Six Spruce

Field Data / Abstinence Study

2012-01-30T00:32:00.000-08:00

Trash haulers no longer making book on number of wine bottles they'll find in subject's recycling.
Subject no longer needs Bobcat 2100 UTV to transport recycling to curb.
Subject can find curb without asking directions.
Subject's recycling no longer reverberates like the Angelus through neighborhood when mechanical arm slam-dunks it into truck.
Subject's Catholic neighbors no longer cross themselves when subject's recycling is slam-dunked into truck.
Trash haulers have started making book on number of plastic mineral water bottles they'll find in subject's recycling.
Subject can manually carry seven to twelve recycling bags to curb simultaneously.
Trash haulers have started manually slam-dunking subject's recycling bags into truck.
Trash haulers have started making book on how many recycling bags can be manually slam-dunked into truck simultaneously.
Police have cited subject's trash haulers for multiple illegal gambling operations.
Subject embarrassed to be seen buying O'Doul's at neighborhood liquor store, disguises self as elderly woman.
Everyone at neighborhood liquor store recognizes subject.
To save face, subject sneaks empty O'Doul's bottles into neighbor's recycling under cover of darkness.
Subject's face saved.
Subject found face lying on bathroom floor, saved it, keeps it in a jar by the door.
Subject still looks in bathroom mirror and sees Mickey Rourke.
Subject no longer looks in bathroom mirror and sees three Mickey Rourkes.
Subject can find bathroom without asking directions.
Netflix has updated subject's preferred genre from "Historical Documentaries" to "Understated Emotional Dramas Featuring a Strong Female Gnome."
Subject thinks "Gnomeo and Juliet" great example of ensemble acting.
Subject looking forward to future release of "A Midsummer Night's Gnome."
Subject looking forward to future.
Odds of subject having future to look forward to recently improved.
Subject has started making headway on road to future.
Trash haulers have started making book on how far subject will get before asking directions.

Greatness is Within

2012-01-22T01:08:00.000-08:00

My daughter got a punching bag for her birthday.

She killed it.

I rest my case.

Who Wants To Be A Tosspot?

2012-01-15T15:26:00.000-08:00

Having nothing better to do, I decided to quit drinking.

A person can choke from laughing that hard, you know. Let's try that again:

Having nothing better to do, I decided to quit drinking. For thirty days. I'm "doing a 30," as the saying goes.

This is day thirteen.

The first couple of days went relatively smoothly, and after a week of such madness, I felt so smug I wanted to celebrate with a case, er, glass of wine.

This seemed inappropriate somehow, so I decided to Phone a Friend. Except all my friends are soakers, I can't remember the last time I had a sober phone conversation, nix that idea.

So I decided to Ask the Audience.

"Hon..." I purred to my husband in a voice I haven't used since the first Bush, "...are you up for a little..."

But I couldn't finish the sentence, I didn't want to raise his hopes. Among other things. For me the word "celebration" is synonymous with "drunken orgy." Plus my husband's also doing a 30 — the family that detoxes together, etc. — what good is he.

All I had left was the Fifty-Fifty option. But deciding between a case of beer and a case of wine seemed, once again, inappropriate. I was at my wit's end. Literally. I had one wit left. And it was nonalcoholic. What's a rummy to do?

I took my remaining wit and my mineral water and located the nearest TV/Barcalounger combo, where I planted my dipsomaniacal ass and channeled Netflix. After seven hours of indecision, I Rokued "Two Weeks in Hell" and "Aryan Brotherhood Behind Bars" and settled in.

Sometime the following day I emerged, sober as the day I was born, which is pretty much the last time that happened. Between the Green Berets training program and a seemingly endless stream of humongous white tattooed shitbags, I'd had my fix. What this particular fix says about me, I don't want to know, but suffice to say I was loaded for beer, er, bear.

Which is a saying I utterly loathe. How about loaded for tea partiers? Loaded for teetotalers? Loaded for tea drinkers? Better yet, just make it loaded and let the party begin.

Believe me, "party" takes on a whole new meaning when you're doing a 30. (See above-mentioned Netflix selections.) For decades I've been accustomed to raising a few whenever life presents one of those special occasions, i.e., birthdays, weddings, funerals, Thursdays, daylight. Raising a few juice boxes to toast the weather, or the arrival of the mail, just doesn't cut the mustard.

Speaking of which, I've had some interesting cravings these past two weeks, mustard being one. Also salt, oregano, tofu, PAM, Crest White Strips and duct tape. Most unusual of all, I had an uncontrollable urge for an O'Doul's last Friday. Which, I'm happy to report, I was valiantly able to overcome, lest I actually be seen buying the stuff. My god, I still have my pride.

For an old boozer like myself, this is proving to be a cathartic experience. Not to mention lucrative. For the first time since becoming an adult (a person can choke from laughing that hard, you know), I suddenly have disposable income. Typically most of my income gets disposed down the nearest toilet — one doesn't buy beer, one borrows it — but now, here I am, swimming in cash! Frontcrawling, backstroking, deadmansfloating in it! What's a lush to do?

I opted for distraction. Is that one of the Lifelines? It should be.

I pocketed my booty and grabbed the car keys and headed out, not to my friendly neighborhood liquor store — my home away from home where everybody knows my name — but to my friendly neighborhood grocery store, where I planted myself in the produce section and harvested as many fresh citrus fruits (and a couple sticks of celery) as a shopping basket could hold.

Which I dutifully lugged through checkout while "My Name Is Wanda! How Can I Help You!" eyed the abundance of lemons and limes and peered at me as if to ask,

"Is that your final answer?"

No need to let Wanda in on my nasty little secret — I utterly loathe fruit! — so I gave her an acidic smile and loaded my purchases like wayward cue balls into my earth-friendly pockets.

Trust me on this, doing a 30 is not one of life's special occasions. When it comes to the excess citrus, I'm simply stockpiling for the next such special occasion: February. Because, as the saying goes, when life gives you lemons...make margaritas!

Hola! Seventeen days to go.

Old School

2012-01-08T11:12:00.000-08:00

My daughter requested a punching bag for her birthday. My husband asked me where we should hang it.

"How about around my neck," I said.

She wanted it for Christmas, but Christmas came and went with nary a punching bag in sight.

When her aunties asked what their niece wanted for Christmas, I didn't hesitate.

"Plastic," I said, conjuring that guy from "The Graduate."

They obliged with a deluge of gift/credit cards that made the pack that attacked Alice look like runoff. Christmas was two weeks ago, I haven't seen my daughter since. But she texts regularly from various coordinates in the mall.

Now it's her birthday, we're back to square one. Not to worry, not that square one. I'm happy to report my daughter's been speaking to me for several months now, and has assured me she's canceled the hit man. Whew. Apparently you can take out a contract on just about anyone these days through Facebook, or is it Ebay? Whatever, technology rocks.

Some people get their rocks off pounding the shit out of inanimate objects — my dream of meeting Michelle Bachmann in a dark alley some day comes to mind — and more power to them. I, however, am old school. I prefer pounding the shit out of myself. Less collateral damage.

In this matter my daughter is also old school — she prefers pounding the shit out of me, too. Or, rather, she used to. Her request for a punching bag is a sure sign of impending maturity (Google "transference"). Although until today, she reminded me regularly of that "impending" status.

"Mom," she said, "I'm still fifteen, no one will hire me."

All I did was wonder aloud if she could handle a fulltime job in addition to homework and Hulu, is that too much to ask?

"You're a sophomore," I said, "it's so...sophomoric. Plus, do you really need eight hours of sleep a night? Can't you get by with, say, three or four? Like Bill Clinton? And make up for it on the weekend?"

It was just after this conversation that my daughter put in her request for a piece of boxing apparatus. Did I mention we've been communicating better lately?

But that was then, this is today. The cat's out of the bag, Pandora's out of the box, the eagle flies on Friday — my daughter has turned Sixteen! I never thought I'd see the day. Don't get me wrong, I knew she'd see the day. I just figured I'd be pushing daisies by the time it arrived.

I remember the day I turned Sixteen! as if it were yesterday. Make that yestercentury. In those days it was customary to give a girl a special gift to mark the occasion. My parents gave me a ring, my best friend gave me a book of poetry, my boyfriend gave me a hickey the size of Iowa. I'm just saying. Maybe I can't remember if I put on underwear this morning, but my longterm memory is still intact. I know what Sixteen!-year-olds are like. It scares the shit out of me.

So regarding my daughter's (Sixteenth!) birthday: while the days of lockets and watches and rings may be behind us, I just can't wrap what's left of my mind around the idea of a punching bag. Or a Planned Parenthood gift card. Or a fifth of vodka. For me. What's a mother to do?

For awhile I considered giving her a surprise party.

"No one's ever given me a fucking surprise party," I said, and my husband said, surprised,

"So give yourself one!"

Except life's just one big fucking surprise party after another, am I wrong? Looks like it's back to square one. But not to worry, not that square one. My daughter's Sixteen!, parties are old school. She's discovered plastic. Call it square two.

Time to paws...

2011-12-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

...and begin again.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

What is the Beautiful?

Truce

2011-12-19T09:53:00.000-08:00

Recently a good friend of ours was hospitalized with a stroke, and it gave those of us of a certain "era" pause. The good news is that our friend not only survived this frightening incident, but his prognosis is for a full recovery, in spite of his having spent an intense two weeks in surgical ICU with a hole in his head, from which a tube drained blood and spinal fluid away but, thankfully, not his excellent mind.

During those two weeks, his friends and family kept track of him on Caring Bridge, a website devoted to connecting people regarding health matters. There we could read daily journal entries, view photos, make tributes, or, if we chose, post to a guestbook.

By the time our friend was released from the hospital, his guestbook had risen to well over 200 posts, and given that he's a journalist, the posts from colleagues made for some great reading. These, alas, were scattered in amongst the usual plethora of God-centric outpourings, and after skimming a few dozen of the latter, I began to wonder if any of those people ever got up off their knees.

Still, I was reminded of W.C. Fields, a lifelong atheist, who, as the story goes, asked for a Bible on his death bed, and when questioned about this, explained that he was "looking for loopholes." Every man for himself when it comes to staring into the abyss, I say.

My husband, however, took great umbrage to the whole set-up.

"When I keel over," he huffed, "don't you dare put me on fucking Caring Bridge."

"You won't have much say in the matter," I snorted, "you'll be fucking keeled over."

"You mean you won't honor my last wishes?" he demanded.

"Who says they're your last?" I retorted. "Miracles do happen."

"I don't believe in no miracles," he grumbled, "and neither do you."

"What does that have to do with letting your loved ones know the score?" I countered.

"I don't have any loved ones," he responded.

"You'd be surprised," I cautioned. "In a crisis, loved ones come out of the woodwork, there's a loved one under every rock."

"That's just what I mean," he complained. "I don't want some wayward loved one praying for me and 'sharing' it on some fucking website."

We paused momentarily in this grumbling/countering/complaining. Something had gotten my husband's goat, and now that the goat was out of the garage, it was too late to lower the door. Whatever.

After awhile, my husband shrugged.

"Okay, have it your way," he acquiesced. "When I keel over, set up a Caring Bridge site, I don't give a fuck. But don't you dare allow a guestbook."

"I don't think you'll have a choice," I pointed out. "I think it's part of the package."

"There will be no fucking guestbook!" he inveighed. "It'll make me even sicker having to read all that drivel!"

"But think of our friend's guestbook," I mused, "there were so many great postings."

"That guy has talented, interesting, intelligent friends," he admonished, "their comments offset all that religious crap."

"Now you've gone and insulted our...other friend," I warned. "I mean, you think after your brush with death, there'll be 237 posts on your guestbook? Think again, Bubba."

"But I won't have a fucking guestbook!" he emphasized.

"We'll just see about that," I chided. "Come to think of it, maybe I'll open my own Caring Bridge site. Then well-wishers can sympathize with me for having to deal with a fruitcake like you! Whatta ya think of them apples?"

"When I keel over," he muttered, "you'll be at my bedside 24-7, you won't have time to go around opening websites."

"Whatta ya mean, 'I'll be at your bedside'?" I mimicked. "This is the ICU, don't forget. There's nothing I can do, my hands are tied, it's all up to the doctors now. I'll be down at the bar."

My husband stared at me.

"What?" I scoffed.

"Hospitals don't have bars," he sighed. "Cafeterias, coffee shops, gift shops...no bars."

"Well, what kind of fucked up deal is that?" I bellyached. "Who needs coffee at a time like this? A couple stiff bumps is more like it."

"I'd say you got a couple stiff bumps," he observed, "on your head."

Which brought us back around to the recent matter involving our friend's head, which gave us pause, which made us feel like a couple of muttering/mimicking/bellyaching assholes for carrying on while our friend was recovering from having just spent two weeks in ICU with a hole in his head, not to be confused with the holes in our heads which, I might add, have been there considerably longer and show no signs of closing up any time soon.

I stood up. Did I mention we'd been sitting around the Christmas tree?

"Truce?" I asked.

"For instance?" he wondered.

"How's about a little Christmas cheer?" I offered.

"How's about, 'Two-Four-Six-Eight! Meetcha at the Pearly Gate!'..." he suggested.

"That's not what I meant," I replied. "Besides, you don't believe in no pearly gate."

"I'm talking about a drink," he corrected. "There's gotta be a drink by that name."

"I'll Google it," I promised. "In the meantime, how's about a couple stiff bumps?"

"Just what the doctor ordered," he agreed, and resumed Christmas-tree-gazing.

Meanwhile, out in the starless night, the snow careened mercilessly around a nearby streetlight.

Coldstruck

2011-12-02T11:11:00.000-08:00

A dream of hummingbirds, a cat under the pergola,
this is what we look for. Signposts pointing a new
direction, or not. Now it's the sixth spruce needs
downing, and winter at the ready, prowls.

Not postcard winter of pines in their shawls of snow,
but the one that bites, then bites again, moving forward
like a shark. Until the way disappears, the very air, and
we are red with blood and still and struck as statues.

Still asking (who?) whether to stay the course or change,
looking for (what?) clues hiding thinly in the glass,
while all around us the snow dunes shapeshift, and
even in dreams, we seek shelter from the cold.

Mouths of Babes

2011-11-19T09:36:00.000-08:00

The other day I was watching my daughter watch a bowl of powdered chemicals turn into mashed potatoes when it occurred to me the contents of the bowl wasn't the only thing that was a hot mess.

From the mouths of babes. Or what goes into the mouths of babes, whatever.

Back in the day -- when phones were still attached to buildings by umbilical cords and being wired meant you'd just eaten some mushrooms and disappeared into the wallpaper -- one of my former friends gave me a coffee mug for my fortieth birthday, note the word "former." The mug is black, and features a rickety old man and a message:

Father Time
Can Really Kick
The Shit Out
Of You

I was forty. I didn't know the half of it. I was a total fetus.

Fast forward a millenium or so to my current situation: not only did the old dickwad kick the shit out of me, he kicked all the rest of it out, too. It's all gone, everything. I'm an empty vessel, a haunted house, a ghost ship.

The other morning I got out of bed (so far, so good!) and from his side of the bed, my husband spoke his first words of the day:

"What's that sound?"

"It's the wind careening through my skeletal structure, Bubba," I hissed, "gotta problem with that?"

As I clattered into the bathroom and turned on the light, I accidentally looked in the mirror and had my first TIA* of the day. Usually I try to leave the mirror-mirror-on-the-wall routine until after my face has had a chance to wake up, usually around 9 in the evening following my first magnum of pinot.

"OMG!" I screamed. Literally. I screamed those letters. In italics.

"UOK?" That was my husband from the bedroom. We like to think of ourselves as bilingual.

"NM!" I called out. "NBD! ILY!"

Telling him that my face had finally fallen right off my head and was now gathered around my neck like the waddle of a turkey would've been TMI. The poor man's suffered enough these past few decades having to watch me morph into some odd ectoplasmic lifeform right before his eyes.

This was it, my wakeup call. Something had to be done. But what?

Legend has it that in an effort to pull back the years, as it were, Marlene Dietrich would pull back strands of her hair into a tight underlying knot at the top of her head, thereby raising her scalp and effecting a sort of poor man's temporary facelift. Not that she was poor, or a man, for that matter, although rumor has it the "man" part's up for discussion in some circles.

Trust me, I've tried this. On several occasions. I had to pull my hair so tight to get my face to budge even a centimeter that I yanked out handfuls of the stuff. And believe me, there's not much where that came from. Now I have another problem: trying to cover up the two bald spots hovering above my ears. Forget Kafka's dung beetle, the evidence shows it: there's definitely a turkey lurking in my mirror.

So there I sat, watching my daughter spoon "mashed potatoes" into her lovely but dangerous mouth, when it occurred to me I needed a new face cream. And not just any face cream, one with a nuclear option. I wondered aloud whether the ectoplasmic foodform in my daughter's bowl might not suffice, after all, hadn't we just watched it morph from a mound of dry powder into a fluffy cloud of softness (Just Add Water!) right before our eyes?

My daughter raised her eyelashes, lowered her spoon, exhaled. All of this very slowly. I could sense words forming inside that lovely but dangerous head in about the same length of time it took for the "potatoes" to form.

"Mom," said the mouth, "please tell me you're still seeing that shrink."

"LOL!" I chortled. "JK! JT!" I pride myself on my hipness as a parent.

Another pregnant pause, then the mouth spoke again:

"Mom," it said, "does the word 'Mr. Potato Head' mean anything to you?"

"Ha! Ha!" I guffawed. "That's three words," I chuckled. "And I'm a Ms.!" I snorted.

There's just no end to my witty repartee.

My daughter sighed heavily and turned back to her astronaut food, which had the same soft and fluffy consistency as her not-quite-sixteen-year-old face. I reminded myself that I used-to-be-not-quite-sixteen.

"TWTTIN!" I editorialized, and grabbed the magnum of pinot and repaired to my belfry.

Where I spent the next seven hours surfing the web for a nuclear option, marveling at the plethora of outrageous shit available to steep one's face in. At around 9 o'clock I clattered into the bathroom, turned on the light, looked in the mirror. A handful of faces stared blurrily back at me.

And here's the best part: I'm happy to report that not one of those faces resembled a large gallinaceous bird. That lurking turkey had disappeared from that mirror (Just Add Wine!) right before my eyes. Who needs a $500 collagen recovery system?

"WTF!" I called out giddily. "JAW!"

And that's just what I did.

*For the technically-challenged:

TIA — Transient Ischemic Attack (a.k.a. mini stroke)
OMG — Oh My God
UOK — You Okay?
NM — Never Mind
NBD — No Big Deal
ILY — I Love You
TMI — Too Much Information
LOL — Laugh Out Loud
JK — Just Kidding
JT — Just Teasing
TWTTIN — That Was Then This Is Now
WTF — What The Fuck
JAW — Just Add Wine

Paean

2011-11-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

How do you follow Death? You don't. Opening act, no problem, it's everyone's lifelong audition. But Death is the ultimate main-liner, no one follows Death. When someone you love dies, it's over. Curtain comes down, stage goes dark, silence. No one expects the show to go on. Not for awhile.

Except when it's a cat.

When my mother died, nobody asked me, "When are you going to get another one?"

At my father's funeral, nobody said, "I just don't get fathers. I'm a mother person, myself."

Even when my dog died, I had goombahs from Waste Management commiserating. Dogs are the great equalizers.

Not so cats. A cat is a dog of a different color.

My husband says cats are like peers. Well, maybe. If you're living in a monastery under a vow of silence in a level eight trance 24/7. Which describes my life about as accurately as a Magic Eight Ball.

Come to think of it, cats are like Magic Eight Balls. Each time they blink, the message changes:

Takeout Chinese sounds good...

Crank up the sauna, my ancestors were desert-dwellers...

Are you even remotely aware of the idiocy of that remark?

Don't bother me, I'm hallucinating...

These messages are sporadic at best, as studies have shown cats can go three days without blinking. During which time they appear to be deep in thought, raising the ultimate question, "Do cats actually think, or do they just appear to be thinking?"

The jury is out on this one. The jury -- which is made up of dogs -- will be out for some time, as a matter of fact, while they exhaust themselves debating the same points, ad nauseum, over and over, endlessly, forever and ever, just one more time, amen.

* * *

My first cat entered my life on my seventh birthday.

Being the middle of three girls, I'd determined early on that I was a candidate for drugs. Cats seemed a close enough substitute until the real deal came along. So on a sunny and miraculously snowless day in April, my father knelt beside me, opened his Mackinaw jacket, and a tiny black furball with white paws and a white forehead star stared out at me in abject horror.

I was addicted from the get-go.

You must understand I grew up on the Iron Range, where, as they say, men are men and so are half the women. Everybody had a dog, nobody had a cat, and if you had a cat, you kept a very low profile, much like a cat.

On the Iron Range in the Fifties (Sixties Seventies Eighties, etc.) human society -- in particular, the male component of human society -- hadn't evolved much beyond the Stone Age (not to be confused with that other era of the same name known as the Seventies), and it was Open Season on anything female. Dogs were considered male, cats female, end of story.

Archie was the first. Then came Ditto, Crazy Horse, Sammy. Nine lives passed in the blink of a dog's eye up on The Range. Then came Mimi, though by this time I'd managed to escape Duh Rainche without being stuffed and mounted on a wall and was well-ensconced in my life down in The City, where I managed to finish college, discover drugs, grow my body hair, get married and divorced, and start collecting, in order of importance: guitars, calluses from playing guitars, complicated little brass hash pipes from India, empty Mateus bottles, footwear from the Forties, and lovers.

Eventually my husband appeared, and the rest is his story.

In the meantime...Bonnie overlapped Mimi, Rita overlapped Bonnie, Miranda overlapped them all, while three dogs, one daughter and a currently-20-year-old plecostomus struggled to get a word in edgewise.

Not that cats are particularly verbal. Rather they're masters of mesmerism, having perfected the art of the staredown, and are capable of reducing lesser creatures to stunned and drooling stupefaction in the time it takes to order out Chinese.

* * *

Thy dog and thy cat, they comfort me.

With a dog, it's all there in front of you, WYSIWYG. With a cat, it's a blind experiment. Make that double-blind.

With a cat, you're just a hapless pawn caught in some unfathomable universe, unfathomably ignorant of reality, but unfathomably grateful to be there.

With a cat, you go blindly forth, lying down in green pastures, daydreaming beside the still waters, pussyfooting up the paths of righteousness, for the cat's sake.

Yea, though you walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, with a cat, you're just tripping. It's all just one big hallucination, like that corner of the living room ceiling the cat's been fixated on for 10-1/2 years.

Your head may be filled with Canola oil, your cup of pinot may runneth over, but when a cat prepares a table before you of headless mice in the presence of the dog -- goodness!

Then mercy shall follow you all the way to the litter box, and you shall dwell in the house of furballs and purring, forever and ever, or at least nine times, whichever comes first, amen.

"Dude! It's those goombahs from Waste Management!"

"Don't bother me, I'm hallucinating..."

"A lion of courage...

2011-10-18T12:51:00.000-07:00

...and precious to the earth."

(Mary Oliver)

MIRANDA

Circa 2000 ~ October 17, 2011

Men At Work

2011-09-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

For millenia men have wondered, "What do women want?" Well I'm going to let you in on a little secret: most women wonder the same thing. Not about men, about ourselves. We have no fucking idea what we want, all we know is that it's...complicated. A word that has never been used to describe the male of the species. The straight males, at any rate. And while women might continue to wonder ad nauseam precisely what it is that we want, we remain confident in the belief that we know precisely what it is that men want.

Right?

Well, hold the presses, the phone, your horses, your pants on. When it comes to what men want, Dear Reader, Yours Truly has gained access to exclusive new information, the result of data gleaned from a recent field study. Literally, a study made in a field. So sit back, grab your favorite mind-altering substance, and let me tell you a little tale. Come to think of it, I could use a little tail, not to mention a mind-altering substance, but back to the story.

About a year ago, my husband had the brilliant idea to install a video camera on the woodshed up at the cabin. Why, you ask? As well you might. Remember, my husband is a man (at least that's what he told me), and the ways of men are mysterious, if not complicated, so have another hit and stay with me.

This woodshed camera provides a live video feed of our "front yard," basically a rocky outcropping surrounded on all nine sides by the Boreal Forest, and my husband installed this camera -- not to keep track of robbers and serial killers and Jehovah's Witnesses, all of whom are notoriously wimpy when it comes to Boreal Forests, not to worry -- but so that he might follow the antics of the local wildlife, at least that's what he told me. (See above comment re mysteriousness.)

Joe Tech that he is, my husband arranged things so that I can sit at my computer in the comfort of my cozy townie belfry, click on a link from the cabin, and stare at a vast and wild live stream of...nothingness. No lions, no tigers, no bears, nada. Just rocks and trees and sky, followed by more of the same, and still more. It's as if the local wildlife got hip to the scene and suddenly turned camera-shy. Still, it's my own personal nothingness, my American dream of nothingness, my Nirvana of nothingness, and needless to say, but I'll say it anyway, when I can't physically be there immersed in it up to my eyeballs, it gives me great pleasure to stare at all this Promised Nothingness from afar, if only on my humble computer screen, the next best thing and all that.

Now, a little backstory.

The cabin -- along with various and sundry outbuildings, including the aforementioned woodshed -- sits at the top of the property near The Highway, and after twenty-five years of fevered anticipation, we're finally having a road put in. Sound the drums! This long-awaited road will lead from the cabin down to The Lake, where we hope to build a house house in the not too distant future, that is, before the world ends, and while we can still remember who the fuck we are let alone what a house house is. Once this road road is completed, there'll be no more bushwhacking a quarter mile over the Canadian Shield and through the Boreal Forest to bask on the shores of Gitchigumee, nosireebob. Our skeletal structures, or what remains of them, have already begun to celebrate.

Got all that?

So. Thanks to the cabin cam, I've spent the better part of my computer time these past several weeks following the progress of said road construction. Along with the usual nothingness, I'd expected to be entertained by the occasional passing manly dump truck or dozer, manned by the occasional passing manly roadbuilder, and I've not been disappointed. However. What I didn't expect was to be spending a portion (an unexpectedly large portion) of my viewing time watching said manly roadbuilders engage in that mysterious ancient ritual of manhood, pissing. And I'm not talking about pissing into the woods, Dear Reader, though these fine specimens of maledom stood surrounded on all nine sides by the largest outdoor toilet in the fucking universe. Nosireebob, these subjects stood like statues, legs spread, faces turned toward heaven, and proceeded to piss -- publicly, regularly, at length -- in our front yard.

Talk about the antics of the local wildlife. Finally, some action. It gives new meaning to the term "live stream."

At first I didn't know what I was seeing, girl that I am. I thought one of the guys was stopping to say a prayer or meditate or something. After all, it happened to be an outrageously splendid autumn afternoon, and I myself have been known to stand without moving in the front yard at the cabin for hours at a time on just such a day.

Then, duh. The Aha! moment.

Once I was hip to the scene, I'm ashamed to say, I was hooked. I couldn't drag myself away. I was obsessed. I felt like a spy. An illegal alien. A war correspondent. Like I'd been plucked from my familiar girly existence and secretly embedded in the House of Men. Make that Outhouse. I'd tear around and do my girly things, then tear back to my computer and stare at the cabin cam for hours, hoping to get lucky, until darkness finally obliterated the screen. The manly roadbuilders had long since left for the day, but still I stared, dumbstruck, into all that black nothingness, as if one of them might return with a flashlight to piss beneath the stars.

I felt like Madame Curie, like I'd made the discovery of a lifetime. I wanted to share my discovery, tell the world, start a chain letter. All this time women have been thinking sex was the answer! That is, to the question of what men want. How could we have been so misguided? Well, for one thing, we don't have weenies. For us, pissing anywhere other than a five-star toilet bowl is a major undertaking. We're just not capable of putting ourselves in a man's position. I mean, standing like a statue, legs spread, face turned toward heaven, as piss runs down your leg and pools in your flipflops? I don't think so.

I should mention, and I will, that these urinating roadbuilders -- these Urinators -- had no idea they were being watched. They remained blissfully unaware of the cabin cam. Clueless. Which begs the question, would things have happened differently if they'd known? One wonders.

But the point is moot. It's over. As of yesterday, the cabin project was completed. The dumpers and dozers are gone, along with their operators. My research has come to a halt. My stint as a bathroom voyeur has ended, along with my innocence. I'm feeling letdown, ambivalent, blue. I've spent a good portion of today sitting at my computer, linked to the cabin cam, staring at a vast and wild live stream of...nothingness. With a road going through.

I've been half-expecting some curious deer or bear or Jehovah's Witness to come wandering up that road and sniff out those patches of dead yellow grass in the front yard, but so far nada. If that should happen, I'll be sure to let my husband know. That his brilliant idea finally paid off. In precisely the manner he'd envisioned. Who knew?

Acts of God

2011-09-16T13:52:00.000-07:00

The Boundary Waters are on fire. An act of God this time, in the form of a lightning bolt, what else. You'd think by now God would've gotten a little more creative.

It started with a high pressure area over The Lake, which lasted for a week, another Miracle of the First Magnitude, this being September. But miracles in these parts are few and far, the pressure was on, something had to give.

"No more Mister Nice Guy!" booms God, and throws down the above-mentioned lightning bolt and hauls out the marshmallows.

The fire is the biggest in state history, bigger even than the last record-breaking BWCA fire a few years back, the one caused by an Act of Man. The man in question was eventually outed, and ended up committing suicide, apparently out of despair over the devastation he'd brought about. That and the felony lawsuit the feds slapped on his careless ass.

You can run, but you can't hide.

The smoke from the Pagami Creek Fire can be seen from space. It looks like some humongous supersizer is sitting just below the North Pole blowing a humongous blunt toward Chicago. It might be Santa, but more than likely it's that wily ol' God.

"Yeah, but I didn't inhale!" booms God, deftly covering His humongous ass once again.

People in Chicago are pissed. I mean, more so than usual.

Much like New Yorkers, Chicagoans tend to forget there's another reality beyond their city limits. As opposed to Angelinos, whose sense of reality bends the boundaries of the time/space continuum and astral projects them into alternate universes on a regular weekly basis, beginning September 26th at 8PM Eastern/7 Central.

Angelinos...ya gotta love 'em. But God doesn't. Does the word "earthquake" mean anything to you? How about Santa Ana winds? Wildfires? Mudslides? Tsunamis? Arnold Schwarzenegger?

You can run, but you can't hide. I'm telling you, there's nowhere left to go.

Used to be Up North was a relative Safe Zone, unless, that is, you happened to be classified as a game animal, but don't get me started on that. Suffice to say that for the human species, at least, Up North has traditionally been a sort of Switzerland of the midsection, the remoteness and the weather keeping the riffraff out and the IQs down.

But then God moves in, there goes the neighborhood.

By the time God finally dragged His humongous ass Up North, He'd apparently run out of cutting edge ideas and was forced to resort to the old tried and true Biblical ravages of pestilence, locusts and lightning bolts. Oh my! Translation: lyme disease, mosquitoes and supersized forest fires.

Apparently God hates pretty much everyone.

I just checked, and as of this morning, the winds have shifted and the fire is headed for Canada. I trust the Border Patrol is on top of things.

After 9/11, the gub'ment suddenly discovered our remote little corner of the world, and the Border Patrol have been zipping around these backwoods in their little Shriners cars for the past ten years, dodging moose and bear and jackpine savages and diligently adding to the tax base and the roadkill count and the bar bill over at My Sister's Place, one of the local watering holes.

Rumor has it that a few years back a couple of BPs donned their Sherlock Holmes hats and managed to track a couple of suspicious characters carrying suspicious packages who'd somehow managed to make it across the Pigeon River and enter the good ol' USofA illegally, before spending a fortnight wandering in the wilderness like Moses looking for a way out. The wilderness being none other than the aforementioned BWCA. The way out being none other than the infamous Highway 61, our local backstreet, where a passing motorist eventually discovered said suspicious characters lying prostrate on the shoulder, thumbs extended, heads resting on the suspicious packages, which turned out to be backpacks stuffed with the latest REI camping gear the hapless Canucks had recently purchased up in Thunder Bay. Maybe next time they'll throw in a couple of GPS units. The "suspects" were apprehended and questioned by the BPs, then promptly dispatched to the border crossing, where they were last seen hiking along Highway 61 back into Canada, thumbs extended, shouting every last verse of "Positively 4th Street" back at the good ol' USofA at the top of their lungs with feeling.

Fuck the good ol' USofA. I'd like to shout every last verse of "Positively 4th Street" back at God at the top of my lungs with feeling. I'd just like to come out once and scream it. I mean, He's got a lot of nerve. All around Him 100,000 acres of wilderness and all its inhabitants are going up in smoke, and He just stands there, humongous hands on humongous hips, grinning. I wish that for just one time He could stand inside my shoes.

Well, you get the idea.

It's the Mosquitoes

2011-09-01T13:24:00.000-07:00

The cat's dying and I'm driving home from work. I only just arrived at work, but I'm driving home again because I forgot my glasses. I'm listening to a program about early onset dementia. Some expert is discussing the difference between normal forgetfulness due to aging, versus forgetfulness due to dementia.

"For example," says the expert, "you forget where you've put your glasses. You search high and low, and then find them sitting on top of our head. That's normal."

Do I know this guy? Is he normal? Did he interview me for this program?

When I get home, I find my glasses. Not on top of my head, in the freezer.

* * *

The cat's dying and the earth moves under Washington. Irene tears up the East Coast. The New York subway system shuts down.

"God's mad at the government!" says Michelle Bachmann. "Vote for me!"

My 22-year-old cousin is killed in a car accident. He's 22 years old and he's driving a Beamer, but let's not get side-tracked.

"Sometimes God just needs another angel," says his family, whose Beamers all sport Bachmann bumper stickers, and I say,

"He's fucking God, for crissakes! Why doesn't He fucking make another angel!"

"Don't vote for God!" I say.

The cat's dying and I find myself under the kitchen table at 3 a.m. During a thunderstorm. With the dog. Usually I find myself under the kitchen table at 3 a.m. for other reasons, not necessarily involving the dog, but let's not get side-tracked.

I look around as a crash of lightning spotlights the room and notice a small dark shape beneath a nearby chair. Not the cat, my glasses. Meanwhile the dog is sitting on top of my head.

If my husband had to choose between me and the dog, he'd be hard-pressed.

"We're hard-pressed!" says Michelle Bachmann. "Let's drill for oil in the Everglades!"

* * *

The cat's dying and I'm seeing a shrink. I started seeing the shrink before she started dying. The cat, not the shrink.

I keep seeing the shrink, but so far I'm still the same size.

Unlike the cat, who keeps getting smaller and smaller. Soon she'll disappear altogether.

The cat's dying and there's a hummingbird at the feeder. The wind is out of the west and the daylilies are still blooming. The hops have reached the top of the arbor, a pair of fawns are asleep beneath the mugo pines.

In this neck of the woods it isn't earthquakes, or hurricanes, and there's no subway system to shut down. Of course there's our own little homegrown natural disaster, Ms. Bachmann, who desperately needs shutting down, but it's not her, either.

It's the mosquitoes, stupid.

* * *

The cat's dying and we're experiencing the worst scourge of mosquitoes in decades. I'm talking the Ten Plagues of Egypt. I'm talking that minuscule and deadly variety that lies in wait 24/7 and attacks below the knees, not to mention below the belt, until everyone in the surrounding countryside within screaming distance appears to be walking around in red stocking feet.

Unlike the cat, who has never been bit by anything, having lived the life of a quintessential housecat, i.e., inside the house, where she's been walking around in white stocking feet for perhaps half of her allotted nine lives, but who apparently caught God's eye a few weeks back when He went prowling for another angel cat to help rid Heaven of all those annoying angel mice.

Never mind that God could as easily have fucking made another angel cat, not to mention fucking unmade all those annoying angel mice, but we all know what a fucking dickhead God can be. Lying in wait. 24/7. Like a mosquito.

But let's not get side-tracked.

Miranda is dying.

Happy Birthday, Barry

2011-08-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

August 4, 1961

Witness

2011-08-01T11:10:00.000-07:00

It was a dark and stormy night, one for the record books, wave after wave of teeth-rattling thunderstorms, rain Noah could write home about, lightning bright as a Walmart parking lot, all of it directly over my bed thanks to a couple of skylights installed half a lifetime ago by previous owners, a couple of stoners who took it upon themselves to do a bit of remodeling on this ancient old lady, the house, that is, not me.

I cling to Wunderground radar like an altar, until lightning strikes a nearby transformer in the wee hours and euthanizes all things electronic within a half-mile radius, meanwhile ozone permeates the atmosphere like egg salad sandwiches in a church basement, so I stagger down to the second floor to escape the onslaught and step on a headless mouse, somehow a perfect metaphor for it all, for all of it.

The mouse owes its headlessness to the cat, the country owes its to the Republicans, I owe mine to the resident 15-year-old, who this morning is borderline civil because she's lost a couple of pounds and is lobbying heavily for a belly button ring, meanwhile we've all had a bellyful of that gang of Tea Partiers, "gang" being the operative word.

In the backyard I am witness to the devastation Mother Nature has wreaked upon the bedding plants, yesterday the pride of my green green thumbs, but today the likeness of drowned rats, or headless mice, or mothers of teenagers, or the President of the United States, who turns 50 on Thursday and not a moment too soon, bless his beleaguered belobbied soul.

There's a heatwave on the North Shore, the dewpoint is at 79, my daughter cleans her room voluntarily, someone from the Far Right represents the Eighth Congressional District (my backyard!) for the first time in recorded history, it's the end of the world, the beginning of the End Times, one for the record books, time for a (birthday!) party.

"Tighten that screw all the way to the right, boys!"
(Carpetbagger CravAACK!)

What's Wrong With This Picture?

2011-07-29T13:24:00.000-07:00

That's right, Virginia. They're all men. White men. Richass white men. And no, they aren't undertakers. What did you say? No, that's not a blackjack the guy in front is carrying. It's a memo from God sent by way of a bush the guy found burning in his front yard a few days ago.

Oh, and one more thing: notice the funny way they walk? That's due to the parking meters stuck up their asses.

But there's hope, Virginia. I think I finally figured out what's wrong with these meter readers: Nature Deficit Disorder. I kid you not! Nothing a couple of months in the wilderness couldn't cure.

I mean, take away the mirrors, the cellphones, the TV cameras, the Crest Whitestrips...these Jeremiah Johnsons will be free to wrestle their demons to the ground to their little hearts' desire and then have their way with them, with no one the wiser.

Which sounds like a good description of the rest of us poor sad assholes.

Picture this: we arrange for a couple of Blackhawks to unload these boy scouts somewhere up in the Quetico, with a boatload of Lipton tea and just enough DEET to cover their assets until payday.

First, though, we'll need to figure out a way to coax them out from behind that circle of wagons. What's that, Virginia? Sorry, but the Sarah-and-Michelle-Red-White-and-Blue-Lap-Dance-Revue, however tempting an idea, is not a plausible option.

Which sounds like a good description of our current state. Make that Ship of State.

Hey, wait a minute, I've got it! How about a couple of years on a ship anchored in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle for these mermen? You know, Ship of Fools and all that. That is, if the Border Patrol nixes the Quetico thing.

Or what about convincing NASA to make room for these space cadets on the one-way trip to Mars, or the Juno probe to Jupiter? That's right, Virginia, the Juno launches in August. At least something will launch in August.

Meanwhile, can we switch to another channel? I kid you not, a person can only take so much "American Idle" before wanting to XXX it all and throw the television out the window. I wonder, is that the same as throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Just ask the rent-a-cops in the photo, they oughta know.

No, No, No

2011-07-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

Amy Winehouse / 1983 - 2011

(*Been trying for a week to embed a video of "Back to Black," but Blogger is having issues...)

Alien Abduction

2011-07-07T10:31:00.000-07:00

Midnight Friday we experienced electrical arcing up at the cabin involving a power line that runs past the outhouse. It occurred in the midst of one of those big ass thunderstorms and provided some big ass fireworks in celebration of the fourthajuly weekend.

At first I thought it might be the mothership of some aliens who'd come to abduct us, but seeing as how the event occurred over the outhouse, I decided the aliens were probably on the hunt for one of the Republicans who'd managed to shut down our state government earlier that day. I mean, what better way to camouflage a Tea Partier than to hide her in a room full of shit.

We have been abducted by aliens, Dear Reader, and I only wish it were those big ass bald dudes from some galaxy far far away, but noooooooo. We've been taken hostage by a walking embarrassment who call themselves "Real Americans" and who remain pathologically unswerving in their evangelical determination to take their balls and go home, like a gaggle of emotionally-challenged adolescents.

I've always been ambivalent about being American, but this has pushed me into another dimension. This country, not to mention this state (of mind), has officially left the land of "It Takes All Kinds" and entered the realm of the surreal. Move over, Rod Serling. What must the rest of the civilized world think? "Civilized" being the operative word. If we continue in this direction, junior, we're going to have to turn in our library cards and join our comrades in the third world.

Speaking of third worlds, a skunk recently moved in next door. Following the advice of the local witch doctor (but you can call me Tabitha), the homeowner played oldies rock at top volume for 67 hours in an effort to coax Pepe le Pew to vacate the premises, which he eventually did, along with a couple of the other neighbors. If only Michelle Bachmann were that easy to get rid of. During the siege, and recognizing a golden opportunity when she saw one, the witch doctor held a big ass dance party and invited a sizeable contingent of local miscreants, who spent the duration reliving their miscreantic youths while Golden Earring, ZZ Top and Billy Idol provided the soundtrack.

JFR, if anyone listening is looking for a way to get Yours Truly to leave the building, anything leaning in the direction of the Country Music end of the spectrum will do the trick in a nanosecond, no need to prolong the agony.

Meanwhile, back at the outhouse (where things were piling up), the mothership, having presumably failed to unearth any wayward Republicans in that neck of the woods, left with a bang, ignoring the whimpering pleas of the cabinowner to,

"Take me! Take me please!"

Having driven uptheshore twelve hours earlier past the phalanx of blaze orange "CLOSED!! THAT MEANS YOU ASSHOLE!!" warning signs barricading the entrances to no less than nine State Park areas (remember, Dear Reader, this was the fourthajuly weekend), I figured we were already on the morph toward Planet X, let's just get it the fuck over with and take the nonstop flight.

FYI, some of those alien flight attendants are real hotties, if you're into that type. Or so I've heard.

Doing Time

2011-06-12T10:01:00.000-07:00

The other day I'd just managed to chew through the restraints when I felt my phone vibrating. Usually I let the thing have at it while I wrestle with the resulting panic attack (is this a call? a text? a tornado warning?), but as a first tentative step on the long road to freedom (plus I once again had access to opposable thumbs), I bravely answered.

It was my sister, calling from the South of France.

"Having a wonderful time!" she screamed. "Wish you were ici!"

I looked around to where the detritus from my Houdinian effort at escape lay scattered across the dungeon floor and thought,

"What's the matter with these people? Don't they read the police reports? Do they think it's all fun and games around ici?"

It used to be all fun and games, that's the problem.

I miss the Old Life. Every drunken, debauched, disorderly, unproductive, hormone-drenched, poverty-stricken moment of it. I miss the snow days, the Mary Kay parties, the size 4 Boys Levis, the anorexic euphoria of it all. I miss playing gin (and drinking it) until the sun came up or went down, whatever. I miss real roller skates, and those big fat radio headphones, and snaking around Lake of the Isles stoned on my City Roller Wheels in a long line behind that one black dude. Whatever happened to him? Or to me, for that matter? I miss real solitaire, fuck Free Cell. I miss real phones, fuck these Milkduds boxes. I miss when "being connected" meant you regularly read the Personal Ads. When "being wired" had nothing to do with electronics. I miss Roseanne Rosannadanna. The Artist Formerly Known as Roger Nelson. Bobby Ewing. Jim Rockford. Cindi Lauper. Chrissie Hynde. I even miss Huey Lewis and the News. Sometimes.

But where was I?

It's not that I begrudge my sister her trip to the South of France (or was it South of France Avenue?), it's just that I want to go somefuckingwhere. The South of Finland. Pago Pago. Iceland. Uzbekistan. New Jersey. Chisholm. Back in time. Anywhere but here. Hell, I'd go to detox if I thought they'd let me bring my cocktail shaker and sleep mask.

The last place I went was crazy, a franchise of sorts, with outlets all over the planet. Which helps explain this nice padded dungeon and my sore jaw. Meanwhile people keep sending me cheery greetings from The Outside like I'm still capable of remembering what the real world feels like. At least I'm still capable of putting two and two together, as in, You're there, I'm here, you do the math.

Of course the Old Life eventually got old, after all one can only withstand so much unadulterated bliss, n'est pas? Humanoids weren't built for longterm Santaland, with the possible exception of Charlie Sheen, who might in fact actually be an escaped lab experiment, in which case my premise still holds.

As for me, I'm counting on my long term memory to get me through this next phase. My short term is shot, which, given recent events, I consider a miracle of good karma. At least I'm no longer restrained -- as if I've ever been -- so I'm able to move around freely while hallucinating about the past and counting down from 1,825, or the number of days remaining until I can collect Social Security, a.k.a., My Due. Which proves once and for all that I haven't been a total deadbeat, contrary to popular opinion. Until then I'm just biding time, or doing time, whatever.

But there's still the matter of these annoying messages that keep coming in from the outside world. What to do? I guess I'll just ignore my phone until it's discharged. Which is what I eventually hope to be.

We Were So Much Older Then

2011-05-24T12:18:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday, Bobby

Fooled Again

2011-05-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

Well shit. It didn't happen. Again. Why can't they nail this thing down? Here I am, all dressed up and no place to go. What a bust! Just like last time! I mean, it's not like this is some trip to Legoland, jack. This is IT, baby, that's all she wrote!

One prepares for a thing like this. Clean underwear, hair washed, nails sanded. New earrings and a matching toe ring. I'm relatively sober (wouldn't want to meet The Man completely sober), haven't blown a doobie in a coon's age, been keeping up the exercise routine. Even been thinking good thoughts about all the dead rels, who I'm about to run into again. Excuse me, who I was about to run into again. But nooooooo.

Just because some joker can't get his calendar straight. Why didn't the asshole just Google it? The Huffington Post would've had a bead on something this big. And it's always a guy, am I right? Afraid to ask directions to the bitter End Times. A woman would've been more organized: pick up dry cleaning, stop by liquor store, reconfirm date of Rapture.

But how silly of me, like I'll be one of those floaters rising into the clouds, that's a laugh. Better rethink this thing. I'll need a change of wardrobe, for starters. Wet suit, waterproof mascara, maybe my husband's golf umbrella. For when the wrath of God rains down. For seven years, if I remember correctly.

Except wait a sec, hold the phone, that reminds me...I was baptized! I was confirmed! I was in Luther League for crissakes! Okay, maybe it was just to get felt up by boys on hayrides, but still! Shouldn't all those Good Fridays my mother made me stay inside and work on my Jesus of Nazareth coloring book while my friends ran wild around the neighborhood on their day off school count for something? Shouldn't there be a record of this shit somewhere?

Not that it would change anything.

When I opened my eyes this morning (a miracle in itself) and realized that nothing was any different, it was all just the same old same old, the first words out of my mouth were,

"Well I'll be damned."

Which, in any Rapturous event, would most likely be the case. So next time, fuck it, I'm going to party like there's no tomorrow. And you can hold me to it.

Shadow and Substance

2011-05-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

I've been looking to fortune cookies for guidance these days.

There will be plenty of time to work hard, enjoy yourself!

That was my husband's, from last week. Exclamation point and all. I switched it with mine when he got up to get his glasses so he could read the thing. As usual, he was none the wiser. Which is what my fortune cookie said:

You are none the wiser.

Well, maybe not exactly those words. Actually it said:

Nine times out of ten you are wrong.

What the?!? I mean, is that kind of thing even allowed in fortune cookie manufacturing? Or maybe it's some kind of Chinese joke played on those idiot Americans?

Except this time the joke is on them. I don't consider myself an American, I haven't for many a moon. Nixon and Vietnam and disco had something to do with it, but my disenchantment began even earlier, back when they canceled "The Twilight Zone." Television had such potential, then we got fat. We started out with Rod Serling and ended up with Jillian Michaels.

I was completely nuts about "The Twilight Zone," I was its Number One Fan. I might've been only ten when it came out, but I was hooked from the get-go. Watching "TZ" was one of my earliest addictions, right up there alongside thumb-sucking and nail-biting. Sometimes I sucked and watched and bit all at the same time, a talented multi-tasker in the making.

I had my favorite episodes, and my favorite lines, which I tried to incorporate whenever possible. "When, doctor, when?" I pleaded while waiting in line at the clinic for my polio booster. "My name is Talky Tina..." I intoned the first time I met my older sister's soon-to-be third (or was it fourth?) husband. "Going my way?" I inquired of the bus driver who transported us to Religious Instruction on Wednesdays. "It's a cook book!!" I shrieked after opening a menu at Bridgeman's.

If my younger sister played with my Shirley Temple paper dolls without permission, I threatened to send her into the cornfield. When I forgot to do a book report, I told Miss Serrano it fell through my bedroom wall into another dimension. I stood motionless in the living room for two hours, practicing to be a mannequin, until my dad yelled Enough is enough! and called me a buttonhead. Eventually, like everyone else in "The Twilight Zone," I started smoking.

Rod Serling died of a heart attack (his third) in 1975, on an operating table in Los Angeles. He was fifty. I happened to be in LA when he died, I took it as a sign. I was twenty-five, running away from a husband, visiting my sister-of-many-husbands, who knew a bit about flight. In honor of Rod's death we repaired to her backyard, where, talented multi-taskers that we were, we passed a pipe and a jug of Mountain Red and ate oranges off the tree and lit cigarettes.

"Next stop, the Twilight Zone," I intoned, raising a Camel heavenward in solemn tribute.

Come to think of it, the fortune cookiers could do worse than look to "The Twilight Zone" for inspiration:

You are traveling through another dimension.

You have no function, you are an anachronism.

There's time enough at last, all the time you need.

YOU ARE OBSOLETE!!

Sure beats "Nine times out of ten you are wrong." Or these gems from "The Biggest Loser":

Can you do it? You bet you can!

Just get up and do it!

Don't say you can't, say you can!

Stop talking about it, and just do it!

How appropriate to have conjured "The Twilight Zone" on this particular day. It's Friday the 13th, after all. Come to think of it, I should stop talking about it and just end this post. Before some wayward Book Awards judge gets wind of it and sends me into the cornfield.

You Didn't Have To Go

2011-04-26T01:44:00.000-07:00

Phoebe Snow / 1950 - 2011

To Say Nothing of Wolves

2011-04-16T14:28:00.000-07:00

We have a little money saved and my husband proposed doing some work on the kitchen.

"Fuck the kitchen," I said, "I want a facelift."

"But the kitchen would benefit both of us," said my husband, "it's only fair," and I said,

"Like you wouldn't benefit from my getting a facelift?" and he admitted I had a point.

Just then the phone rang. Not the cobweb-festooned contraption on the wall, the one in my husband's pants.

"Who is it?" I mouthed.

"The kid," my husband mouthed back, "she says she's lost in the woods."

"But I just opened a beer!" I said aloud.

"Who was that?" said our daughter from the woods.

"It was Mom," said my husband, "she says 'I'll be right there!'."

"Tell her to bring my green Columbia," said our daughter. "Oh and my lavender brush. Oh and my other earphones. Oh and my allowance. For the next three weeks."

Our daughter had set out in the general direction of the 7-Eleven on her way to meet a friend when she took a shortcut through the cemetery, which went so well that, in a stunning reenactment of Little Red Riding Hood, she took a shortcut through the woods, except that her basket of goodies consisted of an iPod and a cellphone, and she wasn't on her way to visit Grandma but to rendezvous with an ex-roommate from the loony bin, to say nothing of wolves.

I can feel my face heading south even as I relate this story.

Little Red Riding Hood being the quintessential cautionary tale, I asked my brave little daughter afterward what she'd learned from her misadventure, and she said,

"To always keep my phone charged. The signal was down to one bar!"

To which I say, one bar is as good as the next.

* * *

As part of my battle plan to lift my facial muscles, to say nothing of my spirits (not to be confused with those other spirits I routinely lift), I recently visited the local cosmetic bar, er, counter in search of the latest snake oil. I'd last made this particular hegira sometime during the Clinton Administration. Things had changed.

Ghostly wisps of scent rose from an aromatherapy diffuser at my elbow while club music pumped from some mysterious unseen source. I half-expected a hookah to be lying about and damned if I wouldn't've had a hit. When a clerk eventually materialized from behind a glass shelving unit, I gasped. Not only was this clerk wearing a white lab coat (the guys in the white coats!), he was a he! It said so right there, on his name badge.

"How may I be of assistance?" chirped Tyler, my Customer Service Representative.

"Errr..." I stammered, momentarily at a loss, when what I really wanted to say was:

"Bite me! You must be fucking joking! You were just beginning your last incarnation when I first started buying cosmetics in this one!"

It's bad enough having to show my face in public these days, let alone at a place where it's in the job description of some prepubescent male to scrutinize it.

Oblivious to my angst, Tyler scrutinized, then putzed among the items on the glass shelving unit, then spun around and brushed my cheek with some product whose name sounded like the latest Ben and Jerry's flavor.

"This is my personal favorite," he twittered, while I tried my best to keep from mouthing "Who gives a fuck?", at which point I noticed the foundation he had on was blended rather nicely, although for my tastes he'd gone a little heavy on the blush.

Having finally made my desperate purchase, I couldn't get out of there fast enough. I was just beginning to recover a sense of dignity, to say nothing of balance, when I exited the mall and was hit by a 50mph wind gust. The desperate purchase flew from my hand, and as I stumbled after it through a wall of pelting sleet, some elderly Marlboro man blowing smoke rings at the bus kiosk winked at me. Either that or he was experiencing a TIA.

I didn't stop to find out. Grabbing the desperate purchase from midair, I staggered to my car and drove away into the heart of a category nine blizzard, which took me by surprise, but it shouldn't have. This is only mid-April, after all, we still have three months of winter left.

By the time I reached home, I was in whiteout conditions. Not to be confused with blackout, which is my personal favorite. I found the garage by ramming into it, likewise the back gate. There I took a deep breath and, putting one foot in front of the other (another time-honored battle plan), set out blindly and bravely in the general direction of the house. But for the frozen birdbath I rammed into in my search for the door, I might've been lost in the woods.

Beside Myself

2011-04-01T09:57:00.000-07:00

My husband never listens to a word I say. Not that I blame him. My dad never heard me either. I was the middle of three girls, sometimes he couldn't remember who I was.

"Did your sister drop one of her kids off again?" he'd ask my long-suffering mother, who'd glance across the table at me and recognize one of her own offspring, although remembering precisely which one was another matter.

I became the three-name kid and holed up in the basement.

"KathyCarriePatty!" my parents would call down to me, combining all three daughterly names, not sure which applied but knowing one would hit the bullseye.

In desperation I made up my own name. I called out to myself over and over, deep into the night, from my spidery hide-a-bed in a corner of the rec room, while the ore trains hummed a distant lullaby and my family slept the sleep of the righteous in the rooms above.

"What a load of crap," my husband says every time I haul out this old story. Meanwhile I'm beside myself with joy knowing he was actually listening.

Just because he grew up with multiple phones and a stereo instead of a Hi-Fi doesn't mean the rest of us had it so good. His mother never put him out on the front porch when he was eight with a packed suitcase and his favorite doll and a pocketful of nickels.

"Good luck, er, you," my mother said, and locked the door behind me.

Her effort didn't take. I managed to weasel my way back into the house and continued to live amongst its inhabitants until I was eighteen, but still. It's the sort of anecdote that sticks in one's craw.

The main irritant in my husband's craw materialized that day twenty-five years ago when he stood in his Valentino suit before a judge down in The City and heard the skinny young broad standing next to him say "I do." Which was probably the last time he ever really listened to me, and it's haunted him ever since.

Then there's the matter of what happened recently in my husband's mouth.

Last fall my husband suffered a mysterious dental emergency, which had several dentists and at least one doctor scratching their heads in dismay trying to determine the exact cause of the intense pain emanating from his craw, er, jaw. I know in my heart he was secretly hoping for an extraction, thinking it might rid him once and for all (if only metaphorically) of the thing that's been stuck there all these years. But after months of painful procedures and false hopes, my husband's tooth -- and possibly our marriage -- was saved by a root canal.

All of which might have something to do with what's been happening recently in my sleep.

The other night my husband took his life in his hands (once again) and shook me awake.

"Who the fuck is Roxanne?" he whispered, dodging a right hook.

"Who-oo?" I gasped.

"Roxanne! All week long, you're all RoxanneRoxanneRoxanne, over and over, in your sleep. It's driving me fucking nuts!"

It took me a few hours to make it to consciousness, but once there, I grasped the situation. By this time my long-suffering husband had given up and gone back to dreamland. Carefully, clandestinely, while the foghorn blatted a distant warning and my husband slept the sleep of the oblivious beside me, I whispered the name over and over, into the dark:

"RoxanneRoxanneRoxanne..."

It was that other name, the name I'd given myself back in childhood. It was my secret, I'd never told anyone, and now after all these years (decades! eons!), I'd said it again...out loud! Not only that...in my sleep! Not only that...someone had heard!!

Except I should've known better (which is what my husband keeps telling himself about that long ago day in front of the judge). Nobody had heard. My husband never listens to me when he's conscious, so why should Mr. Nobody remember some jabberwocky I coughed up in the middle of the night in the middle of a dream in the middle of our marriage bed?

As usual, my worries were dumbfounded, er, unfounded. Next morning he was all,

"How'd you sleep?" and I was all,

"Like a rock...you?" and he was all,

"Out like a light."

And there you have it. A rock and a light. What a load of crap. But as good a metaphor as any to describe this union.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2Qad-gaHMg

March Madness

2011-03-19T20:46:00.000-07:00

The temperature soared past thirty yesterday so I took down all the Christmas crap. I figured it was time, it's almost Easter.

Christmas? Easter? I? Why am I uppercasing these words? Why am I writing this inane fucking drivel? None of this shit is remotely important!!! WHY???

Does the word
HIGH LEVEL RADIATION!!!
mean anything to you???

How about
CORE MELTDOWN!!!

Familiar with that new season???
NUCLEAR WINTER!!!

Weatherman says take your vitamins and stay indoors. For the next two-hundred-and-forty-seven years. I say you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was your trip to Japan?

Tectonic plates...Tsunamis...Tunisia...Egypt...Libya...Wisconsin...

It's the Domino Theory.

It's the Ides of March. It's March Madness. It's the March of Dimes. It's the March of Dime Bags.

It's St. Patrick's Day. It's Lent. It's Purim. It's Ash Wednesday.

It's the Vernal Equinox. Daylight Savings. Dr. Seuss's Birthday. Fat Tuesday.

It's Pisces. It's Aries. It's National Kidney Month. It's a Super Perigee Moon.

It's Barbie's Birthday. St. Urho's Day. National Earmuffs Day. The Oscars.

It's National Open an Umbrella Indoors Day. It's National Chocolate Covered Raisins and World Tuberculosis Day. It's The Swallows Returning to Capistrano, all seven of them. It's Won't You Be My Neighbor Day, but first take a stroll past this lil' ol' Geiger counter.

It's Weed Appreciation Day. It's Quirky Country Music Song Titles and Viagra Day. It's Pencil Day. It's My Mother's Birthday. It's My High School Boyfriend's Birthday. It's My Husband's Birthday.

Last but not least, it's National Make Up Your Own Holiday Day. I shit you not, Google it.

So here's my contribution: it's How Many Half-wits Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb Day. It's How Many Half-lifes Does It Take the Half-wits to Change the Fucking Lightbulb Day. It's National It's Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature Day. It's National What's Wrong With This Fucking Picture Day.

Whatever it is, it's not Christmas. And it's not Easter. And it's not I.

"Not I!" said the Duck.

"Not I!" said the Cat.

"Not I!" said the Dog.

"Then I shall have to do it myself," said the Little Red Hen, and she bent over, stuck her head between her legs and kissed her sweet ass goodbye.

Looking for Jerry Lewis

2011-03-11T09:32:00.000-08:00

Since last we met, I suffered a bladder infection. I know, I know, TMI. The point being, one symptom of said condition is a marked tendency toward sociopathic behavior. At least, that's what I told my husband.

"Why are you hanging from the ceiling fan?" he asked beleagueredly a fortnight ago.

"I've got a UTI!" I shrieked, wiping the foam from my mouth with my free hand. "Rev this thing up a few notches while you're at it! Toss me that decanter!"

Why that man is still in the building is one of Life's Great Mysteries.

Another is teenage girls.

I was driving home from the video store with just such a creature the other evening when, out of the blue, I felt a sudden maternal urge. Not to be mistaken for that other urge, associated with the above-mentioned malady, but let's not go there. I glanced at the two DVDs on the creature's lap and inquired ever so maternally,

"What movies did you get?"

"Thinking hurts," the creature sighed, leaning her lovely head against the passenger window, to which I replied, in all earnestness,

"And what's the other movie?"

I'm nothing if not earnest. I'm congenitally earnest. I could be the poster child for earnestness. My predisposition toward the state of being earnest is another of Life's Great Mysteries.

Yet another is Axel, the new preschool student.

* * *

Axel is not his real name. I never use real names. Not even in real life, whatever that is. I just make shit up.

Axel came to class for the first time on Thursday. Let it be noted that our little cult has been going full tilt boogie since September, but never mind that, Axel had certain pressing issues which kept him from enlisting. My guess is that his long-suffering mother finally threw up her hands, threw in the towel, threw on the pull-ups and pronounced Axel potty-trained, end of story.

Except, Dear Reader, this is a chapter book, the story never ends.

So there we are, unsuspecting innocents going about the usual mayhem of another attempt at learning, when Axel charges into our classroom all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and takes over. He eschews the ubiquitous train table, around which, as always, the boys are hunkered, and instead heads straight for the costume box, a.k.a., Girl Land, where he pushes past Flicka, Ricka and Dicka and lunges headlong into the froth, emerging in less than a heartbeat in tutu, tiara, Cinderella slippers and blue feather boa.

Did I mention pink star-shaped sunglasses bedecked with purple rhinestones?

"Just don't let his father see him," sighs Axel's long-suffering mother, and she picks up the baby carrier holding her latest effort at procreation and heads out the door, leaving us one and all, large and small, agape and agog.

Gaping and gogging aside, I regain my composure and set about the task of reclaiming the airspace, keeping an eagle eye on the new recruit, who himself eventually discards the Cinderella heels (I must say he has more control over them than the girls do), though to make up for this fashion faux pas, adds several necklaces, a green velvet clutch bag and a large rhinestone ring.

Axel's MO is to prance about the room and hit the boys with the clutch bag, ala Ruth Buzzi on "Laugh-In", then prance over to the big alphabet rug and swap jewelry with the girls, who are having a picnic. The boys appear nonplussed at these antics, they couldn't care less, and once I put the kibosh on clutch-bag-as-weapon ("This is a cigarette-and-gun-free preschool!"), they go about their business at train table and block bin, seemingly oblivious to one of their ilk lurking nearby in tutu and tiara.

Not so the girls. The girls are incredulous. Indignant. Incensed.

"He's wearing a skirt!"

"He's wearing high heels!"

"He's wearing the magic ruby princess ring!"

The girls flock around me and shake their heads and roll their eyes, regaling me with complaints about this usurper as if he were stealing their very souls out from under them, to which their long-suffering mentor extraordinaire responds by shrugging her shoulders and reminding them lamely that we're all friends here, we have to learn to share, blah blah blah, and so they shake their heads and roll their eyes at me and return reluctantly to the fray, where their new fancy friend has continued prancing merrily about in their absence.

* * *

And it's true, Dear Reader, and I use this word cautiously but earnestly. Did I mention how earnest I am? There is no other way to describe how Axel moved: he pranced. Like a chipmunk. Like a pony. Like a dancer. Like a...prancer. You had to be there. And you weren't.

I, however, was, and returning to the Bat Cave later that evening, pour myself a flagon of mead and regale my long-suffering husband with The Story of My Day, in all its rumorous detail, leaving no prance behind nor rhinestone unturned, to which my husband beleagueredly replies,

"The kid's three for crissakes!"

"He could be a poster child!" I say. "You had to be there!"

My husband sighs deeply and thanks the Cosmic Oneness that he was in fact not there, and glances longingly at the Florida golf brochure at his elbow, weighing the pros and cons of pulling a Get Out of Jail Free card. Meanwhile I draw deeply from the flagon of mead and thank my lucky stars I remembered to stop by the liquor store, and glance longingly at the shadowy blades circling steadily overhead, weighing the pros and cons of pulling a Charlie Sheen.

And it's true, Dear Reader. That we both, in our separate but equal gravitational fields, continue to orbit the same sun, is yet one more addition to that ever-evolving list of Life's Great Mysteries. Did I mention Sunday is our 25th wedding anniversary? We could be poster children.

Stand Up

2011-02-11T10:11:00.000-08:00

So the kid's back from the funny farm, only nobody's laughing.

Except the preschoolers. They laugh all day. They think everything's funny. These days I'm taking my cue from them.

Take, for instance, Wednesday. Not the day, the word. Wednesday. The preschoolers think it's hilarious. They say it over and over until it comes out all wonky, by which time they're rolling on the floor like cue balls, laughing their little heads off. Then there's February. They can't get past the first syllable without spitting up all over the big ABC rug in an effort to hold back hysteria.

And that's just words. Can you imagine what mayhem ensues when the teacher can't find her glasses...again? or the phone rings during Silent Time? or one of them accidentally farts? I thought I'd have to break out the EpiPen the time Gina emerged from the bathroom trailing a banner of toilet paper from her teddy bear leggings.

This year we have a non-English-speaking student in class, and the possibilities for hilarity are endless. I mean, the little monsters are just about ready for primetime. A typical exchange:

"Class," I say, "can you think of some words that start with the letter T?"

"Tent!" hollers Donald.

"Truck!" hollers Leon.

"Tinkerbell!" hollers Abigail.

"Ironman!" hollers Jameson.

When the delirium subsides, having reminded myself once again that I'm actually getting paid to do this, I try a different tack.

"Class," I say, "how many fingers am I holding up?"

"Five!" hollers Deborah.

"Three!" hollers Martin.

"Eleven!" hollers Katherine.

"Ironman!" hollers Jameson.

The preschoolers are big on hollering. Apparently Ironman is big in the Philippines.

* * *

My father was big on hollering, though not so big on the Philippines, where he was stationed during World War II. I think of him whenever Jameson talks about "da Pillipeens," at least, I think that's what Jameson's talking about.

But I digress.

My father having been a world class hollerer, I vowed never to become a hollerer myself, a promise I more or less managed to keep, with a few notable exceptions: hunters, snowmobilers, Tea Partiers, and all those responsible for putting "Eat, Pray, Love" on the best-seller lists, you know who you are.

Then I became a parent.

Happy families are all alike, that's for sure. They're all fat. It keeps them from having to think. Once adipose tissue displaces the brain, you're on the La La Land Express, jack, next stop, Walmart!

Being of the unhappy family variety, we've always shopped at Target. So a few months back, during an Offgrounds, the warden calls it, I took the kid to Target in a sentimental moment, and she broke down. In shampoo. I mean, she went down. Hit the floor. Seems the sheer number of choices was too much for her. I'm with her there, I've been known to start blathering aloud in lightbulbs.

So that's where I found her, on her knees one aisle over, tears hidden behind a cascade of hair. I knelt down and took the bottles from her basket and pretended to read the labels.

"'For Big Hair'," I read. "'For Humongous Hair'."

"Mom," she whispered, "where were you? I didn't know where you were."

"'For Morbidly Obese Hair'," I continued. "'For Hair in Need of a Stomach Bypass'."

"Mo-ommm!" she whispered, but she couldn't help it, she started to smile. Then she started to giggle. Then I started to giggle. Then we started to hiccup and snort and somehow managed to get to our feet and stagger through the store and out the automatic doors into the parking lot, where we leaned against each other and laughed until we cried, then cried some more.

That was October.

So now it's February. The kid's home for good, this ain't no Offgrounds, it's three weeks today. So I stopped by Target and picked up a couple bottles of that shampoo, which I've gift-wrapped and plan to give to her on Monday, which is Valentine's Day. I'm hoping for a laugh, but I'll settle for an eye roll.

Of course I'm taking my cue from the preschoolers, for whom not all things humorous are equal. Because while they laugh at pretty much anything, the preschoolers believe the cupid silhouette I hung on the door is pretty much the funniest thing they've ever ever ever seen. And they might be onto something. Last year's class felt the same way.

Holiday Letter

2011-01-29T09:20:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends and Family!

Greetings to each and every one of you! I hope this finds you all well and happy! And drunk! Let me tell you, it's been one fuck of a year!

For Christmas this year my husband sent in an application for the one-way Mars trip! Can you beat that? I can! Under "Applicant's Name," he put mine! In case I'm rejected, he has another one filled out under his name! He left a copy of the application under the tree inside one of those tall skinny gift bags designed for bottles! He knew I'd open that one first!

What a guy! I was touched! But as many of you know, I've been touched since I was a teenager! In more ways than one! As many of you know!

Speaking of teenagers, you'll be happy to know they finally let ours out! It's been quite a time, believe you me, but the lobotomy seems to have worked! And I only have a tiny scar, which my bangs keep well hidden! Will wonders never cease?

No, they won't! I keep wondering what will happen next, and then Michele Bachmann runs for President! I kid you not, this isn't some "Saturday Night Live" sketch! I wish I knew that broad's pharmacist! But hey, I'd run for President, too, if I thought I could catch him! What a doll! The Other Michelle is one lucky stiff!

Speaking of stiff, I could use a stiff...mummy! Had you fooled there for a second, didn't I? It's true! Someone I used to know ended up driving around California for nine months in a mummified condition! And I'm not speaking metaphorically! Obviously someone else did the driving, but it's all hush-hush, so mum(my)'s the word! Ha-ha!

Speaking of funny, in honor of our daughter's stay at the funny farm, we had a party! It started last July, when she first went in, and lasted six months! Now that she's out, it's back to business as usual! More partying!

On another note, the job's going great! I passed the drug test with flying colors! Will wonders never cease? My husband thinks the lab results got mixed up, but who's keeping track? When life gives you lemonade, drink it!

Speaking of which, I'll drink to that! Sorry this letter is a wee bit late, but it took me awhile to chew through the restraints! Ha-ha!

But seriously, folks, I hope the New Year brings you everything your little hearts desire! Put that in your pipe and smoke it! Which is exactly what I'm planning to do, when that package from California arrives! Until then...

World Peace! Greenpeace! Peace and Love! Proposition 19!

Friends 4-Ever!
sixspruce!

One Hundred and Forty-one Post-its93—141

2011-01-08T17:27:00.000-08:00

BACKUP PLAN

It was the evening of the twenty-fourth and she was a wreck, or maybe it was a skag.

"'To save us all from Santa's power...'" she caroled, swilling wine, "and who the hell is Mogen David anyway?"

Earlier that same day, or maybe it was fifty years ago, she'd stopped by Red Owl and Piggly Wiggly but they didn't carry Beatle boots, or maybe it was Kickerinos. It had to do with the number of Johnsons in the New York phone book.

"What would Larry do?" she asked the 97-pound weakling behind the counter, who told her to send ten boxtops to Battle Creek, Michigan.

But when the One Hundred Dolls from Around the World arrived, it was Loss of Innocence all over again. Now she had a shoeboxful of inch high pink plastic gumball machine doodads, and nothing to show for it.

She was about to call the nearest Beauty Counselor, or maybe it was Fuller Brush, when the doorbell rang. It was Jehovah's Witness selling Mary Kay, or maybe it was Shaklee.

"Do you carry gaga pants?" she inquired. "Or is it yoga?"

They warned her not to get ahead of herself and suggested Colgate Dental Cream with Gardol. She spiked it with a golden drop of Retsyn and headed for the nearest moviehouse, where she met her first, or maybe it was her third, husband. He was Aries, she was Taurus, it was a mixed marriage.

"How many times have you seen 'Harold and Maude'?" she asked the third, or maybe it was the first, husband, who remained oblivious as ever, his head in the cloud.

Meanwhile it was the evening of the twenty-fourth, and she was making a list.

"All I want for Christmas is a Clad-Easy," she wrote, checking it twice, and the voices told her the message would be saved for one hundred, or maybe it was seven, days.

ALL THE MAILBOXES WERE PEOPLE

A tornado hit the double-wide so she and the He-Man went to Walmart. While waiting at checkout, she read the headlines:

"Woman with beer can in hand starts brawl at wake!"

"Woman calls 911 over lack of shrimp in fried rice!"

"Woman found partially frozen to pavement!"

She wondered if it was all the same woman and asked the French girl, Unique, for advice.

"In 'Brokeback Mountain'," Unique advised, "they were only gay when they went on vacation."

She took this into Consideration and decided to skip town. When she arrived in Consideration, she unpacked.

"Earplugs, pot and a wig," she noted, calling room service, "what else does a girl need."

On TV they were showing a rerun of "Life with Larry." On another channel it was "Sewing with Nancy."

"What the fuck is wrong with your face?" she demanded of Nancy, who remained inscrutable as ever, a living reminder.

When the phone rang, it was the He-Man.

"Where were you during the Harmonic Convergence?" the He-Man asked. "And what about the Singularity?"

"I love the smell of geraniums in the morning," she answered, "but don't forget the seventies were lower case."

When room service arrived she squeezed the red dye into the margarine packet. She eyed the bowl of Veg-All, but ate all the fortune cookies first. This was, after all, Consideration. She rolled a joint then rolled the mini bar up next to the bed then rolled the TV closer. Thanks to the aging process Jessica Lange was morphing back into a Finlander.

"In the end," she sighed, reaching for the last fortune cookie, "it's just one big metaphor after another."

One Hundred and Forty-one Post-its54—92

2010-12-17T17:23:00.000-08:00

THE PICKLE FORK DOG

She woke up and there was a starling at the small, high window.

"I'm in a pickle," she said, and the deer on the hill agreed.

"I just need to learn how to be a horse again," she said, and renamed her dog Jones.

Jones's feet were a bouquet. She slang.commed "jones" and learned that it meant thing or problem. Also addiction, which was more like it. There wasn't much she wasn't addicted to, but she called her main addictions "The Four Things." Like in Buddhism.

While out doing one of The Four Things, she thought she saw a ghost.

"Is there such thing as a tree ghost?" she asked the crow in the road, who reminded her that the first animal she'd ever loved was a cat, get over yourself.

She knew ravenspeak and wolfsong, but she didn't know from goats or chickens or lambs, let alone llamas. Although it was obvious Charlotte was one pissed-off pig. You would be, too, if it happened to you.

"In the end," she sighed, collecting a stool sample, "we're all Gary Larson ladies."

Once she went to California and met a boy in a dish. Next she met a shepherd on a beach. Soon after, she was born again. Now she knew for certain there was a Dog.

"I don't know who has a harder time with change, me or Jones," she pondered, moving from chair to chair to get a different perspective.

In dog years, she was dead. Meanwhile, Jones bit her nails in the other room.

THE OTHER SHOE

They woke up and there was a baby on the doorstep. They named the baby The Other Shoe.

"Birth is a violent act," said the Accidental Mama, and the Accidental Papa quoted Shakespeare.

"Some people have motherhood thrust upon them."

God, or maybe it was Shakespeare, knew the number of hairs on The Other Shoe's head, but did He know the number of headlice? Aye, there's the rub.

The Accidental Mama eschewed the first Dr. Spock in favor of the second, who arched an eyebrow and cautioned that babies on the doorstep grow up to be teenagers on the roof. When this happened, the Accidental Mama took The Other Shoe shopping.

Eventually The Other Shoe overdosed on Abercrombie and called the cops. But not before swallowing enough Advil to stave off headaches for seven years.

"If you want a kid to be skinny," The Other Shoe said from her hospital bed, "name it Casey."

The Accidental Mama repaired to the belfry and Googled "portable morphine drip." When this didn't pan out, she turned around three times, laid down, and began rereading old childhood favorites. Halfway through "Scoundrels, Fiends and Human Monsters," she had an idea.

"HALFTIME!" she yelled, and started writing a memoir.

She called her memoir "Live Long and Prosper" and filled it with white lies. The Girl Who Died in the War, The Girl Who Danced with the Bears, The Girl with the Sewed-together Fingers. After five years, or maybe it was yesterday, she looked up.

"My daughter's gone to church," she lamented, "where have I failed?"

In the corner the piano began, by itself, to play.

One Hundred and Forty-one Post-its1—53

2010-12-05T10:39:00.000-08:00

OUTSKIRTS

They lived off the reservation on Resurrection Road at the Last Resort. He smelled things burning, she was architecturally-challenged.

On the third hair day, she wrote him a letter:

"You didn't get together with me because I could fucking make fudge!"

He used sample cologne from magazines to get her attention. She wore mascara to talk on the phone.

"My life would've been very different if I'd've had hair," she said when she called.

"I wish I could see your hair," he said, and she said,

"In the end, everybody looks the same."

She gave away jackets—and once a jellaba—but a girl could only do so much. Twice she was almost killed, maybe three times. She voted with her vagina and wore France pants and liked to fuck with her earrings on. If her name had been Lois, somebody would've bought her a drink.

She believed everyone should, at least once, have a gay affair and take acid. Not necessarily simultaneously. A late bloomer, she took acid for the first time when she was thirty. Yet she was rarely, and only for brief periods, able to live as that girl.

"I'm not an asshole," she told him, trying to go cold turkey on Free Cell, "I'm a drunkard."

"I wish I could see your hair," he told her again.

Meanwhile, with help from a west wind, her alter ego published a novel, although it was ghost-written. He called her Mothwoman, she called him over. She had no idea what she looked like and was rarely, and only for brief periods, a slut.

Other than that, she enjoyed the play.

A LIFE IN D MINOR

It was Dia de los Muertos and she was harmonizing with a jackhammer. Earlier that same day she'd injured herself playing Free Cell.

"What train am I on?" she asked the conductor, and he said,

"This song is called 'Dawn of the Gods,' hon."

Given half a chance, she'd take it. Her idea of the American Dream was to own a pot kiosk in southern California. She changed linen on a crisis basis, it brought out her inner Edie Beale.

But she was losing her train of thought. Her plan was to drop back nine yards and punt.

Which rhymes with cunt, which she wasn't. She was, however, a Yellow Dog Bitch, somebody had to be. You might think you are, but you're not. They're few and far.

"A funny thing happened on the way to therapy," she said to the mummy in the passenger seat, but the mummy was too wrapped up in herself to respond.

When she came out of her stupor, or maybe it was torpor, he was waiting. She wasn't one of the driven ones, but she liked to drive.

"Last night," she said, checking her watch, "this would've been early."

"Well, she's at it again," he said to himself, and ditched his National Geographic.

She drove. After awhile she said,

"Is it just me, or are sneezes actually tiny orgasms?" and he said,

"In the end, everybody wants to go home."

Open Season

2010-11-20T13:35:00.000-08:00

Your kid's at the funny farm. The Tea Party is having one. The woods have again been systematically purged of anything that doesn't walk upright. Your sister's friend is a mummy.

It's open season. Something's gotta give.

Traditionally what gives is your resolve not to open another bottle. Or five. But you're trying to go, if not straight, at least less...cattywompus. So you fire the Housekeeper and steal hydrangeas. You're too overloaded (you wish) to grow your own, so you steal them. At midnight. From a church. Good thing you're a drunken pagan atheist, or you'd have been dispatched forthwithly by a bolt of lightning.

The Housecreeper, er, Housekeeper finally turned over one too many of your cleavage-heavy Vanity Fairs, and you fired her ass. NOT!! Actually it was the Housekeeper's ass that did the firing, with a little help from your ass's bad attitude.

"I think it's time," her ass wrote, "we went our separate ways."

She left this ass-written note on the still-sticky-with-last-night's-alcoholic-mishaps kitchen table, along with an empty can of Scrubbing Bubbles, and went her separate way, presumably to the nearest nave, where she presumably got down on her housemaid's knees and thanked the lordourgod for having finally had the cajones to quit that evil woman's cleavage-and-icon-riddled den of iniquity, havemercyonmysoul, amen.

Not having a soul, your separate way took you directly to the nearest liquor store, where you stocked up on your own version of spirits. Speaking of which, did you hear about the woman who drove around with a mummy in the front seat of her car for ten months? It happened in California. Where people will do just about anything, and some people will do just about anything for the carpool lane.

When she lived in California -- yes, Dear Reader, she's one of THEM -- your sister used to know this...mummy. But that was another lifetime, as they say, not to mention another story. One for a dark and stormy night. Like the night you stole the hydrangeas.

You were working late -- the preschool where you teach is annexed to a church, of all places, canyoufuckingbelieveit? -- and the hydrangeas were beckoning to you under a crescent moon just beyond the window where you sat, christlike, cutting out bodies for the upcoming Meet My Family unit. Next thing you know you're out there in the moonlight, scissors in hand, wandering through the hedge of four-to-five-foot hydrangeas that skirts the building, ducking like a serial killer every time a car passed. You scored a couple dozen stiffs, er, stems, stuffing them into the back of the Jeep like corpses, and crept home along the back roads under the grinning moon.

Now the hydrangeas people your living room, their encephalitic heads bowed as if in solemn prayer, like so many cherubim, chiding you on your sinful urges and recent shameful stealing binge. From a fucking church! Of all places!

"You should be ashamed," they chide, "but it has been shown that you are a cleavage-and-icon-worshiping drunken pagan atheist and have no shame, so we shall take your shame unto ourselves and shall wail and lament on behalf of your sad and grievous ass forevermore, lordhearourprayer, amen."

But it's open season, everything's fair game. At least you're not a mummy. Yet. These days you're not even a mommy, but that's another story. There's always another story. Like the one you'll be telling the authorities when they haul your ass to jail for picking off hunters and Tea Partiers with a deer rifle from your perch atop the Old Clock Tower downtown.

"Just thinning the herd, officer, thinning the herd."

Not This Year

2010-11-01T23:11:00.000-07:00

For Halloween this year my husband and I bolted the doors and doused the lights and rounded up the canine fur-bearer and tiptoed past the ghosts on the landing to the third floor where we lit the candles and pulled the curtains and burnt incense and streamed Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" and ran an old black-and-white movie with the sound off then pushed aside the skeletons in the closet and staged a fashion show with purchases from a recent shopping spree we undertook to update our eighties wardrobes but first we got stoned.

In honor of the black-and-white movie and the black-and-white holiday and life being anything but black-and-white I declared shoulders once again haute couture and installed MAG16X football pads into each new sweater and paraded around through the wafting air in cigarette jeans and fuck me pumps like some JC Penney Frankenstein until the cobwebs in the corners started to smoke and we cracked the windows to equalize the pressure and saw that the street outside our haunted house was massing with children but none of them ours.

Now it was up to us to keep the fur-bearer preoccupied lest she notice the wandering urchins and commence to agitate so we ratcheted the soundtrack and threw caution out the window and played hide the bone where's the bone the bone is hiding where could it be? until the rafters rang and the bats caved and we drowned out the greedy demands of the masked tricksters infesting the neighborhood where all these years I've been firing up the pumpkin and lighting the lamps and answering the door in a witch hat and cackle but not this year.

Erratum

2010-10-19T10:02:00.000-07:00

"A poem should not mean, but be." Who said that?

Unlike narrative, which can run stinking and drooling over the page like a much-beloved-and-forgiven toddler ("Oooh, isn't she just too adorable, the little poopy-pants?"), a poem is bare bones, word-specific, succinct. It cannot afford sloppiness, be it a wayward adverb, or some bit of extraneous punctuation. Ew.

Because of its exacting nature, it is my experience that a poem requires a gestational period at least as long as an elephant's, and prior to this blog, I pretty much adhered to that rule. But blogs are nothing if not ongoing (in my case they're mostly nothing), thus the preemie of my October 15th post. Which is currently at the gill stage, and will continue to develop lungs for weeks to come, possibly years, if the poet lives that long.

But an early delivery was induced because that's show biz. Due to certain circumstances on The Road of Life, my posts have been few and far between of late, and I'm aware that countless fans breathlessly await word. Thus, the preemie. If you haven't yet read it, don't. Wait a few months and try again. Then a few more.

Meanwhile, I remain enslaved by yet another accidental poem ("I didn't mean to do it, officer, the gun just went off!"), in thrall to the ever-elusive comma, not to mention adverb, which will let me sleep through the night once again and not wake wild-eyed and suicidal at 3 a.m. screaming, "Omigod that's four 'suddenlies'!"

Just so you know.

Nightrunning

2010-10-15T17:04:00.000-07:00

After you run, you drive home through the dusk,
past houses lit from within like pumpkins.
TV screens large as gardens, pictures lined up hopefully
along sand walls, or is it beige? Suddenly it matters.
You want to jump from the car, pound on a door,
inquire of the Occupant, "Which is it? Which?"

But before the drive home, before the pumpkin houses,
you run. Later each time until the time it's too late,
when you start out at dusk and run headlong into night.
Treeshadows looming against the sky, distance closing,
deer unseen until they move, at the last moment, like stalkers.
Now you're a moth following streetlights around a bend.

But before the mothwoman, before the last streetlight,
there was this: will you ever stop pretending?
That the houses don't make you weep, the lined-up pictures,
the windowlight spilling onto lawns? Somehow you can't see it,
somehow it eludes you. Who you are, who you are not.
And then you meet yourself, by chance, on a nightrun.

Fun Shit

2010-10-01T23:17:00.000-07:00

There's a toilet seat in the window of our garage. You can see it from the alley as you drive past. It's been there all summer, I only just discovered this. Like I'm the last to know.

My husband put it there, who else. He claims it was the only shelf space left. When I complained, aghast, he told me to put up curtains. In the garage? Only people from New Jersey do that.

My husband has absolutely no sense of feng shui. He calls it "fun shit."

"All that fun shit," he says, "that's your job. My job is to pay for everything."

He's got a point.

But a toilet seat? In full view? What will the neighbors think? Nothing they haven't already. Still, it's hard enough being the resident BoHos without such blatant advertising.

I noticed the toilet seat last weekend when I was driving back from the Funny Farm with my daughter. I'd taken the long way home down the alley. Actually, my daughter saw it first.

"Mom," she said, "there's a toilet seat in the garage window."

"Good Christ," I said, sideswiping the neighbor's Virgin Mary statue. I'm not sure if this was due to the toilet seat, or the fact that my daughter was talking to me. It's a habit she's picked up since her stay at The Farm. I'm trying to get used to it.

My daughter was having her first overnight at home in more than two months. I tried to remember what it had felt like to return home from college for the first time. I remember thinking the house seemed really small.

"Mom," said my daughter, "the house seems really small."

I also remember feeling dizzy, like I might be dreaming, like everything felt surreal.

"Mom," said my daughter, "I feel dizzy, like I'm dreaming, like everything feels surreal."

Thirty-thousand-and-counting in insurance to unearth a word like "surreal." It might be worth it.

During the next twenty-three hours and forty-eight minutes, my daughter ate and ate and ate and ate, then slept for eleven hours and seventeen minutes, then rose again and ate some more. In between all this eating she talked. And talked and talked and talked. And cried. And laughed. And talked some more. This from a child whose record for not speaking once stood at forty-seven hours and eleven minutes. The poor thing was in danger of hyperventilating from over-oratization. I was developing a mild case of tinnitus.

Two months ago the choice was clear: either let our daughter live in the TV room and leave trays of food outside the door until she turned eighteen, or call The Farm. We opted for Door Number Two.

When I finally put my daughter back in the car last Saturday afternoon (with a bag of Lay's Pickle Chips and a bottle of Smart Water) and waved good-bye as my husband drove her away, I found myself wondering what it would take to keep her at The Farm until, say, the cows came home. Or the llamas or the sheep or the pygmy goats, to name a few other residents.

But this thought was just a momentary lapse. Like so many other momentary lapses. Like, for instance, when one lapses momentarily and lobs a broken toilet seat onto a stack of old shingles, not considering that there just might possibly be another point of view. Like the one from the alley, for instance.

I glanced over my shoulder, hoping against hope, but it was still there, glowing like the moon in the garage window. The choice was clear: either roll up my sleeves and start reorganizing -- which could take until people stopped making jokes about New Jersey -- or measure for curtains.

I stepped into the garage and looked around. Even if I opted for Plan B, I couldn't get anywhere near the window until I'd reorganized everything else. I eyed the overflowing recyling bin. The wall of seventies sound equipment. The maze of trash cans and live traps and gardening paraphernalia and dead two-stroke engines.

"Let the fun begin," I said to myself, already making arrangements in my mind.

Minimum Maintenance

2010-09-11T01:11:00.000-07:00

At long last...

Minimum Maintenance

WWRD?

2010-09-01T06:21:00.000-07:00

We're murdering mice here. We have no choice. Actually my husband's doing the dirty work. I simply signed the death warrant.

Many moons ago, long before Google or "Real Housewives" or Michele Bachmann, my husband and I sat by the light of an oil lamp at the cabin one stormy winter's eve and played poker and drank Jack Daniels and watched a mother mouse methodically transport a plethora of babies from one corner of our tarpaper shack to the other.

Over the counter and through the stove, to the woodbox they did go.

We'd glance up blearily, a couple of one-eyed jacks, and by the time the storm finally abated that fateful night, we'd counted no less than seven, make that eleven baby mice. In celebration of such rodential fecundity, we shot one last bump, and having affectionately bestowed Mama Mouse with the surname Roughshod, which had a certain ring to it, we closed up shop and settled in for a long winter's nap.

Twenty-five years later we woke up.

A normal red-blooded American would've put the kibosh on things that very first night. A normal red-blooded American would've JUST SAID NO. A normal red-blooded American would've had a supply of mousetraps in her storage shed, if not Decon, and failing these options, she would've simply loaded up the twenty-two and, walls be damned, there's a goddamn mouse running roughshod over the goddamn joint, BLAMMO! Take that you rat bastard, BLAMMO! I can goddamn patch that hole in the morning, I'm working on a goddamn fullhouse here!

Of course, Dear Reader, a normal red-blooded American would probably not have purchased this particular piece of property in the first place. She would've taken one look at the squirrel-and-mice-infested tarpaper shack and the Eisenhower Administration outhouse and the quarter-mile trek over rugged outcroppings down to a lake whose average temperature is 45 degrees Fahrenheit, and she would've hightailed it back to the land of sunblock and jet skis as fast as her three-quarter-ton Dodge could carry her.

As they say in this neck of the woods, it keeps the riff-raff out. "It" meaning this neck of the woods.

But even in this neck of the woods, when a mouse runs across your face as you're lying in bed trying to fall asleep after a long hard day of trekking up and down a quarter-mile path of rugged outcroppings, it's time for a new regime. The reign of the House of Roughshod had come to a close.

We swept the mouseshit off the chair seats and considered our options.

Option Number One: artillery. The only firearm we own is a pistol my father brought back from World War II, which I inherited upon his death. It currently resides inside a lockbox in a locked second floor storage cabinet at our house in town, though I seem to have misplaced the keys. In any case, there are no bullets and the pistol isn't loaded, which is more than I can say for myself most days.

Door Number Two: Decon. Does the word slowagonizingdeath mean anything to you? If so, you'll understand why Decon is not an option, she said, gazing down from her stance atop the Moral Highground.

Thirdly: the ever popular live trap. We've used these in the past, sending untold scores of Roughshod descendants into the witness protection program up across Highway 61, but for reasons unknown, the traps lost their effectiveness several years back. As if the wee varmints got hip to our tactics. And aren't they just so adorable, the little darlings, with those teeny tiny hands and those big googly eyes?

Fuck.

Moral Highground be damned, we're left with no other choice: the nuclear option.

It's fast (one can only hope), painless (one can only pray), and easy. Except this isn't moi setting the mousetraps and disposing of the bodies, this is my poor long-suffering serial-mousekiller of a husband, who at last count had already dispatched eight victims and counting, to a far far better place than that old tarpaper shack (one can only wish). Meanwhile, here I sit 150 miles away, weeping over email updates of the carnage whilst drunkenly nibbling slices of baby gouda atop Target-brand Reduced Fat Triscuit knockoffs.

I must've purchased these knockoffs last month, yeah, that's it. Because I'm currently boycotting Target, aren't you? Something to do with Michele Bachmann, I think. Or better yet one of her knockoffs, yeah, that's it.

But here's the thing: I'm morbidly distraught over this killing spree. Moi, who practices catch-and-release when it comes to wayward insects and goes on a morphine drip during deer season. Now I find myself in this goddamn ethical quandary. On the one hand, there's compassion. On the other, there's mouseshit blanketing all available surfaces in the tarpaper shack and the shitters are skittering across the bedclothes whilst we slumber.

I mean, would Richard Gere turn the other cheek after a mouse ran over it? Of course, Dear Reader, one would never find Richard Gere in a tarpaper shack with an Eisenhower Administration outhouse in the first place, now would one. Just finding Richard Gere anywhere would be the thrill of a lifetime, I'm sure. What I wouldn't give for an audience with The Man. I wonder, what would he have to say about...well, any of this? the mice? the insects? Michele Bachmann? moi?

BTW, what's your favorite Richard Gere movie? "An Officer and a Gentleman"? "American Gigolo"? "Pretty Woman"? Here's a piece of movie trivia for you: what actor played the insane killer in "Looking for Mr. Goodbar"? You guessed it!

Speaking of insane killers, I just checked my email and the death toll stands at thirteen. I need more wine. Actually, I need to shut down my computer, it's simply too distressing. Better yet, I could order a Richard Gere movie from Netflix-Play-Instantly, yeah, that's it! Here's one I've never heard of, "No Mercy." God knows what it's about, but the title has a certain ring to it, wouldn't you say?

If Not Irony

2010-08-17T10:23:00.000-07:00

I was profiled at the Blues Fest. Twenty-five thousand people, they choose me. It's like Arizona around here.

Actually it is like Arizona around here. I'm talking weather, man. The North Shore...the last place on earth. But the first to benefit from climate change. I haven't seen a parka since April, or heard the furnace kick on. No ice on the birdbath, no frost on the tomatoes, it's downright miraculous. It's a bird! It's a plane! It's the fucking sun! I actually have a tan.

Not that my tan had anything to do with it. Tan or no tan, the ticket nazis took one look at me and stopped the presses. I wasn't strip-searched or anything, but the experience was revealing nonetheless. Afterward I interviewed a few onlookers.

"What is it about me?" I asked.

When the laughter subsided, one guy was kind enough to explain.

"You look like an ornery aging stoner," said my husband.

Thanks for the honesty, hon.

I'll give him the "aging" and the "stoner," but I object to the "ornery." This was Blues Fest, man, I was downright mellow. Blissful, even. I think the "ornery" has more to do with being of Finnish extraction. Finns are born looking crabby, they can't help it. It's their facial genes. At least this was true in my case.

I remember Great Aunt Helen from Tennessee teetering over my crib, exclaiming,

"My stars, what an interesting baby, but why is it scowling?"

I was sitting lotus reading a Life magazine upside down to show off. I was two if I was a day. I'd learned early on that showing off reaped its share of rewards -- candy, money, drugs. Great Aunt Helen from Tennessee was always good for oodles of shit, having married into the Greyhound Bus Line.

Following in her footsteps, I myself eventually developed a relationship with the Greyhound Bus Line, but mostly it had to do with various attempts to get the hell out of Dodge at certain junctures in a long and disorganized life. Now I've finally accepted the fact that I'm stuck in Dodge for the duration, there's nothing to be done about it, my stars, shut the fuck up and pass the pipe.

I wonder, does anybody ride the bus anymore?

At one point during Blues, I found myself inside a police vehicle the size of a bus. In fact, it was a bus, a tricked-out RV with surveillance cameras and state-of-the-art computer equipment and two darling little yellow Tasers lying in a corner peacefully minding their own business. And there's me, your garden-variety recently-profiled ornery aging stoner, being given a guided tour of Command Central by an Actual Cop, while other Actual Cops mill around outside actually chatting. Surreal is the word that comes to mind. This unique experience came about compliments of the next door neighbor, an Actual Cop now retired, who, apparently, has a sense of humor, if not irony.

I myself have been retired since my twenties. And if anyone along the way had told me that one day I'd be Actual Friends with a Cop, I'd have had to wait for my laughter to subside before asking for a wee pinch of whatever it was the clairvoyant was ingesting just then. Those were the days, man.

Those were the days. Once upon a time I used to be in my forties. Before that I used to be in my thirties. Before that, as mentioned, I actually used to be in my twenties, if you can believe it. At one point in my twenties, before I retired, I went through a bi period: I didn't shave my legs or armpits, but wore tons of eye makeup. It was the Seventies, man. My Friend the Cop says she used to be bi, too, only with this difference: she didn't shave her legs, just her armpits. Or was it vice versa? I didn't ask about the eye makeup.

I wonder, does anyone grow her body hair anymore? In America, I mean.

The morning after Blues, I woke up to the phone ringing.

"Who could be calling at this hour?" I scowled. It was noon.

But it wasn't the phone, it was the new dryer. Apparently my husband had thrown in the towels before heading to the golf course (if anyone along the way had told me that one day I'd be Married to a Guy Who Golfs...). Now the towels were dry and the dryer was communicating this information. In the key of C. I know C when I hear it. I'd been hearing it for days, man.

So once again it was the usual knockdown dragout, but we survived Blues for another year. Now it's back to Dodge, where the appliances send text messages and the tomatoes are ripening and I'm still bi, only with new guidelines: I drink beer and wine. Simultaneously. With tons of eye makeup of course.

A Safe Place

2010-07-27T01:11:00.000-07:00

Here's how you get your fourteen-year-old daughter to go to the loony bin: you lie. It isn't really a loony bin, it's a Residential Treatment Center. In the old days we called it the loony bin.

Here's what you don't say:

"We're at our wits end, you've completely lost your marbles, you're going to the loony bin."

Here's what you do say:

"Take a shower, wear clean underwear, we're going for a drive."

If the fourteen-year-old in question is at least one point above plant life, she'll no doubt ask the following:

"Where are we driving to?"

You're prepared for this. Resist the temptation to admonish her about ending a sentence with a preposition. Instead, say:

"We're going to meet a new therapist."

That's what they're called these days, therapists. In the old days we called them the guys in the white coats.

As you drive to the loony bin to see the guys in the white coats, turn to the fourteen-year-old in the backseat and say:

"What a beautiful day!"

She'll never suspect a thing, you're always saying inane bullshit like this. Because if you said:

"How are you feeling about this?"

she'd immediately become suspicious and jump from the moving vehicle. The reason for all this subterfuge is to prevent just such an occurrence.

For instance, if you'd sat her down the previous evening and attempted to explain this upcoming event, no matter how you presented it, she would've reacted negatively. In the old days we called this going bonkers. As in, first she'd go bonkers, then she'd run the fuck away.

After meandering through the countryside for awhile, when you finally pull up in front of the loony bin, don't say:

"It's not as bad as jail, but it ain't no summer camp."

Instead, say:

"What a beautiful campus!"

As loony bins go, it is a lovely setting. Two hundred acres of woods and meadows, old growth pine, a gymnasium, animal barns. Of course none of this matters, because the truth is, you've just lured an unsuspecting fourteen-year-old here under false pretenses. In the old days we called this pulling a fast one.

At this point, here's what you say to yourself:

"Fuckenay, I just pulled a fast one."

By the time the guys in the white coats have explained to your daughter that she'll be staying at the loony bin for awhile, that she'll be their special guest, you're all so hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of the grand old building, you couldn't find your way out again to save your sorry ass souls.

Resist the temptation to say:

"Did anybody keep track of the number of locked doors we just passed through?"

Instead, say:

"This is the safest place on earth."

At this point, if you have an ounce of cajones left, you ask everyone else to leave, to please wait out in the hallway, and they do (first they unlock the door). Then you turn to your daughter and say:

"Do you trust me?"

By now she'll be staring daggers at you (in the old days we called it giving you the evil eye). Ignore this, and say it again:

"Do you trust me?"

She has no choice. You've finally gotten her attention. There's nothing to be done. She nods.

Here's where you say:

"Everything is going to be okay."

Then you say it again.

Now there's nothing left to do but leave. You follow the guys in the white coats back through the locked doors (there are five), out into the shrieking sun, to the parking lot.

Here's where you look back, once. Then you get in your car, turn the key, and begin the long road home.

Shrapnel

2010-07-14T07:32:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago July 5th our daughter arrived. We called her our little firecracker. Turns out she was more like a grenade. She finally pulled the pin.

Or maybe the pin was set on a ten-year delay, and she pulled it the moment she stepped off that plane in her yellow organdy "wedding dress." I saved the dress, along with the black patent leather Mary Janes I bought her later on, like other mothers save baptismal gowns and worn out baby shoes.

And I've always wondered, should I have bronzed the Mary Janes? Should it have mattered?

This morning I got an email from a friend who wrote to tell me that her cat died, unexpectedly, two days ago. As did her brother two months ago, her aunt a year ago, her young nephew five years ago, and I catapulted back in time to this: in the space of two years, my mother died, my father died, my dog died.

Just like that.

Between my mother and my father -- that is, between their deaths -- our daughter arrived in her yellow dress. She called it her wedding dress because, she told us, she'd worn it to a wedding, and the bride told her she was pretty. The wedding was in California, as was she, in her fourth? fifth? foster family, I forget.

But she wasn't in California any longer, we told her, now she was "home."

Whatever that means.

* * *

When our daughter fell from the sky into our lives, the first order of business was to calm her terror at meeting the husky. We later learned she'd been mauled by a dog in the second? third? foster family, I forget. The next order of business was to rid her four-and-a-half-year-old head of generations of head lice. We must've been napalming great-great-great-grandparents in that bathtub, yessireebob.

I can still see her little self stretched out on the porcelain, brown hair streaming toward the drain, brown eyes squinting steadily at the ceiling light, a stoic if slightly undersized buddha. We later learned delousing was a routine experience for her, right up there with teeth-brushing and bed-wetting.

But for the dog and the cat, the entire household acquired lice, including the people, the rugs, the clothes, the linen, half of the furniture and one of the neighbors. At the time we told ourselves this was symbolism at its best, the ultimate literary device at work. Washing away the old life, welcoming in the new.

Except the old life has proved resistant to the last, a dark horse stalking us like a shadow, tenacious and inevitable.

* * *

"After the first death, there is no other."

When my mother died, I believed I finally understood what the poet meant. Cats, dogs, babies, dreams...somehow I survived all the losses. And then my mother died, and the world changed in a nanosecond. Utterly. Completely.

Just like that.

Never again, I thought, it will never happen like that again.

But. Now. This. Death of a different kind. A child (not mine, mine, not mine) in danger of herself. And the world has changed one more time.

The first order of business in this new world is learning how to move around in it, how not to come in contact with anything. It's the shrapnel. I didn't think grenades contained shrapnel, I was wrong. It's everywhere. The people, the rugs, the clothes, the linen, half of the furniture and one of the neighbors. The entire household has acquired shrapnel, including the dog and the cat.

I've got a piece lodged an inch from my heart, if you can believe that. And I'm afraid to sit down due to a couple of good-sized chunks in my ass. I was able to remove the shard by my left eye, but a tear duct was damaged in the process and I can't stop weeping.

I want to lay our daughter down in the bathtub and napalm this all away. Out with the old, etc. Trouble is, she no longer fits. Not stretched out in the bathtub, for starters, and she's rapidly outgrowing other venues as well. Drugs won't help. That's what Dr. Else says, can you believe that? I kid you not, a shrink named "Dr. Else."

"You can't medicate this away," says Dr. Else. "You can't love it away."

Thanks for telling me, doc. Anything else I should know?

I find myself doing insomniac drunken 2 a.m. Googling. Borderline Personality, Attachment Disorder, Adjustment Disorder, Narcissistic Personality. Followed by a three-hour session of Free Cell in yet another in a continuing series of useless attempts to clear my blown-out brain.

Last night while I was (miraculously!) sleeping, two explosions occurred. In my dreams! There I am, morphing along through yet another in a continuing series of useless dreamscenes, when KABAM! there's an explosion just offstage. A couple scenes later, it happens again, right beside me, KABAM! I wake up and check the sheets for blood.

* * *

Beginning just after her first birthday, our daughter lived with us for half a year. But she arrived with strings attached. Big complicated knotted-up strings. In the form of a big complicated knotted-up birthmother. A niece, to be exact.

At the time, we lived out from town, in the woods beside a river. While the niece/birthmother watched soap operas and blew smoke up the chimney and speed dialed California from the sofabed down in the rec room, I'd wander the woods beside the river with the baby, pointing out various woodsy, rivery things: grosbeak! dragonfly! red pine! wood tick!

If the weather didn't cooperate (and this is some of the most uncooperative weather on the planet, jack), the baby and I would hang out in the house in the first floor great room, wandering an ever-shifting landscape of baby toys. She loved the dolls and the blocks and the books and the stuffed animals, but her favorite by far was a plastic musical toy which sat on the floor and played several familiar children's songs -- Twinkle Little Star, Playmate, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Pop Goes the Weasel. She'd push one song after another after another and sway in a wobbly circle on her chubby legs, flashing a killer dimple and squinting her eyes in delight.

When our daughter left us -- that is, when we put the niece/birthmother/baby on a plane back to California -- we stuffed as many items as we could into their shabby suitcases, including the plastic musical toy. Three years later, when our now four-and-a-half-year-old-soon-to-be-adopted daughter returned alone in that yellow dress, she brought the musical toy with her, tucked deep in the bottom of her suitcase.

By this time we'd moved into our current house in town. We placed the toy in the bump out -- the California room, we call it, filled as it is with plants and sun, with a view of the backyard -- on a low shelf beside the patio door, and there it has stayed. Through the years one or another of us has occasionally taken it out and reenacted the song and dance routine from that time on the river, in that way families have of ritualizing certain memories.

Then late on the afternoon of June 4th, six weeks ago, our daughter stood at the kitchen counter on her sturdy gymnast's legs and ate a bottle of ibuprofen.

Sometime in the early hours of June 5th, as my husband and I drank wine in the California room and stared out at the darkness while our pumped-out drugged-up daughter crashed in a room above us, the musical toy began, by itself, to play.

Just like that.

Was it the heat? the humidity? the shrapnel? What I know is this: the toy proceeded to play, briefly and sporadically, from its perch on the shelf by the door, for several weeks. Symbolism at its best, the ultimate literary device at work. Until finally, unable to bear such pathos any longer, my husband turned it over, and it stopped.

(Lunar eclipse, Grand Cross,

2010-06-26T01:11:00.000-07:00

full moon in Capricorn...I rest my case)

Moving the Pig Around

2010-06-19T09:30:00.000-07:00

After my daughter ate a few dozen ibuprofen in an effort to change the game, I started moving the pig around. Under the bird feeder, next to the red pine, over by the swingset. I just couldn't land it.

This is not an easy pig. My husband thinks 75-80 pounds. I bought her with the help of a Gift Card the preschoolers gave me on the last day of school. The next day my husband and I drove in the hot June sun to a garden center on the outskirts of town, looking for petunias. I found one, only not the kind that grows in a pot. I turned a corner, there she stood, sun rays shooting out around her like a halo.

After we'd hauled her home (rather, after my husband hauled her home) and corralled her in her first location beneath the bird feeder, I went into a swoon and asked for a vision. In laywoman's terms: I got drunk and conjured a name.

Not for a moment did I consider Petunia. Or even Wilbur. Take me out and shoot me if I'm ever typical. No, by the time the moon rose that evening in a night shot with stars, I'd decided on the perfect moniker for this new and unusual piece of statuary: Charlotte. So I named a pig after a spider, so what. Stranger things have happened. And then, one of them did.

When someone you think you know (to say nothing of love) does something so completely out of left field as to stand at the kitchen counter and eat thirty ibuprofen, the first thing you realize is this: you really don't know this person. The second thing is this: you are now in a whole new ball game. Suddenly there you are -- new game, new rules, you're playing with a stranger, you don't know the score.

And there it is, the truth: you don't know the score. Even though you used to. Even if most of the time you were fucking behind, even if you were fucking losing, you knew the fucking score. Not only that, you knew your position. You knew where you should be and what was expected of you. You knew what your job was. You were expected to play, to the best of your ability, the game.

Now someone has gone and changed the game. There are other truths, but this is the truth you have come to.

* * *

When I went to France two years ago, I brought back a pig. A flying pig. A cast iron flying pig who weighs as much as a small lawnmower, with wings outstretched and an upturned cherubic face. The customs officials called her the Angel Pig, and she created quite a stir going through security. Improbable as she was, I carried her with me in the taxis and through the airports and on the planes, and I knew from the beginning exactly where her place would be, once we got home: on the sideboard in the bump out beside the white ginger jar lamp.

Not so with Charlotte. Charlotte's a pig of a different color.

To begin with, Charlotte is nowhere near cherubic. Her expression is far from blissful. Truth be told, Charlotte looks like she'd as soon bite you as look at you. Though it's anyone's guess why, Charlotte is one royally pissed-off pig. Which is in part why I fell for her. Her crabby substantiality charmed me.

The fact is, pissed-off or not, Charlotte weighs as much as a small piano, and keeping my husband's back in mind, I forthwithly installed her beneath the bird feeder with the intention of its being a permanent placement. Then my daughter went and had her little snack, and ever since, for reasons unknown, Charlotte's been on the roam.

I know she belongs somewhere, I just don't know where. I go in and out of a trance state, visualizing scenarios, but she's become almost impossible to place. One minute she's ensconced mid-lawn among the hawkweed, the next, she guards the birdbath while the starlings shower her with indifference. Sometimes I imagine that when she finally finds her true home, her expression will change. She'll gradually begin to chill, maybe even break a smile. Here I am, expecting something miraculous, and I'm not even a believer.

Although I do believe in some things. That life can change on a dime. That a ref can throw everyone out of the game and call it a day and leave town. That there's nothing you can fucking do about it. That if you continually move a 75-pound concrete pig around your backyard, you're going to pay for it. Or rather, your husband will. And it's just his luck, there's not an ibuprofen to be found.

(Broke down...

2010-06-14T12:22:00.000-07:00

...waiting for a tow)

As Seen in Real Life

2010-06-06T09:22:00.000-07:00

For Mother's Day this year I considered putting myself on a plane to Moscow. It was cost-prohibitive, so I queued up "Doctor Zhivago" and settled in with a bottle of vodka.

I can now add Netflix-Play-Instantly to my list of addictions. My husband gave me the hardware for my birthday. I'll say he did. He also gave me the hardware to enable the upstairs television to stream the aforementioned Netflix-Play-Instantly, and it's been streaming ever since.

My favorite genre is "Thrillers," though I'm not averse to the occasional romantic comedy or an award-winning documentary. Netflix also allows me to combine genres, then do a search, but when I enter "Comedic Romantic Thriller Based on a True Story," I get the usual "Item not found, check that all words are spelled correctly and try again."

Obviously there isn't yet a genre that adequately mirrors my life, but Netflix is working on it. They care about me.

I've been watching on average seven movies per night. I'm exhausted, I've lost weight, my right eye won't stop twitching. This has nothing to do with the vodka. Last night I watched "Brideshead Revisited," "Brokeback Mountain," "When Harry Met Sally," "Silence of the Lambs," "My Best Friend's Wedding," "Serpico," "Uncle Buck," and was halfway through "Eleven Questions to Ask the Dalai Lama" when I fell asleep at Number Six ("Why aren't Westerners happy?").

A table saw woke me at noon.

As soon as the snow melts, the Asshole nextdoor drags his table saw out onto the patio and proceeds to make furniture for the next six months. He's not even Amish, he's an Asshole. He's also a stay-at-home Attorney. Meanwhile the wife and kids go shopping, obviously not for furniture. I think the sound of the screaming table saw bothers them, to say nothing of the screaming neighbor. The wife should get the stay-at-home a prescription to Netflix-Play-Instantly, which should put him back on the road to enlightenment in no time.

Rumor has it the Dalai Lama doesn't suffer fools gladly, which should put my chances of ever having an audience with him in this lifetime at one in six trillion. Still, I've assembled a list of questions, should I perchance run into him in another lifetime:

Can Asshole stay-at-home Attorneys enter the Kingdom of Heaven?
That last was a trick question, Dalai, you and I both know there is no Kingdom of Heaven. Right?
Can one choose what one wants to be in the next lifetime?
Or is the next lifetime a crapshoot like everything in this lifetime has been?
How does one go about getting a better job in the next lifetime?
How about better hair?
Is there a limit to the number of times one can come back as an Asshole?
Is pretty much everyone in Chisholm an Asshole?
Will I ever speak French?
Do BP executives come back as game animals?
If that last is true, Dal, I'll join the fucking NRA in the next lifetime. Right?

I myself practice the infomercial version of Buddhism, as seen on TV. While shuffling my way along the Noble Eightfold Path, I took a slight detour at the Twofold intersection, and ended up at this sleazy roadhouse near the Canadian border. Being a Westerner by birth, I was looking for a shortcut to enlightenment, who can blame me.

Turns out this roadhouse suits me to a T. I can practice mindfulness by way of staying centered on my barstool for weeks on end, and there's a television to assist in this pursuit. It's a very Now place. In fact, dig the name of the joint: the Present Tense.

My Present Tension has to do with the Asshole next door and his infernal table saw, but in the great scheme of things, it's small potatoes. There are so many other possible scenarios. I could, for instance, be a 90-year-old bald hasbeen with elevated liver enzymes living in a padded cell with an adolescent serial killer whom I'd like to put on a plane to pretty much anywhere. (I wonder what Netflix genre that would be?)

But instead, Play-Instant-Karma notwithstanding, I find myself in this nice out-of-the-way hole-in-the-wall with this nice barstool and this nice television and this nice endless queue of movies to last me until eternity, or until the next lifetime, whichever comes first. All of which makes me wonder what I did in the last lifetime to deserve this. Right?

(It's just a phase...

2010-05-28T00:40:00.000-07:00

...back next week)

Leftovers

2010-05-13T07:37:00.000-07:00

The other evening at the eighth grade choir concert, I run into an old colleague. I haven't seen him in fifteen years. We chat for a bit, catch up. He's holding writing workshops at a local college, spending the summer in Spain, publishing his fourth book of poetry.

"And what are you up to?" he says.

I look around for the morphine drip.

"I teach preschool," I say.

Sometimes it's all you have left. The truth.

* * *

A former student of mine has named her pet after me. A fish. She's now six. The student, not the fish. If this fish lives to be six days, I'll eat my hat. Actually, I don't wear hats, I have a weird-shaped head. Sort of like a fish.

"This is new territory," I say to Former Student's mother, when she pops in to tell me about my latest namesake.

Last year I had a Barbie named after me, which is more like it.

Maybe I should've mentioned the fish to Old Colleague. He, of all people, should understand irony.

* * *

The preschoolers pronounce "ironing" like "irony," with a hard r.

"I'm i-ron-ing my wedding dress," says Brittany, when I ask what she's doing with that roll of paper towel.

The paper towel is draped over the yellow plastic ironing board and trails across the carpet like a winding sheet. Later she and Benjamin, who've been playing house, decide they don't need a baby after all and put it back in the dryer.

Old Colleague appears to have taken something out of the dryer.

Old Colleague's maybe ten years older than I (if that's possible), with a daughter in eighth grade. This is not the same daughter from fifteen years ago, who's probably pushing forty. Sneaking a glance, I determine it's not the same wife, either, who's probably pushing daisies.

* * *

My daughter and I are in the car, headed for the local alternative high school, where we're due for a guided tour. I ask if she knows a girl named Johnson in the eighth grade, Johnson being Old Colleague's last name.

"You're fucking joking," says my daughter.

I take this as a positive sign. She hasn't spoken to me in 37 hours.

"She's probably blond," I say, trying to hide my excitement, "with blue eyes."

My daughter stares at me, mouth agape. I notice -- more excitement! -- that her retainer's in! It didn't fall out of her pocket onto East Eighth Street after all!

The students -- that is, the entire student body -- of the middle school where my daughter has been doing time, were evacuated from the building on Monday while police dogs cased the joint. When this latest bomb threat was determined to be yet another in a long line of fake bomb threats, a cop allowed my daughter to pet one of them. One of the dogs, not the cops.

"He licked my hand," my daughter told me.

Which is what I feel like doing whenever the evil forcefield that surrounds her falls away for a nanosecond.

* * *

"He licked my hand."

Those were my daughter's last words, until now.

"Do you know how many blond-blue-eyed Johnsons there are in that fucking craphole?" she says from the passenger seat, her retainer flashing in the sun streaming through the moon roof.

I consider mentioning that her graduating class at the alternative school will consist of less than fifty students, but I think better of it. Instead, I reapply my sunglasses and turn Lady Gaga up to warp ten.

I'm absolutely mad about Lady Gaga. She positively sends me. My daughter wanted to send me to a home when she found out about this. She'd asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I told her a Lady Gaga CD.

"You're perverted," she said. Then she narrowed her eyes. "How do you even know about Lady Gaga?"

My daughter thinks I live in a cave when it comes to contemporary culture. She thinks I'm totally in the dark. Blind as a bat. Head in the sand. Pretty much she's right.

But I do have my moments.

I was driving to work awhile back when I turned on the radio, which just happened to be tuned to one of my daughter's favorite stations, where some bee-otch just happened to be shouting about not wanting to be friends, just wanting to fuck (sentiments, my husband likes to remind me, I expressed to him the first time we met), and ooh-la-la, sis-boom-bah, that was it. My hair stood on end. My palms started to itch. I almost rear-ended a Miller Lite truck.

You know it when you hear it. The real thing. I wanted to lace up the Oberhamers and hit the pavement.

* * *

Old Colleague and I are commiserating about the sorry state of affairs at the middle school.

"If it's Monday, there must be a bomb threat," I say.

"How many is this now?" he says.

"Nine," I say, "maybe forty."

I'm trying to recover from my unfortunate career revelation. If I can prove an intact wit, I might still stand a chance. Maybe he'll think I was just pulling his leg about the preschool thing.

Just then my husband gets a text message. Did I mention my husband is here? He reads it, texts back, reaches for his jacket.

"Somebody's hungry," he says, "time to hit the road."

"Our daughter prefers not to be seen in public with us," I say, wittily, to Old Colleague. "She communicates by code."

"They're all the same, aren't they?" says Old Colleague, smiling, shaking his successful old head, and I'm thinking, No, no they're not all the same, not at all.

I leave, then, before Old Colleague's daughter materializes. I don't want to know, I just don't. My husband follows me through the crowd, down the main hallway, out past the entrance doors, to where our daughter is waiting at the top of the steps, brown eyes watching, iPod in place.

"What's for dinner?" she asks, too loudly, over music only she can hear.

We walk down the stairs, out onto East Eighth Street. I look over at my husband.

"There's pasta from last night," he says.

"Refried beans from Tuesday," I say.

I look back at our daughter, who shrugs and turns the music up.

And Many Happy Returns

2010-05-07T08:07:00.000-07:00

"More than any other time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

Woody Allen

Blood on the Keys

2010-04-28T11:09:00.000-07:00

I've been sitting outside in the sun watching dinosaurs at the feeder. I really didn't want to come inside. It's 68 degrees (above zero!), all the screaming children are in school, all the solid citizens are at work, only deadbeats and dinosaurs left to enjoy god's globally-warmed-one-month-premature-spring creation. Except for sustaining a minor puncture wound to my hand compliments of the rusty needle-nose I used to pry apart a rusty wind chime, all's right with the world.

Well maybe not quite.

It's appropriate that our current unit down at the ol' preschool is the ever-popular DINOSAURS!, of which Yours Truly is officially one. Yes, Virginia, it's true, I'm celebrating (if that's the right word) a particularly gruesome birthday this week, and believe you me, I'm terrified. Scared shitless. Granted I'm also thrilled (actually I'm shocked) to be alive after all these years, but I never expected this milestone to arrive so...quickly. Where did the time go? What the fuck have I been doing for nine decades?

Obviously not pursuing any major career goals. Thus the sun on the deck at noon on a school day.

When people ask me what it is that I do, what line of work I'm in, I tell them with a nod to Mr. Keillor, "I'm an English Major." That should explain it. I was a wee lass at my mother's knee when first I wept over a poem, and I've been enslaved by the turn of a phrase ever since. As I recall, the poem in question was "The House With Nobody In It," which begins,

When e're I walk to Suffern
Along the Erie track,
I pass by a poor old farmhouse,
Its shingles all broken and black...

(Give me a moment to collect myself...)

It's a testament to the stranglehold words have always had on me that I didn't need to Google this. These lines are soldered permanently into some deep recess of my brain and will no doubt play a role in the last lucid moment I ever have. Which event may take place any day now.

Being an English Major releases you from a certain type of responsibility. You can't be expected to climb any proverbial ladders, corporate or otherwise, because the truth is you're motionally-challenged (as opposed to emotionally-challenged, the active state of most Math Majors). You're held captive by...well, by nothing a non-English Major would understand. You're simply held captive. By It All. Your natural instinct is not to take part in it, whatever it may be, rather, your instinct is to mull and observe and translate, using as few adverbs as possible.

Some people are called to English Majordom as surely as others are called to The Lord or The Law or California. It's in their blood.

I can see it now: the Movie of My Life, Part One, "I Was a Teenage English Major." And as such, I gave particular subjects wide berth. But now that I've broken a certain age barrier -- let's be honest, I've nuked it to kingdom come -- I find myself curious about some things which heretofore interested me nary a bit.

Like DINOSAURS!

The other day at preschool I learned that most dinosaurs were vegetarian! Like me! Not only that, they ruled the earth for -- get this! -- 150 million years!! Can you believe it? I'm blown away! I had no idea! What an ignorant sonofabitch I've been! And not only that (hold onto your hats!), did you know modern day birds evolved from dinosaurs? Isn't that a hoot? I can hear it now: "Look! Up in the air! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a dinosaur!"

The preschool, you may recall, is annexed to a church, and I know for a fact that several staff members there have their doubts about the bird/dinosaur connection. How do I know? I eavesdropped at the ol' water fountain. I wouldn't be surprised if one or two also have their doubts about the dinosaurs themselves, seeing as how dinosaurs aren't mentioned in the bible. Neither are Republicans, but that hasn't stopped them.

It tickles me pink to realize some people are even more ignorant than I.

I suppose I've passed it a hundred times,
But I always stop for a minute,
And look at the house, the tragic house,
The house with nobody in it...

(This is starting to sound like a description of Yours Truly...)

Speaking of pink, there's blood all over these keys. Compliments of my puncture wound, which is leaking copiously through the Bandaid. I found some peroxide in the medicine cabinet, but it's waaay past the Expiration Date. Like me. I considered pouring wine onto a dishrag and using that to clean the wound, but it was only a momentary lapse. Pouring wine anywhere other than down my throat? What a hoot!

I'm losing my touch. At last count I came up with nine adverbs. Speaking of touch, everything I've touched is taking on a decidedly (ten) pinkish hue. Just call me the anti-Midas. An apt title, given my English Major status. Turning anything into gold has never been my strong suit.

Guess I'll take my pink coffee cup down to the kitchen and get myself a refill, then look around for a better bandage. I'll check on the dog while I'm at it, any excuse to step outside on such a day. I might get lucky and spot a new dinosaur for the ol' life list. It may turn out to be my last lucid moment, you never know.

Bergman Revisited

2010-04-16T21:19:00.000-07:00

My husband claims he's never been depressed. That depresses me. At the very least he should be depressed because he's married to me. But no. He'll admit to occasional lapses of existential despair, as if that compares. Whatever. My husband comes from cheerful genes.

My mother was cheerful, it drove me to drink. Though I wasn't born a drunkard. I was born Finnish, like my father. I.E., congenitally angst-ridden. I can just picture it: My Birth. No sooner did I make it down the chute than I took one look around and stuck my thumb in my mouth. Later I replaced it with a bottle and other similarly-shaped objects.

How can anyone with half a brain live on this particular planet at this particular point in time and remain cheerful? It boggles the mind. Boggle. Isn't that a brand of wine? I wouldn't call my husband cheerful, that'd be a stretch. But he doesn't have an ounce of angst in his body. And he calls himself a Scandinavian, the nerve.

If it weren't for angst, I'd vaporize. Poof! Angst is what holds my very cells together. Sometimes when I first wake up at noon there's a nanosecond between sleep and wakefulness when I experience briefly what life must be like for normal people. It's as if I'm suspended in a gently drifting cloud of well-being. Like Charmin. Then it comes to me: I'm awake! I'm alive! On this particular planet! At this particular point in time! And another teeth-gnashing, hand-wringing, nail-biting day commences.

I've always believed that cheerful people are operating with half a brain. Sort of like drunkards, but without the booze. In which case, why bother. Except I'm not so sure anymore. Maybe it's a chemical thing. I.E., the aforementioned cheerfulness gene. Something you have no control over, like the weather or urinary incontinence. That smiling idiot one car over might be a Nobel Laureate for all I know, who, through an accident of genetics, just happened to be born smiling like an idiot. On second thought, there wouldn't be no Nobel Laureate in this here neck of the woods, so never mind.

Face it, getting born is a crapshoot. Or as we say in the preschool set, "You get what you get and you don't throw a fit!"

I wouldn't know normal if it bit me in the ass. I came into consciousness thinking everyone secretly ground their teeth into nubs and chewed their cuticles bloody. I considered my many and varied tics to be bodily functions, like breathing or masturbating. I mean, doesn't everyone count sidewalk squares on their way to school while silently chanting the alphabet backwards? And after taking Beginning Touch Typing in junior high, doesn't everyone automatically begin air-typing everything they hear? When my boyfriend wondered why I kept tap-tap-tapping on his back as we danced, it finally occurred to me I might be a wee bit different from other kids. Unbeknownst to him (and me), I'd been transcribing the lyrics to "Surfer Girl" on his madras button-down as it played over and over on the jukebox.

The song, not the shirt, played over and over. But you figured that out, right?

Speaking of figuring things out. I'll give my husband something to be depressed about. I'll tell him I've decided not to sign the divorce papers. If that doesn't do it, I'm throwing in the towel. Drenched from over a half century of tears, to be sure.

(uptheshore...

2010-04-01T18:35:00.000-07:00

...backinawhile)

Backstory

2010-03-27T11:42:00.000-07:00

My daughter likes to sneak up behind me and say Hi! It scares the shit out of me. I think she might be trying to kill me. To test this premise, I decided to call her bluff. I was scrambling eggs when she snuck up behind me and said Hi! I dropped the spatula and grabbed my chest and fell to the floor.

She didn't believe me.

This Sandra Bullock/Jesse James thing also scares the shit out of me. What scares me is that I care about it. But I can't help it, I keep seeing Sandra (is it Saaandra or Sondra?) telling Barbara Walters how she's finally found someone who's got her back, and it turns out the problem is what the guy's been doing behind it.

I mean, what, that's his real name? Jesse Fucking James? Who can believe that? This should've been Sandra's first clue. The fact that he's a bottom-dwelling egg-sucker is written all over the guy. Literally. Which should've been clues two through ninety-seven. I mean, this is Sandra Fucking Bullock, people, she might as well live next door. We should take Mr. James' betrayal of the wee lass very personally. It should irk us no-end that he looked her in the eyes and fucking lied like a rug.

Who says that anymore?

I got a rug burn when I fake-coronaried after my daughter snuck up behind me while I was scrambling eggs. The yayhoo who previously owned this house laid carpet in the kitchen, and my knee took it on the chin when I hit the berber. Not only that, this yayhoo carpeted the bathroom, too. Who can believe that? Even as I write, a new lifeform is evolving beneath the pile outside the shower door.

Once when I was a kid I snuck up on my mother while she was sewing my dance costume. She was sitting in a corner of the dinette at the old Singer, which spent most of its life disguised as a small curio table, until, when needed, it rose up from the bowels of its curious little home like the Phoenix. I remember taking many minutes to tiptoe across the living room to a spot inches from my mother's back, at which point I opened my rosy red mouth and said Boo!

Is it snuck or sneaked?

Speaking of rug burns. You'd think Ms. Bullock would be more evolved than to fall for a guy whose second ex-wife is a porn star and who stars in a show called Monster Garage. I mean, what, is this guy from Chisholm? A town renowned for driving a car out onto the ice of Chisholm Lake every winter, then making book on when the car would sink, which event heralded the arrival of spring. No robins or crocuses or pussywillows for that bunch, nosireebob. Need I mention Chisholm Lake was a source of drinking water for the surrounding populace? Who, in their wisdom, eventually figured things out and stopped using cars for this dubious tradition.

Now they use snowmobiles.

Speaking of dubious. You know how certain childhood events stand out in your memory as if a hidden camera filmed the whole thing? Here's the difference between my husband and me: my husband once snuck up on his mother, too...when she was playing the organ. My mother was sewing, for crissakes. On a sewing machine. With a rapidly pulsating needle. I mean, somebody might think I'm from Chisholm. Where kids have been known to sneak up on people cleaning guns. After my little surprise attack, my mother went on to sew again, but needles, er, needless to say, the finished costume did a good job of hiding my rosy red ass at the recital that evening.

Speaking of rapidly pulsating needles. I wonder if you could rig up a sewing machine to give tattoos. I have a tattoo, I got it when I turned forty. Now that I'm turning eighty, I'm thinking of getting another one. I wonder if Sandra Bullock has a tattoo. God I hope it's not on her back.

Speaking of new lifeforms. I wonder if anyone from Chisholm has ever been a porn star. I'm thinking Pussy Willow sounds about right.

Speaking of getting laid in the kitchen.

Speaking of piles outside the door. This post is one of them.

Getting On With It

2010-03-19T11:39:00.000-07:00

March 9, Tuesday

Today is my mother's birthday. She would've been 87. She should've been 87. She died too young. She blamed the rugs at Kmart. That's what she told me, three days before she died.

"It was those rugs," she said. "I had to go out to the parking lot to escape the fumes."

That's where my aunt found her, standing by the Buick, staring off into the distance at the sun sinking into the ore dumps.

I think she knew. In that way my mother always seemed to know things nobody else did. I must admit, when it came to my mother's acclaimed clairvoyance, sometimes she was right on the money.

Like when the neighbor across the street fell off a Euclid at the mine and broke his neck. My mother dreamt it the night before. In the dream this neighbor appeared to her, out of the blue, and gave her a black rose. Even as she was telling me about it the next morning where I sat bleary-eyed over my Wheaties at the dinette table, I watched as the neighbor's wife ran screaming out of their back door and across the lawn in her pink babydoll pajamas.

The dead neighbor had been one of my mother's many suitors in high school, but she'd dumped them all to get on a train for San Antonio and my father. My mother often told the story of how some boy had stood crying on the platform, begging her to reconsider, as the train pulled out of the station. This was War Time, my father had been drafted. War or no War, San Antonio must've looked like the Emerald City compared to the hardscrabble mining town where my mother grew up.

That boy on the platform eventually married a girl from two towns over and moved in across the street from us, which idyll ended when he took a nosedive off that Euclid. I used to imagine how I'd have turned out if he'd been my father instead. Better hair, for sure, but not much gray matter beneath it. Not that there's much matter left these days.

My mother also had major hair, with a streak of gray a mile wide by the time she was seventeen. As if she was marked. And maybe she was. She read tea leaves and dreamt dreams and dispersed clouds and was occasionally overcome by prophetic visions. Like the time a white bird swooped past the clothesline where she was hanging sheets and she knew her uncle had died. Or when she saw in a teacup that a friend would have an accident and that friend drove off a bridge on her way to Ting Town.

Ah, the stories of my childhood.

But my mother's prophecies stopped short when it came to predictions involving her own family. As if a curtain came down. She seemed to do better with distant relatives or long lost boyfriends or the occasional Fuller Brush Man. For instance, if she'd really known about my father, maybe she'd never have gotten on that train. And to be fair, if my father had really known about her, maybe he would've reenlisted, or at the very least gone AWOL.

But none of us ever really knows. Not about ourselves, let alone anyone else. We stumble into someone and fall in love and start out together along the Yellow Brick Road and before you can say I'm melting!, we're being pursued by flying monkeys. Some of them on our backs.

Ten Days Hence

I went AWOL last week.

With all good intentions, I sat down to continue this post where I'd left off, curious to see where those flying monkeys might take me, only to discover that my computer was on the blink. Again. As was my daughter. Again. And my husband was fixing to do likewise, chasing goofballs, excuse me, golfballs in Florida. I couldn't blinking take it any more. I packed a bag and grabbed the wine and headed Up North of North, into The Wild.

The Wild of the Iron Range, that is. Where I grew up. Though some might dispute that last part. The Range. Where, as they say, the men are men and so are half the women. To which I might add, You gotta problem with that?

I guess it wasn't officially an AWOL, seeing as how I announced my intentions beforehand.

"I'm going AWOL!" I announced to my daughter and my husband, in a text message and an email, respectively. I didn't get a response for eighteen hours. It was my daughter, asking what AWOL meant. She thought it was some texting abbreviation I made up.

I blasted KQ and drove at the speed of light and made it through the forcefield to my friend's doorstep by the cocktail hour.

In case you weren't aware, there's a forcefield surrounding the Iron Range. Like a restricted zone. Non-Rangers -- known as aliens -- take their lives in their hands when entering. But having grown up there, I'm in possession of a natural masking hormone, which allows me to enter and leave the area undetected. Once inside, I can move about at random, virtually invisible, able to pass for just another local skag who used to shoot rats at the dump with your cousin, or maybe it was you, but who's keeping score.

I careened to a stop and staggered up to my friend's doorstep and she immediately broke out a corkscrew and she immediately broke it.

"I've still got my jacket on!" I gasped, one hand on the doorknob. "I can drive to the liquor store and get another one! Or five!"

The guy at the liquor store always remembers me. I met him ten years ago, when my mother died. I was in town for several weeks and his establishment was within walking distance of my parents' house. Only twenty miles. He even let my dog come into the store with me, like Petticoat Junction. By the time I left, we were old friends. Now we're ancient. I think I used to shoot rats at the dump with his cousin.

But back to the story.

My friend and I stood staring at one another, aghast and agog, you might say, the corkscrew lying lifeless between us, when out of the blue, I conjured my mother. Or maybe she conjured herself. But suddenly there she was, hovering in the darkening air, trying with all her otherworldly might to change the script, redirect the action, affect the outcome. Why, you might ask? Because, dead or alive, my mother recognized that broken corkscrew for what it was: a Sign.

Not that I disagree. The difference being one of interpretation.

To my mother, that broken corkscrew was screaming, Do Not Drink Tonight Or Ever Again You Besotted Wastrel! Whereas my friend and I saw it as a suggestion of Power, i.e., our Powerful friendship, our Powerful intellects, you get the idea. As with anything, it's all in the eye of the beholder.

My mother always beheld me as having drifted from her vision of who I should be. Which is the usual case with parenting. But in my mother's interpretation, I didn't so much drift, as get myself hopelessly shipwrecked. On some remote desert island, far from land. From Herland, that is.

In my interpretation, I wasn't shipwrecked, I escaped. To a private little paradise called My Own Blinking Life. Not that my life is paradise. But it's my life, not my mother's, which makes it paradisiacal enough for me. Just a quiet little wayside where the bar's always open and I can come and go undetected and I have at least one friend who'll light the lamp and break out the corkscrew when I careen to a stop at the curb outside her door.

Robert Frost said, Home is where, when you go there, they have to let you in. To which I might add, And they always have a spare corkscrew. Which my friend had, and eventually found, and so we got on with it.

Caution: Reading This May Be Hazardous

2010-03-05T00:48:00.000-08:00

It's been a few weeks. Some of you might wonder what the hell happened to me. Most of you don't give a shit. I'm with the second bunch. But I'm nothing if not anal, so I feel an explanation is in order. Actually I'm nothing, but here's an explanation anyway:

My operating system was invaded by a malicious virus.

The same thing happened to my computer.

The virus that invaded my operating system has been documented ad nauseum in these pages, no need to revisit that can of worms. The virus that invaded my computer is a whole different animal. Animalia chordata vertebrata mammalia primates hominoidea homo sapiens, to be exact. (Don't you just loooove Google?)

To be more exact: some limpdick hacked his way into my cyberlife and the cyberlives of untold others via an online newspaper (you know who you are!) which shall remain unnamed, thereby destroying all from within and achieving for himself multi-orgasmic electronic Nirvana or some such fucking thing.

My husband blames Bill Gates. Not that Bill Gates is the above-mentioned limpdick specifically.

My husband hates Microsoft with the intensity of a thousand suns. I don't understand this, but then, I don't understand any of this. That is, any of this electronic mumbo-jumbo. It's all Greek to me. Or is that Geek? Whatever, I am anything but.

Anything but, nothing but, I'm one big but.

But (there I am again!) I'll let you in on a little-known secret about all this electronica: it's based on magic. When I sit down at my computer each noon, I have but (and again!) to type a special hex known only to myself in all the universe, and TA-DAA! It's showtime. This is the way it works. This is the way it's always worked. If you Believe, it will Be.

Imagine my chagrin when I sat down the other day to read the news in preparation for a long day of Free Cell, doing precisely what I've always done for lo these many moons, only to watch slackjawed as everything on my screen proceeded to disappear. First it backflipped around and fireworked for a bit, then it exploded, then it disappeared. Believe me, it wasn't pretty. Like being at a deathbed.

Admit it, we regard our computers as Beings. Entities. As housing the Lifeforce. We spend thousands of our waking hours interacting with these Creatures, and one does not spend the majority of one's life nurturing a relationship with an inanimate object. Unless you're Cindy McCain, but never mind that.

I desperately want to blame someone (you know who you are!), but it's not Bill Gates. He has enough on his plate having to look in the mirror everyday. I mean, that is One Not Very Attractive Dude. You'd think that, as an ONVAD, the richest homo sapien on the planet might at least look into basic cosmetic surgery, if not total facial reconstruction. Come to think of it, after this last virus, I'm starting to look like an ONVAD. And a slackjawed one at that.

Give me H1N1 anyday, eventually one recovers. Not so with Malware, as my husband refers to it. Sounds like a cookie. Another computer term I know nothing about, except that one doesn't ingest it. Unlike my malicious virus, which ingested everything in sight and went looking for more. I swear I could feel it reaching out into the room toward me like some three-D movie monster.

Listen to me, now it's my malicious virus. I need therapy.

The upshot of this pandemic is that my computer had to be put down. I got shitfaced at the wake. And I lost everything. I mean everything. Felix, my electronic pet (is there anyone out there who even remembers Felix?). All my pictures. All my documents. All my Free Cell stats, not to mention proof that I'd actually played over 1,000 games (or maybe it was 10,000, but who's counting). All my email addresses, including 1,142 emails, years of lies and gossip gone in a nanosecond. And my cyber-esteem.

That's the electronic version of self-esteem, only with more cookies. Whatever the hell they are. All I know is they don't make you fat. They make you confident. As in, I can go cold turkey on Free Cell, no problemo, I'm just shaking because it's fucking cold in here! Or, So what if I lost all my email addresses, I still have at least...one friend...who doesn't have a computer...who's still alive (I think)! Or, At least I still have a husband (I think) who can cobble together some sort of set-up so this long-overdue post can finally get out to the masses whose very well-being hangs in the balance wondering what the fuck happened to Six Spruce, all due to the actions of that limpdick whackjob cyber-masturbator referred to elsewhere!

Come to think of it, my very well-being has hung in the balance since 1962, the year I was Queen of Greenhaven. It's been elsewhere ever since.

Be that as it may (or may not), I'm horrified at the straits in which I find myself. Make that straitjacket. Or is it straightjacket? What I mean is, this typeface sucks. These words are writ waaaay too large. This mouse is skittering around by itself on this unfamiliar keypad like...a mouse. This keyboard feels like one of those rinky-dink toy metal xylophones from my childhood. And they don't make those anymore. Not the xylophones, or my version of childhood.

Remember, I'm nothing. If not anal. I hate change. I abhor it. I despise it with the intensity of a thousand suns. And now, due to something new and spiteful from Nabisco, it's all come to naught. Or is that not? The point being, here I am, skittering around by myself on this unexpected clean slate, a new start thrust upon me. Like greatness.

Huh?

What I mean is, I have no choice. The writing is on the...screen. In a big fat sucky font. I'll just have to take it one new Free Cell game at a time. Starting with this one.

Blessings

2010-02-14T11:07:00.000-08:00

Leftover pizza in the fridge.

Clean linen.

A job where you take a teddy bear to work.

Enough $$ in checking to buy the good champagne without balancing.

Nine hours sleep.

Opening your eyes after nine hours sleep thinking you're dead. Good news: there appears to be an afterlife.

You're not dead.

You're not fat.

You're not still sleeping.

You know how to send a text message.

Your Free Cell stats are 98% with 59 straight wins.

Your all-time Free Cell straight-wins record is 406. Without cheating.

You don't cheat at Free Cell. Any more.

You only played 27 games of Free Cell. This hour.

Admitting you played 27 games of Free Cell this hour.

Admitting you responded to comments on your blog that were left by a computer.

Admitting you didn't know the comments on your blog were left by a computer.

Having a cat.

Not getting killed in a car accident three weeks ago.

Not being in therapy.

You haven't left your glasses in the freezer. Today.

You haven't had a panic attack. Since the last one.

You still have three friends. Make that two.

You still have a husband. You think.

You still think.

Christmas decorations are finally down.

Four deer in the yard.

Five cardinals in the mugo pines.

Your Free Cell stats are 99% with 72 straight wins.

Your daughter is at the Mega Mall until Tuesday.

Having a dog.

(Daisy Astrila Valentine, February 14, 2010)

Why I Drink

2010-02-05T10:58:00.000-08:00

Kansas, Farewell

2010-01-30T18:24:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting by the fire with a book and a glass of wine last Saturday evening when my cell phone starts vibrating. It's my daughter, texting. From the TV room on the second floor.

Remember that movie about the babysitter who keeps getting scary phone calls? She finally calls the Operator, who stays on the line to determine where the calls are coming from. The phone rings again, it's the scary caller, suddenly the Operator's voice interrupts:

"Get out of the house! He's calling from the upstairs extension!"

My daughter rarely texts me. But she's desperate. My husband disabled all the usual contacts on her cell phone except for emergency numbers, i.e., her parents and the people who call her to babysit. Why, you ask, did my husband do such a diabolical thing? Here's a hint: what does "FUCK" start with? How about more than one "FUCK"?

We're talking a multiple-fuck report card.

Last month my daughter sent over 4,000 texts. She even texts while sleeping, her thumbs twitching across the blankets like jumping beans. When I pick her and her teammates up from gymnastics, they text one another on the ride home in the car. I feel like I'm transporting a bunch of rhesus monkeys.

Speaking of which, a monkey could've gotten a better report card.

If I would've come home with such a report card when I was fourteen, I would've been sold. First I would've been beaten, then sold. But these days you can't get away with that. Parents' hands are tied, literally. You can't beat your children, it's not allowed. How they expect us to manage these hooligans is beyond me, but there will be no blood.

I think my daughter would've preferred a good beating to having her cell phone euthanized. In her world it's like pulling the plug on a beloved relative. Not that she beloves any of her relatives lately, certainly not Yours Truly. But, as I said, she must've been desperate, her thumbs couldn't control themselves.

"wat r u up 2?" she texts.

"I'm trying unsuccessfully to get shitfaced," I text back.

Did you really believe I wrote that?

"I'm sitting beside the fire reading a rather slow-moving novel, gazing through the piano window at the gently falling snow," is what I wrote.

I try to give my daughter a subliminal literary experience when I text her, lest she start believing that "r" and "u" and "2" are the correct spellings. But I trust she'll figure that out when she's thirty and working on her GED.

When I was in eighth grade, we passed notes. Hand-written, on paper, with pens and pencils. A fruitful day might produce a half dozen, slipped surreptitiously into a friend's palm while passing in the hallways.

I actually have an old shoebox full of the things, which a friend saved and presented to me when we were in our twenties. I still occasionally look through them when I'm in the mood for a good bout of mortified cringing. You rarely see so many exclamation points anymore!!!!! And once I'd acquired an actual boyfriend, I began displaying the symptoms of full-blown mania. Instead of dotting my lower case "i"s in the traditional manner, I started drawing little circles atop them, and my handwriting took on a distinct backward slant. In one instance, I encircled a wrinkled spot in the margin, with an arrow pointing to this explanation: Here is where a tear from my heart fell!!!!!

Can you believe I actually went on to earn an MFA? In Writing?????

I've told my daughter about the Old Days, when we used to pass notes in school. She rolls her eyes and asks if we had electricity back then. Once when she was staying at her grandparents' house down in The City, she pulled me aside into her father's childhood bedroom.

"What's this?" she said. She wasn't a teenager then, she still asked me questions. She was pointing to a rotary telephone on the nightstand. My husband grew up in Edina, they had phones in the bedrooms.

"That's a phone, silly," I said.

"Yeah, right," she said. Which was the same thing she said when I told her that Christians believe Jesus is the Son of God. She was in second grade at the time.

Now she's not. And we're not in Kansas anymore. We're in LA.*

Meanwhile, back at the fireside, where snow is gently falling, she texts me again.

"yr txt made me lol," she writes. So much for subliminal literacy.

"Our texting reminds me of that movie," I write back, "where the Operator tells the babysitter the calls are coming from the upstairs phone." It takes me awhile to type this, the words roll off the screen into outerspace, er, cyberspace.

When I first got a phone with a Qwerty keyboard, I laid it out on a tabletop and carefully placed my fingers in the correct touch-type position. This was before I learned about thumb-typing. Or before I figured out why it's called Qwerty. Do you know why it's called Qwerty? Just texting, er, testing.

A log falls, I raise my glass, my phone vibrates again. This is maybe a dozen vibrations in as many minutes. I've already broken any and all standing note-passing records from the Old Days.

"wats a operator?" texts my daughter.

I drain my glass and pour another. I'm losing sensation in my thumbs.

"!!!!!!!!!!!!" I text back.

I send that, then text again:

"Here is where a tear from my heart fell!!!!! ---> ( )."

I don't hear from my daughter for a few minutes, and I start to worry. Should I go check on her? Then my phone vibrates.

"sory i fell asleep," she writes. It is, after all, after midnight. I picture her beautiful eyes closing, her precious phone resting open on her heart.

Then she writes again:

"btw y r u cryin???!!! goin 2 bed gnite."

I close my phone, look out at the snow. I wonder, is it midnight in Kansas? Are they in the same time zone? I make a mental note to Google it and turn back to my novel, which is moving as slow as ever.

*Land of Attitude

Wormhole

2010-01-24T13:05:00.001-08:00

Wednesday I almost bought the farm. Thursday the Housekeeper started in on voodoo (how'd she know my daughter's inhabited by a demon?). Friday I blew out my knee watching "Antiques Roadshow."

It's been one fuck of a week.

Pat Robertson is inhabiting the Housekeeper. I know, I know, I should can her ass, but she scares the bejesus out of me. I think she's capable of throwing a hex. She runs a mean vacuum, I'll give her that. But she's sucking the vibe out of the air around here. The dog gives her wide berth. Always believe what a dog says.

You want voodoo? I'll give you voodoo: It's possible my daughter saved my life. Except for that little matter of the resident demon, which gives me pause. And actually, a pause is at the center of this cautionary tale, a pause which occurred when I braked to answer my cell phone Wednesday evening. I was in my car, in the parking lot, about to leave work.

You have to understand about me and my cell phone. I'm still barely able to use the thing, it scares the bejesus out of me. I get panicky when it rings and stop what I'm doing.

"Hel-lo?" I said into the phone when I figured out how to turn it on. It's so fucking small you can store it in your nostril.

"Dickles," said a voice. It sounded like my daughter, but I couldn't be sure.

You have to understand about my daughter and Dill Pickle Chips. She's wonky for them. Obsessed with them. Can't get enough of them. And they have to be Lay's, they can't be Old Dutch. Once she had me do an experiment where I blindfolded her (one can only dream...) and proceeded to test both brands. She chose the Lay's and I was forced to eat the Old Dutch. I've never tasted anything quite so...unfoodlike.

The "Dickles" thing happened last fall when my daughter was sick. I tiptoed into the TV room where she'd been holed up for a few months, told her I was going to the store, did she want me to get her some Dickle Chips? That's what I said, it just came out. I corrected myself, but it was too late. Another nonsense word entered our private lexicon, alongside lowchee and farlow and oken doken, to name a few.

So when the sudden request for Dickles came over the airwaves Wednesday evening, I sat in the dark in my unmoving car for, what, two seconds? three? Long enough to answer my cell phone and, BTW, alter the time/space continuum. Then I pulled out of the parking lot.

Halfway home, it happened. This is the voodoo part:

I was driving up 21st Avenue East, a through-street, when, at the intersection of 21st and 1st Street, I noticed a car traveling toward me along 1st Street. Not traveling exactly, speeding. Make that racing. Make that tear-assing up from the gates of hell. Not only that, 1st Street is a one-way, and this car was driving...the WRONG WAY. Before I had a chance to react, the car flew through the STOP sign, shot out across the intersection ten feet from my front bumper, and disappeared into the night on its way to some other destiny.

It's true what they say. About accidents. Time slows. Stretches out. Pauses. Two seconds? three? felt like hours. A weekend. A lifetime.

When my brain finally registered what had just happened, I started to shake. Because this was about what had not happened. Technically, there hadn't been an accident -- I hadn't been broadsided on the driver's side by some escaped lunatic, I wasn't upside down under a streetlight suspended between this world and the next. Still, somewhere, that reality existed. I could feel it. Like an alternative ending. I drove home wondering if maybe there had actually been an accident, which I'd somehow side-stepped, like maybe I'd gone through a wormhole or something and come out in some parallel universe.

Which pretty much describes where my daughter lives. Same block, same house, whole different universe. When I got home I went up to the TV room.

"I forgot the Dickles," I said.

"Like, whatever," said the demon.

"I think you might've saved my...life," I said. I almost said saved my ass. But I'm as capable of a good parental decision as the next jerk-off.

"Like, what?" said my daughter, so I told her.

Okay, okay, any number of things slowed me down Wednesday evening. But my money's on that phone call. I want to believe it was my daughter. She wants to believe it. If for no other reason than to exact a reward payment. Besides, it made for a great bedtime story, and kept the demon at bay for a few precious hours. Which felt like seconds, but still.

Then Thursday it's the Housekeeper and her Funda-mental-illness, Friday I recline motionless in a recliner and blow out my knee, Saturday the demon returns from sabbatical, and it's business as usual. The parallel universe theory starts looking less credible. Although for awhile there, it felt like somewhere I wanted to be. Somewhere...lighter. Safer. Where the air is less...heavy. A place like dreaming. Where your house is never in need of cleaning, and mothers and daughters speak endlessly perfect nonsense, and everybody listens to dogs.

Toast

2010-01-16T12:38:00.000-08:00

It's New Year's, I'm at the cabin, the phone rings. It's my husband, calling from a car wash. From inside the car as it's being washed. This is the same husband who called on Labor Day, from a tree in the middle of a clearing in the middle of the wilderness.

It's always the same.

It's Labor Day, I'm at my computer, the phone rings.

"Hon?" he screams. "Are you there? Hon?"

I'm always here. Where else would I be? I can think of a few places, but it's no use. I don't get around much anymore. Those days are over. Morte. Kaput.

My husband, however, does. Get around. He calls from trees and cars. He calls from planes about to take off, planes about to land, planes about to sit on the tarmac for five hours. He emails from cafes in Barcelona and pubs in Scotland. He texts from Amsterdam, Trondheim, Hinckley.

It's August, I'm at the Blues Fest, the phone rings. It's my husband, calling from the parking lot.

"Hon?" he screams. "Are you there? Do you want a beer?"

"No!" I scream. "I want a life!"

* * *

I had a life. Once. It was called the Seventies. A lot of people had a life in the Seventies. Some of us even remember parts of it.

What I remember is this: I could move all my worldly possessions from one apartment to another in two car loads.

This was the Chevy Nova era. Before the Mustang era. After the Mazda with the wonky, er, Wankel engine era, the car that sounded like a jet taking off. It sounded like a jet taking off after I accidentally ran over a "WRONG WAY" sign in the Southtown parking lot on my way to see "The Sting" for the first time. I went back eleven times. Then I got a divorce.

That was a whole different husband. I wouldn't even call him a husband. I'd call him a telephone repairman. We had phones in every room, including the bathroom. You can see what went wrong.

One day it's Saturday, the husband's in the bathroom, the phone rings. It's me, calling from California. Remember, I used to get around.

"Dick?" I scream. "Is that you? I want a divorce!"

That was the husband's real name. You can see what went wrong.

These days I'd need a Peterbilt to move all my worldly possessions from one place to another. Come to think of it, I'd need a couple of Peterbilts. Sounds like the kind of thing that used to happen back in the Seventies.

* * *

It's last weekend, we're having a party, I'm up on the third floor. I've repaired to the third floor to escape the melee and blow a doobie out the window. One of the other partygoers has repaired with me. We're sitting quietly, repairing beside the open window, staring at the wall.

Suddenly, the stillness is shattered.

"I wish...I had a drink..." says Other Partygoer, "but...I don't think...I can move."

"I can move...my arm," I say, and pick up the phone.

"Hon?" I whisper. "Is that...you? Can you...bring up...some wine?"

Ten seconds later, or maybe it's half an hour, there's a tap on the door. It's my husband, with a tray. He sets it down, raises his eyebrows, retreats.

"Wow..." says OP, "I've never seen...anything like that...before."

"Like what...before?" I say, moving my hand toward the bottle.

"Like making...a phone call..." she says, "to someone...somewhere...in the same house."

"Someone who...brings drinks," I say, and pour.

After a few minutes, or maybe it's an hour, I look up. OP is staring at the wall. Not the same wall, a different wall. A wall with a photo on it. A head shot, black and white, just me and the mike.

"Wow..." she says, "when was that...taken?"

"The Seventies..." I say. "I used to...have a life."

OP considers this. She looks around. At my study, a small cluttered room tucked up under the eaves, where we've been repairing all along.

After awhile, or maybe it's immediately, she lifts her glass.

"Well...here's to...whatever it is...you have now..." she says, and we drink to that.

Blue Moon

2010-01-08T00:01:00.000-08:00

New Year's Eve on the shore, how
would the Eskimos name this snow?
Down to the water for the moon's rise,
who's ahead of me there, nestled
in the branches at Fieg's Point
like a newly-laid egg.

I make my fire and watch as she
climbs the beach house window,
backlighting the frost that laces the glass.
The stories hidden in that pane!
Later an oar boat, far out in the darkness,
hovers like a party under the blue, blue moon.

Resolution

2009-12-29T09:52:00.000-08:00

As there begins to be less time ahead of you, you want to be exactly who you are, without making it easier for everyone else.

Meryl Streep

Vanity Fair

January 2010

Comfort and Joy

2009-12-22T12:08:00.000-08:00

Next to the Last Place on Earth

2009-12-11T10:30:00.000-08:00

You know something's changed when you find yourself in Walmart the night before Thanksgiving thinking about buying a pumpkin pie. They're on Special. You're only in Walmart because the preschool where you teach ran out of star stickers and Walmart is the last place on earth that still carries them.

Christmas is coming, you need all the stars you can get. That's what you tell yourself.

"I'm only in Walmart because it's the last place on earth," you tell yourself.

In your former life, Walmart hadn't even been invented yet. But if it had, you wouldn't have been caught dead there. Unlike being caught dead in the Arctic Cold Plunge at the European Health Spa, which, you must admit, has a certain panache.

"It has a certain panache," you admit.

In your former life, you used to have a couple hits of pot and hang out in the Eucalyptus Vapor Room at the European Health Spa, which gave you Visions. You got into the European Health Spa due to an endless supply of Free Passes, compliments of a friend of yours who had a gig rosemaling end tables for one of the owners. The party ended when your friend ended up in Emergency with blood poisoning from breathing paint thinner. On your last Pass, you breathed eucalyptus until your eyes changed color, then took the Arctic Cold Plunge.

Which proved to be good preparation for the rest of your life.

So there you are in Walmart the night before Thanksgiving with a pie in your hand, and it occurs to you you might be dead. You look around at the other shoppers and now you're really worried. You used to stand out like a sore thumb, now nobody even looks at you. It's like you're one of them. You might as well buy a pink velour sweatsuit and start smoking again.

Which gets you thinking about the girls at the preschool where you teach. Not the smoking part, the pink part.

The girls in your class wear pink pink pink, nothing but pink. You're concerned for the future of the country. In the morning when you dress for work, you have to use a flashlight to distinguish between all the black in your closet. Your idea of color is blue eyes. Which you have, thanks to the Eucalyptus Vapor Room. So does Jesus, according to the photo hanging in the hall of the church to which the preschool is annexed, which always pisses you off. (Actually, every part of that last sentence pisses you off.) You have half a mind to take a water-soluble marker and color Jesus's eyes brown. The other half says take a deep breath and wait for a Vision.

Only don't hold that breath.

Each week at the preschool you celebrate another letter of the alphabet, including as many words beginning with that letter as a four-year-old brain can conjure. When you can't conjure any more, the students take over. So there you are, going along without a care in the world, when suddenly, during J week, you forget Jesus, not that he figured prominently in your Lesson Plan to begin with. One of the girls-in-pink reminds you.

"Jar! Jacket! Jellybean! Jugular!" you conjure.

"Jesus!" conjures the pink girl.

Actually, you have nothing against Jesus. You address him regularly, using his full name.

"A fucking preschool! Jesus H. Christ! The last place on earth I expected to fucking end up!"

Later that same day...that is, the day you forgot Jesus...you're slaving away over next week's Lesson Plan, when you finally have it: a Vision. You've been brainstorming the ever-popular "Question of the Week," which figures prominently every Wednesday and features such time-honored queries as "What is your favorite color?" or "Would you rather have broccoli or Cocoa Puffs for dinner?," when you eschew the traditional choices in favor of:

Who do you like better?

A. Jesus

B. Santa

You are beside yourself with self-congratulatory delight. You've just conjured the Question to End All Questions for the preschool set, and you celebrate with a couple hits of Diet Coke and a eucalyptus cough drop.

Which gets you thinking about the Eucalyptus Vapor Room at the European Health Spa, which gets you thinking about the Arctic Cold Plunge, which gets you thinking about how it turned out to be such good preparation for the rest of your life, speaking of which, here you fucking are, teaching in a fucking preschool at the ass end of nowhere, Jesus H. Christ.

Which reminds you it's J week and you forgot Jesus, which reminds you Christmas is coming, which reminds you to grab another in an endless supply of Post-Its and write "star stickers," unaware that this simple act of reminding will land you several weeks hence in the purgatory of Walmart the night before Thanksgiving, wondering if the party's finally over and you're dead.

Which, it occurs to you, is not unlike ending up in Emergency with blood poisoning from breathing paint thinner, speaking of which, whatever happened to that rosemaling friend of yours anyway, last you'd heard she'd ended up in Emergency with complications from stomach stapling.

It's always something. Then something changes.

New Health Care Plan

2009-12-05T08:01:00.001-08:00

Why did the Tofurky cross the road?

2009-11-26T07:31:00.000-08:00

To prove he wasn't chicken.

Stranger than Fiction

2009-11-21T12:34:00.000-08:00

I told my daughter to run away. Was that a bad thing? I was just brainstorming. As usual, I was driving her to gym.

"I hate you and I hate this family," she said from the passenger side of things.

So I offered the above suggestion. I was on the High Bridge, following some asshole with a dead deer strapped to his penis.

What we have here, I said to myself, is a dead deer.

This child I'm raising -- let's call her my daughter, for the sake of argument, which is what we do -- wants to be somewhere else. Someone else. She changes her name at school, studies her face in the mirror, calls my bluff. Am I bluffing? I didn't used to think so.

Meanwhile, I look in the mirror and Shirley Booth stares back at me. Not the "Hazel" Shirley Booth, who'd fix things in a jiffy then scramble up a pie. The "Come Back, Little Sheba" Shirley Booth, who schlumps around in her housecoat all day mooning over her long lost dog.

What we have here, I said to myself, is a lost dog.

* * *

If my dog ever goes missing, I'll be right behind her.

When we first brought this dog home, my daughter was afraid of her. That was seven years ago. At the time, my daughter still looked at me with wonder. Now I know what she was wondering about.

But my daughter was afraid of the new puppy and avoided the floor for much of First Grade. I envisioned a children's book, "The Girl Who Lived on the Back of the Couch." It had possibilities, I thought, but like so much else, ended up on the slush pile.

Since then my daughter has come down from the furniture, now we're all afraid of her.

* * *

It wasn't always this...bad. It took awhile. Eighth Grade clinched the deal.

When I was in Eighth Grade, I knew my parents were utter morons, but I kept this knowledge to myself. My father's blood pressure was the reason. You don't push an ornery Finn who studied classical piano and planned to be a Forest Ranger but instead ended up in some remote suburb of Palookaville raising three daughters and selling frontend loaders to rednecks. You just don't.

My daughter would push me off the High Bridge if she could. But not before pocketing the car keys.

What we have here is a slush pile.

* * *

I have these memories of my daughter, snuggling up next to me at bedtime, surrounded by a planet of stuffed animals, sloe eyes moving across the pages of a book as I read. Of course one book was never enough, and she kept a wobbly pile of extras on the rug beside the bed.

I don't recall when it first happened. But one night during this bedtime ritual, I started making up my own stories. I'd finish a book, take another from the pile, open it and begin reading:

Once upon a time there was a girl who lived on the back of a couch...

This evolved into a sort of game: how far into a story could I get before my daughter called my bluff. At which point she'd grin with delight, grab another book, ask me to do it again. And again. Eventually I'd insert something too outlandish, even for a children's story, into the narrative (...and then the little brown bunny hopped into a phone booth and turned into Elvis...), and that was our signal for calling it a night.

My daughter's mission in this ritual was to recognize which stories were "real" and which were "made up." These were her labels. And I let her have them. At the time, she was too young to understand that all stories are made up.

Now we both know differently. Now we both know that all stories are real.

Driver's Ed

2009-11-13T00:00:00.000-08:00

A week ago my daughter started speaking to me. Actual sentences. Not only that, she turned off her iPod. Something was up. Turns out she wanted me to take her driving. Other than hiding in the Jeep when she was seven and pretending she was driving to Mexico, she's never been behind the wheel.

"The first lesson in driving is to understand that the automobile is a powerful and deadly weapon," I said.

"You look pretty today, Mom," she said.

I was struck dumb. So much for the toughlove approach. Maybe I should've gone for a more traditional method.

My father taught me to drive by taking me out on the backroads behind the ore dumps and telling me to floor it. No doubt he was following the example of his father, who taught him to swim by throwing him off the end of a dock. He was three. My father went on to letter in swimming in high school, taking State in the butterfly. I went on to break a few neighborhood speed records, but never quite made it to the Wreck 'Em Rodeo over at the Speedway.

My husband objects to our daughter learning to drive. After all, she's not quite fourteen. He has a point. But my husband grew up in civilized society. I grew up on the Iron Range.

Up there we learned to drive young, and we learned to drive fast. When we finally acquired the Holy Grail, a Driver's License, we spent every possible waking moment cruising the main drag in our parents' cars -- First Avenue to Howard Street to 23rd Street and back again -- over and over for hours and hours in a relentless mind-numbing circle, smalltown kids locked in a compulsion to recognize the make and model of every other circling car and the silhouettes of the teenagers within. Until it finally occurred to us that maybe what we were searching for in all those other vehicles was not each other, but ourselves.

Nosirree! That's not me in that Blue LeMans! Maybe I finally saw the light and got the fuck outta Dodge!

Eventually many of us did. Get the fuck outta Dodge. But not before acquiring lasting muscle memories of all that endless driving around and around through the same limited landscape like hellbent gerbils, wanting nothing so much as to escape.

And it was while gripped in the throes of this forgotten muscle memory that it came to me. As I headed out in search of the proper venue in which to instruct my daughter in the ancient art of operating a motor vehicle, I glanced over to where she sat panting with anticipation in the passenger seat, and I knew where I had to go.

"Hold onto your earbuds!" I instructed, hanging a hard left.

Which is how I came to spend last Saturday in the dying light of a gloomy November afternoon being driven endlessly around a graveyard, courtesy of my daughter, whose only vehicular experience up to that point had been driving me to drink. Around and around she circled, eyes wide, lips clamped shut, hands at ten and two, while I barked commands:

"Turn right at Jesus! Watch out for that cross! Pull over by the Garden of Precious Lambs!"

If you think about it, a cemetery is the quintessential environment for the beginning driving experience. A quiet little ghost town of roadways and neighborhoods, nestled in a beautiful parklike setting, offering countless driving opportunities. After you've cruised the place a couple dozen times, the gravestones start to look like buildings -- homes and offices, restaurants and markets, a storage unit! a strip mall! -- and you begin to entertain the possibility of maybe even spotting a few local inhabitants. Your eyes narrow, you stare intently, until it finally occurs to you that maybe it's not one of them you're worried about seeing, but yourself.

Nosirree! That's not me over by that fresh mound of dirt! Maybe I finally saw the light and got the fuck on the wagon!

Eventually it grew too dark to read the names on the markers, and my daughter and I switched seats and headed for home.

"The summer I was fifteen," I ruminated nostalgically, turning into our alley, "I finally got my Permit. And you know what? I even remember my driving instructor's name."

"That was like, a hundred years ago," said my daughter, staring into the darkness, lost in the afterglow of her First Time.

"His name was Ed," I said, "Ed Simonich. True story." I parked the car, turned off the ignition, waited.

"Ed," I said again into the darkness.

"Oh, I get it," said my daughter after awhile, and actually smiled.

Benediction

2009-11-06T18:02:00.000-08:00

My aunt has a boyfriend. When my husband heard about my aunt's boyfriend, he breathed a sigh of relief. My aunt's eighty-eight.

"There's hope for me yet," said my husband. Actually he was only thinking this, but I can read his thoughts.

My cousin called last Friday.

"My mom has a boyfriend," she said.

"Yeah, but does she know she has a boyfriend?" I said.

"Well, the boyfriend knows," she said, "that works for me."

We had celebratory phone cocktails in honor of this development.

My aunt has alzheimer's. Now, apparently, she also has a boyfriend. I'm not surprised. My aunt's the hottest number in the Home. The new guy took one look and made his move. My aunt can't remember what day it is, or the names of her children, but she recognized a move when she saw one.

My grandmother also had alzheimer's. Back then they just called her senile. She spent her last days in a Home on the Range, where a guy in the next room laid under his bed all day thinking he was fixing his car. The last time I saw my grandmother, I pushed her through the hallways in her wheelchair as she waved the queen wave at passersby like a benediction. My grandmother recognized a parade when she saw one.

You might say I'm descended from a long line of hot numbers, the operative word being "descended." In my case, the apple not only fell far from the tree, it rolled into another orchard. An alternative orchard, not a fruit tree in sight. Whereas my mother and her sisters and their mother and her sisters had lain in their various cradles instinctively giving tiny queen waves, I lay in mine instinctively giving the tiny finger. Gene mutation designed to serve the particular world in which a host finds herself.

Isn't evolution a mindfuck?

Speaking of which, I also inherited the ability to read my husband's thoughts. I inherited this ability from my mother. Not that my mother could read my husband's thoughts, though god knows she tried. She kept overlooking one critical detail: my husband has the ability to, on demand, completely clear his brain of any coherent activity whatsoever. He inherited this ability from his father. His father inherited it from his father, and his father from his father, and so on. It's called Drawing a Blank. It's only found on the Y chromosome.

My mother was a master at reading my thoughts, however. Until I woke up one day, looked around at the orchard in which I found myself, and set a nearby leaf pile ablaze. Thus did I discover the ancient art of concealing cerebral activity beneath a cloud of smoke. Alternative smoke.

My mother's idea of "alternative" was to switch to the other hand when one's wrist hurt from waving. Likewise, her idea of "drawing a blank" was probably what she thought of my father's spermatic input the first time she saw me lying in my cradle flipping the bird. Albeit a teeny tiny baby sparrow, but a bird nonetheless.

We were sitting by the fire, having a glass of wine, when I told my husband about my aunt's new boyfriend. I watched him closely out of the corner of my eye, looking for any errant thoughtwaves that might slip through before he Drew a Blank. Sure enough, there it was, a splitsecond of heartfelt relief at realizing there was still hope for him. Then down came that curtain.

Sometimes I think my husband watches me. Not in any attempt to read my mind, an oxymoron if ever there was one. Rather, I think he's looking for signs. Of impending senility, the old genetic crapshoot, the long road to oblivion. Don't forget, I can read his thoughts: Has she taken another step down that long road to oblivion? Or is she just drunk?

My mother was probably never drunk, not once, in her life. I try not to hold that against her. And she was on her own road when she died, her brain intact, working just the way it always had. I try not to hold that against her, either. The last time I saw my mother she was standing outside her house, under a streetlight, under a full moon. I looked in the rearview mirror as I drove away, and she was waving.

Rules of the Road

2009-10-31T11:34:00.000-07:00

Last night I was driving my daughter home from gym.

"I had blood drawn today," I said.

"Did they give it back?" she said.

I looked at her. I shouldn't have. I couldn't help it. These days I take my life in my hands if I so much as glance in her direction. But she seemed unaware of my blatant disregard of etiquette. Meanwhile the wipers slapped maniacally through the rainy dark.

"It's your blood," she said. "They should give it back."

I checked the Sass-O-Meter. Nothing. The kid was serious. I snuck another look. How could something so lovely be so...unlovely? So clueless? I must be an even worse mother than we both agree I am.

A week ago we were in the midst of The Plague, despite which the bad grades and the bad attitude just kept on coming. When my temperature came back down and I could finally hear again, I'd had it.

"You're grounded," I said. Make that hollered.

Problem was, she didn't know what "grounded" meant. She thought it meant she was supposed to stay in one spot and not move until the time was up. So she sat in her room at her computer for eleven hours and watched reruns of "Zach and Cody." It was the quietest Saturday I'd spent in over a decade. She only ventured out when her ass fell asleep. And I slept like a baby til morning.

But you wanna know what drives me absofuckinglutely insane? Mothers who get along with their teenage daughters. I'm like sitting here trying to figure out how to score a busload of crack so as to make it through the next five to thirty years, and some happy little mother is texting me about some happy little shopping trip. Not only is this vagina texting me (I'm still trying to figure out the Xerox machine), turns out she went on this little retail hegira with her fucking fifteen-year-old daughter! And they had fucking lattes at Barnes and Fucking Noble afterward!

I don't know about you, but there's something downright unnatural about that.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I finally saw my daughter's school photos. For some time I'd been afraid she'd had a stroke or something and her mouth would be permanently frozen in a grimace. Turns out her face is normal. Even pretty. Who knew?

I used to be pretty. Now I'm pretty spent. Which is why I decided to get the once-over down at the corner Medical Center. Last time I went in for a lube job Bill and Hil were still running the lot.

"It's like my 'Check Engine' light is always on," I told the doc.

She immediately scheduled me for the whole enchilada, which included the aforementioned blood-letting.

Good news is I have blood. Bad news is it's 180 proof. But what's a mutha to do? Go shopping? Not on this little roadtrip, baby. It's all I can do to keep my hands on the wheel. Ten and two, baby, ten and two. Which, contrary to what my daughter thinks, has nothing to do with the number of times I looked at her without permission on the way home from gym last night. I'll be paying for that little breach for the next hundred miles or so. Or until we run out of gas, whichever comes first.

BINGO??

2009-10-23T10:55:00.000-07:00

No, H1N1 is not a Bingo call. Whatever it is, I've got it. Drink lots of liquids, take drugs, stay in bed.

Sounds like the old days.

I'll be back...(she said, hopefully)...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biq_zNakkfA

(Gone to find the lake...

2009-10-15T08:42:00.000-07:00

...back next week)

Nothing But the Truth

2009-10-10T12:31:00.001-07:00

And the lies just keep on comin'.

I had a doctor's appointment the other day, the first in many moons. How many? Since Shrub took his first oaf of office, er, oath. Whatever, you do the math. I've been a bad bad girl. I don't know why I never go to the doctor, I just don't. I know women who see their doctors as often as their hairdressers. They call their doctor by its first name.

"Yo, Bob, how's the family? The golf game? Oh, and I've been feeling a little fatigued lately."

Well who the fuck hasn't. No reason to overhaul the healthcare system.

So I'm filling out this questionnaire in the waiting room at the doctor's office (these days it's called a Medical Center), and I'm checking all the usual boxes and priding myself on pretty much telling the truth, when the question of alcohol use comes up. Being in Truth Telling Mode, I answer as honestly as I deem fit, that is, just over the border into White Lie territory: "12-15 per week."

It's only later when checking my work (advice I've always given my daughter when it comes to school and which she's always ignored) that I realize the question was how many drinks per week, not bottles.

Details, details.

On the question of lying, I acquiesce to my mother, R.I.P., the once-reigning Queen of Little White Lieland. It was at her little white knees that I was first schooled in the ancient art of embroidering the truth. No intricate cross stitch of the Golden Rule to hang on the bathroom wall for that broad, nosirree. My mother's idea of a sampler was having several different versions of the truth to choose from. Like multiple choice.

"I'm sorry, my daughter can't play with your daughter today because..." (Choose one)

A. She isn't feeling well.

B. She has to work on her "Unknown American Women" project.

C. Her doll died.

These were the options in Little White Lieland. In Honestyland, it was always True or False:

"My daughter can't play with your daughter today because your daughter eats paste." (T F)

My mother wasn't big on the truth. She thought it was overrated. In her world, learning to lie was an exercise in creativity. It smacked of imagination and depth. Why settle for the mundane when you could have the extraordinary? And learning to lie with aplomb was a rite of passage for girls, right up there with never telling your real age and making sure your lips and nails matched.

She did, however, make a distinction between a Lie and a Little White Lie, and I was weaned on the latter. Kruschev and people from Chisholm lied. People with breeding and manners told Little White Lies. And a Little White Lie was not only creative, it was often the kinder choice, the classic example being:

"That dress looks like sausage casing on you." ...versus... "My, what a nice color!"

So when I casually alter my answers on the questionnaire in the doctor's office, I'm defaulting to an instinct buried deep in my marrow. Why complicate my doctor's busy day any more than necessary? She has bigger fish to fry. What happens in my liver, stays in my liver.

Plus, I want to present myself well, it's what people with breeding and manners do. How would it look to admit I fell out of an outhouse in a drunken stupor and cracked a rib? After all, I'm a direct descendant of the royal house of Norway. At least, that's what Mom always said.

Lower Level Disturbances

2009-10-03T15:21:00.000-07:00

How do you know when someone's lying?

I know when I'm lying. And I'll bet you don't. Know when I'm lying. That's probably what makes me a Geiger counter when it comes to lie-spotting. It Takes One To Know One. I've got serious lying credentials. I've been lying since the Eisenhower Administration.

Do they even have Geiger counters any more? I'm going to resist Googling to find out. I Google everything, just like you. I mean, I think I've come up with a phrase or idea that no one else in the history of life has ever thought of. Then I Google it and get 15 billion hits. So much for original thought. Not to mention original sin.

Speaking of which, I should invent a program to spot lies. Then I could save what little is left of my sixth sense for more productive ventures. Like figuring out if that asshole in front of me is having a heart attack or has simply stopped in the middle of the road to text her babysitter. Make that bookie.

Speaking of bookies, in New Jersey it's against the law to talk on a cell phone while driving. So what do you do if you're motoring down the turnpike and some asshole in front of you is blathering away on the ol' LG Dare? Call 911? On your cell phone?

(Note to self: Forget about moving to Jersey, just fuggedaboutid.)

But I'd like to move somewhere. Pretty much anywhere away from anybody remotely resembling a teenager. I used to be picky and persnickety about pretty much everything. A real headcase of oversensitivity. Like, if the wind blew, I got heart palpitations. To be honest, I've never liked the wind. Never trusted it. I always felt it was out to get me. Maybe this comes from having dumb hair. The kind the wind could blow right off your head, given half a chance.

These days I'm not so high on the picky-and-persnickety scale. Thanks to being the parent of a teenager. A state which puts everything else into perspective. There's "everything else," and then there's Hell. The state where you live.

Teenagers are like the wind. You can't control them. You can't trust them. They're out to get you. They make you feel dumb, and you pull your hair out. As an olympic-level lie-spotter and the parent of a teenager, I'm practically bald. I'm in a constant state of arousal. And not in a good way. These days my sixth sense is stuck in overdrive, texting its bookie, laying odds on whether I'll make it to next year. Make that next week.

Wanna lay odds on how many Google hits I'll get with "lie-spotter"? Here goes. Wow. Only 1,700. Nice round number. One of my more original thoughts, looks like.

Here's an original thought: I used to be a teenager. Many people think I still am. Not in the looks department, in the acts. Maybe that's why the ol' Geiger is working overtime these days: there's an adolescent in the building. And It Takes One To Know One.

Makes me want to move to Jersey. Or at least leave the building. These days I have to settle for just going outside. I mean, give me an upper level disturbance over a 14-year-old anytime. I never thought I'd say it, but I miss the wind. These days I'd give anything for a good hard blow.

Life with a Flatted Fifth

2009-09-26T10:25:00.001-07:00

The Preschoolers think it's hilarious that I used to be a baby.

"Every animal on earth used to be a baby," I say, "even me," I say, and they roll around on the floor like apples, laughing hysterically.

First of all, they can't wrap their little brains around the fact that we're all animals. They think, if we're animals, we should at least have tails. So then we riff on that for a few, imagining what our tails would look like, how they would move, etc. Teaching Preschool is a jazz thing. You go where it takes you.

Eventually Cali, who tends to remain introspective on the sidelines, raises her hand (not her tail) and shares with the class that, yes, she believes all of us were once babies, because her dad, who is very old, is still a baby, at least that's what her mom says.

This time I'm the one laughing.

Thus one of the fundamental laws of the universe is proved anew: everything is relative. Cali's father, who Cali regards as ancient, is young enough to be my...well, let's just say he's young enough. Meanwhile, here I am, older than Methuselah, still walking the planet. Make that shuffling.

My husband of late (I mean, he's my final husband, who has lately said this) has added a new item to his list of grievances: you know you're getting older when you wake up in the morning and injure yourself brushing your teeth. As for me, I'm content with waking up in the morning. Make that thrilled. Make that overjoyed.

These days, this is no small feat. Because we got Trouble in River City, pal, with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Parenting. Which infers the existence of One Who Is Parented, am I right? But forget Parented. Make that One Who Is. Because whether any parenting actually took or not is, in light of recent developments, Debatable. With a capital D and that rhymes with C and that stands for...

...coy. But I'm not trying to be. I just don't feel like talking about it any more. When you have an eighth grader living in your house -- let alone this particular eighth grader -- you start to sound like a broken record. Actually, you start to look like a broken record.

So...if I don't want to talk about it, why am I bringing it up? Because to go around pretending like everything's the same old drunken brawl it's always been is nothing if not dishonest. But forget dishonest. It's just nothing. And I'm not ready to talk about nothing. That last being an example of the language skills of the unfortunate person who called to report the latest alleged bad behavior of One Who Is:

"Them sweaters was designers," the unfortunate person reported, "every last one."

Which caused every last one of my hairs to raise. Or is it rise? Being a lifetime member of the Grammar Police and current acting Grand Poobah, I moved immediately to strike the above testimony from the record. Not the broken one, the other one. I mean, when one's default tongue is Kansas Trailer Park, one's credibility is highly questionable, am I right?

In the end, it's all relative. And it's always a relative, isn't it? I try to remind myself that the eighth grader was once a baby, too. I try to remember her curls and her dimples and her fat little fingers patting my cheek. These days, her hair is straightened and she scowls and she'd just as soon punch me as look at me. That's how it feels. More broken records. Broken promises. Broken hearts. I'm starting to turn into someone I don't want to be. I look in the mirror and Mickey Rourke stares back at me. I might as well have a tail.

Parenting. Preschooling. Shuffling. Policing. In the end, it's all jazz.

Every Breath I Take

2009-09-18T12:41:00.000-07:00

Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Anything you may have heard regarding an accident is closer to the truth.

The truth is, I fell out of an outhouse. And I have one word for you: bruised ribs. I'm not talking barbecue, bubba, that's braised ribs. I'm talking a pain worse than childbirth. Well, not really, but I wanted to get your attention.

(You there? Haven't seen you in awhile.)

I had bruised ribs once before in my long long life (braised, too, back when I still thought meat grew from a seed, like lettuce), after I developed a bad case of bronchitis in Junior College. That's what we called it in the Olden Days. I coughed so long and so hard I blew out a rib and had to resort to Class A narcotics. Probably that's when the ol' addiction gene really kicked in. Yo, Doc, yank out my ribs, every last one, just gimme some more of them pills.

Prior to that my drug of choice had been thumb-sucking. I sucked until I was fourteen, when I acquired a boyfriend, who sufficed until I discovered controlled substances.

No doubt my thumb-sucking commenced in the womb. But the first recorded evidence of my sucking occurred on my second birthday, when I was found crouched beneath my parents' bed, thumb cocked. My parents snapped a photo to commemorate the event. I'd gone to the mattresses to lay low after having gouged an opportunistic fistful from the center of my birthday cake as it sat waiting for the party to begin.

Which has been my rallying cry ever since: LET THE PARTY BEGIN!!

In my book, no occasion is too lowly to warrant a celebration. Found the car keys? Crack a couple cold ones. Woke up? Break out the champagne. Explains how I happened to fall out of an outhouse. After all, the moon was full, no pun intended. In my book a full moon is tantamount to the Sesquicentennial. I started partying at 97% illumination and didn't let up until my blood alcohol had reached a similar percentage.

(Still with me?)

The outhouse in question is two stories high. Which sort of describes me that night. It isn't actually used as an outhouse any more. Which sort of allows me to save face. But I got the shit kicked out of me anyway, face or no face.

The fact that this blog was ghost-written over the summer by my identical cousin from Jersey might also have contributed to those pesky death rumors. It seemed like a good idea at the time, my having developed a bad case of writer's block, which could only be treated with Class A narcotics. I mean, we laugh alike, we walk alike, at times we even talk alike. But my cousin's linguistic style is less, shall we say, rampant than mine, no two writers being exactly alike. I mean, if we were, you could lose your mind.

Speaking of which, I'm rapidly losing what little I have left dealing with this pain. Now I know what Adam must've felt like, walking around naked in Paradise, minus a rib, begging God to create Ativan. You could say it only hurts when I breathe. (You could say it, go ahead.) Even though, being of Buddhist leanings, I only breathe once an hour, still, it's a painful breath. An excruciatingly painful breath. Sesquicentennially painful. Child-birthingly painful.

I mean, I accidentally laughed once last week and suddenly found myself moving down a long tunnel toward a bright light, the faces of dead relatives taking shape around me in the mist. Let me tell you, that did it. The writing was on the (outhouse) wall. And it's been a long long time coming. Right then, right there, I made a vow: No more laughing. I'd finally had it, the last laugh.

At least until my ribs heal. Meanwhile, I think we should start calling it the in-and-outhouse. But that's just me.

(Gone for a moonwalk...

2009-09-04T20:37:00.000-07:00

...back in awhile)

Frost Advisory

2009-08-31T11:53:00.000-07:00

In the immortal words of Nancy Zieman from PBS's "Sewing with Nancy,"

"Well it's time to wrap up our three-part series on Magical Fabric Yoyos."

Maybe it was the corkscrew cracking in half that finally did it. Maybe it was the Muzak version of "Feliz Navidad" piping through Super One the day I stopped in to counteract frostbite in the middle of a run. Maybe it was the funnel cloud hovering over the Blues Fest where we huddled in our parkas under umbrellas.

Actually it might've been the tent card someone slipped into my jeans cuff excoriating me to "Turn to the Living God or Perish!" as I huddled in said parka on the above-mentioned August night.

That's right, I said August.

Whatever it was, it sure the fuck wasn't summer. Not when you have to turn the furnace on in July, or can count on one hand the number of days the temperature climbs above 55. August 18th being Day Three.

The dog -- who, you may recall, is terrified of anything unusual or out of the ordinary -- refused to go outside one morning, retreating instead to her kennel, ears back, tail between her legs. This was late July. I decided she was afraid of the sun, which hadn't made an appearance since the last week of May.

Think I'm kidding?

Check out this photo my husband took at the cabin:

We had to move the picnic inside. It was July fourth.

Now it's over, whatever the fuck it was, and all we have to show for it is a heating bill and a couple unopened tubes of sunblock. Oh and a new corkscrew. I thought the old one had a lifetime warranty. Not in my universe, jack. No matter, this morning I used what's left of it to chip a skin of ice off the birdbath.

August 31st. Last day of meteorological summer. And not a moment too soon.

(Got the Blues...

2009-08-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

...back next week)

All Night Long

2009-06-10T08:55:00.000-07:00

Koko Taylor

1928 - 2009

What Would Angelina Do?

2009-06-06T13:52:00.000-07:00

There's mold growing in my medicine cabinet. I've named it Al.

Al has matured rapidly over the past few months. He now sports a goatee and a tattoo. The tattoo resembles a cactus, but actually it's a toothbrush. Al considers my toothbrush his mother. He's a good son, a real Momma's boy. Actually this is my old toothbrush, which I ignored for half a year. Thus, Al.

When my husband first saw my tattoo, he thought it was a seal balancing a ball on its nose. I immediately started drinking. All that pain and new age music for this?

The artist who created my tattoo -- a vegan lesbian from San Francisco with Buddhist leanings -- worked out of a third-floor walkup above an appliance store down on East Lake. Her walls were covered with tattoos, as was she. I made my appointment on a blustery day in spring, just after my 40th birthday.

"This is gonna hurt," she predicted as she lit a stick of incense, "but it's a karmic pain."

That broad would never make it as a dentist.

She had an accomplice, er, assistant who hovered like a dragonfly in the background, replacing incense and adjusting lights and changing tapes. These were the good ol' days, people still played tapes. After an hour or so the vegie lesbo with Buddhist leanings leaned back and surveyed her work.

"I'm gonna make a prediction," she predicted. "You're gonna come back for more."

More what?, I was thinking, Enya? patchouli oil? reefer breath?, but I bit my tongue. If I hadn't, I might've screamed.

It's not that getting a tattoo hurts, per se. It hurts per spicuously, per naciously, per suasively. Afterward, one drifts in a hazy ache for a few months, dulled somewhat by the right combination of reefer and madness, as in,

"I must've been fucking mad to get this fucking thing!"

But, like your parents or global warming, a tattoo is forever. You learn to live with it. There are the inevitable regrets, sure. Like the day you wake up and realize you should've gotten a dragonfly instead of a seal balancing a ball on its nose. But there's nothing you can do about it, jack, so chill.

A tattoo is a time warp. The ultimate Be Here Now. A moment you can't take back, no matter what, a moment that will continue to exist until you don't. And then some. A tattoo is Dorian Gary, er, Gray. FYI: I keep typing it like that: Dorian Gary. Some weird little muscle memory.

Dorian Gary. Sounds like somebody Al might know. Maybe the guy who did his tattoo.

Everybody knows a guy named Al. Some of my best friends are...well, not Als, per se, but they're married to Als. Come to think of it, I used to be married to an Al. No wait, it was a Dick. Everybody knows a Dick. Al is the new Dick. Or maybe it's the new Bob. Or maybe it's the other way around. I forget.

Anyhoo...every time I typed Dorian Gary I LOLed. Then I backspaced and corrected. As if life were that easy.

That Thing with a Glass and a Postcard

2009-05-30T13:53:00.000-07:00

I go outside to escape the words the words, the dog jumps at the door to follow. Later in bed beside me the dog is sobbing. In her sleep, a sound I've never heard. My heart breaks for the last time. For the last time something was lost and not found. Too many times. Too many glasses of wine.

Sober people are all alike; every drunkard is a drunkard in her own way.

When I look out the side window the apple tree is in bloom. Why didn't I know this? Too busy putting a year away, wrapping things up, saying goodbye. Leavetaking. Out on the playground, that last day, the children cawed wildly, their faces upturned. Afterward I taught them murder. A group of crows, I told them, is called a murder, isn't that strange? But the children didn't think so. They'd never heard the word.

To live in a world where some words don't.

So, you see, it wasn't about the lunch box. Or the jacket. Not even the iPod. That next lost thing in a lifetime of lost things. It was about the murder of children out on the playground, their faces drinking the sky. Once upon a time you should have been among them. But you weren't. Instead I imagine you standing there outside the fence, watching the scene like Disney, knowing all the words by heart.

You are my heart, I tell you, that's where you live. I don't say that other children live there, too, in another chamber. That would be too hurtful.

It's dark now, the words have retreated to their shadowy corners. Tomorrow I will find the bee, engorged and enormous in the basement, bumping against the window toward the light. And I'll do what I always do, that thing with a glass and a postcard. And the bee will do what bees always do, when I release them out into the world again: turn around and head straight at me, buzzing murderously, as if I were to blame.

(School's out...

2009-05-22T19:35:00.000-07:00

...back next week)