Pickled

When Frank made the mammoth, it was in a room that pulsed with reds, purples, and orange-flavored pinks -- kept at twilight 24 hours a day, and so warm the staff worked in tank tops and sundresses. Outside, the Northern California Spring was muggy, cloudy, and gray. The skies hung heavy with rain, threatening rolling thunderstorms that marched in from the sea to invade the continent. When Frank walked outside, he had the sensation of emerging from a universal womb. The bodily jolt of coming from the dark-red warmth to the wide-open grays and greens disoriented him.

“There’s no reason we should have spent so much designing the lights, or keep this damn place so warm. It’s a fetus. It’s in an actual womb. What does it care?” His medical technologist Alice would say this every day, as she picked at her kale salad in the hermetically sealed staff break room. Alice was on the paleo diet -- she was only allowed to eat things her primitive ancestors could have picked, foraged, or killed with rocks. It was supposed to be a better genetic fit with the body, reverting you back to a time before agriculture ruined man by introducing him to things like pasteurized milk and pancakes. She knew it was bullshit, that the main point was her ancestors could never have gotten their grubby little hands on the insane selection of fruits and vegetables, weird South American grains and fish caught in Asia, that she could buy at her local grocery store. Those starving, mongrel cavemen would not have been able to eat 3 solid meals a day of whatever they wanted. If they ate one meal a day, they were lucky.

“They might as well just tell everyone to go on a starving African diet, that would be the most effective. I should market that. I could send out tapeworms with the videos,” she joked.  But Alice had married a man who was much more attractive than her, and consequently spent most of her meal times gulping down potions and spells, trying always to shed the extra thirty pounds her Polish ancestors fought so hard to ensure their children could have, to survive the long winters. Frank had married nobody, and sometimes he wondered, watching her push a chickpea around her plate with a bamboo spork, if he might have married Alice had he met her early enough. She was smart and relatively pretty at the peak of various diets. Frank’s sister used to call that particular blend of blowsy, broad features a “peasant face”. But Alice had a capacity to believe in fairy tales ,despite knowing better, that he found hard to swallow. A marriage between the two of them would have ended with him as the bad guy.

“An interesting way to look at the paleo diet is to see that it really means condemning the entirety of human advancement,” she told him one night, as they were getting drinks after work. “Basically, we’re saying that everything we've created since we stopped living in caves, and started planning food supplies, and building farms, has been poisoning us. We wouldn't have science or art, any kind of culture, if we hadn't started staying put in one place and building a stable structure for ourselves. But apparently, that’s when the downfall started. And now we want to have it both ways. I don’t know if that’s possible. It seems like it shouldn't be, morally. All I want to do is lose weight and have good skin, because of the society we've built. The cavemen didn't care about good skin.”

“It’s important to my world view that I not be the bad guy,” he said.

“That’s an incredibly unachievable goal,” she replied.

Elephants take 22 months to gestate, so the team guessed a mammoth wouldn't be too different. They had used an African elephant as the surrogate mother. They used a zoo-bred one, hoping that an elephant raised on man-grown corn and municipal water would pass along to the calf some genetic hardiness to the new world. The effort of the labor was horrible, the calf was breached and nearly split the surrogate’s pelvis in half. There was a Cesarean, but the poor creature died shortly after the birth, quietly bleeding out despite the veterinarian's best efforts. The zoo was incredibly mad at them. But overall, it was a success, because now they had Judy.

Judy was a 200lb miracle -- a ready-made ghost of the ancient past, and the only one of her kind to breathe a modern atmosphere. The first mammoth to see buildings, and electric lights; the first to hear English spoken. She looked like a children s’ toy, with a comically large domed forehead, and small ears close against the side of her head that had never evolved to keep cool at noon on the savanna, or flap the tsetse flies away. She talked constantly, making deep bellowing noises from inside her baby chest that sounded like a hundred bullfrogs singing. She loved to be scratched in the thick, wiry mats of hair behind her ears, and around the white stumps of her growing tusks.

Frank liked Judy. He felt bad for her, all alone growing up in a closed pen. There was nothing natural about her existence. The first month of her life, she consumed a mixture of proteins and acids that had been designed to mimic the nutrients she would have consumed in the Pleistocene era.  The temperature was dropped as her hair grew longer, to recreate the high Asian steppes of her ancestry. The air of the lab was kept heavy in CO2, remembering an Earth that was much wetter and thicker. Frank was a research assistant, and he monitored the little calf’s microbiome, the composition of bacteria in her mammoth guts -- which little creatures were living in her intestines, building their microbe civilizations in her stomach. When he took the daily mouth swabs, Judy looked him woefully with big, brown eyes, an expression only herd animals have mastered, of both confusion and acceptance. She took to butting her lump skull against his arm to try and stop him. All babies have the charm of insistence.  

He tried to talk to her while he collected his samples, He would tell her what his bike ride to work had been like that morning. This morning there had been a strange, old Japanese man selling watermelons right outside the entrance to his apartment complex, who had cursed at Frank in a thick, fluid tongue as he rode by. Frank couldn't understand the cursing, didn't know if it was personal or general. Maybe the old man was just cursing the world as a whole.

“In fact, I want it to happen again, so maybe I can try and memorize what he’s saying, and ask Akihiro what it means. Am I going to grow horns? Flippers? You can’t underestimate strange men, Judy, or their cursing.” And it was true. Frank was not religious, but he believed in intention -- through the course of any organism’s existence, all the pains and joys it experienced, all that energy of emotion, could build up and remained stored away in forgotten parts of cells. The more a creature had suffered, the more seriously one should take its cursing. He snuck Judy carrot sticks he had pirated from Alice’s lunch, letting her grab them delicately one by one with the end of her trunk.

Despite her isolation from the natural world, Judy was certainly not kept from the unnatural world. After it became clear that she would live, that there would be no laying down and dying without warning in front of the school children of the world, the lab set up several cameras and feeds to share their discovery with humanity. It didn't seem to outwardly affect Judy, nothing in her routine changed. But Frank wondered if she couldn't feel the psychic energy of all those people watching her. After all, her body was from a time period before wireless filled the air, her cells were tuned to different vibrations. How could 6,000 year old cells be prepared for wifi? Or even the vibrations electricity must make, surging through the wires and ground, and all around her into machines trained to be focused on her at all times. Did she feel that? Was it just a slight uneasiness she couldn't articulate or shake, the sense of someone watching? Herd animals had to have a heightened sense of being spied on if they wanted to survive, he would think.

He regularly checked his apartment for bugs, but never told anyone.

Frank would sit at the end of the day in front of the window to Judy’s pen, watching her rolling a huge rubber ball around all by herself. There was no one to play with, Alice had gone home. He caught himself thinking about what it would be like to be Alice’s husband forty years from now, watching her die. There would be a lot of pies at the funeral, and he wouldn't eat any of them.  

Frank pictured Judy’s death happening as if she had only a certain amount of breath the universe had granted her - the last allotment of air her dead species was allowed, the very dregs. Suddenly she breathes it out like a sad, old dog, like a clockwork toy running down. She lays her head down on her knees, in that submissive folding grace animals have when they know their final moments have come. An animal doesn't feel they should struggle against the inevitable. They hide away and accept it without regrets or apologies. Their body has simply stopped working, and they have no choice, never had a choice. She collapses in slow motion on the smooth concrete floor of the lab that is the only home she has ever known, and it’s over.

He knew he was still thinking about Alice.

She aged too fast. her telomeres were short, though of course they had nothing to compare them to except modern elephants. The lifespan of the original woolly mammoth could have been three years or thirty, they had no way of knowing. Judy’s lifespan, at its current rate, was five years. There was a moment, almost overnight, where she went from a bumbling calf to a fully grown behemoth, with a long, shiny coat and heavy, dangerous tusks.  She suddenly had the quiet dignity that comes with being unable to communicate with anything around you, the bearing of a queen about to be beheaded. Slowly, the company stopped wanting photo ops. Slowly, the school children stopped watching.

“It’s because it’s more acceptable to keep a baby in a prison, you can call it a nursery,” Alice said, gnawing on a piece of raw sweet potato as she watched the video feed. Frank got up out of his chair, walked over to her desk and pulled her roughly up. He stared at her for a minute before he kissed her, memorizing how there was no protest, how she simply folded into his arms and responded to his motions. He could taste the fibers of sweet potato in between her teeth.

“Stop, someone will see us,” she protested in his ear as he slid his hands up her plump thighs, underneath her stretch-tight skirt. So he stopped.

He called off the next day, and drove up to Oregon to look at farms. No one cared that he called off, except maybe Alice. The Judy project was slowly winding down, the budget was on death watch. Humanity had moved on to repairing other sins, the Yangtze dolphin and the Dodo, far less ambitious projects that didn't interest him. She was, in the end, just another elephant with fur. She wasn't an ongoing salvation. If they set her free on the steppes, made a herd of other mammoths so they could repopulate the snowy mountain tops, the bulk of them would be poached immediately. People were still poor and opportunistic. The only thing that stopped her from being a rug was her singularity in the world.

Frank felt a guilt deeper than his bones.

He went back to work, and didn't talk about it. He ignored her baleful stares, ignored both of them.

Outwardly, nothing in his environment changed, but he could feel the tension of a coming action buzzing in the air. Judy could feel it too. She paced and stomped when he walked right past her pen every day, quickly going home every night to sit in his rented room and think about how weird it was to watch his species, to watch himself, serving a ghost. A loser in the evolutionary wars. Not pretty enough or fast enough to survive. Once they had hunted Judy to extinction, driven her off cliffs to butcher her for meat and bones, and now they worshipped her as  a miraculous sign. He was complicit in this. He had fathered a creature, brought it into a world where it would be alien and alone, for no good reason except he wanted to.

On the right day, he rented an animal trailer and came at 5am, before the PI came in. The only staff was an undergrad tech who could barely keep his eyes open at the end of his overnight shift.

“I’m taking her across the deck to Allen’s. There’s something about her sleep cycle that’s bothering him, and he wants to hook her up over there and take a look. After all, mammoth R.E.M. cycles, you know Do they dream of prehistoric men? Do they dream of stars or sabertoothed tigers?”

The undergrad nodded sleepily. He didn't care. He had a final in two days and rent was due.

Judy fell in step with Frank as soon as they left the enclosure, step by step. The look in her eyes was one of complete trust, because what had she ever feared? The trust of a herd animal, of one bred to link tusk to tail and follow directions, the confidence that comes from having a leader when one has been leaderless -- it came off her in waves and infected Frank with a sense of righteousness.

An hour up the 101, Frank got a call from Alice.

“Frank, I was trying to see if you were coming in today, and then Paul told me you took Judy to Allen’s, but I called Allen and he hasn't seen you. I figured Paul got it messed up.”

“I’m sorry to put you in this position, but I can’t tell you what to do here. I’m not coming back. And I’m not going to hurt her. But I’m not coming back.”

“Shit, Frank, are you kidding? What are you going to do with her? Are you selling her?”

“No, of course not. But who knows how much time she has left, and she’s never even been outside. If she died in that lab, I would never forgive myself. I would never forgive you.”

Alice was quiet. He wondered if she had hung up to call the PI. Maybe she had already done that, and they were tracing the phone call.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here,” she said, finally. “I don’t understand why you didn't just ask Harry if we could let her outside. Instead you took something that wasn't yours. That’s massive theft, that’s grand larceny. The company is going to to send people after you, she’s a proprietary formula. This isn't going to blow over.”

“Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll be glad for the budget room. If they ever want another mammoth, they have an entire back stock of pickled mammoth DNA. Maybe they’ll give up faster than you think. Especially if you give me a head start. Is anyone at the lab with you?”

“No, Paul went home,” she sounded calmer, his righteousness was infecting her too. He pictured her all alone in the lab, thinking about him, wondering where he was.

“Do you want to come with me?” he asked. It was a gesture instead of a question. It was as offensive as slapping her ass. But she didn't know that.

She hesitated again, but not as long. She was smart, he could already hear her brain figuring out the next steps. He didn't ask her what they were, he wouldn't be there so what did it matter? They were not in this together.

“ No, I don’t. But I’ll do what I can. I’m not falling on a sword for you though, I don’t think you know what you’re doing.” Alice tried to sound authoritative and stern, but Frank could hear she was buying the fairy tale already -- him, the renegade hero, Judy the princess in distress. She would never admit that for that particular myth to be true, that made her one of the villains. She was good at doing things like that. So in the end she would do something to cover for him.

“You weren't going to say goodbye to me?” she asked.

“Why say goodbye when I’ll see you every night in my dreams?” he replied.

“Shut up, that’s so stupid. You’re so stupid.”

He waited for her to say something else, so that wouldn't be the last thing she remembered saying to him. But when she didn't, he threw the phone out the truck window.

The farm was nestled high up on the side of a mountain, where the clouds could gather and touch. It was a small, neat shack and a big barn, all surrounded by a high wooden fence. The new wood of the fence smelled sharp in the rain, and glowed a dark wet gold. The fence made him uneasy, the whole point had been to take Judy somewhere with no walls. But at least there was grass, air, real birds. At the very least it was something new. Besides, there was always the possibility that like a dog who has grown up in a cage, no walls would have made her herbivore brain uneasy.

He spent his mornings out there with her, watching her graze in the field, trying all the new plants, their tastes and textures. After a week, her coat began to develop a thick layer of insulation and grease in response to the non-programmed cold and wet. Her tusks were stained and sharpened against tree trunks. Her dirty hair became matted and tangled, and she went from an artist’s rendering of a mammoth to an actual full-blooded real-life mammoth -- articulated in full scale, ripe and threatening. Frank was proud of her statuesque profile and heavy dignity. A mammoth that could breathe the modern air, eat the plants that plants had become, drink the poisoned rainwater and live. He hadn't realized it before, but this was always the only way to end the project, to see if the thing he had made could really live. To see what an actual mammoth really looked like.

His victory was short-lived. Within a month, she was dead. She lay down in the middle of the hillside, curling her trunk around her. She gave an ever so small sigh that made her belly rise and fall, and then she died.

It was probably the plants she was eating. Or maybe the air after all. The composition of the water, or the noise of electricity, the waves of data filtering through her ears, the plastic remnants in the ground, the deadly sunlight coming through the ozone. Maybe just the weight of being alone.

It was worth noting, Frank thought, that an alien can only survive a month in our atmosphere.

Frank left her body out there to decompose. Why tell anyone? Someone would just make a rug out of her. He couldn't tell if he was being disrespectful. Elephants had graveyards after all, there were rituals. But he didn't know what they were, only the elephants knew. He wondered what they would think if he brought Judy’s body back to them on the Plains of Africa, on the Steppes of Asia. How they might have marveled at their ancestor in front of them, a past that had only lived in their pachyderm dreams? Then how they might have looked at him, the invader laying the corpse of a miracle at their feet. What does elephant condemnation look like?

So let her body lay there and be buried, let it be forgotten and not stuffed on display in a museum somewhere. Let no one make carvings of her tusks, or molds of her skull. Let her tail disintegrate with her toes. Let no one break up her marriage. Let whatever intention she carried in her genes dissipate like smoke into the clouds. Please let it be enough to try and be good, he whispered into her little ears. Let the curse not catch him till at least Canada.

 

February Made Me Shiver

So they came upon a field of empty trees, stark and witchlike against the country winter sky. The ground was dirty, muddy, the patches of frozen ( then thawed then frozen then thawed still tenaciously clinging to it's green) grass, now petrified in a permanent taxidermy of an orchard. The gnarled and burned branches lay broken haphazardly underneath the victims. He pulled over, and she got out to take pictures, but the farm dog tied up to the distant barn heard them and sounded the alarm. So they drove further down the empty road, and found a more inconspicuous spot for her to pretend to be a photographer. He stayed in the car.

 "What do you think they are?"

"I think they are monsters."
 "I think they are trees. Probably apple trees."
"I think you are wrong. They are monsters."
 "Well if they are not apple trees, they are too sad to be monsters."
 "Don't you think monsters are sad? I think monsters must be the saddest of all animals. They are all alone. There are very few of any one kind, they are all different and alone and have no one to relate to their own particular monstrosity."
 "But all these trees, they aren't alone. They are just dead together. They must have been alive together at some point too."
 "What if it's not just lots of monsters, but only one monster, buried under the ground, with lots of arms sticking up and out, all connected by tentacle roots, and they all look dead together because only one huge massive thing underneath our feet is dead?"
 "You are a weird funny girl"
 "It's not weird or funny. It's tragic and sad. You only think I'm funny cause you feel like somewhere deep in your chest I might be right. And that's why you put up with me."
"I put up with you because you are brilliant and beautiful."
"That isn't the point. The point is I am right. In some world, these are not trees, this is the brittle rotting skeleton of a creature we might only see in our dreams, something low and long and buried and slow like a glacier or like that giant fungus that is basically the whole state of Washington. That makes much more sense than individual lifeforms that grow up uniformly despite being separate creatures, then die every winter and come back every Spring and just magically give us stuff to eat."
"So that would make sap blood."
 "Yes, and apples would be..."
"...fingernails..."
 "...or warts...."
"something that falls off."
 "right, falls off a living creature, and then we eat it."
 "gross."

Suppose that each black and wizened broken trunk was broken open, that you drove your car straight into the field and mowed them down like kindling. Then as you get out of your Cadillac in the middle of the orchard, looking at the path of dead tree devastion behind you, your radiator starting to smoke, the ground around you starts to sparkle. Slight at first, then stronger, building momentum and light. Gathering like fireflies, only it's daytime though a dark daytime, and yet you can see them clearer and clearer. A thousand pricks of light, little diamonds rising out of the organic wreckage and war, floating hovering through their own pulsing a few feet above their former prisons.

 And every single one is a wish someone made before winter began, something that grew shimmering from a bit of dirt or bark or glass that got lodged one day in your chest, that was coated layer by layer over time with hopes you had for what might happen next year. Then the new year came and went, and February's winds stole all these pearls while we were sleeping, sucked them out of our mouths like cats sucking souls, blew them out of the houses and apartments and into the outlying forests and farms and jesus we're all hidden out there, our real selves and the prettiest part of ourselves, stuck cursed little summer souls in cold dark lifeless magic trees.

 So obviously, you have to knock them all down and free them.

 "But wait, what if our wishes need to hibernate and sleep through the winter like the trees, or they won't bloom when it gets warmers? What if I let them all out and then a frost kills them?"

 You're right, of course. But she doesn't like that conclusion, because it smacks of sentimentality, and spirituality, and purpose. And she'd rather have everything made of conflict.

 The little sparks from the crunching wreckage are now milling about, gusts of wind making them eddy and flow like Northern Lights. They haven't got anywhere to go, and so they blend and bleed with each other until it's a shimmering indistinct fog, diluting with the mud and asphalt of the road as it drifts up and over and into other fields.

Plastic Wrapped Girl

"What is that?" his friends asked, pointing towards the large metal box that sat at his side next to the bar. It was strangely not sinister looking, though person sized and being a large person sized metal box at a bar should have been inherently sinister. The metal was a soft burnished gray, rubbed down and kitten colored. 

"That's just something I bring with me, in case there aren't any girls at the bar." They all laughed. 

"Well there's certainly no one good here," his friend glanced bitterly at a group of young butterfly girls at the other end of the bar, one of whom had decisively shrugged him off by the bathrooms. 

"I don't know, it's early. You never know who might show up."

"Whatever dude, just do it."

"Well, okay...give it a minute to warm up," he said as he pressed a button on his key fob. A little red light glowed on the door. They had another beer. 

Ten minutes later, the light flicked off, and he unsealed the door. Inside was a figure nested tightly in a cocoon of plastic wrap. He carefully, affectionately, unwrapped her. 

She was a nice looking girl, average height, average build. Her shoulder length hair was brown, her clothes were casual, a cardigan and jeans, so average. But when she opened her eyes, they were a deep warm hazel, and when she smiled she suddenly became very pleasant looking. She reminded every boy there of their 1st grade teacher.

She was visibly confused for a minute, her eyes darting over the scene around her in animalistic fright, and then she saw him. She clung to his eye contact like a life preserver. "Hi! How are you? I haven't run into you for a while. How are things?"

"Oh, they're good. Just out with these guys. Worked today. How are you?"

"I'm peachy. Just had dinner with the girls, cause Sarah, you know Sarah who works over at Eastwick? She just got engaged, so we had to do the whole listen to her blab about it thing, look at the ring, ect. I don't know where they all are right now, but they should be back..." and she glanced around again as if unsure where she was exactly. 

"Would you like a drink?"

"Oh um yeah, ginger and Jameson. And actually, I'll be right back, I have to make a phone call. But I'll be right back." She walked off towards the bathrooms, stiffly and slowly, peering around at people surprised, remembering how to move her legs. 

"DUDE"

"No, c'mon, it's not a big deal."

"But doesn't she get upset?"

"No, she doesn't know. I met her at this other thing, and you know, she's cute and we've got a ton of stuff in common, I really like talking to her. But she's not exactly hot. And she's older than I usually like them. But I figured, what if in 5 years I still haven't found someone better? You know, when I'm ready for something like that. But she would be even older then, or she might have met someone. So this way, she just stays exactly the same. And I manufactured a bunch a memories for her, so it's just like she's been living her life for real. Cause otherwise, you know, she'd be so boring."

"What are you going to do with her if you do meet someone?"

"I don't know. Probably keep her around until I know it's going to work out. And if it does, then I guess I would just let her go."

"You should totally give her to me."

"Dude, don't be a dick. I can't just *give* her to someone."

"No, I know, it would be weird. But you could let me have a chance with her."

"Whatever, you're totally not her type."

She came back from the bathrooms. The brief panicked look was off her face and she had reapplied her lipstick.

"It's so weird, my phone isn't working. Also, did you see Krista over there? She looks so much older, I don't think that new hairstyle is doing her any favors. I...I...I wonder where the girls ran off to..." He handed her the drink and turned away from the boys to talk with her, putting his hand on her shoulder and leaning in, as if they were the best of friends. 

I Hate Every Title I Come Up With For This

I read this last night at an event. Or rather, I made everyone else read it out loud, paragraph by paragraph, and that was fantastic. I might make that my thing, making audience members read for me, I'm terrible at reading my own stuff and it's pretty fantastic to hear your words in other people's mouths.

I am incapable of change.
I long for it. I look around at my house, my car, my job, at my body in the bathroom mirror getting out of the shower and I want it all to be different. But when I concentrate hard, when I try to gather up motivations, to suction out the fog in my head and replace it with cold hard strategy, those motivations and strategies and plans are slowly eaten away by my brain’s naturally produced poison of staying put. They are eroded until there is nothing left but a lacey shadow on my brain of what I intended to do. An xray memory. A blot on an otherwise smooth surface.

I live in a city that is as poisoned as my brain.
I drive to work in the early morning hours, when the molecules of the City are still and quiet, and the only movements are the sparse cars gliding along grey empty highways, and the buzzing from street lamps and gas station signs. I drive past monstrous hunks of architecture that have been killed in the battle between industry and flight, the remains of wealth and power. These rotting buildings are the physical incarnations of my shadows, proof positive that no willpower can exist for very long in the Wasteland. Nobody knocks them down. Nobody fixes them. Nobody remembers what they used to be for. We hardly see them anymore, they lay invisible in the background of our lives, full of power but cold and dead.

This is what I think about as I’m at the gas station, the sun rising behind the Citgo sign, (listening to the man on his cellphone at the pump next to me who apparently doesn’t care if we blow up) - Before we had horizons and linear perspective, art had hierachy, an aristocracy. A character’s size was based on his or her’s importance to the story of the painting. This was called vertical perspective. It was left behind in the dust of the modern centuries, because it was illogical, and the concept of abstract art wasn’t due to be reborn on the scene for another hundred thousand million light years. The Horizon was invented and stabilized and everyone started using it, not just sailors on their little toy wooden boats, but writers and artists and soldiers. Like when people who weren’t lawyers first started using cell phones. The Horizon was at one point a modern technological miracle. A shining beacon of what humanity could accomplish - the Horizon!

It comes first from the Horizon. I am driving to work one morning, listening to the same CD I’ve had in the car for a year, when on the edge of my vision I catch a light. Not a flickering street light, or rushing lights of another car, but a gleaming glow coming from the mouth of the river, on the horizon of the large cold block of grey that is the Lake. It is pulsing a silent gold, which reflects on my windshield and shines against the concrete walls of the old City. This light, coming from an unknown awe inspiring enigmatic far far away point on the Horizon, gets stronger and stronger throughout the day. It turns the winter sky pink and silver. It transforms the dirty windows of the warehouses to twinkling prisms.

By the time we are all driving home, during what would normally be a pitch black rush hour, the entire City is lit up like a spotlight. But this light does not just reflect, it sticks, like gold dust settling on the streets. Our car tires turn up storms of sparkles like snow. It settles on our hair and eyelashes and clothes as glitter. It absorbs into the asphalt and turns the soot covered bricks, black with a century of manufacturing coughs, into jewels and shingles into irridescent shells. Those old dinosaur buildings, they become living breathing animals, snuggled in their nests.

The best part though is what happens when you breathe in the gold light. First you choke a little, with the tingling of it down your throat. Then you feel a warmth settle in your chest, as if you had just sipped a glass of bronzed whiskey. Next you feel it spreading through your veins, and up into your head. You want to lie down in grass and stare spinning at the sky, only it’s January in Cleveland so there is no grass. Instead you sit in your car with the heat blasting, and close your eyes, feel the light reaching up your spine behind your eyeballs, and into your corneas, and out through your lashes. I hadn’t realized how slow my heart was beating before, but I notice now in retrospect, as my heart beats faster and faster.

I am dizzy with a kind of universal caffeine. I open my eyes, and everything seems cleaner. The snow is whiter and the brown sludgey ice around the edges is gone. The sky is no longer grey, but shades of mauve and cream and violet. The siding on the houses is newer, the cars nicer, the people better dressed. The City has been gilded through and through. Everyone is happier. I am happier. All my memories are scrubbed clean. I barely remember my disgust with the never ending sameness, instead that familiarity seems to be a power, something that makes me strong, knowing where everything comes from and everything goes. Being “stuck here” is suddenly “ideal cost of living” “affordable amenities” “friends and family.”

There are lots of words thrown around the next few months, and I hear them all the time, online and on the radio, from the mouths of my friends. Revitilization. Civic Rebirth. Renaissance. There are not more jobs suddenly, people are no less poor and miserable, everyone is still bored. But now that the light has made everything seem prettier, nobody seems to mind those other things as much. The mysterious dust is gone, has absorbed into the groundwater and steel, but the euphoria remains. I know deep inside my head, beyond the reach of the Light, that this is not a Golden Age. This is the last huzzah before the end. This is the revenge of all those rotting brick husk buildings, the forgotten schools and masonic temples, the sprawling abandoned factories, they are gasping out their last boomtown breaths. But I just can’t bring myself to protest.

A Few Things I Wrote

Go to Ohio Authority to read my review of drinks at Light Bistro.

Or go to Turning River to read about my brief love affair with a rubber coyote.

Landscape

...And the cities stretched across the granite land in flat miniatures, delicate and tiny, with pleasing surfaces. It might be nice to stretch across them, the towers poking into your shoulder muscles, sharp little nubbies rubbing out your back. The whole of the developed countryside was a pattern of dry glue waiting to be peeled off the desk. If she worked it hard enough with her fingernail, the glue would come off in one solid piece, and the city would stay intact and mobile. She would be able to wave it like a plastic ribbon, fold it and bend it. But not too hard, she didn't want to crack the thin base that all these little toys were attached to. She just wanted to be able to move them, take them with her, look at their flexible undersides, watch the skyline bending in a circle around a coffee cup or fat thumb. She carefully worked at the glue, chipping only a few vacant houses at the edge. The middle came up all at once in a satisfying single solid motion...

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.

South quadrant, third level, Section139

In this building, in the basement, is a cadre of thugs, planning the kidnapping of the Haitian ambassador's daughter. They are smoking cheap cardboard cigars and making margaritas.

On the first floor lives a small lonely brown dragon. He broke his wing against an antenna, when he got turned around in the fog, and has been surviving on rats and possums while it heals. The security staff has been leaving it the occasional sandwich as well, and is trying to sell it's picture to Perez Hilton.

The second floor is for lost children.

The third floor is for clandestine coke deals in tinted Buicks. They also manufacture fake nikes using stolen Filipinos. The denizens of this floor are looked down upon by the Haitian thugs, who wish the neighborhood wasn't going to such shit.

The fourth floor is not your friend.

On the fifth floor, in the center of the parking pillars, is a very old tree who's branches wrap around the reinforced steel and concrete like poisonous vines into the bricks of a house. The tree smells like licorice, and bleeds silver sap which pools on the floor like tiny mercury fish. The fish shiver and sliver their bodies into the cracks of the building, where they glow incandescent as the cells of their bodies multiply, divide, and fall away. They are seeding the electrical wires. On the branches of the tree grow golden apples, heavy and rich. They roll easily into crowds. Once picked, they will not rot for at least 20 years, but once they hit thirty, they instantly become moldy black piles of sewage inside, though they may keep their golden glow for another 100 years.

The 6th Floor is for aspiring photographers and latent republicans.

The 7th Floor promises a lot more than it offers.

On the roof, once you have climbed the well lit, incredibly empty stairways and emerged into the starless city night, there is a large computer with a steady blinking light. This computer has been waiting for you. It smells you as you approach, and hums happily, its screen flashing electric joy. You stand in front of it, and its insides can barely take the proximity, as all its wiring and fans and chips vibrate violently. You touch it, and it explodes into a million tiny contented pieces.

Impromptu Poetry-Off at Happy Dog Last Night

Contestants: Bridget and Jeremiah
Topics: chosen by assorted patrons and bartender
Note: not to be judged on spelling or grammar or my inability to read Jeremiah's handwriting.

Topic One: Chickpeas

Jeremiah:

Fallafel a Ancient
Ongoing tradition
The weight of interminable
centuries and here we ate
putting the same thing
in our mouths,
Fuel for wars,
secular, religious, internecine
stronger than steel
Armies traveling Napoleonic
on their bellies.

Bridget: winner

The grinding
The mush against the edge
Of the bowl
Smells like lemons
And young boys running in sunshine
And sand.

It coats the nostril
With garlic
And seawater.

Topic Two: PJ Harvey and Elliot Smith

Jeremiah: winner

Goblin Mouth and
unlimited teeth
Mourn all you want
unknowable feminine traumas
-I?
I see your glorious witch face and think:
Kiss Me?
And don't bite
too hard
or do.

Bridget:

Elliot Smith
Did not actually stab himself
In the heart.
He was murdered.
On purpose?
Is losing soft breast
and direction
An accomplice to assasination?

Topic Three: Gilda Radner

Jeremiah:

Emblamatic halo
The cursive hair
matching tone-
becoming character.
Becoming -
An act.
The act of becoming and who?
The reckless pleasurable panoply
A parade
And a person.
How long?
Long.

Bridget: winner

There's only so much coke
One girl can do
Before she starts to doubt
Her success against the
Fat Men.

But in her mirror
At fifteen
With braces and a shirt
With horses on it,
She was the star.

Random things I collect when I don't have a computer at home, and I have a whole day of not talking to anyone

1. Ding Dong the Witch is dead! Which old witch? The Wicked Witch! Ding dong the Wicked Witch is dead! (or will be, as of tomorrow, although in not as satisfying a way as some of us would have hoped...). I hope the name George is going to be some generation name, like Katie or Tiffany. I don't need a bunch of little Georges popping up in the next ten years. We don't need them to steal the thunder from the Thousands of Baracks that are to come.

2. Tomorrow I will be headed downtown to watch the Inauguration at either Playhouse Square or the Wolfstein Center. Then I will be headed to Tremont to drink. At this point, it looks like I'll be alone for all of this, because everyone else is working, so if you're not, feel free to holla at me. I want to be in a crowd, I want to see happy people, I want to hear shouting and clapping and drink a lot. Unfortunately, none of my friends consider this the holiday I do. It's probably because they partied on 11/2, while I was stuck in a hotel room by myself. Anyway, I miss having friends that didn't work 9-5 jobs. Like, you know, all of us before two years ago.

3. Watching Stranger Than Fiction and then Adaptation the next morning will play serious tricks on a wannabe writer's mind. Watching the Ernest Angley hour afterwards will not help, and not having a computer while in the mood to not eat anything only drink and smoke and smoke and drink? Well that will cement the crazy and lead you to scribble massive amounts of nonsense down on your watercolor pad (being the only paper in the house). These crazies will seep into your dreams and give you the first nightmare you've had in years, though that could be due to the champagne, edam, and garlic triscuits you consumed in mass quantity before sleep. Also, triscuits is the weirdest cracker name ever, and I don't believe it can really be spelled that way.
I couldn't go to sleep after that nightmare. I wasn't scared during it at all, but when I woke up I got really really spooked, which is one of the downfalls of living alone and also being the kind of person who forgets to lock her door all the time. I can say that safely on the internet, because it will NEVER happen again.

4. Einstein's first wife intrigues me, and I will probably write more about her soon, if only because desperately thwarted women are a thing with me these days. Also, let's talk about how weird it is that it's called Gravity, so sombre, so formal. I'm not sure I believe in gravity. I mean, I believe these reactions occur. But I don't believe gravity is one law, one force, acting everywhere always the same. I think it's probably more of a set of related laws, involving forces we don't have names for yet, which act differently in different areas of the universe. Of course, I have no basis for this, not even a reliable background of basic level physics, only my imagination and observation of how many of the other mightier laws of nature have fallen since the dawn of Science. So you know, okay for a L'Engle novel, maybe not so much for the formal debate.

"Sir John Mortimer is Dead"...or "How I always discover the coolest people through their obituaries"

Here's to Sir John Mortimer, a gentleman who I had never heard of before yesterday, when As It Happens played a recording of a very funny speech he made, in honor of his death. As It Happens is a Canadian public radio news show, and I wish I could find the theme song as my ringtone, because it would serve to weed out people I am unwilling to sleep with. Yes, it's true, I do require as one of my standards that you recognize the theme music of several NPR shows. I think there are worse ways to be picky.

"People will go to endless trouble to divorce one person and then marry someone who is exactly the same, except probably a bit poorer and a bit nastier. I don't think anybody learns anything."

You know, the problem is, after someone dies, it's really hard to find substantive links on them that aren't stories about their death. I've been searching for this speech I heard last night, where he talked about why he preferred to defend murderers than divorcees. Because divorcees will call you up at all times of the night complaining about custody of the dog. But murderers have already killed the one person who really bugged them, so they're quite calm about the whole thing. It was really the funniest speech I've heard in a long time. Obama should copy it for Tuesday.

Instead I've learned that he was the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, wrote the script for Tea With Mussolini and defended the Sex Pistols in the Bollocks Obscenity Trial.

"Mortimer then said that he wished to call Professor James Kingsley to give evidence as to the meaning of the word bollocks. Mr. Richie objected to the witness being called. However, the chairman said ''let's get it over with'', and Kingsley was called. Kingsley told the court that he was the Reverend James Kingsley, professor of English studies at Nottingham University. He said he was a former Anglican priest and also a fellow of the Royal Academy. Under questioning from Mortimer he then went into discussing the derivation of the word bollocks. He said it was used in records from the year 1000 and in Anglo Saxon times it meant a small ball. The terms was also used to describe an orchid. He said that in the 1961 publication of Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang, he had not taken into account the use of the word bollocks in the Middle Ages. He said it appears in Medievel bibles and veterinary books. In the bible it was used to describe small things of an appropriate shape. He said that the word also appears in place names without stirring any sensual desires in the local communities. Mortimer said that this would be similar to a city being called Maidenhead which didn't seem to cause the locals in the vicinity any problems. Mr Kingsley said that Partridge in his books wrote that bollocks remained in colloquial use down through the centuries and was also used to denote a clergyman in the last century. ''The word has been used as a nickname for clergymen. Clergymen are known to talk a good deal of rubbish and so the word later developed the meaning of nonsense,'' he said. ''They became known for talking a great deal of bollocks, just as old balls or baloney also come to mean testicles, so it has twin uses in the dictionary."

It wasn't the only obscenity trial he defended, but it's certainly the most famous one, unless you want to count "The Love That Dare To Speak It's Name", and there seems to be some debate as to his role in the trial of "Lady Chatterly's Lover", but he was definitely there. He married 2 women named Penelope, which is either an utterly lovely or really repulsive name, wrote propaganda films for WW2, and ended his life consulting on Boston Legal. Yeah, that tv show. And he wrote some books that I'll be reading soon, since the titles are "Murderers and Other Friends" and "The Oxford Book of Villains". He wrote a ton of others, like 4 autobiographies. How much do you have to live in order to write 4 books solely about your life? And of course, the Rumpole books.

"We don't know much about the human conscience, except that it is soluble in alcohol."

I have read a few Rumpole of the Bailey books, cause you know, I go for that whole stiff upper lip, rowdy humour, British mystery sort of thing. I always thought She Who Must Be Obeyed was a wonderful thing, the title I mean. So I guess I knew that someone wrote those books, I just didn't know who. Think of all the brilliant people out there, dead and alive, that you know nothing about. It's daunting.

"I always say that if you find a streak of vulgarity in yourself you should nurture it and see what happens. I've been showing off all my life."

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?

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.