my evil heart

New year; new location.

2009-12-13T14:05:00.002-05:00

I've moved! The new deal's called Room Sound. Come check it.

2009-04-28T12:23:00.002-05:00

Changes coming, Henshaw and everyone.
Just hold tight.

"The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page."
--Donald Barthelme

2009-03-07T16:16:00.006-05:00

“I crashed down on the crossbar
And the pain was enough to make
A shy, bald Buddhist reflect
And plan a mass murder.”
-“Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before”
-The Smiths

We had come to see Morrissey at what seemed most non-corresponding venue in the world.

Myrtle Beach’s House of Blues is a compound. After passing five miniature golf courses and at least six versions of Wings, that family mart of all things beachy*, you come to a light where there’s a swampy, overgrown ex putt-putt course on your right. You then hang a right off the main road onto an access road and drive through a Siberia of parking lots. Past Dicks, that tourist restaurant chain where waiters are mean to you on purpose, a Florida-pink Hampton Inn and further in still, where you finally park, across another giant expanse of parking lot from the Alabama Theater, which I think is the rough equivalent of House of Blues for FM country music. You park and you walk and you are subsumed.

HOB is a fortress covered in a cosmetic varnish of folksy appeal so insistent it becomes its opposite. It’s advertising itself. Corporate folksy appeal. I’m telling you, The House of Blues sports more Howard Finster than Paradise Gardens in Georgia. It’s made to look like a tin jukejoint, only some of the folksy signs are painted with messages like, “No cameras inside. We will confiscate.” We sat and ate sweet potato fries and quesadillas at a table in the behemoth restaurant, because they told us if we ate there, we’d be let in earlier and get better seats. I had wanted to order the Blues Burger, but I was stopped by the price combined with the idea of Morrissey fans truer than I—which are most Morrissey fans, actually—shooting me “Meat is Murder” glances. It felt like the start of fan one-upsmanship that undergirds some element of the experience of seeing a show, or did to me, because my extent of knowledge of Morrissey and the Smiths runs to about fourteen of their billion-song oeuvre. To say you are a Morrissey fan feels to me like saying that you hated your mother in high school: It feels like a cliché just to say it even if it’s true, and it is true, to some extent, for many people within three decades of my age. In a way, dining at the restaurant was like a return to high school. Everyone stared at one another. Who were these other people, we all wondered, these Morrissey fans who were Morrissey fans enough to buy tickets and drive to this place and sit, now, here, and wait, sipping Cokes and bobbing their heads a little now, to the sounds of BB King and the Staple Singers?

The staff of HOB is legion, and they are not happy. Our waitress worked with the dull knowledge of a night of poor tips ahead. The man we asked the location of the bathroom when we first arrived pointed it out with a dutiful sigh. Workers in black-and-bright-yellow shirts stood around in unhappy clumps in the bar/courtyard between the entrance to the restaurant and the ticket window. My friend tells me there was an attendant in the other bathroom, and that she looked grim. A scowling woman directed us to the Special Restaurant Diners line. Then an older man, less unhappy, took our receipts and gave us special orange wristbands, for being restaurant diners.
Their misery was, of course, oddly fitting.

We got in line with everyone else, diners and non-. We stood for a long time as the line grew, winding around a log-cabinish ramp (here, the painted “No cameras/We will confiscate” sign). Minutes and more minutes passed. We shivered in the not-quite-spring-yet air. Several recorded announcements came on about what was and what wasn’t allowed inside. Two slightly cross men came and metal-detected everyone and endured the lame quasi-racist "We're not gangsters" jokes of the men in line ahead of us. For some reason, they collected people’s spare change too, which also was not allowed inside. At the door, two more workers confiscated drinks people had purchased outside. When we went to order more at the bar, the two bartenders were having a loud argument. The woman-bartender slammed the small fridge. “I don’t even wanna hear about it,” she said to the man-bartender before turning on her heel and facing me. “Yes?” she said.

My friend and I went and stood in the crowd before the stage. We were a mixed group, wristbandwise. It seemed the restaurant perk thing had been a ruse. Two more announcements came on, about emergency exits and proper behavior. There in that big crowd, my sympathies with cattle felt stronger than ever. It had been at least two hours of measured steps of submission. Despite this, it was beginning to feel more like a show. There was a crazy guy shouting things into the crowd. My friend, who loves Morrissey, bounced up and down on the balls of her feet in anticipation.

The man himself, when he came on, was, of course, just a man. His six-something frame was human flesh that scowled and preened across the stage, that flipped the long microphone cord dismissively again and again, strutting around, his band so far behind him and ignored by him completely, the players indistinguishable from one another in their jeans and tucked-in blue seersuckers, their shorn hair, their polite finesse with their instruments. He was just a man, but he shined. He frowned and he lamented; he beat his chest and pointed and leaned down to grasp the entreating hands from the front rows.

This crowd had paid not only to hear the songs they equated with huge parts of their lives; they had paid to be paid attention to in this precise way. To take part in a show in which the man pretended we were his private mirror. He sang his fictional trials to us--You understand, you understand, he was crying, because no one understood but us, of course; not these seersucker guys; no one. He was all strange sex appeal and raw egotistic need and gentlemanly aplomb; “Thank you so much,” he said quietly after each song, bowing at the ravenous applause.

All of this came down to the giant backdrop, a two-story black and white photo of a young, muscled man circa WWII, flexing his muscles and chomping a cigar. After the show, my friend said, “There was something really comforting in that photo. Something so Smiths about it, you know?” Yes, but blown up to the nth degree, revealed when another curtain in front of it fell with a dramatic flourish before the start of Morrissey’s set and flashing in different shades of foreboding with the colored lights of each song, the giant photo completed the feeling that we were truly at a rally of some sort. And I liked it. The parking lot wasteland and the militant lines, the guards, the timetables and wristbands; all of it had led up to this, so in this way, it seemed fitting as one of his blue-shirted minions swung and hit the heavy gong and the man sang the words, “Life is a pigsty/And if you don’t know this, Then what do you know?” before shifting into the final song, no encore, just the Big Lonely vacuum of “How Soon is Now?” with its strobelike guitar echoed in actual strobes, beating like the promise of violence against the giant face of the young son of war, against our small bodies as we swayed in ecstasy.

(*My friend once spotted what we agreed to be in the Top Five of Worst T-shirts Ever, at a Wings store in the Outer Banks. Beside an illustration of a stripper-pole, the shirt read, “I support single mothers.”)

2009-02-17T09:28:00.004-05:00

Three Small Stories from the Big Writing Conference

The writing conference, it was big.

I.
Saturday Night: Dance Party. Third Floor Ballroom.
The music was terrible. And my friends danced anyway, and I tried, though the contemporary radio r&b that the dj mostly stuck to has no influence whatsoever on my hips. Which sucked, because I wanted to dance. I wanted, specifically, to dance. Even goofily. We all did. We had walked many blocks from a perfectly warm, comfortable bar, through falling snow to get here. This is a lot to say of people who make their homes in the South. This is a lot to say—believe me—of this group of friends.

The dancefloor was full of awkward, gyrating writers who were mostly Caucasian and mostly several sheets to the wind. It looked exactly like a cruise ship. I imagine. (Full disclosure: I have never been on a cruise ship.) When I dance, I myself am an awkward, gyrating writer. I could get with this. With a few tweaks.

We went up to the DJ, requested: OutKast? No. Missy Elliott? No. Even, maybe, Michael Jackson? Guy said he could download something for us, but he wouldn’t have it till the next day. Note: It’s 2009. We’d have happily given him the dollar. We walked back. The DJ launched into “Get On Up.” Surrounded by better songs, this old standby would have been fine. Only it wasn't, so it was somehow more disappointing.
“This," said one friend, "is, like, your cousin’s wedding. And you don’t even like your cousin.” Next up: Madonna. But not “Get into the Groove” Madonna. “Like a Prayer” Madonna. Bon Jovi. (?) At this point, I gave up, left the dance floor and moved to safety—before the opening bars of “Shout.” As in Kick your heels up and. Throw your head back and. It was worse than a cruise ship, or a lame wedding. Another friend nailed it. “I have been to 745 bar mitzvahs,” he said. “This is your 746th bar mitzvah,” I told him.

II.
Sunday Afternoon: O’Hare.
In the long security line, a fortyish woman and a sixtyish man were just ahead of me, carrying official conference tote bags. As we serpentined our way back and forth and back again, they spoke in tones that were a bit loud, looking around with that weird sort of niche-famous pride between sentences. “I think it was a successful panel,” she announced. “Famous Poet A and Famous Poet C should definitely collaborate on that project. And your essay—fabulous! Now you just need to publish!”
“Yes, yes,” he nodded, all corduroy-patched sagacity. “It’s all right.” Back and forth they went about this essay. As we alternately stood and walked, I was reading from my school’s literary magazine—this, itself, admittedly, perhaps, my own version of flaunting the conference tote. The man kept saying, “But where to publish it?” And the woman kept saying, “Oh, there must be a place,” and both of them kept making eye contact with me—or maybe, I think now, I was just staring. I might have that problem. But instead of continuing on silently with the shoe and the coat doffing, I had to say something. Like a six-year-old who imagines maybe all teachers in the world know her mommy, I held up my literary journal and said to the academic poets, “What about this one?” They asked what the journal was, I told them: We took essays, short stories, poems. The sagacious man knit his eyebrows in offense. The woman smiled benignly, seemed to sigh a little. “His essay’s on critical poetic topics in Oobolean form,” she explained as he turned his back and harrumphed on. Damn kids. “Have you heard of Oobolean form?” I shook my head. She practically patted my hand. “He’s the former editor of Poets International,” she said. “He’s no slouch.”

I nodded and apologized as I bagged my slouchy lit mag and prepared to send everything I carried through the x-rays for real inspection.

III.
Hopelessly Middlebrow.*
(aka: petty thoughts following the “No slouch” incident.)
The I-Pod is quickly dropping to lowbrow status. Maybe it’s there already. Real intellectuals do not sit on the subway nor at the airport gate, filling their ears with distracting chatter or catchy hooks. Their ears remain free of tacky white plastic knobs and the cheap, trendy status they imply, (These knobs, now, sort of the anti-tote: NPR or conference), their future, free of the absolute promise of tinnitus. Their advanced thoughts are allowed to soar, independent, unprogrammed, and unimpeded, to novel heights.
I tap my foot. This listening has absolutely nothing to do with anything but the sound.

*“Hopelessly middlebrow,” the term my old friend’s sister was tagged with by a snotty ex-classmate at a reunion, after making some ‘70s television reference. As in, “Sarah,” sigh, “you are hopelessly middlebrow.”

2009-02-03T09:42:00.002-05:00

Predictable Me.
So of course, unemployed and with dead car (yes, that, too) and with an uncertain future in Atlanta, a weekend visit to Beachtown to turn in my thesis and hang out with friends becomes one of the best weekends ever. It was Place-under-glass good. It was Awareness-that-this-is-a-golden-memory-in-the-making good, the way only fleeting moments can be. Moments lived under the weight of awareness of their finite nature. That we know we can’t keep.

During a Saturday morning sunny drive to the beach, a friend and I listened to Smog. Smog, as you may or may not know, is the alias of musician Bill Callahan, a man whom I’ve long assumed, from the sound of his seasoned voice and wise old lyrics, to be a creepily handsome but weathered old man, in the tradition of the Devil character from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? I recently found out that he is not; this was disappointing. Rather than a figure of fable, he’s like, a completely normal thirtysomething dude who’s bedded both Joanna Newsom and Chan Marshall. (And yes, I am aware that the word “bedded” makes everything sound worse and makes me sound like a writer from freaking Star magazine.)

The album A River Ain’t Too Much to Love is so beautiful, I feel kind of unworthy to listen to it and claim it for my own, and then I realized that this is precisely why I never listen to it. Even though I’ve had it for several years, my one wish with this album is for it always to feel happened-upon and new. I don’t want to learn all the words. There is so much lurvely music out there in the world, and I fill as many free spaces as possible with it. But something about this album. It’s so good that I harbor this sneaking suspicion that it’s too good for me. That it’s too good for the rest of my records, even. That it will raise the bar and wreck the happy equilibrium I’ve cultivated in my current community of cds.

Basically, there’s a concern concerning balance, Henshaw. There’s a fear of seesaws. Luckily, on this geographical end there is Marshall, who is pretty damn heavy in terms of import, and at least one amazing friend here (you know who you are, Missy-sitting-next-to-me), too, but I’ve gotta shake a leg and I dunno, where to go with this metaphor? Toss some gold ingots down over here. I am looking forward to the day when contentedness is not accompanied by some necessary “Carpe diem” sting. Does this happen? I have created a bad, bad precedent of not staying anywhere long enough to find out.

2009-01-24T12:25:00.003-05:00

But darling, there's a gun in the garland.
David Berman is calling it quits with the Silver Jews.

The story ("the son of a demon come to make good the damage") is fascinating and beyond fascinating, whether or not you are a big old devotee of this band. I don't know quite what to say about all this music has meant to me. I mean, this website's been riddled with it for years (see above). The lyrics are often the autopilot, archetypal answers-in-the-brain to any weird, new situation. And although I think DB is saddling himself too much with a sense of overwrought responsibility, I also get it, and it makes my heart soar in sympathy.

Oh, I've written too much. Just read the link, and the link's link.

"When I go downtown
I always wear a corduroy suit
cause it's made of a hundred gutters
that the rain can run right through"

Requiescat in pace.

2009-01-22T08:28:00.005-05:00

I hope that you are proud of you, too.
Remember that Mr. Rogers song? “I’m Proud of You”? This was a song my family co-opted to sing to one another in moments of accomplishment large and small, and my sister remembers it as a sweet thing, and I remember it as an ironic, condescending thing. This is what happens in the course of a nine-year age difference.

Good morning, Henshaw. Now would be as good a time as any, I suppose, to admit that I walk around feeling distinctly un-proud, most of the time. Like a lot of people I know, my principle motivator in this life is dread. You know, (maybe you know): the stone in the pit of the stomach. The name I give to the stone changes, constantly: It becomes “all those papers to grade,” or “that phone call to make,” or a glance at the dwindling bank account, or, “What the hell will you do with yourself once you graduate?” (Effing boulder, that one.) There are also more abstract boulders, like “President Bush,” or “Environment,” but I’ll admit that those ones mostly get pushed by the wayside when faced with an imminent doozie, like, “You have to revise that horrid chapter.”

I’ll admit that waking up knowing that Double-You is no longer representing me to the world feels like a mitigation of this load; knowing that Obama is in feels even better. But it is not these things I credit for my unusual good mood this morning. The thesis is almost (gulp) done, and I know that this fact is just as likely to translate to panic for me as to a sense of accomplishment. Because, you know: Now, what?

But this morning, I feel good about it. I look up above my computer, at the insane chart of chapters crawling across the wall up there, see the red checkmarks next to very-nearly each, and feel like I actually deserve to spend some time out in the twenty-degree sun today.

And, inexplicably, I don’t feel imminently stressed out about anything right now. Sure, I have no job and no prospects for one, and sure, it looks like my car is dying, and sure, I’ve been subsisting on this secret, ridiculous notion that this book would pave the way, sort of magic-carpetlike, for the fancy career in writing I’ve wanted all my life, just like thousands of other people who are more talented than I—but, watching my friends and family members who’ve been taking such things as “I’ll find a job that satisfies me” on faith lately, inspires me. Moreover: relaxes me.

Plus, I get to play music with my Carolina friends when I go to visit next week, and plus, I get to play music with my friend here in Atlanta later this week, and plus, I’m teaching myself to play the Decemberists’ lovely, heartbreaking song “The Engine Driver.” Plus, Marshall and I will go for a long walk in the mountains this weekend. It’s just plain freaking good to be alive right now, damn it. It’s a neighborly day in this beauty wood.

2009-01-15T14:17:00.001-05:00

If you were never so much a watcher of Sex and the City, and you’re around a clique of women who are, and they start in with that, “Which character are you? Which character am I?” game, they will always, always tell you you’re Miranda.

Oh, you organic gardener/librarian/tax consultant/drummer, you. You’re practically just like her.

2009-01-07T09:45:00.001-05:00

Pains [Growing]
Feeling like a housewife atrapada, so I came to the coffeeshop where I used to work, to work on this magazine piece I’m doing and on el thesis. This is the coffeeshop where, on a visit to Atlanta in the fall, I spotted Rainn Wilson getting mobbed by college girls outside on the sidewalk. Do you ever get that feeling that your world is becoming very terrariumlike? Very self-reflective and no-degrees-of separated? That moment was like that. The Office is my favorite show and there was Rainn Wilson outside the coffeeshop of my 20s and next, I expected to see my aunt come waltzing in and hang a poster that said my favorite band was playing the next day at the café where we once saw that horrible one man band guy play, only their new drummer was my friend’s boss from Carolina or a former student.

There’s a man here, now, with a four-year-old daughter and a stretch baby carriage bearing, apparently, twins. I worry that if I were a parent right now, I’d be more like the curmudgeonly owner of the record store across town, whose little son is always there with him, a kid who the man seems to me, to resent the hell out of. Eternally annoyed by the kid’s frustrated “I’m Stuck With My Dad at His Job All Day” triggered actions. But instead of ever laying down the law, the man’s always sort of telling the kid to “Aw, c’mon, cut it out, please,” in this wheedling voice. He seems largely annoyed by his ten-year-old son. I fear that’s how I’d be. Largely annoyed by my ten-year-old son.

I am so excited to be back in Atlanta when I stop and think about it. This weekend, Marshall and I went for an epic bike ride all over, and went out to see friends on Saturday night for a Mexican fiesta. We are having more fun than should be legal decorating the house and doing things like putting up ceiling fans (a task for which my role remained, largely, handing him things and holding the big heavy motor part aloft while he connected wires). But during the week, everyone has jobs and I am at home working on my thesis, worrying about the No Job Status, and missing my Carolina friends. This is finite. This is finite, I remind myself. Good with bad. Phew.

Also, the big record store in town has moved down the street. Also, in Carolina, my main beer was Yuengling Black ‘n Tan, because it was delish and only five some bucks a sixpack because they made it in the state. As soon as I moved here, they started making Yuengling here, too, and it was kind of eerie yesterday afternoon to reach for the Black ‘n Tan from the shelf, like an echo of an echo, a sort of deja-two-seconds-ago weird.
I am the most nostalgic person in the universe. I am more nostalgic than you. Let’s have a Nostalgia-Off, Henshaw. You are effing on. Aww, remember a moment ago? When we decided to have a Nostalgia-Off? Sigh.

2008-12-16T11:07:00.003-05:00

The bed Oprah sleeps on.
So, we need a mattress. A box spring, too. Marshall’s mattress, which, though a series of twists of fate, used to be mine, is kind of, I believe the technical term is “mooshy,” and has developed a great big crater at the center, so we always wake up in each other’s ever-lovin’ arms whether we want to or not. And Marshall has a bad back, too, so he’s compensated for a while with a precise arrangement of pillows beneath and surrounding his person. It’s, well, weird, Henshaw.

So we agreed that our Christmas present to one another this year would be a new bed set-up. Last night, while strolling down to the wine shop for a bottle, we passed by a mattress store and decided to go in and browse. The store was brightly lit and went back a mile. It was silent, chilly, and the lighting was sort of bluish white. One salesman stood at the counter and greeted us, his lone visitors, apparently, in quite some time. As we gave a practiced, noncommittal, “Hello,” avoiding eye contact like you do, he followed us around his counter.
“So, uh, you guys. How are you, this evening?”
“Oh, fine, fine,” we said, poking at the first mattress, a Memoryfoam Deluxe Triple Decker Hoagie sort of deal. Glanced at the price tag. Six-thousand dollars. Strolled on.

“So, uhhh,” said the salesman, “I hope you don’t mind my asking—” in a queer, embarrassed tone, like maybe he was being filmed by his managers and had to get this hated line right, “but are you looking for a bed for the two of you, or for guests?”
“For us,” we said. “But we’re really just browsing.” In fact, we had to meet some friends for dinner in just a couple of minutes and had just stopped in on a whim, we said. Marshall lay down on a bed about four beds back, and I followed suit. The salesman followed along behind awkwardly, closing in: three, then two beds behind us, observing us as we turned from our backs to our sides.

“Well—and my manager likes for me to ask this—do you already share a bed,” he said woodenly, “I mean, do you share one and do you like it or not?”

Yes, we shared a bed.

Oh, okay, he said, and then some silence followed as we sat up and lay down again. The salesmen then turned to the mattress of the bed he stood at the foot of, hesitated, and then spoke. “Watch this,” he said, and folded the mattress in two and then let it spring back. “If this had been a traditional mattress, I would have just bought it. I mean, that would have ruined it.” We watched him, propping our heads up on our hands as we lay on our own chosen bed of the moment. Then we got up, nodded, and strolled on. Then paused, at random, before another bed, and looked at the price tag, also far, far out of our price range. The awkwardness was having the secondary effect of causing us not to look at each other, either. The salesman pointed to the bed we now stood in front of.

“That one is made of the same material as this one, and works on a power base, too. And that one, that’s the bed Oprah sleeps on. It works with a power base, as well.”

I tried to make a joke while still avoiding eye contact with the man: Oprah comes in here every night? Wow! The salesman just nodded and smiled. The effect, I fear, of my comment, in the ensuing weird silence, was one of bullying. Marshall glanced again at his cell phone for effect. The price of all these mattress sets: $2,500 and up.

We walked further from the man and sat down on another bed, running our hands over the surface of the mattress like customers at a fruit stand. This mattress set had a remote control sitting on top, which Marshall quickly grabbed and began examining. The salesman followed us up the aisle.

“Uh, that one, too, works with a power base.” Marshal began to fiddle with the remote, and the man patted the foot of the bed, “Here. Lie down. Both of you.” We were already angling ourselves into supine positions and the salesman accidentally slapped Marshall’s ankle. He motioned for the remote and Marshall gave it to him. He pushed a button. The bottom part of the bed began to shiver and shake a little, vibrating under our ankles. Then the top half, under our shoulder blades. It was loud. The salesman stood at our feet, observing our relaxation. We didn’t comment.

“This is the power base. It’s just meant for relaxation,” he said. Then he shut it off, looking at us still. I swung my legs from the bed. The salesman asked, “What are you—I mean, do you know what you’re having for dinner?”

I looked over at Marshall, suddenly afraid we’d blurt out conflicting stories simultaneously. Our lie was already transparent, but the constantly shifting power balance in the room still made me want to avoid the equivalent of our sitting, so deep into his store, now, on one of his beds, saying, “We are lying to you.”

So, “I don’t know!” I blurted out. Then, with a new, practiced air of laziness, a woman just rising from bed after all, and stretching her arms, “We’re going to the Ethiopian place up the road,” I said. “Do you know it?” This might have been plausible, I thought. Perfectly plausible we’d never eaten Ethiopian food in our lives and had no idea what we were in for.

“Wow, yeah,” he said. “I had Thai food last night! Good! But boy, was it expensive!” This man’s enthusiasm was cardboard-thin. He didn’t want to be having this conversation.

Neither, of course, did we. We made our excuses and left: 6:42. Time, precisely, to meet our friends, it seemed.

“Okay, well, I’m just the assistant manager. The manager, Jim, he’ll be in, tomorrow.” These were the saleman’s parting words. For the rest of the night, we tried to figure them out. What was he telling us? Was he just trying to ensure he’d get a commission? Or was he apologizing for his poor sales skills, letting us know that if we returned, it would be to a superior sales technician and experience? Was he so very self-abasing that this was his way of telling us how to complain to his superior about his poor salesmanship? Oh, the times are hard. Coming back to the car from the wine shop, I clutched the paper-bag-swathed bottle recommended to us by the brusque owner there for our dinner at home. Neither of us looked into the mattress shop’s windows as we walked the other way through its bath of blue-white light.

2008-12-15T11:14:00.004-05:00

Rooted to the place that you spring from.
And so I am.
Henshaw, I’ve been remiss. I could tell you I’ve been busy. I could tell you I’ve been working like a squirrel among the oak leaves on my thesis, that I’ve been singing and playing music with my friends, that I’ve been packing for another great, big move, that I’ve been feverishly sick abed and then lashed with bouts of insomnia during which I still didn’t write—

And all this would be true, but it’s no excuse.

I really wanted to write you about the insomnia, about its varied forms: the fitful thrashing caused by the codeine-containing cough remedy, the dry-throatedness caused by radiator heat in an old house, the perfect midnight alertness caused by oversleep during day during sickness, all this and the usual, caused by hamsterwheelbrain. This all seemed interesting for a moment, then it didn’t.

I wanted to write you about how much I’ve come to love my Beachtown friends, and how sad I’ve grown that a good life must be broken apart, in order to move forward. And then that started to sound eerily familiar, and my own sister told me, “This is a pattern with you,” and then I got embarrassed about it and just wrote nothing.

So now I’m in Atlanta again. I’ve moved back, and in with Marshall, my sweet, sweet b’friend and now I'm sitting at my computer, listening to Lois Reitzes talk all sultrily about Camille San Saens. We have a house with a porch and two cats who haven’t met yet. Dangercat’s residing in the bedroom for now, suspicious and pacing. Marshall’s cat, Enoch, a 16-pound cumulonimbus cloud of a cat, saunters lopsidedly by the bedroom door, but seems not to notice the foreign male cat smell—- or, I posit, does not care. He wobbles up and meows for his meals and for affection. He rests on the couch. Such is the life of Enoch.

On the way down here, I listened to friends’ mixed cds and got all choked up and teary, and then resolute. And, lo and behold, it’s good to be back. Atlanta is a city of wretched planning and sprawl; it is also the city whose street map is blueprinted in my mind when I close my eyes. The roller coaster of 75/85’s Grady curve, Mayor Franklin’s metal street plates (pothole resolution of the future!), the layout of the enormous produce section at the Dekalb County Farmer’s Market, where we went on a shopping spree yesterday along with half the city, these are the landmarks that somehow comfort me.

Marshall and I, we’re having a blast rearranging the house. My little corner of the office is cozy, and yesterday, as we schlepped his mint-green kitchen table down to the basement, I realized the potential there: “Craft center! Craft center!” I started chanting. A forest of mod podge and fabric and paper. Ah, yes. It shall be.

And I’m re-learning Atlanta. It’s been just two-and-a-half years, and this house is in a familiar neighborhood, but there are all these nifty back road shortcuts to friends’ houses and to unfamiliar Publixes, and these require routes with which I’m wholly unfamiliar. I’d like to announce with pride to my fellow Atlanta denizens out there: I’ve been here 48 hours, and have not once driven on Moreland Avenue, the nightmare main drag that this neighborhood surrounds.

I’m going to see how long I can keep this up, in our current frenzy of thrift store furniture shopping and eating at a different friend or family member’s house each night. Tonight we go to my sister’s house, to see my nieces and the first floor of their house, whose every inch, square and spare, the girls have apparently swathed beyond recognition in Christmas decoration.

I’m still nervous, but it’s good to be back, Henshaw, to finish out my final semester from afar and ease myself back in to the Big World. I’m excited to share a life and a home with Marshall; in some ways, I’ve become the person I never thought I would, and it’s funny to see that in these pages: I am in love with and living with a a technical writer--which, as a profession, is about half-a-click away from the computer programmers I whined about when I was 26, and we are fixing up a house in a neighborhood in which, yes, we are the lightest-complected people around. And if the two of us did have a dog and if there were a dogpark, and if we had salaries that would allow for some real home improvements, I would totally be one of the home improvement chatters. Well, to an extent. Then I guess I still would get bored. I'd rather talk crafts. Or music. I guess some things don't change. At any rate, life is good and we are all lucky people. I miss you Carolina folk this much (that's a lot), and I’ll write again soon.

2008-11-14T11:08:00.002-05:00

She's roadside!

It started with a hearse. A black hearse, dusty, parked on the street at a house near my own. In white soap, on the windows, someone had written three initials, which I don’t recall, followed by “R.I.P.” In the back window: “We’ll always miss you.” In the side window facing the street: a red and white For Sale sign with two phone numbers scrawled in black Sharpie. I moved in to the neighborhood and noticed the hearse right away. It had red velvet curtains in the back windows. I went jogging by it every day. The inside seemed to be dusty. Morning or afternoon, I jogged by. It gathered dead pine needles and pollen and fallen leaves.

I made up stories about the hearse as I ran. Someone who’d owned it had had an accident and died. Someone who owned it had had a heart attack inside of it and died. It happened just before I moved in. It had happened years ago. But I really wanted to know the real story. Who had done this? Why? And what did they think, every time they mowed their lawn and saw it sitting there? Or returning home, mind on the groceries and a misunderstanding from work, and there, suddenly: “R.I.P.” “We’ll always miss you.” What on earth were they hoping to tell those around them? Their neighbors who lived right there? I had to call these people. There were not one, but two phone numbers listed on the red sign.

Problem was I never had a pen. Also, the hearse was parked on a road next to two houses whose driveways ran onto parallel streets, and it wasn’t clear which house the car was associated with. One of these houses had a dog that menaced me from the fenced yard whenever I passed. At the other, I never saw a soul, entering or leaving or in the window. Never heard a radio from within or the smells of food coming out.
No sign of life in the house, yet there was the hearse: a brave, bald display; their grief at eye-level. The hearse and its writing were what I would call “rude,” in terms of possessing a startling abruptness. A lot other people in this world would also call it “rude,” and mean it the usual way: thoughtless. It was like a Christmas display, complete with recorded looping carols and a spotlight, at midnight, at summer camp. Who were these people who had done this? People’s grief makes them angry, and the hearse, with its writing and its immobility, struck me as angry. Or maybe that was just my own intimidation at such a breach in the usual public order. What would such unabashed people say to me, and how would they say it?

“Call the hearse people,” or “Get hearse #!!” was a perennial item on a dozen well-intentioned To Do lists. As days stretched out into months of the year, I relaxed and shrugged and moved it to Next Week’s list, making the illogical conclusion that the time before me would surely equal the time that had passed.
And then, of course, it was gone, disappearing one day late spring. And a month or two after that, on a pretty day’s walk, I asked some neighbors about it. Oh yeah, they said. Those people had moved. They didn’t know where.
They were there, they said, and then, gone.

2008-10-23T18:51:00.004-05:00

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.)

2008-10-12T10:57:00.002-05:00

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.

2008-10-01T21:23:00.002-05:00

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.

2008-10-01T19:38:00.002-05:00

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.

2008-08-29T11:50:00.003-05:00

I Good things.
1. This webcomic called xkcd, which Marshall alerted me to.
2. This weekend's upcoming visit from Marshall.

Just because you're paranoid.
I was nervous about typing that, up there. No: fearful. This book I'm writing, about well, death, has fed into an previously-held superstition with regards to speaking excitedly about the future. I'm constantly concerned that my loved ones will have fiery accidents on the way to birthday parties, family holidays and bar gatherings. These accidents will be, secretly, my fault. I caused both the plane's engines to fail because I expressed a naive excitement about reunion at the upcoming happy event.

I talked with a friend recently and discovered she harbors the same fear. Before her s.o. leaves the house each day, she must tell him, "Wear your seatbelt! And be careful on the Interstate!" We do the same thing, she and I: Search our minds for potential disasters and then name them aloud out of some superstitious belief that doing so puts us one up on Evil Fate. Or, if not one up, then at least we've voiced aloud a healthy respect for its power. And maybe we just can't be surprised if the worst does occur. (Laughable, of course.)

I don't know about my friend, but for me, it's like I'm bracing myself. I feel real stabs of fear at those moments when I warn people against walking on the side of the road without the sidewalk on the way to my house, although I keep my voice light and casual when I do it. I don't want them to think I'm crazy or that I think they have no sense. But really, it has nothing to do with their actions; crazy things happen every day beyond anyone's control. What I'm doing is between me and fate, alone. It's an incantation, a spell. "Watch out for crazy drivers" means now those drunken lane swervers will steer clear of you, and "Pack a lunch for your trip," means I've now evaporated potential disguntled fastfood employees armed with uzis into the ether. At least for you. At least for you, my dear, my friend.

For a long time, hearing Channel Eleven Holiday Greeting proclaim its innocuous, "Have a Safe and Happy Fourth," or "Have a Safe and Happy Groundhog's Day" or whatever, drove me nuts. How false a well-wish is that? It says, "I wish for you on this celebrated day the bare-minimum of no permanent injury or scarring." Besides, it's condescending. Your viewers: this uniform group of eight-year olds about to shut off their TVs to run out into the streets, scissors in one hand and lit bottle-rockets in the other.

And the acceptance of the "Have a safe" whatever, or the infinitely more cloying "Be safe," only grew. Now it was an acceptable send-off from the office on Fridays. Now it was an acceptable send-off before your trip to Vegas, a place where a certain kind of lack of safety is supposed to be the entire point.

It was wildly unacceptable to me. First: the condescension, and second, the implication that you could control anything that happened to you, that you could make yourself "Be safe;" it made anything unsafe that befell the greet-ee his or her own fault. From inside your own head: "Yooou weren't saaafe!" chided the now finger-wagging receptionist from your afternoon's dental appointment, after your mugging later that night. And thirdly: This wasn't fun. This was freaking paranoid. As a college student, I didn't want to have a "safe" Halloween. Granted, the life-transforming sort of sophisticated debauchery I envisioned, always to the tune of some woozy old Bowie song, never quite materialized; but still. Likewise, for this and other occasions that are Supposed to be Fun, who wants to be told that someone's fearing for your life? Talk about a downer, man.

But, holy shit. I realize now that I've joined the ranks of the legion of warners. What I want to know is whether there are still more people whom actual fear prompts to say such things to people. Are you out there? Where do you stand, Henshaw, on the eve of this Labor Day Weekend, which will be safe for some and unsafe for others and who knows on which side of that line any of us stands on this Friday afternoon?

2008-08-22T16:53:00.003-05:00

This summer shall have a vegetable, and that vegetable shall be called the Okra that is Pickled.
It was supposed to be the summer of the tomatoes that we grew outside in pots, but this fell beast called the hornworm reduced ours to sticks. (Ginger looked for an organic solution to these evil-looking critters and found, “Pull them off the plants and toss them into a bucket of kerosene.” Kerosene. We are not evolution’s ultimate product, not by a longshot.)

Anyway,:

This is not the hornworm. It is however, sure enough an ugly thing, isn’t it? I have a friend in Atlanta who so dislikes pickles of any sort that he gets the skeeves if you so much as touch one on your plate let alone crunch into one in the same booth at the Earl. Which is a shame; the Earl’s got good pickles.

But, pickled okra-! I have Ginger, my Real Live Southern roommate to thank for this one. Since she introduced me to their crunchy perfection back in June, the summer has been one long mouth-watering stretch between um, okra? Okras? Okra pieces? Wedges? Okrettes? Anyhoo. I can't get tired of them. I think it’s the heat. I was at the library one afternoon and suddenly could not get the delicious taste or texture out of my noggin. It was maddening.
I was not pregnant.

I have since scouted out, bought and consumed three jars of the things in various cities. I think they help you concentrate. I think they’re good for you.
Hip, hip, hooray and a great big mwah to my latest jar. Don’t mind if I do.

2008-08-17T12:05:00.004-05:00

Report from House Arrest, (Chained to Computer.)
(Warning: This post contains Snake Island-y content:)

These days, I eat breakfast, consume coffee, writewritewrite, make lunch to Wolf Parade (“Fine Young Cannibals” and “An Animal in Your Care” are the official Themesongs of Lunch in August), then write some more, usually severely reduced-quality content.

I also make lists. Like this.

Nominated for Retirement.
I’ve decided I'd like to nominate the following songs for retirement. They’re not bad songs. I’ve just had my allotment for this lifetime.

“California Dreamin’”
“Satisfaction”
Anything by John Cougar Mellancamp
“I Feel Good”
“Brown-Eyed Girl” and “Moondance”
“What I Like About You”

Maybe you don’t agree. Maybe you can’t imagine a life devoid, from here on out, of any chance of “Jack and Diane.” I don’t want to be a dictator about this. If we could just work something out where I don’t ever have to hear these songs again, that’d be good enough.

2008-08-13T15:19:00.001-05:00

I know it don’t thrill you; I hope it don’t kill you.
Late this summer, I discovered the university library to be an ideal place to work. Its peculiar off-season emptiness pleased me; the place was near-silent except for the occasional off-color exchange between bored summer employees and constant dark hiss of the a/c. All of this contributed to the illusion that I wasn’t really supposed to be there, or moreover, like no one would ever find me there, which made it the perfect place to write.

I like doing work under the illusion that I’m getting away with something, and I like to work at places and times that encourage that belief—a local diner in the wee morning hours, a crowded coffee shop, abandoned classrooms or the departmental office no one ever uses early on a Friday evening, anything to encourage the idea that what I’m doing isn’t work, but some sneaky pleasure.

So I blame my current block on the return of the students to town. I sit and look at these shoddy, rambling, absolutely no-holds-barred first drafts I cranked out in those days of what felt like writing splendor, and have no idea where to cut or how to fix them. And how, and how-! they desperately need it.

And I can’t face them now, not in these days of rapid repopulation by the baseball caps and cellphones and George Hamilton tans. And it’s not just the undergrads. Knowing that my own colleagues are coming back to town feels just as paralyzing. “Go away!” I think when I see their friendly faces and field their friendly Hi-How’re-yous, even in my mind. (Everyone that is, except you, Henshaw.)

Everyone, all this humanity, returning and wresting the town’s character back with it, from weird little beachtown to collegetown once again. And bringing the expectations I knew would befall this experience eventually, with it.

Welcome back to the schoolyear, Henshaw. The very last one.

2008-08-08T13:48:00.002-05:00

Happy, Happy Prole.

My friend Ginger works as a housekeeper at one of the more popular, affluent beaches here in Beachtown. This means she comes home the very definition of drained, every single evening, having spent the day polishing the staircases and scouring vomit from the bedroom floors of tourist bungalows. It also means my diet has expanded, to include exciting surprise items we now find in our refrigerator and pantry on a regular basis: full six-packs of strawberry yogurt, plastic bags half full of Tortilla chips, canned chili and other foodstuffs the profligate tourists leave behind in their beach houses when their vacation week is through.

Since Ginger and Carmelita are the principle cooks in our household, and since their summer jobs maintaining other people’s homes have made occasions of pot roasts and fancy stews less and less a frequent occurrence at home, we’ve taken to grilling out The Tourists’ hotdogs and drinking their leftover Coronas a whole lot. (Or: Ginger and Carmelita have. I don’t know how to use the grill.)

Having recently joined the ranks of the unemployed myself, I’m happy to consume free Wiener Casserole and Shish-kadogs several nights a week. And it would all be quite enjoyable if it weren’t for the fact of Carm’ and Ginger’s drooping eyelids over our (thanks, tourists!) paper plates, every night.

But I do need to find a job of my own. I found out a couple of weeks ago that funding for a bookish, on-campus position I was supposed to hold this fall had fallen through. I didn’t work in July, but concentrated on writing and researching for el Book, thinking that this job would pick up again in August. But now it won’t.

So I’m looking for something mildly interesting and profitable that won’t suck all my energy away this year, so I can concentrate on this thesis. This job doesn’t have to be my career, but it would be nice if I didn’t dread going. I have a lot of friends like Ginger, who take perverse pleasure in the satisfaction gleaned from a rote task perfectly done. People who enjoy physical labor as the polar opposite of writing. How it clears the mind.

But I am lame.
Unlike Ginger and my other friends, I am an imperfect cleaner at best. I get physically tired and when I do, I feel sorry for myself and when I do, I want to whine about it and I want people to feel sorry for me. I am bad at being consistently pleasant to mean, rich vacationers with an exaggerated sense of entitlement. The never-doneness of housework maddens me and makes me want to give up. I work sllllowly.

It scares me, Henshaw, this tiny set of skills that I have. I will never be Ted Conover. Hell, I’ll never be David Sedaris. (But we knew this, Alice.)

I can write. I can talk with people and listen and show them how to do things. I can get extremely involved in one task and hunt down its every last detail till there’s nothing left.
But that’s about it. It's sad.

Workers of the World, Unite! But let me do the part where I don’t have to sweat.

2008-07-29T11:47:00.002-05:00

This food was supposed to be a party.
Tostitos brand chunky salsa makes me sad. And I’ll avoid coy condescension by making no bones here about what I mean by “sad.” To be clear, I mean: its lame, predictable chunky yet canned and bland tomato-y-ness of flavor makes me feel wistful for what could have been, there, atop my tortilla chip. Especially considering this brand's ubiquity at parties and in the refrigerator doors of friends from whom we are mooching snacks. As a whole, can’t we do better, America?

Thank you.

2008-07-11T18:19:00.000-05:00

Greetings!

A hearty hello to you, Henshaw, from the Roadtrip I’ve so far been Too Chicken to Name, but will now call my

Country Death Tour.*
*By the way, an internet search on “death tour” yields no fewer than eight different heavy metal-themed entries. These include but are not limited to: “Conquest of Death Tour,” “A Matter of Life and Death Tour,” “Dance of Death Tour,” “Monolith of Death Tour, “Doppel Uber Death Tour,” “Valley of Death Tour,” “Under Pain of Death Tour,” and “Kiss of Death Tour.”

The fear thing is because my car’s about to fall apart, but I keep driving it across this great land of ours anyway. Because doing so sort of jacks up the stakes of the whole thing and makes it more exciting, despite the terror involved. Even announcing this as a roadtrip, at this two-thirds-through point, feels tempting of, um, Satan. This personal brand of extreme superstition comes up again in a bit and yes, it only gets worse.

To be specific, so far, this tour has consisted of burning miles and oil across: zee Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin. To come: Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia. And back. If I make it.

While driving, when I think to, I keep track of the closest mile-marker on Highway 70 or 74 or 95 or wherever I happen to be, and then I can think, “138, Mile 138, okay, okay,” and know that I’ll have that knowledge handy when Ghostcar becomes a smoking mess on the side of the road in approximately thirty seconds.

So far, the trip’s been totally worth it, despite the Triple Foolish Factors of 1. injured car (bad news delivered by kind mechanics in Pittsburgh), 2. high gas prices and 3. lack of job this month.

High stakes, high adventure. That’s our mantra, Henshaw.

So far, I’ve: Biked down old railroad lines under green, green canopies of cool leaves in Pennsylvania with mi padre and talked about biking from Pgh. to D.C. together next summer. Hung out with extended family and felt the stress drift away with the cool temperatures and lush, leafy hills, bottles of wine and grilled-out food.

Then drove to Springfield, Illinois.
This drive, through cornfield after sundrenched cornfield at sunset, afforded me time to get all choked up about how much I love my family and then, partially because of the topic of this book I’m working on forces/allows me to, I then became completely freaked out about how sooner or later I will lose my family members. Then I thought about independence in the largest possible sense and what that means. People close to me have lost parents in the past year and by contrast, I feel coddled sometimes. In a sense, compared to a lot of people I know, I’ve felt coddled for a long time, and maybe I’m nearing the end of it. Who knows. I am too scared to say it: I am too lucky to speak. Too scared to lose my luck. Too scared to even talk about it. Typing it here feels very Fates-Tempting, frankly.

Near Death in Springfield
In Springfield, I visited the Museum of Funeral Custom, which abuts Oak Ridge Cemetery, where Lincoln’s buried. And which is across the street from a faux log cabin tourist trap that sells Lincoln black velvet paintings, Lincoln coin purses and Lincoln backscratchers.

The Funeral Customs museum itself was incredible: Victorian mourning jewelry made from human hair, antique cooling boards and ads for old hearse companies that doubled as ambulance services. This is my principle travel recommendation to you when you are next in Springfield.

At the Lincoln family’s Springfield home, I suspected abridgement of the usual tour by my group’s National Park grey-hatted guide. I think a lot of this suspicion sprang from terse explanations such as, “This bedroom is where the maid would have slept. Any questions?” It also came from the fact that one of the tourists in our groups was a YOWLING infant. I feel for parents with yowling infants; it’s not like there’s anything you can do about the yowling half the time. I understand: It’s so humid today that your sweat is sweating; you’re tired; it’s four in the afternoon and you have two other cranky youngins on a mutual sugar crash to try to keep from killing each other when Young Yowly McScreamerson suddenly pitches a fit of such impressive length and volume as to DROWN OUT THE VOICE OF THE TOURGUIDE.

Still: Maybe you could leave the tour? Maybe? When it becomes clear that not one person can hear Mr. GreyHat’s lone sentence about Mary Todd’s sleeping quarters?

All this became prematurely moot in the final room of the tour, however, when, eight minutes after we arrived, rain began tappa-tapping on the Lincoln roof. Then hammering. Then, well, insert your metaphorical language here; it was raining, but really hard. Midwest in 2008 hard. And then two more grey-hatted state park staffers ran up onto the Lincoln back porch, clad in these perfect old-style grey rainsuits buttoned up over their uniforms. And they tell us to leave if we plan not to spend the night at the Lincoln house; this is not the worst of the storm. There are tornados coming.

So I ran back to the Ghostcar and floated, inside of it, back to my motel room, and didn’t die. And that was Springfield.

In Which Alice Finds the Town of Her Dreams. Again.
Now I’m in Milwaukee busy doing more research thangs and visiting my wonderful old friend, Jane, and her beau and being all floored to the ground by Milwaukee.

Some facts about Milwaukee as I see it. It’s:
1. lush and green with the perfect degree of postindustrial grittiness/gorgeous old architecture, like Pittsburgh (aka The Homeland)
2. Filled with organic farmers’ markets and festivals and neat community activities like Madison

only

3. with actual jobs and bustle and activity, unlike the former, and
4. without the irritating self-righteous self-importance of the latter.

I’m kind of smitten, Henshaw. I’ll have to come back and visit in the wintertime and get back to you, but oh! What a place! It also helps to have two town historical buffs walk and bike you around the place to tell you about every little thing, too, from the train trestles to the Milwaukee brick.

All righty. I’ve gotta get to tonight’s activities with J and her sweetie. Take care and drive safely yourself this summer, Mr. H. And get out there and see this land of ours if you can. A late Happy 4th to ya.

2008-06-27T10:54:00.002-05:00

I left the river out, and I don't know why.
So it turns out that a lot of people still have AAA. Mea culpa, Henshaw, for my ignorance a few days ago.

Please accept, as a token of my apology, these simple sentiments from Mr. Joe Cocker.

2008-06-26T22:57:00.001-05:00

Against Music Snobbery
(Part 34 of an unintentional, growing series in which Alice rails against one of the great pet-peeves in her pantheon, as part of a larger, futile attempt to fight back the twin fears that 1. she herself is a music snob and 2. real music snobs may look down on her.)

Look, now.
Now; the split second, even, before you get all raised-eyesbrowsy on me. Where did you first hear that band that you’re shocked that I’ve never heard of? That band you’ve been listening to for a whole six weeks, six months, six years now, already? Were you in their basement at the moment they realized brilliance and were you the only one there to recognize it?

Or were you helped along?

Because if you bought their record, it was probably because a friend told you to, or else you heard it playing at someone else’s house and liked it, or you listened to it at a record store, or you read about it online, or you heard about it on All Things Considered (in which case you’ll have a whole busload and half of music snobs laughing at you), or maybe your ex introduced you to a whole new musical world you had no inkling of before you walked into that party and started talking, or else your older sister used to listen to it in her bedroom at night and shut the door on you, and you’d put your ear to the floor, in the dusty yellow shag, there, to hear its vibrations.

If any of the above is true, you have not your own genius, but that of your friends and family and acquaintances to thank. And yes, I’ll say “genius,” because music catching fire inside our brains and bodies feels like nothing but.

And because it’s a better thing to be a bit grateful. It’s a better thing that we all go out in the world and thank whomever it was who first played for us Gang of Four or Shostakovich, Fela Kuti or The Velvet Underground, Joni Mitchell or Lady Day. Thank your old friend now. Send him an email and tell him about the excellent Tom Waits show you just came home from, how breathless and happy you feel, and tell him how you realized all at once, that you never would have been there in that wonderful, boney balcony seat, your spine rattling shivers through your skin, if it hadn’t been for him, way back forever ago, in his parents’ kitchen, sticking Rain Dogs in the CD player and playing it so loud his own dogs howled outside. Thank him for making you listen to it again and again till you stopped saying it was weird.

It’s a better thing to thank these people, even if they’re people who don’t expect your thanks, and I’ll say especially in these cases, better to thank them, than to thank yourself. Because if you pat your own back, that's totally a difficult and physically awkward gesture, man. It pulls your shoulder out of joint all weird. And then you'll secretly know you’re lying. And your mind turns you cagey and craven to prove it. And then, eventually, we have on our hands, way too many solitary, striving, and in the end, lonely, assholes.
And that’s not what music’s About, Charlie Brown.

Maybe you heard this music at a show the group played. Maybe you wandered into there by yourself, or your girlfriend’s band opened up and so you had to do the polite thing and watch their set because they watched your girlfriend’s, even though you’re tired and your feet hurt from this awful concrete floor for four goddamned hours. You stay and watch and listen and suddenly, the room gets that electric feeling. No one there knew this would happen, but it’s happening. This music is chastening the crowd. This crowd is moved. Or maybe there is no crowd. Maybe it’s a different night, one in which it really is only, just you and the performer. And somehow, you experience brilliance.

You’re still not so great. You’re lucky. We’re all humbled by the music itself. Thank the sound.

(Thanks to my colleague in Atlanta, as this diatribe was sparked, in part, by our ten-second phone exchange today in which we argued about nerds versus cool people and I was at a complete loss. Now I'm not.)

2008-06-25T00:59:00.000-05:00

So, it’s the end of my last June in Beachtown, and I find myself thinking increasingly about Next Year at This Time, because: 1. I am just that laissez faire and fancy free, and 2. it’s the middle of the damn night, a late night I didn’t expect to even be awake to see, several hours ago, when I was sitting on the couch, munching on popcorn and watching Annie Hall, a movie in which I can see both the innovations of the period and this horrid datedness.

So it's that perplexing duality that I'll blame. Let's blame Annie Hall, you and me. Together. What the hell.

But anyway, now, somehow, it’s one in the damn morning. And I just ran across this thing I wrote back in March, when I was visiting Atlanta, you know, that town I spent years trying to escape:

“Driving along in one’s car, seeing someone talking on her cell phone one car over, you notice her nodding vigorously, listening. Seeing this, you are certain: you feel closer to this stranger-woman than the person on the other end of the phoneline could possibly be capable of feeling.”

Who wants to go back to this world, right? Not you. Not when your shoulder blades have finally unclenched, when you finally live somewhere with clean! air!, where it doesn’t automatically take 20 minutes to reach any given destination, where this annoying term: “roadrage,” has faded to the status of Archaic Fake Word invented by television pundits in the early nineties and then quickly forgotten about by real people.

Why would you ever go back there? I mean, by choice?
Oh, Henshaw. I’ll explain in the morning. I really, really should go to bed, now.

2008-06-21T16:39:00.006-05:00

Kidnapped by Cowboys, (that's where I been.)

Or: New Mexico!
has a superabundance of…

1. Motels.
Especially Albuquerque. Albuquerque is at least half hotels. Or else motels. All of which ask you if you have triple-A when you call to request their rates. As a child, my favorite thing about AAA were the Triptiks my parents would order, those three-ring-bound portions of full-color maps, your route highlighted in friendly, blazing yellow. Ah, Triptiks, mapquest has nothing on ye. But also: Who the hell has triple A anymore?

Central Avenue, home to the resident Hipster/ Expensive as Hell/Then Sketchy district©, also used to be part of Route 66, so it’s lined with a gazillion old motels with in a parade of colors and lights from the ‘50s and ‘60s. So many of them, we stopped pointing out places like the Gung Ho Inn after awhile. We stayed at the Hiway House our first night. The Hiway House has an amazing vintage sign, cheap rates and lacks room-controlled air conditioning.

2. Nice people.
In the tiny, Old-Westy burg of Las Vegas, NM (not to be confused with the monstrosity: this Las Vegas was the Official Film Site of Portions of Movies of 2007, including No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood.): We soak in hot springs, breathing in sulfur and some insanely sweet flower, eyes closed, breathing fast to abide the heat, listening as the crickets and cicadas start up. As we towel off and put on tennis shoes, our muscles lazy and langourous, a man, apparently a local gentleman, arrives. “Did you enjoy the springs?” he asks eagerly, setting down his own towel, and we nod like crazy. “Good,” he says, with seemingly real satisfaction. As we leave, he tosses out a genial “Careful out on the roads, tonight. A lot of locos out there!”

We arrive back in town to find that all the restaurants have closed. Sheepishly approach a man and woman smoking cigarettes outside the tattoo place. When we tell them our plight, they’re immediately outright apologetic that nearly all the town restaurants are closed. We soon find outselves waited upon by the Most Conscientious Teenage Boy Server ever to work a Pizza Hut.

Over the next two days, same deal in the very nice and crazy-picturesque towns of Madrid and Cedar Crest (where we stay in a hostel with goats. Not in the same room. With the goats. Not each other. Never mind.) But arriving in Albuquerque, the biggest, sprawlingest city since Atlanta, our luck's sure to run out, right? No. Enter hardcore night at local bar, where we talk to the nicest-ever metal drummer for a good 20 minutes. He turns out to be from a town near Pittsburgh, though.

3. Food. That's really. Really, Really good.
(With portions like the very desert horizon.)

Frontier Restaurant (Central Ave. Albuquerque)
It’s shaped like a barn, a yellow barn, with willy-nilly annexed rooms, each decked out in splashy western paintings of John Wayne, Noble Horses, Noble Natives and even a Noble Native Elvis (but no Noble Elvis Riding Horse or even Noble Horse Elvis.) When you get to the order window, the cashier, who’s really nice on both occasions you go, is wearing one of those old-style paper diner hats. But beyond all this: green chile stew. It is cheap. It is addictive. It arrives with fresh-baked, warm, thick flour tortillas and honey. How to convince the owners to move the Frontier to the east coast so I can eat this every week? I mean, despite the whole, um, southwest cuisine thing. And the however-many-years-in-this-exact-spot tradition-thing.

Olympia Cafe. (Um, also Central Ave. Albuquerque)
Oh. My god. So, first: I grew up in Pittsburgh, which, among other things, means this: I have consumed more than my earthly share of Greek dressing, spanikopita and gyros.

(Flashback! To Three Rivers Arts Festival, circa ’85: Mother of a Really Good Childhood friend flaunting her NPR-worthy pronunciation abilities--in a town whose local dialect proscribes that you order “JIE-roes.” In stage-voice, to cashier at stand: “We’ll have three ghhhhheeeeeros, please!” Full, gutteral thrust that caused Maria Hinojosa, wherever she was at that moment, to bow her head in amazement and envy. End flashback.)

The term “succulent” is overused, but what else have we got? I mean, without it, where would Lynn Rossetto Kasper be, week after blessed week, right? But still, let’s see. Our alternatives, according to Mister Oxford, are: “juicy, moist, luscious, soft, tender; choice, mouthwatering, appetizing, tasty, delicious; [informal] scrumptious.”
Yeah.

Our two plates of gyro meat, pork souvlaki, stewed potatoes and accompanying Close Encounters-like dollops of tzadziki sauce put us in instant twin foodrapture paroxyms. Meaning: We ceased both speech and eye-contact as we ate, save for the occasional helpless lifts of the eyebrow, pregnant with meaning, that meaning being, “Oh, mygoodLordinHeaven.”
We fed.

And yeah, to be fair: this was a post-campout meal: First non-energy bar or raisin-based meal of a day whose previous morning and afternoon had seen us hiking the astonishing cliffs of Chaco Canyon. (I mean "astonishing" like beautiful, not like we were using crampons and rope or anything.)

True. But also the best post-camping meal I’ve ever consumed. And, I should note, that I, who was raised in a childhood twistedly based on Clean Plate Philosophy, couldn’t finish this portion, it was so generous, and so rich.

I’d have shared it with you, though, Henshaw, had you come. Next time, maybe.

(Not noted: delirious/delicious cookout grub, above. Nor nearly equally delicious pre-grub high-gravity beer of which author took two sips at high-altitude after full day of desert hiking and got immediately giggly and ridiculous from, but still managed to snap this Bon Appetit-worthy photo.)

2008-06-01T13:23:00.006-05:00

Hi, Henshaw.
I’m not dead. Just at the start of a very active summer here in Beachtown. Some highlights.

This week, I am busybusybusy, pitching stories to magazines and radio shows and interviewing embalmers and such for The Book. It feels good to be so busy.

Much more fun.
I took a break from all this on Tuesday to drive all the way over the Chapel Hill to see X, one of my favorite bands ever, ever, ever. It was a reunion tour without that irritating reunion tour feel. Really, it was tight and energized and lurvely.

I don’t have any friends here in Beachtown who like X, so I went alone, but that fact actually felt like a perk. The drive was great and it was great too, to revel in my nerdy fandom rather than having to explain anything to anyone or worry about someone else’s good time. Instead, it was me and the rest of the crowd, mostly male, future versions of me: 50-ish dudes in black-rimmed glasses who had come alone, a few with girlfriends/wives, and at least one with a little girl who was probably eight or nine.

It was glorious. The goofy quirk being, of course, Billy Zoom, the band’s platinum blonde legendary guitarist. One of my favorite things about Billy Zoom is that, in reaction to the bullshit GuitarFace that a lot of '70s musicians were known for, he plays--these uniquely difficult and weird guitar parts--without ever looking at his hands, and just standing stock-still, grinning.

He's also known for turning this grin on individuals in the crowd. Staring, especially, at ladies. (And it's not just me.)

I’d somehow forgotten this. Maybe it was because last time I saw X I was clearly there with a boyfriend and this time around, I was clearly there sola.

I’d parked myself between Exene and John Doe, but Billy Zoom, down at the other end of the stage there at the Cradle, took a turn gazing into the eyes of every chica near the front of the stage, leering/grinning and grinning/leering. And part of me’s all like, you know: we were all standing there staring at him; why shouldn’t he have a turn? But then part of me feels fucking odd when I’m dancing my arse off like a fool and singing along with Exene and she’s got her eyes squeezed shut into her mic a foot in front of me, but Billy Zoom’s closer, leaning over the monitor singing straight back at me with a trace of that trademark mockery of his. I want to be like, Dude, Exene, do something about this. But even punk rock royalty can do nothing about other punk rock royalty.
And all worth it. And all worth it.

Tourist in your (Ghost)town.
Last weekend, Marshall visited so we decided to be tourists.
We went to the beach, something I never do here by myself, and we went on a walking ghost tour. The confusingly pirate-y dressed tour guide started off the tour by warning us that, in addition to ghost stories, there would also be some history. For this, she apologized. It was unavoidable.

This was especially funny because we had decided on the ghost tour mainly because we couldn’t afford any of the town’s fancy historical tours, most of which require eclectic transportation forms, like horse-drawn carriages, houseboats and double-decker busses. Mostly, I guess, because it’s old people who actually go for this sort of entertainment, not kids under 40 like me.
At any rate, learning about the history of Beachtown through half-bullshat stories was our only way.

Some fact-ishes we picked up: 1. A dueling ground here in town left disgruntled ghosts right and left and 2. Our wonder-of-1970s-archetecture library is also haunted by a racist asshole from the 1800s.

One awesome woman in our tour group (not me) kept things lively by frequently shouting things like, “I want to stay one night in that haunted house! I would pay them money!” Another awesome woman (not not me) kept things lively by remarking loudly, “That’s true!” when the pirate-guide announced that, in addition to housing a lively ghost, one particular house on the tour is also the home of a very friendly cat. This house was the house next door to the house where I started out here in Beachtown, see. So I knew.

Marshall said it sounded like maybe I was a plant on the tour. Oh, well. It was a nice cat. No lie.

2008-05-10T10:55:00.005-05:00

Consumption! A report.

Went to Atlanta this last weekend, Henshaw, and had a silly-good time. And now none of my pants fit quite right. Although yes, like just about all my Atlanta-visits, I can track this one via the delicious restaurants and food-stands I visited, the real reason it was refreshing was all you Atlanta folk whom I love so well and miss so much here in Beachtown. You are my real sustenance, people! MWAH!

That very important point aside, let’s now look at this particular weekend’s Tour of Food.

Friday
The last three hours of my seven-hour drive to Atlanta was spent listening to Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, about a tragic Mount Everest expedition, and I was on the final, wrenching chapter of the book by the time I pulled into East Atlanta, riveted and tempted to just drive around and around to finish the book out, arse-numbness-be-damned.

This last part of the book is all, “I walked out thirty yards from my tent and found that Simon and Joe were face-down in the snow, dead, as well. By this point, I, personally, was so starving and wasted that I couldn’t produce tears.” It had been going on like this, only much worse, for a while when I pulled into my friend’s driveway. I was ready to go someplace and turn on lots of lights, and just cry. Or speed around the city in a sporty car. I was also ready to eat.

Our first stop was the vegetarian Indian restaurant where we always order and consume our body weight in dosai and curries, and where we always order black tea and this request is either first ignored completely, or responded to with explicit instructions—i.e., the waiter frowning and shoving the plastic canister that holds the sugar packets towards Marshall repeatedly, saying, “Sugar. You’ll want sugar with the tea. Sugar,” until Marshall nods and says, “Yes. Okay. Sugar. Thanks.” It made us start to feel very British, in a very bad way, all this tea-inspired tension.

Saturday
The next day’s stop on the food tour was Italian, though uniquely enmeshed with the very essence of all that is Atlanta. More on that soon. First though, Saturday, as many of the more well-informed of you may know, was the Kentucky Derby Party and Race in Cabbagetown.

Race requirements were: a human-powered vehicle such as a scooter or a bicycle, and some sort of horse-head figure. Actual vehicles included skates, bikes, a vacuum-cleaner and roller skates. Oh, and one amazing contestant spent the day making his own wooden/metal/scrap cart. I think he was actually the true winner. The real Miss Firecracker, if you will.

The afternoon’s Great Race sped around the block, with a pit stop at which point there was the required leisurely consumption of one beer of the contestant’s choosing, before finally ending in dramatic triumph back in front of the host’s house.

Marshall and I had managed to find at two(!) separate thrift stores the Morning Of, two of those stick horses that whinny when you push a button on the ear, and a friend loaned us both scooters. Marshall was also dapperly dressed in an outfit whose original intention was White Linen Kentucky Gentleman, but somehow morphed, in the execution, into creepy Dali/Hunter S. Thompson figure. (Which is just perfect, actually, when you consider Thompson’s oeuvre.)

The lucky third-place winner received the bronze horse-head plaque. (Ahem, it made the ride back to Beachtown quite nicely; thanks, ya’ll.) After the race-proper, the street was blocked off, and the New Orleans funk dance-party portion of the race ensued.

At this part of the story, it should be noted that while festivities—the mint julep and polite socializing portion of the festivities—began at four p.m., and many of us were quite prompt, the racing gun did not fire until six p.m. The dancing after the race, it was quite spirited. And it is a wonder that nobody died in the race, from running into a parked car, perhaps, or simply falling off his or her trusty steed.

So the athletes were hungry, of course. Two pizzas were ordered and a few walked down the road to pick them up in the midst of the dance party. Their return was heralded with a cheer, and the proud delivery volunteer sped into a run. In the middle of Savannah Street, his box slipped open and the vegetable pizza fell, cheese-side-down, onto the pavement. And, even as they groaned in dismay, the lubricated athletes fell upon this pie, this street-pizza, grabbed individual slices, and ate.
Just a sign that these were true patriots of this historic neighborhood, of this dear, dear city.

Sunday
Sunday, we didn’t get such an early start.

But the thing about an actual city, versus a sleepy, friendly oceanside community such as the one where I now make my home, is this: You can open the free weekly paper at any given point on any given day, and choose among a number of amazing things to do. Your fun is laid out for you. And on Sunday morning, the clear choice was the Latino Festival at Centennial Park.

Dirk, our old friend, decided to come along. Great quantities of caffeine were consumed, and I, still in my smalltown mindset, was shocked as we drove into the vicinity of the park, to see the great Atlanticlike waves of humanity that had descended there. Oh yeah, I remembered. We’re in a city, now. When we finally found a forty-dollar parking spot in a near-ish-by garage, we went into the park and discovered the following attractions:

1. Live music on a giant stage. Which was loud, and pretty awesome.

2. People. Everywhere. We groggily navigated around the mobs, to see what was drawing them all. The answer turned out to be:

3. Lines. Great, winding lines of people snaking all around booths for Fanta, for Coca-Cola, for the local radio stations, tortilla companies and energy drinks—the last of which was giving away scantily-dressed-lady calendars. This line was populated with people not noticeably different from the others: They were couples and children and groups of men and old ladies. All awaiting their very own free pin-up calendar. The draw of the other lines were primarily:

4. Spinning wheels. Every booth that didn’t have free samples, and this was most of them, had ticking spinning wheels that visitors could whirl and which, in each case, seemed to earn them a packet of coupons.

Marshall really wanted to spin a wheel, but since the lines were so long, usually wending back past the neighboring booth and around a corner, we settled for the shorter lines, for free things. We consumed orange Fanta, disgusting McDonalds sweetened iced coffee and Starbucks-brand sour, hot coffee, all because, as Dirk noted, “It’s free.” If someone had handed us a free drink made of rancid chicken livers, we probably would have taken it. Dirk also told us that he was starting to feel hung-over, too, just being there with the two of us, confusedly navigating the crowds.

2008-04-30T13:58:00.003-05:00

Today's challenge:
Singing along with that MIA song lodged in your brain without just sounding like an eight-year-old boy's interpretation of a machine gun.
"Dun-dada-dun-dada-dun-da-da-dun..."

Best lyric, though, from Timbaland: "Don't get mad!/In fact, let me hit that."

2008-04-29T23:29:00.004-05:00

Snotty remarks about a smart film.
Saw The Counterfeiters tonight. I recommend it. It was one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. Really good. Well-done.

My one thing is this: In period movies that take place at any point pre-1960? In scenes at like, parties? You can just see the wardrobe people having damn orgasms over getting to dress their beautiful, uniformly well-fed and leggy bit actors. In this one, it was all early(!) 1930s(!) Berlin(!!) party.(!) And these people; god, they looked good.
And I’m sure people did look good at such underground soirees, but I’m also sure that not everyone looked so uniformly good: so spotless and stunning and nattily dressed. It’s like movies where there are Halloween parties. Everyone’s always gone all out. (Like they had access to, oh, a costume closet somewhere.) There’s no whole cadre of non-dressed up people, and there’s no ten women all dressed up like Goth Sexy Whatever, to varying degrees of success. (Goth sexy carrot! Goth sexy dresser drawer!)

Okay, but the beautiful people party scenes in The Counterfeiters are like, a sixth of the film. They do dazzle. They made me feel all melty and yearn-y over the gorgeous shoes and red lipstick and yawning creamy expanses of silks and skin. And maybe the whole point was contrast, since the other, dead-serious five-sixths of it takes place in, um, concentration camps. So fine, but fine.

The little-by-little.
It’s midnight now, after day #1 of summer vacation. The last summer vacation. A first day of frantically working on el thesis and trying to make myself relax about working on it. Trying to make an honest effort and convince myself with no feedback from anyone else, that this was fine, this (very) little-by-little.
I do love a schedule, Henshaw. It’s why I came back to school in the first place.
So, summer vacation is good practice for what’s peeking out from ‘round that corner over there: That life post-MFA. Shh!

At any rate, it went fine.

A Telephone that Rings, but Who's to Answer?
So it’s late, now. It’s tonight, now. And I go for the most knee-jerk source of comfort to reward all my solitary Grown Up Lady effort. Oh yes: Headphones plus Stephen Stills. Who’s up for a little “Southern Cross”? Oh, me. Just me. And “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More” with those Brothers Allman, and, as you know, Abba, “The Eagle.” Terrible, wonderful, awful music of childhood, I shall crawl inside of you; I shall shut my eyes.

It’s funny. Most of these songs remind me of my ex-hippie uncle; all of them remind me of being a small child in some hazily-lit nighttime summer where everything was green and the grownups and older cousins and siblings were all relaxed and happy and I was flitting about playing, probably annoying everybody and spending long moments watching them all, so much younger I was than all of them. The specifics themselves aren’t clear. I’m thinking…croquet game? Maybe cashew nuts in a dish on some low coffeetable that I gorged myself on?

(Though too: CSNY and leads to Billie and Art Tatum and Ella; grandmother music. Don’t think and for a second you hear her singing along in her rusty voice, her pink glasses catching those fluorescent kitchen lights as she turns her head upwards, mouth open.)

Trying, trying, trying to assign specifics here, to re-incarnate.

I can give you no real concrete detail, Henshaw. I’m a poor writer about this. It’s so weird how these details fade to us, and yet the feeling—that capital-H happiness—still hangs there, still hazy and warm like a summer night, like the very words, “long ago summer night,” wrapped inside some sound.

2008-04-21T20:11:00.003-05:00

Tonight, I ate some killer soup. Today, I had an all-right workshop. Taught two classes that went fairly well.
But I didn't feel nearly this good.

2008-04-20T22:10:00.006-05:00

Love ‘n Euskara for dummies.
Just saw Lars and the Real Girl. It was so sweet it made me choke right up, and feel all wistful and wishfullike inside the way these movies do—and I’d definitely recommend it to you, Henshaw. Because it was well done and believable. And because, when it is well done, I love the idea that social-misfit weirdos can find true love.
I love-! It-! And you know. Um, it’s springtime.

Still, it makes me consider again this tv/film phenomenon of the socially unsalvageable lad whom some perfectly adjusted gal rescues for no clear reason. You know: 40 Year Old Virgin did it, and Knocked Up—and it’s not just Judd Apatow. Consider, too: Garden State, Everybody Loves Raymond and on and on. And sure, we all heard, like, TV Guide, jibber-jabbering away about the “fat guy/hot wife” sitcom phenomenon (“ho, ho, ho”) a while back as though it were some sort of isolated outcropping, the Basque language of that second’s pop culture.

But, please. What’s with the “2005”-labelled shrink-wrap on this phenom? This weirdo, supremely unhealthy notion that the best men are special cases who need to be nurtured back to emotional health and ushered gently into the world by their women is really nothing new. Girlfriend as mother, all that; not new. I mean, gah, consider the entire decade we call the '70s. Nor has it died now that we’ve tired of talking about it temporarily. And, it doesn’t, it does not help men or women in the real world.

So then, what’s with the movie rec, if that’s how I feel? Well, because: competing synapses. Because nurture, too, and not just nature, works on all of us. What if they’d made Sir Main Character Guy really physically unattractive? How much then would I still be rooting for him and how much would I have been forced to confront my own little urge to jump his bones and then make him casserole?

Maybe I’m just disturbed by that. And, by how much that scene of Lars and that girl on the date at the bowling alley? The one where he’s just sighing a lot and rolling his eyes heavenward just trying to think of a good response to her innocuous conversational volley? While she sits there with a damn expectant grin plastered to her face? Reminded me exactly of someone I once dated.

Meanwhile, big, big changes sharp and bright going on, it seems, with friends far and wide. Time for upheaval, Miraclegrow, all that. Carmelita and Ginger are planting all sorts of new things out on the veranda, so this might really be the year I overcome some of my infamous black-thumbage. Also trying to get some friends to start playing the rock together; currently = all I can think about. Ah, spring fever.
Anyway, take care, ya’ll. Get out there in the sunshine.
(now playing: “Imperial” – Unrest, though, in general, lots of “Ceremony” by New Order. I blame those NPR music buttons between news stories for this.)

2008-04-05T12:13:00.000-05:00

No virtue #32.
There is no virtue in the mere act of sitting at your deskchair, no matter how businesslike your mood. Sitting there without writing weighs out to about the same righteousness-quotient as watching Rock of Love, splayed out prone on the unvacuumed-for-too-long couch, holding a jumbo-sized bag of Cheetos at a 45-degree angle over your mouth.
Cheetos, the least-virtuous of snack foods.

2008-04-04T15:19:00.004-05:00

A Friendly Suggestion.
or two, actually.
Maybe your day's not going so well. Or your week.
You should help it along, by listening to Wussy's song, "Airborne."

I wish they'd come down south. Come on, Wussy! Come to us!

2008-03-31T19:42:00.005-05:00

Right now, when people ask me what I'm reading, I tell them this book from the 1960s on the history of the funeral industry. That or that I’m just trying to plow through the February and March issues of Harpers, which arrived at the same time after I finally got myself a damn subscription. Or sometimes I’ll say I’m reading the latest AWP Bulletin or this December ’07 issue of Glimmertrain, or George Saunders’ The Brain-Dead Megaphone, which is truly excellent, or sometimes, if that “sometimes” is in the past two days, I might say Tobias Wolfe’s This Boy’s Life, which is also true. Also usually always true: I’m reading both forty papers by undergraduate students and essays and short stories by my fellow MFA programmers.

Really true: I want a cabin to just sit in and read and read books and magazines only and to fall asleep and then maybe wake up and read some more and then maybe eat some meat loaf and mashed potatoes while listening to a little Silver Jews’ Bright Flight and drinking a little wine at the end of the day and fantasizing about doing a needlepoint project involving Silver Jews lyrics, which, whoops, I guess I’m doing, now.
Instead of reading.

Also reading this ongoing ethnographic account of the habits of white people, which you’ve probably seen by now since you’re a thousand times more tech-savvy than I, Henshaw. Anyway, I find it startlingly accurate.

2008-03-27T19:45:00.003-05:00

Tales from the Dark Side only, please.
So, howdy, Henshaw.
Somehow I ended up spending the one free day I have during the week doing teaching preparation things: grading papers, planning the next units in both classes and. And. And that’s about it. If-they-knew-would-they-care-no.

Meanwhile, the highlight of the whole day?

Receiving in the mail from Powells, my very own copy of The Last Great Necessity, this stellar history of cemeteries in the United States. I had a copy from the school library and took so very many separate notes in a separate notebook that it was just ridiculous. All like, “pg. 90: Victorian sensibilities/diff. Puritans.” “Pg. 91: Cemetery cave-in/Paris!” Notes like this for every single page. The book rules so hard that I knew I had to buy it but then discovered it was out of print and therefore goddamned expensive and so changed my mind.

But then I changed it back again, Henshaw. Because I’m damn fickle in my affections, that’s why. Or just have Youngest Child Syndrome, and find it hard to turn down my own cravings.
Actually, the first one can’t be true. This thesis-deal requires obsession, which I’m actually frighteningly good at. Heh. Um, heh.

Now that I’ve sent any potential suitors among you running, the rest of us can talk. See, it doesn’t matter. The thesis is like Christine the evil Stephen King car. No other love allowed. Seriously: I’ve been reading nothing else. I come across as a complete moron to my fiction-writing MFA friends at parties. I complained to a professor that I hadn’t found a way to balance the good fiction I enjoy so much with the death-practice reading, and she said, “You can’t. You just can’t. When I’m researching, I have a completely monogamous relationship with my topic.”
Still, I’m sneaking some Harpers and George Saunders essays in on the side. Shh! Don’t tell!

2008-03-18T00:27:00.002-05:00

St. Patrick's Day Log
Beachtown, Carolina
In the late afternoon, the public radio station left on in the bedroom turns to Thistle and Shamrock-style new age flavored Celtic-lite. Dangercat leaves the room immediately. Upon arrival home, he is found on the sofa instead of his usual spot on the bed. The fiddling from beneath the bedside table explains all.

Later, Marshall emails these photos from Oakland cemetery in Atlanta. The tornado damage is really bad, much worse than he'd thought, he says. It's hard to look at them.

2008-03-17T13:11:00.003-05:00

Album of the Week
Or, Misery’s delicate company
Do I have about six things on my to do list for today that I’d planned on getting around to in the noontime hour? Yes. Am I so overscheduled it’s laughable? You betcha.
Am I going to stop everything this moment, just for a moment, to gush to you about Elliot Smith’s first album and how I cannot stop listening to it this week? Oh, and how.

The self-titled album was the first of his I heard, and it’s still The Record, in my book. All rough-hewn acoustic guitar strumming—fingers slipping down strings as each song moves from chord to heartbreaking, cathartic chord, here. On later albums, I tire of his subject matter: how many fingerpointin’ heroin blame-numbers can one stomach in one sitting, even when the singer’s pointing at himself? Listening becomes like trying to remain friends with a junkie; after a matter of time, it’s up to him or her to figure it out, but you have to separate yourself.

But somehow--if it's not just teetering on the edge of huge, tacky metaphor to say so, which I think it is--this record is like the halcyon days of said-friendship: you know, when it was about something else, too. Somehow here it all coalesces into this ramshackle, controlled mess of passion: Smith’s voice low and straining up to sing these simple melodies contrasted so beautifully with his strumming.

The sun out every day lately, way up high in the cold sky, and we’re having these beautiful bright , clean-smelling evenings and driving from one place to another in town in my car, it’s all I want: the steady build of “Christian Brothers,” or the slow, crumbling convergence of those opening chords of “Clementine.” For some reason, the obvious misery here blows right by me and I’m nested for the moment, instead, inside the sheer beauty of it. The sunset, the high sky with its snakes of cirrus clouds, the green trees and this, this, this. Let’s hear it again. Gah.

2008-03-16T15:39:00.004-05:00

Can you hear me S.O.S.?
I was literally on an island this weekend with zero cell phone reception or media, assisting with this writers' retreat, and someone says something to me Saturday about there having been a tornado in Atlanta.
"A tornado." I say this really more than ask it, sure this person's either got her storm-system-type or her town wrong.
"Right through the downtown!"
Well, mmmaybe, I think. A bad storm. But certainly not an actual honest to goodness, Beware Dorothy, hide-in-the-bathtub tornado.
I come back to Beachtown today, to become the last person in the nation to find out that actually yes one did: Friday night, hitting not only downtown, but also my favorite, dearest neighborhood, sweet Cabbagetown, where a number of friends live (all fine, thank god). I'm glad you guys are okay. Jeez. Still kind of in shock, though. I came home a half hour ago and I'll I've been doing is staring at internet footage.

Anyone know: What's the deal with Oakland Cemetery, though? I actually visited there just last week to write about the place for part of The Book, and now, apparently there are trees down all over the beautiful old place. Any other damage? Atlanta peeps?

2008-03-12T12:53:00.000-05:00

I’m sitting here in the campus coffeeshop, and two young girls start a conversation while standing right in front of my table. Before I’ve thought about it, I’m watching them. Rapt, like I was meant to turn my head, from you, gangly ponytailed girl in jeans laced up on the sides, to you, bobbed blond girl in teal t-shirt. The alacrity in their gestures and voices; they’re so young. They’ve gotta be freshmen. Maybe nineteen. Then I remember my manners; you can’t just sit and stare at people while they carry on private conversations, (at least not overtly.) And then and then, I think: I’m probably not really offending them at all. When you’re nineteen, your whole life feels on display. It’s something of a given. You assume all the world is watching you at every moment, anyway.

2008-03-10T03:03:00.000-05:00

In case of insomnia, go here.
Ubuweb is a wonderfully eclectic mix of sound and art and lost and foundness, one of the most eclectic sources you'll find for such things on the web. Actually, not really so much an anecdote for insomnia as much as something to make your addled hamster-brain feel like maybe it's in good company.

2008-03-06T11:06:00.007-05:00

City-Dwellin' Vagabonds are We.
Not American Apparel models. At any rate, something in this series of photos comes very close to the core of whatever it is about this town that fills me with both a deep satisfaction and an ineluctable longing. I'm back visiting Atlanta this week, the city where where I lived for six love/hate/hate filled years. The dirty politics, the unplanned development, as if all decision-making is taking place in a vacuum with no template or precedent whatsoever, meanwhile, everything just vibrates with this burgeoning hum, of art, community, kudzu. The way crumbling old buildings with decrepit storefronts sit cheek-by-jowl with crumbling old buildings with shining new storefronts. The side-streets lined with crazy old houses with original works of arts-and-crafts beside ancient oaks in the front yards between the porch and the broken sidewalk. And right nearby, those old train tracks, and crawling all over everything is the kudzu, whose leathery green bulletproof leaves curl around all of this: old industrial-era architecture, Civil War shells half-buried in the woods in the backyards, the Wal-Mart up north of the city.

9:52 a.m., this local coffeeshop: The punks and the climbing businessfolk clad in bluetooth and the clutch of neighborhood men whiling away the morning at the local coffeeshop arguing about economics and local politics.

It all just makes me sigh and sigh, even as I'm here again, visiting. There's something telling you you can grasp it but it all moves so fast. Any. Way.

Here're some observations from Creative Loafing's Ken Edelstein that link to this series of eerie photos.
Drink and enjoy, Henshaw. And I hope you're having a nice week, too, and thinking of your own only love sprung from your only hate.

2008-02-11T20:54:00.000-05:00

Title TK

Okay, so I’m in school to write a book, so

I. Am writing. A book.

Phew! Glad that’s outta the way, Henshaw. Good golly day, as VC Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic protag’, the starving, incestuous sister, woulda put it.

My book’s about memorializing the dead in the South, and it’s going to be really good. I know this, but I have to convince various organizations of this, too, so they can realize that what they want to do is give me money so's I can travel and do research.
And I stopped, literally, in the middle of a line, with
“My book,”
Uhh. My book, what? Fred? Not Harry and the Lady Next Door; that’s been taken as I understand, and that’s a real shame.
So I started a list just to get m’self a working title, even. I emailed friends, asking for suggestions. Enter entropy, devolution, and of course, hijinks.

Here’s a short list, (the last two courtesy of Marshall):

Confederate Corpse

Oldest Living Confederate Corpse Tells All

Southern Deathtrap! Southern Suicide Rap!

Pig Pickin’ n’ Reef Ballin’

Dixie Dying

Kickin’ it in the Gloryland

How do, Death?

Papaw Looks Funny with Makeup On.

Your Tuna Casserole Won't Bring My Husband Back.

Even better is a title with a colon, of course, rendering that neat Before/After feel. So cut and paste the above as you like and let me know what you come up with. Perhaps Confederate Corpse: Kickin’ it in the Gloryland. Actually, that’s not bad. Actually, it’s terrible. Actually, I can’t tell anymore.

Okay; I really have to get back to work, now. There is so much work to do. There’s a freaking Iron Man to go before I sleep.

2008-02-10T20:08:00.000-05:00

All of the Things That Go to Make Heaven and Earth*

…are, curiously enough, here, in Beachtown, Carolina.
This was what I was thinking last night, driving down the town’s ugliest strip, all dotted with its car dealerships, strip clubs, Carrabas and Hooters and gas stations—twice.

My friend had this idea for all of us to go ice skating last night, and reserved a time at the town’s one rink before any of us had every been there. And so last night, he and I are driving down this town’s Strip of Ugly looking for the place, and marveling at all the headlights around us, all the radios blaring their different stations. Who were are all these people, what were they doing here and where were they going, in this off-season?

And another mile and another and still, no rink. And before we know it, we’re on the freaking *highway* out of Beachtown, without an exit for miles. And so had to loop back around again and ten minutes later were spat back onto the Strip of Ugly, again, laughing hard at all of this. The invisible ice rink, the poor sign situation here in Beachtown and the heinousness of our surroundings. A strip resembling exactly the Gawdawful-Fest that is Piedmont Avenue in Atlanta, or the seediest side of the strip in Myrtle Beach: obscene with its exhaust backlit by bright fluorescence and dirty movie stores and just as weirdly magnetic and electric with nocturnal restlessness. I hate these streets of America and I am drawn to them, at least to driving through them, protected by metal and music and chrome, and maybe a nice beer buzz.

And here, amazed by the way which all this gives way so fast, to empty. To swampland, a different mode, entirely. Or, if you make a different turn, to the ocean. Our bright little self-destructive island of Us Us Us trying so hard to sing so loud. It’s like flying over Las Vegas at night. The desert is still the blackest. Here on the edge of the continent we call continent, the stars are still the brightest.

We found the rink. Skating: fun, and also made me think of futility, around and around that rink. The word rink. Maybe it was the beer, again, but I never fell, even though I think I’ve been skating three or four times, maybe, ever. And I felt more graceful and alone and untouchable than I had in a long time. We went in a group, but there’s always that solitude to skating; you group up and break off; you shout at one another over the terrible pop music, but mostly, you’re by yourself, watching the ice bump along under you, and you think about this flying, and you think about this solitude and circling, circling back to the same place. It just is what it is.

I came back home after skating and found Carmelita had graduated to Queen of the Night at the full-blown bash our earlier small cookout had exploded into. Early Who was blowing the living room speakers ragged and new people populated our kitchen and looked at me like I was strange when I came in. “You’re home!” Carm’ shouted at me, holding her Pabst/Miller/Yuengling aloft. “Didn’t you leave, like, ten minutes ago?”

I fell into conversation, into more beer, into trying to explain the politics of the skating rink to an endearingly smashed Carmelita, whose high spirits translated into her hitting me, hard, again and again--
Alice: So, it was fun, but—
Carmelita (interrupting, whapping Alice on the shoulder-blade and doubling over with laughter): Oh, Alishhh. C’moutside.

Some girl whom we all realized to be a waitress at a town breakfast joint had taken a mug of mine and drawn all over it in blue Sharpie and then insisted to me it was Dry Erase. I tried to scrub it off in the bathroom, but failed. I opened another beer. We all talked and talked. We played a lopsided version of Tammy Faye Cornhole, and everyone left by 11:30 or so, leaving Carmelita and me to eat a couple hotdogs and ibuprofen before staggering off to bed. I was grateful for this end, Henshaw, for this homecoming after the restlessness of the town strip and the rink. It was one of those nights of weird longing and I was grateful for this camaraderie, for the forms it took: the inebriated, bruise-rendering physical affection of my roommate, thumping me again, hard, on the back.

(*name of song by The New Pornographers on their weird, meandering album Challengers that only now&just now, am I beginning to listen to nonstop and nonstop. Okay, Litza; you win.)

2008-02-02T21:11:00.000-05:00

Saturday in Bizarroworld
If I told you yesterday, that today your maintenance man would make you cry and you would make him cry, what would you have said?

This morning dawned bright and clear and January-Indian-Springy. Not that I would have any clue about this, nor would Carmelita, since we both slept till eleven, having driven the night before to Chapel Hill to see the inimitable Nina Nastasia play at the Local 506. It was the first time I felt pure, unhampered happiness in too many moons, Henshaw. It was a perfect show, the perfect evening all around, and I awoke to the sunny morning feeling all shiny-fresh-slated and contented.

But onto the tears!

The first thing I heard was what I thought were repair guys talking and knocking around outside my window, since this house is under perpetual repair at one corner or another, always. I went into the kitchen where Carmelita already stood, and she shushed me and pointed to the window.
“I had to crawl past my window, out of bed,” she said.
I looked out the window and saw our neighbor-man and a lady with a red face, screaming at each other in the small parking lot. They’re probably in their late forties, a fact which made the woman’s slurred words and the man’s open crying a step beyond sad.
“Oh, god. That’s horrible,” I said.
“Yeah. They’ve been at it for at least an hour, just walking all over. They were outside my window for a minute, then I came back from the bathroom and we kind of saw each other and I guess they realized that people, like, live here.”
“Why don’t they go inside?”
“I dunno. I’m sure they started there,” she said, opening the fridge and scanning its contents, “but they’ve taken that show on the road, today.”

The sad fighting couple were fighting right outside our back door, so fifteen minutes or so later, when we went down to the basement to get our bicycles, we were forced to walk right past them. When I opened the screen door, the four of us glanced around the vicinity of one another’s heads for a moment, then everyone looked away and we walked on by, leaving them the illusion of their private fighting bubble. They turned back to their fight with the same intensity at a lower volume.

I hadn’t been down in the basement in months. It’s a truly creepy place. Myriad offshoot crawlspaces shoot off and snake around in all directions under the house, creating the perfect homes for ancient bedframes, rats’ nests and probably escaped mentally disturbed convicts like in the movie Session 9. When we moved in, we put our bikes up against a wall near the front of the basement and trotted quickly back up the wooden steps, to the bright day above. Carmelita's taken her bike out for periodic rides and tune-ups, but since we moved here, I haven’t ridden mine once.

This morning, our bikes were gone. In their place were boards and sawhorses. A can of turpentine sat on top of Dangercat’s cat carrier, leaving a ring of stickiness when I lifted it off. We went up and got flashlights and shined them down those dark, twisty corners, but our bikes hadn’t been moved. They were just not there. I stood for a moment, thinking about my pretty cherry-red cruiser and how I’d abandoned it to the scary basement, all those nights it spent alone down there, and I felt sorry and I felt served right. Marshall bought me that bike, and that made it sadder. But Carmelita was feeling something different. She’d ridden her bike, which she’d spent a summer lovingly constructing, herself. It had an antique French frame, a shiny bell and mirrors, and she’d ridden it just days before. I looked over at her and as she spoke, her voice shook. “If Billy moved my bike. If he touched my bike, I’m going to. I’m going to put a hurting on him.”

Billy’s our maintenance man. And with a phone call, Carmelita found out he had not moved her bike. He had tossed it out into a dumpster that’s since been hauled away from our house, assuming it was trash. The sound of the drunk lady’s shouting was nothing, nothing, nothing, compared to Carmelita’s rage-filled screaming. She started crying right away, but this did not compromise the precisely-crafted stream of invective that rang out, across the veranda and across the world. Do not cross Carmelita.

It turned out my other roommate, Ginger, was having a rotten morning, too. Her grandpa was in ICU because a routine operation had gone horribly awry, and it was more or less the hospital’s fault. So a little while later, after Ginger made plans to hop a plane to Alabama the next day, the three of us loaded up into Carm’s car, to drink Coronas at a restaurant overlooking the ocean. In the car, Billy called Carmelita back.

She paused as he spoke, then said, “Don’t worry, Billy. I was angry because I worked hard to build that bike, but it’s okay, now. I forgive you, and I’m sorry for going all ape-shit.” He spoke then, and she turned to us. He’s crying, she mouthed. Then, into the phone. “No, I mean, you and me, we’re cool. It’s okay now, man. We’ll work it out, totally.” They finished talking and she hung up. There was silence for a few minutes. Then she said, “Now I feel bad for him.”

And it turned out that he hadn’t seen my bike down there in months. He tossed Carmelita’s, but mine disappeared sometime, somewhere back in the months that’ve gone by. Stolen or turned by neglect into another of this houses’s ghosts; either way, I feel more guilty than Carmelita.

2008-01-23T11:19:00.000-05:00

Today's featured article on Wikipedia, as pointed out to me by friend Marshall, spotlights Stede Bonnet, 18th century marauder of the seas, and possessor of one of the baddassiest names ever given to man. The article also features one of the greatest sentences ever constructed by man: "Because of marital problems, Bonnet turned to piracy in the summer of 1717."

(The version in the full-length article is perhaps even more edifying, if lacking the precise graceful punch of the above: "Because of marital problems, and despite his lack of sailing experience, Bonnet decided to turn to piracy in the summer of 1717." (Emphasis added.)

Things didn't go so well for Stede after that, either. Maybe he just shoulda done what Joe did...

2008-01-19T17:15:00.000-05:00

rocking chair sheep

2008-01-19T12:41:00.000-05:00

“I love clothes. I love hats. I love dresses. I love jewelry.”
The woman in, I think, a purple hat, exclaims these words into the camera, her image grainy, her voice breathless with a singularly vapid enthusiasm. She sounds like a reality-show contestant-to-be, only it’s 1985 and so that’s not true. And this is Pittsburgh, land of a thousand local business catchphrases, (“It feels so good, it’s got to be a dream (Dream Waterbehhhds) It’s got to be a dreeeeam,”) but no one’s idea of a fantasy-setting in which to make ridiculously beautiful people do ridiculously terrible things. Few ridiculously beautiful people live in my hometown.

Ask anyone from there, though, who watched reruns of Laverne and Shirley on even the most irregular basis between 1983 and 1987; the purple-hatted woman and her pitching on the ad for the Pittsburgh Fashion Institute, are legend.

And lately, I feel like I’m channeling her. My drive to create, create, create, has amped itself up in the last few days to this extreme that feels like it has nothing to do with me. It’s just this visual-aesthetic thing, this enhanced appreciation of pretty things, specifically, pretty manmade things. This happens every now and then and it takes the form, symptomatically, of: Finding excuses to go to the thrift store and pore through racks of musty old dresses from decades when women had tiny waistlines. (What to attribute that to: restrictive underwear or restrictive eating or some combination thereof?) I try to zip them; I can’t, but I still feel as though something’s feeding me in that moment. Just to appreciate the gorgeous cut, the material; the way the peter-pan collar lies just so across the gingham, the way the pearlescent buttons are spaced out at perfect intervals along the red wool, is weirdly satisfying.

The other night, I couldn’t sleep, Henshaw. I had that head-is-a-balloon feeling you get when you’ve taken cough syrup, only I hadn’t. I couldn’t sleep and my head was disconnected from my body. I was envisioning, suddenly, a wallpaper mural I’d had beside my bed as a child. All in colored-pencil-like hues: a giant tree surrounded by a group of anthropomorphized animals, all equal parts comfort and menace. There were four or five animals in that mural, but all I recall is the old sheep sitting in a rocking chair, knitting her own wool and looking bemusedly out over her spectacles at the goings-on of the other beasts. Also I recall the Cheshire-like blue cat with the big, yellow eyes sitting up in the highest branch, four feet over where I lay in my bed. Definitely scary.

I heard on this great science show on NPR called Radio Lab that we don’t actually file our memories away. As it turns out, memories don’t exist as discrete objects in our minds, even hidden away as such. Rather, each time we recall something, we are, in essence, re-creating that moment in our minds. We are painting those scenes even as we’re remembering them. Along the same lines, the less often we recall something, turns out, the more likely we are to recall its details in an accurate way.

It had been so long since I’d thought of that mural. And now, as suddenly and surely as it was coming back in my mind, I wanted to re-create it, or see it again, and suddenly I had all these other ideas of associated images, too, and knew that I had to put together a diorama. So I got up and sketched out ideas and the next day, spent forty bucks at AC Moore and various secondhand stores around town. Then, that night, I sat down to try to sketch the sheep lady, and, although that mural exists nowhere on earth and I will never see it again, the final drawing gave me the shivers. I swear I can't draw, but something in my past reared up and put to paper, exactly, that rocking chair sheep. An experience eerie as hell, just like all those nights I spent lying in bed as a child and tracing the whorls in her wool with my finger by the yellow hall light. Creepy, but so satisfying.

I have no idea why I ever want to do this craft-thing. Why, sometimes, I must turn to the glue gun and the vellum, the decoupage and the sewing machine. It’s not like any final product I craft is earthshatteringly amazing. The desire is connected to the end-product only in the most distant way. It’s the doing, the way the painting and the cutting and the application of plastic blue gems to a thick sheet of foam board, constrict time, make it drift off completely, in the most satisfying way ever. What can I say. I love paints. I love buttons. I love Mod Podge. I love scissors.

2008-01-08T09:53:00.000-05:00

Ways to Procrastinate in the Morning

After making your To Do list for the day and checking boring, university and work-related emails, you need more tea. Tea to Write By. Go into the kitchen. Pick up fabric tape measure on the way to play with your cat.

Spend five minutes playing with the cat by dragging the tape measure on the floor while he stalks and pounces. This is creative play. This is acceptable. Cat loses interest before you do, however, and soon you’re just a person dragging a tape measure around her house all alone; you realize you are 1. not sleeping in 2. nor reading anything inspiring 3. nor writing, but rather entertaining, not your cat any longer, but yourself with a fabric tape measure at 9:00 a.m. on a Tuesday.

Heed the call of the boiling water. As you stand there, putting teabag, then hot water to mug, tape measure strung around your neck, you realize anew that you are alone in the house. Recall all those episodes of Six Feet Under, which would begin in just this sort of way, all disquietingly-innocent-enough: A humdrum person doing her quotidian activities, only to land herself in some freak accident: getting choked on a fabric tape-measure, for example.

Get back to your desk. Look up “quotidian” to see if it has quite the ring of the mundane that you intend.

Tell yourself you’re not going to check your frivolous, personal email. Check your email.
But your connection’s too slow. Hit Stop. This is a sign. You should be writing.

Look at the cat as he creeps through the room, around the rug that’s too new to yet be trusted. What were his New Year’s resolutions? When you went back to the UU church for the first time in nine months or so the other day, the minister was talking about Tomorrow’s-Gonna-Come-No-Matter-What; How-will-you-arrive-there? And you were enjoying it, the metaphor about being out to sea in your little Schooner (the Schooner of Life), no land in sight, but that land, ho, ho, it would come, yes indeedy. Then on the drive home, the metaphor started to annoy you. Or the fact of it. Because, like many UU sermons you’ve attended, this sermon was: Pick a metaphor and find different ways to riff on it for twenty minutes.

Not to say it wasn’t useful. And the meditation was nice. And the moments of silence and the singing. (Except when they tried to go all gospel for one number. There is nothing worse in this world than a roomful of white liberal people trying to sing gospel music. It makes the heart fold in on itself.)
The people are always nice there, though they’re all your parents’ age; oh god when will you meet someone your age in this town not somehow connected to your freaking MFA program?? Or just some new, real friend, would be nice. But oh well.

So worn is this thought, it’s your autopilot, it’s your I Like Chocolate statement of fact for these three years; sometimes the shoulder-shrug comes first, it’s so emptied of meaning. Like shampoo when you say it twenty times: shampoo, shampoo, shampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampoo shampoo shampoo shampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampoo.

Shampoo, Henshaw. Okay, I’m gonna get to work for real.

2007-12-27T16:06:00.000-05:00

Constant, Schmonstant.
For a Physics final back in high school, we had the option of writing a paper or putting together some sort of group "artistic option" illustrating 12 physics principles. Thus: the filming of the VHS classic, "Physics Project of Doom," in which two friends and I featured relevant snippets from Casablanca, Barbie surfing in the bathtub to the music of The Breeders and of course, 12 illustrations of basic physics principles, all completely riddled with flaws and incorrect calculations.

I think our poor, beleaguered teacher—a really, really young guy whom we caught one Saturday that year working a second job as a salesclerk at Sears—gave us a B. That B was a gift: our movie was lovingly crafted juvenile shlock, but it was crap in terms of an illustration of what we were actually supposed to have learned that year.

The latest on Found Magazine's beautiful website is in the same spirit, I think. Anonymous elephant illustrator, I salute you.

2007-12-24T10:20:00.000-05:00

The Fact Men post their very funny Year in Review.
(Coincidentally, Wikipedia lists no such entry as "Very Little Known Facts".)

2007-12-12T12:25:00.000-05:00

Loving Miranda July (even) More
Write a press release about an ordinary event! Take a flash photo under your bed! Draw Raymond Carver's Cathedral!
This is the best idea I've seen in a long time. If you've got any lazy days coming up this winter break--and even if you don't but just want to feel all warm and squishy inside for some slightly inexplicable reason having something to do with the allaying of the fear that all this goofy internet technology is alienating us from one another--I encourage you to check this project out.

2007-12-05T14:17:00.000-05:00

Read it.

The Used World, by Haven Kimmel. The Used World, by Haven Kimmel. The Used World, by Haven Kimmel.

Goodness gracious, sakes alive.

2007-12-04T09:43:00.000-05:00

Night Sounds
Our house is filled with knocking at night. In the apartment above my bedroom and office, they start stacking heavy piles of wooden pallets, it seems, beginning around eleven and ending a half-hour later. Also, walking around in heavy-soled shoes and I know exactly which is their squeakiest floorboard. Take me up there; I’ll walk you to it.

They begin loading their clothes washer (this I know is true), also their dryer, and hitting “Start” on both. In my bed, I hear and feel the rumble, hear the water make its gurgling exit between Rinse and Tumble Dry. The dryer too, as it growls and shakes. Usually, those things don’t disturb me from sleep any more than the trains that pass through here every couple hours on some weeknights.
Their whistle: Long, long, short, long.

I went through a bad spell last year. During that time, the train whistle, which I heard at two a.m. at my old apartment, felt like a part of my own personal disquiet; a dramatic underscore to my own insomnia. Train whistles can mean anything. When I was little, sleeping in the trundle bed at my grandma’s, they meant that shiver of risk: Train train coming from the wild unknown and disappearing to the same—but meanwhile it was now right here, mere yards from my bed, the safest place in the world. Sometimes I still catch a spark of that feeling. Mostly though, my brain has tuned it out. I fold clothes and put them away, or read, or sleep—right through it.

2007-12-01T12:54:00.001-05:00

The Homeland celebrates its birthday.

Terrible photo on CNN, so I've provided one that's more fitting.
"Imagine what you can do here!"
Yes! Eat stale smiley cookies at Eat 'n Park! Stare at the overcast sky! Visit that one French and Indian War fort!

Actually, long-time readers will know, that like many emigrants from Pittsburgh, I am a freakily fierce defender of my hometown. This means I can make fun of it, like you can make fun of your dad, but you wouldn't catch me mocking your pa's propensity for multiple gold chains and stinky cologne, at least not in front of you, right? Well, that gold-chained papa, with his closet full of Stillers sweatshirts, he is the Dad of Pittsburgh. And don't mock him, or you're in for a hurting, a Jerome Bettis-style bus-accident, my friend.

Sigh. Can't wait till Christmas.

2007-11-29T12:28:00.000-05:00

Dirty deeds, done deep-fried.
Burger King would like for you to engage in a pact with the Evil One.

2007-11-14T00:44:00.000-05:00

Dear Alice,
“I’m on the pill and now no one in his right mind would sleep with me!”—and more!

The following incident might-could have some adverse effect on the supreme powers of a teacher as unquestionable authority figure previously closer in bearing and appearance, from student point-of-view, to some Creative Writing Deity than to an ordinary mortal:

Not that the above is me. But if it were.

Say said-teacher were teaching a poem. An ordinary Monday. Mid-morning. None of the students are responding except the same faithful, eager one or two. But then even they begin to flag and look down at their coursepacks and doodle fake notes in their notebooks.
“Okay, so the speaker compares her current place in life to being in a rowboat without oars(“September,” Jennifer Hecht), here. What could that indicate?”

Dead silence. Teacher reminds class of their participation grades. Asks what’s up. Sighs loudly. Looks around the room and feels a beady-eyed desire to slap all her students in turn, even the nice ones. Makes an effort not to show that through her voice.

“Okay, well, if your life feels like—”

She stops then, because she tastes something—salty—on her lip. More. Puts her hand to her face and realizes that the zit she covered in 1. Zit Begone Stuff, 2. SPF 15 Moisturizer, then 3. Makeup, earlier this morning, is bleeding down her face onto her upper lip, there in front of her class seated around this small table. Bleeding great, big weeping drops.

“Oh,” she says. “I guess I have to go to the Ladies’ Room, now.”

When she leaves she considers never returning, but she does.

I hate birth control pills.
Every time I’m on the pill I have Breakouts Like it’s 1999. Which was, actually, another time my skin was so crappy because I was on the pill then, too. I was never so pimply in real adolescence, only during the weird fake-variety instilled by birth control pills.

Even the brand purported to *control* acne actually has the opposite effect. My facial skin freaks out completely, shouts “Hormones? What hormones are these? Why are there so many? I must make you ugly! And give you pain, too!” These are never ordinary blackheads. They’re big, aching, red pimples with lovely white caps. Giant zits that last for days. All over my face.

My friend Ginger’s going through the same thing, only with uncontrollable, frightening-to-her mood swings. She’s not like this normally. Only on the pill. So what does she do, now—go to a psychiatrist to get some antidepressants and then pick me up and swing by the damn dermatologist’s?

That’s three medications, three different doctors, a heeuge pile of change and drugs all so we can, what, have sex? (If. We even. Feel like it.)

You have to take it the exact same time every day. If I forget a pill and have to take two the next day, I spend the morning puking. If I forget too many pills, I get pregnant. Because I have no health insurance, the pill costs me $40 every freaking month.
I am very, very typical.

In college, I could get the pill for ten dollars a month, and many college students were still paying about that, but then last year Congress passed a bill that sapped Medicaid’s budget and that cost skyrocketed to $40 or $50 even for college students and Planned Parenthood customers like me. (Even if you could still get them for ten dollars a pack, our school’s student health center was all booked up for the year for pelvic exams by the start of this month. Dear Exorbitant Student Fees--thanks! Love, Over Half Your Population.)

The whole deal just blows: the pill sucks, but it’s the best we have. And now it’s getting tougher to get our hands on? Did I hear someone over there saying something about “the best country in the world”? You, over there? Great. Hoist that flag a little higher on the left. It’s a tad crooked.

It sucks enough that women have to even deal with pelvic exams every six months or year because we’re the ones who deal biologically with the horrible effects of HPV. (Most people have HPV, but it more or less only shows symptoms in women, “symptoms” meaning cervical cancer.) The fact that HPV affects women inordinately is no one’s fault. But I’m running out of fingers to count my women-friends who’ve had to go through excruciatingly painful, expensive procedures because of catching the shit too late due to crappy or nonexistent healthcare.

Birth control’s pretty much the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ~~the rather unpleas-~~ the ridiculous oceans of shit women go through, having to do with our reproductive parts. But every time I look in the mirror lately, it’s the one that really gets to me.

2007-11-13T12:28:00.000-05:00

WWJD?
From the q&a section of the website of Krista Blondin, a Canadian Janis Joplin impersonator (my favorite words here are "a minor detail"):

"Q: Will Krista be swigging a bottle of Southern Comfort on stage and using coarse language at my event-like Janis did on stage?
Generally No, especially when we do concerts that are all age family events or corporate functions. Some of our concert goers and biggest fans have been as young as 8 years old, so we have a cleaner version of the show that includes no swearing or glorification/encouragement of the use of drugs or alcohol. Krista is completely able to capture the essence of Janis Joplin without this minor detail. Of course we have an authentic bottle handy, easily filled with ice tea if this is something you would really like to see in the show! At night clubs where people are over the age of 19 there may be the occasional swear word in the show for example: Rap during Ball & Chain."

2007-11-08T20:47:00.000-05:00

Sable-kitty has been doing this...

...all day. Same corner. My bedroom. Where Middle-of-the-Night Rats #1 and #2 were wrangled.

Good night and sleep tight, you of vermin-free households.

2007-11-08T11:48:00.000-05:00

Cats & Rats & Elephants.
I should feel honored somehow, because it’s my room they bring them to, my room, central somehow, the Buddha Belly where you drop off your soft meat hearts.

Instead I stood there last night, four a.m., after grabbing for the thickest-soled shoes and sweatpants, layers between me and It. I thought, Keep the door shut from now on? No, because then the pampered cat, my darling who hasn’t been to the vet in years and who usually sleeps in my bed; he might get bitten by a rabid one and I’d never know; I’d have shut him out like he’s some barn cat. And what if fresh vermin should appear in here with no cats to attack it? Only me, and my futon not so far from the floor. Besides, there was something happening in the corner under the bureau, something I had to take care of right now.

For the second night in a month, the cats have presented me with a rat. I’ve always rented out old houses, places whose walls and floorboards never quite meet, whose windows may or may not open, houses possessing novel heating and cooling situations, high ceilings with pretty molding, secret old balconies, noisy radiators and hardwood. There’s always a price for the beautiful antique wallpaper and the claw-foot tub, however. Character, it means many things: the faucet you have to jostle, the window held open with a stick of wood, extra sweaters.
This place is the most stunning of all; this is the place that leaves our friends truly slack-jawed. “How’d you find it?” they ask and we shrug as if the stained-glass pocket doors and domed two-story dining room ceiling is not remarkable, as if it is our right.
Wonder means hardship in equal proportion. I’ve felt lucky to have porches and commodious kitchens; now I have a veranda and a dining room you must mount stairs to reach. I’ve dealt with kitchen ants, with swooping cockroaches. Now we have rats.

Feeble squeals. The light was dim when I turned it on, so you couldn’t tell that its eyes had been gouged out, that half its pointed head was a bloody mess. It sat upright, its long tail splayed out, its head tucked down, cats surrounding it in a loose hunting circle. A cat would paw it and it would squeal, uncle, uncle, uncle. I just stood there beside the dresser feeling inept. Move the dresser? What if it then ran under my bed? The cats sat and snaked around it. “Kill it! Just kill it!” I told them. Wide awake now. Useless adrenaline.
I went to the kitchen and found an empty tomato can in the recycling bin. I already held another heavy shoe, not consciously sure of what I meant to do with it. When I returned, the smallest, sweetest cat, the dainty spirited cheerleader who is of course the chief hunter, grabbed the rat up in her mouth and ran from the room. The black cat followed, as did my pampered cat and I said, “No! Don’t!” to him, but the more I said no, the swifter he ran, so I followed, envisioning rotten rats beneath sofas, envisioning sick, foaming jaws.
In the living room, I tossed the can atop the rat atop our gorgeous oriental carpet. This cut across its tail and it squealed in pain. Then I edged the insides of a local weekly paper beneath, and a thick book beneath that. I lifted it all up, and the rat brushed weakly against the inside of the steel, a soft, uneven percussion I could feel more than hear. I unlocked the front door with my foot and carried the whole thing over to the edge of the veranda, where I dropped the floor out and the rat pitched to the unused garden below.

This morning I talked with our maintenance man. He tells me getting rid of the rats will be “a process.” Rats will flatten their skeletons to fit through the smallest holes. Rats are smart; they learn to avoid poisoned traps. Which we can’t put inside because of the cats. We’ll start with the basement, he says, and our cabinets. Our house has many gaps and secret spaces. We’ll just see how it goes.
This week I will update my cat on his shots. Tonight I will leave my door ajar again. I don’t know how well I’ll sleep.

2007-11-07T14:41:00.000-05:00

Didn’t want that monkey anyway.
So in this crazy-fascinating article, the NY Times says it turns out that monkeys rationalize things, too. Like many of us, I think that I just assumed that that thing you do? When you’re choosing between two cars and kind of like the pretty/fancy one but then it turns out you can’t afford it? So you go with the practical, ugly one. And by the next day, the practical, ugly one is so much better, in your estimation. Someone even so much as mentions the words, “Rust-red Cooper Mini,” and you think: Oh, they’re just so expensive to fix. And so small.

Same thing with exes. Our brain points out all the ways they’re so unattractive. That thing with his jaw when he’s thinking. There was always something so showy about it. So it turns out that we are—and by “we are,” I mean, of course, “I am”—not crazy. Either that or all primates are equally crazy.

2007-11-01T12:36:00.000-05:00

Never one to hyperbolize, I thought I’d title this entry

Music. Gods.
I truly believe the world would be a better place if everyone in it owned this record.

The Dirtbombs, hey! And the record’s Ultraglide in Black, and it’s freaking me out. Every album of theirs has a totally different sound, something I’d distrust if this one hadn’t already stolen my soul and sucked the marrow out. At any rate, in Ultraglide, the Detroit outfit takes old R&B songs and does waay more than simply cover them. They take the ideas of these songs and make them into things of their own and, in this charmingly succinct album, do the same to you.

I tell you: Making dinner the other night, I found myself going over to the old boombox and hitting “play” once, twice, three times, the volume rising, my roommates drawn to the kitchen for an impromptu groove-off. Every song totally rules, and this group is obviously having such a silly amount of bad-ass fun, you will get jealous. Jealous, even as your own hips shake. Stand-outs are “Underdog,” “Kung Fu” and “Ode to a Black Man.”
Dancedance revoluuution, indeed.

Oh, and their website’s q&a page is also totally funny. Two sample questions:
“Q: Blah blah blah Detroit scene?
A: If there was a 'Detroit Scene', we'd tell you all about it. However, there's not. It's a nice media delusion, but that's about all it is.”

“Q: Blah blah blah the White Stripes?
A: If you want to know about the White Stripes, ask the White Stripes.”
(This last one, with a link to that little band’s website which, once it opens, remains within the frames of the Dirtbombs’ site. Har.)

2007-10-28T23:49:00.000-05:00

The beginning of this end.
Someone tells me Thurston Moore has called iPods the fluorescent lighting of music, and I’m inclined to agree; then again, my agreeing might just be in that sad, petty way of someone who doesn’t own an iPod. Yet.

It’s this “yet” that depresses me, Henshaw, like it’s fate, but more than that—my doom—to listen to all music in this broken-up-by-“tracks” (Whatthafuck happened to songs?) picking-and-choosing Impatient, Important Consumer way. One of the best experiences in zee mundo has to be listening and listening to an album until each song makes sense to you in its context. Especially because everyone makes that context up for himself. It’s beautiful; it’s dying.

The iPod and its MP3-playery ilk (Can you really blame Apple? No matter what, it would have been some brand, right? Some something, in our rearview manifest destiny mirror, at any rate) have steadily decreased the likelihood of being at a party and listening to an album all the way through, having it drunkenly explained to you by the person who loves it, or meeting someone wonderful and talking and talking and later you hear this album again. And having it remind you. I know you. There are records you still can’t listen to. There are records you will always listen to when you want to be reminded. Or whatever, any of the other thousands of things a record can do when it’s a record. Of an event. Of people playing music in a room. As one artist once said. Not me.

I think all this began with the internet, with being able to find music on the internet. Screw whole albums when we can just hear the one song, right?
It’s my fault, too. The other week I ran across the Very First Mix CD a friend made for me that was entirely from ripped internet tracks. This guy worked with me at my first job, this nonprofit in Atlanta. I also had a little crush on him, which may or may not have been reciprocated, but it was all very sweet, somehow, our friendship, which never turned into anything more than our doing goofy seated dances in his Volkswagen as he found new routes all over Atlanta, just driving and driving around, trying to eat at every burrito joint in that town. I was right out of college.

Right before Christmas of 2000, he emailed me and asked me what songs I’d want on a CD if I could have any songs in the world. Any songs—in the world???

Do you remember this, Henshaw? How mind-blowing it was?

I wasted the rest of the day then, wracking my brain and coming up with songs I liked but had forgotten about till then—songs from my childhood and from old high-school mix-tapes and from more recent years. The final CD was my Christmas present, labeled: “Xmas 2K.”

I’m listening to it now and feeling all kinds of nostalgia. So mix-tapes/CDs can do the same thing as regular albums, sure. But that’s because it’s a set list, reminding you of a specific time period. Particular set people you may never see again, or at least never see like you did the first time you heard that song.

So, here it is. Remember: This is from that period when there was still the possibility, it seemed, of Never Hearing a Song again. Of its being lost, forever. The kids, they were less automatically-hip, then. There was none of this Sirius Radio. None of this Pitchforkity madness. With that obvious apologetic preamble, here it is, the list of songs the 22 or 23-year-old me, chose:

Xmas 2K Mix circa Dec. 2000

1. “Tennessee” – Arrested Development
Say what you will, you snob. The beginning of this song totally rules.

2. “Blackbird” – Paul McCartney
Soon after this, my sister had her second child and I made her a mix CD with this song on it For Her Labor, which I now think is pretty funny. The thing stayed in her duffle bag the whole time, turns out. It also turns out Thirtysomething beat me to this idea.

3. “Blue Monday” – New Order
This song seemed so dark and sensitive in that creepyfake Iron Curtain-y Unbearable Lightness of Being-y way. All new wave songs in the early 80s tried to sound just as dark and jaded, but this one wins. Along with that Cure song about “I saw you look like a Japanese baby.” Har. I have a soft spot for such songs.

4. “Carry On” – CSNY
I am a small child. There’s my cool ex-hippie uncle and warmth and all things good. Everything else is foggy, but I still love this song. So. Much.

5. “Clap Hands” – Tom Waits
First boyfriend intro’d me to Tom Waits. I can sing every word to this in my sleep.

6. “Everest” – Ani Difranco
Yes, I was one of Those college girls. But listen: This song stands. This song is so beautiful, it will still make me cry without much prompting if no one’s around.
“And when church let out, the sky was much clearer/And the moon was so beautiful that the ocean held up her mirror.”

7. “Queen of Las Vegas” – The B-52s
When I was 13-ish, I went through a mad, early-new-wavey-B-52s-lovin’ phase. I bought that bio book Party Out of Bounds and cursed God for not planting me in Athens, GA in 1979. At some age other than one.

8. “Hold On” – En Vogue (Those “Never Gonna Get It” folks.)
Lord, so, at the start of this, the ladies do an acapella first verse of “Who’s Lovin’ You,” and it’s just awful. Straight-up flat. But the actual song itself is still pretty good, for a 90s radioland R&B tune. Though I admit, I’ve been skipping over this one on recent listens.

9. “I Wanna Be Adored” – The Stone Roses
In high school, my friend Janice put this on a mix-tape that I wore out. I remember sitting at my desk at the nonprofit and remembering its existence and absolutely freaking out. It’s a great song; you know it as soon as you hear the initial build-up and the metallic guitars that start it out.

10. “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems – Notorious B.I.G.
Undergrad parties, plain and simple. Plastic keg cups of Budweiser you paid four dollars for. Bee-eye-gee, pee-oh-peepee-aye.

11. “Spring” – Kristin Hersh
Her first solo album is flawless, and I love the second one for nostalgia’s sake. The third one is patchy, populated by KH’s once-just-inscrutable lyrics gone silly. But this song stands out. Perfect structure. Pretty Kristin and scary Kristin and still just pretty. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring as interpreted by Throwing Muses.

12. “Stepping Out” – Joe Jackson
Okay, so I’m four years old. And I’m in my big sister’s room, and she’s letting me draw in the red pen on her cube notepad in all the pastel colors while she gets ready to go out with her friends. Red, shag carpet, Garfield poster on the wall and this song, alwaysalways, on her record player or radio.
“We are young, but getting old before our time/We’ll leave the TV and the radio behind; don’t you wonder what we’ll find?”

13. “Trism” – B-52s

14. “Wanna Be Starting Something” – Michael Jackson
Mama-say! Mama-saw! Yeah, you know the rest…

15. “When U Were Mine” – Cyndi Lauper (Prince)
Always my favorite song of hers on her first record. Remember how, when she first came out, it was all “Who’s better? Madonna or Cyndi Lauper?? Who? Who?” I voted for Cyndi. I always dressed as a gypsy for Halloween.

16. “Africa” – Toto
Why? Why because, little kid/1980s, “Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like a lepress above the Serengeti.” At some point, I debated with my sisters over whether “lepress” referred to a female leper. And I just looked it up, and it’s spelled “leprous,” and it does. Well, "suffering from leprosy." Either way, whole new meaning.

2007-10-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

Also?
How can the CD which accompanies Oxford American’s new southern music issue be so relentlessly perfect?* How and how? The blues! The country! The old and new timey rock ‘n roll! As the cheesy record-review cliché goes, the first tune--“If I Were A Carpenter” by Eldridge Holmes--alone, is worth the price of the whole shebang. But then there’s so much more sheer happiness here. Rundon'twalk. Gah-!

(*Well, except for one or two tracks near the end which are just relentlessly really nice.)

2007-10-10T00:20:00.000-05:00

Senseless Attachments, Part 36
In Four Acts

1. Subway tuna-melt sandwiches.
Like I can’t go home and stir together some damn tuna salad and sprinkle some oil and vinegar and banana pickles and oregano over top and call it a freaking sandwich. Here’s the first thing, though. If you lived here and got amnesia but had remembered first to link “Subway” in your mind with “Beachtown,” you’d be saved; there’s one of those ugly little yellow awnings every third block.

And as I drive near one of the eight or twenty Subways boasted by every major thoroughfare, it’s the whole package deal I find myself longing for. It’s the sandwich itself, on that fake wheat bread, with chips and a root beer and that horrible lighting and that horrible booth with no padding. It’s smart in none of these ways: Nutrition, Money, Total Dining Experience.
But it’s my weird little habit and I must keep it.

2. Pringles
We all know that these are fake and reconstituted. That second word? “Reconstituted”? Is how my mother ends any conversation in which the P-word is brought up. “They’re reconstituted, for god’s sake!” with a roll of the eyes, toss of the arm, argument done.

Yeah, I know, Mom; you raised us on the best-ever homemade bread and wouldn’t buy Froot Loops and had us listen to Free to Be, You and Me, but I’m sorry. You couldn’t save us. Yesterday, when I stopped into the gas station for a huge bottle of water after going down to these salt marshes for a story I’m working on, it was ninety degrees. All my own salt was sweated away, a blotchy pattern on my green t-shirt.
Then I saw the can.
It had been maybe years since I’d last had Pringles. Although you wouldn’t buy them, you didn’t count on my best friend in elementary school. I’d get off at her bus stop, and she and I would measure entire afternoons with Doritos and Hohos and Pringles and entire sleeves of Girl Scout Samoas while we dressed and undressed our Barbies and had the little sugar-and-fat-fueled gals run away from home and rescue each other. Till it was time for supper at her house. When we’d order in pizza from Domino’s.

So yesterday, I buy the regular Pringles can, not the small “snack” size that’s one-quarter the height and ten cents cheaper because, you know, I’m a smart shopper. I get in the car and start snacking—no, munching—no; something more grotesque and gluttonous. And then I see I’ve eaten a quarter of the can and so I close the lid.

Fast forward to tonight, when my roommate gets home.

Fearfully, I approach her. “Did you eat some of those Pringles?”
She shakes her head nah.
“Oh, no, Carmelita. You—didn’t? Tell me you ate some! Tell me I didn’t do—this!!” (Alice tears off the plastic lid to reveal…four, maybe five, sad chips curled sideways and alone at the base of the Pringles silo.)
Oh, but I did. I did. I am powerless.

3. Frank Black’s Teenager of the Year
When will I tire of this record? I listened to it on the way to and from the salt marshes. O, “Calistan” and “Ole Mulholland”. “Fazer Eyes” is my favorite love song and “White Noisemaker” just rules and then, like two seconds later, it’s over. Oh, perfect rockitty-pop; I love you. I love you. I love you. I do.

4. My car.
Dear ghostcar may be dying. My mechanic can’t find the problem, but a car whose battery light flashes and then just dies mid-drive is not a well car. So tonight I dropped it elsewhere for a second opinion after not driving it for four days.

Your car becomes the main thing you come to count on without thinking about it if it’s been with you while other, more seemingly-solid things have come and gone.

But it’s old. A few years ago it started burning oil. Then the speedometer and odometer went. Great big tears have rent the upholstery for as long as I’ve had it, and it’s got its share of dents, too.
But it’s a good car. It’s always run well, and I love driving it. Love the way it shifts, its tiny size and vroomy pick-up.

I’m not one to get romantic over cars; I drive a Honda, for god’s sake.

Still, there’s not a major milestone since the end of college for which Ghostcar’s not been there. It was the first car I bought myself. It housed my first major, marathon, heart-wrenching breakup, which spanned a drive from Detroit to Atlanta. (Yeah.) My dog’s muddy, destructive jaunt from puppy- to adulthood. About a dozen moves. Spur-of-the-moment trips to Kentucky. I swear it knows the way to Pittsburgh.

Even with its busted front bumper. Even with its lack of a/c--I'll even take that, here, south of the Mason-Dixon. And the old stickers that will not peel off. I hope it sticks around a little longer.

2007-10-09T22:58:00.000-05:00

Hands down.
Possibly the best Craigslist ad, ever.

"Pine cones - $19
6" - 9" pine cones; you decorate for the holidays. Six cones, boxed and shipped. Shipping and handling included in price. Allow 5 days for check to clear before shipment."

2007-10-02T22:13:00.002-05:00

Bad lyrics good life
I’ve been listening to a lot of music with very bad lyrics lately. Interpol and The Rentals. I love, love, love this music; you just have to plug your ears and go “la la la” when you start thinking about the words (“Would you like to be my missus and in future with child?”) you’re singing.

Things both are and are not as stressful as I’ve made them out to be here. I have a number of ideas for the thesis, and I’m plugging away on quite a few. It’s just that something someone said yesterday in a class, is true: Researching and writing are polar opposite activities. So while I’m all into the research end of things, I see no daily output in the writing, and that… Well, it’s just a big ol’ bummer when everyone around me is coming to workshops with pages and pages and with gleaming faces, “Oh, the writing was just so great, this weekend.” This weekend, for me? Well, the writing About Things Completely Unrelated to the Thesis was pretty good. But even that didn’t amount to much, quantitatively. And the poets. The poets-! With their, “Oh, I wrote two poems this week.” A poem. I am jealous of that unit of measurement.

2007-10-02T21:37:00.000-05:00

Is it True I can spread my wings?

Meanwhile, in one eastern Carolina town, the obsession with Abba’s “The Eagle” resurges with a fresh energy and passion. The colors of that passion are shimmery, shining purple and gold, the colors featured in a 1977 video for the song my roommate, Carmelita, sent to me. And yes, my god, is it ever dull, but you’ve got to remember: this was pre-MTV, pre-Janet Jackson dancing in the streets shoulder-to-shoulder with all the townsfolk, pre-Twisted Sister guy showing up in your bedroom to lay down the law.
Before all that, there were people lip-synching, joyous, into a camera. And excellent T-shirts.

So of course I emailed it straightaway to Marshall, who shares my embarrassing love of many things Abba, who in fact was the person to correct me on the chorus of “Take a Chance on Me” as we painted his bathroom and I sang along, loud and characteristically unheeding of modesty. “Alice, it’s ‘when the pretty birds have flown”.
Oh. Not “would it really hurt, so call!’” I blame the Swedish. I can enunciate just fine.

Anyway, back to the important thing—our “Eagle” emails.

Alice:
Okay, so, for the best moment, go to 2:52-ish, and check out Non-Bjorn’s facial expression. It’s all “I can’t believe I’m in this freaking video.”

Marshall:
I swear, Frida was about to eat that psychedelic eagle flying around in front of her mouth.

Did you see their outfits? You can’t tell until the end, but one is wearing a shiny, shiny shirt with a huge bunny on it, and the other is wearing a coyote shirt not to dissimilar to yours. Well, maybe a bit more polyester.
Glorious.

Alice:
Yes; their shirts basically rule. And it looks like there’s a video for “The Name of the Game,” too, but I haven't watched it yet. I'm saving it for a special occasion. Then again, it’ll probably be some variant of blonde lady and brunette lady singing and the less-attractive Bjorn and not-Bjorn coming in every now and then, n-B trying not to laugh.

You know, I think Bjorn is to me what Orson Welles was to the girls in Heavenly Creatures. "It." He’s so repugnant to me and always has been.

Marshall:
If you didn't know they were named Agnetha and Anni-Frid, you might well think they were office workers from St. Paul. Shiny, shiny office workers telling magical tales in front of their mesmerizing disco ball.

Also, “Eagle” is not much of a disco song. How do you categorize something like that? Pseudo-mystic Swedish synthesizer pop? Could any other band have produced this song?

My favorite line from the YouTube description:
“Eagle” did not perform that well in the charts.

2007-09-29T11:56:00.000-05:00

My head just might explode the very next time I am forced to hear the phrase "deceptively simple." Especially as applied to writing. You, sir or madam, are the one who is deceptively simple.

2007-09-29T02:33:00.000-05:00

(Note: Other beanbag surface features the image of a joyful, smiling Tammy Faye.)

Began this night quiet, at home, writing after going for a run. Pleasant. Nick Drake. Smog. Then silence.
Then there were people here. These people—my friends, after all—announced, “We have wine!” Kept writing for about an hour. Made a mix cd for my very oldest friend. Heard people in kitchen. The best thing, after all, is this: to have people in the next room, available, but you, still alone. Then emerged, so tired, happy. Drank wine. Talked. Joked. Drank more wine. Joked about: Billy Squier, Abba, Crash Test Dummies. Mmm-hmm-hm. (“Didn’t he die? Cancer? Oh god, I’m terrible.”)

A game of cornhole outside. Thwap, thwap. Terrible, tonight. Beanbags landing everywhere but the neat little circle cut out of wood. What do you expect, after three glasses? We stenciled these to celebrate the generous spirit of Tammy Faye Baker, for a party. The friends who lived here before had cornhole sets spraypainted to look like June and Johnny Cash. When I put the purchase of these naked wooden boxes on my credit card, my roommate said her dad would slap her for paying good money for a few pieces of wood, nailed together. I said, we don’t have time to go looking for the perfect cornhole trees. My goodfriendinWisconsin found the whole thing enormously amusing. On the phone, the night we stayed up really late painting them the night before the party at which they would be unveiled, he made jokes: “Your favorite thing in the world always was the cornhole out on the verandah.” and "Okay. Don't stay up too late obsessing over your cornhole."

Tonight, thought about practice. Decided I could do this just about forever. The same gesture, something calming. Casual toss, thwap. Casual toss, wonderful silnece of landing the beanbag perfectly. Decided: we should be the very best at this game at any party, since it belongs to us. We should be cornhole sharks. Thought about the drinking while playing as an advanced brand of training. Should be able to play, drunk. In fact, we should only be able to play drunk. Thought of my father, how he loves to grow wistful and sweet with wine. Thought: I am exactly the same. Thought, What a nice Saturday, after all. Realized: it wasn’t Saturday. What was it? It was this game, midnight. Traffic outfront and you should relax and wow, you are.

2007-09-21T11:50:00.002-05:00

The youth. And: Not freaking out.

I haven’t written here in a while. I am writing, mind you, only it's mostly gems such as these, on my students' papers: “What’s the larger significance of writing about this acid trip? It seems like it could possibly be one layer in a larger story, but as it stands now, I’m left wanting more.”

“Your grandfather’s death is a great concept for this essay. What would make it even better: Some scenes. An exercise to try: Sit down and consider just one scene during this five year span you cover here.”

Truth: I’m not left wanting to read anything more about anybody’s drug trip, dead grandfathers or the puddles of tears “I could of swum in” tears and more tears dripping, dripping to the floor at their “pint sized feet.” Truth? I just want to be left alone. I think this is Phase Two of grad school. Phase One is a head-snapping adjustment period. Phase two is Leave me Alone with my Thesis. I think Phase Three might involve the acquiring of an eating disorder, or perhaps psychosis. Worth the thousands in loans a year by itself. Because those experiences sell books like mad.

2007-09-13T22:23:00.001-05:00

Dutch television shows contain mystery messages.

So, I'm told by Blogger that as an honored user of Firefox, I can download some new application for this site that will play the song I'm listening to at any given moment I happen to be typing an entry or something.

Right now, I'm thinking that would be brilliant if and only if I could choose this song for every entry.

2007-09-09T15:25:00.000-05:00

There's terror in paradise.
There’s this awful movie called Snake Island that came before Snakes on a Plane, about this island, see, and these cruiseship people who get trapped there, and, well, there are these snakes.
Tricky plot.
Well, it was while watching this movie that my friends and I were able to define the classic answer to the horror movie question of Who gets killed next? The answer is always the people who deserve it, because they’re either:
A – Having sex. Sex that’s enhanced visually onscreen with saline or silicone, and, more to the point, sex that’s frivolous and naughty, because we Puritans love to see the frivolous sex-havers getting their due.
B – Complaining. Tacky mustachioed whiners are always the second to get killed by the snakes. Followed by all other brands of whiners.

So, to warn one another that we were about to start bitching and therefore probably deserved to get bitten by all manner of serpents, our shorthand became, “Okay, this is totally Snake Island territory, but…”

So, it’s Snake Island time. I've warned you.

Whatever I devote my attention to, I feel guilty; I should be doing something else. Whatever I’m doing becomes diminished in its importance as the responsibilities I’m not turning my attention to loom up and, just outside the corner of my vision, become these huge, amorphous shapes, impossible to gauge and harder still, to overcome; there will always be more.
I should be grading papers, I should most definitely not be grading papers; I should be writing, but writing what? Is it for my thesis? No? Well, then I should be doing research on my thesis, but that feels like nothing but noodling around on the internet most of the time. (And just what has this or that particular goofy little article to do with my focus, anyway? If the answer's not immediately clear, I'm wracked with anxiety.) So, soon I’m back to working on the paper due Wednesday instead. It’s cut and dry; six pages. Thesis, paragraphs, conclusion, all assigned, all straightforward, all utterly forgettable.

When I was in nursery school, I got this evaluation from a teacher: “Alice gets utterly absorbed in whatever it is she’s working on, but has a hard time moving on to a different task.” This was my problem as a reporter, too. I like working on one thing, not twelve. Grad school is like being a reporter, only on acid. No, I don’t know what I mean by that. I need to get back to work, now.

2007-09-01T11:07:00.000-05:00

The D-Word
I think I’ve said here before that one perk of having moved to Beachtown is that it’s much easier to visit my grandmother, who lives about three hours away from here. She turns 92 this month. She’s lived the majority of those years independently, and willfully so, by herself in the same ranch-style house where my mother spent her teenage years.

I admire my grandmother more than I can say for this independence, and for her snappiness of spirit, her good sense of humor and her amazing adaptability when it comes to changing with the times. (“I don’t know, Alice, why—you know—gay people are like that, but I guess it don’t matter. I guess they just love each other.” This, out of the blue on any given afternoon while slicing up chicken for salad, the kitchen scissors held aloft in that way that you can tell she’s been chewing on this idea since she saw a segment on Larry King the night before. And this, let me remind you: from a nonagenarian who’s lived her entire life in a very small southern town whose major feature amounts to the tobacco, soy and cotton fields that surround it.)

What’s true about what’s happened to her is true even though I hate it, and I hate it because: 1. it seems so preventable in retrospect and also because yes, 2., it’s such a freaking cliché, and who wants to have the circumstances of her life or that of those she loves so easily explained and discardable?

I start and re-start this same sentence:
She had a fall
Since my grandma had a fall last spring, she’s
There’s no denying that my grandma
False starts. I don’t want to use the word “decline,” because it sounds so inevitable and I don’t want to believe in the inevitability of this. I want to get mad at the doctors for not figuring out what’s still making her back hurt her so, after so many months. For not getting it: This is Nona. You have no idea how amazing a woman you’re dealing with, here. She’s never been on a single medication on her life, and now she’s on this horrible merry-go-round of painkillers that she hates and which make it hard for her to keep up much of an appetite and that make her groggy and confused. It’s not her, I want to tell them. I feel angry at them for making her not her.
She had a surgery on her back a couple weeks ago, and I wanted to slug the nurse who shouted to her, an hour into the recovery room, in this horrible sing-song, “Nowww, Elizabeth, are we ready to try to eat something?” The lurch of pride and anger inside me, at this woman who looked at Nona and saw only her lack of hearing (hearing aids out), her grogginess at the drugs which caused her to move her denture plate around in her mouth as though it itself were food. This is not the entirety of who my grandmother is. It’s a moment; it’s not her identity. I wanted to tell Nurse Kindergarten Marm to stand the hell back: This woman’s worth three of you.

Maybe all this anger is in part, confusing messenger with message.

I guess you can’t prepare yourself for this. You can’t make yourself feel everything as hard as possible in the anticipation of what’s to come. Every time my best friend in the world takes off on a plane to a rainforest village in some Central American country as part of his job, try as my hamster-wheel mind might, I can’t make myself dream up every terrible scenario as part of some superstitious Terrible Event Prevention method. And I literally, cannot tell him I love him, enough.

My grandma knows what’s up. She’s scared of the physical pain and scareder still, of the increasing loss of independence it’s meaning. That hour after her last surgery, she really didn’t know up very well from down, but she was sitting up and looking for her shoes; she wanted to go home, now.

She is not afraid of death; at least that’s what she’s said for the last ten years: that she’s ready to go up and sing with the angels. It’s all that comes before. And what I’m scared of, in the end, is that same helplessness: on her part and on mine and on the parts of my mother and uncle: As she walks down this road, we cannot follow; we cannot fix. The most I can do is to be there through any decline that happens, pat her soft hand and tell her I love her, as many times as I want.

2007-08-19T18:42:00.000-05:00

The Candyman Cometh.
We, all of us, have people we rely on to be our musical drug dealers. Sure, there are friends we share music back and forth with, but, and this is if you’re lucky, there’s that one person from whom you take an awful lot more than you give. That person who knows just exactly what you like, what you need, baby, and doles it out little by little till you’re begging for more.
Something like that, anyway.
I am not too modest to admit that a lot of friends have told me I’m that person for them, and that’s great and that’s nifty, but you know what? I’ve got an even purer source. At least one. And that’s where I get my personal stash.

My new discovery is not my new discovery, but one that my Musical Drug Dealer heard first, and knew would be right up my alley. I'm not saying you would like it, only demonstrating my MDD's uncanny ability to get inside my brain. Anyway, the band is from Ohio they call themselves Wussy, and they play nifty lo-fi (low-fi? lo-fih? Har) style rawk that makes my little heartstrings vibrate all crazylike.

La Musica-!
I love the music, but I’m pretty damn picky with it. This is something my MDD understands. He knows I like acoustic music, but only when it’s kind of unprocessed and that I prefer the minimalist-sounding stuff. He knows I like the poppish rock, but only when it contains this particular brilliant originality and cutthroat lyrics. Same with hip-hop. I mean, but seriously: Did that just make sense? Probably not, and I probably left a lot out. This is what is great about a musical drug dealer: He(or she) gets you in a way that can’t be articulated. It is greatness in the world when some other person can do that with any part of who you are. Trying to explain my taste to you in words, Henshaw, is like trying to tell you what a poem “means.” This poem means: screw it.

“Oh, you’re a ‘Music Person.’ Do You Like Coldplay?” and other frustrations.
I resent people assuming I’ve heard of certain bands or that because I like music, that I like it in that competitive asshole, Chunklet magazine, record-clerk way (though the above heading may belie that fact.) To take that a step back, I resent people taking a look at me and assuming any thing about my general aesthetic or what kind of person I must be. (An aside: Just because a person has a couple tattoos doesn’t mean she wants to sit around for hours or even minutes and talk about them, not hers or yours. Do-! Not-! Trap such a gal at a party with someone who does this-! Please?)

The fact is that I care for the music I love with a ferocity that embarrasses me; at times there persists a not-very-still, small voice within me that says: Hey! What’s the deal? You’re not supposed to be this way outside your teens, you odd duck, you. That voice is biznullshit and to be ignored, though. It’s just Self-Doubt saying Hello. Mostly, I just feel lucky to have this force available to me that affects me so strongly any time I want it to. And so, conversely, there is just so much music that I hate. I hate more than I love, just because I love what I love so much. I feel completely indifferent to just about every new band that I hear, because there are just too many of them, now, and I'm just not interested anymore, in keeping up. I'm feeling lazy, lately. I'm willing to rely on people who know my specific tastes to recommend things; otherwise, I'll just sit at home and listen to Guided By Voices some more.

Just Another Teenager at the Doc Martin Sock Hop
Because it's changed.
I came of age at a very lucky time. When you expose a music-spazzy, in many other ways spazzy, adolescent girl to 1990s culture, she just might explode. Zines! Wacky dress that's purely inventive! That has nothing to do with fashion (Whee flannel and Doc Martins and Kool Aid dyed red hair)! There was this Brand New third-wave feminism thing; there was this Sassy magazine-thing (forever a sigh deep inside now, an RIP now.) There were these rock shows, and if you went to these shows, you’d meet other creative freaky dorky people like you. For a time, my teenage friends and I completely lost our heads over it all.

Then of course you grow older, and a wave of underground music becomes commercially co-opted and fast-forward to today, when a whole lot of forces—the aforementioned commercialization being one, the widespread availability of all information, music included, being another—and of course the loss of shine that comes with time; all these have worked together to make finding inventive music an activity more akin to flipping through cable channels than excavating for shiny diamonds. You don’t have to work hard to find anything anymore, and with online saturation, some small band from Ohio, maybe, blows up and becomes huge waaay before it probably should. Before it’s ready to. And there are copycats way too soon and it’s confusing, too, because everyone’s heard that rare Pavement EP and it doesn’t mean that they feel the same way about it as you do.
And nothing’s rare, really.

This is why I keep my passion a bit private. This is why I don’t like to make it competitive. I don’t like every new band that comes along, and the ones I do like, I tend to think of as my secret life soundtrack. I still try to allow myself that privilege, even if it’s a lie. I like to sit down with you and see if you feel the same way, not by talking about this band versus that one, but by hitting play, by whispering, “Listen.”

2007-08-08T18:48:00.000-05:00

News in Briefish

The move – It’s over. The three of us began our move on the morning of an extremely muggy Saturday, under the direction of Yammers, the neighborhood streetcat. Yammers has successfully charmed Ginger and Carmelita’s block with his street-hustler brand of affection, his prodigious drool and equally generous gifts of dead mice, voles and—most recently—a squirrel the size of Yammers himself, on G and C’s front porch.

Interlude/Ode:
A jolly little song for Yammers (named for his sweet potatah’ color and disposition) by Ginger:

Yammers, oh Yammers.
Our new Gentleman Caller.
He doesn’t leave his Calling Card;
He nails it to your Heart.

Turns out that Ginger and Carm’ are not the only ones who’ve been caring for Yammers. He goes by George across the street, where they feed him wet food and dry, and down the road, he’s known as Sam. We found out about one other life that last day. Turns out that next door, Yammers is Walter. There, he lounges around inside and out, and enjoys free-form jazz music with the elderly bachelor who lives there. Oh, Yammers. You’ll be just fine.
So, Yammers/George/Sam sat in his usual spot on Ginger and Carmelita’s porch, looking on with slit-eyed approval as the three of us lugged their heaviest, most unwieldy furniture down G and C’s steep staircase and onto the Oldest UHaul in Beachtown. I’m serious: When I drove the thing off their lot, I first thought it did not work at all, since there was zero forward motion until I had the acceleration pedal flush with the floor.

The Oldest UHaul also turned out to be rusted-through in spots, so when the subsequent noon downpour came, it also ruined a couple boxes of Ginger and Carmelita’s books and soaked through their mattresses as well. Word to the Wise: This is not covered by U-Haul unless you buy their special “Your UHaul is a piece of Crap and Will Ruin Your Personal Belongings If it Rains” Insurance. S’true.
Around noon, two friends came and kicked much moving ass with us until long after the sun went down. Things went a lot faster and both apartments were translated to Mansion House.

Mansion House has many small, quirky, things wrong with it. It is, however, utterly amazing on the whole. I had a friend over for supper the last week and she walked around slack-jawed for about five minutes at the place’s high ceilings and wood paneling and awesome antique peacock wallpaper in the dining room. I remembered, suddenly, doing the same when last year’s tenants had me over for supper for the first time. And thought of how we take for granted what we’re around every day. And how maybe Lorrie Moore is right in this one short story of hers in which one of her characters posits this notion that we can only love what we don’t understand. In some small ways, at some small moments, maybe. Maybe, Lorrie Moore.
Anyhoo.

Chicaaaago! — is where I am, at present. Visiting my sister, yo. This morning, she asked me what I wanted to see, so I looked up all these “Haunted/Weird/Historic Chicago” activities online, but they all cost more dinero than Lowly Grad Student Me wants to spend. So instead we went to Wicker Park for the Haunted Consumer-Whore Tour of Chicago. Ducked into one shoe store where I flipped over a price tag that read $485, and immediately had that sort of scary nightmare idea about What If I somehow destroyed these shoes completely?-->like, dropped them and then jumped up and down on them repeatedly with the hefty mary janes I wore into the store? That whole fear-of-walking-too- close-to-the-edge-of-the-Scenic-Overlook,-because-what-if-you-just-jumped? thing.
Gives you goosebumps.

Tonight, we take in one stop of the cheap and yummy Salvadoran food tour, so I am psyched about that.

Also, about Chicago: The stranger-type-men here are all stare-y and flirty, (and in the worst cases, cat-call-y.) It’s a little jarring after Beachtown, where the creepiness was more in the vein of “Wait, isn’t that guy dating that 19-year-old, 40?”

Also, about Chicago: At any hour that I sit down on this couch in this apartment, there are children playing in the street down below, with at least one screaming in a repeated car-alarm-like pattern. This includes midnight.

Eyelid twitching – I was lying down reading the very last issue of Punk Planet (huge sob. possibly more about this later), dozing off to said screams and shouts. It was that sort of quasi-sleep that involved a To Do list of things that must be accomplished upon return to Beachtown. It also included a brief worry session over the fact that I often have trouble recalling the perfect descriptive words right when I want them, and does this mean I have some sort of early-stage brain disorder or perhaps a tumor? The poor word-recall is part of the reason that my Real Writing™ takes so long, part of the reason I’m an abysmal arguer who often scripts perfect witty and biting come-backs several hours or days after the argument. So I’m lying there falling in and out of sleep, worrying because I’m trying unsuccessfully to come up with the word “integrity,” and then I really fall asleep. And then I wake up and my left eyelid’s twitching. Still is.

2007-07-27T23:44:00.000-05:00

Today I broke up with Proactiv.
And old P’ took it surprisingly hard.

So, I was clearing out everything from the cabinet under the bathroom sink, and somehow, I’m telling you, like six or eight or three-dozen of those little white bottles of the mail-order acne solution stuff had accrued there. Some of them had gotten together in the dark, down there, and mated, or maybe populated the space via some creepy spore-like process. I don’t want to know. What I do know, is that the shit’s expensive, and that it works no better at maintaining my sparkling fine complexion than the five-dollar stuff you buy at Harris Teeter.

So I went to the Proactiv website. Logged in to my account and searched and searched for the page from which you could cease, halt, all ordering of the stuff. No such page. So I grabbed my phone, hit the 800-whatever-whatever, and went back to cleaning out the bathroom.

A nice enough sounding woman answered the phone. She called up my account.
“Ms. Deaver, we have no record of your phone number, on file in your club membership. Would you care to add one?”
“Well, actually, no,” I said, “I don’t think so, since I’m actually calling to cancel my account.” I said this in a nice-enough voice, maybe a tad distracted, since I was now tossing other things from beneath the cabinet: old bottles of lotion with miniscule amounts left, tubes of this and that, expired ibuprofen, and I was marveling at all the junk a single person can collect in the course of a year. How complex can one person’s own body and physical conditions thereof be? Was I some sort of closet-hypochondriac? And good god, was I this vain regarding my damn looks?
Meanwhile, the Proactiv operator had started in on her, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that you’re canceling...” spiel. I only half-listened as she asked me why. I know computer scripts, and I was imagining the one in front of her, which required that she ask me this.
“Oh. Well,” I said, collecting all the tampons into one box. Those freaking buggers can scatter all over the place; I’m telling you if you’re not familiar, s’true. “Well, I guess it’s because-” I hadn’t thought about a concrete reason I could give her. I glanced over at the dozens of bottles of Proactiv acne treatment all lined up like soldiers in the brown cardboard box onto which I’d scrawled “Bathroom” in black Sharpie. I could survive in a bunker with blemish-free skin for years with that box. “Um, well. I guess it’s because I could buy the over-the-counter stuff and it works just as well.”
“So are you saying that the Proactiv isn’t working for you?”
“Well, no. That’s not it.” I stood up. The last thing I wanted was to get into some personal discussion about the degree of effectiveness of acne medication on my blotchy, frustrating skin with this woman. The last thing I wanted was to get into any sort of discussion with her, really. But the times when really elementary prevarication would smooth the way in life are precisely the times when I tend to just trip up and start telling the stupid, messy truth. Usually when I’m distracted by something else. “No, that’s not it. It’s just that I could just get stuff at the store,” I said, considering it honestly for a moment. Then I realized that she just needed an answer to fill in her stupid computer screen. “Oh. Well, you know? That’s fine. I guess I’ll just say that. It doesn’t work.”
This is when everything changed. Suddenly, the woman adopted a new tone.
“Well, Ms. Deaver.” Her voice was sad, disappointed, my sweet kindergarten teacher when no one in class would own up to stealing the cherry-scented Mr. Sketch marker from the set. “I really, really would hope that you would feel you could be honest with us about why you feel you need to discontinue your membership.” Was she going to cry? “I see here, you’ve been a member a really long time.”
What? Was she next going to remind me about my first really bad outbreak when I was nineteen? And how nothing would help? And how it was a shame that Proactiv hadn’t been invented yet, then? Was she going to bring up Nero, my first cat, dead these twenty years? The fact that I had eaten popcorn as part of my so-called nutritionally-complete dinner for the past four nights? What secret tool did this woman not have in her arsenal?
And what fricking nerve? I mean, Jesus.
I reminded myself that she was just a telephone operator who probably hated her job. I would not be that asshole. Further, I would not let her get under my skin, let her ruin my pleasant detachment. I tossed the box of reunited Tampax into the cardboard box, and said evenly,
“Uh, you know? I guess it’s just because there are other, cheaper things that work just as well.”
“Well, how long would you say you've been using these 'other products'?”
“What? Oh. Some months, I guess.”
And then she said, yes, I shite you not:
“Only a few months?”
“Well, months, years."
"And are they honestly as effective as Proactiv?"
"Again, I...yes. Yes, they're better. I really want to cancel this membersh—this account.”
And then, just as she’d arrived, the ghost of my kindergarten teacher Reborn as Condescending Saleslady disappeared. Her voice was crisp, officious.
“Okay, well. I’ll cancel your membership, then. Effective August first. Is there anything else I can do for you, today?”
“Uh, no.”
“Okay, then. Goodbye.”
And she. Hung up. On me. Which is fine. I got to finish up with packing the bathroom stuff, and move on to the kitchen, which was the real bear.

2007-07-24T10:31:00.000-05:00

Hey Summer, Where ya Been?
A= This is moving week. Yes, it’s adieu to ye olde artsy garret in favor of a portion of giant old mansion built in the nineteen-teens, with my two pals, Ginger and Carmelita. It’s not that I don’t need, love and crave solitude, Henshaw; it’s that too much of it in an enforced way magnifies my weird little proclivities to the max. Soon, the decoupage is everywhere and things are organized in a ROY G BIV sorting system made up in a fit of 2 a.m. inspiration. You understand. Merely having people in the next room, or the next wing, as this gigantor apartment will allow, is comforting. It tells me there’s order, and there’s dinner taking place at a normal hour in the next room, which I am welcome to join, or to decline, politely.

The folks moving out left things in the mansion house—which I may just call the place here—with a wink and nod to a great Jenny Lewis tune—anyway, they left it kind of a mess. This means that Carmelita and Ginger and I have spent the past two weeks dumping things and scrubbing things and shouting, “Oh god, that’s disgusting!” a lot, upon revealing items such as particularly gigantic dead cockroaches, rat droppings and dog turds in kitchen cabinets.
No one ever said the road to the life of beauty was a smooth one.

So, we’ve been cleaning. Meanwhile, I’ve been in the early stages of trying to put together a syllabus for my classes this fall, and-! working on two stories I want to have ready for workshop when classes start up again. This, between: putting in many a mind-numbing, but necessary hour at ye olde call center of doom and writing articles for various local publications. That and I can’t seem to shake this weirdo summer cold which tells me that all I really want to do is sleep all the time.

Meanwhile, I’ve suggested to Carmelita and Ginger, the notion of creating some Uruk-hai from the pits of the steamy swamps west of Beach Town to help us move things from our two apartments to the new one, come Saturday. Seems their only close male friend is outta town for the weekend, which brings our collective grand total of close male friends here in town to zero.
Not that we need the menfolk. The three of us have enough moves under our belts to be able to move our big unwieldy wooden furniture in our damn sleep at this point, anyway, I suspect. We’ll be fine. Freaking exhausted, but fine.
Gotta go, now. See ya.

(Meanwhile: Listening nonstop to these songs on the National’s newest record that Marshall keeps feeding me, one by one. Argh.)

2007-07-20T10:05:00.000-05:00

Today I am boycotting the great outdoors. Today, the outdoors are not so great; when I got up at seven o’clock this morning, it was 80 degrees out. The high is 96. Which, when I swung my legs out of bed and listened dully to the public radio announcer say it, made me want to just disappear, like some reverse version of Toad, back into the great cave of my cool sheets and blankets till fall.

Besides, today, I am not so great, either. Last night after work, I went out for Mexican food with Ginger and Carmelita, and even though I’d been the one drumming on the dashboard, practically, in my excitement at the prospect of mole chicken and the best salsa in the world, by the end of our meal, I was ready to crawl under the table and sleep. We crawled home instead, and while Ginger and Carm’ went on to drink beers on their porch and enjoy the beautiful evening, I tossed the shade over my the bedroom window to shut the sun out and went straight to sleep.

I have a scratchy throat today, and a feeling of fatigue that will not quit. However, I also have a/c and a loyal kitty-cat and a computer. And a fall syllabus to design, and an article to write and well, an apartment full of furniture and belongings to transport across town in the coming week when I move, but screw it. I will eat corn fritters and watch McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which has been sitting, taunting me for weeks, lounging around my apartment in its little red Netflix sleeve. (I like to pay fifteen dollars a month to rent what usually amounts to one or two movies. It’s great.)

Anyway, today I will read good things, and I will write things that have nothing to do with obligation, and I will sure as hell not take one step outside until that sun has the decency to go away again.

2007-07-06T11:11:00.000-05:00

Oh, and the new John Doe single, "The Golden State"? The cathartic number he duets on with Kathleen Edwards? That one? Is something I can't stop listening to. You should check it out.

(I'm trying to buy the CD, but every music store in Beachtown is sold out for now. So I have just the one song, and I'm seriously considering just burning it onto a CD so that I can drive around the places I need to go today and just listen to it over and over. I am a wasteful American. Not that I'm actually gonna do it. Ha. Haha..err.)

2007-07-06T10:44:00.000-05:00

Corollary. See: “Rule.”:
…except where it’s supposed to be.
There’s a bar, see, where an ancient copy of the above poster is screwed to the wall, and there it has observed the pool players and drunken dancing girls in halter tops for ages from behind its dusty layer of plastic. The image was originally supposed to be all sex, sex, sex, but it just gives my friend Ginger the willies.

“I hate that thing!” she shouted again one night, and finally I asked her why.

In response, Ginger set her drink down, walked up to the poster and pointed to that weird space. The crevice. Which, the more you stare at it, becomes more crevasse than crevice. “Look at it!” she said, pointing to the faded, overexposed copy of poor Emmanuelle’s chin. “What is that? What is it supposed to be?!”

She was right. It was weird. Some sort of second mouth. A strange landscape where colonies of tiny people could dwell. No, X never was like this, I don’t think.

2007-07-05T20:30:00.000-05:00

Rule.
If you want one web address, but accidentally type in another, you get porn.
If you want one 800 number, but accidentally punch another, you get porn.

Porn is lurking around every false turn in the Land of Communication. (I'd originally typed "nook and cranny" and not "false turn," there, but contextually, that makes no sense. Nook and cranny sounds way more pornlike, too.

There's something terribly wrong with me.)

2007-06-26T23:45:00.000-05:00

Something Like
Homecoming. That’s it.
I’m back in Beachtown. It's been about three minutes since I stepped into this apartment, this place presided over by this Dangercat, (presently yelling and twining himself all around my legs), and it’s weird: A few weeks’ absence isn’t that lengthy a stretch of time, but when I opened my apartment door, extremely unwieldy suitcase in tow, and looked up that mammoth staircase, I inhaled sharply. I swear it surprised me, Henshaw, to see everything still there, that brown, shiny banister and the horrible fluorescent lighting and the dust.
I breathed it in, and breathing it in made me think these exact words with sort of a detached wonderment.
“It smells just like my old life.”
My first weeks and first semester here, a time which, as I pulled the giant suitcase up those 32-million steps, came rushing back in a disjointed and distant little montage (Thunk, thunk, thunk, went the suitcase.) Everything so far away, feeling about as personally related to me as do childhood memories that your elder relatives tell you about: “You remember that, don’t you?”
Sure, I do. Sure. Absolutely.

The feeling didn’t cease once I came inside. My belongings, all these books on this cherry-wood shelf, this black-and-white photograph positioned just so, currently far above the head of the little furry beast loudly proclaiming its ownership over me; someone named me once put these things together in this space and decided it was home, which, at the moment feels, not sadly, but utterly, ludicrous.

2007-06-19T22:14:00.000-05:00

The best thing about sisters is they make you feel like like a non-crazy person.
Example #1:
We're about to go out. My sister notices what I'm wearing, says, “That blouse is so pretty. I’ve never seen it.”

"I know, " I say, practically whispering, practically conspiratorial, “I never wear it.”

Not practically conspiratorial. Absolutely.

Certain friends of mine are great precisely because they give me perspective on my weird neuroses. They say things like, “Why not? You should wear it all the time.” My sister, on the other hand, gives me a different kind of perspective, by mirroring that weird neurosis right back to me in a way that no one else alive on this planet would. Our exchange goes something like this: She says, “Yes! I totally do that!”
Me: “Because you don’t want to wear it too much—”
Her: “And risk getting, like, mustard on it—“
Me: “Or, like, just, wearing it out—”
Her: “—Yes—!”
Both of us: “I thought I was the only one!”

Example #2:
My sister and I are driving home from an afternoon of thrift store shopping. We drive by a Mexican restaurant. I say, “Chips and salsa.” She starts nodding like a crazy person, like I would nod. She says, “And Corona. With lime.” We look at each other, say, “Mexican food.” And that’s dinner plans.

It wasn’t always like this. My eldest sister’s a lot older than I am. When she was a moody teenager, I was a six-year-old more absorbed in the dynastic adventures of my stuffed animals than in the dull grown-ups that populated most of my interactions. When I was a moody teenager, she was getting married; she was learning about mortgages and scary rural Georgia neighbors. Now, we’re discovering each other in our adult years in a way that feels all the time to me—on the rare occasions that we’re together—like the best presents ever.

It’s associating every single stupid thing in the day with a stupid pop song, or with a commercial jingle we remember from our childhood. (“Go ahead: Get ahead, in fashion merchandising.”) It’s singing, constantly. It's understanding the nostalgia-thing: not just the pull toward our childhoods, but the constant urge to examine everything that once happened in some new light. Telling each other stupid stories. Listening.

It’s like someone telling me my crazy weaknesses are okay; that they’re not weaknesses after all. Maybe even things to be proud of.

2007-06-12T15:40:00.000-05:00

Things Seen Along the Way
This weekend I drove down to Charleston, South Cacalacka to work on a story. The great thing about the drive is that you’re actually on a road, rather than an interstate, and that actual road winds through actual towns. You know you’re really traveling, rather than just relying on duplicate green signs to tell you.
Anyway. A couple things.

1. The whole sign-with-cartoon-pig-outside-the-barbecue-place has been made fun of, pretty much to death. You know, “Come partake of me! I am deeelicious!” But I saw one on Route 17 that I think brings the whole thing to a new level. The cartoon pig not only was parked before a heaping plateful of bbq, but underneath were the words, “Gut-Bustin’ Portions!” And Sir Pig’s expression as he looked up toward the viewer, clutching a fork, was that of bug-eyed horror, something akin to looking like he was about to:

a-vomit
or
b-bust a literal gut.

That is, die an excruciating death like that gluttony guy in the movie Seven, or like a duck whose insides are intended for pate, and good god this is a horrible line of thought, so I’ll stop there…

2. Around dusk yesterday, I drove by a golf course that looked like it hadn’t been mowed for a number of months. Right there, at the side of the road, and for some reason, really inviting, somehow. It made me want to pull over and have a picnic and then roll down one of its manmade hills, now soft with weeds and flowers, human negligence having robbed it of some of it manicured bite.

Also: Favorite song lyric from favorite song at present: "I had this friend, his name was Marc with a C./His sister was like the heat coming off the back of an old TV."
Because you needed to know that.

2007-06-03T21:17:00.000-05:00

On popcorn, and perhaps also, on larger problems Alice tends to muck herself up in.
White cheddar popcorn is supposed to be one of those snacks you savor somewhat, oh, I dunno, daintily, I guess. The shape of popcorn demands a one-at-a-time consumption if you’re not to look like a complete slob. Not that anyone actually does this.
No. Listen. I’m serious.
Popcorn is served in such venues—movies, fairs—that call for this carefree, devil-may-care sort of enjoyment, right? An air of, “Oh, I’m not really eating this for sustenance. I’m eating this for the Victorian (or possibly, Edwardian) wonderment that we might partake of this popped corn for the sheer amusement of it all. Ho-ho!”

But instead of carnivals, I always seem to end up eating popcorn, oh, on my break at my hourly-waged job in the break room underneath the fluorescent light, when I’m really hungry. I tear open the bag and—the problem of Slobbery, it’s compounded by the fact of this dusting of cheddar cheese and quite possibly and probably, MSG—I start really enjoying the taste and the texture and everything about the popcorn too much, and instead of taking small, genial bites, I’m soon grabbing these craven handfuls, loading my mouth. I get dissatisfied with those moments between the popcorn-in-the-mouth moments. I become completely greedy, ugly and white-dust-spittley-fingered. Someone who hopes to God that no one else will walk into the break room while I’m making such a raging fool of myself, eating this popcorn. Someone whom, at any rate, they certainly wouldn’t want for their friggin’ popcorn ad.

2007-06-02T12:42:00.000-05:00

Call Center Blues
You’ve got to have a short attention span. You must. Much of the time, working your way through the day means working your way through these lists of names/phone numbers, and you can’t let yourself think too far ahead while doing that or you will just feel really, really lost and frustrated with lots of “This is My Life Oh god, no” thrown in for good measure.

You must incorporate a zen-feeling instead, a now-and-only-nowness, so that these call lists only really consist of a name, Phyllis Swenson of Greensboro, for example, and not 40 names, not an endlessly monotonous rabbit hole of sameness that only leads to more sameness and more. Phyllis Swenson, you are it. This moment is about you and me. Hi there, Phyllis Swenson of Greensboro; let’s try to make this real. Let’s try to be more than blank voices to each another. Please don’t hang up on me or be otherwise rude, Phyllis Swenson of Greensboro. Please don’t—oh, you don’t live there. Oh. It’s a number that’s been disconnected or is no longer in service. Oh. Phyllis Swenson. Perhaps you are no longer of Greensboro. Maybe you never existed at all. But what of you, Wanda Hart, of Wake County?
Always the falling, with no satisfying shock, no thwack, of landing.

When I get sucked into this horrible anxiety, it is usually when I’ve been at the Medical Center making outgoing calls for a couple of hours. I am completely convinced that the supervisor who hands me list after list must hate me, never more so than when, practically gasping, I hand her a list of 40 checked-off names, two hours’ or so worth of work. Without pause, she takes it and hands me a fresh one. Smiling. Smiling while saying, “Oh. Sisyphus. It’s you. Okay, well, all that work you just did? I am now wiping clean. Look. This new list has no checkmarks at all. Go do the same thing, now, for five more hours.” She smiles as she does this. Often she is on the phone with someone and it’s a sort of catch-all, distracted social-pleasantry kind of smile and it makes me irrationally angry. I take the list and I sit and I imagine some rash screaming, jumping-up-and-down-on-my-desk thing. I put my headset back on and crack my knuckles and dial.

Other days are different. On other days, I’m getting trained on new medical studies, which means I’m talking with real people and learning things, and whether or not these are actually things I’d ever choose to learn independently, it means my brain is being stimulated in a variety of ways that feel like actual Variety, compared to sitting there dialing numbers and making the same speech for seven hours. I swear I can feel the dried-out sections of brain being drizzled with sweet water. Or something like that; anyway, it’s good.

On these days, I’m taking inbound calls, which means I get to spend the day reading books I’ve brought in, between having a variety of conversations with interesting people with interesting medical problems. These days, I figure out that, wait! I’m actually a secret favorite of my supervisor. I forget—honestly, like, wiped from the slate—that I ever felt any other way. Now the two of us are on absolute par, walking around in the sunshine of Science, making a difference in the lives of people with Problems that Require Studying. I am a problem solver! On these days, I look around at the others who are working off call lists, at their pale little, unhappy ratlike visages, and I feel downright impatient with their stick-in-the-mud attitudes. They should really learn to lighten up, mainly because they’re bringing me down, slightly.

2007-05-28T07:54:00.000-05:00

This world is big and wild and half insane
I'd like to reiterate: No matter the mood I'm in, a listen to the Kinks song "Animal Farm" always makes things okay. It's the Song of Happiness. The one thing I could imagine destroying my dogged spunk forever (if I may be so brazen as to claim I possess dogged spunk) would be for something truly bad to happen while "Animal Farm" was playing.
But, no. Only good things happen with Ray Davies.

2007-05-27T22:24:00.000-05:00

Nuestro propio animal.

2007-05-22T17:28:00.000-05:00

What I hear
...on any given public radio story:
"So, they've decided to hit those bad employers where it hurts.
[Pause for dramatic effect.]
In the wallet."

What I'd like to hear
"So, they've decided to hit those bad employers where it hurts.
[Pause.]
In the testicles. Hard."

2007-05-21T20:09:00.000-05:00

The Camping.
I am: home. Under a ceiling fan. Sitting beside a loudly purring cat. Alone, alone, mercifully and finally alone. Sunburnt and happy. Did I mention the ceiling fan?

Back from the mentoring conference and subsequent jaunt from the beach on which I live, to another, more remote beach for a camping weekend with old and new friends, where I:

was gifted with and wore all weekend long, the world’s ugliest, $5 bejeweled flip-flops.

laughed harder and in merrier company than I had in a long, long time.

climbed giant sand dunes.

kept reenacting portions of The English Patient on said sand-dunes, till my one friend said, “Hm. This is just an English Patient kinda day for you, huh?” after which I stopped.

got passive-aggressively scolded by a lady in one of those beach convenience stores for bringing in an ice-cream cone from another beach-convenience store down the road.
“Oh,” she said. “I guess I can just stop selling my ice cream, here.” Followed by big smile. Weird.

ate the best campfire grilled fish, ever

read a novel in two sittings. (The Bird Artist by Howard Norman. I didn’t like it at first but then suddenly was halfway through it and then completely. And it’s still reverberating around my head. Let me know if you’ve read it. I want to talk with someone about this book.)

saw more stars than I’d remembered there were. No. Really.

made new friends/kept old.

This summer-vacation-from-school thing, I’m beginning to not hate.

2007-05-15T23:56:00.000-05:00

In Which the Fish goes Inland for a Swim
There are periods in your life that feel more stagnated than others, and then there are periods in which so much is changing so rapidly that you don’t even have time to think about how to classify what’s going on.

I met a woman at dinner tonight who reminded me of this. I introduced myself and she said,
“Oh, we’ve met.”
When?
Five years ago, it turns out, back when I was a student at this same conference I’m mentoring at this week. This woman was a mentor at the time, and she remembered me. Flabbergasted I was, at this. I swear, I don’t even remember me, back then. So much has changed.

The conference is taking place in the town where I went to college. The funny thing is that I spent the days preceding this week just dreading it.
“I don’t work in media any more!” I thought. “How can I possibly mentor some young kid on how to do it??” So many of these completely illogical thoughts. (It’s been what, nine months since I was last “in media”?)

Once I arrived, I realized that these fears came as a result of a dip in courage that I’ve experienced only lately. During my months in Beachtown, I have felt, in large part, rather stagnated in many areas of life in which I want to grow. It’s true that I’ve been faced with the potentially self-esteem-annihilating challenge of being in a new geographic location, doing a completely new thing every day, surrounded by completely new people. But then you also have to take into account that (at the risk of offending those of you who are one of these, err, people), there’s the fact that most of these new people are younger, and lack the same brand of maturity/drive and self-confidence that characterized folks whom I surrounded myself with back in ‘Lanta. I’m not counting my very best friends in Beachtown. So chill, ya’ll.
However, the general climate in any creative writing program is gonna be more laissez-faire than that in an urban journalistic environment. Put that program on the freaking beach and boom: You have the possibility for extreme stagnation for goofuses like me, who rely an awful lot on my immediate environment to supply get-up-and-go. So the energy is lacking and you’ve neglected to find a way to refuel it and you start to lag, to be less than the Kicker-of-Ass you know you are. Then you start to blame yourself for your own lagging, and the next thing you know, you’re thinking all sorts of illogical things. Things like, “What if I don’t remember how to use that piece of equipment I used every day for four years?”

Cut to tonight. A night out, after a great day of mentoring and, well, general kicking of ass. To a healthily beer-enhanced dinner out with a few of the coordinators of this program, and a fiery discussion about the future of communication and news and media, what it should be and what our respective roles should be. Tra. And la. We got there around 6:30 and started right in on this talk and at some point shortly thereafter, I looked up from the table for a gulp of air and glanced at the clock. It was past nine. And I wondered: Where the hell had I been hiding myself all these months?

I haven’t jumped to the conclusion that I’ve made the wrong decision in leaving Small Publication for grad school. I just need to find a way to remind myself of the wider world that I love while I’m immersed in academia and the strange social milieu of Beachtown. To remind myself, that while I love the time I have available now, and the things I am learning; the wider world I prefer is still there and it’s still mine. I don’t have to completely unplug from one, to benefit from the other.

By the time I got back to my hotel, I was in this weird, rare state of complete ecstasy with every conceivable aspect of my surroundings. There were these lovely, intelligent, snappy people I’d just eaten with. And then there was the fact that I was driving through my college town, which is also my favorite place forever and ever amen in the land.

How I love it here. I drove back to the hotel from dinner with the windows open, turning down each street by instinct, amazed how well I still knew the way. Here’s the tree-lined street I used to bike to campus on a-million-and-a-half years ago, I thought, and look, there’s a pack of old hippies on bikes, now. Here’s that street right through the center of campus and look how nothing’s changed! I drive right by some girl crossing that street carrying a backpack and the thought floors me: she’s having her college experience right now. The thought is both heartening and lonely-making: I don’t own this place. It never was mine. Still I drive through it; I catch the air in my hand as I surf it out the window. I let it go again.

2007-05-08T22:46:00.000-05:00

And the Girls All Trying to Look Pretty
I’m one of those people who calls you right when you sit down to dinner.
That’s how my dad always used to term people who did what I’m now doing to make money over the summer: “Those people who call right as you’re sitting down to dinner.” He used to like to, as he put it, “mess with” them on the phone, to tell them that the lady of the house? Oh. Why, she just died, tragically, a month ago. Etcetera.

I had my first person tell me his wife has just died on my very first shift, last Thursday. Only I don’t think he was pulling one over on me. He just said it really quickly and quietly: “She’s deceased, now.” And I said “Oh! I’m sorry.” And we both hung up at the same time.

I’m working at this phone bank at the medical center a county away, which half the time when I’m driving up, puts that Billy Joel song in my head, “He works at Mister Cacciatore’s down on Sullivan Street/Across from the Medical Center,” which is also a song about working pointless jobs just to make money, so it always feels apropos, which makes it stick in my head even longer. Because, you know. I’m trading in my Chevy for a Cadallac-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack.

I got another song stuck in my head last Thursday. We had just gotten through my first time leaving a voice message with someone.
“Thanks; have a good day,” I said and hit the “Release” button, and my trainer looked at me and said, “And that’s how we do it.” Right then, I totally heard “Taking Care of Business” kicking in, in the background of the Movie of Our Every-day Joe Drudgery that was being filmed right at that moment.
I hate that song. Well, no. When I was six, I thought it was the greatest. I just hate that now it’s a stand-in for any montage of “Is it Friday, yet?” culture. Not that this has destroyed its inherent anythingness. Just. Well. It’s just one of those songs.

We call people about medical studies at the center. Last Friday, I got a lady on the phone who right away was familiar with all the medical terminology I used. She ended my sentences for me, interrupting.

“Yes, yes. ‘—any liability.’ I know, I know! I’m a medical doctor. I deal with this stuff all day long. Listen. What I want to know is why you people are using Retinol in this study. Retinol’s a psychotropic. Why are you using a psychotropic drug in a study about acne??”
Uh, well, I didn’t actually think it’s a psychotropic, I muttered. But it was. She knew it was. Further, she wanted to know what we had against people with diabetes that we were testing a drug that had adverse effects on them and who was Betty and why was she calling day and night?
It took me a good three more minutes to get her off the phone. Round and round we went. She was making me angry even though I knew she was crazy and that this conversation had not one thing to do with me. Also a fact: This was the single most fascinating conversation I’ve had in my time so far at this job.

Any new job is the same as any new person you’re dating. Whether or not it’s even remotely something you’d want to pursue for the long term, it’s kind of compelling at the start, simply in its novelty. When that starts to wear is when you realize what you’re stuck with.

Today, across the way from me, another operator asked a man if he had a history of tumors. He didn’t understand her.
“Tumors!” she shouted. “Like, cancerous tumors!” Then she giggled.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s just one of those words that starts to sound funny if you say it too much.”

The coffee at the center is bad. Everyone warns you of this. It’s like talking about whether or not it is indeed Friday yet. But it’s not watery-bad. It’s burnt-bad, which far surpasses the weird lemony-tinged stuff you pay two dollars for at the main coffeeshop back in Beachtown. I really kind of like it.

I drink too much coffee at the center, because sitting still for five hours is absolutely the most tiring thing.

No matter how well you leave impersonal phone messages, you’ll sound like a dork when you get to the “thanks”-part at the end. How can you give a meaningful, hearty “thanks” to someone who hasn’t just done something for which you feel genuine gratitude? Who, moreover, is not a human at all, but a machine belonging to a person you’ve never met in your life? In the weird tinny reverb world of the answering machine message, it’s easy to sound perfectly confident as you say, “I’m calling in regards to a hospital study blah-dee-blah-dee-blah,” but once you get to that ending, that “thanks” will never sound more than perfectly lame.

Today, other operators who got to the center first took all the good headsets. There are headsets that fit perfectly and make you feel kind of like some sort of kitchy, snappy operator from America Past. When your headset feels good, you feel good. The one I was stuck with today was too loose and kept slipping, the mic ending up too low, or more often, too high: in danger of sticking me in the eye or slipping right into my mouth. I didn’t feel remotely kitchy or cool. Instead, I felt like that scene at the dance in Sixteen Candles, where Joan Cusack is trying to drink from the water fountain around her headgear. All day long, this was me.

Today, when I had two hours to go in my endless shift, some man I’ve never met came in for the start of his shift. I don’t get a good look at him when he sat at the cube next to mine.
But then he starts talking on the phone, and I admire his voice. Over the next minute and a half, I decide it’s not just an attractive voice; it’s perhaps The attractive voice. Out of sheer boredom, I spend the next five minutes concocting a small romantic intrigue for me and The Voice. We will go out this very evening. We will have smashing conversation which ends with our both admitting we’re very attracted…to the way the other sounds while speaking. And then— Then I overhear him chatting to another of the operators. Turns out he came straight here today from his other job…at another call center. He works two jobs. Both of them are at call centers. Both.

Every day I bring this book of Susan Orlean essays I’m reading, or reading in theory. As in: there’s a bookmarker in it, so I must be reading it, huh? Really, what I’m leafing through when we’re in those spells of waiting for potential study patients to call us back, is In Touch. Also Star. These magazines are all over the tables at the center and I can’t figure out why they appeal to me. I read them and I’m filled with muttering annoyance at the notion that I should even begin to care about the fashion influence Posh Spice holds over Katie Holmes and my god, have you seen this woman’s cheekbones? She is simply terrifying. A good way to startle the hell out of me would be to have me looking at these pictures of her in Star, and then to tap me on the shoulder and I’d turn around and for you to be her. Seriously, I might have a stroke.

2007-05-01T20:15:00.000-05:00

Eat Mo Shad.
The Dangercat demands it.

2007-04-30T16:27:00.000-05:00

You'll come too, little Indian-giver.
Lately, I’m a quitter.

Not two days ago, I quit my second job in a month here in Beachtown. A job at a supercool restaurant here in town that absolutely everyone loves and which employs the supercoolest most beautiful people and serves the best food and plays the best music.
I quit after one night.

Before that, I quit a job at my favorite coffeeshop here in Beachtown. I quit after two and a half weeks. I gave two weeks’ notice, and then I reneged on that, one fine Saturday morning. Apologized to the owner but said I just couldn’t work another shift; sorry.

Last week I told a gal that I’d discussed moving in with that I’d changed my mind. Then I pulled out of working at this summer teaching camp I’d crossed my fingers to get a position at. Finally, there was yesterday, when I asked for and got back this intricate Christmas gift I’d crafted up for this person who failed to appreciate much of anything I'd ever given.

I’ve become commitment-phobic about every single aspect of life. I’m terrified of becoming trapped in a situation that doesn’t sit well with me. Of entanglement. Of having my spirits broken. So I bow out at the very first indication of discomfort. Which of course, translates to the rest of the world as flakiness. And in this interpretation, the rest of the world may very well be right.

About those jobs, though.
What makes quitting the job at Beautiful People Restaurant so damn cringe-y is that I gained it through a favor by a friend of friend. For what other earthly reason would B.P. hire some 29-year-old non-Beautiful Person who’s never worked in a restaurant in her life?

Still, I wasn’t too worried. All the bartenders I knew at B.P. were super-nice. The manager was super-nice, too. The day she hired me, she joked a lot about how easy it is to be a hostess. Leaning in, she told me, “Honestly? Most of our hostesses don’t have two brain cells to rub together. I don’t think you’ll have a problem.”

It wasn’t till my first night that I met the first non-supernice people. That’d be, of course, the principle folks with whom hostesses have to interact, a.k.a., the servers. Turns out that the servers at B.P. all hate the hostesses, precisely because they hold the opinion the supernice manager had already shared: that the hostesses at B.P. are all about as dumb as rocks.

I feel kind of silly telling you about what crystallized things. I’ve worked in food service before and I know that when you’re busy, there’s not much time for pleasantries, and I don’t particularly expect ‘em. That’s one thing. And when you’re making money, to some extent, who cares? If I had been making money, the birthday cake thing definitely wouldn’t have mattered.

The birthday cake was one that a customer had brought. The hostess who was training me told me to take it back to the walk-in, and make sure to tell that table’s server about it. Okay, I thought: Tell the server, tell the server. What was her name, again…? When I got back, we were officially Slammed and, dumb hostess that I was, I forgot all about the cake, until an hour later, when a different server came up to our hostess podium.

“So, Candi had a birthday cake at her table, and no one told her? Not okay,” she said to the hostess who was training me.

“Oh. That’s completely my fault,” I said, my stomach sinking. Three hours, and something in the air in this place was already causing me to become one of these Stupid Hostesses. Geez.

The server looked from the hostess training me, back to me, slightly deflated. See, she was actually mad because she and another waitress were convinced they were getting stiffed of all the good tables.

“Well,” she said, still looking at the other hostess. “You can’t do that. It looks really bad.” She dumped a pile of menus onto our podium and stormed off.
Not five minutes later, the second waitress who thought she was being stiffed came over.

“Okay, listen: When a server isn’t told there’s a birthday cake,” she said, “that causes big problems-”
“Oh, sorry, that’s my fault,” I cut in. “Totally my fault.” She continued as if I hadn’t said anything.
“When a server doesn’t know there’s a cake, it makes her look really bad in front of her table. You can’t forget to tell her!”
“Won’t happen again,” I said, already more annoyed than apologetic. The server wasn’t even looking at me. And Jesus, I thought. If she’d gonna be this pissy at this hostess, who seemed to me to be doing the very best, decidedly non-stupid, job possible, what was I in for when I started working solo, the very next shift?

During points of the evening when we weren’t busy, the servers huddled together in the restaurant’s opposite corner, talking. No one came by to say hello.

Later, I managed to track down the server whom I’d been told had been so humiliated. When I apologized about the cake, she shrugged. “Oh. It’s really not a big deal,” she said.

I felt like I was inside Kitchen Confidential. I’d read about such weird restaurant staff hierarchies, but lord if I wanted such things to actually start to matter to me at this stage in my life. Not for 6.15 an hour plus an average tip-out per busy weekend night of twelve bucks. So, yeah. I called the supernice manager the next day, and I quit.

But first-!
The coffeeshop was 6.15 an hour, too. It’s my favorite place in town: an independent coffeeshop that also makes excellent sandwiches and soups. That works on such a barebones budget, it can’t afford to hire more than one person per shift. This means you never stop working, making sandwiches and milkshakes and smoothies for tourists who don’t tip, making chicken salad and roasting coffee. It means you are always behind and always closing an hour late, for which you do not get paid overtime, and you begin to get a sore throat from the roaster, which smokes up the backroom something awful. And you’re making lattes and mochas for people which you know you could do in your damn sleep because you’ve done it before, in your early twenties. Only you made more money at that job.

You can’t sleep well. Something about the coffee oil that sticks to your skin and hair, even after you shower, and you lie in bed and smell that smell, which reminds you of your early twenties and the feeling of futility.
Even before you quit, you decide you will never work in a coffeeshop again.

2007-04-25T10:37:00.000-05:00

Noted in the school library:
19 or 20 or even 21 is far too young for a young man to be answering a cell phone call,
"Yell-o."
That offhand middle-aged southern lawyer or real estate salesman speak. It's just not right.

2007-04-23T09:35:00.000-05:00

Lately, I’m mostly interested in hanging out with old people.
To contrast: I talked with Hunter, my ex-boyfriend, now best-platonic-friend last night on the phone, about his weekend up in Madison. Ah-! he told me. The sun's been shining, it’s finally warm, and everyone’s coming out of hibernation. Spontaneous parties start up left and right at friends’ houses all around town and the Coup played a free show on this esplanade at the university. It was a giant lovefest and suddenly he has some magnetic Lady Attractor Beam going on too, because women are flirting with him left and right and yes, summer is starting out allllright.

I laughed, because I also had a great weekend, but I spent the whole thing with senior citizens. I’ve been visiting my grandma in her small town a lot lately, and drove there again, this weekend. Nona is 91 and lives by herself, still, in the house where my mom lived out her teenage years. Also, as I’ve told you before, she’s my favorite person on the planet.
Now that she’s just a few hours away, I find it hard to resist the urge to spend quiet weekends sitting with her on her screened-in porch, watching cardinals and bluejays and drinking coffee or pink wine and cackling together.

A few weeks ago, my grandmother had a fall going out to her garden. It was really scary at first, because we didn’t know if the cause was a stroke or what she’d broken, or anything. Turns out that there was no stroke and that she didn’t break anything, just bruised her pelvis badly. But I did spend that weekend at the hospital. I’ve always thought of hospitals as places where all your needs are met, and although this one wasn’t too bad, I did find out that you actually have to speak up just to get basic things: a napkin and a straw for your grandma who can’t bend her spine enough to sit up and eat the soup they’ve tossed unceremoniously on the tray beside the door; an extra blanket because her bed’s right beside the vent.

Nona’s better now. She’s still using a walker, which she hates and refuses to go out into public with, for fear of “looking like an old lady,” nor can she get very far before becoming too achy. But this weekend, a neighbor came and picked the both of us up on a golf cart (how do people get these things? At what point in your life does a golf cart become a normal item that you decide to purchase and have to keep in your own home?) and we went to a pig picking at a neighbor’s across the street.

It was huge. The back yard itself, the set-up, and the massive group of people who came to eat the crazy-delicious pork right off this gigantic smoker, along with hush puppies, broccoli slaw, boiled potatoes, and my favorite thing in the world for dessert, banana pudding.

What always startles me in Grifton, my grandma’s town, is to see the number of young married people and their kids. This idea that there’d be a new generation at all. What startles me even more is to meet people who don’t know my grandmother and therefore worship her as the undisputed queen of town. Actually, I’ve never met anyone there who doesn’t know who she is. But I never trust anyone who lacks what I deem to be the requisite affection for her.

All in all, I’m much more comfortable hanging out with senior citizens in Grifton. Part of this is that the cultural difference between the elderly people and me feels, for some reason, much less pronounced than the yawning divide that I feel between me and the New Country Pop-Rock listenin’, SUV-drivin’ “Yee-haw!” yellin’ young folks.

All of whom seem like interlopers to me. In my mind, I’ve realized, I’ve turned Grifton into this town defined by and equated to my grandma’s generation. There is some suburban sprawl going on outside the town’s old center, but that’s not the part that I consider even to be Grifton, really. I think of its short stretch of downtown, the mostly sad, empty storefronts—one of them once belonging to a store owned by my grandfather. I think of the railroad tracks crossing through the center of town, the old depot that used to be the center of the town’s operations and now is just sort of quaint. (That curse.)

I love to sit with the elderly people and hear about family histories and scandals and how things used to be when my mother’s family had relatives on every block. Because a selfish part of me thinks of Grifton as somehow belonging to my family. I imagine that once we finally have no immediate tie left there, the place will be swept up from the Earth. Going back there in some period after my grandmother, would be like visiting your childhood home after some new people have bought it and made it theirs. The smell in the air, the roads you take to get to Grifton, all of it feels like, to some degree, it belongs to me.

And so I sat at the pig picking with the elderly people at a group of tables set up on a small rise, while the young families ran around at a faster pace down below. There were two guys of indeterminate age, somewhere between 25 and 35, both of whom I chatted and joked with in line while fixing plates for Nona and me. Both came up separately a number of times, to get Coke from the table where I sat with my grandma’s friends, but I didn’t really engage them again. I was too engrossed in listening to what this childhood friend of my mother’s had to say about a teacher they both had.

There are a lot of end-of-year-blowout, alcohol-fueled get-togethers going on here in Beachtown, too, with the school year winding down and a number of people getting ready to move. But somehow, I can’t work up the enthusiasm to participate in all that, either. Right now I prefer the porch, the birds, and more than anything else, Nona’s face as she bursts into laughter.

2007-04-15T10:58:00.000-05:00

I tell you, it can rain in this town.
It can rain in Atlanta, too, but it’s nothing like here. As I’ve mentioned before, Atlanta’s an overreacting drama queen when it comes to rain. Having, well, a largely inoperable sewer system, the city’s streets begin to flood after roughly five minutes or so.
“Precipitation?? Why, no one told me I’ve have to deal with that!” says Miss Atlanta, and promptly faints. I think this is the true reason every other person seems to drive a big old ugly SUV there. Whenever it rains, the main thoroughfares transform themselves into scenic, treelined canals and little Hondas become dinghies with flooded engines.

But Beachtown. It wins for, like, marathon raining, here. Last fall, I recall one day when it started raining hard in the early afternoon, and I thought, “Ah, the maritime climate,” and settled in with a nice cup of chamomile or something in front of my computer and felt all comfy. That night, it was still raining. Not "showers,” but nonstop freaking torrents. For hours. I’ll admit; it freaked me out, Henshaw.

And this morning, like our neighbors all up and down the east coast, we got some serious storms. Last night, there was talk of possible tornadoes on the news, and a couple friends and I started trying to come up with plans for this. And we realized that just about every single person we know lives on a 2nd floor apartment, here.
We of the cheaper rent are Beachtown’s tornado fodder.

I was all spooked by this, because tornadoes are an old childhood fear. A fear that caused me, later in the evening, to speak the first words I have ever uttered to the male half of the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? couple next door. My office window looks right over their six foot wall, directly into their swimming-pooled patio, so I am always—guiltily, inadvertently—watching them if they’re down there, though I pretend not to. And they can look right up and see exactly what I’m doing in my little garret apt, but they, too, pretend not to.
And he knows this.
And I know this.
We never speak when we see each other on the street. A tacit Good Fences/Neighbors thing.

Till last night, when I noticed him out on his front porch. I was carrying my trash outside and something in the weird, gusty, pre-storm air sparked a bright chattiness in me. So I went with this brilliant opening gambit,
“You think we’ll have a tornado?”
He started, and looked over at me like one of his shrubs had spoken.
“Uh. Why?” he said.
“There’s that really bad storm coming through tonight. They say we might get a tornado.”
(Pause. Still looking like he’s not sure why he should be talking with me.)
“In my 25 years here, I’ve never seen a tornado.”
Then he went inside, and I called out some lame, “Have a good night!” type thing after him.
I’m telling you; Richard Burton ringer.

But so far, no tornado has touched down in my neighborhood. The hail and the wind woke up Dangercat and me a couple times, but I managed to fall back asleep, with that contented Tomorrow-is-Sunday feeling, hearing the nasty storm, all of it outside, all unable to come in.

2007-04-09T10:08:00.000-05:00

What happened to The Natural History?
Some music albums are linked, inextricably, to particular periods of your life. It’s a Shame About Ray by our dear old Lemonheads, will always be about my high school contingent of friends, about the hours spent drawing on our Chuck Taylors with Sharpies and shouting out car windows at the top of our voices, “She’s the puzzle-piece behind the couch/that makes the sky compleeeeete!”

And then there are some records you never, ever tire of listening to. The album I’ve had in mind I’ve only owned for five years, so it may be too early to classify it as Timeless.

But there’s a second component to this sense of fascination. There are bands who put out a really stellar first album, and then an all-right second album followed by a so-so Record #3, the bands who just sort of peter out of your life. And then there are the bands who shine so hard that they’re difficult to look at directly. To use a worn-out turn of metaphor, these bands explode. And then just disappear.
Like, Eddie and the Cruisers style.

On the Dark Side
I first saw The Natural History perform at the Earl in Atlanta in 2002, when my boyfriend-at-the-time’s band opened up for them. Following his band, a group of us all stood around the stage, politely waiting for this headlining band we’d never heard of instead of going home, because that’s what rock ‘n roll etiquette calls for. Then they came on and started playing. And we all did that looking-at-each-other-thing. That Oh, my god; who are these people? thing.

I’m bad at writing about the direct experience of music, but I’ll try to describe The Natural History: Three young men from NYC, a guitar-bass-drums deal, and their music was an angular, muscular, extremely-rhythmic thing. The chords were all jangly and broken up weirdly and the whole thing, put together, was insanely catchy. If you wanted a real idea of exactly what the hell the above is supposed to mean, I guess I’ll just list influences I heard: I’d guess early Elvis Costello and Gang of Four and I heard others say early XTC, but I don’t know about all that.

They were also really enthusiastic about what they did. The singer, Max Tepper, played guitar and wooed the audience like freaking Elvis. He and his brother, Julian, who played bass, would shoot each other glances before pounding down on these cathartic chords together—and Derek Vockins, the drummer, was all the right mix of understatement and brashness and complexity. Just mesmerizing to watch.

So they rocked our world; turned The Earl on its head that night. It also helped that they were really nice guys; they gave Hunter a copy of their five-song EP, which took up permanent residence in my car’s cd player for weeks. It managed to sound just like the band did live: really raw and energetic and barely restrained and catchy and poplike, too. In the months that followed, I felt myself becoming something of a groupie. I was keenly aware of this and tried to play it cool, but still, every time the band came to Atlanta, I found myself back at the Earl, right there in front, dancing and dancing and singing along, loud.
Beatlemania.

It would be misleading if I kept from you the fact that these were not wholly unattractive gentlemen.

They came out with a full-length album, Beat Beat Heartbeat, which lacked some of the raw spontaneity of the EP, but the songs were still great. Then they stopped touring, said they were putting together a second full-length record. Their website said they were looking for a new drummer, and then there were these articles about shows they were playing in New York with larger and larger ensembles; they were trying for a new sound. This didn’t sound good to me, but I waited, still. Waited months. And then their website went down. And then, nothing.

And still. Every now and then, I search the web for something, for any piece of news online about what happened to this band, which, whenever I hear them I’m forced to declare to be my very favorite: The Natural History. What happened? Where’d you go? Jeez; give a fan some closure, at least. Don’t just disappear without a word.