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LATER I REALIZED THAT WASN'T A SENTENCE

I was trying to copy this picture of Marlene Dietrich looking surly while watching The Piano Teacher. What is up with that movie? I am still trying to figure it out. I think that is the point, that it is unsettling. All's I know is, I don't want to be a person who doesn't like that movie. I was thinking, also, how there is this movie trope of the icy blonde; Hitchcock was all about that, and he loved to abuse them in his movies. Especially when they weren't keen on his advances, so I hear. But watching Haneke I was thinking, fuck that, the icy redhead is a much better trope. Isabelle Huppert is so tiny and quiet, and yet so scary. Her face is like a closed door, and you know behind that door is a guy tied to a chair with a rag in his mouth, getting the tar beat out of him.

I stole that sentence! Nothing much to say. Waiting for a return phone call; what a thing to do. End transmission.

An all-around shitty day. Good show, outside world, good show.

Sometimes this week there's nothing for dessert so I make brown sugar frosting and eat it out of the pan -- or sometimes a bowl! even! -- while watching television. Also this week I discovered that watching Californication alone before going to bed is satisfying tv time but ultimately depressing. Nobody is ever happy! They just keep having sex and being rich but damnit, the overwhelming sadness of it all! Life and Hollywood conspire to break our clammy souls!



Good show.

If I post more crap, the good ones will really seem good.

Wait, good ones?

I just remembered how one time at camp a bunch of us gathered a circle of canvas chairs around someone's tent and sat around having a mid-afternoon drink and a chat. Somebody had a boombox and I guess the batteries for it, so I got there first and flipped through my available music and finally put on a Marlene Dietrich CD. It was from a 2-disc set actually called "Cocktail Hour," maybe it was a series, and it had all these terrible cartoony pink drawings of lipsticks and sassy microphones on the faces of the CDs. It was funny, how it was a bright clear day in the woods and we were a bunch of anarchopunk-flavored kids in foldy chairs and Marlene, high-femme foreign archetype that she is, fit in so smoothly. I envy her that. Somebody said it was good music for our cocktail hour, and I felt satisfied. Classy as shit, I know: drinkin' in the woods, queer Germans of times gone by.

Anyway, I am going through all the old CDs I can find and putting them on my new computer so as to banish their physical selves to some far reach of the attic or under-bed, and I came upon that set, which makes me stop and think, How recently have I considered this "my CD collection"? I mean, it's got Beck and shit, and we haven't talked for some time now, whereas Marlene and I are on intimate terms these days. I think I dozed off and missed my connection, is all.

I remember at camp that time, we were all drinking soda or juice drinks from a cooler we desperately kept filled with bags of ice from town, mixed with flavored vodka or whatever it was. Probably flavored vodka, I can't imagine anything cool being there. Somebody had a frosted bottle of something reddish. After Shock? Is that the name? And it had a violent cinnamon flavor, and I remember we all passed it around to try and made various faces and moved on. The person who brought it seemed shy, and this was a way to break the ice. It was still daylight, not too warm, and what a nice memory it makes. I don't remember; we probably talked about music or social justice or something.

One day at work this week, I wrote myself a list of mundane things to do this weekend, so I wouldn't just sit around drinking. I actually looked at it on getting up (noon), and thought about what to do with myself. I did go to the gym, dye my hair and shower, make cookies, and clean out the mini-fridge in the barn in preparation for band practice. I was then reminded that the barn itself is colder than a refrigerator can be, and that it's wasteful to run a device when it's not necessary. I hate winter; I wish it were always between forty-five and seventy degrees. That would count as seasons, right? I felt resentful of the advice, so I filled the sparkling-clean fridge with beers and ginger ale and left it unplugged. Okay, okay, fine. I concede, electricity judges. I wish Rock of Love Bus were on now. That always makes me feel better.

Today I didn't do anything of value but I thought about Laura Kightlinger a lot. What she's doing, whether I should write her a fan letter, where I would send it if I did. Later I went to Walgreen's and spent 95 dollars, mostly on hair products. Now I'm drinking Johnny Walker out of a Bailey's cocktail glass I was once given when it came free with a bottle of Bailey's. I don't like Bailey's very much, given its mild alcoholic value, and I don't like the glass much either, but it was clean.