[sacredwhore] Staying Up Late Being Goth

[NewsWhore]

Yeah, I actually sort of shocked a co-worker the other day: outing myself as a (former?) goth. I was wearing mostly black at the time. Selecting new heels from our (sweet, wholesale) Pleaser catalogue -- you know, the people Hot Topic buys from? It sounds so unlikely, but there it was. She so didn't seem to believe me that I started really pushing it. "I had a radio show." No comment. "I was a DJ at the local club." Nothing. "I was so hardcore I actually went right from the ER, after getting a spinal tap, straight to the DJ booth with my CD books, my bandages still on." Whoa, she said. (Somewhere still in darkest Massachusetts, an old housemate and near-constant-clubmate may be reading this, and says to herself, "That's not goth, that's just gross.") No, I'm mostly useless tonight. I'm trying to write, but somehow end up glued to the Dresden Dolls diary (writtten by Amanda, and full of Cambridge, and I would so be crying in the middle of Newbury Comics over mid-90's video compilations, too, if... well, there's a lot of if there). I've got The Sky's Gone Out (of course, I left a strange party full of wannabe vampires once, the summer of '94, to take the Red Line up one stop to the Harvard Square Newbury Comics and buy a cut-out $2.99 cassette with that same name at the not-so-subtle demand of someone who still reads this blog from time to time) podcast on a loop, and yes, I'm wearing black. J's long asleep, so he doesn't know my secret, that repetitive songs about witches ("I don't care if it's derivative!" says DJ ZoZo, yes!) and remembering what it was like the first time I saw "Pump Up the Volume," once mattered, so much, and without question. There's a box in the back of my closet, with an old, shredded gold cardboard package in it, that once held one of my first pairs of sexy stockings, lace-top hold-up's from Victoria's Secret that were my high school fetish, but now contains sheaves and sheaves of letters (there is an amount at which so many can rightly be declared a "sheave") from my first non-local community, all written between 1993 and 1994, the last two years before I got online, before email took over all of my letter writing desires. There was a store in Harvard Square that closed soon after, and it was called Good Good the Elephant, and it carried every item that made letter writing worth it: rubber stamps of deco goddesses and vintage clip art and faeries and vines and Egyptian stars, and little vials of bats and shiny hearts you could glue to the pages or just pour into the envelope, and pots of densely-packed glitter in gold and black, and stamp pads in every color (the scent of which still take me right back), and sealing wax, and seals of course, and brush-tipped pens, and... ... and I lose track, because just right now I needed to know the lyrics to "Christopher Lydon" -- because he was not only the guy who inspired the first RSS-audio enclosure hoodoo, that gave way to podcasting, that gave way to my being in Penthouse Forum right now, but more because he hosted a show on Boston's local NPR outlet called "The Connection," on which my longtime crush/shorttime amour was an intern for a few summers, on which they did a show on goths that I was too late to get on -- and did the Dresden Dolls hear that one, would they have heard me on it maybe, would Amanda have written the song still -- and there's too much history sometimes, and it's too personal to barely make sense, except somewhere like this... ... which, if this were a letter, would surely be stamped with an ironic little silver-inked web, in the middle of which would be a chipping blood-red seal of the letter M, surrounded by spidery script written with a pen dipped into a real bottle of royal purple ink, then scented with tuberose and just a little nail varnish over the stamp, so you could save me 22 cents and write me back all the faster....

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