The Things She Refused to Leave Behind

She lived in a house the size of a matchbox, at the very last address on the very last street in the very last town at the edge of the world. Out of the little kitchen window she stood at to wash the dishes, she could see only sunshine and smoke – white and hazy and filled with nothing, like a magic trick. In fact, from that angle, there was no indication that her house was built on anything at all. It seemed to hang like a constellation, suspended in the void.
The house was as wizened and crooked as she was – stooped and creaking, with crumbling walls inside and a bravely repatched exterior. Everything seemed held together with a few nails and some strategically placed duct tape. And the way it perched on top of its tiny hill – the only one for miles – made it appear in constant danger of capsizing, either back into the laps of her neighbors, or out into the sunshiney nothing.
Her friends, if she had had any, would have called her a packrat. Her neighbors, though they didn’t know her, called her ‘eccentric.’ Even from the bottom of the tiny hill, they could see the evidence of The Things She Refused to Leave Behind. Her front yard was a museum of ceramic pots, small fruit trees, milk crates filled with old car parts – these were hidden under the front porch – tennis balls, and small decorative boulders that served as tanning beds for an endless string of errant cats. And more yet: along the top of the garden fence, an assortment of empty wine bottles, arranged just so. Chipped and repainted lawn gnomes hidden among the trees and flowerbeds. Hubcaps of various sizes nailed around the garage door like enormous dull Christmas lights. A roadcone painted turquoise. Everywhere flowers. Exploding out of pots on the front porch, trailing out of windows and around door frames, smeared like thumbprints along the path to the garden gate. The yard was beautiful, there was no question – everything positioned very exactly, everything cared-for. There was just so much of it.
Inside – as though the yard was only there to catch what spilled out of the house – coffeeandend tables struggled to hold pounds of knick knacks. At least one bookshelf stood against every wall, bursting with musty hardbound and paperback books like rows of uneven teeth, some unread, some falling apart. In corners, piles of alphabetized magazines and newspapers supported the ceiling. Randomly saved beercans and more wine bottles were clustered like modern art displays, and chunky coffee mugs had been filled with soil and now contained the flowers that wouldn’t fit in the garden. An outoftune piano served as the music library. Above it, stretched across a corner of the ceiling, a stained and torn flag bore the symbol of the republic of California. A hobo had thrown it over her after a concert in LA. “Rock and roll, Kurt Cobain is dead,” he had sung to her, as he ran into the street. And pictures. Framed, unframed, pinned to the wall with thumbtacks – old movie posters, show fliers, watercolor paintings, collages made by small children – whose? – and in a tiny gold frame in the middle of the mantelpiece, a timefaded family portrait. Everybody looking slightly to the left.
Her bedroom was at the center of it all. Her bed lay in the middle, a sea of pillows and comforters and handmade quilts. Her closet was like the costume department of a professional theatre company. Pairs of sunglasses and bits of ribbon and scarves and necklaces with charms and bracelets and earrings dangled from every available hook and corner, and stretched across the mirror, and lay like silver puddles on the nightstand. Under her bed, stacks of shoeboxes held the most precious memories – photographs, ticket stubs, letters from old boyfriends, the nametag from her first job, the cast from her first broken wrist, newspaper clippings her mother had saved from the day she was born, her senior yearbook picture, her ragged journals – she had written in one every single day since she was fifteen – and an urn; empty.
She never threw anything away. When she did “a big cleanup,” which she did about twice a year, she simply rotated things. Things that had become less significant would be relegated to the living room. Things from the living room went into the garage. Things in the garage were moved aside or put into boxes with other things, or moved out into the yard. Things in the yard grew into the soil, or became trees, or sometimes escaped through the fence and went clattering down the hill into town, like children on the last day of school. Every so often, on her way home from work or shopping, she would stumble across a hubcap in a neighbor’s yard, and exclaim, “There you are!” and carry it back with her as though she couldn’t live without it. These recaptured treasures would usually find themselves back inside the house and it was sometimes years before they made it outside again.
Only once had something made it far enough away to be lost forever. This was years ago, before she lived in the crooked little house at the edge of the world, before her hair grew wiry and she stopped throwing things away. She was still in LA, living with a boy who had pink hair and wrote songs about love. It was a skateboard, peeling on top, painted orange underneath, that had been modified with a black Sharpie and his young, eager hands. It had rolled away very suddenly one day, on wobbly wheels that badly needed replacing. She had searched for it for months after it happened – spent nights weeping in the cold with a flashlight. Sometimes now, when an errand took her over to the edge of town, she still had a look for it, though LA was a worldandahalf away, and by now her search was more for show than anything – she thought that perhaps if whoever had taken it saw her still looking for it, they might be inclined to return it.

A long time ago, she had been a musician. Now she worked as a secretary for a small real-estate office in town. Recently, the company had moved its location to a nicer, bigger office down the street. The building was light and airy and smelled yellow. She supposed she couldn’t ask for a nicer coffin.
Her coat had hung on the rack by the door for fifty years. It hung like it had done something wrong – the way a dog does when it has pissed on your favorite rug. Like a hapless sack of guilty potatoes. It quietly watched people come in and out. Sometimes someone coming in – a new client, or a skittery new intern – would glimpse it out of the corner of their eye and turn abruptly, hands raised, mistaking it for a silent third person in the room. Sometimes, when the air outside was silent and the office unbearably still, it would fall off the rack. Just for a lark.
Her desk held no knick knacks or books. She hadn’t collected any in the fifty years she had been living in the crooked house and working for the real-estate company. Everything she had at home came from a time before. Besides, company policy stated that there was to be no intrusion of personal life into the office. It was a pity – she could have used the storage space.
She walked to and from work every day the same way – down the hill, across the street, past the bus stop and around the corner. Then it was a mile down the town’s main street, stopping occasionally to look in shop windows or collect wayward hubcaps that had escaped from her yard. She walked very slowly, hunched in that way specific to very old people. She never needed a cane. She never once came up against a red light – she had learned to time her trip perfectly to coincide with green lights. In this way, her life shuffled slowly on.

On that particular evening, she decided to take a different road home so she could walk past the park. The air felt pinker than usual, and there was a strangely electric openness in it that made her want to be outside. The skateboard was sitting so obviously in the middle of the sidewalk that she didn’t see it at first. It wasn’t until she was right on top of it that she realized what it was. She froze. Her blood felt suddenly new and vital in her old limbs. She stared at it like a rabbit stares down a car. She wanted to pick it up but she couldn’t move. The skateboard grinned up at her and began to meander away on a gust of wind. The yelp in her throat propelled her after it.
It was an intense low-speed chase. The skateboard yawned along lazily, stopping every once in a while so she could catch up, waiting until her hand almost touched it, then rolling on. She creaked after it, cursing under her breath. The light in the sky turned pink to match the air.
She finally caught up to it at the edge of the park. It had come to rest, either by accident or by choice, in a bush by the lake. The swans were out like yachts, telling dirty jokes to each other and looking down their noses at the bits of bread children threw to them. She snatched up the board and held it in front of her face. It was unchanged. Not a day older, not a bit more worn. The same signature was still scrawled across the underside – similar to hers but bolder. There was still a small chunk missing from the front lip. A small bloodstain the same shape as the scar on her left palm. Wobbly wheels.
She held it against herself with her arms. The sky was pinker than it had ever been – a deep orangepink like an Indian Grapefruit. She smiled at the swans polka-dotted against the black lake. Then she turned around and walked home.

The crooked hill and the matchbox house were razoredged against the sinking sun. Everything was so ablaze in the sunset that at first she didn’t see the fire. When she got closer, though, she smelled the smoke. It smelled like books and handmade quilts.
By the time she got to the top of the hill, the house was so engulfed in flame that it was the sun. Tiny flowers popped and crackled around the porch. Inside, she could hear piano wires snapping violently. An upstairs window crashed open like a piñata, spraying shards of glass and dumping china dogs, earrings, paperweights and thumbtacks onto the lawn. A beam fell from the top of the porch, and suddenly the whole house seemed to be tipping toward her like a jar of marbles, spilling kick knacks. Things rolled past her feet and through the fence. Inside, pots and pans fell with bursts of applause. Scraps of posters and watercolor paintings launched themselves still flaming through open windows, burning up in-flight, leaving trails of smoke in the sky. The house wasn’t burning down. It was burning out. The grass around her feet began to take. Clutching the skateboard like a life raft, she turned and hurried down the hill toward town. She had suddenly remembered she needed to buy matches.

The house didn’t tip over after all. One wall remained – the back wall with the kitchen window facing into nothing. It stood up like a bad haircut. Everything else was gone. Still clutching the skateboard against herself, she shuffled her feet through mountains of ash, kicking for buried treasure. An hour ago she had been standing by a lake watching the swans. Her foot touched something hard. She bent down and retrieved the urn; empty. Slowly, she sat down in the ash and examined the skateboard in the changing light. She blazed the sight of it into her mind. She pressed her nose against it. She rubbed every rough edge with her fingertips. She spun the wobbly wheels. She licked it.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a box of matches. Lit the whole thing and placed it under the skateboard. It burned orange and pink, like an Indian Grapefruit, and was gone in minutes. She scooped the ash into the empty urn. Stood slowly and went to the kitchen window. The hazy white expanse of nothing behind it was streaked with gold, like a creamsicle. When she opened the window, the air opened too, warm and electric. She tucked the urn under her arm and climbed out into the void. Stars pricked holes in the sky.

Hipster Hell or: Kid Congo Powers and the Dedicated Followers of Fashion

I gave ten dollars to a long thin girl sitting on a long thin stool just inside the door. She asked me if I would be drinking, and I told her no. I’ve been trying not to drink on Mondays. She had a long thin cigarette tucked behind her long thin ear. Her clothes were boring – long thin black jeans and a long thin black turtle neck over a puddle-brown shirt with shoes and hair to match. Her hair was short. Her nose was too big.
A big, loud girl with a scruffy, orange plaid button-up and matching hair was dancing with her beer right in front of the stage. She had one of those wide “fuck me” faces. She also had a wide “fuck me” ass.
The opening band ended like a garage band usually does, and Kid Congo started setting up. Most everyone was outside, disinterestedly smoking cigarettes. I wondered if they would come back in for the main event, and almost hoped they wouldn’t: sometimes these old guys need to be reminded that rock and roll is dead. It died with the legends who were greater than they are. I sat at the back, too exhausted to feign interest any more, and played my new favorite game – pretending to be from Rolling Stone. A friend and I developed this while we were working for a promotional company that sold hair-salon packages to unsuspecting college freshmen. The premise of the job was simple: go to college campuses and hit up everyone you see with your pitch. Make it sound like the best deal in the world. Make them buy the $100 hair promotion they really don’t need. Force them to if you have to. The trouble was, try as we might, we just couldn’t take the job seriously; and the scathing looks we got from most of the college girls – sensibly dressed (or at least socially dressed) students who sneered at our outlandish Hollywood fashion – only reminded us that we should have been there studying, not soliciting. So one day, at a campus in the middle of GodKnowsWhere, we decided to use our bright clothes and sarcastic demeanors to a better purpose. We scouted classrooms until we found the cutest-looking male teacher on campus, and when his class got out, we cornered him. I had my phone out like a recording device; she had a notebook and pencil.
“We’re doing a special report for Rolling Stone on the disenfranchised youth of America. What are your thoughts? Do you think kids are coming here because they want to learn? Or are they just following the rules society has laid out for them?”
It has since become one of my favorite pass-times, and as I usually carry a notebook and pen on me, I am always prepared to play it. Usually, I don’t interview strangers, I just sit in a corner and observe. It’s a great way to avoid being picked up in bars. Chloe. Chole Sparks. Yes, I am a writer. No, I do not want to talk to you.
The place smelled like vomit, and not in a good way. It smelled like vomit the way my seat on the plane back from Pennsylvania smelled like vomit. Like bad Caesar salad. Which is, I’m pretty sure, what it was. There was no way this place had enough street cred to smell like real old-fashioned vomit. The ceiling was too beveled. The drinks were too expensive. The zombie posters on the walls were too framed. The kids were too trendy.
Before they started, Kid Congo apologized to the crowd. “Sorry for the delay,” he said, “I had to update my Twitter account.”
The sound was terrible. Evidently the accoutrements of the place did not extend as far as the sound board. Vocals basically inaudible. Guitar too tinny (I know it’s his thing, but there’s a difference between a gimmick and a spinal tap.) The drummer was decent – held a solid beat and came up with some relatively creative stuff – but completely lacking in subtlety. Why don’t rock drummers seem to understand that it is possible to play dynamically? There is such a thing as “not hitting the drums as hard as you can.” Even I know that, and I played for Jade Banger… I had seen the bass player outside earlier and written him off as the worst kind of hipster – the kind that sports a jew fro and bountiful sideburns and wears a polyester suit like he’s just waiting for someone to light him on fire. I realized now that he was not a seventies throwback – he was the real deal. I wished someone would light him on fire. A guy who looked like my best friend’s dad stood behind a small effects board, doing GodKnowsWhat, and occasionally playing guitar. And when I say “guitar” I mean “bar chords.”
Kid Congo himself, like a limit approaching zero, never quite made it to “campy." His huge white eyes, peering at us over thick black emo glasses, never quite achieved that maniacal glint that lets the audience know it is in for something truly special. He did have a very charming, European way about him, and his small stature, dark skin and quaffed hair gave him a childishly Speedy Gonzales quality. But, an actor not quite sure of his lines, he played Spanish Dracula with the wrong sort of restraint – restraint that comes from discomfort, not from strong choices. An audience can tell when a choice is a choice and when something is merely a stroke of luck.
A stroke of luck is different from a stroke of genius: while both may occur spontaneously and within a matter of milliseconds, one is a completely controlled moment of clarity from a performer totally in charge of his (and the audience’s) faculties; whereas a stroke of luck is simply a happy accident. A great performer will usually pick up on a stroke of luck and use it to his advantage – claim it as his own, turn it into a stroke of genius. A mediocre performer, if he is lucky, will be able to play it off. Unfortunately, no happy accident occurred to push Kid Congo past zero and into that stratosphere of greatness. The jokes were okay. The stories were just stories. The band was solid. The kids bobbed their heads. A drunk guy stood on a bar stool to get a better look, and got his head stuck in a ceiling fan. Another idiot fell off his stool. The lead singer from the opening band crowdsurfed for about three seconds. Perhaps he suddenly remembered that it was Monday night, and that there was really no need for that sort of behavior.
One of the problems I have with the world of late - apart from its tendency to bleed every possible dollar out of anything remotely artistic - is its enormous market for mediocrity. As long as people are willing to pay twenty dollars for the privilege of not sitting at home on a Monday night, mediocre performances will continue to draw crowds. They will never draw big crowds, but they don’t really need to. Nothing ground-breaking is happening; we are just maintaining the status-quo. People in the audience know what is going on. I refuse to believe that anybody there was really having a great time, or that anyone thought this was some kind of “event.” I admit that, not subscribing to The Scene, and not being a huge Cramps fan myself (I like Bad Music), I cannot possibly understand what it must mean for a true fan. However, I’m pretty sure that the hipsters and bros around me didn’t understand what that meant either. Perhaps Kid Congo knew this too. On another night, in front of a crowd of rabid fans, he might have achieved greatness. It must be sad for him to realize that he is now playing music for the carbon copies of his fans – kids who wear the shirt without knowing where it came from (I once ran into a girl who thought The Misfits was a Santa Cruz based clothing company.) Diehard fans are few and far between. But if you can’t find them in Santa Cruz, where can you find them?
Oh, and the opening band, The Groggs, were so overwhelmingly average I completely forgot to mention them until just now.

Poker Night

Towards the end of my third and final year in LA, I started playing poker every Tuesday with some friends from Sam Ash. Though I had been laid off from the job some months before, the friends I had made there were solid and we still saw each other a lot, though finding time to within everybody’s “project” filled schedules (lot of things happening, lot of big stuff going on, big things, big things happening, real exciting) was tricky, so an organized poker night once a week seemed like the perfect way to get everyone together. Though at first, it was just an excuse to drink. A lot.
One night a few weeks in, three of us sat around the table long after the game had ended. We were trying to get drunk – all of us were too broke that week to throw the game away and so we had played to the best of our abilities and limited our alcohol consumption. After several hands of up the river, down the river, and many, many shots of Jack Daniels and Jaigermeister, we felt ready to brave the outdoors. It was two AM.
My friends Zack, Kali and I left the house silently; Kali and I smoking cigarettes, Zack with his hands in his pockets. We walked up the road outside her house, looking at sleeping homes. I was drunker than a hobo on a Monday morning. Drunk enough to start hopping fences with an audacity I didn’t think I had. Zack and Kali watched, amused and disgusted, from the street. On my third garden adventure, I returned with an enormous grin and an even bigger plant – bordering on small tree – in a rather charming ceramic pot. I’m not sure how I managed to get it out of the garden (truth be told, I don’t remember taking it at all) – the spinach-like powers of alcohol had made me momentarily the strongest person in the world.
“You’re not taking that with you,” Zack said. I ignored him. I felt drunk and triumphant. This was my plant now and I loved it. We started off down the street again, and I immediately wished I had listened to Zack: the plant was a bitch to carry. I threw him my most flirtatious grin, which probably came off more on the side of drunken leer.
“Hey…you wanna carry this?”
“No,” he said firmly.
“Ah fuck you then,” and I abruptly put the plant down and clambered over a six foot wall into the next garden. It was beautiful – I stood on smooth white tiles with my hands on my hips and surveyed its curves and corners. I washed my hands in a marble fountain. I took flowers off bushes and put them in my hair. I went right up to the sliding glass door and put my face against it, peering through my breath into a living room filled with bone china and a grand piano.
“There’s no one home!” I yelled out to Zack and Kali. “You guys should come in!” They didn’t respond. Suddenly, I was paranoid: Kali was trying to snake my deal. I was sure of it. She and Zack were behind some trash cans down the street somewhere, making out like animals. My drunkenly angry state propelled me back over the wall – with a brief pitstop on the way as I attempted to steal a marble statue of the Virgin Mary, which was unfortunately too heavy to lift over.
On the other side, Zack and Kali were indeed behind some trash cans – hiding, not making out. They looked absolutely furious with me as I hopped down into the street, and we ran like bandits until we couldn’t run anymore. The road curved upwards – we were climbing up a big hill. At the top, we stopped, puffing, and smoked a cigarette while we looked at the city. To be totally honest, I don’t remember much of the view.
I do remember what happened next though. We turned to walk back down the hill, and as a lark, or more likely, to prove something, I started running. I wanted to impress Zack, and in my extremely intoxicated state, I apparently thought that running down a large hill was the way to go about this. Boys love girls that can run down steep slopes, right? Of course, I’m sure you know what happens next: I have wildly misjudged the steepness of this hill, and within ten seconds am running flat out, faster than I have ever run in my life, arms flailing like Muppet arms, legs snapping out in front of me like dangerous alien vehicles.
“I can’t stop.” I think. The three most dangerous words in the English language. “I can’t stop. I can’t stop. I can’t stop. I can’t stop. I can’t stop.” It rattles around in my skull like a bad pop song – it begins to match the rhythm of my steps. What’s going to happen if I don’t stop? I’m going to fall. What happens if I fall? I am going to die. I can see it now; one trip, one tiny rock in the road, and I will go down, face over feet, fists flying. My nose will be ground to a nub on the tarmac. Drunk idiot loses nose in freak hill-climbing accident – Michael Jackson recommends surgeon the headline will read. Or worse, I will land on top of my head and my neck will snap, like that guy in the surfing video I saw in Jr. High who went under a wave and got his head stuck in the sand, and then the force of the wave snapped his neck and he was paralyzed but totally conscious face-down in the water and drowned. That’s why I don’t surf. If only there was some grass. I look quickly from side to side, but there is none. There is, however, a black Mercedes parked about twenty feet away.
“That will stop me.” I think, and I steer my wildly flapping appendages into it.

The impact is incredible. The top of the trunk hits me directly in the stomach, and I fold like a ragdoll. My face hits the top of the trunk with such force that my nose feels icy cold and my lips feel immediately swollen, and almost instantly my neck snaps my head into its usual place like a mousetrap, as though the car were made of a trampoline. The wind is immediately gone from me. Gone so fast I feel nauseous and my stomach cramps. Have I ever actually breathed before in my life? What is breathing anyway? I can’t remember. And yet, as much as it may feel like there is nothing inside me anymore, as though the walls of my stomach are touching each other like deflated bellows, a barely audible hollow whine is squeaking out of my mouth. How can there possibly be anything left inside me to come out? Why can I not breathe in? The whine gets louder and louder, the pitch gets higher and higher, as the severity of the pain I am feeling becomes clear to me. I collapse forward and sideways, my body folding like a scarecrow with its insides torn out. I lay on my face on the ground, my ass in the air, gasping and trying to cry.
“Lizzie Lizzie Lizzie Lizzie, you’re okay, you’re okay!” Zack is suddenly there, barreling down on me, picking me up, turning me over. All I can think is, “Fuck, I hope my underwear isn’t showing.”
“Shhh! Shh!” He is shushing me. For a moment we are married and we have just lost our firstborn child (or something tragic) and I am standing against him in a green hospital waiting room, sobbing into his shoulder. His well-chiseled, perfectly tanned shoulder with one mole on it. What I would give to have unrestricted access to that shoulder. In reality he is not soothing me; he is trying to shut me up before someone wakes up and comes outside. I am wailing short little wails, punctuated with sobs and snorts. I sound like a suckling pig. Kali trots up behind him.
“You’re okay girly!” she coos, in her Tennessee drawl, and after that I don’t remember anything until we are almost back at the house.

I am whimpering. Zack and Kali are walking a few steps ahead of me, talking, ignoring my pathetic state. Their initial fears are gone – now I’m just an idiot.
“Why? Why? Why?” I keep moaning. My wrist is severely swollen and immovable. I feel as though someone is driving a knife into my ribs. When we get to the house, they help me onto the couch. It hurts to lie down. It hurts to breathe. “Thank god I’m drunk,” I think, “at least I should pass out quickly enough.”
I don’t. I lay on the couch for about ten minutes, whimpering and quietly gasping. Once Teri’s dog got attacked by a coyote – right outside this house – and he lay on this couch all through poker, whimpering and quietly gasping. We all knew he was fine – that’s why we ignored him. Zack and Kali are in the kitchen, drinking and talking. I wish I was in there with them. Finally, Zack comes into the living room like a zombie, tripping and stumbling. He flops onto the other couch. I am so close to him I can almost reach out and touch him but I am in so much pain that I can’t move. I am miserable. Before I finally pass into sweet unconsciousness, I show him my most miserable face and slur, “Hey, can we cuddle?”
“No,” he says firmly.

The sun is peering through the window at me. Probably laughing. The bastard. This is not just a hangover – this is a full-body catastrophe of epic proportions. My wrist is broken. I can tell without opening my eyes. There is dried blood cracking and flaking on my upper lip and chin. I sit up, and am sharply reminded that I have ribs and that several of them may be broken. The pain makes me cry out loud. Zack is still on the other couch. He opens one eye, shakes his head and goes back to sleep.
Kali is on the deck smoking a cigarette. I stand next to her and light one up.
“Your face…” she says.
“I don’t wanna know.”
“You should probably go to the emergency room.”
“Yeah. I think my wrist is broken.”
“Are you serious?”
I nod.
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
She starts giggling. “You were just running so fuckin’ fast! Zack and I were like, she’s gonna wreck. And then we just heard this THUD! I wish I had my camera.” I cannot help but laugh too, though every breath feels like a knife in my side. I have the image in my head now; me running madly down this enormous hill like a puppet with the strings cut off, straight into the back of a parked car. A run-and-hit. It’s like something off America’s Funniest Home Videos.
“And then on the way back, you just kept moaning ‘what was I trying to prooooove?’” She is doubled over now. I can’t stop laughing either, as much as it’s killing me. It’s the same feeling you get from being tickled mercilessly: what I really want to do is cry, but all I can do is laugh.
“Oh fuck,” I gasp. “Oh fuck. What the fuck was I thinking?” I regain control. We smoke in silence for a minute or so, watching the sun rise over Echo Park. “Fuck, okay. I should probably go. I told Emily I would meet her for coffee.”
“You’re not going to the ER?”
“Eventually. Right now I’m a person desperately in need of coffee.”
“Sure.” She stubs out her cigarette. “Hey, there’s a present on your car.”
“What?”
“Check it out.” She points around the corner of the house. I hobble to the edge of the deck and look.
There, bathing in the glorious rays of the early morning sun, set on the hood like a first place trophy, is my humongous plant in its rather charming pot.
“Zack carried it home,” she says.
“Right on.”

Hobos (A Poetical Essay)

I’ve got to stop Making Friends with hobos. Brokeheaded, shab-me-down, tin-reeking browners, with floppy faded coats and swollen noshoe feet. If I continue to lead this ring of freakers, tweakers and public speakers, I’ll become only less than they are. I can’t wind up a hobette just yet –live The Rest of My Life stinking of booze, rustblood, the handrails in the subway. And yet I can’t help talking to them – joining their myriadminded, one-side-blinded conversations to interject my own hostile pent up pensivities. I cannot help Pretending to Believe Them, Taking Down Their Numbers and Promising to Call Them. This is why, despite all my refusings and deboozings and desperate attempts at Sanity, I feel every day that the straw I am clutching with the grubbedup fingers of so many singers, is twisting, breaking, slowly snaking out of my hands. Strand by strand.

Standing on a corner at Two Thirty in the Morning, silently mourning, pretending to twitter, to Avoid the Eyes and Coyly Lie to the blondies I thought dumber than me; watching the back of my head for a Sneaky Little Thief or a Sneaky Little Raping, waiting for the orangely slow bus that never arrives, I came to the realityzation that homeless people are just People who got stranded one too many times on street corners with no one to talk to but themselves. They are street mourners, feet warmers and beat horners with no regard for the sun and the sky, and the lie that is Fun for it’s done.

There is something in Life like a hitandrun, and we’ll always feel guilty about it. There are other times Life pushes bodies down hillsteeps and we engage in a runandhit. Either way, it’s no way to feel. Catch it on reel or leave it for real, and tell me How Happy You Aren’t – a hobo is just ten unhappy steps ahead of you. Or is he twenty happy steps ahead of you? Working your job, living in slob, going to bed every night with a sob, like a beatendown dog – tell me why you keep doing it? Why you gave up your shot at an Edumuhcation? You live in a place where Edumuhcation is highly adored – encouraged and paid for. Where your thoughts are worth something; where They don’t cut out your Cunt for power and fun, and kill your brother for Singing a Song.

Perhaps I’m wrong – perhaps you have gone to a school in the sky where the fees were so high that you were sure Something Fly had to come of it. Something more than a sidewalk shit and a diploma to wipe it. So then tell me why people decide to Do It? Someone explain why every damn day, millions of crazies wake up from their lazies and go to workspacies and let their lives wastey. It has come to my attention that the people in this nation have sacrificed that spice that kept them curry, because they were in a hurry to get Nowhere. Some got Somewhere, some went Everywhere, yet in their hearts not a one can tell you they’ve come to a place where their Peace is alive. Talk to a coalminer talk to a starshiner and talk to your mother and dad. No doubt they will say, when you ask them the way, that life is just Frabjously Bad. So then why bother with It? If millions of people in this world are so unhappy, why are so many people in this world? And why do they tell us we are working to make the world a betterplace when it was a betterplace before we got here? Quick, she says, fuck me so we can have another squaller and we can teach it to be taller than you, because every son must outshine his father and must get farther, and That is why there is no room. Why we must leave this planet for the Moon.

And it can’t come too soon! they croon, like loons, and they swoon over chances and second advances and they work and they work, and they shirk off their lives without questioning why, or where they are going – but all the time in the Back of Their Mind(s) knowing the things the hobos do too. That life is a joke, and whether you’re Broke or in riches; in rags or fine stitches, the prize is the same at the end of the game: when you finally croak, you will live in Hellsoak. And if we all know this – the sadness and badness – then why do we try?

This is why in my mind I cry, because why, and why, and why? And once I stop asking, and stop multi-tasking, and stop trying to figure things out, I will leave civil life for a worriless sprife – simply stand on a corner and Shout.

See more amusing pictures of hobos here: http://www.linkognito.com/b.php?b=646

Democrats Fuck Up Again

As pissed as I am about this, I really don't think I can do it justice like John Stewart did last night. All I will say is that a Super Majority of Democrats being unable to pass the healthcare reform bill, while simultaneously passing an abstinance education bill, is like having a drawer full of thongs and somehow managing to put on boxers.

I MEAN SERIOUSLY GUYS.

What the fuck is wrong with you all?


Now, if you are really longing for some angry commentary on the subject, check out this link. As usual, John Stewart says it better than I ever could: http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/250803/wed-september-30-2009-jon-krakauer

The Boy and The Indian: A Short Story

Outside a tourist center in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a little boy was selling painted horseshoes from a large wooden wagon. He sat on a bench just beside the entrance to the shop, his wicker hat lay next to him, his small legs swung at the people walking by. Nanette circled the building twice before she stopped. The little voice behind her ear said it wasn’t appropriate to talk to him – hassle him with questions. Really she knew she wasn’t stopping because nobody else seemed to be stopping. That was the problem with other people; they were always around to remind her of how close she was to being exactly like them – scared, polite, infinitely similar. An awful beige monotony she had no desire in joining, which was why, as she came around the corner for the third time and saw he was still there; still largely ignored by the people walking directly past him into the tourist shop to buy plastic rulers and light-up keychains with their names on them; she stopped, as casually as she could.
“Did you make these yourself?” Up close, she was startled by how gray and big his eyes were, how thin and soft his hair looked.
“Painted em, yeah.” He swung his legs challengingly. His teeth were bucked like a twelve-year-old boy’s teeth usually are.
“Cool. How much?” She stood about four feet back with her arms folded, focused on the horseshoes as though she had never seen one before: she was shy around men when she wasn’t drunk.
He hopped up from his bench. “These big ones with the pictures in the middle are ten, these ones here are seven, the little ones are five each and the ones at the top here with the stars on are a little more expensive, those are twelve fifty. You can buy a little string like this” he pulled one from his pocket “to hang them with for fifty cents. If you buy two you get a discount.”
Nanette nodded, taking everything in.
“Okay. Give me the little black one and the little green one.”
“You want the strings too?”
“Sure.” He pulled another string from his pocket, began working it through the holes in the horseshoe in that self-consciously aggressive way that boy’s hands do men’s work. His hands were exactly like her brother’s hands.
“Seven dollars please.” He tugged on the strings to make sure they were secure, handed her the horseshoes. Nanette dug in her bag for her wallet, in her wallet for her money. The boy looked past her at the people walking by. She handed him three bills.
“Thanks.” She put the horseshoes directly in her handbag. “Do you mind if I sit here and smoke?”
“No, go ahead.” His small hand gestured hurriedly and ungracefully – a movement he would not fully gain control of until he was much older. She sat on a bench nearby, tried to think of something to say to him. Now that she was here, she could not think of a single question. They watched the sky turn from blue to slate.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“India,” she said, “but I live in California now.”
“Oh,” he nodded, his eyes rather big. She wondered if he knew where India was on a map. She wondered if he knew where California was.
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“About a mile from here.”
“Did you walk here?”
“No, I can ride this thing,” he indicated the wagon.
“Oh wow. How do you do that?”
“I put one knee on it and use the other leg to push.”
“Oh, like a skateboard.”
“Uh huh.” Silence again. Nanette blew smoke at the sky.
“What kind of music do you like?”
“Oh…I dunno.” He shrugged and smiled.
“Do you listen to the radio?”
“No.”
“But you can, right?”
“Yeah, if I wanted to.”
“Do you know who the Beatles are?”
He shook his head. The air went heavy all of a sudden – rain about to fall. The grass looked darker than it was. Across the road, corn marched in the wind like neat rows of soldiers. Nanette pulled a bag of chocolate covered raisins out of her handbag and offered it to the boy. He came over to her and took just one, didn’t take another when she offered again. They watched the people go by. Nanette was surprised at how few seemed to notice that he was even there. Some did, but seemed too nervous to stop. It was a fragile situation, Nanette supposed, to feel curious but to feel like you had no right to be curious. I mean suppose, she thought, you had never met a gay person before?
“Do you get bugged when people ask you a lot of questions?”
“No, I don’t mind it,” he said. “People are curious.”
“What’s your name?”
“Gideon Jr.”
“Gideon? That’s a cool name.”
“Thanks.”
Nanette clawed through her mind for more questions. So much for being a reporter, she thought. Suddenly she had infinitely more respect for Joan Rivers.
“Still trying to sell them horseshoes, huh?” A man with a pot belly and a crew cut walked by. He was walking a tiny dog on a leash too big for it. His daughter and her mother followed, the girl looking unabashedly at Gideon through her hair.
“Was that one, Mommy?” she said as they went inside.
Nanette finished her cigarette, looked around for a trash can. There was one about ten feet away. She stood up and stretched, flicked the butt in the can. Normally, she would toss it on the ground and stub it out with her toe, but that felt rude in front of Gideon. She checked her watch – she was signed up for a tour that started in five minutes. Out on the road a buggy and horse went by, snorting and sweating proudly.
“Hey, excuse me?” It was Gideon behind her. “Would you mind watching my wagon for a minute? I have to use the bathroom.”
“Of course!” Nanette’s heart flapped a little. It was silly, she thought, such a small favor for him to ask, but she was flattered to have earned his trust. He ran inside and she sat behind the wagon, imagining what it would be like to sit behind it every day.
In the corner of her eye, a group of people was milling around the door where her tour would start. She sat up a little and waved, trying to catch someone’s attention, suddenly angry about trapping herself behind these horseshoes. The tour guide came out of the door and they began traipsing inside. She looked around for Gideon. He was nowhere. She thought about yelling out to the guide, but felt silly. It was only a fifteen dollar tour, and after all, she was already talking to the real deal! What tour could be better than that? She lowered her hand, didn’t attempt to catch the tour guide’s attention when he looked around for people he had missed.
The sky was still out there. Still as damp and as gray as it had been. It would probably rain later, she thought. Or perhaps that was just how the sky looked here. She had only been here for two days, what did she know about the weather in Pennsylvania? She wondered how many of the people walking by did know about the weather in Pennsylvania and how many were tourists like herself. She wondered how many were tourists in their own towns. Gideon came out of the shop.
“Thanks,” he said.
“No problem.” She stood and went back to her bench. “What’s the weather usually like here?”
“Usually pretty good around this time. It snows in the winter and we get good rain in the spring for the crops.” Gideon was no tourist.
“Alright man, how much for one of these things?” The pot-bellied man was back. His daughter was swinging from his arm like a little monkey, the dog trying to lick her face. Gideon hopped off the bench, gave him the spiel. “Alright, I’ll take one. Princess, what color do you want?” The little girl, suddenly shy, peeked at Gideon before pointing to a pink one.
“You want the string to hang it up for fifty cents?” The man nodded and pulled out his wallet. His wife came out of the store, carrying a menu.
“Honey, they say the wait in the café is about twenty minutes. Oh you got a horseshoe!” She had a vaguely Spanish accent. Nanette wondered if it was Mexican or Cuban. “What’s your name?” the woman said to Gideon.
“Gideon.”
“Oh that’s a nice name!” She tossed the menu at her husband and sat down on Gideon’s bench, blocked him from Nanette’s view. “Tell me, Gideon, do you celebrate Christmas?”
“Yes. We celebrate Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving and sometimes New Year.”
“That’s interesting.” The dog was trying to lick her face now. She pushed it away. “Could I take a picture with you?”
“Oh,” he looked embarrassed, “We don’t really do that.”
“Oh.” She looked around and spied Nanette. “Excuse me,” she said. “Excuse me! Yes, you dear. Are you from New York?”
Nanette frowned in surprise. “No, I’m from California.”
“Oh. Why do you wear that hat?” Nanette touched the big crocheted beanie slouched on the back of her head.
“I have very short hair and my neck gets cold,” she offered.
“Oh,” the woman looked disappointed. “I thought you were Jewish.” She turned away from Nanette, back to Gideon. How dare that woman sit between us! Nanette was fuming. I missed my tour to watch his horseshoes! Jewish?
She couldn’t hear what the woman and Gideon were saying, so she watched the woman’s daughter. The little girl was spinning circles a few feet from the bench, long brown hair whipping innocently in front of her eyes. Nanette tried to look at Gideon to see if he was watching her – she was about his age and she was pretty cute – but she couldn’t see his face. The girl’s father was trying to control the dog and read the menu at the same time.
“Princess, do you want grilled cheese or chicken nuggets?” She wasn’t listening. “Princess!” On the bench, the woman seemed to be talking pretty nonstop to Gideon. Nanette wondered what she was saying. What she was asking him. She wished she had been able to think of so many questions. She felt bad about being bitter about the woman – after all, she was a better Joan Rivers than Nanette had been. She caught snatches of his answers; “I have seven brothers and two sisters,” “No, we don’t have TV,” “I play baseball and volleyball and help my parents.”
“No drugs huh?” the husband cut in suddenly. Nanette turned her head. He was peering at Gideon over the menu. Gideon shook his head.
“Uh uh.”
“Jesus, you see, smart people. Smart people.” The pot-bellied man tapped his head and walked away, stood near Nanette.
“That’s one thing I wish I never did,” he said. Nanette realized he was talking to her. He watched his daughter grab his wife’s hand and drag her inside, Nanette assumed to the bathroom. “I have friends, you know, not one of them is happy, you know, that they did it.” He quickly lit a cigarette. “Not one person I talk to doesn’t regret it. Smoking weed, whatever.” Nanette made a sympathetic face and nodded. She had spent the last year in LA getting high and had loved it. “It gets you.” He said. “It made me quit school. You know, I dropped out of school because I was smoking weed. I have friends who are lawyers and engineers now, you know, they’re successful.”
“Man, I have friends who are in college studying to be lawyers and engineers and they still smoke weed,” Nanette said. The man rubbed the top of his head.
“Yeah, yeah. I guess I had friends like that too. I guess they just didn’t smoke it as much or something, you know? I dunno.” He turned and looked out into the sky, seemed to be studying a grain silo on the horizon. His eyes told her he had just realized what she already knew: that it wasn’t the weed that made him quit school.
“Where do you live?” she asked him.
“New Jersey.” He filled the heavy air with smoke.
“Is it nice?”
“Nope.” His voice was flat, matter-of-fact, proud of its knowledge. “You know what rat race means?” Nanette nodded. Rat race, fat race, mouse and cat race: it was the same everywhere. The man was still studying the grain silo. “Not like here,” he said.
Nanette turned to Gideon.
“Do you like Shoo Fly Pie?” she asked.
“My mom makes it,” he grinned.
“How did it get its name?”
“I dunno. I guess one day they were making it and they had to shoo some flies away from it.”
Nanette imagined Gideon’s mother shooing flies away from her pie. She felt that the kitchen would be yellow and the table cloth would be checkered. There would be jars of jam on a shelf above the stove and a large dog asleep under a chair. Somehow it had everything to do with what the pot-bellied man was talking about.
“Honey!” His Mexican or Cuban wife stuck her head out the door. Nanette quickly looked to see if the man had put his cigarette out. He was holding it behind his back. He waved to his wife.
“Looks like my table’s ready. Nice talking to you.” He stubbed out his cigarette, put the half-smoked butt back in the pack for later, went inside like someone walking into Gettysburg, the dog tucked under his arm.
Nanette raised her eyebrows at Gideon, who swung his legs at her. In this way they filled the silence until Nanette’s phone rang. It was her mother.
“I’m in the parking lot. Are you ready to leave?”
“Sure. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Okay. Love you.”
“Love you too.” Nanette closed her phone. “Well, I guess I’m on my way too,” she said to Gideon. “It was nice talking to you.”
“You too,” said Gideon. Nanette thought about writing him a letter when she got home, but she doubted that his trust in her extended as far as giving out his home address. She dallied for a couple of seconds, feeling like there should be more to this farewell. There wasn’t.
“Well, bye,” she said.
“Bye,” he nodded. She made an awkward shrugging gesture, as though he should care that she was leaving, and walked away. As she was about to round the corner into the parking lot, she thought of something.
“Hey,” she called back to him, “Don’t work too hard.”

On the way back to their hotel they stopped at Staples so her mother could buy a digital camera, and while Nanette’s mother berated the stringy haired, acne-d salesman; first for letting them stand around waiting to be helped for fifteen minutes, and then for not having the camera she wanted in stock; Nanette browsed the aisles. On aisle 7: New Technology, she found something called a Sony E-Book. Nanette had read about them but had never seen one up close. She touched the screen, followed a brief tutorial. For the very reasonable price of three hundred dollars (plus the cost of each book), the tutorial said, you could have access to a nearly unlimited supply of reading material.
“You know they have a printer now that prints in 3D?” her dad had told her a week before. “You feed it raw materials and it prints you a shoe, or a coffee mug, or whatever. Fascinating! It’s like living in Star Trek!”
Nanette shook her head at the E-Book and looked over her shoulder for Big Brother. She was always doing this. It was part of being in the race: you always had to be checking to make sure He wasn’t gaining on you too quickly. He wasn’t there: instead she saw her mother striding huffily up the aisle.
“They don’t have the camera I want. Honestly, how can it be so hard to spend two hundred and fifty dollars in this country?”
“Hey, what do you think of this?” Nanette picked up the E-Book.
“What? Oh. Well, I don’t know. I suppose anything that makes people read is good, but it would be hard to curl up with in bed.”
“E-Books don’t make people read,” Nanette said bitterly. “Harry Potter makes people read.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right.” Her mother wasn’t really paying attention. “Shall we go?”
“Yeah, I’m ready.”
They walked to the door. Nanette was surprised to see an Amish woman at the check out. She was pleasantly round, with an unpretentious frizz of black hair and a unibrow. She could have been Gideon’s mother. Nanette had learned at the tourist center that they sometimes shopped in “our” stores for things they ran out of. She wondered what an Amish woman could possibly be buying at Staples. Were they secretly using electricity? Were they secretly reading E-Books? She imagined little farmhouses full of Amish families huddled over E-Books, eating microwaved Shoo Fly Pie, taking turns on the X-Box, their father watching through the curtains in case a tourist should come by. Gideon buying pre-painted horseshoes in bulk from a craft store and riding into town on his brother’s Vespa, parking it somewhere out of site, hiding his Blackberry in his shirt pocket and smoothing out his answers to banal questions. Had she been taken in by this little con artist? Somehow she doubted it. And even if she had, she thought, she would rather keep intact her vision of the yellow kitchen, the jam jars, the sleeping dog. If nothing else, she wanted to hold on to that image for the sake of pot-bellied college dropouts everywhere, who needed to believe there was something else out there beside the rat race.

To see more pictures of my trip to Pennsylvania, click here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=39760&id=1168357147&saved

Hot Blonde Friends

Hot Blonde Friends are absolutely the worst enemies one can have. Personally, I try to keep my number of Hot Blonde Friends to a minimum, though this strategy is only marginally effective, because one Hot Blonde Friend can easily draw as much attention as ten Hot Brunette Friends and five Hot Redheads. My advice when dealing with Hot Blonde Friends is Do Not Invite Them to Places Where There Are Guys You Want to Fuck. If you have your eye on a particular male, do not ever introduce him to your Hot Blonde Friend, because whether she means to or not, she will steal him, and you will end up sitting in your apartment at Twelve Twenty On a Saturday Night, watching Revolutionary Road and Drinking White Wine by Yourself. You will probably also be texting your ex-boyfriend who lives two states away, asking him what he is up to, and wondering if he would just like to Chat for a bit. If and when he responds, you will usually end up insulting him because you are Very Drunk and somewhat Pissed Off.
When you go out with your Hot Blonde Friend, you have to keep in mind that she has Very Long Blonde Hair, and that you yourself have Very Short Mousy Brown Hair, and that guys usually dig Long Blonde Hair, and usually don’t give two fucks about Very Short Mousy Brown Hair (because sinking one’s hands into Long Blonde Hair while Fucking Extravagantly From Behind is probably a lot more Fun.) The Long Blonde Hair Situation is a tough situation to navigate, especially for the Socially Awkward. It requires a great deal of finesse, and should usually only be attempted by the Extremely Self-Confident, or the Criminally Insane. Going to a bar with a Hot Blonde Friend can be incredibly damaging to one’s self-esteem if not given the proper consideration or planning. Do not ever involve yourself in a situation where Raspberries or any other kind of Fresh Fruit is present, because your Hot Blonde Friend will undoubtedly know all kinds of Tricks of the Trade utilizing said things, and you will be left watching as she Repeatedly Catches Raspberries in her Mouth, Eats Them off People’s Fingers and just Thoroughly Enjoys Herself. Once any of the aforementioned things have happened, you are basically done for, because her confidence and presence will continue to climb, as yours slowly but surely buries itself like a forgotten pet.
If you are better at Holding Your Liquor than a Hot Blonde Friend, my suggestion is that you get As Trashed As You Can before even leaving the house (and by house I mean apartment), because a Drunk Hot Blonde is at least ten times more appealing than a sober one, and a Sober Mousy Brunette is never attractive. Though you may think that your Ability to Hold Liquor, and your Excellence With Cigarettes is a turn-on, it turns out that guys usually don’t like Girls Who Can Do the Same Things As Them. They especially don’t like girls who can do the same things as them, only better. It has come to my attention recently that guys like girls because they are not guys – they are girls, and they do Those Adorable Things That Girls Do. Similarly, girls generally like guys because they are guys and they do Those Infuriating Things That Guys Do. While this seems both blatantly obvious and somewhat ridiculous, I have found out that to attempt to change this situation, even slightly, usually Does Not Work.
The worst thing about Hot Blonde Friends – one of those things that makes you feel like a Terrible Human Being – is that they are your best friend, and you love them. The other Really Depressing Thing is that you know that they love you back, because last night they made you Macaroni and Cheese at Three in the Morning when you were Wasted and crashing at their house.