I’m not dead yet
Friday 20 February 2004 | I like a cookie
We don’t lose everyone. We don’t, we don’t, we don’t! [stamps foot, faery-like in great fierce denial, wild insistent no-no-no-ness, I don’t hate the South!] And that’s what CDs and the Library of Congress and the American Film Institute are for. That’s why I have to find three or four weeks soon to visit Texas and drag my dad daily into the studio. Of course, if we don’t lose anyone, then that must mean the karma also doesn’t end here. The sins and the misery and the beauty and the music and the knitting weave on, a curve to shimmer, what makes the river crooked, makes it serpentine.In the same spirit, wanting to preserve all that’s been deemed not worth the saving, I yearn for Mandarin’s discarded prints. All that’s judged weird and ugly, the disconnected and despairing, the spurned and the rejected, my bare walls will use to remember with, like a mala or tattoo; like every rakusu, how can anything made but be perfect, as the precious record of an unrepeated moment in the mind and eyes and hands.
So two things: one a funny thing, a political ad of a guy running for City Council who somehow thought it would be a good idea if his very very young daughter (pictured with him at the top of the column) wrote the copy. He was wrong, and, in the words of the ad, here is why, absolutely verbatim:
Hi im Ali. And I would like you to vote for my dad.And here is why,:
1. Because my dad is genris,
2. kind, and caring.
3. loves the city and town
4. he dosn’t want his kids to move away
5. hi’s a regular person
6. he wants the city to be better
7. hes a leader
8. he loves to work with the commanity
9. his smart
10. he educates him salfe.thanks so much for voting for my dad.
It leaves me skeptical, and having a big problem, no matter how genris he is, with number four—because of course it immediately makes me think that this guy is, at least potentially, a crazy divorced jealous childnapper like Marisa Tomei’s Neanderthal-browed ex-husband of In the Bedroom infamy, and no way in time am I voting for his scary ass.
Next, the next thing, a thing I shall probably only get out if I use quotation marks so that it seems less like a terrible thing Ayn Rand would write.
What do I want? I’ll tell you what I want. I want to drive home very late with someone after an evening spent slowly sharpening each other with the slightly cruel mutual exchange of our most vicious and truest sentences, intimidating and not ashamed of it. I want to stagger from the car buzzing with fatigue and more than a little drunk. I want to have difficulty inserting my key into the front door, mouth dry. I want to have barely opened the lock when I’m seized by certain hands, one at the nape of my neck and the other at my jawline, at the base of my throat. I want to be turned and thrown backward in one rushing movement, slammed back against the plaster entrance wall by the sheer arterial force of someone trying to penetrate to my brainstem through my mouth, trying to gouge through, using teeth or tongue or whatever media lie to hand. I want to be held up not by my own legs but pressed to the wall by the weight of another body, unapologetic for any discomfort incurred through this crush against gravity. I want to have scratches, bruises, pulled hair, and torn favorite underthings because impatience holds skin and fabric in light regard. I don’t want to have time to think. I don’t want to have to encourage or reassure, suggest or guide. I don’t want to be asked Is this okay, are you ready, do you like this. I want someone to know. I want to be utterly stunned, consumed by something nearly indifferent to my survival. I want to have a singed numb blank spot in my frontal lobe where my language faculty shone before. I want to feel fingers sinking with deep satisfaction into muscle, bone smashing unflinching against bone. And above all I want someone to keep up a running lascivious commentary, hissed into my ear, about exactly what’s being done to me now, what will be done next, and why. And I don’t think I have ever, ever had this.
Not since the Republican Sadist anyway. Hello Kitty fails to cut the mustard, apparently. Nor did six years of pricey feminist higher ed seem to rid me of my purple Mills & Boon “aesthetic.”
Shall I tell you who would run screaming if they read such an articulated encomium to violent domination and limp submission? (Cos that’s the thing about vampires, I’m beginning to put it together—they’re so long-lived and so well-read, so elegant and so uncivilized, they know everything there is to know about flesh and blood and aren’t afraid to deploy this information.) Well, in addition to great hordes of Everybody Else: the Librarian and the Film Critic. (M. wouldn’t run screaming but would go all dignified and utter his husbandly je refuse.) Only perhaps the Young Monk would shrug and gamely take a shot. But shan’t.
I hope you find it / whatever it is sings Lori Carson etherially. I eat another marzipan Möwen-Eier (Seagull Egg, pale spring green with chocolate-brown spots) contemplatively, thinking things I ought not entertain. If this lust doesn’t dissolve/resolve/evolve in practice soon, I’m screwed. Or not screwed, and wretched. And now I quietly post and retire chastely to bed with Michael Chabon.
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