Hunger

I'm the sort of girlfriend who will bring you a sandwich. This is mostly rooted in my deepest wish that whenever I'm feeling blue, someone who cares about me will instantly appear, preferably with some sort of combination of bread and cheese.

Anyway, he was having a bad day, and so I thought I'd go across the street from where we both worked to the fancy place and get him a fancy sandwich.  When I returned, brown bag neatly folded over, his blue day had turned into a black day. He wouldn't look at me. He told me he wasn't hungry. I set it aside.

It was the first time that when he moved towards me, I jerked back involuntarily. My body recognized that sort of simmering anger, even if the rest of me wasn't ready to.

Not long after, I noticed a young, lanky kid who'd always been too shy to talk to me, eating.  It took me a moment to realize what had happened. He swallowed sheepishly as he blushed.

"Uh, he went home? I hope you don't mind, he told me he was going to throw it away, anyway? It-It's really good?"

I told the kid that someone should enjoy it and went for a walk.  Not that many weeks later, it had ended and I would circle the block before I'd get out of my car. I thought about the sandwich, and how hungry I'd been when I bought it and what I'd been hungry for.

Youth

I can't remember what sort of party it was, but I remember it was pouring rain. A hot, heavy summer rain since the season hadn't changed yet. It was still stifling enough that some kids were sleeping overnight in the library, the only building on campus with serious air conditioning.

Inside, there was some sort of ridiculous drama. I liked a boy, the first and last boy who wore button downs and khakis I'd ever liked. He was tall and very quiet, and it was easier to think about him than my mom, back in California, sick.

I stepped outside with my drink, dodging couples. Across the way I saw an older woman walking along side her dog. It was old, very old, shuffling with a painful gait. Even from a distance I could see the multiple large tumors bubbling up along his back and down its legs and its many pink bald spots.

The woman walked slowly beside her dog in the downpour, holding her umbrella out over it, in no rush. The loud music came back to me and I felt stupid for being so young. 

Numb.

It wasn't my horse.

We would all try to ride in the early mornings. Sacramento summers mean afternoons of 105 degrees, and the barn was out amid rice paddies and the air port -- no shade to be found any where.  Before the shows in Pebble Beach we would take our horses out to the watery fields to help them get used to splashing around in the water, in the hopes they'd take to the beach easier.

The watering truck had just finished its first circuit of the day, dampening the already arid sand of the arena and the tractor was headed in to drag it with metal spikes to groom the sand neat for surer footing.

We were at a standstill as I was adjusting the girth, the leather belly tack which secures the saddle. When the tractor raised its front bucket with a loud clank, he reared up, screaming. Turning, he threw me into the dirt. I landed on my left side, my arms up over my head, trying to roll away from his descending hooves. He clipped my kneecap instead of crushing it completely.

I pulled myself up and went after him. His eyes rolled and he was worked up in a foamy white lather.

After a long lesson, when he'd finally calmed and been hosed down and put away, I sat down by the tack room. I unzipped my leather chaps, untucked my breeches from my well-worn boots and rolled them up. All riders have lunar pale legs, no matter how brown their arms and noses get from years spending all your days outside. The black started mid-way up my shin. Not purple. Not dark blue. Black. Licorice black.

It extended up over my knee, swollen up like a softball, halfway up my thigh. Like a scorch mark, burnt toast. It was so big and ugly, for months people would stop and ask what had happened to me. When I touched it, I couldn't feel it. I was completely numb.

The rice paddies are gone now, and so is the barn. They built tract homes over everything, and they sit on the flat land of the valley, nearly all empty. At night they turn the lights on for no one. 

Exorcized.

I was very young and I'd just watched "Fantasia" and the thrill of watching "Night on Bald Mountain," which my mother would have never let me watch had she  been there was still in my mind when we were driving home in the rain. Squinting through the rain-spattered windshield, the red brake lights ahead of us reminded me of the writhing flames and little demons from Disney's animated short.

"They look like the devil," I said, pointing.

She turned to me, her face paling. "What?"

"The red lights, they look like devils."

Panicked, my mother rerouted us.

The Preacher's apartment was sparse and cheap, like all apartments of the recently divorced or sober. He gave me a soda and peanut butter crackers. I was left alone for an hour to watch television. I could hear the usual muttering that meant my mother was praying. After a while, they came back into the living room with its black pleather sofa.

"We're going to pray on you," the man explained, and I didn't say no. They put their hands on me, and prayed to banish the servants of Satan. I wondered if he had any more peanut butter crackers and when we would go home.

Further Thoughts On Chris D'Arienzo and O.P.P.

When Buzzfeed came to me asking if I had any ideas for them, I immediately pitched them a running series of interviews with creative people on their processes.

Like the Post Project, one of the ways I've been hacking away at The Horrible It is to really luxuriate in the concept of process. In my mind, process is the infrastructure on which you build discipline. Young artists look for a voice, professional artists look for their process.

Now it seems obvious to me that The Horrible It was inevitable: I was given a time frame in which to execute something and I started with absolutely no process. I had no tools. I was done before I even started.

So now that I have a sense of what my process is, I am endless fascinated by other people's process. (O.P.P., if you will.)

Talking with Chris, the creator of the Broadway hit Rock of Ages, I was really struck by how quick he was to laugh and how obviously happy he is.

When he described to me how he was shut out of the film adaptation of the project, it was clear that while he wasn't short-changing how upsetting and frustrating that experience was at the time, he had reached a place where it was the creative process that mattered more to him than anything else: he just wants to make art. I think it's that clarity of vision and the valuing of process over product that gives Chris his zen-like joy in creativity. I admire it and him.

You can read my interview with Chris here. 

The Couple

I was more than tipsy. While I don't need much liquid courage in a karaoke bar where you have your own room to share with your friends, if I was going to sing George Michael's "Freedom" in a large bar straight out of season 2 of "The Wire," I was going to need more than one beer. 

The couple had been sucking at each other's headspaces pretty much since I walked into the bar. Not in that romantic, intimate way where there's a little part of me that envied them, but in that way that's just obnoxious. Yes, please, dry hump directly in front of the ladies restroom. Oh, for sure, don't worry, I was secretly hoping you'd knock my drink over. 

So I wasn't all that surprised when, at 3 in the morning in Brooklyn, when I'd flagged down a cab, the couple ran down to the corner and stole the cab.

I clenched my fists and shouted out, "You are horrible people! HORRIBLE! And you know it! Tonight, in the dark, when you're clinging to each other and pretending that you don't feel desperately lonely, my voice will echo out, and you will know it in the marrow of your bones, yes, you are horrible people. IN THE MARROW OF YOUR BONES!" 

My friends will vouch that this is exactly what happened. 

Another cab came by about five minutes later.