The beautiful Ms. Seberg, before she decided to off herself with pills.

1. Jean Seberg as Lilith

While I fancy myself a bit of a Seberg, on account of my close, personal ties with the Black Panthers, it is her portrayal of a mental patient that really made me feel close to the gal. I came across Lilith a few years back, when I went on a massive Warren Beatty viewing binge, having decided that I was kind of in love with the guy. Hopefully Warren Beatty googles his name frequently enough that he will stumble across this blog and we’ll be very happy together. I don’t even need him to get a divorce. Annette seems like a pretty cool lady. But, let’s get back to Jean, whose madness in this movie isn’t anything compared to the raw power of turning men’s knees and brains to mush. By the end of the film, Beatty, who’d gotten a job working at the mental hospital, loses his own damn mind.

Wearing bathing suits is an art. Like everything, Sylvia did it well.

2. Sylvia Plath, naturally

“Dying is an art. Like everything. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say, I’ve a call.”
Sigh. Oh, Sylvia, from the moment my 13 year old eyeballs devoured that bit of literary awesome, I have loved you. And even though the movies tell us he was a jerk-face, I totally love Ted. I mean, yeah, he messed around. Yeah, he wasn’t always there for you. But you loved him, Sylvia. And you were no dummy.
What I love most about Sylvia and Ted Hughes is how much they loved each other’s writing. Basically, they’re like Tim and I. Yup. I just compared myself and my best friend to two literary geniuses. Because, duh, we totally are, and also, I once wrote a poem that was pretty good.

F Scott and his dear lady who always looked great in hats.

3. Zelda Fitzgerald

F. Scott loved that woman deeply, as she inspired every single one of his heroines once he met her. She was beautiful, and wild, and the two of them found each other in real life. That gives me hope that my own F. Scott may show up one day. It also gives me hope that if he does, I can be a flapper.

4. Mabel in A Woman Under the Influence

Man, Mabel is a goddam champ. All she wants is to make her husband happy, and she tries, but she’s too much of a wild card to fit in with all of these ridiculous ideas society keep foisting on her. Her stupid dingbat husband has her locked up, but then he gets a taste of what it’s like to be a housewife. Frrr-reallz, that shit would drive anyone over the edge.

5. Betty Blue

I’ll admit it. I love Jean-Hugues Anglade even more than I love Warren Beatty or Ryan Gosling. If presented with the opportunity to make out with Beatty and Gosling or to merely lick one of Anglades deltoids, get him over here because my tongue is ready. And in the movie “Betty Blue”, you see Anglade (in the role of Zorg) naked naked naked so many times. Full on, weinie wagging in the wind, beautiful naked.
This is really one of the saddest films I have ever seen. When Zorg says the the name Betty when he’s happy, bringing her gifts and flowers, it’s like he’s laughing her name. But near the end, when he’s running up the stairs and yelling her name right before finding out that she done gone and popped out her own eyeball, well, I start sobbing every time.

I miss you, bananagrams.

This is a photo taken by an especially toxic ex. He bought me the bananagrams and some bagels as an apology. But then he kept the bananagrams in the split. I miss them.

One year ago today, I was hanging with Colin Ambulance at a punk show.

Colin Ambulance, doodlin' and smokin'. Photo by Preston of Say Cheese and Die

He sends me a message on Facebook that’s all about how I used to be an office aide and I smiled at him in art class and we went to the bowling alley. All I can think is that I bet he’s fat and smells like a weinie wagon nowadays. If I’m wrong about the smell, I’ll bet I’ve never been right about anything in my life.

He hasn’t included a picture, but the message is the long sort, and a glance at his profile shows that he never uses pictures. He lives in Terre Haute. I remember going there to race go-carts, riding in a big van with the other troubled youth, feeling the hot hands of the newest boys, thinking it was love every single time.

None of us girls ever got along unless it was long enough to call “Slut” on another one of the sluts we knew. Thinking back, I bet we could have unionized and been playground powerhouses. Instead we glared each other down and stole each other’s boyfriends.

I remember being an office aide, too. It was first period and I had to walk the entire school, grabbing attendance sheets and looking boys in the eye long enough to make them feel something strange before looking back down at my shoes. One boy would get angry over this and I always had a feeling he’d be the sort to push me down in the dirt at a county fair, getting corn dog mustard on my knees.

But this kid, I don’t remember him at all. I ask him for a picture, and he sends one; sends his senior picture from that year. There’s nothing in his face that brings anything back for me, and I read about the date to the bowling alley. “You kept playing with my lighter, like you were obsessed with fire or something”, he writes. “You sure did have the brightest smile.”

I kick this around a bit and decide against accepting his friendship request. I delete his messages and go on with my day. Later on I’ll try to remember the name of that other boy- the scary one who’d mouth nasty things to me that made me want to cry. Later on I’ll look that guy up and see what he’s been up to the last 17 years. If he’s not in prison, I’ll be a bit let down.

Earlier, on Facebook, a woman I met in San Francisco commented on a post, reminding me of what happened the night that we met. I thought about it for a minute, then I realized that my life is full of really amazing stories, and during most of those stories, I was meeting new people, even if I was out with people I already knew.

And so, I began to recollect the nights when I met people.

It was a really fun, amazing thing to do. Try it. Think about your friends and think about the very first time you met them. Make them smile with the memory.

She wore a garbage bag to my classroom the day of the Halloween party. It was the big, heavy, black sort that shone and crinkled when she walked. None of the other parents wore costumes. Her hair was like twigs, dirty blonde with twinges of green where she’d tried to bleach it. She’d said once that when she was giving birth to Anthony, my cousin, her water broke and it was green. I pictured it the same green as those parts of her hair, the same way I could envelope my whole brain in the same kind of black shiny water as the color of that garbage bag.

There was a constant anxiety hanging heavy over my time in that house. I remember so much of it; have talked so much of it through in therapy sessions. What I missed talking through in therapy usually finds it’s way out of my mouth late night, laying in arms, a spark of a thought about a dog giving birth and eating it’s babies, or something will make me think of spending a summer in bed, writing sentences every time I broke a rule I didn’t know existed.

A few years after I lived with Dan & Gina, my aunt and uncle on my mother’s maladjusted side of the family, I was in a foster home that similarly enjoyed the Public Square style of chastising a person. They’d have the offender stand before the entire family and they would berate, list your crimes, demand that you explain yourself. I would stand there and I would stare past all of it, and I would think “I’m not here. I’m not here. These are not my toes. This carpet doesn’t exist. I am nowhere. I am nothing. These are not even my thoughts, because I have none.”

That foster family came to believe that I was possessed. They were Catholic freaks who seemed to keep finding themselves guardians of all sorts of possessed children. To hear their stories, you would think Satan was the case manager, because there is no explanation for the number of kids who came through their home who somehow became inhabited with an evil spirit.

The only spirit in me, causing me to go cool, grow still, stand for as long as I needed to in order to bypass their bullshit- outlast the madness and not be broken, was the same spirit that had learned how to endure anything.

I was seven.

My aunt used to lay me on the hardwood floors. I was seven when she started to do this. I mention that because when I think of seven year old children, I often consider the amount of misery a person would have to have within themselves in order to cause this level of sadism to be directed at a child. Once on the floor, my freckled nose pointed toward a plaster crack, she would put a shirt into my mouth. Then she would take the buckets used to fill up the fish tanks, dirty plastic, heavy buckets, and she would pour the water slowly over my face, and it was like I was drowning.

You don’t die from most things, and some things you wish you would. I can recall panic attacks as an adult where the loudest though in my head was “Enough! Just stop living already so that this can be done.” And a panic attack, that’s within yourself. You have to grab yourself by the arm, make yourself breath, relax, be okay. Or, you could just take a xanax. But another person isn’t within you, and you can’t grab them by the arm when you’re seven and their arms are that far above you.

When I was 21 my aunt and uncle found me. They called me and we small talked about my cousins, about the house, about my kids. And then my uncle got me on the phone alone and told me about Vietnam and being a prisoner of war. He talked about the tortures he endured, and how those things stay with a person, making it impossible to ever really come back from that.

For over a year the punishments continued, increased, got more intense. There were beatings with a leather razor strop, there were mental games, making me dress in a diaper and goo-goo gaga and drink from a baby bottle in front of the neighbor boy I had a crush on, there were more instances of water boarding, there were three days of making me stand in a corner, kicking me when I’d fall over from exhaustion.

And I remember that time in shades of green and in black, and I remember hiding in the bathroom, overdosing on tylenol because I had read about a kid dying from it. It did nothing. But laying there on that floor, knowing I wasn’t going to die from a thing, not knowing the word torture as it applied to my uncle and his war, only knowing that this would not kill me,I knew that in order to not break completely, I had to do something. I found a way to stare until I didn’t exist, and I would think “I’m not here. There is no me. I don’t exist. I have no thoughts. None of this is real.” until I stopped thinking all together and I really didn’t exist.

The last time I talked to my aunt and uncle on the phone, my aunt said “Every time we see a news story about an abused kid, we think about what we did to you, and we’re sorry.” And I didn’t know what to do with that. I said “That’s okay.”, because what else could I say? “Well, I don’t have to see news stories to remind me. It’s always there.”?

As an adult, after years of therapy, I learned to stop disappearing myself any time I felt like things were about to get hard. I learned to be present in those moments, to accept that stressful things aren’t all going to be as terrible as the tortures endured in abuse. It’s difficult, though, because I react so strongly to every single thing that happens. I liken it to needing to cut a grapefruit when the only tool I have is a chainsaw. Every time there is any situation, no matter the size, my usual tool is so powerful that it can destroy what could be a good result.

It was an act of extreme strength that lead me to invoke the ability to meditate myself away from a thing that would have driven me mad otherwise. And lately, I have felt life testing me, have wanted to replace the sound of the doctor talking about the courses of treatment, the nurses in hasmat suits putting poison into my arms, the nights of aching, the arguments over the phone with billing departments, the fucking loneliness, with that same dark space of not existing. But I haven’t, and I won’t, because it actually takes more strength these days to be present. And I have never taken the wimpy way out before.

See, my uncle was right when he said that those things that happen stay with a person, and he was right when he said you don’t come back from that. You don’t come back; not ever. Instead, you go someplace else. It’s just that the place I chose to go has a a much better view.

I’ve been using the dating website, OkCupid, off an on since 2008. As a result, I’ve met, dated, and become friends with a lot of really cool people. Then there are plenty of people who were only one or two dates, then things just sort of fizzled.

Like anything that is a constant in my life, being a dating woman, especially one who uses a dating website, the whole process leads me to continuously think about the process of dating itself.

Not that I’m Mary Roach and you’ll see me giving a TED talk about it, but I’m like a dating philosopher at this point. I’m like a bedroom Socrates or something. I’m like the Soren Kirkegaard of one night stands. I’m the Descartes of sending out first messages. I’m the Emmanuel Kant of ending things. I’m pretty sure you get the point. (more…)

Trast is 14 and every day he gets a little bit more awesome. I can even look past how much he eats and farts because he makes me laugh and he’s really good to me. Here’s our conversation from last night.

I was eating toast and talking about how much I love toast.

T: Are you going to replace men with toast?
M: Toast don’t talk back
T: Toast don’t tell you that you’ve let yourself go.
M: Toast don’t forget your birthday.
T: Toast don’t leave you with three kids and the rent due.

And now, “Toast don’t leave you with three kids and the rent due.” is one of my new favorite quotes.

I’m currently working on a really great project funded by The Andrus Foundation. We’re in the research phase of developing and piloting a technology based program to help children who are aging out of the foster care system develop the life skills they need to- well, to not have shitty lives after they reach adulthood.

Pretty damn cool, right?

But as I work on this project, of course, it brings up all sorts of memories for me, and most of those memories are pretty dark. My foster care experience is one that I speak of rather openly, because I think it’s important. People need to know what foster care is really like, and they need to start looking around at those gaps in our socio-economic system to see who, demographically, are stuffed into the dark, hidden places. For example, here’s a bit of news you may find interesting. In LA County, the largest demo of our homeless population isn’t veterans. It’s foster kids.

I could go on for a long time, quoting foster statistics and regaling you with tales of some of the awful homes I lived in, but the more I think about it, and the more I look around me at perfectly reasonable people in my life, the more I am baffled that more people aren’t foster parents.

See, I know a lot of healthy, well adjusted, wonderful, caring, intelligent people. And for some goddam reason, those aren’t the people who are taking in foster youth. Those people, instead, are the ones who say “Oh, I don’t have the chops to be able to take care of an abused kid.” Those reasonable people are reasonable enough to understand that in order to properly care for a child who has likely already been through so much is going to take a lot of work. And those are exactly the sorts of people who could be wonderful foster parents.

I get it. The kids are challenging. I was challenging. I was a pain in the ass. But I could have really used a few good influences.

Just. Think about it. Become a foster parent, already.

I used to fear water, or rather, I used to say I feared water. I didn’t really fear it, though there was something about murky lake bottoms and fish bold enough to graze my goosefleshed legs that grossed me right out. Still, I overplayed my fear of water for years, claiming I was psychic and knew how I’d die; claiming that because my father had drowned at 21, I was afraid I’d drown as well; claiming that in a former life I had drowned myself; claiming whatever seemed most interesting while hugging my own arms and making a show of my fear.

Having moved a lot, I could reinvent fears based on convenience. Moving in the summer usually kept my fear of water at bay, with the opportunity to do hand stands in pools during the stickiest midwestern days guiding me to not only not fear water, but to be a mermaid; to lay in the bottom of pools with all of the air pushed out of my body until I was still as a stone, looking up, watching the way the sun turned into three suns through the chlorine kaleidoscope. In those cases, I always picked other things to fear- the dark, the basement, thunder, loud noises.

What was I, after all, if I had nothing to fear? Everyone seemed to fear something, and I had noticed that when they did, they were loved for it. They were loved through it. They were hugged and teased, then protected from it. If they faced their fears, they were hugged harder, even if they came out shaking.

My son, Trast, has real fears. He fears roller coasters, heights, and anything medical. He fears pain, discomfort, and seeing his own blood. And I have a hard time understanding him, because I have had very few honest fears in my life other than spiders, and not being loved, for which I would do anything.

Yesterday Tim and I went to the ocean. We drove down the Pacific Coast Highway, gathering pools of disgusting as we waited in lines of traffic so slow that I daydreamed of rollerskating past all the cars, shaking my short shorts and holding a flower. He just kept telling me to be happy, it was going to be a good day, but I couldn’t feel it yet. I’ve been so angry lately, anyway, and I wasn’t feeling down with his whole “Look at us! Tim and Nikol! Off to do whatever and be spontaneous!” idea.

And then we got to the ocean, and I can’t imagine anyone has ever not felt the way I feel when I’m next to the Pacific. I never get used to the moment of realization that I am so very small; that everything else is so very large; that I have nothing worth worrying about, as the moment I first look up at the perfect spot toward the back of the sky where you realize it seems to have no end. I imagine, had I lived in a time when people thought you could fall off the edge of the earth if you swam far enough, I would have thought, “Sure, stupids, but that’d take you only forever.”

Photo by Joshua MacLeod

When you first feel the water, standing at the edge, as the waves barely touch your toes, the first reaction is to make your way back to the towel and forget the ice water. “It’s cold because it comes all the way from Alaska.” Tim tells me this every single time we’re at the water. “Yeah, but come on! Didn’t it have time to warm up a little?” That’s how I always respond. Things with him are like that. I always know what to expect with him, and I have needed something like that in my life forever.

The waves knocked me over this time. The moon was full and the tide was especially strong. Even if you “stayed low” the water seemed intent on pulling you into it and pushing you down. I started to laugh underwater, imagining what it must have looked like to see my bald head, growing back blonde baby fuzz, one moment above water, and the next gone. I don’t suggest laughing underwater to anyone.

I sat in a shallower area, but the waves kept pushing my head back, filling my nose with salt. I thought about my teen years and my fabricated fear of water, and I thought of how, so long as I kept telling myself it was the truth, I could almost convince myself of anything. Just yesterday morning I decided that I loved doing dishes. I know that by the end of the week, I will be downright cheerful about washing them. The brain is like that. You can tell yourself anything and make you believe it.

If I think about the things I fear right now, I haven’t changed all that much. I still fear that nobody loves me. I still genuinely won’t go near a bug. And I fear being blind folded. That seriously freaks me out. But more noteable is what I don’t fear, and what I have never feared; a thing whose lack of fear has lead me to another kind of fear altogether. I don’t fear death.

Since the moment I knew I was alive I have never feared death. Through any spiritual incarnation of my beliefs, even when I believed there was a hell, I didn’t fear death. I have been near it, I have sought it, I have wondered about it, and I have never felt a moment’s fear about it.

I fear Pelham, who is only five, not having the goofy stories of times we spend together; not being around the very spirit of all that I am that makes others shake their heads.

However, like any proper egomaniac, I have feared life without me. I have feared Trast, already one of the most amazing men I know, continuing to be amazing but without our banter. I have feared Ayden and I never getting to the point where we can say “All those years of butting heads were pretty funny now that we look back on it.” I fear Pelham, who is only five, not having the goofy stories of times we spend together; not being around the very spirit of all that I am that makes others shake their heads.

And I clearly see the parties I’m not at. I clearly see the dinners I don’t cook. People are there. They are eating, happy, smiling. These are people I love, and I am not there anymore. There’s Tim, at the beach, and the water is cold. “This water is cold because it comes all the way down from Alaska.” he says. And whoever he is there with says “Oh.” And I am nowhere. But everything else, like the ocean, keeps going so far that you can’t even imagine where it ends.