I'm Miss World and You Know the Rest

It's spring and I haven't written here for nearly a year! Why am I writing here now? Well, because spring always seems to drive me into an existential crisis or two, mostly of the creative sort; you know: what is art? Who am I? Nothing particularly interesting, really. Nothing to write home about or, frankly, to constitute a navel-gazing blog. I think my life is mostly made up of a series of existential crises wherein I question my purpose in the ever expanding universe at least twice a week. It's boring. I'm boring. It's also humid. I think it's something about the heat that always makes me feel a little out of sorts. Something about everything looking happy and maybe not feeling as content as the sudden scenery deserves. I like to listen to "Malibu" on repeat on days like this. You know what I mean, or you should. Something about Courtney Love staggering out of that trailer, tripping through the sand in her heels, just made perfect sense to my ten year-old self. Courtney's always made perfect sense to me, no matter what messes she makes or absurd statements she releases, I never feel anything less than a sense of kindred spirit-hood. I still believe Courtney Love was at her most beautiful when she was young: all smudgy, before the nose job, her dresses seeming like they were about to fall off or just fall apart. Of course, she wasn't really beautiful back then: too messy. Too much of a mess. Objectively, Courtney Love is a much prettier princess with the cheek implants and restylane, the obsessive rhinoplasty and elaborate weaves. Courtney Love has done everything Hollywood right, but they still hate her. Why?

Probably for all the same reasons I continue, illogically, to hold such affection for her: no matter how nice her clothes or elaborate her skin care, Courtney love will never, ever be able to shed entirely that nasty, angry, questioning girl. Courtney Love still doesn't know what the hell she's doing, so she just sort of, well, does things. A lot of them cuckoo bananas. It's the same sort of spirit which makes me really feel like I missed out by being too young to take part in the Riot Grrl movement. Growing up blows. I am endlessly confused by people at or around my own age who seem already settled into lives which content them. It seems strange and unnatural; how could anyone have a fucking clue what makes them happy yet? And riot grrl, beneath its political motivations, seemed to have a fast moving, nervous desperation. It was, at its simplest, girls saying they were unhappy, that, really, they were pretty damned pissed at a whole lot of things. That maybe they were a little crazy. That maybe they didn't really care.

Not that Courtney Love was aligned with the riot grrl movement; she wasn't. Or at least, not really. Courtney Love was always sort of a feminist, sort of ideologically compatible with Bikini Kill and Daisy Chainsaw and Bratmobile, but at the end of the day Courtney Love was too much and too completely nothing and no one but Courtney Love to stand for any bigger movement. Girl was a hot mess, but she hardly seemed to care. Who was she trying to impress? At the same time, though, the answer was obviously: everyone. Thus the nose jobs. And the cheek implants. And the restylane and weaves, even the fake boobs which have come and gone and maybe come back again. What did Courtney want (and probably still does)? Not a damn thing from anyone. She also wanted to be a star, to be loved and adored and pretty. In other words: she had absolutely no clue what she wanted. Neither do I. What a mess.