on the persistance of memory.

I spent about four hours tonight digging through drawers and the closet of my childhood bedroom. Incredibly bizarre. I found so many things that I couldn't throw away the last time I encountered them (in most cases, this was at least two years ago) because they had such sentimental value. I took some pictures which I posted on my facebook. It was fun and interesting and expressive and quite intense. My eyes welled up once or twice.

The thing is, after looking through everything, I'd be perfectly content to throw it all away. I didn't, though...so I guess I can't really say that for sure.

This idea came to me after finding a photo of me and someone I used to love. Really love. Absolutely, positively. I am currently in another, better relationship with someone I love just as much, but I still think about this person at least once every day, and this person profoundly affected my life, negatively and positively. Anyway, I found a photo of me and this person, and I got the tense-stomach feeling. It's hard to articulate because I'm exhausted, but I think people know what I'm talking about; it's the tense-stomach feeling that you get when you have an encounter or see a photograph of somebody important that you haven't seen in a long time.

I think that people get that feeling because they are very likely to forget what their lovers look like. If I close my eyes and try to picture the person from the photograph (I have not seen him in person in several months), I really can't see him. I can see glasses and hair. If I delve further back into my mental Little Black Book and picture other people, the images are equally fuzzy. However, I can picture Platonic friends--people I haven't seen for years--quite clearly. Worse, when I actually look at a picture of Photoboy, the hair is a different length and the glasses have slightly different frames. It's like my brain is xeroxing xeroxes of my last in-person encounter with this guy.

Anyway, my official research on this (I flipped through a PostSecret book which contained a postcard saying "It's weird...forgetting what you look like") showed that at least two pretentious weirdos have this problem.

Here's my theory. We spend too much time too close to our lovers' faces.

Or other specific body parts. I could tell you a lot of things about my current boyfriend's features: his hairline's surges and recessions, the position of his one slightly snaggled tooth or the shape of a welt he received when I pushed him out of the top bunk of my bed while I was sleeping (I only wish it was a sexier story). Since it's only been a couple of weeks since I've seen him, and I still see pictures of him all the time because I surround myself with them, I can picture his entirety pretty easily, too.

If I think back to Photoboy & Co., I can also remember weird things like hand calluses, freckles, and lip shapes. However, if someone came up to me and said, "Remember so-and-so's Large Public Event That You Should Remember", I see Ray-Bans and Jewfros, or just...height. Nothing more.

I think that, after a breakup, when the photographs are hidden in desk drawers and untagged from the internet, the majority of one's memories of couplehood is limited to these detached, clinical details which lose whatever enticing nature they have with mental replay, forgetfulness and the stages of loss. On top of that, if it was a bad breakup, your mind probably tries to do you the favor of blocking out the whole situation. So, really, the tense-stomach feeling is very Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

I suppose, if you really want to remember someone important, the best thing you can do is take a certain amount of your time together and spend it on opposite sides of the couch. I don't think I'm going to take my own advice here because it's fun to be glued to someone. Still. That's why I think we forget people's faces.

Wow.

Sincerely.

Vargas

Here's one for you to puzzle. Did Alberto Vargas ever get detention for doodling pictures of naked women on his desk in grade school?

I guess we need to make depravity work to our advantage.

Sincerely.

My favorite song.

I always tell people that any of a hundred songs is my favorite song...but this one is my real favorite.

Desolation Row

They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad, they're restless,
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight from Desolation Row

Cinderella, she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles,
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style.
And in comes Romeo, he's moaning
"You belong to me, I believe,"
And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend,
You'd better leave."
And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row.

Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
The fortune-telling lady
Has even taken all her things inside.
All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or else expecting rain
And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing,
He's getting ready for the show.
He's going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Row.

Now Ophelia, she's 'neath the window.
For her I feel so afraid:
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic,
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness.
And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah's great rainbow
She spends her time peeking into Desolation Row.

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood,
With his memories in a trunk,
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk.
He looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet.
Now you would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin on Desolation Row.

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients,
They're trying to blow it up
Now his nurse, some local loser,
She's in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
"Have Mercy on His Soul".
They all play on the penny whistle,
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough from Desolation Row.

Across the street they've nailed the curtains.
They're getting ready for the feast.
The Phantom of the Opera
In the perfect image of a priest.
They're spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured,
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words.
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls,
"Get out of here if you don't know,
Casanova is just being punished for going to Desolation Row."

Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do.
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping to Desolation Row.

Praise be to Nero's Neptune,
The Titanic sails at dawn.
And everybody's shouting,
"Which side are you on?"
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row.

Yes, I received your letter yesterday
(About the time the door knob broke)
When you asked how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they're quite lame.
I had to rearrange their faces And give them all another name
Right now I can't read too good
Don't send me no more letters, no,
Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row




Sincerely.

Time heals all wounds (and, hopefully, still allows for good stories.)

(an actual post, inspired by reading The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson)



Sometimes I wake up and decide, in my mercurial youthfulness, that I should write memoirs. I, like David Sedaris, Bill Bryson or Garrison Keillor, should look back and examine my life in short, witty essays that will make the reader chuckle warmheartedly. My books would eventually be closed with the bright-yellow, bittersweet satisfaction that comes from reading something hilarious to which you can relate.

My significant other also wants to do this with his life (more than I do, for me it's a whim), and he'll probably be very successful. Like Bill Bryson or Garrison Keillor (I cannot remember where David Sedaris grew up, but I'm sure it was FABULOUS), he comes from the midwest: corn, old houses, picket fences, covered bridge festivals, baseball games. He wears plaid, flannel shirts, and he doesn't do that to be ironic as people on the East Coast do. He votes Republican along with the rest of Indiana, and everything about him is earnest and all-American, and all of this will change, and he'll eventually be able to write about it with a combination of sharp-tongued insight and nostalgia for simpler times. I'm sure people will read his book and feel nostalgic and happy.

I don't see myself being successful in the memoir-writing endeavor--at least not in the tradition of the Sedaris/Bryson/Keillor triumvirate. I'm worried that, if I write my memoirs, they'll be a bit more Jack Kerouac/Jonathan Ames/Augusten Burroughs--not good. Entertaining, yes. A good read, yes. Certainly not good for me, though. Unfortunately, these writers are either A) prematurely dead by alcoholism, B) good-naturedly perverse, or C) emotionally damaged and being sued.

I'd like to look at my past with a sense of wholesome affability and happiness, but I can't--at least not yet.

Let's take high school, a time which all writers and artists seem to agree is a completely shitty one in everybody's life, what with the ineffective school system and shallowness and popularity struggles and erections and getting into college. I have stories to tell about high school which would be excellent in a memoir or even (this is another whim) a screenplay. But, again, were I to write them down, they would read more like something out of Running With Scissors than Tales from Lake Wobegone. Interestingly, this would also be true from a geographical standpoint (that memoir standoff is MA vs. MN, and my memoirs versus, say, the boyfriend's, would be NH vs. IN).

Possible Conclusions:
1. Only people from small towns in the midwest can write uplifting memoirs.
2. I am doomed to be one of those writers who writes a Hell of a memoir at great personal cost.
3. New England totally fucks you up (I actually do think this one is quite likely).
4. (And I think this is the likeliest) You cannot write an uplifting memoir (or film or autobiographical novel, whatever) until you are secure, successful, and, perhaps, wealthy. It's a lot easier to laugh at the suckers who picked on you in grade school when you have something positive to show for your suffering, and, if you're well off, the suckers who read your book are probably less likely to give you crap for calling them out. So, I suppose it takes present self-satisfaction to appreciatively poke fun at your past.

Problem: When you're finally self-satisfied after many years, does the gradual erosion of angst ruin the bankability of your hometown fallings-out?

I suppose we'll see.

Sincerely.

Hey.

The Unglamorous reason why I created my third blog.


(and

if you want a laugh

visit my first blog at xanga.com/myfeetarehappy
from eighth grade, where I talk about wildly personal issues publicly

my second blog was an angsty, friends-only livejournal

but i've said too much.)

This blog isn't for my adoring public (although adoration is always nice). The main reason I created it is because I can type as fast as I can think (not the case with my would-be preferred method of ink), and sometimes my best thoughts come quickly.

Also, a collection of word documents is really no better than having a stack of papers on your desk: out of order, easily forgotten, private, etc. Blogs naturally order themselves.

Thirdly, I'm one of those people who is a little OCD about different categories intersecting, especially small things: I have trouble eating corn that has mingled with peas, for example. For this reason, my private, handwritten journals contain no newspaper clippings, photographs, quotes, or any such material, which can often be very inspirational. Since the internet is truly a vast, immoral wasteland of anything you could ever imagine (EVER--enrolling in a science fiction seminar last semester introduced me to the horrifying world of alien abduction pornography, something I may or may not discuss at a later date), I feel less guilty about interspersing my thoughts with these materials. So, my Blogspot blog's primary purpose is to be a mangy, eclectic slut of a mental receptacle.

Fourthly, writing too many Facebook notes makes me feel like a terrible person.

So follow me if you will,
But I won't promise posts, photos, or anything else.

For this is not your blog. It is mine.

Sincerely.