1. I’ve had a special form of the flu for a month now and I’m beginning to feel like that monkey in the movie Outbreak.
2. That my dog only likes to wear cat collars.
3. That I now have my personal trainer’s number on my speed dial and actually miss her when I travel.
4. That I carry self-tanning spray in my purse so I can do it while I’m walking in the mall.
Things you don’t really want to know about someone you have just met for five minutes. But believe me I can stuff that in the hot pocket of inane talk in no time. There are people who are good at small talk and there are people like me. Those who just can’t quit it with the I’m fine thank you. Like plane food, I insist on leaving an odd impression on everyone, like the soggy pasta with mushroom gravy that they serve on long haul flights.
When I was little I wanted to be a star, like many repressed children who had no friends but the local TV stations. Of course now I have discovered that a rolling camera is my casket to disaster. You know how in every movie, your idols just say the right thing at the right time, like Bette Davis and the lot. Everyone should have a scriptwriter, or at least the option to have one. Since real time, without the luxury of cuts, begrudges us of that wonder we make do with our own brand of wit.
I was once asked by some promotional video for a hair product, what I thought made me special. First of all, how do you answer that without sounding like an asshole? Anyway, I think I said I stood out because my grandparents were distant relatives (play odd goofball to charm the audience like a Wes Anderson character). I knew it was a scary answer, odd at best (blank stares gave me that hint), so I just tried to play it down by saying that it was kind of chic at that time to do stuff like that. The turn-of-the-century’s version of dating a spectacularly older poon hound. I saw the sensitively edited version of my babbling reduced to a giggle, which my mouth nervously farted towards the end of the "interview." Editors make great best friends. If only you could have one in real life to delete scenes that you wish you could just forget, along with a scriptwriter, then that would be a wonderful life.
Speaking of which, this leads me to the title of this article. I’m incredibly dull these days, if only maybe to buy me some silence and dignity. But in my "heyday" I was what you could call a dictionary lush. Humphrey Bogart memorably said in Casablanca, "Of all the gin joints in all the towns, in all the world, she had to walk to mine."
I do believe men and women said that about me without the bittersweet sentimentalism of course. There is this deranged, sober Celine talk which I describe as a bit of upstairs and then there is Celine the leader of The Libation Army of the Locquacious front.
Once I got that warm fuzzy feeling there was no stopping me. I told everyone, friends and strangers alike, that when I’m in my Johnny Cash mode 50 percent of what I say is fake. I called it my creative outlet. I’ve cornered soap actors, supermodels, non-English speaking backpackers and friends of my parents in many darkened rooms throbbing with techno music from three years ago blaring against the walls dishing nonsense, feeling supremely intriguing, engaging and beguiling. Preparing my life as a has-been I’d like to call it. I once claimed that I was adopted. There was another time I convinced an equally messed up fellow that we should do a TV show together and be amateur cooks. Each week we’ll try to cook something and just burn it or mess it up and force people to eat it. It sounded very hilarious at the time.
Once I got into this debate with my best friend, now boyfriend, how North Park was the best after-hours place and proceeded to honk the horn of his car and lock him out until he agreed. The sad part was he wasn’t even arguing with me. I find it sometimes baffling when someone starts talking to me about some crap from Grimm’s purgatory of fairy tales that I apparently said the night before. Some of the things I say are so bizarre, so Lynch-like that they actually entertain me.
Now I’m trying on shoes of domestic goddess, although I still entertain with take-out food, I find myself in my domicile with friends who have seen past the lying, entertaining, beguiling and intriguing Celine. The odd night that I do go out, I try my best to behave. Yes, I still mistake important people with other people or worse forget their names (sometimes it seems like everything I know is at the tip of my uncooperative tongue) without the help of a gin and tonic. Being parched from libation liberation, I’m stuck doing crazy talk while being completely conscious of it. I ask teenagers how their kids are, asking relatively svelte women how long they recovered from their lipo (out loud and being unreasonably rhetorical about it) and newly married couples if they have fought yet. I can’t help myself, I’m terrible, my social skills have resembled a Pollock painting, it means something but you just don’t know what.
My mother, being the wise woman that she is told me to slap myself if I feel crazy. In many social occasions you may see me flushed, but that’s not Shu Uemura, that’s just crazy slaps. Socializing is one thing, but being bitchy is another. I admire those silent bitches, they just look fabulous and hold their heads up high being beyond everything else especially reproach. I’m like a character from a Guy Ritchie movie, the stooopid middleman. When I come across smug, self-important bastards, my verbal diarrhea comes up. Any mean little trite thing they say, I’ll respond with something lower, baser and more irrelevant.
Making me the stooped self-important bastard. Aside from nemeses, another verbal laxative are cute guys. I’m talking salt and pepper man in his 30s being just a hint gay. I don’t even want to go into that, it’s just too painful, a castration of any shred of enigmatic magic I have left is gone as I walk in to beauty.
I’ve never been cool. In high school I suffered bruises because I couldn’t walk with shades without tripping. So as a member of the new world I’m a disaster. As a villain or protagonist (depending on scenario) I’m a verbal klutz. Maybe those demure girls had it right all the time. All this time I thought we should herald the individualistic and opinionated females. But there is an edict in their dusty book of gospels: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. In my case if I don’t have anything to say, I should really say nothing at all.