Heartbreaking Jerks and Staggering Genius, Part 2

That's right, you knew this was coming. Something about the "Part 1" in the title of the last post. It was just getting so long for a post on a blog that is ostensibly structured around a 17-syllable poem, but I still had more to say.

It's just that seeing Sybil Lamb read and hearing about her various antics reminded me just a little of my first girlfriend, who was also a terrifying genius, who I was afraid to be around because she bullied me and drove drunk, blowing through red lights in lower Manhattan, and started fights with huge cis dudes on the street and wanted to kill the president and wanted to know where I was every minute of the day, but who I hung around for six breathless months because she published slash fiction about PJ Harvey that freaked out a whole web forum and recorded an entire electronic music album on her computer about Super Mario and wrote semi-erotic poetry about her dog and took photographs of road signs and the moon. And who was almost six feet tall although not an actual Tall Girl.

It was a weird time in my life. I was a graduate student of creative writing at a conservative, Catholic football school in the Midwest (why???) and was living with my ex (because we were too co-dependent to do anything different), and she pushed all my boundaries and questioned many of my long-held beliefs. For example, beliefs that I wasn't all that interested in illegal substances. Which turned out to be true, but there's something to be said for testing our own theories now and then.

Anyway, J, if you're out there, I'm glad I knew you and I'm glad I don't know you anymore, and I hope you're still fucking shit up and making someone rethink everything they thought they knew.

Poem for a Mean Love

While on date with me,
Makes out with strange dude in bar.
"See? I ain't no dyke."

Heartbreaking Jerks and Staggering Genius, Part 1

Sybil Lamb is terrifying.

That's what I learned on the way to the reading and before she got up to read, from all my friends who had met her and also from the other authors who were reading last Wednesday night. She's all big boots stomping and loud, inappropriate banter and sheer dresses with dark, skimpy undergarments and acres of stick-and-poke tattoos and a grin that will eat you for breakfast.

She is also a goddamn genius. The kind that cannot be contained or measured or broken, even by a traumatic brain injury. As she read from I've Got a Time Bomb, she transformed from author reading from her recently published novel into some fascinating troublemaker you just met shortly after the apocalypse, reenacting illegal, illogical antics with friends named after baked goods, reciting dialogue without even looking at the page. At one point, she literally climbed and swung from the rafters of the Marlboro College Campus Center.

Also I'm not entirely sure she wasn't a little drunk.

Also it took her 13,000 years to sign books because she was holding court sitting on the end of the book table and drawing original comics in everyone's book and playing with a toy robot mouse and a ceramic sperm and gossiping/shit talking with Casey Plett and Imogen Binnie, and it was completely worth the wait. Apparently I was smirking the whole time, which is how I express enjoyment, BTW:

"Hey....wanna do book stuff?!" "Hang on I'm just finishing some office stuff... ..."

And if she's as scary as they say, maybe I'd be too delicate to be her friend, but I am so glad she's doing what she's doing and I'll support her work and read the hell out of it (p.s. buy her novel right now it's so good), and I'll totally worship her from afar. Like, maybe really far.

Poem for a Mean Girl

I appreciate
That you're in the universe.
I'll be over here.

That Time Locusts Ate My Bike, and Other Bible Stories

My mom just bought me a bike.

I am going to turn 39 before the year is out.

But she was never able to buy me a bike as a kid, and I mentioned to her I was looking at buying a bike but it seemed like a lot of money, and she said to buy it and she'd send me a check.

"Making up for lost time?" I quipped.

She quoted me the Bible.

Joel 2:25. "And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten."

She quotes the Bible to me a lot, and always has, and I'll admit sometimes it's tiresome, but something about this was sweet. That such an obscure-seeming scripture was at the ready, that she had this assurance that it was not too late to do for her very grown-up kid what she couldn't do when I was little, that broken hearts can be mended while they still beat.

That's what I got out of it, anyway. Well, that and a bike.

Poem for Cyclical Time (See What I Did There)

Time gives more chances,
More a circle than a line,
Cycles round again.

I kind of want a tiny license plate for it that says EAT MY DUST, LOCUSTS or something ridiculous.

Calgon, briefly restore my energy a little!

I've been really tired lately. I can think of several possible reasons. (Seasonal change migraines the medication for the migraines trouble sleeping hormone changes playing a rock show on a week night stress at work Lyme disease probably not but my therapist suggested it might be possible Mercury in retrograde just kidding.)

Tonight I came home from dinner with friends and did not feel like I could do anything but lie down with my eyes closed and the radio on. But I also felt kind of dirty. So I thought I could lie down with my eyes closed in hot water and at least accomplish something before bedtime.

And surprisingly, the bath refreshed me somewhat. Not enough to go back out on the town or anything, but I'm here, ain't I? This confirms for me how much of my recent exhaustion is stress related. Forcing my body to calm down perked me up rather than putting me to sleep. (Also my local radio station just started playing really cute indie pop.)

Poem for still being tired, though

I just learned a thing.
Do I really have to write
A poem now, too?

Even action figures gotta take time for self care.

Now the DJs are talking about the Supreme Court and gay marriage. Zzzzzzzzzzz..........