DAY 36
Goooodddd I come to this cafe to escape the stuffy crankiness of my abode, and it looks like there is a pretty awkward first date happening. People on a first date are something special. What are your dreams? What have you done? What do you like? The answers look so different now than before. I gave dramatic answers to first date questions back then. I want to go back and make them more dramatic even. How could I know that someday I’d say boring shit like, “I want to level up and get a van to live in and maybe have a best friend again someday.” Shelter and company is not exactly dreaming big, except when it is. FML.
I wish I’d said shit like “Lets run away to a corner of the city where we can pop a tent and breathe ocean air.” or “Lets start making up a game where you say a verb and I say a noun and then we act it out and whoever is funnier wins,” or “I believe in an unholy disorder, I believe in random acts of kindness, I believe in chaos magic, I believe in the beautiful ruins of plastic.”
Plastic. Petroleum byproducts. The reason I am here now. Would I give up all my past lust for them to have avoided this situation? Sure but how could I know and what could I do alone? The big difference being out here is all the people I’m around, all the people I gotta admit I need. It was easy to be in the city kinda vaguely solo. Here, I actually can’t gather water and maintain a grid and find food and get a drink on my own. I’m damn lucky I found this little neighborhood. Our scrap piles and our tiny, new date dreams we share at the cafe.
I’m thinking about plastic like a lover that I’ve had a shitty run with. Why did you start treating me so bad? It was so good until…? I really loved you right you know. I gave you the best things I could: my young body, my attention, my platform. Plastic polyester I love you. There is no doubt. Your firm fabrics and designer cuts. Your bright colors and beaded trim. Your weirdly high necklines and short hems, your flowing full length glory, your patterns and solids. Even when you scratched me. Even when I developed a slightly allergic reaction to your high neckline. Even when you got too expensive and fancy for my beer budget baby you are my champagne taste.
My polyester collection, melted in the ruins of the east side of the country. The things I sucked dick and made fake eyes for. The things I never thought twice about hoarding I covet now. Sweet polyester I have five dresses left out of my collection of 50. What’s here is good but it was your sensual variety I loved most.
If I said that on a first date…would it be weird?
DAY 37
It wouldn’t be right to say I checked into the motel camp. I just knew where the strip of motels right north of town were, and I knew I could find one that was inhabited but not too much, something I could build out from, maybe with an old pool or greenbelt nearby.
No, it would be more appropriate to say that I moved into the motel. First, I checked out a couple locations. One had a lot of residents and was too much like Melrose place on crack for me. Knowing I’d only add to the sketchiness of any housing, I wanted a little privacy. Another place was so, so fancy I thought I’d be getting tracked or questioned just for walking in, but beyond the lofted rooms and full kitchen there rested a patina of creepiness in the undertrimmed foliage on the pathways and the fake fireplace which belied the fact that this was merely a condotel where douches must lurk. The type of place where the kids were watching porn on mute on the tv downstairs while the parents watched the same porn muted on the flatscreen upstairs.
The place I settled on was the type of place that middle management and sometimes ladies on vacation together picked. The curtains were horrible but they went second, right after I ripped the comforter-covers off the beds. They’d be great insulation, being ethanolyum-based. I knew I’d find something good soon, needing the comfort of tapestry weave.
There are three floors to the motel. I picked a room on the second floor on the far side for my work area. I just wanted to be around people but also out of the path of highest traffic. Less sketchy. I picked one of the family suites on the first floor for my living quarters. It was a room with a door to another room, generally locked but that was easy enough to pick. I kicked it until it opened, about four tries and it gave while I got to play Uma Thurman, so I loved it. The double room suite then gave me a personal and a creative hangout space. God I love nesting, always have. The few personal items I had — Plus I had a washroom for guests and a washroom for me. I hate cleaning my bathroom and I love looking like I’m fancier than I am, so I keep something little around for visitors.
3hZ. That crew lives in what was a by-the week local joint, painted yellow so many years ago it was now the color of wheat with lines of cream and filth. Sprayed on in red and black hi-gloss paint were fresh stripes of varying width which rendered the building like a goth teens dream of a circus tent.
3hZ wants to take some power back, in order to get further away from ever needing to Cross again. In the meantime, from what I’ve been able to gather talking to folks and going to that fucking meeting, they are working on stealing a set of “clean” chips that people can use to cross with. Their biggest heist to date. That’s the crew I gotta know.
DAY 38
I walked along the road up to work holding my heels in a felt bag, my dress rolled up neatly, my arms sore from the previous nights’ workout. Damn, that girl has a fierce left hook. But I gave as good as I got – and now I’m wearing a long sleeved dress because the last thing I need is questions about an imaginary violent boyfriend. That’s so typical it’s depressing and uncreative. The first time I wore bruises like memories and someone saw them, I just said “I walked into a doorknob” and that had to sound like a pathetic lie but my pediatric doctor didn’t ask any more questions. She also told me I was “a lovely young lady” when I asked her about my emerging moustache, so she was kind of a useless traditionalist. What if I’d had an abusive man who hated the naturally hairy state of women? Anyway at work I like to casually drop minor details about my boyfriend because it keeps the fantasies in client’s heads. We’ve just been together sooo loooong, you know? Oh no he doesn’t mind my work, he’s really busy but super sweet. No he wont visit me. No you can’t come over because he might be coming home but I’m not sure.
Shit if my clients knew the way I actually lived they’d look down on me, even though I’m so happy in my little shiny hut with lace on the walls. Fuck needing a mansion all to myself.
By the time I arrive at the club, I’ve concocted a long story about how my boyfriend really loves me, his good intentions and our shared pets [two dogs, a lab and a Chihuahua] which we had to chase around our hi-rise apartment in order to give them their monthly anti-flea baths, hence the bruises. Loving my cover story I walk in. Getting out my makeup I thought about the offgassing smell of 1960’s pancake. I love offgassing. My old van, shitty and decrepit and beautiful, always smells of sweet velour when I get into it.
The laws around this fucking club are ridiculous. First, in a country so regulated and legislated as this one, you’d think there’d be some rules for treating us girls. The clients have rules, management has rights, and we get rashes from the old dresses, grabby hands, and fallen arches after just five years. Management gets our beautiful years and that’s somehow not enough: they take our money and the guys want even more because it’s their goddamn money. Clients are unreal in their demands. As much as you tell them the rules they want to make their own special laws: these are rich motherfuckers, guys who usually set the rules they want and get around the ones they don’t, so giving them boundaries is a special task of convincing them that they actually want to be controlled.
The club sets it up pretty good, to make them as docile and subservient as possible. But once they’ve gotten some whiskey and a flash of poly its too much for their hearts to keep their blood cool.
DAY 39
The New Middle East – the Albertan Tar Sands and Montana/Dakota Badlands. Secret sexy with all their tiny droplets clinging to dust like a troublemaking lover’s last kiss.
The Old Middle East: 4 sanctions countries and 14 nations worth of birthright and history eradicated based on the new need to control the last drops as much as possible.
The walls that have gone up around re reserves, the homes that were there and the people buried underneath…and all over new names that are meaningless. The countries that exist based purely on access. I want to see a map that shows the relationship between oil reserve boundaries and national borders. I have a suspicion…
Here I am, hiding out, fake brave, swallowing before I jump into a free country that wants to eat me alive and spit me out in a sad sad shell that will add to the GNP, census, tax base, but not the spirit of the land.
Fuck it all, I have to get dressed for work. That means dusting off from my building project on my shitty little hut that I’ve lined with light linen and cottons to hide my unpracticed construction skills. Where’s the carpenter houseboy when you need him? Sigh. Gone with the rest of them.
DAY 40
It’s not that polyester gets me hot per se, its that the magic of plastic has enticed me beyond words, that it’s dirty history and how it’s captured the civilized work’s ability to produce and exist is so mammoth. I’m wearing all plastic right now, and I was older it might be nostalgia bit in this instance it’s profit-based. Like the use of plastic has always been: maybe it’s finally natural. And my seams are ripping ant that’s ok. Nail polish remover, stay away.
I do not want to be left with eyes as hungry as a cab driver, or a girl in a line up which is going nowhere, a line yup where pretty girls have lots of time and never really get their share. Fuck work. Fuck society. Fuck everything.
DAY 41
“I just want to love a girl in a free country.” She looked so serious; I knew she’d been thinking this phrase for far too long.
It resonated with me; I wanted to find my way back to the navigateable terrain of sex toys, waters costs and visa forging. I only knew free countries regardless of strategies. I only knew the Empowerment Lite of cabarets, of girls who will never be models being burlesque superstars, of the opportunity to go underground and reemerge at will.
How tracked are we, anyway? How many people’s fingerprints, electro waveforms, DNA, retinas, and voice patterns can be catalogued and retain meaning? At what point to we have to reapply and start over, naming and numbering individual humanity the way they use to do with cattle.
I wanted to tell her, “Yeah, well we’re not in a free country,” but we weren’t in the same country, mentally. Her crossing onto over the borders to the Land of Love It Or Leave It meant the possibility of loving within her dream, but the woman she loved was left behind in a war torn place that this is coming to resemble. My status on her land was so dubious, nebulous, an outsider to the visionary peacekeeping of this collective. I wanted to cross over, too.
Once I learned how to group up and be responsible to the world around me, and then my inclusion would be definite in the world of adults. Am I ready for the challenge? All I know is: I see the world around me and it’s made up of people taking from those who don’t have it to give, and people giving and giving to each other. Which one is based on a money system?
DAY 42
“I’m so glad that confusing decade is over. Between 1999 and 2009 no one knew what to call the time. I settled on “the millennium” but I knew that was inaccurate. “
“Uh HUH” I tried to sound bright and interested while listening, but I was forcing it so intently. Its not like I’m actually trying to be your friend, John! Please please realize this, that my time is so very precious and your investment policy is not where I want to spend it without getting remunerated.
Sometimes when people bore the fuck out of me, Abba just jumps into my head. Or Cher. Or Nancy Sinatra. I don’t love all these singers’ work and often I get creeped out that these gals are fames for male associations and for ultimately so small a repertoire. That fame rests on an attitude and the dudes around you. I wonder what has misfired in my memory so that it’s Gimme Gimme A Man After Midnight, although I do enjoy it anytime it comes on the internal soundtrack to my life. But, they pop in when I’m listening to some man drone on and on about whatever is important to him. These boots are made for walking but at the moment they are made for making m-o-n-e-y.