pretty on fire, pretty high-wired

Whenever I go into a new situation, new school, new job, I have this person that I pretend to be for a while. I have the dark need to impress people my own age and I do it via a very specific persona that is nearly as transparent as it is deeply pathetic. Anyway, even so, she is still very cool to me and I like her a lot.

I really wanted this blog to be for her: a funny ironic thing that I could link to on my public facebook and post picture upon picture of my fashionable interests. But I'm really such an instinctively stupid idiot goon. A light example to further illustrate the point: recently, one of my cooler ex-coworkers came in to work. I tried and failed to make clever, witty conversation with her, and she in turn told me about a dream she'd had about me. In the dream, I had been featured drinking a huge pitcher of red wine and desperately claiming it was dragon blood. My other coworkers listening in laughed and laughed, commending her on her deeply accurate dream portrait. This is, somehow, the story of my life.

So this is the part where I abandon all semblance of trying to make this "a thing" and default to chattering about my dumb feelings.

This is stupid, but this evening I had the occasion to get super angry. It wasn't one thing, or even something big, and nothing really happened. But since I locked myself away in my room, I had the chance to kind of think about it without employing my usual shut-it-down methods of distraction-forgetting. And it occurred to me that I really have no ability to handle any sustained degree of legitimate anger like an adult.

A friend recently asked me what my angry music was, and I surprised myself (and surely disappointed him, a great connoisseur of metal) by not really having any. I thought about all the times I have been the most angry in my life and how I felt and how I dealt with it. I suppose I saw some themes: feeling helpless or frustrated or trapped. I get mad sideways. I very rarely lash out. I'd like to say I'm just not an angry enough person to have rage-out music, but I think the real deal is I don't really allow myself to express or even really feel anger.

Anyway so tonight I got mad about nothing, and then enjoyed it for about 5 minutes. Oh how I lurched and stormed around my cluttered room like a Gothic hero! (That's a nice thing about our house, in spite of the possums in the shower curtains and no heat, it is really a great place to lurk about--lots of vantage points for moody staring. Sometimes I like to get up from what I'm doing, pace around the dining room and then glower out the cold window into the grim backyard, contemplating gloomily.)I used the energy to fuel a frenzy of destructive organization and cleaning in which I hurled old worn out shoes and bras at my poor trashcan like a nutjob. Then I started to cool off. I felt a little sick, poisoned. I drank a lot of shitty bubble water. I put on my blue dragon pants. Eventually, I crawled into bed, the most defeated girl.

I don't really know where I'm going with all this. I guess like I said: it is pretty stupid.

I was advised to work on my writing today, so I made one line of one dumb poem that doesn't exist yet. I suppose it is something of an angry line. It goes like this:

I strip the tired rosemary

and is about when I mangled my rosemary plant for use in dinner tonight. Oh, yes, quite bad, even for just being a line. But, but, hey. It's been like 6 months. I looked up a weird brainstorming session I did this summer about "my second book" and it was way worse. Oh lolololol summer Jess.

In case anyone wanted to read any real poetry, here is a link to some. Please don't read into the fact that it's about a dead girl named Jess. A man stopped me and read it to me randomly at AWP last year, (I told him after he read it that my name was actually Jess, and he looked at me like I was lying, but fuck, whatever, he's the dupe reading poetry to strangers, don't judge me motherfuker.) and I have liked it ever since, as well as the book it is from too, Sharks in the Rivers. We're all in a little trouble, aren't we?