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Feed Me!

July 13th, 2008

I woke up with compost on my mind today. For the past couple of years I’ve ignored the two big flower beds outside my bedroom and office windows. They’re barren except for a young, stuggling cherry tree, a rosemary that thrives in spite of my neglect and a Martha Stewart KMart rose that puts out some gorgeous blooms every year and then goes into a funk and languishes, dropping sad yellow leaves all summer. I’ve planted things helter skelter and then taken only sporadic care of them. In my life, I’ve done the same thing. Had some good ideas, planted them and then forgot they need to be fed and watered. I dug holes this afternoon, amended the soil and planted a gardenia, a banana tree and a hibiscus, whose blooms under the sprinkler looked like bridesmaids caught in a rainshower. I was so inspired, I took some photos with the camera I’ve been thinking of selling because it’s capabilities exceed my skills and then worked on a new page in my journal–amending the soil.

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Secret Life

June 12th, 2008

I want to be a person who keeps a journal but I got tired of rereading entries that veered between monotonously recurring emotional laments and “warm today, planted some basil” one-liners about My Day. Unfortunately I have volumes that are filled with this kind of stuff. I read it and marvel at the tears I wasted on X or wonder why I thought I’d never ever get over Y, whose last name I can’t even remember. When I found an online workshop about keeping a visual journal, I signed up, bought all the supplies, printed out the lessons and put them in a 3 ring binder as instructed–and promptly fell behind all the other participants who seemed to be journaling, pasting, gluing, painting, taping and cutting incessantly and then posting comments to each other about their progress every 10 minutes. I think these women woke up with doublesided tape and an Exacto knife in their hands. I finally had to opt out of the message boards because I felt so inadequate compared to these dynamos. But just signing up for the workshop lit a little fire. I’m not following all the lessons, but I made a list of topics I want to write about. On my first entry, I used silver gesso to paint my journal pages and then wrote two pages on Secrets. Covering up that relentlessly blank white page helped me turn off the blank stare I usually get when I open my journal and feel compelled to find profound sentences and then slam it shut when I can’t. Maybe because it’s not all about Poor Me.

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EEEEEK!!!

May 31st, 2008

Have you noticed how practically no one posts unforgiving photos of themselves on their blogs? I’m guilty of it too…after all, who wants a grotesque snap of themselves floating around the internet? But this is how I feel today — kind of Quasimodo-ish. I made the mistake of buying a magnifying mirror at Bed Bath and Beyond today, and I was knocked for a loop at how old I am.  Why didn’t my best friends ever tell me that my pores are the size of moon craters, that I probably need a full facial wax and that my jawline needs to be shored up asap before it collapses on my chest? The rest of the day was given over to rigorous magnification of the rest of my faults. Why am I home alone on a Saturday night? Why is my horoscope so disheartening? Why does my friend’s dog hate me? Why don’t I have a New Brilliant Idea? What if I die and no one is on the other side to meet me (yes, I actually worry about things like this–doesn’t everyone?). I love what Duke Ellington said about how he took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues, and I’m trying to remind myself to do the same. My pores are huge, my talent small, but why not write the blues instead of wallowing in them? 

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Let’s Go…

April 8th, 2008

  • to the beach to roll around in something dead and fishy
  • to the bank for a drive-through treat and $250 in cash
  • to see my friend Janie, the big dumb blonde lab who likes to lick me all over
  • to Motel 6 where I can smell the dogs who came before me
  • not the to vet who makes me shake all over and not with love
  • to a country where dogs are worshipped–Florida?
  • to the Dollar Store where I tried to go on my own yesterday and some lady told on me and you dragged me back home.
  • to hunt down some cats and whip their asses

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It Words

April 4th, 2008
This book never fails to inspire me. When I page through it, I can sense areas of my brain lighting up with excitation and inspiration. Do it, write it, make it, paint it. My brain doesn’t quite know what to do with itself when it gets that turned on by someone’s brilliant idea. It wants one of its own. It bemoans its lack of one. It can’t settle down. It roams around the bookshelves looking for snacks…Louis IV, Appalachian short stories, a pop-up book, poetry, meditation? My brain loves a surprise, an epiphany, a discovery of someone or some thing unpredictable, unexpected. And then I have to let it race around the room in a state of hyperjoy until I can figure out how to harness it for my own work.

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Plato’s Chair

October 25th, 2007
This chair is loosely drawn on one I own, but unlike the real one, this imaginary one has “chairness”. It’s the Platonic ideal of a chair…simple, bold, self-contained. If I sat in this chair long enough I might take on some of those characteristics myself. The woman who owned this chair would have long messy windblown blondstreaked hair that tousled itself just so. She’d keep a few Martha Stewart chickens that lay pastel-colored eggs, not the kind that shit all over the yard and go into a brutal pecking frenzy when you try to gather their eggs. This woman–let’s call her some newly fashionable old-fashioned name like Stella–would have a wrinkle-free J. Crew tan that never had to be checked for melanoma and dozens of friends who would appear for a spontaneous Sunday afternoon picnic around a rustic table made from old wine barrels spread with a vintage quilt instead of a tablecloth. In the middle of the family-owned vineyard. As a matter of fact, Stella probably has a wine named after her, with a watercolor of one of her fucking chickens on the label. What a bitch. I’d like to pull this chair right out from under her when she starts to sit down in it to have her portrait painted and watch her fall on her perfect Banana Republic butt. Stella lives in every magazine and catalog I’ve opened recently and I think it’s time for her to get a job in a bank, worry about those sunspots on the back of her hands, and shop at Piggly Wiggly instead of Whole Foods.

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Just Another Day in Fridaville

September 27th, 2007


*wake up 6am, race to gym, notice the moon is still full — no wonder I’m having wild screaming dog dreams, hop on a treadmill, get bored because my iPod Shuffle has a dead battery, hop off, get yelled at by a friend who sees me slacking, hop back on, hook up with my trainer, talk about our weekends (pitifully boring for both of us, but he’s young single cute–what up with that?), lift weights like a crazy person half my age in order to impress young cute trainer–pitiful.
* race home, hop in shower, hop out, wonder why I ever thought a Posh Spice haircut would suit me. I don’t look hip, I look haunted, like an extra in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
* Pace around waiting for yet another repairman to come and fix the problem he created when he came to fix my original problem. Check my hair periodically to see if it’s become hip while I’m not looking.
* I’m late for work, as usual, so I stop at Starbucks. I hit the one where they think my name is Rita. Somehow they came up with that on a drink order and I just kept it. I like being a stranger to myself in Starbucks. All the rest of the day, I ask myself, What Would Rita Do?, when I encounter a problem at work. Usually the answer is, “fuck this shit” or “go to hell.” I love Rita. Rita is my Jesus.
* I have on a new skirt today. A Narciso Rodriguez skirt, the same Narciso who designed Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s wedding dress. Obviously Narciso has fallen on hard times if he is designing for my ilk, but I feel fabulous. But uncomfortable. Like I’m sitting on a corncob uncomfortable. At the end of the day, I go to the ladies room to see if my hair is hip yet and discover that I’ve had a plastic tag the size of Ohio hanging inside my skirt banging against my ass for 8 hours. And I thought pain was just the price I had to pay for haute couture. No, it was Narciso knocking on my back door. Thank god it was inside the skirt and not hanging out like Minnie Pearl’s price tag when I went to Starbucks, where my cute trainer was having a coffee all alone. I pulled my hair down over my ears and hoped he wouldn’t see me put 3 sugars in my nonfat latte.
* In the long homestretch of the afternoon, my coworker, Katie, made a Peppermint Patty run to the convenience store down the block. We like to line them up on the cubicle dividers and take the Patties down one by one. If I were a lesbian, I’d date Peppermint Patty.
* 5pm and my hair seems to be shrinking…no I mean really shrinking. Getting shorter and looking kind of like it joined the Army and got its neck shaved.
*6pm I head home with Rehab blasting, find that the repairman has broken something new, and ask myself What Would Rita Do? Turn water into wine of course.

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Written in blood

September 25th, 2007
I don’t consider my writing is real unless it’s in red journals from Pearl River in New York City. Yes, it’s an affectation, a superstition, an aesthetic preference picked up from a revered writing mentor. I can’t help it. I have to have a row of ready-to-write-in red books lined up on my desk. Red for opening your veins and letting the secrets out. Red for words that burn a hole in the page. Red for the dress I was wearing when I met my first true love the first day of school when I was 14. Red for regrets that never fade. Red for rage. Red for midnight wine. Red for Isaac Mizrahi fuck-me pumps that I feel silly wearing. Red for sirens in the night that remind me to live because death and danger are our constant companions. Red because my heart is beating in time with yours and yours and yours and yours.

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