High School Reunions

Last night, I worked the registration table for a 20-year high school reunion. It was a time bomb. Mother figures with hot pink bangs. Bangle bracelets. Orange skin. Suited in body glitter like space cadets. One classmate gave us her breast pump for the night.

The men fished out their old wallets with the condom rings. They pulled their wives into domestically violent bear hugs -- those couples aren't ever having more children after the husbands collapsed the fucking birth canals.

The popular crowd crept into the event for free. They duped some clown to steal name tags. ("I only went to this school for eight months," he told me. "I'm just here to check out all the old people smirk.")

I watched the prom queen, at the start of the night, grab her man's collar and drag him away from the registration table. They didn't check in, but I wasn't sure until it was too late. They are the ones who started the whole operation, ushering a total of twenty or so big babies through the back elevator. I'm not starting a confrontation with a 38 year old dressed like a video hoe.

Myself, I was an embarrassment in high school. But I didn't know the extent of my damage then, so I felt all right. For one thing, I was pretentious about my writing. I studied the thesaurus for fun and came into high school puking adjectives down the front of my shirt. "In Lord of the Flies, everything is turned upside-down by the noxious smashed coconuts of sex drives-"

They published my gaudy book reviews in the school newspaper, and I bet my peers cringed. I would believe it if somebody told me my teachers were making fun of me to their friends at the bar and their spouses. I would now if I were them; I would root against myself as the student.

In the ninth grade, there is no benefit to the habitual mispronunciation of words like welkin, facade, cerulean. "Her eyes were orbs, ebony wood." Nor the repetition of "verboten" in a single P.E.A paragraph. I used "sanguine" on a regular basis, and it is a fact that I opened my freshman Lord of the Flies paper with the phrase "their humble tropical abode."

I'm not blaming the teachers. I take responsibility for my shit writing. Why would they want to discourage me? They expected me to get fixed in college.

ATTENTION: LITTLE SHITS

The rose garden is full of knaves and bewitching, gypsies and tramps. Whores in red satin dresses grinding the lattice. Cher plays all day from the mocking birds in my hair. We can't stop grinning, and the evil thoughts begin to chew through our chests.



The miniature house is the color of frosting AND IT'S HAUNTED

Office World

So far, the office world is not becoming of me. The collating machine is named "Hal" after the villainous computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. You have to walk over skulls and crossbones to access the paper tray.
My first week was rocky. On the first day, I made 385 copies of the wrong document. On bright green card stock. The boss lunged at me, arms outstretched, and shrilled out in desperate panic, "WH-WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!"

I actually had to jump out of her way. Her freakout opened my eyes to my own demons: I'm wholly impulsive, and my emotions carry me away sometimes; they blow me up with colors, I get excited. I walk on clouds and lava, clouds and lava.

It's really fucking annoying to be on the receiving end of a fiery personality like that. I saw the future of my impetuousness in that crazed little woman's eyes.

I gave a couple of the girls in the office this whole speech about standing up for themselves. Who am I to tell them shit, I know. "If you're not respected here, get the fuck out!" I said. "You, you want to paint! Paint! Quit taking their shit."

I can see how that was irritating of me.

Women's Fiction

sigh.

Christian Haterade

I hallucinated picketers outside Planned Parenthood on my way to work this morning. They were robed in rags and scarecrow hair, three vagrants holding cardboard signs written in an alien language.

Later in the day, I found a beautiful hardcover book about the hippie generation. I would have a zero-tolerance policy for naked females riding my shoulders at a concert. I can't believe how many men were willing to have all those bare, bushy labium wrapped around the backs of their necks like feeding animals.

The book was abundant with protests. Middle-aged parents marching in support of their gay children, holding signs like, "I will not be a closet mom." A plump man in a business suit, "I am proud of my gay son." There were photos of the women's liberation protests at the '68 and '69 Miss America Pageants. Racial equality protests. A profusion of protests to end the war.

Things are different now. It seems the majority of protests in this nation are hags and fundamentalists taking a piss on the things I thought were no-brainers in Now, The Future: GLBT rights, and a woman's right to decide her body's fate. What the fuck happened to us?

The Self-Deception Questionnaire

If you answer "no" to any of the 20 questions, you're deceiving yourself. 1. Have you ever felt hatred toward either of your parents? 2. Do you ever feel guilty? It asks if you have ever made a fool of yourself. That was the... mission statement of my childhood.

#3 is obnoxious. Does every attractive person of the opposite sex turn you on?
You can recognize that a man is attractive without being attracted to him. It's like how I know that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has boyish good looks, but


That can't ever turn me on.

I'm going to skip to the end because #5 is Do you ever get angry?

18. Have you ever enjoyed your bowel movements?
YES

19. Have you ever wanted to rape or be raped by someone?
Everyone is an animal. I've never wanted to be the rapist. I guess the closest I ever came was my first lucid dream.

It was me and the man I liked in a dark concrete hallway. We stood between two metal bookcases. Everything was black but for one fluorescent spotlight on us. The eyeballs of my sleeping body were pounding against the lids as they spun; I felt it while I dreamed. I examined my crush's beard hairs individually. Each blade was in high-definition; long and glossy black, as thick as slices of cheddar. I could zoom in on them until one blade was bigger than my hands could wrap around, and zoom back out. His beard hairs are what I remember best, that streak of shine, and the thickness, and the plenitude.

I was only partially in control of the dream. I did whatever I wanted to do, which was stare into his beard hairs like I was tripping mushrooms. But he was resistant when I tried to kiss him. I went for it, and his face stiffened. He leaned away from me. Rather than become flustered, I said to myself, "This is a dream, and you will kiss me in my dreams." I placed my palms on his cheeks and don't remember the kiss. I think that glitch in control was my demise.

My second and final lucid dream took place in a warehouse. The air was musky with brown daylight. I jumped from rafter to rafter. A zombie jumped after me. My heart dropped like a roller-coaster when I took flight. But I knew I was dreaming, so I had a lot of fun with that zombie. Even though that's all I did. Just jump. Jump. Jump. Jump. Jump.

20. Have you ever thought of committing suicide in order to get back at someone?
I get urges to do stupid shit all the time, but it's never a vendetta.

When I was a teenager, I went on a cruise and contemplated jumping overboard. Kicked my toes up and gripped the rail. I knew I would never do it, but I gazed into dark, hypnotic waves each night and fantasized about my doom. Glanced up a lot, expecting to find birds, and then back down, to the healthy black splash of the sea. Would I break my neck, would the boat chop me up? Sharks?

I still consider sliding over third-story railings at the museum like a rag doll, and swan-diving down the center of a spiral staircase. I contemplate crashing my car into phone poles, plunging my hand into a turbine or weather-vane. Poking my tongue on a hot stove. Jumping in front of a magic spell, Avada Kedavra. Tipping an ant farm above my head and drinking its contents. If there's an opportunity to lose a leg, or free-fall down an elevator shaft onto poisonous glass, I'm contemplating it.


I heard about this questionnaire through the WNYC show Radiolab, episode "Deception." Find the podcast on iTunes, for god's sake! And find the full questionnaire here: www.wnyc.org/files/radiolab/Self_Deception_Questionnaire.pdf

New Mexico

I spent Memorial Day weekend in New Mexico, a lagoon of flowers and mish-mesh nature. Cactus plants puckered like gorgeous monsters with bed sores. Beer cans galore.

I was there visiting a friend's family. His grandmother might be immortal; whenever she buys a sterling silver crucifix, they say it turns to gold within hours and polishing doesn't help. Everyone in the family is stumped and weary. She says to me at breakfast, "Your dress is pretty," and later that day, "What are you, girl, a hunchback?"

I hope I'm a tough broad when I'm old. I think the majority of old people are capable of punching a hole through my head.

The whole family is as frank and quick-witted as its matriarch. Says one aunt, "I worked as a receptionist in a doctor's office once. I didn't answer those fuckin' phones."

It is the middle of the country and the farm dogs run in packs. They're wearing lipstick, eyes of human drug addicts, aggressive. As we drive through the neighborhood, four dogs gallop round the bend and bum-rush my car, hairs raised, dried blood. They bite the tires until the spinning rubber makes them squeal.

The dogs are either run over, or they're eaten alive by a rival pack. They trail your heels as you walk. One of them will rear up on his hind legs and crack you over the skull with a Dos Equis bottle. His cronies then all rise to their hind legs, holding their lower backs like old maids, the wise pit bull putting on his specs. They'll form a circle around your soaked, sunburnt body. You wake up in a sweat. Cigars thicken the air. You're in an upside-down camper, hogtied beneath a table at which seven dogs sit playing poker. One of the little guys leans down and blows you a smoky kiss. You have no idea what will become of you. All you know is he's the most interesting man in the world.

Sunday morning was particularly lovely due to a call from A cappella Zoo, a "web and print journal of magic realism and slipstream." They want to publish my story "Movie Man." Fall 2010 issue. Boom.

This is Teeny! She's one of the good guys.

The Euro

European spa women hate me. I've been interviewed by a handful of them. She always has an exotic accent and never-ending calves. She's Romanian, but she lived in France, muse to the Count of Paris and the painters; she's also Hungarian, skin made of vitamin-rich dandelions. Her wardrobe is accessorized to death with gold belts, and bracelets like ringworm round and round her arm.

I have the WORST interview handshake, uncontrollably clammy. During my interview yesterday, the spa owner looked me up and down. My suit was black and clingy with dog hair. Euro cougars are put off by how unsophisticated I am, too exuberant, splashing smiles like waves, talking with my hands. I put red eye shadow on my mouth when I want lipstick.

Saturday in the backyard

This was my Saturday