It Wasn't Until Then

By Meredith Rivlin

It wasn't until i left your house that i felt the glass.

It wasn't until i left your house and decided to take the long way home,

past the painted water and mountains, on one of the sunny, earth-scented, spring days that could still be counted on one hand,

with an empty stomach because we didn't know if we should

eat breakfast or lunch

or stay in bed sleeping and fucking until the next morning.

It wasn't until then that i felt the glass.

It was sharper than a pebble in my shoe,

and was certainly not round.

It wasn't irritating like a pebble was, making you kick it

to the front of your shoe and keep going, or yelling

"wait up!" to your friends as they walked ahead.

Instead it was a sharp pain in my heel,

so painful that i walked on the toes of my left foot

until i got to a bench where i sat down and took off my shoe

and carefully peeled off my sock.

It wasn't until then that i saw the glass.

Well, i really saw the blood first,

where the glass had entered,

punctured through the calloused skin of my heel.

i nervously picked at it, desperate to get it out immediately

but thinking the worst:

It was lodged in deep;

it had broken into tiny pieces inside my body

i would need surgery;

sterilization;

this was an omen for more pain to come from you.

it wasn't until then that i wondered what had happened

to cause glass to be on my side of the bed, not your side,

where some of my clothes lay in a bundle,

a piece of glass sneaking its way into my sock.

i tried not to imagine you with someone else where i just

pretended to sleep while i really

looked at the spines on your bookshelf.

i didn't want to picture you with someone else,

having such wild sex that you broke glass and didn't even stop

to clean it up.
(I later learned that your landlord broke a bottle when repairing your refrigerator
and that you must not have swept it all up.)

It wasn't until then that i questioned whether i liked you

because of your hair and vulnerability

or because i was nervous that my number of sexual partners

could now be rounded up.

I grabbed the tiny point that hadn't been impacted

completely in my foot yet.

I scraped the skin around it in desperation,

close to panic.

I looked around to see joggers in spandex,

shaded people walking leashed dogs,

families on vacation.

How can they go on walking

when there is pain and metaphor happening!

It wasn't until i took a deep breath and pulled hard

at what had caused such pain

while Aesop's Fables ran through my head:

lions and mice and thorns,

unexpected friends coming

of stereotypical enemies.

It wasn't until then that i removed the glass.

I pulled out the triangular shard,

now tinted red

and a drop of blood

formed on my once impermeable heel.

But only one drop.

Love [is] the Drug

Walking to work this morning, actually walking to buy coffee from the cute new barista at Speeder and Earl's, I saw/smelled 3 people getting high on their ways to work. Got me thinking about getting numb before work to make it not as awful.
Maybe if you can't feel anything while you're entering data or doing things at your firm that people at firms do, maybe then it doesn't feel like a waste or a severe compromise.

Or maybe you only feel truly creative when you're high and then you can come up with really good names for files and titles for spreadsheets, meanwhile sketching trippy patterns and phrases that you will later transfer to a canvas and your journal. And then maybe you don't feel bound to anything; you feel free and light and part of the earth and the trees from where the paper in your printer came.

Maybe you've been smoking since you were a freshman in high school, or even in 8th grade, and now you can't function without weed; it feels more like you're on drugs when you're off them. You like the way your head feels and the way that music sounds and the culture and the experiences that you can't always remember.

And you forgot your lighter at home because you weren't stoned first, or else you would have remembered, so you pack your swirly-colored, hand-blown glass piece and use the matches you keep in your car for cases like this. And while you're stuck in traffic and listening to talk radio and news headlines, experiencing the truly tragic on your 15 minute ride to work, you strike the match and burn your essential green and inhale and hold the smoke in your lungs long enough to make you cough--that's the really good high--and now you're ready for work. Ready like having done your hair. Ready like having packed a 32 ounce thermos of strong Starbuck's coffee with low-fat half-and-half. Ready like having masturbated in the shower in the morning. Ready like having shaved your face. Ready like having put on lipstick and then having put the tube in your purse for touch-ups during the day. And you're ready to hold this vestige, this secret from coworkers, which would surely have you on the streets with little chance of being hired anywhere if anyone found out. And God knows, you don't want to end up like people like that.

local celebrity

Study abroad with this (alt) broad (@ minute 3:40)

Hotties of the Recession, Part Deux

Another Monday and the economy continues to spiral into oblivion and 50% off DVDs at Circuit City (Paul Blart: Mall Cop, anyone?). The silver lining of all this economic doomsday is Caleb Moore and Kyle Sevens, this week's Hotties of the Recession.

Caleb and Kyle live in Baltimore, the Philadelphia of Maryland, and are currently unemployed. Caleb was laid off from a position as a graphic designer (oooh!) and Kyle was laid off from his job as a woodwright's apprentice (huh?).

Pictured with their intricately placed owl lamp* and guitar, these dudes look sad. Sure, they have a very nice apartment, but poor Kyle admits to having taken walks to the ATM even when he didn't need cash. Caleb, with the decidedly cooler name and interesting glasses, has been taking his unemployment in stride; he is setting up a recording studio in their apartment because he's in a band, naturally. But don't cry for Kyle!: he's teaching himself to silkscreen.

Surely, Caleb and Kyle's interesting alternative hobbies will be enough to get these dudes laid for the remainder of the recession.

*This "hip" owl lamp was mostly likely purchased for $39.95 at Urban Outfitters. In these economic times, Caleb and Kyle will need to learn to be more thrifty. Also, boys, lamps go on tables, not the floor.


Faces of the Recession

Hotties of the Recession

In these economic times, The Revolution Will Be will be (ha!) presenting a new weekly installation called Hotties of the Recession. These men and women women are unemployed and sexy. You can most likely find them Mon-Sun. at your local bar, knocking back PBRs, quite unironically. They need comfort and a job too, probably.

This week we have Blake Sims from Austin, Texas. Blake was recently laid off from his job as an offset printing technician. I'm not exactly sure what that means, but it looks like the that sticky bar stool next to him is empty.

[Great Shots from Tough Times]
http://facesoftherecession.blogspot.com/

From "The Bell Jar"

do suicidal artists know something we don't?






"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
Sylvia Plath