Two Gold Rings

"I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Or do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?"*

1. I used to want to be the kind of girl that had silver rings on her fingers. There were all these women that I became friends with, once I moved to Gainesville, that seemed so adorned, even when they first woke up, hung over, bleary eyed, happy and excited and complete, and yet also they all shared these features- dark eyes like me, but dark haired, and so small and petite, like white sand from a gulf beach poured into a very small container and dampened with something better than water- only slighter darker than white, with their big eyes so that you couldn't help but think of soft, grey mammals watching you in the night. Then at Christmas one year in North Carolina in a dark room- not dark in an impersonal way but dark in the way that only a room that has been lived in for so long can be dark- with deeply used oriental rugs and pictures covering the walls and records lining the shelves- very little room for white space or space between people in the room. My mom, grandmother and I sat, all of us in the dark room with pictures on the walls from South Africa where we all were in 1985, and all of us reading, and because it was Christmas between us and for us that meant just that, us sitting together in a room reading, I was very surprised when my mother handed me a very small box and said merry Christmas.

I remember in high school sneaking into my mothers room. She was gone a lot, not out of town but she left for work before I went to school and she came back a good three hours after. I had the house to myself, most of the day if I decided to skip school. We spent our evenings always in the kitchen, always cooking together. She cooked and I did the talking. Then we ate and she went to sleep downstairs and I went into the loft and stayed up at night looking things up on the internet and then in the morning it happened again. But mostly during high school I skipped class. I was a straight A student and everyone trusted me and honestly it didn't matter or even come up. Sometimes when I stayed in I'd go in her bathroom, which always seemed the most private area of the house, and look through her things. There was one basket of earthy, woven material, something that she must have got on the sailing trip, and I'd look through it. There were a few necklaces (silver) and a few pendants that seemed to be from unknown islands. Tahiti? I didn't know. I won't know. I'll never know the intimate details of those places my mother went to. I know that she was there, I know she tied up the sailboat to unknown docks, swam to unknown beaches, I know she was in love. I have the pictures, to prove that they sailed around the world together. In the pictures, they are in love and they are young and they are in places I'll never go to. Especially not now. When I was that age, at that time, I had already thought about their comings and goings, and I had plenty of time to think about their divorce. I had already lived through it. We had the shells around the house, the tapestries and the photographs. But in that basket that my mom kept in her bathroom I found all the unknown details, the things and totems I didn't know or understand. The only thing I could recognize in the basket was the ring. I knew the gold ring was when my dad asked her to marry him, when they were really in love. I always picked it up, I always tried it on- skipping school before my mom got home, before I snuck out to punk shows (through the bedroom window, over the garage, she already knew). 

That Christmas when my mom handed me the small box, I expected something small, but not the small gold ring inside. She said, "you're twenty five, and I don't know what else to give you." It was the engagement ring, very simple, and yet the ring I'd always put on secretly, thinking about her and my dad, thinking about their trip, when the 36ft sailboat crossed the whole world with at first just them, and then finally me, inside its hull. I shouldn't have to explain how much I cried and cried, and have never taken the ring off since. 

2. One evening in my early twenties, I was sitting in the bathtub with my nose just below the water, eyes above, knees peaking out over, and just sort of floating with myself which has been something I've always liked to do. I've always liked to be in water. But I was sitting inside the tub and looking at the white porcelain container I was in and suddenly this wild memory came back to me, of being completely inside a very dark blue ceramic container. I remember the bathtub completely. It was very high, and tiled, which is unusual at least in Florida, and I remember when I got to the house that belonged to the tub always immediately wanting to be inside it, probably for the way the dark blue tiles turned the water in the tub a mysterious, middle of the ocean hue, and then floating inside that space for hours. The memory of the dark blue tiles came back to me, slowly (tidal) probably because it took me so long to realize that the tub belonged to the house that belonged to the woman that my dad was cheating on my mom with. 

I don't know what it's like for other people when they realize they're becoming someone they never wanted to be. I know how it felt for me, but how it happened isn't even something I'm capable of figuring out yet. But I remember an evening where I was literally begging someone I was in love with not to leave me. I don't know if that means anything to you. Let me start over. I was on my hands and knees, in an apartment I paid for surrounded by all my shitty possessions. I remember thinking I needed to sweep the next day, because there was cat hair all over the room, and I remember even thinking that whatever was coming next, it involved sweeping. So a part of me was being rational. The other part of me, you could argue, was drunk, or deliriously in love, or horrifically in love, whatever way you could choose to describe it- I can only say that I felt like if this person walked out that door and left me that I would absolutely without a doubt die (I didn't, and that was the worst part). The next day, when I woke up alone on the floor (getting a white cat was stupid but then I guess you could also argue I've never really been alone) I had this terrible memory come back to me of me, maybe around eight or nine, peering out of my bedroom door and seeing my mom on her hands and knees begging my dad not to leave her. I remember even the memory itself bothering me for so long, because my mom has always been such a strong person (she raised me after that for eight years) but we had never talked about it. I felt like, much like all my biggest fears, that everything had come full circle and I was the person she would never want me to be (that actually might still be true but let's come to that later). I pulled myself up by my boot straps (literally) and charged my phone and called her about it. About that night when I saw her begging my dad not to leave. Much like any memory, I had gotten it all wrong. My dad, as it turns out, had already gotten four DUIs that year, and was drunk and trying to leave to go the blue bath tub woman's house. My mom was just trying to get him not to drive drunk, and was trying to protect him.

After my mom got laid off from her job in Melbourne she moved to North Carolina to be closer to her family. In Asheville she briefly joined a dating website but canceled, because she thought she didn't have the time. Somehow, the only person that emailed her the whole time kept emailing her and bugging her for dates. They ended up bonding over cast iron skillets and kayaking. When he asked her to marry him last year (she was 60) she said yes. When I went to the wedding, on the outer banks of North Carolina, she gave me a small gold ring. It belonged to his ex wife, who died of cancer, but it's an opal, and apparently good luck when you give it to other people, and he wanted to welcome me to the family too, so we both got gold rings that day. I shouldn't have to explain how much I cried and cried, and have never taken the ring off since. 

*Karen Joy Fowler "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves." 

Visit from the Goon Squad

I. Books 

"His desire was so small in the end that [he] could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. [She] was baffled at first, then distraught [...] but eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken [her]; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, [he] supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He's presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that [she] had forgotten how things were between them before [he] began to fold up his desire; she'd forgotten and was happy- had never not been happy- and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him."* 

        Sometimes in passing people like to drop these tiny bombs on me where they say things like, "oh but you get along with everybody." I know when it's said it's meant well, I'm never really offended, but I always think excitedly, internally, "holy shit they're right!" Then I spiral a little bit, worry about who I'm too nice to, who deserves it, if I'm not critical enough in my personal relationships. I'm not ever too nice, it's just that I might try too hard to like everyone. I mean to say that I tend to gloss over certain things in order to attain a balance- left over from a real shitty divorce (my parents) most likely- where everyone gets along and no one is trying to kill each other. I like playing this part; the middle man, camp counselor, whatever you want to call it. I like plans. I like difficult people. I like to organize, mediate, and all that stuff that probably drives my best friends crazy (but they like me because of their own fucked up problems too). With that being said, I am wild about this book by Jennifer Egan.

        I am fully aware of the criticism surrounding this book, but I can gloss over some of the criticism and focus on what's really amazing. Do I need to explain? Have I become one of those people that asks rhetorical questions? Fuck no. I bet if you didn't like the book it's because of some of the last chapters (I sort of skimmed them, not really my style but I think it took some guts, you'd have to read the book to know what I'm referring to). Cool, write about it for your professors while you get your MFA but I'm working 40 hours a week at a bar. I just want to say that the book freaked me out more than anything I've read in awhile and that's saying a lot (the next two books freaked me out too actually). To me, the best parts of the book were about how people loose touch with one another, destroy each other, forget about themselves, and betray their own instincts, all because of time passing and their own very small, innocent decisions that amount to tragedy- their own or someone else's. The redeeming quality of the book was that most of the characters go on. They just keep fucking up or eking out whatever shitty life they're trying to live, a few are redeemed (debatable) but it seems very realistic that no matter how you fuck up your life, it's just going to keep happening.That might not be a saving grace, but it's true. Characters in the book that you felt sure were going to "make it" just totally fell apart, by I guess my own standards. The book made me question my own ideas about growing up, about marriage, about a career, about what was important. I'm not even sure I had appropriate responses to parts of the book. Still, I'm glad I read the book when I did. 

"Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home on the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel."**

        I think it's important for everyone to be intolerant of men whining about women, in every medium- music, books, poetry, tumblr, you name it. I don't mean whining in the sense of showing emotion, everyone deserves their own allotment of feelings, even self-centered miserable ones (goodness knows I've hammed it up a little on my own) but there's a fine line between "I have these feelings I want or need to share" and "this girl broke my heart and I didn't deserve it and she's a bad person" blah blah blah bullshit. Too often men get to use art as a cover up for their own bullshit, their own mistakes, and a mysterious girl gets the blame. I would say oh, about 90% of pop punk. However, This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz doesn't fall into that trap.

       The collection of short stories, mostly centered around the same character (a sort of shadowy reflection of the author) completely fucking up relationships for his whole life. He really takes the blame, and not in a passive aggressive way, but with really tangible self-loathing that I found myself relating to (there was an old Gomek lyric, "four years of youth wasted/fucking up relationships/and several houses"). Dead pan depression, sometimes witty, mostly just sad, and I kept waiting for the characters to stop, to just...stop being so fucked up to one another, but they don't. That's real life I guess. The quote above is from one of the singular chapters with a female perspective, but that doesn't mean the other women in the book aren't given incredible dimension. The mother in most of the stories is the strongest character (the one really deserving of respect and never getting it) but the woman in this chapter, who is sort of patiently waiting for things to work out or fall apart, that really resonated with me most. I used to think that, like anything else, when you fall in love you could control it, wrestle with it, rail against it...I think I know now that when you fall in love you just have to allow it to happen, take a deep breath and see how thing's turn out. Sadly, for almost every character in this book, nothing works out, things fall apart, and the main character ends up alone. Refreshingly though, he knows it's his fault. These are the accounts of all the ways he betrayed his partners, and also himself. He says at the end, "that's about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace- and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start  is all we ever get."

"'A writer needs four things to achieve greatness Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.' 'That's only three.' Alvis finished the wine. 'You have to do disappointment twice.'"***

        Another book about betrayal, complicated human interaction, and the degrading and redemptive qualities of time. Not quite as depressing as the first two. Inspired me to actually stay up last night and write these book reviews though. Don't judge it by the cover (literally awful, didn't pick it up several times from three different book stores) it's actually captivating and quite funny. 

       I read it in the van on my way up to Richmond with Mauser. I don't mind being cramped with seven people for ten hours if I have a good book to read, so if you find yourself on any long trips this summer it would be a good book to have. I don't have beach reads. I have van reads. 

*A Visit From The Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

**This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz 

***Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter 

Deny All Shores

“Human beings, I thought, change so little, and are so much what they are, that there has been only one love story since the beginning of time, endlessly repeated, never losing its terrible simplicity or its irremediable sorrow.”*

I did some things pretty poorly last year, and some sad shit was done to me in turn. I’m lucky though that I have some real stand-up women in my life. My mom, the doctor at the abortion clinic where I worked, and a handful of friends I can talk to about anything about from Marquez to masturbation. Either Nikki or Amanda came up with this idea of “making it nice around the tree” which we say a lot now but haven’t really explained so I’m going to do it now because it has a lot to do with the only resolution I really made. You know how when you sleep with someone (or mess around with someone or make out with them in the bathroom and then forget about it) and instead of falling madly in love you’re just met with a deadpan sort of silence? Then there’s that windfall of awkwardness and you and your sort of maybe partner avoid each other at the bar or make weird eye contact at a show and you sort of tap you’re foot impatiently and you say, alright, enough of this and you go up and say hello and some jokes are made and then you’re laughing and you’re friends again or maybe for the first time? THAT’s making it nice around the tree, and after that you can either keep being friends again or for the first time or maybe you end up sleeping together again. Either way it doesn’t fucking matter if you’re CONSENTING ADULTS (we are exclusively interested in OUR OWN TREES unlike the guy who cornered me at the Atlantic and asked me, specifically, which of his friends I wasn't sleeping with). And that’s nice, when you get to smooth out the awkwardness and keep being friends with people and even though it’s messy and sometimes complicated it’s mostly good. However sometimes, the tree is REAL fucked up. Like you really hurt the trees feelings and wrote them some letters and then you blew them off again and the tree is pretty much far away forever. When a small awkward moment (or just shitty, terrible moment) stretched on indefinetly and suddenly someone you used to talk to all the time not only doesn’t feel like your friend but maybe even someone who really, really despises you (or more than likely doesn’t think about you at all, ever). Well one of those other really smart women in my life told me around my birthday (late November) that making new years resolutions is really silly. Adding on more baggage and more stuff to feel bad about later doesn’t make any sense. Instead it’s better to spend the end of the year forgiving other people for the things you might still be holding against them, and also it’s a good time to forgive yourself for the things you weren’t able to get done (or in my case even started really). It might sound VERY trite to some people but it made me feel a lot better, especially about some real sad feelings I had about myself. I realized that the holidays, in this whole other sense, are about “making it nice around the tree.” I used some time to connect with old friends and let some other shit go, and also with the intention (this year) of not letting little awkward moments stretch out to the point where anyone I care about gets out of reach of communication. I know other people are often terrible. It’s all just like all the other stories sometimes, always so trite and easy to predict. But then after that, when the next chapter starts, it’s so wonderfully, tremendously good.

“The useless days will amount to something.”**

I always wanted to be on the Real World. I remember turning 24 and being deeply disappointed in myself for not ever trying to do it. What an easy way to just be showered in love and attention forever and ever? What an awful, awful idea; I realize now. I think I know now the cut off point in age is because people in their early 20s are so sure of everything. Myself included, of course, anyone who’s ever been 19 or 20 just knows that they’re the best writer or artist or football player or whatever it is that they like about themselves, and then that gets sort of hammered and chipped away at everyday until they eventually get to this point where they realize they’ve been totally wrong, for a long time. Even now the things I think I’m good at, that I really like myself, are the same things that embarrass me about myself when I meet people or think of people who are really, really good at them. Can you imagine a Real World set up with a bunch of creative, smart people in their late 20s? I only use that because it’s how I feel but maybe it stretched out a lot later than this (oh boy!). I can just imagine my testimonials, “well I really thought I was right about this intangible theory of feminism but now...I’m just not so sure...so-and-so really knows a lot more than me and they brought up this really important point about....” and cut the scene where I’m just staring at empty pages for hours, and then drinking, lots of drinking still. It would be a great show. Terribly, wonderfully funny and very depressing and often pathetic. The show might actually exist, and I may have been living it.

I’m finally not so terribly afraid at failing. I’ve done it. I’ve been failing. It just doesn’t seem so bad anymore. It's still ok if I take some mediocre photography, at least I'm doing stuff. I can even write some only "alright" poetry, but at least I'll be writing. I'm even going to apply to graduate schools again, because I've stopped memorizing that other rejection letter. MRR liked our 7"? Great, we're going to make another one! I feel much less distracted by all the terrible possible outcomes and much more excited about doing everything, more, and more fully. If you’ve been feeling really awful about yourself I really recommend reading Beautiful Tiny Things by Cheryl Strayed. I read the book right after the new year clocked in and it really reminded me to stop feeling sorry for myself and, I quote, “write like a motherfucker” among other things. It’s the perfect book for anyone who’s been wallowing, or just stuck, or anyone really. Thanks to all the wonderful women in my book club for recommending it to me.

*The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, Alvaro Mutis
**Beautiful Tiny Things, Cheryl Strayed

that life that is slowly waking

"In the depths on your green eyes, you loafer, I can clearly see the land of laziness. I can see golden hills where you will bask. I can see the sofas of your many-houred snoozes. I can see heaps of notebooks you will never cover with writing. I can see the thousand peaceful cities where you will live from day to day, a thousand peaceful white cities of phlegmatic architecture and friendly climate. Torrid heat reigns from early morning. A streetcar, open on both sides, is making its way through green pastures. Oh, how sweet it will be, to live in the heart of that life that is slowly waking but always nodding off again before final awakening. Open windows, dark apartments, the somnolent dramas of the residents, an oval table covered with a cloth, the remains of banquets that never end, hammocks, easy chairs, old architecture, a thousand gentle rivers under a thousand old bridges, lazy girls going for walks along grassy shores...I'm afraid it's already too late. If you have the misfortune to chance upon a lazy body at the very beginning of your youth, you'll be lost for life. Your innate tendency toward laziness will be awakened and set for all time, and you'll spend your entire life searching for the promised land of laziness. You'll pass through a thousand peaceful cities. All your life you'll hunger for lazy arms. You won't live, you'll sleep instead."*

Be patient with me. Nothing I'd ever say out loud, in the real world. In the real world I'm always tapping my fingers, ready to move on, always rushing around. Inside though, alone in my room, I beg the world for patience. I have to have the exact right amount of time to write. The exact right amount of uneasiness and unhappiness, but not too much, because then I'll be busy taking care of it. There's always something to take care of, but it's hard taking care of ones own self.

I thought that lately I'd been happy. I was wrong. I'm not even sure I deserve to be happy, but really I think I was just being lazy. When it's easy to sleep past noon and stay up with someone, one on one, why wouldn't you? I realized that I need a break from being self-indulgent. This weekend I drank a lot, ran around with old friends and caused some trouble. It was fun, but I got sick and had to lay in bed for the past three days thinking. I mean really Thinking. Maybe that made me even more sick. I realized I still have a lot of work to do before I can be really happy, and that does seem like the point, to me anyway, just to be happy in the end. I saw my friend Charlie this weekend and he said he missed reading my blog, he asked why I'd been so busy, why I haven't been writing, and over beers I realized I didn't have a good excuse. So here you go Charlie, this ones for you.

Rose Cross has one song about partying. The gist is "turn off my brain" and I hop up and down and pogo and it sounds happy but it isn't. I spend a lot of time wondering why I have to be the one to think so goddamn hard. Everyone else seems ok most of the time, like nine out of ten people can walk into a messy room and feel fine and I'm the tenth person that walks in and completely looses it. Going into work and fixing other peoples mistakes, cleaning up after people, putting things back in their place...where does that bone in my body come from? Why can't I coast along, doing the bare minimum, smiling dumbly and dutifully? I get frustrated at everyone's lack of interest with the problems around them, and am worn out always trying to fix them. I often feel like I don't have much to show for it either. Sure, I work a lot, but I'd have rather been at that Halloween party than standing behind the bar for eight hours. I had a really amazing boyfriend for about five months but then I freaked out, thought I was doing everything wrong, felt depressed and ended it (that is the very, very short version of the story). If I could let things go...wouldn't I be happier?

Well fuck that. I'm not going to let New Years sneak up on me. I'm making my resolution now. No more sleeping in, no more comfort, no more easy living. I'm going to be writing more, updating this more, and trying to fix all the goddamn problems, and I don't care how unhappy it makes me. In the end it'll probably be worth it. Probably.

*Jerzy Pilch, A Thousand Peaceful Cities

the siren call of the question mark

"Just as the shape of natural objects like rainbows, snowflakes, crystals and blossoming flowers derives from the symmetrical way that quarks arrange themselves in the atom- a remnant of the universe's lost state of perfect symmetry- so he is convinced that the unhappy state of affairs regarding love can be traces right back to the subatomic. If you read up on strings, you will learn that there are two different types, closed and open-ended. The closed strings are O-shaped loops that float about like angels, insouciant of spacetime's demands and playing no part in our reality. It is the open-ended strings, the forlorn, incomplete U-shaped strings, whose desperate ends cling to the sticky stuff of the universe; it is they that become reality's building blocks, its particles, its exchanges of energy, the teeming producers of all that complication. Our universe, one could almost say, is actually built out of loneliness; and that foundational loneliness persists upwards to haunt every one of its residents."*

I think I owe the Internet an explanation about my absence, but it would be so trite I don't think I could actually bring myself to write it out. I did go to Texas, I am in Europe now, and I guess I could talk about the late nights at work couldn't I? What's the point. Spring stretched out for me like a neglected lawn, punctuated only by reading some fantasy books, which I won't get into here but I think it had the effect of a big pile of sand for my head (i.e. I'm the proverbial ostrich). I think I had sort of given up, accepted the loneliness but also the fact that I couldn't be of any use helping anyone else with their hurts and wants. Although, on a night recently I helped Adrien clean the blood off his hands and face, sat him down with a fizzy water and told him to tell me all about it. So cuts and scraps I can handle, but the big existential problems I'd put on the back burner, at least until after my Great Rambling Adventure in Europe.

"Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over again I made the same mistake, hurt other people and hurt myself into the bargain. Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed- maybe they were part of my very make-up, an inescapable part of my being."**

I read that on the train from Berlin to Prague and it articulated exactly how I felt around the end of May. I felt happy to see my friends, happy to jump into the springs, even happy to wake up with a hangover. Yet I felt like I'd given up on trying to actually be happy. I thought if I just kept my head up, tried not to get involved with anyone, and worked hard, that I'd end up on the other side of my self-loathing.

Of course, thankfully, the world isn't that simple. I ended up kissing someone I've wanted to kiss for a long time, and the rug not only got pulled out from under my feet but suddenly pop songs on the radio started making sense too. I've never felt so utterly insane for someone. But, this isn't a blog about happiness, or musings on romance, so suffice to say that while something rather fundamental in my life up to this point has changed, the big questions remain.

I've spent my time here walking around, endlessly, climbing everything I see, and drinking an incredible amount of coffee. People keep asking me what I'm up to, why I'm here, alone, etc. I feel somewhat sheepish answering, "oh you know, just looking around." I did read One Hundred Years of Solitude again, which still makes me cry, and am rounding book 5 now that I've reached Budapest (I've picked up whatever I could get my hands on at used book stores, which has been surprisingly fruitful). In Vitezslav Nezval's book Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, which I read in Prague, he dedicated the book to, "those who, like myself, gladly pause at times over the secrets of certain old courtyards, vaults, summer houses and those mental loops which gyrate around the mysterious." So I walk a few kilometers (cultural note!) and then stop to stare at the view or a statue or just to smoke a cigarette in silence. I wrote Ryan and told him how I felt like a big key was in my head winding everything up the right way, like all the little gears are tuned correctly now, and when I come home I'll be lighter, clearer, dare I say it, happier. Maybe it's enough just to have my eyes open, and to have some time to think.

There's a true feedback story about exactly everything I've just written called don't give up on nihilism, and goddamn, I can't wait to get home to Gainesville to listen to it.

*Paul Murray, Skippy Dies, pg. 300
**Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun, pg. 42