Saturday night I actually did something other than go to a 12 step meeting, or lie in bed and wonder what my kids were doing at their dad's house and if they were ok, or where the hell I went wrong with everything, and what the hell I'm doing with my life. I mean, I still managed to fit those things in over the weekend, but intermingled with my self-torture I also went to see Roller Derby. I wasn't sure if I would like it. I was hesitant about going at first. But when the announcer described the skaters as "a tangle of fishnets and skulls!" I knew I was in the right place.
Really, I thought I would have grown out of my dark side by now. When I was a teenager I painted my fingernails black and listened to Agent Orange and The Misfits, and that was fine. But I never imagined that at 34 I would be sitting in a college gym full of people who still dressed like I did in 1991, AND ME dressing kind of like I did in 1991 with my Creep Show T-shirt and cut-offs, and getting a kick out of watching grown women with names like "John Cougar Menstrual Cramp" knock each other to the ground. There's something cathartic about the whole thing. And the music! I wish I had the soundtrack to that fucking game! They played Agent Orange, Blondie, The Ramones, and The Runaways! That's the music I try to get away with listening to at work! But I don't!
Anyway, my friend Tricia and I came up with our own Roller Derby names, even though neither of us have skated in years and we don't like getting hit in the head. She is The Velveteen Grabb-It and I'm Gen-O-Cide. This doesn't mean we'll be joining the team, these are just the personas that we'll adopt the next time we go to a game.
Then to complete my juevenille delinquent weekend, last night I saw the movie "The Runaways." It is the story of the all girl rock band in the mid 70's with Joan Jett and Lita Ford. I liked.
When I got out of that movie I started thinking. I'm way too cautious with the way I write. In the movie, when The Runaway's bizarre manager was trying to coach the girls in the band about playing like tough-as-nails rock n' roll chicks, he gave them this constructive criticism, "You ladies need to start thinking with your cocks!" I think it's high time I started doing this with my writing. I'm always afraid of pissing people off, or talking about how I really feel about things.
Inside of me there is a saucy, punchy girl. So far the only way she comes out is in fiction, or when I'm playing a part. If I wore scary face paints, called myself Gen-O-Cide and wore a bad girl clothes then I probably stand up straight, talk unashamedly about how I feel about politics, excessive Facebooking, and how I think that Crocks are the ugliest shoes ever made. Also, I would look like an over-30, mother of three who's trying to look 18. But I don't have to disguise myself to talk or write about how I really feel about things and people in my life. I can just go balls out. Most of my friends do this and people still talk to them. Of course, none of them have published their thoughts. For some reason, that's a little different.
Today when I write I'm just letting everything out. I'm a little afraid of what I might say. Perhaps for the first few days that I do this I should wear fishnets, roller skates and a leather jacket. Just to arm myself. That would be an interesting sight for the kids to see when they wake up in the morning. They'll trudge into the kitchen rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, hear the familiar sounds of the coffee brewing and the clicking of laptop keys, and then the quite unfamiliar sight of their mother in a roller derby helmet and leather pants as she writes at the kitchen table. One of them will say to the other, as she shakes her head, "Mom's thinking with her cock again."
What got me about the movie and really made me think about what I'm doing with writing was Joan Jett's attitude towards music, even as a teenager. She knew what she wanted to do and she was serious about it She still is, I read a little bit about her today. That chick is 52 and she's still performinging live all over the world because she loves to play guitar.
I want to write how that music sounds. Raw and alive. I want someone to open my book, rest their ear against a page and hear one wailing electric guitar.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Two Letters
Dear Cigarette,
You make me feel dizzy and drunk after I smoke you. Why would I want to feel that way? I don't really. So there must be something I'm avoiding. Or maybe something I'm trying to remember.
You taste like someone I used to know. But you also make my breath and hands stink. Your smell permeates everything. You used to taste good but you don't anymore. You are not the person I used to know, you are not a person at all. You don't love me. The second I take you in you begin to disappear. So I have to chase you again, chase this thing that could kill me and leaves me feeling dizzy, lousy, and worried after I have it.
And still, even as I write this, I want you again. Addiction is insane. To want you after all that I've wrriten here is insane. So part of me is crazy. And you're not crazy, are you, Cigarette? You disappearing act, you with no mind or soul at all. You who devolves into tar.
Fuck off,
Lungs
Dear Genevieve,
No more disappearing acts. No more taking in things that don't give back.
Love,
Yourself
Awwe, I wrote "Love yourself." It's nice, I know.
You make me feel dizzy and drunk after I smoke you. Why would I want to feel that way? I don't really. So there must be something I'm avoiding. Or maybe something I'm trying to remember.
You taste like someone I used to know. But you also make my breath and hands stink. Your smell permeates everything. You used to taste good but you don't anymore. You are not the person I used to know, you are not a person at all. You don't love me. The second I take you in you begin to disappear. So I have to chase you again, chase this thing that could kill me and leaves me feeling dizzy, lousy, and worried after I have it.
And still, even as I write this, I want you again. Addiction is insane. To want you after all that I've wrriten here is insane. So part of me is crazy. And you're not crazy, are you, Cigarette? You disappearing act, you with no mind or soul at all. You who devolves into tar.
Fuck off,
Lungs
Dear Genevieve,
No more disappearing acts. No more taking in things that don't give back.
Love,
Yourself
Awwe, I wrote "Love yourself." It's nice, I know.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
To Agent Sarah, With Love
I am done. As of 6:00 this morning, I finished editing the last sentence. I knew I was done when I found myself spending a great bulk of time editing one letter in one word repeatedly. The last sentence is (and you will not get this out of context), "I drew pictures of myself." In my early-morning-up-since-three-not-enough-coffee-overediting-to-a-fault haze I couldn't decide if the sentence should be past or present tense. So I kept changing my mind and agonizing over literally one letter that would change "I drew pictures of myself" to "I draw pictures of myself." Finally I decided two things: 1) since the entire book was in past tense it made no sense to traumatize the reader with a present tense verb out of nowhere, and 2) I was seriously overediting. I also decided that it was time for another cup of coffee.
So there it is, children. Off to Agent Sarah! May she be kind. May she read it and say, "You, Genevieve, are done. This is a master piece. And that past tense verb at the end seals the deal. Here is a publisher, an ungodly advance, and a Starbucks gift card."
So what else is going on with me? I'm happy to start writing something else now, for one thing. The kids and I have been reading the Junie B. Jones series the last two evenings and having a great time. I have the absence of cabel television to thank for that. How am I romantically? Financially? Emotionally? My appetite, blood sugar level, and heart rate? Well, I have a storage bin of disposable lovers, money to burn, happiness aplenty, and the constitution and the body of a goddess. That's my official statement, which I have filed away and am prepared to deliver at the next family gathering I attend, where 50 people will all come up and ask how I'm holding together. And then when they walk away I will turn around and bang my head on their living room wall repeatedly.
But atleast the next time someone asks me about the book I will be able to say that it's in my agent's hands now. That I feel throughout my soul that it is truly done, no more changes. Right, Agent Sarah? Right? Pretty please? With Splenda on top? Yeah, that's what I thought.
So there it is, children. Off to Agent Sarah! May she be kind. May she read it and say, "You, Genevieve, are done. This is a master piece. And that past tense verb at the end seals the deal. Here is a publisher, an ungodly advance, and a Starbucks gift card."
So what else is going on with me? I'm happy to start writing something else now, for one thing. The kids and I have been reading the Junie B. Jones series the last two evenings and having a great time. I have the absence of cabel television to thank for that. How am I romantically? Financially? Emotionally? My appetite, blood sugar level, and heart rate? Well, I have a storage bin of disposable lovers, money to burn, happiness aplenty, and the constitution and the body of a goddess. That's my official statement, which I have filed away and am prepared to deliver at the next family gathering I attend, where 50 people will all come up and ask how I'm holding together. And then when they walk away I will turn around and bang my head on their living room wall repeatedly.
But atleast the next time someone asks me about the book I will be able to say that it's in my agent's hands now. That I feel throughout my soul that it is truly done, no more changes. Right, Agent Sarah? Right? Pretty please? With Splenda on top? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Old bones over bars any day
It's official. I don't know how to be single yet. Last night one of my friends invited me out to a bar (by the way, I officially don't like bars) and I felt completely out of place.
Not in the way I felt out of place in high school - not like I was lower than everybody or less attractive or less witty. It's taken me up to this point in my life to get a truly sober perspective on people in a bar. None of us are all that superior, attractive, or witty. So I didn't feel out of place in a ugly-girl-in-a-room-of-prettier-girls kind of way. I felt more like a lamp in a swimming pool. I didn't work in there. You know, I stood there with a beer. Looked at the guitarists on stage who were good, but didn't play anything I could dance to, so I just tapped my foot. There were other drunk couples who danced awkwardly to music with no beat to it, which would have been amusing if seeing couples together didn't make me want to throw tiny cocktail umbrellas at them.
I felt much more comfortable at the cemetery I'd visited earlier that day. My friend Vicky (not the friend I went to the bar with) and I went to Holt Cemetery, which is a potter's field near City Park. It's where the jazz dude Buddy Bolden is buried in an unmarked grave, along with hundreds of other people whose families didn't have much money to bury them anywhere else.
To say that this place is not kept up well is a serious understatement. It's a mess. But that's what's so great about it. The grass isn't mowed on a regular basis, so it's too high. Some of the plots are covered in clover that's long enough to braid. The graves aren't in rows, they're just scattered everywhere, some right on top of each other. There will be a headstone and then less than a foot in front of it, a wooden cross with someone else's name scribbled in permanent marker.
The grave markers are wooden, cement, steel rods sticking out of the ground, and broken off pieces of plastic. The homemade ones have misspellings like "Bourn: 1923 Die: 1960." My favorite one had a misspelling and what seemed like an interesting story behind it. It said "Here lie my husbans" and then gave their names. Her husbands? She buried them together? One at a time, or both at once? There were "in loving memories" of mothers, fathers, grandmothers, children and teenagers, their faded names on cheap pieces of anything. My favorite name was a World War One vet named Obadiah Wise.
The two most unusual things about this graveyard was - no. I take that back. The two creepiest things about this graveyard were the things that Vicky and I found lying on the ground. Oh, and the big, crumbly brick construction that appears to be an incinerator towards the back of the graveyard. I wish I had pictures to go with this. We're not sure that's exactly what it was. Neither of us have seen a crematorium before but if we had to bet money we were guessing that's what it was. Judging from the potato chips bags, water bottles, and cob webs inside of it, we guessed that whatever it was, it hadn't been used in a long time.
I just googled Holt to see if there was anything that confirmed our theory and I didn't find anything that mentioned it, but I found a much better description of the place:
"As you enter this graveyard through a ramshackle iron fence, your sweeping view of the cemetery will likely give you the impression of a grim forgotten burial waste land. There is no formal landscaping here at this time; bare dirt, mud clumps, and choking yellow weeds carpet this environment. Well and poorly tended plots intermingle. A narrow ditch of green water stretches the length of the Holt. Sometimes a bone works its way out of the ground as graves are re-dug for a second, third, or more burial in the same site. "http://www.examiner.com/x-17348-New-Orleans-City-Guide-Examiner~y2009m7d23-Visit-and-help-New-Orleans-Holt-Cemetery
And yeah, we found bones. That was the creepy thing. Half of a pelvis, a rib, and what we guessed was a thin arm or leg bone. I wasn't disgusted by it or anything. I was sad that whoever that was had unceremoniously popped out of the ground like that. But at the same time, decomposing is a rather undignified business whether one is in or out of the ground.
The other thing we found was an old glass bottle, like the kind you find at an antique store that once held homemade medicine. Vicky picked it up and read the words on the side "Embalmer's Fluid."
At that point it was time to go.
There really was a sweetness to that place, though. The headstones were like handmade cards rather than store bought. There was a loved one's handwriting, trinkets left behind of the deceased, like stuffed animals and a crossing guard vest. There was a wild parrot that was flying around making all sorts of racket, and it made me remember the city's bizarre wild parrot population. It was morbidly magical, if that makes sense. Not without hope.
So I guess yesterday I felt more comfortable in dead ruins than among living, drinking people. Scene of me talking to some dude the next time I'm in a bar:
"What's your name?" he'll say.
"Genevieve."
"What do you do, Genevieve?"
"I tour graveyards looking for bones."
[grabbing his beer and moving on] "Later."
"What? You don't want my phone number? Hey! It's cool. Want to see an incinerator?"
Ps- Yep. It's an old crematory oven. Just saw a picture of it online.
Not in the way I felt out of place in high school - not like I was lower than everybody or less attractive or less witty. It's taken me up to this point in my life to get a truly sober perspective on people in a bar. None of us are all that superior, attractive, or witty. So I didn't feel out of place in a ugly-girl-in-a-room-of-prettier-girls kind of way. I felt more like a lamp in a swimming pool. I didn't work in there. You know, I stood there with a beer. Looked at the guitarists on stage who were good, but didn't play anything I could dance to, so I just tapped my foot. There were other drunk couples who danced awkwardly to music with no beat to it, which would have been amusing if seeing couples together didn't make me want to throw tiny cocktail umbrellas at them.
I felt much more comfortable at the cemetery I'd visited earlier that day. My friend Vicky (not the friend I went to the bar with) and I went to Holt Cemetery, which is a potter's field near City Park. It's where the jazz dude Buddy Bolden is buried in an unmarked grave, along with hundreds of other people whose families didn't have much money to bury them anywhere else.
To say that this place is not kept up well is a serious understatement. It's a mess. But that's what's so great about it. The grass isn't mowed on a regular basis, so it's too high. Some of the plots are covered in clover that's long enough to braid. The graves aren't in rows, they're just scattered everywhere, some right on top of each other. There will be a headstone and then less than a foot in front of it, a wooden cross with someone else's name scribbled in permanent marker.
The grave markers are wooden, cement, steel rods sticking out of the ground, and broken off pieces of plastic. The homemade ones have misspellings like "Bourn: 1923 Die: 1960." My favorite one had a misspelling and what seemed like an interesting story behind it. It said "Here lie my husbans" and then gave their names. Her husbands? She buried them together? One at a time, or both at once? There were "in loving memories" of mothers, fathers, grandmothers, children and teenagers, their faded names on cheap pieces of anything. My favorite name was a World War One vet named Obadiah Wise.
The two most unusual things about this graveyard was - no. I take that back. The two creepiest things about this graveyard were the things that Vicky and I found lying on the ground. Oh, and the big, crumbly brick construction that appears to be an incinerator towards the back of the graveyard. I wish I had pictures to go with this. We're not sure that's exactly what it was. Neither of us have seen a crematorium before but if we had to bet money we were guessing that's what it was. Judging from the potato chips bags, water bottles, and cob webs inside of it, we guessed that whatever it was, it hadn't been used in a long time.
I just googled Holt to see if there was anything that confirmed our theory and I didn't find anything that mentioned it, but I found a much better description of the place:
"As you enter this graveyard through a ramshackle iron fence, your sweeping view of the cemetery will likely give you the impression of a grim forgotten burial waste land. There is no formal landscaping here at this time; bare dirt, mud clumps, and choking yellow weeds carpet this environment. Well and poorly tended plots intermingle. A narrow ditch of green water stretches the length of the Holt. Sometimes a bone works its way out of the ground as graves are re-dug for a second, third, or more burial in the same site. "http://www.examiner.com/x-17348-New-Orleans-City-Guide-Examiner~y2009m7d23-Visit-and-help-New-Orleans-Holt-Cemetery
And yeah, we found bones. That was the creepy thing. Half of a pelvis, a rib, and what we guessed was a thin arm or leg bone. I wasn't disgusted by it or anything. I was sad that whoever that was had unceremoniously popped out of the ground like that. But at the same time, decomposing is a rather undignified business whether one is in or out of the ground.
The other thing we found was an old glass bottle, like the kind you find at an antique store that once held homemade medicine. Vicky picked it up and read the words on the side "Embalmer's Fluid."
At that point it was time to go.
There really was a sweetness to that place, though. The headstones were like handmade cards rather than store bought. There was a loved one's handwriting, trinkets left behind of the deceased, like stuffed animals and a crossing guard vest. There was a wild parrot that was flying around making all sorts of racket, and it made me remember the city's bizarre wild parrot population. It was morbidly magical, if that makes sense. Not without hope.
So I guess yesterday I felt more comfortable in dead ruins than among living, drinking people. Scene of me talking to some dude the next time I'm in a bar:
"What's your name?" he'll say.
"Genevieve."
"What do you do, Genevieve?"
"I tour graveyards looking for bones."
[grabbing his beer and moving on] "Later."
"What? You don't want my phone number? Hey! It's cool. Want to see an incinerator?"
Ps- Yep. It's an old crematory oven. Just saw a picture of it online.
Monday, March 29, 2010
AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!
That was good to get out. I think we all feel a little bit better now.
That was good to get out. I think we all feel a little bit better now.
KFKD vs. The Super Human
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.....(sips coffee)....grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr....(scowls at the phone as it rings)...grrrrrrrrrrrrr-Safety and Security, this is Genevieve.
That's how my morning is going. I'm not feeling good about myself today, but I'm trying to keep it apart from work.
My boss lent me a coffee cup that says "super human" on it, with lots of exclamation points. I don't feel like an exclamation point, though I am tall like one, and I do exclaim things from time to time. I used to feel like a big question mark, but I don't feel like that so much anymore. Maybe I'm a period at the end of a statement, but I would like to think that I'm something more fluid and less static than a fixed point.
I'm a human drinking coffee. Not super, but not despicable either. Last night I ate a piece of pizza that had cabbage and barbecued pork on it. That was pretty despicable.
Anne Lamott talks about tuning into a radio station in her brain called KFKD, which streams all the most horrible thoughts about herself 24/7 without commercial interruption. KFKD, as you have probably guessed or already know if you've read Bird by Bird, stands for "K-FUCKED" because it's all of her fucked up thoughts about herself, and about her writing. Today mine is saying, "You're a lousy whore who just wants everyone to like you, even the ones who have no reason to. And now you have cabbage breath because you ate that pizza." I think it's interesting that KFKD would call me a whore when I've been celebate for quite a while now. Who the hell is running that station, anyway? Like all bullies, the DJ for KFKD has thrown an insult with a nugget of truth in it. I do want everyone to like me, and I keep thinking that if I just try hard enough I can make that happen. I guess everybody does that, huh? Maybe I do it to an extreme because I'm just learning about boundaries and healthy stuff like that, but maybe that does't make me entirely pathetic.
You're not super bad or super good. Just human. Drinking coffee. Keep coming back to that and get back to work, Cabbage Breath.
That's how my morning is going. I'm not feeling good about myself today, but I'm trying to keep it apart from work.
My boss lent me a coffee cup that says "super human" on it, with lots of exclamation points. I don't feel like an exclamation point, though I am tall like one, and I do exclaim things from time to time. I used to feel like a big question mark, but I don't feel like that so much anymore. Maybe I'm a period at the end of a statement, but I would like to think that I'm something more fluid and less static than a fixed point.
I'm a human drinking coffee. Not super, but not despicable either. Last night I ate a piece of pizza that had cabbage and barbecued pork on it. That was pretty despicable.
Anne Lamott talks about tuning into a radio station in her brain called KFKD, which streams all the most horrible thoughts about herself 24/7 without commercial interruption. KFKD, as you have probably guessed or already know if you've read Bird by Bird, stands for "K-FUCKED" because it's all of her fucked up thoughts about herself, and about her writing. Today mine is saying, "You're a lousy whore who just wants everyone to like you, even the ones who have no reason to. And now you have cabbage breath because you ate that pizza." I think it's interesting that KFKD would call me a whore when I've been celebate for quite a while now. Who the hell is running that station, anyway? Like all bullies, the DJ for KFKD has thrown an insult with a nugget of truth in it. I do want everyone to like me, and I keep thinking that if I just try hard enough I can make that happen. I guess everybody does that, huh? Maybe I do it to an extreme because I'm just learning about boundaries and healthy stuff like that, but maybe that does't make me entirely pathetic.
You're not super bad or super good. Just human. Drinking coffee. Keep coming back to that and get back to work, Cabbage Breath.
Friday, March 26, 2010
character sketches
I have decided to invent characters for no good reason. Just a little writing practice. These are meant to be ficticious so if you know someone with one of these names or you are someone with one of these names I apologize. As far as I know, I made you up.
Characters:
Lacy Rodriguez
Stormy Malone
Pete Fellows
Carmen Moreno
Biggie Bell (whose real name is Hank Short)
Melvin Gillespie
Babette Fink
Geneva Sinclair
Lacy Rodriguez is a data entry clerk who loves to jog and wishes that she could do it professionally. Someone asks her if that means she wants to be a runner in the Olympics and she says no, that she really would love to get paid just to jog through the park and wear short-shorts. Stormy Malone is an actress who is beginning to believe that her dog is the best man she has ever known. Pete Fellows has red hair, works in a tobacco shop, and is annoyed that people automatically expect him to be pleasant because his name suggests that he is. Carmen Moreno once auditioned for American Idol and has dreams about running over Simon's cat ever since he told her that her voice sounds like a rake in a garbage disposal. Biggie Bell is a trombone player who is in love with Carmen Moreno and dreams about running over her cat because it would give him a great excuse to talk to her. Melvin Gillespie wants to know what it's like to live outside of the country, but thinks he doesn't have enough money to travel. He doesn't realize that if he just stops buying Starbucks every morning he could easily save up for a trip. Babette Fink has worked at the bank for 25 years and has saved every picture that her children have given her. Geneva Sinclair is a romance novelist who recently gave up smoking and has found working on her car to be a wonderful distraction from the cravings because it really pisses her off.
Genevieve Cancienne loves her oddball, beautiful characters, and totally identifies with the guy who spends too much money on coffee.
Characters:
Lacy Rodriguez
Stormy Malone
Pete Fellows
Carmen Moreno
Biggie Bell (whose real name is Hank Short)
Melvin Gillespie
Babette Fink
Geneva Sinclair
Lacy Rodriguez is a data entry clerk who loves to jog and wishes that she could do it professionally. Someone asks her if that means she wants to be a runner in the Olympics and she says no, that she really would love to get paid just to jog through the park and wear short-shorts. Stormy Malone is an actress who is beginning to believe that her dog is the best man she has ever known. Pete Fellows has red hair, works in a tobacco shop, and is annoyed that people automatically expect him to be pleasant because his name suggests that he is. Carmen Moreno once auditioned for American Idol and has dreams about running over Simon's cat ever since he told her that her voice sounds like a rake in a garbage disposal. Biggie Bell is a trombone player who is in love with Carmen Moreno and dreams about running over her cat because it would give him a great excuse to talk to her. Melvin Gillespie wants to know what it's like to live outside of the country, but thinks he doesn't have enough money to travel. He doesn't realize that if he just stops buying Starbucks every morning he could easily save up for a trip. Babette Fink has worked at the bank for 25 years and has saved every picture that her children have given her. Geneva Sinclair is a romance novelist who recently gave up smoking and has found working on her car to be a wonderful distraction from the cravings because it really pisses her off.
Genevieve Cancienne loves her oddball, beautiful characters, and totally identifies with the guy who spends too much money on coffee.
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