Interestingly enough

When people tell me things like: "If you don't change x/y/z about what you think/act/do/believe, you're probably going to end up alone." I don't get upset. I'm not indignant, or afraid, or questioning. I'm not surprised, or angry, or scared.


Mostly, I just shrug and think to myself "Yeah, you're probably right."


-J

The Tail of Mr. Bojangles

I was dragging my carry-on through the front door of the 3rd floor apartment I shared with my roommate, Steve. I fumbled with the keys, breathing heavily from the trek up the three flights of stairs that always seems to serve as a reminder that I needed to quite smoking. It was 9pm, and I had just completed my bi-weekly commute home from Washington Dulles Airport, where I am based as a flight attendant. I open the door and I am greeted by the sight of Steve, in his pajamas, holding a Rubbermaid wastebasket and signaling for me to be quiet. He looks down the hallway that connects the rooms of our tiny apartment, and I notice the intricate labyrinth of boxes that have been set up. He looks over to me and mouths the words I have been expecting to hear for the last three months since settling into our South Philly bachelor(ette) pad: “We have a mouse”.

I immediately abandon my luggage. I’m excited. I’m intrigued. I grew up in central Pennsylvania, that part of the state affectionately referred to as “Pennsyltucky”, and I am intimately acquainted with the struggle of rodents and people attempting to cohabitate. Growing up on a sprawling, rural area littered with small family farms, my mother would insist on keeping a barrage of family pets around, and the cats would serve as the chief rodent exterminators. Once or twice (ok, maybe a lot more often than that), there would be a mouse too cunning and too brazen for even the most agile of our feline family members, and I would get in on the action. I remember being seven, eight, nine years old, and stalking our unwelcome visitors, armed with a cereal bowl or cardboard box. Truth be told, I always preferred catching them myself, my family watching in horror and amazement as I grabbed them by their little tails, shrieking all the way out the front door and into the grassy fields outside. I found them playful and adorable, and my childhood self could never quite bear to watch them suffer at the paws of the family cat.
At once, we see a flash of grey fur scurry from the hall into the closet-sized living room. Steve jumps back and I start to laugh and plunge forward, excitedly. I can tell Steve is not pleased by the situation at hand, and so I try to mask my delight at the stand-off that is about to occur. I drop to the floor, still in my uniform and heels. I immediately begin to call out for him. “Mr. Bojangles, I’m sorry, but you’re not wanted here. Can you please come out? I’m not trying to hurt you, dude”. Silence. We move the reclining chair, and in an instant Mr. Bojangles runs for the nearest fortress, a box of board games under the coffee table against the wall. With all of the boldness of my previous childhood mouse-capades, I immediately grab the boxes, hoping the sudden interruption will jar Mr. Bojangles out of hiding into the waiting trashcan. I begin to have visions of victoriously pinching him by the tail and setting him free on the fire escape, telling him to run as fast as he can, and explore the delicious array of dumpsters and curbside trash that south Philly has to offer. We wait another five minutes, and Mr. Bojangles is no where to be seen or heard. A small hole in the bottom of the wall behind the television is his new, suspected hiding spot. “I’ll get some traps tomorrow”, Steve says.

He brings home five different traps. A little excessive maybe, given our tiny apartment, but I understand he wants to get the job done. The traps are glue traps, small black sticky pads of doom. Steve arms them with peanut butter and cheese, a kind of smorgasbord of entrapment. We scour the apartment for the most strategic places to set traps. We go back to emailing. We cook dinner. We go to bed. We wait.

In the morning, much to Steve’s delight and my (hidden) dismay, we see our traps have succeeded. There, on the black glue-trap pads of no return, is not only Mr. Bojangles, but another furry accomplice. Briefly, I imagine a sort of rodent Romeo and Juliet scene of a romantic double-suicide, before reminding myself that despite the fact that scientists use them in lab-testing studies and correlate their findings to the human brain, they are still mice. On one of the traps I can see Mr. Bojangles is still twitching slightly, he’s still alive. My heart breaks a little as Steve scoops up the traps, sandwiches them together, and tosses them into a plastic Wal-Mart bag. He ties it tight, double knotting it, quietly sealing their fate.

He went by another name. Intellectual Property reasons, he said. I didn't even know his real last name until one night he made me come so hard that I thought my brain would fall out of my skull. I asked out of a passing curiosity, not because I cared. He could have lied to me for all I know, in fact, I almost wish that he had, because he told the most wonderful lies. His greatest skill was his own self-deception, a game that I had always wished more people were better at playing.

When I saw him for the first time, taking off his jacket in a smoke filled hole-in-the-wall (a place he had chosen no doubt for its suggestive ambiance) I thought, he's not very tall, but he carries himself like a diminutive Adonis. He never drank very much. Something told me he didn't need the courage. He sat across from me, and the stories began, religious beginnings giving way to a loss of the innocence that never really existed (people always recognize their own kind). There were the psychotic breakdowns of the women he'd left in his wake. The emotional destruction of most of the women that knew they could tame him. The way he would wave the warning flag over his head that clearly told me to get away, but that look on his face that said I'd regret it if I didn't stick around. He was a master at spinning his tales, leaving out the most important details, which he would reveal one at a time over the course of weeks and months, as if he were deciding what I deserved to hear. Yet, that first time seeing him, I was not blown away. And when he kissed me goodbye at the end of the night, he had all the constructed grace of a man who knew what he was doing, who usually did much, much more. Later, he would tell me, I was one of the only girls to get kissed at the end of the first night. I wondered why he was trying to be sweet with me, it wasn't like him, but eventually I came to realize he had left out "instead of fucked" from that sentence.

Later, I would find out, he fucked like an expert, with the potential to be a specialist. He liked to be who he wasn't, and the nominal truth of his stories didn't hide the fact that he would never see things how they were. I liked that. He liked to play a part, the part of all-knowing, but I knew better. Or, at least, he let me think I did. It was like he wanted to be the God we had both rejected years ago, omnipotent but fearful that I knew better, and I wanted to be punished for knowing the truth. I told him all the filthy things I wanted to do, all the ways I wanted him to hurt me, and of course he told me I was just trying to impress him. Push. Pull. Until finally, he did what I wanted, under the guise of giving him all the power. It was a certain thrill to believe that I was schooling this self-imagined Casanova. Even if it wasn't true that he had 'never really done this before', he spoke the words with such a sincere fragility that despite its possible insincerity, still made me swell with the depth and commitment to playacting for my own benefit. He wanted to be the young, mysterious stranger in the bar as much as I wanted him to be. He wanted to be destructive, to be allowed to cause pain, to hurt, to create something hauntingly beautiful and violent, and he wanted to take the credit. I wanted to be crushed. Broken. Ruined. I wanted love the only way I knew how to take it - begging, in short, painful, and mysterious spurts, with a stranger I knew very well. I sit across from him, and light up a cigarette. I don't normally smoke, but I exhale gently in his direction, and he gives me the face that I can't get enough of, the face I see when I ask him to choke me, when I tell him to fuck me like the little slut that I am - in an instant, he is repelled, and fascinated. For a moment, we're everything we aren't, and nothing has ever felt so good.

Lolita Grows Up

I have always been pretty
and don't you deny it
it's true
I wasn't mean,
but I was pretty,
and for most
that was basically the same thing.

I have always been pretty
and don't say I'm not
because it's the truth
and I had no innocence,
not by any stretch
but I was pretty,
so for most,
that was basically the same thing.

Despite my railings I knew
I was Nabokov's nyphette,
even very early before
I knew what distinct pleasure
there was
in
that word
people called
evil.
For me, I was pretty
and evil was not, although
they're basically the same thing
I now realize.

Pleasing to the eye of everyone else
gave no pleasure and so
I learned to take it
for myself, in any
cheap presentation and fancy packaging
that it would be offered-

God
love
cigarettes
high-heels.

Of course,
all of these things are illusions
and may kill you in the end,
but they're all basically the same thing.

-J

Choose The Right Victim

When I met you I knew you would take everything
I hoped you would
stories of an everyman's
epic
spilled from your colorless eyes
and skillful tongue
told tales of Odysseus' journey
out of south Jersey.

In and out of beds,
or at least that was
the eloquent way of putting it
I used to recite you poetry
from memory
sometimes mine
sometimes what I wish were mine
but it was never an accident
and I knew you'd fall into
the only love you knew how to give

When I asked you to hold me,
I told you to hold me down
and you looked at me with
that same brief glint in your eye
of nervous fascination and disbelief
like when you were telling me stories,
on one hand proud,
on the other, not entirely believing yourself.

I just wanted to give you what you always wanted
permission to inflict wounds on purpose
visible, like blue and purple outlines of continents
on my thighs
I wanted you to look on what you'd done for once
and be proud
and take credit
It's hard to argue with
what's right in front of your eyes.

You are so unbearably
like everyone but you try,
you create someone else
for which I am so endlessly thankful
I do the same for you
and it is an exhausting game
but not without its little victories,
like the first time I saw
the color of your eyes,
when they widen,
like the look of a
mistreated animal
who never grew quite as big
as he imagined.

-J

Happiness = overrated

and misunderstood.

I am not happy. But, I am definitely not unhappy.

What is the adjective one can use to describe the feeling of being 100%, totally, and utterly alive?

Cause that's what I am.

Dear future Jackie,

Never forget Jackie at this moment. She makes almost no money, she doesn't own anything, and she hides in the third floor of an apartment in a city of over a million people. Her life is insanely beautiful.

Don't forget that. Don't lose that. Wherever you are, whoever you are, remember that you are cool water that can flow and change shape into whatever container holds you, and you're still the same. Don't lose your soul. There's no price that's high enough to make it worth losing. Be proud of the essence you've been able to maintain through it all. Make that your primary goal, always. Keep loving. Keep living. Keep asking questions. Keep the glass half-empty to make room for everything wonderful that comes your way. Stay as honest as you can, but don't beat yourself up too much when you aren't. Forgive yourself, and then forgive other people, because we're all in the same boat, and its not sinking, its drifting, and if you try too rigidly to direct its course, you'll miss all the wonderful places that the wind wanted to take you all on its own. Come alive. Stay alive.

-J

Why I am and am not a feminist

I had always wondered
if I was just
a fraud
parading around
in
stilettos
and my short,
short skirts
I had the ass for it, after all

I didn't look like them
but I was them.
I was all of them.

they'd laugh and call
me fruit fly
flame dame
fag hag
god-damned wannabe
art fucker,
take off your heels,
you're
your
own
prison
they said.

and it didn't matter
what I read
or thought

I raised my hand
to answer
proudly
with
perfectly
manicured nails

and you didn't listen

I sit back
and let
the ones who
looked more
like they fit the bill
speak
for
me.

-J

I don't want it

You
can take
all
your
Bikram yoga,
Memoirs,
Tea parties
and books
about
your
fucking
spirituality

I don't want it

You can take
all
your tax breaks
your
Gideon Bibles
fair-trade coffee
abstinence programs
secularist
religious
bullshit

I don't want it

You
Can
Take
It
All.

I want freedom
and it's not yours to give
so,
you can take it all
and stop
pretending
you're doing
me any
favors.

-J

Once Upon A Time In South Philly

Sometimes, all I need to re-balance is to start a new art project, bake a few cookies, remind myself what amazing people I count as friends, and marvel at what a beautiful life I have.

Some good new tunes never hurt, either.

Buenos Noches,

-J

If You Want To View Paradise

Expectation
is
the death
of imagination

maybe the fight is good
all our
stubborn tics
that we cling to
like a woolen blanket
like a child
with a boundless imagination

maybe it's our parents faults
(psychologist's wallets
need this
to be true)
or the teachers
in the failing schools
where expectation is
the only form
of acceptable knowledge

or the lovers
we bend our will to
freely, we think
until we're operating
beyond any semblance
of what we once were,
or thought we were

it's not compromise that
brings peace
it's the acceptance that
our microscopic individualities
are not to be
hammered out mercilessly
in the name
of expectation

so,
work harder

expectation
is
the death
of
imagination

-J

Re: Bukowski's 'Alone With Everbody'

I see you
in me
sometimes
quite
literally

but I see you
in me
and I wonder
if the hundreds
of others
did too

I wonder if it scared them
I wonder if they knew it
I wonder if they refused, in the end
to see even the smallest bit
of you
like them

I see you in me
and that means
the occasional nightmare
unfulfilled desires,
and grave disappointments
caused of our own volition

the overwhelming ambivalence
the genius of pure humanity
in all its faltering forms
intersect to make a whole
that will never be filled
even when I see you in me

I pray you will never be full


-J

DILFS

I kind of wonder if your kids teachers or the mothers of their friends and classmates hit you on. I would say yes, because goddamn, you're sexy. Actually, I hope they do. Because that's hot.

This post is irrelevant to anything significant. I would like to shout your hotness from a mountain, but a blog will do.

-J