The Car is King

First of all, today, cause it is today already, is my Dad's birthday. Happy Birthday Dad, I love you very much and I'm extremely grateful you of all people are my father, and I'm sorry that your daughter is so weird. Also thanks for the eyes. I like those very much.

And this will always be the song that makes me happy because of you.



Do you know what this morning means? It means it's finally here, Spring and all subsequent consequences of the same. It means we no longer have to get up Monday mornings and ponder the weather, trying to figure out if we can go exploring. Like, sure it was gray and rainy and got pretty chilly in the end, but I still walked around all day in just a t-shirt splattered occasionally with sweat and raindrops. And got to drive with the windows open and the radio on. My hair got all fucked up from the wind. Inside me is this constant quiet ringing of joy.


We were going to hit up a building, but by the time I got to his house, and we had a minute or two to catch up, it was decided the thing to do really was to drive all the way down the Valley, to Kent maybe or to Akron, or Helltown. We drove for a long time. Hours going around curves and hills and highways. There were remnants of mud tainted snow melting on the ski slopes, and the moss was shining bright green along the road.


I appreciate people who you don't run out of conversation with, maybe most of all. And people who know how to just get in the car and drive for a while. We drove through all the places Peter used to drive me to in the dark, where he used to have me shine the spotlight out the window into the black woods to spot deer because I had never seen one in the wild before, and I thought about the long line of boys who have driven me places. Peter was the first and therefore the standard. It's his fault I do this. But all the others, they've just reinforced this addiction, oh some of us we had the best drives. It's the way to my heart, Ohio. Now I'm the one who does the driving, and that took a minute to get used to, but in the end it turned out to be the thing I was meant to be doing too.

We stopped off places and walked around. Locks and woods and parks. Train tracks. I was reminded how much I want to go back to Hope Furnace, that place down South where we went camping, and at the base of the huge stone fireplace we would collect those shiny black glass pieces of slag. When I was little, I loved those black shinies, and they lived with the fake gold, quartz, and tiger eyes I got from the Natural History museum gift shop, and the geode we found when the neighbors were digging up their yard.

In this tunnel, we found this guy, waiting out the rain with his hiking gear. He had been walking the Buckeye Trail for a month. He has a blog about it. There's a thing to do at some point in your life, huh? Jere told me a story about the old times in the Flats, when there used to be street brawls there every Friday and Saturday night, over stupid things like cars, and a girl he met once who said she came down every weekend just to photograph the fights. That girl and this guy are cut of the same cloth. A specific sort of genius.

The canals are a strange thing. 300 miles stretch of barges, supplies, people, mules. Now sitting all weeded and choked up, more like a statewide garden fixture, a landscaping project overgrown. Someday you know, people will dig them up and look at them like pyramids. Here is the best quote from the wiki article on the Ohio and Erie canals:

"As a teenager in 1847, James Garfield worked as a Hoggee, driving mules to pull barges along the canal.^[12] After repeatedly falling into the canal on the job, Garfield became ill, and decided to go to college instead"

I don't know if that's true, but it is just like that ITT Tech commercial. "And I thought, I'd better get in school."

We went to a place in Akron for lunch, and on the back of the bathroom stalls they had pages from today's Wall Street Journal hung. I had to steal the one in my stall, fold it up as discreet as I could in my pocket, because it had this headline: Kremlin Connection Fails To Save BP From Oligarchs. Which is pretty much the best sentence of the day.

On our way to Akron, we passed this scene, which is either an art project, or an upcoming sacrifice to a gray unknown farm god. Maybe horses are really scared of themselves, and these are like horsie scarecrows? I mean, I'd stay out of any field with straw effigies of myself too. I assume the Daddy horse is the tall one, and the Mommy horse is the shorter one, and that raises my hackles a little, which should tell you I'm definitely in the mood for hackles, cause that's pretty dumb, that's just me being contrary. It's all the excitement.

We ended the night at Annabell's, meeting up with his Akron boys and drinking our hackles up. The bouncer there had the exact same tone of voice as Boots, the same bloody Irishness, and did impressions of Ronald Regan and Rocky. There was a mark on his arm that looked very much like a large bite mark, from an extremely large mouth, like maybe a prehistoric fish. I was sent to the jukebox to put on some Wilson Pickett, and he stopped me to remark on it, to point out he had put similar music on just before. Okay. His dog was awesome.

The Internet is Killing Me, The Sunshine is Trying to Save Me, It's All Very Complicated

Today was 80 degrees. This was a big deal to some people, who lived in this farcical little post industrial city, which had been trying to function, despite the cold and the wind trying to blow it down every day for the last six months. I had forgotten what it was like to not be cold. I too had rejoiced at every little 45 degree break that winter sometimes throws at you, but the thing that hadn't changed was me sitting in my still running car, after driving home late at night, not wanting to leave because the car was warm. At one point, 3am in the morning, having refused to wear a coat that night because goddamn coats damn them to hell, I remember having the thought that maybe I would never be warm again, because I was no longer capable of being warm. My nerves had deadened, and I wouldn't recognize being hot, if it ever came again, which it wasn't going to. Desperation leading to acceptance leading to death.

But then the strawberries came back.

We walked around the park, and it was full of people. Not attractive people. Not rich or successful people who liked their jobs and had found the love of their lives, or any kind of affective shit like that. Just the people of Cleveland who couldn't stand it anymore, who didn't give a fuck about what they wore out of the house, just as long as they could actually get out of the house. They were fishing in a river that was too cold for fish, and breaking in the grills, and following their dogs and children around, who were all slightly dazed as if they had just broken out of the egg and were seeing the sun for the first time. Some of those kids and dogs were pretty young, so that may have actually been the case. New things.

So we walked around the river, and got around to the other side, away from the crowd. We did the first careful climb of the year down a muddy steep hill heel to heel, little slide here and little stumble there. As our reward, there were flowers and clover and sprouting things, which, fucking A, is pretty amazing. Is pretty miraculous every time it happens, even though it's happened 31 times for me now. Then we wandered back to the group, and ate food outside, and sat, dazed ourselves, in the heat and light. Urban lizards, and I got reacquainted with that sweat that comes not from exertion but just from above, like the sun's version of rain. I felt my skin burning, the old worn out cells that had done such a good job protecting me from the cold and ice, and now they are going to sizzle up like tiny little Phoenixes each and every one of them. That's their reward.

Later, as the sun drifted down, I drove home and started throwing things away, just everything I could come up with any reason to throw away at all. What I really want is an entirely empty place, where I can just sit in the middle of the floor and do nothing. I cleaned up the back porch, where I had forgotten a carpet I left out there over the winter, and it had rotted to pieces. It fell apart in my hands as I tried to stuff it into bags. There were large plastic looking brown folds of mushrooms all over it. I stuck both of the cats on the porch when I was done. Eddy was all about it, probably cause she's as sick as I am of living and breathing and sleeping in her hair. Nina was a little freaked out, which is fine with me cause I'm sure one of these days she's going to end up on the roof, once she figures it out. Stray cats always hate being put out of doors again, like I'm just going to change my mind about keeping them and never let them back in again, where the food is. Abandonment complexes. I haven't done it yet, even though the fucking garbage bag with the cat litter broke TWICE on the way to the curb, despite being triple bagged. I still have cat litter in the hallway outside my door, which I will vacuum tomorrow, and litter in the front yard by the sidewalk which I am honestly just going to leave there until it rains and hides it. Tonight it was more important to just get the shit out of my house. I put out 12 garbage bags of stuff, and still didn't go through my clothes.


Then I watched Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by myself, and spent way too much time on Twitter and Facebook in this odd head space. That's sort of like smoking an entire pack of cigarettes in one go, you come down and vow to give it up completely, never do it again. Especially when you're watching a movie like that, a movie that will remind you of every demon you have ever seen in the mirror. You will catalog them, and then feel even worse because you know when you inevitably go crazy, HI: Historical Inevitability, you will not be hot like Elizabeth Taylor, you will instead just be the wild haired wide hipped middle aged drunk woman, rejecting reality out of a misplaced sense of safety and security in love which will be your punishment. Ending up with a guy just like you, who tears people open and rips them to shreds to see how they work, and between the two of you there will be so much blood. I emailed Don "It wasn't my parents that soured me on marriage, it was this movie."

Watching that and going through all my stuff and things and stuff and junk, made me realize how much there is I don't get to say to people, because they are what? Dark thoughts? Mean thoughts? Crazy sounding? A friend asked me yesterday if I just spent all my time getting fucked up and posting on facebook, and I was like, "dude, I'm not usually fucked up." Dude, wait till you see me actually fucked up, like bleeding and maudlin and desperate. Then my words escape me in waves. But you can't be honest on the internet. You're not supposed to, because it's just like the outside world. No sweety, instead you are supposed to be writing that shit down into actual stories. Remember, that thing you love to do and also hate? That doesn't involve dissecting each thought for mass consumption, separated from it's context? You know, I don't really miss having a boyfriend most of the time, but there's that thing you can do with someone you fight with and fuck with, which is telling them everything. However sometimes, when you're me, you actually tell them everything, the way you see it and try to communicate the entirety of your world, and it's a massive failure. Usually the parts that apply to them. Oops. I wonder sometimes if I write just to keep throwing myself out there into the void, hoping someone else gets it one day. Not just the pictures and the pithy diary entries, but the enormity of it all. Like, this is me! I'm shouting! Somebody love me for realsies! Be somebody I can love too! Be dirty and weird and enormous! Martha's a romantic at heart. Wild broken Martha.

Mostly I'm just whispering things to myself and writing memos on my phone I can't use till later because someone will recognize themselves in it. I have some good memos though. You have all been stars lately. Please don't mistake my holes and rips as having anything to do with my love for you, oh general life and face of the universe whose name I probably forgot at least twice. That lives strong and quarantined in the seat of my soul.

It's dark now, the wind is picking up in the trees, and I want the rain to come. I want to go to sleep tonight with no covers on, and wake up cold with all of the windows open and the rain blowing in and the sunburn on my skin. And tomorrow (today) is going to be wonderful.

Floods

At any given second, someone is thinking about you. Whether its a friend, a family, someone walking by you in the store or driving past you in a car, or just processing the endless chain of paperwork or databases containing your name that exists everywhere in the world all at once. You are always on someone's mind. Almost as if what keeps us together as identities is this complex network of impressing ourselves on every neuron we come across, and if suddenly it were all to blink out, just snap shut like the clasp on a clutch, then you would be gone. I think sometimes we really do think that, that this new connectivity which has entered our history has changed us, chemically emotionally physically, and now there is a fear. There's always a fear. But now there's like, a new fear. Unrelated to sin or cornflakes or moths or gas masks. Something different, which is waiting, like a snake, to be named.




Another thing that bothers me is this inability to talk about bad emotions. Sure, we all bitch and moan about our work days, and sometimes something really bad happens, and we tell our online worlds "my dad died" or "I lost my house" or "there was a car accident." But that's it. It wouldn't do to have more than two posts in a row about it, and really, you can't mention it more than once, or suddenly you are just the one who's "really only ever talking about that, you know, thing."

I guess that's not confined to the internet. I guess that's a thing that happens in real life too, the inability to really be honest about the chain gang of thoughts beating around your skull with pick axes into the soft coal veins of your stability as a person. I wonder about the darkest places of my friends. Even the ones, no especially the ones I've known forever. I mean, really, who's seen me cry? I cried a lot last year, and I think maybe two people that knew me actually physically saw it. Besides my family, but that's the thing about family, you can cry at the drop of a hat with them.



But maybe the thing that stop us from going really deep into the worst parts online is that you know as soon as you say anything dark, obviously unhealthy, or even just particularly melancholy, you're going to get a barrage of comments about hanging in there, or it's not so bad or THIS IS A LEARNING EXPERIENCE. Yes, I know it's a learning experience. That's why I'm thinking about it. And the immediate assumption that this is AN EVENT. There is this THING that has happened that has you thinking this way, and you just need to get over this THING. An expectation that of course all you need is support and sympathy and you will be fine.

But nothing's wrong. There is no event. If you are thinking about something, anything, all the time, if you are constantly creating fake conversations in your head between scenarios that don't exist, and with every interaction you are imagining the equal and opposite reactions, all the unique ways a situation could go, then Jesus, of course you are going to think about the dark things too. It doesn't do to pretend you don't have dark things. Really dark things. If you tell me you don't, you are either a liar or traumatized or stupid.




I have an excess of imagination. It's not a good thing or a bad thing. No, actually, it's a little bit of a bad thing. It's just the way I function. I talk to myself. I have conversations with people over and over again that will never see daylight or candlelight or streetlight or dome light. It's an ever changing mess in my head of miscellaneous story arcs. It sucks. It's hard to accept things the way they are sometimes, when you have already scripted how they could be, and actually, properly edited, should be. When you can see how they might be. And then you can't even use most of the pretend conversations and put them down properly, because your friends will think you are weird and/or maybe misinterpreted things. If you and I have had a conversation, I have probably had that conversation again in my head at least three different ways, all leading to different outcomes and then different actions the next day and so on and so forth, entirely new universes that have been sprung into existence by two separate lines or two steps to the right. I don't necessarily want things to be different, the potentials just exist already, I didn't put them there. It happens automatically, and it starts the minute I'm alone. Have you ever called me late at night, just randomly about something, and noticed how spacey I sound? It's probably cause I've been talking to myself for the last hour.

I probably need to learn how to hide stories better. Disguise them. It's like photoshopping pictures though. The originals always look better than the fucked with ones.



What I talked to myself about yesterday, after driving around the southern western valleys looking at flooded creeks and melting hillsides, was about disappearing. Just somehow figuring out how to get everyone in the world to stop thinking about or reading or seeing me. But like, not gradually, all at once. In a really quick blink. I think it might be impossible. I don't think even if you tried, you could erase all evidence of me, I think I'm spread too thin in random places, some mark of me would remain. An insignificant mark, but a rub nonetheless. A trace of paperwork in some creditor's office. So that's got to be somewhat comforting to those people who need heaven, the thought that, at least among a certain social economic class, there is no more "gone." In this moment though, I stood right next to the river bank and it was actually scary, to be next to the roaring flood all mud colored and snow cold, and I thought it would be really cool to disappear completely and see what happened if I talked to no one ever again. In what particular and unique way would I go crazy? I hope we've all thought about this at some point, because it would be weird to be as old as you are and not pondered it. It's a secret of course, what horrible points of my nature would lead to my mental demise. But I've got at least two candidates. I just can't tell you, because what if someday someone kidnaps me, and they've read this, and then they know the exact ways to torture me? You never know, I might be worth kidnapping some day.

And I also thought about being alone, not because it's a problem but because it's a fact. I'm not supposed to talk about that, because it's unhealthy and not productive and not attractive or interesting. Really though, what's the point of saying anything about it until I've figured out the new angle? It's not inherently boring, to read about loneliness, dozens of very good writers have have tackled it quite well. But that was the trick see. Everyone wants to talk about how lonely they are, but only those who have something new to say about it, or some new way to frame it, succeed in getting people to listen.

Fridays Questions Know It was the Butler in the Pantry with the Wasp Poison.

Last night was wicked. The wind was blowing things out of existence, and the raccoons were running the neighborhood, and the stop signs were launching down the street like saw mill blades. It was wonderful. The Oncoming Storm of Spring.

What else is wonderful is how much coffee I have in the house. Enough coffee that even if my house were torn up from the roots by the wind, and launched through the sky into a world of witches and oompa loompas, I would still have enough to get this damn project done this weekend. It's awfully comforting, to have so much coffee in the house. I imagine this must have been what Ma and Pa Ingall felt like when they sold the harvest and got to go to town and stock up on things, like real coffee or flour not made from grass. I prefer to believe that all of us have had some point in our lives of not being able to afford coffee, and therefore understand this feeling of security when you have enough of something.



What should I plant this year?

I think you should go through every Miss Marple book, and plant an entire garden of flowers that have been used as death threats, warnings, and poison delivery devices. The English Garden of Death. Hydrangeas. Lily of the Valley. Sage. Yew. Lots of flowering ground cover for hiding bodies. Roses. Geraniums.

Or you could do an entire garden of flowers that mean bad things. Like rhododendrons mean "beware", marigolds mean "pain", mint means "suspicion" and aloe means "grief. Hydrangea mean "heartless". Think of all the awesome bouquet combinations you could give people, and no one would know.

What is the first thing you are going to do when it gets warm?

I'm taking a road trip to Harrison County OH. It's full of ditches and small hills of kudzu and warm wet green and mud and those weird little towns where everyone goes to the lottery place for entertainment. And I'm going to take lots and lots of photos, of everything. I think a project this year might be to hit up different counties for the day each weekend. I like that idea a lot. There's ten counties along the lake alone. It could keep me occupied for, well, 88 weekends at least.

I'm going to a yoga class tomorrow. What foods should I eat that will give me particularly noxious gas?

Hot wings. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Broccoli. Nunzio's pizza. Oreos.

What the hell is up with yoga recently? I mean, it's been a staple of the hipster lifestyle for years, but all of sudden its like everyone I know is going to yoga every night. Hot Yoga, Rock n Roll Yoga, Midnight Yoga, Lesbian Yoga, Beer and Yoga. It's like Yoga suddenly diversified. OR it's like yoga is actually the code word for brainwashing sessions, where humans are turned into mindless drones by insidiously thin alien overlords.

What I'm worried about is how flexible you will all be while I'm trying to kill you all during the invasion.

Weather's nice innit? How many suicides do you think it is preventing?

None of them.
Nice weather only highlights how miserable and despicable you are, deep down inside your soul. Warm weather makes people want things they don't have, and hate themselves for not having them. At least when it's cold and barren and awful, you can stay in bed and not feel guilty. But when it's beautiful outside, then you're a waste for staying in bed for 12 hours.

Which is why you should always make your friends go outside when they hang out with you. Just to be sure. The more outside a person is forced to be, the happier they will be, true story. Houses are terrible things.

The TV news has been saying that Egypt is the most culturally significant Arabic country. Uh, wouldn't that more likely be Saudia Arabia? And is Egypt really "Arabic"?

I mean, it is technically the Arab Republic of Egypt.
And they are part of the Arab League.
Saudi Arabia has more land mass, maybe, I think, but Egypt has the largest Arab population.
Also I would agree they are way more culturally significant than Saudi Arabia, because the Saudis are just sort of stuck, whereas Egypt has been unstuck. And really, in perspective, Egypt is changing all the time, cause 30 years is just a drop in history, and Egypt's had all sort of governments and occupations and stuff like that. Change of any sort, whether good or bad, leads to cultural significance. Egypt still has the active muscle to go places, whereas the Saudis are all sorts of wasting away in their cage.

Ask Me Anything

The Fickle Moods of Clevelanders

Oh my god, I know! It's so cold! We're all so cold, and wet, and it's gray and it sucks and what the fuck.

I think Twitter is the equivalent of conversations you have with cashiers at grocery stores. (if grocery store clerks talked about sex and foursquare a lot)

Listen, remember two days ago? When it was 80 degrees and beautiful, and you were all running and biking, and there were no dead bodies/deer on the side of 90 or mining disasters?

Oh, you don't remember, do you? Because you are apparently incapable of remembering anything that happened beyond the last 24 hours. It's like the same genetic instinct that helps us survive winter storms by forgetting their existence actually keeps us ungrateful towards Spring. Here, have a reminder. You will get this again. Probably in a week. Then once again you will wish you didn't have a job and that someone would pay you to just go into old buildings all the time, or write pithy commentary about tv shows.

A Clevelander's Pictorial Guide to Spring

First, you saw this, and were reminded of your childhood. And talked about it incessantly.

Then you saw this, and spent about twenty minutes taking pictures of the same flowers that the rest of the country was taking pictures of. Which coincidentally are the same pictures you took last year.

Then you remembered this color.

And this happened.



Which naturally led to this.

Have some faith people.

How many people will get to this entry by googling cancer, and then be mad at me?

There's been lots of things going on recently, but mostly they're things I'm thinking about to myself, so not like anything real. I've been vaguely following politics and you know, have quick vague anger about. I think my body is just resting up from the struggle of the last decade. It's like recovering from cancer. After chemo, your body needs to refuel and get its strength back before it can muster up a second attack. See, in this scenario your body is trying to kill itself rather than involve itself deeply in the mire of ridiculousness and hopelessness that is politics.



It's been beautiful outside, so I guess that's good. For a few days everything was swollen and really really green, which kind of reminded me of Akira in slow motion, or really more like if there were tiny sentient jelly drop aliens growing like fish spawn inside all the plants. Then there was the news story about the oldest gas blob we've ever seen, and stories about seeing back in time to the universe's creation always freak me the fuck out.

There was an interview on NPR yesterday. Terri was talking to this mega-neuroscientist who wrote a book about when she had a stroke, and she called it "My Stroke of Insight" which I thought was an incredibly well thought out title. I think I look at neuro-scientists like rockstars, it's a total turn on. And I think of rockstars as assholes, which is not. Even Weezer. So she's talking about how when she had her stroke, she was incredibly aware of everything that was happening to her brain, because that's what she does for a living after all. She said it was like feeling the left hemisphere of your brain detaching, and your brain fighting to keep it. But every time she stopped fighting, she would drift into this state of pure disassociative euphoria, where she was completely in the present moment and could draw nothing from past experience or form any words. And she would bounce back and forth between this extremely painful clarity as her brain tried to survive, and this enormously beautiful nothingness/everythingness.



I think that really sounds like a description of Nirvana, escaping the cycle of suffering and being one with the universe. Having no emotions or desire. Deathlessness. So what if Buddhism as a religion, which is as different from the other major religions as Russian is from the Romantics, what if it started because Siddartha suffered from a stroke? Or multiple strokes? I know, I would have thought seizures first too. But the experience she describes, which is basically a near death experience, is very different. When she first started talking, I almost turned the channel cause she had one of those East Coast accents that drive me batshit. But as she started getting into the recalling of the stroke, this new tone of reverence entered her voice, and she became almost hushed and awed. With a very professional overtone.

I love when really really smart articulate people are amazed by something and tell you about it. There's almost nothing better.

Now yes, I could explore this idea of religion founded on strokes further. I could devote hours to it. I could thoroughly research it and learn new things about neurology and brain mapping and mythology. What a time sink. How do people ever figure out which one idea is important enough to them to invest everything in it?

I guess, if I wanted, I could probably commit to unicorns.