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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.