404. Blurry

Three weeks ago, Marianne was visiting me and we flirted with a boy named Vladmir who draws comics and bartends at the bar where I like to go on Monday nights to listen to poetry and fiction and monologues and weird yelling and songs and skits. One time, I read a story about diarrhea and wanting to be loved, and another time I read a poem called ‘Comefarts.’ Three weeks ago, a group of us climbed down a muddy hill with help from an cable wire that some nice people had nailed into the soil, and we followed abandoned train tracks into the catacombs of Paris that you can’t get to unless you climb down a little hill or jump through a manhole or walk on old train tracks and then crawl through a tunnel (or a mixture of all of these things) and once underground, we saws murals, and rappers being filmed for a documentary by candlelight, cataphiles who sometimes sleep days underground, purists who come every weekend to wash the graffiti off the walls to expose the original art, goth boys and fanged girls celebrating with 40s and old-school boomboxes. We waded through water that came up to our knees, and I had tiny sips of whiskey in old World War 2 bunkers, and I admired a pack of boys who wore all-rubber overalls/jumpsuit, which seemed useful, although I didn’t completely mind the filth water up to my knees when I was hundreds of feet underground, and when we emerged at three in the morning, I was happy for the rain that washed me as I biked from one end of Paris to the other. When I woke up the next morning, my ass was sore and the morning after that, my friends Pearl and Peter were visiting, and Pearl gave me her mother’s bracelet on the last night of her visit. On the second night, we ate Chinese food so spicy we all sweated like it was summer, and it was summer but we had to wear sweaters and walked all over town and listened to our friends play music on the street and witnessed a man slapping another man so hard in the middle of the road that a motorcyclist nearly crashed into a telephone pole and the slapped man spat out blood, which made me wince and think of the time I was in Istanbul and saw a man throw his wife out the window and I cried until the woman’s brother came out and laid down on the street next to her, and then also Fête de la Musique happened here and I lost morale and felt like crying for all the people who were fighting in the street, and then my friends Eric and Christina were visiting for two days just before my friend Bruno was here for three. On the first one we ate Indian lentils and met Jean Luc Godard’s son and walked around the art squat he owns. Some other things happened but for now, let’s whatevs them. I was supposed to leave Paris today and instead I waited three hours at the airport and took another three hours to get home and now I’m here another four days because the pilots in Iceland went on strike, so tomorrow I’m going to a party in an abandoned pool, and maybe buying one of those North African wrap things with spiced peppers that to my unsophisticated taste buds kind of tastes like a pizza without cheese and better spices (I forget what it’s called), and maybe drink some rosé with my friend Charlotte and do a better job of walking around my neighborhood. I guess Edith Piath lived down the street from the apartment I’m staying in, and this neighborhood was also one of the biggest supporters of the Paris Commune, and everywhere I go, I keep seeing street art about THE RED VIRGIN, which reminds me that I can’t wait to tell you about this cool new project I’m working on, and also that I’m sorry I can’t stop myself from squandering my precious internet time on reading articles about HOW TO WRITE A GREAT BLOG, and every tip is like: have a point, stop rambling you muthafucka, why do you just tell pointless stories about yourself, even if you find yourself entertaining there’s a good chance no one else will, have a PRODUCT to offer your readers, something USEFUL. And then I feel confused because sometimes these same writers are the ones who claim their blogging is their ART AND WHY SHOULDN’T I GET PAID FOR MY ART LIKE A PAINTER DOES. But dudes, a fucking transcendent collection of poetry is not fucking transcendent because it has a point or a function or is doing the 100th HEIDI BRAIDS TUTORIAL on the internet, but a work of art–be it a painting, sculpture, video, poem, essay, performance piece, sound sculpture, or whatever–is transcendent because it blows your mind and contains the kind of unreproducible magic that allows it to be the only one who gets to break every rule and is all the more stunning for it. This is the part, where I have to admit that I may never create something like that, and that is why I don’t have inner peace and I write like this every time I write. Oh yeah, also one night I went to get spicy Chinese food with my friend Gianny and we were so hungry that we ate the leftover food from this party of 10 who left their table with 6 plates of untouched food, which was glorious because there were thousand year-old eggs and tofu with minced meat and fried pork and more tofu and noodles with shrimp and scallop in addition to the three plates of food we had already ordered. I’m wearing this Sonia Rykiel dress that always exposes the right side of my bra no matter what I do with the straps. Later, I changed into my Loulou Loves you playsuit with satin ties, and everyone made fun of me, but it was 98 degrees outside and it was either that, or a bikini, or going bare ass naked. Last Sunday, I told a story about my grandmother’s nipples, thanks to Julian Field who hosts an amazing weekly Sunday storytelling and stand-up show called Funny, Lonely, & Vicious, and is doing his own one-man storytelling, stand-up comedy show starting in July called My Own Personal Waterloo, which you should totally go to if you are in Paris. I’m in Paris, but if all goes right and also wrong, I won’t be in four days. Thanks to everyone who keeps checking in on this blog, even though it’s pretty spotty and uninspired. I’ve had a rush of emails lately from potential sponsors and companies who want me to share information with ya’all about them, and I’ve been turning them down, but I don’t know–am I doing right by you? I think I’m doing right by me, at least. Love, Jenny