Flashbulb Memories

Mental Illness

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 23:45:58 -0400

When did people stop talking about their mental illnesses? It seemed in the 90’s it was cool to be depressed or manic. What changed? I live in the most neurotic city on the planet and I don’t know anyone else with a mental illness. I know crazy people but no one of them is actually crazy. Well, that I know of. Because no one talks about it.

I fucking suck at dating.

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 18:48:00 -0400

I really liked this one. God damn it. Why did I get drunk and say too much? I’m such a jackass. I can’t keep doing this. I need to stop drinking.

Broken Beginnings

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:47:33 -0500

A new year starts and I’m just as broken as I was when the last began. I’m tired of nursing my wounds. I want a truly new start. But I can’t leave this place. It’s where I always wanted to be. Now I’m stuck. I followed my dreams and now I have nowhere left to go.

Best Day

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 18:21:00 -0400

The best day of my life was my fifth birthday. I woke up to the sound of the mower running. I got dressed and walked out my front door. Everything smelled of fresh-cut grass. A colorful donkey piñata was sitting on our door mat. I made my way around to the backyard finding my mother fixing streamers to our chain link fence and my father pushing the lawn mower. They both looked so happy. Mom walked over and picked me up. My father turned off the mower and wrapped his arms around us both. I can’t imagine ever experiencing anything better.

Stuff Magazine

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 01:22:00 -0400

Mom has a brain tumor.

My 16 year-old brother had been tasked with breaking the news. I collapsed in on myself. That seems to be what I always do when being told horrifying, life-changing news. Mom and Dad were afraid of telling me themselves. They saw me as fragile, easily broken. My brother is my favorite person in the world and I’m sure they believed the news would be easiest to take when spoken through my brother’s voice.

The doctor says that it doesn’t look like cancer. They think they can remove it. Mom will be ok.

My brother then handed the phone to my mother. The moment I heard her voice I began sobbing. She asked if I wanted her to postpone the surgery until I got home. I should have said “yes” but the calmness of my brothers voice and my mother’s soothing words made it sound routine. Of course she would be ok. I told her to go ahead with the surgery and I would be there the next night. She would see me when she woke up.

I love you so much. So, so much. You are the best mom in the world. I will see you tomorrow.

It takes three planes to get to South Dakota. A full day. When my last plane landed I had to wait a half-hour for a terminal to open. Such a small airport. I busied myself with the newest issue of Stuff Magazine. I loved their silly articles. I told myself that it was alright to laugh. That everything was ok outside of the plane. I never let myself consider the possibility that something might go wrong during the surgery. I never imagined Dad would be standing in the terminal, holding onto my uncle, trying to figure out the right way to tell me she wouldn’t be waking up.

Last Words

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 22:45:00 -0400

I think I might be bisexual. Does that change the way you feel about me?

I waited for his response. I had never told someone I knew that I was bisexual. I had said it in text to anonymous people on the internet but never to someone I had met. I felt like it was time I came out with it.

No. That doesn’t change how I feel about you.

“What does?” I replied. No answer.

I tried to direct the conversation to another topic. He was celebrating his 18th birthday the next day and I asked if there was anything I could bring to the party. I thought that might change his tone. It didn’t.

He was depressed and angry. When he got that way I would normally tell him that he couldn’t kill himself without me. I knew what he was thinking. That night was the one time my response was different. I was angry. And tired of fighting.

You’re going to be sorry.

I didn’t respond. I logged off the computer thinking about what a complete asshole he was. I wondered whether he was worth giving up the limited edition Han Solo action figure I had gotten for being the first in line at the midnight showing of Empire Strikes Back. Maybe I would just keep it.

Red Sox vs. Yankees

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 22:40:00 -0400

My family have been Red Sox fans since 1919. That year my six year-old grandfather saw Babe Ruth play for the Red Sox in a game against the White Sox at the old Comiskey Park. Later that year Babe Ruth was traded to the Yankees, cementing my family’s long standing antipathy for the team. Grandpa always blamed the Yankees for stealing Babe Ruth away.

The real details of why Babe Ruth was traded to the Yankees had more to do with Ruth’s demands for a raise than thievery on the part of the Yankees. The Red Sox were unwilling to double his pay and the Yankees offered cash. The Red Sox made the trade and got quite a bit of money to give him up.

I never discussed this with my grandfather prior to his death last year. I didn’t want to screw with my family’s mythology. It doesn’t matter how it happened but that year we became Red Sox fans. As far as I’m concerned, we always will be. I will always be thankful that my grandfather lived long enough to see us win in 2004 and win again in 2007. And I’m listening to the game right now. We’re winning. (This was written before our spectacularly sad losing streak at the end of the season. Truly and ridiculously spectacular.)

I have to say that what I find even more amazing than the fact that my grandfather saw Babe Ruth is the fact that he saw the 1919 White Sox. That was the the year of the “Black Sox” scandal where the World Series was fixed. The White Sox threw the series and the Cincinnati Reds won. The eight players accused of taking bribes were banned from baseball for the rest of their lives. My grandfather saw those men play that summer. He saw “Shoeless” Joe Jackson run. How fucking cool is that?

I could have had a different life.

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 21:29:00 -0400

My mom only turned away for a moment. She was pregnant with my brother and sister and we were crib-shopping in an Indianapolis department store. When she turned back I was gone.

A teenage store clerk saw the woman pick me up and begin to run. It happened so quickly that by the time my mother turned around the woman holding me and the clerk running after her were no longer visible. The sliding glass doors at the entrance slowed the woman enough that the clerk could tackle her. She wrestled me out of the woman’s arms and the woman escaped out the door, vanishing into the parking lot. She was never caught.

My mom told me this story several times throughout my childhood. It’s not something a neurotic insomniac child takes in and forgets about. I thought about it some nights as I laid in bed, imagining what might have happened had we made it through the door. I never imagined she could have killed me. I was a pretty, blonde, two and a half year-old. It just doesn’t seem like a woman in her 30’s or 40’s (the description given to the police) would take a little girl to murder her. I imagined that she would have raised me. And I would have had a different life.

Fisticuffs

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 23:30:00 -0400

Face… Guard your face… Keep your arms up… You don’t need to protect your titties. You need to protect your face!

Today was my third boxing lesson. My trainer won’t let me get away with anything. I got hit upside the head with his punch mitt at least 10 times. The first time my glasses got knocked sideways. I tried in vain to readjust them using my boxing gloves until my trainer started laughing and put them back in place.

“You can’t fight in glasses. I’m not going to put them back on your face again.”

Ugh. Now I have to get contacts. I hate touching my eyes. But I do want to fight.

I go through periods where I try physical fitness. I’ve never been very athletic. Neither have my brother and sister. I worry that this has always been a minor source of disappointment to my father. He was an All American football player in college and held the state record in shot-put for 40 years. I asked him about this a few nights ago. His reply was, “well, your brother was pretty good at hacky sack…” We both started laughing.

My first kiss

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 20:48:00 -0400

“I’m sorry. You had three years to fall in love with me. Your time is up.”

Those were my words to the boy who forced my first kiss upon me. I was sitting on top on a jungle gym in his back yard. I didn’t want him anymore.

“Please let me kiss you. You don’t have to count it as your first. Just kiss me and I will let you go.”

He climbed up the metal ladder stairs and rested his body on my dangling legs.

“I love you. I thought you were the one I would lose my virginity to.”

I could feel his erection against my calf.

“Kiss me and I will take you home.”

I lived a half hour away in the hills and had no other way of getting back. I relented and let him climb the rest of the way up.

It was the coldest kiss I’ve ever given. I can’t imagine what that felt like for him. I was cruel. He apologized repeatedly throughout the trip back to my house. I sat silent. He began to cry.

After that night he changed. Cut his hair very short and started losing weight. He was always thin but at the end he was 6ft tall and 120 pounds. Knowing him this way made his viewing even more surreal. An embalming mistake blew up his body up to twice his normal size.

Megalophobia

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:01:00 -0400

“Megalophobia is a fear of large or oversized objects. A person who is megalophobic can have their fear triggered by any number of things such as buildings, animals and even planes.”

I have a really lame phobia. Living in NYC has definitely cured me of most of my fear of tall buildings although I think that I would probably start crying if I saw the Burj Khalifa. And planes flying high overhead don’t make me too uncomfortable though I avoid driving on the Grand Central Parkway (next to LaGuardia’s runway.) When an enormous plane lands right above my car, I begin to shake.

I don’t believe that oversized objects are going to hurt me but I shiver and my eyes tear up when something seems overwhelmingly large. I hate how irrational and uncontrollable it is. I wish I had a phobia that more people could understand. Why couldn’t I be coulrophobic? At least the fear of clowns makes some sort of sense.

I don’t enjoy flying but I can do it. What bothers me is...

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 23:15:00 -0400

I don’t enjoy flying but I can do it. What bothers me is being below a plane. I always imagine the sky is falling.

The plane was low when it passed over us. I had never flown and it wasn’t until that moment I realized how truly massive planes are. It dwarfed the houses in our neighborhood. Nothing has ever seemed so big. Then it was gone, behind the trees. I was sitting in a car full of children being evacuated from the neighborhood. When the fireball rose into the air all the moms began to scream. The other children began to cry. I sat silently and watched the smoke rise.

I can't drive 55...

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 23:55:00 -0400

I have a terrible driving record. I have gotten 8 speeding tickets, 2 careless driving, and 1 reckless driving. The two careless driving tickets were also for speeding but I was going so much faster than the speed limit that a speeding ticket wouldn’t have been appropriate. The reckless driving was for 96 in a 55 (the fastest I was ever caught driving.) But that’s not the fastest I’ve gone. The highways in the midwest were designed to have long stretches of straight road so that in the event of an emergency a plane can use them as landing strips. This means that kids with nothing else to do and the license to drive alone at 14 use the interstates as racetracks.

Every time I would go over 110mph, wind resistance on the left side of the car was so severe I would have to keep the steering wheel turned at least 30 degrees to the right to stay on the road. This never scared me but it did my friends so I would only hit those speeds on my way home after I’d dropped them off. One particularly manic night I dared myself to reach 140mph. This was the highest my speedometer would record. I didn’t quite make it. At 135mph the car began to shake so bad that I had to back off. I never tried this again. I don’t know why.

Insomnia

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:14:00 -0400

I am a chronic insomniac. I have been all my life. For the first couple years I would fight my parents when they would try to put me in my crib. When my brother and sister were born I had to give up. I began to read at 3 and found a way to pass the time.

I would only sleep from around 3am to 6am so I had a good 8 hours each night to lay in bed and read. The major problem with this was my lack of reading materials. I would read the same books over and over. The libraries at the rural elementary schools I attended were no help. They never held much variety and would only let me take out one book a week. My solution came when my mom asked me why I hadn’t read any of the books she had bought me a few days before. The stack of paperbacks looked brand new.

I have a reverence for books. I don’t break their spines or crease their pages. They look as though they’ve never been touched. This allowed my mother and me to start making trips to local bookstores to exchange the read for unread. Going to bed stopped being as torturous and but sleep continued to be an enemy. It still is. I take medications to sleep now but some days it works better than others. Most nights I still lie awake for a couple hours before slipping into unconsciousness. I’m often tempted to go off the medications and use all that extra time to get things done. But I know I wouldn’t use that time to work. Or to read. I’m afraid of how I would spend those hours. I don’t trust myself.

Scream 2

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 14:57:00 -0400

On Halloween night, 1997, I went to the movies. A large group of us left a party to go see Scream 2. We all knew it would be terrible but in South Dakota there’s not much to do other than drinking, sex, and going to the movies. We were good kids so we chose the last option.

I intentionally sat between two boys who had I knew were interested in me. I wanted to see who would reach for my hand first. As the movie progressed both boys began to move their hands closer and closer to mine, one on each arm rest. I kept mine in my lap.

Both boys, each named Andy, would kill themselves within the next year. One a couple months later and the other about eight months after that. I was intimately involved in the first Andy’s death (something I will discuss at some point.) The other Andy drank and doused himself in gasoline, then set himself on fire. He did this during the night and wasn’t found until the next morning, charred and cold, by his father who had come out to retrieve the paper.

Subaru-icide

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 14:21:00 -0400

I’m always a little bit suicidal. I would be more so but I’ve become pretty talented with compartmentalization. I can almost always push the thoughts back into their little brain boxes. Driving is the only time I can’t distract myself from death daydreams. Every time I drive down a lonely stretch of highway I imagine accelerating then suddenly turning the wheel of my shitty old SUV sharply to the left. It would be so easy to flip and roll. Fords are pieces of shit so I sincerely doubt I would make it.

I made the mistake of doing something like this in a Subaru when I was 16, hitting a cement highway divider at 65mph. My car was crushed but I was unscathed. My survival was so miraculous that it was covered by the local news… “Local teen’s quick thinking averts tragedy.” The police that were interviewed said I handled the car incredibly well for someone so young (which, of course, was bullshit.) Quality Japanese auto manufacturing saved me. The cops said that in almost any other car I would have died. I know now that if I do decide to go out in a blaze of flaming vehicular glory, I can’t be behind the wheel of a Subaru. Which makes me kind of sad. I love Subarus.

Celebrating like a lonely rapper

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 20:34:00 -0400

I spent last New Year’s Eve alone drinking expensive champagne out of the bottle and snorting lines of coke off of an old cd case. At the moment the clock struck midnight I stood outside in the snow, shoeless, smoking a cigarette, holding my bottle of champagne, watching the reflection of fireworks over the East River in the glass of the project building opposite my apartment.

My silly rapist.

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 10:03:00 -0400

Nothing beats getting raped by a Hasidic jew. Trust me. I know. His sidecurls brushed against my face every time he thrusted in. The experience taught me to not walk alone in Brooklyn at night and not to carry too many business cards. Some fell out of my bag and were left on the dirty floor of the room he dragged me in. I thought I remembered this when wading back into the memory the next day. It was confirmed when I got an anonymously numbered phone call from a thick-accented man demanding to know if I were Jewish. I began to weep and said “no.” He asked me again and again I responded “no”. I guess it’s not a sin to rape a gentile. Lucky him. Lucky me.

I have only told my therapist and my business partner that it was a Hasid. I think it’s because I’m mortified that I could not fight off such a man. They always look so pitiful in those oversized suits. It’s almost funny.

Keep reading?

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 23:24:00 -0400

I’ve been seeing a writer. Well, I had been but then he left town on Monday. I had been holding off on reading any of his books. I was worried that I would read something that I didn’t want to know. I wanted to learn who he was by talking to him. But I don’t think he was ever really too interested in talking. There wasn’t anywhere we could begin. So I bought one of his books at Barnes and Noble on my way home the day after I last saw him. I made it about 6 pages before reading the first of what I’m sure will be many heart-sinking declarations he makes about relationships with women. Great. His writing is beautiful though.

Huge tan boobs...

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 14:57:00 -0400

My mom didn’t want me to volunteer at Planned Parenthood. Not because she didn’t agree with the politics (I come from one of the only liberal families in SD,) she just didn’t want me to chance getting shot crossing the picket lines. But I was adamant and Planned Parenthood was desperate so I arranged a time to come in. That morning I parked my car in the supermarket parking lot down the street (to keep the crazies from defacing it,) navigated around the guy dressed as the grim reaper (awesomely complete with plastic fetus hanging from a sickle) and walked in.

I thought I would be answering phones or something clerical but I was told by the nurse that I would be with the doctor all day. To keep from getting sued Planned Parenthood in South Dakota had a volunteer stand next to the doctor during all exams. I must have seen about 15 vaginas that day. And breast exams. Lots of breast exams.

Finally the doctor told me we were about to see the last patient of the day. I was getting a little grossed out (it’s not that I don’t love vaginas, I really do, I just can only handle so many a day.) The most tan woman I had ever seen lay before me. She was most likely in her 30’s be she could have passed for 55. The doctor started with a breast exam. The woman opened the front of her paper hospital robe and exposed her two enormous leathery breasts. I tried not to stare but they were incredible. So big, so brown, so textured… then the doctor squeezed the left breast and blood came out of the nipple. I don’t know what happened after that. I think I astrally projected myself out of the room. I believe he told her to stop tanning. I mean, he must have told her to stop tanning, right?

So that was the first and last time I volunteered at Planned Parenthood. Eventually the picketers and the politicians won so the clinic closed. But whenever I’m back and drive past what used to be the clinic (I think it’s a Burger King now,) I remember that awful breast and why I decided to forever stay out of the sun.