Little Weirds

by Jenny Slate

  I have many beats at once. I have the beats of that bloody, smooth physical heart. I also rock with the beats of colors and shapes. I rumble with the beats of the private language of those two separate hearts, the language that they have created between them. You could understand, then, why it’s so hard for me to keep still, how even when I am still, I am bopping microscopically.

  There cannot, there certainly may not, be one more man, not even one more man for a night, not one more who comes in and doesn’t feel in himself what I am about, there cannot be one more person who absentmindedly swats at my little triangles and squares as they swim and bob in the air. There may not be one more man who turns his own face away in fear and ignorance from the colors that make him angry because I can see them and he cannot.

  I am the real Color-Spirit.

  I love spicy food and pints of beer. I like the beach. I like dogs. I don’t like rock climbing or other sports that seem like you do them in Colorado. I hate it when people judge other people about being athletic. Computers are not good. I like to get joyfully shitfaced with close friends at least once every month. I don’t care much for air-conditioning. A bathrobe is a wonderful present, so is jam, so are flowers.

  Who will meet me at once in all of my worlds and pump with all of my hearts? To have to kill even one of my hearts to match up with you is simply not worth it to me, after all that has happened. Hit me up if you feel me!

  Version 2: Jenny?

  Mammal, Awake, America, Universe

  About Me:

  Whoops!

  I am a plant and I have a fragile green stem and my flower is still in the pod on the top of the stalk, unopened, when the dawn strolls in over the horizon. My blossom spreads out during the day and it goes into the pod at night and then it goes again the next day and all of the days.

  I am a young woman and I am also a spirit of many translucent tones and classic forms of ferns. I am so delicate, so delicate that I am the one the ghosts know not to spook. I don’t need the shock of the apparition of an actual ghost in order to believe in the other worlds. I am in all of them and I know where my deepest home is. It is a dimension populated by plants and all of the colors that you can know, and the gods are called Ferns of Faith and I am very religious about them. I’m from there. How afraid are you of this? Or do you want more?

  I have my whole stem and this is what I am and what it is. I am the tender stem. Who is the sun who will return every day just to make sure I open up, and who will give me my own dark evening to close and just be within?

  I like the sound of bugs talking to each other outside in the night.

  I think the air smells best when all of the tree smells get swirled up by a storm. Big old trees on my street listen to me and watch me in a nice way like I am their niece.

  The plants and flowers in my window boxes just space out and sigh. I’d estimate that I have spent about forty-five percent of my lifetime spacing out. What do you do?

  Okay. End?

  Version 3: Me

  Morning, House, Now

  About Me:

  I am supposed to be touched. I can’t wait to find the person who will come into the kitchen just to smell my neck and get behind me and hug me and breathe me in and make me turn around and make me kiss his face and put my hands in his hair even with my soapy dishwater drips. I am a lovely woman. Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?

  I make it very obvious what the right way to treat me is. If you don’t think it’s important to hold hands and you are lukewarm about snuggling, don’t bother sniffing around my stall.

  It would be great if you are not weird in one way or another about what your mother did or how you feel about your penis but I know that is a lot to ask.

  Personality types not preferred: Know-it-alls, meanies, grumps, vultures, spoileds, piggies, and especially bullies.

  Preferred: Lovebugs, creatures, boo-boos, rigorous thinkers, wild-hearts, gentle-minds, pets.

  This exercise is actually too sad to do.

  All I want to do is disappear deeply into my own thing and you can decide whether or not to join but I’m pretty much going to enter my own vortex.

  But are you there? Please come close enough so that I can see you, and then I will try to do the rest for both of us, because I have not learned my lesson yet and do not possess the faith to believe in the partner who does his side of the thing. But I would love it if you would, because that would be dreamy and then I would also have that faith.

  I will give you every single treat.

  Letter: Dreams

  Dear Ms. Slate,

  It has come to our attention that you recently created a dream in which you were waiting in line for a sandwich, and that this was the whole dream.

  As if that is not enough, there is a concerning report that your subconscious also produced a tensionless seven-hour dream about watching an airplane land during the day and that, again, this was all that happened. There was not even a sunset or a sense of where the plane was landing, and apparently the message of the dream was, Nothing cared that nothing cared.

  Really, Ms. Slate, this is starting to feel difficult.

  To be clear, nobody is asking for you to go back to Dracula disguises himself as a Frog and waits at the end of the bed for you and only you, and obviously you go right up to “Frog-Dracula” because “frogs indoors who don’t run away and frogs who only want to be friends and sit at the edge of the bed are a real stroke of luck,” but then right when you get to the Frog he turns back into Dracula and you are fooled into being killed by him, and he is laughing at you because he tricked you, and just before you die, you realize that you hate the idea of being tricked more than you actually hate the idea of dying, and you also realize that you are afraid of “getting yourself sucked out of yourself” by a man who is dressed in a tuxedo, which is usually an outfit for a classy man at a fancy party, but really Dracula is just vain and thirsty and there is no party and he is nothing but a bitchy, life-drinking, life-draining liar.

  There is no conversation internally to suggest that we go that route again.

  Nor are we inclined to revisit You are an archeologist and you are wearing all khaki including a khaki explorer-hat thing and bad long shorts with crotch puff, and you are at a flea market/book fair that has been set up in a school gym in England in 1970, and you stumble upon an artifact from the “way before past,” and this artifact is a pencil sketch of a staring woman, and then you look closely and realize that it is you, like, it’s your soul, and the message is vague but far from positive about your lifetime(s), and there is a sourness or curse regarding romantic stuff and the curse is attached to your interlife spirit, and the picture sends something that feels like “the energy of bile but not actual barf” from the picture up to your terror-frozen face and gaping mouth, and you wake up so rigid with fear that your body feels like a bunch of found objects that are the following: parts of a broken rocking chair, old spoons, and chains from the swings on swing sets.

  I think we can all agree that if that’s our only other option, then we should just shut this whole thing down.

  And to be totally frank, we can’t even find the language to approach You go into the first-class section of an airplane and a man who represents an amalgamation of all your exes is somewhere on the plane, and you do not have a ticket for first class, and you find that the seats in first class are not seats but normal-sized brown plastic beds with white sheets, and you do not have a ticket but you still get in one of the beds and pull the covers up and hold the top of the covers between your teeth and you feel the linen in your mouth, drying up the parts of the mouth that it touches so that it would be too painful to speak, and then you casually and completely go to the bathroom in the bed, you poop in the bed with a neutral attitude while lying flat on your back with a dry, linen-stuffed mouth. We can’t, as they say, dignify that dream with a response.

  While we’re not quite at that point of ending your dream-life experience, we do need
to have an honest discussion about this upsetting situation. The laziness and deeply boring nature of the waiting in line for sandwich dream is simply not something that we can tolerate, and it would do us all a disservice to sweep it under the rug. The airplane landing in day dream is discouraging, especially after all we’ve been through. The airplane first-class movement dream—as it has been labelled internally—has understandably caused great alarm and sadness.

  Please come in and see us at your earliest convenience so that we can dialogue about this.

  Sincerely,

  The Committee for Evening Experiences

  PS: Speaking of “sweeping things under the rug,” I don’t think you’d hear even a peep of objection if we were to have a repeat of Rug turns into carpet of flowers that are alive and you can wear the whole thing as a shawl and new blooms keep popping even as you walk casually through a cocktail party at the house of a nice older woman who supports your work. There have also been numerous requests for You are in the passenger seat of a van, sitting on the lap of a real dog who is the size of and style of Barkley from Sesame Street, and he is sitting like a person and you are on his lap and he is hugging you because he loves you and you are sharing a seatbelt and it is the time of year that is the seasonal bridge between spring and summer.

  Trench-Times/Dream Dog

  I know that thing, that thing of waking up but it’s all tinted gray and your blood is paste and your heart is a boring rock. I know that thing that has no voice but sucks the sound out, wasting it, not using it, leaving you either pale or red-faced. I know the gray thing.

  There were the big problems: One man was gone from my life just about the time that another man pig-snorted his way into the presidency. And that made all of the littler problems much harder to face. I was downtrodden and, to my surprise, felt that having a good attitude was no longer worth it. I could not identify what was worthy and what was not. I didn’t know how or why to give myself small pleasures. Something would happen like I wouldn’t get a part in a film or I would cancel a show due to stage fright and I would just stay down at the bottom of the experience. I used to float up. Now I was just flipping out, flopping down.

  For a while I would have trench-times when everything felt like blank paper and I couldn’t feel anyone’s heart pointed even in my direction, let alone anyone loving me or wanting me to be around. Very boring, very lonely, very tired, again. It was hard to feel anything, except I am not one of the creatures who will experience anything precious. Trench-times were shallow, heavy, and mean. I couldn’t get into the actual morning because I was stuck underneath the weight of my days.

  One night I had a dream that I was sitting on the lap of a giant dog. We were in the front seat of a van and the window was open and the weather was fair. The dog was hugging me with great squeezes and we were sharing a seatbelt.

  When I woke up I was inclined to throw away my joy because it is not real but then something in me jumped from deep below where I must have cast it down. I was always yelling Get down! to my resilience when I was in my trench-times. But the thing did not get down—in fact, it came up and out, blazing. This thing inside of me, encouraged by the dream of the nice good dog, yelled out, Your feelings of joy are not fake if you are having them! You are allowed to feel joy about sitting on the lap of a dog in a dream, and taking a ride in a van with open windows and sharing a seatbelt. God dammit, this is a gift from your fucking soul! Self-generate, don’t you see? Break the trap break the trap break the trap leave the trench! Activate the bomb in yourself and bust out, trick yourself out of that trench in any way you can!

  I eventually got out of the bed, and there I was. I was out of the bed. I just got right out of the bed even though there was nothing to do and I was still very tired. My chest was laced through with an ever-tightening web of anxiety that was also reaching up into my throat and pressing my mouth down into a frown shape. I felt that nobody should see this posture of emotional twisting, this sour-seeming palsy, including myself. I could not even look at myself.

  The only thing left was the number zero.

  I spoke to myself in the voice of the giant dog from the dream.

  Open a window up for yourself.

  I found a window that opened.

  There you are, do you know what you are doing? You are finding the new air for yourself. What a useful, good action to take. You are a person who got up and found the air. Take at least ten breaths. It’s a fact that this is the main thing that you need to do to stay alive, breathing, and now it is a treat. Look at you! You have done what the earliest geniuses have done: You have taken the most basic thing and elevated it. If you are sweet inside of yourself for the most part, this is the truth you will know.

  I started to spend my extra time caring for myself in little ways that reminded me of the generosity of my dream-dog who shared his seatbelt. The big pet. My dream-dog. I think he was training me in my dreams so that I could eventually play well in my days.

  Eclipse

  I went outside of my hotel to watch the highly anticipated eclipse of the sun. It happened. The sun was eclipsed. All of the people were out on the sidewalk in New York City, sharing little eyeglasses made of paper, with the plastic lenses. I had no paper glasses. I saw a stranger and I looked shyly at the glasses he had and I asked, “Can I try?” The stranger gave me his glasses so that I could watch the sun become a strange orange fang poking through one side of the sky. A stranger helped me. Specifically, he helped me look into outer space. I said thank you, obviously. Related question: After this eclipse and group experience, is everyone else’s hair also made out of necklaces now and is your heart a plum with a golden marble in it that will spin eternally, like mine is? Final comment: It is very warming to think of the adults going to places to get the paper glasses, and to think of the adults who own a small store or bodega, and that they heard about the eclipse and then ordered the paper glasses, knowing that people would want to watch the rare thing that was going to happen.

  Touch vs. Smack

  I don’t want to smack anything on the ass and say LET’S GO.

  I want to touch something on the side of the face and say WILL YOU PLEASE TAKE ME?

  I Died: Listening

  I died.

  Oh, god! I did die!

  Some man was standing right in the middle of the room talking about how he knew that now was the time for men to listen, and he was proud to say that he knew how to listen but strangely he kept talking for so long and I was the one who was listening and so then what happened was that my head twisted around on my neck and faced the wall.

  But that didn’t seem to bother him and it certainly didn’t stop him because I guess he was on a roll? And then he just walked around to the other side of me and kept talking, and what he was saying was so obvious but backward and wrong, but to tell him that would have caused a big bust-up.

  And even though my head was on backwards and my brain felt, you know, not at its best, I was still aware that two very bad choices were being shoved at me: Tell him that he’s right or at least on the right track and therefore lie and also abandon myself and cause more damage by letting his ignorance and monologue go on forever, or tell him NO, he is not even close to correct, that the fact that he is pontificating and instructing and not actually conversing is a sign that he does not even remotely understand. But then after saying that I would have to weather the storm of his humiliation and frustration, and somehow end up feeling bad about myself, like I should have been gentler and treated him like a child who simply doesn’t know any better.

  Or should I have been grateful that he was interested in talking about listening at all? But then again, he was demanding to be treated like a man who does know how to listen, while he was asking me to only listen to him and lie to him and maybe give him a prize? And I was so chilled by the reality of having to choose between bad and worse that my heart became flash-frozen and then it cracked in half and so what I’m saying is that basically my heart broke almost ri
ght away.

  I thought, “Oh, great. Now I’ve got a backwards head and a broken thingy.”

  I tried to sit very still but inside of me the blood couldn’t go around because there was no working heart to pump it, and he was still talking, even still, and what happened then was that my backwards head, which was already under a fair amount of stress from facing the wrong side of my body and only offered a bad view, which was the man, mostly the man, and then the wall—well, my backwards head sort of tore off at the neck and dangled down, just hung there for quite a while, which was unsightly and embarrassing.

  Oh no! I didn’t want to look ugly!

  The man was getting irritated because I guess I was making a face and rolling my eyes, but what was hard about that was that my head was dangling upside down and so my eyeballs were, to be fair, rolling around. He started to ask tense, defensive questions to which the answer was clearly supposed to be “No, no, the problem is not you, it’s other worse men who do crimes and things like that,” even though it was him and it is probably all of us. All.

  As my eyes rolled back in my head and I saw into my own mind, I caught a glimpse of some old messages scrawled on the walls in there, and I thought, “The bad thing has gotten into all of us and we all need to get it out of us.” And when I started to think about how it is certainly all of us that have a bit of this bad thing in us, the shards of my frozen heart really began to prick at me, and my dangling head became as heavy as a wrecking ball.