My name is Elle. And I’m an alcoholic lol. (Wait, that’s not funny at all. Like, I could have died and shit.)
I think I remember a light.
When I was 5 years old, I said I wanted to be a writer. I also had my first existential crisis.
Actual poem by 5 year-old Elle:
“the things I do are weird
and I don’t know why I do them,
but I do them all the time.”
SLC Punk, 1998
I have been writing ever since. Some years, a lot; some years, nothing. As those years went by, I felt an increasing weight pressing on me saying “you can’t be a writer … that’s not a real job, grow up, move on”. I couldn’t bear
the weight
those words,
so I kept living as if that light didn’t exist. (Later, in undergrad, I learned about the Wall of Knowledge in Taoism – I know now that the wall was getting bigger with each year.)
With each new year came a growing and intense belief that anything my pen put on paper would strictly be – for all intents and purposes – just a young girl’s locked journal…I couldn’t “be” a writer so I wasn’t actually “writing” anything. I could only journal – when I wasn’t working (for the man) or busy being an angsty young person, an angry young adult, or an exhausted middle aged adult.
A lot has been written.
Much of it is gone. Time ate it up. Artifacts sacrificed to Pele. Some of it is still here, though.
This blog will be a space for me to keep a record of those artifacts, whether from years or seconds ago.
It will consist of commentary, story-telling, poetry, prose – about the things I “see” happening around and within me.
“Teenage angst has paid off well but now I’m bored and old.”
Kurt Cobain, 1993
In Utero
We are still the angry teens wearing real Doc Martens and showing too much love, who felt their story die with Kurt in 1994 but insisted on not going home. We’re still at the table with
I am a 90s grunge hippie and still grieve Kurt Cobain. I started high school in 1990, graduated and went to undergrad in 1994, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy in 1998. The decade of my formative years remains current to me, not “the past” or old or history.
plastic bongs
electronic typewriters
and pieces of notebook paper scattered among the baggies and ashtrays with half-smoked cigarettes
and the rest of the $2 pack in our overalls.
We had a curfew, a car, and were not tethered by cell phones. There's a lot you can do in one evening, and still get back to the Chicago suburbs by midnight.
There are a lot of Marlboro Lights you can smoke
before your mom says
“have you been smoking in the car?!" ...and you are
high
on heroin
and don't care about anything
so you say "yea"
and you're bored with the conversation.
“What do you do when when your whole foundation collapses? I don’t know, they don’t teach you that in school.”
Stevo, SLC Punk, 1998
…skip a few decades or a hundred years and you’re a recovering alcoholic/addict with 2 divorces and almost 2 Master degrees under your belt.
This was not what I had planned.
My dad was a hippie before he was a 6 figure idol. He even went with his friends across the country in a van, to California. He meditated in his bedroom, which was actually a closet in an apartment he shared with those friends. He studied jazz guitar at Berklee (as one does in the 70s) and he loved the song “Layla”. Agreeing with the many knowing critics, he called the 1972 sound-legend “among the greatest rock songs of all time.” The sparkle in his then-middle age eyes, when he told me the whole back story, was enough to make a first-born daughter believe in unicorns – even at 15 years old – and that her dad could protect her until another man would.
(Spoiler alert: I’ve not once been protected – every vulture’s belly is full.)
My dad saw Layla as larger-than-life, like a stone monument in Harvard Square where he pushed me in a stroller, the muse of great men…rockstars with art running in their veins and keeping them alive.
I wanted to be Layla. I wanted to be that special, inspirational girl that brilliant artist men couldn’t help but love. And when they loved me, they wanted to protect me. And when they protected me, all the crushing blows of existentialism – and the hard-hitting hands of less-brilliant men – could not harm me.
I spent my childhood summers reading and reading, sending library books flying over the circulation desk.
Until I found drugs and alcohol, and they were exciting and half the work.
I started getting grounded more. I started going to pre-Starbucks-world coffee houses and sat alone, head buried in books on Krishnamurti and biblical stories of psychedelic desert visits and losing your mind as a philosopher. I walked in with my ankle bracelet with bells that rang every time I took a step. I carried that teenage angst on the other ankle (it’s definitely “paid off well”). And I read.
These books were provided by my dad, usually as my “punishment” for fucking up. I ended up immersing myself in the magic of these books. At the coffee house, book in hand, the other hand holding a Marlboro Light or one of those heavy ceramic mugs. I’d read and underline and make notes in the margin. I’d keep reading while taking a sip or a drag, sometimes setting the cigarette in one of those clear glass ashtrays they had at every table in the smoking sections.
I graduated high school and grunge was dead. I had to get out of hell (my parents’ house), so I went to college. I could live there and finally be free. And fine, I’ll go to classes and play the game. I just had to get out.
(and the scripture from my dad’s Krishnamurti books and his copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance were etched in my soul)
I majored in Philosophy. I wanted to be a Philosophy professor. Dad drove me across the country to Missoula to study philosophy again, only this time as a graduate student. This time with mountains in every direction, tucking me into a valley, instead of cornfields perfect for acid trips or getting out of a dude’s truck to puke from too much cheap beer at the keg party we just left.
And when the rabbit holes of existentialism cave in, because philosophy gets fuckin crazy – what do you do? Well there’s really only one option: drop out of a philosophy graduate program, feel the stunning blows from the post-adolescent phase dying, and get a job at a cool deli where everyone smokes pot and no one shaves their legs.
And when your boyfriend gets accepted into the jazz guitar program of his dreams – using your dad’s books from his own jazz guitar program 20+ years ago – you’re again faced with only one option: give the deli 2 weeks notice and move back to Illinois because said boyfriend wants to.
Leave the most magical place you’d ever seen. The brightly colored candy-coating. Where fellow deli workers you’ve known for only a few months actually throw you a going away party.
The first thing I did when that boyfriend (by then, a husband) said he wanted a divorce was bang on his chest with barely any force and cry out “I left Missoula for you!!”
It wouldn’t be the last time I regretted choosing a man over my own magical place.
After a few lame jobs – including an assembly line at a Hershey factory – I finally tossed philosophy aside (with great sadness) to be a social worker.
12 years later, when I was emotionally and physically and mentally drained – years of trying to help the underpriveleged out of their holes (we all know who dug those holes) – I wanted to focus on the policies that put them there.
At 46 I was hit with nostalgia and being an adult, an adult who sold out nonetheless (I was just another “trendy ass poser”). I was hit with boredom and a sadness and a new kind of existential crisis.
I wanted to be a hippie again! I wanted to be my dad’s daughter again. I wanted to believe in unicorns.
(Really, I probably was just regaining hope that a man could still save me.)
I didn’t want to be middle-aged and looking back at half my life gone, so much unknown because when you’re blacked out the memories don’t stick. I didn’t want to have tried to kill myself, or to have had my heart ripped open and then apart by love lost. I didn’t want to have a “bad trip” completely sober. I didn’t want to have seen the devil the night before my high school love killed himself.
I didn’t want to be like Stephen King in that little studio, a snow storm trapping my car parallel parked on the south side of Chicago. I didn’t want to finally resort to online dating. I didn’t want to start new relationships again – they fell in my lap when I was happy or high. I didn’t plan on finding love.
I didn’t plan on later finding a spirit of joy I never knew I could feel, with the kind of man I never actually believed in. He existed, but only in my mind.
Turns out he existed out there, too. He was polyamorous. He was a good husband to his wife, and she welcomed me into their family’s haven. And I knew I could finally rest.
This is not what I had planned. On another rescue-mission, relying on public transportation to get her vape juice and to finish another Master’s degree at a private school so challenging I’ve almost lost my mind thrice.
“I left Missoula for you!”
During those early days of smoking in my mom’s white Corolla, I had the best best friend. Today she is more like a sister. But there was more than a decade when we lost each other.
She eventually found me on the unprecedented MySpace (I’m dead – as the beautiful Gen Z’s say). When she told me how long she’d been trying to find me, she said she almost started a blog called “Looking for Elle”.
She is the sunshine in my life, hair still curly blond like in middle-school. She didn’t have to start the blog, because she found me. I still haven’t.
So here’s my blog. Because “punk doesn’t die, only posers die.”
Looking for Layla: an autobiographical account by Elle B. Hunter, dedicated to Jeff Littner and his “cheerleaders with black and gold hearts”. 