🫖 Good day. Just a few vignettes this week, nothin crazy. 🫖
Tending to my social battery lately has felt like standing with a hose, filling a bucket with a big hole at the bottom. Water in, water out. A growing puddle at my feet, soaking my socks. Plans every night of the week because I can’t say no. Testing my limits. 2 am on Thursday. 3 am on Friday. 5 am on Saturday. I’ve been sputtering along and wondering when the breakdown will come. I haven’t cried in weeks. I sample some sad music to see what will happen. Not yet, not yet. I use minty, stinging eyedrops, and the phantom tears are almost the same thing.
After being gone for a month, I’ve been rolling around in the pleasure of being missed and desired. It’s fun to be a hot commodity. I figure this status won’t last forever, so I take advantage while I can. If a tree falls in a forest, will I still be invited to do things every night of the week?
Damn it, I muttered as my shoelace unfurled for the second time in two blocks. I propped my foot on a tiny brick wall encircling a scrumpy little tree. I peered into the dirt: an unwrapped but seemingly unused condom, cigarette butts, a crystalline shard of glass.
When I’m hungover, my inner voice says sentences like I miss my Mommy. I’m surprised by this voice: I haven’t called her Mommy since I was a kid. I do miss her, but I think what I really miss is being a baby, with a head as clear as a bell, unclouded by intrusive thoughts and vodka sodas.
My other shoelace comes undone. What’s going on here?
I envy people who are contained. I am an overflowing handbag. I am a cloud of gum wrappers and receipts. I smile too much, nod too much, pretend to hear what people are saying in loud bars. I try too hard to make people comfortable and I care about everything and notice everything. Bigmouth la di da. Perhaps it’s that my soul is spilling out of the edges of my body. One time, reaching for my wallet at the grocery store I dropped a tampon smack on the checkout counter.
Despite my clumsy foibles, I constantly insist on remaining unphased. I have a low tolerance for discomfort, so I swallow unpleasant feelings as soon as they bubble up. Somewhere in my mind, there must certainly be a vault of embarrassing memories that I have literally repressed. My loudest intrusive thought is It’s fine. In truth, it usually is.
After my first heavy day at my new job, I scrambled home. I had dinner plans with friends. When I arrived, one was already at the door. Flustered, I grabbed for my keys, and gravity summoned my phone to the concrete. It doesn’t have a case because it’s pretty new and I admittedly like the look and feeling of a caseless phone. Oh no, I said, fearfully retrieving it. Its backside revealed a constellation of cracks, and a spiderweb of scratches on one of the cameras. It’s fine, I thought through my frown.
I had ordered a case the week prior. It should be arriving in the mail any day now.
Lesson: the intention of having a phone case is not the same as having one.
I had a daytime friend who I decided to workshop as a nighttime friend. I took him to a small concert, after which we went to a bar. His idea of a good time was to lie to every person he met. In my experience, lies are rarely good. At the night’s end, he sprinted out of the bar. I was only 30 seconds behind, but somehow he was already reposing on the dirty sidewalk with all of his things strewn about. With his phone to his ear, he informed me that it was a private call and shooed me away from his conference room. Suit yourself I thought as I disappeared into the night.
Lesson: the trajectory of comeuppance is actually downward.
“A couple more songs, then it’s another fucking Tuesday,” said Stephen Malkmus, Pavement frontman and alumnus of Tokay High School in Lodi. Other famous alumni include my Mommy, whom I miss (as previously mentioned).
The crowd laughed in agreement, though I imagined another fucking Tuesday would look pretty different for Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus than the average Larry.
The way I felt about Pavement at the end of high school could probably be best described as “hormonal.” I would listen to Here and fantasize about my upcoming journey to Berkeley. I romanticized the college years even before experiencing them. I was filled with preemptive nostalgia about the end. I guess she spent her last quarter randomly. I pictured the last days of school like a warm sunset, a credit sequence.
I was dressed for success, but I spent my last quarter methodically. I staved off the terror of the plague by making a pretend world in my mother’s home. The dining room was the library. My computer screen was the bar. 5 o’clock was happy hour. I poured a beer into a glass and pretended I was at Raleigh’s. I was a busy robot and I was fine.
I saw Pavement in concert in LA, then New York. At the second show, I had trouble being present. It was Monday and I was tired and on antibiotics and I just wanted to sit. I wish being face-to-face with one of my favorite bands would always be enough to distract me from the feeling of my tired feet on the ground.
It occurs to me that it’s so hard to forego plans because I suspect that everything might be taken away again. I need to remain cognizant of when the intention to have fun is not actually fun. I remind myself that there is no rush, that if I’m lucky I’ll have many many years in this world. New friends, new wisdom, new love, will all come when they are supposed to. I can have nothing days, nothing weeks, and even nothing years which will all just be a drop in the ole’ bucket.
Lesson: It’s thrilling to be floored, but sustainable to be grounded.
Song of the week
“Only Ones Who Know,” Arctic Monkeys
🎶 And I bet she told a million people that she'd stay in touch
But all the little promises, they don't mean much
When there's memories to be made 🎶
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