self-portrait, porcupine

I called the plumber (#16) and finished the book (#1), the big one, at least finished with air-quotes, and then I started wondering if maybe I should just do everything on my to-do list and prove it by showing you entrails. And then I started wondering if maybe I should have put easier stuff or cooler stuff or more serious stuff on that list, beyond dead mice and dead mouse disposal.

It was #13 on the list but Smell Better was next.

I felt a little embarrassed when I realized the hammock was that long ago, and there hasn't really been a proper attempt since. Things that are difficult - things that resist the prospect of effort - are the very ones that need it. Not now. No way. A self-portrait is not derailed by issues of vanity (or not having enough of it). It's derailed by the question of deserving the attention. Not public attention, but the attentiveness of oneself to oneself. A self-portrait is an inherent statement of worth. And when you don't feel worthy because of deed or history or identity, you're sure you don't deserve a blow dry and half an hour in pretty light.

Photographers disregard the claimed unworthiness of the subject because there isn't room for it. There's too much else to consider. Stuff that matters: aperture, shutter speed. When you stink, pretend you don't. Sweep all that subject's bullshit off the table. Disallow anything other than method and math. Straighten a crooked back, be patient, and employ a medium that has no nose. 

This is not a life list.

I made a to-do list and I put TO DO! at the top and used real numbers like 1. 2. 3. 4.  

1. Finish book.

2. Finish other book.

3. Finish other-other book.

4. Stop weeping.

5. Remember that statistics are weighted very heavily to death and when I die, my last words will not be BUT I NEVER SAW SEASON THREE OF GOSSIP GIR-

6. Stop watching Gossip Girl with my mouth open and that one fly who enters and exits arbitrarily.

7. Be a BodyRockerTM. Open tins of tuna with my abs. Film myself opening a tin of tuna with my abs at sunset, at f2.8, accompanied by acoustic pop. Upload to Vimeo.

8. Kill a mouse from twenty feet away.

9. Kill a second mouse from twenty feet away.

10. Kill a third mouse from twenty feet away.

11. Dispose of bloodied, beaten, faces-twisted-in-agony dead mouse bodies from twenty fe- *

12. $42,000.

13. Smell better.

14. Stand meaningfully in front of the grave of the tortured dead person most likely to impress people who are impressed by creative pilgrimages to visit the graves of tortured dead people. Do something in front of it that demonstrates my wit, intellect, and sensitivity and that can also be captured with my phone. Like kiss the gravestone or lie down in front of the gravestone and make daisychains, you know, looking at the clouds, or leave a note that would make the tortured dead person swear off the internet, like AUTHENTICITY ROCKS or a polaroid of my own witty, intellectual, sensitive feet on grave-grass with STANDING IN MY TRUTH written in Sharpie marker, and it would look awesome on Instagram like #awesome #epicdead #graveswoon #OMG. Maybe, like. I don't know. Van Gogh or Jim Morrison or that Texan lady who deep-fried a cheesecake.

15. State the intention of being less cynical.

16. Call the plumber.

17. Aspire to more.

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I downloaded an application onto my cellular telephone and I found it myself and everything. It's called Timer+ and you set it and it goes BONNNNNNNGG at the end of an hour or two hours or four hours and it's the same thing as a Zen Buddhist monk who winds up like a baseball player and hits you square in the forehead with a compassionate cast iron skillet like BONNNNNNNGG and that means it's time to stop whatever you're doing and set another timer for the next thing to do.

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The sequel to The Dread Crew is two years overdue or thereabouts. The happenings of the past two years or thereabouts tapped every last creative impulse. Plus, it's the winter. Fat flakes falling slowly and drafts like a blower of freezing air from, apparently, nowhere.** Grey light and everything sopping and hauling wood and hauling wood and hauling wood because I'll be damned if I'm letting that furnace burn any more oil than the milk in my tea. My camera is upstairs eating anti-depressants and marshmallow bananas. Missy is petting it and shaking her head at me whenever I walk into the room. Gossip Girl? Are you for serious? You're watching Gossip Girl and you're weeping and there's that one fly that's entering and exiting your mouth arbitrarily. The camera whimpers and reaches for a gummy worm. Missy exhales with gusto.

I'm close, though, even if it's just close to the next stage, which is Penelope tearing into each paragraph like those dogs that are trained to attack men wearing one of those Dog Attack Suits. I love Penelope.***

I'm at the end.****

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Third mug of tea. Tenth, eleventh, and twelfth hunks of birch, maple, birch.

BONNNNNNNGG.

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* TO-DO list screeches to an audible halt at this point, needle dragged across a record, tavern doors swinging thwap-thwap-thwap, crickets, tumbleweeds, two chimps, single flower wilting in time-lapse, etc.

** These are the mouse doors, which are less like regular doors and more like the doors at the Taj Mahal or Buckingham Palace or Caesar's Palace and they're gilded and fourteen feet high with hot gay footmen bearing silver plates piled high with two-week-old cheerios and forgotten bags of poppyseeds and fossilized peas.

*** Penelope is my editor. She is skilled with her instruments.

**** In the two days between writing this post and publishing it, I realized that all I had left, for the novel or at least this particular draft of it, was exactly four scenes. So I gave my Zen Buddhist iMonk a stack of cast-iron skillets fifteen feet high and I finished. Penelope is snapping her jaws lustily and I'm not trying to be cute. She's going to come back and say Super-duper. Now remove at least 17,000 words and maybe I'll consider it, or some other somesuch, and then it's one gauntlet bleeding into another and really, truly, wheee. I've got The Claw and my legs are numb from the knees down. I love writing. I am a masochist.

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If you had a hot gay footman, and you could ask him to bring you anything on a silver plate, and the silver plate could be unreasonably huge if need be, and if your hot gay footman could carry it on his splayed-out fingertips regardless of hugeness, what would you ask for?

Or: what small, big, everyday, or profound thing would you feel most fantastic to accomplish this very second? What's stopping you?

The #1 way to erase 8 pounds and other freebies

The bookmobile came through the village and Evan was at breakdancing class and I needed something to do so I went to the bookmobile but I was too antsy for books and so I picked up a womens' magazine for the first time in years and since then, I've thought of at least fourteen different ways I'd off myself if I wrote copy for a womens' magazine.

GUILT-FREE BURGERS: Go Ahead, Say Yes to the Fries!

AU REVOIR TO OFFICE ASS!

TUSH TONER!

OPERATION KILLER BOD BEGINS... NOW!

JUNK THE JIGGLE FOR A BETTER YOU!

FIND A SENSE OF PEACE. A combo of pacifying patchouli and feel-good vanilla and jasmine in Camuto by Camuto, $78!

I flipped through it feeling angrier and angrier, but not for the reasons you might expect. The evil media and the affected woman's identity and legs airbrushed to the point of plastic and all that. For me it's aesthetic. It's the insult that someone, at some point, decided that the best way to appeal and sell to my discontent would be a starburst around the words BOOTY BLASTER! It's the throwaway nature. The words, the paper, the gloss, the tush toning/inner peace stock images. It's all a lie.

Editors backwards-engineer content to make it more compelling and substantial. That's a part of what I do, and so I read stuff and can't help but backwards-engineer it. There's nowhere to go from BOOTY BLASTER. Take out the trick words, the marshmallows, and there's nothing left. Just garbage and chinese ink and nefariousness scented with cherry blossom mist.

It gets worse, worse. So much worse and I'll confess it. The part that makes me want to run through plate glass is that I picked up that magazine in the first place. Why? Because I've got a booty, so to speak, of a dozen varieties, and gosh, well. Shit. I'd like to blast it.

I'm wearing all my feeeelings. Pudgy and bloated and pale and picked to the bone. My pores. The pores! An elasticity I never knew I had is gone. My chest looks like an old-woman chest, you know, the part that shows. Neck and collarbone. It's all ... god. For serious? Wrinkled. It feels different, done. There's no cream for this. Flat. I went out and the beauty I was with was pure tinsel, and I was her nerdy sidekick because she's one of those pure-tinsel types who's so lovely that she doesn't discriminate against nerdy sidekicks. At one point some guy said What was your name again? while peering over my shoulder for tinsel and it made me feel tantrummy and vain and ludicrous.

I am too evolved to mourn the attention of douchebags. I scowled with adverbs.

But then the douchebag yawned without covering his mouth and I could see his tonsils and they were douchebaggy tonsils and I thought You're yawning? YOU'RE YAWNING IN FRONT OF A WAY-EVOLVED WOMAN? and his mind, without him being aware of it, answered like this: I'm not yawning in front of a way-evolved woman. I'm yawning in front of an almost-forty-year-old mom. Your scowl is the scowl of an almost-forty-year-old-mom and it doesn't even register. The sight of you can only be registered by douchebags who are, like, way older than me. Old douchebags. Like how certain sounds can only be registered by dogs and lemurs and stuff. I'm 26. I can't even see you. All I can see are your pores. Your pores are way-evolved.

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I am currently aggregating a variety of visual inspirations and salutations for contemplation. This contemplation will take many months, during which I will contemplate intensely. How it might feel to have rippling shoulderblades and hips that swivel all the way around and I bet if I had hips like that I'd be serene and glowy. I'd be tinsel. I'd have a tan that would come from the inside out. My teeth would go TING! like that. TING! I'd be magnetic. I wouldn't have pores. They'd leave me in protest on the sheer strength of my namaste.

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Those of us who think of themselves as mindful cooks are the worst. We wrap competence around us like chubby chain mail, insisting that there's nothing else we could do to improve because we (cook from scratch) (don't drink pop) (don't eat fast food) (don't eat ----) (eat lots of ----) and that, with a smug shrug designed to appear calm and collected instead of defeated, ends all avenues. Change is not necessary. We don't buy Pop Tarts and Beep, so our bodies are beyond us.

I don't know what's causing what. What's just years, what's salt, what's the sugar in my tea, the wheat, the lack of water, the cheese, the sloth. A bag of Doritos jumped into my grocery cart last Tuesday but it was a better-intentioned and more rare bag of Doritos than your bag of Doritos. I ate it but I didn't really mean it.

See? I stare at what I see and note what I feel and I feel more deaf and blind than smug.

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It's such a cliche to panic post-Christmas and I've never made a New Years' Resolution in my life so don't pin any of that on me. I'm just stating my plan of contemplation. I'm going to think about it. I'm going to grab fistfuls of myself and mutter. I'm going to have flashes of momentary commitment like, I don't know. A whole glass of water. ALL AT ONCE. I'm going to daydream about being stronger. Not hotter, but stronger, and that daydream will be immediately followed by a bagel with butter and cream cheese and two teaspoons of sugar in my tea, and then muttering fistfuls of myself while I pinch at my aging skin.

I care. I don't care. I care. I don't. It's not just calories and booty. It's everything, the coming-apart that we all are, and the feeling better. I might care, but maybe not enough. I'm thinking about it. Are you?