Gay Link of the Day

Mitchissmo and Brother Elder, 1974

Happy Easter.

Fellini in a post 9-11 world

Often I stare at the wall and wish my life were a Fellini movie, black and white and imbued with deep meaning on the one hand, and utter Catholic-kinky nonsense on the other. I also wouldn't mind looking like Claudiaor macking Marcello. Tuesday night in the Midtown Tunnel, I had my chance to live the quintessential Fellini dream: I got stuck in a tunnel.

Due to a midnight hold-up at the tunnel exit (a coffee truck had to be tooth-brush combed for explosives), for 20 minutes my driver and I were stranded in a long, long line of cars. At Minute 10, while cars started a song of honks, I got excited as I imagined hitting the roof and then floating out of the car to Long Island City, a flight which would spark a surreal reflection onto my young life as a film director, acted out by struggling Goth actors and my disgruntled family.

Who doesn't love that opening tunnel car-jam sequence of 8 1/2? It makes traffic look fun. Indeed, the tunnel scene must be quite beloved, given its frequent ripping off for music videos by R.E.M., Radiohead and the like.



Instead of gasping impatiently, my (apparently cinephile) Driver and I giggled about our parallel to Fellini's 8 1/2. Only my Driver, an Iraqi, was not quite as giggly. His giggles were more of a nervous variety, especially when I popped my digital camera out the window to take a picture of the surreal Fellini jam. "M'am, no pictures after 9-11," he said. That's when two white drunk guys, apparently frustrated with the hold-up, got out of their taxi and started walking back to Manhattan, stranding their cab driver. Just in case they were inconspicuous to the surveillance cameras, they screamed and laughed.

Watching them in the rear view mirror, my driver chuckled more easily. "They're in trouble." He looked at his watch.

Sure enough, sixty seconds later a cop car swooshed past us and made an arrest.









I did manage to get one picture, and even arrive home safely with a clean police record intact. But somehow, things look different in color-- more digital, more mundane, and certainly not quite as good as a Fellini.

Liberal Revenge, part II

After all that, they let me have it anyway.

Continents and Teeth: everything is relative, man

One fine hot Michigan day in the summer of 1979:

I, a chubby girl, was excited to carry out an order from Baskin-Robbins ice cream for my mom and older brother, the latter whom I worshipped. Excited to impress Brother Elder, I ran towards B-R with my head turned towards the car, yelling "what ice cream do you want?!" Mid-run, my little head whipped around and THUD, BANG! into a parking meter. A ring of stars and tweety birds encircled my head. I turned to Brother Elder and mom and smiled. They shrunk back in disgust. "Ew, gross," Brother Elder said. I crept forward to the car window, where I saw le disaster. Half my front tooth was gone. We looked for it on the sidewalk, but it was no use. The half tooth was history.

Except for a phase of embarrassing nights at Goth clubs during high school, all of which seemed to employ the then popular blue x-ray lights which made the tooth invisible (and hence render a flop my whole sexed up "Less-than-Zero" look), over the years modern dentistry gave me a plastic part that allowed me to forget about my tooth. Yet lately, coffee, cigarettes and jaw clenching stress have brought the front tooth back to the forefront. Changes needed to be made.




Thus, over the last week my mouth endured 7.6 hours of dental work, spread out over a consecutive three-day period. The periodontic subjects of the top row were prodded, filed, grinded, pulled and coated, resulting in a new tooth line. After Day 1, the top row was in agonizing revolt as the tectonic plates moved. The difference was only .08 mm, but the shifts were seismic.

We think very little about our teeth but lots about our gut. This is unfair, since they both get high marks on inhaling the world… But alas, teeth are so small, really— and small's a big deal. The tiniest change turns their world upside down. God forbid a canker sore enter the picture. Yet sooner or later, the wave of change stops, the gums settle, and a new pink and white landscape emerges. Soon the pearly whites can’t even recall a time when things were different. Revisionist history has taken hold: It was always this way.

Another Reason to Defect to Europe

In Europe, the smart carts are free.

Go ahead, hike my taxes-- just give me something to put my bags on.

Detroit: there is no here here

Back in my hometown, the house across the street-- a flat roofed 50s poolside rancher of an ugly-in-a-cool-way look-- has been razed. Somebody new is building something new in its place.

When I'm back in my life in New York, I have a clear picture of what home is like. But once I make the trip out to my midwest anchor of nostalgia, the cute, the ugly, and the charming have all gone the same way, namely the look of an anyplace, not a my place.

Thank God they left one wall up for tax reasons.

The Eatin' and Drinkin' of 2 Irish Chicks

Me dear mom made me Corned Beef and Cabbage tonight, ye ole family tradition.

What may appear a beerless sober nightmare for some people is a delight here during this (thankfully) brief trip to suburban Michigan. Once again, she reminded me that I "should have been named a good old Irish name like Sheila, not some French thing"

My tummy is still gnawing on the fat.

Write 1 trillion times: I hate Bush, I hate Bush...

Mitchissmo, 1973, preparing early for angry anti-Bush letter writing campaign, hoping to save the world from its end

When I was two, I had a vision: some day, a short village idiot with family privilege and too much testosterone would come to power by utterly corrupt means and wreak immeasurable havoc,
bringing the world to its end by-- among many things-- appointing conservative hawk maniacs, and particularly a man who possessed his same monkey look to a position of world oversight. Needless to say, I scrambled out of my crib, rolled up my jumper sleeves and got cracking.

Some thirty years later, I'm three feet taller and yet feel even smaller. Today, popping your head out of your own small life and reading the paper is debilitating. With votes like 49-51 against irreversible damage for temporary gains, I, like many, feel shot with a stun gun. On this day, there's little to do but mourn and play the numb voyeur. I wish I were two again. It makes (and perhaps even justifies) my eyes turning inwards in self babbling myopia.

In the meantime, i will continue taking pictures of myself to make sure I'm still here. Let me know when it's over, because I may go blind by 2008.

Coming Soon: Multi-Part Series on Confessions of an O.C.D./ A.D.D. Freak

But until then, have a look at my friend Craig's beautiful collage. He is a talented boy who may-- just may-- be touched by what we chronic surfers and moonlighting bloggers call compulsions.

(I took the picture, so it still counts)

Oh, anyone worried about Martha's re-entry? Here is a funny letter that MS wrote my friend Nick.

Sunday Football, Monday Quarterback= Sunday Depression, Monday Insomnia

The older I get, the more I have come to realize how un-American my life is. For starters, I am a zealously single female with no intention of breeding and an addiction to working tirelessly for little or no pay. Even worse, I do not have TV, own a car, or drink soft drinks.

But let's not go too far. I am, after all, an American of Midwestern origin, and upon more thought, there are some very American features to my life: I have no health insurance, little savings, high debt, and a dog. An onlooker—if there are any onlookers on my life-- might also add that I share a certain American trait of a Puritanical sexual hypocrisy/ flip-flopping (blog forthcoming).

However, the most American trait of my life is a new and rather alarming development: I spend my entire week making elaborate plans for the weekend. I have long been curious and envious of "normal" people who do this. You know—the ones with jobs that start in the morning and end just before dinner time, and who do recreational, non-work related things outside that bracket of time? To me, they've always seemed a little nutty. But I see people like secretaries, bankers, advertising executives, even in-house attorneys make post-work social plans... during the week! As if that's not enough, then I overhear them talk about their weekend plans. Wow. The day trips, the outdoor-sy things, double dates, baby play dates, Korean spa dates, basketball games, rock climbing and related Chelsea Piers itineraries. It's mind blowing!

Let me explain. See, my usual instinct is to work— work work work. And if there is no work, think up some new work. If that fails, go somewhere where you know some work-related people will be; maybe this will turn into new work! But something happened six months ago. I finished one work project and found myself staring at the wall on a Friday night. It must have been such a state of mind that inspired the Peggy Lee classic "Is that all there is?"

I won't tell you what I did next, but suffice it to say I started a retail shopping spree which culminated with some $100 spent on fishnets... and even more on non-face or hair-related beauty. And in there, somewhere, I started planning up my weekend like a motherfucker.

Like all those normal people that I'd been so long bewildered by, on Tuesday afternoon I started planning... Plans for movie-catching, restaurant trying, voyeuristic event hopping, kitschy (and then some) parties, peppered by a mish mash of cleaning, odd money gigs, and a general nod to the month's schmooze quota. I'm uncertain as to the origins of this phenomena of weekend-planning, but my guess is that it's a short fall from the hell of cubicles to an obsession with romantic time-blocking.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a kink in the wiring. For the past 7 weeks, a new pattern has emerged: Sunday night depression, followed by Monday night insomnia. From what I'm told, the Sunday Night Depression is, in fact, a Normal Trait of American living. After a two day reprieve, one must look over the edge into the abyss of the upcoming five day grind. To me, it's more that even after all that planning, it's still… well… it's all still somewhere else. There may be no there there, but I'm not so sure there's a here here, either. On cue: Is this all there is?

Maybe Sunday depression exists because the weekend holds such wonderous promise of the future, like someone you've only met in email. Yet on Sunday around 6pm, a problem always bubbles up and lingers in your face. A leftover family squabble, some mysteriously alienating moment with a lover, or the general knowledge that plans are just dreams, only well organized. I don't know. But I do know that on Sunday nights, I feel sad. Which means that Monday morning I awake with such ferocious purposefulness that I cannot sleep Monday night. I simply cannot come down. The little head goes into overdrive and wants to embark on every idea that has ever occurred and attack every last thing on the To-Do-List-- even the items that have been floating sadly on the bottom of it since fall 2002. The world will be taken on, NOW.

It is Monday night, late, and I have already had two cappucinos and lots of Nicorette. There will be no sleep tonight, but plenty of blogging, emailing, other non-essential writing and crossing out of lists. Tomorrow, Tuesday, I will start planning for the weekend.

Liberal Revenge at Tax Time

Need I say more?

I'll let you know if I get audited.