B-Movie Extra

Before I tell you about the giant spider, I have to reiterate something I know I said before, but humor me: I swear I don't do drugs. And I stopped drinking three years ago, so this can't be a case of the DT's, although I'm not a doctor, so maybe the spider was a result of belated withdrawal. But I do know this - I know that I saw him and I know that he was really the ceiling fan.

Most nights, I sleep like a coward. I fall asleep lying on my stomach, hugging the pillow with only the top of my head sticking out of the covers. But the night before last, the night of the spider, I fell asleep on my back with the lamp on. It's like I was an action movie hero, allowing myself to rest but ready to spring into action, which I would detect with my keen, warrior-like sense of "something's fucked up" and I would snap out of a deep sleep and into a me-against-evil reality where I would be the victor who saved the world. All I needed was a gun under my pillow or a ninja sword.

But I wasn't armed with anything when my eyes snapped open to find a giant spider lowering itself from my ceiling fan down to my bed, like an eight-legged mountain climber hanging from a rope. Its brown body was as big as a microwave, and it had long, thin golden legs that reached for me like fingers. I screamed, and it scurried back up its thread toward the ceiling.

It might seem like I cried out like a scared little girl, but I think what really happened is I hollered like Xena Warrior Princess and this spider thought, "I've watched all six seasons of Xena and I know this will not end well!" and decided to bail. Then I blinked and it was gone. This freaked me out more. Where had it gone? It was too big to disappear in a second.

My ceilings are high, so when I stood up on the bed to inspect the ceiling fan, it was still a good two feet above my head, and I was nervous that the giant spider might be hiding behind a fan blade. I looked frantically along the ceiling, thinking that it was crawling away from me and maybe I could catch it before it disappeared into another room. There was no way I could go back to sleep with that thing in the house. What if it bit the kids? What if it snuck back in and bit me? It couldn't have been poisonous, there are only two poisonous spiders in Louisiana and they're....

It was when I was trying to remember what I knew about spiders, when some other rational thoughts began to pop into my mind. The first was that spiders don't get that big here. Maybe in the Amazon where they eat jaguars and cattle, but not in New Orleans. The second was that there was no way a spider THAT BIG could disappear in one second. Third, there was no trace of webbing, and I distinctly remembered that it had spun its way down from the light fixture, which incidentally has brown fan blades like the color of the spider's body and golden chains, like the spider's legs. Most likely, I thought, I had a very real-seeming dream about the spider, and the memory of me blinking was actually me waking up.

I was still looking for it while I thought all of this. My mind was moving slowly but my heart was pounding and I was wide awake. And ready for what? What exactly was I planning to do if I had found the spider that was three times as big as my face? Wrestle it? I didn't even have a rolled-up newspaper on me.

I would like to think that I was brave to seek out the giant spider that was really the ceiling fan, but instead I was just like one of those extras in a B-movie who are killed in the first five minutes. You know the kind.

"Look, there's a giant ant in the street. I'll go have a look," I would say.

"I don't think that's a good idea," the main character would warn.

"It's ok, I'm sure it's nothing," I would say, as I'd step outside and be eaten by Godzilla.

Or I'm like those people in horror movies who you yell at to not go down to the basement to see what that noise is. And they ALWAYS do. And they ALWAYS die.

So the fact that I am seeing spiders that aren't there is only worsened by the knowledge that I would be dead by now if they were real. I'm really not sure which of those two things is worse. If I wake up tomorrow morning and my dresser is a Gila monster, I'm leaving the room.

Off

I was cleaning throw up stains from the bathroom floor and I thought of you. The kids are sick. I wondered if you have kids, if you get sick, if you're healthy most of the time, if you drink too much coffee, if you feel too much or too little, if music does things to you, if you go to the laundromat or if you have your own machines, if the laundromat smells better than your house and that's why you go there because you really do have a washer and dryer you just prefer to go other places that smell like a Tide-All-Gain cocktail, and how you're able to make all of those elements of your life work if you 1) have kids, 2) those kids are sick, and 3) if you have to make repeated trips to the laundromat to clean all of the stuff.

And I wonder if maybe that's why you read my blog, my reader, my vigilante dear who scrubs the bathroom floor, whose laundromat smells better than your house. I'm always blogging about me, me, me. But what about YOU. What about you? Try and appreciate the fact that I'm thinking about you, and not worry too much about how I started thinking of you while I cleaned vomit. The two are, like, barely related.

I'm feeling a bit off today from lack of sleep, family sickness, and caffeine withdrawal. Did you know that the word "withdrawal" has "awal" at the end of it? Isn't the extra "a" weird, giving it more of a warbley sound than you originally suspected? 

Is this something else that I didn't know about you, my reader, my blog-checker who sometimes skips the funny stuff for the serious stuff, and sometimes skips my blog completely to look at the headlines on The Onion? What are you like, I sometimes wonder as I write to you in this place that I've created that's like one long payphone call, the kind that you make when you see a phone on the side of the road and you decide to call a friend. You would have used your cell phone but you think you've left it at home, and really it's fallen under the seat and you won't know that for a couple of days. The payphone is outside the laundromat where we, you and I, go to make things clean, to start fresh, to look over at each other and wonder. "Does he have kids?" "Does she feel too much or too little?" It's strange to talk into a payphone with no idea who's on the other end, but stranger still maybe for you to pick up the phone and listen to someone you don't know. The call comes from a number you don't recognize and ends with a "click" for a goodbye.

I have a washer and dryer. But the laundromat smells better than my house.

Click.

Toughy

Yesterday as I laid down on my VP's office floor, clutching a Styrofoam cup of ice I realized that I needed to take better care of myself.

I'd gone into work even though I'd thrown up that morning. I thought it was just the result of a migraine I'd had and thought, "Eh, it's nothing. I can make it to work." But hours later, as I was being driven home because I couldn't drive myself I realized that I'd been feeling off since Sunday night and just wasn't paying attention to it. It's almost impressive the extent to which I can ignore signals from my own body that something might be wrong. You know, like vomiting. And when I say impressive, I don't mean in a good way. Here's what I ignored this week:

Sunday night: nausea which I chalked up to being upset in general.
Monday: Stomach rumblings, intestinal mischief that should have clued me in to the fact that I had a virus, and a migraine. But a girl still has to go to work, drink six cups of coffee, clean, and exercise, right? Besides, it was probably all in my head.
Tuesday: 4:20 am - Vomit. Probably a result of the migraine. I'm fine, really.

I finally stopped ignoring my body a little after 9:00 when I tried to walk to the bathroom to go throw up and I couldn't make it down the hall. I knew if I didn't sit down I would fall. I was dizzy, nauseated and felt like all of the energy had been sucked out of me. I felt like microwaved french fries, all dried up and tasteless. And I was embarrassed because I was sitting in the hallway, unable to get up, like a drunk in an alleyway. A few minutes later, the director of my department was holding a wet paper towel to my forehead.

"Gen, what's going on?" she said.

"Mmm," I said, because that was the best I could explain the microwaved french fry feeling.

She got me a cup of ice chips and after I sucked on a couple of pieces, I could open my eyes. She and another lady I didn't know led me to the VP's office, who was gone at the time, and they let me lie on the floor in the dark until a friend could pick me up.

I think I was dehydrated. I perked up considerably after more ice, and eventually Gatorade. I slept most of the day yesterday and I'm home today, but I swear to God the thought, "Maybe I'm ok to go in" went through my mind.

I don't like slowing down. I'm sure a lot of people would say it's a result of American culture or something and maybe that's true but I know it's also because I'm a single mom and I've had to become the mom and the dad. So though the mom side of me was saying to slow down and stay home, the dad side of me looked at my kids and said, "I gotta keep going." In some cases that willingness is good. And in some cases, I end up a dehydrated husk on my boss's floor.

So. I'm cutting back on coffee....ok, everybody calm down. I know that's not something you ever thought I'd blog, but I think it's necessary. My caffeine intake is out of control. And I need to start paying better attention to my body signals. Throw up = lay down. It does not mean I'm not a tough girl just because I rest when I'm sick.

And I will repeat that phrase to myself as many times as I have to. And I will repeat it even when I am sleeping. And even when I'm meditating and technically I'm not supposed to be thinking anything, how am I supposed to rest if I don't constantly and obsessively remind myself to rest? I have to keep going!!!!

I'll be on the floor again in a week.

The Femme Trials

I just got home after my arrest from The Femme Police. My wrists would hurt if the cuffs hadn't been so fuzzy. It wasn't easy defending my femininity, especially after that comment about how I don't like shopping, but I managed to get out of there without losing my female privileges. And this was how...

So the other day I was going about my business and blogging about how I'm not stereotypically feminine because I don't care about clothes, shopping, or color coordination. You know, I'm sure you all have been there. And then The Femme Police showed up to revoke my femaleness.

There were two of them, Agents Glossy and Botox, in high heels, makeup, dove gray skirt suits because dove gray was the new pink that morning, and those necklaces that look like five crazy necklaces around their necks with little rocks that made clicking sounds every time they moved.

They raised spiked heels at me. "You're under arrest for slander against shopping. Hand over your membership card and your uterus."

I was sitting on the couch with my laptop across my lap, because I assume from the name that that's where it goes. If it was called an "elbowtop" I'm sure I'd find a way to coordinate that but they cleverly gave it a name that we writers can work with. This has nothing to do with my arrest, but I just thought I'd point that out to make you better informed readers.

Anyway, I set the laptop aside, revealing an attire of sweatpants and a 23 year-old Motley Crue T-shirt.

"Oh dear God!" cried Agent Botox, shielding her eyes.

"Pull it together! Remember your training!" yelled the other.

I gave them a confused look. "What? Oh. This?" I stretched out the shirt. "Come on, man, this was the Dr. Feelgood Tour, 1990. Tommy Lee mooned the crowd! To this day I can't look at this shirt without thinking about that man's ass."

Agent Botox turned green and left the room. But Agent Glossy took a deep breath and stayed focused. She pulled a curling iron out of her purse and pointed it at me.

"Don't make me do your hair."

My eyes went wide. "You wouldn't."

"I'll make you sit in a chair for two hours while I curl each strand of hair and spray them to your head with noxious chemicals while I tell you about my cousin's wedding."

I held up my hands. "I'll go quietly."

True to my word, I was silent until we got to court, where I faced a tribunal of fabulously boring-looking women. They were all too thin, all brunette-dyed-blonde, all manicured, and all with a stunning amount of eye makeup on. I could not tell how old any of them were. They wore yellow robes because yellow was the new pink that afternoon and stood at individual podiums, each with Scentsy warmers on the table top and signs that said "I'd rather be judging" on the side.

It was the one in the center who unfurled the scroll of charges against me and read them out loud.

"Genevieve," she looked up and smiled. "Such a pretty name." Then she looked down and scowled again, "Rheams. You have been brought before this tribunal for the following crimes against femininity...wearing mismatched clothes, poor color coordination of furniture, failure to wear accessories, failure to wear makeup, keeping the same hair style for 15 years, failure to keep decorative pillows on your couch, disinterest in purses, slander against shopping, failure to wear heels, only owning two pairs of shoes, a liking for punk music, too much enjoyment in lifting heavy objects, fear of large groups of other women, and the inability to cry during commercials."

"...Does it count if I cry because the commercials are too long?"

"No!" they hollered. "They must warm your heart."

"Shit," I said. "Well, all of that's true. But there are other things about me that I think count towards being a girl."

"List them please."

"A vagina."

"Oh yes. We'll be needing you to turn that in."

"No!"

"It's an insult to women to go around being a girl without really being one."

"But I also love babies, and little kids who dress like grownups, and little animals who dress like people, and tea cups. And I'm kind, compassionate, intelligent, and a good friend. Surely those count as wonderful feminine qualities as well."

The leader pulled out her cell phone and began typing. "I'll have to google that..."

"Maybe she's more of a man," the one on the right suggested.

The middle one looked up at me. "Do you like to watch football?"

I squinched up my face. "No. I like to play football, but watching it on t.v. bores me."

The three of them threw up their hands.

"What kind of an answer is that?" the one on the left said. "You kind of do but you kind of don't? It's too mixed, we don't know what to do with you."

"But she DOES like babies," said the one on the right. "That counts."

"Why don't we just drop 'feminine' and 'masculine' as labels?" I asked. "Everyone is so different, why don't we just appreciate each other as individuals?"

"Throw her in the Androgynous Holding Tank," the center one proclaimed.

"That's it? That's all you're going to ask me?" I said.

"Yes."

I laughed. "You didn't even ask me about my sexual orientation."

"Oh that? It doesn't count against you if you're a lesbian. We've all slept together. It was good fun."

The ones on the left and the right nodded in agreement.

"Although if you are a lesbian, we can let you go because then it all makes sense," said the leader.

"But I'm not a lesbian. And I'm not straight. I'm bisexual, I fall in love with both."

And that's when their heads exploded. It's ok, I'm used to that happening when I explain my sexuality. But the guards still threw me in the Androgynous Holding Tank. It was filled with men and women waiting for relatives to bail them out.

"What are you in for?" I asked a guy who was leaning forlornly against the bars.

"I cry during commercials and I'm straight," he admitted.

"Did you tell them the bit about stereotyping?"

"Yes. While I cried."

I patted him on the back. The rest of us talked and we all decided to start a rock n' roll band because that's what happens in Androgynous Holding Tanks. That's actually how Joan Jett and the Blackhearts got started. And I was let go and allowed to be female as long as I agreed not to blog things that pose a threat to ideals of men and women that people have grown comfortable with.

I don't like nail polish. It takes too long to dry and I don't like sitting there while something stinky glues itself to my hands. I have better things to do. Ha HAAAA!!! You'll never take me alive, fuckers!!!

Here, enjoy a song about androgyny.

Lighter Matters (with hedgehogs!)

No, I'm not smoking again. My last post probably implied that, but no. I was listening to a song and it gave me the image of cigarette smoke and VIOLA! An "I love cigarettes" post was born. I think that might have been a poem but I'm not sure. I'll have to consult a professional.

Me: Was that last post a poem?

Professional Poet: No.

Drat.

So I know that my posts have been kind of serious lately so today I thought I'd bring you this:


Clearly, there's a story here. The sunglasses say to me that this is a vampire - a vampire hedgehog getting a bath. Look, he's even sparkling! And he loves his human so much, he's not even biting him. If a vampire hedgehog bites a human, does the guy become a human vampire or a hedgehog vampire? Could that guy handle such a drastic change in his life? Maybe this IS a picture of a former-human vampire hedgehog and he's taking a nice, hot bath to relax from the emotional stress of the whole ordeal.

Anyway, I just wanted to drop in and say good morning, and post pictures of hedgehogs. And now I have to go prepare for my sister's wedding shower, and flea bomb the house. I know it must seem strange to combine those two things but it's the only day that me and all of the other living critters will be out of the house AND be able to clean up the mess when we get home in the same day. Plus help throw a shower. This is kind of what my life is like, multi-tasking family events and administering poisons.As long as I don't get them mixed up then no one ends up like this guy:

A Cigarette Knows

I love your smoke.  It's the way it drifts up in curves, like a snake or a slim-hipped woman, a signal rising to show where I am, to spot me in a crowd of people who've got nothing in their hands, no gray halos above their heads.

When I worked with the fire department they showed me once in a training session what it's like to be in a cloud of smoke. It rises to the ceiling, seemingly translucent but if you stick your head in it, you're as good as blind and breathless.

And still after that lesson I lit up a cigarette, sucked it in and spit it out of me, one blinding cloud of my love that poisons the world. I am as remorseless in my heart as an infatuated dragon.

Why I'm Breaking Up with Elliott Smith

For one thing, he's been dead since 2003. Not that a detail like that should put too much of a strain on our relationship. Nuns are married to Jesus and He's been dead for 2,000 years. Although maybe that's not an apt comparison. Their hearts belong to a diety, and my heart belongs to a musician who stabbed himself in his.

That's one theory anyway. Another is that his girlfriend murdered him. She says they had a fight that morning, then she went to take a shower and when she got out she found him with a kitchen knife in his chest. He talked about suicide so much that on the one hand, I can see him doing it. On the other hand, they reopened the case recently. He had wounds on his hands, like the ones people have when they fight back, so they're not really sure what happened.

I've become a groupie too late. That happened. And it's at this point that I should warn you that I'm going to admit things about my Elliott obsession that will probably make you shut down your computer and back slowly out of the room, and start reading someone else's blog with lighter subject matter, like one about snow globes. But if you're a steady reader of this thing you might have noticed two things: I have recently started seeing a trauma therapist to finally deal with childhood nuttiness, and I've been on a serious Elliott Smith kick.So the signs were everywhere that a post like this was coming, and if you keep reading then you can't say I didn't warn you. Don't feel bad, though. Here is a link to a blog about kittens.

I can't go to his shows, so I watch them on YouTube. I can't tell him how much his lyrics and his music comfort me so I sing with him. I watch interviews with him so I can hear his gentle laugh, to know there were times that he smiled, and I think, to try to figure out what went wrong. I don't think that thought out loud, but it's there as I watch him, that shy guy with a Ferdinand the Bull tattoo on his arm and often unwashed hair, so clearly uncomfortable in an interview. He looked like this:



I met him on Pandora a few years ago on my Shins station. I didn't pay much attention to him at the time. It wasn't until this summer when I was listening to "Angeles" that I clicked on his description thinking, "I like this guy. I wonder what else he plays," that I read about him and saw that he'd been stabbed to death almost ten years before. Then I had to read more about him, and when I did it was like finding out that I had a brother that my parents hadn't told me about. He'd been crazy about The Beatles, even as a kid. He was a reader and sometimes his songs were inspired by stories he read, just like how my writing is inspired by music I hear. He said the words would put pictures in his mind and that's where some of his music came from. Music puts pictures in my head and that's where my stories come from. Those things practically make us the same person, right?

I don't ordinarily like to find out too much about famous people. I can't appreciate their acting, their music or their writing sometimes if I know too much. I used to like Tom Cruise movies until I found out all of that Scientology stuff and now I can't watch "Jerry Maguire" without thinking about how he if I met him in real life he might try to sell me on it like an Amway salesman and it would be all awkward. Or he'd think my occasional bouts of depression were bullshit. No, it would never work with Tom Cruise.

But Elliott would say "I know how you feel," I know he would. His music says that to me all the time, even when he's not singing. He had it rough as a kid too, and it comes out. People write about how it came out in his lyrics, but I think it came out in sound.

Sometimes, especially when my kids where little, like before the age of seven, they would make a certain sound when they cried and suddenly I could hear my own crying as a child. When this happened, I had to remind myself that they were just upset about something harmless, like I'd taken a toy away or it was time for bed, and that nothing bad was happening to them or to me in that moment. I had to remind myself how old I was and where I was. One certain sound that my son made when he cried made me taste blood in my mouth. I honestly don't know where that came from. I have no clear memory of what happened to my mouth or why a small noise from him triggered a memory that filled my mouth with blood and my head with my own cries. But that's what happened.

There are certain sounds that Elliott's guitar makes that echoes my own cries, and for some reason it doesn't disturb me. There is no other sound that brings up those old feelings in a way that I can handle them. I can't listen to Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees" not so much because of the lyrics but because the gorgeous, sad sound of it makes me hear myself screaming and I swear I don't know why. But Elliot is different, and I don't know why that is either. The song "Christian Brothers" makes me want to talk to him, not so much because of the lines like "No bad dream fucker's gonna boss me around/ Christian Brothers gonna take him down" but because of the guitar. His sound, instead of making me feel more alone, reminds me that my pain isn't unique. This is good, I don't want to be unique in this way. It's not that I want other people to be in pain, I just want to know that other people who have it get the same way sometimes and maybe we can help each other feel better.

I wish I could have made him feel better. Sometimes I listen to his live performances so I can hear him move and breathe, as if by watching him I can bring him back to life. I watch his fingers on the guitar, see what T-shirt he was wearing,and hear him make mistakes and laugh about them.

I can not believe I just admitted all of that, and more surprised still that I'm more embarrassed about admitting that I watch the way a man moves on YouTube than I am about having flashbacks where I taste blood in my mouth. I think I get embarrassed about all the wrong things.

But, I can't help it. He seemed sweet and cute. He giggled once when an interviewer used the word "kerfuffle" and repeated it to himself. It does worry me a little that I'm so drawn to a person who was a suicidal addict. I've known a slew of suicidal addicts, but I don't go around falling in love with all of them. Only, you know, a few. But this guy...

They said when he died there were no drugs in his system besides behavioral medication. No alcohol, no heroin, nothing. I understand that, I think, better than it happening with some crazy chemical in his system. There was no buffer between his mind and the overwhelming pain of himself that made him tear his body apart. Maybe he was even out of cigarettes.

I can't count the number of things of done to block out the pain of those moments when I've felt so ashamed and so stupid for no reason at all, and it's a desperate, wrecking ball of a feeling that swoops in and hollows me out, and I have to fill myself with something, anything at all. To sit with it is to starve to death, to feel so hungry, so hideous inside like the walls of my stomach are coated with an acidic tar that eats me from the inside out. I have to get up, I have to pace, I have to put something in my mouth, I have to get someone on the phone but I can't talk, it hurts to talk, and I'm so so stupid. I think to myself that I wouldn't be feeling this way if I wasn't so fucking stupid.

And it's a moment and it passes. That's what I've learned. If I sit with it I won't starve to death. Nothing is actually eating me, there is no blood in my mouth. There is nothing I've done wrong, there is nothing that's really bad that's happening to me in that moment that feels so real. And I'm not, as it turns out, stupid.

I don't know if that's exactly how Elliott felt. I'm sure it was a variation on the same theme. I also don't know why some of us live through this and some of us don't. When I think about all of the things I've done to myself, I don't understand why I'm here and other people like Elliott are not. But he reminds me what can happen to hurt children who grow up to finish the job that some sick adult started when they don't take care of themselves.

And that's why, Elliott, I can't go out with you anymore. I know what you're going to say, you're dead and you don't know me, but just hear me out. Being with you these last few months has been a really good thing. But when I listen to you for a few days in a row I've noticed that I go into a dark place. No one will probably know how or why you died. Only you know that. And also the more I get to know about you the more I realize that I don't really know you because you can't truly know someone from interviews. Although I do believe that you can determine that a person is awesome when they laugh at the word "kerfuffle."

I'm going to miss seeing flat, one-dimensional pictures of you and listening to you speak in one-sided conversations that I can't participate in because they're recordings that happened over 10 years ago. My capability for emotional intimacy must be at an all-time low if I can only romantically connect with a person on that level.

But, I don't know. Maybe this is what I need right now, with all of these repressed memories coming up and the frightening, sometimes overwhelming feelings which all led me to believe that I shouldn't be in a relationship with someone anyway. Maybe you, Elliott, who can only comfort me, who can not be hurt by me or feel rejected by me if I tell you that I need a few days off, are the perfect partner (of sorts) for me right now. You don't even know that we're together, how could you feel bummed that we're apart? You can't! It's perfect!

God, I am so fucking weird.

So maybe I won't break up with Elliott right now. I think I need him. I can't imagine going more than a few days with listening to "O So Slow"  which has no words and which is, I believe, the noise of my soul. That's what it would sound like if you put your head against my chest. And there would be a man standing in front of my heart with a guitar like a shield, making my cries with me so that I don't have to sing them alone.