the habit of being

i have had an epiphany. (just thought you should know). it is this: my Problem Of Late is not due to lack of friends, lack of money, or lack of sex. rather, it is due to lack of literature. somewhere, I stopped reading. i mean, not completely… but picking up Generation X or the fuzzy-handcuff chronicles for a few hours a week at Barnes and Noble is not Reading. i used to Read. my house, in georgia, is practically a library. reading is all but my mother’s full time job.. a week where she hasn’t read four or five novels is no week at all. and i was like that too! I was always reading something! something good! even when I was traveling.. god you should have seen that copy of War and Peace we had held together with duct tape, and our rained-on Rilke and everything.. and anyway, I Need that! I need books. lots of books. Literature, no less. and i’ll probably never have this much free time again in my life, and I’m not reading jack shit. i haven’t read anything really really amazing since The English Patient.. and what was that, a year ago? until now, that is! i absolutely devoured The Sound and the Fury this weekend, and it feels so good. like parts of my brain, parts of my heart even, are getting turned back on… and anyway, I bought Light In August too. and I’m going to go get in the tub and start that one. and maybe I just won’t stop. a fulfilling reading life is oftentimes just as important as a physical one.

. . .

All I want to do is Meet Someone, but I read and write instead. It’s more noble that way.

James used to tell me that if I sat around writing in public, eventually Someone would come up to me, someone who wrote too, and ask me what I was writing about.

I would tell them my whole life story, which is my wont to do, and I’d thus have a friend, or a lover.

No one, in my entire life, has ever done this.

. . .

I decided I wanted to go back to the Mountain. I decided the fact that there is only one coffee shop and no cucumber rolls to be had was workable, considering the natural beauty, the seclusion, the cathedral. To share an alma mater with Quentin Compson’s father and to have my financial aid provided for by Tennessee Williams would make up for having to live in the middle of nowhere for at least three years. However, having taken all this into account, I did not realize until I was already halfway through the application and had paid the fee that none of Sewanee’s merit-based scholarships are available to transfer students.

. . .

Every other week an Indian summer. My nails are chipping. My resolve is slipping. I am making a fool of myself.

. . .

again and again. i had a lovely time too, as always.

one of these days, though, in lieu of a thank you, i’m probably going to need to have this whole situation explained somehow. i honestly don’t have any idea what i’m getting/have gotten myself into. not that not knowing is necessarily a bad thing, but i’ve just never learned how to do the whole casual once-a-week thing. i don’t know the rules, not that i buy into having rules for emotional things in the first place. but anyway, i’m used to superheavy superintense superdrama (i.e., the anti-casual), complete with enough baggage to give atlas lower-back issues, and i’m still kindof trying to deprogram myself.

but hey, one day at a time, they say. today, for instance, i was at the grocery store (gasp), and i actually Put The Jar Of Ragu Back and got onions, peppers, tomatoes, garlic.. I am going to cook something myself. i don’t even know how long it’s been since i’ve done that. months. i feel like a bear coming out of hibernation! very exciting. maybe it’s the wind.

. . .

Sitting around with girlfriends drinking red wine and talking about penises. Talking about Peru. Andrea is going to climb a mountain. Lisa says put it on your credit card, it’s worth it.

I fearlessly ride the metro escalator, tipsy, with my torn suede coat and hobo bag. I haven’t had sex in a month today.

. . .

I rolled out of bed mid-afternoon, dragging the last ten unfinished pages of my book sleepily into the kitchen, where there was light. There is no unread Faulkner in the apartment now. My roommate lovingly ordered a used copy of As I Lay Dying from Amazon.com. Literature As Sex Substitute is my way of life this month, and it may as well be high school all over again.

. . .

I wonder if fiction writing can fall on you, like a sickness.. if one day I might wake up with some other storyline in my head. God, please let this happen to me. I would like so much to be freed of this diary. Please let me discover the third person. Please let me out of here.

. . .

Not so long ago, I was in a room with a hole in the wall. There was a Batman poster, a computer monitor covered with post-it notes, and a muted television set with a fuzzy reception. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing there, but at least I was happy.

I slept with a man and his neighbor’s old black cat. It was after 3 and he fell asleep, so I turned off all the lights and set the alarm clock and tossed and turned. I barely knew him, and that’s what made this lovely to me: when you’ve slept with a man before you’ve even fucked, maybe there’s something there.

Maybe there’s not.

. . .

It’s not only that I don’t want to go home to the dirty apartment I should clean up and the fridge with no food. We threw away the moldy applesauce and there are not even any Poptarts left now.

It’s not that I come into work in the morning and scratch things off my list all day and add more and scratch more and yet always I seem to overlook something.

It’s not just the two hours on the phone with my mother, wherein we conclude that there’s no way for me to go to school for cheap now, the best way to kill yourself is by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge (it’s very hard to fail and you’re washed out to sea), and there are only two types of people in the world - mean and pathetic.

It’s that this was a happy conversation. A laughing conversation. For the both of us.

. . .

I want my Southern accent back. I may as well have lost an arm.
. . .

so it’s the beginning of thanksgiving and i just finished angela’s ashes, which is good for reminding me how much i have to be thankful for. because as much as i worry about having to pay three months of overdue this and that, i know as sucky as that is i can still pay my rent on monday and have plenty of food to eat. and even if none of my family lives here and i’m not doing a damn thing today and everyone i know is out of town, i don’t even eat turkey anyhow, and at least my personal brand of good-for-nothing-alcoholic-father called me from whatever treatment center he’s in this year to wish me a happy thanksgiving. and even when i was at my very lowest, i still lived in a country where i could be standing in a line at a convenience store in missouri or someplace with a rag on my head and hadn’t bathed in who knows how long counting change to buy some tropical skittles and the lady behind me in line would up and hand me fifty dollars saying “you look like you could use a break.”
i cried when frank finally confessed to the nice priest in the brown robe about having his first pint and hitting his mother and sending theresa to hell. i’ve always secretly wished i were catholic.
jenny’s in florida till sunday. maybe i’ll have another cleaning frenzy. or just keep right on reading.. chronicle of a death foretold (marquez) is next on the list.. and then as i lay dying (faulkner, again)
i hope you have a happy thanksgiving.

When I was in sixth grade, we had a school project where we had to ask our parents questions and then present the answers to the class. One of the questions was what is your favorite book. Most of the other girls’ mothers said the Bible. My mother said Light in August. I remember thinking it was such a pretty title.

I took a class on Southern literature once, just a couple-weeks-long section at the GA Governor’s Honors Program. We read some short stories, and watched a movie, where someone told us how Faulkner was a drunk asshole who lied nonstop and was mean to his wife.

Message: It doesn’t make one bit of a difference how fucked up and cruel you are when can write one (or two or three or four..) of the most amazing pieces of American literature ever DRUNK OFF YOUR ASS.

I started to read The Sound and the Fury two or three times as I was growing up. I stopped before I got out of the first chapter, and who could blame me?

I finally read the whole thing last weekend. I’m halfway through Light in August now.

I read this stuff like it’s what I’m made of. It’s like I’ve found my very flavor of misery in words. And maybe I couldn’t tell you why. Maybe I don’t even know. I didn’t think racism and misogyny and bad grammar had so much to do wih me. And maybe they don’t. There’s something though. I’ve never read anything that felt so real.

I don’t like literary criticism. I don’t ever know what to say. I do know that I feel like I’m on the verge of having a nervous breakdown because of a book.

I’ve read a lot of books, and I’ve never had any of them get into me quite like this.. get into my dreams. It’s scary.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

I came home and threw up and fell asleep and then James was here again and we were sitting on the bed (just one bed in here again, and turned the old way) and he was going to kiss me, when a raggedy girl came running through our apartment door, looking for a place to stay. She was a hitch-hiker, like we used to be, and of course we said she could sleep here. For some reason she kept trying to steal my things and I’d have to talk her out of it, and it was very nerve-wracking because they were things that were heirlooms and I really didn’t want to lose them. James would see me talking to her and walk away skulking because he was jealous. (He thought he should be the one she wanted to talk to; he was the one who glorified traveling.) She took a notebook that was my mother’s and I had to follow her outside to make her give it back, but she did, and she hugged me and I gave her my email address and she went away. James just stood there watching from the gate.

. . .

It was late at night, and I needed to go from my great-grandmother’s house in Augusta to my parents’ house in Statesboro. For some reason, I was getting a ride with my roommate and her family. We were on the way there when I realized I had left my cell phone plugged into the charger at my great-grandmother’s. We had to turn back and everyone was very upset with me about it. It wound up taking an hour to get back. When we got there, I realized my phone had been in my bag the whole time. I decided to call my parents and see if my mom could just pick me up the next day when she came up to visit her mother (my grandmother, who recently died). I called and Ray answered in a voice I’ve only ever heard him use once (the first time I talked to him, seven months after I ran away), and I asked if Mom was there and he said “No, she isn’t.” I asked where she was and he said “I don’t know. Probably Mexico.” Before I woke up it was revealed that she just hadn’t come home that day, and had a sawed-off shotgun with her.

Of costume parties and unrequited love. Candy, children. Red fingernails and fingerwaves and dreams of things past. Obsession, and sympathy, and drunkenness. Decadence. Halloween.

. . .

My curls are mad and my head aches and I think I may have molested my friend at the second costume party last night. (Stay away from the punch and the eyeliner.) I came home and vomited in the tub.