Trying to Remember

Nosy neighbors

Madonna and Ellen DeGeneres were at the same awards show and were talking to each other on the red carpet about how they were both wearing panty liners. Madonna asked Ellen where she bought hers, and Ellen said Linens ‘N Things. “Me too!” said Madonna. Then she bent down and sniffed Ellen’s crotch and said, “Wait, no you didn’t. You bought it from Job Lot.”

She was right. Ellen had bought her panty liners from Job Lot but lied and said Linens ‘N Things because she was embarrassed.

Eddie asked if we had had a Black girl over the other day, because Diana said she thought she saw one in the house. I didn’t remember a Black girl coming over recently, and when I asked Chris he didn’t either. We decided we needed to talk about Eddie and Diana about how nosy they are.

Not passing

I was in Oberlin. I was standing on the side of Wilder Bowl watching all the students walk by and being amazed at how I didn’t recognize any of them, either as individuals or as types.

A professor I used to know, who for some reason looked just like an archeologist in Rhode Island who my father works with sometimes and is friends with, came up to me and asked me if I could help him move a rock. I said sure. He took me over to a field that was fenced off from the Bowl and showed me the rock, which was huge. He told me to pick it up and follow him. I had a lot of trouble moving it but the professor just kept walking away, so I started dragging it. He came to a hole in the ground with stairs leading down and waved at me to follow him down, and then went down himself. When I got to the top I kind of bent over at the waist and picked up the rock from the very top and suddenly, carrying it that way, it felt very light and easy to move.

When I got to the bottom of the stairs the professor and the rock were gone and I forgot about them. I was in a parking garage in Madison. The parking garage was also kind of a hang-out spot, with a bar and a cafe and a lot of tables, but I was the only one there. Then I saw someone walking in. She was obviously transgender, male to female. She had a chin-length brown wig in kind of a local news anchor style and a dowdy red dress and lots of stubble and was obviously biologically male. I immediately knew that she wanted to pass as completely female and thought she was doing OK at it, so I felt sad for her that she really wasn’t. Then I noticed that she was covered in blood and was carrying a knife.

She walked over to a table near me that there was a cake on and started grabbing pieces off of it and eating them while walking around the table really fast. Everything she did was really quick and manic and there was obviously something wrong with her. She may have been mildly retarded, too. She said “Hello” to me and I got really scared. I asked her what the knife was for and she said, very matter-of-factly, “Sex.” I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. She said that she thought she should go back to the airport, because “It was really hard to cut his arm off all the way and I want to make sure I did it right.” She said a lot more, but I don’t remember what. She was there for a really long time, and I was terrified that she was going to attack me. I kept getting vivid flashes of bloody cut-up dead bodies. Eventually she left and started walking towards the airport, which was very close by. I felt really relieved but still worried that she would come back.

I called 911 on my cell phone and told the operator that I was calling from the parking garage downtown, not the one that was just a standard parking garage (which was across the street), but the other one. I got really flustered trying to explain what was unusual about the garage I was in, but she very cheerfully told me that she knew which one I was talking about. I told her what happened, and I mentioned that the woman was obviously transgender because I thought it would help the police identify her, but the operator acted really shocked that I would even mention that. I felt bad.

Nationalism

When I left my therapy session I accidentally took my therapist’s notebook home with me. I knew I shouldn’t, but I read what he had written about me during the session. He wrote that my response to my situation was to struggle to create a pure, national music. He thought that this reaction made sense but was futile.

I was really startled and angry to learn that he had misinterpreted what I told him so badly, and also disturbed by the fact that he seemed to think that this goal, which struck me as verging on fascistic, made sense. I decided to stop seeing him.

Then I started flipping through the rest of the notebook scanning other entries about other patients to see if there was anything about lesbian sex. There wasn’t anything, or at least I didn’t see anything. It was hard to tell, because the handwriting was different for each patient and sometimes it was pretty much illegible.

Advice

I was about to get a nose job. I was sitting on concrete steps with Chris and people walked by occasionally and asked me what my new nose was going to look like, and when I said I didn’t know yet they would give me advice on what they thought it should be. The guy who used to DJ Strangeways at the Green Room (the guy with long hair and plugs, not the short stocky one) had his nose all wrapped up and told me what style he got, but I don’t remember what he said. I said to Chris that I probably would want the same nose I have now, just closer to my face. He made a joke about turning it into a shelf. After that, all he wanted to talk about was how much he hates Beth Orton.

Something isn’t everything’s nice

I was substituting in an elementary school and all the kids could talk about was a new pop singer they all loved, whose name was Emma. I couldn’t stand her, and thought she was a revival of all of the worst elements of the early nineties. So I took it upon myself to teach the kids about good music.

I started to say “So, if Emma’s supposed to be so special…” but got interrupted by a bunch of kids, horrified, saying “supposed to be!?!” I started over, and said “If Emma’s so special, why isn’t she anywhere near as good as this?”

I pressed play on a little gray tape player that I had brought in, one of the round ones with a handle on top, and a David Bowie song started playing. The first lyrics were “See things right/Something isn’t everything’s nice.”

I couldn’t see the kids, but they must have been there, because I was standing in front of them facing them.

Complications

Scraps died of complications from his stroke* and almost half of the comments on the blog post where I found out were spam.

When I got out of bed I noticed for the first time that something was written in the dust on my wall. It started with my initials, EMR, but I couldn’t quite get the right angle to make sense of what the rest said. I had a strong feeling it was insulting.

*Breaking the format to say he didn’t really, thank god.

Three-pointer

Chris had one of those talking basketball hoop games, and he was playing it. He had it mic’d, and he was putting the sound through a series of effects pedals until it transformed into a really beautiful, high-pitched, ethereal kind of grinding noise that was going in and out of audibility every ten seconds or so. We could still hear the original, unaltered noises of the game, and they sounded really good together.

Sexy

I was watching a documentary with a female friend who looked kind of like Elaine Bennis but didn’t act anything like her. She said racism was disgusting but kind of a turn-on. She was very emphatic about it and kept calling it sexy. It was very hard for me to stomach. All the mail at work had half dollar-sized holes through it.

Speech

Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech:

“Let it be known upon every hill: that we are all Americans, and bemoan the power, that there is no evil.”

I tried very hard to understand why he would say that, but it sounded to me like he had lost it.

Figured it out

I was in the bathroom cutting the back of my head with the clippers. I told Chris happily that I had finally figured out how to do it. I had trouble before with the mirror. There was way too much hair on the floor, and it wasn’t my color.