rubypearl

Apples at the Airport

2009-11-15T19:49:00.000-08:00

I was eating candied pecans with my dad today when I bit down on what felt like a piece of glass.
"Shit," I thought."What is with the pecans of pain? Not cool."
It wasn't until my tongue brushed against the back of my mouth that I realised it had been a piece of my tooth that had broken off.
"Dad. My tooth just broke in half. What the fuck?"
"Oh no." he said." Now you have a hundred and two problems."
Un
Fortunate.
Now I will have to reconcile with my estranged dentist.

Last night I visited with him and his friend Rick, who he has known since he was 17 years old. They met in 1969 in Freedom Park, and they are like brothers, closer than any family either one has. When they were twenty they ran a drug treatment center called Our House.
"People came in, they needed a place to come down without getting hassled by the cops, they needed a safe place. We fixed them up, gave them a little counseling and sent them on their way." he said.
My mother was a Jesus freak then, my dad had long honey brown hair and a chest length beard, the spitting image of the Saviour. When she met him he was looking for volunteers to help out at Our House. My mom thought that people coming down from a bad trip would be susceptible to hearing the Word, so she went over there with her friend Linda.
"I had just gone undercover to get Linda out of a cult she'd gotten caught up in," she says."We didn't have anything else to do."
That is how, on the same night, my mother met my father and Linda met Rick. They are still married, my parents are not, but I believe that if my dad had not resembled the Lord and Savour I might not be here.
The love between these two men has run underneath a lifetime. It's touching to see it.
I have friends like this who hold me up and inspire my spirit. I hope that we'll reach middle age together as they have.

I took my dad to the airport today, his visit is over. I am still in the midst of a shitstorm, one that I am coming to see will only get worse before it gets better, neutralised by time, as all things are.I am terrified but also strangely at peace with whatever comes, tears waiting unshed behind each breath I take.
"This is real now." My dad said to me in the car."You have to be a warrior. I don't mean you have to fight, but you have to conquer your fear and listen to what you know is right in your heart. Move through this with open hands but hold your strength inside you like a fist." Good advice.
When we got to the airport I grabbed his bags from the back of my truck and set them on the curb. I am always, always aware that every goodbye could be our last. It kind of sucks, and makes it difficult to be lighthearted. We hug for a long time.Then he took me by the shoulders and looks me in the eye.
"I would fight and die for you." He says."You have been the zenith of my existence.I would be honored to go out like that, so call me up if you need me to." I was, of course, crying at this point.
"You are the best thing I ever did. And it only took a few seconds!" Then I was laughing again.
He splits then, disappearing into the airport. I decided to wait a while in my car and eat an apple. I didn't really have a reason for this, and I expected to be hassled by security minions, but they never came by.
I see couples embracing, some smiling, some crying. I see an old, very obese woman with one shoe, one bare and swollen purple foot limp out of the car and struggle to help carry her daughter's bags for her. The big girl waves her away. They embrace for a long time, holding each other tight. When the mother turns I see that her eyes are full of tears as she limps back to the car.
I see a beautiful woman with odd shoes get out of a limousine. She looks mildly famous and I wonder who she is.
I see an old white man in a bow tie embrace a young black man in baggy jeans. I watch dozens of people enacting these farewells for me as I eat my apple.

What is this current that runs between people, the terrible weight of this love we carry. It can sustain your heart, it can level you to the ground. I wonder about human beings, we are slaves to this feeling-at least part of it's roots evolutionary, a necessity for keeping the tribe together. But I think it's more than that. The love between old friends, parents and children, women and men and thousands of other odd assortments of people connected to people. It runs through them like the blood that pumps ceaselessly through our hearts until we die. I will never understand it, but I will hold it in my heart as strong as a fist while I open my palms and be thankful to have it, if only for a little while.

One hundred and one

2009-11-14T13:17:00.000-08:00

I have sudden;y found myself in the midst of a swirling chaos of serious personal problems. Looking back, I can see that they've been building, rising like bread dough in the dark as I turned away from them, looking outward, hoping they would go away. This morning I found that they'd grown so big I could no longer ignore them.
"Look at me." they said.
"No. If I do, I'll have to do something."
"Too bad. Here I am."
So I did.
Here is the thing about this blog. I have a big mouth. I will tell anyone anything about myself. If the situation involves the privacy of others, however, it becomes off limits to write about. Some of my best stories are canned because of this. I remember reading a quote by Joan Didian.
"Never forget. A writer is always selling someone out."
I try hard to avoid doing that, although I like that quote and understand it completely. You are listening to someone, having an experience, and always,always thinking of what kind of story it would translate into. Even very painful events can be transformed into something like art, soothing them. Unless it is someone else's story.
But, this morning I am in the middle of a hurricane, an ongoing improv piece enacting by me and someone I love dearly, the end of which I don't know yet. I guess it will be created by both of us, spontaneously. It's tempting to feel self pity or blame, to justify my role in this play, but I know that I am creating it just as much as the other person involved, and really-that's the worst part isn't it?
My dad told me a story once. A student was forever whining to his teacher about his problems. One day the teacher turned to him and said.
"Everyone who lives will have a hundred problems. Except for some people, who have a hundred and one. They are in a terrible spot, the worst imaginable."
"What is the hundred and first problem?"the student asked.
"Ah,"said the master."Their problem is the hardest. They believe that they shouldn't have problems."
So, today, once again, with every breath I take through my tears, I remember to be thankful to be alive. I try to keep in mind that sometimes there are hidden parachutes in every situations that aren't easily seen, bridges that will take you somewhere out of your pain, places you can't imagine exist yet. I look downward, to people whose problems are worse than mine. There are many. I bless them.
"May you be free from suffering." a prayer my mother gave me, one that comforts someone who doesn't believe in prayers.
I stopped by the grocery store today. I'd been crying and I was slightly embarrassed to be there in public.
"Just get your shit and get out." I thought.
The sun was shining on a blackbird hopping towards my car. The light reflecting off his body was oil slick and iridescent with blue green and purple. I could see his eye look at me, a bead in the color, as he cocked his head my way.
"There is something to be happy about." I thought. A small,exquisite miracle on the asphalt of an ugly parking lot.
I did my shopping, I didn't cry like a weirdo in line or anything stupid, which I was immensely grateful for, and walked back to my truck. He was still there, he had hopped up on the bed.
"Thanks for waiting buddy." I said. "I gotta go deal with some bullshit though, you gotta go."
And he flew off as I got into the truck, as birds will do when they are startled. I watched him fly away in circles through the sky, thought of all the advice I have been given about my pain, trite or wise but every word so well meaning, and tried to let at least one of my hundred and one problems fly away with him.

Here's a Tip

2009-11-12T15:32:00.000-08:00

I just went to have my fake nails redone because last night one came off in the pizza dough I was kneading. I never found it ( sorry dinner guests! Let me know if you see it later today!)
I went to a new place, next to the post office I had to run to. The girl who did my "fill" was pretty young. She was Vietnamese, but her English was pretty great. I can't imagine learning a new language as an adult, how hard that would be.
As I sat down I took a call from my mother on my cell phone. She overheard me trying to explain a complicated plan I was cooking up for the evening involving my mom babysitting for me for two hours, me picking up Ruby and driving to a friends house to babysit her children for a few hours and then taking her home. Like all plans with complex variables, my mother, bless her, gets confused. These situations are dicey to explain, often she throws her hands up in frustration and suddenly refuses to participate.
"I don't know what the hell you're trying to do." she will say" Leave me out of this bullshit." and hangs up.
This time, I explained it several times before I gave up and got off the phone. The nail tech raised her eyebrows at me.
"Even I get that," she said."What wrong with you mom? She kind of stupid?"
"Um, no....you know how it is with moms. You love them, but... you know. Hard to communicate sometimes."
"Yeah but that so simple. You need babysitting for you kid so you can go out with you boyfriend for dinner, then you go watch somebody elses kid for them. It's not hard to understand. What wrong with you mom she don't get it, huh?"
"Yeah, I don't know."
"Your boyfriend, he same daddy to you kid? How come you not married?" She is taking a small electric file to my nail bed, it feels hot from the friction. One wrong move and she could cut or burn my cuticles with it. I am afraid of angering her.
"Yeah, we aren't really married. But we may as well be. We are common law, we have a kid."
"Yeah you should get married though! You have a kid! It's big commitment!You need take that serious!"
"Um, we do. I don't know. I just don't see the point, really."
"Yeah but you have kid together, right? Who you think going to take you now? You have a kid? Look at you! You can't get anybody else, right? Nobody want to date you now!You marry him!"
I am squirming. She isn't even looking at the electric file. I feel it burning away my nail bed. She is too excited about my lack of commitment. I try to make her feel sorry for me, just to get her off my back.
"He runs around with other women a lot." I say.
"OOOOH, that's too bad. Yes, too bad. Still, though. Who else gonna take you now?"
I am pretty sure that there are men who will date women with children, but I'm not going to argue, besides I am not looking to date. I try to deflect, back onto her.
"Do you have kids?"
She shakes her head. "No No I can't take care of a cat even. No kids."
AH. There it is. Always the most opinionated people on the subject of child rearing are the young and childless people.
Hey-people with no kids! Here's a tip-Shut the fuck up. You will, someday, understand. I know you just love your dog("They're just like my children! I feel like I know what it's like to have kids now!")
Yeah, you don't. Not even the tiniest little bit. I can't explain it to you, cause you wouldn't get it, but someday you'll know, then you'll remember back to when you were Judgy McKnowitAll and feel like an asshole.
She spent the rest of the time having an animated conversation in Vietnamese with a sleepy looking woman sitting in the pedicure chair. As always, when my nail techs are talking to each other I am positive that they are mocking me, but maybe it's just because that is what I would do if I spoke another language. At one point, I ask her-
"What are you guys talking about?" and they look at each other.
"We know this man, he have kids by two women, he no want to marry either one, and he try to date me."
Oh really.

My dad, The tic tac and the Havelinas

2009-11-12T08:08:00.000-08:00

My dad almost choked to death on a tic tac this morning on the way to Costco. He began to choke suddenly, gasping for breath.
"WHAT? Is it my cigarette?"
No response, just gasps. What are you supposed to do?? Hit their back? Punch them in the solar plexis? What? Aren't there movies where people do those things and something comes flying straight out?
At that point though, I didn't know about the tic tac. I was reminded of the time, two years ago, when he began to cough in a similar fashion and what came flying out was a stream of blood. He was sitting on my couch, telling me a joke I'd heard a few times before earlier in the day. As I pretended to chuckle, just to indulge him, the blood came. He was in the hospital for a month after that, that time.He has end stage liver failure, stuff like that happens.
Today, in the car, I felt the familiar ping as a small panic moved somewhere in my heart, a Mexican jumping bean of fear, telling me "You have let your gaurd down. You have forgotten me."
But we do forget, we let waves of petty, inconsequential details washy over us, consuming us in what we think of as "life". We let ourselves get lulled into believing that we will live forever, that stupid, fleeting things really matter, that our loved ones will be around us always. We are all rolling the dice with each breath.
"DAD!" I shouted as his coughs began to subside."Are you okay? Should I pull over?"
He opened his eyes and looked up at me. He smiled, opened his mouth and showed me an orange pellet on his tongue.
I giggled with relief.
"Dude," I told him."It would be so funny if you got taken out by a tic tac after all this Hep C shit."
"I know. It's always what we don't worry about, isn't it?"
"Could you please do that for me? Try to die in some way that will make me laugh. Stop being so selfish, think about me for once. Jeez."
"I know. I really should think of your amusement more often. But I won't, just to spite you."
"Why? I'm such a good daughter, much better than you deserve actually."
He grins.
"I'll never forgive you for not marrying Robert Rodriguez."
"Jesus Christ, Dad. That director was NOT Robert Rodriguez. Besides, doesn't he have,like 11 kids or something?"
"I don't care." he feigns petulance."I loved El Mariachi."
"Dad, I told you. I never met him. That guy I dated before Jeff just made movies. He was not Robert Rodriguez."
"I just wanted to be in a movie, that's all."
A few seconds pass. When I look over at him again he is fast asleep.
We get lost in Costco again, our second visit in 24 hours. Somehow, although I wasn't intending to shop, I leave the store with an electric toothbrush, 30 rolls of toilet paper and enough apple juice to carry Ruby into high school. Every employee my dad comes into contact with is treated to the same lecture.
"Isn't it crazy how we let the corporate beast ride on our backs for a good deal?" He leans close to them. They look around for backup, afraid. Their eyes plead with me, but I can only shrug.
He will continue."This mega store won't even let me use any credit card except American Express!!!Why is that?"
"I just need to check your receipt before you leave the store, sir."
"These big corporations just bleed us until we are dry husks, they aren't even human! They are giant machines that control everything!"
"Dad, lets go."
I drag him away. When we get in the car he Tells me story about almost getting killed by a pack of havelinas in a canyon somewhere when I was a baby. He has many such stories, guns to his head, narrowly escaping death. Then he asks me to take him to the State Surplus Warehouse, out in the middle of nowhere. It's full of everything that gets confiscated at the airport, all the wicked looking pocketknives you could dream of,scissors, hundreds of inexplicable snowglobes from all over the country and kitchen tools. There were also bins filled with hundreds of sunglasses, watches, cell phone chargers and jewelry that people must have left on the plane.Everything was a dollar.
My dad got me a Daniel Boone sized switchblade, I almost bought a huge Captain Ahab fish hook, and he bought himself four identical pocketknives.
"Dad. You have hundreds of knives at home from this place. This is unhealthy."
"They are worth sixty dollars!"
"So what? You don't sell them. Are you planning on starting a knife wielding gang? How are you going to get them home on the plane?"
"You're going to mail them to me."
That might be illegal, I don't know. He has given over twenty such knives to me and Jeff, which we have stored somewhere, awaiting our West Side Story moment. I need to get us some cool, matching jackets.
This knife thing is disturbing, I fear my dad will cut a Costco employee someday. Maybe instead of choking on a tic tac he will die outlaw style, shanking a minion of the Corporate beast, and I will say with pride,
"That's my dad."

Five Minutes

2009-11-12T06:04:00.000-08:00

Ruby,to me, as I drive the car-" Mommy, I have a baby sister in my belly"
Me-"Really? That's special. What is she doing?"
Ruby-"She's swimming around like a fish. She loves me."

Ruby, addressing her daycare class- "Look! I got no panties on!"
Me-"Put your dress down Ruby"
Ruby-"Look! My hoo-hoo!"
My dad,who is visiting me, to the teachers at her school-"You'll have to remember that line later, but you'll have wait until you're really drunk to use it."
Me-sigh.

It takes me about 30 minutes to become fully human in the morning. It's always too early, my mind only capable of repeating one word again and again.
"WRONG WRONG WRONG" it says.
I don't wake up easily, even with a tiny face positioned a centimeter from my heavy eyelids yelling

"MOMMY! IT"S WAKE UP TIME!"

Me-"five more minutes."

"BUT THE BIRDS IS UP!"

"go back to sleep."

"BUT THE TRESS IS UP!"

"mommy needs five minutes."

"I KNOW! YOU BE THE MOMMY LION AND I"LL BE THE BABY LION! GGGGGRRRROOOOOWWWWL!"

When I am able to drag my body out of bed I trip over the dog, who is half jumping, claws punching my solar plexis, needing to go outside or eat or have its being validated or something. The dog pushes me to the door, jumping on my bare feet again and again, while Ruby tugs at my pajama legs, outlining her demands-apple juice, hold her on the couch, yogurt, cereal, ice cream, Spongebob video, play like you are a baby lion. It registers dimly in the back of my brain.

If I manage to escape for a minute, I can hide under the covers of our bed. It takes .05 seconds for Jeff to begin humping me in his sleep, mumbling "Quick! We have time!"
"We do not have time. Go make me some coffee."
"C'mon! Five minutes!"
"I need more sleep! My hoo hoo isnt awake!"
It only takes a minute before I am hunted down again, before i feel a cold wet animal nose in my face or two tiny feet digging into my bladder.
"LETS GO PLAY! YOU BE THE MOMMY RAINBOW AND I"LL BE THE BABY RAINBOW!"

So I get up.

"Just don't drink any unknown substance before you are fully awake." I think to myself each morning "Don't drink bleach water and you're all right."

My dad is visiting this week, sleeping on the couch, so lately after I let the dog out I am faced with two bright eyes above a scraggly grey beard.

"Good Morning beautiful daughter!" he chirps. "Will you take me to Costco?"

He means the south Costco, as we have already visited the north one.
I thought i would hate Costco, given the battles I have been through with other superstores, but I don't. I did feel a weird vertigo staring up at the towers of paper products. It does make me feel tiny, like a toddler, to stand next to huge cans of green beans and plastic bottles of canola oil.I kind of like it though.

"Everything is so Cheap!" I kept exclaiming, to the salespeople, to the old people waiting for the next mini pizza to come out of the sample oven. After my tiny square of pizza was in my hands I sensed movement to my right.

"Dad!" I hissed."Smoothies! Three o'clock!" As we darted over to the next cart dozens of other shoppers raced over to get one of the quickly disappearing paper cups of smoothie. We ran around this way for a while, then it began to get tiresome pushing old ladies out of my way for a free treat, so we wandered around the electronics department for a while. I want one of those tiny laptops that fit in your purse. I don't even like laptops, hate them actually, my fingers don't know how to type on the keyboards so I have to hunt and peck on them and it makes me feel retarded, but I love the idea of a computer in my purse. It makes me feel
a. Grown up
b. Like a Jetson
So we asked a bunch of questions then we split.

Today we'll go to the South one, cause that is what you do when relatives visit you.
"This is what Costco is like down here in the South. Pretty great, no?"
I realised yesterday that I need a card there, so I can begin stockpiling food for the Apocalypse. I do like to be prepared. If my garage was stocked with sofa sized cans of mandarin oranges and tuna, I think I would sleep better at night.

The problem is that I will want to buy packages of skittles the size of body bags, and bales of red lichoriche instead of boring nutritious food. When I am awakened by my family one morning after Armageddon, as I am struggling to ignore the chorus of needs rising up to my ears from the creatures at my knees,I will raise my glass of bleach water absently to my lips as I pour the giant bag of Skittles in to the dogs bowl and think
"I just need five more minutes."

Chop Chop

2009-11-10T08:11:00.001-08:00

I write about going to the dentist a lot, because I go to the dentist a lot. I have been experiencing that special, you-need-another-root-canal feeling in my back molar for a few weeks now, but since I compulsively sent my oral surgeon an inappropriate email after my last visit, I will have to find a new one and I just can't face that right now.( Okay, P.S? Doctors don't like it when you imply they were drunk during your procedure. Even if it's CLEARLY sarcastic you have to remember that tone does not always come through in emails)

Although I obsessively floss and brush all day long now there were ten years that I refused to go to the dentist. In my twenties I was invincible. Now I pay,pay,pay.
Even before my routine trips to the dentist I had a thing about teeth.

My father has bad teeth too. By thirty-five, all of my relatives get their teeth pulled and replaced with dentures. Dentistry is a luxury the poor cannot afford.

I remember touching my Granny’s dentures, floating like an exotic sea creature in a glass of water by the bed. The slick plastic gums, the skeletal grin of their smile, everything about them frightened me. She would grin at me, openmouthed, just to freak me out. She thought it was hilarious.

I have never had good health insurance, if any at all. Checkups were a rarity in my youth. As a result I have had eight root canals and two extractions in the back of my mouth. I began to collect teeth after the first one, to replace what I had lost. People were happy to give me their wisdom teeth. I solicited them before they went in for surgery.

“ Make them let you keep your teeth for me.”

They always agreed. As my root canals grew in number, so did my collection of other people’s teeth. I needed to have enough to superglue them together, fashioning my own dentures in the event that my oral surgeon became suddenly unavailable to me. If I offended him, or the Apocalypse came, I would be ready.

“ A tooth is a living being,” he told me once. “ Yours are injured.”

Teeth, once pulled from your skull, will never grow back. The finality of this act reminds me of my own death. I am losing pieces of myself every day, dying brain cells that will never be replaced, eggs growing ancient and feeble in my ovary, capillaries in my lungs permanently damaged by every inhale I take from a cigarette. The only organ that can regrow itself is the liver, like an earthworm that has been cut in half.

The enamel on your teeth is the hardest substance in your body, lacquered around a substance called pulp for its protection. Enamel looks like bone but it isn’t. It’s made of a mineral called calcium phosphate, which also forms structures called “brain sand” near your pineal gland. Your brain, by the time you reach middle age, has teeth.

The gums your teeth are planted in, pink like the sticky, sweet substance we chew of the same name, are part of the ecosystem in your mouth that teems with microscopic civilizations living and dying as you speak each word aloud, organisms that suckle on your sugar and burrow holes through enamel, searching for electric nerves.

A typical adult has thirty-two teeth. As I write this, I have 30 of my own left in my mouth and 19 in my collection. They are displayed in a special cabinet that is decorated with dragons and melted toothbrushes and glitter. If my house were to catch fire, after securing the safety of my child, I would reach first for that little dental shrine. Jeff would be on his own.

Slaughter Your Darlings

2009-11-09T09:57:00.000-08:00

I have a gallon of hot pink mouse paint and I'm determined to use it, somewhere, sometime. I feel compulsive about it, the paint cannot go to waste. It's free paint! I have to use it.( Does anyone who lives in Austin want a gallon of hot pink paint? Come get it. It must be used.)

Yesterday I decided to paint one bathroom wall with it. It looked terrible, so I sponged over it with a navy blue faux glaze. That looked terrible, so I sponged over that with a green grey glaze, imagining a weird, shimmery tri color effect. It hurts my eyes now. It's terrible. I may paint it white again later today.

I spent the morning crying because of a phone call. I try not to have expectations of life. I feel like the less you expect, the happier you will be.

"I'm still alive!" If you think this way at the end of each day, instead of focusing on anything that didn't go your way, you feel lucky. It doesn't always work.
I tried to to have high expectations when the agent who had been promising to read my book for three months emailed me last week.

"I'm amazed at how beautiful your writing style is. You present an evocative world for your readers. I see some problems but they are small and fixable. Let's set up a phone meeting." ( I don't know what 'evocative' means, really, but it sounds so positive.)

I am currently attempting to practice detachment, so I 'let go' thinking about how the last book this particular agent picked ended up on the Oprah's bestseller list, how I cried when I read that book because it was so beautifully written, so perfect. How wonderful it would be to work with someone who had the insight to pick such a book.

"I am lucky today, I am still alive." I thought to myself all weekend. Let go. No expectations.

But it's hard to do, really.

This morning we had our "phone meeting"( anytime I am invited to a 'meeting' I feel the same way that I do when I wear high heels-like a grown up)
"I'm amazed that you haven't had formal training." she said."Your writing style is like a painting, it really drew me in,"

BUT

"It meanders. It has no formal structure. You need to shorten the time frame and give your readers a more definite beginning, a middle, a climax, and a resolution. It contains too much that isn't vital to the plot. I don't know how to market this book. If you make these changes, send it to me again. I'm really interested in this book."

So, good, bad, what is it? Both.
She may be right.

"She is wrong." said my editor, who I called immediately, sniffling."Fight for your book. Find another agent. Remember Confederacy of Dunces? Who the hell is she? Find someone else."
My editor, by the way, has cancer in both breasts. She is scheduled for surgery in a week, a double masectomy. Yet she took an hour to listen to me whine about this, to sympathyse and commiserate with me.( Get it into perspective, I told myself silently. Seriously)

But she's a marketing genius! And maybe she's right! I don't know!

An artist I knew, a brilliantly talented pastel painter, said to me once-" In order to be great and not just good, you have to be willing to slaughter your darlings."
Meaning-you have to remain detached. You have to be willing to paint over that perfect tree you just did if you stand back and see that it distracts from the rest of the painting. You have to be willing to cut out your best writing if it cripples the rest of your book.

I get that. I remember that advice every time I make any kind of art.

So I opened up Word and cut everything the Agent told me to. It amounted to 2/3 of the book. 2/3 of what I spent two and a half years writing. 2/3 of a story that is woefully incomplete without it's remainder. The soul of the book. Cut.
If I take the Agents advice I'm committing myself to spending at least six months rewriting, maybe more. I'm altering the story I'm trying to tell into a completely different one.
But she may be right. I don't know.

So the process reminds me of the wall I am painting in the bathroom. Paint the wall, finish. It's not right. Paint it again, and again, and again, and maybe just back to white and start all over. Either way, I'm going back to the drawing board somehow-by rewriting the whole book or waiting another three months for another agent to read it-maybe for them to say the same thing. It takes an incredible amount of detachment to go through this process over and over.

"Why am I doing this?" I asked Jeff today through my tears."It sucks."
"You make art, you have to show it to people."
"I'm just going to put the whole stupid thing on my blog. There are a hundred people on there who would like it."
"Don't do anything compulsive like you did with the bathroom Sunny."

So I won't. I am practising detachment. I am, every moment, remembering how small my problems really are and how lucky I am to still be alive at the end of each day.

And after a while, I'll repaint the wall white again.

Fun Fun Fun

2009-11-07T22:31:00.000-08:00

Ladies-
No matter how you try to accessorize it, a bra will never be a shirt. It's not. Really, people can tell if you're trying to substitute it for a swimsuit top too, but they don't care as much. Even black bras shouldn't be worn as a top. Definitely not taupe, skin colored old lady bras with thick straps. You had to know that was a bad idea before you left the house because
a. It's November
b. It's your bra.
What gives?
Saw two of those, one shirtless man, several seizures that turned out to be exhibitions of extreme enthusiasm and lots of falling down today. The "FunFunFun Festival" is going on in Austin this weekend. I didn't want to go this year because last year I didn't even have one fun, despite the promised designation of three times the normal amount of fun. Since I don't drink I don't enjoy

Standing around(when I could be sitting, or better, laying down)

Shouting my conversation close to someones ear("WHAT?"
"I SAID THIS SUCKS!"
"OH YEAH. GET ME ANOTHER BEER WHILE YOU'RE THERE!")

Loud discordant music(sorry fans of punk rock. Your "music" is just painful noise to me. I am not cool.)

So our plan was that Jeff would go while I stayed home with Ruby. Then, my mother spontaneously decided to watch Ruby OVERNIGHT, which made me feel an immediate and urgent need to do something. I called everyone I knew, only to find out that they were down at the fest. I was desperate. Finally, after finding nothing to do, I went down there and snuck in, a decision I would quickly regret.

People really seem to love this "music". They will stand still for long periods of time, nodding or gyrating while they watch a tiny figure on a stage far away, listening to the same music they could download for free while laying down on the sofa.
We ran around after the festival with our friend JMart. He is the most guilelessly cheerful person we know. Imagine drunk Winnie the Pooh carrying a nap sack and greeting every passerby.

"Hey! Hot Dogs!" he shouted as we passed a couple eating hot dogs."All right! Hot dogs!"

Passing a freakishly skinny and circus-tall reveler-
"Hey dude you're tall! You rock!" as he attempts to give the man a high-five.

Later
"Hey! Jean shorts! All right man, jean shorts!"

Later(to what is clearly, in my eyes at least, an aimless drifter looking to cut our throat and steal our change)

"Where's the party man? You need a ride?"

Jmart had Jeff's sweater in his nap sack, and when it got cold Jeff began to focus obsessively on getting it back.
"Jmart keeps running off. I need my jumper."
Me-"Your WHAT?"
"My jumper. You know, I'm cold."
"What the fuck is a jumper?"
"That's what they're called dude."
Me-"We are not in England Jeff."
Even the gays find the word jumper too gay. Unless you are a freshly scrubbed schoolgirl, you are wearing a sweater.

Jmart-
"Hey! How's your jumper? All right!"

गेत्तिंग अ fill

2009-10-31T16:48:00.001-07:00

Just saw an elderly midget dressed as a Gnome smoking a cigar as he rolled down our street in a Rascal, cutting off a group of trick or treaters with a sour look on his face. Red pointy hat, the whole outfit. Now I know it's going to be a good Halloween.

Here's a tip. If you feel a sudden compulsion to stop in to your local salon and get fake nails applied instead of going over to the house you just moved out of to clean the rotting food out of the refrigerator, think twice.
I did such a thing today. I regretted said decision at certain moments-when I looked down at my hands and discovered that had I paid more attention to what the nail tech was doing I might have told her-"Hey. Don't leave them long and square like a tree sloth." or "Maybe I don't need to snort cocaine with my fingernails, let's cut them a little shorter and shape them so people don't point and laugh."
Sadly, I didn't really think any of it through. Not until jars of pickles were sliding from my paws did I realise it might make manual labor difficult to have inch long extensions protruding from my fingers.
Ladies! How do you manage this? I've always been a nail biter, but today i decided-I'm 34 years old. I want big girl fingers.
Not a good plan.
You know what else is made difficult with long painted claws?
Typing.
Sewing.
Picking up small objects of any kind.
Certain essential sexually related activities.
Opening/using the cell phone while driving and smoking a cigarette.
All important activities of my daily life.
Unfortunate. But they look fucking hot.

स्टाप

2009-10-28T08:56:00.000-07:00

Things I have seen this week-

1.
The most spectacular display of plumber's ass in a decade. The entire ass, underneath the pimpled curve of the cheeks. He was clearly trying to hold it up with a belt, but failing. Still, credit must be given for the effort. I only turned to notice it because I heard him muttering about "somebitch" while he was buying his Winston soft pack in front of me at the convenience store, which reminded me of a funny story my friend Danna told me about a girl she knows who returned home late one night dressed only in a blood covered bra and drunkenly smashed into her dad's car in the driveway. When her dad came out she yelled,"Be quiet! My dad's going to kill me!"
"I am your dad."he said."Whose blood is that?"
"Somebitch." She said and passed out.
I love this girl. So much. If you are out there,Somebitch, I am giving you the shout out from the bottom of my heart.

2.
A display of Christian books in the HEB near my house. Next to "60 Minutes in Heaven", "Who I met in Heaven" and "God's Tips for a Happy Wife" was a book entitled "Patrick Swayze:One Last Dance."
Underneath that was a shelf full of truck sized containers containing a substance called Monster Milk featuring a grey Bladerunner looking fellow with sinister snake eyes, those evil goat eyes where the pupils are just slits. He looks off in the distance, as if contemplating stealing a child like La Chupacabra or enslaving humanity. "Monster Milk" makes me think of a room full of genetically altered freak animals lying on their sides, moaning in misery while a vile thick substance is pumped out of their teats by a futuristic machine. But I think I have too much imagination and not enough psychological stability-so that's just me.
Anyway, I couldn't buy regular cows milk after that, I went with soy. I don't want any liquid that has been "milked" out of anything for a few days.

Jeff and I went out to dinner last week. We sat at the bar next to a 78 year old man while we waited. It was his birthday, so he was drinking whiskey shots. Sweet and charming, he asked us where our new house was located. We told him the general area.
"Isn't that neighborhood full of blacks?" He asked loudly, still grinning cheerfully, utterly unaware that I was looking around frantically to see if anyone had heard him.

"Um, yeah. But that's okay now. It's okay." Because it wasn't really the time and place to make a big It's-not-cool-to-be-racist speech. Anyway, it wouldn't have done any good. I find it embarrassing when old people are racist like that, but it doesn't enrage me as much as when I see it in the younger crowd, unless it's accompanied by meanness or cruelty. It's usually just little off-comments like that.

It's so ingrained in them, it's almost innocent, they really don't know they are saying something totally wrong. Maybe it would bother me more if I was a minority, I don't know.

My grandmother was like that. I remember sending her a picture of my first boyfriend, a sweet,harmless looking skinny little black fellow. Not the big,menacing faux-gansters my friends and I would later run around with, this guy was more akin to Erkel from that show.She called me immediately.

"Honey,"she shouted, her hearing shot,"Cats and Dogs don't mate. It's not natural. Blacks and whites is the same thing. You gots to quit it."
I got mad. I tried to convince her that she was being racist.
"It ain't racist honey. It's just the natural way of things. It's even in the Bible."
"It's not in the Bible!" I shouted.
"Hush up and stop showing your ass." Which means, be quiet and control your temper.

My new neighborhood, although pocketed with beautifully maintained homes, is also threaded through with crack houses and ghetto apartment complexes. I spent much of my childhood in the projects, the actual low income housing food stamp projects, when my mom and I moved out I still spent summers there with my Granny-so the unique brand of boisterous crazy behaviour displayed by poor people doesn't bother me. I enjoy it, actually.

I don't know if it's the fact that a lot of low income people are living so close to the edge of survival that they just don't give a shit(Fuck it, I'm going to Wal Mart in a thong! Who cares anymore?) or if it's an endemic social problem caused by lack of education and little opportunity that keeps people caught in a cycle of desperation that affords them little patience with decorum. Maybe there are just more mentally ill people living in the projects, but when I hang out in ghetto neighborhoods I see beautiful displays of crazy all around me.

Despite the warning from my old friend at the bar, most of the crazy has been acted out for me by white people.

There was the aforementioned exposed ass of the morning. I saw some junkies perched outside 7-11 with a sign that read Fuck You( not good marketing, guys) begging for change while one of them peeled a long thin strip of skin as wide as his hand from his shin. I heard this conversation as two guys rode past our house on their bikes-

"Yeah man bitch was not stopping, she was a FREAK for my shit!"
"You use a rubber?"
"HELL,no!"

While driving with my mom to Target I saw some skinheads standing in the middle of the road giving the finger to a car full of black guys, yelling "WHOOOOOP!"
Another car swerved to avoid them, almost hitting me( totally unnecessary move, by the way. There was room) My mom grabbed the dashboard in terror, as she often does when I am driving. As I rolled down my window to yell "RETARD!" as I often do while I am driving, she grabbed my hand.

"I don't think you should be getting into fights in your new neighborhood, Sunny."
"What are you saying?"

"I'm just saying, you have a tendency to get into stupid arguments with people, and maybe you should rethink that strategy now that you live Crackhead Heights, that's all."

Now I am annoyed at her. She has made me miss my opportunity to inform whoever was driving that car that they suffer from mental retardation.

"Mom. Seriously! Shut up with the advice already!"

"Hey!" she points a finger at me and I hear a familiar note in her voice from long ago.
"Hush up and stop showing your ass."

वहनन्न toAmerica

2009-10-24T19:02:00.000-07:00

I'm dead tired- it's time for a quote.

Here is my favorite,
The Prologue to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography

What I Have Lived For

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

इ'म नोट psychic

2009-10-24T02:34:00.000-07:00

I got a free gallon of that horrible pink Disney paint yesterday because I complained at Home Depot.
"This mouse paint is ass." I hefted what was left onto the table and tried to look mean and customer-y at the clerk.
He just laughed.
"Let me give you some more." he said.
"Why would I want more ass paint?"
"All I can do is give you a free gallon."
"Okay." And now I have slightly less hatred for Mickey Mouse and a LOT of pink paint.

Today we move our furniture over to the new house, the Big day-you know the day you move the Beds and the Sofa. I'm not sure how this is going to go. Ruby was up every half an hour puking into a towel. Every time we move someone gets sick.
I'm somewhat paranoid about the flu this year. An eighteen month old baby died from H1N1 .05 miles from my house ( I mapquested it) two months ago. Two weeks ago a five year old died, from which flu they dont know, but it doesn't really matter anyway.In my house flu=freak out.

In fact I'm only writing about this because I am trying to reverse call it. The theory being that if you call something out-it won't happen because the bad things that happen are never what you worry about-always something completely out of the blue.

"Oh,"you think."I always worried about knife wielding strangers. I SHOULD have worried about getting hit by a bus."

If you reverse call something-if you say it out loud-really what are the chances that it will happen? Jesus, I'm not psychic or anything. I can't predict tomorrow's events. I'm not that woman in that mystery show that is always waking up suddenly in the middle of the night gasping and grabbing her husbands arm because she saw the murder about to happen.( We call that show 'Lunesta")

So you're safe. At least on that one. Watch out for the bus.

particles

2009-10-23T04:00:00.000-07:00

We seem to have the need to anthropomorphise, put a human face or apply human motivations to, what we come into contact with. That is why people think their dogs are experiencing a range of complex emotions, it's why lonely people talk to their plants, and why people overwhelmingly speak of God as a "Father". We distill ideas and experiences into what we can understand.

I've been thinking a lot about an extraordinary branch of physics that may provide a sufficient explanation for the existence of God( in my mind)But I've decided that I'd also like to indulge myself in a little anthropomorphism as well.
Since the most profoundly spiritual experience of my life was becoming a mother, I've been thinking a lot about my own mother lately.

There are other kinds of love-transcendent, life altering love that isn't maternal to be sure- but this is the one I am thinking about today.Sorry fathers-you're great in a different way but this is not about you.

There is the joke, on sitcoms and commercials and on playgrounds, that mothers are taken for granted. We do tend to dismiss them, but more because they're the backdrop of us. Our mothers grow our bodies in their bellies, using their blood cells, drawing the calcium from their teeth to create our bones. They feed us milk from their bodies, siphoning off vitamins from the food they eat to make it. We are them, in some sense, even as our psychologies cry out that we're not.

They have found fetal cells swimming in the bloodstreams of elderly women, they can find your mother's cells living in the skin at the base of your neck-where your spinal cord was first formed.

Our mothers form our first landscape of our self, we don't notice it because it's all around us, the way I don't register the view during my commute to work each day. It's too familiar.

It's what we must push off of to create healthy identities as teenagers. There is a biological component to your terrible 13 year old as well-without distance from their parents they could never leave the tribe to marry and create their own offspring. Never mind that we don't do that here, in this century, in Western countries at least. Their bodies operate off of an ancient clock.

Our mothers,the good ones, don't mind this supporting role, offstage and behind the curtains, watching us shine in the spot lights.
The time spent loving a child, maybe the knowledge that they feel that love, is all mothers ever really need to receive from our children. That, and a papier mache imprint of their hand on Mother's day.

My own mother grew up in poverty and chaos. Her stepfather almost constantly drunk and violent, her mother took off for days on her motorcycle, leaving my mom and her little brother with no food or supervision.She remembers sleeping in the closet each night. She remembers gunfights and visits to relatives in the county jail. Her family could barely read or write.

She left home at 16, graduated high school alone and decided to have a different life. She was the first person in her family to graduate college.

She was poor for a long time. I remember dance lessons and art classes that she sacrificed to put me in, a dollar at a time in a jelly jar. I remember new school clothes put on layaway each spring to be retrieved in the fall. I remember her hand on my forehead, her form at my bedside throughout long nights of fever each time I was sick. She pulled herself into adulthood, creating a mild and gentle world for me. I have no idea where she pulled these qualities from, deep out of herself amid the chaos of her family, to be the mother she was.

My father was absent much of my life, not by choice, but a distant figure. I look at him now, he influences me but remains distinct.
"What a curious fellow." I think.

But my mother is in my blood. I don't analyse her effect on me, I can't see it. It's too close.I feel echoes of it when I bathe my daughter or make her cinnamon toast on a cold day.

I don't know how many mothers have felt what I feel as I hold my daughter's little body in my arms. There are currently six billion people on this planet, half of them female. How many billions of women have come before me in human history? Attached their heart irrevocably outside their body, altered themselves in the direction of a child. To imagine that each one felt the way I do, this overwhelming love,is to connect to eons of energy flowing downward through generations of evolution.

If I close my eyes, I can feel a shade of that immense love that forms the backdrop of humanity. You can extrapolate it out to everyone you meet. It's hard to hate an enemy when you imagine the ghost of the child they were laughing in their mother's arms. I am clearly not the expert on this one, but I do try.

Because I am oriented this way, I see war and famine through the lens of motherhood.
(Thirty thousand children die every day from lack of food and water. The United Nations estimates that 16 billion dollars a year would be enough to solve this problem. If that sounds like a lot-consider that Americans spend 19 billion a year on pet food. But that is for another story.)

I can connect to a tiny part of the joy and grief of billions of women. As I write this I am looking at a carving of Guan Yin, the ancient Buddhist symbol for the divine mother in all of us. She was rumoured to be a woman who lived a long time ago who sacrificed her eyes and her hands to save her son(or her father, depending on which story you like-I'm going with the son on this one)

The statue has an expression of gentle contentment. I may not believe that she is a God, a Deity in the sky watching me, but I can imagine trillions of particles jumping around inside the atoms of that statue, inside everything,from mother to child as deep as DNA, inside all of us, transmitting an unknown energy in and out of dimensions stretching through the universe and around time, maybe it could even be called love.

लाइट कैन बे बोथ वावे एंड energy

2009-10-23T03:17:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot recently about obtaining some sort of spiritual belief system. I'm shopping around. It's not going well.
I've always been jealous of people who believe in God. They are safe, looking outward to something greater than themselves. They feel loved and cherished by a vast being who knows their every thought and is waiting until their death so it can frolic with them and their dead relatives for eternity( or something like that,anyway)
I can't get into that, but I've decided that I would like to have something.I've been reading books about quantum physics, and I don't pretend to understand them, but I think it's something like this. There are tiny particles that zoom around inside electrons, which dance around inside atoms. They are so small we can't see them, we can only see where they've just been.
The crazy thing is, they disappear. They go somewhere else and then reappear later. Sometimes( and this is certainly up for debate by many really smart people) but sometimes-they change from particle to a wave only when they're being observed. So the act of observation by a conscious being changes their structure, or so they say.
The point of this being-scientists don't believe in God because the energy in the Universe is a closed system. None comes in,none comes out. If Something were affecting events on Earth, energy would be coming in from another plane of existence. It's called downward causation-in other words energy flowing downward from somewhere into here.It doesn't.
But maybe it does. Some people see evidence of this in string theory-the possibility that those particles inside of electrons are disappearing into and reappearing from another dimension or many other dimensions. That layered around us,in us, above us,are a myriad of other planes of existence.
It sounds like science fiction, but it's been observed since the 1930s. Einstein spent the last decades of his life trying to match up the behaviour of these particles with E=Mc2, the theory of energy that governs the natural world. He tried to come up with a theory of Everything, a theory that explains how these tiny, unpredictable particles work that also makes sense of what we know about the natural world. He couldn't. Once things get to super small scale, they just do whatever they feel like doing. It makes no sense to anyone.
Unless you explain it with different dimensions, which is what string theory is all about, the particles are vibrating on "strings' that run through everything, layers and layers, some of them spherical, which I can't even wrap my mind around.
The point of all this, and I have no doubt I'm misunderstanding most of it, not being a super physics genius, but the point seems to be that it could explain downward causation, energy coming in and out of our universe from somewhere else. On a basic level, it could provide a loophole for God.
Or not. I'm not even sure I'm right about all of this. But I like thinking about it.

मिकी मिक्केय्मोरों

2009-10-22T16:19:00.000-07:00

Seriously will someone please tell me how to make my Titles type English again?

Attention Visitors to my Home--
I am not mapquest. I am not a helpful computer program that enables you to look up the location to my home. I do not generously provide a route and a visual map to assist you in finding my street.
Here's a tip. Before I get into my car, if I am near a computer, I look up where I am going. I do not call the person or business I am visiting to ask for directions if another option is available to me.
If I am forced to bother someone for directions, I call them before I start driving. I do not call them en route, saying something along the lines of "Where are you? I don't have a pen so tell me your area and I'll call you when I get closer to find out exactly where it is."
I do not require the person to give directions twice, in other words.
If I don't have a pen, I do something CRAZY. I listen to what they say. If I am unprepared, instead of annoying someone by calling twice, forcing them to spend precious moments of their life repeating themselves, I listen to what they say.
But that's just me.
Be advised that from now on I will be giving directions to the local titty bar. Have fun.

Went to Chuck E Cheese twice last week. Why? Because parents love their children. Enough to jump in front of a train, barely enough to venture into a brightly lit dungeon full of screaming children throwing tokens at each other. The rides are boring and a giant mouse stalks around fondling random children. When he thought no one was looking his shoulders lagged and his mouse head fell down onto his chest. He seemed to be looking straight at the knife one of the cheerful workers was using to cut the cake. If I had that job, I would long to slice at my wrists with any dull instrument within reach. I sympathised with Chuck-E.
Me-"Are You having fun?"
My friend Amy-" I don't know. It's like anal sex, I kind of love it but I kind of hate it at the same time."
My other friend Jessica pipes in -" No. It's like a blow job. You do it to stop the whining, but you'll never get back those minutes of your life."
So true.

Today I painted Ruby's room three different shades of pink. One of them was made by Disney, and it sucked in ways you aren't interested to hear about but significantly impact your life and experience when you are the one doing the painting.
"Fucking mouse!" I said over and over like a mantra.
Any adult would know that paint endorsed by a giant talking rat might not be the highest quality product, but not me.
"What a pretty color!" I thought.
So unfortunate. It may not have helped that I thinned it with Gatorade but it was clumping and our water isn't on in the new house yet.
So,to recap-
Get your own fucking directions-
Yes.
Mice-
No.

फ्रीएंद्ली Advice

2009-10-20T16:32:00.000-07:00

To the man in the sparkly purple Lincoln Continental driving in front of me on I35 this morning,

Maybe if your car is suffering from a condition that requires you to drive 25 MPH on the deadliest highway in America you shouldn't get on the Interstate. The Texas Department of Transportation has thoughtfully provided a road that runs parallel to the highway called a "feeder road."
Also, and this is just my opinion, unless you are 90 years old, on some good drugs or myopic it is fucking retarded to STOP when trying to merge into traffic. Cars are whizzing past you going eighty. You have just made it almost impossible and extremely dangerous for me to speed up enough from a dead stop behind your pimpmobile. Yes, I know, you are eating a slice of pizza and talking on the phone to a ho from your stable of toothless women. We've all been there. But if you don't have the balls to speed up when you get on the highway then stay off the godamn highway.
Please understand, Purple Car, that when I laid on my horn for two minutes it was a friendly gesture. I was only trying to say-"Hey friend,I feel violent. Since you are parked in the on ramp it's not inconceivable that I might jump out of my truck and brain you with your sparkle phone. MOVE."
It's so unfortunate that we had to exchange the gesture of the bird. It's even more puzzling how fast you were able to suddenly speed your car up to ninety in order to chase me.
You forgot to turn your hazards off. Just to let you know.

For some reason all of my blog titles are turning into some weird Arabic characters, I'm not doing this on purpose. It might be a sign from Muhammed. I would be a perfect candidate for jihad.

Ruby--Mommy, I'm almost a mouse.
Me-How come?
Ruby--Cause I got a job as a mouse so I can go to the bank and get some monies to buy my dolls some toys.

यू कैन दो आईटी पुट यौर अस इन तो It

2009-10-19T11:14:00.000-07:00

I've been attending secret training meetings. It could be the Masons, it could be a society of psychic assassins led by Angelina Jolie. I could be learning how to make a better Molotov cocktail or how to decipher the map on the back of critical Early American documents. Since they are secret-you will never know-and I will never tell.
The secrecy factor means I can't tell some of my best stories lately. I can't talk about the man next to me the other day wearing yellow gym shorts, the nylon kind one would play basketball.
"Hope you don't get a boner accidentally," I thought. And the next time I looked, there was one. Slight, but undeniably there.
Adult men-the world is not a basketball court. Leave the boner pants in the gym. Please.
I can't talk about the huge homeless woman who "slept" through last nights meeting, tossing and turning on a couch way in the back, covered in a noisy plastic sheet, moaning and clearing her throat like Slingblade during critical moments. I've seen her there before. If the world is even the slightest bit like a kung fu movie then she will hop up unexpectedly to num chuck an enemy soon.

"Grasshopper,"she will tell me."You cannot make any assumptions."

And I do try not to.

A man in the parking lot talked to me for 10 minutes about an invention he has patented, something to do with rubber and tires and roads, I couldn't catch it.
"The president and the First Lady are calling me about it," he said."Arnold Schwarzenegger called me last week."

"I guess he needs tires for California." I said. What do you say to someone like that? Your constant stream of words at me has become tiresome. Please take a breath so I can politely excuse myself. Nope? Well, I'll just have to turn around and start walking to the car. Oh, what? You want to keep talking as you follow me to the car? You need to tell me the chemical breakdown of the product you've developed as i fumble for my keys? Your four year old son recently developed a patent for a drinkable mosquito spray? Really? You wrote a book about child psychology? Is it called-

"Back Away from my Vehicle Before I Run You down?"
Oh, right, sorry. That's what mine is called.

I think I have pissed off the book agent.

I have written about this before, but for the last six weeks I've been waiting for an agent to read the book I spent two years writing. The two years, by the way, went by in an instant. The six weeks has dragged on like a root canal.
I entered a manuscript contest in the spring and won it, the judge was this agent from New York, who said she would read my book and decide whether or not to represent me.
I sent it to her and waited until three days before six weeks would have been up. Then I sent this-
"Have you read it yet? Because this is KILLING me. I keep having nightmares that you get hit by lightening or move to an organic farm before you get a chance to read it. Are you done? Let me know. Just read it."

Again, perhaps being compulsive is not the best way to handle a professional situation, as it has been two weeks and she has not replied. I sent her a few more during that time, just in case she has that disorder that Drew Barrymore had in that movie where every day she woke up with no memory of the previous days events.

"Call her," say my friends who have had scripts published by such agents. And I will. Then, because I know myself well, the calls will become Prank Calls, and the whole situation will disintegrate into a familiar scenario entitled-"How I like to Fuck things up-but it's still kind of funny."

What she really had going for her, in my mind, was that she didn't require me to write what is known as a "proposal". Imagine you have spent two years writing a book, taking the bones of a story, fleshing it out with description and dialogue and humour until it's seems almost like a living being to you.

Then, in order to have a chance of someone reading it who has a chance of taking it on so she can have a chance at selling it to a publisher--you have to deconstruct it again. Back down to the barest, retarded sounding list of events.

"2009-author has mental breakdown while trying to publish a book. Author goes to unidentified meetings to cure such breakdown. Homeless woman sleeping on the couch bestows great wisdom. Author runs over Tire Patent man in parking lot and feels better."

See how stupid that makes a story sound? I have zero motivation for doing this, and yet without it there will be no publication.

Then I started to think this morning-why did i write it? It wasn't to make money. You make art, you catch a glimpse of something extraordinary in the world and you want to embellish it, turn it into something else, share it. Sometimes you want to turn pain into beauty. Sometimes you want to connect something in your experience with someone else's.

I get more enjoyment out of writing this blog than I do out of anything else in my workday-and I am not getting paid to do it. So even though I could keep trying to go through approved channels of publication, part of me is really standing up and yelling "Fuck this " and telling me to just self publish. Which is free to do, people can even buy it on Amazon, but without the compelling ego trip of being "approved" by Random House. When you self publish your book is thrown in with the Wiccan Holiday Cookbooks, midget lesbian erotica, and all the Get Rich Self Help books that agents and publishers have declined. It's not cool, not at all.

Yet I feel like everything I have ever done has been outside accepted channels, underneath and to the side of the way you are supposed to achieve what you want. I started a clothing company without getting a degree in Fashion--mostly because I didn't have the money to, but also out of the same Fuck It sense of irritation I feel now. Creative people should not have to be bureaucrats to be allowed expression. My family history tells me that nothing is mysterious or too difficult to do yourself-just read some books and go. When my dad wanted to become an engineer and build robots, he didn't get a degree. He went to the library instead, learned about it, and five years later got a job doing it at Intel.

In sort of a cosmic way-there is something appealing about writing a book and then letting go of it. Giving it out to the world without demanding a contract and an advance check first. I wonder what might come back my way?

So much effort and worry and time spent living and breathing this little novel and then poof-out it goes- and not for money.
Not for a reason to call up my high school guidance counselor late at night and say- see bitch, my bestseller just got on Oprahs book list,how you like me now?
Not to be able to say at parties when asked what I do-"I'm a writer."
Not for an assurance that what i spent doing really really isn't a stupid embarrassing piece of crap if a giant corporation would publish it.
Not to feel important, distract me from my existential crisis, ease insecurity, buy a boob job(just to get me back to pre-baby, there is nothing wrong with that)
feel superior when I see people I don't like,
not for any other reason than -

you make art
you create
for yourself
even if you are the last living person alive in Armageddon world ruled by zombies
you make art and
just show it to the other people left among the undead,
to connect you
to try to share a glimpse of your consciousness with theirs
or vice versa.
You don't know why you create
but you keep doing it, even for free.

Zombies get a free copy.

More Crazy

2009-10-17T05:35:00.000-07:00

Continuing on with the theme of crazy etsy emails I have gotten-

Everyone on etsy has a username. This girl's was kinkajousylv ( for kinkajous-the little monkey like marsupials that Paris Hilton collects and Sylvia-her first name)
She bought a bunch of clothes from me and asked to return one of the items a month later. Usually I'd say no, but she'd been so nice that I let her do it. It came back emanating an odor reminiscent of a hobo's ass. Like she'd worn it to do a weeks worth of yard work using only urine as a deodorant.
"Damn," I thought. "No more returns."
Then she asked to return two more things she'd bought, claiming that they had frays at the edges. I use 70, even 80 and 90 year old materials, sometimes they are not perfect. I am not Dillards, with rows of pristine dresses clean of tiny spots or little frays. you either get it or you don't.
In any case, the time to return is not six weeks after you get it, even at Dillards.
So I said no-

This is what I got back-
Enjoy.

You really are not some "really nice person" you claim to be. How dare you. How dare you. You have some nerve.
Just because you live in Texas, doesn't mean you're a hot shot. I don't care if you have a two year old. That's your fault. You just sold yourself down river. You're clothing is not all that great. It's ripped and torn, and full of holes. Anyone in the southwest can get ahold of the lower end clothing market/black market of clothing, and get a bunch of junk and pretend to be a master. Well, I'll be one to tell you that you're not. You ought to tell the shoddy workers you hire to take a hike, cause they aren't doing you any favors. If you just give me the refund, and refrain from negative feedback, I will do the same, I can hopefully receive my money back, or maybe just go through the proper channels; ie, paypal. What I received is junk, garbage trash, and expensive. I shouldn't have to pay for garbage.

Me-(paraphrased) "No."

More-

You've asked for it! You have no decency, at all. You just had to make your name seem classy, but you're the furthest thing from it!
I won't accept this. You are so jealous. You don't even know what a kinkajou is. I suppose your bad sewing school never taught you that. Learn a thing or two, and you might come out not seeming like a complete anthrophobe! You're sick! Go to hell you cowardly two faced scammer.

I got twenty-eight emails like this from her.

She finally ended up leaving some really spectacular bad feedback on my etsy site, written all in caps, after I called her "KooKoojousylv" I couldn't help it, I laughed for days over my own joke. Totally worth it.

This one was a lot better. She never ended up buying anything, even after twenty one emails, most of which were about the painkillers she was taking and her sons problems in and out of jail for selling Ecstasy, long long emails,lots of caps, but this first one was pretty great.

"While most of me is no longer Plus Size, I am proud to say that I have somehow managed to retain my once-spectacular, now somewhat shopworn Giant Tits, the tits to fulfill your search. Yes, I still proudly wear my size DD cups, and measure a full 44" around when I am strapped up and secured into the Big Breast Bounce Buster Bra styles I wear. Gotta have the correct tit fit if you're gonna firm the form using a foundation of fabric and frills filled with frolicking female flesh.

I am a happy, healthy, though woefully wobbly woman-of-size, firm believer in being firm of form where firm is a distant, though firmly formed and fitted, fond memory. Of course, once the flabby, aka "infirm" form is fitted with a finely fabricated, functioning, form-fitting flab-infirmary foundation of fabric, frills, and female form (aka "the corset") fundamental faith in firmness is reaffirmed, forming a fond fantasy of fine, fulsome feminine figure, the firm and flowing form fit to fondle, fully or fleetingly, yet always fondly and frequently. Finding this form of flirting fun facilitates a fecund fullness to the formerly-flaccid phallis, finally filling to factored firmness for finest form and fabulously fun function the facinating fullfillment found in florid flights of friendly fornication.

Awesome. Need some of her drugs.

I need crazy

2009-10-15T05:47:00.000-07:00

Imagine that you are a person who loves bewildering displays of insanity. Think about how it must feel for you to live in a somewhat uneventful and sleepy city where nothing really happens. You are deprived of the irrational egomaniacs of the Los Angeles movie industry, you are bereft of the spectacular scitsophrenics in the ranks of New York City's homeless population.
We have our eccentrics here in Austin. The mayor recently issued a special waiver for a billy goat that walks the residential streets close to downtown. He violates some city code, but after a rousing public outcry of support for this horned fellow, an exemption was written in by the city council, led by the mayor, to allow the goat his freedom.
There is a vigil going on in front of Seton hospital as I write this for a cross dresser named Leslie who was in an accident last week. Flaunting a beard and a mullet, he has sashayed his skinny body through our streets for twenty years, taunting the frat boys on sixth street, dressed only in a thong and a bra. Now, as he recovers from a head trauma, hundreds of people from all walks of life wait outside his hospital room to show support. Groups have popped up all over Facebook, collecting letters and donations for this kooky Austin celebrity.
We have elected a man to run our city council whose only previous work experience was selling flowers on the side of the highway.( Remember that? What happened to the roadside flower salesmen?I liked them better than the firemen and church people I see collecting donations these days)
But, as much as I love Austin for these displays of eccentricities, this is not the batshit crazy that I crave. This is not the woman on the corner trying to tear her clothes off because an angel told her she is on fire. This is not the drunk running into a stop sign as he yells,"Suck my cock black guys!" to no one in particular. That happens so, so rarely for me, and I enjoy it more than words can possibly express.
Now imagine that you are me, and you wake up to an email that was sent at four in the morning from Courtney Love. You know it's really her because you sold a dress to her earlier in the year. The transaction went smoothly, and you were disappointed because another designer you know, who sold to her, ended up getting publicly called out as a coke dealer( she is not) and a whore( not to my knowledge, at least)
So it is with pure delight that you see this email, reading it over and over without any comprehension. You are further tickled that the notes begin to come regularly, always sent in the wee hours of the morning, always as indecipherable as a letter from the state mental facility.
Because I am generous, I will share this crazy with you. Enjoy.

thats cute did you do the embroidery f so then why dont you look at my old 1k for a body stiocking with enbroidery on it, footless and as imistative of great chantilly lace as possibvle itll be hard thats why its a thousand bucks, if you can do it thin like it was made in a factory embroider after the nylon some cherry blossoms in a chenille velvet like pink frpm right leg to chest even putting in three darts at the side using nylon cheap sears ruffles fron their barbie laingerie on the sleeves and on the ankels covered in metallic im pbsessed with metallic silvers id crochet the black and put some silvers in there and a few stars frm fred frankel and some black patent leather little sparrows from nicolas kniel,

Keep in mind, this is not in response to any previous conversation or exchange. It had been two months since our last transaction.

ME---Which dress are you referring to?

The next night 3AM-

add velvet( slk velvet) straps im in with alutttle strecth where you need it this is LOVLY, really good job how did i never notice you?

This was two months after she'd bought three hundred dollars worth of stuff, many conversations about fit, etc.

Me-----Which dress are you referring to?

Days later-

sorry re the cash flow, its complex theres a lot of cash but i wont do sonthing faustian to get it throw my lkids money into my former lawyers bank never to be seen again hold on cos i lovethat dress i dont buy dresses lightly here work on it and make it work on me it will be bought soon, sorry for the wait i cant do strapless so maybe fix so ready to wear,

Keep in mind, I have sent emails trying to discover which dress, what the hell she's talking about, with no success. I have offered her 25 dollars off just to keep the crazy going, but I still don't have a clue what she means.

A few days later-4:30 AM

wait i like this yellow make im buying it 36 c go for it ill war the hell out if of em!

Then communication abruptly stopped.

Courtney, if you're out there, drop me a line now and then. I love you more than words can say.

You can do it put your ass in to it

2009-10-15T05:26:00.000-07:00

I've been attending secret training meetings. It could be the Masons, it could be a society of psychic assassins led by Angelina Jolie. I could be learning how to make a better Molotov cocktail or how to decipher the map on the back of critical Early American documents. Since they are secret-you will never know-and I will never tell.
The secrecy factor means I can't tell some of my best stories lately. I can't talk about the man next to me the other day wearing yellow gym shorts, the nylon kind one would play basketball.
"Hope you don't get a boner accidentally," I thought. And the next time I looked, there was one. Slight, but undeniably there.
Adult men-the world is not a basketball court. Leave the boner pants in the gym. Please.
I can't talk about the huge homeless woman who "slept" through last nights meeting, tossing and turning on a couch way in the back, covered in a noisy plastic sheet, moaning and clearing her throat like Slingblade during critical moments. I've seen her there before. If the world is even the slightest bit like a kung fu movie then she will hop up unexpectedly to num chuck an enemy soon.
"Grasshopper,"she will tell me."You cannot make any assumptions."
And I do try not to.
A man in the parking lot talked to me for 10 minutes about an invention he has patented, something to do with rubber and tires and roads, I couldn't catch it.
"The president and the First Lady are calling me about it," he said."Arnold Schwarzenegger called me last week."
"I guess he needs tires for California." I said. What do you say to someone like that? Your constant stream of words at me has become tiresome. Please take a breath so I can politely excuse myself. Nope? Well, I'll just have to turn around and start walking to the car. Oh, what? You want to keep talking as you follow me to the car? You need to tell me the chemical breakdown of the product you've developed as i fumble for my keys? Your four year old son recently developed a patent for a drinkable mosquito spray? Really? You wrote a book about child psychology? Is it called-
"Back Away from my Vehicle Before I Run You down?"
Oh, right, sorry. That's what mine is called.

I think I have pissed off the book agent.

I have written about this before, but for the last six weeks I've been waiting for an agent to read the book I spent two years writing. The two years, by the way, went by in an instant. The six weeks has dragged on like a root canal.
I entered a manuscript contest in the spring and won it, the judge was this agent from New York, who said she would read my book and decide whether or not to represent me.
I sent it to her and waited until three days before six weeks would have been up. Then I sent this-
"Have you read it yet? Because this is KILLING me. I keep having nightmares that you get hit by lightening or move to an organic farm before you get a chance to read it. Are you done? Let me know. Just read it."
Again, perhaps being compulsive is not the best way to handle a professional situation, as it has been two weeks and she has not replied. I sent her a few more during that time, just in case she has that disorder that Drew Barrymore had in that movie where every day she woke up with no memory of the previous days events.
"Call her," say my friends who have had scripts published by such agents. And I will. Then, because I know myself well, the calls will become Prank Calls, and the whole situation will disintegrate into a familiar scenario entitled-"How I like to Fuck things up-but it's still kind of funny."
What she really had going for her, in my mind, was that sh didn't require me to write what is known as a "proposal". Imagine you have spent two years writing a book, taking the bones of a story, fleshing it out with description and dialogue and humour until it's seems almost like a living being to you.
Then, in order to have a chance of someone reading it who has a chance of taking it on so she can have a chance at selling it to a publisher--you have to deconstruct it again. Back down to the barest, retarded sounding list of events.

"2009-author has mental breakdown while trying to publish a book. Author goes to unidentified meetings to cure such breakdown. Homeless woman sleeping on the couch bestows great wisdom. Author runs over Tire Patent man in parking lot and feels better."

See how stupid that makes a story sound? I have zero motivation for doing this, and yet without it there will be no publication.
Then I started to think this morning-why did i write it? It certainly wasn't to make money. You make art, you catch a glimpse of something extraordinary in the world and you want to embellish it, turn it into something else, share it. Sometimes you want to turn pain into beauty. You want to inspire.
I get more enjoyment out of writing this blog than I do out of anything else in my workday-and I am not getting paid to do it. So even though I could keep trying to go through approved channels of publication, part of me is really standing up and yelling "Fuck this " and telling me to just self publish. Which is free to do, people can even buy it on Amazon, but without the compelling ego trip of being "approved" by Random House. When you self publish your book is thrown in with the Wiccan Holiday Cookbooks, midget lesbian erotica, and all the Get Rich Self Help books that no one wants to publish. It's not cool, not at all.
I feel like everything I have ever done has been outside accepted channels, underneath and to the side of the way you are supposed to achieve what you want. I started a clothing company without ever taking a class, much less getting a degree in Fashion-mostly because I didn't have the money to go, but also out of the same Fuck It sense of irritation I feel now. Creative people should not have to be bureaucrats to be allowed expression. When my dad wanted to become an engineer and build robots, he didn't get a degree. He went to the library instead, learned about it, and five years later got a job doing it at Intel.
In sort of a cosmic way-there is something appealing about writing a book and then letting go of it. Giving it out to the world without demanding a contract and an advance check first. I wonder what might come back my way?
So much effort and worry and time spent living and breathing this little novel and then poof-out it goes- and not for money. Not for a reason to call up my high school guidance counselor late at night and say- see bitch, my bestseller just got on Oprahs book list,how you like me now?
Not to be able to say at parties when asked what I do-"I'm a writer."
Not for an assurance that what i spent doing really really isn't a stupid embarrassing piece of crap if a giant corporation would publish it.
Not to feel important, distract me from my existential crisis, ease insecurity, buy a boob job(just to get me back pre-baby, there is nothing wrong with that)
feel superior when I see people I don't like,
not for any other reason than -
you make art
you create
for yourself
even if you are the last living person alive in Armageddon world ruled by zombies
you show it with other people
to connect you
to try to share a glimpse of your consciousness with theirs
or vice versa.
You don't know why you create
but you keep doing it, even for free.

Zombies get a free copy.

"I'm mad to you!"

2009-10-15T04:53:00.000-07:00

Last night Ruby crawled into my bed. We slept side by side, her hand grasping my thumb. Jeff was out of town on business, so it was just us.
At three she woke up wailing from a bad dream. I asked her what it was about.
"Somebody-stole-my-BOTTLE!" she was sobbing so hard she could barely get the words out. This was serious business for her.
I had soothed her into a calmer state, and I thought she would fall back asleep, when she suddenly sat up and announced-
"We can go into the living room and watch Spongebob now." Oh, can we?
"It's too early, sweetheart." I said.
And she began to sob again.
Living with a toddler can sometimes be like trying to dress and feed and reason with a feral wildcat. It's the hardest job I can imagine, to walk the line between firm( I don't want a brat like my friends kid, you think) and loving( your heart breaks to witness them struggling to control their strong, overwhelming emotions)and you never really know if what you are doing is the right thing or not.
My dad says that the Native Americans had a term for the two parents you must embody, I forget the name of the gentle one, but the strong one is called the Death Parent. It's the part of you that is called up when you must pull a thorn from your child's foot, knowing it will hurt them like hell but to leave it in will hurt and sicken them in the long run. The Death parent is what you must be when you cause a little hurt now for a healthier child later. It's the mask a parent would put on as he holds a child down while a broken bone is set, a shot is administered, or a promise must be broken for reasons the child doesn't understand. You have to do these things, a myriad of actions that you believe are best for them, and they don't understand, maybe will never understand.
So we enforce time outs, and endure the screaming fits without giving in to her regal demands. It's not pulling an arrow from her foot, but it feels like it when I hear her crying.
Last night, when she was crying to be let out of bed at three AM to watch cartoons, I said No again and again. Instead of giving her a time out, as I normally would, I just held her and allowed her to cry, rubbing her back in circles.
"Are you ready to use your words?"I said.
"I"M MAD TO YOU!" she cried as she held my hand tight.
"I hear you. You're mad." I said.
"I GOT MAD!" she hiccuped and fell asleep with her arms around my neck.
How touchingly vulnerable and defenseless children are to seek comfort from the one they love, even as they believe we have wronged them. When does that defensiveness we all have begin, when we turn our backs and raise our walls to those who hurt or anger us? They are like tiny Dalai Lamas clutching barbies and firetrucks, walking around with guileless and open windows for hearts that anyone can see into.
I've spent my life drinking in beauty wherever I can find it, and I can't think of a more perfect experience to witness-a tiny hand grasping the thumb of someone she loves, made up of love even as when she's angry, seeking comfort as she falls asleep beside me.

Passing Notes

2009-10-13T05:28:00.001-07:00

Someone told me recently that it's web etiquette to respond to the comments left on your blog, even to visit the web pages of your commenter's and respond yourself.
"Oh my God," I thought." Have I been being rude this whole time?"
Sometimes I do look at the people who follow this blog, at their sites, and feel lucky that so many creative people actually want to read what I write. But I don't do it just because they leave a comment, that feels disingenuous. And I almost never respond.
I don't know why. Something about it embarrasses me, but I can't put my finger on the source.There is something vaguely embarrassing about this whole thing-having a "blog", telling people about it on facebook, writing about stuff.( Just who in the hell do you think you are? says the little voice. You know the one.)

In fact, I don't think I would have started doing this at all if I hadn't read that book publishers look at how many hits your blog gets, how many facebook friends you have.
"Godamn it. I have to self promote again." Hate, hate hate it.

But now I find that writing these little stories is the best part of my day, excepting the time spent playing with my daughter and harassing my husband.

And, since I clearly can't keep up the pretense of being cool for long, I cherish all of those little comments. On bad days I read them over again and feel better. When I see a new one it reminds me of junior high, when someone would pass a note to you from across the room. It was always thrilling, whether it was from a boy you liked or your best friend.

I kept all of my notes from sixth grade to college in an old round steamer trunk. I opened it this morning. Here is what I found.

Multiple Care Bears greeting cards with long notes from my Granny Pearl written deliberately in a slow, painstaking hand.( She dropped out of school in third grade to work the cotton fields, she had to teach herself to read and write-becoming the only person in her family able to do so.)

A forgotten cartoon series I drew in high school called "Super Grasshopper"( content self explanatory) that seems vaguely racist now.

Desperate love letters, all unsigned, making it impossible to know who sent them.

A pastry bag, napkin, and cup with the Starbucks logo on it from a 1992 trip to Seattle. It was, at the time, the only Starbucks in America, located in Pike's Place, and I thought it was so cool and unique that I saved the trash from it as a souvenir.

The Official Sticker Collector's Album

Hundreds of notes and letters that were passed to me in class, most signed B.F.F. Forever!!.There are letters that were sent after high school too, all the way up to when I turned 25 and discovered email, which is where the paper trail ends. I guess that kids text now, I hope there are still notes passed hand to hand, desk to desk, with funny cartoons mocking the teachers.

Here is a note from someone named Priscilla.

"Sunny,
I will attempt to explain my letter, since you failed to understand the first time. I will state my question which is very simple: 'Sunny, do you have my shirt?' I am no longer interested in how you obtained said item, accident or not, I want it back.
You sounded in your letter as if you had something to feel guilty about. I do not wish to discuss it further. It is a black Hard Rock Cafe T shirt if you need to know.
Priscilla"
I have no memory of the girl or her shirt, but I wish with all my heart she'd signed her last name so I could Google her address and send her a black hard Rock Cafe
T-shirt in the mail."Hey Priscilla," my note would say."Sorry it took so long to get this back to you! B.F.F. Forever!"

Here is a note signed from "Elvisardine" which could have been any of my precocious, obnoxious brat friends.

"Sunny,
You make me sick. Are you going to forgive me or what? You're such a bitch! but hey I'm easily annoyed and you are annoying. Tiffany is easy. You'll do fine if you remember one thing-men stink and if you don't know the answer to the quiz today guess your bra size.
Have you ever noticed that Roderick looks like Cindy Crawford?
Elvisardine"

I wish I still knew how to fold the loose leaf paper into that crazy octagon thing- you could stick your fingers in the folds and move around, revealing different words or drawings on each plane. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? I'll bet the girls do. Can someone teach me that again? Maybe I'll park in front of the local high school and pay a gaggle of girls to show me.

Here is an idea-
Send me an email at my personal email address( sunnyharalson@hotmail.com) with your real address or P.O. Box in it. I will send mine. Instead of always communicating and making new friends across the globe through the computer, let's send notes instead, until I get tired of it.I might scan in the best ones for this blog, or I might just stick them in my steamer trunk for my grand kids to read.

"Whoa" they will say," How quaint. Now we just use telepathy with the chips implanted in our brains to communicate. It's so much easier to mock everyone that way."

The Official Sticker Collectors Album

2009-10-13T05:18:00.001-07:00

The scratch and sniff Peach still smells like peach.

Famous people

2009-10-11T10:51:00.000-07:00

I'm 98% certain that I saw Robert Downey Jr. at Home Depot yesterday. He was picking out paint samples with some woman.

"Why would Robert Downey Jr. be looking at paint in Home Depot, Sunny?" Jeff asked.

"I don't know. I didn't ask him shitbird."

Since I thought I saw Snoop Dog at Wal Mart last Saturday I made sure my glasses were on ( check) and looked surreptitiously four times. 98% certain.

Here is the thing about seeing famous people. They really aren't that recognizable. They look smaller, and weirder, sometimes they just look really familiar but you can't place it.

One time I prank called Benicio Del Toro, pushing redial on my film maker boyfriend's cell phone while he was in the shower.Not as fun as you might think. He didn't even get mad, just kept going "hello? hello?" even though I called three times. Then I realised that with caller ID, he knew the number, and probably just thought the connection was bad. Bummer.

When I lived in New York I worked at an art supply store. A man came up to my register to buy an armload of watercolors. We were slacking, me and my coworker, playing blackjack behind the till. As I rang up the paints my fellow employee leaned against the counter to chat up our only customer of the day.

"You look familiar." he told the man.

"He looks like that actor." I said.

The man smiled.

"Which one?"

"You know, that guy from Superman." I was distracted, there weren't any prices on his stuff so I just hit the 99 cent button over and over. The sooner this guy got out, the sooner I could resume our card game and win back ten bucks.

"Gary Oldman?" my coworker asked, narrowing his eyes at the man.

"No, retard, not Gary Oldman.Look at him-does he look like Gary fucking Oldman? This guy-He was in....Batman too,right? No.I don't know." Now I was annoyed.
I was so hungover, my mind was slow. I stared at our customer, who watched us closely.

"So, who is it?" he asked.

"This guy-he's really handsome and talented, I love him. It's a compliment, really!" I assured him.

Then I had it.

"Gene Hackman!!!"

The man laughed. "What a compliment. He is handsome.I think he's been in a lot more movies than Superman, though."

He finished signing his credit card receipt and I pushed it into the register without looking, waving him goodbye. What an old sweetheart, I thought.

I stared outside for a while, the card game forgotten, wondering how soon I could go for a smoke break. My mind went blank for while. Too. Much. Beer.Last. Night.

"Sunny?" My friend called from the other register. I jumped.

"No one looks that much like Gene Hackman." he said.

I frowned.

"You're right." We opened the register and there, lying on top, was a signed receipt.
Gene Hackman, it said.

"He was fucking with us!" I laughed.

"Lex Luther, you bastard."

"Was it Superman? I thought it was Batman." I said.

He shrugged. And we went outside for our smoke.

Shitbird

2009-10-09T04:42:00.000-07:00

Jeff and I were driving, Ruby is in the backseat.

Ruby-"Mommy you like Mommy birds, Daddy you like Daddy birds and I like Baby birds.I like them because they tickle my face with their wings."

"Is that so?" Jeff is laughing.

"No! Stop it birds! I don't like that!" she is getting really agitated.

"Ruby, there are no birds in the car."

"Birds! I told you already, stop it!"

Speaking of birds, my new favorite insult is "shitbird". It makes me laugh every time I think of it. I'm giggling right now as I write this. There is something so patronising about calling someone a "shitbird". It's what a mean old alcoholic father would call his son after he wrecked the car.I love it.

As we were leaving the festival this weekend two guys were walking arm in arm, their hands in the back pockets of each other's matching camouflage cargo pants. Normally I would be moved by such a sight, but as they were directly in the middle of the road and all I wanted with every fiber of my being was to leave the festival grounds and not return for at least a year, I hated them.

"See, Jeff?" I turned to him."That is why you can't wear your cammo shorts."
"I understand now." he says.

I don't honk at them, because I just can't bring myself to honk at pedestrians or bicyclists ( cars, no problem. People, no.) But when they FINALLY move slowly out of our way I lean over and yell-
"Out of the road, shitbirds!"

God, I thought. That is so insulting. I love it.

Earlier in the day, when we were packing up the last of our merchandise, I bought some body products with a bird on the packaging. A white crane, which seemed to imply a clean, fresh smell and feel.

We were throwing away 25 rain jackets I'd bought. I'd started with 75, bought at thrift stores and quickly resold as the temperature became wet and the air cold.

"Jesus Sunny, you're such a profiteer." Jeff didn't know what to make of my enterprises.

"What? It's not like I'm jacking up the price of gasoline or bottled water. This isn't Katrina."

"We are making the same amount of money selling all of those rain jackets with the sale of three dresses. Why are you fucking around with this?"

"I can't drink. I can't get high. I can't go out and have sex with strange men. What fun do i ever get to have? This is my gambling, Jeff!It's my thrill!"

"What is wrong with you? I am Never taking you to Vegas."

So I sold these rain jackets, and it was awesome. People lined up waving money at me. I was thrilled. I took a little risk and it paid off, much like betting at the casino or playing the stock market.

But then I had 25 mud splattered jackets left on Monday.

"I'm throwing these out." I said.

"let's go see if anyone wants them."

"Who is going to want 25 jackets, shitbird?"

"I'll go ask those guys." He pointed to a booth staffed with three gorgeous Africans in traditional garb.

I watched, as he offered his pile and they eagerly took it. He came back to us.
"They were so happy. They know a bunch of refugees who don't have any clothes."
"Kind of makes you feel like an asshole, doesn't it?"
"Yeah."

So I walked over there to say hi and buy some stuff, feeling kind of bad that I hadn't done so before.

I bought some Neem oil-I don't know what it's for but I like that word, and some shea butter, and some mosquito spray, all handmade in villages in Africa.
The man pointed to the spray.

"I'm an entomologist." he said."I tested this on a trip to India last year. It works.'

Cool. At 15 bucks a bottle it better work.
It's unfortunate that I was too tired to think about smelling my new products before I bought them.

The next day I poured some "neem oil" into my bath and was overpowered by the distinct aroma of gasoline. I looked at the glowing white crane on the bottle.
Just what the fuck is neem oil? What is a neem? Is it a plant? A nut? A root? An animal by product? Is it made from the white crane on the bottle? It occurs to me that I don't know, and now I am soaking in it.

When I get out, I reek like a gas station attendant, but my skin does feel pretty soft.

I open up the shea bottle, eyeing the crane suspiciously as it takes flight again on this new product.

It reads-
Diaper Cream
Calus
Family
It smells like rotten honey with the consistency of old butter.

Jesus, I spent 30 dollars on this crap.

In a desperate attempt to redeem my purchase I search out the insect repellent that was tested in India. I go outside and spray it at the cloud of black flies swarming over our shit covered display on the porch. They dissipate quickly("He wasn't kidding!) making me feel like less of an idiot, but it smells strongly like urine.
Damn.

Africa! We put synthetic fragrances into our products for a reason! Consider doing likewise!

The white crane on the bottle now looks like it's flying away from me, perhaps saying-
"Ha ha! You could have gone to Sephora!"

Shitbird.