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either Janet, or my neighbor

Boy have I been feeling crummy lately. I’ve been doing the same thing with all my creative efforts that I do while I’m driving: obsessing over things I’ve done wrong. Yesterday, when I was once again tight-lipped and near tears after trying to parallel park the car and failing miserably — no, I am not turning into a two year old baby, I just play one on tv — Todd pointed out that I only have Good Driving Days [cue Arvo Pärt and soft glowing yellow light] or Bad Driving Days [cue monster growls and Berloiz]. Because when I do one thing wrong, like stall out at an intersection, I’m so busy thinking, “You stupid moron, goddamnit, you can’t even drive a fucking car right,” that I do something even worse, like blithely sail right past a stopsign, which happened twice yesterday. On the other hand, when I’m doing well I get so excited and happy and hopeful that I will, in fact, pass my driver’s license test instead of being doomed to Driver Permithood for the rest of all eternity that my driving gets charmed; I hardly resemble the same person who not only sails through stopsigns but tends to only do it while driving by the police station.

I have a theory that the cops either can see by the strained look on my face that I’m learning to drive, or are so astonished by my gall that by the time they get it together to come after me I’m long gone.

So I’ve been on the same ridiculous catch-22 of a merry-go-round when it comes to my creative efforts as well. I do one thing right, I’m on top of the world, but if I screw up once I might as well turn off the computer and put away my crochet hooks and go read a book. I was telling Todd last night that if I could just move out of my body and leave all the crabby-horrid elements there to stew amongst themselves I’d have it made. But, barring that possibility, I’m determined to gag and blindfold them instead and threaten them with twenty four straight hours of listening to that polka-beat top forty song that’s sung by a woman who doesn’t sound a day over five years old if they don’t shut up.

Whenever we hear that song on the radio we end up walking around the house saying everything in the same cadence; “la la LA la la la LA la, will you PLEASE take out the GARbage,” etc.

Just recently we’ve gone back to reading Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series aloud to each other in the kitchen, we’d gotten disenchanted after far too many pages of a character who, given the opportunity to spend a month in England, finds nothing to do but complain about all of the amenities he feels are lacking. Having finally gotten past that part, however, we finished Babycakes and are now well into the first few chapters of Significant Others. And Michael (the same character, incidentally, who whined about England) is being morose about safe sex and the ways it limits his life and how he wishes San Francisco hadn’t changed and how wonderful it was In The Good Old Days when you could have sex with anyone you wanted without any worries. Kitey said something similar when she and Jill were here and Jill was watching the PBS Tales of the City movie.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t go through puberty until AIDS was a fixture in everyday life that I don’t understand a nostalgia for a time when people could have sex with anyone they wanted without any worries. The concepts of “sex” and “safe sex” are synonymous in my head. To hear Todd read about Michael’s wistful gaze into the past is like hearing someone talk about “how wonderful it was when humans could fly”. Perhaps I’m very much in the minority, but when I’m ninety five years old, sitting in a rocker with Todd by my side, looking at the sunset from our front porch, I don’t think I’m going to be saying, “Remember that hot summer day when we kissed upstairs for what seemed like hours and then…” No, I think I’ll be saying, “Remember that night in Boston when we ran through the rain holding hands and then suddenly came upon a laser show on the side of a building and a huge wedding and stopped and stood in the rain and watched it all?”

Funny, when I first sat down to write about this I was feeling crabby about the whole concept and I’m realizing that really it’s a completely different frame of reference, and of course it doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t even understand exactly what people are nostalgic for.

Back when VCRs still came in two flavors, Betamax and VHS, my friend Zoë and I decided to rent the movie Psycho. Since we knew it’d be scary, we stayed up until three in the morning (now that’s something I’m nostalgic for, the ability to stay up past nine p.m.) and started it up because we figured by the end when we were really freaked out the sun would be rising and make everything less frightening, therefore avoiding nightmares. We were asleep before Janet Leigh even had a chance to get behind the wheel of her car and never did get a chance to see the rest. Well, it was a good plan in theory anyway. When I saw Psycho in the free video section of the library I borrowed it, thinking I’d finally have a chance to see what it was about.

Yes, the free section — like a good miser I’ve been studiously avoiding the rental videos, even though Christopher Eccleston’s latest movie, Jude, is there begging to be taken out. “I’m only two dollars! Rent me, rent me!”

We made it just past the Famous Scene before falling asleep. Which is why I woke up an hour later, hearing strange sounds from the next door neighbor’s house, and decided that he was doing something evil and then got really freaked out when I heard one of the cats using the litterbox and convinced myself it was Janet coming to get me. If there’s no journal entry tomorrow you’ll know she succeeded…

© 1997 QN Podcast (formerly Quirky Nomads).