Why can't library cards earn us airline miles?

I have been amazingly literate lately -- for me this means going to the library twice in the last month. I'm pretty sure I'm going to stop buying books altogether, because library books are so much more pleasing to me than anything I purchase.

Why are library books always better? I feel practically compelled to eat them (literally), while if I buy a book, I can only read like 3 pages a day. I complain about books that I buy, often dislike them, and will very likely never read them again. Maybe because I spent many years trying to create an impressive library and I only bought books that I believed should appear on display in my home, so that anyone who visited my home would be impressed by my eclectic and fabulous literary taste. That was in college; it alarms me that I still know people who read and buy books in this way -- to display them. That is gross.

That is what the Auersbergers in Thomas Bernhard's "Woodcutters," which I just finished, do: host disgusting "artistic dinners" and invite the kinds of people who buy books in order to display them, in order to display their own books. If you would like to be completely grossed out by the future godawful personalities that of many of our contemporaries will inhabit by the time they're 50, you should read it. It is lovely and hilarious. A man narrates an entire novel while angrily sitting in a chair in a dark room at a party, picking apart all the guests and refusing to interact with them. Also, this book has also made me almost completely certain that I am about to abandon American literature completely...

A trio of old ladies just made fun of me

Me: Sitting in a breakfast hotspot, cheerfully observing this table filled with old ladies who all had the same spun sugar hair, and I was all like, "aw, ain't they cute." They had these complicated canes with handpainted designs on them, and I couldn't figure out whether they were sisters or lovers or just VL in the future. One of them smiled at me, and I smiled back. That is how cheerful I was. One of them dropped her cane, and I thought about picking it up for her, but then I thought that maybe that was insulting, so I didn't.

And then they all laughed these dry, smoker cough-laughs, and I saw an arthritic claw pointing at me. "She looks so tacky!" the one wearing the most jewelry rasped in this I'm-trying-to-talk-quietly-but-my-friends-are-mostly-deaf voice.

They totally made fun of me. Old ladies.

This summer I am going to write:

1. A Family Drama.
2. A Musical. Actually it will probably be more like a rock opera.

What? So it's a short list. That's still really a lot to write.

Miami Beach was chock full of celebrities, and I didn't see a single one.

Also, it monsooned basically the whole time we were there. Also too, I got a sunburn that turned this eerie maroon color after a few days, even though I had slathered on the 45 and lounged under a palm tree. The second half of that sentence is the result of having read nothing but women's magazines and Twilight all week. And plus also too, there were a ton of spring-breakers there. And I saw a huge blue jellyfish.

Act V: Desecration by Kittycat

: I am pissed! I can't find any of the pictures I used to play Barbies with on my computer! I think my evil boyfriend may have murdered them! Grrr! Now why would someone want to murder an image of Elizabeth Taylor or Wayne Koestenbaum from their photo albums? I don't get it. Luckily I've been drinking, so I'm not that pissed.

: Also luckily I was not among the murdered images! I guess I am just that likeable. Or else this is a dream, like the one you had the other night about living at the Playboy mansion, where you had to borrow Holly's backless pink satin shirt with the polka dots, that your boobs kept flying out of. I thought it was strange how you felt so uncomfortable in Hef's shower with that random dude. To me it seemed like great fun!

: Um, excuse me, but how did you break into my dreamlife?

: Crowbar, fork and knife, and the very crafty meercat I hired in the alleyway.

: I am no meerkat! I'm the Gato, otherwise known as McFuzzy VonStubenKitty! Now it is time to claw your face off!

Pinch Punch Ch. 4: Room 4832, Caravaggio

Ch. 1 here
Ch. 2 here
Ch. 3 here

So I was running down this Mediterranean beach, full of mania and malaria and mead and sunshine and oceanwater and a history of stabbings, to deliver my paintings to the pope.

This is what I replay in my mind all day long in room 4832 at the Pinch Punch, where I am allowed to drink only the vile liqueur TYRA calls her “specialty,” where I am allowed only jars of fingerpaint in the three primary colors with which to create my masterpieces. That I was almost there to deliver my paintings; that I was almost pardoned for the 357 murders I had committed the week prior; that I was almost free again. That I…

“Watch it again and tell me what’s missing, says my 19-year-old roommate Kashmir. “I just don’t think it’s right yet. Something about the beesting rings so false.”

Before he arrived at the Pinch Punch, Kashmir was a film student at West Suburban Community College for about three days before he fled because his brilliance “could not be contained inside the walls of WSCC.” He has teeth like a vampire and carts his projector everywhere for “necessary impromptu viewings.” Since he arrived he’s been making a film about my life, which he projects onto our wall at all hours of the day. Kashmir’s masterpiece began as a 12-minute short and has devolved into a 200-hour miniseries, which documents every itch, scratch, and orgasm of my existence.

"Watch it again, watch it again,” he says, so that I spend every minute of my current “life” inside the Pinch Punch reliving my life as it was before I arrived here.

Since I’ve existed in the Pinch Punch, I have not been in love (forbidden), nor eaten a French fry (forbidden), nor broken a sweat except those induced by drinking (the only exercise I enjoy is jumproping, also forbidden). There’s basically nothing left of the old me, so who cares that I wear a wig and swimming trunks at all hours, that I am a state of complete disrepair, that I stand in the shower for days at a time without turning on the faucet, thinking about washing then deciding against it? Who cares that I stab for entertainment?

“The bumblebee that stung my tongue that winter didn’t sound zzzz like an airplane, you bastard; he sounded like a puncture wound doused in hollandaise. Not fucking béchamel. Hollandaise. Their sounds are completely different,” I tell Kashmir.

Lately everything I tell Kashmir is a lie. TYRA says no books unless she wrote them or has read and approved, which means no books, which means no research for Kashmir. Fuck Kashmir. TYRA is in love with his vampire ass and allows him any artistic freedom he desires; he is the ultimate reminder of my former life.

Why is he wasting his life creating films about me? I don’t ask—I cooperate and tell him his project is way too brilliant for WSCC and pray that he destroys his whole life creating a botched miniseries of such impossible detail that no one will be able to watch it for more than ten minutes at a time without crumbling into a heap of boredom.

“Hollandaise…hollandaise,” Kashmir says.

Kashmir definitely grew up on Applebee’s; Kashmir will never travel the world, except to visit other suburbs.

“Can you describe that for me?”

“It’s like how your face tastes after I stab it.”

“I hear the new pope wears saucy red leather shoes made by a shoemaker in Genoa, which cost $600 a pair, but which are free for him,” says Kashmir, to spite me. “Wouldn’t I look fucking fabulous in those?”

“I think the new pope is a bastard, and that when I deliver my paintings to him I’ll wait for him to pardon me as his eyes to go afire with the love of Christ. Then I’ll then stab him in those fucking shoes, steal his robe, and make myself pope.”

Kashmir giggles, slaps me on the back, tells me I’m “such a card.”

He thinks I’m kidding about the stabbing, but stabbing is all that keeps me alive. Kashmir and I share bunk beds, and at night I stab stab stab up through the mattress, but his young skin rejuvenates itself immediately, frequently digesting my switchblades.

“A switchblade digested by pasty juvenile vampire skin is not the same as a switchblade destroyed,” I said to TYRA after I lost the first three to Kashmir's bellybutton.

She said: “Nu-uh girl. Same difference. You shouldn’t stab things that are so soft. The softest things are the evilest things. It’s the soft things that will seriously fuck your shit up.”

That’s when she put the humiliating purple wig on my head and told me I had to wear it always, else be sent to the Pinch-Punch vats.

I’m up to switchblade #7, but I can't help myself from stabbing everything in sight.

Remember that one time we all dressed up like Jon?

We were sooo ahead of the times. Probably they didn't even think of the idea of making Watchmen into a movie until some movie exec saw a group of Dr. Manhattans traipsing through Chicago.

Act IV: The Conflagration

: Richard Burton is my true love!




: Unless you're doing a character voice, Ball, there's gonna be a beatdown.




: Careful, he is a soothsayer, which comes from the Old English. And means truth. Also, he believes in lucid dreaming and spontaneous combustion. So do I, come to think of it.


: I'm growing out my hair. Lizzie, did you hear me? I'm growing out my hair!




: There is no such thing as violet eyes!




: Okay, I get it. You're pushing my buttons. Attacking my mythology. Did Jon hire you?



: I don't need other people, Taylor. Frankly, you have insulted me. I'm going to go hang out in outer space for a while. Why don't you join me?



: He's baiting you, Lizzie! Don't--Lizzie? Lizzie? NOOOOOOO!