The horse’s head is meaty and none but fools do eat it
Read this part last I know you won’t
I’m really sick of me. Are you sick of me? I’m kind of really fucking sick of me now. Too much, too many years being this. Same. Me. I want to be sucked into your photo and become you. All of you. Any of you. I am tired. I think the weight of a thousand hundred million unoriginal thoughts repeated a million hundred thousand times over is a little heavy multiplied by a factor of thirty. 30. These numbers are accurate, I tell you, precise. TO THE DATE. To the decimal. Numbers. I always hated them and replacing them with letters to represent their changeable, infinite nature is a sin. A sin against god almighty, who taught Maths IV at a pre-school level in a small town near Sedona.
Prologue
But now, this time, I want to talk to you about entertainment. Why we find such solace in it, how it came to be, how I came to be such a bloody entertaining girl, enthralled by entertainment.
The horse’s head is meaty and none but fools do eat it
It all started the night that my sister brought two friends home from a party. She made them hot, sweet tea with a shot or four of bourbon and a slice of apple pie each. And I looked at them and I thought, wow, you’re so much prettier than me, your lives so much more interesting, even that one, the one that shares half my very own genes; the slightest alteration produces an entirely different creature, a completely different set of neuroses, an entirely different batch of insecurities, a completely different nose and head of hair.
They stifled giggles so as not to disturb my mother, who wasn’t sleeping as much as half-dead on Valium in the other room. And I thought, girls, girls I just don’t get you. We have roughly the same body parts and yet I ogle your tits and your mouths speak gibberish to me, much the same way ‘red-blooded American males’ are said to think. Girls, how come you’re so soft? so close? your eyes and lips and hair so shiny? I’m not supposed to touch your satiny skin and yet here you are, sleeping in my bed (two beds, four girls, infinite equations), reeking of alcohol, sweat and smoke underneath the thick layer of Hollywood II by Gina Seducé (pronounced seh-doo-say) you so tactfully bathed in earlier this evening. No man should have to endure this. No MAN.
I’m shitting you, nothing started that night. Put that thing away. It all started much earlier, much much much earlier, a long and longer and getting longest time ago. The End.
Epilogue
I am still sick of me. I am sicker than ever I have been sick. I am going to crawl under the motor home now and refuse to come when you call. To wait for death alone. Only to crawl back out a few weeks later, manky, smelling of piss, rail thin and glad to be alive.
25 August 2008 at 8:05 pm
Hey Ani!
I just read your “Notice” part - this is my first time here - and I already think you are awesome. Definitely keeping myself up to date with this blog :)
25 August 2008 at 8:41 pm
I read the last part (the part you put first) last because you told me do. I’m a compliant type of girl.
26 August 2008 at 10:28 am
I must confess that, unlike Clarissa, I read this in the wrong order. Then I read it in the right order, as requested. Then I read it again. And parts of it again. Let’s just say that I read it a lot …
26 August 2008 at 12:40 pm
May I offer you a virtual malteser?
26 August 2008 at 12:41 pm
For the record I did your opening paragraph last. I tend to cut and paste works I want to read carefully in Microsoft Word so that I can adjust the font and spacing to suit my failing eyesight.
This is really a sweet-and-sour piece, isn’t it? I am curious what you hoped to gain by asking your readers to exercise a modicum of self-control at the start. I’m tempted to think this is to place them in a similar position to the narrator of the piece with the object of her … desire I suspect is too strong a word … curiosity so close.
I do understand what the narrator is on about when looking at her sister. I felt something similar about mine: if I was a girl, I’d look like you; I believe that was the day, sitting on a bus in East Kilbride, that I realised we both took after our mother.
What is interesting is that I feel this piece is being directed toward the males in the audience, or am I reading ‘Put that thing away’ wrong? It is an ‘entertainment’ but one where you pull your punches.
The use of ‘motor home’ in the epilogue caught me off guard and changed my impression of these girls; suddenly I’m thinking “poor white trash” and I’m a bit out of my depth.
My wife tells me that Sedona is a nice enough place to live, certainly not what she’d associate with trailer-trash-country but I have no idea. This first/last paragraph is a great rant. It’s very much a before-and-after, isn’t it?
27 August 2008 at 7:10 pm
Zinzy: Hello and welcome.. and thank you kindly.
Clarissa: In that case, please give me 50 quid - no, a hundred. Now. Thank you.
AUW: Bet you say that to all the girls.
Drodbar: If you really think it’ll help?
Jim: I’ve never been to Sedona, but the name is significant all the same. Where I used to live in the states, trailer parks and ghettos were right up cozy next to the more affluent areas. I think it’s something to do with giving the appearance of equality. You can imagine it has exactly the opposite effect. These girls aren’t trailer trash, though, that’s too obvious. It seems a cat is narrating the story. Or something. ;)
I confess, I half expected you to get the reference in the title, though…
29 August 2008 at 4:11 am
Brilliant! I enjoyed it all, including the last last part.
30 August 2008 at 12:45 pm
I’m such a disappointment I know. So where’s it from?
31 August 2008 at 9:54 am
Just to put Jim out of his misery - I believe it’s said by Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. By Shakespeare; William Shakespeare. The guy with the moustache and the camp hair.
Do I win a prize? I would like one of those exclusive Down In Me tea-towels, please.
31 August 2008 at 2:10 pm
“Her vestal livery is but sick and green
And none but fools do wear it.”
I needed AUW to get it, and I’m not even sure it’s the right one. William S., Romeo & Juliet – anyway.
31 August 2008 at 3:26 pm
Your Wandering Mind: Good, I’m glad you did, this is entertainment, after all.
Jim Murdoch: Heheh. You are no such thing. With no other clues to go on, it would be near impossible (Mr Unreliable Show Off there is aware that I can quote some of Romeo’s parts so he had somewhat of a head start).
AUW: You big show off. :P
Lore: Your tea towel is in the mail!
[Mind you, now I can’t help but feel like a Shakespeare-referencing, pretentious twat.]