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scaries

February 27, 2019

Do you feel like yourself? I don't think I do.

Tonight during yoga I lost an entire toenail, which turned gray last month, and said Oh. Then I stood up—or did I fold over?—too quickly and blacked out for a second. Relief, disorientation when I assured myself that I had come through skull-intact. I wonder if that’s what it feels like being born. I don’t know it’s cold until I round the corner. My lip split. Everything I eat is cold and tastes like lentils.

I’m not sure what day it is or when I ran errands or how to write an email. The only memories at full resolution are the bad ones, and also this dream I had about people in a frozen yogurt shop singing a Shakey Graves song. Freshman year when I couldn’t feel my body so I wanted to dye my hair to see if it was still there, attached to my head, but I was too scared to go outside or spend money in my neighborhood so I went to the beauty supply store at 72nd to buy bleach and toner. Junior year when I was a nervous, abused, overextended mess and I was crying, heaving at 2 am alone in a big t-shirt listening to the couple next door have sex so I ordered French fries with an expensive water to hit the delivery minimum and heard Madee? behind me when I went to pick them up and my friend Jesse, leaving a booty call, was like What are you doing? so I laughed because words wouldn’t come out and when I got back to my room a lightbulb shattered so I left the broken glass on the floor and cowered in bed, cold and nowhere near this earth. December when I yelled at Nomar to Go away so I could mop up his liquefied shit at 5 am and he looked at me as if to say I’m trying my best, am I still in trouble?

One, two, skip a few. How bad my jeans looked when they fit too loose. How bad my jeans felt when they fit too tight. Your fingers on my semi-conscious spine with the shades closed in Nazareth. Ninety-nine, one hundred. I wish I knew what it felt like being born.

Did you know Lucy gets vertigo? Did you know I had pneumonia? Did you know moose can run a few days after being born? Well. People feel hard to reach until you see this: you’re just finding it hard to do the reaching. Or, rather. People don’t change but entropy makes up the difference. See here. Today the call dropped and I pocketed my limp fist and panted and sat down on cold concrete, wondering how I’d gotten to my old crying spot. Listen. I forget who my friends are, but not in a loyalty way, I just don’t think I could name them if you asked. Reach. I can’t see at night and I can’t remember how I organized my books last month. Press and hold. I’m petrified of death, doing nothing, sitting still. Being un-self. Getting pudgy and slow. Never being born. Leaving the house without my watch and ring. Thinking of words and forgetting them.

God forbid this table should fall over. Three candles, two shot glasses, eighteen roses on the ground. $17.04 which I counted tonight. One tiny poodle tooth (truthfully disappeared months ago). A toenail, disembodied, like me.

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10/21/2018

If you start to recognize your own victimhood and all the blood drains from your body out of embarrassment because your partner has made it very clear that this is not and never will be a relationship so considering it a toxic relationship means you think it’s a relationship and that’s mortifying because you’re taking your non-relationship too seriously, you’re actually demonstrating the toxicity.

Your partner should not make you feel small and afraid and guilty about the space you take up. You should not have to sit in your room alone, inconsolable, ashamed that you care, and convince yourself that it’s your fault you feel this way every night even though they’re the one draining you of your self esteem. And you definitely, absolutely, indisputably should never have to tell yourself that a case of coercion was actually consent.

It was easier to take it out on myself. To compound the pain. To submit to the downward spiral. Newton’s first law even says so. Besides, I’m confident and self-aware, so how could it happen to me? But manipulators gonna manipulate; self-haters gonna self-hate. Cruel people can be incomprehensibly charming.

Nothing about accepting it feels good, or even intuitive, but trust your gut. Ask for help. Hate me for saying that like it’s easy to do. If your friends aren’t there to support you, find new ones. Like Mr. Rogers said: look for the helpers. There are resources, patience, and empathy. There is emotional availability. There are people who will excite you without giving you gastritis and shame.

I promise, it’s not all in your head.

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Home is where the Blender is

Mount Baker, Washington, 22 August

1.

Listen. Since we fucked I can’t say your name out loud. But I’ll give you glowing reviews unsolicited. If you’re fine with it, your to-do list: think about spiderwebs, reread yourself.

2.

Home not 5 minutes. Already sick with blackberry and stale reflux. The honey here comes in crystals. The mozzarella comes freeze-dried. I’m losing interest if I can’t drive my car.

3.

Here’s how I am beautiful: with rings of Cascade dust on my legs. Under eyebrows. Drinking flat beer out of a Kiddush cup with my mother.

4.

4 years and a week later I dip my head in sunwarm water. I left my shoes in the same place I did when he died. It is still true how you acclimate. It is still a childish fright when lakeweed touches your feet. Let me run up and down hils; let me feel proud.

5.

Here’s a list of things I have gotten for free this summer: bourbon (and my hair pulled). A room full of Calder. Iced coffee, iced coffee, iced coffee again. Almond cakes (weeks apart). 3 notebooks (when I stole them). 2 tall plastic cups of water (the coldest thing I’d had since June).

6.

All week long my dog eats scrambled eggs but I eat fried rice. Could you keep a living thing?

7.

I know what I am and it is this: Moses Herzog, Molly Bloom, young, denim, mostly water, Mom, Dad, a handful of small rugs, small mice, much closer than the moon. A national park, if you listen hard enough.

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June II: What I Learned this Time

Boerum Hill, June 2017

You can wish to be ribbon-peeled. You can wonder all day what it feels like to be dripped on by the A/C unit in your window. You can sharpen your teeth hunting wasps at a dollar a fig. You can sprout on your own like old squash in the crisper. You can dim the lights and fuck a bottleneck. You can hum yourself to sleep.

You cannot learn from my mistakes.

It is better to sweat a lot than not to sweat at all, especially when you wake up in air like the bathroom in an old house, when you run through pea soup and molasses in the afternoon. Grind up grass, drink it with milk. Tie your own hair in knots and pour ice down yourself. Is that any better for your morals?

True, sea water doesn’t sting for long. Someone on a sandbar tells you submerge but you hop over whitecaps and clench all your teeth. Dunk everything, your hair ties itself in knots, ten toes point themselves.

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June

midsummer 2016, 434 Riverside Drive, New York

Could Urban Fauna be something? I just feel like I want to know every pigeon with brindle feathers and every rat coasting between iron rails below tiles below avenues. Get back to me. I love to lie on my back but I sleep on my front. Tonight I tucked my feet in the crack between couch cushions and I am sorry if the blanket got tucked along with them. Right leg sagged but left oscillated like my tower fan; held my breath to try and disappear the bloat. My stretch marks are iridescent and I want to talk about it. I can trace my scars with eyes, fingertip, speech and I remember them all. Only the one on my chin is still a bit foreign like the fact that I am a little Sephardic, which my mother told me recently. Is it just me or is the way that my polyester shorts bunch around my crotch kind of enticing. The couch was restful, even as I halved the length of my body and watched a yellowed orb of sweat roll down my sternum. Underground is not ever comfortable like that. The breeze off of an approaching train is not even relief, it is just more burnt air coating your irises. Every time I rest on the balls of my feet between sooty tile poles or settle into weathered wooden benches with my knees knocked I leave now and ease into some set of mind and body that I inhabited over the past three years. Usually it is me, hanging a little more loosely from my bones. The recycled minds and bodies are so vivid when they are so vulnerable. Don’t ask me why. You have to look for movement to spot a rat, because they blend in. They are the same matte gray as the iron and the flattened trash between tracks. Have you ever wondered where they go because I don’t think they have errands. But rats are always moving. I looked up sharks on the Discovery Channel website and apparently it is only a little true that they die if they stop swimming. Do sharks read the same thing about me?

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an excerpt from a thing I feel good about, or, ‘Am I Hunter Yet’

Paradise, Nevada “You know,” my father says, leaning over with his hands stuffed in his front pockets and that I just spent three minutes developing the joke I am about to tell you look on his face, “I see a lot of other guys my age with girls your age around here. But we might be the only father—daughter pair.” I give him a deep side-eye and duck under the velvet rope to take my third complimentary quarter-ounce of room-temperature water. We are in line with at least fifty other people to check into the Bellagio this afternoon. It is 103° but bone dry, and I feel more dust-coated than sweaty. In the lobby are legions of white capri pants and slip-on wedges, thirty-year-old “Jim’s Bachelor Party in Vegas—Woo Hoo!” t-shirts, and in-progress Snapchat stories. Outside the revolving doors is the most depressing sight I could imagine: the Las Vegas strip in broad daylight. Everyone here seems to walk the same way, as if trying to sit down while in motion. I put the empty water bottles in my bag and fold in half to stretch my hamstrings. We have a “fountain-view” room. It’s the water feature from Ocean’s Eleven. I lean against the window—the glass is cool, Vegasly  air-conditioned on this side, but it must hold Satanic heat on the exterior—and watch the display. I am hypnotized, partly by how gratuitous it is, partly by the numerous pedestrians’ tall, neon vodka slushies I can see from 32 floors up. “Dad,” I ask, “can you teach me how to play poker?” I turn and see the exact same fountain performance playing on the TV. “I mean, I guess, but when are you planning on playing cards? You’re going to nap now, then we have dinner, then Britney Spears, and then an early night. And we leave tomorrow afternoon.” He’s right. I slip off my Chelsea boots and get in bed. The blackout curtains work too well.

The next day we weave through bodies to the other end of the strip where we eat eggs and drink green juice. My father has a conference call at noon, so I sit in a mall and read. We drive to the Hoover Dam, my eyes hurt from the sun. We leave for the town of Alamo—little more than a cluster of buildings along Route 93—around 3. I still don’t know how to play poker.

Black Mailbox, State Route 375 (Starting Line) From Calico Racing’s website: “Marathoners will climb to the Coyote Summit at 5591 feet and then descend into the town of Rachel at 4970 feet. From the start, the town of Rachel is roughly 20 miles. Marathoners will PASS by the Little A'le'Inn restaurant (the finish line) and go another roughly 3.1 miles. At roughly mile 23.1 marathoners will turn around and run the remaining 3.1 miles back to the Little A'le'Inn Restaurant and finish line where the BREAKFAST SPREAD awaits! 8 hour course cut-off.” Which means that the race, clumsily titled the E.T. Full Moon Midnight Marathon, is shut down at 8 a.m. Which means that I, sitting in a rental car with my old man at 11:30 p.m., am quivering and trying to practice mindful breathing. I prop my feet on the dash and feel my eyes roll back, meanwhile chanting, I cannot do this, why did I sign up for this, whose idea was this, I simply cannot do this. You see, I am a talented runner, but an even better catastrophist. My meticulous training calendar, including consistent double-digit mileage on the weekends, accosts me now as useless since I only ran in the daytime, through the sea-level humidity of New York City. I cannot breathe and I hardly know how to work my headlamp. “Madeline,” Dad urges, “You can and you have to. Get out of the car.” I wrap my earbuds neatly around my phone, fold my sweatshirt on the passenger seat, and descend from our rented SUV onto the dirt road. This is my fifth marathon and the crowd in the starting corral is comparatively minuscule, but familiar. There are middle-aged men soft-bragging about how many times they’ve completed this race, women in fucking tutus, and one hyperfit couple syncing GPS watches in the porta-potty line. I stand alone and start to wonder if my eyes are even open. The blackness is so disorienting that I think I might be hallucinating, supplying those starting-line characters from past experience. The night is cool and I feel the breeze stick to my skin, whistle through the braids I’ve secured over my double cowlicks like alien antennae. Near midnight, someone tips the remaining water and Gatorade coolers. The fluids collect dust as they roll downhill in slim, round, unsolid masses; maybe it’s my nerves, maybe it’s the visibility, but they look like Dementors. There is no starting gun. Only someone who cries out, “Ok, go!”

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#NowPlaying #np #UnfortunatelyWayBetterThanTheOriginal Next Year - RAC Mix by Two Door Cinema Club

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southeast

purse your teeth

pick dirty water from your fingernails

watch my hairline

breathe through your nose

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swoon...!

Poem 285, 1552-54

The voyage of my life at last has reached, across a stormy sea, in a fragile boat, the common port all must pass through, to give an accounting for every evil and pious deed. So now I recognize how laden with error was the affectionate fantasy that made art an idol and sovereign to me, like all things men want in spite of their best interests.

What will become of all my thoughts of love, once gay and foolish, now that I'm nearing two deaths? I'm certain of one, and the other looms over me. Neither painting nor sculpture will be able any longer to calm my soul, now turned toward that divine love that opened his arms on the cross to take us in.

-Michelangelo Buonnarotti

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Yahrtzeit

Shirley Kenarick Ehrenberg died 366 days ago. In light that morbid landmark, here is some more old content.

Hallmark 1308

Tonight my cousins Hannah and Zoe and I went to our Grandmother’s Battery Park apartment because she was probably dying. Mom says She is septic from bed sores and Be prepared and She will be skeletal. Call Dad. Zoe says She looks frail. I think she looks like pieces of wood; splinters and knots. Her mouth is wide open and every now and then noises come out of her throat that are not made by a person. What is she, 94? Her hands are not in the shape of hands anymore. They are piles of knuckles locked around thin white towels. There is a sore on her wrist. A little version of what is killing her. I don’t know what the white powder on her collar is. I count 5 or 6—because one might be a shadow—long, abandoned hairs sprouting—it really is a sprouting—from her chin. Some are white and the rest are black. I sit on Zoe’s lap and breathe in time with her because that is how alive she is. She says things into my shoulder like This is probably the last time we’ll see her and Are we supposed to say goodbye. I know she is making herself say those things since they sound significant. Every time she plants her chin somewhere else on my ribs I shiver. I swear to God, we have been awake for three days. None of us wants to be gone but we all want to go. I rub my eyes to scratch. I stand next to Dad in synagogue. I am sorry about that.

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#Unf Play It Right by Sylvan Esso

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From now on...

...if anyone asks me about my semester abroad I'm just going to say, "Have you seen Snatch?" and stop talking

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Peels

Broadway 316, Columbia University, 18 January

I don’t know what happened but I peeled off my clothes and shivered in bed. Peeled off my skin in the shower. Thought about the window in my freshman dorm (my window) and how I felt close to the wind whipping against and through it, to the people I could see on the street if I leaned right and cocked my head, to the salad days that it shielded me within away from the cold and the notion of living on one’s own. Speaking of which I mounted my Bluetooth speaker on the window sill and blasted that KEXP video of “Still Together” live at Bumbershoot. I would either fold my laundry and whisper along with my eyes half closed or sit in the hair-and-sweat-coated functional rocking chair (it was, I can assure you, mostly mine) to watch the Canadian warbler squat in dirty high-water pants. Unless night had deeply duly fallen (just consult the weather channel) I needed to release the blinds, part with my glass panels of vigilant, impatient, solitary youth, resist the terrestrial glare that wrapped around my computer. Peel back the knotted strings that tugged on my eyes.

Thought about things that were still OK. Listed appealing things. You know what words I like? Beverage, Yawkey, and detritus. You know what smells I like? Beef brisket, half-cooked parsnips, and hot. I like the t-shirt I got in the town of Rachel, Nevada, which is just two buildings that are little more than trailers. One of these questionably permanent structures is the Little A’Le’Inn, which is where I bought the t-shirt at 5 in the morning with a crust on my whole body. I did not like the time that I stepped into a laundry room and it was the kind of wet that made me want to call my Mom, but I liked her voice because it came over the office phone and I could hear her lab coat with the teeny stethoscope pin on its lapel. I could hear my own pride.

All week I understood that growing up will be delicious. First I reveled in dim foolishness, running until every porch light flitted on, measured with my steps. Let my feet sweat, let my mother cut off the hospital bracelet, let my nose drip into a flat bowl of hoisin-doused noodle soup. But then I washed my hair and aimed for later, for when I get to make friends at the dog park and think of buying olives and own a sturdy umbrella. And so I peeled the hair off the back of my neck, watched the ice cubes tumble, and let the timeline labeled “home—present” gently shrink.

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fixed

Dublin 1, 11 December 2016

Today I ran and my right-hand calf felt pressurized (acute) and I wore shorts because it was warm even in the metric system. I looked east and west and saw the sky cracked open into an old-fashioned gender binary, an industrial blue and gold respectively. In a week’s time I would be preparing for landing into Paris-CDG International Airport and I wondered have I learned anything. Not sure, still. At least I am starting to feel things without telling myself I ought to be feeling them. At least I can conjure a selection (current) of this season’s fixations:

Black coffee Charlie Day Urban park services (new!) Surviving reductivism and general tension between Hibernian social groups, i.e. rural, working-class Irish Catholics and landed, Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry (“West Brits”) (new!) Color GODdaMn color!!! Even coloUr if it must be so! Availability of dairy products Fiscal and environmental impact of bottled water Garlic salt (new!) Civilized day-drinking Hannibal Burress (new!) The status of tumble-dryers as a privilege, not a right Taylor Swift’s dangerous brand of racism The rarefaction and compression of passing time (new!) Ribs Fried eggs

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7 slappers in a ROW !!!

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how?

26 Marlborough Street, 6 December

How to reenter a body? All answers, as far as I can scramble through brain matter, are water. Brew tea, step in lake, splash face. I put some in a glass and washed down a (remarkably enough) rose quartz tablet, pressed the white plastic button that signals a shower, and thought ha ha what if I fell down? I still think it is funny, too, that I said I was going to sell them. I never thought it was funny when a small, small man encouraged me to abuse. A body check, too. I mean I tried one, I cocked my head and stretched upward and look! The lines were in the right places, it was not so hard, what do you think fits again. Here is an update, my head feels heavy. (1. Do you still like me?) Also steeped in water and well-liked: the air was warm and wet in suspension, it felt like waking up alone and drinking coffee. I felt comfortable, for once, sitting outside even though my clothes were spandex. I just sat and sat and sat and looked down, and the light was flat. And every song was loud or made me cry, not because I wanted or had to, because it reverberated in a new way. It took five hours to write that one page, and I forgot how to subtract five, but it did not so much matter. Another update, it is working. (If you answered “I am not sure” or silence to 1. above, please respond to the following. 2. Do you cherish turning right on red? 3. Do you narrate? 4. Is it strange that I can perfectly recall but NOT reproduce your intonation of a long “o”? 5. Have you watched one or more episodes of any of the television shows I listed? 6. Do you want to hang out? 7. Can we shuffle on the wood floor?) Finally, an illuminating update, I fell asleep with the lights on and did not breathe through my nose until two and a half hours later, I ate a heaped bowl of lukewarm rigatoni, I misunderstood how another four hours could pass. The radiator shook, I crawled back and forth at the foot of my bed and failed to imagine a world wherein I would not, singly strandwise, pull the hair from my beige carpet with a thumb and three fingers. More water in a glass. Did not notice plenty of things last week. Like buying two juices and a flat white, like a messenger notification, like a whole day. Like a 60-hour-old wad of cotton (saturated, rank) exactly where you think it was. Like gravity. I have tried splashing water in my face a handful of times, but I do not remember it ever working. But the rest of it I did tonight, I drank humidity and remained conscious beneath a running spigot. I do not know how these things work. I am grateful, though: can feel my hair, and it is damp enough to put me to sleep.

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Why is it never "cum for yourself" ?