Darude - Sandstorm

After returning from "college" when i was 18, I fell into a routine of rebellion against my parents. Anything and everything i could think to do to break their rules. I had been at school, on my own, and had to come back home. I didn't want to be there, they didn't really want me there. But this was way before i had my respectful moment of enlightenment, before i really understood that they were just people who really just wanted to get some sleep and didn't want strangers in their house breaking shit and stealing stuff. so what did i do? stayed out to ungodly/unsafe hours for an 18/19 year old girl and made really poor decisions. Looking back on it now, I didn't really make any huge mistakes. I never drank at the time, maybe took a hit or two off a bong, but very rarely, definitely wasn't having sex because i was probably my biggest and most unattractive at the time... I was mostly running around seeking any sort of distraction from the burning and ever present "WHO AM I?" question (still looking, if anyone has any hints, btw,) and looking for anything to make sense in the midst of my recklessly propellant panic disorder.

In the midst of this 5 or 6 year haze, a haze i have thought so many times to document and have only succeeded in getting down a few blog and journal entries (because it is so bizarre, bewildering and painful to remember and mostly so far removed from who i am now,) I managed to find and retain some of the very best friends of my life. We would go to house parties and IHOPs and concerts. We would mostly drive around and listen to music and eat donuts and and get lost in doing absolutely nothing. Eventually everyone coupled off, found their direction in life and went back to school or got jobs, or just ... grew up. Don't mean to give a spoiler alert here, but hey, spoiler alert... I have done none of these things. I am still the one at the coffee shop all day, going to house parties and concerts and never settling on a philosophy, career, degree, routine or partner. Sometimes I feel like i dodged a bullet because I don't have to pay for day care or I'm not roped into a single career forever because that's all my education says i can do. I'm not stuck with the same one man I will resent and regret forever. Mostly I feel forgotten, overlooked, and pigeonholed... Despite all the drastic changes in my mind and body in the past few years I am almost certain I will forever be the fat girl who loved a little too hard and made terrible decisions. My wish and assumption is that there are still a handful of people who knew me then and have watched me grow and still love me, regardless. These people who adopted me and became my surrogate sisters and brothers, who I feel certain secretly watch my back and would take maybe not a bullet for me, but a punch or two.

One such person i met back in these dark days was actually someone I reconnected with from high school days... Lesley was a few years my junior and I remember her as the wild child across the gym in homeroom. Then she came to my senior prom with my friend Pete, and wound up at the after party that night. I just remember her fearlessness. I remember being jealous of it; I remember being catty and bitter about it... I remembered her for years after i graduated and then seemingly out of nowhere, she came back into my life.

Rob and I had gotten to a final bow (part I) of our relationship. I finally grew the tiniest set of balls and started granting myself a modicum of a social life. I had for a year or more, basically confined myself to the house hiding from life and from him. This, as i have learned, is pretty typical behavior of women in abusive relationships. This wasn't something he enforced in our dynamic, it was some warped decision i had made on my own. It had something to do with feeling like i was setting a good example... If i didn't go out, there was no reason he should. If i didn't drink, he shouldn't need to, etc... The guilt i carried with me for the next 10 or so years was the reason i never let myself drink. This is my theory, anyway. When I had finally gotten to the point where i was trying to stand up to him, is when things got the most destructive and violent. I had cowered in the corner for so long that when I finally stood up a little, was when shit really started hitting the fan... and the doors and the bed and the ceiling... I want to reiterate one fact however... Rob did not "keep me prisoner" or trap me into that relationship. It was my own stubborn need to "fix" him... I've honestly gone through enough therapy to understand everything that happened and have forgiven both him and myself, implicitly.

I honestly will never forget this day. and it's something I think about all the time, I have mentioned before how i am so good at appreciating miniature moments of simplicity... this was one such moment that I honestly don't think I've ever talked about it, and if i mentioned it to Lesley she probably wouldn't remember it... I had made an announcement to Rob that i was going out for the night. I just wanted to go to the coffee shop and write and read and be outside for a bit. I hadn't been in months, maybe a year or more... Rob, of course, had to come with me. (I even remember what I was wearing, a white v-neck undershirt of my father's.) I took a sketchbook and sat on the patio at Mission Valley while Rob sat in the car drinking beers, waiting for me; I had a time limit. Then, from nowhere, I look up and there is Lesley... Just as beautiful, friendly and open as she ever was. She and a handful of her friends sat with me and we chatted for a while and I was eventually invited to some house party or some night out with the crew. I agreed and we exchanged numbers. I went out with her and the people that would become my closest new friends. It was probably within the week that I finally stood up to Rob for the last time and things ended. I finally felt remembered, I felt like someone wanted me around. After 2 or more years of hiding in the bathroom and giving everything, including blood, to a person who was so enraptured with their own disease i almost ceased existing, it was such a relief to just... get outside.

I never told her this, and I don't know why and I am glad i get the chance to do so now...

Lesley, of all the people that I barely managed to hang onto throughout that time in my life, including my own family, for whatever reason, you were the one that got through to me. you were the one that gave me the strength to break free. you saved my life. I have ALWAYS credited you with that, and my love for you is so strong i don't even know how to tell you because even here, even now, 10 years later, I am fighting back tears... If you hadn't remembered me, taken a chance on talking to me; making me remember that i deserved friends and that i might still have a cool/fun person inside of me; i might still be in that place. I might have lost me completely.

There have been times I have backtracked. Times when the sorrow, pain and self-disappointment is so strong I find myself once again looking to terrible choices to numb it away or find an excuse to sit in denial and break promises. god knows why I do half of what I do, and I know I have spent my entire lifetime trying to figure out why, but you were the one person who has known me from the beginning of who i was, from that awkward goofy high school kid, to who i am now, and you have never stopped loving me or believing in the best of me. you have forgiven me for stupid mistakes and my spontaneous flakiness, you have encouraged me to take chances and dance like a wild woman. you introduced me to basically everyone i know now. you have the greatest heart and the biggest brain of almost anyone i think i know. I have so much respect for you, I sometimes feel like I want to hide things from you to keep from disappointing you, almost the way i do with my family, and for that i am sorry. I know we aren't close the way we used to be and time marches on, etc, etc... But i hope you know that I know how lucky i am to know you and have you in my life. you are my hero, you saved my life and i love you.

The reason i chose this song to represent Lesley is because I've never heard it and not thought about her, first of all. And also, I love the irony that when we became our closest, through the Raleigh Goth scene, there wasn't a Monday for many, many years we weren't at Legends and I would just love when she would convince Joey to play this song and I got to watch her do the swoop & twirl Goth dance to Darude! I remember very vividly the first time she played it for me in her creepy little basement apartment and her excitement of how much she liked it... so ironic and amazing!

The B52's - Love Shack

I am a gypsy. Although I have spent the majority of my life living inside the Beltline, I have moved every year for the past oh…. 6 or 7 years to a new apartment. A break back to my folks’ house once after a break-in at a house I once lived in off of Gorman Street.

This Gorman street house, although I didn’t make it there a full year, holds some of the deepest, darkest, most insane memories for me. Mostly these memories are centered on parties that reached epic proportions. This song, while played to death on most pop radio stations and holds a special place in the heart of everyone on earth for some reason or the other, makes me think of drag queens and Goths raging at 4 in the morning in that little green house.

What had happened was: I was living in Cary with my ex. We split up a year or two after we probably should have, and I decided to purge myself out of that apartment. (I basically pulled a Peaches.) I put out some feelers and much like every random hook-up I’ve ever received in my life; my mom’s mastery of word-of-mouth at her hair salon came through. I cannot tell you how many jobs, piano teachers, boys, apartments, cars, etc. I have gotten through my mom’s shop. A client of my mom’s, Ms. Hazel, had a house for rent. It was 3 bedrooms, old and busted, and only $500 a month. It took my dad and I a few Saturdays to paint, clean and fix it up to a livable condition (leveling the toilet, lying carpet, lining cabinets, you name it.) We finally got it move-in ready and filled that house with a bunch of adopted furniture and salvage from the NCSU lot.

I wasn’t there long before I realized I needed to have a housewarming party. I did. Not much longer, in the midst of a horrific depression, I realized I was broke, so I got a part time job. I wasn’t working the part time job long before I realized I needed to have yet another party, a New Year’s Eve party. Yes friends it’s THAT New Year’s Eve party. There are some people who have been in the scene long enough that *still* talk about this party. I used every connection in every scene and clique, getting the word spread, even handing out flyers at the store. 3 bands played. Every scrap of furniture or anything that wasn’t nailed down got shoved into a locked back room. I got a keg. I even bought chips and a veggie tray.
This is an excerpt from my long-lived and still kicking livejournal (began in 2000! Keepin’ it oldschool!) about the evening:

“…so alot of sh*t got f*cked up. one of my nicest turtles got broken. my coat rack got ripped off the wall. tons and tons and tons of beer spilt on the floor. assholes outside kept dropping their cigs on the ground on my front porch so theres like a million scorch marks in the outdoor carpet. im still not done cleaning up... not anywhere near done. im too tired.”

So many things happened that night. I met my first drag queen. Liquid acid was rampant, people still come up and tell me new stories about that night involving acid that I didn’t know anything about. (Talking to azalea bushes?) Lots of sexual deviances. Troops of hippies, Goths, punks, rock stars, frat guys, supermodels and pre-hipster-hipsters came through there. I managed to stay sober the entire night and the cops only came once to tell people to move their cars to the other side of the road. It went on until dawn and at one point there was a count of about 300 people inside and around the house.

My crowning achievement… my glory and hopefully my legacy in Raleigh will be this party and what happened after the bands played and the CD player got turned over to the PAs set up in the living room. The microphones were still on and ready for the loudest most ridiculous 3am karaoke jam in existence. After much Olive, Vengaboys and the like, the real “party” music started. I very vividly remember a goth friend of mine, one of what I would have at the time considered queen of the Über-goths, took the mic and sang this song at top volume while Babs, the S&M drag queen, danced with the hippies.

When I hear this song I think of New Year’s 2001.


Then I think about what happened after on Jan 21, 2001. (Made public for posterity. Please note I was 23 at the time. My head is hung in shame.) Needless to say, it wasn’t very much longer after that I moved out of that house.

(note: livejournal is now basically hidden to anyone not on my flist, so all you'll get to stalk of me there is a bunch of random youtube videos and other vague such things. enjoy!)