An ex-friend from high school contacted me, and apparently is doing better than I expected. But she’s married a bearded something in a Harley Davidson t-shirt. She’s gaunt and tanned where she was once cherubic and pale. Her child’s photographs are beautiful, almost identical to the mother’s at that age, but I see the scars of self-inflicted wounds on the wrist in the background. I gave up the worry years ago, but good luck to you, Angie. And be careful.

1/5/1980

I must spend the next week convincing myself that 26 is not that old.

But…but…

Yet another dream: Johnny Knoxville is in charge of a strange, MXC-type game  in a swamp and an old house. He seduces me, seems to like me, then promptly sells me into sex slavery.

Dream becomes fodder for small rant

I dreamt that Doug showed me how, with a mild bleach solution, to turn old electronics (Walkmen, Discmen, Game Boys) from gray to a pallid caucasian fleshtone. (He called it “penis-colored” which sounds nothing like him, but a lot like me.) They ended up looking very much like prostheses, which to Doug and Giahn and a lot of other people, their newer toys are. Giahn pulled out his PSP in the tire store yesterday, but there were TIRES EVERYWHERE to look at, and SQUISHY, ANEMONE-LIKE non-slip floormats to walk across! There’s too much to look at everywhere to be constantly staring at a screen. My puzzlement may be rlated to the fact that I’m internally five, or eighty-five. I have an mp3 player, last year’s Rio Carbon, which I do love, because it works, because it’s gray instead of white, and because the shape brings to mind airplane seatbelt closures. But I never use it in public, partially because I am a small, hypervigilant person, but also because I like ambient noise and don’t want to give up birds, chunks of conversations, or the Doppler airslice of traffic.

Tangentially related: I try my best to avoid Rufus Wainwright (although his name is difficult/fun to say quickly) but I’d forgotten he’s lent his particular brand of mosquito-like nosecaroling to at least one Christmas song. A much-needed visit to a good ENT would end this man’s career.

Potentially disgusting:

This sounds like a playground lie, but I swear that I occaisionally produce rectangular waste matter. With perfectly formed edges. Like a prism. As if my bottompart was a Play Doh extruder.

Disappointment (King Kong semi-spoilers)

If you have even the most rudimentary understanding of physics, human anatomy, or (most of all) of animal behaviour, you may find yourself annoyed at the island portion of King Kong. And the island portion is long. Admittedly, I’m worse than the average person at suspending disbelief, but this was just frustrating. The beginning of the movie is wonderful, though. And the end is padded and silly and way too long, but yeah, that was me crying in a bathroom stall post-credits. Less for Naomi Watts’s character and the Big Fake Ape than for the fact that humans treat other animals horribly. Hurts.

Thursday morning I dreamt I ordered a vibrator, and when it arrived, the packaging said “refurbished from diseased plastic: always use a condom.” Also, I hadn’t paid in full, so the toy company ordered me to cold-call 150 cereal and candy companies to settle my debt.

Last night, I dreamt I was in an ornate vampire movie set in the 19th century. But way better than Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Waking up was disappointing.

If only…

A sadly misleading ad on Rottentomatoes.com:
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Letter B

I’m not at all the John Lennon fan my sister is, but on this anniversary I have been wandering around with this in my head.

EGOISTE!

It seems horribly self-centered to be reminded of myself, or portions of my past, by bits of movies or literature. But it happens, occaisionally. And then I gnash and blush.  With that disclaimer out of the way:

“…She remembered encyclopedically her years of education, pages of print, apparently arbitrary details of their histories. And some trivial incident or phrase from their childhood might at any time fetch up from her mind and flop down in front of her, alive and thrashing. No, but it couldn’t be called “remembering” at all, really, could it? That simply wasn’t what people meant by “remembering.” No act of mind or the psyche was needed for Sharon to reclaim anything, because nothing in her brain ever sifted down out of precedence. The passage of time failed to distance, blur or diminish her experiences. The nacreous layers that formed around the events in one’s history to smooth, distinguish, and beautify them never materialized around Sharon’s; her history skittered here and there in its original sharp grains on a depthless plane that resembled neither calendar nor clock.”

-Deborah Eisenberg, Some Other, Better Otto

It’s worth noting that this character is mentally ill with a severity that dwarfs my brain troubles. But that stabbing sense of the past reaching in when it shouldn’t, of remembering years-old details the other participants forgot an instant later, the embarassment of being forgotten when I still remember; this passage is the only reference I’ve ever seen to any of it, and it fairly thrust me back into the wall when I read it the first time.