I’m in a particularly black mood today. The kind of day I want to cake on black eye liner, smash a lipstick into my mouth, and tamper with the over the counter cold medications at the old age home I’m FORCED to volunteer at. Juvie. Don’t ask.

Really old people smell like pee, cooked cabbage, dust and old pennies… coppers as my Nana use to call them. I don’t recall Curtis smelling like that, but those were different circumstances.

Some of the old bags at the home try to cover it up with lavender, lilac and rose, but they only end up smelling like a funeral home. The old men try to cover it up with scotch while trying to grab my boobs as I’m spoon-feeding them their cream corn. They get that desperate old man horny look, imaging that their wieners would actually work. Mr. Johnston actually took his out one time, mashed potatoes and cream corn smeared all over his mouth and chin. It was like a tug of war with a gummy worm. I pinched it really hard to make him put it away and then he peed himself. Dumbass.

I used to like to bury things when I was younger. I particularly liked to bury things at construction sites, especially when they dug up roads. I would sneak down in the middle of the night and bury my treasure in the dirt that a bulldozer had dug up, among the water mains they were repairing, or the sewage pipes. It always gave me a thrill to see them pouring concrete, sealing it in until some future construction workers came to repair the exact same pipe and came across my box, all ravaged by being buried for years. They would all huddle around it, and point, and discuss and smoke their cigarettes.

I always buried curses; homemade voodoo dolls with pins stuck in them, torn up bible pages, pages and pages of symbols I would write with cranberry juice, thinking it would look like it was written in blood when it was discovered. I can picture those construction workers finding those old wooden jewelry boxes, all excited, thinking they were finding some old biddies’ pearls or a mob diamond stash, only to open the creaky lid and discover an ancient curse had been placed on them. Just like King Tut’s curse, they’d all die of heart attacks, or dysentery, or have an iron girder fall on them because they opened the box.

There’s one particular intersection in town where I buried one of my curses that has not been discovered yet. There’s lots of car accidents that happen at that intersection. I take full credit.

A few weeks after Curtis died I snuck out to his grave across town one night, dug a hole on top of his grave and put a Tupperwear with his gerbil, Flag (stupid name) in the hole. I figured if he heard his gerbil making its gerbil noises, maybe his ghost wouldn’t come back and haunt me.

Where’s my lipstick?

Be Mine

I didn’t install a hit counter on this thing. It would just remind me how terribly unpopular I am, like this girl Karen I went to grade school with. We all had a Karen in one of our grades growing up… that one kid in class whose clothes were just a little too tattered or out of style, whose hair was a little fucked up, who stood out, but not in a good way. Their family usually had a lot of junk in their yard, or their parents drank a lot, if they had two parents at all.

I wonder how many people it happened to in elementary school; Valentines’ Day, kids would bring in cards that their mom bought them at Zellers, the really cheap ones printed on crappy paper, they weren’t glossy or anything, made in China probably by people getting paid 25 cents a day or something like that. You know the kind of cards I’m talking about, with the cheesy sayings, like that stupid joke off of The Simpsons; “I choo-choo choose you” with some bug eyed train with a big shit-eating grin on it, like it just took a bong hit.

Anyways, we’d all have made these stupid boxes with our names on them with hearts and stars (this one bitch Cindy, who spelled her name “Cindi”, even though it wasn’t her Christian name, dotted her I’s with hearts), we’d give all the cards to the teacher, and then during recess or lunch, she’s “deliver” them into people’s boxes. There was always that one girl (Cindy) whose boxes couldn’t even hold all the cards put in it, and there was always the kid who got one pity card, from the teacher. That kid in my elementary school was Karen. That day the teacher forgot to put a card in Karen’s box.

I was only about 11 at the time, but I remember seeing a look in her eyes, like her soul broke… not a broken heart, or humiliation (like during the previous year’s Christmas gift exchange when David K. drew her name and wrapped up a bar of soap with her name on it) but the utter destruction of some vital part of her, like taking a sprouting seedling and crushing it with your boot… slow. She didn’t cry, or run from the room, she just calmly sat back in her seat and waited. I don’t even think Miss Johnston realized what she did (she was oblivious most of the time and there was that one time during a pop quiz where she fell asleep at her desk, and we all cheated and she was so proud that the whole class got straight A’s ‘cuz it proved what a fucking spectacular teacher she was shaping our young minds.

We never did find out what happened to Karen. She just never came back to school after that day. I remember overhearing Cindy telling Heather at lunch one day that her mom said that Karen stood in front of a freight train on a bridge on the other side of town the same night of the whole card incident. Fucked up. I didn’t believe it at first, but Miss Johnston started falling asleep at her desk even more, and started smelling funny, like she hadn’t had a shower for a long time. Eventually Mr. Tardiff took over our class. Funny how some people just disappear out of your life and you never think of them till years later.

After school about a week after Karen stopped showing up for class, I ran as hard as I could to the bridge that she supposedly died on, looking for any sign that what Cindy heard from her mom was true. I waited and waited, thinking maybe her ghost would show up, screaming and wailing and looking for her Valentine.

I wear a big heart shaped locket around my neck that an Uncle gave me for Christmas once. It was silver at one point but I rub it a lot so the yellow metal underneath shows through. When I’m feeling bad, or I get in a bad place, or am having one of my very extremely awful days, I clutch the locket in my hand and shake it, and inside I hear the rattling of the tooth I found under the bridge that day, and it makes me remember that it could be worse.

-L-

Blogging is Retarded

I kinda think that blogging is a bit stupid. Who actually reads this stuff? How many millions of blogs are out there on the internet, the people who make them religiously putting in their entries, looking for links, searching for pictures, and nobody reads them. What happens to dead peoples’ blogs? If I die tomorrow, where does my blog go? Does it just kinda sit here digitally rotting until it’s flushed out of some kind of system? That happened to my brothers Facebook account. I would see his face everyday and it kind of freaked me out knowing that he had died but people were still sending him messages and crap. Nobody knew his password and it was really weird seeing comments on his wall like “Lookin’ good Curtis!” and he was already buried. Creepy. Eventually one day his Facebook link stopped working and it was like he had double died.

I’ve done the random blog search thing when I’ve been bored, which is quiet often, especially since it’s summer and school is out, and people blog about the most retarded shit. I don’t care about their babies, or recipes, or quilting tips, and I got bored with the celebrity blogger thing a long time ago. I don’t care about Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Britney, and I think Perez Hilton is a cockmunch. I don’t think they’re important enough to look at. They already have fame and money, I’m not going to be another sheep to add to their pile of money. It’s like actors getting paid tons of money, living the good life, then getting awards on top of it… they basically get it all to play pretend and then they get more people telling them how fabulous they are. No wonder so many of them are screwed up. Maybe like a dead person’s blog, they’ll just go away if I stop clicking on them.

I don’t care about a lot of the stuff that’s on the internet, but that’s what everyone says and then they go and look at porn and then delete their caches. I’m not a geek AT ALL but I know how to delete a cache. A girl can’t be too careful never knowing who’s gonna get hold of her laptop living in this house, and dad (Fucktard of the Universe) won’t let me put a lock on my door as long as I’m living under his roof blah blah blah whatevs.

I don’t know what I can say that’s going to be particularly interesting. I’m not a cutter… gross… I’m not anorexic… super gross and bad for my teeth… I’m not a slut, or a celebrity, or an alcoholic, a drug addict or a teenage prostitute so I don’t really have much interesting to say. I’m not going to do that “Dear Diary” crap either. I’m probably going to get bored of this in about a week and then I can rot with the rest of the blog corpses in a digital graveyard. I can play YouTube videos of Michael Jackon’s Thriller while I do it. Sick. Maybe my brother can be one of the zombies.

Bored.