the man upstairs

When you move in, I just can’t believe it. You are tall, long blond hair, round lens, ride a Harley and are a biologist. And a bartender on the weekends. Of course there is a girl whom you have loved forever and a wife you were married to that produced a little girl who is half japanese and half of you. There is this terrible racket upstairs for days and days and days. When I come up to ask what all the noise is about you show me the bed you made, yourself out of logs in your tiny studio that has one foot in the hood for real and one foot in the old glamour of our city.

You and I become friends. Of course you put some moves on me but I have come to think it is just part of your job description. An expectation that all men and women have of you because you are so beautiful. It seems unreal that you are as good looking as you are and I can’t believe that you are interested in me and so luckily, I don’t ever really believe it and you don’t ever really break my heart. I know what it is and am okay with it. We only hook up a few times and I feel bad because you do have a girlfriend but the thing of it is,  I don’t believe that I am the only one like this. There is no way. You must have a string of them somewhere. How could you not? You are charming, funny and not at all stuck up about your drop deadness. You look at me when I talk and think or at least act as though it is all fascinating.

I ride on the back of your Harley all the way to PA to visit your daughter at your parents house. I get the feeling you don’t see her much and am too young and afraid to ask why. My long curly hair becomes so hopelessly tangled whipping behind me for the 2 hour tour over the back roads that it almost masks the beating of my heart out of my chest because I have never been on a bike like that. I was so convinced we were going to crash and die, my limbs torn off my young body that my natty hair was at the bottom of my list of things to worry about. My rosy cheeks of fear outshone my ratty do and the blankness of my mind too overcome with eminent death to allow me to say anything obnoxious or inappropriate so I am unusually quiet and subdued.

You move out and I move on to another Mark. There were many Marks, for some reason and none turned out to be a good idea in general. After cooking a crazy fancy feast for one Mark and just as he told me he had to go because it was 9:30 and he has plans to meet someone later. I say, Like a date? And he says, Nah, just some friends. I say, Um, I thought this is what you had planned. He tells me, well, I have two things and I am busy tonight, so, gotta go.

Just as one of the Marks puts down his napkin and I am sitting across from him with the lingering smells of my garlic chicken dinner and strawberry shortcake in my nose and my mouth agape with shock the door bangs open so loudly we both jump!

“NIC!” my old neighbor shouts and sees me sitting in the dining room and races down the stairs and scoops me up into his arms and twirls me around kissing me. Just like in a goddamned movie. I yell his name and kiss him again genuinely happy to see him. He puts me down and without noticing that one Mark sitting at my table proceeds to tell me all about his new job and apartment and the girl he is living with and I how great I look and what am I doing tonight because he wants to go see this band and do I want to come. I look over at one of the Marks, now sitting with his mouth agape I tell him it looks like I do not have any plans.

My ex-hunk looks over at the one Mark and gives him a casual Hey Man, and then looks back at me. He kisses me again like a brother on the cheek and says how great it is too see me and do I have his mail? He doesn’t want to forget it.

The one Mark gets up to leave and we all walk out together. I get onto the back of the Harley and put on my helmet and we pull away. I wave at the one Mark and think to my self, this is the only proof of jesus I have ever had.

So thank you, jesus.

smoke and mirrors

The corner of the bar is cramped and the high backed stools with wide seats allow me to curl up like a cat on them and watching you talk with your hands makes me purr. Keening and stretching to find the light that will make you see me. The more we talk the more I feel that there is this ribbon tieing us together getting tighter and tighter pulling me toward you. Easy laughter and rapid flow of conversation feels like a pot bubbling over and there is no lid. Like a river current, like the one you worked on while on the tugboat, pulls me to your house, into your life as though I had always been there. We can sit in silence, me reading, you reading and its comfortable and warm. We are always surrounded by this warm light that flatters even the most wrinkled moments. Smoke and cards and drinking and Tom Waits on the stereo. You serenade me and hope that you don’t fall in love with me while I pray to someone elses god that you do. That you are and will be forever. Desperate comfort in sleeping next to you and feeling like my place will always be next to your pillow. I am on the left side of the bed because you are on the right. Days and nights blend into one single moment winding out into time compressed into a breath. Your breath on my neck and your laughter in my head. I believe you when you tell me I am your beautiful angel and I love you so completely that it doesn’t sound corny but like wine from gods lips. In a single moment, feels like the very next breath that is all and you are done and on to someone else. I obsess for quite sometime, stalking you really, driving by your house because you are addicting. You were addicting. Magic, that illusion you made for me, the first one of love, was not easily forgotten. Complete love isn’t left behind but it is easy to forget and forgive the fragments. Where ever you are now, lost in some other world I will not know for years to come, is reflected by the light of the sun on the water, the Hudson River gray in winter but brilliant in the light.

A general downward spiral

I should have known that meeting someone for the first time when they pull down your pants when you are making some kind of announcement about too many people smoking pot in the stairwell and where the hell did all this hay in my living room come from and is that a fucking kitten is not a good sign.

I don’t know how many more months pass before we meet again but it must be like a year or so. You are living with this asshole I use to date who kind of ignores me mostly when I sit on the couch and eat pizza and watch TV. You are a bad influence on me because you like to do all the bad things I like to do and what no other boyfriend has ever done with me. You tell me one night  you would be my bitch forever if I bought you an eight ball and thankfully I am just repulsed enough to know that is not really a way to a guys heart. I am frightened that while I make pretty good money it could just go whoosh down the drain if I let you take over.

You buy us mushrooms for my prom. Its a scandal because I should have gone with JB but I liked you and wanted to go out with you and cool things a bit between JB and I because it was all too serious and JB didn’t even have a job. I didn’t want to cheat on JB so I told him what I was feeling and he left me in Loch Raven. Just got out of my car and kept our prom tickets. I hadn’t even done anything yet. Well, okay, maybe one kiss but that was it. I still wanted to go to prom with my senior year boyfriend but instead he took some wack-ass sophmore who felt a little overwhelmed by the whole drama thing of it. And I was super fucked up and had this cape thing that I just couldn’t do a thing with. Dancing was hysterical. Dinner…was hysterical. Even I if I hadn’t been on shrooms it would have been funny. I was vegetarian/anorexic/intodrugsmorethanfood and ordered the veggie plate. I think I was the only one. I got a potato, a crown of broccoli and some carrots in a dish. That was it. No butter. No sour cream, just this giant brown potato and huge crown of broccoli. I laughed and drank water and stared at my broccoli. I danced.  I took some more drugs..those speed pills truck drivers take that you use to get at 7-11.

We left the prom and layed on the grass and watched the stars and then went back to your place.We took off our clothes but you were just too funny naked and I was tripping to hard and well, we just tried to sleep as we listened to you favorite sound track, “Made in Heaven” and I think of all the things I could have done differently.

I feel like one of those choose your own adventure books and I have chosen this really weird path that makes the walls wavy, broccoli funny and make me break boys hearts as well as my own.

Just like you said it would be

My phone rings at 10pm and its a school night and he says, come see my new car. I say, I can see it in the daylight and its a school night. He says, come on, don’t be like that. Oh come on already. I am going to be outside, downstairs in your parking lot at 12 midnight and you have to come and see my new car. I say, who cars about cars? He says, I do and come see it. Meet me, you know you want to. I say, I’ll get in trouble and that will suck because she will ground me and I will never see your new car again. He says, just be downstairs and stop arguing with me. and then he hangs up. I put on my t-shirt I sleep in and his boxer shorts I stole and read until midnight. I wait 10 more minutes just to see if he’ll wait. He does. We sit in his car and then we drive around the block. I am still not impressed. Who gives a shit about a car? whatever. Not whatever, its COOL. he tells me twice. We kiss. We smoke. We talk. Its late and I am sleepy because tomorrow is school then work after. We say goodnight and he drives off in his new car and I wonder did he just want some excuse to see me or was I really supposed to be impressed with his new car? I climb the stairs to my apartment, one flight, two flights, three and ease open the door and close it quietly behind me. Go to the kitchen to get an alibi in case my mother wakes up. I take my alibi back to my room and write in my journal before I fall asleep thinking how will I ever have enough time to shower and do my hair if I sleep in?

Its like finding out Santa is just a crock of shit

My shoes were pretty but gave me wicked blisters. That price I paid for beauty when I knew them before…the not eating, the vomit, the excessive exercise paled in comparison to how much the one of 4 blisters on my feet pain me this morning. A little skin rubbed off and exposing a weepy sore spot mirrors the spot on my heart where too many boys rubbed it the wrong way. I get the double entredre there, seriously I do and I guess I mean that also but its more that weak place that takes up root in your heart when you start to fall in love for the first time. Or times. Or think that its love. That facsimile of love that you feel so intensely when you are a teenager and while I am well aware of what a John Huston cliche that is– I can’t help but notice it more acutely when I am around them.

What I guess is strange is to be faced with who I thought I was more than 20 years ago. I am not sure if I was even aware of the idea that I was actually someone. An actual person versus this collection of limbs and hair and shoes and cute skirts and eye liner and hairspray and earrings. Assembled like a new toy for christmas with all the hope and expectation of this thing that you have always wanted only realizing that if you played a little to rough with it, it would break and you would see the cheap made in China label and you can tell yourself that it doesn’t really matter because you never really wanted that anyway. But you still carry all those broken parts around and as you get older and older you try to fit them back together and figure out how to make it work again.

It still works, your body, your mind but you are aware of choices you make and you really are in your life-feeling every little bit of the rumble and snap of those parts fit back together like in some episode of McGuyver. I am all bubble gum and paper clips and pieces of string. More homemade than a store bought toy wrapped and gorgeous under a glistening tree. I rattle when shaken now and I can not find, for the life me, that fucking receipt.

There isn’t any magic, nothing just appears. You make it all happen and as your life comes zooming up to stop at your feet like a drag racer skidding to the curb you realize you are not just watching the race, but you are in it. You are driving the car.

So its a lot of fucking pressure, you know?

blahblahblah, right?

So now I don’t know where to begin because it feels like the beginning again. There are many things spinning around in my head that don’t feel too personal as the personal shit was taking up a LOT of room. All the room inside my brain in fact. Thank goodness I am not in school right this very second or maybe that would be better because then I could think of body systems and functions and skip all this other shit going on in my life/head/soul. Shit. I don’t believe in souls. Well, whatever that other useless squishy part of my being that is not my brain that reigns supreme and coerces me into stupid, stupid, stupid shit.

blahblahblah.

So, in order of as it occurs to me and not importance…somethings I have been thinking in case you are all done yourself thinking your own thoughts and want to sponge off of someone else:

1. Birds. Always freak me out. Where are they always going? Do they get tired of flying? Do they even thing about it? How do they find there way around when most are very small and fragile? What the fuck are they chirping about all spring and summer? I think it is “FUCK ME” . The chickadee song is a perfect example of that. Google it.

2. Every where in the world is some incarnation of something else. Case in point: Last night while I was out playing pool I ran into a younger version of Jay, Josh, Tyson and Paul. There was the funny one, the smart one, the quiet one and the hot one. The funny one seranaded me with an inappropriate song that I am sorry to say I do not know the title of but was mostly about being willing to do sex in whatever position I found pleasing and that we could bone all night. Although my funny one would be too shy to sing that but would gladly mock in a clever way the one that would. You know which category you fit into. Bonus points to anyone that can tell me what the song is.

3. I am old but people, random strangers and people at work think I am about 26-29 years old. While I find that flattering I suppose I can only conclud that I am VERY immature and I can’t wrinkle my forhead so it is not so creasy?

4. I love Chica and she is becoming this delightful creature whom I adore almost all the time now except when she talks in that baby voice when she is trying to get something she knows she can’t have and is trying to be as pathetic as possible. Or when she is whining. Or when she is complaining. Or, well, fuck it. Really I like her more now than I did a few months ago but my train of thought seems to be contricting that so I am just gonna stop right here because I would like to believe I like her more. Loathing her kind of cuts into my mother of the year nomination.

5. I love running and who would have thought it although I do not like running in humidity and 80 degree mornings at 7am so I am not running so much now. Drat you summer heat and stickiness.

6. I am an excellent typist (yes I say this in my most rainman type voice as I also drive well in the driveway). People at work always marvel and say, “Lookit her go hun.”

7. I love that I can have long fingernails while not in clinical although JAHCO frowns on it.

8. I am not fatter in my swimsuit than I was last year and that is nice. I am not smaller but not fatter.

9. I have been married for 16 years this year. thatisalongfuckingtime. BTW.

10. I have a really hot dress and hot shoes and will be happy to have occasion to wear them since my scheduled event was cancelled. Will consider most reasonable offers. Must be willing to fawn and gush sincerely and tell me how much hawter I am now than when I was in high school and was the size of a small tiny twig.

blahblahblah.

this still feels stupid.
I should just start keeping a journal again. Must find good hiding space though. Like buried in my yard. And you know, screw spell check. You shouldn’t even be reading this anyway.

You, yes you, turn around and back away from the computer

While this has been this nice and neat and tidy and faux expressive venue to express myself, in the words of Inigo Montoya, Let me splain, no let me sum up…

I can’t write about anything. I am boring and the interesting things are too personal lately.

Maybe I don’t want to write about what an asshole I am? Hmmm. Possibly. This self indulgent and bleckly snark seems trivial and self-piteous. I shall, in the words of a wise Turk I know, contemplate immaculate perfection and learn the last four digits of my zip code.

Dropped off the face of the earth

It wouldn’t be the first time and yessiree this is the last time that it will occur to me to wonder. Dropped off the face of the earth whether I like it or not and maybe yessiree I do. Dropped off the face of the earth because I can and I will and I did.

It really was no mystery. No real surprise or A-HA. Nothing like that. More predictable. More cliche. More ridiculous really.

Dropped off the face of the earth because it was barely there to begin with. Like that one lost shoe. You know you came home with both shoes but the other has just disappeared. They didn’t fit anyway and they weren’t your favorite pair to begin with.

So, good bye shoes. So long.

Lost of a life I have yet to find

That churning feeling of something spinning
inside me, like a cord broke free flapping againt the engine
The will to grab that end and make it fast, attach it
to something real and meaningful is useless

Useless because when I catch it, if I caught it
I couldn’t hold it anyway.

You make these choices and walk along the line
Down the stairs, through doors that lead
only one way out

Opening and opening and opening into another
Like a dream you can’t wake from
certain that it isn’t real, searching
Lost of a life I have yet to find.

I’ve been a thinkin

If phone cameras and digital movie cameras had been around when I was a wee lass, holy jebus fuck would I be very regretful. Seriously. I did some  pretty stupid shit. Some of which I have shared with all 3 of you that read this and crap.

Seriously, I am thankful that there are only nude photos of me floating out there. They are arty and tasteful and I was very, very, very, very thin then so I don’t really even mind so much. It was for art and I was a part of a final project for my friend Matt Blanch. Do you know him? I have been trying to find Matt Blanch for about 3 years now. If you can get me  his number I will send you a prize!

Thank goodness I grew up in the age of walkmans and cassette tapes and VCR’s and donkey kong. Whew. The only good thing I can think of about being as old as I am.