Little Weirds

by Jenny Slate

  There are a few things to say right away.

  The first is that he wanted the dog to sit on the skateboard and not on the ground. What is that for? Why? The other first thing to say is how it makes me feel a sort of completeness that this young one has apparently named his dog Patrick. I wonder if the puppy is perhaps named after a character in a book or a movie, or maybe after a cousin who is admirable? The third (other “first”) thing to say is that he said “Sit?” And not “Sit.” He was not sure if it would work, or was uncomfortable with giving a command to the thing that is his friend and ward and companion. It is not natural to be a master in a casual way, to some of us. The last and only thing that I could say and that I mean with all of my heart is that I wish them both the best for all of the years that are coming to them as a pair of companions.

  Kathleen/Dog-Flower-Face

  I don’t know who used to live here. Only I live here, me and the old dog.

  I hired a woman named Kathleen to come and make a fence around my house so that I could be safe in a self-imposed pen, like an old goose or a young pig. Like both, really.

  I hired her to start me a small garden of plants that would bloom throughout the year, so that there would always be a flower to say hello to when I return home. I was incredibly eager to tell her what plants I love and to make sure that she would not give me anything like an azalea or somehow misunderstand me and just roll up with a bunch of cactuses and gravel and make me look like a severe woman who has no idea what’s going on. Having “no idea what’s going on” is my central fear, most days.

  I told her that I wanted people to come through the big garden door, into my pen, and feel a rush of wildness and color, and to encounter many different green forms. I wanted to present a big, full energy markedly different from the stress of whatever is outside my walls. I told her that I wanted my garden to be like the inside of what I see in myself. You see my garden, you come into my home, and it tells you not just what I like to see and what I want to be around, but how you should treat me. I am the live thing that belongs here, with other live things like this.

  This is what I told the woman named Kathleen.

  Kathleen patiently told me about the plants and flowers that could live in my garden. My small old dog walked with us and we looked at the sunlight and shade. I pointed to a bunchy blue burst of flowers growing on the hillside, sort of a vine that didn’t lie flat, a bramble. The flowers looked like the shape of a fruit, and I always like it when those two images, fruits and flowers, gesture to each other. I like that and I always have, and I like it when fruit is in flower arrangements and I like it when flowers are in the salad or on cakes and I like it when fruits are on women’s heads in their hats or if their whole hat is fruit.

  I have always adored a cornucopia, of course.

  I pointed at the blue hill-flowers and asked her, “Can I have that kind?” She told me that I could certainly have it. And then, very seriously, she said, “The only thing is that dogs love to smell the blossoms and they are actually very sticky, so your dog will have flowers on his face, and I don’t know if you’d like that.”

  “I would like that,” I told her.

  What I didn’t tell her was that when she asked me that question about flowers on my dog’s face, she showed me that a legitimate option for experience—a true one that is real and is deeply concerned with beauty—could be mine. This was my home and my world and the future was all geared up and ready for pleasure and we were getting specific: Do you or do you not want flowers that stick to a dog’s face? Yes or no? If yes, I was a citizen of the world of breezes and Sticky-Dog-Face-Flower. With every small choice, the world was emerging. What would I like, from all of it?

  I didn’t tell Kathleen how dear it was to me that she told me this sticky-flower fact in total earnestness. I didn’t tell her that even though everything about me really points to liking things like flowers on animals’ faces, I was pleased that she did not assume. I was pleased that she made sure. Because in making sure, Kathleen gave me the opportunity to say out loud to another person that I would like my old dog to have flowers stuck to his face, and when I said it out loud—that yes, I would like that—I knew it was true. Then I admired myself. What’s more, I felt tenderness about my personality and my choices for delight. I said who I was, on my land.

  I didn’t tell her that she was making me more than one garden. One outer, one inner. I was woozy as I watched a space open up inside of my inner me-garden, space that would be private just for me, in which I could observe myself and be private as I gazed upon myself.

  I didn’t tell her, “Hey, Kathleen? You’ve revealed yourself to be a woman of wonderful character.” Rather than being unconsciously lazy and telling me something, she had reached out and grabbed a moment. No, she did not miss the moment, this woman Kathleen. She asked a question and so much bloomed and the plants weren’t even there yet.

  What I didn’t say, because I selfishly wanted to keep the sweet sap of the moment swelling inside myself, undiluted, was “Actually, more than anything, I would like my dog to have small blue flowers stuck to his small face as often as possible, and now that you mention it, I want this more than most things that I want, but most of the things that I want are like this thing, and it is a certain type of person who feels this way that I feel, and I’m proud to be one, and now I see that I must really not forget that the style of what I find beautiful is incredible to me, that it is incredible to feel lucky to want to want what one wants, to be able to see the rings of yourself this way, and honestly, Kathleen, I am dead serious on this one.”

  Letter: Super-Ego

  Dear Ms. Slate:

  We were absolutely thrilled when, roughly three years ago, you got your hands on an Adam Phillips article in the London Review of Books about self-criticism and the super-ego. We were encouraged when you seemed to take in the information and hold it up to your own interior experience. We looked on in approval as you paraphrased the article to friends and strangers, telling them things like “The super-ego is reiterative. It repeats the most boring, pointy, hurtful things, and if you met it at a party, if it were a person, you would think that the person was not only mean and insane, but also not as smart as they think they are. You wouldn’t listen. You would think they were a shithead.”

  You spent time passing this information around, yet upon close analysis, you did not seem to be passing it through yourself. It seemed to be lodged in your mouth, right in your little mouth, like an echo just bouncing around and then flying out of your face at parties and even in meetings, and then it would bounce off other people’s faces and right back into your mouth. Of course, you could have swallowed it down, or explored its flavors. You could have let it work its way through you, but instead you did nothing with this information except to tell it to other people.

  Oh, Ms. Slate, you do know that telling people things is not the same as living by the principle of the things, right?

  Clearly you do not know. If you insist on peddling these psychological wares without sampling them yourself, if you insist on talking about things that you only know about in form but not in function, you will put this entire operation in jeopardy of looking like a fraud, and you will drag this whole initiative toward time-wasting and identity failure.

  It is with deep regret that we inform you that you have been put on probation. You will no longer be able to access this subject matter in conversational form; nor will you be able to casually email it around. Be advised, should you try to speak about this article or sort of bat around this super-ego stuff in general, we have activated the emergency system, and there is no override.

  If you are to open your mouth and then plan to say something like “The super-ego has very tight margins and doesn’t allow for variance,” while secretly listening to that actual super-ego voice inside of yourself, the system will be alerted and you will be supplied with an emergency sentence and you will find yourself saying things like “Summer is the warm time,” or �
�Babies are the youngest ones we have,” or “Horses are too big,” or anything that is true but rather hazy-sounding.

  We believe that choice builds strength, and so we have provided a list of approved chat items for you. As we grow more confident in your ability to not secretly shit on yourself all of the time, we shall expand the list. Our hope is that one day, you will not need this list at all, and will be able to speak freely and without the secret sibling of self-abuse and shaming.

  But for now, your approved topics are as follows:

  “I want to learn to be a better gardener,” “Veal is a bummer and it’s not even that good,” “Library,” “Baryshnikov: any and all performances/his face/his voice/him,” “How to do bagels,” “Swimming in the Atlantic Ocean,” “Swimming in the Pacific Ocean,” “Evergreen trees,” “Why celery is not exactly what you wish,” “Fits of bras,” “Fits of jeans,” “Caves,” “Explain Easter?” “Paper cut stories,” “Grandmothers,” “Mustards of the world,” “The astronaut who wore the diapers so that she didn’t have to stop on her way to murder somebody,” “Snowboarding: I can’t try,” “Aunts and their houses,” “Ghosts, of course,” “Going to the bathroom on the plane or the train,” “Jars,” “Maggots and mold,” “Pumpkin carving,” “Doritos,” “Can a skunk be de-skunked and become a pet or will it be fundamentally gloomy without its stink?” and the follow-up “I love skunk smell, actually.” Furthermore you may access themes around “Grapes,” “Tropical fruits,” “Volcano,” “Cucumber,” “Sesame Street in the past,” “Wars,” and “Gaudí was the One and Only and I love how he stuck fruits and shells into the holy structures he was inspired to create,” “Monochromatic outfits,” “New Year’s resolutions,” “Silk outfits,” “Graves,” “In Peter Pan, did you ever notice that the actor who plays the dad also usually plays Captain Hook? But not in Hook the movie,” “Potluck dinners,” “Swamps, marshes, and bogs,” “What mushrooms do,” “Acrimony,” “Scoliosis,” “Wells and buckets,” and “The amazing Dukakis family.”

  We’re aware that this list may seem limited but it simply mirrors the limits that you have shown to the community. Hopefully adherence to these guidelines will condition you to be able to take deeper dives on your own and become honest and free.

  We look forward to watching your progress and growth. We yearn for it, even, Ms. Slate. We yearn for it. It is with faith and love that we say: It doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t need to do this anymore, and judging from what we caught you murmuring while you were on drugs by yourself at five in the morning, you know this to be true.

  Sincerely yours,

  The Office of Internal Affairs

  Creed

  Yes, it has been a long day and there have been strings of days recently, weeks, of empty and painful situations. There has been a rash of experiences that are empty and painful at once. There have been only empty times when there was no pain, only emptiness, and my body felt cold and dry and the sky looked white during the day and the night.

  Then there were times that were only painful, during which I’ve lumbered through regret, humiliation, self-doubt, and feelings with loud blabbering blubbering voices that say, “Well, here it is. I’m the ugliest I’ve ever been,” or “Well, this is it. This is how it starts. This is how it all starts. Watch, watch your career, relationships, and youthful physique just float away from you like trash in outer space. You’ve begun the docking process that signifies the start of terminal failure. And you, you brain-peasant, won’t give up, so this whole thing is most likely going to last another seven years before you really admit it’s even happening and then four years after that until you finally can see that the shape of your failure is final and hardly spectacular or unique. Here you are now. Nothing that happens now or after will count as much as anything you’ve done before.”

  Things like that. Yes, there have been lots of feelings that have felt like breaths in with no out breaths.

  So, yes, it has been a hard time and nobody could say differently. But it occurs to me as this long day ends—and I can hardly make myself stay up past six PM because I’m too busted up in my heart, because my brain has the posture of an old couch, because I try to imagine the blood in my arms and all I can imagine is air being blasted through pipes made of paper . . . It occurs to me as I fight so hard with myself that these cruel and persistent voices are the echoes of trauma from the times when people treated me like I am now treating myself. And that, perhaps, it is possible to close an inner door and shut out voices that are not mine. In the last light of a long day, I sit on a chair on my porch and watch the sky drain colors down and out and I realize I want to hear my voice and only mine. Not the voice of my voice within a cacophony of old pains. Just mine, now.

  And then, at the end of this day, in the start of another night, at the first lip-lick of this appetite for hearing myself clearly, it really hits me: I never really want to argue with anyone ever again, nor am I under any sort of obligation to do so.

  It occurs to me that I just never want to argue with a single person ever again and I will do anything I can to prevent it. Will I discuss? Yes. And will I disagree? Yes, I will also do that. I will also most likely feel classic lava-flows of anger.

  But it is suddenly clear: I know what I want to hear when I hear myself in this life, and I am feeling very certain that there is absolutely no good reason to ever be disrespectful, no matter how upset you are. I do not need to hear bullying voices ever again and there is no reason to ever do that sort of emotional violence to anyone. There is no good rationale behind calling names or being tricky or cutting or scary or to say a ton of swears. That was never my style, but I let other people do it to me, and then I did something to them, too. And now, no.

  I recall losing myself to eruptions of temper, and I deeply regret it all, and I regret it in a new way. It occurs to me that a rude and crude struggle is not anything that I can even connect to anymore.

  It occurs to me, even as I’m not sure what’s left of me, that I can use what is still alive to really behave in a way that I admire. It occurs to me that I can have every single feeling I need to have without ever trying to overpower someone or win something.

  It occurs to me that if anyone is ever here again by my side I will do my best, and if that doesn’t work out, I will leave. I will not do my half-best and stay for a ridiculous amount of time.

  It occurs to me that if anyone ever bullies me again I will warn them one time but probably start to stop loving them, and that if they do it again I will have my final answer, that a person who does that to me does not love me. And then I will explain that their behavior has made it clear to me that I want to leave, and although I will have been clear, I will have been respectful, I will leave without participating in condemnation. I will go without digging deeper into the dark.

  And then it occurs to me that it is never too late to write yourself a good little personal creed, and that finding a creed for yourself is about gathering a set of rules that supports your self-respect and your community. It occurs to me that even though I feel very much at sea, I am noticing that I am finally mature enough to develop a creed and to live by it, and that this will no doubt cause me great satisfaction and give me exquisite, lacy-patterned strength in my spirit.

  Yes, it has been a long day, and I am not at my best, but I’m like someone limping away from a fight that she won by just a hair. I may even be playing dead just so they don’t try to find me. I’m going toward a land that I have defended but not even lived in yet. I am banged up and I can’t see well and I’m stumbling too fast for someone so tired, but I am the one to live in the land now and I am the one to write the creed and when I wake up tomorrow, I will know that today was the day that I knew and felt all of the hard things, and that I was visited by many astounding pains but that I also realized the truth: It is finally the time for a creed, and this will change everything.

  The Code of Hammurabi

  I am sitting in the room in my hous
e where I’ve put the television in a big wicker cabinet so that I don’t ever have to see the television. I enjoy watching the TV, but also I think that it is an ugly object. I cringe when I see the TV loitering like a dumbass, incorrect in its placement next to my books and tender hanging plants and thoughtfully chosen textiles. But here I am, sitting in front of it. I am watching a documentary that anyone can find and watch. I have not dug deep into a subculture to find it. It was right here when I turned on the thing and clicked on the other thing.

  And the world is certainly scary because suddenly everything is computer and computers and internet stuff, but there is still some good to extract from it, like this documentary I am watching.

  I have Thai food that is so spicy that I start to sweat and breathe in and out like how ladies do Lamaze breathing while having a baby in a movie in the 1980s. I ordered it with the vague notion that it might be really nice to just blow my colon out once and for all. It might be nice to live life as a big empty whistling network of inner caves. But now I see that I am just bloating myself with salt and fusing my insides together with oils that I am not genetically inclined to process.

  I think, “If my ancient dog gets even a lick of this curry, his hair-fur will fall off of his body like when you blow on a dandelion. And then he will throw up a small trickle of yellow. And then he will die. And then I will have nobody at all including the many different men who have held this dog to whom I have said, This is amazing. He really likes you! When what I really mean is

  You are holding my dog. I can’t tell if you are nice or gross yet. We’ll see.

  This is what I think as my insides burn to bits, as my guts curl up into cracklins for a goblin to chomp in hell.

  Every morning I call my best friend and we have coffee on separate sides of the city and we talk about how Patriarchy is killing us. She told me that this documentary was one to watch, and so here I am, watching this documentary on my TV that I basically keep in a big giant basket. The narrator is a British woman who seems borderline horny to tell me what she is about to tell me, and her documentary series is called The Ascent of Woman, which actually makes me “emotionally horny” as well.