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 Fairytale of Hoboken Part 1: Massacre by the Streetlights

Even though it seems counterintuitive, you should play this song through the videos. It's a thing. It's a composition.



Sleep accumulated Thursday to Friday: One Hour

On the eve of the end of things that used to be, I folded myself into a flying machine, which went up and up and up into the atmospheres, and threw me to the coast faster than a blackbird over powerlines. I left my friends and lovers behind for the thrill of strangers, and as we hurtled through the wet cold clouds, I thought how much more I loved the houses than the general population, quiet and suffering. The ice floes ripped the rivers, and the driveways stitched together the subdivisions, and like every time I transport with miracles, I fell in love with the industrial revolution. On the coast, I was picked up by a Queen of the Internets, and her handsome escort, who took me to their 3rd floor walk up. Oh, you know, they said abashed, it's Hoboken, it is what it is. Oh, I said, but it's Hoboken! It's name is known. Not for anything in particular, but for being. It's a prayer to trying to live in asphalt.

We're going to a party to celebrate the End of Everything That Used To Be, and you can come too. So slippy slide we four wheeled it to the liquor store, and everywhere in the streets were dogs being walked and cars buried in ice and people rushing to make out with strangers before they became people who weren't strangers, in heels and short coats, nails done, teeth brushed, chests out and pockets proud. Up and up and up we walked, to the court of the Lighting Kings. Did you know all professions hang out together, like tribes? There was a dog named Eureka, and every time we called it's name, a new idea was born. Once up in the clouds, at the fifth floor walkup up high next to the artificially lit lights, the one cracking away from the earth like a fault line, there we made drinks and I smiled at strangers and tried to be cute. We tied lifelines from ourselves to the fault line, in case it cracked. That's the thing you have to do for the first hour, until everyone has sucked down their drink. Then someone breaks out the very old licorice cows in tin that have been sitting on top of their fridge for years.

At first, the cows were peaceful, happy, farmlike. They each had their own family, and their own myths, sense of purpose. It was quiet agricultural heaven. It was the Valley of the Plenty.

Then a little cow was lost. The skies roiled and heaved with pain. And his family was very sad, and looked for someone to blame. There were rumours, raids in the night on other stables. Of course, there was no one to take the anger but fate, except fate doesn't allow retribution, and crops do.

The neighboring cows, across the river, took the brunt of the retribution, and formed a militia to defend themselves. They armed themselves with grenades, spears, strategy. They poured their village budgets into military spending. Soon every herd in the valley was trying to keep up, sending their own children to train, searching for meaning in the hidden radio messages that now crisscrossed the once clear rural skies.

Only a few spoke out. When their rational words fell on deaf angry patriotic ears, they ran to the Midwest and were never heard from again, until years later when their furniture became trendy.



It never ends well, you know, wars between land bound animals. And everything their ancestors had fought for was flung to the vast emptiness. Up to heaven, down to hell. Some of us opting to hang out in the middle.

But this was the End of Everything, so we laughed off the warfare and the loss and the hurt, and we listened to vinyl songs, and smiled at strangers. At the stroke of the End, the Italians blew up bombs, and the people like us gathered on the rooftops and yelled at other rooftops and screamed happily and we were all very happy to not be licorice cows.



The next morning, Elly made us collard greens and black eyed peas, to feed luck into our veins and ward off starvation for the next 35 days. We didn't leave the apartment for 11 hours, friends brought us wine and British actors played ukuleles and cats ate ham for the first time. Because This is Now The Begging, The Beginning.

Random pics of Destruction

I know, I know. What's up with all the firework pictures lately Bridget? Can't find anything more interesting to show us? Well first of all, fireworks are the Rorschach test of my dreams. In my world, the entire cityscape is the canvas for my sick interpretations of reality and nightmare, and you all just gape and deal with it.

Second, I took a lot of pictures on July 4th.

Third, these are not actually fireworks, July 4th just happened to be a date of catastrophe for the City of Cleveland.


Catastrophe Exhibit# 1: An immense monster, towering hundreds of feet above the skyscrapers, emerged from the lake. The lake water slid off its muddy pelt in a torrential waterfall, completely destroying the beaches and marinas with a tidal wave of shipwrecked waverunners and confused sheephead. It's eyes were giant glittery orbs, vacant and robotic, and it barely noticed the city as it followed the river south to its true prey, Canton.


Catastrophe Exhibit #2: Evil baseball hating aliens from Epsilon Eridani B bombard the stadium with death rays. Thank god that the Downtown Cleveland Alliance spent all that money putting a force field over it.

Oh.


Catastrophe Exhibit #3: The Rock Bottom Brewery explodes.

Memorial Day: For Remembering Things, I Think

Things to Remember on Monday:

1. On May 30th, 1968 (which is maybe the original day, but not the official day) a group of freed slaves dug up a mass grave of Union soldiers in Charleston, reburied them in individual graves, and decorated the new Union Graveyard with flowers. This was the first Decoration Day, which eventually became Memorial Day, but not to some Southern States who refused to celebrate Memorial Day cause they hated the Union. So they still celebrate Decoration Day the Sunday before, which is really like a Day of the Dead thing. The point is that digging up hundreds of dead decomposing bodies, (on a hot day... at the end of May... in the South... which has got to include mosquitos and horseflies), in order to honor them is more patriotic than anything you will ever imagine doing. Except for that James Bond fantasy you have involving a Shetland pony and 2 tons of c4. Also, I suspect that maybe the freed slaves were not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.

2. In 1977, on Memorial Day, Star Wars opened. The politics of sex was altered irrevocably.

3. On May 25th, 1979, American Airlines Flight 191 took off from O'Hare airport. About half a mile from the take-off point, the airplane pitched into the ground, killing all 271 people aboard, and two others living in a trailer nearby. It was the worst domestic airplane crash in history.

4. On May 25th, 1975, the grizzle bear was declared a "threatened species." I think I like grizzle bear more than grizzly.



5. 5/25/15, all Armenians living in Eastern Anatolia are deported by Turkish Ottoman decree. This came the day after the Russians issued a memo claiming the Turks had massacred the population of 100 Armenian villages, for being pro-Russian.

6. On May 25th, 1861, Lincoln suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus in the interest of national security. Douchebag.

7. Hanover, Germany hosts the International Fireworks Competition every year. My neighbor however is not German. This is not related to Memorial Day, but I have thought about this at least once a day for the past week. Mostly because of the need to constantly repeat to him "no, you cannot set those off before July 4th." Also, he set them up specifically for a photo op.