learn to forgive all the fuckers who made fun of me for two years because of my support for Obama, then had a magical conversion during the party on Tuesday night. True, they mocked people making phone calls and called the canvassers bad names and talked day and night about how Obama was just a shady inexperienced candidate, but anything was better than Republicans. But I need them to vote in another 4 years, so when they tell me how proud they are that there's a black president, I need to just walk away. My rancor from this is particularly coming from
****, who sent me an email in which he simultaneously mentioned how "fucking annoying" I was about Obama, but also how much fun he had partying with the brothers, and how proud he is of his country for electing a black man. What? Who the fuck do you think made this election happen, assholes? The people who worked really hard to convince your dumb asses to vote. You got to party on Tuesday because thousands and thousands of people have been working tirelessly for two years to get this done. So you should be down on your knees grateful, (not necessarily to me cause all I did was a couple phone calls, a lot of arguing with strangers, and a lot of snarky blogging), but at the very least you could refrain from insulting me, or them. And the sad part is, they just care about the fact that he's black, not about the fact that he's good, or about any of the issues he supports. And even in the same breath, they're commenting about how "we'll see if he actually does anything in office".

See, I need to let all that go. All I need to think about is that they voted, it's all that matters. And figure out some way to get them to keep voting that way when its not about a black man, or about Bush. As a first step of this, I need to take a deep breath and stop using names. (Oh but its hard to let go of anger, its hard...)

Something I don't need to let go of is...

2. It depresses me to no end that all the anti-gay legislation passed. As happy as I am about this election, I feel like all my gay friends just got labeled second class citizens. And I wish all those people who are so happy about a black president could think for just a moment about how there is a still very oppressed minority in this country, a whole group of people that we won't allow to get married, who many people in this country don't consider worthy of the basic human rights of everyone else. Hmm, we used to do that to this other group of people....who was that....remember?

I Love You America. Thank you. This is better than I ever, in my entire life, thought you could be.





I'm totally crying right now. And everyone is talking about MLK and the Declaration of Independence, and all that. But GOD, PEOPLE, you finally proved to those bastards that you're not racist, or crazy, or delusional, and you don't believe their lies, and you really learned something from the last eight years. At least more than half of you. It's so awesome. I'm actually proud to be American right now, and I don't think I've ever felt that before in my life, even for a second. I'm not used to being this sincere. I wonder how my parents feel right now.

Brit Hume is totally kissing his ass right now. In your face Fox. Seriously, I hope you crumble, you passive aggressive assholes. "He was elected because people don't remember the civil rights movement" YOU LOSE.

Okay, seriously, I need to go to sleep. But instead I made a mix called "You can't date hipsters forever cause eventually they get old too", and may have punctured my ear drum with a defective Q-tip just now, and somewhere off Detroit there is an apartment where 2 boys are going to drink and play video games all day and I have to return some German book about the oppression of women by fish to one of said boys plus drop off some postdated checks to various people and pack for my trip to Austin and then Marty and Rebecca's for post Halloween pumpkin carving...and I really should probably do my dishes before I leave, at least sometime before the actual airport. So yes thank you I would like some coffee and no, I think I'll pass on the blue hole of...what? despair? Hardly. Guilt? No. I think I need to get away from in front of the mirror.

Why do I ever pick up my phone after 1am?

I haven't stayed up all night sober in...well...I can't really remember it, so we'll just assume at some time it did actually happen. Also, how convenient is it that I don't have to change any of the clocks I actually look at? I listened to a LOT of Ozma. They make me think of that night in the Detroit Casino, Rudy and I talking about movies and girls while Paul actually won some poker money and had to pay for the gas money back. The drive through beat down Midwest sunrise, in Paul's van occasionally used for band equipment but mostly just drunk people sitting on the floor.

I wanted to tell you about My Girl Snow. She's the cousin of a friend of mine, and for years she'd been the Go To Girl for everything, especially party favors. We'd call her on Tuesday afternoons, when neither of us had a job or maybe we did but it was retail, and meeting up with her involved taking a brief tour of old poor porches in the outskirts of Lakewood (you know, where really it's still Cleveland?). The living rooms were always filled with what would be thrift store furniture, if it hadn't been there for the last 20 years really, stained with Koolaid and menthol smoke. Dogs in the basement. Shake on the table. Daytime television running in the background. And we had to hang out, you always have to hang out, the requisite cover time. But it was better than going to Uncle John's by yourself, because he was 500 pound man who never left his house and he wasn't letting you escape anytime soon.

Side note, I remember one time we bought from someone My Girl Snow knew very briefly, and at some point the man of the household/apartment(the kind of yellow brick 1972 apartment where old gay guys go to surround themselves with cats, plants, and cheap drugs while they wait to die) told me if I really wanted money, I should go into the escort business. Fat girls can totally do it, he said, as long as you're not picky. The lady upstairs is like 350, and she gets guys online all the time. I'll help you, he said. We did not go back there.

So this was how I knew her for years. She worked at a BP station, if you called her at work, she'd have her boyfriend bring the stuff there and she'd meet you in the warehouse next door. Then she'd do a few lines herself, surrounded by boxes of plastic coffee stirrers and old office chairs. She dated this boy who grew in his basement pretty seriously, and collected giant dogs, and broke up with her all the time. For like ten years, it was on and off, she was at her mom's house, she was back in with him. He was terrible, an awful human being. He had a mastiff that got sick, and when he didn't want to take care of it anymore, he abandoned it in Rocky River Park. In winter. She cheated on him constantly, with his friends, old boyfriends. Snow must have a magical puss, because no guy has ever been able to dump her, and she's not the most attractive girl, covered in tattoos and flabby, loose like a stretched out sweater. But she gets into a dumb guys soul, and plants her little tentacles there, so that she can pull a guy back from miles away. I just never understood why she would want to. She wasn't always ghetto as shit, she used to have the semblance of a smart person, she used to be entertaining, funny. But slowly she peeled away from the decent world, shrinking away from the light, clinging to the beds of cockroaches.

Snow found out a few years ago that she had this serious disease, and her intestines were all rotted away and falling apart like swiss cheese. I thought maybe she would clean up a little since she was so sick, it didn't seem to me like a choice. Several surgeries later, she hasn't let it affect her indomitable spirit, except that she seems more determined to kill herself and also doesn't use birth control at all. She used to live with her mom, but then her mom died. I went over there once. My Girl Snow was just laying in the upstairs bed, covered in dark bruises from some new guy she had met. Her mother's boyfriend had cooked for her, the mother, a candlelit spaghetti dinner downstairs, but she kept him waiting while upstairs she tried to bum the stuff I had just bought off me. Literally, standing there with her hands out to me, because My Girl Snow wouldn't give her any for free.

The rest of us have of course grown out of certain expensive habits and gotten day jobs and boyfriends who don't necessarily require us to be lookouts, but she's a trooper. Snow still swallows oxys twenty times a day, lives off the state and sells out of some efficiency one room apartment where she crashes with her 19 yr old dealer boyfriend Paco. She has his name tattooed on her in at least ten different ways. He has a giant one of her name across her chest, like the Sublime album cover. He won't let her take showers by herself, he'll will cry and beat the wall if she does. She never leaves the house without him. At least, she'll never have a baby with him. Her body rejects pregnancies like your skin pushes out splinters, the baby chunks fall out of her battered womb with the ease of sausage pulling out of the casing. It's like her body knows better than her.

I bring her up because she is still my friend's cousin, and he just told me this story about her. I had to stop answering my phone when she called a while ago. I just couldn't take the tragedy anymore, and I'm not related, so you know, I don't have to.

My Girl Snow and Paco went on a deal. They drove in her old blue explorer, which has a bad starter and you have to hit it with a hammer to get it going. Paco has been selling these pills for a while now that he passes off as E, but which are in fact so queasy causing combination of speed and other nastiness. So they went down to the East Side, to meet up with this crackhead (no, actual crackhead), and the customer takes the pills, then refuses to pay Paco. Paco of course fights with crackhead, and crackhead pulls a knife. He stabs Paco in the face and chest. My Girl Snow has run back to the car to grab her own knife, and joins the fight, where she proceeds to get STABBED THROUGH HER CHEEK.

So eventually this ends with My Girl Snow and crackhead (who has health care) both sitting in the emergency room, and she steals supplies to glue Paco's face later. And she buys a gun. She now has a 4 inch scar on her cheek and 2 shot pistol.

Seriously. Stabbed in the cheek by a crackhead while trying to sell bad pills in the ghetto. I mean, seriously?

Driving home tonight, I found a mix CD by some guy I used to talk to briefly, years ago. He lived in Michigan, and worked at a newspaper, and it was interesting for a minute. Then he sent me this CD and I was all like "hmmmm, this is a lot of very frat boy music" and I didn't really talk to him again. So I was listening to it, and its fun, in a very 2001 Blink 182 way. But there was also a Cake song on it, and it occurred to me that I have like 5 Cds from guys that have a Cake song on them. And it's always the leather couch song, or short skirt/ long jacket.

What is it about me that makes guys think of Cake? I like Cake, but it's never been, like, my favorite band ever. It gets grouped in my head with Ween and Dropkick Murphys. I think I would prefer to be thought of as a Dylan girl, or a Willie Nelson girl. But no, apparently I make guys think of off the beat singing and a horn section.

I thought I had stayed out too late, but then I remembered our nice little gift from the Powers That Be tonight. Our world is kinda fucked up when the government can give and take your hours like Christmas bonuses, but it's a good reminder that the concept of structured time can go suck it. My friend is all super concerned that Obama won't win, he's like, having a nervous junkie breakdown. I keep telling him to be calm, accept the inevitable. I have become positively zen about the whole thing. We were watching Palin parrot youtube videos tonight while dinner cooked, and then we found that phone call. Seriously, that phone call. How can one be concerned about any of this anymore, except that in three days my major source of daily entertainment and merriment will be gone! The sarcastic political blog market is about to collapse! Wonkette's traffic will tumble, Huffington Post will lock out it's employees in the cold, metaphorically speaking. Small time bloggers will be forced to come up with new creative thoughts. It's the biggest cultural disaster in eight years! Where's OUR bailout motherfuckers?

Of course, Kerry could be Secretary of State...

Oh and DAD & CARRIE, I meant to send you this, though by now you've gotten it in seventeen different emails I'm sure...

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.

Halloween Part 1

Went to a Halloween party last Saturday.
Well, first, I went with my friends to a Capitol Steps concert.
As I was running through the red carpet veranda of the Allen Theater to get to the bathroom before the show started, in my Halloweeny garb of course, an usher stopped me and he said,"hey, what is this show anyway?"
I replied, "well it's musical political satire."
And he nodded his head sagely.
"It explains the audience, doesn't it?" I asked.
"Yes" he replied.

So let's explain this audience. There were a few requisite gay couples, like my friends. Doug was the one who took us, cause Doug is the sort of person to text you after the Obama infomercial with how awesome he thought it was. And I'm the type to text him back excitedly, so it works.
Then there were a lot of old people. I love my parents, but I think they can admit that they fall squarely in old people camp now. And there were a lot of guys that my dad probably thought were too dorky for words, and a lot of wives who laughed INSANELY LOUD like my mother does when she watches sex comedies. There were maybe three people under thirty in the whole crowd and Buddy and I were two of them.
The Capitol Steps are old people political humor. They're kinda funny, but not if you're the type who obsessively reads every left wing blog you can get your hands on, every morning while you drink your cranberry juice (did I mention my recent addiction to cranberry juice?) The sad fact is that they are just not current enough or extreme enough to be that funny to me. I think my favorite song was Putin singing "Midnight Raid to Georgia". Other than that, it's like "really, you just made a joke about Cheney shooting a guy? And yes, we know Palin shoots moose too." But it was entertaining enough to make you glad enough your friend bought you a ticket.

So then we went back to get my car, and we drove seperately to this party. The girl who invited me told me it was on West Blvd, but it wasn't her house, so she didn't know exactly where. And it turned out to be on the one spot of West Blvd where none of us wanted to park our cars. We drove past it three times thinking it couldn't be there. Finally Girl and I coordinated enough on the celly to find it. I didn't know anyone there except Girl&Husband. So the Boys and I walked bravely in, straight into Devo Man in the kitchen who I totally didn't recognize but then ended up talking to for most of the night. We wandered self-consciously downstairs, and I inadvertantly made my entrance on the raised basement dance floor with pole. Yes this guy had a pole and a bar and DJs and kegs in the basement, and the floor was filled with every possible rendition of school girl, girl scout, cheerleader, naughty witch you could think of. Found Girl, who was talking to Girlscout, who I instantly fell in love with. Girl introduced me to Butcher, owner of said den of inequity and also some blue Tequila I proceeded to drink without heed for the rest of the night.

On the attic floor, Butcher had made a haunted house. Kitchen filled with body parts, dead bodies on the floor, dayglo and bloody handprints on the walls, strobe light. That room stank of weed the whole night. Next door to Kitchen was Dead Body Bag Room, which was AWESOME. Just a dark room, smoke machine, incredibly realistic filled body bags hanging from butcher racks. As several people pointed out to me that night, they wanted to have sex in that room. I wanted to have sex in that room.

Highlights of the night include Girlscout making out with my boobs, me spilling a full glass of punch all over Buddy, me trading my Obama pin to a Republican referee for an entire new glass of tequila, me spilling more of that on my shirt than in my mouth. Me falling over the woodpile in the backyard. Me demanding Obama pin back from referee when I found out he was a Republican. And lots of girls on the stripper pole. Then Buddy and Doug left, so Devo and I talked the rest of the night, mostly to keep ourselves occupied until I was sober (enough) to drive home. And like most of my nights these days, the talk was about guns and anime.

Halloween Part Two tomorrow at Lo and Jessica's house. I've been literally promised to star in fights with at least two republicans. So if you wanna go, gimme a call.

How many links to adequately express how pissed off I am that you ruined this again and I am alone cause you couldn't get it together?

Be Specific

Self Like

Rest In Peace

Got Your #

Still Got It

Typist

Minus One

Yeah seriously, screw you.

Oh well. In less than a week I'll be sitting in a hotel room in Austin, watching the election results, and Obama will win and then I'll go to bed and when I wake up it will be a brand new world where no one can be angry at each other anymore. And all the New York hipster elitists will be friends with the steelworker Ohioans, and the crazies will go back to being just weird crazies, and Joe the Plumber will....okay we will still all hate Joe the Plumber, but thats because he reminds us of the guy our friend used to date who was just SUCH a douchebag. And Rachel Maddow will be elected Queen of the Lesbians, and she'll hold high court on a farm somewhere in Connecticut. And no one will watch Frank TV. Ever.

Seriously, how much more heartbroken can one heart be before it is turned into a walnut and then buried by a mean squirrel in the backyard of my soul?

So my systems are down right now at work. It’s a revelatory situation. Most of the time people sit around wishing they had no work to do. But the entire cubicle forest is freaking out because we have all these calls to make and things to do, and it’s just throwing our SCHEDULES off, man. I’m gonna be so BEHIND tomorrow. Oh how I miss the days where I didn’t plan out my hours in a maze of multitasking.

Of course, I would love the distraction right now, to get my mind off the fact that I’ve been taken in again AGAIN by Sean Ayers. I swear, at this point, my non-relationship with him resembles my non-relationship with the Republicans. Every time I think “there is no way I can be hurt anymore by this, there is no way I can be any angrier”, something wallops me on the back of the neck and proves me wrong. And it’s my fault, cause they’re both so predictably going to hurt me. Seriously though, what was I thinking? What corner of my primeval junior high brain thought I could spend a week of nights with him, and he wasn’t going to blow it all up like a Molotov bomb? Because, you know, he “doesn’t owe me anything”. Like picking up the phone, or just being straightforward and honest about the fact that the one night in 10 he’s not spending with me in bed, he’s immediately out with another girl? And I think what makes me even angrier about the whole thing is that he knew he was doing something bad to me, which is why he tried to pick a fight with me the day before, and why he turned his ringer off the day of, and why he just can’t own up to it but instead tries to backtrack and defend. Like a kid who’s been caught in a lie. Just be a man and say “hey yeah, I was out with Kate last night, so what? I’m not your boyfriend and I don’t care how you feel about this, so if you don’t want to talk to me now, fine.” THAT I could at least respect. Take your consequences. Don’t act like you don’t know I’m going to be furious and brokenhearted. You knew I would be, and you did it anyway. Don’t play stupid. “I don’t have to tell you, I don’t have to, I’m sick of your ultimatums, blah blah blah”. It’s not an ultimatum. It’s called a “tell me you made out with some other girl last night so I can at least know exactly where we fucking stand”. I’m just so furious because of this shady attitude of his, and also because I just know if he could have managed to be happy just once in the times he had a chance with me, it could have been so great. But hey, start talking to me? You’ll immediately become mired in misery and your life will become a “nightmare”. Seriously, it'll go straight from "man I'm having so much fun with other girls" to "I hate my life and I want to kill myself". Within a week. I’m impressive like that. I guess the idea of going out with me again is like instant yummy poison, like dogs and chocolate. They think they want it all the time when they don't have it, but then they get hideously sick. He might not have even gone out with girl! He might have just gone to bar! But he needs an excuse to stop talking to me!

Oh god, on to other things. That concludes the vindictive, heartbroken, “god I hope your little fashionista googles you and finds this so she knows you were fucking me all last week” portion of this post. Also, I swear to god if any of you say anything at all to me about poor Sean who misses me so much, who's so heartbroken, I will rip out your eyeballs and feed them to my cat. Lies, they're all lies. Guy may love me in some weird indiscernible way, but he certainly doesn't like me.

Thoughts today include general amazement at the amount of celebrity rubbish I subject myself to daily. Also love for the functioning part of my brain that insists on functioning, despite my every effort to squash its hope with Gossip Girl, cigarettes, Kraft mac and cheese, pictures of Sarah Palin as a child. It just keeps going people, it refuses to die. It huddles in the darkest little corner, yearning to stick its head out, but scared of the CW crocodiles paroling my emotional plains. It’s anemic and gray, with tiny little limbs I can break with a forefinger or an opinion about which is the better Olsen twin. They are not separate entities, in fact they are a two headed mutant, a monster whose actual body extends far below the sewers of New York, like an iceberg we only see the tip of the problem.

Oh, also I’m trying to temper my political hatred, in anticipation of needing to eventually come down off this high Obama horse. I’m trying to remind myself that I’m an extremist, and I need to be more tolerant. Only, I don’t feel like one. I feel like my anger at the not even trying to be subtle lying and rumor-mongering is completely justified. And I’ll tell you what REALLY burns me up, the price of gas! It’s so low! Because it’s always this low before the election, predictably and measurably. For the last 12 years, like possessed clockwork! For the first Bush election, and the second Bush election, and now McCain. They want you to have less to bitch at the Republicans for. It’s mind bogglingly obvious who the gas companies are pulling for, and its brain bustingly insulting how see-through it is, and yet NO GETS MAD. Not at the Republicans mind you, AT THE GAS COMPANIES. Doesn’t it tell you how willy nilly they fleece you, that they can reduce gas to 2.25 a gallon for weeks before the election? It’s not the global market collapse, or hurricanes. They do this EVERY FOUR YEARS. Why are we content to sit here quiet as a mute child while they laugh at us, and then set our wallets on fire, while they hand out scraps to us like starving dogs? Why do we just keep flying into the glass window again and again and again? When is the American public going to get mad at the real evil bastards?!

So, you know, this confuses me, the utter immovability of the prairie mind. It falls into this tin bucket I carry around in my torso, the things that make me sick, that leave rusty tastes in my mouth and stinging needles in my eyes. I take deep breaths often, trying to contain the desire to shout at everyone around me. When people talk about the courage of activists, what they are really talking about it the courage to wake up every morning and do the same thing and say the same thing to an implacable wall, a dead black hole that surrounds them. Remember the scene from C.S.Lewis’s voyage of the Dawn Treader, where the ship sailed into the black fog, and the lights couldn’t even stay on in the face of the utter blacknesss? That’s what I think of when I see people who “do stuff”. I think of those sad little warm lights flickering and weakening and turning cold, unable to stand the lack of acknowledgement from the world around them.

I’m not even an activist. I am a do-nothingist. I am a have-a-jobist. I am a don’t-have-to-kill-the-animal-myself-so-its-okayist. I have no hope. I have too active a curiousity. I am a self-concerned shameful person. And all of you are too. Which is why I don’t understand why we can’t even get angry about something that affects US directly? What hope do the less selfish causes have then?

Of course, maybe the price of gas doesn’t matter so much to you, because you’re not living off yogurt and cheerios just to make sure you have enough gas money to get to work for the next two weeks. Maybe you don’t know the sense of horror when you realize that after the bills are paid, that’s it, there is no spare dollar that shouldn’t go into your gas tank. You’ve probably never called off work just because you didn’t have enough to get there. You think rush hour is just a nuisance, but to me that time spent waiting burning running is tomorrow’s morning’s allowance.

Yes, I am very angry today. At you, at me, at gas, at capitalism, at hormones, at all girls more than three years younger than me, at boys, at the ice collecting on my car, at my squeamy looking hair, at absolutely everything in the whole world except the pot roast in the crockpot at home which will be my sustenance thru next Tuesday. Also, I’m not angry at the Red Fox Dream Baby.

I swear, every time I think about leaving the house today, it starts raining. Then it stops, when I've already watched 45 minutes of the O.C. and I really want to see what happens at the Winter Dance and with Ryan making out with Caleb's love child. When I finally tear myself away and put my shoes on? It starts raining again. I think I will just throw all my laundry out and dress in nothing but jeans and black shirts from now on.

My grocery list:
cat food, the kind she likes
yogurts
bread
onion bagels
cheerios
some fucking juice, god do I want juice right now
maybe tuna?

My halloween costume ideas: theme for the party is Monsters
-Ashley Todd
-Myself,circa 1996*
-really wasted Obama Girl.**










*I need a white slip and pentagram for this one
**Oh wait, I already did that one. Saturday night. It was a smash hit. Until I fell down on the woodpile and spilled my punch on people. Twice.

Alright, lets start at the beginning...my cat. She's obviously my lifeline, so why not the beginning too? Long time readers and also anybody who knew me last winter, will remember the drama of "why won't my cat clean her ass and why does she insist on scraping it on every fabric covered surface in my apartment?". Well, that's died down a little now, thought not completely. Only when I forget to clean her litter box. However, Eddy never used to do that.

I got Eddy when I moved into an apartment in Duck Island, a silly tiny efficiency with painted shut windows and no room for a proper fridge. Peter died that winter, on Christmas, so I was going to bar by myself quite a bit. One night I went to Edison's, and that chubby blonde girl was working there. Anyone remember her? She had really curly blonde hair and enormous breasts and was quite short and not very cool at all. She collected stray cats from Tremont. So when this little kitten ran in from the snow and hid under the stairs, she wouldn't just throw the poor thing out. She said "I'll buy free drinks for whoever will take it" and so I did. I walked down to the cornerstore and bought a foil pan for a litter box and some cat food, then ripped the cat from under the stairs and took her home. She definitely did not want to go. Just think, if I hadn't taken her, Eddy might be a Edison's bar cat right now. She might be hiding under the steps mewling during Open Mike. She might have been killed by an errant dart.

So I drove her home and yes, she pooped all over the back of the car, and all over me as I walked her up. Which is why I know now that you should never feed stray kittens milk. She hid under the bathtub for a long time. I decided that I would make a practice of taking her to bed with me every night, so she'd be used to it. She has never gotten used to it. I bought her toys and tried to play with her. She stared at me, but then started a lifelong love affair with the chain from the bathtub drain. I used to sit in the bathtub with my knees up and she would sit on them.

Eddy has lived in multiple places. With other cats. With dogs. With people she doesn't like. She was okay at David's, but not happy, being stuck in the attic the whole time. Oh my god, have I always lived in attics? She was happy at my parent's house, she got to roam outside and sleep with my mom. But she ran away for a week then, and when she came back her tail was a bloody mess, she was pregnant, and she had no more interest in going outside. She had one kitten from that litter, the rest were stillborn. And it was a happy little kitten, and we gave it away. Then she got pregnant again, before we fixed her. We didn't know at the time, but when my mother took her to get fixed, she had a whole litter almost born. Mom insisted on aborting them, and we lived with Mom, so we didn't really have a choice. She took her to this dingy yellow house on 65th with dirty siding where The Man did cheap surgery on feral cats for cheap. Leaving her there overnight was the hardest thing. So Eddy has lost babies to the cruel structure of society. Her stomach has never recovered, its still saggy and waddly. I'm not completely convinced that there isn't cotton wadding or calcified kitten corpses still in her gut. When she sees kittens, she tried to kill them. Literally. She's a psychopath.

We moved in with other cats, in other apartments, and she seemed okay. There was living with Rob for a brief second and his cat. Then I went to my job interview and the bar downstairs caught fire. I came back to find Eddy in a carrier case, and we had to go track down Rob's poor kitty in the next door apartment. So she's been in a fire too.

Back she went to Mom's house, while I crashed at Buddy's, and I didn't have her for almost a whole year. Then we moved in with Sean. And Eddy really loved Sean, he rubbed her belly in the way only he could, because he has much bigger hands than I do. But then the butt scooting started, and other things happened, and we moved out again.


So now Eddy and I are all alone. I keep thinking about getting another cat, to keep her company. Because I'm not home half the time, and she's all alone. But I think she prefers to have me to herself, and also, she might kill it. When Sean comes over, she won't go to him now usually, as if she's afraid he's going to move back in and take my attention away. Every morning she wakes me up by shifting her 13 pounds onto my hipbone violently, and when that doesn't work, she paws me in the lip. Recently she decided that she only eats fancy feast, and when the litter box is not cleaned, she tips it over. I got a laser pointer recently, and she watches it very intently, with no intention of moving.

Things she has killed:

The mice in the stove
A bat she left by my bed
Multiple birds
2 large spiders
A purple feather

She still gets a little upset if I don't pick her up when I come home. And she freaks out when there's no food. And she freaks out about going on the porch, because if I shut the door, you know I might not let her back in. My cat and I are extremely similar.

What does it mean that I now rely on my cat for survival? Does it mean I really ought to have a child instead? :) Or does it signify my full fledged entry in Cat Lady-dom? I've been planning on getting a dog when she finally kicks it for years, but knowing her, she'll live forever. Is my cat fucked up because I'm fucked up, or because I suck at cleaning litterboxes? Does she come over to be with me when I'm crying because she cares, or because she likes licking the salt? How long could Eddy survive by gnawing on my corpse?

You know, I was faithful and madly in love with him for years. And I defended him to everyone. And I thought, just give him time, he just needs time, he's just in a really bad place. But when he started telling me that his "bad place" was all because of me, and his constant misery and inability to enjoy anything was because of me...well I still stuck it out for months. He spent the night at another girls house the first night we moved in together, and I stuck it out. He told me he wasn't attracted to me, and I still stuck it out. But finally I couldn't do it anymore and I left.

Then he said "what can I do?" and I said "date other people, be happy". And he did. For months he told me that he still wasn't happy, but he still kept going on so many many dates, every girl he fucking ran across. And I sat at home, trying to be empowered, trying to get over him, trying to look like I didn't care. I was miserable inside, I was so fucking unhappy, I cried every night I was alone. But I kept telling him no, I kept hoping it would get better, that something would happen that would make me feel better.

Finally, this guy starts writing me, talking to me every night. He wanted me to come visit him, he wanted to fly me down! ME, who couldn't get her own boyfriend to take her anywhere. And so I went. But see, it was his best friend. So yes, that's really really bad. I didn't care. He was fingerbanging every 21 yr old waitress on Craigslist, he was going out of town every weekend. I couldn't even pay my car bills and no one else had told me I was pretty or special for years. I thought, he doesn't love me. He even told me I wasn't pretty enough for this fucking guy to like me. So fuck him. Why should he have all the fun? Oh, it was my worst moment. It was the coldest. It was the thing to not do.

And its not even like I slept with the kid. I didn't even get that. But can you believe I did that? It tells the kind of person I am.

Course I get back and I missed him even more. And I couldn't stop thinking about him. And I felt myself starting to go crazy, that point where you feel the voices starting to divide in your head, and you can't even talk like a normal person. And the fucking tears just wouldn't stop, none of it would fucking stop. I couldn't wake up in the morning without laying there, thinking it was useless and meaningless and just a waste of my fucking life. And I tried to write a novel. I tried to pick up new hobbies. I lived for his friend's phone calls because it was the only real interest anyone had in my life, until those grew stale and stupid and cold. My friends tried, but they all hated us together, they thought I was fine. I didn't want to look stupid in front of them, look like the stupid co-dependent fat girl I felt like. I knew I was all alone. I knew he wasn't. His friend said "he's met someone else, let him go, stop talking to him so he won't feel guilty" so I did.

Then I couldn't. I called him. I said "I hate you and I miss you and please take me out and get me drunk." So he did. We sat at the bar exchanging bitterness for a few hours, while I drank as fast as I could and cried and didn't even care when people looked at me. He told me how much fun he'd been having, how he's gone to Chicago and New York for shows with this girl, how he'd seen Nick Cave twice.

Then he took me back to his place, and he loved me, and told me how all these girls knew I could steal him away at a moment's notice, and he was in love with me, and missed me, and over and over again how beautiful I was, how impossibly pretty I was, how soft my lips were and no one kissed like me. And I lied to him. I told him we weren't getting back together. I told him I hadn't kissed anyone else. I told him I wasn't even thinking about getting back together.

Then he didn't want to tell me what he was doing this weekend, for sweetest day. He refused. I got mad. I made him take me home. On the way, in the car, he told me he was going to New York with three girls. I cried. I begged him not to go. He said he couldn't cancel. I begged him to take me with him. He refused. I got out of the car and walked home. He came to my house and called and called and said "are you my girlfriend?" and I couldn't say yes. Because the last thing he said before I got out was "how can I not go to New York with three girls who want to fuck me?", and I knew nothing I said was going to stop him. I went to bed weeping again, but I'm used to it now I thought.

The next day I was desperate, I knew he was gone. I sent him emails accusing him, I sent him text messages begging him again and again to take me, to not throw me away. As if I somehow believed he wanted to keep me. I called and I called and I wept and drank and wept more into his voicemail. And he still never called. His friend was talking to both of us all day, his friend who told me not to talk to him. He was also telling him all day not to talk to me. I texted him again, I said "please don't listen to Nick. I listened to him and it was a mistake". I meant about not talking to him, but who knows what he said to Nick the next morning.

I woke up Saturday in tears already, dreaming that he was already gone. I called and called and called, but his voicemail was full at this point. He showed up at my house at 11am, in a suit already, set to go. He barged in without knocking, stood over my bed, and I knew he was going to kill me. I saw it in his face. I went hysterical, I screamed into my pillow "why why are you doing this to me?" Why would he make me fall in love with him again, make me admit my fucking weakness, only to reject me? Revenge? Or just not good enough anymore? Wasn't good enough the first time, why would I think I was good enough this time. Did he plan it out, to get back at me? Did he and Nick do it together?

Then he went into the second bedroom, through the boxes he had packed for me, and stole the only love letter he had ever written for me. It's in a manila folder. He's taken it from me twice, only to have me take it back. He said "how could you go down there and suck my friend's dick?" and he looked at me but he didn't really want an answer. I said "you hurt me for years" it was the only thing I could get out, he was just standing there so self righteous and hateful, and I slapped him. Then he spit on me. In my face. Twice. It's the second time a guy has spit in my face. I went crazy, tried to rip the letter from his hands. He shoved me on the floor and told me I was dead to him. That I had ruined his weekend.

That was the worst part. That I had "ruined his weekend". Nothing of the past two days ruined his weekend. The fact I wanted him back and he was leaving me didn't ruin his weekend. But this, the idea that I had sucked someone else's dick, that ruined it. It was only his pride he cared about. He left me sitting on the carpet, things strewn around me. That's not fair to him I'm sure some will say. Maybe some will tell me I broke his heart again, even worse. But he was going to leave me anyway. He didn't want me. He probably never really wanted me back, and it only took meeting another decent girl to convince him of it. It only took having some fun, like I'd been telling him all along.

And I was dead. I knew it. He had struck me down. He had ripped out anything left inside me. Years and years of this same scene, but he had finally killed me. He won.

At first I took it literally. I thought to myself, this is it. I am going to kill myself. I called off work. I wrote him a letter. I sat in the bathtub for hours, letting the water go cold while I contemplated how I was going to do it. I couldn't afford a gun. I was afraid of razors, that I wouldn't do it right. I wanted pills, but where to get them?
And because I had nothing handy, I didn't do it. I took to much time. I tried to think out the details, where I would put the cat, how to not hurt the family below me, how my own family would feel and what would they do for the funeral, how would they afford it. I'm ashamed my family wasn't first in my thoughts, but really, it was the cat. It's always the damn cat. The details, they made it too difficult. I wanted simple. I wanted to just fall asleep and not wake up.
I sat in the dark all night. Finally I fell asleep, but then I woke up and it was today. I was so disappointed. I lay there till 4pm, hoping I would just fall asleep some more. Then I started drinking.

And I'm still drinking, but I'm not pretending anymore that I can off myself. I can't. It's not that I don't want to. But I can't. And I won't. So I'll just continue waking up every morning. And its the most frightening awful thing. But I guess if I can construct sentences still...and I've been listening to Johnny Cash...and I've decided to get surgery...and stupid craigslist keeps taking down my ad because someone keeps flagging it which is either because I said no republicans or because he's doing it...I know that he was the one. And he's irrevocably gone. And there's nothing I can do about that. But at least maybe if you already found and lost the one, then there's nothing more to keep searching for. And that's gotta be worth something. Cause maybe I don't have the courage to physically kill myself but maybe being dead inside will be better for me. Maybe eventually everything will go numb. At the very least I can pretend I have something to say about all this. I can create this fantasy where he comes back and says "be mine again" and I say "I never stopped being yours, I'm branded, diseased, broken, with your name scratched across my insides like a kid writing on a school desk, and yes okay, yes always, yes yours."

Oh and the worst part is the cars. When he left me the first time, I heard saw his car everywhere. It was always out of the corner of my eye, for months and months, almost a year. Now it's started again, car doors, and brakes, and footsteps. All day, I turned the tv up loud so it buzzed, just to not hear the fucking cars.

But the really important thing here, the thing that I think will make me wake up just a little bit harder every morning, with just a little more shell on me, is that at least it's a story. It's a really good story. And I think I will start writing every part of it down as I remember it, until its finished. Because I really do love him, and I will always love him, even when he isn't here anymore.