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.

I’m going to SF this weekend. I’m glad I don’t have any friends who call it Frisco, because that would pretty much seal the deal on me never going back there.
First time I was there, it changed my whole fucking life. I was a meek, frightened mess when the plane landed, then by the end of the week I’d called my husband and told him I was leaving him.
Last time I was there it was with you. You took me on the most romantic date I’d ever been on, and we cat-sat for your friend, and you were still calling me a sweetheart. You’d lay there and look at me and say how I was so cute. And all I could think of was how you were such a nice guy and so good to me, and we went to a really nice book store and I met your sister and her family.
Tomorrow I’m going with someone else, and I think he’s a nice guy and he tells me I’m cute, and we’ll probably go to a bookstore.
But it was after that trip that you started getting mean, eyes rat-like as you’d put your hand up and tell me to shut my mouth. It was after that trip that you’d wait until we left a party and were driving home, then start telling me I was a piece of shit and I smelled terrible and we’d have those big crazy fights.
So, I guess I’m a little bit nervous about going on this trip. For once I’d like to go up there, smoke weed with some SF hippies, and then just come home without anything at all changing. Do you hear that San Francisco? Just leave things alone this time.

Back in my midwest poetry writing, watercoloring, soap making days. 2003-ish.

Every once in a while I still do it, too. But I used to do it every day.

Recently, my first ex husband got remarried. I’ve been married twice already, and some days I’m fine as frog’s fur with that, and other days I feel like it’s a bit of dirt up my nose that I can never wash out. I can smell it, and it’s visible, and that dirt says, “Here’s a lady who doesn’t know how to have a long lasting, meaningful relationship. Here’s a lady destined to make bad choices.” Couple that with having three kids from three different fathers, take a look in my cupboards at my chipped, non-matching dishes, and look at the way I thumb tack mementos to my bedroom wall, and this is the pretty little package of a someone stunted person.

So, Mitch got remarried. Nothing feels weird about it. There are no moments where I miss what we had; no regrets that things ended. The wedding reception was great, too. They had a mashed potato bar, you guys. And in the morning? At brunch? Another mashed potato bar. It was some kind of heaven, and a goddam lovely time.

And I remembered that when he and I were married, I used to make soap. And I remembered that back then, I used to paint. And I remembered that back then, I also used to write poetry. I started to dig around for it, and I found some. Most of it’s pretty awful and should be destroyed. Then I came across a specific poem about our divorce- a poem that I rather like, and I figured I’d share that here.

Rightful Owners

How long will
that finger stay
thin in a band
crunched like cellophane
white in testament
of the abdicated throne?

The callous line
crossed down
custody
half my
coffee pot
dish rag
sheet set
debt
margarine

The once upon a
time line
crossed down
ownership
Half my self
detached from him
shuffled and sorted
Not yet in every respect
back to me

How long
will we reach
for a goodbye kiss
ask how work was
to empty air
that once held promise
now just
dust particles
and bemused compunction

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.

He said that he knew a friend, a girl, a real tough lesbian with all the tough lesbian things like a motor bike and big dogs and plenty of sleeveless tops. This girl, he said, this girl she was cool in every way a person could be, and there was only one thing she was an idiot over, and that, of course, that was love.

Sometimes I think I’m in love with you, because it’s easiest to think that way. In part I can use it as an excuse when some guy goes silly over me. I can pull the, “But I’m in love with someone else.” and they usually say that they kind of knew that all along. But, also it keeps me from needing that feeling with anyone else, because you and I know how the hell it goes with me when it comes down to getting excited about anyone else. I’ll call you up and I’ll start listing off all the great shit about some guy, and you’re cool enough to listen, and you’ll tease me a little and then in a few weeks I’m bummed because those fucktards either stopped being great, or they stopped calling. But with you, I can just keep loving you and getting drunk and eating hamburgers whenever I feel like it, and you always tell me I’m good looking. Always.

I’m a heart retard, though. I’ll get solidly into my cool again, and I don’t give a fuck or a damn or two shakes of my head, any eyes that I bat aren’t blinking in shock. I’ll be cruising through it, living wild and laughing it off. And then I’ll decide I’m hot for some guy, and I turn into a total pain in the ass, questioning how I should be wearing my hair and starving my guts of air until they call me.

I don’t know what I want to say tonight. I’ve been slowly melting into a thing that’s likely wrong, and allowing myself to start with the mushball momentum, and as I feel it start to happen, I like it and I hate it and I like it again. So, that’s why I’m laying here at 9 p.m. on clean sheets just in case he wants to come lay on them, knowing already that he’s not coming, trying to just get back to being cool, and wondering if I’m ever going to stop being a girl about this stuff.

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.

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.

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.

Most recently, the thoughts that have been really challenging me are about gender roles in modern dating.Specifically-

Should it be assumed that the man will pay?

I recently ran across a profile of a woman who was pretty annoying. After promising that her profile was going to be “HILARIOUS! JUST TO WARN YOU!”, she then went on to be the most unhumorous, high maintenance princess I’d ever come across.

Specifically, this:

bothered the crap out of me.

While it is nice to go on a date and have someone else treat you to dinner, I cannot get behind the idea that this is the man’s responsibility. Why should it be? And in her case, the reasoning is that she might sleep with the guy. Shouldn’t both people be getting enjoyment out of the sex, and if so, why would one of them be required to pay for a meal? Explain to me why this outdated concept still exists, because I am having trouble understanding why, in an age where both sexes work, men are still considered losers if they don’t pay for the date?

That said, should you want to buy me dinner some time, go for it. I’m super broke. I’ll knit you a doily or something.

Why’s it always “He never called me back?”

So, I went out with this guy. For the sake of this story, we’ll call him Ben Affleck. (Come on. Just imagine me out with Ben Affleck. It’s not that much of a stretch.) We had a decent enough time. We got along. And then, a few weeks pass.

And then I hear from him. He’s having a party. Would I like to come?

And my first thought is “Oh, no he di-uhnt. How’s he going to not call me, then out of the blue he wants me to show up to his party?”

And then my second thought was, “Giiiiiirl,” (I always start my thoughts to myself that way. Makes it sassy and fun. Try it sometime.), “you got a phone, too. How come you didn’t call him?”

Well, to be honest, I forgot. I went on other dates. I went about my life. I honestly just totally didn’t think to call him. And why is it any more his job to call me than it is mine to call him? And was he waiting for me to call, not wanting to seem needy? Or did he just forget about me, too?

Nothing is the same anymore. There are NO rules.

Modern dating is not cut and dry. All of the things we’ve been hearing for decades about double standards in sexuality, all of the ideas about the best ways to attract a mate, all of the books written about gender roles and why we want what we want- all of that is out the window. Geeks are sexy, woman who drink whiskey are alluring (just trust me), and we’re a culture of too many options.

A friend of mine was talking to me about tumblr yesterday, and how fascinating it is to watch what people do with the space they occupy. I pointed out that tumblr isn’t pre-set with an idea of what it’s supposed to be, so it ends up just being a stream of honesty. And with dating, it has not been able to define what it’s supposed to be for several years now, which is why we’re all just out there doing some combination of what we grew up believing and what we’ve turned it into.

So, I’ll continue to challenge the thinking that I have had about all of this. Which is really just code for, I’ll continue to enjoy my dip in the dating pool, even if I’m well aware that the warm spots are pee.