So Totally Clueless

The whole way to the DMV there is a chorus of redhead harpies in my head, pouting in plaid:

"You're  a virgin who can't drive."

Probably the most cutting truth/insult in the teenage girl lexicon. It's...repulsive. Reductive, Typifying, emblematic of the only two things that matter when you are eighteen: being free and being loved. I feel an ugly twelve the third time I try to parallel-park and the so-called "friendliest driving instructor in the state of Maryland!" tells me, in a sing-song chirrup, "You're not done!" I am done. This is the best I can do. Please let me show you I can back up in a straight line, you unfashionable immigrant (tempers run high; sorry).

When I have to get out, before a lot of people, and shuffle back to the driver's side it is humiliating. All the other eager parents, waiting for little Johnny to finish his right hand turn, are screaming the epithet also with their piercing eyes, shielded against the June sun: There goes a virgin who can't drive. More pathetically, she is in college. I mentally make a list of people in my head who I admire who are also virgins, who can't drive. I come up with...Mother Theresa. Mary. Maybe Mary.

My Dad won't let me drive because I seem too emotional so I hunch against the side door and let "Huge Ego" fill the conversational void in our car. It is so static in here I want to vomit--I'm wearing twelve year old shoes and twelve year old underwear and attending summer camp every day, like a twelve year old. I am a virgin who can't drive, I am a virgin who can't drive...

inexplicably I start to imagine irrational, crazy things to deal with the pain: I could get smack somewhere, and shoot up in the window sill while I listen to Otis Redding and gaze down at my neighborhood in the dark. I could dye my hair fierce fire-engine red and drink alone tonight as I watch Bladerunner. I could be more pathetic, but also somehow more cool--because at least I wouldn't be sitting shotgun in my Dad's company car journaling about boys and music and eating skittles while I walk to the grocery store to buy pads. Maybe it's like that awful movie Jack with Robin Williams, and I am twelve but no one has told me yet. Maybe this is Groundhog Day...somehow...

Coming back into my house (as a virgin, who can't drive) I meet the neighbor's dog, Hobbes: he's a black and brown dachsund with a really melancholy expression for a canine. Nobody seems to be watching him, and I suddenly recall a conversation my mother told me about where she talked to the family and they all claimed to hate the little dog; he'd been some Christmas present no one had really had the gumption to take care of. With Red Dye 52 burning a hole in my hand, the sun overhead, a friendless animal and me in the frontyard of my parents house in suburban Washington, I get this weird feeling that I've been given the gift of immortality on the condition that everything will always be "almost" and no real changes will hold.

I'm rescheduling the test. 

The World, The Worldview and Me

I feel like I am on an island. The water that surrounds me is actually carpet, though, and debris and bric a brac and dirty laundry and a weird smell I suspect comes from some dish I forgot to put away a while ago. I'm prone on the two mattresses I've shoved together here, kind of mentally catatonic in that I'm so tired I have to directly channel my energy into performing even the smallest tasks: typing, thinking, one by one. A moment ago I lurched across the room and pulled out these three beat-up albums: Bad, Jackson: Live and Goin' Places. I put Goin' Places on the Stack-o-Matic. I went, places, back to my island, so I could sit and concentrate on breathing. 

I. Man of War: A mild-mannered, vague uptempo anti-war ballad. 

People sob in the streets when celebrities "die" and then FaceBook and Twitter electrify, everyone presumably determined to make sure everyone knows they're sad, devastated, coolly ambient, or totally beyond the celebrity culture and wishing everyone would get over it because they didn't KNOW them, after all...I mean, that's what I do. I hear something sad and my first response is to form an opinion quick, and it had better be a good one so everyone can assume I'm either simpatico or not with the wave, so I'm funny, so I'm employable, so I'm a huge fan. I like to believe this is just the culture's fault and not my actual need for attention going to town on tragedy, especially because my status updates are as much for myself as they are for everyone else I know. I want to have things like death and heroes set in stone; they are the rules I am governed by as a person who tends to glorify romantic, fatalistic popular lifestyles and rock n' roll and pop gods and goddesses. I need to know I loved something intangible, that I I can be made to feel deep things through art, and that I have a real capacity for a general kind of grief. 

This is why I hate those people who pretend that the deaths of celebrities don't affect them at all. For one, this is assuming you have to individually know everyone who has ever died to feel sympathy for something and this strikes me as inhuman--and another, pretending you are above the current of popular music and television and movies is just stupid even if you happen to live in the woods. It seems silly to some but this, commercialist or not, is the reality of our Culture, it is the air we breathe and the soda we drink. And of all things to reject in our oxygen, why reject the ability to feel unity with strangers in Arkansas over someone who, sure, you never spoke to, but I'm sure you have myriad memories associated with? "I Want You Back" was the first song I ever HEARD, in the sense that it was the first song on the first CD I ever received on my first own stereo when I was first old enough to take ownership over anything I liked. I would crank that shit on individual repeat for days, I'm not kidding, days, and while I don't necessarily HAVE to thank Michael Jackson for days spent jumping on a bed or dance parties in high school or ex-boyfriends' inspirations or inexplicable moments of car-ride bliss, I could. I should thank someone, considering I don't believe in God. I know I didn't make everything myself--after all, I failed Precalculus twice. Couldn't make you a paper crane so cannot take full credit for making what surely also became a part of other peoples' memories.

Sidetracking. 

All of Side One, I think about the MNBC documentary with Anne Curry. This must have been whipped up at top speed, in a frenzied newsroom. In Harlem, two women standing behind the camera already brandished T-Shirts that they must have made in bulk at like 5:45, maybe, bearing "RIPs" and "We Love Yous". They're thinking about Off The Wall, probably. Anne Curry's pretty pre-occupied with the most tragic, enigmatic human descent I've ever seen profiled: not one person who has spoken so far has been able to give any real insight into the kind of person this man was who sang my favorite song so well. Did people love him intimately? (As in, not because of his music?) Why, most of all, I'm asking as I watch him go from Bad to Dangerous: this went unchecked, this happened at all, this is what they mean when they say the line between genius and insanity is thin, it's surreal. I'm sad because I think of this living literal shell of a person, a shell maybe even while he was making really fucking good music, and all of these fans willing to send white doves into the air at his child molestation trial they're so enamored but unable to tell you, for instance, what his real laugh sounds like, when he's caught offguard by something hilarious. I sound like a raving groupie most likely--but that's painfully tragic, the living part. That's what you notice when someone dies, but that's what sticks: some kind of sticky, dark form of useless regret and a thousand unanswerable questions hovering in the air like a swarm of angry mosquitoes. 

II. Jump for Joy!: What can only be described as a lighthearted romp

My cousin Lauren used to love the Michael Jackson of Beat It: at six, she would boogie down in front of family reunions and swish her little butt back and forth, and we used to provoke her with harrowing allusions to his many misdemeanors but she would defend her pale idol to the bone, to the point of screaming. Aunts would have to tell us to quit it, to concede that maybe he wasn't a child molester, just so Lauren could get some peace of mind; probably useless reprimands, because we were just being obnoxious and she was a more vigilant fighter anyways. She died two years later in a car crash and of course I've always thought of her fierce expression and waggling hips, the serious devotion, every time I hear MJ on the radio or something. I am not crying about her now--I am not crying at all. Since these associations my MJ adoration persisted into a brief uncontrollable desire to learn the Thriller dance (fulfilled last summer, bitches), but of course this is something that lingers also. Now I'm forced to break down the literal make-up of this music, now on Goin' Places, a more mediocre production from a talented set: is there a formula somewhere in this melody that begs perpetuation? Is this shit, has he been successfully double-martyrized somehow in the timeline of my life? Where do music and memory fuse? Really, I'm talking I suppose about textbook reality and personal perception, but once again I don't see a difference. 

My selection is limited. I idly (that's a lie: rapidly) head to eBay to hunt for Off The Wall on vinyl, sneering at my own cliche and the escalating-before-my-eyes prices. Why am I doing this? I Want You Back and Beat It and Thriller clamor for attention on the discotheque of my medulla but I buy Off The Wall and Thriller, I listen to Goin' Places. I bet no other fan anywhere is listening to Goin' Places. That's not why I'm doing it. I just like it: and that is all, I just LIKE it. Goin' Places is the National Anthem of my Island. The thing about missing people after they're gone, or missing times in your life that passed before you understand what they were, or missing times in your life that are happening while you are missing them, or missing people in love, or missing a person you never met, or being a missing person, is that you want to be able to explain them and commemorate them and speak about them drolly at parties or move on, carrying them with you always. You blast it loud and you should not have to try. You should not have to think. This is what I believe: it should all be feeling, and it should all be about you being allowed to languish in the agony of everything you wanted to eulogize but never got to, every passing pain you need brought up for a moment. We are strapped to mortality while they transcend, and when the documentaries end what will have died a little in me, been commemorated and put to rest, are memories. Things to make you cry now, perhaps just a bit more than before. It's like...a changeover. New emotional property. And it is in a way about You The Man for the World, running totally parallel to You The Icon for The Me.

Does this make sense? I hope not. I will have become predictable to myself. And once my emotional range has been widened and resucitated, regrouped and rehabilitated, what will be left for me is the adult ache, the ironic, adoring fever, and "Goin Places". 

RIP Michael Jackson. I hope so deeply that you are happy now. 

RIP Farrah Fawcett. 

I Got A Brand New Pair of Roller Skates

A List Of Things I Have Thought Today:

*There's something about Chuck Klosterman: right when I feel like he's pretentious or a living, patented Rob from High Fidelity complete with bizarre ideologies and write-offable 'cuteness' he says something that smacks me in the chest it makes so much sense. Reading "Killing Yourself to Live" (lifted from Courtney) and there's this passage in it where he muses about Cotard's Disease, this syndrome where the afflicted is convinced they are dead. I have moments like this a lot, weirdly, and I always think I'm the only person in the world who thinks this--so having it identified was so amazing. Ditto to his articulation of how weird it is to go somewhere just to say you've gone somewhere...I mean I could go on and on and on, but the gist is, I'd like to be trapped in an elevator with him on a rainy day.

*I can't decide whether or not to quit my second job. I feel jipped by the world job-wise this year (oh how obnoxious, Brittany, who isn't?) and I've kind of come to realize that I just honestly don't ever want to spend time doing something I know in my heart to be useless, even for money, again. It's partially cowardice and fear, but I also want to prove to myself I can do it for some weird vanity reason. 

*If I could cover a song and make my own music video for it (which I can. And WILL!) I would do Kiss, by Prince. It would be sooooo hot.

*President Obama smokes. Honestly, my first thought is 'cool!' and I can't really explain why. He seems quite human with a crutch. And also, I am a weak-hearted victim of the subculture, I cannot tell a lie. A lot of the time people look cool smoking. They don't look cool dead or in hospitals or with tracheotomies or black lung or "BAD PERSON" stamped across their forehead or fishing butts out of gutters or wearing Nicotine patches or with yellowed teeth, no, it's true, but the physical act of inhaling a little death and blowing spirals into the air is sexy. I think that's just fact.

*It was very scary riding the Metro today; it felt like being inside of a movie. How horrible for everyone involved in the crash.

*I still haven't made it onto Texts From Last Night despite a few of these winners:

-we're sitting around drinking margaritas and discussing marky mark's enormous dick in boogie nights. this would be like a great episode of sex and the city if these people weren't my parents...

-played rock paper scissors with osmar for an hour last night on the couch at 5am. so stoned we threw the same thing over and over. best party ever!

-dad on juno: it's not like he met her in a club and thought she was 23. this movie is unrealistic.

???

-do you think a water fight will damage my brand new biofit??? fuck it already in car, wet t-shirt party i guess.

*I just feel, in the world, that it should be easier to have sex. If everyone is so desperate, we shouldn't even have to try, right? It should be like the inevitability of seasons changing: if we treat the planet pretty good, we should be able to expect at least a little bit of snow, right?

In summation, I am...troubled.

Credo

"One must be drunk always. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time that breaks your shoulders and bows you to the earth, you must intoxicate yourself unceasingly. But what with? With wine, poetry, or with virtue, your choice. But intoxicate yourself."

Charles Baudelaire

Fell a bit in love last night, was surprised, feels like "Oh, Sweet Nuthin" by The Velvet Underground and the taste of popcorn. Looking for something profound and non-indie to say, but it's really just the best kind of ache, isn't it?

Fireworks

I have been on a handful of first dates: you know the kind I mean. Not the accidental sweetness of an outing of mutual friends that sort of turns into a date, not "hanging out", nothing on the internet or the phone I mean picked up, dropped off, paid for, awkward, scattered conversations and lingering silences, physical contact that feels dangerous in even the smallest increments, fake smiles, reassurances, the wait for the first kiss. The world as I know it (popular culture) tells me that this has been going on forever, this is what has always happened and what will always happen when someone likes someone else they will do this dance, shuffle through the motions, both parties will have to struggle and sort of writhe on the inside trying to figure out if this is worth it, if the interest is enough to pursue. But a problem I have always had in this weird little culture has to do with standards: how do you know when it's worth it? Should I be thinking of budding relationships on a sliding scale, judging by the evening's end whether this is second date-acceptable, third-date possible or long term obvious? I guess what I'm trying to articulate also has to do with fear, and disinterest, and even desperation--let's say we all want it to work out, you go on a First Date because you want to see a future, but it so rarely is either a BAD DATE or an AMAZING DATE. This is an awkward social encounter with a stranger, so if something feels PRETTY GOOD, ALRIGHT/OK, NOT DREADFUL, KIND OF NICE, is it worth following up? This has always felt like a set-up to me, but now I'm beginning to think my standards are too high. You see, I look for fireworks from the very beginning, I dream in passion and conversation and frenzy and the sense of not wanting to end an evening. This is so pretentious, but accepting that average first date feels too rigidly mature, too much like feeding fish and shopping at Anne Taylor and going to bed at 11:30 and the office at 9:00. Why should I settle, I think halfway in, noticing that our conversation has stopped, that we don't like the same movies. But then the Devil's Advocate on my shoulder reminds me I am writing someone off before I truly get to know them. How much does Spark and Instant Chemistry account for in a relationship? How much should we expect from the very beginning? I'd just as soon keep shopping for the person who's car I never want to leave, who's giggle beside me in some dumb movie makes me want to swoon, and who's prickly question or awkward conversational fumble I won't even register, I'm so caught up in the moment of being. First Dates as I know them are too future-oriented anyways, too frenzied, too contrived, as if all the Single People in the world had been sent out on some kind of timed quest by a higher power to find The One, to relax and recoup only when a second meeting was secured. 

What am I doing then? Who am I to whine about loneliness if I challenge every single poor, stumbling gentleman to whisk me off my feet or simply let the friendship fade into harmless flirtation? What I want I can't articulate, I just have the smallest image, the smallest faith, that it exists somewhere. And as much as I don't believe in judging or impossible standards, as much as I hate to complain, as dysfunctional and lonely as I feel sometimes, I'll defer to Carrie Bradshaw on this one: some of us refuse to settle for anything less than butterflies. It's just something we'll all have to remind ourselves, us brave, lonely people, when we're all heading out as third wheels on date night or serving a third sentence as a bridesmaid or buying fifteen dollar watch batteries for our vibrators every week at a store where the sales associates look at you with the most pitying, the most knowing of grins: we are stupid, we are impossible, but we are hopeful and we are waiting. 

Found This Video on the PostSecret Website:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWt5oswXarE&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fpostsecret%2Eblogspot%2Ecom%2F&feature=player_embedded

I think it perfectly explains the reasons for creating an internet persona in the modern age. Very deep, check it out. 

Fits of Bravery: Poorly Produced (Putting it Lightly) Summary of Brittany: 2009

Have decided never to be bored, to take more ridiculous chances and have a whirlwind romance starting immediately. Fave pics from 2008-9 (in no particular order) synched up with first extreme rough cut of the one song I've managed to write on the guitar. My cat is crawling all over me as I write this.

Old song I wrote (Working Title: Romance or the Art of Breathing)

now (with this here melody)

i'm feasting on that agony

foresworn when you promised me

I'd never die alone

lined up like a guard brigade

the boy toys march, they serenade

but plastic is the new charade

so to the flames they go

watch close for you might guarantee 

the queen will take you out to tea

yeah, everyone's afraid of me

that's just the way i show.

chorus/bridge: 

I recognized you from the other day

when we were younger; we were kind

you'd give me this for some that

you could read my mind

so is it sposed to be just you and I?

how bout we sit back and watch the wicked time fly?

candy wrappers and cellophane, all the boys and all the pain, 

diamonds in the pouring rain,

baby.

2. so boys put away your magazines

and wander from your bleary teens

just love the girls who write you things

keep the fear at bay

and girls just put your wands away

no magic keeps them where they lay

it's up to fate and baseball games

that's what the experts say

chorus/bridge.

so here's the game, it's undefined:

the whip back gets me every time

let's try our best to skip the line

I'll carry you for real

but here's the simplest, smallest curl:

you're a boy, and I'm a girl

we live in an imperfect world

and that's all that I know.

Triflers

A wise woman once said:

"No, I don't want no scrubs. A scrub is a guy who can't get no love from me. Hanging out the passenger side of his best friend's ride, trying to holler at me."

There are many things I don't pretend/hope never to know about the mysterious, elusive opposite sex, but the practice of Trifling is not among these. A Trifler, not unlike a Scrub, texts or calls at bizarre or seemingly unrelated intervals and makes plans he promptly breaks. You are left waiting--most often in a very cliched fashion by the phone with hair all done up and nails all filed--to be jerked around later, given noncommittal replies or fumbling "My bad's, what are you doing in the next twenty minutes?" kind of texts. This is Textbook Trifling. I know of no person who deserves such treatment based only on the external merit of his/her good heart and character, but at the same time the whole reason such beings are allowed to exist and walk around untouched or unscorned in this world is because we (I) want them. I enable because I need. It's deeply fatalistic, pursuing a Trifler, yet I find myself fuming while still buying push-up bras or clearing weekends on the offchance I could be...summoned. We ask for all of this and then complain when it happens, and that's how sexism is probably best perpetuated.

Last night talked about Hume, sex and biological tendencies at length with a bunch of girlfriends over a handle of Captain Morgan. Now, have to go to work. Have resolved to spend the rest of this week working, hanging with family, recording songs, writing, working out, reading The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and living a double life that demerits instantly all the previous good intentions--ruthlessly struggling for power via text message with people who likely won't find these "ambitions" interesting. And I'm not even upset about it, I'm just sort of mildly bewildered, when I stop to think. I think.

Pet Names (Before I Forget): Rude Gus, Boba Fet

The Four Moon Planet, Billy Collins

"I have envied the four moon planet." (The Notebooks of Robert Frost)

Maybe he was thinking of the song

"What A Little Moonlight Can Do"

and became curious about

what a lot of moonlight might be capable of.

But wouldn't this be too much of a good thing?

and what if you couldn't tell them apart

and they always rose together

like pale quadruplets entering a living room?

Yes, there would be enough light

to read a book or write a letter at midnight,

and if you drank enough tequila

you might see eight of them roving brightly above.

But think of the two lovers on a beach,

his arm around her bare shoulder,

thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight

while he gazed at one moon and she another.