Kristin Hersh - The Letter - Part 19

[Chantel]

"Paradoxical Undressing" by Kristin Hersh is a live spoken word project incorporating film, music and essays. The show will feature excerpts from Kristin's upcoming memoir, "Paradoxical Undressing" read by the artist, with musical accompaniment.

The show tells the story of a teenage girl wrestling with issues of extreme creativity, mental illness, pregnancy and life in the music business as founder of seminal American indie rock band Throwing Muses.

Kristin regularly send out exerpts from PU via email. This one in particular made me giggle a LOT.


When you walk down any street on the east side of Providence, you get handed a fistful of pamphlets. Well-meaning (though copy machine-challenged) college students line the sidewalks to blab and thrust fuzzily printed booklets at you. Like many things in life, it's annoying and hilarious.

For one thing, their causes just slay me. They can’t seem to come up with anything you haven’t heard a thousand times before.

"Save the what now? Whales? Why? What are whales for?"

"So…war’s bad?"

"Are you saying Republicans don’t like me?"

I've found that if I take their booklet and appear to be listening to their spiel, they eventually run out of steam. Plus, the booklets make for entertaining reading back at Jeff's apartment. We read them out loud and have to take frequent breaks to keep from hurting ourselves.

This afternoon, a kid with a tie and a cherry red Mohawk stopped me to talk about “killing God”. I was intrigued, started making plans for tonight’s reading at Jeff's. Killing God is way better than saving whales. I definitely had not heard this a thousand times before.

And this guy was on fire. His Mohawk twitching, he started right in. “Did you know that religious wars kill more people than political ones?” I didn’t answer; I wanted him to hurry up and tell me how to kill God. “Well…they do. And it’s because we as a species have yet to rise above the church and take responsibility for our own actions.” I waited. Kill God, c’mon. “For example, say you’re a smack freak-”

“A smack freak?”

He looked down at me suspiciously. “...a heroin addict. You’d blame society for your problem, which is understandable, but that’s not taking responsibility for your own drug use.”

“No, it isn’t." I thought about this. "So…do heroin addicts…start religious wars?”

“We all start wars!" he yelled. I leaned back, spit was flying. "Throughout time, we humans have fought terrible wars against each other in the name of God!” He wasn't stopping to breathe. “If you take God out of the equation, we’re all on the side of humans again!”

That sounded nice. Even so, I bet killing God is a hard sell compared to, like, fighting cystic fibrosis which is what the girl on the opposite corner was selling. He'd probably had a hard day, I felt bad for him. I smiled. “That’d be great.”

He finally took a breath and his shoulders dropped a little. “It would. Because no one is in charge but you." He paused, then looked at me intently. "I bet if you were in the Holocaust, you’d blame Hitler, right?”

In the holocaust? “If I were...you mean World War II? Hmmmm...I never thought about it." He deemed this answer unacceptable by continuing to stare angrily, so I continued. "Uh...I'm gonna say yes. I guess I'd blame Hitler for the holocaust. If I was...in it.”

“That’s the problem," he sighed. "It’s your Holocaust too, whether you’re a victim or a perpetrator.”

“It is?”

"Yes. When you hate Hitler, you hate everyone.” He was enjoying himself now. I bet I’m the first person who ever stopped to actually discuss killing God.

I’m not sure what he said then because I was busy studying his face. He had thick, dark eyebrows and wicked cool crooked teeth. They looked like they were in backwards.

I've always wanted teeth like that. My fourth-grade science teacher had backwards teeth, and she was beautiful.

A mustache'd be good, too, the lady kind of mustache, just a little shadow on my upper lip. And a huge, squishy ass so I could sit anywhere, as long as I wanted and ride my bike forever. I hate my bony ass.

I don't like being blond, either; blond is a dumb color for hair. Blue was good for a while, but now that that junkie girl's gone, blue hair makes me sad. Can't say I like cherry red much. This guy's hair could cause seizures.

God, he's still talking. Boy, do these guys like to hear themselves talk.

“…say you were unemployed because you didn’t graduate from high school. Most people wanna blame the government for unemployment. But it’s your problem. You can’t blame the government; they aren’t in charge, either.”

“Can you blame God?”

He suddenly became agitated again. “There is no God!”

Eek. “Oh. I’m sorry. I don’t follow. Who did you want to kill?”

“Our perception of a God.” Goddamn it, I knew it. “I used to think there was a God, too, like a big father up in the sky. Then I realized it was my own father I saw in the sky. A fragile human being with problems of his own, just like yours. Nobody makes the rules and nobody’s gonna take care of you. You have to kill that idea.”

Oh, sad! His Dad, for Christ sake. He was trying really hard, though, and I appreciated that; spiritual responsibility is a good cause. It’s just that I was getting showered in spit.
I thought I’d cut it short by taking his pamphlet.

He looked sincerely grateful, took both my hands in his. “Read this and we can talk again tomorrow.”

I took it but felt guilty. I am too nice. “Okay, sure.” I made a mental note not to walk down this street tomorrow.

Love,
Kristin

[Hitman]

TLDR