Keep My Words

“You need to stop pining over this guy,” my mom said.  I had called her to explain how Jayme makes the dressing for steak salad.  (Ginger, balsamic vinegar, honey, Dijon mustard, and water, cooked on the stove top with onions.)

“If you’re referring to my new blog post, this is a totally different guy than last summer,” I informed her.  “And I’m not pining.”

“Well, you need to forget about him,” she went on,  “The sweetest revenge is shaking ‘em off quickly.  Forget about him.  He isn’t worth a fart.”

I laughed.  “But mom, forgetting about these guys isn’t good for my creativity.”

She sighed.  “You need to be with someone who treats you right.”

“But these guys do treat me right at first!  Then they turn out to be complete shitheads,” I said  “Really though, I’m fine.”

“It’s just that when you write about it, you seem… disturbed,” she claimed.

“Disturbed over the situation or disturbed in general?” I asked.

“Over the situation.”

“But I am disturbed over the situation!” I told her.  “It disturbs me that people can be so completely shitty.”

“Well, they can.  So deal with it,” she replied.  “I’m the mom, and moms know best.  If you see him, ignore him, or be really nice.  If you feel like he is really slime, then ignore him.  I’m telling you.  Moms know best.”

“I hear ya,” I agreed.

“Here’s the truth: (a) I’m an artist, (b) I don’t want to have tough skin, (c) I don’t want to live in a world where everybody has to have this tough skin and has to pretend what happened didn’t hurt my feelings, and (d) it does hurt my feelings!”
-Paul Reubens, b.k.a. Pee-wee Herman

Last night an old friend showed up at my door.  “Just come to the bar,” she said.  “Who cares about that stuff?  We’ll have fun!”

But I care.  And I shouldn’t have to pretend that I don’t.

“I told him he had to be nice to you,” another friend said.  It confused me.  She should have been telling me to be nice to him.

It’s difficult not to hold a grudge when One has been so completely wronged by Another, especially when Another shows absolutely no remorse for his/her actions.  One can forgive without Another’s apology, but still feel the need to not grace Another with One’s company.  And this is not to say that Another gives a shit either way.  But One needs to act with self-preservation in mind, and this may involve not forgetting Another’s proven insincerity.

Additionally, it’s not only about One forgiving Another, but about One forgiving oneself.  That’s where the antipathy lies.  It’s self-resentment for believing anything that Another ever said, and making foolish decisions based on that trust.

A few weeks ago I was at the bar with Tom.

“I like it when you write about weird shit like being a Terminator,” he said.  “I don’t like it when you write about your boyfriends or report weird news.”

“I’m going to quote that in my blog,” I told him.  “So, anything else, Tom Carley?” I asked.

“Yeah.  Tom Carley is the coolest dude in the world and all the ladies should flock to him,” he responded.

My recent writing hiatus was not due to a lack of heartbreak or confusion.  Additionally, I have no shortage of blog notes about “weird shit like being a Terminator” or “weird news”.  I’ve just been busy working.  And trying to be happy.

See, the other night in bed, I decided that I would be happy.  I repeated the word over and over in my head: happy happy happy happy happy…  I imagined conversations, for example:

“How are you?” a random person might ask,
To which I would reply “Happy.”
Then they might say, “Why?  What do you have to be so happy about?”
And I would tell them, “No reason, just trying it on for size.”

Still, I don’t think I’ll smile often.  I’ve never really been a smiley person.  People who smile too much seem hollow and disingenuous, as I’m sure people like me appear cynical and unfriendly.

But I’m not concerned with those unintentional judgments.  They spontaneously combust somewhere between “Nice to meet you” and the 40th drink, or else they’re confirmed, which really has nothing to do with the physical act of smiling.

That is to say, it has more to do with reality and the people that inhabit yours, and mine.  We’re primates, sometimes throwing feces out of anger, and other times picking bugs off one another for amusement.  But if you sit in front of the plexiglass for long enough, eventually you’ll see each individual show some sort of honest affection.

I’m not sure about that last statement, but I want to believe it.  So, I do.

It was a beautiful day.

Andrea, Becky, Caitlin, and I were at an Applebee’s somewhere between D.C. and New York. While Andrea and Becky perused the menu, Caitlin and I stepped outside to smoke cigarettes.

Upon exiting the establishment we immediately found a bench, most likely placed there by the fine people of Applebee’s for the enjoyment of nicotine-addicted customers like ourselves. We sat down and saw that directly in our view was a teenage girl sitting in her car. She was parked in a spot labeled “Carside To Go”.

Suddenly, out of the restaurant came an Applebee’s employee carrying a bag of food. The employee walked the 30-ish feet to the teenage girl’s car and handed over the neatly packaged meal. In exchange, the teenage girl gave the employee a credit card.

The employee then walked back into the restaurant. Moments later she emerged once more, and walked back to the car so that the young girl could sign the credit card receipt. The teenager drove away with her meal, never once having to endure the sunny, 75 degree, 30-foot walk into the corporate eatery.

Caitlin and I were amused. We stopped the Applebee’s employee as she walked back towards the door.

“Excuse me, um, how exactly does this work?” Caitlin asked, though the tone of her voice and look on her face posed a different question: You understand how ridiculous this is, right?

The employee looked at us like we were crazy. “It’s Carside pickup. You just call and place your order, then you park in one of those spaces and we bring your food out to you,” she said and walked inside.

This left Caitlin and I to talk (and laugh) amongst ourselves. Instead of parking and walking what can only be a short distance in a lot so small, people would prefer to sit in their cars on a gorgeous day while an employee walks back (“Here’s your food!”), and forth (“I’ll just go run your credit card.”), and back (“Sign the top receipt and keep the bottom copy.”), and forth (“Thanks and have a great day!”).

In reality, it probably takes longer than if one were to just go inside and pick the food up him/herself.

Don’t get me wrong, we did see the benefits of such a service – elderly people, mothers with a car full of children, handicapped… wait a minute.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Where are the handicapped spots?” Caitlin and I looked around… and around… and around. Behind us, noticeably farther from the Applebee’s entrance than the Carside To Go spots, were the handicapped spots.

We looked at each other, eyes wide and heads shaking.

“I am continually amazed at how lazy America can be,” I noted.

Our cigarettes were done. We went to our table and joined Becky and Andrea, who were still debating about what to order. I had made my decision long before our arrival. Actually, we were there for one purpose, and one purpose only:

“I’m going to eat the shit out of some ribs,” I reminded them.

On May 21st, 2010, Jarrod Wyatt, 26, and Taylor Powell, 21, decided to enjoy some mushroom tea.  As the psychedelic drug took effect, the men became preoccupied with the notion that the end of the world was near, and that soon there would be a final struggle between God and the devil.

They thought that a tidal wave was coming.

Hours later, Sgt. Elwood Lee was dispatched to meet a man who had reported a stabbing.  The witness, a friend of Wyatt and Powell’s, took Lee to a nearby house.  It was there that Lee found Wyatt, naked and covered in blood, standing over Powell’s mutilated body.

“I killed him.  Satan was in that dude,” Wyatt told Lee.  Wyatt was convinced that Powell was the Devil.

“At one point,” Lee said in court, “[Wyatt] asked if we were God, or if we were God coming to save him.”

After cuffing Wyatt, Lee took a closer look at Powell’s body.  The majority of Powell’s face had been removed and an eyeball lay strewn across the room.  There was an 18-inch incision in the chest from which his heart was ripped out.  The victim’s tongue was also cut out and cooked in a wood burning stove along with the heart.  Wyatt told investigators that he cooked the body parts because he was fearful Powell was still alive and he “needed to stop the Devil.”

A lawyer representing Wyatt has claimed the wild mushrooms caused him to act in such a violent way and that he had no control over his actions.  “My client was trying to silence the devil,” said James Fallman, Wyatt’s defense attorney.

Wyatt has been charged with first degree murder, aggravated mayhem, and torture.  He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.  However, prosecutors argue that the act of removing Powell’s heart, tongue, and face took enough time to prove evidence of intent.

Prosecutors added the torture charge because Powell was still alive when his heart was removed.

Jarrod Wyatt (above)

“Yea, that was a bad one,” Justin (not Justin) said about yesterday’s post.

“Really?” I asked.

He didn’t hesitate.  “Yea, pretty short, boring, not very insightful.”

It took me hours to write that post.  I wrote entire pages and deleted them completely.  I went through my blog notes over and over again only to find that there was nothing I wanted to write about.

Lately it seems that instead of letting myself become inspired I’ve been allowing myself to be distracted.  I’ve been making bad decisions because I don’t care about the consequences anymore.  On the other hand, I’ve been making good decisions for the same reason.

I’m doing whatever I want at any given moment.  Spontaneous.  Dangerous.  Fun.

“I really like your blog,” a friend told me the other day.  “You’ve got a lot of balls to put it out there like that.  Knowing the person you’re writing about could read it.”

People tell me things like this all the time – that my blog is “honest”.  I think my blog is dramatic.  I wonder if these things define me.

In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut writes:

Kilgore Trout owned a parakeet named Bill… He told Bill that humanity deserved to die horribly, since it had behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet.

I am curious to know if this was how Vonnegut truly felt, disguised as fiction.

“I have trouble believing anything is 100% fiction,” I once told Tim.  All of the fictional thoughts and experiences we read in our most beloved novels must come from some truth.

Some nights I lie in bed drunk and make blog notes.  (Ashleigh’s Writing Rule #658: Never write when drunk, only make notes when drunk.) One evening, I noted how I wanted someone in particular to die.  I thought about seeing the splish-splash of this person’s blood and guts on the ground.  I wondered how this person’s friends and family would feel when they heard that so-and-so had expired and is on his/her way to meet our maker, or maybe just to a meat locker in the morgue before being reduced to worm food or ashes.  (I’m not really sure what so-and-so’s last wishes regarding burial might have been.)

Is that honesty?  Debatable.  Is it any more or less honest if I create a character who expresses such thoughts to his/her pet parakeet?  Again, debatable.  Should it be stated that I obviously don’t wish death upon anyone?  No, because it goes without saying.  Should Vonnegut have clarified whether he really did or did not think that all of humanity deserved to die horribly?  No.  Why?  Because he was writing “fiction”?

I dunno.

What is something I do know?  That this blog is my cathartic release.  It’s my inaudible music.  My intangible painting.  Me dancing without movement.

It’s me screaming as loud as I fucking can without making a sound.

It’s my heart and my brain, thrown into Jayme’s food processor and made into a meat shake for the world to drink.

“Oh, you like to take pictures of dead things, too?” Aunt Heather asked me.  She had noticed the photo of dead birds being used as the background on my iPhone.

“I do,” I replied.  I’m like the Weegee of dead bird photos, I thought.

Weegee (derived from the phonetic spelling of Ouija) was the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig.  His family moved to New York City from Poland in 1909, when he was just 10-years old.

Fellig left school at age fourteen to help support his family. His first job was as an assistant to a commercial photographer. He also obtained extra money by taking street portraits.  In 1918, Fellig was employed as a darkroom technician in Lower Manhattan.

Then, in 1935, Fellig left his job and attempted to make a living as a freelance photographer. By tuning his radio to the police frequency and monitoring their calls, he often beat authorities to the scene of a crime.  This resulted in grotesque images of murder victims, car wrecks, and the public’s reaction to such tragedies.  He even had a complete darkroom in the trunk of his car.

Fellig sold his pictures to newspapers, and in 1938 he became the only New York reporter with a permit to have a portable police-band shortwave radio.  Since then, his photographs have appeared in multiple exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art.  Books of his work have also published.

In unrelated news, I have a new mole.  “Whoa, you should really get that looked at,” Ryan told me.

The other night I dreamt that it grew to cover the entire left side of my face.  It was quite hideous.

Photograph of a murder victim taken by Weegee (above)

One of my photographs of a dead bird (below)

On Mother’s Day, 1939, Lina Medina gave birth to a healthy six pound baby boy.  But this was no ordinary pregnancy – the new mother was only five and a half years old.

Medical documentation revealed that Lina had begun showing signs of menstruation when she was eight months old, and she started having regular periods at age three.

Lina’s family did not know of her condition until she was already seven and a half months pregnant.  Living in their small Peruvian village, they did not have the technology or money to diagnose the five year old’s bulging belly.  However, as the months passed, the family began to worry that little Lina had a fast-growing, life-threatening tumor in her belly, so they carried her into town for medical attention.

After doctor’s confirmed the pregnancy via x-rays and biopsies, Lina’s father explained that before her stomach started to swell, she was having regular periods that all of a sudden stopped.  Physicians were stunned by Lina’s pregnancy and were not going to pass up the opportunity to study this medical miracle. They transferred Lina to a hospital in Lima, Peru, so she could be observed at all times.

Due to Lina’s small frame and pelvis, it would have been impossible for her to give birth vaginally.  Doctors at the Lima hospital concluded that she would have to have a cesarean section.

In 1941, two years after Lina gave birth, the New York Times published an account of an American psychologist who had examined Lina while visiting South America:

Ms. Kosak said she gave a series of intelligence tests to the child and that on the basis of this study she has no doubt that the child’s age was given correctly.

“Lina is above normal in intelligence and the baby, a boy, is perfectly normal and is physically better developed than the average Mestiza (Spanish Indian) child,” she said.  “She thinks of the child as a baby brother and so does the rest of the family.”

Jose Sandoval, an obstetrician who took an interest in Lina Medina’s case and authored a book about her in 2002 said that Lina was a psychologically normal child, that she displayed no other unusual medical symptoms, and that she preferred playing with dolls rather than her own child.

Lina’s boy, named Gerardo, did not learn until he was ten years old that the woman he thought to be his sister was actually his mother.  He grew up healthy but died in 1979 at age of 40 of a bone marrow disease.  Lina still lives in a poor district of Lima with her husband (who fathered her second son in 1972).

Members of the American Medical Association meeting in 1939 were a bit skeptical of Lina Medina’s extreme youth.  Per a Time Magazine article published a month after Gerardo’s birth:

Most of the members believed that Lina was at least eight or nine, little younger than several U. S. child mothers now living in the South. Baby teeth, said the critical U. S. doctors, are no criterion of age. Lina’s early menstruation, said U. S. pediatricians, was probably caused by an ovarian tumor. Ovarian tumors are not rare, sometimes cause menstruation in children a year old, often produce glandular changes which stunt growth. Concluded A.M.A. spokesman Dr. Morris Fishbein: “It is difficult or impossible to determine the exact age of children born in primitive tribes. . . . It is likely that she was much older.”

The father of baby Gerardo was never determined. In fact, Lina’s father was jailed for incest and rape of Lina, but was let go due to lack of evidence. Lina herself never gave any answers to doctors on how she became impregnated.

I’m getting to that age where a number of my friends are having children.  “Babies having babies,” I always say.  Now when I say this, I’ll always think of little Lina Medina.

Lina Medina, seven and a half months pregnant (above)

(From Facebook:)

Ashleigh Walker –> Justin Tiemeyer: I had a dream that we went to the same school together but class was held on a roof in Brooklyn and on the last day of class you got mad at me because you kept saying you finished reading my blog and I didn’t believe you. Then we were going to walk home together but some weird guy started talking to you, so I just left. Sorry dream-me abandoned you.
May 23, 2010 at 12:54pm

Justin Tiemeyer: Haha. I’m almost done with July 2009! So you basically lost a significant other and decided to leave work and go back to school and wrote a blog as a way of creatively dealing with it?
May 23, 2010 at 3:34pm

Ashleigh Walker: That’s how it started, a kind of quarter-life crisis. And somewhere along the way I remembered how much I love to write, and people seem to like to read it, so…
May 23, 2010 at 3:49pm

Justin Tiemeyer: Good. There’s definitely some struggle in your writing, but it’s not blown out of proportion like a John-Cusack-movie-loving, Real-World-watching, Coldplay-listening writer might. Oh and there’s structure. Which is different. Memoir-based, feelings blogs rarely have anything resembling structure. I’m enjoying your sorrow so far. Haha.
May 23, 2010 at 4:20pm

…

I started this blog one year ago today.

A lot can happen in a year.

I’ve lost some old friends, made some new friends, and held on to some true friends.

I’ve graduated college and begun working for a small company that I hope to help flourish.

I’ve gotten over last year’s heartbreak only to find there is heartbreak far more cruel than those previous, reminding me that someone I believe to be compassionate can turn out to be quite merciless.

I’ve been forced to question if the world is really plagued by bad people, or just good people who do some bad things.

I’ve changed but remained the same.

I could have never imagined that this is where I’d be now.

I wonder what the next year will bring.

Happy birthday, blog.

It was the end of May.

Jayme, Maria, and I were watching the first Sex and the City movie.  In the film, Big doesn’t show up to his own wedding.  His fiancé, Carrie, is devastated.  When she confronts him on the street only moments after he told her he wasn’t coming, she is hysterical.  She hits him.  Repeatedly.

I had just dealt with a similar (but still very different) situation.  “Is it ever okay to hit?” I asked the room.  “Like really?  Shouldn’t you never slap someone?”

“I really don’t think it’s ever okay to hit someone,” Jayme responded.  Her words wounded me a little, as she knew that I had recently lost control of my emotions and slapped a boy.

After Maria left, I brought it up again.  I’d been sitting there over-thinking it and feeling guilty and terrible.

“Should I apologize?  To xxxxxx for hitting him?” I asked.  “I mean, it’s never okay to hit someone.”

Jayme looked at me, and very sternly she said, “No.  He deserved it.”

“But..,”  I started.

“No.  I mean.  It’s not okay to hit.  But he deserved it,” she assured me.

“I just.  I just feel so bad,” I told her.

“Well stop.  Stop feeling bad,” she said.

I told this story to Rona via email.  Jayme’s a sage, she wrote in response. I think she verbalized exactly what the situation is.  Also, a few slaps make a man!!

This boy and I have mutual friends on Facebook.  In my news feed the other day, I noticed a comment one of them posted on his wall.  The mutual friend was expressing how happy he was that this boy has found himself a girlfriend.  It contained the text: …it’s been a while since either of us have dated someone…

I found this funny, since the boy whose wall it was had dated me for months almost immediately before he decided to commit himself to this new girl.  Maybe he never mentioned it.  Us.

Ha ha.

Also quite funny is that this other guy just moved back to Brooklyn.  He now lives around the corner from me with the girl he left me for two years ago.  It certainly does not affect my heart anymore, it’s just… funny.

Ha ha.

But returning to Facebook and emails, I recently received an email from a very old friend that I just reconnected with over Facebook.  He wrote:

Hey Ashleigh, I wouldn’t normally do this. I tend to be shy and don’t really Facebook and all that stuff. I am content to have left my old life behind and blend in…  MY POINT. I loved your website. Really cool words. Thanks for sharing them. Good AM reading. Even if they leave a small hint of residual sadness in the room.

I thought that was nice.

And finally, back to Jayme.  She and I were playing pool the other night at Lockinn.  The jukebox there contains one of my favorite Depeche Mode songs, “Blasphemous Rumours”.  Additionally, I have become newly obsessed with the Regina Spektor song, “Laughing With”.

These songs have much in common.  Maybe they should fall in love.

I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumours
but I think that God’s got a sick sense of humor,
and when I die I expect to find him laughing.
(Depeche Mode, “Blasphemous Rumours”)

God can be funny
when told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right way,
and when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini
or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus.
God can be so hilarious.
Ha ha.  Ha ha.
(Regina Spektor, “Laughing With”)

Last week I decided to find some of the pianos stationed around New York as a part of the “Play Me, I’m Yours” exhibit.  I met Andrea at my last stop: McCarren Park.  Playing the piano was an old man accompanied by his friend on the drums.

“I really thought there’d be some hipsters rockin’ out on this one,” I commented to Andrea.  “Oh, and I thought you’d like to know that I haven’t washed my hair in a week and two days.”

“You are a hipster, you know,” she told me.

“How so?” I asked.

“Uh, what you’re wearing,” (I looked down at my ankle-high pixie boots, jean shorts, and thrift store tank top), “you don’t have a real job, you don’t wash your hair, and you’re sitting in McCarren Park on a weekday afternoon,” she stated.

The day before she had texted me a picture of some birds.

Sometimes birds don’t die, she wrote, Sometimes they chill on stoops like cool awesome people would if they had stoops.  I mean me.

Awww, I replied, But also.  I wish they were dead.  God.  I’m cruel.  Kill them and send me a photo?

You are the worst person in the world, she texted back.

In other news, on July 14th, 2010, Keep My Words will turn one-year old.

It was around this time two years ago that this guy broke my heart.

And it was about one year ago that I decided to break my own heart before this guy did.

Then this year, only a little over a month ago, another boy broke my heart.

Independence Day is painfully literal for me.

independence – (noun) freedom from the control, influence, support, aid, or the like, of others.

All three of them had new girlfriends less than a month after our dissevering.  The latter two ended up with skinnier, more-tattooed, and I’m sure less-cynical versions of me after claiming to be too commitment-phobic to dare call me their “girlfriend.”

Oh well.

Right now, I am uncomfortably content.  Part of me thinks I’m better off alone, and part of me thinks I just haven’t met the right person.  But it’s fine.  I want to meet a good man as much as I want to win the lottery – it could happen, and it could make me gloriously happy, but it’s not necessary.  And it certainly doesn’t happen for everyone.

I have no idea what tomorrow will bring.  Possibilities are everywhere.  With each second, I am changing.  Those boys don’t even know me anymore.  You don’t even know me anymore, nor do I.

Yet there’s enjoyment in constantly becoming reacquainted with myself.

Andrea’s birds (above), Piano at Thompkins Square Park (below)

Piano at Astor Place (below)

Piano at Greeley Square Park (below)

Piano at McCarren Park (below)