Insomnia Strikes Again

Ah, yes, again, I haven't posted in around 2 months, but consistency is for athletes and entrepreneurs. My pasty potbelly (it has the look and feel of a hardboiled egg) and distrust of anything that involves a strategy or business plan should be a testament to my inability to see anything through. Nevertheless, sorry guys.

Anyway, the reason I'm writing tonight is because I can't sleep. It's been a little over 3 months that I've been in New York, and I can feel the old anxiousness creeping up on me, prickly and gauzy as tuille. I'm in my new place, and though it's only a few blocks from my old one, I feel like I'm in the pit of Williamsburg; not in the pseudo-religious or physiological sense (although there's plenty of moral perfidy and body odor going on), but in the literal one: my place seems like it's at the basin of some valley, into which the uprooted of Brooklyn come tumbling. There's conversation...correction: shouted conversation...going on all the time, between every variation of talker. My bedroom faces one of the busiest streets in my area, and whenever I choose to listen out my window, the shit I hear is unbelievable.

For instance, there's this drunk, Mexican crooner who's turned Lorimer street into his personal lounge-singing showcase. It started last week when, as I was reading a manuscript for work, I heard this weird indiscernable gurgling that sounded vaguely like "that's amore." It definitely had a tune, but I couldn't be sure if it was really a song because the singer sounded so acutely pained! Every note started like a cliff jumper, on solid ground for two seconds, before it dove into some crazy unnatural register. His voice splintered into weird wheezy chords and half-formed words, their endings lopped off like gangrenous limbs. What's that you say, you sloshed serenader, you? "weeer raaaaaaaaaaaaaag mooooo laaaaaaaaang!" Be still my heart.

Anyway, he was out there earlier tonight, setting off car alarms and wailing about some languageless heartache, until my timid Indian neighbor hung out her window and screamed "Shut the fuck up!" He's been piping up every 20 minutes or so since, but you can tell his heart isn't in it.

It got me to thinking how many times my singing has annoyed people, which I'm guessing is a lot. Recently, my very French boss looked at me with watery eyes and said, "Rachel, do you ever stop singing?" I do now. I can recall maybe the first time I bullied someone into listening to me sing for an extended period, and it was my (now deceased) Grandpa Woody.

Now, it's really strange that I unearthed this memory tonight, because I honestly believe I haven't thought of it since it happened. What's more is that I have very few clear memories of my grandfather, mostly because he lived in California during my childhood, and as I got older, he began to develop Alzheimers. By the time I was 13, our conversations were sparse and sad, and whenever I saw him, he seemed rooted in a bewildered silence.

The point is that the few childhood memories I can still invoke are incredibly vivid, and he a vibrant figure in them. They're strange and isolated, but they're the same ones my sister has too, and I think they're pretty illustrative. I remember visiting him in California, and how he let us pour half-and-half over our cereal instead of milk (the fatty dairy fiends that we are)--the taste was cool and sweet, coating my teeth in rich froth. It was an indulgence I never brought back with me to Pennsylvania. I remember the game he played with Emmy and me, how he pretended to be asleep on our couch, and each time we tried to poke or shake him, he heaved a tremendous snore that rattled and sputtered out of his throat and sent us into fits of laughter.

There are many other memories like this, in which my grandfather is playful and indulgent, but the one I thought of tonight speaks to the man's patience. For some reason, I can't quite remember why, I was on the phone with Woody, I guess maybe waiting for my Dad to get home so they could discuss something. Anyway, I was probably around 7 or 8, and had just gotten Disney's Pocahontas on VHS. The trials of Colonial America thrilled me...also I liked the raccoon, and the delicious-looking biscuits that he steals from John Smith. Having watched it compulsively for several weeks, I had memorized all the words to The Colors of the Wind and decided it was about goddamn time someone heard my shrill eight-year-old's rendition. Now, this song is probably only about three-minutes long, but I managed to stretch those three verses like hot sugar, until they became thin as threads. I paced around my house, singing to my poor grandfather over the phone, for probably around 15 minutes, and not only did he never interrupt me, but he actually applauded me when it was over. In all probability, he probably put down the phone to make a sandwich or something while I sang "The rainstorm and the river are my brothers" five different times, each with a different rhythm and tune, but the point is that he never let on. Given my enormous capacity to absorb, obsess over, and torture myself with any insult or criticism I receive, I can't understate how important it was that my grandfather encouraged me then.

Around the same time, my parents (stupidly) bought me a pottery wheel, and after about two days trying to use it, I gave up. I couldn't stand how I could be molding a perfect little vase, but if I put just a little pressure on one side of the wet clay as it spun, the whole thing would mutate into some bulbous, sticky mess of mud. It makes sense to me that my own personality is equally delicate. We get poked and pressured during those formative years, and to this day, I can still find places where my own clay is cracked and crusted, others where it rises in a wet bulge. These malformations are the result of such tiny influences, the origins of which, many times, cannot be traced. Woody's silly, kind remark, small though it was, is a definite origin, a light pressure that ultimately formed one of the lovelier things in my life. I am so happy to be involved in music and, although it irritates everyone, to be able to sing with obnoxious frequency. Most importantly, I am so grateful to Woody for creating that memory, and for adding some sacred design to this lump of mud.

Sorry for the sentimentality, hopefully now I can get some sleep.

Sorry Kids, Can I Make it Up to You in Whimsy?

First, this is a googlemaps pictures of where I was inititally looking at apartments. It's a very up-and-coming neighborhood in the crackhouse real estate arena.

Now, to the point. So yes, I've been depressingly inconsistent with my posts, but to show I haven't been totally unproductive, I'm posting the start of a short story I've been working and reworking FOREVER! I originally composed the draft of this story for my creative writing class, but wasn't satisfied with it by the end of the course. I've been restructuring it a little bit over the past week or two in the hopes of eventually turning it into a novella (that's right, now I tell all my artist friends I'm writing a novel as we smoke cigarettes and talk about Foucalt).

Around a week ago, I posted this beginning part, but due to certain parties' proximity to the story, frantically deleted it after drinking half a bottle of riesling alone in my waterlogged kitchen. There's a divet in the linoleum into which every spill migrates, making a weird little briney pool in the middle of the room. After possibly sighting tadpoles wriggling around in the stinky water, I sopped it up with a towel and promptly went to sleep.

Anyway, digression fail. Here's the start of the story. I realize there are some little inconsistences: 1). I haven't decided whether I want the opening scene to take place in the cold or not, and 2). I also haven't decided whether I want to remain consistently in Silas's perspective for the whole first part (I'll definitely slip into Molly's point of view in other sections). I'd really appreciate feedback if anyone is up to it. Otherwise, enjoy!

Oh, one more thing. I'm also putting the very first paragraph of the next section at the end.

Psyche: one more tiny thing: This is fiction!

Long Underwear Story (Working Title)

All manner of strange things had been filling his head lately: weird unprovoked thoughts, vivid impenetrable dreams, a deep and unshakable concern over the sorry state of his long underwear. He had never cared before that they were yellowed and sagging, that they hung shapeless around his crotch but constricted his pale and flabby thighs. Every morning he faced the cold in them, shirtless and shoeless, as he smoked a cigarette on his parents' lawn before work. This week, however, he'd seen his reflection in the living-room window. His red hair flamed up at crazy angles in the morning sunlight while his tiny eyes glimmered; the skin of his chest seemed translucent, as though it were thinly stretched over lumps of vertebrae and rib bones, and though he tucked one hand into the underwear's elastic waste band, the other he let dangle on the end of a long and pasty arm, intermittently flicking the ash of his cigarette on to the ground. Pelvis cocked forward, torso leaning back, skinny legs shivering in the underwear's warped embrace, lit cigarette in hand, he thought, “I look like a child molester.”

And that was when the strange thoughts started.

He flicked his cigarette into the wet grass and watched the single vein of smoke that emerged. It twisted in jagged circles as it rose, melting into the gray sky with an eerie crookedness. He shivered. He wrapped his arms around himself and squeezed the soft flesh below his shoulders, but even his skin seemed strange—slimy and torpid, a membrane. His whole body felt that...strangeness. What was it? He seemed raw and mucoid, like a slug, like some web-footed embryo, some half-formed thing. Oh God. Something sour crept up into his mouth and made the backs of his teeth gritty. Some orange mist settled in his head and congealed there, clogging his ears. He was freezing in the warm morning air and his heart began to race.

“What the fuck,” he whispered to no one. “Something is wrong with me.”

“Nothing is wrong with you,” Molly said. She rolled her eyes at him from across the
McDonald's table and he instantly regretted his decision to meet her here. “Besides, when did this happen? Like a week ago? You're still in one piece.”

“It was two days ago.”

She dismissed his concern with a flick of her hand. “Whatever. I think you're being just a little melodramatic.” Around them the sounds of commerce clicked and fluttered: plastic trays clacking together into neat tiers, napkins sliding across doughy faces, paper crumbling, it was a flighty and familiar rhythm. Outside, the rain drummed on parked cars, making a tinny rumble. A hot blast of greasy steam sprung up from somewhere behind the counter, hissing as it melted. Over everything, Silas's wheezy chatter could be heard clearly. His voice was nothing special and tended to creep into one's consciousness for its persistence, if nothing else, like the hollow beeping of a phone left off the hook.

“I'm just...I'm totally corrupt, I'm 31 and completely morally bankrupt,” he said, mashing his palms into his closed eyes and shaking his head.

Molly nodded skeptically, sucking on diet coke and gnawing the already mangled straw. Before Silas arrived, she had been watching two children play with the salt-and-pepper shakers. They continued their game behind him. A little girl slowly slid the pepper shaker across the table with her chubby hands while a little boy, presumably her brother, jiggled the salt shaker up and down as though it were dancing. Occasionally, the girl's hand would dart across the table and deftly tap the lip of the salt. “Kiss!” she shouted. Molly smiled, but Silas couldn't see them, so she turned to him.

“Don't be ridiculous,” she said. “First of all, I don't think you look like a child molester...but you were wearing those long underwear?” He nodded. “Well, honestly, I think most people who stand outside in their underwear at 7:00 A.M. run the risk of being mistaken for a pedophile.”

“Yeah, but I mean, it wasn't just that. It was like...I don't know, there was like a physical reaction. I felt sick...in both senses of the word.”

Molly sighed and began rolling her straw into a plastic coil. Her flippancy could be incredibly irritating. Silas knew she was listening, but he also knew she had a flare for disinterested mannerisms, like the grease thing, and the straw thing, and the glances at the two flailing children behind him. In fact, he noticed, she seemed more aloof than usual. The humidity outside had made her normally straight hair boil over her barrette in great, billowy swoops, dripping down to her shoulders like brackish rainwater. Her forehead twitched and wrinkled without warning. Her leg bounced a jittery rhythm beneath the table. Her whole body seemed poised for motion, as though she would bolt at any moment. Somehow, the gravity of his situation was not quite reaching her, and so Silas began to relate the series of events that followed his morning vision.

That night, a mere 48 hours ago, Silas was accosted by a vaporous and poignant breed of shame, the kind that pervades every room and sits heavy on the conscience like a cloudy film. In the past four months, he had divorced his wife with whom he had lived for 10 years in Oregon, given her their home, returned to Boston to live with his parents, lost his job, and warded off perhaps the only woman who had genuinely cared about him. Then, that very morning, he had seen the pale, flaccid, starved figure of his wasted soul. Seated on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, the litany of his failures unfurled itself before him, and the sight was unbearable. He drew his naked knees toward his chest until they skimmed the coarse fuzz of red stubble on his chin, then he reached up to the sink and procured a tube of toothpaste. He squeezed one long coil of paste into his mouth and swallowed. Then another, until half a tube was gone, then...

“Wait, wait, wait,” Molly interrupted, “you tried to kill yourself with toothpaste?”

Silas paused, then, “Yeah...I guess.”

“What the hell?! Where do you find this stuff?” She laughed, but not cruelly, and Silas remained silent. “Well, did you eat the whole tube?”

“Yeah.”

“And what happened?”

“I stayed up all night puking.”

They looked at one other for a tense instant, then Molly’s face twisted into a wry smile and she shook herself into laughter. “Well, at least your death rasp would have been minty fresh!” She laughed until her friend could not help but join in. Silas often considered his problems to be too specific for the groping hand of a friend to touch, too small and dense to be caught in some therapist's Freudian gauze. But Molly had a way of diffusing the things, hard and black as coal, so that they became a kind of soot that floated around his head and tickled his senses. From anyone else, her comments would have been cruel in their merciless specificity, but he had always felt in them a kind of devastating tenderness. She had seen him at his worst, starved, bug-eyed, propelling his fist through plaster, spilling droplets of cold coffee on his long underwear...and even then she had made him laugh.

“You're such an asshole,” he said to her, then leaned across the table and knocked her empty cup to the floor. They chuckled, then coolly retreated into themselves. Without the straw to occupy her knobby hands, Molly began to carve her initials into a smear of congealed grease. It peeled away in muddy clumps, lining her fingernails with sludge, turning her skin brown. They reminded him of miner's fingers, capable of extracting essential things: ores, minerals, sparking rocks, things in him he could not see or had tried to forget. When he looked at her hands, he felt a sort of sinking sensation, a falling back.

Over his left shoulder, the little boy was sliding a shiny nickle into the center of the table. It flashed silver in the beams of headlights through the rain. He pried the salt-and-peper shaker from his sister's fleshy fist, which she promptly stuck in her mouth, her lashy eyes now fastened , enraptured, on her brother. He was placating her, pushing back her free hand that reached for the pepper shaker, smiling reassuringly. Eventually, she settled down on the cushioned seat, her stubby legs swinging. When the boy raised the shaker high in the air, she gasped and pulled her gooey fist from her mouth, shrieking with delight as he slammed the shaker down on top of the nickle.

“Pick it up!” He told her, grinning.

She stood up on wobbly legs, her sneakers sinking into the red cushion, and snatched the shaker up. To her surprise, a stream of pepper tumbled from the shaker's bottom, rolling in a pungent wave over the edge of the table and into a pile on the floor. She looked at her brother with dewy eyes, her tiny features quivering, and dropped the shaker onto the floor with a howl. He laughed and jumped on the tabletop.

Molly's eyes followed the little girl as she sobbed and curled herself into her mother's abdomen, hiding herself in the plush folds of her downy coat.

Silas noticed Molly shake her head sadly.

“Can't you see I've been through a lot?” he said.

* * *

Coming back to Boston...Jesus, almost four months ago...Coming back to Boston had been like tunneling. Although Silas had technically soared across America in the rumbling gullet of a jumbo jet, there was still something subterranean about that journey. He felt cold and wet and sun-starved, like the slimy transparent creatures that slip along cave floors, running their suckered fingers over both grime and crystals with the same numbness. From his window he could see the shadow of the plane glide along the bristly, crusted terrain of Middle America, and he imagined he was on the other side of that dusty earth. This journey should not be full of clouds, he thought, but of hoary, warted roots curling into dead air, of stalagmites and stalactites thick with milky grime, of water dripping ceaselessly. He wrapped his hands in the sagging fabric of his shirt and shuddered: This was no surface heartache—this was tectonic.

Boxed Wine and Baskin Robbin's

Today is a day for soothing influences.

Over the past two days, in casual conversation, I've been given examples of creatures that would dwarf bed bugs in terms of the grossness and vastness of infestation. So now, a day after the extermination (I counted 22 bites on me this morning), I thought about what, besides bed bugs, I would rather not share intimate sleeping time with.

Behold: The List of Creepy Bedfellows

10). Cockroaches
9). Cicadas
8). Zombies
7). Sham-Wow Guy
6). Bewitched used condoms
5). Evangelical Christians
4). Herpes
3). A mannequin made from the faces of all 44 U.S. presidents
2). A balding, middle-aged man, and an emo kid, blended into the same person, like a salty milkshake of ennui
1). Rod Stewart

Although, I just found a bug bite in my ear (my fucking ear!), and am realizing that I would share my bed with almost anyone/anything on that list...minus Rod Stewart...but I'd probably let him sleep on the couch if it meant the bed bugs would leave. Honestly, I think the real reason that the bedbugs continue to thrive despite the fog of pesticide that's drifting around our kitchen is that the exterminator forgot one critical ingredient of annihilation: Chuck Norris. Perhaps, during the next round of fumigation, Chuck Norris can seduce or battle the bed bugs into destruction. Until then, new subject.

Last night, I went to my first outdoor concert in Brooklyn (it was David Byrne) at Prospect Park. Park Slope is a beautiful area, full of brownstones and tiny restaurants that line their windowsills with bottles of wine. It's definitely more clean-cut than Williamsburg...unless, of course, you are one member of a throbbing hoard of people waiting to enter the David Byrne concert. Slightly drunk from the paper-bagged forty you've been sipping, irritated by the furry gnats that keep wriggling into your pores, lusty for pumpin' jams and girls in gladiator sandals, there is only one way to respond to authority, and, more specifically, the compulsory formation of a line: apathy.

When my friends and I got to the park, we were shocked to find hundreds of rowdy 20-year-olds neatly waiting in the kind of snaking, endless, convoluted line that defies logic. I'm convinced it was a trick to discourage the faint of heart, or the really stoned...and it worked.

Still, it was a lovely night, and good to be in the open air. For me, night summer city air has such a unique smell and feel: it has a sourness to it like gasoline, and it's a little thicker than air in the country, so thick that it diffuses light and makes things glow that would normally sparkle. You know me, I love my muted tones. There's also something about being in a crowd of people at night that's different, and so much better, than being in a crowd during the day. People are bleary-eyed and silly, accidentally treading onto your blanket in the dim light, spilling beer into the grain of a tree root, catching fireflies. Absorb this, I tell myself, whenever I'm in these cool and chattery places.

Anyway, had David Byrne been playing in the softball field at the very edge of the park, then we would've had a great view. We were convinced he would emerge from under the pitcher's mound in a cloud of smoke and lazers, but alas, we were content to watch the fiery loops made by the ends of lit cigarettes. In the end, we were drunk, outside, and able to hear the bass line of most of Byrne's songs, so we were happy.

Guh, this entry has made me tired, and I'm ready to pursue the soothing materials mentioned in the title of this post. Have a good night all!

- Wolfie

Infestation Proclamation

Several times in every person's life, I think it suddenly becomes apparent that the way we live is completely different from the way we perceive we live.

"Whaaaat?" you say. "I didn't sign up for this serious of a blog entry."

Cool it, kids. Let me relay some examples:

1). Your roommate, who regularly counsels battered women and rescues feral cats, suddenly realizes she doesn't really like helping people or animals other than herself.
2). Your brother, who spent four years at Massachusetts College of Art making florid abstract and textural paintings of vaginas (to praise from all his professors), suddenly realizes all he really wants to do is design software programs in an office cubicle.
3). Your friend, who after an entire year of living in a constant state of drug-induced torpor on the floor of his Philadelphia apartment, suddenly realizes that he is, in fact, living in Cleveland.

Whoops.

Point is, I just came to just this kind of revelation. Since my move to Brooklyn about a week ago, I've kind of cultivated this image of me as a serious, but slightly off-beat professional woman...you know, like every Sex and the City cliche. I may not be Sarah Jessica Parker, but I've got my two pairs of shoes with the stumpy heels and lacquered buckles, one stick of eyeliner that may or may not have punctured my cornea last night when I applied it drunkenly to every part of my face that was not my eyelid, my sassy black dress that smells like coffee and curdled half and half. I strut down the street sometimes, albeit into a hotdog stand or a sewer grate, but you know, I'm usually strutting before I'm eating or falling. I'm fabulous...sort of, in like an understated, slightly mildewy way? I'm...oh fuck it.

Today, as I started sliding all of my clothes into plastic bags in preparation for the exterminator tomorrow (called in to combat a Biblical bedbug infestation), it dawned on me that I'm less of a Sex in the City type figure, and more a Sex in an Alley breed of lady. I'm still technically in the city (I am a professional, and I am a lady), but just in the slummy, drug-laden, barbed wire-fringed part (I am a professional waitress, and I'm a lady that lives with four dudes).

Anyway, was this a depressing realization? In that I have let my personal appearance slump to the point that I look strung out and abused, yes. My right leg is a flaky mosaic of dry skin, crusted-over bedbug bites, mustardy gray bruises, swollen blisters (goddamn those stupid heels), and an angry red scratch I received after stepping on my roommate's cat. The bitch is fierce. In addition, I have some sort of Arabric writing scrawled over my shoulder in orange highlighter (who knows where that came from?), while my arms and legs are flecked with red velvet cake-batter that really resembles the pink of open sores.

On the other hand, it's always good to confront reality. As my roommate Chris said, "You didn't come here to live in fucking SoHo and be ironically grungy right? You came here to be really fucking dirty." Right on. It's time to exterminate all the Sex and the City fantasies right along with the bed bugs. I love you Carrie, but you are an avatar of something I can't have tempting me right now, so I'm going to put you in a plastic bag filled with pesticide and crack open a beer.

Delusions are the worst pests, harder to kill than any mere arthropod. Not to get too philosophical here, but I think a large part of the collapse of the American economy has to do with the pursuit of culturally disseminated delusions and images of prosperity. Our culture promotes the idea that living a lifestyle totally inconsistent with one's means is fine, thus the entire country is in debt. Anyway, enough of that. Let me just say that confronting reality allows you to see and address your most pressing needs, which for me at this point is, quite frankly, a shower.

Goodnight!