Narrative Non-Fiction Category
“Narrative non-fiction” is a term for “essays that use the word ‘I’ — a lot.” Well, it’s other things, too. David Sedaris writes narrative non-fiction. Dave Eggers writes narrative non-fiction. Ariel Meadow Stallings writes narrative non-fiction. Oh yes. Yes, she does.
Regurgatory Erotic Response II
3
Oct
2002
In: Narrative Non-Fiction
[Click to read Part 1 - Stella's, 1992]
Janusz and I parted ways shortly after the vomiting incident. We went to a free Pearl Jam concert in the park, and then I met a boy my own age at my high school, and started dating him. Cut to just over three years and a half years later, after that high school boy and I had finally broken up for the last time. I’d been flirting with a young intellectual hipster in my Sociology class. He, unlike the high school boy, had impeccable Euro-trash style, a love of chrome housewares, and fastidiously tidy handwriting. Unlike the high school boy, he didn’t live in a carpeted house full of other 20-year-old boys who liked to ignite their farts; he lived in a studio with a hardwood floor. Alone. He also had a striking addiction to coffee.
Regurgatory Erotic Response I
2
Oct
2002
In: Narrative Non-Fiction
The first time it happened, I was 17. It was 1992; the summer before my senior year of high school. I was in Seattle on a date with a 19-year-old named Janusz, who I had met via a BBS. We met at the Rosebud Cafe on Capitol Hill (which was not the bar that it is now—it was just a coffee shop), and got along smashingly. He was an Evergreen College drop-out, and I was a wide-eyed ingenue. We both had our share of idealism and he had long strawberry blond hair and seemed cute at the time. Not at all vomit-inducing.
Third Door
13
Jan
2002
In: Narrative Non-Fiction
Last week when I went to the Christmas Tree Burn with Daniel Talsky, he introduced me to Beth, who happens to be the volunteer coordinator at Consolidated Works, a massive arts center.
ConWorks was hosting this wacky Seattle theater festival called 14/48. Basically, 14 plays are written, cast, directed, rehearsed, and performed in 48 hours. It’s pretty cool. So, I went to volunteer, and lo and behold! A ton of the people who are working with ConWorks are old coworkers from my days at ENTROS. Crazy actors. Good to see all them again.
My assigned volunteer position was “Hall Monitor.” The bathrooms at ConWorks are up in this strange hallway which also holds the dressing rooms, and so it’s usually a little crazy up there, and apparently theater-goers frequently get lost on the way to the restroom and find themselves walking into dressing rooms. So, my job was to stand in the hallway and show people to the bathroom.
Perhaps that doesn’t sound like fun to you. I actually had a great time. “Around this corner, and then the second right. Looking for the bathroom, sir? Around this corner, then the third door on your right.” I got to talk to everyone. One guy stopped and said “Oh my god–is this your job?” Yes, it is, but unlike you, dumbass, I’m seeing this show for free! Third door on your right!
Surely the high point of the night had to be when a hurried looking guy wandered down the hallway. “Looking for the restrooms?” I chirped. He looked at me.
“I’m a director!” he hissed. Oh yeah, sorry man. There’s only, like, SEVEN plays (with SEVEN different directors) showing tonight. Third door on your right!
The plays themselves were of varing qualities. The theme was “Eco-terrorism,” and by far the best play involved the three men bitching simultaneously about car alarms, cigarettes, and cell phones. Brilliant. Also good was the one about the neurotic cubicle worker, terrified of all environmental work hazards. Regardless, considering all the plays were written last night, I’d say everything was pretty fucking good. Third door on the right!
Afterwards, I stayed for the cast party and caught up with my old friends. Got to hear about how Mark Baker was doing WaMu commercials, Jim Jewell is engaged, a former manager was fired for paying his ecstasy dealer with restaurant food, and reminisce with Shawn Belyea about working in Arizona in 1998. In fact, now that I think about it, the paycheck from my three weeks of work in Phoenix helped me buy this very computer that I’m using right now. Good times. Third door on the right!
- 0 Comments
- Tags: entros, theater, volunteering
The Library
10
Nov
2001
In: Narrative Non-Fiction
Thursday night I had an hour or so to kill between dinner with my father and going to the Maxwell show with Echo. I stopped in at the new Seattle Public Library, just to kill some time. I thought I’d sign up for a membership so I could check some books out. I filled out the paperwork, then sat down to wait for it to be processed.
The young woman working the counter was very friendly and chatty and said right away “Oh! It looks like you’re already in the system!”
“Really?” I wondered. “Like, from 1992?”
“Yup, November 1992,” she replied, starting to enter in my new contact information.
I started reminiscing: “Yeah, I remember now, that was senior year when I had to do a 20 page term paper for my humanities class. I worked my ass off, researching the differences between matriarchal and patriarchal religions’ perspectives on sex and the body.”
“Mmmhmmm,” the nice library girl said, clacking away on the keyboard.
“You know, it sucked so badly: I worked so hard on that paper, and even finished it a week and a half early. Since I was done so early, I decided to help my stupid boyfriend with his paper, which was about the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was so fucked up: he didn’t even have a thesis. It was just basically a 20 page long timeline. I helped him pull the paper together at the last minute, feeling happy that I’d gotten mine done early. Then, wouldn’t you know it: I got a C- on that paper. Bastard boyfriend got a B+! And I’d helped him write it! It was so frustrating!”
“Mmmhmmm,” the nice library girl said again, still clacking away on the keyboard. “Well, here’s your new card, and you’re all set to go, except one thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked, as I picked up the card and slipped it into my Paul Frank wallet.
“It looks like you have an overdue charge here…”
“From 1992?!” I gasped.
“Yeah, it’s not big–just $4.00. You can still check out books and stuff.”
“What book was it?” I asked.
The nice woman grimaced, “John F. Kennedy and The Cuban Missile Crisis.”
Of Pets And Toys
19
Aug
2001
In: Narrative Non-Fiction
Today I would like to tell a story about two things that aren’t typically combined in the same sentence: pets and sex toys. If you’re faint of heart or are already thinking “Geez, too much information,” you should probably just go click one of those links to the right and read something else. I won’t tell.
So, last spring I moved from Seattle to Olympia (a move I’m preparing to reverse in the next week or so, if all goes according to plan). I was living by myself for the first time since 1994, having left both the boyfriend and the pet rats in Seattle. In a desperate attempt to have SOMETHING to open the door and shout “Honey, I’m home” to, I decided I would get a pet. I saw a sign at the co-op where I volunteered for a free chinchilla and thought it was a fortuitious.
Chinchillas, for those of you who don’t know, are basically high Andean marmets. They’re these sort of rodent-slash-squirrel-slash-rabbit animals that are incredibly cute and were almost trapped to extinction for their fur, which is so soft you almost can’t feel it under your fingers.
They’re also like gremlins. Evil. They chew everything. Now, I’ve had rodents and rabbits and all sorts of chewing pets before, but NOTHING like a chinchilla. Photos, electrical cords, plants, shoes, belts, everything was teething material, and Fidel (the communist chinchilla–he came with that name) was never done teething. He *was* awfully cute–he literally ran up the walls when he was dodging around the apartment, which is adorable unless you’re trying to catch him to put him back in his cage for the night, which it felt like I was always doing. And don’t even get me started on the one time he slipped outside. Fidel was a bit infuriating.
Anyway, as an independent and warm-blooded woman who was living alone, I also had a few, eh, accessories. Nothing frightening or anything I feel like discussing any more than I am in this post, but just a couple basics. Items to keep a girl warm on a cold night.
You can see where this story is headed, naturally. Fidel the chinchilla liked to get into my closet and bureau, and the next thing I know…he had nibbled a dildo.
I don’t know WHY he chose to nibble it. Was it the shape? Was it the high quality silicon the thing was made of? (It WAS from Toys in Babeland so it WAS quality, you know.) Was Fidel the chinchilla gay? We’ll never know. All we know is that he didn’t just nibble it, he had to chew the very tip. The most important part, and suddenly it looked like a chocolate that someone had pulled from the box, sampled, and decided against. The latex showed the indented marks of Fidel’s rodent-y incisors. That’s not sexy. It was no long a toy I wanted anywhere near any delicate parts of myself.
I mourned. A woman grows attached to her friends, especially when her boyfriend is 60 miles north via the black ribbon of death we call I-5. It was really sad, but I refused to throw the dil away. I wrapped it in tissue, put it in a coffin-like shoe-box, and stored it in my dresser. I would have had a funeral, but the dildo had told me once that it didn’t appreciate such things, and I wanted to respect its wishes. We were close like that.
Then I got rid of Fidel. He was a cute pet, but after he destroyed one of my closest friends, it was clear that Fidel and my time was over. Around Christmas of last year I sold him to a very nice man from the Eastside for the cost of his cage. I’m quite sure this man does not own a dildo, so I figured he would have a better time with Fidel than I did. It was a sad goodbye, but not nearly as sad as the dismal thought of my retired friend, resting dormant in its shoe-box.
A few months ago, I stopped in at Babeland to see what was new. It’s a fantastic store, and I can’t recommend it highly enough for those of you of either gender in Seattle or New York. Based on the “woman-friendly, sex-positive” model that San Francisco’s Good Vibrations established, walking into Babeland feels more like walking into a good independent book store than a sex shop. There are no greasy-haired men behind the counters. There are no “back rooms” with sparkly pink crotchless maids’ costumes or vagina lollipops. You won’t find any fuzzy purple handcuffs. Just well-lit wooden shelves of quality books, vids, and supplies for happy healthy sexy people. You’re as likely to run into an mid-50s lesbian couple mumbling over a hitachi magic wand as you are to see a pierced guy in his 20s looking at the “Bend Over Boyfriend” instructional video series.
And the women who work at Babeland are fantastic. Very good natured, helpful, chatty, and well-informed. You can watch them feel out each customer’s comfort level–is this their first time in a sex shop? Do they need someone to hold their hand and explain the difference between a battery-powered or plug-in vibrator? Or is this the experienced customer who knows exactly what they want, and it’s happens to be an enormous studded butt plug, but not in latex it HAS to be silicon and they need it to be in purple or else it’s just not right? The women who work at this store can read customers like nobody’s bizness, and they’re very helpful.
I assumed it was a lost cause, but I figured I’d ask if they could think of any way that I could resurrect my friend, the chewed toy. After initially laughing heartily (and apologizing afterward for because they didn’t mean to “laugh at your pain,”), the girls got to thinking. Surely there had to be a way it could be fixed (this is also what I like about the store: they didn’t immediately insist that I needed to BUY something). You couldn’t really MELT the tip to get rid of the bite marks, because that would compromise the silicon that it was made of, potentially destroying the whole thing.
“Wait,” one woman thought out-loud. “Couldn’t you sort of shave it back into shape? Like, with a filet knife?” Why, by jove, I think she’s got it! We chatted (and laughed uncontrollably) about the details–it would need to be a smooth knife, definitely not serrated, and there would be a little girth lost. But it was the tip, so maybe that was ok. My friend would need to be thoroughly washed afterward, and I’d need to be careful not to leave any rough edges. But given all that–we seemed to have a plan!
I rushed home, pulled the dil out of its coffin, and got to work. Why, I felt like a circumcision doctor, toiling away over my faux phallus, shaping it and shaving off the bits that stuck out strangely. It must be stated here that I’m not into circumcision as a concept or a practice, just FYI. Anyway, after about 15 minutes of knifework, my job was done.
And my friend was back in action. Granted, a little svelter at the tip, a little rougher around the edges, but that’s just fine. Like any lover, it’s got some rough times in its history, and that just makes me appreciate it all the more.
- 0 Comments
- Tags: pets, sex
Confessions of a disillusioned rave magazine editor
17
Dec
2000
In: Favorite Posts, Glowsticks, Narrative Non-Fiction
I still remember the first party I went to when I just didn’t feel it. I spent $40 (20 to get in, and 20 to do what I thought you had to do to have fun), six hours, countless liters of sweat, and ended the night thinking “THIS is what I’ve dedicated my life to? My money would have been better spent buying an eighth and laughing to myself as I took a walk on the beach.” After that first, there were others.
Let’s face the truth: at its worst, the beloved rave scene is nothing more than a bunch of kids on drugs dancing along crooked paths of self discovery/delusion in huge rotting warehouses. Then there’s some guy who thinks he’s a musician because he can spin two records at the same time, playing beats that are not always good, but are always loud. Promoters skulk around the edges of the room counting their money, and I leave feeling like I’ve wasted my time and energy, embarrassed by my own adopted family.
These are the times that I think “Ok, it is just about the drugs.” The more the media talks about raves being drug-filled parties, the more they become just that. The kids who really know what’s up get sick of dealing with the shit and move on, becoming hipsters in clubs, publishers of pretentious electronic music journals that make fun of the very readers who buy their shit, yuppies who laugh at their “wild years,” or burn-outs in the gutter.
These are the times I sit in my bedroom, wide awake at 7am on a Sunday, black grit under my fingernails, wondering about the deeper meanings of raving … and all I can come up with is a hollow acronym that is spouted most frequently by hypocrites: “PLUR! Wait, that person’s pants have cuffs that are less than 40 inches around? They’re not a RAVER — Fuck them!” We fight for PLUR and the noble Right to Dance “Officer, we’re dancing because we should be able to, damn it!” Well, that’s nice, kids — ever thought about protesting something that actually helps the world instead of simply entertaining bored middle-class kids (aka helping yourselves)? Ever heard of altruism?
These are the mornings when the drugs take their toll, and I feel like a plastic recreation of myself, with synthetic lubricants pumping through my fiberglass arteries. My emotions like a website, “Click here for disillusionment. Click here to buy drugs to take the doubt away.”
These are the mornings when I wonder why I’ve spent so much time here, who I’ve helped, what I’ve done, how I’ve made the world a better place. I’ve filled landfills with water bottles, punctured my health with drugs, wasted money on “good times” that weren’t always good (how many nights did I spend shaking in the corner, having frighteningly honest conversations with my own psyche as the bass beat embossed my soul with loud conviction?).
I talk to friends who have joined the peace corps or volunteered to help teach inner city youth, and I half-heartedly justify to myself, I’ve taught inner city youth — I’ve talked to kids who didn’t know about their health or birth control, discussed God with dilated pupils (get it?), I’ve patted the back of vomiting over-indulgers. But who have I really helped? And does a pat on the back of someone who’s directly responsible for their own vomiting really compare to teaching someone to learn to read?
These are the mornings that I take a shower long and hot enough to get the rave grime out of my pores, drink some chamomile tea, and sit in the garden listening to the bass of sap coursing through tree trunks, the treble of morning birds. The steady rhythm of my own heart, the epic build of my breathing.
I’d forgotten.
These are the mornings when I remember to turn down the music and listen to myself, for a change.
Regurgatory Erotic Response II
3 Oct 2002 In: Narrative Non-Fiction[Click to read Part 1 - Stella's, 1992]
Janusz and I parted ways shortly after the vomiting incident. We went to a free Pearl Jam concert in the park, and then I met a boy my own age at my high school, and started dating him. Cut to just over three years and a half years later, after that high school boy and I had finally broken up for the last time. I’d been flirting with a young intellectual hipster in my Sociology class. He, unlike the high school boy, had impeccable Euro-trash style, a love of chrome housewares, and fastidiously tidy handwriting. Unlike the high school boy, he didn’t live in a carpeted house full of other 20-year-old boys who liked to ignite their farts; he lived in a studio with a hardwood floor. Alone. He also had a striking addiction to coffee.
Regurgatory Erotic Response I
2 Oct 2002 In: Narrative Non-FictionThe first time it happened, I was 17. It was 1992; the summer before my senior year of high school. I was in Seattle on a date with a 19-year-old named Janusz, who I had met via a BBS. We met at the Rosebud Cafe on Capitol Hill (which was not the bar that it is now—it was just a coffee shop), and got along smashingly. He was an Evergreen College drop-out, and I was a wide-eyed ingenue. We both had our share of idealism and he had long strawberry blond hair and seemed cute at the time. Not at all vomit-inducing.
Third Door
13 Jan 2002 In: Narrative Non-FictionLast week when I went to the Christmas Tree Burn with Daniel Talsky, he introduced me to Beth, who happens to be the volunteer coordinator at Consolidated Works, a massive arts center.
ConWorks was hosting this wacky Seattle theater festival called 14/48. Basically, 14 plays are written, cast, directed, rehearsed, and performed in 48 hours. It’s pretty cool. So, I went to volunteer, and lo and behold! A ton of the people who are working with ConWorks are old coworkers from my days at ENTROS. Crazy actors. Good to see all them again.
My assigned volunteer position was “Hall Monitor.” The bathrooms at ConWorks are up in this strange hallway which also holds the dressing rooms, and so it’s usually a little crazy up there, and apparently theater-goers frequently get lost on the way to the restroom and find themselves walking into dressing rooms. So, my job was to stand in the hallway and show people to the bathroom.
Perhaps that doesn’t sound like fun to you. I actually had a great time. “Around this corner, and then the second right. Looking for the bathroom, sir? Around this corner, then the third door on your right.” I got to talk to everyone. One guy stopped and said “Oh my god–is this your job?” Yes, it is, but unlike you, dumbass, I’m seeing this show for free! Third door on your right!
Surely the high point of the night had to be when a hurried looking guy wandered down the hallway. “Looking for the restrooms?” I chirped. He looked at me.
“I’m a director!” he hissed. Oh yeah, sorry man. There’s only, like, SEVEN plays (with SEVEN different directors) showing tonight. Third door on your right!
The plays themselves were of varing qualities. The theme was “Eco-terrorism,” and by far the best play involved the three men bitching simultaneously about car alarms, cigarettes, and cell phones. Brilliant. Also good was the one about the neurotic cubicle worker, terrified of all environmental work hazards. Regardless, considering all the plays were written last night, I’d say everything was pretty fucking good. Third door on the right!
Afterwards, I stayed for the cast party and caught up with my old friends. Got to hear about how Mark Baker was doing WaMu commercials, Jim Jewell is engaged, a former manager was fired for paying his ecstasy dealer with restaurant food, and reminisce with Shawn Belyea about working in Arizona in 1998. In fact, now that I think about it, the paycheck from my three weeks of work in Phoenix helped me buy this very computer that I’m using right now. Good times. Third door on the right!
- 0 Comments
- Tags: entros, theater, volunteering
The Library
10 Nov 2001 In: Narrative Non-FictionThursday night I had an hour or so to kill between dinner with my father and going to the Maxwell show with Echo. I stopped in at the new Seattle Public Library, just to kill some time. I thought I’d sign up for a membership so I could check some books out. I filled out the paperwork, then sat down to wait for it to be processed.
The young woman working the counter was very friendly and chatty and said right away “Oh! It looks like you’re already in the system!”
“Really?” I wondered. “Like, from 1992?”
“Yup, November 1992,” she replied, starting to enter in my new contact information.
I started reminiscing: “Yeah, I remember now, that was senior year when I had to do a 20 page term paper for my humanities class. I worked my ass off, researching the differences between matriarchal and patriarchal religions’ perspectives on sex and the body.”
“Mmmhmmm,” the nice library girl said, clacking away on the keyboard.
“You know, it sucked so badly: I worked so hard on that paper, and even finished it a week and a half early. Since I was done so early, I decided to help my stupid boyfriend with his paper, which was about the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was so fucked up: he didn’t even have a thesis. It was just basically a 20 page long timeline. I helped him pull the paper together at the last minute, feeling happy that I’d gotten mine done early. Then, wouldn’t you know it: I got a C- on that paper. Bastard boyfriend got a B+! And I’d helped him write it! It was so frustrating!”
“Mmmhmmm,” the nice library girl said again, still clacking away on the keyboard. “Well, here’s your new card, and you’re all set to go, except one thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked, as I picked up the card and slipped it into my Paul Frank wallet.
“It looks like you have an overdue charge here…”
“From 1992?!” I gasped.
“Yeah, it’s not big–just $4.00. You can still check out books and stuff.”
“What book was it?” I asked.
The nice woman grimaced, “John F. Kennedy and The Cuban Missile Crisis.”
Of Pets And Toys
19 Aug 2001 In: Narrative Non-FictionToday I would like to tell a story about two things that aren’t typically combined in the same sentence: pets and sex toys. If you’re faint of heart or are already thinking “Geez, too much information,” you should probably just go click one of those links to the right and read something else. I won’t tell.
So, last spring I moved from Seattle to Olympia (a move I’m preparing to reverse in the next week or so, if all goes according to plan). I was living by myself for the first time since 1994, having left both the boyfriend and the pet rats in Seattle. In a desperate attempt to have SOMETHING to open the door and shout “Honey, I’m home” to, I decided I would get a pet. I saw a sign at the co-op where I volunteered for a free chinchilla and thought it was a fortuitious.
Chinchillas, for those of you who don’t know, are basically high Andean marmets. They’re these sort of rodent-slash-squirrel-slash-rabbit animals that are incredibly cute and were almost trapped to extinction for their fur, which is so soft you almost can’t feel it under your fingers.
They’re also like gremlins. Evil. They chew everything. Now, I’ve had rodents and rabbits and all sorts of chewing pets before, but NOTHING like a chinchilla. Photos, electrical cords, plants, shoes, belts, everything was teething material, and Fidel (the communist chinchilla–he came with that name) was never done teething. He *was* awfully cute–he literally ran up the walls when he was dodging around the apartment, which is adorable unless you’re trying to catch him to put him back in his cage for the night, which it felt like I was always doing. And don’t even get me started on the one time he slipped outside. Fidel was a bit infuriating.
Anyway, as an independent and warm-blooded woman who was living alone, I also had a few, eh, accessories. Nothing frightening or anything I feel like discussing any more than I am in this post, but just a couple basics. Items to keep a girl warm on a cold night.
You can see where this story is headed, naturally. Fidel the chinchilla liked to get into my closet and bureau, and the next thing I know…he had nibbled a dildo.
I don’t know WHY he chose to nibble it. Was it the shape? Was it the high quality silicon the thing was made of? (It WAS from Toys in Babeland so it WAS quality, you know.) Was Fidel the chinchilla gay? We’ll never know. All we know is that he didn’t just nibble it, he had to chew the very tip. The most important part, and suddenly it looked like a chocolate that someone had pulled from the box, sampled, and decided against. The latex showed the indented marks of Fidel’s rodent-y incisors. That’s not sexy. It was no long a toy I wanted anywhere near any delicate parts of myself.
I mourned. A woman grows attached to her friends, especially when her boyfriend is 60 miles north via the black ribbon of death we call I-5. It was really sad, but I refused to throw the dil away. I wrapped it in tissue, put it in a coffin-like shoe-box, and stored it in my dresser. I would have had a funeral, but the dildo had told me once that it didn’t appreciate such things, and I wanted to respect its wishes. We were close like that.
Then I got rid of Fidel. He was a cute pet, but after he destroyed one of my closest friends, it was clear that Fidel and my time was over. Around Christmas of last year I sold him to a very nice man from the Eastside for the cost of his cage. I’m quite sure this man does not own a dildo, so I figured he would have a better time with Fidel than I did. It was a sad goodbye, but not nearly as sad as the dismal thought of my retired friend, resting dormant in its shoe-box.
A few months ago, I stopped in at Babeland to see what was new. It’s a fantastic store, and I can’t recommend it highly enough for those of you of either gender in Seattle or New York. Based on the “woman-friendly, sex-positive” model that San Francisco’s Good Vibrations established, walking into Babeland feels more like walking into a good independent book store than a sex shop. There are no greasy-haired men behind the counters. There are no “back rooms” with sparkly pink crotchless maids’ costumes or vagina lollipops. You won’t find any fuzzy purple handcuffs. Just well-lit wooden shelves of quality books, vids, and supplies for happy healthy sexy people. You’re as likely to run into an mid-50s lesbian couple mumbling over a hitachi magic wand as you are to see a pierced guy in his 20s looking at the “Bend Over Boyfriend” instructional video series.
And the women who work at Babeland are fantastic. Very good natured, helpful, chatty, and well-informed. You can watch them feel out each customer’s comfort level–is this their first time in a sex shop? Do they need someone to hold their hand and explain the difference between a battery-powered or plug-in vibrator? Or is this the experienced customer who knows exactly what they want, and it’s happens to be an enormous studded butt plug, but not in latex it HAS to be silicon and they need it to be in purple or else it’s just not right? The women who work at this store can read customers like nobody’s bizness, and they’re very helpful.
I assumed it was a lost cause, but I figured I’d ask if they could think of any way that I could resurrect my friend, the chewed toy. After initially laughing heartily (and apologizing afterward for because they didn’t mean to “laugh at your pain,”), the girls got to thinking. Surely there had to be a way it could be fixed (this is also what I like about the store: they didn’t immediately insist that I needed to BUY something). You couldn’t really MELT the tip to get rid of the bite marks, because that would compromise the silicon that it was made of, potentially destroying the whole thing.
“Wait,” one woman thought out-loud. “Couldn’t you sort of shave it back into shape? Like, with a filet knife?” Why, by jove, I think she’s got it! We chatted (and laughed uncontrollably) about the details–it would need to be a smooth knife, definitely not serrated, and there would be a little girth lost. But it was the tip, so maybe that was ok. My friend would need to be thoroughly washed afterward, and I’d need to be careful not to leave any rough edges. But given all that–we seemed to have a plan!
I rushed home, pulled the dil out of its coffin, and got to work. Why, I felt like a circumcision doctor, toiling away over my faux phallus, shaping it and shaving off the bits that stuck out strangely. It must be stated here that I’m not into circumcision as a concept or a practice, just FYI. Anyway, after about 15 minutes of knifework, my job was done.
And my friend was back in action. Granted, a little svelter at the tip, a little rougher around the edges, but that’s just fine. Like any lover, it’s got some rough times in its history, and that just makes me appreciate it all the more.
- 0 Comments
- Tags: pets, sex
Confessions of a disillusioned rave magazine editor
17 Dec 2000 In: Favorite Posts, Glowsticks, Narrative Non-FictionI still remember the first party I went to when I just didn’t feel it. I spent $40 (20 to get in, and 20 to do what I thought you had to do to have fun), six hours, countless liters of sweat, and ended the night thinking “THIS is what I’ve dedicated my life to? My money would have been better spent buying an eighth and laughing to myself as I took a walk on the beach.” After that first, there were others.
Let’s face the truth: at its worst, the beloved rave scene is nothing more than a bunch of kids on drugs dancing along crooked paths of self discovery/delusion in huge rotting warehouses. Then there’s some guy who thinks he’s a musician because he can spin two records at the same time, playing beats that are not always good, but are always loud. Promoters skulk around the edges of the room counting their money, and I leave feeling like I’ve wasted my time and energy, embarrassed by my own adopted family.
These are the times that I think “Ok, it is just about the drugs.” The more the media talks about raves being drug-filled parties, the more they become just that. The kids who really know what’s up get sick of dealing with the shit and move on, becoming hipsters in clubs, publishers of pretentious electronic music journals that make fun of the very readers who buy their shit, yuppies who laugh at their “wild years,” or burn-outs in the gutter.
These are the times I sit in my bedroom, wide awake at 7am on a Sunday, black grit under my fingernails, wondering about the deeper meanings of raving … and all I can come up with is a hollow acronym that is spouted most frequently by hypocrites: “PLUR! Wait, that person’s pants have cuffs that are less than 40 inches around? They’re not a RAVER — Fuck them!” We fight for PLUR and the noble Right to Dance “Officer, we’re dancing because we should be able to, damn it!” Well, that’s nice, kids — ever thought about protesting something that actually helps the world instead of simply entertaining bored middle-class kids (aka helping yourselves)? Ever heard of altruism?
These are the mornings when the drugs take their toll, and I feel like a plastic recreation of myself, with synthetic lubricants pumping through my fiberglass arteries. My emotions like a website, “Click here for disillusionment. Click here to buy drugs to take the doubt away.”
These are the mornings when I wonder why I’ve spent so much time here, who I’ve helped, what I’ve done, how I’ve made the world a better place. I’ve filled landfills with water bottles, punctured my health with drugs, wasted money on “good times” that weren’t always good (how many nights did I spend shaking in the corner, having frighteningly honest conversations with my own psyche as the bass beat embossed my soul with loud conviction?).
I talk to friends who have joined the peace corps or volunteered to help teach inner city youth, and I half-heartedly justify to myself, I’ve taught inner city youth — I’ve talked to kids who didn’t know about their health or birth control, discussed God with dilated pupils (get it?), I’ve patted the back of vomiting over-indulgers. But who have I really helped? And does a pat on the back of someone who’s directly responsible for their own vomiting really compare to teaching someone to learn to read?
These are the mornings that I take a shower long and hot enough to get the rave grime out of my pores, drink some chamomile tea, and sit in the garden listening to the bass of sap coursing through tree trunks, the treble of morning birds. The steady rhythm of my own heart, the epic build of my breathing.
I’d forgotten.
These are the mornings when I remember to turn down the music and listen to myself, for a change.
Hey there. I'm Ariel Meadow Stallings, a native Seattleite who's written my way up and down the Left Coast. Electrolicious is where I post daily randomata, but I also write for a living. My first book, Offbeat Bride, was published last year.
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