Recently in Dear Diary Category

Everyone around here is predictably obsessed with Doree Shafrir's HIPSTER GRIFTER investigation in the Observer.  It's the usual story-- comelyish tatttooed jezebel flees Utah/the long arm of the law to hide out in Brooklyn where she seduces everyone at Union Pool, claims to have lung cancer, and writes a bunch of bad checks before getting busted by her new friends and moving on to do the same thing all over with the crowd at Barcade, Pete's Candy Store, repeat repeat repeat.

The story itself is actually a little too low-stakes and ordinary to be exactly novel and it's about as repetitive as a bad joke.  Still, at least as of yesterday, all of my friends and I were captivated.  Everyone I've talked to seems to have their own personal reasons for being into the whole thing.  Some of my ladyfriends seem primarily interested in the Grifter's amazing/unlikely powers of sexy persuasion, while others just seem baffled by how this girl could seem to be everywhere at once.  Most people have known a compulsive liar who manages to snow everyone by being so magnetic and likable, so there's that angle too.  I guess I personally am mostly interested because this completely crazy girl reminds me, sort of, of myself.  I have never written a bad check-- partially because I can never find my checkbook-- and I'm too indiscreet to be a convincing liar, but still there is something familiar and unsettling about the way she managed to make the same mistakes over and over. 
 
I often fantasize about moving to Sydney or someplace like that and being a perfect person. No one there would know about any of the embarrassing shit I've done over the years.  I could reinvent myself amidst a tan crowd of jolly surfers with hot accents toasting me with sloshing pitchers of beer.  (Right Justine?  That's what Australia is like, right?)  In a sunnier place, I like to imagine, I could be a better person and none of my new surfer friends would be the wiser as to my former annoying self.  It seems like a great plan.

Which is why Kari Ferrell's story is just sad to me.  She actually had a shot!  Although she was totally WANTED in Utah, she managed to escape to Brooklyn where she promptly got a semi-coveted job, made more friends in a few weeks than I've made in New York in six years, and left the beehive fuzz in the dust.  Then, having succeeded at giving herself a second chance, she  went about fucking up her life in the exact same ways that she'd done it before.  When she sort-of-but-not-really got away with THAT, she did it all over again.  Girl, I've been there.

I like to think that I learn from mistakes, but I've made that error in judgment one too many times.  Would things be different in Australia?  It's really really far away, that weather is nice, and there are lots of exotic/colorful birds.  But if I'm as much like Kari Ferrell as I suspect, I have a feeling I'd figure out a way to make it exactly the same.

Ariel Levy's article in this week's New Yorker regarding a nomadic band of badass van-driving separatist 70's lesbians known as the Van Dykes was great by any measure, but it almost made me cry.  Why?  Because I have had the fleeting, sometimes frustrating pleasure of knowing a lesbian with a van.  Well, a minivan: blue Dodge Caravan, fake wood paneling, creepy doll parts superglued to the dashboard, a mattress where the seats should be.  A musty dirty-foot smell poorly disguised with Bath & Bodyworks strawberry-kiwi body spray and Ani on the stereo, bitch!   You know the drill.  If you don't you should.  Some of the nicest times of my life were spent in a minivan with all of those things.

I met S. during my gloomy freshman year of college, when I lived in a picturesque but lonely room in a gingerbread house in which no one would visit me because it was at the bottom of a giant hill.  S. was was never my best friend or anything, but she was magnetic and the ringleader of the tight-knit circle of girls with whom I had thrown in my lot, so we ended up hanging out all the time. She was always spearheading some activity that no one else would have ever considered.

She had a van.  You weren't really allowed to have a car as a freshman, but S. had been forced to bring her van to school because she needed it in order to leave campus every weekend to attend Ani shows.  Since the school didn't grant special Ani DiFranco parking permits, S had to park in the scary-posh neighborhood that engulfs Sarah Lawrence's (also scary-posh) campus.  One afternoon I was sitting in my lonely room, probably feeling sorry for myself, when I heard honking, looked out the window and saw S.'s Caravan outside.  It had been freshly decorated: where before it had been a staid navy, it was now spray-painted with neon swirlies, womyn symbols, and, in giant pink letters, the words LESBO SEX.  It took me about two seconds to make it into out of my room and into the back of the van where a gang of girls was already sprawled on the mattress drinking beer, with S. in the driver's seat as the cheerful pilot.  I don't remember where we went that day-- probably nowhere in particular-- but after that paint job S. was always getting mean notes on her windshield from the people in front of whose giant Tudor mansions she parked.
 
We were constantly driving around in that van-- not just me and S, cause like I say, we weren't really solo friends like that-- but her and me and The Girls and often whoever I was dating.  We went to the diner what seemed like every night, and S. would order weird off-menu vegan meals cobbled together from various substitutions.  ("Can I get a burger but with extra lettuce instead of buns, no mayonnaise, extra ketchup and pico de gallo instead of beef?")  She was always taking us to some thrift store or another in a series of down-at-the-heels suburbs with names like Rompompano so she could buy toy pianos or whatever for her latest art project.  The best time we barely went anywhere-- we'd gotten all this beer and toffuti and kosher marshmallows and stuff for a picnic but there was a huge thunderstorm so we just parked by the side of the road and all crammed into the back of the lesbo sex van and got wasted and discovered that kosher marshmallows don't really compare to the regular kind.  I mean, it wasn't that exciting; it was just nice.

S. got over her Ani phase and started painting.  She stopped wearing broomstick skirts and started wearing white pants and old t-shirts with lacy Victorian frills sewn into the collars so that they buttoned up to her chin.  She took a year off and went to Texas, where she got into synchronized swimming.  She was always telling you about her latest scheme with these wide eyes and an incredulous shit-eating grin, basically daring you to believe her.  She punctuated everything with a gargly cartoon laugh. 

She could be moody and unpredictable, but she was always funny, even when she was being an asshole.  One time she got mad about something and superglued everything on her roommate's desk into place.  Well, that was funny to me. 

Eventually S. got a dog named Vandal who everyone hated.  She had adopted him as a mangy puppy from a homeless man she met over a summer when she'd organized a traveling lesbian circus.  She named the dog Vandal but addressed him as Wanda, which seemed appropriate-- he identifies as a Wanda, she explained.  I thought it was more likely he identified as a monster; he was always trying to eat people.  Everyone hated that fucking dog.  On top of being crazy and scary, he was also a racist.  On top of being racist, he liked to shit indoors for no other reason than to piss everyone off.  Really, he was much too skittish, aggressive and carnivorous for the undergraduate lifestyle.  Wanda had to be on the move or he would just have to eat someone, which only fed into S.'s already-ballooning wanderlust.  With Wanda around, S. had someone to ride shotgun and didn't need anyone else.  She seemed to have grown bored of people anyway-- or maybe just of me. 

I still saw the van a lot, but only when she stopped to roll down the window and chat on her way to some solitary destination.  She had become obsessed with abandoned buildings and had taken up squatting in this old empty mansion in a hidden part of town before Hollywood kicked her out they could use it to shoot Mona Lisa Smile.  After that, S. was even more distant.  But I was all wrapped up in my own stuff too, and, anyway, we were still friends and everything.  Sometimes we went to Wendy's after art history class (she got fries or maybe she had stopped being vegan by then; I can't remember) but  those occasions grew few and far between.  We fell out mostly out of touch after college, which was something I regretted after I got dumped by someone I thought I was in love with and considered taking up nomadicism myself.  I was hoping to hitch a ride, but I didn't know how to summon the van anymore.   

Last time I saw S., she'd blown into New York for about eighteen hours.  It was never easy making plans with her; we both had this thing about cell phones and she always had a packed itinerary and not much time.  On the rare occasions that she appeared it was always like "meet me at this warehouse at 2 in the morning and bring beer."  So I met her at 2 in the morning a party in a warehouse in the middle of Brooklyn where a nude man in his fifties wandered aimlessly amidst a crowd of twentysomethings.  The music was really loud and S. and I had to shout to hear each other, but it didn't matter, she still made me laugh.  She was wearing some crazy outfit but I can't remember what.  She might have been had a fake moustache fashioned from the real hair on her head; she did that a lot.  We talked for a couple hours.  I haven't heard from her since.

A girl with a van has places to go.  She has people to see.  You can be friends with a girl with a van, you can ride shotgun and sing along to Ani on the stereo.  It is very easy to fall in love with a girl with a van, even if there are more than a few reasons a relationship would never work.  From the passenger's seat of a girl's van, windows rolled down, you always know for sure that, in the end-- probably sometime soon-- you'll be standing in an empty parking lot waving goodbye as it speeds out of there on the way to some dyke paradise that can only be seen from the top of a pyramid, and that if it ever rolls back into town its driver will have another name and a new tattoo.

The one thing that kind of sucks about "being a writer" (putting that in scare quotes so you don't puke-- secret "writer" trick!)  is that once you make your first writing dollar you start to get jealous of things you would have once just enjoyed.  I know there are probably some people who will claim not to have this weakness (JUSTINE perhaps??) but I think more are like me than will admit it.  Whenever I read anything that's really good or even see a book that just looks really good I'm torn between pleasure and suicidal ideation.  Because that should have been my great book!
 
The worst and most ironic part is that the closer a book feels to your (my) soul, the more you (I) can't totally enjoy it.  Peter Cameron's SOMEDAY THIS PAIN WILL BE USEFUL TO YOU is probably one of the funniest and most moving books I read all last year, but the narrator reminded me so much of myself when I was in high school that I had to get up every few pages and fume over the fact that someone else had written the book that I was meant to write-- and worst of all, had done it better than I probably could have.  If I had read the book ten years ago, none of this would have occured to me; I would have just really liked it.  OH LOST INNOCENCE.

There are many other books I avoid entirely just because they feel too close to my personal interests.  Such areas of interest include crazy girls, sluts, press-on nails, and hot stoner guys with impossibly long eyelashes.  If I know in advance that a book touches on any of those topics I am not going anywhere near it cause what if I want to write something similar someday?  (The answer to that rhetorical question is admittedly fuzzy but it seems like something bad could happen.) 

This must all make me seem like the most crazy and petty person in the world but I am just trying to give you all of my realness.  The internet is a safe space for realness, right?

What it ultimately means is that I can basically only read things that are either really shitty or things on topics that I don't care about at all.  Things published before the death of Kurt Cobain/birth of Lourdes Ciccone are usually okay too because somehow that just feels like a whole different category.  As for everything else I have a hard time. 

You would think that this would take the fun out of everything AND IN SOME WAYS IT IS THE SADDEST THING IN THE WORLD, but the flip side is that it does make it much more pleasurable to read stuff that sucks.  Terrible literature makes me feel so great inside.  Airport bookstores are now my favorite.  Happy ending!

I just finished reading Lorrie Moore's amazing ANAGRAMS-- I had never read it before!-- and it made me wish that I could have a blog composed of nothing but Lorrie Moore quotes.  (The new heading of this here blog is simply a reflection of this desire so no need to call the suicide hotline on me.)  I'm not normally an underliner and am in fact have always been extremely suspicious of people who "highlight" things or "take notes," but halfway through any Lorrie Moore book you're always kicking yourself trying to remember all the stuff you didn't underline.  Cuz you know you're gonna want to repeat those jokes later pretending they're your own.  So you pick up a pen and you start underlining all the brilliant passages and that's an even bigger waste because before you know it you've underlined the whole book which doesn't really accomplish anything.

So can we all agree that 2008 was a tremendously shitty year? I resolve that 2009 is going to be so great. Also I resolve to be less introspective.

- best EB White quote from this week's very interesting (and maybe scarily relevant?!) article on White in the New Yorker

- title of my future autobiography

As a former employee of the Gap, I was interested and horrified to read this psychotic Fake Trend piece in the Wall Street Journal, which tells a scary story of the "legions" of former Gap clerks who are afflicted with a strange kind of Post Traumatic Folding Disorder that causes them to compulsively fold everything in sight.  According to the article

"Gap Inc. says it has trained "hundreds of thousands" of Gap store employees in the art of folding since the late 1980s.
Along the way, legions of retail grads have spent countless hours neatly folding T-shirts and jeans and stacking them on tables and shelves.
Now, their peculiar idea of perfection is straining marriages and leading to bizarre behavior ranging from buying clothes based on an item's foldability to straightening up sloppy displays while shopping."

I worked at the Gap for something like five years I think.  Not continuously-- I started when I was a Junior in high school, quit when I got mono, went back when I needed money to pay for whatever it was I spent money on in high school (fast food and Compact Discs?), quit when I went to college, went back for summers, went back when I was broke during the school year, and finally quit unceremoniously and for the last time when I was stressed out about exams.  This pattern lasted between I think 1997 and 2002-- I worked in three different stores.  And yes, I can now fold a mean pair of "denim" if I absolutely need to.  By which I mean I can do it if it's a fucking matter of life and death, so if it isn't please don't ask me to fold shit for you.  Until the day comes when my folding skills can somehow stave off the destruction of the planet Earth, my clothes will be in a crumpled pile covering my bedroom floor, thank you.   

The obvious and overlooked thing about this (by the way completely made-up) article is that, of all the annoying and often degrading things a person must do as a Gap employee, the absolute worst of all of them is FOLDING.  It is a thankless, boring, and truly sisyphean task.  And also: BORING.  It takes forever and you're finally making some progress and then some horrible person comes along and knocks your whole pile over and it's like you never even started.  When I worked at the Gap, I came up with a million ways to get out of doing the folding thing at all.  My specialty was walking around sort of rubbing the clothes in a way that I imagined made it look like I was folding them.  I figured if anyone asked me why none of the clothes I was supposed to fold were remotely folded I could just say they were perfect a minute ago until some bitchy customer ruined the whole thing.  (Not sure if this fooled anyone or not.)  The idea that a person's time in the retail trenches could make them "unable to go shopping without automatically spending 10 or 15 minutes refolding messy T-shirt piles in stores," as the Journal article claims, is insane to me.

That's not to say that I didn't pick up a few things from working at the Gap. The company spent so much time teaching us all about shoplifters as well as trying to catch us-- the employees-- in various forms of theft, including something called "Time Theft", that stealing became a fascination of mine.  The fact that our corporate overlords trusted us about as much as they would trust your average crook-- but surely not as much as they would trust actual proven rich-person criminals like Leona Helmsley or Cindy McCain-- made me obsessed with the idea of taking them down.  In other words: I'm working, but I'm not working for you.

I spent many of my zoned-out folding hours trying to devise the best possible way to steal from the company in the hopes of DESTROYING it from the inside.  The thing is that shoplifting from the Gap is actually really easy-- ask me sometime and I'll tell you exactly how to do it-- but it's running a successful ongoing SCAM without eventually getting caught that is trickier.  You could run a return scam, sell register tape on the black market, be the inside-man for a shoplifting ring... there were many possiblities, and even though I was never going to actually try any of them because I am really just not that kind of guy, it was my number on on-the-job fantasy.  Like I say, if the company was going to treat me like a criminal anyway, it wasn't such a leap to imagine myself as one.

I think a lot of my co-workers were thinking along the same lines, because every now and then, the Gap Secret Police, known as "Loss Prevention," would show up from Corporate and take someone into the back office and that would be the last we'd ever see of that person.  Hopefully people all got assigned to laundry-folding duty in prison.  At least allow them that small pleasure.

Happy Fourth of July.  The Fourth of July is my favorite holiday not only because I am a patriot but also because I enjoy fireworks.  They appeal to my very gay sense of instant nostalgia.  Watching the fireworks inspires a simultaneous feeling of awe and regret: they're over practically before they start.  With fireworks (especially local fireworks versus impersonal big city extravaganzas) you get a visceral sense that your life is passing you by.  This is a feeling I love.  Yeah, I know it's childish of me to find this kind of angsty wallowing so delicious.  I can't help it, but I will try to be more grown-up by next year. 

The other thing about the 4th of July is that there are a lot of great songs about it.  Off the top of my head I can think of Galaxie 500's 4th OF JULY (above, featuring sparklers!), X's 4th OF JULY, Aimee Mann's 4th OF JULY, Bruce Springsteen's 4th OF JULY, ASBURY PARK (SANDY), and Elliot Smith's INDEPENDENCE DAY. I think there are a lot more that I'm forgetting right now too. (Oh! The Elliot Smith video on youtube just led me to this great-seeming song.  And who remembers a lady by the name of ANI?)

When I was little I was always concerned about what would happen if somehow the fireworks didn't extinguish themselves as they were falling for the ground-- if somehow you managed to catch a piece of one, what would happen?  Good or bad?  I thought about this for awhile and finally asked my mom and she told me your arm would fall off and you would probably die.  I guess she didn't understand the question or was worried that I wanted to go out and play with fireworks or something.  Whatever-- her scare tactics did not work.  I was generally a skittish and fearful child, but in this case, my mother's dire warning just increased the appeal to me.  It was at this moment that I first understood that it is worth risking life and limb for dumb things that are pretty and short-lived.

I went to see The Breeders last night.  If you are not familiar with The Breeders, they're kind of like the ladies from Grey Gardens except instead of mom and daughter Bouviers, they're twin sisters from Ohio.  And instead of lying in bed all day singing Tea For Two, they RAWK.  Of course the show was awesome.  This Dutch documentary about the Deal twins is also awesome.  Seriously, it's just like Grey Gardens; I'm not joking.