Yesterday I wrote about being mortified while on a date seeing “Mortified”, the storytelling show that features people reading from their teenaged diaries. Now I am dying to be properly mortified at “Mortified“. As someone who loves being on stage AND has kept a journal of some kind since age 12, of course I am. Of course I went home after the show and poured over old composition notebooks so full of adolescent angst Manic Panic hair dye practically bleeds from them.

As this blog is called New York Cliché, my high school online diary would be been called Teenaged Cliché.

Its content is wildly bipolar, most entries starting with creative intros like “This week was awful,” or “Today was great!” Song lyrics compose the titles of nearly every post, with some exceptions: like June 6, 2003 aptly titled, “fuuuuuuuuuuuuck” and December 12, 2003 more succinctly, “FUCK”. I’m tempted to make a mix tape of the songs from the titles, but it would be a head-ache-inducing collection of obscure Bay Area punk, Broadway show tunes, and music I sang in my high school chorus.

Below is an untitled Teenage Cliché entry from  2002. I think it contains all answers as to why I never really dated nor did any drugs in college! And why I moved to New York instead of LA!

Is it mortifying enough to submit to “Mortified” the show? I’m not sure… you tell me.

November 9, 2002

 

I feel like shit. And I don’t even know why. I had a good night. It stopped raining. But still I feel like I just want to fucking cry my eyes out. Yeah, really cry them out, so I don’t have to look at all this ugly shit anymore.

 

 

It’s Friday! I have a fucking 3 day weekend. I’m going to a show tomorrow. So what the fuck is wrong with me. I’m lonely. I feel so alone right now. There is absolutely no one to talk to. I don’t feel comfortable. I have low self esteem. Fuck it.

It took me 2 hrs to get to school today. All the power was out by Van Ness and Market. Too much rain. Everything at school is carpeted in pine needles. I wonder what it it would be like to be carpeted in pine needles. To crawl into a layer of pine needles and come out when you feel like it, not when some one tells you to. Like a cocoon. Mary wants to be a moth.

 

 

Not me. I’m never going to accomplish my goal. My goal that means more then anything to me. I’m never going to be an actor.

 

 

I’m gonna have some shit job that I absolutely hate and sit in a cubicle and seethe while those I’ve hated succeed. And not have any friends. No husband. My parents will be the only ones who ever call me. And I wont return their calls. And I’ll have a one room apartment in LA (just so I can feel ugly) with a bed and stove and fridge and shower and couch. And I’ll spend all my money on CDs and records, drown myself in music. And write novels that no one will ever read, and paint paintings that no one will ever look at. Until after I die. After I overdose one day, and it takes 2 months for my rotting body to smell bad enough for the landlord to notice.

 

 

They cremate me and throw my ashes in the trash. In a gust of wind, the garbage bag topples over and the burned, black, unrecognizable remains of me flutter across the street into the open door of a small delicatessen. There is a cat sitting on the window sill. It sees the ashes fluttering by and bats at then with its paw. A couple walk into the store. They went to the same college as me. In fact, the women was my roommate sophomore year. The man was my lover that same year. They look exactly the same as the day in February when I dropped out of school. With a broken, betrayed heart. Wedding bands shine on their fingers, tightly entwined together. As they make their way to the cash register they trample over the tiny delicate chards, grinding them into the floor, where they go unnoticed, even missed by the store owners broom as he sweeps the floor.

 

 

Maybe a bear. Moths lives are too monotonous. But a bear. Hibernation. Sleep through the worst time of the year. Eat as much as you can, build up the fat, and then go to sleep until life is nice again.

It’s funny reading the diary entries of youth, isn’t it? I’ve changed so much and yet…this Teenage Cliché isn’t all that far off from a New York Cliché post or two that I’ve written over a d