Carpet and Carrie

When people walk on carpet
no sound
no sense of progress
suburbs and office
make numb
make nice
streets make crazy
hard and hot


There was a girl named Carrie in college. she had thin lips and crunchy blonde hair and no one seemed to notice.

(those things)

Oh, they noticed everything else. She was a Christian. She did not drink. She held offices in Student government and in her sorority and had a cute boyfriend who wore shoulder pads without irony, was on the dance team which meant she wore blue spandex. This is the problem with women in offices. At any given point any of the stenciled women in dark blue suits carrying papers might have worn spandex. Blue spandex shorts with MT stenciled across the ass in white and little pompoms to cover it with shimmy until just the right moment. The problem with the "girl next door" is really that any "girl next door" can never be taken seriously if at some point in her life she ever wore blue spandex.

My spandex was orange. Hooters. The girls who weren't good enough for blue. Across from an auto-diesel college. I drank GrandMarnier at a shit trap tourist bar in Kissimmee and drove forty five minutes home in orange spandex and a sorority sweatshirt plastered. I turned up the radio. I kept between the lines as best I could. I turned up the AC. My hair was a rat trap of dye jobs. My purse was a spilled chess set of product. I cannot believe sometimes that I did not fall harder. Life was so real. Traffic so frustrating. Malls so soothing.

I ran up credit cards as soon as I could get them. Any they world sent me. I bought things. I kept in touch with my roots in the sense that I hid them. I bought packages at tanning beds and gyms. I went out to the Wing Shack and drank beer with a fat girls ID and ate fried food with a skinny girls metabolism. I cannot remember the last name of a single person I knew then.

With Carrie it's only her first. Carrie. That's all she ever needed though. Homecoming Queen. Probably grad school. President of shit. Girls who feel important by being elected to jobs no one else really wants to do. Maybe that's kind of what it's like to be an artist.