My lower back is throbbing. At first I didn't know why ... I thought either I was getting old or the base of my spine was having a baby, but then I started bleeding out of my vagina and realized that it's just my uterus somehow beating the hell out of my kidneys.

What an image. I'm picturing the uterus holding little mallets and ponging my internal orrgans like little misbegotten drums, creating a timpani roll loud enough to reach the cheap seats. I fucking hate being a woman.

In other news, I got a call from my friend Cate this weekend, and she said, "Kelly!"

That's me.

"Cate!"

"What are you doing right now?"

"Nothing." (Not entirely true! In fact, I was trying to will the earth to spin a little faster so it would be night again and I would have a reason to stay locked up in my room, which I've neglected to the point that it has reached the messiness level of "junky den." Funk is hard work.)

"Wanna go see Courtney Love in Marin?"

"What?"

"She's signing her new book at a mall in Corte Madera. When can you be ready?"

I was still in my pajamas, and had just gotten out of the shower.

"About ten minutes."

"Great! I'll pick you up in twenty."

And she did, and off we went in Cate's 1989 pickup truck, which is dark blue, spangled with spray-painted galaxies, and the best place to share beer and cigarettes with Cate on a warm afternoon.

I'm not generally a celebrityphile, but I like Courtney Love. She has no qualms about showing her lunacy, nor about flaunting her fame, and I dig her complete lack of pretense. I have mixed feelings about most of her more popular songs, because they were on the radio when I was in high school and was totally anti-radio. I've since recovered from that blind prejudice, and am able to like pop culture items despite their mainstreaminess. What a hero I am.

I like Hole. I like Courtney Love. Her interview on David Letterman, when she was totally all over the place, flashed Dave and confessed to him her undying love, and sealed her fate as one of my favorite celebrities. I want to hang out with Courtney Love.

When we saw her, Cate said "She looks like hell."

I disagree. She looks her age (42), that she's "had a lot of work done" (her mouth looks like it was ripped of a Barbie and stretched on a rack), and that she's done some hard livin'. But she doesn't look like hell.

A friend of mine, a former heroin user who looks fantastic, once joked about the preservative effects of smack. My viewing of Ms. Love makes me argue against it.

It's weird to refer to meeting a living person as a "viewing," but that's sort of what it is to attend a celebrity book signing. You mainly go to look. These people are not going to ask you for coffee, because they're busy and they don't fucking know you. On no other occasion is it counted as an "event" to have 20 seconds of face time with someone you recognize whom you will never see again.

Ms. Love seemed cool enough. It was extremely weird that she was hosting a signing in a small bookshop in Corte Madera, a suburb located in one of the wealthiest counties in the nation. The line formed outside the door, in the bright ol' sunshine, while extremely well-dressed, well-coiffed women with tailored jackets, perfect pocketbooks and the air of premeditated casualness (passed down to their hipster offspring) went about their errands.

There were 50 people in line at most, and we were kept waiting for over an hour before CL's arrival. At the 90-minute mark, a gay man behind me yelled "Courtney Love, you are ruining my day!"

When she showed up with her modest entourage, the response was less a cheer and more a groan of relief that we would no longer have to stand and pointedly ignore each other.

Love swooped in, said "Sorry I'm late! I had some shit in my eye and had to go to the hospital." I shared with Cate my mental image of Courtney Love flicking a cigarette in her limo and having a wayward cinder burn the shit out of her cornea.

We had to purchase her book, Dirty Blonde (duh) in order to attend the signing. Cate paid for more than half of mine as an early birthday present. Otherwise, I can't say it's be on my wish list. It's basically a giant hardcover containing scans of her notebook poetry from the 70s to today. The book doesn't contain anything terribly surprising or revealing, and the quality of writing can be found on any given seventeen-year-old girl's web site. Not worth the price of $35.00, (nor worth a cited excerpt in this entry, because seriously, you can find something comparable by bouncing around Diaryland,) but it was a fun, unexpected way to spend my Saturday.

Ms. Love seemed to be quite sweet and personable to each of her fans while taking the requisite 5 seconds to sign their books. When I got to the front of the line, and was able to see how her forehead and cheeks are eerily smooth while her eyes look like marbles set in crinkly, saran-wrapped bread dough, she turned her attention to her own music playing in the background and started yelling at the crowd. (To make amends for her tardiness, she played some of her as-yet unreleased tracks. Meh.)

"Don't you guys LOVE this music?" She said. "Because I FUCKING DO!" She flailed a little. She flipped her hair a lot.

"Mmmmrggh ... yay," said the crowd. I just stood there as my book was signed. She didn't look at me at all, but instead stared at the gatherers. It was a little awkward.

Cate and I took our books and drove around until we found a cheap burger stand, where we ate greasy sandwiches and onion rings. It was a good day. I was glad to get out of the city.

Though I've been busy, and have been having fun, my good days have been rare for a while. When I first moved to California, everything was covered with a dirty golden newness, like a dusting of pollen, and I was struck by the way the city's idiosyncrasies fit into a patchwork. Then I became busy and jaded, and I stopped noticing. When I pass through the streets and corners I first encountered upon my arrival, I'm reminded of how I originally felt, but remembering takes effort.

I've been concentrating on all the facts in my life pointing to "happy," and have failed to notice that I'm actually quite tired, anxious, and raw. With the people I love, I'm either pretending to be champion of the world, or a fucking neurotic pain in the ass.

On Halloween, I took a long walk, killing time before a friend's party. Halloween in San Francisco is pointedly bacchanalian, with the Castro hemorrhaging crazies at 300% its normal level. Being crowd-phobic, I did not go to the Castro, and instead wandered through a residential neighborhood sprinkled with boutiques I can't afford, where little kids and their parents gathered candy from shopkeepers. It was a beautiful night, the kids were adorable, the streets were well-lit and I was heading to a party where I was wanted. I passed a bin of free pumpkins, grabbed a plump one for my hostesses, and started crying.

For fuck's sake. I feel like I would have had a lot more to say about everything in this entry if I had written it over a year ago.

In that retarded, poetic way fraught with sadness-laced joy, I was happy. I used to feel that way all the time, but I've been purposely numbing myself for a while. Boooooorriiiiing.

Let's see ...

- There's school, where I often feel inadequate and am constantly bombarded with uncomfortable realizations about myself.

- There's geography, and how the people who are most important also happen to be the furthest away, and they all want me to be with them, and it makes me feel selfish and unreasonable.

- There's family issues, and my depressed mom and my once-heroic uncle who is now shattered and on round-the-clock suicide watch, and how our family dynamic creates giant web of shame, blame and denial.

- There's my housing situation, where I live with three and are friends with none. I think that my house mates are really depressing people to be around.

- There's my job, which is in flux, in that I've been looking for a more steady gig for the past month and a half, and have more or less given up on feeling stable for the next couple of years.

- There's the guilt I feel knowing that my own shit is a total cakewalk to most people.

- Whineycakes.

On an up note, my birthday's on Sunday. I'll turn 28, officially embarking on my late 20s, and I'm pretty happy about saying goodbye to this decade which has largely felt like a blanket of FUN covering a strong undercurrent of waiting-for-things-to-stop-sucking.

In celebration, Saturday night, from 9:30 on, I'll be at Zeitgeist on Valencia. Feel free to stop by if you're in the area and are game for a potentially awkward meeting with a drunk chick and her buddies. It'll be fun. Mopey as I may seem, it's my fucking BIRTHDAY, and having fun is in the rules.

~ Last Five Entries ~

Something About My Big Freackin' Bed - 07.11.07

Summertime Fix in Hawaii - 06.12.07

About Zigs - 04.26.07

Chris - 03.21.07

Zooming Around - 01.26.07

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BUY JEN'S BOOK! BUY IT! DO IT!

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BUY DEAN'S BOOK, TOO! YOU KNOW YOU WANNA! SERIOUSLY.

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