Thu, 19 May 2005

addictions
Time passed, and she grew smaller in her wants, the things she felt she needed, the things she relied on as a constant comfort, having downgraded from illegal painkillers to sleeping pills and cheap lite beer in order to help her sleep and not dream, as dreams are where the dead confront her. The comfort in telling people no, in watching the look in the face when they realize they’ve made a mistake. The comfort in mistreating service industry temps, a little more forceful in the argument than when she was younger, a stage whisper “idiot” as she walks away. Throwing newsprint and bottles in with the rest of the garbage, no longer wiling to sort and sift as though it made a difference. Hanging up on people. Listening to bad pop music and agressively pretending to love it, mentioning it in every conversation she had with her sad trendsucking friends who kept swapping bad haircuts and dismal rainy-day lovers in some brute-force attempt at an antiseptic fat-free smoke-free vaguely leftist adulthood. Nothing so sad as a hipster mom, she told me last Friday, as we sat on the roof of the trailer and watched the combine in the field across the street strip corn from stalks. I was telling her about what I’d been up to, modifying Teddy Ruxpin dolls and making songs of modified baby cries and writing a hypertext novel about strange reel-to-reel recordings found one day in a thrift store, and she said “You really are dead-set on wasting your life, aren’t you?” I tried to clever up an answer, but fumbled it somehow, and then we didn’t say anything for a while.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #