essay about experiences in New York City
Monday, July 26, 2004
If it wasn't for my bladder, I don't think that I would get out of bed sometimes. No, if it weren't for my bladder, I would lie there just hoping to fall back asleep, back to my dreams. Sometimes the quality of my dreams sure beats the heck out of the quality of my life. I guess you could say that my bladder is my higher power, because it succeeds where no one else can in getting me up out of the bed, and because I have to trudge down the narrow stairs, mindfully, because you can sure break your neck on the narrow landing, then get myself into the bathroom before I pee in my pants, so you better believe I am moving, and then finally the relief of being able to let go. All that work seems to pass for some kind of energy, and then I can make the coffee and start my day.
And my life has gotten a whole lot better, believe it or not. When I was a kid I would sleep for twelve hours at a clip, and no bladder calls to rouse me. Nothing but pure, blissful, sleep, until my mother came in to sprinkle water on me to to pull me down the length of the bed, or to holler at me to get me out of the house and into the yard with the rest of the kids.
Aww--this is shit! There's no way I am going to be able to write anything good. I just need to let go of the idea that I can do something creative. I need to calm that anxiety down that my life is worthless because I am barely making it financially, have no money saved for retirement, have a husband who has given up on his working life, and we live in a decrepit, historic stone house that we can't afford to fix up. That's why I am trying to write something--to publish a book that is sure to be a best-seller, to find a different way of life so that I can feel proud of my achievements, find the work that sustains my spirit, and have a dollar in the bank to boot.
I was going to call my book Memoirs of a Dirty Woman. I thought that it was catchy-enough title, that it would promise salacious and erotic doings, and anyway would be the perfect title for the book, because since I can barely get myself out of bed to get to work, I can hardly rouse myself to clean the house.
And it isn't just about cleaning the house, either. It is about living with clutter, mine and my husband's. He seems worse than me. I try to clean out the attic, and the shed, to create some semblance of order, and he just fills up the space over the next few months with junk that should be thrown out. He's like a tide of junk, and the tide abates for a while, and we both stand around and admire the empty space, but the tide comes in again, regularly, and fills up the space. He just can't abhor a vacuum. Even the kitchen table, which he knows I like to have clean and free of opened mail, dead flowers, cookbooks, just gets cleaned off and looking pretty, giving me the sense that there is order in the universe, and before the next day is out, the flotsam and jetsam of his life crawls in and destroys my serenity.
Now, he is a pretty good guy, and he has always been sweet to me, but you see clues to people when you meet them. You just think that what is evidence of a poorly structured life is just the stuff they are temporarily going through. For instance, when I met Georges, he was being evicted from a loft on the Lower East Side. Yes, his name is Georges, and it is pronounced Zhorzhe. He is French, from Paris, even. Anyway, when I met him, he lived in a huge loft that was still raw space. He had his printing tables that filled up some of the space, but he just had a cot to sleep on, and his only electricity was a bare light bulb hooked up to his neighbor's loft. He had a toilet in a closet with a broken door, a paint-spattered sink, a hot plate on the floor, and a cat who peed and pooped in a litter box that obviously never got cleaned out. Not once. I had known him for a few weeks before I got to see this place, and enamoured as I was of him, I saw the mess he lived in, but it didn't matter to me at the time. All I knew was, he was sweet, shy, sexy, and spoke English with a charming accent. He was also an artist, which had been a secret dream of my own--to be creative, to do something, paint, or draw, and I took art classes and went to life-drawing sessions in Soho for years myself.
So there were some clues, but I didn't pay them any mind.
And my life has gotten a whole lot better, believe it or not. When I was a kid I would sleep for twelve hours at a clip, and no bladder calls to rouse me. Nothing but pure, blissful, sleep, until my mother came in to sprinkle water on me to to pull me down the length of the bed, or to holler at me to get me out of the house and into the yard with the rest of the kids.
Aww--this is shit! There's no way I am going to be able to write anything good. I just need to let go of the idea that I can do something creative. I need to calm that anxiety down that my life is worthless because I am barely making it financially, have no money saved for retirement, have a husband who has given up on his working life, and we live in a decrepit, historic stone house that we can't afford to fix up. That's why I am trying to write something--to publish a book that is sure to be a best-seller, to find a different way of life so that I can feel proud of my achievements, find the work that sustains my spirit, and have a dollar in the bank to boot.
I was going to call my book Memoirs of a Dirty Woman. I thought that it was catchy-enough title, that it would promise salacious and erotic doings, and anyway would be the perfect title for the book, because since I can barely get myself out of bed to get to work, I can hardly rouse myself to clean the house.
And it isn't just about cleaning the house, either. It is about living with clutter, mine and my husband's. He seems worse than me. I try to clean out the attic, and the shed, to create some semblance of order, and he just fills up the space over the next few months with junk that should be thrown out. He's like a tide of junk, and the tide abates for a while, and we both stand around and admire the empty space, but the tide comes in again, regularly, and fills up the space. He just can't abhor a vacuum. Even the kitchen table, which he knows I like to have clean and free of opened mail, dead flowers, cookbooks, just gets cleaned off and looking pretty, giving me the sense that there is order in the universe, and before the next day is out, the flotsam and jetsam of his life crawls in and destroys my serenity.
Now, he is a pretty good guy, and he has always been sweet to me, but you see clues to people when you meet them. You just think that what is evidence of a poorly structured life is just the stuff they are temporarily going through. For instance, when I met Georges, he was being evicted from a loft on the Lower East Side. Yes, his name is Georges, and it is pronounced Zhorzhe. He is French, from Paris, even. Anyway, when I met him, he lived in a huge loft that was still raw space. He had his printing tables that filled up some of the space, but he just had a cot to sleep on, and his only electricity was a bare light bulb hooked up to his neighbor's loft. He had a toilet in a closet with a broken door, a paint-spattered sink, a hot plate on the floor, and a cat who peed and pooped in a litter box that obviously never got cleaned out. Not once. I had known him for a few weeks before I got to see this place, and enamoured as I was of him, I saw the mess he lived in, but it didn't matter to me at the time. All I knew was, he was sweet, shy, sexy, and spoke English with a charming accent. He was also an artist, which had been a secret dream of my own--to be creative, to do something, paint, or draw, and I took art classes and went to life-drawing sessions in Soho for years myself.
So there were some clues, but I didn't pay them any mind.
