Molly Says

looks fake today, like you could turn it off with a switch if only you could find it, but you can’t. You can’t find it.

Got a story published here at burnt bridges press. I was really excited and told everybody, but now I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed that I’m excited. Still, look.

School started this week. The class I teach is filled with women, which just means it will take me longer to learn their names. (I’m sexist like racist. 18 year old girls all look alike to me.)

Mostly I am exhausted and thrilled re: everything and seek others that feel similarly. Cursory look outside reveals somebody found that switch after all. The end.

It’s important not to take things too literarily. Life is life and movies are movies, etc. I was walking down the sidewalk and I spotted a beetle-like insect, turned over on its back, frantically clawing at the air with those black, shiny legs they have. It was iconic, for one, but also reminiscent of two months ago when I saw the exact same thing. That first time I righted the insect with a stick, which revealed the larger problem: a broken leg. It moved in circles like a rowboat with one oar. It was humiliating. I thought about philosophy, and eventually decided the best course of action was to leave it on the sidewalk. A wounded insect wants to be stepped on, I reasoned.

This time I righted the thing again, and the beetle seemed physically fit… it ran down the sidewalk for a few seconds, and then plop! The idiotic bug flipped over once more. What is this, a flaw in nature’s design? What was the fucking deal? I moved it to the grass to see if it liked that better, and the thing seemed to flounder. The truth is I fell in love with the insect, or the romantic idea of it, anyway. I wanted the event to mean something disgusting or wonderful for my life. I resolved then to scoop it up and take it home with me. I would put it in a jar and it would become my pet. Perhaps I’d place it next to my bed and it would whisper stories to me in sleep. I decided this was a good idea.

I have a little tomboy in me but not so much that I’m going to carry a beetle in my bare hands. After a few failures (a leaf, etc.) I designed on a simple paper funnel as carrier. It tried furiously to jump out of the funnel and then fell down again, dejected. My second thoughts began at this time.

When I got home I put the beetle inside a sprouting jar. It’s breathable, it has holes! I thought this would be the point in the LARP where other hilarities ensued: What will I name the beetle? What do beetles eat? Water source? But it turned into something else.

The story becomes very dark. I learned something about beetles. When you find them turned on their back, groping at the air like mad men, this is not to be mistaken as a cry for help. It is, in fact, a suicide.

Allow me a little heaviness: It’s the same action with humans; I’ve seen it. On my grandmother’s death bed, I watched her grope out at nothing in front of her, her old withered hands having turned into claws. She looked like a kitten playing with yarn. She looked like she was trying to catch fireflies and failing. She looked like she was dying. A few hours later, she was dead.

The beetle is in a sprouting container on my kitchen counter and it is phenomenally depressed. It crawled to a corner and hasn’t moved since. It wanted to die on its back in nature with dignity, and instead it’s dying face down in plastic, all because I went searching for literary meaning somewhere I didn’t belong.

Next time you find yourself gazing at a single flower in a vase on the windowsill, in a urine scented stairwell, or standing with a bloody knife in your hands over your ex lover’s mother: take caution. You’re probably just in somebody’s story. Flip a light switch.

You may remember that I am a professional dog walker/sitter, in the sense that I profess a level of competency in the field, based on nothing, really, and I occasionally get paid for my services. These animals, with a few exceptions, love me. They doubtless love their owners too, but it can be startling how quickly they’re willing to shift their affection to any human who pays attention to them. (see: the attention economy.) Theres is an unconditional love – or at least, based on the measliest of conditions. It’s not even “feed me.” Just “touch me.” Who am I kidding, I’m the same way.

The puggles I walk on wednesdays are undeniably adorable, albeit useless little alien pig-like anomalies of nature. They don’t play fetch, sit on command, fetch newspapers (ha!) They in fact embarrass me. At the dog park when people tell me how adorable they are, I scream “they’re not mine!” But still. In my car they crawl around excitedly, like little, retarded toddlers. I talk to them. I have lengthy conversation that I imagine someone is overhearing. (No one is.) I’ve been referring to them as boys, as in “let’s go boys.” “shut up, boys.” etc. although, as I understood it, they were a boy and a girl: Rocky and Jayda. Today I looked closer at Rocky’s heart shaped tag and saw the name “Roxanne.” Hmm. Quick check revealed no external genitalia and gosh was my face red! So Rocky is Roxy and the boys are girls. I’m gonna keep calling them “boys” to be different. Brevity brevity brevity. I’ll tell you about some of my other charges later, resting on the belief that it’s not what you say but how you say it, cuz honestly, other people’s dogs? zzzzzzz.

Except three more things:
1. To a dog, the mouth is like a hand. A hand you can taste things with, but also pick up things with, but only a limited number of things. I theorize dogs don’t long for fingers so much as two mouths.
2. I get jealous of how much they love rawhide bones. I wish I loved something that much. I doubt I love my mother as much as they seem to love gnawing on shit.
3. That shameful look on their faces? It’s always there, but most apparent to the observer when they’re pooing. It’s the same way their smiles are not really smiles. A smiling dog is bound to start whimpering, and the illusion = shattered.

6. A Conversation on a beach in Provincetown, MA:
I asked a gorgeous, sun-bathing Enriques Iglasias-looking man to watch my bag while I went swimming. Upon emerging, a brief conversation ensued.
Gay dreamboat: Did you have fun swimming?
Molly: It was amazing! I’m from Michigan. It’s been years since I swam in the ocean.
Gay dreamboat: You have lakes.
Molly: I know that.

9. In my notebook on an airplane:
The first thing you do is change into something less comfortable. Wear it on the wings of the most expensive bird you can find and then sing to it. Never give up. If you love someone and they love you and it’s meant to be, don’t worry. You’ll play their favorite song on the jukebox, they’ll text you a line from some obscure poet who defined you in high school, and you’ll know. Forget about where your birth certificate is – remember the archetypal mother. Suck from her breasts without blushing. Do everything and then come back and show me how.

I went on vacation. I didn’t keep a journal, per se, but this mind of mine? A steel strap. (Typo, I’m keeping it.) I’ve also been reading that the Internet is filled with MTV babies who don’t want to read long things. I understand. I’ll go you one further: I don’t want to read anything. So, after the fact, I recreated some memories in list form, and I figure every day for the next little bit I’ll post an item or three from the list.

4. At a McDonalds in Boston:
I asked for coffee in my travel mug. They brought a paper cup full of coffee to the counter, poured its contents into my mug, and threw away the cup right in front of me. It was like in the holocaust when Nazis would shoot a mother’s children in front of her and then leave her there to live. It’s like that in kind but, I’ll concede, not scale.

8. In route from Ohio to Michigan:
How many hearts can one woman shatter in the span of fourteen days? Answer: At least two. Possibly four.

3. A park in Brooklyn, New York. Specifically, Williamsburg.
Let me preface this by saying that hipsters are not bad people. Also, the truth is, I sort of like fashion. I like it best on others, and I like noting regional differences. New York is different from Montana. The men: tight shirts, cut off shorts. The women: high waisted shorts, tank tops, superfluous belts. I attended a picnic. I saw an older man, late 50’s, a large belly hanging over shorts, pulled up socks, a polo shirt, and a red, earnest face. I saw him walk by once with a plastic sack full of water, then I saw him walk by a second time, and this steel strap of mine took note. The big reveal: the man was watering a small, dying tree in the center of the park. What a man! How lucky to be alive to see it, and indeed, all things.

On the one hand, ten days of Vipassana meditation is a lot like jail* except there are more rules and your imprisonment is voluntary. On the other hand, what an illuminating, invaluable experience! Consulting the list I made on my last post, I would say that all 5 of the first objectives were achieved.

1. The Saturn handled like a champ. I even managed to pick up a hitchhiker on the way home, and my little sedan handled the sheer weight of all of our heartbreaking life stories with aplomb. More on the hitchhiker later.
2. I shut up and sat still. I remembered how, and this is not nothing, because forgetting happens. You might think the effect is mystical, but it’s not. If anything, it is more ordinary, and the ordinariness makes it special.
3. I was alone. I missed my friends and family and life and books and pen and paper and computer, but how wonderful, to realize how much you love exactly what you already have. Pardon the sentimentality, but so true.
4. A better person? I hope so. It’s not that I learned anything new so much as the things I knew intellectually somehow in doing nothing came to the surface experientially. I learned that I’m far too easy on myself in some areas and far too hard on myself in others, and as alcoholics are so fond of saying, I think I gained some wisdom in recognizing the difference.
5. Discipline? I hope so, and I hope it lasts.

So 5 for 5 on that shit, and other gains as well that I don’t even feel like going into! So then the second list I made were all these things I wanted to manifest, and this list I’m pretty sure was met with exactly opposite results.

1. A shiny new bike
What did I think? Did I think there’d be a brand new Shwinn with a big red bow on it waiting for me in the living room? Things generally don’t materialize out of thin air. Remember when science didn’t exist, and if suddenly there was a book lying on the table the people concluded that the table gave birth to the book? Well, we don’t live in that time anymore, and the driveway didn’t give birth to a bicycle in my absence.
2. A couch to replace our shitty futon
Not only no new couch, but in fact, I came home to discover we’d been evicted. We didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just that we live in our landlords house and our landlord has suddenly decided to move. Impermanence! The good news is I don’t have to move a new couch.
3. Chastity & Continence
The truth is that I had a sort of micro romance with the hitchhiker. In my defense, he was 22, free spirited, and here is the clincher, covered in red freckles. I am not sorry.
4. Make me neater
It’s hard to say.
5. The greatest writer that ever lived?
Again, it’s hard to say, but I did have waiting for me in the mail a rejection letter from “The Michigan Quarterly Review” that probably should have left me feeling despondent but instead made me positively giddy and grateful to be alive. I felt like a real writer. You know, the struggling kind. A handwritten little blurb at the bottom used words like “witty” and “imaginative approach.” (Barf.)

So this Saturday I leave for New York, then a brief stint in Provincetown, MA, and then a week in Detroit. Adventure! Friends: I hope to talk to you from there.

*and yeah, I’ve been to jail, long story**
**it’s actually not that long of a story: booze + drugs + a perceived lowly socioeconomic status due to lack of showering = brief incarceration. I digress and that’s how come the asterisks.

2. Religious Observances

On Wednesday I leave for 10 days of Vipassana Meditation outside of the already very rural Onalaska, Washington. You can read about the place I’m going and what the program is like via their informative and stimulating website. In brief: 12+ hours of daily meditation, no talking, no Interneting, no writing, no reading, no drinking, no smoking, no lying, no cheating, no acoustic guitar, no meat, and no dinner. They feed you delicious vegetarian meals and give you a mat. Also, it’s free. Why would I do this? If you don’t understand it I can’t explain it.

I’ve done it once before a couple of years ago in Brighton, Michigan. It was difficult but not impossible, and I was revived an empress. On the one hand, in grand Buddhist tradition I am interested in detaching from the results. On the other hand, my hopes include, but are not limited to:

1. Safe travel to the center and back. (What’s 10 hours on the road in a rickety 95 Saturn to an artist?)
2. I want to remember what it’s like to sit still and shut up for a second. Many, many seconds.
3. How to be alone.
4. Perhaps this sounds trite, but I want to come back a better person. Look, I know I’m not a monster now, but we could all be better, couldn’t we? Do I have to be so sarcastic and acerbic all the time? Do I have to hold on to petty resentments and act like a child when I don’t get everything I want? Just saying, I can do better. You deserve love, world, and I am here to love you.
5. A little fucking discipline, if you please.

This next list is a little absurd. Why not mix in a little new age mysticism with my old school meditation practice, before it’s too late. Set it and forget it like a rotisserie chicken, here’s some shit I’d like to manifest while I’m gone. Just leave it on my doorstep for when I return.

1. A new bike. Something slick and street compatible that makes me look cool.
2. A couch for our new apartment. And while you’re at it, make that weird broken futon disappear.
3. Chastity and continence. Sort of. (Inspired by @St Augustine)
4. Lord, God, Krishna, could you make me neater? Make me care about the dishes and laundry, because God, you neglected to give me this gene and I’m starting to catch on to how alienating filth can be.
5. Is it too much to ask to be the greatest writer that ever lived? Could you give me the words to say all the brilliant shit I’m thinking? I mean, I don’t want to get into a fiddle contest or anything over it, but we could all use a little more grace in storytelling, and by us I mean me.

Again, I mean all of this in a totally free from desire kind of way. Let me give something back.

3a. Music

These are some songs I’ve been particularly enjoying this summer. I spend a lot of time on an Internet music site called blip.fm where I play music and hang out with my other djs, or “friends,” although let me assure you, I love them like real people. Which they are. You know, sort of. So here’s a list, and if you want, you can follow this list to my playlist where I have helpfully placed these songs for your enjoyment. (Again, sort of. The task proved long and boring so they’re not really in order but most of the songs are there probably. Create a dj name and blip yourself, it’s fun! I’m not crazy!)

Lou Reed – This Magic Moment

Dépêche Mode – Clean

Otis Redding – Try a Little Tenderness

Yeasayer – Ambling Alp

Kenny Rogers – Just Dropped In

Mumford & Sons – White Blank Page

The Kinks – There’s a New World Just Opening for Me

Dolly Parton – Jolene

The Strokes – Heart in Cage

Lil’ Wayne – A Milli

Warren Zevon – Back in the High Life Again

George Harrison – I got My Mind Set on You

Florence & The Machine – Addicted to Love

The Black Keys – Next Girl

Townes Van Zandt – Lungs

Michael Franti & Spearhead – Say Hey (I Love You)

Sam Cooke – A Change is Gonna Come

Murder by Death – Until Morale Improves, The Beatings will Continue

John Lee Hooker – I Need Some Money

Gene Pitney – Town without Pity

Delta Spirit – People C’mon

The Mars Volta – Miranda, This Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore

I love you all. Who knows what kind of weird mystic will be running this place when next we meet.

Don’t trust a Molly. They always break their promises. The summer is half over. I can feel it slipping through my fingers like sand. Think of everything I didn’t do. Actually don’t.

The other problem is that I kind of really don’t know what this blog is for. I used to have blogs in the past, back when the Internet was in its infancy, and back then it was just some sort of weird teenage to post teenage performance art. Molly expresses an emotion! Veiled shout outs to boys I liked. Complaining about writing. (Perhaps things haven’t really changed…) I just pontificated wildly with white letters on a black background. I wrote all the HTML by hand, and getting 100 hits in a day was a really big deal. It meant something then. Now I get like 60 hits a day doing absolutely nothing. 60 people accidentally waste seconds of their life visiting my website, and what have I to offer them? This is the last time I start my blog post with a lengthy apology about not posting, I swear. Let’s accentuate the positive. Here are some things I did in fact do.

How I’ve spent My Summer Vacation:

1. Work

“We had money. We were grimy and tired. Usually we felt frightened, because there was something wrong with us, and we didn’t know what it was; but today we had the feeling of men who had worked.”
-Denis Johnson, Jesus Son

Suddenly all of us were confronted with the fact that the school year was over and the University wasn’t going to send us checks anymore. However meager the TA salary may be, it is in fact money, and everybody loves money. (That’s why it’s called money, Ho!) As someone who pretty much had all of her hopes and dreams fulfilled when I moved to Montana, I have become accustomed to manifesting pleasant futures. When thinking about a job, I knew what I didn’t want. I wanted to do something with integrity. I didn’t want to aid in making people sick or fat or sad. I didn’t want to abet people wasting money on a service they didn’t need and I didn’t believe in. I didn’t want to do anything that occupied a fair chunk of my mind. I didn’t want to sit at a desk, input data, write things that weren’t my own writing, read things that weren’t what I wanted to read, or teach already privileged children how to pass a standardized test I didn’t believe in. The options were narrowing.

Then one day, while doing the dishes, God (yeah, God talks to me. I know you’re jealous, suck it) said to me, “Molly, why not start an organic cleaning business.” So, I, you know, did.

Firstly, it’s phenomenally easy to start an organic cleaning business. Step 1: buy some cleaning supplies and make products to use via recipes found on the Internet. Step 2: advertise on Craigslist. Those are the two steps. Now, if you know me in real life, it might startle you to learn that I would clean someone’s house on purpose. I am, perhaps, one of the messiest girls alive. (I am recalling an argument I had with an ex boyfriend once: “What the fuck is the problem? I like eggs. I like coffee. Why can I not use the egged fork to mix my coffee?”) So some, and not all but some of my friends and family had all sorts of unsolicited opinions on the matter. My sister, via facebook:

“you + a cleaning job?? um… so that would kinda be like how hairdressers always have the worst hair.. alas, I’m guessing all the jobs descripted as ‘personal tornado’ have already been filled.”

Firstly, it’s always a unique pleasure to have your friends and family so candidly express doubt in your abilities to succeed. Secondly, you were wrong. I am doing it. I have clients. I took up dog walking/sitting as well. It is exactly as God decreed it. Also me. I wrote this on my old blog about a year or so ago:

I’d like to be a custodian this summer. It’s the most peaceful job I’ve ever had. Cleaning toilets, one after another, a long porcelain line like so many beaded pearls = the epitome of zen.

It’s true. Cleaning houses is a little different but the principle is the same. It’s better because it feels more direct, close, personal. These people trust you to come into their home and manhandle their stuff, and you trust them to pay you, and everyone is richer for the experience. I think it’s great for character building. Humility. Humbleness. There is no room for ego when you’re scrubbing floors on your hands and knees like Cinderella. Humans want to be rewarded for their work, to receive some sort of accolade or recognition. This is all going to sound crazy but bear with me. You might scrub a spot on the floor for minutes, (think of all the elbow grease!) and no one will ever know you did it, and you just have to suck that up and move on. Good work has to be the reward in itself. I’m serious.

Next, cleaning for others is an exercise in patience. I have to manually remind myself not to cut corners. Do everything every time, one foot in front of the other. It’s not about cleaning but polishing. The smell. My homemade products smell good and my hands are like velvet. Do with this information what you will.

Finally, hello! Buddhism! Sand painting! Nothing ever stays clean. Do it again and again and never get to the finish line.

To think, there are other items on this list! I went way long with number one, so I will try to come back in a couple of days to continue. Then again, don’t trust a Molly. I don’t trust me.

Molly says, it’s been well over a month. Where are the angry letters? Why is no one storming my castle? Oh well. Yeah, what can I say, you get busy. Except I’m not at all busy. What can I say, you get lazy. School is over and it’s “summer” in Missoula, Montana. (It’s cold is why the quotes. Imagine I’m doing air quotes.) This is a magical place and the people here are possessed with a secret satisfaction I can’t even reveal to you here, because it’s a secret.

I’ve been writing, and trying to figure out what being a writer is all about, and editing and revising. Without school it feels very “without a net.” I spent most of last semester in varying stages of unrequited love. It was very 17. It filled me with all sorts of imaginary passions, and it informed a lot of my writing. One morning I woke up and I was released from the spell, but I’m left with all this stuff I wrote. Weird residue on the pillow. What to do with it? Give it away. Garage sale. Everything must go. “The Sting” is imperfect (the ending is bullshit, for example) but it’s sort of neat and tidy and complete, and I’d like to offer it to you here as a way of saying I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything.

I want to update this a lot this summer. Starting rightnow! Go!

I didn’t read a lot of female writers before I came to Montana. I think it’s because I believed that women didn’t know how to do much besides cry and make babies. I would like to soften my position. Mary Gaitskill, Mary Robison, and Joy Williams are three writers I have come to appreciate. Besides a penchant for the name Mary (one of my all time favorite names, ordinary as it may be. It is often my pseudonym. I am named after my Aunt Mary. etc.) and being white, these women share the gift of nuanced, informed prose. They know things about humans. In this sense they are like mystics. I think writers are sort of magical. I have created many unpleasant things through my own writing, for example. Once, I turned a man I knew into a coke addicted maniac. I turned myself into a data entry person. I may have turned one of my old bosses gay. I digress, big time. I just wanted to share with you this Joy Williams impersonation. Mother, I hope you don’t read this, and if you do, I hope you don’t take it personally. I love you. I wouldn’t change anything. What has and hasn’t happened made me who I am today, and I’m grateful.

Look Out!

Every year my mother and I went to the city to see the Detroit fireworks. Afterwards we would eat at a restaurant in Greektown where men made of rock wore nothing but leaves in front of their privates. The year before I circled around one of these statues and put my hand under the leaf. A table in the balcony above me cheered when I did it, and I got embarrassed and cried, but my mother hugged me and said that nobody thought I was gross. She was always on my side. She told me that everyone thought I was cute and funny and loved me, and I believed her, but suspiciously.

That was a full year ago and this year I knew a lot more. My mother had a boyfriend that summer named Lou that I didn’t like. I hated when Lou came with us places because he always got to sit in the front seat. Mom couldn’t hear anything I said in back and kind of seemed like she didn’t want to. I sang along loudly with the music and kicked the back of Lou’s seat.

My mother clutched my hand tightly when she led me through the crowd. I liked all the black faces and I felt like they liked me too because we were different from each other and that was very interesting. My mother was a drinker. Every year she brought a thermos full of Vodka. We laid a blanket on the grass in front of the river and we stared at exploding lights and the smoky shadows they left behind. Years later, in that same spot, the fireworks would remind someone of Vietnam and he would shoot three strangers, but nothing bad happened that year.

Before the Greek restaurant and after the fireworks mom and Lou got drunk and yelled at each other a lot on the sidewalk while I stared into an alley. At the time I thought anybody who set foot in an alley got raped, and I thought getting raped meant a strange man beat you up and then took a razorblade and ripped holes in your clothes. I’m through, you crazy bitch, Lou said. He walked off in the other direction and my mom started crying. She took my hand and led me around the city, wheezing and stumbling. It took us a really long time to find the car, and I was mad because I didn’t want to find it, I wanted to go to the restaurant where they set the cheese on fire and the waiters scream, “Opa!” which means, “Look out!”

My mom rested her head on the steering wheel. Fuck you, she said. Fuck you. Fuck you. It was embarrassing, her talking to someone who wasn’t there. I didn’t answer. I think the silence upset her even more, the no one answering. No, she said. Fuck him. Not you, honey. Fuck him. She put the key in the ignition. I had the thought that it might have been safer for an eight year old to drive the car home than for my mother to.

* * * * * *
Lou was through with her that night, but not overall. Like twenty years after that, my boyfriend and I had an apartment in Detroit, in that same neighborhood even. We filled old water bottles full of whiskey and walked down to the river to watch the fireworks. When we drank too much and screamed at each other on the street, at least we knew where we were, and we could walk home. Fuck you, I would say to him. Fuck you. Not fuck her. I said this right to my boyfriend’s face. In this way, my mother and I are different.