Manual Moping: typing up my turpitude

The crush of it all,
the never-ending list of things I must do,
it can't be that bad, really.
I sit all twined up around myself on the subway,
trying to become a singularity but less significant,
just a glob of aching joints that others cannot scrutinize.
But I do not want to blend in.
I can't, anyway, my skin is too shocking, my hair is not dyed that color.
I am out of place.
The stares press into me while I mumble to myself,
repeating the litany of my anxieties, my daily tasks,
so I can forget the gnawing that grief has been doing around my orifices.
I think it's hoping that if it chews away at my ear holes enough,
meanwhile liquifying my insides--grief is an arachnid,
I hope you realize, silently trapping its prey
and holding it motionless for fear of moving forward,
being caught again--while the pressure of stares and tasks and stagnation
continues to mount,
eventually my brains will come squirting out of my ears, nose, mouth.
All over the sleeping man across from me,
if someone gets on at the next stop who looks like her
and catches me unawares.

I am not an artist, it seems,
just a story teller.
There is a difference.

Reaching the End of My Last Nerve: or, child sacrifice at work

From a conversation I had earlier this morning, at work:

*phone rings*
Me: Good morning, ____ Gallery.
*ambient noise on the other end of the line, no voice*
Me: Hello? ...Hello?
Guy: *after more silence* ...Oh, hi.
Me: Can you hear me?
Guy: Yes...
Me: Hello...
Guy: Who is this?
Me: This is Lynsey at the ____ Gallery.
Guy: Oh.
Me: ...can I help you?
Guy: Well somebody called me from there.
Me: Ok, there are about 25 people at this office. Do you have any idea who it might have been?
Guy: Oh!
*silence*
Guy: It might have been M____.
Me: Well, she works at our other location. But I can put your call through from here.
Guy: Ok.
Me: ...can I tell her who's calling?
Guy: Oh, yeah, it's P____.

...now. Who in the HELL calls someone without: A) being prepared for someone to pick up and say hello on the other end, B) considering who it is that they're calling, or C) being prepared to identify him or herself? Obviously this guy, but really, what KIND of person does this?

Am I supposed to telepathically know who you are, what you want, and who you need to talk to? If so, that would be bad for you, because by virtue of knowing telepathically what a douchebag you are, I would also (in my version of an X-Men mutant power world) be able to telekinetically strangle you, thus saving the gene pool from another line of morons.

Yesterday I got so annoyed with the borderline handicapped people calling me every thirty seconds that once as I was picking up the phone, I had to take a moment to remember how to answer, because I almost said: "I will sacrifice your children to my dark god" in a spooky goth voice instead of saying: "Good afternoon, ____ Gallery."

This isn't good. I can't keep up the happy smiley voice much longer.

From round and about

Interesting New York moments of note from the past few weeks:

-In a deli on 137th Street, as I was waiting to pay for my coffee and unhealthy snack, a woman entered and stood directly behind me, not exactly in line but not doing anything else, either. She started singing. Maybe to herself, but her voice was so highly trained and operatic that she was loud enough for everyone to hear. She sang the song Jessica Rabbit sings in Who Framed Roger Rabbit: "Why Don't You Do Right." (Which, as it turns out, was originally written in 1936 by Kansas Joe McCoy and called "The Weed Smoker's Dream," then rewritten and performed first by Lil Green in 1941 and made famous by Peggy Lee the next year... or so says Wikipedia.) It was bizarre. I didn't know anybody else on earth knew that song. I wanted to join her in it, or turn around and smile, but she was singing it in such a vibrato-heavy, show-tunes-with-jazz-hands style that I couldn't get into it. I left the deli singing it quietly to myself, all sultry like it's supposed to be sung.

-This morning, walking to work along 57th Street, a man in front of me was walking with a closed umbrella in his hand. He was wielding it in a very strange fashion. With each step of his right foot, he would put it down as if it were a cane, but when it came back up, rather than swinging it forward to put down again, he would swing it up very fast and hold it out parallel to the ground for a second, then in a jerky motion put it down again and repeat the whole cycle. It was odd. But what was odder was that when he would walk past a plate glass window, he would stare at his own reflection, perhaps mesmerized by his antics with the can. I could only wonder if he saw me behind him, staring at him with a bemused expression.

-Myself, stuck to a wall in a public place, frozen in fear and struck dumb by grief, breaking down for all to see, right there by the door. I do not do these things, I thought even as I crumbled. I wanted to batter down past those arms holding me at a distance, enter them instead and wrap myself inside until that shattered heart let me in to do much needed repair work. My hands are tender and my mortar is strong. But no dice. Instead I watched myself as if from someone else's perspective, hiding in plain sight.

Rainy days

Definitely having another empty kind of day. Lots to do, no time to do it, and lots of thinking. But this about sums it up. Thanks, Townes Van Zandt:

Won't say I love you, babe,
won't say I need you, babe,
but I'm gonna get you babe,
and I will not do you wrong.

Living's mostly wasting time
and I'll waste my share of mine
but it never feels too good,
so let's don't take too long.

You're soft as glass
and I'm a gentle man;
we've got the sky to talk about
and the earth to lie upon.

Days up and down they come,
like rain on a conga drum.
Forget most, remember some,
but don't turn none away.

Everything is not enough
and nothing is to much to bear.
Where you've been is good and gone,
all you keep is the getting there.

To live is to fly,
low and high,
so shake the dust off of your wings
and the sleep out of your eyes.

Goodbye to all my friends
it's time to go again.
Think of all the poetry
and the pickin' down the line.

I'll miss the system here.
The bottom's low
and the treble's clear.
But it don't pay to think too much
on things you leave behind.

I will be gone
but it won't be long.
I will be bringin' back the melodies
and rhythms that I find.

We all got holes to fill;
them holes are all that's real.
Some fall on you like a storm,
sometimes you dig your own.

The choice is yours to make,
time is yours to take;
some sail upon the sea,
some toil upon the stone.

To live is to fly
Low and high,
so shake the dust off of your wings
and the sleep out of your eyes;
shake the dust off of your wings
and the tears out of your eyes.

Helpless

Neil Young will NOT get out of my head. And I just dropped a piece of lettuce from a charity salad down the front of my shirt. I've just been accused of sitting on a FedEx package for two months before sending it, which I did not do because that would be ridiculous. There is a Picasso show coming up and of course that means the WORLD IS ENDING. Ick. I'm in a kind of doldrum-feeling afternoon, where I'm sitting here motionless and inspirationless and with a very distinct treading water kind of inertia setting in. Gotta keep moving, keep working, keep writing. Make some phone calls, maybe. I hate phone calls.

All I really want to do right now is spend some quality alone time with myself, figure some things out about my place in everything that's happening and how I FEEL about it, but there's no time except for these long afternoons at work where I'm not really at any kind of liberty.

So, I've decided to just say fuck it, and start singing the song in my head out loud and screw the clients and art appreciators. I have a good voice; they can deal with it. I will also share it with you, hypothetical reader:

"Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows in our eyes.
Leave us...
Helpless, helpless, helpless..."

I was trying to raise these plants, see. I've never been much good with plants. I like to think of myself as in tune with nature, and I love trees. They are like godparents, sheltering and shading. And houseplants are like cousins, nephews, nieces. I had a few of them. Started out slow, with a cactus that looked like dragon claws reaching up from the dirt. A succulent--very easy to care for. A few others joined their ranks, more complicated plants with more insistent needs. It felt good, keeping these things alive, these little friends. Watering them, repotting. Caring for them, letting them put themselves under my wing, where there is room enough for anyone.
One day I returned to find my belladonna drooped over and gone. A chill went through me. Pure terror. Premonition. It would all end soon, I thought. All of this illusory power to hold and keep and help the lives of these living, breathing beings. They are not mine, really. They belong to a higher order, that thing that is out there that dictates to us all the spans of lives, the depth of love.
I mourned the belladonna. I mourned the visions I'd have of my abilities. I was distraught.
Today I looked up to see an arm--a whole arm--of the succulent had fallen off sometime during the day. I wasn't there to see it. I couldn't have known how to help it. It looked fine yesterday.
I'm sitting here looking at it. It's falling apart on me and no amount of watering or repotting or turning it to the sun is going to change that. I am helpless. I can fuss over it all I want, click my tongue, touch it lovingly, breathe carbon dioxide onto its leaves, but in a few days time I know it will be gone. Like the other.
It aches. It's a deep down, slow, quiet ache that can be overlooked sometimes, when things get hectic. It doesn't demand much, and it's too steady to cause those jags of heaving pain that can come out as sobs very often. But it does creep up at times like this. An empty kind of longing, as if each breath I take is just echoing around inside, perfectly useless, like I am in such situations. The kind of pain that leaks out from the eyes but despairs too much to be violent.
Well, the cactus is still here, at least, tenacious and joyless on the other dresser.

What am I supposed to do? To say? How can I make this right? Every step I've taken for weeks has been thought over a thousand times before I move my leg, and yet for all those carefully planned footfalls, I'm still just standing here, with a big hole in me and weighed down now by a thousand new weights, trying to balance. But even walking won't fix this, it's a something that was broken before I got there. Now it's a matter of finding the glue. But I've got a hundred and twenty boxes of tubes of things and bits of yarn and where the fuck is the goddamn glue? I need a map to all of this, to the way your heart works, because all I want is to sit down, lay all this out, and rebuild us in the light of all the lightbulbs rattling around in another eighty-five boxes. We'd be brilliant if we could get all the wiring out of the other, other boxes and fit them into a socket. Could we just get to a space where I can lay all this down? Can we find one of the crayons in my pocket and make a map? It's cold out here, and wet and snowy, and even this physical flying across the country isn't going to take that away.

Here's something.

Through the past two weeks, which have been so up and down and insane that I have no idea what to think or feel or do, I have at least come to realize that the one thing I can always depend upon is a deadline. And I've met my latest one. New column is up today:

Porn Has No Soul.

Monster Side

She patted the back of my hand,
urgency in her eyes and demeanor-
She often taps her fingers on tabletops when anxious-
and when I turned to her she said:
"Your monster side is showing."

We were at brunch.
I looked down at my hand under hers,
there on the white table cloth.
She quickly removed her skin from mine and,
yes, I could see it there,
the black, wiry hair poking out from the cuff of my sleeve.
I moved it under the table, smiled sheepishly.
I'd almost forgotten about those claws.

"When you laugh," she whispered,
"you scare the people at the next table.
I can see them cringing."
I pushed my lips down over the fangs.
"And," her eyes were cast down to avoid my yellow ones,
"when you talk, you gesture so much, and
your claws are so dirty. I don't think
we should do this any more."

I stared down at my palms, smooth and almost-human.
She quietly got her things, threw her hair
over her shoulder like she does,
and left.

I guess I should have known better
than to think my happiness could mask those nails,
or that smiling might diminish my teeth.

And anyway, what choice do monsters have in life
aside from becoming writers?
And who can write when they're happy?

Crappy Coincidences, or Bad Omens?: or, how to tell you're going to have a bad day.

When I woke up today, I absolutely could not convince myself to get out of bed. It was warm in the bed and cold in the room, it had snowed all night and looked soft and quiet outside, and I knew that today would be a very long day of sitting in a chair in various places if I did get up. It didn't look promising. But I told myself I'd been so productive the past few days and had so many things to accomplish that getting up would be worth it. So I did.
And then the shit started happening. Small at first, but escalating slowly. I had slept in too late to yoga, which I've been trying (somewhat successfully) to do every morning to help keep my energy up. Instead I got in the shower to soften up my skin so I could give myself my two weekly injections of anti-joint-hurty medicine, but then remembered that I'd left the refill of Enbrel at work because they have to be kept refrigerated and I hadn't gone straight home after they were delivered yesterday. So I gave myself the other shot when I got out of the shower. When I was done with that, I set about making eggs to go with the Korean-style kimchi-fried-rice bowls we had half-prepared the night before, but all the frying pans were dirty. So I had to wash one, and of course I chose the one that had the most stubborn grossness in it, which took me a good ten minutes to clean out of the pan, only to get it dirty again, which seemed wrong and made me angry. As I set about cooking the eggs, the ferret came up and started giving me the most mournful, "I-know-you're-going-to-leave-me-all-alone-here-all-day" looks and pawing at my leg, which made me feel really shitty. And then, for no reason at all as far as I could tell, both the eggs I broke into the pan had broken yolks.
I had no time to eat breakfast after this, and left my house later than expected. On the way to the subway, I got dripped on three times, all over my face, the makeup I had just put on, and the hair I had just blown dry. I told Connor I was sure this was going to be a bad day, and he told me these weren't omens. I disagreed.
Once at work, I realized how little money I have when I glanced at my banking account. Then it turned out that my coworker had called out sick, which will make it much more difficult for me to leave here in time to get to my first night class of the semester. Showing up a half hour late for the first class would be embarrassing and unpleasant.
Just now, I decided that I'd give myself my second shot in the bathroom on my lunch break. Giving oneself an injection in the work bathroom is not fun. Not only because this particular injection hurts like a motherfucker and then stings for hours afterward, but also because the bathroom here is like a middle school bathroom. A row of four stalls and four sinks and no way to lock the door to keep out the constant stream of other women who need to use the loo. So there I was, with my shirt rolled up and my pants pulled down so I could see my stomach, where I was preparing to inject my Enbrel subcutaneously. I'd brought a cotton swab and alcohol in a plastic bag, and as the woman in the other stall made the usual preparing-to-pee noises, I was standing creepily in the other stall and crinkling a plastic bag a whole lot. I'd already gone to the bathroom a half hour or so before so I couldn't even fake like I wasn't doing something shady by popping a squat. As she left the stall to wash her hands, I actually injected myself and bit my lip--hard enough to really hurt--to keep myself from sucking in a breath at the stinging pain of the medicine going into my body. I think it might be one of those things where the molecules in the medicine are too big to fit in with the molecules in the blood stream or something, but I'm really bad at remembering science-y facts so maybe I made that up. Whatever the case, injecting this shit hurts really bad and I had to try really hard not to make some noise that would fit the context, but to someone else in the bathroom minding her own business, would sound really, really creepy. It hurts so much that no matter how much I try to inject the very small amount of liquid into my fatty tissue, I just cannot push the plunger down very quickly. At home, when I'm being more of a baby about it, it can take me up to a minute to get it all in. This time it took me maybe half that long.
Finally the other woman left the bathroom, I finished injecting, and I put the used syringe on the makeshift 'shelf' I'd fashioned out of the toilet paper holders. I got all my clothes back to where they were supposed to be, and as I reached up to put my instruments of torture back in the plastic bag, I accidentally knocked the syringe into the toilet.
GOD DAMN IT.
There was nothing else in the toilet, and our toilets get cleaned every day by the building cleaning guy, and I've heard a billion times that the water that comes into the toilet is just as clean as the water from the tap, but... There are like 20 women at the gallery who use this bathroom every day. I did NOT want to stick my hand in there.
Luckily--I thought--the air in the syringe and the plastic of the stopper and hand-grippy-thing at the end were keeping the syringe floating, needle-down, in the potty. If I could reach in and just grab the very end of it, I might be able to avoid getting wet.
I grabbed a paper towel/napkin I'd been using to set things on and folded it up so it was long and thin, then bent over the toilet. I balked the first time, and rearranged the way I was holding the paper towel, then reached for the floating end of the syringe. As soon as my hand brushed against it, the entire thing stopped floating and landed with a soft 'chink' at the very bottom of the toilet bowl.
No words for my frustration. The skin on my stomach burned and itched where I'd injected it (this happens every time... actually, it still does...), but it was really annoying right now. "Fuck it," I muttered, plunged my entire hand into the toilet bowl, brought out the dripping syringe, stuffed it in the bag, and stormed out of the stall.
Thank god nobody saw me come out, all wet, and stuff a plastic bag into the garbage, muttering obscenities to myself. I washed my hand for a LONG time and went back to the desk, where I'm writing this now. If you don't hear from me for a few days, rest assured it's because something even STUPIDER happened to me, and I am hiding out in my bed until the bad days pass.