mundanetoday

I started a new blog, which will have a completely different tone than this one. I will try and post in it every day.

http://thepurplebicycle.blogspot.com

Tonight, as I was leaving, following a trio of friends and wearing my nifty airplanes Ames Bros. shirt, a guy stopped me.

"I just wanted to compliment your shirt. I'm air traffic control, so I keep all those planes from running into each other.

"Well, it's nice to meet you." I shook his hand. "Maybe I'll run into you again sometime."

"Not if I can help it, I'm air traffic control."



It would have been endearing if his handshake hadn't been so limp.

without trying.


I miss you all the time.  




xo.



                                                                I wish i could afford your plane tickets.

There's a strange taste in my mouth, but today was a good day. Good food, too much sugar, stayed home and stayed happy. Rested my tears and tested my thumbs.

Apparently, Edwige loves Louis' email address.

But it feels like 1988.

Nothing is okay anymore.


The whole world has gone to shit in three days. It's funny, the person who hasn't tried to spend time with you in months suddenly finds out she's not your bestfriend anymore, and an atomic bomb explodes. The radiation poisoning is intense; I want to stay home. I don't want to see anyone, just to ride my bike to work and back. I don't want to eat. One meal and some beer and everything will be fine. You want to talk to me--like talking will make me your best friend again, like you're going to explain that you were really busy with school and work and him and you didn't realize and I never said anything and I know all of these things. I was busy with school and work too, and I never said anything, because we were friends, and I just forgave you for all the broken plans and unanswered phone calls. I thought you saw me standing in the shadows, and I thought you wanted to be busy with him. I was okay with all these things, and at some point I called less and made fewer and fewer plans. A lot of the time, I was ready anytime you called to hang out, but slowly I found other people and things to fill my new free time. The most recent plans we made were a few weeks ago, but I realized I couldn't make them. I realized I didn't need to call and cancel, because if you'd even remembered the plans, you didn't mean them. As far as I know, you never noticed I didn't call you.

Talking to me isn't going to change the status of anything. You can tell me you want things to be the same as they were, or that we're both different but you still want to have a close friendship. But telling me these things won't make me believe you. He'll  be back in a few weeks, and you'll be the same person you were when he left--except, perhaps, having realized you haven't had a best friend for months--and despite any intentions of being a new best friend to anyone, you'll still be in school and working and with him and I'll be too nice to make a big deal about how you're canceling plans and not returning phone calls.

But in the meantime, you're really fucking me up. Everything was fine until you decided it wasn't, and now nothing is fine, and everything is slowly destroying itself. You're slowly destroying me now.

And that makes everything you want to say to me even worse.

It was a good night. I'd had a couple beers at the coffee shop, some short conversations. I hopped in my car to come home, a detour at the grocery store for a little more beer to top off the night. A good night. Windows down, Albert Hammond promo spinning in its place. The light at Riverside and Congress was red, and I watched the Chevron mural to my right, a map of the lower Colorado, placing the dams in my head, when the car between us (me and the mural) began waving.

Easy mistake. It would be easy, were it light, to tell I wasn't looking at them, so I waved and sat back, content to listen to my music and watch the rest of my surroundings. It's been unusually--and wonderfully--cool since last night. If there is a God, he was blessing our celebration of the country's birthday. "Hey baby!" My next door wavers had obviously mistaken any--every--sign I had given them in the last thirty seconds. I ignored. My music was loud and it was pleausible that they were drown out.

It got louder. "Hey baby! Hey! HEY HOT STUFF." Then he started singing about making love. Having a little brother gives you a good amount of practice at ignoring people.

I wonder, has any girl ever responded to this? Has any girl laughed, given them her number, then sucked their dicks? It's never worked on me.

I make it to the HEB parking lot, manage a fabulous spot, and stroll inside. A slow moving woman manages to cut me off just exactly, and I want to scream. I check out the sales--do I want a 6 pack of Shiner bottles for 6.49 or a 12 pack of PBR cans for the same price? Tomorrow is independent coffee shop kick ball; I decide to plan ahead. None of the twelve packs are cold, ad I shift through a few cases before giving up.

"Hey do you have ice house here?"
"Excuse me?"
"Do you have icehouse here?"
"Uh, I don't know if they have Icehouse here, but if they do, it's going to be over here in the cheap beer section." For some reason, being mistaken for an HEB employee really bothered me. Maybe it was the fact that I wasn't wearing black pants or a red polo shirt. Maybe it was the fact that I was obviously looking for a cold twelve pack, or maybe it was that all I really wanted at that moment was a cold beer and this guy was asking me about worse-than-shit beer in a manner lacking all form of respect and I wasn't going to be getting a cold beer.
"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you worked here and were stocking." Yeah, beer companies have always hired small-ish girls to stock beer. Didn't you know?
"Hey baby. Hey hot stuff." Then some kissy noises.

Hitting on me when you're fifteen years older and in construction after your friend has just mistaken me for a grocery store employee doesn't win any bonus points. When you said the exact same thing to the clerk--who was in the middle of checking me out--on your way out the door, it lost you all the points you'd already lost.


I hope you masturbated yourself to sleep for the thousandth week in a row.

Why the fuck not? I've had t oo much to drink, and fuck, you might as well read about wmo wants to bone me.

http://austin.craigslist.org/mis/742257080.html

"I know, I am lame. Write me soon, sweetie."

I'm pmsing and I'm drunk for the first time in a week since I've been on antibiotics for strep throat.

Did you know that women are menstruating they get drunk faster?

Did you know that carbonated drinks get you drunk faster than non-carbonated ones?

I probably shouldn't have drunk carbonated drinks while I was menstruating.




WHY THE FUCK NOT

ps leon if you need a couch to sleep on mine is open whenever, in your mind, it's particularly open while i'm not menstruating

Texas requires all the children within its borders to take Texas history, I believe, twice in their primary education years. This is a little bit ridiculous, but it's a very Texas thing to do. After all, there is an intense nation pride for the state.

I underwent my first round of Texas history in fourth grade, as a student in Mrs. Westbrook's class. We talked about the various Native American tribes, the explorers and priests who had later tried to convert them culturally and religiously, and all six flags of Texas and what they meant. As part of learning about the Native American tribes, our teacher chose five  to focus on. I believe they were the Comanche, the Karankawa, the Caddo, the Jumano, and either the Kiowa or the Apache, I'm not entirely sure. In any case, I was always up for a challenge and chose to be part of the Jumano group, a small people in West Texas, about which there is almost no information.

Every year before school started, when they announced who would be in what classes, I would always comb through the lists to see if there were any new kids in my class--and if not, what classes new kids were in. Fourth grade was my lucky year, there were TWO new kids in my class. One of these was Danielle, who we all called Dani, who was a very tall, solid (but not fat--she actually played on the guys' football team in middle school) and always happy. I remember once she said something like, "Yeah, when my parents got divorced my brother had all these these problems and got really depressed. But not me!" and then laughing and running away. That probably wasn't in fourth grade, that was probably a few years later. But she was awesome.

The other new girl in my class that year was Anne. Anne had moved from Ohio (I think? I'm not sure about this. There was a new kid the next year, in fifth grade, named Eric that I KNOW was from Ohio. He decided I had a crush on him because I accidently stole his pencil). Anne was kind of short, a little fleshy, and very pale. Very pale, with very, very light blonde hair. I think I remember her being really happy too, but for whatever reason, I couldn't stand her. Dani loved her to death, so I sort of put up with her, but really, I couldn't stand her. I mean, as far as I remember, what she loved to do most was draw pictures of smiling hippos. Yuck.

By whatever fluke, the Jumano group ended up being me, Dani, and Anne. I didn't like Anne and tried to keep an eye on her at all times, because she was just the type I  trusted to ruin our project. I tried to be in control and just keep things from going off the deep end, without being too authoritarian. Part of the project included a large cut-out of Texas that Mrs Westbrook had attached to one of the bulletin boards in the classroom. Each of the groups was supposed to draw something that represented their Native American group, in the area of Texas in which that people had lived. Well,  the only two things really known about the Jumanos is that they lived in pueblos and ate buffalo.  Now, these are pretty important things, and I figured that it was pretty obvious what we would be drawing in the West Texas panhandle. I convened my group to discuss the matter.

" We already put something up for our group," Dani said, with her characteristic smile and braided pigtails. "Oh!" I was surprised, and went over to look. In the middle of our West Texas desert and waterless expanse, Anne had drawn a large, smiling hippopotamus.



She transferred schools later that year. I never missed her.

Today a dogfood commercial made me cry


At least I get all weepy and not all bitchy, huh?

Years ago, at a party, one of the guests smiled at me: "You're the sort of girl a guy marries."  A bright beach ball rolled through a nearly deserted parking lot of drab and stopped at her feet. There were no beaches for miles and no pools for blocks. A ripe banana laid in an empty street, alone and desolate. "You never know how young you are until you actually get old." I am surrounded by the dumbest pigeons, the stupidest doves, and I could make a movie about bicycle safety.

My throat hurts. It's been through worse, through days and nights of horrible pain of just wanting to be asleep and never wake up until nothing hurt. You can't sleep through pain, and you can't make up beach balls and bananas.

Death never goes away, does it?


and there's nothing i can do







except cry

I AM SO HUNGRY.

I write too much when I'm drunk, and can't write at all when I'm sober. I'm not drunk, actually. Not drunk right now. Two tall boys in, but with my food intake lately that's probably more than enough.

Avant garde zombies and I want to be held. Last night was foolish, foolish and online, drunkenly mispelled words and a mental image that will never fit in your head the way it fits in mine. "That day, that day." Life is hard. It's the most expensive thing you can do. And I am out of food, except the tomatoes I am afraid to eat. I want so many things from so many people, but never know what from whom. I know I want everything from you, but I don't know what that is. I dont think I'll get it. And I dont know what to do with all of that. Our most tenable possibility was a fraud and we both understand it. Actually, both of them. We're cheated all the time, I think. And because we're cheated, we cheat ourselves. I do. I think you do. We both want to play fair, and no one will let us.

I check my email too much.

I'm no good at poetry. The best I've ever done at it is what seems like a half effort without a single slant rhyme. And you, friend of a friend, shame me with eevrything you write. Perhaps if I took months off between "published" pieces I might contend, but a "journal" means writing for myself, and writing for myself means writing "too much."

I check my email too much. I'm always worried, that you'll email me and I won't get it until too late. If I check enough, I'll get one from you so recently after you sent it that you'll still be in your inbox. If you were worth cheap replies we'd probably be emailing all thime, but I can't say worthless things to you--and when I do, they're so much more revealing than I imagine.


I miss you. I miss you lots. I think about you too much. This is al so silly.

Tonight Jimi leaned over. "When are you going to have babies with him?" But you're the only person I can imagine bearing children for, and that's half because I think you'd let me name one Miloš. He would too, but it would be lame.

I'm afraid of us. Mostly, of me. You always seem so bold and resolute, and I find that so intimidating. I can only muster that when I've had too much to drink. Aries and Leo are compatible signs--as much bullshit as that is.

I think you    could say anything to me and I would love it. You're upset, you're in love, you're depressed, you're unethusiastic. It doesn't matter how inspired or unspired you feel, I love reading everything and anything you write.



It's so easy to write about so many people at once, but at the end of it, I'm only thinking of one of you. If I'm lucky, Of one of you. I didn't mean to type that, but it seems so right. It's all, I don't know. Thoughts are stupid and you're not. I've had too much to drink, and I might have one more.

What else am I going to do with myself?

I love arriving home, 2:30 A.M., sweating because the sun has been down for five hours and I can still fry eggs on the sidewalk.

I always ride home slowly. The closer I get, the slower I go. Number of hills and proximity to my apartment are directly proportional, but the last leg of my ride is always the slowest. It's not because I'm tired, but I'm slowly beginning to suspect that it's because I'm secretly not ready to be home, to pour myself a glass of water as I peel off my clothes.

I've had one too many. I always have. I lock my peddle brakes to the staircase and barely remember my back light. I never talk about it--none of us do--but there is a strange power in nighttime bike riding.  I worry slightly that the men coming to fix my shower in the morning will end up in my apartment and I'll be sleeping naked in my polka dot sheets. It's not so much that Im worried what they will see or feel, but about how it would fulfill everything it seems like they believe about me. Not that these things aren't true. Maybe the possibility of their plausibility is what I'm really afraid of. When you think about it, any prophesey is frightening, no matter how well you pretend.

I want to ride a camel.

I don't understand why some people hate scene parties so much. I really don't.

I went to a party tonight. Perhaps this is where I should begin my rant. I went to a party.

I trusted this party, because it was thrown by a good friend, Adam (of whom pictures have never been posted so don't look), who has a tendency--no, a reputation--of throwing awesome dance parties, which are mostly populated by scene kids who pretend that they love (the irony of) "Come on Eileen").

So, although I showed up completely sober to a party that I thought would be full of white kids like me dancing horribly like me, I was completely disappointed.

I walked through the door and looked around and for a second I was afraid that Adam had moved and not told me. There was no one I knew--not a bad thing in itself at all, because I'm quite a talker and cute enough that generally I can find someone willing to put up with my bullshit (I wish LJ had footnotes, they're so much better than parentheses, and they give you CHOICE of when to interrupt your reading: wait til you reach the footnote, wait 'til you end the sentence, wait 'til you end the paragraph, not read at all, etc. I do not like end notes on the other hand, they make reading them so difficult so as not to be worth it. It is nice for works cited though, since you usually don't care about that unless you're using the book to find resources for something YOU are writing, and then all the sources they used that you want to use are all listed in one place). But tonight was lame.

Tonight, as one of Adam's many spectacular playlists (although I had to add "Come on Eileen") played through, one of the guests leaned over to another and said (quite loudly), "What did he say? Did he say Cat's Paw?"

Listen. I don't expect you to know... I don't know, "Supermarket" off of London Calling (which is my favorite; actually, I might have been disappointed if these people knew it), but "Rock the Casbah"? Are you kidding? I knew that song before I owned a Beatles album.

So here I am, surrounded by these people that I hope I have nothing in common with, who have no idea what to do with 6'6" Adam's ridiculous (and therefore awesome) dance moves, yelled lyrics (that lyric you've never quite understood what they were saying? He yells it--correctly), and generally awesome music selection they're never heard of.

And when I say surrounded, I mean it quite literally. For some reason, these people like to form circles. Okay. I like circles. They're a pretty neat shape (try to deny this, I dare you). But when you form a circle, regardless of who is in the middle or if no one is in the middle; if your form of socialization is a circle, I think there are problems.

Obviously, the horribleness of these problems is demonstrated by the fact that I want to be outside them. Yes, it is better to talk to no one than to pretend to be friends with the girl whose never heard "Rock the Casbah."

In any case, I have never been to a scene party as horrible as this non-scene party was. And I am not scene--my not-scene-in-any-way friends think that I am, but my truly scene friends know better than that. But at least at a scene party, it's cool to pretend you can dance.