Journal excerpt: Memorial Day, 1996, Santa Monica, CA:
"I'll be going along fine, being happy, not thinking about much, when all of a sudden it will leap from nowhere. It's like, 'oh, I'm sad, but I don't know why-- OH YEAH.'
"Had a dream the night before last. My mother made me dinner, turkey meatloaf, and I asked her if she could save some for my father and she said yes, she would. Then I went to an amusement park with D. and it suddenly occurred to me that there was no reason to save meatloaf for him because he's dead. Maybe this dream is a step in the right direction, a type of slow, repairing realization.
"It comes in waves. Most of the time I'm fine, but then it will hit me and I'll feel awful and sick and horribly alone. I still can't fully believe it. And I can't write. No one understands and I hate them all for not trying. Fuck them, fuck them. I'm so alone.
"I think I'm taking this badly."
Check this out... Wil Wheaton on Audioblogger geeking out about his broken iBook and his strategies for a poker tournament in Vegas... It's so boring it's magnificent.
Just makes you wanna get all close-up into frame and shout "TTRRRRAAAAAAAAAIIIIINNNNNNNN!!"
Sometimes he forgets to answer my emails.
Sometimes I go for weeks without talking to her.
Sometimes I have no idea what's going on in her life.
I am dizzy with sadness over the inevitabilities of growing older... and dizzy at the thought of the lines that string between us becoming more and more tenuous.
And sometimes I concentrate so hard on my sea-sickness that I miss everything important.
... that you are reading the blog of an "underappreciated genuis"? Well, the New York Press certainly thinks so... scroll down to find the reference (but stop before you see who wrote it... hee).
I was going to post an old journal entry from seven years ago on my blog today, but I changed my mind. Would you want to read that? Would anyone? I might do it tomorrow. I apologize in advance.
Lime Angelina performed out for the first time this weekend. That's the tentative name of my and Soph's new band. The gig was a little music-geek party at some Manhattan loft. One song. Wrong instrument. It's a start.
I want to entertain you all today but I haven't the spirit. Plus I've stopped eating and I need to conserve my energy. In the meantime, here's a picture I took of a byoodaful budderfly in a Botanical garden in Florida last week.
I accidentally killed it seconds later.
Just kidding.
I was in a jovial mood the other day and decided I would Bake Some Cookies. I googled for the perfect oatmeal cookie recipe, using search strings like "awesome oatmeal cookies" and "best oatmeal cookies ever." But then as I was trying to print my recipe out, my printer decided to hate my guts. So I struggled with it for about a half an hour, screaming like a Wookie and scaring the cat, beating my fists on the table, rending my garments, until finally my printer was like, "god what a loser... fine, here's your damn recipe."
Don't you think some things should be immune to the miseries of technical failure? Like a sweet little innocent oatmeal cookie recipe? I mean baking, come ON! It's up there on the purity scale with clean sheets and new pencils and marshmallows and the V. Mary and the first two seasons of Full House.
But the cookies turned out stupendous, by the way. Ha ha, FUCK YOU Hewlett Packard!!
(Click to make it talk.)
...meaning, it's impossible. You can never find the words, and when you try you are a dizzy fool, you are as dumb as a blind mushroom stumbling around a garden... and even Google can't tell you what you mean, not exactly... so why should you even bother?
But you do. You bother. You bother so much and you won't stop bothering. You are talking to yourself mostly but it's still talk. You won't shut up, and then you DO shut up, but your mind spins even faster on its axis and you have to either go to sleep or drink it away or start talking again... which you always wind up doing anyway.
And then you ask yourself, which is closer to what you meant to say before you started spinning? Which isn't even a real question, because you know it's been gone since the moment you tried to name it.
So. Until you can find the EXACT way of describing what you mean to yourself, you will keep looping around the meaning until you spiral into it. Which can never happen, of course. And you understand this is why you keep talking... because somewhere, pressed with a hot brand into the smooth steel of your body, is the knowledge that you will never, ever get it right.
I'm in Florida again, doing wedding things like HAIR and MAKE-UP and DRESSES and SHOES and I'm like, WAAAAY too much of a bride right now to discuss anything normal/human/interesting so instead I'd like to speak frankly with you because... well let's face it. I like you. And you like me. And you're a consumer. Am I wrong?
Buy my plays. Don't wanna commit to an entire eight pages of reading? Then buy my monologues. Monologues, I say. MONOLOGUES. I won't make any money from your purchases, but you should support the folks who made the books because they are ass-kicky people.
And the next time bro's are hanging out at your crib, you can ply yourself with drinks and casually drop one of my books on the floor and then be like, "oops, I'm a sloppy drunk... But HEY. That girl with the monologue in there? She writes an ass-kicky blog! That's where I got the term from 'ass-kicky' from, actually... and HEY. Do you know she [insert fun fact about Sheila Callaghan]? Dude, man. SWEET."
See, this is what living in Bridalshire will do to you... you think you're the center of the effing universe.
The sequence I am about to share with you is entitled "The Flying Series: Siblings In Motion," circa 1984, in which three children attempt to capture on film their occassional and long-rumoured supernatural abilities. In nightclothes.
Item one: An erudite-looking child, somehow able to mug for the camera yet avoid smashing her skull on the headboard upon landing. (Incidentally, those frames had no lenses. I went through a brief period of wishing my vision was bad.)
Item two: A delighted-yet-cautious child, keeping the ship low and centered. Note the photo of Duran Duran taped to the mirror in the background.
Item three: Speaks for itself.
All photos taken with a 1983 Kodak Disc 4000, known for its inexplicable square lens, its wheel o'negatives, and its stunningly poor quality.
Last night I made the worst fucking hamburgers on the face of the earth.
The fuck was I thinking...
I love this so much, but it also kinda scares the piss outa me.
Please don't leave until you find the secret click.
Excerpted from Brand Trueboy:
"UNDERGROUND is when u spend years toiling in lonely obscurity as u attempt to recompose the way u think and speak after the fateful, tragic, liberating, magical moment in which yr mind got blown and u lost yr language.
"UNDERGROUND is not about the masses or the lack thereof. what makes a scene ferreal is when there's room for everyone but a need for no one. that's the real definition of exclusive.
"UNDERGROUND is a part of america. don't be narcissistic enough to believe that u can somehow exist outside the system. perhaps for a second or two, but then the whole thing unfurls and wraps around u like a flag...
"u get to eat america but not before america eats u first...
"UNDERGROUND is historically where u MEAN things--there in the dark beneath the surface of a world that's lost all meaning. then came those who believed that true meaning was arbitrary, and that the essential state of the world was meaninglessness. and so they made art and writings that expressed this in weird and wacky ways as well as over-the-top boring ways too. then, more recently, have come those who are tired of everything being everything and so they are working to reinstall meaning, like u reinstall an operating system. they want to believe in some sort of nietzchean ubermensch mentality and they look to BRAND TRUEBOY for some of that when really im only here to show them how it doesn't matter a goddamn bit what u think--in the end we all fall apart, dirt mcgirt. asses to asses. dust to dust."
From: kenyatta cheese
To: Sheila Callaghan
Date: Apr 29, 2005 7:59 PM
Subject: I just saw a homeless man....
...taking a crap in the 23rd St C/E train stairwell. He was bent over, ass hanging out with a bunch of newspaper in his hand ready to wipe. Fucking nasty as all hell.
How's your evening?
-kc.
I love my friends. But I especially love them when they leave songs on my voicemail.
It's spring and outside something is humming but you can't quite make it out because it isn't meant for you, it's meant for girls with motors in their hips and long pretty fingers and skin that smells like cold milk. Or boys without shirts who do pull-ups in the subway when the cars are empty. But you sit on your stoop and strain your ears anyway.
A blond girl walks by wearing a green plastic belt, she bought it with her new boyfriend who is four years younger but has a Vespa, she asked him how it looked on her in the store and he said awsome but really he was picturing himself sliding it off that night on her roof with Conor Oberst playing on their ipod headphones, and he hopes she won't get the giggles this time because it makes his heart drop a little.
Another girl walks by with black spikey hair and a bike chain around her neck and you want to get high with her because you like the way she cuffs her jeans, but then you remember you don't smoke anymore and anyway she is probably on her way to Coney Island to buy cooler drugs, but yet she looks back over her shoulder for just a second, and thinking fast you offer her your beer. But not really. And she's gone.
And then you realize maybe the only thing you were ever good at is longing, and so you think of ways you can sell it. On a street corner in Queens. Under the 7 train. Mason jars filled with pale yellow cotton you soaked overnight. Just putting the lids on is progress.
And then you remember it's spring, and spring is a magnifying glass held to the sun and aimed at the center of your body, and the longer you're out in it the bigger the hole it burns in you. Best to stay inside and wait for it to pass.
Football=class.
Lucy=college.
Charlie Brown=me.
That's right. My fall playwriting class got cancelled. Totally heartbreaking.
Hey all you Academic Chairs who read this blog... now's your chance to really shake up your department... HIRE ME. I'll be your rockstar. I'll be *just* impolitic enough for you to have something to argue about in staff meetings, but not enough to be scandalous. I'll give your department street cred, and I won't consort with the other profs as to retain my mystique de l'artiste. And I look younger than most of your students, which will work in your favor in unexpected ways. And heck, you don't even have to pay my health insurance!
All that on an adjunct salary? You can't go wrong!
She cracks me up, okay? She just does.
PS: I'm about to become famous for my trashy bartending exploits (scroll ALLL the way down, last post)... see ya on the other side of rich...
This is the man I am marrying:
It is so rare to find a fella who knows how wear a pair of clothespins with aplomb... but ladies, have faith. They are out there.
