come, take a walking-trip through happiness.

TOMORROW: LOS ANGELES / THE BEST AUSTRALIANS / JENN R. / DRUNK TIMES / MOCA / FRIED GNOCCHI & FRENCH DIPS & DIM SUM / THE OCEAN MAYBE?

“look at the map,” my mother instructs. “count the states we have been to.”
i trace my chubby finger over the crumpled atlas, counting as i go. most of the states mean nothing to me, except miles and hours and anonymous rest stops where i climb onto the roof of our minivan while everyone else goes to the bathroom. i keep track of different license plates i glimpse in a notebook, written in shaky nine year old script in the bumpy backseat. the ones from arizona are my favorite, they are flame-red and have a small cactus in the middle. they seem more exciting that our bug-splattered blue and white utilitarian ‘land of lincoln’ plates. i like all of the ones from the southwestern states: colorado, new mexico, and utah’s- which blithely proclaims ‘ski utah!’ on it. the southwest seems like a different planet to me, even though i know it is the same and i have been awake across the green hills of iowa and the banal plains of nebraska that lead up to the continental divide and the harshly beautiful rockies down to the gypsum dunes of white sands- we have never left the ground, i am sure we are still on earth.

i don’t know how i can want to be something i can’t describe. when i’m at a party and i’m doing something dumb like talking shit or stealing someone’s cigarettes i know that i have so far to go. i think a lot about the discourse i have with my friends and peers, and sadly, it is always about other people. an absolute waste of breath. the joke is that i am pretentious as diane chambers, and i like that- i want to be talking about kierkegaard at the bar, or writing in a journal at happy hour. no one around me is interested in reading, in traveling, in edification- but there are times when i can not tell if i am just pretending to be, or lowering myself to their level, or lazy enough to only care about gossip.

it is certainly because of my father that i developed an affinity for stifling southern heat, his fault that i grew to adore the allure of deserts. of course it wasn’t immediate, as an eight year old trekking around pueblo ruins i can only imagine my bratty lack of appreciation, grumbling as he led us through cliff dwellings and down ladders into kivas. to his credit he never once told me, one day you are going to realize this is enriching, i had to figure that out on my own. if my dad has ever followed a religion, it has been the one of pursuit of knowledge, and i try every day to match his ardor- but i have never been as absorbent a sponge. i inherited some mutated gene from him that makes us belong behind the wheel of a car, constantly driving. some gene that impels us to just walk and walk until we are content with the awareness of how small we are in the world, our brains so distended with ideas and information that it makes it hard to ever sleep, elated with the knowledge that our breath is eroding the ancient sandstone around us, who could possibly need a god to worship once you realize that?

so aaliyah died ten years ago today. know what that means? it means that ten years ago around this time i started my first blog. i know this because i remember the day she died- i had just moved to champaign a few days prior, and was settling into my awesome apartment. it is really too bad that i went crazy there because it was the cutest flat ever, down to the address even: 910 ½ s. locust (adorable!). it had pink tile in the bathroom and the tiniest afterthought of a kitchen, and it was furnished with a new plush faux-suede couch on which i took probably hundreds of naps. by a stroke of luck i had cable when i moved in so i spent a lot of time watching TRL for some reason while i downloaded thousands of songs from audiogalaxy (remember!) and listened to ted leo records and blogged on my stupid new blog. i remember when aaliyah died because that night i had gone to see jay and silent bob strike back alone and i came home and was crying because i was twenty and living in this giant college town- and i had just gone to see jay and silent bob strike back BY MYSELF. i must have been watching mtv and they were talking about aaliyah. i wish i could say that hearing about her dying made me reevaluate my situation and made me realize how lucky i was, but i was a completely shitty narcissist ten years ago, too.  

so, this dude wanted me to eat a donut off of his dick. seriously. it’s not like it is a new idea, though i don’t remember exactly how the topic came up. oh yes, it was because he told me one day that he ate five donuts for breakfast. my sister was like ‘you were in love with homer simpson?’. yes. a jew-fro’d homer simpson. what kind of person eats five donuts in one sitting? probably someone who is so unhappy with their life that they emotionally overeat, i’m glad that isn’t me anymore! i should probably write him a little thank you note to say thanks for making me feel so constantly fucking sickened that i am now as thin as i have been in my adult life. if i had agreed to eat a donut off of his dick, it would have taken place pretty much the moment his girlfriend walked in on us. i guess too bad, because then she really would have kicked my ass. was it alexyss tylor who once said, donut dick will make you slap somebody? it’s true!

i didn’t want to do it because we had just gone to dinner and i ate a marvelous squid and melon salad and a giant lamb shank and we had even had dessert, a banana semifreddo, i think it was. you should be able to tell from that sentence alone that i am probably too much of a stuck up foodie to eat a donut off a dick. i was also confused as to the logistics of it, i mean, did he want me to just eat the donut? blow him and THEN eat the donut? alternate between bites and dick-sucking? it was all too confusing.  who knows why i didn’t, it certainly isn’t because  i have dignity or anything. i dated someone who peed on me once. in a non-sexual manner. like two months into the relationship. so it’s not like i’m taking a firm stance on not letting myself be degraded by men.

jessica also dated this guy but i don’t think he peed on her. he may have spit on her or dumped beer on her head or something. he did make both of us look at his butthole, though. haha, ‘make’, obviously we consented to it. strangely i did not know jessica did this until the other night when i was trying to be all charming at the bar and she texted me ‘um he made me look in his butt when I was dating him’. way to throw my off my game, dude. i guess he thought he had hemorrhoids and wanted corroboration, but what is weird is that even though he made jessica do it he made me do it again, years later. wouldn’t you just be like, oh yeah, butthole pain, probably hemorrhoids. even my mom still makes fun of the fact that he had hemorrhoids (so you can see where i get the ‘being a total bitch’ part of my personality, i guess). at least eating a donut off a dick, i would get to eat a donut. i like donuts. well, liked.

tonight i have the first practice with my new band. we had a band meeting last night and i am feeling super excited about what we are gonna become. it is going to be something to be in a band with people who are actual musicians (disclaimer: i am not an actual musician) instead of a bunch of sad record nerds. and yes, there is totally going to be a song about donut dick.

because i am no longer being held hostage by friday evening ritual, i went downtown and parked on fifth street. i wanted to eat a neapolitan pizza and drink some wine even though i know next to nothing about wine. so i sat at the bar, in the corner, as far away from everyone as i could get in the tiny restaurant. somehow the setting sun managed to shine right in my face, through an aperture in the otherwise shaded windows. i was wearing a blue and white striped dress, a dress that has earned compliments from my sister, my boss, and a random old woman in an elevator in new york city:
“thank you for wearing a blue and white sun dress! you never see anyone wearing blue and white sun dresses anymore,” she told me.

the bartender was adorably young, in a plain white t-shirt and black jeans. he came over and i told him to recommend me some wine, something white, something sweet. he deftly grabbed a chilled bottle and poured a bit for me to taste, telling me about trebbiano grapes.
“that doesn’t mean anything to me,” i shot back, playfully.
“honestly, it doesn’t mean anything to me either. i didn’t know anything about wine before i started working here. i still don’t, but i can fake it,” he said, tossing the cork.
i drank three glasses of wine and slowly ate my cauliflower caponata while he drank water from a mug and explained all of his tattoos to me. a man across the bar with his girlfriend or maybe wife (i couldn’t make out their fingers because i am in denial of my worsening nearsightedness) was staring at me every time i looked at him; i’m sure it was a freakish sight to see a platinum blonde in a dress alone at the bar, alternately scribbling furiously in a journal and trying unsuccessfully to flirt with the bartender while rolling the stem of her wine glass between her fingers. i watched this couple eat their food and drink several glasses of peroni, and i tried hard to put together a story for them but i could not. they seemed suited for each other. he didn’t take off his baseball cap and she did not smile the entire time. they did not look happy and i could not help but hope for them that it was just maybe just enervation from the august heat and the end of another long week, and not because of any romantic infractions.

i paid my tab and waited until the bartender walked outside to smoke before i left. i decided to walk to the movie theater even though it was blocks away and the early evening heat was still toasting the concrete. on the way there i stopped and bought a ring that is small black pebble, i have been wearing it on my left ring finger since then. married to gravel, united with elements, wed to a chunk of bedrock. i sat on a bench on second street where it ends at san antonio street, and beyond i could see the gentle sloping ranges of the hill country. sometimes i like to imagine what it must have been like to be lady bird johnson, spending her summers as first lady vacationing in the middle of texas, sitting by her pool all day, maybe waiting to hear the plane overhead coming in from austin, bringing her husband home to her, kicking up all sorts of dust as it hits the airstrip behind the ranch.

i bought a $4 box of m&ms that probably would have cost 80 cents anywhere else. for the next several days, i found m&m’s charmingly smashed against various objects i pulled out of my bag. i drank root beer and watched the future and the wine, the wine that i didn’t know anything about was making me cry. a calculated telephone call leads to an affair in the film, and it forced me to remember the name that puts bullet holes in my brain every time i think it. i was thinking of the moment i would have stopped time in my own life, like jason does in the movie, in my mind i know all the curves of the figure i would cover with a sheet and hold up by the forehead while i stare at the full moon, begging it to not let life go on.

i walked back to my car, buzzing with anguish at the movie’s ending. i asked the capitol building, when will the residue of the last four months finally be wiped from the cityscape? i asked the frost tower, when will the morning come that i don’t wake up with my hands in fists, molded by anger in my sleep? i woke up on saturday morning and went running before the sun was up- the only time of day it is not utterly unbearable to be outside, but also the only time of day i can arrogantly jog down the middle of my street, counting the number of stop signs on each block before it dead-ends at the cemetery.

i vowed to keep my phone turned off for the entire weekend and then i scrubbed my entire house clean in my favorite symbolic act, my favorite pretense of having any control over anything in my life. i made a birthday cake, because food is the only way i know how to show someone that i care about them. i fell into bed, exhausted, at eight o’clock and let the dog drift to sleep on my chest, his head nestled under my chin. yesterday i had to turn my phone back on, and i talked to erin for like two hours and after we hung up, i started to think i should write a novel. jump on the bandwagon. maybe to prove to myself that i can do it. because writing this bullshit is not self-indulgent enough. maybe i could just apply to a bunch of MFA programs and see which one will take me. i am kidding myself with these pipe dreams; i know i need palm trees too much and i haven’t read a work of fiction in years and i don’t have enough ideas to make it to the end.

but: maybe i can fake it.

thanks to erin also for reminding me that i put this song on a cd that i made for my ex-non-boyfriend’s mix cd trading party like three months ago. i even made one for his girlfriend! OH MY GOD I ALSO PUT “OPP” ON IT!!! damn, i am fucking clairvoyant or something. anyway i know i said i was giving up on dudes like a day ago but come on, you can’t expect me to be serious. all my best stories involve shitty dudes so clearly i am going to keep searching for dick-related drama. i guess the consensus is that i should find a bang thang, since i am a triflin’ ho now. yes, a dear longtime friend of mine called me a TRIFLIN’ HO. who knew that someone who was a virgin well into their twenties could ever attain such a status, it is like a reverse ugly duckling situation where i become a more horrible person the older i get. but i get better looking on the outside, so i am totally okay with it!

erin says i should try to find and bang lucas pepsi because he lives in austin now. we met lucas pepsi in 2005 when he showed up at our housewarming party. i opened the door and in front of me was a dude who looked like barney rubble and next to him, this pretty hot hipster babe. barney rubble aka grimace aka johnny was erin’s classmate and the babe was lucas pepsi. okay, sorry, i just fell down a rabbit hole looking at pictures from that night and getting all nostalgic for our apartment where erin had a crack den bedroom and we kept a tv that didn’t work on the balcony for months and it was so poorly insulated that our heating bills were like $800 during the winter and our landlady was this psycho from canada. but i digress, at that party lucas pepsi earned his nickname because we found out he drove a pepsi truck in milwaukee or something. he also fell in love with erin because that night in front of a captive audience in our kitchen she did a shot of vodka with a scorpion in it that i had brought her home from london. i don’t know if it was after that or later that i told erin she should bang him for sport. i guess a few weeks afterwards we went to a party and he was there and had on the same blue and pink new balances as my boyfriend at the time and he was all jealous because lucas pepsi made them look way cooler. i think lucas pepsi came home with erin that night but they didn’t bang and she claims that when i saw he was in her room i poked my head out from my door and gave her a congratulatory thumbs up. i don’t remember this because it was super early in the morning but i do remember why i was awake and that is because i was eating ice cream. YES I USED TO EAT ICE CREAM AT LIKE 5 IN THE MORNING. dark times. this is why i can not keep it in my house.

anyway, eventually i moved out of that apartment because my boyfriend made me lose my mind and erin and i weren’t friends for a long time but one day i was at work and she sent me a message and it said “guess what, i totally banged lucas pepsi” and other stuff about our landlady being a total cunt and we have been friends ever since. LUCAS PEPSI WAS THE REASON FOR OUR REUNION, clearly he deserves some kind of thanks. now he lives in austin and he is in a terrible band (oh god, i haven’t heard them, but their name is the worst!) and last year i went to have lunch at frank and i could have sworn he was working as a bartender/barista but ‘brown hair with tattoos on his arms’ describes approximately 150% of the population in this city to it was hard to ascertain. although i looked him up on facebook and he looks like more of a choad that i remember and apparently has a girlfriend now. oh wait i forgot that kind of thing totally doesn’t stop me these days!

so i am going to publish it because i’m sick of looking at it, even though it is stupid.

i don’t remember when i started giving nicknames to dudes, probably a few years ago while eating bowls of pho with erin & we decided that ‘fatty brisket’ would be a hilarious one. it reached a fever pitch upon moving to austin though, since mary had been nicknaming guys for years prior, together we began to dole out derogatory monikers for everyone! one of the first guys we christened was THE NECK, who has probably the best story: our ex-roommate told mary that this guy was in the butthole surfers, so every time we’d go to a show we’d be like ‘it’s butthole surfers guy!’. he seemed to show up everywhere and had this long (really long!) hair. as he made his way through the throngs (HA!) at beerland, mary pointed out that he never moved his neck so he wouldn’t disturb his mane, remarking, ‘he’s so AWARE of his hair.’ so we started calling him ‘the neck’, and later found out that he isn’t in any band at all and that our ex-roommate was totally fucking with us. he is just some asshole who goes to a bunch of shows. i was introduced to him one night and he told me he name was ‘carson, like johnny’, and i am pretty sure fell in love with me since he kept making jokes about us getting married. as if, dude. sometimes they are not always creative: for example, the guy who wrote me a missed connection was dubbed ‘big cheze’ after his extraordinarily lame e-mail address; a classmate was ‘texas tattoos’ because his arms were covered with longhorns miscellanea.

however, most of the nicknames were reserved for guys who we were pursuing romantically. since their (the dudes, not the nicknames) appeal usually waned after a few weeks, we would devise these pejoritate epithets by which to refer to them so we wouldn’t have to speak their actual names. treat them like they weren’t real. i mean, the story of my life, i’m after this guy who doesn’t want anything to do with me. one night mary and jon and i were drinking margaritas and i decided to call this dude and ask him to get a drink. when he answered he told me that he can’t because he thinks he has a KIDNEY STONE. dejected, i hung up and blurted out, GOD, HE IS A REAL RETARD. ‘there’s your nickname!’, said mary. et voila, THE RR was born. i feel sort of bad about it because i have since gotten over this guy and should probably not call him that but i have just been referring to him as the rr for so long that it would be a pain to switch now.

the next one was the infamous and legendary land line. i thought for sure one day we would be close enough that i could tell him hey i’ve been calling you land line for the better part of a year! but ALAS. the dude who told me i should die a spinster was dubbed NBB by emily, for ‘no bang ben,’ because there was absolutely NO WAY i was going to bang him! sometimes we just got lazy though, like when i named this guy ‘hot taco’ even though it had nothing to do with anything- we just needed a code name so we could talk about him without anyone knowing.

mary’s former coworker we called ‘lago’ for lago vista, which is where he lived in a condo in a converted retirement community, which he apparently thought should be super impressive. this guy was younger than me and so many signs pointed to him being a real live pickup artist. one night we went out with him and his friend to a fucking absinthe bar; i was having a great time at first because they were both wearing ties like proper fops and kept ordering drinks for us (chivalry is nice) and picked up the tab and also i thought for sure they were gay. lago’s friend became ‘pleats’ because the first time i saw him at this movie he had on this godawful pleated pants (i tried to change it to ‘lil sleazy’ after a few days, but it was too late- he is PLEATS to this day). then we went to a different bar and lago started surreptitously rubbing the back of his hand along my thigh and telling me how his favorite thing is girls in tights (which i happened to be wearing), it became a lot less fun for me and after he asked me to have dinner with him sometime i began to jab my elbow into mary’s side to let her know it is time to go!!

i am sure people have nicknames for me, i would actually love to know them. i have always wanted a nickname but apparently i don’t have any hilarious defining characteristic  about me that would lend itself to one (because, sorry, ‘sad sack’ is already spoken for). even when erin was gaya bukkake and my ex was wayne gagball, somehow we could not come up with a totally inappropriate sexual act to match my middle name (anne). what is the word for eating a donut off a dick?

48 hours in my birthplace and with my friends: a digging of emotional distance from things in texas i want desperately to forget. i will not lie, i tried to imagine his face and what it looked like the last time i saw him, his hand on my breast mere seconds before his beloved walked through the door. how instantly i turned from flesh and limbs, willing before him, to jetsam, an expendable nuisance as he ran for her. to her. i have thought about exactly how many nanoseconds it required for him to wantonly flip this switch, to turn all his desire for me into feeble contrition towards her. on friday i felt his ghost as i walked through security at austin-bergstrom, imagining how mere hours earlier he must have walked the same path bound for the same place but we would not be meeting now, as we had planned for weeks. i saw the full moon later that night over chicago and remembered how a month ago we walked down poquito street to my birthday party and he told me, in the most obligatory tone, that i looked pretty. i was wearing a dress that i’d searched for and finally bought one night in new york city, telling the saleslady, i need a dress that will get me laid- and her telling me, ‘oh, i’ve had sex with like three guys while wearing that dress.’ i never needed the dress. but the full moon was there and i wanted to hold his hand while we walked but it seemed somehow too intimate. and so now there was the fucking full moon again and i was on my way to elgin wearing the same god damn dress and i can’t believe i’d forgotten that the orbit doesn’t ever stop.

the worst part of an affair, of being the other woman (for an earnest idiot like myself) is having gulped down everything he told me that i wanted to hear like my life depended on it. i wrote him letters and nothing i told him was an exaggeration, but of course now i don’t think for second he felt anywhere near the same, it was all just sad fawning absorbed so easily by his ego. i wish i could find the place that my feelings come from, and i could just dam it up with steel wool and rusty nails, even for just five fucking minutes. i am so pathetically eager to love and be loved that i always ignore all signs that a guy is an ignoble cur. he could probably see my frailty from across the bar the first night, he probably knew he could do anything he wanted to me without any campaign of attrition, all along kept going because he knew that in the end, the worst is that he would get caught- but he would have a safety net, and he could cast me out of his life with blackhearted ease, without so much as a word. i understand silence, more than i understood anything he ever said to me, in this i should have known he’d be most fluent.

but i have not been able to stop thinking about how this is working out for the best, whatever that means. it means that this weekend i was happy. happier without him. if he were there i would not have had my arms around my friends of over twenty years, friends who now live in far flung corners of the country and globe, all convened in the place we’re we’d met and grown. muffy wrapped her arms around janine and me, exclaiming, ‘so, yesterday we were all just in fourth grade!’. it feels like it. jessica played nicki minaj for me on the jukebox and mike came over and leaned in to tell me that he played the zombies for me. boys are always playing the zombies for me, this wasn’t the first time. there were so many friends there that i couldn’t even drunkenly keep up, i only had three drinks and despite eating the erstwhile customary elgin post-bar fourth meal of a taco bell burrito, i fell asleep in the backseat sitting up, like a baby, for the whole ride home. the next morning we went walking through erin’s idyllic town, we bought red plastic cups of lemonade from some little kids on the sidewalk, we sat on the porch as a thunderstorm pummeled chicagoland, the rain cascading down in furious waves across the pavement. we laid around and ate candy from trader joe’s and went to oak park and had dinner with mary and i laughed at everything luke said because laughing had not felt so good in a long time. i showed up at my parents’ and they surprisingly didn’t immediately assume i was having a nervous breakdown. i blew bubbles on the deck, twirling the giant wand around me in the grass, blades lush and velvety from record levels of precipitation. later i took a bath in my parent’s jacuzzi, submerged in the amniotic water and i pulled the plug and sat there as every last drop chugged down the drain.

i walked to my mother’s sewing box to grab safety pins and the aroma of late summer air floating through every open window smelled so comforting and tropically sweet that i started crying while i pinned up my dress, ripped wide open over the chest. when my parents deposited me at o’hare, my mom looked at me knowingly and said, ‘don’t be sad about….you know‘. she has never said anything bad about him (my friends, well, that is another story) and i nodded reassuringly, with hope that i can attempt to live a life with a heart as pure as my mother’s. i want to be doing it right, i want to forgive. i was reading about the darkest planet- a jupiter-sized behemoth so many light years away that even trying to conceive of what that means could make one go insane- a planet that absorbs nearly all of the light that hits it. god, he is like the personification of this blistering ball of gas, but there isn’t anything we can do, light will continue to hurl forth and sometimes, like goodness, we won’t get it back. i am a sun, he is a distant planet, but one so black that i will have to look very hard to see.

so, who knew that this would be my fucking life. i’m thirty and suddenly content to live a lie. it’s mercury retrograde right now. when i met him it was mercury retrograde. BAM, full fucking circle! yeah, it is hard to live with myself these days. my friends are all there, to cheer me up and tell me i dodged a bullet and i know my life is not going to change but i still feel a kind of portentous undercurrent. i have been ignoring so much lately, so the simplest things are starting to seem monumental: the moment in the morning before i get out of bed, when cola sidles up next to me and offers up his belly for me to rub, stretching his twiggy legs to the ceiling. a picture my sister texts me, of my dad pretending to take a bite out of a giant fake hot dog. an embryonic lizard crawling on the side of my house, who, when i gently poke him with my finger, runs into a crack and it sets off some kind of chain of events that changes our lives and no one could have ever predicted.

ever since i have had blonde hair, i feel like my life has been different. i am taking the rest of the year off from men. boys. i have let enough of them treat me like shit the last few month to last me years, but of course, it should really be up to me to maybe seek out a therapist and perhaps they can figure out what it is about me that makes me only want to chase guys who view me as utterly disposable. tomorrow night i will be on a plane to chicago. my clandestine trip. i can not even begin to cognize how much this 48 hours is going to fix me, even dreaming about how tomorrow night i can sit around erin’s house with her and jessica and luke is a billow of hope. like a jerk, i thought i would keep it a secret from my family and just go be with my amazing friends, but now i want to drive out to my parents’ house and surprise them. i told my sister so she can make sure they are home, but i am pretty sure when i show up at the door they are going to freak. i hope my mom doesn’t faint like the one time i staggered up their stairs at 7am because i drove all the way home from college during the night because i couldn’t stay in my apartment without having consecutive panic attacks. anyway, this trip could not have come at a more perfect time. a window seat will be my medication, i will go a thousand miles just to lean on those who love me, and when i return i hope to not feel as though i am the one who has been vanquished.