be someone be someone
Once you leave a three-page handwritten poem of tearstained apologia and promises of unending ardor spilling over into sickness on the windshield of a woman’s Honda CR-V things change. The world became ordered in accordance with the fact of my humiliating heartbreak; I was a pathetic loser and I felt much better. In the fighting and the wanting and keeping–particularly if you are extremely immature– the pain is constant, new and ever advancing injuries moaning open every time the text tone chimed. At home with what I had done there was the white noise of old stings, but nothing left to be afraid of. Having debased myself at length, and leaving a physical artifact of that debasement, the make-ups and breakups I’d once imagined would go on for all my life were now so obviously, so entirely, perfectly over. That I would even touch her hand again was unthinkable. I was twenty-four! I was even worse then. I applied to fifty or sixty jobs in one manic Saturday slurping down red bull before beer and was hired to speak to senior citizens on the telephone about their car insurance at twice my retail pay. I quit I moved I saved I thought of nothing but going forward & two years later dragged and begged and pushed and hoped my pale subcompact past a broken open deer in New Jersey and through flash floods in Virginia before stopping in Nashville to drink with my sister at a rooftop bar where our soldier cousin was turned away at the door (he was wearing no sleeves) then on through the unbearable soul-scooping openness of north Texas highway, into and out of dusty Arizona rest stops, over, barely, mountainous New Mexico to land at last before a “LA-bron” billboard paid for by the city’s preeminent ambulance chaser law firm I guess less to encourage Lebron James to become a Laker but to signal their support of this development. It was 2018. I lived here now.
ALL THIS TO SAY . All right. I’ve been in Los Angeles long enough now that the years before I moved seem less than real to me, as if I were a sleepy child until twenty-six and then fell out of bed into my life. That sounds stupid. It is stupid. Another dull as dishwater story about moving to the big city and doing exactly nothing there but thinking about yourself and how you moved to the big city. I don’t think I am quite so bad as all that all the time but I do want to be wary. Jemima Kirke Instagram post “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much” yeah, babe.
Even so I have been thinking a lot–because of my solipsistic nature, because I was on my period, because of the mostly inane discourse about “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman this week which reminded me of the moment in 2015 when I would play her Greatest Hits album (which fucking rules) constantly at the Barnes and Noble store which employed me and my favorite gay coworker Justin would tease me for foisting my lesbian music on the masses and stupidly this would make me feel more firmly like a real live queer person than any sex I’d ever had–about my old self and what clues she might offer about the person I will become next. The constant strangeness of not knowing if the who you have decided to be is the right who is a closed loop of checking and squinting and checking like jiggling the doorknob three times four times five to watch the lock hold its ground over again before leaving the house.
It is probably some warped self-importance that makes me addicted to believing everything about myself is something I chose and therefore anything I don’t like signifies an error I made. I know that. I no longer wonder about what I would be if I had gone to a different college or studied hard instead of spending time combating my body into thinness or left that party before things went sideways. These are the concerns of childhood and I have set them down like dolls (the old Mes all lined up in different shirts and the same unkept hair at differing lengths) or so I say and say and mean as much as one can mean things. Imagining alternate versions of my personal history and theorizing about how these alterations would reanimate the present was a beloved compulsion for so long that in letting go of this practice I’ve felt a bit adrift. Maybe I will always want to gaze at my own puddles but against my will then I must keep my eyes on the road.
ALL THIS TO SAY. Well. This is a year to get stronger. To lift heavy things and read the news and poems. I want to spill less water on the floor when I wash dishes. I am trying to teach myself to write again and in doing so I have written a lot of what I know to be drivel and I am fighting with myself all the time to find something worthwhile beyond the trick of “voicey-ness” and to say something of substance. Perhaps, not there yet. I need to do more for others and smile more at strangers and say hi to the bus driver and ask my coworkers about their kids or garden projects not as an appeasement to sexism or because I think performing niceness can will me into enlightenment but because it’s healthy and I refuse to let introversion and the preference, often, to be left to myself, morph into the antisocial selfishness of 21st century living. Though sometimes it does. I need to not get snippy even briefly if my girlfriend wallops me at dominoes. I need to throw away jeans that won’t fit again unless I’m sliced in half like a ham sandwich. This is a year to improve my push-up form and stop saying I don’t know when asked what I am thinking although neither of these has proved natural or easy or within my current means.
It took me longer to leave my hometown than I expected. I had been planning my escape since I was three. Detailed, rigorously plotted dreamworlds in waiting which I tweaked over time. Then when the chance first came, I was scared and, yes, broke, but also scared. For a long time after I was ashamed of that and I attributed any sufferings, cosmically, to that cowardice. But I have killed now or am killing the demented magical thinking that forever ordered my inner life and dictated that all things exist within a Rube Goldberg machine of cause and effect over which I of all people have been put in charge So what if I was chicken? Life goes on. I stayed til I could go and then I went. Whatever. A friend told me she read somewhere online that Capricorns are born small adults, and nothing really makes sense until they’ve grown up into big bodies in the world who are looked at with seriousness and then finally, they can play, like Benjamin Buttons but not gross. Or something to this effect. If I have bastardized this quasi-wisdom into something more suited to my needs, then only all the more appropriate. I’ve aged up to keep in step with my spirit lately and want to make my days reflect this. For a long time, I felt very mature and some of that time I really was and some of that time I really was faking it and some of that time I was confusing thinking a lot with knowing but now I feel baby fresh all the time which is better.
ALL THIS TO SAY. It’s been a long week and I will have fourteen hours of award show prep and production and celebrity hand holding and pushing people toward their seats and organizing prizes on tables and cheeses in green rooms for work tomorrow which will be both fun and awful and while I sometimes feel bad about having a job meant for a new college grad I also sometimes think it doesn’t matter, really, and that work has very little to do with any of the things in the world that are worth thinking very much about. After that: Sunday and the rest of my life. I tried to make an ordered list of the last ten years as I can remember it as an exercise in noticing and then letting go and what came out by mistake is a shitty poem which I will include below as exposure therapy.
westward ho: a map
bachelor of arts bag boy. sick, suspended, spinning, heliotrope. laughing
writing in other beds on the floor at night or in the notes app. and bad jobs.
not ready: to learn to cook or to look long in a mirror or
to say that what I thought was first love took something away forever.
not stopping for long enough not touching that yet.
touching anybody else though touching silver lip rings slivers of surgical scars in
bars. sad, afraid and very very happy. H&M leather jacket.
blank days and black cherry Revlon lipstick with a paper plate face. open. then
tricking my boss into fucking me (or so I thought). blonde soft butch
very exciting for having little wrinkles and smoking and getting sad at night
in her ugly apartment in a dead downtown and
she says “I love you” the second time she makes me come so I have my first girlfriend and am a new person though in the end that was
nothing to do with her at all. I used to think
everything that ever happened to me I did to myself and
this was my balm against the idea of being in danger.
I don’t think that anymore but in her case it’s basically true.
how would I know I was a dyke if I never really knew any?
the kind who rode mountain bikes to women’s houses and married them instead of just reading Adrienne Rich.
sorry about all the parties where I flirted with your friends. I was just excited.
that year I learned that real lovers only hurt each other by accident
and how to eat pussy (which was easier than men made it seem) and
I drank Strawberitas at James Taylor in a tube top.
when I realized it was over for good I cried for three days then felt amazing.
like in a bad indie movie where everything that happened was for my benefit.
my snot-nosed growth done as if I’d made the whole thing up I
drove to LA in my baby blue car that’s dead now.
having nothing and no sense of what would happen. which I liked!
having no one but three white plastic bins of clothes, four boxes of books,
one air mattress, two pillows, my many handfuls of trinkets and
a round wooden cross a dying nun made for my aunt at work.
she didn’t want it. which i liked!
bad dates with bad men too much booze and a junk drawer of jobs
and I am excited all the time even when I wonder about dying. and baseball.
a long pause. inside and outside Stephen King’s The Stand. the dying. and then love.
reanimating cell melting unzipping the skin i wore outside myself
love.
astoundingly important and easy, too.
plus switching to men’s sneakers, boiled eggs, Wellbutrin,
sitting next to Jack Quaid at The Creator. He ate sour ropes.
Am I at the now what or is the now what new all the time. tbd.
consider: joining my class action lawsuit against idiot savant streaming television phenomenon TRAITORS for the gross malfeasance enacted by production in last night’s episode which allowed Pilot Peter to live to see another day!! I think the Tina Fey Las Culturistas clip going micro—viral with the girls and gays today about how you should not say your real opinions on people or the art they make if it is possible you’ll work with them someday, which is obviously good business advice for famous people, is also a boring and bloodless way to live, as evidenced, for one, by the virtual death of the celebrity magazine profile and also of anyone doing anything interesting ever BUT I connect with the philosophy as it pertains to a one Parvati Shallow, who I do think Megan and I could become friends with. Therefore, I will tread carefully in saying I worry she may no longer have that dog in her, as it were. Which is great, probably, for actual life but less so for a televised game of Mafia. But I still hope she can right the ship!! ** this very weird and sad story about a British teenager who was telling dangerous criminals he was the son of a Russian oligarch and seemingly got suicided for it????? ** Kacey Musgraves says she isn’t hitting her gravity bong when she wakes up anymore and of course I am excited to see how that impacts the forthcoming album. ** We had quesadillas for dinner last night I can’t remember the last time I had a quesadilla before that which is stupid I think I love quesadillas. ** Will I be happier if I get a haircut? Will my loafers give me blisters tomorrow? Will Francesca Scorsese inadvertently catch me pulling my dress pants out of my crotch in the background of a TikTok? ** Another perfect Boston Rob post. What else? #strong