Sunny Delite, My Stripper Name

Sitting in the Starbucks writing poems and blogging and crying under my sunglasses. Listening to a lot of Badfinger. What a cliche!

The environment is filled with references to Bhutto and the ash and confetti of contradictions blown up by the explosion.

I'm working on a series that re-envisions movies on Lifetime television, themselves just variations on the dry and abrasive tale of Mrs. Emma B, with some water, good-for-you vitamins, and chemicals to enhance mouthfeel added, so it ends up like reconstituted orange juice. Mom, thanks for the Sunny D! So even our escape is rooted in a man's vision. Many have tossed off the comment that Lifetime movies are all based on the Brontes. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Lifetime is neither so inventive nor so class-conscious. I fucking love Charlotte Bronte.

So I'm attempting to further reconstitute an orange drink product. Mix liberally with vodka and lace with ecstasy.

I should set a rule for myself like the one for my daughter, where no new toys come into the house until we give away some old ones. In this case, it would be no new poems for me unless I send out old ones. But writing them is interesting and sending them out is fraught and ultimately humiliating. What a laugh on me, another of many right now! I'm the one who can't stand it when people pull out that fucking "it's the journey not the destination" shit. It doesn't mean a thing to me unless there's a reader. So here I am writing like mad and no readers, none, and it keeps happening, and I actually said not one minute ago that it's more enjoyable this way. Oh, the sexual parallel is obvious, but I'll have the grace not to make it.

Just another in a long sequence of humiliations. You get so many once you hit 40 as a woman, you almost can glide past the ones that bump you every day--but for me to seek out more, by trying to reach out in so many directions, it's a little sick if I stop to think about it. Badfinger! Jesus!

So I'll just wallow here, and quote myself. It's from the novel (thriller) I'm working on. The woman still has her babyweight and is trying to figure out how to tail someone:

"She remembered how in movies, a woman trying to escape pursuit would use wigs, scarves, sunglasses, dye her hair over and over. Didn't they realize that all you had to do was put on 15 pounds, and you'd be invisible? She was free to go anywhere; no one would remember her from one moment to the next."