pretty dumb things

play out your dead

When I was seven, my mom married my stepfather and we all moved to Middle-of-Nowhere, VT, pop. 700. My mailing address was Chelsea G. Summers, Middle-of-Nowhere, VT O5555. Were you to have sent me a postcard, it would have gone to a post office about the size of my current bedroom. I would have walked the half-mile to the boudoir-sized post office to pick up said postcard, and if you’d sent it to me after the age of nine, I would have done so with a large St. Bernard padding along beside me.

My family lived in a converted two-room schoolhouse. Initially, we only rented the right half, but then the grandmother of my mom’s high school friend sold the house to my parents, and we had the whole drafty, poorly renovated hydra-house, and sometimes rented out the left half. To the exact right of us lived an old German couple in an old American farmhouse. To the left and behind us rolled out a carpet of farmland, a sometime home to a herd of Holsteins, and in the spring, many frogs who sang their guttural songs about eggs and flies and the pain of pollywogs and other chthonic frog songs. Beyond the field was a bilious green house owned by a family named Moody. They shared our party phone line. Mrs. Moody drew on her eyebrows. The Moodys had gun racks made out of deer hooves, the deers’ little hooves pointed eternally up, ironically bearing the method of their own destruction.That house always smelled like the bottom of a grease can.

In front of us was a wide ribbon of field. White in the winter, green in the summer and brown the rest of the year, the field unfurled to a river. On the other side of the river were more hills, a string of houses that at night lit up like Christmas lights, and a big red barn where square dances were held. Women went to there dressed in poufy little skirts held aloft by crinolines ethereal as mounds of egg whites. Men wore string ties. I imagine that on Sunday nights these people watched Hee-Haw and enjoyed it.

To the far right, beyond the German couple’s home, beyond the sliver of woods behind and the evanescent pond before, a pond that sometimes froze in the winter and the local boys would play hockey, and I would skate alone thinking of Dorothy Hamill, beyond all that lay our local graveyard.

stepping onto virgin territory: a tale of friendship

I have an unlikely best friend. Most of my friends are very much like me. We misspent out youth in an array of anti-social and vaguely creepy manners. We have long and tortuous histories with sex, drugs and/or rock ‘n roll. We fucked at least a handful of strangers and at least one of them was most likely a stranger of our own biological sex. We flopped about aimlessly in various professional pursuits, and only after throwing many fistfuls of mud at the wall did we finally find something that stuck in an artistically arresting position. When young, we stole stuff, and though we’ve given up the practice the thought remains. We vote Democrat, reflexively.  We are not always kind to strangers. We tip overly well because we worked in the service industry. We distrust the mechanisms of culture: marriage, religion, corporations, suburban housing developments and their lawns. We’re the ones voted “Class Weirdo” at graduation, if we bothered to formally graduate at all.

Standing apart from my usual band of miscreants, malcontents, low-level addicts, and tattooed love children is my friend Elizabeth.

death: the banal frontier

Death, it seems, comes not from on high, nor in a carriage, nor on little cat feet, but with casseroles. Or in my Uncle Aaron’s case, and in my Aunt Ava’s condo, also with babka, bagels and cookies. Death seems to have a preoccupation with carbs.

Unsurprising to those who know me, I have a minor obsession with death. I’m currently watching season 3 of Six Feet Under, reading Julian Barnes’ mortality memoir, Nothing to Fear, and working on a short story whose first line is “When your roommate is a vampire, you have to solve the tampon issue”—and no item on this list is particularly uncommon for my life. My own suicidal tendencies are so recurrent that I’ve said the song of my life is a funeral dirge. It's not that I am much frightened of nor concerned about what happens after death, nor am I enthralled with the concept of it. It’s more that I am quite often in pain and find bemusing the fact that some day I will die, like everyone else.

I have been to six funerals in my life. My first was my grandfather’s wake; he hung himself when I was twelve. I don’t remember much about the service other than I very quickly grew tired of people’s pity for me and their anger toward him. The second was my stepfather’s father who died when I was nineteen; I can’t recall exactly why, perhaps a heart attack. The sadness I felt seemed abstract, as if my grief were a Rothko painting. I didn’t know this grandfather well, but I liked him. Primarily, I felt for my stepfather. My mother’s mother died the next year from a stroke, and that was a huge, though not unexpected, loss. I took quite a break from death and funerals. Then, when I was 32, my ex-boyfriend Will overdosed. That was a weird, weird scene in which many people threw passionate bolts of love and hate in my direction. A few years ago a friend of mine’s dad died, and I went to his funeral to support her. And this past week, of course, I went to Philly for my Uncle Aaron’s.

My life experience with death is quite limited. I have only those six funerals. The only deaths I’ve witnessed have been those of dogs; I held their paws and bid them to go gently into that good night. I have watched scads of deaths and funerals on film and television and read of hordes of others, but nothing brings into high relief the artifice of those fictional ends of lives like going to an real, live funeral.

It’s not surprising that we humans paint the ends of human life in such saturated colors. We do, after all, paint everything else with more intensity. No birth, no first tooth, no first day of school, no pangs of adolescence, no first love, no break-up, no hellish job, no courtship, no marriage, no divorce, no bank robbery, no computer hacking, no crime investigation, no abortion, no political scandal, no betrayal, no ugly-duckling-turned-swan, no empire’s rising, no epiphany, no war, no peace and no death have the glamour, the sheen and the cleanliness of its fictive counterpart. Fictive lives are shinier than our real ones. Even the mess seems prettier.

And what these fictions cover up is exactly how tiresome the process of life is—even as they celebrate how wondrous it can be. The truth about funerals is that they bring bone-weariness and boredom. The casserole, that infinitely reheating self-contained dish that may be quite good or really bad but is never exceptional, may very well be the perfect metaphor for funerals.

My Uncle Aaron’s service was not much different from most funeral services. The Rabbi talked like Reverend Lovejoy, dropping the ends of sentences like stones off a cliff and then suddenly switching it up and making the last word soar like a swallow. The eulogy itself was a sudden apotheosis of my uncle. He was the loveliest, the warmest, the funniest, the most loving, the most generous, the most everything. My Aunt Ava sat directly in front of me sobbing fiercely, and I, being an empathetic crier, wept along with her. Other people cried too, while some didn’t. All listened to the Rabbi’s superlatives. The funeral service, is after all, for the living, and my family is as much like everyone else’s as it isn’t.

The living leave a funeral immersed in their own mortality—how can we not? Don’t ask for whom the casserole comes, it comes for thee. And plunged into my own mortal introspection, I thought about what I wanted for my eulogy. I don’t want superlatives, for one thing. I want whoever speaks at my service to show me as the complicated, contentious, sarcastic woman I am. A speaker with a strong sense of the absurd would be swell. I don’t want my living to remember some whitewashed, sanitized version of me. If they loved me well in life, they’re fully aware of my glorious faults and my faulty glory. They might as well get one last full measure.

This past fall when I was fully immersed in my suicidal font, I wrote a suicide note and started plotting my service. It was a profoundly pathetic experience, as well as a cathartic one. Nothing so much yanked me back from the brink as my self-laving in self-pity, and the fantasy service was the pitiable straw that broke the solipsistic camel’s back. Really, how many people have played “Moonlight Mile” at their funeral? This was the depth to which I had sunk, and stunned by my own operatic dismalness, I clawed my way out of the open grave.

I didn’t know my uncle Aaron very well; in fact, I’d not seen him in over 25 years. He may very well have been as exceptional as his eulogy described. I could just be seeing his service through my own sardonic lens, in which case shame on me. I didn’t know the man well, and yet I had to honor Aaron, my memory of him and his small imprint on my life, which will last as long as I do.

I also went because I wanted to serve as another buttress in my aunt’s monolith of grief; the more people who surround the grieving, the less they have to bear. It’s what the living do. We go and we eat bagels and we cry as we let others cry on us. We drink bad coffee and we pick at the babka. It may be banal, but it’s life, and therefore it is beautiful.

on the dollhouse dilemma and joss whedon's body of work

It’s no secret that I worship at the altar of Joss Whedon, and the irony of that statement, given Whedon’s avowed atheism, is not lost on me. I am one of the legions of people who are autodidacts of the Whedonverse, those who will from time to time exclaim, “Shiny!” when pleased, who can sing along not merely with “Once More with Feeling” but also “Commentary! The Musical,” and who secretly lust after a Smile Time Angel puppet. I am a shameless Whedon geek. Should Joss Whedon cross my path, I would be reduced to a blithering idiot and be overcome with my need to kiss his, well, anything, really.

Which is all a preamble to my explanation of both why I find Whedon’s new series Dollhouse not very good and why, despite recognizing that I don’t like it very much, I’m still watching it.

spencer t. jones, five years gone

I wrote this piece two years ago to honor my loss of my first dog, the legendary Spencer. I've reposted it here because try as I might, I don't think I could write anything more beautiful and right.

Three years ago on 3 July 2003, I euthanized my dog, the Legendary Spencer. I quail a bit at the word “euthanize”; I find my chest contracts at it. It’s an ugly word. To my mind, though, the euphemisms are worse: put down like an insult or put to sleep like a child, as if there is a time when he, my furry eternal toddler, will rise again.

Three years ago Spencer and I took our last walk. I leashed him, and he looked at me with dying and hopeful eyes because he loved me and because he loved walks. He unquestioningly went with me; he stepped gingerly down the stairs of my apartment for the last time. For the last time, I watched him pee, him no longer able to lift his leg. For the last time, I saw him pause outside Bang! Bang! because one upon a time the store had been another store, a store that unfailingly had provided Spencer with biscuits, and he never, not even in his slightly addled dotage, forgot a place that gave him biscuits.

For the last time I took him for a walk and for the last time he trusted me.

He was, unquestionably, ready to die. His kidneys were failing, and his lung cancer had progressed to a point where he hacked and coughed often and with a painful rawness; just breathing, for him, was difficult. He had ceased to eat, even yummy treats like liverwurst. I had, a few weeks earlier, had him shaved for the summer, something I had never done before. I felt he was old and uncomfortable in the heat, so I had brought him, also for the last time, to the groomer’s, which he hated.

I bid adieu to his beautiful caramel sundae hair, the first bits of him I said good-bye to; the rest would come later.

And so three years ago for the last time, I brought him to his vet’s, where she put us in a quiet room and then injected him with some kind of preliminary downer, to get him to sleep before she gave him his lethal dose of whatever.

He wouldn’t sleep there on the vet’s floor. He couldn’t. His body, dehydrated from his failing kidneys, and his mind, nervous from being at the vet’s, wouldn’t succumb to the soporific drugs. His eyes remained open and he remained restive. Finally, unable to wait any more, the vet just came in, and kindly and gently injected him with a series of shots. He died in my lap.

I held him and cried, and then I clipped tufts of his ear hair, which I have saved in a box. I also took ink prints of his left front paw on rice paper. (I would, about a week later, walk back to the vet's to pick up a white bakery box that read " Spencer, the loving pet of Chelsea Girl." It still contains his ashes.)

I walked home from the vet’s alone. Alone I spent that night and the next day, 4 July. The following day, I took the prints I had made of Spencer’s paw after his death to a tattoo artist, and I had him tattoo me with Spencer’s paw, his name and his dates on my right deltoid. It’s not a very good tattoo—it wasn’t my usual artist, and I knew I’d regret its ham-handed scarring depth—but I will never remove it.

I have lost friends, I have lost family members. I have never in my life felt the keening grief I felt over losing my dog. I sobbed with animal loss—deep, heaving, inarticulate moans of loss. I can’t even write this today without tears. And I think that this grief is due to the fact that people have disappointed me. People have created conflict. People have given me qualified affection.

My dog never did. Sure, he made me angry. Once he ate the corner of my then-roommate Becky Sue’s mattress. It was not a good day for either of us. But Spencer was always unequivocally happy to see me. His love for me was pure, and steady, and unqualified.

I was his God, he was my dog.

I remember in those first few weeks of insane grief, in those days when all I wanted, all I really wanted was to be with him, how I felt his fear of being removed from me, how I worried that no one would take care of him wherever he was, and how I had a dream. In my dream, he and I were out on a beautiful summer day, in a park that wasn’t a park, and somehow we got separated.

I saw him across a wide expanse of very green grass and I called him, but he didn’t come. He stood there, his long blonde and white hair rippling in the breeze as I called and called, and then he walked, his big Aussie butt twitching, away from me. In my dream, I remembered that he was deaf, that he couldn’t hear me, but then I woke and I realized that he had left because he was dead. He was gone, and I could never call him back.

I don’t have a religious background. I don’t have a clear idea of an afterlife, of a heaven or a hell or even a reincarnation. However, in my hopes, if I live a good life, if I’m moral and take responsibility for my mistakes, if I treat my neighbor as myself, and apologize when I do not, then I shall at my life’s end be reunited with Spencer.

In a perfect world, dogs like him would never die. In a perfect world, I would never have known this loss. But in a less perfect world, I console myself, I would never have known his love.

Spencer T. Jones 11/27/90-7/3/03 

a pervert's guide to good grammar: part 3, subordination and coordination

Once more, I hold you, my audience, in the cross-hair grammar and kink. Nothing adds credence to your pervert's pedigree like seriously well-endowed self-expression.  If you're interested in further building your skill set, here's Part One, on comma use, and here's Part Two, on semi-colons and colons.

Sometimes grammar just sounds naughty. Dangling participle. Passivization. Periphrastic. They’re terms like “mukluk” or “mastication” in that they sound far more prurient than they really are (which is not to say that one couldn’t express a naughty thought about mastication in a passivized syntax: “Trussed in twine, Bob’s bulbous balls begged to be masticated, but I forbore,” for example.)

But of all the kinky-sounding grammatical terms, the ones that seems to announce their own smuttiness most boldly are “subordination” and “coordination.” It might be my own polymorphously perverse imagination, but it’s hard for me to hold those terms in my head without seeing a seething, roiling mass of promiscuously mixing bodies. But that just may be me.

on his royal highness's royal boxers

Lately, I’ve become fascinated with the Showtime series The Tudors. Starring the very toothsome Jonathan Rhys Meyers, as well as the equally esculent Jeremy Northam, the show centers on the reign of Henry VIII when he was a young, lithe and decidedly randy man. It’s filled with pretty people wearing pretty clothes having pretty sex while high drama and many servants and the occasional inexplicable plague creates a compelling backdrop. It’s a lot of fun.

It is not, however, particularly historically accurate. The show, for example, lumps both of Henry’s sisters, Margaret and Mary, into one composite character, and then they play fast and lose with her, marrying Margaret off to an aged King of Portugal (she was really married to King James IV of Scotland and was the grandmother to Mary Queen of Scots) and then having her dispatch him handily with an overstuffed pillow so that she could marry her lover, the Duke of Suffolk (it was really Mary who married an old man, though he was King Louis XII of France and then, after indirectly causing his death by excessively athletic sex, she married Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. So they did at least get that part correct). But, really, history is written if not by the heroes, then by the television corporations who broadcast it, so who cares.

Essentially, The Tudors is “history” with really good personal hygiene and completely historically inaccurate, if more attractive, hairstyles. And I felt really fine with being swept up in the drama, the brocade, the rat-free lifestyle of these super-scrubbed fifteenth-century folk filtered through a twenty-first-century lens until the episode with His Royal Majesty’s Boxers.

a pervert's guide to good grammar: part 2, colons and semi-colons

Apparently there is quite the contingent of grammar sluts out there lurking in the digital gloam. I had no idea that so many of you would be so hungry for a little syntactical discipline. But then who doesn’t want to feel the stinging lash—as well as the mollifying lick—of the grammarian’s tongue? No one I want to share a turkey sandwich with.

Now that I’ve explained the wonder, the power, the flesh-cleaving glory of the comma, I’ll move on to  two of my favorite marks of punctuation: the noble colon and the oft-debased semi-colon. Several of you asked for it, so let me comply with your polite requests, as I am oft wont to do, both in the boudoir and out.

Colons and Semi-Colons: Putting the Kinky in Your Thinky with Punctuation

Colons and semi-colons function very similarly to commas in that all three punctuation marks indicate a close kinship between separate ideas contained within a single sentence. However, if commas often indicate that your ideas work together as a series—as when they separate items of adjectives in a list, or if they show what’s not entirely necessary but kind of fun in your sentence—as when they indicate non-restrictive clauses, or if they help to prevent misreading—as when they separate two independent clauses joined by one of those seven magic words known as coordinating conjunctions, then your colon and your semi-colon usually form a logical or analytic link between your ideas.

Think of it this way, if it helps: in the orgy that is writing, commas are kind of the lube. You can fuck without it, but why? Without commas, sex is going to be pretty straight-forward and possibly boring. However, in the great syntactical gang-bang, colons and semi-colons make for some truly interesting coupling. These punctuation marks slam, slide or otherwise seduce two or more often fully-formed concepts into close copulation. In brief, colons and semi-colons make sentences do some pretty kinky shit. Which you really kind of have to respect, if not cherish.

a pervert's guide to good grammar: part 1, commas

I am not in a minority about this matter: I find good grammar sexy. There’s something about a properly honed turn of phrase that can make me a bit damp around the lacy bits, sometimes even if the sentiment expressed is profoundly lacking in apparent sensuality. Grammar, you see, is nothing more than a set of rules that order discourse, and in that way, it’s just a slender shade away from other human endeavors bounded by agreed-upon rules. Like tango, say, or BDSM.

Because I do love rules as much as I love breaking them, and because I love knowing the difference between ignorance and style even more than I love breaking rules—and that does mean something, I present to you the first in a hott, hott grammar series.

A Pervert’s Guide to Commas:

All punctuation shows an explicit relationship between ideas. Sometimes, as with a period, the idea comes to a full declarative stop when the sentence ends. Other times, as with an exclamation point or a question mark, the punctuation indicates not merely that the idea has ended, but that it has done so with a specific emotional marker—quizzicality on the part of the question mark, and surprise on the side of the exclamation point.

Commas also show a relationship between ideas, but rather than being the definitive end that a period, exclamation point or question mark provides, commas are rather more subtle. You can, if you want, think of those ending marks as an orgasm. The deed is done. Another may be begun. Or it may not. A comma, however, is more like those little somatic susurrations that flicker and twitch, but don’t signify the end. Rather, they show a close and intimate relationship between single words, dependent phrases or whole independent clauses.

Commas are the most useful little things marks known to punctuation. Acting like “cleave,” they are the contranym of the world of punctuation, joining as much as they separate. If you ever were told to insert a comma where you would a breath, take your next vacation to hunt down and punish with furious might that person who instructed you thus. Here are seven simple rules for utilizing commas correctly.

life in prepositional phases: back at 2007, forward to 2008

One year ago about now, I was nervously waiting for the derailed NY Observer article to be published (it wasn’t). Today, I write this post with a book contract sitting all shiny on my desktop. Sure, it’s not a contract for my book—that is a book for which I hatched the idea out of the freshly fluffed fields of my imagination—but it’s a book contract nonetheless. In the intervening twelve months, I have gleefully left my Ph.D. program and have had two articles published in Penthouse, been paid to write for Sappho’s Girls blog, penned an introduction to an erotica anthology and had two more stories accepted for publication in anthologies in 2008. I’ve done a reading at Rachel Kramer Bussel’s In The Flesh reading series, been interviewed by the legendary Susie Bright for her podcast and the ineffable Alana Noel at Lust Bites. I like getting paid to write. It’s pretty much the grooviest.

In the past year, I’ve come close to getting engaged, come close to breaking up, and somehow come closer to my boyfriend, Donny. Though we have yet to resolve our relationship in easily parsed ways, we love each other great big fat lots. I have written virtual reams on Donny’s terrible beauty in bed. I don’t think I’ve written near enough about how very good he is at being my friend. He listens, even when he doesn’t seem like he is, and he surprises me repeatedly with how well he knows me. Trying to express my feelings for this man makes me tread on uncomfortably well-worn cliché territory. I’ll stop now before I write something your aunt would want to stitch on a pillow without irony.

And as for me, the inside of me, that pulsating and wormy-pink beating grey matter, I’m feeling pretty good, in general. Sometimes I feel frightened. Other times I feel confident. Most times, I feel a mixture of the two. I’ve seen my engagement flicker before my eyes like an apparition. I’ve experienced the thrilling cognitive dissonance of my birth-father’s return to my life. I’ve begun negotiating a successful move from academic to writer. Oddly, in the face of it all, I’m relatively shit-together, actually, which continues to shock me when I stand back and look at my relative shit-togetherness, though less shocked as I used to be, thus testifying to the aforementioned state of being shit-together.

(Parenthetically, one has to marvel at that particular scatological metaphor. I suppose it’s better than being shit-apart, but as a metaphor, the phrase “shit-together” really only gathers steamy luster when imaginatively juxtaposed against its opposite. No one wants to be shit-apart, but one only really wants to be shit-together when one imagines the alternative. You have to wonder if “shit-together” has been subject to scrutiny by William Safire, or if he found the term too cloacal and unsavory.)

With the hindsight that is if not 20/20 then is at least less fuzzy than my oft-myopic vision of the present, 2007 looks pretty rosy, however studded with the pricking thorns that make roses interesting. After all, if it were all milk and honey, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. It’s only through confronting adversity that I find I have the sterling stuff.

Here’s a look back at 2007, and here’s to you and yours and wishing you a simply smashing, if shit-together, 2008.

In January, I considered the bloody pleasure of menstrual sex, did my best not to flip out over my boyfriend’s virtual indiscretions, and evaluated the pros and cons of writing a blog with, if not about, sex.

In February, I sang a paean to my retired mattress, an encomium to dildos, and a requiem to Anna Nicole Smith.

In March, I suffered from mono, kicked my dissertation to the curb and missed my boyfriend’s kiss.

In April, I reflected on remakes, spit and people who suck.

In May, I wrote about my long-lost birthfather finding me, about metaphors of skeletons and other bogeymen, and about how spanking national holidays can be.

In June, I gave some advice for people who want to fuck (and haven’t), who have to go to a fucking party (and don’t know what to do), and who want to find a fuckpartner (and need direction).

In July, I gave you two separate opportunities to thrill to the sound of my voice, and I took some time to reflect on the dulcet tones of Jon Bon Jovi’s.

In August, I went on vacation with my boyfriend, ________ him,  and despaired at Wikipedia.

In September, I rode a rock-and-rollercoaster of contentment, disengagement, and whores.

In October, I celebrated a marriage, many manwhores, and Slutoween with mixed results.

In November, I marinated in the piquant dressing of my relationship’s apparent demise, got skewered by my readers, and ruminated on some hard-core fellatio.

In December,  I gave thanks to the kindnesses of strangers and opened a great fulsome can of writhing worms when I opined that, contrary to conventional wisdom, women do not have an easy time getting laid.

Enjoy your New Year's in whatever manner you see fit and wish me an easier and yet paradoxically interesting 2008.

kissykiss,
chelsea g.