Soundtrack to the Motion Picture

I post in waxes & wanes. Mostly micro. The latest is underneath this sticky-post.
If you can't see anything feel free to sign up and request a friend-add.





Get this widget →

Outside The Skinny Bar, 07/02/09 =

I'll be at the party (tomorrow) Saturday May 9th. If you want to get on the guest list, please comment with your name. (Alternatively you can email me = tiffany.leigh33@yahoo.com).

Things are normalizing as I reawaken from The Black Sleep of Kali. I'm still stung, this Honky is less objective than the last Honky, and if you read on you'll feel that through the screen.

I lick my wounds. I pat pockets and count my fingers and toes to make sure I didn't lose anything permanent. I genuflect to an imaginary goddess, thankful to something bigger and more powerful than myself that I dodged this latest armor-piercing bullet.

My harrowing escape physically manifested as well. I have a riot of knots and twinges in my lower back that has me shuffling and saying "oof" when I tilt slightly or walk around. The moment it appeared? The last time I spirited away from her apartment, sprinting to the subway, putting as much city and humanity between me and that tendrilled, dangerous epicenter. Toxins have been evacuating my system like high gauge needles through the skin and sinew of my back. Exorcism. I hobble and ache but through it all I can still walk.

I'm loath to even call her an ex-. She wasn't. It wasn't a relationship. We weren't partners, boyfriend/girlfriend, or lovers. To say so demeans the human condition of two people wanting to be together. She rebounded from a relationship with a married man with children that would always be inaccessible and unavailable to her. She claimed she wanted someone physically and emotionally available for the first time in a long time. She lied.

I'm angry at myself for believing her. She was trouble and she'd be the first to tell you so (when drunk, and usually wistfully and pridefully). Chaos, disorder, and turmoil swirled around her like Pigpen's cloud. Her worldview was swaddled in dark caves of fiction and myth. Her aversion to reality was expert and perverse. She was utterly disconnected from anyone or anything outside herself unless slathered purple with prose, yellowed in sepia tones of nostalgia, viewed in blinding rose-colored tints, located thousands of miles away on a map, or wholly impossible and unattainable.

I'm angry because she is this unreliable narrator, and I should have known better. She is also an unreliable narrator who blogs. I found out from a friend that she blogged me rapidly after the dust-up. I at last was enshrined into the flotsam and jetsam of her Hall of Fame. (Another prideful boast was her wide-angle scorched earth landscape of ex-boyfriends and broken engagements. Notches on a bedpost.)

I was still furious when I deigned to read the entry. It was a Mad-Lib. The formula: blind-item your most recent ex-, name-check one or two others, coat it in a Carrie Bradshaw ham glaze to cheat sophistication and worldliness, reference That One True Love, wallow in self-pities, and navel-gaze your way to a "You go girl!" denouement.

Predictably, she absolved herself of total responsibility and left out any prescient and inconvenient facts that didn't paint her as warm and fuzzy, or less heroic.

She also made sure to spitshine her martyrdom. This is her cottage industry, and for me the smoking gun. She always frontloaded conversations with Bronte-esque laments about how she'll always be alone, never find The One, always have it harder than everyone, and be resigned to the "cold comfort" of being an honorable mistress to loveless, unavailable men. Even when presented with alternatives to this sad-clown inevitability.

These talking points insure her legacy and burnish a self-fulfilling prophecy. As long as she can stiff-arm anyone that doesn't lead her to or keep her chained to these proclaimed disappointments, she can stay disconnected. You can't win, essentially, if you don't play.

I'm sure she's reverting to her default settings as we speak. Re-connecting with her most recent ex would be a start (which isn't a stretch since it's a mutual unavailability society between them), and further blogging it out to rationalize her agenda.

I had the white-hot angriest letter I've ever written ready to send after reading her post. The act of writing it defused some of that impulse. The act of writing THIS does too. But cathartic as these feel, I still wanted some vindication, as she puts it, or revenge.

Then it hit me: the best revenge I can ever enact against her is 1) to live well and happily, and 2) to feel epically sorry for her. So I will live well, and I will live happily, and I do feel sorry for her. So now I have my vengeance.

I need feedback. My confidence, instincts, and very perception of Relationship Reality was challenged so I need to ground myself again.

If the following situations or scenarios occurred in a relationship you were in with your significant other, would they elicit immediate red-flagged, "uh-oh" type gut feelings that *maybe* you weren't with someone that was very mature, stable, safe, or healthy?

Granted these are cherry-picked -- but I'm not embellishing them. Please tell me your first impressions. Also, for ease of use I'm employing "girlfriend" but feel free to substitute SO/boyfriend/mistress/alien/etc.

Scenario #1 Your girlfriend makes plans with an ex-boyfriend she hasn't seen in seven or eight years who suddenly emailed her out of the blue. You don't know the guy. You also have no idea she made plans to meet him - around the corner from her apartment - for drinks. It isn't until you get a text message from your upset girlfriend, who has been stood up by the ex-boyfriend, that you had any idea that this happened, and that it all happened less than three hours after you had left her apartment. When pressed, she "didn't think it was that big a deal" (her words).

Scenario #2 Your girlfriend has two "friends" who are a married couple.

The wife is a notoriously Olympic alcoholic that gets drunk early and often and quickly, and while drunk she's confrontational, angry, sloppy, and out of control. Basically someone like that is dangerous to you, and you feel unsafe around them.

The husband is a burly barrel-chested guy. A former bouncer, so he has that hard stare and scowl. He gets drunk a lot too, but usually he or his wife stays sober to care for the other on nights out.

You meet the three of them at a bar. Your girlfriend is already drunk. Her friend - the Wife - is dangerously drunk. And tonight the Husband is very drunk too. Your girlfriend introduces you to them. You nod and shake hands with each of them. The husband glares then stomps to the corner away from you. He doesn't say a word to you all night.

Later on you are told by your girlfriend the following information - over the course of several hours -- in this order:

A) The husband doesn't like you because he thinks you are gay and that you are just leading your girlfriend on.
B) The husband is protective of your girlfriend because he doesn't want to see her get hurt, is all.
C) Before you knew either of them, the husband tried to sleep with your girlfriend - to the point where it could be (according to your girlfriend) construed as rape - but was unsuccessful. The wife to this day knows nothing about the incident.
D) Your girlfriend apologizes profusely for the husband's behavior (re: his blatant drunk homophobia) and hopes that you won't hold it against him because he didn't mean it and was just drunk. He "feels really bad" after the fact and wants to apologize the next time you see him.

Scenario #3 Your girlfriend breaks off a relationship in the days leading up to the first time you and she are "officially" together. This breakup is a spectacular crash and burn -- there's no amity between them, and she says she never wants to speak to him again.

She goes on a week-long trip out of town four days after the break-up with the former boyfriend. Communication is understandably sporadic - mostly texting or emails. Several times during the week you receive emailed photographs she sends via cellphone. The list of people CC'd on these includes you, her two best friends - and the most recent ex-boyfriend.

She explains to you after the fact that this was in fact merely a revenge plot against her recent ex-boyfriend -- sending him photos from a place where he promised endlessly to take her but never did.

Scenario #4 You have been together for only four weeks, and the following occurs during the first four weeks you've been "together."

Your girlfriend works at a college and is in a full-on end-of-the-semester grading frenzy. There's no gap between her trip (see above) and this workload. This, she tells you, requires her to spend upwards of 12-14 hours a day at times grading. She has also told you she won't have time to see or communicate with you much at all while because she will be so stressed and busy.

In the four weeks she is working and unavailable -- including the 10 days she was on vacation -- you see her a grand total of three times. Of those three times, you only spend the night together once. Of those four weeks, you speak to her on the phone (i.e. hear her voice) only twice. Both times you initiate the calls, and both times they are more like frustrating arguments and less like kind and social conversations.

The primary mode of communication during these four weeks is sporadic texting, emailing, or seeing her status updates on Twitter. Days go by between any texts or updates to you, and other times they come in steady streams.

My questions:

Am I wrong to have any issues or objections to some, any, or all of the above examples?
Are my instincts wrong if I feel unsettled, unsafe, off-balance, or chaotic?
Am I out of bounds in being frustrated that this is how the relationship was going this early?

AM I CRAZY?

If I wrote this to Dan Savage he'd beat me with a rubber hose and say DTMFA as I slipped into a coma.

What say you, judges? I could use some reinforcement, bucking up, and a bit of a kick in the pants.

"But of you do me the wrong of thinking I am beautiful, that I have a million rescuers from despair, and therefore I can take calamity better than anyone else, remember, truly, it is only you who bestow even these gifts upon me. Therefore, how much greater my loss must be which takes even what appears to be mine by nature, my power to endure and resist."

~excerpted from "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept," 1945

Why I'm encouraged enough to give Moby's upcoming release a chance after his past two Fat Elvis-esque albums collapsed under the weight of their self-indulgence:

1) Moby's not singing in this track.

2) He's returning to minimalist but layered arrangements, á la "Play." Especially the found song sample looped in reverse, which conjures "Porcelain" mojo.

3) David Lynch directs the video. The soundscape's and subject matter is right in his wheelhouse.



Shot In The Back Of The Head from Moby on Vimeo.

There are 7 intersections in Manhattan where it is legal to make a right turn at a red light:

A) First Ave @ E 39th Street
B) Canal St @ Chrystie Street
C) Little West 12th St @ West Street
D) Adam Clayton Powell Blvd @ W 152nd Street
E) Adam Clayton Powell Blvd @ W 153rd Street
F) Seventh Ave + West Broadway @ West 153rd Street
G) Amsterdam Ave @ W 154th Street