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.