Time-Fill

The longer I've lived away from this place, the more depressing it feels when I come back to it. There's something soporific about it; somehow I sleep twelve hours a night and still wake up tired. I lost my driver's license a few weeks ago at an "underground house" party, so I can't go anywhere, held prisoner just as I was seven long years ago. At least, I console myself, I should have time to work. I need to work. Goddamn it, why can't I work?

When I'm here my head fills with dark thoughts. There's too much silence and pitch-blackness here, not the busy whirrings and beepings and blarings of the city but silence, the kind of silence that is filled with the ghosts of one's own creation. As a lonely adolescent I imagined grinning skulls and rivers of blood; I thought I was going crazy. I wasn't really going crazy. My madness was only atmospheric, but atmosphere can prove a mighty oppressor.

My boyfriend won't even give me a call to help fill the silence. My first night back here I dreamed he left me for a willowy nymphet with long, straight, black hair, ageless, bathing with her sisters in the surf of some tropical beach. "I'm sorry," he said, "I love you, but life's too short," and walked out to meet her on the sand. I'm not a lucid dreamer, so I did not doubt it was all real, and felt so terribly sad. I woke up in a panic. How pathetic! I was probably whimpering in my sleep. Only a dream, it's true, but this place brings out my worst thoughts, and today I think he ought to die for not bothering to call me.

If I still lived here I would blog daily in order to stay sane and it would make a dismally boring blog.

My parents live in a world that is separate from my brother's, which is in turn separate from mine. I can be in this house with all my family and yet it is as though I am alone. My parents live in an anachronistic, Eisenhowerian world wherein a shot of brandy in the eggnog is too much, where the word "shit" is met with gasps and giggles, where Michelle Malkin is a genius, where ten o'clock is bedtime, where "secular" is a bad word, where Rummy did a heckuva job, where Reefer Madness speaks the truth about marijuana, and where my boyfriend and I share an apartment but surely not a bed--God forbid.

My brother, meanwhile, occupies a penumbral sphere that is like a nightmare within my nightmares. Instead of going to school he works the graveyard shift at a big retail store, making minimum wage. In the morning he comes home and sits in front of the computer, talking to invisible, underage Myspace girls with monikers like **LuVz2Kiss69**, listening to death metal and watching porn with the shades drawn. Then, when he has a night off, he goes to lame, red-cup parties with less-invisible, still-underage Myspace girls, and in order to work up the strength to talk to them he swills long island iced teas, doubtless mixed strong with Ketel One and its kin. Then he drives home, I imagine. And as I've said before, he's dangerously depressed. Fuck, wouldn't you be dangerously depressed? (I know all this, by the way, only because my brother was stupid enough to use the computer in my room without deleting the history, thereby enabling me to find his Myspace page: I am a nosy bitch.)

All of which is a long way of elaborating on my point that my family is so divided and unlike that being here is like being alone.

And yet it's somehow distracting. I can't work. I would work far better at home with all its pleasant distractions--the cats purring while kneading my stomach with their pink paws, my boyfriend spinning records and offering beer, the drunks cursing one another on the street below, my newlywed flatmates yammering in French while cooking dinner. That, I can work with. I can't wait to get back to that.

In the meantime, I am trying to write a painfully long, poorly conceived post in the hope of going to bed soon after its completion and thus avoiding all thought. Have I succeeded yet?

Not yet? Very well: more then.

At the underground house party where I lost my driver's license, I stood in a long line waiting for the bathroom. The guy standing next to me struck up a conversation with me, something about censorship in China. (I love this city.) But soon we were interrupted by Random Guy #2, who for some reason took an interest in my place of origin.

Random Guy #2 (pointing at me): You are from the Midwest.

Me: No.

RG#2: Europe.

Me: No.

RG#2: Manhattan.

Me: No.

RG#2: LA?

Me: No.

RG#2: Washington, DC?

Me: No.

RG#2: Bay area?

Me: No.

RG#2: Vegas?

Me: No...

RG#2: East coast?

Me: No...

RG#2: California.

Me: Yes.

RG#2: Fresno?

Me: No.

RG#2: Central Valley?

Me: No!

RG#2: Bakersfield?

Me: No!

RG#2: I give up.

Me: San Diego.

RG#2: That's basically LA.

Me: No, not really.

Random Guy #1: What a tool.

Later, downstairs, I was privileged enough to hear the following conversation between a couple of meatheads:

Meathead #1: So dude, she was, like, totally hot.

Meathead #2: Like, wow.

MH#1: I know, like, yeah.

MH#2: So, like, whaddidya do?

MH#1: Well, I was like, and she was like, her boobs were like...

MH#2: Fuck yeah.


Now have I succeeded? It's late; I think so.