season of the bitch

There’s a story in me today, on the verge of coming out. It’s like being on the verge of orgasm, almost there, yes, don’t stop…

what’s going to push me over the brink? It’s maddening sometimes.

I’ve been carrying on an affair with New York City. More of a summer fling, really, though like any good affair I’m afraid to make it real–afraid to live there for fear the glamour will wear off and I’ll get bored. Fear that I don’t really love it anyway and if I was presented with what I think sometimes that I want, it would disappoint.

I’ve been cheating on Philly with New York. Philly is stodgy and boring, and yet I feel like I don’t know it very well, that it’s got secrets that it hasn’t shown me yet. It doesn’t love me, yet I come home to it and am vaguely unsatisfied every night when  I fall asleep.

When I left South Carolina for Philly I thought it would be fabulous and exciting, that it would sweep me off my feet. After all, I’d spent three years back with an ex that I should’ve never talked to again, Hilton Head. Sure, it was rich and I never had to worry about money, but it didn’t get me and tried to convince me that its superficial charms–sandy beaches, golf courses, pretty blonde people and boys in cargo shorts with no shirts–were enough to hold me.

They weren’t. But I stayed too long.

Denver and I had an abusive relationship–it tricked me with offers of pretty boys and friendly people and its athleticism, but it quickly turned messy. We couldn’t connect, and I turned to drowning my feelings in booze rather than really admitting how I felt.

New Orleans and I had a dramatic love, one of the longest and the most significant, for sure. It loved me not wisely but too well, but pulled back and left me crying many a time, only to come crawling back, whispering sweet things in my ears and seducing me with its sweaty charm. The sex was intense, dreamy–but would you expect anything less of it? The air tasted like liquor and spice and we danced all the time, danced to escape all the rotten feelings that came swirling in off the Mississippi.

I’ve been so afraid to visit New Orleans, because it was in a downward spiral that culminated in Katrina and I was hoping it was getting itself back together again, but now Gustav is headed its way and I’m terrified of what might happen to it. And yet again, I haven’t been back to whisper “I still love you” in its ear.

You have to let go of the old loves, I know, before you can really have new ones, and I’ve always been crap at that. I haven’t given my heart to anyone in so long because I haven’t gotten over the past, and I can’t open myself up to new places when my real love is elsewhere.

I’m still thinking of New Orleans, and now I’m afraid it’s going to fall apart again. And once again, there’s nothing I can do except wait, and watch, and wish I could help.

I haven’t really been out dancing in ages.

Sure, I’ve gone places where there was dancing–a wedding, the Bust party–but I haven’t gone with the strict intentions of just drinking and letting go to whatever the DJ was spinning.

I’d never been to either place my friend suggested, so I was game. I put on my war paint–hot pink lipstick, black eyeliner smudged with a glitter pencil, and super glam silver shoes–and went.

First bar turned into a sausage fest of the kind of awkward straight white guy you know isn’t there to dance. The ones who stand around in a nervous clutch and look around for girls who aren’t talking to a guy. The DJ looked like a guy who got into it to meet girls, spinning boring 90s ‘dance hits’ and Britney remixes. Meh.

So we left, and walked down the street to another place that looked like a normal bar downstairs and like somebody’s house upstairs. Literally. The DJ’s stand was built on top of a bathtub, there was still a toilet next to it with his records sitting on it, and that corner was tiled black-and-white. The bar was small and awkwardly built against the wall, and the bottled beer selections lined the windowsills. A mismatched clutch of velvet thrift-shop couches and chairs were filled with casually dressed hip kids–not uberhipsters, just funky northern liberties twentysomethings.

Bel Biv DeVoe’s ‘Poison’ got me onto the dance floor after two vanilla vodka Cokes and a Red Stripe, and then the DJ blended in New Order and I was hooked. My thighs ached from swaying and dipping in four-inch platforms, but it was worth it.

Dancing for real uses your whole body, not just your legs or hips. Arms, shoulders, back, hips, thighs, feet…all moving. It’s the best kind of exercise there is because it doesn’t feel like exercise. It feels like celebration.

So many people don’t like to dance in public because they feel like everyone’s looking at them, but when  you really let go and do it you both don’t care, and you invite their looks. Yeah, I’m not trying to look sexy, I’m trying to feel sexy and that makes all the difference. One is for others, the other is for me.

I woke up early this morning to take care of my dog and my sister’s dog and kitten that I’m petsitting. My body aches a bit, but it’s the kind of ache that makes me want to cause more. Think I’ll lace up my sneakers and go for a run with the dog.

Kim wrote about horses, and how nothing bad can catch you there. She’s right. Horses were my safe space when I was younger.

Now it’s the dance floor.

I have to remember that.

I’m quite happy with this interview that just went up today on Newsarama. G. Willow Wilson is a journalist turned comic book writer, and her excellent new book Air just hit stands yesterday. My local shop was already sold out, so you might have to ask your shop to re-order, but check it out. It’s quite good.

And check out my interview, please. There’s a link to click to recommend it, and I’d appreciate if you did that too, but enjoy the story.

So while I’m busy, I share with you this post, from a favorite novelist of mine. Madame Emma Forrest, on why relationships are beautiful.

Someone asked me a while ago what I wanted from a relationship if it wasn’t traditional marriage and kids. This is as good an answer as I can think of.

I posted this video the other day when I had too much going on to really explain the thoughts going through my head. It was a synthesis of my teenage dream-come-true interview with Neil Gaiman (yes, Neil fucking Gaiman, buy the next issue of Comic Foundry to read all about it) and talk about Iggy Pop, and my beloved Pop Feminist’s question Can Women Be Part of Counterculture? and Octo’s post on Feministe about “Sparkle.”

And so before I went out I posted Siouxsie. With her short-cropped hair and Egyptian-queen makeup, her shorts and vest and skinny boyish body are genderfuck supreme here, especially singing an Iggy Pop song where she takes on the male power-role—she isn’t the passenger, someone else is. She’s going to take him for a ride.

She’s got both masculine and feminine aspects here, of course. She’s glittery and glam and made-up but in skinny boyclothes, taking on the male role. When she dances, she does high kicks with the boys from her band, she covers Budgie’s eyes, and mostly you have to stare her in the face—each time she moves, she keeps her eyes on you.

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Back here in good old South Carolina…yeah, well…

It feels like I never left. Feels like the last year or so was a dream (on better days, feels like the two years before that were a dream, too, and I never met that guy). I’m working and laughing at myself at the thought that I could ever get out of there and be having as much fun as I’ve had in the year I’ve spent in Philly and NYC.

It’s fun to pretend that certain things never happened, but then I’m brought up short with the realization that they did. My father has to come into his office (at the house) where I’ve temporarily taken over because it’s home to the high-speed Internet connection, and he has to weigh himself twice a day to make sure he doesn’t have congestive heart failure. So the talking scale tells him that he’s over his target weight and asks if he’s taken his medicine that day. A sharp reminder that this time last year he was on his third week of five in the hospital and we thought he’d have to be on oxygen for the rest of his life. Thank whatever you believe in that he isn’t, but still.

My mother is depressed. She thinks she’s fat and hates to leave the house (she’s gained probably ten pounds. Why on earth should this be debilitating or grounds to stay inside all the time? But you know, I just can’t go there right now). She can’t work because of her shoulders, but she rarely does anything else. She watches soap operas and worries about my dad.

I miss Kacie like crazy right now. I have plans to watch the fights tonight with a bunch of old friends at B.’s house, and one of the last times I was at his house was with my sister and Kacie. And after remembering that, well, this was where she lived and so everything reminds me of her. So I put on more red lip gloss and pretend I’m doing it for her, and touch my tattoo and smile.

When I see other people that knew her, we hug for longer than we used to. It’s a way to hang on.

I come back and I have to go see the One that Got Away. It’s a rule, a compulsion…something. It’s too easy now. He runs a restaurant, my mother goes there all the time, and his parents always ask about me and I tell myself they’d be upset if they knew I was in town and didn’t stop by.

He looks shocked and then stares at me when I’m not looking (according to Megan, who had the seat with the angle that could see him). He will barely even come say hello to me. Like I’m going to bite him, or yell at him for breaking my heart? It was years ago. When I lived here I didn’t think about him as much, but when I come back for brief visits, again, it’s like a time warp and suddenly the wounds feel fresh.

Yet I’ve learned to take pleasure in little victories and little moments, and not ask for the world, and knowing that I’ve still got the ability to knock him for a loop makes me feel good.

He looks tired, thin. Had little to say. And when you love someone, you truly want them to be happy, and so I wonder if he is. Wonder what more he wants.

But there are other people in my life (one in particular) who make me happy now. So phone calls and visits to old lovers don’t have the weight they used to.

I missed you last night too.

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
- Neil Gaiman

I’ve got posts in draft and posts in my notebook and they’re all quite intellectual even if most of them are about comics. But a discussion at UnCool made me stop for a minute and toss this up right quick ahead of the good stuff I’m working on. Because technically I’m at work right now and thus don’t have the time to do justice to my other thoughts.

Twitter is my new crack. Love it. You can see it in my sidebar, and you can make me your twitter friend and see my lovely posts about politics, mimosas, and objectifying men in 140 characters or less. And I was thinking about its kind of necessarily-snappy, one-liner-ish quality. Because how much depth can you put into a couple of lines? (Maybe I’ll try short-stories-in-one-sentence via twitter next!) 

Twitter’s kind of another path to internet-stardom, or an addition to the one I’ve already got. Suits my newly BlackBerry’d lifestyle rather well, and is oddly addictive, especially when you’ve got friends that are quite witty with it. But it’s another step away from me and into persona-land. 

As was noted on the thread I linked above, everyone’s blog is a persona. Hell, even though mine has my real name on it, that probably forces me to create even more of a persona than not. If I had a pseud and was well-hidden on here, perhaps I could tell you the truth about how I feel about everything. (as it is, I save it for a few special people. very few.) 

My voice on here is a combination of several ‘voices’ that I cultivate as a writer. One of them is definitely snarky, another is those flashes of pure honesty that come over me at times, and a third is deeply analytical. They’re all pieces of me, and if you slag off any of them you’re still not slagging ME off. Because you don’t know me. 

Even though we make blog-friendships and such, there’s something about face-to-face interaction that I think can’t be replaced. Someone knows me far better if they’ve looked into my eyes while I’m ranting on about Scalia or Neil Gaiman or Lucero, and they find it harder to insult and rip on me. They still do it, I’m sure, but…yeah. 

Internet interaction is weird and fraught with miscommunications, misreadings of tone and inflection, and completely wrong assumptions about the identity and motivations of the others behind the keyboard. But it’s still just as hurtful as anything that happens out in the real, flesh world. 

Too many people I like have been getting slagged off for no real reason lately, and I’m sure my turn is coming. And so I tend to retreat even further into my own fledgling cult of personality (VERY fledgling) even though my compulsive honesty wants to tell everything–everything. 

But go tell Caroline you love her. 

I have a photo in a silver frame on a shelf in my living room. It has moved with me everywhere I’ve lived, but it is not of family. In fact one of the people in it is one of the few people I truly hate.

It was taken before my senior prom. 10 years ago now. My senior prom, where a beautiful boy with kind eyes who wasn’t my date kissed me and sent one person into tears and another home early.

He’s in the picture, the boy who broke my heart a thousand times but never managed to make me not love him. He’s not looking at the camera-all of my favorite pictures of him show him looking away. He’s still beautiful. And now he has a beautiful wife and a life that doesn’t include me. I just have pictures.

There’s a blond guy in the photo with a striped cane. I once (morethanonce) thought I could have loved him, but he didn’t let me try. We spent a few nights together, intense, but always with a wall up that I couldn’t break down. I don’t know if anyone has. I hope so.

The one looking straight at the camera is the only one I still talk to. My best friend for a while, at the time the only one who got it, I kissesd him one night and things got out of hand. I loved him but wasn’t in love with him and I lost all of it for a while. But not forever. Friendships last longer. The good ones anyway.

The girl in the picture isn’t me. I hate her because she slept with my man (though I could never hate him for it) but even more because she tried to pretend that she didn’t know why it hurt, why I couldn’t forgive her. She was my friend.

But I hate her too because she’s in that picture. With those boys that were so much of my life for years after that picture was taken. It should have been me.

The guy who took that picture got married a few days ago. I wasn’t there. I pushed him away because my ex didn’t like him. How stupid of me. Who ever mattered to me more than these people? I’ve yet to have a love that does. And if I did, that person would have to understand why I keep this picture.