Your '90s Valentine

The Ingredients for this My Time: too much sax but just enough love, and of course, protection.

Lovers, sometimes on Valentine's Day when I am without an Argentinian lover yatta yatta, I think about one of my favorite guilty pleasures. When I examine that history of such guilty pleasures (and I'm lucky that mine is one of the best live acts ever), I am filled with jealousy. Why can't a cult or a drug addiction or a stage accident come AFTER ME? There is a cult in Los Angeles that worships the color purple, between Downtown and Korea Town, and often, on the way to a walk through skid row, eventually to the American Apparel Factory Outlet (I liked to watch the teenagers on cocaine wade in the kitty pool), I lingered outside this cult headquarters...sitting...posing...wearing various shades of purple...and, nothing.

(purple vagina.) ...as a rich woman with no empathy, it has occurred to me that a cult, an addiction to heroin, or falling off of a stage (Honey, remind me to tell you of an ex-stripper friend who RETIRED to Vegas from LA, divorced her husband [who strangely looked like he had leukemia and was in a band named after a backpack] and thought she was stretched enough to go dance on that bar stool: broken leg) would be a progressive move toward liberalism for me. I digress. Anyway, no cult members ever came out, and all that sought little Dagmar out was this man who ALWAYS pulled up to me in a van in skid row and told me, nonchalantly, "just get in the van, ok?" The side door would open, magically, by the hand of another man hiding in the depths of back, and you know what, Honey? I considered it. But it was no purple worship. And lo, ahead of me was the kitty pool to watch.

So what do we say to days meant for global love and sexing? We take ourselves out on the date we always wanted to go to, as feminists with no particular grasp on appropriate, banal, professional reality would, and drink a martini per man we wish to curse/bless. We dye our hair red as a demon, grab a selenite orb,

and we welcome sentimentality as a protest against intellectualizing corporations like Hallmark (boring!). Play your favorite 90s love songs, drink yourself under the table, and don't spare any expense on you as your lover: wear that expensive french perfume, get that bottle of Imperial, and work it, you elegant beast. This involves comparing yourself to a hunter at some point, obviously, as there's nothing a Midwestern man enjoys more than hearing whispered into his ear, like a red-tail hawk woman, I would bring home fresh meat for you:

If you're not going to kill yourself AGAIN, join a cult, or develop a drug addiction, let the town that loves you, that welcomes you back to the bar stools with hoots and hollers when you've gone too long, that has never met but respects and toasts your father, allow you to be a 90s sentimental punk beat hot mess right out of Brian Eno's fantasy land. Since your childhood with dad was basically an Eno/Beefheart mindfuck anyway, you're on the right track, Sweet-De-De. Remember when your father brought you roses he cut from others' lawns every Valentine's Day, sure with a blade and revolver hung from his black leather fanny bag? Oh, Honey, you don't remember that? Oh, sorry. I forgot. I'm not a real person. I've lost who I am. So that must be a fake memory. It is times like these I wish my father (in my fake memory) hadn't died at the age of 39, and long before digital images existed across the classes. I mean...I was RAISED RICH and my father, a senator, went into witness protection. Anyway, he had an FBI agent send me flowers on the Day Of V. It's so hard to lose oneself.

But I'll still invade the body of a real woman this Feb 14th and work it for all it's worth. Give me that Old Time Religion/without your new afflictions: it's good enough for me. Happy Guilty Pleasures Day to Everyone, from your blessed admirer (seriously, can you please let me join your cult?),
Dagmar Ottenham.