Roll Up The Rugs

Small Change

2010-05-26T04:37:00.000-07:00

I've started a new blog called all writey then. It's real plain-jane so far, even more so than this one. I'm not sure what the reason behind the change is.
When I was just out of high school and I started to feel that pressure build up like a storm a coming, that feeling that something needed to change but I felt powerless to make any definitive life movements, I'd put another hole in my ears. I ended up with five in one and four in the other. There was something so satisfying about the chunk-stab of it- like putting a needle through a dried apricot. Or I'd make a dress, or I'd shave my head. Year before last I went through a pie thing where I baked and ate pie every day for about a week and a half. That was great. I love pie.
I guess now I start a new blog.
I haven't been very good so far about replying to my comments. And I haven't put up a blog roll or fleshed it out in any way. It's a new room with a fresh coat of paint and lots of windows and I have a table and a chair there, pen and paper, cup of coffee, and space enough. Would you come to visit? Perhaps I'll even make pie.

When Life Isn't Sweet Enough Candy Pie

1 deep dish pie crust, slightly thawed
60% chocolate bittersweet Ghirardelli chips
walnuts, rough chopped
dried cherries
real maple syrup, B grade

Preheat the oven to 375 F. Cover the bottom of the crust with chocolate chips. Cover the chocolate chips with walnuts and cherries. Sprinkle with more chocolate chips. Pour maple syrup over the whole mess, but just enough to wet, not enough to cover. Fold the walls of the pie crust over the top of the filling (the filling should only go about halfway up the sides) so it's all nice and tucked in, and you have a bit of a top crust. Place pie on a cookie sheet. Bake until the crust is golden brown and not raw looking. Remove from oven and chill.

Topping:
sour cream
heavy whipping cream
maple syrup

Whip all ingredients together until the soft-but-firm stage.

Slice pie into small wedges and top with cream. Contemplate life.

Absolute power...

2010-05-06T03:58:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to write lately but the words won't come. I want to write about spring, and how every morning the birds outside go wild and wake me up with singing and it reminds me of beauty, so I wake up with the idea of beauty every morning but I'm not going out in it, and I feel sad about that. I wanted to write about my sister on her birthday, but no matter how much I pushed the keys it all came out strange and forced. I will want to write about my mama and my other mother come Mother's Day. It's all off, everything is off. I thought this morning that maybe it is because what I need to write about is what's going on in my daily life, which I don't want to write about, because it is about work, but it is what is swimming around in my head. So please, if you don't want to read about work, feel free to click away.
A few months ago the owner of my restaurant sold out to another restaurant. It all happened very fast and there was little communication involved with the staff. We were told not to worry, that they wanted to keep us on and that we would all have jobs. There was bad blood over the whole thing with the bar manager at the old place, and the bar staff jumped ship rather spectacularly. Their last night open they destroyed the place. They gave away more than they sold, they smashed glasses, they drank straight from taps and bottles. I do not envy the new owners the clean up.
We closed for four days and reopened under the new name and management. Same building, different job. We tread lightly. I likened it to having a foster family- it was nice that they kept us together but we didn't know the rules in this new house, foster mom and foster dad were different and strange, their real kids seemed cocky and didn't know the 'hood. Our regular customers were confused and disgruntled.
After a month and change our front of house manager quit, and I don't blame her, but she did so leaving the schedule unfinished and a snarl of problems that we couldn't even begin to know were there. Five servers and two hostesses were leaving for the summer, we had no new hires and she'd let half the staff request off for graduation weekend.
They asked me to be the new manager.
The new owner explained that she liked the way I am at work, that I'm a good server and I take care of the customers, even if they aren't my tables, that people respect me and that I'm a favorite among the kitchen and front staff. That I have open availability. She wanted me to teach the other servers to be more like me.
It can't be done. The things that make me a good server are not the things that make a good manager. I look after the customers because I cannot stand to see anyone unhappy or needful. I spend every moment when it is busy moving moving moving because even if I do not need to refill my glasses or bus my tables I need the momentum to carry me through the night. I talk to the customers because I am interested in their lives, how they are doing, what they do when they are not sitting there waiting for their food to arrive. I do it because that is what I want to do. To those servers for whom this is only a job they do to have some running around money, it can be almost a painful thing to try to care that much. Most of the restaurant staff in Tallahassee are either drunks or students, and both groups do the job, a rather thankless job at that, only because it has the flexibility to allow them to live their real lives. I do it because I like to walk around with plates and eavesdrop on conversations.
Being the manager is an in between job. I am not the employee, free to bitch and joke about the management. I am not the boss, able to take people's concerns into account and make changes. I get to make the schedule (which no one likes) and walk around saying things like "Don't doodle at the counter" and "Your pants have a hole in them." People come to me and tell me that their paychecks are light, or that the uniforms are too hot for the summer, or that the coffee we carry sucks. I'm told to make the order for drystock (to go containers, tea and coffee, equipment we might need) and I do, and then the orders are cancelled because the owners have those things at home, and then they never bring it in.
The owners have other things going on with their lives, hard things to deal with personally, and that gets in the way and distracts them. I feel for them, but these are not my problems and I do not want these to be my problems. I want to do my job and go home.
We have one more big weekend and then things will smooth out. I have to keep reminding myself of that. This summer, if I hire some good people and get them trained up, will be easy peasy and we can do all the tightening up we need to do. I just have to get there. Until then this job is invading my dreams and causing my face to break out. I've developed a hunger for ice cream that cannot be denied. I'm working way too many hours.
So there. That is what's going on with me. Now that that's out, maybe I'll be able to write. Maybe. I hope.

Your Big Head Don't Make You King

2010-04-10T04:32:00.000-07:00

Last night at the restaurant, a relatively well known local musician played. This is not uncommon, we have live music now four nights out of seven. This particular man is someone I've heard stories about for a while and his name was known to me but I'd never had the, ahem, pleasure of seeing him perform.
Here's the thing about musicians. My Daddy is a musician. Not Daddy Glen, of course, but my biological father. Padre is a guitar player and a damn fine guitar player, probably the best I've ever seen close up and personal. I grew up in houses filled with music, with musicians and late night jam sessions. Dancing in the living room, dancing barefoot in the dirt, dancing with my Mama and dogs and crazy-eyed wild men who drove their women crazy but who could make sweet sounds with those bad boy hands. Men and women who sang, men and women who may not be able to make rent but who always had instruments, even if the amps blew, even if the speakers buzzed. Rock and roll jingle jangle was the lullaby of my childhood and I still feel safe and sleepy at live shows.
When you grow up with musicians you don't revere them. You may adore them, you may love them to pieces, you may need them to complete you, but that sort of otherness reverence is reserved for talent a little less familiar. I need my Mama to make me black eyed peas and collard greens, I need my Daddy to play Do Right Woman. To quote Michelle, "Same same."
So when I'm faced with a musician who glad hands gregariously and postures shamelessly and looks at the air above my head and says a bunch of nothing words that mean, "You think I'm great. I think I'm great too." I feel nothing but exasperation. Shut up and play the damn music already. Make me want to dance, that's all I ask.
This man last night was one of those. I understand how it happens, I do. He is loved and he has a certain bellowing charm, and it takes a lot of balls and attitude to get yourself up there and on stage and rock the house. It's protection and projection and without it I don't know if you can survive that particular lifestyle. But really....
Before he went on I introduced myself because I know he knows my family, and has shared bills with our Fairy Godparents Lon and Lis. I told him I was Mary Moon's daughter and he knew right off which clan I come from. His eyes lit up and said "So Jessie is your sister!" and then proceeded to tell me that he's going to buy her a drink in a couple of weeks for her 21st birthday, and that men will be lining up to buy my girl a drink. I looked at him squinty eyed but had to agree, my girl is a beautiful angel and that's just the plain truth. Then he asked me if I played music and I said no, but that my Daddy, Jerry Thigpen is a guitar player..... and he cut me off. "Ah, so Jessie is your half sister." He said it with his voice bent down and final, like he knew what time it was.
Let me just say that nothing makes my blood boil more than the words "half sister" in relation to the sisters mine. When I was in grade school I knocked a girl down for saying those words that very same way. It's been a long time since grade school, but babies, I am not afraid to knock a bitch down. Any day can be bitch-knocking day as far as I am concerned. There are no halves in my family, no steps, no halves, no partways or sideways or sometimes or maybes. Who claims this family? I do, now get the fuck out of my way.
He got back on stage and growled and shouted through his set, and I hustled and served and bussed and leaned in close to hear my orders. My feet were fleet, my spine was straight, I picked 'em up and knocked 'em down. The crowd was into it and happy, buying beers and singing along. But no one danced. No one danced and the man on stage did not make eye contact and for me it was all just background noise. It was over for me as soon as he cut his eyes away and cut off my words. I feel sorry for a man who thinks that the blood in your body is more important than the bodies in your blood. #1) Sleazy. #2) Self important. #3) Didn't make me dance. Music? Fail. I do believe I will ask off next time that man is scheduled to play.

2010-04-03T21:59:00.000-07:00

3/03/10

I did not want to see anyone I knew this morning, and so I took the back roads on my walk to the cigarette store. On my way I saw Sue, who is a dear, but talks so fast and must catch up on family and howareyou and whatareyoudoingthesedays. On my way home I ran into Dirty, and shit fire it was good to see that boy for all that he is clean these days and soon to go overseas.
While I did my laundry I kept my head down and my earphones on and talked a while with my landlord who was walking by.
On my way to work I ran into Miriam, sweet Miriam who is doing so well.
Work was busy because it was a live music night and don't you know I knew the singer, I think she slept with my dad once and we did not speak but she knew who I was.
And Dave walked in and Allyson, who is now a blond bombshell and we say "Oh it has been so long!" and they ask "Where have you been?". And again, after work who but Big E who wants to know where I've been. And I say, "I've been around, I don't get out much anymore."
At work I say, "Tangled Up in Blue" is the only Bob Dylan song I don't like." and Owen says, "Why? Why don't you like it? Is it because of J-?" because he knew me when and I hold up one hand like a stop sign and I say, "We do not speak of J-." and I walk back out of the kitchen and into the dining room to say hello to some regulars who just walked through the door. "What is wrong?" They ask. And then they introduce me to their friend who I already know through Ezzie whom we agree is a magnificent woman.
Can't I just not like a song?

Here is the sweetest thing: Two weeks ago I was so far away that I could walk down the street and not know anyone at all.
Here is a funny thing: When I am home, in my hometown, everyone I meet is nice and asks about my life and my family and they smile and they look into my eyes and I feel so desperately self conscious and exposed, so naked and raw, that no matter how nice they are I want to hide. Everywhere I go I see these very nice people, and I do not know why but it makes me feel scrubby and small. And so that is what I think I am.
When I went on my trip to see my friend Ezra (not his real name) it was not what either of us expected. I have known Ezra since before my youngest sister was born, and she was born when I was eleven so perhaps I was nine or ten, I don't remember. Ezra and his family lived in an Airstream trailer pulled by a (help me out here, Mama) '56 (?) Belle Aire (God what a pretty car, it looked like a rocket on the inside). They traveled the country while his daddy played the blues and his Mama taught the kids and once a year they would park in our driveway and Hank and I would get to stay home from school just to play. It was marvelous.
As kids we would put on shows for our parents and play truth or dare and roam the neighborhood and those boys (Ezra is one year older than me, his brother one year younger) were not like the kids at school, they were more like us. They had Imagination, and we could get them caught up in our worlds. Behind every fence there is a forest and that is where the children go. But then we grew up. Sort of.
Ezra and I kept in touch through letters. So many letters sent to Wyoming, to New Orleans, to Washington. Sometimes we were sweethearts, most of the time we just were, we had no name for this friendship that stayed mostly on a page. We talked on the phone, usually late at night. I've fallen asleep talking to him, but he never seemed to mind. It's always been earlier wherever he is. We kept in touch through boyfriends, through girlfriends, through heartbreak and marriage, through divorce and broken bones and babies born. He has two, aged eleven and seven. The last time I saw him was a long long time ago and so, when he offered to spot me a plane ticket, I packed my bags.
The family talked, afraid I would not come back. We aren't like that, I said. Mmmm hmmm, they said. But how do you explain a relationship spread out so long?
I am different now. I am not the girl who got in her truck at age nineteen and set out across the country. I am not the girl who went to Ghana and planted trees, or the girl who went to Paris and learned how to walk. I am not so free and easy, I am heavy, I just am. And I was afraid of that. It's one thing to talk on the phone and email and laugh and tell a million jokes and another to be face to face with your imaginary friend. I was afraid he would see how old I am now. I was afraid we'd run out of things to say. I was looking at myself through my hometown eyes.
It's a funny thing to see a childhood friend all grown up. He still looks the same in his smile and his eyes. He is famous in his town, and everywhere we went people knew him. He is the proprietor of a store and co-owner of an art gallery.

3/06/10

I hadn't been on a plane in so long, I didn't know how to do it. I watched the people in front of me take off their shoes and coats and put everything in bins to be x-rayed, and I followed suit, but when I asked if I needed to take my sweater off they laughed at me and told me that they'd let me keep my top on. I blushed at their belief in my stupidity (I was wearing a shirt under my sweater) and stood dumb as a cow in sock feet while they checked my shoes for explosives. "What if I had just walked through a fireworks warehouse?" I asked. "That could be a problem." they said. Note to self: Do not fly around the fourth of July.
I was afraid that I would be afraid of falling, afraid of crowds, afraid of birds flying into the engines or errant turbulence slapping my head into the ceiling and later causing death, but I wasn't. Alone at the top of a very high thing and I am terrified, trapped in a large metal tube hurdling through the air- no problem. I tried to sleep without drooling on myself.
I had some idea that I would freshen up once the plane got close to Seattle, so that when I saw Ezra for the first time I would look as good as I could under the circumstances. That plan was amended to "Eat a Mint" because there is no freshening in an airplane toilet, I would've had to stand in the aisle sideways to brush my hair, and for that I would've had to stand on a baby because there were so many babies on the plane. I will not stand on a baby to brush my hair.
I got off the plane and took the tram and barreled up the stairs and walked out into the sea of airport proper and turned around and there was Ezra. He had tried to hide, but couldn't once he saw me. The waters parted, I dropped my bags, and he snatched me up.
I felt so shy I couldn't look at him full on, I had to look at him in sideways bits and bites. He looked the same, he looked just fine, he looked like my friend, he grinned like a fool and after we picked up my luggage and got in his van we felt like we'd gotten away with something and no one was the wiser.
It took me three days to believe in the reality of him, it took three more to believe in his reality of me, and by that time I was home.
Every day I would wake up early and walk to get coffee and write, and then sneak back in to wake his sleepy self up and we'd go rambling. We went to the shore to look at horrible popping seastars and found a barnacle that looked like a tooth and stuck it in our mouths and said Golleeee and later I broke it. We went to breakfast with his friends and I ate blood oranges and offered to show them my breasts and was flattered by their silence. We went to an opening at his gallery and I got to meet the woman who is his partner and his best friend there and she is beautiful and makes beautiful art, she is a real artist and she has gorgeous eyes and sees gorgeous things with those eyes and puts those things, those luminescent things on giant canvases for everyone to see the gorgeous things in her eyes. We went to little towns and he is famous even there and we met the illusive Anacordes Mustache Bandit. We went to a military forte and discovered the tiny driftwood houses on the other side and we crawled into them like children and had adult conversations inside.
This friend, this friend, this friend took my awkwardness and my anxieties and was kind. He is my go-to man and whatever I wanted to do we did and whatever I needed he gave and whatever I was excited about he let me babble on, no matter how little he cared about that thing he just watched me with his whole face.
It wasn't easy for me. Here at home I try to be invisible and I can't be because everywhere I go I run into people I have known my whole life. There, with Ezra, I was invisible to the crowds and the seals and the waitresses (you should see how they look at him) but observed so closely by him I felt highlighted. I am a watcher too and I watched to memorize the way he picked up a rock or brushed his teeth or put on his hat or turned his head. I watched the way he looked at me, and the way he looked at everyone else.
How do you describe a friend, and why you like them? He is kind to strangers and tells good jokes. He has strong hands. He appreciates a good mustache. He will eat what I cannot finish. He loves his children. He wants everyone to have a good time and makes it so. He is not bothered by small things. He is very very patient, perhaps to a fault.
He took me to Seattle again toward the end of my stay and I found that I love Seattle. I love the colors and the people. We toured the underground and learned that Seattle's history is based on terrible plumbing, prostitution, and crooked merchants. We ate salmon every day and don't you know that made me happy? Every where we went he knew how to get along and so all I had to do was keep my eyes open and follow. At night in Seattle you can walk to the water and the factories look like stars.
In the end I came home, like I said I would. The Pacific Northwest has an energy like a mist blanket that settles around you and calms and quiets. It is a lulling thing and comfortable, but it is not my home.
Honeyluna took care of my house and cat while I was gone. When I got back it was cleaner than I left it and the bad cat was sweet and well behaved. She left me the sweetest notes telling me what she did while I was gone and how much she loves me. Sometimes I am just shocked by how altogether amazing that girl is.
I don't know, my friends. I'm glad to be home but I don't like my job and I feel that strange irritation of having been quiet and still for too long. A trip can mix things up and confuse things, it can make your life look different. It isn't that I want to be there, but here isn't any great shakes either. (And by here I don't mean Tallahassee per se, I mean what I've done with the place.) I tell myself I need to write more, but the words don't come, I think I should go out but I get so sleepy. In trying to be good, I do nothing at all. I read a thousand books. I have a bad attitude at work. I draw pictures of a table set, and do not color in the flowers. I will figure out the next right thing, it just takes me a very long time to do so. I have to put it in the back of my mind and pretend I'm not looking at it directly. And in the meantime this is life.
The thing is, I guess, that we can do anything, but we are bound by the constraints of what we want to do and what we feel comfortable with and what we can live with ourselves with if we do the things and so therefore we really can't do anything. But that which we can do is proabably a lot bigger than we give ourselves credit for. It's a matter of perspective. And it's no good trying to see ourselves through other people's eyes because that is always changing and to really understand we'd have to have their brains as well. So somehow, I've got to clear away the layers of desire to please and the neediness, and what I think I should do based on what I think is expected of me, and find that place inside that has wishes and dreams and let that air out. If I can. I do believe that a heart ignored is what causes bitterness and disatisfaction.
I am thankful for my friend for taking me away from my comfort zone. For making me laugh and showing me things. For waking me and shaking me, and getting me to open my eyes.

A Thousand Words

2010-03-29T04:04:00.000-07:00

(Photo stolen with love and without permission from Django Bohren.)

For My Pretty Friend

2010-03-05T15:09:00.000-08:00

The children of parents who swing
roll around town
and grow up banging their good brains
against the walls of the world we live in
While nighttime bed springs sang
the children sat in one room
with only each other and learning
the lessons that will make them very good drunks.
What makes mother and father
has broken down and
picking up fags and touching tongues
they stick out hips and laugh too loud
Growing up to paint their lips and
hide their hearts
The need for trust so keen
that one body cannot hold it
it trembles and stumbles inside them
their souls painted by Picasso
And in hand-me-down clothes
and broken down trailers
they protect and protect and protect.
I don't judge
I'm sure it seemed like a fine idea
at the time.

Life Is A Cabaret, My Friends

2010-02-15T08:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was Valentine's Day, and aside from taking reservations for parties of two, we did nothing special at the restaurant. Still, the people came. Last year (as I was told repeatedly by disgruntled coworkers) we had a special meal of several courses with wine and dessert. Each couple's bill came to $100 and each table was a $20 tip for the server involved. It was like a $20 tip factory, and even if you only did twenty covers all night you walked with $200. This year my boss was not feeling the love, and we caught as catch could, and slung the food, and pushed the trout, and used a heavy hand to pour the wine. I was there from 10:30 AM till midnight.
Our restaurant has an attached, but separate bar where we pick up our drinks from the bartenders at night and make our drinks ourselves during the day. Day drinks are simple. I do not make anything that involves muddling, or elderflower liquor. I will not make a cosmopolitan or a kamikaze or anything named after a sex act or a baked dessert, but I will make a gin and tonic and I can tear up a bloody Mary. Even though it is extra work I like making the day drinks. The bar is empty and quiet and clean and the house lights are on. Almost everyday I have a quick fantasy about taking a nap back there. There are couches, though the reality of what sorts of bodily fluids that may be in those couches is enough to make my cheek itch, but I think I could possibly lay a tablecloth over the cushions and it would be more than fine.
Last night, in honor of Valentine's Day we had a "cabaresque" troupe perform in the bar and so during the day they wandered in and set up and did sound check and ate snacks and generally got in the way. With the house lights up in the empty bar they were just regular girls and awkward looking boys. The girls a little on the heavy side, the boys leaning toward gangle or muffin top respectively. I liked the ladies, with their thick thighs and dirty hair. One of them was a redhead with chewed fingernails. One of them was so dark she was almost blue and her red lipstick announced her face before you even had a chance to view her fabulous breasts. A boy with a wispy mustache wore a bowler hat. I worried about them a little. The people who frequent our bar are not very forgiving. They all come from money, they all look the same, they are all young and say judgmental things and end up puking in the hallway or weeping or fighting or peeing in inappropriate places. This is how the youth of the uppercrust act when they get fucked up. Classy.
I didn't have much time to worry, and for the most part I put them out of my mind- the fancy girls and the potential bar crowd both because in the early part of the day it is all about brunch. People seem to think that their mothers like to go to brunch. I don't think so. The coffee is never hot enough and the bacon is never crispy enough and they invariably get something sticky on their decorative sweaters. Everyone seems pissed off at brunch, I don't know why. I try to encourage ridiculous consumption at brunch, just to lighten the mood. Why not get chocolate chip pancakes as an appetizer? Why not substitute french toast for the bread on your bacon and egg sandwich? Let the child have red velvet cake for breakfast! Is it really so much worse than bananas foster croissant bread pudding? I will bring your son a trough of whipped cream, I don't care.
Brunch was a fuck-all circus and we had 45 minutes to clean up, change our shirts, light the candles, and set the mood for dinner, which we did. I looked like something that came out of the dryer, but I had never seen my fellow co-worker Raina look more beautiful.
It's a funny thing that happens when the management is disorganized and apathetic. The crew pulls together tighter. Each table was a nation of two and we were in our own little world, alongside them but not of them. Conversations between us cut off and picked up an hour later as if we never parted to refill drinks or carry food. One of us is getting married in a week. One of us broke up with his girlfriend a few days ago. One of us is sad because the boyfriend does not believe in Valentine's Day. One of us is wearing very unfortunate panties.
All of the couples who came in wear their relationships so nakedly on their faces that I could barely look at them. Boredom, anger, disappointment, lust, hope- somewhere in all of that there is love. The ladies put so much effort into their clothes and hair. Some of the men do alright, but I think they were mostly missing the point. Men- it is not about you. Suck it up. Be sweet, for one night. Not because it is Valentine's Day, but because your girl did her eyes for you, because she wore that dress for you, because her feet hurt in those shoes she wore for you, because her wrists and bosom are touched with hopeful scent for you. Because that girl is sweet on you and does silent secret things to make you feel good, to make you happy that you don't even notice but maybe you feel, give her one damn good night.
It all passed very quickly. The kitchen staff traded sushi for pizza. My favorite bartender slipped the waitstaff cocktails and told me one day we would run away together. I told my new favorite joke (What's the difference between a blond and a pair of glasses? A pair of glasses sits higher on your face.) and made the sous chef hug me when he went to push me because he thinks I'm pretty. We all got mad at the hostess, but I felt sorry for her because she is all alone and not a part of our fun. We ran out of napkins. The toilet flooded.
By midnight the magic happened and I had nothing to worry about. The bar was dim lit with candles and amber lights and the fancy girls were transformed into something otherworldly. They circulated in their feathers and jewels, corsets and fishnets and made the patrons look down and adjust their trousers. The awkward boys of the troupe snapped their suspenders and pushed out their chests and kept eyes on the hands of the crowd, mindful that the slap-ass didn't get too familiar. I left before the show went on, my show was over and I said thank you, and goodnight.
I came home and listened to Emiliana Torrini sing If You Go Away and it was not sad as it sometimes is. I caramelized onions and garlic for me. I cooked tomatoes with olives and red peppers. I made salad and cooked pasta and watched a movie, and at 2:00 AM I ate a brownie and went to sleep. I dreamed I saw an old friend in a yellow cab. He had a bouquet of flowers with a red plastic heart stuck in amongst the roses. He picked them out, because girls like hearts, and I knew that even though I only saw him through the window as he was driving away. I was happy because he was thinking of girls and flowers. Then I stopped dreaming. Then I slept forever. Then I woke up.

She Works Hard For the Money

2010-02-04T17:31:00.000-08:00

I'm not feeling well, chickies. I'm on day three of an eight day stretch at work and already my arches ache and my toes burn, and I feel like I'm coming down with something. Nothing too bad, I can't hear and my face hurts, but as far as colds go- this ain't nothing. The girls (my wee pretty sisters) and I went and cashed in our Christmas mani/pedi gift cards today (Thanks, Mama!) so the feet are slightly more attractive and feel a little better. I love a pedicure. I always feel like an ugly man going to a whore when I go get one, because generally my feet are just those things I bang the ground with, but the ladies there touch them gently with their very own hands and speak softly in Vietnamese.
Soon I will be flying all the way across the country to visit my best friend who is not related to me by blood, and the thought of that is enough to get me to straighten my weary shoulders and put my squash blossom nose to the grindstone. A week off on hourly wage is a quarter of my monthly gone, but a week to see his face again and find my girl side and serve no man- I'll work every minute till then for that and grin like a gator while I do it.
Normally when I get sick I reach for the comfort foods, those foods that have a maximum of salt, fat, and sugar per gram of white flour (and if you know me you know this is not how I eat). Yes the macaroni and cheese, yes the cereal and milk, yes and yes again to the m&ms mixed in a bowl with roasted nuts and mini bagel chips! Cookies! Butter! Buttered cookies I shit you not, somehow it's all good when one is puny and there is a weight on the chest. I have no time for delicious excesses now, I have shifts to work. Eight days on, two days off, a double, a shift, a double on Valentine's Day. Ahem. A VD double. Son. of. a. bitch.
So soup is simmering, like it should. It has pumpkin, carrots, celery, onions, oh so much garlic, roasted tomatoes, red bell peppers (no, I won't be making this soup for you, H.) that I charred my own damn self over the gas burner, and sweet white beans. This soup may very well save my life. I hope I like it, I made enough for seven brides and seven brothers. Wish me luck and big tips, my friends. When all this is done I'll sleep like the dead.

p.s.
Last week a customer slapped me on the ass and motor boated my tits. I think that deserves more than 20%, don't you?

Francois Bucher, pt 4

2010-01-25T05:17:00.000-08:00

One day the phone rang and I answered it.

Hello? Nautilus Foundation.
Hello? This is Nelson Mandela. Is Francois Bucher there?
Yes, yes. Just a minute.

That was part of the magic of the place. A modern art castle in the North Florida woods. Gauguin's ladies. Ancient books. Skin puppets in an old trunk. A secret passageway. A ghost ship. Michelangelo's cold brained boy. A phone call from Nelson Mandela. A monster from my childhood. Einstein's couch. Avenging angels. Pick-up truck angels. A nun's room. A locked tower. Zillions and zillions of stars. A Minotaur.
I began to pull away and Francois became bitter again. You don't wiggle anymore. He accused, his face turned away but his eyes cut to me. I told him I had to leave. Who will make me my smoozies? Of course he argued.
I told him I needed to get a job, and that Lloyd was just too far out to work and to go to school. He told me that I was throwing away an opportunity. He told me that my studies would suffer, that my health would suffer. He told me that children who went to school and lived in apartments did more partying than studying and did not take school seriously. (I think he had forgotten that I was in auto mechanic school.) He told me I was not like them, that I would be unhappy.
For the most part he was right. I loaded up my truck and moved into town. I got a job at a falafel place and an apartment with a girl named Nikki who ended up trashing some of my things and ringing up $906 worth of phone bills under my name that I had to pay. I dropped out of Lively Vo-Tech and TCC. I did not take school seriously. But I did have fun. I smoked pot out of a hookah with naked girls. I wore an evening dress and drank icy cold vodka while Nikki read aloud the works of Shakespeare and I rolled around on the floor in hilarity. We ate Chinese food till bursting and passed out in greasy stupors. I danced barefoot at drum circles and tried to learn to juggle fire. I did not shave my armpits. It was everything Francois was afraid of and more.
The other day I was describing my time at the Nautilus Foundation to a friend of mine. He said that it seems so surreal, that it must seem like a completely different life. It does and it doesn't. My life immediately after I left seems more like a dream or something that happened to someone else than my time with Francois. When I lived in the apartment with Nikki (who grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey and was far more foreign to me than Francois ever was) and worked at The Pitaria (real name, delicious falafel, shitty hommus) I was trying so desperately for the sort of youthful exuberant life that I thought I should have. It was fun, but it was forced, and I never felt like I belonged. Living with Francois was a bizarre and magical fairy tale, and I always expected the bizarre and magical. My brother and I lived in fairy tales when we were kids, and something like a castle in the woods was only a matter of course. In some ways I am more shocked at how mundane my life has become.
It was that same year that I packed up and headed west. Those adventures were more my style, done alone and slowly with many many miles to absorb what I was doing and who I was becoming. I never saw Francois again.
He died a couple of years later. I do not know if he died alone, or if someone else was there to call for an ambulance. If anyone ever wrote his memoirs they are not published. His body was placed in a concrete box on a slab between the pond and the main house. I went back once, to lay flowers at his grave.
It was a bluesky sunshiney day and it must have been in the summer because I also went looking for black berries. I drove down the driveway and it looked much the same except the dormitories were condemned and there was a giant gate, like the entrance to a Shinto temple. The property had been bequeathed to Florida State University and I was stopped by a man on a riding lawnmower as I got out of my car. He told me I was trespassing, and had to leave.
I stood and talked to him for a little while, I told him about living there and the wonders that were inside the building. I told him about Francois, and he was kind and listened. By the end of the talk he let me wander around a little bit. I walked around the building. I touched the rough cinder block of the walls and noted the wear and tear. I went into the woods but I couldn't find any trace of the Chinese junk. I stood for a long time by the box that held Francois.
It is very plain, that box. If you didn't know it was a mausoleum you might think it held a pump or some sort of electrical gadgetry connected to the house. I put my face against it and tried to feel the man inside, but he was not there. I cried a little, laid my yellow flowers down and said I'm sorry. That was the surreal part, the part where I knew he was dead and cold and in a box and I was standing next to it. It was surreal that I could not just walk inside and find him sitting at the kitchen table, smoking and waiting to tell me something he had been thinking. I wondered what happened to the art, what happened to the dogs. I still don't know, and I haven't been back.
FSU has now renovated the place and turned it into a conference center. The art gallery, which contains some of Francois's own work is named after him, but the center itself is not. When I look it up on the internet I find no mention of the things that really spun my brain, the valuable art, the little light green couch. The information says that there are four bedrooms and two bathrooms available for rent or retreat, but it does not say that there is a secret passageway to one of the bedrooms and I wonder, where are all of these bedrooms anyway? Do they really make visiting guests climb over a stage to sleep in the Nun's room? Did they put a bed in the tower? Or have they ripped the shelves out of the library and put bedrooms in there? It would be too strange to see it so changed and so naked. No doubt FSU has sucked the magic out of the place as best they could, they are good at that. Visitors don't want to be surprised by angels and spiders in the corners of the rooms.
I do. I do. I want the angels and the spiders both. Francois lives in me so frail and whole, his naked skin, his purple scar. He is not a part of another life, he is part of this one. I could not give him what he wanted from me, but he did touch me and I touched him and we changed each other, even if it is just a little bit. To be honest, I do not miss him. But I remember him. I think that is a fine thing. When I die I don't want too many people aching for me, but I would like someone to remember the shape of my hands and the way I laugh. He did not wear his seat belt. He liked artichokes in oil. He had large knuckles and ropey veins in the backs of his hands. When Francois laughed, sometimes it was a bitter chuckle and a sideways glance, but sometimes it would burst so loud and unexpected I could hear it even if I was tucked up in my room. Even if I was walking away, as fast as I could.

Francois Bucher, pt 3

2010-01-21T04:47:00.000-08:00

The kitchen in the Nautilus Foundation was not state of the art. The oven did not work and the stove top was one of those crappy electric kinds where the eyes never settle right after you try to clean it. The refrigerator was of indeterminate color and probably from Sears, bought new sometime in the late eighties. There was no dishwasher, and when I moved in no coffee maker. Looking back I think that things must've fallen into disrepair when the girlfriend moved out, perhaps she took the coffee maker. I met the ex girlfriend only once, when she came to sort out a shipment of art they had bought together on a trip long before.
Francois called me into the library to meet M. and see the puppets they were pulling out of a trunk. The puppets were made of human skin. M. was tall and lean with short blond hair and strong hands. She looked like a woman who would be more comfortable riding an elephant than cooking supper, and she barely registered me as she pulled the puppets from their wrappings. They looked like tiny angry mummies. I stood for a moment off to the side but left quickly, the air in the library that day was sharp and thick and I did not like the way that Francois was so giddy or she so absorbed in her task. She was only there a few hours.
What made the kitchen wonderful wasn't the appliances. It was obviously a kitchen for a man of the mind and not the stomach. There was a butcher block and wooden table where we would take our coffee and meals. There was a back door that was always open for the dogs to come in and go out, and you could see the pond from that doorway. Against one wall was the giant hutch that hid the secret passageway, and up on the wall that the kitchen shared with the front room was a painting by Paul Gauguin. The painting was one from his Tahitian period with bare breasted ladies reclining in the shade of fat leafed trees. I loved those ladies, they looked so wise and so lazy, and I loved that I could reach out and touch the whirls of paint that made them.
As soon as I moved in I insisted we get a coffee maker. At first Francois protested that instant was just as good, and certainly good enough for him, but I began too brew freshly ground organic french roast with cinnamon in the basket, and he began to hum as he drank it. I would find him there in the morning with his first cigarette and his coffee mug, naked aside from graying briefs, slightly reclined with one leg crossed over the other. I would pour a cup and start taking fruit out of the freezer for our smoothies.
I made a smoothie in the morning for myself because I liked it, and I began to make one for him because he was intrigued and he had trouble with his bowels. Fruit, soy milk, flax seed, spirulina, he called it his "smoozie" and I think this is the first thing that made him love me. Company was fine, hot meals at night were good, but get him to take a morning shit and all was right in the world. He would hug me and call me his "Wiggly Girl".
On the back of the stove were the few spices he had when I moved in. It was the first time I'd ever seen a shaker of MSG for private use and it just seemed wrong so I tucked it toward the back of the cabinet. There were salt and pepper and paprika and a small glass jar that held little silver lumps, roughly the size and shape of Hershey's kisses. One day, when I thought of it and we were both in the kitchen I held the glass jar up and said "Francois? What is this?"
"Oh those? Those are teapots!" he sounded positively gleeful. "Sometimes? When I put the teapot on the stove? And I walk away for a little while? I come back and they look like that!"
I was enchanted. There were about five in there and I had no idea how long it would take to melt down an entire teapot to a Hershey's Kiss shaped lump.
"May I have one?" I said.
After smoozie making and coffee drinking and talking talking talking I would beg off and drive to school. Auto mechanics was not going as I had imagined it would go and each day I would get a little more down. I liked the teacher, he was a good old boy local with thin white hair and sparkly blue eyes. Most of the guys in the class had been working on cars their whole lives and the teacher spent most of his time trying to break them of bad habits. "Not everything can be fixed by hitting it with a hammer" I remember him saying.
We balanced and rotated tires, we changed oil, we tinkered with our own cars. I wasn't accepted as part of the group and spent a lot of time away from the garage and in the classroom supposedly reading my ASE textbook, but really writing letters to college friends. Sometimes in the morning I would pick up a dozen donuts from the Krispy Kreme for the guys, but though they ate them, they didn't smile at me. One guy let me help him rebuild the carburetor on his daughter's VW Bug, but that was the extent of my coed interaction, unless the prof made them include me.
One day a car caught fire in the parking lot and we rushed out en masse to watch it burn. Just as we got there the teacher yelled out, "STAY BACK! THERE MIGHT BE A GUN IN THE GLOVE BOX!" and we all hit the dirt, expecting bullets to come whizzing out at any second. That did not happen, and he calmly sprayed the car down with a fire extinguisher. "Let that be a lesson to you." he said. "You never know if there's gonna be a gun in a burning car." I never forgot that. Years later I saw another car on fire and I GOT BACK. I turned to the person next to me and said, "There might be a gun in there. You never know."
I would come home in the evenings and do my homework and make supper. Francois was always eager for my return and often had something to show me. One time it was a Bible in Aramaic, over 400 years old. One time it was a video of a party he'd had where everyone was quite drunk and played the most intellectual game of charades I had ever seen. One time it was a cartoon he'd drawn, portraying him hanging off the side of a cliff and me up at the top, reaching down to take his hand. He told me stories about the things in the house, about Einstein's couch in the hallway to the gallery (which I jumped on one time when he wasn't home and it made a horrible SPROING! noise and I leaped off and one of the dogs looked at me like he was utterly disgusted). He told me about his wild and beautiful daughter. He told me about getting old.
There was so much talking, and I was so quiet. I'd seen so little of the world and I felt I had nothing to contribute. He took my silence as fascination and maybe reverence, and one day he told me that he had been thinking he might let me write his memoirs. I wanted nothing to do with his memoirs. I wanted to be young and free and have adventures of my own. I wasn't a scholar, and the more he talked and the more he wanted me to stay home to listen the more I began to resent his need. I could kick myself now, but that's how it was. It frightened me to have someone need me so much. Anything that took me away from him was degraded. He felt I needed to cut the apron strings of my family, he felt that my friends were a frivolous distraction, he even tried to convince me that my long distance boyfriend was probably up to no good. "I just don't know about this Steve" he would say, which infuriated me because his name wasn't Steve.
Perhaps he saw in me an intelligence, a spark that I've never given myself credit for. I'd like to think that, and not believe that he was just so lonely that he would have adopted practically anyone who showed him kindness. I think at one time he was a lion, and in my quiet listening and careful cooking, in my manners and naivete, he saw himself resurrected in my eyes. I hugged his old bones and made him feel young. I gave him an audience.
I began to walk in the evenings as well, just to have some time to think. He decided he would join me, and so at night we would walk up the driveway to the road, back down to the creek, and back to the house. Sometimes I would go in with him and sometimes I would say good night and head out, walking fast, fast as I could. After the careful constitutional we shared my alone walk felt like flying. I felt I could just take off into the night and never come back.
On one of those nights a storm came. I was about a mile and a half out when the stars disappeared and the sky let loose. The rain came down hard and fast. Thunder and lightning toppled all over each other with no break in between. The wind pressed the trees down sideways and threw branches on the road. I was afraid like I've never been, afraid of the storm and afraid of the cars because there was no sidewalk or shoulder, just road, gushing ditch, and fence. I followed the fence to a break and walked up the driveway to the house at the end. When I knocked on the door and asked to use the phone the woman there was wary and wouldn't let me inside. I was astounded that she would be scared of me, even after I explained who I was and where I was staying. It was as if she didn't believe that I was just out walking, even though I was wearing only a tank top, shorts and running shoes and clearly carrying nothing in my hands. I finally convinced her to pass me the phone, which she did through the crack provided by the chain lock on the door. I called Francois, but he didn't answer. Even though he knew I was out in the storm. I handed the phone back to the lady on the other side of the door and she told me to leave. So I did. I didn't know what else to do.
I made it maybe another fifty feet down the road when a truck slowed and stopped beside me. The man inside was wearing a worn baseball cap and cover-alls and he opened the door and said, "Hey, you need a ride?" I climbed in. He told me he had seen me walking on his way home from work and mentioned me to his wife. When it began to storm his wife looked at him and said, "Bill? You better go get that little girl" and so he did. He carried me in his truck right up to the Nautilus Foundation front door and made me promise to never go out in weather like that again.
When I got inside, soaked and shaking, I found Francois in the kitchen listening to the radio. He told me he didn't like to answer the phone at night. He told me he knew I'd make it home alright. "You're a smart girl" he said. I bid him good night, took a hot shower, and went to bed.

Francois Bucher, pt 2

2010-01-20T10:59:00.000-08:00

When my brother and I were kids, there was a brief time when our dad's band practiced in a warehouse on Gaines Street. This warehouse is now a bar, but at that time it was just an empty space rented out by various people for various reasons. Where the beer taps are now was used by a florist to store back-up stock, where the pool tables are now is where I would rollerskate while dad's band worked through their set list. The smaller room toward the back where they host open mike nights was used to store art, probably from FSU art school, but I don't know that for sure. The memories are hazy. What is not hazy is one particular piece of art in that back room that scared the heebie-jeebies out of me. It was a mannequin, laying face-up on a cot. Where it's head would have been someone had put a large black globe with moth-like antennae growing out of it and a hole in the face area. In the hole was a light bulb. I don't know why this thing scared me so much, but it did to the point that just knowing it was back there was enough to make me stop mid roll, look over my shoulder, and shiver.
I probably only saw it in person a couple of times, but it never really left me. It had gotten under my skin. Which is why, after living in the Nautilus Foundation for a few days and I looked under a sheet draped over an object in the theater and saw it lying there, I was both terrified and not really surprised. So you've finally found me. I thought, looking at it's mute, empty head.
I lived in the Nun's Room, behind the stage. Every time I got up in the middle of the night to pee, I had to climb up onto the stage, cross, climb down, walk through the aisles of chairs past the horrible thing beneath the sheet, go out into the room with the sleigh bed and the angel with the sword, and only when I got to the green marble bathroom would I find a light switch. I always carried a flashlight. God forbid I forgot to bring the flashlight with me in the morning and I'd have to walk all that long way back there at night in the dark when I went to bed.
My room was furnished with an antique iron bed that had originally come from a 13th century Chinese hospital, but more recently had been hauled out from a concrete dome in the front yard which held about 20 more of the same. I also had a vanity that I brought from home and a peach crate containing some of my clothes. The rest of my clothes were housed in the Italian armoir in the front room, as I had no closet in the Nun's Room. My sewing machine and table were on the stage and looked like props for some homey little play, but when I used it the sound would clatter around the auditorium, so I did very little sewing during my stay.
Francois Bucher was a retired professor of medieval art and architecture. Born in Switzerland, he had spent most of his life in the US, but he retained his beautiful upturned accent that made everything he said sound either like a question or a good idea. He had taught at Yale and at FSU and had been granted a Guggenheim back in the fifties, or in his fifties, I can't remember which. He spoke many different languages and had led an exciting life, but he never made me feel ignorant or lesser than. I think that by the time I met him a lot of his spark had gone out. He was lonely and depressed.
It was hot in the Nautilus Foundation (there was no air conditioning) and soon after I moved in Francois grew comfortable enough to walk around in only his underpants, as was his habit when he lived alone. After seeing him the first time without his clothes, it really was no big thing to live with an old man in underpants. I kept my clothes on, though he assured me there would be no threat on his part if I chose to walk around in the nude. It was simple modesty that kept me clothed, although I would occasionally go skinny dipping in the pond out back.
There was a pond out back, I've forgotten to mention that. In fact, there was a lot more to the Nautilus Foundation than just the main building. The grounds covered several acres of woods and fields. Along the driveway, back up toward the road was a gigantic round building under construction that was intended to be the dormitory for the scholars that would come. The round shape of the building was so that no one would would have a better room than anyone else, to create equality amongst the guests like King Arthur's round table. The driveway curved past the main building, over the creek, and into the woods. Past the stone carver's house, past the barn that held the construction equipment and materials, past the giant kiln, past a few more out buildings, up a hill and into a clearing was the duplex my ex boyfriend rented. It was no longer available to rent because Francois had built an observatory up there and he didn't want anyone polluting the perfect darkness with kitchen lights and reading lamps.
In the woods there was an art path that had grown over from neglect. The sculptures that lined the path seemed to pop up out of nowhere and were themselves being reclaimed by the North Florida flora and fauna. In one part there was the sad remains of a full sized Chinese junk ship made entirely of multicolored rice paper. It had been vandalized by drunken locals not long after it's construction, it's great sides torn and dripping from it's skeleton, the masts broken and leaning heavily on the trees around it. Spiders and snakes and squirrels lived in it, poison ivy grew up between it's toes. I still wish I had seen it when it was whole. It would've been a rainbow ship, it would've been infused with light when the sun was overhead.
Francois sounded bitter when he told me of the ship's destruction. He sounded like the whole human race was fucked if people would wantonly destroy something so beautiful. He was disappointed in humanity at large.
He was also disappointed in his life. I could tell that no matter how much he had lived, he could not believe he had ended up so old and so weak. It pissed him off that he had to follow dietary guidelines, pissed him off and frightened him. He would ask me over and over as we ate supper if I remembered he could not eat vitamin K, if I had perhaps accidentally put butter in the pasta. He told me to feel free to drink the vodka in the freezer because God knows he can't drink it, Goddammit. He would look longingly at my greens salad (I don't remember why he was not allowed a greens salad) and tell me long endless tales of his youth. The time he ran away as a boy with his best friend and ended up on a raft surrounded by sharks. The days he spent with Albert Einstein discussing recipes and time travel (He was a fairy of a man! He said of Einstein.) The women he slept with. The stupid children who took education for granted he taught. And on and on. I should have paid better attention, but I was one of those stupid children. I was tired by the time we sat down to dinner, and I was young and he was old and I didn't want to sit for hours and be talked to.
My days started early. When I dropped out of college I decided that I either wanted to be a midwife or an auto mechanic, so I enrolled in the auto mechanic program at Lively Vo-Tech and in an anatomy class at Tallahassee Community College. I had to be at Lively at 8:AM, so I was up at 4:00 to walk before I made us breakfast.
I fell in love with walking in Lloyd. At four in the morning the world was dark and quiet and cool. I walked past old houses and farmland, past fields filled with giant rolls of hay that looked like sleeping woolly creatures. I walked past long stretches of barbed wire, past tangles of kudzu, past creeks and goats and trailers. As I walked my muscles would loosen up and I would wake up from my sleeping dreams only to fall into daydreams. I told myself stories about the people who lived in the houses and trailers, and I told myself more darkly made-up stories of the people who lived in the woods, the ones who made homes in wood rot and gopher hole. The ones who could hide in the Spanish moss and who blended in with leaf mold. I walked and dreamed for an hour every morning and found myself back home.
I'd come in sweaty and get the coffee started and by the time I'd showered and dressed for class (in greasy jeans and a clean t-shirt) Francois would be up, sitting at the butcher block in the kitchen, waiting for me.

Francois Bucher, pt 1

2010-01-20T06:57:00.000-08:00

When I was nineteen I lived with a man named Francois Bucher. This was just after I dropped out of college but before I took off in my truck for sights unseen. When I called Francois I had no intention of actually living with him, I just wanted a place to stay for a little while with cheap rent and I was wildly inexperienced in finding lodging. What I knew of Francois Bucher was that he was a little eccentric and a boyfriend that I'd had when I was fifteen rented a place from him in Lloyd for the very fair price of $111 a month. I had good memories of the place- it was a little cracker shack duplex set inexplicably in the middle of a monks bald spot of a field at the top of a hill somewhere in the Lloyd woods. We would get stoned and wade in the creek just down the hill from the place and at night there were zillions and zillions of stars.
Back then, people were actually listed in phone books and so that is what I did. I looked up his name, I called the number. (Later when I was living in my truck I employed this same method of detective work while in La Conner, WA in an attempt to find Tom Robbins. Don't try it kids, he ain't listed.) Francois answered the phone and told me that the duplex was no longer available, but if I was willing to drive out to Lloyd he might have something else for me.
Francois Bucher lived in The Nautilus Foundation, a place he dreamed up and built of his own design. The intention of the foundation was to create a space for artists and intellectuals to live and work, a communal genius utopia. He lived there alone, with his two dogs.
The main building was an asymmetrical castle in the abstract with a tower over the middle part that had one of those pointy roofs that one would expect on a tower on a castle, with a flag coming out of the pointy bit. This building was set far enough off the main road so that you couldn't see it if you were just driving around Lloyd and it surprised the hell out of me when I first drove up. I parked in a small parking lot and walked up the path to the main doors. Now I don't recall if I knocked, or if the doors were open, but somehow I got inside and was greeted by the man himself. Before we sat down for coffee he gave me the tour.
The first room I entered was large and dark and had very high ceilings. There were no windows, but there were two doors along the wall to the left, one door to the right, and one straight in front. The room contained a large sleigh bed made up for company, a red and green painted armoir, and a statue of an avenging angel on a pedestal. One of the doors to the left took you to a bathroom completely lined with green marble, the other to a hallway. The hallway sloped downhill to the art gallery which was made from an old silo that had been cut down and bolted on with giant metal bolts. The door to the right in the main room entered into the auditorium style theater (where the plays of geniuses would be performed, I suppose) which at this time was being used mostly for storage of strange objects de arte. At the back of the theater, beyond the rows of chairs and up and across the stage was a small door. That door led to a round brick lined room with one tiny window that Francois called the Nun's Room.
Back to the main room and straight across was the kitchen. To the left of the kitchen was the library. The library was something to behold- chock a block full from floor to ceiling with rows of books on shelves made from boards and bricks and so cram packed that there were even stacks of books on the floor and in trunks and boxes yet to be unpacked. There were two small desks, one at the front of the library against the wall that led to the kitchen, and one at the back that held a lamp and a small statue of a young man whose cranium you could remove to expose his carved wooden brains. The statue, Francois told me as an aside, was made by Michelangelo.
Upstairs from the kitchen was Francois's bedroom, personal bathroom, and the way to get to the tower. You could get to his bedroom either by climbing the obvious wooden stairs in the kitchen, or by going through the secret passageway hidden behind the hutch. It was in the kitchen that we sat, had coffee, and talked.
Francois had recently gone through the break up of a long term relationship and a quadruple bypass surgery. He was afraid that if he were to have another heart attack it would be his last, and he would die alone on the floor with his dogs standing over him, unable to reach the phone to call for help. His proposition was that I would move in and cook suppers for him (following the guidelines provided by his doctors) and in exchange receive room and board. I thought about the library, about the marble lined bathroom, about the secret passageway behind the hutch. I looked over my cup of instant coffee at this old man with an angry purple scar stretched tight across his chest and the doorhandles of his knees pushing against the worn fabric of his trousers. He sat like a man defeated, he held his hands with fingers curled. I was nineteen and all of life was a grand adventure. I said yes.

Little Miss Lonely Heart

2010-01-11T06:20:00.000-08:00

I never did eat those chocolate covered bananas. Too messy, too sticky, too much really. That was all the way back in October and I was beginning to think that maybe my man fast had gone on too long. It's good to take some time and reevaluate (or in my case, write down every sexual experience I've ever had, acknowledge where I've been selfish, dishonest, or caused harm, and read it all aloud to someone else while they make comments and laugh at my expense, all through the good of AA) but there comes a point, babies, where you have to get back in the game.
[Back in the game? I deplore sports metaphors, I'm more than likely to mix them up. Let's give it the old college try! Time to knock that ball through the field posts and try not to get fouled and end up in the box! You can't get a touchdown if you try to steal third! Let's bogey this sumbitch and take 'er home! Match, set, love, where's the motherfucking ball boy? Why am I the one who always gets drenched with Gatorade?]
ahem.... Back in the saddle. [Better. Now I feel like a cowgirl.]
I realized last night at my meeting that I may be the only female in my homegroup (which is large) that has gotten through two years of sobriety without sleeping with anyone else in AA. Even very old women with white hair who spend their hour knitting and nodding and speak in shaky voices full of wisdom and experience are out there getting more action than I am. I see the way they look at the gentlemen! It's like a goddamn sober sex party and I was invited but decided instead to wash my hair. Now I am seen as this font of self control and piety, when really I'm just clueless and awkward, like I've been my entire life. Not that I want to sleep with recovering alcoholics, those people are cra-zy. Besides, whenever I find myself attracted to anyone from AA I find that he lives at the shelter or he just got out of jail. I don't judge! I'm just sayin'.
Very recently I decided to take a man up on his offer of love and found myself alone and wearing foolish nightclothes. It is a very chilly thing to wake up in an empty bed in silky bits expecting company. He said all the right things, but there was no follow through. It feels like lies when there is no action to back the words up, and makes me feel like a back-up plan for if the night gets lonely. It made me angry. I love words, I have words, I have all the words I need.

[my love is like a tempest tossed
the sparrows up against the wall...]

[if tender feet I do not have to place inside my lover's palms
then I will have the poetry, I will have the words and songs]

I am hesitant to write in all seriousness about love because it is an embarrassing and private thing, unless you are in love and then the world loves with you and smiles on your shining face. And there are those who will say I had my chance, that love was there for the taking and I walked away. But love for me, like anything because I am too sensitive, is hard and tricky. I want it to be right. I can't be easy, I am not easy, and it is not a comfortable thing to be this skittish, this sober, this self conscious all the time. I envy those girls who have three-ways in cars and end up sleeping in fireplaces (that actually happened to a girl I know. slut.). Not the experience itself, a three-way in a car strikes me as decidedly uncomfortable, but the ease and laughter that goes with it, the shrug of shoulders and wicked smile- that I envy.
There's a Jamaican man I knew who used to say "Don't fatten a fish for another man to eat", meaning don't wind your girl up and leave her wanting, she'll satisfy herself somewhere else. Or maybe it doesn't mean that, he also used to say "You know what time it 'tis" and I would smile, desperately hoping that I at least looked like I did indeed know what time it 'twas. Anyway, I feel like a fattened fish that grows cold on a plate.
I yearn for sweetness, for ease, for warmth. I was self contained before but now, woken up I am needful. A need without fulfillment is no fun and not funny. I feel useless and at a loss as how to find what I want, which is strange for me. Alone is not lonely until you don't want it anymore.
A few weeks ago I picked flowers and cleaned my house in anticipation of company. Perhaps he thought that my house is always so shining, that I always keep a jar of camellias and eucalyptus by my bed. Or perhaps he did not care. This week I cleaned my house again and washed the clothes and made the house smell like lemons. Before the freeze I went out and picked camellias, arm loads of creamy perfection so lovely they seemed edible like they were made of fondant, and rosemary, and lavender. Now though it is so cold outside and all the flowers have fallen from the bushes and the sky is so blue and thin it looks like it might crack with the effort, I have a garden inside. For me and me alone and for my eyes to rest on something beautiful and gentle when I wake up. Though I love them, the flower's faces are so pretty, the gesture now seems as empty as the sky.
I was more content when I was all so self contained, but I don't want that contentment back. It's alright to yearn in winter. And be fragile. And crave warmth. Things happen in their own time. I may as well crave spring, and I do, but I think this longing in me has made me more whole. I feel more tender toward myself and toward others. I fell asleep last night thinking of Mwa and Danielle and Jo, thinking of the snow of Europe. I heard on the BBC that people in the Netherlands and in Germany were being advised to stay indoors because it is so dangerously cold. I worried about them, about you my friends. Do you have enough to eat? Do you have warm blankets and wool socks? And so perhaps this softening, this need is not useless after all. When one is hard and self contained there is no room for others to get inside. I want to let this softening happen, and not try to be so tough.
Which I think, perhaps, is finally the point of this post. I am afraid to open myself up and say I am tender, I am soft, I have a happysadness, because that is not cool or smart, and there is no protection there. But what do I have to protect? I am not so cool and smart, I am just a girl. I like flowers, I like poetry, I like the words "kiss" and "touch" and "pink". Perhaps I am coming into who I am again, and this time soft and on cat feet. If one is lonely, one must let others in. So simple and so frightening.
I started out this post meaning to be funny, and I end up so timid and serious. Perhaps this is why I don't write so often. I am in awe of those of you who write so well about your feelings, whose words are their honest hearts. I am going to end this here, where there is no ending, so I can go to the library and go to the grocery store and cook the food and go to work, but I am going to post it anyway, neatly done or not. To post and hope that I will write more, I will be a part of your brave circle. I hope you all are warm today. When I come home tonight I'll read your words and worry about you and smile with you and we will all crave spring, and that will take the edge off my foolish little loneliness.

2010-01-08T07:29:00.000-08:00

My crack-daddy neighbor is moving out this week. No, no, not the sex couple (who would not meet my eyes at the Publix the other day, do they read my blog? Do they know my name? Have I been walking around in my altogether too much?) who live across the courtyard. This is the person who lives right across the hall, my closest neighbor who has been there for years. When I moved in the apartment manager warned me about him, saying that he was an alcoholic but a harmless one, and may sometimes park halfway over in my spot. This is all true. Sometimes he does park halfway over in my spot, but I'm just glad he made it home.
Melvin's (not his real name) apartment is a bachelor pad de-lux. There are velvet paintings of black panthers and leopards on the walls and heavy dark blue and maroon rugs stapled to the hardwood floors. Ashtrays shaped like wild psychedelic glass vaginas share space on small rickety tables with lamps filled with shells and scented candles half burned down and blown out. One time he invited me over to see a painting a woman he knew had just given to him. It was in the bedroom, hanging next to his bed, and showed the headless (I imagine this is more from the limitations of the painter rather than a stylistic choice) intertwined bodies of a man and a woman floating in a green and red (bed? sky? Christmas sex cloud?) background. The man, he pointed out, was him. He was quite flattered and pleased. And what man wouldn't be? The painter may have had no talent for hands, head, or feet, but she had a fine and clear memory for cock.
Melvin is somewhat of an ambassador of the apartment complex, he has a wonky-eyed charisma and an easy laugh that has made him an acquaintance, if not a friend of all who live here. I have only met a handful of my neighbors but Melvin knows each and every one. Somehow he is harmless, even when he knocked on my door one day, a pair of my panties pressed tight to his face and making noises of pleasure, I knew that he was simply returning something I dropped in the laundry shack and not being stalkerish or creepy. This is his gift.
For a while he had his sister living with him. They seemed to do fine for a while until he brought a lady home. The lady was bottle blond and had a hard life living in her face, but her eyes were freaky blue and I could see the beauty she had been. She wore clothes better suited to a college girl with loose morals and looked like the entire town of Panama City, FL wrapped up in one tired body. She and the sister did not get along. They all drank, they all fought, sometimes the cops were called. Melvin seemed bewildered and frustrated at his lot in life and I could tell he was not a man who enjoys having two bickering women living under his roof, upsetting the peace and strewing their flea market potpourri around his living room.
The sister left in the night, knocking on my door one final time and having a talk with me in the hallway. She was drunk out of her mind and her body had loosened to a point where it appeared she had no bones and her face moved in such a way that it seemed she had mice roiling around under her skin. She talked on and on about how she was worried about Melvin, how he could get in trouble, how this woman would bring him down, and how now that their mom had passed she (the sister) was all he has. She clutched at my arms and begged me to keep an eye on him. She insinuated that something sinister beyond my imagination (because I am a good girl) was going on over there. I didn't like the feel of her hands, it felt like something sinister was going on in her body, and I kept carefully taking them off of me and placing them on her own shoulders, her arms crossed so that she could hold herself in and not go spilling out onto the floor. I told her that it was none of my business, and wished her well.
Melvin kicked out his blue-eyed girl a few weeks later after her mom and daughter moved in. I suppose he realized that was not an improvement. I was not sad to see them go, they were always stealing my mop bucket.
But now Melvin is moving out, the cold has driven him away. Our apartments do not have central heating, they have giant crackling radiators that are our responsibility to light. I had to have my Superman Brother-In-Law come help me with mine as it is tricky and scary and really a two man job. I tried to help Melvin with his, but no matter which of the two tasks I gave him he just couldn't get it and I left him there in the cold. I felt bad about that, but he's lived here longer than I have and I thought for sure one of his friends could come do what I could not, but next thing I know he's signed a lease for a one bedroom in a newer complex, one in which the heat is central and the utilities are included. Melvin is not a man who needs to be playing with fire, and I believe he knows his limitations.
He will be fine. He'll move his portrait and his velvets, he'll tear the rugs from the floors (or not) and cart the ashtrays and the lamps and the coasters and recliners and framed pictures of his mama and President Obama across town and crank that heat. He'll sit back in his leather chair with his radio on in nothing but a tank top and tube socks, light a joint and raise a glass of amber oblivion, and laugh that crazy rooster cackle at his supreme good fortune, at his new bachelor pad deluxe. And I know, because he told me, that he will revel in the fact that it is only a ONE bedroom, and there is not space enough for any sisters, mothers, or daughters to move in. I'm sorry Baby, he'll say, this is our love nest. Your moms has got to go.
Here's to you, Melvin. You will be missed.

A Series Of Unfortunate Events, and Happy Christmas, Y'all

2009-12-18T05:36:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I took to my bed. It started last Sunday when my apartment, over the course of a matter of hours, turned into a hellswamp. I'd been at my father's house participating in the annual tree trimming song singing extravaganza and I'd left all my windows open.It had been very cold, and then it began to rain, and then it got very warm, and the weathers collided in such a way to make Tallahassee resemble the inside of a mouth. My apartment was one of those terrariums you build in sixth grade science class to explain how a rain forest works and it's all very exciting in sixth grade science to discover that you, like God, can create rain, but it is not very exciting when you discover that God, like you, can move into your apartment and say "HA". "ONLY I CAN CREATE RAIN. NOW MOP YOUR CEILING, BITCH."
I was very adult. I covered my laptop, hid my journal, and mopped the ceiling. Then I mopped the floor. Then I did it again. I ate some soup on my couch that is actually a twin bed, huddled on the damp sheets like an Katrina puppy on a raft, and went to bed.
No, wait, it started Sunday morning, when I decided to make a Christmas tree. I have a history of making my own tree. Who doesn't remember the futon frame I folded and leaned against the wall and decorated all those years ago? (Much to the chagrin of my then boyfriend because it stayed up for about two years.) Last year and the year before I actually had REAL trees and they were WONDERFUL and they stayed up till February (real trees die, so you have to throw them out eventually). This year money is tight, and I no longer have a futon frame, so I cast my mind about my possessions until it settled on a wrought iron plant stand that Mama gave me a while back. It's a lovely little three tiered thing that looks like a spiral staircase you might find inside a cathouse in New Orleans. When I look at it I can easily see tiny hopeful men ascending, with their hats in their sweaty little hands, their mouths slightly open. In other words, ideal for fake Christmas tree making.
So Sunday morning I made coffee, retrieved the plant stand from the front stoop, gave it a cursory swipe with a rag (that unbeknownst to me I would later use as one of the many things I would mop my ceiling with), and looked for my Christmas cd. I have one, and I could not find it. I did however, find a mix of love songs that was made for me back when I was sweet and pretty, and that seemed to do just as well. Al Green, Dinah Washington, Etta James, thank you and yes. It was lovely my friends, the music sultry, the rain falling soft, my hands and mind busy in the task of carefully twining multicolored twinkle lights around each and every intricate twirl of brothel-ornate iron- until I finished (it took me an hour) and plugged the damn things in and discovered that only half the strand lit up. Not even the good half. (There was a good half.) Don't you dare say that I should have checked it first! I did! I did check it first! This is not my first rodeo! Remember the futon frame! That took me hours and many many strands of lights! So, I sighed. I turned off the cd, which was really making me depressed anyway, unplugged the lights, and cut the bitches off with some wire clippers. They now fill my tiny desk waste basket, tangled and bitter like chains cast off the ghost of Christmas past.
Then the tree trimming song singing father's house extravaganza, then the fetid Godsfault terrarium hellswamp debacle.
Monday was a day of respite. I woke up, called my sweet Mama, and followed her advice of closing up the house and turning the ac on. Worked like a charm. I have an old apartment and I do not have central ac, but I do have three window units. THREE! I am richer by far than many of my peers. Two, of course, weren't working. The one that was, fortunately, is the one in the living room (and so the one most centrally located) and it's a giant rattling thing that hums and spits and curses, but damn does it make the air cold. There was a feeling of Christmas as the great humping beast tharumped it's croupy wintry breath into the air and sucked the moisture from the room, all but pouring water onto the ground outside. My coffee steamed, the music swelled, and we went round two on the decorating, and all was as it should be.
I worked Monday night and came home filled with a strange lighted energy to make Christmas presents. Here is my favorite part of Christmas- that time when the inspiration to make pretty shit to give to my family fills me up and overflows out my nimble fingers. It only happens once a year and by God it is a Christmas miracle and though late this year, I'll take what I can get, so in a frenzy of glitter and glue and gratitude (the three "G"s of Christmas) I pulled out my supplies and set to work. It was a gorgeous night and I stayed up until 2:AM in happy construction, like an elf with a 401k and a dental plan.
Tuesday morning I woke to discover that the glue I had used the night before was, of course, the wrong kind of glue. I can't tell you exactly what went wrong, because that would be giving away the secret of what I'm giving people for Christmas (and really, the secret is the best part of it, this year is pretty weak. No pajamas this year, people!) but suffice to say, everything I had done needed to be scrapped. I did not cry. I went to work.
The details of the next few days are unimportant. Here are the highlights: Work. Cold. 100% Chance of rain (I wish the weather man would say something like "I bet you a Million Dollars it is going to rain", it sounds so much more fun that way). Premenstrual. Bone pain to the point of crippling. Serving a table of twelve peevish viragoes. Nausea. Which brings me to yesterday after work when I came home, put my purse on a chair, took off my bra, and got in bed. Done, I say! I am done! I was ready to hang up my apron and live in my car.
But today, after fourteen hours of uninterrupted sleep, everything feels much better. I know that all this is just spoiled child's blues, I know that most of you out there have children and it is a luxury I have that I can just lay my pathetic burdens down and go to bed, but oh babies, I needed it. I needed a temporary oblivion, a thick sweet dream state, I needed blankets pulled up to my nose and the world going by without me for a while. Christmas Day is one week away, and I don't want to hate it.
I love Christmas. I love the excuse to make silly things. I love the madness that comes over everyone once a year that infects them to drape their houses with tiny lights and bring trees inside. I love the smell of cinnamon and peppermint and orange peel. I love the absurdity of it, the way we hang giant socks from our fireplaces and bake cookies for imaginary men. I love that we make everything so pretty.
I love beauty, I need beauty. I don't understand why beauty seems unimportant or unnecessary in everyday life. We have these marvelous bodies that are able to touch and taste and see and hear and why not see color and light? Why not smell fir and vanilla? Why not hear Etta James and Otis Redding? When you reach out to touch, touch velvet, touch silk, touch the oily mottled smoothness of an orange, the prickle of a pine, the warmth of a cheek. And mistletoe? The succulent poison of its fat fleshy leaves and waxy berries, hanging in doorways for promises of stolen kisses. Ginger. Clove. The stab of holly so green and glossy and red berries that fall and make a mess and we don't even care we love them so. Golden globes hung from branches heavy with the burden of family history and each cardboard box of ornaments a treasure you open once a year.
When I went to buy the correct glue the other day I had a moment of panic in the craft store. All around me there were the things that make me happy- ribbons, paper, new pens, paints (that smell of alcohol, that smell of rot, that smell of sulphur), crayons, jewels, beads, sequins, bells, needles, and thread. And all around me were people red faced and angry, brandishing advertising circulars like weapons and shouting at other people who I promise you were not getting paid nearly enough to get shouted at. Behind the cacophony of voices ran the tinny sounds of insipid carols that have been done and redone by both celebrities and dogs and everything in between and played only because the words "Christmas" and "Holiday" and "Snow" are mentioned somewhere in them. This is not my Christmas. I wanted to bolt, and bolt I did as soon as I bought the glue.
My mother hates Christmas, but she has never passed hate of anything on to her children. I am so lucky for that. I am so lucky to have the family I have that lets me be me, and pick and choose the Christmas I want to have. Each year they let me make my misshapen handcrafted things and pass them off as presents. They let me ignore the mall and get all starry eyed over the sparkly bits, the twinkle lights and glitter trees and red bows that people, in their madness tie onto just about anything that will let them. When I was growing up we drank cocoa out of mugs shaped like Santa's head and felt special, even as we rubbed his cherry cheeks white year after year, and we put out cookies, and we put out carrots. Mama, who does not like Christmas read us "Twas the Night Before Christmas" on Christmas Eve every year until one year we lost the book and my brother spoke up in his tiny child's voice and recited the whole thing from memory. As children we clutched our stomachs in despair at having to eat raspberry strudel BEFORE we could even look at the tree to see what Santa brought us! When we are children it is all magic, even if the "tree" is actually only a branch that dad cut off a pine tree behind the house and our stockings are mostly filled with tangerines and walnuts. As children we do not have to fulfill Christmas wishes and bargain shop and fight tooth and nail for the last Xbox on the shelf. We can sit next to the tree and push our faces up so close so that all we can see is a forest filled with lights and magic, with colored glass so delicate you could crush it in your hand and yet survives year after year because we are careful with our magic, and we wrap it in paper to keep it safe.
I try to keep my Christmas a child's Christmas as much as I can. Like fourteen hours of sleep, I know that it is a luxury I have because I don't have children of my own. But I do envy you mothers and fathers. Even if the light is gone from your own tired eyes by the time Christmas Day arrives and you are worn out and you have tape in your hair and cuts on your hands and you feel sick from eating Santa's cookies at midnight to keep the babies believing in make-believe one more year. I envy you, that you will be there to watch the light in your children's eyes. You will watch them grin their gap-toothed grins and wriggle in their nightgowns. You will be able to pass on pretty, you will make beauty for your little beasts, and they will love it, oh they will love it. And when they grow up, maybe they will keep that in their hearts and still get excited each year, because you gave them that.
And now, sweet friends, my house is dry, my stomach is settled, and I am well rested. The proper glue is sitting on the table next to me and the scissors are calling out. It is only one week till Christmas. I must get busy. Christmas waits for no man. God says "HA". I may not finish my gifts in time, but it really doesn't matter. I wish I could kiss all your pretty faces. If it gets too stressful, put on some Lady Day, take time to breathe.

Children and Mad Men Think I'm Pretty

2009-11-22T16:17:00.000-08:00

Today at work an older gentleman dressed in various shades of plaid and drab told me that he would come back to eat sometime, but only if I was working. He would have to call, he said. He told me that he was getting over a heart condition, that is, a woman had just broken his heart, and that it didn't hurt to see a pretty girl. I assured him that we have other pretty waitresses and he waved his hand dismissively and said, "They aren't hags or anything, but..." and proceeded to give me a long and dubious metaphor involving double-bagged groceries and how you don't really need two bags but it's good to have them in case the primary one bursts. I believe I was the primary bag. At some point he also wandered to the rear of the restaurant to commend the chef.
A few weeks ago I met a man named Jimbo who lives on the streets in my fair town. I met him on the street, actually, walking from the health food store to my apartment. He was carrot haired and beet faced and swayed a bit as he walked. Approaching him I could not help but admire the way he owned the sidewalk. We said hello in passing and he called me Sunshine and asked me for some change to help a brother out. I told him I'd just spent all my cash money at the grocery store, and after he assured me that was alright I moved on and he paused to let me get ahead before he continued his walk. Later that same day I ran into Jimbo again, on a different street some miles from our earlier encounter. "Sunshine!" he hailed me, a grand bellow full of gravel and oboe, "Marry me! You are beautiful!" "Not today!" I returned, feeling every bit a Sunshine.
The day after Halloween I had the pleasure of serving a fairy princess, a Harry Potter, and their beautiful mama, who was herself dressed as herself. They ordered chocolate chip pancakes, sourdough french toast, eggs over-easy, fruit, and grits. The fairy princess ate only bacon and did so with tiny bites from baby teeth and pinkies out, like a lady. As I asked if they needed anthing else, the fairy princess hid her face in her mama's tummy and her mama said, "It's alright, you can tell her." The little girl looked up at me, her eyes like sugared gumdrops in her berry face and whispered, "I think you're pretty!" and then quick! back to the safe dark hide-away of mama's blouse. I blushed and cut my eyes at Harry Potter, who gave me a wicked chocolate grin.
People's eyes are as variable and unreliable as shop-store windows. In some we are tall and thin and young forever, and some cast every awful angle in sharp and haggard relief. I was once told by a manager that if I could not be cute, I would have to be good to cut it in the serving world, and I took that to heart. It's true, I'm not cute. I wear black framed glasses and have severe hair, which I call my Frida Kahlo hair. My bosom is small and my bras perpetually ill-fitting with straps that tend to slide off my shoulders and peek out my short sleeved black t-shirts. When I am thinking of a lot of things at once (which I am always doing while serving) I scrunch my lips and furrow my brow. However. Children and madmen think I am beautiful, and if anyone in this world can speak the truth as it springs flashing from the mind to the mouth it is the insane and the very very young. And if the man is not only mad but also drunk? Oh my, then it must be true.

The Fabulous Sex I Am Not Having

2009-10-21T06:57:00.000-07:00

The girl in the apartment across (or as we in my family say, acrost) the courtyard from me is having spectacular sex. She and her boyfriend moved in about a year ago and all I heard from them was the boy's boorish voice in heavy and pontificating discourse, warped by walls and distance to where I could only make out the occasional word. Words like "halo" and "xbox". He moved out one day in August, one van and a buddy, his clothes and face wrinkled and worn, his hair distraught. He hailed me as I went to enter my foyer and told me he was leaving, the first words he ever spoke to me. "Off to better and brighter things!" I said. "Maybe" he said. The sex started soon after.
At first I thought she was weeping, and I put my earphones in. The walls here are very thin, and to give privacy one must do more sometimes than close a window. The weeping went on and on and I took my earphones off, concerned. Ahhhh, I thought, that's not weeping.... and back to book on tape.
Perhaps she is not having spectacular sex. Perhaps she is doing many very frightening, very exciting somersaults. Perhaps she is faking. If she is faking she is dedicated to the fraud, committing herself to the act sometimes several times a day. Somehow, I don't think this is the case. I almost feel sorry for the boy who left. Sorry you Shlub, you treestump of a man, sorry you big toe in trousers, you brown haired tousle, you shrimphook, you fat thighed monocle! You didn't do it for her! And now someone else is! All the time! Many times! I hope you're doing well! Don't worry, your girl is fine!!
I don't mind hearing the sex. They aren't right next door or above me, there is some muffling involved. From other apartments sometimes I do hear weeping, sometimes I hear fights or screaming or drunken girls in piercing hilarity. From my apartment I imagine other people hear the occasional burp, or me yelling at my cat, or both- making it sound like I am yelling at the cat for burping. Or sometimes I will sing my cat's theme song while she is furiously biting my arm Craaaazy on you! Craa-aaazy on you! Let me go crazy crazy on you! which is what I imagine she is singing in her own head but because she doesn't have words I have to vocalize for her.
I ran into a friend yesterday and I told him about the fabulous sex I am not having. He brushed aside my story like cheezit crumbs off a beautiful woman's bosom. You could be having sex.... "That's not the point! I'm not jealous, I'm just relating a story!" he didn't let me finish. You could be having sex. Lots of guys would have sex with you, but you're all "I'm May, I'm crazy!" He said this while flailing his arms in the air and running around. I would've given him five to the two if he wasn't so spot on. I arched my brow admiringly. "Oh, you're good, my friend. You're good."
I had a dream the other night that I was in a store that sold only chocolate covered banana products. Chocolate covered banana cereal, chocolate covered banana chips, chocolate covered banana bananas... They claimed to have more chocolate covered banana products than anywhere in the whole world. I related this to Mama and she said, Hmmm, I wonder what Freud would have to say about that? I hadn't even thought about it like that. I'm glad that I didn't mention that in the dream I was in the store because I was looking for someone. He wasn't there. I thought I don't even LIKE chocolate covered bananas! Now if this place sold mustard...
Petit Fleur writes about the marvelous brain and it's electric pathways, it's firesnap magic and I have to concur. While I am wandering around my days, wheeling through shifts at work and laundry and money and mold in the bathroom, my brain is doing the jizzy math of my basest instincts. My age plus my solitude multiplied by the moaning thumps across (acrost) the courtyard and divided by the heft and holler of my nephew in my arms = Chocolate Covered Bananas! You don't even like chocolate covered bananas?! says my brain How do you know if you haven't had one in a while? Look at the variety! So many kinds to choose from!
My brain may have to wait. In my head there are many kinds of brain (I'm May! I'm crazy!) and the primal sex monkey part is not the one with the keys to the kingdom. I am sober, you know. So very very very sober. It's not like I can go out with friends, get a couple of drinks in me and loosen up enough to sit back in my chair, much less let the hair down and peek over the glasses with that look that means come hither, that means maybe, I take the glasses off. No, I avoid all such situations. The compliments on my appearance I get are from old ladies at the grocery store. They like my buns, and they are not referring to my ass.
Today is the fifteenth anniversary of my car accident and I have to mention that here because it is on my mind. I do not recommend getting hit by a car, but I will say that for the first few years after the accident it imbued me with a great courage and confidence. After seeing my bones come through my skin, after watching my wounds weep red stained yellow tears, after waking up each morning crying before I even opened my eyes, falling on my hop-step way to the bathroom and waiting for someone to come along to pick me up, after all that normal life seemed so sweetly tame. The girls who intimidated me no longer had tigers in their eyes, the boys who would not give me the time of day were whitewashed selfish and preening. If I wanted to do something, like get in my truck and drive west alone with no map and no phone, I did it. If I wanted a job I just went to the place where I wanted to work and asked for a job. If I needed a cheap place to live I called a man I'd never met who I heard charged only $111 a month for one side of a duplex and instead ended up living with him, for free. Why not? But now it's been fifteen years and life has stepped in. At some point a few years ago I realized I was afraid again, and that scared the hell out of me. When I got sober, I made my life very very safe.
Part of getting sober in AA is doing a sexual inventory. You write down every sex thing you have ever done and you read it to someone. The point of this is to figure out where you have harmed others, where you've been selfish or destructive, so you can break your patterns and make amends when necessary. I thought it was great. I would go to meetings and say "So, I'm doing my sex inventory and I was thinking about the time when I was in bed with two of my coworkers..." not knowing that most people do not talk about their sex inventory at meetings. Cancer, yes. Bad haircut, yes. Sex inventory? Not so much. They'll listen, oh yes, they will listen, but talking about it seems to make everyone shy. I wasn't ashamed of my sexual behavior as much as I was ashamed of my regular drunken convivaling and besides, it wasn't nearly so interesting as I've heard through the rumor mill that it was. Three-way with the coworkers? Never happened. I enjoyed the moment but hopped out of bed before the deed was done, shouting thank yous for a lovely evening and stealing three Newcastles out of the fridge before sneaking off into the night. I'm a story whore, a make-out slut, but I get as twisted and tight as my professional hair when faced with actual promiscuity. Sigh.
So now what's a girl to do? I'm getting wrinkles around my eyes and sag around the back. If my 31 year old breasts are perky but there is no one around to see them, do they still perk? How does one go from talking about kazoos and the weather to slipping off the skivvies? I don't think it will happen at the coffeeshop, or good lord, at the Publix.
And I'm not crazy, I'm waiting to fall in love. I'm waiting for that moment of head rush, for my neck to prickle and my stomach to heave. Sex for sex sake is a young woman's game. One who believes that a tumble bump means she's beautiful, or that a warm body keeps the cold out of her own. I have showers. I have a lovely cat. Besides, I have a lot to do. I need to clean out the refrigerator and learn to cartwheel on the left side. Busy busy.
Amanda Ziller once said "Birth, copulation and death. One day I was born, someday I shall die, today I will copulate." Today, I will probably not copulate. Today I will walk to the intersection that knocked my bones out and cross the road, and then cross back. I will go to the grocery store. I will get chocolate and I will get bananas. I will stick one of those things in the freezer and one on the stove, and tonight when the cold comes in the windows and the moaning ululations reach with sticky fingers to my ears, I'll sidestep my wicked tender brain's dreamplan by distracting it with cool and sweet. You want chocolate covered bananas, you psuedo-Freudian charlatan? Here you go. You can have chocolate covered bananas. All. night. long.

From The Diary of Miss May E. Thigpen Upon Meeting Her Nephew

2009-09-29T05:23:00.000-07:00

I saw my baby nephew for the first time yesterday.
He is beautiful. We all say he is beautiful! He is perfect. He looks like a changeling, with his very serious face, those hooded eyes and very important eyebrows. His nose is like a cupcake turned upside down and his little mouth is full on top and tucked lower lip that gets dragged into the tiny knob of his chin by his heavy, dewy cheeks. He is pink, and has long, long fingers. His legs are long as well like a jumping frog with the same narrow hips and his feet have prominent heels and monkey toes. His ears make me think of shells cut crossways, or maybe just one perfect nautilus in half because they match of course and are on either sides of his noggin in just the right places. They are soft and have good lobes. Mama says he bleats like a goat when he is squalling, but I think he sounds like a boy. I have not looked overmuch at his tummy but I suspect it too, is perfect.
It was the strangest feeling to hold him. He is not my boy, but he is my blood, and it was more like looking into my sister's face than just any other baby. Jason said when he first saw him, his heart just dropped. I was not so much aware of my heart but more like I'd been missing something and here he was. Sometimes we talk about Jessie, and how she was an accident, but we can't imagine our lives without her- that yawning space she would leave without us ever knowing how empty we were. Here it is again. Hello. Here you are. We've been waiting for you, little man.
To speak of him in the clumsy words we have and to give the full weight of how I feel about him I would have to say I am in love with this boy. Then if you were to say Well, if you love him so much why don't you marry him? I'd say, Shut up, You Stupid Fool. I already have.

Welcome

2009-09-26T17:10:00.000-07:00

He is here! I'll let Mama get home and get some rest and tell you all about it, but from what I know, Owen Curtis Hartmann fell to Earth around 4:40 this afternoon. Both Mother and child are safe and healthy. He is beautiful.

Hopefully next update will include a baby.

2009-09-26T10:05:00.000-07:00

Still laboring, everyone is exhausted. They gave her an epidural so she can rest, and when she wakes she'll start on pitocin. Mama wanted me to log on here and tell everyone that Lily is the bravest* woman she's ever seen give birth, and that's saying a lot. Also, the resident on the floor right now doesn't know his head from his ass, if there is a difference. (Okay, she didn't want me to say that, but I thought it was funny.) I'm still Typhoid Mary, so I'm quarantined at the house. I think my boss thinks I'm faking because I've been saying I have a fever since Sunday night. HELLO! IT'S THE FUCKING FLU! As if I'd fake sick while my SISTER IS IN LABOR!

Sorry, I must be feeling better, because I'm more pissed off than I was yesterday. Ah, the trippy Zen of fever dreams....

Anyway, keep us in your thoughts (Lily, Owen, and the crew at the hospital). They sound plumb wore out.

*Um, she may have said "More Grace" as in "Lily is handling her labor with more grace than any laboring woman I've ever seen." Sorry, not sure. I am still running a fever.

Here We Go

2009-09-25T06:34:00.000-07:00

The day my sister Lily was born, there were a hundred people at the house and my brother and I ran wild. My mother wore amethyst beads around her neck and a tie-died shirt of Daddy's and nothing else, and though her belly was huge her legs were still the envy of every woman in the world.

When we have birthdays in my family we start out like that. At some point, in the midst of kebab making or sushi rolling or river wandering, someone will say, On the day you were born... and the story will get told. In mine, Hank is entrusted to the care of Aunt Lynn, who wisely braids her long golden hair into two braids the way my mother wore hers, to give him something to hold onto. In Hank's, there is an honest attempt at natural childbirth with only a book and a woman who had given birth before as guides. In the story of Jessie I chime in, carrying the thread of the story to say, And as you slipped from the womb, Anne-Helena got so excited that she pushed my face into her very impressive bosom and I missed the whole thing. Lily's birthday is in two days, but today, today she is in labor with her own child.

I have the flu.

Owen, I will say, On the day you were born, I had the flu. Your Mama went into labor at 5:30 in the morning, and your Uncle Hank called me and woke me up at 8:30 to tell me the good news and to say that he and Aunt Jessie and Auntie Taylor were going to breakfast.

So funny this day. It is beautiful and sunny and warming, there is a hush so far and not too much of a busy. I am very aware of the birth story that is unfolding right now and I am doing my best to make only right actions today. My cat is playing Monster Under The Sheet and I am wrestling with my sore hips and rusty bones, but I am clean and I washed with rose soap.

I called Mama and made sure that Lily is wearing her amethyst beads and she is that makes me cry, I don't know why. I want to be there to look into her eyes and to feed her honey and to rub her feet, but instead I am trying to get my fever down and crying over a lavender necklace.

Mama gave that necklace to me some years ago, probably because I borrowed it so many times. It took me a while to get over my selfish and narcissistic desires, I loved that necklace for it's light catching beauty, for the purple shadow it threw against my collarbone. The winter I first got sober, I gave it to Lily. It was always hers, anyway.

She is wearing it now, and laboring. She has thrown up (which is Wonderful, Mama says) and her contractions are regular, though short. They will be at this all day.

I can not tell you how proud I am of this girl.

On the day Lily was born, I was not afraid, because my Mama was the strongest woman in the world, and I myself was proof she could do it. Now Owen is getting born, and I am not afraid. Lily is the strongest woman in the world, with the biggest heart and the longest legs and the arms made for holding and a well inside her deep and pure. She may have to dip into that well today, deeper than she ever has before, but it will never be empty. Her strength has no bottom.

Owen, on the day you were born, I had the flu. But my every waking thought was you. My every stretch a lean toward you. My very dreams a moving train to you to you to you. And every moment before and after you are born is love for you.

Come on Baby, we are waiting.

For Michelle.

2009-09-17T11:41:00.001-07:00

Happy Baby Meat.

For Lily.

2009-09-16T18:54:00.000-07:00

Plus, I was getting tired of looking at all that meat.

Health Care. You've been Warned.

2009-09-09T05:17:00.000-07:00

No doubt everyone who comes here has already been over to Bless Our Hearts and read my mother's post about the health care debate, and the comments that followed. Some of the people who commented are new to her blog, and felt the need to tell her how wrong and backward she is. I of course, wanted to jump in, eyes blazing, and pick apart each comment one by one. It is the daughter in me, the badger, but I realize that her blog is not mine to defend. She does a fine job of that already. Luckily, I have my own.

This is not a democracy. This is not a newspaper. This is Roll Up The Rugs, and these are my thoughts and feelings. If you don't like them, be happy that you are free to write your own damn blog.

I'm not for communism. Okay, sure, in high school I entertained the notion that it seemed like a good idea, but since then I have seen that it is a good ideal and not a very good idea at all. It doesn't work, it never has, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with public health care. I don't know why people keep bringing it up.

I happen to like capitalism. I like the American Dream. I like that I can work for my money and buy whatever the hell I like with it. I like that, if I wanted to, I could take classes and work hard and get a job that allows me to climb a ladder and get to the top and make a bunch of money and eventually own a house in Paris and St. Tropez and go to the Isle of Capri and not worry about breaking my leg and being able to afford to go to the doctor. I like that I have that option, but the fact is that we can't all do that.

I'm not saying that we don't all have the potential to do that, I'm saying that in order for this country to run, we absolutely can't all do that. It wouldn't work. It's fine and well to say that we are all free to make our own money and take care of ourselves, but really, we can't.

Do we like our restaurants? Our grocery stores? Do we like to buy meat, purchase clothes, find new music to listen to? Do we like to have clean toilets wherever we go? Do we like to be able to walk down the street without stepping over dead dogs? Do we like to have someone else get an armpit full of hot oil as they pull the oil filters from our cars every few months so we don't have to? Do we like the service desk at Target? Do we like to stop at well-stocked gas stations when we are on long road trips? Do we like our lives, our clean and comfortable lives in this country? If so, we better be pretty damn thankful that a huge amount of people are willing to work in low paying jobs to make this lifestyle actually happen.

Poor people are not necessarily lazy, they are just poor. People, real, living breathing people pick the vegetables, slaughter the meat, cook the food, clean the restrooms, sweep the parking lots, paint the houses, stock the shelves, iron and steam the clothes (that come from Paris, that come from India, that come from Mexico), change the oil, deliver the goods. Human beings write the music that inspires, that makes our hearts open. They paint the pictures that make us think, or catch our breath, or break our hearts. They take the photographs. They self educate so that they can give us information about the toys we want to buy, they fix our phones and our computers. They write the books. People do everything that must be done in order for having money to mean anything at all.

And most of these people do so without health insurance.

Whenever I hear someone say that they don't want to pay for someone else's health care because those other people have the same opportunities as everybody else, and that it is their own fault that they haven't made more of themselves in this free country, I get confused. The ones among us that are privileged enough to have the jobs that provide the money that pay for health insurance should be pissing themselves with joy that there are so many people willing to do all the things that they do not want to do. Personally, I like being a waitress. People like being served. Do you like being served by a sick waitress? Do you want your butcher to come to work with the flu?

That's really what it comes down to for me. I'm not even going to get into the fact that emergency care costs all of us more in the end than preventative, and so we end up paying for it anyway. I'm not even going to bring that up. (ha.) What I am going to say is this: If you like your capitalistic lifestyle, you must accept that you are able to have it because of the hard work of people who have less than you. In order to continue living the way we do, we must take care of those who provide the goods and services that keep us happy and content. This is not communism. This is simply what it takes to let the rich enjoy their riches.

Now go enjoy your filet mignon, tip your waitress, and shut the fuck up.

Just a little bit of nothing

2009-09-02T04:22:00.000-07:00

It's been too long between posts but the words won't come. The words come, but not the connective tissue. Wanderlust. Fall. Raindrops. Waitress. Heartbeat. Love, love, or lack thereof.

I've written for an hour and deleted every word. I feel like the world is in motion now, or my world, my world is in full spin, where it has been stalled for so long. I feel there is a change a coming, but I always feel that when the fall comes.

I like my new job. I like the restaurant, the people, the food. I like the mood of the place, the lighting is forgiving of my oh so recently sedentary ass. If I ever decide that I'm going to take time off again to figure out my life, will someone please knock me down? Please remind me that a body in motion stays in motion. Still, the time off has made me thankful for the movement. I'm sick to death of laying around, as much as I needed it.

But back to work and being busy. The working makes my mind work and perhaps that's why I cannot write. I can't sit still. I walk and paint and clean. I feel the desperate need to clear the dust out of my corners, in my body as well as my home.

The rain is really coming down now. There was no sunrise today. A long time ago I was in Guatemala and my friends and I climbed to the top of the Jaguar Temple at Tikal in the dark to see the sun rise over the ruins. We sat for hours and though we saw the purple flowers and we heard the scream of monkeys, there was no sunrise, just a slow and gradual lightening. So we climbed down.

I'd like to go back there. Who will take me? Who would like to go? I don't think they are burning buses anymore.

I don't know if it is the motion of getting a job that gives me the wanderlust, or if it is the change of the season that gives me the motion that allows me to get a job, and the coolness of the air through my open nighttime windows that makes me dream of highways, but it is raining and there was no sunrise today.

Lately I am thinking that I seen so many beautiful things, but those are only a tiny tiny bit of the beautiful things to see. I have seen snow on yucca. I have seen breastfeeding babies. I have seen wildflowers on train tracks. I have seen a toucan in the jungle. I have seen a scorpion as big as a kitten. What is there to see that I don't know is there to see? And so my mind jumps.

I'm going to give up on this tattered post and I do apologize for it. If you live in Tallahassee I invite you to come downtown and float boats down Franklin Avenue with me as I do not work today. We might catch cold, but we might also catch a frog, you never know.

Three Observations and a Roll Up The Rugs Challenge!

2009-08-17T08:03:00.000-07:00

My cat is a crazy bitch and I can't write. Of course, it occurs to me that that sentence would be equally true if reversed.

I have a block. I am blocked. I can't even write in my journal, because the pens are too scritchy and the air is too moist and Tropical Storm Claudette is making my ass hurt and I am on my Period (sorry boys) and because of that I am so puffy, so bloated, if anyone saw me they'd think I just got off a five day bender. I only wish I had knees. You can call me M. E. Puff-in-stuff. I should be in burka, but as I am not Muslim, I am in a dress that is both too short and too wide. It reminds me of the dress Kurt Russell tried to pass off to Goldie Hawn in Overboard that inspired her to say, "I was a short..... fat..... lush?"

Really, the reason I can't write is because nothing is going on with me. I've decided that if anyone asks me what I've been up to lately I'm going to say Oh, you know, bringing sexy back but that is simply not true. I'm unemployed and under stimulated. I dropped off some resumes last week and one place told me to call back tonight so the fantasy is they'll say Yes! We'd love to hire you! You start next week! because I need the job and God forbid they want me to come in tomorrow before the swelling goes down. If they could see me now they'd say Oh, I'm sorry, we just don't have room for the Macy's Day Parade right now, but check back around Thanksgiving! Of course, there's a huge possibility that they will have already hired Boo-Boo the disher's cousin and they'll have forgotten me entirely. There is always that.

So as I have nothing to say, here are some things that I've been thinking about lately:

(1) When you buy trail mix from the health food store it tastes like what it is: dried fruit and nuts. The fruit is chewy and sweety sourish and the nuts are crunchy and meaty. It is delicious and it makes you feel very earthy and righteous, like maybe you are a lumberjack or Jesus or a Lumberjack For Jesus, or maybe a Norwegian. When you buy trail mix from the drugstore or the gas station, no matter what, it tastes like it was made in an airport out of great plastic vats that have been sitting open long enough to absorb a smell of carpet and desperation, and for the fruit to become hard and the nuts to become soft and banal. It tastes as though a donut has farted in it.

(2) Do you remember those commercials for Summer's Eve (at least I think it was Summer's Eve) where the girl goes to her mother and says, Mom? Do you ever have that.... not so fresh feeling? I think about those commercials a lot. They came out when I was a child and they scared me. I wondered if being afraid of the smell of your own vagina was an inevitability of growing up. Now I know that if you have a not so fresh feeling that can't be taken care of by a shower, chances are you are a skanky bitch. You need to go to the doctor. Really. Also, how vague were those commercials? It wasn't exactly obvious that they were talking about the vagina. If I was the mom I'd be like, Maybe you need to shave your armpits because that is what I do when I have a not so fresh feeling and it works. Those commercials would have sold a lot more douche if they showed only men saying, Bob, I can always smell my girlfriend's vagina. THAT would've sold SHIT TONS of Summer's Eve! Or even Summer's Eve- it's a shower for your cunt! Truth in advertising.

(3) Fashion forecast: Skinny jeans and sushi are on their way out. They will try to sell you last year's skinny jeans but do not fall for it. Chances are you have a butt and some thighs maybe and they make you look like a triangle. Give them to your little brother because even if he is fat, they will look better on him. And he will need them because I think they are going to try to bring back pleated pants, which won't go over well because no one ever liked them to begin with. They have the charm of a belted garbage bag and the added bonus of creating a pocket of moist heat in your crochular area, which may give you a not so fresh feeling and will inspire a resurgence of Summer's Eve and fungal sprays. This may be good for the economy because it will force you to buy things to correct the problems that other things you bought will bring, but that does not mean it will be a Good Idea. Ass shorts will give way to stretch pants, yoga will give way to ballet, and Thai food will be the new sushi, which means that the approximately 425 new sushi restaurants in Tallahassee will be SOL but you can eat all the pad thai you want because you will only look as fat as everyone else in your pleated pants.

Okay, that's it. Three observations are pretty much my max. I'll keep you posted on my possible employment. Hopefully soon I'll have something worthy to write about. Here's a challenge to all who wish to accept: Try to bring sexy back. Report. 500 words or less. Good Luck! (Successes and failures welcomed equally. Roll Up The Rugs is not responsible for any injury due to attempts to bring sexy back. Pictures appreciated.)

Ms. Moon is gone to Mexico and I stay in her house

2009-07-28T16:05:00.000-07:00

My mother's house. It is truly beautiful out here.
When I was in high school this house belonged to my friend's family. Her mom and dad were married underneath an oak tree out in the yard, over by where my mother's garden is now. The oak tree is gone, and my friend's parents are divorced, but they produced three beautiful children and this was where it started.
In high school my friend brought us out here. At that time were a tight group of mostly girls, one boy. One time we all got on a canopied bed that was in what is now the library and traded off massages. One of us would lie in the middle and the rest would settle at her head, her hands, each of her feet. It was heaven. Another time we ate acid and walked down to the railroad tracks and stood five feet from the train (which was as close as we could bear to get) and we screamed into it's oncoming horror and it roared back and we could not hear ourselves scream.
Now it is my mother's house, and no one could mistake it for anything else.
My mother is a homemaker. By that I mean that she is able to make a home, which I think is more rare than people realize. My mother has light and color in her soul and she is able to bring all that up and out, through her hands, through her eyes. She understands that being around beauty makes you a better person and so she fills her surroundings with beautiful as if her house is an extension of herself, and it is. To walk into my mother's house is to walk into her.
Everywhere there is something to look at, something good to rest your eyes on. I see a chime. I see a doll. I see a feathered mermaid. I see a virgin. I see a chair with curve, a flowered cloth, a chicken lamp. There are pitchers of flowers here always, she brings the outside in.
Oh, and the outside.... When Mama is here and we come visit she takes us out on walkabout. She points out her new babies and her old babies, telling us their stories- where she found them, which ones she rooted, which ones are lovely mysteries. We wander through the garden and she pulls cucumbers from vines and from furry stems tomatoes that are so sweet they taste sugared, and she puts these in our open hands and goes for more. There are flowers here in purples and pinks and reds, and succulents that are jade on top and magenta on the bottom. There are plants that shine like gold and plants that are the color of fresh bruise.
While my Mama is not here, we (her children) watch over the house and the chickens. I would put up pictures of their funny surprised faces but I have no camera so I will have to tell you. They miss her, these chickens. She calls them all by name and they eat out of her hands. I tell them they are fine chickens, such pretty chickens! And they are greedy little buggers too. They bumrush the collards and the watermelon, they snatch a flung cockroach from each other like drunk-mad bridesmaids to a bouquet. They sidle and cluck, one eye on me, then the other, sidle sidle step-hop feet and cluck. These chicken ladies have bosoms that make me feel inadequate, and they are lucky they are so pretty and I don't eat meat.
I have not seen the front step toad. I think he is waiting for Mama to return.
The whole house is waiting for Mama to return. It has taken a great inhalation and rests patiently. I think a house can hold it's breath for a long long time.
She will not want to come back. She never does when they go to Mexico. But she will, and once here she will be glad. There are chickens. There is a baby on the way. She will breathe in her house and her house will breathe with her, relieved to hear her footfall and her laugh, relieved to see Mr. Moon duck his head when he comes through the door. Did you know there are love notes from him to her tacked on cabinets, tucked behind photographs, all over the house? A woman in love always returns to the place her love notes are kept.
Until then we will wait, the house and I, for her to return and make this place her home once again. This is a beautiful house and I love to be here, but my Mama is my home.

Behold, the stair car.

2009-07-24T10:33:00.001-07:00

Two Walks, Same Day.

2009-07-22T15:05:00.000-07:00

Ten AM today and I was leaping down the stairs fueled by goat yogurt, four cups of coffee, and an extremely satisfying journal write. The sky looked like a pool with the pale horizon shallow end and the view above where children dare not stray for fear they will sink into the universe, there was a breeze and I was wearing my flappy green shorts. I was ready to hit it, and hit it hard.

On the way out while crossing a street I noticed that an iron pipe cover had come loose, and feeling warm toward my fellow man I kicked it back into place, barely breaking stride. I thought Yay Me! as I speed walked past all the men and women in ill fitting business suits carrying plastic Publix bag lunches and looking pissed, as we all do when we are going to work and the day is hot.

The walk was fine and so was I. There was no more walking, it was all flying, the people, the birds, the buildings and the cars all a blur and I sang songs under my breath and felt assured that I looked no more crazy than I really am.

Halfway through my walk and I've already passed the Witch Family House, the Fairy Family House, a former apartment of a friend where I always holler HEY JOE!, the House of Strange Trash (today it is still the matrice set complete with sheets, the other day it was a box of Easter paraphernalia), and the Tree That Grows Out Of the Sidewalk (that knobby bitch always tries to trip me up but I can dodge and feint with the best of them). Now is the Big Hill. It's not a very high hill but it is a very long hill, it is the hill that I was never able to run the entire humping length of it at one go before my screaming bones told me to stop fucking running. I don't even try to run it, I'm in it for endurance not Popeye calves, and so I walk like the hounds of hell are nipping at my heels (but only the walking hounds of hell) and I pretend that I am in a race and I am winning.... until.... Until a crazed mother mockingbird dive-bombs my head and again and Yes Ma'am I am Running! I am running up this motherfucking hill with the now running hounds of hell and the dive bombing mockingbird from hell and I am doing those crazy arm whipping motions around my ducked head thinking Not the eyes! Please God don't go for my eyes! and now I am at the top of the hill! I am fucking Iron Man!

Now the coffee has worn off but the adrenalin is full free flowing, I round the bend, I pass the German Lady House, I pass the Italian Man House, I pass the What-the-fuck-someone-painted-two-fucking-knights-of-the-round-table-on-the-wall House, I can't be stopped, I won't slow down, it feels too good. I get to the Korean War Memorial and do my soft shoe flim-flam shuffle that firms my abs and plumps my butt up the curvy path and down the curvy path, faster than I've ever done it before, an old man watches- his mouth open in pure amazement. I am Youth! I am Vigor! And then as I am crossing the street that leads to my street and almost home I bust my toe on that same damn iron pipe cover that I kicked back into place not an hour before. Foreshadowing people, powerful stuff. I almost go ass over tea kettle but I'm crossing a damn street and if there is one thing I will not do it is fall down in the middle of the road.

Shake it off, Slugger I tell myself, channeling Shoeless Joe Jackson I pull out of my stumble and go for home. It's not wrong to finish strong I tell myself The toe's not broke if you can still kick ass.

Post protein shake and shower, the busted toe and murderous mockingbirds aside, it seems like a good idea to walk to the library. This is a chillin' walk, a saunter in my summer skirt with the lace at the hem that kicks out over my tanned (ahem) calves and flip-flop clad feet. It's hot but it feels good, which is pointed out to me by another old man, this one on a ladder painting a house. We agree we live in Florida, we agree we like the heat, we grin thinking about all those suckers who live in northern climes, we bid good day.

The library is there in all it's bookly glory. The librarians are ornery, the homeless men are grunting craziness, the children load their mothers up and dash away to get more books already forgetting the ones in arms. I got two talkies and three fat eye-reading novels full of potential. I am as satisfied and excited as a dog with an unwatched cake.

On the way home two girls in a white Camero honk an air horn at me, laugh hysterically, and then honk at a guy on a bike who swerves into the next lane and narrowly misses getting creamed by oncoming traffic. The girls laugh again and speed up. But guess what ladies! There is a red light up ahead and I AM PISSED. Gone is my sunny day and disposition. Gone is my warm regard for fellow man. In two seconds I am standing by their car.

Roll down your window. I shout at the glass.

No! Screams the girl, looking at her companion.

Roll down your fucking window! I say, my words and eyes steel.

They do. They comply. The girls are at the most 17 and pretty. They squint their doe eyes at me, looking up through matching curtains of over highlighted hair. I pull out my cell phone.

I am calling the cops. I have your licence plate number and I am calling the cops right now. It is illegal to blow an air horn out of your car in traffic. You could've killed that dude.

Bitch. Says the girl in the passenger seat.

You're a bitch. That guy could've died.

The window goes back up at the same time the light turns green. They speed away. I put the cell phone back in my pocket and walk on down the road. As the light works its way back into my eyes and the blood drains from my face I see a stair car driving down the street and I stop to watch thinking about that show Arrested Development and I realize I am smiling. It's a good day to be alive my friends, a very good day indeed.

Ode to a Rose

2009-07-08T21:20:00.000-07:00

I have a sister and her name is Lily Rose, and she is pregnant.

When Mama was pregnant with this sister I was seven. I had an older brother but until then I had been the baby. I don't remember if I was reluctant to relinquish that position, I only remember being excited. I told my friends at school that I was going to be a big sister soon, and that she would be born at home, and that I would get to see.

I'd seen pregnant ladies before, but none so close up and personal as this. I watched my Mama's belly grow to outrageous proportions and I accepted it as the norm. My Mama was my first baby maker teacher and she was a very good one. It did not seem easy to carry this baby. Mama sweated through the hot Florida summer with that belly poking out. She washed herself in cold Wakulla waters, she ate chili dogs, she wrapped herself in magnificent zebra print maternity, and sometimes a scarf flecked with rose and gold tight around her middle, and no it did not seem easy but she made it glamorous.

When my sister came we were allowed to stay home from school. As my Mama labored, walking around the house and deck wearing only amethyst beads and my stepfather's tie-dyed t-shirt, her friends came outside and told us not to be afraid.

My brother and I were not afraid! We had been told all about this! We had been told by our very own Mama! We were busy playing! All day we made everyone wreaths of morning glory to wear in their hair to welcome the baby, and we played our secret made-up games where my brother was the king and I was everyone else.

That is how Lily came into the world, with friends and family all around. I remember there were so many flowers and so many of them were lilies and roses.

Lily was my first baby teacher. I learned how to squish her rubbery little arms into tiny cotton shirts, I learned how to change a cloth diaper and wipe a wee butt. I learned how to walk and walk with her baby bean body until my skinny arms were cheese and I had to pass her off to someone else.

Sometimes I was not the best big sister. She was a force from the moment she was born, a howling tempest with feet that stamped the air and fists raised high in grand protest. I lost my temper. I lost my patience. My mother lost her sleep and her mind. I got off easy.

Here's the deal- we always talk about how difficult she was but what we forget to say is that she did not frighten us off. When Mama got pregnant again three years later I never once thought Oh God here we go again.... I was just as excited for another. As feisty as she was, I loved her furiously. I used to make nests for her on the floor out of blankets and toys all around so that wherever she looked there was something fun. She had a stuffed caterpillar that she called a callipiller and so I called her Lilipiller, and I still do.

Now she is all grown up and the girl who was my first baby teacher is now my second baby maker teacher.

I haven't written about her pregnancy because my Mama has done such a good job at that over at Bless Our Hearts, but I was looking at her today and she looked tired and a little worn and oh so beautiful. I have never seen such a beautiful woman in my life.

She glows, she really does. I watch her belly grow and it is not so much a swelling as it is a blossoming. She was lovely before but now she is opening, like, yes, a rose. When I'm around her I want to touch her, I want to press my face to her skin, rub her under my chin like a buttercup. I want to smell her. She smells like baby.

I never would have guessed that this girl, this baby, would have a baby before me but I am lucky for it. If and when I am so blessed I only hope that I will have one half the grace she does now.

My luv is like a red red rose. She walks in beauty like the night. I have no words, no words to speak of her or of how I love her. I have a sister. Her name is Lily Rose and she is pregnant.

Look at someone else, Learn about myself

2009-07-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

I'd like to talk about pain. Not the pain of heartbreak, although a friend of mine asked me about that the other day because he'd never experienced that before. I told him that it was the worst to get your heart really broken, the most physical and emotion tearing you can imagine and the worst part of it is no one cares.... but no. Heartbreak, blah. If you're lucky you'll know it. It's bad but it's boring. Unless you're going through it and the I'm sorry for you. Go ahead and call me at 4:AM and I will drowse while you cry.

Ah but pain. Pain the body breaking down. Pain an injury. Pain a break. Pain a smash. Pain a growth that knocks your insides around. Pain with jagged edges, with teeth that bite and claws that catch. It's so personal and so relative and we really don't know how to deal with it.

My sweet girl, my baby sister Honey Luna just posted on her blog, Finding Those Dulcet Tones talking about her knee pain, and discovering that after all these years of us telling her that it's nothing, it's something. I feel bad about this.

Not too bad. I'm not rending my clothes or anything, and actually I'm glad that it's something, that she can get it fixed. She just.... well, it's a matter of timing.

This girl grew up so fast. I mean that literally. At one point she was small, and then over a few short years she grew about three feet. It was a foot a year, like a teak tree, and sometimes I thought that I could see her growing before my eyes, and her legs hurt. Now when I see her I say, "Nice Stems Baby-Cakes!" but of course her legs hurt her! She is not a tree, she is a Girl. Bones and tissue and muscle, sinew and tendon, racing and unfurling inside her stretching skin, she hurt. When her knees started hurting she was still growing and we were used to saying "Oh Baby, you hurt because you are tall". In retrospect it doesn't make a lot of sense, but none of us can deal with the pain of those we love. We didn't want to get down in the guts of her pain and ask, "Is this a new pain? Describe your pain."

Describe your pain. Well. It's an aching. Sometimes. And a sharp where it should be smooth. It feels like a crunch, and I may have gear sheers in there, but sometimes it is a jump pain like a shot that makes you jump. I have a buzzing, there is a tender buzzing that is pink but when it is red there is a stinging and then the bits are all angry. Sometimes it is not a pain at all but a weight, the area is filled with lead I have to drag it and it doesn't move when I tell it to move and sometimes I fall. Sometimes the pain is a coming out pain, like the bones are swelling and will burst through my skin and sometimes the pain is a smashing crushing, an ever so slow and tightening vise that turns and turns. Something like that.

That's my pain, from my magically healed bum leg, that gives me my sexy gimp walk (Gimps up, ho's down) but what good does it do to say it?

I remember when I was in recovery from my accident and nurses would ask me to rate my pain, 1-10. I really stressed out about that, probably because I was all wooped up on percoset and morphine, but what I wanted to know is, what are their reference points? If I said 3, what does that mean to them? All they wanted to know was could I stand it and did I need more medication but it seemed so existential to me. How do you rate pain? Every day you live your pain meter changes, every one's is different. Have you had a child? Do you suffer migraines? Have you been punched in the nose and boy that hurt? Is your pain as bad or worse than when you swallow a potato chip you haven't chewed properly? Is your pain as bad or worse than if someone were to stand on your calves and wiggle around? Have you been hit by a car? Have you any tears and cysts in your knee?

It reminds me of when old men joke about stomping on your foot to take your mind off the pain of your ear. THAT would actually be helpful. YES! YES IT HURTS WORSE THAN THAT!

Then there's my girl, and how she's been walking around so tough. We do want to be so tough, don't we? We don't want to complain, because we don't want to be complainers or martyrs or, god forbid, pussies. But who has the wimp-o-meter? Where are the pain police?

I don't feel too bad about not addressing my sister's pain, because she has been so quiet about it, but what I do feel bad about is maybe I like that I'm in pain? That I gain some sort of sick personal power from my constant ache? I don't hurt myself on purpose, but somewhere down the road of dealing with my chronic pain I've made it into one of the things that makes me special. And I want to be special. And I think that this has made me less sympathetic when someone else is in pain. Instead of feeling tender toward them I feel a cold comradeship. I don't like this side of myself. I don't know how I could have gotten to the place where I thought misery made me anything but miserable. I'm only really able to see this now because I do feel tender toward my sister, if there is any one on this earth I feel that soft protectiveness for it is my baby sisters. How can I call myself kind when I am so unkind and so uncharitable toward the people around me, and to myself?

It's such a delicate balance between being strong and stone. I am not glad that my loved ones feel pain, but I am grateful that there are people I love that help me see the softness in my heart, and the selfishness too. I'm so glad that her knees can be fixed, and that some pain is not necessary.

Ah me, this has ended up so far from where I thought I was going. Start out so sassy and end up so introspective. I have to learn to be more gentle. And not so serious all the damn time.

Okay Honey Luna! Get your knees fixed girl! You are far too tall to not be able to squat.

We Are Still Cool. Thanks Dads.

2009-06-21T08:39:00.000-07:00

Happy Smappy, Hanky Slanky

2009-06-08T03:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we went to the river.

Day before yesterday I was being a baby about it.

"I don't want to go to the river", I told my Mama. "I don't like to be on a boat. You can't walk around, you can't leave, you can't pee when you want to. Then we're going to a bar. If there's any place I want to eat and drink to excess, it's in a bar by the river."

"If it's beyond your comfort zone, you don't have to go" she said.

"It's for Hank, of course I will go."

I am a forgetful girl, and a contrary girl. Sometimes I can be a very stubborn girl, but if there's one thing I should remember, it's to trust my brother.

My brother is a genius. He taught himself to read when he was three using the Playschool play desk. I only learned how to read when he stopped being so kind as to read to me. I was seven. He told me when I was eleven that I did not feel the opposite of love when I purported to hate my first-kiss boy, that disinterest was the opposite of love. He taught me the difference between 2-D and 3-D by holding his fist beneath my nose ("THIS is 3-D") when I was five or six. He let me stay ignorant when I thought that a mini skirt was named after Minnie Mouse, and when I thought I could run as fast as the wind. When I went out of my head at college in Sarasota he let me come to him in St.Pete, he took me to vintage shops, he let me walk around in leather and wood platforms I bought there, he bought me bloodthick island juice, and he let me sleep while he wrote my gender studies paper for me. And when he wanted to go to the river for his birthday, I didn't want to go, but I went anyway.

We docked at St. Marks and ate at the Riverside where we could tie up our boat and walk up the ramp. Mama watched me with a keen eye and pointed out the steamed vegetables on the menu. I was smelling the fish and the water, that delicious river stank, and I ordered the peel-and-eat shrimp because I wanted that swamp water in my gut, and I'm glad I did. Our waitress was inept and spacey with leather skin and her lips a violent slash, I wanted to be her for a moment, but I let it pass.

With our bellies full we were all hands on deck and the river looked the other way as we slipped onto her back bone. Shrimp in my mouth and all down my hands, river in my eyes and nose, and boat hum in my ears, I finally relaxed and let it all go.

It is the river and it is June. The jungle on either side of us and at bends up ahead was full-on green, fecund and breathing. Each waterpath away from the main stream gave us glimpses of whole other worlds, adventures of sleeping girls, pirates, and horrible screaming blood sucking spiders, it made my mind go wild while the river kept my heart a steady beat. We saw turtles, we saw birds, we saw a great goddamn boat, and when Daddy climbed the bow to pick a swamp magnolia he did not fall off.

The river is not tied up in knots, it is a loosening thing. I get so twisted in my head sometimes, my face and stomach pinched, trying to work out all the end results so I won't be caught unawares. The slowly slip and glide of the water worked it's magic on me and reminded me that I am just an animal, made to smell and feel and prick up my ears. I felt no pain. We were in paradise all around, and when Daddy took the boat very fast we were flying through it. At one point I even went swimming.

And to think I didn't want to go! Sometimes I think I am quite stupid without my brother. He can make me do anything, thank god.

This week is his birthday, starting yesterday. Hank gets a whole week of birthdays, just because he can. I'm going to dredge up my old self. I'm going to rabble rouse around him. I'm going to punch him and kick him. I'm going to hug him on the neck. Maybe I will get him a goat cart for his birthday! (just kidding) (not kidding) (just kidding) Maybe I will get him nothing! He will love me anyway!

You are a very fine thing, you dastard, you bastard. You may not be thoughtful sometimes, but you are the knowingest man I ever met. Happy Fucking Birthday! I love you till the river falls off the earth, and straight on till morning.

p.s.

If you want to see pictures, go over to my blog list and click on Bless Our Hearts. (Thanks for having our boy, Mama.)

I hope you think I'm cute, because I'm going to talk about my kitten now.

2009-05-28T08:13:00.000-07:00

My kitten is like a robot shark. One time, in a bar (Waterworks, for all you Tallatrashy Lackeys) I conducted a survey to prove my then boyfriend wrong, with resounding success. The survey was made up of only one question: "Robot Shark- Made to bite?" The only answer that makes any sense is "Yes". People who try to question this are assholes. What, a robot shark would be made to sneak into enemy HQ? I think not. Scare children? Perhaps, but children are more easily scared than making an entire GIANT ROBOT SHARK would warrant. Make a movie? Yes, but the role would probably be advertised like this: Wanted for movie/ One Giant Robot Shark/ Made to Bite.

I believe my kitten is made to bite. Her claws are only more razor sharp teeth on the end of her paws. It is not fair for a cute little animal, one that many people seem to think is appropriate to have in the home, has so many teeth in so many places.

She especially likes to bite my toes and ankles, but perhaps that is just because they are generally down on her level and therefore easy access. I have become more adept at leaping and tucking. She gallomps after me and I trot like a Lipizzaner around the tiny apartment. Making coffee has become an entire Riverdance unto itself.

My ass also, she likes to bite. Because I am not tall and I like to have my feet on the floor I tend to perch on the edge of everything I sit on, including the toilet. I had no idea there was so much space behind me back there, enough space for a kitten to jump up, dance around, and bite me on the ass. I think she sees my ass as the enemy because I allow it to play with the toilet paper and she can not.

When I tell my family about this they smile indulgently and say, "Oh, that is what kittens do!" as if this makes it all okay. But I am no fool, I remember Jagger with his horrible mouth teeth and his terrible feet teeth and he was a grown cat and he was a smart cat and before he ran off with Mama's diamond on the day of the Bruce Springsteen concert, his joy in life was to make us cry over our morning breakfast cereal. I also know Baggy, who is the Meanest Cat in the World, who lives with Down Town Guy, and who makes me curse and spit and bleed.

My kitten is becoming not-a-kitten. She eats like a dog and is getting those chunkamonk rolling shoulders of a lion, even if she still has rabbit back feet. We're going to have to come to some sort of a truce as we live here alone with only a mannequin head named Leto and a ceramic squirrel for housemates. My God! She is biting me right now! If I were not such a pussy myself, I'd bite her back.

Monday Song

2009-05-04T06:34:00.000-07:00

It's 9:02 and overcast

the laundry's in

the kitten's bad

when no sun comes

don't feel like day

my bones a ache

and I got lists

and bills to pay

the floors need sweep

the tub needs scrub

the kitten knocks a pitcher down

a break a plate

a break a bone

a brush the hair

a clean window

my feet too hurt

no walk today

but clean them floors

a heave-ho-hey!

make soup a pot

pick beans from stones

and lie like dead

when all it's done.

Please Have More Living

2009-03-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

We had a death this week. My brother, Down Town Guy, wrote about it on his blog TallyHassle, which I would link if I knew how to do that, but if you want you can go to my blog list and click there.

I can't write much about Demitri, I didn't know him well. I knew him in high school when he was a boy, climbing trees, writing and painting. I met him again a few times at parties and gatherings of friends, his face all sharp angles and he was a man.

I went to sit on my brother's steps with our friend who was close to this man, and bear witness to his grief. Then, when it was time to go I gave him a ride home, because he lives almost right across the street from me. His plan, which wasn't his plan at all, was to ride out that night with friends. To drive eight hours through the night to go to the wake in North Carolina.

I suggested we go to the grocery store to get him food for the road. The grocery store was bright and surreal and I remembered a trip I took there at night right after my Aunt Lynn died. I knew I had to get food, I didn't want to be there but I wanted to be home and well stocked and so I had to go. I remember I put things in my basket but I don't remember what those things were. I was hyper aware that every one is in their own world, that you never know what people are going through. Their faces seemed painfully alien to me. I saw one person I knew and I grabbed on to him, pushing my face in his shirt saying "My aunt is dead".

Togi was in shock as we walked the aisles, both of us getting a few things. I had to keep saying, "Would you like to put that in the basket?" because he seemed to forget the items were in his hands the moment he picked them up.

We drove to his apartment and I parked around back, eventually turning off my car to sit and talk and smoke awhile. Togi and I have the most wonderful conversations. There is something about him that lets me say anything, that puts me at peace and allows my true thoughts to come out. I am not afraid of what he will think of me, and I am always curious to know what is on his mind.

We didn't talk about Demitri in concrete terms much. Mostly we talked about life, alcoholism, and death. Not necessarily in that order. He shared two death stories with me, one in which the person was old and in pain and was able to die when she was ready, and one in which the person was young and alcoholic and died horribly, kicking and screaming and saying he was not ready. He told me that he thinks that we live relatively long lives so that we can gradually let go of our egos and then, when it is time, we have very little to give up and we are ready to go. I hadn't thought about it that way and I liked it. I told him I would have to think on that some more.

We talked about alcoholism, and is that any better or different than shooting yourself in the head. The idea of it being that when we are using we are killing ourselves slowly. I suppose the difference is awareness, and the struggle. I brought up people who eat two double cheeseburgers everyday and die of heart attacks when they are 55. I reminded him that, other than the alcoholism and the smoking, he and I are very healthy people who exercise and are vegetarian, and that to live a life that does not hasten your death at all would be a very ascetic life. And besides, I said, the end result is the same. It's what you do before you die, the loving and the living.

We talked about a lot of things and then at one point he said, "All this is true, but it doesn't help." It doesn't help. It doesn't help when your best friend shoots himself in the head. It just doesn't.

I had a moment a couple of weeks ago when I was walking down the road where I all of a sudden desperately felt death so close. It wasn't a feeling that I would die soon or that someone I love would die soon, but a feeling of the inevitability of it, and it was so sharp I thought, "Get Off The Road". Not the physical road that I was walking on, I was on the sidewalk actually, but it was the thought I had when I'd been hit by the car back in the way back and I knew with absolute certainty that if I did not get off the road I would die and I was not ready to die. Then, after I had that thought, it was like a wrenching in my guts, a whirling away from death. Not to run away from death, that would be futile, but to face and to fight my loved ones as they marched toward it. It was a funny thought, me with my back to death, battering back my friends and family, and it snapped me out of the desperation I was feeling but the image stayed with me.

When I was talking with Togi I remembered that, and I didn't bring it up but I tried to tell him that the rest of us left would not leave him. That we would hang on.

Another thing he said was that each death was different, just like how you love people is different for each person. That there is no way to prepare for how you will feel.

I couldn't feel what he was feeling. I could be true but I could not help. I watched the emotions wash over his beautiful face and I thought that the only thing I can do, the only thing any of us can do to help the ones we love is to stay alive for as long as we can. To be careful with ourselves. To keep living our lives, no matter how hard it may seem or how unfair or frustrating. Watching the cavern open up in him, I don't want to cause that rift in anyone else.

When you love someone, their life gets in you and becomes part of your life. When you love someone you are taking an awful gamble. When you let people love you, your life is no longer wholly your own.

I don't blame those that take their lives. For them, it must be a more terrible thing to live, and that is very sad. I suppose that our friend was ready to go, even if we were not ready to let him go. We can never be prepared for how we will feel.

I am thankful to Togi for letting me sit and talk to him. He helped me more I think than I helped him. It's easy to walk around with blinders on and do our work and eat our food and forget what the end result will be. Last year when my friend Jarryd died, he had just that day told me he was happy, that he'd been swimming naked with pretty ladies and spending time with friends. He understood that life was in the living and loving, and that you never know what may happen. I wish I did not have to be reminded of that, but I do, and I am.

I am loving you, you people I love. I am loving your life. I am living for you. I am living and loving you.

So Sweet it Slips

2009-03-11T15:29:00.000-07:00

I'm not angry anymore

There are angels at the door

I have no need to greet the devils

Just a wrasslin on the floor.

And just like that: Spring. Last night my check engine light came on and a strange smell of burn pervaded the interior of my car. I was wearing my nightgown covered by a sweatshirt, flipflops, and nothin' else and I'd left the safety of my home to get cigarettes because god knows when one is in a funk one needs her smokes. It was 10:30 at night and I'd gone to bed early, but I'd woken up in a nightmare of small creatures biting me and something oh-god-what-is-it was hiding behind my door, watching me. So off to the corner store for cigarettes with only my wallet, cell phone left behind.

Car problems frighten me, honestly my heart beat faster when the engine light came on than it had when I woke up from my dream. I parked down the street, scurried inside, slung my sheets over my head and talked myself down until I was dreaming of two sweet baby boys, one for each hip.

The morning came quick and I called my dad. Not the dad that bought my bed, but the other one. He is tall and that's not all, I am a lucky girl indeed to have two such darling daddies. The man came as soon as he had finished his meetings for the day and his soup, and after I had hollered her down from her apartment across the way, my sister was there with me to greet him. As is always the case when Mr. Moon is around, I at once felt everything would be fine.

A couple of hours later and some stops along the way I had a headlight replaced, my battery connectors fixed, and the car left at Pedro's because it suddenly developed a desire to lunge.

I don't know when I'll get the car back, but here's the thing- it's okay. Maybe every angry person should have their car taken away. Taken away when they are hungry, and there is no food in the house. How can I be angry at the world when it is so pretty?

I put my walking shoes on and I stepped out. I love to walk. I don't love to walk for exercise, no, but I love to walk to places. I love that I can just step out the door and put one foot in front of the other and get somewhere, without a car or pedals under my feet. My own sweet legs that work and work well, the slow shift of my thighs, the muscles sliding soft under my skin, the well placement of my ankles to my arches and the strong balance of my toes.

I relearned how to walk in Paris, back when I was married. I watched them walk, and perhaps it is because they use walking as a way to get where they want to go more than we do they seemed long-leggier. We (and here I am generalizing) seem to walk with the idea that it all starts from the knees down. They (and again, really a gross generalization) seem to walk from the highest of their hips, they slang those legs out with a toss and stride, shoulders back, chins up, eyes straight forward. So did I, from the Louvre to the Musee de Orsay, to the Eiffel Tower, and all along the Seine, and I ate some cheese, and I watched people kiss, and I have to say they are good at it.

Tallahassee is not Paris, but it is my home, and by that I mean my heart. I walked to the health food store and I felt my heart and my eyes open. I was hailed by construction workers. I smelled the corner of Magnolia and Park, that always smells like the fair. I saw a half eaten cookie placed carefully on a post a though someone said, "Oh, I've had enough, maybe someone else will want it". My skin sucked in the sun and on the way back I picked pink azaleas that I put in a glass in front of a picture of my sweet Mama and Mr.Moon on my dining table. Later I walked to the library to restock and I had a discussion about Zora Neal Hurston with a man in a tie and sneakers.

I feel humble now and quiet. The sun is setting soon and people are out there driving home. I am so thankful to have my family. I am so thankful to have my legs. I am thank you three times. I am thanks a million. In my kitchen I have arugula and organic tomatoes, a hunk of fish, a cup of tea, I will feast well tonight.

Everything Is Fucking Fine

2009-03-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

So. As of yesterday I am unemployed. I worked my last shift on Sunday, came home, slept for about 14 hours, woke up, ate six biscuits with jam and honey, slept for another fourteen hours and now it is today.

In my last post I wrote about starting up a new business with my family. That same day, I got the call that told me it was not going to happen and yes, I was a little disappointed.

I like to know that things are going to happen, I like to plan. One of the things that drove me so crazy about that job that I just left was the chaos, the inability to make a plan and stick with it.

I understand that life is what happens when we are making other plans. I understand that one must be flexible in life, and that God doesn't close one door without opening another and blah blah blah. I understand that when I am angry at someone I should look within myself to find my own character defects and to see my part in whatever the situation happens to be. I understand all that. I even implement it, staying calm for the most part, doing the next right thing. Or at least doing my best to do what I perceive as the next right thing, and isn't that all we can do really?

But I've hit the wall. I'm angry, and I'm going to let myself be angry because it is a new day and I'm not motherfucking Mary Poppins sent in to make everything better and teach everybody life lessons and then leave when the wind changes. Y'all can all go fly a fucking kite, you might as well, the weather is beautiful.

I stopped seeing my therapist because of my unemployment, but I'll be fine. One thing she told me is that it is okay to be angry and grateful at the same time. That I don't have to feel guilty for my anger, and that sometimes anger is the appropriate emotion in a given situation. Like my accident and the resulting chronic pain. I can be grateful that I did not die and for the life lessons it taught me and for the closeness it gave me with my family, but I can also be angry that I am thirty years old and I'm dealing with decision s that most people don't have to deal with until they are 60 or older. I can be angry that I can't get out of bed without holding onto the wall and I can be angry that I fall over when the weather is changing. I don't have to feel guilty about that, even if I am standing next to someone who has no legs, your leglessness doesn't make my pain go away. Perspective is nice, but the fact is, I live in me, my perspective is through my own blood and my own bones and I have to walk my miles in my own shoes and that's enough.

I'm not angry at my family. How can I be angry at the only people who really like me? Who know me and still think that I'm fun to be around? No, not angry at them. I'm not angry at God. My higher power just doesn't work like that. I am loved by the universe because I am the universe, there's no fair in a swirling mass of what will be will be, my faith and serenity come from knowing that I am meant to be here because I am here, nothing more. So, not mad at God. I'm not even angry at the place I worked. I feel sorry for them, they are not happy, joyous and free. I am just angry. I am an exploding star, a suckpool of snakes. If a bull gets stung by a hornet, is he mad at the wasp, or is he just a snorting madness in general, pissed off to the max that this unexplained burning sting has happened to him? The bull does not stop to blame the wasp or God or the people who build the fence, the bull simply feels his anger, knocks down the fence, kicks and gores everything around him, and eventually feels better. I will be as the bull.

And when I'm done kicking and snorting I will find a new job.

Until then, please do not stand next to me. My massive horns and terrible sparking hooves do not need a hug. I am as I should be. I am one with the universe.

Wherein Miss Maybelle gets a big girl bed and quits her job.

2009-02-23T03:12:00.000-08:00

Listen, if you are going to go crazy and lose yourself and your shit to drugs and alcohol and have to flee an abusive relationship in the middle of the night, it is best if first you were a good person so you have people to call to come circle the wagons. Drug friends are no good for this, trying to get drug friends to circle the wagons is like herding cats. No, you have to reach back for your good people, and whether or not I deserved it when I did, I reached back and I had those good people and it is because of those good people that I am here today. That is not an exaggeration, they saved my life.

I stayed for a hot minute in my friends' house, where they didn't make me pay rent and they didn't ask me for anything and they watched me with nervous eyes until I insisted on my own place and then they helped me move again.

That was a bad time, even with all the help I was getting it was a bad time and I'm not real proud of it. I was not yet in recovery, I'd fallen down a deep hole and had yet to even try to dig myself out but kept insisting that I was. That's the thing about crazy, when you have truly gone crazy you can't even see sane, you have no idea what sane looks like anymore.

I didn't have a bed. I don't think I had a bed since I moved out of my parent's house to go to school when I was eighteen. I slept in a dorm twin at New College, then a futon matrice that fit in my truck bed, then my new husband's bed, then another futon, then a boyfriend's bed... Well, you know, in your twenties it's pretty easy to sleep for years in beds that you don't really own. So when my world fell apart this last time I moved into an apartment and the only furniture I had held my clothes. And goddamn no money, I had to borrow money from my parents to pay my rent and get my utilities turned on, there sure wasn't money for luxuries like beds or shower curtains or say, food. (Stay away from drugs, kids.)

Another old friend of mine just happened to have a twin bed that her daughter (a girl I used to take care of) had grown out of, and they gave it to me. I didn't even think about what a miracle that was at the time- not just a bed but clean sheets as well! The whole shebang, ready to ride! Mama and I set it up and joked that it was a nun's bed. "Nun shall pass" I said, "You aint gettin' nun" says Mama.

I didn't even realize how uncomfortable the damn thing was until I got sober a little over a year ago. Even then, with my broken body and learning how to sleep through the night, well, it worked. It was a bed.

But then, oh glory, a couple of weeks ago, just for sweetness, my dad bought me a New Bed. It is new, it is big, it is wonderful. Honey, it is a Queen. It came wrapped in plastic and everything.

I felt a little funny about accepting such a large gift. I feel like I should, at age 30 and 2/3 be able to buy myself a bed, but the thing about buying yourself something is that there is always something coming up that takes precedent over it. There's Christmas and birthdays and car insurance and the economy's bad and tips aren't good right now and what have you. And I don't live like an addict anymore. I have a shower curtain. I have back-up everything- toilet paper, paper towels, q-tips, shampoo, lotion, toothpaste, bars of soap. When I mop my floor I use a real bucket, I don't have to empty the trash so that I can use the trashcan for that purpose. These may seem like small things but you know most drug addicts don't have a spare roll of paper towels if you come knocking, they just don't. So I swallowed my pride and said, "Thank you, Daddy" like a good girl should regardless of her age and I am so glad that I did.

Did you know that it is possible to sleep all through the night? That when you wake up to pee at four in the morning you can go BACK TO SLEEP? I thought I had insomnia but really I just had a shit ass bed.

Now I'm not saying that the bed has changed everything in my life, but it wasn't but a few days after I got it that I went and quit my job. Look, the bed is paid for, they can't take it away from me.

After getting enough sleep I found that I was not more able to deal with the craziness that goes on at my job. Instead I had the energy to be angry. More and more my boss was reminding me of that crazy drug addicted man that I left a couple of years ago in the middle of the night. Same walking on eggshells, same irrational bursts of anger followed by remorse, same super hero complex. Same me, running around trying desperately to put band aids on everything just trying to get through the day without everything falling apart. Everyone else just sitting tight and trying not to make too much noise, scared she might flip out over the least little thing. No thank you. I will not let another person's insanity run my life, I've got enough of my own to deal with.

I've got a couple more weeks there and eventually, when it's up and running, I'm going to help work that bar that my stepfather is building. It's time I hitched my wagon to the ones that would circle up if I came calling. And I'm going to go back to school. It may seem like utter foolishness to quit a job before another is ready, especially with the economy being as it is, but my hard won sanity is far more important than the one dollar raise that I've been offered to deal with the shit that I've been dealing with. Sugar-Babies, I'm making my bed and I'm sure as hell gonna lie in it.

2009-01-15T08:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday my very best friend that I don't talk to turned thirty. Today, if he had lived, my best sleep on the couch drink all my beer pee on my toilet seat make me laugh till I puke friend would have turned 28. Tomorrow my Aunt Lynn died a year ago. It's three days that make me feel lost, lost in time, little girl lost.

Nyna, I called her Nyna in high school, she was my high school wife. The girl I'll never get over. When we met she was so shy she had her childhood friend call me to invite me to her birthday party. I'd never known a girl like her. I remember her hair, it was a universe of curls, a tangled wood, she let me plunge my hands into it until my hands disappeared and I would stay clutched there, wanting to make her mine. She had purple hands and toes, so different from my own, and her skin smelled like amber, and sometimes like sesame.

We were in the same classes. Somehow, in freshman English, our teacher decided that she and I already knew everything (no lie, this is true) and so we didn't have to do the assignments or read the required texts. We were allowed to read whatever we wanted to read and then report on it. We read My Papa's Waltz by Theodore Rothko and interpreted it a metaphor for child abuse. We read that strange book about rabbits, that made me feel as though I had a hole in my head. She taught me all the lyrics to Suzanne, by Leonard Cohen and we would sing it in the courtyard of the school. I made her sing. She didn't want to. Her singing voice was not strong, but it was perfect.

I broke her heart, and then she broke mine. It was like our love was too strong and strange and we were kids, still figuring out love. We were hurtling full throttle into life, not backing down, not looking where we leaped, not being careful we wanted life and freedom and fuck all and no regrets but I was not careful and she was too sweet and too beautiful and we both got damaged. At some point I leaped and looked back and she was not by my side. She had better things to do.

A few years ago I went to her wedding and wept the entire time. It was too beautiful, just like her. What is it about friends, these girlhood child friends we have when we are young that make pale the relationships of older age? I cannot love another like I loved her, it hurts too much, it is too dangerous. We must contain ourselves. And now she is thirty and has a baby and I still dream about her.

One time, before she was married but after my divorce, I had a potluck at my College Ave apartment and it just happened to fall on her birthday. She called and said she was in town and I made a chocolate pudding cake and cut her name out of pink postcards and glued them on toothpicks and stuck them in it. Then Joe came by and it was his birthday too, but at midnight, and so the cake then said Joe as well.

I'll call him Joe because his name is Joe and he is dead and he cannot be embarrassed by what I write. When I moved into the apartment on College Ave, freshly separated from my husband, Joe and a boy who became my boyfriend were the first new people I met. I chose the other boy because he was taller and had better shoes.

At first Joe hated me. I remember one time at the Warehouse him telling me, "Shut up May, no one cares what you think". He was not afraid to be an asshole. But as time went on and I became the den mother to a wrestle and tug of sweet sweaty boys, we were thrown together more through proximity and at some point found that we were on the same team.

Oh I loved that time. It seemed like I was always cooking and we were always drinking and there were games and movies and midnight runs to the grocery store to make sandwiches. Joe often slept on the couch, or sometimes in his cab in the front yard, one time dressed like a pirate. Once we made sock puppets. They tried to teach me to play chess. One time Joe and another boy were trying to teach me the proper way to shoot pool and it involved them standing close behind me, their arms over my arms, hands over my hands, and my boyfriend got mad and we had to go home. We were often getting mad at Joe.

One time we got kicked out of the house Joe and I, by my boyfriend, and we went down to the Leon Pub to drink beers and shoot pool on the midget pool tables. My boyfriend and I had been having problems and I was upset. Joe stood at the end of the pool table, cue in hand, dark hair and dark eyes and pale face haloed by cigarette smoke and stinking of beer. He said "You know May, I will always be your friend."

And then too soon he was gone. He played banjo. He wore red swim trunks. He drove his car into a tree at four in the morning on my birthday. Today is his birthday.

I don't talk with the mutual friends we had back then very much anymore. Partially because when you break up with someone you break up with a whole group of people. Partially because when you get sober you have to change people, places, and things. That's okay most of the time, but it's this feeling lost, this wanting to say his name out loud and have someone else see his face. I miss him. I miss him so much.

My Aunt Lynn deserves a whole blog unto herself, any words for her are short shrift. Can I just say that there was no one like her? That she more than anyone else in my life inspired the beautiful and the absurd? That she faced the world with the most beautiful devil gap smile, that the wind blew only to push her hair back from her face. She was there when I was born, taking care of my brother while my parents welcomed me to Earth in a trailer in Lloyd. She taught us to throw the hair from our hairbrushes outside so the birds could make nests with them.

She cannot be gone. She is not gone. This is what I mean by being lost in time, that she is not gone, and Joe will show up with his banjo and his crooked smile, and Nyna is singing Suzanne and is still my friend and we are all old and we are all young and we are babies. This day is so cold and blue and the air is so thin it could fit a million souls inside and still have room for angels dancing on the head of a pin. It is not too much to feel this sad. It is not too hard to cry and miss and feel this pain. It is exactly right, this bigness of love, and gratitude to have met the people who are here for not long enough.

Sometimes I think I feel too much, that my body is not big enough for the feelings that I have. I am grateful today for my over emotion. To feel the world spin and time go back and forth and all eternity inside my heart, it is what it is. Today my tears and the blood in my ears are my poem to the people who will never be goodbye.

My Tonight Quiet Thoughts

2008-12-12T17:52:00.000-08:00

I've gotten out of the habit of writing things here. Everyday, I write in my journal, I wake up and I write and I drink coffee and I look out the window and my head is full, but my voice is silent. Sometimes you need to just quiet that mouth, quiet that mouth about the important things and just let them happen until they trickle on in and make a home inside.

Last month I celebrated my one year of sobriety. And it was Thanksgiving. It was Thanksgiving and sobriety and thankfulness and fullness and help me God and Thankyou. I got to stand up at the AA birthday meeting in front of all those people who have seen me cry and who have seen me laugh and my sweet mother and strong step-father and tell my story and receive my coin. I feel quiet about this because I cannot say how it was. I cried so I wet my Mama's hair when I sat down next to her.

Sobriety is not just not drinking. What a lonely, empty life that would leave, just a life of not drinking. Sobriety is a spiritual journey, one in which we remind ourselves to pursue progress and not perfection.

I was not born with a steady hand. This mind I live in, this heart and body, so sensitive. I have a hard time disappointing people, even in the smallest way. My heart breaks when I make mistakes, I have to walk very carefully and tall so that I don't knock things down. I don't want to see people sad, and I try to make them laugh, but when they don't I want to take their pain inside me, take it from them and wrap it in my own body so it is a dull thing and not sharp enough to cut. But I can't. And it is unbearable. I don't have many close friends. Always, a game is only fun until it seems someone will definitely win, and then someone will lose and the game is not fun anymore.

I had a husband once who did not like for me to be praised. If I made something pretty, he grew sour and silent. He did not think I was pretty, and I did not know that until after I married him. He married me in part, because I was just good enough, but not better than him.

I divorced him and he moved far away without ever really knowing me at all.

Drinking made me feel numb and I liked that. It made me feel free, and I liked that very much. Drinking allowed me to be a super bitch, and I liked that best of all. Oddly enough, I had lots of friends. They all liked to drink, too. I don't think they knew me very well. I lost myself in those years.

Dancing, sewing, painting, writing, thinking. All those things dwindled down to tiny memories of my magic life I might have had and I was busy trying to forget.

My mother did not let me forget.

Now those lost years, they feel like some one else's story. I am still so sensitive. I am learning how to deal with that. People feel pain, I feel pain, pain is good. Pain is better than numb. I have all the alive feelings now, because I am alive now.

That is what sobriety is, it is the fullness of being, the alive feelings, the grace of the muscles being moved by the soul. My mother wears salt in her hair very well.

All of that, the getting lost, the waking up, the finding my way and how I am today, that is what I feel quiet about.

Here it is December and it is cold tonight. I gave a homeless man three dollars in the parking lot outside Bill's Minimart. He said he would buy a blanket. I think that was a lie. I don't care if he bought a blanket or a beer, it's cold tonight and I have a warm home. When I walked home the moon was so full and big I said "Oh god, you are beautiful!" and there were two stars.

I have a tree in my house and isn't that cool? To have a tree in your house? If there is a sentient Man/Woman/God person I bet they say "I have so many trees in my house! That is so cool!" My tree has lights but I haven't decorated it yet because I'm waiting for the right moment. Last night I helped my sister and her husband decorate the tree in their house and to see my sister's eyes on that tree, their first married tree together! Her eyes were more sparkly and beautiful by far, but as she is inside those eyes it's good she has a tree to look at. Her husband is the luckiest one, he has the tree and those eyes. How does he sleep at night with all that glitter and goodness around?

Here I am, thinking about my Mama again. No matter how crazy I get all I have to do is call her up. She lets me walk around in her mind and therein find my stable ground.

This post is not good writing, but I am okay. It is how my mind is talking tonight. Maybe I'm just breaking the ice again, getting back into poking these keys instead of thinking pen in hand. If you want good writing go to Bless Our Hearts or TallyHassle, I do. Everyday.

Aren't we glad the world is such a big thing and we are such little things? Isn't that something to be thankful for?

But Can Bloody Mary Tell Me Who the President Will Be?

2008-11-02T01:25:00.000-07:00

Insomnia is a serious inconvenience. I thought that I would clean my house with all the extra hours that I have to work with but everyone is asleep here at the old Park Ave Apts and how do you clean without rocking out? When we were kids, my brother and I would slow as we approached our house coming home from school, Bruce Springsteen evident from a block away. Oh dear, Mama's cleaning.....

My neighbor sets his alarm for 5:AM every morning and I just heard it go off. Boy is he going to be pissed when he realizes it's daylight savings time again! Of course, it's also Sunday. The whole thing seems off, but it's comforting to me. Someone else is alive! Yes! He is hitting the snooze button! Ha-Ha! Maybe he is a spy. If he is he has a very good cover. He has a wonky eye and whenever I see him he's joyfully drunk, his steps as rolley and unpredictable as his vision, but his smile is sure.

I went and voted on Halloween. Early voting on Halloween is super fun. Batman voted, and Darth Vadar. Do you suppose Vadar voted for McCain because he is aligned with the dark side, or did he vote Obama because he is black?

The lovely T-Bone was the one who suggested we go vote. We work together and had spent a fine morning at the restaurant wearing the fake mustaches that I brought for the staff. Each mustache was different and had a name. Mine was "The Rogue", our chef sported "The Scoundrel". Our fey and stylish gay waiter chose "The Party Boy". Neither T-Bone nor I can remember the title of hers, but it could have been called "The Paisano" because combined with her dark hair and red bandanna it made her resemble a disgruntled pizza cook. I wanted to make her perform for me. "Sharpen your knife and look mean!" God, it was so good.

At first we thought we might wear the mustaches to vote, the upside being that it might enable us to commit voter fraud by voting again ("Hey! Didn't you just vote?" "Oh no, those girls had mustaches!") but we had already exhausted the adhesive and went sans disguise. (If you are planning to commit voter fraud I suggest you do not buy your disguise at a place called The Festivity Factory.)

The line was long but we were motivated. First we had to stand in the line that led to the line that led to the courthouse. I thought there might be snacks and mimes, maybe for entertainment purposes, but T-Bone thought not so we came prepared with drinks, baby carrots, and cigarettes.

We spent the hour and fifteen minutes talking about the people we know, the people we used to know, who's in jail, who should be in jail, all the drugs we used to do, and who's doing the drugs now. The people around us were silent in that very pointed way that people have when they are listening very hard. Perhaps we were the entertainment. We should've worn the mustaches! We would've been so much more amusing, not to mention more anonymous. ("Hey, I heard you were gossiping about me in line to early vote at the courthouse." "Oh no, I heard those girls had mustaches.")

We were a little worried that they would search our purses once we got in. T-Bone had a knife, and I had a little wad of something suspicious looking wrapped in plastic wrap (it was a mustache, I swear) but that fear turned out to be unfounded. What we did find at the end of the line was an especially tall handsome man in a floral button down shirt. His job was to stop us from madly rushing the polling booths before they could take our information. I told him that I liked his shirt, that it was very handsome, coyly cutting my eyes away. He said that when he put it on that morning he said to himself, "Yep, nobody's gonna miss Mr. Tim today". T-Bone pointed out that it was helpful that he was also so tall. When it was my turn at the booth, Mr. Tim thanked T-Bone for coming out to vote. She told him that we were excited to vote, that we were excited to be making history, and he smiled and thanked her again, and they had a moment.

The voting? My heart did swell. I checked and double checked to make sure that I did, in fact, vote for Obama and against the We Hate Gays proposition. I knew I did, but there was a paranoid part of me that somehow I'd filled in the wrong circles. It's like that feeling that you might just spasmodically drive into a building some day, you know you won't, why would you? But you think somehow you might. By accident. Like maybe you lost your mind for a minute.

When I walked out of the courthouse, into the dusk of Halloween, I felt strong and hopeful and exhilarated. Me! I voted! The trees glowed bright. Everyone was smiling. Children played.

As we walked back to the car we talked about what we had done, how we felt, and what it meant. I said, "Mr. Tim, do you want my phone number? I vote YES!" and we decided that we needed to use that pick-up line before the end of the election.

Last year on Halloween I wore a flower in my hair and sprayed myself with body glitter and went to a party and did jello shots. This year I wore a fake mustache and laughed more than I have in a long time and voted in a historical election with one of my best friends. Ah there is hope for us yet, ah there is hope and laughter and hope again.

2008-10-29T15:35:00.000-07:00

The Fall is here, the Fall, the Fall, as if it never was at all. It's cold finally, as cold comes in Florida. There is no tapering, it comes all whoosh and me not ready. Do I have winter clothes? Does anyone here, really? We wear layers, we wear two pairs of socks. I wear legwarmers left over from long ago dance class with my flip-flops, and three skirts, and fashion be damned a hat I found left from the man dance of a bar fight. It is fall and my skin sings with it, the itch of tighter flesh and wash-red hands. My eyes look prettier in cold weather.

We have color change in Florida. The skies are more blue, so blue you remember what blue is, and the sunsets are a orange and a pink and a rose rose red. The carnival will be here soon and I remember how fun that is, how we used to say "It's not fair!" and Mama would say "Ain't no fair today!" but oh Ha Ha! It is Fall and yes there is a fair come today! The fair as a kid, I rode all the rides, the fair as an adult, I always fall in love. The candy colors and circus sounds, the laughter screams and smells of popcorn, sweat, and sweet fried bits. A fair is for making yourself scared and smashing your face into your friend's sweatshirt, screaming and smelling their safe safe smell. I will win you a goldfish, if you did not bring a sweater dad will buy you an airbrushed shirt. It will say your name! I will want it!

Soon I will get a man to come and light my furnace. It is so old it's like a fire in my hallway, and sounds like an angry child tap dancing on pop rocks. Sometimes when it is very cold I curl up next to it in my sleeping bag and watch the blue flames dance behind the glass, and I dream of camping and hot chocolate. Sometimes I dream of snails, and sometimes there are ghosts, but never monsters.

In the Fall there are angels with the spiders in the corners of the rooms.

In the Fall the shop signs creek in the silent spaces between the traffic lights.

In the Fall the kids on bicycles have bright white grins that match their knuckles and they are coming home for soup.

Maybe Fall will be my time, my time to wake up. Outside my window I can hear a cat crowling, and far away someone is playing electric guitar.

It Ain't No Accident if You Ask For It

2008-10-20T15:25:00.000-07:00

Fourteen years ago tomorrow, I was hit by a man named Lorenzo in a Toyota Corolla. I was sixteen and slightly depressed for no good reason other than being sixteen. Sweet, sweet sixteen and walking to school because the idiot children at the high school where I was supposed to catch the bus to go to my school taunted me and the idiot administrators told me they could do nothing because I was not a student there. It did not occur to me to ask my parents to intervene on my behalf, it took great courage to cross the lines of mockery and enter the great brick building in the first place. When it came to nothing I thought, "Well, alright then. I'll walk."

I've started this wrong. I like to walk. The taunting of the students was only an excuse. The mornings were glorious. Up before the sun, the world a hush and the air gentle. Every night the spiders would string hopeful webs across the sidewalks and every morning I would be the first to break them, like the spiders were silent housekeepers and I was the first to break the seal on the toilet seat of the morning. Not very poetical, but just that fresh, and so lucky I felt to watch the stars melt away and have that quiet half hour all to myself to think my thoughts.

My thoughts that morning were along the lines of "Please, a change. Just anything, anything at all" because being sixteen and having all the luxuries of privilege had become just too unbearable. Ever since then I have been much more specific in my prayers. You get what you ask for, you know.

[ This is all coming out wrong and heavy handed. I've never been good at writing about this, maybe because I really want to. Just stay with me. I'll get it out somehow.]

I was wearing an Indonesian batiked dress that I'd borrowed (stolen) from my best friend. It was blue, red, pink, green, and patterned with eyeballs and squiggles. I had on hiking boots and thick socks and I'd carefully done up my hair in milkmaid braids pinned to the back of my head. I was carrying a black backpack, heavy with books.

The morning was overcast. The sun was not quite up. It was early, you know? High school starts so early, not like a 9-5 job, it's 7:AM for learning, and so sleepy we were.

I approached Monroe Street on Brevard, pushed the crosswalk button, looked both ways, and started to walk. Monroe is a big street, five lanes including the turn lane and lots of ways a car can come, and lots of ways to miss seeing a car, if it is gray like the morning, and if it has a headlight out, and if the streetlights aren't working, and if the crosswalk is malfunctioning. And lots of ways a man can miss the sight of a girl in the road, if she is wearing muted colors, if he is blind in one eye, if he is trying to make the light. And that is how it happens, the little things come together, the universe laughs and you are falling.

One minute walking, next minute falling, I remember thinking, "Oh shit, I've been hit by a car", and the world slowed down. I'm sure it was a violent surprise to see a girl come through a windshield, her arm around her face, a head through splintered glass. It must have happened so very fast, it must have scared the hell out of him. To me, it was slow and gray and falling, falling through silent soft ever-gray, the gray of feathers and slow and slow and then I opened my eyes and the world blew up.

I heard a man yelling and cars, so many lights of cars going so fast and the feel of asphalt under my back and the sky so dark and I knew, I had to get up! I had to get off the road because this was Monroe Street and they couldn't see me! The cars, the cars can't see you if you lie in the road! So I sat up and looked down at my legs and saw one looking oh so normal and one looking oh so wrong. It was a stairstep leg. There was a sharp bend where the knee was, yes, and another sharp bend between the knee and the ankle and my hiking boot foot looking for all the world like it wanted to kick my own knee, and looking like it was doing a pretty good job of trying. There in the bend was a tear and in the tear a black trickle and a bone. That bone fucked my mind. I was okay till I saw that bone, all jagged and pink and the skin like rucked rubber simply Not Doing Its Job, because skin is supposed to keep that stuff in where you can't see it.

As my mind was trying to work out the leg situation and make it make sense, the scene around me worked itself out so that I would not get hit by another car. I suppose Lorenzo's car was in the way, I don't know. I never actually saw it, or Lorenzo himself. I heard him. I heard him say I jumped in front of him. I minded that. It seemed to me his car jumped into me.

A woman came over and told me she saw what happened, she asked if I was alright, she got me to lie down. "I've gone blind!" I screamed, because as terrifying as the leg had been it could not match the terror I felt as the world went black around me. Gasoline smell and oil soaked roughness scraped across my eyes and my sight returned. "You're not blind, you just got blood in your eyes is all" said the woman. "My name is May Ellen Thigpen. My Mother's name is Mary Moon. Our phone number is 224-6547" I said in return. More people came. I repeated my statement to each and everyone of them. It didn't seem like they were hearing me. It seemed like everyone was acting completely inappropriately to the situation. A very frail old woman in a green pantsuit told me to squeeze her hand if it hurt. The thought that I would crush her tiny pathetic bones if I squeezed her hand enough to help myself out passed through my mind, but I gave her a little pressure, just to make her feel better.

I heard a man say, "Get out of the way! One of my kids is in there!" and I thought, "Dad?" but no, it was my school's resource officer, pushing his way through the circle of people around me. That also seemed wrong to me. Why was the resource officer pretending to be my dad? Was that allowed? I asked him to tell my teachers that I wouldn't be at school, and I was glad when he left.

About a year after that the ambulance got there. The EMTs were young and happy. At that point I was in so much pain, so much pain I kept thinking that there couldn't be anymore pain in the world, and then it would get worse. Up and up, that's what it felt like, the pain went up and up and up and I smiled at the EMTs. So young, so happy, I knew they had medication in the bus, I thought, "if I am good and nice, they will give me the medication". They asked me how I was. I thought that was a stupid question. I told them my statement about who I was, who my mother was, and my phone number. I also told them that my teeth, well, my teeth had been knocked a little crooked. The EMT crouched by my side smiled and said, "No they're not, my friend got hit in the face with a baseball once and his teeth felt crooked for a week!" The comparison between a baseball and a Toyota Corolla, combined with the fact that the EMT had not seen my teeth before the accident, proved in my mind that I was being rescued by well meaning idiots. Idiots with medication. I smiled. I smiled as they cut the dress from my body and the shoes from my feet. I smiled as they put me on a stretcher and lifted me into the ambulance. I smiled as the pain went up and up and I wondered at the wonder of my amazing ability to hold so much pain. I felt like a mystery had been solved. How much pain is the wonderful human body able to feel? Infinite amounts of pain! They told me on the ride to the hospital that took about 40 years that they couldn't give me any pain medication until we got there, just in case my brain was jargled, or something like that.

When we finally arrived we discovered that my entire family (both sets of parents, my brother, and an uncle) as well as three friends from school, had beaten us to it. By that time, the pain combined with the fantastic amounts of endorphins whipping through my body had made me a little goony. I reassured my weeping mother that I was wearing clean underpants. I told a large police officer who asked for my clothes that he could have them, but I didn't think they would fit. I was hilarious! I even got the cop who was taking Polaroids of me for evidence to give me one. "Smile!" they said. No problem.

The rest of the story goes on like any accident story. They told me to count back from 100. They wheeled me away. They put pins and screws and stitches where they needed to. They even left behind a drill bit that broke off in my bones. A souvenir.

I woke up cold like I'd been dead, thirsty. It seemed cruel that they would only give me ice chips to suck on as I shivered, as I ached. It wasn't funny anymore. I hurt. I was alone. I wanted my mom. I was not strong. I cried.

So that was my day, fourteen years ago. That was the day the universe taught me to not ask for stupid things.

My cheek bone was broken. My collarbone was broken. My fibula and tibia were broken in fourteen places, fourteen years ago. All on the left side. I'm lucky. The backpack full of textbooks may have served to stabilize my spine, it may have saved my life. An eye witness said that before I was hit I was walking with three black men. They may have been angels, or she may have been crazy, or both.

After my accident my family were my angels. They hovered and nursed. They fretted and fed. They dried my tears and made me laugh and I was so lucky. We rented all the accoutrements of a hospital room and laid me up in the guest room by the kitchen. Every morning Mama would climb into the hospital bed with me (after drying my waking tears and changing the scab filled sheets) and we would watch Northern Exposure and she would knit. That Christmas she gave me the long blue-green scarf she knitted and I still wear it every winter. It brings out the blue in my eyes.

We call that day my Rebirthday. Tomorrow, Mama and I will climb into her little blue car (will it bring out the blue in our eyes?) and drive to the coast. It is the same coast that she bundled me up and drove me to all those years ago to let the healing waters wash over my wounds, and the salty breeze and the seagull cry take my tears away. We are going to celebrate this painful life, this magic world, where the love goes up and up and up and the wonder of it all is that our tiny frail human bodies can contain that much love and that much pain, all at once. We will ask the universe for nothing. We will say Thank You.

Keeping My Nose Clean and My Hands Busy

2008-10-02T06:27:00.000-07:00

I pulled an ant out of my nose yesterday. I don't know how it got there. I wasn't resting my face in the grass or against trees or anything. It was right after work, I'd been waitressing. I like to imagine that it came from above, that it fell on me and took the short trip from my head to my nostril rather than the long way from the ground up but either way is disturbing. Somehow it had to have crawled across my face undetected to get to the seemingly attractive ant cave that is my nose. This bothers me. If an ant can get into your nose without you noticing, anything is possible. In my fragile emotional state this seems to be perfectly indicative of the fact that there are no constants in life. We cannot count on anything. We might fly off the earth at any moment, and when we do, there may be ants in our noses.

I tried calling around the other day to find a therapist who takes clients on a sliding scale, or perhaps a program to help people dealing with depression. Those who I talked to said I was brave to try to get help, but that I did not meet their criteria as I have never been hospitalized before for depression or addiction, and I do not have children. I never imagined that birth control and AA would betray me like this. The therapists given to me by the help line did not call me back.

I'm not going to give up so easily. Even if I didn't wake up pondering the pointlessness of life everyday, I've accrued enough baggage in my 30 years of misbegotten adventures to believe that talking to someone might be a good idea. In the meantime I'm putting myself in my own rehab, MayA, so to speak.

Activities include: Walking Around Outside, Thinking A Lot, Arts and Crafts, and Crying when Necessary. So far I have made a purse. It can hold my cigarettes while I walk around outside.

My sewing machine, not unlike my heart, is broken, so making the purse took a very long time. That's a good thing because I also did quite a bit of Thinking A Lot while sewing.

I believe that we hold feeling memories in our bodies. People get sad around the anniversaries of loved ones lost without consciously thinking about it, and conversely certain times of the year make people happy because of the happy times in their personal pasts. I thought about the assurances that my AA friends gave me when I told them I was despondent. They said that everyone gets like this around their 10th month of sobriety, they said "Don't beat yourself up, don't put the shit in your body, and go to a meeting". Okay, so this is normal. Great. Why? What is it about the 10th or so month that sucks so bad? I thought about muscle memory, I thought about last year at this time. As we get closer to a year, I think that our bodies are remembering how bad it was the year before. This is when we began to hit rock bottom. Last year I taught my body and brain that when the weather turns cool it's going to mean that there's going to be alienation, loneliness, and despair. This year I'm reliving all those emotions because that is what my caveman survivor brain tells me I have to do, and it's been so bewildering because my life doesn't suck right now.

Also, and without a doctor's evaluation, I think I may have a touch of the hypoglycemia. It's pretty common in alcoholics, what with the overtaxing of the liver and kidneys and the all sugar diet that is alcoholism, so I'm adding Eating Smaller Meals More Often to my list of activities. And I'm giving up wheat, just for kicks.

I think the slogan for MayA is "Do what you can, then do it again".

As I sewed I thought about all this, and thought about my past, and thought about my future and all the while the sewing itself kept bringing me back to the present. The wrestle of the thread, the heavy fabric, the tangle and untangle, the finger jabs, the geometry of purse without a pattern, and sometimes oh sweet the smooth sail of a straight line of stitches, you have to pay attention. I had forgotten how much I like to do this, but my hands remembered and were sure and steady and patient, even when I wanted to cry over broken needle and fray of thread. They just reached for another sharp from the packet and pulled another long length from the spool and began again, and therein lies my constant. Every time I wrap the doubled thread around my finger, twist and pull to make a knot, that very necessary base to hold my work, I think about my mother's beautiful hands because she is the one who taught me that particular practical magic trick. A knot where there was not.

She was sitting in a chair, there was sunlight, I was small, her hands at eye level and over and over she showed me how to do it, until I did. It's so easy, and so small a thing, but if you don't know how to knot a thread with one hand it can be a difficult and frustrating thing. And if you make no knot at all your stitches will fall out and all your effort will come to nothing.

Hearts and needles and thread may break, but we do what we can and we do it again. We make our knots tight and sure, so when they break we don't lose everything.

Next year, when the air turns cool, maybe my hands will turn to sewing and my brain will turn to thinking instead of feeling heavy feelings absent of their meanings. I will Walk Around Outside, I will Cry When Necessary, but not too much, and if I find an ant in my nose I will remember that as weird and disturbing as that is, I'll try not to feel overly concerned. When it comes down to it, a nostril is by no means the worst place on your person to find an ant.

2008-09-30T05:41:00.000-07:00

This too shall pass. That's something we say a lot in sobriety to each other, and it always feels good to hear it. I like talking to recovered drunks. They don't take any shit, and when you tell them all your wicked secrets, all your gump and refuse they smile that snake bite smile and say, "Is that all you got?". Then sometimes they tell you about the meth lab they blew up, or the children they neglected and lost, or the people they put in the hospital, or the many divorces, or the many wrecked cars, or their prostitution pasts, and you feel better. Better living through "there but for the grace of god..". I haven't been going to meetings lately and I know that's a large part of my depression.

I haven't been writing either. That's a pride thing, and something else we're told to watch out for. When I get down, I isolate, not because I so enjoy my own company to the company of others, but because I don't want people to know what I'm like when I'm sad. I look like shit, I feel like shit, I don't want people to see that. I want them to think that I'm a funny, happy, sunny girl. Smart, talented, oh pride. Without the company of others it takes longer to get better, but without anyone around, it's easier to forget it was ever so bad. If a Miss Maybelle falls in the forest and there is no one around to see her, did she really fall at all?

This time is different. This particular camping trip into the Tate's Hell of my subconscious has gone on far longer than in the past. I've run out of breadcrumbs, my sleeping bag is damp, and I've been wandering in circles for days.

Anyone who has gotten help for addiction or depression, anyone who has dropped and broken all the eggs in their basket has a fear that once they get "better" people will be watching them more closely, waiting for it to happen again. And they will. Some with love and concern, and some with wicked love of watching walls fall down, but they will be watching. That, I have to let go of. That is not something I can control. It is none of my business what other people think about me. Most of the time they have better things to think about anyway. It's only me who thinks about me all the time.

So. Sorry about the dreck and dreary of this post kids, it ain't so much for reading, it's more for the writing. Insanity, so they say, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I'm lighting a signal fire, I'm going to try to get out of these woods, and if someone crawls in here to help I'm gonna take it and damn my pride. I don't think I was fooling anyone anyway.

One Fine Lady, Summer Thoughts

2008-08-27T06:13:00.000-07:00

When I was a little girl I had a friend who wanted more than anything in this world to be a popular, wild, normal girl. Her mother was a yoga instructor and her father, well, I'm not sure exactly what he did but I think it involved taking people on adventures to the Everglades. She had a little brother as well but like most little brothers, he was not important.

Their house was a haven of calm. There were geodes reflecting light and gathering dust on all the windowsills and classical music playing softly from the radio on the kitchen counter. Tofu was served, as well as seaweed, and brown rice with butter a treat and on Sundays we might be allowed to put carob chips in the pancakes!

This was the eighties. In direct rebellion to her mother's ways, this friend of mine had a room of pink and black garish pop boy madness. Her walls were plastered with movie stars and TV actors, her bangs were carefully sprayed into a shower of what once resembled hair, she chewed gum, she snuck cigarettes, she ravenously ate sandwich meat straight from the drawer in the refrigerator at our house with her hands while making wolf noises until she was sated.

But this isn't about her. Sure she seemed to sparkle when we were kids, she always had crazy ideas that my brother and I reluctantly went along with. We got in trouble, especially Bubba, because he was the smart one and I just a kid and what could you do with her? She'd break the rules and smile and switch that sassy ass as she walked away from whatever empty threats the parents gave us. But frankly, all that sparkle and sass just turned eventually toward bitterness, and I hear she has at least one child now and I just don't care. She married the boy who used to lob pine cones over the fence at us and once shot a cat that belonged to another friend with a bb gun and killed it. He was in high school when he did that. She married a teenaged cat killer, good for her.

Her grandmother. Her grandmother owned a kennel out on what was the outskirts of town (and is now much closer in) on what seemed like endless acres of pecan trees and oak grove. There was a pond and pasture and a neighbors cows we would torment and who would enact their revenge by eating our clothes when we went skinny dipping. There were great big dogs the size of horses and sand pears we couldn't stop eating even though they were not sweet and pulled blood from our gums as we ate them. The grandmother would swoop us up on long weekends and take us to the grocery store and buy us anything and then set us loose across the pasture to camp out next to the pond. I was eight and they (my brother and the girl) were ten when we started doing this. Steaks! Lighter fluid! We camped naked! We blew up cans of root beer in the fire! We peed on giant ants! And her grandmother not only allowed us to do this, she financed it!

The grandmother let the girl dye her hair blond. She bribed us with eyeshadow to clean her windows. She had a boyfriend who was an author, who wrote a dirty book that I read in secret, but he also gave me a copy of Alice in Wonderland which filled my mind with colors and opened corners that made me shake inside.

One time, I don't remember why, we spent some time in the grandmother's closet. It was a large closet, and even though you never saw the grandmother in anything other than jeans and a t-shirt, it was filled with silk and fur and velvet. I remember standing hidden in the clothes, in some sort of ecstatic trance rubbing my face back and forth against the fabric of her clothes. On a high shelf there were stacks of heart shaped chocolates boxes covered in lace and foil, fake flowers and ribbons and I thought they were the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. Were they filled with love letters? My brother would know if that is a true memory or if I made that up, but I was only able to bear the sight of them by promising myself that one day I too would have stacks of chocolates boxes given to me by handsome men and filled with letters tied in string.

I wish now I'd paid more attention to the grandmother. Who was this woman? More than any other adult in my life she seemed to be a complete person, she had history and depth. This is not to say that other adults didn't but I was a child, it was difficult for me to imagine my parents lives without me. It seemed like the grandmother did not need children to occupy her time, she let us flow in and out of it but her time was already full. She appeared to be living her life, she gave me a feeling of past and future that sometimes caught me full in the chest and stopped my breath. There was more than this! Once she was a girl like me, then a beautiful young woman with lovers, then a strong mother, then a grandmother, an owner of dogs, a boss, a grandmother with a boyfriend, and she was not done! There would be more! What!? That feeling in my chest, that whoosh beneath my feet, that what cannot be named of time passing and me not in it!

I ran into a woman who knows the grandmother yesterday. We talked about the falling out that happened between the girl and the grandmother. We do not know why and we know it is none of our business, but it is still a shame. I asked how the grandmother is these days, thinking she must be old now, she must have slowed down. The woman told me that the grandmother has a house on the beach and a boyfriend in New England whom she meets in Spain, whom she meets in Paris. The woman took my phone number to give to the grandmother. She said that I should go visit her at the beach house, that she would love to see me.

Will she call? I have that falling feeling, that perfect perception that life exists without my existence. I want to go to the beach house. I want to ask about the letters. I want to see her hands and face. I am just a little bit afraid that if I do go visit her I might find myself discovered tucked deep inside her closet, rubbing my face on her clothes, and trying to find the answers to all my childhood questions in her smell. I think I could, given enough time. Just a few minutes, if she would just shut the door behind her and leave me in the velvet dark.

2008-08-24T08:57:00.000-07:00

When it rains for many days we all go a little crazy with it. My bones swell inside my skin until my skin cannot possibly hold, I feel burstable, breakable, my skin feels like it will tear. Everything is wet, the walls in my apartment are wet, my sheets are wet, I try not to walk barefoot on the slick hardwood floors. The mold. There is mold blooming in my bathroom and itching the tabletops, I feel like I am moldy. Overwhelmed with the mold, what can I do? Attack the bookshelves with bleach? The sun is trying to come out now, I've opened the windows and turned on the fans and maybe the rooms will dry out.

Outside I can hear the frogs and the cicadas, they are screaming their joy, it is the song of summer. September is coming and with it some sort of relief, or at least hope of relief and this great humping son of a bitch of August can leave us alone. Beware the aides of March? March I long for, this is Florida, a paradise of blooms and barnacles and sunkissed bottoms and goddamn yes the blossoms of mold, a plague of frogs, the laughing stock locusts.

A couple of my regulars at work, elderly and sweet, tease me with my Miss Maybelle name and change it once a month. Maybelle in May, then Junebug. In July they called me Miss Firecracker, because they couldn't come up with a pun that satisfied. Now they call me Augusta, and I feel like an Augusta. Ramrod straight, no nonsense hair, a pinched and furrowed brow, a spinster aunt, a bit of a bitch. I don't like this me. September. I have hope for September.

I have hope for September, but she is a shy girl, a long haired sylph, she has dreamy eyes and wants to be an actress, I think, or a poetess. I hold my breath for October. October stands on her own, she's quick and witchy. October combs gum into the hair of the mean girls, she goes to the fair and rides all the rides, she runs down the street and turns out all the lights and sets the signboards swinging, she cackles back at the crows. In October we paint our eyes to look like giant gorgeous spiders and dress like gypsies. In October we fall in love.

Now the world smells like wet dog and the low creatures are kings. I am not in a good mood and I am sorry. If you want happy, look to the frogs.

Oh my little soldier boy...

2008-08-16T03:34:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about this boy I know lately. I used to work with him, he worked at the restaurant where I work now until they cut our hours, economic slowdown. He just graduated from high school, it seemed like he was on the fast track to being a fine chef one day. Now he's decided to join the military.

He comes in sometimes to say hello, and I think he likes the attention. The ladies, the servers, we flutter around him, hug him, kiss his rosy cheeks, slap him, knock his hat off, rub his heartbreak head, tell him dirty jokes, act like his mom. He basks in our chicken fluff, our sweaty flirtation. What nineteen year old wouldn't like that? To have the attention of a full female waitstaff all moving quickly, shouting orders, hair trailing, white arms encircling his waist, we are a tornado of woman to this boy, all of us older than he.

Chef says, "Join the military during wartime? So stupid."

We all cajole this boy, ask him if he wants to kill, ask him if he believes in this war, beg him to stay home, go to school.

He talks about the money. He talks up the adventure, makes me sick. He thinks he's grown, he thinks he's had all the adventure this town, this country has to offer. He's slept with the girls, the pretty high school girls, he's tried the drugs, he's played in the band, he's had the job and he thinks he knows what's what and all the whos and who cares, oh he's so bored. Thirty thousand dollars (he says he'll buy all us servers dinner out one day) and the adventure of a lifetime, my god his life is cheap.

At what price a life not yet lived?

It's not just the possible loss of life or limb or skin, it's what he will see and do that can't be undone. We ship them off after training them for two years and there they see death, and there they see rape and there they see what chemicals and bombs and bullets and bravery do to a human body and maybe then they know how cheaply they sold their souls. For nothing, for a mistake, for a bloody shameful tangled mess of politics and jingoism.

Those eyes, they kill me when they get back. They have those eyes that have too much in them to focus on what's in front of them, those eyes are broken and we do not take care of them when they come back.

When I was his age I bought a truck and lived in my truck. I saw snow in the desert, I saw redwoods and gypsies. I jumped in hot springs naked and ice cold oceans in my long johns. I stalked an author. I joined a circus. I met my lonely. I camped with strangers. I got lost and found. I drove up, I drove down, I got tired and I slept.

I told him all this and said that there are these adventures, that you don't have to go on someone else's preplanned war story, that you can make your own. But how can you tell a young man so full of hot blood and salty semen that the far-away look in my eyes, of what I have seen and what I have done does not make dumb the feel of soft flesh beneath my fingers and hard wood floors beneath my feet? That love is there, how do you tell him that love is there, when he will sell his soul for thirty thousand dollars and the empty promise of a gun?

2008-08-10T20:02:00.000-07:00

I broke three glasses at work yesterday. The final one shattered in my hand like a cherry bomb, I stood holding the shape of what was a glass, all tiny peices of danger now perfect in my palm. The glass rained over my eyes, my clothes, the server shelf where we keep the silverware and coffeecups. Everything had to be taken apart and cleaned. Only one shard, one cubic fortress of solitude chunk did not fall from my hand when I overturned it. I pulled it from the fleshy part between my thumb and my pointer finger, everyone winced and turned away. And then there was blood and my boss bathing my hand like a skinny Mary Magdelene on Jesus. But I am not Jesus. I worked my miserable shift. The glass looked like diamonds in my eyelashes. It was beautiful.

Dirty Hands, Clean Heart

2008-07-21T15:03:00.000-07:00

A cluttered house is a cluttered mind. My Zen Shiatsu Acupressure teacher used to say that. Of course, he was very zen about it and he meant everything from your actual house to your colon to your soul, but it pretty much rings true across the board.

When I lived in Phoenix, I cleaned the house of a man named Rhythm and Blues Rick for a little extra income on the side. I was already working full time in a coffee shop, but my tightwad husband (ex-husband) decided that since I didn't make as much as he did and we shared a bank account I needed to get a second job. R and B Rick was a pretty laid back guy, he was a regular at the coffee shop and when he mentioned one day over his single shot cap that he was looking for someone to clean his house I jumped at it.

The first day I went to his house was the only day I ever saw him there. He preferred that I arrive and finish while he was at work, and that was okay by me. He gave me a key and the tour, showing me where all the cleaning supplies were and the washer and dryer and how to work the stereo (very important), and with great faith left me alone with all of his earthly possessions.

I liked the job fine, he paid me by the hour, didn't mind if I took my time, and left me tasty snacks and coffee to enjoy while I worked. Also, R and B Rick was a clean man. I vacuumed floors that didn't seem to need vacuuming, I wiped counters that were already wiped, and I mopped a kitchen floor you could already have eaten off of. Mainly, I think he just didn't want to do his laundry or clean the bathroom, as these were the only dirty spots in the house. I guess you can say that I sort-of hosed the man, considering that I charged him for an entire house cleaning that he did not need, but that's what he asked me to do.

The best part about the gig was not that it was so easy, but that Rhythm and Blues Rick worked at an adult toy/bookstore and he tended to take work home with him. In order to get out the vacuum cleaner I had to push aside the whips and chains. When I dusted the knick-knacks on the shelves I gave just as much careful attention to detail to the framed pictures of his mother as I did to the penis and vagina sculptures. Sometimes there was a surprise, like the time I went to do his laundry and found handcuffs in the hamper. Some people might have been freaked out by some of the things he had lying around, the edible panties under the bed, the Big Book of Big Cocks that I faithfully dusted once a week, but I felt privileged and discreet, like we shared a professional relationship not unlike that of a doctor and patient. Every time I left his house I felt both virtuous and expanded, my little mind awash with the possibilities, some so dirty and some so clean.

Eventually the charm wore off, a penis was just something difficult to dust properly and the whips would always slip off their hooks right when I thought I'd gotten everything back in its place. One day, while down on my hands and knees cleaning behind the toilet I thought "That's it! This is the last time I'll clean a toilet I don't use! From here on out it's for love or not at all."

That declaration of course proved false as I have cleaned many a toilet for money since then, but they've always been in restaurants, never have they been such an intimate experience as it was then.

Today I cleaned my house. I think I'm better at it now than I was when I did it for R and B Rick. I've gained some experience, I'm older now, wiser. I can get a polishing job done in minutes what used to take me an hour of relentless rubbing and rubbing! Sure, I can get the job done, but does it really mean as much when it's just for me alone? Clean, yes. Fulfilled? No.

In the end I have my clean house, but no one leaves me tasty snacks, and now that I've quit drinking there are very few surprises in the laundry hamper. I suppose that's how it should be.

Sometimes I wonder about R and B Rick. I wonder if he got a new girl to clean his house. I wonder if she was discreet, if she was good. I wonder if she was better than I was, or if maybe sometimes he looks back on those days like I do, sighs, and thinks, "She was the best, the best I ever had."

You Can't Eat All the Cookies at Once

2008-07-16T09:47:00.000-07:00

I believe in the power of the fortune cookie. Somehow, the universe is able to send me messages through seemingly random slips of paper encased in slightly sweet crispy cookies wrapped in clear plastic that is sometimes printed with roses. I like those. I keep all my fortunes, have for years and whenever I need a little direction in life I dip into the pile. Sometimes I have a question on my mind, like it's a magic eight ball, sometimes I just dip with a clear mind and an open heart.

Today I woke up feeling a little lost. I think I'm on the right path, I'm trying to do the next right thing. I've been sober for eight months. Eight months of recovery, healing, strength. Recovery is a funny word. Whenever I heard it before I only associated it with recovering from illness, or recovering from a disaster, like it was synonymous with healing. It's not though, it's not about getting better, it's about getting back what you've lost.

Addiction will slowly steal so much from you. It comes in on kitten feet and takes the tears and tatters of what makes you you. And silent and sleepwalking you don't notice or you don't care, a bit of joy, a bit of creativity, your energy, the things you love, you lose them, you forget. Yes, drunk people may get in a horrible car accident and kill someone, they may lose their jobs and families, but the people who don't still lose so much. I lost myself.

I lost myself so quietly I didn't even know I was gone until I looked around and found this great yawning emptiness, this dark tunnel of bewilderment. There was something here, but what? And where did it go? Then comes work. I didn't want to continue going to work. I didn't want to get up every morning. I don't want to wash the dishes or do the laundry or brush my teeth or sweep my floors. I wanted to have the great spiritual awakening all quick and fast, as easy and shocking as an impulse buy sour apple candy in my mouth. But, surprise instant gratification girl! It takes time to lose yourself, it's gonna take time to get it back.

The real surprise to me is that it comes back as it left. Tissue thin and bubble breakable, little bits of me are slowly finding their way home. They come when I'm not looking. I'll find myself with needle and thread in hand and realize that it's been years since I sewed anything. I'll find myself on the floor, sweating over a painting that really isn't any good, but it feels so damn good to have that brush in my hand. If I try to force it I get frustrated, like a child trying to read on a level she isn't prepared for. It's better if I keep chopping wood and carrying water and looking straight ahead, because the stars are there, and they are always better seen and far brighter out of the corners of the eyes. My little will-o-the-wisp memories, my lost dreams, I'm learning patience.

I'm not good at patience. So some days I wake up and I think, "Alright, so what I've been sober for eight months, what have I done today?". That's a good day to Chinese fortune dip. Today I reached in, swirled them around, and held my breath. I pulled out one tiny perfect slip of paper. It reads "Now is the time for peace in your life. Go along with other's ideas." Then my brother called me and invited me to go to trivia tonight. Okay Universe, I accept. There is buried treasure to be recovered in spending time with family. I just hope my brain can recover useless bits of trivia, and we don't come in last.

If You Want to Make an Omelet, You Have to Break a Few Legs

2008-07-11T14:28:00.000-07:00

Did I imply that waitressing is a fun gig? Once I took a ballet class from a woman who told us to imagine that we had a $100 bill stuck between our ass cheeks. After that all she had to do was yell "Hold your money, girls!" and we would all meercat up, spines straight, heads held high, ass cheeks clenched. Lately, I have not been holding my money.

Business is slow, tips are bad. The bathrooms are especially nasty. The trays are especially heavy. The weather is like the inside of a mouth.

There is one man, a regular, who comes in everyday and says inappropriate things. One day, as I was presetting for his desert he asked me for a napkin of a different color. Okay, fine. Then he wants a smaller spoon. Alright, here you go. I put his trio of peach sorbet balls before him and asked "Okay Mr. __? Is there anything else I can do for you?" "Will you eat my sorbet balls and let me watch?" he replied. "No Mr. __, I am afraid you are going to have to eat your own balls." I said, and swept regally from the dining room to go scrub my skin with a metal scrubber and throw up.

The thing is, this restaurant is of a higher class than any other place I've worked. It doesn't matter, rich people are rude. Rich people feel that they have a right to be rude. Poor people look into my eyes and see a human being. Rich people look at my tits and see tits. Tits they will leave a 10% tip to.

At least I'm employed. That's what I said to myself today as a fellow server broke a glass and spattered me with cappuccino. At least we're employed, we whispered to each other as our hostess' voice rang out requesting us to clean the patio. As we watch our anorexic boss get skinnier. As we scrub gum off table legs. As we are spit on (yes, SPIT ON) by children.

Someday, I will spit back. Until then, I need my job. I'll just take a deep breath, hold my money, and try not to have to eat any one's balls.

I Have a Friend in Dirty

2008-07-01T19:30:00.000-07:00

I don't have many friends. I never felt the need to have a lot of close friends around all the time. I remember after my divorce I would sit at home and watch episodes of "Friends" and cry and think "What is wrong with me? Why don't I have a group of kooky people to hang out with? Where is my Joey?" but that passed. I have some friends. Those friends I have I love, oh I love them, I love them fiercely. Maybe I only have a few because I love the ones I have so much, I can't imagine loving a lot of people that deeply.

Earlier tonight I heard from a friend of mine who moved away from town a few months ago. He's back in town for a visit, said he'd been thinking of me. I saw him not too long ago, at Jarryd's memorial. Jarryd was quite a man, too. A sunshine of a man, a gorgeous boy. When brother called me to tell me Jarryd was dead I thought, "He can't be dead, I just saw him" I thought, "He can't be dead, he's so pretty". Pretty face, pretty soul, loved the pretty ladies, Jarryd. When I got to the memorial I arrived alone, tripping over the rocks and roots at the land co-op community center in my unfortunate shoes. I felt lost, so many faces, so many people I hadn't seen in so long and not one among them I wanted really to share my grief with. Until I saw Dirty.

Dirty is one of his names. I don't know how he came to be called Dirty, other than maybe sometimes he is. Dirty skin, sure, dirty fingernails, maybe. Clean soul, giant heart, the man is a lion. He's got curly dreaded brown hair he keeps tucked back in a bandanna and prison tattoos, he's tall and broad and when he smiles you'd think the sun just came out and those eyes, good Lord those eyes. There are stars in those eyes, but also oceans of sadness too he does not show. Dirty has been a hobo, he's lived in train yards and on rooftops. He would just as willingly protect me in a fight as he would hold my hands and kiss my face.

So I saw him, standing a bit away from the crowd, side touching another good boy we know. I made my way over and he just pulled me on in. His hand on the back of my head, one arm around my waist, he tucked me right in there between them so strong, and the other boy rounded out the knot of us. I dropped my purse on the ground and had my arms around both of them as much as I could hold and I cried, god I cried, and they held me as I shook and they were shaking too. The crowd was in the shade and we were in the sun, it was so hot there were rivers of sweat between us and rivers of tears on our faces and our shoulders, down their backs I cried and pushing my face into Dirty's chest I cried. I hurt so bad I wanted to crawl up in his strong strong heart and just stay there till the pain let up. And he let me. On beyond when it would have been polite to let go, on beyond when it was even comfortable anymore to be holding someone in that hell hot sun, he held me. 'Cause that' how strong that man is. That's how strong he loves me, and loves Jarryd, and loves that other boy we were holding.

He left town that same day, and I hadn't heard from him since, but that's how he is. He's a sojourner. Once he bought a beer from me and wrote on the five dollar bill "Dirty loves all of you" and after he walked away I put five ones from my pocket in the till and kept his fiver. I took it home and clothes pinned it to a trailing hanging plant that lives in my living room, just for a little makeshift voodoo, a little blessingway to keep Dirty and his love safe and healthy.

Some people just touch you. Maybe Dirty isn't the kind of friend who will sit in a coffee shop with me and be catty about the people we know (or actually he might, he's a pretty well rounded guy), he's the kind of friend who will come and go in my life as he wishes and that is fine. Just knowing he's out there makes me feel safe and loved. I love me some Dirty, that boy is hearts ease.

I Can't Sit Long Enough to Write

2008-06-30T16:58:00.000-07:00

The rain is making me crazy. I understand that we live in Paradise and in order for it to stay so beautiful and lush we must have the rain but I need a reprieve. Once, a long long time ago I was hit by a car, and when it rains it feels like my bones are filled with lead, lead that is made of bees, angry bees that sting and bite (okay, I know bees don't bite, but these are lead made biting bees) and weigh me down. It's rained everyday for a week. I want to snap at the raindrops like a nervous dog.

Come Onna My Kitchen

2008-06-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

I am a waitress. I am a waitress because at some point some years back, when I was still of an age that being a waitress was an acceptable and respectable thing I got a job as a waitress and realized that I was very good at it. Some days. Some days I am the worst waitress in the world and I will forget whether you are drinking sweet or unsweet tea, I will kick your chair when I pass, and I will caress the back of your head with my boob when I lean over you to retrieve your empty plate. You will pretend this did not happen. Hopefully. However, the bad waitress days are few and the good waitress days are plenty and most of the time I love my job. I love my job because I love to walk across a floor, I love to carry many things in my hands, like so many things that I imagine people are noticing and thinking "My! That waitress can carry more things than is humanly possible!". I love to multitask. As I'm pouring water at the server station, my other hand is already reaching for lemon slices and my body is already turning to be in position to pick up a bread basket and I'm thinking about table 12 who needs refills and as soon as I do that I must drop the check on table 3 so that means that I'm calculating the tax in my head, oh 7.5% on a slice of quiche and an iced tea is .68 so that comes to $9.68 and by the time I've thought of that I greet Mrs. Blankenship at the door, "Oh! Hi Mrs. B! How are the cataracts? Has Sally had that baby yet?" and turn and drop drinks and pick up plates and ask if everything's alright and already turning again to bus the plates in my hands, pick up the order for table 8, tell a dirty joke to the grill chef, think about rebrewing the tea, think about the level of the lemons, check the 86 board to see if we're out of something and out the door again to the dining room and smile and smile and smile. If all is going well, and I do my best to make sure everything is going well, it feels like I'm flying. Everyone is happy. I love it when I look around the room and all the diners are smiling. If they aren't, I try to make it so they are by the end of the meal. Maybe I flirt with an old man, maybe I ignore the old man and ask the wife how she's doing and really listen when she tells me her hip hurts. If I go to a table with a very glamorous looking woman and a shy looking woman, maybe I'll tell the shy one that the color of her blouse makes her eyes look amazing. I don't care if the glamorous woman is paying and I may be shorted in my tip, the shy woman my carry that compliment all day, maybe she'll smile more and the people at her office may smile more back at her. If you open your eyes there are always good things to say to people, and I never lie, or say something just for the money. It makes me feel my job is important, that I make a difference in their lives. The food is not my job. It is the chef's job to make the food taste good. It is my job to make the people able to enjoy the food, and if they do not, fix it. You can't enjoy your food if you are uncomfortable. I'm lucky that I work in a restaurant that does have really tasty food, it makes my job so much easier. If I worked at an Appleby's I would stab myself in the throat.

Having said all this, I am terrible at fine dining. That is what this restaurant becomes at night so I can't work nights. The money is great, yes, but you can't talk to the customers, you can't laugh. You can't dance. Once, at a restaurant, a manager walked past me while I was getting down while putting sour cream in little plastic cups and said "Stop dancing or your fired". I quit that job. If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your re....staurant.

I busted my chops in a very different sort of restaurant than where I work now. The man who ran that place had a lot of fire and a lot of passion but very little business sense. Part of my training was to inform me that a "Safety Meeting" was when the staff convened in the walk-in to smoke pot. I did not smoke pot but I liked to cram in there with everyone else and sip a little cold white wine out of a soup cup while the frosty air filled with that beautiful green fragrance and we all calmed down and told jokes. Service was shoot from the hip. We were all expected to develop our own style and develop we did, every table had a very different experience. We tried to match the personalities of the servers with the tables but that didn't always work, the whole place had the feeling of eating on a ship in stormy waters with everyone careening here and there, port to starboard, with the place crewed by children and escaped exotic animals headed for other territories. We were drunk, we were stoned, we were sweaty, but damn if we weren't a family and we did care about the food. I miss that place, I miss the camaraderie we had, but I don't miss coming in to find my fellow server puking out the back of his van or the disher awol because he got arrested the night before. Once the cops actually came to the restaurant and the chef tried to get one of the severs, this sweet little girl from south Florida, to sneak out to the dry storage shed and hide the bong. No, I don't really miss that. But the thing is, I learned there. I learned how to do things on the fly and how to improvise in sticky situations. How to think on my feet and how to, no matter what, make the customer happy.

Someday I will run my own cafe. I dream of it at night when I'm falling asleep and in the morning over coffee. I think about the good parts of all the places I have worked and I plan how to fit them together into a crazy quilt that could be beautiful and strong. I think about a place that does not careen so much, but does allow room for a bit of listing. A place where the food is good and simple, where everyone gets fed, where you can see the cooks laughing in the kitchen. Someday I will serve my shortbread with coffee, and I will make a mean shepherds pie, I will slice jeweled tomatoes from local gardens onto sandwiches, and I will greet you when you come through the door. And I will encourage all the servers (who will probably be my family and friends and need no encouragement) to dance. Until then, all this is just training.

Everybody Freeze

2008-06-26T20:12:00.000-07:00

Do you remember that game "Freeze" we all used to play in kindergarten? The teacher would play some sort of music and everyone would be instructed to dance until "Freeze!" the music would stop and you were supposed to pause in whatever position you happened to be in at the time. Remember? Remember looking around at all your friends, their google eyes and spider monkey hands hung limp from arms spread wide, hips cocked out, do you remember the stumble of it? Then back into the music, unfreeze. Lately I've been trying to play this game in real life.

I've been listening to my Mama and her friends. They say, "Oh, what would you do if you had your thirty year old body back?" they say "It sucks to grow old" and I think about how I have a thirty year old body and I think about how to me, they are not old. But I know what they mean. The years are just wooshing by faster and faster. I get lost in the past sometimes, a smell, a song, and I'm 15 jumping naked into a sinkhole, I'm 20 riding shotgun down those long hot streets of Phoenix with the stereo on full blast, I'm 21 getting married, whoosh I'm 24 getting divorced and getting down and getting a sunburn and getting laid and giddy-up go, and I'm thirty. Thirty is good, I like thirty, but it's true, we don't pause to catch these moments as they pass us. We keep them as memories and they are so shiny, we were always so much prettier back then, more free, more alive. At least that's how we remember it so it must be true.

So now, I'm playing Freeze. Not all the time, just sometimes. Walking down the street this morning the world was washed clean from last night's thunderstorm. The sky was so blue and the clouds were just flirting, and the sun was gentle on my face and bare shoulders. There were limbs down, the weak and the dead slung from the trees, but this morning the trees were still. So still and the birds were calling, taking inventory of themselves and each other. I pulled limbs out of the road. I thought about the cyclists and the man in the wheelchair and the lady with the walker who all use that sidewalk and I cleared that too. I felt the pings and pangs in my bones as I bent and tugged. I felt the elastic of my muscles and my skin. I paused. There it was, Freeze! Thirty years old, this is what it feels like to be thirty years old, right here so fine, so pretty, so alive. I looked around at the people in their cars with their google eyes and their monkey hands and it was a laugh to see what positions we were all in. Then Unfreeze! and I went on my way, swept up in the crazy music of the morning and the dance to get to work.

I hope I keep this game up. I wonder what position I'll be in next. I wonder what new game I'll learn if I keep listening to those wiser than I am. Till then I'm going to play the music, okay guys? And when the music stops, no matter what position you happen to be in, everybody ...... Freeze!