Jessi Klein's NotBlog

It always breaks my heart to see a lost dog poster.  I don’t know what’s sadder: picturing the owner sitting at home, feeling guilty, crying, calling friends, looking at pictures of the dog, going to Kinkos to make copies of the lost dog poster, all the while thinking, “I can’t believe I’ve become the person who has to make the lost dog poster,” buying tape to put the posters up, drowning their anxiety in ice cream – or the dog, confused and wandering down alleys, eating little bits of garbage (actually, every dog I’ve ever known has really loved eating little bits of garbage from the gutter, so maybe this is the one perk of being lost) and pizza crusts, not knowing how to cross the street, curious about some things, afraid of everything.  It’s a sad situation all around.  Still, there are pressing questions whenever I see those posters.

1.  How the fuck did you lose your dog?  Were you one of those people who got cocky about letting your dog off the leash on the sidewalk, passive aggressively bragging to everyone else “yeah, my dog can be off the leash – we have a pretty intense understanding.”  Fuck you.  Don’t take your dog off the leash.  

2.  Within the realm of lost dogs, it seems like more than half the time it’s a small dog that’s gotten lost, which makes sense.  It’s easier to lose small things, like keys, than it is to lose big things, like a drier.  But on the occasions when I see that someone’s lost their mastiff or their German Shepherd, it’s harder to understand.  Where could it have gone?  I feel a sense of failure on the part of the public, those of us who are supposed to be looking out for the dog.  How could we not have found it by now?  It’s enormous.  Open your eyes, people!  There’s a 150 pound mastiff wandering the city!  Someone must have seen it!  Pay attention!!!  Live!!!!!

3. Then there’s the question of whether a lost dog poster is still relevant.  Do people come around and take down the posters if their pet has been found?  Surely some of these people must find their dogs.  Would they let us know if they did?  Would there be an update notice, like “Thank you to the people of Branson!  Wilbur is safe and sound.  We can never express how grateful we are for your your support and prayers during this difficult time.”  Every so often I’m actually tempted to call the lost dog number just to check and see if there’s any news, any leads….

4.  This is a difficult one, because it’s going to come off as obnoxious, when in fact I mean to help.  But the other day I saw a poster for a Lost Parrot.  I’m sure the person who lost their parrot is upset, and cares very much about their parrot, even though I’m not sure how that’s possible seeing as how parrots, like all birds, are disgusting.  That said, I know people can form emotional connections with all kinds of living things, because as my father once told me, there’s not enough love to go around in this world (depressing; probably true; why did he tell me that?)  In any case, I truly believe that if you’ve lost your parrot you must learn to let go.  It has flown away, into an infinite blue sky.  Does it prefer to flap about in the open wind, going wherever whimsy takes it, to perching day in and day out upon its own shit in that tiny brass cage you bought in Chinatown?  I suppose we’ll never know.  But your parrot is probably on to bigger and better things.  Don’t put up posters.  Don’t go to Kinkos.  Look at this as a sign.  Maybe the parrot getting loose is God telling you to quit your job, and finally open that bagel store you’ve dreamed about for years.  Maybe life is telling you to flap your own wings, get out of the Chinatown cage, put yourself out there and go on a date!  Be vulnerable!  You put up so many walls, you never allow anyone to truly get to know you!  Your parrot knew it!  Now you must know it!

I just quickly need to say that last night I took a so called “spinning class,” which I feel a bit of shame in admitting in the first place.  However, I must ask this:  does it really count as a spinning class if the instructor simply

1.yells “up!” 

2.yells “down!”

3.yells “faster!”

4.yells “you can do it!”

What about the subtle nuances of how I should position my hands?  What about making sure I have my seat level to the correct height?  What about carefully making sure we do not overextend ourselves?  I was expecting at least some instruction in the art of spinning, and instead was simply yelled at to sweat more.  Which I did.  I think I lost 15 pounds.  I will definitely be going back.

I just watched some of the Bob Dylan “No Direction Home” documentary on PBS, and holy Jesus, it brought back all the love and music-inspired longing I’ve ever felt for Bob in my whole life, which is tons and tons and tons, so vast and enormous I don’t even know where to begin.  Seeing that early footage of him playing in a Southern field, or him doing an angry Ballad of a Thin Man to a resentful, suspicious folkie crowd, it was like seeing my first love on the street after many years, that punched in the gut feeling you still get no matter how long it’s been because that person did something completely new and wild to you – first first first crazy love. 

Well, there’s a beginning.

My father was a huge Dylan fan.  I remember the album covers leaning against his record case, Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 and Bringing It All Back Home and Planet Waves.  When I was around seven, my dad brought home a poster of Dylan and tried to put it in my room - the photo was kind of blurry and purplish, and I’m almost certain it was him at Budokan, all big hair and crazy eyes and weird outfit.  I was terrified.  I think back now on the fact that my dad wanted to put this picture on a seven year old girl’s WALL and it’s pretty hilarious.  But he loved Dylan and he loved me, so he wanted me to have the poster.  He used to play “She Belongs To Me” and say it was my song, which I didn’t appreciate until years and years later.  Between the scary poster and Dylan’s kookoo voice, as a seven year old I was totally opposed to him, one of those people who says “but he can’t sing!”  I was a fucking jerk.

I don’t remember exactly what the turning point was, but I think I was 14, a freshman in high school.  I was home sick and bored and wanted to futz with the record player, and Dylan was already on the turntable.  I listened to Like a Rolling Stone, and I know this couldn’t be more cliche, but it suddenly clicked – maybe I was just old enough, or angsty enough, or smart enough; but the thing was I suddenly got Dylan and wanted to listen to him, and only him, all the time.  I bought a Dylan poster and put it on my wall.

High school was not my strong suit.  I was a tomboy with a total beanpole body and less than zero fashion sense.  I wore wingtips and a vest over a T-shirt, mostly because I took my wardrobe inspiration from Pretty in Pink - not Molly Ringwald, but  Duckie. The point is I looked and felt like a mess.

I didn’t have a boyfriend and I wanted one desperately, but shockingly, no one wanted to snuggle with the female Duckie.  I became obsessed with “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”  The music, yes, absolutely and completely, but even more so with that cover, the one of young Bob and his girlfriend (I think Suze?) walking arm in arm down a snowy McDougal Street.  I lived around the corner from McDougal, which still looks sort of the same as it did then, all quaint fire escape and brick.  I was so enthralled with Dylan that somehow that picture came to represent everything I dreamed of having.  I wanted to be that brown haired girl who got to walk down snowy McDougal Street with my boyfriend, the genius.  And that winter that I got obsessed with it, the weather was particularly snowy, and I remember just sitting in the sill of my window on 6th Ave alternately watching the snow turning all pink as it went down past the streetlights and staring at that album cover, listening to that record over and over and over and feeling poetically lonely and awful and secretly happy because Dylan made snowy loneliness amazing.  And I now had a CD player, so I could just put it on repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat….

I used to do the twenty minute walk home from school, a place I would leave feeling outsidery and not knowing why I felt so outsidery.  As a freshman, I was still wrestling with why I couldn’t make friends there (wingtips! vest!) – it just felt surreal to be so unaccepted, and walking home the surrealness of  my high school day kind of clung to me – it was almost like that feeling when you’re in the middle of getting out of a pool that has steps, where as you emerge from the water your bathing suit gets heavy and you feel like you have to struggle to be fully on dry ground.  But I remember I would listen to my walkman the whole way home, and the song I listened to almost every day was Visions of Johanna, one of the most surreal and beautiful songs ever – and the lyrics of that song were so mysterious and enigmatic and weird and at the same time so deeply, smokily cool, that they made feeling weird feel like something beautiful and right, desirable.  After all, Johanna is a weird girl, right?   ”The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face….” The Mona Lisa of modern music?  Maybe?

So that was the first obsessive song, that freshman year.  Sophomore year, however, I developed a crush on a guy that turned into an absolute, painful, all encompassing love.  He seemed to appear out of nowhere one day in my class, and somehow we became friends, and I yearned for him like I had never yearned for nothin’ or nobody.  But I was completely stuck in the friend zone.   I was no longer wearing vest and wingtips; I was now on baggy plaid pants and a baggy G’N'R T-shirt; yet inside this guy was causing all kinds of womanly awakenings.  We were close – we would hang out at Washington Square Park, at diners, eating crappy chicken parms.  I thought he was the funniest person I ever met, and I made him laugh. 

And then he went out with someone else.  I was in so much agony – even though it’s so long ago it’s completely vivid.  I punched walls.  I cried.  But mainly, I remember just breathing through that first heartbreaking well of unrequited longing, studying it, wrapping myself in it, sleeping it and eating it.  And just at this precise moment the Bootleg Series box set came out.  A box set seemed like an enormous luxury moneywise but I needed Bob.  And the song that took over, and that I think is still my absolute favorite of all time, was Mama You Been On My Mind.  I would see my guy after school, and we would talk and laugh, and then he would go off with that other girl, and I would put my walkman on and do my slow walk home listening to these lyrics, over and over and over:

“Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat and coverin’

the crossroads I’m standing at

or maybe it’s the weather or something like that

But Mama you been on my mind.”

Dylan’s voice is so raw and pure here – it dove deep down into my innocent little ache and eased the pain that felt so ridiculously big.  The song became my friend; the song understood; the song sings to the beloved and the unrequited lover both at once.  It sang me all the way through that first dumb love, steadily and tenderly; and when time took over and my obsession with the guy finally faded, the love that remained was for the song. 

I’m listening to it now, a new version I just found that’s a duet with him and Baez – it’s folksier and sweeter than the Bootleg one, but still wonderful.  I got it on Limewire, which my boyfriend downloaded for me right before I left New York.  Well, actually, my ex boyfriend – we broke up a few weeks ago.  I’m in LA, and the rain is coming down; and once again, Dylan is turning the loneliness into secret amazing happiness. 

So this past weekend I had to attend a memorial for my grandmother, who passed away recently at the age of 89.  She had a good life, I think, and while it’s sad she died I feel calm and OK about it.  It’s funny how people don’t know how to react when you tell them a grandparent died.  People are either really close with their grandparents, or not close at all, or it’s that thing inbetween where you love them but you know that they’re, frankly, old and going to die.  When I told people I was going home for my grandmother’s memorial they would usually look at me and say “I’m SO SORRY,” which comes from a nice place, but makes me feel like I have to comfort them about my grandmother’s death.  I’ll say, “Well, she was very old,” and then I become afraid that I don’t sound upset enough.  She and my grandpa used to take me and my siblings away to the Catskills for a few weeks in the summer, where we would eat fresh oranges and learn to swim and listen to them bicker.  One time I got stung by a wasp (I was always the one getting stung by something or being pooped on by a bird or stepping in dog shit, and everytime it happened my mom would make it seem like this was actually the best thing that could have happened: “You got stung by a bee because they know how sweet you are!”  “Getting pooped on by a pigeon is good luck!”  These are ridiculous things to say,and sometimes as I tried not to yack while washing green birdcrap out of my hair I’d be annoyed, but I realize how glad I am they were said.  I guess it’s the Jewish mom version of “when life gives you lemons make lemonade,” but it takes a great kind of moxie to so stubbornly insist on the good fortune of an encounter with animal dung) and my grandmother held me while I cried, and she put a cold compress on it and I snuggled into her and started squeezing the old loose skin of her elbow crook, which was soft and comforting.  Later, we drew penguins together.  She was a good artist.

In any case, she died, and I went to her memorial.  We took a limo to the cemetery,which I was dreading because it was in New Jersey, and my experience of anyone dying and being buried in the tri-state area is that the trip to the cemetery is a horrifyingly ugly, traffic riddled drive to some pit of a site, where you know you’ve found the cemetery because on the map you’re told to make a left directly after the nuclear reactor, or whatever those horrible things are you see where there’s just a series of huge pipes with fires bellowing out of them.  What the fuck are those?  What asshole dreamed those up?  It seems so inexcusably awful, that someone would ever feel the need to manufacture something in such a way that you’d need to involve a series of weird hell chimneys.  Whatever they are, in any case, they’re usually directly across from cemeteries, and you can’t help but make a morbid connection between the miles of ashtray like graves and the flames licking upwards from deep in the earth.  That’s the other thing, is that these cemeteries always seem to look and feel the exact opposite of peaceful, just people being stuffed into the earth in the same manner in which they lived, all crammed together in the grey city, as if you wanted to replicate in your eternal death pose the sensation of being on a packed rush hour subway. 

So that’s what I always think about these places.  But this cemetery was not that.  It was actually pretty beautiful.  The surrounding area had kempt, pretty houses and big graceful trees.  And in the cemetery itself there was a feeling of peace and rest, which was satisying, as that would seem to be the main point of a cemetery.

Anyway, we meet up with the rabbi who is going to perform the service, and he seems like a kindly old man, which is how I like my rabbis – I think because it’s a way to preserve something of that childlike belief that God is an old man with a long white beard.  When you inevitably grow up and go to Vassar, it’s not really cool to believe that anymore.  But at least an old rabbi with a long white beard gives you a little of the flavor of that, and I think if someone says they don’t picture God that way they’re lying at least a tiny bit.

So we walk to the plot, to my grandmother’s grave with the dirt freshly filled in, and he begins the service.  Despite having never met any of us, most notably my grandmother, he’s trying very hard to talk about how lovely she was, and his effort is appreciated, if at times a little over the top.  Like he says more than once, “She was a gem, a princess, a doll.”  A doll?  Hm.  Did he ever meet her at a bar in 1932?  Then maybe he shouldn’t call her a doll.  But it’s endearing. 

He takes a long detour to talk about Yitzhak Perlman, the famous violinist, and the night the rabbi’s friend saw him in concert and Perlman makes his labored walk to the stage in his leg braces and begins to play, and about fifteen minutes into the concert one of the strings broke, and the audience nervously tittered as they expected he would have to stop to get another string or maybe even another violin altogether.  But instead, he just decided to keep playing.  Everyone gasped, as they knew it would be impossible to make any kind of symphonic sound without the right number of strings.  But then, something happened – he played the most passionate, beautiful music anyone had ever heard.  The rabbi was not entirely successful in tying this story together with an aspect of my grandmother’s life.

So anyway after a bit he’s coming to the end of the service, the most solemn part where he’s going to say the Kaddish in Hebrew with my mother.  And they begin, and about fifteen seconds into it someone’s CELL PHONE GOES OFF.  You know how when someone’s cell phone goes off in the middle of a movie it just seems like the most mortally awful thing?  Well imagine the movie is about your dead grandmother’s funeral, and then imagine it’s not a movie, it’s real, and someone’s CELL PHONE GOES OFF.  That might give you a sense of what it’s like.  We’re all silently horrified, but it’s so unspeakably terrible that for a few seconds we can’t even look at each other.  Which one of us bares the device that marks us as the world’s biggest asshole?  We don’t want to know,  but I finally have to look up and I realize that in fact the cell phone belongs to the RABBI, who is not in any way breaking stride on the prayer and is just absolutely plowing through it.  The amazing thing is that we’re not talking about one or two rings that were then immediately hushed.  The rabbi, holding the prayer book in his old feeble hand, is using his other hand, which is also old and feeble, to slowly poke around his pockets and find the phone which he seems to be having trouble locating.  But he doesn’t seem in any kind of rush, which is, I think, just incredibly ballsy, especially if you know that his cell phone ring isn’t just any old tone – it’s the most classically grating series of tones in the world, that original Nokia ring – DUH NUH NUH DUH NUH NUH DUH NUH NAH NAAAH!!!!  It was the cell phone ring clearly invented by people in the early stages of cell phone inventing, when you could picture some scientist/engineer techie nerds, the kind with smarts but no understanding of people, standing over a phone prototype and saying, “The most important thing is for people to know beyond a shadow of a doubt when someone is calling the phone!  We need a sound that will be loud and differentiated from any other natural organic sound in the world!”

He finally finds the phone, and pulls it out and silences it, and my brother in law swears he saw him look to see who was calling.  I can’t confirm or deny that.  But the rabbi puts it away and finishes the service, reminding us that we should pray for all the troops around the world to come home safely to the United States and for peace on earth, and for my grandmother to rest in peace.

All in all, it was a great service.  In the limo on the way home, we moreover agreed that even with the cell phone incident it was somehow the right service.  It was a very beautiful spring day, with a wild blue sky and blossoms whizzing by all along the way to the George Washington bridge, and then after that, even blossoms in the city itself.  When we get home, we go to separate rooms to relax and be glad we’re not in a cemetery anymore.  After a bit, my father comes over and tells me that Yitzhak Perlman is playing the violin on channel 13.

I have a terrible knot in my neck.  I don’t know how it got there.  One morning I woke up and as I was turning in bed I suddenly felt a huge pull in my neck.  So somehow I sprained my neck becoming awake. 

The thing to do would be to get a massage, but for some reason whenever I get a massage I get more stressed out.  Something about putting my face into that massage hole thing makes all the blood rush to my head and then all of a sudden all I can do is think about problems.  So some chick is rubbing me and I can’t even feel it because my mind is racing.  Every now and then I get off the stress carousel for a few seconds long enough to remember I’m being massaged, and then I get mad because I paid for it and it’s being wasted, so I’m lying there angrily telling myself, “Feel it!  Feel it!”

I suppose this is part of what happens when you come from a long line of worriers.

I’ll just start by saying that if you’re out there seeing this on my site and thinking “holy fuck, not another douche with a blog-” then you should know I totally understand how you feel.  Even though I like certain blogs, I’m annoyed by the word.  Aren’t we all?  I’m not even sure why I’m so annoyed, but it seems even more annoying to try and figure it out.  So let’s agree this isn’t a blog.  It’s just a place where I’ll put some stuff and if you want you’ll read some stuff.  Because the thing is, I’m really trying to make myself write every single day, and, after many months of waking up early to write, and masturbating instead, this seems like a path worth trying.

And tonight seems like an appropriate night to begin this writing because Pepper Dennis premieres tonight, and if it turns out to be the show I hope it is, I may make this an entirely Pepper Dennis centered journal.  Every week, just a fucking exhaustive analysis of Pepper Dennis. 

So let’s go on this little journey together, shall we?  Come with me, take my hand.  It’s dry, I promise;  but not nearly as dry as Tim Robbins’ hand.  What, Jessi?  What did you say?  You heard me.  Sit back and get ready for a CELEBRITY STORY:  I know this about Tim Robbins’ hand because my friend and I randomly, briefly, met Tim Robbins at a bar a few months ago, who was very nice and shook our hands.  He had the largest, dryest, warmest, most perfect hand-shaking hand ever.  It’s hard to describe, but try this:  imagine the feeling of wearing your favorite worn in baseball glove.   Now imagine it’s made of cashmere.  Now imagine your phone just rang and it’s someone with real authority telling you you just won a billion fucking dollars.  That’s how it felt shaking Tim Robbins’ hand.

When we left, totally unprompted, my friend turns to me and goes, “Was it just me, or did Tim Robbins have the largest dryest warmest hand ever?”  It was undeniable.  Great hand.