The Dolor

Loman, Revisited

Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Father was a traveling salesman. When he held his fork at Sunday dinner the muscles of his arms would bunch up beneath his sleeves. It was the fault of the cases, he said. They were heavy and brown, filled with samples, lined with vinyl, naugehyde. Weighted with the anticipation of checks signed, bills folded into sweaty palms.

After mother died, it was him and me. He sold the house but kept the car. We stayed in motels, scattered like loose change over the state of Ohio. I didn't go to school. Instead there were coloring books. There was the radio and undulating hills of green outside the window. There was waiting.

At night, he would stop the car and pop the trunk and I would climb into an empty sample case. Father would latch me in, pick me up, carry me to the motel office. "Room for one," he would say. It was easier this way, he'd told me. Better for them not to know.

The case smelled like rubber and motor oil. I fit inside perfectly. I loved being hoisted into the air, the slight swaying of the case as my father carried me. Left behind in the room while Father trawled the stoops of helpless housewives, I would climb into the case and close the lid, dreaming in the darkness of our concatenate futures.

A year passed and my knees began to scrape against the inside of the case. Rivets from the handle hurt my skull. I emerged one night crying. "I'm growing," I said. "What will happen now?"

Father smiled and held me tight around the waist. "I'll get a bigger case," he said. Like a fool I believed him.

Tenth-Year Elegy

Friday, February 12, 2010
Careless man, my father,
always leaving me at rest stops,
coffee shops, some wide spot in the road.
I come out, rubbing my hands on my pants
or levitating two foam cups of coffee,
and can't find him anywhere,
those banged-up fenders gone.

That is not what I meant, at all.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009
In what feels like another lifetime, I was an actress. I don’t really remember what it was like, playing other people. Even now that I’m involved in my first performance in ten years, I can’t really remember what to do, or how to think about it. How do you take something that is not real or spontaneous and make it seem real and spontaneous? I used to have an idea, but I don’t anymore. It used to be very important to me.

I think, now, that what I liked about acting was the opportunity to focus on feeling things in a safe, relatively organized way. Emotions have never been my strong suit; they are so unpredictable and uncomfortable, and in real life, especially my college-age real life, it made so much more sense for me to put my real feelings away somewhere and sublimate them instead, in class. It made so much more sense, but then everything began to break apart. Emotions are like water—they exist, and though you can hold water in clay and plastic and glass, eventually the water will make its way to where it wants to go. I hope that I understand that a little bit better now.

Anyway, I found this short student film on YouTube today, just out of the blue. I remember that I traveled to Chicago to make it, and that I was excited to make it, and that we did it very quickly, in less than 36 hours. I’d never actually seen it until today—the director was my boyfriend at the time, and then we broke up, and not much longer after that I started to think that maybe acting was just a bandage on a larger wound. I’m not quite sure what to think of it besides the fact that—though I know it’s me—in my heart, I can’t really recognize myself at all.

Pickin' and Grinnin'

Tuesday, February 10, 2009
My grandmother, Hazel Juanita Almond (nee McGee) was the oldest daughter of Roscoe McGee, himself the second oldest of 16 children born to Will McGee and his wife, Mary Fulp, known to most as Granny Toad. Will McGee was famous for having the first car in Stokes County and also for being a terrifyingly good left-handed fiddle player.

Roscoe, before becoming the first chair barber at the Winston-Salem Greyhound Station, was also a well-known left-handed fiddle player, and he briefly toured the vaudeville circuit playing music for minstrel shows. Even better was his younger brother Ralph, who went on to win at the Galax Fiddler’s Convention well into his nineties.

The family had largely dissipated by the time of my birth, but I still have the vaguest memories of going to see my Great Great Uncle Ralph play the fiddle at the Ponderosa in King, NC. And ever so often, my father would show me Roscoe’s fiddle, the veneer nicked and scarred on a bed of purple velvet, the bow long un-rosined.

Sadly, the gift of music, passed down for so many generations in my family, has been treated much like Roscoe’s fiddle—appreciated but not activated. I took lessons but never stuck with anything; the fact that I can’t really play an instrument is one of the greatest regrets of my life. I see the joy that being able to make music brings to so many people that I love, and wish that I could honor them and the memory of my family in that way.

Fortunately, 16 children make for a lot of other children. While searching for some information on my Great Great Uncle Ralph, I found the website of his grandson, Rex McGee, who, together with his brother Ralph, is carrying on the McGee tradition.

Here’s Ralph, playing the mandolin with his brother Rex accompanying him on guitar, off-camera:

And here’s Rex, playing a waltz originally performed by my Great Great Uncle Ralph:

The Best Thing About Exes

Monday, February 9, 2009
Mixtapes, hands down. Almost a decade later, I think I finally own every album used to create this masterpiece.

I Just Wanna Be Your Tugboat Captain

Thursday, February 5, 2009
Galaxie 500 always makes me think of lazy summer evenings spent drinking beer in a sunset haze. One fourth of July, Alec and I rode our bikes through a freak thunderstorm all the way to Coney Island. That night, we rode back up a trail on the Brooklyn waterfront, under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, through clusters of families holding sparklers and drinking beer. Still later, we found ourselves at the end of an abandoned pier in Red Hook, sipping 40s of Budweiser and watching the tugboats come in to dock. We banged our legs against the loosening concrete and sang this song to each other.

The Record Producer

Wednesday, February 4, 2009
When I was 18, I decided to postpone college in favor of saving up money and taking a train trip across the country. In May of 1997, I boarded the Carolinian in Charlotte, switched over to the Capitol Limited at Union Station in DC, and disembarked in Chicago, a city I’d only been to once before.

Chicago was the adopted hometown of a boy named Mike Smith that I’d met briefly when I was 15 and fancied myself to be in love with. He met me at the station wearing a pair of Henry Kissinger-style nerd glasses with heavy black frames and the lenses tinted golden yellow. We went back to his apartment in Wicker Park and I met his friends: Jeremy, Pierre and Rollo. Jeremy was obsessed with Ralph Waldo Emerson and writing a novel. Pierre was French and rich and had an Italian girlfriend. Rollo wore hats trimmed with fraying bits of grosgrain ribbon and seemed to exist in permanent halftone. I remember that we stayed up all night, smoking more than half the carton of cigarettes I’d brought from NC and watching Chungking Express. Everything seemed magical and infused with importance; each conversation was revelatory; every moment felt as if it had been meticulously crafted in advance to elicit the greatest amount of effervescence and spontaneity and memorable qualities.

It was the early, early morning and we were listening to Tom Petty’s Wildflowers and contemplating breakfast. Mike Smith was lazily thumbing through the liner notes.

“I have this theory,” he said. “See this?” He motioned towards the text. “It lists all the players on the album—like here, ‘Drums: Ringo Starr’—but at the very end it says ‘Nothing at all: George Drakoulias.’”

We all shrugged.

“He’s in a Beastie Boys song too. They rhyme his name with Orange Julius. Maybe he's like, a spy or something. Or a drug dealer.”

We all agreed that it was pretty weird that the Beastie Boys and Tom Petty would be involved with the same dude. In my sleep deprived state, I became convinced that we were onto something. George Drakoulias was some kind of elaborate mystery person, some kind of inside joke! And only Mike Smith had been smart enough notice.

I discussed the mystery of George Drakoulias as I traveled back and forth across the United States, in the smoking car of the Empire Builder on the way to Seattle, over strawberry wine in an ancient RV, with a trucker from Fargo who later admitted to me that he had an embarrassing foot fetish and that the sight of my naked toenails was starting to get to him.

Just thinking the word “Drakoulias” instantly transported me back to that beautiful night in Chicago. “Drakoulias” conjured up that nervy intent synonymous with being young and aimless and filled with a love that needs only a focus in order to declare itself to world that is, as if for the first time, wide open and completely unknowable. Each new fact about George Drakoulias was another piece in an existential puzzle.

Even after I discovered, several years later, that Mike Smith the person was infinitely inferior to Mike Smith the fantasy, George Drakoulias lived on. Billy Bob Thornton gave him a face, playing a character known as “Big Bad George Drakoulias” in the movie Dead Man. Such discoveries, I felt, made him more uniquely mine. Occasionally I would dangle him in front of others, a pithy anecdote brought out at parties.

And then, inevitably—“Why don’t you just google his name?”

So I did.

Turns out that George Drakoulias is a record producer who also happens to be friends with Rick Rubin. Big fucking deal.

***

Recently I was spying on an old acquaintance of mine—we’re friends on Facebook but that’s about it—who had filled out one of those “stuff about me” memes that having been popping up everywhere lately. While reading her list of 25 random facts about herself, one statement caught me by surprise: “I remain unconvinced that my life is at all improved by the internet.”

I agreed with her, though it felt like blasphemy. Wasn’t the internet responsible for my first published critical essay, not to mention an unending flood of reunions with long-forgotten friends? Wasn’t the internet responsible for the immediacy of email, for long-distance digital phone conversations, for the illegal music downloads of which I am so fond?

What I began to focus on was this—that beyond the free indie rock and ease of communication, there are hours of time, wasted. There is my increasing narcissism. There is the access to wads of information about people I used to be friends with and wanted to remember in a particular way and now can’t, because my curiosity got the better of me. I have been robbed of all the things I didn’t know.

In a culture that places so much value on knowing, the value of not-knowing can be hard to fathom. But between knowing and not-knowing there is a void, a tension, like the curved dome of a raindrop balanced on the single point of a prickly bush. The sensation of reading a letter, or a book, or listening to an entire album depends entirely on this tension and the slow dawning of knowledge that it imparts. And, most importantly, there are those things that, by not-knowing them, become a million times more interesting than they ever were in real life. George Drakoulias, for me, was so much more than a record producer. He was the riddle of my world, a talisman to hold close and to explain those moments in life when everything is connected, yet the thread is invisible.

And then I googled him. And now he’s just some dude I looked up on Wikipedia.

Stomp Once For Britney...

Tuesday, February 3, 2009
According to N+1 Magazine, January 30 marked ten years since Britney Spears first entered the pop pantheon with the song “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” In tribute, they have cadged together a rather awkward assemblage of “tributes,” though all of them are, at heart, over inflated memoirs. Emily Gould’s piece—an advice mixtape of sorts, featuring predictable songs by lady singers of the 70s, 80s, and 90s—is the possible exception, as it’s a blog posting and not a coherent essay.

Taken as a whole, the exercise is remarkably condescending, to pop culture in general and to Ms. Spears in particular. Each piece chastises the reader for having been too stupid and overfed and drunk on the success of the Clinton years (yes, I suppose, too American) to have noticed the harbinger of blankness that Britney represented. Each essay is weighed down by a heady combination of regret and disgust at what has transpired over the past ten years and, if we are to trust these authors, Britney Spears is the both the lightening rod and the mascot of our demise.

I don’t care one way or another for Britney Spears, but I find this assertion lazy; worse, I find it boring. What has this pop tartlet ever done besides be exactly what we wanted her to be? Perhaps the blame rests more squarely on the shoulders of the American public, a public that includes not only 12 million Wal-Mart shoppers but me and you and (yes) several staff members of an elitist, highfalutin’ literary magazine that continues to assert its importance by childishly standing on the outskirts of the party, hurling insults at anyone and everyone who dares to admit that they might be having fun.

Just in Time for Valentine's Day

Thursday, February 14, 2008
[Write a fragment of a story that is made up entirely of imperative commands. 500 words]

You are not going to eat the cake in the library. You will wait ten minutes, then get up, walk to the library, and wish your boss a happy birthday. If offered, you may accept one glass of champagne, though it is important that you realize this is taking a risk; alcohol impairs your judgment, which could result in the consumption of said cake in a moment of reckless, half-drunken abandon.

There are three emails that you need to send. Concentrate on those for the next ten minutes. Even if you do not want to send them, even if you do not want to write them, composing email is an essential part of your job, a task you must accomplish. Regardless of whether or not you will be rewarded with a piece of your boss’s chocolate mousse birthday cake, you are paid to do things like send sparsely-worded but unsnippy emails to people unobservant enough not to understand contractual copyright law. You do not receive compensation for cake, or bitchy missives. Keep that in mind as you craft the following three replies.

Reread your response to George F. Humbucker, Jr. regarding the use of James Thurber’s cartoons in a nationally distributed religious tract. Pay no attention to the grumbling in your stomach, or the sharply pitched peals of laughter that feel like sandpaper in your ears. You are not writing to Megan Maxey, boyfriend thief, possible anorexic, she of the banshee laugh. You are writing to George F. Humbucker, Jr. a self-described “inspirational speaker” whose affinity for an all lower case writing style, woefully misused contractions and the serial comma you find oxymoronic. Remember to check all of the contractions, commas and capitals in your own email as a silent rebuke to George F. Humbucker, Jr. Make sure the line “In the future, please be sure to double check the copyright pages of all texts for information regarding proper rightsholders” is in boldface type, as per your own personal precedent. Hit send.

Stop wondering about the nutritional content of chocolate mousse cake. Remind yourself that mousses are made with egg yolks and that egg yolks are high in cholesterol and that your cholesterol is already high. Silence any argument to the contrary, including the one insisting that the only reason you’re depriving yourself of chocolate mousse cake is because you wish, someday, to be as skinny as Megan Maxey, and to have a bevy of suitors, one of which might include a certain former boyfriend who had been known, in the last days of your brief courtship, to refer to you as a “lard ass” when you refused to get him another Brooklyn Lager as he was watching the Knicks fail just like they did last week, and the week before, and the week before that. Take a moment to upbraid yourself: thoughts like that are not only dumb but self-defeating, since there is no way that you could ever be as skinny as Megan Maxey anyway.

Check the time to see how many minutes have passed. Neatly close the windows on your desktop. Allow yourself to apply a small dab of lipgloss before rising from your desk. Practice a quick smile in the compact mirror. Don’t allow yourself to think about your hair, or your face, or the fact that you should have powdered your inner thighs the last time you visited the restroom. Stand up. Square your shoulders. Don’t think about the cake.

The 3 A.M. Epiphany

Wednesday, February 13, 2008
My writing, lately (when I've been bothered to do it), has been slow and boring. This may have something to do with the unusually ordered nature of my life right now. My creativity, oddly enough, doesn't often seem to be spurred on by order. However, in an attempt to bring a bit of sense into my writing life (that, hopefully, doesn't result in boring and overthought prose), I checked this book by Brian Kiteley out of the library. So far, I have found it to be smart and interesting and the exercises are actually inspiring, challenging, and informative.

So, anyway, I'm doing these exercises, and I figured it couldn't hurt to post them here every couple of days. Here goes...

[Write a first person story in which you use the first person pronoun only two times--but keep the I somehow important to the narrative you're constructing. 600 words.]

That first day, it had been a new dress and an old pair of shoes with no socks or hose. It was the summer, and the very idea of donning pantyhose in the city’s concentrated fug conjured up images of sweat-soaked librarians in fuzzy gray cardigans, mopping their brows with embroidered handkerchiefs, expiring (yes, expiring, the perfect combination of old-lady vernacular and bookish understatement) in the heat. The shoes were conservative (and, for that very reason, largely unworn), mary-janes with low heels. They would, most likely, be comfortable.

While walking to the subway, the heels of the shoes had started to pinch. Foot sweat mingled with the stiff leather, a haven for blisters. None of these things, though, were so bad that they couldn’t be ignored. Turning back to change shoes was impossible, now; it was the first day, the first impression. Punctuality was essential.

The receptionist looked like she was sixteen. She had on a sundress with spaghetti straps and her shoulders were bony and tan, with freckles. Her feet poked out from beneath a hulking desk—long and thin, wrapped up in strappy sandals, the nails of her big toes so polished and shiny that they looked like grandma’s silver.

She smiled in that insincere way all receptionists have, her eyes sliding around the tiny room, over the damp surface of the dress, eventually traveling down towards the shoes. Suddenly, everything seemed all wrong. Not just uncomfortable, but wrong, deeply wrong. The dress too tight about the waist, the shoes too dowdy and hurting, skin sweating, makeup running—everything too honest, too apparent, like an airplane with a banner reading “new girl.”

“You must be Linda’s new assistant,” she said. “She’ll be right out to show you around.”

Linda, when she appeared, was short, and wearing pumps, and she was dressed like a JC Penney ad. She said she was happy to see me. She didn’t seem to care about things like shoes or clothes or the faint, frazzled scent of sweat that enveloped the room. There was some hope.

No one else in the office was wearing mary-janes, though, or pantyhose, or any of the kind of stuff that might be described as business wear or office wear or even sensible. Most of the women Linda introduced were dressed like the receptionist. They looked like her, too, and smiled in that same slightly condescending way. Linda seemed oblivious to it all, rattling on about desks and files and the location of the water cooler.

Midway through the day, after orientation and the office tour, the shoes felt the size of a six-year-old’s. It hurt to sit or stand. It hurt to think the word “shoe.” The fate of the expiring librarian, now, seemed most certainly preferable to this. The slightest glance at any sandal-shod appendage caused a great upwelling of emotion, a heady mix of envy and embarrassment.

Lunch was proffered as a variety of take out menus. “All of these places are within walking distance,” Linda said. “I think the farthest is about six blocks away? You could run out and bring something back here. Or eat in the park. Whatever suits you.”

The shoes were growing tighter by the minute. Insistent, throbbing pain reverberated with every step. A chance to be barefoot was immediately necessary.

“The park sounds great.”

Outside the heat was alive, a pulsing dampness. A man on the corner was selling mesh slippers in a rainbow of colors. He had an orange pair in a size nine, with tiny sequined flowers in shades of white and green. They looked refreshing, cool, so much more inviting that those cold upstairs gazes.

“Five dollar,” he said.

I slipped them on, threw the mary-janes in a trash can. And began to walk, and continued walking.

Tasty Chicken.

Thursday, August 2, 2007
So, now that I'm engaged and all, I've entered a new domestic zone. This involves cooking. Since it's so damn hot outside and my air conditioner also sucks, I've been trying to create yummy cold salads that are tasty and familiar yet don't involve deadly amounts of Duke's Mayonnaise. With these guidelines in mind yesterday evening, I created the best thing yet, The Dolor's Delicious Chicken Salad. It's really easy to make and super tasty. You can use regular cukes if you want, but the baby ones (from Trader Joe's) are especially sweet and therefore blend exceptionally well with the tarragon.

Enjoy!

The Dolor's Delicious Chicken Salad

1-2 lbs. Skinless, Boneless Chicken Thighs, trimmed of fat
1 C. Uncooked Brown Lentils
1 C. Baby Cucumbers, chopped
� Red Onion, minced
1 C. Parsley, finely chopped
� - 1 C. Feta Cheese, crumbled

Juice of One Lemon
1 tbsp. + 2 tbsp. Olive Oil
� tsp. Tarragon
3 tbsp. White (or any type of herb flavored) Vinegar
Sprinkling of salt and pepper, to taste

1. Preheat the broiler. Trim all fat off of the chicken. Take one tablespoon of the oil and slather it over the thighs. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Broil about 4 inches from the heat source for 10-15 minutes, until the juices run clear.

2. In the meantime, place the lentils in a medium saucepan, covered by about two inches of water. Bring to a boil and simmer, uncovered, for 15-20 minutes, until the lentils are fully cooked but still firm. Once cooked, drain the lentils under cold running water and set aside.

3. After removing chicken from the broiler, shred the meat by pulling it apart with two forks. Place in a large bowl and combine with the remaining dry ingredients, including the lentils.

4. Toss with remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil and lemon juice. Add white vinegar to taste. Sprinkle with salt and chow the hell down!

Here I go again on my own...

Thursday, June 7, 2007
My friend Heather and I, we love to get drunk. We do lots of other things together, too, but it seems to me that, in terms of our capacity for drink and willingness to imbibe, getting drunk is what we do best.

So, anyway. We were drunk a couple of months ago when she dropped the Sexcamaids bomb on me. Heather, it turns out, had brainstormed this entire idea for the Mermaid Parade, in which several girls would dress as different sexual fetish-themed mermaids and parade, in the dancing/stepping New Orleans-style, around Coney Island.

�So, wait. Who would you be?� I asked her.

�Well, like, maybe a golden shermaid, or a merminatrix,� she replied.

�And what would I be?�

�Anything you want, as long as it's some kind of sexual fetish.�

�Like, if I wanted to dance to Whitesnake exclusively and call myself the Tawny Kitermaid, I could do that?�

Remember, we were drunk.

I didn't think much of it as the conversation took a turn towards excited plans that I, for one, had absolutely no intention of fulfilling�rigging a giant paper mache jaguar hood to my outfit, for example, so that my sexcamaid could writhe around in proper �Here I Go Again� video style. I did, however, offer Heather copious amounts of encouragement to pursue her idea. Such copious encouragement that now, three weeks before the 25th anniversary of a parade I've never been to, I find myself shopping at Spandex World and copying out tail and flipper sewing patterns in LES puppet studios, all whilst in the company of such esteemed cohorts as the Preggermaid, Transgendermaid, Golden Shermaid, Merminatrix, Furmaid, Pin Up Girmaid, Victoria's Secermaid, Necromancermaid, Catholic School Girmaid, German Bermaid, and a couple that have slipped my mind as of this writing.

And, dude, I'll be the first to admit to feeling a little ambivalent about the whole thing at first, but I am having FUN. Working on the Sexcamaids is the mental equivalent of reading a Jacqueline Susann novel�engaging and addictive and, at times, comprehensively challenging. I am hanging out with this giant gaggle of girls that I never would have met otherwise. I am learning how to hand-bead my own Whitesnake tee. I am counting 5, 6, 7, 8 while practicing awesome step-march dance moves that we refer to as �I'm a star and you're not� and �Hips and Tits.� I'm listening to an incredibly diverse lexicon of trashy music.

And, for the first time in ages, I really feel like I'm part of something. Me and all these girls, we hang out and drink too much and talk too much and smoke too much, and somehow, after we've practiced our dances and cut our fabric and tried on all the wigs, we've suddenly bonded. As a one-friend-at-a-time type of girl, I've never placed a lot of confidence in groups of ladies; often have I scoffed at the Sex In The City-generated bonhomie of women whose love of one another is but a thin veneer masking their competitiveness. The Sexcamaids experience, however, is eroding my cynicism. And, I might add, getting me drunk on a regular basis.

Do you ever get the feeling that you've been had?

Thursday, May 24, 2007
Dream Song 14 by John Berryman

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

(This is momentary, I'm sure, but the combination of certain events and Blaine's post...well, whatever. Berryman says it better than I can.)

Nostalgia and Its Discontents

Wednesday, April 11, 2007
I just got a new freelance gig with a regional North Carolina rag. My first copy of it arrived today. I would describe the thing as being for rich people but, thinking back over it, what magazine isn't for rich people? So nix that. It's a publication focused on affluent, culturally aware North Carolinians. I'm very happy to be writing for them.

Anyway, I got my first issue today. And it's all about North Carolina nightlife. There's an article about the Orange Peel in Asheville, the Varsity Theater on Franklin Street, the Double Door Inn. Everywhere, it seems, North Carolinians are going out, drinking small batch whisky and handcrafted ales and generally whooping it up, listening to live music and going to see foreign films in restored movie theaters. It all sounds pretty cool. My memories of North Carolina nightlife, though, are a little bit different.

I remember sitting on the front porch of my house in Winston Salem, bored off my ass on a Saturday night and playing a broken trumpet. I remember buying thong underwear and dart guns and tapes of 80s music at the Super K at 2:00 in the morning. I remember how everyone in Winston lived in gigantic houses built from Sears & Roebuck kits, and that the rent for those houses was something like $200 per person per month. And I remember how we trashed those houses every weekend with our beer and our Boones Farm and our Camel City cigarettes. I remember singing Karaoke at an AmVet bar so far out on Peter's Creek Parkway that I don't think it was called Peter's Creek anymore�I went with this girl named Kat who I'd met only a few weeks earlier, on Halloween, when she was complaining of freezing out on the back porch of one of those Craftsman houses, smoking. She was dressed like a Playboy Bunny. At the AmVet bar she was clothed more fully. We drank Budweiser and sang �American Pie� by Don McLean and we won the veterans over. Drunk, we talked to third shift waitresses, amputees. We were young enough and self-centered enough not to know that these people existed and we were fascinated by them. One woman sang a county song. It went �satin sheets to lie on, satin pillows to cry on.� She was off-key but we cheered her and sang along with her when it seemed like she needed a little help.

I remember driving a whole houseload of acid-tripping boys downtown in my truck so we could go swimming in the Wachovia fountain. I was 18 and in love with one of them. I remember forcing college freshmen to shake a giant cooler filled with a mysterious alcoholic concoction known only as Yucca for an hour before allowing them to take shots of it in my backyard. Hours later, I remember them puking in my bushes and my kitchen and my roommate's bed. I also remember that family that lived across the street in the yellow house. It was a grandma and a mom and a dad and their fat son. They were called the Swanns and they always called the cops when we had parties. The other neighborhood kids used to scrawl �The Swanns Suck� on the pavement in front of their house. I always got a kick out of that.

I remember hopping the chain link fence of an abandoned bleachery at four AM, tearing my skirt and not caring, then sneaking inside and riding a conveyor belt from the second floor down to the basement. I think that it's a Wal Mart now.

I remember sitting on a park bench beside a man who was not my boyfriend on my last night in a town I hated, drinking warm Olde English in a park that I used to play in as a child, and knowing that such a peculiar moment would never occur again.

So when I see that magazine, and even when I think of myself�here, now�and how endlessly replicable most of my evenings are, is it any wonder that I sometimes long for the singular, for those mostly muggy or freezing cold evenings where there wasn't really anything to do but goddamn if we were going to let that stop us?

Grow up, I tell myself. You still have fun, I say. And it's true, I do. It's just hard to come to terms with, sometimes. Getting older. Getting wiser. Sometimes, I really want to not know any better, to make bad decisions, to do really stupid shit, to drive through police checkpoints with a beer between my legs. It's finding the balance is all: finding that elusive, elegant balance.

The Scab

Tuesday, April 3, 2007
He'd given me a book before I left. It was blank, and he'd pasted pieces of handmade paper into it for decoration. There was a pocket in it, too. It held tracing paper. I wasn't sure what I would trace or draw but the gift seemed to imply that he thought of me as someone urbane, which was nice, I guess. There was more than a little whiff of clich� about it, too, but I made a conscious choice to leave that out of my luggage.

I carried the blank book around with me everywhere: the blank book and a copy of an enormous novel that I was determined to finish. I didn't write much. It was summer in Paris and it stayed light until almost 11. I think it would have been romantic if I hadn't of been with my father and if my leg hadn't hurt so bad.

Figuring out the right thing to wear was tough, because of the scab. It ran the length of my calf in the shape of Florida and was raised and scaly and caught on everything. The scab was sharp enough to put holes in my tights. Pants grazed against the scab and exacerbated the cracks and made it weep. I was bloated from all the wine and the airline travel but while my skin stretched with fluid the scab stayed the same size, delicately hovering in my skin like an island. I wanted to pick it but I knew that was a bad idea.

I'd gotten the scab on the first date, if you could call it that, before the night when he'd come over with pills and we'd ridden our bikes through the parking lots on Merrimon and also before the day when we ate falafel. That first time, I'd met him at an abandoned car garage on Riverside Drive. Wesley Willis was playing there. I was drunk and Wesley Willis headbutted me. I fell over, laughing, the engine oil slick and shiny on my new black pants.

I was dirty and drunk and I reveled in it. We drove out to the parkway and parked in a siding and he led me through the woods to a flat ledge with a rope swing.

�You should try it,� he said. He showed me how to stand on the log and put my feet in the loop at the bottom of the rope. �Hold it here,� he said, and put his hands around my hands to help me grasp the knot.

When I stepped off the log, everything came rushing up to me at once. It was as if I'd tipped forward and poured out of myself. The night was black and I rushed into it. Whereas before I'd been pretending, contained by my knowledge of his gaze into assuming some kind of improvised role, on the rope I was alone and the sky was invisible and limitless.

The pendulum slowed and I hobbled off of the rope, awkward again. �Out where you were?� he said, pointing into the empty space, �It's a three hundred foot drop.�

I was scared of the rope after that. We lay against the log for a long time, talking and smoking. I wondered when he was going to kiss me. �One more time,� he said.

And I did. He didn't help me. I fumbled with the rope. He hadn't kissed me yet. My body shuddered as I sailed out over that vast and empty space. I swung back towards land but my foot would not come unstuck from the rope. I dangled in the air. It felt like hours. Neither of us spoke.

Eventually I pitched forward in the direction of the ground, hoping that the impact would disentangle me. The gravel bit sharp into my palms and I was dragged backwards, towards the sparse bushes that grew around the edge. Finally I slowed. The relief was greater than the pain. I laughed then, unsure.

He kissed me after that. When I woke up beside him the next morning my calf stuck to the sheets.

I sent him a postcard from Paris. By the time he'd got it, we'd already had our last conversation and I'd put the blank book on a high shelf. The scab, though, lasted the whole summer, gradually shrinking like a memory from far away.

Navel Gazing

Thursday, March 8, 2007
Ever so often, my life takes on a quality that can best be described as parenthetical�where it seems that while my current thoughts and activities, when looked back on from some great (as of now inconceivable) age, may add a certain footnoted quality to my life as a whole, they are overall best forgotten. When I'm trapped inside the parentheses, as I am now, all seems hopeless and listless and dull. Everything is scary. Getting through the day is simply a means of finding the most creative way to waste time. Life becomes, quite simply, dolorous.

I was standing in Target today, in the health and beauty aisles. They have a special line of cosmetics that I have recently decided will change my life if I buy all of them. So there I was, surrounded by all of these well-packaged boxes and bottles and vials, all promising amazing things if I just take them home and follow the directions. The fluorescent lights were beating down. And suddenly, it occurred to me: I'm lost. I look like a dowdy 40 year old and I'm shopping for miracles at Target and I'm lost.

These past several weeks I've felt as if I'm barely hovering over the surface of my own life, having conversations, taking the train, reading anything from self-help to Henry James, but nothing seems to hold my ankles in place quite firmly enough; I float away. My mind wanders. For the first time in a long time, I'm realizing that I don't know what's next.

The worst of it is, I don't have being single to blame these feelings on anymore. So many times I have tricked myself into believing that, if I was loved, really really loved, everything would be different and better. I would blossom and bloom like a well-kept houseplant, tended by the love of a good man. The unfortunate truth, however, is that I was wrong.

Christmas in Jersey.

Monday, December 11, 2006
First in a series.

Call me Dolores.

Sunday, November 12, 2006

I Won't Be Home No More

Monday, October 30, 2006
The first time I met Jamie Hollifield was in the kitchen of the Tunnel Road Olive Garden. I reminded him of that the second time I met him, years later and three sheets to the wind. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I'm sure I could look back through the stories I was writing at the time and get a close approximation. He was a character in most of them, though I don't know that I ever portrayed him in the fairest light.

By the time of that second meeting, he was 24 and a chef. His daughter, Autumn, was 7. He'd tattooed her name across the nape of his neck. It was still red and swollen at the edges. It's mentioned in his missing persons report, too, along with the flaming dice on one forearm and the spider web tattooed around his elbow. I never did see the �love� and �pain� tattoos across his knuckles that they mention�those must have come later, maybe after the second marriage didn't work out.

Anyway, Jamie Hollifield fell in love with me. I don't know why. I liked his sideburns and his pug nose and the way he always used to scratch on the break. I liked his rolled up Levis and the way his bowlegs looked in them. He looked to me like the kind of person that I would be attracted to. But I never loved him. I loved the free drinks and the cigarettes and the pool-playing advice and the flowers and the job he helped me to get, but him I never loved.

* * *

One night, after last call, we bought beers from the bartender and went back to his place. Everything in that house was brown and streaky filthy and the kitchen smelled like burnt ramen noodles. His roommate, Lucius, was home. I think he'd just dropped acid. We gave him a beer.

There was blood on the living room floor. Lucius was sitting on a broken footlocker, grinning. He didn't seem to notice.

�Hey,� he said, �you met my dog?�

The dog was small and gray and limping. One of his paws was covered in duct tape, like how the gutter punks fixed their shoes. �You trying to make a fashion statement with that?� Jamie asked. I could tell he was nervous.

�Why's he walking all funny?� I pointed at the silver paw.

Lucius proceeded to go very suddenly and violently crazy. �Who put fucking duct tape on my fucking dog?� he yelled. He jumped up and down on the floor. He kicked the broken TV, the wobbly coffee table riddled with cigarette burns. �Who put that fucking shit on my fucking dog?�

Jamie held Lucius by the shoulders and gently pushed him back down to the floor. He possessed the tenderness of a man with a daughter. �Hold on, man,� Jamie said. �Lemme look at it.�

I was the one that noticed the thin trail of blood leaking out over the top of the tape. �He's bleeding,� I said.

Lucius' arms flailed wildly. �Who the fuck cut up my fucking dog? Who the fuck put duct tape all over my fucking bleeding fucking dog?�

I looked over at Jamie. �I think I'm gonna go.�

He nodded. �That's probably a good idea.�

* * *

Jamie told my friend Amanda everything. �He says he hasn't felt this way about a girl since he was 15!� she said to me. She said other things too: that he'd sworn off heroin for good, that he was trying not to drink so much.

How fitting, then, that it was Amanda who told me that Jamie was dead. They found him in a field. He was a half mile from his house, in the woods, decomposing. He'd disappeared a month before, after the cops came to his house to clear up a domestic dispute. They don't know yet what killed him. I have my own ideas.

Oh Jamie. I worry that no one will ever write about you. I worry that you have passed through this world, come and gone in a storm of hurt and lostness. I never loved you, couldn't love you, but I can write about you, try to capture in words that nervous smile you always had about you when we would drink and drink and drown our sorrows; when you would sing along to Hank Williams songs in the sweaty, throbbing kitchen and call out for me to bring you the first shot of the night; when you watched me, wordlessly, from the dark corners of the bar. I never knew you, not really, and I won't pretend to something we didn't have. But we were alive then, you and I, and now you're not and I can only hope its better where you are.

Before. And After.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006
I think the couple that lives up the street has moved away. Maybe they broke up. The tiny hand-knit sweaters, each hanging from a miniature hanger in the window, are gone. The old gilt letters arranged to spell �LOVE� on the listing marble-topped table are gone, too.

Their names were Amy and Josh. They had met at the Pratt Institute. Josh was older, an architecture student interested in sustainable materials. Amy was a painter with a minor in letterpress printing and type design. They went to the Alibi and smoked too many cigarettes while beating each other at Big Buck Hunter. Amy liked to watch Josh's hands as he held the fluorescent orange rifle, the blunt tips of his long fingers, the dull sheen of his nails, the determined lines on the surface of each knuckle. His hitchhiker thumb.

He shot all the geese and the pheasants too. Later, as they rode their creaky, fat-tired Schwinns the wrong way up DeKalb Avenue, he asked her to come home with him. She thought about his hands and said yes.

It was awkward in his studio apartment. The bed was lofted and Amy stood there in her baggy Carhartts and her soft cup bra and stared up at it. Bed had always seemed like a descent to her. Josh watched her there, studied her rounded belly and the slow trickle of sweat that started between her shoulder blades and then dropped down into the fine hairs and dimples of her sacrum. He pulled the covers and comforters and pillows down from the bed and laid them on the floor for her. She turned off the light.

Months passed. They traded beers at the Alibi in for oversized nine dollar bottles of Montepulciano. Josh began to think of the house they might build. He stayed up late into the night, sketching and drafting, wearing through the elbows of his sweaters. Amy bought a cookbook and started knitting scarves.

They moved into the abandoned storefront in the spring. The rent was cheaper if they did the work themselves. Friends from school helped them put up the drywall, which Josh hated but it was all they could afford. Amy picked the colors�adagio, mayonnaise, philipsburg blue. She found curtains on sale at Urban Outfitters and hung them from the metal grates in the storefront's empty windows with clothespins she bought at the dollar store.

Josh graduated. They had a couple dinner parties. They bought wine glasses at IKEA. Amy made love notes with leftover scraps of paper and the Vandercook Press and mailed them to Josh's office in SoHo. They still held hands on the way to the subway.

They are what I have made them. I've peeked through their thin curtains and imagined a world where the pots hang neatly from the ceiling and all the art on the walls is real and all the indie rock is arranged in alphabetical order. I've looked at the marble table and the gilded letters and the tiny sweaters and thought to myself, �They must know.� I've compared myself to them.

And now they're gone. I never met them. I never even saw them.

Their building has been repainted, restored. The sweaters are gone, and the golden letters too. The curtains have been replaced with blue cotton sheets. I know something now, though, that I didn't know before. Announcing your love in a window isn't enough.

Maybe Josh was a cokehead. Maybe his name wasn't even Josh. Maybe it was Randy and his girlfriend was allergic to fish. Or maybe he and Amy were just as perfect as I imagined. These days, that still doesn't get you very far.