Saturday Night

I like these soft, stubble-muffled kisses. You keep the count of boys above the count of girls. You are beautiful and I should keep this to myself.

That was clever, clever as a pirate - like Alison, like you don't even know it's happening. Did you? What do you mean? I was waiting all afternoon. "Nothing too crazy... maybe the Cell Block Tango?" I'll just go crazy slowly. I'd love a boy who will grin into my face and nuzzle. I'm afraid we started on the wrong assuption and that your liking me is no safe one.

Can simple lust be so loving? Couldn't it maybe stay like we made it? Secrets out? Secret's out.

Oh, love of mine, would you condescend to help me
'Cause I’m stupid and blind?
And desperation is the devil’s work,
It is the folly of a boy's empty mind
Now I’m feeling dangerous
Riding on city buses for a hobby is sad
Lead me to a living end,
I promised that I’d entertain my crippled friend
My crippled friend
- Belle & Sebastian, "The State I Am In"

The Effluence of Affluence

I'm convinced perfect girls are getting it out of bottles and I think I should buy some more.

I like magazines fat and models skinny. You're not supposed to be able to see the lines below my eyes or even November from here. I bought red slingbacks, left a record somewhere, haven't cut my hair yet but keep listening to the Pavement song. "I don't care, I care, I really don't care - did you see the drummer's hair? Advertising looks and chops a must."

Naked quote. Goddamn sixty-nine in seventy-five makes me crazy. I like naked products and naked people, preferably in glossy pictures and holding enormous seven-thousand-dollar snakeskin handbags.

Sell your vicious snow and screaming toys; I want hundreds of dollars in cotton dresses and white boots. Exhaustive econ textbook makes capatalism classy, but the floral industry is in for the euphismic hard sell and tacky trade magazines. "Permanant botanicals" are made out of petroleum, which is surprisingly impermanant and also gathers dust. How much of an unblushing markup will it be for the "sympathy solution", real actual dying flowers on the coffin?

Here's what I've learned: they're close to indestructible. Pinch, cut, pierce, wire, drop, tape, squeeze, fluff, bend, ruffle, cut and recut. It's not design - that's a euphanism too. It's closer to rote, rotate, poke, pick, add and multiply. It's made out of fake ribbon, wax tape, too-shiny wire, and self-importance. It's sickeningly gaudy and instantly dated.

Flowers are free when they grow outside, free to cut and free in old bottles full of dirty water. I'm going to live to see them, free them, mistreat them, and bring them home to you.

The Nineteen-Story Tomb

"I want summer," moans Lindsay, upstairs, downstairs, on the floor, under the lights turned out, dressed and shivering. We can almost sleep on blue mats over institutional cement.

Seventeen says stay slim, slices of cake no bigger than your Sidekick. (Did you know you're going to die?) Beth and I are sitting over residential cement, basement rug, tearing through the pages, flipping the LP to hear "Rebel Rebel". I'm never going to be Seventeen.

If they have no brain, let them eat fake. I don't know what these chemicals are, but I paint them into my eyes. I demand nuclear freebies, empty calories, and easy things not to do.


I bought shorts and found myself with nothing to write this time last year, too. I want to lie in my friends' beds 'til the sun shines on slingbacks and bicycles.