Don't Do It

Monday Morning

In the past 12 hours I’ve had a budding relationship end, a good friendship begin, a man seek me out on “Missed Connections” on Craigslist, another tell me he loves me, and yet one more punch me as he passed me on his bicycle for no reason other than malice.

The sky is dark with rain and my head is achey and full of the pain and hurt and love of others, taken and offered and shoved at me. I’m considering going into that alternate universe now. You know, crying there a little, as I did to my bagel man this morning, who kindly offered to break in two the man on the bike: “I will snap him in half,” he told me. Thank you, bagel man. I appreciated the physical demonstration of snappage you gave me with your hands.

For Some Reason, I Love This

Mr. Ladyfriend just called me to say he’ll be in my hood to FedEx something and asked if I wanted to have a drink. So I said, “Wait. Are you sticking around my neighborhood anyway? ‘Cause I’m still at work.”

And he said: “Well, let’s say that if we opened up an alternate universe in which you didn’t exist, I would just Fedex this and go home.”

Where They Lost It

In honor of the beauty of spring sproinging in high form today, I started asking around on IM where my friends “lost” their straight virginity. You know, locationally. Structure and place. Some people threw in some extra, delicious info, however. Here’s what I’ve gotten so far:

“A tent in Alaska.”

“In a bed in the south of France.”

“On a living room floor of a third party in Virginia.”

“A cabin in the Berkshires. He made use of cornhusker’s lotion as lubricant.”

“Living room, sleeping bag, NYE party. Girl with a glass eye. I win.”


So far, you do. Yes.

More.

The warmth of the air wending through the wet clouds is making me want to burst through a person-shaped cocoon around my body; I physically want to scream from my arms and out my face.

More.

Excruciatingly

Two lines from Edmund White’s autobiography, My Lives:

1. Because this did that for me:

“We’re all creatures of habit and every old dog stares reproachfully at whatever disturbs his routine, but inspiration breaks through at exactly these ruptures.”

2. Because prose sometimes expresses a meaning through metaphor and description, but also through the stringing together of words at the same time, and this does that:

“All I was doing was living—excruciatingly—in the remembered moment, not in the perception of the scene before me (the wet pillowcase, the gauze curtains shifting and swelling in the breeze slipping in through the cracked window) but of the beautiful body that my imagination turned like a vase before setting it out to dry.”