Every junkie is like the setting sun

Someone started a game of Telephone at the party yesterday, and wouldn't ya know it, by the end the message was "bagina." Kids these days. This morning I answered my phone to a solid minute of Little Sister sobbing. She had been on the phone with our mother and it was a brutal assault on love and reality. I rode my bike to Target and felt mystical connections between 9-11, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and the telephone game. And me and my sister.

The thing with 9-11 is that I was in an Armenian village when the planes hit the towers. No one spoke English and I spoke the Armenian of either a stupid adult or precocious toddler. Apart from the pictures and the talking and the talking about the pictures, and awash in a country of pain and tradegy and genocides, I didn't feel attacked; I was sad because a tragic thing had happened, and I received dispatches from the pain of the people I love. This pain, like ripples in bodies of water, mirrors and touches the pain that other people are in, and it made me feel sad and tremendous and small and powerless: like a human.

And like Owen Meany's predestination, I wonder that life I've led up until now was preperation for the eventual tragic end of my mother. Little Sister's tears were for sadness and loss but also a degree of shock: how can this be our mother? Hateful and stupid, fueled by narcissism and a staggering amount of pills and booze, how can this be the message at the end of the line? I'm getting it second-hand: I know what she's become, but only through the barrier of my little sister's body and soul. Telephone, telephones: we have to call children's services; we have to call the pharmacy; we worry for the call that she's dead. And I try to hold the pain of our family, really personalize it, but I feel the same universality that I did when I heard about 9-11--I can't stop my heart from amplifying into our family, out to the children I've met, to all the people you love and your love can't stop their pain, all the lives lived and died in the span of anguish.

When I was young, there were key people that were terrified for how sensitive I was. I heard their concerns when I went into child welfare, but the heart wants what it wants, and avoiding the truth is lying, too. I am so grateful, now, to have felt how that our horrible pain is universal and also precious and deserving of all the attention in the world. My mother's tragic, wasted, increasingly monstrous life is one of millions crashing around the world right now, and it also deserves a moment of silence the universe over.

"Wow. The manitee has become the Mento."

I have been watching a great deal of '30 Rock' on the internet. Anywhooos, nothing to blog, so let me share with you some of the best lines Tracy Morgan has said, as Tracy Jordan:

"I'm not on crack! I'm straight up mentally ill!"

"We're a good team, like chicken and a chicken container."

[On marriage] "Be a good listener, a giver of gifts, and work that vajayjay."

"I even have a monthly column in Ebony called 'Musings.'"

"Griz is in charge of sitting on me when I get overstimulated."

and, of course, the subject line.

Don't you people say I never gave you anything.

"What the frick is this world coming to?"

Alls I know is that I was sitting on my porch, enjoying the High Life with a gal pal, when Old Man Mulligan came over to discuss how he could remove even more branches from the tree without smashing the windows of this gray car right here. First he calls my landlord, Sue, telling her he's "with that red-haired Irish girl" and telling her he needs a rope. While we drink, Mulligan leans on the porch steady proving that if you're wearing overalls, you're having a good time. Spybar car, the car with the personalized 'Spy Bar' license plate, pulls up. And a hearty Mulligan hello to Johnny Spybar, the Number 1 bartender in Chicago! Mulligan tells us that Johnny has Spy Bar tattooed on his neck and he can get us dates with him; gal pal is already dating a bartender, and I keep trying, but nothing is clicking, and Johnny Spybar was wearing sweatpants.

Sue arrives with the rope. Mulligan walks back across Kimball with his white goatee and mini machete on a pole, perpetrating like Moses. Rope goes on branch, I pull on rope, Mulligan gets to sawing, and timber: giant full branch narrowly misses the gray car due to my rope maneuvers and quick thinking. I have to hop on my bike to pick up the last $50 I owe Sue for rent; in my absence, Super Pretty Boy arrives and helps clear the brush. Pizza arrives and my new neighbor comes home and at this point, something is wrong with the cooler, I keep finding it full of empty bottles instead of full, full, full. Alls I know is that Super Pretty Boy took off his shirt and shoes and chased a motorcycle down Kimball; locked out at 1:00 am, we forced New Neighbor out of bed, and he answered the buzzer in neon green patterned boxer shorts.

Trees fell, hearts were broken and mended anew, I was given a precious sentence, my neighbor should probably move; imagine your most gorgeous friend running after a motorcycle at midnight. My porch is fucking awesome.

Tortured by Joy*

Iced coffee gets me high. Every frickin time it's this hot I get Vicodin and ice coffee memories, la de dah. Right now the heat and wind downtown + ice coffee = perfect accompaniment to my general too-much-ness of late. Too much joy, too much beer, too much thinking and crying and writing manifestos to myself; I get a song stuck in my head, sing it quietly, and then cry a bit. Here I could insert a selfsnarking comment about looking crazy on the street, but that would be inauthentic and disingenuous. I don't think I look crazy on the street. First of all, I don't think anyone is looking. Secondly, if anyone were looking, I choose to believe they would say to themselves, maybe the two- or four-legged friend they are walking with: "Look at Weepy McJoyfulson over there. Nice dress."

A couple of things are going on with the crying, I think. The process that started this winter on the Mountain went underground for a bit, and now, with the change of seasons I'm getting all jacked up again--every time I put my foot down or inhale I'm thinking and feeling things that have an unfamiliar depth to them, and then I can't breathe deeply enough and I cry a little bit, maybe laugh.

I cried at a play a couple of weeks ago. The Soil Cradling, Temporarily** featured Brownie, soil depicted as a big Muppet looking thing with a gravelly Muppet voice, and Sprout, the spunky little seed scared of her inevitable sprouting. Initially, upon finding myself all moved and crying, I figured it was the nurturance factor: depictions of proper parenting get me like, um, a hamburger under glass might affect starving people. So I thought I was crying for little bitty me, and then my mother and I, moving out to her mother and her, my beautiful client/kids, eventually spreading to all the moms and all the kids ever.

In the weeks since, however, I'm feeling like the mourning for my mom is lessening, and that my reaction to that play--the fact I keep thinking about it, beyond my love of Muppets--is that as a person who effectively raised herself, I get to be both Brownie and Sprout, I get to send the bright and shiny version of myself that I fostered to go out into the world, the whole time worried that she'll get hurt or embarrassed; but it's inevitable; it's already happening. Sprout is talking about how she doesn't want to go, won't go, even as she walks offstage. The inevitability of my healing, the answer to question of what is going to happen to me--that I'll be fine--closes the door to a room I know really well and forces me outside, where there are more people and louder noises and more questions. There are also cicadas, Muppets, strong winds, and novelty gifts. It should be noted that everyone I truly love already thought I knew this, already knows I'm okay, but it took me a bit longer to catch on. It took me 30 years, point of fact. God willing I get 30 more and I wonder what else I'll learn. Maybe some science? Maybe this math I've been hearing the kids talk about.

*Tortured by Joy is a short film I love directed by Henry Griffin and featured on the The Believer's Dec '04/Jan '05 DVD.

**Written by Marika Mashburn. Directed by Chris Mathews. Featuring Jake Minton as Brownie, Dixie Uffelman as Sprout. As part of Bring May Flowers. What did I do with that seed they gave me? Fuck.

***Also, Kerry James Marshall is not dead, I just miss seeing new paintings.

I miss you, Kerry James Marshall.

My love is bigger than your love.

How Sassy changed my life:

1) 1991: my sister and I see a girl by the pop machine at our new high school and she was wearing the skirt made of neckties from Sassy's You Make It column. We were staring at her in awe when she turned and, according to Little Sister, "gave me a dirty look." Who was that Sassy lassie, with kool-aid-burgundy hair I was convinced she ratted? My Super Best Friend since 1994! Sister and I called her the Tie Skirt Girl until she and I discovered a mutual love of sewing and laughing at least partially attributable to Sassy.

2) Yesterday while waiting for the "How Sassy Changed My Life" reading they were playing the Vaselines. Pow. I was walking into BeeBop Records in Toledo, nearly dying of shame and desire, and buying college rock at the age of 13 because Christina Kelly told me to in Listen Up. The Vaselines were awesome, I really hated Eugenius, there were hundreds of tapes and records purchased from bad jobs and money stolen from my mother so that by the time "Stepford Sassy" took over, I was sad but not shaken, having found a place in the subculture that went beyond Sassy and into vinyl and zines and punk rock shows.

One of the authors brought up the irony of so much Sassy nostalgia: we liked the magazine, hated our lives. I look back at a chubby girl in clothes she made herself buying records and reading books that were ridiculously precocious and I'm thinking how awesome I was, how valuable I was, despite being troubled and obese and living in a one bedroom apartment in Toledo with my depressed and unemployed father. All the time I was aware of how even the outside had an inside and convinced, to my core, that I would never know the inside of anything.

2007: Fluffyhair and I are at the Hideout, cute as fuck and loving life, as she turns 30. I've been 30 for seven months and the wonder is unceasing. We are the women our 13-year-old selves dreamt of being, saw in Sassy, and made ourselves into while totally unaware. That's fucking tragic. And fucking awesome.