"They hate you coz you're guilty"

This is an artistic representation of what I witnessed on Saturday. Ted Leo performed the song "The Ballad of the Sin Father" olde time religion style, passionately and oratorically. The song was fucking awesome and most importantly, right where I write "hits himself in the head three times with the microphone until he bled down his face", that's what he motherfuckin' punk rock did:

"I spent a night in Kigali, in a five diamond hotel, where maybe someday, they'll do the Watusi down in Hutu hell.

I fell in with a merchant marine who promised to take me home, but when I woke up beaten and bloodied, I couldn't tell if it was Jersey or Sierra Leone!

[hits himself in the head three times with the microphone until he bled down his face]

And you didn't think they could hate you, now did you? You didn't think they could hate you, now did you? You didn't think they could have you, now did you? Ah, but they hate you, and they hate you coz you're guilty...

And the knocking in my head, just like the knocking at my door. Maybe it was me or maybe it was my brother, but either me or me and him went down to the bar, where I got seven powers in me for to give me the cure, but when seven powers failed to spin me, I had to get me seven more.

And when I say, "me" I mean my brain. And when I say "give me the cure" I mean to kill the pain. And when I say "kill the pain" I meant to get the devil out. And when I say "devil" I mean the manifestation of doubt!"

I responded to his spastic oration, his skinny mania, and most importantly: his palpable self hatred. Because I'm guilty.

The air conditioning's on, I have a car, I fill that car with gas; I am not in Armenia, I am not facing down a tank, the water is hot or cold as I will it shall be. The guilt is oppressive. Take that microphone and smash it into my head, Ted Leo! Wait.

When Little Sister was deciding whether or not to abort the cats, she kept coming back to how bad she felt. And it was a realization for me: because I feel bad about things all the time, and that's the thread that ties us all together, as humans: we should be feeling bad. Sad things are happening and people we love are in pain and people we don't know, but hope that would would love, are in pain. The avoidance of pain is ultimately paralyzing, and is why Hummers exist. And how dead on is that bit about "killing the manifestation of doubt"?! Zing. Pop. Punk rock!

The desire to cause oneself pain, in the idea that it will make things better for everyone, is bizarre and nonsensical. Except. When I was in Armenia, and deeply shook up, I went to an orphanage filled with ravaged children. It wasn't some Romanian hellhole. It was just what it was: bent and agonized children without enough love. I didn't want to see it, but once I had, I kept wanting to hurt myself, thinking that if I could, I could relieve the guilt and sadness--which I couldn't. And that's how I stumbled upon my own personal vision of the sacrifice of Christ. Total bummer, right? True story!

Anyhow. I just wanted to say that I keep thinking about that song and a bad war and hurt kids and my life and the sound of that microphone hitting that dude on the head. My manifestation of doubt picks, picks, picks things apart--and I wanted to say that it was theatrics, timed to music, impotent marketing, but it shook me up and made me wonder how many people struggle with weighing their pain against the pain of others.

Punk rock is nearly the greatest thing on Earth.

The Future Mr. Renegade

I just saw Colin Farrell on the Tonight Show. At one point I bit my own arm in a confusion of lust and anger. I know that Colin has many female admirers but not one has helped him button up his shirt--and I can be that woman. Let's imagine that, shall we? I literally cannot take how much I like him. And my sister may be going to the Miami Vice premier. It's a quick jump from being a Movie Star Assistant to be a Movie Star Sister-in-Law. Please let's make that jump quickly. I am drawing my own blood here.

This is not a celebrity watching blog. It's not his fame I love--or, it's not his fame I love the most--but his accent, and his addiction to booze. Also his forearm tattoo. And the fact that actors are needy and I love the needy. In fact: I have a therapist, and my therapist is helping me define my own needs for the unconditional love I did not receive as a child, and so--listen here, Colin Farrell--my therapist says you should sleep with me. It's that simple. If you need an official letter I can get you one, and then you can be all "Hey, Angelina, there are all kinds of humanitarian giving" and I'll be winking in the background.

Tear it up, Sister.

"Isn't it amazing how the world can appear to be going to hell in a handbasket, and then someone douses the handbasket with gasoline, lights a match, and drop-kicks the whole flaming mess straight into a stadium filled with toddlers, adorable baby animals and flammable trash?"

---Heather Havrilesky

Well, lookee here! I have been updating this blog for a year. I am a steady train of responsibility and consistancy, like: I have steady gained 20 lbs since last year's series of costly, body-altering surgeries, and I have steady attempted to make myself okay, as in, feeling okay about things.

Many are now predicting the end of the world, but that has been predicted before, so I am thinking that there will be another year of blogging. If the world is ending and the Witnesses to Jehovah (not J-Hova, as in JayZ, but the other ones, the creepy ones) are correct, then...whoops. Anywho. I resolve, in this next year of blogation, to cultivate more humor combined with intense pathos. Also maybe more porn, right? Cuz damn. The world is probably going to end soon, we should partaaay!

Lameness, unrelenting

The thing I was writing about before? The love and the sadness? That theme continued through the week, until reaching a drunken apex in Lincoln Square. Combine wine + women in their late 20s + social work and you end up with a sassy stew that I ate too much of and resulted in a couple hours of sleep on someone else's couch. The love and sadness train has run out of steam, I think. Right about when I was laying in the yard at 4:30 am eating Cheetos while someone mourned a friend's death. Figuring out what needs to be open and what needs to be closed is one of my adulthood tasks, I think. So for now, after all that tenderness: sarcasm and summer days.

Off to a BBQ today. I have already planned an outfit, which makes me think that the near total absence of Little Sister from my life has resulted in me becoming her a little bit. My primary goal in all my weekend socializing: find homes for the kitties. Before they lose their adorably bankable kitten-ness. I should also fix my bike and join my fellow Chicagoans at the lake shore, which I tend to avoid, as it looks like the Power Point presentation my soul would show itself in a seminar entitled "This is What You Should Be Doing Instead of What You are Doing." Biking, beach volleyballing, being just tan enough.

In fact, my favorite summer activity may be setting off fireworks, unwelcomed in these skittish times. While everyone else in my neighborhood gets in their shorts and takes the bus to Fullerton beach, I shall take a stroll instead, pretending that the shimmering heat off cars stuck in traffic is the waves of Lake Michigan, and that all the trash is little boats.

Destiny is only the dense residue of childhood.

Only jackasses quote Rilke (Rilkey? Rilk? I'm not Germanic) but, as one of my favorite clients says, "yet and still" there are words he has written that apply to my current situation. He wrote a little-known poem entitled "beleaguered Social Worker in Chicago Attempts to Build an Admirable Life" which was more like a freestyle rap and was too progressive for late 1800s Austria-Hungary. Anyway, the quote above is from Marie, and this is too:

To be here at all is a glory.
You knew it, maidens,
even those of you seemingly
passed over, sinking into the city's meanest streets,
festering alleys choked with
trash and stinking of excretions.
Each of you had her hour,
or it not an hour,
an instant, at least,
between two moments when
life burst into flower.
Every blessed petal.
Your veins throbbed with it.

This is it. I met with a boy today, a boy with a history we should all be shielded from, who has of late taken to threatening and stealing from me. The idea is: intimacy is horror to him. He is pushing you away, Renegade. If you move through this--the stealing, the threats, the creepiness--the basic human need for love is revealed. And I had stealed myself for theft and assault and pain, for months and years, but I was willing, I am a soldier of love.

Today he was more open and real then I had ever expected.

Last night I was awoken from a deep sleep with a night terror that consisted of my age, cast in mythical proportions, and my own sense of mortality and worthlessness. I don't care if it's all bullshit but, following a dark night of the soul in which I questioned every step I've made, I go to work and a:

precious child tells me secret things about himself and reveals shames he has carried for years.

If this evaporates tomorrow, I was still gifted a moment in which my love for someone meant something. It occurs to me that I am so saddened by the fact that, at 29, I have not been loved (completely, sexually, like in the movies) that I forget how much I have been given the opportunity to love. It's all Chicken Soup for the Soul but, nonetheless, I carry the experience of loving a child. I can literally feel my heart expanding. Existential woe, get thee behind me. Half of what we love about others is how much they let us love them, and I am racking up numbers like you wouldn't believe. It's gratitude and apology mixed up in one: also fear and pain. German poets, Chicago streets, indie rock songs--anything that crosses my path on a day like this is literally slayed by love. If we get even one moment like this, veins throbbing, love palpable--we have each had our hour, our instant, our veins throbbed with it.

You could pluck out your eyes, if you wanted to.

Do you see how they beseech thee with their eyes? They are trying to kill us with their cuteness. Look away! Don't look away!

Piggy went to a new home and was re-named Mary, Jr. Now only Redface (AKA Pretty) and Pirate remain. I am working on a home for Pretty, but Pirate has winked and orneried his way into my heart.

This month I ended my relationship with my mother. I was also informed that my eggs are unfit for engineered reproduction. How nice is it that I get kittens to frolic on me? They stare with vacant love and they bite with youthful abandon. Even when they smell a tiny bit like poo I can't stay away. They are little balls of fluffy goodness and as soon as my heart is mended I am selling them on the black market.