Church of the Big Sky

Minotaur: Fellini Would Be Proud

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Fri, 03 May 2013 03:50:00 +0000

Many of my 2.5 loyal readers are already familiar with my amazingly talented friend Javier Grillo-Marxuach, creator of the utterly awesome-saucy Middleman comics and equally awesome-saucy Middleman TV series ** (huzzah!) and writer of fine words/producer for shows including (but not limited to!) Lost, Medium, Boomtown, Jake 2.0, and Charmed (oh, turning Shannen Doherty into a man, still a classic!) Javi even crafted an episode of a dun-dun (aka doink-doink) franchise show. You know what I mean. Oh yes, you do.

Well, Javi (whom you may find here or here or here or here and sometimes here, when he's got his MiddleVibe goin' - follow him everywhere!!) is a filmmaker in his own right. This week, he released a freshly-crafted, wicked cool short film called Minotaur, and you should go spend 14 minutes and 35 seconds soaking up this deliciously twisted cinematic goodness. Now! Go right now! And share the link with your friends. It's pretty dang cool stuff.

Two words: pig head.

Okay - is that not enough to get you to go check it out? Pig. Head. Of course, if this mysterious reference to a porcine noggin isn't enough, let me be more emphatic:

Minotaur. Go. Watch. Enjoy!

Seriously, you'll dig it. It's a total trip.

(And hey -- once you've traveled that path, go check out Javi's short film Reverse Parthenogenesis. Another gem, featuring some of Javi's friends who will be very familiar to Sunnydale High fans.) :)

** And you should go buy The Middleman on DVD. When you're done watching Minotaur and sharing the link with your friends!

Dry Run

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 05:38:00 +0000

For someone like me, economy of words has always been a problem. I never met an adjective or adverb I didn't like. So, having 500-word writing assignments in the creative writing course I took last autumn was a real challenge for me. The instructor's rule was, if you couldn't keep it to 500 words, you could max out at 750. I had one that wrapped up at 749. And that was after considerable editing.

This one ended up at 699 words. A proud moment, not cracking the 700 mark. This assignment asked us to take a single opening sentence—“Chris began to question the wisdom of this trip.”—and spin out as much of a fiction narrative as possible in 500 words. Okay, in 699 words. The goal was not to finish a whole story, but just get started. We were encouraged to finish our stories on our own. I never did that, but I actually like where this fragment drifts off.

A few notes:

Gudbrandsdalsost is an actual Norwegian brown cheese.
Kum & Go is an actual chain of gas station mini-marts. However, there is not a Kum & Go in Moline, Illinois. That is just a convenient fiction.
Sapp Brothers is an actual chain of truck stops. They have these awesome, giant neon signs shaped like old-fashioned coffee pots. At night, you can see those red pots for miles.
The "windowless lavender shack" is an actual windowless lavender shack (unless it's been repainted) somewhere between Moline and Chicago. And yes, the signage described is accurate.

So, here's a tiny story fragment for you. Fiction is not my expertise, so the training wheels are still on.

Dry Run

Chris began to question the wisdom of this trip. The Stevenson Expressway could be a slow-moving traffic jam on the best of days, but now, with a jack-knifed tractor trailer splayed across all four in-bound lanes, the Interstate was a parking lot. Chris' fingertips drummed on the steering wheel as she squinted at the wall of Illinois State Police cruisers and Cook County Fire & Rescue vehicles blocking the slick roadway. This was a stupid idea, she cursed herself. All for some damn cheese.

Tor's parents, Bob and Marlene Eriksen, were due in Moline that evening, and this time, Chris vowed, everything would be perfect. Every year, without fail, they arrived from Duluth for Christmas, bearing gifts and Marlene's conservative disdain for Chris, "that girl" who made her son live in sin.

"There's no pleasing Mom," Tor would always remind her the first night, wrapping his arms around Chris's waist and kissing her in the quiet of their bedroom. "Don't even try, hon. Just not worth it." In the darkness, while Tor slumbered, Chris would recall the screaming matches, police calls, and emergency room visits of her parents' fractured marriage. Marlene would never understand it, so Chris just smiled and placated her as best she could, if just for a measure of holiday peace. "Christmas détente," as Tor had proclaimed it after the first awkward year.

And that was why Chris was stuck on the Stevenson in freezing rain, trapped behind a shattered semi and its escaped flock of frozen Butterball turkeys. "Gudbrandsdalsost.Brown cheese," Tor had sighed, scrolling through one of Marlene's myriad emails, jammed with glitter and flashing holiday images. "Mom's obsessed this year with making those little Norwegian pancakes and serving them with jam and this damn brown cheese. She says there's an import store in Chicago that sells it. I mean, it's good and all, but, c'mon. Two hours to Chicago for cheese?"

Chris had her coat on before Tor was done talking. One less thing for Marlene to count against her.

She gassed up at the Kum & Go around the corner from their tiny bungalow, and snagged some caffeine for the ride. The Kum & Go gutbuster soda was always Chris' weapon of choice for a haul to Chicago, and she'd dropped ninety-nine cents for a giant Dr. Pepper before hitting the road. Tor disgustingly referred to her enormous refillable mug as the "Kum cup," and, on that basis alone, she'd considered ditching it for something not branded with the Midwest's most questionable gas station name. A liter and a half later, the cup was empty, Chris was full, and Chicago and that goddamn brown cheese seemed a lifetime away. There was no way off the highway now, and the good Dr. Pepper was knocking on her bladder wall.

Chris tapped her foot, breathed deeply, did some Kegels, and tried not to look at the streams of icy rain gushing down the windshield. She should have stopped at Sapp Brothers' truck stop a few miles back. She should have passed on the gutbuster. She should stop letting Marlene yank her chain. Shoulda coulda woulda. Chris flicked off the radio as an ad urged her to cruise the gentle flowing waters of the Caribbean this winter.

She looked longingly down the shoulder to a windowless lavender shack she'd passed a hundred times before. Black letters, three feet high, shouted ADULT VIDEOS - BOOKS - MASSAGE - HOT SHOWERS - 24 HRS and beckoned lonely truckers and road-weary salesmen with an unsubtle siren call. Chris would have welcomed the filthiest toilet in the joint if she could have safely abandoned the old wagon and slid across the expanding black ice. With her luck, she would fall, pee herself, and freeze to the road among the turkeys. She had a vision of one of Cook County's studliest firefighters trying to peel her off the blacktop, and it made her snort. "Turkeys and urine and cheese, oh my!" She giggled, a little hysteria setting in, but caught her breath as her muscles relaxed. She was not going to turn the Focus into the Pee-mobile. That would just make Marlene's week, and there would be none of that.

Why yes, I did take this photo!

The Window

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 03:10:00 +0000

Last year, I took an online creative writing course through the Gotham Writers Workshop. The course was a gift from my dear friend, the Sasquatch, and it was my first foray into "classroom" writing/education/critique in a very, very long time. Each week there was a writing assignment with a prompt and a fairly draconian word limit. I get that—teachers need to sleep and don't need 3,000 words of navel gazing from someone who thinks he's the next F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The first assignment was to write 500 words (well, more or less) using simply the title "The Window" as a prompt. It could be fiction or non-fiction, and was just a chance for the teacher to get a feel for our abilities. I opted for a non-fiction entry. Non-fiction is always easier for me, and I thought I should stick to something within my comfort zone for the first time out. Dip the toes. Get used to writing on deadline for myself. Selfishly, deliciously just for myself. Ahhh.

So, I've decided to share these writing exercises on the blog. After all, a story is a story, right? This story is true, save for me changing my colleague's name.

The Window

It was ungodly hot in the Hotel Yerevan café that afternoon. Summer was at full boil in Armenia, and there was no breeze from the large windows that faced the street. The waitress had cranked the thick glass panes open as far as they would go, but left the curtains closed to try to shade the empty room. We were her only patrons, and she sat in a corner with her arms crossed and lips pursed, fanning herself with a menu. She had eschewed her hotel uniform in favor of a thin, daisy-dotted cotton shift and sandals (with white socks), and she was clearly annoyed by us lingering in the swelter of the day. With a glare, she'd brought us a cold bottle of local white which sweat profusely in front of us. My colleague Julia pulled a large stack of photos away from the damp ring expanding on the tablecloth.

"Oh, we can't damage these priceless artifacts," she said with a smirk. The photos were all the same—blurry black and white images of supposed UFOs our local host,Wolfgang, had snapped off the balcony of his flat. "My wife says I'm crazy," he'd told us that morning, mopping sweat from his brow with his shirtsleeve. "But it's true. They come visit me almost every night." I was more fascinated that his name was Wolfgang. "My parents loved Mozart," he'd shrugged in explanation when I raised my eyebrows at our first meeting in the Yerevan airport.

Wolfgang was on the city council, and he'd volunteered to be our guide on this brief humanitarian aid visit, but he had ulterior motives—he'd been dying to share his supposed UFO encounters with Americans, whom he assumed would embrace his obsession. We agreed to review his handiwork. After all, it would make a good story back in Moscow. Thrilled, he'd left us a pile of his pictures to study while we had lunch. Uncharitably—and encouraged by wine—we snorted at Wolfgang’s fuzzy smears of light.

As we laughed, though, a sound was building in the street outside. It was a keening, ragged wail that chilled the heat of the day and drew us and the waitress to the window.

Through the thin fabric, we saw a slow-moving mass of people walking up the steep, stone street below. We pulled the curtains back and hung over the sill, watching the crowd—men and women sobbing, shrieking, staggering, holding each other up. In the heart of the mass, six men held aloft a long, thin box containing a long, thin man.

He had been dressed in a plaid shirt and dark trousers, and his arms were draped across his torso,hands gently and modestly crossed over his groin. His skin was dusky, and his wide lax face was framed in jet black hair and a broad mustache. A perverse, nervous thought ran through my brain. He looks like Freddie Mercury.

But then Freddie Mercury didn't have a bullet hole in his forehead. This man did, centered above his closed eyes.

The dead man floated and dipped above the crowd, his body jarred now and then with the surge of mourners. Every time the crowd bumped his casket, I held my breath, praying they would not knock him to the ground in their frenzy. The weeping grew, the crowd passed by, and the echoed misery faded in their wake.

"Freedom fighter," our waitress sighed. "Nagorno-Karabakh. We see so many these days." She pointed to a house up the street. "See that coffin lid? That's another one there. There's another on the next street, too. All the time now." We stood there for a couple of minutes, saying nothing. Just breathing.

“Alright, girls. Enough.” The waitress dismissed us, pulling the curtains closed. She moved back to her corner and resumed fanning herself, and we returned to our table, silent, subdued.

Julia carefully gathered up Wolfgang's UFO photos and tucked them in her briefcase. We slowly drank the rest of our wine, avoiding each others’ eyes, the lightness of the day consumed in the weight of strangers' grief.

He said

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 02:12:00 +0000

He said, "I love your profile. You're funny. God, you've traveled everywhere! Love your pictures."

I said, "Well, remember, those pictures are only of my oversized head." He laughed. I had been very honest in my profile. No surprises. Just me. He had no photos on his profile. I knew he was 6'1", that he loved ska and 80s music and science fiction, and that he was "a spiritual guy," raised Catholic, but had fallen off that wagon long ago, like me.

He said he had two children—daughters. They were young and lived with his ex-wife, except for two weekends a month. I told him I was sorry, that it had to be hard to raise kids that way. Hard for everyone. He didn't respond to that.

He said he was really happy to find someone who liked the same movies and music as he did, the same TV shows. And oh—he liked to run.

I said, "Well, as you can see, I'm not much of a runner, but I love to walk." Running was just "fast walking," he said. He said he was 39. I told him I had eight years on him. He said he didn't care. He really wanted to meet and have coffee with "such an incredible woman."

I felt a twinge. I don't take compliments well, especially from strangers. It makes me distrust them. It makes me question the sincerity. But coffee is just coffee. I said yes and very cautiously turned the key in my chest, a rusted key that kept my heart from taking sucker punches and being shattered. The door opened a tiny bit.

He said, "How about the Starbucks in Wheaton?" I agreed. It wasn't far from home—mine or his. I described what I would be wearing, but added, "You can't miss me. I'll be the biggest woman in the place."

He laughed. An online laugh. "LOL." He said, "I'll be in a black jacket and jeans, with a plaid scarf." We set a date. We set a time.

I arrived about 15 minutes early. Coffee shops get crowded on Saturday afternoons in winter. I wanted to make sure I had a table to avoid any awkwardness. Well, more awkwardness than there would already be, the fat broad meeting a stranger for coffee and small talk. I had let my hair fall in its natural curls, my minimal makeup in place. (If I have lip tint and mascara on, that's a big deal.) Green jacket to highlight the sparks of green in my hazel eyes (eyes most people don't even notice are hazel), Russian scarf... I smelled like roses.

And I waited.

I saw an old Honda pull up, and a dark-haired man stepped out. Black jacket, blue jeans, plaid scarf, average build. But he was far from 6'1". I know 6'1". I like looking up into someone's eyes. He was in the neighborhood of 5'8", 5'9", but I'm short, and I'm fat, and what does it matter in the end if he fibbed to feel good, right? Right?

He walked in and scanned the room. His eyes fell on me, and I could feel his entire body stiffen from across the cafe. I didn't wince, but just said, "Kenneth?" and waved. A smile appeared and then fled from his face as he waved back. He walked over, taking his scarf from around his neck. He said, "I'm going to get some coffee. Do you want some?"

I said, "Sure, I'll take a small coffee, cream and two Sweet'N Low, please." He walked up to the counter and stood behind two other customers who waited for their drinks.

And then, he turned around.

He strode to the door, right past my table, without looking at me. He pulled his scarf tight around his neck, fumbled with his keys, and got in his Honda.

He pulled out of the lot, and he drove away.

He pulled out and drove away fast.

Fast.

Fast.

I sat for a few minutes. I waited for the people who had been at the counter—the people who had seen what just happened—to get their drinks and go. There were no open tables, so no reason for them to linger. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes... I finally got up and quietly walked out to my car, hoping no one at the tables had noticed. Hoping that they were so engaged in conversation or texts they didn't see my humiliation. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes... I sat in my car and felt my shame well up.

And then my phone buzzed. New e-mail.

It was him.

And he said, "Sorry. I just can't do this. I didn't realize just how unattractive you'd really be."

I re-locked the door in my chest, the key settling into familiar rust. And it hurt. Old rust, scratched with fresh pain.

I closed my eyes and breathed in roses.

And I drove home, to the quiet, to the empty. Full of things, but still empty.

He said, "I just can't do this."

I prayed. "I hope someone can."

Rusty Heart by Vera Kratochvil

Open Mic Night and the Rebirth of the Spoken Word Performance

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 07:14:00 +0000

So, the Sasquatch and I have been attending open mic nights at Jerry's Music, a fab local music shop and rehearsal space in Rockville. It's a small group of people who get together every couple of weeks, with nice, talented folks performing largely blues, folk, and country music. The Sasquatch brings a totally different feel to the experience by playing classical works on his trumpet. I love it. I first heard him play about 27-ish years ago, and I love it every single time he gets up with a horn in his hand. The boy ain't too bad with the "expensive plumbing" (his term).

I had considered maybe singing at one of these someday, but I haven't sung in public in a long time. Other than in car, my singing has been limited to doing things like singing Russian lyrics into an MP3 recorder in the ladies room at work, so I could send them off to my friend Thomas Dolby for a project a couple of years ago. Singing solo in the toilet, I managed to go horribly sharp, a fact attested to by the track Thomas sent back to me, with him playing keyboards to accompany my howling. Despite the horror of my efforts, I absolutely treasure the fact that I have my very own custom Thomas Dolby track. That's pretty damn cool, no?

The Sasquatch has been encouraging me to get up at open mic night and not sing, but, rather, read one of my spoken word pieces -- resurrect my essay writing that I started when I did radio commentary here in DC (before the show for which I wrote these pieces was dramatically altered for a young hipster audience and the older commentary crowd, including me, was sent unceremoniously to the rest home). So, I pondered, the Sasquatch encouraged, and I printed out my piece about being attacked by a squirrel in the parking lot at the Wendy's on Nicholson Lane in North Bethesda. (Or is that Rockville? I seriously don't know.) I waffled a lot about this, got shy, and considered skipping it. After all, everyone else was a musician - talented folks - and would it be incongruous with the rest of the event? Also, with my back really messed up (now it's the sciatic nerve, and total numbness in my right leg), I was worried about even getting on the stage.

Turns out, getting on the stage was the hardest part. After the Sasquatch played a couple of numbers (very well-received by the audience of fellow performers and shakily recorded by me), he came back to escort me to do my thing. I felt like such an invalid, but the Sasquatch and Phil, the guy who hosts the open mic nights, helped Fat 'n' Gimpy up the stairs, and breathlessly I started talking. I gave an intro to the piece, explaining that I'd spent the last two days at the Explorers Symposium at National Geographic, spellbound and awed by the spirit of adventure and wonder personified in the assembled explorers, who shared amazing stories with us all.

We had the first woman to summit all 14 of the world's highest peaks without supplemental oxygen. We had James Cameron ("explorer and part-time filmmaker") fresh from his Mariana Trench dive and Don Walsh, who, with Jacques Piccard, made the first astounding journey to the bottom of the Mariana in the 1960s. There were mesmerizing talks by scientists and filmmakers and photographers (and generally just cool individuals) who shared stories of the rich and fragile biodiversity of the planet, our increasingly indelible connection to technology, and even an archaeologist studying Egyptian dig sites using satellites! (Side note: said archaeologist came by my office, and I think she was greatly amused to see both my autographed photo of Harrison Ford and a Sallah "Mighty Muggs" vinyl figure, complete with fez. At the time, I didn't know one of her areas of work and expertise is Tanis. As in "The Nazis have found Tanis?!?" As in the Map Room and the Well of Souls. Yeah, that Tanis. And yeah, I know there's no real Map Room or Well of Souls, but this woman must have realized she'd found a kindred, but totally goofball, I ♥ Egypt chick.)

So, there I was up on stage, talking about how amazing the past two days have been and how inspired I was by all the explorers. I took a deep breath and said, "And what has that inspiration led me to? Here's a story about being attacked by a squirrel."

I kinda sucked, I was a little out of breath, but I did it. And here is the story, which will be familiar to those who heard me back in the day on public radio:

Wild, Wildlife

I got attacked by a squirrel last week. Yes. A squirrel. I was being lazy, eating some buck-ninety-nine chili in my car, reading Entertainment Weekly in the parking lot of a Wendy's right off Rockville Pike. There I was, minding my own business, when suddenly I had a face full of chattering, manic rodent. I can only assume the critter in question had been hanging around the Wendy's lot so long it had developed an insatiable addiction to chili. All I know for sure is that it launched itself directly at me through my open window. I proceeded to scream like a little girl and thrash around, trying desperately to dislodge this little ball of fuzzy fury from my person.

The harder I fought, of course, the more entrenched the squirrel became in my shirt, which was now covered in both tufts of fur and hot chili. I had to pull my shirt almost all the way over my head to get the squirrel back out the window. Let me tell you, there's nothing quite like being half naked, hyperventilating, screaming, and covered in spicy beef and beans in a public place. Any passers-by who didn't spot the demented squirrel would have thought I was clearly insane. Chili was spattered on my dashboard, my face, my hands and I was swearing at an innocent-looking creature on the pavement.

Welcome to the whacked out wildlife of Montgomery County.

My neighborhood, despite being less than a mile from the Beltway–and even closer to a busy section of Rockville Pike–is crawling with critters, especially at night: deer, rabbits, raccoons, coyotes, owls, and a fox that likes to sit under the crabapple tree outside my bedroom window. Night after night, he plants himself there, yelping out what I assume is a lonely bachelor’s mating cry. From the frequency of his visits, I can only assume he’s not very successful with the ladies.

By the way, the wacky squirrel wasn’t my first experience with overly aggressive animals here. I've done repeated battle with a huge pileated woodpecker that likes to attack me on the way to my car in the morning.Once I even chased off a hormone-crazed buck that cornered a neighbor one evening during mating season. I'm still not sure if he wanted to mate with my neighbor or just challenge him to a head-butting contest.

Just the other night, I had a ten-minute stare-down with a coyote who kept me trapped in my car as he sized me up. He was a long-leggedy beastie, tall enough that he barely had to tilt his head up to give me the evil eye. I ended up spraying him with a bottle of raspberry seltzer water pulled from my groceries in the back seat. It worked, and he fled the scene. No harm done, I think, except, perhaps for some wounded coyote pride.

Now, a black bear has been spotted wandering around Potomac, Gaithersburg and right here in my little corner of Bethesda. Great. I’m usually quite fond of the critters that dot the landscape in my part of the county. But I walk with a cane, I’m slow and have only one fully functioning eye. To a hungry bear, I might as well have the words “tasty snack” tattooed on my forehead.

A couple of days after the first bear sighting, I saw a very large tree across the street from my building shaking and swaying – branches bent with the weight of something much larger than a bird or squirrel. That was the same day I stopped leaving my balcony door open at night.

I once had a dinner guest hop from the ground to my balcony in one fell silent swoop. If a slightly out-of-shape smoker could do that, I figured a bear could, too. I can handle the occasional mouse under my stove, but a bear lounging on my La-z-boy? Sorry, I’ll pass.

It's not just suburbia here with the abundance of wildlife. The District has plenty, too. Early in the morning, I've seen deer grazing on Mass Ave, right across from the British Embassy. Once I almost flattened a fox racing between cars at Dupont Circle. And just about every morning, there's this amazing Great Blue Heron that poses on a large stone in Rock Creek, as if for the benefit of the passing commuters.

Of course, there are those who might say the DC wildlife gets more aggressive and colorful the closer you get to Capitol Hill - sharks, barracuda, and the occasional weasel and rat... but those are all of the variety that walk on two feet.

All in all, I think I prefer my chili-crazed squirrels. They're less dangerous.

Basta!

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Wed, 30 May 2012 03:38:00 +0000

DC summer is here, despite the calendar swearing it's still spring. The season, as usual, was heralded by hideous heat and humidity arriving late last week. Of course, I didn't really have to experience the sweat-fest, as I spent the Memorial Day weekend housebound by an ankle injury (which followed a back injury). How does one badly screw up an ankle while lying still? I don't know, but I did it. 3:30 Friday morning, Princess Insomnia is out on the sofa, watching old Mythbusters episodes, when suddenly there was an audible grind and POP from my right foot, and I was rendered a gibbering, moaning, writhing mess. I ended up going to the hospital on Friday for an x-ray (nothing broken, fortunately) and then proceeded to curl up in a fetal ball at home for days.

The Sasquatch had offered to drive me to the hospital, but I declined. I think I was pretty awful and very succinct about saying no. He was sick, and when that man gets sick, it's never just a little cold. He seems to have a switch that goes from healthy to *click* full-blown Stephen King straight-from-The-Stand Captain Trips. Thus, my reluctance to take him up on his incredibly kind offer.

There had been a wonderful plan to grill lobster tails with the Sasquatch, but between my gimpiness and his 100F fever, it did not happen. I contacted the nice people of Salt River Lobster and canceled my order of lovely crustacean tailage, and they promised they would "be sure to find a loving home for them." That message alone guarantees that, when I'm less hobbled, I will procure some tasty lobster badonkadonk from them, big time.

I had Giant's Peapod service delivery groceries to me on Saturday, which was a blessing, since I can't carry a newspaper upstairs without weeping and dragging limbs like some cut-rate Hammer film monster. Sadly, I could not convince the Peapod delivery guy to do my laundry or take down my trash, so I've been eyeing all the crap and clothes in the entryway, pondering just when I will run out of clean clothes and be forced to go downstairs. That day is coming. Soon. Very soon.

Until then, here I am. Stuck and increasingly cranky about it. (But hey - I'm 1000% less cranky than I was the six days my orthopedist had me on some steroid pain pack. I almost took somebody's head off over getting the wrong - sugared - flavoring in my McDonald's iced coffee. Not pretty.) When you're a cranky, housebound insomniac, you have too much time to think. So, I'm going to take advantage of the heightened crank factor and share a short list of things I never want to hear about, ever again.

Ready?

Things I've already grown weary of this summer:

1. Fifty Shades of Grey
2. Snooki's pregnancy
3. Any show with the word "Housewives" in the title that isn't a canceled narrative drama on ABC
4. Donald Trump and "birthers" (didn't we go through this crap already)?
5. Project America's Got Gleeful Duet Voice Idol Talent
6. Wonderful musicians dying
7. Kardashians. All of them. ALL of them. If they grow facial ridges and giant lizard necks and move to a space station, I may be willing to revisit this point.

Side note: Bruce Jenner. Why all the plastic surgery? I'd like to say it was a rare moment of foolishness late in life, but then I remembered this:

8. Big Fat Gypsy Weddings on any continent or island, Toddlers with Tiaras, Dance Moms, and that aging surfer dude and his four wives
9. That I even know the shows in #8 exist
10. A distinct lack of margaritas in my life

I know. First world problems. Get me out of this apartment and I'll work on real world problems. For now, this is what you get, snark and too much basic cable.

But hey - at least I wrote something.

It's a start. Maybe the Muse will take the trash downstairs...

Conversations You Can't Believe You're Actually Having: the Staples Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:22:00 +0000

Staples, somewhere along Rockville Pike, 5 p.m.-ish today...

Me to Clerk: Hi, I need to exchange this 12 x 12 x 12 shipping box for this 18 x 12 x 12 one. I miscalculated my shipping needs just slightly.

Clerk to Me: Ma'am, these boxes are the same.

Me: Uh... no, they're not. One is 12 x 12 x 12. The other is 18 x 12 x 12.

Clerk: They're both marked "medium," ma'am. They're the same.

Me: Nooo. They're different sizes. One is bigger than the other.

Clerk: No, ma'am. They are the same. It's just that one is a square and one is a rectangle. They just are shaped differently, so it's an optical illusion. They are both medium boxes.

Me: Umm... that's not an optical illusion. One is bigger. The one with the EIGHTEEN in the dimensions is bigger than the one with all twelves in the dimensions.

Clerk: No. (Points at writing on both boxes.) See? They are both marked MEDIUM so they are the same size. You can just keep your first box, and it will fit the same.

Me: You're kidding, right? Look, I may have flunked out of honors math in high school, but even I know that these boxes have different volume. There are several box sizes and shapes you carry - some are in the small range, some are medium, and some are large.

Clerk: And these are both medium, so they hold the same amount, but can hold different shapes.

(At this point, I start to assemble both boxes. I was the only customer up front. Man, I wish there had been an audience for this.)

Me: See? This box (points to 18-incher) is bigger. It also costs fifty cents more than the other one.

Clerk: Oh, it's more expensive? Then it must be bigger.

Me: (smiles) Yes. It is.

(Not so much.)

Umm... is this thing on?

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 02:01:00 +0000

To quote old Ben Kenobi, "Not dead. Not yet."

I'm still here, and I think I'll be posting something new tomorrow. It may not be great. I may be rusty. But I'm getting back in the saddle.

Meanwhile, for the three people I know who haven't seen this already, here's how I spent Monday:

Engaging in some cleansing laughter with Thomas Dolby at Sirius XM, 10/3/11.

So, yes. I live. And occasionally, I laugh. I've missed writing, but things have been busy. Projects eating my brain. Too many thoughts jammed in my skull.

I still can't find the end of that damn "closet monster" story, btw. Tiny apartment and no freaking clue where that notebook went. So, I'll move forward with a new story. It concerns a trip to Apple's headquarters several years back, and a story told to me by a veteran Apple engineer. I'm calling it "Steve Jobs and the Fried Chicken Revenge."

More tomorrow, kids!

We were on a break!

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Wed, 04 May 2011 01:35:00 +0000

Last night, I spent two hours typing in pages of my chicken scratches to formulate the final piece of the Closet Monster story. It was long enough that I stopped typing last night and saved the entry to finish tonight. My back went out this morning, so finishing it tonight was a no-go, but I wanted to check and see just where I stopped typing yesterday.

And guess what?

The draft entry is gone. Totally gone. Hours of work, eaten by Blogger. I could weep.

Serves me right for not just finishing it last night. Dammit.

Can't sit at the computer for more than a few minutes, so recreation of the wheel will have to wait a while. (For the four people actually reading this.)

Crapsky.

The Closet Monster, Part Three: Suffocation and Staircases

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:40:00 +0000

Our dog found nothing suspicious about my bedroom closet. I couldn’t blame her in truth, in truth. She was not operating on kid logic. She was operating on dog logic. And dog logic is simple: “This is my person, and I love my person, and my person loves me, and I get food and water and walks and lots and lots of attention from my person. And --- oooooh, squirrel!”

I wasn't going to get any sympathy - or alarm - from sweet little Termite.

Now, had human reason or common sense played a role in my thought process, I would have recognized a number of legitimate explanations for the open door:

Our curious cat, the one and only Princess Tuptim of Siam, adept at nosing and pawing her way into just about any space, might have sought a warm pile of linens for a long night's snuggle.

The house, still settling on its foundation, could have nudged the door open on its loose and silent rollers.

Or, God forbid, in an egregious violation of the Monster Rules, I might have left the damn door open myself, inviting in the unseen hell-beast as surely as a vampire might stroll across your threshold at the utterance of a foolish welcome.

But reason was in short supply at times like this, and countermeasures had to be taken!

From that day forward, my nightly ritual was to reach one hand inside the bedroom door from the relative safety of the hallway, flick on the overhead light, and then head across the room to turn on the reading lamp by the bed. With my heart racing, I would I hold my breath - no dead people dust for this girl - and check (and double-check) the closet door. Only then could I turn off the overhead light and race for the bed.

Now, here's where things get a bit too close to "certifiably insane."

All sheets had to be tucked in completely around me - and I'm not talking just on the sides and the foot of the bed. I was convinced that, if I didn't have the sheets covering my head, tucked down behind my shoulders, IT could get me.

I know it's ridiculous. I spent years nearly suffocating myself at night to assure that some vicious creature couldn't attack me. It's amazing I didn't kill myself.

Still, there were many nights when I was absolutely convinced I heard the closet door roll back and heavy, dragging footsteps came to my bedside, stopping just inches from my hidden (and sweaty) face. I could swear I felt hot, moist breath pressing against my cheek and the sound of ragged gasps. What I probably felt and heard was my own hot breath as I hyperventilated in my near oxygen-free 200-thread count prison.

I will not deny that I was not always the brightest bulb on the tree.

But you have to understand that my personal mythos of the Closet Monster was backed up by the existence of a Basement Monster in our house. The Basement Monster snatched at your ankles as you tried to run up the stairs from our damp, spiderwebby cellar. My late brother E. used to live in an awful room down there, cloaked in cigarette smoke and backed up with a soundtrack of Moog-synthesized Bach. His dungeon was stacked high with science fiction paperbacks and decorated with cheesy paintings of dragons and busty redheaded fantasy novel vixens. It was a total pit, but now that he's gone, I miss it a little bit.

E. had a macabre streak that ran straight through the center of his soul. He took pride in scaring the crap out of his sisters, and his attempts to freak the bejeezus out of me were well-honed from years of practice on the other siblings. E. introduced me to Stephen King with a dog-eared copy of Salem's Lot which I read late at night with the light that filtered through my protective bed sheet cocoon. One night - in an epic effort - E. wove together a giant hand from willow branches off the tree in our back yard. As I breathlessly read about vampires in New England (since I could do it no other way, as I cut off my own air supply in a wall of cotton), E. maneuvered the willow hand up to my bedroom window from the patio below . With no warning, he started smacking the hand against my window while bellowing "BWAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH!" and (in a classic move) illuminated his face into a demonic red grin with a flashlight tucked under his chin.

Much later, I would have to admit to being impressed by the effort E. put into weaving willow fronds together just to momentarily scare the living shit out of me. However, my parents - veterans of decades of kid pranks - were less impressed and didn't appreciate my screaming from my room, which shared a wall with the master bedroom. Thinking back, though, that was one of the few nights the Closet Monster wasn't foremost in my mind.

The Basement Monster, though? It didn't have to wait for nighttime to come after you...

Yep. To be continued...

The Closet Monster, Part Two: Rules of Engagement

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:25:00 +0000

So, how does a harmless, albeit creepy, pillow open a gateway to some demonic force?

Well, you have to understand kid logic, as opposed to adult reality to truly fathom how these things occur.

That awful pillow rode home in the back of our Plymouth station wagon, stowed directly next to the old metal Coleman ice chest (that I vowed I'd never eat from again, now that it had direct contact with a corpse pillow). Every time I turned around in the car, hour after hour through Minnesota, Iowa, and all the way home to Illinois, that white satin taunted me.

When we got home I picked up the offending object using a car blanket wrapped around my hands so I didn't have to touch it. I raced it into my doll-sized bedroom with the speed usually reserved for hauling coolers for organ transplants. Breathless, I flung open the closet door, and with one hand, I felt around for something to contain the darkness. My fingers met the splintery stays of a cheap green basket left over from Easter a few months before. I pulled it down and stuffed the awful souvenir deep into a bed of pink, plastic grass. With the fervor of an Olympic hammer-thrower, I hauled back and launched the basket back onto the shelf, where it rolled into the pitch black space at the back of the closet. I barricaded it in with a wall of sheets and towels, and slammed the door shut.

And here's where kid logic comes in: whatever's hiding in the dark, if you can't see it, it can't see you. And if you only open the door in the daylight to retrieve clothes or shoes, you're okay. And, of course, you must always hold your breath when you open that door, or you might accidentally suck in some dead people dust and become a zombie or just die yourself.

Funny, huh? Not at the time. This was all deadly serious.

I'm betting most kids have their own set of Monster Rules. Those were mine. Initially, at least. I spent three years sleeping in that tiny bedroom, one eye on the closet door every night, hoping the knob did not turn on its own. In what was surely some low-level case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, I would rattle the knob fairly aggressively, making sure the seal between me and that hideous pillow was firm. Only then could I confidently climb into bed and let my uneasy sleep settle in.

But then, my sister B. moved out of the house, and I inherited the big bedroom next door. The big bedroom was vast for a 12-year-old. Lots of space for bookshelves, a queen-sized bed, room for my drawing table (a table I still have and use today), and an enormous closet. Unlike my smaller quarters, this closet had two doors. On rollers.

This was a complication I had not pondered as I emptied the contents of my old room into the new one. I was so excited about the new digs that, by the time I'd gotten to clearing out the top shelf of the old closet, I'd nearly forgotten that hateful thing tucked away in the darkness. When my fingers brushed a satin edge, and I heard sawdust crunch within that white wrapper, I flinched as if a snake had bitten me.

Now, you might ask, why didn't I just throw the damn thing away? And certainly, that's a very good question. Honestly, I just couldn't do it. At first, I think I was afraid it might get discovered in the trash and get me in trouble with my parents, especially my bellicose father, still grieving. Later, that damn thing had just grown to epic proportions in my mind and developed a sinister life of its own. I figured if I ditched it, I might just find it back at the foot of my bed the next morning, waiting for me. Waiting for the moment to make its move.

Because limbless, mindless pillows make terrible, horrible moves in the world of kid logic.

And so, foolishly, stupidly, I grabbed that damn basket, bolted next door, and tossed that sucker as far back in the new closet as possible. For the second time, I'd buried it, and I hoped whatever powers it possessed would stay cloaked in a wall of flannel sheets. I rolled the door shut, and, and once I calmed my heart to a normal beat, all was good with the world. That first night in my new digs, I slept soundly, our dog Termite planted at my feet.

But in the morning, I saw the terrible evidence of otherworldly activity: the closet door - that door I had so carefully shut the night before - was open. Open. Oh god, oh god, oh merciful god, it was open. Not much, surely. But enough. Enough for me to know that whatever portal swirled at the back of that shelf in a cheap green Easter back was open, and something very, very wrong had slithered out, and likely spent the night hovering over my bed, pondering how to eat me or tear me limb from limb. As I gawped at the space between door and frame, Termite just watched, wagging her stubby tail, and smiling that eager canine smile.

"Great guard dog," I growled at her. "Just great."

To be continued...

The Closet Monster, Part One: Pillow Talk

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:30:00 +0000

I had a monster in my bedroom closet until I was 18 years old.

It's completely true, you know.

I can pinpoint the moment the Closet Monster moved in. It was September 1975, the month my sweet Grandma J. died. J. was my father's mother, a tough, but twinkle-eyed woman who weathered a lifetime of Minnesota seasons, the early death of her first husband - my grandfather - in a harsh Twin Cities winter just a handful of years before the Great Depression pressed hard on the nation, and then decades with her second husband, the Pole. The Pole was a cruel, vile man who terrified me as a young child. He spit tobacco into a rusty coffee can he kept near his chair in their small Minneapolis home and spoke to everyone aggressively in a heavy, abrasive Eastern European accent. My only experience with accents like his were late night creature feature movies.

I thought he was a vampire.

The reality was just this: the Pole was an abusive man who thought Grandma J. had lots of money squirreled away somewhere because she knew a handful of wealthy folks in the area, including members of the Pillsbury family. It wasn't true. The Doughboy hadn't greased Grandma's pockets; she had nothing except her two little boys. After my grandfather died, Grandma J. played piano in a silent movie theater while my father and his little brother, my Uncle J., danced and sang for the audience, who pitched pennies to the fatherless - and nearly destitute - children. My father learned how to rock train cars as they rumbled along the tracks, causing open-topped freight cars to shimmy just enough to spill potatoes or coal to bring home. It was not a glamorous life.

But the dark Pole was certain Grandma was hiding riches somewhere. He married the young widow, and she did give him wealth in the form of a legacy: she bore him two sons, whom the Pole held dear over her first two children. But when he realized there truly was no money in his wife's coffers, flashes of the Pole's rage would appear. Even in their declining years, the light of his miserable soul could be ignited like a match, burning bright for a moment and then vanishing into the impotent weakness of his arthritic bones. While staying with the elderly couple for a few weeks in the last year of Grandma J.'s life, one of my sisters saw the Pole fling a cast iron skillet at the tiny woman's silver-hared head. There'd been many stories of his violence, but this was the first time one of us had witnessed it. As I recall the story, my sister snapped and poured out her venom and anger at him, suggesting that, perhaps, he'd like her to throw a skillet at him. It was an empty threat, but one backed up by the genuine horror of seeing firsthand what all our family - who lived so far away - had feared might be happening.

The Pole was a wretched old bastard.

And, in a cruel twist of fate - and one that defied the usual course of nature - Grandma J. died before he did. I remember my father taking the call that his mother was gone. He had his back to me as he spoke with one of his half-brothers who lived a comfortable life in a comfortable suburb of Minneapolis. I don't think I ever saw my father cry. That was not his way - at least around me. But this time, I recall seeing his shoulders sag and then shake. I'm sure he wept, but he did not invite anyone into his grief.

I was nine years old in 1975, and I'd never been to a funeral before. We drove from Moline to Minneapolis - Mom, Dad, my teenager sisters, and I - and I can only remember bits and pieces of the whole event. I recall the funeral home - it seemed so big to me, like an enormous auditorium - but I know that is just a trick of the child's mind. In college, I rode past the funeral home all the time on the bus to downtown St. Paul - just a modest building in a modest neighborhood. Yet, it will always be overwhelming in my head.

Grandma J. looked serene in her casket, her snow white hair styled and swept away from her pale, paper-thin skin. I think she was dressed in blue, but I can't really be sure anymore. This I do remember: her head rested on a small, white, satin pillow covered in a sash that read "From the Grandchildren" in elaborate script. When my mother took me up to say goodbye, I was trembling. I understood dead. I understood she was gone. And yet, I kept waiting for her to take a breath, for her chest to rise and fall, for her eyes to flutter open, for her to reach out and take my hand.

I was terrified.

"You can touch her hand or kiss her cheek, if you'd like," a voice whispered into my ear. God bless this poor man - the funeral director (who was probably no older than I am now) - trying to comfort a saucer-eyed child paralyzed with fear. I had no intention of touching the body, of course, lest she come back. I had siblings who specialized in scaring the bejeezus out of the younger kids. My late brother Ed was a consummate professional when it came to giving me nightmares. And, already at nine, I had a decent amount of respect for things that go bump in the night.

So, I simply stood stock still, one hand on the cold casket, unwilling to engage any further. I remember one of my sisters leading me off, back to a row of seats in the half-lit room. At the end of the visitation, I saw the funeral director slip something out of the casket before the lid came down on Grandma's peaceful form. As we got up to leave, he came up to me. "I understand you are the youngest grandchild," he said to me quietly, kindly. "I think you should have this to remember her by." And, dear god, he was holding The Pillow. The small, white, satin pillow that had rested under Grandma's J.'s head. The casket pillow. The corpse pillow. The pillow that had cradled a dead head. The deceptively cheap pillow filled with crunchy sawdust, since corpses don't really require comfort. Oh god, oh god, oh god. He was presenting it to me, like a flag at a soldier's burial. I was nine, and everyone was watching. What should I do???

I took it from him.

And with that simple action, I invited the closet monster into my life.

To be continued...

Anyone up for a new story?

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 19:05:00 +0000

I think I might be ready to put some words to paper. Well, to screen. Ether. Whatever.

Yeah, I think I'm ready.

One of these things is not like the other...

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 01:38:00 +0000

Holiday quiz time, friends!

Guess which twinkle lights are mine?

As a friend said on Facebook, my neighbor's lights look like an EKG gone horribly wrong. I think alcohol *may* have been a factor. Probably a factor. Well, definitely a factor.

Ho ho ho and a bottle of rum, Xmas mateys!

I swear, world - we are not this stupid

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 03:14:00 +0000

Just watched a TV commercial so ridiculous, I had to play it back, freeze it, and take a photograph to share.

I know psoriasis is a horrible condition, and it's a painful and awful thing for anyone who suffers from it. Immune system diseases are evil, evil things.

That said, I would like to address the marketing geniuses and overanxious lawyers behind the TV commercial for the InsidePsoriasis.com website (which I see is a property of Amgen and Pfizer from my brief visit to verify that I did not hallucinate this ad.) Please, Madison Avenue whiz kids and big pharma peeps: while we may not be the brightest bulbs on the tree, Americans aren't quite this stupid. I hope. Check it out, fresh from my TV:

Okay...

Apparently, we are supposed to imagine that this is what's going on inside the body of someone suffering from psoriasis, where extra skin cells are being produced due to an immune system malfunction. And holy crap! The extra skin cells are produced by microscopic robots with a conveyor belt. IN. YOUR. BODY!

But wait! What is that mysterious text at the bottom of the screen?!? Aha, kids! You can breathe freely again! There are no robots inside us! This is just a dramatization! Yes, the fine folks behind this miracle of science think we are dumb enough to believe that tiny metal robots are engaging in a small-scale industrial revolution in our flesh, just because they showed it to us - in cartoon form! And to make sure that we are not tripped up by our own remarkable idiocy, they take the time to kindly point out that the wee mechanical men aren't real. "Not an actual representation of the disease process." WOW. THANK YOU!!

My god, what would I have done without that disclaimer?!? I was just about to call my doctor and ask what to do about the small cotton gin in my liver and the army of miniature Chinese sweatshop workers toiling over tiny sewing machines in that sneaker factory in my colon.

Really? Really, people? Is this a disclaimer that needs to be made? At least to people other than those who believe they have "alien implants"???

Congrats, Amgen and Pfizer - y'all are definitely in the running for the Let's Talk Down to the Consumer award. Mazel tov.

Now you'll have to excuse me - I have to go tend to the small dwarf living in my stomach...

We were on a break!

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 02:52:00 +0000

Okay.

So, I took some time off.

I wrote a maudlin piece of poetry back here in - jeez, was it September? - and took it down almost immediately. Then, I just walked away for a while. Wasn't feeling the love.

Can't believe it's been over two months since I posted anything. I blame Facebook.

And work. And aches and pains. And a little vacation.

Here's the Reader's Digest condensed version of the last two months:

Work, work, sleep, work, torn rotator cuff, pain, sleep, sleep, work, went to the cabin in west virginia for a few days, walked, walked, slept in big chair down by the river, wrote some bad poetry, sleep, work, work, wonderful thanksgiving, aaaaand we're back!

Guess it's time to dip a big toe back into the pool and get going again.

Made my Christmas wreath the evening before Turkey Day while watching awful holiday made-for-TV movies. (Lifetime: Media Hell for Shut-In Women.) For the past few years, I've had two wreaths for the holidays. A friend whose family is in Maine always sends a big, beautiful evergreen wreath that I put out on the balcony at Chez Merde, along with white twinkle lights that I loop across the length of the balcony and through the wreath itself, so it glistens in the nighttime winter sky. Once I put up the wreath and lights, I leave them on until the first week in January. The twinkles use up a minute bit of power, and there's something so lovely about driving up the block and seeing the lights of home in the distance, growing closer, welcoming you to warmth and comfort and peace. (Well, except when the sorority girls or the drunken cougar are home, too.) When the wind whips up, you can smell the evergreen, too, as the scent wafts down to the sidewalk. It's really very nice.

But I have a second wreath, too - one for the door to Chez Merde. This wreath (crafted from finest fake Canadian pine!) I make myself, with colorful bits and bobs from the crafts store. A new one every year, and my policy is to never spend more than $12 to make it. Through the miracle of coupons and other discounts, I've always been able to meet my self-imposed cheapness goal and still make something pretty cool. At the end of each holiday season, I donate that year's wreath to Salvation Army, so another family can put it aside for the next year and enjoy it.

I think this year's wreath is pretty damn good. I even made my own bow, and I'll admit I went a little over the top: it's possible the bow could be seen from space. I think it looks plenty swanky, and I dig seeing it waiting for me when I walk up the stairs. It certainly improves the institutional mud green of the apartment building hallway:

To all my friends here in the United States, I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving, with good food and good friends, firm in the knowledge that you are loved and appreciated and that there is much to be thankful for in your lives.

And to my friends beyond these borders*, I hope you know you are loved and appreciated, too. I know I don't say it enough, but I am blessed and humbled by my friends, who have seen me through some rough times - and some downright weird times, too.

I'll raise a glass to you all tonight. And yeah, it's good to be back.

*These TSA-warped-junk-touching-scary-radiation-levels-in-that-body-scanner borders, that is. I think I may have to ask my friend the Sasquatch to guest blog on that point...

One More Night in a Glamorous Life: the Sleep & Skank Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 01:56:00 +0000

We have new tenants here at Chez Merde. The departure of the nice half-Brazilian, half-Norwegian (Brawegians? Norzilians?) family upstairs has heralded the arrival of the the Sorority Sisters. A pair of young hotties who are are badass night owls, they arrived with a handful of boxes in the back of their banana yellow Chevy Cobalt, a craptacular car festooned with fake floral leis and beach resort stickers on the bumper. (I wonder if I should tell them that the last resident here with a banana yellow car somehow managed to raise the ire of a mentally unstable neighbor on the block who brandished a pistol and left rambling, multi-page manifestos tacked to our lobby message board - all because she hated yellow cars.) Within a week of the duo's arrival, one thing was clear - they weren't used to living in shared housing with working adults.

I swear to God, even when I was a teen or in my early 20s, I could not go out and party every night of the week without turning into an utter zombie. These guys? They're animals. And honestly, I couldn't give a shit if they were the biggest party critters on the face of the earth, save for two things: 1) they're moronically loud when they come home late at night; and 2) they don't seem able to master the challenges of the laundry/trash room. I say this after following a trail of thong underwear (and food trash) down the stairs to the entryway today. Apparently, they don't have a laundry basket or garbage bags - maybe I should buy them some. Unless that would undermine their secret plan to lure hungry, horny elves, fairies, or trolls up to their second-floor lair. Who knows? (This actually was a point of discussion between me and another neighbor this afternoon - we both refrained from picking up the discarded undies.)

If it wasn't for the sudden bursts of late-night noise, I might find them amusing. One had her 21st birthday shortly after their move-in. There was something deliciously awful about watching their flashy-trashy white stretch Hummer limo attempt a u-turn on our narrow dead-end street. Classic! Except that some of their drunk-ass friends were using my car as a place to rest their drinks as they observed the maneuver. That's the only interaction I've actually had with them - yelling to their friends to move their crap off my car.

But I think some fresh interaction may be coming their way - if their downstairs neighbor (with the cute toddler) doesn't beat me to it. It's the nearly nightly arrival home, accompanied by screaming. Last night, it was 2:45 in the morning when Sister #1 got home and made the drunk walk back to the building, announcing herself to us all: "OMIGOD!!! LET ME IN!! I NEED TO PEE!!! WAAAAAAAAAH!" (Keep in mind, there's no lock or access code for the front door of the building. It's just a matter of getting your own damn apartment door open.) Immediately, you could hear and feel the building coming quickly and unhappily back to life. The silence of sleep was shattered, and floors started to creak as we all padded around, trying to sort out our broken rhythm.

For me, it was useless. The specter of insomnia is always lurking over my shoulder, and it was more than happy to envelope me in its misery. I curled up on the sofa and turned on the TV. A friend had alerted me to a freebie HBO/Skinemax weekend for FiOS users, so I flicked through the late night offerings.

There's a reason Skinemax *is* Skinemax: most channels had one form of soft core porn or another. It's a constant parade of lame scripts, bad new age funk elevator music, and enormous fake boobs. All I could think was "God, her back must hurt all the time" or "Oh, Jesus, what happens if one of them pops? Will it just deflate? Will there be a flesh explosion?"

I'm not kidding. You show me cheap Skinemax porn, and that's what I'm thinking.

Well, actually, it's worse than that. I find it so lame, I'm usually looking into the background of the scenes. This time, in one flick, a couple flopped around on a desk in a classroom somewhere in Asia, where a blackboard featured a set of algebraic equations, sans solutions. I love algebra. Things always come out right if you respect the formula, after all. So, there I was, at 3-something in the miserable a.m., mentally completing equations and multiplying out fractions, while some bored "actors" in a tract house in the San Fernando Valley bumped uglies and pretended to be in Bali. I was psyched to finish all the equations before the couple wrapped things up. I may have flunked out of Calculus in high school, but I've still got the basics down, baby! (Oh, and that chick had a heinous tramp stamp for those keeping score on the actual porn content. Seriously, I've seen better porn between fuzzy lines on channels we didn't pay for back in the days of crappy 90s cable.)

Clearly, I'm not the Skinemax target demographic. I actually yelled back at the screen during an improbable kitchen sex scene. The woman was shown burning her hand on the metal handle of a hot pan on the stove (oven mitts, honey) and then, almost immediately, the dude picked her up and plopped her on the stove for what passes for a good rogering in this level of cinematic non-achievement. Of course, my first reaction was: "Jesus! Hot stove! Hot stove! Her ass must be on fire!"

I was also thinking "Christ, that has to be painful - nothing like having the metal grill of a stove burner plate pressed into your rump, full force, over and over again." (I may be an unadventurous party-pooper, but I'm looking out for your ass, pornstress!)

This reminded me of an event I attended in Baltimore a gazillion years ago (oh, I bet you're wondering where this is going - and no, John Waters was *not* involved.) The cast of the brilliant - and wretchedly underappreciated - TV show "Homicide: Life on the Street" did this series of wonderful live events now and then to support the Fells Point Creative Alliance. "Homicide Live" allowed the cast members to stretch their wings, performing theatrical vignettes, poetry, and music for a very appreciative audience. I went one year, and it was a blast. In one piece (culled from a play I sadly cannot identify tonight) actors Peter Gerety (late of "Rubicon") and Ellen McElduff recounted the misery of a sexual encounter up against a wall, including back pain, balance and height challenges, and some horrific wall-based form of rug burn. It was hilarious and awful and always comes to mind when I flip past bad cable porn (and whenever "The English Patient" is on TV.)

What's the point of all this ramble? (Well, other than the fact that I just outed myself for shamefully watching execrable adult fare on cable in a fit of insomnia last night.) I honestly don't have a point this time. It's just another Saturday night here in suburbia, and I spent it at home alone again, spilling out more words about the inherent weirdness of my life. Trails of thongs, screaming sorority girls... Jesus, maybe I'm actually Stephen Tyler. Jury's out on which one of us breaks a hip first.

G'night, kids.

Oh, I think I should feel a little bit bad about this

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 00:02:00 +0000

Some poor soul using a public school system computer in Arizona did a web search for "Dian Fossey discoveries and difficulties" and Google directed him/her to my Interview With a Silverback post.* And, while I am very proud of my fake interview with a gorilla (and wish more people read it), I would hope there is not now a child in Tucson writing a report about great apes using a blog post as research. Especially one featuring a fictional talking silverback discussing his virility and gorilla gas with me via satellite phone.

Then again, part of me hopes it happens.

The same part of me that once told a stoned college student who dialed up the American Embassy in Moscow for help with a paper that Karl Marx was the father of the Marx Brothers and John Lennon was the illegitimate child of Vladimir Lenin.

Good times.

*I checked. "Interview With a Silverback" shows up on Page 8 of the Google search. Hilarious. And a little sad. Apologies to the late Dian Fossey. My gorilla is 100% fake.

Archery of My Middle Ages

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 21:15:00 +0000

So begins a series of occasional posts that I originally wrote as radio commentary for the "Metro Connection" show on WAMU, the public radio station here in the DC area. As that gig has gone belly-up for me, I'll be posting the narratives of my unaired commentary pieces here now and then. This first one is about my pleasant obsession with sharp, pointy things.

Well, here goes. I guess you'll just have to imagine the sweet dulcet tones (snerk, cough, cough) of my voice reading this on air...

Some people hit their forties and have the stereotypical mid-life crisis: buy a fast car, have an affair, bungee jump over a gaping crevasse. My own crisis unfolded over the first half of my forties after a series of car accidents, a pile of broken bones, and partial vision loss. I felt defeated, and I needed some inspiration. But fast cars and affairs aren’t my thing, thanks, and I’m way too chicken to bungee jump. So what did I do?

I took up archery.

Other than paying a few bucks to shoot warped wooden arrows at ye olde Renaissance Faire a few years ago, I hadn’t had a bow in my hands since high school gym class in 1984. Back then, we were handed a few splintery arrows, assigned a beaten-up bow, and pointed in the general direction of some equally beaten-up targets... targets placed directly in front of the faculty parking lot. I always assumed our gym teacher had an axe to grind with her fellow educators as we heard the unmistakable sound of projectiles bouncing off hoods and windshields – and occasionally impaling a tire.

Or maybe she was just a sadist. She usually didn’t hand out protective arm guards until after we’d shot a few arrows and half the girls had walloped their arms with bouncing bow strings. As novice archers shrieked in pain, the teacher would casually point out the bucket of crispy leather straps, stained with years of high schooler sweat. And, faced with the choice of bruises or contact with God-only-knows-what on those diseased pieces of cow skin, most opted for the bruises.

When I recently went with a friend to choose a new recurve bow, I told him about the bruised arm phenomenon back in the day. But I realized I rarely ended up with bruises. (I also never winged a teacher’s car.) Instead, I managed to hit the target with surprising regularity. Turned out, I wasn’t half bad at archery. And when you are a clumsy fat kid in high school, if you find you excel at anything in gym class, you hold on to that. For once, I felt like an equal with the nimble girls who moved in ways I never could. I felt strong. I felt confident and self-assured. And that felt pretty cool.

But like so many things, archery got lost in the haze of college. And then, in work. And work. Aaand work. Over the years, I told incredulous friends how much I’d loved archery. But I never seemed to find the time – or place – for it. Then I hit forty and became a magnet for vehicular disaster. As I thanked my lucky stars to still be alive and mostly in one piece, I started to take stock of what I enjoyed most in this life. And that’s how I ended up happily schlepping a weapon through a Montgomery County park this spring.

There’s a public archery range at Lake Needwood Park up in Rockville. It’s located in a quiet meadow - safely across the street from the nearest picnic area – and has a handful of hay bales and stone markers noting distance. You have to bring your own targets to hitch onto the hay, but the ones I’d ordered hadn’t arrived yet for that first day. All I had in hand was a six-inch by six-inch piece of sticky paper from. The small square was marked with a single red triangle encompassed by a single black circle. It was ludicrously small for a beginner (especially one with crappy eyesight), but I figured, what the hell - I was here, and this was, after all, just a first attempt.

I picked a target and slapped the sticky paper on the hay. When I’d limped the forty feet back to my bow, that little red triangle looked ridiculously tiny, and I wondered just what the heck I was doing. But as soon as I had that bow in my hand, it felt right. I nocked my first arrow, took a deep breath, and drew back the bow string. And when I heard that arrow zing straight into that little scrap of paper? Man, it was good. It was kinda Zen, even.

The score at the end of my first day? Well, I managed to step on my arrows once. Somewhere along the way I lost a fletching off one of them. (I have no idea where it ended up.) And on one shot, I actually snapped the bow string behind my protective arm guard. (That shot briefly voided my Zen.) But it didn’t matter. I shot sixty arrows and had to retrieve only two that I managed to embed in the hillside. The rest? They all landed true on that tiny target. Not bad for a chick with 1.5 eyes and a numb leg, eh?

Another archer arrived while I was shooting. Older than me, with a fancy compound bow, he shot at another target and occasionally stopped to watch me. We wrapped up at about the same time, and he came over to me. “Don’t know how long you’ve been shooting,” he said. “But you’ve got talent. I hope I see you out here again.” How ‘bout that? I’ve got talent! And a big bruise.

Now, I know I’m never going to be called up for the Olympics - or defeat the French at Agincourt - but I’m hooked. Best. Mid-life crisis. Ever. I found out there are at least two other archery ranges in Montgomery County waiting for me. So, consider this fair warning, hale bales of Maryland! Beware!! I’m armed, I’m ready, and I’m coming to show you who’s boss!

No More Radio Days

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:08:00 +0000

With the departure of my friend/host/producer @ WAMU, it appears that my time as a public radio commentator is apparently over. I am very grateful for the handful of times that I was able to tell stories on-air. It was fun while it lasted, but like all good things, I suppose it had to come to an end.

I guess now I'll just have to come up with my own podcast, eh?

Several weeks ago, I forwarded a few pieces for broadcast consideration, but never heard back on coming in to record them. So, rather than let them languish and grow stale tucked away in a file, I've decided to share the pieces here. Keep in mind, these were written for radio performance - and a 3 minute, 30 second-ish performance at that. The words are sparse and the rhythm specific. These are words edited down to the bare bones of stories to meet a stopwatch countdown. I just figured you might find it interesting to see what the radio script looks like out here.

I'll reformat the first one tomorrow and post it. It's not snarky, for the most part. It's all about how I'm handling what passes for a midlife crisis in a household that operates paycheck-to-paycheck. No electronic toys. No fast car. No international travel. (Hell, not jack shit, really! Not even a savings account these days.) Just something simple and very much to the point.

More tomorrow...

I defy you to not enjoy this

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:33:00 +0000

I swear, I've watched the opening musical number from the Emmy Awards like, fifteen times, and it makes me smile like a moron each time. You'd have to be: 1)a heartless puppy snuffer; 2)a hater of pop culture; 3)utterly un-American; and 4)not own a TV to not enjoy the stuffing out of this.

Seriously, what's not to love? My favorite Springsteen song, the Glee kids, John Hamm, Jorge Garcia, Joel McHale, Tina Fey, Jane Lynch, Tim Gunn, Betty White...

What a kick!

Can I Get a Witness?

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 23:29:00 +0000

Leaving work today, I witnessed a nasty car accident from about five feet away. A woman in a Camry swerved across two lanes of traffic directly into the path of a Tahoe which was motoring along in the far left lane of M Street. There was no way the Tahoe driver could possibly have missed the blue bullet in his path.

The impact was intense and in just a split second, the sidewalk in front of me was showered in glass fragments.

I felt my whole body go cold, my stomach started to flip-flop, and, dammit, I immediately had a flashback to last June's collision. And then - what the hell? - to a collision from many, many years ago, when I was hit in my mom's station wagon by a speeding red light runner back in my home town (directly in front of our insurance agent's office.)

When I regained my composure enough to speak (with that shaky shock voice you have when you've just seen something that could have ended a life or two or three) I approached the driver of the Tahoe and offered to be a witness to the accident. Very few people have stopped to be witnesses for me, so I know how important it is to have an independent voice to describe the situation.

I must have been speaking much louder than I thought. The driver of the Camry - amazingly uninjured but trapped by the crushed door of her car - kept yelling over to me, "Oh no, no - I'll take responsibility for this. You don't have to be a witness. You don't have to wait for the police. Really, you don't have to be a witness!"

Hello, lady - I call bullshit on that one.

I found one of my non-day job business cards (the ones that say "freelance writer & blogger") and handed it to the stunned Tahoe driver.

"Look, I've been in several accidents in recent years. If your insurance company or the police need to talk to me, you give them my information, okay?"

Again, the Camry driver yelled her mantra. "You don't need to be a witness! It's okay!"

As I pressed my card into Tahoe guy's hands I said, "As the Russians say, 'Доверяй, но проверяй' - trust, but verify. She may say this now, but stories tend to change overnight. Have them call me."

I've just gotten over that shaky wave of nausea. Took a couple of hours. But I think I'm going to bed early tonight. And I hope this guy's insurance company calls me.

I'm a very good witness.

Folks, if you ever have the misfortune of witnessing an accident, please don't walk away or drive away or just ignore what you saw. You may be the difference between a speedy resolution and months or years of anguish and frustration for some poor sod.

And you'll have some damn good karma on your side.

Yeah, I Live in "Classy Town USA"

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 03:20:00 +0000

I posted this suburban nightmare to my Facebook account a couple of weeks ago, and I realized I never told the tale here. Forgive the presentation of this story - I'm pulling this from my original Facebook post and then my follow-up comments in response to appalled friends.

To be muttered a la Jack Bauer:
the following took place at a strip mall right outside Montgomery Mall in Bethesda, more or less between 6 and 7 p.m., August 9th...

Original Facebook post:
"Gentlemen: no matter how sweaty you get, no matter how pretty you and your clown car of peeps want to make yourselves before going into a local bar & grill... please do not all strip to your skivvies outside your minivan and, uh, cleanse your nether regions with baby wipes in front of all the alfresco diners at Ledo Pizza and the Corner Bakery. I may never shake hands with a 20-something male ever again."

In response to comments of amazed horror:
"It was disgusting. A whole minivan of young dudes - clearly they had been running/biking/working out in some way, but to shuck your clothes in a really full parking lot in front of tons of cafe patrons? Just tacky. And - god help me for writing this - one of them dug into his undies twice with the baby wipes to clean his junk and then - oh god, oh god - he lifted the soiled baby wipe to his face and sniffed it. I sat in my car and dry heaved.

When these guys had all changed clothes, they were in dark jeans or Dockers, with button-down shirts, and all had gov't agency IDs clipped to their belts. These weren't exactly homeless guys. Just... disgusting. People were walking past just staring in shock and amazement. And a little horror.

Gaaaah, now I need more Purell just for writing this!"

And later...
I actually called one of my sisters because I couldn't believe it, and - poor thing - she got an earful when I yelled, "OMIGOD, STOP WIPING YOUR JUNK!" That's the point when my sister said, "Oh Jesus, I'm hanging up now." Stay classy, suburban DC!"

Yes, Bethesda. Stay super classy!

And to all, a good night.

Forty-Five

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 02:38:00 +0000

So, in a couple of months I turn 45. Halfway to 90. Halfway to dead, I sometimes joke. Truth is, no one knows how long we get on this planet. Gotta make every moment count as much as you can. Maybe I'll wax on about that later, but not now.

Usually, when folks turn 40, it's a big deal. (At least for those of us who dig birthdays.) My 40th was not exactly a big deal. But some things have happened in the intervening years between 40 and now that make me want to celebrate this number.

I lost a brother.

I lost a sister.

I lost part of my vision, and my parts of my spine were crushed. (Along with a bit of my spirit.)

I found out that I was a little more fragile that I ever figured I would have to admit. And I have a greater respect for the impermanence of life - and the need to squeeze every drop of joy you can from it, circumstances be damned.

And so, I want to mark this date somehow. In the end, it may just be me and a big bottle of cheap Aussie wine (seriously, the Australian wine industry owes me some royalties at this point), but I feel like I should make it count.

If I had any cash like a real adult, I'd invite some folks to be my guests and join me for dinner or BBQ in a park (it'll be a wee bit cold for that, likely, come November) or sit around a fire, telling stories and drinking cider. (Man, I miss the embassy's dachas outside of Moscow sometimes!!)

But, as always, the cupboard is pretty damn bare. Being the hostess with the mostest isn't a possibility, much to my shame.

So, creative thinkers, how would you celebrate a milestone birthday on a shoestring budget? I'm aiming to not just have a tuna sandwich in front of the TV watching the previous night's episode of "Mad Men." (Although, I'll take a hearty slice of John Hamm any old day, thank you very much, even if he's playing an ass like Don Draper.)

Should I rent myself a pile of movies and just hunker down for a day of slugliness? Should I squirrel away enough $$ for a tank of gas to go sit out on the beach for a cold autumn day at the shore?

What would you do? Creative - and reaaaaally inexpensive - ideas welcome.

Hint to DC City Workers

noreply@blogger.com (Merujo) — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:55:00 +0000

If you're driving a city-owned car (or, as was the case this morning, city-owned tractor!) and you have a sticker on the back window that reads "How's my driving? Call 311 to report problems" DON'T DRIVE THROUGH EVERY RED LIGHT ON CONNECTICUT BETWEEN THE HILTON AND DUPONT CIRCLE.

Amazed people like me will actually call 311 and complain. (And, for the record, I spoke to a lovely, uber professional person at DC's 311 line who took my complaint, confirmed that this was a city worker, and gave me a complaint confirmation number.)

The same goes for federal workers driving cars with USG plates. You're driving on our dime. And you have federal license plates. You're easy to report when you're swerving between lanes in morning rush hour like a Friday night drunk.

Grrr.