D.C. Pierson's Blog, page 3

Take heart:Most of those well-styled smiley sexually attractive financially stable people who seem...

Take heart:

Most of those well-styled smiley sexually attractive financially stable people who seem like they’re never gonna actually do anything are never gonna actually do anything.

At the end of my Freshman year of high school our theatre teacher announced the plays we’d be doing...

At the end of my Freshman year of high school our theatre teacher announced the plays we’d be doing the upcoming year. It was so exciting. I read all the shows and narrowed down which roles would permit me maximum triumph.

Over the summer, the principal fired our teacher for letting us play laser tag in the auditorium. His replacement then scheduled a different, shorter slate of plays.

The principal’s name was Dr. Mosher.

That fucker still owes me a Brighton Beach Memoirs and I intend to collect.

In third grade I attended a newly built elementary school.The student body got to vote on our...

In third grade I attended a newly built elementary school.

The student body got to vote on our mascot. Designs had been submitted by the students themselves. This was Arizona, so a lot of the mascots were desert-themed. I remember there was a cactus. Somebody wanted us to be the Estrellas.

And then there was a shark.

The shark wore sunglasses, and his name was Finn McCool.

I don’t think they even had to count the votes.

1 Slot Left In My Writing Class Starting Tonight

Come kick it with us for the next four Wednesday nights, starting tonight. You will write things you’re proud of.

http://writingpad.com/creativewritingmultigenre.htm#LITMOJO

"This is where it gets complicated," I said, pointing at everything.

"This is where it gets complicated," I said, pointing at everything.

"Witch Night"

NIGHT ONE

There’s a tap on my bedroom window.

I yelp, and look up. It’s Nina, who disappeared seven days ago.

She’s sitting perched at the edge of the window-mounted flower box, facing out into the night. You couldn’t get up there without a ladder, but I don’t see one.

I push the window open. 

“Hey,” she says.

“Hi,” I say. “Are you okay?”

“Totally,” she says.

“Do you want food or, like, a blanket—”

“Liz,” she says, “it’s cool. This isn’t a distress thing, and I’m not coming back, I just thought I would come say ‘hi.’”

“Hi!” I say again, like clip-art of a happy person. 

Then I start crying.

“No, don’t, I’m fine,” she says. “I’m so fine, I’m better than fine!”

“Okay,” I say. Then I stop crying. I make myself.

“I have seen such creepy shit in the last little while,” she says, “but nothing as creepy as the fact that you can just stop crying on a dime like that.”

“Can I put that on a college application? Like under special skills,” I say. “That’s got to be some kind of achievement, right? ‘One time I creeped out a witch.’”

“Sounds like you could get an essay out of that,” she says, “but if there’s one thing I’ve never worried about, it’s your ability to get an essay out of something.”

There are many, many things Nina always seemed not to be worried about. She projected an emotional wall of not-worried-about-it ten feet high, and behind the wall were the kind of worries that apparently can drive you to exchange your life in human society for one I cannot even begin to understand.

“Aren’t you cold out there?” I say, thinking that by “out there” I mean “sitting outside my window in the middle of the night in early November,” but realizing I actually mean “the world.”

“No,” she says, “but thanks for asking.”

 

There’s a golf course across the street from our school, and next to it there’s a walled-in bunch of above-ground pipes and meters that probably do something like regulate the golf course’s sprinkler system or the water level of its man-made lake. There’s this alley between one of the walls and some fenced-in power lines where kids from our school go to smoke. I went out there with her a few times between finishing our food and the lunch bell ringing. 

At first it was cool, and I didn’t smoke, just got a buzz from the totally acceptable amount of risk involved in leaving school grounds during the day despite not being Seniors. The kids were mostly older and pretty nice, and they liked the same music as Nina. I stopped going with her once I realized it wasn’t just for the companionship of cool kids who agreed with her about what was bullshit, she had a chemical need to go out there and smoke. Once she started having her own cigarettes. I thought not going would be a good way to get her to stop, but it wasn’t. And not long after I stopped, this guy who didn’t go to our school started hanging out back there.

“People are gonna say, oh, she got seduced by that guy and wanted to become a monster, like Twilight or something, but I’m not even attracted to him. There’s nothing less sexy than a guy who’s actually a thousand spiders.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he’s literally a thousand spiders inside of a human skin.”

“Oh. Wow. Umm… Cool?”

“You don’t have to pretend not to be grossed out. It’s gross. Just because I’m like this now doesn’t mean I don’t understand the concept of ‘gross.’ But you become like this when you decide you’d rather be around people who are literally full of spiders who are emotionally full of spiders.”

“Like Kellyn Altschul?”

“Uh, yeah. Living breathing spider’s nest.”

She really is. I laugh.

“Nobody knows anything about the… occult aspect of it. Nobody except me, I mean.”

“Well, do you think that?”

“Think what?”

“That I got… like, seduced.”

“I don’t think that, and not just because you’re telling me right now that it’s not true. I never thought that.”

And really, I never did. There was no point in the lead-up to her disappearing where it was like when she had to go across the street to smoke, like there was this chemical thing she was powerless to stop. It seemed like she was making all of her own decisions, unclouded by spells of the magical or just plain old mind-game variety. She told me everything she was doing every step of the way. She said there were no blood sacrifices, no animals were harmed in the making of this witch. They would never hurt an animal, she said. She just thought it about it for not very long before making her final decision, and then placed a series of household objects on her front porch in a particular order over a series of evenings and after a week of that, they came and picked her up like they were going to soccer practice, except she was asleep when they did it, and there were, as far as I knew, no vans involved.

“Everybody else thinks you ran away, and I haven’t told them different.”

“Thanks,” she says. “If you want, I can do something that makes it so you don’t even know you’re lying.”

“I’m a fine liar.”

“I bet you are,” she says. “Liz Cobb. You are so underestimated.”

“Thanks,” I say. She used to have these compliments that, until she said them, you never realized were exactly what you wanted to hear about yourself. Somehow the ones I usually got - “nice,” “kind,” “kind-looking” (no, I swear, more than once) - had become so tiresome they didn’t do anything for me anymore, even though I knew they should have, because they were, you know, nice. But all of them seemed to carry this thin note of condescension, like, oh, you’re so nice, you’re also not a real person, because you’re not really a threat.

One time Nina called me a “threat.” Once I realized she meant it as a compliment, I also realized: everybody wants to be considered a threat.

The wind blows hard out of nowhere.

“I gotta go,” she says. “See you later?” Like I’m the one that decides whether or not I see her again. Like I’m the one who can just appear on peoples’ windowsills in the middle of the night, instead of the one who’s about to go to sleep in a bedroom in her parents’ house, the one who’s still worried about the teacher calling her name in first period and not being there to say, “Here.”

“Sure,” I say.

“Can I borrow this?” she says about one of the withered plants in the flower-box.

“Of course,” I say.

“Thanks,” she says. And then the night sky seems incredibly close somehow, and then the stars and the sky are back where they should be, but she’s gone.

 

I sit alone at lunch now. The day after she disappeared I tried to sit with my old friends from band but as soon as Emily Campbell started treating me like shit, stopping just short of accusing me of capital treason against the woodwinds section, everyone else followed suit, so I said “fuck it” and sat alone in the part of the lunch room where there are tables full of people who are technically sitting together, but are, in actuality, staring straight ahead or at a book or a laptop or their phone. I have chosen book when I hear Kellyn Altschul right behind me.

“I heard she ran away with this random from the smokers’ alley,” she says, using the same fake-newscaster over-enunciation she uses on the morning announcements.  “He probably sold her into sex slavery,” says Eva Burditt.

“It’s not slavery if you’re fine with it,” Kellyn says.

“If you’re fine with it!” says Meegan Price, then shrieks out some too-enthusiastic laughs.

“If you’re begging for it,” Eva says, and then they all join Meegan in a fit of laughter that’s more about being heard laughing than actually enjoying the joke.

I stop crying before I even start. I wish Nina were here, she’d be so proud of me. But she’s not here, which means she’s not here to defend herself. But I am.

“What are you even doing?” I say, standing up and spinning around. “You never sit over here.”

“Free country,” says Meegan.

“Yeah,” Kellyn says, “Last time I checked it wasn’t illegal to have a conversation.”

“You’re having your conversation at me, just to be mean. You think because you’re smart that you’re not mean, but you are. And if people weren’t so mean, she wouldn’t be—” 

I shut myself up.

“Wouldn’t be what?” Kellyn says. “What do you know, Elizabeth?”

“Is she hurt?” Eva says.

“Is she dead?” Kellyn says, seeming genuinely fascinated and excited.

“This isn’t a story. You’re not a reporter.” I say. “You’re just an asshole.”

“God you’re defensive,” Kellyn says. “I’m not even trying to be mean. I’m just saying, if you know something, it’s your responsibility to tell someone.”

“I don’t know anything,” I say, “but I know she’s not dead.”

“Too bad,” Eva says.

I want to hit her but I don’t know how to cross the three steps between our tables or what angle to hold my arm at. Instead I start crying, and I can’t stop it this time, so I just grab my stuff and run, like a little kid. Like anything but a threat.

 

 

NIGHT TWO

That night, I sit on my bed and tell myself I’m doing my homework but I’m really just watching the window, hoping she will appear.

She does.

I open the window and before I can say anything, she says, “What’s wrong?”

I tell her about the girls.

“Fucking of course,” she says. “I hate that I’m not there to help you.”

“I mean, then it would just be two of us getting verbally abused instead of one. But… Yeah, I mean… I miss having you around, in general.”

“Aww,” she says. “BFFs,” she says, and emits a dry-leaf chuckle.

“Is there anything we can do about them? Like… steps we can take?”

“Liz Cobb!” she says. “What a boss. Calling a hit in on the popular girls.”

“It’s not that,” I say, “There just has to be some way we can make them not so fucking smug.”

“Oh,” she says. “There are ways.”

“Will I have to like, sell my soul?” I say.

“No!” she says. “No, no, no. That’s partially why things like me exist,” she says, “so that not everybody has to ‘sell their soul’ anytime anybody wants to get anything done. I’ll be right back.” 

She hops down from the flower box and lands in our backyard without a sound. I see her walk from one end of the yard to the other a few times, and for a second I worry about my parents seeing her, but she doesn’t seem worried about it, so I decide not to be, either. I hear the lid of our trash can go up, and slam back down. 

“I just put the minor-est hex on your dad,” she says.

“What?!” I say “Is he gonna—”

“It’s cool,” she says. “It was just to fuzzy up his pattern recognition so he’d think I was a raccoon. He’ll be fine. It’s a neat little trick: the only side effect is he’ll be creepily sweet to everybody for the next few days.”

“That doesn’t sound like witchcraft,” I say. “That sounds… nice.”

“I’m nice,” she says. “Sometimes, it is, too.”

She climbs in the window.

“Now this, on the other hand,” she says, referring to the mash of garbage and grass and leaves and several potato bugs she’s working into an awful little meatball in her left hand, “is gonna be anything but.”

“What does it do?”

“It’s going to be up to you.”

“How do I go about making it do… whatever?”

“You already have,” she says, and reaches over and yanks one of the hairs out of the bun at the back of my head.

“OW!” I say, “there had to be an easier way to do that.”

“There’s not,” she says. “I mean, I could try to find one on your pillow or something, but it wouldn’t be encoded correctly, and knowing your mom, the sheets are washed daily so there wouldn’t be anything anyway.”

“Don’t you need the other peoples’ hair, not mine?”

“What, like a voodoo doll? It doesn’t work like that. See, every cell in your being is encoded with your intentions.”

“You sound like Oprah.”

“How do you think she got where she is? Your hair is just a bunch of dead cells, right? And the root, the one that was just inside your scalp and recently alive, is encoded with your most recent intentions. Those girls were mean to you today. You intend to get revenge.”

“It’s not going to kill them, right?”

“Do you want them to be killed?”

“I mean… sometimes.”

“I don’t think so. Not really. You’re not that person. With you, it’s just going to be FUN. Now— I need something to put this in. Give me one of your condoms.”

“I officially regret ever telling you about these.”

I go over and open the top drawer of my nightstand. I tear open the box of condoms for the first time since it was given to me by my dad a year ago after a long and serious talk about what it meant for me to be asked to homecoming by an “older boy,” who, as I tried to explain, was the dorkiest kid in band and very possibly an android. 

She sees me tear open the box. I see her see me.

“Did I say anything?” she says.

“You didn’t have to!”

“But I didn’t!”

“What, my best friend mysteriously disappears, and I’m gonna drown my sorrows in, like, a penis parade?”

“Why not? Maybe I’m making the wrong charm here.”

We laugh, and not the kind of laugh that’s just so other people will hear it.

 

The next day at lunch, the girls are sitting at the table behind me again. I have my back to them, and there are no tables between me and the far wall of the lunch room, so nobody sees me pull a little tied-off condom out of my backpack. Nobody sees me shove it with my thumb into my half-drank bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper, nobody hears it hiss as it hits the liquid, or sees all the bubbles in the soda shrink to nothing instantly as the liquid turns black. The tied-off condom pulses like a weak little heart and then vanishes into itself. I have a Diet Dr. Pepper bottle half-full of darkness, and then the liquid starts draining away, but there’s no hole for it to drain through, it’s just draining into nothingness. 

Then the bottle is empty.

“Whoa,” I hear Kellyn say. “Nap time.”

“Yeah, nap time,” Meegan says.

I look around: everybody in the lunchroom, with the exception of me and the three girls, have their eyes closed. With bites on their forks and sandwiches half-raised to their mouths, they are asleep seated or standing up or walking, in mid-step. 

“Guys… What the fuck?” Eva says.

Underneath a big sign that says CAFETERIA (a gift from the Senior Class of 2007, who apparently had some trouble figuring out for themselves what this room was and didn’t want classes of the future to be burdened with the same brain-teaser) the lunch-ladies are catatonic with ladles half-dipped into heating dishes full of mashed potatoes and gravy and spaghetti and meatballs. 

The dishes begin vibrating:

BANG BANG BANG BANG.

“Should we leave? Should we get help? What do we do?” Meegan turns to Kellyn with big eyes, looking for guidance. 

“I don’t know!” yells Kellyn.

One of the giant fridges behind the sleeping lunch-ladies blows open and a disgusting mass of gray-ish ground beef falls out onto the floor:

SPLAT.

Then it stands up.

And when it does, little curlicues of meat flake off of it everywhere, and what’s left has two meat legs and two meat arms and a little meat nose and even meat-hair. Its meat haircut is asymmetrical and extremely stylish.

The four people left awake in the lunchroom (or CAFETERIA, sorry ’07 seniors) are looking at a Kellyn Altschul made entirely of school-lunch ground beef.

It walks a spongy, beef-legged walk around the lunch-ladies and into the seating area, where it’s joined by a Meegan made of mashed potatoes and basically bleeding gravy, and a Eva made of spaghetti that’s slithering in and out of itself, like a colony of worms ate a corpse entirely but maintained the corpse’s basic shape.

“Guys,” says Kellyn, “Run.”

The girls vault up and run for the door, and it’s not the kind of run they used to manage somehow in Freshman PE where they could be fast and vigorous and athletic without really breaking a sweat or ever looking anything but perfect. This is a scared-shitless run, the kind any of us want to see any of our enemies make someday. We don’t really want to see them dead. We just want to see them running like they might be dead if they don’t.

“STOP THEM,” food-Kellyn says in a voice like a kitchen-sink garbage disposal trying to run with a fork stuck in it.

Food-Eva whips a spaghetti-arm out in front of the running girls and it wraps around them, drawing them close together like tied-up hostages in a heist movie.

“YOU’RE FREE TO GO IF YOU REALLY WANT TO,” says food-Kellyn, beefing her way toward them.

“YEAH,” says their captor, food-Meegan. “FREE COUNTRY.”

“BUT WE JUST FIGURED YOU’D WANT TO STICK AROUND AND HANG OUT WITH US. AFTER ALL, WE’RE YOU. AND YOU LOVE YOU.”

Kellyn starts crying this impossibly high little-girl cry. I instantly feel like I know her. I’ve always known my idea of her, the idea she works so hard to put in everyone’s head. But now I know her. And I start to feel sorry for her even though I know Nina wouldn’t want me to.

“WHAT’S THE MATTER? DO YOU NOT LOVE US? WAS I… WAS I WRONG?”

“CAN’T BE!” food-Meegan says.

“IMPOSSIBLE!” food-Eva says, spraying gravy everywhere.

“I’M WOUNDED BY THIS,” food-Kellyn says, and points to where her heart would be, and her meat-chest starts sizzling and popping and caving in on itself, and big gloopy tears of fat stream down from the hollows of her meat-eyes, a parody of real Kellyn’s real cry.

“THERE’S ONLY ONE THING YOU CAN DO TO REASSURE ME THAT YOU REALLY DO LOVE US, THAT YOU REALLY DO THINK WE’RE WONDERFUL AND WORTHWHILE AND THE BEST.”

“What’s… that?” says Meegan, seemingly unable to resist following orders from Kellyn in any form.

“EAT US.”

“No!” Kellyn says, back to normal again, her concept of “gross” seeming to have over-ridden her concept of “scared.”

Food-Kellyn grabs real Kellyn’s knife from her tray.

Holds it at real Kellyn’s throat.

Nina said they wouldn’t die. Because I didn’t want them to die. And I don’t.

Kellyn reaches up. Takes the knife out of Food-Kellyn’s sloppy hand. Takes the fork from her tray.

Chows down.

 

 

NIGHT THREE

 

“And when everyone came to, they were just sitting in the middle of these giant mushy hills of the grossest food, just eating and crying!”

“Heh,” Nina says. 

The wind blows strong. Now it’s really fully that part of fall that isn’t pretty so much as it is a movie trailer for the worst winter has to offer.

“Aren’t you cold out there?” I say.

She’s still wearing the same black t-shirt that says GRESHAM HOMECOMING 2011: BLACKOUT! in multi-neon-colored lettering on the back, the one she disappeared in, the one that, when she still went to our school, made people upset because Gresham’s our rival, and also upset these two Gresham kids we ran across coming out of a movie one time, and none of them, our supposed peers or the Gresham dicks with sunglasses resting on top of their backwards crimson baseball caps, could understand why she would wear it when SHE DOESN’T EVEN GO TO THEIR / OUR SCHOOL! And by getting upset over something so stupid, they proved a point she didn’t even know she’d had. (One of the Gresham kids, in the early stages of non-comprehension: “Does your boyfriend go to our school?” Nina: “No, does yours?” It felt so good to be standing next to her at that moment.)

“I don’t get cold anymore,” she says.

“That’s cool, right?”

She shrugs.

“Wish you’d been there today,” I said. “It was… beyond classic.”

“Sounds cool.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says, then: “I met Satan today.”

“… Whoa,” I say. “Cool?”

“I guess it was… I mean, he was different than I thought. I dunno. More like self-parody or something. There are entities I’ve met in this thing that are really interesting and deep. He wasn’t necessarily one of them.”

“That’s too bad?” I say.

“If you don’t actually feel broken up about me being disappointed by Satan, I’ll understand,” she said. “You don’t have to fake it.”

“No, I mean, I just know it’s something you were probably looking forward to. Like, if I got to meet…”

“Colin Firth?”

“Fuck you! But… yeah, like if I met Colin Firth and he turned out to be a dick, you’d feel bad for me even though you don’t love Colin Firth.”

“Satan wasn’t a DICK, he was just… I dunno. A little too into himself. Like, somebody that only knows one joke, and the joke in this case is ultimate evil. Anyway, it’s not that big a deal, it just sucks to realize, oh, people can disappoint you on this side of the Veil, too.”

“Veil?”

She gestures vaguely out into the darkness.

“Well… You can always come back.”

“Actually I can’t. I’m not a person anymore.”

“Oh, that’s ridiculous—”

“No, literally, and I literally mean ‘literally.’ See in here?” She holds up a think, pale arm and pulls back the skin around her wrist where the veins should be, but there are no veins: the tightened skin becomes a translucent window into a river of something dark. “I’m like, a writhing mass of darkness with my old skin stretched over it. No bones, no organs, just black muck in the shape of a human.”

“Nina!” I say in a tone I realize is this specific tone my mom hits sometimes, pitying and horrified but mostly just disappointed.

“It’s the choice I made and I’m not sad about it. It just means no turning back.”

I try to think of how I can possibly lighten the mood when my best friend, or maybe former best friend, just showed me that the person I knew is gone and has been replaced with person-shaped murk. I have to lighten the mood because even though the person-shaped murk told me it’s not sad, I know the person-shaped murk better than that.

“What made you chose that instead of, like, a thousand spiders?” And I laugh, because I’m trying to be light.

“It’s not a choice. It’s a rank, based on merit. That kid made of spiders, I’m better than him. Much better.”

I have to try harder.

“Do you want to come in?” I say.

“Why?” she says.

“I dunno, just hang out.”

She hesitates.

“I’m not trying to change you back. I know you can’t. I just thought maybe it would be good for you.”

“Part of the reason I did this is so I’d never have to think about what might be good for me again.”

“Fine,” I say. “It might be FUN.”

 

I shut the window.

“DON’T!” she says.

I open it again.

I go over to the computer, bring up Spotify. I find a Gwen Stefani album.

“Fifth grade,” she says.

“Mm-hmm,” I say.

“Turn it up,” she says.

“My parents…” I say.

She closes her eyes, starts mumbling, and walking from wall to wall. After hitting all four walls, she touches the floor. After the floor, she pulls out my desk chair, stands on it, and stands, still mumbling, eyes closed, with one hand pressed against the popcorn ceiling.

Then she stops, opens her eyes.

“They’re not gonna hear anything coming out of here tonight,” she says, “now turn it up.”

 

We talk loudly. We dance like idiots. We look at Facebook pictures of guys we think are hot but dumb, and guys who are hot and not dumb but suffer from a critical inability to get over themselves. I run down the hall and grab a dusty DVD out of the back of a cabinet what was the playroom when we were little that has since been converted to my dad’s home office, and we watch “The Adventures Of Shark Boy And Lava Girl,” a chaparoned trip to the opening night of which was the first thing we ever did as outside-of-school friends. We read old hyper-emotional blog posts aloud to each other, and I feel a little better about Nina’s transformation when, reading back through old posts, I realize that all throughout middle school and into the beginning of high school both of us were declaring a “new me” regime every five or six days. This is the “new her,” but as long as whatever her she is at the moment is in front of me unselfconsciously rapping along to “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” everything feels fine.

 

When the sky starts to purple outside the open window, Nina says, “This is my stop.”

She climbs out onto the flower-box. My dad would be proud of how much weight it can support, but if I told him about it, it would blow her whole raccoon cover. And she was right about the random sweetness: he lets me pick the satellite radio station for a full week after the hex went into effect, and never once joked about hitting boys who look like they might try to “get fresh” with me with his car.

“Can I tell your parents?” I say. “Just that you’re okay?”

“In a year, they’ll wake up one morning and just know I’m okay. They won’t know why they know it, they just will. And knowing them, neither one of them will ever mention it to the other one. But until then… Let ‘em feel.”

“Okay,” I say. I never could talk her out of anything. It took me years to realize it was one of the most pointless exercises in the universe to even try.

It feels like a if-there’s-anything-you-have-left-to-say-than-say-it kind of moment, and there is something I need to say. Or ask.

“Did I fail you somehow? Like… Is there something I could’ve, or should’ve done, that would have made you not want to go?”

“Hey! No! What? No! Liz— this is— me right now, I’m what I’m supposed to be. Because there’s what IS, right? The laws of physics, man-made buildings, the FACTS… and then there’s what could be. And out there, in what’s left of the wilderness, in the dark, what could be is waiting, and we’re its agents, its ex-human representatives. This friend of mine said: ‘We wreak what could be on what is.’ It’s poetic and sometimes it’s sad or cruel but just as often it’s beautiful and right and just, and no matter what, it’s never, ever boring. And me, right now? I’m what the what could be version of the human me. Not to sound like a gym teacher, but my potential’s being fulfilled. And you’re not responsible for making my human life miserable, but you ARE responsible for me feeling like I could do something about it. Just by being you, you showed me what it looks like to make steps toward something, to not just want it, but to think about it and then go after it. And also by being you, you also showed me what I’m NOT supposed to be, which is someone headed for great success in the human realm.”

“You don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”

“I do. I actually do. And your what could be is going to require exactly zero intervention from me and mine.”

“But what if I make it so that it does, so that you have to come back?”

“Your path is the rare human path that’s not going to feature greed or exploitation or making other people small so that you can be big. If you figure out a way to truly fuck that up — and you won’t, I know you won’t — you won’t see ME again. Not like this. You’ll just see locusts and flames.”

“This life I’m supposedly going to have sounds really goody-two-shoes. Like stuff you’d want me not to do, so we could ditch class instead.”

“It’s not goody-two-shoes. It’s brave. Once you see enough really bad stuff, you’ll realize how brave and how tough to pull off real kindness is. And your life is about to be one big perfectly-executed bank robbery of kindness. And not to sound like a gym teacher, but you already helped me fulfill my potential, my what could be, so in that way you’re just as much of a witch as I am.”

“Poppies, poppies!” I say, putting on a Wicked Witch voice to try and launch myself out of my feelings. “Poppies will make them sleep.”

“They don’t, actually. Unless we’re just talking about heroin.”

“Oh God, I’m gonna be so tired at school today.”

“No, you’re not,” she says, and reaches down, runs a finger through some dust on the edge of the flower-box, then grabs both my hands and starts inscribing temporary runes on the backs of my hands with the dust.

“In like twenty years, if I’m not already a local legend,” she says while putting the finishing dust-loops on the runes, “Will you start one about me? Like, please only the say most horrible things.” 

“I will if I’m here, but I probably won’t be here,” I say. “I hope.” 

“That’s cool,” she says. “I probably won’t either.”

She drops my hands and I pull her into a hug. When we break out of it she sees that I am, as ever, crying.

“Come on,” she says, “Do your thing.”

I stop on that dime I’m so good at stopping on.

“Good. And don’t wipe your cheeks with the backs of your hands,” she says. “Unless you DO want to be exhausted at school today.”

“Okay, okay,” I say, “stop bossing me around.”

“I was never bossing,” she says, “I was merely suggesting awesome alternatives.”

What’s left of the night comes down and takes her away.

 

Occasionally I’ll get the urge, like the urge you get to slam the EMERGENCY STOP button on an elevator just to see what would happen, to let it all go south somehow, to truly spike my life into the ground just to see those locusts and those flames. So I can say to whoever I’m talking to at the moment, “Excuse me, I see my best friend from growing up over there,” and run up to the bug-belching Biblical inferno, and scream into it: 

“HOW ARE YOU? I HAVE MISSED YOU SO, SO MUCH.”

 

 

 

illustration by Sara McHenry - http://heypais.com

"The Ballad Of Punk-As-Fuck Jess"

One time my friend Chelsea
told me about a friend she and another friend of mine named Chelsea had
and this friend was named Punk-As-Fuck Jess.

I don’t remember the conversation that followed too well
but I think I asked if Jess was a boy or a girl

(Jess was a girl)

and I think I asked what exactly Jess had done to earn the title of ‘Punk-As-Fuck’

(If you knew Jess, you would just know, I was told)

and I think I asked if Jess had christened herself that
or if someone else had done it

(And here again “Punk-As-Fuck Jess” was treated as something self-evident,
something no one,
not P.A.F. Jess or anyone else,
would have to stick on her.
Her innate Punk-As-Fuckness had just been revealed over time
the way the tide washes away sand to reveal a great big punk-as-fuck rock
that has been there since the days where lava was the rule,
not the exception.)

So I never met her.
And I never heard any tales of her exploits,
her Punk-As-Fuckness in motion.

But every so often I think about her.
I just thought about her tonight.

And is that, in the final accounting, the essence of Punk-As-Fuck Jess?
The ability to burrow deep into the mind of someone she never knew, as deep into my being as being punk-as-fuck is in hers?
Or is that just good marketing?
Or is punk just good marketing?

Is it punk to disappear as quick as you came into being,
or is it punk to stick around?

I don’t know.
For Jess I’ll bet punk-as-fuckness manifested itself
in some form of cool self-mutilation
of the physical and/or emotional sort
and great taste in music
(“Great taste” meaning so many good choices
interspersed with a few sublimely bad choices)
and great taste in people
(Again, meaning so many good choices
interspersed with a few sublimely bad choices)
and I’ll bet she had a haircut then that your cousin has now.
(This was thirteen years ago, and at the Speed Of Cool,
it takes thirteen years for the light emanated by white-hot people like
Punk-As-Fuck Jess to reach the dark cold outer reaches
where your cousin lives.)

Or maybe she was Punk-As-Fuck for reasons you had to be present to fathom,
ones that cannot be recounted later using such tools of the Establishment
as words.
And I wasn’t present,
because if I’ve ever been anything-As-Fuck,
it’s Removed-As-Fuck.

Even if I had been there,
her Punk-As-Fuckness probably would’ve just read to me as anxiety-inducing wild-carditude.
It’s doubtful I could’ve enjoyed it in the moment,
and if she was anything,
I bet you she was in the moment.

And people like me, if there’s ever a moment we’re in,
it’s never the one on the clock.

But here she is in my memory,
somebody I never met,
and she’s probably out there somewhere,

Punk-As-Fuck
or Married-As-Fuck
or Rich-As-Fuck
or Crazy-As-Fuck
or Fat-As-Fuck
or Happy-As-Fuck

or All-Of-The-Above-As-Fuck.

There’s no reason she couldn’t be some or all of them
and still be Punk-As-Fuck.

I don’t know what punk is, really,
but I know it’s not mutually exclusive.

I worry so much about when it’s going to turn off that I can’t even enjoy it when...

I worry so much about when it’s going to turn off that I can’t even enjoy it when it’s on.

And that is how Energy Saver Mode on my girlfriend’s window-unit air conditioner is like my experience of just about everything.

"Here's That Coyote"

There’s a scene at the end of the SOPRANOS episode “Where’s Johnny,” where Tony is tearfully asking his (at this point fully senile) Uncle Junior if he ever really loved him. Junior, probably slightly less tuned out then he’s pretending, absentmindedly remarks on a nature documentary on TV:

“Here’s that coyote.”

I often think of that line. THE SOPRANOS touched on so many of the ineffable, difficult parts of being human most popular entertainment would (kinda understandably) rather not deal with. Tony is touching on the dead part of his uncle’s soul that maybe always has been dead. Tony has a spot like that in his soul, and one of the primary investigations of the show is, has that spot grown to become Tony’s soul? Has it always been the entire thing, and is all the humanity we, the audience, have clung to in our protagonist despite his deeply awful deeds, is that all a grand narcissistic dance, solar flares sent up from a planet made entirely of pure selfishness that our empathy tricks us into thinking look pretty?

When I rewatched the episode about a year ago, I read it like Junior was naming that nameless deadness all of us have inside of us to one degree or another, that we can stifle or cultivate or justify, depending on what kind of person we want to be or have been made into: What are you gonna do, kid? That’s just the coyote.

I think about that line now, when I stumble upon the queasy and inexplicable inside myself, or inside of others: “Here’s that coyote.”

James Gandolfini, by all accounts a generous man, and clearly a great artist, is dead.

Death is a fucking coyote.

I Would Die 4 U

We sure do talk about time a lot.

Specifically how technology is accordion-ing our perception and experience of time, how the pace of everything seems to be accelerating maddeningly, or accelerating perfectly, if you’re a technology-is-always-the-solution gadget-blogger type. 

And starting this essay by talking about how we’re all talking about something instead of just talking about that something when I don’t even really want to talk about the conversation around that thing, I just want to talk about the thing itself and how it relates to my favorite Prince song, is one of the many ways we all try and run up the flag of “Look, I get it, and I’m not one to go around NOT getting it.”  

It is a way to say “I AM AWARE THAT THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THIS THING, GOD FORBID I BE JUST ANOTHER PERSON TALKING ABOUT IT, ALLOW ME TO DEMARCATE MY SAVVY, ALLOW ME TO PARTICIPATE AT JUST A SLIGHT, FIVE-FOOT-ABOVE-THE-FRAY REMOVE.” Just like so many things me and people like me do every day, it is another barrage in the arms race of proving how much we fucking get it.

How to participate in this arms race without it dampening our we experience of media, news, life, and each other, I have no idea. I don’t know how you can engage in any form of cynicism without it becoming very real dirt on the windshield through which you view the world. And I say this as somebody that pretty much can’t reach inside myself without feeling the very comforting contours of trusty weapons like The Ironic Distance, The Self-Aware Caveat, The Pre-Apology For Sentiment. I don’t know how I assembled this arsenal, exactly, but just like a lot of hardened gunslingers I find it extremely difficult to resolve my problems without these guns now. They have always been there, and unless I work to take them apart, they will always be there. And what happens if I disarm and I come across somebody that still has them and knows how to use them? I’ll get killed, right?

This is the way I say things on the Internet. This is the way I say things in real life, too. You probably do as well. A lot of, “I know this topic has been done to death.” “I know everybody’s  talking about this, but…” For some reason, nothing feels more ancient than the thing everybody was talking about this morning.

Everything can feel instantaneously exhausted and exhausting. Or maybe not, depending on what your mileage with all this kinda stuff is. I expect my experience with all of it is pretty typical. I find Twitter alternately enriching and tiring. I find Facebook mostly just the latter but I think I’m getting better at using it for what it wants to be used for, which is playing mindless hyper-addictive games against people I had an improv class with six years ago. I will often use “Tumblr” as unfair shorthand for “someone with a lot of style and no substance,” but if I’m honest, just like anything else, it boils down to how you use it, and it if you want to use Tumblr to be a fountain of really interesting, beautiful things it can be that just as easily as it can be a soulless fashion carousel.

But taken in total, in a million tabs and windows I can’t help but keep open all the time, this stuff, for me, pretty often results in what I’ll go ahead and call the Long Afternoon Of The Soul, a feeling of strung-out-on-info-ness, and not even INFO per se (that makes me sound all cool and cyberpunk-y, like I’m mainlining 600 terabytes of raw data a second, but I can SEE THE PATTERN, MAAAAAN) but strung out on what would, taken by themselves, be wonderful little bleeps and bloops of human-ness (expressions of love and joy and humor and anger and hypocrisy, and yes, pictures of cats) but taken together during this Long Afternoon, leave me feeling kinda cranky and draggy and sad all the time.

“Dude,” you might say. “Just, like, get up and go for a walk.” And you would not be wrong.

And again, your mileage may vary with this stuff. Maybe you can bang around our Internet’s finest content aggregators for five hours on a random Tuesday and get up feeling fresh and alert and not loaded down with a sort of small-yippy-puppy-coming-out-of-sedation-after-a-nine-hour-flight-in-a-freezing-cargo-hold kinda feeling. And good for you. Like so many other ways other people seem to experience the world, I am endlessly jealous of you and wish you could teach me how to feel it the way you do. 

But I feel alarmed by the way technology seems to impact my experience of time.

And my favorite Prince song is “I Would Die 4 U.”

And among the reasons “I Would Die 4 U” is my favorite Prince song is, “I Would Die 4 U” is the sound of time stopping.

I only vaguely remember when it was that I first heard “I Would Die 4 U”: I would’ve been in my early 20’s and it would’ve been in New York and I would’ve just put Prince’s Greatest Hits on my iPod from the UCB tech booth computer, which was and probably still is a marvelous aggregation of like nine different people’s MP3 libraries. It probably came up on shuffle. And it just sounded so ageless and beautiful and like nothing so much as frozen time.

I know so little about actual musical terminology I cannot begin to try to explain why I think “I Would Die 4 U” sounds like a perfect crystalline standstill, why it sounds so amazingly outside of time, outside of influence, outside of everything, how even though it has component parts you recognize (“There’s Prince… there’s female back-up singers… there’s the guitar… and horns, and that’s a synthesizer, right?”) it feels less like other songs you’ve heard and more like you are being suspended in between galaxies and shot through with rays of infinite knowledge.

I don’t know what it is about Prince over the synth line that pervades the song that makes him sound like a floating holographic head projected out of a crystal that you just stumbled upon in an Antarctic cave. 

It doesn’t hurt that said head is declaring that he is somehow EVERYTHING, and yet unlike anything you’ve ever seen or felt or known. It seems like the vogue in rap now is not to compare yourself to something, but just say you ARE that thing, like Big Meech, or Larry Hoover, or Ellen Degeneres, or God. I like to imagine every single one of these I AM declarations as a shadow cast on the wall of Plato’s cave by this, the platonic ideal, Prince’s declaration that he IS a dove, he IS your conscious, he IS love. 

And yes, I get all the Christ imagery. I’m not one of our nation’s leading Prince scholars, and for all I know he’s writing directly from Jesus’ POV, and this is just the best-ever Christian rock by leaps and bounds and even more leaps and bounds. But isn’t it more fun to read it like Prince is saying all these things about himself?

Prince is talking to YOU. It is you and Prince. You are having a conversation. It’s incredibly intimate and you feel truly alive and truly present and truly in your body. You feel very yourself and very grounded despite the fact that you and Prince are having this conversation in the eye of a temporal mega-storm at the nexus of infinite timestreams. And Prince is telling you:

He is all things, yet entirely his own thing. 

He is all things, but there’s nothing like him.

And he would wink out of existence — and then be nowhere, and yet somehow everywhere, still — and he would do it just for YOU.

The whole business is pretty fucking Prince.

I am going to see Prince tonight in Anaheim. I’ve told myself for months I was going to really get familiar with his entire discography, not just the hits. It never really happened. I listened to his self-titled second album a bunch last year, but haven’t continued the education past that point. Yesterday, I bought the “Purple Rain” album. I figured I could either skim the catalog, cramming in the time remaining, or just really focus up on “Purple Rain.” It seemed very Prince to pay attention to one thing obsessively instead of trying to absorb (and inevitably under-appreciating) the whole sweep of the catalog really, really fast. Who wants to listen to a lot of Prince just a little bit? I feel quite certain that Prince would rather me listen to a little bit of Prince a lot. 

And on “Purple Rain,” after “When Doves Cry” comes “I Would Die 4 U,” because fuck any artist who ever wants to feel like they’ve accomplished anything in comparison, Prince put “When Doves Cry” and “I Would Die 4 U” back to fucking back. And so I decided to telescope in even further, on to just “I Would Die 4 U,” for a few hours, while I wrote about it. 

I resist playing songs over and over, or albums over and over. I tell myself I don’t want them to get “played out” for me. But I am realizing that making sure nothing is ever “played out” comes at the cost of nothing ever really being “played in”: broken in like a favorite old t-shirt, allowed to put down roots in a particular time and place in your life the way music and other media do when you have access to less of it or just the will and the love to focus in on just a little piece of it. The bummer of not really living with works of art for an extended period is, you don’t get a chance to have a second opinion about them, or a third, or a ninetieth. I am not trying to be Old Man Media here. I’m also not the first person to make these observations. But I am trying to remind myself that it’s silly to make a rule like “don’t let things get played out,” silly to resist obsessive attention instead of embracing it, flexing it like a muscle, learning (or re-learning) how to fall all the way into something, be it a book, or a movie, or a cuisine, or a project, or anything, really. It almost never matters what the subject of such focus is. Tight focus on the most mundane or frivolous thing can’t help but yield unique results. On the flip side, you could have distracted, slightly cranky, slightly checking-your-phone-to-see-if-there’s-a-better-party-going-on-across-town focus on something that’s very deep and demanding of attention, and all you’re going to yield is mediocrity. 

And more importantly, practicing obsession on seemingly inconsequential things is still practice. That’s practice that will serve you well when it’s time for the big stuff, whatever the big stuff ends up being.

It’s fun to feel cranky about technology while listening to Prince because you know whatever slight Luddite inclination you have, Prince would either back you up on it or tell you you’re not going far enough. In 2010, Prince said the Internet was “over”. And I have the life I have thanks in part to the Internet, and you are reading this on the Internet, and I know the more gadget-bloggery among us probably snickered when he said that. But to me, Prince can say stuff like that without sounding like Old Man Media. Prince isn’t Old Man anything, despite being, y’know, older. 

Just imagine Prince pointing at a giant barn full of servers and going “THAT… IS OVER.” Then imagine all the red blinking server lights blinking out one by one in shame. You can’t help but think we’d still be super-duper futuristic without that stupid old Internet, because you can’t help but believe the impossible while listening to “I Would Die 4 U.” You have to imagine we’d still have a sort of Internet even after Prince declared our computer-based one over, but that it would be a much cooler (truly COOLER, in the sense it would be a secret) one that functioned entirely via word of mouth and gypsy language and coded symbols and whispers and ruffles and positively gigantic hair.

A secret, Prince-inspired emotional Internet. It does not sound remotely realistic. But it does sound so much more awesome than what the Internet can come to seem like after one of those Long Afternoons Of The Soul: a running firefight of bullshit. 

It’s not that I don’t want the future. I want the future. I just don’t always want the kind of future you can realistically envision spiraling outwards from the present we are in right now.

To me, the Prince of “I Would Die 4 U” is reminding us that there is something outside of everything, and you can go there any time just by choosing to. And we can make our world look like that one. All we have to do is cultivate what would be the primary hardware of that theoretical gypsy whisper-net: endless attention. Minds that can concentrate perfectly and forever, discern signal from noise, not just notice nuance but treasure it, these minds would be the Googles and Facebooks of this imaginary computerless backroom Internet.

“You have to get obsessed and stay obsessed.” I remember that, the second-to-last line from “The Hotel New Hampshire” by John Irving, and I don’t even have to look it up, because I read it when I was in my super-duper John Irving obsessive period in high school when I tried (unsuccessfully) to read all of his AND Vonnegut’s books in a year. Both of those guys were trying to teach me how not to be cynical. I already needed the help, and I still do. I still believe the journey out of cynicism is one worth taking. I am still on the road.

Meanwhile, “I Would Die 4 U” is playing for the 52nd time according to iTunes. In it, Prince is trying to teach me how to be simultaneously in the moment and outside of it, and that’s all I’ve ever really wanted to know how to do.