Less Good

Part 1:  Old Times  

I had a dream this morning about ordering cardboard from a vendor, and then finding, somehow, a report or internal document or something from that vendor that complained about and mocked my participation in this transaction.  My response in the dream was a kind of angry glee.  That, I think, is the revealing and embarrassing part: I liked it.

But after the righteous anger faded, because there was nothing to be angry at, because it was a fucking dream, I was left with an empty space where that feeling used to be.  I still kinda felt like I'd been criticized, but not in a way I could respond to, because it didn't actually happen.  And now, as if I need to justify this feeling, I am calling up all the critical voices that linger in my memory.  I am inviting every accusation, the fair and the unfair, over to my place for drinks, so we can reminisce about old times.


Part 2: Hush

There is a game that keeps coming up when I blog surf about gaming and social justice, an indie, definition-bending game called Hush.  I want to play.  But it starts with an empty text box and this directive:

Describe a scene of intimacy in 50 words.

And I can't do it.  I start by writing about sex, but that's too easy and obvious and wrong.  Sex =/= intimacy.  And then I try to write about some other experience of intimacy, but I can't think of one that feels right.  The more I look through my memories, the less I know what I'm looking for, until I think that I have no idea what intimacy is or what it feels like. 




Part 3: List

I'd like to see someone make a list, a la McSweeney's or the fun page of the DI, except instead of "Porn Star name or Vin Disel character?" it's really, really obvious.  Like, "Sylvester Stallone movie or Babysitter's Club book?"

1.  Boy-Crazy Stacey
2.  Logan likes Mary Ann!
3.  Rambo
4.  Claudia and the Sad Goodbye
5.  Rambo III
6.  Demolition Man

Part 4: Away

I want to be somewhere else.  I want to be someone else.  I want to drive somewhere that no one knows or expects anything from me, where nothing means anything and I don't have to live with anything that happened another city, another life, away. 

I can't do that, so I put on Hedwig and the Angry Inch in the car as I drive to Gilbert and back.  I play it loud enough to stop thinking. 






(Babysitter's Club book: 1,2,4.  Stallone movie: 3,5,6.)