Holly Selph

Tunesday, Part One Year Ago

Aimee Mann- Phoenix.  At this exact time last year, I was dancing with a golden retriever to Elvis' version of  Unchained Melody. I was supposed to be packing, but all I could do was dance around the living room knowing that I'd never see my dog again. The yogurt in the refrigerator was dated to expire after me. I felt sorry for it. It had so much hope. It was purchased by a girl who believed she would outlast it. I remember when he booked my flight home; he was on the phone: "February 12th. Phoenix to Atlanta," he said, and then, "just one way." He looked at me, shook his head, and mouthed, "so sad."  He chose this day because the 13th was a Friday, notoriously unlucky, and because the day after that was Valentine's, notoriously cruel to the unexpectedly single. I remember exactly what I wore February 12th, 2009 while I waited for him to change his mind. In a black dress, an orange coat, and a yellow handbag, I drank a beer on the patio underneath the orange tree and waited for him to walk outside and say something different. I brought my suitcase downstairs and when he looked up from his work, I waited for him to realize this was real and say something different. In the car, I waited for him to turn around and take me back home. On the plane, I pressed my forehead to the window and watched everything get small. I looked at the bottom of Camelback Mountain for a man with his arms outstretched to the sky waving for me to come back down.

Sean Hayes- Fucked Me Right Up.  So, maybe there is a theme. Every night for weeks, months, maybe, friends showed up at my house, often unannounced. They lit candles on my porch. They poured wine. They tossed packs of cigarettes at me and then held a flame to my lips. Indulge, they said, without saying anything. Sometimes, we laughed. Sometimes, mostly just the girls, they cried with me. Sometimes, no one said a word and the only sounds were exhalations, a glass setting down on the table, eyes shifting from one to the other before landing on the ground at a bottle cap, the moon, a shirt sleeve where a thread had unraveled and become the most important thing in the world.

The Mountain Goats- Moon Over Goldsboro.  It is February, 2008. Ryan and I are having breakfast before he flies back to Phoenix from Atlanta. He has been visiting for the weekend, and we are in our last hours.“I don’t speak pancake slang,” he says. I look up at him. He is studying the menu, genuinely perplexed.  Fortunately, I can speak this language, and I translate the meaning of breakfast for him as simply as I can: Breakfast is not the beginning, but the end. Breakfast is when you’ve made up your mind about everything and the only remaining choices in life are between the following species of pancakes: ww pancakes (whole wheat, for those who wish to live long, but enjoy nothing), bb pancakes (blueberry, for those who would rather have any answer, even the wrong one, than allow a question to dangle leaf-like in the air), cc pancakes (chocolate chip, for those who climb mountains for the thing at the top, those who expect cherries, and those who break promises.) In the end, we both choose toast. Sourdough. I eat everything but the crusts. He notices and exclaims, “good job with your toast.” This, I recognized, is bread slang, and means something that can only be translated with a cello.

Clem Snide- Beard of Bees.  Here is the good news: Anything happens. Anything happens with or without you. Anything happens when you’re having a beer with a venture capitalist at a bar. Anything happens on a Tuesday morning when you walk into a tattoo shop on 2nd street and shake hands with Hector. Anything happens when you kiss the boy you loved when you were seventeen. Anything happens when you just sit with three girls and don’t watch football. Anything happens in New Orleans at the same time anything is happening all they way in Paris. Anything happens in the sky, just as anything is happening on the ground. The trick is not trying to make anything the shape of something else. That’s not a man waving down there by the mountain, after all. But it is a nice tree, a palm, and it was having a grand time with the wind.

Annuals- Brother.  My brother is now almost as tall as a skyscraper, but he’s much kinder than one. When we were young, a zig-zagged bathroom adjoined our bedrooms. A secret tunnel! When we would fight, our parents would separate us by sending us to our rooms, and one of us--usually Alex--would quietly sneak through the secret tunnel, knock and sorrowfully apologize for the hair pulling or the name calling or the usurpation of the remote control. Whomever apologized was always forgiven and the hours that followed were a joyful reconciliation during which we happily shared everything. “No, you can be He Man, and I will be Skeletor. I insist!” Once, during such a bout of camaraderie,  Alex burst into my bedroom with a green marker and wrote, AH! on my white door. This, he explained, was our initials and also spelled,  AAAHHHH! A genius discovery! The graffiti was our secret until I got in trouble for something. My father stood in my doorway scolding me and before I could swallow it I burst, “Alex wrote on my door with marker, and it won’t come off!” My father promptly forgot about my infraction, walked down the hallway and Alex, caught quite off-guard, was punished. When I walked through the secret tunnel to apologize, he was unready to accept. This was not the worst part of the betrayal. For the following two years, when caught doing something I ought not, I blurted, “Alex wrote on my wall!” and pointed furiously to the door. It was magic. Our father would instantly forget that I had done anything wrong, and he’d head down the hallway to Alex’s room and once again, lecture him about not drawing on the walls. When Alex would try to explain that he’s already been scolded for this, my father would remind not to interrupt. I’ve confessed this since, but I did try unsuccessfully to use it once more when I dropped out of college. I’ve walked through the secret tunnel and apologized, and have been mercifully forgiven, but let this be my public apology. I’m so sorry, Alex! I will play Monopoly with you, and I won’t cheat this time or make fun of when you do something dumb like let me trick you into trading Baltic for Boardwalk. You can even be the little dog! I will be the thimble.  AH!

Tunesday, Part Thursday

Do you know who I am not going to talk about glowingly? Animal Collective. Their 2009 release, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was given the top spot on every Best of the Year list on every indie music blog I read except for one, who boldly reduced them to number two. I downloaded a few tracks months ago, and I have tried to like it. I tried so hard that I was bordering on neurosis. What is wrong with me? Do I have a soul? Why does it hurt my teeth to listen to this? I can appreciate experimental music. I like The Books and Akron/Family, two bands that some of my friends refuse to classify as music. I realize at least a few of you are shaking your heads while I make the auditory equivalent of standing dumbly at a Jackson Pollack: This isn't art. A five year old could have done it.  Well, so be it. The optical illusion on the cover could be cool if it didn't serve to add to the pretentious message of the entire album: utter inaccessibility that accuses the listener of vapidity. Next time someone wants to subject music to an existential crisis, be innovative. Spare us. Say it with silence.

Music that will not hurt your teeth:

1. Fun.- All the Pretty Girls.  A few months ago, I was sitting at a bar in Atlanta with my friend, Brittany. At the time, she was seeing a guy who was running sound for Fun.  They were playing at The Drunken Unicorn and he suggested we go to the show, but we were camped out with Bloody Marys and declined. I regret this decision almost as much as I regret the time I ate a lemon Starburst while hanging upside down. This song recently won an Independent Music Award for best pop/rock song. If that weren't cool enough, one of the judges was Tom Waits. Lots of instruments. Lots of harmony. More fun than a noseful of candy. 

2. Midlake- Bandits.  Midlake  just released a new album, The Courage of Others, this year. After reading reviews that said their previous release was their masterpiece, I bought the whole thing. It's gorgeous. I am so in love with this band, I want to write them letters with a quill feather by candlelight. I want to bake them cakes that taste like Jethro Tull. I want to pull up a log around whatever fire they've built in the woods and pass around a bottle of whiskey and name the shapes in the smoke. Pieces of this song are symphonic, then layered harmonies reminiscent of Crosby, Stills, and Nash build into a crescendo replaced by an electric guitar solo, and then back to one lone voice, a flute, and a story. I want to go weave something now.

3. The Magnetic Fields- You Must Be Out of Your Mind.  Stephin Merritt is one of my favorite songwriters. None of his songs sound alike, but once you get the hang of The Magnetic Fields, you'll know one when you hear one. I'm partial to the three volume album 69 Love Songs about which Merritt has said, "69 Love Songs is not remotely an album about love. It's an album about love songs, which are very far away from anything to do with love." This song is from their latest album, Realism, released last month. This song is jangly. You'll be able to sing along during your second listen. That's not a bad thing. If you're unfamiliar with this band, and decide to venture into their catalog, be forewarned. You are going to think WTF a few times, in letter form. You will involuntarily clap your hands, grin, and think, “what the fuck?” in unabbreviated form. I dare you to close the curtains, put on, "For We Are the Kings of the Boudoir" and not do a Medieval dance. Not that I did.

Sufjan Stevens- Chicago.  Paste Magazine  named the album Illinois the best album of the decade. I am so proud of them for this. I have nothing against U2 or Radiohead, but seriously, lie down, Rolling Stone, and roll over. I picked this song because it is quintessential Sufjan, but this album is so good, he put out a whole other album of the outtakes from this album, and it is just as pleasing. Included are three other versions of this song: the acoustic version, the adult easy listening contemporary version, and multiple personality disorder version. There is a song on Illinois called, “They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!" Yes, I had to copy and paste that. 

Deer Tick- Smith Hill.  You’re in a small, unfamiliar town in Pennsylvania, just passing through, but not sure where you are going to end up. After hours on the road, you book a room at a motel with a neon vacancy sign. Next door is the only bar in town. Outside are motorcycles and trucks with American flags peeling from the bumpers. You walk in, sit in a booth alone. Bearded locals are drinking domestic draught with cherry pie at the bar. A yellow-skinned chain-smoking man is playing pool with a woman who has a faded tattoo on her calf. You stare out the window. Your beer arrives in a mug. This song comes on, and in unison, the bar patrons begin to sway back and forth, knocking their glasses together. The sorrow of it all becomes celebration. Everyone sings along. It is an anthem. When it’s over, you look away from the window. No one has moved, and you wonder if you were swaying back and forth, sloshing beer to your left and right, cheersing the stale air, and even if you were, did anyone notice?

Deer Tick- Friday XIII.  Same band, only in this song the singer conjures Johnny Cash, if Johnny Cash drank a shot of Kevn Kinney on the rocks, and by rocks, I mean actual gravel. Liz Isenberg sings June to his Johnny. 

P.S. I know it’s not Tuesday.

Tunesday

I grew up in a home where I was often rudely awoken by repetitive scales played on a grand piano. Once her hands were warmed up and I was storming up the stairs, my mother would have moved on to Chopin. I would know my parents were going to the symphony when the hallway smelled of perfume. While my mother finished dressing, my father would play Rachmaninoff. This was the sound of playful impatience. I learned how to fall asleep even when the windows were buzzing from my brother practicing  drums. Once we were teenagers, there was a constant flow of boys in shaggy hair and flannel shirts marching up and down the stairs carrying amps and guitars. They’d play Nirvana for hours, stopping only to smoke cigarettes. Sometimes neighbors who lived a quarter of a mile down the street would say to my parents, “Alex is really getting good!” One summer, an unmarked police car staked out the house for weeks. There was so much constant coming and going of suspicious looking teenaged boys and pretty girls, I think neighbors thought we were running a drug ring. In a way, we were. Down in the cave of the basement, under fluorescent lights, music was growing up the walls.

Since I am the black note in my family, I spend an immoderate amount of time hunting for perfect songs. I read music blogs. I subscribe to several podcasts that send me free mp3s daily. I’m almost ready for my own radio station. I can’t play music, but if you could hear what I compose in my head, you’d want to take that Grammy away from Taylor Swift and hand it to me. Thus, I’ve decided to share my musical findings with you. Every Tuesday, I will offer you a small, well-groomed list of songs. Also, is an iTunes media player from which you can listen to a clip and purchase the songs I’ve jammed about.

Without further ado, here is your first communion:

Beach House- Zebra.  Once I lived inside a soda bottle. The glass was thick and vaguely green. Shapes in the world were either very small or very large. Sometimes I would see eyes the size of moons peer inside, but no one let me out. One day, someone turned the bottle upside down and I tumbled out, a little sticky, but otherwise unharmed. I didn’t fall in love with him at first, but then he pointed to a skyscraper and said, “one day we will dance up at the very top and we won’t be afraid.” He always wore green jeans until he gave them to me, and said, “always remember me.” I do. We never danced on top of the skyscraper, but if we did, it would be to this song. Him in green jeans, me in soda pop.

 Elvis Perkins in Dearland- 123 Goodbye.  I saw this band hours after I had landed in New Orleans. Elvis Perkins is the son of Anthony Perkins. His mother was killed in one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11th. He opened his show by saying, “let’s get this one over with” and then he played this song. He keeps trying to say goodbye. Ready? 1, 2, 3...I’m going to really do it this time. Eventually, he does. Eventually, we all do. It isn’t easy, is it. 

The Low Anthem- Charlie Darwin. This album, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, is the product of 23 instruments, many of which you’ve never heard,  passed between three people. One of them is a NASA technician and classical composer, another is a folk musician and painter, and the other is a Jazz bassist and baseball scholar. Intrigued? Buy the whole album. Right now. Then, go to NPR and watch them play live. During “This God Damn House” one of them puts down a horn, dials one cell phone from another, whistles and moves them closer and further apart to create reverb that somehow sounds completely organic and entirely otherworldy. Genius.

The Long Winters- The Commander Thinks Aloud. When the Challenger exploded, I was in third grade. I had just done a report on Christa McAuliffe. She was my hero. The television my teacher had rolled into the room was malfunctioning. She was pressing the buttons and checking the plugs when the principle came in and took her into the hallway. When she came back, she was crying. By the time they brought in a working televison, the space shuttle was reduced to smoke. This song is about the Challenger disaster. Listen to it in the car, driving fast, windows down, and loud.

5. Pearl Jam- The End.  I almost waited a few weeks to add this. If I had, you would know enough of my musical sensibility to be surprised that I’d include a Pearl Jam song. I loved them when I was sixteen. Ten had just come out, and they had the two o’clock slot at Lollapalooza. During Black, Eddie Vedder  disappeared from the stage. Someone near me pointed to the sound wall at the back of the lawn. There was Eddie, standing on top, thousands of people away from the stage. He stretched his arms out, and as the crowd gathered, fell backwards into their arms. I got an elbow. He floated on top of a sea of people and then was lifted back on stage where he finished the song. That was the most rock and roll moment of my life, the trust it took for him to fall like that, to be carried by strangers who could have taken him anywhere. It was performance art. I was sixteen. Everything had meaning. But, then I fell off the sound wall.  A few of my friends are still die hard Pearl Jam fans and have urged me to listen to Backspacer. Yesterday, I heard this song for the first time. It didn’t take me back to my adolescence. Pearl Jam is relevant now. I should have known, Eddie, to trust you with my ears like you trusted me with your elbow in the summer of ‘93. 

If you have a suggestion of something I should include in Tunesdays to come, feel free to email me at love@hollyselph.com . 

How To Play the Saxophone

Recently, I had a saxophone hanging from my neck. I realize this sounds as though I was soaping up in the shower one morning, looked down, and discovered I’d sprouted a brass wind instrument overnight, but this is how I recall it, sans soap and water. I wasn't sure what I was expected to do with it. It was too heavy to wear as a necklace, and couldn’t possibly qualify as a musical instrument if I'm the one blowing into it.

I had a Real Live Musician™ instructing me, so I did as told as best as I could.  I put my fingers on the "pretty ivory colored things"(I'm five in musician years), wet the reed with my lips, and blew. This resulted in a sound usually heard when whales mate, only not quite as sexy. 

I know enough guitar chords to play Bob Dylan songs. On top of that I know two others. I can read music, given the time to point to a note and mouth, "Every Good Boy Does Fine." When I was six, I gave a violin performance at the mall. And last but not least, I share 50% of my DNA with a drummer. I should be able to rock the sax. Right?

Apparently, it's a little more complicated than that. One must properly wet the reed with her tongue, pull her lips around her teeth and apply just the right amount of pressure before she begins to blow. Simultaneously, her fingers must press the right buttons at the right time. The experience  served mostly to make me question my abilities in other areas, but I figured I must have learned something. Those who can't do, teach, yes?

This is a lesson in playing the sax, no musical ability required:

1. Make your lips the shape of kissing something dangerous: a palm tree, an octopus, someone you can never have.

2. Wrap them around the mouthpiece as if keeping something fragile safe in the cave of your mouth: a butterfly, a secret, someone you love enough to have, but no longer want.

3.  Embouchure: The most difficult part is in believing that air has pitch without the application of your vocal cords. Think of the last time you actually made a wish over a cake filled with a number of candles. Think of the wish has having tone. Think of the last time you blew all the fur from a dandelion. It's lower, that note, than a wish. Now think of making fog on a window. This note is almost soprano, but not as much as, say, the air of relief. 

4.  Force: Don't just exhale. Exhale with faith that you no longer need your arms. They are now their own entities, annelid, and can function independent of you. Let go of the handlebars or the reigns or the other things you've lead them to believe are necessary to the survival of your balance. On the contrary, do not blow as you would into a balloon. Attempting to manipulate the shape of a saxophone is an insult. The relationship should be symbiotic. Don’t give up your shape, either.

5.  The remaining instructions are technicalities like, "put your fingers on the pretty-colored ivory things." I know nothing beyond this point except that it must involve naming the lines and interpreting the spaces between them, that sharps and flats are likely involved and this complicates rumored truths like Every Good Boy Does Fine.

6. This has been a lesson in making sound out of air, something out of nothing. If you expected to actually be able to play music, I apologize for misleading you. However, if you are anything like me, you have been wondering what to do should you ever encounter a saxophone in the middle of the road. This is your first chord:

Greet it like a stranger who might one day love you, like a lover you will walk away from once you've become, from yourself, estranged, like a friend you keep by never telling him who you really are. 

A Blip in the Universe, A Tweet in Time

 Photo by Rikki Osborne, used with permission.

I don’t Twitter. In fact, I so don’t Twitter that I just used Twitter as a verb instead of the more proper, “tweet.” I tried it twice, and I do have it set up so that my blog posts are automatically sent out via Twitter. I don’t, however, announce to my followers that I’m blow drying (blowing dry?) my hair or that I saw an ant carry off a crumb from my scone at Starbucks. I do not eat scones, either.

I do read the news, and I just learned that  www.blippy.com is the new Twitter. There, you can plug in your credit card information and each time you use it make a purchase, Blippy will tell all your furthest friends and closest strangers what you bought, where, and how much you paid.  

I already don’t care when even my most favorite people are drunk, tired, wearing a red bra, or frustrated with an Excel spreadsheet at work. Call me when you fall in love, you fall down the stairs, or you’re falling to pieces. Let’s keep it interesting. Not only do I not want to know what everyone else is buying, I don’t want you to know what I just bought. I recently purchased Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” on iTunes. I will offer this information willingly now, but if I were about to have it automatically broadcast to the Internet, I’d probably rethink my choice and buy something cooler, like an indie album by a band that doesn’t even exist yet. The act of observation changes the behavior of that which is being observed.

On the other hand, my friend, Rikki, is as much art as she is artist. If she updates her Facebook status, she doesn’t just tell you she’s eating French onion soup. She will tell you it tastes like lust feels. That’s information I need. If you just ordered lust for lunch, by all means, Tweet! And then pass the spoon. If she signed up for Blippy, her cataloged purchases would be things like superstition, the shadows of strangers, property on the moon, dark chocolate, and bourbon. Rikki can update her moments as they occur as far as I’m concerned. The other day, she sent a photo to my cell phone of a hand-painted sign on the side of the road that said, “Everything Will Be OK.” Again, this is information I need, because I wonder sometimes.

Instant information is good. I like instant. I'm impatient. I just reheated mashed potatoes in the microwave. It took one minute and thirty seconds. In other words, forever. With that much down time, I was able to respond to an email I had neglected for ten minutes. Because of the delay, Brittany sent a text to my phone from her Gmail account that said, “stop ignoring my email. beech.” Her reply to my reply reminded me that she’d be calling at 4:34 and that I’d better answer. That’s twenty minutes from present time. Some people might want you to know about all that will occur in those twenty minutes, but I’d be more inclined to savor my privacy and not release this information: 

Holly just poured a can of Sprite into a glass.

Holly doesn’t like ice in her Sprite because it waters down the carbonation.

Holly likes how carbonated drinks dance on her tongue.

Holly is planning on having three friends over for wine tonight.

Holly is listening to The Mountain Goats on her iPod.

Holly put a lot of black pepper on her mashed potatoes.

Holly is now full.

Holly falls in love, falls down, and falls to pieces several times a day.

Holly won't tell you everything, but will tell you at least that she actually does need to dry her hair before Brittany calls, that there’s an incomparable honesty that speaking of herself in the third person allows, and that for every time she does decide to announce where she is, what she is doing and with whom, how many dollars she spent and where, there are a thousand unanswered whys @TheUniverse RTworldpopulation  #everythingwillbeok? 

Dear Holly, I Never Existed. Your Friend, Fiction

My relationship with the Internet began around the same time I entered college. I was eighteen. I had a dial-up modem and AOL. I was a freshman studying English literature and creative writing and I was obsessed with my new ability to talk to strangers online. Equipped with a screen name and profile, I entered chat rooms, often with my astronomy classmate and fellow budding writer, Joie, and we'd entertain ourselves endlessly with answering age/sex/location instant messages. Chris Hanson wasn't yet compelling us to beware of who was on the other end of the type.

 

Then, I met Pammy. She was an Australian girl, about my age, living in Delaware as an au pair to two little girls. For a few years, we emailed pages to each other about our lives. She was a strong Christian who was struggling with her sexuality, as she had only had relationships with women. I was in a volatile relationship with a man for whom I'd lost most of my friends. We both had secrets we could only tell each other. In real life, we were required to keep up appearances. Her emails were detailed, almost Austenian. We maintained this friendship long enough that I saw her life unfold from lesbian girl struggling with her religious beliefs to a woman who eventually fell in love with the father of her host family after the mother died unexpectedly. Meanwhile, I left my boyfriend of five years and eventually became engaged to another. 

 

Yesterday, I was overcome with a need to paint. I found my brushes, easel, and canvases and searched through unpacked boxes for my acrylics. Instead, I found a box of old essays and papers from college. Inside was a file folder a few inches thick of Pammy's emails. I spent two hours rereading them. The last one was dated June, 2000, just before she was to marry a man 23 years her senior and become stepmother to the two girls she had been hired to help raise five years before. She explains that I might not hear from her for quite some time and ended with, "I am your friend and for the last time writing to you as the unmarried maiden named Miss Pamela N------." I never heard from her again. 

 

Naturally, ten years later and with the power of high speed wireless Internet access and Google, I searched for her. Did she end up marrying this man? What did the conservative townspeople in Lewes, DE think? Does she still speak to her former lover and friend, Vicki? Could she forsake her sexual orientation for a man she seemed to truly love? I needed the sequel. And, that's what I got.

 

"Pammy" never existed. She is a character in a novel I read as it was being written by a man whose "fiction draws on 18th-century models but tends to involve modern, astute characters, fanciful settings and surreal social conditions." (From his website, which I am not linking.)

 

Brilliant technique, huh? Find a member of your target audience and offer her pieces of a novel as if the character is real. He tossed in a few extras, commenting on the state of my life, relating to the struggles of taking on an overwhelming course load , often apologizing for being "too sermony" as Pammy and I had differing religious perspectives. I was always attempting to assuage her Christian guilt for her same-sex relationships, a fruitless pursuit.  After all, I was talking to an 18th century model living in modern social conditions.

 

I feel something between honored and victimized. I cared about this girl, which means that his writing was successful, but also that I spent a substantial amount of my young adulthood offering the energy of friendship when really I was just a focus group. 

 

I sent an email to the author. I don't expect that he will reply, though my tone was not admonishing. Actually, I hope for his success just like I hoped for hers. If someone eventually publishes Pammy's story, then she gets to exist after all. I'll be her silent, clandestine friend who lived on the other side of the screen, often in the middle of the night with a blanket around my shoulders, illuminated only by the light of the monitor, just as much a ghost as she was.

In These Economic Times, We Don't Need More Made-up Words: A Stimulus Package for Tweens

My friend, Brittany, and I talk too much. I don't mean we talk too much in general, although some people would argue differently. We talk too much to each other. If we plan to meet somewhere for conversation and a cocktail, we talk on the phone from point A to point B until we see each other, wave, say good bye and then greet each other anew. Last night, I felt like I'd missed an entire lifetime because I hadn't yet heard about her regular dental checkup (no cavities, but the wisdom teeth are coming out.) She leaves work at 4:30, and if I don't get a call by 4:34, a sense of unease sets in. The suspense of how many times she blinked and what she ordered for lunch is palpable. If she decides to head over to my place after work, she says, "take a shower and put on some clothes, I'm coming over." "Wait, how do you know I haven't showered?" I might ask. Silence. If I had showered, I would certainly have notified her of the event.

Lately, we've had an ongoing conversation about altered words people use when the original would generally suffice. For example, ridonkulous, which I just learned is actually spelled redonkulous. This irks me even more. I don't know where the donk came from or why it might imply that a thing is even more absurd than if merely dic, but I am ready to establish a petition to outlaw it even at the expense of freedom of speech, a right for which my regard is as high as, say, freedom to breathe. If you say redonkulous, be warned that I will make the following assumptions about you: 

1. You drink too much beer.

2. Not only do you drink too much beer, when you drink you still laugh at the Budweiser frogs and imitate them until something even better comes along (see below) 

3. You raised hell when news broke that Creed got back together because their tour is going to be "off the chain."

4.  After you receive a call on your Sidekick, the first question you ask your bro is, "where you at?" This is followed by ignoring the caller to engage the people you're entertaining with another round of, "Bud...Weis...Er" in order to exhibit how much fun you are having at the location where you are currently at.

5. No matter where you are, there are always “so many hot girls there, it's redonkulous”, even if it's just your roommate's girlfriend and her cousin from a place so remote that it can only be identified by county.

Next, Brittany and I discussed the use of "sexpert." This is slightly less annoying than redonkulous and has a different set of connotations. I realize that if one needs to refer to Dr. Drew, Dr. Ruth, or Susie Bright, it is cumbersome to say, "sex expert." The tongue is a lazy muscle that has priorities higher than speech, and sexologist sounds too much like someone went to college for a redonkulous amount of time. Sexpert is used so that people like Anderson Cooper (I'msorryIloveyou) and Larry King can feel hip. "Next on our show, we will be taking phone calls live with sexpert and former porn star, Annie Sprinkle!"

 Poof! Larry doesn't have a combover anymore.

The next one--and I blame Brody Jenner for this, although I think Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are its founding fathers--is bromance. Bromance is what occurs when heterosexual men who require a generous amount of product to maintain the vertical direction of their hair, share a camaraderie formerly known as friendship. If we were dudes, Brittany and I would be engaging in bromance. Instead, we're friends who don't need to defend our love with the use of slang that says, "we might bump chests and high five a lot, but we're not gay, we swear." 

This list could go on, but there are so many words underscored in red that this document is beginning to look like a crime scene, as if I murdered both Merriam and Webster. 

I try to be a tolerant friend. If you ate too much garlic and you want to talk closely to me, that's ok. We're cool. I got an app for that. If those jeans make you look like someone tattooed pockets on your ass, I'll be a pal and tell you that they must've shrunk in the wash. Just don't ask me to go so far as to say you look bootylicious. (Frighteningly, bootylicious is left unmarked by spell check. I'm starting to buy this 2012 stuff.) Should you have trouble discerning when to use lie or lay, I won’t correct you. I still don’t know which one it is I am doing under the sun in my tankini. 

Maybe it's not you. Maybe it's me. I just recall simpler times, when my only problems were yadda, yadda, yadda. If I am so uptight that I would consider unfriending someone over words that are unnecessary and not clever enough to delight me, then perhaps I need to loosen my tie a little, get with it, and chillax. 

For Andy, Who Would Have Known How to Ship This to His Forwarding Address

 

A few days ago I was lying awake in bed. It was about four in the morning. I was thinking of a friend and former coworker who was diagnosed with mesothelioma two years ago and given only months to live. Months passed, and even though the cancer was unresponsive to surgery and treatment, he kept living. In fact, the only thing he listed in his interest section on a popular social networking site was “living.” Most of us want more: to travel, to get rich, to eat exotic food, to write the next great American novel. Andy just wanted to live. For a thirty-three year old man, this doesn’t seem too much to ask.

Today I remembered that Andy kept me awake the other night, and so I went looking for him. He had started an online comic strip about living with terminal cancer and it was there that I learned that nine days ago, Andy died. Over a year has passed since I’ve had contact with him, and I missed him by nine days. 

Last time we spoke, I suggested we get together and do something fun. His energy was inconsistent, but he wanted to play video games, order pizza, you know, before he died.   So, I told him, “yes, let’s do that.” And then, my life went on. I moved to a bigger apartment. My husband and I separated. I went on dates. I fell in love. I moved to Arizona. I moved back to Georgia. I played video games, and ordered pizza, but I didn’t call Andy. Living was the last thing on my agenda. After all, as far as I’m concerned, it’s guaranteed. 

While I am often dissatisfied with this promise called life, I cling to it. It’s all I know. I know only these bones, the lines on my palms, the secret places I have freckles, that the knuckle on my right middle finger is larger than its counterpart on the left because I fractured it catching a football when I was thirteen. I know that my knees make a perfect table for my chin, and that my left wrist will need to be popped back into place every morning. I can predict how my breasts will change size throughout the month. I know how I taste and smell, which parts of me are lovely and which are asymmetrical.  I am all I know for sure, and I’m not quite even certain of that. I realize now with a fullness I can only compare to fruit or the sea, that I will die too. Andy certainly was on to something. The only interest we all should adopt is living.

I don’t know if Andy thought of me over the last year. I did think of him, but--and I just looked to be sure-- Andy was the sixth person to subscribe to this blog. When I post this, an email will be sent to him. Even though he will never receive it, I say these words for him:

Andy, you laughed a lot. Your laugh was so loud that it carried through the warehouse and into the office and when you laughed, we all would giggle in the boxes of our cubicles. Nothing, it seemed, could possibly be more funny than the very sound of you thinking something was funny.  l had to tell Michael today that you died and he says you have his Richard Pryor box set and he hopes it brought you joy. I told Michael that I bet you laughed that crazy laugh all the way through.  I bet your laugh is what kept you alive so long. 

I want to ask you things like, “what is it like to die? Does it hurt? Were you scared? Is the weather nice? Will I need an umbrella? Can I bring my own pillow?” But what I wish more is that I could have told you in life that you were good, Andy. I remember once you found out someone at work needed help with something...a medical bill for his child, I think. I don’t remember who or exactly what, but I do remember that you just went ahead and gave your whole paycheck. When word spread that you had been so extraordinarily generous, you were embarrassed and shrugged and said, “you can’t take it with you.” You didn’t know then that you would be leaving so soon.

Andy, you were right. You can’t take it with you. But you can leave it behind. You will be remembered for all that you gave, and didn’t take. You, in your millions of Nine Inch Nails t-shirts, with that crazy laugh and your moon-shaped heart, took care of us all.  

The Ghost of Halloween Past

After I wrote the last post, I went on an archeological dig in my parents’ basement. There is a cardboard pyramid in the corner of things that I refuse to throw away, but never keep with me. When I emerged from the cave, I had four boxes of old letters, photographs, concert tickets, a giant stuffed chicken from FAO Schwartz. I even found small scraps of paper on which I had taken notes from Carmen San Diego, and my report card proving that I had found her, and earned my A.  I carried them upstairs. As I unearthed old clothes, I had adorned myself. I went down barefoot, in jeans and a tank top and emerged in tights, striped socks, Doc Martens, a Pearl Jam t-shirt with a plaid flannel over it. In the mirror, the ghost of 1993 stared back at me.

Inside one of the boxes was one of the mixtapes that my best friend and I made that summer. I also found a Walkman that still worked. So, I listened to the warbled tape, purchased each song on it, and made a playlist on iTunes. During “Rhinoceros”, I found the box of letters from some of the kids who were locked up with me in one of those mental institutions that were popular in the 90s. None of us was crazy, at least not certifiably, but we’d be caught running away from home, or with a bong hidden under the bed, come home drunk from a party, or failed trigonometry. Most of us were living the motto, “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” the 90s incarnation of “Parents,They Just Don’t Understand.” In 1993, there weren’t just parents to rage against. There was a machine.

Through the miracle of social networking sites, I found the boy on the other side of the wall. So, I knocked. He wrote back within two minutes: a phone number with a Seattle area code and the words, “call me.” 

“I try not to remember,” he said, “so, I don’t.”

Still, he has the necklace I gave him hanging from his guitar. I still have the notes exchanged under the door when I was sleeping on a mattress in the lobby. I was about a hundred pounds then, pale white with black hair, a slip of a girl, but they thought I might find a way to bust through four sets of bolted doors and jump over a brick wall three times my height. I took this as a compliment.

“I remember Jeff,” I said on the phone. He did too. “I don’t think he’s around anymore,” I said. He’s on the other side of the wall.

I was on the mattress under the clock by the staff desk when Jeff came in. His ankles and wrists were shackled. When they unlocked him, he ran up and down the hallway like a caged animal, roaring as he hit the wall and turned to run the other way. He was six feet tall, weighed 110 pounds, and had a crack addiction. He was malnourished and given cans of Ensure several times a day, and wouldn't acknowledge anyone. After a few days, his blue eyes had soul in them, and he started to speak.

He might well be the kindest person I’ve ever met. He was gentle, curious, childlike. He had a fifth grade education. His mother was an addict herself. No one taught him how to be good, he just knew. He taught me the proper pronunciation of “ain’t” and how to make moonshine from apples, in case I was ever in prison and needed a drink. He taught me that some drugs don’t grow from seeds, but are made in bathtubs. When he managed to smuggle in a cigarette taped to his dick, he offered it to me, first. I insisted he enjoy it and let him in on the secret pack of matches that we kept taped under the table in the common room. He taught me, without ever complaining once, that life is brutally unfair, that we are not all given the same opportunities, the same chance, or even a choice. He wanted more than anything to learn, to get out of his meth-infested suburb, but there was never much hope. When I told him that I loved him, he dropped his head in his hands and said through tears that it was the first time in his sixteen year old life that anyone had ever said those words to him. One of the letters I found was written the day before he was released. “I really, really love you,” it says, “so love me too, please.” 

I had promised to save him. The last time I heard his voice, he was calling from a pay phone. He was about to smoke crack for the first time in three months, and I pleaded with him not to. “I’m in a lot of trouble,” he told me, “I can’t tell you what I done or else you may not love me no more.” For weeks, I left messages with his mother, and then his number was disconnected. I never heard from him again. 

I remember one of the counselors pulling me aside one day and saying, “Holly, you’re different. You don’t belong here, and you know it. I lose sleep every night because I know most of these kids are not going to make it. There is hope for you. Do what you have to do, get out of here, and never come back.”

I did belong there. There was hope for all of us. And yesterday, I climbed inside cardboard boxes, and I went back.

On Halloween in 1993, it snowed in Atlanta, Georgia. We could see it falling from the window in the courtyard and begged to be let outside. For five minutes, under careful watch, we were allowed to feel the snow fall on us. This was, for fifteen teenagers who had been removed from the world, a miracle. Snow was as rare as freedom, and not nearly as precious. 

They brought us inside, gave us fingerpaints, and told us we could paint the windows to decorate for our Halloween party. An anorexic painted a skeleton. The girl who sang hymns every night alone in her room carefully marked crosses on tombstones. She had buried something her religion disallowed. Shannon, the youngest of us, painted cobwebs. Her mother would allow her release under the condition that she admit she was lying about what her stepfather did. Jeff didn’t paint a thing. He just sat back in a chair, watching us with a big old grin on his face. We painted ghosts. Our bodies were trapped, but we were free.

By the next morning, the windows had been washed. The oak tree surrounded by the brick wall barely offered the light of the sun, and under it, on the concrete, remained a veil of white, the breath of something long dead and resurrected, the thin skin of ghost. Hope.

How To Have a Rose Petal Parade (and How Not To Get Caught)

My roommate was a runaway kleptomaniac. She had boyish cherry-cola hair, but her lips were dangerously full. The juxtaposition was a clear indication that she had been given reason to renounce femininity and arm herself with combat boots and flame-spiked hair. 

We couldn’t have been more different. She was under investigation as an accomplice in armed robbery with her boyfriend, who was a member of the Bloods. My crime was reading too much Sexton, Plath, and Roethke ("What's madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance?") while drinking vodka straight from the bottle. She dropped out of her alternative high school. I wore pleated skirts and never skipped a class at mine. Naturally, we requested to share a room. Different species, we were fascinated with each other.

We went to “school” the first few hours of the morning. For history class, I played Where in the World is Carmen San Diego. When I caught Carmen, red-handed, in a V.I.L.E. hide-out in Istanbul, I received an A. Following, we had a series of therapies. In art therapy, Nicole and I made each other bracelets with alphabet beads that spelled each other’s names. In music therapy, she choose, “Daughter” by Pearl Jam. I played “Sober” by Tool because I thought it might get me out faster.  In between these group therapy sessions, we were required to stay in our rooms and only come out if there was an emergency, which occurred at least once an hour on any given day.  

We found ways to entertain ourselves. We drew pictures of flowers and then covered them in black. She taught me gang symbols. I read her the eleven page love letter my boyfriend had written entirely in a cryptic code on purple notebook paper. We knocked on the wall of the adjoining room where the boy we both had a crush on stayed with a crack-addict whose mother delivered joints through the window screen. We rolled potpourri in kleenex and pretended they were cigarettes. Once, we tried to light them with a hair dryer. 

One day, after two hours of drawing faces on our chins and hanging upside down from our beds, one of the nurses knocked on our door. Nicole’s gang boyfriend had sent a dozen red roses. The nurse said we were not allowed to have the vase in the room. It was glass, a potential weapon, banned along with shoelaces, razors, and hairspray. Even our mirror was a dull, unbreakable metal that did not serve well to apply mascara or to check for spinach caught between our teeth. Fortunately, they didn't feed us vegetables.

"You can leave the roses in the vase and keep them in the atrium for everyone to enjoy, or you can have the roses without the vase in your room," the nurse said, with an obvious preference.

“Bring them,” Nicole ordered. When the door closed, she looked at over at me, “we are having a parade.”

Nurse Dee returned, a fistful of long-stemmed roses dripped from her hand. Methodically, Nicole and I pulled each petal until we had a pile on her desk. We traced our lips with black eyeliner and filled them with her purple lipstick. We drew circles of pink on our cheeks, teased our hair, and dressed in mismatched tye dye, pajama bottoms, different colored Doc Martens on each foot. Nicole put Smashing Pumpkins on her Walkman and cranked the volume, handed me one of the ear phones.

“Ready?” she said, “Go!”

We threw rose petals in the air with one hand while we held the music to our ears with the other, and danced under them as they fell on our heads. We threw them at each other and laughed hysterically. We were both spectators and participants in this gaudy celebration, this sad charade. When all the petals were on the ground, we picked them up, brought them back to life.

We didn’t hear the warning knock.  Dee was suddenly there, in our room, her hands on her hips, her gray hair pulled back in a bun. Dee disapproved of everything: my giant stuffed chicken from FAO Schwartz, my pigtails, my constant requests for more paper and pens with at least a 0.70mm point. Most of all, laughter. She had been on a mission to separate us. It had been observed that we were forming a friendship, a bond considered “inappropriate” in a facility where hours a day were spent confessing our deepest secrets to strangers. Also, we once booby-trapped our room with dental floss and coated the door knob with the alcohol-free shampoo they provided. At about two in the morning, we caught her like two black widows with a helpless fly.  She appreciated our ingenuity about as much as we appreciated her habit of aiming a flashlight at our sleeping faces several times a night.

And now, she had caught us. We were standing in a bland room, fuzzy music barely escaping from the ear phones dangling from our hands, dead flowers in pieces on the ground. We were clowns who had been abandoned by their circus, patients painted as girls, caught red handed in a mental institution, acting crazy.