Early October 2015

prelude

What did you do in the dark and the cold?

I smoked and I shivered with no hand to hold.

Where did you go when your teeth got fucked up?

I slept on the stairs and I never woke up.

Who was the girl that you used to be?

Nobody much, 

Just little ol' me.

***************************************

Dear readers, I have  been in a psychiatric hospital since last Thursday and just got out today.  I would say I just got sprung, but it was nice in there; the food was okay and sometimes good, the nurses were nice, Christian, pretty Armenian women who wore a lot of make up and who I would have written off as being dumb and mean when I was a teenager, just for being pretty and religious.  I had a nervous breakdown.  I haven't gotten over the summer's heart surgery and my new ticking heart yet.  I take too much stuff. I am moving to Florida on Friday, to stay with my dad and stepmom for a few months.  

I just wanted to let you know.  

xoxo princess robin xoxo

Life Poem

sometimes I feel so old

I feel like a woman 

instead of a girl.

Ain't We Got Fun

Ain’t We Got Fun

In my darkest hour of need

Still I reek a bit of greed

Hands that shake and legs that lock

A heart a lung a cunt a cock

Who’s that sleeping ‘neath the sun?

Why, it’s me!

Ain’t we got fun?

Kitty Litter from Target: Pasadena: Trash Food: Time Travel

I work exactly across the street from the school I attended in Kindergarten and First Grade.  Another biographical fact is that I used to live with my mom in Pasadena on the weekends, and with my dad and Stepmom on the Westside the rest of the week.  Mom was poor so I lived poor on the weekends too, giving “You wanna start something?!” scowls at people in line at the grocery store who sighed exaggeratedly as she fished out wads of food stamps from her pockets.  The rest of the week, when I was middle class, and happened to be in a grocery store, I always made sure not to scowl at people in front of me in line  when the fished out wads of food stamps from their pockets; I always tried to make it seem that I wasn't noticing anything. Some people think it’s nice to go out of their was to smile and fuss over someone who is feeling embarrassed, but I usually find it's kinder just to act like whatever disaster they’re undergoing is the most natural thing in the world.  I think that people who go out of their way to smile and fuss over someone who is feeling embarrassed, they just want a big pat on the back for how caring they are.  In some Raymond Chandler novel, it’s explained that Hollywood used to be just some pioneer town with dirt roads, and rich people lived in Pasadena.  Now it's  an eyesore of tacky live-work buildings and shops like Abercrombie and Fitch.  Still, I see some things I remember from before, from when I was a kid.

I cannot fully accept the idea that time travel isn’t possible.  There’s a movie theatre in Pasadena that I go to with my husband and son sometimes.  It’s been there forever.  When I was a kid, mom and I lived so close, we walked there all the time, like, every weekend.  I can’t help but believe that if I just started heading in the right direction, her apartment would still be there, with me sitting on the front steps. 

Another reason I find it hard to accept the impossibility of time travel is because of how quickly people age when we become grown ups.  Children seem to take all year to grow a year older.  Adults blink away whole years.  I am 36, and I remember so many details from childhood.  I remember my 3^rd grade teacher Ms. Wilson correcting a poem I’d written for being grammatically incorrect.  It started dramatically with the statement “Flowers.”  I remember showering in the public shower with my grandma after taking a swim in the faculty swimming pool at Michigan State University; everyone else kept their bathing suits on out of modesty, but there was another woman showering with us who was completely naked and  old.   She sweetly smiled at us when we made eye contact and it made me feel sorry for her for some reason.  I also felt sorry for her because she used a bar of soap to wash her hair, and I’d been taught not to use soap on hair because it dries it out.  I think I’ve used this woman as a character in maybe a million short stories and little autobiographical non-sequitur ramblings like this.  It’s just that she seemed so perfectly content to use whatever was available, the little sliver of soap from the soap dish.  It’s hard to believe that she’s not still there in Michigan, sudsing her gray pubic hair, so unselfconscious and tangibly content.  Grandma and I were able to use the faculty pool because grandpa was a professor there, and now he is dead.  Other people are dead too.  My friend Bill is dead.  Almost every night I dream about him.  He is pretty much his usual self in the dreams, except a little testy, which he almost never was in life.  We do our activities with mom, who was his best friend and the love of his life.  Sometimes the activities are absolutely awful, like picking food off the floor in a hoarder’s apartment to eat for dinner, or visiting Bill’s old bookstore just to look at how it’s so wrecked, no roof and rubble everywhere with most of the books charred.  One particularly sad activity that Bill, mom and I repeatedly act out in my dreams is that of wrapping up the utterly worst pieces of trash in the world to give to each other on a Christmas day with no fanfare.  Pigeon brains, empty bags of Ruffles chips, dirty underwear.  Other times, we are all just doing fairly commonplace errands together like picking up a repaired pair of his shoes or buying several bags of kitty litter from Target.  One thing is always the same in these dreams, though.  I always have to break it to Bill that we’re in a dream, and that he’s not really alive anymore.  Sometimes I warn him that he will be dead when I wake up.  He always believes me when I tell him that, and he just tries to take his lumps.

Is there any way to bring him back?  Is there any way to stand up, smooth my skirt over my big fat curves, here at work, walk to the elevator with a head full of mischief and hope, cross the street to my old Kindergarten, and just stay there forever?  Just stay there and wait for it all to come to me, all the things in this world that I like?  My son could come to me in the classroom where I am sitting in my old seat.  “You’re going to really like your new teacher, Ms. Hays,” I’ll promise him, even though she’s long gone, dead as a doornail. 

 

russian time machine

Comics for Girls

Ode to Sorry poem

And Other Emergencies

I go to the ER sort of a lot.  I used to work with this woman, Rosalba, who also went to the ER a lot -- she said she once went two times in one week, one particularly bad week in which she had abdominal pain on Tuesday and fell and broke her tail bone on Friday.  We were both so embarrassed for ourselves (but kind to each other) at being that type of person.  It was surprising to me that she'd ever feel embarrassed by anything.  She was so charming it was probably a pleasure to take her blood pressure.

I have a good friend who also goes a lot, as the method of being admitted to the hospital for her condition.  I just finished reading a biography about Edie Sedgewick, who actually seemed to like Emergency Rooms, hospitals and damaging procedures performed on her under the guise of masculine professional help.  I think Sedgewick was into it for the pills, but also, maybe, the comfort of knowing you're being watched over, even if it's only by strangers.

When I used to work with Rosalba, I was in my early twenties.  I'm a bit mysterious but not near as charming, and whenever I went to the ER I was always suspected of having caused my ailments myself, through drugs or alcohol, which was aggravating in one sense, to be judged off the bat like that, but it was also sort of flattering that they'd assume that about me, because I've always thought of drugs and alcohol as being glamorous, despite knowing from experience that they aren't at all -- but even though I know a lot about them being consumed when one is home all alone and lonely just watching TV and waiting to get sleepy enough for bedtime -- I can't help but associate drunkenness and highness with having fun out with friends, being enjoyed and enjoying the night.

Sometimes after an ER visit, or hospital stay, I'm able to write a good poem or story about it, but there are a lot of very strange things I've seen in ER's that I have never committed to paper because I'm too lazy to try to get all the absurd details just right.

The last two times I went to the ER (a few months ago and last night) I didn't even to try to collect details to use later.  I just closed my eyes and imagined myself flying, instead of sitting there in the waiting room in pain but assuming I'm unlikely to die with so many people around me.  That time, the waiting room was mostly full of rich-looking people all playing on their phones.  No exaggeration -- every adult in there was on their cell phone even when they were sitting right next to the people they came with.  I keep trying not to judge people but that night, i wanted to punch every last idiot in their stupid faces. 

Last night my main ER waiting room experience concerns a 22 year old boy who was sound asleep in his seat.  he looked rather beautiful, skeletal and gay and vulnerable, especially asleep the way he was, so I sat next to him and read his name on his wristband, so I could wake him up when the nurse called his name for intake.  i don't mean for this to sound like a selfless deed -- I just enjoy doing things that normal people are afraid of, and there were normal-looking people sitting close to him, exchanging mocking looks about him.  I also saw on his wristband that he was born in 1993, and it always amazes me that any young adult can be so young, like how Nirvana is considered Classic Rock now and the music they used to play on the oldies stations when I was a kid, like "Big Girls Don't Cry" and The Supremes songs, are so old now they seem to have disappeared.  He did sleep through the nurse calling his name, like I thought he might, so I tried to wake him up, politely at first, but then I got frustrated with him and I was shaking him and telling him "Hey, wake up, get up, you're going to miss your turn.  Get it together."  it was so uncharacteristic of me to be shaking some sense into someone like that, because I'm usually the one who needs to have the senses shaken into me.  Later on, though, when he was back in the waiting room and I was still there, and I was still compelled to watch over him as he fell back into his deep sleep, I had to remind myself that I was there to watch over myself, to find out why I had a bunch of spontaneous bruises developing  all over my arms and legs.  That kid was just a stranger, and while lots of good people think that it's good to help strangers, I've been experimenting with the concept that maybe it's not.  Or in any event, I've narrowed down the groups of strangers that I want to help; it's pretty much that classic disaster maxim, women and children first.  When a nurse called his name again, this time because a bed was ready for him, I wasn't sitting next to him anymore but I went to him and shook him roughly awake like last time, telling him "Get up!  What if they skip you?  Just get up and go over there."  He tried to wake up and was pleading with me, "Okay, okay, I'm sorry, I'll get up, I'll do it."  Then he started to half-cry and said "This is too much for me.  I can't do it."  I felt so intent on shaking some sense into him, I wanted to know what was wrong with him so I could reason him out of it, so I asked him if he was on drugs, because that seemed to be his problem, and I knew I could reason him out of a drug panic.  He suddenly seemed very alert as he yelled in my face, "I'm not on drugs."  I realized then that whatever his problem, and how ever much I outweighed him, he was to some degree a potential threat to me.  I hoped the night wasn't as bad as it felt and that maybe there was someone there watching me, ready to shake me back to life if needed.

Tired Glamour

tired glamour like a magnolia leaf fallen from its tree.  it is losing its velvety whiteness, starting to crinkle dry at the edges, but it still smells sweet, like the pasadena streets of my childhood.

Fuck It: Both Soiled Hands

"And the light crept up between the shutters

And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,

You had such a vision of the street

As the street hardly understands;

Sitting along the bed’s edge, where

You curled the papers from your hair,

Or clasped the yellow soles of feet

In the palms of both soiled hands." 
t.s. eliot