"Yes Yes Yes! It's My Autumn Almanyac," by Laura Jane Faulds ---> NOGOODFORME.COM

Tuesday , November 24, 2009

"Yes Yes Yes! It's My Autumn Almanyac," by Laura Jane Faulds

ABOVE: Self-Portrait of the Artist with Polar Bear Cookie, November 2009

Don't you think it's funny how when we are sad, water pours out of our eyes? Oh, sorry. It's not even water, it's salt water. What the hell?

What a stupid thing to have happen to you, when you are sad.

I see Jenny once per every two weeks. We get stoned and play a game, which goes: I tell her everything that's happened to me since two weeks ago. It consistently amazes her- how quickly my life moves! A day takes forever, but my weeks run apace. I worked very hard for a very long time, to have my life unfold like this.

And then now that it did, I don't like it at all.

And like I said in October: I don't like the fall.

Please never listen to "Rain" in the rain. Rain means only that water pours from the sky. Rain is not happy or sad or the Beatles. It's just another weather.

Autumn begins on the 1st of September, and ends on November 30th, 11:59 PM EST. It is 7,862,400 seconds long. It is the length of "Autumn Almanac" by the Kinks played 40,950 times. Listening to "Autumn Almanac" by the Kinks 40,950 times over the course of one single autumn is as stupid as forcing yourself to listen to "Rain" by the Beatles once, just because it happens to be raining out.

You can't soundtrack every second of your life, but you can soundtrack some seconds of your life.

Sometimes this fall, I would listen to "Autumn Almanac" by the Kinks and think about how, at the end of the fall, I would write an essay about my fall based around the lyrics of "Autumn Almanac" by the Kinks. I wondered a lot of how this essay would be. Here is

The Kinks, "Autumn Almanac"-

And now here is the essay.

I. WHEN THE DAWN BEGINS TO CRACK

It never shocked me, because it wasn't shocking.

In early September I wore a uniform: whichever t-shirt was closest to my hands when I woke up, and either the green track shorts or the grey track shorts. There was so much cereal on my bedroom floor! The Diet Coke can/wine box graveyard looked like the audience of Shea Stadium when the Beatles played there (with Sheriff's badges), only in a parallel universe where girls are Diet Coke cans and dudes are wine boxes.

It was not the saddest I'd ever been, but it was the most I've ever cried. I called my best friends crying, and then hung up the phone.

Three cheers to the moon, the way you never judge.

The Beatles had been ruined; "The Kinks are all I've got!"

In September, I only listened to the Kinks. "I'm going to watch every single Kinks video on all Youtube," I decided. And I did.

If that month had been a Kinks song that doesn't exist, it would've been named:

"Tired Of Waiting For You (To E-Mail Me Back)."

I thought I was unhumiliatable, but, as usual: I thought wrong. It was more than innocent blushing- admitting to all the people, that this was how it turned out. My poor parents! I'll never be "a victim", but I'd certainly been victimized. By a MAN! When I tell people the story, they say they're sorry like somebody died, but not even died the normal way- like tragically, before their time. The people look like deers and they hold me tight. I thought I was just being irrational. It was so strange to find out it's worth that tight of a hold.

I wonder what would happen if I said the truth and then they put the truth on the Internet news. It would be funny and in no way satisfying. I could write the sentence, "That's what you get when you fuck with The James Joyce of Fashion Bloggers, BITCH."

I could do that anyway, and I did. I like to "do the thing." But even more, I like to "write the sentence."

You know, Gang, I've got it all figured out. I can solve any, and every, problem. And I did!
__

It only took me the fall.

II. THE SUMMER'S ALL GONE

"Let it be" became "Let it beat"; then: Let it be beat. Let it be good, Let it not be bad.

Let it be better than this.

Let it belabor, beleaguer, become, and bereave.
Let it bewitch and beguile, or maybe, let me?
Let it breathe, bleed and die soon- I hope it's all three!

Here is what my summer was like.

It was the goldenest joke. It wasn't a dream, it was a game I wish I'd never played.

But I like games!

Okay Laura Jane here's a new one then. It's an "imagination game." You love using your imagination, don't you Laura?

Yeah I totally do.

This is the "Imagine you got shot in the arm Game." It goes:

Imagine you got shot in the arm. What do you do?

1 If they shot me in the Paul McCartney tattoo I'll use my John Lennon arm to call 911 2 I look at the blood pour and think of applicable descriptive adjectives while waiting impatiently for the ambulance to arrive 3 The ambulance comes and I show the people my Health Card, am critical of their haircuts 4 "I wanna be sedated" 5 They sedate me 6 I wake up 7 I have stitches 8 They take the stitches out 9 I go to physical therapy 10

I have a scar on my arm.

I ask him how he's doing. He says, "Bad. I mean, okay."

III. OH MY POOR RHEUMATIC BACK

I woke up somewhere else on a Saturday morning, and one of my eyes was kind of red. It didn't phase me. My eyes are temperamental and I'm used to it.

I woke up three weeks later, on a Saturday again. I'm not bullshitting you- I was blind. I looked like the alien "Mac" from Mac and Me. My beautiful eyes! They were swollen shut and killed. I couldn't tell which were the tears of pain and which were the tears of eye infection and which were the tears of self-pity.

It was raining, so I bet you can guess what song I didn't listen to. I ate a cornflake Ritter Sport and my father took me to the emergency room. I was 100% convinced that I was going to be blind forever and imagined my crappy new life as a blind person. I cried at the shrieky white light and I cried because

"I'm gonna be the Beethoven of writers!" I cried.

"I'll buy you a Braille keyboard," said my Dad.

Because I'm hilarious, I nicknamed my exile "Rear Windowin' it." I couldn't look at the computer, not to mention "the sun." My eye infection didn't understand that I'm a fashion blogger. I got down on my hands and knees and wrote out blog posts on landscaped pieces of 8.5 x 11 so I could "see the flow". How's that for commitment to the cause?

I took to drinking entire bottles of cheap champagne at three in the afternoon while crying and listening to Holy Ghost Language School in the dark. My eyes hurt too much to even read a book. I showered like fifteen times a day, because there was nothing the fuck else to do. I liked to read out the names of the ingredients on my roommate's shampoo bottle. The purple kind, for old ladies and platinum blondes.

My first loves were Sodium Laureth Sulfate and Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, because they reminded me of my name and I like my name, "Strawberry Laura Jane Faulds Forever" and all that. But really there are so many gems:

Cocamidopropylbetaine. It might actually be "Cocamidopropyl Betaine," I can't tell because the line cuts off. Ricinoleamidopropyl.

Cocamide Mea- that one's the name of my second-born daughter.

Guar Hydroxypropyltrimonium Chloride, Methylchloroisothiazolinone, Methylisothiazolinone.

These are real words that exist in the same world as I do. How can I not feel like it's a beautiful place?

Ext. Violet 2. Violet 2.

IV. IF I LIVE TO BE NINETY-NINE

When I was at my sickest, I was dying, and it scared me, because I didn't want to die.

Some people say they would prefer to die in their sleep, but I'm not one of them. I would take any death over that one- even plane crash, even drowning. I want to know that I am going to die NOW. Sleep-death means disappearing. It's like somebody talking about you behind your back.

So when I was dying, sleep was so scary. Also, I was really crazy. Something a crazy dying person would do, is what I did- an anti-death ritual performed every night before going to death, I mean, sleep. I "had" to knock on wood three times, on three different woods, three perfect taps per each full knock, and with every knock I had to say "Please let me stay alive through this night", in my head, in perfect timing to the taps. Three perfect knocks, nine perfect taps, "Please stay alive..." and that was my only shot I guessed, my only best bet. I'm not one to gamble. It would take forever to get it right.

What if? What if tonight I don't do it and I die.

V. BREEZE BLOWS LEAVES

The Kinks, "Susannah's Still Alive"-

I'll cry and never die. I was so sad at the beginning of October. "You're still alive, Laura Jane!" I'd coach myself.

I feel like all I'm ever undoing is her damage. That elfin little seductress idiot.

The seven stages of grief are true. They end with "acceptance," but that doesn't mean the story's done. It just means that, now, you have to live in "acceptance" forever. If you're looking for an ending-

Have fucking fun.

Back in "anger", "bargaining", and "depression", the promise of "acceptance" was all I had. But because I didn't know it, I mistook it for something else- a something I don't think exists. "Disappearance," it would be. Disappearance, like sleep-death.

Let's play the "Imagine you got shot in the arm Game" again. It's so helpful.

"Acceptance" is a gunshot scar; the word "McCartney" looks all wonky now. Eventually, you'll stop noticing it every single second- you'll no longer self-define primarily as "the person who recently got shot in the arm." But you'll always be "a person who got shot in the arm once." You'll never forget that day, or the weeks and months that followed, how much it fucked your life up.

People will ask you what's the deal with that scar on your arm.

You used to sit with your best friends and grasp at their forearms with your good hand and those ever-telling eyes would plead, "PLEASE explain why this had to happen to me"- And once they choked on their breathing How they missed your derisive half-smile HER- HER POOR ARM HER POOR ARM HER POOR ARM--

And now you have a stock response to that question; you know it from memory and deliver it mindlessly in- hold on let me check my non-existent watch, I don't believe in time Right?-

Like forty-seven seconds!

Motherfucker dropped off the face of the planet, and I will never know the answer.

The end!

VI. TEA & TOASTED BUTTERED CURRANT BUNS

"I'm sorry if my bedroom smells like Thai food. It's because I just ate Thai food in my bedroom."

What if? What if tonight I don't do it and I die. What if I stop throwing salt over my left shoulder. What if I stop making the words mean the exact perfect thing about my life. What if he doesn't like these words. What if I always eat when I'm hungry? What if I stop having an eating disorder?

I can sit around and cry about it if that's what I really want to do here. Or I can think of every person who loves me, and even a lot of people who don't. I can think of how scared they once were and how now they're not. And that's because of the work I did, which was worth it.

I hate my body less than I hated it one month ago but it still scares me, because it's new. You can't live for other people, but it helps a lot. These people see my body and they don't think hot nor cold. They think Thank God. They muss up their pale heads of hair and I'm not going to die anymore, you guys. I love you so much and I promise I did it. You don't have to be scared anymore. I promise, I swear.

VII. PEOPLE GET TOGETHER

Yesterday I wrote the words "derisive half-smile" and I think I'd rather die than ever eat a polar bear cookie again. I went to bed early for the summer but pretty late for now. I dreamed about John Lennon- dreamt?

He was Imagine-era John, and I was Laura Jane. We sat on a bench beside a river, and shared a bag of sunflower seeds in the shell. We spat the shells into the river. I'm pretty sure they were "Spitz." I smiled at him.

"There's that derisive half-smile!" he said.

"You have a derisive half-smile too!" I said, and took his hand. I said, "Look," and I pulled him up by the hand and I brought him to the river. We looked at our reflections in the river. There were sunflower shells floating atop the swirly picture of us. We half-smiled derisively, and watched ourselves.

It's good to have heroes who are dead. They will never let you down that way.

VIII. AUTUMN ARMAGNAC

John Lennon, Paul McCartney. John Lennon & Paul McCartney. John Lennon & Paul McCartney used to write songs together. They sat in rooms and did that. They had a rule-

They didn't write it down. "Because," decided John Lennon & Paul McCartney, "If it's that good, we'll remember it tomorrow."

When I was sick, I used to participate in a ritual I nicknamed "procrastin-eating." I only ate twice per day, and the only meal of those two that actually counted as actual food was "dinner." The safe window for dinner-eating would shift depending on my duties and obligations at that point in time, but for the most part, it was between 8 and 8:30 PM. The most exquisite time to eat.

But I like to live on the edge, right? So I would play a game with those minutes. I wasn't allowed to eat unless everything was finished. What do I mean "everything"? I don't even know. It depended. Some days it would be tidying, other days it would be fixing up my hair, or writing e-mails, calling someone on the phone. Some days there was nothing to procrastin-eat by, so I would invent some bullshit task. Untangling gold necklace chains, alphabetizing the Muppet Babies cubby of my shelving unit.

But mostly I used my writing here. It was eight and suddenly became imperative to record twenty bad ideas that had been slacking off inside my head all day. I knew the same bad idea this morning, but I never cared then.

I would sit on the side of my bed writing down all these words, starving as my food turned cold. Pages and pages of scrawled worthless sentences that nothing ever came of.
__

John Lennon's favourite Kinks song was "Wonder Boy." The Kinks' nickname for Paul McCartney was "Pull My Cock Off."

I listened to "Autumn Almanac" a lot last spring. I never wrote an essay about the spring, but I listened to "Autumn Almanac" way more times then than I did this fall. I taught myself perfect posture to its yes-yes-yeses.

My favourite part of "Autumn Almanac" is- was- how he pronounces "Almanac" as "Almanyac" at 2:24. How adorable! He is emotionally unstable and has a gap between his two front teeth.

When I started writing this essay, I looked up the lyrics to "Autumn Almanac" by the Kinks to help guide my titling. Lyricsfreak, Metrolyrics, Lyricstime. The one I arbitrarily trust most is "sing365.com." According to "sing365.com," he never says "Almanyac" at all. He is singing, "Armagnac."

I Wikipedia-ed "Armagnac"- "Armagnac (drink)." Armagnac is a distinctive kind of brandy or eau de vie produced in the Armagnac region in Gascony, southwest France.

When i was a little girl, my Father told me that life never happens the way you expect it to, which made me huffy because I thought he was telling me I'd never be a famous writer. But he was not.

He was telling me that "Almanyac" is "Armagnac."

Myself at ten, how could I have guessed that I would one day become the James Joyce of Fashion Bloggers? I couldn't have. Because there was no Internet.

IX. IT'S ALL PART OF MY AUTUMN ALMANAC

For me, equipoise is anathema. Two sisters- Fiesta and Fiasco. My life moves fast because I'm a shape-shifter inside of it. I'm a real dunce sometimes- I make the most idiotic mistakes, but then I learn the lesson. I drink Diet Coke out of cans and I smoke too many cigarettes and get so jazzed when the convenience store employee keeps her lips zipped. Wine makes me a way better writer, and coffee makes me the best writer of all. I bite the fuck out of my fingernails and it's unladylike.

"I'm not exactly the sanest person in the world." But craziness does not preclude contentment. You just have to work a little bit harder.

If there's one thing that has changed about me this autumn, it's that I've learned to do what I want to do, instead of what I think other people want me to do. You must never sacrifice your today's happiness in the name of potentially improving tomorrow. It's the most failsafe method in the world, for making tomorrow suck.

In other words: You can't let it be whatever you want until you learn to let it be whatever it is.

In the middle of last summer, I made sangria for my best friend. She is a Golden Delicious apple, or lemonade. She is like the sun.

We lay on the wood of my bedroom floor and I nooked my head into her shoulder. "Ally," I said. "I promise you. I'm going to live the best life that anybody has ever lived."

And in the fall I waited. It was not the saddest I've ever been, but it was the most I've ever cried. I attached a number to it, and that would be the day: the ballad will be gone, my life can re-begin. And in those days of waiting, I learned how to exist in the not-knowing. And then the day came, and I did something I thought I never wouldn't: I didn't.

This is what it feels like to be Laura Jane when she is twenty-four. You don't get to be the John Lennon of Crazy Novelists unless you're the James Joyce of Fashion Bloggers first. I have destroyed every coping mechanism, and now there's only me. I love her so much.

If you need nothing but yourself, it becomes so beautifully easy. to value everything you have.

X. YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES- YES!

The Kinks, "Big Sky"-

I am irascible. I like the sun but I'm not like the sun. I like the moon and I'm like it, too. The sun and the moon are cool, but they just live in the sky.

And compared to the sky- everything pales.

Tags: assholes, assholes suck, Autumn Almanac by the Kinks, autumn of 2009, eating disorder recovery, John Lennon, Laura Jane Faulds, Laura loves the Kinks, Paul McCartney, pink eye, polar bear cookies, self-acceptance