Today I broke up with Proactiv.
And old P’ took it surprisingly hard.

So, I was clearing out everything from the cabinet under the bathroom sink, and somehow, I’m telling you, like six or eight or three-dozen of those little white bottles of the mail-order acne solution stuff had accrued there. Some of them had gotten together in the dark, down there, and mated, or maybe populated the space via some creepy spore-like process. I don’t want to know. What I do know, is that the shit’s expensive, and that it works no better at maintaining my sparkling fine complexion than the five-dollar stuff you buy at Harris Teeter.

So I went to the Proactiv website. Logged in to my account and searched and searched for the page from which you could cease, halt, all ordering of the stuff. No such page. So I grabbed my phone, hit the 800-whatever-whatever, and went back to cleaning out the bathroom.

A nice enough sounding woman answered the phone. She called up my account.
“Ms. Deaver, we have no record of your phone number, on file in your club membership. Would you care to add one?”
“Well, actually, no,” I said, “I don’t think so, since I’m actually calling to cancel my account.” I said this in a nice-enough voice, maybe a tad distracted, since I was now tossing other things from beneath the cabinet: old bottles of lotion with miniscule amounts left, tubes of this and that, expired ibuprofen, and I was marveling at all the junk a single person can collect in the course of a year. How complex can one person’s own body and physical conditions thereof be? Was I some sort of closet-hypochondriac? And good god, was I this vain regarding my damn looks?
Meanwhile, the Proactiv operator had started in on her, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that you’re canceling...” spiel. I only half-listened as she asked me why. I know computer scripts, and I was imagining the one in front of her, which required that she ask me this.
“Oh. Well,” I said, collecting all the tampons into one box. Those freaking buggers can scatter all over the place; I’m telling you if you’re not familiar, s’true. “Well, I guess it’s because-” I hadn’t thought about a concrete reason I could give her. I glanced over at the dozens of bottles of Proactiv acne treatment all lined up like soldiers in the brown cardboard box onto which I’d scrawled “Bathroom” in black Sharpie. I could survive in a bunker with blemish-free skin for years with that box. “Um, well. I guess it’s because I could buy the over-the-counter stuff and it works just as well.”
“So are you saying that the Proactiv isn’t working for you?”
“Well, no. That’s not it.” I stood up. The last thing I wanted was to get into some personal discussion about the degree of effectiveness of acne medication on my blotchy, frustrating skin with this woman. The last thing I wanted was to get into any sort of discussion with her, really. But the times when really elementary prevarication would smooth the way in life are precisely the times when I tend to just trip up and start telling the stupid, messy truth. Usually when I’m distracted by something else. “No, that’s not it. It’s just that I could just get stuff at the store,” I said, considering it honestly for a moment. Then I realized that she just needed an answer to fill in her stupid computer screen. “Oh. Well, you know? That’s fine. I guess I’ll just say that. It doesn’t work.”
This is when everything changed. Suddenly, the woman adopted a new tone.
“Well, Ms. Deaver.” Her voice was sad, disappointed, my sweet kindergarten teacher when no one in class would own up to stealing the cherry-scented Mr. Sketch marker from the set. “I really, really would hope that you would feel you could be honest with us about why you feel you need to discontinue your membership.” Was she going to cry? “I see here, you’ve been a member a really long time.”
What? Was she next going to remind me about my first really bad outbreak when I was nineteen? And how nothing would help? And how it was a shame that Proactiv hadn’t been invented yet, then? Was she going to bring up Nero, my first cat, dead these twenty years? The fact that I had eaten popcorn as part of my so-called nutritionally-complete dinner for the past four nights? What secret tool did this woman not have in her arsenal?
And what fricking nerve? I mean, Jesus.
I reminded myself that she was just a telephone operator who probably hated her job. I would not be that asshole. Further, I would not let her get under my skin, let her ruin my pleasant detachment. I tossed the box of reunited Tampax into the cardboard box, and said evenly,
“Uh, you know? I guess it’s just because there are other, cheaper things that work just as well.”
“Well, how long would you say you've been using these 'other products'?”
“What? Oh. Some months, I guess.”
And then she said, yes, I shite you not:
“Only a few months?”
“Well, months, years."
"And are they honestly as effective as Proactiv?"
"Again, I...yes. Yes, they're better. I really want to cancel this membersh—this account.”
And then, just as she’d arrived, the ghost of my kindergarten teacher Reborn as Condescending Saleslady disappeared. Her voice was crisp, officious.
“Okay, well. I’ll cancel your membership, then. Effective August first. Is there anything else I can do for you, today?”
“Uh, no.”
“Okay, then. Goodbye.”
And she. Hung up. On me. Which is fine. I got to finish up with packing the bathroom stuff, and move on to the kitchen, which was the real bear.

The cat, he's a bit of drama queen, and there's no way to convince him that it'll be okay, that the advancing brigade of cardboard boxes do not signal the end times. He twitches and flips over again, washes the same spot on his chest, and won't move from that spot on the furthest corner of the bed, where he faces the wall.

2 a.m., you walk home. You’ve been drinking but try to maintain that upright bearing, try to maintain that I-will-kick-your-assedness-if-you-so-much-as-come-near-me, potential attacker/whatever person. You hold your car keys like so.

Tonight was too soon to have four beers. You were just getting over a cold, but damn, that country singer was so good, you couldn’t help it and when she sang that sad, sad song, you needed something to pour down that space inside you it opened up.
((Which sounds maudlin. I’m aware.))
So, two a.m., you walk home and you stop by the pizza joint and order and eat a slice alone at their bar. The place is packed, but you have that aura of Don’t Mess and no one bothers you; you think, this is medicinal. This grease: to not feel like shite in the morning. You think: this could be my life, now. Ordering medicinal slices of pizza at two a.m., alone, while drunk. Walking everywhere alone, as you have been, anyway. Which is a thought neither positively- nor negatively-loaded. Only thoughtful, as you watch the antics of Brittney Spears on the Fox News above everyone’s head and scarf that cheese slice down. Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, some part of your brain goes, back to that song your voice teacher had you sing way back when, in high school.
You finish your slice in five minutes and finish the walk home, sticking to the un-streetlit spots because they feel somehow safer, somehow hidden. You are not the spotlighted solo drunk chick, you are not the caricature of yourself you’d never care to see; you are stealth. You are the watcher. And in another minute, you are home. To shower. To bed. To another night gone.

Hey Summer, Where ya Been?
A= This is moving week. Yes, it’s adieu to ye olde artsy garret in favor of a portion of giant old mansion built in the nineteen-teens, with my two pals, Ginger and Carmelita. It’s not that I don’t need, love and crave solitude, Henshaw; it’s that too much of it in an enforced way magnifies my weird little proclivities to the max. Soon, the decoupage is everywhere and things are organized in a ROY G BIV sorting system made up in a fit of 2 a.m. inspiration. You understand. Merely having people in the next room, or the next wing, as this gigantor apartment will allow, is comforting. It tells me there’s order, and there’s dinner taking place at a normal hour in the next room, which I am welcome to join, or to decline, politely.

The folks moving out left things in the mansion house—which I may just call the place here—with a wink and nod to a great Jenny Lewis tune—anyway, they left it kind of a mess. This means that Carmelita and Ginger and I have spent the past two weeks dumping things and scrubbing things and shouting, “Oh god, that’s disgusting!” a lot, upon revealing items such as particularly gigantic dead cockroaches, rat droppings and dog turds in kitchen cabinets.
No one ever said the road to the life of beauty was a smooth one.

So, we’ve been cleaning. Meanwhile, I’ve been in the early stages of trying to put together a syllabus for my classes this fall, and-! working on two stories I want to have ready for workshop when classes start up again. This, between: putting in many a mind-numbing, but necessary hour at ye olde call center of doom and writing articles for various local publications. That and I can’t seem to shake this weirdo summer cold which tells me that all I really want to do is sleep all the time.

Meanwhile, I’ve suggested to Carmelita and Ginger, the notion of creating some Uruk-hai from the pits of the steamy swamps west of Beach Town to help us move things from our two apartments to the new one, come Saturday. Seems their only close male friend is outta town for the weekend, which brings our collective grand total of close male friends here in town to zero.
Not that we need the menfolk. The three of us have enough moves under our belts to be able to move our big unwieldy wooden furniture in our damn sleep at this point, anyway, I suspect. We’ll be fine. Freaking exhausted, but fine.
Gotta go, now. See ya.

(Meanwhile: Listening nonstop to these songs on the National’s newest record that Marshall keeps feeding me, one by one. Argh.)

Today I am boycotting the great outdoors. Today, the outdoors are not so great; when I got up at seven o’clock this morning, it was 80 degrees out. The high is 96. Which, when I swung my legs out of bed and listened dully to the public radio announcer say it, made me want to just disappear, like some reverse version of Toad, back into the great cave of my cool sheets and blankets till fall.

Besides, today, I am not so great, either. Last night after work, I went out for Mexican food with Ginger and Carmelita, and even though I’d been the one drumming on the dashboard, practically, in my excitement at the prospect of mole chicken and the best salsa in the world, by the end of our meal, I was ready to crawl under the table and sleep. We crawled home instead, and while Ginger and Carm’ went on to drink beers on their porch and enjoy the beautiful evening, I tossed the shade over my the bedroom window to shut the sun out and went straight to sleep.

I have a scratchy throat today, and a feeling of fatigue that will not quit. However, I also have a/c and a loyal kitty-cat and a computer. And a fall syllabus to design, and an article to write and well, an apartment full of furniture and belongings to transport across town in the coming week when I move, but screw it. I will eat corn fritters and watch McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which has been sitting, taunting me for weeks, lounging around my apartment in its little red Netflix sleeve. (I like to pay fifteen dollars a month to rent what usually amounts to one or two movies. It’s great.)

Anyway, today I will read good things, and I will write things that have nothing to do with obligation, and I will sure as hell not take one step outside until that sun has the decency to go away again.

Oh, and the new John Doe single, "The Golden State"? The cathartic number he duets on with Kathleen Edwards? That one? Is something I can't stop listening to. You should check it out.

(I'm trying to buy the CD, but every music store in Beachtown is sold out for now. So I have just the one song, and I'm seriously considering just burning it onto a CD so that I can drive around the places I need to go today and just listen to it over and over. I am a wasteful American. Not that I'm actually gonna do it. Ha. Haha..err.)

Corollary. See: “Rule.”:
…except where it’s supposed to be.
There’s a bar, see, where an ancient copy of the above poster is screwed to the wall, and there it has observed the pool players and drunken dancing girls in halter tops for ages from behind its dusty layer of plastic. The image was originally supposed to be all sex, sex, sex, but it just gives my friend Ginger the willies.

“I hate that thing!” she shouted again one night, and finally I asked her why.

In response, Ginger set her drink down, walked up to the poster and pointed to that weird space. The crevice. Which, the more you stare at it, becomes more crevasse than crevice. “Look at it!” she said, pointing to the faded, overexposed copy of poor Emmanuelle’s chin. “What is that? What is it supposed to be?!”

She was right. It was weird. Some sort of second mouth. A strange landscape where colonies of tiny people could dwell. No, X never was like this, I don’t think.

Rule.
If you want one web address, but accidentally type in another, you get porn.
If you want one 800 number, but accidentally punch another, you get porn.

Porn is lurking around every false turn in the Land of Communication. (I'd originally typed "nook and cranny" and not "false turn," there, but contextually, that makes no sense. Nook and cranny sounds way more pornlike, too.

There's something terribly wrong with me.)

The Ooh, The La and the Oh No. (a.k.a. The Wherefores of Bad Making Out.)
I have parsed it out. There are four basic kinds of crappy people to make out with and here they are (these examples all refer to the male of the species, by the way, since my experience is more or less in that way limited; you understand.)

1. The Extreme Sportsman.
Keeps a waterbottle by the side of the bed/couch. Is really into Trying out New Things in this way that feels akin to, perhaps, bungee jumping. You have never in your life had any desire to bungee jump. Alternately, may cause your body to feel a bit like a jungle gym. Extreme Sportsman’s waterbottle is very likely one of those squirty-jobbies, and he takes frequent breaks to reach over and squeeze more H2O into his mouth, to “hydrate himself,” proclaiming with a hearty athletic enthusiasm, “This is fun!” You ready your hand for a possible high-five.

2. The Don Juan in His Own Mind.
Thinks of himself as having a technique. Is really, really into both this Technique and his own physique—and yours—but mostly his. Sizes up certain of your physical features a lot, saying things like, “Yes!” Seems to want to re-create movie scenes a lot. Gives you the distinct feeling you could lop off your head at any point and replace it with that of the girl down the street, Katie Couric or perhaps Condoleezza Rice and it would be the exact same experience for him. Lots of heavy breathing, lots of “Oh, yeah”s (reminding you of exactly of the Kool Aid man), little eye contact. Would be just as happy spending the evening with a mirror, perhaps even happier.

3. The DJ.
Has created a CD just for this experience. Gets up to change the music, adjust volume levels and/or album tracks frequently.

(A note on music: Good music can certainly enhance making out, but bad music can raze the experience down to the ground, and there’s such a fine line. One time my friend was kissing on this guy and the public radio station was on in the next room. There was an enthusiasm and a zest to their activities but suddenly, says my friend, they both realized that the new age show, “Music from the Hearts of Space” had come on and the tune playing was this synthesized thing with sitar and howling wolves. She says she busted out laughing and said, “I’m sorry. I feel like I should have on some Stevie Nicks dress and like, some feathers, instead of this tank top.”
And then there’s music that’s too obviously designed for making out. I was, err, engaged in this activity at this guy’s house shortly after noticing that he owned a record by Steely Dan and putting that on. Next thing I know, there’s one of those eight-minute funky 70s-porn percussion and wa-wa guitar things going. I, of course, felt like this soundtrack was urging me to say something like, “Oh, you must be the plumber. Well, isn't that funny. I was just about to step into the shower.”)

4. The Absentee.
After weeks of his clumsy, charmingly endearing hinting that his feelings for you are, err, more than chaste, you finally, finally kiss him. When you do, he says nothing. At all. You ask him if everything’s okay, if this is what he wants. “Yeah, sure, it’s fine,” he says, the way you imagine he responded to his mother when she asked him how his day at high school went. Fine.
Stellar.

The Fabulous Destiny -!
Last night I had two friends over for supper. While I was buzzing around getting ready, cleaning the bathroom counter, chopping onions, singing to el Dangercat and whatnot, I felt this weird hum beneath the surface. This is good, I thought. I am coming out of my summer funk, I thought, which, in truth Henshaw, has been more of a late winter/spring/summer funk. It was then that I realized that it’s been months. Months. Since the end of winter, that I’ve invited another person into my home. Which is highly ridiculous, since cooking meals for people and breaking the old bread together is one of the things I live for in this world.

Here’s the thing, pointed out in another context by one of the good friends I had over last night: You have to put out there what you hope to get back. You can’t just sit around miserable and hope someone freaking notices. Which sounds all platitudinous, maybe, on the surface, but really: How many of us have ever bitched about not getting real letters in the mail anymore? How long has it been since any of us has sat down and written a real letter to someone?
So, not to get all Amelie on your ass, but still. It’s something to think about, Henshaw. We had a really great time last night. I am thankful for the good people in my life.