Eyeliner

Last night I was opening saved blog posts from the writing/mag site where I started posting back in 2009 because the site is closing for good and a bunch of us who had belonged there were waxing (or waning) nostalgic. I found the piece that follows, though it was never published and was written years after I had left that site; it's just been sitting in a folder on my Mac. Though I barely remember writing it, I do remember the time, years ago now, and feeling like a balloon held by someone who didn't have a firm grip on the string. Reading it made me laugh and shake my head a little. I didn't edit it, am just serving it up as the messy omelet it is.


           I write better with eyeliner on.

            Last week was spent splashing around with Simone, first in the fountain here at Casa de Swell, then the beach, and finally in the big blue pool at Spirit Hill Farm. I wore baggy capris and lots of sunscreen but no makeup for a who-cares-bare-your-face summery seven days, but now I’m back and trying to get real. Like a brother-in-law told me:  It’s nice to vacation at the shore, but part of me misses my wingtips. The gimlet-eyed sliver of me that watches blood dripping from my fingers onto the keyboard and issues a score for authenticity sees those pajama bottoms and dirty hair.

            How can I be this old and still unsure of so much? I swing from one end of an arc, down and up to the weightless other (imagine The Pit and the Pendulum), then down and back, over and over. I want success and praise and fame and money, I’m jealous of others who get those things, I tell myself I could do/have them except for -- insert list of Things Beyond My Control and list of Things Which Require Too Much Effort – but then I’m all … meh. Seriously, imagining one could be The Next Blogging Rock Star is like thinking I should cash in our IRAs and go to Vegas. And I hate Vegas. I don’t even buy lottery tickets, though I totally would if that national one that’s illegal in California wasn’t illegal in California. Who doesn’t want a few Mega Millions?

            Then I happen upon some statistic (after getting sucked into logging in at Twitter – an utterly mysterious universe – by the baited hook of an email that says someone wants to follow me  - pant!pant!) - that the Twitter Snarks push in front of my confused, insecure, uneyelinered eyes that crows: So_and_So has 4,836 followers. And I happen to know that So_and_So is an annoying, self-righteous, adjective over-user that my invisible friends and I have made fun of for years. And I think: 4,836? Really? and try to work out how So_and_So got like serious dirt to use as Follow Me ransom on nearly five goddamn thousand people. Which leads me to be totally positive that I would have to be just like So_and_So in order to be popular on Twitter, so fuck that, I will eschew Twitter, possibly forever. I write down “eschew” so I can remember to use it again soon. Or not.

            Time for a break from “work,” so I read the latest from The Bloggess, who is one of my online heroines. Should I just try to be wackier? Adobe Soup would certainly be funnier if I used all the loony unspoken flotsam that sloshes around in my brain, X-rated topics allowed, full confession time, with a straight man like Bloggess’s Victor as a foil. I’ve done some Wry Dialogue With Mr. Forte pieces, but he’s the bumbling comedian and I always get to play the smarty-pants with the raised eyebrow and the right answer. Should we reverse roles? Not in real life, just in the stories. Wait. Stories? Could it be that Jenny’s blog is stories, not real life? Or maybe rewritten real life or exaggerated real life? Does that require a disclaimer, like “This is not exactly nonfiction” like that guy James whatshisname who got busted for exaggerating the grisly details of his drug addiction and rehab? If I cartoon up Life With Mot to get strangers to laugh/follow/become huge fans, what about all the people who actually know us and read Adobe Soup who will then think Mr. Respectable is married to a potty-mouth lunatic? I should never have sent those email blasts to friends/family trolling for readers. Maybe I should change my name.

            Okay. James whatshisname’s drug addiction leads me to consider writing a memoir, which is really nothing more than many emotive, embarrassing-past-disclosing blog pieces published under one title. Like that woman in the New York Times Magazine piece, Jeanette Walls, who wrote “The Glass House” about her horrific childhood and god-awful mother (who still hoards, lets cats pee all over her house, refuses to bathe and, therefore, stinks and who hid – and ate – a Hershey bar when her kids had no food).  I have to admit that when Ms. Walls (“whippet thin,” according to the reporter) said she sometimes doesn’t eat for a day or two, I really hated her even if it happens because she spent her childhood being hungry all the time. That memoir was a monster bestseller. Or Mary Karr, who wrote “The Liar’s Club,” another secret-spiller and money-maker. In a contest for crappiest mother, mine could hold her own against those two, I think. Still, a book is even more of a crapshoot than a blog. All those months of work, clinking through the Carmeda memories like so many empty booze bottles, agonizing over the cover art (because I so would) and font style, only to wind up with a bunch of unsold Kindle editions … do “unsold Kindle editions” actually exist? … I’d be better off writing a cookbook.

            Or just cooking. Writing a cookbook is harder than writing a memoir, and there are all those uber judgmental So You Think You Can Braise people out there. Fah. Cooking is fun and beautiful and messy and smells wonderful and satisfying in damn near every sensory way. Except for the problem that I’m oozing out of my bra and my jeans barely zip, cooking is a killer option. Some days (like all the ones between 15 pounds ago and right now) I just say, fine, if Ina Garten can wear untucked shirts and waddle around Paris in flats, not caring, so can I. (That assumes that Ina Garten doesn’t care what her ass looks like which, since we are not latte buddies, I don’t know. Maybe she cares as much as I do, which is why I’m eating tomatoes instead of a potato/cheese/cream gratin for dinner.) Size 10, here I come. Just in time to go to Paris in September for our vacation of a  lifetime and make a beeline for Poilâne where I will eat my weight in bread with perfect crust. Oh, and I’m not going to think about what the esthetician told me: “At your age (she didn’t actually say that because she’s far too nice and I would have cried if she had, but it was totally implied) if you are thin, your face looks gaunt (and wrinkled, again unsaid, like a prune) and your body looks great; if you are a little overweight, it is the opposite.” See? One or the other, never both. Except when you are young, before you are on your final swim upstream. Like a salmon. By the way, have you ever seen what happens to a Chinook’s face on that last lap? I am now very seriously considering Juvederm. And I just bought Power Swabs on Amazon Prime and am looking up neckectomies.

            So now I have spent two hours on what everybody will think is a Woe Is Me thing that I totally hate when people do. It’s not, so don’t go all “No, Candy, it’s not that bad.” I know. It’s only that bad half the time, at the bottom of the pit, and in just a minute I’ll be heading up up up to the lemon ricotta cheesecake from Della Fattoria. Or maybe beans on toast. There must be a place that grows borlotti beans that I can find around here, 500 miles from Sonoma County where they are everywhere. As if I actually need to eat beans. Or toast.

            One last thought. [Mystery Person] posted this hilarious thing on Facebook a few weeks ago that I can’t stop thinking about.

INSERT THING 

Is that not the ultimate passive-aggressive rationalization piece? I remember when my brother was trying to make a living as a musician (back in the idealistic ‘seventies) and there was a lot of bad-mouthing of bands who were “commercial” and how it was way more bitchin to write songs that were real and true to yourself instead of going over to the dark side and putting out stuff just because it was what the radio stations wanted to play and what the masses wanted to sing along with. When every single guy with a guitar and an amplifier and a hopeful voice would have thrown his best friend to a gang of starving lions for a record contract.

            Which reminds me. We watched The Hunger Games last night. I did anyway; Mr. Forte saw the first few and last few minutes, missing the bloodiest bits. He liked Stanley Tucci’s blue-haired guy. It was quite good, I thought, and I get why Jennifer Lawrence is such a hit. She’s an under-actor, a plus, and has one of those fascinating faces – not pretty (except those moments when it is and is stunning), missing the classic angles and features of magazine cover girls – that is Meryl Streep-ish. She plays strong women in Hunger and Silver Linings Playbook. She runs a lot. I think acting (back when I was young, not now) might have been a very cool thing to do if it didn’t involve running. And knowing that you always look ten pounds heavier in the film than you are, so you have to go through life eating and drinking (or exercising six hours a day) to be X minus 10. Maybe not so fun. I would totally eat the blue berries for Mr. Forte even though I’m pretty sure he would only pretend to, the heartless survivor. Story of my life, romantic gesture seeker that I am.

            A classmate in court reporting school (who routinely flunked dictation speed tests) used to say, “I just washed my hands and can’t do a thing with ‘em,” which still makes me chuckle. So I guess if I’m going to get anything down on paper that’s worth a few eyeballs, I better get cleaned up and find my Raven Glaze Lacquer pen.