Month: September 2024

“Cocky Chick” outfit

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The staircase in my art deco dream pad is dramatic and steep. When you turn the corner, you’re surprised with a giant oil painting in a gilt gold frame by my friend Skyler Pierce of girls riding horse-sized roosters in the yard. I remember a few years back, newly single, bringing a beautiful man upstairs, eager for his reaction. “What do you think of my giant cocks?!” I asked, emphasizing the consonant cluster(f*ck), as I turned on the neon light I had in my bedroom then. It read FEAR, ILLUSION, DECAY and cast a sickly green pallor over the skin. “I’m…a bit afraid…of big birds,” he said in his dreamy British English accent. It was then the truth struck me like a bolt from the blue(jean): It’s me. Hi! I’m the problem. It’s me. Or if not me, at least my taste in art. I borrowed this outfit from a story slammer to wear last night at Story Story Night’s SLAMMER OF THE YEAR, because the team I coached decided to wear Canadian tuxedos. We …

“Not Going Back” outfit

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What a month and a half, no? The day of Trump’s near-assassination, I happened to be in Challis with a group of circled-up women, outlining rough plans if a Civil War breaks out after the election. You know. Just in casesies. (Waves white…er….American flag.) I know what I would do, I thought to myself, getting up to go….anywhere else….I would stand in the middle of the road and say, “Flatten me now, please and thank you. It’s too late to make me breeding stock, joke’s on you.” Putin-fleeing-journalist Masha Gessen wrote right after Trump’s election in 2016 about the apathy that sets in after a too long spell of the violently absurd. It felt almost surreal to feel….what is this strange thing?…after Biden dropped out and Kamala was vibing her way into the presidential race. Then it popped into my mind, a long-forgotten phrase fully formed by the wise words of Sarah Palin: “It’s that hopey changey thing.” It’s been a long, long time, hopey changey thing. Nice to feel you again. Custom Leather Works …

“Blowin’ in the Wind” outfit

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What if you’re so late to bloom you go to seed instead? Motherf…nature. I cannot pinpoint exactly what went wrong this year but it started with sudden weight loss and insomnia and hair loss and skin eruptions and severe unrelenting anxiety and you know when you learn new words to help better define your world? I highlighted ANHEDONIA in the Oxford: the inability to feel pleasure. “Ahhh, sounds about right. Dead-voiced yay.” Dictionary footnote: Maybe just don’t get off your meds, ok. “My books will be my kids,” I’ve said since I was 20. But what if I never wrote any books, and it’s too late to have kids, and what if I always thought all the gutting and hilarious and hideous things that happened were the ultimate storytelling fodder, but what if I was just dissociating from my real life, fictionalizing it in real time, instead? Here I am, 44, looking at myself dead-eyed in more ways than one. A pale vintage childless cat lady in a desolate red state in a white vintage Caddy …