on becoming someone else's fiction

So, my first real job out of college I worked at this tiny, four-person pr agency. It was run by a woman who really liked to yell.

And say things like, "a monkey could do your job."

And six people quit in the six months I worked there.

Four after one day.

One after one week.

But anyhow, I digress. Point being that my job was to open and sort through mail, among other things.

And one day this beautifully produced, thick, creamy post card landed on my desk. It had three bands of color across the front, a rose, a blue, a yellow. And in white, bold text, it said, "Become someone else's fiction."

And I kept it. And sort of pondered it a lot -- what does that mean? It seems dashingly romantic, that notion.

It was an ad, for a printing company. Random, don't know who. But it sort of morphed into this mysterious message from the universe to me. Something to ponder.

It has hung on every wall of every apartment I have lived in since I found it ten years ago.

Sometimes, it's all about creating a dashing, idealized world to populate, about abandoning to the impulses of my own imagination. Creating a more vivid world than the one I live in to inhabit for a minute or a day or an hour.

A place to linger where your choices are not your own, but are driven by the plot. There's something adventurous about the notion. Something reckless.

It hung everywhere except my apartment now, the place I have lived in a new city for almost a year. Where I've become someone else, somehow.

Where maybe I don't want to be someone else's fiction, the construct of someone else's fantasies, someone else's will.

I kind of like living my own reality. Or at least I recognize it as the place with the most rewarding possibilities.

Is that grown up?

Or am I just really, really stoned?

Earlier tonight Annevan and I actually watched this movie, or fifteen minutes of it -- it's sort of a tragic tale about a smart young woman trapped in a backwater small town somewhere in Humbolt County. Raised by ex hippies, she embraced a more rock-and-roll image. But what she really wants, above all else, is a shot at a show on the Food Network. So she does the only thing she knows how -- she makes a show that's all her own.

Shots of her cooking steaks, "the size of my ass cheek," are intersperced with images of she and her friends smoking up, shooting guns randomly off the back porch of their house. The fades between scenes always include fireworks and heavy metal riffs. Her cooking is awkwardly punctuated when she unconvincingly takes shots of jim beam straight from the bottle. She wipes her lips in slo mo.

We took pictures of the tv, to illustrate for you, dear reader, but I can't find the damn camera cable.

Yep, definitely stoned.

Vegas tomorrow, woot.