Sinister: don't you ever feel you just survive some days?

[lindsey baker]

hello sinister.

this has been an odd weekend. i think i am destined now to have only odd 
weekends for a while.

(warningwarningwarning: this might be a long post. apologies now.)

friday, i participated in one of the most interesting events ever, i think. 
i took my very twee self (mind, i was dressed way too twee for the event, it 
turned out) to a punk rock show. a friend of mine invited me to check out 
the slew of blink 182 hatah wannabes on his new record label, so i went. 
purposely dressed in all my thrift store glory, tans and muted greens and my 
now siganture creamy white tights. i stood on the fringe of the largely 
14-year-old crowd with my ex-boyfriend, and watched the middle school 
young'ns get down and funky in their button badge-covered stocking caps and 
hoodies. i adjusted my own button badge-covered handbag, making sure my new 
belle and sebastian buttons (and my prized high fidelity button) were 
prominently displayed, though i fear no one there new about our b&s.

i think my fear was almost confirmed when, to my horror, the buck-toothed 
fuckhead of a fifteen-year-old fronting the first MEGASWEET band i endured 
looked at a girl in the audience, a relatively twee lass who looked in about 
the same amount of pain i was under.

'what's wrong?' the kid shouted around his teeth, eyebrow ring twitching. 
'you into emo shit and all that? go listen to radiohead or something you 
bitch.'

my little hand curled around my handbag strap. the b&s button dug a little 
circle into my palm. the ex kind of restrained me as i muttered something 
about thom yorke's lack of true emo-ness and the band kid's lack of 
something else.

i saw the sweet singer a while later. he was standing, oh, about two feet 
away from me. i looked at the ex, and then at myself, and began screaming 
then and there about how much i LOVED radiohead and that i COULDN'T WAIT to 
have thom's children. GO EMO! i think i said, too, and then a few words like 
GO MARK HOPPUS I LOVE BASS PLAYERS!!

on my way out of the god forsaken wasteland of pre-pubescent pop punk, i ran 
into an omaha indie kid i know and practically threw myself into his 
jean-jacketed arms. he said there was a party. a large boy named hector gave 
me a map on the back of a jinxpack flyer. i wrapped my scarf tighter around 
my throat and went. one drink and about a hundred cigarettes later, i 
realized that not only did everyone at the get together know me before i 
arrived (apparently, word gets out when people hook up) but something else 
happened in the process.

i have written about not being one thing or the other, a label and a 
category and a brown and green sweater. but all the talk of images in this 
post has been for a reason, much like all that damn imagery in the old man 
and the sea.

i am in.

the crafty kids at saddle creek and all the rest. all the fringe kids. yeah, 
i guess i'm between them, now, and that was weird. but not uncool. so i lit 
another parliament and accepted the crown offered by the crowd.

*****


we had an ice storm in nebraska last night. the winds kept wrapping around 
my apartment building, bringing with them tree branches and chunks of ice. i 
jumped every time something smacked against the windows, and hated that i 
was home alone with nothing to do. (i also figured out that even though you 
can have a 'crew,' so to speak, the thought of doing the same thing every 
night is almost as boring as doing the same thing every night. so i opted 
for alone time, you see, which was a mistake. wind is lonely. then again, so 
is the monotony of two sisters telling me over and over how cute he and i 
are.) i was still somehow bored out of my mind, and i ended up lying in the 
middle of my living room floor watching breakfast at tiffany's (again) with 
one eye and my mobile with the other.

the phone never rang, and i went to bed while the sky was still weeping.

*****

today i covered an abraham lincoln festival. in lincoln, nebraska. har har. 
i was to focus on the three men impersonating honest abe for a contest. i 
arrived at the theatre playing host to the festival a bit early, so i walked 
to the paper, then back to the theatre, then back to the paper. i have 
walked the windy distance three times, now, in low heels and velvet, and it 
was only on the third round i noticed the snow angel imprint in the drift 
beside the sidewalk, and the imprint of every ice-melting pebble beneath the 
soles of my shoes. i will have to walk the way once more to go back to my 
car, and i hope it will be after dark, when the wind picks up again and i 
won't have to have a cigarette to have clouds of white trailing from my 
mouth.

the festival was rife with kids and people dressed in period costumes, 
twenty-first century grandmas and grandpas and their teenaged grandchildren 
wearing civil war uniforms and hoop skirts, do-se-doing in the same theatre 
that put on 'rent' a few months back. i watched the girls' skirts flare 
coyly as they demonstrated period dances, and for about ten minutes, i hated 
my modern-day culture of gap jeans and indie rock. but then i remembered 
telling my roommate that i could never be married to a boy in the army -- 
the absences would kill me. and civil war girls almost all had no choice but 
to wed the honor of a rifle and sit at home, useless.

(does it all have to come back to that? with me, i guess it always does. 
scarlett, too, though, was always after the same thing i am these days. 
maybe women will never change, really.)

at any rate, i interviewed the abes, and the winner was an aged farmer from 
kansas who i knew had breath that smelled like the sweet gherkin pickles i 
used to eat at my own grandmother's house every summer. on the walk back to 
the paper, every pebble felt like a memory.

a place in the world -- be it a scene or a home or a rocking chair -- might 
forever elude me. though somehow i doubt that, as i suspect i am in my 
place, and it is either too small or too big for me to notice it and cleanly 
grab onto its clear, simple, american explanation.

i had to write an identity poem for my poetry class (damn assignments like 
that. shitful, they are) and my professor didn't quite like what i handed 
in. his comment at the top expressed sentiments of confusion, and he said 
that nothing in the poem was fully developed -- the words only hinted at 
something, scratched an evasive surface.

i wrote about being the road between omaha and lincoln. and i think at times 
the best anyone can do is define themselves in terms of something else, 
something abstract and concrete and inanimate and always moving. and it is 
vague and underdeveloped. but if a character and a life can fit into three 
or four or a hundred stanzas of shallow verse, it shall not be my character 
or my life.

i was confused when i wrote it, and as i write this and i will be later when 
i walk back to my car and my home and my bed.

ah, well.

tomorrow is another day.

xxx, your lou

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