"My weird"

I dreamt that Ron Silliman had ended one of his blog posts with the words, "My weird."

A woman with whom I grew up in Minnesota, whom I shall call Corinne, urged another of our lifelong friends not to know me any longer. Her statement (reported back to me) was: "Why do you still like her? She's so we-ee-ah-ird."

When I expressed condolences that Corinne's brother had died at 41 of a heart attack, she said, "He was a burrr-den."

"Women fight so much," I said wearily to Kelly over drinks.

"I hate women," Kelly said. "They go into heat so much."

While Corinne, a famous artist's daughter, awaited divorce from her husband who had moved to Chicago and was driving the family into bankruptcy, she took a man -- a lawyer -- into her house weeknights and weekends. She let the world know she was in love. The man's wife lay in a coma -- likely never to revive -- while he lay in Corinne's soon-to-be-foreclosed house in the suburbs. As a child, Corinne said racist things to other white kids. One time in about third grade she called me "nigger lips." Later, after she had groomed her house and children for House Beautiful and was coming out of hiding as a domestic abuse sufferer, Corinne developed an attraction to black men; she became, in Spike Lee's words, "curious about black." Her black lawyer friend had a coke habit, and it wasn't long before her teenaged son, she herself, and even the girl had bit. When I heard that she'd let drugs into her family's home, I pitied her and wished recovery for her, especially after the lawyer had left. Kicked out of the home, working as a diaper changer in Special Ed., shacked up with a white tooler -- a man who bragged at a party that Corinne had "one organ" of any use to him -- and draining her parents' retirement, I thought she'd hit bottom. While I kept silent counsel about her, the woman who'd called me "nigger lips" in grade school had had more to say.