The Blinks so Far (For Gabriel)

 

The blinks so far 

Cosmically speaking, our lives are over in a few blinks of an eye, 184 to be exact. 

And I have already done a bit of blinking. 

Before us, the world was simultaneously chaotic and boring. 

Remember?

Spring smelled of cherry blossom, petrichor and dread. 

I spent a lot of time fiddling in my room cradling my phone, trying to make lemonade out of the fan-flug shitfest we suddenly found ourselves in, playing reluctant therapist to my wide-eyed girlfriends. 

There were long jogs, dodging South Philly trash. Panicked Acme runs. Zoom meetings. The days melted together.

Everyone was going through it. 

And then you arrived out of nowhere like a beam of iridescent light with your magic tricks and your polaroids and your joy, prismatic and infectious. I absorbed it. Happiness via osmosis.

Sweet face, warm body, and that voice. I ate you up. You were my favorite thing.

Oh oh, aren’t you lovely.

You were a dream born of a nightmare.

Not to hyperbolize, 

But it felt that way.

We got on so good, casually mapping out our lives, strolling past suburban bungalows, porches stretched wide, hugging Victorian-style houses we could not afford.

You and me wielding the registry gun in the Bed Bath and Beyond of life. Kids, garden, ride-on mowers. I want that. I want that. I want all of this. Beep. Beep. Beep. 

You invited me into your life so sweetly and I was elated to bring you in mine. Your idiosyncrasies were slowly revealed to me and I loved you more for them.

I remember laying in my bed, memorizing the contours of your precious surface area when the realization struck me hard and abruptly like an aneurism. 

Our time starts now.

And it’s already going too fast.

Blink.

Veggie dog inhaled in an IKEA parking lot. 

Blink. 

Warm pho reviving our souls, mindless cartoons, your arm wrapped around my calf.

Blink.

A kiss so intimate it felt like passing a secret back and forth. Oxytocin mind melt. 

Blink.

Lying on your cool bed, my lips against your temple, telepathically declaring I love you, I love you, I love you, I love----

Blink.

Sleepy morning in a souped up motel, dazed in a communication breakdown hangover, your body wrapped around mine confirming Yes, yes, yes, I am still yours. 

Too fast. 

You are soul food, medicine, fantasy lover, best case scenario. 

You are dreamboat, moral compass, best friend, big bet.

You are third-chair boy band material (kidding).

You are home, and for now---forever?

You are mine. 

If I go crazy. If I lose my mind. 

You are the rest of my blinks.

Driving, windows down, wind whipping at our faces, cutting through the humidity.

We are sleepy from a day baking in the sun.

You stick out your thumb and I grab it.   

Keep me in the light, John Mayer croons over your Subaru sound system. 

Looking at you. Your face. Our plan. This need. 

Can we stop blinking?

Can you keep me in the light?

Bad Room

Before, I was locked in a room with an angry snake, eager to pounce, my brain thumping a garbled racket, cut with static and dreamt of dousing myself with gasoline 

Kept myself balled up, small and noiseless, fingers circling fragile wrists, comfortable with the space I did not occupy, room for you and them and the snake seething in the corner and the others

Then was sick and itched to do something different but could not—the sadistic routine had woven itself tightly in my brain, code engrained, part girl, part gadget. I whispered: I am a tiny martyr. I am a quiet warrior. Hear my battlecry: I’m sorry.  

I felt my cells dying and I felt each one go and I mourned them

The sickness burned but knocking helped, softly at first, around the perimeter, heavy crack indicating dense solid and hollow thud meant drywall, forgiving

Am I bad, I asked and pressed my ear against the wall, knocked

The snake lashed out, fangs digging into flesh, crushing bone, kept asking. With each bite, a scar formed, hard like a nail until I was covered in it

With an armor of calluses, it could no longer hurt so it became bored and slept 

Feeling around the wall and pressing and knocking until I had memorized the soft parts which formed a picture of nothing but it was also everything and something I had already known but could now confirm

I kicked the the most delicate spot and the light I had not seen in decades poured in. There was nothing glorious outside like I had imagined but the peace was deafening and I became big, expanding in every direction towards the softness like dewdrops on a spiderweb at dawn, shuttling liquid golden light.

Erin's Top 5 Books of 2017

Are you sick of me talking about George Saunders yet?

1. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders


Lincoln in the Bardo was the best book I read this year. This was the easiest call of all.  I couldn't stop thinking about this book for MONTHS after I put it down. I scoured out other Saunders books after reading this, insatiable, looking for something to make me feel similarly nostalgic/melancholic (melanstolgic?) and I couldn't find it, guys. I proceeded to read everything Saunders ever published anyway. What a hilarious dude, but let me assure you--there is nothing out there that is like this book in concept or style.

I am not going to regurgitate the plot here. I already told you about it, probably over a beer with such intense ardor that it may have frightened you. I'm sorry. 

I will tell you that no one handles emotion and landscape and character with the wit and grace of George Saunders. I am in complete awe of the thought process that went into this book and the way each and every soul in the Bardo told their story in a unique way-- and with such heady poignance.

A trillion stars. Lincoln in the Bardo is holy and perfect.

2. Moonglow by Michael Chabon 

Michael Chabon is such a good freaking writer, pulling off this weird hybrid memoir and fictional family history, sprinkled with delightful anecdotes from his heavily-medicated grandfather on his deathbed. Chabon unashamedly states Moonglow's fictional roots and ultimately questions the concept of a factual memoir: How much of a memoir can be said to be true when peoples' memories are notoriously unreliable? Extremely entertaining. Side note, Chabon is also weirdly hot. 

3. Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

Stephanie Danler is like,  30 years old and has the writing chops of someone much, much older. Also, she is really pretty and stylish and makes you want to take a long, hard look at what you've accomplished in your three decades, as a grosser, less-photogenic human being. 

Anyway, this book rocked. It was low-key raunchy, which appealed to me as a GIRL and written in glorious crystal-clear prose, which appealed to me as a PERSON WHO LIKES BOOKS. This book will not win a Pulitzer, but God, was it entertaining. 

4. Crapalacia by Scott McClanahan   

Crapalacia is another pseudo-memoir about suicide, dead miners, an uncle with cerebral palsy who drinks six-packs through a feeding tube, and children being left to scream and writhe in pain because their parents couldn't afford to bring them to the doctor. And yet, I couldn't stop laughing. I laughed at every page. Go figure. Scott McClanahan deserves way more attention. 

5. Homesick For Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh  

I have been following Ottessa Moshfegh since I read Eileen last year and it disturbed the living hell out of me. Moshfegh's writing is raw, visceral and unapologetic, peppered with brazen violence and crazy graphic sex scenes. These stories are grim, expertly depicted snapshots of people and places you'd never want to experience for yourself. If you like to be broken down a bit--like me--give this a go. 

Ok so there you have it. Please read Lincoln in the Bardo ---or the other ones. Or don't. Follow your own bliss. There's so much good stuff out there.

Love you. Stay cute, 

E

P.S. As always, I love recommendations. I think about you every time I read a book you recommend and I love talking to you about it when I'm done. It's such a nice thing. Please recommend me something.

Good. How are you?

I.
I am running partly on paint,
Shushing the malignant buzz that sustains itself in the back of my brain.
I am coating bumps and cracks with goopy, saccharine enamel.
I am sedating madness with dripping slimy gunk that reeks of chemicals.
I am painting a bogus picture of clouds and swing sets and dirt kicked up from screaming kids,
Then covering up again with a fresh coat of muck.

II.
I am running mostly on gears,
These days my flywheels spin madly, left to their own devices,
Equipment clinking moving ratchets up a spring, sprockets and cogs,
Click and whir, propelling through the motions.
My body in formulaic locomotion,
My brain in fucking la-la land.


III.
I am running EXCLUSIVELY on DEALS.
15% off sitewide TODAY ONLY.
Color palettes cute and useless, pretty tchcokes.
Fluffy cashmere promises an easy today, an easier tomorrow.
I am SHOPPING MY SPRING PICKS HERE,
Guided by the sacred wisdom of TODAY's HOTTEST STYLE INFLUENCERS.

IV.
I am running purely on endorphins,
Tweezer plucking sinew and arteries,
The nerves dead and drunk and laughing.
I pull them up and wind them on a spool of cork,
Soaking blood and draining life with every nonchalant turn of the wheel

V.
I smash a ceramic teacup with an aluminum bat, smile, and swallow the shards.

VI.
Good. How are you?

This poem is about NO ONE IN PARTICULAR

My clicking gears seize and stick
A jerk, an ugly stop to brush off a leech
But yours whirr, purring along,
Sideways glance, a shake of the head

How nice, I say. How Nice, FUCK.
How Nice I say in the mirror and look at my teeth. My teeeeeth.
Niceeee. That's fucking beautiful. How nice.

Fingertips drum on cool marble, grounding, grounding.
Hello. Oh yikes. Hello. Grounding.
Let's play nice, Dear.

Am I bad?

You glide and scoop the things you want.
Sure hands break holy capillary
"Mine now," you say and swallow it.
As natural as breathing

In awe, I watch you make requests
The things you need and like
Me? I say: not yet, not me.
Assuredly, not mine.

I'll study you forever.

I loved your sweet little head.
My head, a mess of horrors, zero savvy,
I  mean, LOOK!
Check me out charging headfirst into thirsty bayonets
And then coating the wounds with paint,
thick, slick and soggy
What a fucking--

The thought of purgatory scares me witless

The tub is closer than I thought
And the bathroom rug is soft, it smells like bleach
Brain pumping a sweet soft metallic flow,
I taste it now

FUck. We're ok. FUCK. We are fine. Fuck and thump.

How DARE you thrive while I unravel.

How can you thrive while I unravel?

You were always fine when I unraveled.

Pleasure Chemicals

I am fundamentally fucked up, perpetually premenstrual
Frying myself in bacon fat
Residual, asexual
Fidgeting with the things I've found, suspiciously ineffectual
Festering in my frigid room, a tipping point eventual,
Never getting the feather duster out to brush away the rigid gloom,
Indispensable.

My heart takes orders from other peoples' neurons,
Deceiving,
Pumping liquid love into a face I don't believe in
All valves open and bleeding all over my sleeve and 
those who don't know me are missing something new and blue 
and they will fuel me with nicotine, amphetamine, liquor (it's quicker!)
It's true, but you,
You can fuel me with your words.

I'll sprint a thousand springs, 
Laugh a thousand times on wings,
Craft a thousand-million useless pretty things
I'll spend hours scanning LED boxes
trying to find something new about oxytocin 
As if biology is the sole reason for my rotten mood

I am rolling, forlornly: "JUST FINE."
As sweet as jam and as aimless as jelly
Down a tediously shallow, red white and black, dizzying decline.

Civil War II: The South Avoids Ecological Progress Like the Plague Created and Spread by One of Their Own and HOO BOY AKA "American War"

Here I go again gushing effusively for American War, a book I read over two months ago,  but I SIMPLY MUST. I can't stop thinking about it. Not since The Handmaid's Tale has a dystopian novel screamed at me in such a loud and satisfying way.

I wonder how far along El Akkad was when he realized that the country he was writing about became captive to a tyrant intent on carrying out the policies that caused the very near-future apocalyptic America that shaped his novel. 

American War's  horror lies in its plausibility. There are no aliens attacking and enslaving us. Nothing supernatural or outlandish cause our demise.  This book lets us know that more than anything, we are perfectly capable of ruining ourselves. 

This book is just THE BEST book. MAD KUDOS to my main man Omar El Akkad for this brilliant adaptation of the Second American Civil War.

I give it one trillion "you did it" glitter  stickers. Go read it, my dude.