Nothing's For Sure

Now I just wanna join a fan club or something, start my own or something. I've been Made in America just like every other fucking asshole who thought something was fucking wrong with the fucking TV. After all the raging and posturing and badmouthing and bird-flipping, I'm as American as the next guy, as the next Sixties throwback who started inhaling and didn't stop and dropped out and grew her body hair and waited tables and left her college diploma in the trunk with the spare tire and ran away from one home after another and four decades later for some ungodly fucking reason got addicted to the fucking Sopranos, who'd watch the whole fucking thing all over again, duck to duck, except now I've been through the fucking ending, it's fucking over.

Except it's never over.

Now I'm going through my fucking closet, it hasn't been gone through since the Carter administration, someone has to do it. It's taking days and weeks, a lifetime, the stuffing out of me, the patience of a saint. I'm making piles to take to the shelter, every pile's a chapter, it's the story of my life. I can't believe I wore this shit. I can't believe I saved this shit. I can't believe I fit into this shit. This whole undertaking is a study in shades of black. Speaking of undertakers, doze guyz always wore black to da funerals and dere wuz a whole fuckin lot of em.

Nothing's ever over.

Last night I'm serial-dreaming, one after another, and in the middle of it there's a stove and a pot on the stove and it's boiling over and I rush to save it. Then this morning in real life I'm heating coffee in a pot on the stove (camp coffee my father called it) and it boils over and I rush to save it and it's deja vu all over again. I wonder if my father would've liked The Sopranos. Once during the Nixon administration I took my father to see The Sting. I was proud of my new car with the Wankel engine and the diploma in the trunk, only I wasn't paying attention, I ran over a sign. "What the...?" I say as the car hiccups and a One Way pops up in the rearview mirror like a jack-in-the-box. Soon after I get a divorce and my father liked the movie.

Except when it's over.

I read in the paper where one brother shoots another brother but misses the deer, sometimes there's justice. But don't get your hopes up, the second brother was only wounded. Last winter at The Cabin we found an antler on the path then another in the spring by the old outhouse like postcards. My husband is going to France next summer, he wants to take me to France next summer, I'll send postcards. During the Eisenhower administration I used to talk in a made-up language so people would think I was from France. I went to Morocco during the Ford administration which says it all.

My daughter says it all, then says it again, it's called backtalk. She can walk backwards talking backtalk and chew gum at the same time. I talk back to the screen when it goes blank. "What the fuck?" I say, "Fuckenay!" I say, "This is fucked!" I say, then the credits start rolling like my daughter's eyes when she's chewing gum walking backward backtalking, and I just got made. Where did I fucking learn such language, not from my father, that's for sure.