Blues of a Waxwing

Gum and Madge

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:32:00 +0000

I pulled the car up to the same house I'd pulled up to countless times before. My eyes scanned the yard where Easter egg hunts had taken place, where tag-you're-its had gone down with hurried breathing and where hide-and-go-seek boundary rules had been defined. My sister Huta got out of the car seemingly free from this assault of memories. Her surroundings don't change as much as mine do. She's in the thick of her memories more often than I am. Intensity and attachment to memories must be a function of absence from their triggers. I felt like taking her ass down her on the lawn and tickling her so she'd remember too. Please remember like I do. But I gathered that would irritate her somewhat, and since I'm no longer inclined to fuck with the Huta, I restrained myself.

"Grab the food", I hollered back as I walked up towards the gate. I pulled it open in what seemed like slow motion and recalled the time my tiny body clung to it while someone pushed me back and forth on it. The bougainvillea next to the gate that was usually in full bloom and full of bees on the white adobe wall was all shriveled up, a barren skeleton of a plant, dying of thirst in the Arizona sun. What the fuck? That's not how I had remembered it. I was inside a traitorous memory; instead of the clear colors and hugeness of it all, it had all been violently downscaled, shrunken by my adulthood, and weeds had germinated through the cracks in the patio and the paint on the door frames was now chipping away. Things are always much better kept in memories.

As I turned the doorknob to my grandparents' house and let myself in as I always had before, I half expected to find my Grandpa Gum clad in his favorite checkered button down shirt and his jean-like slacks, standing on a ladder fixing the ceiling fan or sitting in his chair poring over his history books with his glasses at the edge of his nose, his long slender legs crossed like a woman, just as my dad's legs do when he sits. I expected my grandmother to be in the other room re-wallpapering the dining room or baking 20 dozen peanut butter cookies for the church bake sale.

The scary grandfather clock that used to haunt me as a child stood tall in the foyer, but not quite as tall as it should have stood. I knew just where the key to it was hidden -- on top of it on the back right corner. I could easily reach that key now. I wouldn't need to stand tip toed on a chair if I wanted to open up the grandfather clock and peer into it with my heart pounding. But I ignored the urge to do that. My Great Grandmother´s Lladro statues sat unshined and dusty, but right where I remembered them. The pink silk couches, the same couches that have been reupholstered half a dozen times were exactly where they ought to be. The place, as always, had the feel of a cold museum, filled with untouchable icy artifacts with museum-keepers that were not much warmer.

Instead of standing on a ladder, Grandpa Gum was struggling at a snail's pace with a walker to make it to his chair so he could rest. I kissed him despite how uncomfortable I knew it probably made him and said hello. I tried not to let on that I was surprised at his frailness, his strong frame withered into a stoop, his once clear and sharp eyes sunken into his skull with the glossy fluid look of an aged gaze. He barely moved or said a word, a smile being more than he could muster these days, incapable of giving a warm hug. It didn't matter. He had never been capable of giving a warm hug before, even when he could.

"Why hello", my grandmother said, putting her arms around me with a smile. This tenderness...it's new. Added to the chipped paint and the short grandfather clock was this strange affection I hadn't seen before in her. It betrayed my memories of her.

"Where should I put this Grandma?" my sister asked referring to the take out food she was still holding.

"Oh, just put it anywhere." My grandmother waved a careless hand.

"How are you Grandpa?" I asked him as I took a seat next to him near the giant fireplace that for some reason was as scary as the Grandfather clock.

"I'm great. I'm just waiting to die," he stated, matter-of-factly.

I stared into Gum's emotionless eyes and in a moment, no longer than a couple of seconds, I saw a man that had fought in World War II, a man that had made it through law school with fucking narcolepsy, a man that had married the woman of his life and had had eight children with her. I saw him receiving the news about the death of his son in Vietnam. I saw him anxiously waiting in hospital rooms for news good and bad. I saw him starring at the Great Wall of China and Stonehenge and the Grand Canyon and Mount Everest and the Egyptian pyramids. I saw a man that was appointed to serve as a federal district court judge by Jimmy Carter. I saw him, dressed in legal garb, starring into the eyes of the worst of humanity, along with the wrongly accused, the framed, the exploited. I saw his blunders in Tibet and his winters in fucking Siberia. I saw him dancing and speaking in other languages and kicking any one's ass at a crossword puzzle or backgammon. Old Gum had out read us, had out bred us, had out travelled us, had out earned us, had outwitted us, had out fucked us. He had stood firmly inside the panopticon of human experience and had seen the best and the worst that life had to offer and check mate, he was fucking done. In his flat reply to my question regarding his current state of being, in so many words he told me that he'd be damned if he was going to will himself into another five years of this diaper bullshit he was currently putting up with.

Unsure how to reply to his death wish, I said nothing to him at all and I turned to my grandmother who was in a much more pleasant state of denial regarding her own deterioration.

"So, how're the kids?" she asked me, politely inquiring about the offspring I wasn't aware I had. It dawned on me for a moment that maybe the reason why she was being so unusually warm was because she was confusing me with someone from her church. I brushed it off.

"You mean my nephews, Grandma? They're good."

She looked at me, and confusion momentarily crossed her beautiful blue eyes, through her rhinestone-rimmed glasses that sat on a perfect nose, above gorgeous cheekbones covered in gentle lovely wrinkles. She smiled, showing the teeth that had made it all these years, but furrowed her brow trying to sort it all out and I noticed how her snow white hair shifted forward.

Huta, uncomfortable, and possibly wanting to speed up this grandparent visit stated, "Well, our food it getting cold, so why don't we have dinner now".

"Oh we can't have dinner now, I'm afraid." Grandma replied.

"Why not?"

"Well, because my granddaughters will be here shortly and they're bringing us dinner".

Ah, Fuuuuck.

"Grandma," my sister said in a gentle whisper, "That's us. We're your granddaughters."

This time the perplexity lingered longer and was a bit more disheartening.

I glanced over at Gum, who I believed was contemplating finding some hidden strength within to take us all down with his walker. He glared at whoever looked his way.

The doorbell sounded and Aunt Eunice made her skinny appearance with her tattooed eyebrows and a tub of ice cream under her arm. Thankfully, she was quickly recognized by both her parents, taking a bit of the burden off of us for feeling like intruders in a home we had spent so many Christmas Eves, so many birthday parties, so many Thanksgivings.

After awkward two-pats-on-the-back hugs only serving to remind us how thin the threads to the fabric of our family are, we sat down around the table with paper plates and plastic forks and passed around the Olive Garden take out.

"Why, this meal is delicious. I don't remember the last time I had pasta," Grandma graciously exclaimed.

Gum's shaky hand wasn't allowing the noodles to stay on his fork long enough to reach his dentured mouth. I stole a glance at Huta and knew we were both regretting the Olive Garden decision. I began to worry about his hungry looking limbs and digits that weren't cooperating to help nourish themselves.

"Gum. Put your fork on your plate like so and turn. See? Like so," Grandma instructed. He pretended not to hear her and went on trying to shovel a shaky fork full of unstable noodles into his mouth. "Gum. Down and turn. Like so," she repeated in an increasingly irritated tone.

"Leave me alone," he eventually growled at her with his mouth full of what small morsels had made their way there by chance.

She gave up and turned to me, "So, how is Spain?"

Internally, I breathed a sigh of relief that she still knew who I was as I answered, "It's great, Grandma, we're doing really good. Just working. You know."

She stared at me, questioningly. "So, are you from Spain?", she asked me with that worried crinkled brow.

"No, Grandma. Remember? I was born here." Her confusion didn't have time to linger, because my Grandfather interrupted her.

"Madge? What happened to Bob's ashes?"

Aunt Eunice audibly choked on her Fettuccine. "Bob's ashes?" she blurted out incomprehensibly with her mouth full of food. "What are you talking about? Uncle Bob died?"

"Yes, Uncle Bob died," Gum calmly replied to the inquiry of his dead brother. "Bob's wife is bedridden and she had his ashes sent to Madge and me to handle them."

"My god", Aunt Eunice replied in disbelief, "When did all of this happen?"

Grandpa turned to Grandma, "Madge? Do you recall when all of this took place, because I don't."

"Oh Gum, I don't have the foggiest idea."

My Grandfather with a steady voice and no movements stated flatly, "I suppose it was a couple of months ago now. Madge? What did you do with my brother's ashes?" He asked her again as if he were inquiring about the location of his favorite pen or the crossword puzzle he was working on.

But Aunt Eunice was already in a fury, frantically calling her siblings and informing them that "we have situation here and I think you had better come over to Mom and Dad's. Were you aware that Uncle Bob died? Well he did. Two months ago. They have his ashes but they don't know what they've done with them. They were supposed to have arranged a service and apparently forgot to."

Huta and I gave each other knowing let's-get-the-fuck-outta-here looks and began to clear up the dinner mess. There were upset tones and minds that were in disarray and we no longer felt we should be there.

So goodbyes were said with bewilderment and frustration so palpable I could feel it and suddenly I realized that this might be the only time I had ever been able to pick up on any emotion whatsoever from my grandparents. But there was something else there besides the confusion and fear when my Grandmother grabbed my hand and gazed into my eyes and pleaded slowly, "Do come again," maybe with waves of knowing who she was even talking to but with certainty that there was love between us somehow.

On our way out I closed the door behind me. I walked through the carport I'd walked through so many times before. My grandmother's car used to sit right there, the one she used to pick me up in to take me to the ballet or to a play when I was a child because she was concerned about my status as the child of divorce and didn't want me to feel neglected. In her frosty, restrained way, she had loved me. And today, even with her not knowing precisely who I was, had marked the first time I had ever really felt it as an adult.

I noticed that the laundry room door was ajar and the light was on. I peaked my head in and remembered a favorite hide-and-go-seek hiding place. I smiled, turned the light off, and shut the door. Weeks later my grandmother would be found by my aunt in that hot laundry room in the middle of the scorching summer heat, with nothing on but her underwear, completely dehydrated, mixed up and distraught, unsure of how she got there or how long she'd been in there. When things calmed down and my grandparents had been fed, hydrated, and bathed, their pride had effectively withered to the point that they were finally willing to have a look at those pamphlets of Aunt Eunice's on assisted living.

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Fuck was that ever long. If you've made it this far, you deserve some kind of reward for reading that. This story is not entirely true. It's based on several true stories, not all of which happened directly to me, but my point was to recreate them and experiment a bit with description and dialogue. Thanks for making it to the end. Critical feedback welcome.

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Tienen cojones

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 19:25:00 +0000

I rarely do this, but this one just had me pissing, my friends.

Check out this picture of Spain's first family together with the Obamas.

I wish my dad had been as cool as Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and had let me wear whatever I wanted all the time, no matter our diplomatic engagements.

Please watch this. I can't stop watching it.

This is one of my top 10 moments of Spanish diplomacy. It is right up there with the King of Spain telling Hugo Chavez to shut up.

If you grow up amidst Spanish statesmanship and manage to be this anti-establishment when you're bumping shoulders with society's elite, you deserve my utmost respect. Or at least my chanted prayers while dancing around a pile of stones in the forest.

Now that is what you call Spanish cojones. I fucking love this country.

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The souls of everyday objects

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:19:00 +0000

At work, I normally keep to myself. I sit at my desk with my red felt tip pens, my stapler, my eraser, my mechanical pencils and my ruler that I use to mark my spot on the page I'm reading. These are the objects I share more time in my day with than real people. These are my tools for work, but other than that, I don't attach much transcendental importance to them.

I share an office with an English bloke that is nearing retirement age. He's nice enough, occasionally chuckling or blurting something out, thus requiring me to interrupt my interaction with my tools and crane my neck around his computer monitor and find out what he's on about. I usually reply with something along the lines of "Ain't that the truth" or whatever it takes to let him know that I'm politely responsive but that I don't care to continue the conversation as I have 500 pages in front of me that need to be proofread by next week.

I have lunch and share coffees at times with the authors that I proofread for, and we exchange pleasantries and talk about the weather and shit. But in general, I keep to myself; my working life and personal life don't intermix. In fact, the office just adjacent to mine is filled with nice looking people whose names I do not even know, because I stay in my shell, huddled over my pile of documents, and when I leave work I go home as opposed to partaking in the BBQs and movie nights and pub crawls that are organized by the more social co-workers among us.

For this reason, I didn't really know Don, whose office is directly in front of mine; office number 76. I only know Don by name because it is written right on the door which is the first thing I see when I look outside my office. Don's door is usually open and I can always see him click clacking away on his keyboard or speaking to someone loudly on the phone, causing me to quietly get up and shut my door. He always shoots me an apologetic look. I shake my head and mouth, "No problem" before closing my door gently.

But today his door is closed and his light is off because Don died of a heart attack over the weekend.

Please don't say "I'm sorry" or "my condolences" which would imply that I had exchanged more than ten words with Don in my life, all of which were obligatory niceties such as "G'morning", exchanged with the most hastened of eye contact imaginable in the hallway to and from the shared printer or the restrooms, like I do with all of the other 200 people in this office that I don't know. It would imply that maybe we had cigarettes together, or bumped shoulders in the café downstairs while updating each other on our weekend. It would imply that we informed each other of office gossip from time to time or included each other in work-friendly email jokes. We did none of that. I don't even know Don's marital status or if he has children.

I'm certainly not upset. But I know somewhere, some people are very upset.

I know that someone will go through the things in his office and empty out the physical remains of Don's professional life, shortly after the remains of his physical life-- his body-- are dealt with and probably long before the remains of his personal life – his clothes, his aftershave, the half-used bottle of roll-on deodorant with a straggling armpit hair still stuck to it– are parted with painfully when the stomach can be mustered up to do so by the people closest to him.

The remains of his professional life must be the items given the least importance. Maybe the person that cleans out his office after his family has picked up his personal items will think nothing of returning his pile of paperclips to the general office supply room to mix and mingle and become indistinguishable from the other paperclips. That bottle of White-Out that Don used to carefully correct his work that later became smudged with his shirt cuff will be carried away to its proper place, perhaps finding itself on some secretary's desk within a week's time. A half-used pad of post-it notes will be placed on top of the stack of unopened ones in the supply room and someone will pick them up not knowing that the used post-its from that particular pad had been used to jot down Don's grocery lists, meeting dates, deadlines, birthday reminders. Maybe the pens that Don preferred - the black Pilot Vball 0.7 pens - will thoughtlessly be cast into their appropriate box without a thought to the fact that one of them in particular was actually held by Don himself when blood was still pumping through his living hands, who never imagined that he would be dead before he himself chucked the pen into the waste bin or before he patted his breast pocket to find that it had become lost. Maybe he never looked at these items and wondered if they, with their plastic flimsiness and Made-in-China cheapness, would outlive him. Perhaps these things that carry no sentimental value were the objects that had the most physical contact with Don during his waking hours. They intimately melded with Don's day to day life and will now be dissolved into the ebb and flow of impersonal, sterile office life and reincarnated onto other employees' desks without even their knowing.

I'm stopped in the hall on my way inside my office from the water cooler and am asked for clarification regarding some of my proofreading work, and I see that I am responding and explaining but I feel far away from myself and my voice becomes a hum inside my head and my eyes can't keep from darting towards the closed door to office number 76 with no light coming through underneath. I imagine Don's desk and all of this meaningless office supply shit among papers that look disorganized but that I'm sure had some system that only Don could explain, were he here to do so. I imagine the coffee mug with a ring of dried back-washed coffee that still contains some of Don's saliva at the bottom that he forgot to rinse out when he left on Friday afternoon because he wasn't feeling well. And my eyes turn back to the tedium of my red handwriting across the stapled page of the document that I'd spent hours poring over that is being held up for me to look at. I notice my coffee smudge at the bottom corner of it from Friday's desperate afternoon latte, and I think about all the stupid shit that we touch that remains in the world after we disappear that nobody gives a thought to when we're gone. And vulnerability punches me hard in the gut.

Suddenly I remember how when I was very young and in love with a boy, even the pencil he had chewed on became a relic for me to hide in my jewelry box and flush over when I'd pull it out and examine the tiny bite marks in it, knowing how ashamed I would feel if he knew how I'd saved it. And I remember the first time I ever saw Luisito's bedroom, allowed in as a platonic guest before we had ever shared a bed and I remember very clearly how my eyes scanned his room and lingered on his pillow and how I felt a pinprick of jealousy and wonder towards it for sharing more intimate contact with him than I ever had.

Just objects.

And I felt a deep sense of shame for carrying on just outside Don's closed door, behind which seemed to me to still contain part of his remains.

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Can't I just post an audio clip of myself groaning and you'll know what I mean?

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:52:00 +0000

I miss being able to write. I'm blocked and I know that it's mostly just the not doing it that's making me not do it. I see some of you are blocked like me. But say you're not quitting for good. That would be awful and it would force me to think about that one time when it was really cool, back in the day of good blogging. Nostalgia is my worst enemy right now, so please don't do that.

My reading is suffering. Pretty lame of me to beg you to not quit when I haven't even remotely done my part to encourage you.

Other times, when I can, I carry on across your blogs like we're still in touch, like you're in my head and you too have read that pretentious post that went through me just the other day that lingered there in the center of my nervous system, playing Double Dutch with my neurons. I played with it and tapped at it and scratched and tortured it, the poor stupid thing. None of this happened with my pen, which would have required entirely too much effort. I pulled its little legs off of its twitching corpse and carried the carcass around the house in my mouth until its gut juice seeped through the incisions my teeth had made and its bitter taste made its way to my tongue. And then I didn't like it anymore and how could I give you such a foul cliche in hopes that you would praise me for killing it?

I know I should have some things to say about home, other than the cheap overview I gave you a couple of weeks ago.

I suppose I should tell you how it takes going home to realize that home's definition has apparently been revised in the 2009 edition of My Mind and that I actually feel the calmest and best in the anti-home, the scapegoat and seed of all of my turmoil. My inner dictionary has been rewritten, without consultation of its primary user. That thing had always been so reliable up until now.

Home is apparently not where one is safe and secure and comfortable and at peace. It's a place of confusion where I'm no longer cut to that mold and when I leave I'm relieved to say goodbye to release the pressure and intensity surrounding the visit, to let home fall into the background of memory and fuzziness and distance where it now resides permanently, quieter and quieter, its unbearable decibels turning to a light hum.

I fall into non-home and the excited pace of 'see this, go there, enjoy! Enjoy! It will all be over soon!' ceases and the heart goes back to a healthy steady pace feeding oxygen to the cerebral cortex again, a bit less frantically now, but certainly providing all that is needed to keep those synapses from going on strike.

And now I think I can make it through the winter without you, you infidel of synonyms. I won't be flying over your mountains and swimming pools and palm trees any time soon because I'm to the gills with you. I'm ignoring your threats that the longer I am away, the less you'll resemble what I thought you were. We were separated for so long and you became so perfect and tender in my mind and then you go and throw a fucking antonym at me right when I'm trying to cuddle up in your arms? That's lame.

There -- I went and brought you a carcass and placed it in your shoe, a hunted token so you know I love you, and I looked up at you blankly. I know. It's not as good as new and its legs are missing and it has teeth marks in it and one of its filmy wings is down the hall near the bathroom. But it's the only kill I could find in this lifeless, quiet place.

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I almost got you a keychain

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:19:00 +0000

Well, it's been awhile and according to my ego, you are waiting for an update from me. But my ego is extremely unreliable and so for now I won't say much about my time away.

Besides, you know I can't write under pressure.

I overslept, I overate, and I overspent, alright? That's what vacations are all about. Not much else to tell.

But I did think of you along the way.

In lieu of stories, I brought you a few souvenirs. Just some little trinkets I picked up on my journey for you to put next to your mini Eiffel Tower and your I heart NY mug on your mantel.

Here they are, I hope you like them:

1). Sister giggles

Sister giggles are extremely rare, often counterfeited, and can usually only be found for a couple of weeks in the summer and at Christmas, and sometimes not even then. They grow in unexpected places, and their release almost always requires mental tickling or self ass-making, but the latter usually proves more fruitful. The ones I brought you come all the way from the bottom of the Grand Canyon. In order to capture these giggles, I had to hike 10 miles and then while heavily dosed with muscle relaxers, attempt to lance a blister on my foot that was competing in size with the canyon itself. Further sister giggles were picked up on a boat on a river in Sacramento where I attempted wakeboarding with a posse of psychotically fearless lesbians. My ill attempts to get up on the board unleashed a plethora of these cackling gems, which I captured with my squinted eyes and saved for you. Their authenticity is guaranteed.

2). Upside down mountains

Upside down mountains are really the best kind of mountains, when you think about it. They are great for when you feel upside down yourself, at home but not quite. Best of all, they don't require climbing like right-side-up ones do, which is great for still-blistered feet, but they sometimes beckon you to skip rocks on them. The ones I brought you have been well worn in by skipping rocks on an early morning. I had to go all the way to Mammoth Lakes to find them for you. Please do not turn them right side up, as they get dizzy and may result in me drowning.

3). A crater-sized lemon meringue pie all the way from Mars

Um, I mean from Death Valley. You would be smart to enjoy this pie with a bottle of water, something I forgot to have with me while driving through this strange planet, tempting fate with my engine light ablaze, in the middle of a hot summer day. I guess I figured if I broke down and got hungry there would be plenty of refreshing lemon pie to go around. As it turns out, I made it through the mortal valley of doom and so the pie is intact for you.

4). This Song

I'm sorry, but the one you get is not exactly as you hear it there, which may be preferable to the version I brought back. The one I brought you was screamed by me at the top of my tired and secondhand smoke filled lungs in a club in Vegas at 4 a.m. Unfortunately the DJ cut the song off, so the one I bring you is not quite complete. But I can assure you that its breakage was not taken lightly and the legitimacy of the DJ's birth and the virtue of his mother was questioned in a shouting nature by virtually everyone in the joint, including myself.

5). A fertility prayer

What? You don't want it? Neither did I when my dad and his wife cornered me in the rental car parking lot and attempted to lay hands on my apparently barren womb. I grimaced and squirmed, befuddled as to how they even knew we were trying to conceive and why they suspect I am infertile even before I do. So now I'm trying to get rid of this thing, so I don't have to thank them when I get pregnant, but no one is having it. Are you sure you don't want it? I think it would be funny to pull it out at a party if you want to see the room clear.

6). Pine trees for picking

Don't be fooled by imposters. These are the only pine trees on earth whose scent in a milisecond could remind me of Grandma's cabin, egg nog, bee stings, forts, and tree swings all at once. They just begged me to pick them like a flower and put them in my pocket and bring them to you. Please be careful though as they are highly flammable, and while it might not seem like it, there really aren't that many of them left.

7). Cold feet

I only deliver the good kind of cold feet-- the kind that you can only get from a quiet lake of melted snow in Yosemite, the kind that give you goosebumps and make you not care that your hair is tangled. They can make you finally adore the sun again and remind you of everything you missed the most about your country. Be sure and take extra gulps of the coldness to save for when you'll need it most, like when you come back to a hot stuffy apartment in Spain, and reality sets in that vacation is over.

You know what? I'm sorry, but I think I'm gonna hang on to the cold feet if you don't mind.

You understand.

Sister Giggles by Luisito
Upside down mountains by Luisito
Mesquite Dunes, Grapevine Mountains by Jim Dollar from Flickr
Pines by Luisito
Cold Feet by Luisito

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Puzzling

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:01:00 +0000

I'm off soon.

Three whole weeks in the states.

I don't know how steady I'll be on the blogging front. Sometimes when I'm home, I get floods of feeling that I need to put somewhere, but maybe I won't be able to.

I'd organize guest posters, but my guest posting karma is pretty much crap right now, as you may recall.

I've never gone home for this long before to visit.

Three weeks is roughly 6% of the year. Add that to the two weeks that I go home for Christmas and it's roughly 10% of the year. That means that I have 10% of the year to try to find a balance to outweigh the favoritism of self that I give this place – the place that gets 90% of my day to day, that sees 90% of my breathing, 90% of my blinking, 90% of my yawning, 90% of my sighing.

During that short time at home, I get to feel like a puzzle piece that fits perfectly into place. I know I fit when I smell the freshly cut grass in the morning and hear the lawn mower outside my window at 7:00 a.m.; when I wake up in the dark and my feet find the soft carpet below just like they should, instead of the unwelcoming tile floors of Spanish homes, just after realizing that the bed is exactly the height that a bed is supposed to be. I know I fit here because there are garbage disposals that suck the shit out of the kitchen sinks, out of life, instead of getting all clogged up where I have to spend forever picking out tiny pieces of food with a chopstick, never quite getting all the bullshit.

And I think, this is it, babe, this is where I fit so snuggly, see? I nudge him-- this is where everything dovetails, where the tenon finally fucks the mortise. And I see him trying to cram the little uncooperative bits of his puzzle piece onto my part of the puzzle with all his might, bending and folding and partially fucking up his appendages. I see him thinking it must be here where he fits too because he's relieved at finally seeing me comforted by the shape and form of the architecture surrounding us. But he can't make the cardboard edges line up properly; the outgrowths are too big where the holes are too small, and besides, he's a piece of sky with clouds on it and there are clearly no clouds in this sky.

And it sucks something out of me like the garbage disposals I miss to know that where I match up and fit all compact and sheltered like a cubbyhole he does not, where his bits align and contour just right, mine. just. won't. -- try as we might to fit our puzzle pieces into the same surrounding structure.

But by some manufacturing fluke, both of us as pieces fit so perfectly together, like we were certainly meant to dwell in the same part of the jigsaw puzzle, like our fibrous matter belonged attached, unsevered, having always been tethered even before when we were just sheets of paper board smoothed down to be cut with the fretsaw by the puzzle-maker.

He rolls over in bed, prostrates himself on his stomach and his shoulder presses against the mattress and he extends his arm with the palm of his hand facing up, finding the place it wants to find, cupping over the fleshiest part of me as I lay face up. This is my cue to place my hand on the small of his back and let sleep wash over me again.

It's as if we originated from the same cellulose pulp derived from the same wood, from the same tree, as the same organism, to later be disjointed and scattered unfound inside a box of a thousand imposters.

So we stay as two perfectly fitted pieces reserved to the side of the card table. We go together. It's just not really clear where exactly we go.

See you soon.

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The Mixed Tape

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:35:00 +0000

Every time I go home to Arizona for a visit, I walk through my mother's door, tired and worn down from the long journey and I take the load off my sore shoulders from all of my many heavy bags and I plop them down on the ground in the guest room, glad to be in familiar surroundings. I stare at the wooden chest my father gave me and it stares back at me, beckoning me to toss aside the doilies and the tacky ceramic figurines and coffee table books my mother has placed on top of it, open it up, inhale the distinctive cedar fragrance, and remember.

But the thought of opening it and becoming acutely aware of time, and in my case space, makes me gulp slightly for extra air. Besides, I don't have to open it up to know that underneath the Guinness coaster I kept from a pub in Ireland, the U2 ticket stub from the 1993 tour, the embarrassingly immature letters exchanged with friends or exes, and the incense burner that once filled a cozy apartment with hippie aroma, underneath it all, surely somewhere at the bottom of that chest, tucked inside an old shoebox, there must be a long lost mixed tape.

That mixed tape, if it is there as I suspect it is, would have survived the many moves and shifts of home. It would have escaped being accidentally placed in the box of cassettes to be sold at the garage sale which a brave mystery shopper would gamble a whopping 15 cents for, not knowing what would be on it. It would have somehow survived the brutal, tidying hands of my sister who had no idea how much fleeting feeling had gone into this delicate piece of plastic and wheels and coils of tape when by mere chance she tossed it absentmindedly into the 'junk to keep' pile as opposed to the 'trash' or 'Good Will' pile.

Mixed taping is quite a forgotten art, isn't it?

No, it is not the same as burning someone a CD or sharing a playlist or sending someone a YouTube link. It just isn't.

MP3 playlists don't have the folded flap to be filled in with ever-so-neatly executed tiny penmanship, perhaps even a second draft, with the first flap having been tossed because a right mess was made of it, and a new one having been stolen from a fresh unused tape so it would be just right.

Burned CDs don't have that clicking noise on the tape between the songs where years later someone, a real person, can be heard carefully pushing pause after having run back into the room near the song's end, conjuring up the images of the tape-maker fumbling through all of the CDs laid out on the floor in front of the stereo. You can imagine how the tape-maker pored over the CDs painstakingly one by one, to identify the best of the best of their songs with just the right lyrics sending just the right message to the recipient of the mixed tape. Runner-up songs that didn't make the mixed tape cut would be eliminated distressingly, but only after much indecision. An entire Saturday would be killed to create this musical anthology as a parting gift, crafted as the perfect compilation of ardor and devotion turned to the foreshadowing of absence and recognition of the fate of circumstance.

Maybe that mixed tape would be exchanged during a good-bye with a quivering voice awkwardly saying:

"I want you to take this tape I made you...and I want you to just listen to it."

And words would be giant jagged stones to be tripped over and fallen onto and injured by accidentally. Because the compiler of the tape was afraid that muttered words would be the wrong ones, coming out in the wrong way without a fraction of the eloquence of the composers of the songs on the tape. But this tape was also an insurance policy of sorts because if feelings changed, words were too committal, whereas, a song's true meaning could be easily questioned, or its inclusion on the tape could be justified based on musical appeal alone, having nothing to do with its lyrics.

But maybe the recipient would forgive the tape-maker for borrowing sentiments from songwriters, unable to say anything original from within and with decision. She would listen with wonder, looking for clues, as if the tape-maker had actually been the one who had written all of the lyrics. Maybe the recipient would listen to that tape that very night again and again, Side A, Side B, Side A, Side B...

And maybe the recipient would sink into her seat on her first international flight ever, and buckle herself in for a long flight and maybe she would put on her headphones and let the mixed tape soothe her excited mind.

She would listen without an inkling that this tape that contained so much intent and emotion, would soon be forgotten, the compiler would soon forget having ever made it.

She would not envision that after much listening and much rewinding and fast forwarding of the tape and undertaking many repair procedures with the careful precision of a chewed up pencil, she would soon tire of listening to it, and might even stick her nose up to that kind of music later.

She would not foresee that as the months passed, the original meaning of the songs, reflecting the momentary feelings of the tape-maker, would be lost to her and the songs would take on new meaning for her somewhere else across the world.

When she gently pulled the flap out of the case that she had placed into the seat back pocket of the plane, she would admire the craftsmanship that went into its careful inscription, and she would be wholly unaware that it would soon enough get misplaced, leaving only the tape floating around unlabeled and unprotected to be tossed into an old shoebox and thrown at the bottom of a cedar trunk somewhere to never feel the rotating spindles of a cassette player again, to mix and possibly unravel among the other junk and memorabilia, just like any other artifact of an ordinary past.

"I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in" by Hryck from Flickr
"TDK C90" by Status Frustration from Flickr
"Cassette" by Tania.Paz from Flickr

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Hoping for Giggles

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:28:00 +0000

My husband Luisito and I are planning to hike the Grand Canyon while in Arizona for holidays this year.

You know, just "for shits and giggles", as the expression goes.

I am hoping, however, that it will be minimal shits and abundant giggles, considering the primitive plumbing situation (actually, the shits should be minimal as my asshole is very finicky about functioning in an unfamiliar working environment and does not hesitate to go on strike when his working hours are altered or when his rights to vacation days are not respected, taking my entire digestive track to the picket line with him. This is normal, as my asshole is, after all, pretty much European now).

Regardless of how shits will be dealt with in the canyon, I have my doubts about the availability of giggles unless laughing in a fit of hysteria at my own misery counts.

My mother will be joining us, who I haven't said much about before, mainly because her personage and my feelings toward her are so skull-fuckingly complex and are characterized by contradictory bouts of shits and giggles, that I don't even know how to begin to weave her into a coherent narrative that would make her a believable character, or my reaction to her a logical one.

Despite my undying love for my mother and the giggles she induces on occasion, I am not blind to the fact that as my mother has aged, she has increasingly leaned toward the part of her personality which requires her to emit this heavily polluted nonsense when she speaks whereupon confusing shit-fumes of insanity invade my oxygen supply and annihilate my giggles torturingly one by one. What I mean is that she is loud about her 'politics' (really too polite a word), which happen to be the opposite of my politics, which would be fine if she didn't shout them from a hill top or from the bottom of a canyon or from wherever the hell she is in a continual stream of verbal diarrhea taking any and all innocent giggles as collateral damage.

One way to prevent the destructive effect of said shit/airborne toxic poisoning via motherly political speeches and to increase the ratio of giggles to shit storms is to ingest liquid forms of milder poisons in heavy doses. But considering that we're going to be hiking in the scorching Arizona desert, I doubt that it would be wise to occupy any water room with alcohol. Besides, I think my asshole might inform the labor union about what's going on if I even attempt to favor giggle recruitment and subsequent dehydration over shit-eating sobriety in a desert work environment. A high-profile labor claim of that sort may even cause the entire company to liquidate its assets, which...well, ewww.

Friendly debate with my mother without alcohol has never worked before. Attempts at open, respectful dialogue often end in seizures of "Why are you mad at me!?" hollered from a tear-streaked face and insane amounts of guilt taking hold of me for partaking in giant political feuds during my short and infrequent visits.

For this reason, I first considered wearing some type of repellent head and body gear for my canyon descent. I felt that such equipment would have a two-pronged protective effect: it would shield me from the poisonous giggle-corroding aerodynamic political fecal material that might make its way toward my ear canal while simultaneously cushioning my head from hitting the canyon walls or my body from ricocheting off of needled cacti should I decide that a head-first dive into the canyon is preferable to an 8 hour stroll at a conversational pace with my mother.

However I fear that the effectiveness of my repellent jumpsuit may be compromised because my dear husband would likely latch onto me as I jump. Besides, launching myself and my spouse head first into the Grand Canyon, quite frankly, does not provide the prospect of many giggles and it may actually instigate pant-shitting which has actually been proven to be incompatible with giggles. Such forced and unexpected labor for my asshole would in turn create problems later when I ask him to cooperate with downsizing after I realize that my enterprise has gotten too large to attempt to hike a canyon of any size ever again.

You know what? I'm just going to chuck everything from my backpack and carry a tank of laughing gas, which is really the only thing that I will need to survive in the desert on this adventure. Plus my asshole can take a couple days off which will boost his morale for when we get back to normal operating conditions at the factory.

Bring on the giggles. Stay away shits.

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Historical agnostic icons can suck it

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:25:00 +0000

The funny thing about Jesus and his super potent sin-cleansing blood is that he can forgive anything, except not believing in him. His blood can wash away any sin except ditching him at the bar and leaving him alone with those douchebags the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, while you flirt with Charles Darwin right in his face and then go off to play darts and order two rounds of Mind Erasers without even asking anyone else if they want one.

But Darwin is totally hawt and stuff. And he totally gets you. Like, his shit just makes sense. You can just tell he's well read and has thought his shit through before he goes babbling on about some theory. Jesus, on the other hand, just kinda throws stuff out there and everyone gets all quiet and awkward and it used to sound all poetic and stuff, like when you first started going out, but now it's sometimes like, "Srsly, dude, what the hell are you talking about?"

So you decide to ditch the chastity belt and ask ole' Chuck to come back to your place to kill a bottle of Captain Morgan and listen to that really sweet Phish album, 'cause OMG-- he's totally into Phish too. I mean fish.

You don't really remember how it all went down but you can pretty much assume the sex was totally NOT awesome.

And now you're all kindsa hung over and throwing up that slice of pizza with a side of ranch that you don't even remember eating, like all over that blanket you got from Urban Outfitters and your hair looks like a rat's nest and your breath smells like sour rum mixed with diet coke and extra cheese and nicotine. You can tell Darwin is starting to feel all uncomfortable, his eyes darting around and he's fishing for his keys and you can feel him wondering what his responsibility is here. And he starts putting his pants on kinda sneakily and and he's all, "Well, I'm gonna take off, I gotta go help my buddy move. So…I guess I'll see ya around. I'll give you a call n stuff."

And you think: Fine. Just leave me here in this pile of vomit. Asshole.

I swear. It's just like that time when you totally got it on with Karl Marx at that bar in Nogales, after he came up to you and totally rocked your world with that pick up line about the 'opiate of the masses'. But when the going got tough and, due to unreasonable amounts of tequila, you required a short nap in a Mexican toilet stall at 2:00 in the morning, Marx was nowhere to be found to help scrape your ass off a disgusting tile floor.

Historical agnostic icons can suck it, 'cause they don't do jack for the soul or forgive sins or any of that crap. What a bunch of dicks.

So you're left all alone with your own vomit-stained soul with nothing but piss-warm beer and a shot of tears for breakfast and you can't even find the keys to your truck which you don't even remember where you parked anyway. And who the fuck knows where your wallet is, not that there's any money left in it.

And now you're all: Duuuude. Jesus totally would've spotted me like 20 bucks and would've gone to get me a sesame seed bagel and would've acted like I didn't call bullshit on every story he told last night, embarrassing him like that in front of Satan and Yahweh and all those guys. Jesus would've loaded a bowl for me and been all, "Wake and bake! This will totally cure your hangover, babe!" with a big forgiving grin right before going to get me some breakfast and then making me a hemp necklace.

Face it. You completely dogged Jesus, dude. And so now it's time to play god to yourself and forgive yourself for all the stupid philosophical bullshit you said before you fell off your bar stool last night after those Mind Erasers. And you're trying to wash out the puke stains on your soul with a glass full of blood, which apparently worked for Jesus, but you don't know what his secret is because that shit just creates further staining. So, you try to nail yourself to a cross to let bygones be motherfuckin' bygones but it turns out it's actually a two-man job and you've exhausted the phone number list that is thumb-tacked to the communal bulletin board in the kitchen and nobody is even willing to bring you an Egg McMuffin right now, let alone come over and help you crucify yourself.

So it's just you and your sins. Buck up, shithead. You'd better put on your big girl panties cause you can't find your chastity belt fucking anywhere, yo-- maybe you left it in the car. You best roll up your sleeves and dry your tears of self pity and learn to forgive yourself for ditching Christ and your religious family and all the other sins that have come post-bubble that no omnipotent beings are gonna be around to cleanse and wash away.

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Jumping Bubble

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:53:00 +0000

This post is inspired by and written for Gwen.

I grew up in a bubble; a thickly-walled, strong, soapy bubble, like the bubbles made from some kind of industrial run-off, with the swirled rainbows of contamination in them; transparent, but distorting everything outside of them.

Ours was a bubble of religion, enveloping us in a particular brand of millenarian Evangelicalism that my father became involved in upon my parents' divorce. This religion crept into our lives and, almost overnight, filled every crevice of neutrality, every hole of gray, every crack of on-the-fenceness, every fissure of the no-man's-land of morality, leaving no aspect of life outside of its comprehensive judgment. Things that were seemingly benign before like television, music, games and toys were suddenly reinterpreted and their intrinsic evil became prophetically revealed to our family.

When I was eight years old, our television was sold. My father was going to protect us from the evils of the secular world, you see. He read to us at night, when normal families were watching television programs. He read to us about the miracles of missing limbs growing back at worship services, about people who had been blind their whole lives suddenly seeing, about the economically troubled suddenly finding an envelope filled with cash with their name on it.

Religion encased us completely and the only oxygen allowed to fill our lungs, to run through our blood, was scripture. Our giant beautiful, truth-giving, enclosed sphere was a gift to be grateful for. And we floated beyond the world, only needing the word of God and God himself to tell my father what to do.

God told him to marry Pam, a widow with three small children, aged three, six and nine. Pam's husband Jim had died just a few months before from colon cancer. Based on my recollection, my father and Pam barely knew each other and I remember that when I met Pam and her children, their marriage plans were practically already decided. Apparently, God had spoken to them and told Pam that she didn't need to grieve her husband after all. Other members of the congregation confirmed the voice of God telling them that they ought to wed, despite the situation of sorrow and heartbreak that her three young children found themselves in.

So my father married Pam, a woman who just a few months before had refused to bury her dead husband, because she and other spirit-filled members of the church were laying their hands over him, waiting for God to raise him from the dead, because they thought they heard God say that Jim would be healed.

As it turned out, they heard wrong.

For days my step sister and step brothers' father remained unburied in their house. They waited, hopeful that Jesus would heal Daddy Jim and he would get up from where he lay and embrace them again. They believed. They believed so hard. My blood boils when I think of how those little three believed.

As our family grew by four people, our giant glistening ball of truth got even thicker, even harder, seemingly unbreakable as it floated through the empty space of reality. Pam made it so. She thickened our bubble somehow and made it rise far above the rest of the bubbles it had previously bumped into and reflected off of in similarity.

In our high flying globe I could look through to the other side, but what I saw was always twisted like a scary fun house mirror. I saw demon-filled people and lost people and underlying darkness disguised in a sham of false goodness. Occasionally the distortion would subside and I could see people out there that looked good and happy -- but they were not like me, I was told, because they were outside the bubble of faith, true faith. I was warned that if I got too near to them, I would be vulnerable to them pulling me out of our bubble somehow, unless I managed to pull them in. I shouldn't be fooled -- outside of the bubble there were no shades of gray, and there was certainly no light.

But I ached to poke my head through -- just to see. Followers stronger in faith didn't need proof, didn't need to see what was out there to know that the air supply was cut off and the oxygen of Christ would cease to reach the blood flow. But I knew there was something that wasn't right about our household being run like a fascist dictatorship, where I was under the constant control of the thought police. "Honor thy father and thy mother", was the only explanation for why I could not read Christopher Pike horror books for teens but could read other types of horror books that could terrorize me for weeks, months as I lay in bed at night. "It's worldly", was the simple reason why Debbie Gibson was not authorized audio entertainment. But this type of music was encouraged (Go on, listen to the lyrics. If you can control the shivers, like I am incapable of, I commend you).

Normal PG or G rated movies were also off limits because of "hidden messages from Satan" unless they had been previously approved by the rod-bearing parents/police or by other trusted members of the bubble. Even seemingly harmless movies, because they did not contain a Christian message, such as Disney movies, were all under suspicion because they might infect the minds of the children. On the other hand, movies like this were encouraged. When I see that clip my face becomes red with anger and shame. Knowing that they truly believed that they needed to prepare their children for the rapture does not make me any less angry with them for allowing me to see this as a young child.

There was constant discussion among my parents and their closest friends about what was and was really not inside the bubble. Family members, friends, even entire churches that were once considered inside the bubble were suddenly proclaimed to no longer be, due to differences in the interpretation of scripture or due to God having spoken to my father and his wife. As I grew older and more anxious to meet boys, church youth group services and activities were suddenly suspect. Such co-ed activities encouraged by so-called churches of God were actually the devil's playground where the demon of lust had fertile ground to blossom. My father and his wife had hopes that they would eventually find a man for me from within the bubble and we would court each other until everyone agreed we would wed -- at a very young age, of course.

And the bubble drifted and floated and got further and further away from other sorts of bubbles, like my best friend's Methodist bubble, or my grandparents Mormon bubble. Our bubble - the true bubble-- was increasingly less populace as good Christian schools were replaced by homeschooling (which I escaped thanks the protests of my mother who still had a say in my upbringing), and Wednesday night, Friday night and Sunday morning services became replaced by "home fellowship". We were officially weirding out the people that once shared a place in our bubble.

As I got older, and the bubble got higher and higher into space, the oxygen inside the confined space didn't seem to satiate my lungs any longer. I looked through its translucent walls and the images stopped looking so deformed and twisted. As my doubts about what I saw outside grew, I knew my bubble was becoming more permeable. My hand could just slip through to the other side and could feel the light of the world where religion didn't pervade every aspect of life, where demons didn't hover around every possibility.

I began to feel a world where people didn't have fits of crying and laughing on the living room floor during fellowship, a world where tears were not constantly rolling down their faces every time they had a Bible study session with a bunch of other strange bubble people, culminating into a massive mess of hysteria and emotion and tension. It was a place where people didn't scream out, "Praise Jesus. Shun duh duh hun duh maka laka dali shi shi maaaa....praise God, thank you Father. Shallalalalala malaki hunda mana chi ki laki. Blood of Jesus! Blood of Jesus!"

Soon enough I dared to stick my head through the soapy wall and saw all of the other bubbles floating around below.

I hung out on the edge of the bubble for awhile, stepping out completely but leaning up against it still, letting it support me and comfort me and feeling those family members gripping at my limbs with all their force and pulling to keep me inside.

"You stay away from those liberal universities," they hollered from within the bubble. "All they do is instill doubt in the minds of the faithful. Satan will get a grip on your mind there and make you doubt. You stay with us and you won't need to go to college because you'll find a god-fearing man to become your husband and you'll discover the joy of serving your spouse and giving him children."

But it was too late, because my mind already doubted, already wanted to jump and as I turned to take one last look inside the bubble I realized how very very small it was and how very dark.

I landed with a hard and painful thud on the ground just like the law of gravity said I would, from those science textbooks they tried to keep away from me. And I looked up and saw the bubble getting smaller and smaller and weaker and weaker among the millions of other tiny bubbles floating all around, all stemming from what I perceived to be the same effluent waste.

"Twisted World" by Jeff Kubina from Flickr.
"Lightness" by clydye from Flickr.
"Bubble symphony" by bricolage.108 from Flickr.
"Esferas doradas" by * Cati Koe* from Flickr.

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That Thumb Looks Familiar

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:08:00 +0000

I wake up startled, as usual. The surprise reality of 8:00 a.m. scares the shit out of me every time. When will I learn to expect it and not get startled? Haven't I noticed a pattern here yet? Sun goes down, eyes shut, sun comes up, eyes open. Nothing new here, no need to have an anxiety attack every time it happens.

But this is my welcome into each day; the dream world-- my world -- ceases abruptly and somebody else's life begins for the day, a responsible person's life.

This time my surprise wake up is different though, not the usual alarm-from-hell wake up. This time, someone's gigantic swollen hand with brachydactyly type D thumbs I'd recognize anywhere is about to strangle me into my typical day of obligation, characterizing how I'll feel until I fall asleep again that night. I try to push the lifeless foreign arm thing away but what the fuck is happening with my real arms? Why the fuck are they on vacation when you need them? One of them appears to be replaced by this slug of a giant, swollen, clubbed-thumb hand/arm bullshit that isn't reacting at all to my commands.

Where is the obedient arm I remember that could help my docile hand check my nose for crusty boogars right now, that could rub the sleep out of my eyes, that could push myself out of bed, functional with all its submissive digits awaiting instructions from the brain?

For some time now I've had the feeling that I am no longer actively living my life as I once did, rather it is being lived and I'm allowed to watch as if I were watching my own open-heart surgery. I'm a recursive puppet, apparently with an abnormally large maverick arm with a clubbed-thumb hand, controlling its own show, but a puppet nonetheless; no soul, no spark, no ganas, infinitely feeding myself back into my own circularity, leaving myself bewildered by my own uncontrollable control over my own life.

My own abnormally thumbed sadistic hand is holding me down, holding me in place, smacking me in the face to wake up, hurry up, go here, read this document, go there, stop for milk, call the guy to get the dishwasher fixed. The rest of me – the me that hangs from strings controlled by the swollen infidel appendage-- just wants to be left the hell alone with the full use of my capacities, with digits and limbs that mind their master again.

Someone's hand that looks like mine slaps me into the reminder that the laundry situation is no longer bearable. If I controlled my own arm, I might go out and just buy new underwear to avoid responsibility for that giant mountain of dirty clothes that has long since overpopulated the hamper, sprawling out onto the floor, creating a suburb of clothes alongside it now, competing with the hamper itself in size. If I controlled my own arm, it would rest behind my head as I'd watch the pile of clothes grow and mutate, pants giving birth to dirty underwear caught inside their legs. My well-behaved arm would help my hand light a cigarette for me – a much better alternative as an activity for arms compared to sorting laundry.

Then I'm slapped in the face with the tumescent tissue again, as a reminder that dinner must be made -- an event, something acceptable, something balanced, something fit for a proper family with real plates and shit. Popping a frozen bagel into the toaster to calm a single rumbling tummy simply. won't. do. This act would be too utilitarian, giving nutrients to the bloodstream, nothing more, sans the symbolic ritual of it all. If I controlled that traitor of an arm, it might prepare just that and then check off the hunger box on my list of shit I can be bothered to deal with. I'd eat my acceptable nutrient-product while staring at a blank wall without blinking. For dessert, the dutifully complying arm/hand would fetch me a spoonful of peanut butter which I would enjoy perhaps sitting on the kitchen counter, with that same blank stare, my other hand following orders to support my chin and to not dare attempt to mince garlic, wash dishes, or throw away the spoiled chicken in the fridge.

Maybe one of these days, I'll wake up and my arms will become incumbent upon me again, cooperating once again and surrendering to my will and will stop trying to run my life with all their busy activity. The first thing I'll do with my obedient arms is grab the scissors and cut the puppet strings.

Vacation countdown: 26 days.

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The story of Huta

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:12:00 +0000

I just love reading about large combustion plants all day and the current document I'm working on is just making my eyes bulge out of their sockets while I shart in my pants from excitement. The task of changing the word phosphorus to phosphorous twenty bazillion times a day makes me violently playful (hello, can't you freaky academics have your asses peer reviewed into proper adjective formation?). I'm afraid to bring this beautiful piece of literature home, for fear that it will keep me up at night and not let me put it down and get some much needed sleep. The suspense of how Annex VI on monitoring standards might end is just killing me right now. That is some good shit right there.

But there comes a time in the middle of the day when I'm supposed to be reading mind-numbing nonsense and I'm about 200 pages behind schedule and I just say, fuck it, I've got to put the red pen down, turn away from the arousing chapter on fugitive emissions (which actually sounds rather erotic), and look out my window and think of Dublin.

Yes, Dublin.

You see, not all of my internet uselessness amounts to nothing. My fantasy vacation planning actually landed me a flight to Dublin in October for 60 euro bucks. Not bad. Let's not get into why I'm planning a weekend away in October and it's barely July right now, but it might have to do with fugitive emissions and procrastination.

But Dublin, of course, makes me think of my sister, Huta. Welcome to my tangent-story about Huta.

Huta and I always hated each other. Well, not always. There was a time I remember, a short time, maybe a summer when I was 9 and she was 6 when I took her in and loved her and there was room in our little make-believe world for each other where our imaginations melded together in perfect harmonious child play-- our imaginary worlds of playing house and dress up and school. Before that time and after its short duration, we were separated, our sisterhood (or lack thereof) was at the mercy of divorced parents who could not bear to be separated from all of their children at once, so they decided to separate their children from each other because their empty hearts were more important than our togetherness.

We saw each other on odd weekends and spring breaks and such. We never learned how to deal with each other. We probably barely knew each other. When we coincided living together again we were both too old for imaginative play where anything goes and everything is a potential house-play prop and everything is shared and roles are flexible and can be reversed at whim. I was now an irritable pre-teen and she was a spiteful elementary over-achiever who glared at me through squinted hateful blue eyes that looked just like mine.

Huta copied me but hated me all at once. We were forced to share a room and in order to handle her bothersome and forced company, I cleared out my side of the closet and created a sort of mini room for myself in there – a place to escape from her annoying and ironically hate-filled emulations of me. The privacy of my closet room was good for a few hours where I relished in my own tiny little defined space. But when my sister discovered this valuable piece of real estate she had not been previously not privy to, she promptly emptied out her side of the closet and created her own little special room, where she glared at me from the gap in the closet and whistled and hummed and scratched around and fidgeted and annoyed the living fucking hell out of me and my property value plummeted like a mobile home in a hurricane.

The following years can only be described as Huta and me having bouts of ignoring each other intermingled with waged armed conflict where projectile missiles of coat hangers, flip-flops, or any large blunt objects found on the battleground were launched at each other with the full force of our capacities.

We were eventually granted our own rooms by the wise intervening powers that be, trenches of sorts where our ammunition both real and sentimental could be collected, our cannons could be loaded with insults, where shields could be strapped on, especially over our hearts.

Ceasefires were short-lived and peace was a delicate state always teetering on violent upsurge by either side, especially if a word was uttered in the wrong tone, if a blush-brush or a certain feather pillow went missing, if domestic duties were seen to be unfairly assigned, or if the company of the family cat was perceived to be monopolized. There were various territorial zones one normally respected, but even with these honored fortresses, doors were frequently slammed, bedrooms frequently looted, important artifacts often went mysteriously missing and were later found in foreign garrisons. When diplomacy was engaged, such as with a loud bang with a clenched fist on a bedroom door, it was commonly met with a not-so-statesmanlike, "GO AWAY."

When I turned 18, I moved out of the house and moved in with my older sister who had total and complete control over my military capacities and I therefore did not instigate wars because I knew my military would never stand up against hers. And my younger sister Huta disappeared from my life, for the most part in any practical sense, yet again.

Oh, we would see each other when I went home, gave each other a "hey" or an awkward hug if it had been a really really long time. If I stayed longer than a couple of hours, her icy eyes would form into their usual squinty glare and it was always clear that our peace-treaty could be reneged if either of us so much as breathed wrong. Ignoring each other was easiest.

But then at one point we coincided amazingly by choice, in Dublin, spring of 1999 and I hadn't seen family or home in months, and was homesick as ever. We had a beautiful time together, even though she was kind of an idiot and just when we got bikes to go for a bike ride she had to slam on her brakes and fly over the handle bars like that. But I forgave her clumsiness because I had missed her, surprisingly, and we went for beers together for the first time in our lives. We talked about our dreams and our future and our parents and love.

And then in a small hotel room in Dublin we decided that we needed to have one final battle. And we brought out our best soldiers and put them on the front line, we flexed our muscles and showed our greatest technological advances in sisterly-love-destruction. We raised those old medieval fortifications again and pointed our artillery through the holes and I think I got some really good hits in there and threw the best of the best of my mortal grenades. But it was the final blow instigated by the Huta, the one that has always stayed with me that took down the stronghold inside me:

"You've never given a shit about your family."

And in the midst of my homesickness and longing for precisely family, that arrow got me in the gut and sent me down to die in the mud.

And I never fought the Huta again.

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Can I get you some more crock pot food?

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:01:00 +0000

I might be breaking some blogging commandment that states:

"Thou shalt not blog about blogging"

Or, at the very minimum I may rile up your pet Peeve, making him bark and chase his tail until he barfs up your missing shoelaces.

But I feel I must explain because when you have a friend that usually calls and then they just stop, well, you deserve the courtesy of them stumbling like an idiot through an awkward excuse as to why they haven't called. Actually, you deserve them to buy you like five rounds of beer, but anyway, we'll start with the clumsy excuses.

My problem has been that for weeks now thoughts have come into this very confined head-like crock pot sitting on my shoulders where they have simmered, marinated, and tenderized, and then finally dried up and turned into the beef jerky version of thoughts. But I waited and waited in hopes that they would turn into a lovely curry instead of the same ole run-of-the-mill dried-the-fuck-up-crock-pot-pot-roast.

Fucking crock pots. Everything tastes the same when cooked in a crock pot. And don't go telling me I need to add a can of cream of mushroom and everything will be okay. Please, that is some sick shit.

Rather than serving you the crock-pot version of my thoughts, and instead of reading which just reminded me that I had this unbearable urge to force feed someone a nasty pot roast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, well, I stayed away.

So what have I been doing?

I've been filling my free time with the opiate of lazy Internet play: planning trips to Sardinia I may never go on, searching for apartments I may never live in, looking up recipes for Lasagna I may never make, drooling over jobs I may never apply for, or PhD programs I'll never submit an application to, reading economic forecasts that may never materialize into reality.

I can fill my days and weeks with this Internet narcotic, a vacation of sorts from a mind that I can open up and pick words from like there's a god damned pot luck going on up there. And I spend my days in that drugged state because the words annoyingly string together in the same damn way and I'm just so bored of it all– telling the same story I keep hearing on repeat again and again inside me. And I'm just staring at this paper plate full of shitty crock pot casseroles and stabbing my plastic fork into something and watching it jiggle as a solidified blob of cream of mushroom and bump into the wiggly jello-inertial-mass dessert from hell and I'm thinking....Oh, fuck this shit, let's go to McDonald's.

These fantasy vacations into the online world of Your Potential fill my mind with purposefulness, and attempt to confirm in me that my life can be, must be, meaningful in some way. I remind myself, no, I beat myself over the head with the argument that I've traded something for experience; loved-ones for a life less ordinary, where I can hop on a flight to anywhere in Europe, maybe live in an apartment that looks onto a quaint Spanish plaza, dulling the dreaded realization that no matter what the fuck I fill my days with, Father's Days and birthdays and 4th of Julys are passing me by and I'm. Not. There.

This brainless virtual wandering allows me to not have to think, especially about my upcoming trip home with all of the familiar anxiety that it entails.

The visiting with loved ones is nearing, which must be good, right? because I miss them so. But as Noble Savage alluded to, the good can only be experienced as such because it is defined by what it is not -- the bad; 'visiting' as the inversion of 'missing', 'home' as opposed to 'distance', utterly incomprehensible as concepts now on their own without the stark awareness attached to them of what they are framed by -- what they are not.

I long for a time when I didn't have to juxtapose happiness with its opposite; when there was the hazy in between, when definitions could be somewhat fuzzy or at least I didn't always see the dialectic staring me in the face, where 'togetherness' didn't make me so in tune to its ultimate undercurrent and its ever-present antonym 'apart'. I miss the gray area of 'potential togetherness' – that my mom might call at anytime for a quick lunch on a weekday, or my cousin might call because he's in the neighborhood and lets go grab a coffee at the Lux on Central. It is not the pure form of togetherness that erases the sad separation anymore, it is only potential togetherness that can erase the awareness that togetherness is always always always the opposite of a life spent without each other. And it's this potential togetherness that I don't have anymore.

So you see, I stay away because I myself tire of this broken record I hear when I click clack cluck away at this keyboard; the repetitive, dulling, unoriginal sound of a heart sick with longing for, not a place, but a state of mind I had once upon a time that I'll never get back, no matter how often I visit. Surprisingly I am all the more heartsick as my holiday nears, as the summer heat beats down on me and I try to find shade in the sparse palm trees of this city which reminds me so much of 'home'. The awareness gets nearer and nearer with every unit increase on the centigrade scale that my body feels when I step outside, or as I fall asleep listening to the familiar sound of the air conditioner, with every day that passes bringing me closer to August and to my trip.

You guys used to be my virtual escape but now I know that some of you get me, and all of you have real pulses that still really beat when I close my laptop and your realness makes you become like the other friends and family that I just don't pick up the phone to call for some reason that I can only explain by stammering my way through something that always sounds the same. In your case though, I'm honest and don't say I've been busy.

Cause I haven't. At all.

So here I am, on a limb. Hoping you'll forgive that my fingers won't stay away from the same keys, forming the same words I have asked you to read too many times now. Hoping you'll forgive me for making crock pot food for the millionth time that you've come over for dinner.

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London Bridge is Burning Down

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:18:00 +0000

Don't I wish a London post could just be about London; the River Thames, the Tower Bridge, the view of Big Ben and all that lovely stuff.

Right now, me talking about London would be the equivalent of when my grandparents put on kimonos and gave a three hour lecture/slide projection about their trip to Asia when I was 10.

"...And this is me on the bridge. It was neat-o. Here we are crossing another cool bridge. London has really cool bridges."

You see, I'm just dripping with eloquence about London. Maybe the words will come later, the desire to describe it. Actually, you know what? There is someone who can describe and photograph it much better than I can.

I've got nothing on London because the trip wasn't really about the city itself, it was about reuniting with old friends and contemplating scorching the fuck out of bridges.

Sometimes reuniting with friends brings about the discovery that you don't have as much in common as you had remembered; you are older now and less tolerant of truckloads of bullshit and less willing to spend precious moments in life that are way-too-damn-quickly passing you by alongside people with whom you find no shred of commonality with any longer.

Or maybe the bad news is that you do find commonality but you just really, really don’t want to...you've been trying to flee from those parts of your personality. Your currently fighting yourself to not be that.

Maybe the bridge-burning fantasies are just something that happens in your thirties when you stop caring how you are perceived and start realizing that if you want to live your life the way you truly believe you should, it sometimes means throwing a match to the bridges you can no longer be bothered to cross, mainly because, well, you've been up and down this riverside a shitload of times now and you know damn well there are a million other more beautiful bridges just begging you to cross them.

There are bridges that are more historical in your life, ones that you believe are sturdier, with much more interesting architectural designs that please your eyes and your feet and your spirit as you cross them, solid ones that can take on various onslaughts of meteorological and erosive phenomena, ones that make you feel more secure in that they can seemingly take on much more weight; the weight that true friendship sometimes demands.

I love those bridges; the really good ones.

And it is bridges like these that make the flimsy, shaky ones that are made of old rotted wood, barely held together by a few rusty nails just not seem worth the trouble anymore.

I didn't exactly burn any bridges in London, because maybe I avoid conflict when I should stand up for my values, but on numerous occasions I greedily caressed my matchbook with my index finger, running it up and down the side taking a single powerful match out and teasing it against the sandpaper threateningly, all the while eyeballing some kerosene and begging my husband to shackle me down so I would hinder my pyromaniacal tendencies of ending friendships. Those walking, talking, flammable bridges I sometimes refer to as "my friends", beckoned to be served a molotov cocktail of shut-the-fuck-up with my burning flame of bridge-detonating disapproval.

But in the end, the flimsy-ass bridges remain intact.

I just don't know that I'm gonna cross them anymore.

And that, my friends, was my weekend in London.

And I guess this post officially makes me an asshole.

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Guess where I'm going for a long weekend?

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:24:00 +0000

Here's a hint.

Eleven years in Europe and I've never made it for a visit.

I'd love to tell you one of my travel stories from somewhere in Europe that I've actually been, but as usual, I'm in a mad rush to get crap together for the trip, since I can't be bothered to pack in advance. You deserve much, much better than this post a la twitter. But I'll bring something back for you.

xoxo

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You're just mucking up their farm, see.

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 11:38:00 +0000

The police, four of them, stopped him in his tracks.

A female policewoman pressed her palm against his chest and pushed him sternly but not aggressively, using force but not violence. With her push she moved him about a foot from where he was originally standing; it was not a purposeful gesture, but a symbolic gesture of the power of the state over this African immigrant. It was as if to say, "even though we don't recognize you as legitimate, you will be the subject of the state now at this moment and you will succumb to us."

I sat in a beauty salon waiting for my turn to be serviced. I --legitimized by that small blue card inside my wallet, given to me upon civil marriage, that little plastic covered card that allowed me to find fair employment -- sipped a frappuccino in the cold air conditioned place where people who can afford to go to have unessential things done to their hair, skin and nails. I watched curiously out the window at this unfortunate black man sweating in the hot Andalusian sun trying to keep a smile on his face to hide the worry he felt, the worry evident in his posture.

The police were not brutal in any way to the suspect although they demanded that he hand over his backpack to which he cooperatively complied. The man watched as items, which just minutes prior were his personal belongings, became items on display for the officers and for the women staring out the salon window. He continuously shifted his weight from one leg to another. He appeared to not quite know what to do with his long, dark, lanky arms that he decided to fold and then unfold, possibly discarding the folded arms option so as not to appear defiant in any way.

The policeman in charge of the backpack passed the man's items that had been previously concealed in the privacy of his person to another policeman to hold.

A wrench.

A compact mirror.

A small blue book.

A calendar, crumpled.

A pair of sunglasses, broken.

A bar of soap in a plastic baggie.

Papers, but, alas, not the right kind of papers; not the ones that legitimize a human being. Not the ones that make a person a real subject of the state and therefore easily managed. Without such papers this man was an unreliable subject who the state could not keep track of, who may disappear into thin air at whim and reappear elsewhere, evading official stamps of approval or rejection, necessary paperwork and nosecounts, ducking under the diocese of the nation-state apparatus, sidestepping jurisdiction at the last second.

Without such papers, he didn't fit into the perfectly crafted forest of organisms to be managed.**

This is the real reason why the state will not allow for "illegals". It is not because the state and those who represent it are genuinely concerned about the jobs available to constituents or that they are concerned over the balance sheets of federal and local budgets, and exactly how much illegals subtract from or add to them. It is merely a question of knowledge of subjects and therefore power and veto over them. Those who attempt to float in anarchy above territorial dominion are simply not tolerated.

"Would it not be a great satisfaction to the king to know at a designated moment every year the number of his subjects, in total and by region, with all the resources, wealth & poverty of each place; [the number] of his nobility and ecclesiastics of all kinds, of men of the robe, of Catholics and of those of the other religion, all separated according to the place of their residence? ...[Would it not be] a useful and necessary pleasure for him to be able, in his own office, to review in an hour's time the present and past condition of a great realm of which he is the head, and be able himself to know with certitude in what consists his grandeur, his wealth, and his strengths?"

--Marquis de Vauban, proposing an annual census to Louis XIV in 1686*

This makes sense to me, but I'm amazed by how in tune to this idea this policewoman is with her seemingly insignificant gesture, not only of physical power, but of power on paper, theoretical power, symbolic power. She knows that even one "illegal", whatever his sad story is about his exile from sub-Saharan Africa, is a challenge to state sovereignty itself, a rebellious tree growing in the wrong place in the wrong tree farm, attempting to convert the place into a wild, unmanageable forest.

As a person who has defied borders myself, who has also spent my time in Europe sin papeles, jumping over the hoops of the state while everyone else around me got to jump through them, it is difficult to not feel that people should be able to move freely across borders, (just as products and production lines do) as an obvious human right. The lost creativity, lost input and lost ideas that get hidden along with the illegals with whom they originate, pushed under the dirty rugs in their tiny rooms of their infrahousing and in the shacks outside the city they are forced to inhabit is a devastating loss to the world and especially to the country they have fled to. All of that human potential, so great, becomes suppressed as they stand on street corners selling packets of Kleenex, or selling bootleg CDs while always keeping an eye out for the cops.

I understand their frustration, their desire to go where they need to go for survival, but my situation is not even remotely comparable. I never had to survive. I never had to fumble my way through questions in the airport about what I was doing here. It never even mattered. Nobody suspected that a 21 year old blonde from the first world was an illegal. I remember standing in the line at Customs with my heart racing and sweat dripping down my back, watching officers interrogate brown colored people in line ahead of me for what seemed like ages on why they were attempting to come into Spain. The officers held their passports up to the light to make sure they hadn't been fudged, consulted with other, more senior customs officers on what to do next. But when it was finally my turn they just said "buenos dias" and opened my passport and put a new stamp on it, never even bothering to look through it, where they would see that I was clearly living here in Spain illegally.

Nobody ever pushed me with the palm of their hand in a symbolic gesture of power or demanded that I hand over my belongings, even though I feared at times they would. And while those days are gone now for me, I remember feeling a fraction of their fear and impotence, because I too was a rogue weed growing in the middle of a perfectly aligned forest of trees, always expecting someone to uproot me at anytime and toss me out of the perfect tree farm and throw me back into the one that I corresponded to.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Quoted in Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.

**The comparisons in this post to the forest are also based on James C. Scott's book. You can read a short except of the book here where Scott compares the difference between a forest which is wild in its flora, organic inhabitants, and freely growing trees in a balanced ecosystem with a tree farm where the only thing that matters is the knowledge of the forests' equivalency in terms of firewood, paper, or pulp. Any plants or animals that don't fit perfectly into the calculated tree farms are not tolerated.

"Perfect Alignment" by lakewentworth via Flickr.

"Fageda d'en Jorda" by MorBCN via Flickr.

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This is me. There's a freak show going on in my brain.

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Sun, 31 May 2009 18:45:00 +0000

I spend a lot of time walking the streets, people watching.

I watch people, okay?

I'm a Peeping Tom that's just right there in the open, walking to work. I'm Blues, butt watcher, boob leerer, clothing critic.

I'll dissect your fashion statement in a millisecond in my mind.

My gaze used to favor the young and beautiful, the slender, the sleek, the strong, the dolled-up. My eyes preferred the ones subconsciously offering breeding services to members of the opposite sex through impressive and accentuated hip to waist ratios, through strong family-protecting arms, through voluptuous baby-feedable breasts highlighted by the appropriate push-up equipment, through clothing displaying a certain level of social status and ability to financially support offspring. My glance lingered upon those that fit the very precise and limited beauty mould that our culture has decided deserves a double take.

Pretty people, yup.

But lately, I find that my eyes linger over the motherly.

I see women, their pouchy abdomens attesting to the children they have carried. I see their less than perky boobs that finally became entirely utilitarian, after years of oblique glances stolen, peripheral staring, and a lot of fuss. They have finally passed the phase of alimentary purposefulness. I see some of them in their mom jeans that highlight what happens to the female bodies...afterwards. And I know they would never trade their children for their old bodies.

I see a young mother extend an arm backwards, pinky jutted out while she looks sternly at a small child walking behind her, encouraging the child to take her hand. I hear the child say, "Mamá" and the woman answers, "Que?", exasperated, as if tired of all the questions. And I wonder, does she take it for granted in that moment? Being a mom?

I canvas their faces for proof of age. Are they older than me? Are they younger than me? Maybe they are older but have just had some work done. Shit, she must be old. I wonder what kind of wrinkle cream she uses. She can't be younger, is she??? Fuck, she's younger. Did they have to get fertility treatment? Did they adopt? Or did they try to get pregnant on their honeymoon and wham bam, it worked?

I look at Luisito and I think...what if? What if we can't, babe? Okay, so we adopt, we know this, but I wanted you and me, you know, we wanted...we wanted to do this. I wanted the baby to have your eyelashes and your nose and your thighs. Can we swing this if we can't? Can we deal with this level of disappointment? If we add this to everything we've been through will there be a giant surplus of bullshite? Will we implode?

And I feel a fear in my belly, a fear that my assumption of being able to snap my fingers and have children whenever I wanted might be being challenged. With every period now, I think, Hmmm. Okay, I guess not this month. No biggie.

"How long did it take you to get pregnant?" I quiz my sister, my sister in law, my friends.

"Oh a few months."

"We just stopped taking birth control to see what would happen."

But I feel menstrual pain like I never have before. The last time it kept me up the whole night. My periods are irregular now and fucked up and long. Things....they don't feel right.

"Acude inmediatamente al ginecologo". Go immediately to the gynecologist, my general practitioner told me, not knowing he was gonna scare the bloody life out of me by saying it with such urgency.

So I went to the gynecologist the next day and with clammy ass hands and trembling legs, and trying to act all, "No this ain't weird that my junk is all up in the air, yo. No, not at ALL. I'm cool", I mounted the handy stir-ups and offered my crotch up to the lovely phallic probe of truth, all the while chanting to myself:

Be thankful you have health insurance
Be thankful you have health insurance
Be thankful you have health insurance.

Ooof. This isn't supposed to hurt. I'm not supposed to be freakin' THE. FUCK. OUT. right now.

The doctor stared at the ultrasound and informed me that all my junk looked perfectamente normal.

Oh yeah, doc? Well, then why did you schedule me for a pelvic MRI? Then why did you make me do all those blood tests that made my arms go numb and my blood pressure drop and my lips turn blue?

Be thankful you have health insurance
Be thankful you have health insurance
Be thankful you have health insurance.

I can't find the words to express the anxiety I'm feeling. Truth be told, I have serious issues with hypochondria, and anything medical-related makes me want to either faint or barf, but I can't shake this. Because I don't know that I can deal with more disappointment (centered around myself) right now. And I'm just fucking scared that something is wrong with me.

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I went on a hike this weekend, that's what I'm trying to say

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:57:00 +0000

I have this thing.

This perpetual thing that is hardened to me from over-use that I sometimes call "homesickness". If it is a sickness at all, it is most certainly improperly diagnosed.

Truthfully, homesickness was what I felt my first semester of college, when I had to say goodbye to the home I had finally found after having put a stop to my parents bouncing me around in a ping pong match. Homesickness was what I felt when I spent a few weeks too many in the Amazon jungle, bathing in a fucking river and trying to determine where the tribal folk took shits and had sex. Homesickness was what I felt as a study abroad student, completely out of my element and way, way, way before the assimilation of culture.

True homesickness only happens when you know for sure, beyond any doubt, that you don't belong.

Herein lies my problem. When I go home, my suspicions that I might belong here are supported. And shadows of doubt hover over my fantasies of belonging there, only there.

No, this...this is not homesickness.

Call it perpetual maladjustment (cultural or otherwise) or incessant emptiness or constant unease. Or something.

"I'm homesick". This just makes me not have to deal.

It will be eight months of not being near my organic place. Eight months in what feels like a plant pot that's way too small for me. Eight months away from my original soil, away from my familiar precipitation and that sunlight that I've been perfectly acquainted with all my life touching me just so, just the same way as always, photosynthesizing me from within just as intended, allowing me to flourish as I was meant to, as I was taught to subconsciously, through gestures and symbols, language and allegory, and place, oh, especially place.

This misnomer is an unscratchable itch-inducing bitch that doesn't hide, and whenever I hit a wall, as I am wont to do, it's often the delinquent responsible for my misfortune or discontent. Problems don't exist for me here that are separate from this one problem, see, I don't let them.

How ridiculous. How irresponsible of me to attribute everything to this misnomer. Doesn't hate exist anymore? Or pure loneliness? Or pure disappointment? Or pure wrong-doing, independent from this worn out crutch?

This thing I've mislabelled is difficult to alleviate, mostly because I am constantly concentrating on the banana skins that exacerbate it, like being hogtied by red tape. I stop on my path and pick up the stones I've tripped over despite having seen them.* Then I study them under microscope and determine their mineraloids, whether they are sedimentary or metamorphic, noting their texture and chemical composition, when all I really had to do was kick them the fuck out of my way to begin with and keep moving.

Until last weekend.

When we went for a hike.

When I left my misnomer somewhere and I left the stones I had tripped over in my fucking geology lab of doom and we sat on a rock near a waterfall and had our lunch.

Suddenly, my roots were nourished in soil that felt damn near original. The sun shone on him and me bright as ever, but it was actually raining at the same moment; one of those impossible moments in nature, one of those impossible moments that happen all the time in Arizona. And then the rain cleared away and the sky held the horizon sharply in focus from the dryness in the atmosphere so much like home. I looked out at the leaves, grateful that they moved in just the same way as I knew they would, that the water flowed just as it was supposed to, that gravity held me down on the rock like it always had before, and that the birds sang those same songs I remember from the warm spring days from long ago and far away.

And I felt my inner photosynthesis happening in it's old way, it's familiar way. For a few hours, I flourished and I knew I belonged to that place at that moment, without tripping stones or dangerous banana peels, or crutches to blame.

*this comes from something Denise sent me that says "La experiencia me sirve para reconocer la piedra con la que volver a tropezar" - Experience is good for recognizing the stone that you will continue to trip on. I think I translated that right. Thanks Denise, if you had a blog, I'd link to it.

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Awkwardly Neighborly

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Mon, 25 May 2009 17:28:00 +0000

I guess I'm not very neighborly.

Well, that's not entirely true. I want to be neighborly. I like the idea of being neighborly, but it doesn't come naturally for me.

I don't think it's because I'm an asshole. I mean, I don't think I'm an asshole.
I think it's because I'm so nice that I don't want to infringe upon other people's privacy. Okay, truth be told, I don't like people infringing upon mine.

Neighbors, for me, have always been people you sort of look through, with your eyes semi-glazed over. If they are good neighbors, they look at you with the same semi-glazed over look. They don't look at you, directly with accusative curiosity that says, "Holy shit, I totally heard you two going at it last night, you dirty little slut" or "Clean up your kitchen you friggin slobs" (my neighbors can actually see inside my kitchen here. Whatever, shut up, I don't care if you think it's sick that I forgot to put my cheese away, mkay?)

I've never felt compelled to get to know my neighbors or get involved in their lives in any way. The likelihood of the sudden conversion from really nice dude that lives next door into goddamn snoopy asshole has always been too high to warrant the risk involved in interaction.

In my neighborhood growing up, of course, I knew the neighborhood kids (we had a trampoline which made our house a powerful magnet for booger-nosed kids), but I never knew any of the adult's names, not even the next door neighbors or those living directly across the street (after living there for six years). My mom and step dad didn't either. I guess we were sort of quiet folk who kept to ourselves and I learned to be non-neighborly by watching my parents non-neighborliness (okay, total anti-social parents). In fact, on our block, the neighbors would have block parties for the 4th of July and Halloween but the cut-off point was our house and they would fence their little block party off with that plastic tape stuff just before reaching our yard. Fucking assholes. I didn't want to go to your stupid potluck anyway what with all your happy neighborly chatting and mutual babysitting and cup-of-sugar borrowing.

So, you see, it takes great effort on my behalf to be neighborly with my new friendly neighbor due to the trauma of having been rejected for neighborly potlucks.

She's lovely, really she is. She's a good looking and friendly young-ish Norwegian engineer with excellent English and Spanish and she seems like she has a really interesting story to tell. Her only flaw seems to be her proximity to me. And by proximity I mean from my couch, her head is about 8 feet from my head directly in front of me staring at me (or at least it feels like she's staring at me). A car can barely go down the street I live on without scraping itself up and when I open my curtains (which are totally necessary for dancing to Ring of Fire in my underwear and freaking my husband the fuck out as to how the hell he ended up with me), I see her. Right there. Sitting on her terrace. ALL THE DAMN TIME. She is there as I type this. If I need to scratch my butt right now she's gonna see it. Hello. Um. Hi.

It's her right. That terrace is hers. It's not her fault that our houses are positioned in such a way that when she is sitting there sipping her tea she is staring directly into my living room and dammit, are those underwear on my living room floor? How did those get there? Uh, hi.

Up until recently, it was no big deal, just shut the curtains and adios amigos. But Luisito, having the neighborly spirit that he has, often goes out to the balcony to have a smoke and so they have begun chatting and he has begun pestering me to go and be neighborly to the poor new neighbor that doesn't know anyone and doesn't have any friends.

And so I did. And I should be thankful to have such a wonderful neighbor.

But now, my problem is that when I want to prance around in my underwear, or dance to Ring of Fire at will, especially at night, or eat a meal without being scrutinized, I feel I have to first close the shutters, which is always extremely awkward for me because she's always RIGHT THERE. I always feel like I'm accusing her of being nosy just by the act of closing my own fucking shutters. Which means, that I usually leave them open to avoid the awkwardness of it all and cut out the Ring of Fire underwear dancing ritual and in fact, I've started picking crap up and putting the cheese away.

But leaving the shutters open has created further awkwardness. It's like I can feel the weird dilemma between us of the shutting and/or leaving of the curtains and shutters open.

Sometimes I wait until she runs in to go to the bathroom or something and then when she comes back she finds my closed shutters. And I have no idea if she's relieved I shut them or if she thinks I'm a total rude bitch.

Okay, I'm a weird un-neighborly neighbor, and aren't you glad we don't live next door to each other? I guess I might come across as unfriendly. Even though I like you.

It's just that this place makes me claustrophobic.

Maybe I just need to knock it off and be nice to people.

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Has it really come to me moaning about the good ole days?

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:38:00 +0000

I often wonder how different my experience with Spain would have been had I been born five or ten years before and had arrived here that much earlier.

Personally, I don't know if I would have survived living abroad permanently if it hadn't been for email and cheap long distance, which had "happened to everyone" just in the few years before I moved here. I opened up my very first personal email account precisely because I was moving to Spain, to keep in touch with friends and family while I was over here. I remember gathering email addresses from the people that actually had accounts and one friend in particular told me he didn't "fuck around with email." You know, back in the day when it was still possible to decide whether or not to not have an email account and I don't know, actually get real shit in the mail besides Publishers Clearing House.

As it turned out, I arrived on January 2, 1998 when communication with my own country was easy, facilitating an indefinite stay here.

The late nineties was a peculiar time for Spain. It was a time when the Spanish baby boomer generation was in the late teens and early twenties.

In the 90's only remnants of the intense transitional period that Spain had just lived through could be seen; the death of Franco, the death of oppressive right wing fascism and the start of an era of democracy of the late 70's. These college kids that I met and partied with were babies when Franco finally croaked and democracy came shining through the clouds. They were little kids when the last real political drama happened in 1981 when an attempted military coup took place. But Spain was already ecstatically holding democracy in it's hands after waiting a long damn time, and it wasn't having any of that shit.

But these kids I hung out with never went through anything. Nothing ever festered in them but a desire to buy shit and go on cool vacations and get awesome ring tones for their cell phones and take English classes and go to law school or whatever.

But had I been around just ten years or so earlier, I would have entered a vibrant and excited time for Spanish music, film and art in general; the 80's movida Madrileña (Madrid groove/ Madrid movement). Some good music came out of this time. It was a sigh of relief to the era it had survived, the era of having to take a road trip to France to see Last Tango In Paris. All of the bottled up mad energy that Franco had put a cork in had become molotov and was boiling over with oppression and finally popped. The old bubbly would keep it's fizz for awhile, through the nineties care-free-life-is-fucking-good "big bottle" or botellón youth movement.

I was a part of this Spanish "big bottle" youth phenomenon. "Big bottle" was total and complete youth ownership of the cities and the streets, in such a way that police could not possibly hope to control us. We filled the plazas each and every weekend night, buying bottles of whiskey and 2 litre bottles of coke, plastic cups and bags of ice and fucking owned those plazas, those church steps, those statues and monuments, those fountains, those park benches, those narrow streets, that city hall. Every weekend was a street festival of cheap drinks and hash and massive quantities of gathered young people the likes of which I had never seen before, and I haven't seen since.

Big Bottle was everywhere. Someone's birthday? Big bottle. No money? Big bottle. Going to a concert? You guessed it, big bottle.

You Big bottled before you went out, you big bottled after you went out, you big bottled instead of going out, you big bottled while you were out to save money. You big bottled anywhere and anytime you damn well pleased and nobody said a word about it. You big bottled if you were a snob, a hippie, a jock, a slut, a communist, or a Catholic.

That city was taken in a hedonistic coup and it belonged to us. It was a birthright. It was as if to say, "you all went through hell to get us these freedoms, so we may as well enjoy them." Well, it wasn't my birthright, but I showed up accustomed to extremely tough Arizona open liquor and general drinking laws and an extremely puritan cultural background and decided to claim this as mine as well.

My mouth hung open as I saw the insanely huge crowds of young people, the liquor consumed. All the while, these twenty-year-olds with their long hippie hair carried on eloquent discussions of politics, well-versed in philosophical and historical concepts that most Americans our age that I knew couldn't hold a match to intellectually; I certainly couldn't. Their teachers who had lived through the transition had apparently trained them well; trained them to....well, sit around in plazas drinking and contemplating a bunch of nonsense.

This time of big bottle madness, so it goes, also coincided with unprecedented levels of prosperity, relying, dare I say, almost entirely on the construction boom.

We, the big bottlers, would someday financially support this country. We would someday pay mortgages, maybe on the same houses whose doorways we had pissed in when we were three sheets to the wind. Some of us would someday have kids and want the plazas clean and filled with playground toys, not filled with a bunch of fucking washed up pseudo-anarchists. Soon, we would want the big bottle to dry the fuck up and we would support the anti-big bottle law against open liquor containers in public. But for now, we sucked and milked from that big bottle. We enjoyed the well-kept plazas that the previous generations were paying for with their tax dollars. We left our trash behind in utter indifference for them as they walked their dogs on early Sunday mornings and shook their heads, impotent to do anything about it.

One day we would see our jobs come into danger. We would see our friends out of work. We would wonder how the fuck we were gonna pay those mortgage payments for those houses with the doorways we used to piss on. Those of us that haven't had kids yet would wonder if it would ever be a good time to, if our kids would ever get to play in those playground plazas we used to have our "big bottle" fun in.

Maybe things will get bad enough that the hard times will blister in the hearts of young folk again, since their asses are no longer drunk in a plaza. Maybe they will make some good art. I guess that's one thing I'm hopeful of an economic crisis bringing; inspiration.

Oh, but I do miss the big bottle.

Antonio Vega died this week at 51 years old. He was one of the seminal founders of Spanish pop music at the start of the democratic era, emblematic of the countercultural Madrid movement of the 80s. People seem affected by it here, it's all over the news; there are tribute concerts being aired, and this song is constantly on the radio (appropriately titled "girl from yesterday" or chica de ayer).

Maybe it is because there is a nagging in them that tells them the time of excited bottled up joy of freedom and subsequent over-indulgence is ending and a new unknown and worrisome era for Spain is beginning.

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"stepping o'er the bounds of modesty"

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Sat, 16 May 2009 11:41:00 +0000

Twas a lazy Saturday morning whence one bored Blues dost diplayed her dorkification.

Blues dost payeth attention to thine stat counter. Getteth thee a life, I knoweth.

But would thee believeth, Blues still getteth a shit ton of people visiting thine olde blog that she moveth from like forever ago? And then twas the stat counter that dost told Blues why this may be the case:

For thou hath not updateth thine blogrolls yet, and thou still hath my olde link of yesteryear on there (which I loveth thee for, by the wayeth).

If thou still loveth me, as I loveth thee for there art none fairer, wilst thou updateth thine blogrolls and purge the internets of ye olde Bluestreak?

Methinks my olde English is shitteth, yo.

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Balloon watching

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Wed, 13 May 2009 15:37:00 +0000

At the young age of six, I was whisked away, along with my eight-year-old sister to start a new life in Albuquerque with my dad. Dad didn't want the divorce and he was gonna be damned if my mom was going to take away his daughters.

He was taking the kids.

He was gonna be in control so that he could see that they were not badly affected by the stigma of divorce.

He would figure out a way.

He was flying off with them; it would be just the three of them for now, somewhere better, if he could get lucky, if the wind would only blow the right way this time.

I'm not really sure why the hell he picked Albuquerque. Maybe Phoenix held too many reminders for my dad about his failed marriage. Maybe it had never brought him anything good and he wanted to try his hand somewhere else, somewhere far, but not too far from his other young daughter, just three years of age who my mother had managed to get custody of. Maybe he wanted to be far enough away from the frowns of his disapproving family and the muffled snickers of my parents' "friends". Maybe the I-told-ya-so looks were too unbearable.

My dad was around 29 years old at the time; tall, a full head of beautiful light brown curly hair, clear blue eyes, straight teeth that had escaped the eager, greedy hands of his family's orthodontist when he was a teen. My dad grew up in all-American, upper middle class family of nine children in Arizona during the 60's. He escaped Vietnam by just a couple of years, unlike his brother who my father, at age sixteen, saw buried. His father was a federal judge, his mother had a master's degree in Psychology but was a housewife and a devout Mormon. He came from a family with a history of power and success; his maternal grandmother had served in the Arizona State legislature in the 1940s (no small feat for a woman at the time), his paternal grandfather was a Professor of tax law. All of his siblings had gone on to law school, or had become accountants or had started to work their way up the military ranks.

Compared to them, my father had a head full of hot air.

My father had not a dime to his name, just some nice oak bedroom furniture and a clothes dryer, but nowhere to put it in our tiny apartment so it stood in the living room absent a washing machine (my mom had gotten the washer).

He had never gone to college like the rest of his family or travelled much out of the state. He had not done much of anything except disappoint his parents and my mother, who he had married at the ripe age of 19. He grew up in the Mormon tradition, but it was likely a life-style choice of his parents rather than being deeply ontological. They were at the same time cultured and well-educated, steeped in community and family, and very well-respected.

They were grounded, not like my father who was floating off into space, with all the others who would never make anything of themselves.

They probably didn't like that my dad smoked pot.

They probably didn't like that he had asked them for money to start a sales call center out of his apartment; to start-up a vending and snacks company (based on the "honor system"); to get his real estate license; to pay the IRS all the money he owed them; to buy himself a Ford escort to replace the giant brown Chrysler he had also been gifted from his grandmother.

They probably didn't like that he had opened his uncluttered mind to becoming an evangelical to soothe a failed marriage, a career that had gone nowhere and to find meaning in life. It must have been so easy to turn to that and it must have itched at and irritated their Mormon roots so.

Scoffed at by his family and ex-wife, he turned to his two young daughters to fulfil him. He learned to braid their hair for school. He did their laundry, properly sorted and all. He made sure there was a nutritious breakfast each day, specializing in chocolate chip pancakes on the weekends. He learned to make quiche and chicken enchiladas. He made sure they took their Flintstones vitamins. He had them see a counselor with experience on dealing with children of divorced parents. He bought an ATARI, somehow, who knows how he got the money, but they played Pac-Man for hours together.

He sometimes accidentally burdened them with things he probably shouldn't have shared with them, such as how lonely he was or how worried he was about whether the food would last all week until his next paycheck. He didn't have anyone else to talk to. It couldn't have been easy to find a female ear or heart with all the baggage and debt he carried.

And then I'm sure he would plant his feet firmly again and vow to never burden them like that again, to keep his head out of the clouds, to make them think everything was okay. Everything would be okay.

He had tears in his eyes a lot.

Defeated.

Regretful.

Utterly disappointed with life.

And those two girls picked up on every bit of his discontent and yearning.

Each day at the breakfast table with bowls full of oatmeal and Flintstones vitamins ready to chew and orange juice poured, four big eyes would stare up at him and give him some kind of motivation to put one foot in front of the other. Sometimes those little people asked him if he was sad. And he would blink his tears away and smile and say, "No."

One time he took them to see the Albuquerque Hot Air Balloon festival.

Maybe he stared up at that colorful New Mexican sky while the girls took turns sitting on his shoulders and maybe he wished he could glide away with them in one of those air-filled, stripe-spangled jewels, effortlessly through the crisp sky to somewhere else, somewhere easier.

I know one little girl wished it.

Three is a Crowd by JadeXJustice from Flickr
Untitled by TailspinT from Flickr
Mass Ascension by a4gpa from Flickr
Checkered Sky by JadeXJustice from Flickr
Above the Crowd by a4gpa from Flickr

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MuthaF%@ckin' Roundabouts, or how I got tricked by a civil servant

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Wed, 13 May 2009 13:06:00 +0000

Well, folks, looks like I'm Spain's bitch again.

No, scratch that.

I'm Spain's leather-clad, gagged-yet-whimpering little gimpy bitch. That's much more accurate.

Remember in my last post how I told you that I was a horrible driver? Well, that was a slight exaggeration. Besides a few parking tickets, I have an impeccable driving record (Mexico notwithstanding). While under observation (i.e.when I'm taking the driver's test I just forked out 400 euros to take), I drive with the precision of the popemobile chauffeur trying to make a U-turn in the middle of a pro-choice parade.

That fact (belief, ridiculous notion, whatever) stands in stark contrast to the fact that I failed my practical drivers exam within the first 30 seconds of driving. No exaggeration. Just a big 'ole fuck you for your effort.

See, here in Spain, the point in any exam, be it a University exam, a state civil servant exam, or a driving exam is never to actually test your aptitude. It is always, always, always, to see who is sly enough to overcome the sleight of hand and utter trickery thrown one's way. Learning processes in these contexts only exist insofar as they enlighten on how to skillfully manage the cunning and art of deception employed by the examiners and exam writers.

So I show up to the car school at the butt crack of dawn to meet my group that I'm supposed to caravan with to the DMV. There are three of us all together; me, it being my first time taking the exam, another girl, it being her 3rd time taking the exam, and still another it being her 4th time taking the exam. I was feelin' all shades of hopeful at this point, as you can imagine. These two are nervous as hell, with good reason, so I agree to take the exam first.

We arrive to the DMV to meet our state examiner. He looks like a dick and barely mumbles, "buenos dias" before he's demanding we sign all kinds of forms.

Finally we are ready and I position myself in the driver's seat.

Deep breath.

Adjust seat first.

Adjust mirrors next.

Fasten seat belt, yo.

Await instructions.

"Ma'am, please go straight until we reach the roundabout," the examiner says.

My heart is kind of pounding, because, fuck, I hate roundabouts and feel like I'm gonna get sideswiped by every other car going round. But there isn't much traffic and hell, I've been driving for 16 years. There's no need to worry.

As we slowly approach the roundabout the examiner says, "Please take the second exit out of the roundabout". Sweet, I'm already in the right lane, so no worries of side swipage. I cruise along passed the first exit, counting mentally, "One Mississippi..." and then I see the next exit "Two Mississippi!" I signal, of course, with my blinker, 'cause I am ON that shit and I take the second exit as per the muthafuckin instructions.

"Stop the car. You have just entered a street that is closed due to construction. You have failed the exam. You have just been made Spain's little bitch"

(okay, I made up that last line).

We back up to look at the sign and I see this:

Honestly, have I completely lost it, or does that look like a closed road to you, what with the two blue arrows and the rails that have been removed so that cars can pass, and the cars actually passing??????

The examiner proceeds to tell me that I should have ignored his instructions to take the second exit and in fact should have taken the third exit and that by following his instructions, I had disregarded a vertical sign prohibiting entrance.

The other two people taking the tests also failed again.

As soon as Spain has had enough of my money, or as soon as I learned all of the possible tricks that can be thrown my way, like the examiner telling me to do things that are apparently illegal, but that don't look illegal to anyone with full use of their faculties, I will have a driver's license.

Round two is next Wednesday. I might instigate a mosh pit if I don't pass.

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This place is driving me insane

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Sun, 10 May 2009 19:09:00 +0000

I've been an idiot all these years.

I didn't realize that never driving a car over here has influenced my sense of freedom and has made me feel trapped amidst this cobblestone and these walls on all sides and the rot iron always, always hovering over me. No sunsets, no air, no views of any kind, just a maze of tiny madness.

While it can be beautiful, over time it can suffocate you, especially if you grew up with this as a reference for how space is supposed to be organized:

I used to sort of take pride in not using a car or needing one. It can be more time-consuming to take a car somewhere than it is to just put on some comfortable shoes and walk there. It also keeps your ass from looking like ricotta cheese (they don't have cottage cheese over here, so my ass can only look like cottage cheese in America; here it's a smoother ricotta which obviously isn't as bad).

When you walk, you stop along the way and you buy your baguette, your cigarettes, and you have a cup of espresso in a teeny tiny cup and then you say buenos dias to a construction worker...oops wait a second, I think I just confused my reality with a Mentos commercial. I actually really do all of those things, except for say buenos dias to construction workers*, as a general rule, because I'm nice, but not that fucking nice and believe me, Spanish construction workers do not need another reason to catcall.

My point is, I don't use a car -- I walk, and I'm all European 'n' shit, okay? And I thought it was cool at one point and now I'm sick of it and I want my Nissan pick up truck back, and no I'm not gonna help you move your shit.

When I go home I drive everywhere and I derive unusual levels of pleasure from the experience. I roll the window down, I blast the music, I swerve in and out of lanes like an asshole and generally drive like it's my last day alive and I give every driver within a ten mile radius reason to consider road rage as a viable option for dealing with me even though I'm on vacation and I'm not even remotely in a hurry and I stop at five conveniently organized places of business with gigantic parking spots close to the entrance where I can piss all my money away and then get a Starbucks and do my banking through easy drive-thru windows that just make my life exemplary in terms of time-management and then get Taco Bell on the way home. (That run-on sentence was meant to make you feel like you were on a Phoenix freeway and you didn't know what the fuck was gonna happen next, because someone like me just made your life flash before your eyes).

I miss that life. I hated it at one point, and thought it was lame and socially isolating and dispiriting but right now I would trade a day of dicking around sipping Espresso out of ridiculously small cups for running errands in a giant hurry in a traffic jam in America any day.

You just never know what you'll miss when you leave home.

(No, your eyes do not deceive you. That is, in fact, corn dog pizza. I don't really miss it, I'm just making a point, okay?)

Well, it seems so easy then, Blues, just get your Spanish driver's license. How bad can it be, you speak Spanish, right? Get your license and drive off into the Spanish plains, where the rain apparently falls gently.

Right, but unfortunately, this isn't America where the worst part of getting your driver's license is having to mingle with the masses at the Department of Motor Vehicles for an hour or two and getting yelled at and humiliated by some disgruntled civil servant because you failed to fill out your form correctly.

Luisito got his drivers license in Arizona. It cost him $25 and about 3 hours of his precious time (one hour to study the little booklet and two hours of waiting in lines and taking tests). I was with him from start to finish and it felt like one gigantic fucking inconvenience to my day at the time. But now, if I could, I would hang out all day at the DMV; I would camp there for two days and then invite all of the masses over to my house for a potluck if that meant I could get a Spanish drivers license at the end of it all.

Here in Spain you can't just go to the DMV and take the test. Only privately owned driving schools can sign people up for the tests (European socialism, my ass). So, you have to enroll at one of these blood-sucking-ass-boning driving schools, complete their curriculum (which amounts to no less than 20 hours of theoretical classes at a cost of 100 euros), then pay 40 euros per practical driving lesson, and of course, since the school has to sign you up for the test, it's really only when they say you are ready (i.e. have sucked you for every last penny) that you can take the test. Oh, then you have to pay the 80 euros written test fee and the 20 euros medical exam fee, then the 100 euros practical exam fee.

I will be lucky if I walk away from this thing for under 400 euros, and that's if I pass my practical exam (I'm told it's rare that they pass you the first time you take the exam, and I have a hunch that this is because the car schools are in questionable collaboration with the state examiners and both make a killing by failing people).

Who would have thought you'd have to climb mafia ropes to get your damn drivers license? Welcome to my world where up is down and down is up and you don't get what you want when you want it, because this ain't Kansas anymore and you are now at the mercy of Spanish bureaucracy and when they decide I have paid them enough money, they will allow me to drive in their country.

I just passed my written exam, which actually did take quite a bit of studying. Signs are easier to read in the states because they are designed assuming that everyone speaks English. Here the signs do not. Why don't you take this little quiz and see if you understand what the signs mean. In a matter of time and a whole lot of patience with this system, this will be me:

*I don't really buy cigarettes either, I'm still cigarette free, going on two months now. You might be able to tell that I'm still a bit irritable.

Streets / Callejuelas by SamwiseGamgee69 from Flickr

Big Yellow Dot by phxpma from Flickr

Corndog Pizza by lason from Flickr

Chevy Chase caught in the roudabout from Youtube

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I want to tell you about my family but unfortunately this is where the story begins

waxwingblues@gmail.com (Blues) — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:46:00 +0000

I don't have many childhood memories from before the divorce of my parents. My very first real, complex memories consisting of more than just momentary flashes of color, feeling, fleeting sensation or glimpses of fading images are those of the time right when my parents were splitting up.

Those first few memories that I retain reflect a child trying to piece together the scenario of separation with lapses of naive hopeless hope for a reconciliation. I'm thankful for the fact that my mind didn't let me keep everything that happened, only a few memories as parts of the complete narrative of my childhood.

I am six years old. I am in front of the last house that my parents lived in together. The house at the edge of the cul-de-sac, the house in front of the scary man's house with the ribs that jutted out, who always smoked cigarettes and who didn't like us playing in his yard. This was the house where my mother told my father she would never move to another house with him again. She was sick of his social ineptitude, his failed business ideas, his uprooting his family every time the wind changed, trying to make a buck off the equity. These are the things I know about, the reasons I was given later in life, the filtered data.

In my memory it's raining and I'm playing in the hot Arizona rain. I'm barefoot on the sidewalk and the sun has gone down and I look down and see giant raindrops. They are oddly huge, and they ingrain themselves into my mind and the fragrant rain melds with the smell of oil on hot asphalt.

Just over at the porch of my house my parents sit watching the rain, and I'm happy that they are sitting together on those fold-up chairs we take to the lake sometimes on Sundays. Likely they were discussing divorce minutiae such as who would call the phone company to get the line turned off and when would be a good time to go to the bank to close their joint account, when would be a good time to tell the kids.

In another memory, I come out of my bedroom in the middle of the night to find my parents calmly packing their things into separate boxes. They are talking like nothing is wrong, having accepted the way things are now and just having the task of transmitting that acceptance to their children.

My mom holds up some sort of Native American dreamcatcher and asks my dad if she can have it. He says "yeah", shrugging.

No tears right now, just the packing of separate boxes for two separate houses to distribute divided, mismatched things within; things that used to fill just one house. Most of the things belonged to my father, whose well-to-do grandmother had died allowing him to inherit some of her nice things, like a set of China and a classical oak bedroom set. Eventually he decided he didn't care about China and let my mother keep it, but he needed the bedroom furniture for his new apartment in Albuquerque. No matter that the bedroom set would never fit in his tiny bedroom. It wouldn't have fit in my mother's new tiny apartment either.

In another memory, the family is in the car on our way to a restaurant. I see my parents in the front seat. I can't see them clearly, just the shapes of their heads over the seats, but there is palpable sorrow between them and maybe they are even holding hands. My mom doesn't think we kids are paying attention and says quietly to my father that this is probably our last meal together as a family.

In the restaurant we sit at a round table. My parents pay attention to stupid things like if we are sitting in our chairs properly and if we are eating our vegetables. But tonight, for some reason, we're allowed to have another Shirley Temple and order dessert instead of waiting until we get home for Otter Pops.

In the parking lot after the kids are buckled in the back I look out the window and see my parents embracing; just the behavior that fill a six-year-old heart with that desperate, naive, and hopeless hope.

These are not memories of explosive arguments, abusive shouting, spiteful jabs of hate thrown at each other with ugly words hissed through closed teeth with clenched fists. Those things undoubtedly happened, but I don't recall them. These are just memories of two people that cared about each other but had failed at love, time and time again, and eventually gave in.

There is nothing so sad as watching your parents fail at love.

Well, except maybe watching yourself fail at it.

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