Listen very carefully because I'm only going to say this once...
you know how sometimes when you read a blog and the voice sounds just like the voice that's in your head with the crazy rambling and embarrassing stories and lack of punctuation and all? and it cracks your shit up?

This one is that voice for me.

I read it every day but sometimes it scares me because I think "how the f*ck did she find out?" and then I realize she's talking about her and not me and that makes me feel better for about a minute. then I have to go smoke a bunch of cigarettes because I get worried about that time I dropped acid and imagined that my brain separated from my body and created another self that ran away and if that really happened what if it is me?

Y'all just better recognize...
On Saturday morning, Erin and I rode our bikes to opening day of the Charleston Farmer's Market at Marion Square. I imagined feeling all European on the way home with a loaf of bread and a bunch of flowers in my bike basket, but what ended up in my basket was a small watermelon (!) and a wild mushroom quiche. As I screamed to (at) Erin several times on the way home, "my quiches is in pieces!"

We had to make a pit stop at the office before we biked home. While we were locking our bikes up out front, a homeless man passed by and advised us both to "recognize." I assured him that he had nothing to worry about, as we were doing some serious recognizing. Except for when Erin almost crashed into the back of me because I braked without warning to avoid a tank-sized SUV pulling out of a driveway near the park. She was not recognizing at the time.

What else we recognized:
*We said "Hi Mayor Joe!" to Mayor Joe.
*Artist friend Paul Silva has a booth this year and Erin bought two pretty giclees.
*Kids often scream for no reason and it's funny when you're not the mom of them.
*We live in a crazy-beautiful place. Everyone who doesn't is jealous of me.
* I really should get out more.

You are what you love, not what loves you back...
I've been listening to my new Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins CD (thanks, Michael!) nonstop for about a week now. "You Are What You Love" is my favorite (she's an amazing songwriter: "This is no great illusion/When I'm with you I'm looking for a ghost/Or invisible reasons/To fall out of love and run screaming from our home...").

Besides Rabbit Fur Coat, here's my What I Love That Doesn't Love Me Back list for today:
*Deborah Harry (I get to go see Blondie in June...thanks, MK!) won't give me the time of day.
* Laurie Notaro makes me laugh until I cry, but she doesn't even know I'm alive.
* My LPs don't snuggle with me on the couch, so I think they're destined for Accessory Land.
* Two words from my lips that can make any of my friends run from the room screaming: Seth McFarlane.
* Heavy strings, tuned low and played hard, always remind me that I never had a chance to meet Stevie Ray Vaughn (because if I had, he would have loved me...as soon as I was legal).
* I have so much literary love for this journal that I check the shelves at B&N every time I'm there, even though it only comes out 4x a year. It's the literary equivalent of riding my bike by the house of the boy I have a crush on even when he's at his dad's house for the summer.

And you know I love you too, right? Even if you don't love me back, I'm just going to love and love and not care if you even glance in my direction. I know you're out there, barely paying attention, thinking about someone else and wondering how to let me down gently.

Someone needs to lighten up...
That would be me. In the words of the so-full-of-himself-he-might-implode-taking-the-universe-with-him-into-a-black-hold-of-monotony reality tv hairdresser Jonathan, "I am SO over myself."

If I still had a shrink I would feel sorry for her for having to listen to my crap. I can't even stand the sound of my own voice in my head. Everything I do annoys me, from talking out loud to the cat (yes, I thought it was cute at one time) to that weird thing I do with my tongue and my teeth when I get nervous (I thought that was cute once too). I hate my clothes, my hair, my height, my feet, my car, my fingernails, my arrogance, my smugness, the way I walk, and my taste in TV. I irritate the hell out of myself.

Spending too much time alone? Probably. That would explain the talking to the cat thing (because it's two more cats and a floral bathrobe away from crazy old woman). And I think I like myself a lot more when I have to defend myself to others. When I don't have to stand up for myself, I start to wonder who I was fighting for in the first place. Bottom line: Apparently I need criticism to survive, otherwise I start looking for another host body to occupy.

"Interesting. No wait, the other thing: tedious."
-Bender (Futurama)

Involuntary acts of memory...
Catching up on my blog reading recently, this post from Charlie reminded me that I do have hobbies: Wallowing in the past. Nostalgia-as-nervous-tic. Pouring salt in old wounds.

You know how when you're just driving around and suddenly something pops into your head, and you think, “I haven’t thought about so-and-so in a million years?” And then you get lost in thinking about the memory, letting it take you through a door that had been closed for a long time? I love that mental trick; it’s like reassurance that even when I think I’ve lost people and places in my head, they reappear and I can have them back again...like they had just been resting, or waiting for me to be quiet for a while so they could come back.

Listening to Dinosaur Jr. recently brought back a memory of a childhood friend; we met in 8th grade and were on and off friends through high school. Not too long after college began (for me), our friendship began to dissolve. We fell out of touch, those memories scurried to find a place in my unconscious, and I thought of her only peripherally for years. Until I heard "Blowing It" from Green Mind on an Internet radio station.

The auditory recollection connected with an image of the t-shirt (of the album cover featuring the little girl with a cigarette hanging from her mouth) she wore so often, and it all came back in a rush: A summer in NYC, trips to Beaufort, running away, lots of running away. Even in our early 20s, always talking about running away. The memory didn't make me miss her (the crazy had just gotten out of control by the time our friendship ended), but I did miss the me I was then.

Some memories feel like an ambush. It’s like having all of these pieces floating just outside of your conscious mind, amused and wicked and waiting until they feel like surfacing to screw up whatever it is that you're supposed to be focusing on.

I wish there was a better way to control it; to keep the things that make me smile, blush, or laugh when they surface, but edit out the ones that make me angry or sad. Yet another thing to add to my "PROS" list for a future voluntary lobotomy.