come, take a walking-trip through happiness.

what does it mean when you meet someone who makes the romantic thoughts you’ve had about every other dude feel utterly contrived?

i want to take a paring knife and skillfully exise out the soft part of my brain where the memory of them resides, like carving the rind off of a lemon. people are disappointing. i’m sitting on the couch, in between two…men? boys?, one is pulling on the right side of my dress and i don’t want him to stop. we have all drunk a bottle of bourbon, a seventy dollar bottle or a hundred and fifty dollar bottle of bourbon. we are dancing in the living room, alone, the song is so good but i feel stupid asking what band it is, he slips his arm around my waist. we are swaying, the muscles in my legs weaken with desire and i blurt out: what are you doing to me?

he doesn’t answer. he grins.

later i grab his face with both palms and plant an innocent peck on him, then he tugs on the hem and then i go home and wake up hours later and i can’t feel my arms because i forgot to drink water. later in los angeles i buy a copy of a record he once played for me, certain that i will never actually listen to it but rather to have it as a kind of sick reminder. a pinch of salt gently dusted between my thumb and forefinger onto this giant photo album of a healing wound: how was i to predict that i would never know how he wears his scarf over his winter coat, that we would never exchange christmas gifts, that the image of him wearily drinking whiskey, neat, would not be one i would bear witness to more than once?

people are disappointing- perhaps if you have never stood on the santa monica mountains, drinking in the smoggy vista of los angeles, in awe of what human hands and minds have built- they are disappointing. maybe if you have never walked the naves of foreign man-made cathedrals, centuries old, feeling like the resonance of your own breath could stop time- they are disappointing. probably if everywhere you go you never stop to really see what’s there- disappointing.

hey, i have been disappointed more times than i can count: when i said i love you and he said i know. when i failed to cook an omelet aux fines herbes and knew i had to give up on a dream i had never much believed in to begin with. when i watched him call a car and unceremoniously get inside and leave me again, for years. when i walked down grand street during san gennaro drunk on carpano antica, certain that i was the only person alone in the entire world. when high summer swallowed the whole year and i found out that i do not wear blonde as well as i previously thought. when. when. when. these men?, boys?, unrevealed hellions, were reliable as sleeping pills in that regard: disappointing. i have more faith in what people have made that i can see.

the darkness inside the bar belied the reality of the outside world. it was like being stuck inside a gross, dank dungeon but whenever the door would swing open the sunlight would appear with violence, an assault on retinas that caused me to rush to lift my forearm to shield my brow, so bright for a second that it was painful.

i didn’t know the man in front of me. he was old enough to be my father, despite his shaggy grey hair and sagging skin, he exuded an air of boyishness, maybe due to his spindly limbs and lankiness; he was so thin his chest was practically concave. i know he was from oklahoma, and he spoke with the gentle nasal elocution of a lifelong southerner.

i abandoned the north and its four distinct seasons, it did not take me long to adjust to always having bare arms. i still struggled to sit up straight on the bench, smoothing the pink fabric of my skirt over my legs, never able to sit still- the nervous habits of uptight yankees, vestiges of my midwestern upbringing. i could never sink effortlessly into a chair and sip beer so relaxedly.

maybe i will develop an ease with myself once i am his age, i think, pretending to contemplate a sad pile of wilted lettuce languishing on a wrapper in front of me, the detritus from half a sandwich that i hadn’t wanted but consented to eat. he told a story about a friend who, after the dissolution of his marriage, decided the thing to aid his vitiated heart was skydiving- the account made my axons freeze up for a moment, because i too have always known the healing power of viewing the world from an airplane, being able to hold acres between your thumb and forefinger. it is the one thing that has always quelled my quivering anxiety. if you fall out of an airplane, if you can submit yourself to gravity and make your way back to solid earth alive, perhaps grief will burn off on the way down like exhaust.

i just went along with it the whole time, too brainwashed by the smell whenever he got into my car to oppose- toothpaste, soap, aftershave? this aroma of cleanliness pricked my nostrils and it made him seem more delicate to me than he ultimately was. it wasn’t safe; it was kindling. he is nothing but the most recent domino to fall- they have always made me run to the threshold of a runway, uprooting myself for days in a vain search to find another way to say what i am feeling.

i understood. i often can not stand knowing that those who have hurt me can share the same air, the same zip code, that they could know the joy of living in my hotheaded city and the smell of cedar, the sparks of sunlight that glare off of lady bird lake and the sky so constantly blue it feels like a cavernous prison sometimes. i need a different current to course through me, something to drive out these muddy iniquities. there has to be a limit. they can not all descend upon my heart ready for battle, or maybe i have to learn to manage it as a muscle.

can we talk about my house? man, i am obsessed with it. i bring it up because soon we are getting a new roommate! the third new one since i’ve lived here. the best news is that it is a dude so i can make tons of jack tripper jokes (actually, shit, i think this makes me the chrissy, so maybe nevermind). it is going to be truly wonderful to never have to see the idiot boyfriend of my soon-to-be-departed roomie, he doesn’t know how to close a door like someone who wasn’t born in a barn and also this morning the toilet was filled with his piss and an almost-delicate looking wad of phlegm. i suppose this is the universe’s retribution for when i let my boyfriend stay at erin’s & my place constantly and he doubtlessly annoyed the shit out of her.

i am definitely the house matriarch, i suppose by virtue of being the oldest lady and also the one who has been here the longest. i feel an odd sense of ownership over it, though it isn’t mine. it is the most perfect place i could have imagined. after spending two days looking at run-down shanties and hovels that you couldn’t pay me to live in, my mom and i arrived in front of the house not feeling optimistic. the landlord greeted us, i was taken aback by how young (and babely) he was. all i needed was one look at the kitchen and i knew this was the place. it is comparatively giant, and has a gas stove! fortunately the rest of the house was also perfect and we scrambled to get the lease signed before we flew back to chicago the next day.

additionally, i love my neighborhood so much. technically it is the hood, and we have definitely had all of our patio furniture stolen off the porch and there was a break-in last february two days after my roommate moved in (while i was asleep in the next room, talk about creepy). once mary and i were walking to get a much-needed margarita at red house late one night when a couple of dudes rolled up next to us in their hoopty and were like where do you think y’all are going? so we told them we lived down the block and they asked us incredulously, do you know where you are? you are in THE HEART OF THE EAST SIDE! which became a long-running joke for us after that. i guess seeing a couple of white hipster bitches walking in the middle of the street at 11pm is still an odd sight for some denizens of my neighborhood. i have never felt anything less than completely welcome here though, and i spend a lot of time walking cola all over and meeting and chatting to people and letting little kids pet him.

i have lived here for a year and a half- so has cola. in that time we’ve seen three roommates, two birds, and a cat come and go. now we get a dude, and another dog! we just got a fence around the backyard so now we can turn it into a real hangout space. last year we had a weekly movie series where we projected a movie every thursday night, hopefully one day it will stop being a hundred and fucking three degrees outside every day so we can start again (so far this year we have only shown slade in flame on labor day, with this amazing pre-show alice cooper concert video from the 80s where he does all kinds of choreography with a blow up doll). some day i am going to buy a hammock and sit outside and drink lemonade and read a book, soon.

oh shit, it is national unmarried single americans week! thank god those of us who are permanently unlovable get our own week of commendation. obviously it is a total sham (not unlike a lot of people’s actual relationships!) but last year i celebrated by taking myself out to a meal at wink where i ate seared foie gras on brioche with red onions and blackberry gastrique and chocolate cake and sweetbreads and a salad with ricotta salata and early girl tomatoes. fuck, it was so good, i was in one of those ‘food comas’ that retards always talk about! i made a reservation and i dressed up because i sometimes sort of believe in the concept of fine dining and was infuriated when i found everyone else in the restaurant clad in jean shorts and burnt orange longhorns t-shirts and sunglasses perched atop their heads. if my waiter hadn’t been so attentive with the wine i might have slapped the lady next to me who ordered a dr pepper with her meal. i suppose she also might have liked some ketchup for her foie, as well? as the hostess led me to my table she said, with a knowing twinkle in her eye, ‘i love it when my boyfriend goes out of town, too!’

sometimes i am glad i don’t have a boyfriend, i spent my entire weekend going out to eat by myself in new york city and i was in god damn heaven. you meet the best people when you go out by yourself! for instance on saturday i met these people who told me their friend iris looks just like me but with dark hair. haha um, so she looks like me if i didn’t bleach the shit out of mine? they all proceeded to whip out their iphones and flip through photos but i didn’t see the similarity except for our identical sharp chins and pointy noses and it just made me wish i had a cool name like ‘iris’. as the blood from my rare as fuck lamb burger dripped down my chin, the bartender shredded horseradish and told me that her boss wants to open a bar in east austin. ‘that is where i live!,’ i proclaimed, marvelling it how i can never escape this place.

wait, it gets better. for dinner i took myself to osteria morini because emily & i went there for my birthday and i haven’t been able to stop thinking about the rigatoni with shrimp and fava beans i had. i went at like six o’clock because i am a senior citizen, and i eventually struck up a conversation with the dude next to me whose name was, i am not even shitting you, AUSTIN. actually, austin austin. i spent like three hours talking to austin austin and his adorable bartender friend rich who provided me with so much to drink that it is sort of a miracle i made it home. i don’t think i’ve consumed so many different kinds of alcohol since the night i went to coyote ugly (exactly). i seriously don’t remember anything until waking up the next morning and dragging my ass to get a massive pistachio croissant at momofuku milk bar. i didn’t do anything on sunday except walk around, i just walked and walked and went to leaf through expensive heavy books at the taschen store and bought a lauren moffatt sweater that i won’t be able to wear in texas probably ever and lit a candle for my long-dead catholic grandmother at st patrick’s cathedral even though i don’t believe in god. i walked and ate tarragon gelato then read the entire mission street food cookbook at a bookstore and kept congratulating myself for wisely bringing flats instead of boots with three inch heels.

but even though i didn’t do anything i still have been recovering all week. at lunch i have been taking naps in the backseat of my car. i am so envious of my friends who can go out night after night until 2am or later and still go to work the next day, i still have an infant’s appetite for sleep. i could sleep all the fucking time, i love it so much. i love to sleep when i am depressed and i love to sleep when i’m happy. although i confess that i didn’t sleep well in new york without cola. i am used to a tiny wet nose squirming under the covers and poking me every night before i drift off. anyway this singles week has been boring as hell aside from an awesome band practice yesterday. tomorrow night i hope to go down in a booze and oyster blaze of glory after happy hour, in bed by ten with my dog firmly knitted to the small of my back.

sometimes it feels like i live everywhere.

that is the thought that kept tearing through my brain this weekend as i walked everywhere. quickly deposited in hoboken via a jetblue flight/the manhattan-bound E/the PATH train, i checked into my room at the W hotel- i figured, if i am going to go on a trip alone, still nursing my silly bruised heart, i might as well go balls to the wall. when i got to my room it was seriously like the scene in big business when sadie ratliff starts screaming because they have little soaps in the plaza hotel, ‘could you just diiiiie?’. since i have practically made a career of slumming it on my friend’s couches until now, staying in such an opulent hotel was sort of jarring. i spent barely 8 hours there, probably 7 1/2 of them asleep, so i didn’t even get to enjoy the ‘hoboken view’ (the top of the roof).

hoboken is strange. it feels like a movie set. like when you are watching a street scene on seinfeld and it’s supposed to be new york but you know it’s a set. i am not convinced it’s a real place. i walked from the hotel to maxwell’s, buying a pack of cigarettes on the way because i have never bought a pack of cigarettes in my life and i thought it might be nice to pretend i am someone else in the pretend land of new jersey. smoking a cigarette is sort of painful, but afterwards you feel good- like getting a tattoo or something. a tattoo of carcinogenic tar on my lungs, delicious. i got to maxwell’s and joel came up behind me. as we embraced i couldn’t stop myself from creepily telling him that i had started to think he wasn’t real- four years is a long time to go without seeing someone. tim came over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. stroked my hair, and nuzzled his mustache on my other cheek. i was leaning against the wall, or i might have fainted like a lady from the nineteenth century.

the first band was terrible. i think how i put it to dianne was, they were a bit too bombastic for an opening act. later they were all doing blow downstairs so i guess they think they are rock stars. oh yes, i finally got to spend a sort-of-substantial amount of time hanging out with dianne even though i feel like i have known her forever even though we were INTERNET BUDS. the best part was that she asked me, ‘so did that donut thing really happen?’ GUYS, DONUT DICK IS GOING TO BE MY LEGACY. too bad donut dick has blocked me on facebook, maybe i could message him and be like, hey you’re a legend now- you’re welcome! i had one maker’s & coke on a totally empty stomach so by the time you am i played i was feeling truly fantastic, so much so that i enjoyed what was in hindsight an otherwise quite shambolic show. my favorite part was probably when tim suddenly pointed at davey exclaiming, ‘the solo from crazy little thing called love, for twenty dollars!’, and davey nearly pulled it off.

i missed sloan’s entire set. i am sad about it but since i hadn’t heard their newest record, i figured my time would be better spent with joel and the dudes since it may be another four years until i see them again. i helped joel and andy pack stuff up and we pushed the rented gear down 11th street to sloan’s tour bus. as i tried to stop my massive amp from careening into the street i heard andy yell behind me, ‘just let it roll right into the hudson!’

the night ended so fast, all of the sudden i was hugging dianne and joel goodbye, and i was alone again. i lit a cigarette for the trek back, mostly to have in case i needed to burn any of the sort of intimidating flocks of bros i kept passing: ‘you are attractive, and i ain’t lying’, said one. ‘please don’t rape me,’ i thought. as i crossed over to a less busy street, i flicked the cigarette onto the sidewalk, sending a tiny firework across the cement. somehow the walk made me drunker and the hotel attendant had to show me how to work their fancy fucking elevator and when i got to my room i realized that i hadn’t packed pajamas, but i HAD saved my potato chips from lunch. call it even!

the more often i leave work in the middle of a friday afternoon and drive straight down 183 to the airport and just get on a plane, the more exciting it all feels to me- i should make it some kind of goal to fly somewhere at least once a month. a 737, md-80, an airbus a320- the flights all feel as flippant as a cab ride now.

i went west this time, which is something i haven’t done for awhile. my memories of los angeles were sparse and muddy at best; the last trip was when i was not quite eight years old and my entire perception of la was based on the movie back to the beach. i thought that because they bump into OJ at the airport, that we would see tons of famous people and was irked when we didn’t encounter a single celebrity (who i considered a celebrity at that age, i can not recall). my uncle lived somewhere around anaheim, and when we visited i slept on the floor and was transfixed by a tarantula they had in a jar on their patio. we went to disneyland, to knott’s berry farm, to the beach.

the best part of this trip was every part: from our ninth-floor hotel room in little tokyo with the weird japanese toilet (slash bidet, with a heated seat!)- to the cauliflower ravioli i ate on saturday night (and am convinced were roofied because i don’t remember anything after getting our car from the valet until waking up the next morning)- to the spindly seussian palm trees that put texas’s stumpy, dried-out palms to shame- to a you am i set so full of songs i didn’t even know i wanted to hear- to the sight of mountains right out the window, how is it that i have gone years without seeing mountains?

“how did you get so good lookin’?”, tim slurred, leaning into me as he stumbled towards the hallway- it was hard to believe the last time i saw him we were perched side by side on barstools in the east village, drinking margaritas and sharing stories about italy and he wasn’t this person who had written these words that have saved my life a lot of times. there is an indelible smoldering mark on my right cheek where he planted one on me as a greeting, and he sweetly teased me by sarcastically remarking that there is ‘nothing’ in austin. he told us about the chess set he bought here, years ago- metal vs jazz (seen here). you can really build up an ordinary human being to be something huge in your mind, when they are always so far away. after the show, this guy sat down next to me and started chatting me up, and i told him i’d flown twelve hundred miles just to see you am i. ‘that guy seemed pretty phony,’ he remarked about tim’s cheeky stage manner. my blood alcohol level was high enough that i didn’t take offense to this comment until the next morning as i laid in bed, soberly taking stock of the previous evening’s events.

i could not have imagined, if you asked me to in 1996, that as a thirty year old i would give this much of a shit about this band- mainly i could not have fathomed being this old, or them still being active. when my dad dropped jenn and me off at lollapalooza fifteen years ago, clad in a hole t-shirt (her) and a white men’s undershirt that had been ripped and re-pinned together with safety pins and adorned with black-sharpie-scrawled bikini kill lyrics (me), my teenage head would have exploded if you told me that in ten years we would be drinking sol in a hotel room in cleveland with these guys or that russell would invite me to lunch in sydney or that i would one day share davey’s sweet potato fries at a bar in new york. i would have never believed you.

i have seen their first show of the tour, and i am privileged enough to be going to see their last, next friday. los angeles is the eighth city in which i’ve seen them, hoboken will be the ninth. while they played i was already so happy and drunk that i was stumbling into people (sorry to the tall girl in front of me for: basically bodyslamming you because i was so excited to hear ‘who put the devil in you’) while dancing, but it is sadly a truly rare occasion that i see a show and not only know, but love, all of the songs played (er, except ‘trigger finger’, that song is kind of boring). the only thing sustaining me at this point is that i know i get to do this again in ten days.