Sunday, August 12, 2012

Elegant, Anxious Mornings

Ingredients for this My Time: Trader Joe's organic LIGHT whipped cream cheese, frozen bagels, 2 mg Xanax, iced kombucha tea.

Oh, Honey, I love the mornings. I am such a morning person.

It's like, I wake up with so much on my mind, so much to do, so much to see in the world! I get so excited that it's hard to tell what I'm feeling, so I simply have to settle on either 1. incredible depression, or 2. incredible hangover. And every morning lately it's been a toss up. Who knows, I think excitedly! What is it today?!?!
As I prepare my morning banquet of HALF a bagel with LIGHT whipped cream cheese or nothing till 2 pm, hands shaky with--what is it exactly? Vim? Vigor? Nervousness? Debilitating anxiety? Heartbreak? Mistrust of the world? Anticipation?--I think of all the things on my full social schedule for the day.

There's always a few hours of work on my project that needs to be done,

there's the WORKING OUT UNTIL I'M LESS UGLY of the day

and there's the ability to avoid it all with a glass of champs and 2mg of Xanax until all my EXCITEMENT FOR LIFE is calmed down to a reasonable, dignified level. Ah, the mornings. It's when you crawl out of bed while casually considering suicide, and stumble toward your television and find out that there's a show called "Love Handles: Couples in Crisis." Hahaha you think, distracted from your own demise. But wait, Darling, you only have one part of that equation, and not the other. BOOM, thinks your television back to you: BOOM.

Honey, being a rich, rich woman in the Midwestern country is a complicated thing and one can, if one must--and she must sometimes--indulge too much in order to sublimate the confusion that comes along with this culture, and with being a living creature in general, and with being grossed out by being alive with this body and these orifices. Being a woman in this DAY AND AGE means having SO MUCH to do, and finishing something 5-years in the making, like the charity project I'm working on, is just so taxing on the soul. I mean, I don't have a soul or feelings or morality, but you know, it's so taxing on the prescription pad. It's almost like you think, wait a minute, is that a feeling? Am I feeling TOO MUCH? AM I FREAKING OUT? As you turn to your elegant social group to remark on what you might be FEELING and you watch them politely shudder away into a "Hi how are you? Fine? I'm fine. We're all fine forever" part of the charity ball, you are reminded that, indeed, people of our social class do not feel.

You drink alcohol. Sometimes you freak out and eyes are adverted, and other times, everyone is perfectly, richly, JUST FINE. I mean, of course, Honey, we know we're all not. How can we be? We've been working for years on artistic projects and academic degrees that come without love, affirmation, a future, or even collegiality. For those of us in PRE-DIVORCES who are settled into a lovely exchange of legalize, silence, and affairs, I wonder--what keeps us in? What moves our mornings? One might hope that it is, indeed, love

and not the crippling, cliche silence that not communicating about the depression our silencing relationships have wrought has landed us in. And for those of us IN-BETWEEN marriages, well, we vacillate, especially in the mornings, about how lovely it is to finally see oneself looking back, how you didn't seek your desires out with the fervent passion that leads to such drunken exhaustion of getting a PhD, and how sleeping with this knife, with this selenite orb, with this body that you can fuck up how ever you want, well there's something settling about that. I mean, in the upper echelons of society, Honey, I can't tell you how many times someone is willing to fucking kill themselves to finish work with an uncertain future, yet how incapable the same person is of asking someone on a date, or for affirmation, or to speak to their spouse about the incredible sadness that led to so many transgressions. But that degree or tenure line or charity planning--that could get the weight of one's heart. Simple, easier to fulfill, beautiful, sessy desires, not so much.

On the other hand, those of us IN-BETWEEN marriages think, a marriage presumes love, commitment, later alimony, and empathy, doesn't it? And isn't that something to be jealous of? How do we get there? Will once again, one day, we too see a naked body? And ALIMONY? Will it be like our previous times or will we be able to get there through a frank accounting of our desires, needs, and a willingness to communicate openly despite fear of rejection, thus landing us with a more suitable, and courageous, mate? That is what we hope, Honey, 'tis. Until then, there are these hard mornings where no matter the heat, the familiar cold moves through your shaking insides.

But like my favorite "gay husband "from The Real Housewives series (this one: Vancouver) reminds us, "Maybe you've had a hard life. But you don't need to show it here. No one needs to see that on your face."

So the best thing about being IN-BETWEEN marriages is that your mornings are yours. And later, when you go out to prepare for another tragic morning, your freedom is knowing that when you contemplate suicide, it's yours. When you have your HEALTHY morning kombucha tea with a Xanax floater, no one needs to know how it smooths the sadness away from your pursed lips, and really, Darling, bouncing back and forth from the complete bottom to the very top of SOCIETY has made you incredibly stable. You can contemplate suicide and communication and your own shaky hands, but you have been and will be strong enough to live day-to-day with your testimony. Which is to say, Honey, Dagmar always asks out the gorgeous men, even when she knows they'll say "no," and feels fabulous more than anxious about doing so. Which is to say, Honey, there is no ladder we can't climb if we are our desire, and we speak frankly about what we want, and what we're never willing to put up with again. Everyone presumes you're too intense, crazy, and own a trampy mouth anyway if you speak your mind without reserve for gentile politeness, so why not??
"I was married to 2 very irritating men. I deserve the money."

And that is what makes it possible for me to lounge through the morning until the later possibilities of the day. Of course, Sundays are the worst, so double everything in the My Time recipe to taste.

Champs on me, later, Honey, and maybe I'll propose, too:
Dagmar Ottenham



Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Wetting Your Home Husks

Ingredients for this My Time: Old places, new feelings, old drinks, new hangovers.

Well, Honey, I finally made it. I'm back in the country called Midwest. And you know how I got here? I DROVE. With my feral manx beside me at every turn of Interstate 40, sleeping while I had to "keep myself awake"
I drove for two days, leaving Malibu-Lite, where I only had memories to, well, remember. Memories like my mother smoking a cigarette in front of a fire truck while only wearing underwear, as if the lights signalling danger were her personal disco balls. Memories like hiding hiding various kinds of wipes all over the house we shared as a family so that I could always feel safe. Memories like asking my mother at least 30 times to return the Gucci 1998 shoulder-padded shirt she "borrowed" from me. Memories like driving from LA until I hit my halfway point, my escape that I always seem to return to,
and then arriving to a place that strangely, beautifully felt like home in a way it never has for me before.
Ah, Missouri. My mini-mansion awaited me with open, creepy arms, and the local Taco Bell had almost gone out of business without my charity. One night to celebrate my return WITH EXTRA LETTUCE OKAY a knife fight started in the parking lot, but being the industrious, elegant woman that I am, I simply locked my 'Uar (that's my Jaguar) doors, closed the window that allowed for so much communication between me and the lovely man on the other side of the speaker, and folded my arms. I waited out the knife fight until I got my items.
that's right. It's about my Taco Bell
Look, Honey, sometimes a lady gets so excited that she needs to wake up with iceberg lettuce between her breasts as a reminder of her joy and her mistakes, which are often one and the same.

Now, more importantly that I'm home and feeling all these confusing home feelings, like, why is communication in the Midwestern country so confusing, I get to be home. That last sentence is called circular, Honey. And my birthday is coming up, which means either stab myself AGAIN instead of letting Dr. Rommelstein stab me with the botox needle, or: have an elegant affair for the community where we raise money for the most important local causes that effect women.
Ha ha I kid! You think that I'm one of those hateful, unintelligent rich persons who spends time talking about wombs and making opinions on what I think wombs should be able to do. But the truth is, Honey, when I think about a womb it is only my own.

Much like the drought during corn sex season that the Midwest is facing, my womb is all husk, and no place for anyone's opinion. The dessicated core of who I am, female, has been in a drought for some time, and when a woman faces such husky conditions, she can only work to lubricate her surrounding parts that she may walk in the water of life-bearer metaphysically. What doth female bear? Well, enough lubrication to assure others that she, of all people, certainly should not be a life-bearer.

So what should we do for my birthday? If the options are suicide or shoulder pads, you know it's a hard one for me to decide. If you haven't been here, Honey, you don't know the competition in the upper echelons of society to be constantly nice but not warm, talking but not communicative, friendly but not invasive. It's confusing, and after so many divorces your little Daggy can't just pile of the settlement money and make it communicate for her. So, what does she do? Well, she's frank. But the anxiety such forwardness promotes in me even in asking a lovely young person over to dinner. It's like with every turn if you are a bawdy YET TOTALLY CLASSILY RAD lady,
 you want to scream, "don't worry, I seriously mean to hang out and be buds and I'm totally not trying to sleep with you or make you uncomfortable by trying to hang out, I just like friends and you seem nice and if you think I'm a weirdo it's cool look I'm already over there bye." I mean, why can't we all just roll around on my recently cleaned carpet like tigers and stroke each other's hair and lick each other's paws? That's not inappropriate, right? That won't provoke anxiety, right? Ok ok ok, the truth is, Honey, I feel sometimes. It's confusing when my prescriptions run out and I'm home yet don't really know what it means to not have a home in this world yet, and I want affirmation that comes from human contact. Or animal contact. The truth is I just want to purrrr in sync with some others and roll around on the floor surrounded by a protective circle of selenite rocks and salt. I know as a rich woman that this is not too much to ask, so my goal is trying to be less nervous about things like desire, needs, and purring. I'm a dramatic woman who enjoys a good swoon now and again
and like Dr. Analyst tells me, if you are going to be a TRUTH BEARER,
 you have to have less nervousness about speaking the truths you truthilly speak. You have to toughen up if you're going to be so tough on yourself, and loosen up if you are going to be a lose whore. You know who you are.

Honey, a lady is always triumphant, thus will be my shoulders on the night Leo meets Virgo and I WET MY HUSKS.
With lubrication and (pretend) love,
your Daggy.


PS--god, the things I try to think about and the extent to which I avoid my charity work when I'm having one of "mommy's headaches."