Words

-You can’t put a Yin-Yang on a sign that says “Relaxation Spa” anymore unless the black dot is winking and the white dot is made of jizz. It almost seems racist to just leave it up there, as if everyone doesn’t know. You know.

-Saw a place today, don’t know what it was. I’m pretty sure that the plaza’s name was not the name of an establishment within the plaza, as there was no such establishment. However, the package goods store, the chiropractor and the three places up for lease were perfectly fine being under the umbrella of “Chicken Vacation,” and that doesn’t particularly bother me; after all, I imagine it could help business in a way.

Especially the chiropractor, amongst cowards.

But wouldn’t an enterprising mind at the fucking least open up a vegan restaurant there? It’s a vacation from meat for the human and a vacation from death for the chicken. Win-win.

-I drove past a sign today, telling me that I’d be in Yardley if I drove 5 miles west. Immediately, I thought back upon this woman named Emily. We worked together in sub-contracting, editing and proofreading transcripts of focus groups. I learned so much about diabetes that year.

I passed, and there was Emily, and all she had to say was all she ever has to say in my head, which is, “oh my God! Is River Road near Yardley? ‘Cause that’s like right by where I live!” So now, every time I pass anything Yardley, a blonde twenty-something with a French last name and a burning desire to shop a lot at Fashion Bug pops into my head. What an imprint.

-Ever see the movie Imprint? It’s a Takashi Miike flick, the last film of the first season of Masters of Horror. If you’ve seen it, then you likely have no idea what it’s about; I’ve seen it, I don’t, and I’m smart.

But if I remember correctly, it’s maybe about a 19th Century-or-so aborted fetus with blue hair, the spirit of which goes to work in a ghost brothel. Or the blue-haired girl lives, and helps Mom perform abortions, and then works in a demon or ghost brothel, where she either kills or gets killed by Billy Drago, who loves her. I think. Oh, and there’s a ton of prostitute torture that happens to be some of the most harrowing stuff I’ve ever seen in a plain ol’, run-of-the-mill, steak-and-potatoes, shits-and-giggles movie.

This movie was so special that Showtime actually never aired it, at least not in the US. Apparently, there was no way that they could edit the movie so that it…made sense?, so they never showed it.

This would happen to Mr. Miike all the time, if his movies were ever shown in the US with any sort of frequency. Ichi the Killer is not representative of his body of work, in that it’s relatively coherent. Same for Audition. Izo’s closer, and that’s a two-hour thesis on the nature of accepting one’s personal fate…cloaked in fight after fight after fight after fight…after fight…after fight. After fight. Then watch Visitor Q. Fuck you.

So when Imprint was finally released on DVD, it was gobbled up by horror hounds everywhere who gasped, gawked, shuddered and then had a sandwich. These characters, these folks know how to shrug off a woman, hung upside-down, having her nails ripped out and urine running all over her face as she cries while evil, black-toothed den mothers cackle and punish. Good movie to show to someone who never watches horror, or likes nothing but rom-coms and remakes of Forrest Gump.

Why bring this up now? Bring this up now because I thought of my Fashion Buggy Buddy and Yardley and the Imprint she put upon my mind, and then I crossed a creek called Cuttalossa Creek, which triggered the thought of the blue-haired girl and the abortion doctor performing frontier medicine out by a creek where women were, in the saddest and most desperate way possible, cutting their losses.

Yeah, all for that.

Or maybe all for this: maybe 7, 8 years ago now. A long-time friend of mine from “back home,” Cheeks (his name is actually Cheeks, which is a lie) and I were talking about high school while maybe drinking or eating or both. It was at Ruby Tuesday’s or Bennigan’s or TGI Friday’s or Harper’s. No, not Harper’s. It must’ve been drinking, because I barely remember this story.

What I do remember of it, though, is that we were talking about the types we were in high school, the people we remembered being in that Breakfast Club-sort of way that people can often paint themselves. What I remember of this story which is, of itself, based on hazy memory, is that Cheeks was on the fucking money about the guy he was, and I couldn’t have been any more distant from my own target.

I, being so deep and creative and dark, and no one listened to the music I did or watched the movies I loved and held so dearly, my shield against a world that hated me…was completely full of shit and had no idea. Cheeks looked at me like I had two heads and one of them was made of nothing but blooming dicks as I went on about how I was a loner. It was great.

No, it wasn’t. I was probably hammered, and that meant that I was probably twice as afraid as ever that I had shattered on the floor. I look at it now and like it, but I probably defended my lonerdom for either as long as I could or…well, I guess any scenario is “as long as I could.”

We’re still friends, so I guess I didn’t lose my shit and try to hit him, which would’ve been a miserable failure. He’s gone on to become quite fit and probably pretty strong, and had I tried to start some sort of ruckus, he would have described the ruckus to me. Mess with the bull, you get your own bullshit back at you?

I thought about the fragments of what I remembered of that night, and it all got mixed up with Relaxation and French last names and Yardley and Chicken Vacation, Yin-Yangs full of winking cum and blue-haired, aborted film directors and my first reaction was, “I’m completely full of shit.”

Still feels pretty right.

As the night falls over, though, I’m becoming far more comfortable with the idea that I’m a fiction. I think of a line from a Kathryn Bigelow movie, one of the two that she did between Near Dark and The Hurt Locker that isn’t Point Break, called Strange Days, and Angela Bassett’s character tells Lenny that “memories are meant to fade.”

I remember that line every time like the first time I heard it, when I was 16, and it still makes me shudder, get a little weak. I keep on thinking that I have this incredible memory. I remember all of these things from one ride, one route, just today. I remember how all of these things go together or don’t, how they clash to make new mountains of memory.

All I really remember is a line, a block of ad space in the air, a vague time in a bar that might or might not have been a bar.

I’m a fiction. There are facts along the way, things that happened that are real, happened in my life. And then, maybe some aren’t real and never happened. Memories are meant to fade, and that’s a little bit of why I write, right? I write to remember my own past, but never tell the whole truth. There’s a spin on it, something there that, in my mind, makes it a better read, worthy of having been written. And then, do I remember the thing or do I remember the story?

She’s crying when she tells Lenny that memories are meant to fade. Her memory of the man he was is fading, the man she cared for in the first place almost gone as he stands before her. In the movie, Lenny climbs out of the muck and comes back whole and strong, their embrace ends the film as the year 2000 floats over the screen and offers all of the hope and change that the actual 2000 did and didn’t.

I don’t think I come back. I’m not the loner, I’m not John Bender. I don’t remember whole stories, only words, pieces. I’m never who I thought I was and won’t be what I think today. Memories are meant to fade and I am only words. And even that’s not the full truth by this moment.