Author Archives: Wistar

I know someone who went to Helsinki and spent $10 on an Us Weekly with this headline. Ten dollars seems extreme, but I can’t really deny that after a few days in Finland I might feel an expensive need to read about Britney Spears. Traveling outside of my comfort zone, where I know exactly who and what I’m contending with, I might feel so swallowed up by the sheer number of other, anonymous lives being led that I need celebrity reassurance. Reading about Britney might assuage my feelings of being no one in the world. She is a lighthouse around which we can all gather. “Come home to me,” she says. “Drink soda out of my baby bottle. Take shelter from the storm.” It comforts me that for a moment, one human can be the epicenter of the universe, even though she’s depicted as a bipolar cartoon from Louisiana. “You will not be anonymous for long,” she says. “Some people can break through the Earth’s crust. My genes are famous. My children have fan clubs. This magazine says I’m immortal. Do you want to bump uglies?”

We got back from our trip at 4AM. I drove the whole way from Brooklyn, fueled by dessicated chicken fingers, Diet Coke, chocolate chip cookies, and Necco wafers. The train ride from Montreal to Penn Station was beautiful – we saw the ruins of a Spanish castle on a Spanish castle-sized island in the Hudson River. We saw a drunk man stealing the seats of other passengers and then pretending not to speak English. We saw Poughkeepsie. We saw white sailboats moored beside motley trash barges.

After spending a few days in two big cities, I started having olfactory hallucinations. I smelled shit and feet everywhere. I started smelling it on me. I started smelling it inside my nose itself, trapped there like dust. Maybe I am a snob. Maybe I am a small-town girl. In the subway station we saw a man with his pants down sitting beside a garbage bag, and I thought he might be dead. Then a police officer put on black gloves before poking him with a stick, and the dead man started gathering his things. I am in a bad mood. Yesterday my mom told me that my grandmother has been in the hospital all weekend. She has a wound on her leg that won’t heal and on the train home I imagined I could smell it. Human infections have odors when the bandages come off. I saw her today and she is all right. She is propped up in bed drinking Boost and watching the US Open. Then my other grandmother came to the hospital for a visit. Both my grandmothers have their injured left legs wrapped up tight and they now share a doctor, who calls them the Profore Twins. We all sat in the hospital room and talked about the wonders of Montreal while they elevated their feet per the doctor’s orders. I have a friend who is convinced he smells like shit, even though no one else can smell it. He has been having this hallucination for a year. It gets so bad sometimes that he doesn’t want to leave the house. Recently I read a Martin Amis book that contained a character with the same problem. It turned out he was schizophrenic. Now that I am home, I don’t smell anything anymore. It is like a desert here. Now that the sickness I imagined is nearby, down the street instead of hundreds of miles away, the putrid odors have gone the way of the ghost.

My stomach is empty again. We might have people over for Labor Day hamburgers.

I am rambling and depressive. This is so you realize you didn’t miss me after all.

On my to-do list: sneak Dewar’s and dark chocolate into Martha Jefferson Hospital.