Themes Will Emerge

The Commemorative Issue: 3yrs of me & you're still here??

Mascot? Sister?

For those of you that joined us because of the sexy androgynous maybe-twins murder story, hey, surprise, over here in the scattergory part of my brain it’s all My Little Pony comics and TCM. Same as it ever was. You’re gonna be SHOCKED how often I reference Playboy models (Playboy models being the preferred generic term, over the more specific and contentiously debated Bunny, as per Holly Madison on her rewatch podcast with Bridget Marquardt, Girls Next Level) as both cultural and feminist reference points. But mainly I talk about my family, and tv, and books even sometimes. And have been for three fucking years and I just NEVER run out of opinions. Not even close.

This is going to be another patch job. If Ima keep catching things with a net as they pass, I’m going to have to let the posts exist in more than one moment. This is a Tuesday morning in July. This is a Saturday night. Both are humid, metallic, stretchy. What if we grew like a field, instead of a tree? I’m not sure those things are related but I read that recently, and it felt good.

What is life now? I’ve been to Chicago to see my best friend and the de Kooning exhibit, I’ve just almost survived my first Summer Reading Program at the library (I’ve had theater tech weeks where I cried putting on my makeup and listening to Lana and it’s all TOO TRUE, but damn this is literally the first time in my life I’ve listened to Give Me Something to Break at 8:30am on my way to spend time with children). Five of the chicks we hatched are in the coop at my house with the bantams. Upcoming notary class, possibly an August concert, new friend, old friends, the new book - and putting out the other new book. There’s no back to school but life moves the speed of light nonetheless.

Thursday morning listening to the local news in a familiar voice, flanked by antique sleigh bells on one side and an Edison machine on the other. The heat broke (for now). A still moment.

I’m living my best life but who isn’t taken apart by the last part of the summer? JD Salinger knew, John Mellencamp knew, even at its best it can all still be kind of a slog.

So this is three years, then, let me say that, clear in a paragraph near the beginning somewhere. Three years of Ultimate Gothic Summer, three years of sharing and being a person and keeping the wound from scabbing over, keeping the phone lines open.

Keeping the fear to a manageable size.

It’s crazy that the Internet was one of the first places that you could really lead with your work, and now your first piece of work has to be yourself. If I could go back in time and make up a fake name before Radium Girls came out, I would. Instead, let’s keep this whole thing contained.

Theme Song?

So what’s different, what’s the same, here in my yard, between now and that Barbenheimer Summer both yesterday and so long ago?

I’ve pretty much let got of Armie, but I’ll love Jared Leto’s weird ass for forever and a day. Still spend a ridiculous amount of brain space on lip glosses, plumps, oils, balms etc. Still trying to get Eric to drive me to the store instead of having to drive myself.

Just as obsessed with cults. Just finished a Heaven’s Gate doc this very day. The only thing I want in summer is cults. Extremes. People who can’t get close enough through conventional means. Desperation. Wanton vulnerability. (I’m jealous of all that, of that ability to…open.)

Still reading Wuthering Heights every summer (in progress right now) and hearing Richard Burton as Heathcliff’s voice.

Still writing & trying just as hard if not harder.

I returned to theater. (Sort of left it again for the moment, just a moment). Went from zero jobs to two. Watched my kid go from a sophomore to a driving, employed high school graduate. Our dog count went from 2 to 3 to 2 to 1.

What’s the big epic blockbuster at theaters this summer? The Odyssey, but I’m waiting a week or two to see it. I like to go to the movies right before the movie leaves; when it’s in the tiny side theater and no one else is there, when you have to let the projectionist know you’re ready so they can leave the popcorn machine & turn the movie on because it’s Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon- or at least they used to have to go up & get it started when the only ticketholders were ready. Maybe it’s all automated now? And if you all get popcorn you all miss the beginning, because the machines go on without you? I can’t say.

I just saw Backrooms and my dreams have gotten expansive the last few nights, to say the least. I remember that feeling a little bit with the web series but those were manageable sizes. Horror movie length is the right size dose for me. It felt unreal, but in that way that dream space is too real, too made of feelings to be real or obey known rules. Certain parts I thought, I have already walked here, especially the underground room with pools- it FEELS collective, doesn’t it? Like if we described our dreams to each other, then drew them.

This film felt important, in the part of the brain that gets tingly when it wakes up. It feels like an artistic cultural touchstone, a literal stone dropped and we’ll watch the ripples.

One of those big stone/ripple moments for me was O Brother, Where Art Thou? I’d say the return of bluegrass music and hayseeed culture was easily as important for me as The Dead at Buckeye Lake for every white male born in Ohio between 1972-1978, and Hamilton on Broadway for the between-admin queers. O Brother put Ralph Stanley on nationwide tours and smoothed out a lot culturally for the redneck or hayseed. Along with My Name is Earl, it brought us a long way from Deliverance, though Tiger King & Hillbilly Elegy took us a fair few steps back (I’m sidestepping conversation about various media with The Whites because personal love for both them and Knoxville clouds my judgment on the cultural impact. I love The Dancing Outlaw and The Wild and Wonderful Whites, I view these through a lens of comraderie and nostalgia that you need to be born amongst hollers to understand). Luckily whatever else is going on, we’ve always got Dolly pulling for us.

Theme song?

“Us” is a complicated word. I see all these Pride and church videos and all this hyping of your own and your people or whatever and literally the only time I’ve ever felt any type of sense of community or shared wavelength, or like I was NOT among aliens was surrounded by a bunch of fuckos in some pastel-painted dayroom or another. Like I have only ever been amongst my own when amongst those that are also releasing some sort of inaudible but sensed vibration of distress or sensitivity -‘the world is pressing in on us wrong, and in fact what if it’s us that’s wrong?’ That’s the vibration, the tourist-y tism-y alienation when not amongst those who are also mainly made of nerve endings and observation. I’d never felt fellowship like that summer afternoon almost exactly nine years ago in the dual diagnosis ward, when our Christian community college occupational therapist brought her acoustic guitar and a binder full of songs she could play - I picked Rainbow Connection, half-joking, and we started out laughing and all ended up crying and my friend said, “Goddamnit, Amanda,” then we kicked everyone’s asses at ladderball because I’m great at everything when there are no stakes. I don’t know what this has to do with anything, just a way to make Pride about me I guess that doesn’t have to do with any of my own Don’t Ask Don’t Tell era feelings.

I saw the fireworks from my car along with some shell-shocked deer, and both of us watched the red, white and blue reflect on the curve of railroad track & thought what a shame, what a shame, about nothing in particular.

You still here? Let’s talk about sweet, sweet Johnny Knoxville and the mortality I can actually feel in my own knees and dry skin with the Last Jackass. Knoxville is a philosopher unappreciated in his times like unto Walt Whitman. He’s the Everyman with perspective on mortality, and he’s the closest thing my generation got to beatific. Whatever else happens to be going on, he’s been there reminding us that we’re nothing but wild children trapped in temporary flesh bags and whatever stupid, dangerous or cathartic thing they were doing is just as legitimate a life choice as thinking in terms of upgrading from one car to the next. Remember we’re animals remember we’re temporary remember we’re ALIVE!

Emphasis on temporary. He was perfect and beautiful and singular and he didn’t and doesn’t care what it means and that makes it better.

Also while we’re talking about aging, Madonna did an AARP article and won me back over. All it took was the crystallization that she’s 100% self aware.

Theme Song

I wish Lana would just hurry up and put out her Stove or whatever so we can get past it and onto the next thing. A lot of what bothers me about her at this moment, besides her, you know, just generally always being sort of terrible, like low key even when she’s not out-loud bad, she’s probably not cool, like every celebrity rich famous person once they’ve passed the point of Actual Risk and aren’t willing to morph so much as wear different costumes- but my original point was the reason I’m most pissed at Lana is because for a minute there she was taking real risks again, letting some of her music be unsure of itself in a growth/change way, a couple albums started asking questions like “Am I maybe someone besides who I am in relation to a relationship? Is there a weird lone Lana, separate from men, perhaps like Liz Taylor between husbands?” And she looked that question right in the face in what could only be holy terror, answered NOOO! and married as quick as she could find a blue collar man, and she snatched that particular static victory from the defiant jaws of change before her fortieth bday. Then chickened out on her dirty country album and renamed everything in relation to her new hubs. Jaysus. Even what I assume were the cop-breakup songs on Blue Bannisters are preferable to whatever type of 50-times re-produced stuff she’s leaking now. Get your shit together, girl. You always do better when everyone is against you. Well, here we are. You’re not swamp Taylor Swift or suburban Ethel Cain, so let’s see what you got next.

The way no one frames that hard turn (see also Gwen Stefani, M.I.A., Grimes), is that even now- whatever ‘now’ means - the richest most successful women in the world still feel somewhere deep in some alert system that’s brought them this far goddam it that this is the safest best boy, the caricature, the cliche, the one that excludes but is never excluded.

Told you the themes would emerge. Is this not connected to the same train of thought that formed the Barbie movie email I sent to Craig, that was the first entry of this blog three years ago?

I can never complete a thought, I guess.

Nothing surprises me, though, I was around for that sort of anti-girl coalescence at the beginning decade of y2k when even the emos were singing (whinging) about murdering their girlfriends (they wished she was was their girlfriend), and as a weird girl that had always been rejected by the pretty girls, I didn’t mind the hate, it had nothing to do with me or the gatekept privileged areas occupied by beautiful women and their mysterious OS’s. I’ve blogged about it in other caterpillar forms and I’ll probably blog about it in another ten years on Meta Greyfold 1 or whatever - The Girls Next Door and Holly Madison was my feminist awakening. Realizing women had been purposely categorized as a way to keep them apart was a revelation, probably sparked my interest in class war, as well.

When I think about that stuff, what was probably our class war (at least culturally), equality, the ideas of togetherness, peace, unemployment, desegregation, sex, all that shit they were selling during the Vietnam War, it’s easy to get cynical and pull way back. But it’s interesting to me that in a decade of civil rights street warfare, napalm deaths, the war on poverty, the extermination of the Kennedys, the extermination maybe of the illusion of the American moral core- what’s interesting is that culturally, what was of value, what people wanted to keep and take forward from that time was Love. Love was the lasting sentiment of all that, the part that emerged impossibly that we have most wanted to keep.

Can I slow down? Apparently I still can’t tell how hard I’m pushing, but at least maybe I can recognize when I start to crack, & back up off the pressure before I shatter completely. I feel like I got myself in hand early enough in the summer that I can still be saved with aquarium glue and a think stack of novels and notebooks, and one very greyed out dog.

Thinking about the imagery I use when mapping my own interior. I used to picture my space as Mars, then later the Ocean, and now it’s very much the Woods; I seem to be getting closer. At this rate I’ll die amongst humans after all.

Wildfire smoke postponed the harness races at the county fair, and storms delayed the project judging, but there’s a reckless raccoon out there that we’re watching instead. I mean, what choice have we but to try and love the monster the world has become - and maybe through our love transform that monster into a benign and lovable mutation?

The horrors persist, and so do I. Yet? I don’t remember. Survive this summer, even though, I’m sorry, Lestat is not that good… But it’s fine. What do I care? I live in the land of hummingbirds and lightning bugs, beautiful amongst the fires and floods.

This post leaned a little on the darker side, so let me close on the memory I’m having right at this moment because Sophie B. Hawkins As I Lay Me is playing: early Autumn and me and a boy and a girl in a cemetery and when we got to play practice late all three of us were covered in my sparkly silver makeup, and I’ve finally fit that into a work-in-progress so if I accidentally mention it again later or before, it’s a ripple of that.

Enough with all the purple. I am big fat liar, out here trying to tell the truth. Whether I picked you up at Barbenheimer, the Markay, The Velvet, the library - or some weird street corner or shady thrift store, thanks for being here. Thanks for reading.

Amanda G.

Theme Song