Take a look at my girlfriend.
Yesterday continued to have weird voodoo powers long after I woke up without the urge to kill/escape.
Driving back from an interview for work way up I-75, I let my mind drift and suddenly knew exactly what direction to take my short story in. Then I came from work and spent the next four hours writing in the most relaxed, enjoyable manner, ever. Very little pacing about the house, very little shouting out expletives to no one. True: The end-product might win no prizes, but the afternoon was still one of the best I’ve had in a while.

I can’t help thinking this is sort of like the tip-of-the-iceberg in this Being Single thing. I’m starting to enjoy myself more than I have in years, and I’m struck over and over again by the realization that prior to now, I've spent very little of my adult life boyfriendless. No good, Batman. I know it.

Friday night, Audrey and I went to The Earl to see this great band Sybris , from Chicago. Drunk boys tried to pick us up but we just laughed and laughed at them, and then when I got home, I stayed up late painting my toenails and reading Karen Armstrong. But the best part of coming home was that I could have done anything I wanted. I could have decoupaged my room or jumped up and down on my bed or gone back out and eaten a sundae at the Majestic.

New things:

I’m singing with a rock band, now.
I’m beginning the process of applying to MFA programs.
I’m sleeping every now and then, too.
But not much. Not nearly enough, in fact.

And of course there is no time to write, now. So I’ll just leave you with this (Could Be A-)Fact of the Day, courtesy of my writing professora:
Some 80% of affairs take place on vacations.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
All righty.

And I miss that dog.
Isn’t that the punchline to that joke/country-song about the man’s woman running off with the man’s dog?
Anyway, Otis is gone. Hunter came and took him. I mooned around the house some yesterday afternoon, then did some writing for this creative writing class I’m taking, which allowed me to direct my mooniness to a different topic. I went out for sushi with my roommate and we lingered over dinner, and when I got back, I listened to Victoria Williams in my room while straightening up, and Buddy Holly Danger Cat slinked around my heels. He purred and meowed demands at me, because he knows I'm all his now.
And it was okay; it was finally over. I felt free, and it felt right, just at that moment. So I think it’ll be okay.

Driving to Carolina
Last weekend I visited my grandmother in rural North Carolina. It was a great lesson in zen. We watched the finches and cardinals on the birdfeeders; we drank coffee and we talked. That’s all. She kept saying I must be bored. I kept insisting she had no idea; this was bliss.
The drive up was the start of the low external stimulation: I-20 and I-95 aren’t much but flat fields and billboards for South of the Border. Listened to music from college and entertained the caffeine-inspired delusion that I could get everyone from those days back together again.
In South Carolina, every car looks like a cop car. And there are lots of cop cars, but there are also a lot of big shiny sedans that contain only pissed-off old people wondering why this gal in front of them just slowed down from 85 to 65 for no reason.

Fishfry
The only night of excitement ended up being Night One. I arrived at my grandma’s house tired; it had been eight hours in the car. But I was hours earlier than I’d told her, and so she whisked me off to a neighborhood fish-fry with a
“C’moan!”
And I say okay, although really, I just want a beeeeeer. (Yes, a petulant beer.) And a naaaap. And I’m just standing there picturing this group of people from her town. Whom I kind of think of as nondrinkers. Also Christian. Also over 70.
But then we get into the car and indeed it’s loaded down with older folks, but the woman next to me is sporting a cocktail she’s taken to go. This is not a usual sight in my prior experience of my grandma’s town. And the woman’s making joke after joke. And the night ends up not so bad. I consume pounds of fried fish and hush puppies and drink cranberry juice with vodka in someone’s garage. Just like college.
And near the end of the evening, when one man chides my grandma for voting for Kerry, the cocktail-toting woman grabs my arm.
“Alice. It’s like I say: Politics is like assholes. Everyone has one. It’s just, some people’s stink.”

Rites of Spring

In Atlanta it has been sleeting and raining and freezing and thawing and cold and damp and grey.

And then today the sun came out and the temperature went up to fifty all of a sudden. And I can’t stop listening to music and singing at the top of my lungs and not understanding how everyone isn’t simply shocked into paroxyms of wild glee at this day.

Of course, this also has to do with the fact that my roommate and my friend Dirk and I went out and got espresso & ice cream milkshakes.

It’s Indian Spring.

(Why the term “Indian Summer,” anyway? Is it akin to “Indian giver,” some horrible idea that the Indians were the ones who gave the white folks things and then took them back and not the other way around?)

On these days when the sun comes out and declares winter dead without first bothering to hold up a mirror to its icy nose (and is always wrong) —I think this band—The New Pornographers-- is the exactest match and the best, especially if you are also in your car. The New Pornographers specialize in cold catchy pop with exacting, complicated lyrics. They’re not selling spring quite yet, but its doppelganger, this weather that can and will turn around and bite you in the ass.


Other seasons have their exact records, too. This is how I’ve got it figured:

Early Summer Always was and always will be Last Splash by the Breeders. Says pack up the car, let’s go to the beach and hey, kiss me with those gritty, sandy, sunblocked lips.

Late Summer Exile on Main Street-Rolling Stones. This album was nostalgic the moment it was recorded, and even if you’ve never sat around drinking Red Dog beer on a back porch on a North Carolina August night, it’ll still bring that to mind.

Fall Impasse By Richard Buckner. It’s about the beginnings-of-endings. It reminds me of Halloween.

Winter Harvest by Mister Neil Young. “Are You Ready for the Country?” will always make me think of a bunch of bearded woodsman out in some Yukon beerhall. I have no reason for this.