#lissa aka beagan

[razorsadness]

Once Upon a Night in June

Deep Red Roses and Sweeter Than The Bees Humming sat on the front porch of Sweeter Than The Bees Humming’s parents’ house. It had been a roughtumble tarsoaked day of lollygagging around the hot pavement sidewalks of downtown, drinking soda and smoking cigarettes, and trying on dusty dresses in thriftshops, dresses that swung out wide from their hips as they waltzed around aisles crowded with the refuse of folks now dead and gone. And now they were sitting on the porch as the day changed to dusk, sitting singing songs of love like teenage girls do. The heatbaked day was giving way to cool Junechill night, the mist gathering above the Great Lake and rolling in to coat their shoulders and goosepimple them. The sky was winedrenched and the moon huge as it rose; creating silver trails that glinted off water and boats. Deep Red Roses shivered. Soon it would be time to huddle inside a hooded sweatshirt. Soon it would be time to go home. But words lingered on her deep red lips and she had to speak, had to form them into sound.

O, Sweeter Than The Bees Humming. How I want to kiss you.

—Jessie Lynn McMains, from Sad & Beautiful World #7: Fables (summer 2007)

[razorsadness]

Nights, I spent at Paddy O's, with whiskey or gin, pumping the jukebox full of money so I could hear Patsy and Johnny and Elvis (and The Clash and The Tossers), talking with Beagan whom I will always love with a love so big and easygoing and pure. And those were fun nights with old friends, thoroughly intoxicated; sometimes K. would waltz in and the two of us would tango around the bar (to the chagrin of some patrons, and the delight of the old men) - but I fell into a lot of melancholy moments. With all the alone time I had during the day, I was left thinking too much about everything, about ghosts, about how screwed up I am, and when those thoughts combined with glass after glass of booze, the sadness came. And with it, drunken, 1 a.m. text messages to Maggie and Filia. The messages to Maggie either consisted of quotes from World/Inferno songs (Hothouse flowers grow lush and bright in tiny little towns across this big night), or questions like Will I ever stop missing old lovers and wishing for new ones? Her response to that one was - All signs point to 'no.' And I laughed at that, and then started to cry, because she's right, and it's funny that she knows me so well, but the situation is not funny at all. And the messages to Filia all said basically the same thing: When are you going to quit being a jerk and come visit me? She didn't respond to any of them. It breaks my heart, because I know I really have lost her, or at least lost the closeness we used to have. It's not like the time I didn't hear from her for ten months. No, she communicates every once in a while, now. I've even seen her twice in the past year. But she no longer makes an attempt to come see me - if I want to see her, I have to go to her. And when I do see her, it is not the same. All we do is talk about memories of the things we used to do; we no longer create new ones. She is stuck in her world of boyfriend and job and battlefield ghosts. Just a couple days ago, I was looking through stacks of old zines, and I found one she made six years ago - collage art and cut-up poetry. She is so talented, and always has been; but she doesn't see it, and she doesn't do anything with that talent, and it frustrates the hell out of me. No matter how many times I tell her how amazing she is, she refuses to listen, or to believe me.

[from a journal entry, 7/27/06]

[razorsadness]

L.'s Bedroom // summer 2000

[razorsadness]

In my Memories on Facebook yesterday, there were two photos that made me incredibly wistful and melancholy.

Top: me and my best Lissa, at Paddy O’s; May 27, 2010.

Bottom: me, at/in the alley outside of Toad Hall; May 27, 2016.

I don’t know why they hit me so hard. Unlike some other old friends I could have stumbled across pictures of, I’m still friends with Lissa. Both bars still exist and now that I’ve started going to bars again occasionally, I could ostensibly go drink at one of them sometime relatively soon. I dunno. Something about the relentless passage of time. Something about how even if you’re still friends with someone or can still visit a place, it’ll never be the same as it was back Then cuz people change, places change, you change. You know?

[razorsadness]

There we were, stoned, and I decided I had to play “Hour of Deepest Need” for her. We don’t love all the same music, but we do have enough of an overlap in our tastes that we turn each other onto new stuff quite often, and I knew she’d at least somewhat like that song because she’s a huge Bob Dylan fan and that song has a definite Dylan vibe to it. I played her the album version and she had the same reaction I’d had in the car. Oh, fuck. So after that, we found a live video of the song, and then we found another live video of it and we sat there watching it and sighing and swooning and getting teary-eyed and J. rolled his eyes at us. This is how she gets with music she loves, he said, as though that’s a bad thing. This is how I get with music I love, too, I said. You’d think, being a musician, he’d understand that kind of visceral reaction to music; truth be told I think he’s maybe a little jealous because she doesn’t react to his music that way. But we didn’t let his scorn bother us; we just kept listening to the song, talking about how sad and beautiful it is, how much longing is in it. I feel like I’m always longing for someone or something, she said, and I said Me too, lady, me too. It’s true, I am always longing. But, as my horoscope for September said: Luckily, you’ve reached that certain age when nothing needs to make sense anymore, and longing is itself a form of pleasure. Something is always far away.

[from a journal entry, 9/22/16]

[razorsadness]

I met L. in front of her apartment, then we walked the couple blocks down to our favorite coffee shop, which I haven’t set foot in in…three years, at least. We both got coffees and spinach-feta croissants (very reminiscent of ye olde days when we were diner rats, we’d both usually order the spanakopita if we were in the mood for more than just fries and coffee).

Then we drove out to Petrifying Springs, sipped our coffees, hiked across the bridges and on the twisting trails up into the woods. Sometimes we were just quiet, observing things separately, the rest of the time we were talking about everything that’s going on in our lives.

She’s going through a really rough time with her partner, J.. Things have been rough between them for over a year now. Things seemed to be getting better for a while, now they’re worse than ever. Basically he’s going through some shit and taking it out on her and on his closest friends/family members, and they’re all trying to help him but he is refusing all of their efforts and doubling down on shitty behavior. She’s at the point where if things don’t change soon, she’s probably going to leave him. And like, obviously she loves and cares about him. They’ve been together nearly as long as P. and I have. And every relationship has rough patches but sometimes there comes a point… I care about J., too. I’ve known him long enough that we are good friends in our own right, and I want him to be happy. But my loyalty will always be with L. and if she’s reached the point where he’s refusing all her efforts to help him or get him outside help, and he’s making her miserable, she has every right to let him go.

We also talked about crushes, and gossiped a bit. She was telling me about this guy (who’s also a friend of mine) who she has a crush on, and this girl (who I sorta know) that they both have crushes on, and said girl is married (and it’s not an open marriage) but she’s fucking this other guy (who is also married) who I used to have a huge crush on… And other permutations of who is fucking or dating or crushing on who and… Part of me misses being out around people and having crushes, but as she told me all this I was actually kinda glad that I’m pretty hermity these days. Because Kenosha is a small enough ‘scene’ that the webs there are all tangled, and anyone there that I’d even be interested in—is either someone I used to hook up with and been there, done that, don’t need to revisit, or it’d just be way too goddamn messy. I used to thrive on that kind of drama, but now it just sounds exhausting. I’m too old for that shit.

After we’d walked and talked for a while, we found this great old fallen tree trunk to sit on, and we sat there and wrote in our journals for a bit. Those are my favorite kind of friendships, where you are comfortable talking about everything but just as comfortable sitting quietly side-by-side doing your separate things. And that was also like ye olde days—wandering the park next to the campus where we met, over 21 years ago; the park where we used to get stoned and now just drink coffee; sitting side-by-side writing in our journals.

[razorsadness]

Her and Cigarettes

She and I were just a couple of screwed-up punk rock kids, that long-ago summer. Getting high on the rocks, looking over the lake glowing in the twilight, ranting about communism and anarchism. Me with my ubiquitous leopard-print whatevers and she with her “fuck white supremacy” shirt. My fingers were always stained with typewriter ink from producing endless issues of my zine. Some nights we’d get so high we’d have to go to Taco Bell. Taco Bell sucks but we were broke and they had cheap-as-hell bean and cheese burritos. I was so lost so much of the time, had no idea where my life was headed, but when we smoked one last cigarette in my car before I dropped her off at home and she leaned her purple-pixie-haired head against my shoulder, I didn’t give a shit about any of that. The world distilled itself down to her hair, my fingers in it, greasy junk food wrappers, cigarette smoke, her root beer lips, whatever song was playing on the mix in my tape deck, and everything else fell away.

—Jessie Lynn McMains (originally appeared in Reckless Chants #13 [2013]; also appears in What We Talk About When We Talk About Punk)

[razorsadness]

from Safety Pin Girl #20, spring 2003

[razorsadness]

from Safety Pin Girl #12, summer 2001

(Please do not be alarmed by my comment about wanting younger punk kids to have crushes on me. A. I was only 19 when I wrote this. B. I said I wanted them to have crushes on me, not that I wanted to reciprocate said crushes!)

[razorsadness]

1. Saturday was the solstice. I have written too much about the summer solstice and personal anniversaries already. Here, there, everywhere. But god, I am thinking of that summer sixteen years ago. Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland. Wisconsin & Illinois. The How ‘Bout That Tour. Heartbreak & driving in a car with suspended license plates. Were-cats & lesbian ravers. Porch steps in Cincinnati, the hostel in Philly, the cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains, that motel room in Pittsburgh. Weed & beer, that motel in Pittsburgh, glow-bowling, my lucky dress, my little accident... All those long-lost lovers and f(r)iends. Sometimes I miss those days, that’s right you heard me... Why is that summer still so vivid? And how much of it, now, is a false memory? I have written so much about that summer, about that year, in ways both fantastical and more true-to-life, that I wonder how many of my memories of it are my “real” memories, and how many are memories of what I’ve written rather than what I actually lived. But what’s that Joan Didion quote? I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

2. On Sunday, my parents came over, and we had a socially-distanced/with masks Father’s Day cookout in our backyard. It was good.

3. The fireflies are out. So are the neighbors, shooting off fireworks at all hours of the day and night. I love the fireflies. The fireworks freak me out.

4. Random memory I had the other day, so vivid it, for a moment, felt like I was back there: summertime, circa 2000/2001, sitting outside Leroy’s Water Street Coffee in Door County, reading zines, chainsmoking, drinking pinhead gunpowder tea (which I first drank because of the band Pinhead Gunpowder, but then genuinely loved the taste of.) And of course thinking of Door County and Leroy’s made me think of other long-lost friends and lovers. But what doesn’t make me think of that?

5. Thinking of Door County. Thinking of Wisconsin. I’m finally putting out my chapbook Wisconsin Death Trip next month, the one I’ve been working on in some form for nearly four years, now. Thinking about how there are so many more poems I could’ve written for it. I realized I’ll never be done writing about Wisconsin. I’ve lived here, on-and-off, for more of my life than I’ve ever lived in any other state. And though for a good decade and a half I resisted letting it be my home, it became that, anyway. There are many other places that feel like home to me (places I’ve lived, and ones I’ve only visited), but Wisconsin is Home.

6. A couple nights ago, thinking about poetry, I had this thought: the poem is inextricable from the form. Meaning: you can’t paraphrase a poem, not truly; because if you expressed the content in a different way, it would be a different poem. Then I thought that I must have read that line somewhere before, because it seemed too smart for me to have come up with it. I searched through both my blogs for quotes about writing/poetry, and didn’t find that exact quote, or anything even that close to it. Then I Googled it, just to make sure, and again, I didn’t find it. So I guess I did come up with it. But when I Googled it, I came across something similar, in the book Poetry and Mindfulness: Interruption to a Journey by Bryan Walpert:

The various uses to which verse can be put–line breaks, repetition, returns in all of their forms–suggest why we cannot truly paraphrase a poem into what it means, cannot abstract its meaning from the specific way one word leads to another.

&

The meaning of a poem, in other words, is inextricable from its language and its form, and therefore inextricable from the experience of reading it, inextricable from the journey.

7. A short story I wrote in 2003 was included in a digital anthology featuring most of the former members of a certain underground literary organization. I’m not going to name the group, here, because...I have mixed feelings on the whole thing. I chose to be part of it because I want to honor who I was back then, & what I was part of, & because the guy who put the anthology together is still a friend of mine, & so are a handful of other people who are part of it. But I’m not mentioning the anthology anywhere publicly because a couple years ago I had a major falling out with the founder/figurehead of said org, whom I’ll call K. Long story short-ish—he’s always been an antagonistic old crank, but in recent years he started getting even more reactionary and siding with the “free speech means I can say whatever hateful shit I want w/ no consequences!!1!” people, talking shit about “social just warriors,” and also talking shit about people on food stamps or any kind of government assistance. (The government assistance rants especially baffled me, because he’s always talked about being a Working Class Writer. Like, how you gonna be all Working Class Pride and then shit on other working/poor people?!) So after all that happened, I pulled both my stories from the magazine he currently runs, and blocked him on all social media. It was really hard, heartbreaking, because for years he seemed like, while a crank, a good-hearted one, & he was, for a long time, one of the biggest champions of my work. (+ I was bummed to have to pull those stories, because I think they are two of the best stories I’ve ever written, and now no one gets to read them.)

7.5. I just don’t feel comfortable publicly sharing my inclusion in the anthology. For one thing, I’ve come to like some of the big-name authors that group most frequently lambasted. But also after reading the introduction to the new anthology & being reminded of some of the more antagonistic antics of the founding members, especially K., & comparing it with his more recent comments, I realized... He talked a big game about creating an alternative to the mainstream literary establishment, but he wasn’t really challenging the status quo or building anything new so much as he was another angry white male writer, who was bitter because he wasn’t the one making it big.

8. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about “underground” vs. “establishment,” especially when it comes to the arts. I’ve reached this point where I think it’s good to criticize the literary (or other) establishment for valid reasons (i.e., institutionalized racism, misogyny, classism, etc.), but to hate on an author solely because they’ve broken out a bit? Boring. Or even worse, to attack POC, LGBTQ people, women, disabled people, etc., who are like “uh, maybe just don’t call me a slur?” as enemies of free speech and art, and to claim that they’re now the ones upholding the establishment? Fuck off. Where was I going with this? IDK. I don’t think it’s inherently noble to labor in obscurity, but I’m also uninterested in making my art palatable to some mainstream (or even indie) ideal. I wanna make it on my own terms. I wanna make weird, rad art and put it out into the world along with other people’s weird, rad art. And make enough money off of it to help take care of my family, & support my press, & continue to make more art. (Well, ideally, I’d like no one to have to worry about making money at all, but ykwim.)

8.5. A writer acquaintance, the same one I mentioned back in May, who said that what I do with my press, even when I publish myself, isn’t self-publishing...she went on a Twitter rant not too long ago, telling young/emerging writers to never try and connect with anyone in the indie literary community, to just get their MFA & not look back. Now, I get where it stemmed from, because a few more people in the indie lit world have recently been outed as abusive creeps, & also she’s lamented before about not having her MFA. But when a few people politely tried to suggest that getting an MFA isn’t the right path for every writer, she said “getting an MFA is only a waste of time if you already can’t hack it as a writer.” I stayed out of it but I got irked... I mean sure, sometimes I think about getting an MFA in poetry/cross-genre writing, but that would solely be to deepen my craft. Up until I make that decision for certain, and have the means to do so, I’m doing just fine without one. There are so many reasons to not get one! What if your job that pays the bills is in a completely different field than writing, and you’re fine with that? What if you have managed to build a writing/writing-adjacent career without an MFA? Etc. TBH, though I have respect for her, I think I’m done engaging with her via social media. The things she says about self-publishing vs. traditional, MFA vs. non, indie writers vs. establishment writers, etc., make it very clear that she’s got a heavy case of imposter syndrome which she then tries to push off onto everyone else.

8.75. & yeah, it sucks every time someone in the indie lit community turns out to be a creep or rapist or a abuser or nazi or TERF or... But there are plenty of all those sorts of assholes in the literary establishment, too (if not more). There are shitty people in every group or scene. That doesn’t mean you abandon it altogether, though. Like, let’s weed out the assholes and abusers and build something even better!

9. Blah blah blah. Sorry for the rants & ramblings. I don’t have anyone to discuss this stuff with IRL right now, so I scribble it all on my sideblog where, like, two people read it. Anyway. Funny side note about fallings-out and the anthology: the piece F. (the guy who put it together) initially selected for it was a piece I’d written about the Great Year of 2004, about visiting Iowa with “Maggie” (aka whoever, aka my ex-bestie.) I asked him not to use that one,  because... It’s not that I think she’d see it, and even if she did so what? She already hates me. No, I asked him not to publish it because I’ve put enough writing about her out into the world already. Probably more than about any other old friend, excepting maybe “Filia,” and definitely more than I’ve written about any old flame. And I don’t wanna laud or lament her in my writing anymore. Of course I’ll still write about her. (Here I am, doing it now). But maybe I don’t wanna do it so publicly anymore.

10. But yeah. I’ve been thinking about old friends, what else is new? Thinking about F., who put the anthology together, and how it’s been 17 years that I’ve known him, nearly 17 years since we went on tour with the Perpetual Motion Roadshow. And earlier today, I was talking to someone about my friend A., & said that I’d known her for 20 years, & they said: “You have such a lot of deep connections with people.” And I guess I do. All these people I’ve known for somewhere between 5 to 20 years (or even more, in some cases). And guess what? 90% of them are people I met through zines and/or underground literature, punk and/or underground music, activist and/or arts communities. And those deep connections mean so much more to me than a degree or a publishing deal with a major press. Not that having those things wouldn’t be nice, too, but that I’d rather have the deep, long-lasting connections.

10.5. Which makes me think of things I’ve written in the past, about how many friends I’ve made through zines / all the action they’ve gotten me; about how my zines are basically just glorified personals ads. Which also makes me think about this patch, which I stumbled across a few months ago, and desperately need, but the shop is on hiatus right now, bummer.

11. I’ve also been thinking about my old pal J.P. Since having that techno music dream, I’ve been listening to a lot of Chemical Brothers, and I remembered how J.P. (who makes techno/electronic music) & “Beagan” & I used to have this inside ‘joke’ based on “Elektrobank.” One of us would say: “Who is this doin’ this...” And the other two would reply: “...synthetic type of alphabetapsychedelicfunkit?” And realizing I’ve known J.P. for 17 years, too. We’ve drifted out of each other’s lives for years at a time, but always, eventually, reconnected.

11.5. J.P. & I first met when we were both in our drunken slut phases, & yet we managed to have a totally platonic relationship. Well, almost totally platonic. We drunkenly made out once & then were mutually like: “That was...weird. Let’s not do that again, hey?”

12. It’s just. Friends like Maggie, who I thought I’d be riding side-by-side with for the long haul, they took themselves outta my life for good. Friends like J.P. & F. & A. & so many others...we’ve had disagreements, we’ve drifted apart for years at a time, but we always reconcile and reconnect, and I consider them true friends at this point. I guess you never know who’s a ride-or-die, do you?

(Lucky) 13. Totally unrelated thing: My mohawk is getting unwieldy & I’m already sick of it. I’m considering either just shaving my head entirely or leaving bangs / “sideburns” & doing the Chelsea fringe thing for the first time in 10.5 years. (Oh fuck, now that I’m thinking about a Chelsea cut I’m about to go deeply down a (ANTI-RACIST, OBVS) skinhead-nostalgia rabbit hole.)

[razorsadness]

please, my favorite, don’t be sad (part four of four)

61. lately I find myself kicked in the chest by the passage of time; it absolutely knocks the wind out of me. I know I’ve been acutely aware of the fleetingness of everything from a very young age, but it just gets more acute as I get older. (sometimes I wish I could take the me of 18, 15, 10, hell, even 5 years ago, and say: “you think it’s bad now? the nostalgia, the way time has gone and what it has taken from you? it gets so much worse.” then again, me 5 or 10 years on from now will probably wish they could say the same to present-day me.)

62. I just. two of my old Chicago haunts—Heartland Cafe, The Mutiny—closed in 2018. I remember Loop Distro zine readings at Heartland, reading cryptic pieces I’d written about my crush; hoping they wouldn’t know it was about them, but also hoping they would. sixteen, nearly seventeen years ago. and The Mutiny. the last time I was there was January 2009–a decade ago. it was the night I dreamed up Punk Month. it was the last time I saw W. that motherfucker. I miss him. I lost him in the “breakup” w/ Maggie. though she had such a chronic habit of dropping her supposedly best friends (which I didn’t fully realize until she’d dropped me) that I wonder if she’s since ditched him, too. not that I’d even know how to find him, now. he’s one of the people whose real name I don’t remember, cuz I mostly knew him by his punk name.

62.5. & I was reading the newest Razorcake because a lot of my friends are part of this issue, & thinking about the days when I used to write for Razorcake, & realizing that I stopped writing for them 15 years ago. which also means the Year of Our Inferno, Heart Attack 2004, was 15 goddamn years ago. & I discovered Coyote Boy’s married now & even though I haven’t felt anything romantic towards him in a long time I still felt a brief ache because I miss the times we had together (cheap beer, ‘Mats records, the coyotes howling outside; polka bars & RUCKUS!), & god, that was all so long ago, too.

63. queue I feel so much older now, and you’re much older, too. how’s your husband, how’s the kids? you know that I got married, too. queue I’m older now than you were then...

64. early November, I voted at the Cesar Chavez Community Center. it was the first time in a while an election gave me any hope: lots of people at my polling place were registering to vote same day; many of them were young, many were non-white. & tho I’m not a die-hard Dem, I’m glad so many people elected nationwide were women of color and/or LGBTQ+, & I’m glad Wisconsin finally got rid of Scott Walker.

65. the next night, I saw my Beagan for the first time since August. the day after that, I drove to Kenosha again. or to put it all poetically:

65.5. I was coming down off a two-day bender, drunk from the sugared lips of a girl with purple hair. we danced to the rattle of the Union Pacific going by, & I went reeling. tried to steady myself with coffee & a grilled cheese at the boathouse on the river. there were two crows sitting in a vacant lot, & the smoke was on the air...

66. it was all downhill from there. I spent most of November depressed. October was pretty much a month-long manic episode & November was the crash. I was burnt out, sick, & sad. as always happens when I’m depressed, I became convinced I’d never complete another piece of writing, & that it didn’t matter because I’d never be successful anyway.

67. Thanksgiving was good. my immediate family (P., the kiddos, & my folks) started a new tradition a few years ago, of having our Thanksgiving meal at the Pfister (a fancy old hotel in downtown Milwaukee). it’s a good tradition; the food there is amazing, & since no one has the stress of cooking a holiday dinner, we argue less.

68. I began to climb out of my depression on Small Business Saturday. I walked around downtown Racine, visited various shops, began buying holiday gifts for my loved ones. I was given a red beret & the next day I wore it for the first time, & wrote two poems. I joked that the beret cured my writer’s block but obviously that’s not true. it’s more that wearing it made me feel like I had to write something, to be worthy of it.

69. some snippets from late November-early December: financial worries that turned out all right in the end. / decorating the house for Xmas; hanging garlands, building altars, putting out dishes of candy. / finding the joy in early mornings, making oatmeal for my children & myself, serving it with cream & walnuts  & brown sugar & fresh berries or sliced bananas. / feeling completely overwhelmed by my children, but also crying while packing up the clothes C.’s already grown out of because I’ll never have another baby. / realizing that though I still like wearing short skirts/dresses or tight pants/tops occasionally, as I get older I am more drawn to loose, flowing, drapey clothing. it’s not just the comfort, it’s not even that I’m trying to hide my body—I’ve realized loose/drapey/flowy clothing is sexy in its own right, sexy in a different way than short/tight clothing. / finding out a creepy ex who borderline stalked me is friends with some of my friends.

70. a dream from late November: I lived in San Francisco; it was present day but in my dreamscape the vibe was more like ‘60s SF. I was part of a polyamorous triad with a man & a woman. she was a fashion designer & clothing maker who screenprinted these gorgeous dresses & kimono-like robes with vibrant, abstract patterns; he was a painter. I was a poet. she & I sat together at the small kitchen table as the late-morning sun came in through the window; there were ferns hanging everywhere which gave the room a subtle, lovely green hue; she & I both wore robes she’d made, she made coffee in the french press while I read aloud from a poem I was working on. he & I had a lot of passionate sex—I remember the flecks of blue paint on his dark skin & beneath his fingernails. god, why isn’t that my real life?

71. on the night of December 2nd, I had a dream about trying to help a bunch of people escape a burning building. it was very realistic & terrifying; it wasn’t until halfway thru the next day I realized I’d had the dream on the two-year anniversary (right around the exact time of night, too) of the Ghost Ship fire.

72. in a lot of ways, I’m living my dream. there are areas of my life which are lacking, & even the good parts are often stressful, are hard fucking work. still: writing, spoken word, editing, publishing, teaching the occasional class; I’ve made the things I love into a life. into a living. & I may not always pay all my bills on time but—

72.5. queue the only ones who have suffered from it are the creditors & the landlords. well, you know what? fuck them.

73. Pete Shelley died on December 6 & it was really hard for me. I’m writing a longer piece about it (which will probably be published in zine form), for now I’ll just say that I mourned the world’s loss of one of punk’s great songwriters, I mourned my own loss of a man whose kindness meant a lot to me when I was young (yes, I knew Pete; not that we were close friends but we’d met), & I mourned the loss of who I was back when I first heard Buzzcocks—back when I was a teenage misfit always falling in love w/ people I shouldn’t have.

74. the next day was Tom Waits’ birthday, & I used it as an excuse to partake in some nostalgic pleasures; to be my old self if only for an hour or two. or as much my old self as I can still be. I went to the Douglas Avenue Diner for lunch, w/ C. as my date. I thought of Filia. I always miss her most in November & December. & diners make me think of her, & Tom Waits makes me think of her, & the death of old punks makes me think of her. everything reminds me of her. I thought of Hearts Don’t Break, the novella I wrote in ‘02/’03, which was heavily based on our friendship; thought of my description of the coffee-stained comfort of our favorite diner. different diner, different city, different year, but it was comforting to be there. they were playing Christmas carols & the patrons were an equal mix of punks & old folks.

74.5. oh, nostalgia. Greek-American-owned diners like Douglas Ave. make me the most nostalgic, as those are the diners I grew up going to—there are so many of them in the Midwest. I thought of the Alps East in Chicago, the Greek diner I haunted as a broke college student; how I’d go there & order a cup of soup & a bottomless coffee & sit for hours eavesdropping on other patrons, getting ideas for short stories. I thought of the Greek diners in Kenosha, going to them w/ Beagan back when we were dating, sharing an order of spanakopita & a side of rice pilaf.

75. after I left the diner, I mailed out a bunch of zines and chapbooks & that, too, was the same as it ever was.

76. oh nostalgia. E. recently recommend my zines to “anyone who wants to feel nostalgic for the days of wine & Punkin Donuts,” & that made me happy. & A. said that as a hypersexual bi person reading my words made them feel seen; they also told me there was a week straight when they read a particular one of my poems every day on their lunch break & had to go cry in the bathroom every time.

77. & crying. in early December, I took the kids & P. to Barnes & Noble so I could participate in a poetry & music jam some of my pals were doing to raise money for the Racine Literary Council. I only got to sit in with them for about a half hour before the kids got antsy, & I cried as I walked away because goddamn, I miss my friends. though I enjoy alone time, I truly am an extrovert. if I don’t have meaningful interactions w/ other adult humans on a regular basis, I get depressed.

78. mid-December, I stood out in my backyard and saw the comet Wirtanen, a weird green glow moving across the sky.

79. oh, nostalgia. December was all about nostalgia & I am nostalgic by nature. I found myself missing S., missing our whiskey-drinking, impromptu zine-making, taking tons of photos days. but she stopped talking to me and unfriended me around the same time Maggie stopped talking to me, probably due to things Maggie said. yet another friend I lost in the “breakup.”

79.5. anyway. in December, I found myself missing N., too. I remembered the first time I saw his band live, before I’d met them, N. held the mic out to me during a song about heroin so I could sing along on the refrain. I was newly off heroin at the time, & a year later when I met him I mentioned that & he said: “yeah, I could tell, takes one to know one, y’know?” N. was probably one of my soulmates, in a totally platonic way. I was never physically attracted to him, but we were a lot a like & I loved to be around him.

80. I had a good Xmas & birthday/NYE. I’m 37, now.

81. this year I’m rediscovering the joy in writing. I’m submitting less & remembering that publication & recognition are nice but they’re not why I write. sometimes the act of getting it down on the page is its own reward.

82. January 3rd, we had a sunny, warmish day (30 degrees! you know you live in the midwest when...). I put coffee in a travel mug & drove to Petrifying Springs (the park alongside Parkside where I’ve spent a lot of time smoking cigarettes & writing poems in the woods). C. fell asleep on the drive & I parked the car & sat writing & drinking coffee in the front seat while he napped in the back & it was perfect.

83. I fell into another depression mid-January. it wasn’t as devastating as November’s depression, more just the winter blues. still, I didn’t feel like writing much for a couple weeks. so I did a lot of cleaning and organizing, & during my downtime I read a lot & took a lot of baths & just tried to be gentle with myself.

84. I felt pretty fucking sad when I heard the news that Maximum Rocknroll will no longer be a print magazine. love it or hate it (or love/hate it like most of us), it was just heartening to see a punk mag last that many years. I’m glad that I finally made it into MRR a couple years ago, before they ceased print operations. of course, thinking about that made me a little sad, too, cuz the interview was about WWTAWWTAP, & the press that was supposed to publish it never will, now... but maybe I will self-release it as originally planned. yeah, I think I will. I’ve got some new things to add and I really feel like it has to be out in the world so I can fully move on.

85. I saw Beagan again, mid-late January. we drank & talked & just being around her heals me.

86. then the midwest got hammered by polar vortex temperatures. I holed up at home, wrote a lot, cooked delicious food. then Imbolc & Chinese New Year. wearing red for luck, wearing my Brigid pendant, placing ginger & oranges on my altar. planting seeds that will grow in the next few months, making way for the new. 

87. there have been hard things. C. has been ultra clingy & cranky in the evenings lately. the other day, while writing part of this entry, I went into a sad spiral about the Maggie situation & stupidly Googled her & then had a panic attack. right now I’ve got some awful virus that’s wearing me out. but I’m finishing up my full-length poetry manuscript, doing press work, preparing to publish two chapbooks, preparing the two classes I’m teaching soon (one about tarot & poetry, one about zines). all I can do is keep going, because I don’t know any other way.

[razorsadness]

My Free Will Astrology Horoscope for this week reads: Are you a force of nature right now, or are you a freak of nature? I think the truth is that you're a freaky force of nature. You're just about as anomalous as it's possible for a Capricorn to get, and yet you've also got the equivalent of a thunderstorm's energy at your command. The funny thing is, the two factors are related. Your eccentricity is feeding your power, and vice versa. My advice is to refrain from questioning and worrying about this unusual state of affairs, and instead just capitalize on the odd advantages you have at your disposal.

A freaky force of nature. That sounds about right. I will send a hailstorm raining down on the world; but it will be a hailstorm of clown noses & chickenbones, wineglasses & pinecones.

These last few days have been coffee and cigarette mornings; nights of whiskey and words. There is a touch of autumn in the air. Summer is not over. August is a hot month, sticky, and I know for certain there will be quite a few more weeks of porch-sitting, of adventures, of late late nights spent drunk and running around. But I can feel autumn behind it all. It blew in last Wednesday. There was a huge storm, the kind that washes the heat off the pavement and sucks it out of the air. The storm brought a bit of autumn with it. The mornings are chilly and dew-damp. At night, way beyond the car fumes and charcoal from cookouts, I can almost smell smoke from burn barrels, the pages of fresh notebooks, apple cider.

I have never been able to relate to January 1st as being the New Year. My birthday is on New Year's Eve. Still, to me, the New Year comes in autumn. It doesn't start on any specific date, it changes year to year, but I always know it when I feel it. Sometimes, it's when the first leaves start turning colors and drifting to the ground. Sometimes, it comes on the day that the clocks switch back an hour. And sometimes, it's on the first day that it is cold enough to wear a sweater all day; the day I first see a rime of frost on my car windshield. Summer is such a gasping, breathless season. It always goes out with a bang and a blaze. Then autumn brings its quiet shuffle, and that feels like the New Year to me. The New Year starts in autumn, when the world is slowing down. It ices over in winter, and builds up again in spring – builds up to summer, which has to be the final season of the year, the year climaxes in summer; one last showdown before it dies to make way for the next.

As often happens to me when the first chilly mornings come, I have been listening to and reading a lot of Leonard Cohen. I have been waking up early, sitting in front of the open window, feeling the breeze waft through the screen, listening to the trains go by, and reading the newest Leonard Cohen tome, Book of Longing, which I checked out from the library a couple of weeks ago. It is so sad, and beautiful; sleazy and sweet, sexy and funny. I love the way words unite; the way that, because of L. Cohen's words, a twenty-four-year-old woman can relate to a seventy-two-year-old man.

But summer is not over, yet. The next week and a half is going to be crazy. Tonight, Levi and I are driving down to Chicago to see Tom Waits. I don't think I've ever been so excited about a concert. After the show, Levi and myself, and Maggie and B., are going to get drinks at a bar which is just exactly the type of bar I can imagine Tom frequenting. I am going to drink bourbon until I can't stand up. Then, I will have to get food and sober up, because I have to drive all the way back to Milwaukee.

Tomorrow morning, at 11:00 a.m., I am getting on an airplane and flying to Philadelphia. Philly already promises to be a marvelous, adventurous time. Just a few hours after I arrive in Philly, and drop my stuff off at the place I am staying, I am going to meet S. and A. We're going to Pointless Fest. Most of the bands on the line-up are crusty punk shit that doesn't do anything for me, anymore (I no longer enjoy listening to music that makes me feel like I am being screamed at, where I can't understand the words because it's so distorted – I wonder if that means I've gotten old?); but it is worth putting up with those bands because the World/Inferno Friendship Society will be there! I love going to shows where W/IFS is playing with more traditional punk bands; you can always tell the Inferno fans from the non-Inferno fans. The non-fans, they don't get it. They look at us strangely: Why are you wearing suits and party dresses to a punk show? Because, my friends, it is entirely possible to look good whilst fucking shit up. I feel like I should thank the universe for allowing me the rare privilege to see my favorite singer and my favorite band within the same week.

On Friday, in Philadelphia, Jess the girl becomes Edna Million the Clown. I will be waltzing on glass while I play my accordion, and doing the human pincushion, amongst other things. I have my make-up and costume all decided on, Edna Million the Clown is sexy yet melancholy; I don't think I'm wrong to say that I will quite possibly be the cutest clown, ever.

I'll be in Philly for a week – sometime while I'm there, I believe I'm doing a reading at an art gallery; other than that, my days will be spent sitting in coffeeshops, wandering around the city that owns my heart, maybe drinking at Tattooed Mom's a couple of times. There is so much left for me to do before I go to Chicago tonight: dye my hair, do laundry, sell some records to make some extra cash. I need to practice my accordion. I need to put the finishing touches on issue #11 of my zine, and make photocopies. While I'm in Philly, I plan on starting on issue #12. And I will probably write several letters while I'm there, while I'm sitting at a coffeeshop or bar. I love to write letters when I travel; something in me gets loosened up by distance from home. So, some of my friends will be receiving blue valentines, all the way from Philadelphia.

I am often reminded, lately, of how very much I love my friends; of how very kind they are, how much they care about me. At the pub a few nights ago, Beagan shoved a ten-dollar bill into my hand.

I know you're going to protest, she said, but take it.

What for?

Consider it a sort-of going away present. Only sort-of, because you're coming back. You are coming back, right?

I laughed. Yes, yes, I'm coming back. I just signed a one-year lease! But really, you don't have to give me money.

I know I don't have to, but I wanted to. I got way more tip money tonight than I expected. Just bring me back something from Philadelphia; like a cool rock from your favorite street.

I told her I would bring her something, but not a rock. Maybe I can chip a piece off one of those mosaic buildings that line South Street. Or maybe it should be something Zipperhead-related; back in the days when Beagan was my girlfriend, "Punk Rock Girl" was our song.

Two nights ago, a little after midnight, I ran out of cigarettes. I was writing; I tend to chainsmoke when I write. I ran out of cigarettes, and I had to walk to the twenty-four-hour Citgo down the block, to buy more. The moon was nearly full, though I don't know if it's waxing or waning, right now; it would hide behind clouds, then peek out. I noticed a sign I've never seen before, hanging high up on a lamppost. United Church of Christ, it read, 7 Blocks; an arrow pointing west, and underneath that, Welcome. If only Christ could actually help me, I thought. I was in a very melancholy mood, the zine I'm working on has not been an easy one for me to write – I've had to relive a lot of things I'd blocked out.

As I neared the gas station, a carful of guys speeding past on Kinnickinnic leaned out their windows to whistle at me. I jumped, startled, I was not expecting it or even aware of the outside world, I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts. It made me angry, like it does every time a random guy shouts things at me, whistles, hoots. I didn't understand, that night. I wasn't wearing anything sexy or revealing – just some old jeans, a tanktop under a hooded sweater; I had no make-up on, and my hair was all messy and hanging in my face. But I guess, to guys like that, it doesn't even matter what I look like. Just the simple fact of me being a woman, who is walking down the street alone at night, makes me a target for their attention.

I could see the gas station clerk from half a block away, through the brightly-lit windows. He is a young man, I think younger than I am, twenty or twenty-one, I'm guessing. Every time I see him in there, he is always talking on his cellphone, smiling, laughing. I envied him, at that moment, that night. He seemed so content, safe inside the warm glow of the store, talking to a friend. I am not built for contentment.

I bought my smokes, I walked back home. Sat on the front porch to smoke one. I looked at the moon; looked at the moon reflecting off of spiderweb firmaments hanging from the trees. I listened to the cicadas, the trains, the night-birds, the rustling of baby rabbits in the bushes. And I cried my eyes out.

[journal entry, 8/9/06]

[razorsadness]

Yesterday, P., Declan, and I had a diner adventure. We drove 35 minutes southwest to Paddock Lake - a tiny town between Kenosha and Lake Geneva - to go to Antonia’s Pancake House.

I had never been inside Antonia’s, but I knew right where it was, from the fateful summer of 2001. A.W. and I usually met in Lake Geneva - as it was approximately halfway between the towns we lived in (he lived in Rockford, IL, and I lived here in Racine) - but sometimes, if I wanted to take him to Kenosha or Milwaukee, or he wanted to take me to Rockford, we’d meet in the Antonia’s parking lot. If we were going to Rockford, I left my car there and rode in his; if we were going to Kenosha or Milwaukee, he left his car there and rode in mine. I believe it was one of the nights we met there which was the one and only time in my life I got caught in a lie wherein I told my mom I was somewhere other than where I actually was. (I lied to her about my location at other times, but that was the only time I got caught.) It was one of the times when I’d left my car there and he’d taken me to his stomping grounds, and I’d planned to get home in time for dinner, but time tended to get away from me and A.W., and I didn’t get home until around midnight. (This was also before I had a cell phone, so I had no way to call my mom and let her know I’d be late.) “Where were you?” she asked, when I came home. “I was with Lissa,” I said, because that is often who I was with and I was sure my mom wouldn’t question that. “No you weren’t,” she said, “she called this evening asking what you were up to.” Oh. Oops. I didn’t get in trouble - I was 19 and only living at home again temporarily before moving to Chicago - but she was pretty mad I’d gotten home so late and also lied about it.

God, that summer. That boy. I can’t believe it was thirteen years ago.

Antonia’s is a classic midwestern diner/family restaurant. Ugly floral patterns on the backs of the booths, tables shellacked with pictures of odd things (ours had the statue of liberty on it), sports memorabilia on some of the walls, crappy, weak coffee. An oldies station playing the hits of the ’60s - half of the ones I heard yesterday were on the Forrest Gump soundtrack, including the one playing when we walked in: everybody’s talkin’ at me, I can’t hear a word they’re saying… And great, greasy, stick-to-yer-ribs food. When the waitress asked me how I wanted my eggs, I was tempted to order them over-medium (How ya gonna like ‘em? Over-medium, or scrambled?), but I chose over-easy, instead, because that’s how I like ‘em best. As I sipped my crappy coffee, I looked out at Paddock Lake, and thought of a different Tom Waits song: Marysville ain’t nothin’ but a wide spot in the road… Paddock Lake is sort of like that.

I love diners so much. In the summer of 2001 (!), I wrote this:

Early in the morning, we met up with Ali’s aunts and uncles and cousins for breakfast in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, at a little diner called Summit Plaza Restaurant. These places, these simple moments, are the only times I feel good about living in America, the only times I think it’s worth it. At the Summit Plaza Restaurant, for about four dollars total you can get an excellent egg and cheese omelet - not too greasy, just greasy enough - and home fries, and good coffee. The waitress called me “hon,” and I got to watch all the locals: haggard old men with leathery skin, and parents and their babies.

It ended up as part of a longer piece in issue #12 of Safety Pin Girl. I remember that someone who read it wrote me a letter, and mentioned that paragraph. “I know what you mean,” they wrote, “and it’s so strange. Sometimes small town and mid-sized city diners are the places I feel most comfortable, and sometimes they are the places where - as a punk, as someone with radical politics, as someone who doesn’t look quite ‘normal’ - I feel the most frowned-upon.”

I’ve felt that, yes, I’ve been at diners where the other patrons and the staff looked at me like I was dirty, melted gum stuck to the bottom of their shoes, but really, a larger percentage of my diner experiences have been of the comforting variety. Most of my diner experiences - and oh, there have been so very many - have been the kind where the other patrons are either too caught up in their own lives to worry about me, or where the other patrons find me interesting and I end up making a new friend or at least having some kind of odd encounter that I can turn into a story later; most of my diner experiences have been the kind where the waitresses call me “hon” and don’t give a shit what I look like, and don’t care if I sit at the diner for hours upon hours, so long as I have the money to pay for my coffee and maybe order a side of hashbrowns with cheese.

Diners still make me feel good about living in America. They’re such a cross-section, a place where many different kinds of people gather together, united in their need for food or coffee, or just a warm place to sit and think in the winter (or an air-conditioned place, in the summer). Antonia’s was like that: our waitress was young and pretty, but with a tiredness in her eyes that made her seem older than she actually was. The old Greek couple that own and run the place were there; the woman (Antonia?) was sitting at a table folding silverware into napkins, the man rang up customers at the front counter. There was an aging biker at a table near the door - he had fading tattoos, and a skullcap, and a graying ZZ Top-style beard.

—

We drove home a different way than we’d driven to the diner, and so passed through the suburban reaches of Kenosha, all the stripmalls and billboards and big box stores and multiplex movie theaters. We drove past the Office Max where, in the summer of 2000, a friend of mine worked. She was a zinester from California who moved to Kenosha to live with her boyfriend; she found me through zines and we started hanging out, getting coffee (at diners), trading zines and mix tapes. And she got a job at Office Max, and I would go in to make photocopies when she was working, and she’d let me use her employee discount. I wonder whatever happened to her?

It sounds strange, maybe, to have such fond memories of those suburban shopping sprawls. You could say that those kinds of areas are a symbol of everything that’s wrong with America: capitalism, homogenization, urban sprawl - and you’d be right. But when you grow up in a place where that’s all (or, not all, but a large chunk of) what’s available to you, you find some magic there, anyway. We couldn’t have what we wanted, so we learned to want what we had.

[7/1/14]

[razorsadness]

I.

My list of "things I need to do/get" right now reads as such: Go to Closet Classics and buy a new corset. (Something appropriate for a sexy, yet melancholy clown-girl.) Go to a flower shop and buy corsage pins. (Not for corsages, but for sticking through my flesh.) Go to the costume warehouse and buy clown make-up. Go to the library and rent Fellini's movie The Clowns. (Study the funeral scene in particular.) The circus is my life. My life is a circus. I couldn't be happier.

I have been saying that I am at a loss for words for the recent events of my life. That statement is not entirely true. The words are all there inside me, so many of them, it is like I am made of words. But they are refusing to come out. They are holing up inside me and it is making me ill. I wake up with my shoulders stiff and my stomach roiling; the words have burrowed themselves into my muscles and they are swimming around in my stomach like fishes with consonant eyes and vowel tails. I just wish I could get them to stop being afraid of the open air, to come out into the light where they could be of some use instead of just making me achy and nauseous. When did my words become fearful? They used to be so brave. When did the truth start to scare me? My beautiful Underwood is broken, and though I've fixed typewriters before, I can't figure out how to fix it. That is not helping with my wordproblem - I have always been able to write more freely on that Underwood than on any other typewriter, or any computer, or with any pen or notebook. I have to buckle down and write - fear and broken typewriters be damned. I only have a few days left to do my twenty-four-hour zine; and I got perhaps overly ambitious this year and decided to do not one, but two of them. And this is the last month and a half of my life, right here, told with the only words I can coax out.

II.

In mid-June, Levi and I went on a roadtrip. June is one of my favorite months to be out on the road, out in the Great American Night. June is one of my favorite months, in general. Everything bursts with life; the world is not so sure of itself and much more fun. The curtain that separates the mundane from the magical is much easier to push aside in June. Which is why it is a good month for travel - there is so much more to see. I wrote a couple entries from the road - well, one written one, and one voice post. There are so many things to say about the journey. As always, I spent half the time hanging out with ghosts; some of the spectral kind, but most of them just memories of my past. J. was there, for part of the drive, talking about that roadtrip we took together a few years back, to go to the Underground Press Conference in Bowling Green. He sat in the back and I tried to ignore him, he is a ghost that makes me sad, but it was difficult because he kept pounding out rhythms on the back of my seat. A.W. appeared alongside the road as we drove past Rockford. He sent a huge, white moth flying into the open car window. He was trying to remind me that I should never, ever take things for granted; because just when you come to count on something, it disappears. I gasped when I saw his ghost in the high beam of the headlights, because for a moment I thought he was really there, in flesh and blood, 'til I remembered that he is in Korea right now. And then I felt a wave of relief, followed immediately by a wave of great sorrow, remembering the way I broke his heart and how in doing that, I broke my own. Ian followed me around St. Louis - peering around certain corners in Laclede's Landing, I caught glimpses of his mohawk and his kilt. He was there to remind me of the days when I had no qualms about fucking a boy I'd just met a few hours before. His ghost made me sad, too; I am not that girl anymore, and I wouldn't want to be, but I do miss how brazen she was. Brazen and brave and bold, all those marvelous b-words. J.W. popped up in St. Louis a couple times, too, but his ghost only made me angry. Shoo, I growled under my breath when no one was listening. I have no use for you, anymore. You're being a dick. You're not welcome to take up space in my mind. Leave me alone. Go drink your whiskey and write bad poetry about sex and cigarettes. Even Maggie’s ghost hitched a ride a few times - she regaled me with her memories of our odyssey (the second time I ran away with the circus). She rolled cigarettes and sang: Sometimes I miss those days, that's right, you heard me. Other times I could not give a damn. Her ghost unsettled me more than any of the others, because she is still in my life. But it was the ghost of the way she used to be, back in those days, and it reminded me that even though we are still bloodsisters, we have changed, the nature of our friendship has changed, and things will never be the same. Which is both good and bad. Or rather, neither good nor bad - it is what it is.

Door County was, other than the stuff I already wrote about: buying odd instruments (I now own a toy piano, a melody harp, a musical washboard, a slide whistle, and a thumb piano) and pirate daggers. Dreams about a girl named Hesper and being burnt at the stake as a witch. A sunrise seen from Pebble Beach - I walked high-wire style on a fallen tree and watched black silhouettes of seagulls flying across the graypink sky. And of course there was my drunken breakdown, which, after the initial tears and pain, turned out to be a good thing. The next morning, I did a one-card tarot reading for myself. I drew The World: The World card, very aptly, represents a successful conclusion, all aspects accounted for and taken in. A culmination. An integration of all aspects. I believe I am coming closer to accepting the whole of myself, contradictions and all. It is not an easy process, and I will never reach the end, not fully, not in this lifetime - but it is a worthy goal.

On the drive from Door County to Madison, I saw a line of trees on the horizon that looked like a herd of buffalo galloping across the plains. I almost cried, thinking: at one time, there would have been buffalo roaming free in this part of the world. And now the only buffalo left are raised on farms and used to make burgers. Madison was fun, waking up in the hotel in the morning, having that familiar travel sensation of waking up in a town I am not used to waking up in. The way that seeing an unfamiliar ceiling means that the day will be full of exploration and adventure. And the day was June breeze and iced coffee and everyone out on the sidewalks. Street musicians and lovelygirls - including one who saw my It is a sad & beautiful world tattoo and sighed Oh, that's so true; and one who sat at a table outside a cafe, scribbling in her journal. She had short red hair and a gray tweed fedora, a double strand of fake pearls around her neck, and an ashtray full of cigarette butts with crimson lipstick stains on them.

Then there was the drive south from Madison, down past Rockford and all the abandoned factories, toward Collinsville, Illinois (a town near St. Louis, where we decided to stay because the motel rates were cheaper). Oh the night was glorious as we drove south; the only way I can describe it is to say that it was a Carl Sandburg night. With the almost-full moon looming over us, the sound of trains in the distance, driving down Route 66 while the stars made pictures of fishes and rabbits with fire-ears and fire-tails. We didn't get to the motel until early in the a.m., and we stayed up for a few hours more after we checked in. We got high, wrote song lyrics, and watched a very old silent-movie Western that was on the television. By the time we were about ready to turn in, it was five in the morning. I listened to cricket fiddles playing in the grass below the window, and watched the sun rise brilliant orange over a twenty-four-hour roadside White Castle. We didn't have as much time in St. Louis as I would have liked. The day was hot and sticky and smelled of the Big River. My lunch was catfish and cornbread, eaten in a blues club where we got to listen to Bessie Smith as we dined and drank an afternoon beer. We wandered around by the river, for a bit, looking at the three-mile-long flood wall that all the graffiti artists in St. Louis have adorned with colorful words and pictures. There were lovelygirls everywhere that day, too; they smiled at me and I smiled back and then blushed and looked away, because girls make me so very shy. We spent the last hour of our time in the Gateway to the West at the City Museum, which has to be the coolest museum, ever. So much whimsy and wonder, a museum I'd want to live in. Gargoyles, fountains, slides, circus and carnival memorabilia (including a mechanical fortuneteller that was eerily right-on about my life: she told me I was feeling trapped), and a cafe called Beatnik Bob's that you could actually smoke in! In the cafe, there were shelves and shelves of dusty, crumbling books; I left a copy of my zine next to a book about Lewis Carroll.

On the outskirts of St. Louis, on our way out of town, we stopped at a gas station. There were birds flying all around, swooping, diving, all the same kind of bird, and there had to be at least ten of them. At first, I couldn't tell what they were, but then one of them briefly lit on a low stone wall and I saw - they were nighthawks. The drive through Missouri was strange and unnerving. Most of the billboards were either Jesus or anti-abortion related, or they discussed the dangers of crystal meth. The two most disturbing things I saw? A "cemetery" someone set up on their farm to represent all the "children" killed by abortion. . .and a Klan-related billboard. Yes, really. And I was terribly upset, but what made it odd was, there were beautiful things in Missouri, too - lushly emerald farmfields and craggy red rock formations, rolling hills; the moon, which was full that night, and the same rustred as the rockfaces; classic rock on the radio (Levi and I both agreed to turn up the volume and absolutely blast the music when "Free Ride" came on, and then laughed at ourselves about it); and a BBQ joint where we stopped for dinner - there were enormous pink elephants next to the parking lot, and everyone working that night was extremely friendly. Oh, the dichotomies of the world, of life. I squealed with glee when I started to see Waffle House signs appear alongside the highway. And then we arrived at our motel, a three-story pink stucco thing on the eastern side of Memphis, and I stood out on the balcony and felt the warm Southern air (yes, with a capital "S," we were no longer just in the south, we were in the South) on my bare shoulders that were already tanned and freckled from days spent in the sun, and I looked at the lights of the city. I slept very well, tucked between the cool sheets, dreaming of grace.

In the morning, we had breakfast at Waffle House. Our waitress was a woman who was a transplant from Detroit, and she joked about it: Yeah, I've been here long enough that I say "y’all." We went to Sun Records, of course; and it was humbling just to understand how many talented people, how many shining musical stars, had walked on that very same stretch of pavement in front of the building. We drove all around the city that day, checking out various record stores and coffeeshops and just generally exploring. Driving past pastel-painted houses with vines growing up the sides, willow trees trailing the ground, Baptist churches. And everywhere, that smell of muddy riverwater, and of barbecue tangy and thick. It was even hotter, there in Memphis, than it had been in St. Louis, but it seemed right, slow and meandering and making me calm. The heat was okay as long as I could drink some sweet tea, which of course is not hard to find in Memphis, Tennessee. There was a used book/musical instrument store we visited, run by a man named Johnny Lowe, and his wife. He is an eccentric in the best possible way, doing his own thing. He has a mass of tangled, curly hair, and the day we met him, he was wearing a shirt that said: Rock music is dead, punk got stale - could this be the wave of the future? Jug music - join the revolution! He makes power-chord slide guitars from cigar boxes and broomhandles; some with two strings, some with four, some of them even with two necks and two pickups so you can play bass on one neck and guitar on the other. They're called lowebowes, he sells them out of his shop; and while he showed Levi how to play them, I talked with his wife. She's in charge of the books in the shop, as well as a display case full of tarot cards. I bought The Halloween Tarot deck because it was so spookycute, and fitting with my life and interests. We talked about tarot for a while, and she gave me a pair of the bottle cap earrings she makes. The entire day, I had the sneaking suspicion that I had been in that city before. That happens to me, sometimes, with places I have never visited in this lifetime. Memphis was one of those - I have never been here, but I know this place, in a deep, deep way, not in a way you can learn from a tour book or a story.

After the long, hot day, we went back to the motel to freshen up and change. I changed in to my red red rockabilly dress, because we were headed to Beale Street to see a rockabilly band. Beale Street, at night, in the summer, is a wonderful place. Bikers and locals and tourists all together, everyone having a good old time, dancing 'til dawn. You can drink on the street, there, and the bars are open until three. The band was The Dempseys, and they honestly put on one of the best live shows I have ever seen. Such energy, such passion, you can tell they truly love what they do. Their guitarist sometimes plays the trumpet, and the bassist likes to surf his upright while he plays. I drank gin&tonics all night long, and danced until I shimmered with sweat. Levi and I befriended a local rockabilly kid who seemed stunned to see a girl all dolled up in '50s clothing, and when I introduced myself, he thought I said my name was "Jezebel." Everyone loved my dress, that night; every time I went to the bathroom, a different girl complimented me on it. One girl was hitting on me, she was blond and I don't even normally dig blonds but it suited her; I'd noticed her earlier in the night, she danced drunkenly and hit on everyone in the bar, which made me smile, reminded me of myself in the old days. Between sets, we stood out on Beale Street with our drinks in our hands, chatting with the guitarist from The Dempseys. He told us that we were not tourists, because we hadn't gone to Graceland. And after three hours, the band was still rocking, but we were drunk and hot, tired and hungry, so we walked over to the adjoining restaurant and ate barbecue until our faces were sticky and our stomachs were full. On the drive back to the motel, I took my high heels off and put my feet up on the dashboard. I rolled the window down, let my arm hang out of the car, and sang along with a mix CD - Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Carl Perkins.

The next day, we spent as much time downtown Memphis as we could, before we had to leave and make the long drive to Chicago. We ate lunch at the Arcade Diner, Memphis' oldest diner; we had to go there because of that scene from Mystery Train - when I am in cities where my favorite films took place, I always seek out the landmarks. And everyone mosied down the hot streets, even the downtown businessmen on their lunch breaks were in no rush to get back to work, they stopped under trees to catch a bit of shade, to drink sweet tea and have a smoke. Old black men on benches were overheard saying: Sho 'nuf, and we rode the streetcar down the length of Main Street. And I did not want to leave, not at all. In just a day and a half I fell so in love with Memphis, with the South. It was blues and bluegrass and beauty, hot and sweet and slow. I want to live in Memphis, someday, yes, another place to add to my ever-growing list of places I want to live. There was something about it that fit right with me, and there have been signs: since I have returned, I keep seeing cars with Tennessee license plates, and every time I go into a bar, someone is bound to play something by Elvis or Johnny.

The drive through Arkansas, Missouri, and Illinois was long and overbearingly hot, the sun was high in the sky, searing through the car windows. Arkansas was flat and dry and dotted with graveyards. Somewhere in southern Illinois, we passed through a county called Iroquois County, and it made me happy, and then it made me sad. Yes, I'm sure there once were Iroquois there, as well as the Illini tribes - Kaskaskia, Peoria, Cahokia, Tamaroa, Michigamea. I am also just as sure that they were driven out by white settlers. And do you know why this is especially hurtful to me? I am part Mohawk. I also have a bit of French and English ancestry. And to know that some of my ancestors were most likely brutalized by some of my other ancestors - well, there are so many people in this country who are in that position. It makes for a war inside you.

We got into Chicago late, late, delirious from driving and traffic. All we wanted was a drink. We scooped up Maggie from Hell House, and then drove to the Skylark. We made it just in time for last call. When we ordered three Pabsts and seven shots of Jack Daniels, the bartender looked at us like we were insane. And maybe we were - but what good is life without a little insanity now and then? That night, Levi and I slept in the same back room that Maggie and I made our home in at the end of our June journey of two years ago. A lot has changed in my life, and in that house, in those two years, but it was a little too familiar - the stuffy darkness, the memories, the wish to be still on the road. And so, another odyssey came to an end.

III.

A few days after we returned to Wisconsin, I had to go down to Racine for a week. My parents were going to be out of town for a week, and they left me in charge of caring for the house and the dog. It rained a lot while I was there, everything was damp and there were mushrooms everywhere, velvet-brown heads or spotted white-and-red tops popping out of the trees and the lawn. I wished I knew which ones I could pick and eat and not die, only hallucinate the earth. I spent my days outside mostly, on the deck, drinking coffee, reading poetry, jotting observations in my journal (I bought it a few days before the roadtrip, and wrote on the cover: No time for Poetry but exactly What Is). I watched the crows and the mourning doves, the rainwater dripping from the pine trees, and the preteen kids skateboarding down the cracked sidewalks. I spent some time digging through old notebooks and old files on my computer. I kept finding strange notes; sometimes only one word long, sometimes whole sentences or paragraphs. It's as though I leave secret messages for myself to find months or years down the line. One of the documents I found on my computer was simply saved under the filename "awesomeness." Two sentences on a page, that's all it is. Both of the sentences are quite beautiful, but here's what's odd - I'm not sure if I wrote them or not. Usually, when I write down quotes, I give credit to the person who came up with them so as to avoid confusion in the future. The two sentences in this document have no name or book or movie attached to them. Perhaps I wrote them; they certainly sound like sentiments I have expressed in the past. But I don't remember writing them, and since I found them, I have been a bit obsessed with trying to figure out if I wrote them, or if I got them from a movie or someone else's writing. I've even tried doing a Google search with the text from this document, to see if it would come up with anything, but nothing was found. The first sentence is: It's not so much that I dream up my characters; as that they're dreaming me. The second one, my favorite, says: There comes a time in everyone's life when they must crawl to the top of a roof, and drink until they have empty bottles to throw into the street. I'd really like to figure out who wrote them. If it was someone else, I'd like to be able to give credit to the genius that came up with them. And if it was me, I'd like to know, so I can use them in something. Maybe it shouldn't even matter, but it really has been driving me slightly mad.

I also wasted a lot of time online, and ended up getting into a random conversation with a kid of sixteen. It started because of a mutual love of World/Inferno, and then the kid ended up pouring their heart out to me, telling me they've been dabbling in coke and heroin and I got to be the older, wise one. I used to do that stuff, too. I had a massive heroin habit when I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. I'm not going to tell you not do it, because that would be hypocritical. Just. . .be careful. And for the love of God and Jack Terricloth - make sure you always use clean needles! The kid said: I do always use clean needles, and it's not a problem, at this point. I just do it occasionally, for fun. I know, I said, and it always starts out that way. But it is so easy for it to cross that line from fun into a debilitating addiction. Yeah, the kid said, I've been trying to keep track of it. If I feel like it's starting to become a problem, I'm going to tell someone. Good, I said, that's a very smart idea.

Nights, I spent at Paddy O's, with whiskey or gin, pumping the jukebox full of money so I could hear Patsy and Johnny and Elvis (and The Clash and The Tossers), talking with Beagan whom I will always love with a love so big and easygoing and pure. And those were fun nights with old friends, thoroughly intoxicated; sometimes K. would waltz in and the two of us would tango around the bar (to the chagrin of some patrons, and the delight of the old men) - but I fell into a lot of melancholy moments. With all the alone time I had during the day, I was left thinking too much about everything, about ghosts, about how screwed up I am, and when those thoughts combined with glass after glass of booze, the sadness came. And with it, drunken, 1 a.m. text messages to Maggie and Filia. The messages to Maggie either consisted of quotes from World/Inferno songs (Hothouse flowers grow lush and bright in tiny little towns across this big night), or questions like Will I ever stop missing old lovers and wishing for new ones?' Her response to that one was - All signs point to 'no.' And I laughed at that, and then started to cry, because she's right, and it's funny that she knows me so well, but the situation is not funny at all. And the messages to Filia all said basically the same thing: When are you going to quit being a jerk and come visit me? She didn't respond to any of them. It breaks my heart, because I know I really have lost her, or at least lost the closeness we used to have. It's not like the time I didn't hear from her for ten months. No, she communicates every once in a while, now. I've even seen her twice in the past year. But she no longer makes an attempt to come see me - if I want to see her, I have to go to her. And when I do see her, it is not the same. All we do is talk about memories of the things we used to do; we no longer create new ones. She is stuck in her world of boyfriend and job and battlefield ghosts. Just a couple days ago, I was looking through stacks of old zines, and I found one she made six years ago - collage art and cut-up poetry. She is so talented, and always has been; but she doesn't see it, and she doesn't do anything with that talent, and it frustrates the hell out of me. No matter how many times I tell her how amazing she is, she refuses to listen, or to believe me.

I also spent a lot of time playing the piano when I was in Racine. I worked on some of my own songs, as well as figuring out how to play "Invitation to the Blues." It got stuck in my head one day, Tom's ragged voice singing: She's just a moving violation from her conk down to her shoes. An open invitation to the blues. It would not leave my head until I learned how to play it.

The night I got back from Racine, Levi and I, as well as two of my Kenosha friends, D. and A., went to Shank Hall because the Burlesque-A-Pades was in town. It was vaudeville and circus and burlesque all in one, music and comedy and sword-swallowing and sexy girls. In short, everything I love. There couldn't have been a better cast: Corn Mo, the "accordion rock god," with his hilarious stories and accordion-playing and his amazing voice reminiscent of Meatloaf and Freddie Mercury. The World Famous Pontani Sisters - so talented! Kitten DeVille - meow, baby! Miss Saturn, hula-hoop artiste extraordinaire. Trixie Little and The Evil Hate Monkey - Trixie was adorable, and The Evil Hate Monkey is just fucking hilarious. All the burlesque numbers were backed up by the Fisherman Xylophonic Orchestra, who were marvelous, and made me really, really want to do burlesque with a live band. And the whole thing was hosted by Tyler Fyre, who is one of my circus heroes. He did sword-swallowing and the human blockhead, and told dirty jokes, and he was fantastic. The whole night was wonderful, really, D. and I were both ridiculously drunk, in a silly, swirling way. We kept hugging each other and giggling, and she bit my shoulder so hard I had a bruise there for a week. The night also made me realize, as though I didn't already know - that is what I want. Circus and burlesque. I had one performance with a burlesque troupe in Chicago, but that wasn't going to work longterm because it is just too hard for me to commute to Chicago a few times a month for something I'd get paid so little for I wouldn't even break even on costumes, let alone gas money. And the circus here in Brew City that I was supposed to be involved with, that didn't pan out either - for various reasons, mostly because the guy who is the ringleader of the whole thing gave me very bad vibes, and if there is one thing I have learned, it is that nine times out of ten, my gut reactions to people are right-on. Yes, the Burlesque-A-Pades made me realize that I need to do whatever is necessary for me to be part of circus and burlesque, because that is who I am, that is what I need in my life. I guess, sometimes, the universe does listen. I wished for it, and like magic, it arrived. But that story is in the next chapter.

IV.

I first found out about the Underground Literary Alliance because of my stint on the Perpetual Motion Roadshow in September of 2003. Now, the Perpetual Motion Roadshow is in no way affiliated with the ULA, but there are many ULA writers who have toured with the Roadshow. One of my tourmates was F., and he was already part of the ULA way back then. I guess he told them about me, and must have had nice things to say, because soon after I got back from the tour, I received a letter from K.W., asking if I'd like to join the ranks of the ULA. He warned me of things - that the ULA makes some enemies because they are very upfront about their opinions of the mainstream literary world. I joined up, anyway. Maybe it comes from my punk rock background, but I've always thought that if a group like that is pissing people off, they must be doing something right. Like I said, going on the Perpetual Motion Roadshow got me connected to the ULA. Part of the reason I was attracted to the Roadshow in the first place was the description of it as "a traveling carnival of words." That's why, when Jim Munro asked us to come up with our own taglines for the tour, I pegged myself as "Jessica Disobedience, the bizarre and freakish zinester from Chicago." There was a carnival element to the Roadshow, and so it only makes sense that there would be a bit of that in the ULA, as well; that all three things would turn out to be connected, and everything would come full circle.

When F. asked me to participate in the F Independent Literary Festival in Cleveland, I immediately made sure my schedule was clear for the weekend of July 7. It had been a long, long time since I'd done a reading, and I felt the need to get my words back out into the world, again. I wrote a lot in 2005, but didn't do much of anything with the writing, just let it sit and collect dust on my desk, or take up space on my computer's hard drive. The time had come to throw my words out amongst people again, to stop babying them, to let them fend for themselves. I was also looking forward to seeing F. again - he became almost like a big brother to me, when we were on tour with the Roadshow, and I hadn't seen him since then - and I was looking forward to meeting people I'd been communicating with over the past few years, such as P.K.

I couldn't make it to Cleveland for the first day of the festival, on Thursday the sixth. Cleveland is a long drive straight from Milwaukee, so Levi (who joined me as my travel companion and official photographer) and I crashed in Chicago on Thursday night, and after a properly greasy diner breakfast on Friday morning, headed off toward Cleveland. (Slowing down along the way, of course, to give the finger to the Museum of Science and Industry, which was closed to the public that day because Dubya decided he wanted to spend his birthday there. It makes sense, I said, he needs to learn about things like how the human body works and how airplanes are operated.) We arrived at bela dubby, the cafe where the Friday night event was being held, about 45 minutes after it started. I thought we were going to arrive fifteen minutes early, but when we crossed the border into Ohio, I remembered that I had to flip my clock ahead one hour. Whoops. It turned out okay, although I missed P.’s reading that night, which I was bummed about. When we got there, J. was halfway through his reading. I didn't know who he was prior to that night, had never heard of him (ssshhh, don't tell him that!), but was immediately intrigued. His story, which I didn't catch all of, had something to do with getting kicked out of a show for being a clown. And there was a banner behind him, with a painting of himself on it, one half of his face with a leering clownface painted on, holding a cane; the other half, with no make-up, but grinning and holding a drill. Yes, definitely intriguing.

C.R. was next; I'd met him years before, he was the opening act for our Roadshow stop in Cleveland, and I was curious as to what he'd pull out of his sleeve. He did a one-card tarot reading for everyone in the audience. Each person drew a card, and then he interpreted them. I drew the Queen of Pentacles, which in his interpretation means that I am a strong woman, but a touch melancholy. I think that's fairly apt.

During the intermission, Levi and I went outside to smoke. We met F.’s wife, C., and she hugged us and told us how glad she was we were going to be staying at her house. The three of us smoked cigarettes and talked about tattoos and the New York Dolls, and then W. came galloping outside and set off firecrackers in the middle of the road. I was a bit jittery - out-of-it from driving all day, nervous about my performance, and also feeling odd because everyone else there had been drinking beer all evening, and I was still completely sober. But as I watched W. jumping up and down, laughing madly, as smoke and sparks poured down the streets of Lakewood, past the bowling alley with the flickering fuchsia sign, as smoke curled up toward the steelblue sky; and as I watched everyone who was still inside talking and drinking coffee and beer; and saw P. lean up against the brick wall of the building and light his cigarette with a match, I knew it was going to be a good weekend.

Jack McGuane was next, the poet laureate of Lakewood, Ohio. He's not a ULA member, but he is a wonderful poet - his poems are about simple moments of everyday life, with a touch of oldman romantic cynicism. His speaking voice is gruff and commanding. He was a welcome addition to the troupe.

Then W. read his politically conscious soundpoems, including one about the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, and I think maybe I'm not intellectual enough to get the full meaning of his work, but I did enjoy listening to them. The way that, even when the words didn't make sense to me, the sounds still did.

And then it was my turn, and I was nervous, but I channeled that energy into the stories, and I think it worked. The first story I read was a story about kids smoking angeldust-and-marijuana joints dipped in embalming fluid and returning from their flights with the memories of dead people. I heard gasps during the story, and one guy clasped his hand to his chest and said Oh, Jesus. Later, a woman named April told me that when Levy took a picture of me during the performance, she thought the camera flash was lightning, that I had somehow brought lightning into the room. I believe that is one of the best compliments I've ever gotten - to hear that I cast a sort of spell over the audience. My second story was a short one, not quite as intense as the first, but a favorite of mine - a tale of the end of the heyday of the American Traveling Circus, and the carnival barkers being being forced to live in a secluded retirement community. That cast a spell, too, at least on J. After the evening's performances were over, he bowed to me and told me my stories were perfect, and then he said: We're not dead, you know. I wasn't sure what he meant, but then he proceeded to swallow a sword and then snap a mousetrap on his tongue, and I figured it out. That was the moment things came full circle, the whole connection between the circus and the ULA and the Perpetual Motion Roadshow. Have I ever told you that I don't believe in coincidence?

F. was the finale of Friday night's events. He read from his rock'n'roll novel, which I became quite familiar with when we toured together - and it is still, to this day, one of the funniest stories I have ever read. The kind of thing that you should not read on public transportation, because you will laugh out loud, and everyone will turn to stare at you.

It was discovered that Levi and I weren't the only ones staying at F. and C.’s place. W. and P. and J. had stayed at another house the night before, but got kicked out because I guess a concerned parent in the neighborhood didn't like J. waving his sword around in front of the children. So they were to be staying at F.’s for the rest of the weekend. Levi and I went to get a quick bite to eat, while everyone else went to buy beer and wine, and then we all met back at the house for an afterparty of sorts. Time for me to end my sobriety. April even joined us; the more the merrier. It was a wonderful night. It's not often I get to sit around a big table with a bunch of writers and artists, everyone drinking wine or beer, talking about Life, Art, Music. And then J. accosted me in the kitchen and we talked about Circus, and he said to me: Would you like to learn the human blockhead trick? Why, of course, I replied. First, I have to teach you the Carny Code. He told me the Code, which I can not repeat here under penalty of death (!), and besides a true showman doesn't reveal her secrets to just anyone, but I nearly wept tears of joy as he told me the Code, and then as he taught me how to stick a nail into my nose, because by teaching me these things, he was saying that I was worthy of the knowledge. And with that knowledge, I transformed from simply a carnival/circus aficionado, to a real live Carny. (The trick was a success, by the way - soon, everyone was snapping photographs of the two of us with nails up our noses.) And then there was more drinking and talking, and those off us who do those sorts of things stepped out to the backyard to share cigarettes and other smokeable treats. April told me I was like The Debbie Harry of poetry; and then she told me I was brave to work with the guys from the ULA. I wasn't quite sure what that meant. You mean, cos the ULA has lots of enemies? I asked. No, she said, these guys are just so. . .strange. I laughed, and responded: Most of my favorite people are strange. I'm pretty strange, myself.

Saturday morning, we all woke up and sat around the dining room table once again, listening to The Replacements while eating waffles and drinking coffee. I love waking up in houses full of people. Levi and I had to part ways from the rest of the crew for a few hours. We had to drive into Cleveland so I could make photocopies, and we wanted to make a stop at a comic store. Our tattoo artist here in Milwaukee requested we bring him a present from Cleveland, something Howard the Duck related. (You know - Cleve-land. That would be the name of this planet.) When we returned, there was a cookout going on. Along with those of us who had stayed at C. and F.’s the night before, C.R. was there, and Adam Hardin, and Elias from Bad Touch zine, and members of a couple of the bands that were going to be playing that night - Kill the Hippies and The Dad of Rock. And there was plenty of beer and salad and hot dogs or veggie burgers for everyone.

About an hour before we were supposed to be at Pat's In the Flats, there was a mad scramble for the bathroom. J. took up a lot of time in there, putting his clownface on. Seeing that made me miss clowning; I told him how I have clown training, did some clowning when I was a preteen/young teenager, how I've even performed at the Clown Museum in Delavan, Wisconsin. (That's the great thing about Wisconsin - you can say whatever you want about how much it sucks, but there certainly is a lot of circus history here.) I told him that I'd like to get back into clowning, but I'd have to come up with a new clown persona, because the one I had when I was younger was named Pumpkin, and was much too sweet for the kind of thing I'm going for, now. Well, you should come up with a new one, he said. Yes, I said, I think I will.

When we got to Pat's, I was already feeling good. The nervousness I'd had the night before was all gone. I was psyched to perform, and, well, C. had given me a Xanax before we left the house. The edges of everything blurred a little. Don't get me wrong, I was still fully functional at this point, just giddy, and the quality of light looked softer than normal. Pat's In the Flats is a great place, a dive bar/rock club in the industrial part of Cleveland. It's been around in some form or other since the 1930s. Back then, men who worked in the factories would go there to get their lunch. And, since its conversion to a rock club (sometime in the '70s, I believe, but don't quote me on this), a lot of kickass bands have played there. Levi got us whiskey&Cokes, and I scuttled into the dingy bathroom to do a costume change from the jeans & t-shirt I'd been wearing all day to a skirt and strapless top. I also put on bright red lipstick, and when I was putting on mascara, I got the impulse to darken my eyebrows. I've had this thing, lately, with darkening my eyebrows for the purposes of photographs and performances. When I make facial expressions, my eyebrows are a large part of that, so I think that if my eyebrows are exaggerated, it shows up better. When I emerged from the bathroom, W. said: You look great! You're like a. . .cheerleader of the apocalypse! Now, that is a description of myself I would use for publicity. While others were busy setting up the sound system, I sat and assembled copies of my zines. I had a moment of realizing how god damn lucky I am. Because of the zines I've done over the years - zines which I've lost money on, and which many people have considered a fool's errand from the beginning - because of my zines, I have met so many amazing people. (Not to mention all the action they've gotten me. Ha!)

Show time drew closer, and I grew giddier, the adrenaline and Xanax now mixed with whiskey. Man, I said, I feel lame. I don't have any props. Just my stories. I don't have any props, either, P. said. Let's think of it this way, I said, our stories are good enough that they can stand on their own. We don't need props.

The show was terrific. F. did an excellent job of pairing up bands with writers; it was one of those magical nights were everything just clicks, and you feel like you're creating something much, much bigger than yourself. Particular standouts for me? C.R. with Kill the Hippies - they rocked out punked-up versions of old spirituals. And J. with The Dad of Rock. J. chased W. (in disguise as the Evil Professor something-or-other) around the stage, W. set something on fire, there was sword-swallowing, and I even got to be J.’s lovely assistant for the mousetrap trick. My set went so well. The stories and poems I shared that night were about love - my romantic, twisted, tragic take on love. Humphry Clinker played music as I spun my words into the smoky bar air. I felt like a Beat poet, the way the music flowed with the words and then, before I knew it, my words went with the rhythm of the music. (Levi told me, later, that he talked with Pat - not P.K., but Pat the owner of the club - and she said I was her favorite of the night.) Between my stories, Humphry Clinker played their songs, and they fucking rocked. They deserve big kisses for helping my tales come to life. At one point during my set, I looked out at the crowd, and it all seemed so right - Derek DePrator, rocknroll guitarist, in drag. Punks and clowns and poets. The best minds of my generation, and other generations, indeed - all with a touch of madness, but not destroyed by it. Angelheaded hipsters, and those expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, and those who danced on broken wineglasses barefoot. Allen Ginsberg woulda been proud. P.K.’s set with Tripolar Faction came after mine; and that went wonderfully, too. I love P.’s stories - dark, and intelligent without being at all pretentious. And I kept drinking, chugging whiskey; by the time we were all leaving, I was thoroughly fucked up.

On the car ride to F.’s, with the moonlight streaming blue and cold through the windows and making all of us shine, someone requested that I sing a Tom Waits song. I belted out "Cold Water," followed by other Tom songs, and then I recited a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem. Well, I did warn them - once you get me started, I don't stop. Back at the house, the drinks continued to flow. There's a lot I don't remember of that night. From what I do remember, it seems I was still in performance mode - I scared the shit out of J. by shoving a kitchen knife down my throat. I did yoga in the driveway; and J. and I danced on broken wineglasses barefoot. There are other things I remember, but I'd rather not get into them, here. (Ahem.) I drank too much wine, and the last thing I remember is puking in the front yard with J. holding my hair back; then he and P. carrying me into the house. See, these are the kind of folks that are in the ULA - not only are they great writers, they're good people. They open their homes to strangers, and they'll take care of you if you get sick from drinking too much.

When I woke up the next morning, my neck and face were covered in lipstick and clown make-up. There were bits of gravel embedded in my shoulder, and a pack of cigarettes in my underwear. After a couple more hours of hanging out and coffee-drinking, everyone had to be on their way. There were hugs, and promises to keep in touch. I hate saying goodbye. It seems, sometimes, that I've spent most of my life making new friends while on the road, and then having to say goodbye to them. But since my return home, I have received an invite from the Philadelphia faction. I'm going out there in August, to be part of Carnivolution, and to do a reading at a gallery. Final conclusion? Cleveland does, in fact, rock. And so does the ULA.

V.

And life since the visit to Cleveland? Well, I've been working a temp job for the last few weeks. Eight hour days, three to five days a week. Yesterday was my last day. It was a dull office job, but Lord knows I have plenty of experience with things like making photocopies and entering data into computers. Sometimes a girl needs money to buy her costumes and clown make-up, and I'm not too proud to do. . .well, pretty much anything. . .when I need the money - whether that means posing nude, selling records I don't listen to anymore, or working a temp job. I have about six hundred dollars coming my way, now, and that's a good thing. A necessary thing.

I saw The Handsome Family when they came to Milwaukee, and they were wonderful and haunting, as expected. Rennie reminds me a bit of myself (well, if I'm flattering myself). She was introducing a song, and she said: This song is about two people who go into the woods, but only one of them comes out. That's my favorite kind of song. I have a few of those in my songbook. And I just thought - Oh, yes, that's my favorite kind of song to write, too.

I saw Pirates of the Caribbean. It was enjoyable, if overly long. As far as I'm concerned, the best part of the movie was Tia Dalma, the island witch-woman. Especially the whole conversation about Davy Jones - And do you know why he cut out him heart? It was a woman. I heard it was the sea, the sea he fell in love with. Same story, different versions, all true. It was a woman who was wild and un-tameable as the sea. (And those are my favorite kind of women, those wild, un-tameable ones.)

When not at work, I have spent my time practicing the human pincushion, the human blockhead, glass-walking, clowning, and other things of that nature. I have also been feeling truly beautiful, truly and absolutely beautiful, having nothing to do with the way I look, just because of being who I am. And I have been feeling quite fragile. The new World/Inferno Friendship Society album, Red-Eyed Soul, is the soundtrack to my summer. August is going to be hot and wild and wonderful. On August 9th, I am seeing Tom Waits in Chicago! (I got an e-mail yesterday, where the chap who wrote it said: A sociologist friend of mine pointed out that there is a "Tom Waits Generation" that doesn't really fit into either "Gen X" or "Y." How true. We are the TW Generation.) And the day after that, I am flying out to the City of Brotherly Love, to join the circus. That's it, for now. I'll leave you with this, five chapters and fifteen pages after I started. And here I thought the words wouldn't come out. I guess, now that I've pried the floodgates open, the words won't stop coming out. It's time to dig out my Olivetti and get to work on that zine. Even if my Underwood doesn't work - I love my Olivetti, and any typewriter is better than none, right?

[journal entry, 7/27/06]

[razorsadness]

A few days ago, the kiddos and I went to the library. I’ve now been in the library twice since they’ve fully reopened, and it is ridiculous how happy it makes me. There’s so much stuff I used to take for granted that I no longer do. Like the library, like when the zine I’m writing is finished, I can actually make copies at the copy shop instead of printing individual copies on my home printer. I realize the copy shop was open last year, but I tried to minimize going out in public unless it was absolutely necessary. And yeah, I still wear a mask in indoor public places. I’m fully vaccinated, but I know not everyone is, and my kids aren’t able to be yet. But I don’t mind wearing a mask when needed. That was never a problem for me. I’m just glad I can go out in public without fearing I’m risking my life and the lives of my family every time.

P. is depressed. It’s coming up on the one year anniversary of when he found out his mom was sick and went to visit her for the last time. It’s just hard because there’s nothing I can really do for him except hug and kiss him a lot, and let him know that he can talk about it if he wants to, but also not force him to talk if he’d rather not. Sometimes all you can do is let people know you’re there if they need you, just be with them. It’s hard for me, because if I can’t actually solve everyone’s problems, I get anxious. I want to fix everything, and it’s a hard lesson to learn that’s just not possible.

We had a great solstice, though. Welcomed it in with a sublime round of fucking and then we sat listening to a thunderstorm, watched  the lightning split the sky. And we’re still cooking great things. Battle Eggplant was awesome, this week was Battle Greens. Two nights ago, as round two of Battle Greens, I made mac and cheese with gouda and aged white cheddar, with bacon, green onions, and kale in it. It was seriously the best mac and cheese I have ever had in my life, and P. said the same.

Last week I drank too much, to the point where I had a few days of pretty bad hangovers, so this week I’ve cooled off on the imbibing. I made mocktails one night; another night I just drank mint iced tea. The night before last, I went to hang out with my bestie for the first time in nearly a year and a half. And yes, I did drink that night, but I didn’t overdo it, just had a couple drinks then switched to sparkling water. Last night I had a beer with dinner, but that was it.

So, yes, I hung out with Lissa the night before last. I thought I might cry. I didn’t, but I felt all of the feelings. She and her boyfriend J. are the first people other than family I’ve hugged since February of last year, the last time I saw them. And that span from February 2020 to now was the longest she and I have ever gone without seeing each other, in the entire twenty-one years we’ve known one another. Even when I lived in California, I flew back to Wisconsin often enough that I got to see her every three to six months or so. I’m so happy we’re all fully vaccinated now and can hang out again. It was so great to see her, and talk about everything, and listen to music, and have drinks, and sit in her kitchen watching people walk by on the sidewalk below. Even just driving to and from Kenosha was good. It felt like so many summer nights past; headed south on Highway 32 with old favorite songs on the stereo. And on the drive home, the fog was thick, that ghost-fog on Highway 32 that I’ve mentioned in so many of my poems.

My album comes out on July 2nd, and was put up for preorder on Wednesday. The box with my “author copies” of the tape arrived today, but I haven’t opened it yet because I am so excited that I need to prolong that just a little bit more, if that makes sense. Also on July 2nd is the opening reception for the zinester art show I’m part of, and the timing is absolutely perfect cuz it’ll double as an unofficial release party for the album.

The night after that is the opening reception for a friends’ art show down in Kenosha, and I wish I could make it to both but there’s no way I can get anyone to watch the kids so I can go out two nights in a row, and I used to get really, really bummed about shit like that but after the past year+… I said to Lissa that I’m just happy things are happening again, and that most of us (in our extended friend/acquaintance group) are fully vaccinated—I am happy to be missing things again for normal reasons like not having anyone to watch the kids or because I have something else going on or even just that I don’t feel like going, rather than the past year+ of pretty much all in-person events being cancelled or switched to virtual, or, for the rare event that wasn’t cancelled, I didn’t go because uh, I didn’t want to get a life-threatening illness.

I haven’t heard yet about that writing gig I applied for, but I am envisioning it as if I already have the position. I’m manifesting shit this summer, for real.

I realized the other day that I haven’t left Wisconsin since before C. was born. In 2017, when I was pregnant with him, I travelled to Michigan and to Chicago, but since he was born I have not left the state of Wisconsin. I’ve traveled fairly extensively within the state since then, but haven’t left it in nearly four years, now. I need to change that. As much as I love Wisconsin, I’m ready to see some other places again.

I’m having a hard time starting that W/IFS zine. I have extensive notes for it, but every time I sit down to work on it I’m paralyzed by fear. Not fear of what I’m writing about—any “incriminating” stories in it are ones I’ve already told in some form, so it’s not like people will have any new dirt on me. Rather, it’s fear of not getting it right. Of it not being perfect. This happens to me often when I’m working on a new piece or project. I know once I say “fuck it” and really delve into it, the rest of it will burst out of me and then I can edit it before it’s published, but it’s taking a while for me to get to that “fuck it” place.

I’ve been looking through old photos to use as promo pictures to go along with my album release, and reading through old zines and journal entries as research for my W/IFS zine, and I’m so nostalgic I could barf, but what else is new?

[razorsadness]

oh my little darlin’, you won’t be mine forever; you weren’t made for me - you were made to be free

The person I am currently trying not to write about is someone I had a brief but very intense thing with, once upon. Last week he announced his engagement to his girlfriend, and I am taking it harder than I thought I would. I mean, he got together with her right after things ended between us—or, rather, him getting together with her was why things ended between us. I’ve forgiven him, and we’re still friends and frequent collaborators. And I want him to be happy, and she seems like a rad lady, and they seem like a good match. I’m not jealous, not in the sense of if I can’t have him, no one else can. It’s just, well, it fucking hurts. Because even though the thing between us was short-lived and ended quite some time ago—if I’m being honest, I still have feelings for him. Not the kind where I pine for him every day, but the kind where sometimes when he sends me a message or posts a photograph of himself I feel a little flare in my veins, a little pang in the pit of my stomach. And I guess maybe there was still a tiny part of me that hoped one day, when we saw each other again, something might happen…but now that he’s engaged, I know once and for all that it won’t.

And this is all so familiar. I have written about similar situations so many times before. He was just as into me as I was into him, I’m sure of that. He asked me to move in with him; suggested we travel together. But that would have meant leaving basically my whole life behind. So I didn’t, and he got together with another girl. It’s not to say that his feelings for her weren’t just as strong as the ones he had for me, but there was also the fact that she didn’t already have a primary partner, and she was willing to drop her life to start one with him. This has happened to me over and over and over again: I fall for for someone (a male someone; this has only ever happened with guys, my lady-loves have been much better at non-monogamous, fluid relationships) who is basically monogamous. I tell them that I am not, and that I either already have a partner or will, eventually, want other partners. I also make it clear that I am not willing to give up my life for them. (And that’s what it’s about for me, really. Because even if I am not actively polyamorous at the time, I refuse to give up my whole life, and that’s always what they ask. They never say: I’ll move to be where you are, I’ll travel with you, no, it’s always: Move to where I am, travel with me.) Eventually, they find someone that will drop everything else just to be with them, that will be monogamous, and then they drop me—and they almost always do it unceremoniously, with no real closure, and they usually assume that I won’t have any strong feelings about it because people always think if you are polyamorous it means you didn’t have as much invested in the relationship as the monogamous person did. They couldn’t be more wrong. Loving many people doesn’t mean my love is diluted. It means I have so much love to give that I can’t limit it to just one person; it means that I love many many people so very very much.

I’ll get over this. Soon enough, I’ll no longer be reeling from it. But right now, right now, it aches in the rag and bone shop of my heart.

The weekend before this last one, we were up in Door County, and I decided to take P. and Declan to one of my old favorite haunts, Pebble Beach. I spent so many lazy afternoons there, so many drunk-stoned nights. I’ve had spiritual revelations and nervous breakdowns on that beach. I wanted them to see it, to know its magic; I wanted to look for lake stones for my altar. But the private beaches on either side have been fenced off (there were always private beaches on either side, they just didn’t used to enforce it), and it was overrun by tourists, and the magic is gone. And the feeling I got was sorta the same as how I felt when I heard the news of that old flame’s engagement. (It happened on the same day, because life likes to smack you around like that sometimes). The feeling is—I don’t know, is it jealousy? I’m not a mine-all-mine person. In fact, I want to share the people and places and things I love. But when those people, places, things leave my life completely/become someone else’s wholly… It hurts to be reminded that they’re no longer mine—again I’m not trying to imply ownership with that word, more a sense of belonging together—and probably never were to begin with.

—

Other things:

-We drove the back way home from Door County. I saw a herd of Sandhill cranes in a field, and a herd of Whooping cranes flying overhead a bit later in the journey. Cranes are an auspicious thing to see, and beautiful, and strange. And we drove through small lakeshore towns, and I thought: I could live here. One, in particular, had a neighborhood full of early 1900s houses with big front porches, and I’ve always longed for a house like that. A beautiful big old house with a front porch—the kind of porch with an overhang, so I could sit out on it in any kind of weather. A front porch I could put a porch swing on, where I could sit on the porch swing and play guitar, or drink whiskey or coffee, or watch the rain. -I’ve been frustrated a lot lately. My printer is broken and the copy shop I go to has new Xerox machines that suck and my typewriter hasn’t really worked in years and in general I’ve been feeling like there’s no place for an aging punk writer like me. So I’ve been doing things like listening to Fugazi at top volume, and dying my hair violet, and I bought myself a brand new typewriter. -I recently found out that one of the other names for lemon balm (which I have been growing in my garden and using in my spells) is “Melissa,” and that it is often used to soothe heartache and sorrow. Which is appropriate, considering my bestie’s name is Melissa, and she is often the only one who can soother my heartache and sorrow. -I’m getting really frustrated with some of my friends. They’re getting into this doom and gloom mindset because of climate change / violence / politics / you name it. I don’t blame them—things are horrible and frightening and I fall into that mindset quite often too. But I try to talk about it only occasionally, to select people, or channel it into something positive. And particular friends of mine are barfing it all over my Facebook feed and it bothers me. I am trying to hold onto some small shred of hope because my despairing will not do myself or the world any good, and it is very difficult to do that when half my friends are constantly saying we’re all fucked. I’m especially furious with the handful of friends who are using their despair to low-key shame people with children. I have a lot of friends who are childfree by choice, and they have made that choice for multitudes of reasons. I have never, ever shamed anyone who chooses not to have kids (no matter the reason); nor have I ever asked anyone why they don’t have/don’t want kids. So to see some of my friends say things like: This is why I’m never having kids, because we’re all doomed… They might as well be saying: You’re a fucking moron and a shitty person for choosing to have kids. Did they ever think that maybe, for some of us, having kids gives us even more reasons to fight for a better future, and to hold onto some hope? -Speaking of kids: I am so, so excited for the arrival of my baby girl in December. I just can’t even express how excited I am.