It's Not Love

Pink Fish is like Red Bull, and it’s all they’ll serve you on the rooftops in Granada. Con un poquito mas Sauza, por favor? They’ll play Tupac if you ask very nicely. What do you want to hear?

Anything, anything. It’s been too long, too hot.

I’m just a California girl in a California world.

Don’t listen to the Australians, they’ll tell you everything you want to hear. This one says he’s a chippee. Does that career path come with a 401(k) plan?

No, he says. What is that?

You’ve traveled great distances to sweat under a different sun. But it’s the same sun, and it’s so hot your thighs are wet.

I will ask the questions, you say, and we will only stop to dance. Okay?

Sure, he says.

It will be good to see a chippee dance. You can check it off the list now, next to get lost and get found. Things only go on the list after they occur.

I think I am sick of Red Bull, you say.

The Stars Fell On . .

“When you leave here may your journey be safe. We are all travelers. From birth to death we travel between the eternities. May these days be pleasant for you, profitable to society, helpful to those you meeet, and a joy to those who know and love you best.” So says Elaine Sharp, via the heartfelt message on the placard propped up against my pillow, a deep investment for a $46.95 motel stay in middleclass Alabama. It almost makes the peeling carpet and pervading scent of cigarette smoke worth it, even if the HBO channel is still fuzzy and there’s no antenna. But it’s comforting to know that Mark Wahlberg is just as handsome here in the forgotten backwoods of the messy south, even with half his face fading into drifting cable snow.

It’s really the smartest thing you can do, watch more television, when you’ve realized that the manager of the motel suite is a better writer than you’ve been in weeks. Months. Okay, maybe ever. Those two sentences are pretty great. It makes me want to figure out what the hell the rest of this dialogue references, something about ‘The Stranger Within Our Gates.’ I bet it has to do with the Bible, but I don’t dare to guess. Wouldn’t you know the Bible is the one book that never made it on my top twenty-five.

It occurs to me that I could start to read up on it now, as the Bible and more oft than not the Book of Mormon have been my steady companions in the bottom drawers of hotels, but I hesitate because I fear it might start a false precedent. I wouldn’t want God to get the wrong idea, that it took a headache and a lack of available gin to turn me on to The Genesis.

I said a few prayers already, last night, when I thought I could hear someone heavy walking back and forth in front of my hotel room that faced a back lot. It was windy here, a little rain and a lot of jet lag mixing a powerful cocktail for delirium and strange dreams. My dreams really have been far out there lately. I tell myself it’s the humid Alabama air, the pressurized cabins of the recent flights.

I’ll tell myself anything at this point.

When I thought I might die yesterday, from the man I thought I heard rustling near the window in the rain, or just because I watched too much Law & Order, I found out something interesting. I told myself to roll out of bed and grab a knife from the tiny kitchenette in my room. Check out the peephole for confirmation of disturbances and call the office. Instead I just rolled over and buried my head in the pillow, awake but too lazy to save myself.

Of course I remember thinking, “I will definitely move if I hear one more sound.” And then after a muffled cough and some scraping from outside, “Maybe if the door knob starts jiggling, I’ll move.” But I just don’t remember the doorknob being jiggled. I passed out, eventually.

A couple hours of sleep later, I was dragging myself into a pair of old jeans to head west on the US-72. My rental car does not take speed bumps well, it is a lesson I learned the hard way. Alabama is so green, I never thought I’d see the end of so many trees. I try to force myself on token venues, but there is something about the confederate flag flying high over the “Knives and More” shop that simply does not convey security. Why Knives and More? What “more” could one possibly need, especially with “Guns and Tackle” right across the street? I don’t go in to find out.

I am disappointed when I meet people who don’t have the southern accent, and I meet more people who don’t than those who do. There are more ethnic restaurants than I thought there would be, there are more ethnic people, and my fears of an all white lynch mob are unfounded, at least in the bigger cities. There is little trail of the South I thought I would find, except for those at waffle house, of course. But logic dictates there would be some locus for all the blue eyeliner and grit cakes with gravy.

The busier parts of Alabama don’t satisfy me, but I think there are parts of it, the untouched parts, that might be able to. I glimpse them on a long stretch of two-lane freeway in the north, where I hoped they might be, where the signs fall off and the turn outs are dirt and gravel, the cars giving way to the rusted pickup and the toted RV. I see the turn off towards Chattanooga, and I get excited, silly.

I want more time, I would need weeks to trade in the shiny rental for the truck, take it all the way to Chattanooga and back, then deep down into Mississippi. It’s on the schedule board, to give the South the lazy days and warm lemonade it deserves, sometime before I get to France, maybe after New York.

I stop twice on the 72, at the park I find on a map that matches the one I had typed on paper months before. I make friends with a hopping terrier and hesitate only a little past the entrance sign, warning me its guarded by shot guns three days out of the week, offering me a sporting chance to guess which three they could be.

Later I turn out at a gas station, a mini mart where a tired old timer is pumping gas and puffing a cigarette at the same time, forget the fire hazard.

It takes me a minute to realize he is talking to me, asking to fill up. I don’t need any gas, or I would take him up on it. It’s been a long time close to never since someone seriously offered to pump my gas. He asks me if I want something else, following me inside. I say yes, but the smoke is so heavy it sticks to the candy in the aisles and I’m sure everything will taste like an ashtray. I buy some anyway and pretend not to notice the curious stare he’s giving me.

I am interested in the stories he has, but maybe not enough to sit down in the back with the smoke and his chronic cough. I hear deep accents rolling out from the back. The gas station and mini mart triples as a cheap restaurant, but biscuits and gravy are all that are on the menu. It is enough to hold the interest of the swollen women who marinate there, laughing over tinkling ice cubes and cindering lungs. I wish I had more time.

From birth to death, we travel between the eternities. We are all travelers.

The Big Sleep

Insomnia is no fun.

I’ve had it pretty bad now for about a year. It’s lame and consistent and my sleeping pill stash has been dwindling. It's especially lame because I can’t figure out what causes it, and the price of sleeping pills just keeps climbing.

Inflation in this country is an epic battle.

Of course logic stipulates that it’s stress or anxiety or the bottle of bourbon in my panty drawer that must be keeping me up at odd hours, but things that stress me out keep changing, and my life keeps changing, and even, yes, my boyfriends keep changing, or they did when I had them, but insomnia . . . so consistent.

Recently it’s the stuff that comes before sleep that keeps me from getting there, the pseudo dream stuff your mind starts to explore just before you drift off into black beta waves. My before-sleep stuff is starting to become something of nightmares, only there’s really nothing bad going on in them. Just people I know, people I’ve tried to forget, we all hang out at a bar and laugh about old times. Only no one is drinking, and I’m smoking, and I don’t smoke. Also, the old times are usually old for a reason. They’re things I’d rather forget.

I’m taking a break from writing, something I would not have a problem with a year ago, or a couple years ago. I’m taking a break on purpose now, a week or two, I tell myself, the MS is getting stale and I need new perspective. Meanwhile, I have no new ideas for the massive holes in the plot but I’m writhing in agony over not typing, and my pre-dream stuff is getting pretty far out there.

In one of these, I’m in Spain again, and I’m watching a movie I know and I’m eating popcorn, the good kind that’s so buttered it’s orange, served up old school in those striped red and white boxes. The theater is pitch black and I’m confused because the usher, responding to my broken Spanish, examined my ticket and led me into a dark theater. He dropped me off in the back of a near deserted playhouse with a film already underway. There are only a couple people littering the seats in odd intervals, the kind of haphazard pattern that signals a matinee or a restless day, just some broken hearts and listless old women whiling away the time.

On the screen, there is a beautiful foreign creature screaming in Spanish, but it’s all hopelessly screwed up. She is blonde and blue eyed, but she is no California dream. She looks European with that lazy, undone prettiness, and she is screaming at an older woman in what looks like a Cuban cabana. I find out it is an island off Nicaragua, the older woman is her mother, and they are screaming over her black lover. She switches effortlessly from Spanish back to French when it suits her, but the subtitles are in English, except when they are not.

There is a lot I am missing but I do not mind, I am comfortable with my popcorn and the woman next to me has large glasses and is giggling, never mind that the black lover all the fuss seems to be about just washed up ashore near the cabana as an unhappy corpse.

I bought tickets to see The Lake House. It’s printed on my stub, and while I’m no expert at foreign nuances I am pretty sure Sandra Bullock is not going to pop out of the closet.

The movie ends over an hour later and I am not sure what I paid for. The woman next to me turns and starts talking to me, gesturing, but I don’t hear any of her words. It’s like someone hit the mute button on a magic remote control and I am just watching another movie. I sit and eat my popcorn and watch her mouth things at me until she starts to cry behind her big glasses. Big watery fishbowls, filling. I have no idea what is going on.

There are several problems with the whole thing. Namely, I remember this day in Spain very well, because I remember all the days well. It was a hundred and six degrees everyday, and there was nothing else to do all month long but burn and try to stay awake. But several things are off, and I never did get the title of that bizarre film, though I waited through an agonizing hour of obscure film to get it. Also, this is just pre-dream stuff, but I remember the theater and going there, but I know I didn’t have any popcorn. I had spent my last euro on an overpriced taxicab ride.

So I wake up, because it’s better than lying in bed in non-sleep wondering if I have a deep-seated craving for popcorn or I am really just screwed up. There is no breeze outside the window and it’s a sad thing to be in the I.E. when the days are burning again, and there’s no hope for a breeze now and again.

The Write Stuff

It’s been a long week, and I hate when that happens on a Tuesday. The problem is that my boss wants me to more of a cynic.

Those who know me may be thinking, “But if you were to get any more cynical and morose, we worry your hands would shrivel up and fall off.”

Yes, there is that. But apparently my taste for the macabre and sarcastic is too often found in life, and not often enough on the page. Apparently, my nonfiction comes off sounding too chipper. Too “PR”. I’m just too fucking nice.

Who would have thought?

I find it distasteful to tell my editors that being ‘nice’ is faster than being cynical, or that I’m trying to finish my assignment in twenty minutes so I can go back to writing something I actually care about. And anyways, there is only so much one can say about lawn turf and breast enhancement surgery.

But how do you say, “when I was a kid and wanted to be a writer, I didn’t understand that I would have to spend a great portion of my time writing about things I don’t care about, in order to afford to spend a small portion of the time writing about- oh, my opus. My life’s work.”

My editor doesn’t give a shit about any of that. “Be skeptical!” she says instead.

I am, apparently, making the president of a “Power of Positive Thinking” company come off as sounding overly positive. Nevermind the fact that she really is pretty happy most of the time. She prefaces her various emails to me as “Happy Monday!” “Happy Friday!” and she’s already sent me a free copy of her book in the mail.

How skeptical can I be? The chick eats her Wheaties for breakfast. I get it.

But readers don’t care about genuine happy endings. They want to know that the CEO of Sunshine and Rainbow Land actually enjoys snorting cocaine off the overly bronzed stomachs of strippers in between clients. Even if she doesn’t. So fine. I insert skepticism and my editor loves me. All the readers of the entirely unpopular audience-bereft publication I write for will be thrilled. My check for $0.99 is practically in the mail.

I tell myself that’s why, when the LA Times writer I just interviewed gets upset that she will come off sounding like a green-behind-the-ears cub scout in the upcoming issue of our magazine, I can look her straight and the eye and say, “I’m sorry, you said you enjoy NPR and Crossfire was your favorite political debate forum? I could have sworn you said you said it was the Care Bears, and the pink one was your favorite. My mistake. My mistake.”

I wonder if she'll still introduce me to Joel Stein.

And Therin Lies The Rub . .

I am having a problem. You always hear that the first step to fixing it, whatever it is, it admitting you have one. So I have one.

What it is, really, is that I’m writing shit. Shit. It’s a little bit of a concern for me, since it’s Everything I Want to Do. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Evidence:

“It would have been inspiring, if it didn’t want to make Joleen giggle, just a little bit. And she never, ever, giggled. She settled for biting her lip."

There are many problems with that selection, but most important among them is that I was entirely unaware, until last night, that I had been writing a shitty romance novel. The first issue of the night was grappling with how my MS became one, 200 pages in. Delete.

Secondly, Joleen and I, we have an understanding. She's tough, and she doesn't giggle. But does saying "she never, ever giggled," ruin that? I think so. And further, why can't I just let Joleen giggle? The bitch wants to giggle. She's been dealing with some shit. And she doesn’t even know what’s coming. Why do I deny her this moment of springing abandon? Do I know anyone who has never giggled? I think not.

Maybe, I think, the problem is that I am out of touch. Joleen is single, but she does not need to be as crazy as me. She has a penchant for shotguns and stick shifts. Surely, she will do better. She can pull through.

And that is why, I think, I ended up with waffles and screwdrivers at 1 a.m.

The trouble with waffles and screwdrivers is (and you really have to search to find one, because as a rule they are pretty fantastic any time of day) is that the when you get to the point where waffles and screwdrivers are on the horizon, it’s really only baby-steps from there onto much more damaging pursuits, like bad reality television.

Where before you had standards that would balk at “What Not To Wear Now” and “I Love New York,” late night snacking expands your appetite for voracious brain cell slaughter that knows no bounds.

The only upside to waffle-eating and channel flipping is that it (just barely) refocuses me on the task at hand. Ah, research. Joleen will conquer her giggling issue, I think. I will find other women who do not giggle. I will find a woman who has strength of character and a great rack.

Instead, I ended up being sucked in by “The Bachelor.”

I haven’t seen this show in years (probably because during the interim I had a life . . . I’m not sure where that went), but it appears that, if possible, it’s really taken a hit to the middle section.

This season of The Bachelor really amps the drama with the subplot tease, “An Officer and a Gentleman.”

I could interject here with the dangerous territory of anyone, multimillion dollar television industry or not, fucking with the ideal of Richard Gere in his pressed whites. Women need Richard Gere, and reality television shouldn’t be able to take that away.

While the gentle strains of “You Lift Me up Where I Belong,” play wilitingly in the background, we are introduced to Officer Andy Baldwin, Navy Doctor, national hero, humanitarian, and athlete.

What can ABC say, really? Andy likes puppies. He blows dandelions in the breeze. He’ll always let you have the last Dorito chip, and he has a huge dick.

“I just have so much to give,” he actually says, jogging along the beach shirtless and throwing a sexy smile back at us through the camera. “I’m rapidly approaching 30 and I want to find the love of my life.”

And he just happens to be single, through no fault of his own. Surely, ABC, you jest.

Let me tell you what’s really going on, and I don’t need nine more episodes, a tearful engagement, and the following week’s Tattler Magazine to figure it out.

Andy wants to pee on you.

It’s not his fault, because his father left when he was little, he has Mommy issues, and shit happens. But it’s the sad truth, and throwing twenty-five desperate, catty, overly-tanned women into a locked up house to fight it out isn’t going to change that.

I know what you’re thinking. “She’s bitter. She’s bitter, and she shouldn’t have had the second waffle.”

Okay, you’re probably right. I have a syrup addiction I can’t shake, Andy is a great guy, and urine washes off in the shower, so really what is the big deal.

The problem is that the show, like so many others…no, wait, there are no more shows like this because women have stopped watching them, present single women over a certain age with The Dream, that there are fantastic people out there that you, in all your neuroses, simply have not found.

This, my friends, is really why Joleen needs her shotgun in the first place.

If you can’t deal with a little pee here and there, well, who’s fault is it, really? But guys like Officer Andy, guys who get full-ride scholarships to Duke University, join the Navy and become doctors, are six-time Iron Man “finishers,” as he likes to call it, are all around you, and if you will put on a bad dress and sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” they too, will be moved to share their 401(k) with you.

Just as soon as you wash that stuff off your leg.

Why I Hate E-Harmony, Chapter 4

Okay, listen.

I joined eharmony because a friend asked me to. This is my excuse, and I'm sticking to it. Not like I hadn't thought about it before. Not like I didn't wonder, more than once, if my hesitancy to sign up for internet interaction was what was really keeping me from Romeo and my romantic illusions of my own private Verona. This friend, who shall remain nameless, did not want to join by herself. She plied me with the idea that entering into such an experience together would be a bonding token of our lasting union. We could double date together, she assured. We could laugh about it when we grow old.

Now that I'm about two months older and wiser, I do laugh about it. Hah, hah.

I laugh alone, however, because my nameless friend's application was rejected. Flat-out denied. "Unacceptable," they said. "Inapplicable for candiacy." By this time, I had already finished typing in the expiration date on my credit card, and was happily whiling away my second glass of wine. Her rejection, when I became privy to it, really only encouraged my false sense of security,

"Oh. So they really do pre-screen . . . ."

But enough with the reasons. I think I really finally joined because, in my ferverent attempts to change some aspect of my unyeilding personality, I wanted to know if there was really anything to this "committed relationship," "boyfriend," "i-know-his-mother's-name-and-use-it" kind of lifestyle with a man, and I was incorrectly guessing that a pre-screened relationship-py kind of place like eharmony was the place to find it.

Beep. Incorrect.

But I can't be bitter, because if nothing else it might just be acceptable material for a new book. Mostly because . . .well, I don't HAVE a book, and also because I've convinced myself of a conspiracy theory I've constructed that involves the corporation driving young singles to drink and destruction as they slowly degrade their mortal defenses while reading their poorly assigned matches, resulting in mass revenue due to their undisclosed business partnership with Prozac, Xanax and Wellbutrin, among others . . . products we will all be taking after our memberships expire.

Today they sent me my possible soul mate Luis. Luis is a mechanical desigenerrr who has children. I didn't misstype, that is how Luis chose to spell his chosen profession. His life's work. His bread and butter. Let's not even address the fact that I requested not to be matched with people who already have spawned. But maybe Dr. Warren thinks that my situation is really so dire that I need to broaden my horizons. Maybe you are as fascinated with Luis as I am and want to know more about his life. I have copied and pasted his "most influential person" section because I was just on e-harmony and I am so appalled that I had to share.

[The most influential person in Luis's life has been:

i cant really know because their is many ppl in history! like benjermin frankline, plato, leonardo da vincci, jesus, martin luther king jr., pancho villa, los 6 nono eruez del catillo de chaputepec. any man or woman that made life more humain 4 man kind!!]

Seriously? Seriously, Dr. Warren? Is this really the best that you can do? You matched a writer with someone who thinks it is grammatically acceptable to use numbers in place of speech while constructing a sentence? I think it was a special touch to introduce me to Luis at the same time that you reveal your new advertisement banner to me.

"EXTEND YOUR MEMBERSHIP!!" it says, in big bold letters next to a nicely super-imposed image of a cleanly-scrubbed Asian couple who presumably found each other through this sugar-coated mass communicated vortex door to hell, and are so in love and caught up with their mutual affection that they can not stop nuzzling. They are caught forever in the e-harmony spell of mid-nuzzle, right there for everyone to see. "E-harmony was always intended to be a 12 month program. It takes time...." the advertisement continues for a few more lines. I couldn't tell you what the rest actually said, because at this point I was already frantically clicking the "sign out" button with such a vengence that I think I sprained my index finger. As we all know, that's a very important digit for a writer. And for a woman, who clearly isn't going to get her satisfaction from anyone with her $60 a month e-harmony subscription.

The Beginning

I am a masochist. I had a moment of self-discovery today, a few hours earlier when I was standing in my kitchen, eating yogurt with one sock on, (because the urge for yogurt hit while I was still peeling them off and really, who am I to deny these cravings?). Somewhere in between pureed strawberry bits and low-fat dairy, I was musing about my crackup relationship with e-harmony, and I had one of those epic moments of clarity. My screwed up revelation: Misery really turns me on. Epic movies, impossible relationships with impossible people, tortured moments, esoteric disjointed poetry, cheap teenage paperbacks filled with gothic violence, old words and ripped pieces of lace. All of this stuff really gets me going.

Really, this shouldn’t be such a big surprise to me, as I’ve always recognized my self-destructive streak. The first time I heard the word “nihilism” it rolled around on my tongue tasting like candy, and I scribbled it down on the corner of a piece of paper in an instinctive heat, knowing it would one day be on my tombstone, my divorce certificate, scrawled in permanent tattoo on my bum.

I’m not exactly sure where this feeling first began. I probably got screwed up real early, back when my babysitter would play “Labyrinth” on replay for us kiddies to keep the lot of us all slack-jawed and silent for hours on end. All those years of watching David Bowie strut around in a shattered wig and tights clearly did something to my state of mind. I started off life believing that goblins were real, David Bowie was God or something real close to it that deserved a capital letter, and every man should have a nether region of impossible size that defied the laws of gravity and common sense.

None of this did any good to my still-forming mind, I’m sure. But whatever the affects of early exposure to rock-icon-in-hosiery, more recently I’ve become consumed with a sense of urgency about life that flying to Spain, piercing various parts of my body and riding on the back of motorcycles barefoot just can’t cure. Whatever it is, a desire to live or an ill-concealed death wish brought about my own mortality served to order on the solemn face of a prescription pad, a simple blip in the cosmic crisis of a girl in her 20’s, or something else, the thought occurs that it might be time for a change.

Can one girl of relative height and subsequent station give up her taste for desolate storylines and the languorous taste of danger, neck sweat, and dirty olives? Would I be happier in committed relationships, pearls, and longer hemlines? Are the bad girls or the good girls really having more fun?