Invisible Monsters

You see, I can handle the baby food and the not talking and being homeless and invisible, but I have to know that I can love somebody. Completely and totally, permanently and without hope of reward, just as an act of will, I will love somebody.

We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.

The future is just wasted on some people.

I wanted to give up the idea I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone.

The truth is I was addicted to being beautiful, and that's not something you just walk away from. Being addicted to all that attention, I had to quit cold turkey.

If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

The wild daisies and Indian paintbrush are just the genitals of a different life form.

Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another.

A Million fucking fashion makeovers that only leave me trapped being me.

Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.

All around us, erosion and insects are just chewing up the world, never mind people and pollution. Everything biodegrades with or without you pushing.

You're safe because you're trapped inside your culture.

How is it you can keep mutating and still be the same deadly virus?

It's not living alone if you keep a rifle under your bed.

It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't love.

What I need to do is fuck up so bad I can't save myself.

People all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.

"Birds ate my face."

It's because we're so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the

Sometimes the best way to deal with shit, she says, is to not hold yourself as such a precious little prize.

Haute couture and getting hauter.

When you don't share your problems, you resent hearing the problems of other people.

She'd wear shades of lipstick you'd expect to see around of the base of a penis.

You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.

What I wanted looked more and more like what I'd always been trained to want.

Las Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night.

Jump to present time with my folks sitting on lawn chairs at night, and watching these same super-8 movies projected on the white side of the same white house, twenty years later. The house the same, the yard the same, the windows projected in the movies lined up just perfect with the real windows, the movie grass aligned with the real grass, and my movie-projected brother and me being toddlers and running around wild for the camera.

"The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger."

Go figure, but Texans seem to be a lot more comfortable around disastrous house fires than they are around anal sex.

The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.

It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way a gun is power.

Be famous. Be a big social experiment in getting what you don't want. Find value in what we've been taught is worthless. Find good in what the world says is evil. I'm giving you my life because I want to whole world to know you. I wish the whole world would embrace what it hates.

Our real discoveries come from chaos.

Anymore, when I see the picture of a twenty-something in the newspaper who was abducted and sodomized and robbed and then killed and here's a front-page picture of her young and smiling, instead of me dwelling on this being a big, sad crime, my gut reaction is, wow, she'd be really hot if she didn't have such a big honker of a nose. My second reaction is I'd better have some good head and shoulder shots handy in case I get, you know, abducted and sodomized to death. My third reaction is, well, at least that cuts down the competition.

Make me into anything, but just love me.

No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all.

That's what I love about fire, how it would kill me as quick as anybody else. How it can't know I'm its mother. It's so beautiful and powerful and beyond feeling anything for anybody, that's what I love about fire.

Him yelling, Give me lust, baby.

Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.

This makeover would make piercings and tattoos and brandings look so lame, all those little fashion revolts so safe that they themselves only became fashionable. Those little paper tiger attempts to reject looking good that only end up reinforcing it.

When you go out with a drunk, you'll notice how a drunk fills your glass so he can empty his own. As long as you're drinking, drinking is okay. Two's company. Drinking is fun. If there's a bottle, even if your glass isn't empty, he'll pour a little in your glass before he fills his own.

Just remember, the same spectacular Vogue magazine, remember that no matter how close

"I'm an invisible monster, and I'm incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse."

Don't you think that somehow television makes us God?

Don't expect this to be the kind of story that goes: and then, and then, and then.

All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.

Nobody's all-the-way dead yet, but let's just say the clock is ticking.

You know how you look at ugly hunchback girls, and they are so lucky. Nobody drags them out at night so they can't finish their doctorate thesis papers. They don't get yelled at by fashion photographers if they get infected ingrown bikini hairs. You look at burn victims and think how much time they save not looking in mirrors to check their skin for sun damage.

Sorry, mom. Sorry, God.

The fashion photographer inside my head, yells:

The nurse brings me the personal classified ads from a newsletter. Sister Katherine peers down her nose and through the glasses to read: Guys seeking slim, adventurous girls for fun and romance. And, yes, it's true, not one single guy specifically excludes hideous mutilated girls with growing medical bills.

"The nun's arrived with the man ad his I.V. stand, a new man with no skin or crushed features or all his teeth bashed out, a man who'd be perfect for me. My one true love. My deformed or mutilated or diseased prince charming. My unhappily ever after. My hideous future. The monstrous rest of my life."

Ancient aboriginal petroglyphs and junk are just whizzing past

Going outside, the world is all color after the white-on-white of the hospital. It's going over the rainbow. I walk up to a supermarket, and shopping feels like a game I haven't played since I was a little girl. Here are all my favorite name-brand products, all those colors, French's Mustard, Rice A Ronni, Top Ramen, everything trying to catch your attention.

A sexual reassignment surgery is a miracle for some people, but if you don't want it, it's the ultimate form of self-mutilation.

Do the things that scare you the most.

"And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap."

And the crowd of shoppers is bailed, leaving just us and the security cameras instead of God watching to catch us when we fuck up.

I wanted the everyday reassurance of being mutilated. The way a crippled deformed birth-defected disfigured girl can drive her car with the windows open and not care how the wind makes her hair look, that's the kind of freedom I was after.

The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill.

Save the world with some advice from the future.

Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited.

"When you understand," Brandy says, "that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan," Brandy says, "then we'll figure out who you're going to be."

Jump to the week after Manus's last visit, last meaning final, when Evie drops by the hospital. Evie looks at the glossies and talks to God and Jesus Christ.

"The world," Brandy says, "is your cradle and your trap."

Evie starts telling me about an idea she has for a remake of Cinderella, only instead of the little birds and animals making her a dress, they do cosmetic surgery. Bluebirds give her a facelift. Squirrels give her implants. Snakes, liposuction. Plus, Cinderella starts out as a lonely little boy.

Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.

Mostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she's so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she's just like me. What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody.

When I met you, I envied you. I coveted your face. I thought that face of yours will take more guts than any sex change operation. It will give you bigger discoveries. It will make you stronger than I could ever be.

"Whatever you're thinking, a million other folks are thinking. whatever you do, they're doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort."

"Now," those Plumbago lips say, "You are going to tell me your story like you just did. Write it all down. Tell that story over and over. Tell me your sad-assed story all night." That Brandy queen points a long bony finger at me. "When you understand," Brandy says, "that what your telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan," Brandy says, "then we'll figure out who you're going to be."

Everybody here thinks the whole story is about them. Definitely that goes for everybody in the world.

The truth is, being ugly isn't the thrill you'd think, but it can be an opportunity for something better than I ever imagined.

"[W]e're so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes" Brandy says, "I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life."

People just can't stand not knowing something, she says. Especially men can't stand not climbing every mountain, mapping everywhere. Labeling everything. Peeing on every tree and then never calling you back.

Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. (ch3p32)

Another thing is no matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.

When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?

What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock-tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?

Seth says how your being born makes your parents god. you owe them your life, and they can control you.

Evie says that beautiful people should never date each other. Together, they just don't generate enough attention. Evie says there's a whole shift in the beauty standard when they're together. You can feel this, Evie says. When both of you are beautiful, neither of you is beautiful. Together, as a couple, you're less than the sum of your parts.

Hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.

The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.

The murderer, the victim, the witness, each of us thinks our role is the lead.

Somewhere in heaven, you're live on a video web site for God to surf.

When it's time to reintroduce me to solid foods, their words again, it's pureed chicken and strained carrots. Baby foods. Everything mashed or pulverized or crushed. You are what you eat.

"She has to take a needle and thread and sew herself up" ".. The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open"

Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anyone in the world. We're all such products.

Rip yourself open. Sew yourself shut.

Your folks are like God because you want to know they're out there and you want them to approve of your life, still you only call them when you're in crisis and need something.

"First," Manus says, "your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life."

"The whole time, growing up," Evie says, "I just thought being a woman would be...not such a disappointment."

You have to keep recycling yourself.

When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

This is the world we live in. Conditions change and we mutate.

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known.