High on Sunday, low on Monday, plain messed up on Tuesday.

Show not your soul to the world, for bandits prey on easy treasures of the heart.

These are the words found etched at the crossroads of isolation and companionship. In grade school, teachers fail to tell you that friends are really highwaymen searching for a most precious commodity to steal - your time.

Relationships shouldn't be mistaken for honesty. Pals aren't good Samaritans waiting to aid those in the seclusion of life's desert. They reveal a true nature with age, peeling away layers of self-induced secretiveness until the bitter end. Wrong as it seems, acquaintances are merely the disguised enemies of tomorrow.

Or at least that's how I'm feeling at the current moment; betrayed, abandoned, and unquestionably loved. Yes, I'm loved. My scorn for those who I hold dear must mean one thing - that affection can only be validated by the feeling of loss. I think that has something to do with the phone calls and text messages I've exchanged with Grace over the course of my uneventful weekend. She's reaching out to me in the most simplest of ways, returning the favors of my concern one nudge at a time. We talk for 20 minutes here and there, intermittent IMs and picture messages followed by another half hour of conversations. She's trying to tell me something in not so many words. I know. This is how she's been since Freshman year.

"Meet me down at Applebee's, I'll introduce you to Pete and we can talk about those weird dreams you been having. Bring some cash - I need eyeliner."

Pause for two hours. A disturbance rocks my stained notes. The phone vibrates so much that it shakes its way off the kitchen table. Pick up. Again.

"Yeah, I didn't study for that quiz. We're graduating, fuck ten percent of my final grade. Is that local band playing the South Shore by the way? Oh. Jennette hon', is something wrong? Did I piss you off? It was just one night. Please don't let me find out those stupid poems about the end of the world have something to do with this."

She hears me plucking at the minor chords on my acoustic. There's a quiet tension, a somber silence in my empty house. She hangs up. There's only nausea and palpitations left in the cold, vacant space where a young girl's body used to sit. Now I'm standing, swimming in fear, sipping on illness, floating off into the dry heat of an unproductive, Sunday afternoon.

I fall asleep to the ringing in my head. There's always something to put the cherry on top.

Lock yourself away in the insane asylum of small talk and gossip. Human connection is about as dried up as a nursing home in Nevada. And I hate Nevada. It's just another desert filled with oh-so obvious outlaws looking to hold up a wagon train of passion, creating a Mexican standoff where your true self is the exploited victim of society's cavalry.

Fuck off, bandits. I'm sticking to my guns. The only ones I have...and they look like a human heart and soul.

Be genuine with me, Grace. Let me know you're not in on the plan to shut down the faithless radicals, bleeding artists, and lonely rebels wandering this fair city. Join the renegade posse, even if there are only two cowgirls.

I'll have the Manhattan clam chowder to go, please...

Last night she fucked him. Good. She told me over the phone late in the evening. Their love is now a stain on the backseat of his Lexus SUV. Oh subtlety save me from the audaciousness of those fallen from Grace. Literally.

I lied yesterday when I said I was beautiful. Not aesthetically speaking, I mean. That could be true if you tell me so. But you can't reassure confidence to a female without positive male attention.

There are a lot of things I'm not in light of Grace's foray into sexual union. Let me spell those out:

1. I'm NOT a doormat who needs dick to feel like I'm a positive contribution to my gender.

2. I'm NOT a girl that feels like half a girl because a quarter of that same girl lacks a guy.

3. I'm NOT upset that I was the one who didn't lower herself for the sake of experimentation.

4. I'm NOT stupid enough to misunderstand that fucking has FUCKING CONSEQUENCES.

HOWEVER:

I AM a tad bit jealous.

Not for the pleasure either. Actually, it's all about knowledge. The sensory experience of knowing you and another human being are physically imparting an immense act of affection upon the other. The vestal virgin in me hides herself beneath a shroud of haughtiness and exaggeration. My comments and opinions may be nothing more than an attempt to conceal my deepest desire for instinctual release.

And I'm human. A flawed animal with the sacred fire of sexual ancestry that demands at least one dance through the tribal gathering of life.

Oh shoot me, I know. Philosophy has Jennette held hostage. Call 1-800-KISS MY WRITING'S ASS if you can't handle using nature's strangest invention: the brain.

I digress. Last night my subconscious spoke better than Freud lying on a velvet couch - monocle and all. There was an awfully vivid dream, one that I couldn't do justice to with the limited, abstract scope of words.

Alive in the stillness of my sleep there were relatives and friends huddled around a large wooden table. Above their heads were weathered glass windows, spacious and tinted to accentuate the dim glow of gas lamps positioned neatly in a row along the table's edge. It was a waterfront eatery of sorts, with conch-shells and clam shaped clocks lining the oak-paneled walls. Darkness claimed the sky, feeling as if it were the moment just before midnight on a seaside winter's eve. The air tasted of salt. My blonde hair unfurled at the edges, each curly lock straightening from the dank cold atmosphere that permeated our seating arrangement. From the flame's low light you could see sailboat shadows reflecting onto my olive skin, dwarfing me with their intimidating silhouettes. Outside on the inlet they bobbed gently, splashing tiny droplets of sea water onto the glass panels. Vanessa, my punk cousin (yes, she has hot pink hair and tattoos), was making out with her always silent boyfriend, Tom. They never came up for air, kissing passionately as they ignored myself and Joe, a neighborhood acquaintance of theirs. I've always associated him with the shore, you see. He and his on-and-off-again girlfriend Christine are part of Vanessa's posse of Mannesquan Misfits (a name only Jersey Shore dwellers would be proud of). I've missed them recently, and their presence in the dream signified all the more that change was coming for me. They have been there during the most pivotal moments of my life (Bleeding statue of the Virgin Mary? Go ahead, ask them about it), and their warm glances and unabashed displays of affection must mean I'm headed for spiritual fulfillment. Or something along those lines. Cause the next part made little sense.

"I'll have the clam chowder to go, please..."

2 AM. Dead silence. Sounds of drag racing reverberating from the Staten Island Expressway all along the suburban utopias and onto the windowpane of my humble residence. Fuck. What a bizarre dream.

You did this to me, Grace. You make me feel ugly. You make me feel childish. You make me...hungry.

Clam chowder, eh? Well, you know what they say about clams. I'm not Lesbian...honest.

Perhaps this all a grand illusion manifested by the jagged roads of imagination. After all, anything can happen when you're lonely, loose, low, and locked up in the maritime misery that is South Jersey, Even if it is all a dream.

THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WENT OUT ON STATEN ISLAND!

Grace, come back. I need your friendship like a geek lacking social capital.

It's a strange sea of delirium when you're locked in the cage of freedom. So soon am I high on life and then tumbling deep into the weeds of panic. Innocence lost. Not paradise. Somebody call Milton and tell him to get relevant to our needs...

Grace has been absent, and therefore, I've been forced to sit and ponder the dreary weather alone at my cyber confessional. We've been out of touch lately. She's off, wandering the island's less frequented avenues under the guise of a mature young woman with even more mature ideals. Sure, we know how far that'll get you. A lap dance in the elevator at the Staten Island Mall or maybe a job at the supermarket where you can inhale the fishy odor of baby products and tampons just sitting appropriately next to the seafood counter.

Fuck my life. My best friend is out whoring. I'm home alone...sick....maybe.

What is sickness to the Generation With Information, anyway? Is it an excuse to flee the confines of our intimidating futures predestined to either country clubs or alleyways? Is it the proverbial vaccine for our losses that we endure on behalf of our naivete? Or is it a simple defense mechanism that alarms our souls to abandon ship before we plunge into the icy depths on the Capitalism Atlantic?

Alas! My heart flutters so! There is no light at the end of the tunnel when thirty car pile-ups of broken homes and panic disorders block our exit. But hey? At least we can all party before the flood waters drown out our make-out sessions of protest.

Oh wait? Was that a lie too? I cant hear my sexual needs flourish over the sound of your social Darwinism.

Sexy? Is that a currency in your country? Well sorry, even I was sexy (and I am, teehee), there's little chance in hell you're gonna' force me to partake in the outrageous stock market exchange of courtship in this city. I'll find me a man when faith brings him to me on his pathetic, feminine knee. I can only pray he'll be donning a multicolor frock of glory atop an overly skinny or profoundly portly torso. That's the key, you dig? The less acceptable by your Sunday School teacher, the higher the probability your partner is one of the untainted virgins who are undergound. And I'm all about the undergound, bitches.

It's a police state out there - a state of emergency. Don't lose hope now, we're just getting to the good part. Ya' like thunderstorms? Get ready, honeys. We are about to have them all the fucking time.

Mourning the morning.

Emotion. I wake up in the early dawn to feel, not to breathe. With every hopeful inhalation there is a painful exhalation of disappointment. That is the tragedy of life in the era of extremism and ethernet cables. Humanity has become the nationwide network for the virus of violent faith, and your soul is the corrupted hard drive.

Is nothing sacred anymore in the sea of radiation we call modern civilization? The invisible trenches of exchanging text messages, cellular phone calls, and web-browsing on demand? They exist solely to conquer you and eradicate healthy cells left in your body. I should know. My name is Jennette, and I'm an addict of the American kind.

Don't believe the daytime talk shows. Even your own life processes, your very biology, is against you.

Those aren't my words. I'm not the one you should hate. Hate the search engines that tell you every small ache in your lower calf is a death sentence from the gods of disconnection. Their own personal Christ is that fake doctor that's feeding teens and alienated youngsters lies. Illness is their salvation. Fucked up logic? Yes. But we're all fucked up and high on depression. Go right ahead. Read the Book Of St. Internet To The Misguided Legions. This time it's you and me on the cross dying for everyone else's sins.


I'm crying like everyone else this morning. Sad that we've learned so much, understand so little, gone so far, and come back right to the very point at which we started. Kiss me, Lady Liberty. Embrace me with the tender warmth of genuine freedom. Ravish my body like the closet French woman you are. I want to be the great American lesbian that shows false liberals and whacked out conservative prophets that taking yourself seriously is the first step to failure. No, it's not humiliating to be so frank. Shock value should be added to the Constitution. Desensitization solves problems. At least I'm not lying when someone asks me if I ever wondered what's up that green skirt.


As a New Yorker, I can't help but feel proud. We are unified on this one horrible day, standing hand in hand as we relive moments that spawned countless lifetimes of fear. Remember the dead. Keep them in your prayers. Hold onto the memory of the horror for dear life, for the sanity to understand that the fallacies around us should be fixed in honor of the unfortunate persons who died 9 years ago today.

But most of all...live. It's all we'll ever have. Life is the heaven and hell between heaven and hell.

I swear I'm not an existentialist, Lord. Amen.


Mom's calling for breakfast. Ciao.

Jen.

The Philosophical Salumeria Of A Young Girl's Mind

On Staten Island there is no such thing as discerning the forests from the trees. By the time you hit eighteen years old, you’re already wishing that you hadn’t been given an education. That way, it’s easier to blend in with a crowd that couldn’t possibly even begin to comprehend what was really at stake in the freeze-frame moments of their isolated, little lives. No, I’m not being harsh on my community. I just understand things. I’m in tune with the Earth. Not in that “go green” hippie sort of way that everyone seems to be enamored with two boroughs over. It’s more of a “girl walks into a pizzeria with bare feet, hair dripping wet from a steamy, urban summer sweat and blows kisses with her eyes to the clerk behind the counter” sort of way. My friend Grace tells me it’s an Italian thing. Earthiness incarnate. She swears I’m sexier than a virginal maiden from Renaissance Florence. Maybe. Or perhaps she just loves using her sex to get just that.  It’s like I said. There is no forest from the trees in my town, only the murky green blur of a sylvan scene that’s all too redundant in a world of pedestrians and pizzerias.

Oh well. I forgive Grace. She only sees what’s on the plate and not under it. We wouldn’t be best friends if she didn’t provide that guitar pick sized window into the minds of SI’s populace. She’s the yin to my yang, or the marinara sauce to my mozzarella sticks of doom. Mwahaha!

Seriously, internets. She is bringing out the best in me. I’m working on savoring the limited beauty that’s around me. Challenging is an understatement. Class has started, and I find myself writing nonsensical messages in the margins of my notebook. Post-apocalyptic daydreams so to speak. The thin blue lines are playing tic-tac toe with images of my own American nothingness. There’s a country in my head that’s a barren flipside to the one in which we live. Sometimes the monsters of my illusions are echoed in the sounds of static coming from our television sets, hanging ominously over our heads in the rear of homeroom. There’s been a lot of turmoil as of late, has there not? It’s almost as noisy out there as it is in my head. The lies of change and uncertain hope are inescapable like the ringing ears of this teenage MP3 addict. Get me a root beer float, a cute boy with safe ambitions, and some failing grades, because this sock hop of competitive society is about to start rattlin’ and rollin’. Rejection never felt so fun, kids.

Believe me when I say you’d never want to visit the afternoon deliriums of Jeannette’s high school prison. But you know what? I’m offering free tickets to the amusements. I want all of you, EVERYONE, whoever can feasts their eyes upon this verbal vomit of the soul that someone out there knows it’s absurd too. No, not absurd. CALCULATED. We’re living a lie, and it’s bigger than Staten Island. It’s out to separate our art from the unseen anxieties that linger in each and every rebel of the Generation With Information. It wants your family, faith, beliefs, and goodness to squander itself to a paper, green Darwin. And oh yeah…it told me that your college degree is it’s fuel for fire. How’s that for oil-war, price gouging gasoline, Mary Jean?

Stand tall, GWI. This blog is for you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my cousin just called. He wants to know if I’d join him on Xbox Live (very important, you understand).

Power to the humans,

Jen.

I’ll be spilling more beans about my life…stay tuned.