Backbones

This post was written under the influence of a whole bottle of £8 Chardonnay, five pieces of Baklava, white cheddar cheese, toast with Irish butter, more toast, some humus I licked off my finger and what my brain told me was the rejection of companionship.

Every instance of excess comes with a warning...

I miss who I was, I miss who we all were in high school... Selfish and narcissistic, lacking in responsibility, which is especially relevant to relationships.

Oh fuck, she's ranting about love and sex again, thinking she's so philosophical and shit. Mmm, tell me how you really feel. Maybe we'll get into a fist fight, ponytails being pulled, bobby pins whizzing by like hay in a tornado.

Just as back then, it wouldn't make a god damn difference even today. My life would carry on and so would yours. But for a split second this scrap would be the only thing that mattered.

People don't give each other that feeling enough any more... once you're "grown."

We were angry and so awfully depressed and excitable and passionate about idiotic things.

When you get older and you watch the news and read philosophical books and visit other countries, you always have an excuse for why people act the way they do. "I guess she's having a bad day." "Who's to say what's better or worse?" "Sure." "I kinda want to text him, but I don't want him to think I'm clingy." You see both sides and generally try not to let one emotion boil out of control.

In Sweden, it's "Lagom." It's not good. It's not bad. It's so so. It's... lagom. But fuck lagom. I want to see something furious and confused and memorable. Make me nervous and uncomfortable. And happy, please... 

This is what I've learned: 

Coddle every emotion, not only the good ones. Every moment of heat behind your eyes, accept each tear whether there's a reason for it or not. Scream when your throat gets dry with anticipation of the sound. Dance and bump into people. Get roughed up. Fuck whoever and whenever you'd like. Take some drugs man. Drink and do so heavily. 

"Moderation in all things, including moderation," eh dear Petronius? I cannot stress enough how important "including moderation" is.
 

Because there are things you won't understand until you have excessed, until you been so promiscuous the gyno comes in an gives you antibiotics for trich, until you've taken that one pill that makes you lay in bed concentrating on how slow your heart is beating hoping it doesn't stop, until you've driven hundreds of miles after two Shakespeare's triple rum and cokes for no other reason than to sleep in a Motel 6, until you've been dropped off by a cab driver who speaks no English near the Hagia Sophia with a dozen lustful men helping you with your bags and maybe your pants, until you've scoured dirty New York streets for change under the shadows of Wall Street to get a subway pass home, until you've tasted blood from lips you've pierced but aren't sure what filthy bacteria swim in it.

That excess is beautiful. But here's the warning...

Once you've excessed, you won't be able to go back to the desk, back to the mainstream. That safety net starts to itch like that tag in your favorite undershirt. And you're picking at it all the god damn time, scratching at your side or the nape of your neck, trying to lay it down flat against your skin or pull it away. You finally decide to just cut it out, but you can't find scissors and the butter knife at the Italian restaurant is just too dull. So all that's left is to pull and you end up ripping a hole right at the seam in that favorite shirt you wear nearly every day... under all the other tops.

Just like that undershirt, as you get older you start adding layers... And the blemish in your personality goes unnoticed.
 

Life demands you fit in, sit up straight, stop vomiting on the platform, stop speaking audibly when you're alone. But you end up crazy even still... You make yourself normal but secretly do things that are fucking insane. You uncross your legs on the train just to touch knees with the middle-aged man sitting beside you. 

"There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep towards me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey;" 

There's this couple sitting across from each other on the Great Northern line on Friday night, their knees slightly touching. That's it for me. Just to touch knees and to look up and see someone smiling because they love you. Not in the "Let's get married" kind of way, but in the "I see you" kind of way... And all those fucked up things... I like those too because it's different and noble and the world is a bit more colorful with you in it.

If we as humans could get to that place where we might reach out to a stranger and they actually SEE us...

We wouldn't need a god damn mood chair.

While touring Level39, a large fintech accelerator in London's Canary Wharf, I run into the mycoocoon, a white leather lounge with a honeycomb like dome that drops over the sitter. And the dome changes colors. See you pick a card on the table beside the chair depending on how you want to feel, "emotions" (there is no "negativity" here) like balance, clarity, energy, cheerful and love. LOVE!? Really? Are you fucking kidding me?

They're telling me if I sit in this pod under a pink (yes, pink; how very cliche) glow in this tech accelerator where old investors swap millions of dollars with young entrepreneurs building things as revolutionary as a fucking mood chair, above a crowded, high-end shopping center where business people dash to their next meeting around those just moseying to get another pair of $500 shoes or consume some pre-made chicken sandwich from Pret, I'll feel love. Love! Like that thing people are consistently failing to grasp?

I can't even bear to sit in it. I'm not ready to experience love from a chair...

 

No, instead I'd rather experience love from this...

 

There's a peppery smell, or one I associate with pepper because the smell seems as though it's alive, bouncing around. It's the smell of someone that doesn't where the deodorant I've grown accustomed to in the U.S. or just less of it. There was only a moment when I thought I didn't like it.
 

It's a manly smell? No, that's a lie really. I like it because when he speaks philosophy comes rolling out, and then, "Well I could be talking bullshit." There's really very few that turn me on with their intellect so this seems something unique.
 

I tolerate it, but that's too strong a word. My body, brain, whatever this is that gives purpose to the things I do, has decided to embrace it, because that thing tricks you into realizing purpose when there really isn't one.

It's tricked me into observing intently the situation when we're together. The other day, he's on top, twig-like arms holding himself over me, his head drops into my neck and the only part of him I can see are his shoulder blades. And those shoulder blades are only bone, jagged, pointy, they nearly come together in the middle. They aren't these smooth lumps on the back of a guy who cares a whole lot about physical appearance, lifting heavy things to fit some societal idea of what attractive is.

In that moment, it felt more like a bird of prey, a vulture was hovering over me. And I think back about how I've written about vultures before, equating scavenging journalists to the bird. He's one of them. God damn, doesn't that fit nicely.

But these tricks... Then you're stuck writing a blog post trying to tie high school and knees and mood chairs in fintech accelerators and South Africans and birds of prey together coherently.

But you see he allows me to feel like myself, rambling on about decentralization and what other nonsense we don't remember until we're having the same god damn conversation.
 

He's extreme, like I want people to be. In this certain way... He's definitely living under the poverty line. I've always been told the life of a freelancer is hard. But because it's hard, he has priorities, and us laying around naked on the mats that double as a bed on his floor for days on end just doesn't get him by.
 

Taking things slow is really not my M.O. I don't have time for slow. My life is running out. I want my relationships to burn, to flare, exuding immense energy everywhere and to everyone we touch, until they have to look away.
 

And then we'll wake up and look at each other and blush because we have absolutely no idea why we're lying together still. And we'll shake hands and part ways.

But right now I'm still waking up on the floor with some really great music playing that makes you ask over and over "Who is this?" Staring out at a tallboy Red Stripe with a lime green glob of chewed gum on the top. My American flag zippo is beside that and a small jar with the remains of burnt tobacco and gum wrappers.
 

Writers tend to overuse nostalgic, but there's this sense I've woken up like this before, slightly hungover, nearly heaving when I smell the smoke on my hands, with someone I'm just not that familiar with.

It was in high school... So many mornings in high school.

And just as high school was full of excess, there were so many warnings I did not heed.

And I know he likes analyzing every fucking word, every sentence, every statement, asking himself if he agrees with what's being said, if it's true, whether it has meaning. But if you're reading this, I promise there is no meaning here today. Meaning only happens after the fact, when you've had time to look from an outside perspective and make connections out of coincidence.

Right now, I'm just ranting. 

This is my home town. This is where I'm from.

It's a bluesy sound, the music of the Late Rounders, the guys likely all from one of the small towns in the area although they'll all say they're from Cape, have voices like you'd hear on the radio. They cover the Ray Wylie Hubbard song Snake Farm although the way the lead singer whines you'd think he'd been there before.

"I asked Ramona how come she works there.
She says it's got its charms.
Nothing to do in the winter.
Now and then some kid gets bit at the snake farm."

And I'm sure he has... Just in a different city with a different name, maybe right across the bridge which stretches over the great Mississippi River leading drunk college kids and deteriorating rednecks like mosquitoes to the neon lights of the Pink Pony in shit-hole Southern Illinois.

The Pink Pony. You wouldn't think it's turn up noses similar to a name like Snake Farm, but across the 50 states I've been to plenty of Pink Pony's and they're far from toy stores relying on little girl's love of My Little Pony. No sir-e. They're places that rely on some little girls growing up without much of innocence to fall back on. They've all smelled of smoke and molding liquor. The majority of the clientele is male and also smell of molding liquor. And 100% of the performers are female and aren't afraid, or maybe there is fear and that's part of the rush, to show a lotta skin.
(I want to intrude here... I'm sure not all strippers come from broken homes and struggle. I think it could be a very empowering thing to do in some cases. In others, possibly the majority, not so much.)

It's 10 o'clock in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, a burgeoning (Ben Affleck and David Fincher were recently in town filming Gone Girl) small college town in the Southeast of the state. It's one of the more liberal areas in Missouri although no one that lives there and most that witness the townspeople's idiotic, ineffectually smartass, Facebook posts would agree. But there's a tired youth connected to other, “better” places through the internet, so the town's population, even the young adults that basically vomit exactly what their parents think about politics and economics and society and racism, hears other sides to the story and that's the first step towards acceptance.

So it's 10 o'clock and the music is loud and the atmosphere is just what I like. I'm sure it's because I grew up here, but us Southeast Missourians know how to party. We're educated, we know what class is, we just choose not to partake.

A 20-something blonde is being spun around by a gray-haired man. She's laughing, and while his smile is unassuming, I'm sure he's still got one toe in the gutter. This isn't abnormal, for the young adults to hang out with the old hippies, to stroll around town together, to share a Budweiser and a bowl together, to sleep together.

And no one stares unless their smiling along with, feeling their toes start to tap until it bounces them right out of the chair and onto the dance floor in front of the pool table. That beer-splattered green cloth sleeps under the various knick-knacks that have been collected and attached to the walls and ceilings--a license plates, sports memorabilia, anything and everything. Isn't it cliché? A dirty dive bar full of junk, but I'd put a bet on everyone else copying us.

The couple keeps dancing, the gentleman pulling her away from the girls walking in like they own the place, in rhinestone-assed jeans and pointed-toe high heels. And while I'm proud of where I came from, I can't help but roll my eyes at these small town “big deals.” And since I've been removed I can actually smile at these patrons, but maybe it's a bit patronizing, but it's not the fake smile and gossipy pleasantries everyone else here uses.

Seven dollars for a vodka/cranberry in a pint glass, light on the cranberry. Four dollars for a pack of Marlboro Lights that you can smoke anywhere.

Warning, there's a tangent afoot: At the beginning of 2011, a vote was brought to the citizens of Cape Girardeau, what was called a “controversial” bill to ban smoking in bars and restaurants in the town. On April 5 Missouri voters struck down the bill by a 52% margin—a slimmer margin than I honestly would have expected, but at that time I was a serving bar flies extra strawberry butter and BBQ plates, watching over my tables from the end of the bar where I smoked like a chimney on the clock at a restaurant owned by one of the opposition leaders of the bill, grumbling about the strangling of our freedoms and the loss of revenue the downtown area would feel if those regulars had to walk outside. Shit they might have even realized it was a god damned beautiful night and go for a walk by the river, which is literally three feet away, behind the river wall, painted with notable people who “were born in the state or achieved fame while living there,” like Yogi Berra, Calamity Jane, George Washington Carver, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Pulitzer and Rush fucking Limbaugh.

But if you do venture outside for some fresh air, it'll be tainted with a puff of skunk-y smoke. And harder drugs, you shouldn't have a problem finding anything you need.

Just ask the people sitting at the bar already clearly fucked up. Like that middle-aged man that was a dish washer at that staple Bar-B-Que restaurant I worked at and played at for a couple years. He's laughing hysterically, spinning on his bar stool. “You look good,” he repeats and then laughs again, spinning away from me. He isn't saying it because he hasn't seen me in forever. No, instead the drugs are blocking his recollection and demanding over and over, “Find pussy.”

But you gotta ask early. Drugs get smoked, snorted and injected quick...

A friend of mine bought coke for my arrival. I'm not sure why, maybe for old time's sake. 

The night before this night at the bar, he microwaved the gram on probably an everyday, ordinary plate in his mother's kitchen because it was wet, tested it, decided it wasn't very good coke, so snorted it all by himself at 3 a.m. watching an Umphrey's McGee concert.  

“Why would you snort it all?”

“It wasn't good so it wouldn't even be worth it for you to do.”

I laugh; he gets upset and tells me not to judge. I'm not.

It's just ridiculous. It could easily be a scene in a movie adapted from a Hunter S. Thompson novel. And everyone would laugh at that man's unbridled “don't give a fuck.” 

I think it's harder for him to think it's comical, since he's far too smart to be struggling with drug addiction. Maybe I laugh because I am an asshole; I'm removed from the pestilence so what the hell do I care; it is like watching a movie.

Maybe I am judging...

Cincinnati

I skipped my Greyhound so I could continue to have sex with him. I might not have gotten off five hours before, but this was the type of sex I could get attached to. I was also hungover but that was more of an excuse; surely he didn't actually believe that.

So I spent another day with him. I spent some of that day working while he slept, although it became near impossible to work by noon because my vagina had started making decisions by then. So I got back in bed... And as he's talking with a Rosa's employee who doesn't seem to understand my vegan diet, all I can think is that my mouth should be a lot closer to his dick. .

But he makes me so fucking nervous. Or maybe last year is what rattles my nerves... 

He reminds me of Zeus. Maybe because he's flaky, or because he says no one compliments him, or because I can imagine he throws back quite a bit of pussy, or because he's so confidently honest it could be a lie, or maybe it's just because I'm passionate about him... and it's been a while. 

Uprooting my life to live in sleepy Cincinnati is a thought I've dabbled in. And when a man has that kind of sway... well it's never worked out for me before.

I should have looked into his eyes more. But maybe that was subconscious, knowing what I'd find there. 

But they are different than those black child eyes Zeus had. Jesus Christ those eyes... Bright blue like nothing in nature I can metaphor. They're like that color of blue I hated as a kid, Cerulean. I much preferred the darker versions, a Navy or Wild Blue Yonder for instance. But in his eye sockets, I know every woman in the room notices him. 

They're different though... Zeus has innocent eyes, a trick of evolution, so he could hide that he wasn't very innocent. It's possible I'm wrong, but I swear there's actual feeling behind those blue eyes. The way they excite as he starts talking faster when he tells me what we're doing now. 

He called off a trip to New York earlier this year at the last minute because some Hooters waitress asked him to be exclusive in bed one morning. I can imagine she knew what she was doing... I've always been a fan of asking for things after sex and after Sunday's go around he said, "So I am moving to New York or are you moving to Cincinnati?" so he's exploiting the same method. 

He doesn't always text back. And he's told me he just stops responding when he doesn't want to say no... Probably a pretty good indication today that he's not going to make a trip to Missouri in November.

I don't want to be the scared woman anymore though... But I still am. I'm afraid they're all lying. "You're amazing."Sure it feels good but that isn't the only feeling... "Me and Michael always used to talk about your ass." Worry is the other feeling; I'm worried I'm being conned. 

It's constant... My brain won't shut the fuck up about it. But I guess that's what happens when you date a man that never tells the truth, and lies so poorly you always find out different.

But anyway, Monday I flew into Newark. First time flying into Jersey. The cabbie was pissed he had to take me to Brooklyn; I was equally unhappy about spending $85 to get to Brooklyn. 

Then the Holland Tunnel... White tile on either side illuminated harshly by fluorescent lights, it looks like the hallways into the guts of a mental institute. It looks like that; it is that. 

New York City is that hospital. This is where the crazies come to be dosed with booze and drugs and attractive men and women, made docile by fetish parties and themed events with expensive cocktails and shared batty's and cocaine, to be drugged with opportunity, both to work and play, walking the streets alone, talking to yourself, knowing the family that just passed with sideways glances won't ever see you again so what's it matter. Raise hell. New York doesn't reprimand you, it only gives you more. 

Every one of us here, we may have different conditions, some of us Schizophrenic, others Bipolar, still others Depressed, but there's one disease that we all share... Unsatisfaction. 

We all started out just dissatisfied, but that's only a symptom, like HIV it slowly turns into the full blown AIDs of an individual's character. There is a slight nuance between these words. Dissatisfaction is an expectation that fell short, whereas unsatisfaction is an expectation that has not been met at all. 

I'll eventually have to leave New York, move back to Where people can be satisfied. 

Maybe it's because I've aged but I used to be so much more flippant. I'd love someone for a week, and it'd be passionate and it'd be true if not long. 

Now there are people I won't even make out with because I know there are people much better, probably walking past us right now at the top of the subway saying good-bye with an awkward hug. 

And now I know there is. He's sitting in Cincinnati watching TV, texting people that would get there tonight, even though I could be there tomorrow... And I'm doing the same... Reading Tinder messages from a man that has just read my blog for the first time. "Fuck." "Trouble..." "I didn't know girls thought like this." "Hooked" "I want you." "Sheets and bootlegged movies." 

And it makes me twitch. It sounds good... It's just coming from the wrong pair of lips, the ones that gave me the bruises I pray will stay eternally tender to the touch, the ones I just left in a region of the country that will always be able to pull me back. 

"Love's not all that complicated. 

It tells you who it's after 

and it either gets what it wants 

or destroys you." 

-Beau Taplin

And one more from this genius man...

"The one thing I know for sure is that feelings are rarely mutual, so when they are, drop everything, forget belongings an expectations, forget the games, the two days in between texts, the hard to gets because this is it, this is what the entire world is after and you've stumbled upon it by chance, by accident--so take a deep breath, take a step forward, no run, collide like planets in he system of a dying sun, embrace each other with both arms and let all the rules, the opinions and common sense crash down around you. Because this is love kid, and it's all yours. Believe me, you're in for one hell of a ride, after all--this is the one thing I know for sure."

-Beau Taplin

Now you'll just have to wait to see which one Cincinnati is.