Even in collage weirdly. But I went to art school, so we carried things like huge paintings and super long rolls of paper around the city campus, not laptops in black bags with nice pants on. We smelled like turpentine and had charcoal all up in our nostrils, fingernails caked with paint and ink and everything else we used to make with.
My childhood neighbor had a pen pal who lived in some far off place, from our southern California beach town. I was always super envious of the letters she would receive, with stickers and little doodles, boring kid updates about visits to the dentist or a school field trip. I never had a pen pal, but was always super intrigued by a relationship of letters. A written interaction with stamps and time and government workers seeing to the absoluteness of its delivery.
The bulge in an envelope arriving in the mail, the odd shape tweaking the clean lines of the symmetrical paper still drives me wild. The way Valentines Day cards have a few pieces of candy, sealed inside the small red house, holding the colorful cornstarch shapes. Candy is disgusting mostly, but send it in the mail with a glitter glue note and its the most magical thing I've ever seen, to precious to be eaten.
I remember in high school senior year borrowing this old junker of a computer to write my collage essay on... I don't think it actually was the kind with the black screen and the neon green all cap font, but close enough, painful. It crashed and froze up every 2 seconds and I re-wrote my essay over and over. I practiced being Zen and deep breathing, I tried to "let it go" and "find my center" every time it lost the whole thing.
That was back when I drove a car. It had a cassette player in it. I loved the way my car smelled, how I was all alone in it with my mix tapes stuffed into every crevice. The car was a home. I sang in it, I cried in it, I made out in it probably... though I remember the crying part more so than the make-out sessions.
I was really good about putting on lipstick while driving, I guess I learned that when I was a kid though, the whole putting on lipstick without a mirror trick. Its easy, my older sister taught me how to apply a whole face of makeup when I was six, seven maybe. Red lipstick was the name of the game then. The inside shape of that car was a great shape to hold a crying teenager.
I have those long high heel boot shoe boxes full of rolled up, wrinkly, random journal writings. I would crank out the pages and fill up boxes and boxes of paper, all misspelled and XXXXXX'ed out. One type writer lived on the front porch, one lives on the book shelf, one lived on Sarah's little wooded chest she gave me when she moved to Africa. I wrote her letters and stuffed them inside the draws of the chest. I never mailed those.
Two times in my life I have sent handwritten letters out to sea in bottles.
The first time in the south of France, the second, on Christmas day last month from Vashon Island. I have never found a message in a bottle before. But I think it's think romantic.
Years and years ago when I wore short hair, in a graffitied bathroom of a San Fransisco club I wrote a love note in sharpie on the wall. I had never written that type of confession before, but I was love sick and knew that we would not be together; it was a private-public place I could put that. This blog is similar. a private-public gritty, layered space, just behind the door of the booming music, a place to try and salvage the sweaty make-up face, wash the sticky spilled drink hands, perhaps experience one of those magical moments that you randomly encounter in ladies room.
