Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life by Anonymous
August 2, 2004
Anne’s apartment is kind of messy, and there is rarely food there, and nothing in the way of TV or video games or things like that. But that’s not the reason you don’t like to spend the night there. The reason you don’t want to spend the night there is stuff like this:
“Hey, wake up!”
“Mmph… wha… ?”
And that was the moment Anne dropped the snake on your face.
Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen
Yesterdays Are All Around Us
Yesterdays are all around us as we sit in your paint-chipped kitchenette, playing Gin and drinking bourbon from the bottle. You have a newfound habit of disclosing to me every opportunity we’ve missed for things to turn out differently than this. A week ago you informed me of your aborted proposal last Christmas. You blamed the weather. The city had been ill equipped to handle so much snowfall, you reminded. I remembered the impassable streets, your father shoveling for hours. I remember every detail of that Christmas acutely: your hand slipping up my thigh in the front seat; returning your smile from across the dining room table; falling asleep on your chest in your brother’s bed, your arm guardrailing me in. The details of that Christmas are not so different from the details of every other day we spent together the last six years. They are no more or less bone-crushing than the other five hundred thousand I am involuntarily overtaken by at any given moment of the day. They are no more or less a cause of agony than the knowledge that our lack of matrimony may be a direct result of a city planner’s failure to purchase salt.
I’ve been waiting twelve hours to be allowed into your lap. In the meantime I’ve made a note of everything that is the same or different since the last time I was here. There are more sames than differents. I am unsure if this surprises me. When you are in the bathroom or otherwise occupied, I walk around, leaving little bits of myself as I go: an eyelash, a ticket stub, a sticky note onto which I’ve written: things fall apart. As I do so I take account of the items I’ve left on previous occasions: a bottle of Bailey’s, a plastic frog, a bag of dog bones. I am unsure about assigning a word such as “hope” to the fact that they have not been discarded.
I didn’t put up a tree this year. Nor did I cook a turkey or carve a pumpkin. This is probably obvious, but for some reason I felt the need to say it out loud.
At midnight you set down your cards, look at your watch. I take this as my cue. I make my way to you and you don’t fight me off. Every fuck now has the potential to be our last. Because of this I am unhurried and deliberate in my actions. I am conscious of remaining conscious. I am wary of drifting off. There is the pull towards last Christmas, toward the winery that was closed along with every other business for four days. I visualize us surrounded by barrels. Peter and Ashley standing on either side. I am unnoticing of your glances. I lean against you, your arm supporting my head. I breathe in your mother’s dryer sheets. I could stand like this for hours… if only the lack of snow.
I push forward; fill your mouth with my breast. The application of teeth ensures I remain. The second the pain diminishes I miss its reminder. I say, please, please, but my mouth feels flooded with wine. I procrastinate an ending. I remain completely still, cling motionless surrounding you. Every movement brings us closer to my departure. I will never know the words you were prepared to speak. I want to hear you say it one more time: for you, for you. Your eyes are closed when I reach inside my mouth to extract the gum, stick it on the underside of the table. I think about the person who will find it, what words you’ll speak to her.
If you’re one of the seven people who caught it, I had a post up yesterday about smoking weed every day. I deleted it because who cares about that. Posting on the internet is new to me and I like it but I’m still sorting out which of my thoughts are interesting and which aren’t.
Posting more on the internet than the occasional self-promo is good for me because it makes me write every day. Like most writers, I knew that writing was what I wanted to do with my life pretty young. Also like most writers, I go through spells of not writing, agonizing about not writing, writing garbage, and thinking about how much more bearable I would be as a person if I could just shut the fuck up, though honestly all of these moods have improved a lot since I got out of school.
Most of my friends who write poetry and fiction don’t blog or even post on Twitter. I get that language can feel sacred, especially if you’ve spent years studying it. But writing a lot of maybe-nonsense and making it available to other people for free doesn’t hurt anyone. To me posting is less of a disservice to your writing than sending your poem to an Established Magazine and letting them lop off lines here or there.
I think of posting every day as part of my general effort to enunciate. I’m practicing saying “Hi, this is Serena” clearly and crisply on the phone at work, and I’m practicing putting coherent thoughts on the Internet in the hopes that I’ll get better at making myself understood.
A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer by Christine Schutt
“We were young.
At a pub once and under swags of weeds we were meant to kiss by, my young husband said I was a fool.
What could we have been talking about when he said, “You don’t know a thing about me”? He said, “You never did.” But I thought, I thought, I thought was the way a lot of my sentences started then with him, then with her. Youth and appetite! Something else about this part of my life, when I spent most nights with a man I called my young husband—I kicked him for not coming sooner to the rescue with the cigarettes. I called him names at restaurants when I was drunk with visitors. I said, “Who knows?” when anyone asked me what he was doing. I said he was a liar when I was a liar, too. I went out of my way to hurt him, spending too much money—I was mean to my young husband, and I often no more knew why that was than I knew what it had to do with our lives.
And there was more that was significant. Her teeth, her mouth. And more, more you should know, how, about to board the plane for home, my young husband broke the bottle of expensive wine that he had saved so conspicuously. The wine was red, of course, and ran under and around my shoes.”
Foghorn Leghorn by Big Bruiser Dope Boy
Hologram Baby
Baby I’m a disposable camera.
Baby you stop me dead in my tracks, burn a hole in my brain.
Baby I’m your biggest fan, I’m wearing your t-shirt, can’t you read the pop-calligraphy?—can’t you recognize your own handwriting?
Baby I’ve got filing cabinets full of dreams you wrote, my office is dripping with dream-juice, my hands are holding fresh dollar bills, ready to spend on you.
Baby you make it all seem worthwhile, you get me out of bed in the morning, you make the coffee taste hopeful, you make me leave the house with confidence and go to the office where I fill cabinets with dreams of you.
Baby take these handcuffs off of me, now put them back on.
Baby your picture exposes the end of what I desire, which is the beginning of what I desire, a road paved in dreams.
Baby the cacti are singing me road directions.
Baby I’m confused, the world is changing—quick, tell me something I can trust even for a second because I can’t come up with anything good.
Baby stop hiding me in the utility closet.
Baby stop looking like an angel.
Baby don’t open your mouth, don’t ruin the suspense we’ve worked so hard to sustain.
Baby my hair is standing on end, my nerves scrambling to catch up with you, playing possum in the moonlight.
Baby the wise know their foolishness well.
Baby you were cast in bronze, racing headlong toward me through a hot glass tunnel.
Baby the glass is cracking, you’re humming in my ears like a flute.
Baby thinking of you like this is a holy tradition at this point.
Baby I see you across the room at the party, I can’t hear you, but from the look on your face I can tell what you’re talking about me—you’re talking about finding the disease in me.
Baby the world is hungry and so are we, but we’re harmless enough you and I—tadpoles in a puddle of tears.
Baby you may be my baby but I feel just like a child when it comes to you, I’m trying to stay warm in the nest you built.
Baby puke inside my mouth, tell me something I can strap my heart to with a horse-hide belt.
Baby fire is quiet and painless and ice is a punishing screech in the wild.
Baby our bodies are being destroyed and I can’t turn my eyes away from you.
Baby I’m sorry for being dramatic but the world, inexplicable and cancerous, moves like an insect across the ceiling.
Baby was that you on the side of a building, riding a golden wagon in the sunset?
Baby, I hope I’m right on target, hope I’m reaching you clear.
Baby are you tuned in?—is this making any sense?
Baby our kingdom has epilepsy, we live in a sensitive fortress, we might have to smuggle ourselves out in disguises to survive.
Baby you’re just over this hill, just around this corner, just through this door, I can see your shadow hinting safety from where I stand, I’ll follow the necessary logical steps.
Baby we’re ruthless when we talk to each other, do we really believe it’s fun to drag this cruel contest out?
Baby I have to go to the bathroom, if you don’t have an excuse to shut your eyes I’d be glad to give you one if it’ll help, because baby, I’m here to help.
Baby we are commas in each other’s breaths, hitches in each other’s steps.
Baby we only want to feel what we heard feels good.
Baby let’s put on the rubber gloves and go on a rampage, we’ll have the town talking for weeks.
Baby gossip flings off of us effortlessly: all we do is tell ourselves stories, we’re a force to be reckoned with.
Baby what are we doing now?—let’s find another problem we can’t solve.
Baby you remind me I’m not yet finished with the task at hand, your tent glowing on the mountainside, I can smell the smoke from the meadow below.
Baby I’ll be there soon, don’t fall asleep yet, it’s cold, I’ll make my way up the mountain in the dark.
Baby I have no way of knowing what I’ve done, I’m walking to you without a person to count on.
He called his grand scheme sophiarchism and it was ludicrous. As he prepared the oils, butters, silver instruments, and paint, he outlined a system of government where the only voters were holders of social science PhDs. The notion that the governing power should be concentrated in the hands of capable specialists. Heavy stuff. She wasn’t entirely sure she had the right approach but something seemed… unpatriotic about it.
He approached her with an emory board and lazily she shifted her hand so that it lay on the armrest of the reclining chair. He began to file her pinkie gently. That he had a grand scheme was lovely, she thought. That he had a scheme at all. His polo was mint green, his apron pure white, his khaki pants straight to his strong-looking legs. He worked cocoa butter into her skin. When he hit the spot between her index and thumb bones, tense as a broken wing with carpal tunnel, she moaned. “Oh,” he said softly, as if surprised, “Lisa, let it go.” When the manicure was over he brought her a thimble of espresso, jet black in a doll-size cup.
—
I wrote this last spring and I still think about it occasionally because it perfectly encapsulates how I feel that I have something to say but have no idea what it is. I know I should just shut the fuck up… but…
Looking back on the piece I can tell I was thinking about intimate situations in which people who aren’t in the habit of listening have to listen. What might make them want to listen (sex appeal, physical pleasure, color). Also about the kinds of jobs people who might have been academics end up doing. Also about hands and the innumerable things they do. How much I love to encounter an idea out of context, in the wild.
It’s occurred to me that this is a terrible piece because it’s riddling, but not in the satisfying way. “Write poems, not puzzles” is deeply solid criticism I have received. But real life, at least to me, seems mostly to consist of unsatisfying puzzles and non-epiphanies. At least in writing you can style the riddle so that it feels good in your brain. I have a not-very-coherent thought about writing as ASMR, about head-scratchers and head-scratchers. After all, what’s the difference between something that’s ambient and something that’s vague?
Intention, I guess. But why write (more) useless bullshit?
Why not, I guess. Someday someone might pick it up and realize it’s music.
One of my dad’s many musical passions is just-left-of-center British rock from the 70s and 80s. As a middle schooler I was as likely to get into Eric Clapton as he was into Nero, but we could always agree that Brian Eno, Genesis, and David Bowie were good stuff.
Of all the bands he showed me XTC is probably the weirdest. I love it protectively. I won’t summarize this pretty accurate listicle but what made XTC so great, while simultaneously dooming them, was their inability to pick one sound and stick with it.
The XTC song I encounter in the wild most often is ‘Senses Working Overtime’. Twice this year I’ve heard it while shopping for clothes. ‘Senses Working Overtime’ is a catchy alternative track with cute-sounding but ultimately cynical lyrics: “My, my, sun is pie / There’s fodder for the cannons / And the guilty ones can all sleep safely”. It’s probably XTC’s most listenable song.
As a wearyingly literal kid, something I loved about XTC was that no matter how well I knew the words, I never had too strong a grasp on what Andy Partridge was actually saying.
Pulsing pulsing,
There’s a beat in his arm still.
Pulsing pulsing,
Like the throb of an anthill.
Pulsing pulsing,
No death in the rain.
I’ve been washing my hands
In the stuff I wash my brains.
When the songs had a clear message they were rebellious in ways I could understand and sympathize with: fuck organized religion, fuck whispering neighbors, fuck authoritarian middle-class parents.
And when I wanted to dance, I could really throw myself around the living room to the tune of ‘Ten Feet Tall’.
As I got older the songs that resonated were the ones about trouble in romantic relationships. “Why on earth do you revolve around me? / Aren’t you aware of gravity?” There are plenty of lovely love songs XTC’s catalogue, but the stories are never easy.
Punch and Judy
Did it truly
And were married in a haste.
In love, maybe,
Using the baby
As a kind of romance paste.
She’s grown fatter,
Her hair cut shorter,
Looks much older than nineteen.
My dad relinquished his XTC CDs to me, though retained sovereignty over the vinyl. Criminally underappreciated, Mummer was the disk I carried in my backpack and forced my friends to listen to. It opens with the aggressive, plucky, Middle Eastern inspired (?) ‘Beating of Hearts’. There’s a fair amount of chanting. It closes with the least convincing pop song of all time, ‘Funk Pop A Roll’. I can’t defend listening to the entire album and haven’t done it in years, but a few bars of ‘In Loving Memory of a Name’ always made my dad emotional—and now me.
But my favorite XTC CD, the one that barely left my CD player, was Rag & Bone Buffet. Not until later did I find out Rag & Bone Buffet is all B-sides and radio versions. That means that the versions of XTC songs I have in my head are not the ones that were popular. I still find it disorienting to hear the unremastered version of ‘Respectable Street.’
There’s absolutely nothing cohesive about Rag & Bone Buffet (if you couldn’t tell from the title). I loved it because every song was a new stab at songwriting. There’s the totally ambient ‘Over Rusty Water’ and the dubby ‘Cockpit Dance Mixture’. Andy Partridge’s voice may be the unifying feature, but it’s not powerful enough to hold XTC’s discography together.
I would never have been able to come to XTC as an adult because technologically my approach to music is so different. These days I’m never stuck listening to the same CD over and over. If I hadn’t had to listen to each song so many times, I don’t think I ever would have been able to hear the lyrics. And the lyrics are where XTC truly shines.
A song that speaks to me more today than it used to is from the first on Rag & Bone Buffet, ‘Extrovert’. It goes:
No hidden message, nothing political,
You needn’t listen, I just wanted to show.
I’m feeling extrovert.
I am the lion who’s roaring, not the mouse that gets hurt.I feel like someone else,
Yes I do, yes I do, yes I do.
I feel like someone else,
I feel new, not so blue.
I feel.
Spring
snow thick and wet, porous
as foam rubber yet
crystals, an early Easter sugar.
Twigs
aflush.
A crocus
startled or stunned
(or so it looks: crocus
thoughts are few) reclines
on wet crumble
a puddle of leas. It
isn’t winter and it isn’t spring
yes it is the sun
sets where it should and
the east
glows
rose. No
willow.
Miss Forceful Wants You 
