tasting
It occurs to me that I haven’t had soft serve all summer. Walking back from the gym this morning I hopscotched over what I would venture to guess was human shit and even then, pinching my nose and bounding skyward, feeling sorry in a directionless way and meanwhile investigating the sidewalks teary gray terrain I was thinking about Serena and Dan ordering ice cream flavors that didn’t mesh.
The Gossip Girl novels were published in paperback and featured on the covers various arrangements of two or three mostly white, all skinny girls in fluttering club dresses or prim skirts and their heads cut off at the end of the page before you could see the eyes. I began to read them at ten. Once my mother picked one up and read the blurb on the back which described the books as, “Sex and the City for the younger set”. She pointed this out to me not to mean that I could not go on with reading them but more, it seemed, out of a sense that if we both understood I was probably too young to be reading them then that was much the same as her setting some kind of rule that said I could not. Business-like, I agreed they were for teenagers and she forgot and I continued to writhe and keen over descriptions of eflin Blair Waldorf stepping down as if from a stepladder off a pair of pale green wedges or all the loving sentences on the very clean, noble lines of Serena van der Woodsen’s thin wrists.
Release your fear: I am not building up to Blake Lively discourse—to me the matter is simple: damning traits of Blake Lively: got married on a plantation, best friends with Taylor Swift also generally seems to have just as bad a personality and taste as Taylor Swift, advocates not using hair conditioner. what Blake Lively does have going for her: the innovative way she says the word “juice” in Ben Affleck’s The Town, the suits in beautifully stupid romp A Simple Favor, the scene in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants where she runs on the beach at soccer camp with her hair down loose which is insane but looked so amazing that it changed countless lives—because I really don’t associate Blake Lively with Gossip Girl at all. Glad she could donate her time to us in the CW mines but Serena is a being far beyond the bounds of one random Californian woman. While I am of course intellectually aware of Blake’s relation to the text when I see Serena that is just Serena. I don’t know what to say. I have a very beautiful mind. But back to the peppermint.
This lingers in my psyche. I have tried to explain to varied groups at a number of parties and to multiple dates in several bars what a profound impact Dan and Serena’s mismatched desserts had on my development upon encountering it as a track-suited sixth grader. It’s impossible to say whether I’ve ever sufficiently gotten the point across. Can one get the point across? Sorry to be existential. Sometimes a person does feel rather existential. So this is what happens. Dan and Serena go to Serendipity 3 just like Michelle Pfeiffer with those rugrats in One Fine Day and like me on a day trip to New York with my grandmother and two aunts and four cousins. Patrick puked in the car both ways that time and on every other trip. It was terrible. I had the frozen hot chocolate. They order. They eat. As Serena breezily demands, they switch. It was terrible. A mouthful of peppermint sauce making a noxious slurry with the hunks of banana left in Dan’s molars. Or so I figure. There aren’t many details. It’s a fairly self-evident scenario even to a not quite eleven-year-old reader. The combined effect of the two sundaes is a poor one and as Dan chokes it down he looks across the table at perfect, gleaming Serena and thinks to himself that hopefully this is not a sign as to the forecast for their own melding, though it obviously is.
Megan is away and I’ve been eating my own dinners and breakfasts and lunches again which is a curioser experience now every time. I ate an entire cucumber chopped and slathered in maybe seven condiments plus seeds. The farmers market tomatoes last Sunday were almost vulgar in their beauty and I’ve had them on toast and a bed of mayo most days this week. Black bean burger patties with hot sauce and strawberry ice cream on the side. A peanut butter sandwich at work. Cold noodles with soy sauce and two small lemon cookies. Four plums and a popsicle. Hot cheetos in cottage cheese. Protein shake and a pickle. Scrambled eggs with grated parmesan. Frozen fish sticks and shoestring fries in the air fryer as a special treat when I was feeling a hateful sort of sad, which gratefully fell out and off of me with the application of some drinkable THC and Interview with the Vampire season two1. All my little plotting. I am losing track of old rules while finding pleasure. I notice myself being more generous to myself and wince at the soggy fact but then am proud too and more than that washed in a love of such magnitude and intensity which I’m afraid I once thought existed only in Marauders fan fiction from the early 2000s or the novels of Laurie Colwin because Megan’s care for me and desire to see me fed is so obvious and easy that it has created in me a capacity for ease that was missing all the time. The flavors together now sing.
The only other news of the day is that I got a microcurrent device on a very good sale. After the dopamine hit of the purchase began to subside I felt bad about spending money and about valorizing youth and betraying the feminists who came before me or something to that end but the truth is I become unbearably morose to be around when my face is puffy and so I am doing a public service by getting out in front of that and I like the tiny zaps. It’s amazing and meditative and my hangups are dead as I Zamboni my jawline in perfect bliss. I may get the glass skin overnight Korean face mask that keeps getting advertised to me on Instagram, too. Though in my heart I know, and really believe, it is my obligation to make the effort to be advertised to as little as possible—to stop being such a mark, to untangle my changing moods from just Buying Shit, to find value in myself and in the world that is not based on physical appearance, to make my mind as free as it can be of capital influence, which, of course, is not even very free—I also know that I am just one worm nibbling my way through the corpse of the American empire all the time faceless wordless transitioning flesh into flesh and if I am ever going to make myself into a good person I think I will have to meanwhile make the most of my good skin so as to give myself moral support.
skinny bitch moon from August 6th
It is frankly criminal that I am only just getting around to season 2 but what can I say I’m a bitch in sicko love and I rarely make time to watch TV alone. My expectations could only have been described as high and still I am knocked out, bowled over, gagged, choked, freaked, et al by how good this season in particular is. I have two more episodes which I will be watching as soon as I get home tonight and it does feel like a special event on the calendar though it will be me alone in underwear with maybe some wine. Sam Reid… now there’s a Serena.