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.

This is Disjointed, because I'm slowly taking all the screws out

I was going to write a post about how great my dad is. Because, of course he is. But then I spent the weekend taking pictures of Jamison bottles, and turning down strange men in bathrooms, and watching a bridal party dance to the Pixies in Akron, and seeing great movies, and talking about writing. So let's just take that all as proof that my father was/is a fantastic father, because my life was pretty fantastic this weekend.

It didn't start off as fantastic. It started off with me working my ass off, and then vowing to get wasted that night because of work, stress drinking, and having a messy night where I got "maudlin" and vented out all the relationship/marriage/getting old poison that's been batting around in my head all week. It was like lancing a boil, and watching all the thick yellow pus well out. In the end, I passed out in the backseat while my sister and Jere argued about ridiculous things like the Magna Carta and shit, and when I woke up we were still driving and it was light out, because they had argued themselves almost to Pennsylvania before realizing the mistake and turning back around in the right direction. And after waking up like that, the infection had passed and I was once again content and happy and appreciative. So I slept for three hours in a real bed, and then went back to the beach.

Are you sick yet of beach pictures? I'm not, so deal. Also, who sleeps in the summer? Vampires, that's who. Are you a vampire? I mean, maybe you are. And if so, let me tell you, eternal life isn't worth the price of never getting to be in the sun again. Also, vampires are assholes. So you are an asshole.

On Friday, we saw Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and it was wonderful and slow and magical and kind of terrifying if you let yourself stare straight into the jungle and you are the sort of person who knows how real and horrible fairy tales can be.

On Saturday, getting drunk in Akron proved again to be the cure all for being Too Cleveland. Which was apt, because it happened after hanging out with Erin, and pretty much talking a lot about Cleveland. But being Too Cleveland is a thing, because the largest part of life is not where you are exactly, but how well you're doing it, and you can't do it well enough if you expect the place you live to do it for you. I'm not an expert at living, but I think I do know that.

On Sunday, the beach was overcast and dark but warm and breezy, and when I stood in the water I wanted to bottle Ohio Blue and sell it. Is it a paint color already? It should be. Maybe it can't be. When I was a little girl in the backseat of my parents car, I would look at sunsets and try to decide what color out of the sky would I want a dress of the most. I decided I am going to be friends with the lifeguard. Then, later in the afternoon while it was pouring sheets of corrugated metal, we took our atmosphere soaked bodies for coffee, and talked with the girl at the cafe about neighborhoods and gardening. Later still I went to see Midnight in Paris, the trailer of which does absolutely nothing to show you what the movie is actually about, but it's ridiculous and delightful and I laughed a lot and when I laughed, I could feel my leg muscles were just a little sore from the dancing and the waves, but sore in a hot water bottle of my soul kind of way. It was all very relaxed and easy.

The dog next door barks at everything. Since it's been nice out, his owners, who are very elderly for having such a young lab, just let him out in the backyard all day, and he stands on the picnic table and barks for eight hours at squirrels and people walking by and cars. Then the dog who lives below me will go outside and they will bark at each other (the dog downstairs has a weird half bark he does as well that sounds a little like a monkey, so it's very similiar to how I think a monkey/dog fight would sound). Then people will come home from work and let their dogs out in their yards, and all the dogs will bark at each other. Since I work from home, this has been incredibly annoying. But writing it down makes it sound charming.

When we were finally packing up to leave the beach on Sunday, because the thunder told us to, we ran into the lifeguard Mike walking back to the car. He had run to grab a raincoat and I asked if he had to stay on the beach when it stormed? He answered that he didn't really know, because no one had told him, and he didn't really know who to ask. So maybe he sat out there by himself in the storm. I don't know, we left.

So now today it's back to the beach. My Monday adventure partner got a job while schools out, and I'm back to asking around for companions for exploring since little girls aren't supposed to wander around by themselves, but really I'm just giving up because you all work on Mondays and finding someone who is down for the sort of rambling I like to do the most is hard, there are requirements conversational and motivational. The thing that happens is this: everyone wants to go exploring, everyone wants to go to movies, everyone wants to go to the beach. They see me out at places, and they tell me how much they want to do these things too, how great it is that I do them, how much fun it looks like, and then I invite them, but it always falls through. I don't think you guys understand that there is a decision you have to make to have these kind of days. And I just really believe, deep far down in my chest, that everyone I know would be happier if they came along. But I can't keep giving you opportunities. You have to make the call.

There is an idea that you are supposed to be aloof to be cool, that you are supposed to just let people come to you. I'm the worst at that. If I meet someone I want to hang out with, I'm filled with enthusiasm and motivation. I'm the puppy who jumps on you and wags her tail furiously, and then if you don't take me up on it, I quickly forget when the next new person comes in the door.


And so I wonder if I'm fickle, or flighty, or just really smart, or just really irresponsible. I mean, the most important thing is to rage against the rising of bitterness or disappointment, right? To fight it. To really really enjoy what you are doing, to put your head entirely in the moment and focus on the hour and be conscious of how long that hour is and what is happening in each minute, to feel with toes and the little hairs on your arms the little whoosh of that minute degrading and crumbling and passing. Also to get out in the fucking sun, which is also degrading and crumbling and passing. I'm only 31 for another 20 days, and then I will never be 31 again.

Glass Slippers Made Into Towers

Pittsburgh should really have a different name. Like Paragon. Or Oval City. The Glass Cage. Not as if that makes any sense, but Pittsburgh sounds like a small farm city. Like a place where you go to buy fertilizer. I guess it is pretty small, space wise. It's all compact and squeezed between the hills. Cities in hills always have that magical feeling when you approach them on a highway. Like, you come around a curve, having driven for hours at approximately the same speed, coffee and ice melted together in a warm sticky cup at your side and this being the third time you have listened to this same mix CD in a row, and then oh There It Is. I can see it. I may actually be able to stop driving at some point and I wonder if I'll remember how to brake. What if my brakes suddenly don't work? I'm almost finally there.

If I ever get a speeding ticket, it will be on the approach to a city I'm visiting.



The reason I went up Tuesday was to see a show, but then I mostly missed it thanks to drinking sangria with lawyers, which is a particularly odd thing to do when you just got out of the car, and you're sweaty and hardly put together but they are all dressed up coming from work for happy hour. I think I've covered this before, the slow drag that driving a long ways has on my face. I'm one of those people who is overly nice to toll booth people because I feel so weird driving alone that I think I must be acting weird, trying to talk to someone in a normal way after not saying a word out loud all day. Point is, making chit chat with nicely dressed young men and women is more of an effort. I try really hard to not seem odd. A guy in a suit talked to me about visiting Maine, and biking the coast, and man, maybe I should move to the coast. Maybe?

The point is we missed the show. So we went to the bar instead and as a matter of course. These developments were accepted as a danger long ago. A dancer named Jade sold me a cherry bomb and talked to me about local dance companies. Nobody believed me when I came back and said how nice she was, and smart, because she was a bar girl named Jade selling cherry bombs from a tray.


I saw a bit more of Pittsburgh in daylight this trip. We walked a little ways downtown, and then drove through it again after breakfast the next morning. Everything was very clean and proper and active on a Wednesday morning. I don't know, maybe someday I'll understand the roads in that city. I will never understand the highways though. They twist in and out like some giant was trying to teach its kid how to tie knots. I don't get terrified getting lost though. I mean, I don't really. I'm getting to know the main idea of it, Pittsburgh. It's starting to make sense a little. I need a map of every major urban center tattooed in my brain. How useful would that be? I don't think I would ever stay in one place again.

I thought briefly on the road home about getting a tattoo that says "Brave." In that typeface, with a period. That's what Bridget is supposed to mean anyways, sort of. Strength. I've been into the idea of a tattoo lately. Well, I want one that is very difficult and pretty, I have one in mind, but it's expensive enough that I will probably never get it. One word, that's not so bad.

It was the longest road home though, and 99 degrees. I wanted to hang my head out of the window like a dog, but you're not supposed to drive like that, so I had to make do with my hand out the window. I do that with my feet under blankets too in the summer, hang one foot outside and off the bed. That's more lizard than dog-like, using a small exposed body part to stay cool. We are all such lizards some of us. Maybe I'm just also feeling a bit more reptilian than usually these days. Cold blooded and addicted to sun. Feeling hardened and baked, with glaze dripping off me and turning the air around me thick with chemical burn. It's not surprising we imagine lizards as the most dangerous of the radioactive mutants. They seem like the only creatures who would willingly eat toxic waste.

Summer came late and already drunk to the party, screaming at us all to catch up

There are three things I'm fairly sure of this week:

1) My cats are actively trying to take down every window covering in the house. I'm down to only three blinds up still. I've lost the motivation to fight them. I walk around at night with the lights off so the neighbors won't see me half dressed. I suspect I am going to have to nail the curtains to the actual window frames but even then I'm sure they will just rip them down. Maybe they have the right idea though. It's much nicer in the apartment when all the windows are open and uncovered.

2)When they say "get a tan" they mean "your skin will molt the same way a Martian fire lizard does when it sheds it's youthful shell and develops it's hard impenetrable exoskeleton." Right now my skin is in the tender pink tore off a fingernail stage. Next week I will be bullet proof.

3)I need to move someplace where you can go to the beach for much longer periods of the year. For instance, Uruguay. I wonder how someone even begins to find a job in Uruguay. Probably by learning Spanish.



I left work Thursday and went to meet Colleen at the beach. It was 6 when I got there, but the sun refused to go down, and when I got home at 9, it was still hanging on, refusing to get with the horizon. Maybe the horizon said something mean. The beach is an odd place when you live in the Midwest. It's always a strange and alien land, because we don't see it for 8 months a year, so you never get quite used to all the little nooks and crannies. Foreign. Then there's the city issue. Depending on what filter you want to adopt in your head, the beach can either be this great lip of the giant glacial lake, or it can be this burning wasteland with dead trees washed up like bones and occasional trash and people baking themselves like dry breadcrumbs. I do sorta like both filters, but I'm a child of the Wasteland after all, not the farmland. Some people might be turned off by looking down the waterfront and seeing smokestacks and loading docks. What's funny to think about it is that smokestacks have a shorter lifespan than sequoias. They come tumbling down all the time.

The other thing that is important about the beach is that it forces everyone to be half naked in public, which is a useful exercise in realigning your priorities. Especially in Ohio, you are not allowed to let other people's judgements about your body keep you covered up. I say especially Ohio because we are all pale and fat here. Everyone is a chubby white little worm shedding it's chrysalis, even the pretty people. But the sun and the water are such precious sensations, the desire to experience them overcomes modesty or shame. I mean, I look absolutely terrible in a bathing suit. There are parts of my body that shouldn't be allowed to exist. But I don't give a shit. I'm not trying to have sex with anyone there, or make them look at me. I just want to left alone to wriggle my fat little worm body in the water and have fun and smell like burning flesh and think about things like murderous fanged sturgeon waiting on the sea floor amid mussel covered shipwrecks.

The beach reminds me to be a person, not just a girl.


On Friday, it was Asian Liquor/hookah night at Andrew's. We hung out in the backyard while the boys grilled chicken and peppers, and learned things like black licorice makes your baby dumb, what neighborhood meetings in Euclid might be like for history majors, and how to drink soju in a way that respects your elders. Andrew made some joke about the girls having to reveal their ages, but here is one thing I love about the girls I am friends with at this particular stage of my life - I know all their ages. Because they will tell you, willingly and without pause.

Soren taught us the etiquette for hookahs, and how to burn them correctly. The coffee one was the best of course. The coffee one is always the best and I don't know why anyone pretends that it could ever be anything else. I suppose you might think otherwise if you are one of those lame human beings who have never inhaled any type of smoke into their lungs. I mean, not once? Not even out of curiosity? I refuse to believe such a person exists, but theoretically if they did, they may not understand the allure of coffee.





Jason and I took a trip to the grocery store to buy bug spray for the night, and he bought a package of dryer sheets to rub ourselves down with, which pretty much worked. I walked out of the backyard that night with only one bite. However the dryer sheets got left in my car, as many items are indeed, because my car is a hoarder. Not me, I'm not a hoarder. But my fucking car is for sure. When I got into the car the next day, it was stifling hot and smelled exactly as if I were in the dryer myself. Thank god we went with "fresh linen" and not "lavender and vanilla".

The Indian whiskey was awful, tasting of flash frozen peat. The Japanese whiskey was great, but probably mostly because of the writing on the label. The Turkish Arak, which was like sucking on a Good and Plenty, was my favorite. All my babies will be dumb.

Saturday night I went with Knut and Soren to a Phish show. I don't listen to Phish. I used to listen to hippy crap all the time though, true, and I used to wear beads in my hair. I used to do a lot of things. But you know, a Phish show, why the fuck not. I am not a hater. I have nothing against people wanting to have a good time. I like hippie music. I mean, when the suns out.

The thing I don't like is Blossom Outdoor Amphitheatre, being this large and sprawling and hilly mass of inconvenience. Far to drive. Horrible traffic jams. 45 minute walks between drinking at your car and getting in the door. But it's sort of like Blossom heard me hating on it, and was determined to prove me wrong. Cause there was no traffic getting there, Knut completely by luck picked the direction to come that no one else did. We parked right away. We got fucked up right away. Sure there was an incredibly long hot walk. But I hadn't been to a gathering of hippies in a while, I had forgotten about the sporadic villages that spring up, the multiple glass sellers and knitters and painters and men with baskets yelling loudly that they have shroom chocolates available. Plus the 6 or 7 people we encountered selling water on the way to the gate - "It's 6 dollars inside folks, it's 3 dollars here! Just don't open it, you can take it inside!" That part was like leveling up in a video game, beating the hustle, knowing just when to take advantage of it. Like when we bought our waters from the last guy, who was right in front of the gate, and his waters were only a dollar. The hustle! Some people got it.

I spent the first set sitting on the grass amid a forest of legs, people watching and sky watching, and in addition to looking the same and both being very tall, Knut and Soren also dance the same. So with one on either side of me standing, it was like passing through statues at a port entrance in a tiny dinghy, but like, if the statues were those giant inflatable wind dancers you see at car dealerships. The second set the sun had gone done completely and I got up and danced too, and the light show was, as one would expect from Phish, phenomenal, and I had a really good time. People kept throwing handfuls of glowstick straws up in the air, everyone did it, they were multi colored meteor showers in the blue gray gloom. Being in crowds is fun. Hearing crowds scream and sing together and hearing the noises die out against the clouds is fun. Walking back to the car in a huge menacing centipede is not as much fun, but we got home okay, and I only bled a little from my heel which was my fault for not wearing proper shoes.

Sunday we all went to the beach again. I now have a half moon serious burn on my right breast, which means that probably for the rest of the summer, even after it heals, that will be the darkest spot on my whole body.

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.

"On the Lake" can mean so many different things

I've always had this idea in my head that Geneva on the Lake was some sort of cookie cutter Quaintsville place, with little wineries and restaurants and campgrounds. I mean, it sort of is that. But it's way more "Let's get smashed and eat hot dogs." We ended up there instead of the Cleveland Wine Festival, because while driving to Nautica, I saw the river cruise boat pass by, with the hordes of overly tan stringy women in Ann Taylor, and I knew I just couldn't take it. So I'll go there today after work, now that my spirit has been fortified with the true spirit of Ohio Lake People, which is "Let's get smashed and eat hot dogs."

Ohio wines tend to be sweet, too sweet for me, lacking that pampas bite I like. So I was okay with running from the Jimmy Buffet cover band at the ferris wheel winery to the conflicting dulcet tones of Frank Sinatra inside/Afroman outside on the patio at the skank bar across the street. Business in front, party in the back, right? We were there before it got super skanked, when it was mostly just harmless looking older gentlemen in cut off tees, and young girls going on 40 in halter tops. But as we left, several gorillas shoved right past us in the doorway, without even glancing, beelining for the cornhole and the baby's mamas. So we left there right in time. Afroman got replaced by Tik Tok, like over and over again. In fact, it felt like every bar we passed was playing Tik Tok. Tik Tok all the time, to shake your little white shorts to. My friend said every girl there smelled the same, which I told him was a creepy observation.

Liquored up, we hit up one of several arcades, and blew all the quarters on skeeball.

Then the requisite Slovenian sausages, with onions and sweet pepper relish, with summer job kids in paper hats grilling under greasy green lights.

Finally a few drinks at a place called "Vegas on the Lake" where the band introduced themselves as "I'm Mr. Covert and behind me is the King Sausage" but the older Asian lady who owned the place had fresh squeezed pineapple juice in the fridge. The bartender actually warned me about it, said lots of girls didn't like it because it was fresh, instead of from a can and diluted with sugar, made me try it in front of her to make sure I liked it. The skank bar behind us started playing Pitbull as we walked back to the car.

"Al Gore is a Peter Schilling Wannabe" Cause Peter Schilling invented the internet?

In case you were wondering, the Peter Schilling album Fehler im System is fantastic. The second track is some sort of dance hall crap, but the rest of it is exactly what you would think German dance music from 1982 would sound like. Hello, we are synths from the future and we are programmed to make your cellular walls shake with the vibrations of our musical apocalypse. You will turn into robots just from the sheer effort of not caring about anything but the call and response of your muscles to our end of the Century tonal awakenings. Alright, it doesn't really sound like that, but don't you wish could listen to something like that right now? I was trying to download Dark Side of the Moon, but apparently it's hard to steal a decent copy. Maybe Pink Floyd was spiritually directing me to Peter Schilling, it seems like something they would do. You have to hear Major Tom in German. It sounds like secret rites.

This kid at the corner gas station, who looks like a taller shaggier version of Sam from Ann Arbor, cards me every time I go in to buy smokes, and every single time he tells me 1979 was his favorite year. I ask him why. Every time he tells me it's because of some different musical fact. Like, the first time he named all these songs he likes that have 1979 in them? And then last time he told me it was because indie rock started in 1979. I said "why?" And he responded with "Madness's first album." I said, "really, Madness's debut album came out in 1979?" He said, "no, it came out in 1978, but it hit big in 1979. Also, the Cars?". So, you know, the kids are alright. Since this shaggy kid is probably at least 8 years younger than me. But that's the glory of growing old in the digital age, the only generational gap that really matter is slowly disappearing as even old people learn to use iphones. Or they die. You hear that old people? You will die if you don't learn how to use the internet. We will convert you into bio batteries, see if we don't.
Point is, everyone gets to be into the same junk, in the same weird specialties, and you don't have to stay up late going to dark little clubs to find new music or old music.

Rebecca has destroyed my life by showing me where BBC America was hiding in my cable guide. All the way up in the stratosphere, whereas I never go above 67. Maybe 213, Soap Net, if I feel like drinking and watching 3 hours of old O.C. episodes. So now I have a DVR filling up with rerun episodes of Doctor Who. It is like a warm quirky cocoon I want to crawl into every day after work, because work this week has been unbelievably frustrating and busy, and David Tennant makes me feel sedated. He is starring in a Fright Night remake, which would not interest me except for the part where he plays a boastful Las Vegas magicians who is less than helpful about vampires. What?

I really miss Jere and Charity and our little exploration group more than I thought I would, and quickly too! It's only been a few weeks, but I feel alone for the summer, like I was sent off to YMCA summer camp or something. Or better yet, like everyone else is at camp and I'm at home alone doing math exercises at my parents kitchen table. I know Jere is around, but he's all not free and busy with the whole advancement of career status thing. Lots of people have offered to go, but it's not the same going on Sunday with people who weren't there when we started. We were such a good little scooby gang.

Making room for new people is hard, and there seems hardly enough room for the ones that are already there. Like my social circle is a very small apartment having a party, and the kitchen can only fit three people at a time trying to get ice, and everyone is out on the balcony having a smoke, and if I don't balance it carefully the balcony will collapse, they will all fall down, and then I will have to try very hard to collect their pieces and put them back together again in the right order.

I am stalled on the book cause I feel like I definitely should be working on it right now since I'm not doing anything else, and instead I'm suffering from Lonely Summer syndrome. It's like I have to be active to write, but then I'm active and don't write. So I switched myself off, and I'm flatlining. I mean, haven't I lived enough to write just this? Can't you just be satisfied, stupid crazy head of mine, just long enough to do this one thing right?

On that note....