Director commentary, the vainglorious vanity press of video duet

Or is there one girl who does have friends but just can’t bear the thought that she doesn’t have as good a best friend as another? That to me is normal social pain.
- Dr. Michael Thompson, quoted in the New York Times

Misread and more said; little ghost in the body and one in the head. They're tearing up my high school but the streets around bring back the best (oh I was on my way downtown, or to John's, to see Alex, dressed for tonight at 6 this morning, my red bag, the year I turned red, and I fought Alison but we didn't wear shoes or panties and how I loved American history). Everyone I ask describes the opposite, the bellyache horror of cinderblock walls where each was his repressed and small and sad own precursor. I'm an ingrowth or an anachronism, alumnus unconsummated, and they never did send my diploma, so if you were to ask I can't prove it happened.

Jen consults the experts, John the horoscopes, and I turn to sleep-in sabotage. I couldn't feel one finger most of last week and there's something amiss between my throat and my ears; ghost in the body. Ghost in the head? I'm battling bad old nursed habits and all my false hopes for new seasons. This feeling like your muse has left you: you've only abandoned yourself. I think I could live if I could hear Clark Gable's voice in everything, corrosive and delicious. "You didn't do it because you thought about it," he'd say. "You thought about it and you were scared!"

Well, bowl me under, handsome misfits writin' the Internet. Us kids understand each other, and no other girl needs hairspray (and only hairspray) at this hour. I'd break out and walk downtown right now if I could. I was dreaming — boys, girls, dreaming, and now it breaks me up to say. I held utterly false beliefs and I was wronger than I've ever been in my life and I wound up broken-souled and loose-lipped on the thin side of the dividing line between a shrieking Southern nervous breakdown and my own reflection.

Leave me home to come down with the spell of my own sickness. I'm thinking I'll deck the next person who tries to tell me about the Belle & Sebastian show in October. Fuck you. I'm going to be dressed up and passed out, alone in a beautiful city I hate, dreaming of girls somewhere who must be doing the same.

Mary Jo, back with yourself
For company, keep telling yourself you're young
and it'll happen soon
- Belle & Sebastian, "Mary Jo"

You can plumb the depths on voice alone

What's your starting point again? You won't always be this happy. You can't get it so light, so full of tastes you forgot and foul with sugar and temptation. I can't get the good words out or the good deeds done.

I thought I wanted to see this life in chart and graph, tear it up looking for all the laziest inefficiencies. What couldn't I do getting up early enough? Now I wonder what bedevils the greatest, whether they own up to their worst, and who knows about it anyway. The grim and the successful, great editors, are you who want to be? and what's stopping you?

In here somewhere, after a hundred thousand hours of kilobit sound, I want to know if I get to start again. I'm in the mirror every time, gaping at the distortion, then biting in and going to lie down. Stop believing!, or start, or give up entirely. Who can I ask? What makes more happen every day, or must I keep making lists, switching through papers and pens, trying to put novelty in the check marks of self-responsibility? There's no end to the possibilities, and the less it feels like more.

Trying to make every day the last I'm dying, or just — to throw open my old cabinets, slip into all my collage supplies and cut on the edges and plan with my fingers and unscrew the glue and fuck the carpet! Presto, I'm making again, but I'm just tired thinking about it without someone saying, God, how I'd like to see what you used to be able to do. Je m'accuse, the conceited pest, and no one who doesn't already know ever tells me the truth.

Sometimes the image comes in so clear to me, and I can write it out or see it in color, one second only. Sometimes it's right on in a film, and the dream lasts until I have to do laundry, bleach out on the Internet, my hours bleeding through my fingers, washing and washing and washing my hands. I go back to take notes on the costumes, trying on everything in my hopeless search for a palette to stick to, but it's just loose knits, sensitive lighting, and the face of an ingénue I'll never be.

In the future I'd like to dress in the comforts of my academic discipline, to tour a facility I will devote myself within; to own a leather-trim weekender, to pack light; to write always like I can sometimes.

Love, your old feral beauty (January 17, apparently)

Girl right now, we are sitting in exact opposition to four-squared walls. I want you to seam-rip you out of your chambray, bottom to top, with the exactitude of a tailor and the trembling quick of an opening scene. Let me suck off your sick polish and stop combing your hair, we'll comma just be space a revision of the rules they set up to make these things more difficult.

I have the world through Venetian blinds and life under beveled glass, and you have the purest hair or the shyest looks. I miss having something up my sleeve for after-school or across the hall, and if you can't be anything then please please oh please you can. It is the shortest trip, I am the only girl, we will the most inseparable broken pieces.

I'm trying harder because I know you're not reading yet. (Hello, beautiful, I hope you know me sooner.) What I'm trying to say: I can't begin to understand why I'm here, except to tell you that this girl knew something, that this girl had the words, had the shoes, had something that got left behind. I'm telling myself every day, but I can't begin to see what it isn't anymore.

What's life like off the clock? Tick-ticking away in blinking ["trials of patience and the pure at heart"? I never finished the sentence, which is why I never published the post. But January is a great month for writing.] The real girl is making mixtapes for the minimum wage, sliding faders or writing or washing dishes at three in the morning, sitting in the bathroom wishing she were good enough for food or friends, androgyny or art.

"In the beginning there was the word, and after that no one else got a word in." — Erik on John