out with the new... and in with the old

hello.

satire, art, politics, reconstructionist feminist theory, crass humor, stanford law students... this post will be none of the above. so if that's what you're after, please ignore the following.

this is phoebe. writing to you from somewhere at or near the eastern seaboard. still bruised, battered (emotionally and somehow deservedly) and recovering from a truly pathetic case of guilt, catholic and otherwise.

my last days in san francisco were much more and much less than i expected. there were a few people i never got to say goodbye to. i regret that. there are a few i regret saying goodbye to. but really that's not what i wanted to talk about.

i wanted to talk about how it felt lying in bed under the uncovered white duvet woven too tightly and too shiny for comfort looking at e. whom i know so well, who knows me so well... having him tell me thru a bubbly meth haze that i am a cold hard bitch, bitching me out for being a bitch, having him pissed off at me for having slept with another boy, thinking i know he's only pissed at me because i told him what i did so consensually last weekend..... feeling e grab my left loin and squeeze hard so that i could know he wanted it to hurt, punishing me for having "given it up" and not to him.... i said there wasn't going to be any feminist theory in here... so i should stop now before the quote marks above blossom into neofeminist sadistic bromide...

k was a freak but not like me. but he did like me. that was the surprise, and i told him so but only because i was hammered enough and just threw up over all these people at a bar and was so surprised nobody noticed or seemed to care. i was wearing this tight sweater that was dusty rose but it used to be metallic. v got it for me when we were both 19 and catholic. it was part of an outfit he got me so i could look up to par when i met his parents for the first time, but i didn't wear that outfit to meet his parents. maybe that's why i did so "badly" that day and now hang out in biker bars and fall asleep on the couch when i get too wasty to walk.

my mom... just came in here and it was the first time i saw her bald head without the ugly gray cloth she normally ties around it. the fact that my mom's got a bald head which is not totally bad, cause she used to have these huge bushy eyebrows that would embarrass me because she never looked enough like a barbie doll and i wanted my mom to be pretty in a totally generic way when i was a kid and she never was because she had these eyebrows and wore birkenstock sandals with socks on even in the winter and never wore a skirt (even to parties) and i felt totally unfeminine having a mom like that. so now that her eyebrows have mostly fallen out from the chemo she looks kind of cool like a hairless cat, and i think she's so much more beautiful this way than before.

but now she's coughing this awful drawn-out hacking cough in the other room and it makes me feel bad but i don't like how it sounds and it makes me wonder about compassion and how i could have so little of it as to be annoyed by this cough when i know it's just a little fleghm getting coughed up from cancerous lungs...

and i imagine myself squatting on this beach with all these fluorescent clouds melting and prancing across the horizon and i am looking at them, and then i turn around and i see these people swarming lethargically around this fire rubbing their hands together... but they're all too chilly and soon their cheeks start sinking into their jaws and they all look hollowed out like so many aids patients and crack whores and they just keep circling ceremoniously around this fire until they dance their grotesque bony feet into the hot coals and the flames lick at their nappy leg hairs before smoking and swirling round bruised and bony thighs...

together we construct our pyre and then intoxicated, we celebrate its kindling. when the yellow flame is high and snatches at our golden robe-hems, each cell blazes its final burst in solitude, the fatal popping sound of its incineration lost in a cacophonous symphony of identical others.