Aaron Blair-McCutchen

I was obsessed with the Dressed to Kill comedy special when I was a senior in high school. I still break out the cake or death joke from time to time.

Almost every power player in this current administration should be, starting with the president.

This is Musk saying, “If you don’t have value to me, you don’t exist.” And he only valued her as a son. Not as a person, but as what she represented. Because a man’s best chance at immortality is having sons.

The thing that strikes me the most is not just the arrogance, but the, for lack of a better word for it, sociopathy on display. His child, a person he is supposed to love above all others, is dead to him just for not ascribing to Musk’s vision of who she should be.

Feedback from my poetry workshop instructor:

In an unfortunate turn of events, the instructor for my poetry class wants us to record ourselves reading our poetry. I HATE the sound of my own “I’m a sexy baby” voice and it makes my poetry sound so unserious.

It’s really good. It’s 2 hours and 20 minutes but that time goes by fairly quickly. I would definitely watch it again, which is generally my metric for whether or not a movie was good for me. If I want to watch it again later, that’s a good sign.

We went to see Mickey 17 today. We (my husband, two of my nephews, and I) all liked it, but there were only two other people in the theater. Being one of only six people in an IMAX theater is a little creepy, in a liminal space type of way.

I lost 109 pounds and still wear the same bra size. This is a big ol’ womp womp for me.

My creative writing courses start on Monday! I’m taking a poetry workshop and a short story workshop. I’m excited but also nervous, especially about the short story one. I can bang out a poem in my sleep, but I haven’t written a short story in years, aside from one I wrote for another class.

The photos I turned in for my last two photography assignments have been some of the worst I’ve ever taken. I hope to redeem myself next week, but I probably won’t.

I did end up getting Cowboy Carter tickets, but we’re going to Atlanta, not Chicago.

I will eat a Thin Mint no matter how many calories it has. And, ironically, relatively speaking, Thin Mints ARE low-calorie cookies. A chocolate chip cookie or an Oreo has twice as many calories. But, also, I eat food! I eat food multiple times a day every day! Including cookies! Jesus!

However, I know my mother, and she has lately been trying to convince me, all evidence to the contrary, that I have lost too much weight and must not actually eat. So “low-calorie Thin Mints” are the only way I would actually eat a cookie.

It might have meant “Wait, you’re eating cookies? I thought you were trying not to be fat?” Which is probably how most people would have taken, I think.

When I was excitedly telling my mother about how my husband bought me ten boxes of Thin Mints, she said, “Oh, there are low-calorie Thin Mints?” It was such a master class of passive-aggressiveness that I almost had to admire it. And she could have meant ANYTHING.

I do primarily operate as a black and white thinker, though. Everything is either terrible or awesome and there is no in-between. When you play the game of borderline personality disorder, you either win or you die.

During last Friday’s therapy session, my therapist put on her DBT hat and pushed back on what I was complaining about and I did not enjoy it. Usually she’s on my side, but that day she woke up and chose violence. I think if she could have she would have yelled “black and white thinking” at me.

My body has never just been mine.
When I was young it belonged
to every man who ever saw me
in a short skirt and imagined
how my legs would look
wrapped around his waist.
Now that I’m old it belongs
to gravity, to the physics
of decay, of sagging skin
and deflated breasts,
and lines upon lines.

I’m eating SweetTarts and drinking a Capri Sun because I am an adult and I can do what I want.

“If you close the door, the night could last forever.
Leave the sunshine out and say hello to never.
All the people are dancing, and they're having such fun.
I wish it could happen to me.
But if you close the door
I'd never have to see the day again.”

— The Velvet Underground

The best thing about BPD on medication is wanting to scorch the earth while knowing for certain you will regret it later. So you’re in this limbo of having a really strong desire to act out conflicting directly with being conscious of the consequences. It really sucks.

But look, America. I know you.
I know the sight of your daughters
makes your knuckles ache.
I know you want to wrap your hands
around our delicate necks and squeeze.
I know you want to see us tremble before you.
It’s a father’s most sacred duty,
to teach his daughters to fear the world.

I’m wearing fifty shades of lavender,
and a body that doesn’t belong to me.
My mother tells me to tighten my bra straps,
and I wonder when I will ever be enough.

I am the haunted house. The haunted house is me.

Your blood has soaked into the boards.

I just realized that I did the Bluesky version of Buffy Summers’ “baking cookies” speech a few days ago.

I had to Google, and then I realized that I recognized her face from various videos and articles about tradwives, but I had no idea what her name was because there’s ultimately nothing interesting or memorable about her. She’s pretty, though. I guess that’s something.

I have to read my own poetry multiple times before I can decide whether or not it is garbage. Part of the problem with the poem I just wrote is that I plagiarized myself and I don’t know if that counts as a recurring motif or intellectual cannibalism.

It disturbs me that the young women in my Women’s Literature class apparently think “Daddy” is a straightforward poem about telling your mean dead dad to eff off. Um, no. Absolutely not.