"that sweet young boy Todd" (2001)

...that sweet young boy Todd who gave me his number on Halloween -- turns out he's 23, which is fantastic, because I didn't know how I would let him down if he liked me, and now that's solved. Surf is nice but w/o pot it's not the same...w/out wanting to fuck someone there it's not the same. Maybe I'll go back and do my set -- maybe not, maybe I'll go back home and write (?). Or do something, something to try to redeem the wasted day. Maybe when I read the story so far I'll be inspired to continue it. I'd better. And I'll do some more news for the site, and write my press release. Yeah, yeah -- I'll sit there watching TV and needlepointing. No! Come on, Janice. Hey, I didn't smoke tonight -- smelled it, wanted it, didn't hunt it down. Better if I don't go to Surf. Nothing there for me tonight...A one-woman show? Not likely. A book! A book! A...an I don't know. I don't know anything. At least it's not a major depression, but it sure feels like a rut. I cancelled the day after Thanksgiving. I'm glad. I see Judith tomorrow and I have nothing to report. I have nothing to write to myself. What's the story after this one? A suicide letter? Something about the psychic?

"I am psychically weak" (2000)

I am psychically weak. I would not be able to lift the car off my own baby. I would be too conscious of my ability to fail. "Other women do it all the time," I'd be thinking. "Just lift." And all the while, my baby crushed under the chassis wheel, or wherever the baby lands under the car.

What happens if you lift the car and the baby's dead anyway from having a car on it? Wouldn't the shock just cause you to drop the car again, and splat! The baby would be paste.

"starts hugging and making out" (1996)

...starts hugging and making out w/me, then we go to bed, feeling and kissing and touching and then he says he's not sure what it is but something's changed, and he doesn't want to make love to me the way he did, and I try to be patient for about, oh, 5 full minutes, then I hop off the bed and say you know what? You're not ready for this. This is a responsibility you can't handle. You're so trapped in your act and your fears, and I told him this is a power play, this stinks of the time

you said you couldn't see me because you have a date, my teeth were chattering, and I was afraid and mad, and I told him so, I said if after all the fucking let's get it on of the last 2 months you're going to tell me you want to be my friend I am going to be disappointed and annoyed. It's always some redemption drama/catharsis scene, how much enough can it possible suffer? So then he starts leaking tears, not crying, just sort of nonchalantly rolling out of his eyes and down his face, and he says he doesn't have to go away to figure out what he wants, and since I can't paraphrase his meaning, I'll quote, he wants "my clarity, my vision, my level of awareness, my attention," and he's afraid he doesn't have it. So then I comforted him, we finished cooking, ate, and went to bed, which was pretty gratifying all around, then I came home and I was wired so I called Kim and smoked a bunch, didn't read or anything instead.

"carpe diem: seize the dime" (1994)

came together like
two people folding a blanket

law of the streets, baby
carpe diem: seize the dime
                  you snooze you looze

this and other
hard feelings I hold
                  against you

like the free square white sugar mint
like the second in your dream
                  when the man with the gun

I am out of my mind 
but you are even more out of my mind.

this hard new kick I'm on 

"Chicken Fight" (1993)

CHICKEN FIGHT

we recognize each other
two half people, trying to
mold ourselves around wholes
whole people, whole smiling
beautiful people, incredibly lucky
who let us ride on our backs
like geckos from hell

I never see you
alone anymore, it's
hard to remember,
I think at Danny's
birthday party I was
sitting alone in the
coatbedroom on the coats.
I hate parties, I hate
parties where you are
there with Nancy and
I watch you sit together
and hold hands on the
couch, and then Danny
comes over and sits 

it was intense
it was volatile
it was fucked up
it ended badly,
    so badly --

the sex
the fights

he was so sullen
he was so hurt 

"Women gather their things" (1991)

Women gather their things
to them when wounded you hurt them 
they make motions to leave
but slowly, lighting cigarettes
and fussing with buttons 
giving you plenty of time
to ask them to stay
they bring their things nearer,
rifle through purses, run their
stockings
cry and cruse softly
re arrange themselves, re armor
re prepare, once devastated and
determined
not to let it happen again
taking everything
tidy, spiteful, leaving no trace
taking everything with them 

Helping

That is what Minky is doing here.

Not too long ago, I took out all my old notebooks and put them in chronological order. 

 

At first, I was like, whoa, that's a lot! Good job, me. Then I was like, actually, for twenty years, that's not that much. Cancel the kudos.

There are some gaps in the chronology, times when I wasn't writing in my notebook much. 2000 was a hazy year for me; I didn't want to look at my life in my own handwriting; if I'd dared face myself on the page I would have had to change my life immediately instead of eventually. Then there's a notebook that ends halfway through with an entry on 9/10/01. The next one picks up about three weeks later.

The college years were light, too. I didn't "journal" back then, I just wrote down phrases, ideas, dialogue for the book I was diligently writing, called YUCKIE LOVE. "Yuckie" was an acronym for "Young Urban College Kid" (as opposed to all those old college kids); the book was half plot and half sociology, with bar charts and stand-alone essays on things like "The First 1000 Hours of a New Relationship." I was convinced that I had nailed the zeitgeist of my friends and my time, and every single day I could not wait to finish my book, have it published, and get famous like Tama Janowitz. Then Douglas Coupland published GENERATION X, and I dropped dead.

I'm grateful that YUCKIE LOVE was not published, not that it had any opportunity to be. At the time, recognizing that my book had been rendered useless, I thought that my whole world had collapsed; the thing I went to bed thinking about and woke up in the morning eager to greet again had collapsed into dust. I never imagined that one day I'd be happy it never saw the light of day. But I've skimmed pieces of it in the past five years, and it's...well, let's just call it "juvenile."

Anyway. I'm going to be mostly offline for the next two weeks, but I don't want to neglect the blog as badly as I have in the past, so I'm going to put up a few auto-posts that will go up in my absence. They're scans of old notebook entries from the above-pictured tub o' writin', with transcriptions underneath (you'll need them). Some of them are just thoughts, sketches for unwritten poems; others are parts of journal entries. I look forward to hearing your reactions, and to writing to you again, gentle reader, upon my return.

Sister from another mother

I heard from Jessie Sholl the other day. Her memoir, DIRTY SECRET: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding, is coming out in December, and I am hanging on this book. The title itself is revelatory, makes me think of my own mother -- why is our mothers' problem our secret? Why does it hang over our heads? It's vicarious shame, like vicarious embarrassment, the agony you feel when you're watching someone make an ass of themselves in public (which of course the Germans have a name for: fremdschämen). It's empathy, but it's too much empathy. It involves entering the mental realm of the disordered in order to understand them. I've likened interacting with my mother and her husband to jumping into a double dutch; you just try to anticipate how they're going to turn the ropes, try to stay inside the eye of their cyclone of fucking lunacy. 

I was watching Hoarders on A&E the other day, thinking suddenly, I wouldn't want my child to live like this. I thought about all the heartbroken parents who genuinely love their kids, but whose kids are suffering from addiction and mental illness to the point where they have to be given up for gone. I thought about how far I would go for my kid, how I'd fly anywhere on the map for them, and how I would march in there (wherever there was) and physically drag them to rehab, or a hospital, or out of the filth they've been living in, and get them cleaned up and safe. So why won't I do that for my mom? Because I tried once and failed? I must not have tried very hard. Shouldn't I try again? I wouldn't give up on her if she was my kid.

I KNOW, I KNOW. My mother is not my kid. I KNOW. She is childlike in her helplessness, in her stubbornness, in her lack of practical sense. In the way she lies about things poorly, stupidly, like children do, with pie all over their fingers and face, insisting that they didn't eat the pie. She is a fucking eight-year-old brat at times. But she's not legally a child. If I had a kid who lived like this, I could appeal to the authorities and courts, I could send that child to a disciplinary school, I could have that child kidnapped, like my friend A.'s parents did to him when he was fourteen, had him woken up in his bed in Brooklyn by two men who threw a bag over his head and tied him up, then threw him in a van and took him to the airport, where he was sent to boot camp in the desert for three months. If my mother were my child, this would be legal.

But she is neither a child, nor is she mine. She is her own adult. She is legally allowed to live however she wants, and though I don't see how that could be possible, the authorities have told me so. Animal Welfare, Building Department, social services for the elderly -- they say there's nothing they can do. Even the guy I wanted to hire to clean the place up told me he couldn't and wouldn't do it. "This is how they choose to live," he told me. "They're not unhappy about it. You're unhappy about it."

I didn't realize, until I had this stray thought, that I still thought she was mine, that I ever thought she was mine, but of course I always have. Even when I was avoiding her, I knew I could never leave her. The best I could do was stuff her in the attic like Rochester's wife. Now it seems she's escaped.

The strange thing is, she ran away from me. And all this time I thought I was the abandoner. 

Likes

Subway reader, 2010, by Amanda Stern.

Also: Jersey Shore. I know, I know -- it's a minstrel show, it's offensive, and it glorifies steroids and violence.

But this was my young adulthood.

These were my friends, this is what we did: we pre-gamed before going out to clubs to dance half naked on bars; we drank ourselves sick and shouted at people; then we drunkenly hooked up with each other at 4 in the morning when all other prospects had failed.

And in between the fights, and the bullshit, and the couple who can't stay together or break up, and the one guy whose pickup tactics border on sketchy, and the cliques within the cliques, we had fun, often by singing stupid songs to make each other laugh.

As Paulie D says, at every opportunity, for no reason, at top volume, "Oh yeah!"

I'm not saying these Jersey Shore people should be rich or rewarded because they behave like obnoxious, drug-addled idiots. GOD FORBID someone had followed us around with cameras at that age; thank the lord there was no internet back then; we would have been even more criminally self-involved than we were. I agree with those who say that none of these people should be famous, nor should I have an opinion on the upcoming season of The Bachelor (that Brad guy again? bullshit...). However, it suits me fine that this show is on the air, because it's like watching myself at the age of nineteen, when I was, if I do say so myself, somewhat of a J-WOWW. As in WOWW, you should really wear more than that when you leave the house. WOWW, you probably shouldn't mix ecstasy and acid if you ever want to have a coherent thought again.

PICS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN:

There's something to the adage that ignorance is bliss. Or not ignorance, but a special kind of not-understanding that leads to a groping about the world with only feelings, no concepts or words, and not even emotional feelings so much as physical ones, sensations and pre-verbal desires. This was the world to get lost in, this world that sounded like drums in your ears that was really your pulse, the feeling of being pulled forward by the front of your pants, irresistible, how the cigarette smoke spoke to you in sines and cosines, explaining determinism on the couch of your friend's mom's apartment and this is the most comfortable couch I ever...

Other People's Movies

You know what I sometimes like to do, is make movies with my friends.

Friends like, for instance, my dearest Emilie McDonald, pictured here at the recent sold-out debut screening of the short film she authored, directed, starred in, and co-edited, Other People's Houses. (Also pictured: Co-star Miranda Smollanoff.) Thanks to the Bowery Poetry Club for hosting us!

Also, friends like my hubs Bill, who shot and co-edited the thing.

(I held the boom mike, and I hosted the screening, in case you're wondering what I'm doing there.)

What's even better is when those friend-made movies wind up screening at the Big Apple Film Festival, which is what's happening on Saturday, November 6, 2:30-4pm, at the Tribeca Cinemas at 54 Varick St. (corner of Canal). Tickets are expected to sell out for this program (which is program number 20), and are available online at www.bigapplefilmfestival.com through Oct. 29. Come catch some homegrown indie cinema with us!