On The Road

Goddamn.

So I just got back from a road trip halfway across the country in service of that little side-hustle called Art. Me and Trudie and The Cowboy had a gig at a contemporary art museum down south, so we took a couple of days to drive down, hung out in Athens for a couple of days, then curved up to our week-long residency before booking it back to Rust City in a straight 17-hour shot. With the three of us plus the whole show packed inside Sugar Magnolia, we were on the road for a while there.

When we crammed ourselves back in for the return trip, I realized I wanted to stay on the road.

For the Record

I haven't gotten any better. I've just gotten better at faking it.

I'm not like this. Folks who really know me know that I'm not like this. But to all the rest--and really, that's most of the folks out there--I could be like this. I may not be like this, but someone is like this. For all they know, I could very well be a regular person going through her regular day the way she regularly does. I could be a regular person.

As long as they're not peeping into the Gingerbread Cottage, that is. As long as they don't see that the place is trashed, just one big pile of unopened mail and dirty laundry and dirty dishes from mid-November. As long as they can't look in to see me curled up in the bed all day (or all two days or all three days or four days), only getting out of bed to pee or feed the cats or get a new box of tissues once I've run out. As long as they can't hear me talking to myself, trying to find some loophole in the logic of the universe and some how make things different, make things better. For Mr. Badger. For me.

Not Eloquent At All

After it happened, I sat in the hospital lobby for about two hours, mainly because I had forgotten how to walk. Then I sat in my car in the parking lot of a strip mall for another two.

After that, I got a hotel room, and I sat in a warm bath as long as I could. Then I curled up naked on top of the bedcovers, thinking that maybe if I closed my eyes and stayed there long enough, he'd show up and crawl into bed behind me. I waited until my whole body was shaking from the cold. And then I waited some more.

He never showed up.

This Is Wonderful

The world has a nemesis.

Well, if not the world, then at least the country. And I don't mean my own personal nemesis. While I have been mentioned on their website, I know that I'm not awesome enough to be, you know, a personal adversary. No, no, this is a nemesis all of us need to keep an eye on.

They're called Kansas Kountry Khurch.

Shaking the Family Tree

So I have this thing. It's called pleurisy. Basically, pleurisy is when you have an infection in the lining of your lungs, so that when you breathe, the pleura kind of pulls away from the rest of the lung. It results in a stabbing feeling every time you inhale. For reals. It's like getting stabbed with a knife, in your lung, every time you inhale. You can try to keep your breaths really shallow to avoid it, but you also can't sustain that for a long time, so sooner or later, you know, you're going to get stabbed.

It ain't so fun.

A Life More Ordinary

It's only maybe a week since I've allowed myself to put my guard down.

Really, I should say since I resigned myself to having my guard down. I don't have a choice in the matter. I'm so exhausted and fragile right now that really, the only choice is whether to leave the house or never leave the house. Since I enjoy earning a paycheck, I've opted for leaving the house defenseless and weak. But I thought at least it might help me figure out what happens in ordinary life--life without aliases and disguises and alter egos, without SuperPowers and nemeses and getaway cars.

So far, I've only discovered one major thing that happens when a girl walks around with her guard down: guys hit on her like there's no tomorrow. Seriously, dudes are crawling out of the woodwork to sling some mack on me. And we're not talking your expected alcohol-fueled party flirting, or the closing time move-in-for-the-kill. I'm talking about, like, on the street, you know? At the Quality Dairy. When I'm walking to class. It's like one of the scenes from Dawn of the Dead where you see all the zombies outside the mall trying to get in to murder the living, only replace "zombies" with "strange dudes looking to get laid". It's frickin' ridiculous.

Rescue Me

I've fallen down on the job, my babies.

For reals.

The last few months...I don't know.

Transitions are so rough. So, I left South Central and moved up here to Rust City, and everything was so different. Rust City is a great place and all--no complaints here--but it's so different from South Central that I think I got the culture shock. I mean, once the initial distractions of moving and unpacking and junk fell away, I started having a bit of a panic. The panic of realizing I was basically alone in a new city--once again, a girl completely on her own. I mean, there are folks here in Rust City I can call in the case of an emergency, folks that I can count on for the occasional work lunch and once-a-month knees-up at a karaoke bar in the country, but there's no one local that's really a part of my everyday life, you know? No one I can call up after work to chat about the crazy things that happened that day. No one to plan strange art projects with. No one to cause trouble with. No one to go to concerts. Or on road trips. Or watch movies. Or stay up all night with and have those conversations you only have at 3am. You know, just no one.