Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Dillweed
I think it’s a little clear to me.
Oh, there’s nothing like reality for making time change speeds. For making a body suddenly cold on the warmest day of the season, for making a body burn like it runs on napalm beneath the ministrations and oscillations of the most reliable of fans.
I don’t feel much like talking again. But I have this time and I don’t want to waste it. I waste so much. I should be scrubbing the bathtub. Work. I believe in work. I should be throwing things away instead of screaming my stupid head off at my keyboard skipping every other damn word.
A stupid head. That’s what I have.
I thought I was doing pretty good about laying shit out here, even shit that I was fairly uncomfortable about. Notwithstanding the fact that saying anything about myself that is true is rather discomfiting to me, I was trying. But today, the old embarrassment squick rises up again. I want to come off so much better than this.
And my sitting there numbly while our lovely nice guy was lovely and funny and shirtless and flirting with everyone in sight including the girl he’s apparently dating, the cute girl in costume handing out pamphlets, the 72 year old volunteer woman, the middle aged party moms and needless to say, said nary a word to me doesn’t make me look like much more than chopped liver. I was very, very numb as a result. I didn’t eat, or talk much, just put my head in my book and I know what you’re saying because I was hearing it in my head about friendship and being whatever and not giving a shit about things and just being with people like the palm reader advised, but I just couldn’t.
I was really incapable of not minding. But, I did was any sangfroid type of girl does in these situations. I introduced myself to this new girl. The new cute girl who was invited to ride the tractor specifically because she was a cute girl – a situation which perhaps invites more questions than I care to answer – something which no one has ever requested I do. I smiled and turned around and shook her hand. All the while feeling like a complete imbecile with these tumultuous emotions of being irritated by his exact unrightness for me and his randomly asinine behavior being thrown in my face right after the gut punch of suddenly wanting him wildly and followed by the brick wall of it was never going to happen anyway.
It becomes insanely petty and silly when you write it down, though….it doesn’t become petty or silly enough for me to let it go. Not yet.
I felt like a heel. Like Cinderella, pre-fairy godmother, invisible and meant to work. Meant for work. Completely de-sexualized with my got up an hour early face and my little summer outfit and my fake lashes and my positive attitude. Like nobody would even look at me like that, I felt like a fucking eunuch. Except of course, for Mr. Creepy and his compliments. I would really rather not be spoken to at all if I was given the choice.
The Great Plan really didn’t go so great today. I came home and judiciously ate a few bad things and then tried to plot a better course, something more helpful than redirecting my bruised ego into something physically negative. I want to go to this fancy-dress party in September and make people faint clean away, I want to get to wear what I like and feel like I’m not…nothing. I want to float in Cinderella, post extreme makeover, post all the calluses pumiced away, post the drudgery that kills one soul. It’s a lot to fucking ask, I know, but it’s a goal. It’s supposed to be lofty. I want to be slender and still and glowing. I want to be unforgettable.
Because maybe then I’ll be able to forget today.
Adelaide
Oh, day of minor disappointments, how I wish to utterly forget you.
I did my part. I was cute. I had my painted nails. I had my side ponytail. I had my peasant top. I was be-neckaced and all my stars were aligned. Nothing.
Got nothing but a minor sunburn, a bag of sweet corn, and some sweaty, nigh on post-coital looking eye makeup to show for it. Nobody worth any notice showed up. I got a lot of looming creepy guys, but what else is new? No monotone, no nice guys, no prospects. This whole falling in love aspect of the Great Plan is apparently no easy checkmark.
I have nothing, I suppose, to do about it but resign myself to try again next week. Maybe if I just go and sit after 17 weeks some rock will be overturned and out will pop eligible bachelor hooray and hoorah.
If I sound cynical and irritable and heat-stroked, you are a winner. Please collect your prize at the door.
Tomorrow doesn’t look good, either. Gotta just let it go. I have a certain degree of nausea and my keyboard is on a slight delay so I think twice or five times as fast as I type. Funny how bothersome that is.
I wish I had something better to say. Can I blamen not getting in my full 500 words on my incredibly shitty keyboard? Os tahat faire to…
Okay, refreshed the browser and we are back in business. I wonder if this absence of vague description is bothering me, too. I can wax poetic for miles, but we’re just talking facts of the day right now. Seems like the truth is a big old drag. Who wants to read about mediocrity and getting by and okayness, anyway? Who wants to read about someone who has risks that are on this sub-level. These risk-free risks that spur me on.
So I want to cheat and paste in an excerpt from my old way of blogging, my nothing said but my heart bled type of page. I feel shitty about this but my hands hurt and I just am over it tonight. I’m missing my heart being in it. I’m missing not having to level with you about the fact that I’m not loved, not focused, not trying, not smart, not fixing the problem. I’m not facing the page. I’m running from it and its protective hand. I apologize, but what better answer is there out there but the faking it and the making it? Give up and go home?
I might have let the brownies burn. Hmm.
The hospice man died yesterday after I left early for the day. And that, apparently, is that. He is past-tense. Like so much trouble and so much misfortune washed away by a good sleep. Now starts the behavior of the griever, the decisions about what is acceptable for the family to do and how they can be. The service won’t be for weeks, after he is cremated and his event, the event he lived for, somehow proceeds without him.
There’s that.
The Great Plan
Whatever it is, the Great Plan has to have some groundrules to be followed. Otherwise, I don’t think I can be held to much account for following it. I’ve been trying to think about it today, loosely, because I know that the Great Plan is wildly disparate. It can mean everything and in so doing choke itself on its own tail. It can mean nothing and literally mean nothing.
I have this piece of amber that several years ago I invested something into. I invested in this pseudo-magical-kitchen-witchery-need-to-do-something piece of amber what little I knew about what I hoped for in terms of someone coming into my life. I don’t know what I believe in, but I think that there’s something in a person’s will, in their hopes, and in their fears that can become a kind of energy, a magic that can alter what does and doesn’t happen for them. I don’t mean The Craft, I just mean….I put enough into it that I couldn’t wear it as the necklace it was meant to be. I couldn’t even bring myself to put it on because of the possibility that it could work. That it could honestly bring me someone who could be kind, and funny, and liberal and true and like bad movies and be in the right spot in terms of overcoming all my massive insecurities and troubles and then, I’d be in the terrible fix of having no good reason to rebuff him.
This was an issue because of the after. The dangerous after. An after I had no clear visioning process for. An after that could leave me really messed up or an after that I could tramp through with my army boots and destroy even just by accident. Commitment issues, sure, why not. It felt like a forever that would impact everything. That if it was the answer to everything it would stop the search, stop the wanting, stop the status quo.
So, I have this piece of amber. It’s been through the washing machine. It’s been in an out of pockets and purses, under pillows, everywhere but around my neck – hanging there, announcing that I might have some hope, some want, some sincere desire. I’m thinking about wearing it now until I do. Or until he arrives.
I know there’s the basic argument that love arrives when you least expect it, when you’re out Great Planning something else. But I’ve been doing other things for as long as I can remember, with intermittent splashes of maybe! and a boatload of depressingly unacceptable even to someone with no real standards to speak of, and nothing obvious has ever snuck into my ken.
So, one piece of the Great Plan, might be this. Wearing this necklace for whatever it means or doesn’t mean, whatever it brings or doesn’t, because I’m trying to let down these Great Walls. I had a whole Great Barrier Reef joke that didn’t quite work. But, I hope you get some of this drift.
It’s the color and shape of a honey tear.
Badinage for One
Well, I really don’t feel like doing this tonight. Like at all.
I should do drugs. I did carry around a box tonight with the single word COKE printed on it. And another one that read: BEER. Coulda been a fun night if it was more than just words. Story of my life.
I don’t have any clue how I’m going to get to 500 words without ending up complete gibberish. We just finished eating at Village Inn which was pretty quiet except for a group of seven or so self-righteous teens and some kind of parental supervisory unit and they were all talking about the immorality of abortion. My sister and I actually got up and got our food to go. It was ridiculous because not only were they full of asinine confidence about the moral state of the soul and when conception happens (all this decided at the Village Inn, alert the media) – they were abrasively loud.
So tonight – it’s late at my crepes benedict feel like a wheelbarrow full of bricks got dumped in my stomach. I don’t know what to talk about. We can talk about tomorrow and freedom and fireworks and hanging out and being rad at the farmers’ market. Or some variation thereof. I’m not great at plying my words tonight. Too tired and guilty. It doesn’t grease the wheels.
Stupid man continued to be stupid. I don’t know what he’s thinking. This kind of overweening praise only serves to make him look…well, overweening and desperate and obnoxious. At least to me. I don’t need every time I see him to be complimented on how I have it together, or how I handle everything so well, or my overall aplomb or how I’m looking good or how if everything gets better with age in a few years I’ll be fucking Gandhi (that was my paraphrasing as I’m sure the actual wording was too lame to exist on this blog.) It’s creepy. It’s just creepy.
And it makes it difficult for me as I’m wildly in love with the voice of another man with the same name. Yes, wildly. His voice. Yes. It’s this David Duchovny-esque monotone and it sets my soul aflame. This is a dangerous conflation of sign and signified. They really couldn’t be more different except that both are convinced that I’m professionally more professional than I’d ever profess or than could ever be reality. Yeah, say it three times fast. And one has this tragic conception (it doesn’t begin with the sperm and the egg, kids, it begins with the dolt and the flapping jaw. SHUT. IT.) that I might turn to him and bat my fucking eyelashes and give him some sort of satisfaction. The other is oblivious to the fact that I may have saved his freaking life, that I bring him cake because I’m in love with his voice and I want to hear him talk about, well, everything in that sardonic manner that reduces everything to a pithy, dismissive soundbite. He wasn’t in tonight so I had to give cake to the semi-rastafarian chick who ran the desk and look over my shoulder in despair to see if he was hiding in the racks. Not so. Another thing let go for another day.
Tomorrow I’m bringing my Decameron, my poetry, my Ipod, a pen and paper, maybe my laptop and a winning smile to our farmers’ market and see what I can pick up. If the nice guy is there, as expected, the great plan involves staring at him until both of us are really uncomfortable. I didn’t say it was a good plan…just a great one.
The man in hospice yet lives.
Enchantee
There’s a boy. It always starts with a boy, doesn’t it?
Makes me feel like I’ve spent my life holding my breath.
Everyone’s having babies and married. Everyone’s happy. Makes me feel like I’ve come to school naked. Forgot to take a class for a whole semester. Like I’m still using school analogies when I graduated over three years ago. Like I’m a fool.
I’m running around trying to pretend that there’s no reason to make eyes at a boy. That I don’t even want to. And I don’t even want to. He’s not even anything more than a checklist of cleared hurdles. Manageable liabilities. A fine young man. Too fine, really. He’s not a layabout. Not a spelling champion. Not secretive. But he touches everyone but me. Strokes them. Rubs their shoulders. We just nod hello with a gravity as if we are one another’s graveyard, we know there’s no reason we can’t laugh, soften, smile, but habit, you know? It’s a misbehavior somehow and inappropriate and starting something there’s no reason to start. Maybe no desire.
I think I only fixate because I know how to do it. Oh, so well. I know how to glow with a want that means as much to me as world peace. I know how to watch him in a room and fume when he drinks a couple beers and leaves. I know how to tabulate every other girl in the room’s score on a scale of yes and no. I know how to find myself lacking. I know how to screw up my face and stare in the mirror. I know how to make grand assertions about how I can fix this. I know how to stand completely still and feel as though my cells are reaching out against my will, my body begging for touch, attention, the grace of a lingering eyeball, anything, and finding no respite, leave completely numb and chilled and unmoved and everything that rose is choked back and cordoned off and the spills on Aisles 4 and 9 are mopped up and whatever memory there was turns tea-colored and pinned into a scrapbook.
I sometimes feel like I do this because as pathetic as it is, whatever wretch it is slowly and surely turning me into, it’s a path well-tread. It is safe and regret is some other girl’s problem on some other day. It’s better than the alternatives of both failure and victory, of being chained by the results. It’s better than finding out you’re just a nice guy who can’t spell who likes to go hiking and help people and maybe you like me or maybe you don’t and then, there we are. We’ve chosen our own adventure and page 53 or page 89, either way, we wind up dead.
Still.
We’re the only two young ones. Unattached ones. Good-natured ones.
I know I’m supposed to ignore that.
I know I’m supposed to ignore that, toss back my head, flirt disaffectedly, and not feel like you’re waiting for something better. Even if that’s exactly what I’m doing, too.
