Wilmington Vasectomy

There's a guy I know who just got a vasectomy.

It's bad, because at first when he told me about it, I was all supportive and sympathetic, because I had a boyfriend once who got one, and every time I say that out loud to myself, I feel this dark twinge of "Oh geez, he *really* didn't want to get me pregnant..." I mean, no matter who you are, you're going to have some deep pyschological reaction to the idea of a vasectomy or hysterectomy.

So anyway, I was the good, sensible, positive friend. And then he told me about how since he only had one ball, from a previous trauma, the doctor had given him a half price vasectomy. Because they only need to do half the procedure, right? See? And now I can't stop laughing every time I see him. Which is not what you should do to a man who just got fixed.

His girlfriend (and let me tell you, it was a bit weird having casual frank conversation with a couple about their vasectomy) knew a girl who had to have a c-section, and she had them do a hysterectomy at the same time, cause hey, you're already in there. Two for the price of one hysterectomy and baby delivery.

There's a Wilmington Vasectomy Commercial. When Mom came to visit, she was particularly impressed by the soft core porn style billboards for plastic surgery all around town, and also we have local commercials for vasectomy services.

A bunch of women at the co-op where I work just had babies. They are all the cutest babies ever, and not just cause they are babies, but because the general attractiveness of everyone in this place is so much higher, and that also applies to babies. It's gotten to the point where I feel bad when I see a not so cute baby in the place, because it must feel self-conscious next to the virtual Gap ads being carried around in swaths of Egyptian Cotton by their yoga model mothers.

Look, the thing is, I'm not against yoga as exercise, I mean, I have a neutral opinion about it. Certainly everyone I know who does it is much prettier than normal. But the culture of it? With all the clothes and mats and headbands and blissness - it's creepy. I call it Yoga Brain. People come in after class, and they are blissed out on an exercise high, and they're half asleep, wandering around, getting into their cars and driving. Sometimes it's hard to have a conversation with someone who is *really* into yoga, because that weird calmness makes it hard to read the normal physical and social cues. On the other hand, it's pretty easy to convince people with Yoga Brain that you're awesome, because you just have to be sweet and friendly to them, and they think you embody happiness in the universe at that exact moment in time and existence.Which is why I always feel bad when a Yoga Brain's card gets declined, it seems so mean to harsh on them like that. It's usually just cause they entered their pin wrong. But sometimes it's because they've been taking a 20 dollar class twice a day.

I don't know why vasectomies and yoga go together in my brain, but they really do.

I bet there are a lot of old rich men in this town who get vasectomies specifically so they can fuck whatever girls they want to and not have to worry about any illegitimate bastards coming after their fortunes, which are already divided up enough between three alimonies and child support. I bet that's a thriving industry here - the vasectomy that frees you to enjoy the fruits of your manhood and early retirement. A vasectomy you deserve.

If I was an old, rich man, I'd get one.
But also if I was an old rich man, I'd look homeless, so it wouldn't matter. I'd probably *be* homeless.

The One Where We Try This Again

This weekend, Jeremiah came to visit me.
We drank a lot with people in Halloween costumes, and went to the chilly beach, all around the big old mansions and hidden gardens, into the hipster house party and the southern polish festival and down the Cape Fear river on a flat boat with a piano and a dog. I made grits. It was the best I could do for him.

Every time a good friend of mine from Cleveland comes down here, I feel a conflict of personalities - a deep insecurity about how the Past Me will measure up to the Present Me. The Past Me was riddled with bad emotional decisions and squashed ambitions. The Present Me has sun bleached long hair and no money ever and the vulnerability of a small puppy that's just been weaned and needs someone to hug it. I'm not saying one is better than the other - no, actually that's exactly what I'm saying. But I need approval, I crave it constantly, and so a visitor will bring out a need to show them why I'm here. And every time, it works. They all love it here. They all say they want to move down here with me. I seem so happy here, they say. And I'm left feeling drained by my internal conflict, unable to process the validation, and somehow feeling rejected by the world. I want to follow them back to the safety of my neighborhood. I want a world that embraces me and loves me.

People have been repeating a refrain to me lately - how much Wilmington loves me, how amazing it is I know so many people, how great I'm doing for only a year here. I remember hearing the same refrain in Cleveland, and there's something about that kind of praise that makes me feel worse. Because I know it isn't true. I know it's just a facade of confidence I've put on, a persona that is still a persona no matter how hard I try to keep it real and true, and they see what they want to see. I mean, I get this is what we all do, present our good and sane face to the world. But in Cleveland, I had people who had seen me at my worst, for years. Here, that hasn't happened yet. My worst has been lying curled up in a tight little ball inside my chest, and just because I've learned to put a leash on it and teach it to sit doesn't mean it isn't there and it doesn't also need love. That's where the disconnect, the deep unhappiness I feel sometimes, comes from with this place. Most of the time, I'm fine. Half of the time I'm ecstatic here. Some of the time there is a gray heavy fog of despair, and I'm lost in it, and I don't understand why no one else can see it.

One night, I said to my roommate, as we drove back from the bar, "I don't understand it, I'm fuckable, right? I'm not hideous, right?"
And he replied, "Bridget, you're the most confident person I know."
Which is not the response any girl wants to hear.
But there's only a few adjectives Wilmington knows to describe me with - confident, brilliant, intimidating, hilarious. I know I should be grateful to hear those, and I am, but it's only ever those four, ever. Over and over until they lose their meaning. In Cleveland, people threw beautiful or sexy in there occasionally. I haven't heard either of those in over a year. That makes me feel like something is horribly wrong.

 And this is what Jere said to me, he said "Bridget, all the men who have fallen in love with you, it's been through your blog. That's how you get people to want you. You are never going to be the one they look at and fall for, they have to read you."

I think that's depressing as shit, but what can I do?
They don't know, but I know that anyone who loves me for my mind is going to eventually have to deal with the worst of me, that isn't house trained and jumps on people and barks at passing cars all the time. So that'll never last anyway, and the only obvious conclusion is I'm just one of those people the world will love, who will never actually get love. That's a conclusion that tows the fine line of realism versus nihilism. Because sure we all know it's the *wrong* thing to say, that several good souls will try to console me and feed me lines about hope or whatever, but also it's a Very Real Possibility. It happens to people all the time. Especially really smart people who have ambitions of not settling, who are incapable of settling because they know it will turn them into a bad person. It's why having such a reliance on love like I do is a deep personality flaw, and one that will inevitably let you down again and again.

A friend of mine is going to a spiritualist conference this weekend, and the theme is "The Question That Drives You" - figuring out your personal koan. From their website:

"When we take all our life-actions into consideration, what primary drive are they trying to satisfy? If we want to increase our chances of fully satisfying that primary drive, would it make sense to pay more attention to the feeling of it, our interpretations of it, and how we could phrase it to ourselves in question form - in effect finding and working with our personal koan? Does it take great doubt to arrive at certainty?"

It's becoming increasingly obvious that one of the main stories in this town is the seeking of spiritual clarity. I think that must go along with the ocean thing - people attracted to the Great White Noise are seeking respite from the harsh daily noise of the physical real world, and so it makes sense they would be seeking emotional respite as well. There are a million churches here, and they are not all traditional Southern baptist. There is a growing collection of non-denominational, meditation based, yoga based, crystal and oil faiths - all the little closet ones that exist to help the bourgeoisie find a semblance of wisdom by talking to them about their favorite subject - themselves. All human beings love talking about ourselves. It interests us the most. It makes us feel special and important, to be the subject of introspection and critique. Tell me what my soul is like. Tell me what color it is, and what plan it has for me. Tell me how my heart should feel, how to forget I have a mortgage and kids and insurance bills, because I have enough money to cover all those, so I can afford to forget it for a while. Teach me how to be special, how to become superior to the other lost souls around me, and how to find all the other superior people so we can hang out together and talk about how great we are.

In that respect, Catholicism will always have a special place in my heart, because they just get together to talk about how non-special and awful they are. It's refreshing, that old school self-hatred.

I was somehow, almost completely against my mother's will, raised to believe I require no other moral structure than the one already in my head. I am weirdly unimaginative that way - I don't long for a god, or think to myself when I look at a beautiful sunset that there must be one. I don't believe in an afterlife, or anything other than decomposition, and I'm not scared of that, death seems totally normal and non-traumatic to me. My heart stands on a solidly concrete floor where it doesn't feel the need to ask questions of the universe that can't be answered. My heart thinks if there are other answers, I'll just learn them as they are presented, but why bother wondering about them until then?

But I do want to figure out why other people are so obsessed with them. I naturally come to that from a place of superiority, where I think "silly people, don't you know this is futile and doesn't help poor people, and maybe if we all just stopped thinking about ourselves for a few minutes and thought about real world things that would help people, maybe capitalism wouldn't exist." (As a counter-point, I offer this entire blog entry - but I know I would be a better person if I thought about myself less.)

That isn't a helpful attitude to have towards spiritual folks if you're trying to suss out where they come from and what they're about, and why people choose religion. Just like only thinking about yourself isn't helpful to life, thinking you're just naturally smarter than 90% of the population isn't helpful either. I have a fear of coming off like the biggest rube - the one missing some essential part of the human experience and just assuming it doesn't exist cause I don't see it.

So yesterday I was thinking about my own personal koan. What is the nonsensical statement that sums up the inspiration of my self-doubt the most? What is the clutter stopping me from seeing my own personal drive? Or do I already know it, and yes, actually I'm just more intuitive and well-adjusted? And HOW WILL I EVER KNOW IF I KNOW IT?

Is that it?

I mean, what is it that I want? Do I want love more than anything? I have lots of love around me, maybe it's to be desired that I want most. Or do I just want to be sure of what the hell is going on around me? Just to have a real knowledge that how I see reality is pretty close to the truth, and therefore some camouflaged cosmic angler fish isn't going to lunge out and surprise me and chew me up with sharp little teeth. If modern man has become aware that what he perceives as reality is a construct of only his experiences and therefore not reality at all, then isn't it just a primal form of self defense that we try to figure out if we're right or not?

A guy told me recently my desire to never be bored was intimidating. I thought to myself when he said it that he didn't understand where the truly interesting things about knowing someone lay, that when I really like someone, they are never boring to me - that really no one is boring if you are really looking at them and not just at yourself.

Last night, I watched something called John Safran vs. God - it's on Youtube, go find it, all 8 episodes are amazing. But in particular, the Buddhism episode. He goes to a monastery and tries to learn to meditate, to answer the koans correctly, and hold focus. He ends up getting beat with a stick a lot. And in the end he says he doesn't understand why Western Buddhists have left behind the best part of this ancient Eastern religion - which is getting to beat people with a stick a lot.

Maybe if American Buddhists beat each other with sticks, instead of buying 80 dollar yoga mats and burning 20 dollar beeswax candles of the Buddha, maybe I would like them more.

Leave of Absence

I've been gone for a long time.
It's my first summer by the ocean, and it turns out that the worst place in the world to have writer's block is by the ocean, because it's a giant white noise machine designed to get you addicted to cooking in your own sloth. But even worse, everyone tells you how healthy and awesome it is you're going to the ocean every day, because they don't understand you're using it to run away from the 5 stories you owe that you can't seem to write, and the bills you struggle to pay every month, and the general lack of affection in your life that's slowly becoming more of an obsession because sex is more interesting than the novel you were supposed to spend all summer working on that you no longer feel worthy of.

If you're interested in what failure looks like, it turns out it's very, very tan.

After this last full moon, I felt this release of frustration, a venting of sexual energy fed by disappointment and shame, and it came roaring out into the night, almost threw up in the parking lot of Blue Post, and caused me much mortification the next morning when I checked my text messages. But then, as if a boil had been lanced, the paralyzing shame of my own ineffectiveness drained away, leaving room for resolve to be better, and I can feel my head clearing up from the pheromones, and the twenty thousand crushes I had slowly being replaced by the much more useful desire to be a good writer. So I think we're back on track now, or getting there. But I won't be attempting to get back to this blog for a while, because I have those stories, and that novel, and then school starts in two months again. And I am SO far behind.

In the meantime, as a marker for anyone who's googling me and seeing this defunct site (which I still love very very much),  here is a story I recently had published in the UNCW literary magazine, Atlantis. 

Deer Eggs

Gladys comes into the office holding a carton of eggs in her hand. The office is very modern, all the walls are painted happy shades of yellow and white, and the furniture is pale blonde. Gladys is not pale blonde, she is dark mahogany, and her figure is very trim. She wears cotton skirts and cute button up blouses. The effect of her walking across the tastefully gray carpet towards my desk is very neat and professional. Except for the eggs.

She puts the eggs on my desk, and I can see they are larger than chicken eggs, very large in fact, and cracked all over. “You need to take these,” she says, and it is not a request. One of the eggs shakes a little, quivers on its axis in the plastic carton. There is a new crack. Something is moving around.

“What is it?” I try to remain calm. Everything is always a crisis around here.

“Deer eggs. I found them in my backyard, and I can’t have them in the house, Gary will go apeshit if we get deer. He loves his chrysanthemums.” She stands there with her perfectly formed hands on her trim little hips, and for a minute I am consumed with hate for neat little Gladys and her neat little yard and her neat little husband who gardens and has the same first initial as her. But it’s fleeting. I actually like Gladys a lot. I just wish she wasn’t so pretty.

“What am I going to do with them?” Everyone in this office comes to me with the weird stuff. I suppose it’s because I don’t dress like I belong there. I tried at first, but then my entire wardrobe became work clothes, and I felt boring when I went out socially, so I decided it was better to not fit in at the office than not fit in with my friends.  And if it’s not my clothes, it’s probably the mousepad on my desk, which is blown up photos of viruses and bacteria I got from a friend of mine who works at an animal hospital. Being the weird one is okay. It keeps the serious stuff off your desk, and it’s important to not let things land on your desk. Once it’s physically on your desk, the problem is yours; that’s the golden rule here.

“I thought maybe you could take them out to your mom’s farm. Let them live there. They’re mostly deer eggs, but I think there’s a few chicken in there too. Doesn’t your mom have chickens?”

Pushing aside the absurdity of the situation, the fact that Gladys has just brought me a tray of living breathing about to be born animals and that she brought it as casually as one might bring in a jello salad to the company picnic, my nurturing sucker instincts take over. If there are chickens in there, they need heat. I pick up the tray and position it under the small sun lamp I have for my cactus. Gladys seems satisfied that I’ve taken ownership by my act of touching the damn things, and walks away.

I’ve never heard of deer eggs. I sit there in my office chair for a minute studying them. They are large, almost the size of ostrich eggs. I pick one up carefully with two hands. It is hot and disturbingly smooth, like a child’s hand. It gives a violent shake and I almost drop it, so I put it safely back. But they will need to be moved. I have a bread basket on my kitchen counter, I think I can line it with a towel and that should do. It is impossible to work after that. I try to type, but the slightest movement of the eggs distracts me. I google “deer eggs” and find nothing. I feel a fear building in me, a worry, I have no idea what’s actually in those things. Are they hawks? Ducks? Platypuses? Obviously I know it’s not deer, I’m not an idiot, I know how mammals work. But it’s hard to fight the instinctual excitement of something being born. Whatever’s in there, I want them to survive.

Finally the day is over. I drive home carefully, the eggs cradled in my coat on the front passenger seat, my hand hovering over them in case I have to stop suddenly. I feel infinitely relieved when I get them upstairs to my second floor walkup and they are established safely in my smallest laundry basket, the bread basket being too small after all. They sit there, on my kitchen counter under the sun lamp for the rest of the night. I lock the cat up in the second bedroom. I drink a beer and sit there on my only stool, watching them, gently touching, tracing the cracks with my fingertips. I can tell which ones are the chicken ones, there are two of them and they are much smaller. They don’t move nearly as much as the four larger eggs and I worry they are dead, but maybe they are just not ready to come out.

The next morning when I wake up, I’m ecstatic to see one of the chicken eggs is cracking too. All of them are moving like crazy, it shouldn’t be much longer. I remember something about turning the eggs, to make sure they are coming out right side up. Sticking my hand in the basket to gingerly move them is the same as sticking it in a basket of scorpions. I recognize there is now a terror weight in my chest, a large beast breathing slow hot air into my cheeks, which are vivid and red. I call off work, tell them I have a fever. I have a little fantasy while I'm eating cereal that Gladys wonders why I'm not there, wonders if something happened. But better that it be me, the girl living alone with no husband or kids to worry about. I start to feel more charitable to her, but only a little.

It's a beautiful warm sunny day. I take a book with me to the back yard, and the basket. We lay in the sun. I'm vaguely aware that an actual mother would never do this because of hawks and vermin. "Lucky eggs, you. You landed in the arms of a superior predator, " I say to them. They are being still at the moment, it must be hard work, hatching. Especially if you're a little deer, trying to kick out with your spindly little knocky knees all tied up in knots. Someone close by is cutting the grass, and it smells warm. I fall asleep briefly.

I dream of the pulsing red beats of life, of the color of your thumb when you hold a flashlight to it, of the spark of livesavers in my mouth late at night around a school trip camp fire. I dream of falling off my bike, and first dates.They are dreams of being afraid and full of awe at the same time, a euphoric lack of control over the universe’s laws and regulations.

When I finally open my eyes, my body is cold and stiff. The sun has gone down, way down, and the yard is night time dark. There are crickets chirping in the blue shadow leaves, and the memory of the sun still lingers but has chilled considerably. I sit up. Even the grass feels sharper. Looking down by my side, I can see the eggs are lying broken, empty.

They are stumbling in the weeds, a few feet away. Tiny, delicate, and awkward; only a few inches tall and glowing a faint moonlight green. The hooves of their stumbling glass feet must be smaller than my fingernail. My eyes trace the contours of their arched necks, their pointed fawn ears laid back in confusion, their big dark eyes wide with introduction. The babies stumble and climb up unsteadily again, the strong ones are fairly walking already. Among the stalks of grass that are barely taller than their heads, the light from their bodies sparkles and drifts, interrupted like glitter. I stay incredibly still, and barely I catch the soft high pitched squeals and murmurs. It sounds like pieces of chandelier glass knocking against each other.

Then I catch a different sound, a very ordinary cheep, a chirp, from a little closer. By my knee, the one little chicken to survive. She is shivering in the evening air, curled up against a fold in the blanket. I reach down and cup her beating weak body in my hands, hold her up to my cheek. She settles into me immediately, and falls asleep. I think to myself that I’ll give this one to Gladys in the morning, she and Gary can take care of a chicken, they’ll probably like that. A pet chicken playing among the chrysanthemums. The chick and I watch the deer,  keeping each other warm.

Desperate Times Call for Desperate Confidence

So I'm in a self inflicted bind. I need some way to get at least 700 dollars in the next two months in order to stay afloat with school, and an apartment. It's not as bad as it was a month ago, when I was basically fantasizing about mild acts of prostitution as a possible solution (I'm sorry Mom, but we're all adult women here and we've all had those holes.)Thanks to the fact that I have some superpower when it comes to finding really amazing friends wherever I go, the fog of "Oh my god, this is so fucked up I can't even imagine it ever changing, good or bad, like I can't even conceive of the very worst result", that fog has lifted a little. But...there's not a very large margin for error, and I want to be able to stay in school, so I'm not fucking around with this.

I don't think of myself as someone with very much to offer this planet, but I do think the one thing I know how to do with semi-reliable accuracy is write a short short story. Especially when I have a very specific audience. Like, you guys know, you've read those posts that were very obviously intended for one person, usually a boy. I'm not a good typist. I'm not a particularly good comedian. But I can be a good writer.

So for a donation of ten dollars, I will write you a 300-400 word story, about anything you ask me to. Anything at all. I'm sort of hoping you will get creative with it, but I will not promise to write porn. I won't *exclude* it, but I reserve the right to ask for a new subject. And then you will own that story. If I ever want to use it again, I'm going to have to ask and possibly pay you. If I was a painter, this would be the equivalent of me painting caricatures for tourists on the beach. If I was a musician, it would busking on a street corner in Ann Arbor.

Also you can totally buy more than one story, but you can't buy a longer one for more, like I'm not writing a 1000 word story for 20.

After you buy one, I would ask that you come back to this post and leave a comment telling me if you like it or not. I will allow you one edit - I will go through and change things you ask me to.

As an added selling point, I would like to remind you I wrote this. 
(I love that post so much, I will pretty much link to it at every given chance for the rest of my life.)

I really really didn't want to start a kickstarter, because this is isn't 2009. So I'm just going to request you use paypal. My email is sharpshinyclaws@gmail.com. So make a payment and then email me what you would like. Within 5 days I will email you back a story.

If nobody does this, and this was a stupid idea, I'm not going to tell you guys either way, so there.

A Conversation Between My Dad, Dorothy Day, and Cesar Chavez

This is what Dorothy and Cesar look like when I try to put them in the same room in my head. 

Today is my dad's birthday. He is not dead, just to clarify, this isn't some conversation taking place in heaven. I just thought I'd bring two dead people back, because when I think about who I'd like to see talking to my dad, these are the two foremost names I associate with him. That may not be completely his fault, the choice of pacifist urban catholic hippie school they sent me to had a large part to do with it. Remember, before environmentalism, how we used to celebrate Peace Day by writing presentations on Day, Chavez, Ghandi, and MLK, and then sending off large amounts of dangerous balloons careening into the atmosphere? It was very pretty though. And they stopped it, a while ago. We were just so innocent then.

So anyway, my dad is not dead, and looks like himself. Chavez is dead and now thanks to Google is irrevocably illustrated in my head as a Dora character. Dorothy Day, for reasons best kept to myself looks like a combination of Dorothy Parker, and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. In real life, that's not that far off. She's also dead.

Scene: A Parma Pizzeria, with green vinyl chairs and little red votive candles on the table. 

Dorothy: Food for the body is not enough, there must be food for the soul. In the spirit of that sentiment, I would like to suggest we order the Vegetarian Lovers.

Cesar: If you really want to make a friend, go to someones house and eat with them. The people who give you their food, give you their heart. So we should probably just get the House Special. I can pick off the peppers. Also, extra pepperoni.

Dad, to Waiter: Can we please get one large, with half green peppers and mushrooms for the Saint here, and the other half pepperoni?
(aside to Dorothy) Cesar's not such a fan of vegetables unless he knows where they come from.

Dorothy: Don't call me a saint, I don't like being dismissed so easily. But whatever.

Cesar to Dad: The fight is never about tomatoes or peppers, it is always about people.

Dad: I know. You said that.

Cesar: I mean, it's never about ferries.

Dad: Very funny.

(The pizza comes. Dorothy covers hers in red pepper, and Parmesan. Cesar eats his plain, with a fork. Dad gets a slice on his plate, then stands up at the bar a couple feet away to eat it.) 

Dorothy: So, I don't understand facebook.

Cesar: I can see how social media has the potential to be a powerful organizing tool, but the last rally we held, we had 217 replies that said they were coming, and only 20 showed up. That seems like an irrational proportion.

Dad: Well, that's why getting low income people internet access is so important - the people who need the organizing don't have those lines of communication yet. And you cannot get a job in today's workforce if you don't know how to use a computer, you can't even be a mechanic anymore. And it's why it's so important that we fight for keeping the internet unmonitored, without corporate regulation. Because this is how the world talks to itself these days, this is the beginning of a new era in human connectivity, and we can't let people be kept behind. Facebook is just a sort of commercial infancy, but it has it's uses. For instance, my daughter has never been able to remember my birthday ever, her entire life. It took her twenty years just to get it in her head it was in April. But this year Facebook told her. She's still super poor, so she can't get me anything, but I'm sure she'll call at least.

Dorothy: I'm sure part of her inability to remember you or her mom's birthdays is because somewhere in her very active childhood imagination she associated your birthday with you dying one day, and we both know if you or Bonnie ever die, she is totally screwed, she needs at least twenty more years to be okay on her own.

Cesar: Maybe she'll marry someone rich and get them to build the ferry for you.

Dad: That's enough Cesar.



The Plain Dealer gave a birthday present to my dad today, go read it here. 

Missed Connections

Guys, I'm obsessed with Missed Connections on Craigslist.
And I'm not the only one. I keep meeting people, one here, one there, who all admit they read it every day.
I recently referred to it in a set as the Romantic's Lottery, which no one found very funny.
But a couple people did.
In Cleveland, for a minute, for a good six months, I got really into writing fake ones. But like, obviously fake ones. One to every hipster boy in the ABC on a Thursday night. Another one to all of my ex boyfriends at once. I usually got a lot of responses to those - boys who just wanted to say how funny they thought it was, others who obviously trolled the boards writing every single w4m ad trying to arrange apartment trysts in the time between their girlfriend leaving and their shift at Olive Garden.
In Cleveland, you always saw a lot of Missed Connections posted for pregnant women, there were a lot of pregnancy fetishes - or maybe men in Cleveland are just obsessed with fertility in the face of crushing economic depression.
Here in Wilmington, there's not as many, and most of them are for bartenders or college girls. Not a lot of people use craigslist. I've become a cheerleader for it, in the hopes of making it more active, I tell people about it constantly. It's 2004 again, and I'm still hoping someday all the regional craigslists will take off, as I wander wistfully through the NYC boards.
I've never had one posted about me, except maybe this one that I think was from my ex boyfriend, about how much he never wanted to see me again and how much my book sucked. I'm not positive it was him, but I read it and thought immediately it might be, which is how these things work. If it's not him, then somewhere out there is another girl writer whose ex also hates her, and that scenario massively appeals to me too, especially cause I want to know if her book really does suck.
Recently there was an ad posted on the m4w boards here with the title Bigfoot was a Republican, and was a "literary" ad, which basically just described his dream girl as a barefoot hippie with a lot of trash in her car who picks up hobos and reads a lot of Tom Robbins, and then threw his vision out into the universe, waiting to see what stuck to it.
I wrote him and told him I liked reading it. We emailed each other a few times. It died off, like these things do.
But the point is I am skidding on the line between just reading and actively participating.
The other day this very cute guy was at my friends house, and mentioned he read them all the time too. he has a girlfriend, but if he didn't, it would be incredibly tempting to write him a real one. Except how does one even do that?
Yesterday a customer brought a professor from school in who I hadn't met, and introduced me, and he made a really good impression. Then I googled him, and found this hilarious local paper article about him, that made me like him even more. But the teachers are never searchable on facebook really, so I wrote him an email at his school address that was basically like " this made me laugh a lot, sorry this is creepy I googled you, if you want to talk to me here's my real email." And I keep feeling like I've done something untoward, even though I don't think I have really? He's my age. We're adults. But before I actually wrote the email, I actually thought about writing him a Missed Connection, just to see if he was the type.
Because there's something nice and a little crazy in a comforting way about someone who reads them, to me anyway.

But they are so crass mostly. It reminds me of the people who pick up civet cat poop to find the coffee beans. Just digging in shit for some caffeine.

Wait, Kurt Cobain is Dead?

 Something like Kurt Cobain dying, I guess I wasn't old enough for it to really be anything to me, but it seems like it means a lot to everyone else my age. I don't know why this is, except for the way I was culturally behind all my classmates cause of my parents being hippies/hipsters/weirdo nerds. I mean, don't get me wrong, all the hippie/hipster/weirdonerd parents I know now, my taste turned out awesome, I think it's properly bloomed in all the right places. But be aware that you are automatically sending your children through the same cultural growing pains you went through. And maybe they won't care about Kurt Cobain the way they are supposed to.

 Nirvana Unplugged is the album that meant the most to me because it was the one I had consistently in every car or radio I was regularly around. The first album of theirs I actually got was when I was in eighth grade and I signed myself up for one of those Columbia club things - my credit was doomed even then. It was one of those deals where you get five free cassettes for the price of one, or you have to cancel in thirty days or something like that. I ordered Nevermind, The Blue Album, Whipsmart, Dookie, Flood. Flood was the only one I actually knew I liked. The rest were guesses. They were pretty fucking good guesses for an eighth grader.

 Kurt Cobain's sweater probably influenced me more than anything else. If they make a time capsule of the nineties, that sweater should be in it.
 And then they should burn it, the whole thing.

I don't understand why the nineties have come back into style.
I'm not ungrateful, I understand that as a single woman in my thirties, I have a unique opportunity to actually know a little bit more about dressing in that particular crushed velvet style better than the girls who are awkwardly struggling through how to wear floral print right now. But I don't want to. I hated that style even then. The only good things that came out of that were plaid shirts, doc martens, and army jackets. Frankly, it's a little cheating to claim army jackets for the 90s instead of the 70s, but you guys are old, you're not going to argue. You're more worried about your taxes.

 I'm in my thirties, I should be worried about my taxes too. But maybe that's one of the reasons why everyone still talks abut Kurt Cobain's anniversary even though there are far more important things going on in the world -( like for instance last night I learned my moon is in Capricorn, which apparently tells me that I'm constantly trying to be pragmatic about my emotions, which totally explains my fling with open relationships.) Anyway, no, that's not one of the important things, but my point is why do we bother nineteen years later to conjure up any emotions about this short lived singer who while very influential musically, hardly taught the world anything meaningful except how we all have weird fucked up sexually ambiguous lyrics bouncing around in our psyches. We've all moved on to more self involvement - we've clarified our selfishness over the years. I guess that's an important lesson - Kurt's championing of self involvement definitely influenced the blogosphere and Twitter. But not Facebook, it didn't influence Facebook, that's a whole new kind of self awareness or lack of, and that to me proves that he's sorta defunct in this time. It's not far enough away from the turn of the century for us to be idolizing our turn of the century monsters yet. Give it another thirty years and I'm sure Kurt will feel more relevant. To me Nirvana, and the early nineties, was about a large part of the population discovering culture. Now we've got too much culture, our society hasn't figured out even how to process it correctly yet, we're lagging behind our accesses.

 But we've run out of fashion styles to fixate on (there are far many less styles of human dress than we like to think, it is only a fraction of the internet), in this day and age where it's more about costumes of self than ever. So the nineties got resurrected, because it's cheap and easily replicated in Targets. All the loose cuts mean it's easier for clothing manufacturers to mass produced the patterns and prints. Pleather is cheap. Plus, honestly, tights and leggings are never going to go away. Once it become socially acceptable to wear them without dresses, girls were never going to wear pants or pantyhose again - because we like being comfortable but we all hate our legs. I'm hoping what will happen is the cuts of the nineties will stay and the prints will change.

 Maybe that's what Kurt did - and that's why even little grade school me liked him - because he kept all the same cuts but changed the prints - made them solid lime green wools that beaded up easily in the washer, and were impossible to wash blood stains out of. That's why I resent him being thought of so importantly, because to me the lesson was the singer was totally unimportant, what mattered was an entire group of people growing up in the same economic class, dressing the same, in the same country, the same TV culture, all understanding what he was saying and feeling that potential in ourselves, both to be great and to be a colossal failure of a grown up who does too many drugs and ends up killing themselves out of pure spite in like, the most selfish way possible. A messy way.

 In summary, I think this is all about clothes.And also about how we worry as adults that the kids won't be as angry as we were, that the world will run out of time for anger, like we have in our always exhausted adulthoods. Which I guess also is all about clothes, but in a more sweatshoppy way.

The Breaks in Communication

Things that stop me from talking to you like I would talk to myself, washing dishes in my kitchen on a sunny afternoon, listening to the water pour over porcelain bowls and into the metal of the sink, with my cheeks and hair warm from the light, and the thoughts that lay heavy but quick on my mind, drumming:

1) I cannot stand the way your hair looks, the patterns and teases it takes on. Him with the fractalized mop of muppet coal, Him with the thick golden brown mane of dog hair, Him with the silvery patina carefully sculpted and trimmed. Your hair silences me, it takes all of my concentration to not touch it, and then there is no energy left for being witty. I feel my own lank oil pan brown tresses, which are soft in my fingers, but overall disappointing aesthetically, and I want you to want to touch my own hair the same way, but doubt that many people in the world feel the need for touch the way I do, and therefore out of deference, I never do. He once accused me of not being affectionate enough, but when I heard that, I thought of all the times I had looked at him and thought about kissing him, thought about touching his face or his shoulders, and had refrained because what if it wasn't right? This is how I feel most of the time, like I am a vast being of air and wind which longs to caress everything, and I am bottled up inside a short squat rubber mold, disconnected even from the nerves that flow through this plastic skin, cut off by the habit of courtesy. Of not wanting to make people uncomfortable.

2) I am not witty. I string any witticisms that come out of my mouth from the fragmented broken bodies of other better thoughts. I cut and pare and pair, until a thought has become a joke, but I never like my jokes as much as I do the messy convoluted things I say to myself, out loud, or to you, stoned on a Friday night, trying to explain how I can be personally offended by you calling your ex crazy, not because I'm actually personally offended, but because on a universal level all women are offended by a man who judges them crazy without attaching the caveat of his own craziness, and all older women, we recognize we have been brutalized by this, we shy away from the suggestion of it as if you had raised your hand against us. But if I explain this to you, you will merely nod and think to yourself that I am crazy too. Which of course I am, we are all crazy, we long for punchlines instead of discussions so we can easily compartmentalize the crazy and quickly judge it, because crazy is okay as long as it produces art, and only then, and even then not for sleeping with.

I am exactly like every other girl. When I was younger, I pretended I was not, and I got laid a lot more. But I don't have any interest in lying anymore.

3) I am awkward. I fumble with my body. I overthink how I look, how you look, the distances with which we're sitting, the surrounding people, the position of the car seat, the smudge of my eyeliner, the little curl by my ear, and the proportion of skin to cloth. I think this way because I want you to love me, guy or girl, dog or bird or car, I want you to love me enough to keep me close by always, I need protection. I collect people like armor. Despite my attempts at being correct, this desire to be loved seeps through the best intention and artifice. It is thick and gray and like fog or cilantro, some people have the yen for it and others only smell fire and taste soap. He told me that it was a problem for me, this wanting to be loved so much. I told him I knew, but I couldn't change it, the way you can't change current or the natural color of your hair.

4)  I don't look up to you. I don't look up to anyone.  Therefore, if you won't give me escape from this awkwardness, I won't beg for it, and it will harden and cement, as if affection and ease were a liquid to be mixed in slowly with the dry, folded even, tablespoon by tablespoon, and once the bread bakes up flat there is no saving it.

5) I have assumed things about you.

5) You should understand that these charges of emotion that hurl around me, while volatile and vulnerable, are not the things I subsist on. You take my pronouncements as seriously as if I had just cut my wrists in front of you, but I only articulate these thoughts for entertainment. I was only heartbroken once, when it broke for months and I ate nothing, and did nothing, and felt dead. You weren't responsible for that, and you will never recreate that, and I'm sorry that black stain exists in me now because it is definitely the immovable dark part. I purge these happy flitting emotions, the every changing crushes and angers, vanities and rejections, like blistering fireflies boiling up from my skin, and then they float away and I'm still here, the large dark purple squid floating in a black ocean, nameless with unknown intent, waiting. I breathe in a larger hope, living on it, and when I breathe out, anger and lust are the gaseous rejects of my body digesting love. Not your love, necessarily. Love. The thing larger than ourselves that breathes hot on the back of our necks and makes it hard to talk to you.

The point is, I don't know how you're supposed to talk to a squid either, so I forgive you and I'll just be floating over here when you realize you are bored.

Blood Week

I'm going to try like heck to start posting on this blog at least twice a week. Because when I don't, I notice I start to measure my self worth by things like how shiny my hair is, or did anyone come over to talk to me at the party. This blog acts like a time stamp, a brand marking my true worth, and so when you see it lying dormant for a little while, the world has come between me and myself and that way lies madness. Lots of cigarettes and madness.

So here's what I got so far.

1) House of Cards is awesome. Question: Did I have a Southern accent fetish my whole life, and this is actually why I wanted to study writing down here, because I wanted to meet Kevin Spacey and let him mind fuck me into a vaguely euphoric kudzu infested sleep of submission? Answer: possibly. What I do know is that my predilection for grossly stereotypical Southern blowhards means I have to stop criticizing people with a Louisiana vampire fetish, cause basically they're the same thing.

Last night the Prince called me at 1am to tell me he thinks Kevin Spacey's character has directly influenced his life, because he was super productive and unfeeling yesterday.

2) My taillight on the car is out and I can't afford to fix it right now, so the next few days will be full of cop paranoia. Which is like money paranoia, except worse, cause I'm already full of car breaking down paranoia.
I vaguely miss not having a car, but once the financial hole I got myself into by taking that Cleveland trip is resolved, my natural ability to turn stress in a water soluble digestible fiber should take over.

3) The first day of my period this month was also, coincidentally, the first day of Passover. I don't know, possibly not a coincidence at all. Maybe my body was all like "Hey God, I don't actually own a doorway, but the vagina is a metaphorical doorway, so I'm going to just smear this blood on it and hope you metaphorically leave my firstborn alone." I love the story of Passover because it's all about communicating with a higher power directly through blood, as if God was a lurking sneaking stealthy beast who speaks no human language, and we can barely control it enough to sic it on our enemies, but it also might turn on us at any moment if we don't appease it with blood. Spring is a good season for Blood Holidays - Passover, Easter, International Workers Day. Spill the blood and take the blood and make the universe listen to you with it.

I also love that it's the one holiday where we're all like - hey, god could kill you whenever he wants, like, immediately, with no reason or circumstance, just by being like boom! gone! So don't eat any yeast.

This menstrual connection is really fleshing out here.

4) My voice has somehow gotten much better in the last year. I mean, not great, but for a while there I wasn't really able to sing at all, and now I feel like I can at least as well as I could in high school. This makes me incredibly happy, and I'm singing all the time now, whenever I can. That's a big difference between the bus and a car - you can't sing on the bus but you can sing the entire time you're driving. Everyone make me CDs okay. Not itunes playlists, I can't play those in the car.

5) If it weren't for the inconvenient messiness of it, I would actually enjoy my PMS week/ period a lot, because in these two weeks I can actually feel the waves of hormones and emotions, good and bad they become physical and real instead of just health book hypotheticals, and I can imagine the drugs my body naturally produces coursing into my brain and making all the little electric neurons go frantic, like a Lite Brite had sex with a Simon Says. When it's so real you can actually taste the pennies, it's makes it so much easier to know your own intentions. Like, tonight my intention is to go to sleep, forever. In twenty minutes, my intention is to stand in a hot shower for an hour. Later today I will become effusively happy, and then dead tired, and it will be entirely predictable and minutely controllable. When I'm not a churning bag of hormones, who knows what the fuck I want. Certainly not me, most of the time.

If you want a straight answer out of me, I try to give that all of time, but there's one week in particular where I can't do anything else, and that was last week. So...save them up for next month? I think I just like myself more when I'm bleeding. It feels so much more true, like whatever mask I'm trying to wear for your sakes doesn't even fit that week. And then the blood actually starts, and happiness returns to my cells, and life flows on again, having sated the blood god one more fertility season. Women are springtime incarnate once a month, that's a gift.

But also, I am the firstborn. That means something. Plagues and sacrificial desirability. Inheritances. Staring down the Beast, who isn't Kevin Spacey, but if Kevin Spacey were to play the Beast in a movie, none of us would blink at the image of him growling dark and incoherent around doorways, waiting to drag the eldest off for the sin of being born to his enemies. Someone make me a CD of Kevin Spacey coming for the Egyptians, and I'll learn to sing along to that.

The Love That Remains After the In Love

 The temptation to let the entire month of March go by without acknowledging it is overwhelming. It's already the 22nd. I had Spring Break, and I had Midterms, and I had shows and taxes and got a car and got laid by some very nice people and one terrible person. But I knew he was a terrible person before it happened, so that was fine. I did my taxes and made sure my FAFSA was in and worried about school bills. I missed a lot of work, and then worked a lot to make up for it. My hair got super long and I started wearing very dark smudgy eyeliner again. Today for instance, I'm dressed in what I call my 1970s Italian summer outfit. This year I'm just going to try and channel Sophia Loren. 

I used to go to this place called The Tower, which was an apartment above a storefront on Lorain Ave. In the storefront was a tax prep place, with only one sign to advertise that, and windows covered with butcher paper and dirt. Across the street was a convenient store, and when I walked over there to get cigarettes, the old Syrian guy who worked there would check my I.D. and exclaim "Oh! Brigitte Bardot!" Every. single. time. So I've got to just start with the first name and next learn French and Italian (not or, and. Let's be honest about this.) And I'm going to have to get kinda tan but not too tan, and wear nothing but black or white underwear, and never run out of mascara. Get it? Mascara? Run?

Fuck you March. 

""In North Carolina, it's 60 and I'm cold. In Ohio it's 30 and you're angry." - Scott





There is a moment where you look at someone and you see them very clearly. Exactly what measure of asshole they are currently, and what kind of sweetheart they are, and the veil of whatever tolerance you were willing to give them lifts. Any excuses, any lust for power or affection, and forgiveness you gave them in the name of circumstance - it all disappears and you're left with the naked fact. How much exactly do you like this person, and how important are they in your life?

Most of the time, the answer is not very. Sometimes you realize you hate them, other times you know you love them. Sometimes you see that they used to be really important, but you shouldn't make decisions including them anymore, that period of your life is over.  

And that's what happened with me and Cleveland during Spring Break. 
Not Cleveland the people, the people were fine. I saw friends I missed a lot, and family, cats and dogs. I didn't get to talk to anyone as much as I would have liked, I wanted an entire day for each person and then I would have just had to move back home. 
But Cleveland the city? 
You know how that's not always a bad thing, to see and know a thing clearly for what it is? In fact, it's the best thing right? The Love that remains after the In Love is over.

I saw my old cat Eddy of 13, 14 years? for the first time in six months, and realized I was genuinely not a cat person, but that I was going to cry a lot when she died, because she was the last part of 20s me that remained, hanging on tenaciously, refusing to get older.

I saw The Prince and realized I was always going to be in love with him, and that we would make the worst couple ever, and that I'd be lost without him in my life and I was never going to stop talking to him again.



 As soon as I articulated this to myself, I missed my Hitman like someone had just swung a cinderblock at my head. But once the worst of the pain was over, it was okay. That's how it works, just deal with the pain and then it will be over and you will hardly remember except every time you fall in love with anyone ever again.

The Prince took me to Cafe Miami, finally, after never successfully going there with me our entire whirlwind summer last year, because we never got up in time. That was crazy as shit. I can't even begin to explain it, because you aren't me or the Prince, and so therefore when you go, you'll appreciate it in your own way, but definitely not our way. He complained the whole time about how fucking cold it was, and it was horribly cold. There was this white stuff on the ground and all this frozen water, and it was practically unlivable. But he also, somehow, without planning to, took me to the library, and to walk on the breaker rocks, and to the coffeeshop I loved, and managed somehow to give me the best kind of Cleveland non-tourist experience. Which I don't usually need any help with, in my own city, but I was just SO COLD. And that's why he's so good with couchsurfers, I guess.

Everyone who saw me at shows asked me where the old confident Bridget had gone. I thought about how the only thing people in NC ever told me is how they wondered at how confident I was, and then I got very quiet.

I saw Jere, and discovered that moving away from him has made him infinitely more valuable to me and I want him to move here please and be my exploration partner again. I can't talk more about that here, but it's absolutely imperative he do this.

I had sex in an abandoned church made yoga studio, and realized I got off more on it being a yoga studio than a church even, as far as desecration sexiness goes, because I find yoga just as creepy as church, and sex in places that creep you out is a power grab. I think that's why I want to tell everyone about it, because I deal with yoga as a presence in my life every day at work, and I don't hate. I even respect it. But I am scared of it. It tries to tell me every day how ugly and unworthy I am, because I'm fat and not rich and drink and smoke. So having sex in it's own lair is kind of a coup for me.  

All the shows went pretty well I think. 
I made some money, I sold some books. 
I saw Mom and Dad at the farm, the dogs came back covered in horse manure. 
Then I drove back the 14 hours by myself in a car that I had been convinced would leave me to die in West Virginia somewhere, only it didn't, and instead I just drove through the mountains singing for an entire day and it was kinda easy and amazing. Turns out I like driving by myself  a lot. I'm sure that's not a surprise to anyone who's ever had a veil lifting moment about me.

And then I came home, to North Carolina, and it was actually coming home.  Which is disorienting, but a relief at least, that it turns out I made the right decision. The first trip back to the city of your birth is always a test. 

Whenever I think about Austin renting a car and driving all the way down to North Carolina to come get me and take me home, I feel so incredibly loved. Austin, Scott, Jere, Lou, Don, Ramon, David, Sean, Peter, I know all the best boys.