I Will Not Think

I've been told that if my pulse does not improve I'll be put on herbs. This is Chinese medicine for "get your shit together."

I've been meditating with a back full of quills on the long bed in the small sleeping closet at the acupuncture office for several weeks now. I'm trying to figure out a way to process my emotions so they don't make me sick. To learn, as I've been instructed, to imagine that emotions are like a picture frame and mentally drape a sheet over them when I don't want to feel them. To see emotions like food. To take them in, digest them and then pass them--never storing them as pain. There are apparently all these ways to picture emotions and do something about them. I've been picturing ways to picture picturing them. Or something like that.

As my doctor turned out the lights and left the room last night he asked, "Do you have any questions?"
"Yes," I replied, pleadingly. "What can I do? Can I cut anything else out, stop eating eggplant, use more fresh ginger in my diet, perhaps add a little light jiu-jitsu or something?"
"There's nothing else you can do. Except...worry less. Ponder less."

Now, to be fair, he said this with a small hint of the desired irony that one with a back full of hot needles would demand in a moment like that. And then he left me in the dark. And I thought. I thought about thinking less. I thought about pondering less. I thought about worrying less. I worried about worrying less. And then I made a small vow. For one week (let's not kid ourselves here), I'm going to imagine a sheet. And when the grinding machine begins to chink, chink, chink away, churning itself into nothingness, I'm going to put up that sheet and let those thoughts hit it.

I'm not going to worry.
I'm not going to worry.
I'm not going to worry.

Okay, let's revise.

I'm going to worry...less.
I'm going to worry...less.
I'm going to worry...less.

And after this one week, I'm going to see what worrying less has done.
Because hey, I sure know what worrying does.
(Insert blank space here).

Ill Wind

Well, it's official. I won't be representing my country in the Ironman triathlon in June. For that matter, nor will I be able to continue my work as a fit model, UN Goodwill Ambassador and Dan Brown's ghostwriter. It's all become too much. I'm overextended, outwitted, undernourished and ornery as hell.

I've developed these cravings, see, for pickled foods. I'm waking up nights wanting gourmet doughnuts and grilled cheese. None of the usual fare satisfies. Don't want beer. Can't be bothered with caiphrinhas. Don't wanna feel altered. Just wanna feel hidden.

It all started when I heard about Muir drinkin' that pine needle tea to get more "sequoiacal". Purple juice, restoring color. I thought, 'I'm only drinkin' this here Kool-Aid. Somethin's wrong.'

I don't see sky. My roof is these fluorescent bars. I've gotta see something mightier than silver, more ancient than chrome.

I miss mountains.

The electric city is electrocuting me. Blue wire, red wire, motherboard. I'm plugged in at the fingernail. Muir said "overcivilized". That's too kind. Overdone, overzealous, overboard, overwhelmed. Over it.

I went to see my acupuncturist last week. I sensed the wind element, the presence of which had sent me to bed for days with migraines and a piercing pain that crawled along my spine like a spider wearing stilettos. He said my lungs were exhausted. In traditional Chinese medicine they govern growth and maturity. In his strangely stoic and well, "sequoiacal" style, he explained its root cause as "too much sitting on one problem for too long."

Did I say I miss mountains?

Busy Bee

MUSE

Well, things have been hoppin' around here. Sho' nuff, after writing the post below I felt compelled to go and visit my aspirational arm ornament in person. Now, in fourteen years of New York City living I've never been inside a designer store. Not once. But I actually broke the fourth wall for the Gucci. She'd been replaced on the pedestal by a hot little purple number so I had to seek her out. This gave a sexy, black-clad store clerk the opportunity to ask what he could do for me. I described the bag in question and he led me right to her.

"This one's special. We don't have another one like her", he said. Of course not. "She's got a real unique edge. She's sophisticated without being dated. She's playful." 'My God, they get right inside of you', I thought. He put her in my hands and I ran my index finger over each of her weighted, pristine details. The gentleman behind the counter described the features that made her uniquely a Gucci. The zipper pull, lining and structure. The irridescent metallic fabric. I slipped her over my shoulder and strode to the mirror. I watched her dangle from every angle. I was wearing jeans and a pair of black Chuck Taylors, but I coulda been in a Mugler bandage dress and a pair of Fendi booties. She transformed me. I brought her back to the counter, traced the stitching on her underbelly and stepped back to take her in. She was mine.

And then I walked away.

I got myself a little gig this week. I'll be writing about beauty trends for Examiner.com , a culture site with readership in 109 cities. This means great exposure and maybe a little ca-ching, but mostly the opportunity to report publicly on my product fetish and tell you all about critically important things like how to wear the half-black, half-white manicure in real life. You know, world news and matters of national security. Hey, at least you'll be outfitted in the event of another financial crisis. Don't say I didn't warn you that the strong brow was back for fall!

I saw U2 at Giants Stadium with my husband, who is their fan. But before that, I saw Muse open for U2. Muse is my new muse. I can't stop listening to them now, despite having had them on my ipod for 3 years and being pretty into their huge, dramatic sound. Think Queen in a mash-up with Metallica and Radiohead. Throw in a frontman in a pair of really tiny red jeans and a huge white piano and you'll have Muse. Fist-pumping and showstopping. Made up entirely for the fact that a huge Jersey gorilla of a man asked me to move out of his way during the first song in U2's set, which froze me self-consciously in place and kept me from moving for the duration of their show. "Stuck in a moment and you can't get out of it"? Bono didn't know the half of it.

Better than all of that, I saw Fanfarlo at the Bowery. Beautiful and strange and Swedish. Trumpets and saws and fiddles and guitars. A small, buttoned-up frontman with a butterfly vocal that flew out and soared above all of our funky, stoic heads. Such romantic lyrics for such a young gent. I feel so lucky to live in New York, to be able to stand on two legs at midnight and listen to six strangers play me music I can sway to.

Life is good in the electric city.

From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

All I can say is, never underestimate the power of a glossy patent handbag.

This slick sack? We've begun seeing each other. Well, it's not formal, actually. I see her and she just sorta stares back, invitingly. I haven't introduced myself yet. She's kind of a loner, actually. People tend to put her on a pedestal. She sits astride one just so in the gleaming Gucci ghetto on on Fifth Avenue and 54th Street. She's worth two paychecks at least, maybe three, and I usually find those kinda girls pretty intimidating.

I'm afraid that if I brought her home I'd have to stop wearing mom jeans. Girls like these usually demand a certain garment-related savoir faire, and bare minimum that you can at least stand in heels for longer than fifteen minutes without pulling out your pair of Chucks. There is a school of thought that these kinds of gals encourage your A game. But secretely I wonder if just like the awesome patent ankle boots from Bond Street that seemed so brilliant two years ago, she'd really just spend most of her time at home in curlers waiting for a "special occasion" at which to make an appearance.

Thing is, though, I want her. I know it's cliche but she just gets me. For one, we're both in touch with our dark sides. She loves metal, she's soft-bottomed with all the pinches and tucks you'd expect from a sophisticated woman of a certain season. And the best part? It looks as though after a long, late night she broke her heel and fell into a pool of gasoline. If things were to get too hot she could burst into flames in a second. That's just the way you'd want any good broad to be: nice and shiny but never precious.

Partie D'Août Deux

Alright, August. This is it. We've come to the end. You've wrung me out. You've somehow managed to slip into Blogger and fuck with my font. Even my Georgia, August. Even my Georgia? My own familiar black typeface now looks foreign. And suddenly there's a tab here I've never seen, labeled "Monetize". What won't you monetize, oh sodden month? This lowly changeling blog too?

Most of you know I rarely post real-life photos. This isn't that blog. I usually feel a thousand words are worth a thousand words flat out, no arguments. But once in awhile a picture metaphor is just too damn honest and it is necessary in this blog. The above is from a corner of my office. Not "mine" per se, but the one I work in and among and inside, and around. I go to this corner often to retrieve paper for the copier and last week I finally stopped in front of that motivational poster on the floor, which has been there since January. This is a wall. This corner. This office. It is glass or steel or a magnetic field or a piece of cellophane or epoxy or nothing at all. But I am trapped inside it. I feel trapped inside it.

August is my credit limits slashed, company 401k closed, car in the driveway unwilling to start, doctor dropped by insurance, dental plan gone, $11oo in cell phone bills and a stack of mail unopened. This is a wall. These bills, this loss of security. It is glass or steel or a magnetic field or a piece of cellophane or epoxy or nothing at all. But I am trapped inside it. I feel trapped inside it.

I think I've come to understand something. I've been boxed in because I've got to learn how to become more resourceful. If all my outs have been well, stubbed out, then I'm gonna have to use my imagination. If I can't fly away because there's no more plastic, can't drive away because there's no more rubber, can't bail myself out using the mythic retirement fund and escape into temporary unemployment, then I'll have to figure some other way to get out of this job and get within the same country as the life I want. Basically, there are no more excuses and there's no easy way. It is glass or steel or a magnetic field or a piece of cellophane or nothing at all. What happens if I poke my finger through it?

Most of you also know I'm not into having my freedom encroached upon. I'm the girl who had it tattooed in Latin, festooned by laurels and anchors where the Kundalini don't shine (what's that saying about a good way to lose your freedom? Have it tattooed in Latin?) as my permanent middle finger to expectation, obligation, boundary. If only declarations were the same as decisions.

I start school tomorrow. I'm taking Beginning Fiction and I'm totally terrified. I'm trying to remember what the hell I was thinking in May when I signed up for it. I have no idea how to write stories. But as I type that last line I'm thinking perhaps this is part of the new emergency exit plan. Maybe I'm going to have to write myself a new story with a mad, unexpected ending. One that involves a fabulous escape plan.

August

Morning's Inner Monologue
Rush hour,
heat index.
High-class cattle in column dresses.
Moo.

UV
My decolletage is freckled, I fear, permanently.
Micro calico remnants of two Adriatic weeks.
The final map charted by rising heat
from Diocletian's Wall
onto my chest in water bubbles.

It reminds me of the line
from that Ball play,
"freckles ruin shoulders", or
something like it.
Shit, I'm ruined.

Alright, enuffa that shite.
It appears that the soupy summer slosh has begun melting my heart, soul and most certainly cerebellum into a murky pool about to be splashed onto the side of a taxi. They don't make Pacino movies about August bank robberies for nothin'. I'm spending far too much time alone in this office while the rest of my "team" is off in one Hampton or another, or telecommuting or...whatever. I've taken to listening to endless streams of NPR for company, their steady tones floating off on the air conditioner's hum into the dark recesses of our computer closet. "Well, I began my career with a fellowship to do some work in Burundi..." Hisssssss.

It's so odd being stuck in Manhattan in August. Well, let me go back. I mean it's odd that an entire city empties for a month in the first place. But given that reality (the reality that nobody works in New York in the summer), it's strange to be someone who is, commuting into Midtown with the few sweaty blue shirt suckers who have to be present for their TD Waterhouse teambuilding exercises. Slosssshhhh.

I'm running out of ways to creatively clothe myself for the 75% humidity. When I'm alone on Thursdays and Fridays I wear flip flops and tank tops that don't conceal my wide, black bra straps. Today I'm wearing an acid washed gray hat with nautical metal stars on it. I added hoop earrings, hoping it might give my look an urban edge. It did that, alright. Now I look like I'm working at an Amoco station. I can tell when I've hit a homerun because our doormen actually make eye contact. But when I come into the office in on Fridays looking like I'm headed for a public beach near the Florida panhandle, they refuse to acknowledge me, even though I've been walking through those doors for over eight years. Ssssouuup.

Perhaps it's worse now that we have a new tenant in the office. She's a classic New York cosmetic professional: poised, sophisticated, and beautifully packaged. She wears a suit of sleek black armor every day that perfectly displays two enviably chiseled guns. And she's one of those heel types. One that can pull it off. She's got loads of spiky, spiny skins and leathers. Some are sharp points, some rounded, but all tall as hell. She's like a chic boutique tower, warming her leftover pasta in our dingy old microwave, chatting me up about this and that. It always feels as though I'm standing in my underwear when we're talking. Something about her makes me feel naked. Lately, it's been just the two of us in the office. She runs her business on the other side, but she's close enough that I can overhear her conducting conference calls. She's diplomatic and assertive. Sometimes I'll turn off the air conditioner and just sit and listen to her talk on the phone as the room warms up. When I came in this morning she said she loved my hat.

Heeeeeaaaatttt.

Coming Out of the Dark

My husband has been subletting on the sunnier coast for just nearing six weeks now. I haven't written much about it because, frankly, I haven't known how the hell to talk about it. When he visited LA in March to explore his career options, our lives took a sharp turn toward what is commonly referred to by our actor friends as The Inevitable: the sometimes-hard-to-swallow reality that the big pool of work lies out west while the cultural and intellectual baby pool we really wanna congregate in floats smack dab on this lean and leggy east coast isle. That sharp turn was both unexpected and exciting, but we knew things were never gonna be the same and that eventually, some kind of really hard decision was gonna have to be made about place or career or both.

Shortly after the March trip, we decided to pool every financial and emotional resource we had to send him back there as an all-out immersion experiment...just to see what would happen if he...lived there, for a time, as an actor, undivided. You can read his blow-by-blow at CouldYouPleaseJustNot. Below is my east coast version of that all-out immersion experiment.

It's no secret that I've taken a pretty bumpy ride to Psycho Town this summer, visiting my relatives on the dark side often and with gusto, downing vodka sodas, even digging deep to dust off the old agoraphobia. I picked a fight with our creepy neighborhood cross-dresser after he tossed an empty cup into a flowering bush, audibly sobbed my way through a documentary about modern China's stranglehold on peasant farmers, spent an afternoon detailing the back panels of my bathroom door with a bleach wipe, spent all day in the dark watching Michael Jackson's funeral, and peeled, and peeled, and peeled hardboiled eggs. When my sister came for a visit she complained that I'd become too controlling about the way the bathroom hand towels were folded. I laughed at her reflection in the mirror as I picked away at a microscopic eyebrow hair with a pair of tweezers. Those goddamn things, they'll make you crazy.

After that battle royal with all my filth and fury reached its zenith, I sat stunned in the muted mustard hues of my psychopharmacologist's office, where she inquired in her usual cool, anonymously eastern European way, "what ees zees depression of which you write on zees intake questionnaire?" We made a subtle medical adjustment to my chemical makeup. But I know there's no kind of gel-coated cocktail for what truly ails me. Uncertainty.

I walked down Park Avenue after the appointment thinking that it isn't at all being alone that's been hardest about my husband being gone. In fact, it rather suits me in some ways. It creates a wide open internal space in which those pithy little obsessive demons can emerge and thrive inside me. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. They rear, they terrify and then I can purge them. But what's caused all this utter insanity is not that he's gone. It's that that there seems so much attached to his being gone: possibility, upendedness, alpha, omega, beginnings, and endings. It's so weighted, his absence. But rather than grounding me in anything I could hang onto and derive some meaning from, it instead sent me surging straight up into the stratosphere without a capsule. I've been Major Tom, looking down at the life I had, watching it get smaller and smaller, seeing nothing ahead but a big, black, starless sky.

Perhaps I've broken through the ozone or something. Or at least begun to. I'm feeling ready to harness all this intensity, all these feelings of directionlessness and kid fears and use them to, I dunno, make some discoveries. I don't wanna pick fights with the creepy cross-dresser anymore. I don't wanna peel eggs on my porch in the rain or be obsessively tidy. I don't even care about getting blonder (okay, that might be a stretch). I have no idea what we're going to do about LA. I have no idea where we're supposed to be or what the right decision is about anything. I think we did the right thing by forcing change where we could, by surging forward in spite of having no bona fide evidence we should, but I don't really know that we did. What I want most to do is just say that. I. Do. Not. Know. I don't know, I don't know, I don' t know. I'm thinking the more I hear it, the less like a life sentence it feels. The more like...a second skin. Something I can breathe in.

So, there it is. Some tiny little shred of it. As it is today but will not, in any way, ever shall be.

Amen.