05.10.17

last night i dreamed that i finally gave in to my adulthood-long urge to shave my head. "it looks better than i thought it would," joe said, "but your skin is so thin. now everyone knows your blood is green." when a woman shaves her head she ends up with a little port at the base of her neck through which all her green blood might spill, so she has to ask her partner to check her stopper each night before she turns in. so many things i hadn't considered.

i'm reading kristin hersh's rat girl, a memoir adapted from journal entries between 1985 and 1986, when she was eighteen and throwing muses performed at bars around rhode island. the bouncers never remembered her and her bandmates between sound check and their shows (which none of them looked old enough to attend; they weren't, not legally), so they had to pay their way into their own gigs.

Tea and I are stepsisters—we introduced my mother to her father and they got married, of all things—but even though there's no blood between us, we look very much alike: puny little dishwater blonds. When people ask if we're twins, she tells them we're "step-twins" and they always nod, like they know what she's talking about. Tea also says this about us: "It's good that we're ugly—it makes us funny." Of course, we think ugly is beautiful.

[...]

I pick up every snake I see. Every single one, and I see a lot of snakes because I look for them. Now that spring's here, they're everywhere. Snakes're perfect. What a handle they've got on locomotion...they swim, climb trees, glide across rocks and sand, through grass and leaf litter. I can only do a couple of these terrains comfortably and I'm fairly sporty. Snakes can eat things that weigh more than they do, they come in all sizes and colors and they can adjust their temperature just by hanging out in the right places—they soak up weather and wear it. Snakes win; the rest of us should quit.

i'd use adjectives for rat girl but i think you can probably tell how i feel about it.