I tried to read between your lines as you would so rarely speak
But I gave you far more credit than you were actually due
You see I thought I was only seeing half the man
But that was all there was to you
You took my breath away
Took my breath away
You took my breath away
And now I want it back
I am closer to who I want to be when I am alone lately. With people, I hear my voice and I just wonder who or what I’m doing all this for. Spreading myself out in front of people. Devaluing my ostensible worth by being so readily available to almost any random pedestrian who wanders into the crosswalk of my focus. If someone is within an earshot I shoot off at the mouth.
This drug has placed me in the eye of the hurricane. Or is it a tornado? Whatever it is, it’s a whole lot of weather, placing everything valuable in jeopardy. If I could only get a fixed idea myself, I wouldn’t have to constantly look to other people. Trying to outguess them, to convince them of my idea of myself. Hoping that if they believe that’s who I am, then maybe I’ll be able to believe it, too. But when they do believe it, when they seem convinced that I am who I’m seeming to be—and they even approve—I inevitably feel that I’ve fooled them. That they must be pretty goddamn gullible to fall for my routines.
My panic is rising again. My sense of isolation and worthlessness. And no other senses worth mentioning apparently. It’s not nice being inside my head. It’s a nice place to visit but I don’t want to live in here. It’s too crowded; too many traps and pitfalls. I’m tired of it. The same old person, day in and day out. I’d like to try something else. I tried to neaten my mind, file everything away into tidy little thoughts, but it only got more and more cluttered. My mind has a mind of its own. I try to define my limits by seeing just how far I can go, and I find that I passed them weeks ago. And I’ve got to find my way back.
Stop playing the part of the glib martyr. You’re just trying to make cyanide out of 7-Up. I talk about myself in the third person, as if I were talking about a child of mine, or a new television series. I talk about myself behind my back. I talk about my private life and self like they were just common gossip. I make and sell myself cheap. I serialize myself. I am the Mad magazine version of Psychology Today. I waste myself.
Here’s what he said: People adapt to you. Don’t worry, you can’t alter what they think of you to any great degree, and by the same token what they think of you can’t alter you. You sit patiently, awaiting that dreaded yet hoped-for disapproval. You’re afraid you seem foolish or pretentious. You pounce on everything you say with a pair of tweezers and pluck it about until you can’t remember exactly what it is you said, what context it was in, if you even said it, and if anyone heard you at all. And how much their opinion means to you. Are their mental credentials so impressive that you have to put yourself behind their eyes, find yourself loathsome and/or boring, and then make it matter?
Why am I in such a hurry to find out what people think of me? I even have gone to the trouble of playing myself broadly in order to hurry up their decision. I give them one of many varieties of brief or not-so-brief summaries from which they can draw a conclusion. It depends on how much time and energy I’ve got and then I give away portions of myself according to that. I mustn’t allow myself to get sucked into thinking that it’s romantic to be neurotic, that being neurotic means one has to be complicated and somewhat intellectual. Deep. Proud of the fact that you can sink to the depths of despair. A neurotic, complicated, somewhat intellectual, deep gal who’s also wacky, zany and madcap. A must at a wake.
I must be who I am and people adjust to it. Don’t try to rush or influence the decision. Do not let what you think they think of you make you stop and question everything you are. Surely between the various yous, you can find that you not only have enough going for you to keep you going, but to “take you far.” Maybe even to Alderaan and back.
Who are you doing all this bullshit for? Certainly not yourself. If you were the only one around to be yourself for, you’d stop for the lack of interest. You know all the shit you tell people—you know it, you’ve lived it, you’re living it, etc. So what’s the point of telling any and everybody else? Ingratiating yourself to them by being so available. “Admitting” and “confessing” and “confiding” all those things that sound secret and special and spontaneous when it’s really just the same old ploy. Seduction. I would resent if I were on the outside looking in. Someone telling me things I didn’t ask to hear. Telling me things I don’t want to hear. Too much, too soon, and I don’t know what she wants in return. Am I supposed to nod and smile, look interested, or does she expect me to exchange stories? Does she expect me to tell her about my childhood, my parents, guilt, anxiety, fears, sexuality? ’Cause if she does she’s got another thing coming.
I should let people I meet do the work of piecing me together until they can complete, or mostly complete, the puzzle. And when they’re finished they can look at the picture that they’ve managed to piece together and decide whether they like it or not. On their own time. Let them discover you.
You’re my thought collector
Part-time love rejector
Draggin’ round and round and round in my dreams
And you make me smile
Decorate my meanwhile
Drivin’ me to extremes
Can you hear me, my sweet chauffeur
Drivin’ me to extremes
Something really incredible happened to me. Something that should’ve happened a long time ago, but Jesus, I’m just grateful it happened. I mean, it’s changed everything. You’re probably thinking, oh, she’s falling in love, or she’s found God, or the IRA, or whatever. But it’s nothing like that. Although in a way it’s like all of those things because it’s a kind of revolutionary deep emotional religious experience. And yet not like that at all. I suppose I should just tell you exactly what happened and let it speak for itself.
I was sitting by myself the other night doing the usual things one does when spending time alone with yourselves. You know, making mountains out of molehills, hiking up to the top of the mountains, having a Hostess Twinkie and then throwing myself off the mountain. Stuff like that. Anyway, I’d done this . . . oh, 4, maybe 5 . . . we’ll call it an even 19 times. I was just about ready to start construction on my 20th molehill when I suddenly thought I heard someone playing a polka outside my window.
I later discovered that it was a recording of Ray Conniff jamming live at the Troubadour with Led Zeppelin. It was early Ray Conniff, before he got really commercial. When he was still really mellow and innovative and . . . Well, when his music got inside you, you know what I mean? You remember the days when everyone would rush home from school, grab some Fritos and Ripple wine, put on their favorite Ray Conniff album and just unwind. And finding out when his new album was coming out and rushing down to Discount Records, hoping that they’ve not sold out.
I know one guy who actually saw a Ray Conniff concert, before he stopped giving them because the girls would scream so loud that you couldn’t hear his music. But this guy was close and could hear pretty well and he was just . . . Well, completely blown away. I mean, he said it was so fucking moving, you know? He said that Ray Conniff, and I do not make this up, he said that Ray Conniff was the most real person, the most together person, he’d ever seen. And this guy’s been around and met them all—yes, including Mantovani—and yet Ray Conniff was the one person whose mere presence and even merer music moved him profoundly.
Anyway, all this has nothing to do with my experience really, except I think it is somehow ironic that I should be sitting there and suddenly hear this incredible music that had meant so much to me. So I stopped work on my molehill and went to the window to see where this music was coming from. Suddenly I noticed a light in the distance that seemed to be coming towards me. As
it grew closer I could see the light was coming from a fire. I look back on this and find it really strange and sort of eerie, but at the time I thought nothing of it. It was almost 5 feet in front of me when I realized I was looking at a man sitting on a flaming pie. He smiled serenely at me—or maybe he coughed violently—but whatever it was, it was mystical. Almost embarrassingly mystical, if you know what I mean.
The man must have noticed me blushing because he offered me a rainbow trout and enough money to finish my payments on my new Dyna-Gym. My eyes filled with tears and he leaned over and wiped my eyes with the trout and then said, “You needn’t ever make mountains out of molehills again. You have misjudged yourself. You are not who you think you are. You have been examining yourself from the wrong end of the telescope, one might say. You can set up housekeeping on one side of the looking glass or the other—the side that makes big things small or small things big; I like to hang out on the big things small side, you meet a better class of people there. But of late, you haven’t been able to see yourself clearly. You see, my dear, you are not Carrie Fisher at all. They just told you that to test you. Well, now, my dear, the test is over, and I’m pleased to say you pass with a C−. Now you can graduate to your true identity. You see, my dear, you are really Mr. Ed. And you have been all along. You can now live out your life as who you were intended to be. Farewell.”
As I watched him disappear on his flaming pie, I suddenly noticed the rainbow trout smiling at me from the windowsill where the mystical pie man had left him. I started to ask if I could get him something—a drink, or some bait—when he suddenly let out a shrill laugh, as only a fish can do. I politely asked him what was so funny and he said, “You. So you’re Mr. Ed. Old horse face with the dumb jokes. No wonder you got canceled.” Then he laughed again and continued laughing until he fell off the windowsill and into the street below.
He lay in the street the entire night screaming with laughter and then suddenly the laughing stopped. I don’t know what happened to him. Although recently someone was talking about the sequel Don Knotts was doing to The Incredible Mr. Limpet (The Incredible Mr. Limpet Two) and they were describing the fish that had the lead opposite Knotts, and it could only have been my rainbow trout.
Mystical, huh?
There are plenty of fish in the sea
And you sure look like a fish to me
As soft as a crayfish with a mouth that opens and closes
And like a fish you don’t say pretty things
And you don’t send no roses
There are plenty of fish in plenty of seas
And like a fish you don’t bring shiny diamonds
And fall to your knees
If you’d never gotten close I wouldn’t have noticed when you were far away
But you filled up my nights and then emptied my days
There are girls who can be helped and there are girls who can be had
But you helped me and then had me
And now fish I need help again I need help real bad
. . .
But, like the fisherman said, there are plenty of fish in the sea
And maybe someday some sweet salmon will come and swim away with me
When we talk it’s not merely idle chatter
We discuss things that really don’t matter
We talk of love and god and pain
To life’s never-ending song
We add yet one more refrain
And as the pace gets more and more frantic
The words get more and more pedantic
We leave no sophistry unturned
As our rhetoric becomes more intense
Using our very large vocabularies
To disguise our very common sense.
The words get longer and the plot gets thinner
Another discourse to discuss at dinner
There is no feeling we can’t analyze
Seizing each chance to intellectualize
Talking in the past and present tense
We’re making a lot more noise
And a lot less sense.
She: I love you.
He: What?
She: Nothing . . . never mind.
[Pause]
He: Is something the matter? I mean, you seem sort of uncomfortable.
She: Me? . . . No, I’m fine . . . I feel like a water lily floating on a Chinese lagoon.
He: You what?
She: I said, I feel like a . . . Oh, never mind! Everything’s fine—I’m fine.
He: You sure?
She: Yes. . . . I’m just a little wired that’s all.
He: You want anything?
She: Anything.
He looks at her for a moment then stares off into space nodding.
She laughs.
He: What?
She: Mmm?
He: You looked like you were about to say something.
She: Did I? I always look like that, I guess. It’s kind of a twitch.
He looks off into space.
Sheila and Hugh
Resting in arms
Testing your charms
Repeating a ritualized “I love you”
Sharing a fight
Or a kiss in the night
Shrugging when friends ask “What’s new?”
After the wedding
Her hips started spreading
His hair line began to recede
They remained together
Out of habit now
And not out of any great need
He’ll show up from work
Showing signs of strain
While her day was spent cleaning
Letting the soap operas wash her brain
. . .
He reads the evening paper
She calls him in to eat
They share their meal silently
She’s bored, he’s just beat
Then they climb the stairs
Multiplying the monotony
With each step they take
The hours spent sleeping
They find more satisfying
Than those spent awake
He removes his work clothes
She puts on her curlers and cream
Hoping the sheets will protect them
From the demon of daily routine
Then he clicks off the lamp
And the darkness holds no noise
For in the dark you can be anyone
Housewives will be girls
And businessmen boys
. . .
“I love you, Sheila”
I love you, Hugh”
But she’s deciding on dishes
And his thoughts are all askew
And the sheets supply refuge
For this perpetual pair
Neither really knowing anymore
Why the other one is there
I act like someone in a bomb shelter trying to raise everyone’s spirits.
He’s far from a fool, nowhere near. I’m quite near. I can feel the fool that’s so far away from him breathing down my neck.
I would like to not be able to hear myself think. I constantly hear my mind chattering and jabbering away up there all by itself. I wish it would give me a fucking break. Write, don’t think, write. You’re not thinking properly, Ms. Fisher, I suggest you write.
If anyone reads this when I have passed to the big bad beyond I shall be posthumorously embarrassed. I shall spend my entire afterlife blushing.
I’m scared. Scared that I’ll let Harrison hurt me. That I’ll change plain old leaving into abandonment again. It’s no mean feat. Hurting might be familiar but it certainly isn’t fun. It’s a bit pathetic to set yourself up to be humiliated or passed over or whatever
and then at the last minute deciding it really wasn’t what you had in mind—perhaps you could show me something in rayon.
None of us have been really given the opportunity to explore the possibility that, given our own situation, we might not choose to see one another. We’re thrown together and we make the best of one another if for no other reason than convenience. Would we still seek out each other’s company in “REAL LIFE,” when we regained our temporarily suspended perspective? I don’t think we could honestly say at this point. We could very easily be deceived by the sheer convenience of one another and the seeming absence of options. At this point your main objective would be to find someone—anyone—as long as they were close, willing and this side of the grave. (It’s not difficult to live up to those qualifications.) Something handy, immediate and as human as possible. We aren’t really in the position to be choosy. The real test is being in a situation where it’s not just convenient—where there are a substantial number of alternatives to the more than likely possibility of coming down with a case of 24-hour loneliness.
Anyway as George’s wife Marcia says, we’re gold in the same place (referring to the theory that we look for people that are gold in the place where we’re shit and shit in the places where we’re gold), so instead of picking up where you leave off, we pick up and leave off in practically the same place (that place being somewhere between high school and Gilligan’s Island).
I do not want to take part in my life. It can just go on without me; I’m not giving it any help. I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to talk to it, I don’t want it anywhere near me. It takes too much energy. I refuse to be a part of it. If you have a life, even if you get used to it ruining your sleep, spoiling your fun, requiring your somewhat undivided attention, what overwhelming relief one must feel when it finally skips town.
The Princess Diarist Page 9
