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

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

But then the strawberries came back.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

So Close to Something Better Left Unknown

"I forgot about Michael and was delivered back to something crude and familiar, a time when my life hinged on maintaining an animal stillness"

First of all and most important to how everything went down, you can smoke in Pittsburgh. Getting to smoke inside, at the bar, is like Christmas every time. Every cigarette. Even the 20th one in a long day of drinking. Christmas Miracle. Also important to this story is the fact that every shot she ordered came in a full size glass, and was basically a mixed drink without any ice. Without knowing these two things ahead of time, one might wonder how she was persuaded to spend 48 hours going between bars, one after another.

To get to Pittsburgh, there is a long long stretch of darkness that comes first. There is a toll road. There are hours of black two lane highways that roll first across the flatness of Ohio, over a million rivers and creeks, and then cuts into the Pennsylvania hills as if the flatness gave the road speed enough to crash into the mountains and erode them like a glacier over time, the millions of cars chipping away at the hills as the young people drive back and forth between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, back and forth for shows and family and girlfriends and meetings and parties. There is the toll worker that will ask her if she's caused any accidents yet, and she will hazily (drugged by the driving) not understand if she's driving badly or if he's pseudo hitting on her, in that way that men do when stuck in jobs they hate, and as she drove away she realized her left breast was almost hanging out her dress, she's all dressed up for seeing people, and she'll try to pull herself together before the destination because even though driving is a still frozen activity it's impossible to arrive at a place unscathed. No matter how nicely you tried to look, you will always present the appearance of just rolling out of bed when you get where you're going.

But once the drive was over, Johnny had her meet him at this bar which was actually a club. The opposite of a place she might go or might expect, a bar with two dance floors and 25 yr olds grinding to Will Smith and Backstreet Boys, which is retro now, in the very clubbiest part of Pittsburgh which by all appearance (poor actual Pittsburgh, thrown against the hills in the shadows, while the downtown tries to glitter and shine) should not exist. But have enough college kids in one place and everything will eventually exist. There was a group of people she didn't know, and the one cute friend she sort of knew who was standing there watching Johnny and his girlfriend and shaking his head at being there as well, but what the fuck, if we're going to be here then I will fucking be here she thought, and she bought Johnny's girlfriend a shot, which was three shots in one glass, and sang along to Rhianna because that's what you do sometimes to get in with the girls, and accepted that tonight was going to be a night where strange girls motorboated her and she paid cover charges, and she tried to be the best kind of sport, but was still very relieved when they left for a real bar. One that was still crowded at close, but where there were less wanna be video dancers, and more girls in cute jackets with glasses, and guys actually talking to each other instead of escorting their conquests home. And the first night ended up in an attic after party, smoking in small groups, which was her thing anyway really. She does well in attics. She always ends up in attics.

In the morning, they went to the casino early in the morning, early for them anyway, by 12? Unheard of. Johnny won 50 on the roulette table immediately, within five minutes, and then walked away, and she appreciated the resolve, because the point was the casino champagne brunch, unlimited drinking oh and also eating. Casinos in the daylight are always fun to her, less hustle and bustle, more watching the old people eat away their retirement savings and this particular casino had more daylight inside than she had ever seen. Usually they keep it dark, so you don't know what time it is, and you lose track of yourself. But here it was bright and clean and the buffet area was just like any other breakfast place, only the old waitress named Patty kept bringing her champagne to fill up her lip gloss stained flute, and later gave Johnny's girlfriend an ibuprofen wrapped up in foil from her purse, which made her fall in love with the waitress and secretly hope the rest of the table gave her a massive tip. She tried french toast first, when that failed, the hottest stir fry she could get them to make, drenched in chili oil. The plates were hilarious. The girl with nothing but sushi and cornbread. The guy who tried everything seafood they had. The other guys, one with three plates of food at once, another with nothing but heavy Italian, and then finally when they all started on desserts, Johnny's insistence on a shrimp and dessert plate. And Robin eating it. Because at least it's pretty colors. At least it looks edible.

Then the bathroom at the casino, which appeared to tipsy her to be a portal. Not to heaven or hell, but some ambivalent dimension where there were some annoying ghosts, but mostly you just walked around alone, the Shining but for Midwest retirees, and sometimes you got your period while out of town and it caused you to give even less of a fuck than you normally would because that's what PMS does to her, when it's all said and done and there, then everything else, the hours and the people run together in happenstance, and she doesn't care about anything because there are shiny lights and new people and champagne and Kanye and tunnels. Hormones draining makes her gleeful. Sure she doesn't really feel like a girl, but she feels like a person. Johnny won some more roulette money, and talked about his system, which was not a system but a prayer to the power of everything on black. She tried to stay a quiet drunk, but then turned the music up loud in the car, because even around people she didn't know she tried to keep her mouth from running, especially the sarcastic things especially the strange thoughts that might make her seem too weird. Especially the kind of conversations she feels are inappropriate to have around other people's boyfriends, though she doesn't mean anything by it, she's just one of those kind of drunks.

The plan was to drive to Ambridge and see an abandoned building. But the plan was derailed pretty quickly when they realized they hadn't left the casino till 4, and the light went away while they were at the rugby bar, where once again they met people who worked at the casino, like they did at every bar. So instead of straight to Ambridge, they went to a cold snowy park at the top of a hill, and there were lights everywhere across the valley, progress glittering like stars, like her skin cells felt they must be glittering too, between the artic biting cold and the warm flush of discovery. It was the very prettiest park, and she thought about the difference between Lake people like her, and River Hill people, like him, which is snow tires and a sense of land bound ambition, where the views are not where the waves crash, but how high you can get up in the sky.

Johnny kept apologizing, because he didn't realize that the story she was after was the adventure that just sort of happened, not always the planned kind. And they drove in the dark on the Ohio River Blvd, above the valley, singing to Belle and Sebastian, then tapping fingers to bluegrass. He took her to another bar, the kind she liked so much more, where she finally got to talk to him a little, and make him tell her stories about breaking down in the desert and about childhood friends who were genius musicians. Things you can't get people to tell you when they are in groups of friends, the sort of things you have to drink with someone alone to get into, which were the conversations she liked most, she's a much better singular drinker because Johnny, it's not your loud bar singing or flailing hand gestures she wants to know, it's things like what makes you the most nervous, or which of your friends you like more.

Then they drove to the old stone inn house his parents lived in, and she had coffee with his mom out of dainty blue teacups with pink roses, and the house smelled lovely, like old wood and older paper. He showed her the cabinet full of buddhas, and when they left, she thought about how she missed her family, because his mom reminded her of her own mom, back in Cleveland on crutches because of a fall, and she felt guilty for not doing all the vacuuming last time she was there because she was running late for something else.

They stayed up late again, to drink more gigantic shots made with bright blue energy drinks and vodka, to talk to girls with eyes the same color as the shots, then eat smushy sandwiches with coleslaw that fell down her dress, the same dress she would wear for three days in a row now, and finally end up back in the attic talking about activism, plugging away at the hardness of the universe, and the point in your life where you realize what your role really is, the thing that you are, your true nature. She said she was an observer, he said witness, and it became boom fact yes that is what she is. And she said, you are a doer, but she had her contacts out by then, and his face was only a fuzzy blur across the smoke, and she didn't know if it took.