Friends only. I'm easy to friend, I just want to know who's reading.

"People only know what you tell them."

I don't if Frank Abagnale really said that, but I doubt.  Abagnale was a patholigical sharp-shooter, and whoever coined that phrase missed the mark a little.  People would only know what you tell them if they believed you in the first place, but they know you're full of shit and they know that because they are all full of shit, too.  Everyone lies.  No exceptions.  Show me a completely honest person and I will show you a masterful liar. 

It follows that because everyone lies, everyone also assumes that everyone else is lying, both to you and, more profoundly, to themselves.  It's human nature to expect from others exactly what we expect from ourselves.  Watching for what people presume about you will tell you a lot about a person all by itself. 

No, it is better to say, "People only know what you show them."  That's an awareness that only comes with careful observation.   Most just pick up on it subconsciously, the subtle body cues, the flat-lined inflections of the voice,  the phrasing of a phone call,  the curt way a secretly annoyed person arranges his eyebrows, or the a way a used car salesman draws the corners of his mouth up to form a plastic Cheshire-cat smile. 

It is easier to see what I mean if you try it yourself.    Just watch.   Try to throw away completely the words that any given person is saying to you and  pay attention to everything else.  What environment is the speaker in?  Is he aware that others are watching him, or are you alone together?  If other people are in the room, then he is not just speaking to you, he is also speaking to them, even if the conversation does not include them.  Look for his ticks; everyone has them.   He might lick his lips or bite his cheeks or crack his knuckles or look up and to the side when he's trying to remember a detail   I have a friend who always says "What?" as though he didn't hear the question when he's buying time to think of an answer.  But he gives himself away every time, because he answers the question before it's repeated.   Little things like that.  

Becoming aware of the thoughts behind another person's monologue is the key to effective deception (or effective honesty).   Once you can read someone, you will know how they read you.

That's really dangerous.  

I love, love, LOVE this dress, but it's a little out of my price range:

http://www.davidsbridal.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplayView?storeId=10052&catalogId=10051&categoryId=-49995498¤tIdx=11&subCategory=-49999486|-49995498&catentryId=6110585&sort=

This is more like it:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&item=110403983387

Wine. I was thinking instead of an open bar, which is pricey, or a cash bar, which is tacky, I could just put a bottle of wine on each table:

http://www.thebarrelroom.com/wineshop_barefoot_californiasauvignonblanc

http://www.thebarrelroom.com/wineshop_barefoot_merlot

. . . and then maybe have some seriously spiked punch.

Punch Recipe:

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Luscious-Slush-Punch/Detail.aspx

(one reviewer pointed out that you can make it two weeks in advance and then freeze it, which is awesome).

I thought sparklers might be a nice touch, instead of the usual rice, bird seed, or bubbles:

https://www.sparklersonline.com/shop/10_inch_sparklers.cfm

I'm stuck on food. I don't want to pay to have it catered, but I don't really know anyone who can cook a massive amount of food in a short period time. Maybe get one of the boys to be grill master and just do hamburgers/hot dogs/whatever?

Tables and chairs. I'm thinking the "white wood padded"--metal chairs are tacky, sorry, but I'll spend the extra $2 a chair.

http://www.partypalacerental.com/tablechairs.html

Also, should I do citronella candles or incense? Something to keep the bugs away.

I had a dream last night. I am in London, but the stiff calculated etiquette of the British bores me to madness, so I jump a plane to Johannesburg. It touches down after midnight when the innards of the Inner City spill their guts under the swampy light of the street lamps. My heart is pounding so fast. I'm the only one in this "cab" and the driver is making eyes at my creamy pale quivering white skin in the rear view mirror. He is in a rough mood, it's too hot. My aloneness makes him lusty and quick-tempered. He wipes at beads of sweat that cling to his forehead.  It's 35 degrees Celsius in the dark but I'm wearing a leather jacket.  That should have been his first clue not to fuck with me, but his senses are dulled by sickness.

This whole car reeks of malaria.

I tell him to take me to a hostel on the North end, but I have a queasy, dazed feeling in my stomach like I've been punched. The car bumps and jolts over pot holes, we're not headed in the right direction. The ghetto glitters with the spooky nocturnal diamond-studded eyes of wolves thirsty for a mouth full of blood. Abruptly he slams on the breaks; the midget-sized minibus coughs and stalls out.

Here it comes. He will now reveal his plans for me.    I finger the pistol that is tucked against my ribcage (A gun? How did I get it on the plane? Or did I get it after I got here?) He pushes himself into the back seat and barks at me with blood dripping from his teeth, bearing his greedy fangs as though he's about to unwrap a sinister Christmas  present.   Let's see what''s beneath your clothes.    But I am ready for him, I shove the barrel of the pistol against his throat, and right away he knows, I pull all my energy into showing him with my mirror ball eyes that Yes, I am serious, I will hurt you, I will kill you, right here, right now. I am an animal just like you. I tell him to Give me the keys! Now! I push him out of the car and he falls onto the ground, stunned, shamed.  It is a deranged practical joke, but he doesn't get it.  I spit on him for good measure. Sorry, man.  You picked the wrong girl tonight.  

I slide into the front seat, dropping the clutch into first gear.

Suddenly, I am alone behind the wheel of a rickety unpredictable vehicle in the ghetto of a notoriously dangerous city. I have no one to call and no where to go. Just this pistol, a stolen car, a fistful of rand, and the morbid possibility of spending the rest of my short life in a South African prison.   I wake up shivering, panicked, terrified.

And I think, Fuck. I've gotta go to Johannesburg.

Wow. This will be an epic post. I´m going to try to remember every detail to the best of my ability.

Cairo. City of Eternal Summer. The majesty of such a place is in its finest details. Children sell strings of jasmine flowers on every corner to the cab drivers who hang them on their rear view mirrors. They smell beautiful, you could fall in love.

The Nile is the great animated life-giver of Cairo, and it has been for thousands of years.







We went to see some belly dancing. This woman was fabulous, she made it look so easy but I know it's not!



Even in such a modern city, you get the sense that they still do so many things the same way they did them four thousand years ago. The camel is called "The Cadillac of the dessert" and I quickly learned why. This grumpy, noisy, spitting creature is in fact a very smooth ride in comparison to the bumpy, halting horse. (Pardon the bad crop)



The Pyramids at Giza are amazing. You cannot imagine how colossally big they are, or what it is like to stand before them. I was so impressed at the Colosseum in Rome last year. But the Colosseum, after less than 2000 years, is crumbling. The Pyramids at Giza still stand, rivaled by nothing else in Cairo after over 4,500 years.



I had a photo shoot with this lovely young British woman. She has lived in Cairo for three years, and was, of course, quite knowledgeable regarding the local dialect and culture.



We met the most amazing cab driver. I have never seen anyone know any city like Hanni knows Cairo. He knew every felucca captain, every night club on the Nile, every hole-in-the-wall cafe. And he has the best hash. The Egyptians call it "hubbly-bubbly" which I thought was hilarious, I guess because they smoke it out of those shisha-hookahs.

These are all things on my "List of Things to Do Before I Die" that I have done over the last several years. In order from most recent:





*Seen the Pyramids at Giza.

*Seen the belly dancers in Egypt. You have not seen belly dancing until you've seen it in Egypt, the art form's true birthplace.

*Seen the treasures of King Tut's tomb in the Egyptian Museum.

*Browsed the occult shops in Salem, Massachusetts.

*Seen the Eiffel Tower.

*Seen the Mona Lisa/Winged Victory/Been to the Louvre.

*Seen the Sistine Ceiling.

*Seen the Colleseum

*Thrown a coin over my shoulder at the Trevi Fountain for a "safe passage back to Rome."

*Been to the Vatican.

*Rode on a gondola in Venice.

*Been to Verona, Italy and rubbed Juliet's "breast" for luck in love.

*Been to the British Museum.

*Seen Westminster Abbey.

*Seen the street performers in Barcelona.

*Seen the Taj Mahal---straight up wept in front of the Taj Mahal like a little baby, it was so amazing.

*Seen the Burning Ghats of Varanasi.

*Smoked marijuana in Amsterdam---maybe not a great accomplishment, but a rite of passage for world travelers.
*Sneaked into a mosque in Marrakesh.

*Gambled in Vegas.

*Seen the Preservation Hall jazz band in New Orleans.

*Went scuba diving in Kauai, Hawaii.

*Swimming in the Pacific Ocean.

*Got drunk on moonshine in the Appalachian Mountains.

*Read the Teachings of Buddha.

*Climbed the Great Wall of China.

*Been to the Forbidden City/Tienanmen Square.

*Worked at a funeral home.

*Met Joyce Carol Oates---at a book signing, but still, I'm proud of that one.

I'll be adding more when I get home in a few days.  Not a bad start to the ultimate life.

I'M ENGAGED! I'M ENGAGED! I'M ENGAGED! I'M ENGAGED! I'M ENGAGED! I'M ENGAGED! I'M ENGAGED! I'M ENGAGED! I'M ENGAGED! I'M ENGAGED! I'M ENGAGED!

Through the eyes of an artist, I see you. Always in the perfect light, from the perfect angle.

She stepped out of her mint-green 1950s Chrysler Imperial this morning in a pair of patent-leather high heels.  I blink to freeze-frame the image.  Here is a woman who embodies impractical.  The flashy bright-screaming audacity of that absurd little car would embarrassed a psychedelic circus clown. 

"Wanna go for a drive?"

It was a sudden, grand-sweeping gesture, to offer me relief in the form of a joy ride. I pulled out my metallic cigarette case and held them out to her. I am, after all, the villain in this tale, the temptress of small but deadly pleasures. We drive all the way down Route 81 South to 64 West. Out where the river meets the smoldering explosive mountainsides of coal country.  I want to be scattered here when I die.  Just cast my ashes into the wind and forget about me.  Never think of me again.

"Thirsty?"  She pulls into a parking lot scattered with summer flowers dripping from the trees.  The lopsided bar bends under its own weight, but if the blinking neon sign is to be trusted, it is, in fact, open.  We drove through four counties before we found a wet one.  It never made any sense to me these dry counties.  So the kids all drive a few towns over, get hammered and drive home through these winding mountain roads, daring Death to meet them careening around the next corner.  What good is it to ban water when one only needs to cross the road to find an oasis?

She pretends to be a deep Southern girl taking the long way to Hollywood; a dreamy teenager with Rodeo Drive reflected in her eyes like starlight.  I pretend I'm a hitch hiker, just along for the ride.  It's sort of true.  I am just along for the ride.  Haha, will you look at that? 

We are who we are. Nothing else is guaranteed in this Life, so hold onto that.

She's been on my mind all month. Every few days I catch a glimpse of her in a reflective surface, sitting on the street corner of this ghost town, smoking dime-store cigarettes and scrying into her volcano-misting cup of coffee. My apparition, My Other Self. I swagger past her as though she is marked invisible by her tranquility.  I have no time for inner peace anymore. But it makes me laugh to think she might still believe in it, despite the indiscriminate explosive tragedy of everyday life.

I am not bitter. I am not proud.

But I do know better.

Still she follows me.  Always silent, but sometimes pleading with her eyes: 

It's okay.  Look at me!  I know all your sick little secrets, and I don't mind. 

I like to think of her as the Lost Little Girl, stuck between Worlds and stepping behind me in my foot prints, hoping they will lead her out of this life and into the next.

But the truth is, she knows better than me.  The truth is, I'm chasing her.  She knows damn well I'll run the other way if I catch on to her bait, so she lets me think she's walking behind me instead of the other way around.  So what the hell?  What's another day wasted chasing the dead?  I killed her a long time ago, this Lost Little Girl, slit her throat while she dreamed peacefully next to me in bed.

Am I making any sense to you?  I know you've felt this feeling at least once.

It took me a long time to realize this part, but today I figured out that I've been following her in circles.  Not really circles in the perfect sense, where one path meets end to end, but more like the loops of a child's slinky.  In other words, she's taking me somewhere, but she always goes the long way around, and I can never get my bearings well enough to know in which direction we are ultimately headed.  Up?  Down?  Oh, shit,  I hope it's up..

Well, not really.

There's no poetry in joy.  There is no art in knowing where you are going and getting there the way you meant to.

I am the rain.

All this tear-splashed land stretched out for miles below me, I want to drench it all, rushing over every melting mountainside, saturating every radioactive neon-green glowing plant of the jungle, running the through the canyons and the rivers, filling the darkest crevices, into the deepest part of the Earth.  Into the deepest parts of your mind.

There I stand, the collection of so many dew drops into a watery, solid, see-through form.  So large, not even the ocean can contain me.  So dense, the air cannot hold my exhaled vapors.

I am the rain.

There are only two elements in the Universe: Good and Evil.

Those are the smallest opposing subatomic particles, and everything is made of a little of both.

Perfection is neutrality.

Off you go. Good luck with that.

You and me.

On the dark end of the phone.

I take a moment to open this little space in space. Drawing circles in the sky with a sage stick. Whispering incantations under my breath, three dozen lines of sacred poetry that I know forwards and backwards by heart. The moon is full and high and watery blue, hanging low and dripping milk like a new mother in bloom.

No one worships like I do.

There's frankincense on the altar, it smoking up sweet. Frankincense-on-fire has a vibration, you can feel it in your soul, shaking you, moving you. It takes away pain, carries it up, up, up into the drifting, shape-shifting dark clouds. It stirs the ancient, collective wisdom of your ancestors who run with the blood in your veins.

This is my in-between-worlds.

That's the power and beauty of this art form that is old as dirt:

You can move mountains with your mind.

I'm going down to the crossroad to make a pact with the devil.

I'll let you know how it goes.

In the end, I'm going to come after you like a thief in the night. You won't even know what hit you, baby. It will be so swift and well-executed that you'll think it was your own idea.

.





He's supposed to be at Josh's.  But instead, he pulls into the 7-11 and parks in the back.  A woman, early twenties, an exploding volcano of lava-red hair, is already waiting for him.  Who is she?  Why have I never seen her before?  He whispers something to her, and she laughs.  They speak only briefly before she hands him what looks like a leather or cloth envelope.  Oh, damn.  Is that what I think it is?  But no.  He pulls a book from it, and then hugs her.  They seem familiar to each other.  Very familiar.

I turn the car onto the street before cutting on the headlights. 

This is wrong.  I don't need to know this.  None of my business. 

This is what goes on in my head.

Every.  Day.


Me:  You're so fat.
Me:  But I just lost all that weight.  I thought you'd be happy.  I'm only 118 pounds now.
Me:  That's fat. 
Me:  Okay. I'll eat less, I guess. I don't know what else to say.
Me:  That's because you're stupid, too. Stupid and fat.
Me:  Hey! Be nice. I'm tired today, okay? I'm not feeling well.
Me:  Well, get off your lazy, fat ass. It's your fault you're sick all the time.
Me:  It's not my fault. The doctor says---
Me:  Who's fault is it, then?  Take some responsibility
Me:  Maybe it is my fault.
Me:  The doctor's full of shit.  He's trying to kill you.
Me:  That's crazy.  He wouldn't do that.
Me:  Then why does he give you those pills?  You know they don't make you any better.
Me:  He's doing his best.  I know he is.  He wants to help me.  He said so.
Me:  I heard him tell the nurse you're ugly.
Me:  He wouldn't say that . . . would he?
Me:  Not to your face.
Me   Please just leave me alone!
Me:  Stop crying.  You're a grown woman.  By the way, Kevin never loved you.
Me:  How can you say that?  He loves me.  He must.  Why did he stay with me for so long?
Me:  Why can't you bring yourself to sleep with H*****?  He's going to think you're prude.
Me:  I don't know.  I'm scared.
Me:  That's not normal. 
Me:  I'm just different.  That's good, right?  I'm unique.
Me:  You're a freak.  And that's all he wants you for.  He thinks you'd be a nice piece of ass.
Me:  Please be nice.  I'm begging you.  Please?
Me:  Those pictures you took today suck.  You can't show those to your client.  
Me:  I thought they were nice pictures.
Me:  Well, that's because you have no eye for it.  You should quit.
Me:  But other people say they like my pictures.
Me:  They're lying because they don't want to hurt your feelings.
Me:  Oh.
Me:  You're voice is horrible, too.  You were off this morning.  You should practice more.
Me:  I practice every day. 
Me:  That's not enough.  If you were really dedicated, you'd practice longer.
Me:  Okay.  I'll practice longer.
Me:  Don't bother.  You have no talent, Tiffany.  I'm sorry.  You're not an artist.  
Me:  But I like art.  It's my favorite part of life.
Me:  Maybe you should kill yourself, then.  Oh, that's right.  You fucked that up, too.
Me:  Maybe I didn't die because I'm here for a reason.  God has a purpose for me?
Me:  There is no God.
Me:  Don't say that.  Shut up!
Me:  Stop crying, it's pathetic.  Someone will hear you, how will you explain yourself?
Me:  It's okay to cry . . . sometimes.  No one will hear me.  I'm all alone. 
Me:  No surprise there.  Why do you think that is?  No one will ever love you.  Everyone thinks you're crazy.  They all hate you.  You're a burden to them.  For Christ's sake, you still live with your mother.  They can't wait until you die.  They talk about you behind your back.  They plan your funeral.  They know you'll slit your wrists, it's just a matter of time.  Oh, nevermind.  You won't slit your wrists.  There's the Glock, right there in that drawer.  Go ahead.  Do it.  See?  You don't even have the balls to shoot yourself, let alone watch yourself bleed to death.  You'll take pills.  Just like last time.  In the end, you'll be a coward.  That's why you have to spend so much time proving to them that you've got guts.  But no one really believes you'll make anything out of your life.  They all think you've lost your mind.  You have lost your mind. 
Me:  Shut up!  Shut up!  Shut up!
Me:  Oh, you think alcohol is going to make me go away?  Go ahead.  Chug away.  Here, I'll help you.  I think there's some more vodka in the cabinet.  Drink yourself to death.  I'll be right here .........waiting for you ..............when you wake up..................wait!  I'm so lonely, I'd rather have you than no one.