This is my favorite one that came from the 35mm I used in the Holga. It has a vintage feel which appeals to me, like Eddie Fisher is about to come out and start serenading. I was telling my friend Merry about this picture last weekend and she got really excited. Too excited. "Oh my God, I can’t believe someone else knows that! I used to drink that all the time!" she yelled in her southern drawl. This took place over the phone, but I pictured her excitedly cooling her face with a lacey fan held by a gloved hand. "You drink steak sauce?" I mean, I know I have weird friends, but I was still taken aback. Just a little. Then she explained that she thought I had said Ale 8, a ginger ale-ish beverage. "Yeah, Erin. Whenever I get that craving for a delicious drink of savory meat sauce, I just have to have my A-1."

My first attempt at using the Holga. This is Chooch’s boyfriend, Reynold. It’s unfortunate that the empty can of Milwaukee’s Best in his lap isn’t visible.

Downtown, by the Amtrak station.

A church, you know?

Bueno Mexicana’s visiting from Ohio, so we’re about to go and try to get arrested today.

In the beginning, Henry and I used to go for walks together in cemeteries. We would have so much fun, too. Probably more me than him, but still. I would try to push him down hills and scare him by springing out from tombstones and I would tell him jokes and we (I) would laugh and it was just really nice to have that bonding time together. He’d teach me about moss and the flow of electricity and I would pose mind-exploding queries about fucking Siamese twins.

It was like our thing, you know? Like our habit of watching Asian horror movies before it became a cool thing to do. It was something in our relationship that I could count on. "Oh good, it’s the weekend. Time to dance on graves."

We don’t have any "things" anymore. Now, I go to cemeteries by myself. I listen to post-hardcore and screamo (and sometimes Timbaland) on my Zen and feel aggressive and then I get lost in my thoughts, which turns into contemplating doing really stupid things and puking on graves and it’s just no good. I miss having a cemetery companion.

Today I was on my way to Uniondale Cemetery and as I sat at a red light, two black guys crossed the street in front of my car. One of them looked at me, smiled real wide, and waved. I smiled back — a real, genuine smile — and thought to myself, "I bet that guy would want to have a ‘thing’ with me."

Why doesn’t Henry?

As of this moment, my new last name is Jelly. I will answer to nothing else but Erin Jelly. Not Erin Jam, neither Erin Preserves nor Marmalade, but Erin Jelly.

When I was ten or so, I was in Europe with my grandparents and Aunt Sharon. On these trips, Sharon and I were always roomed together, which sometimes was fun but her moods could be quick to sour and I’d often end up sulking in my bed, wishing I was home.  I was feeling particularly unloved and neglected one night — I think it was in Florence, maybe — so I decided to pretend like I was lost or kidnapped by gypsies.  “They’ll all be sorry,” I thought bitterly. After dinner, I ran ahead of everyone and made it to the room before they had even stepped off the elevator. The windows in the room were blanketed by floor-length drapes and I slipped behind the heavy folds, making sure the tips of my toes weren’t peeking out.

It didn’t take long before Sharon made it back to the room and noticed my absence. I remember her leaving the room but I was determined to stay hidden. The excitement of the game had my bladder in a tizzy, and I had to press my thighs together to keep from leaking. What a way to spoil my ruse, am I right?

Soon, I could hear the harried voices of my grandparents, chastising Sharon for letting me run ahead of her. I could hear the dinging of the elevator and a British accent as our tour guide ran to join my family, probably all smooshed together in one big huddle of fear. Muffled voices melded together into a frenzied choir of panic and I hiccupped back my mischievious laughter. My chest swelled a little, relishing the idea of being sought after and missed. I heard Sharon run back into the room to retrieve something — maybe something she might have needed on the search and rescue mission, like a flashlight or a bag of crack to bargain with my gypsy captors — and I stumbled out from beneath the curtains in a fit of giddy laughter.

My prank was not as well-received as I would have liked, but instead met with roiling umbrage. Especially not since the tour guide had called hotel security.

I did this a few years ago, as a grown woman. Henry and I were at my mom’s for one of her summer cook outs and Henry wasn’t lavishing me with tongue-wagging attention, so I dramatically ran off with stomping feet. I stowed myself underneath the desk in the unused living room, my limbs tucked into my crouched body. I hid there for at least twenty minutes before Henry’s kids finally discovered me. (They, evidently, were also the only people looking for me.) The boys sat with me while I sniffled and sniveled, wailing that their father was an asshole who didn’t care about me, and they heartily agreed that they hated him as well. “He’s a fucker, we hate him too!” they lied, telling me what they knew I wanted to hear. A small part of me gloated.

Sometimes I still get this overwhelming desire to hide, to just dig a fucking trench in ‘Nam and lay in it until I die, maybe stuff a Ziplock bag with some uncooked tortellini and little tubs of jelly to prolong the process a little.

That’s all.

I’M BEING MOVED NEXT FRIDAY TO A NEW SEAT AND I’M VERY UPSET ABOUT THIS. I LIKE MY SEAT AND I HATE CHANGE AND THIS IS REALLY FUCKING GAY.

I’ll chain my ass to my fucking desk if I have to. Or quit. Yeah, maybe I’ll just quit!

There’s one pro, though: I’ll be far away from Gum Popper.

Eleanore keeps saying things like, "Babe, I don’t know why you’re complaining. You’re moving to the best seat!" Still, this is really fucking unacceptable.

let’s just stop
drop everything
forget each other’s names and
just walk away.

it could be like we never knew each other at all.

Before I left for work today, Henry was enrapt in some dating show on Fox Reality called "Manhattan Match." There was some sniveling basketcase of a single woman on there, and let me tell you, she was saying all those red-flag things that, if I was a man, would have had my penis tripping over itself to be castrated. She was sobbing and whimpering things like, "I’m not needy! I’m not! I don’t know why guys leave me! My last boyfriend went on a business trip and I never heard from him again! I have no standards, I’ll take anyone who gives me attention!"

It was a level of desperation I couldn’t fathom.

"I don’t know what’s worse," I said to Henry. "Being so desperate that you find yourself crying on a dating show, or being stuck in a loveless, dead-end relationship like I am."

He wasn’t amused.

There are a lot of things in life that I would love to be good at, to understand, or at the very least tolerate. I’d like to be able to slice open a brain and turn it into a pretty bowl for cradling dip or perhaps a warm pool of gravy on Thanksgiving. I’d like to be able to snap my fingers. I’d like to be able to exist in the same room with Henry without finding thirty-two annoying traits he harbors.

But these are all dreams for a different day. Like perhaps, a day when patience pays a visit.

I decided to instead start at the bottom and choose something less complicated and patience-oriented to learn: Football. I know, I know, I’ve been down this road before. But I’m tired of people talking about The Game at work and asking me if I watched The Game and then following that question with a horrifying intake of breath and then a "What do you mean you don’t like football?" Plus, I really want to have a Superbowl party this year so that Henry can make dips and perhaps some delicious cocktails and any other time I try to have football-focal parties, I end up getting irritated when people, I don’t know, watch the game and stop talking to me? I’ve adopted the "If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em" mentality and I’m ready to do this. I want to scream and holler and yodel at all the right moments. (It’s hard to do that when you always stubbornly root for the opposing team and have no other cheers to piggy-back.)

Unfortunately, finding a teacher hasn’t been easy. Henry threw in the towel years ago, my step-dad doesn’t have the patience, and I was going to ask Kim but last week when she and Eleanore were listening to THE GAME on the radio, she sounded oft-confused and kept saying things like, "But why? WHY DID THAT HAPPEN?" and she seems to spend more time saying things like, "Oh that’s the guy I like he’s so hot" which is great! It really is — that’s the mindset I like to take too, but this time I’m really serious. Almost like it’s for a grade and if I don’t get an A, my parents are going to pelt me with searing hot coals and torpedos.

So my work frienemy, Collin, was brave enough to step up to the plate (that’s baseball, right?) and we met up at a bar on Sunday for some serious football schoolage. As I left the house, Henry called out from the couch for me to wish Collin luck. I’m not that bad. Jesus.

In between having valuable oxygen and elbow room stolen by a pack of older aged bar hags (and their fresh-from-the-links boisterous male counterparts) and having an intellectual discourse about the taste of blood (we both think it tastes decent), Collin actually did try to learn me a thing or two. He even went so far as to draw diagrams in my purple memo pad (from Rhonda!) and a purple pen; he looked even more masculine than usual.

I got distracted a lot though. I couldn’t stop fixating on the brusque bartender’s ill-fitting pants that kept slipping down enough to assault us with a flash of ass, and every time he would replenish my amaretto sour I would sing a "Yay cherry!" song in my head. Then I contemplated my good fortune upon seizing a quarter that the group of older people left behind; it was thrilling to take something that was theirs. I really did hate those people. This one lady was standing right behind me and kept cramping my style. She was the whore of the group, for sure; probably the girl who taught the other girls how to give blow jobs back in sixth grade. I bet she rides on the backs of Harleys and spouts off predictable double entendres, too.

"I’m going to go home and write a story where they all die," I whispered angrily to Collin. He laughed, but only because he probably didn’t know he was going to be part of the death toll.

Then Collin and I talked about how great I am for awhile too, because that was more exciting than watching football.

When I came home that night, Henry asked me what I learned.

"I learned that the one guy with the hair went to Pitt and that orange and black striped stick is what they actually see on the field instead of the bright yellow line we see on TV and that fifty-year-old women look like assholes when they try to dress like a twenty-year-olds, especially when they have husky voices and the physique of a body-builder."

"What?" Henry looked exasperated, but then erased it with a shake of his head. "What teams were you even watching?"

"Two red ones."

Later that night, I remember something crucial. "Oh! And I learned that there are about three feet in a yard."

"Not about three feet. Exactly three feet. That’s normal mathematics."

I’m still having my damn party, though.

It appears cemetery photo shoots on December 25 became a tradition without me knowing it. Here’s hoping Chooch passes it down.

The rest of the set is here.

Here in Pittsburgh, Santa doesn’t smile, preferring instead to emulate the mouthal shape of the child on his lap.

Merry Christmas, yo.

I’m working 12-8 today since it’s Christmas Eve. At first, I was angry to be here so early, since I have to endure the Gum Popper and the Lady with the Laugh (today it sounds like she’s sucking back an entire circus of albinos down the back of her throat and Collin actually had me contemplating the kinkiness of this until I remembered what she looks like).

But then, something magical happened: Santa came.

Yes, SANTA. Here. And I got to have my picture taken with him! And his skanky, over-aged elf tossed a broken mini candy cane into my hand!

Due to all of the excitement, I forgot to tell him that I really want this for Christmas:

(Ew, the lady next to me just laughed and it sounded like a phlegm water fall was going to shoot from her nose. When she was through sonically assaulting me, she mused, "That’s another thing I need to get at the store — tissues." YA THINK.)

I was looking for something in the murky archives of my LiveJournal, when I came across a post about finding my high school year book and I laughed because 10+ years later, this is still relevant.

 This has been said to me a lot lately, for some odd reason.

Pretend like this is my year book — leave a comment. It’ll be fun. Maybe.

No matter how hard they pushed, nary a gumball popped from her mouth.

"Maybe if we cut off her head?"

A fine proposal indeed.

Tina was my secret santa. I had a sneaking suspicion because the reply to my thank you note the other day said "YOU ARE WELCOME" and Tina never uses contractions. I don’t think she knows about them.

Then it was awkward because people were hugging their secret santas and in my head, I could hear echoes of Tina’s voice talking about past sex acts and nude sleeping and lesbians wanting to buy her cars so instead I flashed her my best smile and said thanks.

She really did get me some cool shit though!