Bourgeois Vagabond

Accomplishments: 11-11-11

2011-11-11T22:57:00.000-08:00

Woke up.
Showered.
Did Hindu chants.
Dressed and packed bag.
Stretched.
Packed an apple.
Met friend.
Took vitamins.
Ate sensibly.
Ordered Decaf.
Donut hole instead of donut.
Spoke to Ruthie in Israel.
Spoke to Leener in New York.
Refuted UCB ticket.
Wrote letter to mentor.
Called insurance company.
Filed insurance forms.
At apple.
Called Grandma.
Drove to city.
Got gas.
Met woman.
Found miracle parking.
Found dreamy Palestinian restaurant.
Wrote article.
Made Rugelach.
Cleaned dishes first.
Got pretty.
Made bed before leaving.
Prayed.
Convened with ghosts.
Spoke with strangers.
Connected with non-strangers.
Drove home.
Wrote list of accomplishments.

On Poland, Indellible

2011-01-26T14:09:00.000-08:00

Catharsis.

Questions. Questions of belonging. Questions of departure. Questions of niggunim, of womanhood, of Jewishhood.

Overwhelmed with a desire to fix everything in sight. Would like to be the salve to the broken-hearted descendants to survivors. Would like to redo the memorialization at Belzec, at Auschwitz, at Birkenau, at Madjonic. Would like to do Polish – Israeli dialogues. Would like to solve the problems in Gaza. Would like to restore this nation, Israel. Would like to eradicate the acceptance of racist mentalities of Israeli youth. To heal bodies. To heal souls.

I need to excavate that cemetery. To name the dead. To restore the spirits lost in space. I need the shamanic council, I need them all to stand at Belzec and shake with the unreal buzz of dead people unsettled. So many ghosts. They live in black hats. Avenge, not revenge. Nausea. Screams and piles. No one knew they were human. Dogs, buried en masse. Not even those soldiers, liberators, were prepared. Vomiting at the sight of the Jewish vermin. Extinction failed. They are insipid. We have taken over the earth. Am awaiting the rat poison’s return.

USA arrival. Hating the living in the name of the dead. All those deniers of the Holocaust. The word “holocaust.” The numbing out. Giant steel building to represent the unrepresentable. Make a giant and everyone goes blind. People can’t look giants in the eye. That thing. Was. Real.

Chassids at the grave sight. My body in charge. Shakes, leaking, exhausting. Pain before emotion. Entire body, one ache, all those ponds full of human ashe, spilling over in the rain. My boots coated in the Jewish dead. Do I bury my boots? Or walk that mud through the old city, scrape the Auschwitz remains at the Kotel.

Onlooking anti-Semites. Misbehaved Israeli children chiding the hatred. “Why do you care? American kids behave horribly, too.” “Because American children don’t represent the Jewish people.” Peoplehood. His anger at inter-marriage, “how can you suggest that after this trip?” Desperate to hold on to the past, forgetting that nothing can be held when squeezed. It always, undeniably, will pop.

Lost on MeaSharim, fear of my own people because of the length of my skirt. I dared them to mess with me. I dared them. I would have yelled about shame and solidarity and the burnt pile of my people underneath a filthy ugly museum exhibition. Muddy dead.

Hope and beauty and preservation. A book. A CD. A restaurant. And then the fat Chasids and the feeling, all over that shul, of murder, of disregard. Something horrible is still happening.

My cousin in America and the boys at school. They threw money at her feet and said “pick it up, You Jew.” Dirty Jew. She is a warrior, my dirty Jewish cousin, who stood and read to her hater classmates about who she is, what it means to be Jewish. And the apologies that ensued.

Chosen people, indeed. We should, according to plan, according to statistics, according to that extermination camp, those cells in the basement, that firing squad, those gas chambers. Oh, God, those gas chambers. Echoing with the unfinishing of lives. I lulled them all, those screaming wailing souls, with song.

I lulled the dead until so empty I could collapse. There is no love when everyone is torn up with grief. There is only kosher noodle soup.

According to statistics we should all be dead. Left and forgotten in shtetl after shtetl, wasting in the camps where the liberators turned their faces in disgust. An issue, this war, this Holocaust, long forgotten. The memory is an irritation, sand paper on an open wound. We did it too big, giant mausoleum for the giant dead, but no one can look, I said, a giant in the eye.

I tiptoed through history, waded along muddy banks of torture and slavery, starvation as a meal-plan at winter camp. The only real evidence, a bombed crematorium, a desperate attempt to cover a crime. You know the wicked by their guilt.

And then all those hearts, hearts of the destroyers, unclean. “We expect them to begin telling their stories now,” the guide told me. The surviving killers, on their deathbeds, she is referring to. We expect them to come out in tchuvah before they pass. “I raped 500 young women in three years and then bayonet killed my own babies.” Dirty Jews.

There was fresh graffiti near the old synagogue “Juden” and a $ sign. Mass graves of babies, the only marker, a fence. NAMES. Where are the names? A sword, a monument, candles, photos. Find the names. Excavate the dead. Why do healers convene in the Alps, together, secluded? I call upon the shamans, worldwide, to join me at Auschwitz. The mud is full of the dead. The graves unmarked. The names, afloat, drowned. Gone.

I need a council; I need an army of healers to wander with me. Arizona, on my mind. A boy whose soul is a reflection of a national dilemma. God is dying, everywhere. Help me. Bring. God. Back. Into these hearts.

I am so small and my body so weak. Help me, heal me, join me, I need to fight a giant war on the hearts of killers. A war of love, of resuscitation. “It is the government, not the Jews,” said my cab driver today. “I am Muslim. I like the Jewish. They believe in Allah. I can talk to them. It is the government, not the Jews. Jewish does not say kill people.”

Gripped by fear. Gripped by shoulder pain, knee pain, a stomachache, a headache, a cold, a lack of self-control. God, Baruch Hashem, sangoma, Bangladeshi monk, the writing teachers, the acupuncturists, the shamans, the rabbis, the priests, the seers, the believers, whoever you are. We need to cut through, like a meditator cuts thoughts, we need to cut the air, the culture, the social layers, the blinders. Help people fall over. Help people wail. Release, Yared, release the pain in the chest. Release the dead. Writhe at the emptiness, a body born anew no longer inhabited by ghosts. God, release us, release the Jewish people.

Questions of Judaism. Questions of solidarity. Questions of pork, of kosher sandwiches at airports. Questions of the beauty in secular eyes, the clouds in those who herald god. Give me a shovel, help me dig. We need to erect a monument to our suffering, to release it, to visit it annually and live between hearts and eyes the other 364 days.

I miss my grandmother. I saw everything that haunted her, the good, the beauty, and the absolute horror. Synagogues of gold, acoustics that echo pure glass, a countryside, a grove of trees. It looked like DC, only thinner, gaunt, those trees. The only witnesses to everything. Silent mourners. A group shot in the forest. A group. No. Group after group after group until they quit. Too expensive killing Jews with bullets.

You want to tell me I am stuck in the past? That Israel is stick on the Holocaust? Try to unglue yourself from a grave that large, the size of a football field, coated in imported volcanic rock. Imported stones to represent the immensity of the local dead. Representation an insult to reality. Nothing is needed to imagine. Just lie there, flat on the earth, long enough and it will rush through your system. You can feel them clawing for air, hear their prayers sang until choking on “gift-gas.” We fail at mourning. We, the people, by the people, for the people, fail at mourning, fail at witnessing. A woman of two nations, her people ruining themselves.

God help me. God help my people to mourn so that they may begin, anew, to see their neighbors. Grief blinds. Blind Jews with guns will shoot their neighbors. Clear our vision, unblock our sight, cleanse our hearts. 300 candlesticks in San Diego, a way of holding on, in case, just in case, they decide to do it again. History, says the Torah teacher, is already written. Your country will lose its Jews too. And the question is, are we left to preserve the Jewish people, or to restore dignity to the world? Or both? Or neither? The task is too great, this superhero expectation that I will fix a nation. Or two.

Jerusalem Nights

2011-01-23T13:49:00.001-08:00

Inspired by one Bhanu Kapil, yet again, I will attempt a blog entry. I have a lot of friends in the world, some old, some new, some very new and very quick and then suddenly gone to San Francisco. I was in Poland last week and met a Russian princess who, in the back of a bus that said, in Polish and English, “You can dance” on the exterior, a Russian princess who coached me in bravery.

I am back now, in the land of neither here nor there, this place called Jerusalem/America/the devil everyone sees from the other side of the ocean. I go to school with a whole lot of people of all walks, big people, small people, Jewish people, not Jewish people, American people, people from New Zealand and Australia.

After class tonight I met a friend on a street corner for a clandestine talk about planning our futures. We are both holding each other’s secrets like gold, and helping to build, what we pray, is a solid long-term plan. These types of things, plans, careers and goals, require secret meetings for women of Torah. This is off the books.

I had an appointment at six, and she walked by us during our clandestine chat. The six pm appointment was also secret, so like ships in the night, I shifting positions from sitting to walking, waving one woman goodbye and meeting the other. We walked.

I am being interrupted now by someone hitting a car outside my window. It wasn’t hard, but I can hear the muffler scraping.

I also can usually hear my landlord but tonight, quiet, thanks to an inspiring talk from my new Peace and Conflict studies professor on the importance of finding peace in the home before and during bringing peace to the world. I visited my landlord, told him about Poland. He is a big Israeli man who is very kind to me, thinks of me as a daughter and often ends conversations with a fatherly “I love you.” It is strange, but also endearing.

He has a collection of toy owls and a small white bird in a cage near his flat screen TV. His kitchen is a bit like a little prarie house, and heated like mad. We discussed Poland and how they looted and killed, the Poles, not the Nazis, in order to get all of our people out. We then discussed a way to ensure quiet at sleep time, also evaluating American quiet time (10pm) VS. Israeli quiet time (11pm.) I can “call every five minutes” and ask him to be quiet and it won’t annoy him, he claims. He said he just needs a reminder.

This, of course, is in response to a 3, 4, and sometimes 5am rude awakening to the sound of TV, radio, and/or yelling in Hebrew. I am mostly sequestering myself this week, attempting somehow to post my photos from Poland in a coherent and honorable way. I am failing, and spent five hours tonight simply attempting to download and then upload and failing on all fronts. I think these photos need incubation time.

It is way past my bedtime. I aspire to one day be as amazing as Bhanu Kapil on paper, in looks and in action.

Last Week

2010-07-25T07:23:00.001-07:00

There is little to say when so much takes place. I can describe where I am. I am somewhere between perfect and imperfect, sitting by the Mediterranean on my computer drinking mint tea. It is Friday, our Saturday, and I forgot my phone at home. Someone might be trying to reach me for our lunch date. I will get to them when I eject from said balcony over the sea.

Things here are crazy. Always. I made lovely Nigerian friends on the Sherut a few nights ago and then lost my cool when the bus driver and some random small woman started yelling at me in regards to my destination. “Are you American? I don’t like your country. I don’t like Americans.” People are very good at insiting anger here, at provoking edges and thorns. It is a nation that is constantly navigating boundaries, inside and out.

I got a ride from a stranger who gave me chocolate milk and had me listen to his recording CD. A religious boy offered to helpo carry my groceries. I made friends with a cab driver after asking, sincerely, if he was ok. He stopped the meter and drove me for free. I found my little friend from New Mexico.

Habib sang songs for me and other staff members and demonstrated breakdancing skills while I sang “I believe I can fly.” My Congolese student was sad so I played a Nico song for him, he learned the words, and sang away his misery. I learned a few language skills, smoothed over relations with a thirsty crazy lady, and regained my appetite for the first time in over a month. I ate out with my favorite Israeli twins and started cooking for myself.

Everything is fine, weird, edgy, injected with the craziness of this place, but fine. I have a beautiful friend in London who is happy, and I have another en route to North Carolina to begin to seal the matrimonial deal. I saw Twilight Eclipse and ate popcorn and Jelly-Bellys with my cousin.

I can still hear the sea. Focus is not my forte right now. There is a glimpse.

Shabbat Shalom.

Arriving

2010-07-16T02:33:00.001-07:00

This morning. So loud, those 8’s and 10’s and 12’s of Orthodox children, it felt like they were all in my bed, jumping, yelling in Yiddish and Hebrew to get up. I was slow. It was a religious weekend in the city of mystics. 20 minute uphill walks, 40 minutes downhill, 20 more up. Impossible on the calves.

I went to my well. I drank. I ate with a midget and her giant children in a secret hole in the wall. She fed me many forms of flour. Flour with apples. Flour with jam. Flour with flour. I had a stomachache walking 20 minutes uphill, 45-degree angle, home to my room with the orthodox reverberating children.

For moments, in mystical cities in the mountains where everything is quiet bar children, and everything is holy, for moments you might think you are home. But by the passing of the Sabbath life resumes and cracks reveal themselves. This is inevitable, even in the concreter marble mansion. Once they left, I saw the unfinished edges. Nothing is completely what it seems.

I left after breakfast. A one-breasted sage and a Canadian religioso tried to save my soul. Whether they succeeded is to be determined. I left quickly and overwhelmed, relaxing more and more as we left the epicenter. They took me to a tomb the night before. Women wept before the grave of the author of the holiest mystical text, the author of “light.”

Then they fed a tour group pizza and told stories of why war is bad and then my stomach, more flour, no nutrients, continued to grumble. I walked home alone to my room, through naked shuttered streets that are thousands of years old. Like Florence or Venice only everyone is orthodox. I walked and there were stray cats and a crazy-looking lame dog that could have killed me but walked right past. Between the tomb and the pizza I was haunted. Through and through.

I dreamed of rooms and drawers and a plane and packing wrong and forgetting bags and sitting with cool kids. I woke to more raucous ortho-brats. I left after the sage. I sat next to a musician on the bus. I slept. I got home. I got agitated. I left home. I walked to the beach. I walked. I didn’t care that I was hungry and dehydrated. The beach was alive and I was blessed. Mountains and holy cities and beaches in one day. My mind was quiet. Something happened there, in the city of angels.

And then I walked and walked and walked and I found the medusa heads and I found the stones and then the Herzliya hermit’s house. He changed it. It is more wonderful, more glorious than I remembered. I wanted him to come outside. “I have been waiting for you, Miriam.” But he never did. I imagine he is my soul mate. I imagine living with him in the sandcastle baby the sea. I wanted to bow, to supplicate myself before his home. I am in love with his choice, the patterns in the wall.

But he never came out and we aren’t soul mates and I didn’t get invited to see the inside. He didn’t come and tell me the secrets of my soul and I was still on the beach in rare beautiful form, the beach. And so I walked and then lay flat on my back in the sand. I could lie there forever if my body and mind didn’t have so many needs. I am in love with the ocean, even if its boundaries and borders terrify me. This country is unreal in its beauty and treachery.

Today. Not sick.

2010-07-07T13:20:00.001-07:00

A quick ten-point commitment of the day:

1) I found a bus. Bus 90. Bus 90 takes me from my door to class. Do you know what this means? My commute is no longer three busses. I no longer fight for a seat on the mini-van, battling for fairness in culture wars. No more protecting the person who was there before me. Nope. None. Just one big fancy bus half the price of my previous three. Deeeeep breath.
2) I might be making friends. I am the least sick that I have been since arriving, which is pretty un-sick, and that means I smiled today, like a real wide smile. Smiles bring friends. I made one from Belgium. There are other potentials. In my language class they range from Brazilian to Thai to French to the American boy that everyone loves but I know better than to love him too much because he has the face of a man and the body of a teenager. That is trouble. I smell it from here.
3) Motorcycles on sidewalks are allowed here. Motorcycles on a walking strip are scary.
4) I saw a Chasid on rollerblades on Ben Yehuda street.
5) I found the Black Hebrews today. I walked into their vegan organic restaurant and said it reminded me of Everlasting Life in DC. The man asked, “On Georgia?” I said yes. He said he used to live in DC and his uncle bought that place out. No more Everlasting Life on Georgia.
6) Then I found an organic food place next door and was given a tour of their clinic in back, acupuncture, shiatsu, etc. They said I was going to slowly fall in love with this country. I gave him a very dubious look. We debated US voodoo Vs. Chinese medicine.
7) Habib, my very best student, brings in the lyrics to songs by Miley Cyrus. He also brings in quotes from facebook in need of translation. He is amazing and showed videos on his phone of himself breakdancing.
8) Habib walked me to the bus tonight because I no longer feel safe walking alone. I teach Sudanese refugees in a very sketchy neighborhood. There are a lot of skinny white crack-heads and weird suspicious activities, and cats. I had Habib walk me to my bus.
9) I asked Habib about the marks on my students. Everyone has scars and burns and other marks, and a few have these intense lines around the circumference of their skull at the hair line. I figured they had been tortured with some sort of string, but Habib told me they are tribal markers. I asked more questions and he revealed that we have two Southern Sudanese tribes represented in our class, explaining the circles scars and the protruding forehead dots. Habib is good.
10) I went home at 9:30. Arrived home at 9:30. I left the house at 8am. Today was a full day and I was healthy today. Can you imagine? After over a month of mystery illnesses and hives and infections and fevers, I had the strength to walk the city, take a class, teach a class and then some.

Saturday Indoors

2010-07-03T08:02:00.000-07:00

My roommate emerged yesterday and asked, "There is a water war, have you heard?" Naturally being that I am in the Middle East surrounded by war-zones and water shortages, I assumed that "water war" was somehow related to my recent use of the sink and something to do with water rights control. In fact, he meant, "water fight." Annually there are a lot of things in this funny city, like a "white night" where everything is open all night, and a "water war" in a downtown fountain.

I passed on both. I packed up my room yesterday, for maybe the 10th time, probably more than that, this year. That room caused headaches and allergies like I have never known, all that dust in thick layers over everything from a nearby construction site. I moved and a friend helped relocate me. I navigated the feelings of others, found someone eating and watching TV in my new room, ignored it, deposited bags and went to dinner.

Dinner here is family times ten. I cry when I see people I love here, because the hours and spaces in-between are often voids, loveless, scary even. I am reading Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami, which may not be helping with this drifting floating feeling.

My neck is off. I am in between settled and unsettled. I have three weekends to go, 8 or so classes to teach, and 16 to take. I miss something, like deeply American, and I can't quite put my finger on it. I have flashbacks to places I didn't know I cared about, like Bradley Road in Bethesda or Koreatown, L.A.. Something is birthing in me, but there is only one person, someone way upstairs, who has any idea what that will be. In the meantime, Edward Scissorhands and World Cup soccer are today's saving grace.

Chapter Next

2010-07-01T23:36:00.001-07:00

The hives, bar a trace outline, have gone. Yesterday I walked to work from the central bus station like every time. I was tired from a one hour commute, taken three times in one day for complicated reasons. When I took the walk up the gruesome street that houses the African Refugee Development Center there were more crack-heads than usual, and a large group of angry sweaty children in front of the center.

I don’t know what went on, except that there was a lot of junk food strewn about the ground and the kids were hitting the smaller kids, hard, in the head. It brought back memories of that horrible video of the students that killed their classmate fighting in the hot streets. These moments, for a teacher, are awkward. They were not my children and they were not in my jurisdiction but once a teacher, always a teacher.

When I heard the fists on flesh I started yelling from down the street for them to stop. When I got closer I yelled less because it was clear it was more out of hand than I understood, and there was a chance the kids would turn on me. Angry hurt and hungry children are more fierce than anyone. I saw this in South Africa and I saw this in Brazil and so I started walking away. I was on the verge of tears, those thwaps to the little boy and girl’s heads were hard.

I wasn’t really leaving and not really totally engaging and then people ran out, adults, from the refugee center and a woman grabbed and held one of the girls and a man talked to the kids and then it was over, they dispersed. I was glad I yelled a little. In DC, when I was driving I would sometimes see people starting fights, one time saw someone get shot. When I saw physical fights starting I would honk my horn really crazy like hoping to spook them out of their anger, and/or draw attention to the scene.

Things here change every day. I am staying as a house sitter in a cousin’s house where it is quiet and there are no cockroaches. I am not interested in parties or all night discos. I want to teach and I want to teach well. I want to learn and learn well. And then, I want to go home. In the meantime, I want to rebuild my immune system from all that time sick, and maybe hear some music and walk the beach. I am a simple explorer, not a conqueror.

Fever Breaks

2010-06-28T05:38:00.000-07:00

When I left my apartment on Friday a man biked by with a Walkman and a handgun tucked into his pants. He was whizzing by, the Walkman clipped on, and the gun shoved in his waistband. This is no Kansas, I’ll tell you that.

I was told to go to the hospital on Friday. My face was swollen and my legs and upper body were coated in purple and red marks the size of dinosaur eggs. It was acute Uticaria, also known as “hives.” Cause: Unknown. I had left my apartment that time with my angel of a roommate who concurred that we could get antihistamines from a knowledgeable pharmacist instead of going to the hospital.

It is so nice to have a nice roommate. I bought the meds and some lip-gloss and watched the hives spread even further. Some say the hives and fevers and dizziness I have had since arrival are a sign I was not meant to travel, or a sign I was not meant to come to “the holy land.”

I am collapsing and purging heat from my body, inside out. This last year, heck, the month before departure alone, was so full and so complex and my relationship to me became as long distance as my day-to-day living. I am here, in the mothership, to sew myself back to myself. It is hard, involves, now, prednisone and high doses of cortisone and anti-allergy drugs, and even those, for all I know, are useless.

All I can say is that the fever is down thanks to a French cousin’s Austrian doctor and life without a fever is infinitely better than life with one. I can walk in the sun again, I can lift things around the house without wanting to fall asleep, I don’t wake up coated in my own sweat.

Today I asked a man about my upper back. It has a bump and it hurts. He said it is my upper hammer that is in trouble. I went to the neurosurgeon on Monday in the neurosurgery ward. He didn’t charge me, especially when he realized how much hospitals traumatize me. He said I was fine, maybe paranoid, and that I need a massage every week.

I am not totally fine and not totally paranoid. My upper hammer is in trouble. My lower legs are coated in purple and red dinosaur eggs, like a mushroom. I watched Avatar. I didn’t like it so much. I was not changed. I was, however, reminded of all I have been learning. And amused by the articles I read about how people were depressed after the movie because they wanted to return to that world, the world of blue or whatever.

That is why my upper hammer is out of whack. Because I learned, years ago, that that other world from the movie exists on earth. And then I returned to my body, after discovering it, and watched it wilt, like that man’s body, and I longed for that earth connection and that wildness and that full body existing.

Like I said. I am sewing here, as best and as fast as I can, so I can go back to blue-world Merissa living. People got depressed because our world kills that sanctuary, that spiritual world. But maybe individually we can choose it back. Take back the blue night. Whatever. My fever is broken, but the effects of two weeks with a high temperature remain.

June 22, 10

2010-06-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

My hives have mostly disappeared. The stray cats scare me less. The heat wave is on a down turn and Argentina just scored a goal. Despite the physical yanking me back to this country in a real and palpable way, I am slowly settling in.

Tonight, Georgian food with an old friend and her new husband. So many incredible beautiful women. The men don’t compare here, not yet. I am drinking lemon mint water, as prescribed by an acupuncturist after I showed up coated in hives. He said I had too much heat in my body and we “bled” me of that heat with acupuncture points and lemons.

My room is still holding yesterday’s heat wave. I live on the top floor and heat rises and it sits like a cloud over my bed. I will sweat out any impurity here, manifest the devil in skin rashes and hopefully emerge a better woman.

Friday, lunch with the gays. Tomorrow, a mommy is swooping in to feed me proper dinner. Ulpan in the morning and teaching at night and even though this is what I have been waiting for, a normal full day, I secretly want to continue sleeping in a sweaty mess until all the swelling from my face is gone and the heat has left the building. Seeing that this could take weeks, I will book it to class.

There are bats here, and homeless people. There are hipster bars and gelato stands and giant projector screens with the world cup hoisted between boulevards. In another body, this would be bliss. But even as I write this, I see a hive forming from the heat on my right hand. My muscles feel like I was beat up and in some ways I was, from the inside out. It took me to arrive ill in the Middle East to muster up the strength to admit that it is possibly ok to not know, and even more ok to believe in yourself.

He asked me earlier, “when was the last time you had faith?” Performing. There is faith in writing and in stage and in connectivity. I am a teacher, but how, and to whom, that is the question. ESL is not my calling, because no matter how much I fight it, and no matter how heavy it grows, a thorn in my side, I am a writer. A writer who teaches. And so, my job here, sweating and swelling and coughing: to take the thorns out of the act so I might flow freely and creatively for the rest of my days.

Amen.

Today.

2010-06-20T02:05:00.001-07:00

The view out my window is of thick tropical trees, the kind whose roots look like old fat witches dancing. They are thick and sprawling and green and the light is shining through onto my cockroachy dirty balcony and it is a really beautiful day. I am inside, however, still astounded by how the body, when releasing me from one rung of physical hell, always adds a new one on.

For example, when I had terrible back pain last week, it stopped, without warning, just in time for me to have a fever, upset stomach, chills and dizziness for three days. And like clockwork, the minute my system cooled off and I felt normal and walked the stairs without fears of falling back down, then the back pain snuck back in. Or, another nice example, after the flu the neck and head pain came, something awful. And now, just as it subsides, a nasty desert cough has sprung up, one that, had I still had all those muscles strained, I never could have mustered a cough at all.

Oh, bodies. I, here in Israel, am at the whim of my own. I thought I would want to go out in the sun, or go to the beach, or make friends and smile and laugh and be gay and crazy in the city of avoidance. That’s how I see this place: where you go to forget where you are. Ie, in Tel Aviv you forget about war and the Middle East and it is very hard to even fathom your mapped location amidst all the hipness.

I loathe hipness this month and crave nothing but calls from doctors and gentle family gatherings. I am a bit embarrassed by my lack of “take hold, traveler!” I have been an amazing traveler at times, on amazing travels. But the older I get, the less fun it becomes in some ways, because the work is all on me. As a kid they basically led me on a rope through this country and I just went along.

And in going along, I had insta-friends. And with those insta-friends, laughing and gallivanting, I NEVER had sciatica. Sciatica and I are like whoah, buddies, it seems, for life. I am determined to find a way to divorce this buddy.

I do have an amazing roommate who made me fresh pasta last night with homemade sauce. We sat for two hours talking until I decided I knew nothing and he decided I was not a Jew, but a Buddhist, and I felt comforted by that and confused. There aren’t flashes of exquisite crazy things now, because I think I live here now, whereas before I was landing myself here. I landed. This is my hot room with that awesome view in this dusty city with a glorious beach.

If pain subsides, will I take seize of the opportunities for fun? I hope so.

Somewhere after the other day.

2010-06-18T06:49:00.001-07:00

There are certain things, in my mode of existing, that are left forgotten. For example, I never check the climate or the present temperature before moving to a country. I hardly ever buy a map and I rarely use a guidebook. I was raised by a walking guidebook and we usually deceived the traveler’s how-to.

This being said, I highly recommend knowing the temperature first, and preparing somehow, as if possible, when the heat is through the roof. I am melting layers of Merissa all over the streets of this complicated town. It is mixing with the dog piss and the fruit slush and the creepy man’s front yard waterer.

Today I am more awake than yesterday. Yesterday more awake than the day before. I was near dead the day before, on fire with 103 temperature and what felt like a flicking rubber band inside my brain. I nearly passed out every time I stood and ate a banana and some rice in three days.

Today I tried a juice, from the juicer, a carrot, ginger, apple, celery thing. It was a lost cause.

What is there to say to someone asking about this place, this life, this twisted trip? I love teaching. I love my students. Some are scary, the anger in their eyes, others exquisite, the softness in theirs. One man said the most expensive thing he ever bought was a plot of land. Where? In Darfur.

Being a refugee always sounds so sinful. It is so not sinful. Today is world refugee day. I would picket the streets with the rest of them, only the sun, it seems, is out to slowly kill me. So I will save my energy for teaching English and let someone else take to the streets.

As for a map. I still prefer asking, same goes for a guidebook. It is more exciting that way, gently dropped in the right direction. This method includes failure, which is part of the fun.

That is all I can muster. Been literally asleep for two days fighting someone else’s flu. Good morning.

Day Two

2010-06-14T13:22:00.000-07:00

I slept somewhere between morning and a couchsurfing Canadian filmmaker’s loud living room departure. This morning a phone call and then a cab ride and then I was gone. I left the dirty city and all the smells and the bats and the smears of dog shit and arrived at a castle by the sea. A topless shaman met me in the tower and we sat there, my eyes spilling open and his feeding my heart.

He made me tea. He was an illegal squatter. He found me a savior. We drove and did errands, I was happy just to be in his presence. Few are like this, men whose eyes beg you not to lie, beg you to unearth that which was buried and singeing your chest. He asked for orange juice and I got him some, and he flagged me a cab and then he was gone, or I was, and it never happened, the exit to Brazil and South Africa and every other city where the ocean forces you to love something, even a stranger in a nearby tower.

And then the second. And the words. And one minute’s confusion becomes another minute’s clarity and the only answer is to sleep, long and hard, until the dreams untwist the knots that other people tie behind your back when you least expect it. And the knots you tie around your own self, in front of your own eyes, without a peep of protest.

I bled myself of demons in my dreams.

And then poof. Awake. And then lunch. A salad. Alone with the textbook. Alone in the city in all forms and all places and alone, far, not just miles but thousands of miles, from home. This is real alone, the kind when you knock on the door of your self, you hear echoes. From this far away it is murder to avoid yourself. From this far away the you is forced, shoved, re-adhered inside because otherwise you could be swept away by any number of shamans, faux messiahs, new refugee lovers.

And my class. It was exquisite. To teach is to perform and they have all seen things far beyond my imagining, slaughter, to be precise, murder and slaughter and blatant human beings behaving like wild animals, only animals with their hearts cut out.

My students. They were brighter and more focused than any classroom I have ever taught, stomaching worse than the worst. And I was at peace, finally, for those two hours, exploding grammar into weird physics lessons and odd explanations of words through cooking and marriage analogies.

I am possessed when I teach. I leave the room and enter my head and strings are grabbed from every field I ever wandered, tightened at the middle and spewed back at the pupils. I want them to learn more than they know. For them to learn is for me to re-adhere.

This is the goal now: to reverse the ungluing. I drew pictures at a white island sushi stand in the middle of a boulevard, watched a man drop a snake down the subway drain, and still another get chased by the police. I saw a fourth get his head shaved in a parking lot and a fifth shove his tongue down his girlfriend’s throat. As dead as one might feel in the process of coming back inside, something seethes around me without my permission. I am alive, whether I like it or not.

Day One Out

2010-06-13T14:07:00.001-07:00

In a secret place. Left my cocoon early and a nice man, a cousin, he lifted my 150 lbs of luggage to my room. It was not as terrifying in daylight. It was beautiful. We walked the neighborhood and then he left me, my cousin, and my eyes flooded with tears.

And I slept. And I woke. And alone, no longer tethered to another human, my fears dissipated. I left and found the Chinese-British-American writer in his fatigues and his scarf and the t-shirt and the New York speed and we wandered lost thanks to other people’s directions.

Lunch was fine. He told me about borders and fears and about the holiest sites and the biggest guns and Christians, he felt, were experiencing something different. He asked me more than once, “are you Orthodox? You think like an orthodox.” No. Not an orthodox. A thinker.

We ate like ten mini courses and then poof, Mr. America was gone and I was asleep again and then awake again and I did all the growing up I had lost in returning to the womb all over again.

And then a hunt for a sim card. And then a nice man, a Russian on her computer, a drunk with a dreamcatcher tattoo and eyes of a holy man. The grocery store gave me minutes, then back to the nice man, a troll on first glance, a mensch down deep. He filled my cell phone with minutes and the drunk sage looked at me with eyes that filled my heart with love.

He was, I was sure, a prophet gone astray. There were others like him, the sunburnt crazy claiming to be the messiah, perched cross-legged in Jesus clothes on the street corner. He had a following, tourists deeply engaged in spiritual exploration. It could be Boulder, this city.

And then I was lost, and then a cabbie, half-Hungarian, half-Austrian, he took me to my job and I thought one place was it, the fancy printing press lounge, but it was the room behind it. And there, in the backroom, I saw my own family only taller and darker and more deterred by lacking possibility.

This secret city is crumbling at the seams. My back is too. We are relics of a time undone. Now I am home. I ate dinner with the film students from Mexico, France and Canada and three locals. One girl almost cried over wearing the same outfit accidentally on her second date.

I left. The food was churning inside of me. I am home.

Yenta Conquers Public Radio

2010-05-05T19:35:00.000-07:00

This morning, after dreams of bad high school parties, Paul from WVVY public radio called at eight am and woke me from my slumber. I had e-mailed him about how I wanted to do a radio segment and he said, "How about you do one alone from 5-7 tonight?" Ok. So at 12:15 I met this man at his house in the woods.

Today was a perfect incredible crisp spring day and Paul was sitting on his porch eating gourmet pizza and an orange drink of which I had to restrain myself from asking for a sip. I was there to get acquainted before he escorted me over to the radio station to show me the ropes.

Paul said hi and kept eating his pizza. I just sat down and it was so nice. Just being offered a moment like that, to just sit with another human on a porch on a perfect day.

Paul has a peacock tattoo on his right arm that I noticed the day before when I saw him at a cafe but didn't know who he was. I just saw the peacock tattoo and thought how much I liked it. Little did I know that that peacock tattoo was gonna hand me random radio air time the following day.

Paul is a builder and woodworker and was wearing overalls and a button up shirt. He built his own house. I went inside for a minute to get water and saw the woodwork. Amazing. We went to the radio after that. It was a crazy space in the second basement of this church-like beautiful wooden house. There were lots of levels including a yoga studio and a music room and a party room. We had to go down spiral concrete stairs in a black tube-like structure and then it was all so casual, a little secret radio room in the basement of this odd secret house.

I am trying to focus as I write this, but frankly, there are so many animals outside this house I am in. I am in the woods and I can hear the animals outside and am doing my best not to conjure up ridiculous nightmarish scenarios of bandits in the forest coming to steal me into the nether realm.

Paul took 15 minutes to teach me how to launch my own radio show. I mean in 15 minutes I learned how to fade in and out of segments, to air the piece, to work the AUX and the CD and the two microphones. That was it. 15 minutes and the radio was mine.

I went home and prepped, a tiny bit, and returned at quarter to five very nervous and very excited. This was my second time on the radio, my first time alone, and it was SO fun. It was all a lot like teaching high school. Prep your lesson, trust your gut and then go for it. Here is what my two hour-radio show consisted of:

1 Excerpt from "Counsel For The Damned," by Neil Fleishman on how the five hours after marriage make or break a marriage, all based on the bedroom skills a man is born with and carries to the threshold.

4 Announcements of Heather Jardin's fight cancer fundraiser on May 14, 6pm to Midnight at P.A. in Oak Bluffs.

1 Story about the Catholic school religious teacher and his love for body building.

2 Poems from Emily Carr's "Directions For Flying: 36 Fits: A Young Wife's Almanac."

Songs by Nina Simone, Arcade Fire, Devandra Bernhardt, Big Mama Thorton, The Barry Sisters, Run DMC, John Lennon, The Baka Forest People and others.

2 Excerpts from "Stranger Than Fiction" by Chuck Palahniuk on wrestlers and their gnarled ears.

1 Story about how much I love the pool story in "Haunted."

A handful of mentions of farmers and their merits, my favorite Vineyard establishments, etc.

Roughly 10 excerpts from AskYourYenta.com covering everything from S&M safe words to tantric sex, depression, psychopharmeceuticals and chronic dating disasters.

Now that's what I call two hours of public radio randomly handed to an amateur advice columnist, thank you very much.

A Rough Start: Salvador, Brazil

2008-09-21T08:21:00.001-07:00

To blog, or not to blog: that has been the question. Distilling an internal adventure on to the page can be a daunting, if not experience-killing task. But when the experience gets toughest, the blog beckons.

I have been around the block and back over the past few months. Like a foreigner in America I traveled from hostel to hotel to campsite to couchsurf for about a month and have now landed myself in Salvador, Brazil.

I am here for what will potentially be an artist's residency, but, thanks to a rude arrival, is presently a hotel. I have been spoiled by America, the clean streets, my own fearlessness. When arriving, after over twenty-four hours of traveling, only to soon thereafter see a dead body in the road, my fearlessness shrank away.

It didn't seem to phase me so much, the body alone in the highway under the white cloth, the large crowd of people watching from the side, standing there with bicycles. During my summer writing program there was this weird epidemic where all of us were seeing dead and half dead animals. One guy found a bird, I found a chipmunk with a broken leg, and a bunch of other people saw things from half dead rattlesnakes to dead squirrels and birds. When that happened I learned about different interpretations of death, and was told that all of us were finding these dead things as an indication of our new beginnings to come, it was at the end of our time in school.

I kept this in mind when my cab driver and I drove past the scene. He said sorry, almost sounding ashamed, and I wanted to say, "you didn't kill him." My mind moves very fast. I entertained thoughts of the cab driver himself having hit and run this person dead in the street, his apology doubling as one for his guilty action. I thought about death as a new beginning and decided to take the shrouded form as an omen for new things to come. What else do you do when you arrive alone at midnight to a foreign place?

It made me think of the blue body they took out of the lagoon in Hawaii. It made me think of the girl who once told me a horror story about running over a body that fell from a bridge above the highway. My cab driver didn't kill the person.

He turned on music for me instead. "Hippie hoppie," as he called it, and asked if I was voting for "McCainey or Baracky Obama." I said "Baracky."

As we neared the place I was supposed to stay I started getting nervous. The streets changed every block from fancy to slumlike and back to fancy again. I was bargaining here, hoping for a fancy street, not equipped at this point for much more. We arrived at my supposed new home and the doorway was coated in trash, the hostess was not home, and there was a stray dog sleeping next to the door.

I have a lot of friends who have rescued stray dogs, one even brought one back from Mexico. I tried to determine the significance to the stray dog lying there before my new home. I do not know the symbolism of sleeping stray dogs.

The hostess came running up soon thereafter and kissed both my cheeks, opened the door, and then launched into a long ramble including questions about who I was (she was unsure despite our emails and phone calls to one another), apologies about the state of the home (which looked like a construction site), and an announcement that she had given my room away to someone else and was offering me a tent on the roof next to a sleeping topless man.

I started crying at this point, because I had been holding on to the vision of my own room, the one I had been promised, the one with the veranda and private bathroom, at the end of my long day. This room does exist, but not until Monday. Jahlyn, the person in charge of what brought me to Brazil in the first place, she took me into the room which, in three days, will hopefully be mine.

We sat on the bed and I felt brave for telling her that she let me down and she took it well and she and this Russian girl, Kselyn, and I made a plan together. I said I was not going to sleep in the tent on the roof and would like help finding a hotel. We found me one and then arranged for me to meet Kselyn for lunch, after her Copeira training, the following day. Jahlyn, scatter-brained, had no time to offer.

The cab driver waited while this all happened. He saw me crying and looked more upset than I did at the sight of me. He took me from the house to a hotel that I dreamed of as being fancy, like Four Seasons fancy, and was rudely snapped back to reality by a normal, slightly dodgy establishment. Desires for obscenely fancy and comfortable places always arise when I am traveling alone. It is like a sickness.

On the way from the airport the cab driver, Nau, he seemed to have serious trouble understanding my Spanish. When we drove from the house to hotel, and I unleashed an emphatic rant about the dead body and the room and this woman who I knew would be flaky, but not this flaky, he listened with such empathy and compassion that I wondered if suddenly, chock full of emotion, my Spanish was as good as Portuguese. Nau was an angel, would not let me pay for my second ride in his cab, and promised if I needed anything at all he would be happy to help.

Later the evening was topped off when I checked my banking online, as my credit card was denied. It said I had "-$888,000.00" in my checking account. At this I really lost it, hyperventilating, so that the Bank of America woman on the phone kept saying, "calm down ma'am, I can't help you unless you breathe." Eventually I learned that I was not actually robbed of eight-hundred thousand dollars, which I hardly have one-hundred thousandth of to begin with, but was in trouble for trying to get my pin number mailed to the wrong address, bank account in tact.

I am still in waiting; anxious to move into the room, the home, the arts center I came here for. As I explained to a friend on the phone before leaving, I am in the fold of a piece of paper. One side has the adventures that happened, the other side, the adventures to come. I am waiting in the crease to uncurl myself.

Panama etc.

2008-01-19T17:39:00.000-08:00

In sum...

It began with a week meditating in the mountains of Colorado at the Shambhala Mountain Center. I returned to turmoil in Boulder, exited, and arrived, post Miami, in Panama City.

From Panama City I flew to Bocas del Toro, a small Island on the Caribbean side of Panama where my dear friend from college met me at the airport. A host beyond any I have had, he set me up at one of his 3 hostels where I shared a room with 3 18 year-old girls and slept above a bar.

The transition from silence to debauchery was not easy, but the kindness of my friend Daniel and his friends made it all the smoother.

I spent my nights raucous, my mornings hungover, and my afternoons taking boats to nearby islands where I would hike and explore from starfish to rainforests to roarous secret beaches.

On New Year's day I trekked with a group of UVM students and their friends up to Costa Rica to an organic sustainable teaching farm which Daniel set up for me.

To get there we took a boat, two busses, walked from Panama to Costa Rica over a bridge, and then took a cab, an hour hike along the beach, and arrived at Punta Mona, or Monkey Point, home of bats, rats, howler monkeys and a phenomenal ocean view beyond any I have ever seen.

I stayed at Punta Mona for a week with another amazing group of people from all over the world. There were Swedes, Texans, and Canadians. A tall silent Norwegian man, a hardworking German girl, and a sleu of Vermonters. We ate from the land, made truffles from cacao beans, tortillas from fresh-cooked corn, salad from jungle leafs. I did odds and ends farm work for the week and then hiked alone back to civilization on January 8th.

I went back to Bocas for one last night where I was dressed like an 80's pop/porn star, served another homemade meal thanks to Daniel, and was introduced to the hostel's "power hour" after which I slept on a cot in a closet at the sister hostel. By the following afternoon I left on a boat and then a long bus ride up to Boquete where I visited distant relatives.

Boquete, land of coffee and flowers, was beautiful, a bit of a Boulder mountain feel. It was something like a Florida retirement community planted in the hills of Panama. My hosts, again, were beyond hospitable taking me out to exquisite meals and driving me through the area with tours of orchid gardens, coffee farms, and mountain castles.

After Boquete, where I stayed at a tiny inn with an enormous nativity scene display, I flew to Panama City. There I stayed in Casco Viejo at Luna's Castle, my friend's third hostel. I had Shabbat dinner in the large Panamanian Jewish section, was shown the city by night, and left early the next morning for Boulder.

This is the scaffold. Being that I am the most intense and emotional woman on the planet, you can use your imagination to fill in the blanks, all those transitions between worlds, mindsets and people. From a mountain meditation retreat to a frat party in the Caribbean to an organic farm cut off from all contact to civilization.

Add in the Israelis I met, the pleasure at speaking Spanish, and four revealing and intense Shabbat dinners. I was called an experience junkie today. If that is the case, this past month was the fix. I highly suggest traveling in the midst of one Daniel Smetana's universe for the sake of relaxation, extreme kindness, fun, and ease.

Berlin, Germany

2007-08-28T10:49:00.001-07:00

In one week three years of thoughts and feelings were opened up. They are leaking now that I have returned to my special little town of the healthy and the mindful. From partying in Washington with the people I love most in the world I quickly shifted, post redeye flight, to the land of the Germans and the history. I shifted to the life of Daniela Gerson plus the emotions of Merissa Gerson. The land of many bike rides, swans in the Baltic sea, and the most beautiful river and coffee shops, all a little tainted with the stain of the past.
This is only a small glimpse of a week that spanned years.

I didn't want history lessons. I was full already, between the sirens that had the same sound as the pogrom sirens, the train tracks that carried us to vacation and my ancestors to their deaths, and the forests, our bike riding and leisure domain despite once having served as the hiding place for so many. It was irritating for her, my constant remembrance, but I couldn't help it. Remembering in Germany and remembering in America are not so different, only one holds physical markers of the images that flash through my head anyways.

We went to Synagogue the first night, the shrouded shul. It was guarded with men and wrought iron and glass and walls. Inside was a small group of Jews including Holocaust survivors.
Everything Jewish in Germany felt like the other side, as it is, to a war. It was clear that something happened, that this locale was not just a transition of space, but actually held the history that haunts me even though I was not there and did not live it.

The morning after synagogue we took the train to an Island on the Baltic Sea. We biked like maniacs with Jessica the porcelain artist and met the Russian fleamarket people at the supermarket. It was BBQ and wine in a box for dinner and a drunken bike ride, clad with angry fighting, back to the guest house.

It was on the Island in the German countryside that I understood that the war was over, and had been for 60 years. I was Jewish and they weren't coming to get me and I had the right to lie there and cry on a bench. A right to ride my bike. A right to vacation.

The next morning it was hippie brunch at an artist's residence. After the Baltic sea it was Germany and the Gerson twins. I biked further than I thought my body could handle and sang Ricky Payton songs loudly, American loud, through the streets of Berlin.

We ate Moroccan hummus near the soccer game bars and Thai food with an Israeli DJ friend who lived on Ibiza. He and his Italian music partner had us to dinner and we listened to trance and danced with a 6 month old baby in one arm and wine in the other.

Then there were museums and there were walks and on those walks there were random memorials. Memory became a curse when concentration camps were remembered in shopping districts and Jews were given homage on street corners. I was a racialized other, despite their attempt to kindly honor 2000 years of Jewish history. God explained on a placard and Jews lumped together as a people. I question my name now.

And then I was stopped for having the wrong subway ticket for my bike. I cried when they took me off the train. I cried because they were rough. I cried because I hate police. I cried because I was in Germany and I was wrong and I didn't listen to the blonde angel with the diamond in her tooth who warned me about this. The ticket for 40 Euros somehow made me think of the $20 a month they sent my grandmother as a scant apology for the murder of her family.
An Ethiopian woman in DC advised me to forgive and forget, contrary to the advice "never forgive, never forget" from my ubringing. Who am I forgiving now? And how do I forget?
I am racializing to cope with my racialization.

I loved graveyards in Germany because they exhibited the privilege of a marked grave. I loved the candles burning in coffee shops and the bike paths. I loved the eggs and the Vietnamese food and the graffiti. And then the architecture and the art and the beautiful people and the thrift stores and the hot pink dress I never bought. I loved my afternoon with Anya, Russian girl of steel, and the immense seesaws and the 3D triangle lawn.

I loved Germany in the present and wasn't sure what to do with Germany in the past, let alone America in the past, and I am suddenly in South Africa and Israel and back in DC after those trips and again I question the choices in the construction of my reality.

Another Holocaust survivor died this week. Memory is the question that remains. Selecting memory, discarding memory, finding a balance between retention of past and obsession with it. When I got to Boulder there was a gift from the Holocaust Museum in the mailbox. They sent me a calender with a different drawing of war for every month. Something about bearing witness, as if memory were not indellible. If we stop bearing witness will it happen again? Or will we maybe get a chance to breathe in the present without being terrified of the resurgence of the past?

I am a grandchild of the Holocaust.

L.A. Vermont etc.

2007-06-24T19:02:00.000-07:00

At present I am supremely sunburnt. I am being punished for attempting a hike at 1pm on a 98 degree Boulder day. I went to Eldorado Springs and met a friend for a random bushwhacker hike. We saw cactus flowers. We saw enormous jagged cliff things. We saw a cave, a river, and the development of a storm. When I left to go home there were insane winds whipping the canyon at which point I saw a very tan man in a white shirt with a white bird on his shoulder. I closed my eyes to protect from the sand and water being blown in my direction, and when I opened them, the white bird man was gone. My father said he thought maybe I was halleucenating.

This is possible. The past two months feel like a halleucination. I have been around the block and back, to say the very least. I have ridden the subway of Los Angeles with a creepy cop and his Israeli anti-terrorist dog. I saw best friends and went to a hippie mountain festival. I listened to a woman and her sock puppet talk about off-beat weddings.

There was the libertarian wino dinner and the gourmet pizza poolside date. There were fifteen plus conversations with rabbis, an unbelievable Korean day spa, and the Thai massage place of my dreams. This is all Los Angeles, mind you, where I was shocked to find some sort of satisfaction. I have never loved seeing Jews so much and never been so surprised that driving in bumper to bumper traffic for hours could decrease loneliness. Everyone else, I realized one day, was also alone in their car.

Los Angeles yielded unbelievable music events, newfound family that I adore, and yes, an interview with my man Kenny G. I saw a porn studio, a warehouse turned art studio and apartment, Thai Elvis, and Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. I meditated on mortality and dead blue decaying bodies in Santa Monica, looked for Brandon Walsh everywhere I went, and heard more about Paris Hilton than is healthy for any grown woman. Paris nausea was rivaled by the kindness and support of the Jewish Journal staff.

There was better food than I thought was possible to eat and the ocean, in case it was possible to forget, makes two hours in traffic worthwhile. Celebrity sightings: Julia Louise-Dreyfuss, Rick Schroeder, Robin Williams, a sleu of Jazz musicians, and Kirsten Dunst. Sidwell Friends sighting: Brooke Press. Wash U sightings: Danny Hurwitz, Robert Miller, Dwyer Kilcollin, Pat Vallencourt. Others to be mentioned: Pete Nowalk, Meta Puttkammer, Willette and Manny Klausner, Jonathon Gold, Don Ringe, Arianna Huffington, Ashley and Anna and then some.

From LA I flew to Boston and my car was driven by a craigslist wanderer back to Boulder. Boston took me to Providence took me to grandma took me to Jon took me to Burlington took me to Montpelier took me to the wedding took me to Martha's Vineyard and then, back to Boulder. I watched architects marry on Lake Champlaine, ate creamies in the hills with a long lost friend, and spent the best night of my life alone in the woods where it all started.

Now Boulder is a writing summer session full of famous writers and 12-hour school days that end in a pile of me in my boiling hot bedroom. Boulder looks like the Land Before Time and when I leave here I will be wrinkled like dinosaur from the constant sun. Rebecca Brown, Wanda Coleman, Karen Tei Yamashita, Laird Hunt, and Samuel R. Delany are my writers of choice this week. My car arrived in one piece and I am still being gathered. Little chunks of Merissa are now scattered in California and along the coast of New England. If you find one, bring it here and I will take you hiking to a cave, the tectonic plates that mirror your insides, and then tubing down the glacial stream.

Topanga Days

2007-06-01T01:38:00.000-07:00

I am waiting to hear back from all of them. From the food writer, the baseball coach, the rabbis.

Los Angeles is full of secrets and it is nothing until you realize this. It is a city for peeling away layers and finding the best make-your-own veggie burger joint, the most exquisite Korean day spa, the farmer's market from heaven.

Yesterday we ventured up Topanga Canyon to the Inn of the Seventh Ray. What other city on earth can you exit in ten minutes and arrive in the mountains of what feels like Vermont? The corn salad and strawberries, the dark roast coffee and the crab legs were to die for.

With the Nepalese former Sherpa and his white, crooked-toothed girlfriend, we boarded the shuttle bus to the festival. Little Beverly Hills kids and their plastic surgery mother joined us up the road to the fifteen-dollar fair.

Hippiedom is dead. The healers and the crystals and the psychics, I am too old for them and see through them now. I know those little booths will steal my soul.

There were wooden vaginas and ear cuffs for sale, art from South African to Native American. There was a Goth chick clinging to the fence by the water spritzer and the embodiment, he said, of sexy, dancing with the hula hoop.

16 year-old girls were too hot and too naked and it made us uncomfortable. Rick Schroeder was there and he is small and a wrinkled version of his former TV self.

Our Nepalese friend bought us beer and took his shirt off and his hair down. When his friend left he started touching me and we decided, despite the power of the Brazilian salsa-rap extravaganza band, to leave the man and hike up the hill to the porta-potties.

We were short-lived wannabe hippies. I bought a sunhat. We went down the mountains to Malibu for ten-dollar sandwiches and the grossest beach in California with un-emptied toilets and a heavy scent of excrement. It also had a lagoon and a mountain view, pelicans in tens and twenties, and a ridiculous sunset to make up for it.

Boulder to L.A.

2007-05-13T21:36:00.000-07:00

After prepping my hot pink floral apartment for its takeover by a seventy year-old man, I picked up David Henry Gerson at the Denver International Airport. David and I drove from there to Vail where we wandered, annoyed, through the creepiest movie set town on earth. Sandwiches went for nine dollars and breakfast was not all day, even though the sign said so. We left as fast as we could, the altitude was going to my head.

We drove on until a stop by the Colorado river where we, set on hiking, in Merissa fashion chose instead to lie by the river. From there it was on to Utah where we decided to stop in Green River. Green River, Utah is a tiny town with the best Best Western hotel on earth. We checked in, enjoyed our free internet, and left for dinner. Utah is mostly a dry state but we found a bar and a Scottsman and enjoyed our meal.

Ray's Tavern served up some amazing burgers, ice cold beer, and homemade pie. We asked who baked the apple pie, it was delicious, and the guy said Sam's Club.

The Scottsman was satisfying company. He told us about the film cannister of hash he found next to his Gideon's Bible in the hotel room, and about how stoned he was at his mother's cremation. He was traveling alone for three weeks by car, a little solo vacation cross-country. He said his job back in Scotland was to help arrange proper transportation for the physically disabled. He also said they wouldn't serve him enough beer anywhere from New Mexico to Utah.

In the morning we enjoyed our free full hot breakfast at the hotel, swam in the riverside pool, and continued on our way. We stopped in Salina at Mom's Cafe and bought candy, a toy bow and arrow, and growing dinosaurs after lunch. Utah was by far the most beautiful part of our trip.

Next destanation was Las Vegas, Nevada. We knew, upon crossing the Nevada border, that we were headed down a slow ride to the center of hell. Las Vegas was huge and hot and terrifying. We stayed in a discounted room at the Luxor hotel because David, "dreamed of staying in the pyramid." The pyramid was enormous and the staff overeager. We changed and left to find food.

Tobin said to go to the buffet in "Paris" so we walked in that direction. We walked past New York, through the colossal Bellagio, and arrived in Paris. There was a low fake sky in Paris, the slot machines were loud, and the smoke was thick. We tried to sit in the VIP lounge. They kicked us out. We tried to eat. There was an hour wait everywhere. Eventually we ate "French" crepes only after a mild breakdown due to overconsumption of sin.

We hiked home fast past Harley Davidsons, past the Hooters hotel, past Disney's Excalibur. We got to our hotel where David, aware that I was losing it, treated both of us to MRI-like water-massage machines. We bought ten dollar Pina Coladas that tasted horrible, watched a man lose twenty bucks in a slot machine, and lost ten bucks of our own. Someone asked me to pose in their high school reunion shot, David lost his morale, and we went to bed in the pyramid tower.

By the morning our souls were gone and we rushed out of the city of sin, very very sad. We had McDonald's breakfast, which didn't help, Del Taco for lunch, which also made matters worse, and not until we reached California did we return to humanity. Nevada is the devil and we never, ever, wish to return.

In California we found the nastiest rest stop in America. Despite the toilets full to the brim of waste, and the empty storeroom shelves, it redeemed itself with a man-made pond full of giant fish. And of course there was the suggested purchase of "Sweet Pussy" scented incense, by said creepy salesman with anonymous accent.

After a giant drop in altitude, a California man's advice to "Enjoy life," and the most incredible view of the trip, we made it to LA. We took an emergency pit-stop in Pasadena and are now staying with Molly in her beautiful bachelorette pad.

Colorado to New Mexico

2007-03-29T13:25:00.000-07:00

On Friday, March 23rd at 10am I left Boulder. Catherine and I drove to Colorado Springs for lunch and from there we went to the Great Sand Dunes that randomly landed in Southern Colorado. Catherine is a classmate at Naropa. She is blonde and has big boobs and an incredible body, with the complex to go with it. She used to be a gymnast. Her parents are very strict. Her Dad once had seizures for a year and she took care of him. Catherine will marry Ivan who lives in their apartment in L.A. where she commutes regularly.

Catherine and I were not a match made in heaven. We were good at handling the elements though, as we were struck with wind, fire, water, snow, and the element of female drama threefold. We camped at the dunes the first night and the silence was amazing and it got louder the longer we sat. We made macaroni and cheese for dinner and while draining it noticed that the stove had burst into flames. We handled that well and left our mess out so our food would stay hot. We said the Shabbat prayers at sundown and read a passage from Martin Buber and lit the candles and blessed our Annie's. Catherine is Christian but she was a good religious partner all the same.

We did not sleep much due to high winds, a large animal that arrived in the night, my bladder, my talking, apparently, in my sleep, and then the rain and snow that came in the morning. I had borrowed Tawnya's sleeping bag and it was not particularly warm and my thighs, of all things, were freezing all night. I woke in the rainy snowy morning and, depsite the beauty of the dunes, asked if we could leave. We did and went to Fawn's in Alimosa for breakfast burritos before heading towards Ojo Caliente.

There was a psychotic "spring" Colorado snow storm. I have never seen so much snow so fast. The road to the hot springs was closed due to fatalities. I was going on zero sleep and hate driving ever since I got squashed, so I pulled over. My next move was to insist on checking into a hotel, which we did. It snowed maybe 10 inches and then by the late afternoon cleared completely. We stayed at the Inn at the Rio which was equipped with a hot tub, jacuzzi, and my personal favorite, an enormous water park. Catherine and I took three hour naps and woke up to cook our camping lunch in the hotel room. We took a walk through, now sunny, Alimosa, and had a field day at J.C. Penny.

We ran into Louette from D.C. She went to Maret and is now living in Alimosa teaching 6th grade. She was at this great coffee shop with live music. I was REALLY glad the day worked out and that Alimosa was so wonderful. We were ushered into a bridal shop that planned weddings and another store with a chocolate fountain before retiring to the pools. A group of adorable kids escorted me up the tall stairway to the water slide. I went very fast and screamed at the bottom.

Catherine and I made soup in the room and then went to this brewery to meet Louette and see more live music. We had beers and there was an amazing couple. The woman met the man in Palau where she was doing the peace corps at the time. The man was from India and owned an Indian restuarant on the island. They were on a vacation together for nine days and hadn't seen each other in ten months.

The next morning I ate my complimentary breakfast, Catherine and I got in a really nasty argument, and we drove off, burying our drama and enjoying the road. Miraculously. We entered New Mexico and stopped at the EarthShip museum which I adored. Earthships give hope in the age of environmental franticism.

We stopped for a gourmet lunch in Taos and I listened to Catherine's stories of sexual antics at the retreat center in upstate New York and then we continued on. For such a judgemental up tight girl she's had quite the wild past.

The drive was really fantastically beautiful. We went to a little women's artist co-op and finally we landed in Chimayo. Chimayo has a healing church which people walk into on crutches and out on their own two feet. There were abandoned crutches lining the walls. It was all really moving except for the part where I wondered whether I maybe am wrong not to believe in Jesus. What if, I thought, he really is the answer? That confuses my Jewish identity for a hot minute.

We ended up at Ojo Caliente hot springs where we set up camp, made some couscous and Indian lentils on our camping stove, and then soaked in the hot spring pools. Between the fight that morning, the religeous epiphones, and now the iron entering my vegetarian body, my head started spinning. I felt mildly insane until this kind woman gave me a free "Milagro Wrap." She wrapped me in wool blankets and put her hand on my shoulder and listened to me cry a little about my cruel traveling partner and the fears of another night camping with the girl. Then a woman named Marisella gave me a salt scrub and a shower. I got dressed, washed our couscous pot in the spa bathroom, and left.

I waited for Catherine and met a nice couple who were running away. He was a hairdresser with a motorcycle. She had hot legs and a target bathrobe. Catherine joined me and we got ready for bed in our freezing tent. My buddy with the Milagro Wrap gave me wool blankets to keep me warm out there. We got to the tent, where we were the only ones camping, and heard two large noises in the river. I took control because, even though she told me I was a fearful girl all weekend, Catherine was freaking out about the sounds. I found the hot springs security guard and he was nice enough to explain to us the habits of river beavers. We went to bed.

I did not sleep and I tried to pee in my Nalgene because it was so freezing outside that tent. It didn't work and I peed in the woods all night, or that's what it felt like. I was awake with the beaver river thrashers most of the night and was secretly very happy to be able to exit the sealed suffocating bag that a tent is, just so I could see the river and the stars. Tents make me think of the Holocaust. Not sure why, they just do.

The next day I had the best morning of my life. I woke up frozen at seven am and left Catherine to sleep and sat in the lodge where there was free Starbuck's coffee and a fireplace. There were also tons of people intrigued by me, the wild camper girl who braved the freezing cold night. I loved those adults and all their words about Boulder and grad school. One woman took me out to breakfast for burritos and juevos rancheros and green chili sauce. She told me about her trip to Jamaica and I gave her the number of the Shamanic healer in Santa Fe that Marisela suggested to me.

Catherine was waiting for me when we returned. She and I drove to Bandeliers where we ate peanut-butter and jelly on tortillas and then hiked up to the ruins of the cave society built out of stone years and years ago. We fought about cultural appropriation which I thought was an over-sensitive concept. From Bandleiers we drove on to Santa Fe where again the shit hit the fan.

With my skimpy sleeping bag, without my wool spa blanket, I would not manage camping in that cold. I ended up alone and crying in a motel parking lot as Catherine proceeded to camp in the mountains. I recovered fast, showered in my amazing, beautiful, and discounted room, and then went to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame for dinner. Dinner was gross but I got to write for a long time and talk to a creepy mathemetician. I went to bed in my king sized and tried to ignore that fact that my room was haunted by Native American men.

I ate my continental in the morning, went to Albequurque with Catherine, forgave her for ripping my heart to shreds the night before, boarded a plane, and flew to D.C.. D.C. arrived quick, along with the drama and tension it once held. But Lord, I am happy to be back in the land of good radio stations, eclectic scenery, and around people I love. And finally....I spent the morning designing a table top for the Kennedy Center table top design competition. Joan's assistants greeted me this morning in my pajamas with frighteningly eager faces. Whew. That's a life.

"The Most Expensive Screenplay Ever" or "Merissa's Rendition of Kiss Me, Judas"

2007-03-12T21:00:00.000-07:00

BLACK SCREEN.

SILENCE...with slight cracks. Blank radio silence. Eerie.

Show quote in typewriter text, white with strong black smudges:

obscurely through my brain
like shadows dim
sweep awful thoughts, rapid and
thick. I feel
faint, like one mingled in entwining love;
yet ‘tis not pleasure.

-Prometheus Unbound, Percy Bysshe Shelley

O.S.- SOUND of teeth chattering and bath water moving.
This goes on for six or seven seconds in the DARK.

FADE IN:

Sounds continue without change.
Gray and green toned shot.
BLURRY through bathroom wall of stacked glass cubes.

INTERCUT

ECU-the bath water.
The mucus and the blood and the ice.

INTERCUT

CU-WHITE PAPER with girlish handwriting clutched in bluish hand. Reads “If you want to live call 911.”

O.S. DIAL TONE, and a struggle.
Sounds are pronounced, ECHO, against backdrop of eerie silence.

INTERCUT

CONTINUOUS INTERCUT ZOOM SHOTS, ECU details.
Bloody bath water, a hotel robe, matted hair.
You don’t see the man yet.
O.S. - 911 picks up.

OPERATOR

Emergency operator.

PHINNEAS POE

I need some help.

OPERATOR

Please describe your situation.
#
INTERCUT

EXT. Zoom out to the whole scene CONCURRENTLY with the next line. View of man in bathtub in low-lit bathroom.
Single bulb in vintage chrome fixture.
Floral etching on fixture.
Hospital-green walls and vintage sink and claw foot tub, chrome edging. White shag carpet.
The bathroom is vintage but high-end.
Very clean and swanky except for the dirty tub.

PHINNEAS POE

I’m in a bathtub.

OPERATOR

Are you injured sir?

PHINNEAS POE

I’m cold and there’s blood coming from somewhere.

PAN SHOT OF PHINNEAS POE, his body, the tub...all slowly throughout the conversation. Don’t focus on his face.

OPERATOR

I’m sending an ambulance right away.

PHINNEAS Poe hangs up.
ZOOM IN to his face and then GRADUALLY ZOOM OUT to his whole body. Watch him struggle.

Sounds of quiet struggle, bath water moving, and backdrop of cracking eerie silence.

FADE OUT to the blur of the glass square wall.

CUT TO:

BLACK SCREEN
O.S. - Chaos sounds and muffle of the hospital.

INTERCUT

CU-Jerky shots of him moving on the stretcher and the paramedics. Lots of greens and blues, dark shots.

O.S. - Voice from a doctor-face not shown.

DOCTOR

Don’t worry, you really only need one Kidney.

#
FLASHCUT TO:

MUSIC: All Tomorrow’s Parties, Velvet Underground

EXT - Angled aerial shot of the interior of an elevator shaft moving away from the camera.
Red velvet walls with buttons sewn in quilted pattern.
A chandelier.
A man in a cheap retro suit and shaven head, blood shot eyes. From the aerial shot he looks clean, proper, and of high stature.

INTERCUT

INT. Closed elevator doors, POV PHINNEAS POE.
Doors open when DRUMS start on the music.
Sparkling gold carpet rolls out in front of him.
It is bright and the rest of the shot is dark.
There is nothing else but the carpet.
Abysmal darkness and a bright carpet.

INTERCUT

EXT. Zoomed out shot of PHINNEAS walking, extremely slowly. March-like steps to every other beat of the music.

PAN-SHOT - PHINNEAS is walking. Very slowly. Camera rotates around Phinneas Poe so his disheveled nature is revealed.

INTERCUT

ECU - Zoom in on PHINNEAS’ face.
Shaven head, bloodshot and puffy eyes.

INTERCUT

ECU - PHINNEAS’ hands.
Bright white against the light of the gold carpet.
Only the silhouette edges show.

INTERCUT

EXT - PHINNEAS stops and turns a slow circle.
Camera turns with him.
JUDE appears sitting cross-legged in a leather armchair, leg swinging back and forth.
Vintage floor lamp curves and shines light over the chair.
She is in the horizon of the darkness.
Red dress. Yellow fishnet stockings. Black stilettos.
Long black hair streaked with blonde.

FLASHCUT TO:
MUSIC: Teach the Children, Dennis Alcapone

EXT - Low lit bar.
Chrome cascading rows of liquor behind bar.
#
Backlit by grass green lighting.
Orchids between bottles.
Slanted ornate mirror from ceiling to bottles.
Chrome curving bartop.
Men in suits with their backs to the camera.

Music fades to background.

O.S.

PHINNEAS POE

Vodka.

INTERCUT

CU - Bartender-Man with blonde tipped mohawk and black t-shirt. Uncomfortably bright blue eyes.
Magnolia pinned to breast of his shirt.

BARTENDER

Vodka how?

CU - Phinneas Poe.
Disheveled vintage suit.
New stubble. Shaven head.
Weary dark circles under the eyes.

PHINNEAS POE

I don’t know. With lemon and some ice.

Zoom out. POV bartender.
Drink arrives, PHINNEAS drinks.
MEANWHILE the woman in red arrives and sits down next to him.
POE loosens tie.

INTERCUT

ECU - JUDE’s face.
Deep black eyes.
Scar on mouth.
Wears necklace with black stone.
Unflinching, unafraid.

JUDE

Are you a tourist?

INTERCUT

ECU - POE.

PHINNEAS POE
#
I’m not even sure what city this is.

O.S. JUDE

Denver

PHINNEAS POE

I’m a salesman.

O.S. JUDE

That’s funny,you look like a cop.

PHINNEAS POE

I’ve just been released from a mental hospital.

INTERCUT

ECU JUDE

JUDE

Perfect.

ECU - Jude’s hands.
She dips her fingers into the glass.
She has a green apple martini.
Her nails are blue.
She fishes out the lemon.

INTERCUT

ECU - Jude’s mouth.
She eats the rind.

INTERCUT

CU - Pan from PHINNEAS Poe to the two of their faces.
Tight shot.
They are inches away from each other.
She takes a deep breath and exhales slowly.
Shot slows and her breath is visible in slow-motion.
Particles enter Poe’s mouth.

JUDE

You must be a terrible salesman.

PHINNEAS POE

I am.

Jude bends and lifts. Her hair brushes Poe’s face on accident.
#
JUDE

Do you want to buy me a drink?

FLASHCUT TO:

Fade into a bright white screen.
Sound of teeth chattering.

INTERCUT

Aerial shot of Poe in a bathtub.
Sound of POE attempting to breath against silent backdrop.
Shards of clean seaglass tinted glass everywhere to his neck. Still sounds of BREATHING and teeth chattering.
Everything a little beautiful and clean looking in the tub.

CUT TO:

CU Jude and Poe, POV Bartender.

JUDE

My name is Jude.

PHINNEAS POE

What are you drinking.

INTERCUT

ECU Jude

JUDE

Silly question. Tequila sunrise.

O.S. PHINNEAS POE

Why is it silly?

JUDE

Look around, It’s island night.

Swirling camera shot.
Music gets louder.

INTERCUT

EXT - bar and lounge.
Low slung green velvet couches.
Exposed brick walls.
A dance floor.
Candles and tikki torches.
#
Barefoot waitresses with magnolias in their hair and grass green bikinis.
White waist aprons.
Chrome trays with neon green drinks and green umbrellas inside. Low lighting.

INTERCUT

CU - Jude. She is smiling. Drinking a tequila sunrise from the straw.

FLASHCUT TO:

ECU - POV PHINNEAS POE.
Silence and teeth chattering and ice moving.
The sound of him struggling to breathe.
Looking at his body in the bathtub. Close up to wet black hairs against sickly white skin.

INTERCUT

ECU - shot of shrunken sickly genitals.

INTERCUT

ECU - Bullet wound on left thigh.

INTERCUT

ECU - Blue knees.

Zoom out to contents of bathtub from POV Phinneas.
Focus on the chards of glass.
Quick fuzzy fade out.
Fade in to focused view of ice, not glass.
The ice is red.
Sound of chattering teeth and breathing intensifies.

CUT TO:
MUSIC: This Train, Culture
EXT - Bar.
Pan in to CU of Jude and Phinneas’ bodies.

INTERCUT

ECU - Jude’s garter belt is revealed.
Yellow like the fishnets.
His hand is working it’s way beneath the red dress.
Her thighs are strong and coated in goosebumps which camera sees.

O.S. - JUDE

Do you want to go upstairs?

INTERCUT- simultaneously with next line.
#
CU - Both Jude and Phinneas’ lower bodies.
Phinneas looks for keys in pocket.

O.S. PHINNEAS POE

YES, but I can’t find my keys.

O.S. Sound of the keys

INTERCUT

JUDE

Room 411.

Zoom out to whole view of Jude and Phinneas.
Jude shakes the keys, dangling from her hands.

PHINNEAS POE

That’s my key.

JUDE

Of course it is.

FLASHCUT:

INTERCUTS - fast quick dizzying shots from different angles.

MUSIC: Today your love, Tomorrow your world, The Ramones Instrumental only.

INT - Jude and Phinneas in Elevator.
Same one from earlier. Colors less pronounced.
Faded red velvet quilted walls.
Tarnished light fixture.
Bad lighting.
Suffocated camera movement. FAST QUICK SHOTS.
Focus on Bodies.

Phinneas tries to touch Jude’s thighs again.
She gracefully removes herself.
He looks frustrated.
Tries again at her waist.

Focus on bodies and Phinneas

O.S. JUDE-in a soft and confident voice.

This is going to cost you two hundred.

The elevator stops.
The music stops.
The CAMERA RESTS ON PHINNEAS.
#
JUDE

Do you have two hundred?

PHINNEAS POE

I’m sure I do.

INTERCUT

Zoom out to shot of entire elevator interior.

The elevator rises again.
Makes pronounced groaning noise, creaky and old.
Jude stares at the floor.

Phinneas looks ill.

JUDE

What’s wrong with you?

INTERCUT

POV-Phinneas POE
Phinneas looks in a tarnished mirror.
He is a mixture of pale, red, and a little green.
His face disfigures for a minute.
And returns.

O.S. JUDE

Why don’t you want to be famous?

PHINNEAS POE - to himself in the mirror

I’m terrified of crowds.

Cut To:

MUSIC: Amandrai by Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure is playing.

EXT - the door of room 411.
Door opens and Phinneas and Jude enter.
Camera follows them in.
Room is lit low.
Thin white willowy curtains.
Plush carpet.
Pale green satin comforter.
Vintage ornate light fixtures above either side of the bed.

Jude drops her purse on the bed.

INTERCUT

#
Quick CU of the PURSE - looks like a doctor’s bag.

INTERCUT

General shot of room and Jude and Phinneas.
Jude suddenly and mechanically removes her dress.
Like a kid ready to shower.

INTERCUT

CU- Phinneas. Phinneas empties his pockets on the bedside table.
Like an old man in his movement.
There is money and a disheveled looking condom.

INTERCUT

CU- Jude. Jude walks over.
Takes the cash and puts it in her shoe.

Zoom out to include Phinneas in shot.

Phinneas tries to tear open the condom.
Jude throws it away.
Jude starts unbuckling Phinneas’ belt.

PHINNEAS POE

Aren’t you worried about disease?

JUDE

I never worry.

PHINNEAS POE

A Stranger’s blood can kill you.

JUDE - bending to her knees

It’s ok, I’m sure your blood is clean.

FLASHCUT:

Phinneas in the bathtub coated in blood.
Same echoing sound and his breathing and the ice shifting.
Shot goes blurry.

FADE OUT.

Kathy Acker Assignment

2007-03-12T20:59:00.000-07:00

Little Red Riding Hood

It was a crisp fall day the day the wee one opted for change. From Beverly Hills to Washington, D.C., she said, boarding Mommy and Daddy’s jet, forefinger extended to indicate, “Fly me in the Eastern direction!”
It was a fast flight, turbo fast, and her long blonde locks, they stuck flat to the sides of the hood of her red Fred Segal cape. Even the goodies for the potential grandma-ma flattened a bit under the pressure of the jet.
Upon arrival, baby poochie puppy Chihuahua thing in arm, she had her limo drive her, onwards and upwards, to the white mansion in the center of town.
“Delightful!” she screeched. “There are little sharp shooters! Oh glee! Little toy soldiers with fake black bazookas on the roof of this exquisite mansion. Why didn’t we come East sooner?” Baby pup barked with in agreement.
Since the porn release, and the new book, her power suddenly evident, Paris headed for this place where she heard a crazy old couple dwelled. Crazy, she decided, was the new sane. Additionally in search of a long estranged grandmother figure, she was sure this white house would incur some answers.
When her limo pulled up those cobblestones she saw first the rooftop snipers and then, the tent on the lawn. Although, not on the lawn really, but past the line of black men, the front liners, and the latter line of white generals. Beyond the fence, and the motorcade, and the cobblestones, a tent.
“All these people playing dress up and color coating themselves, this is wonderful!”
Curiosity pulled her towards the disheveled little abode, despite the call of her mission and the allure of the mansion. Puppy on arm a man, a few yards from the revolutionary’s tent, a bearded man stopped her. It was Wolf of the Zendyk people, trying to sell a magazine, a t-shirt, a bumper sticker.
“Um, sir, I don’t do solicitations.” “We recognize you from your body art films,” Wolf exclaimed. He wanted Goldilocks for the farm parties. Just imagine this woman on ecstasy, he thought, and the fame, oh the fame she could bring our cause. Wolf tried to lure her with thoughts of freedom from the system, from the taxes, from the order of the babylonian world.
Paris laughed and tossed her hair back, “Silly, those are all the things that I live for. I am the system and therefor free.” And she moved on to the tent. On closer look she saw the smelly dirty couple, living here in the tent for 27 years of protest.
“You guys stink!” she said. They ignored her griping and tried to educate the colossal blonde caped woman about sitting protest and revolution. She didn’t hear a word and offered, instead, a makeover.
Paris sent for her crew who in no time installed a shower, toilet, and mini kitchen for the decrepid age old tent. “See you guys!” she yelled to the dumbfounded and awkwardly grateful couple, “I am off to find my grandma-ma. She might be in that house on the other side of this crazy modern day civil war reenactment.”
“Oh,” the newly straightened and combed couple muttered. “The stupid blonde doesn’t know we are at war.”
Red cape trailing, Paris went through white house security. “I’m sorry ma’am, but we have to confiscate your dog.” A fit was thrown. So shrill. So loud. So awful. They returned her dog.
Paris toured the bowling alley, the food elevator, the movie theater, Bill Clinton’s chocolate-chip cooke kitchen. She thought the house was outdated, bland.
A woman named Laura emerged quietly from a bedroom, unaware that Paris was lurking in the halls. Laura, upon sight of the scantily clad red-caped blonde figure, screamed. “What are you doing in my home?!”
The teddy with the nipple tassels was something Paris would recognize anywhere. “Are you my grandmother?”
Laura quietly ducked back behind the door, black lace and all.
Sure this was the grandmother she had been searching for, Paris knocked furiously on the bedroom door, her Chihuahua barking like mad.
Laura, now in her two piece suit covering knew elbow and collar bone turned to Paris , “Ms., you have me mistaken.” Paris screeched. “I’d recognize those nipple tassels anywhere.” Laura tried to deny it, claimed her name was actually Barbara, not the Laura from earlier.
Paris wouldn’t have it. She quickly disrobed to reveal her own matching teddy with nipple tassels, proving she was in fact the offspring of this mysterious woman. “See?”
Laura then knew this was Jenna’s illegitimate baby. The one she had in college with the bionic man who caused people to age two times as fast. Laura knew she was face to face with the hidden baby who could hide no longer. She especially knew Paris was the one when, as a gift for grandma, she bore a collection of confiscated videos starring Laura herself.
Her facade was busted. No more campaign for the children, no more stoic Christian veneer. Paris moved into the crazy white house. Porn was soon celebrated across the land.
It was later revealed that Laura’s husband was gay and that she was a porn store and that behind closed white doors people were entering through the tunnels below for illicit sexual experimentation parties involving large amounts of smuggled white powder. Paris shed the cape and knew then that she’d found her home.

THE END.

Gertrude Stein Assignment

2007-03-12T20:58:00.000-07:00

A Day at the Lake

Sincerely smart he was. He was sincerely smart but not severely sincerely. Sincerely smart he was not, being such that he was insincere. Sincerely insincere he was severely, and thus sincerely.

Sincerely insincere and severely smart. Severely bald and severely ugly. Severely bald and sincerely ugly. It was that sincerely he was profoundly and soundly smart in his insincerity.

He, the severely bald and insincere went over to the lake, severely. Sincerely bald and insincere he severely stepped for the sake of sincerity towards the severely deep lake. Severely smart he went sincerely bald to the profoundly deep lake.

Profoundly he sat and profoundly thought of the profundity of his insincerity. Profoundly he thought of the profundity of his insincerity near the profoundly and severely deep lake. Profoundly he sat and profoundly he thought although thought insincerely because that’s what he did, sincerely.

Insincere even with his lonesome sincerely bald self-profoundly he found that the deep, and sincerely deepest of lakes, was also, for him, sincerely empty in its insincerity. This profoundly occurred to the sincerely insincere, the severely bald and sincerely ugly profound little man.

Sincerely and profoundly-severely bald and ugly, the sincerely insincere severely felt the profundity of his insincerity.