Amy's way or the highway

The Forgotten

I'm sittting in a cafe window. I'm in one of those writing zones that, if I could maintain this zone, I would be famous. It's the zone of all zones. It smells like dusk. It's good. There are clouds swirling around in my brain. A film has coated my brain. Creative armor has embraced my being. I am God. I should vanish. I should levitate and be on a mountain building a fire. People should be chanting behind me. I should not know if the chanters are wind or monks. I should be so calm the whole world sounds like the whole world and a tree's skeleton is a fishes skeleton. I should sink my heel into the earth and wrap my toes around the core. Bottled, I should be expensive.
A man taps on the cafe window and races in.
"Oh my god,"he says. "You're here now."
His noise is the boom made when a plane breaks the sound barrier.
"Huh?" He awakens me from a pleasant sleep.
"I wondered where you went. It's so good to see you."
I have two choices here. I either offend this person and pretend I don't see him, thus salvaging my creative shell....or I interview him, slowly moving away from this literary utopia, thus making him feel seen. The fact is I have no idea who he is. Maybe my mother could penetrate this zone. Maybe my husband, but not this passer-by.
At this moment, I feel I am making a decision about my entire life. If I choose my work, I will be an artist. If I choose the man, then I will be sacrificing myself for the greater good of humanity. I'm an intense girl. That's how I roll.
I choose humanity. I interview the man with random questions.
"Are you still working there?"
"No."
"Are you still living there?"
"Yep."
"How's it going? What's new?"
His face is falling like the snowman under a leafless tree. I've been outed. He leaves, shoulders not in their hanger, invisible.
Half way down the block, as I watch his lifeless shirt, I recall him. B. B from three cafes past. B from Ohio, who plays  guitar in a band called "Yes, man." B, whose girlfriend left him last summer for a man named Dan who did stand-up comedy with too many props. B, who told me all his dreams when I took breaks from my writing.
I tell someone how bad I feel about B. My friend looks at me incredulously.
"Jesus. It's not like you saved his life," he says. "And he ruined yours."

breaking up with a cafe

It's important to know in this story that I change my cafe as soon as I get too familiar with it, as soon as everybody knows my name. I'm social, so this will happen. My husband can see it happen, but he's past warning me. He misses the old spots, but he's rational. He knows it's just a building. He knows there are others.We pretend, as a couple, as if the place were never there.
I can feel my impending repulsion too, but I let it happen. I have to. That's the kind of animal I am. When the cacoon become a butterfly, when the aroma of the coffee becomes a stink, I seek a new cafe second home. I circumvent thru streets to avoid the old one. The ex-cafe becomes and old boyfriend, one who I waited too long to breakup with, one who I despised for too long before we parted. I guess this is what happens when one gets married. We get crazy. We break up with coffeeshops to quell the monster who needs to leave things.

girls ain't funny cause...

girls ain't funny cause all that time boys been evadin' their emotions and making jokes where feelings go....
girls been "aw honey, aw baby, I'm so sorry about that." Putting ourselves in your shoes so you don't feel alone....
Our compassion, or that thing we been raised to do, which is listen and empathize and compasionalize, and shit like that---it ain't funny.
What's funny---is when someone tells you their feeling and you make a joke
or
what's funny is---when someone asks you how you feel and you make a joke
cause
with lotta men, nothing hides the pain more than the jokes
and
that joke lands on another joke on another joke, and no matter how many women tell boys
"You are emotionally irresponsible" or "You don't take me seriously"
those joke muscles have got strong by then, those jokes muscles climb buildings and scale shit mile high

Afternoon films and bathrobes

I am sitting in Pirates of the Caribean at noon with a friend. I am uncracking the lid of my Starbucks fruit salad(tough as a CD case) and water(very PC, I'm saving someones life by drinking it). I am feeling clever because I snuck my treats in past the sleuth-like ticket taker.
I am unphased that the all-powerful ticket taker made me chug my latte.Small victories placate me. My seat is terribly uncomfortable and my friend is pissed about the lattes. "I'm not buying any of their crap," she told me as we passed the concession stand. Tempting as it was.
I look at the screen and say, "This is as good as it gets." I see her look at me out of the corner of my eye.
There's a long pause. If disappointment could talk, it would sound like this. She says, "I guess."
My friend wants bigger "as good as it gets than me." She's been flown to Hawaii on a third date. I drove to Kentucky with a brother and sister who seemed to be having an affair. Either that, or they used each others beds as drawers. I've been promised very small things. She's been promised very big things.
My people are what you might call "Hippy Snobs." We look down upon many people and things, yet the top of the mountain for us is actually...walking around in our bathrobes and seeing movies at noon. I understand some people reach higher, and I say, good for them.

Lady in the Lake

I hate knowing something about a director before I see their movie. I hate knowing something personal about him, something about his character. Apparently, M. Night Shyamalan is a terrible person. He's arrogant and he cast himself in his own movie.

I once had a writing teacher, names Paul Carter Harrison, an elegant sophisticated man who saw nothing carnal upon seeing snother man stop a woman on the street and tell her "You have incredible legs." He said there was nothing prurient about this because it was as much fact as a blue sky. He also said that when you turn written words over to the screen or the stage, you gotta back up. It's an impossible negotiation, setting a playwright next to a director. It is nothing less than a necessary act of surrender for the playwright, an impossible situation opf setting your child into the world. You've done all you can do, now close your eyes, and let them walk the plank.

M. Night Shyamalan starred, well peripherally, in his film. Knowing, or hearing that he was an ego-maniac, did not help seeing him up there. I looked for aspects of him I could like, to better enjoy the film. He's sort of lovely, the way his eyes hang like his loose shirts. He reminds me a little of my overly brainy and fiercely artistic Long Island cousins. Though, I must admit, knowing who he was, was disruptive. It was like seeing the guy who works at the corner store in a starring role. He's as much your cashier as your mother is your mother. I don't know how people in Hollywood see movies.

Comme d'habitude, Paul Giamatti, who played Cleveland Heep, apartment building superintendent, was fantastic. He seems like the opposite of ego. He's an actor who conveys emptiness miraculously. But also strength and salvation. Nothing else there, other than he makes the film.

Writing this, I think of the film Dogma, that was ripped apart by the critics, but I liked it. It was the otherworldliness that also self-reflected, and winked at the audience. M. Night Shyamalan cannot help winking at the audience. He gives long speeches about what he is doing and he lets us know he knows he's giving long speeches about what he is doing. Though it is the parts that he does not wink, that move the most. The subtlety of showing us the bike room in the basement, reminding us we are still in this world, even is another one has intercepted with ours.

This film was also about being an artist, and the intensity of feeling spoken through. There is one speech his character gives about his thoughts becoming uncluttered that brought me to tears. And what artist wouldn't be?

This film is also about not knowing who we are in the world. We might be special. God might be at our door. Who knows who we are in the grand scheme of things. The older I get, the less I am impressed with this epiphany. When I was ninteen years old, that brought me great comfort. In my thirties, I am more convinced I am the person sitting in front of me. He says we're important, maybe, but only based on the effect we have on those who come after us. When the "lady of the water" tells Shyamalan his future, she talks about his futures rippling effect, more than his present.

What can I conclude. I liked it better than Pirates.

the ouch generation

I noticed it first in comedy class. Or maybe it was my friends in perpetual breakup mode. Either way, all I can say is that the past six months, have been as hard on the heart as they have been on the world.
But this is a rant. I don't care that everybody's hurting. I'm tired of it. Life sucks. Buy a helmet. Life's hard buy a plunger. It's the human experience. Love it or leave it.

It started with the breakups. They kept happening, once after the other. And they genuinely sucked. My friends were genuinely being hurt. Hurt and disrespected. Underappreciated. Manipulated. Blown off. Screwed and deserted. Swept off their feet and dropped on their ass. Twirled and swirlied. Women, who derserved no less than admiration and awe were being tossed out with the Tuesday trash. Well paid, good hair, go to the gym, skip breakfast, more than adequately raised in prep schools and music camps...tennis players, clean, witty conversationalists....passed over...

"I don't get it," my friends would say, after the guy left without pause, without pleading, without regret.

"Neither do I," I say, over and over. And I don't get it. I eeked into that marraige window before I felt any ounce of lonliness, any panic of woman with cats syndrome. And I don't know who to be pissed off at.

Am I supposed to be pissed at the men who overlook my beautiful amusing friends?
Am I supossed to be mad at men who rob interesting intelligent women of their dignity by making them despertate, hungry and ready to date men they would have spit at in high school(not that that would have been okay either)
Am I mad at my beautiful amusing friends for wanting all of the men(even the losers) to be 'the one', sending men into a panic-then sending the men into alleys with uncomplicated young women, who wear no musk of panic?

I don't know. This entry was supposed to be about being pissed, and it's only the invitation to being pissed. Check my next entry for pissed.

to california on his bday

Dear Cal,
The alien planet friendster sent me a reminder that you were going to be 19 years old soon. Have fun with it. 19 is fun. Henry Miller thought it was fun. Kurt Cobain thought it was fun. I think Axel Rose did too. I don't remember 19. Okay, vaguely, but not unless under deep hypnosis. But in all seriousness, whenever your birthday is, have fun. Saw JG sometime this year. He was like an hour late, but it was nice to see him and I never heard from him again. I called him once from a train platform. Vagueness. Gotta love it. I want no more or less. That sentence was a lie. There are actually some areas where vagueness kills me. Hope school if formidable and you're being smart and tolerant.
Amy

lightning strikes

Dogs freak out during lightning storms. Kids race into their parents bedrooms. Me and my sisters used to wash out hair in storms, in Indiana, at our dad's house. We also put raw sliced hotdogs into our chef boyardee. Jane Fonda was just becoming famous for the second time as a health guru.

A Canadian friend asked me why we care so much about the weather in Chicago. She lived here during grad school, and she was constantly amazed how Chicagoans approached her to talk about the weather. (she also rode a cops horse-talk about fish out of water.) She said Chicagoans talk about it being too hot, too cold, a perfect day, wish the sun would come out, wish this snow would let up. Some even get metaphoric. "Snow brushing the sidewalks like spirits,"-"So hot it's like walking into a hair dryer...

It's one of those extreme weather weeks. The gay games soccer match is on hold when the storms start. It's the lighning more than the rain. My first step outside is a timid one, an expectation to be assaulted. Last night, driving home late, there were too many lightning bolts. I cowered as I drove along Lake Shore. Where were they hitting, what were they connecting with? I looked at couples casually walking underneath that violent sky. They were braver than me. I tried to remember what the weather experts say about lightning and driving in a car. Was it the best place to be? Was it the worse place to be?
I had a good life yesterday, I told myself. I finished a great writing class. My last sketch went all right. I saw an excellent stand-up routine by a crazy wound man named Trent W. I could die now, right? What were my chances of getting hit by lightning compared to all those other people out there on the street, in their cars, up in trees? I remember that I bought my old pickup from a guy who'd been struck by lightning. He told me that lowered my odds of getting struck since I knew someone who had been. I still cowered the rest of the way home. I saw every tree traveling through my windshield. Oh well. Not a brave day

oregon coast

Dear M and A,
Last night I dreamed about those damn hills next to the ocean again. I can't help from wondering if I'm supposed to live in the ocean. Opps. I mean, live near it. Or do I mean, in it? (see mafia threat "She's swimming with the fishes.")
The dream goes like this. I'm driving up and down these unimaginably steep hills. Way worse than San Francisco. They're the kind of hills that mess with my gravity. But I'm breezing up them, mostly. The ocean is raptuous ocean beside me, inhaling everything near it. It's so lovely, I want to swallow it right back.
I stop the car, because the road has ended. Any further, I'm in the sea. I pull the car over and get out. I stand beside the bottom of a cliff, so I'm standing in the ocean, but on top of something, so I'm only wet up to my knees.
I'm waiting for a wave. I know that every once in a while, a large wave will come in and envelop me. I want it to. The wave comes. It drenches me. I wait for another. I don't worry that it will drag me in.
I wait for another. It comes.
Soon my mother has joined me. She says "I'm feeling my age." She asks, "Is there anything for me to hang onto." She hates to miss a party.
I point to a rope that has been joined to the cliff, with intermittenent knots nailed into the slated rock. She holds onto it when the wave comes. And comes again. She looks at each of the waves seriously, as if she has some illusion of controlling them.
When she's ready to leave, she walks, with the rope, back to the road. She stands and watches.
There is no logic to this story only water.
Hope all is well with you,
Amy

to my lawyer in new york

dear j,
you're out golfing now with the partners and i am sitting next to a smack mouthed crazy man, talking about jesus. we're sitting in the window, together, because a few minutes ago he yanked his chair close to me. then, he slid a biscotti next to my keyboard. i declined. he said, can you blame a man for being in love. earlier, at the gym, a man insisted on holding the water fountain button for me. ish. i hate it, and yet i am intrigued, when the world, cannot see any of my walls. maybe it's everyone. maybe it's this damned mess in the middle east and the whole world is walking around pissed off and driving into their neighbors-hood in tanks.
the mentally ill man keeps tapping the window when he sees children. when they come towards the window waving, he says, come inside, come get your cookie. i only feel slightly possesive of that cookie.
he sucked the almonds paste out of his croissant and its laying there, deflated butter crust.
now, he's taken his biscotti outside for someone to open. the packages are harder to open than CD's. maybe that's why he wanted to give it away so badly. after the nice man from minnesota opens it, the mentally ill man sets his coffee next to the family and breaks off a part of his cookie. he offers it to all of them, who all decline.
i can't help thinking he has the right idea, this wall-less man, who left me to join them. he's this permeable thing, uneffected by the rules of modern day personal distance society.
the world is in turmoil. i'm constasntly pretending the news is some mel gibson futuristic movie, and not the real world. and when i say mel gibson, i mean mel gibson before we knew about his religious fundamentalism, but after we knew he had ten kids, which definitely made him less attractive to any liberal middle class girl who wore "i'm pro-choice and i vote tshirts" at age five.
the crazy man dropped his cookie. he's picking up the crumbs from the ground and adding them to his tongue. the minnesotans continue to eat their blackberry ice cream, unphased. the father looking person keeps an eye on the crazy man, but only as a precaution.
a lovely northshore mother, or the nanny, walks by pushing a stroller. her knees aren't like tea cups but they are very tan. if orange is brown, they are very very sinkissed. the man disppears as far as the window can see.