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Holoholo%20Girl
Passing Notes with Alex

January 12, 2006





Alex (a.k.a. “Grimes”) is one of my dearest high school friends—in

fact, my grandma still asks about him—and we recently began

corresponding again, after more than a decade of not. He now lives in

Oakland, working as a warehouse manager and making documentaries with

his wife, Eerie, their wee dog Cello and the ghosts that dwell in their

flat. This is a sampling of some of the emails he’s sent me over the

past year…





Dear Sam, Ahhhh, the wonderful trap of Nostaglia.  You lived in the desert, you know about mirages...



Okay so I am itching to write, and I am overbooked as always, and I

am waaaaaay behind at work, and I don’t want to be here I would rather

be at home unpacking so I can get my life back to where I can write but

before I do that I just want to be with my “roomie”—who I see

seldom—and my doggie who is freaked out by the move and though it is

great that she is developing intonations that sound a lot like “Grimes

stay” when I am trying to leave it breaks my tiny black heart to have

to come to this place where I find myself itching to write and I am so

overbooked and waaaay behind at work and why did I agree to be in this

wedding this weekend anyways? I have no time to go to my friend’s

birthday party because I am going to my other friend’s going-away party

and the whole time I am going to try to duck out early of both ‘cause

my puppy with the Ewokian pout is scratching at the front door

wondering when the hairless ape with the treats and the food will be

returning... and I do miss you and I wish that I had a better sense of

self when I was young and you were around and less an emotional spaz

but not so unemotional as I am today and how’s that for nostalgia and

anxiety all in one?

And I was listening to Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me last night as Eerie

played it on the record player and sang along, and I thought of how

much time was lost because I was so overbooked, and itching to write

and waaaay behind... and I thought of the people that I made cry and I

felt like a star snuffing black and I thought of what terrible and

wonderful people we can be. And I thought I understood for a second but

there was so much distracting me that I was pulled back into the

desert.

“You and I will meet again one day, under a night sky lit by soft black stars”



This world is not for us... Love, Alex







Ms. Campos, I have been thinking a lot about how men and women are

wired so differently. It is remarkable to me and the more I ponder it,

the wider the gulf becomes and the bottom sinks deeper still. It’s

wild! I realize that I know even less than I thought I did about

people. This gives me that horrible feeling you had as a kid at the

start of the school year when you were overrun with people you are

forced to interact with. It’s awful... too much to ponder... back to my

tea. Deep thought is not only self-indulgent, it’s downright

introspectively dangerous.

Yours, Alex







Dearest Sam, I have the wandering death booked and have contacted

the appropriate hookers in Paris to find me. I will need to borrow a

manuscript or two—something juicy from your erotic collection that you

are working on—so as to have people think I wrote it and then have it

published posthumously. Then you can contest it and it will create more

of a buzz about the work and me and you, and then you can make up

stories about us and publish that. Turn it into a movie. Then 

Eerie can sue you. You both write a book about yourselves, me, us and

that then gets turned into a movie of the week on Fox where Lou Diamond

Phillips will play all three of us. You two get together to sue Fox and

Lou. My name is back in the paper and somewhere in Springfield, IL, a

16-year-old will go to a Hot Topic and buy a T-shirt with a quote

wrongfully attributed to me and a bad picture of me in Paris with some

hooker taken just a few hours before I am found with your manuscript

that is attributed to me that makes you sue... and she will remove the

size label from the Hot Topic T-shirt and use it to light her cigarette

that she will eventually put out using her arm.

Having a terrible day... You? Signed, Me







Samantha Campos raises a glass to all her friends, in every dive bar she’s in. MTW