spencer t. jones, the dog of my life

I wrote this piece a couple of years ago to honor my loss of my first dog, the legendary Spencer. I've reposted it here because try as I might, I don't think I could write anything more beautiful and right.

Three years ago on 3 July 2003, I euthanized my dog, the Legendary Spencer. I quail a bit at the word "euthanize"; I find my chest contracts at it. It's an ugly word. To my mind, though, the euphemisms are worse: put down like an insult or put to sleep like a child, as if there is a time when he, my furry eternal toddler, will rise again.

Three years ago Spencer and I took our last walk. I leashed him, and he looked at me with dying and hopeful eyes because he loved me and because he loved walks. He unquestioningly went with me; he stepped gingerly down the stairs of my apartment for the last time. For the last time, I watched him pee, him no longer able to lift his leg. For the last time, I saw him pause outside Bang! Bang! because one upon a time the store had been another store, a store that unfailingly had provided Spencer with biscuits, and he never, not even in his slightly addled dotage, forgot a place that gave him biscuits.

For the last time I took him for a walk and for the last time he trusted me.

 He was, unquestionably, ready to die. His kidneys were failing, and his lung cancer had progressed to a point where he hacked and coughed often and with a painful rawness; just breathing, for him, was difficult. He had ceased to eat, even yummy treats like liverwurst. I had, a few weeks earlier, had him shaved for the summer, something I had never done before. I felt he was old and uncomfortable in the heat, so I had brought him, also for the last time, to the groomer's, which he hated.

I bid adieu to his beautiful caramel sundae hair, the first bits of him I said good-bye to; the rest would come later.

And so three years ago for the last time, I brought him to his vet's, where she put us in a quiet room and then injected him with some kind of preliminary downer, to get him to sleep before she gave him his lethal dose of whatever.

He wouldn't sleep there on the vet's floor. He couldn't. His body, dehydrated from his failing kidneys, and his mind, nervous from being at the vet's, wouldn't succumb to the soporific drugs. His eyes remained open and he remained restive. Finally, unable to wait any more, the vet just came in, and kindly and gently injected him with a series of shots. He died in my lap.

I held him and cried, and then I clipped tufts of his ear hair, which I have saved in a box. I also took ink prints of his left front paw on rice paper. (I would, about a week later, walk back to the vet's to pick up a white bakery box that read " Spencer, the loving pet of chelsea g. summers." It still contains his ashes, but now box and ashes reside in a creamy white marble mausoleum, lovingly made by a friend.)

I walked home from the vet's alone. Alone I spent that night and the next day, 4 July. The following day, I took the prints I had made of Spencer's paw after his death to a tattoo artist, and I had him tattoo me with Spencer's paw, his name and his dates on my right deltoid. It's not a very good tattoo—it wasn't my usual artist, and I knew I'd regret its ham-handed scarring depth—but I will never remove it.

I have lost friends, I have lost family members. I have never in my life felt the keening grief I felt over losing my dog. I sobbed with animal loss—deep, heaving, inarticulate moans of loss. I can't even write this today without tears. And I think that this grief is due to the fact that people have disappointed me. People have created conflict. People have given me qualified affection.

My dog never did. Sure, he made me angry. Once he ate the corner of my then-roommate Becky Sue's mattress. It was not a good day for either of us. But Spencer was always unequivocally happy to see me. His love for me was pure, and steady, and unqualified.

I was his God, he was my dog.

I remember in those first few weeks of insane grief, in those days when all I wanted, all I really wanted was to be with him, how I felt his fear of being removed from me, how I worried that no one would take care of him wherever he was, and how I had a dream. In my dream, he and I were out on a beautiful summer day, in a park that wasn't a park, and somehow we got separated.

I saw him across a wide expanse of very green grass and I called him, but he didn't come. He stood there, his long blonde and white hair rippling in the breeze as I called and called, and then he walked, his big Aussie butt twitching, away from me. In my dream, I remembered that he was deaf, that he couldn't hear me, but then I woke and I realized that he had left because he was dead. He was gone, and I could never call him back.

I don't have a religious background. I don't have a clear idea of an afterlife, of a heaven or a hell or even a reincarnation. However, in my hopes, if I live a good life, if I'm moral and take responsibility for my mistakes, if I treat my neighbor as myself, and apologize when I do not, then I shall at my life's end be reunited with Spencer.

In a perfect world, dogs like him would never die. In a perfect world, I would never have known this loss. But in a less perfect world, I console myself, I would never have known his love.

Spencer T. Jones 11/27/90-7/3/03

on blott, the octogenarian cat

Living in Vermont, my family often went through cats like we went through tubs of mink oil, which is to say quickly and without much attachment. My first pet was a cat named Brillig; I’m too young to remember him because when my mom fled her abusive husband on that May day almost exactly 46 years ago she also abandoned Brillig. The next pet was also a cat whose name has gone the way of all cat-flesh, as did the cat. The next one was named Sammy Davis Jr., as were the next three or four, who were named Sammy Davis Jr II, III, and IV. One was killed by Parvo, another by a car, yet another by something unknown, and the last died of old age.

I have owned seven cats myself. The first, named Ms, a feline testament to my very early feminism, lived with my family after I went to college, and she lived long enough to grow swaybacked and bald. She also grew demented, thus leading my sister to buy a refrigerator magnet that read, “A cat by any other name is a horrid little fleabag that shits behind the couch,” a sentiment that rarely fails to make me giggle. 

After I left Ms to my family, I got, successively, Grant, Pig and Jasmine, all of whom drifted away, as cats are wont to do. I once saw Pig and Jasmine after they abandoned me; they both gave me the feline stink eye, turned their tails at me, and flashed their anuses as one. I’m pretty sure their body language meant precisely what it seemed to say. When I lived with Eff, we adopted Sam Shepard, the Cowboy Kitty. I moved to Gotham to be with Eff, and Sam accompanied me. He hated it, the indoor kept-kitty lifestyle, and Sam blew up until he looked like Walter Matthau in a cat-suit. I brought him back to Vermont to live out his days with my parents in suburban splendor. He died a few years ago; he was old and still glorious.

Living with and without cats, I discovered something I never thought possible: I am a dog person. In high school and college, when the choice between cats and dogs defines you as much as whether you wear Sweet Honesty or Charlie, drink Coke or Pepsi, or listen to Devo or Motörhead, my choice was firmly feline. I collected cat poems (Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible,/are changeable, marry too many wives,/ desert their children, chill all dinner tables/ with tales of their nine lives./ Well, they are lucky. Let them be/nine-lived and contradictory) and made a chapbook. I had the B. Kliban books, the B. Kliban mugs and the B. Kliban posters. I held a staunchly pro-cat agenda. I was all about the cat.

Growing up, I’d had dogs, two of them, both St. Bernards and both hairy, drooling, stinky and much beloved. But in wanting to give myself the insouciant, tail-flipping independence of the cat, I renounced dogs and all their shaggy, needy fidelity. I embraced the cat within, which is to say that I often treated people poorly, was conscious only of my needs, and held no compunction about gacking on anyone’s floor and leaving it to them to clean up.

I’m not exactly sure what changed—maybe it was living in an alienating city for a year in a small apartment with a man I no longer loved.  But at 28 I made the conversion to Dog Person. As with most converts, I became a zealot. I was all-dogs-all-the-time, even working as a dog walker for a year and a half. During that time, I got the Legendary Spencer, and while the canine fervency has cooled, I would describe myself doggy. I love dogs, can’t live without them, want a man who is a dog; pro-dog, that’s me.

And yet I have a cat. His name is blott. He’s black, and he’s evil, which is to say that he isn’t, but being bound by his genetics, as we all are, he can’t help but be evil. Cats haven’t much of an innate desire toward altruism, and no matter how many heart-warming reports of cats dragging babies out of fires I read, I’m not going to alter my views on the intrinsic, and not unpleasurable, evilness of cats.

Cats can see things we don’t. I’m convinced my cat, who routinely sits in corners and stares at the wall with great intent, communes with Other Beings. Blott is odd, and black, and dark, but as cats go, blott’s pretty good. He is friendly and he doesn’t bite much. He is also, finally, old. He’s seventeen, maybe sixteen, and he’s lived with me in this apartment almost as long as I have. He has seen Spencer live and die, and he’s seen another cat, Smudge, a cat who was notable for his stickiness and stupidity and torpor, come and go. He’s seen many boyfriends and born witness to much pain and bad behavior. He doesn’t care. Blott’s indifference is the stuff of legend.

Blott was spry and gorgeous and now he’s old and evil and, I fear, a wee bit senile. Of late, it’s felt like I live in Alistair Crowley’s Shady Pines, a geriatric home for aging Satanists. Daily there is poo and there is goo. This morning I woke at about 6:00 to the scent of doody and a carefully deposited tiny turd under my pillow. I had been visited by the Shit Fairy or, more likely, my cat’s dexterous ass had defied inertia to plop that pinky-nail sized poop on my bed. Later, when I rose, I found a seven-foot long trail of cat gack trailing a slimy path through the kitchen into the bathroom; this line was punctuated by a hairball the size of a gerbil.

My cat is old, 84 human years, if websites can be believed. He has grown extra intensively cantankerous and privileged, which in a cat is saying something. He cries like a banshee in the night, and I answer with food. It’s clear that his death is nigh, and sometimes I feel like it’s not nearly fucking nigh enough. Night after night blott wakes me with caterwauling and bad smells, and I imagine my hands closing around his ancient little neck and snapping it like a sere twig.

I won’t, of course. That would be “wrong,” and “immoral,” and “illegal,” but to not admit my urge would be to refuse the whole story and to renege both my feelings for this cat and my own humanity. Aged dogs look wise and gentle; they look at you with love and the patience of eons. Cats just look more calcified in their spite. Their entitlement grows a stony carapace around them, and we—or at least I—bend to the old cat’s will. I kowtow and placate and scratch behind the ears and beneath the chin. I pick up the shit where I find it, and I’m finding it in just horrible places. I mop up the goo, and I rub the snot from the cat’s nose. I buy the canned food, and I open the stinky tins at ungodly hours. I do it all because I feel an unlikely, reluctant love, and because I know that when that day comes, and I find blott hard and still and quiet and dead, I will be sad.

I will miss him, that evil little fuck.

james joyce, a man who liked rumps

I've a new piece on Filthy Gorgeous Things about James Joyce. It's called "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pervert," which is a title that does give you a fairly comprehensive idea of what the piece is about. Here are the first two paragraphs:

Should you want to read the rest--and how could you not?--go here and do so. Then leave me comments below because, sadly, F/G/T doesn't give you that option.

bodies in time and space

This August, I’ll have lived in Gotham twenty years. In those twenty years, I’ve lived in eleven apartments, though I’ve spent fifteen in the one I’m typing in right now. I moved around a lot my first five years, which is pretty typical for new New Yorkers, actually. In those eleven apartments, I’ve lived with four men, with collective whom I shared around eight years, to make a smeary approximation. Add to those eight the five years or so I’ve spent with assorted other dudes (including the three-ish years I spent with Donny) and for a total of thirteen years, give or take, the cavalcade of my dating life has been traipsing through Gotham.

There are many bodies that hang like asteroids in my one-score block of Gotham time and space. There are bodies who throb and glow like pulsars, and others who lie dead and dormant like white stars. There are none whom I’d call black holes, thankfully. But they’re all there, somewhere. Spend enough time in a city, date enough people, and the landscape becomes dotted with relationship remembrances, a ghostly breadcrumb trail that pulses with meanings invisible to any other naked eye.

Taking a cold empiric if necessarily hazy accounting, I’ve spent only seven years on my onesy, and yet it feels like I’ve spent ever so much more time alone than partnered. I am, of course, single now and feeling fine about it. I suffer an almost rosily nostalgic glow when I see couples performing couplehood, which couples do as much to express affection between themselves as to express their bond to the world. Ah, I think, I recall holding hands. Yes, I know of having a wisp of hair brushed from my forehead. I can recollect that specific canting of torsos, the one that implies shared intimacy, emotions and bodily fluids.

I remain able to summon a vague cloud of dating interest, a romantic nebula. It’s a pretty sight when I let my mind drift into that telescopic view. I see the sparkles and the lightning flashes and that ethereal glow intrinsic to the happy clashing of two separate people who spontaneously unite into one hot element. I can visualize that moment and feel it resonate with that pleasurable bassy thrum that bounces between my solar plexus and my svadisthana, to drift a little old-agey prose-wise. I can see it, but I can’t touch it, and I’m not sure I want to.

Which is all to say that at some point in the past few years a seismic change took place. Something major shifted, almost without my notice, and the landscape of my interior life changed, possibly irrevocably. I used to feel a mad desperation at being alone. I felt oppressed by singularity, disfigured by it, strange and crazed and wild at my single experience. I dated in a frenetic rush. I flagellated myself with my own undesirability when I wasn’t dating. I felt the press and crush of my own romantic failures with gravitational force. I nearly broke myself with my own pressure to date. Without a man, I was nothing. I didn’t cease to exist—that would have been a step up in emotional health actually—rather, I turned antimatter, a singularly horrid and shadowy incarnation of my dated self.

Now that wild compunction is past. I put my eye to the romantic pinhole and see the expansive glory that can be a romantic relationship, but I’m still nonetheless aware of what lies just outside of the rim of my vision. The unavoidable disappointment, the uncomfortable sleeping, the pain and the fear and the meeting of parents and other family, the boredom and the sports watching. The apparitional specter of Xs and the weighty baggage that every human accumulates after adolescence. The bad smells and the anger and the stuff that drifts gently away like so much space detritus.

 I hope some day that I’ll be able to put these two views together—the rosy macro and the lurid micro—and finally put the “real” in “relationship.” Neither one view nor the other is valid, though neither are they false. And yet, even a contented spinster such as myself can see the value in the coupled state. Plus, I would really rather enjoy someday having sex. Bodies in space are nice, but bodies in bed are nicer.

Or, faint as the morning star, so I seem to recall.

picture this, my telephone number

I rarely serve up pictorial evidence here on my pretty dumb things, but I've lately embraced the photo booth feature on my iMac. Pictures, for all their two-dimensional limitations, do provide an accurate, if peccable, documentation. I've been documenting change, in short, and I'm going to show it to you, courtesy of my iMac and some help from my friends.

For any number of reasons, I've been slowly emerging from the chrysalis of doom that held me in its livid embrace for so many months, and for any number of reasons, that emergence has caused me to change my appearance. Part of my choice to relinquish the cookies of pain--which I've written about previously--and implement the diet of vigor sprung from internal forces, the feeling that I was just over and done with managing my emo self by eating. But the other part of my choice came from purely external and vain reasons.

Two months ago, I decided to put into action my friend Karl Elvis's kind offer to buy me a tattoo. I saw my tattoo artist, the very fabulous Stephanie Tamez, at her studio in Brooklyn, and staring at my toad-white upper arm in the clinical fluorescent light of the studio, I was appalled. I got my tattoo appointment, did some quick calculations and cemented my desire to get into shape. If I was going to sport a new tattoo, I wanted that arm to look good enough to eat.

I wanted Stephanie to transform my memorial Spencer tattoo that I already had from its thug life incarnation into something pretty (see original at left; click to embiggen; my computer flips photos; the text isn't mirror image in real life). I'd had an idea that Stephanie, in her infinite dermal wisdom, quickly convinced me was stupid beyond the telling of it. Mercurial and dark, Stephanie rummaged through some of her many drawers and pulled out a tattered and battered book of Victorian clip art. Rapidly, she thumbed through the book, pausing every once in a while to jab a forefinger at one illustration or another. I told her that I absolutely deferred to her good judgment, and after Stephanie took a picture, drew a diagram, filled in a form, and looked at me decisively, I got an appointment.

Stephanie chose for me a design based on Victorian graphic filigree, and yesterday's tattoo session was long-ass, highly painful, and incredibly successful (again, pictures at left; clicking and embiggening). Naturally, because my tattooist's opinion of me is paramount, I sat still as a Maori and stoically let Stephanie have her painful inky way with me. We chatted about books and sex work and her girlfriend and my lack of boyfriend and Texas and why it's difficult to go home again, and three hours later I had new art.

It's not quite finished yet. Stephanie wants to add another curlicue or two and shade the bellies of the cues with gray. "It'll give it depth," she said. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but given how well she does what she does, I'm tractable as a lamb. The next appointment is Friday 15 May.

I've another physical transformation in the works. On Thursday, I have an appointment with Randall, my Texan hairstylist, for a haircut. I've not had my hair cut in a year and a half, pretty much to the date (see eighteen months for significance here). I grow hair like Julia Roberts grows teeth. My hair is an unstoppable force. It grows recklessly, willfully and with an assertively healthy abandon. Currently, my hairstyle is out of Lord of the Rings (see left, and what the hell, right). It reaches my waist. And while even I must acknowledge it's pretty, I nonetheless feel like it's also sort of creepy in its Crystal Gayle excess. It's not going to be turning my green eyes blue, but it's not making me happy. Plus, it's a heavy, itchy, cumbersome animal, and I just want to hack it off with an Exacto.

The haircut I'm considering is that of Starbuck in Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. Which basically means that I'll be taking my hair into hyperdrive and crossing time and space, as well as transforming it from Eowyn exorbitance to Kara efficiency. Hair has always held a kind of Victorian significance for me. I understand with visceral inarticulacy why in Robert Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" the eponymous Lover chooses to strangle Porphyria with her own hair: her hair is inextricable from her eroticism and to use it to kill her is to punish her for her promiscuity. I fear cutting my hair will divest me of my mojo, but I'm so very tired of this beast decorating my scalp that I'm ready to risk it.

I may still change my mind.

Finally, my friend 1st Republic, 14th Star has made good on his promise to photograph my much beloved graveyard, the one I felt such nostalgiaNeil Gaiman's Graveyard Book. Looking at the photos of this halcyon/eldritch space, I get that strange emotional palimpsest of recognizing the old while seeing the new. The graves, their decaying gray and wind-worn nubs, remain the same. The pointy fence and the arching sepulchral trees, however, are gone. The hill to the east remains, but while it had been carpeted in spiky evergreens, houses now peek above the sight-line. about after reading

It's hard for me to look at these images. A tsunami of remembrance hits against a flood of newness, and I swirl in the vortex. That said, I do love the one with Camel's Hump in the background. This is the view I remember well, and in a strange reverse-Proustian memory, looking at it summons the smell of meadow, earth, strawberries and growing things.

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write on, a status report

A realization struck me yesterday: for the past year, for better or worse, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, I supported myself with my writing. One complete year now, I’ve been a writer. I’m a bit stunned, actually.

To be skeletal honest, most of my paid writing isn’t the writing I’d like to be doing. I am not, for example, being paid to be a columnist, a job I’d dearly love. No great media giant like Condé Nast is doling out my happy yearly salary in great dripping gobs. I don’t get much groovy gratis stuff such as hot-and-cold-running tickets to rock shows (like my friend Sasha Frere-Jones) or tickets to plays (like my friend Terry Teachout) or cruises with 90’s bands and trips to Sasquatch seminars (like my friend Eric Spitznagel). I don’t have a book contract. I didn’t get my piece published in the Times, sadly. I don’t even have agents falling over themselves to court me, as I once did. But I do pay my bills by the fruits of my linguistic labors.

Most of what I write falls under the broadly defined rubric of “copy.” The term brings to mind packing excelsior: stuff that’s made to fill other stuff so that yet more stuff doesn’t rattle around and break from stress, entropy, or gravitational force. The copy I write sells things. It seems I’m fairly adept at writing stuff that sells things. I also ghostwrite, and it seems I’m fairly adept at ghostwriting, that practice that seems more ventriloquist than apparitional, for when you write as a ghost, you’re transmitting someone else’s voice through your body of work. I sometimes write for magazines, though not often and not the ones I want to write for. I had three sexytime stories published in three separate anthologieswriting for a sexytime website (which writing I actually do enjoy). But what I want to write for money mostly isn’t what I’m getting paid to write, not yet anyway. last year. I’m

I have hope. I have guidance. I have ideas. I have talent. And—enter the weirdness—I also apparently have diligence, devotion and discipline. It has been four years since I waywardly began my journey into this writing life, and though I’ve not quite stumbled onto my perfect path, I don’t veer off the trail, to run a metaphor into the dark, loamy ground. I doubt myself with soul-keening acuity, but I do so less frequently. This is a good sign. I also feel as if my writing is getting stronger, more structural; it’s losing its wisteria. Don’t get me wrong: I like wisteria; it’s pretty and it smells good. But wisteria in all its purple glory hides its roots that tear up foundations and leave buildings hollow rubble. It needs to be pruned. Prose is the same way.

I may not yet be paid to write what I want, and I may not yet be paid enough with the kind of consistency to keep me thoroughly solvent, but I am getting closer. Most importantly, none of it would be possible without this blog. This blog started me writing consistently. Having it made me write honestly, bravely and dangerously. I am not a person who can write without an audience. If there’s no one reading, I don’t want to write.

Like the generous support that makes the fine programming at PBS possible, my freelancing year was made possible by this blog, and by extension those people who read it. Because not only did my blog kick my writing ass, and not only did it provide me with my much loved and very necessary audience, but it also brought me almost every single opportunity I’ve had to write. With the exception of one magazine gig, the paid projects I’ve received have come to me through people who read my pretty dumb things: the copywriting, the ghostwriting, the Penthouse and other magazine pieces, the public relations copy, the erotic stories, the sexytime website—all of it.

One thing I’ve learned about blogging: you never know who is reading. It’s a risk to choose to write, but it’s deadening to choose not to. I’d rather be alive and reckless than inert and reckful.

All of which is to say thank you. I write as much because of you as because I must. I don’t know most of you, but you’ve made an indelible, positive mark on my life, like a collective big check in the plus column. I’ve only yet realized an imperfect version of my dream, but I’ve found some lurking eldritch confidence that I’m edging closer to what I want. Slowly, slowly, I’m getting there. Thank you for pushing me.

14, 2, 18 and 99 matters of time

I am woman who is decidedly not a mathlete, yet I am obsessed with counting. This post is about numbers, those theoretically pure empiric indicators of time’s passage and all that goes along with the slow counting of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and so on to inaccurate infinity. Pythagoras and his mystical manipulations might have been misguided in believing that numbers hold an intrinsic magic, but there’s no denying that they carry unassailable power.

On the surface, they’re just figures. 14 years. 2 years. 18 months. 99 days. But as with make-up, linoleum and Potemkin Villages, a pretty façade can hide a Midas load of loss. This final week in April marks a series of anniversaries. Fourteen years since my ex-boyfriend Will placed a significantly dog-eared copy of Herman Hesse’s Siddharta on the floor, entered his closet, put a needle in his arm, and shot himself up with a lethal mixture of heroin and cocaine. Two years since my long-lost biological father sent me that digital bolt from the blue and claimed his stake in my life. Eighteen months since my ex-almost-fiancé Donny and I split. And 99 days since we last spoke.

The weather of this end-of-April has mirrored the weather of that end-of-April fourteen years ago when I got the phone call that Will had died. It has been freakishly warm, warm in that uncanny untimely way that nearly robs the warmth of its pleasure. April in Gotham should not reach 92 degrees. This year, like that year, spring sprang like a jungle cat and wrapped the city in its furry close embrace. After Will’s death I spent a series of odd, disjointed days as an unwitting drug widow—I had not known that Will had loved me as deeply as he had until his funeral; I had not known that he had considered me The One; I had broken up with him six months before, and I had moved on with the single-minded Acela speed—and every April since then, I have felt Will’s death hanging apparitional. This year the ghostiness has been especially acute. The trees aggressive budding, the acres inappropriate and glaring white bare skin, and my own excess of free time have pushed me further into reverie than I like.

I don’t miss Will, but I do wish he weren’t dead in an ambient way. The loss nonetheless remains.

Two years ago, I woke up, flicked on my computer and found an email from my biological father. I’d not heard from him in 44 years. For about eighteen months, our relationship remained steadfastly electronic; we sent hundreds of fevered emails, almost like those of lovers in their joy. We did not call one another. When he came to the Gotham area, he made no attempt to see me. Our correspondence began with frenzied, gleeful steps, but it soon became clear that I was not following his lead. I was not the dutiful daughter welcoming back her prodigal father with open arms and boundless forgiveness. He bristled, objected, lashed out, and grew petulant. The last I heard from him was in November. He sent me an email whose subject line was “Hoping you’re not wishing you weren’t born.” He was sending me birthday greetings. I’ve not corresponded with him since.

It’s hard to miss someone you never knew. And yet I still miss the idea of a father I’d carried with me from childhood. My biological father showed himself to be untrustworthy, immature and hurtful. The loss nonetheless remains.

Eighteen months is a squidgy time-frame; it’s the only number that is not exact, but then given its significance, it could hardly be carved in stone. Here’s the thing: many years ago my stepfather left my mom after she’d confessed an affair. He was torn up and went to see a therapist. He told me a story. “I can’t eat,” he’d said to his therapist. “I can’t sleep. I can’t concentrate. I feel so much goddamn pain. How long will it last?” He said he expected his therapist to dole out some soulful emo panacea along the lines of “until you come to terms with the bird that is your love’s fluttering beauty,” but the therapist instead looked my stepfather in the eye and said, “Eighteen months.”

Eighteen months is the average amount of time it takes an averagely sane human to cope with a loss. And it’s actually pretty accurate. From the evening that Donny showed he was neither living up to his word to marry me, nor was he taking responsibility, I started clock-counting. I knew that the pain I felt was finite and its end was hovering somewhere around a year and a half in the future. For months, I felt tremendous, solar plexus searing pain. I found myself plunged into an industrial-sized vat of I-wanna-die, and I was pretty close to doing it myself. I made plans. I wrote a note. It’s a testament to the power of my friends to my unconscious tick-tick-ticking math that I’m still here, about eighteen months later, feeling fairly free.

Which leads to the next number of 99, the only exact figure I have. It has been 99 days since I last spoke to Donny; I know this because Obama has been in office 100 days, and we last talked the day after the inauguration. 99 Donny-free days have passed, and in that time I have morphed from a person who missed him with a sweet acuity to one who doesn’t really miss him at all. I once wrote of missing Donny like ellipsis, missing these bits and pieces of him, his Jersey twang, his beech-tree smell, his long fingers, the point of his tongue when he laughed. I think of him, of course—how could I not? But it would be inaccurate to name what I feel for Donny as missing. You only miss what you want; I don’t want that man.

And yet I might miss missing Donny. It’s its own oddness, the loss of loss, the strange nostalgia for pain I don’t exactly feel anymore. There aren’t words in English for the faint echo of a loss that has healed. It would be nice if there were. The loss nonetheless remains.

I look at this string of numbers—14, 2, 18, 99—and think of the first few lines of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”:

If April is the cruelest, and certainly a case could be made that in my life it has a sadistic streak, it nevertheless holds a strange and dogged beauty. Memory and desire do live hand in hand, as much as they die side by side. Time passes, and as it does, it marks us, quiet and indelible as ballpoint pens. We remember our losses, but we also see what has grown because of them. The dead are buried; the living rise; two phrases whose syntax reflect their truth. I am a sum of numbers, both infinite as pain and fixed as healing, and I shall count at least as long as I am alive.

And then, when I am gone, or when you are, the loss nonetheless remains.

my new body of smut, now conveniently located otherwhere

(I wrote this post originally for my main blog, pretty dumb things on Typepad. For context, you might need to know that I once wrote a lot about sex.)

It began as just a default setting, but as with so many decisions that wear the cloak of circumstance, it has become a clear and conscious choice. I’m not writing about sex here on my pretty dumb things. Or, I should clarify, I’m not writing about the sex I’m having, the sex I’m not having, the sex I had, the sex I want to have, or the sex I dream of having. I do reserve the right to write pretty dumb things about sex as a generalized or ambient concept, a sex divorced from my specific genitals at a specific moment in a specific time with a specific human, machine, or implement. I further reserve the right to write about my sexual history in less KA-BOOM! POW! BLAMO! graphic terms. I reserve the right to break my own rules, in short. I am a despot in the land of my narrative.

This not-choice to not-write about sex seems to have started when I stopped having sex, but in truth, it began well before I started living the lover-free life. It started, really, when I began to realize that I loved my ex-almost-fiance Donny deeply. To trot out the intricacies of our intimacies, however displayed in the laciest of poetic language, felt at odds with my love for him. It began to take on a patina of betrayal, and to pour out to a faceless public the liquid details felt like I was making a product out of precious experience. I stopped enjoying the writing, in short, and it began to feel like a burden rather than a gift.

Then Donny and I broke up and I stopped having sex. I slumped into doldrums; the doldrums grew into a vast depression; and I drowned in that murky black for altogether too many months. I didn’t fucking feel like living, much less did I feel like fucking. Forget fucking writing anything other than what I was paid to write, which was not about fucking.

The lake receded and I’m now high and dry and relatively chipper for an ambient misanthrope raised by a long line of dour people. I have vague and happy notions of perhaps dating in the not-too-distant future, and I have optimism that this potential dating might lead to actual physical friction with another willing, perhaps enthusiastic, partner. But I won’t write about said friction because, as I’ve explored previously, I don’t want to jeopardize a fledgling relationship with my occasional will to overshare the very moist, throbbing and tumescent portions of my life.

Plus, I don’t want to be only a sex writer for the rest of my life. So there’s that. I have too much to say to limit it to things most quintessentially expressed in guttural phonemes.

And yet, I acknowledge that I do like writing about sex. I think it’s important cultural work. I think there’s a power in doing it well, and I have the hubris to believe I do do it well. I just don’t want to do it on my blog. Therefore, you will be able to find all of my new sex writing at the gloriously shiny, newly opened, terrifically sleek and gleefully—if thoughtfully—perverse Filthy Gorgeous Things.you can go here to read my first piece for the site. It begins with Hegel and ends with Oscar Wilde, and because I’m both thinky and kinky in equal measures, it meanders through strip clubs and deep-throating. I’d love to know what you think here because there are no comments there. In fact,

I’m keeping my smut archives here on my pretty dumb things because to jettison them would be untrue to the history of this blog, but the great priapic share of my new sex writing will be now found on FGT. I’m already working on two new pieces on sex and techs. They’ll be really very, if not like totally fetch.

I do hope you enjoy the full body of FGT. It’s quite beautiful and strange and erotic. Plus, it’s wicked smart, and anyone who doesn’t get the intrinsic sexy value of the grey matter is no friend with benefits of mine. I’ll let you know when I post new material, or you can check out my Twitter feed here.

the weight and the loss

Once more, I have cheekbones. They’ve returned or, to be more factually accurate, they haven’t. They’ve always been there like twin hillocks hidden under the snowy cover of my adipose tissue. The spring has sprung; the snows have melted, and the cheekbones have become visible again.

Which is all a purple way of saying that I have lost weight. I have lost weight and I have done it on purpose. For the past six, almost seven, weeks, I’ve been dieting, a word I hate with passionate abandon. I have also been working out, a term I loathe for its blind punnery. We work out issues, we work out with weights, we undoubtedly work out issues whilst we work out with weights, or on the treadmill, while boxing, when we do yoga, or any number of other dumbly physical activities. But diet I have been and working out too, in several senses of the term.

I am counting calories. I use a computer program, and I dutifully enter every food, its calories and its fat content. The program tells me how many calories I’ve eaten (1,238 today) and how many grams of fat (36). When I go over my allotment in either, it flashes red. It’s very stern for being a great big fiction. Only were I to measure my sustenance out gram by gram and milliliter by milliliter would I have the truth. I can live with the fiction.

Michel Foucault’s eternal canonical life was made on his tenet that prohibition of sex created an unavoidable “incitement of discourse” about sex. The same, I’ve found, is true about dieting and food. It’s less that I want to eat everything that crosses my mind. Indeed, I seem to have commenced my diet at precisely the right moment. I felt pain; I bought cookies; I ate the cookies of pain; I felt more pain: I realized this cookie-pain chain wasn’t working any longer. I stopped; I started a diet. But if I don’t desire food in the way that led me to snowcapped cheekbones, I still nonetheless constantly think about food.

All day, every day, food is at the forefront of my mental conversation.  What I’ll eat, when I’ll eat it, how many calories it has, and how it fits with everything else I’ve eaten that day. It’s a great, big, apparently very pleasurable, puzzle that I put together each new day, all day long, because I eat four or five times a day, every three to four hours, like clockwork. It is all incredibly boring and immensely engrossing as only complex math problems can be. I carry food with me when I leave the house. I feel like a refugee fleeing her metabolism.

I once counted calories before. I was thirteen. It was the summer before eight grade and my parents had sent me to spend a few weeks with one of my father’s oldest friends in Greenwich, CT. The wife in the couple had a slight issue with control, and she saw in me yet another new project. She taught me to count calories. Each one, all day, every day. A Nilla Wafer + a banana slice + a dollop of Hershey’s = 42 calories. A bowl of cereal + skin milk + a slice of toast = 280 calories. I did a lot of math that summer. By the time I left that house, I’d lost about twenty pounds and gained valuable precision in addition.

My mother has spent her entire life counting calories. Her Chabad-Lubavitch calendar shows a cheerful image of Jewish life on top, but below every single day waits patiently until she fills it in with a number. My mother’s day isn’t complete without adding her daily food fiction and plotting these numbers in red ink, like so many little empirical stop signs. It’s what she does. She’s done it since I was old enough to recognize numbers, which is, at this point, a long time indeed.

There are two big upsides to all of this planning, adding, plotting, carrying, graphing and dieting. The first is the self-evident one. I have lost weight. I can wear jeans that I couldn’t get up over my hips a year ago. Salutations have been made to bones I’d lost and nearly forgotten: cheekbones, ribs, knees—my hipbones will be next; that will be very exciting. So there’s the weight loss part. The other thing is that when you are dieting, everything you eat is the best thing ever. It’s like going to bed and waking up   Samuel Pepys, who was always eating the best meal he ever had (when the Great Fire of  1666 threatened his home, Pepys made sure to bury with his treasures both a wheel of Parmesan and his wine, a decision I can fully endorse). Hunger, it turns out, is the best sauce for supper. Also breakfast, second breakfast, lunch and snacks.

It’s all a little weird to me, really, this sense that I’m content with the diet because, hungry or not, I am content. Odd, strange, even eldritch, but content, if mildly obsessed. I’ve been meeting my emotional needs with food for so long that to now be meeting my emotional needs with emotions (and my food needs with food) feels like speaking in a strange language. I can’t quite wrap my tongue around it, and yet there is pleasure in the process. I’ve also always felt such a wilding despair at dieting, such a resentment and such a rage, that it’s weird for me that those feelings too are gone. All I feel is that this is right and that I like avocado in my salads. Weird, but freeing.

I don’t know how long this odd détente with my appetites will endure. I almost feel as if I’m skidding along updrafts like a kite, and the drafts might keep me aloft, or they might betray me and I’ll fall, thudding gently when I hit the ground. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m learning how better to take care of my insides and my outsides, and maybe I’ve realized that cookies of pain taste not like sugar and chocolate but of ashes and loss. I’ve realized there are much better tastes to have in my mouth. Triumph is good. Pride is quite nice. And with a little soupcon of self-love, it’s even better.

one lone gunperson aiming from language's grassy knoll

In an interview last March, German magazine De Spiegal queried Secretary Homeland Security Janet Napolitano about her choice to replace the term “terrorist” with “man-caused disasters” when she addressed Congress:

Napolitano: Of course it does. I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word "terrorism," I referred to "man-caused" disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.

This linguistic shift has been termed “Orwellian” by many neoconservatives, while Peggy Noonan archly commented, “Ah. Well this is only a nuance, but her use of language is a man-caused disaster.” Certainly, whether an adherent of Fox News or a devotee of MSNBC, you might feel the new term seems at the very least to be engaged in a warm and fuzzy obfuscation. We ought not to be fearful of terrorists, Napolitano’s suggests; rather, we should be afraid of men and the disasters they can cause. This linguistic re-habbing by Napolitano—and, by extension, the current administration—longs to place the responsibility on individual people who take destructive actions and to equate their destruction with the seemingly senseless abandon of a natural disaster, a tsunami, a hurricane or an earthquake.

The linguistic prestidigitation that turns “terrorism” into “man-caused disasters” does seem to deflect the looming Code Orange fear. We don’t live in perpetual terror of natural disasters. We watch the weather, we hope for the best, and when the worst is coming, we do our best to plan accordingly (or not, in the case of Hurricane Katrina). In effect, the administration seems to be saying, it’s time to take the same approach in the face of terrorism. It may work, it may not, but what interests me is less the softening, humanizing touch of Napolitano’s phrase and more the thorny issue of the word “man.” Because in this shiny, new phrase, it’s a word that is problematic, political, and just plain wrong.

Unsurprisingly, New York Times language guru William Safire disagrees with me. He says:

Napolitano...is to be hailed for breaking the taboo that has afflicted the word man. Political correctness, driven by the abhorrence of sexism in language, has banished such phrases as the forgotten man, man on horseback, century of the common man, even man in the arena. The adjective manly is forbidden and mankind is out, replaced by humanity. Chairman finds its substitute in chairperson or plain chair (although The Times requires a writer to choose between chairman and chairwoman). The only acceptable use of man is when it is introduced by hu.

The crux of Mr. Safire’s protest is the wresting of “man” from the linguistic fallback setting for “people.” In this brave new politically correct world, man is only man, a change that Mr. Safire decries. His litany of devalued man-based phrases illustrates his nostalgia for a time when men were men and man was everyone.

It’s a feeling I can’t share. I do believe that the world is a better place now that there are firefighters, postal workers, police officers and homemakers. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” Ludwig Wittgenstein said, and I have to agree. When we use language to ghettoize occupations and people, we do a disservice to the occupations and the people who do them. More importantly, we create a world where a culture holds a subtle bias both for and against genders.

What we say, how we say it, and what we associate with what we’re saying is fundamental to how we understand the world, as a recent study by Stanford cognitive psychologist Lera Boroditsky suggests. Studying gendered languages to see how native speakers connote feminine or masculine terms, Boroditsky determined that gender matters.  "In one study,” she said on NPR, “we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender." At least when it comes to gender, studies suggest that we think the way that language tells us to.

Which then creates problems when you’re talking about “man-caused disasters.” Despite what Mr. Safire argues, there is a whole lexicon wherein we freely use man, and they often have to do with violence. Hit man. Gunman. (Also, I might add, longshoreman.) We never talk about hit women, even though we like it when Angelina Jolie plays one. We never talk about gunwomen, even though Bonnie was as much a gunslinger as Clyde. We don’t, mostly, because we don’t like to associate violence with women, a psychic holdover from the eighteenth-century concept of women as the feeling, healing and moral cultural force, an idea that morphed into the Victorian Angel in the House, and an idea that never really went away.

The thing is that women do do violence. A quick Google search of the term “women terrorists” brings up over eight million results. There are Pakistani women terrorists, and there are Palestinian women terrorists. There is even a history of American women terrorists (see: Hearst, Patty). And as much as one woman’s activist is Glenn Beck’s terrorist, there is no disputing that women are capable, willing and active in “man-made destruction.” The term is incorrect. It’s wrong and, even more, it’s pernicious.

The thing is that until such time that we as a culture can accept that women are as able to be evil as men are, women will not achieve equality. Feminism is discourse engaged in arguing women’s parity with men. We all have the ability to be good, evil, creative and destructive because we are all—sorry, Mr. Safire—human. Fail to recognize that women can be violent, can take violent actions, and can be destructive, and you continue to buy into a deeply problematic mythology of moral superiority. Our language needs to reflect that fundamental humanity in all its glories and in all its horrors. What our language does not need to do is coddle a public with sexist terms under the rubric of warm, fuzzy humanism.

Terrorism is scary, fear-mongering is bad, but I myself would rather worry about the equanimous terrorist than the sexist “man-caused disaster.” Nuance be damned.

parts and holes, frankensex and murk

If, like the kids today, I’d gotten my nascent ideas about sex from heat-n-serve, hot-n-cold-streaming Hi-Res porn, my ideas would have been a lot more complete. Which is to say they would have been just as incomplete, but in totally different ways. But in the 1970s, porn was not as easy to come by as it is today, and I had to glean sexual crumbs where I could and then mash them together in my head until they formed some sort of cobbled-together whole.

I sneakingly read my uncles’ nudie mags; I squirreled away pieces of the letters to Penthouse, the better to line my erotic nest. I took sexy scraps and amatory orts from whatever novels or movies would offer them up to me: a scene from Oh, God; a limpid nude scene from a Bertolluci film; the flash of thighs and chests from Dukes of Hazard or Love Boat. I even pilfered the soundscape of my parents’ sex, a recollection that today fills me with thudding horror. When you’re twelve or thirteen, you’ll do whatever you need to do in order to flesh out that mute, yowling need.

I remember being around twelve or thirteen and, having just discovered the secret garden that is masturbation, taking the Frankensteinian erotic monster of my own creation out to play. Often, that monster would take the form of a local boy, this kid I’ll name Lance Irish, because it’s the closes approximation of his name I can come up with.  I remain certain that Lance’s phallic name had as much to do with my picking him as anything else. Lance was a chimera. It was upon his body I projected my inchoate desires.

Lance himself had a kind of annoying greaser patter. He had the affect of an unsuccessful snake oil salesman. Today, I’d grant him the metaphor of selling off-brand Viagra, but Viagra didn’t exist in the mid-1970s, Viagra—like cellphones, personal computers, post-it notes, and Hot Pockets—had yet to be invented. So Lance had the unpleasantly slick manner of a huckster, a mountebank, but he was only fourteen too. He would have been a mini-mountebank. He had black hair and a tender sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of his nose. His lips were wicked red (that’s how we talked then, and there, in mid-70s Vermont), and he had these skinny hips. He had a pervert’s air, and I imagined his body white and whippy, interestingly tufted with that black, black hair, and I even gave myself permission to almost imagine Lance’s lance.

Lying in my bed on dark winter nights, or sunny summer afternoons, anytime, really, I would think of how to get Lance to have sex with me. I’d imagine calling him and being all like, Hi, Lance…so, like, do you want to have sex? Or I’d imagine being somewhere and being all coy and flirtatious, rolling double-entendres like spit balls and lobbing them at him until the idea stuck to his skin. I would imagine us somehow, magically, improbably alone, in the same empty place at the same empty time, with too much time on our hands and too many hormones coursing through our bodies. I imagined nature taking its course, even if I couldn’t quite grasp what nature would do.

Unsurprisingly, that place would sometimes be on the flat moor-like plain cresting the hill behind my house. It might be smack in the middle of the fern patch fed by the crick running down the length of the mini-mountain to the right of the moors. It might sometimes be the high and dry sandy ground of the graveyard; I envisioned Lance leaning casually on the blocky mauve carapace of a grave and somehow being improbably suave, and then I imagined us a tangle of limbs in the strawberry-scented air. Sometimes I even imagined him in my own narrow blue bed.

But while the urge was strong, it was not stronger than sense, and I didn’t follow through with any of my rococo and painfully unlikely scenarios. I mean, obviously. Part of the problem was that while I had the Frankensex shambling about in my head, it was missing bits. I knew how sex worked, and I knew that I seemed to want it, but while I could define the act of copulation in a stunning array of biologically correct terms, and while I had a vague idea that people engaged in a whole bunch of activities between the kissing and the copulation, and while I could even tell you some of the Latinate terms for those activities, I couldn’t for the life of me fathom how they worked. And, of course, the other part was that the very concept was absurd. Even at thirteen I knew the value of fantasy.

I’d only kissed my first boy at twelve, and I was stunned to find out that the pink slippage of tongue made it exotically French. The magical genie who could make manifest, even in the privacy of my imagination, those other activities was still locked tight in the bottle. And so I was stuck between the hard place of stampeding libido and the vertiginously swirl of my own incomplete knowledge. The sex need pressed itself upon me with enough weight to conjure Lance Irish naked, tufted and indistinctly assertively male, but I couldn’t make a whole out of the parts.

These days, I have to range far and wide in the lecherous fields of my mind to come up with anything as eldritch as those amorphous Lance fantasies. My years of experience have licked the erotic lump into a fully formed baby bear, and that bear has itself grown up and given birth. It’s nostalgic to think of those times when alone in my narrow bed, I gave a long, if borrowed, leash to my sex, and I didn’t know where, out in the darkness, it led.

play out your dead

When I was seven, my mom married my stepfather and we all moved to Middle-of-Nowhere, VT, pop. 700. My mailing address was Chelsea G. Summers, Middle-of-Nowhere, VT O5555. Were you to have sent me a postcard, it would have gone to a post office about the size of my current bedroom. I would have walked the half-mile to the boudoir-sized post office to pick up said postcard, and if you’d sent it to me after the age of nine, I would have done so with a large St. Bernard padding along beside me.

My family lived in a converted two-room schoolhouse. Initially, we only rented the right half, but then the grandmother of my mom’s high school friend sold the house to my parents, and we had the whole drafty, poorly renovated hydra-house, and sometimes rented out the left half. To the exact right of us lived an old German couple in an old American farmhouse. To the left and behind us rolled out a carpet of farmland, a sometime home to a herd of Holsteins, and in the spring, many frogs who sang their guttural songs about eggs and flies and the pain of pollywogs and other chthonic frog songs. The house to our left was bilious green and owned by a family named Moody. They shared our party phone line. Mrs. Moody drew on her eyebrows. The Moodys had gun racks made out of deer hooves, the deers’ little feet pointed eternally up, ironically carrying the method of their own destruction.That house always smelled like the bottom of a grease can.

In front of us was a wide ribbon of field. White in the winter, green in the summer and brown the rest of the year, the field unfurled to a river. On the other side of the river were more hills, a string of houses that at night lit up like Christmas lights, and a big red barn where square dances were held. Women went to there dressed in poufy little skirts held aloft by crinolines ethereal as mounds of egg whites. Men wore string ties. I imagine that on Sunday nights these people watched Hee-Haw and enjoyed it.

To the far right, beyond the German couple’s home, beyond the sliver of woods behind and the evanescent pond before, a pond that sometimes froze in the winter and the local boys would play hockey, and I would skate alone thinking of Dorothy Hamill, beyond all that lay our local graveyard.

Like any proper graveyard, it was limned in pointed metal fencing. The very best dead real estate—the graves closest to the road and fading gently back—were the oldest graves. Set amid great dark trees, these stones were fragile, the dates and names worn down to gentle depressions by the constant touch of breath-quiet fingers. These carvings had become shadows of themselves: the most apparitional ivy, the flirtation of an angel, the barest filigree of skeleton. Many whole families gathered together under the ground as their tombstones grew equal portions of lichen and disrepair. Often, the family had gathered together the same year, the same month, the same week. I imagined some great felling by ague, calenture or chilblains, some illness I’d gleaned from compulsive reading of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

As the graveyard unfurled uphill, as the trees gave way, as the ground grew sandy enough to support wild strawberries, the graves grew older, firmer and colored. Here were names of families I recognized. Here were stolid, solid graves, not those vulnerable wafer headstones so popular with Victorian dying. Here, where the gravestones were warmed by the sun, away from the shadowy crypts lining the far darkest right wall, the fancy flew. These graves were unabashedly pragmatic, whole and discrete, and sometimes decorated with plastic flowers that never wilted but rather turned ever paler in the sun.

I spent a lot of time with the dead of Middle-of-Nowhere, VT. For many of them, I was their only visitor. I’d wander through the graveyard singing Judy Collins songs; if anyone had seen both sides now, these people had. I trailed my fingers over names strange and familiar and do the math. If Constance B. Haskwell had died in 1856 and been born in 1847, then she was nine or so, I’d think, and see this girl around my age dressed in picturebook pinafore and tights grow ill and feverish and expire, a white pale light in a nightgown, because I read a lot. I did much math in the cemetery.

In early summer, I’d walk through the upper aeries of the graveyard looking for berries and reciting Hamlet’s various death soliloquies. To be or not to be, that is the question, I’d say and paw through a black raspberry bush. To die, to sleep, perchance to dream, I’d confess to a particularly monolithic pink granite grave. Ay, there’s the rub, I’d say, and wonder what Walter Patrick Elmer dreamed of, if he dreamed of all. The speech usually ran out around “contumely,” a word that I would look up again and again and always forget what it meant. To this day, I can’t recall. A display of contempt, it turns out. I just looked it up again.

I liked the graveyard. It was quiet. It had drama. It held that faint frisson of ooginess. It felt comfortable. In retrospect, I suppose I’ve always been a morbid girl, for all of my Malibu Beach Barbie looks. The woods behind my house may have had this terribly attractive stream and many rotting logs under which I could look when I felt like playing naturalist. The river in front of my house might have had a lovely river for plashing around in when I felt like giving my inner naiad a twirl. The cows may have been there when I wanted to feed large things and smell their patient odor. But it was the graveyard that worked the greatest mental magic. I was alone there, and I was not.

I’d more or less forgotten my time with the dead people, but then I read Neil Gaiman’s Newbery award winning The Graveyard Book. The story of Nobody Owens growing up in graveyard surrounded by ghosts and one kindly vampire who would bring him bananas and crisps jostled my memory enough to release that cemetery nostalgia. Seemingly alone in Middle-of-Nowhere, VT, removed from people my own age, plunked down in this grim and verdant place with my mother and a usurper father, I discovered this place of ghosts held a kind of logic. Where else could a ten-year-old girl recite Shakespeare with impunity and great volume?

Before writing this, I looked at Google maps to see if I could find a street-level view of my graveyard. The street-level van apparently has yet to make it to the Middle-of-Nowhere. There are only satellite views, and they reveal a Middle-of-Nowhere that is now the Middle-of-Somewhere. I see the aluminum roof of my old house gleam dully. The woods behind my house are much diminished. The river before it dried up. There are new houses to the left and to the far right. And the graveyard, most tragically, seems to be gone. Maybe it simply doesn’t show up on the satellite photo, those little dots of crumbling stone and those blocks of moldering granite. But there’s a new road—a large, wildly looping road—that seems to be where the graveyard once was.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope it’s just a trick of the light, of the lens, of the space. I hope that the Middle-of-Nowhere graveyard lives on. I hope the graves molder and the leaves fall and the berries come and that they are all appreciated. I hope that someone, sometime, visits that graveyard and invites, as I did, the dead to play.

(The very lovely photo at the top comes from the Flickr page of Snake Eyes. Also, should you wish to listen to Neil Gaiman read The Graveyard Book, go here. I recommend it.)

on Amazon's cruel, senseless and sudden breaking of my heart

I spent my first five years in Illinois with my single-parent mom, her parents and her three brothers. There were always lots of people milling around that big castle-like house, but when my mom left to go to her job serving pizza or out on a date, I grew immediately lonely and sad. Often I'd run away next door to the artsy couple who had this fantastic house sprinkled with magical things--a purple shag rug, split geodes studding the walls, water taps shaped like swans. I loved them and this quiet, magical home they had.

When I was twenty, my parents and I returned to that place and unexpectedly knocked on the door of the old neighbors. They and the house seemed the same, but the walls were now dotted with countless paintings of churches. Old churches, new churches, churches with white steeples, churches with steel spires. Everywhere churches. The couple, it turned out, had been born again, cheerfully, assertively, self-congratulatorily, evangelically born again.

I was crushed.

Which is precisely the feeling I had yesterday upon hearing about the recent and much descried changes on Amazon. Over the past few days--or, according to other sources, over the past couple of months--Amazon has quietly been making software programming changes. These changes were brought to light by author Mark R. Probst who noticed that his books had lost their Amazon ranking (the numbers that indicate the book's sales relative to other books and thus show the popularity of a book and whether a book is a best-seller). The numbers were simply gone. Writing to the company, Probst received this reply from an Amazon representative:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Much has been made of this Amazon debacle. (It was the hottest topic on Twitter yesterday, gaining its own organizing battle cry #amazonfail. Jezebel has a fairly comprehensive thumbnail of the issue, a listing of books both losing and keeping their rankings, and a roundup of stories on the matter, if you want more information.) Much has been made and for good reason. There is no logic to this restructuring at Amazon. In fact, not only is there no logic, there is a great logic suck and that void is carrying with it books good and bad, books high and low, books classic and pop-tart, books of a stunning range of topics, interests,  readership and quality.

Amazon ranking does more than simply tell a reader, or an author, how well the book is selling. It also tells the Amazon search feature how to function. Screen out "adult" books--and adult here means  books dealing with GLBTQ issues, erotica, sex manuals (gay, straight and, I might add, Christian), books by GLBTQ authors, and sexual memoirs--and you're going to get a funky-ass crazy quilt of results. Perhaps the best example is this one, which gives four results for books searched under "homosexual," all centering on the topic of how to "cure" gayness. This is a problem of mind-imploding proportions.

The problems here are myriad. On a purely pragmatic level, you can't set up a search feature to "exclude 'adult' material" because most literature is "adult." You set up a search feature like this and you exclude not merely erotica, but you exclude Jeanette Winterson's memoir Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, and Betty Dodson's Sex for One. You don't, however, screen out Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho or Tucker Max's frat-boy memoir I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Set up this kind of screen, search for "Lady Chatterly" and you get four pages of results before you get to one in-print copy of the book. It's fucked up and it's just mouth-breathingly dumb.

On a political level, it's hard not to get irate at a company who feels it needs to parent its many, many consumers. I'm fully confident that if I search for books on anal sex, books by Quentin Crisp, or books on anal sex by Quentin Crisp, I can stomach the results. A search result never hurt anyone, as Susie Bright pointed out. Moreover, there's more than one way to incense a cat. Search for "helium balloons" and you get a string of suggestions for books on suicide. There's no way for Amazon to police for people's tender sensibilities. It's futile, offensive and stupid even to try.

On a purely capitalist level, Amazon is a company. It sells things. That's what it does--and does well. To set up strange, ineffective and pointless barriers to bringing people the things they want to buy is counter-intuitive. It's like a McDonald's turning out the lights, erecting a maze of curtains and making its customers grope in the dark to reach the kiosk. Your average web-savvy customer isn't stupid. We're going to toddle down the Internet highway and find that copy of Anaïs Nin's Spy in the House of Love somewhere else.

And on a personal level, I am sad, confused and angry. I love Amazon. I love it so much I want to take it behind the middle school and get it pregnant. I want to make sweet, drippy, sloppy, sweaty, unprotected love to Amazon. That's how I feel about Amazon. I spend thousands of dollars I can ill afford at Amazon. I am a book/DVD/music glutton and Amazon is my 24-hour Quickie Mart. I can't believe Amazon is making these gigantic mistakes, kowtowing to this shadowy and invisible "customer base" who is mortally offended at the idea of adults doing what adults do with other adults (but only in book form--it's not a problem to buy any one of the four really bad DVD versions of Fanny Hill, only the original, excellent novel), and making it hard for me to buy what I want to buy.

Or anything at all, really, because if Amazon doesn't fix this egregious error, this "glitch" that they are calling it, I'm done. I'm gone. And I'm taking my money and my love with me.

(If you're as angry as I am, take twenty minutes and call the Amazon customer help line, 800-201-7575, and ask to speak to the customer representative manager. Explain to him or her your reasons for your anger and tell him or her you'll boycott Amazon. You can also join Twitter and send messages to Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels. There's also a petition, but I don't have a lot of faith in it.)

UPDATE:

This afternoon I received the following email from Amazon's customer service. I kind of like the use of the adjective "ham-fisted." Here you go:

what is a man? read this, print it, staple it to your forehe

In response to Esquire's essay of the same title published in its instructional May 2009 "How to Be a Man" issue.

A man carries cash, or at least a debit card. Maybe a handful of loose change, which he puts into a bowl of assorted change at the end of the day. Or perhaps the man just throws it on the coffee table. Because a man owns a coffee table. Also coffee mugs. But not demitasse spoons. A man wouldn’t be caught dead with a demitasse spoon. Unless he is Jonathan Adler, in which case he proudly carries his demitasse spoons with him. A man eats peanut butter out of the jar. With his fingers. But without washing his hands.

A man builds things. Bookcases out of bricks and 2x4s. A coffee table out of a deer crossing sign. A fort out of his mashed potatoes. A mountain out of a molehill. This is his way of escaping mortality. Also of escaping Alcatraz. A man knows how to tunnel out of a maximum security prison using only a toothbrush and the cardboard from the center of a toilet paper roll. Steve McQueen was a man. So is SpongeBob Squarepants. You can tell because they both wear pants. That’s where they carry their cash and maybe their demitasse spoons.

A man can look you up and down and tell whether you’re wearing pants. Before you say a word, he’s figured out the pants situation. That’s because a man is fearless about scoping the crotch every once in a while. Even if he gets busted. From your shins, from your loins, from your button fly, a man infers.

A man owns things. That is why Buddha is not a man. Maybe he was when he was alive, because he probably owned that sheet thing he wore, but let’s face it. Buddha didn’t have pants. So he had no place to carry his cash, his keys or his demitasse spoons. What kind of man is that. Not much of a man. He would have been stuck in nursery school, never mind Alcatraz.

A real man loves the human body. All of it, but especially the delicate skin at the base of a throat, the swoop and curve of the left instep, the ineffable squishiness of the medulla oblangata, and the entire lymph system. A man, a true man, appreciates the glorious beauty of lymphocytes. When his woman, or his man, or, hell, even his dog, bends over, a man sees the beauty of the initial lymphatics, the prelymphatics or lymph capillaries that specialize in collection of the lymph from the ISF, and the larger lymph vessels that propel the lymph forward. Seeing this, he feels a thrum that only a man can feel.

A man doesn’t point out that he has a pimple.

A man looks out for children. Makes them stand behind him. Especially at parades. Because a real man loves a parade and doesn’t want any damn children blocking his view.

A man has had liquor enough in his life that he can order a drink without sounding breathless, clueless, or obtuse. Also without sounding obsequious, purple or clairvoyant. When in doubt, a man panics and orders a Slo Gin Fizz. Because they’re yummy, dammit.

A man welcomes the coming of the apocalypse. It frees him. It allows him to use the Lord’s name in vain because, fuck it, after that thing with that underage stripper that one time and the cheating at Russian roulette he was never going to make it to heaven anyway.

A man writes in short declarative sentences. A man knows that dependent clauses are for pussies. Only the week need more punctuation than a period. Fuckers.

A man owns tools and knows how to use them. But a real man always abides by common safety precautions including the use of safety goggles. A man puts the tools back where he found them. A man also puts the lotion on its skin. Or else it gets the hose.

A reciprocating saw, incidentally, doesn’t quite do what its name implies. Still, it’s a very good saw if you’re fitting windows, cutting down saplings or dismembering a body.

A man knows how to eat frisee without it sticking out of his mouth like he’s some kind of latter-day Apatosaurus. Speaking of which, a man enjoys the oeuvre of Judd Apatow. A real man would like to share a turkey sandwich with Judd Apatow. And then maybe a cuddle.

A real man knows the emotional value of some man-on-man spooning. Also possibly man-on-man forking.

A real man is flexible. He can touch his toes and those of others.

A real man will dance, but only to Huey Lewis and the News. Or Zeppelin.

A man shapes his opinions as carefully as he shapes his pubes. A man puts the “man” in “craftsman.” A man doesn’t fear needless repetition. A man doesn’t fear needless repetition. A man doesn’t fear needless repetition.

Quiet and introspective, boisterous and extroverted, crenulated and caespitose, a man likes to watch stuff. Stuff is what he likes to watch. All kinds of stuff. Anything, really. A real man just really, really likes stuff. This is not so much collection or meditation as obliviation. Men watch stuff and imagine that it’s blowing up. Because if there’s anything a man likes more than the creation of stuff, it’s the destruction. Also the deduction, especially if the man is a tax accountant. Men also enjoy the construction. A man also likes paper. A man refracts vision and gains acuity. But if he’s a Battlestar Galactica fan, the man re-fraks. A man is not ashamed of his Cylon fantasies. In this way, a man is like the Terminator, both captive and free, both man and machine, both artificial and intelligent. You cannot take your eyes off a man when he is like that. You shouldn’t. The hell if you know what he’s thinking, who he is, or if he has his demitasse spoons.

the dearth of cool

Music may indeed soothe the savage beast, but what it does best is separate the cool from the dorks. We judge humans first on their clothing and their hair; our costumes provide a map for what we do, where we live, how much money we make and what we value. But nothing tells us whether someone has that ineffable waft of hip or that damning fug of square like the music we choose.

The problem is, of course, that as Maxïmo Park tells us, the coastline is always changing. (This sentence was, of course, a multi-part test, like one of those grade school standardized reading comprehension exams. If you know who Maxïmo Park is, you sail past bubble A; if you don’t, you’re screwed. Bubble B then tests how you understand Maxïmo Park. Being British and marginally on trend with post-punk music, you’ll feel one way; being similarly American, you’ll feel another. If you love, love, love Maxïmo Park, you’ll see me as a kindred cool spirit; if you hate, hate, hate Maxïmo Park, you’ll see me as a tarnished poseur. And even if you don’t know the band at all just their gratuitous use of umlauts could make you see me as a reborn idiot.) Where you are along the musical vista makes you hear the song differently. It’s a Pavlovian Doppler effect, but with rhythm and harmony and bass. Or, you know, if you’re listening to ambient, not.

Two things happened last week to make me consider this kaleidoscopic trait of music. First, I put up a Tweet asking for people’s recommendations for new gym songs. I got only two replies, one from a music buddy who has high confidence in his tastes and the other from a friend who lowered her virtual voice to confess that she listens to Bel Biv Devoe, Justin Timberlake’s “Damn Girl,” or Hole when she works out. The other thing that occurred is that I went to see the ‘80s hair band musical Rock of Ages. (Here is my algebraic review of Rock of ages: (The Wedding Singer + Pippin – Our Town)(American Idol) ÷ (Guitar Hero) = Rock of Ages.) It may not be readily apparent, but the common denominator of both workout music and Rock of Ages is shame. Music, in addition to bringing up feelings, thoughts, and memories  also causes one of two ancillary reactions: pride or shame.

When I scroll through my iTunes, and I have about 9,000 songs, my life passes before my eyes. I see “Lovin’ You,” and I remember being twelve and buying shoes with my grandmother in Thom McAnn, hearing the song for the first time, and feeling both like this was the stupidest song I’d ever heard, and that in its stupidity, it might just be brilliant. The Eagles’ “The Best of My Love” causes me to recall in sensorama-like detail slow-dancing with Glen Yandow in seventh grade. Anything by Boston forces me to look for the nearest keg. Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” makes me look for the closest pole. Big blocks of songs bring to mind various boyfriends and my acquiring their music like their t-shirts. Other blocks make me remember break-ups and my applying the Tom Tom Club’s “Man with the 4-Way Hips” like a soothing unguent. And still others don’t bring much of an association at all. These tend to be the songs I listen to like I look at wallpaper: without much thought or attachment.

There is a secondary layer to my iTunes musings, of course. There is the flesh-crinkle of shame and the leaping solar lord of pride. When I consider various people looking at my iTunes library, I feel solid. Substantial. As if I stride the earth as a colossus. But when I imagine others, people whose musical tastes I respect, musicians, critics, or just those people who invariably wear the best shoes ever, I die a little inside. I would not want them knowing that I own three full discs by Sean Hayes, or that Kelly Clarkson’s “Miss Independent” is my fifth-most played song. I fear the judgment.

The thing is that it’s ok to like lame music ironically. It is, as Chuck Klosterman points out in his excellent Fargo Rock City, totally fine to assume the ironic position (which I think involves some kind of hip cock) to enjoy the oeuvre of, say, Warrant or Poison. You can like all kinds of stuff if you like it disingenuously. But only when someone bigger, badder and cooler than you comes out and asserts his or her love of, say, late ‘80s Tina Turner do you feel permission to avow your sincere passion. Music is singular in its ability to inspire as much mortification as pleasure. Sometimes at the same time.

Which is what is strange about both the gym and Rock of Ages (and RoA’s musical ilk: Jersey Boys, Xanadu, Mamma Mia, and the aforementioned The Wedding Singer. I shudder when I consider the eventual musical comprised of all ‘70s era punk; I just can’t tell if I shudder in revulsion or delight). These are two spaces where it’s not only acceptable but actually encouraged to enjoy the worst music known to human.

Gyms require a release of consciousness or else you’re fully aware that you’re doing something absolutely stupid. It’s not just the bobbing iPod nation that is the gym, either. Gym classes play horrible, horrible, delicious, cheesy music. What we spend in fat-and-sugar calories we make up in sweet, greasy musical delight. The body must go on autopilot, and there’s no gas like crap music. The mélange musical, however, operates on the concept of camaraderie. Everyone who is there knows what they’re going to get, and they want it. They want to hear Quiet Riot’s “We’re Not Going to Take It” repurposed as a political anthem. They want to hear Starship’s “We Built This City” as an argument for urban planning. They want to hear Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” as an expression of muffed dating cues. They do, they really, really do. They do because this musical celebrates and contextualizes the now-shameful music of its audience’s past.

I can remember the doozie-of-an-outfit runway of my life’s clothing, and I don’t flinch. I can recall a long battalion of just awful men I pined over, and I find nothing cringeworthy. I can look at any number of terrible decisions I’ve made, and I remain blank as a slate. But if I allow myself to recollect that I once subjected my family to an entire Captain and Tenille album at dinner, I suffer the unmistakable crawl of the horrorsloth. It’s mortifying, really, and I was maybe eleven at the time.

Our choice of music represents who we are to ourselves. Sure, other things do too (Mets/Yankees; Treetorns/Chuck Taylors; Wii/Xbox; iPhone/Blackberry), but nothing quite so much as music. And that’s because music is like the Proustian Madeline of the identity. Nothing shows us who we were, what we loved and loved passionately, and how much we changed than listening to a song and realizing you’ve grown out of a band. And nothing shows others who we are, and how cool we are, like the music we love. Music makes bleating herds of us all. Few are the intrepid enough to hold onto their Falco, their Led Zeppelin Presence, their Olivia Newton John “Have You Never Been Mellow,” their Kris Kross, their Milli Vanilli, their Jessica Simpson, their—gasp—Nickleback—and aver their love. I myself am one of the gutless.

Don’t judge me. Please. Let me just play you this other tune that I know you’d really dig.

(The first photo is uncredited, the second is Minnie Ripperton's album and the third is Mötley Crüe by E.J. Camp via ABC News.)

odds, no ends

Life has a way of being funny in the way that Benny Hill is funny. Which is to say that it’s less the loopy urbanity of Eddie Izzard, the ironic cultural club sandwich of 30 Rock, the loony absurdity of Monty Python, or even the generic one-size-fits-all misogynist chumminess of any Judd Apatow venture. Life is more funny in the kind of way that makes your head do the befuddled dog tilt at anyone who finds it actually amusing. And recently my life has been a tad on the rotund British dude being chased by a bunch of nubile clothing-reduced lasses, only without the dude, the lasses or the chasing.

A couple of weeks ago, I got rejected from Stanford (once) and the New York Times (twice) and on my original blog, I threw myself a pity party to celebrate the four-year anniversary of my pretty dumb things. The next day I get an email from the agent for that book of corporate erotica I walked away from last year (and I thought I wrote a post on it, but apparently it's apocryphal, the writing that is, not the thought). It looks like I’m going to do it, or it seems like I’m considering it, or at any rate I’m getting a contract for a contract for writing it next week. Which is to say that a contract for a contract is better than no contract at all.

Money is, I’ve discovered through some trials by financial fire, quite nice. Last week I wrote a post about my lamentable finances, and thanks to the several very lovely and terribly generous readers who contributed to my tip jar, I ran flush on the fees and I’m going to be able to groom my dog for the first time in a year. It’s a good thing because his fur is starting to grow algae, like a sloth. He has yet to develop a prehensile digit, but I check his paws regularly. So I thank you, Boswell thanks you, and the groomers thank you. If you were one of the lovely handful who donated, you have been part of this micro stimulus package.

But every in every happy lucre shower a little hobgoblin must fall, and mine is in the form of an unplayable Season 1 Battlestar Galactica DVD set. Apparently, I bought a Hi-Def DVD. I have a Reg-Def DVD player. If you or anyone you know wants a Hi-Def Battlestar Galactica DVD set, unwatched, you’re welcome to it. Email me. It’s free, but laved in shame. I’m sure it’ll play despite the shame.

I’m doubly disappointed about the DVD because I recently decided to relinquish my highly expensive gym membership. I neither could afford it nor could I be bothered to go. The combination of wasted money and wasted opportunity caused me to feel great megatons of guilt, which I treated by sitting on my couch, watching DVDs and eating cookies. About three weeks ago, I took stock of my waste and my waist and started to diet and work out. I’ve lost some weight, which is swell, but I’ve also regained my love of the non-sexual physical activity. Which is a shame because, see above, relinquished membership. My last day is 10 April. I am sad.

The additional byproduct of the working out and the eating right (parenthetically, there is nothing more boring than listening to people recount their diets and physical regimens. I actually feel the inside of my head coalescing like concrete when people do so) is that I have become phenomenally frisky. It’s a problem because I continue to be utterly dateless. I was asked out for drinks by a reader who kindly included the address of his blog. I read parts of the blog, and after feeling my interest noodle into the piqued range, discovered that he has been happily partnered with the only woman whom he could ever imagine spending his life with in this world or in the next and so on to eternity. Which then made me cock my head in the aforementioned confused dog manner. A friend pointed out that men are horny. I rebutted that women were too. It was a conversation ending in impasse.

Which is to say that my life of late has not been bad, just a bit on the odd. Perhaps it’s the vernal equinox. Or perhaps it’s just the ghost of Benny Hill conniving me into dropping my clothes followed by my chasing him around park benches until I look splendid in my panties. As long as he’s laughing, it is not in vain.

and...comments are back

Leigh, my hard-working editor here on PNN, has managed to work her software mojo and find a way to allow me to have all the goodness of reader reaction without the toxic fumes of my stalkers. I remain a bit dubious, but nonetheless hopeful that opening my pretty dumb world up for comments will not bite me in my delectable ass.

Feel free to avail yourself of the great digital canvas below to say something extra nice to Leigh. She's the woman with the virtual magic wand.

And thank you to everyone who contacted me privately to lend your kind words of support. I tried to respond to all of you, and if I missed any one of you, I apologize. I appreciate all of you and every choice you made to tell me that I matter to you.

kissykiss,

chelsea g.

on empirics, abortions and pain

Yesterday I wrote a post about my extraordinary friendship with a woman almost entirely unlike myself. A woman named Marsha here on PNN reacted to the piece, choosing to forgo the frieindship entirely and focus on my multiple abortions. Her main critique is that while she is pro-choice, she feels that my multiple abortions are too many. Marsha says, “Eight? There's no excuse for that. One's understandable. Even two can be forgivable. But any beyond that and you're using it for birth control.” I’d not be the first to point out that abortion is birth control—it’s messy, painful, post facto, complicated birth control. But that’s not my point of contention with Marsha. Nor is my point of contention her assertion that eight abortions is too many (though I myself had seven); I readily agree that it is. Where Marsha and I part ways is how I don’t think it’s right to be pro-choice to an arbitrary empirical point. And moreover, I really don’t think it’s right to judge a person before you know her story.

Almost three years ago, I wrote a post on my other blog wherein I narrated in full and without flinching my eight pregnancies, seven of which ended in abortion (the eighth was an ectopic pregnancy, a pregnancy that occurred in a fallopian tube; the tube burst and it and the pregnancy was removed surgically; I would have bled to death had it not). At the end of the post, after giving the story of my pregnancies, I explained why I’d gotten pregnant so many times.

This is what I said:

I don’t blame my fecundity for my embarrassing track record of terminated pregnancies. I don’t blame any one thing, really, for it was a clusterfuck of issues that made it possible for an intelligent and forthright girl-woman such as myself to make this same mistake again and again and again and so forth to eight.

I knew full well how to prevent pregnancy. In fact, I’d known since I was about four, when my single-parent mother told me in excruciating detail first how babies were made and then how babies are not made. Even being a baby myself, I could see what her subtext was: she was saying, in effect, had I had this, this pill, you would not be here.

My abortions were in part my attempt to rectify my mother’s mistake. I was trying—and failing, failing miserably—to take control for my mother’s poor decision-making process that had left her alone at nineteen, a single mother.

In part, my abortions too were my attempt to compete with my mother. If she defined early adult life by her sexuality, then I would do so too, and with a vengeance. I outfucked my mom. I did it in her face, a whirlwind fuckforce of blonde retribution.

In part, my abortions were a by-product of my constant and desperate attempt to be close to someone, somewhere, somehow, regardless how flawed and regardless how wrong. Sex was the closest I got to love for a very, very long time in my life, and ok, cue the Oxygen for Women soundtrack, sure, it was because I didn’t love myself.

I know a lot about not loving my self. In fact, I know with agonizing precision how much a person can not love me. I have spent so many long bleak atomic wintry years of my life not loving myself that there is little a person can say to me that is outdone by what I have said to myself. And clearly, my will to terminate and terminate again and terminate once more was as much a by-product of my self-loathing as anything else.

Reading this piece I wrote a couple of years ago, I become yet more aware of exactly how terrifically fucked-up I was when I was young woman. Were I the person then that I am today, I wouldn’t have put myself in the position that I put myself in over and over again. (Although, oddly enough, I wouldn’t be the person I am today without being the person I was then, but that’s opening a whole other metaphysical can of worms.) I still feel that my decision to abort was the correct one, even if my decision to get pregnant was not.

When I wrote the first narrative piece, "Terminate," I was terrified, and afterward I had summoned the nerve and hit the “publish” button, I walked around in a wondrous sense of relief mixed with a jangly fever of anxiety. I was fully expecting a full ration of pro-life shit, and I got some, not as much as I’d expected, but some.

What I was not expecting, and what I got in great, heaping mounds, even from people I knew, was condescension from individuals who consider themselves pro-choice. Despite searching, I can’t find any of the blogs who linked to my post, but to a one, the writers who linked to me essentially condemned me for exercising my choice to abort a few too many times. This condemnation was echoed by acquaintances, women who themselves led wildly deviant lifestyles, and women who consider themselves Progressive Democrats. Their objection boiled down to a single sentiment and that was this: I’m pro-choice, but seven abortions is too many.

It all led me to wonder why it is that people who would consider themselves liberal would hasten to condemn another so readily, even when that person was in pain. It led me to wonder how liberal these people really were when they couldn't get past their prejudice in a number to see the person who suffered behind it.

Today, almost fifteen years after my most recent abortion, I still feel pain about what I put myself through over and over again. I recognize that my abortions—and the lingering ache I feel over them—had as much to do with my ancient self-loathing as anything else. I recognize too that I no longer loathe myself as I used to. I forgive myself both for my loathing and the somatic susurrations of that loathing. I forgive myself, in short.

Seven abortions is too many, but it’s not ethics or pure empiricism that makes seven too many. It’s simply too many because the pain that caused me to do it and do it and do it again, each time to myself, and each time with no less pain, was too much pain for any human. No unmarried, unsupported, ill-educated woman in her right mind would choose to get pregnant that many times, and I was not in my right mind.

It’s a good thing that I could make one good choice in the midst of that hurt, and that one good choice was to abort. I remain grateful, profoundly and unutterably thankful, that the choice to abort was legal, readily available, and relatively affordable. For these reasons, I remain proudly, staunchly and violently pro-choice. And for these reasons, I feel it’s my duty to tell my story, to tell is simply, and to tell it again and again. Only by putting a human face on the blank and easily appalling number of seven can I hope to turn judgment to compassion, and prejudice to understanding.

stepping onto virgin territory: a tale of friendship

I have an unlikely best friend. Most of my friends are very much like me. We misspent out youth in an array of anti-social and vaguely creepy manners. We have long and tortuous histories with sex, drugs and/or rock ‘n roll. We fucked at least a handful of strangers and at least one of them was most likely a stranger of our own biological sex. We flopped about aimlessly in various professional pursuits, and only after throwing many fistfuls of mud at the wall did we finally find something that stuck in an artistically arresting position. When young, we stole stuff, and though we’ve given up the practice the thought remains. We vote Democrat, reflexively.  We are not always kind to strangers. We tip overly well because we worked in the service industry. We distrust the mechanisms of culture: marriage, religion, corporations, suburban housing developments and their lawns. We’re the ones voted “Class Weirdo” at graduation, if we bothered to formally graduate at all.

Standing apart from my usual band of miscreants, malcontents, low-level addicts, and tattooed love children is my friend Elizabeth.

Unlike me, Elizabeth is a virgin; she waits for marriage. Unlike me, Elizabeth is a devout Catholic. I am, in contrast, a devout catholic, especially in my musical tastes. Unlike me, Elizabeth matches her clothes to her jewelry and her shoes to her clothes and her bag to her shoes. I don’t invest much in matching anything, almost ever. Unlike me, Elizabeth doesn’t go outside her house without a full face of make-up. She carefully does her hair, every day. When she drops an expletive, Elizabeth looks pained. She sleeps in a single bed, narrow as a novitiate’s hips, sheets tight as a hymen.

Unlike me, Elizabeth is the very definition of conservative. She is a Republican, a serious and white-knuckled Republican, though as Elizabeth is an intellectual, she is not a Bill O’Reilly knee-jerk Republican. She is pro-life but, paradoxically, she initially supported Bush’s Iraq war. The war has since lost its luster for Elizabeth, which says a lot about the extreme badness of the war and not so much about her. She very much votes, thinks, and acts as the Pope tells her to. For her, section 2352 of the Catechism, the one that states that “masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action,” is gospel. This is a woman who may have moved away from her Midwestern home but stalwartly will not adopt even the gentlest of Gotham's sybaritic values.

Which is all to suggest exactly how different my friend and I are. People who know us both, if separately, puzzle over our friendship. We would seem to have little but a right to trial by jury in common. And yet.

Bonding first over a boring lecture and a piece of gum, which I offered to Elizabeth because I dimly recalled that when you take out a treat you’re supposed to offer some to the person sitting next to you, Elizabeth and I learned that we shared a love of eighteenth-century literature and celebrity culture. We also, it turned out, enjoyed the sensibility of Wes Anderson, good coffee, sarcasm and lip gloss. It was enough to tenderly launch a fledgling relationship, one that has grown over the past ten years.

As close as we got, I retained the need to cushion Elizabeth from the torrid blows of my sexual life. I found myself euphemizing and downsizing, calling what was a full-blown raunchy sexcapade “casual dating” and the like. For years I kept Elizabeth swaddled in a soft cocoon about my past, and for years I nimbly sidestepped related myriad political landmines like abortion, gay marriage and John Ashcroft. And over time, my deference to what I saw as Elizabeth’s tender conservative sensibilities began to wear on me. Our friendship began to take on a hollow ring, like the tolling of a plastic bell, and I began to feel inauthentic. I felt dirty.

One afternoon, just any afternoon, no special day, Elizabeth and I were sitting on my couch, talking. The conversation had swerved of its own accord ever closer to politics, ever nearer to abortion. Maybe it was the climate—the air was thick with the presidential nominee process—or maybe my unconscious had moved its ethereal hand, but sitting on my couch about a year ago, I told Elizabeth I’d had seven abortions.

“Wow,” she said. “That’s a lot.” I agreed. It is a lot.

I inhaled, and I decided it was time to take one for the home team. I narrated a stark, thumbnail version of the seven. I told her how my repeated pattern of sex, pregnancy and abortion was inextricable from my depression, my problems with self-worth, and my mother’s lamentably bad parenting. Elizabeth listened. She didn’t rail, or condemn, or look revolted. At the end of my story, she said something comforting; I don’t remember what. And eventually we rather comfortably segued into some other, less emotionally volcanic topic.

Since then, our friendship has grown. I’ve come to see my friend as a person who has her own guiding principles to which she’s fiercely attached, but I’ve also realized that she doesn’t judge me for my choices (though she does pray for me—regularly). Elizabeth loves me unconditionally, which is pretty swell, and I her. Having had that one extraordinarily difficult conversation, we have granted ourselves the freedom to discuss politics of every order. We are free to disagree. It’s really rather lovely. I do still edit some details of my vagaries, but it’s more like leaving sprinkles off the cupcake. I no longer hold back the cupcake.

I like to think that I’ve put a friendly face on abortion for Elizabeth (I also like to think that I’ve humanized sex workers, sexual liberation, and Progressive Democrats). But she’s given me something even greater. Once I put down the cumbersome burden of coddling her from my actions and gave Elizabeth a story of my stark past, I also relieved myself of a hefty weight of ambivalence. Around Elizabeth, I felt a hydra of shame and defiance—shame from the way I imagined Elizabeth would react if she knew the truth, and defiance because I wanted nothing more than to tell her and shock her out of her perceived self-satisfied and ignorant stance. Things between Elizabeth and me are a lot lighter now, and we can tackle the weightiest of subjects.

I was raised in a world where everyone who thought as I did was right (if Left), and everyone who didn’t was wrong (if Right). Elizabeth was raised likewise, if in polar opposite. I thank my friend for helping me realize that it’s not a matter of Left or Right; it’s a matter of being brave enough to speak your beliefs, of being kind enough to listen, and courageous enough to love. That and having a steady supply of gum and celebrity gossip.

no comment for you

In some ways, it’s a mark of distinction. Undoubtedly, it’s also a minor irritation, a suck of my time, a waste of my energy, a drag on my psyche and an experience unfathomable to others, but I nevertheless must acknowledge that having stalkers is a sign of distinction.

For almost three years, I’ve been harassed by cyber-stalkers. They have sent over 300 emails to me, and they’ve sent a few to my friends, my supporters and my acquaintances. They have researched me in order to ferret out where I went to high school and to college, who my family and friends are, where I live and what I do for a living. They very clearly obsessively read every single blog post I write, and though I don’t have a way of finding out, I suppose they read everything I publish under both my pseudonymous blog name and my real name. These are people with an unwavering agenda to hurt, intimidate and slander me.

I know who my stalkers are. I know the reason that their twisted brains have provided for their going-on three-year campaign of hate. They are a married pair of bloggers who live on the Eastern seaboard.  A mutual friend introduced us, and we became Internet acquaintances, corresponding via email somewhat regularly. Their friendship turned to cast-iron enmity when I made what was to me a minor choice and was to them a grievous error.

The wife in the pair once wrote a sex blog. I was once the editor of the Tuesday sex-blog roundup on Fleshbot. For those readers unfamiliar with Fleshbot, it is the porn arm of the Gawker media group, and when your blog gets featured on the site, your traffic grows like an erection on Viagra (it also falls just as quickly; it’s a temporary tumescence). In May of 2006, I chose a post from this wife’s blog for my first roundup; I also chose to include a post from our mutual friend. Six weeks later, I once again chose to include a post from our mutual friend, but I didn’t include a post from the wife’s blog. This minor choice is the cause for the harassment I’ve suffered for the past two years and ten months. The irony is that I did consider using a post from the wife’s blog, but I could find none that fit that week’s theme. I certainly would have included another post in the future. However, once the wife perceived a slight, she started sending me waves of highly disturbing emails under her own name, and I backed off from having contact with her.

Within a few weeks, I started to get a barrage of abusive emails and comments on my blog sent from a variety of addresses and under a variety of names. I didn’t make the connection at first; I just assumed that my wide readership came with a price and this price was a handful of critics. Eventually, the mutual friend showed me a series of emails she’d received from the affronted couple about me, and it was clear from the phrases, the diction, and the ideas present in both her emails and my own that there were only two harassers and they were the married couple, my former acquaintances. I should note that this couple went on to cyberstalk the mutual friend, a friend of hers and four other people I know of. This couple are dangerous, amoral people.

Since that time, rarely a week goes by when I don’t receive an email or two—the only exception was last fall when I took a four-month hiatus from blogging. Each email comes from a new and different email address. Sometimes the emails come to the account attached to my blog; other times the emails come to my own personal account. Even though the names are often different (they like to recycle some; “Mike” is a favorite, as is “Anil,” “Mina,” “Minka,” and others), I always know it’s they who are writing. The names may change, you see, but the themes are always the same. I am a loser. I have nothing. I have no one who loves me. My ex-boyfriends are happy to be without me. I am old, fat, ugly, and pointless. My choices are bad. My writing is bad. My life is bad. I am bad. And I might as well die.

I know why my stalkers hate me so much. They hate me because I tell the truth. They hate me because I have connections, talent, support, and dedication that they don't have. They hate me because I've chosen an unconventional life and make no excuses about it. They hate me because I don't apologize for my choices. They hate me because they're threatened by me. And mostly they hate me because in their minds I rejected them. There is nothing I can write that will make them go away. Nor is there any other action I can take. They are a low buzzing sound in my life, and they probably will be until they get bored or die. Frankly, I don't care which.

Sadly, however, they have had effects on my life. When I began writing, I chose to write my blog under a pseudonym so that I’d have the freedom to keep my writing separate from my identity as a college professor. My stalkers successfully connected my two identities in a forum my former students would have access to, and despite my trying to remove that link, it stays. I no longer teach. Certainly, while I was depressed my stalkers’ venom affected my emotional state. Now that I’m not, it doesn’t.

Here is the most recent effect. In the past 36 hours I've received around eight comments from my stalkers. PNN doesn’t allow for comment moderation, thus giving me a choice not to publish my stalkers’ comments before anyone else can read them and therefore requiring me to police my site. I’ve chosen to turn off comments on my blog posts.

This saddens me. I like getting responses to my work. I like knowing that I’ve touched someone, and as long as that person’s reply is civil and thoughtful, I even like when people disagree with me. I personally don’t care a whit what my stalkers say to me. They can call me names until they’re positively cerulean. It finally resonated in me that these people have shown exactly how cruel, vicious, amoral and crazy they are, and therefore I can’t respect their opinions. Their words have no affect on me, not anymore. They’ve done their worst, and they have failed. However, my readers don’t know which detractors are my stalkers and which are not, and the people who like me come to my aid. Allowing my stalkers to comment on my site could turn my posts into a sludgy, toxic morass, and I’m not willing to let that happen.

It’s a long story with a short end. There will be no more comments on my pretty dumb things, not here on PNN. If you want to comment, and I hope you do, feel free to contact me through my helpful little “contact me” button located in my profile box, or go to my main blog at prettydumbthings.typepad.com.  I’m taking one for the home team. I’d rather forego the pleasure of knowing what you think than bring the hideous effluvia of my stalkers here to the global water cooler for women.

UPDATE: Comments are back. Magic PNN screens have been put in place, so yay. Express yourself.

the girl and the money and the shame of life

I have confessed a vertiginous range of seriously private matters here on my pretty dumb things (and said confessions serve only to underscore the applicability of this blog’s name). I have narrated sexual peccadilloes aplenty; they blow like burrs in the wind, they are that light and insubstantial. I have recounted loves lost, and I’ve recounted loves won and then lost. I have described the most painful moments of my life with the dutiful, if poetic, precision of a most dedicated and passionate analysand.  Freud’s Dora had nothing on me and my enthusiasm for the talking cure, though my form of the cure has been a near-steady stream of gut-wrenching writing.

I’ve related bodily functions in Ifochromatic hues. I’ve bared my emo breast and told of my laving in self-pity, my dipping into depression, and my retreat into suicidality. I’ve talked about being a stripper and bearing that job’s humiliations, as well as its triumphs. I’ve talked about menstrual sex, filing for bankruptcy, losing my will to dissertate, going on a makeover show and why I love Wookiees. I have not, however, ever shown you the horrors that lie below.

For I’ve never shown you my bank account.

On Sunday, I went to the bank to withdraw money and discovered I was $2.12 overdrawn. By Tuesday that amount had swollen to an impressively turgid $223, of which $175 were overdraft fees. Waking today, I found out that I was $315 overdrawn, of which $245 were fees. That is one solidly priapic number. That’s a number that causes a girl to go a bit faint in the solar plexus. That's a number so big it's hard to swallow. It’s a figure that will do the figurative number on a girl’s lifestyle when a girl recognizes that she really only takes home $450 a week. It’s a number that makes a girl stop and ponder how exactly she got into this economic freefall in the first place.

Looking at my transaction history (figure left, click to embiggen), I realize that there were many small, stupid straws that broke this fiscal dromedary’s back. There were the two automated payments totaling $100 that I’d forgotten about, ditto the $46.13 for anti-depressants that I realize now I should have bought a long time ago; maybe they’d have saved me some of this anguish. Those are the items that I knew I needed to account for but just slipped my mind like it was coated in Teflon.

There’s also the food. Three purchases at gourmet food purveyor Balduccis totaling around $121. Which is just stupid. Trader Joe’s is not that far away. Still, I can forgive myself the food, likewise the $10.00 for subway fare. The real problems are everything else. The Neil Gaiman print I bought from Neverwear.net ($51.95): even as I pushed the happy “purchase now” button, I knew I ought not to buy.  The treats for my pets ($23.89). The two books I inexplicably had to have (Parallel Lives: Four Victorian Marriages and Serenity: Better Days, totaling $19 and change). The subscription to The New Yorker and Portfolio I bought because Sasha Frere-Jones helped me out with that rejected piece and I felt badly that it hadn't been accepted and I forgot that Condé Nast isn’t a charity ($30.00). The rental of Star Wars parts IV-VI ($12.97) because I had to see them and not any of the 78 DVDs festooning my shelves. The DVD set of Battlestar Galactica, season 1, ($16.89) that I absolutely needed for no discernable reason. And let’s not forget the two songs I downloaded from iTunes, “Single Ladies” and “My Life Would Suck Without You,” which I bought because to allay the deep suspicion that my life sucked without them.

I admit I generally suffer from a kind of magical thinking surrounding my bank account. It’s as if despite all logic and experiential history, I feel that I have the everlasting gobstopper of checking accounts. Somehow, my pitiful, rocky debit card acts like the mythical stone soup and nourishes every being living in this united states of me. The cold, hard fact that I need to realize—yet again—is that it doesn’t.

To be perfectly fair to me and my shameful overspending self, last week presented the psychological and fiscal perfect storm. I was reeling in the unpleasant blowback of three rejections in one week. I had chosen that week to go on a diet, and this fact is important both because “real” “food” is expensive and because denied of my usual comfort of cookies I went somewhere else, and that elsewhere was apparently Half.com. Add to that fragile emotional state the knowledge that I had recently gotten a wee raise and that I’d chosen to relinquish my dizzingly expensive gym membership. I felt positively deserving as well as completely well-funded. This feeling was, in both cases, complete fiction.

Let’s look a bit further, because really, why stop at a cursory point in this spelunk of shame? Stopping would have the disappointing denouement of the final shot of Thelma and Louise, unfulfillingly forever frozen above the Grand Canyon. I went to the bank. My very much beloved bank manager, Carl, took pity on me and did away with $105 in overdraft fees, leaving me to pay the remaining $135. Right now, after Carl worked his managerial mojo, I am $177.83 overdrawn. Which means that I overspent only $42.83. That’s all. Less than fifty bucks. At almost any other time in my life going on a $50 shopping spree would not have pushed me off the financial cliff. But it does now. That is how fine my finances are. It’s a freaking sobering thought.

Reviewing my past week, my feelings of wafer-thin vulnerability, my spiraling feelings of loss, my cringing self-doubt, and my choices on how to take care of myself, I wonder what it is I think I’m worth—or not. I feel a tremendous burden of shame over screwing this money poodle so badly, a burden that’s probably disproportionate to paying $135 in overdraft fees. That’s because money, how much there is, how easily I make it, where it comes from, and what I spend it on is such a potent symbol for how I view myself. I’m probably not much different from anyone else in that respect. It’s one of the reasons why we are so reticent to share the crunchy numbers with others, and why we ask what something costs in lowered voices, the voice we usually reserve for sexually transmitted diseases and madness.

I’m going to be a Pollyanna and see my willingness to show my shameful pecuniary panties in public, my choice to air them out and scrutinize my financial skid marks, as a sign that maybe I’m starting to change. Maybe I’m becoming someone who can see herself as being both worth more and more worthy of better care. Maybe soon I’ll earn enough that my suffering won’t seem as dire, and maybe I’ll even make enough that I can treat myself to Battlestar Galactica, Seasons 2-5. Maybe both I and things will change, or maybe as I change myself, I will change things. A girl can dream, right?

in praise of the cocktail hour

I’ve been experiencing prolonged nostalgia for a repressed age in America: the 1950s. The age of the Cold War, Joe DiMaggio, Abstract Expressionism, Joe McCarthy, girdles and Buddy Holly, the 1950s were also the golden age of the cocktail hour. Ah, the cocktail hour, that metonymic moment when adults shuffled children to their beds and were thus given free rein to enjoy Old Fashioneds and Side Cars, smoke cigarettes, snap their fingers to cool Jazz and generally be adults. Little marks the difference between adult and child like the cocktail hour, and little embodies the erosion of the privileges of adulthood like the gradual disappearance of that golden hour.

To be historically precise, the cocktail hour did not begin in the 1950s, and it began not as an event as quotidian and daily as dusk, but as sparkly and incandescent as a comet. Like Coltrane and Presley, the cocktail party has its roots in post-WW I culture. Some historians argue its invention in 1924 London; others that the very first cocktail party was held in St. Louis, Missouri in 1917 (which actually places its invention toward the end of WW I, but not technically after it). Prohibition’s alluring and illegal excess gave birth to the “modern drinking woman,” and thus the cocktail dress sprung like a beaded Athena from the brow of a fashion-forward Zeus. The end of WW II caused a coalescence of the middle class and its standard-bearer, the nuclear family. And it was in this increasingly ordered culture that the cocktail hour came into its own.

There is a lot that was very, very wrong with the 1950s. One thing that it got right, however, was a separation between adults and children. Limits were placed. Boundaries were kept. Men were men and women were women—and this was one of the very, very wrong things—but more importantly adults were adults while kids were kids. Father knew best in this leave-it-to-Beaver world, and as problematic as that structure was in terms of gender, race and class, it was kind of awesome when it came to being an adult.

I was born in the 1960s and raised by a single mother, so my knowledge of the cocktail hour is somewhat limited. When my mom and I were living with her parents, I do recall being bundled off to bed early while the adults did something glamorous and highly scented downstairs. However, most of my understanding of the cocktail culture comes from reading Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver and John Cheever and watching old movies starring Lauren Bacall or the recent television series Madmen. I recognize the limits of my real experience and thus the necessitated romanticization of the magical land of cocktail. Still, I want it.

It’s less the alcohol. I’m rarely an enthusiastic drinker, though I do drink. It’s not the smoking; I quit over ten years ago, and I’ve never looked back. It’s the idealized concept of a space where adults may be adults and we need not worry our sophisticated brains about the contamination of nearby innocent children. We can roam free as Noel Coward buffalo, and no one will scream in horror, “But what about the children!”

My fantasy cocktail hour absolutely is a fantasy because it’s not about real cocktails or about real hours. It’s about the internet. I have written this blog for almost four years (my anniversary is—eek—Tuesday 17 March). Here, I have given myself the freedom to write about anything I feel like writing about. Haiku to sexual dysfunction, odes to my dog, primers for blow-jobs, paeans to relationships, dissections of television shows: every scrap of detritus that blows across my brain is fair game. I’ve not ghettoized the carnal from the cerebral, the modest from the profane, the adult from the adolescent, or the NSFW from the SFW. And that choice has worked to my disadvantage.

Early on in my writing a mommy blogger linked my blog and then a day later delinked me. I asked her about it, and she admitted that she didn’t want her babysitter knowing that she read my blog. Which is fine, it’s her prerogative. I understand the discomfort this blogger might feel, and perhaps she saw my blog as inhabiting her own Utopian cocktail space. But it set up a paradigm where my work, like Ang Lee’s openly sexual film Lust, Caution or the HBO series Tell Me You Love Me, kind of falls through the sexual cracks. It’s not filthy enough to be porn, exactly, nor is it sanitized enough for general consumption. I wonder how many people choose not to link to my blog because I have categories devoted to oral sex.

But it’s not just that my ego gets bruised or my traffic gets thwarted. It’s also larger issues about the ways that Internet behemoths like Google funnel traffic. Like the sites of Tony Comstock and Violet Blue, among others, my site was temporarily lost by Google in the winter of 2006. We all simply ceased to exist as far as Google’s search engines were concerned; a programming glitch had placed us all into an unsearchable category reserved for sites that had violated various terms of service. The matter was resolved in a week or so, and we all reappeared.

This kind of programming snafu continues with Google’s treatment of the word “clitoris.” Search “clitoris” with Google’s safest filter and you will get zero results. “Penis,” however, returns hundreds of thousands of hits. People have pointed out this disparity and called it sexist, and I suppose an argument could be made for that distinction. To me, however, the great Google clitoris/penis gap is less an example of overt sexism as it is a sign of how impossible it is to shield children from the oogitty-boogitty world of adults. It’s not possible in real life, and it’s certainly yet more impossible on the web. Kids will learn about penises and they will learn about clitorises, and if they’re very fortunate, they’ll learn how very pleasurable each genital version can be.

The stark fact is that no matter how much we try to police the Internet, we can’t. No matter how much I wish I could create my site in the cocktail hour paradigm, I can’t. No matter how much I wish for an adult space, but not an XXX Adult Space, it’s not going to happen. We can’t return to the boundaries of the 1950s. Not in real life and not on the Web.

Still, I wish that we could. I wish for a sophisticated, sparkly space that can undulate between the ribald and the political, the savvy and the sexy, the silly and the sophisticated, a space as complex, as dark, as shiny, as messy as real adult life is. A virtual cocktail party complete with the sound of tinkling ice cubes, occasional raucous laughter, the smattering of emo drama, the spikey scent of cocktail olives, and the quiet breathing of the tidy little kiddies  slumbering happily unaware upstairs.

long live Luna Lovegood

The thing about living in New York is that no matter who you are, what you look like, or what you enjoy, there is somewhere in this city a community ready to welcome you. Are you a cross-dressing surf punk? An Eastern European animator-contortionist? Seasonally employed Zamboni-driver/Good Humor man? Sexually attracted to lichen? There’s undoubtedly a place for you here in Gotham, a place where your predilection is not merely tolerated but expected. I may not know where, but I’m sure someone does.

The unsightly pallid underbelly of this acceptance is, however, the flip side that no matter who you are, no matter how conventional, no matter how “normal,” no matter how little you’d frighten little old ladies in a Skokee, Illinois beauty parlor, cause muttering in Swan River, Montana Grange Hall, engender hushed epithets at a Baton Rouge tea, or fisticuffs in Hollister a biker bar, there is always somewhere else that you’re completely offensive. Everyone offends somewhere. It’s a comforting kind of discomfiting equality.

If you believe Marlo Thomas, you and I are free to be you and me, but the truth is we don’t often avail ourselves of that freedom. Most people spend grand swaths of their lives feeling constrained to be one of the masses. This point that becomes especially ironic here in America where our Declaration of Independence assures us “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This is one country that likes to present conformity as the shortest line between us and happiness.

It’s too bad, really.

I can’t find much good in the trappings of convention. I can totally get behind systems of cultural order—I’m a big fan of traffic lights, politeness, personal hygiene, the judicial system and the Golden Rule, for example. These are the mechanisms that keep people feeling safe, and they are necessary and good. What I’m less in favor of are the showy cultural mechanisms that people kowtow to without much thought: gym class, standards of dress, marriage, Sex and the City, procreation, and the SATs, for example.

Which is one reason why I am particularly fond of Luna Lovegood, the Harry Potter character given to wearing radish-like earrings, abrupt honesty, and a serene, unshakeable belief in ideas that others brutishly condemn. JK Rowling, in her finite wisdom, blessed Luna “Looney” Lovegood with an alliterative flower-empowered name. It’s the name a hippie would pick, and as with most names in the Potterverse, it’s a tip-off to her character (Argus Filch both watches and steals; Albus Dumbledore is quite as white as egg white, quite as busy as a bee, and quite as British as Albion; Severus Snape divides and belittles, and so on). Luna is a moony, dreamy, benevolent character peacefully at sea in a world that can’t quite grasp her value.

Luna’s greatest treasure, aside from her wit beyond measure, is her endowment of a tranquil and unflappable steadfastness in her strange beliefs: the existence of nargles, crumple-horned snorkacks, and wrackspurts, and the truth of The Quibbler, which her father publishes. In the weird world of Hogwarts, Luna’s beliefs stand out, a testament to the depth of her strangeness. Luna is, of course, persecuted for her otherness; she is lonely; she is teased; her belongings go missing every year; she is quietly overjoyed when she finally, after adoption by Harry and his crew, has friends. But despite her isolation and her martyrdom as St. Loony of the Strange, Luna remains stalwartly who she is. I find it hard not to burst with involuntary empathy for the character.

In the real world, people like Luna have a harder time. We’re not so kind to non-conformists. The best that most strange people can hope for is finding some tiny island of society of people somewhat like themselves. Fortune’s few—Tilda Swinton, Russell Brand, Steven King, Salvador Dali—find ways to channel their bizarreness into fame, fortune, art and a following.  But most people who cheerfully stand on the hems of society find themselves, at least from time to time, shoved and told to stand closer to the center.

Last week a friend of mine invited me out to dinner with her and her boyfriend. I love my friend; I like her boyfriend. I see that these two people truly care for each other, and I am glad that my friend is made happy. I am not, however, delighted when my friend’s boyfriend feels the need to point out my failings in because, as he avers, he wants “to help” me. I am, he says, too sarcastic. I don’t dress to show off my physical assets. I need to loosen up. I am not letting the love in. I always wear baggy clothes. I need to, he says, enter his boot camp in order to become…something else, someone different, some person he’d like better.

Sitting at a table and listening to my friend’s supposedly well-meaning man rattle off my areas marked for improvement, I found it painfully hard to hold my tongue. I wanted to tell him to take his list and find some anatomically interesting thing to do with it. I wanted to light into him and explain as I would to a toddler that his roster of changes exposed much more about his failings than it did about mine. I wanted to tell him that I am quite fond of myself, and if he isn’t, it’s his issue, not mine. But since I love my friend a lot and want neither to make her unhappy nor to seem ungrateful, I said little.

But today in the harsh light of 48 hours later, I realize the weight of my anger. I also realize that the reactions my friend’s boyfriend has to me comes from his feeling threatened. We who don’t fit in—and we all don’t fit in somewhere because life will always, invariably, inevitably and eternally be some manifestation of high school—threaten those who feel they do. They do what they do, say the things they say, and take our belongings as they will, because we point out the failings of their conformity. Conformity is rubbish, and at the heart, everyone knows it.

It’s not a bad thing in and of itself to wear clothes from the Gap, work a 9-to-5, marry a person of the opposite sex, have 1.8 children and own 2.4 cars. It’s only a bad thing if a person chooses to do those things because culture tells him or her to do them. I’m not knocking informed choices. I’m not knocking mistakes—because as Sesame Street tells us, everyone makes them. I’m knocking the blind acceptance of whatever your culture—Surf Punk, Mennonite Polygamist, Second-Amendment Absolutist, Clothing-Optional Trailer Park Fanatic, Born-Again Pagan Vegan, or some combination thereof—tells you to do. And I’m knocking the continuing to uphold those culturally mandated values when you realize that they are at odds with what you really want.

Conformity for comfort’s sake is boring, a cop-out, and inimical to the Declaration of Independence. Moreover, it makes people act in thoughtless, hurtful ways, and it also apparently makes them tell me I need to wear more make-up more often. Be yourself, I say, and let others be themselves. It is our inalienable right.

Feel free to be. And while you’re at it, mind the wrackspurts; they can make your brain go all fuzzy.

I'd like a date: or je voudrais fixer une salade d'épinards

If by “date” you mean a social appointment with an individual with whom there is a shared interest in potentially pursuing an amorous relationship, I’ve not had one in over a year. In the interest of full disclosure, I have seen my X, Donny, a fistful of times, and while those times could fall under the heading of “social appointment,” they didn’t quite meet the rest of the criteria. They were more like social appointments of two individuals between whom there is a shared interest in disengagement.

I have also had quasi-hook-ups with two men. One happened last April with a man who is both in a committed, if elastic, marriage and lives many, many thousand miles away from me. The other took place last August with a man far too young to be taken seriously. While I’ve written about the first hook-up, I’ve chosen not to write about the second because it was a fiasco of such depressing dimensions that I’d prefer not to relive it. I suppose that I did date-like things with both of these men, but though adult beverages and food were consumed, and though walks were taken, I don’t consider them dates. No future, no date, not to my thinking anyway.

A year and a couple months after becoming single, I suppose I’m ready to start thinking about dating.

It is what single people do, or so I dimly recall. They date, or they think about dating, or they do both and think about dating while on dates, especially if the date in question is going horribly awry, like a Seth Brundle teleportation experiment. I do vaguely recall the flush of excitement preceding a date, the purchasing of garments specifically intended for the dating process, an unusual devotion of time to the body in preparation for the date (one that sometimes included the shaving of toes and other depilatory procedures), an increase in anxiety levels leading up to the date, and then a spectrum of emotions that registered after the date, many of which were recounted in agonizing detail with members of the same sex after the date had come to completion.

I remember there was sometimes kissing, the pressing of lips against other lips or various body parts, often with an introduction of tongues and an exchange of saliva. I also recall that sometimes there was more, sometimes followed by breakfast and other times followed by unintelligible excusatory phrases and the mad search for errant undergarments.

I don’t remember many of my dates, and I have had many. My first date with Eff, the man for whom I moved to Gotham, centered on going to a movie theatre to see Purple Rain. My first date with the first of the Twin Peaks was a visit to the Central Park Zoo (an excellent date venue, by the way). I went to Tea and Sympathy, a Brit restaurant on Greenwich Avenue, with C. Donny and I walked along the Hudson and then went to the worst, most fratty bar in the Village. In Boston, I went on a first date with this guy to the beach. We got wet and cold and left early. I went to a coffee bar with a loud talker who nearly screamed his family’s inculcation into a cult for all to hear. There was the one date with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author that derailed when he showed me his bullet hole tattoo located over his heart. There was the very bad date with that horrible little lawyer with the itsy-bitsy penis. And that would be just about all the dates I remember clearly. Not so many.

And yet, a quick systems analysis seems to announce that the date light is a go. I’m over Donny in that I don’t miss him and feel really quite resolved about our relationship. I am relatively sane and moderately content. I’m fairly confident and rather frisky. According to all internal checks, I am ready to date. My therapist has waved the green flag, and  we should be off into the wild dating yonder.

The thing is that I don’t remember how. I recollect that dating used to be relatively easy, even when I complained that it wasn’t. I used to float through the dating pool and feel that every backstroke took me closer to the buoy, or the boy, as it were. Now, however, I feel like I’ve forgotten it all. It’s like I was once fluent in French and could discuss Derrida but now I bungle an order for a spinach salad. The waiter, I sense, looks down on me and sneers.

I have lost that dating feeling, in short. I feel odd and out of place, like I’m suddenly twelve again, because everyone I could play with is either far too old or far too young. I can’t seem to recalibrate my desires to reflect the age I am, and when I do meet men my age, either I don’t find them attractive or they’re married, or both. But even were I to overcome the empirical obstacle and find that a social Lotto dropped an exceedingly appropriate man in my lap, I’d most likely walk away single. I can’t recall how to flirt. I’ve lost the language of nudges and half-turns and partially open mouths and suggestive self-caresses. I am aphasiac and overly blunt. I may have late onset dating Asperger’s.

It’s not so much that I’m talking myself out of the dating pool. It’s more that I realize that if there is a dominant culture, I’m not part of it. I don’t conform well. I’m one of those things that is not like the other, one of those things that just isn’t the same. The oddities don’t seem to do well in the dating game. I’m sharp of tongue and quick of wit and though I may try to hold back my sarcasm, it always busts through the dam. I can only plug my finger in the dyke for so long. Plus, I don’t have many measures of success. I have a rag-tag history that makes for some pretty entertaining evenings, but for men who want a solid woman with a straight trajectory, it ain’t me, babe. I am one salty, tortuous, tasty bitch.

But the strange thing is that as much as abstractedly I think I might again enjoy dating, I don’t much mind being alone. I am once more discovering that the inside of my head is a pretty fun place to be. It’s fancifully decorated, for one thing, and it’s furnished with many delusions of absurdity and a finely functioning parallel universe. I’ve a busy, busy brain, and it keeps me fairly well entertained. It would be lovely if I could meet someone who enjoys it almost as much as I do (though he will never have the full lay of my Dadaist land), but if I don’t, I think I’ll be fine. Which is as weird a thought as I’ve ever had, if not also one as delightful.

death: the banal frontier

Death, it seems, comes not from on high, nor in a carriage, nor on little cat feet, but with casseroles. Or in my Uncle Aaron’s case, and in my Aunt Ava’s condo, also with babka, bagels and cookies. Death seems to have a preoccupation with carbs.

Unsurprising to those who know me, I have a minor obsession with death. I’m currently watching season 3 of Six Feet Under, reading Julian Barnes’ mortality memoir, Nothing to Fear, and working on a short story whose first line is “When your roommate is a vampire, you have to solve the tampon issue”—and no item on this list is particularly uncommon for my life. My own suicidal tendencies are so recurrent that I’ve said the song of my life is a funeral dirge. It's not that I am much frightened of nor concerned about what happens after death, nor am I enthralled with the concept of it. It’s more that I am quite often in pain and find bemusing the fact that some day I will die, like everyone else.

I have been to six funerals in my life. My first was my grandfather’s wake; he hung himself when I was twelve. I don’t remember much about the service other than I very quickly grew tired of people’s pity for me and their anger toward him. The second was my stepfather’s father who died when I was nineteen; I can’t recall exactly why, perhaps a heart attack. The sadness I felt seemed abstract, as if my grief were a Rothko painting. I didn’t know him well, but I liked him. Primarily, I felt for my stepfather. My mother’s mother died the next year from a stroke, and that was a huge, though not unexpected, loss. I took quite a break from death and funerals, until at the age of 31, my ex-boyfriend Will overdosed. That was a weird, weird scene in which many people threw passionate bolts of love and hate in my direction. A few years ago a friend of mine’s dad died, and I went to his funeral to support her. And this past week, of course, I went to Philly for my Uncle Aaron’s.

My life experience with death is quite limited. I have only those six funerals. The only deaths I’ve witnessed have been those of dogs; I held their paws and bid them to go gently into that good night. I have watched scads of deaths and funerals on film and television and read of hordes of others, but nothing brings into high relief the artifice of those fictional ends of lives like going to an real, live funeral.

It’s not surprising that we humans paint the ends of human life in such saturated colors. We do, after all, paint everything else with more intensity. No birth, no first tooth, no first day of school, no pangs of adolescence, no first love, no break-up, no hellish job, no courtship, no marriage, no divorce, no bank robbery, no computer hacking, no crime investigation, no abortion, no political scandal, no betrayal, no ugly-duckling-turned-swan, no empire’s rising, no epiphany, no war, no peace and no death have the glamour, the sheen and the cleanliness of its fictive counterpart. Fictive lives are shinier than our real ones. Even the mess seems prettier.

And what these fictions cover up is exactly how tiresome the process of life is—even as they celebrate how wondrous it can be. The truth about funerals is that they bring bone-weariness and boredom. The casserole, that infinitely reheating self-contained dish that may be quite good or really bad but is never exceptional, may very well be the perfect metaphor for funerals.

My Uncle Aaron’s service was not much different from most funeral services. The Rabbi talked like Reverend Lovejoy, dropping the ends of sentences like stones off a cliff and then suddenly switching it up and making the last word soar like a swallow. The eulogy itself was a sudden apotheosis of my uncle. He was the loveliest, the warmest, the funniest, the most loving, the most generous, the most everything. My Aunt Ava sat directly in front of me sobbing fiercely, and I, being an empathetic crier, wept along with her. Other people cried too, while some didn’t. All listened to the Rabbi’s superlatives. The funeral service, is after all, for the living, and my family is as much like everyone else’s as it isn’t.

The living leave a funeral immersed in their own mortality—how can we not? Don’t ask for whom the casserole comes, it comes for thee. And plunged into my own mortal introspection, I thought about what I wanted for my eulogy. I don’t want superlatives, for one thing. I want whoever speaks at my service to show me as the complicated, contentious, sarcastic woman I am. A speaker with a strong sense of the absurd would be swell. I don’t want my living to remember some whitewashed, sanitized version of me. If they loved me well in life, they’re fully aware of my glorious faults and my faulty glory. They might as well get one last full measure.

This past fall when I was fully immersed in my suicidal font, I wrote a suicide note and started plotting my service. It was a profoundly pathetic experience, as well as a cathartic one. Nothing so much yanked me back from the brink as my self-laving in self-pity, and the fantasy service was the pitiable straw that broke the solipsistic camel’s back. Really, how many people have played “Moonlight Mile” at their funeral? This was the depth to which I had sunk, and stunned by my own operatic dismalness, I clawed my way out of the open grave.

I didn’t know my uncle Aaron very well; in fact, I’d not seen him in over 25 years. He may very well have been as exceptional as his eulogy described. I could just be seeing his service through my own sardonic lens, in which case shame on me. I didn’t know the man well, and yet I had to honor Aaron, my memory of him and his small imprint on my life, which will last as long as I do.

I also went because I wanted to serve as another buttress in my aunt’s monolith of grief; the more people who surround the grieving, the less they have to bear. It’s what the living do. We go and we eat bagels and we cry as we let others cry on us. We drink bad coffee and we pick at the babka. It may be banal, but it’s life, and therefore it is beautiful.

people come, people go, alienation is forever

In late August 1970, my mom married my stepfather on Mt. Mansfield in Vermont. The craggy rocks behind them were dotted with parti-colored hippies arrayed in floaty clothes that dragged on the stones like festive seaweed. My mother’s uncles and her parents were there, as were a bunch of my mom’s friends. None of my stepfather’s family were in attendance. Instead, he was surrounded by his band-mates, including the trumpeter who was an ordained minister and performed the ceremony in his bare feet. My step-dad was estranged from his family; his new marriage to my mother prompted him to repair the relationship.

I met my step-dad’s family the following Christmas, when he, my mom and I braved a snowstorm to drive from Vermont to Philadelphia. I had an ear infection, and upon stepping on my spanky, new grandparents’ welcome mat, I puked ebulliently. That was my new extended family’s introduction to me. As a beginning, it was less inauspicious than it might have been, but it did signal a certain uneasiness, at least on my part.

My stepfather’s family has very little in common with my mother’s, the only family I had known until the age of eight when I puked on that doorstep. My mother comes from a long line of dour, pessimistic people, and while my stepfather’s can be categorized as only marginally more optimistic, they are different—voluble where my mother’s family is tight-lipped; given to spontaneous acts of affection, where my mom’s family hug like they might catch something; and generous, where my mother’s is prudent. Most emblematically, if reductively, my mother’s family is Unitarian, while my stepfather’s family is Jewish, and though my step-dad’s parents celebrated Christmas (there had been a remarriage in that family too, as well as an attendant shifting in custom), these Christmases stood in bright, shiny, opulent, noisy and fun contrast to my traditional modest affairs that played out to the subdued strains of Handel’s Messiah.

I felt alienated from my brand new extended family, but then I felt alienated from everyone. By eight, I realized I would never fit in, though I still had about three decades to live before I accepted it. And yet, similarly to the ways I felt about my original family, there were some members I liked, some of which I were quite fond, some I loved, and some I was terrified by.

There were also others who fascinated me. My Uncle Aaron was one of these. Aaron had this rat pack, ring-a-ding-ding aura about him. He spent the ‘70s wearing a lot of Orlon shirts in complementary tones of swirly, paisley or marled colors—blue and beige, coral and red, maroon and brown; his wife, Ava, who is my stepfather’s sister, often matched him. Aaron and Ava were two of the best coiffed people I had ever met. Their hair always was perfect. Their clothes always were perfect. Ava’s make-up included a complex blending of several shades of eyeshadow that she mixed with an oil painter’s precision, and it was always perfect. They always smelled perfect too, some elixir of perfume, mouthwash, antiperspirant, and styling products.

Ava and Aaron were one of those couples who move together with the unthinking grace of synchronized swimmers. In their speech, the pronoun “we” worked with a seamless logic, even if they were expressing their own individuality. Ava loved to read, which she did ardently. Aaron loved to play poker, which he did well and judiciously. Neither of them wanted children. Neither of them liked the country. They both enjoyed easily recognizable food. Both of them smoked prodigiously, and when I watched them smoking, I saw that both of them enjoyed it, immensely.

Yesterday, my Uncle Aaron died after a protracted battle with lung cancer. He was in his mid-sixties. He had been diagnosed a handful of years ago, and when the cancer progressed, he had a lung removed. Then the cancer hit his bones, and within a few months, he had dwindled to just over a hundred lbs. He was over 6’ tall. He died in his and Ava’s condominium, my Aunt Ava watching him, her sister at her side. I feel for Ava and for all of those people who actually knew Aaron, loved him, and felt close to him. My own sense of loss feels so abstract that it washes to a pale coloring-book facsimile of the intense grief Ava and others feel.

Tomorrow I go to Aaron’s funeral, and I’ll see my stepfather’s family, most of whom I’ve not seen in over twenty years. It will, undoubtedly, be strange. But then it always was strange, though no stranger than being with my own family. To intensify the strange, the last time I saw all of them was at my grandfather’s funeral. My stepfather was understandably grief-stricken. I remember his close-mouthed fury at his stepmother’s choices that flew in the face of Jewish tradition: an open casket, a four-day lag time before burial, no one sitting shiva. At his father’s grave, after my grandfather’s body had been antiseptically lowered into the ground, my stepfather angrily clawed a handful of dirt from the frozen ground and threw it, his eyes stony as a basilisk’s, onto the coffin.

Life has a way of being messy, and nothing brings that mess into high relief like a death, even a death of a person to whom you’re not particularly close. Tomorrow, I see my parents from whom I’m moderately estranged. I’ve spoken to them about five times in the past seven months. I see this group of extended people who last saw me when Reagan was president. All that time passing, all those years, and all that change, and still I wonder if I will always feel betwixt and between, separate from my family, different and alien, and ever slightly uneasy, no matter the quality of affection, or the bloodiness of our bonds.

the dollhouse dilemma and Joss Whedon's body of work

It’s no secret that I worship at the altar of Joss Whedon, and the irony of that statement, given Whedon’s avowed atheism, is not lost on me. I am one of the legions of people who are autodidacts of the Whedonverse, those who will from time to time exclaim, “Shiny!” when pleased, who can sing along not merely with “Once More with Feeling” but also “Commentary! The Musical,” and who secretly lust after a Smile Time Angel puppet. I am a shameless Whedon geek. Should Joss Whedon cross my path, I would be reduced to a blithering idiot and be overcome with my need to kiss his, well, anything, really.

Which is all a preamble to my explanation of both why I find Whedon’s new series Dollhouse not very good and why, despite recognizing that I don’t like it very much, I’m still watching it.

Dollhouse, which began airing on Fox on Friday, February13, centers on Echo,  played by Buffy alum Eliza Dushku, an operative for Dollhouse, this futuristic rent-a-person company housed in what may be the best-looking spa on earth. Operatives—there appear to be a half-dozen or so of varying races and both genders—are incredibly beautiful, blank beings who spend their spare time wearing as little as possible, doing yoga and running on a treadmill. They also do Tai Chi, though they’ve yet to drink chai tea. When hired, these blank beings recline on spa chairs outfitted with blinky lights to get “imprinted” with “composite” personalities that allow them to be imbued with any range of characteristic, whereupon they are leased to people with more money than IQ points or self-awareness. In essence the company that is Dollhouse is in the business of creating the perfect person for the job at hand, regardless what the job may be, and for a limited time only. There’s also a rogue operative named Alpha and an impossibly hot FBI agent who is inexplicably hot on Dollhouse’s trail, just to complicate matters.

It’s an intellectually fascinating premise. Dollhouse has elements of The Matrix (easy implanting of difficult skills), Alias (the protean ability of one captivating woman), The X Files (an FBI agent who wants to believe and suffers for it), Terminator (technology gone horribly awry—or not), as well as a soupcon of The Stepford Wives (unbelievably gorgeous and compliant people). Dystopia + technology x (sexy bodies + gender politics) = a lot to ponder. And yet it’s the very premise of Dollhouse that poses its thorniest issues.

Because it arose from the consciousness of Joss Whedon, the show has recognizable elements of his other three programs. There is the faintly dangerous force of dominant culture—Buffy’s Watcher’s Council as well as its Initiative, Angel’s Wolfram & Hart, Firefly’s Alliance—that shows up here in the eponymous Dollhouse corporation. There is the theme that we humans make our own worst enemies—Buffy’s Frankensteinian Adam, Angel’s freaky son Connor, Firefly’s zombie-esque Reavers—that reappears in Dollhouse’s problem son Alpha. There is the blending of genres. There is the ambient mistrust of capitalist enterprises.  There is the hero’s mysterious background. There is the gratuitous musical moment. There are, in short, all the telltale markers of a Whedon production.

If it’s Whedon, it also has to be feminist, and Whedon’s history of feminism stands to be the most contentious point among Dollhouse’s feminist critics, if the conversations on the Web are any indication. Whedon’s oeuvre’s showiest feminist character may be Buffy but he has created a voluminous list of strong female characters. Most importantly, Whedon creates not only good female characters, but also evil ones, and some like Willow and Faith who traverse the territory between these two extremes. A person is a feminist only when he or she believes that women can be as good as men—and that they can also be as evil. The question becomes how, then, can a show that glories in the trafficking of perfect women be a feminist enterprise? Dollhouse seems to fairly smack of misogyny.

However, this is Joss Whedon we’re talking about, so we need to look again. Three episodes in, Dushku’s eternally plastic Echo seems to be made of sterner stuff than she initially appeared in the pilot. Dushku is not much good at playing blank. Her features read too lively, too mercurial, to play convincingly empty but for cheerful obedience. This would be a problem if Echo were the ideal Stepford operative; by the third episode, she clearly is not. She may embody the silver screen upon which buyers project their wishes, but as she herself announces in the pilot episode, a clean slate is never clean. It always retains residue of its history, and like a slate, the brain of the cleverly named Echo is never washed completely.

This dirtiness stands to reason in the Whedonverse because rather than unthinkingly duplicate the cultural mechanisms that churn out the cookie cutter template for women, Dollhouse questions them. The best example of this critique is the most recent episode, “Stage Fright,” that centers on Rayna, a Beyoncé/Britney/Rihanna hybrid, who complains of being “grown in a lab” and of being “a factory girl,” and whose wish to be killed by her number one fan is as much fueled by her desire to escape her gilded cage as it is by her desire to give a good show. It’s a pretty, compelling portrait of any number of young female celebrities who have been rendered powerless through money, fame and management. The problem is that you can’t critique a media system without appearing to be complicit in it, especially if you’re making a television program on Fox. And yet I detect the criticism amid the glitter, pop music and washboard abs.

It’s not Dollhouse’s slippery grappling with female representation that troubles me. It’s that three specific elements of the Whedonverse seem absent from the show. Dollhouse lacks the trademark Whedon humor, for one thing, and though there are a few toss-away funny lines, they’re buried in a gloomy atmospheric murk. Second, the show’s premise is so complicated that it overpowers the program. Buffy’s simplicity was genius: its surface arc was “the blonde girl is not a victim but a savior,” while its metaphoric arc was “high school really is hell.” This simplicity allowed the program to grow in unexpected ways and to expand both on literal and metaphoric levels. Dollhouse’s prolix concept seems to overburden its narrative. And finally, while Buffy, Angel and Firefly all drew their narrative strength on the show’s complex bonds between people, Dollhouse’s infinitely replaceable personages preclude these bonds. There can be no Scoobies, no Angel Investigation, no Serenity in the Dollhouse world; relationships are forgotten as soon as they’re forged.

The real issue at the heart of the show is that when your central character is constantly changing, your audience has a hard time liking her. We can feel for her in an abstract and anxious way, but because she doesn’t sit still long enough for us to attach to her like moss to a stone, we can’t identify with her as we did with Buffy, Angel, Mal or any of the other myriad characters that populate the Whedonverse. It’s hard to find a likable character on Dollhouse, and that may be Whedon’s ultimate undoing. I can appreciate their abs, their abilities, and their wardrobe, but I stop short of wanting to be them. That’s a problem.

And yet because I love Whedon’s work so ardently, I’m going to give him and his new show as many chances as Fox will allow him. He has his work cut out for him, but if he can make the concept resonate in the heart, it might just be genius. I hope for the time when watching Dollhouse gives me a visceral thrill, an emotional response, and a gut laugh—and not just an intellectual jungle gym.

so many thoughts, so little skin

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single tattoo in possession of open space is in want of some company. Which is to say that my intermittent compulsion to get inked seems to come not from my conscious but rather arises from my flesh itself. This feeling is, of course, imaginary. I realize the limitations of my skin; its cognizance is limited to expressions that feel metaphorically onomatopoetic. “Ow!”, “mmmm!” and “eesh!” are about as articulate as my soft tissue gets. The time has come to get tattooed, for my usually dumb dermis has started to scream.

My first bundle of tattoos will turn twenty this summer. They were three bees—one on my ribcage under my left breast and two hovering in the general vicinity of the waistband of my jeans on my lower abdomen and hip. I got them in Derby, CT, a town that is if not the armpit of Connecticut is at least its nostril. My first three tattoos cost me $100 and they were inked by Spider Webb, something of a legend in the tat world. As he was tattooing me, Spider told me a story about a man who had himself covered with accurate illustrations of butterflies from around the world. By chance, he walked into a bar and met a beautiful lepidopterist. They fell in love. It ended tragically. My time at Spider Webb’s was an experience that supports the adage that your first is always your best. I got tattoos, a story told to me, a story I could tell, and a t-shirt.

Eight or so years later, I was stripping and living a life of pompous edginess. I strutted and preened for a living. My days were hamburger-raw and hazy, and my nights stuffed with loud music, flashing lights and plastic shoes. Caught on the lintel between my strip life and my academic life, I was a creature neither of one world nor the other, and I was struck dumb about it. So I got more tattoos. My bees had grown faint, what with the rubbing of jeans and g-strings. They cried out for color, so I went to Rising Dragon located at the foot of the Chelsea Hotel. Darren, the owner, colored my bees appropriately yellow and added two more—an African bush bee on the back of my neck and a digger bee on my right sacroiliac crest.

My right ankle twitched and signaled my next tattoo, also by Darren, that of a lugubrious Victorian illustration of a moth with skulls on its wings. And when I realized that I had to remove my tongue ring because it was damaging my gums, I got this corresponding visceral kick to transform the two feminine bees on my abdomen into big, dark, flapping bats. They’re all about that raw and metallic urge to flip the world a collective bird.

When I had to put down my dog, the Legendary Spencer, I felt it all over my body, but I marked it with a print of his paw on my right shoulder. It’s an ugly tattoo, or at least the lettering around the paw is ugly, but its ugliness embodies the pain I felt about his loss. I knew before the day I walked Spencer to vet’s for the last time that I’d mark my dog’s death on my body. I put his paw where he once reached when he jumped up on me in exuberance and in love. Some Brazilian boy did the tat, inexpertly and deeply.

My most recent tattoo is a quote from James Joyce, the last seven words in Ulysses, “and yes I said yes I will yes.” It’s a faint, nearly illegible tattoo, but it’s a thing of beauty. This one was done by a woman, Stephanie Tamez, the person I now refer to “my tattoo artist.” This tattoo is in a book. The black-and-white photograph shows the tattoo and my wrist in all its glory, including the white slug of my suicide attempt that crawls inexorably toward my thumb.

Today I’m pondering a new tattoo. Two patches of skin call out, each in a different place, each with a different cry. My right shoulder wants a frame for the keening black that is my Spencer tattoo. It’s too naked and too emotionally bloody. It needs some soft, protective coating. Something with levity, perhaps, coiling around it like cultural cotton. Therefore, I’m considering making a semi-sleeve out of words; two quotes jump like puppies. One is "Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc,” which are, as Morticia Addams, not just pretty words. I cleave to the concept that my innate defiance gives me strength. Why not put it on my arm, in Latin, and be cheeky with it. The other is, naturally, a quote from Buffy, the ineffable force that kept me alive this past year: “I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it.” Pop culture is as much a part of my life as Joyce, and it seems to form a slender logic that my right shoulder wants to announce it.

My back, however, has a different idea. It flows all cold and high-brow in its somatic response to my shoulder’s snuggling up to pop. It wants the Beaudelaire poem “Enivrez-Vous,” in French, naturellement. My back, at least the strip on my left side from shoulder blade to waist, feels Gallic, pretentious and bohemian, apparently. And yet it’s a poem I love, love with an extra-flamey, white-hot burning passion, and it espouses an idea that I strive to embody, even as I recognize the adolescence of its charm. Who doesn’t want to stay drunk on wine, poetry, virtue or whatever? No one I want to have lunch with.

My tattoos, my shrieking flesh, and my inevitable choice currently are stuck in the bureaucratic wicket. I have some time to see which part of me, shoulder or back, no-brow or high-brow, screams the most stridently. In the meantime, I will sit quietly and listen to that inexpressible prickle signaling the time to get buzzed.

books, books, books and a loss of loss of self

I read an awful lot, though I tend to hoard more books than I actually read. When I die, I’ll most likely be sent to a revision of Dante’s fourth level of hell. I imagine myself in the crowd of other bibliomaniacs like Oprah and Edward VI, all of us pushing giant library carts stuffed with triple-decker Victorian novels and non-sequential volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary shouting, “Hoard them! Hoard them!” and we’ll crash thunderously against an opposing stream of people like Anthony Comstock and Sarah Palin pushing carts full of Harry Potter and The Origin of the Species and screaming, “Burn them! Burn them!” Either that, or I’ll spend eternity at the roots of some giant tree that forever lashes me with its branches, should the pagans be right.

I don’t read as much as some people, but I do spend a fair amount of my time reading something—often things on the Internet, but more often books. I live my life awash in narrative, and I’m fine with that. I firmly believe in the transformative, explanatory and healing power of a good story. Fictions—and all stories are fictions, even those based in fact, perhaps especially those based in fact—are necessary. Fictions bring order to the roiling chaos of our interior lives. Stories are what we tell ourselves and to others in an incessant effort to make sense of everything from the trajectory of a career, to the rise and fall of empires, to the gravitational swirl of planets, toilets and love.

A reader recently asked me how many books I’ve read. The answer is I don’t know, and this uncertain hole sits at the center of this piece. I tend to juggle three or four books simultaneously. Right now, I’m concurrently reading Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory; Harry Potter 7, The Deathly Hollows; Jan Bondeson’s A Cabinet of Medical Curiousities; and Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire. I’m about twenty pages into the first, 400 into the second, 150 into the third, and 25 into the last. I also have four other books next to my bed in various stages of neglect: Dicken’s Great Expectations; a collection of Pulp fiction, the all-crime edition; an annotated Dracula (I have three different versions); and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which if I’m going to be honest with myself I may not get through again. Right now.

I will read just about anything but historical non-fiction, sports books and technical manuals. The first bores me, the second confounds me, and the third is like reading English translated into Klingon and then back into English. In the past two months, I’ve finished something like eighteen books (five graphic novels, two memoirs, six novels (three juvenile fiction), three noir novels, a great book on writing, and one book that defies genre on these totally macabre dollhouses that this woman spent her dotage building in order to train cops on reading crime scenes); these are all in addition to the books beside, in, and around my bed that I named in the previous paragraph. Currently, my favorite bed partners are books, which is either a sad state of affairs or not, depending on your point of view and level of friskiness.

I have three bookshelves that stand three feet wide and about seven feet tall. But for one shelf’s worth of space, they are jam-packed with books. I’ve read about 7/10 of the books on these shelves completely or nearly completely. I just got a book in the mail today (David Lynch’s meditation book), one last week (Titters, the 1976 anthology of female humor), and I’m expecting another any day (Michael Chabon’s new collection of essays, which I ordered from McSweeney’s).  If I had to name my top last few books, they’d have to be that weird dollhouse book, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death; Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and his Graveyard Book; Nabokov’s Lolita, which I just reread and loved as passionately as the first time I read it twenty-five years ago; and Dark Banquet, this fantastic book on sanguivores by Bill Schutt. If you love leeches like I love leeches, you need this book.

On any given day, I have about sixty books on my Amazon wish list. Unsurprisingly, they’re from a hodgepodge of genres and by a cavalcade of authors. There are books by astrophysicists, and there are books on eighteenth-century coffee house culture. I’ve picked out three books on fashion, four graphic novels, two epidemiological books, a couple on politics, one on robotics and another on the sex-life of insects. There are also a bunch of run-of-the-mill novels.  I have catholic tastes in reading.

And yet, as much as I read now, and as much as I love it, I rarely experience the kind of slip-sliding of self that would occur when I was young. It started when, at about the age of seven, I discovered I could read to myself, and it lasted until my mid-twenties. I would read a book and I would be thoroughly immersed in it, submerged in its narrative thrall as I am in my dreams. I would rise only when called by necessity—the urgent press of pee, the undodgeable phone call, the unshirkable presence of a parent, boyfriend or friend. Then I would struggle through the narrative’s pool back to consciousness; I would put the book down with truculent reluctance; and I would fret until my return.

These days, I don’t suffer that sublime loss of consciousness that I remember from my reading youth.  I don’t know if it’s age or experience or the years I spent in school dissecting writing like an anatomist bent over a cadaver. I don’t know if it’s because I myself am writing more, and therefore I’m acutely aware of every mercurial turn of phrase, of each shifting transition, of each song of syntax, and when or where those turns, transitions and syntactical choices fall flat. I imagine being a writer and reading is not unlike being a musician who hears an orchestra attuned not just to the swell and fall of the symphony but also to the piccoloist who just isn’t pulling his or her woodwind weight. No matter what, I am aware that what I’m doing is reading. It’s a drag.

I miss the great escape that books once gave. I chase that fall from consciousness like I’ve read about heroin addicts chasing their first high. I read consumptively.  I read, in no small part, because I’m searching for that book that once more will give me what I’ve lost: the pure immersion into a seamless story more wondrous, more ghastly, more pathetic, more beautiful, and more real than my own.

a period piece: or, a call for the end of bloody segregation

I am a menstruating woman. Which is both to say that I am a woman who menstruates—and therefore neither one who has not yet started nor one who has ceased to menstruate—and to say that right now, this moment, as I write this piece, I have my period. Now 46, I’ve been getting my period about 33 years and seven months; I’ve had something around 395 periods, give or take a couple of months for pregnancies, anomalies and bad math. Factoring the length of my average period of five days, I’ve spent 1,975 days or just under five-and-a-half years on the rag, as it were.

Thus I know of what I speak. A lot of time has passed since my very first period at the age of twelve in August, 1975. Yet I still remember it as I remember very few specific days. I know that then, as now, my period appeared at around 5:00 p.m. I know that I was lying on my belly watching some program on my family’s tiny black-and-white television. I know that I felt an alien low-grade fire deep in my underbelly, a strange and unparseable pain that remains strange and unparseable to this day. I remember getting up, going to the bathroom, sitting on the toilet and finding that sanguine smear in my white panties. I remember sighing heavily and then pragmatically and reluctantly donning the belt-and-pad contraption my grandmother had bought me some months earlier.

I remember feeling exactly how stupid that thing was with its weird bra-strap elastic and its strange little buckles. I remember hating the thickness of the pad and fretting over its visibility. I remember hating the whole kit-and-caboodle, this-girl-is-a-woman-now stupidity of it. I remember telling my mother, and I remember asking her not to tell my father, and I remember that she did anyway. I remember finding out about her betrayal when, after I said something to my dad about having a stomach ache, he turned to me from the driver’s seat of the car and said something along the lines of “Some ladies when they have their periods feel pain” and then launched into something about how female clitorises were actually larger than penises and I shouldn’t feel badly. I remember feeling absolutely mortified. As well as angry.

I remember the next day that I was supposed to go to the beach, and I remember spending at least two hours in the painful and ultimately triumphant endeavor of stuffing my mother’s super industrial-sized tampon into my twelve year-old vagina, something that took so long we never got to the beach. I remember crying with anger and pain in the process, and I remember crying with anger and pain later when I discovered that tampons also came in “Slender,” the size I still use to this day. I remember the week of my first period as I remember few other swaths of time. Perhaps only one other week in my life retains the color-saturated details of my first menstrual week.

I’m fairly certain that I’m not alone in my ability to summon this specific memory, even without the aid of a sanguine Madeleine. The breathy anticipation surrounding the release of eighteen-year-old Rachel Kauder’s My Little Red Book, an anthology of first-person first-period stories, argues the power that these memories hold for women. The truism that we all are born alone and we all die alone might be modified to say that we women all go through our first period alone too, even if we are surrounded by people. On a fundamental level, it’s an experience that every woman has on her own, as much as it forms a bond between us.

I don’t have an issue with this book—it’s a fairly brilliant premise. I may read it; I may not. I don’t have a whole lot of patience with narrowly themed anthologies. But I can see the value in telling stories. Narratives provide frameworks for the ways we experience our lives, for the ways we can make order out of chaos, and for the possibilities we might change. With these points in mind, I do have a problem with this book being cordoned off as a women’s book, a book that needs to be passed around under tables like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was in middle school, and a book that—above all—needs to be kept out of the hands of men.

Such is the way that New York Times reviewer Dr. Abigail Zuger treats it in her review, “In The Open At Last, A Secret That All Women Share.” Giving the context of private dressing rooms in Victoria’s Secret, the presence of segregated “men’s and ladies’” bathrooms at the musical Hair, and the continued acceptance of teaching Sex Ed to both genders separately, Dr. Zuger seems to want to keep period-talk within the confines of the red tent.

“At this point,” Dr. Zuger says about a third of the way through the review, “male readers may want to go outside and toss a ball around for a while. No matter how sympathetic, how curious or how deeply interested in life’s little yuck factors you are, this collection is unlikely to hold more than the mildest intellectual appeal for you. But it is hard to imagine any woman, from the most straitlaced and body-denying to the most uninhibited and body-embracing, who will not read right through it with pure enjoyment, small flashes of recognition and the urge to buy it for every female preteen in sight.” Oh, dear.

This is the part where I get angry with Dr. Zuger. Because she assumes that men need to be protected by the “yuck factors” of our mysterious women's bodies. Because she suggests that men—the very men who may become fathers—ought to busy themselves with masculine activities centered on balls, rather than worry their tender little heads with our “female trouble.” Because she seems to argue that nothing—nothing—illustrates the difference between men’s and women’s bodies like the fact that once a month for most of women’s lives, we bleed, and that it’s our job as women to hide that bloody light under an absorbent cotton bushel.

It’s actually kind of ironic that Dr. Zuger feels the need to perpetuate the hoary gender separation that generations have constructed around menstruation—especially since she chooses to mention by name Gloria Steinem’s essay “If Men Could Menstruate.” Our culture has come up with a colorful run of phrases to sidestep the point-blank utterance of “I have my period.” Whether “Aunt Flo is here to visit,” or we’re “riding the cotton pony,” or we’ve “fallen off the roof,” or we’ve simply “got our friend,” we chicks perform linguistic loop-de-loops to hide our ever-present embarrassment over our “monthlies.” Even “feminine product” advertising employs the ubiquitous and incongruous blue liquid in their ads. Should I ever look down at a pad and see the cool blue of radiator fluid, I’d be fairly freaked out. Our culture, like Dr. Zuger M.D., likes to euphemize menstruation—as goes death, constipation, and incontinence, so go periods.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ll not be shocked to discover that I, like Steinem, am really tired of treating menstruation like it’s some kind of sacred, if twee, activity. I don’t furtively buy menstruation gear. I have no problem sending my boyfriends out to pick up a pack of O.B. tampons for me. I’d like it if the world just got over their collective pool of ooginess about what women’s bodies do. For that reason, I think that if you do buy a copy of “My Little Red Book” for your pre-teen, as Dr. Zuger says you should do, you should also buy one for any man with a close personal relationship to a woman. For the sake of women everywhere, and for the possibility of change in the future, your boyfriend, your daughter’s father, even your dad should probably read this book. Even if I don’t.

(You can find out-takes of My Little Red Book here, and you can even tell your own story, should you have one.)

to pee or not to pee, or freud had a point

The other night while at the ITF reading and after consuming two giant glasses of soda water with cranberry and one tiny dram of bourbon (because I had to get my Dorothy Parker on), I was struck by the completely understandable human need to pee. This is not usually a problem. I have been housebroken for decades and one thing I do count among my pool of attributes is fastidious care of my bathing-suit area. I’m not anal, except in the good way, but I do like to keep things cleaner than a whistle. When you’re a chick and have to pee whilst at a bar—and I say nothing new here—it’s almost always an exercise of gymnastics and virology. Invariably, you have to contort your body into some pose worthy of a Cirque du Soleil dancer in order to suspend your belongings and your bottom to squirt uncomfortably and inaccurately into the bowl. Usually, there is a failure and something gets wet. It’s a whole big thing.

It is not, however, a whole new thing. During the eighteenth century, a woman of means wore an awful lot of clothing. Her outfit consisted, from the inside out, of the following items: a long chemise, a corset, a pannier or bustle, a petticoat or two, an underskirt, an overskirt, a floor-length combination of a jacket and a dress that was generally hand-sewn into the corset, and a fichu or scarf tucked around the neck and into the bodice. It was a breathtaking amount of clothes that averaged around 15-30 yards of fabric. When you consider that the undergarments of corset and pannier were constructed of steel and/or whalebone and/or bamboo, you have to factor in yet more weight. To that, add the weight of wigs that at the beginning and the end of the long eighteenth century could tower a couple of feet into the air and weigh up to twenty pounds.

Then consider that there was no indoor plumbing for another half century or so. (There was also no antiperspirant, aspirin, penicillin, tampons, or toilet paper. There was, however, coffee, condoms and legal laudanum.) Instead of toilets or water closets, upper-class people had a fancy chamber-pot of sorts, which is to say that rather than just having a pot made of metal or clay all naked and out in the open, they had a pot made of metal or clay hidden in a fancy chest with a lid one opened to find a seat and a cabinet for the chambermaid to open and remove the contents. (In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, this system was amended so that all of the contents of the cabinets rolled, slid, slithered, or dripped into a large collecting pool in the house’s basement. There it was trucked out weekly. A friend of mine is writing a fascinating dissertation on the relationship between human waste and masturbation in the eighteenth century, but I digress.)

 Unsurprisingly, it was a massive pain in the everything for an upper-class woman to leave the table, or the ball, or the theater box, whenever she needed to pee. Thus was born the female urinal, which the wealthy woman in question and in need could signal her maid to bring, tuck up under her voluminous skirts, hold in place as she peed, and then whisk away to territories best left unimagined—all with no discernable break in the festivities.

Most female urinals of the eighteenth century looked a lot like gravy boats. They could be plain clear glass, cast metal, or ceramic and painted. My very favorite one is a blown glass urinal in the shape of a penis complete with testicles and a tip as red as the nose of Santa’s most famous reindeer. I found this image at the British Science and Society Picture Library, one of my favorite online destinations. What I particularly like about this urinal is not only its mischievous motif, but also its multi-tasking design. You can’t tell me that the woman who owned this thing did not use it in the privacy of her own boudoir.

(Dildos, of course, were also fairly common among the elite of the era, or at least common enough that John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, wrote a scathing and hilarious poem about them. I like this photo, again from the Science and Society site, of an ivory dildo “in the form of an erect penis” that, the site claims, “came complete with a contrivance for simulating ejaculation.” Nothing is quite as exciting as faithful verisimilitude.)

Verisimilitude seeming to be a concept underlying the design of at least one contemporary portable female urinal. (Urinals come in two genders—male and female, and two main types—stationary and portable. Male stationary urinals are ubiquitous. Female stationary urinals are problematic, even if people try to tell you they’re not. Male portable urinals are for truckers, as is speed. Female portable urinals are the topic at hand.) The Shenis is pretty much the great-great-great-grand-daughter of our blown-glass progenitor up there. It’s twelve inches of gold urinary splendor, and although punning Shenis is shaped remarkably like a cunning penis, the site sternly tells the reader, “It’s not a sex toy…and isn’t intended to be used as one.” Thank you for the heads up.

The Shenis, as the doughty editors of Jezebel demonstrated in October, 2007, helps a woman to pee standing up without much fear of dribbling on her shoes or down her thighs. The makers of the Shenis proudly and cheekily nod to Freud, theories of penis envy, size matters, and even phallic racial stereotypes on their site. I can appreciate the élan of peeing while standing, but it’s hard to imagine swaggering through a crowded bar, and standing in line for the loo, my Shenis in hand. Discreet, the Shenis is not. Wish fulfilling, it might be.

The FUD (or female urinal device, the acronym of choice for girls who want to pee like boys) also comes in pink and vaguely vulval. The Feminal ™ looks like the spawn of a gas can and an obstetrician’s model of a vagina. It’s also pink, so you know it’s for girls. It is resealable, which is a plus for female truckers, I guess, if no one else. There’s also the SheWee, which has the look of camping gear and is marketed to outdoorsy women. There’s the unisex IPEE, which looks uncomfortably like a mini water bottle and is biodegradable.  And there’s the interchangeably named She-Pee or P-Mate, which is made of cardboard and seems to be marketed to women who arrange their lives and their wardrobes around Coachella and Glastonbury. None of these devices seem to solve the wiping issue, which is to my mind rather looming. Not to mention damp. All of these devices seem to require a pun in their names, word to the wise if you’re any one of the 10,000 patent-holders on urination devices.

There’s a lot of appeal to peeing while standing, at least there is for those of us who aren’t readily able. (There’s at least one voluminous website that seems pretty dedicated to the premise that women can—and should—pee standing, but I remain unconvinced and seated.) The standing pee seems to be hindrance-reduced. Men just whiz right in and out of bathrooms. And they so rarely worry about their hems, asses or accessories getting wet. Bully for them.

I find it interesting exactly how much we associate masculinity with the ability to pee upright, or the other way around, or—for that matter—sitting down to pee with femininity. Men, frankly, can do it both ways, but the only thing that’s notable about men choosing to pop a squat is that it’s somehow faintly effeminate, something a man only does if he’s a boy, an invalid, or hen-pecked. Real men, it appears, pee standing. And in the case of public urination, if nowhere else, I find it hard not to concede the Austrian doctor his due. I, at least when confronted with a dank, damp toilet seat, remain envious of the dicks who can do what I can’t, those who can stand when I must squat.

live, direct and In The Flesh

If you're in Gotham, delight in the carnal, love Susie Bright like I love Susie Bright, and want to see me read, you need to go to tonight's Very Special Episode of Rachel Kramer Bussel's erotic reading series In the Flesh. Every writer who is reading appears in Susie's bordello-scarlet anthology X: The Erotic Treasury. My story gets down and dirty, while I get down and scrubbing. It's both red hot and ice cold. And there's an audience, but only one person.

Intrigued? Of legal age? Come to Happy Endings at 302 Broome St. Show up early. Doors open at 7:00, the show starts at 7:30. It's free as air and twice as bracing. I'm going on just before the two headliners, so kind of late in the program.

And if you do come, please do say hi. I'll be the hot forty-something with excessively long blonde hair, a prodigious rack and the DVF white-purple-and-blue abstract print wrap dress. I only look like a total bitch; underneath, I'm a bigger cupcake than anything Rachel will ever eat.

For more information, get thee to the In the Flesh blog.

of mutts and men

“Men are dogs,” people say in order to disparage the males of our species. Men are like dogs, presumably, because they tend toward the promiscuous, the easily distracted, and the eternally hunting. Like dogs, men will sniff all tails, hump anything animate and inanimate, eat trash with gusto, and do it all without any visible (and proper) shame. Men would lick their own balls if, like dogs, they were anatomically predisposed to doing so. Men would prefer to be low-down, lazy and dirty, like dogs. Men and dogs, above all, share an insatiable yen for pussy. And thus, men are dogs.

I actually like the men who are most like dogs. Think of it this way. Linguistically, the to be verb “is” enacts the equal sign and, as we all know from algebra class, flipping an equation does not affect it. If A+B=C, then C=A+B. Therefore, if men are dogs, then dogs are men. (Likewise, if love is war, then war is love; if diamonds are a girl’s best friend, then a girl’s best friend is a diamond; if life is a bitch, then a bitch is life. And so on. Try it at home, it’s fun.) But as anyone who has ever stood on her head knows, what a difference an inversion makes in a Weltanschauung.

The concept “men are dogs” cherry-picks from a dog’s least desirable attributes (or those least desirable to human interaction; these traits seem to work just fine for canines). The sniffing, smelling, chasing, humping and indiscretion of dogs become those of men in the conventional metaphor. Flip the order and suddenly men are imbued with a whole new set of qualities. They’re trustworthy. They’re faithful. They’re noble. They’ll tell you when Timmy’s down the well, save babies from burning buildings, travel thousands of miles of treacherous terrain only to be with you, sleep happily and protectively at your feet, mourn when you leave, and jump with joy when you return—even if you only went downstairs to get the mail.

In my twenties, I considered myself a cat person. I looked askance at the dumb devotion of a dog. I mistrusted the unquestioning commitment of a canine. I derided the mute submission of the mutt. Why would I align myself with any creature that obligingly came when called? Give me the twitchy-tailed and haughty. At least cats were cool. I couldn’t imagine wanting a dog, even though I’d grown up with them and loved them.

Nearing thirty, I found myself changing, and I got the Legendary Spencer. He was everything I could ever want in a dog—smart, beautiful, connected, playful, funny, obliging, obedient and unequivocally mine. When he died, I was distraught, and then I adopted Boswell, who is as much like Spencer as he is different (he’s smart but neurotic, playful but frenetic, obedient but challenging, beautiful but a total goofball), and I realized that I am a dyed-in-the-wool, never-look-back dog person, and I’m good with that. More importantly, I realized that many of the qualities I love in my dog are the ones I desire in a man: intelligence, connection, commitment, affability, and a love of napping.

I do not, however much I like them both, want to treat men like dogs. I don't believe there's value in the wash of self-help manuals that suggest you can "train" your man using a metaphoric collar and leash, nor do I believe there's much good in the book that argues you can find love if you "pick your breed of man." Google the phrase "men are dogs" and you'll see a plethora of this kind of codswallop written with the intent to make women feel...something. If you want to train something, get a real dog. If you want to establish an equable relationship, find a real man.

I have written before of my Wookie fantasy. I recognize the embodiment of what I like in both men and dogs in Chewbacca. I suppose that doggy-man thing also explains my affection for Sirius Black from Harry Potter and my love of Oz in Buffy, especially Oz, the werewolf played by Seth Green. I would initially consider myself a Spike girl, but really the man who personifies the man I want is Oz—a whip-smart analytic dude whose offbeat cool masks the primal beast yowling beneath, the man who would literally go to the ends of the earth to find a way to be with me. Oz’s guitar playing would only be the icing on the dog biscuit.

Language shapes the way we think, and neither clichés nor metaphors are an exception. In my mind, men should be dogs: great, big, smelly, hairy, loving, wet-tongued dogs. I’m all for bringing out the mutts in men.

a sea-change in a sex change

Longtime readers of my pretty dumb things may have noticed a change in my writing—and not merely the fact that after a long and robust glacial age, the block has thawed and I am now writing again. No, rather I speak of the complete dearth of sex writing.

I’ve always said this was a blog with sex and not a blog of it. That distinction, however, was probably a pallid one in the eyes of my larger audience. At its peak, this blog had some pretty respectable stats; it averaged around 4,000 pages a day read by around 2,000 readers. Those readers arrived at my virtual bedpost because my blog had come to light through a cluster of connections with other sex blogs, whether big, small or anything in between. Becoming part of that larger community of—and I use this term reluctantly because I’m not fond of it—sex-positive people was pretty exciting. I felt enlivened by a groundswell of support of such like-minded, happy fucking folk.

And yet that sense of belonging didn’t come without a steaming side dish of obligation. While I’d begun writing about sex because it really was the thing taking up the biggest portion of my sludgy grey matter, I didn’t consciously make the decision to write a sex blog. I had stumbled upon the challenge of translating the purely somatic and ineffable into the completely intellectual and articulated, and I found out I was good at it. Praise can be a terrific motivator (one even better than spite, it turns out), and so I wrote more often about sex because more and more people seemed to like it. I became the editor of Tuesday’s Fleshbot sex-blog roundup. I got more readers. I found myself writing more about sex to keep them. I acquired more readers and so on. It was a circle-jerk of a sort and it felt just fine.

Until the time when it didn’t.  All of a sudden, I found myself wearied rather than energized when I contemplated which of my sex ponies to trot out into the ring. The sex writing wore on me, and it wasn’t just the compulsion to find something dirty, wet, glistening, pungent, roseate and adamantine to write about. It was also that I’d grown closer to my X, Donny. We grew close as kudzu, and with that embiggening intimacy came a reluctance to splay our relationship open like an anatomist’s textbook. I began to feel as if tour-buses were unloading in my bedroom, and the exposure caused discomfort. Still, though, because I had so many readers, I kept writing about sex.

Beginning about a year ago, the time when I realized that my break with my X was absolute, I stopped writing about sex because I stopped having it, and because slaloming in the wake of pain as I was, the subject just hurt too much to submerge myself in it. I began writing about sex less and less, and then I began writing anything less and less, and then I stopped writing altogether.

These days I don’t have a lot of interest in writing about sex at all. Part of my erotica apathy stems from the sense that I’ve written a lot about sex. I’ve described it. I’ve intellectualized it. I’ve made it funny. I’ve made it emo. I’ve done it in a train. I’ve done it with some pain. I’ve done it with a frown. I’ve done it with a clown. And I don’t know how much more I have to say about the sex. I am proud of my sex-writing. It’s damn good and it taught me a lot. It also has helped other people, or so all the emails I have received specifically about my deep-throating posts have led me to believe.

So there’s the feeling that I’ve done it to death. But there’s also the inescapable fact that I’m not fucking anyone right now, and while it would be nice to do so in the future, I’d like to fuck that person without the intellectual specter hanging over my bed and narrating what I’m doing and feeling. No one needs to imagine an apparitional Howard Cosell providing color commentary whilst one is going at it like rabid mongooses, not unless that fantasy would enhance one’s experience, in which case have at it. Plus there’s the fact that most humans don’t want their sexual experiences put into artful narratives and posted where the virtual world can see it. Sex with a human would be nice. Some day.

It’s hard to change branding. Even though Blackwater has become Xe, will we ever forget what it did? Or ponder about the disaster that was New Coke. We humans have long memories, however often we forget where we put our glasses. I realize that this will not be the pretty dumb things of yore, yet I hope that my old readers will stay with me, because the small girl within me wants to please everyone, even as the grown woman knows that’s an utter impossibility. I can’t say I’ll never write the sex again, I just can’t say when it will be.

I can, however, tell you that “poodle” is, was, and always will be my safe-word. I look forward to the day when I again have the sublime opportunity to use it, regardless of whether I choose to put it in writing.

résumé, or why I write of Dorothy Parker

Of late, I’ve found myself awake in the small, dark hours of the morning dissecting Dorothy Parker’s “Résumé.” It’s one of the very few poems I’ve memorized; the others are a couple of Hamlet’s soliloquies. I have a thing for suicidal poetry and not much else, though I can rattle off the first few lines of T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock.” I may be terribly pretentious, but I tend to the prosaic. And yet “Résumé” circles like a buzzard in my brain.

Here’s the text of the poem, in case it’s not stamped onto your hippocampus as it is on mine:

Taken at a first reading, it’s a poem that treats the serious matter of suicide in a nonchalantly callous, even flip, manner. The laundry list of methods, the condescending tone, the sarcastic last line—they all combine to create a speaker who has contempt for the subject matter and for anyone whose pain has pushed him or her to the limits. There’s a strange cognitive dissidence in every line—if a person hurts so badly that she’s putting her head in an oven, does she care if the “Gas smells awful”? If a person feels so dark that he’ll drink Drano, does he care that “Acids stain”? Not so much, and certainly not if the person is ready to go harshly into that good night.

The rhythm of the poem adds to its generally sneering tone. The Platonic ideal of English poems, as anyone who has been forced to take a poetry class knows, rests on the iamb, a two-syllable poetic foot where the stress sits on the second syllable: dah-DUM goes the iamb—sub-MIT, the BAT, en-TRAP, a LOT are all iambs. Iambic pentameter, a poetic structure wherein you have ten syllables broken into five iambic feet, has for myriad reasons assumed the position of the most well-known and best respected verse form. Think Shakespeare’s sonnets (Shall I/com-PARE/thee TO/a SUM/mer’s DAY? Or My MIS/tress EYES/are NO/thing LIKE/the SUN), and you’ll get the general idea.

“Résumé” resists the sophisticated iamb and its fluid pentameter line. Rather, it rocks along with the hurdy-gurdy rhythm of a nursery rhyme. Parker chose to use the trochee as the basis for the poem, two per line. The trochee is the exact opposite of the iamb, for the accent is on the first syllable of the two-syllable foot—PAR-don, BITE me, PER-ish, RIGHT now are all trochees. If you want to get technical, Dorothy Parker, that exquisite bitch, wrote “Résumé” using trochaic dimeter, a metrical scheme seen in such urbane verse as PET-er/PET-er/PUMP-kin/EAT-er, and others.

Look at it again:

You listen to the childish meter (compare it to RING a/ROUND the/RO-sy or ASH-es/ASH-es/we ALL/FALL DOWN). You hear the simple rhymes. You consider the sarcastic tone. And then you put what the poem does metrically and rhythmically up against that one foot that drops from line six only to reappear in line eight. You think, after all, what happens when the noose gives? The person lives, you answer, and that simple metrical sleight of hand forces you to reconsider the poem.

A résumé is, of course, a list of things a person does professionally. One does not attempt suicide professionally—or one doesn’t unless one is a poet or a writer. Consider for a moment the number of writers who killed themselves. Sylvia Plath didn’t mind the smell of the gas. Virginia Woolf overcame the dampness of the river. Ernest Hemingway found no barrier in the legality of firearms. Thomas Chatterton was undeterred by stomach cramps. And, most recently, David Foster Wallace’s noose held fast. With being a writer, Parker’s poem implies, comes pain and suicidality. (Peruse this incomplete Wiki list of writers who have successfully done the deed.)

All of which leads you to remove those twin accents shadowing the “e”s in the poem’s title. Remove them, and you get “resume,” the word that encapsulates the last line, “You might as well live,” a line that at first read seems to read with resignation. Erase the accents from the title, however, and the last line seems less resigned and more committed. These tricksome accents gesture at how important punctuation is. Note the semi-colons at the end of each poetic line. Semi-colons don’t provide a full stop as a period does; they suggest a close, intimate and continued connection.  The lines of “Résumé” do not end with a period. There is no end until the end, and the end leaves the reader with a continuation.

I’m not a person who puts a whole lot of stock in reading an author’s work biographically, but “Résumé” glows brighter if held up to Dorothy Parker’s life. The woman lived her life depressed—also, I might add, drunk. She attempted suicide several times. She always thought she’d die young and unknown and pointless on a rainy day. She didn’t. She died at 73, on a sunny day, in her Manhattan apartment. Her writing has never, ever been out of print, a feat that has escaped many other New Yorker writers. She lived in the sardonically optimistic spirit of her poem; she lived, she succeeded, she wrote, almost despite her own worst efforts.

I get the overlapping of the life-and-death waves in Parker’s “Résumé.” I too have lived my life hearing the mournful siren song of suicide. If it weren’t for my friends and my dog and a huge well of cowardice, I would not be here walking and talking and writing today. I spent great swaths of time this past fall laving myself in gothic fantasies. I jumped from bridges. I hung from ropes. I swallowed drugs. I slashed wrists. I drank glasses of drain opener. I lovingly imagined guillotines, but just try finding one on E-Bay.

And despite the uninterrupted imaginings of self-offing, I kept going. I kept up the daily pretense of life though mired in pain. It was serious rough, but I continued to rise in the morning, lie down in the evening, those lovely images of deadness dancing spectral in my head. Then, unaccountably, the dark mist drifted bit by bit and left me with my life, my work, and the happy poetry that happens when life resumes.

I’m not naïve enough to believe that I’ll never greet my suicidality again (hello, darkness, my old friend). I’m not living in a Panglossian world replete with Pollyanna optimism. I know that my depression and its accompanying death wish is on an endless loop, like the water cycle or one of those films at the museum. I know that even though the memory of my gothic daydreams seems distant, they are only as remote and as alien as happiness felt just a short time ago. I can’t explain what ineffable force brought me back to the world of the living, but I can embrace it for as long as it lasts.

(On my website is a recording of Dorothy Parker reading “Résumé,” which comes from the anthology Poetry Speaks. If you listen really closely, you can actually hear the cherry in her Old Fashioned.)

not so much a post as a postcard

If you've fallen in with the Twitter crowd, you know all smoking butts under the birds and assertively following every little thing Neil Gaiman, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Kawasaki and Molly Crabapple see fit to tweet. You can now follow me there too. Because you never know, I might say something interesting. Or I might just tell you what I ate for lunch.

Somehow Neil Gaiman makes drinking hot chocolate fascinating, even while staying under 140 characters. That's genius.

happy valentine's day. now sign a petition.

I'm going to put the heavy burden of my heart-singed cynicism aside and celebrate, yeah, love. In specific, I want to celebrate the love of my married gay friends Tom and Dimitry who got hitched in sunny California before the passage of Prop 8--and whose marriage is now threatened to be nullified because of legal briefs filed by Ken Starr. If Ken Starr is successful, over 18,000 same-sex marriages will be rendered illegitimate and these couples will be forcibly divorced.

Don't let this happen. Forget the flowers and the chocolates. Just hold the hands of the person you love, look in his or her eyes and say something loving. And then watch the video and sign the petition.

The right to marry is a civil right. Do what you can to keep Ellen & Portia, Melissa & Tammy, Simon & Jonathan, Tom & Dimitry and all those other loving people married. Support the freedom to marry and show that love is important to you every day, in every way and for everybody.

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

what I'll do for money, honey

I have been utterly felled by a vicious flu. I've had a fever, which is really rare for me because, like a reptile, my basal temperature hovers around 96 degrees. I'm weak, shaky, befuddled, and beset by vague ailments like the way my hair hurts and how I'm aware of my elbows. Plus, my brain has been racing whilst doing a scansion and a close reading of Dorothy Parker's "Résumé"; tell me that won't keep you awake.

Naturally, I've scheduled myself for a reading for this writers' group that I apparently belong to. I'm not much of a joiner. I am far too misanthropic and cynical, and yet joined this group I have. Moreover, I decided to go to a meeting of all single writers, and I've volunteered to read this piece I'm preparing to submit to the New York Times "Modern Love" column. (If you're not familiar with that particular column, go here for an idea.)

Anyway, I'm feverish and addled-headed, and I have to read this thing that's a rewrite of my earlier Vampire/mistress piece. If you feel like reading it, I've placed it below. It'll give you an idea of how I revise, which right now I'm thinking is not nearly enough.

It was an ancient arrangement conveyed in the most contemporary way and proposed in the most modern of terms. First in text message, then by email, and finally by cell-phone, a man employed his Blackberry to make me his mistress. Using contemporary parlance, he offered to “take care of me” if I “would hang out” with him. An answer of yes, and all my financial woes would disappear faster than wrinkles on a Botoxed brow.

I had met Alessandro in the summer of 2004, just before the Republican Convention. He was good-looking in a continental, tall, dark and world-wearily handsome kind of way. Ivy-league educated, given to crisp shirts and dry bon mots, Alessandro would not have looked out of place in a cravat. He lived in one of those old-money apartments on an old-money avenue; bland old-money first and last names sandwiched his chosen middle name, “Alessandro,” like Wonder Bread stuffed with Chianina. Alessandro was many things, but above all he was, to put it bluntly, exceedingly wealthy.

Money has never served as much of an aphrodisiac to me. I’ve not been much motivated by cash—for example, I chose to attempt a Ph.D. in English Literature, and after realizing that I wasn’t cut from an academic cloth, I chose to become a freelance writer. For me, dating a man who was rich was a sociological experiment: an unparalleled chance to experience up close a culture unlike my own. I didn’t date Alessandro because he was wealthy; I dated him because I liked him, his eyes ringed by brooding circles, his long-fingered hands, his way of taking me on his lap when he asked particularly intimate questions about my life. His money was a perk, it was charming, but it didn’t compel me more than, for example, a French accent or a career in elephant studies and an all-access pass to the Bronx Zoo.

In the first few weeks of seeing each other, Alessandro offered to fly me out to his summer home in the Hamptons. He made a big production of my speaking with the pilot, discussing schedules, and plotting itineraries, as if I had a life that required Secret Service-level planning. I felt faintly amused by the whole show, but mostly I felt glad to be spending a couple of days alone with Alessandro, whom I liked, but whom I didn’t entirely trust. In the end, the flight was cancelled due to security risks around the Convention, and I was driven out to the house in limo-driven style. Three days later, after two romantic dinners, a spectacular outdoor shower, lots of sex and even more conversation, I was returned by a hick driver in a stinky white van.

It was a fairly telling episode in my quasi-dating relationship with Alessandro. I didn’t have expectations or illusions about my status with this man. I had met him on a website unabashedly devoted to facilitating hook-ups between consenting adults. I was an adult. I consented. I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend. I saw Alessandro because I liked his company, but I wasn’t going to invest a whole lot in something that I knew pleasurable and ephemeral in equal measure. Alessandro was a friend I slept with, and I was fine with that.

The only way I could make sense of those days when I was choosing to consent—and choosing to do so early and often—was to limit mindfully my emotional involvement. I didn’t talk about my interior life with the men I dallied with. It felt too exposing, and thus I thrust myself into the great paradox that is modern no-strings-attached relationships: all sex and no intimacy. When Alessandro started to probe into my emotions, I hesitated answering, but answer I did, and when he seemed to dismiss me like the help on that Tuesday morning in that sunny, tasteful beach-house, I rankled and refused to see him. It felt like he had broken the rules in plumbing my feelings and then sending me packing. One or the other was fine and expected; both together were impolitic and hurtful.

All fall and into winter, he tried and tried again to see me, pleading and cajoling via text message, and eventually because it was the holidays and I was sad, I caved. We went to a play, we went to his house, he cooked me dinner. He was utterly, completely and winningly charming. His charm escalated from offering to take me to see some show I wanted to see, to suggesting we go with his friends, to buying me a first-class ticket to London, where he was going for business and I would join him for pleasure.

Offering me a trip to London was for me, a scholar in eighteenth-century British Literature, the equivalent of giving me cultural crack. My steely exterior melted in the fiery furnace of Alessandro’s sparkling largess, and I slept with him.

A week and a half later, having heard little from Alessandro, I called British Airways to check on the reservation. I was politely informed that Alessandro had called the next day and revoked the tickets. I wasn’t shocked, but I was hurt. I hadn’t wanted to believe Alessandro’s hype, and yet I had. I had exhaled gently, and I had fallen and crashed hard into that soft-smelling roseate cloud of potential love with a dark, handsome, emotionally unavailable man. I had bought the princess dream, however momentarily, and I had been betrayed not merely by this man but by my own good sense.

That was January of 2005. Since then, every year around the holidays, I would get a cryptic text from a man I assumed to be Alessandro—I had deleted his number and thrown away all information for him, so I didn’t know for sure. I never responded. At least I didn’t until this year, another holiday when I was feeling sad.

Text after text Alessandro sent, one yet more pleading than the next, and for the first time he signed his name. “Plze,” he said, “u have the power ill do whtvr u say.” “I want 2 make amnds,” he said, “tell me what 2 do.” “Im sorry,” he said, “let me make it up 2 u.” Finally, after many texts, I texted him back.

“Why?” I asked.

This word led to a prolonged, if truncated, conversation in texts and emails, and a brief fantasy shopping trip at the Apple store wherein I amassed an imaginary list of Mac devices totaling around $7,000. It ended with a phone call that took me by surprise. The phone rang, it was Alessandro, and he reiterated his offer in clipped, brusque speech to “take care of me” if I “hung out” with him.

In the weeks of sporadic texts from Alessandro, I had Googled him. I found a picture of him standing next to his apparent wife; he had evidently gotten married in the intervening four years. She was petite and appropriately blonde. I too am blonde, but far from appropriate; I’m tattooed and, while erudite, I’m often foul-mouthed. I have lived a life as colorful as my skin, and I’m not ashamed of it. I wasn’t shocked to see that Alessandro had married, nor was I shocked that he was pursuing me again. I was shocked that I was entering into any kind of conversation with him.

I knew, knew to the depths of my soul, that this man was a bad, bad man. Though openly desirous of an affair, he was less interested in sex than he was in the sweet exhalation of breath that signifies a woman’s descent into the outer reaches of love. I had heard from two separate friends on two separate occasions that they had friends who also had been swept off by Alessandro. New York can be a very small place. I knew that my interest to this man had less to do with me, my body or my mind, than it had to do with my consistent resistance to him. He merely wanted to see if he could, despite the wall of hurt he’d subjected me to in the past, make me fall again.

And yet, I was tempted. I have always reviled the film Pretty Woman for its shallow materialism and callow sexism, and yet there remains in me the secret Cinderella wish. The sweet, pink hope that a man, however emotionally stony, will suddenly provide me with financial security, physical luxury and, above all, love.  I’ve not wanted to admit the pilot light this hope has held in my secret breast, but there it was, on the other end of the phone.

“Alessandro,” I said, “I’ve always been straight with you in our brief relationship—“

“I’ve gotten married,” he said and cut me off. I told him I knew. “I’ll take care of you,” he repeated, and there flashed in my mind a vision of a life where I had more than $40 in my bank account, lived free of the monthly creative math required to pay my bills, and could readily summon the cash for my student loans.

“I don’t date married men,” I said. There was a pause.

“Well,” Alessandro said, “if that’s your hard line.” His voice trailed off.

I said it was, and we hung up. I fought the urge to hit the “return” button on my cell, call him back and change my answer.  Whenever I ponder the Sisyphean task of paying my monthly bills, I remain torn. I continue to question whether my choice, while undeniably moral, was absolutely right—or I do until I remind myself how undependable Alessandro was, with the exception of his extraordinary consistent unreliability. Remembering his staggering heap of unfulfilled promises helps to dull the ache of lost luxury goods.

I also marvel at the promiscuous mixing of old and new inherent to Alessandro’s offer. The arrangement of mistress and benefactor is one that time has not forgot, but to have it presented to me in a dizzying array of electronic devices and in the jejune language of a Freshman causes temporal vertigo. Even more, I wonder at my desire to say yes, because it’s not just about the money or just about the man. It’s also about the endurance of the mistress myth, the one colored by Belle Époque gowns and Julie Roberts movies and the general mystique that only very large hats can provide. I have to stand agape at my own desire to succumb to this hoary seduction, in spite of both my good sense and my political sensibilities.

In rejecting the man, the money and the mistress myth, I made the emotionally, psychologically, logistically, politically and morally good move. I made the only move a modern woman in my position could make. And yet, I can’t say I made it without looking back.

(Still want more pretty dumb things? Go here for archives by subject and here for archives by month.)

girls gone gross

“Oversharing is in,” said Rebecca Traister yesterday in her Salon column, “The Great Girl Gross-out,” thereby summoning the inherent chic of women’s writing graphically about their own bodies’ grossness, a genre of writing whose omnipresence sure makes it seem like all the red, moist, fusty rage.

Drawing a lot from websites, magazines, and books, Traister points to the trend of specifically female “oversharing” about specifically female parts. She quotes from posts on Jezebel that deal with the stink and agony of lost tampons and the stink and agony of garlic as a cure for yeast infections; she looks at Miranda Purves’ Elle article on the psychological horror and the genital gore of childbirth; she dwells on the recently published Little Red Book, an anthology of stories of first periods; and she briefly takes a peek at Charlotte Roche’s novel Wetlands, which begins with the sentence “As far back as I can remember, I’ve had hemorrhoids,” and which was recently released here translated from the German into the English. (Jezebel published a reaction to the piece, which you can read here.)

Traister’s column reveals that her reaction to this trend is a polyvalent stew of admiration, revulsion, empathy, wonder and irritation. Reading it, I got a sense that Traister couldn’t quite get past the shock and awww that signals a complex mixture of disdain and reluctant respect combined with a soupcon of condescension, a reaction that she cops to at the end. Somewhere in the middle, Traister writes, “for a lot of people who are doing the sharing, or experiencing it, it's not so much ‘too much information’ as it is the next, necessary step in personal-is-political, enlightened honesty about the female body.” She has a point.

As hard as it may be to read some of this writing—and maybe I’m showing my age here, but I do find it hard to read narratives that, as Moe Thacik’s did, liken the smell of a tampon to “a fermented tofu renowned for smelling like rotting fish meets sewage meets Black Death” and the look of it to “bloated like a corpse in the harbor.” However, you can’t negate that it is political, and in a very specific, very powerful, and very empowering way.

Women’s bodies have always served as the marker not only for beauty of the human form, but also for its horror. As a culture, we project our needs for physical beauty on women, an idea that is not new. We also use women’s bodies as the yardstick of our fear of our own bodies—our bodies’ smell, our bodies’ decay, our bodies’ nasty and invisible recesses, our bodies’ waste and all the myriad anxieties that these smells, decay, and effluvia cause.

I might be rushing to state this next point, and bear with me if I am because this is just a blog post ripped from the top of my fecund mind and not a fully researched article. I’m going to say it nonetheless: if you want to know what values a culture holds dear, you need to take a look at the way the culture looks at everyone from male to female, young to old, bottom to top, but if you want to see what makes the culture’s skin crawl with the inexorable creep of the horrorsloth, you need to look at the way the culture treats women’s bodies. I’m not suggesting that the way we look at male bodies, specifically aging male bodies, reveal nothing. Pictures, text about, advertisements involving male bodies with back hair, big guts, man-boobs, nasal tufts, bald heads and so on say a lot about how we think about aging and what fears we have about masculinity, but male bodies don’t serve quite the same cultural function that female bodies do. Men get a lot more latitude. Women don’t.

Reading Traister’s piece and the Jezebel pieces, and reflecting on conversations I’ve had, things I’ve written, and other things I’ve read, I realized that Traister was right about the grrrrl-power that shades the gross discourse of Sarah Silverman and the raw honest of book like Little Red. Sadie Stein of Jezebel weighs in, saying, “The female body will not be ignored: it burbles and leaks and creaks and drips and emits and produces and reproduces and generates and puffs and inflates and occasionally reeks. It is fascinating. It is scary. It is alarming. It is hilarious and silly and mysterious.” Stein’s joy in the freedom of language is palpable.

Mostly, reading all this writing about women’s newfound voice brought to mind Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” a poetic narrative of a man, Strephon, sneaking into his lover’s boudoir and discovering an eschatology of ever-increasing grossness. He begins with her dirty smock with its “armpits well be-smeared,” moves onto the fetid disarray of her cosmetics and dressing table, looks into her washbowl and examines her sputum, investigates the toes of her hose, and pauses to look in her mirror to imagine her squeezing her zits. Strephon’s long and lingering—and highly imaginative—foray into Celia’s private space crescendos when he reaches her commode, opens the lid, and looks in. The speaker exclaims,

Thus finishing his grand Survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away
Repeating in his amorous Fits,
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!

Everyone, as the children’s book notes, poops. But it’s women’s poop, women’s blood, women’s hair, women’s stink, women’s mysterious genitals that frequently bear the cultural burden for all of humanity’s pooping, bleeding, shedding, stinking and mystery. The important thing is that this kind of rude, crude, crass and lavishly descriptive discussion of female bodies used to be the sole provenance of men. Women didn’t talk this way, or they didn’t often, or they didn’t openly.

The only text I can summon that had this kind of down-and-dirty discourse was the 1976 book Titters: The First Collection of Women’s Humor. I read it at my friend Jess’s house, and I remember this florid, funny instructional on how to insert a tampon for the first time that ended with the tampon fully inserted in your ass. All the other humor about women’s bodies that I can remember—and I may just have lived a very cloistered life, or I may have lost said humor to the dustbowl of time—has been either women-written and very recent, or it was written by men.

A lot of the writing that Traister references feels strangely tomboyesque, and that makes sense because there is a built-in testicular swagger to a lot of it. Our model for talking out loud about women’s junk is masculine. It feels boyish because the discourse has always been by boys—or it has been highly euphemistic rainbows-and-princesses condescending dreck that treated women as if they needed to be coddled from the hard truths of their own anatomies.

To be a woman and to write boldly, nakedly, honestly and funnily about your own body is unquestionably a political act. It’s a revolutionary act. And someday, it may change the way we view the world of human bodies. Someday we might live in a world where every body holds beauty, every body holds secrets, and every body can poop, stink, bleed, decay and be gross, equally.

(Still want more pretty dumb things? Go here for archives by subject and here for archives by month.)

welcome to my pretty dumb dance

Joining a new blogging network is kind of like being the new kid at the sock hop. Sure, you know the steps and the music, but you still feel both out of place and painfully obvious. And writing that, I realize that I sound as if I actually went to sock hops, which in fact I didn’t, except for the one in eighth grade that was more of a costume dance than anything authentic. We all wore our best imitation of ‘50s garb and danced awkwardly to ‘70s music. A girl named Chris O’Brian—a name ironically shared by a man with whom I would later spend a couple of years trying to seduce while he held me at bay in a frigid purgatory of indecision—won the “Best Dressed” award because of her authentic poodle skirt. To this day, I covet that skirt.

I am new to this blog, but I am not new to blogging. For almost four years, I’ve penned a blog called pretty dumb things, and it won an award and got me interviewed and a few published articles and some renown (before which there was the painful nowning process). A lot of that blog holds content that is euphemistically called “Adult” or, more recently, “NSFW.” Which is to say that I wrote an awful lot about sex. I’ve always maintained that pretty dumb things was a blog with sex and not a blog of it, a statement that seems fairly prescient in that now that I’m not having sex, I don’t have to feel compelled to write about it. Or, then again, I might. Erotic writing is a lot more fun than doing laundry, or at least it is for me.

This fall I took a hiatus from writing, which is fairly ironic because I also quit a couple of jobs so that I could devote myself to writing. The very first thing that happened when I called myself a writer was the plummeting of the biggest writer’s block known to woman. It has been a block of magnificent size and fortitude. A monolith of a block, it has attained in my life the hefty significance of the Kaaba or the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This big, black hole of writing nearly consumed me, or perhaps it did consume me, and here I am having been masticated, digested and excreted ready to write again, however beaten, bedraggled and besmeared I may be.

At any rate, I look forward to being clasped to the fragrant bosom of the PNN network. I’m happy to be here, and I’m hoping you’ll have me, early, often and with great passion. Because that’s how I like it.

(Want more pretty dumb things? Feel free to browse my archives by date or by subject at www.prettydumbthings.typepad.com.)