Blog Abyss

Spoke with a friend about the impossible topic of blogs, but this time in the context of the history of diarists and the confessional novel. The discovery: nobody is listening but you write for the masses anyway. That is what I am doing here. I am fully resigned to my audience of one. Singing to the mirror with my banana microphone. Admittedly lewd image. I don't believe there can be anything like a personal diary anymore. Private is not public either. More like performed privacy. I had a dream about little tigers in a cage meant for mice. So horrifying.

My So Called Wackness

I just saw “The Wackness,” a film “dramedy” set in New York City in the early ‘90s when the city was still ‘getting clean’ by Giuliani’s oh-so-kind urban reconstruction policies. The film has some flaws—loosely limned characters that probably work better on paper than on screen (aged role model protagonist is a pot-smoking psychiatrist who screws Mary Kate Olsen in a telephone booth, for instance), and the tiresome conventions of coming-of-age and enlightenment, blah blah. But a review is not necessary here because it was basically awesome, mainly for its depiction of a time with pinpoint freakin’ accuracy. It brought to mind my own loafing around NYC days in the ‘90s. Wheatpasted street art was the craze, as were Digable Planets, Biggie, A Tribe Called Quest, KRS, etc. I remember visiting the city in the swelt of August when I turned 15. I got to stay with my nutso 22-year-old cousin in Fort Greene. My dear mother must have been in such denial about the reality of my accommodations. When my cousin worked, I aimlessly roamed the streets of Manhattan. I met so many people, which is crazy for me to recall, because I don’t meet people randomly on the streets anymore. Maybe that’s a good thing.

I remember frequent stops to the “pizza parlor” at 2 a.m. to pick up “pizza” from some weird dude with barely any teeth who lurched into the car and commented on my smile. Then onto some loft, who knows where that was, to do drugs, smoke weed, and sit around naked, like a pack of sweaty animals. I remember my cousin’s friend talking to some of us girls about smearing raspberry jelly on her –nether region- so it would taste good to some boy. I loved that one! No trip to New York as a teenager was complete without the obligatory and entirely unsanitary piercing on Saint Mark’s Place behind a see-through curtain (later to be ripped out by Oribe, the famous ‘90s hair stylist to the stars, in a “hair show”…Do they even exist anymore? Anyhow I was a very glamorous hair model).

Then I met “Gabriel” who was friends with Mike D from the Beastie Boys, a dubious fact he managed to mention over and over. He later came to visit me at my parents’ house in California. I can’t believe I pulled off that request. When I rejected his sexual advances he recoiled into the reflective depths of his journal, which I later found because he was dumb enough to leave it under the bed. No Freudian interpretation necessary. Upon reading the journal I discovered he did not think so favorably of me (words like “cunt” and “bitch” served as clues) and that he was a heroin addict. He detailed all of the times he shoved a suppository up his ass in my bathroom. Lovely. When he arrived back home he called imploring me not to read his journal and to just send it back, a ridiculous request that human nature can only respond to with a burst of laughter. I actually didn’t read it for over a week, truth be told. But because I delayed in sending it, it sat on my bedside table, tempting me, for far too long. Needless to say I read the whole thing. He called and asked if I had read it.
I said, “Only one page.”
“What did the one page say?”
And with that, the flood gates opened and I couldn’t help but purge all of my disgust about this that and the other, which was all detailed in the journal.

He was silent for awhile and then replied, “You got all that from one page.”

When I moved back to New York a few years later I randomly ran into him at a deli -- a weird occurrence to say the least.

Like Me, I Hate You

Like Me, I Hate You

I wish I still had my homework journal from second grade. I remember always struggling with wanting to please my teachers, and because I was never the favorite, I resorted to a sort of passive rebellion. At the bottom margin of my class journal I used to write my teacher tiny, hate-filled notes. With considerable practice, I taught myself to write in extremely small print. After turning the journal in each week I would revel in the slim possibility of my mean notes being read, and my true thoughts becoming known. I was never confronted, so I think I began writing a little larger. I did something similar in fourth grade. I went to an after-school program situated only one building away from my classroom. The playground surrounded the classroom, so I would be able to peer in to see if my teacher was there. When the door was open, I knew she was grading or preparing for the next day. I would then shout, “Mrs. ____ is a fat cow!” And off I ran. I did this so often, and I don’t remember ever being caught, which may have contributed to my feeling of invincibility that dangerously persists to this day. The sad thing is that I really liked these teachers.

Mystery

Vacation

From the age of 12 to about 15, I kept a journal that was divided into two parts: day dreams and night dreams. Reading through the entries over the past couple of days has been a great amusement. Oh the pain and agony of being 12! Below is an entry written when I was 13 in the night dream section, recounting a dream I titled "Vacation". I trained myself to remember the meticulous details of my dreams, which I would record each morning. Inside the jacket of the journal I wrote in cursive, These dreams are but mere and vague images. I suppose that was a sort of disclaimer. I can't remember my dreams anymore.

"Vacation"

Melanie and I went on this vacation. We had these kinky escapades at the airport. We met up with this guy, I guess we knew him. We progressed onward until we got to the horrid destiny. This "guy" was a familiar friend of mine, Joel. He met up with his friend at the destination. There was a long row of suites, although Melanie and I had to stay in this wretched flat in the middle of a ghetto. The people were crazed like being in a war zone. In one instance a lady intruded into everyone's flat and said, "If anyone moves, I will shoot all you motherfuckers". I quickly piled tons of blankets upon me. I was petrified. I heard murmurs and gun shots. Thankfully the psycho didn't see me. Melanie had gone to visit the "guy" who vacationed in the luxurious suite outside of the ghetto. I decided I would go the following morning. Morning came and I went to knock on the door. For some reason I ran away as a vague person appeared. I was then greeted by the "guy". The apt. was gorgeous. His space was upstairs. I remember red and yellow satin sheets. I sat down and heard the obnoxious voice of Zach who was downstairs. The guy explained how he despised Zach. Zach was always fucking girls. The "guy" could hear everything. The rest of the dream is lost in memory.

Parenthetical Memory

In Lawrence Durrell's Justine, buried in parentheses, a gem:

(What I most need to do is it to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place--for that is history--but in the order in which they first became significant for me.)

Throwing Faces at the Sky

The childhood letters I found caught me completely by surprise. I had forgotten about the extensive letter-writing that would go on between me and my friends at school and anyone I happened to meet. I went to a very preppy middle school where I clung to a pack of girlfriends. We were in some ways the stereotypical “weird girls,” but in many respects I think we were genuinely unusual - a mixture of being wise beyond our years and immature tortured adolescents. I think the letters speak to this in-between zone. Somehow a few of us became friends with local “gutter punks” - kids who would drink 40s under bridges (were obviously not in school) and would redundantly philosophize about fascism and punk rock. I found a slew of letters from someone I had forgotten about for many years. He would write so many desperate and passionate letters to me about his terrible father and his love for the Subhumans. We called him Robert because he styled himself as Robert Smith, complete with dirty black jeans, eyeliner and teased hair. He even had a British accent that he often broke out of. I of course pretended not to notice, preferring him in full character. I wish I could obtain my responses to all of these letters, but alas the internet, as we know it, was still years away…These letters are but a taste of “Robert”: