For the first time in a long time, I have no desire to write. I can't think of anything worth saying. I can't find anything that feels like me.
Work is strange. We've had a week of intense drama and rampant gossip. I kept my distance. My apartment is a mess. It looks clean, but it's not. I keep forgetting I put the first plants in and need to water them. The sun is out and the trees are suddenly green and leafy. Strangers keep asking me out on dates. Strange ones. I don't care. It's spring, for godssakes. It's all chemical.
I sent out a short "story" (insofar as everything I write is borderline fiction) and haven't heard anything back. I have no idea if this bothers me or not. It certainly doesn't surprise me. Not in any kind of self-deprecating way, either - but just in the way that there is too much writing in the world and not enough places to put it. In a bold and unprecedented move, I'm not taking it personally.
Oh - but here's a question: Does anyone know if there's an easy way to archive all blog posts? I'd like to get these all burned to disc(s). You know, just in case I never feel like writing anything again. It should be fairly obvious that this post in particular is worth saving for ever and ever.
I'd like to do it in a single shot, rather than going to the trouble of copy/pasting everything into files.
I know you've been waiting for me to finish up those edits. You've been so very patient. And I know I'm meant to send you a scintillating blog entry, and you've been really patient about that too. You are a good, good person.
But there were these shoes, you see? These bone-and-gold, patent and haircalf, leopard print, Italian peeptoe shoes. The heel is so high it makes my foot look impossibly tiny and my instep almost fetishly arched. The inside is lined in the softest metallic leather. They make me feel fatale. They are the kind of shoes that change a girl: filter every look through a fringe of eyelash and coat every every phrase in a predatory purr.
I really meant not to buy them at all. They were expensive (even on sale) and not exactly what you'd call practical, so I had meant to come straight home and get to work. I am, after all, an adult.
But I couldn't stop thinking about them.
(Because I am not an adult. I clearly need supervision at all times.)
And because they cost so much and I couldn't think what I'd wear them with, I had to walk around the store for forty minutes, trying on seventeen other pair of shoes that would probably make more sense in my closet. I had to rule each of them out, systematically, methodically. I mean, I knew I didn't really want any of those other ones right from the start, but the process was very important and not to be abridged.
(When you're broke and procrastinating, sometimes it's necessary to work yourself into a frenzy of guilt and desire between racks of impractical shoes. It gets your mind off things.)
Now I am sitting at my computer, working like a good girl, my feet cradled in two very lovely, very ridiculous shoes.
I think we both know, there was nothing else I could have done. g.
This is what I found at the end of my street, just one door north of the crack house. All three chairs were perfectly lined up. The yellow one was so pretty I thought about taking it home. It's amazing the kind of cool stuff people leave at the curb. If it wasn't for my neighbours cleaning out their basement, my record collection would still be in stacks of random boxes. But it has long been my policy never to pick up anything absorbent... or nestable.
Years ago, an ex boyfriend told me about the time his parents bought a new living room set. They picked it out at the showroom and a few days later it was delivered from a warehouse in a great big truck. It was all very exciting. They weren't rich people and a new couch was an event. But it turned out the warehouse was full of mice. Not long after the furniture arrived, it became apparent that mice had nested in the upholstery - a whole family of four-footed stowaways. Once rested from the journey (much to the horror of my boyfriends mother) they began eagerly exploring their new home. Total infestation.
My ex's dad did more or less what you'd expect: he swore a lot and pretty much carpeted the house in poison and snap-traps and - for safety - yelled at his three young children not to touch anything. It was the seventies, so they didn't.
One night a few weeks later, the happy little family sat in the living room: Mom, Dad, and three children under eight. They youngest, Marta, was only two or three. Suddenly, the tiniest, sweetest little mouse popped out from under an armoir. It was a charming thing, not quite full grown - not a bit scary. It bounced fearlessly into the center of the room. Marta giggled and clapped with glee. Even Dad had to admit he was a charming fellow - so brash! Of course no one considered he might be crazy with the poison.
Mr. Mouse stopped in the middle of the room, went into tiny, brutal convulsions and died.
And that's why I don't pick up upholstered things from the sidewalk.
A hard morning and an easier day drain slowly into an evening of no consequence. I am still myself. The sun came back, that petulant flame, and brought with it a bit of clarity. It's more than enough to reattach my head.
(The cat feels it is not a moment too soon.)
There is this thing teenagers do where, emotionally, they live entirely in the present. (Maybe because the past is a bit short of material and the future to date has been so brief.) Every moment is the Only Moment: If you get me those shoes I'll never ask for anything else again. You know they mean it - and why not? It is inconceivable there will be another time and another want to present itself. The Long View does not exist.
And so this applies to melodramas, large and small. Indeed, how could any tragedy be "small" when it is the only one in the world? Every disappointment is the the middlepoint for ripples of violent consequence, every crisis potentially fatal. The phrase "I will die" comes up a lot. If you make me sit next to so-and-so, I will die. If you tell anyone what happened, I will die. Those are years spent on the edge of the void (no place for clumsy children to be) and Statistical Improbability has no dominion.
I think it's charming, in an insufferable kind of way.
Eventually, though, you learn to let things go, let things sit. You learn that there is tomorrow and there is actually no reason to assume it will be the same as today. You learn that you can manage and everything passes and you can probably live with it - or without it - if you have to. Eventually, you learn that.
I mean, I don't, but you do. g.
PS: The cat feels goggles are "undignified". Uppity little beast.
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