Wrote this During an Insane Time--And I feel the Same Today

I have a good friend who I just spoke with over the telephone.  She suggested that I start writing again, at least until I can recleaim the feeling of happiness I felt a month or so ago when I was without Mark.  I have been trying to live in a world without this man since I was twenty-three-years-old.  I am now almost thirty-eight.  This is an amazingly beautiful, fleeting life we've all got.  I am so sad that I keep getting sucked back in.  Here are the things that make me go back: loneliness; wanting a "real family;" not being close to my real family and having few friends; wanting Ezra to be happy; crazy fear about not being able to make it financially on y own; fear that ppl. will never know me as well as he does, as I have known him longer (in a sense) than my real family of even my own, beloed son.  But this last thing is not even true; it is only a fantasy spun out of the anxiety that happens when I am on my own.  He does not reall yknow me, as he does notreally know anyone, not even Ezra.  He is a self serving, spoiled creepy scummy guy who has the emotianl intelligence of a thirteen year old.  I deserve so, so much better.  Saying this, saying that I deserve so much better is even difficult, as he has led me to beleive--for years now--that I am crazy, lazy, selfish, a bad mother, etc.  If I view the world through his eyyes, and I tihnk desperate women like me do this often.. I do noth thingk I am unique in this way.. I feel like nobosy would ever love me.  He has told me that there is a "type" of man who married single moms and that they are predatory.  Interestingly, he wants to "date me" his own son's mother, have me clean his disgutingly gross apartment that looks like someonw ith mr lives there.  He wants me to listen to his political ideas (which are somwhat informed, but  born only out of a desire to serve his ego and to feel better than other, more educated ppl.  Note;  he is fabulously undereducated.)

This man has never truly parented a day in his life.  He wants Ezra so that he can have a buddy who keeps him company and admires him.  I beleive he keeps his daughter (who he has abonded many, many times) @ bay so that he can feel as though someone much better than him has a longing fo rhim.  his man has: lived in a trailer, date a prostiture/stippper; had the stripper burn down his apartment; had the stripper look after his daughter even though she had lost not one but two children to social services.  And he came out of this expereince not grateful that she was the only woman who ever loved his daughter, but angree b/c she stole a few hungred dollers, as he would not pay more than half of his share in their rental agreement.  THs man does no respect women.  He suess his very owen mother to bail him out of legal issues as well as for a place to live when nobody else will take him in.

I listened to this man belly-ache about how sad his life was, as his daughter's maternal grandmother raised her.  When the daughter was born the woman he had her with became so nuts she could not take care of her; thus he was--and cry me a river here, flolks--abandoned with his baby.  Of couse at age twenty-three why would I doubt this story?  Most twenty-three year old cannot be trusted to pay for appropriate car insurance, never mind synthesize real adult life situations.  I have heard lately that oone's brain does not fully even develop until they are twenty-five.  I adore our son with my whole entire heart.  And it is thus that I would most likely not restructure my life if I had the opportunity; however, imagining a life with this beautiful boy and a REAL man, an educated, kind man who did not manipulate his, his mentally ill daughter, his low life means-spirited-already parents, was not an immature drug user , etc. is a killer. It breaks my heart.  I imagine poetry written on cardboard castles, small tiny songs that you can hear on Sunday mornings, and friends over doing cool stuff, even playing PICTIONARY.

Cool Chimney

I referred to the cool chimneys in Sweden in another post.  But then I could not find a cool picture to illustrate my point.  I seriously cannot remember which post this was.  But here is a cool photograph.  It might not be the very best... I dunno, maybe I'll keep this post to illustrate what I am talking about, and I can update it on a reg. basis.

Fuck, and I am wondering why no one reads this blog.  Hm.  Could it be b/c I am even boring my*self*?

Doing It

Doing It

When I was thirteen, my best friend April and I spent almost every weekend with each other, as both of our fathers lived in the same city, which was over twenty minutes south of the sleepy, college town where we lived in during the school week with our mothers and younger siblings.  Our siblings, though mostly invisible to us, went with us back and forth on these weekends.

My dad lived in an impressive condo that overlooked the bay.  While he typed in his rapid hunting and pecking system, I would stare out the floor to ceiling windows at boats idling through the water’s dangerous current.  There was no wishing myself out of his condo, so I would call April.  Though April understood that my father was the antithesis of cool, she preferred spending time with me there in this place of exquisite light and clean lines.  We would make fun of my sister who was eight years my junior while my father either ignored us or suddenly blew up at us, whacked-out in his declarations of our under achieving slummy-ness.  Her father lived in the more poor section of this city, though it was not a dangerous area, nor were there any family housing units that accepted section eight vouchers or that kind of thing.  April’s father lived in a seedy place with a roommate who we never saw.  We wondered several times if there was even a roommate.  April’s father had a perennial bottle of JD next to his bed.  His bed was a mattress sans box spring on cracked wide pine floorboards.  The house smelled like stale pot smoke and broken air conditioning, especially in the winter.  If I had been the more dominant friend, the friend with the power, we’d have spent our weekends, all of them, at April’s dad’s apartment.  I felt bohemian there and though I wore preppy clothes that my mother bought for me and that mirrored the outfits of all my peers, I enjoyed fantasizing that I dressed like singer Steve Nicks, like some kind of haf prairie girl, have witch of all that is enchanted: black, sparkles, and everything billowing and flowing. 

On one particular weekend that punctuated our regular schedule of time spent reluctantly at my dad’s;, we sat in April’s dad’s living room almost crazy with boredom.  We brushed our hair and then each other’s hair.  We organized our makeup bags and talked about tampons as opposed to pads.  We wondered if we were anything like Dicey from Cynthia Voight’s Dicey’s song.  Would we have immediately gone for adult for help?  Would we have been instant in seeking out an adult first before single-handedly taking on our little siblings, traveling across the country looking for a living relative?  Or would we have ditched the siblings and found a cute man to look after us? We loved this idea; like the character in the book, our mother has abandoned us at the mall.  Before we decide what to do, we would shoplift tee shirts from the Limited.  Then, we might take the bus downtown to the record store where we’d find a super nice guy who would take care of us.  He would be old, but not so old that he was no longer cute, like almost forty.  We would leave our siblings in the dust, we usually concurred.

While we wandered through our fantasies out loud with each other, mostly whispering our ideas about these men who were several years younger than our fathers, we took big slurps from a red vintage thermos filled with cheap wine we found in the refrigerator.  We listed to reggae, UB40, on his turntable.  “Red Red wine, you make me feel so fine; you keep me happy, all of the time.”  Her little brother and father were sleeping.  The roommate, as usual, was nowhere to be found.  We decided to look through her father’s bureau that doubled as one of the crooked couch’s side tables.  After rummaging for several minutes through rubbers, broken pens, pencils with teeth marks and soiled erasers, and endless receipts for groceries, we found a stack of neatly typed, tissue-y papers.  We pulled them out gingerly and then, with girlish excitement, quickly. 

April’s father was taking a creative writing class, we decided.  For these papers were organized into bundles that were mostly fastened together with rusty paperclips and some were stapled together.  Each bundle had a header in the left hand corner with a first and last name and a date.  Below this, but centered, each bundle seemed to have a working title.  Looking through all the bundles, almost all at once, we almost immediately zeroed in on one bundle with the name “Cynthia Danish.”  Cynthia’s title read, “The First Time.”  April and I locked eye’s and squeaked.  Then she started laughing and borderline somersaulted over onto her heap of pillows.  She mock screamed into one of the pillows.  Then she said, “We have to read it;  it is a “doing it” story. 

We had read a ton of doing it stories.  As middle school girls, we were somewhat “over” Seventeen Magazine, realizing that style was not something you gleaned from a magazine, especially not for “teens.”  We gathered our current ideas for fashion by sitting in the student union building on campus in the town where our moms lived during the school week.  We would take notes and sometimes ask older, college girls what the thought of doc martins with hippy skirts.  And were high heeled cowgirl boots classy with jeans, or were they just slutty.  We wrote for hours about these questions and answered them on occasion after watching and asking so, so many older girls. 

I passed the doing it story to April and waited for her to stop with the giggles so we could start reading.  She took a big swallow of the wine, wrinkled her nose, coughed, and then took a big swallow of diet coke.  She cleared her throat again, and tucked her silky, near-perfect blond hair behind an ear.  Shaking her head, she started to read:

I saw Peter for the first time when I was over at Chuck’s house. It was afte a football game.  Our team had won and we were all pretty crazy with happiness.  SO happy, in fact, that we invited the other team to party with us that night.  My friend Jane’s parents were out of town, so that’s where we were all at.  I was sitting on a couch, on Dan’s lap.  And then I looked into the kitchen, and there was this tall guy with super hero hips and hair that looked like a movie star.  He was nodding his head and smiling with a cute frown that prefaced the grin.  I imagined a carton heart above my head.  Then I hoped off of Dan’s lap.  And I walked, sticking my chest out kind of, but not in a slutty way.  I walked like this the whole way into the kitchen.  And I tried to make my hair bounce, because I have naturally curly hair and it kind of boings when I walk, or at least people used to tell me this during highschool.

“Boing Boing.”  April and I howled.

“Girls!” Aprils father yelled, or I should say slurred loudly through his paper thin, bedroom walls.   

I could see this red headed Cynthia.  I could see her looking at this gorgeous dude and I was so impressed that she knew she was pretty enough to got and get his attention.

“Would you ever just talk to someone like that?” I asked April.

“Like what?”  She asked.”

“You know, first.  Like, she’s going into the kitchen to talk to that guy.  My God, I would be so nervous I would puke.” 

“You cannot be like that,”  April told me.  Sometimes she could be such a know-it-all.  And, I thought, I have had way more boyfriends than her., so why was I even asking her?  Because, I answered myself, she held all the power.  She was the boss of the friendship; without her, really , I was just a half pretty preppy alone at my father's house on the weekends.  

Kate Braverman

Is freaking amazing; my God, I adore her.  She is like a poet.  Or, she uses poetry to write her fiction.  She makes everything you read feel like a narcotic.  I feel her words in a visceral way.

And this page:

http://www.katebraverman.com/downloads/witchs_brew.pdf

made me feel excited to write; however, the writing I've started, the "story" about Ella, Ella's parents, and Delia is depressing to me.  The only kernel of hope for me with that project is the image of JT's old cape (which I've morphed into a New Englander), and the idea of the stained glass windows, etc.

Braverman suggests to you this:  do a case study of a landscape.  OK, resort town, you cold as a witches' hands, mean dark place, I will look into you like I look into the mirror.

I do think I differ here as both a writer and reader.  I am now less concerned with the writing that I am reading, and want more to hear/read about character.  Literary writing is less interesting to me, unless it is really good.  I no longer have "rules" for myself about what I read;  I love this; it is very, very freeing.  I wasted years forcing myself to read boring shit.  I want that time back.

I am kinda self conscious....

…to the point of being a shitty writer.  Every last thought, that tangled ribbon of nonsense, gets put onto the page, as though editing were a bad thing, a thing for assholes, chumps, or the nouveau riche.  I am in the middle of reading an essay over at Tav's magazine,  Rookie and fuck it all, if I could write like Emma Straub I would never have a sad or insecure day again.

I wrote nine pages of a story the other day.  And it sucks.  It is about a thirteen year old girl named Ella whose unemployed, addicted, former nurse mother commits suicide; meanwhile, her Junky father is left to deal, though he can hardly take care of himself, though he is a former genius artist with a fancy RISD bumper sticker on his clunky old gas guzzling truck.  And then there is Ella's half sister Delia who is schizophrenic, a loose copy of the real half sister who I feel haunts our life and who in some ways is the very bane of my existence.  Dramatic much, Violet?  

Here is Emma Straub.  Isn't she freakin' adorable? 

One issue I am having now is I joined a writing group and I am not sure the two women are right for me.  I am lured in b/c I loved one of them right away, as she is a real salt of the earth person.  And the other woman has some impressive cred.  Well, at least somewhat impressive.  I just think their writing is boring, well written, but not at all appealing to me; I need to be around ppl. who are more edgy.  But I am going to stay with them and be honest about how I feel, and maybe it'll lead me to somewhere else that will fit me in a better way. 

Back to the story:  I feel like I cannot get edgy enough with it, so I am dancing around what I truly want to say.  And it is , btw, super hard for me to write fiction.  

Follow This Blog, No Wait, Steal This Blog

I am kinda a wannabe.  If I act/write/speak like my real self, I am sort of like a boring, less talkative, vapid Kelly Kapoor  character.  Even if I act like my alter ego Violet, it is like this, too though really.

Only, we know in real life how fucking smart she is.  I am sorta half smart. I have kind of a "fake smart"  or "smart, affected deal" blahblahblah.  I am a huge phony.  And I am tired; I would love to just sort of become who I am.  But I am too scared, I do not have enough money, etc.  I am no:

Read this blog.

Follow this writer.

Follow this blog.

Write comments about what I say.

Read what I say.

Really, I live with someone who is rarely in a good mood and I am not working.  And I cannot stand to live in my head another moment.  I have seen too many Office reruns.  Fucking save me.

If yer reading, fucking say something about me.   Even if it is only to tell me I have essentially zero to say to me.

I'm sexy and I know it.

Or, read this story, and tell me if you like it or if you did not and why.  BYE.

http://harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1998-01-0059425.pdf

But my question remains:  David Wallace?  Is he derived from David Foster Wallace?

And my basic germ of thinking is this:  I am fucking desperate for anybody's attention, seriously.  If you knew anything about the prick-ish way my loser BF treated me, you'd fucking tell me to get the hell outta dodge.

Happy Thankxgiving

We're going to our friends' house which is right down the road.  I am pretty happy to be clear of in laws.  I ran into a casual friend the other night who lamented about the culture of Thanksgiving avec her MIL.  She went on and on.  I would not be able to deal with what she is dealing with.  I would say no, but I know now, from the tiny iota of maturity I've gleaned from my almost four decades on the earth that sometimes it is just better to deal with hit in order to keep the peace.  I am horrid at this.

I have the beginnings of a migraine, I think.  I am in a sort of denial about it, as I do not want to purchase my medication; it is so fucking expensive.

We lost power last night.  I was on my nightly walk the moment the power went out.  It was scary, but mostly so fucking gorgeous.  The trees heavy with too much snow.  The ground perfectly white.  And the air that reminded you of every sledding adventure you've ever had.  I was a bit onto the woods path that is lit up with street lamps and they went dark.  At first, I thought it was just the path and I just has bad luck with my timing, as this has happened on the path before.  It reminded me of being at a kiddie baseball game at night, when they shut the lights off, as it is finally time to go home, and you stumble with your kid(s) and your stuff, hoping you do not step on another person or yourself.

But then, I noticed it was not just the path, as there was a flicker, the lights going back on and then, reluctantly they went off for good.  I looked behind me, down into the street where the path spills.  And it was dark there, too. I scurried home, using my ipod to light the way. waving it over my head somewhat when cars drove past, worrying they'd not see me with my black hat and black jacket.   I looked like I was holding a lighter a t a cheesy, classic rock type concert.  Here is what I loved the most, well, there are two things really.  The way the star lit up the sky was intense in a way that is more organic than any recent experience I've had.  Everything seemed so real, so natural.  And then, as I approached our apt., I saw dim lights from the windows, people lighting up their rooms with tea candles and florescent flashlights.  And I heard them: Mr. Z and the old man shuffling down the epic stairway in the dark looking for the lone, lost momma in the dark.

I loved last night.  If I'd gone in the night, I think I wold have had a good last day.  We played charades in the dark and Mr. Z and I acted out scenes from The Office.  Life felt so sweet.  and I felt like I loved and was beloved.  I did miss my family though, mostly my dad.  I think I will always miss my dad.  It is something that will never go away; I do not want to let go of the hurt b/c it is all I have from him.  It is something.

Here is what I was reading last night and this morning: Confessions of a Memory Eater by Pagan Kennedy.  I'll maybe discuss it in depth later on, another day.  It is an extremely fast read and she has created a work filled with beautiful sentences, amazing imagery via analogies and metaphor.  I am impressed; however, there does seem to be something slightly amateurish about the overall work.  I cannot put my finger on what it is that makes me feel this way.  Again, I'll discuss the work in more detail later on.  I need to shower, get my migraine meds, make a salad, and get my family off to our friends' house.  The novel often refers to Thomas De Quincy's masterpiece, Confessions of an Opium Eater which I have never read, but, of course as a wannabe junky, want to.