—YOU GOT THE BEST OF ME

 

Sex Education, 3 of 3

 

 

He’s not the one for you, and it’s you, not him. He doesn’t make you sparkle.

 

All.Vulvas.Are.Beautiful.com

 

I think that would look good in the bedroom.

I think that would look good back in the box.

 

I don’t think you should go to Nigeria.

Why?

It’s dangerous to be gay there.

It’s dangerous to be gay anywhere. 

 

Why is your face not moving?

 

Don’t therapize me.

 

Do you even know what you want?

 

If you even think you’re happy, then I’m happy.

 

I got a feeling that I want to live.

 

It’s kind of hard to like someone who doesn’t like themselves.

 

Do you want to go smash shit?

 

Thanks for the offer. One of these days I’ll be good enough to cry on your shoulder.

 

This isn’t about pan-shelves, is it?

 

I’m pansexual apparently. I like fucking pots and pans.

 

Dreams aren’t real. That’s why they’re called dreams.

 

Make a sad face and I’ll roll with it for you, for a while.

 

Orphan to orphan: nothing changes if nothing changes.

 

We’ve got all the information we need right here.

 

Can you smell the wild garlic?

 

So, with respect, I’m taking my heart off the table.

 

Steve is in charge of the vulvas now.

 

Become more Eric, okay?

 

“From the moment you were born you begin to die.” I think it means, Live for the day.

 

You like helping people. It’s one of the reasons I love you so much.

 

I’m doing a vagina workshop in a bit.

 

This was, um, strange.

 

Did you just say, “Jiggy?”

 

Sex just doesn’t do it for some people.

 

Sex doesn’t make us whole, so how can you possibly be broken?

 

Turn around.

 

Kiss me harder.

 

Five times.

 

So, who’s Maeve?

 

Oh, how it hurts, to say goodbye.

You are everywhere. Again, and again, and again.

 

  

 

TONIGHT, I PRAY FOR UKRAINE, AND I PRAY YOU DO AS WELL

 

 

--A Ukrainian road-maintenance company said it was removing all road signs to hinder invading Russian forces: "Let us help them get straight to hell.”

 

--“The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.” Voldoymyr Zelenskly, after the U.S. offered help in evacuating people from Ukraine:

 

--"We will fight as long as it takes to liberate the country," Zelenskiy said in a video message.

 

--“You have one choice, to drop your weapons or else have bombs dropped on you. Do you read? Bombs will drop on you. Do you read? This is Russian warship.”

--“Russian warship, we read. Also, Fuck you, Russian warship.”

 

 --“When we left the shelter this morning, the sun was rising. We had this weird feeling that the world will never be the same again. Also that our home would never feel as safe as it used to be — and probably there isn’t a safe place anywhere in the world at all.”

 

--"We have to persevere tonight,” President Zelenskly told his people in a video posted to Facebook. “The fate of Ukraine is being decided right now. The night,” he predicted, “will be hard, very hard. But there will be a morning."

 

--“Good morning, Ukrainians!” Zelensky said in a video posted on Twitter at 6:57 a.m. “I am here. We are not laying down our weapons. We will protect our land!”

 

--“The hard fights on the streets only raised people’s spirits,” Yehor Soboliev, a former parliamentarian who now fights with the civilian force, said.

 

--“While the Russian army is firing rockets into peaceful neighborhoods out of desperation, killing children all over Ukraine, trying to convince us of a lie in a vile way, we believe in our army and the president,” she told Yahoo News. “We know we will win. We are already winning. The whole world is with us.” Iryna Kulshenko

 —I WAS JUST THINKING ABOUT YOU

  

From Sex Education, Part Two of Three

 

 

You remind me of joy. Only joy.

 

Nothing feels right when I’m not around you.

 

I know what you mean about shutting off. I do it when I’m hurt or don’t quite fit in.

 

--I’ve been an absolute shit.

--Me, too.

 

I had some stuff that I needed to think about. It was new to me.

 

Oh, Sweetheart, I don’t think anyone understands love.

 

Is it all inside my head?

 

You shouldn’t ever give someone the power to humiliate you.

 

Yeah, I have a problem with trust. But I want to try.

 

I hate him, because I love him. 

 

There’s a first time for everything.

 

So, I was thinking we could be each other’s Mum.

 

People deserve your whole heart.

 

Don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky.

 

I just said, “I love you.” Why are you laughing?

 

It’s too hard to tell where I end, and where my father begins.

 

I’m going to kiss you, okay?

 

Love is a murderer…And love is a curse…But I can change. 

 

There. That’s what it’s supposed to feel like.

 

She’s going to love me, I swear it.

 

I’m an evil genius.

 

I can change, I can change, I can change, I can change, if it helps me feel real love.

 

You can talk to me about anything, you know?

 

We only get one chance to do our first time. So, we should try to get it right.

 

Liking someone is pretty close to loving someone, don’t you think?

 

This is a safe place.

 

Your repugnance is palpable.

 

No, no. It’s not goodbye. It’s see you soon.

 

 

--LOOKING FOR BLISS IN A BLAH DAY, INDIFFERENT TO MY OWN INDIFFERENCE

 

https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_how_to_stop_languishing_and_start_finding_flow?language=en

 

—WHAT IF BY THE TIME I REALIZE, IT’S TOO FAR BEHIND TO SEE?

 

gewgaw

 

on the attic floor the broken toy lies limbless and starving dust motes scrolling past his thunderstruck eyes his throat dry as kindling a crack of shine through a bowlegged seam in a weary wall wakes him for the first time in days weeks months years and so he shimmies on his plastic belly over the warped floor toward one of his leftover legs takes a chunk out of a thigh a calf an ankle the toes everything tasting fraudulent counterfeit nothing nourishing or containing liquid his arms are the same as mantis wishbones but he sucks on them anyway to get to their marrow eating himself feels perverse idiotic juxtaposed but he wants to live as most people do and when up the steps comes a stump stump stumping he flashes an uncertain gewgaw smile so as not to get more broken again but the shoe has a wide sole like the atlantic sea only made of leather and so his skull conflates rubber cheeks glued inside to inside the last words he says are i still love you and can you please let me know if i’m really your son?

 —THE MORNING’S GOT ME ON THE ROPES

 

 

What I’ve Learned From Sex Education Thus Far…

 

 

She’s probably right, but she didn’t have to say that.

 

Things are easier when you don’t care. Nobody gets hurt.

 

I didn’t think I cared about things. But you made me realize I do.

 

Every time I’m around you, my cells are fizzy and alive. And I’m afraid of what it would be like not to have you in my life anymore.

 

Wow. You’re so pretty. So rare.

 

I don’t hate you. But it would be so much easier if I did.

 

If you truly love someone, it’s better to bend than to break.

 

If you love someone, you should tell them. Life is short. It’s fragile.

 

Time will always try to kill me…

 

Vulva cupcakes?

I guess I’ll have another one, with pubes.

 

I had a fight with my best friend. I feel really bad about it, but I also want to punch her in the face. 

 

Commitment can be a terrifying concept.

 

5,000 pounds! Just think of how much latex I could buy with that.

 

I’m basically an erotica genius.

 

Fuck the pain away…

 

It’s just a line.

Nothing is just a line.

 

Being an older parent is intimidating.

 

What that man did to you on the bus had nothing to do with your smile. It was about him.

 

Actually, every vulva is unique and beautiful, to be cherished.

 

What do you do that makes you feel joy?

 

Often when children are bullied by their parents they will turn off their emotions completely.

 

Jealousy can make us act out of character and make us say things we don’t mean. 

 

I’d like to touch you, 

but I’ve forgotten how 

And I said I didn’t need you 

but look at me now.

Sometime in the summer, 

when we’re lying in the breeze, 

the breeze will kill me. 

The breeze will kill me.

 

You were right. I did make choices, and they were bad.

 

It’s okay to admit we’re lost.

 

Please, may I touch your ears?

 

  

 

—THERE’LL COME A TIME WHEN THE WORLD WON’T BE SINGING

 

…Two days removed from “the most romantic day of the year,” I thought it might be good to share this, from Heather Cox Richardson: 

  

On Valentine’s Day in 1884, Theodore Roosevelt lost both his wife and his mother.

Four years before, Roosevelt could not have imagined the tragedy that would stun him in 1884. February 14, 1880, marked one of the happiest days of his life. He and the woman he had courted for more than a year, Alice Hathaway Lee, had just announced their engagement. Roosevelt was over the moon: “I can scarcely realize that I can hold her in my arms and kiss her and caress her and love her as much as I choose,” he recorded in his diary. What followed were, according to Roosevelt, “three years of happiness greater and more unalloyed than I have ever known fall to the lot of others.”

After they married in fall 1880, the Roosevelts moved into the home of Theodore’s mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, in New York City. There, they lived the life of wealthy young socialites, going to fancy parties and the opera, and traveling to Europe. When Roosevelt was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1881, they moved to the bustling town of Albany, where the state’s political wire-pullers worked their magic. Roosevelt’s machine politician colleagues derided the rich, Harvard-educated young man as a “dude,” and they tried to ignore his irritating interest in reforming society.

In the summer of 1883, Alice discovered that she was pregnant, and that fall she moved back to New York City to live with her mother-in-law. There she awaited the birth of the child who Theodore was certain would arrive on February 14.

As headstrong as her father, Roosevelt’s daughter beat her father’s prediction by two days. On February 12, Alice gave birth to the couple’s first child, who would be named after her. Roosevelt was at work in Albany and learned the happy news by telegram. But Alice was only “fairly well,” Roosevelt noted. She soon began sliding downhill. She did not recover from the birth; she was suffering from something at the time called “Bright’s Disease,” an unspecified kidney illness.

Roosevelt rushed back to New York City, but by the time he got there at midnight on February 13, Alice was slipping into a coma. Distraught, he held her until he received word that his mother was dangerously ill downstairs. For more than a week, “Mittie” Roosevelt had been sick with typhoid. Roosevelt ran down to her room, where she died shortly after her son got to her bedside. With his mother gone, Roosevelt hurried back to Alice. Only hours later she, too, died.

On February 14, 1884, Roosevelt slashed a heavy black X in his diary and wrote “The light has gone out of my life.” He refused ever to mention Alice again.

Roosevelt’s profound personal tragedy turned out to have national significance. The diseases that killed his wife and mother were diseases of filth and crowding—the hallmarks of the growing Gilded Age American cities. Mittie contracted typhoid from either food or water that had been contaminated by sewage, since New York City did not yet treat or manage either sewage or drinking water. Alice’s disease was probably caused by a strep infection, which incubated in the teeming city’s tenements, where immigrants, whose wages barely kept food on the table, crowded together.

Roosevelt had been interested in urban reform because he worried that incessant work and unhealthy living conditions threatened the ability of young workers to become good citizens. Now, though, it was clear that he, and other rich New Yorkers, had a personal stake in cleaning up the cities and making sure employers paid workers a living wage.

The tragedy gave him a new political identity that enabled him to do just that. Ridiculed as a “dude” in his early career, Roosevelt changed his image in the wake of the events of February 1884. Desperate to bury his feelings for Alice along with her, Roosevelt escaped to Dakota Territory, to a ranch in which he had invested the previous year. There he rode horses, roped cattle, and toyed with the idea of spending the rest of his life as a western rancher. The brutal winter of 1886–1887 changed his mind. Months of blizzards and temperatures as low as –41 degrees killed off 80% of the Dakota cattle herds. More than half of Roosevelt’s cattle died.

Roosevelt decided to go back to eastern politics, but this time, no one would be able to make fun of him as a “dude.” In an era when the independent American cowboy dominated the popular imagination, Roosevelt now had credentials as a westerner. He ran for political office as a western cowboy taking on corruption in the East. And, with that cowboy image, he overtook his eastern rivals.

Eventually, Roosevelt’s successes made establishment politicians so nervous they tried to bury him in what was then seen as the graveyard of the vice presidency. Then, in 1901, an unemployed steelworker assassinated President William McKinley and put Roosevelt—“that damned cowboy,” as one of McKinley’s advisers called him—into the White House.

Once there, he worked to clean up the cities and stop the exploitation of workers, backing the urban reforms that were the hallmark of the Progressive Era.

 

 

 

—I’M CRACKING EGG SHELLS WITH A PEN

 

  

What I Loved Last Week:

 

Jillian Weise @ POETRY FOUNDATION

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/157053/romantic-gesture?utm_source=Poetry+Foundation&utm_campaign=56edf00d2b-PMAG_FEBRUARY_8_2022&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ff7136981c-56edf00d2b-185855521&mc_cid=56edf00d2b&mc_eid=092c9477da

 

 Ben Loory @ CRAFT

 

https://www.craftliterary.com/2022/02/11/bear-ben-loory/?fbclid=IwAR0D5QtUriw6wzMywG-561UYoKbOAijrr-qXkma1pOwKbc5SWl440Aedkak#

 

Sommer Browning @ HOBART

 

https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/bad-sex?fbclid=IwAR1qwuIe104ImLS9YnmFIArn00PuD4jDTAq9rYxe_owUOgAb0Mpog6gc6N4

  

Francine Witte @ FICTIVE DREAM

 

https://fictivedream.com/2022/02/07/when-jj-visits-his-life/?fbclid=IwAR3-vbE9b57IBjH9dTlMFM-TGZ2xzlOOGiIK1tGVvb1E4GXPxTbfExMFJdg

 

 Meg Pokrass @ SUNDAY STORIES: BROOKLYN

 

https://vol1brooklyn.com/2017/10/15/sunday-stories-egg-foot/?fbclid=IwAR3njm3UyUq87rCx-FqOTuVgDRufPo7QQuKQhMEXhlEIr9ID_tYAwM2T-0Q

 

 Jacqueline Doyle @ BENDING GENRES

 

https://bendinggenres.com/where-are-we-going-2/

 

 Salena Caaha@ BENDING GENRES

 

https://bendinggenres.com/what-we-are-to-each-other-and-what-we-are-not/

 

 Bekah Fly @ BENDING GENRES

 

https://bendinggenres.com/the-ghosts-i-choose/

  

Francine Witte @ BENDING GENRES

 

https://bendinggenres.com/radio-to-knoll-a-wordle-story/

  

Annie Bien @ SIX SENTENCES

 

https://sixsentences.blogspot.com/2022/02/gut-instinct-north-tower.html?fbclid=IwAR2blxK14eE3UcJ8QvWjcR0w8rupT6lKBomkzLsG4u1qBfgVT4rDiPRTKLk

  

Gay Degani @ SIX SENTENCES

 

https://sixsentences.blogspot.com/2022/02/love-music.html?fbclid=IwAR0bE-LpPVXIZy3r6-4CcnmMbXRAGpHr59UhKE_0GBsUZXolosgHJiTFePs

 

Kate Naylor @ FLASH BOULEVARD

 

https://flashboulevard.wordpress.com/2022/02/12/kate-naylor-everywhere-i-walk-i-trail-a-thread-of-forget-me-not-blue/

 

 

—WELL, THE NIGHT DOES FUNNY THINGS INSIDE A MAN

 

 

… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-iBmzantJo

  

…What I try to do now is think, If I had just one month left, who are the people I’d like to spend it with?

 

“I think the thing is, we both realized that we didn't have that much time. And I accepted him for who he was, and I didn't expect him to change, and I think he felt that for me, too. I liked his drama, and he needed me. And I loved him. I really loved him.” Leaving Las Vegas

 

…Some of life’s greatest mysteries (sans question marks): 

1.) If God is God, where did God come from, before he was God. 

2.) If Jesus is God, and He knows absolutely everything, even what’s going to happen before it has, happened, why then Eve, and that snake, and then afterward, sounding like all-so-surprised, like “Sheesh! I can’t believe she did that and he did that and they did that and then they did that again and again and again.” 

3.) How have I not got COVID. 

4.) Trump.

5.) Genetics.

6.) Airplanes.

7.) Massive cruise ships that don’t sink.

8.) Why some people still love me.

9.) How 9/11 could actually happen.

10.) How a person can get depressed when they have it all, and then some.

11.) How Lucy never fails me.

12.) Why I’m still alive, when there are a million valid reasons why I should be dead instead.

13.) Trump, again.

 

… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEAy7eXb2lo

 

…I was just thinking how handy it would be to have a Creamatorium.

 

…I should probably stop thinking about 9/11 so much.

 

…“Do you know what time it is? You should be drinking coffee. You're a young guy. It's none of my business, but if you could see what I see, you wouldn't be doing this to yourself.” Leaving Las Vegas

 

…You see your children suffer, and the world just fucking collapses. It’s another kind of helplessness altogether.

 

…Last night someone gave me the most incredible compliments. About my new book, they said, “I didn’t just like it. I absolutely loved it. It’s one of the best books I everread.” And while I knew they were completely sincere, this other me inside of me didn’t believe it whatsoever. That other me has always been a persistent haunt.

 

…This person, the one from last night, also said, “After finishing your book, after all you’ve been through, I can’t believe you’ve come this far.” That was one thing we could agree on.  

 

…“I came here to drink myself to death.
“How long will it take you?
“I'd say, about three to four weeks.” Leaving Las Vegas

 

…The night is young, while nothing else is.

 

…I kind of like looking at my windows, very late at night, when they’re just stupid black plaques, nothing looking back but a shot of blurry onyx. It’s so dark out that there’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing to worry about.

 

…Seventeen Going Under is pretty much my youth autobiography, but I wasn’t a tenth that tough.

 

…I always forget how old I am, because in my head I’m 9 or 16 or 23, but then I look in the mirror, and she corrects me properly. It’s like a legitimate Bitch Slap.

 

...“Is drinking a way of killing yourself?
“Or, is killing myself a way of drinking?” Leaving Las Vegas

 

…I don’t know what’s happened. This year I’ll have my sixth book published. Years ago, if you would have told me I would have a single book released I’d have laughed. Now, I’m still extremely grateful, but I don’t know if I care as much as I should.

 

…Everyone has their own definition of trying, and I suppose that’s okay.

 

…I love optimism when it’s authentic. I hate it when it’s scripted.

 

…My brother who died first, he was no one I really knew. He was a junkie. Did some really horrible, horrible things. Once asked me to get him Mariner tickets two days before the game. Never picked them up. That wasn’t one of the horrible things. He died alone. It didn’t affect me that much at the time. I’m ashamed to say that now. But it all bothers me now.

 

…“Don't you like me, Ben?
“What you don't understand is—no, see, no. You can never, never ask me to stop drinking. Do you understand?
“I do. I really do.” Leaving Las Vegas

 

…My fear of heights is getting a lot worse. I wonder what that means.

 

 …“The distinct personalities of the songwriters come through really raw; they’re communicating with each other in heartbreaking, angry ways,” says Zoë Howe, author of the book Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams and Rumours. Adds Spanos: “You’re getting the great theatre of heartbreak from multiple sides.”

 

…Everybody loves differently, because everybody is different. That’s why people communicate, or don’t communicate, differently, and that’s also why relationships can sometimes jump the fence/ the shark/ the cliff, running for cover like rabbits that only know one thing, how to run.

 

…I still believe in miracles, and I always will.