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dirtypink, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

On Friday night, I suddenly got a wild notion that LCF and I should get cheap-ass massages at the Chinese Natural Therapy Center on 9th St. I didn’t much care that everything in the place was dingy-dirty-pepto-pink, or that the oily sheets were kinda nasty. With this kind of stuff, you get what you pay for, and I was committed to my mission of grungy luxury. I guess I was a little nervous or uncomfortable though, because after I self-consciously hustled out of my top and was waiting for the lady to come back, I tried to swing my ample frame jauntily up onto the table and wackiness ensued. My vast converse-clad foot somehow got wrapped around the curtain that devided my lil’ table from the dude getting reflexology in the bed to my left, and the more I struggled, the more it slid open, until the sore-footed gentleman was treated to a half-time show of my wildly flailing mams as I struggled to extricate myself. He didn’t say anything and I somehow managed to keep my giggles to a miunimum, but I was hoping he would at least tip me on the way out or something. As far as I know, LCF created no such drama.

Trouble in Mind, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

Last night LCF and I tried to shake off the week’s worries with a little date nite. In an imprompu flurry after work, we got all dolled up in our goth-punk finery and hit the street for a bit of a rummage at the Strand, a hurried bite at Cosi, and then some big budget terror at the cineplex, complements of Silent Hill. This picture of my foxy paramour was taken before the flick, so you can just imagine how freaked out we both looked afterwards. While it wasn’t anything like what I expected (I suspect the DVD release will have at least another hour of exposition that never made it to theatrical release) this movie still scared the crap out of me. Plus, it was very rad to see a horror movie where all the main characters were women, without any cheesy gimmicks, or awkward explanations, or mandatory exile to some chick flick ghetto. The theater was evenly packed with men and women, and the action was grisly and uncompromising despite the fact that women and little girls were dong all the heavy lifting in the plot. I had nightmares about the movie once we came home (of course) and woke up choking, coughing, and begging for water. Lordy, I can be such a sensitive child sometimes.

Grace Church NYC, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

I was listening to Mahalia Jackson this morning while getting ready for work. The recording was all old and crackly and sounded like it had been cut live on location in a southern baptist church in the ’50s or something. She had a full back-up choir, and a rickety sounding organ wheezed in the background while her miraculous voice shook the rafters and made congregants scream out in seizures of spiritual revelation. I know I shouldn’t have religion envy, but sometimes it doesn’t seem fair that when it comes time for me to “pray,” I’m just expected to rattle off from memory some phonetically memorized sounds in a language I don’t know, while people lucky enough to see Mahalia Jackson actually had the experience of feeling as if they had been saved by her songs. She sings with such absolute conviction and authority, it makes me want to believe that she’s right, and that all the glory she predicted for herself has actually come to pass. In a perfect universe, Mahalia is in a sweet cotton candy heaven right now, with Jesus riding shotgun beside her in her great big pink cadillac.

Bones, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

On the treadmill monday night, I was watching this amazing documentary on PBS on the Donner Party and it totally freaked me out. There I am, trudging along on the road to nowhere, while on the screen, doomed pioneers in 1846 are trying to WALK from freakin’ Illinois to California. All their shit was breaking down and native tribes were killing their cattle with poison arrows, and they were getting into fights and exiling each other and killing each other, and freezing in the mountains and boiling in the desert. I was almost at the part where they were gonna start starving and resorting to cannibalism in the Sierra Nevadas when I reached my alotted 30 minute time limit and got nudged off the hamster wheel by some shrimpy guy guzzling Vitamin Water like it was his job. LCF says he’ll netflix the doc for me so I can see the grisly conclusion, but in the meantime, I can’t stop thinking about it. By the end of the trail, 2/3 of the women and children made it all the way to California, but only 1/3 of the men did. I wonder why. Was it because the women and children could reserve their strength earlier in the trip before everything broke down? Is it because women will fight through absolutely anything to protect their children? Are women and children just cooler with the idea of eating human flesh? It’s hard to speculate since it was such a different world, but it makes me wonder if humans are just bred to be wussier now. I’m so tired these days that the alarm clock makes me cry and I’m considering ingesting my diet coke intreveinously just to get through my work day. But in 1846, women hit the road with babies strapped to their backs, fully knowing that the end of the road was 1600 miles away, and totally did it anyway. They didn’t know they’d be eating pioneer tarre tarre, but they knew the voyage would be enormous and they faced the challenge optimistically. Honestly, I can’t even imagine living a life like that. It’s not like any form of humanity I’ve ever seen.

Fast Food Nation, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

Walking to meet Alpha yesterday, I was totally creeped out by how many empty storefronts there are in the village now, and even more creeped out by the fact that every new store I’ve seen open up in the last 6 months has been a chain. It gets me all riled up because I thought there were supposed to be zoning boards or something set up to keep this from happening. I always figured New Yorkers could justify paying the rents that we do because it’s worth any price to escape whatever suburban hell we came from to live in the most diverse, exciting place on earth. But the proliferation of these giant franchise stores is neither diverse nor exciting. Their crushing sameness ruins the landscape of my evening walks and makes me feel like I’m living in the middle of a giant, mean, dirty, mall. Maybe it’s just being presumptuous to assume that people don’t want it this way though. If they keep succeeding there must be a reason. Last night at Mike’s 30th birthday party, held in the back of an immaculate gay bar on 10th ave, Anya’s friend was pleasantly chatting us up about how her three fave restaurants in New York are Outback Steakhouse, Red Lobster and The Olive Garden. Seriously. I waited for the ironic laughter to follow, but it never came. I guess these bland nightmarish places are just giving the people what they want, but it’s hard not to just stand in the middle of the street sometimes and shriek at the top of my lungs, “STOP! YOU’RE FUCKING RUINING EVERYTHING!!!”

Radioactive, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

I was talking to LCF on the phone today, and he used the term “comfortable hell” to describe my current situation. Springtime isn’t always a big glorious breath of fresh air. There is a kind of subtle torture that occurs when feelings, curiosities, and desires are forcibly kept dormant, while all around me everything in nature is kicking out the jams. I know I’m being intentionally vague. I don’t totally have a handle on this whole blogging thing and the urge to censor and couch my language needles me whenever I try to write. I guess what I’m trying to say is that staying intentionally still, and isolating myself from new experiences because I’m already overwhelmed with what I have chosen to do, is poisoning the well. I’m so stagnant I can feel the algae growing between my toes as I type. Flies are swarming overhead. All my best ideas are half buried in unmarked graves. If I try to resurrect them now, will they be too rotten to live again?

14D, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

That Stephen King show “Kingdom Hospital” is totally one of those shows that gets an all access pass to my dreams if I watch it before going to bed. Last night LCF and I watched three episodes on DVD before I conked out, and because in the show two characters were planning a trip to Salem, MA, that is where I spent all my dream time. I dreamt I was in Salem planning a wedding, but I couldn’t figure out if it was supposed to be my wedding or someone else’s. Everything was very clean and colonial and austere and vaugely sinister, and as I made the rounds of Puritan meeting halls and caterers and bed and breakfasts and florists, the fact that I didn’t know who the weddng was for became increasingly problematic. If I didn’t know who the wedding was for, how could I know if the bride would like what I picked out? If I was the bride, would I like what I picked out? I realized I was picking out all the things that I thought weddings were supposed to have, but not necessarily things that I liked or wanted. Everyone I consulted with around the town was a severe witchy woman, and they all would answer my questions in tones of terse malevolence. It made me feel stupid and confused and very lonely and I woke up feeling much more tired than I had been when I went to sleep.

Gym Bunny, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

Mirror , mirror, on the wall, who’s the sweatiest of them all? Surprise! It’s me! I provide here incontrovertible proof that Dolphin Fitness has never before seen such a sweaty lady as I. The best part about wearing this particular shirt to the gym is that I can gauge how hard I’m working by how far the giant sweat stain creeps down the Erika Lopez cartoon plastered with salt to my chest. Once I covered the whole image and victory was mine. It was a gross, slimy, victory that prompted others to gape in thinly masked disgust, but I didn’t care. On that day, I was the undeniable queen of sweat, and I ruled my kingdom with a just but damp hand.

Caf 61 Exterior, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

Cafeteria 61 is the deli where I used to get my bagel every morning and exchange flirtatious banter with the cute counter boy. A couple of months ago it closed, and now this morning it was all burned up. Looks like an insurance fire to me, which is a shame because it was a beautiful old building that Laurie says used to be a club/restaurant called the Lone Star Cafe that I remember hearing about in a Paul Simon song. The upper part used to be this big open lounge space surrounded by windows where I could just hang out and drink diet coke and watch 5th Avenue flow by all day.

Our Lady, originally uploaded by emilyrems.

This is Our Lady of Perpetual Theft. She is part of an altar Mr. Logan del Fuego assembled by our front door and she guards our house, protecting us from the khaki-wearing hoardes swarming outside our fortress of solitude. 

Here’s a little gem compliments of Found Magazine that I will refer to often to inspire me throughout my long and arduous day.

BOCCE is good for letting go of your problems. It is a beautiful day,
let go of your problems as you let go of your balls. Clutch the balls
and really work them over in your palms until you have gathered up all
of your negativity and let the balls spread it back into the earth. The
earth is there for you to talk to and let go of your balls on.

–from a handwritten note
FOUND by Britten Stringwell, Ann Arbor, MI

Why, oh, why must I be the only fat girl at the gym? Like, I know there are some thick chicks there sometimes, but in a huge, packed gym you’d think there would at least one other genuinely big girl there for me to give a solemn up nod to on the way to the water fountain or something. Last night my back felt weird and bad from hunching over my desk for so long, so I did the bike instead of the road to nowhere, and I swear I thought I was going to give myself a black eye. Something about the way my body situates itself on the bike squishes all my fat upwards, sending my tits into a spastic rhythmic jiggle every time I lift my feet to pedal. The faster I go, the faster they go, until I’m afraid they’ll just glide over my head and smother me like a giant mammory tsunami. I can assure you all eyes in bike land were on me. Not necessarily in a mean, or even in a pervy way, but more in a “What the fuck is happening on that girl’s chest?” kind of way. I guess the point of this very special episode of Emily’s Funniest Home Videos is that I did my 30 minute cardio sesh despite the bounce-a-thon, but no matter how my back feels next time, I think I’ll probably just get back on the road to nowhere with two sports bras for good measure. I’ve already abandoned the elliptical because of the intense bounce factor though, so it’s sad to see another option go. Et tu bike? Et tu??? If I could just figure out a way to make bounce-resistant exercise clothes, I’d make a mint.

This morning, astrologer Rob Breszny kicked me in the teeth with this little bit of advice. “This is one time when ‘no waiting’ is the rule. You could make three months’ progress in 15 days.” This sucks because I really feel it too. Feel like I have the steam building up to actually do something, ANYTHING, outside of the narow confines of what I’ve been single-mindedly working away on for the past few years. I don’t want to chuck it all or anything. I just want to make room for more. Diversify my time more. Put more things into the world with my name on them. Some times are just slow times for me, but I hope I’m breaking out of one now. All I have to really do is show up for new work. Whatever it is I decide to do. But at this point that idea is still exhausting and terrifying. On a totally unrelated note, the usually very staid and conservative doorman outside my shrink’s office was jamming out to a ye olde Madonna track in front of the elevators, totally not caring who was there. He was in the zone and would not be denied. Today, he shall be my spirit animal. In accordance with Native American tradition, I bestow upon him the tribal name, Dances in Lobby. Whatev. I need to put down the crack pipe and do some work.

As I was trying to explain to LCF earlier this evening, I’m having some sort of internal meltdown because I haven’t made anything I can really call my own in quite a while. Having just come back from Han’s and seen for myself her belly getting all puffed up as she suffers and gags on her own ultimate act of creation, I’m tasting my own bile, an acid emptiness rising in my throat. At some point in my mag career, doing my own projects became impossible to coordinate with my work schedule. Or so I told myself. Ideas would press themselves up against the windows of my days, steaming them up with their warm needy breaths like big-eyed orphans until I finally drew the blinds and chased them off, begging them to leave me alone. I guess I ultimately found having ideas too painful, too distracting, and now I’m missing the company of my own excited imagination so much it even hurts to dream.