Poppy Z. Brite's Blog, page 77

Generically Titled Update

It feels as though I'm overdue in posting here, but every possible subject I can think of seems doomy and gloomy, which is not really representative of where I am. I take side-eyed comfort in the fact that this is a somewhat difficult time due to measurable, concrete circumstances rather than free-floating depression. There's no one huge terrible thing, but my house is in great disarray, and the books have really overrun the available shelf space, and it seems that many of my necessary household possessions (e.g. vacuum cleaner) are succumbing to planned obsolescence all at once, and one of our oldest cats has a chronic, increasingly unpleasant (for us more than her) health problem, and this and that and blah blah blah.

On the bright side, the weather has been cool and gorgeous, and I've cleaned up much of the garden's summer disorder, planted petunias and parsley and chocolate mint, harvested a very respectable crop of Padron peppers, for which Chris was previously paying his produce guy $10 a pound. They're very tasty, but I had no idea they were such fancy boutique peppers and had been putting them on my homemade pizzas and things. Now they're featured on the Green Goddess' dinner menu in a seared tuna dish with smoked plum sauce. Moving up in the world!

Eggplants are starting to come in too, in all different colors (I planted an assortment). And this is strange: did you ever hear of cucumber vines that produced one (1) tiny cucumber all summer, the season when cucumbers are supposed to grow, and then took off fruiting when the weather turned cooler? Last year I tried to grow Mexican Sour Gherkins, a charming miniature cultivar whose fruits look like tiny watermelons, but all my seedlings damped off. This year the vines grew so vigorously they killed my two other types of cucumber, but had only produced a single ripe fruit (admittedly tasty, but there wasn't much I could do with it). All the others turned black and dropped off while still tiny. Now they actually appear to be staying on the vine and ripening. We shall see.

Insomnia

Can't sleep. Last Saturday I stayed up drinking Diet Coke until 3:00 AM, then remembered that I wanted to be up for the Saints game at noon. And you see where that got us. Maybe I just won't sleep. Maybe I'll read another dumb but entertaining "romantic suspense" novel by Beverly Barton, my latest improvement-free pleasure.

(I refuse to have guilty pleasures; I'm too old for them. But I do admit that some of my pleasures are unlikely to improve me.)

New Orleans has been almost autumn-like these past few days. Low humidity, a cool wind, a snap in the air, pumpkins in the stores. Fall might be a good time to regrow a few layers of skin I seem to have lost lately. That guilt I wish I could talk about but can't (nothing to do with Catholicism, by the way, in case anyone wondered). The way music fills and hurts me in a way it hasn't really done since I was about 25. The feeling that somehow I've lost the path of the Beam.

I don't mean to be all gloomy, though. I'm really not. You should have heard me telling Chris about my plans to do a karaoke performance of "Only the Good Die Young" at St. Louis Cathedral this morning. OK, I guess I can't let that go by without an explanation. It started with Chris saying something about our trip to Amsterdam last November being for our "twentieth wedding anniversary," and I reminded him that we never had a wedding.

PZB: Do you want to have a wedding? You have to wear the big white dress. Let's spend $20,000 on our wedding. Everybody does it!

CdB: Yeah, everybody does it!

PZB: We'll have it in St. Louis Cathedral, because the priest there likes me so much.* We'll get a pumpkin-shaped carriage like Harry Connick Jr., and after the ceremony, I'll do a couple of hours of karaoke for the guests. OH! I'll do "Only the Good Die Young"!

CdB: That'll go over well at St. Louis Cathedral.

PZB: I'm a bad Catholic, aren't I?

The karaoke plan occurred to me because I love to sing, but nobody loves to hear me, and I figure a captive audience of friends and family wouldn't dare hurt my feelings on what is supposed to be My Big Fucking Day.



*Monsignor Crosby Kern, who actually spat at Our Lady of Good Counsel/St. Henry parishioners protesting the closing of our churches in Jackson Square on Palm Sunday 2009.

Why Can't You Just

I don't know. I just don't know. There's so much pain and heartbreak in the world already. I can't stand the idea of adding to it in any way. I'm ashamed of having added to it in the past, and want to completely avoid doing so in the future. But I don't suppose you can completely avoid adding to it as long as you're alive.

I'm 100% down with the concept of rejecting the gender binary, but that's not where I am on the spectrum. I sometimes wish I were. If it weren't used as an anti-trans slur, I think I'd be perfectly happy with being an "it." It evokes no emotion in me one way or the other. It seems calm and neutral. " docbrite is in its house, lying on the living room rug, stretching its spine in a patch of sunlight and wondering what it will have for its dinner." See, just objectively, I like that. But as well as being an ugly slur against people who don't wish to be reduced to objects, it probably also indicates a certain lack of self-esteem: I don't even like it when people refer to one of the cats as "it." If you can't tell, guess; the cat won't care and you'll have a 50% chance of being right. And this paragraph is making the Knights of Ni cry, so I'm now going to end it.

I just deleted a whole paragraph about Billy Joel. You're welcome. I should probably delete this entire post, but fuck it.

My Own Private Liberty DeVitto

Even I, with my musical illiteracy, know there are few things more valuable to a composer than a great drummer. And Liberty DeVitto was an excellent drummer. And Billy Joel probably did screw over his band to some degree. Still, after reading most of that biography last night (see my 92785 tweets on the subject; I haven't dared check to see if I lost most of my followers yet), I feel inspired to make up my own Liberty DeVitto quote:

"Yeah, we met this scientist who invented a cure for world hunger, but Billy bought it and threw it in the ocean off Oyster Bay. He was drinking Scotch and yelling 'Fuck you, I'm Billy Joel!' while he did it. I think he spent a lot of his life being frustrated because his dick was so small. I was born with a fat eight-incher, and finally -- this was while I was writing most of the songs on The Nylon Curtain -- he asked me if I'd consider a transplant. Just like, 'Hey, Lib, man, can I have your dick? It's not right that a big star like me should have such a small one.' So I did it. I let him have my dick. Because I really loved the guy, you know? Had it transplanted right onto him. He never gave me credit. I had a kidney removed and cryonically frozen at the same time, just in case he ever needed an extra one, but I heard he took it out of the deep freeze and pissed on it a few years ago. Pissed on it with my dick. I'm not bitter, but that just ain't right, you know? I think he was mad because Christie Brinkley always had a secret thing for me. Hey, Christie, if you're reading this, you still got my number, right?"

"I Ended Up Farting Furniture Polish"

Some mysterious illness has sent me to bed with dizziness, delirium, headache, vague nausea, and feelings of withdrawal even though I have not been doing drugs. Also feeling weird and guilty about The Whole Trans Thing. I'd explain why, but it would probably violate other people's privacy. Never gonna please everybody. Never gonna please everybody. Maybe never gonna please anybody. (repeat ad infinitum)

Have spent much of tonight live-tweeting Billy Joel: The Biography by Mark Bego, should you wish to subject yourself to such horrors. I don't know why I do these things. You should all shun me. But I must say it actually seems like a pretty thorough and serious musical biography. As I said over there, comments from rabid Billy Joel fans had me expecting it to portray him shooting smack with one hand, diddling nineteen-year-old girls with the other, and wrecking a car at the same time. None of that has happened yet, but I'm only on page 123 (they just recorded The Stranger, so he's about to get a lot more famous and probably behave badly as a result). Also, BEST. SUICIDE. ATTEMPT. EVER. (See, and Google if you wish, title of this post.)

Of course one should be inherently suspicious of any rock biography, including mine. It just isn't a reliable genre. If there is such a thing as a reliable genre. Which, come to think of it, I doubt. (I told you I was delirious.) But in general, his interviews (which Bego often quotes from other sources, but I don't think that is a terrible thing) are funny and insightful and worth reading even if it turns into a train wreck later. I mean, it is about a rock star. (What was it Neil said? "An otherwise quiet earthquake"? And look at him now!)

730 Days

Just about ready to smash something, or at least vomit.

The one bright spot during the debacle that was today's Saints/Falcons game occurred when marquisdd came over and we took a third-quarter break to go up the street to a second line parade. The Saints scored a touchdown while we were there; people were dressed in fabulous black and gold outfits; neighbors were enjoying each other's company. (There exists on marquisdd 's camera a picture of me in my Dutch men's underwear and my neighbor in h...

House of Leaves

In keeping with my tendency to discover things ten years or so after everyone else does, I'm finally reading Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. Of course I've known about the book for years, but I think I subconsciously had some idea that I wouldn't be smart/patient enough to read it, and that if I did, it would somehow drive me insane with terror. A little over halfway through now, and I won't claim I understand everything, but I certainly didn't have any trouble getting into it. I figur...

Sometimes The Agoraphobia Is Right

Well, apparently taking myself out to make groceries was not the panacea I required. I got the groceries, but backed into a lady's SUV in the parking lot. Totally my fault, though I could not tell you how I did it if you put a gun to my head. I only dinged my rear fender and cracked a taillight, but I scratched up her passenger door pretty good, and just guessing from the super-fancy private school stickers on her car and the high-poppalorum street address she gave me, I bet it's going to be ...

Me, Plain

Me, Plain

That thing where you're supposed to post a picture of yourself before you get "fixed up"? Well, I don't get "fixed up" much these days, but the reading glasses come off and the hair gets tamed with some pomade before I leave the house -- which I plan to do very soon.

Hanging Around

I haven't been able to post because I was too busy hanging upside down. marrus kindly lent me her Teeter Hang-Up inversion table (see last post), and I can hardly stay off the thing. After the first day I had it, I was almost free of pain. I didn't even know how to move because my body felt so different; I'd find myself doing things (as simple as getting up from a chair) in my habitual slow, careful, old-creeping-Jesus way and being surprised when they didn't hurt. It was an actual high, like...