Erin Meehan

“It’s quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy ,generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don’t do it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

I recently enlisted the services of a Shaman who performed a cleansing ritual on me. It was quite intense. At the end of the ritual I was instructed to ask for the things I want in life. It was requested that I do this out loud, and then I was motioned to ritualistically raise my fragrant oil-covered hands towards the sky while putting these requests into the universe. (Mind you, I was asked to do this while wearing nothing but a leotard—after having been lathered in oils, rums, various remnants of flowers, plants and smokes that were blown, rubbed and smacked against my shivering torso.) I was rendered completely speechless. How could I possibly say these things out loud without feeling completely self-indulgent, pathetic or trite? After my epic failure to complete this task with even the smallest shred of sincerity, he told me that I had homework. “How can you ever expect to get what you want in life if you don’t ask for it?” he said. My homework was to write these things down. To demand that the universe give them to me. So universe of 2012, I say to you with complete selfish sincerity, “GIMME.”

I want…

One of those ridiculous, and probably outrageously expensive, hippie-looking beanbag chairs that you can only buy from fancy furniture shops in Beverly Hills, so I can read all of my books smooshed up in it like I’m in a magical burrito that spoons and hugs me Asada-style. Also, a handsome man to bring me coffee, tea and brandy while I read in it. But not all of these liquids at the same time. That would be gross and probably not gastrically safe. Is “gastrically” even a word? My computer insists upon putting that offensive red-dotted line under it. Fucking bastard. I can make up words if I want to!

Someone to make me bubble baths and cook me foods that require things like spices and those contraptions that grind things. Oh yeah, food processors. Maybe they even know how to make that foam shit that you find on fancy menus because it’s “fancy.” And I refuse to attempt any of these things myself. Martha Stewart can suck it.

A backyard for my dog to play in, and well, poop in, so I don’t have to walk him. I’m lazy.

A fireplace to sit in front of so I can pretend that I’m in some quaint cabin in the mountains, even when there are like 50 helicopters flying over my neighborhood hunting the nefarious. I live in Echo Park.

To wear kaftans and dance around to Van Morrison records in a beautiful backyard with a garden or a teepee or a greenhouse.

To be with someone who thinks this is charming and whimsical, like I’m some ravishing and alluringly tragic young creature in a Fitzgerald novel rather than some old and NOT alluringly tragic hippie women who took too much acid and thinks that Jimmy Buffet is a genius. I’m from Florida.

To read until my eye sockets impair, then read some more.

To need someone more than they need me. Just sometimes.

To give people tiny fragments of myself, slowly, and only after I conclude that they even deserve said fragments in the first place.

To feel like the possibility of being alone forever (as in not finding that mythical, ubiquitous person people call “the one” or “soul mate”—eye roll) is OK, because even when we’re not alone we spend much of our time sitting in silence while watching television, celebrating why we are so great together, whilst secretly speculating if we are the two most abominable human beings to ever join together on the face of this fucking earth—staring blankly at each other in restaurants, or agonizing about how annoying it is that he never puts the roll of toilet paper on the thingy that you put the goddamn roll of toilet paper on.

To ride on the backs of motorcycles and climb up desert mountains and ski down winter mountains and run naked through forests even though it’s freezing cold and January because nothing matters but happiness.

“He sent his words to her like letters, as though they left him sometime before they reached her.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender is the Night)

Adonis

1.
EACH of us like you
has died once,
has passed through drift of wood-leaves,
cracked and bent
and tortured and unbent
in the winter-frost,
the burnt into gold points,
lighted afresh,
crisp amber, scales of gold-leaf,
gold turned and re-welded
in the sun;
each of us like you
has died once,
each of us has crossed an old wood-path
and found the winter-leaves
so golden in the sun-fire
that even the live wood-flowers
were dark.
2.
Not the gold on the temple-front
where you stand
is as gold as this,
not the gold that fastens your sandals,
nor thee gold reft
through your chiselled locks,
is as gold as this last year’s leaf,
not all the gold hammered and wrought
and beaten
on your lover’s face.
brow and bare breast
is as golden as this:
each of us like you
has died once,
each of us like you
stands apart, like you
fit to be worshipped.
H.D.

HAPPINESS
by Carl Sandburg

I asked professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool
with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and
children and a keg of beer and an accordion.