benedetto.charlotte

2010-10-29T08:39:00.001-07:00

rats/stars, to a secret girl

2009-08-06T23:51:00.001-07:00

Chin is a mouse tucked into a tiny matchbox bed under a square of olive green wool.

Eyes are subtly colored, and calm, almost cold, and it's hard for me to meet them.

A perfect woman-shaped woman, with the perfect amount of space between everything, perfectly formed.

Hair is the color of the world's cutest potato.

She's like a dream to me. from the moment I saw her I knew she was my destiny. Finding her is like running down the escalator as it numbly climbs up and up. Something I felt in the bed with me, but can never find on waking. Something I could search my whole life for, and see it recede forever.

I will take her and run away with her and knit our hair together in the night while she sleeps. and we'll go on like that with our faces pressed together forever, only ever having to whisper, and never let our cheekbones cool. We will sleep with our faces pressed together. and let each other drool into each others mouths and eyes. and not care. My forearm will grow moist and stick to her waist under her shirt. her hand and wrist will live on my belly. and when we eat we will raise a sandwich with one hand each to our twin mouths. and bite and chew in unison. she will put the lipstick on my mouth and I will put the lipstick on hers. and together we will devour you, giggling, and making sounds like an aquarium. devour you, all the while making sounds like a bathtub filling up, and we'll shit out rats and stars.

Wax Lake, Minko

2008-01-31T11:10:00.000-08:00

WAX LAKE

A slightly attractive young brunette woman with no legs below the knees is crawling up a set of stairs. She is plump and motherly looking. Someone moves her wheelchair up the stairs for her and she hoists herself into it without help. A bus comes down the lane slowly and cannot stop, and turns with great slow turns in the roundabout, eventually losing momentum and crawling with nose pressed gently up against a brick and glass fronted gas station café. Everyone is wearing polyester shorts, hats with foam, Velcro sneakers. The edge of the lake is white. Minerals crust on it, thick, opaque and firm like bacon grease in cold water. It is cold and damp and the air billows with lucid mist. I peek into the bus and a young woman comes down the stairs with a rustling vinyl bag. A live rabbit's head out pokes of the bag, over her shoulder, its big flat eye watching me as she trudges away.

MINKO

A series of 20th Century pickup trucks sleep in a thicket of blinding, diesel-hot sunshine. Dark denimed deliverymen pause for a polite exchange under a silvery, sickle day-moon right above the horizon. They have thick, blond forearms and thoughtful, Mormon delivery. They are tasteless and clean. The gas terminals shimmer under a dark haze—-mosquitoes, and hot exhaust, and the seeping grey mirage of water vapor in the heavy air. The grass is soaking wet. The rain shimmers in the near future like a bell or the train sounding far away. The sun inexorably retreats into a pink smear. Insects take over in the few hours they have left to live before being drowned in the deluge flashing ever closer on the horizon.

THE Greatest Picture of Me Ever Taken

2008-01-24T20:52:00.000-08:00

So what do you do for a living, hataz?

found journal entry from 4/15/2006

2007-11-03T13:37:00.000-07:00

April 15 2006

The beautiful monsters swallow mountains, well, they chew through them eventually. And through the countryside.
They swallow and swallow and reproduce . . . they take things and make them nothings. They want everything and eat everything wantonly-- there are lumps of gold and whole wondrous pearls in their shit.

They are the layers of waste. At all times their stomachs swell against the skin
And rib cage. They are always full and shitting, and always moving on and discussing the next kill, the next morsel, the next feast or recipe. All orifices on the beasts must be taken into account for constantly—the mental one, the nodal bones in the jaw vibrating.

Spitting out words with the mouth and swallowing them in the ear. Gulping in and out.

An Ode to New Womanhood.

2007-09-02T10:52:00.000-07:00

The new woman: an ode.

Dear, sweet sisters, let me start by saying thank you for using plastic applicator tampons. Deep undersea, a cloud of white oblong tubes swells and sighs, then settles on the ocean floor. . . a permanent plastic shrine to a moment of your intimate convenience. Like a cloud of lily petals, your plastic applicators turn and tumble with grace. Thank you for choosing “silk glide” plasticity over the intruding brutality of your own finger. Thank you for being in terror of your own juices, in fear of your own vulgar meats. Thank you, new woman, for your fastidiousness.

Thank you, new woman, new liberated woman, for your toilet seat coverings, precisely manufactured from pulped, waxed and bleached trees. Thank you for demanding these toilet seat covers, so that your buttocks might never touch the same plastic as another’s buttocks. New Woman, what better destiny for the spreading thicket, the arms of forests, than a sheath for your perfect, untouched, superior buttocks? Thank you for your exemplary cleanliness.

Thank you new woman, for reclaiming the prerogative of the village healer through Whole Foods endcaps and “aromatherapy candles.” Thank you for taking back the power men stole from us and giving me organic eye-shadow. Thank you for reviving the words “spurious,” and “cupping,” ear candles, homeopathy. New woman, for your astrology—sweet, sweet exotic and marketable astrology, I thank you. What guidance could I possibly have found in this male-dominated patriarchal society if not for your sisterhood bookstores, your Mother Jones classified ads, your leftist vibrator boutiques? All hail the new Woman, for she is Healer, Witch, wise crone, herbalist, amazon.com preferred shipper and keeper of arcane knowledge.

Oh, new woman, OHHH!--let me thank you again for the sex toys. Masturbation no longer means “shallow, meaningless auto-gratification”—thank you, new woman, because of you, masturbation is “empowerment.” Masturbation is something I choose—not the default setting of loneliness, a bad personality or ugliness. Thank you for training me to make myself come—men cannot be taught or trusted to do so. Men and their five minutes of kissing, their too-fast pulses of pearl jam can’t possibly please the new women. She is a sex goddess, a sex machine-- thus only a machined, motorized, brightly colored vinyl fuck-stick pleases her.

A woman’s natural mate is not a pork-sworded, complex, stinky meat-slab, a woman’s proper mate is a motorized, hot-pink, bunny-shaped piece of silicone. All hail the multi-orgasmic new woman! Lo, how she hath nobly gotten her groove back all over a bouncy chew toy. All hail her pussy you may ejaculate inside of again and again without unseemly odor or pregnancy! All hail her jerking off alone with a blue plastic bird while her callous mate showers or snores! Hip hip! Hurray! New Woman wins again!

Thank you, sister new women, new WOMYN, for radical feminism. Thank you for officially codifying, reinforcing and re-defining all male stereotypes about women under a new brand. Thank you for “eco-feminism,” that no one might think of earnest, womanly workers for the earth without snickering-- therefore we can go on working un-noticed and un-funded. Thank you for the “stay-at-home-mom” that command-within-a-role, for that we all thank you.

New Woman! I hail you and your tamed body- waxed, toned, proana, promia, all hairs under direction, fat liposucted, controlled! I hail your amphetamines and lap-band surgeries! Your implicit trust of all advertisements, your sweet innocent acceptance of images of other human bodies, your naïve and adorable striving to be and look and feel just like the woman in pictures, forever.

Hail “Seasonale”! Hail “Yaz”! Viva “Norplant” and “Nuvaring.” You are truly a pioneer—turning your body into a machine. Turning fertility on and off like a light! Today’s lady doesn’t take orders from her menstrual lining-- she’s the one giving the orders! On our marks, get set. . . Menstruate! Ovulate! Now quick—conceive! Ready. . . set. . . give birth! She, and only she, controls each of her functions with a pink pill, an injected wash of proteins, hormones and enzymes are her handmaidens. New womankind has total medical and technological mastery over her fully submissive body. Her body is the Conception Clubhouse--no boys allowed! Should science prove impotent, and New Woman accidentally conceives—it’s cool, because she has also preserved her “choice.”

Oh, new Woman, this most serious capital C, I especially hail your Choice, your Right to Choose-- the abortions you crave, the privacy you deserve. The only moral abortion is your abortion, good New Woman, good New Wife; you are free to return to the pro-life picket lines as soon as you’ve cleared the recovery room. No one will rat you out to daddy or hubby. Choice! It’s your choice! You don’t even have to TELL the poor sucker who knocked you up before you clean out that womb. It’s YOUR choice, girls, not HIS!

You and only you, have the power of giving life or choosing death. You can always light a “focus” aromatherapy candle. Play some Alanis or Cat Power “post-procedure,” groove on Ani after the “appointment.” Buy a new iPod docking station or some weed and forget about it, kiddo! Hip hip Hurray! Pink is back! Glitter and marabou are back—heels and pointy toes are back, but now we wear them not just to balls, but to work! YES! You can get lumps inserted into your humps. You can get lumps taken out of your humps. You can- truly- have it, ALL: big tits, perfect teeth, voluptuous lips, wide eyes, unlined skin, thick hair, no hair, all these. Woman’s bodies are more beautiful and powerful than ever—slitted and sewn-tight faces, stitched and tightened vaginas, fat suctioned out, ribs cracked off and removed, broken and re-molded jaws, cheekbones and noses, metal and glue and ceramic and silicone inserts under her skin.

This is the dream of the New Woman. Corsets are back, but it’s because we like them now! Nipped-in waists and missile-tits are more popular than ever! Now we get to dress like the 50’s, not have to dress like the 50’s! We’ve come a long way, baby. The New Woman, she is verily—A Superwoman. Isn’t it so much better than the dumb old days, you know: reclining nude in moist brothels, or posing up on that pedestals. . . so much better than the rule of thumb, the barefoot and pregnant days, when they called us the weaker sex?

Your new gray flannel suit

2007-07-18T19:36:00.001-07:00

It is green, moist and very late in the afternoon. A hot springtime in your far youth-- a day like that. You actually hear a cicada hissing nearby. You can actually hear that cicada and the kiss of your tires rippling against the hot, black asphalt, simultaneously. A genuine, very bright green magnolia coalesces next to a mailbox. Best to park here. The car shudders off and there is instantly, a smell of cut grass or horse feed permeating everything.

Coming up on the long, long treelined driveway you see the typical strewn hazard of entitled suburban childhood. Skip rope. Dollies. Chalk and questionable drawings and scribbled out messages. A sound like bells, and one of the little darlings is upon you, a clean white dress like an orange blossom, like frosting. A rolling cherry red tricycle. It's like something out of Norman Rockwell for fuck's sake. She stops abruptly and looks at you. You feel your blood sugar spike as you realize this assignment, your assignment, will really be a piece of cake. Like a piece of diner cake perspiring under glass. Your mouth waters a bit.

"Is your mother home little girl?" Try to sound not like Paul Lynde. You want Garrison Keillor.

"Ye-eesss."

But just as you breathe easily and feel gently the paperwork inside your raincoat there is a shimmer of white from either side and these two flickers of something and it's snapping the meat on your jaw, the hot, black asphalt, somehow you are against the ground, face down, your eyes can't hardly open from the pressure and the soft snap shock of hitting the ground, dear God!

Suddenly and as you feel someone taking your wallet, the asphalt hardens against your face and knees-- all you see is blurred, fractional. Mary janes, and farther off a dollie and your hat, distorted by distance against the hot, smooth street. Shaken, shaking and trying to break free now like a jumping bean. And what the fuck is going to happen now?

Surprised and outraged somehow they got the jump on you, you're hitched, you're down, it's been a full ten seconds or so and you can't beat them-- you don't know what the hell happened. Another moment passes and several small sticky hands have palpated your wallet and confiscated your paperwork.

It's been a long time since you've been in this position, and frankly your knees have had it. Just as you begin a long slow sigh and start to muscle against your bonds, you close your eyes and begin the sigh of someone about to address their captor, it's all over. You are unroped and kicked over gently so quickly you don't realize it. The shock is like that when you are about to fall asleep-- the moment in between sleep and waking when you inevitably dream that you are falling down stairs and when you jump and hit the bottom, you awaken and you are alone. There is no one. No little girl, no mary janes. Nothing but the hiss of a cicada and sidewalk chalk taking on moisture in the heat.

There is a gentle wave to the branches framing a break in the woods. Is that receding sound laughter or the cry of a hound? Did I just get robbed by invisible little girls?

But you don't have your wallet.
And you certainly didn't serve anyone with any very important paperwork.
But you certainly don't have it anymore.
And you have a very, very uncomfortable split on the right side of your face from the almost sickening-sweet thud of your head against the deep black driveway.

Everything is purpling up with the advancing dusk. Everything is very through the looking glass.

You shuffle back to the car where everything is just as you left it. You put the car in gear and motor away as fast as you can manage. After a minutes you pull out your mobile phone and dial a call. It was a terrific day to be a junior g-man.

Remember this for the next time

2007-06-29T22:26:00.000-07:00

This gas-station world, with all the flat horrible surfaces and squares. . . all the electric lights and desolate dirty cheap things. Cinder block buildings and cost-effective high security fencing. Huge noisy signs, and the orange haze, the world remade for cars. . . Advertising. Is this the best we could do? It quite honestly is not an appreciable improvement. We really cut back on death in childbirth, and the yellow fever. . . but in exchange you get plastic fake nails, cigarettes and car accidents. It's gross. Modernity is gross, evil and ugly. Wooden cutting boards are more hygienic than plastic ones. Car and plane and all combustive motor exhaust is like constantly breathing 20,000 year old fermented dinosaur farts hotboxed in a hell furnace. Plastic bottles of water absorb dioxins that make your tits grow tumours. You can't cheat. It's not any better than the bad old days in many ways.

There is a random compensatory reaction and subreaction for every "advancement." The melon-scented cleanser kills the cholera but it also kills your unborn fetus. The sodium benzoate in the endlessly fresh salad dressing combines with the Vitamin C of your carrot to form benzene in your gut. The anti-cancer sunblock runs off your face into the river and makes the male fish lay eggs.

And what of it, every cellphone has enough cadmium and lead and mercury to give you a fine thicking growth or cyst or cancerous mass and no one seems to care. People get "tragedy fatigue," they stop caring about the multifarous toxins and hazards of the world. They stop believing everything, lies, truth, everything.

This is really, really gross.

Two Recurring Places As Settings for Several Dreams

2007-06-24T13:17:00.000-07:00

There are two places I dream about over and over again. The first place is known only as "the roses." By the sea, in a town almost exactly like Pt. Lookout. Only more European. The beach is bigger and more flattened, more urban in demographic and there are long orange cement and pebble boardwalks that are everywhere like in Hawaii. I have a part time job selling jewelry in a pavilion in the shade and the stuff is shiny rocks on leather thongs. There are roses on the walls and there are a lot of stucco surfaces. The house is very much like the house at Pt Lookout but darker, more victorian, greener, more glassy. This place is beautiful but threatening. There is treasure hidden everywhere and there are these hills with long beige tracks running up them, into ominous caves and white terraced abandoned villages. Once in a storm the water crashed and revealed a beautiful shipwreck, covered in moss and slime, with intact violet and opalescent glassware and metal treasure items spread all round it. . . then the next bottlegreen wave crashed over it and it was covered again. There is a beach with gray washes up way high on the sand, where the tide is dramatic and the beach is huge, inaccessible, strewn with boulders, moss, spikes and rebar and all kinds of marine trash. I smell ambergris, I know I smelled it once as a child and didn't know what it was, I know this beach is hiding ambergris and opals and all kinds of tiny bits of semiprecious rocks, the sand has these gleaming gray bands, and the bits are just there, half hidden, waiting to be found. But the green-glass waves are really high and big and intense, and storms come up so fast you could be wiped away in an instant. The beach is close to the house, but the house is staggered from the violence of the shore by these white and brick stone walls. Covered in roses and iron trellises. The streets are gooey and black with tar. Once I was there with Joe in a dream, and
I heard a crash out the right side of the house. When I looked it was a gray helicopter that had crashed in the street, and brought down the tin roof of the porch as well. Another time I dreamed I was nude from the shower, in the upstairs bedroom, and a man came in the unlocked front door, upstairs, pushed me down on the bed and very gently raped me from behind. Then when I turned around it was Adam's friend from somewhere, and I was outraged but physically okay and my brain was telling me that I didn't mind hardly at all, but there was bad darkness sort of in my not minding. Once I was there in a dream and I was selling cocaine and had to escape the police on my bicycle.

The second place is "the house on the cliffs." The house on the cliffs is in the midwest. There are swimming holes and a sepia red river bottom many yards below the house in the ravine. Everything has a wonderful Thomas Hart Bentony green sheen, or the sand by the river is red like a deer. The house is actually a cluster of buildings on a high hill, amongst green hills and
mountains. Its not cold but not hot. There are mountain roads that zoom and bend very fast into the valley. The houses are all this dark red brick and mahogany color and are either a red-bricked, fat and round Richardsonian Romanesque or are a smooth-veneered Adirondack casual. What both places have in comon is that the water is very important. There is always one biggest house, and the whole property is mine, mine, but I don't stay in it, preferring the back house which is littler and closer to the cliff. The land is not the south, I can sense this, and the soil is red, deep orange clay colored. I don't stay in the big house. Sometimes my family is living here, sometimes strangers. In every incident I live in the small house, a cottage or back house which is older and littler and closer to the cliff. The houses are somehow historical, everything is somehow historical, like it was a school or an asylum or a commune, but way back in time. . . there is a smell of the Chautauqua all about everything, although this is Canada or Vermont or the midwest, it has a whiff of that or the Oneidan communities. The biggest house scares me with ghosts or something, it is perfectly modernized and renovated. It is really amazing to see, the Victorian elements perfectly re-pointed and new stair treads, strange passages, superquiet carpeting everywhere. It has a huge beautiful turquoise pool, surrounded by an oak grove, with steps leading down into the backyard from a series of staggered brick porches. There are amazing curved brickwork walls, retaining walls, and structures everywhere, all in Richardsonian excess with multiple styles of decorated brick. The backyard is distinctly gray and stone colored, the pool has curved red brick coping, and round lobed pools of varying depths. The area around the houses on the cliffs is historical and being
developed, there are ticky-tacky little houses with cheap siding and wooden decks in the valley in the cut-up orange-red dirt. My brother in the dream works building houses. The land is
orange clay colored. It is very red. My friends and I take these
dangerous and loopy paths down to the river where no cars and no people are. We swim
naked down there and the river is clean, and there are little fish, its
very untouched. Its very cleanliness is what makes it dark and powerful
and scary.
There is a canyon wash where the cows have trampled to death a black baby bull. It is nothing but flattened hide and stink, I wish there was a skull for me to take but it is already gone. There are lights down in the valley at night, but there are not a lot of people around. One time I can see the job site my brother is working on from my back porch, he parks his truck a little ways from the job site, and wades into a nearby cornfield. . . from the cliff far above the valley I can see him locate a secret pond in the middle of the cornfield. He takes his shirt off and lays it on the top of the corn stalks and it gleams very visibly as he swims around in the pond. Another time I am sitting very sadly in the backyard of the big house, and I see that red oak leaves have completely covered the tops of the pools, like a scaled skin. I am sitting on a gray granite slab looking up at the back of the house, and I am very depressed about something. My mother comes on the scene, appearing very professional, and she has luggage. She greets a little girl, and it probably is my little girl, but I still don't sleep in the big house and I am still depressed.

I suspect that I was nearby this place when I had this recent dream about Joe Quinn's dog, Buddy. I was swimming in a pond that was in the middle of a broad red wood, and the water was brown with leaf tannins, and leaves were everywhere at the perimeter of the pond. I was just playing with the dog and hanging out, and he was pretty far away from me swimming when I got out onto the muddy shore. I was wearing the bathing suit I owned as a 10 year old, and I was sitting in the mud when I saw Buddy come right at me, with a lot of focus and I was afraid. He swam at me as fast as he could, growling, and I just sat there not moving, terrified and confused, and he swam up and out of the water at me, snarling and in one perfect snap, he leaped up and out of the water and bit a rattlesnake's head off that had been sitting right next to me. I looked at the writhing bisected snake all bloodied and slowing and Buddy looked at me like "Yup, I saved your ass."

"Infamous for being Infamous."

2007-06-19T20:07:00.000-07:00

There used to be this girl named Ayah who lived in the CopyCat Building. She was a very slender blonde with a dramatic, grouper like underbite. But in a cute way. She was from Iowa. Her sister came to visit in March of 2005 I believe it was. . . at the Wham City Theatre Night, the very first one, Adam sang "You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth" to her, directly to her, like there was spot on her in the crowd and he referred to her as his girlfriend and soul mate and shit.

Aaron, Kevin and Evie and I did a HORRIBLE five minute terrible terrible skit, which made absolutely no sense, and was written of course by Aaron, like the afternoon OF the show. This absurdist monstrosity was predicated entirely on Evie and myself having a fistfight. The only line worth remembering was 'Are you some kind of bitch?' delivered by Evie to me. The skit itself wrapped up with "Around the World" coming on the PA and the four of us doing a ridiculous dance off stage. I remember somehow I kicked the go pieces everywhere during this dance number and they remained there for the rest of the night.

After the show Ayah introduced me to her sister, who for today we will refer to as "Ikea."

Ayah: This is Charlotte, my neighbor
Charlotte: Hi. Nice to meet you.
Ikea: Hello. Your skit or whatever was really funny.
Charlotte: Heh, yeah. Did you like Adam's song?
Ikea: Yeah that was great.
Ayah: I knew it was going to be like that, I just didn't know. . . it was going to be LIKE THAT.
Charlotte: Adam's awesome. He's a real character.
Ayah: There's a lot of those around here.
Ikea: Yeah, the whole show was really great.
Ayah: (to Ikea) Charlotte's infamous, like an infamous character around here.
Ikea: Oh, really, well I wouldn't have guessed. (smiles)
Charlotte: Infamous?
Ayah: Wouldn't you say?
Charlotte: Infamous for what?
Ayah: You know, just around the building.
Charlotte: But infamous for doing what?
Ayah: Well I know you painted that sign on the garage door.
Charlotte: The landlord paid me to do that, it's hardly 'infamous.' I'm an artist. (laughs)
Ikea:
Charlotte: Usually people are infamous for doing something. Usually something BAD.
(here I look directly at Ayah's lippy lippy little blonde paralegal head and smile at it.)
Ayah: Well I guess. . . I guess you're infamous for being infamous.

How I Ruined My Life, Part the First

2007-06-19T14:49:00.000-07:00

First of all, let me start off by saying *I* ruined it. It wasn't my parents, or my ex-boyfriend/girlfriend, wasn't my friends, or some pusher or pimp. It wasn't my teachers, the police or my pastor, it wasn't some molesting stranger or my shitty roommate or anything like that. I ruined it myself and only I myself can be blamed for doing that. It wasn't the fucking government, the "administration," it wasn't a bureaucratic error or overblown typo. This is the true story of how I ruined my life.

I was born, and then I began to eat. This was my first mistake. After that, it was all downhill. If I had failed to take to the breast, or if I had refused nourishment and withered it would have been less expensive and a lot less trouble for everyone involved. The small disappointment of a defective babe would be far easier to fade than the cavalcade of minor errors, major missteps and waterfall of whoopsie-daisies that followed as I grew.

My second mistake was not running away from home when I was nine. I chickened out. I made several half-hearted attempts, most of which coincided with my mom's interest in church or some new-age thing she had just discovered. I also blew the chance to become a ward of the court, and to be placed in exciting, educational foster care.

Had I just pushed my father's rage a bit more, or ran around naked in the street or something, I could have been somebody. I ruined my childhood by playing in the garden hose, messing around in the creek catching crawdads and begging for riding lessons. I blew my chance at genius and greatness by doing Girl Scouts and liking Nancy Drew instead of danger and strangers on motorbikes.

When I was fourteen, I knew I was in trouble when I broke my brother's arm. The amount of psychotic rage contained within me could not be bounded by the tiny preadolescent bod, so I got fatter and these dramatic swellings happened all over the place. If someone had kidnapped and trained me to be a super-warrior in the summer of my thirteenth year, the world would be a better place.

That summer, I grew strange soft tits and steatopygous buttocks. The sex-parts grew so fast my skin stretched apart and it's never been the same. It was a mistake not to run away and become a child prostitute, I know that now. It was a mistake not to become a documented athiest/agnostic and to use this as a prybar to becoming an emancipated minor. I pussed out. I didn't have the guts to do anything more than give a few all too typical handjobs and blowjobs to geeky boys my own age I found over the internet.

I again chickened out in my teen years, when I was young enough but still nubile enough for an assortment of internet pedophile-paramours to spirit me away to another life. I know now if I had let Mr. Ott and his sleazy buddies meet me at the Wendy's in Tyson's Corner, I would have had a better time of it, with meeting new people, lots of exercise and healthy experimentation. Hell, I could have even come out of it with a cash settlement or the basis for a best-selling memoir. But I blew that opportunity, for sure. I grew up normal, unexploited, and bored.

When I was seventeen, I was 5'1" and I weighed 185 lbs. I never did anything like join a band, exercise (unless it was sex), protest for political reasons, learn computer programming, or make out with lesbian girls. I literally only got drunk one time during all of high school and I didn't like pot so much because it was too expensive. I had a job as a nanny and a neurotic, redheaded Jewish boyfriend who used me as a cover for his homosexuality; I think we did it all of five times in 2 years. When he went to college, I had a real boyfriend, Charlie Funk, and we immediately screwed each others brains out in every public park from Reston to Baileys Crossroads. Stupidly, I was on the pill.

I should have let Charlie Funk knock me up with punk rock triplets, or I should have gotten him to marry me. I really loved him, and his parents were insanely rich. It was foolish and a mistake to let him go. He was 6 foot 6 and really wild fun, with a great imagination. I should have gotten him to elope with me, and this hesitation ruined my life, I know now.

(Charlie Funk met this woman Monica, who won't allow him to see/speak to any of his old friends or women he dated, no matter how long ago they were involved. . . so my hesitation ruined Charlie's life, too, in this respect. Monica still calls my answering machine periodically to say mean and crazy things. I haven't seen Charlie in 8 years.)

But back in time again. . . I was seventeen, and never once tried cocaine, or heroin, or prostituted myself, never once. I turned eighteen without never having affiliated with eco-terrorists, vandals, addicts, gutter punks, phreakers, or committing a single fire or stink-bombing, without putting my capable hand to gang-related murder or assault. What a waste! I never once panhandled or huffed anything!

I foolishly graduated high school, and I was late to the graduation. They had ordered for me a XXXL graduation gown which hung on me like a horrible joke on all fatties. Like the drape for a van, like a nylon parachute. This graduation gown flowed out and over the auditorium seat and dragged on the floor when I walked. It was so big it had to be a cruel joke. Fuck you, Langley High School of McLean Virginia, no, I will not forgive you, fuck you. I wasted this opportunity for mayhem, editorial comment and all meaning-- I walked across the stage and didn't protest anything except I refused to shake my principal's hand. if I knew then what I know now, I would have set that fucking gown on fire, with me in it.

For a year after I graduated high school, I commenced trying to wreck and lay waste to my youth in earnest. I immediately enrolled in Community College, which killed my soul in a million small ways. I bought a 1976 Nova, which was the greatest car I ever owned. I got a job running a frame shop (shudder) and a night job delivering pizzas (healthful). I ate a whole medium pizza and drank 6 Cokes a night. I was a vegetarian and my brother was really my only friend. I did NOT get laid. I smoked a pack of Merits a day and a little pot, but nowhere near enough for me to stop bullshitting my youth away.

Part of the problem I had was I'd just take the first offer that came along-- for jobs, for sex, for the car, friends, everything. So I ended up with a baseline or below-averaged level everything. I had many, many arguments with the cops and rent-a-cops of Northern Virginia Community College-- mostly about my use of the studio. Had I been smarter, or at all conscious that I was ruining my life-- I would have spit in that cop's eye, and let him arrest me. After about a year of this, I applied to a third rate college outside of Philadelphia and moved there. For literally no reason. It was the first school to accept me, so I went for it. I was nineteen.

I moved into the first apartment that was available. I was from the suburbs, and couldn't walk anywhere because I was so fat and lazy. Part of the reason I dropped out of this third rate public college in Pennsylvania was that I was fat, lazy, and had taken an apartment too far away from school. So I pissed a thousand or two dollars away, and stopped going to class. A far more interesting way to ruin my life on the horizon: sleeping with older men from work!

At this point I was about 200 lbs, I wore size 39 pants and a 44 bra. I was big, ugly and fat. I dyed my short hair black and I smoked a pack of Merits a day. I drank wine from the box, Coors light at the bar, and did not smoke any pot or do any drugs. I was a fucking loser. I had applied to a number of jobs at the local malls (Concord and Christiana Malls of charming Delaware) and of course I took the first one that accepted me, because I was trying to ruin my fucking life evidently.

When you're nineteen or twenty, older men (read 30+) will bone you, because you are an idiot and they are 30. It doesn't matter what you look like, because these guys are older and know you're young and tender and untainted by the STD's. I know now I should have robbed each of these assholes for their CD collections, musical instruments, cars and safes full of money, in that order. One guy, I actually had the key to his house. . . I blew that chance to make something of myself by simply sliding the key under his door one day and moving away, instead of going in and turning all the faucets on and having at the valuables. I regret this choice to this day. One of those assholes had a signed Warhol sketch. I. . I. . wasted my life.

After an enormous hiatus of idiocy, working in retail, eating everything except animals and their delicious excretions, smoking cigarettes, never reading, writing or making art, I had this terrible attack: I felt like I was ruining my life. I felt it. I made a world class U-turn on new year's eve. . . I quit my job, I quit my stupid secret older boyfriends, and I moved back home with my parents. If you want to know, I actually liked that song that came out about sunscreen being really really important. This is how much of a fucking loser I was.

part the second continues in a moment.