Wow, not even a week and already another stranger on my answering machine. Two messages this time, both from a girl named Mary, whom I'd guess, by the sound of her voice, is about seven years old. She called to report that she'd found my cat "Leeches" and wanted to know whether it was missing (or just roaming). She started off both messages saying "um…" repeatedly, in a voice that was barely audible. I had to turn off the fan in the room and call one wrong number before I figured out what number she'd given me. Apparently Leeches befriended her sometime during the day yesterday, and she'd called to make sure cat and owner were reunited. (By the time I got home from work, Leeches had returned home.) I called Mary to thank her, and was sorry to only have the opportunity to leave her a message. I guess I would've only sounded like any other adult to her, my real voice making her more nervous than my recorded one. For some reason I don't feel like I should be classified exclusively as an adult yet; instead, I feel like I'm standing somewhere in between, with one foot in each territory, able to step with two on either side. Had I talked to Mary, I would've wanted her to know not to be nervous and to not call me ma'am and, come to think of it, what sort of adult does she think would name her cat "Leeches" anyway?

***

Tomorrow I leave for New York.

To me, Faith Hill is evidence that celebrity marketers (or whatever it is they're called) do their job very well. Why? Because I can't seem to figure out why I know that woman's name. But I do. Every morning I see her smiling down at me from a billboard just before my exit, and my mind responds involuntarily with the words "Faith Hill," not unlike Pavlov's dog. The thing is, I watch almost no TV, I hardly ever buy magazines of any sort, her name's not mentioned on any web sites I visit, and I don't listen to the radio, as my car has no antenna. I could have picked up the information in the ocean of magazines that wallpaper the aisle at the grocery store counter...I vaguely remember Ingo once asking me, while we were standing in line, if Faith Hill was some sort of cemetery. But it's not just her name I know; it's others, too. Could they all have come from magazine covers? How does this information seep in, and how can I get it out?

There's a pink stuffed pig in the door of the freezer. In the living room, there's a painting hanging on the wall that I'm told has been there since the sixties. I'm not sure what it is, but I think it might be an abstract picture of Jesus. Just beneath the painting, there's a red-and-blue swirled bowling ball shoved in the middle of a mystery three-pronged floor lamp, and, until recently, there was a small motorcycle helmet in the living room closet, decorated with pink raised paint, drawn in swirls and flowers. There's a purple dragon puppet fitted over the antique soap dispenser in the bathroom, its mouth fixed wide open to greet each visitor with a silent scream. In the attic hangs a homemade Ouija board, made from a white piece of poster board and black marker, dangling by a string from the center of the ceiling. Glued in the bottom right-hand corner of the board is a black-and-white picture of a cat pawing at a sock monkey.

I don't know where any of this stuff came from. That's what happens when you live in a house that's been on a continuous lease for five years, a lease that eighteen different people have exploited, officially or not. It's as if eighteen people have eaten off the same plate, but that plate has never been completely emptied, just washed off here and there as parts are cleared. Naturally there will be a few crumbs left over, staining the plate, adding flavor and dirt.

On Saturday Martin and I spent seven hours trying to differentiate the flavor from the dirt, making trips to the dumpster and the thrift store, neatly packing away the ghosts worth keeping and getting rid of a lot of the clutter. Since I moved in more than three years ago, I've painted all the rooms in different colors, added a screen door, my own furniture and wall art, and I've learned (contrary to my pack rat tendencies) how to throw things away. Now the plate looks as if it's been freshly washed, with a new meal sitting attractively on top of it. It's clear to me, though, that the plate has merely been sponged off, and that I'm responsible for only a fraction of the flavor.

Daniel's been misbehaving again. He doesn't seem to be able to control himself. In fact, today in the library, he decided to use a stick as a sword, and began "popping other people on the bottoms" with it. He simply cannot settle down and get his work done.

I don't know who this Daniel person is, other than that he's in elementary school, he "pops other people on the bottoms" with a stick, and he has a teacher who dialed the wrong number and gave me the message his parents were supposed to get. I found it really funny, which probably has a lot to do with the fact I'm not Daniel's mother.

Today at lunch, while Earle and I were walking down Ninth Street in Durham, I was telling him about the house Ingo found on Long Island. "It was built in 1883," I told him. Right as I said it, a random guy I'd just passed exclamed, "Eighteen eighty-three?!? Man, that's a long time ago." I turned around and answered, "Yeah, it is, isn't it?," almost as if it were natural that a guy I didn't know, leaning on a wall in a town that isn't mine, would add to my conversation. I almost expected it to happen again and again, heads popping out the whole way to the restaurant, adding comments at the ends of each of our sentences.

Tonight there were written comments, printed on a black TV screen with the fancy white frame, the kind that regularly interrupt any proper silent film. Scott is in town, and has brought with him a copy of The Sandman, a film in which he wears dark eye make-up, fears for his eyes, and courts an automaton. Throughout the film he added his own comments in addition to the supplied ones, laughing in odd moments from his cross-legged spot on the floor.

It seems like a thousand things have happened, yet I can't seem to put any of it into words. I feel like I'm hovering above a cloud of unrelated occurances and feelings, all knocking into each other like hot molecules, affecting each other and affecting me, though how, I don't exactly know. Richard says motion begets evolution, and maybe like evolution, things are happening too slowly for me to actually witness. I only know after it's already there, fully developed; somehow I seem to miss out on the process.

***

It's even better news if you live where I do: Helms retires.

I'm not sure how to feel about the dead squirrel on my back porch. Yesterday I looked out the window and saw Leeches (the stray) jogging through the yard with something that looked like a kitten in her mouth. So I put on my shoes and started down the stairs, and, rather than hiding her prize, she brought it directly to me, and set it down at my feet. It was a squirrel, rather than a kitten, and it was (thankfully) dead, even though I could still see its open glossy black eyes, and even though there was no blood. It was just frozen in its position, its tiny arms bent in a Z next to its body, its tail all wet and slender. I didn't say anything, though my gut reaction was to be upset with her. Instead, I did nothing. I didn't yell or pet or congratulate or refuse to let her in. I just closed the screen door and sat down on the couch and thought about cats and nature and silly sentimentality and about my own cat, Jane, who isn't a cat at all, but a seal, and who has done a bad job preparing me for moments like this.

I've always been bad at refusing presents I don't want. This time, though, I'm not going to bury my gift in a box at the back of my closet, but rather in a pile of leaves and dirt at the edge of my house, where it'll be appreciated down the chain one link. In the same vein, it's probably time to sift through my closet and make a trip to the thrift store.

Later, both Leeches and Jane endured (separate) flea baths, and Martin and I endured scratches and bites.

It's weird how some days turn themselves into errand days or cleaning days or e-mail days, even when you don't intend for them to be anything in particular at all. Yesterday sneakily became an errand day. It started out as a trip to a vintage store to find something for the mod party I was going to later, which of course turned into a trip to three vintage stores and lots of discussions about what mod is exactly. While I was out, I figured I should pick up a gift for an upcoming wedding shower, some windshield wiper blades, blank CDs, a belt buckle, guitar strings and a shag rug, none of which I really needed, except for maybe the shower gift and the wiper blades. Sometimes I think stores work subliminal messages into the Muzak that make things seem far more necessary than they really are.

And then I go to places with shelves stacked so high with useless garbage, covered with giant pointy signs and exclamation marks, flourescent lights burning and TVs parked around the store barking obnoxious advertisements at you, and I just want to make my way out of the store empty-handed and get the hell home. By the time I was finished shopping yesterday I felt really finished. I did find something to wear to the party, though, and I was able to affix my false eyelashes without getting too much glue in my eyes and my shag rug looks really nice, especially when my cat sits on it, which of course means my day was a success.

I'm suspicious that today will somehow make itself a cleaning day.

I don't often talk at length with people behind counters or who sit next to me on planes like my dad does. He meets people wherever he goes, and somehow he always runs into someone who knows someone he knows, or who grew up in the same town as his mother, or who married the sister of his old best friend. I can remember when my parents visited me in London, standing in a mass of people outside Buckingham Palace, chatting away to some people who not only knew of the small town where my parents live, but who had friends there. By the time they finished talking, these strangers were wishing me well and telling me they were proud of me.

If I'm encouraged, I'll politely respond (this is the South, so I acknowledge the passerby and smile when smiled at), but I certainly never engage in small talk on my own volition. Most of the time I don't have any regrets about that, but sometimes it occurs to me that I might be overlooking interesting characters, eating the same flavor of ice cream and nothing more. Today was nice, because I spoke for about an hour with an older stranger about his business, his dog, guns, and movies. Granted, it was for an assignment, but I was happy to be where I was and seeing and hearing the things I don't normally see and hear. It's an odd feeling, really, crossing paths with people you know you will probably never meet again.

My CDs are stacked in a tall skinny bookshelf, arranged alphabetically or completely scattered next to the player, poking out of the bag I take to work, mysteriously misplaced somewhere in Martin's room. They are labeled conventionally and invisibly, of course with the artist and album title, but also with the feeling that I have subconsciously assigned to each one. It is as if my moods are packed away in transparent boxes and can be simply selected from the shelf, inserted into my CD player and into my brain. And then I am there, with that person, in that place, without even having to leave. Sometimes I match and reinforce what I'm feeling; sometimes I ambitiously drive it away. And then, sometimes, there's nothing at all I want to hear.

***

Today I read this article about going to a bridal shower as an unmarried woman. I think because I related to parts of it so well, it left me feeling alienated and uncomfortable, almost as if I was sitting in a corner at a shower right then, underdressed and unable to keep up with talk of gowns and babies and china. It leaves me with a weird taste in my mouth—they almost always do—like I have to hurry and drink in some people I can better relate to, before I awkwardly mutate or explode.

The thunder has come again to crack the sky open, the storm to play games with my light switch—disabling it, and then emulating it. Yesterday I watched a storm from below, my head down on the bed, up at the sky, with the silhouette of a dark cat in between. It was the most peaceful part of my weekend. The rest was over-stretched, though pleasant, meeting with old friends from high school who are mostly married and partly pregnant (it's about perspective and choices, not about age, I'm learning), meeting with another old friend on Sunday, and running errands and cleaning in between.

My car has A/C now, for the first time in years, which is an amenity I always said I didn't need but one that I've quickly grown accustomed to in the past two days. And I have new foreign chocolate in the refrigerator (no A/C in the kitchen), from a hungry trip to a gourmet grocery store. While there I couldn't resist buying a "Fancy Marshmallow," which is nothing more than a blue-colored marshmallow that's about 10 inches long and is wrapped in its own cellophane. (Again, it's about perspective and choices.)

This weekend I went to two parties. At one, I met a guy who'd previously worked for a failed dot-com that attempted to sell (online) gardening equipment to Amish people. At the other I stood in an old bomb shelter and tried my first swig of Red Dagger.

For lunch sometimes (though increasingly rarely) I bring a freezer-burnt self-glorified entrée that usually has some reassuring Italian name printed on the box. It's cheap and easy and sometimes gross, but I don't even have to get out of my chair…I just roll with my wheeled office chair over that clear office-chair plastic, and fire up my thawing lunch as I continue what I was doing. There was a while there that I didn't have that luxury.

Last November, when my department moved offices, we lost our microwave, and, instead, I would walk down two flights of stairs, often stand in line, stare at my lunch spinning around in a 1970s-model black box for five-odd minutes, and then carry the hot, fumbly plastic tray back up two flights, only to find the center of my nutritious meal still frozen. Fortunately I noticed our old microwave sitting unused on the floor of a storage area, so I rescued it and installed it on top of a bookshelf in my cubicle, available for anyone who sees it to use. Almost no one does. That's good, because I don't know if I could stand the melange of smells that would accumulate in my gray cloth world…the beep is already disarmingly loud.

Today, while waiting for my lunch to cook, I snapped my head around repeatedly to see how many seconds were left, determined to catch the box with my weapon the stop button before it screamed at me. It's not usually so bad, but that swimmy, hyper-sensitive headache is back, and I am its minion.

I wonder when the office took over.

Three Copperhead snakes have been spotted in Martin's mom's yard in the past week, confining cat and dog to the house and making his mom nervous. So yesterday for some reason I decided to join Martin and a snake-handling friend of his on a mission to coax the snakes from their hiding places in order to snag them and move them to a less-populated area. I don't really know how we were going to do that, once the snakes revealed themselves; I never got to see that maneuver because they all stayed uninterested, unprovoked, absent or hidden. It was a curious feeling, though, jabbing bushes with a long pole, half-hoping a snake would spring out and half-hoping one wouldn't. Martin did find a Rough Earth Snake, though, and I volunteered to hold it; its tiny body thrashed around in my cupped hands, trying to fling itself free. (It was about the size of five earthworms attached end-to-end; I'm not as brave as it might sound.)

In the backyard I was careful to slide my feet through the grass rather than stepping indiscriminately, as to not bring my boot down directly on a snake more intimidating than the one I'd been holding. In doing that, it seems I rang the mosquito dinner bell, because suddenly I noticed their little wiry bodies perched all over my bare skin. At that point I went inside.

I got some pictures back today. They're from DC, a hike in the woods, and there's an old one of the kittens. (Nine photos total.)

All day I've been making phone calls to strangers with thick northern accents. I have a scripted paragraph in front of me that I read almost without breathing, starting with the beep of the answering machine, like a gun at the beginning of a race. If the person answers, I slow down a bit, and try to sound less like a robot, but I don't think it works, but I also don't think it matters. By now I've read the words enough that I no longer think about what the sentences mean or even what the words are; they just come stumbling out of my mouth while my mind drifts elsewhere, sometimes asking the question what is this strange language that I'm speaking?. It's not unlike staring at a word you know well so long that it begins to look utterly strange and unfamiliar. I'm glad this isn't my job.

I had a good weekend in DC, though I brought back with me a headache that seems to have made itself quite comfortable in my head. I can't persuade it to leave; I think its purpose is to remind me of something. It's working.

In my left hand, I'm holding a shoestring with a stuffed shark finger puppet attached to it; in my right, I'm cupping the mouse, except when I'm typing, of course. The kitten is not satisfied. She's been jumping and climbing and standing exactly in the way and walking across the keyboard of my laptop, in dadaist fashion.

I'm in a hotel room in DC, motivating myself to take care of that flat tire (no, it isn't my car this time) and to ignore the blisters that came last night walking around Adams Morgan. Somehow when we were ready to go back to the hotel, we completely misplaced the car, and ended up walking up and down hilly, winding, zig-zagged dead-end streets (yes, they were all all those things) in unending residential neighborhoods. It would've been nice, had it been an intentional stroll; the streets were quiet, muffled by green, thick woods, and the houses loomed above us, dark and old and remote, separating themselves from the sidewalk with steep angular stony paths. Finally, defeated, we rode around in a taxi and retraced in order to find the car. I'm certain that if we would've watched ourselves from above, turning and backtracking and dead-ending like confused rats in a maze, we would've been yelling at ourselves like you yell at dumbly brave people in a horror film. Today we're bringing the map.

For some reason there's a naked Adam and the Ants CD sitting on the floorboard behind the driver's seat of my car. I have no idea whose it is or how it got there or why it doesn't have a case. I found it there yesterday after I got home from work, and it's still there. I'm not sure what to do with it.

This morning I took Leeches (the stray) to the vet to get the sex taken out of her. I know that's the right thing to do, but I couldn't help feeling like I was delivering her to the butcher. In a few hours I'm going to make use of the cat carrier again, this time for one of her kittens. We're going to DC to meet Ingo. She's going to sing, and I'm going to stick my fingers through the bars and talk to her, and it will do no good. We're going to listen to music more quietly than usual, and we'll stop at rest areas to stand in the grass. I'm going to drive back to Raleigh on Sunday, alone.

It's strange, thinking about the people I'm on the road with every morning and every evening, because I almost never think about them. I think of them as cars, instead. That big-ass pickup truck with the grill that's higher than the roof of my car, barreling toward me in my rearview mirror… I don't really think much about the person who chose that truck, or why that person isn't worried about rolling right over my little Honda; instead, I just accept that that truck exists on its own, it's its own character, and hating it will have no effect whatsoever. I can't even talk to it or reason with it, because it's a truck. It's the same way with 18-wheelers, BMWs, El Caminos, whatever. They all play different roles, roles that are determined roughly by three factors: the cost of the vehicle, how that vehicle is being driven, and what the "face" of the car looks like when it's in your rearview mirror. (Hence, the truck's negative points.)

Bumper stickers are really the only links that remind me that there are actually people in these metal beasts. This morning I saw one that said, "CRIMINALS DON'T FEAR THE UNARMED," and I just had to look to see the profile of the person who not only surely has an arsenal at home, but wants everyone who doesn't fall under the vague description of "criminal" to have weapons too. A couple weeks ago I saw another bumper sticker that said, "Tax the Rich." I think that guy probably needs to watch out for the one with all the guns. I don't know; maybe he thinks the rich should be taxed as well. I wonder if they've passed each other.

It's different in the city. No bumper stickers to go on in the subway, just shirts and labels, suits and heels. Eyes aren't headlights but are real eyes, even if more evasive. Harsh words that come more hesitantly than horns, advertisements above windows rather than on billboards. So many more bodies and smells and thoughts about other people, so much more human contact, however uncomfortable.

I've never been able to identify with one social group so much that I completely abandon the others in order to immerse myself in it. I always found it rather limiting, having the hangouts, wardrobe, and, in some cases, friends, dictated by my social flag, and there were always too many groups that had aspects that appealed to me. At the same time, however, I always wondered what it would be like to be fully a part of a particular scene, rather than just a visitor, and whether I would feel more whole if I could define myself in relation to my scene.

Perhaps that's why I found Heavy Metal Parking Lot so intriguing. Maybe I'm not supposed to find it intriguing; maybe I'm just supposed to laugh…but both happened. For the 15-year anniversary of HMPL (which documents the parking lot at a Judas Priest show in 1986), the film is currently on tour, along with Neil Diamond Parking Lot, Girl Power Parking Lot (the Spice Girls' movie premiere), Harry Potter Parking Lot (a book signing), Monster Truck Parking Lot, and Raver Bathroom. Basically, the films set up fans to comment on their own fanaticism, just by behaving like fans. The fans at the respective events were drastically different and alarmingly alike; the clothes and ages and pre-show activities and expression of devotion varied a bit, but all of them had their religion. Of course there were a few clever people at last night's showing of HMPL who brought video cameras with them, you know, filming Heavy Metal Parking Lot Parking Lot.

To watch the films online, click here.

My car is back! It drives. It still says 253,000-something, but it really means 100,000-something. So it looks like I'll make it to 300,000 after all, even if it's not legitimate.