people who hate me make me famous!!!!!!

My friend wrote me a love letter. I guess it's a love letter, because I don't know what else to call it. She is one of my favorite writers in the program at UCI where I am getting my MFA. This girl and another guy, who I will just call BLANK (because I didn't ask permission to use his name) encouraged me and loved me into a submissive state of self-love and openness that has never occurred before or since. I love these two people with all my heart and soul and they make me want to be whatever I am in all its flawed uncontrollable energetic glory.  At some point this summer I asked Kat to remind me who I am. I asked her to tell me what she thought of me and to reflect back that I should stay here on planet earth and continue to be my Lisa Douglass self. As per usual I was looking for some form of validation of a self that I don't always completely understand but that I exist within as I am in this current human body----I was hoping for just a sentence or two of what meaning I might have to people here on the earth as we know it. Instead, Kat wrote me the following thing. I read it on my phone, in a room with people who were very very sad. People who I love. I cried openly, but no one noticed, immersed as they were in their need to stay alive in their own way, just like I do through words. Happily, I share this with you, because I've never had anyone say these things to me and because I have had many people think that I hear things like this often when nothing could be further from the truth. I reflect back to you, to ask a friend to tell you what they think of you, because it might be interesting. I doubt, with my whole open heart, that you will ever get a letter so beautiful and well equipped to keep you going one more day, but in this case, I humbly thank Kat for saving my dear heart and for reminding me that sometimes people see things that I cannot see at all. Namely, myself.

Kat Lewin

                  Lo, we have reached a period in the troubled beginnings of this millennium – a crossroads – at which nothing is as it appears. Banks are government-subsidized for-profit industries, PETA kills tens of thousands of kittens a year, and everyone on the internet is a ten-year-old police officer. It’s an ugly scene, no doubt, and to make it through the day while swallowing the absolute bare minimum of Pills That Make Us Not Feel Feelings (for which I praise the god who probably doesn’t exist), we need one truth to hold dear. Oh it’s time, my kittens, for a manifesto.

And on this worrisome day, there is BUT ONE THING I HOLD MANIFEST: There are very few damn good things in this world. Lisa Douglass is pretty much all of them, condensed down into superdense space plasma.

THE MANIFESTO OF LISA DOUGLASS, BEAUTIFUL, HONEST, CUPCAKE-SCENTED VIDEO-MAKING GODDESS



1. Lisa Douglass is not a goddamn liar. You know how we all loved Catcher in the Rye when we were thirteen, before it became embarrassing to admit you like Catcher in the Rye, because when you’re thirteen everyone you meet IS a goddamn phony and, by gum, you do hate those phony bastards? I don’t care whether it’s embarrassing or not: everyone you meet at thirteen is a phony bastard. Everyone you meet at twenty-three is a phony bastard. Everyone you meet at thirty-three and forty-three – the world is filled with douchebags, and we need to keep acknowledging that so we can treasure the rare prize of a non-phony.



2. Lisa Douglass is not a phony. If your hair is fucked-up, she’ll tell you your hair is fucked-up. If your prose is fucked-up, no one else will tell you. Lisa Douglass will tell you. This is a gift that surpasses that of the wish-granting gem.



3. Lisa Douglass will never say anything about you that she won’t say to you. And usually the things she says to you – the things she says to me, anyway – are the kinds of things you give up hope on people saying because you’re beginning to suspect they’re probably only wishful thinking on your part.



4. Lisa Douglass is unfairly beautiful



5. and the chick has style, that kind of style that you can’t beg borrow buy or fake so if you’re not born with it, look, why don’t you just go ahead and get your Connecticut country house and keep shopping Isaac Mizrahi for Target the rest of your life, because you’re strictly drugstore-smells-alike and everybody knows it.



6. Lisa Douglass’s fiction is the reason we will always need fiction. She’s got that damn heart thing that most people are too scared to even approach. Her fiction makes you laugh but then it jabs you with that those truths that are big and hurt like fuck but you can’t put them away. Lisa Douglass isn’t afraid to butt heads with The Big Lie. Every other lame wannabe New Yorker fiction dude or Saunders-alike on the street fights their heart on the way to the page until it’s limper than a sell-by-yesterday supermarket porkchop. Lisa Douglass pins down that hot thrashing thing right to the page and she doesn’t even nuzzle it. She writes things that hurt me to read. (The good kind of hurt. Everything worthwhile hurts; the rest is just escape, and where did escape ever get anyone? Except Jews in Nazi Germany, I guess. THIS MANIFESTO IS NOT FOR JEWS IN NAZI GERMANY. THEY HAD THEIR OWN SHIT GOING ON AND ARE THUS EXEMPT FROM THESE VERY IMPORTANT THOUGHTS.)



7. I remember details about every single thing Lisa Douglass has ever turned into workshop. Go on. Test me sometime. She is the real goddamn thing and everything she writes gets into your skin and inside of you. Except it was already there inside of you, just waiting to be activated, because it is so goddamn true.



8. Sometimes Lisa Douglass’s fiction is so true and inspiring that it makes me hate myself, and go to the gym and run too long on the elliptical while thinking Why Am I Pretending To Be A Writer Thoughts, and then bang out twenty pages of red-hot prose while thinking, “What would Lisa say? How would she say it? How much of this is disguise and which parts of this needless façade would she crush into the dirt with one of her impeccably stylish boots?” Often when I’m writing fiction and it’s all weird and fake and New Yorkery, I tell myself, “Pretend you’re writing a letter to Lisa,” and you know what? It always helps me.



9. Did I mention Lisa Douglass is unfairly beautiful? Some people don’t think that’s important, and I know people are born with what they’re born with, but for my money, confidence and style make the world more bearable and goddamn is it nice sometimes to be able to look upon a person and think, “Yeah, your presence makes my life feel a little more like a movie I’d like to watch, one that’s filled with excitement and intrigue and Beautiful Things.”



10. Lisa Douglass actually gives a fuck about you. Maybe she gives too much of a fuck – maybe that’s something that hurts her beautiful truth-making heart – but even if it leads to painful vulnerability, it matters. Lisa Douglass writes the flat-out best critique letters I’ve ever read, because instead of talking about nuts&bolts and things that can be taught, she looks at the big picture: how art touches lives, how it makes people feel, how it can change you. It seems sometimes that Lisa Douglass is the only person who remembers What Actually Matters (which isn’t, in my experience, at least, always the easiest thing to remember).



11. Lisa Douglass is weird. Ultimate weird. Mega-weird. Irreplaceable weird. And if there’s anything more worth being than weird, I don’t even want to know about it. You can’t replace Lisa Douglass. Not in a room, not around a workshop table, not in the conversation of contemporary fiction, not in the world. Period. Everyone gives Henry Ford a lot of credit for creating the assembly line, with its interchangeable parts, and yeah, props to the dude for enabling twentieth century convenience – but the thing about convenience is it robs us of doing The Hard Thing, which is true and difficult and therefore the most worthwhile. Lisa Douglass, on the other hand? Roll up your assembly lines. She’s straight artisan.



12. Lisa Douglass is exquisite and magnificent and I adore her very, very much. Anyone who doesn’t is a phony a douchebag a flake and probably a communist.

These things, today and in perpetuity, I hold manifest.

Love love love,

K

This is Us: Dead

I feel them watching me. I am at the side of the basketball court. I hold my breath as I pass by. I know nothing of what they see, I can’t understand myself in that way. What I am to you, was always unknowable, so what I am to the world, is unknowable too. As much as I don’t want that to be true, it is. In my mind there is a ball of light, I don’t know how else to say it. It lives there and gives me all my ideas, but it is not really a part of me. instead it is larger than I am or larger than I pretend. When I think of you, you are in the absence, not in the light but outside of it. You live there and haunt me like a ghost. I have done many things to love you and just as many to hate you. I have tried to forget you, but you are all around me, like air.

When I had my first dog, which was my only dog, I understood that you can love a thing and fear it. Not fear it in the way you fear a monster, but fear it in the way, that the thing that loves you needs you and that you will never be enough for that thing. You are only you. A human. I am me. A girl. That is all I will ever be. I have tried to be more, but I was born this way. Fragile and trying to cover that up. I walk the planet knowing that things can love me, but that I cannot help those things. They will be outside of my reach to make safe or to save. This fact is like a tree. It is there and once you see it, it just is. Beautiful and green and vastly alive, but all alone in the way we all are when it comes down to it. A tree keeps its distance from the other trees, if they are too close, they fight for sunlight and their roots get tangled and they become each other. Or something.

I was thinking in that golden shiny ball earlier today and it moved. It traveled down into where my heart is supposed to be. It is there now, making that spot warm and getting it ready for something. I can’t sleep. I know what’s coming and I’m scared of it. I know I cannot meet the challenge of being anything at all except my quiet self, my real self that I hide because I don’t think you would like it or understand. I am usually on some sort of stage trying to entertain you so I can feel love.

Have you ever held a bird in your hand and felt its heartbeat? Birds are wonderful, I think my Father said that and he’s right. There have been many birds in my life. Broken ones. Dying ones. Healthy fat ones. I have always loved them. Except for seagulls or pigeons. Both of those birds make me sick. Like they are rodents with wings. Scavengers that aren’t actually birds at all, because they pick garbage and do a bird bath in gutters. I realize that doesn’t make sense, but nothing will after this. I am a different thing right now.

I am not of myself in the way that I can describe something as accurate or in the way I am actually feeling it. I have always wanted to say things with precision, but words have an inherent limitation being that we are all animals and communicating as if we are noble and fearless. That’s dumb isn’t it? To be something we aren’t.

When I went to school, I saw kids there. I didn’t know how to talk to them, because I was scared. I thought they all knew each other already and I didn’t know how to meet them. My mother would say, just go and play with them, but I didn’t know how. So, I would walk up to the place that the kids were playing and find something to do with my feet. I was ashamed that I didn’t know what they knew. It made me scared to be alive. Later, I became an athlete at least a playground athlete, on the monkey bars swinging the whole time so I looked busy and wouldn’t have to talk to anybody.

My mother used to say she was painfully shy and her sister looked like Elizabeth Taylor, but my mother looked like Audrey Hepburn and I thought she looked better. Not as fat. When I was little I always thought Elizabeth Taylor was fat, so to say someone looked better than her was stupid. Just be happy to look like Audrey, I would say, she’s thin. I was painfully shy to be myself, never comfortable to be myself. I thought I wasn’t enough. I remember sitting in my mother’s car while she had panic attacks and didn’t know how to drive across the street. I remember being so young and not knowing how to drive and thinking, this is a bad scene, me in this car and my mom freaking out. I didn’t know if telling her to stop acting crazy would make her more crazy. I remember thinking things I wanted to say and then not saying them afraid I would upset my mother. I was very quiet as a child.

When I told my mom I was too scared to go to school, she didn’t believe me. I was scared for real. I would go and no one would talk to me and I’d be scared. Later after I made friends the people I did meet told me I seemed stuck up. I just didn’t know how to meet them and it froze me. I found out if I got sick I could stay home. So, I was sick a lot. Earaches. Sore throats. Fevers. It kept me away from school and I could get codeine. Codeine didn’t help the pain, but it made me feel quiet and safe. In a warm bubble all by myself, but not caring anymore that that was the way it was and was always going to be. It made me happy to be alone. It made me understand I had the best brain and I was the coolest person.

I realized today that I tell people how to be around me, but they don’t pay attention. I am very particular and closed off while pretending to be open. They say they understand how to act, but eventually I see some glimmer in their eyes wherein they think I’ve changed my mind about the directions I’ve given them. I want to tell them, you can only be close if you play by the set of rules and parameters I have given you, but there is free-will and they think they’ll do things their way and that I will like it, it will be good for me—their way. Only their way shuts me out forever. They didn’t listen. I have rules—you can only get close by pretending not to and once you drop the pretense, you are out. There is no other way, it’s because I’m scared of dying.

I think about death more than most people. When I was little I knew that all the people I loved were going to die someday and the pain of knowing it was hard to take. There wasn’t anything I could do about it. I remember finding out. I was in my parent’s bedroom, I even remember the bedspread—it was mustard yellow and brown flowers or leaves or something. My father was on the bed and I was on the floor with my world piggy bank, I was counting my money and my father was telling me stories. I asked what would happen to me when everybody died and he told me I’d die too someday. Why be born at all if only to die? It seems unfair. It stayed—the knowledge of it. Most people know this and can forget it and that’s why they don’t do anything in their lives with a desperation—they think they have all the time in the world. Or feel content in relationships or find stability---But I know it and can’t forget it, so I am awake to it all the time, which is a burden in one way, wherein I’m in more pain and feel things all the time, because no one else seems to know what I know, that we are all going to be dead, so why not try things, at least just once? Why wait it out. I think that’s why I live the way I do, in a way, like I am perpetually on vacation, doing things children do or teenagers do. It’s because we are dying.

Dear Diary--Are You Bored Like Me?

Dear Diary,

When last we spoke, I had been thrown into a jail cell for a long weekend and it was the single best forced diet I have ever tried. What they don't tell you about jail is its like the worst highschool gossip nightmare anyone could imagine. You are not separated from people unlike you, you are sleeping, pissing and eating with them. My friend Anna was looking at a 7 year sentence for heroin possession. She was my jail friend, someone I would only know then and never again. I always like to think she is the one Anthony Kiedis wrote about in one of his songs, "she got seven years for being sad." I was released before her and being held for a very bad crime that I did not commit. My boyfriend had his jaw broken in  four places by some gang in Venice. I had driven drunk and hit the car that came after us. By the time we got home Brett was so angry he jumped up and down on my guitar and smashed one of my chairs to my little antique table. Although I was in bed and crying because Brett could not be persuaded to go to the hospital, the cops came because of the screaming. He told the cops I had broken his jaw with the chair leg. Anyone knows that in Los Angeles, if the cops are called and there is a scratch on the other person, they have to take you in. Brett later recounted everything in front of a judge and I was exonerated and the "crime" was expunged from my record. It was a long nightmare, Brett, but I'll never forget him. He's on me like a stain.

When I got out, I was skinny. The jail was in the middle of Los Angeles, near Beachwood. I lived on Argyle. I walked home and sat down and never wanted to be in a relationship again. 

Goodbye. You write to me next. Start it with---Dear Lisa (Wizard of all things Human) and end it with a sincere statement on what it's like to be you, the only one who hears my secrets. Till we meet again. Goodbye.

A Tale Of The Spider Who Was Actually Satan

A Tale of Why We Are So Fucked—As a Species

Before the Baby Salty Jesus birthed us and we became our non-human selves---it is written that we had once been human. We were real live human beings that liked to kiss and tell and do the Holiest of the holies in front of the videoscreen. But that was before the spider incident which later conflates into the Satan incident which follows:

Once upon a time, in the middle of winter, one winter when we were really fucking cold in our beds and wearing our see-through hot pink number without panties, somebody came to visit us in our rooms. It was the first night after the brand new white sheets and the first night of the spider who stared at us with his beady eyes on our bedspread—wherein we went---why is that spider’s legs spread out like he is about to run the 100 yard dash and why do I feel like he is conscious and wants to talk to me about something quite important?

We were all ears.

On this night of the spider, we looked again and there was a man, this man was Satan.

Remember: Before this happened---We had known how to love one another without fear and we had understood that one text does not make or break any relationship of value and we had been unafraid to do what we liked because there was no fear to do the Happy.

But, what happened was we wanted to be cool, more than we wanted our hearts deepest desires and Satan knew that on some level when he came to us in the nighttime while we were fast asleep in our angelic poses in our beds without wrappers or crumbs but still in a cute outfit. On that night that Satan came, we opened up our beautiful orphan eyes and said to the Bad son of God because he was more competitive than Jesus and corrupted souls through deviant means:

 “Hi.”

Satan the Lord of Darkness had a little contract with him and he was charming and good looking (even better looking than our adorable bedmates who we had just stopped hugging to witness the aforementioned spider)

and Satan goes: “Hi.”

We felt our wholeness right then and there. We were no longer ordinary—we were visited by Satan and that fed our enormous but undeservedly so's ego.

It was terrifying how like a human Satan seemed and how handsome and how we hoped he would text us the next day. (We smoothed our hair in the face of it).

But we weren’t scared of new things at that point, we were still innocent with pure hearts.

What Satan said was hey, you seem cool and I’ve been watching how everyone else kind of looks to you as the model of cool and how you have a hard time with commitment and significant others, so I was thinking you might want to join a club:

The Club of Not Feeling or Caring and Impure Hearts but Look Cooler Than Everyone Else Club. 

We thought we might.

He made it sound so fancy.

So, Satan the Lord of Darkness made us sign a commitment to not feeling human emotions at the expense of our inbred coolness. So, we were like: “OK, what do we have to lose anyway, we are always trying to avoid feelings and stuff by eating too much or too little or buying shoes and obsessing on how to wear our hair in order to be neat and different.” But, really we just said, “OK.” (Because we want to be considered cool and like we aren’t overthinking this shit).

And we signed.

The contract basically said, anyone who loves you from here on our will be seen as the enemy and Lo and Behold it motherfucking was.

After that our hearts were closed off. God and the Baby Salty Jesus were disturbed and kept sending us people who wanted to love us, but we only saw them as suspects in a larger scheme of our newfound paranoia of all things cute and adorable and we read into everything with the one thought: What can this person possibly want from me? Fear Fear Fear Fear Fear Fear Fear Fear Fear Fear Fear I'm Scared, Etc. (Only to be cured with copious amounts of anonymous sex and vast amounts of designer shoes for the girls or car stuff for the boys).

And that is how we became non-human and unable to love.

Please send $200 to Lisa Douglass at her PayPal

fishtwin@earthlink.net

For this most important fact that is unchangeable and why we are all so fucked.

The end.

Why Doesn't He Like Me, Lisa?

I also get calls from girls, going, why didn't he like me? Wasn't I cute enough? Smart enough? Did I bang him too soon or not soon enough or in the right position or it took too long or too short, Etc. Etc.
Here's the Real truth---I sat with my friend, kind of famous for being good in the sack and good in jail, and he told me the real reasons, the ones we all fear are true but never get told because the guys are being polite. His name is not Matt and not Brian and not Gregory and NOT Josh and or JIM (although those are five very good SOLID guesses).

Exhibit one:  Your pussy is too tight. This is the one boys can never say because it harkens back to pre-verbal stage when the insie-dimensions of the pussy-of-the-world---the one belonging to the MOMMY, well.. Yours reminds him of that pussy and he can't have that pressure on him ever ever ever again.

Exhibit two: You text smilicons and emoticons and tell him too many flowery things after he leaves your apartment and before he gets back to the other girl he is fucking. She then looks through his phone and the boy gets in trouble. So he gets FUCKED three times, not just twice like he planned.

Exhibit three: You believed the lie the boy told to get into your pants. It was basically, I really really really like you and even though I have a horrible reputation that all your friends warned you about I won't treat you that same way. In this way, the boy feels he's degraded you and that you aren't that smart. Dumb girls scare boys as much as smart ones do.

Exhibit four: Whenever he looks in the mirror and go: MONKEY! BANG!, you ask him what that means. It just isn't polite to always be asking a dude what everything means. And he doesn't know how to answer you anyway. (See: Exhibit Seven).

Exhibit Five: He likes bigger titties or smaller titties or faker ones or less fake ones or ones with the giant nipples and you only have the tiny pink nipples and he likes the other kind of nipples the opposite of the ones you have. The darker ones or pinker ones or bigger and or smaller ones. (This one can be fixed by painful plastic surgery ONLY IF the dude is willing to tell you his preference--which is very hard to get a person to admit).

Exhibit Six: Your breath is bad, consistently like you just ate a whole plate of salmon. Boys don't like that salmony breath, but are scared to tell you, the only difference is they will fuck you first and then ignore you unlike a girl who if they smell the salmony breath will just think of a cat they once had. (Cat's name: Mittens).

Exhibit Seven: You analyze everything the boy said or did or didn't say or didn't do and you go over it with your smartest friends and your dumbest but sexiest friends and then you call some psychics to see if they can get it right or tell you that very thing that is a match for the answer YOU WANT TO BE true but never is. You analyze it to mean the boy really must LOVE you, that is why he is avoiding you and that is why he said that thing about Mr. Rodgers and that is what the spirit guides mean when they said: HE IS NOT THE ONE (in your mind it still equals HE LOVES ME). Hint which hurts: He's not intimidated or too into you to call. (Hint which hurts more: If he won't fuck you, he doesn't find you attractive---for serious--NO one is going to say out loud--I don't want to bone you cause of your weird NOSE, that's just mean).

Exhibit Eight: The boy didn't like you all that much, he just wanted to see what all the fuss was about and you seemed to enjoy yourself too, so what's the BIG WHOOP? (And you actually did say too much or not make the right sounds during the "special act.")

Exhibit Nine: Cars and motorbikes and "TIME WITH THE BOYS"; and or working too much or not working enough or working on himself---all code for: I DON'T LIKE YOU I JUST WANT TO FUCK YOU AND DISCARD YOU LIKE A FILTHY WHORE but are too polite to say what I want.

Exhibit Ten: Once when the boy was very small he realized he only liked blondes and you, sadly, are brunette, beautiful, but only for fucking not for marrying. DYE YOUR HAIR unless you don't have the skin for it, then MOVE ON.

The boys say sorry they are such cowards, but are convinced that you are cowardly too in too many ways to count seeing how you are the weaker sex only to be used for sex and psychological domination. SORRY, they feel really really bad and guilty but you mean nothing to them.

See: Porn addiction

See: Video Chat Rooms

See: Lying.

Sincerely, boys of the Americas and British Isles (Not Japanese or Kazakstanian boys).