clobbered!
Thursday 19 January 2006 | I like a cookie
By the menstrual faeries, a full week early; unprecedented—well, for the last several years. In addition, my breasts throbbed premenstrually, swollen and sore, which they haven’t been for a long time; and, I have the cramps like a motherfucker, which I also haven’t had for roughly speaking a squillion years. Clearly, there’s life in the old girl yet, or anyway there’s some estrogen still kicking around in there somewhere.
Ow. Ow ow ow. [In which she takes two horsepill Tylenol with a swig of kombucha. Mandarin and I are by now totally addicted to GT’s raspberry, cranberry, blueberry, and mango-flavored renditions of the stuff; she thinks it’s because it’s high in B vitamins and she’s just been diagnosed with pernicious anaemia, to which I say plaintively, well then what’s my excuse? And she’s brave, unfazed by the floating mushroom which every bottle sponsors, while I stare in repelled fascination at its trailing grayish-brown algae tendrils, like unto those of a Portuguese man-of-war, and I invariably shudder, fetch a chopstick, extract the wee beastie from its flavorsome host, and down the drain she goes. Heartless murderer of yeast and bacteria colonies—they can’t possibly survive Santa Fe’s graywater treatment, which is surely chemical and evil, I’m willing to bet.]
Speaking of which (”Ow. Ow ow ow.”), I didn’t go in to the newspaper today but stayed in bed, huddled around my hot water bottle, listening to the gentle rustle of my fat cells growing. But I did swing two full reviews, another reason to think there’s life in me still, or anyway more words, the simulacrum of blood in my veins.
Last night I sunk into the pit of squalor (completely unaware that it had largely to do with plummeting hormone levels) and, in an effort to extricate myself, called Mandarin, called the Brujo, and finally fired up a documentary about Townes Van Zandt. Hey, the next time I think it’ll be a mood elevator to watch a two-hour eulogy to a manic-depressive songwriting genius who, over the course of 30 years, 3 marriages, a gaggle of kids and a bunch of cancelled studio sessions, basically boozed and huffed himself to death—somebody stop me, okay? An early friend of his recounted how she’d seen Townes and his girlfriend shooting up, and it was the first time she’d ever seen such a thing before: “And you know what they were injecting? Bourbon and Coca-Cola, because that was all they had.”
Having been diagnosed as manic-depressive in his early twenties and subjected to the only treatment available at the time (vide Plath: drug-induced insulin shock, followed with electroconvulsive therapy), he chose instead to self-medicate. Which works, I suppose, but takes a toll on his ability to work and on the lives of everyone around him. He goes from being a lanky young cowpoke, fresh-faced and sweet, to looking like Charles Bronson’s extremely dissipated older brother—so drastic are his shifts in appearance that the documentary has to inform you constantly across the bottom of the screen, “Townes Van Zandt.” At first I was stroppy about this, and lectured the telly sternly, while sewing rips in my nine-patch quilt, “Don’t be ridiculous, I think we can tell who he is!” But after a while I stopped saying this. Started coloring in my journal, shellshocked, thinking of Jeff Buckley, Hart Crane; and Voldemort. It will be a long time before I can hear about self-medicating manic-depressives without slipping into the canyon of what the Brujo calls so wisely, ruinous numinosity. Ca veux dire, the attractor of all my projection onto him.
Thus shocked and weepy, and not receiving canyon-vaulting succor from my incorporeal telephonic companions (one of whom is brain-dead from days on the road and the other of whom had been thoroughly Romanoffed, as well as having watched her first horror film in many a year—28 Days Later, in which the zombies aren’t the nice groaning poky ones to which we’ve become accustomed but actually sprint around the UK with fearsome celerity), I did fall into the well, like baby Jessica Hahn. The well in this case being, a great Internet searching for 1) whispering heaven tea, which the local bulk grocery store will no longer carry, now that they’ve created my dependency upon it, and 2) kombucha information. The articles didn’t get written until 7 or 8 am this morning, at which time the ruinous numinosity had assaulted, mauled, ravaged and just generally had its way with me so thoroughly and I was so woozy with exhaustion that I was able to choke out 1000 words on the merits of, respectively, The Matador and Crimen Ferpecto (films which have certain unexpected parallels, though I suppose I only noticed that because I watched them on the same day).
I then checked Box Office Mojo, ascertained that neither film made the top ten over the weekend, that in fact I probably should have reviewed Nanny McPhee, Big Momma’s House 2, Underworld: Evolution and/or Annapolis. I thought about this bleakly for a quarter hour or so and then went to bed.
Bugger. Rubbish. Pants.
And now to write capsule previews for such fresh cinematic fodder as, as, as, well, to be completely honest, in the words of David Cassidy when he was still with the Partridge Family, I actually have no idea what’s coming out tomorrow, and what is more I suspect that I secretly have no intention of writing any bloody thing. Sneaky, that’s what I am. Devious.
The Brujo just called from Albuquerque to say that he was in Albuquerque, and would be chez moi the minute he’d finished helping unload gear and so forth.
“But aren’t you toasted?” I squeaked, turning my plastic bag of frozen alphabet soup (Tabatchnik’s, no relation to the composer but a literal lifesaver this winter) over in its boiling water. There was a long silence during which we both contemplated the utter preposterousness of this question, which seemed to be increasing with every passing second.
“Never mind, forget I even asked that, what was I thinking—just get yourself over here as soon as possible because dammit, I don’t give a shit how tired you are!” We laugh. “Yeah, I was wondering how to tell you nicely that I just don’t even care.”
As long, I thought but didn’t say, as you’re prepared to deal with some furious little stomping faeries. But he’s been ringmaster to a gaggle of lesbian trapeze girls all weekend, so how troublesome can mere hysterical faeries be?
Oh, you’d be surprised.
In other unhappy news, Mandarin’s thesis advisor accused her of making up the word “nosology.” This has us both gobsmacked. Wouldn’t you assume that by graduate school, one would have lost the taste for inventing vocabulary and maybe, oh, I don’t know, looking up the goddamned word before leaping, sproing! straight to the conclusion that it’s made-up? Right, just like all those other made-up words you also don’t know…it reminds me of a story that made the rounds in the early days of email, in which someone tried to purchase liquor using a driver’s license from West Virginia as ID, whereupon the clerk sneered, “If you’re going to fake your ID, you should at least use a real state!” Vide also all those tourists who wonder if they need a visa to visit us here in Nuevo México.
Alphabet soup will forever remind me of Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, the narrator so tormented by her school friends (”Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.”) that she barfs in a snowbank, and then studies the “ruined letters.” And the back of her throat feels raw, like a scraped carrot.
And as this was vegetable alphabet soup, I came a couple of times across a small cool lima bean, which I accepted, though no one was urging me to do so.
How many times undone / can one person be? How many more can I bounce back up and present my chin, squared for the inevitable uppercut? How much romantic detritus, how many thousands of kalpas of accumulated bad karma, how much lying on the floor thinking, why am I not just dead. Why hasn’t this just killed me. Because women have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love. Yeah—tell that to the women who told themselves, it’s getting better, he doesn’t really mean it, he’s sorry afterwards, he’s going to change, everything will be like it was before.
What concerns me with the Brujo, however mature he undeniably is, is that I’ve never yet met the man who was mature where these matters are concerned. And that his sobriety, so shiny-new and tentative and frail, is crucial. If I exercise my polyamorous tendencies—stay in love with Voldemort and the Librarian and Mandarin, fall in love with someone new—he could be horribly hurt, which could threaten his fragile new sober self.
Mandarin says, you don’t have to take care of him. You have to take care of you. You don’t have to decide anything tonight. And you only really have to decide whether you want to be involved with him, or just go to bed with him. It’s really okay. It’s okay to date boys. It’s okay to sleep with them. —I don’t believe this.
It’s not as though Voldemort isn’t already, very likely, merrily making out with someone young enough to be my daughter, some half-a-dozen stop signs from here. It’s not as though he gives a flying fuck what I do with my life, as long as I stay the hell away from his, other than his generalized compassionate may-all-beings-be-well stance of great openness—with an oily coating of condescension, which he probably can’t see and wouldn’t acknowledge if anyone pointed it out. It’s not like what I do or don’t do will make any difference to his not wanting to see me again. He’s left and I’m on my own, I’ve been yanked off the hook and, as the Former Film Critic once said, thrown writhing and still-bloody back into the pond.
If someone else can catch me, should I let them? How slippery and agile and crafty should I be in trying to elude capture? Where is the person who can give me a run for my money? The one whose brain works fully as fast and colorfully as mine?
someone who can slap me with a
kiss that’s like a fist and can
sing so it stops me like a brick wall
I like the Brujo, terribly. I feel better when he’s around. He’s profoundly kind—and not at all in any weedy or ineffectual way, but solidly so. We speak using words like oneiric and numinous and don’t bother lingering over them, because we’ve both read the Bollingen Jung and so what’s there to talk about, other than getting there? We know the difference between a tonic 7th and a major 7th. And yet it’s Weil’s “terrible consolation, which leaves suffering intact”: I feel, still, so starkly alone in this dull world / in thy absence no better than a sty; / and there is nothing left remarkable / beneath the visiting moon.
A bleached-white landscape. A barren oval. Only Marina understands: You taught me how to live in fire, you threw me there / and then abandoned me on steppes of ice. I could have resigned myself to this before him, but now—can I forget what it’s felt like. Can I stop aching for it. Do I have a choice.
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