Project Run-Away

I couldn’t quite find it in the creamy center of my Swiss cheese brain, the willpower to cook up a more creative title for this new outlet, so “Kiss n’ Tell” it will be.  I usually relish the privilege of getting to name something. I think of titles for things all day long, and then when it comes time to actually name something, I totally drop the ball – like clockwork, each time. I get too excited thinking about the prospect of getting to interact with whatever is getting named. No patience in my body, whatsoever.  If I’m ever unfortunate enough to sprout my own little vermin someday, I’ll probably name her something very plain and hasty  like “Katie” or “Sarah” just because I’ll be too excited to start teaching her foul words and  how to spit. 

Oh shit. A day dream just popped and sizzled behind my right ear (where they always start)  like an errant bottle rocket in a rain-starved and crispy redwood forest. It looks like it might be a big one.  The upsetting thought of my own future progeny always runs in and takes over, I hate it.  A little grey alien parasite sucking up my life juice and invading my crotch, making me fat, forcing me to expel it from my F-hole and wipe it’s nose and teach it to read until it grows a pair of its own, steals my cash, gives me the finger and leaves home. These are not thoughts I want to have but I have no control over my own brain anymore. That fizzled sack of nerves does what it wants and drags consciousness along behind it like a younger sister trying to walk  the  Golden Retriever before she’s even out of Velcro shoes.  (Can you tell yet that I like metaphors?) (Can you tell that last one might have actually happened? I’m glad we’ve reached an understanding.)  Daydreams are just tangents of thought, and while even trying to chase one in particular to make my first paragraph make sense, you can see I’ve strolled down yet another one all together.  

I saw a little girl, my little girl – an anonymous “Katie “or “Sarah” standing in little red shorts out in a gravel driveway holding a garden hose, shielding the yellow Midwestern sunlight from her eyes so she could stare right into the souls of  the traveling homeless hopeless unseen in the filthy seats of the Greyhound bus as it speeds by pulling a monster tide of khaki dust behind it.  There I was, running. (but we’ll get to that later) I was traversing a country I had very little in common with, yet always kept a profound reverence for its ways – backwards as they may be. There I saw a little kid without a thought in her head, just a garden hose in her hand. And I thought out of all the fates there could be for a little girl, being just another “Katie” or “Sarah” in a little shithole town in the Midwest  wouldn’t be the worst you could have. It actually is probably one of the better ones. No – you probably won’t win any awards outside of your high school, and you might just die a mile or two from where you were born, but at least you get to be you. You get to be a whole person here, I think – so I’ve heard, whatever whatever, amen.  I’m sure that every little girl here in Microsville USA wishes she could leave and see “The Big World” but what she should realize at some point is that for every one of her kind looking to get out, there’s another little girl on a Greyhound bus from The Big World headed her way looking to hide out for awhile.  The point is, If I ever happen to squeeze one out, I plan on leaving it in an empty KFC tub on the front steps of a Lutheran church somewhere in the middle of cow country.  Even devoting your adult life to mastering the art of the potato salad is better than cursing the name of your goddamned uncle and living a lie. Even if it is a glamorous, luxurious lie, the problem is – it’s all yours.

This journal sure is off to a roaring start. I hate thinking about pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood - so what do I do?: Write a fucking essay on it. I guess it’s the same way with car wrecks – can’t look away, even if you try.  Does this all sound pretty messed up so far? I'm glad.  I hope whoever is reading this thinks it is. That might prove that there’s still a little sanity in this world. But still, one has to wonder – who is more messed up: the one who writes down her problems, or the one who licks up each little scandalous morsel and comes back for more?  Fuck – I’m probably on page 4 by now.  Well I have a lot to say – it was a long bus ride, and now I’m looking to excrete what I’ve been carrying around all this time.

At age 24 are you allowed to call yourself “a runaway?” No one called the police nor printed my face on the milk cartons or those little postcard sized mailers that everyone tosses away with the junkmail. Technically I am “running away” and the place I left had been “home” in a distant sense of the word.  When you’re 14, doing what I did 2 months ago is seen as a brazen act of defiance. When you’re 24, and no one really likes you anyway, you’re just kind of doing everyone a favor. It ‘s an act that doesn’t even have the gall built in when you decide to disappear permanently from social life but make your family members or friends clean up a nasty suicide corpse – it’s the same effect really. Being gone forever one day – just without all the expensive body removal bills.  I’m sure they’re thanking me for that aspect in their own way out there somewhere. Their biggest display of gratitude would be to simply forget about me, and never bother to try and look for me.  Ok, fine – I admit. So maybe they might miss me, but ONLY out of obligation.  Just so that when their friends ask “Oh, How’s Janie these days?” they don’t have to say “Well to escape the bitter coldness we showed her at home, she packed up an left for Minneapolis.”  Yeah, that’s enough to put the sword through the cherry of any poolside cocktail party.  Uncle Rob attends plenty of those, and has plenty of obligatory friends who would ask such a question – again, purely because they’re obligated to care. That’s the only reason I’m even a little hesitant to spit too much detail in this trough. One net-savvy private dick finds this and Uncle Rob will be harassing me for the bank key on my new front porch.

This new blog feels like a new friend. This being the first entry, it feels like that first long conversation you have with the new friend. It happens on a day where neither of you have anywhere to be except right there and the hours kind of slip away until all of a sudden the whole day is gone and you have this invisible pull toward the heart of this person who was nearly a stranger to you yesterday.  In that first monster convo, you have to lay down the foundation for who you are, in hopes of establishing a context for your personality to fit into in the eyes of this friend from that day on.  You have to tell the “life story” the way you tell a bedtime story to a kid.  It’s so familiar to your own ears, but you see your audience listen with such attention, so hungry for the next piece of the narrative.  And keeping to the “bedtime story” metaphor – the story changes just a little each time you tell it either to suit the audience, or your most recent state of mind or perspective on things.

This voyage here to the Midwest was such a kamikaze move anyway – I don’t even know if its worth it to spell out every little biographic iota in here.  I don’t see the point. Plus, who would “Janie Nygme” be if she laid it all out, Barbara Walters style.  I moved my ass to the Midwest, the same way that Thelma and Louise decided to take a driving tour of the canyon.  Catch the drift?

On the other hand, I’m thousands of miles away from anyone who might put this in any kind of context, and Minneapolis seems like a big enough place to stay hidden for any amount of time – so even if someone got even halfway wise to where I was camped out AND cared enough to come after me with a lasso, I’m pretty sure that I can just keep my head down and look like a loon or a lake or a piece of casserole for awhile.  So if this blog is really going to be my new best friend, I suppose there’s no way I can avoid a little biographic show-and-tell.  It’ll just have to be rather brief, and rather vague to keep the keywords far enough apart for Google not to hone in on the life and times of “Little Janie Runaway.”   

She was born rich and bored in S.outhern Cal.ifornia (a little search engine camoflage trick I learned from a friend – pretty snazzy, huh?)  But unlike her very bored friends who just sat and bitched to each other about the prison bars on each side, I was busy painting the bars primary colors and festooning their circumferences with ribbon.  I did Debate, Speech, and AP English so at least I could articulate what I couldn’t shout.  I read as many books as my social life would allow.  It’s funny how I talk about all these “friends” of mine, and these theoretical interactions between new friends, and so on and so on – when the true blue of it all is that I’ve had so few people in my life that I could really call a FRIEND – in the honest sense of the word. And even then, all of them lived too far away to rely on them the way I hear ‘friends’ are supposed to be able to.  Therefore I have always counted on the internal monologue to make sense of it all. Back in the day, when I was a good girl, I would journal it away in little pink diaries so I could read it someday and see just how far I hadn’t come.

Here goes nothing, Barbara...

 Two big brothers, one little sister, some cats, some dogs, and a Mom and Dad. It was one of those ongoing, very unplanned families – where the older brothers are WAY older, and the younger sister is too young to relate to.  Mom and Dad loved each other in that kind of ubiquitous, impersonal, "hippie" kind of way. That’s what they were after all. Total Hippies. Even after dad ended up making all of his money by providing a very valuable but mundane service to the movie industry, they still found ways to keep it real.  They just kind of went on breeding because they still could. Money wasn’t really an object, and I guess it was just kind of a way of leaving signposts in the sands of time. To have a kid at the beginning of every decade and to name them arbitrarily the way one names a pathetic online journal.  I am the 1980’s – I represent fruitless excess, misguided economics, and absurd pop-music.

The way Mom and Dad kept true to their hippie roots in light of owning a house in O.range C.ounty and driving a ridiculously un-hippie car was to visit their old shack in the hills. I’ve never known right where it was but I’m absolutely sure that all of my siblings and I were conceived there. I’ve been there in spirit I suppose – as a sperm or egg – whichever was the case,  but I’ve never set a living foot in or near “the shack.”  Over the years as their situation improved they made improvements to the shack. They would leave for long weekends to install various items of creature comfort in and around their little nest.  Gas lines for heating and cooking were one of the last improvements they made. Dad installed the piping himself – the handyman that he was.  Mom sometimes questioned the quality of his work in that department (womens’ intuition & hippy earth-spirits insisted, I’m sure) so she made him hire this local Mexican kid who lived near to the cabin to go and check on the pipes for the smell of gas like once or twice a week in exchange for a little money or old appliances each time they would go up there.  

You can probably see where I’m going with this by now; DIY Gas piping, placing safety in the hands of a Mexican kid, referring to them only in past-tense.  I would say it’s a gruesome way to go, but from what I heard there was absolutely nothing left.  Just a big black hole. It was the same day that some wildfires blew across the highlands and didn’t get put down until 2 ½ weeks later after spreading a couple hundred miles across dry grasses and crinkled yucca plants. I sometimes like to think that it was them passing a joint that sent the whole shithouse up in flames, which then in turn burned up mile after square mile of s. California’s 6 to 7 figure real estate country.  Or the blaze could have started independently and consumed their shack in a deafening blast while they took a nap – either way, it doesn’t really matter.  My story basically begins with the day my parents were atomized.

I was at home one day and I get a call from my dad’s old lawyer-turned friend, who first briefly told me that I have been orphaned, followed soon after by an elaborate sequence of directions which have me drive 30 miles to a bank with a thick stack of stock certificates, bonds, cash envelopes which I stash in a family safe deposit box along with about a liter of tears and snot.  The lawyer told me that Dad’s estate got put in to my Uncle Rob’s name on the will because of some pressure from my Grandpa since Rob helped him out with money when he was just getting started.  But if you knew Rob you would know that there would be dollar signs in his eyes way before there would ever be tears for his brother’s untimely demise.  I guess this lawyer knew that Rob would absorb all of it before there was ever a chance for any of it to reach my sister and I. A little bit of property was left to my brothers but they hadn’t really updated the will since before my sis and I were born.  He was just looking out for us.  Good thing cos, as we soon found out, no one else was. 

As soon as Uncle Rob found out that he inherited custody of my sister along with his estate he did what any sympathetic family member would in the time of a crisis: the motherfucker put her up for adoption.  I didn’t know until then that you could put a 10 year old up for adoption, but apparently you can in Cal.ifornia. I made her memorize the address of the post office box I bought. She said she would write since I was not allowed to know where she was adopted.  My friend Peyton checks the box for me every few weeks or so, but up to now, I have had no word from her.  It’s been 4 years. 

For the first 6 months I was ‘allowed’ to live with Uncle Rob and his transparent trophy wife – as long as I paid rent equal to the going market rate for one-bedroom apartments in the area.  He lived in Sherman Oaks, so you can see just how that went.  Plus he would try to drill me for the location of all dad’s stock certificates and mom’s jewelry, and the cash and all the stuff I hid in the box. He would claim it was his and I was being a criminal and violating my dead dad’s wishes for keeping it from him.  As if it was in keeping with dad’s will to pawn his youngest daughter off to strangers and make his other daughter spend her makeshift inheritance paying a fortune in rent to him.

Jesus – it really looks like I’ve committed myself to telling this story, haven’t I? It’s the damned pills, I swear. For being hippies, my parents sure did have a blind trust in modern pharmacology.  Since puberty, I have been on a daily cocktail of mood stabilizing drugs.  I have reached the opinion that it’s kind of unknown at this point whether or not I needed all those teen-uppers and kiddie-downers,  but it’s certain that at this point in my mid-20’s, I can’t go a goddam day without them now.  My brain probably doesn’t even make its own chemicals anymore.  It’s porous straight through, like a cartoon block of cheese in a room full of hungry mice with forks and knives.  Maybe I could have been one of the greatest minds of the 21^st century – but I’ll never know.  I’m just a pill chewing wad of post-modern nihilism with a feisty vendetta against the world, a secret identity, and an overactive sex-drive hungry for the private bits of strangers.

Ok, fine I said it. I’m about as loose as they come. The alternative to paying a small fortune to be miserable in Rob’s house was to move out and just sleep over at the homes of friends every night. The problem was, I never really had enough friends I could do such a thing anyway. The friends I had weren’t all that close either.  It was pretty shitty.  I don’t really know how to work or have an apartment (although I’m trying now)  The problem with my family was – well, I was loved - yet neglected simultaneously. Does that make sense? Some people might wish their parents had never pressured them to look for work or do lots of extra curricular stuff – but I wish mine had. Like a kid standing blank faced staring off into space back stage at a school play. She didn’t hear her cue, and is unknowingly causing moment after painful moment of butt-clenching dead air on stage and in the audience. Teachers and parents frantically whispering your name as loud as they can to make your move and get the show on the road.  But no, you stare off at the silver garland covered cloud suspended in the rafters above the stage picking the pink spandex unitard out of your ass-crack.    

I had no real friends to sleep with, so I slept with strangers until they felt like friends.  Yes, after it worked so well the first few times – it became so very clear what I must do. Yes, I would become the cheapest whore in the county.  Anything you like for the low low price of letting me crash at your pad and making me feel like your pet for a little while.  I even stayed with girls a few times who insisted I didn’t need to pay them back in any way, but I would always end up eating their cunts eventually so I wouldn’t feel like I was racking up any debt.   

 

So “why did you move to Minneapolis,” so many of you have asked in various states of undress? Cliche pillow-talk. From what I heard it seemed very real here. “Seem” is always the word I will use for that perception.  PS3 “seems” more real than NES, but either way in the end you’ve still wasted an entire day sitting inside mashing a piece of plastic with your thumbs in exchange for some paltry neuro-chemical stimulation.

I heard that there was a chance that “Minnesota Nice” might allow me to crash on peoples’ couches and I might not even have to fuck them for the privilege. The only catch was – I WANT the privilege TO FUCK THEM – I so don’t care anymore. It’s not about pride or self-esteem, or even utility anymore.  It’s about a 1 way ticket to the bottom, and old-fashioned endocrine juicing. Getting my rocks off whenever I want with whomever stands in my way.  I am going to re-define the word “Slut” like Michel Gondry redefined “Music Video” and am going to chronicle my exploits in a post-modern sutra that transforms all known ideas of depravity in to museum quality artwork for all to revile or revere.

If you want subtlety this won’t be the place – try The Current. (god, I hate that station.) What I’ve discovered is the only thing I like better than fucking strangers is writing about it.  Why not? I have an endless budget, a cool apartment, a hot body, and a brain just numb enough to think it’s all a pretty good pastime.  What else would a good Nymphomaniac Synesthetic Pill Popper do in my shoes? 

(Oh, by the way – if you don’t know what the condition known as Synesthesia, you should really know, because I have it in a very extreme form and I’m going to be talking about it a lot, and things are bound to get very confusing/psychedelic if you don’t know what I’m referring to. Here’s the wikipedia link, because you are lazy: Synesthesia )

In short, whenever I receive stimulus from something real, I experience a corresponding secondary stimulus that is entirely imaginary, but no less real to me.  For example if I ever get in a nasty argument with someone (I won’t say with WHOM, but…) I might see odd numbers drip down the walls. If I hear a good song, I might smell lavender and the inside of a new car. If I have a great fuck I might hear a perfect E tone followed by all of its octaves all the way up and down past the limits of human hearing.  Do you see where I am going with this? 

I also love dancing. It produces a pretty non-stop parade of positive extra-sensory entertainment. There’s a possibility that all the drugs have made me schizophrenic as well, so sometimes the voices will tell me the numbers dripping from the walls are all integers of 4 when they’re actually just a Fibonacci sequence beginning at .4 and ending when the numbers get so long so quickly that the digits all blend together and the walls just turn white again. So you can see how it gets a little confusing being me sometimes.

But as far as dancing goes, my favorite around town is at First Avenue (Prince’s home venue!) on Saturday nights.  It’s also been the home of my first few scores. Tons of beautiful boys and girls dancing to pretty decent music – all of them too real to know how easy it is to just take advantage of someone.  When I go home with them – It’s me going to their house for some extended revelry and them just coming along for the ride.  What happens, happens – and everyone is all smiles the next morning. 

Speaking of things that my brain has chewed up and churned out – one of them was my morning dose and the other was this exhausting 8 page gut spill.  My head is so tired, and my fingers – equally so.  I really need to truck over to that coffee shop across the park where I got my first quadruple espresso shot this morning and reload.  No it’s probably not a good idea to mix these head-meds with so much pure java. You all tell me that my heart might just stop someday, but I wasn’t really planning to make it much further than 30 anyway, so what’s the worry?

Again this feels like that age-old “first conversation” I was talking about earlier – you know, with the “new friend.” You just don’t want it to end.  I feel like I’ve probably christened this blog better than most do on their first posting – but I have nowhere to be, and neither does the internet. I’ve hit ‘save’ 8 times now.  I am tempted to start talking about the days before I left the valley, or… that one really good summer in High School that was different, or my first few awesome lays in Minneapolis, or even the hellish bus-ride from California to here.  It can wait. It WILL wait. So will you.

Thanks for reading. You’re wise; it might be you I meet next at TML.  And if I already have, don’t take it personally – I can be a notch on your bedpost just as much as you are on mine.  To quote the Artist, “thank U 4 a funky time.” Keep dancing, my fishes. Keep dancing.