Paper Blood

I am in that lovely stage of a cold when my chest has constant offerings, my nose is raw from blowing, and I've used up an entire tree in tissues. I wonder if I should plant a tree every time I have a cold, just to offer balance to our resources? I couldn't help but think about how it used to be before there were widely available tissues for nose blowing. How many loads of wash would you have to do of handkerchiefs a day? How much more gross would having a cold have been in the eighteen hundreds? Not to mention the whole problem of being more likely to die from a cold or flu. I mean, not that people always did, but certainly you would never imagine dying from one in this day and age.

Another thought is that there are lots of places on this earth right now where tissues are not widely available. What do people unspoiled by fancy resources do about their snot? I don't feel all that proud of being an American these days, but I am thankful for the tissues. I really am. I am also thankful for toilet paper.

The picture above of my mom and me was taken sometime in 1989. I was nineteen years old and visiting my mom in the armpit of California. That outfit is not a costume. I was either just about to graduate or had just graduated from FIDM (Fashion Institute Of Design And Merchandising) in San Francisco. That was back when I was still absolutely certain that it was just a matter of time before I would prove my designing genius and end up in Vogue magazine, shown with pins in my mouth industriously hemming the dresses about to head out on the runway of my own show. I would also be holding a cigarette at all times and have a whole gaggle of gay friends waiting in the wings to reassure me that all the men I fancied were actually gay. Because, as you must know already, all men are.

My mother says I wanted to be a fashion designer from my birth. What I remember is being thirteen years old and deciding that I was going to be in Vogue. Now my only chance of ever being in Vogue is if I get photographed for an article about obesity striking all failed fashion designers. It's funny to have been so focused for so long on one single prize and to have ended up nowhere near it at this point in my life. I am a firm believer in late career changes, but for some reason I feel like to make your mark as a fashion designer you have to start young. Writing feels like an ageless career, but fashion design is so youth oriented it seems that if I was to start now I could not get a foot in.

I don't really feel sad about it. Yet, like the writing I do, I never stop designing clothes in my head. It's funny because I do it all day long, every day. Right along with the writing that never stops running it's course, shedding pages in every corner of my brain, all day long I imagine new clothes, new shoes, new hats, and new fabrics. This is why I could never become an investment banker. There is no room for numbers in my head. My life is spent trying to get all the busyness in my brain out on paper so that I can at least pretend to be somewhat sane and not scare people. I'm like Bartholomew Cubbins with the five hundred hats.

I have paper blood and cloth organs.