Hoppipolla

September 3 2008.

Anna says, "DUDE. Let’s be crackheads! Our lives would be so fun. Wait…no, they wouldn’t."

The second week of January in Philadelphia was full of cold. On that Sunday, my favorite addict was kicked out of our safe haven shelter for refusing to take a shower because it reminded him of prison. I spent the next few days looking out for him on the usual side-streets, the cardboard piles over gutters, but no one had seen him, a terrible sign. The Wednesday before that Sunday, I spent four long hours in the hospital holding up another man, John, who, full of opiates and Xanax, kept passing out and falling out of the waiting room chair. His hand was broken in six places and he had arrived at the haven that morning without three teeth and the left side of his face smashed in, murmuring about conspiracies. Near the end of summer, I was turning out of the train station on my way to Chinatown with a couple friends, when a man approached us with an empty coffee cup. “Can you spare a quarter? Lost my train ticket.” I looked up, under the man’s hat, and he recognized me.
“Claire! How you doing, babygirl? Gonna visit us sometime soon?”

I’ve had a lot of people ask me something like: But isn’t there something awful and desperate and funny-but-sad, about sitting on the phone with Social Security for an hour, calling on behalf of the crazy homeless man next to you, who periodically extends the already painful conversation by grabbing the phone and telling the underpaid operator racist jokes?
The answer is yes. Of course. But we don't want to save the world because it's fun.

EDIT: Loneliness- That Is What We Are Selling Today.

Writing YOU FAIL AS A WRITER on post-its and hanging them about my room at home and sleepaway camp didn’t stir me to creation in the way I hoped it would.

If only I fell for girls who weren’t in the midst of mini heartbreak. Before I came back here, Nicole asked why I couldn’t find any uncomplicated girls- I think it has something to do with forgetting the future exists, and the feeling of rushing hand-in-hand towards some disaster, having your heart all caught up in laughter and anxiety and some realization but dismissal of horror. Before I came back here, Nicole took Coletta and me to a gay club in the city: it was full of sweaty young people, moving and writhing and slipping and pounding in some crazy fervor- this desperate dance.

Everyone was beautiful and everyone had something to prove.