For the love, comes the burning young/ From the liver, sweating through your tongue

What do I think of the new Bon Iver album? I know you’re curious. It’s a brilliantly floaty, dreamy, melancholy story. Every so often, the tone lifts enough to leave a break for breath amidst all the grief, because despite itself, this album is not desperate. There seems to be hope. Maybe it’s the way Justin Vernon’s voice goes up with the crescendo of the melody and rhythm sometimes, which is reminiscent of church music. I’m thinking particularly of “Towers” when I say this. Not that “Towers” can be called a happy song. It’s just got some hope. I don’t know about anyone else, but when you’ve got a hole in your life, a lovesickness that keeps you up at night, a propensity to (delicately) use substances for some kind of relief, hope is good. My only issue with the album is the last song. It sounds like it was stolen from the GAYNGS record (one of Vernon’s other bands). GAYNGS’ music is a bit too close to cheesy 80’s synth-pop for me. Why end the album this way? It’s already a short listen, and to leave the previous, beautiful wistfulness of the earlier songs is a mistake. When I listen to the album straight through, which I, so far, have done every time, namely in the dark, on one or more of aforementioned substances, a body floating in a small yellow raft through the Pacific, looking up at all the fucking stars and feeling so alone, so lonely, so captivated by this aloneness that it almost seems right, that there can be nothing else at that moment, despite who I might be missing or the subsequent emptiness that enters, which feels like a kind of cleansing at least, when I listen to the album straight through, the last song doesn’t fit, and suddenly I am back in my bed, getting up to change the track back to one and start over.  

Also, just in case anyone is wondering, I watched an old chick flick last night, called Under the Tuscan Sun. This is not a good movie, but I enjoyed it, like I am apt to. Somewhere in the middle, the main character reminded me of something true, something I have been overlooking, despite how true it is. Heartbreak doesn’t kill us (even though maybe it should, to avoid the agony that comes after). Not only am I not dead, but I am living in a new city, making new friends, still growing, still learning, still keeping it together, sometimes letting the wildness (that’s thank fucking god still there) inside me out, and it’s gradually getting easier, like it always was going to. 

did i need to know?

The World At Large

Ice-age heat wave, can't complain.
If the world's at large, why should I remain?
Walked away to another plan. 
Gonna find another place, maybe one I can stand. 
I move on to another day, 
to a whole new town with a whole new way. 
Went to the porch to have a thought. 
Got to the door and again, I couldn't stop. 
You don't know where and you don't know when. 
But you still got your words and you got your friends. 
Walk along to another day. 
Work a little harder, work another way. 

Well uh-uh baby I ain't got no plan. 
We'll float on maybe would you understand? 
Gonna float on maybe would you understand? 
Well float on maybe would you understand? 

The days get shorter and the nights get cold. 
I like the autumn but this place is getting old. 
I pack up my belongings and I head for the coast. 
It might not be a lot but I feel like I'm making the most. 
The days get longer and the nights smell green. 
I guess it's not surprising but it's spring and I should leave. 

I like songs about drifters - books about the same. 
They both seem to make me feel a little less insane. 
Walked on off to another spot. 
I still haven't gotten anywhere that I want. 
Did I want love? Did I need to know? 
Why does it always feel like I'm caught in an undertow? 

The moths beat themselves to death against the lights. 
Adding their breeze to the summer nights. 
Outside, water like air was great. 
I didn't know what I had that day. 
Walk a little farther to another plan. 
You said that you did, but you didn't understand. 

I know that starting over is not what life's about. 
But my thoughts were so loud I couldn't hear my mouth. 
My thoughts were so loud I couldn't hear my mouth. 
My thoughts were so loud. 


(modest mouse)

welcome to purgatory.

Losing that kind of love is a death, but worse, because you have to die again day after day until there is nothing left to die.  Then you are sentenced to walk around numb and utterly dead inside for a while, a kind of personal purgatory, until you are able to lift your head above the ground and breathe again, and of course, you will . . .

Loneliness feels so slow & alone no matter what, until someone says the right thing that lifts everything just enough. Thanks Sean.

Suicide and Everything After

May 17, 1999, my best friend killed herself with a shotgun in her mom's bedroom.  Or at least, that’s what I imagine. I don’t know where she shot herself, if it was that room, or her bedroom, resting her back against the wood paneling of her water bed, or with her bare feet pressed into the smooth tile of the kitchen floor. I guess I’ve always imagined it happening in the room where the gun came from because I know she was scared. She had to work up the guts to go through with a Decision like Suicide, at age fourteen, before her life had even begun to take shape (what we don't know when we're fourteen...fuck). And if she pondered it, in that moment, long enough to wander through the apartment, holding the cold neck of the gun in her small hands, with the thought of something as big as Life also in those small hands, she might have chickened out.

About two weeks earlier, Nicole was on the other end of the receiver, choking between sobs. She told me she wanted to die. The reasoning was complicated regardless, but for a couple of fourteen-year-olds, I felt for her in this particular mess of circumstances. She had not long before come out to her family, maybe not as a lesbian, but at least bisexual. She wasn’t sure. Her Christian mother and stepfather were of course completely shocked and unreceptive to reason. No, was their response. No you are not gay, and no more slumber parties, so you can forget about your weekend social escapades. On top of that, her girlfriend had broken up with her, the girl who she’d recognized her own complicated sexuality with had just abandoned her for someone else, a BOY. What the fuck, was all that came out of her mouth. What the fuck, and I want to die. This is never going to feel better. I’ve never been happier than I was then and now I will never feel worse. This is it for me, I can’t make it. It genuinely felt like this was the End of the World, her world. And that afternoon on the phone, I’d calmed her down, somehow made the world seem at least a bit more worthwhile so that she promised me she wouldn’t kill herself so long as I didn’t tell anyone. I promised.

A couple weekends later, we were going to go shopping for eighth-grade graduation dresses. But I was busy with my boyfriend, so I kind of blew her off, said we still had time to go during the week or the next weekend. She yelled at me, telling me I was so caught up in my own life and Josh and that I wasn’t being a good friend. Couldn’t I live without seeing him for just one day to hang out with my best friend? Well, I was fourteen, and I didn’t like anyone telling me I was doing anything wrong. So, I told her to just chill out and we would go next week.

I’m sure you can imagine where this is going. On Monday, when Nicole wasn’t in school, the second I got home I ran to the phone (the age before cell phones) and called her. Her stepdad answered. It’s hard for me to remember exactly what he said. I know he called me “sweetie” and I could hear a lot of crying in the background. I know I slumped to the floor and started screaming, bawling, dropped the phone as the realness of that pain rushed into my body and all around me. My mom ran in, confused, and by then, I’m sure the receiver was beeping.

I have never been a person who is huge on anniversaries. I don’t set aside time every May 17^th to reflect. To be honest, I don’t pay attention to the date all that much. Today, it was late afternoon before I looked up at the calendar and registered the date in my head. I texted Brandon about it, and he asked me if I was ok. Yeah, I’m ok. It’s been twelve years since I wept next to the cabinets on the kitchen floor of my parent’s house in Milwaukee, struggling to breathe, wondering if it was my fault, if my actions had led to my best friend’s suicide. 

What I think about now is all the time that has passed, the person I am now, the person I was then.  I was at the cusp of adulthood— adult emotions, adult situations, adult decisions. I’d experienced almost none of what I would now consider to be BIG life events. In fact, that was the first. I think about everything Nicole never got to do, all the wonderful and horrible things that happen to us in our teens and twenties that make us feel on top of the world, or at the bottom of it, or ingloriously in the middle. I think about the fact that twelve years ago, I was a person that I still can recognize as myself, a more naïve and inexperienced version of me, but not a child (which seems separate). I feel both old, (twelve years and my memory of that day still comes back instantaneously), and young, knowing that in another five, ten, twenty years, I’ll be looking back at where I am now and where I was then in completely different ways.

seventh grade, we were so cool.

I remember the winter night, it must have been 1997 or 1998, I was sleeping over at Nicole's when she closed her bedroom door, whispered that she had to tell me something. She said, "If you want to go home after I tell you, I understand." And then she told me that she was pretty sure she was gay, and she had been recently experimenting with this newfound discovery with someone. Maybe I was a little surprised (we'd been boycrazy for awhile by this point in our lives), but I didn't want to go home. OF COURSE I didn't want to go home. I laughed that she'd even thought I would react that way. "Well, we do share the same bed when you sleep over, so I didn't know if you'd be uncomfortable," was her response. Then we probably put on Hanson, or Silverchair, or Third Eye Blind and danced and put makeup on each other and talked and talked and talked before eventually falling asleep. Livin' the dream.

Yeah, I’m ok, but heavy and nostalgic and wise and confused and melancholic and calm. I scratch Luna behind her ears as she lets out a big, sleepy sigh--it feels especially meaningful, and I don't know why.

My First Time

Last night, I went to a strip club for the first time in my life. My friends have friends visiting from out of town, and because Portland is so “open-minded and free-spirited,” strip clubs are aplenty and come in lots of crazy varieties. Finding a good one is often high up on lots of tourists' Portland-Things-To-Do-list. Portland does everything WEIRD; Portland prides itself on this. Why should strip clubs be the exception? The weird strip club we went to last night was called Devil’s Point, and Sunday’s at 9pm they host stripper karaoke, or Stripparoke (not sure of the spelling, but that’s not really the point, is it?).

I wasn’t sure what to expect. Is the focus going to be more on karaoke, or strippers? Amateurish, or the real deal? Is it primarily a bar, do they only have strippers for this one event, is it going to be kind of creepy like I’d heard rumors about from friends who’d been to strip clubs before? I didn’t even know what it was called, so I wasn’t able to prepare by looking at the website. Not that a website can answer these sorts of questions, necessarily.

Here are the answers. The focus was on the strippers, OBVIOUSLY. The karaoke was integral to the night, sure, but singers went up to the stage (a stage fully equipped with a pole, because it is in fact a strip club) and stood in the back corner singing while a dancer did her thing. These were not amateur dancers. There were four of them, and I thought the bar did a nice job of showcasing a variety that could appeal to any taste by choosing these four dancers for a particular night. What I mean is that their body types varied—big boobs and super curvy on one end and stick-thin, small-chested on the other end. Two were covered in tattoos, two with long hair, two with short hair, and different styles of dancing so the audience wasn’t watching the same thing all the time. The skinny-skinny one had some amazing acrobatic moves on the pole which were entertaining. One girl with lots of a tattoos and a punk-rock blue hairstyle was doing hand stands, as well as balancing her legs on some lucky shoulders, then flipping back up. Not that anyone would have cared what kind of dancing was going on, really. These girls were all attractive—not just their bodies, but cute faces, too. And they looked like they were having a good time, which makes for a pleasant atmosphere, as opposed to creepy and weird. I didn’t feel dirty being there because the dancers didn’t seem to feel dirty doing their job, and I think that’s important. Also, most of the people there were with a group of friends out to have a good time. Not saying there weren’t some guys who’d obviously come alone…but they were heavily outnumbered by the rest of us. I can’t speak for what this place is like the rest of the week, but for karaoke, it was a fun time in a semi-crowded bar. I call it a bar because aside from the stage with a pole in the middle of it, it looked like a regular, maybe even cool bar. Pool table, some walls were red which gave it a sort of rock ‘n’ roll feel, reasonably priced drinks ($2 pints of PBR, for example). Overall, just a chill place.

Something strange happened to me while I was sitting in this strip club, taking in the whole experience. The girls were so pretty and fit (ok, HOT) and confident, not to mention entertaining. I was watching all these guys ogle the dancers, and I think my instinct was to feel jealous. Not that I didn’t find them attractive and entertaining myself. And not that any of the guys, was my guy. But everyone knows that guys have fantasies about these types of girls, and what girl doesn’t want to be the subject of fantasies? Sometimes, I get carried away overthinking things, analyzing until I come up with some kind of logical sense. Never know when it's going to happen really, and amidst the sexy red glow and half-audible karaoke singers, I was lost in thought.

I thought about where my jealousy was coming from. For the last couple of years, I was in a relationship with someone who wouldn’t even call it a relationship. It follows, of course, that he never told me he loved me ( because he probably didn’t). That doesn’t mean that he didn’t act like he loved me, though. We did everything together, talked about everything together, like a couple, and it was amazing, enlightening, fun. We even moved to another country together for almost half a year, spending all of our time together acclimating, learning about ourselves and the world and each other. So, what then...? Why is this relevant to my strip club story?

I was totally in love with him. Imagine being in love with someone who won’t even acknowledge feelings for you, despite lots of actions that would seem to contradict that. Actions speak louder than words, right? Well, not exactly. I often felt uncertain, irresolute, maybe even scared. That uncertainty led me to a kind of overwhelming jealousy of every other girl he talked to, looked at, even the occasional sexy pic of a movie star as his laptop desktop background drove me crazy. I’m a confident person, so this jealousy that was growing in me felt so foreign and wrong. I hid it, I tried to fight it, reason it away, but it was still there. It wasn’t until last night at the strip club, as a superhot, tattooed & black-lace gartered dancer made eyes with me, pulled me against her, that I finally had the epiphany that I needed to wake me the fuck up. I wouldn’t feel jealous with someone who loved me, not only acting like it but saying it all the time, really being IN the whole god- damned beautiful thing, with someone who I could trust with those incredible and overwhelming love feelings.

This isn’t even about jealousy, but existing within the confines of an emotion that up until this point has been mostly vacant from my life, one that makes me feel neurotic and unhealthy, sucks, and isn’t worth it. Not for love, nor for anything. (Easier said than done, I know, but I’m trying…) At my best, I’m confident, I’m easygoing, I’m open-minded, I’m adventurous and warm and loving and well-rounded and fucking healthy. I don’t act like a psycho about some picture of a hot girl on your computer. If you love me, and I love you, we can do anything together. Including, but not limited to, going to Devil’s Point to sit at the rail and gawk at the girls together, giving them all our dollars before we go home and love each other some more.

I’m not completely blaming him for what happened between us, and what happened to me as a result. I have control over what occurs in my life, and I let it happen. For awhile, it really did make me happy to feel so much love for him, regardless of anything else. He was never dishonest with his words, but it’s hard to leave someone when you are so effing in love with him AND you have everything in common AND you spend ALL your time with him, when he still acts like he adores you, too.

Love is tricky business.  Some combination of the general strip club environment, watching some of my best friends, recently engaged and so in love, interact in that environment, and maybe sexy Sydystyc , too, dancing like a goddess above me, brought me to this long-needed epiphany. Life is so weird. 

Home, yet?

I’ve been in Portland for a week and this is what’s on my mind. It’s effing difficult to move to a new city. I have moments of despair and moments of elation. I have freaked out a couple times simply from all the stress (sorry Brandon). That said, if you’re going to move to move to a new city without a job (but at least with a small network of friends!), and feel kind of bipolar in the process, Portland is perfect. It’s kind of like Hawaii in that it rains on and off most of the time, but in between rains, the sun makes everything warm and bright. The city itself is beautiful—mountains, tall trees and green everywhere. It smells like a forest pretty much all over the place. Even driving the interstates through downtown is breathtaking, cruising over ultra-high bridges that cross the Willamette River with panoramic views on all sides. And that’s without even getting into the many cute neighborhoods, the thriving art scene, the amazing local food/beer/wine that is available everywhere.

My nights have been pretty boring/lonely, because I don’t know too many people here yet. Cute Portland guys are around, but I’ll get to that in time. I’ve been plowing through episodes of Californication, which I will admit is on the cusp of soft-core porn, sure, but it’s a quality show. I know it’s good because it makes me think about some larger issues that surround my own life. The main character is a writer and in one episode, he talks about the evolution of language, and his reluctance to accept certain aspects of of what that entails. Using internet-speak, saying “lol” or “omg” or “brb,” is this actually the evolution of language, or is it a temporary cultural modification that will fade out as quickly as it came? This is something to think about as a writer, or as any person, really. Succumb to the influx of contemporary speech patterns, or stick with what I’ve been using my whole life? Whatever, I don’t really have to Decide. Yet, it is important to be aware of these shifts, to consider them and their uses within writing, what they add or take away from language on the page and how it will affect readers.

shelves and cinderblocks are the best.

Luna is happy that I’ve unpacked my life here. She started to relax once I sorted through the boxes, fashioned a homemade bookshelf, and hung up all my clothes in the closet. If only it was that simple for me. I need a job, friends, a life. I know it will come in time, and that struggling builds character. Of course those things are true. But in the process of the struggling, sometimes I just want to curl in a ball and watch twelve episodes of Californication in a row, with a bottle or two of wine, and wallow in a drunken pile of myself with Luna on my bed. Good thing that instead of doing that all day, I swallow it, take Luna to these abundant, gorgeous parks, nail an interview for a server position at a fancy restaurant (called back to meet with the chef tomorrow, just ten minutes after the interview was over!), and make use of the amenities at my West Hills apartment complex—gym, sauna, hot tub. It’s a wonder I’m able to do it sometimes, because it can be so difficult, and my motivation dwindles when I’m having a particularly bad moment/day. I guess I owe it to everyone and everything in my life that has molded me into a person who is too self-aware to think those lows won’t pass, who knows how to make them pass more quickly or easily (thank you to my most wonderful dog, and hiking, and bouts of evening drinking, and the few friends I do have here, and reading a waterproof book in the hot tub, and endorphins for kicking in after a gym session, and my family for listening to me complain, and my long-distance best friend who usually knows better than to take anything I say seriously when I’m in one of my worst moods).

Alas, the wonders and woes of relocating. I’ll get back to you when I have a job.

"Back home to the escapes of Time and Memory"

I’ve never read the book from which I take this quote, Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again.  I only know the saying, “you can’t go home again.”

one of my favorite homes, the BsAs terrace.

Buenos Aires was never my home, or so I thought. It wasn’t any less of a home than anywhere else that I wasn’t home. My current location, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, feels like it should be more home than Buenos Aires, because I grew up here, my family lives here. I know how to get around the city without thinking about it, I know that spring is never as early as anyone wants it to be, I even know which stoplights are timed and which aren’t.  But having built something of a life in Buenos Aires, even though I knew it was temporary, Milwaukee isn’t giving me the warm, cozy home-feeling that a home typically would. I’m sure some of that has to do with the REALLY temporary-ness of my stay here (6 weeks), and going from spending all of my waking and nonwaking hours with Brandon to spending the majority of my time by myself. And the relentless cold.

Luna and I are ready to move to Portland. We’re leaving next week! I’m excited for the potential of home for me there. I have lots of friends living around Portland, all of whom I can’t wait to see. I know that I’m drawn to adventure and relocation, and that will probably never change. A stable landing spot though, it’ll be nice to have one of those. 

And what is it about Milwaukee that can't feel like home to me? I don't know.