…they always ask in a job interview “So why do you want this job?” This is an eternally stupid question, especially if it’s a retail job, or a job at an establishment that serves 3 foods together in a paper rectangle which you order as a “basket.” I mean, I haven’t sat through an interview for one of these jobs for a LOOOONG time (partly because I’ve been employed in retail ever since I can remember and vowed to cut my hands off before reaching the level of applying for a foodservice job ever again) so I imagine they’ve dropped this from the interview procedure. Maybe not, because I’m pretty sure that The Company For Which I Currently Work still requires one to splop out something about loving sneakers, and enthusiasm, and winning, and, ugh, passion…and about really wanting to stick it to the Cambodians who have to make the shoes and deserve a life of torture, anywayyyy.
But when they ask you this question at an interview for, oh, say, an administrative assistant job, for, say, a moving company…what the fuck are you supposed to say? “Oh, I just really feel alive when I’m administrative assistanting.” I would find it delightfully refreshing to sit across from a girl who would say, “You know what? I need the money. And I am prepared to work for it. So let’s get it on.”
Not that anyone has called me for any administrative assistant jobs, or any other of the five hundred million trillion jobs in Chicago and the suburbs I’ve applied for. I’m convinced, though thorough testing and re-testing has proven otherwise, that when my resumé and cover letters are emailed, they translate into some freakish loser language, and the pages are stark white except for the words “Bloop, bloop, bloop!”
Would someone please call me and make sure my phone works?
I Don’t Know Why…
…I get some kind of pleasure out of watching Intervention. I mean, it’s not funny to watch a fat bitch place bets on horse races while her four year old eats out of the trash can in the bathroom. It’s not funny. Come on. It’s not. Hey.
Aside from that, it’s just not entertaining to watch these jackoffs steal from their families, smoke crack, say stupid, boneheaded things into the camera, play some wacked-out songs on their guitars under a bridge somewhere, all for the last thirty seconds of the show, which only reveals a picture of their obese, sober ass fresh out of rehab, then a couple of lines about when they relapsed. It’s usually like, thirty minutes after the camera crew left.
So whyyyy do I waaatch it helloooooooo?
I Don’t Know Why…
…I keep turning on my TV because EVERY TIME I TURN ON MY TV I’M LIKE WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT ON MY TV?
I Don’t Know Why…
…I can’t figure out which bills I forgot to pay this month, but I do know that yesterday in 1348 was the first day the bubonic plague showed up in England. Hollerrrr!
There are a whole bunch of drink tickets on my kitchen table that I don’t want, so if anybody wants to swing by and pick ’em up, that’s cool. I’ll leave ’em on my front step.
Last night’s alley firework battle was like being in Fallujah, or whichever city it is that’s right in the middle of all of the action. There was a huge party of people in front of us, across the street, and a group of people behind us, in their part of the alley. Every once and a while, the fireworks from either group would zoom into our little crowd, causing us to scream and scatter. Or they’d just cross invisible boundaries on either side and set something off on the ground right behind us. The boys did an excellent job. And one of them had a starter pistol, which I got to fire (unfortunately after it was empty). I think that’s the only gun I’ve ever fired, unfortunately. I didn’t expect the trigger to be so heavy. Are you supposed to do finger exercises when you’re a gun-shooting type of person?
Finger exercises…hahhahahah.
I think I may have a slight problem with rage. Here are the two things that make me think this:
1. At the grocery store self-checkout the other day, I swiped my card and the entire fucking card reader popped off the base and clattered to the floor. In pieces. It was like it had exploded. Everyone stared, of course, for a good hour or so, I bet, and all I could do was go, “Haaaaaa…” nervously, then grab my grocery bag, and bend down to the floor to press “OK” on the broken reader. It printed my receipt and I stepped over it and left. HOW did I rip that thing off the stand and SHATTER IT?!
At least it took my angry swipe on the first try. Because I didn’t want to face the people who run the self-checkout lines. One of them is this guy who looks like Grizzly Adams and rolls his eyes and stomps around a lot, like he pretty much hates his life. The rest are annoyed overweight women who bark directions at you if you fuck up, and always say something like, “Naw, see? You done messed it up now. It’s messed up,” like by pressing “lemons” instead of “oranges” on the touch screen, you’ve started an irreversible chain reaction that ends with a plane crash into a puppy farm.
2. At work, everyone was talking about being tired, and how tired they all felt that day. Someone said, “I just want a nap,” and I said, “I don’t want a nap, I want this, like, room? Where I can go, you know? And nobody else can get in it. And there’s nothing in there, but the walls are sound proof. And I can just, like, scream. For hours. Without anyone calling the police.”
Everyone just stared at me.
Well excuuuuuse me for thinking that was a common desire. It’s MY desire, you jerks.
And here is a quote from a book I stopped reading because the high point was the top of a downward spiral into boredom. But I like this:
Goodbye, goodbye! she called out in her head as she ran, imagining the other woman he would find. She would be prettier than Jemma but stupider, and she would be the type of woman compelled to uncover the past lovers of her lovers. When she heard the story of Jemma’s behavior she would be utterly unable to fathom it.
I’ve only ever written one love letter, and the boy I gave it to responded by “coming clean” about the fact that he had a girlfriend, and had the entire time we knew each other, and had just asked her to marry him. He confessed that his dalliance with me was a symptom of cold feet.* Then he told me that he’d used bits of the love letter, and other correspondence from me, to serve as dialogue for a female character (with a man’s name) in the script for a television show pilot he’d just sold to Fox for $7,000.
(Some of you already know this story. I know, I know.)
Do you know what it’s like to watch the new Fox show lineups on the off chance that this show is actually made, and some man-hating bartending actress ends up broadcasting my personal correspondence??
Now that guy was a stupid motherfucker.
I do not write love letters anymore.
*This is when I coined the term “Rachel Bilson” as a verb, as in “Don’t fucking Rachel Bilson me” and “Are you Rachel Bilsonning me right now?!” meaning, of course, don’t treat me like Zach Braff treats Rachel Bilson in that awful, awful, AWWFUL movie The Last Kiss, which is about pretty, successful, happy assholes who fuck around before they get married and make up for it with a Coldplay soundtrack.
What’s great is when someone has a crush on you, and they tell you every chance they get how great you are.
What sucks is when they suddenly STOP having a crush on you, and their friends start telling you how great they think someone else is.
It’s like a nice clean little bullet hole through the forehead, one that everyone at the party can see, one that they all want to put their finger in to make sure it’s real.
I don’t like it when inanimate objects tell me what to do.
I got a letter from Verizon Fucking Wireless yesterday that said “Open immediately.” I did not like its tone! So I opened it TEN MINUTES LATER, and it was just a notice confirming that I had removed a feature from my stupid account. Oh, like some stranger got my password and wants to save me money on my bill. You stupids.
I just grabbed a Stash tea bag at work, and it said on the wrapper “Steep for 1-3 minutes.” I will steep for however long I please, thank you very much, you uptight tea bag!
What’s next, is mayonnaise going to tell me how I can and can’t enjoy it?! Am I going to be told not to eat sour cream on my pizza?!? FUCK OFF!!!
This week I got a fancy little surprise: Pinky Links said some very nice things about this here blog!
“Well, while sneakily and silently stalking Steven’s site (see what I did there? with all the S’s?), I came across this total gem. Cupcake Heartbreak. I love reading new blogs, because at first it takes a little bit of time to figure out if they’re male/female, streyt/ghey, peoples of what color/country/background, liberal/conservative. So, this is me welcoming Cupcake Heartbreak into our (Katamari!) neighborhood. She’s so cunt-centric, I digs it. She also has a mouth/keyboard like a sailor.”
It really made my day. I didn’t have to talk about myself so much that day because other people did it for me. Thank you, Pinky Links bloggers!!!
Also, -Z- mentioned Katamari, which is my most favorite game to play on PS2. I even play it on my phone (a tiny, tiny, tiiiiny version called Rolling with Katamari! that is super fun and has made me miss my bus stop more than one time). When you fail, the king says “Like a lollipop…YOU SUCK.”
I used to play that game so much that when I’d get in the car I’d want to just run over everything…and, uh, everyone. I drove really fast. And if my boyfriend was driving I’d be like “OHHH YEAHHH!” when people were ambling innocently over a crosswalk. It was not very safe.
Here is some of my favorite Katamari-inspired stuff, plucked from the Web:
Katamari checks! Do your best!
THIS IS A FUCKING CAKE.
I love how Jesus and the Apostles are like, "What...the fuck?"
Everything sticks to these shoooooes!!!
I am sad today because I found the Katamari Dunks, and every asshole who had featured them on their blog made it sound like you could get a pair if you dropped enough money. Unfortunately, I traced them to their source, which is just some dude and his Katamari-lovin’ wife who bought a white pair of Dunks and hand painted them for her. So you can’t buy them, you stupid fucking jerks. I should sue you for making me think I could.
Now watch this:
Fucker.
There are a couple of things that I think are really funny, and when I think of them during the day, I just crack up laughing and people look at me weird. I’m not sure what triggers them, but they’re sort of always floating around in there and sometimes they just pop into my immediate consciousness. Like, when you call my friend Agent Orange a fucker, he says “You fuck her, you brought her.”
And one time in high school, my best friend (who was a total troublemaker/smoker/school cutter/bad influence all around, so that’s why I said BEST friend) interrupted a biology class by grabbing a giant coconut out of this wildlife display cabinet the teacher had, held it high over her head, and yelled over everyone to him, “HEY MR. SMITH…WANNA BUST A NUT?”
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Oh, I just laugh and laugh. That’s funny stuff. I should collect the funny stuff I’ve witnessed in a book or a blog. It will be called Remember That One Time?
More from the Boy Swamp
I’m not surprised that it happens to me, but yeah, okay, it’s a little bit annoying when I’m just trying to have a good time.
I am no stranger to the fact that boys often bang up against each other to see who’s the top dick. I’ve seen it happen tons of times, you just sort of stand back so you don’t get Axe body spray splattered all over you (it stains, you guys). But every now and then, one of these dudes comes scraping out of the dude swamp and wants to play “I’m Smarter Than You, You Girl” with me.
It’s like I’m the minotaur, and they’re these boysies with wimpy-ass swords and dangling, tattered loincloths trying to hack and bullshit their way through the labyrinth. There’s a damn pile of them outside my door. It is getting hard to open my door!
Here is a little excerpt from an experience I wrote about in my old MySpace blog on Tuesday, July 24, 2007:
I was tired after, but we had started so early that it was only about ten when everyone was crashing. It seemed a waste to go home and pass out when there was the St. Alfred’s party at Empire, and even though we’d all said we weren’t going to go, pretty much the entire Pumafia showed up. I’m glad I took the time to freshen up and change out of my barbecue sauce-encrusted jacket, because that place was “going off,” in the way that those parties do when all of the boys put on their biggest hats and flashiest grills.
There wasn’t really any dancing room, it would have actually been very dangerous to try, since every time you moved, someone was trying to push past you in that really annoying way where they just hold their drink out in front of them so it gets spilled all over someone when they get pushed. So we kind of stood there, nodding our heads, whatever, and eventually friends of friends were nearby, and some guy in that category was sitting right by where I was standing, and when I took notice of him, he reached up and tapped his glass against my bottle. I nodded my acknowledgment. Had the interaction ended there, I think everything would have been fine.
This dude stood up at some point, and he was a freaking giant. Almost Andre the Giant. Huge. He could have touched the ceiling. He was trying to communicate with this little spider monkey of a boy who I’ve been around before and have never really been impressed by. One of those guys who just darts around everywhere, acting completely stupid in the hopes that someone will look at him. And despite his obvious attempts to gain people’s attention, he seems to hate all of them. I think he’s had a disgusted look on his face every time I’ve seen him. So the Giant and the Monkey were speaking some language they taught each other, waving their drinks around, getting all excited, leaning across my friend and myself. I suppose it was done in an effort to get closer to the Giant, to somehow cut across the limited space between us and stand where I was standing, but at some point in their conversation, the Monkey reached out, placed both tiny paws on my collarbone, and firmly pushed me backwards.
You can imagine how I felt about that.
I stepped forward just in time to see the Giant spatter some of his girly drink into my friend’s hair, and I immediately reached out to wipe some of the droplets away. In doing so, I’m afraid I drew attention to the fact that the Giant had committed some sort of faux pas, and though I fully understand that these things happen all the time in crowded bars, I’m not the kind of girl who ignores drops of liquor on her friend’s head just to keep some dude from feeling bad. A brief apology is in order, of course, even if it’s just a drunk-guy-in-a-bar type of apology, the kind they throw out, say, when they hit you in the mouth on their way to request Fergie’s “London Bridges.” First of all, they don’t really mean it, and they say it just to keep from feeling bad, and they say it in a way that suggests maybe you shouldn’t have had your mouth in their way. And besides, they just really want to hear “London Bridges.” Still, they say it.
The Giant saw fit, instead, to ask me why I was such an asshole. He reminded me, because I had forgotten, that I was not in a library. Oh wait, I believe it was a fucking library that I was not in. “This isn’t a fucking library, you know.”
True, Sir Giant. This is not a fucking library. I understand that fucking libraries are usually very quiet and full of books, which readers may borrow for brief periods of time. If you would like, I could give you the address for the library in Logan Square, and you can see for yourself that it looks nothing like Empire Liquors, and we will both laugh and laugh when you realize just how silly it was to tell an intelligent person that a bar wasn’t a fucking library. Haha! Silly Giant! And then maybe we will read something besides that worn-out copy of The Best of Vice you carry around with you. I will try to find you something that has a few pictures of designer sneakers in it. You know, to keep your interest.
So I ignored the guy. I let it roll off, I was tired, and I’m never really sure how to answer that question. I didn’t think you were supposed to. I thought I’d just made an enemy out of some enormous hipster, who would forget all about me on his wobbly bike ride home. Secretly, I hoped he would remember me just when his face grated against the pavement, and then forget me, but that was just wishful thinking. Instead, he loomed around for the rest of the evening, and every time I looked up, he was staring at me, staring in that weird way that’s more just watching someone, where you can tell they’re still looking at your back when you turn away. I didn’t even feel like dancing anymore when it cleared out a bit in there, because I’d look up and this fuckasaurus would be sitting like a retarded lump, giving me the most repulsed and confused look I’d ever seen.
So the Giant thought that maybe the best course of action would be to ask me again, later, why I was an asshole. Again, he was met with polite indifference. So he held out his hand, ten times the size of mine, and said “I’m ——-.” I shook his hand, immediately forgot his name, nodded, and said hello. That wasn’t enough for the Giant.
“No, see, that’s not how introductions work! They’re supposed to be reciprocal. This is how they go: I say hello, I tell you my name, then you do the same thing.” Whilst Giant was yelling this into my face over the music, I do recall thinking it a little odd that talking to this dude was like being yelled at by my stepdad, which made me even more uncomfortable with the situation, if such a thing is possible. I remember thinking how maybe this guy should consider himself lucky that I’d been drinking since five, and was falling asleep anyway, which meant I wasn’t in top form and not in any shape to actually tear into him. I also found it very interesting, as he stood there completing his oratory on proper introductions, that the Giant obviously had a firm grasp on etiquette, so I wondered why he had prefaced our introduction, which was becoming more and more important to him by the minute, by referring to me as an asshole.
I also thought, wait a minute…I’ve never even talked to this guy. Just how the hell did he know that I’m an asshole?!
So here’s this enormous guy, jabbing his finger in my face, spitting all over the place as he struggles to explain to me just how I should be behaving in a bar that’s not a fucking library, and he actually holds his hand out, pointed down at my chest, and says, “Now we’re going to try this again! My name’s ——-!” As far as I understand, it’s a certain unalienable right to decide who you want to meet and who you don’t. So I looked at his hand and said “No thank you. I don’t want to meet you.”
Oh, I’m sure it would have been more acceptable, as far as relations between friends and friends of friends go, if I had just giggled and smiled and shaken his hand, told him my name, and then bitched about him all the way home. But I’m not afraid of people like that, I can’t think of much he could do to me that hasn’t been done, so I wasn’t really surprised or shocked when he spent the rest of the night calling me a bitch, telling me I looked like a whore, asking my friends why I was such an asshole. I wasn’t at all surprised when the Monkey joined in, actually sitting on the Giant’s lap (oh, it was perfect!) and started his yippy jeering in my direction because it meant that maybe someone would notice he was alive. The Giant kept reaching around his monkey friend to say, “Truce? Truce then? Truce?” and hold out his big hand again. And I said, “What’s the point? I don’t want to know you. Forget about me. There is no us.”
I think it’s funny that I was wearing a shirt that said on the front, “I don’t have a gun,” and on the back, “but I can get one.”
Take Monday night, for example, at Agent Balboa‘s birthday party. An old friendgirl we used to work with came and brought with her the foppiest, greasiest little punk rock prom queen I’ve seen in a long time. He had that slicked back Dave Navarro hair that sort of flips forward and makes the wearer look like a Yorkshire terrier*, and the half-assed little skinny goatee that looked like it was glued onto his face with Elmer’s. He wore tight jeans and pointy shoes, and a striped shirt rolled up at the elbows with extra little pieces of fabric that folded up over the rolled-up sleeve and attached to the button. You know, in case he was going to be doing some serious lifting and sawing and hammering and wouldn’t want to be bothered with rolling his shirt sleeves up again and again. While he was talking, I could only imagine him folding up those little button flaps, and, with his nimble, precious fingers, pulling the tiny pearly button through the hole. Of course, the whole look was tied together with a skin-tight black vest, so I half expected to look up and find myself on a steam locomotive in 1924 with this asshole demanding to see my ticket.
I thought he looked stupid, sure, but it wasn’t until he opened his big dumb flappy mouth that I knew he’d be a pain in the ass. At first it was just his two cents here and there during my portions of conversation, little peeps, little burps, like the bubbles that come up from the bottom of the toilet when the clog is about to recede. I’d be talking about something, or answering someone, and he’d interrupt with his commentary on whatever I was saying, and what it meant about me. “Oh so you’re like THIS” or “OHHHH so you’re THAT GIRL…Oh I see…” That was my first clue that he was picking up on certain aspects of my personality and probably wanted to tie our wrists together for a knife fight in the alley. He had a big fucking mouth and wanted me to slash it open wider so he could fit more cock in it.
So he tries to joke with me. He sits next to me and tells me my cupcakes sucked. “I was like, this is the worst cupcake I’ve ever eaten. It’s crap.” I told him I was happy my crappy little cupcake was about to get revenge on his ass and thighs. Buttercream, mother fuckerrr. I won’t sit here and recount the entire conversation, it just went back and forth like that for about twenty minutes, him trying to get my attention with his pathetic limp-dick insults, and me being as nice as possible about setting him gently in his place. I was being very nice, because I love the friendgirl who had brought him along, and it was hard to tell what, if anything, their relationship was. It was so HARD to reign it in, though, because it was like there was a big goddamn joke of a man in front of me, saying, “Oh, I seem to have dropped my ass…would you please hand it to me? And feel free to mop the floor with it first.”
It went too far when he started to talk about his band. And here is how he did it:
Pure silence. Then, out of nowhere,
Him: “Sooo, I’m in a band, soooo…”
Me: “Oh yeah, cool.”
Him: “Yeah, we’re called ———–. We’ve played a few shows so far, we were featured in the RedEye a few weeks ago.”
Me: “Mmm.”
Him: “Yeah, totally. Do you remember the one about Christian Bale and Johnny Depp being here for a movie premiere? Yeah, we were in that one.”
Me: “So you got overshadowed a bit.”
Him: “Yeah. I mean, well, not really because it’s kind of a big deal to get into the music section. Soooo that’s cool.”
Me: “Are you…advertising to me?”
Him: (Obviously angry and embarrassed about my disinterest) “No! It’s not like this is costing you anything! God!”
Me: “Uh, ‘advertising’ doesn’t necessarily mean that money changes hands…”
Him: “I know! I know! I’m just saying that like, you know, I’m in a band and you should check us out.”
Me: “Uh huh. And what would that be called?”
Him: “…”
Me: “That’s what I thought.”
Him: “I heard you were kind of a bitch.”
Me: “I’ve been advertising.”
That twat. He went off in a huff, and later, as we left, he said rather loudly to our friendgirl, “Your friend was hatin’ on me for telling her about my band.”
I said, “I wasn’t hating. I just wasn’t listening.”
“She’s a bitch!” he pouted to our friendgirl.
She smiled and said, “I tooooold youuuu!”
This is an interesting theme that has emerged in my life. Usually, stupid assholes who talk a bunch of shit hear that I’m an asshole and get a few drinks in them and want to wrassle. When they fail and face public humiliation, they think that calling me a fucking bitch will redeem them. I’ve had boys hurl all kinds of insults my way after situations like this. They say “I was just joking with you! I was just kidding!” and I say, “Well, me too, dude,” which they don’t understand because the girl is supposed to roll over and put her knees in the air and laugh like a dipshit at everything he says, the boy is supposed to be the funny one, the smarter one, the quick-witted one. So they get mad, and they tell me that I’m the way I am because I “never get any,” I’m bitter, I’m bitchy, no one will eeeeever want me because I’m such a bitch. It’s like a script that dumb boys follow.
Then there are boys who enjoy it, who don’t run off with their tails between their legs, but who I end up dating and getting in stupid dating fights with, and start crying or whining about something pointless, as one naturally does during a dating fight, and so disgusted are they with tears and frustration and anything other from the token lack of concern and laid-back sarcasm they’ve come to expect from me, that they say “I thought you were tough! You’re not tough. What was that, like, a tough act?”
I am fairly certain that people are only interested in other people who only have a single aspect to their personality. You’re one way, or you’re the other. Seems like it would be easier. This shit just goes on and on, over and over. Boys who talk to me are either one way, or they’re the other. Do they know how fucking stupid they all are?
Unfortunately, my personality is like a katamari.
I’m sure this blog post could be filed under the category of tooting one’s own horn. “She really thinks she’s something. Look at her, talking about herself like that. Well well well.” I’ll have you know that this is nothing like horn-tooting, as I am against personal horn tooting. Horns should be tooted by others, if at all. It is more fun that way, duh. What I’m trying to point out is the frequency with which boys come to me looking for a fight. It’s not like I’m standing here grabbing at my dick every five seconds like I’m on the basketball team or something and I need to make sure everyone knows it’s still there. SO SHUT UP.
*When I was a kid, my grandma had a Yorkshire terrier. She named him Prince Toby and fed him from the table and took Polaroids of him, which she kept in a photo album and wrote things like “Stop feeding me ice cream or I’ll get fat, Mom!” next to them. He returned the favor by pissing all over her house. You would walk around in your socks and they’d be piss soaked. You would lie down on the floor with a pillow to watch TV and roll over into a puddle. She made a regular practice of letting the dog out into the yard to “go pee pee!” but he treated the yard with indifference and trotted back in with tangled hair to piss on the carpet. Someone suggested to her that she have him neutered, and even though he was a full blooded dog with papers, and a mother with a name that was seven words long, she decided to do it. She remarked that she’d “turn ‘im into a girl and start callin’ him Princess Toby if I have to!” When I heard her say that, I got really scared that my grandma was so dumb that she thought it worked that way, that the dog would be a girl if she had him neutered. It gave me anxiety. I also hoped she didn’t believe that cutting a dog’s balls off made him stop pissing in the house. I wanted to tell her that they only stop doing that if you tell them to with violence. Anyway, Prince Toby never stopped pissing in the house, and when my grandma died, he lay down in a puddle of water and drowned himself. THE END!
He must plan all day long, painstakingly dissecting a blueprint layout of his yard, adding flowers and small trees and calculating the best sunlight at certain times of day. He must work on it all night long, when it’s not as hot out, rearranging shrubbery and tossing day-old geraniums into the trash like rejects from the bakery. I say this because I go home after work, and the yard looks one way. I go out at night, I come home in the dark, and he’s always out there with the hose, lurking in the shadow of the hedge, but not in a menacing way. In the morning, I leave for work, and the lawn has been reinvented.
I think perhaps “lawn” is not the right word for what this is. The man’s home is squooshed between a three story apartment building and a dilapidated church. I think that he is somehow affiliated with the church, because I’ve seen him locking and unlocking the front and side doors, going in and out. I’ve watched him dump garbage cans full of pieces of wood and dusty window coverings into the dumpster in the alley. I’m not sure what else he has time for between maintaining the brokedown house of God and revising his yard, and I would like to know how one goes about making a living from cleaning up after a nonexistent congregation, because there is yet another abandoned church right across the street from the one my neighbor has laid claim to, and another just a block away, and I would be happy to quit my job and care for either, if that’s all I would have to do. I would live on a street of dead centers of worship, pour rat poison along the baseboards once every week, and live happily ever after.
Anyway…what? Oh yes, well, my neighbor lives in this little cottage-style house between the big deceased church and the apartment building. It looks squatty and small in comparison, but it really is very shady and cute, and it has this path that runs along the side of it, over which he’s built an arbor of sorts for vines and roses (although he sometimes clears the arbor of all natural growth and starts over again, just the bare wood showing). The front rectangle of lawn is what he spends the most of his concentration on. He has outfitted the perimeter with a tiny fence. The fence holds flower boxes, which sometimes contain transplanted strawberries, and other times African violets from plastic grocery store containers, and neither for very long. Most of the patch of lawn is shadowed by the overhang of the little house, which provides extra shade as it’s covered with growth. There are a few small trees lining each side of the lawn, and all do their part to add more secrecy to the center.
Last summer, the neighbor got rid of the hippie-style wicker chair that consisted of a base, a bowl-shaped center that settled down into it, and a pink pad that went into the curved center. By “got rid of,” I mean he turned the seat parts into planters and threw out the pink padding. He purchased a small black iron loveseat type of thing, with a shade over it, and a wrought-iron fire pit contraption to go in front of it. The back of the seat faces the street, the front faces the fire pit, and beyond that is the giant picture window, the shade for which is always, always open, so that I sometimes see the neighbor and a friend playing a silent game of chess behind the glass on my way here or there.
A few days ago, the seat had been accented with a long, red satin cushion that looked like it was straight from Suleiman’s garden. Not only was the fire pit blazing, but there were about seventeen mini tiki torches sparkling with tiny flames all over the place. I couldn’t help but stop for a second and take it all in, it was very pretty. The fences were spilling over with blood red flowers, flat pillows with sparkling gold threads lay on the ground next to the fire pit, glittery gold curtains line the sides of the loveseat and the edges of the picture window. The tiny trees held mini strands of yellow lights, and the concrete path was overflowing with yellow and red flowers, bursting color like split arteries. The weird thing was that nobody was sitting in the yard, the house was dark, and I got the distinct feeling that my neighbor was not even home.
And the next day, it was all gone. Flowers, lights, cushions, curtains. The ground along the path, the dirt in the fence boxes, it all looked like it had been dumped out and poured back in. The fire pit basin was overturned on its stand, holding a giant Jif peanut butter can with a sick-looking sapling in it. A rat darted out from behind the fence and across the street.
Meanwhile, my other neighbor is training her toddler in persistence. I lay out in the sun, pretending to read, watching them in their yard. She drags the plastic baby pool out of the shed and sits back on the swing, watching while the baby wobbles to the rusty spigot on the side of the house, struggles to turn it on, fills his plastic cup with water, which always overtakes him and splatters all over him. With his cup half full, as the force of the water usually blasts off from the bottom and empties the cup, he strains to turn off the spigot. He wobbles across the yard to his baby pool, pours in the few drops that have survived the journey, and returns, slowly, to the faucet. Every now and then, she takes pity on him and puts the hose on a slow trickle and sticks it over the edge of the pool. But most of the time she just watches and smokes and smiles at passersby.
The booze closet.
I haven’t had a drink in 27 days, and from what I can tell, it doesn’t do much but allow you to see all of the fine details on everything flying out of the unhinged archives in your mind. I suppose that is the point.
Tomorrow I will have completed my self-imposed rehabilitation period. I almost didn’t notice it, the absence of beer. Sometimes on my evening jogs I will see a band of hipsters on their way to some lawn party, carrying black plastic bags from the liquor store, and thirsty and hot, I will think I’m going to die if I don’t get a freezing cold shot of Patron as soon as is humanly possible. But I think that’s just because I drink that so cold, and it’s more like water than alcohol on its way down, which is all I want on mile 2.
Unfortunately, I am not sleeping any better, and the 4pm panic that hits daily still carries the same intensity, and goes from “I am not doing enough” to OH MY GOD I AM NOT DOING ANYTHING. It’s the feeling of inertia that flattens me to the wall and sends me into a daily tailspin. I have the constant thought of I should be more than this, now, which does nothing but answer the question of “Who are you?” with Not enough. That’s enough self-inflicted pressure to drive anyone up the wall.
For instance: I feel extremely guilty for sitting here, on a Saturday afternoon, in the shade on this patio, analyzing the breeze and the human traffic and receding into my head, while there are people to be called and haircuts to be gotten and research to be done and emails to be written. In between each sentence I read or write is a repetition of You lazy fucking asshole! Get a job!
There is one change between my sober self and my actively drinking self, which is the amount of caffeine I take in daily. This, you could say, would be the reason for my insomnia and rapid-fire panicked thoughts. I basically swapped alcohol for extra caffeine. I drink it in the morning to avoid a day-killing headache, and again in the afternoon I will allow myself a quad espresso so that I can function properly, maybe even positively. I drink them all the time, but I don’t understand why quad espressos are legal. They should not be.
My mother told me that when I feel my thoughts dragging toward the negative, muddling my brain, I should try a little trick she read about in some women’s magazine. You’re supposed to snap yourself out of it by “thinking faster,” that is, speeding up the tempo of your thoughts. I suppose the point is to get them over with in a hurry, or blast them out of your head just by multiplying them until they cancel each other out, but I think I must be adept at this already, too good at it to trick my thoughts into being positive. If I sped them up any more, I’d be splattering everyone with gray matter and skull shards every five seconds, which is about the rate at which I remind myself that I need to be doing more, better, faster, sooner.
By the way
It’s not that I hate carefree or positive people, I just think they’re stupid. If I ask what you’re doing, and you respond that you’re “chillin’ and hustlin’,” or something to that effect, I am just going to think that you’re dumb. I wasn’t asking because I wanted to be entertained. I was asking because I genuinely wanted to know. This means either that you did not want me to know, or you do not want to know yourself. If I ask you what’s up, and you respond “You know, I’m just workin it, bangin it out,” you are catching your ankle on that trip wire in my brain that makes me think, “Ugh” and not want to talk to you anymore.
Maybe I’m just bored with endless niceties and meaningless conversation. Or maybe most people are just douchebags filled with cherry-scented antiseptic ointment.
At least it’s cherry. I don’t think I could deal with vanilla.
Lately I’ve been in this mood. I’m not sure, actually, if I should be calling it a mood, which would imply that it’s something short, temporary, on its way through, like storm clouds or birthday parties or fingerless carnival ride operators. I find myself hoping that it’s not a mood because it feels like something more important, deserving of some type of status that is less than fleeting. But it settled on me like a mood, and it’s hanging around in that weird and wavy way, so for now that’s what I will call it.
I was thinking the other day that I’ve lost a lot of books by loaning them to people who lose them, or forget to pack them when they move, or just sort of dissolve out of my life until it would be kind of weird for me to call them up on a Thursday afternoon and ask if they know where they put that copy of The Virgin Suicides. It’s something that’s occurred to me before, because there have been times when I’ve been proud of my bookshelf, and annoyed at the fact that something is missing from it. So when this short list of loaned and lost books came up in my memory the other day, I surprised myself by not really giving a shit. Instead, my next thought was how can I get rid of the rest of these???
This mood makes me want to sell all of my things, and all of the things I’ve had to buy to hold my things up off of the floor. I feel the need to live as simply as possible. I feel the need to be lighter, to be able to leave easily. I often have the feeling that there is nothing for me here, in this city, that this is definitely not where I’m supposed to be. But now it’s stronger than ever, and I just have to find out where the fuck I am supposed to be. I need to do everything I can to avoid taking root in what I know to be the wrong place.
I know that this is what old people do before they die, and that creeps me out a little.
So, I walked around my apartment and mentally marked everything to sell. I got to my couch and realized for the millionth time that it needs to be thrown away, that only an idiot would pay money for it.
When I was sixteen, I got it into my head that I wanted to redecorate my room. I put wall paper on the ceiling, painted furniture, re-arranged my Tori Amos posters, and bought a futon. It was this deluxe model with an innerspring mattress and a blue cover that matched my ceiling cloud wallpaper. I paid $300 for the futon and the frame, and my boyfriend and I drove out to pick it up and pay the guy at the warehouse, who wouldn’t accept my check. I gave him cash and left without a receipt, and my mom freaked out when she heard because she said I could “get screwed over.”
I put it together. I slept on it quite comfortably all through high school. I covered it with pillows to lean against so I could sit up and stay awake for each instalment of Anna Karenina on Masterpiece Theater at 3am, every morning, for a week. I read all seven Harry Potter books on it. It’s where my sister and I cuddled to watch The Last Unicorn one more time before I moved to the city.
I took it apart. I put it in a truck and took it out of a truck and put it together again. It has been disassembled and reassembled at least five different times, losing more little pieces every time. At least three boys have “helped” me reassemble my couch from scratch, and each time I have let them give it their best shot before asking them to stand the fuck back while I build it from memory, thank you very much. It has been nicked with screwdrivers and spattered with nail polish and all of the parts have been dropped separately. I have made out with a few different boys on it in the last eleven years, and slept with a couple of them on it. (If you have enjoyed sitting on my couch and think that’s gross, well, I don’t ask you what you do on YOUR couch, Princess. If you have enjoyed me on my couch and thought it was a good time, well, you’re right on the money.)
Travelers have come from Seattle, the Quad Cities, St. Louis, New York, and various parts of Southern Illinois to sleep on my couch. It has been voted Most Comfortable by all (with the exception of Seattle, quite possibly…due to the couch being quite literally on its last legs by then…).
At least two people I do not like have sat on my couch. I did not like it.
At least one artsy, blurry, black-and-white photo shoot took place on my couch.
One fateful Laundry Day, I accidently left a giant bottle of laundry detergent lying on my couch, with the cap only half on. The result was a big puddle of bright blue laundry detergent, which soaked through the cover and onto the black cushion underneath. My best friend was visiting and when he saw what I’d done, he exclaimed my name really loud, and like he was sorely disappointed in me…like a father would be disappointed in you if you drove the car into a ditch or got a dumb pink heart tattooed onto your ass cheek. And I didn’t think his reaction was weird at the time, because I felt bad for doing it to my couch, and for proving myself once again to be completely absentminded about things like lids and leaky fluids and a surrounding world of thirsty fabrics. (Also, my best friend has always had a special place in his heart for furniture and rugs and wall art and lamps, so to commit a crime against a futon was to commit a crime against someone in his family.)
The detergent left a large, soapy, Mountain Breeze scented stain, and he would look for it every time he visited and slept on the couch.
I have taken countless naps on the couch. I have watched endless epic television on the couch, and endless crappy television. I slept on it when I was mad at my boyfriend or when I was just too lazy and sleepy to get up and go to bed. I have stayed up late on the couch, and gotten up early on the couch. I have sat on the couch while thinking about how great the couch is.
Last fall, the couch uttered a plaintive creak beneath me, more than once, as I innocently curled up on it. I ignored it for as long as possible, but it’s hard to ignore your couch when it crashes to the floor in pieces under you. I tried to fit the parts back together. I got new screws that looked a lot like what I remembered about the original ones. I used duct tape, Superglue, nails, stacks of crappy books, and rope…and still the whole thing would clatter to the floor, creating a fluffy mattress slide that would just roll me down onto the rug, gently, but firmly, as if the couch was telling me to move on. Not one to let go of something I love without a bitter fight, I borrowed a power drill and bought a bunch of bracket sets at the hardware store, and though the parts of the couch that were meant to fit together do not even touch, meaning that the only thing holding the couch up is little skinny brass bits, the damn thing has held on and allowed me to enjoy it for just a little longer.
But in September, it will have to go. And I will miss it, but I will be happy to have one less heavy thing in my life, and I will not buy anything to replace it.
At work on Wednesday night, I looked down at a to-do list someone had left on the desk. All of the to-do’s were crossed out, so I’m pretty sure that the dog got food and copies of keys were made for the new apartment, but the last one was left un-crossed, and it said, in all caps, “SELL COUCH!”
It is quite possible that, out of all the stuff I own, this couch will be the one thing I miss.
Cupcake Heartbreak 