In Place of Real Insight

I would love to write about the roomful of models I sat in last night. Gorgeous, cookie cutter girls with long, shiny, straight hair tossed just so, leaving the standup show at Soho House periodically to feed their coke habits. Or how I nearly ruined one girl's coat with handsoap when she asked me, without even looking at me, to watch it while she retreated into a stall, sniffling hurriedly. And the poor standup schlubs in their jeans and hairy chests and messy dos, the females with saddlebags in extratight pants, their little bellies just over their belts. The chubby and the neurotic dancing for the wealthy elite. And the anger that filled me watching the nearly six-feet tall women buying twelve dollar drinks as I carefully babysat the eighteen dollars in my checking account. Insecurity, for sure. But also a feeling of: they're beautiful, rich, and tall. How can their lives be possibly less than enviable?

And I hated them.

My anger frightens me sometimes.

And I had managed to drop crabcake dip on my left tit. My electric blue ribbed turtleneck had felt flattering and sexy before I'd entered Soho House. It matched my eyes. Now, well . . .

I came home, talked to a couple friends and worked on a play I've also been babysitting, allowing it to simmer for weeks till it burns a hole in my brain for the words to smoke through. And somehow the anger did what potheads pretend weed does for them. My head opened up and I fell in love with the characters I was writing about. And then the tears came. I felt for my parents and my dad's ex-girlfriend (upon who(m) the play is based) and a teenage version of me and all of the people who are inevitably stricken by your sadness as much as one can be touched by sadness that is not their own or shared.

And so it went. My angry evening deflated into something else, aided by Newman's Own Butter Boom popcorn and flat Diet Coke with Lime. I like to think the words I wrote in those hours were brilliant and chances are they're not but I have a feeling they were sincere. I take some pride in that.