Liar
I’m a liar.
Just so we make that clear.
I need to eat some more food so that I get on the right bent. A belly full of peanuts and Diet Dr. Pepper doesn’t constitute positive nutrition. And consequently, I get snippy. But, I also get a bit truthful, which is one of the things I wanted to do this blog for. Just flat-out, balls to the wall, NO FOOLING. But it’s very difficult for a pathological liar to evince truth even if she knows exactly what it is. I like to think I’m still at the stage when I can point out my own truth if only to myself and if only to decide what the best costume for that truth is.
I’m not sure what I’m doing. I’m nervouser and nervouser. I am drawing the devil of loving someone nearer and nearer and I’m trying to do things to get it to happen and stay. And there is a whole vast internal landscape of shrieking goddesses and bludgeoned carcasses and rivers of blood that come into view when I think about making this nest available to anyone else. They laugh because this effort is not unknown, not a brave new start. It is an old dance, a biannual shuffle, a strain really that I perform to no applause and to no effect.
But what the old crones and the battlestars don’t know is that the reason there’s been no entreaty inward is because for all the masquerade, I haven’t been ready. I haven’t known how to get ready to accomodate, modulate myself for another person. A self I feel extreme shame over. There have been no invitations accepted because none have been proffered. The doors have been so barred that I can feel my heart gag for air against my clutching rib cage. Safety. Safety. The future is unknown and if the future shone its full light upon you, everything would be seen. All the pretense and the goddesses and the moonlit paths and labyrinths and bloodied gothic surrounds would be put to dust. There would be coffee, opinions, and expectations. I would not do well in the world where lies are not art. I do not do well when I try to walk in that world. I would be on the ultimate high wire. Faking to exist, to stay upright, pretending I know this path like everyone else knows this path…as sheer instinct.
So I have my agonizingly messy life. A universe of flotsam and jetsam strewn about, each bottle and unfolded shirt saying go away, the owner is not ready to entertain. Miss Otis Regrets. This is home. Being here is watching the undergrowth become overgrowth, watching myself collapse inward. Not writing because I might say something that makes my head uncomfortable, something less than the palatial monument to great writing would enshrine in the completely fictional confines of my gnawing, entropic mind. Not reading because I might read something that makes me realize that the dream of writing is not achievable by someone with such rusty, disturbed and anachronistic skills such as I have. Not doing any thing with the time I have carved out because that becomes a commitment to a personality, a place, a hope, and therefore, a threat to this life. Such as it is.
There’s this whole cancerous mass of self and I worship it. I worship it so hard that I scar people’s faces, I warp their words, I make lepers out of everyone who might venture a hello. They are the ones in the colony. Being in here is the only place to be safe.
It isn’t about being unwanted. It isn’t about being ugly, unsettling, unfit. It isn’t about being incapable of committing, of choosing, of finding anything outside of this poisoned Eden worthy of crossing into its miasmic, shardsand environs. It’s about a girl who once saw a pretty thing, walled herself in with it and when she heard footsteps, swallowed the key. Now it’s just her and the thing and whether or not she loves it anymore, whether or not there’s any other thing better or brighter or more deserving on the other side of that wall, this is what she has. And she can either worship it and call her misery worship, too. Or she has to stop telling lies and start asking for help. And nobody has any mercy for liars, not really.
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.
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.
Mnemosyne
You don’t know me well enough to know if I’m doing this to be ironic or not.
You don’t know if I’m humming the old song we used to sing because I want to remember or because I can’t forget.
Oh, how maudlin we’ve become in our twenties.
There’s a few things I think are memorable about this gray, odd, awkward day. I’ve made a plan to make a new life plan. This plan is currently in only the outline stage, but it involves me shedding lame old habits and picking up fresh, tremendous, dynamic new ones. Like this dear haunt, for one, and the dressing I am sewing for its windows. Apparently, the plan involves purchasing a vibrator. And lots of water glasses being ticked off a very large chart. And it involves me cooking – which I seem to avoid like the plague of late and I don’t know why. Which is to say, I know exactly why, the kitchen’s a mess and I really can’t be arsed to clean it. Because I only have have the desire and ability to do one thing well and if I give it to an apple green kitchen, I can’t be giving it to you. So, really, aren’t you happy with my choice?
I don’t know why I’ve given up on the question mark. Another way I’ve failed the English grammar, I suppose.
The plan will go into effect whenever it will be most efficacious or whenever I feel the strongest longing for a greater happiness that outweighs my natural sloth and terror. Soon, I hope, probably when I feel my tether slip. I’ve already been clocked about the head about the need for the plan by people I both love and loathe, so we’ll have to see what becomes the trigger. I’m getting myself open to it. I’m counteracting the inertia. Clever!
I have no idea how I ever got to 500 words ever before. This is a sort of agony tonight, but I will soldier on. It’s cooler, anyway, and the rain has stayed the grievous heat that has made its way under my skin and would not give me peace. What else?
The man in hospice was sitting up today. It’s not disappointment, or even awe that he’s still alive that I feel, it’s more a sort of feeling that you know that someone’s playing hooky. It’s not your business, and you won’t tell, but you wonder if someone’s waiting on him, tapping their feet. But I don’t think he’s the one keeping him there. I think he’s got every limb tied to someone who loves him and can’t manage without him, even though they have to. Even though one of his best friends told us about the plans for the service, the cremation. Even though he was sitting up today. So they increase the morphine, he turns yellow and corpse-like, and we talk about what we’re doing for the fourth of July and how much we’re looking forward to the fireworks.
Also, as a post-script, I may have flashed a woman today by accident. Sorry, it’s a horrible shirt!
Punch to the Voicebox
That’s an anemic sounding car horn.
Sometimes I like the songs they play on the radio.
Irritation and frustration, saddlebags to the stars.
Things about today.
I don’t know why I was so damn chatty yesterday and now I totally cannot be arse to string together a sentence. There’s not been any movement on any front. Except maybe one, but I don’t want to jinx that by being too mouthy on the topic because mouthiness is one excuse for the obliteration of an ideal. Which sounds sort of existential, but comes down to me just wanting not to feel like a failure yet again. If I can avoid that, believe me, I will.
Things I want to do once I find a person good enough – qualified – not deranged – not unmoved to do these things with. (It is hilarious how I have to convince myself that no one I know will ever read this, because seriously, no one I don’t know is reading it, either):
Go to the zoo. Not for a day, not for every animal. We don’t need to go into the giraffe house and I have no interest in anything avian. I just want to go, see the gazelles, that crooked sign that explains the difference between dromedary and bactrian camels. People watch. Just until I start to feel bad for the animals a little bit.
….
I thought this would be a long list. That I might use it as a springboard to start to say something meaningful about my outlook on love. But I don’t have an outlook or a perspective or a toehold. I’m completely on the outside of the whole phenomenon. I try, but I find that I go backwards, what attracts me I repulse, what I repulse wants me. Ah, sweet science. I try and make a plan aside from pulling up my hemlines and sticking my leg out on street corners. But there isn’t anything particular I’m longing for. A person for outdoors, for sharing the breeze and those stunning sunsets, walking about. A person for indoors, talking about everything that’s outdoors. I don’t have big ideas. Or any ideas really.
Meanwhile, my sister may be planning her wedding, another finalizing her divorce and the other one is passing out (from donating blood.)
There’s weird conflict between us. But right now things are actually okay, something I couldn’t say a couple years ago. But it puts things in a very real relief – I’m always in waiting and yet, I have no idea what to stick my neck out for. What’s worth going through all of this for…no big plans, no real daydreams of a joined life. Just the sense that I really fucking need one for reasons beyond wanting to tell someone that the sound of the wind chimes and the air blowing tonight is amazing…even if it’s not doing a damn thing to cool me down.
I want someone for inside and outside. For sudden heat lightning in the courtyard. For the story of the walk with more than eight brown rabbits – my good luck charm (they’ve each got four feet a’piece, how can they not be lucky?) For a backrub. For a consistent murmur that I can spell, I do have a good heart, and in me there is an invincible season that is beautiful…to some folks. There’s a reason to carry on.
