Rat Girl

No drug is a cure, though. Drugs are just big pieces of tape they stick over warning lights.

If Americans thought music and art belonged together, they wouldn't have the Grammys.

Now I know I’ll never be numb again. A mother is condemned to feel everything forever. And I’m finally afraid, condemned to fear everything forever. But that makes sense: feel someone else’s pain, feel someone else’s everything. And he’s my baby, so everything’s okay.

She drops the singsong thing. “I do go to school, Krissy. I didn’t quit.” Ow. “You know what I think? I think you’re under a lot of pressure, with a baby coming and making your first record. Maybe it makes you want to go back to a time before you had all these stresses in your life.” She is blowing me off. “So you’re a psychology major after all.” She doesn’t laugh. “I’m going to give you some advice now.” No shit. “Don’t ever run away from your commitments. You’ll have more options open to you if you don’t run away. Does that make sense?” I say nothing. I shouldn’t have said that I ran away. I should have put it differently. ‘I’ve come to a decision’ or something dramatical like that. Then she’d be on my side, welcoming me back, not lecturing me. “We all have a snake,” Betty continues, and right now you need to -“ “What?” It’s like she slapped me. “I said we all have a snake and yours is -“ “We all have a what?” My head’s pounding along with my heart. “I don’t mean it literally. I’m just trying to say that if you don’t face -“ “Did you say we all have snakes? Why did you say that?” She sighs. “Krissy, if you’d let me finish, I could tell you.” I sit, stunned. I never told her about the snake. “I have a snake and you have a snake. We all have to face our demons some day, sweetheart, and that day’ll be the scariest you ever lived. Then you’ll wake up the next morning and realise your snake is still there, that you have to face your demons again. But it won’t be so scary this time. Once you see your shadow, you’ll realise that the rest of your life will be spent staring it down, but you know what?” “What?” “You can do it.” “Yeah. Thanks, Betty.” Christ. “Krissy, you have a calling, so make this record. If you hate it, you never have to make another record again.” She doesn’t understand. I slide to the floor. The [university student campaign] issue girls turn around to stare at me, their clipboards at their sides. “Promise?” I ask. “I promise,” says Betty. “If this record’s as bad as you think it is,” she says cheerfully, “you won’t be allowed to make another one!

It’s okay to be scared, sweetheart,” Betty says. “How are you gonna give ’em your heart if you don’t have one?” She says Al Jolson told her that, too.

Deep Purple's kicking us out!' he yells. 'Deep what's what?' 'Deep fucking Purple is kicking us out of the bloody studio right in the middle of the fucking session!' Leslie sits up and swings her legs over the loft. We look at each other. 'What's "deep purple"?' I ask. She looks grim. 'It's an old-fart band.

And every time a song is done, it whispers, you can go now... you aren't needed anymore.

Fine. We’ll try to keep your system clean for as long as possible throughout your pregnancy. But keep in mind that you are to evaluate your mental state continually. Do you have a friend, a work associate and a family member on call?” I haven’t actually done this; I’ve always kept this stuff from the people I care about. “Uh… I’ll get right on that.” “It’s important because you will not always be able to evaluate your own behaviour. That’s true of anyone.

It’s a handy safety net! A one-dimensional one, maybe, but people create [personas] for a reason.” Carefully, she balances the napkin football under her index finger and lines up her shot. “Personalities are more reliable, of course, even though they seem to be… processes. Processes of building up and tearing down. Construction and destruction.

… Facing this wall is worthwhile, though, ’cause some of the graffiti is great: notes passed to faceless friends. “Thoughts are empty, heads are full,” I read.

I figure if you can’t do one day at a time, one minute at a time still counts. Probably a good rule for almost anything.

There is a phenomenon known as “paradoxical undressing” that affects those dying of hypothermia. Freezing to death, people tear off their clothing as they’re overcome by imaginary heat. Lost in blizzards , on snowy mountains, in frozen forests, their bodies become convinced that they’re burning, not freezing. Honestly, I’m so shy that I find most contact with people deeply unsettling, but songs - the alive kind in the air, injected with evil from the Doghouse - mean that I’m burning with sound, not frozen with fear. ’Cause they’re my way down to where we all are. I didn’t ask ask to go down to where we all are, but as it turns out, I’m a member of a deeply social species in which the only truths worth speaking are the most naked. In other words, I had planned on wearing all my clothes into these freezing woods - songs ask me to wear none. But way beyond stripping off clothes, the musical kind of paradoxical undressing strips you down to your bones. And as it turns out, we all have pretty fucking similar bones. Who knew?

Comfort isn’t necessarily comfortable, after all; sometimes you gotta wander into the woods. Everybody knows that.