My second grade class is lining up in size-order to go the day’s special class—art or music or maybe library. I am second in the girls’ line and my best friend is second in the boys’, as we will be until the only pair we could reliably see over have growth spurts a year ahead of us in 6th grade. It is the 80s so I am wearing purple corduroy pants and pink t-shirt featuring an iron-on photo of a fluffy white cat standing in a meadow; my favorite outfit. Someone behind us is picking on another girl who had to change back into her sweatsuit from gym class because she spilled her soup at lunch. Or, more likely, someone knocked it over onto her.

“My sister says you shouldn’t wear all pink because you’ll look like a pig,” announces one of the kids behind us, smirking at her pale pink sweats.

“Or a hippo!” says another. The lines begin debating which of these two animals she is most like. I remember thinking the instigators of this resemble some sort of rodent, but clam up, wondering if my pink t-shirt looks funny from the back. It’ll be almost fifteen years before I own another piece of pink clothing even though I know this is all bullshit.

ii.

It’s late. We are late. My then-boyfriend is standing uncomfortably in the vestibule of my parents’ house waiting for them to release me. I am in college, however, my step-father has no qualms reporting my car (in his name) stolen to get the last “word” in any of our arguments. We are supposed to be on our way to a symphony performance that he needs to see for one of his classes. He’s in a suit and I’m re-wearing the somber black dress and heels I wore to my junior prom. My hair is pulled up in some fancy combs. I look nothing like my usual self, but I look great. My stepfather disagrees.

“Just put on some god-damned lipstick and you can go!” my step-father shouts, slamming his fist down onto the table. We’ve been at this for nearly a half hour.

“I’m wearing lipgloss… it’s the only kind I have that’s an ok color for this…” I say, cautiously trying to back out of the house without further uproar. This never works.

“I can’t even see it. You have no color! Don’t you want to look nice? It’s time you started making an effort to look like a woman! People are going to think you’re a….  You are not leaving this house until you put on some makeup,” he insists.

I borrow a weird mauve 90s long-lasting lipstick from my mother to appease him and get us out of there and spend the ride scrubbing it off trying to soothe the dryness with my objectionable different-pink tinted gloss.

I cannot remember what the symphony played that night but am reminded of this exchange each time I’m choose (or opt out of) lip colors.

iii.

I’m in my post-teen runaway phase, living in Los Angeles and working for a tech start-up that’d recently been bought out by a giant monster. Everyone around me is a nerd wildin’ out with dotcom paychecks and rollin’ kegs into the office for expense-able happy hours. My friends are mostly side-gig promoters and djs and we wear a lot of black. I’ve bleached my waist-length, naturally dark hair as white as it could stand so it will soak up as much flamingo pink Manic Panic as possible. To make this perfectly average factoid tip into the range of mortifying, I wore it in heavy pigtails stabilized by popping them through lensless goggles.

The girls at the goth night we frequent are old school Morticia Addams-style ladies. They do not approve of my giant flamingo hair or or neon fuchsia tights, blaming them for the slow shift from the dark riffs of Sister of Mercy into the dark synths of other bands that had honestly been around since the 80s too, so what gives, right? They care though, in the way cats only care about changes to their environment and routine.

“Raves are over, powerpuff girl,” hisses a woman dressed like the Queen of Hearts, the train of her gown soaking up better-left-unidentified liquids from the bathroom floor.

“I know, I know. And everyday is Halloween,” I say earnestly beaming, still hopeful that I don’t have to be miserably cool to make friends. I am surrounded by “harrumphs!” and a rustling of black lace and feathered fans. I try again, “You know, like that Ministry song… no? Oh, not into it. Right.” Shrugging, I finish washing my hands and adjusting my cumbersome hair before escaping back to my crew at the bar.

Crossing the dancefloor on the way back to my table of co-workers and friendlier associates, an underage gothling in a Joy Division shirt (aka “the squiggly lines everyone posts on Tumblr”) taps my shoulder and smiles at me. As I lean closer to hear him, he says, “You have my dream hair. That’s my favorite shade.”

“Oh, it would look really good on you! It’s a super pain to maintain though.” We chatted for a while about mixing colors and application techniques, and a few weeks later I run into him at a record store with the shiniest, most vividly dyed locks shifting from deep magenta to cotton candy pink. It was glorious. If this had been last year, I’m sure we would’ve Instgram’d delighted selfies taken together immediately.

The second time we ran into each other was at a diner after hours. He introduced me to his boyfriend as the “fellow pink he’d gotten good color advice from” giving me a sense of accomplishment I haven’t surpassed.

iv.

“Check out his socks,” whispered a colleague at my most hated office job, nodding in the direction of our co-worker who’d just gotten up from his cube to meet his latest report at the printer.

I glanced at his feet as he walked by my desk and in our inter-office chat application tapped out an “I dig ‘em” to her.

“They’re hot pink. That’s weird,” she types back. I sigh.

“It’s a perfect compliment to the grays he is wearing,” I reply in our wretched little window on screen.

“I know it’s in all the stores right now, but I really hate it when men wear pink. It’s gross.”

“You’re gross,” my fingers instinctively plonk out, before backspacing and sending, “If everyone had a say in what other people wore, no one would want to wear whatever the consensus ended up being.”

“I knowwwww. It’s just he’s got a girlfriend though so I don’t get it.”

“Because only gay men are allowed to be trendy? Because girlfriends should veto things that might make their boyfriends seem gay? I’m no expert on the subject but wouldn’t you laugh and laugh and laugh if your husband tried to tell you not to wear a certain pair of socks? Do you select all of his clothes? Is he a toddler?” I don’t bother stiffling the intensity of my keyboard smashing.

“Right. I know. I know. I’m just saying guys wearing pink icks me out. Just sayin’!”

“I think beige clothing makes people look like earthworms and/or mummies swathed in Band-Aids. I don’t hate it, but I do think it’s hilarious. Please keep my opinion of your favorite sweater in mind when you wear it. Let the echoes of my laughter haunt you forever. Especially when you are shopping. Just sayin’.”

“Nice to meet you, Baktiotha. So what do you do?”

“I rule over the forty and the nine kinds of serpents.”

“So, just like, some of the snakes?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Not even any of the other reptiles?”

“Um. No. Say where did you get that mini quiche? Are they bringing those around? … Bartender, I will require ten and one glasses of the Obelisk cab. Just keep them coming.”

• I Can’t Even So You Shouldn’t Have: Why do people continue to care about things I don’t care about?
• Let’s talk about how everyone should shut up about things I don’t want to hear about.
• Trends are for Other People: the inherent dullness of interests outside my own.
• You had fifteen minutes to acceptably mention that former trend and now you are dead to us too.

(The difference is purely tone.)

Track-list for my upcoming catcore project’s album:

1. Someone Entering the Kitchen
2. Are You, Perhaps, Heading Into the Kitchen?
3. The Person Has Returned (Jingling Keys Mix)
4. A Pizza Box Opens
5. The Moving About and Opening of Cans (Tuna version)
6. The Opening of Cans (Savory Pate dub)
7. The Opening of Cans (Oh, Just Green Beans remix)
8. Crinkling Paper Jam

“It was most certainly not a spider,” the arachnid specialist assured the press conference.

“It was most certainly not a spider,” the arachnid specialist said again adding, “Hearing this story, my first thought is ‘Why would a spider have any interest in an appendectomy scar?’’’

“It was most certainly not a spider,” continued the arachnid specialist. “A spider knows very little of internal human anatomy and would not even know an appendectomy scar could be an entrance.”

“It was most certainly not a spider,” said the arachnid curator of Arachnology (Emeritus), joining the conversation thread. “There is just no historical evidence of interest in under-human-skin travel by any spider populations. A three day trip, burrowing about the torso of a human male? This does not fit with spider customs at all.”

“It was most certainly not a spider,” the arachnologist repeated. “While one cannot rule out the  possibility of environmental and cultural shifts creating subtle differences in behavior as inter-species influence affects social mores — but, I ask, why would a spider want to crawl around inside someone like a mere parasite? A spider surely would not.”

“It was most certainly not a spider,” the arachnid researcher from the Arthropod Institute affirmed. “My initial reaction is that you are looking for a completely different animal. I’m not one to speculate or point a claw but in my professional opinion I see this the work of a mite.”

“It was certainly not a spider,” said the arachnid specialist.

“Certainly not a spider,” the arachnid curator emphasized.

“Not a spider,” concluded the arachnid researcher.

I was sitting on my bed, a portrait of terrible posture, leaning over my work laptop gchatting with a co-worker to let him know an issue had been resolved when an impossibly loud cacophony happened all around me. A noise so enormous it felt heavy –oppressive. Suddenly everything was very bright and then very dim and crackle-y like a bad VHS tape. The “tape” ends abruptly with static fuzz, except it was not just on screen it was everything, everywhere I looked. Then I was laying back in my bed, my legs still crossed like I’d been sitting. I don’t recall falling asleep or waking up, only looking around my room bewildered by fuzz and the noise, then silence and seeing the ceiling plain as day.

According to gchat, five minutes had passed since I’d sent the “no prob” to my co-worker, but it was a blip to me. My heart was racing and I was burning up. No one in the house was panicking like they would if that noise had been real.

Still shaking, I got up and went to ask my mother what low blood pressure feels like. She listened to me describe what I’d felt and, alarmed, asked me what I’d eaten for breakfast and how much coffee I’d had so far. (A banana, two slices of toast with cream cheese, two cups of black coffee, one cup of tea — much better than I usually do when I’m in the office just drinking coffee from 8:30am until lunch.) I followed her to the kitchen and munched on some dried fruit while she fixed us sandwiches and described how she feels when her blood sugar is low. Light-headedness and then extreme tiredness. I felt very awake right then, but figured it was because I’d scared myself into alertness passing out like that. I brought the tall glass of orange juice she gave me back upstairs to my laptop and finished my day of work.

Still weirded out a bit, I joked about it online and a friend tells me to look up “Exploding Head Syndrome” and after some hesitation I wiki’d that shit. Sounds like something out of a cartoon, yeah?

Blunt name aside, and despite the part where I don’t really remember feeling tired before-hand, the description of EHS symptoms is pretty much exactly how I explained the experience to Mom, right afterwards. Here’s an abstract from pubmed on EHS and the wiki page on it that made me go hrmmmm.

Weird stuff — especially considering how excellent I am at sleeping and relaxing and being chill. Can you be too tired to notice? Is my work so boring that I don’t even recognize how dull it is? Seriously though, if this type of thing is as common as the Internet would have us believe, I can certainly see how people could think they were haunted or being messed with by aliens.  This was a wee bit too Videodrome for me.

Work might be doing something to me. (I am still not 100% convinced that we are in fact designing/building anything, and aren’t instead part of a research test group taking part in a study on boundaries and stamina.)

Totally unrelated: I’ve written your new experimental dark-ambient neofolk project’s first hit. It’s titled, We Will Never Be Coil.

But every song’s like broken teeth, greyscale, shakin’ in the asylum

Spoken word, ambient sounds, recording in the bathroom

We don’t care, we’re circuit-bending in our dreams.

But everybody’s like Thirlwell, post-punk, synths over blastbeats

Horror score, science, bustin’ up technology

We don’t care, we’re caught up in our own nightmare

And we’ll never be Coil (Coil)

Too much alcohol in our blood

This kind of noise ain’t what it was

We crave a different kind of fuzz

Let us be on your label (label)

You can say we’re like Psychic TV

And man we’ll be cool, cool, cool, cool

Let us drone infinitely

Last week in Hatteras, NC.

Whhhyyyy did I come back? There’s no beach here.