A Game Not Invented By Me

Plum-looniness time in MFALand, Henshaw. Thesis deadlines loom, and people are going starkers. Meanwhile, the weather is doing that cold-then-hot thing, and the late afternoon sun knows how to aim right for your eyes.

I mean, like "crazy;" not like naked.
Although I’m not up on the gossip. Who knows.


So, a friend writes with a new game. Actually, to be fair, some guy I’ve never met, who first wrote someone else, started it off. Unimportant. What is important is that said friend writes me with the guy's first move:

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in My Pants
The Color Purple in My Pants
Little Women in My Pants

I wrote back:
The Road in My Pants.
Also: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City in My Pants. I think we've all been there.

And she replied, with a spark of hope:
The Sun Also Rises in My Pants
The Secret History in My Pants

And Marshall came up with this one:
A Good Man is Hard to Find in My Pants.

Her:
Pyres in My Pants

Me:
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit in My Pants.

Her:
Honored Guest in My Pants

Me:
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been in My Pants?

And she tells me:
Running With Scissors in My Pants

Me:
Q: What is the What in My Pants?
A: All the Pretty Horses in My Pants.

(With thanks to Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Louisa May Alcott, Cormac McCarthy, Nick Flynn, Hemmingway, Donna Tartt, Flannery O’Conner, Derek Nikitas, Jeannette Winterson, Joy Williams, Joyce Carol Oates, Augusten Burroughs, Dave Eggers and Cormac McCarthy again.)

The drive back was so dark. Through the swampy woods driving back north, up that spindly road with its spindly yellow line, I clutched so hard at the steering wheel and let everyone pass me. And gradually, another feeling overtook that one. I felt so alive as I drove up to the garish fluorescence and McDonalds and ordered a cheeseburger and fries. So grateful for my own agency and for the dollar bills in my own wallet and for the hunger in my gut, and for my ability to chomp down the flavor and texture that that corporation has tricked my body into associating, elementally, with my own childhood.
But what does it mean, that entering a house of death and then leaving it again should renew one’s own zest for living? How cheap? Because I had called the girl’s mother and asked to come over. And I left, feeling the proximity of all of us to the edge; blade-sharp fear, and the night full of black and forest sounds felt bigger, maybe, than some witless Me could handle. Until the rotting, living smell of that river air, which, coming up and through the windows as the car scaled the slope up to the bridge hit me like a gift, because the girl had been denied just that, that night, and here I was, experiencing it, and felt close to tears for that reason but also, shamefully this, superior. Like I’d done something right and so been chosen. Which is not true. I'll have my own day. But I feel like I’ve stolen her fire. I was dull and unable to smile for weeks before that night, and I’ve been unable to stop, since.

Then suddenly, a storm.
October is the last hurrah for all the giant roaches. The ones they call junebugs. You tell me it’s time to get the exterminator to come out on the verandah, because there they rove in wildest waves, roach-gangs across the tiles and if you stand still for just a moment, talking on the phone, they will be up your very leg like that, lady, so ungentlemanly are they in this, their last-hurrah month. Sitting on the floor inside, even, computer in lap, even, looking for all the world like one of those modern ads, the ones with the people in silhouette, with white electrod—headphones, I mean, affixed to ear sockets; so hip/clean/untouched are you, too, till those black armored antenna’ed beasts come scurrying, across that hand you have so casually tossed behind, downloading illegal music, reading that email your sweetheart sent you.

It's like this every year. Thank god for the kitties. They get less sleep, now. They stalk. They stab them and leave them, pitchpoled, bicycling legs frantic, to find in the morning and squash.

I said Goddamn,
Henshaw, I ain’t even taken off my apron, yet. But this record’s burnt an unholy hole right through all that pork grease in the heavenlyfried pork chop/cornbread/tater/green bean supper that Esmerelda cooked us tonight, and alacri-fied me right up.

It’s been hours. It’s been days of legs pedaling, to and from campus, or sitting uncomfortable at sweaty, polluted intersections with the heat rising in waves, and weeks of sitting and working silently at the library, and listening to the morning news in concentrated silence, knit-browed, and working silently here at home, or silently at school. "Concentration" and "dread for my country and yours" can pretty much sum up the time since I wrote last. [God. Horrors and nightmares. Story from canvassing last Sattiday: Woman our age calling down from her porch, in a chummy sing-song: “You knooow Obama just got the nomination because of affirmative action!” We kept walking: step-step-step, then I hissed to my partner: “What did that even mean?” “It meant she’s racist.” “Oh.”]

And I’m so glad to have to have all this split wide open, finally, by Jenny Lewis’s new album, of all things. Yes, really. It’s called Acid Tongue. I don’t even know it well enough yet, to describe individual songs to you, just to say: Holy Hell-!, let’s rejoice; she’s put out a barn burner, left that last, tame and tiny rickety Thing that was that last Rilo Kiley album behind to eat her country-bluesy dust, fellas. She’s got Elvis Costello singing with her on one song, and the Watson Twins, too, on some, but the main deal is that the songs are just good. There’s like, some Dusty Springfield, and even, dare I say, some Joni Mitchell up in there. But mostly, you’re just thinking, “Oh, good song.”

Because, sorry to whine, but it’s just been so long since I’ve been caught up that way by anything new.
Everyone’s talkin’ ‘bout, well, say, the Fleet Foxes this and that, and they’re…fine. They’re pretty. No, they don’t remind me of CSN&Y, though yes, they’re clearly a bundle of talent; but there’s only so long I can marvel honestly at your perfect playing-card tower construction. “Wow, so flawless and towering. Such nice right angles.”

Gimme something clumsier. Something greasier. Thank you.