Got me in trouble again? Hard to say that i don’t like trouble at this point. That i like to trouble is clear–both in the critical sense, that’s how i wound up in grad school, but in my personal life as well. The two year itch. The permanent open door. The insistent, umm, curiosity about boundaries. i collect it nouns and verbs.

To collect pretty trouble. Like Elizabeth Peyton’s painting of John Lydon. Most people see ugly. She sees gorgeous. Now i can see, too. Like glitter and drag queens and hot, sticky loud shows in a tiny room toilet paper jammed in your ears and everyone’s pretty, too. Like the way David Gordon Green used to be able to make a junkyard or a broken building, or even a kid with pica beautiful–see above photo. And see this one:

Then sometimes the metamorphosis births the cockroach instead of the butterfly, and the trouble i get into just hurts. Think Lindsey Buckingham’s “Trouble.” If you know the song, it is soft, sweet despair–that moment when you realize, shit. i care. And it hurts. And you try to text that feeling and it looks like: crapcrapcrapshitfuck. And you listen to the song, and it’s a soft descent that makes you think, should i worry now?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbpuflLgmgM

But then you watch the video. Ha. Hahahahaha. It’s absurd. Six dudes playing guitar, singing with mouths open wide. Six more dudes standing up playing drums–totally feeling it.  Mick Fleetwood is even there, looking kind of like Animal from the Muppets. Supposedly he was meant to record a drum track for the whole song, but he and Lindsey had a tiff in the studio, and there are only 4 seconds recorded, and that is actually the drum track for the song. Those 4 seconds, over and over. On the double. “I think I’m in trouble. On the double.” Form follows function, on purpose or not. Trouble doesn’t have to stop at bad. It moves.

So here i am. There are piles of clothes on the floor. Most days i wake up, go straight to the coffee shop and work for a few hours, come home and change, walk to Isa and work for 9 hours. Repeat. Sometimes i have breakfast with Joni and then race him to school. i stay up late the night before and pack his little lunchbox and set his clothes out. Make sure his penguin humidifier is full for the night, that i roll him over when i see that little leg hanging over the side of his munchkin bed, that i kiss his forehead while he’s asleep, and giggle when he comes and jumps on me at 6:45 the next morning.  Yes, ritual unions got me in trouble. Again. i’ll take it. On the double.