Pursuing the Life

He was not a special man, waking up in the morning every day to go to work, singing along to Willie Nelson in the car as he rolled through the grey and rising morning Ohio highways, because he found talk radio grating. Stopping to get a large black coffee in a styrofoam cup, blowing through the plastic lid to try and cool it down. His eyes felt heavy and dirty, full of sleep. 5am shift in the laundry room was quiet until everyone's coffee kicked in. There were 5 of them, and they all basically got along because that's what you do when you have to be at work that early. It took them 5 weeks to get accustomed to each other, and then someone would inevitably leave - move up to security or switch shifts or something, so that there was always a new person to have to teach and answer questions and walk that thin line between supportive and insufferably condescending because how many times can you explain the functions of a washer, even an industrial one?



The building they worked in was set across the parking lot from the main hospital building. Gwen said it was like they were importing and exporting laundry with another country - little trucks made deliveries to the dock door, and picked them up again, even though it was only half an acre away. She was constantly reading Anne Rice stories in between loads. They all sat around reading or listening to music in the pauses while the huge machines whirred and clunked and sssshhhed, creating a white noise din which isolated them in the building, fell like a blanket over the afternoon, wrapping them up the thick steamy air, and the food coma from lunch creeped up their central nervous systems. It was, in a way, extremely relaxing.


It was an afternoon like this that the accident happened. The big steam roller had been repetitively clunking and whirring for an hour when suddenly there was a screech, and the hard slow motion of the machine became frenetic and panicked. It reminded him for a flash of a moment of that moment you see in animals fucking, the sudden pitch forward in urgency. Another guy rushed forward to try and pull a lever, a plug, something. And in that moment, he saw something flash against the tight cotton sheets, he was sure of it. The guy, his name was Terry, slipped on a hanger on the floor and hit his head on the steel frame. He was okay, he didn't die, but it was a lot of blood, which meant a lot of paperwork, and Terry was gone for six weeks on workers comp.

It meant they were short handed during that time. No one new could be hired because Terry was coming back. It didn't really affect their workload, but it threw the balance of the group off. The 4 of them paired off, and he found himself talking to Gwen a lot more, about things like his girlfriend and her dogs and one day they were suddenly talking about Terry's accident, and he remembered the thing he had seen that seemed like something he maybe made up. Gwen didn't think so. She had a theory, but she said she couldn't tell him until she got some collaboration. Gwen had a lot of theories. Sometimes it is true that a person can read too much. Especially of the wrong sort of thing.


A few weeks later he was loading the giant dryers with Tom, and as he shut the massive door and bolted it shut, deep in the bowels of the chamber he saw another flash. More than one flash in fact, a quick burst of glints, like a piece of glass had been left in the laundry. To his left, Tom slammed his finger in the door, and it broke off immediately, not clean like a knife wound, but bruised and horrible and raw. There was screaming, and paramedics, and more paperwork. He told Gwen about it the next day, whispering so that the loan in from cleaning services who they had been forced to bring in now wouldn't overhear his craziness.

This time she was sure, she told him. "The machines are warning you," she said sincerely under her breath. He rolled his eyes. "They are trying to tell you something bad is going to happen, they are reaching out to you, which means they think you are the closest to them."

He thought about that, if one could be close to a machine. A computer maybe, he could see that. But huge industrial dinosaurs? It would be like a woolly mammoth trying to talk to a Rubix cube. At least that was the first thing that popped into his head. Who was the Rubix cube, he wasn't sure. He tried to think about the machines, sat there at the desk tuning out whatever nonsense Gwen was spouting now, and he focused on the Roller, sitting there impenetrable in the middle of the room. He listened for it's particular instrumental sound in the orchestra of the workday. He heard nothing.

That night he went home to his girlfriend, and they went out to a bar for dinner. She was talking excitedly about something that had happened to a friend of hers, and barely noticed that he was drinking his gin and tonics quickly. Later that night, after she fell asleep, he sat in the living room in the dark, beer in hand, and contemplated all the machinery he could see without getting up off the couch. The big tv. The computer. The air conditioner. The refrigerator singing off to the side, and the clock ticking on the wall, the light on the microwave flashing. He could hear all their individual hums, and if he shut his eyes and sipped the beer, each one seemed to be on a particular rhythm with his own heart pumping.

The next morning he stopped in the supervisors office, in the main hospital, and requested to be transferred to Security. The supervisor did not seem hopeful. "We're pretty short staffed in the laundry room right now," she said, "you know that." Walking back into work later that day, he looked around the room, at the mute humans going through their paces, amid a clockwork of moving pieces and turning barrels, and he desperately wanted to run away, his heart was gripped with a strange and sudden fear that he couldn't articulate, a feeling that he was not in control of this building, that in fact no one here had a choice, the hospital existed as a independent collective of consciousness that had nothing to do with human decision. We are not even worker ants, he thought, we are red blood cells. Pumping through the Hospital, carrying oxygen and nutrients and janitors.

Benefits and Dinners and Cilantro

I had a lot of really amazing food this weekend.

On Friday, my friend Justin took me and my sister out to Amp 150 and we had did the 4 course Chef's Choice, which turned out to really be like three small dishes each course, so a total of 12? It was a just a lot of food, and it was all really great, but I'm not going to give you a play by play about edibles today. The important thing about Friday is that we were all just dressed down and we hung out and there was no sense of having to act a certain way or look a certain way or be certain places. Just sit around, talk about shit, eat a lot of food for a long time. The chef Mel kept coming out to sit and talk with us about tattoos and pigs. It was wonderful.



Saturday I went to the Veggie U benefit, which is a charity event with famous food people who you can ogle and tons of restaurants giving you little plates and so much wine. Camilla and Sarah and I got all garden casual skirted up and drove out to Milan. In the car on the way there I said "I wish Veggie U wasn't a thing I actually like a lot, because now I can't go there and be snarky." Which, you know, is how I might normally approach something like this. I mean, there were limos present. At a farm. This is a thing about luxury items as you get older though, you know people at them and you like them. Also here's a hint about how to pick which fancy events you should go to: does the event mirror in structure something you might be doing with your friends anyway? Getting way too dressed up and dancing to a bad DJ? Bad. Eating food in the backyard getting drunk? Good. We accidentally parked in the VIP lot, cause we were sort of lost and this guy just waved us into a spot, so...okay. The best part about that mistake is that we got to ride in a golf cart from the lot to the event. The guy driving us I think got a kick out of us being so excited about the golf cart. Lesson 1, when you are at a fancy event, you should never try to act apathetic about being in a golf cart.



Then followed hours of us eating and drinking. The food was all great of course, but the cheese and the cakes and the miniature bottles of champagne we drank with straws were definitely the highlights. I am a simple girl. If you give me a tiny bottle of bubbly that's all mine, I'm won over instantly. The big tent was very equalizing, since all the fancy people were just as drunk and sweaty as us, it was in the 90s and sweltering in that thick rich Ohio farm kind of heat, which is a long way of saying humid as hell. We said hi to lots of people we knew. We looked at people's clothes, and instantly hated the beautiful girl in the green dress who was not sweaty at all. There were fans with water misting through them at the entrances, and these spots became prime real estate that people were greedy about. Mister Wars. One lady actually told my friend Allison that "you only get one turn at the mister" in an effort to shame her into moving along, which I wasn't there for, thank god. Cause my response would have been to ask her very specifically how long she thought one turn should be, and then to time her. And she probably would have gotten huffy. I agree, don't park yourself in front of the fan in a way that will block everyone else, but if I'm standing a respectful distance off, then fuck off lady. Let's see, what else happened? I really really wanted to slip off with my mini bottle and wander around the farm and take pictures and hang out with the staff and see the place really, but I didn't cause that would have been rude and they were busy. I was talking to this one cute chef who had just gotten a chance to be away from the table, and then Lee Anne Wong from Top Chef came running over all excitedly and totally cockblocked me. I didn't really mind, mostly I like being able to say that last sentence. There were adorable little kids running around in carrot costumes. All these old frog faced ladies kept cutting the Jeni's ice cream line, and Camilla gave them the stink eye. Every savory dish I got had cilantro garnish on it. Every single one. I like cilantro, but it was my enemy by the end of the night. Cilantro, you and I have to have a talk about the difference between a garnish and a weed. Finally we hit our wall of chocolate and beef and all the vendors only had red wines left, and people were dancing around in the leftover dry ice. So we left, and while waiting for our golf cart back, finally had a chance to make fun of rude rich ladies who were upset that they didn't get the next golf cart and yelled about it. Everyone else though, all the volunteers and the chefs (and most of the guests, the ones who weren't yelling at golf carts or pointedly not making eye contact with you as they cut lines), were so nice and I snapped pictures of flowers and made eyes at the police doggie hanging out at the entrance.


I don't know who that older guy in the blue shirt is, but next time I go to one of these things, I'm partying with him all night. Always find the people who are just as amused by the dry ice as you.

I ended the evening proper at 1am on a porch in Ohio City drinking beer and talking to bike kids about what you call someone who lives in Columbus, since you can't call them Columbians. Best suggestion was Christophers.

The takeaway today is that the point of really good food is not that you eat lots of it, but that you eat it while enjoying yourself with people you like immensely.

Noodles!

Things that can now happen in Cleveland because Noodlecat is open.

1) I may finally have to learn to use a different parking garage when I go to that area. I am so ashamed I use a parking garage at all, but there it is. I may have to diversify my shame. This is basically just to say I will come to downtown way more often.

2) I no longer have to walk into any of the fancy places on E. 4th to get a drink in ridiculous grungy concert clothes. I can just go to the noodle shop in ridiculous grungy concert clothes. I really can't stand HOB, guys. Let's revisit that again some time. But now when people ask where I want to meet up before a show, I will have an opinion other than "meh" and "no, not the fucking way too expensive bowling alley again".

3) At some point I have faith there will spring up competing noodle houses and maybe, just maybe, one of them will be 24 hours? Or maybe...hint hint hint...Noodlecat could stay open really late? Because I swear to god, a 24 hour noodleshop would be AMAZING and I would probably move downtown for that.



4) I may actually order a vegetarian option at a restaurant willingly over one with meat. I am still thinking about that mushroom broth. The smell of it. Even the color of it was beautiful. Like, I would drink that for breakfast every day and probably live forever.

5) I have faith there is very good chance that someday the place will get an accidental shipment that includes a magical dragon's egg, and someone's kid will find it and hatch a baby dragon, and then this whole pg rated conflict between good and evil will occur in the city and usually there's fireworks in those movies at some point, so I'm looking forward to that.

6) You know what else would be nifty? A well choreographed yakuza battle on Euclid. I'd be okay with that too. Like, a dancing one. Accompanied by a parade of kittens in costume?



7) I will finally stop being annoyed at people raving about restaurants that all have versions of the same dishes. Because they will start raving about this one, and then I will totally be like "yeah, no, that's right." (I have been waiting so long for something like this to open here. I was like, c'mon food scene, catch the fuck up, please please please. So I'm extremely biased here. Also, does that sound snobby? I feel like it does, and man, you should have heard my snob factor the other night about Neutral Milk Hotel. )

8) Every good second date ever will probably be here.



9) I may also try to make sure there is at least one breakup that happens there too. It seems like a good casual breakup place. I mean, that's a compliment. Those are hard places to find. I only know like one other.

10) I will finally figure out a good way to get broth stains out of a dress. I hope.

Bastille Day

So I knew it was going to be coming down any day now completely, and I dragged my sick and burnt carcass out of the house to try and get some shots before it was all the way non existent. I don't know why, but I assumed that everyone would make the Bastille Day/ Cold Storage connection, massive fortresses coming down by the will of the people ect, and while I was talking to this photographer out there I mentioned it too, like "so everyone should have some good shots up tomorrow, right?" and she was totally confused. But still nice. We stood precariously on the tip of the concrete barriers, to lean cautiously out over the fence. There were tons of people there taking pictures with their cell phones and cameras. When they first started tearing it down, I had thought about going out every day at the same time to the same spot to take a picture. But then it took SO long. And someone else for sure did that right? Like, someone's going to send me the link to those right?

Dear Cold Storage, this is how I will remember my 32 years staring at your visage.

- Coming home on family trips when I was a kid, seeing you hovering over 90,and thinking I had to know what exactly they did inside you, and also that it was tacky they let other people paint ads on you.
- Using you as the landmark to navigate my way down into the Flats to go to Nate's houseboat.
- Walking past you on my way home from the Rapid station, when my first apartment was in Tremont.
- Being scared of you because Boots told me that's where all the homeless people lived, when I lived that place briefly with Zelda and Dan and him, and it was right there behind the highway bridges, the fortress of the Bridge People.
- Hanging out staring at you while I waited in the parking lot of the Gateway Clinic with a stray cat in a box, cause they opened at 9am and it was first come first serve and I had to be at work at 10.
- When they knocked your smokestack down and Allison and I loaded a bunch of the bricks from it in the backseat of my car, to make a fire pit out of. Since they were curved and fire proofed. Then those bricks sat in the back seat for like a month, because I was too lazy to unload them all myself, until one day my landlord and I took them all out and set them up in the backyard.
- Watching fireworks next to you July 4th, with all the neighborhood people crowded around on the railings, and the cars all playing radios, and freaking spiders everywhere. Then driving home the first year we did that, and W. 25th was this dense thick smog of firework ash, and in the distance you could hear them going off like a war, and we thought for sure that there had to have been a giant fire somewhere to cause all this.
- stopping by you on the first day of me going out with my new camera to take pictures of the graffiti along Columbus Rd.
- later using that same picture for Nate's 30th birthday present.
- Trying to go inside you and finding everything so pitch black of course, there was no point in endangering myself on your crappy staircase. You remained completely unfriendly to photographers, a belligerent old cranky elephant of a building.

I'll miss you. The fact that so many people come down day after day to take photos of your demolition in stages is testament to the impression you have left in our minds of the Cleveland landscape. You were the guard at the gate to the West Side, our own personal fortress. Nothing is ever going to look the same again in Tremont, or Duck Island. Abbey Rd, which has for so long been the predictable same old street that I drive down at least once if not 4 times a day for the 10 years I've been driving (or taking that little RTA shuttle they used to have back and forth), is going to be completely alien, will be fucked up, like visually, forever. I can't even process that. It's sort of like if they took down the West Side Market. No, actually, it's exactly as if one day they just tore down the Market. Or the Masonic Temple. Or the Guardians.

But anyway, Old Thing, there you have it. Them's the brakes. You were totally loved.

The Ass, the Angel, and the Lawyer

The triune brain (our brain in three parts - reptilian, paleo mammalian, proto mammalian) is a concept that will get me yelled at, cause it's what? Outdated and not true, at least as far as physical structural evolution of the brain goes. Oh we've all got the same basal ganglia, they say. And mammals don't get to have all the limbic fun. But you know what, sometimes concepts that aren't scientifically true are still good for your narrative. After all, there aren't really wizards either. Sometimes when you do something that makes no sense, you need a basal ganglia to blame.

My reptilian system, which we will call the worst and best parts, kept me out in the sun for days this weekend, in an exploding Mercurian sort of sun. I basked in it, I let the UV rays mutate me, I gloried in my baked scent. I had no other thought except to be in the water and to be burned by unfiltered starlight. It was extremely irresponsible. Lizards are not known for their common sense. The next morning I had turned into a bright pink alien, sick with longing for the home world. The sun had infected me, and I was really and truly ill. Turns out even though part of my brain is reptilian, the rest of me is still very vulnerably mammalian, and I slept cocooned in sun sickness for two straight days while my largest organ tried to either heal me or kill me quick. Did you know if you broil your skin, it also affects your immune system? Yeah, turns out that's true. Fever, chills, weakness, dizzyness, swollen throat, migraine. Fuck you too skin. Why do you have to be so fucking Irish skin? What's that ever gotten anybody?

So, feeling the sickness coming up on me, I tried to wander outside in the newly wet and gray thunder soaked Monday world, to cool down a little, since a giant tub of cherry jello was not available. I'm pretty sure I had a fever, and I wanted the rain to substitute for my lake, which I'm not allowed to go back into until I've healed my exoskeleton. We tried all the proven methods to make me feel better - ice cream from Scoops, walks in the Metroparks, standing under train tracks and holding onto the steel beams to feel the vibrations from up above. I believe train vibrations are just as effective as magnets, at something.

If the paleo mammalian limbic system dictates our parenting instincts, our connectivity to community and that weird little emotion called love, is it possible to have a reverse limbic system? Like, I just need to be taken care of myself, to be eternally the child who just wants a pair of arms to fall asleep in? And then when I'm really sick, when I've reached the point where I'm feverishly texting my friend about sequenced images planted in my brain as code, and this dream I had where we were on different security patrol, one by air one by water, trying to destroy an invading animal/fungus/threat to humanity, well then there's two opposing forces. There's the desire to be held, but also the stronger desire to crawl under the dark cool porch and die alone, where no predators can find me and take me out early. I love that when my immune system is at war, I dream of fighting.

Then of course, what you've got left is the neocortex, the New Mammal, designed to bring you back from the edge of your Stanley Kowalski conversion, back into the world of engineering and architecture and paying bills and planning for the future. The responsible part that took me over to Urgent Care to make sure I wasn't actually mutating into a lizard or dying from sturgeon flu, which is apparently as much Not a thing as sun poisoning Is a thing. They say. I don't know. Is it weird that I feel like Urgent Care doctors know less than hospital doctors? Like, I feel the reason he kept me waiting is he was looking up my symptoms on WebMD. Anyway, I think the train vibrations were far more helpful at bringing me back to neocortex level, whereas the doctors office just made me wish my jaw unhinged so I could start attacking.

I wonder also if since the Triune Brain is no longer a scientific concept, but solely a cultural one, if we should add a fourth brain in there - The Cloud. Everyone's all in a tizzy about Google+ because privacy! Only, you don't really want privacy. Privacy is an Old World concept darlings. What you want is recognition, and not just from your already known and encircled friends, but from the world. What you should really be mad at is that our economic system didn't catch up to communism at the same time as our intellectual system. The Cloud - the part of our brain which allows us to plug in. The USB port of our soul.

"Dante organized people he knew into circles, too." Pheezy

Ohio and I turned 32

32 years ago yesterday, I opened my eyes and Ohio blinked into existence. What had been dark thin void before became blue and vast and full, strange and deep.

I opened my lungs and screamed and the wind blew in from a new northern sea, and the sea overflowed into the hills and became rivers and the rivers became valleys. Rocks pushed out of hills with violence and purpose. Wind turbines grew up from the water table, giant white willows, feeding off the raw minerals sitting in my chest sleeping, waiting to be discovered.

My fingers flexed and learned to grasp, and the concrete castles crackled across the landscape electric. They bowed molten and then solidified in the rains, hard and fast, permanent as first impressions. The granite sparkled and sighed.

I splashed my new limbs in the water and waves created a perpetual motion machine, back and forth, the heartbeat. Boats rose up from the depths of the dark glacial afterbirth, and birds came into the new land from all corners of the void to eat and swim and fly and fight and scream. The fresh air unwrapped itself from the vortex, and everything was filled with sound.

I learned to walk and jump and drive and the Ohio territory stretched like play doh, always pushing out and in all directions except North, rolling out before my outstretched eyes so that the horizon exploded. I tried to find the end of all things, but always it was just beyond my line of sight.

Into this playground we ran and built and traveled around, purposeless fools, soaking in the green and blue, which were my favorite colors before I was born, were genetically programmed into my brain, a memory of the land my ancestors came from - the paleolithic caves and fields of Southern France, the trek across cold northern continents, the softness and richness of the peat Islands. The leaves and hard ground and smell of grass came from a dream I had, the dream of what my cells had touched and breathed. Somewhere out there is also a house, and we will sit on the porch and feel the breath of the deep underground leaking into the sunshine.

Things to Do In Cleveland Tonight and Tomorrow

Tonight: The Big Urban Photography Show. I have a few photos in this, but mostly I'm excited to see the other work, cause I've already seen mine. Its free!



Tomorrow night: Art Attack! to Save the Columbia Building
Starts at 4pm at the building, which is on E. 2nd and Prospect, and is currently planned to be demolished in order to make a parking garage for the casino.



From Save Lower Prospect, the group organizing this:

"FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Petitions Delivered to Elected Officials; Columbia Building Art Attack

On July 1, 2011, members of Save Lower Prospect Avenue (SLPA) delivered copies of over 1,100 signatures on “Downtown is Our Town” petitions to elected officials.

On Friday, July 8, 2011 from 4:00pm until midnight, SLPA will host an “Art Attack” on the public sidewalks in front of the Columbia Building. Local artists will craft images in sidewalk chalk that will highlight the beauty of the building. Other participants will transcribe the names of each and every Northeast Ohioan who signed the “Downtown is Our Town” petition: a visual representation of where Greater Cleveland stands on this issue.

Local musicians and Dim and Den Sum will be present to inspire us to keep our efforts strong!

COME ON DOWN AND DRAW, PLAY, OR JUST SHOW YOUR SUPPORT!
HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE!"

If you are unfamiliar with the issue, here's a few links to help explain it:

Threatened: The Columbia Building

What Will Become of the Columbia Building?

So if you're going to be downtown for Made in 216/Dredgers Union Opening, or the ballgame, stop by and support a vision for downtown that preserves the character of our city and promotes liveable walkable spaces. And if you can't make it down, take a minute and sign the petition.

Sunday: Buy Me a Pony Because It's My Birthday.

There's This Whole Speech About America in My Head and We're Going to Leave It There, Because I am America Too

It was one of those weekends that flew by but was also full of momentous and sparkling things. I guess, really, when you think about it every weekend is like that. I was going to say "in the summer", but then I considered what this past winter was like. So every weekend is full of momentous, brilliant, shiny, or dark and intense things. Every moment that you're not at work is. Maybe they don't seem momentous, or maybe they don't stay that way, but at some point in the timeline between something happening and your memory of it, each event or conversation has it's brief important meaning. That's perhaps a side effect of constantly being on the look out for the next thing to tell people about. I hadn't anticipated that. Is it happiness? I don't know, seems like a risky conclusion. But it's out there. It exists. It's pretty fun.

Friday night I had a weird night. The concert was fantastic and heartbreaking. The Elected were amazing, and I couldn't stop smiling despite myself. Saturday I went to a party in a very nice house with a bunch of nicely dressed people, and stood in like one or two spots in the backyard like the whole time while faces came by, stopped, said hi, got moved off by the natural wave through the space. Strangers and I just had weird random conversations in that way you do when you don't know anyone but you're in the mood to talk. This one guy came over to talk and I don't know how it happened, but in like 5 minutes we were talking about, like, life goals and marriage and plans for like ten minutes. Suddenly I was like "oh man, wait, I don't know how this got so deep." And he took a swig of his beer and said "yeah, and like I have to go to the bathroom, but I don't want to seem like a dick." And we parted pretty quickly. The next time we found ourselves standing by each other, we talked about kickball and stand-up while people tried to light sparklers, and it was that kind of night, each person had their set of topics that had seemingly no relation. You just took up where you walked in. The wind picked up beautifully, and then it poured and drenched the streets. I left and met up with my sister and this group of 22 yr old girls she somehow knew. They were all so unworn and new. Later we had hot dogs, quickly and with drunken determination. Later again, at home, my downstairs neighbors were still up from their party that night, and we stayed up till 5am talking about god knows what, skanks and jobs and motorcycle lights, I was already home by then and they gave me more whiskey. We sat in the driveway under their tents with red cups lying dead all over the wet concrete. Nobody got in any fights until after I finally stopped leaning on their car hood and went to bed. I lay there upstairs listening to them screaming at each other, and bottles being broken, the sounds of people who have been drunk around each other for way too many hours.

Sunday, well we're going to talk about Sunday in another post. There are many pictures and thoughts about my mom and thoughts about Ohio. It doesn't belong here. It was actually too daunting for me to try tonight. The really long hours of working in front of a computer, on job stuff and personal stuff, is starting to kill me in the heat. 12 hours a day I feel swollen and inflated and languid. My body longs to be in other positions. Dancing, swimming, fucking. Any movement at all. I wander aimlessly around my house, trying to feel my muscles and bones back into being. Also my tattoo is starting to itch. I think it's peeling, finally. I'm sunburned. Today at the grocery store I bought only bananas, chopped dates, pears, a little cheese, some bread, two bottles of rose to drink over ice. Espresso roast to make an entire jug of iced coffee which I've done already, mixed with half a gallon of soy milk, because it was so imperative I have it. There are four full trays of ice in my fridge. I guess what I'm trying to tell you is my body is starting to enter summer lockdown. It took a minute to figure out what was going on, and then it was like "fuck this shit, hydrate me and cook nothing."

Ever since I got the tattoo, which by the way I still like very very much except for the itching, friends have been asking when I'm getting the next one. In that funny way everyone claims tattoos are addictive. Frankly, I'm still getting used to the fact that my arm is permanently changed, I'm still sort of in awe of that. I look at it and think, there is the passage of time. I have marked myself in the point of my life and it will always be there. There is another tattoo I want, wanted first in fact, but I can't afford it and I don't know if I could find someone around here I trust to pull it off, since the girl who does this style is in NYC, and 300/hour. Someday maybe? The only other one I would get would be if they could somehow take a square of my skin, and paint it completely pitch night black, and then illustrate fireworks on it, but in some sort of paint that glowed iridescent and also smelled like explosives and small patches of trees and brush under streetlights by the river. I would get that immediately.

On the 4th, I went to the beach. The water was perfect, but I had to keep holding my arm out of the water, so I lay in the sun and read southern gothic short stories and the feathers in my hair blew around in the breeze. We met the lifeguard's wife, and the lifeguard told me about how last time we saw him, he was glad I had said goodbye to him in front of his regional manager, because it made him look good. I love that beach so much. After a few hours, we reluctantly got up and went to my friend's house besides the bridge, where the girls were all in sundresses and the dogs digging holes in the new yard, and I drank pear cider and peach beer and felt the sun burning through my skin from earlier. Matt was there, back from L.A., and he had developed this odd veneer, this sort of glossy exoskeleton, that looked good on him but also very different. He was no longer cute goofy faced Matt the music student. He looked like a Spaniard, in catalog clothes. It was hot, in a sort of expensive way, but it just made me want to break him down and get him really fucked up so that he became old Matt again. I'm not being fair to him, he was really tired and had been out at family things all day. He may very well still be old Matt and he just wasn't on that day. But there was something...anyway, it was very nice seeing Matt. I hadn't realized I missed him, but I did.

The boys lit off their fireworks in the backyard among the tomatoes, and the neighbors on the street lit off theirs, and all the houses around for blocks and blocks were full of people and the skies full of noise and light. My friend's dog got so scared by the first firework, he peed on her mom's foot. I myself may have yelped and then screamed with joy. The other little rag dog in the bandanna barked and barked and barked at the sky, long after the lights had fallen down, as if he could scare that horrible noise into not coming back. Or maybe he would hold back invaders from space with his teeth. We all walked down to the Bridge to watch the city show over the river. There were people everywhere, all along it's mile long stretch, leaning against the concrete balustrade with kids on shoulders and dogs on leashes. A group on the other side of the bridge kept lighting up these great paper lanterns, that would fly up into the sky and away past the giant guardian statues at either end, as if it were an actual festival of lights. One man had his dog in his arms, so that he wasn't on the sidewalk, but held him like a child who also wanted to see the show but was too short. I was mildly drunk, and held the button of my camera down on continuous shot, taking over 300 pictures of fireworks for no good reason. There is absolutely no reason at all to ever have that many pictures of anything unless it is to map a planet. But I whittled them down to ten, and if I hadn't taken 300 maybe I wouldn't have these.

The thing I love most about fireworks, the reason they cause me to feel joyful and light and amazing, is they enhance every environment they are in. There is no place on earth that chemically colored gunpowder can't make prettier. I look at these pictures, and squint my eyes, and the fact that it's a city at all goes away. Instead it's just swathes of color and light, abstract patterns across a dark backdrop. Art and jewels and aurora borealis rolled together in a giant glittering mass, throwing light into the backs of my corneas, and then maybe I take those signals and interpret them as a cityscape, but maybe also they are alien cities, or a flotilla, or the universe just exploding piece by piece in slow motion.

The Third Girl

When after many weeks, neither of the girls had returned, it was generally agreed upon by local editorial boards and talk radio callers that a third girl was going to have to go into the forest and see what happened to them. Not because anyone believed they were coming back, but because the fear of not knowing what they were supposed to be afraid of wouldn't last nearly as long as the fear of something specific and Girl Hungry.

"Well, why's it gotta be a girl?" the Third Girl asked.
"Because obviously it only eats girls," They told her.
"But no one has ever sent any boys in, maybe it just hasn't tried one yet?" she argued. They just shook their heads wisely.
"Well, then, why's it got to be me?" she asked very logically.
"Everyone has to do things they don't like, honey. You're not the only one with problems." And with that they pushed her off.

So into the forest she went, down the same sunny path the First Girl had gone. The forest was still beautiful and there were still little yellow flowers out, but the Third Girl was still arguing in her head with the elders, and didn't notice them. When she got to the dark part of the woods, like the Second Girl she paused for a minute, and thought very hard about just going off to the West, where there was another town and a pub she had been to. But then she remembered that she had been in the habit of sleeping with a bartender there a few times, which was okay because he was cute and fun, but her head was full of serious thoughts about sexism and inequality in the system and the unfairness of being expected to be independent and happy no matter what, and Cute Fun Bartenders Who You Fuck Occasionally don't want to have serious conversations generally. They are full of their own problems. So she kept walking.

The dark part of the forest was indeed dark. Walking was at least easier, since the shade of the towering old trees kept the floor relatively clear, and you could see forward and around you, but then also you saw nothing ahead of you but more trees. After a day of being motivated she suddenly knew she had to stop, as the sun started to get lower and lower somewhere beyond the vast caverns of tree (at least she assumed it was getting lower because the light was getting dim. We assume when the light gets dim, it is the less threatening option, but really it could have been anything, she thought to herself. It could have been a storm. It could have been the sun dying. It could have been a giant crow searching for dinner). Ideally, she would have done what they do in adventure books, climb up a tree to sleep for safety. But the fear of falling and breaking her leg, all alone here, kept her on the damp ground. And the thought of a fire blocking out all the darkness around her kept her cold. She wanted her eyes to adjust.

She barely slept, but when she did close her eyes, she had a dream. At first she was sitting at a bar by herself. There were lots of gay guys in the bar, and she was watching the door for people coming in who she might know, or any straight man worth having that evening's crush on. One man walked in, and she thought to herself "That's like a older not as cute version of my Ex. Like, not as cute in the face, his nose is weird. But same haircut. He can't really pull it off the same way, The Ex had one of those round happy faces that made that haircut okay. Is it always going to be older men now, have I reached that point? And Why am I always going straight for the ones who remind me of him? The last three boys, they all had parts of him I totally recognized, like Billy knew how to open doors and drink right, and Sam had the same mood swings, and I knew that's why I liked them, but he was the worst relationship of my entire life. What's wrong with human girls that we look for the same qualities that made us miserable in the first place? Animals don't do that. They avoid the bad habits, or the bad habits die off. Like this guy. I don't even like that haircut. And I hated that the Ex wore the same clothes everywhere all the time, like a fucking black tshirt uniform, like he worked for the black tshirt company, and this guy's wearing the exact same boring thing. But here I am thinking about hitting on a guy who for all intents and purposes is..." And while she was drinking her beer and having this internal monologue where basically she lamented her terrible mind and it's terrible purposes, the guy in question picked up his phone and started walking around talking on it, and she realized with a snap and a click that it WAS the Ex. There are some mannerisms that will always be obvious to someone who has known you forever, and for all the hours, years, she had spent watching him on the phone and waiting for him to get off the phone and being pissed he was on the phone, she knew it immediately. Her heart filled with terror, and boom, she woke up.

The forest was dark, but there was a light growing in the distance, which could have been the sun or might have been a far off place being bombed, it's impossible to always know. We just have faith that whatever is providing the light is not the worse case scenario. Knowing she wasn't going to be able to go to back to sleep, she gathered up her sweater/pillow/slash only thing in the world she still owned, and kept walking. The forest was unending, and all looked the same. She knew deep down she wasn't going to find the other two girls, and that probably she would find nothing at all. She wasn't a tracker or hunter or ranger or prince, she had no viable skills to qualify her for a search and rescue. She accepted that wasn't going to happen. What was probably going to happen was that eventually she would happen on another town, somewhere on the other side of this void, and there would be other bartenders. Or maybe some crazy hermit would kill her in the woods and eat her. Or maybe there was nothing at all but woods in the entire rest of the world, and she would wander alone until she died of exposure. But there was absolutely no point in turning around and going back to a place that only wanted her if she was good at what they thought she should be good at, when she very clearly was not.

The Second Girl

Did you know how easy it is to stain skin permanently? Perhaps you do, maybe you've got lots of stains, everywhere, all over you. But the girl had imagined a much more painful involved process. She should have known better, that nothing would have remained popular throughout history if it really awfully sucked.

She had spent the day making peace with her arm. Looking at it, memorizing it unmarked, the way it was after 32 years unblemished. She would never see that particular arm again. It would never be that same uniform shade. It seemed whiter to her at that moment, purer and better and lovelier. She took pictures of it, to remember her arm by.

The actual process was quick. The guy with the gun was Irish, and had big green eyes and a red beard with gray in it. While his tow head bent over her arm, she stared at the books on his shelf - Criminal Tattoos of Russia, A History of Pirates, Garden Secrets for Birds. He told her about the plants his girlfriend was growing on their balcony, and how their pug kept eating them. He talked about how he would like to grow vegetables, because fresh vegetables were expensive, but wanted his own yard to do it in. She was in his thrall, because he had the gun and she had to stay perfectly still. But in retrospect, she would have argued with him. This was Ohio after all. The one thing we could do was grow things. Vegetables should be cheap here.

It was over, and quick. She walked down the street to the Used to Be Dive Bar, and ordered a double on the rocks while she waited for her friend. At first, she kept the bandage on, because she had been told to. But by the time they were at dinner, it was falling off, and she stuffed the bandage in her purse. The biggest worry had been that she would hate it. But now she kept glimpsing it out of the corner of her eye, and every time she saw it, she started to laugh. "I now order whiskey at bars, and I have a tattoo," she said to herself, and she looked at it and loved it and was extremely happy. Her friend was in love, and his eyes dilated when he talked about his girl, which was amazing and heartbreaking at the same time. The bartender had broken his hand himself one night after a game, and made puppy dog eyes when they took pictures of it. Outside the night was mild and warm and dark, and the summer patio lights glowed. She felt the liquor in the back of her throat, and laughed again, easily. Everything was okay. This was a really great summer. She sat outside of the forest, ignoring it till the morning.