Introducing Avl Grit

Lookee here: http://ashevillegrit.com/left-unsaid-avl-grit-anniversary-party

May Day Poem

What year is it?
What time of year is it?
What a time we're having.

It's a beautiful night
and you cut a beautiful figure.

Eat my life
with the dainty spoon.
Make it last and last.

Items Found In Bag Last Opened September 29, 2013

1/3 roll of scotch tape

garnier fructis sky-hi volume mousse

depresser nozzle for garnier fructis sky-hi volume mousse

tea light candle, unlit

unused lavender soap in tissue paper wrapping

single imitation pearl earring, stud, backless

sinful colors professional nail polish in hot spot, dark blue shimmer

royal blue shimmer nail polish, origin unknown

empty visine bottle sans cap

organic peppermint essential oil

dale earnhardt jr racecar earrings purchased from Goodwill in Madison, CT, dangling

eyeliner pencil sharpener

covergirl natureluxe mousse mascara

rimmel glameyes day 2 night intense volume mascara

rimmel eyeliner pencil in pure white

jordana eyeliner pencil in espresso

jordana eyeliner pencil in dark brown

jordana eyeliner pencil in sapphire

burt's bees watermelon lip shimmer

burt's bees evening glow lip gloss

burt's bees super glossy nectar nude natural lip shine

lipliner pencil, soft pink, origin unknown

tiny green embroidered pouch to hold earrings, empty

first aid kit, tangle of earrings inside, single alcohol swab

retractable makeup brush stolen in college

six cvs brand 3 mg melatonin tablets in original bottle

single silver owl earring, dangling

blue four-inch plastic comb

bic ultra round stic grip ballpoint pen, black, capless

herbpharm kava liquid herbal extract in dropper bottle

rape whistle

skinny white hair elastic

the good witches' brew lavender spice bath salts

bach rescue remedy dropper bottle, empty

crest 3D white glamorous white travel toothpaste, empty

park ridge health 30 spf suncreen spray pen, procured at 5K

crest whitestrips, four, taken from parent's bathroom cabinet on trip home

peter thomas roth mega-rich body lotion and peter thomas roth mega-rich conditioner, two each, hotel-sized, gift from solo male traveler who visited the YMCA where I worked

single blue and silver dove earring, dangling

silver and pink lipstick case, sans lipstick

blue plastic foundation cap, sans foundation

round white thumbtack

orange clay buddha charm still in tiny ziplock bag, first gift from Roxy, came with card that said "sorry I walked in on you masturbating"

three quarters

one dime

single copper-colored hummingbird earring, stud

Missed Connections

One ritual that I truly cherish is reading the Missed Connections section of the Asheville Craigslist. I sometimes forget about it for stretches of time, but other days I check it as often my email. Reading the missed connections for any city is like sinking into a warm bath of human neuroses and longings--an invitation to soak in need, want, fear, desire. I find the mere fact of their existence soothing--this quirky human instinct for connection and the pitfalls of its execution, a reliance still on the written word to communicate for the heart what the mouth cannot. And the typos! The typos are golden. Consider this recent gem of a post title: Beautiful girl riding her yellow bike threw the arts district. Pure poetry! 

The posts range from puerile requests for head to heartfelt odes to platonic beauty to heartbroken screeds and bitter warnings about the perils of love. I love it all with abandon. I feel like an anthropologist of my own community, sometimes literally shaking my head at what I uncover, a map of these mountains coming into place in my head microcosmically, all urges, locations, sightings laid bare, artifice applied and artifice ignored. How could one not love the plaintive cry of "I will not be doing any medium today work so please do not ask in your email?" So very Asheville, that exasperating and charming combination of Southern good manners and hippie idiocy and the entitlement of the chronically underemployed artistic type.

My foray into the world of online flirting-and-running-and-posting began when I moved here four years ago--nearly 24, heartbroken and with no idea how green I really was, plunged into small city life after ten months in a tiny rural winter town, two months before that spent completely alone on the road. I slept in a lofted bed in a house under construction where my twin's boyfriend was staying. The August days held a strange unsinkable heat. I sweated through my clothes every afternoon, lifting hair heavy with humidity off my neck, paying a series of men my last shekels to repair my truck, staring into the haze of blue mountains that framed each scene, licking sweat off my lips, wondering what on earth had brought me here, what magic the heat was working through me, that strangers said hello to me on the sidewalk, in the hardware store, everywhere and anywhere there was someone asking me how I was who seemed to really care.

 I went for slow runs around the block where I was staying, memorizing street names, climbing over gravestones in the cemetery on the hill where I discovered O. Henry was buried (tale of the magi the ultimate missed connection, perhaps) and falling spectacularly on my face on one memorable occasion downtown, sidewalk grit ground into the heels of my hands and knees. Not even a day later I woke up next to my friend in that lofted bed--the night spent sitting on the kitchen floor, eating tortilla chips, swapping jokes about having ashtrays for hearts, drinking a brew of found alcohols combined with juice on sale at Whole Foods--and sat up directly in the path of the heavy wooden ceiling fan, was nearly knocked unconscious by the blow and began wailing in pain, warm blood gushing from my temple over my face and covering my tank top, my sister's boyfriend Kyle performing wilderness first aid on me in my underwear, blood-spattered and shaky in the bathroom. I wore a band-aid on my face and banged up knees and hands for my first two weeks in Asheville, meeting potential roommates and employers and new friends with what I hoped was a bashful and not battered air. 

I moved into my own place, had my first series of jobs, fell for the Asheville classic (seduced and dumped by bartender of grandiose ambition with a pretty-young-thing fetish and limited emotional capacities) and back out of it (see: "men who would not, could not, find the motivation to take action to heal their own wounds"), dabbled in therapy that wasn't sticking yet. It was in this state that I experienced my first missed connection. I went out with my sister Laura, my friend Louisa, and their farm worker friend Alex to a trivia night at a bar in West Asheville, the neighborhood I had just moved into. I was wearing a shirt from GoodWill my parents had bought me during their September birthday visit, a soft navy blue polo with the words Yu Ken Cut It in white lettering where a breast pocket would go. The conversation ranged from rent to debt to trivia team names to handjobs, hilarity combining with the slight hysteria of the recently moved and currently broke.  We walked down the warm, rainy street, saw not-yet-familiar faces. We ended the night at a place with ping-pong and foosball and such, buying the cheapest cans of beer they had and sitting on stools at the bar. I don't know whether it's a trick of my imagination or not--knowing as I do now what would come next--but I think I remember making eye contact with a dark-haired man on my way to the bathroom, crossing my legs and turning toward him again as I sat back down at the bar--a pleasant little frisson of nonverbal flirtation.

I woke up the next morning, by which of course I mean afternoon, and scrolled through the internet alone in my bed, summer light streaming in, shirtless with my skirt tugged down my hips in tangled sheets, a hungover reverie.  I've tried to find the original text but it is gone to the ravages of time, another lost piece of craigslist ephemera, a fitting symbol of the fleeting temporality of missed connections in general. It said something about my glasses, my thigh-high black socks, my dark hair. I don't remember the exact words, and I eventually lost that shirt, but I remember that night.

That's what I love about missed connections: however much they misfire, misspell, mistake attention for attraction or friendship for love, they also record. A moment in time recalled in solitude (near enough to the essence of poetry, I've heard)  followed by another moment, building on the first, of creation or discovery. In either role one's hands are hovering above a supposedly dehumanizing keyboard. But in each case there is a drawing out of yourself, either into your written expression or in the act of reading someone else's impression of you.

After that experience I started reading the section religiously. I looked for clues, talked and texted about it with friends, witnessed the sometimes beautiful, sometimes awful words of those unable to speak but full of feeling. Sagas unfolded, tales of betrayal, divorce, pregnancy, marriage--tremors of trouble and new love throughout--the trembling hope of  a first meeting, the pangs of consummation, the isolating wrench of lost or broken relationships. I looked for myself in the listings, scanning for mention of any recent outings, place names, key descriptors.  I looked for my friends, and exes, and coworkers, any identifying detail setting off a chain of conjecture. Sometimes there would be a lull, with only a few postings a day. Holidays were a sure sign that there would be a flurry of yearning, a rush of  people trying to make something happen with someone, anyone, even a stranger in line at the family dollar, serving you food in a restaurant, making their way across a parking lot with child in tow. I would have a romantic or erotically charged encounter with a stranger and peruse the section for hours or days afterward, hoping to see a note. I would fantasize about writing my own posts, although I never have. To the owner of the perfect red Nissan pick-up outside the yoga studio with flowers on the dash--I'm still looking for you.

If nothing else reading missed connections has proven to me that there is truly someone out there for everyone--in the most basic sense, others are looking at you, seeing you, attempting to make themselves known. There's no way of knowing who you might attract. These listings are evidence of nothing less than the sheer potential available to us. Sometimes this is not a pleasant revelation--there is humor and light and poetry in these pleas and also cruelty, violence, pain. When I'm feeling the worst about the world and the worst about Asheville I see the story played out in this online arena as proof that many people are ignorant, sexist, trapped, greedy, hungry for power. At other times I see the sheer joy of the people living in these mountains, drinking their coffee, selling their art, trying to survive--and taking a moment to compliment someone's smile, to let it be known that someone else's beauty or warmth or charm changed their life for the better, however briefly, to offer condolences to those still seeking love or those recently burdened with loss, to ask to be seen.

To see and understand that duality exists, to see and understand that multiplicity exists--this is the true education of the missed connections enthusiast, and it's why I can't tear myself away from them. They represent the unavoidable realities of the human condition. And Kevin, whoever he is, has a lot to answer for.

Twenty Minutes: January 13th

It takes twenty minutes to pick up the trash off your bedroom floor, start a load of laundry, make your bed, send an email to an ex-lover, put your shoes in the closet, screen a call asking you to donate blood, listen to Solomon Burke sing Cry to Me twice and Serena Ryder sing racing in the streets twice, put your books away, pick up all the half-empty coffee mugs and water glasses, turn some lights on and off, close the kitchen cabinets, hear the sound of your breath moist in your chest, take a gulp of coffee,  look at pictures of your friends three thousand miles away, know what tv they’re watching and music they’re listening to and food they’re eating. Just twenty minutes after salad and bacon for breakfast and a book of essays and a cold sit on a misty front porch. Warm bruises from a lover underneath ripped jeans, eggs baking in an oven, dreams hovering around the edges of consciousness still, speaking of war, speaking of floods, dreams violent and strategic, warnings of incalculable loss. The fact of the holes in these socks, the cold floor on my feet.  A problem worth fixing, in the mind of my lover, who gave me his cast-offs upon noticing the holes in these, who teased me about the manliness of their faded blackness, rough against smooth legs. Some fragility there and some shuddering of ego.  What can be found in the fact of these socks, in my obstreperousness in not replacing them--some sense of  poverty cheerfully accepted or duty abnegated? My casual shrug when he asks me why I’m wearing socks with holes in them--these are my socks, I said. I crave his noticing and his delivery of it has this flip side, his attention, like the marks on my skin, can be measured less in good or bad than by a quality of wholeness. He asks me if I've washed my hands when I eat leftover chicken from the fridge with my fingers, and my body stiffens in offense. But he comes over, asks me what is wrong, makes amends for hurt feelings, for colliding world views. Sometimes he dreams about tidal waves and this morning I read about Mars moving into Pisces, rigid structures of force encountering primal flow. I don’t think about washing my hands in that way, don’t or won’t or can’t replace my broken things, don’t care if the period stains aren't totally washed out of my jeans, if my shoes are muddy. I prefer the total effect, lipstick smeared across my freckles into a blush, the wet corners of my mouth, the stretch of skin and bone and muscle between my shirt and my hips, the intent and the artifice of shaved legs, perfume, lingerie. “I like this, but I don’t get the point of it,” he comments on the sheer nude bra, a scrap of purposeless lace. “That is the point.” I say.

I Heart The Nineties

I woke on Thursday morning with a shiny orange cheetah-printed slap bracelet on my wrist, a Lisa Frank sticker of some puppies in a hot air balloon decorating my phone, and a mild case of craft beer flavored ennui. This state of affairs was courtesy of a conscription into attending one of a series of beer-and-food-tasting shows that are staged periodically at the brewery where I work. The theme was the 90's, my date was my twin sister, I had lots of eyeliner in my bag but no pen.

I had agreed to attend and write about the show in a paroxysm of holiday cheer back in December and then promptly forgotten all about it. When the arrangement finally resurfaced in my consciousness a few weeks later, it was attended by a host of prickly but-i-don't-wanna feelings: a fear of attention, a fear of work and social life colliding, urges to demur, urges to run. Organized fun is just not my jam--bowling, party games, icebreakers--all inspire the same middle-school type anxiety in me, a fundamental aversion to participation that I have learned to temper through avoidance, sarcasm, and looking better than I feel. But I love getting dressed up and Going To Things, and I love amateur theater, and I love beer and food, so I managed to keep a fairly positive spin on what parts of me feared was going to be an ordeal.

I spent the afternoon drinking tea and listening to music with my sister, half-heartedly folding laundry, trying to choose an outfit, and fielding a series of increasingly confusing text messages about if I would be needed to bus tables earlier in the evening. My twin and I both agreed that a philosophical approach was best. "It will be fine" and "whatever happens, happens" were our mantras as we bundled up, chose our lipstick colors, complimented each other's outfits, and drove through the darkening streets downtown.

As reliable as my particular brand of social anxiety is, so too is the truth that once I'm actually doing the feared activity, it's not so bad. Once I was inside, cheerfully greeted by my coworkers, eating deeply of the pull-and-peel twizzlers that decorated each table, I felt much better. The so-co and beer shooters upon our entrance didn't hurt, and being given a little gift from my lovely co-worker Rachel--a strawberry shaped hairpin--warmed my cynical heart. My sister and I were ushered to the "media table" that had been set up for us. As this blog is mostly about my obsession with myself, I was a little taken aback at being designated as press. I called upon the powers of imagination that have blessed me since childhood and pretended I was a fancy lady reporter covering a colorful local event, perhaps returning home to a well-appointed loft of some sort to work on my story. The vision gave me the courage to sit up straight, my sister provided a mini-notebook, a pen appeared courtesy of my coworker/comedienne/director of the show Kelli, and I was set.

The show was comprised of skits based on seven iconic nineties movies--the trailer for each projected on the screen in front of us, themed beer and food delivered as each movie was presented, and the lulls punctuated by a well-curated playlist of nineties hits. The actors mingled in between the tables as we readied ourselves for the first skit--Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I held my breath, waiting for second-hand embarrassment to spike. Mini-pizzas were delivered to the table and devoured and to my delight no mortification was forthcoming. The skits were funny and well-written, the actors enthusiastic and game, the pop cultural references on-point. A large part of the success was the trappings of perfect 90's nostalgia incorporated in the experience--from gak on the tables and those skate-inspired S doodles on the menus, to thumb wars and iconic lines--draw me like one of your french girls--woven into each sketch.

My sister and I played hangman with our star table companion of the night, a woman named Katie who was researching for her role as director of a similar (if less edgy) revue. We chatted about being kids of the eighties and nineties, compared notes on correct gak deployment, and sang along with Pink wanting real love.  We agreed on the infuriating quality of the song that goes "This is the story of a girl/who cried a river that drowned the whole world/And while she looked so sad in photographs/I absolutely love her when she smiles." Clearly it should be "laughed."

 During the Wayne's World sketch,  one of the actors (Chase McNeill, incidentally an old coworker of mine at the Y and one of the most cheerful persons I have met to date) drawled to my sister, "We've got a bit of a babe on our hands here. A double babe! Baberasaurus! Babraham Lincoln! Babia Majora!"  Another favorite was a line in the Forrest Gump sketch--a movie I have always secretly loathed for its sheer sentimental hubris-- in which Forrest is taken to task with the words "just because you're stupid doesn't mean you're forgiven." Amen.

I particularly appreciated the perfect marriage of topicality with nostalgia when Kelli sent up the movie Frozen by belting "The cold never bothered me anyway" during the sketch for Titanic. I drank from Katie and Laura's beers--allergies on one hand and designated driving on the other--and floated out the door in a haze of high-gravity hilarity with the words of the Dude echoing in my head: "That's just like, your opinion, man."

That's all we writer types ever really have to offer--our opinions--and the hope that others might feel the same way we do, whether about the ridiculousness of a fight club or the silly eroticism of that hand-print-leaving climax in Titanic. We no longer live in a time when Kate Winslet's bared breasts have the power to shock or Brad Pitt's brand of anti-consumerist masculinity feels refreshing. The glow of the iphones of the photographer and her beau seated next to us were a testament in themselves to the attention-span deficit of our current decade and the cynicism such constant access to entertainment inspires. It was nice, to be taken back in time for a night. To remember what it felt like to write a note and pass it, to record a song onto a cassette because that was the only way to hear it as many times as you wanted, to slap a bracelet on your wrist with a satisfying smack. We went out into the cold, pilfered twizzlers in our pockets, heading for home and the modern comforts of instantly streaming television. Friends, in case you were wondering.  





Thank you to Kelli Cayman Cozlin for her tireless work on the Beer Dinner Series. More here: Sticky-Note Productions and a shout-out to our actors: Chase McNeill, Allan Law, and Rigal Pawlak. Y'all rocked it out.

Ballad of the Hothouse Flower

"Mrs. Witterly is of a very excitable nature, very delicate, very fragile, a hothouse plant." -Nicholas Nickelby

Or, seasonal habits of the highly sensitive. I sometimes refer to myself as a hothouse flower. In unkinder terms: fussy, a whiner. There's a part of me that needs coddling, thrives under optimal conditions of heat and light, is sensitive in the extreme to its likes and dislikes, no matter how big or small. I need exact directions, a little handholding, an extra sweater, a handkerchief to sniffle into, the right kind of pants, information about the immediate future--when do we get to go home? will there be a place to seat? who is going to be there?

 Having no other option in the interest of my sanity, I've come to think of these predilections toward comfort as essentially positive traits, with positive outcomes. I fancy that there is a grace to my delicacy, the noble sheen of a wish for a better, more pleasant life in my constant need to monitor. If I'm paying attention in the right ways,  these tendencies create more ease and creativity in managing my day-to-day life. My attunement to sensory details and atmospheric data make me a valuable employee, a kickass hostess, and a pretty good friend.

And yet. A hothouse flower has connotations of weakness, a reliance on others to supply the caretaking, a fundamental inability to endure the endless barrages of unforgiving nature. And these hothouse parts of me, with their proclivity for sunlight, warmth, freedom of movement, absolute tenderness, endless encouragement, loathe and fear nothing quite so much as the coming of winter.

I have come to understand that I am a creature best suited to luxuriate in sunlight.  Cold weather descends and I fold like a house of cards. Gone the long summer walks, gone the sundresses and shorts and breezy tees of spring, gone the crisp novelty of fall.  Frost kills and I crumble, right around this time every year. My bravery is no longer aided by the magic of the holidays, the spiritual peaks and valleys of Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the darkest nights of the year, the most poignant.

It's the second week of January and my predominant thought now is that winter sucks. I"m dehydrated, sore, tired, snotty. I don't know what to do with my hair. Getting dressed has become nothing short of a heartbreaking, tedious chore.  Too many layers involved, too much scratchiness, stuffiness, not-quite-rightness. Static electricity lurks everywhere with its pointless, non-warming energy. I could write a separate essay on the torture device known as a winter coat. My resolutions are tried and tempted, it's cold as fuck but with no snow to speak of, everyone's relationship is falling apart under the sudden cease of holiday pressure and before the insidious crawl of February toward Valentines' day. My skin is somehow dry and breaking out at the same time, there's stubble poking through my tights, my sweatpants need to be washed every two days because I sweat through them in the middle of the sleepless night. Finding matching socks is a trek across the icy landscape of living room and kitchen. In short,  everything feels like a trial. Everyone is pissing me off, including myself. The news is even more horrible than usual. I'm restless and closed in, craving space, but doing much of anything feels like too much.

 I almost cried today because I couldn't make my braids look like they do on Game of Thrones. My health insurance bill was four times what it was in December and I don't know why and I need to call people and email things to fix it and I wailed for an hour and a half after realizing this. I'm an idiot child struggling through this life sometimes, doing way less than my best on most days and some days just surviving. And maybe doing that requires some strength that is integral to the hothouse flower. Some hardiness that is fueled, not thwarted, by this need for creature comforts. I take comfort in this sense of unconventional strength.

 A hothouse flower of a different color mused to me last night, in light of Hebdo, in light of every dark and brutal and chaotic thing, in light of this narrowing of the year to a pinpoint--on the essential meaninglessness of life. I was only partly joking when I offered hedonism as a possible answer to this riddle, that our only purpose, really, and the only meaning, is to seek what brings us pleasure. There is a part of me that absolutely believes that this way lies salvation. Filling your life with what is most beautiful and stimulating to you is a crucial function of a healthier life more free of needless suffering. The animal warmth of my body, my socked feet lying on his moving chest, the hum of a house in winter, time softly ticking from eleven to midnight. And I'll take that over meaninglessness any day, but hedonism has its limits.

The challenge, for any hothouse flower, is to learn how to water and sun and feed yourself--for me that means finding ways to have lots of leafy greens, exercise, orgasms, dancing, and pleasure even in the dead of winter. It means striving for those things that give me the best chance, whatever they are, from vitamin d supplements to a space heater. I sat in the sauna at the Y today, finally experiencing the miracle of sweat, breathing in and out, drinking water out of jar I'd found half-frozen in my borrowed car. For just these things I felt deeply grateful, and of course once I started I thought of many more. My blessings are incalculable. In the locker room two women started talking about their hair together, swapping ways to wear it while undergoing cancer treatments and beyond them. It was a brief, warm interaction. One woman recounted her first shortest ever cut, visiting Germany in 1989, the year the Berlin wall came down, how she walked out in the street after her friend cut her hair, how she felt the air on her scalp, how she caught sight of herself in a store window and was transfixed, not recognizing herself.

Suddenly my braids seemed less important, this clutch that winter has on my hot little heart less strangling. It is ok not to know what to do with your hair, your room, your clothes, your life. It's ok not to know what to study or who to date or how to live. It's ok just to sit, and pay attention to what your stupid little magical body needs and just try to answer that need. Sometimes that's really the only thing you can do. Put on another goddamn coat already and get ready to grow.