rear window

so there's these neighbors across the way. i'm convinced that they are vampires because as far as i can tell, they don't sleep. they exist constantly in a wakefulness fueled by guinness and diet coke because those are the cans littered on their balcony rim like soldiers left for dead on the battlefield.

it's not that i stalk it's just that they are there. every time i look up from my perch on the couch where you can always find me at most hours when i'm not at work/sleeping/eating, i see their figures moving like lost souls, always moving and searching. logically i know that they are likely constantly on drugs and locked within the expanses of their neurological connections. yet i can't help but wonder what they see when we're all asleep. what they notice, what they hear. do they hear the homeless man who rattles our trash cans every morning looking for recyclables cry at night? do they look up and see those stalwart stars who dare blaze their light, la smog be damned?

i also wonder what they think of us- the neighbors across the way with the glass doors. undoubtedly they will see his curly head and my dirty blonde/auburn/idon'tevenknowanymore hair, usually tied up into a messy bun, out of the way. they will see us holding glasses of wine, usually white, sometimes red, sipping methodically as we consume the entertainment that we work so hard for during the daylight hours. i wonder if they think we are obnoxious- stopping every few minutes to gaze and kiss and touch and feel, still feeling awestruck by the majesty of love.

i wonder if they mistake the warm cocoon of monogamy for being boring. i wonder why i care.

jonathan dean sisto

I don't trust my own memory. I write to remember.

It's sadly enough an easy thing to forget in the wash of the day to day.

Los Angeles is like a vortex, a literal haze that sweeps away the prior years of existence so that the years within its valleys feel like centuries.

I'm an adult now. At least that's what I'm told.

But I can't help feeling that whatever adulthood is (the crushing of idealization and naivete?) began in August of 2005.

Real conversation. That's what brought us together or at least that's how I think of it now. I'm sure that we had those conversations that every teenager has but at the time our confessions and observations seemed revelatory. We were smarter than everyone else and could solve the world's problems in your Jeep Cherokee. 

Luckily we had gotten the hard part over with. One mismatched fumbling and pressing of lips at a school dance ruled out love so we were free to be friends. Of course that didn't stop you from the occasional seductive look. You seemed to give the entire world that look. Some weaker libidos fell prey for it as they do. They would steal your sweatshirts and never give it it back, probably clutching it at night on their pink sheets, the musky smell of man in their nostrils.

It's amazing how vivid your smell is to me yet I can't remember what I did last Thursday night. The memory is not linear- a chronological organization of what happened when. It's a jumble of sights/smells/feelings/chemicals that somehow make up a you-ness. The remnants of the past sometimes step forward out of the haze and announce themselves like they are tonight in this Ralph's parking lot.

These snatches of you are so clear now but will likely fade into the background once I awake tomorrow. 

What I'm trying to say is I'm sorry. What I'm trying to do is not forget. 

My goldfish brain is trying, Jon.  

the megan

A few minutes into her visit with plastic surgeon Dr. Jeffrey Epstein, a 40-something brunette pulls up a photo of Megan Fox on her iPhone.

But it’s not Fox’s nose or cheekbones that the patient wants.

“This is how I want my eyebrows,” she says.

The doctor smiles politely. It is the third time in a week he’s been shown a picture of the actres

“I assured her that it’s not really necessary [for me to study the portrait], because I have the shape of Fox’s brows and the direction of hair growth imprinted in my brain,” says Epstein, recalling the client’s consultation last month. “The look is incredibly popular."

Just as Jennifer Aniston’s “The Rachel” was the most requested hairdo of the mid-1990s, in this boom time for cosmetic enhancements, “The Megan” is the must-have eyebrow of 2012.

Powder and pencil can only go so far. With the bushier look back in vogue — fuller arches are the signature style of everyone from Kim Kardashian to Kate Middleton — specialists such as Epstein have seen a 30 percent rise in the demand for eyebrow transplants.

“Over the last two years, it’s got really big,” adds Epstein, who performs between 12 and 15 eyebrow surgeries in New York and Miami every month. “A lot of women want [to copy] the Kardashians, but Megan Fox is far and away the favorite.”

This is real life.

mal de coucou

Just like that, she was back in Junior High again.

Except the secret this time around is not howAshley got felt up by Brian at the Winter Ball and worst of all, liked it. It's the kind of secret that is shared in bathrooms, scratch that, bathroom stalls. The planning, the whispers, the illicit glances, the rush, the seemingly intractable bondage that forms under the guise of a secret. 

The first time she tried it, it made her feel the same way she did when she lost her virginity. It was like those cautionary tales had seeped into her bones, telling her what to feel (which was dirty), that nurture finally triumphed nature with a score of 5 to 4. 

Eventually that feeling, not unlike the pain of a recently broken hymen, dissipated and the pleasures of the act surpassed the initial guilt. How nice it was to finally know what to say at parties, to know what to say to fill those scrambled silences when everyone is racking their brain for the next topic. In fact there was so much to say and she just had to keep up with her captive audience who hanged on every syllable that spilled out or at least, so it seemed. 

How delicious it felt to finally have this world be her reality, a world that had seemingly only existed in Facebook albums of the beautiful and glamorous. Those quotes that ex-sorority girls might as well inscribe on their gravestones- "Well-behaved women rarely make history", "Dance like nobody's watching/Laugh like you've never been hurt"- suddenly had both relevance and reverence. 

Of course there would be those times, especially those late hours when the sun threatened to rise, when it almost seem like this new life was a hallucination of her own wanting. Her new friends seemed like ghosts that faded away with the dawn, leaving her with a lingering, gnawing ache that seemed to only be subsided with a few spoonfuls of peanut butter. She existed in their clouds of chatter, she subsisted on the inclusion of their company, bathroom or no, but couldn't put away the most earnest of her desires that creeped up upon her when she was alone in her bed; to hold her baby blanket and have someone who loved her sweetly stroking her hair.

you know what you know

If earnestness is the hallmark of youth

then cynicism is the patron saint of adulthood

Let's examine this in the most organic of ways- music taste which tends to fluctuate with the listener's state of mind, being, whatever.

When I was young, flush, and in love with the notion of love, my favorite song was "Bittersweet Symphony" by the Verve. 

Although the message is trite, the soaring violins and classical hook seemed to endow it with sophistication.

Night after night, I would lay in my bed listening to the song over and over in my headphones, indulging the secret fantasies that always plague the young- a crush noticing me, a moment in class where everyone realized my brilliance, a singing performance that caused the crowd to stand and cheer, finding friends that understood me, etc. 

The song remains a time capsule- holding in it all the pain, awkwardness, and confusion  

It's amazing what ten years can do. 

The sweeping majesty of the violins have given way to the anarchic howl of guitars on my current and probably forever favorite, "Where is My Mind" by the Pixies.

 If you look lyrically at the two, there is a similar core theme- the recognizing of living in a stifling intractable society. 

Whereas the singer of Verve wants to change and liberate himself from the confines of reality

the Pixies actually do so

choosing absolute inebriation and obliteration of consciousness as a way to avoid coming to terms

Literally losing themselves, distancing themselves from reality

Maybe we get that way because avoidance and cynicism is an easier pill to swallow

As time escapes and we see that our lives don't match up to our grand narrative that we've constructed,  as we begin to compromise our dreams, as we look at the omnipotent pillars of society that are seemingly intractable, how are we supposed to hold onto those candy-colored dreams that pervaded our inner lives? 

Some choose to avoid that pain. Some choose to keep themselves in a haze of substance.

And some choose to fight.

cut open my sternum and pull

I'm no stranger to pain

There's this odd little game that we play sometimes.

A game that seems simultaneously a universal dance for two but also utterly ours

The game is usually set in motion after some sort of catastrophe either viewed on TV or through hearsay

We'll look at each other, happy and safe in the couch/on the bed, but briefly imagine the other in that situation

The fear grips us at a safe distance- the knowing of us currently being safe but the knowledge of possibly losing the precious object a faint but threatening reality

Joel and Clementine flirted with this dance too

She would pretend to smother him with a pillow and he faked dead

until she pestered him enough that he awoke 

like a modern day Lazarus

This play is all fun and games until the play becomes reality

At the thought of actually losing him, my chest seizes and I lose my breath

As long as death is a distant specter, the game remains fun

Mitigating the fake pain of a fake passing

exitstrategy

1. Run away to Brooklyn. Rent an apartment with a claw footed bathtub. Commute to Manhattan during the week and put in hours at a menial publishing job. Drive home to New Jersey on weekends to swim in the pool and cry to your mother. Smoke Gauloises on the fire escape. Let yellowing issues of Rolling Stone and Vogue pile into a protective fortress around your bed. Listen to Cat Power. Fall asleep mostly naked beneath the duvet watching Sportscenter and drinking earl grey. Date a Yankees fan and kiss his hands on the 4 Train into the Bronx.

2. Run away to Barcelona. Eat milk chocolate magnum bars and drink cheap champagne. Burst into charming fits of laughter whenever you get embarrassed about butchering the Catalan language. Wear denim cutoffs, Dr. Pepper chapstick, and very little else. Go dancing at 3 a.m. Whiten your teeth. Tan your shoulders. Braid feathers into your hair. Perpetually wake up with sand caught in the thin cotton sheets of your tiny bed. Listen to the Rolling Stones and kiss all the longhaired boys you can get your hands on without ever having to apologize.

3. Run away to Los Angeles. Sublet a studio in Venice three blocks from the beach. Listen to top 40 radio. Go to Chateau Marmont and charge drinks you can’t afford to a long-dormant credit card. Sleep with a television actor who lives in the valley. Sleep with a musician who lives in Bel Air. Break things off with both of them when gas prices begin to rise. Find Gilda Radner’s star on the Walk Of Fame and swallow a sob when you see the filthy cement around her name is cracked. Walk through the Venice Canals until the sun sets and you forget your own name. Call your mother crying from the parking lot of a 24-hour Ralph’s supermarket. Tell her you want to come home.

4. Run away to Paris. Gaze at the pink and pistachio glow of macarons in the window on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Listen to Joni Mitchell. Meet an Argentinean man in the Latin Quarter for drinks. Melt into his accent and kiss him goodnight, but return to your apartment alone because his face doesn’t look enough like the man’s you are trying to forget. Get lost in the Richelieu Wing of the Louvre, admiring Napoleon’s fine red damask. Walk alone along the Seine in an old dress, ten-dollar shoes, and an Hermes scarf. Fumble with the locks on the fence overlooking the river. They all have lovers’ names etched into them and the girl who left the red heart-shaped lock has the same name as you.

5. Run away to Martha’s Vineyard. Write heartbroken stories during the day in front of a large fan that blows curls of humid hair across your tired face. Take a waitress job at The Black Dog at night and try hard not to drop too many trays. Learn to ride a moped. Pretend you’re a Kennedy. Listen to Carly Simon. Eat hand-churned ice cream out of waffle cones. Visit the flying horses and consider how many girls just like you have sat on the same horse clutching for the same brass ring. Get stoned and dance barefoot down the length of the eroded Jaws beach. Date a Red Sox fan. Yell at each other during baseball games, and then kiss and make up between tangled sheets.

thestoryofourlives

You want to know why I love TV?

We're always trying to look for ways to validate our existence- whether it be through

religion, power, drug use, whatever it is that allows us to connect with something

higher- something intangible that makes us feel more connected, less alone, the truth of the triviality of our lives forgotten for that moment

And here we are, a species that has created a whole other medium

a world that we can escape to for an hour or a half hour

where every action a character has generally affects the other

the effect of the action giving that action meaning and depth

TV allows us to perpetuate the notion that each of our lives has a narrative

We aren't alone. Our lives have meaning.

The cruel joke is that TV isn't reality- it's a construct of our fantasies and fears

The genius of the human race is that language and storytelling allow us to communicate our experiences to make us feel less alone and engender the idea that our lives have direction and meaning

The tragedy is that it's a lie.

keep your body still

sex without religion is like cooking an egg without salt. sin gives more chances to desire. —luis buñuel

hollow

I'm convinced that we are all living a movie of our own lives.

Character traits used to be something that you gleaned from social interaction.

That delicate touch and go where you test their humor with a joke

ask questions and quietly await their time to share

the battle of determining pecking order that occurs within a handshake

The time that a friendship takes to unfold- the ebb and flow of contact is half the beauty of it 

You begin to treasure those that have withstood the test and trial of time

keeping the count of them like rings on a tree stump

Nowadays you have thousand half friendships

little seedlings that you tend to here and there 

with a birthday post or a direct Tweet.

You have the modes of connection but nothing really happens

Internal reflection has ceased to exist

There are now multiple modes, including this very blog, where you can blast your thoughts

into the wide nothingness that is the web

hoping to catch some attention with your verbal bait

And through these half thoughts we construct the screenplay of our lives

Yes it's nice to look back at that wistful nostalgia at my written and recorded thoughts and desires

when I was sixteen, eighteen, and twenty-one

but I find that those memories are elusive and hard to catch

the culprits either being too many nights of willful drinking 

or some unnamed syndrome where once  you write it down

you allow your brain to not to have to remember

It doesn't take much to get a sense of who I am

I've carefully chosen the bands, TV shows, movies, and activities that indicate the person I am

or at least how I want to be seen

No one needs to know about my childhood love of Animorphs books

or that I bite my cuticles raw

it's not cool to know these things

What you should see is the tastemakers indicating 

that I am a white, young, relatively intelligent female with psuedo-serious taste

We are our own publicists-figuring out our brand and sticking desperately to it

fearful of being found out

And so we walk

bobbing around each other carefully as to not make physical contact

iPod headphones in, oblivious to passersby and the world around

listening to the soundtrack to the film that scores our life story

you can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness

Now there's enough distance so it feels like that happened to someone else.

In all these cases, the damage was done before you knew you were damaged. 
The worst part was that, as the years passed, these memories became, in the way you kept them in a secret box in your head, taking them out every so often to turn them over and over, something like dear possessions.

I never expected for it to all come back when I cracked the cover.

A friend had given me a cautionary disclaimer: "I had to put it down because it reminded me of my past relationship- it made me cry"- which rather than steering me away piqued my interest. The apple just hovered there and I simply had to taste it.

 As I read, what always happens when we read happened.
In stories of love and loss, we always look for the parallels to our own life narrative, the characters that we read into being mirrors of ourselves, the relationships that end up spanning chapters or are reduced to a footnote.
 Reading it, reflecting on the relationship that I had and lost, losing that safety of separation that time gives, hurts but it's a kind of numb pain.
Like when novocaine starts to kick in
but you can vaguely understand that what they are doing is painful
so you remain in this paralyzed state
 the knowledge of the pain that you should feel but strangely don't, hurting you more than a physical reaction

Her story parallels my own in ways I can never admit aloud
the intoxication of knowing that you are pivotal force standing
between life and despair for another
it's the way heroin might feel if it were a conscious being
And you know as you've known all along the more that you are consumed-
the stronger the addiction
That's what that relationship was
not love but an devouring force

 The truth was that we both were- on either ends of spectrum- addicted
Him to me the object against loneliness
and me to being the object
Objectification feels attractive when you slip it on once in awhile

But the cold hard unvarnished truth
is that I didn't have enough strength to leave
The deeper he took me into the forest- the more closely I followed
He took me to place that that the preening sorority girls
Who found absolution in the bottom of a bottle
couldn't even comprehend
but at the end he pulled himself out and left
I became a person that you could leave.

We haven't spoken in two years.
I've fallen in love again.
I am happy.
I won.

  You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her make you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you know who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences.

sartorial concerns

I never used to get it...not really.

 I could appreciate the benefits of being sartorially-proficient the conversation starter that a new pair of shoes can bring etc. but despite trying to look nice, I had always suspected and covertly bought into the notion that to be obsessed with fashion was to be preoccupied with the surface and concerning oneself with fabrics, patterns, and foot coverings belied an individual who had nothing of substance to say-as surface as his or her preoccupations

I haven't entirely changed my view

I still think that the fixation on the changing trends and the in ness and outness of certain silhouettes, patterns, looks, etc. are time wasted.

I get food- that's my thing.

Food makes sense to me- provides nourishment, brings communities and people together, reflects traditions, culture...

But now I get the artistry
I get the preoccupation
Whether you claim or care or not, there is a level of consciousness one has to have about their appearance
Even when you are "not giving a fuck" in your sweats and dirty tee-shirt
The choice to wear those things is the choice of how you want to be perceived
This paradox emerges- not caring but you care about not caring
Despite this
I don't know if this is girly, or silly, or superficial for me to say
But I can't help liking the way a new pair of shoes, dress, or piece of jewelry makes me feel.

separate togetherness

There's something quite zen about an afternoon to while away, a glass of wine, a book, and a bar.

Safe solitude amongst the masses. The clink of silverware against plates. The orchestral banging of pots and pans in the kitchen. The high tones of women's voices offset by the low murmurs of their male companions with the occasional monkey howl of an infant whose parents thought they were ready for the decorum of a public place. They all harmonize together into a comforting chaos and I fall into it, both apart and not a part of the scene. When my engrossment falters, I like to look around me and wonder what brought the patrons to this place. Sunday, this barfly perched next to me on his stool in between intervals to the bathroom, sniffed vigorously, jerking his head to look around, and muttering to himself under his breath- having a one-sided conversation with his own demons. I wonder what happened to him- what the steps were from the babe born to the coked up old man with glass straps downing beer after beer. I have always depended on the company of strangers.

the eternal damnation of the human condition

It's the same thing from the time before that. Like the time before that. And the time before that. You have it in your hands. The sweet succulent taste of satisfaction, of victory felt, of time spent and rewarded, of the moment that you had fantasized about so much that you can taste it. But it's never enough, is it. Really. When you all boil it down, achievement is a fucking orgasm. Brief, ecstatic, life-affirming, a respite from the minutiae of everyday life. Then just like that, it's over and done with and you're on to the next one. I get it you know. I understand that if we were every truly satisfied, boredom would set in and the anxiety and unsettling feeling would creep in. Dissatisfaction motivates us, keeps us going, striving, nothing is ever enough or better. We are eternally Sisyphus- pushing up whatever boulder rests upon our shoulders only for it to roll down and we begin our toil once again. My parents bought their house in 1988. They've remolded one aspect of it at least every couple of years. A counter here, a garden there, nothing is ever...right. Finally when everything is...there- that room just right, the side table works just so, they decide that they want to sell the house and start again. But why must this be so? Why can't things just...be. When will we realize that the greenest of the grass is on both sides of the hill?

the fade out

I hate looking at old pictures. It reminds me of what I dislike the most about myself.

Looking at the faces of friends long gone, teachers that I learned from then discarded from my life like a used tissue. I'm terrible at keeping up with those that aren't in my immediate periphery. It's too easy to let them drift away- time preserves them as "that person that I was close to when I was [still singing/16/at camp].

I've always been jealous of people who are good at keeping in touch. That prideful, almost arrogant way they say "My friend/mentor of [numerous] years...I've known them since I was [blank years old]". What they're saying is giving that person context in the story of their lives. What I hear is "Keeping people close for years on end is a priority to me- it signifies that I can be friends with people for years on end without the relationship fading away into obscurity. I have stronger values than you do". Clearly what I hear is a projection of my insecurity but I end up berating myself in the end anyways.

With the exception of a select few, my friendships are like chapters in a book. The rush of the beginning, the climactic moment, then the gradual end where we pass by each other through our respective lives like ghosts in the night.