Jenny Jones

"My parents didn't love me."

Actually they did. But that's what I'll say to the prosecuting attorney. It will catch her off guard. She'll realize the harsh reality of my situation and then I'll glare, teary eyed at the jury and plead, "can't you people forgive me for what I've done?" The judge will have to interrupt my outburst with his gavel shouting, "Silence!" and there will be a muffled stirring in the courthouse. Women will fidget with their dresses or pretend to look out the window. Men will clear their throats or resettle in their seats . Unintelligeble words will be whispered in various locations, the wooden room will creak under the weight of anxiety. Somehow, like on television, a dramatic emphasis will be put onto the statue of Justice. Her scales will tilt as if some force beyond our comprehension has cast its breath onto it. Her blindfold will fall away like a piece a velvet. My innocence will be carved into the stone of each jury member's mind.

Prosecuting attorneys are always women in my mind. That's because of Disney movies. More often than not, Cruella DeVille, Mileficent, wiked stepmothers and treacherous stepsisters, octopus witches, and evil queens want your heart torn out and put in a box.

I am the victim here. Forget that body they found. It feels so good to say that. Being a victim is like getting a Jenny Jones makeover. You're suddenly someone completely clean and new. You can start your life again from that point on. Jenny Jones would be a frightening prosecuting lawyer. She'd show up in some kind of animal print suit, with her hair done dangerously by the mod girl with tattoos and that Bettie Page look. But this would be the next day, and Jenny wouldn't quite remember how to style it properly, so it would be a rats nest with an edge. When cross examining me, she'd say things like, "You've really dug yourself in deep this time. Good luck climbing out," and "you're a real piece of work," and "Is someone eating a tuna sandwich in here, because something smells fishy," and other prophetic truths. You probably don't recognize that last phrase. That's because I made it up. The funny thing would be if someone in the courtroom really was eating a tuna sandwich. The irony would be too much and Jenny would probably fly off the handle, cursing like a pirate and swinging at anyone who comes within five feet of her. I have this strong feeling that Jenny Jones can't stand irony because she can't really define it.

On a different note, on the way to work today I saw a tree that had turned red and yellow already. It couldn't wait i guess. Everything else is still mostly green. I admire it's forwardness and willingness to establish something.

Terror

Two years ago today I was working at this health-food joint/ juice bar in Syracuse. There wasn’t a television in the store. So when a co-worker came frantically running in with digital pictures he had taken off of his TV at home of the billows of smoke rising from the twin towers, I honestly thought he was joking. We all rushed out into the main part of the mini-mall to watch CNN on the screens hanging from the ceilings in the dining area.

I obviously don’t need to explain what I saw. We all saw it over and over and over again. It strikes me that in order for this event to be accepted as a reality, many of us - even people who witnessed it firsthand as they ran out of the buildings, or watched from a Hoboken rooftop, or from the very street it was on, needed to see it again and again on their televisions. We needed to see it from different angles, in different lighting, with different news castor’s saying “oh my god, oh my god…” No one put that on their cue cards. We just couldn’t believe it…and we couldn’t tear ourselves away from that image. I stayed up until 4 am and must have seen the attack over a hundred times that night and morning. It reminds me of the Kennedy assassination. We watch these things again and again hoping, even expecting something to change - some minor detail that was overlooked that could bring light and understanding. We analyze it; learn its characteristics like the lyrics of a song. “Here’s the part where the explosion shoots out the other side…” “Here’s the part where Jackie reaches for him…” Maybe the truth is that television has become more of a reality than our real lives. We need it to address our insecurities. We need it because it seems we've learned not to trust ourselves, and it verifies that something actually happened.

The headlines today read, “U.S. Says 'Major Terror Attack' May Come Today”. This isn’t the world I was promised. I want a refund on the 20 years I spent preparing for “real life”. I thought all I needed to be concerned with was graduating from college and finding someone to love me. This is a dangerous new landscape.

They are playing the loop again on the television. It isn’t bringing me any solace.

Post-It

At lunch today I sat outside and let the sun cook my back through my suit for a while. It was really nice. A lot of people sit alone here. One man held a pack of cigarettes and a cell phone in front of him as if he had to make some crucial choice between the two. He either wasn’t very coordinated, or he was thinking about something serious. Cell phones are the new cigarettes after all. They are addictive, they’ve been accused of causing cancer, they are a hazard while driving, and people use them to socialize and satisfy an oral fixation. Regardless, he looked distressed. A lot of people look distressed here. In fact, they look defeated. I can’t let that happen to me. I hate when people say things like “Gotta do whatcha’ gotta do” or, “Welcome to the real world” or, “ That’s life” when I express a grievance with daily monotony. We don’t HAVE to put up with these things. We’ve allowed them to happen because we are a passive, fearful bunch. Anyway, I gotta get back to filling the staplers and counting the post-its …

Brookland

Today I put deodorant on my lips thinking it would work like chapstick.

Color me crazy, but I'll argue that my roommate Lesley’s cat, Karma, has intentions to seduce me with his sleek, black hair and smart yellow eyes that say soothingly “I know, I know…but I still don’t give a damn.”

I moved to Brooklyn on Sunday. The apartment is quite nice - high ceilings, large bedrooms, and a small, unkept garden in the back. Moving into a new home is like doing a crossword, or a puzzle. You have to figure out what goes in the blank spots with clues given by the space itself. This does not exclude one’s body. I keep smashing my head on a glass shelf every time I stand up from turning the shower on. I must get used to moving about the space. My body must learn how to respond to the language of this obstacle course. “A nice Ikea end-table would fit quaintly in this corner. The wall right here is just begging for an abstract landscape.” I should just call up that annoying woman from Trading Spaces with the huge teeth and horrible hair – Paige – and have someone else decorate my space. It would be fun to decorate someone else’s because you could do something absolutely repulsive. I would insist on everything being mustard yellow. Everything. And maybe put a big, diagonal, hot-pink stripe across the wall. I would only carpet half of the floor, and place a table with two legs on, and two legs off the rug. This would guarantee things would be spilled at some point. Then I would go to Sears and have my portrait taken against the Christmas backdrop with a larger transparency of my face superimposed in the upper right-hand corner. This would hang above the mantle and someone would definitely cry.

Karma moves about a new space as any cat would – being completely confident it his uncertainty. After he moves his bowels in the plastic igloo littler box, he scurries about, excited from that feeling of unloading something bothersome. He leaps and attempts to roar. Some great ancestor in him was a panther, and he knows it. In fact, he’s cocky about it.

Cats don’t always have the time to be bothered by our pathetic, neediness. Sometimes they’ll let you cuddle, and other times they’ll look at you like it's just all wrong and why do you insist on speaking to them in that shrill, whiney tone. They’re so manipulative. In the end, though, they simply want to be loved like you or I. And if that requires playing hard-to-get, so be it. I may fall under Karma’s spell after all.

Karma, if you’re reading this, then I want you to know that I saw you chewing on my brown tie. You pretended to be doing something else when you realized that I was watching. You’re not that clever, and I’m not that stupid. Does Lesley know you are using her computer?

Blog, lesson 1

So this is what it comes down to? How cliché. How absolutely and utterly uninteresting. How bland. There is even a giant fake window down here in the basement of this fortress (because there are no real windows in the basement). I spent the last few hours thinking about how you can compare a sheet of uncut baseball cards to a potato. I guess the comparison between potato chips and baseball cards that have been cut are not as astounding. I had to get glasses. I’m farsighted now, but only slightly. Thanks Apple™. “Think differently” how I could still have good vision.

The woman at the glasses store did all these tests where yellowish photographs of hot-air balloons (which had to have been taken in the 70s) were shown to me in and out of focus, far away and close up. The instrumentation - the machinery that was placed in front of my face nearly brought on a panic attack. She was so brutal with me. It was all a routine to her, and she got me out of there as fast as she could. It didn’t matter to her that this was the deflowering of my eyes by optomological penetration. I left her a small sweat-print in the shape of my ass on her black vinyl chair. Now whenever I want to read or do something on the computer I have to put on this tool that enables my body to continue to accept the punishment of corporate technology.

I just got back from Dallas, Texas. The company I work for was there managing this huge conference about fiscal something or others and bottom lines and “head count maintenance” (firing people). I’m not at liberty to say the name of this specific cola company, which is the alternative to Coca-Cola, but they had about three hundred execs from all over the place meeting there to improve sales, and increase profit. Imagine that? Basically the rooms were full of middle-aged white men. There were a few women, and even fewer black people, who had to have felt tokenized when the speakers kept insisting on increasing diversity to help appeal to a more “urban” and “ethnic” market. The speakers all compared everything to sports games, which made the sheer cutthroat competitiveness just raw. There were no fair players there. I think I gagged at one point. They screened this video that insisted their company “owns the culture of youth” and that it’s only those pesky dead people who refuse their product. If only we could make dead people purchase things. Here’s an idea. Rather than wealth going to family when a loved one dies, their purchasing patterns can be tracked and the money can be divided up amongst their favorite corporations. This could be called post-mortem assets.

The theme of the whole conference was TAKE IT ON, and I kept singing it to the tune of “Take on Me”, and “Take it Off” (the Donnas, yuck). It just frightens me how people can be so immersed in an ideology that’s as narrow as a sewer tunnel. Sell soda at any cost. The world will not function without our soda; people cannot have fun without our soda. These are the things they want us to believe! I mean this was a friggin’ soda convention and they didn’t even have recycling cans out. I wanted to sit down with one of the execs and say, “Listen. If you want to increase sales and appeal to a broader youth market, you going to have to make it look like you care about something other than money. Make cola that’s organic, and whose ingredients weren’t gathered by four-year-old rainforest plantation workers. Or you could just close up shop, move to your house in the Keys and shrivel up like a sun-dried tomato and die.” I’d opt for the second scenario.

On a brighter note, autumn is coming quickly. It’s my favorite season. The cool weather, the leaves turning fiery pigments, the harvest, apple picking, pumpkins, and the sweet earthy smell of everything dying. It just makes me want to drink cinnamon tea and spoon with someone warm.