Blues of a Waxwing

''Just say the word and tell me that I'm forgiven''

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 09:56:00 +0000

Alright FF, if yesterday's happy song jerked your tears, I can make no guarantees about today's sad song. I promise that one of these meme categories will soon provide me with a funny, upbeat memory, but not today I'm afraid.

Day 4: A song that makes you sad: Never Gonna Let You Go by Sergio Mendes

I remember the day we went to pick up my mom's ''new'' little red Camaro. She had pointed out several times on the street what kind of car she was getting but she always pointed out one that was shiny and new. "See that one right there? That's a Camaro. That's the kind of car mommy's getting. A red one.''

I was surprised at the used car dealership at how chipped the paint was, how the interior smelled like an old ashtray, how the visors hung badly, and how the stuffing was coming out probably through a cigarette burn in the dark upholstery that was stained with unidentifiable liquids. I touched the car while I peered inside the window and quickly withdrew my hand. It was summertime in Mesa, Arizona, the air was thick and dry and almost burned your lungs going in, and you could easily fry an egg on the hood of that car.

Mom was starting over. My dad, far away in Albuquerque, was no longer holding her back and neither were we: me age 7, the Huta kid age 4, and the Chulster age 8.

Mom had a new job working on the assembly line at Motorola. That and the dealing of weed to a few friends and relatives paid the bills and allowed her to spoil us just enough when we visited her. It paid for her new apartment.

That apartment. It was a tiny duplex on a corner near a car wash with a tree that was good for climbing and oleander bushes that filled with bees. Most of the neighbors had covered their windows in tin foil to reflect the sun out. There were no garages on our block, just carports filled with junk and yards with grass that was yellowed and dried and patched with dirt.

You would never guess by looking at the inside of her place that it was just on the border of the projects, that most of the neighbors on our street were on welfare. Inside the apartment was a twenty-something single woman's oasis of independence, a hideaway where she could reinvent herself in a world unhindered.

She had painstakingly decorated the place in her hip, youthful 80s way. Everything about it was a statement of creativity. Restaurant menus she had nicked and hung up carefully on the dining area wall every which way seemed the epitome of funky and fun. Her bedroom was a den of seduction where she had hung Chinese umbrellas upside down over her bed, covering the light and creating an aura. On top of her dresser she had her own swiveling earring rack filled with big cheap earrings, just like the ones in shops that I loved to spin round and round until I was told to stop. She had covered a lamp in a romantic black mesh which was surely meant to kindle something I knew that I didn't know much about. Her negligees hung from the expensive kind of silk padded hangers, not the wire ones that tangled themselves up on the closet floor impossibly at my dad's place in a mess of dirty laundry and shoes. Those negligees probably fit her nicely now with her new boobs. Her designer friends she met in her photography classes came over and as they listened to my mom's Sade album on the record player, in their cracked voices of holding in a drag from a joint held tightly by a roach clip, they would comment on how creative my mom was and how great her apartment was and how happy they were for her. She must have lay in bed alongside my dad and dreamt for months about how she would decorate her own place once she got away from him and his grandmother's hand-me-downs that filled their joyless home.

But back to the little red Camaro. That car, like the apartment, represented a break from the prison of family life or the prison of my dad, from the ugly long brown family car he had humbly accepted when his grandmother passed, since he was worse off than any of his eight siblings. This was supposed to be a happy day for her, a day of confirmation that everything was going better for her now.

We stood around restless while my mom closed the deal: Chulster, with her signature summer sun scowl and her orange popcycle stained lips, the Huta kid covered in a layer of sweat and grime, with her golden baby curls and pouty red lips, and me, with my stringy thin braids going down the sides of a face over-populated by wreckless freckles.

She paid for the car in cash, shook the dealer's hand, and her three little sweaty girls crammed themselves into the tiny hot Camaro that now had her name on the title. The hairs near our ears curled from the heat and our faces flushed and as she reached over the front seat to roll down the passenger side window, she warned us not to touch the metal trim on the windows because it would burn us. She awkwardly put the keys in the ignition, not used to exactly where it was. The engine started up and we were off. Mom could now tick off another item on her to-do list for making a new life.

The hot breeze gushing into the non-air conditioned car was welcomed with relief and she turned on the radio. ''I was as wrong as I could be, to let you get away from me, I'll regret that move, for as long as I'm living..."

''Mom?'' the Huta kid asked. She scooted her tiny body up to the edge of the hot red velour seat. ''Mommy?''

''Shhhh!'' the Chulster turned around from the front seat and hissed angrily. ''Mom's sad.''

''I'm never gonna let you go, I'm gonna hold you in my arms forever, gonna try to make up for the time I hurt you so…''

I could see the back side of my mom's profile and could tell her cheeks were wet. She switched lanes furiously while wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

''Mommy?'', the Huta insisted in a worried small voice. ''Mommy, ARE YOU CRYING, MOMMY?''

''But if there's some feeling left in you, some flicker of love that still shines through, let's talk about, let's talk about second chances…''

''Mommy is this the 'Never Gonna Let You Go' song?'' Huta urgently needed to know while tapping on my mom's shoulder.

''Yeah honey, it is.''

''Does it make you sad, Mommy?''

''Yeah honey, it does''.

''Is that why you're crying, Mommy?''

''Yeah.''

Huta looked around at the three of our tear streaked faces and confirmed, ''Me too. I'm sad too, Mommy.'' She looked down and her bright red lower lip protruded outward and then she proceeded to carefully examine the rest of us for clues on how to be sad from a song. ''Never gonna let you go...'', Huta belted out in her tiny voice, to sing along with the rest of us who were singing it softly under our breaths.

I was heartbroken because even at 7 years old I knew the song was a lie. She was letting go, of him and of us, she was only going to hold us in her arms while we were here visiting from Albuquerque, not forever, like the song said. There was no flicker of love that still shone through and there were no second chances and she didn't have any regrets like the guy singing did, otherwise we would all be together again with Dad. So why was she crying? Because she wished she felt like the guy and girl singing? Did she wish that for our sake she didn't need to face life as a huntress just one last time?

From time to time I'll be at a the mall or in the grocery store and I'll hear this song on the musac and there is no amount of time that can pass between my seven year old self and my adulthood to make me not feel as confused as my sisters and I did that day in my mom's little red Camaro.

StumbleIt

"Hey you with the pretty face, welcome to the human race"

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 13:51:00 +0000

You know how when you listen to that one song that makes your throat get all gulpy and mesh and swell with your tear ducts and the subcutaneous layers under your face start to feel puffy and goosey somehow and you realize you're almost crying, but you don't know why the hell you're almost crying because you're not sad you're actually really happy but you just think this song in this moment was written for you, which you realize is ridiculous? And you like the song so much that you keep starting it over while you're driving down the road before it even finishes which makes no sense at all and now you're totally losing it? No? Okay maybe it's just me.

Day 3: A song that makes you happy: Mr Blue Sky by ELO

Mr. Blue is due at the end of July. He was made with love, and let's be honest, a shitload of expensive science and the build up to his formation included a lot of torment for a couple that was already dealing with more shit than they should have been.

Luisito and I have been together for 13 years. I remember him telling me at the very beginning that even if we broke up, he still wanted to produce offspring with me because we were meant to mate (in Spanish it sounded really romantic).

When we first got married it wasn't the right time, according to me. I was going back to graduate school and even though every bone in my body wanted to say fuck it, let's make a human, we waited. Luis always always wanted to at any time since the day we got together. After graduate school we moved back to Spain and we thought it would happen soon, very soon. But then I got a new job and my boss announced she was pregnant and would be needing a lot from me to help out while she was away. She was back to work a few months when she announced her pregnancy with her second child. I knew it was wrong for me to let this influence me, but it did and I worried about my employers not taking me being pregnant well. So I continued to insist that we wait while Luisito continued to want children whenever would say yes. And then the problem was that we were still in that shithole and I wanted a real home before we started a family and I didn't picture my life like this and Luisito just pictured his life with me and some kids and nothing else mattered.

And that's when I screwed everything up. I got depressed with my life and lonely and angry and completely withdrew from Luisito for the first time in our 10 years together. I pushed him far away from me and we almost lost each other, and when I think of how close I came to being alone without Mr. Blue and Luisito I feel gutted. When we finally started to patch up and fix our problems, we had to face infertility. The guilt I held for waiting for so long to find that I was no longer fertile was almost more than I could bear.

But that was before and today it's a beautiful new day.

Mr. Blue Sky, please tell us why
You had to hide away for so long
Where did we go wrong

Hey there Mr. Blue
We're so pleased to be with you
Look around see what you do
Everybody smiles at you

This song will forever be my happy song about my baby Blue. I'll sing it to him in the car, I'll sing it to him while I rock him to sleep. I'll put it on and watch him dance. And I'll never ever take for granted again his Papi who I'm finally seeing happy for the first time in too many years. Today is the day we've waited for.

StumbleIt

I've got one hand in my pocket and the other one is smashing my neighbor's stereo

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 09:35:00 +0000

So, you guys didn't really believe it was going to be 30 songs in 30 consecutive days, did you? Come on, cut me some slack - I can barely remember how to type a sentence.

Day 2: Your least favorite song

1995 was not a good year for me.

I graduated from high school in spring and was due to start college in the fall. I didn't know why I wanted to go to college. I only knew that it sounded slightly better than working at Dairy Queen and I had heard that this was what successful people did, so I went with it. I had no real aspirations of what to study and minimal interest in anything other than trying to look cool and listen to music that I though affiliated me with cool. The more obscure the band, the more attractive I thought I became to people with this particular brand of cool, but the shit couldn't be too obscure, otherwise I would lose touch with the whole coolness barometer altogether. By the time I graduated from high school I had a good, trained grasp of the fact that anything liked by the masses, with a few exceptions, was automatically suspect, even though I knew very little about what really made music good.

I was heading to a state school. My parents had lacked the cultural capital required to know what went in to exploring a college education for their kids. There were no trips to the nearby PAC-10 schools or out east for interviews or campus visits. I was never encouraged to do things that might look good on a college application. My parents didn't know the first thing about looking into scholarship options. The only time I ever remember my mother talking to me about college was to say that her dream for me was to go off to college and marry an older boy that was about to graduate which would apparently secure me a worry-free future sustained by a college boy salary. Great vote of confidence to get me started at college, eh?

I thumbed through the housing options catalogs and was sold on the idea of 'getting the most out of an authentic college life experience' where I would have an 'important networking opportunity' and would likely establish relationships that would be memorable to me throughout my life.

This was a golden opportunity to try out new versions of myself. I had a clean slate and was heretofore unpigeonholed. I could change my hair, my clothes, my interests, and my taste in music. I could redefine the coolness barometer altogether to fit with the real me. The trouble was, I wasn't comfortable enough with myself to determine what it was I really liked and felt lost without a reference to see how I measured up. I looked around me and was overwhelmed with trying to determine where I belonged.

In high school I had barely been within the margins of the cool crowd. I didn't get asked on dates or to dances a lot, but I got invited to parties and was generally good at tethering myself to people that were well accepted. I was carefully perceptive about what kind of belts were being worn at the time, just how worn my levies should be, and the minimum acceptable number of earring holes required to be part of the crowd. So even though I was a few notches down on the pretty scale compared to the girls I most admired, I fit in with the scenery and didn't draw too much attention to the fact that I had no business being there or anywhere really.

But in the college dorm environment, I couldn't clearly identify the alternatively cool anti-mainstream crowd I had elbowed my way into in high school and I was suddenly surrounded by hundreds of stunningly beautiful, rich women in their prime that were rushing for sororities, whose parents had shipped them off to sunny Arizona from the east coast. I looked around and knew that being on the margins of cool wasn't going to cut the mustard. But I didn't have the confidence to attempt to be accepted at the sorority level. So I duly linked greek life to the claim that it was all just a bunch of bullshit and that I hated it, while I secretly browsed the catalogs of the sorority houses and imagined what it would be like to live in one of them.

I was lonely as fuck at a time when I was unable to appreciate aloneness. I became friends with some of the girls that weren't really into the sorority thing. They were nerdy and smart and knew things like that U of A had a top notch medical school and what your GPA had to be to get into law school. They were all so sure of what they were studying and spent hours at it, while I wandered around bored, with my books barely cracked open. I hung out downstairs on the cement benches where people with obscure t-shirts that seemed integrated and happy and cool smoked cigarettes, but I was too shot down in my loneliness to approach them, only able to muster up occasional eye contact in the hopes that someone would come talk to me. The few fleeting relationships I managed to form made no impressionable impact on me. I don't remember a single person's name of the people I shared months living alongside.

This Alanis Morissette song was popular at the time and the girls in the room in front of mine blasted it multiple times a day with their door wide open for the entire first semester. Every young 18 year woman - nerdy, hippy, alternative type, sorority sister - sang this song from the top of their lungs while clutching their hearts or wrapping their arms around other like-minded women and they all felt like it was written just for them. They were all high but grounded, sane but overwhelmed, lost but hopeful, baby. They knew it was all gonna be fine fine fine. I guess they all had one hand in their pockets and the other giving a high five and I hated them all for their camaraderie and their college life experience that I felt so disconnected with.

Besides, the song is just dumb. Who puts one hand in their pocket while the other one is playing the piano? Please.

I left U of A after one semester.

StumbleIt

''You know I could never be alone"

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 14:54:00 +0000

Jesus it's dirty in here. Sorry I didn't respond to all of your comments in the last post. They were nice and made me happy.

But the crusty laundry is piling up in this place, I've got a sink full of dishes with the remnants of food on them that I don't even remember eating. There is a layer of grime and dust on the creative parts of my brain, I haven't mopped in months, and the sheets haven't been changed in god knows how long.

The thing is, the filthier this place gets, the harder it is to throw the moldy cheese away that's on my counter no matter how sick I realize that is. Unfortunately, I'm the type of person that unless I can organize the place down to color coding my spare buttons and find the time to iron my damn sheets, shit's just gonna get moldier.

But today it was as if someone had walked in and I felt ashamed of the unidentifiable smell exuding from the fingerprint-tainted refrigerator and I decided that if I at least throw out the stinky shit and DO SOMETHING, I will be a better person for it. So I'm here to prove to myself and maybe to other awesome people I won't mention because they know who they are that I am not a moldy cheese type of person.

I'm a storyteller, dammit.

And I'm intrigued by a damn meme. Because it allows me to tell you stories and show you how cool I am because of my taste in music is all at once. Either that or it will make you once and for all realize we really have nothing in common.

So it's 30 videos in 30 days, so help me fucking god.

Day 1: Your favorite song

Alright, so unfortunately I have a problem with this meme already. How can I possibly pick a favorite song? It's too much pressure. So I'm already changing the category - I'll pick a song that brings me back to a time when I was one of the most favorite versions of myself.

After days of wandering around Madrid in a state of awe, I met Fernando. Fernando had creamy 18 year old skin with dark sugary eyes, longish black hair and the teeth of a toothpaste model. He spoke with the perfect boarding school English of an Argentinean that had been born into just the right family. His charming, educated manner and his nuanced table etiquette contrasted with his wrinkled heavy metal t-shirts and his black and white Pakistani scarf, symbols of rebellion against his family that was pressuring him into an aristocratic life he was nowhere near ready for and that his favorite songs and books told him was the enemy.

He too was lost in this new place. We had both just landed on this strange continent without a friend or a plan, but Fernando had the language down with an accent that made me drooly and he carried a thousand US dollars in cash in his underwear and a knife to protect himself from the unexpectedly benign world of European youth hostels. I was as naive as he was, if not more, with my water droplets which I thought were going to make the Spanish drinking water potable (turns out it puts Phoenix tap water to shame). We clung to each other in our foreignness and naivety and maybe without being fully conscious of it, our refusal of a mold other people had made for us without our consultation. We both seemed acutely aware that this was temporary, that we would be forced to fit into some tight box soon, but now everyday represented a refusal to be anything but what we wanted to be that day.

We had nothing to do except catch trains to Toledo in search of old graveyards to creep around in or lay lazily in the sun on a rowboat in Retiro Park letting each other listen to our tape collections with our headphones. Fernando was way more into harsh metal shit and didn't know any of the blues or Dylan or Dead or indie stuff I liked, but we coincided that day in the park with this little Rolling Stone's number.

As much as I enjoyed Fernando's company during those couple of weeks, my head was full of all the people I wanted to meet, places I wanted to go, languages I wanted to master, books I wanted to devour, new music I wanted to hear and having anyone glued to my side the whole time would have been a burden. Besides, we already had conflicting ideas about how to travel. The money in his underwear had to last him six months and he had to be careful. He started his day with mate for breakfast and skipped meals. He followed me around while I ordered food and claimed he wasn't hungry. He was proving to himself and to his family that he could make it in the world without them and I respected that, but I had two freshly cashed student loan checks in American Express travelers checks and a study abroad program that included my room and board so this was spending money, baby and I wasn't wasting any time or thinking about tomorrow.

My 21st birthday rolled around and I had only one person to celebrate it with, and I wasn't having any of that frugal bullshit. I needed someone to not think about the future with me just for a day and I reeled him into my quest of finding a bottle of wine from the year I was born and ordering it no matter what the price. We walked for hours, soaked in the pouring rain, in and out of expensive looking restaurants and bodegas to see if they had anything from 1977 without any luck (or maybe with a lot of luck, Jesus, what was I thinking?).

We finally settled on a nice expensive but not outrageous wine, and I told him to order anything from the menu, it was my 21st birthday, dammit. He ordered a plate of octopus and I ordered the paella. We sat next to a window overlooking a side street off of Puerta del Sol and if I close my eyes right now I can be there in that moment and hear the sounds of the street down below, the noisy clinkering of glasses and silverware and the chatter of the Spanish lunchtime crowd and the suits and white tablecloths. I can hear the accordion player trying to lure the pesetas from the tourists seated under the beige umbrellas just under our window.

I know that moment by heart because I mapped it into my guts and brains and the thickest, most fibrous parts of my soul. I must have closed my eyes and feared that if I opened them it would all be a dream, that Fernando and Spain and the accordion player and the octopus and me, the me I had always wanted to be would all disappear. Actually, Fernando and the rest of it could have very well disappeared, but I wanted to open my eyes and still be the me I was right then. The one that was confident for the first time in my life and looking to nobody else as a reference for how to behave, for what kind of music to like, for what I wanted to look like, for what I should think. The one that was open to experiencing things for the sole purpose of someday making my own good stories that were more mine than any other belonging I could ever own, that I've unfortunately gotten shitty about sharing. The one that saw the world as a never-ending series of open doors with mostly good things beyond them. The one that didn't feel even remotely dampened by a future unknown, and that appreciated the fleeting effervescence of life in its most vivacious and ripe stage - the now. The one that felt the intense heated color of gratitude - a feeling I knew then, that I lost touch with for some time and that I have found once again today.

I had to take off for Seville and I made it known to Fernando that he wasn't welcome to tag along on my adventure, we were parting ways. He was a good sport about it and didn't take it personally and was ready to venture off somewhere else himself. We kissed in the rain and I was surprised at how his long face bounced off me with an indifference I had never experienced before, especially for someone that would have at another time turned me to butter with a glance. He said he was sad that if we ever saw each other again it wouldn't be like now. I smiled, because I didn't regret it at all. I would still be me.

StumbleIt

Don't stop kicking, okay?

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 11:58:00 +0000

I've been meaning to write about you.

Really I have.

Because when you're older you'll probably think I didn't care at all about what was happening to you, that you had now grown to the whopping size of a red bell pepper, that you were now doing somersaults inside me. I had written so passionately about other things, other people I loved, people I barely knew even, but not you. I was even able to write about the lack of you. But not you.

But see, I write when I'm conflicted, troubled, mixed and jumbled up inside and in need of pulling everything into focus somehow, to probe and dissect innards by way of word hunting. With you, I hadn't felt any of these things. Everything had felt just the way it ought to. There had been scaly monsters inside me locking horns like there usually are for other things. I hadn't felt fear or uncertainty or guilt or absolute weakness.

But this week that changed.

This week I remembered how my cousin lost his baby boy five years ago and my stomach sank like a stone inside, you must have felt it too. Tiny Jordan wasn't as tiny as you, but as humans go, he was pretty small at only 18 months. This perfectly healthy boy suddenly lost control over his left eyelid, causing it to droop down and not blink properly. Then it was discovered that he was developing cataracts. To add more worry to his devastated parents, whose baby was going blind, he refused to eat and anything that made its way inside was promptly spat up. The doctors decided to perform an endoscopy. It was an outpatient procedure, but one that required general anesthesia. Little Jordan went to sleep so the doctors could find out what was wrong and help him get better, but he never woke up again. He was killed by diagnostic medicine.

Those two people managed to pick up the shattered pieces of their family life. I don't know how they did it. Your kicks and somersaults and racing heartbeat confirm to me that I Would. Not. Make. It. I can only assume this process took them years to recover from, if indeed they ever really did. I know that Jordan's older brother Stevie must have suffered too. Stevie was developmentally disabled but he understood things. Stevie is sweet and smart and even then at only 5 years old knew that his parents were hurting. At some point he knew not to ask about Baby Jordan anymore.

Today 10-year-old Stevie is hanging on to his little frail life by a string. His parents, terrified I'm sure by all things medical, took him in to the hospital when he began to lose his balance and his head began to bop from side to side. The doctors wanted to sedate him and perform an MRI. During the MRI, they discovered he had a spot on his brain, which would require further testing, a spinal tap, another MRI, all of which have had unexpected complications and problems breathing, which then required an induced coma and a ventilator. Little Stevie went to sleep so the doctors could find out what was wrong and help him get better. They are now trying to release him from the coma, by injecting him with medications that are causing him to go into seizures. The doctors do not believe he is not going to make it. They want a complete blood transfusion now and a heart biopsy.

His parents are, were, will twice-forever be, eternally, redundantly broken. They were finally limping around trying to hold each other up, sometimes being too much weight for the other to bear with his or her own limp to manage. They were finally making a life again. I don't think they really ever imagined such a shattering blow would fly out of the god-clouds so unfairly soon, while they were still so fucking injured. I don't think they ever imagined that another one of their boys might lose his life in another rare medical diagnostic tragedy.

In the meantime, you kick. Through my tears over breakfast, you kick. Through the floods of memories that hurricane over me of the childhood I shared with my cousin, the one where he got the shit life of shoes that were too small and a drunk stepfather passed out on the couch and 7-11 hamburgers for dinner, and I got the good life, you kick, kick, kick.

And your kicks remind me that you are living and healthy and safe inside me. And you also remind me of how weak and fragile you are: now, when you are born, when you are 18 months, when you are 10 years old, and probably for the rest of the time we share the world together. Your weakness and fragility translates into my own weakness and fragility. And your little kicks remind me that if all the humans on earth stood in a line and shit-lives and medical fuck ups on tiny loved ones were rationed out based on who deserved them, there's a small chance that I might end up with one, and my cousin definitely, definitely wouldn't.

I love you my little red bell pepper. Please don't stop kicking.

StumbleIt

Titles are crap. Do you require a title if we're just sitting there? No.

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 10:57:00 +0000

So can we just act like we're hanging out having a coffee? And can I just say straight away that I'm not fucking using my thesaurus today because when people have coffee together they don't whip out their thesaurus to try to express themselves just so. And don't expect even so much as a spellcheck out of me today. If we're having coffee together, I assume you are interested in me and even if you can't identify with my predicament, you don't require that I spin you round a wordy flying saucer adventure, do you? I just have to talk and I don't even care at this point how it comes out.

Because through all of this shit I'm going through, I forgot that I need my friends, and more than any of my real friends, I need my internet friends: you. And them.

So, remember that one thing where I do that really animal thing but then for some reason no little homo sapiens appear? Well my doctor just told me that Luisito and I are the equivalent of a dog humping a stuffed animal on the living room floor, the uncooperative stuffed animal with the missing ear being me. Well, that’s not exactly the case. I’m actually more like a stuffed animal with a tiny pathetic pulse that makes the dog so crazy he chases his own tail in between humpings: I have ‘diminished fertility’. I gather that means I get to listen to approximately 108 more enlightened individuals tell me that I just need to ‘relax’. Believe me f-tards, I couldn’t be more relaxed if I were stuffed with latex.

Stupid font bullshit I don't care.

The scare tactics, which I'm fully aware were scare tactics, of the fertility clinic have worked on me and we've signed our infertile asses up for full in vitro and yes I feel conflicted about the whole damn thing to the point where I'm unable to even write about the conflicting feelings, but there they are and this is where I stop the post because this is just so fucking inadequate as far as posts go.

Can we do this another day?

--------------------------------------------------------------

Maybe I explain myself better here.

StumbleIt

A package from Mom

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:21:00 +0000

I walk in the front door and see what is sitting on the dining room table and instantly feel the gratification of a child that was able to jump out of the pool and run dripping wet into the street and catch the ice cream truck in time.

A Box.

Just for me.

From home.

Holy fuck it's exciting. I can't decide whether to clap or rub my hands together like Gargamel.

In a frenzy I would be embarrassed if anyone saw, I attempt to pick the tape off, tear it, gnaw it off with my teeth and exasperatedly grab my keys to try to sever the bitch open so I can get my prize.

The box flaps open and reveals some mauve colored tissue paper and an envelope with my name on it on top. Ignoring my instincts to toss it aside and bite my way through the tissue paper all the way to the Reese's peanut butter chips I know are in there, I carefully open the envelope and pull out a piece of flawlessly folded notebook paper and my little heart sinks and my conniptional joy wanes and a dumb lump takes over my throat and a coup is declared over my tear ducts cause I know what I'm going to see.

Not the words or the message in the letter but the handwriting parachutes off the page and glides over me and I suddenly recall all of the things I had seen with this exact penmanship in a turbulence of affection and anamnesis: birthday cards, lists of chores, checks to cover my rent, notes on the fridge of things needed from the grocery store, the pages of the journal she kept when she first got married to my dad that I had found that one day while I was snooping through her shit, letters to a small child that lived too damned far away from her mother, letters to Spain that tried to hide a heartsickness and hope that this wouldn't go on for much longer.

She had upright letters that were a series of perfect arches that stood tall and bold, large and confident, so perfectly aligned with the horizontal page lines it was almost scientific, reminding me of how brutally intentional she was, how you could never accuse her of not wishing to do things exactly right, how her only failure was in the actual execution of the things she had in mind to do, but never in the fervency with which she penned them, with which she had in her mind to do them. The perfection of the print of this letter informed me that my mother had sat down with several pieces of paper, had written some things, didn't like the way they looked, crossed them out, frowned at the strikethrough, then started the letter again, then accidentally placed her coffee mug on the page, cursed herself and then started a new page, blemish free after getting another cup of coffee. I had seen her do it before. She was a perfectionist printer with nothing to do except send care packages to her daughter in Spain that needed packed brown sugar and Midol P.M.and the thrill of getting something in the mail to make it through life.

I had given her a list of things I needed but she always sends some extra things in there too: a new skirt, bobby pins, a DVD for Luis. I imagined her carefully crossing things off an impeccably composed list with her perfectly precise handwriting, a list perfected after many inferior lists had been discarded, smiling inside at the forgiveness inherent in a deliciously blank sheet of paper. I know this because I do it. It's not the shit that gets done that's important, it's the zeal with which the list itself is created and the thought that goes in to each and every item: in what order it will be listed, what the item will be called, what information if any will follow it in brackets, what items should be included in a sublist of any one listed item. If I could only fucking consummate the shit that gets immaculately committed to paper, well, I'd just have all my shit together now wouldn't I?

This is the day to day I don't see of her anymore, her lists, her post it notes everywhere, always signed with a perfect little heart. And then I look around at notebooks I have lying everywhere, grocery lists and scraps of reminders and half literate paragraphs of potential blog posts. And I realize she is in my day to day. I notice my letters arch with the same bold intention to do shit right and I know I just fall short in the executing of life part. I know that my hand curls over the pen just like hers does. I step out of myself and know I even have the same expression on my face right now. She's always right here with me. I just look down at my hands and see her. When I scrawl my name on a credit card slip, it's her, with the same curly, flowery ambition.

And then I slowly and calmly open the tissue paper and my fingers lightly kiss the items that she had touched several days before and damn do I ever miss her.

StumbleIt

Tips for the discerned lady traveler

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:51:00 +0000

As a seasoned lady traveler, I thought I'd share some tips with you, still fresh in my mind from my recent week of leisure in Northern Spain.

1). Opt for the most luxurious accommodations your pocket book can afford you. Being a more adventurous traveler, I often find myself far away from my many summer estates, which often requires adapting to more bourgeois living arrangements, with a staff that is unaccustomed to my rigid requirements. When selecting such accommodations, consider the calibre of the fellow lodgers, as the inevitable exchange of pleasantries may be required, and you'll want to find yourself amongst the gentility of your peerage. I usually find the fellow lodgers at the Ritz hotels to be of a tolerable cultivation, and it is hence a suitable compromise when I find myself on the road. If this is not feasible, a lady like myself may just have to deal with the beer filled fuckers flying the pirate flag at the next tent over.

2). Upon making your reservations, insist on ocean views when seaside. I highly recommend requesting a suite with a wet bar stocked with the finest imported beverages, a grand piano for nightly entertaining and separate sleeping quarters featuring a king-sized mattress of the highest orthopedic advancements. But if need be, you can always just chuck all your shit into a two sleeper and pump the air back into your mattress in the middle of the night in the pouring rain.

3). Be sure to select among your staff the chauffeur with the most experience in mechanics for untimely roadside repairs. Remember your rank and resist the temptation to get out of the car to help. You may, however, bark orders from behind the windshield and act like a pissy bitch tapping on the glass and pointing out what he's doing wrong.

4). If local giants move in on you and make attempts at intimidation, use your wit and charm to gain their confidence.

Failing that, throw those bitches down with your weak ass trembling quadriceps, but remember, your knees will actually come in handy afterward, when you need to run to the outhouse in the middle of the night.

5). Have your staff pack your trunks lightly. You would be surprised at how a simple pair of black Jimmy Choo pumps can transition perfectly from a daytime stroll of fine shopping to the nightly entertainment offered at cocktail hour. A T-shirt can also easily substitute for a turban, should the scalp scorching sun require it, like if you decide to hike 12 kilometres up a horseshit mountain at high noon.

6). When making a wine selection, opt for a Le Montrachet DRC 1978, served only in the finest hand blown Venetian crystal goblets. If you find this superb choice unavailable, a Carlos Serres 2005 will also do, or as my travel companion likes to refer to it, "the best shit at the camp store", served in a plastic cup.

7). Being away from your culinary staff may require intestinal adjustments, but do try the local delicacies if you can muster it. If you are an especially delicate eater, consider preshipping your capricious preferences such as caviar and baby eel ahead of time to await you upon your arrival. If this is not feasible, a slab of meat the size of your head should get your shitter functioning again, quick like.

8). Ensure that the personal chef assigned to you is skilled in both classical and modern gastronomy, maintaining a synergy between sweet and savory, and is capable of creating culinary harmony through elaborate preparation, emphasizing the visual spectacle and employing irony as a fundamental ingredient. Actually, you know what? Fuck it. Throw those vegetables that have been sitting in a pool of melted ice in your cooler for days now over the fire and then pick the black gunk off of them after you scorch the living shit out of them. Gracefully pretend to enjoy burnt onions.

9). Choose a resort with a saltwater infinity pool, which are quite fashionable nowadays. If your resort of choice has more antiquated playgrounds, a traditional salt water pool such as this one should do quite nicely:

10). A swim up bar may seem very passe and even low class, but even a lady while on holiday will let her guard down and welcome a little pool time horseplay. If you are not fortunate enough to enjoy a swim up bar, you can always bribe your traveling companion with the promise of awkward tent sex if he gets up and buys you a beer from the ice-cream truck looking thing.

11). Do make time for a spa treatment while on holiday. Caviar facials will do wonders for your fine lines and an Evian bath will get your body rehydrated. For the feet, opt for a diamond peel microdermabrasion treatment. Or you can try one of these organic scrub treatments to make your fugly cracked heels look less like horse's hooves.

Remember to pop the blisters you got hiking with your Swiss army knife before indulging in this luxurious treatment.

I hope these travel tips do come in handy while you are out living the life of leisure you have earned this summer. Don't forget to send me a postcard my darlings.

Muaaaaa!!!

--------------------------------------------------------
Photos:
all ours except the pirate flag one and the feet one.

I’m fine, really, I just needed to go for a jog and to say the fuck-word ten hundred times

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:39:00 +0000

I step into the elevator and stare in the mirror at what can only be described as a thirty-something, American dork giving me the stink eye. She’s wearing these dumb blue running shorts she’s had for like 15 years which act as some ridiculous cake topper for the hairy and mole-ridden legs that haven’t seen the sun in 9 months and that are probably about to get rocked into a melanoma frenzy by the hot Seville sun.

There are tits somewhere under this sports bra that is so tight that I become forcefully acquainted with the previously unknown phenomenon called ‘back fat’, which I just quickly add to the list of body parts I would like exchanged for something else. The hidden, smashed up tits are stupid, inadequate blobs of uselessness though because they’ve never once served either one of their real purposes. I’d be better off with mosquito bites, or cancerous moles or watermelon jelly beans for tits.

My workout clothes are out of style and too small for me because I refuse to spend more money on shit that's gonna rot in my closet from lack of use. And by 'refuse to spend money on' I mean 'can't buy because pretty soon I’m gonna be unemployed'. But whatever, I'm not talking about money and my stupidly precarious job situation, okay, I'm talking about the fact that my boobs are idle, ineffectual flesh quagmires and that I never fucking exercise because I have problems with self-discipline.

Today's different though. Today I'm going running. Yeah, like, with my ipod and all my stupid gear and shit. And I look like a total dork but I don't care. Because my body parts are stupid anyway and they go with my dumb outfit.

Today I want to smash pavement with my heels, until my head turns a scary shade of red with a rush of the opiate of endorphins, no matter how much the impact pulverizes my whiny little bitch of a sacrum that, while I'm at it, should be added to the list of body parts that need to be exchanged.

I raise my lip slightly exposing my teeth in disapproval at my reflection. Stupid elevator mirrors. I should have taken the stairs. I decide that I don’t care if my sacrum shatters into a million pieces. It’s not like I’m pregnant and I need to be careful. It’s not like I’m “healthy” anyway. Nature already decided that my kind are to die out, so what’s the diff? Ha! The pavement is going to feel what I want to do to people’s faces. People like my doctor with his stupid 25 thousand million dollar scheme he has cooked up to make me a sci-fi baby in a petri dish because I apparently require weird lab equipment and a million dollars to have a family. He'll only do this after stabbing me for scary blood tests and looking in at all my rotted organs and after cutting out a chunk of my husband’s balls and after making him jack off on demand. Bam! How does that feel, stupid pavement face? What up with your science now, bitch? The pavement also gets to be all the stupid people that have pestered us to have kids because my god, it’s so goddamn simple, you just lay down and deposit your cum and voila!- you have a vomiting woman and a positive pregnancy test and truckloads of like hope and excitement and shit and, you know, a future that doesn't resemble the fucked up one that's in my mind right now.

I blast the music on my ipod and hope people hear it and know I’m not interested in humanly high fives, chit chat, eye contact, sharing the universe with them, offering them a drop of water if they were dying of thirst, or being a member of their stupid society with their stupid ideas and their seeds they spread like a germ diaspora while my shit never gets fertilized because it sucks. Them, with their perfectly functioning ovaries and sperm, with their abilities to bust out their junk at any given moment and create the seedlings of a human, statistically speaking, with nearly anyone that just happens to walk by. Them, with, you know things like property in their name and, oh I don’t know, a steady income so that they could adopt a little baby if they wanted to, a little baby that needed a mommy and daddy and that's out there and that needs me. I know I only live in a rental apartment and I might not have a job soon, but I'm gonna make it and so fuck you for not letting me have a family until I'm fucking old and gray and too decrepit to have one.

I don’t belong in that society. I guess I’ll just hang back here with the a-holes that think breast milk in a sealed container in a fridge at work is offensive and that say they don’t want kids simply because they don’t like what it would do to their beautiful bodies as if gravity ain’t gonna fuck that shit up anyway. We'll just hang out here with our dogs and talk about furminators and about how great life is without kids and how people with kids fucking suck.

By the time I get back home, my head is clear and I don’t hate everyone anymore, and science and society are cool as shit again, and I'm gonna survive, I guess. But my face is red for the next three hours and my back really fucking hurts.

Stupid sacrum.

StumbleIt

Stepdad

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Fri, 28 May 2010 17:04:00 +0000

I stared blankly at him from across the table and examined his giant orange peel nose, his melanoma-speckled forehead, massive and red - the shore of his baldness which had morphed at some point from athletic-type buzz cut into old man head. Years of golfing weekly with no sunscreen and hair loss can do a number on a good looking man.

As usual, he wore a tie-dye collared sports shirt, one of his shirts -- the ones he'd been dyeing and selling for 20 some years, having started his business in our garage with our own washing machine. Together with his shorts and runners, his whole ensemble perfectly represented both pot-smoking hippie and jock that had molotoved him into one hot conservative Republican mess. He was on his third tequila sunrise (requested in a tumbler lest he be mistaken for a ‘faggot’) and we hadn’t even had our appetizers yet. His green eyes peered through sagged eyelids that appeared to droop down so low they almost folded over themselves and nearly touched his eyeballs while a few still remaining eyelashes pointed almost downward, emphasizing the tired, pigeon feeder Grandpa look about him. His squarish fingers were spread out as he monologued, his thumb naturally in a position of hyperextension.

I suppressed eye-rolling, groaning, or feigning an epileptic fit. We were, after all, in a restaurant for god's sake. I drifted in and out of listening to avoid the worn shoe of confrontation.

"...So anyway, we was the kinda kids that would break anyone's ass that got in our way. I mean it..."

Jesus Christ he’s old, I thought, and at 56 he’s still talking the same shit about growing up in Wisconsin. Maybe he read my mind because he stopped, turned his head ever so slightly, smiled goofily, and sweetly uttered one of the many nicknames he had for me. His cracked tooth that had greeted my giggling face so many times over the last 25 years reminded me of the beautiful man behind the worrisome sun spots, the political diatribes, and the days of old before he was a joy-sucked middle-aged adult whose better days were far behind him and who watched way too damned much Fox News.

".....I dated Margie back then -- she had the biggest tits. But anyway, that's not the point..."

I pretended to be intensely interested in the wine list and buried my head in it, while I breathed in my mother's tangible, thick embarrassment. A familiar parcel of family dinner failure was about to arrive without warning. But she only scoffed and then shoved a vodka tonic into her face.

"...Those fucking people. They don't know how to work. All they know how to do is cash their welfare checks and use their food stamps. And I'm gonna work my ass off and pay for their health insurance? Uh uh..."

Food stamps, I thought, and had a faint recollection of using a food stamp for postage to a letter to Santa Claus. This is the man that rescued my mother from standing in line for blocks of government cheese when I was eight years old. Maybe his politics were more nuanced back then.

"...Fine. I'll shut up. Can I get another tequila sunrise please?"

From my eight year old point of view, he was like a large freckled child – unlike any other adult I had ever met. He was a massive muscular man testifying to the hours he spent boxing, wrestling, running, and in general trying to maintain the youthful body that would eventually escape him. His patience for kid hyperactivity was inexhaustible. He would chase me around the couch until I fell to the floor in utter euphoric exhaustion where I would be doomed to a tickling session until I cried out for my mom gasping for air through my roaring upheavals of laughter. Then, fully clothed, I would get tossed into the pool as I squealed in a mix of terror and delight, but mostly delight. On occasion, he would then pretend to walk casually and step fully clothed into the swimming pool, as if just walking about. La di da, he would hum, for my amusement. He would take out his wallet soaked and ruined and pull out the sopping wet money and pretend to pay for something while I doubled over in pre-adolescent hilarity.

When he wasn’t acting silly for the sole benefit of getting me to snort and snicker and squeal, he was working himself to the bone, reinventing some way to keep the wad of Benjamins he always carried in full supply. He couldn't go back on a rescue attempt. He knew my sisters and I would be needing synchronized swimming lessons and Guess Jeans and trips to Disneyland and trampolines and cars insured for 16 year old garage mishaps.

"...We're losing our house..."

I snapped back from my rescued childhood, replete with everything I had ever wanted and more and stared at the man that now had an IRS freeze on his checking account.

No, no, no, no. You got it all wrong. You are the one with the piles of cash everywhere and the Christmas presents that fill an entire room, see? You're the one that knows about mortgages and investments and the stock exchange and interest rates and how to check the oil in my car and how to file my fucking income tax return, and how to interview for a job at Dairy Queen. You're the one with all the answers who knows how to solve everything. I'm the one that needs a girl scout uniform and flute lessons and braces for my gnarled teeth and someone to pay for my college tuition. I'm the one that needs help paying my rent and that can't afford to get my wisdom teeth pulled. I'm the one that crashed my car and can't afford the $2000 repair job. Remember me? You're the one that went into a trance and punched the fuck out of a punching bag in the garage. But I'm the one that has always needed you punching. You're not defeated. You can't be.

My eyes flashed between his sad eyes and my mother's uneaten plate of pasta and I wrestled myself from the ridiculous grips of self pity and the selfish solitude of realizing that there was no one left to hold my life together if I were to fuck it up. I allowed myself to grasp, however superficially, his disappointment, loss and sense of years wasted - his own personal Waterloo. How much graver and more psychologically destructive is it to, at 56, lose everything you've ever worked for than to, at 33, watch your childhood superhero become merely a man?

I flagged down the waiter and ordered another margarita while I calculated if I had enough money in my checking account to pay for dinner.

StumbleIt

I'm already gone

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:12:00 +0000

I’ve gone on about this before, but it’s a feeling that’s so strong, it’s hard to ignore as I do with all the other fleeting realizations, memories, potential posts that I push out of my lazy mind until they whither into forgotten possibilities, too busy with books and work and life. But this? This feeling, this moment is when I realize I need this space to eject something, and my guilt about not being good to you all is overridden by my need to slough something off, whether or not it’s even read, a need to dissect meaning and pore over fibers of sound and play with syllables and scrutinize the allegory of words until I am satisfied in my mind that what I’ve written is really how it is inside here, this place I want to understand, so my brain can call it a day and can stop being harassed by something I can't pinpoint.

I booked a flight to Phoenix (you know, to that one place where I grew up, that place I’m refusing to call home anymore), and as is always the case, from the moment I decided to go, my head has become filled with its every smell and tone and hue and nuance and I ache for it in ways that I didn’t allow myself to when I knew it was out of reach. I don’t call it home anymore because it feels ungrateful to allow myself the luxury of continuously claiming that the true fit, the realer real is taking place somewhere I am not, especially when this city is throbbing with spring like it is, true to how I remember it throughout these many years.

Besides, isn’t home supposed to be a place where there is warmth under my feet, where my sheets are blazed in sunshine in the morning, where a rogue strand of hair gets pushed behind my ear sending delightful shivers curling around my neck, where my toes get the lint cleaned out of them one by one, where daily negotiations on who will make morning tea get played out with kisses and promises of ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’? Yes.

Isn’t home where people, acquaintances I have not chosen to befriend but who have appeared in my life, have persistently gouged away at my heart by approximation until they have succeeded in finding a pulsating soft spot in it beneath all the barricades of bored sighs and disinterest due to hyperbolized cultural difference? Yes.

I felt it, home, I was sure of it, just the other day when for once it had stopped raining and the sun made a shy gesture from behind the clouds and so we (me and these people I'm discovering I might love) went outside to live in these streets again and drank and drank and we continued as the day turned into the dusk that only required a light sweater. And in changing from one bar to another, we had to stop and order beers in small glasses and bring them outside to the middle of the street. There we stood, leaning against a badly parked car, slippery thumbs fighting for their grip on cold beers, thanking Christ or somebody for having given us a sunny day, in the middle of Calle Mateos Gago, the street that leads to the heart of the Giralda. There we humbled ourselves before that radiant stone giant towering over all of Seville in all her raw beauty, the nimbus of dusk surrounding her. And as we inhaled the orange blossoms that bejeweled the trees lining the street down to her gothic door, we jumped slightly on tip toes and bumped into each other warmly, silly and cozy inside from the day of drinking, cheeks aching from smiling, and feeling, above all, lucky, and I thought, “Fuck yes this is home.” Where else on earth could it possibly be?

Tourists frantically snapped pictures of the Giralda with their cell phones trying to capture her perfection in the early evening light and they stared up at her as I would the Taj Mahal or the Empire State Building, admiringly but as a jewel in someone else’s jewelry box. But this, I own her. I see her as I turn in to bed and she lights up my skyline. Those morning teas that get negotiated? I drink them with her, quiet but there. But it’s not just now that I see her more often, from a fortunate vantage point now that we moved into the house of windows. I also have endless memories across time at her feet in the twisted labyrinth of streets surrounding her, and this time is what confirms what I already know: that this is as home as home gets, complete with a long trail of memories, good and bad, following from behind.

But why then, if this is the case, just when I hesitatingly click 'OK' to confirm the charge to my credit card for my flight purchase, does my mind open up and a flood of mountains and heat and freeway traffic juggernaut into it and a landscape, a cityscape, a housescape snaps hard into focus and reminds me that, while maybe not home home anymore, surely Phoenix is something, and that something feels like it’s bruising me as it ironically gets further and further out of reach the closer I get to my travel date, because the closer I get to my travel date, the closer I actually am to my return travel date, and thus the further away any of it is altogether (Noble Savage wrote beautifully once on this very strange phenomenon).

As Phoenix pulls and tugs and begs and pleads and scratches and reminds and blames and guilt-trips with endless memories of its orderly grid of me flying through it with my window rolled down, I realize there are more memories there than can fill these labyrinthian streets. It lectures me, telling me that it’s definitely something if not my home and it’s more than just a place in my past or a holiday. And no matter how much I tell myself that I prefer the Giralda to Camelback Mountain, the lively plazas with cervesitas to the half-vacant strip malls of neglected Subways and derelict Jiffy Lubes and the cobblestone streets over sardine-packed freeways, a visit there is still akin to breathing and eating and human contact.

And I begin to find it odd and in some ways shameful that the sense of missing and nostalgia as an expat at least in my experience and the definition of home is sometimes not at all focused on people and relationships as one would expect, as it should be, as maybe some fault in my character or some coldness in my heart doesn’t allow it to be, as I often claim it is. Rather the missing is all intertwined with a way of living, a way of experiencing urbanization, a way of merely travelling through one's day, and sadly a way of consuming. And a feeling of panicked urgency to be coddled in that urban space once more invades my mind and takes hostage of my ability to look out the window and realize what a beautiful month I have ahead of me in Seville.

I stare out at those lone palm trees that are so very familiar to me, virginal from the sad winter but now spreading up and open in celebration to be penetrated by that hot Spanish sun, that are scattered across this city stuffed between baroque churches; they are normally reminders to me of the Arabia that once dwelt here that I get to contemplate because this is part of me and this is my home but now they only yank me back to that sun-scorched desert valley where I dread going because I dread having to leave.

StumbleIt

I'm losing my mind a little. Do you know what time I was supposed to be here?

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:16:00 +0000

There are a lot of things that I’m realizing about myself now that I’ve moved. Maybe with more light you see things more clearly. One is that I have been needlessly being a bitch during most of my waking hours for the past several years. Okay, it's true that I was utterly, hopelessly claustrophobic in my job and in my house to the point of wanting to headbutt my way out of reality, and now I feel like I’m finally out of prison, but still.

Another realization I've had is that I’ve spent far too many years acting like clocks and watches were for pussies.

So, tickety tock, I bought a new clock.

It’s a beautiful brass and metal German antique clock from the 1950s. It's in the shape of a starburst which makes me feel all hip and in-the-know decoration wise. But best of all, it has the most lusciously subtle whispering tick tock you’ve ever heard and listening to it is like Earl Grey and cashmere and bubble baths and pine-scented candles and chicken enchiladas and sunsets and foot rubs reformulated as the sound waves of a metronome.

When I sit on the sofa I don’t want any bullshit electronic gadgets jacking up my tick tock time. Not like Luisito. Luisito has to have some gadget carcinogenisizing my oxygen every waking second of the day (but I'm turning over the nice leaf so I don't yell, I just drown everything out but the tick tock). But when he's cooped himself up in his office, fabricating homemade 3D glasses or planning his robot project, I sit in almost-silence with only the tick tocking of my new timekeeper to be heard. The sound of finely gauged progress over the sundial is all I need; to hell with nanotechnology and interceptors and shufflers. I don’t even want any music. I only want my tick tock.

Tick tock reminds me of the clock in my grandparents home that used to bewitch me and calmly terrorize me with its swinging pendulum. I would stand before it on an almost-silent-yet-ticking Sunday afternoon when there were no lights on in the house, but the sunlight would pour through the Frank Loyd Wright style skylights above and into the entryway where the clock patriarched over the rest of the furniture and the light would make shadows all over the bluish porcelain statues spangling the neighboring shelves. I imagined unlocking it's chamber and slipping my lanky skinny body inside and coming out the other end where there would be another world beyond it, a melty flowery surreal world, with crystalline streams and pots of gold at the end of rainbows. Maybe one where everyone was a centaur or people served you Turkish Delight from sleds or where you could drink some potion and become really small or really big or you could cross into an enchanted forest and ride through it on the back of a tortoises where you would only survive because you would find a nice cow that you could milk or a giant white dog looking thing would give you a sky-ride to a princess where you could fathom one grain of sand.

But tick tock also reminds me of the clock in my house when I was in high school, a mini grandfather clock because my mom was trying to be fancy when she bought it and thought it would go well with the cherry wood entertainment center that was way too nice for everything else in our house. This clock in particular and I were engaged in a constant game of wits as I pushed the gas pedal to the floor in my Toyota Corolla racing myself home on the freeway from my boyfriend's house in the wee wee hours. That clock usually won and would proceed to ruin my life every time I came in past curfew bracing myself for another encounter with one teary-faced mother who was taking it very hard that I no longer did what she said.

When I was in college, I decided I was done with clocks altogether and I even swore myself off watches. At that point all they did was remind me of how incompetent I was, of my total lack of organization and they impulsed me to feel that frantic panic of running late every time I needed to be anywhere. I used to talk about how timepieces in general represented some kind of human bondage. God was I ever pretentious when I was in college. I wish I could wind the clock back, oh a good twelve years or so and stuff a sock in my mouth and tie myself up and force-listen myself to the tick tocking while erasing my brain of the cliches I'd learned that I didn't know were cliches. That shit would get reprogrammed quick like.

Now? Now my clock feels like home for better or worse and grounds me in something I fully accept as mine. It makes my future gain its will to glow again. But at the same time it makes me panic slightly and feel like I'm running late for something really fucking important that I don't know how I've managed to not show up on time for. I feel like I've been hitting snooze for several years.

I know now why real grown ups have a real ticking clock in their homes and I understand why twenty one year olds that don't have to worry about anything other than if they are going to drink Four Peaks that night or Tom Collins don't. Real grown ups need to be reminded, subconsciously that time is actually moving, even if you act like an a-hole for five years pretending it isn’t.

Tick tock. I already miss my new home, because I know someday I’ll move from it. I know the landlord will want the flat back long before we are ready to leave, or maybe, if things aren't entirely fucked, our family won’t be so small anymore. I wonder how many ticks that clock will breathe in and how many tocks it will breathe out before that happens, if it ever does.

So now I’m on the market for a watch, preferably with subtle tickage.

And you know what else? I want to see an infertility specialist (or is it a fertility specialist?). Because I'm 33 years old and and I fear my clockwork may need repair. Luisito doesn't want to because he thinks we're maybe just wound up too tight causing our hands to spiral backwards frantically, not allowing our mechanics to function properly at all. But I wonder if there isn't some spring that's been dislodged or a wheel that's been rusted, or maybe the wheels' teeth aren't matching up properly due to misuse.

On the other hand, maybe we're a time mechanism that is set to a fucking explosive.

Or maybe I'm a perpetual motion machine that's has suddenly been told that perpetual motion was disproved by physicists.

Help.

StumbleIt

Just Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:59:00 +0000

Yesterday was the ideal Sunday.

After a Saturday filled with midday partying (which is so underrated), causing me to fall into a beer slumber at an unusually early hour, I awoke Sunday at the bird-chirpingly early hour of 7:30 a.m.

After talking a reluctant and sleepy Luisito out of bed with the promise of tea and milk and lemon madalenas, we watched a blood-orange sky drop hints that a triumphant sun would rise over this sleepy Spanish city. The days here are cloudy and unpredictable making for the loudest, most incestuous tangerine and pink grapefruit sunrises, where exaggerated violets zealously mate with silky blues and apricot yellows, thrusting me back to the Phoenix monsoon summers.

After the sky flaunted the pinnacle of celestial achievements and the sun fearlessly confirmed a coup over dreadful weather, I dropped the blackout shades in my bedroom and crawled back under the feathery down comforter with my cat and patiently waited for him to find his position at my ankles and I fell into a blissful lazy morning nap.

At 10:30 I awoke rested and ready for Breakfast Part II: coffee with cream and french bread toasted with drizzled dark green olive oil and heirloom tomatoes.

I settled in to a long-overdue session just me and Microsoft Word and click clacked away letting my brain unreel and my thoughts disentangle as my fingers unshackled phrases that have been tugging at and crowding my neurons persistently all week; nothing spectacular to speak of, but a release all the same.

Soon we mosied downstairs to a nearby Mexican restaurant where Luisito consented to me ordering everything on the menu that had melted cheese on it. I washed it all down with a Corona.

Since it was cold outside and was hardly the day for a casual stroll through the Alameda, we made our way home with hurried steps and I ran a hot bath, turned on my audiobook and soaked my ice cream thighs in sultry bubbly goodness.

Soon we were two in the tub and my pruned feet claimed ownership of Luisito's shoulders while my arms almost involuntarily linked themselves around his wet calves. We steeped in silence, Luisito patiently waiting for me to finish listening to my audiobook. I disappeared for awhile into the story, hypnotized by the voice of the narrator, barely conscious that I was smoothing the hairs on Luisito's legs with a washcloth.

When the book finished, further naked activities commenced, but their impracticalities were soon recalled as knees and elbows and ankles seemed to multiply in the most unexplainable way and press themselves into unforgiving porcelain. An immediate transfer to the locale of standard procedure was in order: an invitingly fluffy bed where I had already spent a good portion of the day but was happy to return to under the auspice of far more lively undertakings.

Nail-biting tautness was contrasted with the clemency of timely release as we felt the heavy strain of two jumbled minds fall under the irrational persuasion of our much more resourceful bodies.

That night with very little convincing, Luisito agreed to make vegetable lasagna from scratch and I somehow found room to welcome more melted cheese into my belly. This was finished off with a slice of decadent chocolate cake that I had slaved over the day before using some premium German chocolate I had picked up at a gourmet shop.

Then, we melted into the couch under a blanket, the cat curled up into a donut between us, the heater warming our previously neglected toes to lazily watch a little TV before turning in.

Luisito turned to me and said, "Hey Honey, it's Valentine's Day."

I really had completely forgotten.

Of course, with Sundays like these, who the hell needs Valentine's Day?

XOXO

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:02:00 +0000

I´m in love again.

With the internet, that is.

I used to have a school girl crush on this blogger, and now I think I´m full on in love once again. She pointed me towards a new obsession and now I want to be a photographer.

(Insert forehead scrunching)

I want to be a lot of things. Like a person that does more than stare out a window smoking cigarettes with my swivel ashtray in my free time (shut up, can we talk about it later? Moving was stressful).

Little by little I´m catching up with my many other crushes and long time loves. I´ve missed you a lot. I´ve thought about you daily.

Besides having a really cool window to stare out and a whole damn city needing to be spied on with binoculars and cigarettes that need to be smoked, the thing is, I read really boring-ass shit all day until my eyeballs feel like the Sahara desert. I have even developed a "benign growth of the conjunctiva" which means that I'm some sort of a vampire because it presumably comes from too much sunlight, although I know damn well comes from reading about electrostatic precipitators in eight hour stretches.

Fucking eye growths. What did I do to deserve this? My dad had one too and eventually he had to get it removed. If you guys knew how I felt about getting shots or even stepping foot in a hospital to visit someone, you might be able to deduce how I might feel about someone holding back my eyelids with clamps and poking at my eyeball with scalpels and shit.

Besides that, I´m supposed to be learning how to edit professionally (and I have a long damn way to go), since in one year´s time I have to take an exam in order to keep my position at work and apparently, oops, I need to learn French within that year too, because the goddamn exam is in French. Don´t ask me how an exam for an English proofreader in Spain can be in French cause I haven´t got the foggiest idea. But apparently I need to figure this shit out or my career is going to turn into trace gas and my income is going to become nanomaterial. (Did you just hear that? Did I just say career? It may be the first time in my life I´ve thought in those terms.) Does anyone know how the eff I´m supposed to learn French while living in Spain, with a full time job and blogs to read and neighbors that need to be spied on with vampire eyes that need to be dealt with?

So I´ve neglected you a lot. And I don´t read books anymore or newspapers and my brain is going to expire soon and start rotting if I don´t start inputting and outputting some goodness.

I´m making an effort. But I always thought you deserved more than my crossed out and haphazardly scribbled brain upchucks and so I stay silent for ages. Why do I want to dazzle you so? Maybe because I like you a whole lot. This rut, it's hard to get out of and the only way I can do it is by posting words I haven't previously massaged and french kissed and marinated in butter overnight (I said something along those lines when I started this blog, but this time it´s fer reals and I might even post a bullet point list next of shit in my closet, or shit that my neighbors are doing, even though you deserve much better).

So there.

Because it makes me happy to just talk to you.

Because

I.

Love.

You.

<3>

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Old doll, old wall, new window

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:53:00 +0000

“This rug tape won’t come off.”

I stopped what I was doing and gave him the please-for-the-love-of-god-figure-it-out look. “Put some more paint thinner on it,” I offered. “Use a razor blade” and then I mumbled from the other room, “Or just leave it there. Let the next tenant deal with it.”

I rushed about the place, as we were already late in turning the keys in. Violent arm and leg movements hurriedly slammed cupboards, tied trash bags shut, kicked a random screw under those horrible sofas that the furnished rental had come with, wiped the cheap faux wood table down one last time where we’d had countless meals.

This was it. These were the remains of our valuables, the only hints of the five years we’d spent in this flat: a shriveled plant on the windowsill reminding me of my inability to accept responsibility for anything, some old cleaning rags and a bottle of Don Limpio that got the place sparkling to a state that contrasted sharply with how it had looked while we lived there, a couple of old winter coats that didn’t make their way to the suitcases we’d stuffed to breaking point, a half a dozen unidentifiable gadget pieces we weren’t sure if we should throw away or if they would end up being the secret essential pieces we would need to get our vacuum cleaner or coffee pot to work again when they break. Everything went into the last crate.

He took the crate from me and started down the stairs to the car. “Vamos.”

“I’ll be down in a sec, I just have to grab the mop and stuff.”

I just needed one last look. I’m a glutton for this I guess. I suppose I had seen my dad do it on his countless relocations. This was what I did when I moved. I just needed to do some final mind engraving, some psychological mapping, some primitive photography. I took it all in. It was just so. The sofas were over there just like that; we had sat just right there, with the TV over there and right there was the window where he had stood. I can't forget.

I shouldn't.

Those walls. It was the walls that needed to get in one last finger shaking at me and they called me back in for one last talking to, as if I were in my late teens moving out of my parents home for the first time, getting one final scolding on not meeting curfew the night before my move.

You know the kind off walls that are out of style nowadays but that everyone had when we were younger? The ones with the drywall spray texture that created all sorts of camouflaged eyes and pointing fingers, hidden demons and genitals that turn into clowns? Now they angrily pulsed and swirled until my cheeks finally became wet and then they stood still again.

I had snagged on these walls, they had pulled at my weak loose strings and had latched on until I had unraveled completely, until all my innards of spongy stuffing had spilled out before them, right here on these cheap sofas. They had seen that, contrary to popular belief, I was not actually stuffed with diamonds and rose petals. I was stuffed with possibly-toxic synthetic material. They were so judgmental, these walls. They loomed over me and forever scolded me and never ever forgave. I guess these particular walls didn’t have the chance to see much of the good parts of me.

He had picked up my stuffing and pushed it back inside me carefully. He had sewn me back together slowly, trying not to damage my original form along the way, remembering what I had looked like brand new on the store shelf, the smell of sweet plastic, unopened. Once he had put me back together again, he scrubbed my face clean and combed back my stringy hair, and straightened my tattered dress. I wasn't the same, but he wasn't one to throw imperfect things away.

Those walls had been witness to all that goodness too.

He finally placed me in the crate to take down to the car. He was taking me away where the walls could no longer get at me.

I dried my eyes and closed the door for the last time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I suppose my new walls are in a state of shock from the Ecru #C2B280 they were so generously coated with, intended to erase their memories of the previous dwellers.

These walls and I are still in the getting-to-know-each-other phase and actually I’m quite agreeable initially. I have the kind of face that looks attractive the first few times you see it. You have to look at me awhile before you begin to notice that one eyebrow is actually higher up than the other, that one eyelid droops down slightly, that my forehead is always either frowning or raising my eyebrows up to exhaustion, that my mouth is unusually small and that my thumbs belong on a member of some mythical diminutive race. I’m actually quite funny at first too. I can be witty. I let out little jabs so one will know what kind of cultured individual they are dealing with. To those walls, I must look like a brand new doll; that sweet smell of strawberry plastic.

But I’m not afraid of them here. They don’t have the hidden genital clowns embedded in them. They are smooth and stainless and they don’t have any opinions yet. And there aren’t as many of them to gang up on me unexpectedly like before.

Besides, all the windows in this place keep the walls in check, and I find windows to be altogether friendlier.

Don’t you?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nukke 2 by vaula from flickr.
Doll with cracked head by zen from flickr.
Sister of chucky by peasap from flickr.
Untitled by Luisito

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Do you know where I can get some boxes?

noreply@blogger.com (Blues) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 09:33:00 +0000

When we found the new apartment, that little corner came into focus again.

Just a tiny jagged corner to get around. The one where you have to tiptoe around broken glass and rusty lockjaw-promising nails, while people are sling-shooting massive turds at you from every direction.

This little corner involved seeing the apartment and feeling my weak hope swell up from a buried place in my stomach and come up into my face and take over my mouth and my eyes, turning me into an infidel to my own good reason and experience. It involved sleepless nights of pretending it was from all the coffee I had drunk and not from the worrying that we wouldn't get it, that it wasn't all going to turn around for us, that the person that had it on hold would end up taking it.

Once it became ours for the taking, it involved hours of worrying that we would get our drawers yanked down -- once again -- by greedy mother fuckers, like the time we made a full price offer we couldn't afford on that flat in the old Jewish quarters and they said they now wanted more. (Side note of vengeance: three years later that flat sits unsold. And I try very very hard to push away fantasies of that fucker's skin rotting off and being unable to afford a dermatologist cause he can't sell his stupid flat). Or when we found the perfect penthouse on the Alameda to rent and they called us and said the flat was ours for just 300 more bucks a month. (And I try very hard to dismiss the images in my mind of the person's face getting the shit rocked out of it by my imaginary fist).

On tippy-toes we cut through the mine field armed with not caring too much if we lost another limb. Yup, just me and Stumpy. We can get by feeding each other with the toes we still have left between the two of us, we don't need anything more than this. Besides, I'm actually starting to think that the cockroaches the size of dump trucks that hang out everyday in our bathroom are kinda cute.

And so, pretending we were indifferent, shoving the feeling that bad luck was somehow following us into the back of our mind, pretending we weren't expecting lightning to strike our goddamn pen, we signed the lease.

I've been unable to sweep my thoughts up into the dustpan and find, amongst all the dirt and cat hair, the tiny missing screw holding my fucking life together.

But I think I can get to sweeping now. As soon as I get all this shit packed.

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Gum and Madge

noreply@blogger.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.

===============================================================

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

noreply@blogger.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

noreply@blogger.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?

noreply@blogger.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

noreply@blogger.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

noreply@blogger.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

noreply@blogger.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

noreply@blogger.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

noreply@blogger.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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