3 of my favorite videos

success in a handbasket

There’s an old adage, probably at least 20 years old, that, roughly quoted (from a song by the Smiths), goes: “I was looking for a job and then I got a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now.” I bring this up because I’m used to complaining about having too much time on my hands, and I just started a perfectly fine (in the future, I foresee thinking it’s even great) job, so if you are unfortunate enough to be in earshot of me this week, you will probably hear me complain about being overwhelmed instead of the recent common complaint of unerwhelment. If it’s not one thing, it’s another, with some people (me!).

Anyway, I was thinking about free time. Do only single people and Buddhists enjoy free time? Single people spend their free time doing all these great activities where they might just run into someone to fall in love with (dj’d pool parties on the roof of The Standard, artwalks in Chinatown, blah blah blah), and Buddhists know how to chill out: with their free time, they draw out all the daily rituals and relish in the simple acts of doing them…. Brushing teeth could become mind blowing and take an hour …. Laundry can be done while simultaneously chanting under one’s breath, etc. I have no Idea what ambitious single people and Buddhists do with their time but this is life as I imagine it for them. Who else might enjoy having lots of free time? Drug addicts? Cats? Loafers? Obsessed athletes? I dunno. I’ve never known what to do with too much free time, myself. Not including living things, writing is what’s most important to me, but I have a strong love/hate relationship with it. I don’t like talking about writing, and often, I don’t like writing – it’s physically painful to me, often. It’s so frustrating to have an idea and to try to translate it effectively into words, it gives me physical pain when I’m in the midst of trying to write a story and failing at it. Also, I almost never write. I write in short, quick bursts, usually, and when I’m done, I usually only edit for grammatical errors, not for content. So, maybe I can’t legitimately call myself a writer, maybe just a fiction-lover. Anyway, whenever I’ve had long stretches of unemployment, like the one I just wrapped up last week, I always kick myself for not taking advantage of the time to write. But I only get inspired when I’m out in the world a lot, and when I have free time without free money to accompany it, I’m not likely to go out in the world more than necessary. I wrote my first novella on scraps of paper I kept in my pocket when I was a janitor, and the novel I just finished writing was written in my car during lunch breaks from a job that made me cry all the time. Sitting in my apartment watching all the Harry Potters in order, in a row, at least once a week, for at least 2 years, didn’t provide much life-based fodder for short stories. I did part time tutoring in English Language Arts with children from underserved communities during the last 6 months of my CA unemployment period (so I guess I wasn’t actually unemployed during that time, but I’m pretty sure I lost money on that ‘job.’ But the time spent with the children I tutored was, while a bit heartbreaking because it was so easy to get emotionally attached to them and I had only a limited amount of hours to spend with each of them, such a relief to me because it was something productive for me to do with my time. I realize that at least the past couple months have been spent watching movies (like I say, many of these movies were Harry Potter) and crocheting, with some IM’ing and the occasional face to face socializing thrown in.

So, am I a workaholic? No. Am I lazy (meaning, could I have spent all my recent months free time training for a marathon or writing more?)? – sort of, yes. I don’t know why free time makes me as anxious as it does. I know I’ve always relished being the passenger in car trips, and I think the two are related – being a passenger and being bad at enjoying spare time. Maybe I just genuinely enjoy watching movies and crocheting and it’s not as dumb a pastime as it sounds to me.

Maybe I just need to have a full-time job like I just got to force me to interact with the world at large. The whole issue of having had too much time on my hands vs. feeling overwhelmed now (but so relieved to be having a regular paycheck soon) makes me consider the meaning of life in the modern world. What is one supposed to do with a life. A person lives their life and has experiences and learns lessons whether they choose to or not, just by dint of being alive. But, you know, there’s the popular bumper sticker that reads “Follow Your Bliss.” What do the people with those bumper stickers on their cars do with their spare time, or for a career? Do they procreate and take bike rides on the weekend and own their own bakeries or what? What is “success”?

Hollywood Forever?

In case you've never been to the touristy part of Hollywood Blvd., which I live a couple blocks from, there's been a growing phenomenon the past few years: people who I can only assume are incredibly poor & in some cases homeless dress up like characters and stand in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Visiting yokels take pictures posed with these characters and then usually understand that they're expected to pay a little something to the person in the costume (like a dollar). Sometimes these characters are a bit of a nuisance, but I'm sure that dressing up like Elmo for dollars on a 90 degree day, as a creative way of panhandling, is probably sort of a nuisance to the costumed people. anyway, here's what recently happened, in this fair city of HOllywood:

http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-hollywood-characters,0,2280392.story

okay, i always expected there to be a big sweep that'd get rid of the characters in front of the theatre. that in itself wouldn't irk me so much. but here's what local government-sanctioned eyesore takes up the space where they used to panhandle:



oh shit, what happened, is everyone okay?, i thought, the first time i passed by this corporate sculpture, which is in fact some piece of shit corporate stunt to promote King Kong (I guess there's going to be a new one?). And then when i realized that it was just a tourist attraction, i thought wow, how clever. Not really, though. I think it's so fucking crass. Why is a deadly looking fake car crash an okay tourist attraction? and why is it okay to squeeze poor people out of every area they manage to get some small claim on, like the characters who made a few bucks in front of the theater?

it's so, so lame and gross. i hate it.

A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That

Hmmm, so nobody's very interested in reading my novel in serialized form in the blog format, it seems. Duly noted, and that's okay.

What've I been thinking about lately?

The Lakers Riot that we had here in Los Angeles, the celebratory riot in downtown, got me thinking about human nature & class issues. I was unfairly attacked when I was a teenager, by a mob of people, so my gut reaction is to be upset by groups of people giving in to mob mentality. while I've increasingly come to appreciate the spirit of anarchy, I still have mixed feelings about the Rodney King Riots. It was just so unfair that Reginald Denny got beaten up so bad, it seemed like such a misdirection of anger. But then, his beating was no worse than the beating King'd received from cops who were allowed to get away with it. My husband is usually pro-riot, so I've thought about the good sides of that riot of the nineties, and I do think that it was the result of a bunch of disenfranchised people not being able to control their rage, it released some of that rage. Maybe in the long run, that riot was useful? I'm still not sure.

The Lakers celebration riot was not political like the King riots. or was it? I think a lot of people are upset by how shitty their jobs are and healthcare and unemployment, etc., so when my husband said he thought the riots were sort of cool in a way, I thought about it and thought that it was possibly just another necessary release of people's rage. I hope the rioters didn't hurt anyone and that the property they did damage to was to cars too expensive to exist (I CAN'T STAND that some cars cost more than houses), or to Bank of America or one of the fancy new lofts in downtown that's standing where homeless people's homes used to be (where the fuck are homeless people supposed to live, when even Downtown Los Angeles's Skid Row has been gentrified?). At the same time I constantly wonder if violence can ever truly be productive.


The other thing I have been thinking about is self esteem, because when i recently posted on FB about burning my neck with a curling iron because I was feeling down on my frizzy hair and was trying to tame it, I got a lot of sweet and concerned responses, some of them including advice about frizzy hair management. The fact of how quick the responses came and how sweet they were made me think about self esteem, made me wonder how many people my age still have self esteem issues regarding their looks, and also made me wonder if my hair looks worse than i thought it did - HA!
xoxo Robin

only child syndrome

I think I might be a textbook case of an only child born of interesting parents and raised in los angeles: i was lonely, did stuff for attention, and much of the stuff done for attention involved art projects featuring dolls (my best friends!). anyway, this particular photo must've fallen out of one of my oldest photo albums last night, when i was scanning some old photos of friends to put up on Facebook. i just found it on the desk this morning and it seemed a bit like magic. two of these dolls were ken dolls i turned into trannies, & the girl dolls were unique in their own right. i brought them to school often, when i was in 7th grade, & me & my "weird" clique of friends played with them at lunch. definitely a sweet bunch of kids who wanted it known that we weren't just anyone, that we were unique. the two tackle fish that the african-american barbie is holding were named alfred and zappa, as my scrupulous teenage documentation states: these were two tackle fish i tied to the end of a scarf i wore on my head almost every day of 7th grade (the scarf is the blue fabric with the gold stars and moons on it that is the backdrop in this photo). the scarf was kind of gypsy-looking and i also wore a lot of jewelry and heavy metal t-shirts with long skirts, so i called myself a Metal Gypsy. Anyway, this photo is pretty funny, only-child's-tranny-dolls'-family-portrait-wise. i documented so much of my childhood as neatly as this photo shows because i always wanted to be famous, & i think a lot of people with the fame desire document their lives this much, to be able to provide good artifacts for all the documentaries that will be made about us someday or something, i think.

pessimism poem

The ones who want kids will be sterile
and the ones who don't care will be breedy
and like Michael Moore recently theorized
student loans keep employees acting needy
and cancer's a little more cancerous
at County Hospital than at Cedars Sinai
and sometimes when the cookie jar's empty
all you can do is just sigh.

renting movies from the library

admittedly, i've been too much of a couch potato this last century as a mostly unemployed young woman. that's a story for another day. but in any event, it's long been my goal to see as many films as possible -- isn't it weird how many movies there are? how many millions of dollars that get spent on straight to video b-movies, even? i'm not being critical here, i really do think the film industry is a marvel.

in any event, i'll tell you right now, in this hardcore film watching year of mine, i've developed a problem: the Harry Potter films. i'm addicted to them. as i write this, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone plays in the background, and it's actually a calculated decision on my part: i keep our less popular dvd's in a drawer, & the more popular ones on shelves, and i'm currently letting myself watch each Harry Potter movie one last time before banishing it to the drawer.

anyway, i just started renting movies from the library down the street. some people's local libraries charge for dvd's but not mine (though if you want to buy drugs or hook up with a male prostitute, which you can also do at this library, at the front entrance before the library opens, it'll cost you plenty). you are aloud to rent 3 movies per genre: for kids movies or grownup fiction movies, you can rent the movie for 2 days. for documentaries, they're presumed boring enough to be in little demand, and you can therefore keep them for 7 days. most of them are russian language though, but i did have some good documentary finds: all the michael moore movies (don't bother arguing with me if you hate him, because i don't want to hear it), and a good one about hunter thompson called "Gonzo."

for the most part, the dvd's offered are slim pickings, because they're donated, i think. This is how and why i recently ended up re-watching the Back to the Future trilogy, or finally giving in to watching Jerry McGuire. i've ended up watching some movies i never would have seen otherwise. recently, i watched the original Towering Inferno (which geof's dad is in, as a stuntman). it was pretty good -- the ruggedly handsome steve mcqueen looks awful in comparison to paul newman ... i think they were both in their fifties in that movie. anyway, the movie Poseidon has the same plot as Towering Inferno except on a yacht, and even though the library carries the original Poseidon, I opted for the early 2000's remake, starring Kurt Russell. What, i watched these movies? yes.

i have always hated Disney movies, even when i was a cute little youngin, but i rented the old animated disney version of Alice in Wonderland, and boy does that movie suck! all this weird shit happens to her, and it's kind of neat and pretty, but then right when things are about to get interesting, she wakes up and her private tutor says something like, 'Oh Alice, what am i going to do with you? you've been napping this whole time!' The end. what the fuck?

geof and i made a deal that i would watch the 3 original Star Wars (i never had) if he'd read Slaughterhouse 5 (my bible), and i was able to rent 2 of the 3 Star Wars from the library, so that was helpful. i had to watch the first one for an undergrad film class and was the only student who hadn't seen it before, and i never saw the other 2 -- I'm glad I finally saw them. I wish I liked them when I was a kid because Princess Leia is a really strong female character: she's smart, compassionate, strong and an anarchist and i would have loved loved loved her when i was a little girl. instead, i only loved that weird Ewok movie/Star Wars spin-off, with those blonde siblings in it that dress the way people dress in Malibu in my imagination, taupe linen shifts and braided headbands, etc.

Today from the library I rented: Mouse Hunt (kids movie with Nathan Lane's voice), The Muppet Movie (which kicks almost as much ass as Follow that Bird), Flyboys (i'm powerless against movies with james franco in them), and Bulworth. I lose my temper on a regular basis with strangers who try to take advantage of me or do a half-assed job on medical procedures, which unfortunately happens often in the hustling bustling city of Los Angeles, but other than that, i try to keep my feelings reigned in, which is hard for a tempestuous, passionate, some may say crazy girl like me. in any event, when something makes me extremely happy or sad in a movie or book, days worth of passionate disappointment or bliss get unleashed and I cry like crazy (my poor dad and stepmom had to stand around the theatre lobby like 'uh, should we go check on her?' recently when we all went to see Slumdog Millionaire and i excused myself to the restroom to cry uncontrollable rapturous tears for a half hour). I saw Bulworth when it came out, and it might not seem like it'd be a good movie, but it's really excellent. but it made me too emotional to want to see it again. Anyway, that's what i just finished watching, and the ending hasn't change since the last time i saw it, so i just finished crying. hmmm, what should i do with myself now?, i thought. while i take care of my Harry Potter-watching project, that is. So here we are. good night. xox princess robin

Musical Therapy Part II

There've been a couple misunderstanding of lyrics that always seemed poignant to me. The uk surf version of The Pixies "Wave of Mutilation" was one of me and my mom's shared favorite songs when I was a teenager. One lyric goes:

I've kissed mermaids
Rode the El Nino

but my mom always misheard the lyrics as

I've kissed her legs

and once she told me she loved that line because it was so tender.

When I was heartbroken once in college, sad Otis Redding songs were all I wanted to listen to, and similarly, the lines I misheard were also my favorite lines. There's one verse that goes:

Honey, I saw you there last night
With another man's arms holding you tight
Nobody knows what I feel inside
All I know is I walked away and cried

and I always love the last line of that verse, which I thought was All I know is I want the way you cried.

Musical Therapy

in 2004 i had open heart surgery. in the long run it was a success, but in the immediate post-op aftermath, my cardiologist, Dr. Dumbfuck (which in English translates to Fatally Incompetent), didn't actually look at any of the echocardiograms he had me wait hours to take, 3 days in a row, and so nobody knew my heart sac was filling up with blood, until my heart almost stopped working one day, and this time when i went back into the hospital, i guess the insurance company weighed the risks of making me leave again asap, and this time they took care of me until my heart was healed. i lived.

in 2005 i had a nervous breakdown, but i'm too sarcastic to ever go fully crazy, so while i was a bit incapable of taking care of myself, i wasn't fully incapable, and therefore i was a day-patient (I didn't have to live at the facility, i could go home at night, not that i wanted to) for 3 weeks at a rehab/mental health facility. the famous one wc fields went to.

we had music therapy on fridays. the woman who facilitated the class looked like a ballerina and was nice and calming. she let people play songs that they related to, as a form of therapy. my closest friend at the institution was, unless he was bullshitting, raised by his grandpa in a cult, had been in Desert Storm, and was an ex-cop. he was on twice the normal dosage of whatever it was he was on, and the side effect was that he basically had amnesia. even though he looked like a jock and i always try to look like a sloppy ne'er do well, he seemed to be sweet on me, he'd get me soda refills at lunch and stuff like that. but he forgot me and got reacquainted with me every day, liking me more on some days than others. One Music Therapy class, the facilitator let him put on one of his songs, and it was Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People." Here are some of the lyrics:

The beautiful people, the beautiful people
It's all relative to the size of your steeple
You can't see the forest for the trees
You can't smell your own shit on your knees

There's no time to discriminate,
Hate every motherfucker
That's in your way

Oh god, it was so funny to see the pretty ballerina smile and close her eyes and nod her head along with the music. "Okay, that was really interesting, very expressive," she said, when the song was over. A middle aged women who was normally really quiet said "I liked it. It reminded me of the rock music we used to listen to when I was younger."

Every song that played during these sessions yielded such fascinating reactions. The Eagles "Desperado" made a lot of us cry. it's really a beautiful song, tacky as it is. I love these lines:

Now it seems to me, some fine things
Have been laid upon your table.
But you only want the ones
That you can't get.

Desperado,
Ohhhh you aint getting no younger.
Your pain and your hunger,
They're driving you home.

When it was finally my turn to play a song, I chose Elliot Smith's No Name #3. I love the chorus:

a good old fashioned fight
so come on night
everyone is gone
home to oblivion
home to oblivion
home to oblivion

But my friend with the amnesia and the history of falling victim to brutal institutions (a christian cult, the army, the police force), he put on the wrong song. He put on No Name #4, which goes like this:

For a change she got out before he hurt her bad
Took her records and clothes
And pictures of her boy
It really made her sad
Packed it up and didn't look back
I'm okay lets just forget about him
The car was cold and it smelled like old cigarettes and pine
In her bag I saw things she drew when she was mine
Like this one here
Her alone nobody near
What a shame lets just not talk about it
No it doesn't look like you
But you did wear cowboy boots
That's your fame
There's no question about it
Once we got back inside
With one ear to the ground
I was ready to hide
'cos I don't know who's around
and you look scared
it's our secret do not tell okay?
Let's just not talk about it
Don't tell okay?
Let's just forget all about it.

This song sounds to me, obviously, like it's about an abusive relationship. "That was a very pretty song, Robin," the ballerina said, "Are the lyrics significant to you in any way? do they remind you of something that's happened in your own life?" The empathetic therapist thought I'd been in an abusive relationship, and i didn't want to embarrass anyone by admitting that it was the wrong song. I told her, "uh, i've never really listened to the lyrics. i just like how it sounds."

the music therapy class would never hear my own real song choice, the song about going home to oblivion.

it was a strange 3 weeks. most of the people in my group therapy sessions were on the make. we were in a nice, warm waiting room of our real lives, but recovering from psychic incapacitation takes too long and is too sad.

odds & ends

despite all the neat clothes, books, jewelry etc i've sold, given away or just left behind, these are 4 postcards i've managed to hang on to for over 10 years. xo

Princess Robin and the Cinema

I watch a lot of bad movies. that's been the case for awhile now. I used to just naturally only want to watch good movies, even/especially when I was a teenager -- it wasn't like I was forcing myself to do a Midnight Cowboy/Jules and Jim/The Sterile Cuckoo triple header, in the middle of a saturday, when I was a fifteen year old -- it was what I wanted to do with those hours. Let me clarify that I know it may sound unhealthy, spending a day of my youth, many saturdays in a row, watching movies all day. but i spent my weekends visiting my mom and she was really poor, and we both had our reasons for this near-addiction to escapism, so, we watched a lot of movies on a lot of weekend days. Anyway, I have long been unemployed and it's very anxious-making, and what makes me feel best is watching dvd's while crocheting, that's what keeps the anxiety at bay. uh, i have a little thing where i watch the Harry Potters at least once a week, but i'll save that for a blog about OCD or something. what i'm honing in on here is my draw towards bad movies.

once i read an interview with Kathleen Hannah where, god it was years ago so i may be remembering it poorly, but the upshot was that she had a hard time relating to most mainstream people and mainstream media, because there were all these grossly obvious destructive depictions of women, & the majority thought of these things as unimportant or funny, whereas to her they were incredibly upsetting. for instance, everyone thought American Beauty was an amazing movie, and that just blew her mind, to her the film was just like, completely disgustingly misogynistic. i think of that dilemma often, trying to get by in the world when one is a particularly sensitive person. lots of traumatic things have happened to me, and when i was a teenager i reacted to that by eschewing every mainstream value. i still have a lot of anger in me, but i also have this "of the people" draw towards mainstream film, & get annoyed by people who don't watch crap. among my dvd collection: the die hard box set; the lethal weapon box set; bootlegged copies of seasons 1-4 of It's Always Sunny in Philly. Those should be good enough examples. but am i just trying to deaden the oversensitivity i was born with, i wonder sometimes. because sensitivity is a LIABILITY. sometimes, though, i feel so suddenly struck by how much ugliness and meanness the mainstream world presents as normal. I started watching "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell" the other night & I felt sick to my stomach & fought back tears early on, at how disgusting the characters & the whole script were. in particular, the characters went to a strip club, and the strippers there were depicted as choosing that line of work because they were looking for boyfriends -- what kind of misinformed shit is that? & then the main character tried to get a woman to stop hitting on him by saying that if she didn't leave him alone, he'd punch a new fuckhole into her abdomen. it made me physically sick to hear. similarly, i like a lot of mainstream hiphop, but sometimes when i listen to the lyrics, i think "fuck, what if i was the woman in this song who was getting tricked into thinking the protagonist loved her" or something like that (the politics of white listeners/hip hop/ and that whole shebang is also something i'd like to write more about in a separate blog). Anyway, the other day i heard notorious b.i.g.'s Mo Money Mo Problems on the radio, & I turned it up really loud because i love that song, & suddenly I thought I heard a mean line about "jews" that i never noticed in the first verse, and it really hurt my feelings (I looked up the lyrics; the word he said was "jewels," not "jews").

i've always been torn between being militantly anti-establishment, and not being judgmental of mainstream society, which includes the bulk of the people one comes across in a common day (though it's all mixed up now -- the people, at least in my neighborhood, with the most visible tattoos and craziest hair are all personal trainers or actors in soap operas -- it's very disorienting). javascript:void(0)

maybe that's why i never leave the apartment anymore!

old-fashioned rhyming

writing to no one
talking to self
emily dickinson
dead spider on shelf
life can be simple
and unemployment fun
when talking to self
and writing to no one.

Turning 31

well, it's 10:12 pm on a sunday night. i'm up to my usual restless tricks. geof is asleep in the bedroom, coughing his poor little lungs out. I have a movie on quietly (Aviator), and am online looking for jobs and yes, occasionally giving in to my recent obsession to Farmville. I have gotten out of the habit of reading, and don't seem able to complete anything lately. I was reading one of my favorite type of novels, something contemporary that nobody's heard of that mom bought at some yard sale in san pedro or something, but that wasn't doing it for me, i wanted something more epic, so I tried to start War and Peace, but it wasn't quite for me, and now I'm trying to make myself stick it out through what seems MAYBE able to hold my attention, graham greene's The Tenth Man, checked out from the North Hollywood Library, when I was there tutoring one of the couple tutoring clients I have left. I can't even finish a scarf lately, before crocheting another one. these should be bday resolutions: finish what i start. stop playing farmville. watch less movies, read more (though boy did i see an impressive slew of films this weekend, especially in terms of gore: Jennifer's Body AND Drag Me To Hell -- I didn't even know I liked gore so much but I seem to be in the mood for it).
if any of you are millionaires: i'm still making and trying to sell my beautiful scarves. also, i just put an ad on craigslist for my tutoring services.
it's been really neat, to meet children as their tutor, to help them.
also, anyone creative and macro-managing who entirely trusts me and my instincts and wants to hire me to do something that will prove heroic, please write to me.
tomorrow morning at 3:55 am (what it says on my birth certificate) supposedly I'm going to wake up and remember to say Rabbit Rabbit because that's good luck for the first day of the month. I will be 31 years old tomorrow. I still feel 17, and sometimes 19. I still feel elusive as an eel, maudlin as a clown with an ulcer, beautiful as a trapeze artist, special as the personalities of cats, doomed as doomed can be, but somehow also hopeful. i have a cow valve in my heart and reproductive problems. I am wild but also boring. I am getting up there in years. someone please publish my novel. give money to nice homeless people but sidestep the bullies and don't let them touch you. that's my advice, from this 31 year old woman.

and now, for your reading pleasure....

here are 4 poems i've written in the past few years that i sent to many literary journals, to no avail. actually, a literary journal called Poetry Motel told me they would publish "saints" but I could never reach them after that one letter from them, so, who knows. well, here goes.... a bit dark in places:


4 poems by Robin Crane


Saints

For you the saints of love appear
They ask you what you’re doing here
You say you’ve needed them so long
You’ve since forgotten what was wrong.


Female Traveler

In Washington they’d probably
Prefer to just remember me.
In Michigan my ma and pa
Left for me what as kids they saw.
Savannah with its sexy grins
Is where I threw up all my gin.
New York New York the laundry hangs
On lines that line the sky with veins.

Los Angeles I made my home
But panic freezes up my bones
The only words that comfort me
Are “Coast to Coast Cab Company.”




All This Could Be Yours

As in a farcical mystery novel
Whose hapless hero falls unconscious in a den of murderers,
But who wakes up in someone’s nice bed,
Only bruised and curious,
I went out trapped
On a cold table
A mask to my mouth and huffing a gas
So sweet it made me gag,
But when I came to,
I was alive.
Manhandled by a nurse with an axe
To grind and no nice manners,
But alive.
All that I could tolerate,
But what has been so bad,
So baroquely sickening,
Almost like a joke,
Has been the return to all this.
The red white and blue of the neighboring lawns,
The lonely secretarial days.
The quirky off-tempo beats of a Frankenstein’s Monster heart.

The doctor’s red-blooded skepticism towards a self-proclaimed
Victim.
Buck up, Bucko.
The only pretty parts have been the
languid suicides of purple and orange leaves
And sometimes love.



Hospital

Aren’t you tired of your beauty, your singular way of threading a plastic saint heart and a sentimental John Lennon pendant on a silver chain and wearing this heartbreaking, too-poignant jewelry around your dirty neck?

Sometimes you have appeared at a birthday party or other event, mercifully restored somehow, in a worn-through, not-laundered but beautiful dress, looking pre-Raphaelite and sober. But sometimes you’ve needed a diaper, and the lenses of your glasses have been smudged with chocolate and tears. This is all unbearable, it causes house fires and little fissures in the tissuey walls of the heart.

But aren’t you tired of your beauty, its ghost, on all the days and in the years when you were okay at least for awhile? Sunny, jingly-belled laugh afloat in the sudden wellspring of happiness of a manic episode. Moments when a certain tranquilizer didn’t make you drool but instead allowed you to articulate last nights’ dreams. Months of being pregnant and having a recognizable function in society, a sudden usefulness to a race of strangers. The memory of such triumphs is no good right now, it’s like an animal trap, a steel jaw garnished with some delicious sustenance. Take a step towards this gift and slam! Your leg is caught for good. The only options are to lay there watching your soul drift out of your body through your mouth, or to chew through your leg.

Drugs, drugs, life of drugs
Alcohol and Fun.
Who can count the down and out?
Count me in as one.

It was so messed-up feeling and such hilarious fun, to be on vacation from my sad sex education life at the college in another state. To be on winter break in my hometown, at a Christmas party for adults, the two of us gigglingly guarding our vodka bottle, getting drunker and nicer and more sentimental about the Holidays as the night stretched out. Feeling the holiday spirit, the nervous anticipation of magic. Little colored lights defining the cold night air and making us feel like children. We were two too-charming women, smoking and drinking, a mother and daughter variety act. We knew what we were doing and that it would come to no good. Even then, we were telling them laugh-stained anecdotal miseries.

There is a lineage of mental illness and dependency, abuse of all kinds. The women of her family have uniformly prostituted themselves in one way or another, and for the purpose of absolutely ruining all joy. They’ve been moms who had stomach flu or a migraine that was just a hang-over.

Women already carry the burden of self-sacrifice. These women of my family created for their sisters and daughters elaborate ceremonies in which to frame our sacrifices. Here is a bag of her pills the ER nurse handed to me. I am throwing it into the mouth of an active volcano. The volcano is still hungry and I am beautiful, honeyed and pink as a barbecued pig.

So I dive in.

There had been some fun in this kamikaze sisterhood, and now there is none.

The question can be asked “Why not?” Or “Why me?" Or: is God an ambivalent miner, drifting off to sleep in a bar somewhere, his arms on a sticky table, his head resting on his arms like they are pillows?

In the Absence of God

Lately I've been wondering what the meaning of life is. doesn't that sound cliche? but it's true. I was a sort of christian for awhile when i was a child. i never believed in hell but i believed in heaven and God. I used to pray every night, it was such a bizarre prayer though because it was a litany of all my paranoias and fears, i remember a part of it went like this: "And please don't let mom die of AIDS and don't let there be an earthquake in the year 2000 that knocks the earth out of orbit" and I ended the prayer with "in your holy, sweet name i pray, amen." but one day when i was in 6th grade and i was at a restaurant with family, i was just seriously bummed that day, i was the #1 punching bag in my junior high that year and was actually suicidal, i realized there was no god, and i stopped praying that day.
it's been part of my identity for a long time to be someone who "hates christians." i don't really hate them, but when i was in high school and was a weirdo i was called a devil worshiper a lot and harassed really badly about it, so my reactions to that (like, things i'd write in my zine) made people be like "boy, that robin sure hates christian proselytizing."
anyway, all that information is by way of saying that i can't believe in a christian heaven as the meaning of life, because i'm repulsed by all things christian. i'm interested in jewish culture, & often play up my "jewish side" (my dad's family is jewish, my mom's family is catholic), but ... my jewish interest is in woody allen & shit like that, not in the religious aspect of being jewish. i'm not at all religious.
one day when i was driving i had what seemed like an epiphany, that reincarnation is real, and i felt so happy when that thought hit me, and for a long time i believed in reincarnation, but i grew out of that a few years ago.

i try to be an existentialist, because to me (i know there are die hard existentialists that could correct my understanding of it), existentialism means accepting the present tense as the most important thing and making the best out of it. i had more fun calling myself an existentialist when i was younger though, because it was my way of .... euphemistically speaking...partying too hard, without feeling guilty, because i was living in the moment. the concept of existentialism lost its allure for me, though. i don't even try to read Nietzsche or Sartre or blah blah blah now, even though those books are at my fingertips, on my husband's shelves in our bookshelf.

i lived in philly from 2006-2008 and those were really my kurt vonnegut years, i think i read his novels practically every day i was in philly, and thanks to all that vonnegutness (i did my thesis on him, to boot), i am now slightly inclined to say i'm a "secular humanist."
but i'm really nothing. i don't really "believe" in anything.
when i was younger i used to have all sorts of epiphanies about what the meaning of life was, it had to do with experiencing beauty, etc., but not coincidentally, these epiphanies coincided with my time at college, my first time experiencing "freedom" and not for nothing, my first time experiencing getting stoned.

it just seems to be bad days heaped on top of bad days lately. i forget to ponder. i forget to be special. and i don't have any tagline for the meaning of life. what do you think is the meaning of life?